The Project Gutenberg Ebook The PG Complete Works of Gilbert Parker
#127 in our series by Gilbert Parker

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Title: The Project Gutenberg Complete Works of Gilbert Parker

Author: Gilbert Parker

Release Date: Aug, 2004  [EBook #6300]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on December 19, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII





*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMPLETE WORKS OF  PARKER ***




This eBook was produced by David Widger




CONTENTS:

The Judgment House
Pierre and His People
Romany of the Snows
Northern Lights
Mrs. Falchion
Cumner & South Sea Folk
Valmond Came to Pontiac
The Trail of the Sword
Translation of a Savage
Pomp of the Lavilettes
At Sign of the Eagle
The Trespasser
March of White Guard
Seats of the Mighty
Battle Of The Strong
Lane Had No Turning
Parables Of A Province
The Right Of Way
Michel And Angele
John Enderby
Sorrow On The Sea
Donovan Pasha &c
The Weavers
Embers (Poetry)
A Lover's Diary(Poetry)
The Money Master
The World For Sale
Never Know Your Luck
Wild Youth
No Defense
Carnac's Folly








THE JUDGMENT HOUSE



by Gilbert Parker


The "Judgment House" etext was produced by Juli Rew (juliana@ucar.edu)


NOTE

Except where references to characters well-known to all the world
occur in these pages, this book does not present a picture of public
or private individuals living or dead. It is not in any sense a
historical novel. It is in conception and portraiture a work of the
imagination.


"Strangers come to the outer wall--
(Why do the sleepers stir?)
Strangers enter the Judgment House--
(Why do the sleepers sigh?)
Slow they rise in their judgment seats,
Sieve and measure the naked souls,
Then with a blessing return to sleep.
(Quiet the Judgment House.)
Lone and sick are the vagrant souls--
(When shall the world come home?)"


"Let them fight it out, friend! things have gone too far,
God must judge the couple: leave them as they are--
Whichever one's the guiltless, to his glory,
And whichever one the guilt's with, to my story!


"Once more. Will the wronger, at this last of all,
Dare to say, 'I did wrong,' rising in his fall?
No? Let go, then! Both the fighters to their places!
While I count three, step you back as many paces!"


"And the Sibyl, you know. I saw her with my own eyes at
Cumae, hanging in a jar; and when the boys asked her, 'What
would you, Sibyl?' she answered, 'I would die.'"


"So is Pheidippides happy for ever,--the noble strong man
Who would race like a God, bear the face of a God, whom a
God loved so well:
He saw the land saved he had helped to save, and was suffered to tell
Such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as he began
So to end gloriously--once to shout, thereafter to be mute:
'Athens is saved!' Pheidippides dies in the shout for his meed."


"Oh, never star
Was lost here, but it rose afar."





THE JUDGMENT HOUSE



BOOK I



CHAPTER I

THE JASMINE FLOWER


The music throbbed in a voice of singular and delicate power; the air
was resonant with melody, love and pain. The meanest Italian in the
gallery far up beneath the ceiling, the most exalted of the land in
the boxes and the stalls, leaned indulgently forward, to be swept by
this sweet storm of song. They yielded themselves utterly to the power
of the triumphant debutante who was making "Manassa" the musical feast
of the year, renewing to Covent Garden a reputation which recent lack
of enterprise had somewhat forfeited.

Yet, apparently, not all the vast audience were hypnotized by the
unknown and unheralded singer, whose stage name was Al'mah. At the
moment of the opera's supreme appeal the eyes of three people at least
were not in the thraldom of the singer. Seated at the end of the first
row of the stalls was a fair, slim, graciously attired man of about
thirty, who, turning in his seat so that nearly the whole house was in
his circle of vision, stroked his golden moustache, and ran his eyes
over the thousands of faces with a smile of pride and satisfaction
which in a less handsome man would have been almost a leer. His name
was Adrian Fellowes.

Either the opera and the singer had no charms for Adrian Fellowes, or
else he had heard both so often that, without doing violence to his
musical sense, he could afford to study the effect of this wonderful
effort upon the mob of London, mastered by the radiant being on the
stage. Very sleek, handsome, and material he looked; of happy colour,
and, apparently, with a mind and soul in which no conflicts ever
raged--to the advantage of his attractive exterior. Only at the summit
of the applause did he turn to the stage again. Then it was with the
gloating look of the gambler who swings from the roulette-table with
the winnings of a great coup, cynical joy in his eyes that he has
beaten the Bank, conquered the dark spirit which has tricked him so
often. Now the cold-blue eyes caught, for a second, the dark-brown
eyes of the Celtic singer, which laughed at him gaily, victoriously,
eagerly, and then again drank in the light and the joy of the myriad
faces before her.

In a box opposite the royal box were two people, a man and a very
young woman, who also in the crise of the opera were not looking at
the stage. The eyes of the man, sitting well back--purposely, so that
he might see her without marked observation--were fixed upon the
rose-tinted, delicate features of the girl in a joyous blue silk gown,
which was so perfect a contrast to the golden hair and wonderful
colour of her face. Her eyes were fixed upon her lap, the lids half
closed, as though in reverie, yet with that perspicuous and reflective
look which showed her conscious of all that was passing round
her--even the effect of her own pose. Her name was Jasmine Grenfel.

She was not oblivious of the music. Her heart beat faster because of
it; and a temperament adjustable to every mood and turn of human
feeling was answering to the poignancy of the opera; yet her youth,
child-likeness, and natural spontaneity were controlled by an elate
consciousness. She was responsive to the passionate harmony; but she
was also acutely sensitive to the bold yet deferential appeal to her
emotions of the dark, distinguished, bearded man at her side, with the
brown eyes and the Grecian profile, whose years spent in the Foreign
Office and at embassies on the Continent had given him a tact and an
insinuating address peculiarly alluring to her sex. She was well aware
of Ian Stafford's ambitions, and had come to the point where she
delighted in them, and had thought of sharing in them, "for weal or
for woe"; but she would probably have resented the suggestion that his
comparative poverty was weighed against her natural inclinations and
his real and honest passion. For she had her ambitions, too; and when
she had scanned the royal box that night, she had felt that something
only little less than a diadem would really satisfy her.

Then it was that she had turned meditatively towards another occupant
of her box, who sat beside her pretty stepmother--a big, bronzed,
clean-shaven, strong-faced man of about the same age as Ian Stafford
of the Foreign Office, who had brought him that night at her
request. Ian had called him, "my South African nabob," in tribute to
the millions he had made with Cecil Rhodes and others at Kimberley and
on the Rand. At first sight of the forceful and rather ungainly form
she had inwardly contrasted it with the figure of Ian Stafford and
that other spring-time figure of a man at the end of the first row in
the stalls, towards which the prima donna had flashed one trusting,
happy glance, and with which she herself had been familiar since her
childhood. The contrast had not been wholly to the advantage of the
nabob; though, to be sure, he was simply arrayed--as if, indeed, he
were not worth a thousand a year. Certainly he had about him a sense
of power, but his occasional laugh was too vigorous for one whose own
great sense of humour was conveyed by an infectious, rippling murmur
delightful to hear.

Rudyard Byng was worth three millions of pounds, and that she
interested him was evident by the sudden arrest of his look and his
movements when introduced to her. Ian Stafford had noted this look;
but he had seen many another man look at Jasmine Grenfel with just as
much natural and unbidden interest, and he shrugged the shoulders of
his mind; for the millions alone would not influence her, that was
sure. Had she not a comfortable fortune of her own? Besides, Byng was
not the kind of man to capture Jasmine's fastidious sense and
nature. So much had happened between Jasmine and himself, so deep an
understanding had grown up between them, that it only remained to
bring her to the last court of inquiry and get reply to a vital
question--already put in a thousand ways and answered to his perfect
satisfaction. Indeed, there was between Jasmine and himself the
equivalent of a betrothal. He had asked her to marry him, and she had
not said no; but she had bargained for time to "prepare"; that she
should have another year in which to be gay in a gay world and, in her
own words, "walk the primrose path of pleasure untrammelled and alone,
save for my dear friend Mrs. Grundy."

Since that moment he had been quite sure that all was well. And now
the year was nearly up, and she had not changed; had, indeed, grown
more confiding and delicately dependent in manner towards him, though
seeing him but seldom alone.

As Ian Stafford looked at her now, he kept saying to himself, "So
exquisite and so clever, what will she not be at thirty! So well
poised, and yet so sweetly child-like dear dresden-china Jasmine."

That was what she looked like--a lovely thing of the time of Boucher
in dresden china.

At last, as though conscious of what was going on in his mind, she
slowly turned her drooping eyes towards him, and, over her shoulder,
as he quickly leaned forward, she said in a low voice which the others
could not hear:

"I am too young, and not clever enough to understand all the music
means--is that what you are thinking?"

He shook his head in negation, and his dark-brown eyes commanded hers,
but still deferentially, as he said: "You know of what I was
thinking. You will be forever young, but yours was always--will always
be--the wisdom of the wise. I'd like to have been as clever at
twenty-two."

"How trying that you should know my age so exactly--it darkens the
future," she rejoined with a soft little laugh; then, suddenly, a
cloud passed over her face. It weighed down her eyelids, and she gazed
before her into space with a strange, perplexed, and timorous
anxiety. What did she see? Nothing that was light and joyous, for her
small sensuous lips drew closer, and the fan she held in her lap
slipped from her fingers to the floor.

This aroused her, and Stafford, as he returned the fan to her, said
into a face again alive to the present: "You look as though you were
trying to summon the sable spirits of a sombre future."

Her fine pink-white shoulders lifted a little and, once more quite
self-possessed, she rejoined, lightly, "I have a chameleon mind; it
chimes with every mood and circumstance."

Suddenly her eyes rested on Rudyard Byng, and something in the rough
power of the head arrested her attention, and the thought flashed
through her mind: "How wonderful to have got so much at thirty-three!
Three millions at thirty-three--and millions beget millions!"

. . . Power--millions meant power; millions made ready the stage for
the display and use of every gift, gave the opportunity for the full
occupation of all personal qualities, made a setting for the jewel of
life and beauty, which reflected, intensified every ray of
merit. Power--that was it. Her own grandfather had had power. He had
made his fortune, a great one too, by patents which exploited the
vanity of mankind, and, as though to prove his cynical contempt for
his fellow-creatures, had then invented a quick-firing gun which
nearly every nation in the world adopted. First, he had got power by a
fortune which represented the shallowness and gullibility of human
nature, then had exploited the serious gift which had always been his,
the native genius which had devised the gun when he was yet a boy. He
had died at last with the smile on his lips which had followed his
remark, quoted in every great newspaper of two continents, that: "The
world wants to be fooled, so I fooled it; it wants to be stunned, so I
stunned it. My fooling will last as long as my gun; and both have paid
me well. But they all love being fooled best."

Old Draygon Grenfel's fortune had been divided among his three sons
and herself, for she had been her grandfather's favourite, and she was
the only grandchild to whom he had left more than a small reminder of
his existence. As a child her intelligence was so keen, her perception
so acute, she realized him so well, that he had said she was the only
one of his blood who had anything of himself in character or
personality, and he predicted--too often in her presence--that she
"would give the world a start or two when she had the chance." His
intellectual contempt for his eldest son, her father, was reproduced
in her with no prompting on his part; and, without her own mother from
the age of three, Jasmine had grown up self-willed and imperious, yet
with too much intelligence to carry her will and power too
far. Infinite adaptability had been the result of a desire to please
and charm; behind which lay an unlimited determination to get her own
way and bend other wills to hers.

The two wills she had not yet bent as she pleased were those of her
stepmother and of Ian Stafford--one, because she was jealous and
obstinate, and the other because he had an adequate self-respect and
an ambition of his own to have his way in a world which would not give
save at the point of the sword. Come of as good family as there was in
England, and the grandson of a duke, he still was eager for power,
determined to get on, ingenious in searching for that opportunity
which even the most distinguished talent must have, if it is to soar
high above the capable average. That chance, the predestined alluring
opening had not yet come; but his eyes were wide open, and he was
ready for the spring--nerved the more to do so by the thought that
Jasmine would appreciate his success above all others, even from the
standpoint of intellectual appreciation, all emotions excluded. How
did it come that Jasmine was so worldly wise, and yet so marvellously
the insouciant child?

He followed her slow, reflective glance at Byng, and the impression of
force and natural power of the millionaire struck him now, as it had
often done. As though summoned by them both, Byng turned his face and,
catching Jasmine's eyes, smiled and leaned forward.

"I haven't got over that great outburst of singing yet," he said, with
a little jerk of the head towards the stage, where, for the moment,
minor characters were in possession, preparing the path for the last
rush of song by which Al'mah, the new prima donna, would bring her
first night to a complete triumph.

With face turned full towards her, something of the power of his head
seemed to evaporate swiftly. It was honest, alert, and almost brutally
simple--the face of a pioneer. The forehead was broad and strong, and
the chin was square and determined; but the full, dark-blue eyes had
in them shadows of rashness and recklessness, the mouth was somewhat
self-indulgent and indolent; though the hands clasping both knees were
combined of strength, activity, and also a little of grace.

"I never had much chance to hear great singers before I went to South
Africa," he added, reflectively, "and this swallows me like a storm on
the high veld--all lightning and thunder and flood. I've missed a lot
in my time."

With a look which made his pulses gallop, Jasmine leaned over and
whispered--for the prima donna was beginning to sing again:

"There's nothing you have missed in your race that you cannot ride
back and collect. It is those who haven't run a race who cannot ride
back. You have won; and it is all waiting for you."

Again her eyes beamed upon him, and a new sensation came to him--the
kind of thing he felt once when he was sixteen, and the vicar's
daughter had suddenly held him up for quite a week, while all his
natural occupations were neglected, and the spirit of sport was
humiliated and abashed. Also he had caroused in his time--who was
there in those first days at Kimberley and on the Rand who did not
carouse, when life was so hard, luck so uncertain, and food so bad;
when men got so dead beat, with no homes anywhere--only shake-downs
and the Tents of Shem? Once he had had a native woman summoned to be
his slave, to keep his home; but that was a business which had
revolted him, and he had never repeated the experiment. Then, there
had been an adventuress, a wandering, foreign princess who had fooled
him and half a dozen of his friends to the top of their bent; but a
thousand times he had preferred other sorts of pleasures--cards,
horses, and the bright outlook which came with the clinking glass
after the strenuous day.

Jasmine seemed to divine it all as she looked at him--his primitive,
almost Edenic sincerity; his natural indolence and native force: a
nature that would not stir until greatly roused, but then, with an
unyielding persistence and concentrated force, would range on to its
goal, making up for a slow-moving intellect by sheer will, vision and
a gallant heart.

Al'mah was singing again, and Byng leaned forward eagerly. There was a
rustle in the audience, a movement to a listening position, then a
tense waiting and attention.

As Jasmine composed herself she said in a low voice to Ian Stafford,
whose well-proportioned character, personality, and refinement of
culture were in such marked contrast to the personality of the other:
"They live hard lives in those new lands. He has wasted much of
himself."

"Three millions at thirty-three means spending a deal of one thing to
get another," Ian answered a little grimly.

"Hush! Oh, Ian, listen!" she added in a whisper.

Once more Al'mah rose to mastery over the audience. The bold and
generous orchestration, the exceptional chorus, the fine and brilliant
tenor, had made a broad path for her last and supreme effort. The
audience had long since given up their critical sense, they were ready
to be carried into captivity again, and the surrender was instant and
complete. Now, not an eye was turned away from the singer. Even the
Corinthian gallant at the end of the first row of stalls gave himself
up to feasting on her and her success, and the characters in the opera
were as electrified as the audience.

For a whole seven minutes this voice seemed to be the only thing in
the world, transposing all thoughts, emotions, all elements of life
into terms of melody. Then, at last, with a crash of sweetness, the
voice broke over them all in crystals of sound and floated away into a
world of bright dreams.

An instant's silence which followed was broken by a tempest of
applause. Again, again, and again it was renewed. The subordinate
singers were quickly disposed of before the curtain, then Al'mah
received her memorable tribute. How many times she came and went she
never knew; but at last the curtain, rising, showed her well up the
stage beside a table where two huge candles flared. The storm of
applause breaking forth once more, the grateful singer raised her arms
and spread them out impulsively in gratitude and dramatic abandon.

As she did so, the loose, flowing sleeve of her robe caught the flame
of a candle, and in an instant she was in a cloud of fire. The wild
applause turned suddenly to notes of terror as, with a sharp cry, she
stumbled forward to the middle of the stage.

For one stark moment no one stirred, then suddenly a man with an
opera-cloak on his arm was seen to spring across a space of many feet
between a box on the level of the stage and the stage itself. He
crashed into the footlights, but recovered himself and ran forward. In
an instant he had enveloped the agonized figure of the singer and had
crushed out the flames with swift, strong movements.

Then lifting the now unconscious artist in his great arms, he strode
off with her behind the scenes.

"Well done, Byng! Well done, Ruddy Byng!" cried a strong voice from
the audience; and a cheer went up.

In a moment Byng returned and came down the stage. "She is not
seriously hurt," he said simply to the audience. "We were just in
time."

Presently, as he entered the Grenfel box again, deafening applause
broke forth.

"We were just in time," said Ian Stafford, with an admiring, teasing
laugh, as he gripped Byng's arm.

"'We'--well, it was a royal business," said Jasmine, standing close to
him and looking up into his eyes with that ingratiating softness which
had deluded many another man; "but do you realize that it was my cloak
you took?" she added, whimsically.

"Well, I'm glad it was," Byng answered, boyishly. "You'll have to wear
my overcoat home."

"I certainly will," she answered. "Come--the giant's robe."

People were crowding upon their box.

"Let's get out of this," Byng said, as he took his coat from the hook
on the wall.

As they left the box the girl's white-haired, prematurely aged father
whispered in the pretty stepmother's ear: "Jasmine'll marry that
nabob--you'll see."

The stepmother shrugged a shoulder. "Jasmine is in love with Ian
Stafford," she said, decisively.

"But she'll marry Rudyard Byng," was the stubborn reply.




CHAPTER II

THE UNDERGROUND WORLD


"What's that you say--Jameson--what?"

Rudyard Byng paused with the lighted match at the end of his cigar,
and stared at a man who was reading from a tape-machine, which gave
the club the world's news from minute to minute.

"Dr. Jameson's riding on Johannesburg with eight hundred men. He
started from Pitsani two days ago. And Cronje with his burghers are
out after him."

The flaming match burned Byng's fingers. He threw it into the
fireplace, and stood transfixed for a moment, his face hot with
feeling, then he burst out:

"But--God! they're not ready at Johannesburg. The burghers'll catch
him at Doornkop or somewhere, and--" He paused, overcome. His eyes
suffused. His hands went out in a gesture of despair.

"Jameson's jumped too soon," he muttered. "He's lost the game for
them."

The other eyed him quizzically. "Perhaps he'll get in yet. He surely
planned the thing with due regard for every chance. Johannesburg--"

"Johannesburg isn't ready, Stafford. I know. That Jameson and the Rand
should coincide was the only chance. And they'll not coincide now. It
might have been--it was to have been--a revolution at Johannesburg,
with Dr. Jim to step in at the right minute. It's only a filibustering
business now, and Oom Paul will catch the filibuster, as sure as
guns. 'Gad, it makes me sick!"

"Europe will like it--much," remarked Ian Stafford, cynically,
offering Byng a lighted match.

Byng grumbled out an oath, then fixed his clear, strong look on
Stafford. "It's almost enough to make Germany and France forget 1870
and fall into each other's arms," he answered. "But that's your
business, you Foreign Office people's business. It's the fellows out
there, friends of mine, so many of them, I'm thinking of. It's the
British kids that can't be taught in their mother-tongue, and the men
who pay all the taxes and can't become citizens. It's the justice you
can only buy; it's the foot of Kruger on the necks of the subjects of
his suzerain; it's eating dirt as Englishmen have never had to eat it
anywhere in the range of the Seven Seas. And when they catch Dr. Jim,
it'll be ten times worse. Yes, it'll be at Doornkop, unless-- But, no,
they'll track him, trap him, get him now. Johannesburg wasn't
ready. Only yesterday I had a cable that--" he stopped short
. . . "but they weren't ready. They hadn't guns enough, or something;
and Englishmen aren't good conspirators, not by a damned sight! Now
it'll be the old Majuba game all over again. You'll see."

"It certainly will set things back. Your last state will be worse than
your first," remarked Stafford.

Rudyard Byng drained off a glass of brandy and water at a gulp almost,
as Stafford watched him with inward adverse comment, for he never
touched wine or spirits save at meal-time, and the between-meal
swizzle revolted his Eesthetic sense. Byng put down the glass very
slowly, gazing straight before him for a moment without speaking. Then
he looked round. There was no one very near, though curious faces were
turned in his direction, as the grim news of the Raid was passed from
mouth to mouth. He came up close to Stafford and touched his chest
with a firm forefinger.

"Every egg in the basket is broken, Stafford. I'm sure of
that. Dr. Jim'll never get in now; and there'll be no oeufs a la coque
for breakfast. But there's an omelette to be got out of the mess, if
the chef doesn't turn up his nose too high. After all, what has
brought things to this pass? Why, mean, low tyranny and
injustice. Why, just a narrow, jealous race-hatred which makes helots
of British men. Simple farmers, the sentimental newspapers call
them--simple Machiavellis in veldschoen!" *

Stafford nodded assent. "But England is a very conventional chef," he
replied. "She likes the eggs for her omelette broken in the orthodox
way."

"She's not so particular where the eggs come from, is she?"

Stafford smiled as he answered: "There'll be a good many people in
England who won't sleep to-night some because they want Jameson to get
in; some because they don't; but most because they're thinking of the
millions of British money locked up in the Rand, with Kruger standing
over it with a sjambak, which he'll use. Last night at the opera we
had a fine example of presence of mind, when a lady burst into flames
on the stage. That spirited South African prima donna, the Transvaal,
is in flames. I wonder if she really will be saved, and who will save
her, and--"

A light, like the sun, broke over the gloomy and rather haggard face
of Rudyard Byng, and humour shot up into his eyes. He gave a low,
generous laugh, as he said with a twinkle: "And whether he does it at
some expense to himself--with his own overcoat, or with some one
else's cloak. Is that what you want to say?"

All at once the personal element, so powerful in most of us--even in
moments when interests are in existence so great that they should
obliterate all others--came to the surface. For a moment it almost
made Byng forget the crisis which had come to a land where he had done
all that was worth doing, so far in his life; which had burned itself
into his very soul; which drew him, sleeping or waking, into its arms
of memory and longing.

He had read only one paper that morning, and it--the latest attempt at
sensational journalism--had so made him blush at the flattering
references to himself in relation to the incident at the opera, that
he had opened no other. He had left his chambers to avoid the
telegrams and notes of congratulation which were arriving in great
numbers. He had gone for his morning ride in Battersea Park instead of
the Row to escape observation; had afterwards spent two hours at the
house he was building in Park Lane; had then come to the club, where
he had encountered Ian Stafford and had heard the news which
overwhelmed him.

"Well, an opera cloak did the work better than an overcoat would have
done," Stafford answered, laughing. "It was a flash of real genius to
think of it. You did think it all out in the second, didn't you?"

Stafford looked at him curiously, for he wondered if the choice of a
soft cloak which could more easily be wrapped round the burning woman
than an overcoat was accidental, or whether it was the product of a
mind of unusual decision.

Byng puffed out a great cloud of smoke and laughed again quietly as he
replied:

"Well, I've had a good deal of lion and rhinoceros shooting in my
time, and I've had to make up my mind pretty quick now and then; so I
suppose it gets to be a habit. You don't stop to think when the
trouble's on you; you think as you go. If I'd stopped to think, I'd
have funked the whole thing, I suppose--jumping from that box onto the
stage, and grabbing a lady in my arms, all in the open, as it
were. But that wouldn't have been the natural man. The natural man
that's in most of us, even when we're not very clever, does things
right. It's when the conventional man comes in and says, Let us
consider, that we go wrong. By Jingo, Al'mah was as near having her
beauty spoiled as any woman ever was; but she's only got a few nasty
burns on the arm and has singed her hair a little."

"You've seen her to-day, then?"

Stafford looked at him with some curiosity, for the event was one
likely to rouse a man's interest in a woman. Al'mah was unmarried, so
far as the world knew, and a man of Byng's kind, if not generally
inflammable, was very likely to be swept off his feet by some unusual
woman in some unusual circumstance. Stafford had never seen Rudyard
Byng talk to any woman but Jasmine for more than five minutes at a
time, though hundreds of eager and avaricious eyes had singled him out
for attention; and, as it seemed absurd that any one should build a
palace in Park Lane to live in by himself, the glances sent in his
direction from many quarters had not been without hopefulness. And
there need not have been, and there was not, any loss of dignity on
the part of match-making mothers in angling for him, for his family
was quite good enough; his origin was not obscure, and his upbringing
was adequate. His external ruggedness was partly natural; but it was
also got from the bitter rough life he had lived for so many years in
South Africa before he had fallen on his feet at Kimberley and
Johannesburg.

As for "strange women," during the time that had passed since his
retum to England there had never been any sign of loose living. So, to
Stafford's mind, Byng was the more likely to be swept away on a sudden
flood that would bear him out to the sea of matrimony. He had put his
question out of curiosity, and he had not to wait for a reply. It came
frankly and instantly:

"Why, I was at Al'mah's house in Bruton Street at eight o'clock this
morning--with the milkman and the newsboy; and you wouldn't believe
it, but I saw her, too. She'd been up since six o'clock, she
said. Couldn't sleep for excitement and pain, but looking like a pansy
blossom all the same, rigged out as pretty as could be in her boudoir,
and a nurse doing the needful. It's an odd dark kind of beauty she
has, with those full lips and the heavy eyebrows. Well, it was a bull
in a china-shop, as you might judge--and thank you kindly, Mr. Byng,
with such a jolly laugh, and ever and ever and ever so grateful and so
wonderfully--thoughtful, I think, was the word, as though one had
planned it all. And wouldn't I stay to breakfast? And not a bit stagey
or actressy, and rather what you call an uncut diamond--a gem in her
way, but not fine beur, not exactly. A touch of the karoo, or the
prairie, or the salt-bush plains in her, but a good chap altogether;
and I'm glad I was in it last night with her. I laughed a lot at
breakfast--why yes, I stayed to breakfast. Laugh before breakfast and
cry before supper, that's the proverb, isn't it? And I'm crying, all
right, and there's weeping down on the Rand too."

As he spoke Stafford made inward comment on the story being told to
him, so patently true and honest in every particular. It was rather
contradictory and unreasonable, however, to hear this big, shy, rugged
fellow taking exception, however delicately and by inference only, to
the lack of high refinement, to the want of fine fleur, in Al'mah's
personality. It did not occur to him that Byng was the kind of man who
would be comparing Jasmine's quite wonderful delicacy, perfumed grace,
and exquisite adaptability with the somewhat coarser beauty and genius
of the singer. It seemed natural that Byng should turn to a
personality more in keeping with his own, more likely to make him
perfectly at ease mentally and physically.

Stafford judged Jasmine by his own conversations with her, when he was
so acutely alive to the fact that she was the most naturally brilliant
woman he had ever known or met; and had capacities for culture and
attainment, as she had gifts of discernment and skill in thought, in
marked contrast to the best of the ladies of their world. To him she
had naturally shown only the one side of her nature--she adapted
herself to him as she did to every one else; she had put him always at
an advantage, and, in doing so, herself as well.

Full of dangerous coquetry he knew her to be--she had been so from a
child; and though this was culpable in a way, he and most others had
made more than due allowance, because mother-care and loving
surveillance had been withdrawn so soon. For years she had been the
spoiled darling of her father and brothers until her father married
again; and then it had been too late to control her. The wonder was
that she had turned out so well, that she had been so studious, so
determined, so capable. Was it because she had unusual brain and
insight into human nature, and had been wise and practical enough to
see that there was a point where restraint must be applied, and so had
kept herself free from blame or deserved opprobrium, if not entirely
from criticism? In the day when girls were not in the present sense
emancipated, she had the savoir faire and the poise of a married woman
of thirty. Yet she was delicate, fresh, and flower-like, and very
amusing, in a way which delighted men; and she did not antagonize
women.

Stafford had ruled Byng out of consideration where she was
concerned. He had not heard her father's remark of the night before,
"Jasmine will marry that nabob--you'll see."

He was, however, recalled to the strange possibilities of life by a
note which was handed to Byng as they stood before the club-room
fire. He could not help but see--he knew the envelope, and no other
handwriting was like Jasmine's, that long, graceful, sliding
hand. Byng turned it over before opening it.

"Hello," he said, "I'm caught. It's a woman's hand. I wonder how she
knew I was here."

Mentally Stafford shrugged his shoulders as he said to himself: "If
Jasmine wanted to know where he was, she'd find out. I wonder--I
wonder."

He watched Byng, over whose face passed a pleased smile.

"Why," Byng said, almost eagerly, "it's from Miss Grenfel--wants me to
go and tell her about Jameson and the Raid."

He paused for an instant, and his face clouded again. "The first thing
I must do is to send cables to Johannesburg. Perhaps there are some
waiting for me at my rooms. I'll go and see. I don't know why I didn't
get news sooner. I generally get word before the Government. There's
something wrong somewhere. Somebody has had me."

"If I were you I'd go to our friend first. When I'm told to go at
once, I go. She wouldn't like cablegrams and other things coming
between you and her command--even when Dr. Jim's riding out of
Matabeleland on the Rand for to free the slaves."

Stafford's words were playful, but there was, almost unknown to
himself, a strange little note of discontent and irony behind.

Byng laughed. "But I'll be able to tell her more, perhaps, if I go to
my rooms first."

"You are going to see her, then?"

"Certainly. There's nothing to do till we get news of Jameson at bay
in a conga or balled up at a kopje." Thrusting the delicately perfumed
letter in his pocket, he nodded, and was gone.

"I was going to see her myself," thought Stafford, "but that settles
it. It will be easier to go where duty calls instead, since Byng takes
my place. Why, she told me to come to-day at this very hour," he
added, suddenly, and paused in his walk towards the door.

"But I want no triangular tea-parties," he continued to
reflect.... "Well, there'll be work to do at the Foreign Office,
that's sure. France, Austria, Russia can spit out their venom now and
look to their mobilization. And won't Kaiser William throw up his cap
if Dr. Jim gets caught! What a mess it will be! Well--well--well!"

He sighed, and went on his way brooding darkly; for he knew that this
was the beginning of a great trial for England and all British people.



CHAPTER III

A DAUGHTER OF TYRE


"Monsieur voleur!"

Jasmine looked at him again, as she had done the night before at the
opera, standing quite confidentially close to him, her hand resting in
his big palm like a pad of rose-leaves; while a delicate perfume
greeted his senses. Byng beamed down on her, mystified and eager, yet
by no means impatient, since the situation was one wholly agreeable to
him, and he had been called robber in his time with greater violence
and with a different voice. Now he merely shook his head in humorous
protest, and gave her an indulgent look of inquiry. Somehow he felt
quite at home with her; while yet he was abashed by so much delicacy
and beauty and bloom.

"Why, what else are you but a robber?" she added, withdrawing her hand
rather quickly from the too frank friendliness of his grasp. "You ran
off with my opera-cloak last night, and a very pretty and expensive
one it was."

"Expensive isn't the word," he rejoined; "it was unpurchasable."

She preened herself a little at the phrase. "I returned your overcoat
this morning--before breakfast; and I didn't even receive a note of
thanks for it. I might properly have kept it till my opera cloak came
back."

"It's never coming back," he answered; "and as for my overcoat, I
didn't know it had been returned. I was out all the morning."

"In the Row?" she asked, with an undertone of meaning.

"Well, not exactly. I was out looking for your cloak."

"Without breakfast?" she urged with a whimsical glance.

"Well, I got breakfast while I was looking."

"And while you were indulging material tastes, the cloak hid
itself--or went out and hanged itself?"

He settled himself comfortably in the huge chair which seemed made
especially for him. With a rare sense for details she had had this
very chair brought from the library beyond, where her stepmother, in
full view, was writing letters. He laughed at her words--a deep, round
chuckle it was.

"It didn't exactly hang itself; it lay over the back of a Chesterfield
where I could see it and breakfast too."

"A Chesterfield in a breakfast-room! That's more like the furniture of
a boudoir."

"Well, it was a boudoir." He blushed a little in spite of himself.

"Ah!... Al'mah's? Well, she owed you a breakfast, at least, didn't
she?"

"Not so good a breakfast as I got."

"That is putting rather a low price on her life," she rejoined; and a
little smile of triumph gathered at her pink lips; lips a little like
those Nelson loved not wisely yet not too well, if love is worth while
at all.

"T didn't see where you were leading me," he gasped, helplessly. "I
give up. I can't talk in your way."

"What is my way?" she pleaded with a little wave of laughter in her
eyes.

"Why, no frontal attacks--only flank movements, and getting round the
kopjes, with an ambush in a drift here and there."

"That sounds like Paul Kruger or General Joubert," she cried in mock
dismay. "Isn't that what they are doing with Dr. Jameson, perhaps?"

His face clouded. Storm gathered slowly in his eyes, a grimness
suddenly settled in his strong jaw. "Yes," he answered, presently,
"that's what they will be doing; and if I'm not mistaken they'll catch
Jameson just as you caught me just now. They'll catch him at Doornkop
or thereabouts, if I know myself--and Oom Paul."

Her face flushed prettily with excitement. "I want to hear all about
this empire-making, or losing, affair; but there are other things to
be settled first. There's my opera-cloak and the breakfast in the
prima donna's boudoir, and--"

"But, how did you know it was Al'mah?" he asked blankly.

"Why, where else would my cloak be?" she inquired with a little
laugh. "Not at the costumier's or the cleaner's so soon. But, all this
horrid flippancy aside, do you really think I should have talked like
this, or been so exigent about the cloak, if I hadn't known
everything; if I hadn't been to see Al'mah, and spent an hour with her
and knew that she was recovering from that dreadful shock very
quickly? But could you think me so inhuman and unwomanly as not to
have asked about her?"

"I wouldn't be in a position to investigate much when you were
talking--not critically," he replied, boldly. "I would only be
thinking that everything you said was all right. It wouldn't occur to
me to--"

She half closed her eyes, looking at him with languishing humour. "Now
you must please remember that I am quite young, and may have my head
turned, and--"

"It wouldn't alter my mind about you if you turned your head," he
broke in, gallantly, with a desperate attempt to take advantage of an
opportunity, and try his hand at a game entirely new to him.

There was an instant's pause, in which she looked at him with what was
half-assumed, half-natural shyness. His attempt to play with words was
so full of nature, and had behind it such apparent admiration, that
the unspoiled part of her was suddenly made self-conscious, however
agreeably so. Then she said to him: "I won't say you were brave last
night--that doesn't touch the situation. It wasn't bravery, of course;
it was splendid presence of mind which could only come to a man with
great decision of character. I don't think the newspapers put it at
all in the right way. It wasn't like saving a child from the top of a
burning building, was it?"

"There was nothing in it at all where I was concerned," he
replied. "I've been living a life for fifteen years where you had to
move quick--by instinct, as it were. There's no virtue in it. I was
just a little quicker than a thousand other men present, and I was
nearer to the stage."

"Not nearer than my father or Mr. Stafford."

"They had a bigger shock than I had, I suppose. They got struck numb
for a second. I'm a coarser kind. I have seen lots of sickening
things; and I suppose they don't stun me. We get callous, I fancy, we
veld-rangers and adventurers."

"You seem sensitive enough to fine emotions," she said, almost shyly."
You were completely absorbed, carried away, by Al'mah's singing last
night. There wasn't a throb of music that escaped you, I should
think."

"Well, that's primary instinct. Music is for the most savage
natures. The boor that couldn't appreciate the Taj Mahal, or the
sculpture of Michael Angelo, might be swept off his feet by the music
of a master, though he couldn't understand its story. Besides, I've
carried a banjo and a cornet to the ends of the earth with me. I saved
my life with the cornet once. A lion got inside my zareba in
Rhodesia. I hadn't my gun within reach, but I'd been playing the
cornet, and just as he was crouching I blew a blast from it--one of
those jarring discords of Wagner in the "Gotterdammerung"--and he
turned tail and got away into the bush with a howl. Hearing gets to be
the most acute of all the senses with the pioneer. If you've ever
been really dying of thirst, and have reached water again, its sounds
become wonderful to you ever after that--the trickle of a creek, the
wash of a wave on the shore, the drip on a tin roof, the drop over a
fall, the swish of a rainstorm. It's the same with birds and
trees. And trees all make different sounds--that's the shape of the
leaves. It's all music, too."

Her breath came quickly with pleasure at the imagination and
observation of his words. "So it wasn't strange that you should be
ravished by Al'mah's singing last night was it?" She looked at him
keenly. "Isn't it curious that such a marvellous gift should be given
to a woman who in other respects--" she paused.

"Yes, I know what you mean. She's so untrained in lots of ways. That's
what I was saying to Stafford a little while ago. They live in a world
of their own, the stage people. There's always a kind of
irresponsibility. The habit of letting themselves go in their art, I
suppose, makes them, in real life, throw things down so hard when they
don't like them. Living at high pressure is an art like music. It
alters the whole equilibrium, I suppose. A woman like Al'mah would
commit suicide, or kill a man, without realizing the true significance
of it all."

"Were you thinking that when you breakfasted with her?"

"Yes, when she was laughing and jesting--and when she kissed me
good-bye."

"When--she--kissed you--good-bye?"

Jasmine drew back, then half-glanced towards her stepmother in the
other room. She was only twenty-two, and though her emancipation had
been accomplished in its way somewhat in advance of her generation, it
had its origin in a very early period of her life, when she had been
allowed to read books of verse--Shelley, Byron, Shakespeare, Verlaine,
Rossetti, Swinburne, and many others--unchallenged and unguided. The
understanding of things, reserved for "the wise and prudent," had been
at first vaguely and then definitely conveyed to her by slow but
subtle means--an apprehension from instinct, not from knowledge. There
had never been a shock to her mind.

The knowledge of things had grown imperceptibly, and most of life's
ugly meanings were known--at a great distance, to be sure, but still
known. Yet there came a sudden half-angry feeling when she heard
Rudyard Byng say, so loosely, that Al'Mah had kissed him. Was it
possible, then, that a man, that any man, thought she might hear such
things without resentment; that any man thought her to know so much of
life that it did not matter what was said? Did her outward appearance,
then, bear such false evidence?

He did not understand quite, yet he saw that she misunderstood, and he
handled the situation with a tact which seemed hardly to belong to a
man of his training and calibre.

"She thought no more of kissing me," he continued, presently, in a
calm voice--"a man she had seen only once before, and was not likely
to see again, than would a child of five. It meant nothing more to her
than kissing Fanato on the stage. It was pure impulse. She forgot it
as soon as it was done. It was her way of showing gratitude. Somewhat
unconventional, wasn't it? But then, she is a little Irish, a little
Spanish, and the rest Saxon; and she is all artist and bohemian."

Jasmine's face cleared, and her equilibrium was instantly
restored. She was glad she had misunderstood. Yet Al'mah had not
kissed her when she left, while expressing gratitude, too. There was a
difference. She turned the subject, saying: "Of course, she insists on
sending me a new cloak, and keeping the other as a memento. It was
rather badly singed, wasn't it?"

"It did its work well, and it deserves an honoured home. Do you know
that even as I flung the cloak round her, in the excitement of the
moment I 'sensed,' as my young nephew says, the perfume you use."

He lifted his hand, conscious that his fingers still carried some of
that delicate perfume which her fingers left there as they lay in his
palm when she greeted him on his entrance. "It was like an incense
from the cloak, as it blanketed the flames. Strange, wasn't it, that
the undersense should be conscious of that little thing, while the
over-sense was adding a sensational postscript to the opera?"

She smiled in a pleased way. "Do you like the perfume? I really use
very little of it."

"It's like no other. It starts a kind of cloud of ideas floating. I
don't know how to describe it. I imagine myself--"

She interrupted, laughing merrily. "My brother says it always makes
him angry, and Ian Stafford calls it 'The Wild Tincture of
Time'--frivolously and sillily says that it comes from a bank whereon
the 'wild thyme' grows! But now, I want to ask you many questions. We
have been mentally dancing, while down beyond the Limpopo--"

His demeanour instantly changed, and she noted the look cf power and
purpose coming into the rather boyish and good-natured, the rash and
yet determined, face. It was not quite handsome. The features were not
regular, the forehead was perhaps a little too low, and the hair grew
very thick, and would have been a vast mane if it had not been kept
fairly close by his valet. This valet was Krool, a half-caste--
Hottentot and Boer--whom he had rescued from Lobengula in the
Matabele war, and who had in his day been ship-steward, barber,
cook, guide, and native recruiter. Krool had attached himself to Byng,
and he would not be shaken off even when his master came home to
England.

Looking at her visitor with a new sense of observation alive in her,
Jasmine saw the inherent native drowsiness of the nature, the love of
sleep and good living, the healthy primary desires, the striving,
adventurous, yet, in one sense, unambitious soul. The very cleft in
the chin, like the alluring dimple of a child's cheek, enlarged and
hardened, was suggestive of animal beauty, with its parallel
suggestion of indolence. Yet, somehow, too ample as he was both in
fact and by suggestion to the imagination there was an apparent
underlying force, a capacity to do huge things when once roused. He
had been roused in his short day. The life into which he had been
thrown with men of vaster ambition and much more selfish ends than his
own, had stirred him to prodigies of activity in those strenuous,
wonderful, electric days when gold and diamonds changed the
hard-bitten, wearied prospector, who had doggedly delved till he had
forced open the hand of the Spirit of the Earth and caught the
treasure that flowed forth, into a millionaire, into a conqueror, with
the world at his feet. He had been of those who, for many a night and
many a year, eating food scarce fit for Kaffirs, had, in poverty and
grim endeavour, seen the sun rise and fall over the Magaliesberg
range, hope alive in the morning and dead at night. He had faced the
devilish storms which swept the high veld with lightning and the
thunderstone, striking men dead as they fled for shelter to the
boulders of some barren, mocking kopje; and he had had the occasional
wild nights of carousal, when the miseries and robberies of life and
time and the ceaseless weariness and hope deferred, were forgotten.

It was all there in his face--the pioneer endeavour, the reckless
effort, the gambler's anxiety, the self-indulgence, the crude
passions, with a far-off, vague idealism, the selfish outlook, and yet
great breadth of feeling, with narrowness of individual purpose. The
rough life, the sordid struggle, had left their mark, and this easy,
coaxing, comfortable life of London had not covered it up--not yet. He
still belonged to other--and higher--spheres.

There was a great contrast between him and Ian Stafford. Ian was
handsome, exquisitely refined, lean and graceful of figure, with a
mind which saw the end of your sentences from the first word, with a
skill of speech like a Damascus blade, with knowledge of a half-dozen
languages. Ian had an allusiveness of conversation which made human
intercourse a perpetual entertainment, and Jasmine's intercourse with
him a delight which lingered after his going until his coming
again. The contrast was prodigious--and perplexing, for Rudyard Byng
had qualities which compelled her interest. She sighed as she
reflected.

"I suppose you can't get three millions all to yourself with your own
hands without missing a good deal and getting a good deal you could do
without," she said to herself, as he wonderingly interjected the
exclamation:

"Now, what do you know of the Limpopo? I'll venture there isn't
another woman in England who even knows the name."

"I always had a thirst for travel, and I've read endless books of
travel and adventure," she replied. "I'd have been an explorer, or a
Cecil Rhodes, if I had been a man."

"Can you ride?" he asked, looking wonderingly at her tiny hand, her
slight figure, her delicate face with its almost impossible pink and
white.

"Oh, man of little faith!" she rejoined. "I can't remember when I
didn't ride. First a Shetland pony, and now at last I've reached
Zambesi--such a wicked dear."

"Zambesi--why Zambesi? One would think you were South African."

She enjoyed his mystification. Then she grew serious and her eyes
softened. "I had a friend--a girl, older than I. She married. Well,
he's an earl now, the Earl of Tynemouth, but he was the elder son
then, and wild for sport. They went on their honeymoon to shoot in
Africa, and they visited the falls of the Zambesi. She, my friend, was
standing on the edge of the chasm--perhaps you know it--not far from
Livingstone's tree, between the streams. It was October, and the river
was low. She put up her big parasol. A gust of wind suddenly caught
it, and instead of letting the thing fly, she hung on, and was nearly
swept into the chasm. A man with them pulled her back in time--but she
hung on to that red parasol. Only when it was all over did she realize
what had really happened. Well, when she came back to England, as a
kind of thank-offering she gave me her father's best hunter. That was
like her, too; she could always make other people generous. He is a
beautiful Satan, and I rechristened him Zambesi. I wanted the red
parasol, too, but Alice Tynemouth wouldn't give it to me."

"So she gave it to the man who pulled her back. Why not?"

"How do you know she did that?"

"Well, it hangs in an honoured place in Stafford's chambers. I
conjecture right, do I?"

Her eyes darkened slowly, and a swift-passing shadow covered her
faintly smiling lips; but she only said, "You see he was entitled to
it, wasn't he?" To herself, however, she whispered, "Neither of
them--neither ever told me that."

At that moment the door opened, and a footman came forward to Rudyard
Byng. "If you please, sir, your servant says, will you see him. There
is news from South Africa."

Byng rose, but Jasmine intervened. "No, tell him to come here," she
said to the footman. "Mayn't he?" she asked.

Byng nodded, and remained standing. He seemed suddenly lost to her
presence, and with head dropped forward looked into space, engrossed,
intense.

Jasmine studied him as an artist would study a picture, and decided
that he had elements of the unusual, and was a distinct
personality. Though rugged, he was not uncouth, and there was nothing
of the nouveau riche about him. He did not wear a ring or scarf-pin,
his watch-chain was simple and inconspicuous enough for a
school-boy--and he was worth three million pounds, with a palace
building in Park Lane and a feudal castle in Wales leased for a period
of years. There was nothing greatly striking in his carriage; indeed,
he did not make enough of his height and bulk; but his eye was strong
and clear, his head was powerful, and his quick smile was very
winning. Yet--yet, he was not the type of man who, to her mind should
have made three millions at thirty-three. It did not seem to her that
he was really representative of the great fortune-builders--she had
her grandfather and others closely in mind. She had seen many captains
of industry and finance in her grandfather's house, men mostly silent,
deliberate and taciturn, and showing in their manner and persons the
accumulated habits of patience, force, ceaseless aggression and
domination.

Was it only luck which had given Rudyard Byng those three millions? It
could not be just that alone. She remembered her grandfather used to
say that luck was a powerful ingredient in the successful career of
every man, but that the man was on the spot to take the luck, knew
when to take it, and how to use it. "The lucky man is the man that
sits up watching for the windfall while other men are sleeping"--that
was the way he had put it. So Rudyard Byng, if lucky, had also been of
those who had grown haggard with watching, working and waiting; but
not a hair of his head had whitened, and if he looked older than he
was, still he was young enough to marry the youngest debutante in
England and the prettiest and best-born. He certainly had inherent
breeding. His family had a long pedigree, and every man could not be
as distinguished-looking as Ian Stafford--as Ian Stafford, who,
however, had not three millions of pounds; who had not yet made his
name and might never do so.

She flushed with anger at herself that she should be so disloyal to
Ian, for whom she had pictured a brilliant future--ambassador at Paris
or Berlin, or, if he chose, Foreign Minister in Whitehall--Ian,
gracious, diligent, wonderfully trained, waiting, watching for his
luck and ready to take it; and to carry success, when it came, like a
prince of princelier days. Ian gratified every sense in her, met every
demand of an exacting nature, satisfied her unusually critical
instinct, and was, in effect, her affianced husband. Yet it was so
hard to wait for luck, for place, for power, for the environment where
she could do great things, could fill that radiant place which her
cynical and melodramatic but powerful and sympathetic grandfather had
prefigured for her. She had been the apple of that old man's eye, and
he had filled her brain--purposely--with ambitious ideas. He had done
it when she was very young, because he had not long to stay; and he
had overcoloured the pictures in order that the impression should be
vivid and indelible when he was gone. He had meant to bless, for, to
his mind, to shine, to do big things, to achieve notoriety, to attain
power, "to make the band play when you come," was the true philosophy
of life. And as this philosophy, successful in his case, was
accompanied by habits of life which would bear the closest inspection
by the dean and chapter, it was a difficult one to meet by argument or
admonition. He had taught his grandchild as successfully as he had
built the structure of his success. He had made material things the
basis of life's philosophy and purpose; and if she was not wholly
materialistic, it was because she had drunk deep, for one so young, at
the fountains of art, poetry, sculpture and history. For the last she
had a passion which was represented by books of biography without
number, and all the standard historians were to be found in her
bedroom and her boudoir. Yet, too, when she had opportunity--when Lady
Tynemouth brought them to her--she read the newest and most daring
productions of a school of French novelists and dramatists who saw the
world with eyes morally astigmatic and out of focus. Once she had
remarked to Alice Tynemouth:

"You say I dress well, yet it isn't I. It's my dressmaker. I choose
the over-coloured thing three times out of five--it used to be more
than that. Instinctively I want to blaze. It is the same in
everything. I need to be kept down, but, alas! I have my own way in
everything. I wish I hadn't, for my own good. Yet I can't brook being
ruled."

To this Alice had replied: "A really selfish husband--not a difficult
thing to find--would soon keep you down sufficiently. Then you'd
choose the over-coloured thing not more than two times, perhaps one
time, out of five. Your orientalism is only undisciplined self-will. A
little cruelty would give you a better sense of proportion in
colour--and everything else. You have orientalism, but little or no
orientation."

Here, now, standing before the fire, was that possible husband who, no
doubt, was selfish, and had capacities for cruelty which would give
her greater proportion--and sense of colour. In Byng's palace, with
three millions behind her--she herself had only the tenth of one
million--she could settle down into an exquisitely ordered, beautiful,
perfect life where the world would come as to a court, and--

Suddenly she shuddered, for these thoughts were sordid, humiliating,
and degrading. They were unbidden, but still they came. They came from
some dark fountain within herself. She really wanted--her idealistic
self wanted--to be all that she knew she looked, a flower in life and
thought. But, oh, it was hard, hard for her to be what she wished!
Why should it be so hard for her?

She was roused by a voice. "Cronje!" it said in a deep, slow, ragged
note.

Byng's half-caste valet, Krool, sombre of face, small, lean, ominous,
was standing in the doorway.

"Cronje! . . . Well?" rejoined Byng, quietly, yet with a kind of
smother in the tone.

Krool stretched out a long, skinny, open hand, and slowly closed the
fingers up tight with a gesture suggestive of a trap closing upon a
crushed captive.

"Where?" Byng asked, huskily.

"Doornkop," was the reply; and Jasmine, watching closely, fascinated
by Krool's taciturnity, revolted by his immobile face, thought she saw
in his eyes a glint of malicious and furtive joy. A dark premonition
suddenly flashed into her mind that this creature would one day,
somehow, do her harm; that he was her foe, her primal foe, without
present or past cause for which she was responsible; but still a
foe--one of those antipathies foreordained, one of those evil
influences which exist somewhere in the universe against every
individual life.

"Doornkop--what did I say!" Byng exclaimed to Jasmine. "I knew they'd
put the double-and-twist on him at Doornkop, or some such place; and
they've done it--Kruger and Joubert. Englishmen aren't slim enough to
be conspirators. Dr. Jim was going it blind, trusting to good luck,
gambling with the Almighty. It's bury me deep now. It's Paul Kruger
licking his chops over the savoury mess. 'Oh, isn't it a pretty dish
to set before the king!' What else, Krool?"

"Nothing, Baas."

"Nothing more in the cables?"

"No, Baas."

"That will do, Krool. Wait. Go to Mr. Whalen. Say I want him to bring
a stenographer and all the Partners--he'll understand--to me at ten
to-night."

"Yes, Baas."

Krool bowed slowly. As he raised his head his eyes caught those of
Jasmine. For an instant they regarded each other steadily, then the
man's eyes dropped, and a faint flush passed over his face. The look
had its revelation which neither ever forgot. A quiver of fear passed
through Jasmine, and was followed by a sense of self-protection and a
hardening of her will, as against some possible danger.

As Krool left the room he said to himself: "The Baas speaks her for
his vrouw. But the Baas will go back quick to the Vaal--p'r'aps."

Then an evil smile passed over his face, as he thought of the fall of
the Rooinek--of Dr. Jim in Oom Paul's clutches. He opened and shut his
fingers again with a malignant cruelty.

Standing before the fire, Byng said to Jasmine meditatively, with that
old ironic humour which was always part of him: "'Fee, fo, fi, fum, I
smell the blood of an Englishman.'"

Her face contracted with pain. "They will take Dr. Jim's life?" she
asked, solemnly.

"It's hard to tell. It isn't him alone. There's lots of others that we
both know."

"Yes, yes, of course. It's terrible, terrible," she whispered.

"It's more terrible than it looks, even now. It's a black day for
England. She doesn't know yet how black it is. I see it, though; I see
it. It's as plain as an open book. Well, there's work to do, and I
must be about it. I'm off to the Colonial Office. No time to
lose. It's a job that has no eight-hours shift."

Now the real man was alive. He was transformed. The face was set and
quiet. He looked concentrated will and power as he stood with his
hands clasped behind him, his shoulders thrown back, his eyes alight
with fire and determination. To herself Jasmine seemed to be moving in
the centre of great events, having her fingers upon the levers which
work behind the scenes of the world's vast schemes, standing by the
secret machinery of government.

"How I wish I could help you," she said, softly, coming nearer to him,
a warm light in her liquid blue eyes, her exquisite face flushing with
excitement, her hands clasped in front of her.

As Byng looked at her, it seemed to him that sweet honesty and
high-heartedness had never had so fine a setting; that never had there
been in the world such an epitome of talent, beauty and sincerity. He
had suddenly capitulated, he who had ridden unscathed so long. If he
had dared he would have taken her in his arms there and then; but he
had known her only for a day. He had been always told that a woman
must be wooed and won, and to woo took time. It was not a task he
understood, but suddenly it came to him that he was prepared to do it;
that he must be patient and watch and serve, and, as he used to do,
perhaps, be elate in the morning and depressed at night, till the day
of triumph came and his luck was made manifest.

"But you can help me, yes, you can help me as no one else can," he
said almost hoarsely, and his hands moved a little towards her.

"You must show me how," she said, scarce above a whisper, and she drew
back slightly, for this look in his eyes told its own story.

"When may I come again?" he asked.

"I want so much to hear everything about South Africa. Won't you come
to-morrow at six?" she asked.

"Certainly, to-morrow at six," he answered, eagerly, "and thank you."

His honest look of admiration enveloped her as her hand was again lost
in his strong, generous palm, and lay there for a moment thrilling
him.... He turned at the door and looked back, and the smile she gave
seemed the most delightful thing he had ever seen.

"She is a flower, a jasmine-flower," he said, happily, as he made his
way into the street.

When he had gone she fled to her bedroom. Standing before the mirror,
she looked at herself long, laughing feverishly. Then suddenly she
turned and threw herself upon the bed, bursting into a passion of
tears. Sobs shook her.

"Oh, Ian," she said, raisig her head at last, "oh, Ian, Ian, I hate
myself!"

Down in the library her stepmother was saying to her father, "You are
right, Jasmine will marry the nabob."

"I am sorry for Ian Stafford," was the response.

"Men get over such things," came the quietly cynical reply.

"Jasmine takes a lot of getting over," answered Jasmine's father. "She
has got the brains of all the family, the beauty her family never
had--the genius of my father, and the wilfulness, and--"

He paused, for, after all, he was not talking to the mother of his
child.

"Yes, all of it, dear child," was the enigmatical reply.

"I wish--Nelly, I do wish that--"

"Yes, I know what you wish, Cuthbert, but it's no good. I'm not of any
use to her. She will work out her own destiny alone--as her
grandfather did."

"God knows I hope not! A man can carry it off, but a woman--"

Slow and almost stupid as he was, he knew that her inheritance from
her grandfather's nature was a perilous gift.



CHAPTER IV

THE PARTNERS MEET


England was more stunned than shocked. The dark significance, the evil
consequences destined to flow from the Jameson Raid had not yet
reached the general mind. There was something gallant and romantic in
this wild invasion: a few hundred men, with no commissariat and
insufficient clothing, with enough ammunition and guns for only the
merest flurry of battle, doing this unbelievable gamble with
Fate--challenging a republic of fighting men with well-stocked
arsenals and capable artillery, with ample sources of supply, with
command of railways and communications. It was certainly magnificent;
but it was magnificent folly.

It did not take England long to decide that point; and not even the
Laureate's paean in the organ of the aristocracy and upper middle
class could evoke any outburst of feeling. There was plenty of
admiration for the pluck and boldness, for the careless indifference
with which the raiders risked their lives; for the romantic side of
the dash from Pitsani to the Rand; but the thing was so palpably
impossible, as it was carried out, that there was not a knowing mind
in the Islands which would not have echoed Rhodes' words, "Jameson has
upset the apple-cart."

Rudyard Byng did not visit Jasmine the next evening at six
o'clock. His world was all in chaos, and he had not closed his eyes to
sleep since he had left her. At ten o'clock at night, as he had
arranged, "The Partners" and himself met at his chambers, around which
had gathered a crowd of reporters and curious idlers; and from that
time till the grey dawn he and they had sat in conference. He had
spent two hours at the Colonial Office after he left Jasmine, and now
all night he kneaded the dough of a new policy with his companions in
finance and misfortune.

There was Wallstein, the fairest, ablest, and richest financier of
them all, with a marvellous head for figures and invaluable and
commanding at the council-board, by virtue of his clear brain and his
power to co-ordinate all the elements of the most confusing financial
problems. Others had by luck and persistence made money--the basis of
their fortunes; but Wallstein had showed them how to save those
fortunes and make them grow; had enabled them to compete successfully
with the games of other great financiers in the world's
stock-markets. Wallstein was short and stout, with a big blue eye and
an unwrinkled forehead; prematurely aged from lack of exercise and the
exciting air of the high veld; from planning and scheming while others
slept; from an inherent physical weakness due to the fact that he was
one of twin sons, to his brother being given great physical strength,
to himself a powerful brain for finance and a frail if ample
body. Wallstein knew little and cared less about politics; yet he saw
the use of politics in finance, and he did not stick his head into the
sand as some of his colleagues did when political activities hampered
their operations. In Johannesburg he had kept aloof from the struggle
with Oom Paul, not from lack of will, but because he had no stomach
for daily intrigue and guerrilla warfare and subterranean workings;
and he was convinced that only a great and bloody struggle would end
the contest for progress and equal rights for all white men on the
Rand. His inquiries had been bent towards so disposing the financial
operations, so bulwarking the mining industry by sagacious designs,
that, when the worst came, they all would be able to weather the
storm. He had done his work better than his colleagues knew, or indeed
even himself knew.

Probably only Fleming the Scotsman--another of the Partners--with a
somewhat dour exterior, an indomitable will, and a caution which
compelled him to make good every step of the way before him, and so
cultivate a long sight financially and politically, understood how
extraordinary Wallstein's work had been--only Fleming, and Rudyard
Byng, who knew better than any and all.

There was also De Lancy Scovel, who had become a biggish figure in the
Rand world because he had been a kind of financial valet to Wallstein
and Byng, and, it was said, had been a real unofficial valet to
Rhodes, being an authority on cooking, and on brewing a punch, and a
master of commissariat in the long marches which Rhodes made in the
days when he trekked into Rhodesia. It was indeed said that he had
made his first ten thousand pounds out of two trips which Rhodes made
en route to Lobengula, and had added to this amount on the principle
of compound multiplication when the Matabele war came; for here again
he had a collateral interest in the commissariat.

Rhodes, with a supreme carelessness in regard to money, with an
indifference to details which left his mind free for the working of a
few main ideas, had no idea how many cheques he gave on the spur of
the moment to De Lancy Scovel in this month or in that, in this year
or in that, for this thing or for that--cheques written very often on
the backs of envelopes, on the white margin of a newspaper, on the
fly-leaf of a book or a blank telegraph form. The Master Man was so
stirred by half-contemptuous humour at the sycophancy and snobbery of
his vain slave, who could make a salad out of anything edible, that,
caring little what men were, so long as they did his work for him, he
once wrote a cheque for two thousand pounds on the starched cuff of
his henchman's "biled shirt" at a dinner prepared for his birthday.

So it was that, with the marrow-bones thrown to him, De Lancy Scovel
came to a point where he could follow Wallstein's and Rhodes' lead
financially, being privy to their plans, through eavesdropping on the
conferences of his chiefs. It came as a surprise to his superiors that
one day's chance discovery showed De Lancy Scovel to be worth fifty
thousand pounds; and from that time on they used him for many a
purpose in which it was expedient their own hands should not
appear. They felt confident that a man who could so carefully and
secretly build up his own fortune had a gift which could be used to
advantage. A man who could be so subterranean in his own affairs would
no doubt be equally secluded in their business. Selfishness would make
him silent. And so it was that "the dude" of the camp and the kraal,
the factotum, who in his time had brushed Rhodes' clothes when he
brushed his own, after the Kaffir servant had messed them about, came
to be a millionaire and one of the Partners. For him South Africa had
no charms. He was happy in London, or at his country-seat in
Leicestershire, where he followed the hounds with a temerity which was
at base vanity; where he gave the county the best food to be got
outside St. Petersburg or Paris; where his so-called bachelor
establishment was cared for by a coarse, gray-haired housekeeper who,
the initiated said, was De Lancy's South African wife, with a rooted
objection to being a lady or "moving in social circles"; whose
pleasure lay in managing this big household under De Lancy's
guidance. There were those who said they had seen her brush a speck of
dust from De Lancy's coat-collar, as she emerged from her morning
interview with him; and others who said they had seen her hidden in
the shrubbery listening to the rather flaccid conversation of her
splendid poodle of a master.

There were others who had climbed to success in their own way, some by
happy accident, some by a force which disregarded anything in their
way, and some by sheer honest rough merit, through which the soul of
the true pioneer shone.

There was also Barry Whalen, who had been educated as a doctor, and,
with a rare Irish sense of adaptability and amazing Celtic cleverness,
had also become a mining engineer, in the days when the Transvaal was
emerging from its pioneer obscurity into the golden light of mining
prosperity. Abrupt, obstinately honest, and sincere; always protesting
against this and against that, always the critic of authority, whether
the authority was friend or foe; always smothering his own views in
the moment when the test of loyalty came; always with a voice like a
young bull and a heart which would have suited a Goliath, there was no
one but trusted Barry, none that had not hurried to him in a
difficulty; not because he was so wise, but because he was so true. He
would never have made money, in spite of the fact that his prescience,
his mining sense, his diagnosis of the case of a mine, as Byng called
it, had been a great source of wealth to others, had it not been for
Wallstein and Byng.

Wallstein had in him a curious gentleness and human sympathy, little
in keeping with the view held of him by that section of the British
press which would willingly have seen England at the mercy of Paul
Kruger--for England's good, for her soul's welfare as it were, for her
needed chastisement. He was spoken of as a cruel, tyrannical, greedy
German Jew, whose soul was in his own pocket and his hand in the
pockets of the world. In truth he was none of these things, save that
he was of German birth, and of as good and honest German origin as
George of Hanover and his descendants, if not so distinguished.
Wallstein's eye was an eye of kindness, save in the vision of business;
then it saw without emotion to the advantage of the country where he
had made his money, and to the perpetual advantage of England, to whom
he gave an honourable and philanthropic citizenship. His charities were
not of the spectacular kind; but many a poor and worthy, and often
unworthy, unfortunate was sheltered through bad days and heavy weather
of life by the immediate personal care of "the Jew Mining Magnate,
who didn't care a damn what happened to England so long as his own
nest was well lined!"

It was Wallstein who took heed of the fact that, as he became rich,
Barry Whalen remained poor; and it was he who took note that Barry had
a daughter who might any day be left penniless with frail health and
no protector; and taking heed and note, it was he made all the
Partners unite in taking some financial risks and responsibilities for
Barry, when two new mines were opened--to Barry's large profit. It was
characteristic of Barry, however, that, if they had not disguised
their action by financial devices, and by making him a Partner,
because he was needed professionally and intellectually and for other
business reasons, nicely phrased to please his Celtic vanity, he would
have rejected the means to the fortune which came to him. It was a far
smaller fortune than any of the others had; but it was sufficient for
him and for his child. So it was that Barry became one of the
Partners, and said things that every one else would hesitate to say,
but were glad to hear said.

Others of the group were of varying degrees of ability and interest
and importance. One or two were poltroons in body and mind, with only
a real instinct for money-making and a capacity for constructive
individualism. Of them the most conspicuous was Clifford Melville,
whose name was originally Joseph Sobieski, with habitat Poland, whose
small part in this veracious tale belongs elsewhere.

Each had his place, and all were influenced by the great schemes of
Rhodes and their reflection in the purposes and actions of
Wallstein. Wallstein was inspired by the dreams and daring purposes of
Empire which had driven Rhodes from Table Mountain to the kraal of
Lobengula and far beyond; until, at last, the flag he had learned to
love had been triumphantly trailed from the Cape to Cairo.

Now in the great crisis, Wallstein, of them all, was the most
self-possessed, save Rudyard Byng. Some of the others were
paralyzed. They could only whine out execrations on the man who had
dared something; who, if he had succeeded, would have been hailed as
the great leader of a Revolution, not the scorned and humiliated
captain of a filibustering expedition. A triumphant rebellion or raid
is always a revolution in the archives of a nation. These men were of
a class who run for cover before a battle begins, and can never be
kept in the fighting-line except with the bayonet in the small of
their backs. Others were irritable and strenuous, bitter in their
denunciations of the Johannesburg conspirators, who had bungled their
side of the business and who had certainly shown no rashness. At any
rate, whatever the merits of their case, no one in England accused the
Johannesburgers of foolhardy courage or impassioned daring. They were
so busy in trying to induce Jameson to go back that they had no time
to go forward themselves. It was not that they lost their heads, their
hearts were the disappearing factors.

At this gloomy meeting in his house, Byng did not join either of the
two sections who represented the more extreme views and the
unpolitical minds. There was a small section, of which he was one, who
were not cleverer financially than their friends, but who had
political sense and intuition; and these, to their credit, were more
concerned, at this dark moment, for the political and national
consequences of the Raid, than for the certain set-back to the mining
and financial enterprises of the Rand. A few of the richest of them
were the most hopeless politically--ever ready to sacrifice principle
for an extra dividend of a quarter per cent.; and, in their inmost
souls, ready to bow the knee to Oom Paul and his unwholesome,
undemocratic, and corrupt government, if only the dividends moved on
and up.

Byng was not a great genius, and he had never given his natural
political talent its full chance; but his soul was bigger than his
pocket. He had a passionate love for the land--for England--which had
given him birth; and he had a decent pride in her honour and good
name. So it was that he had almost savagely challenged some of the
sordid deliberations of this stern conference. In a full-blooded and
manly appeal he begged them "to get on higher ground." If he could but
have heard it, it would have cheered the heart of the broken and
discredited pioneer of Empire at Capetown, who had received his
death-warrant, to take effect within five years, in the little cottage
at Muizenberg by the sea; as great a soul in posse as ever came from
the womb of the English mother; who said as he sat and watched the
tide flow in and out, and his own tide of life ebbed, "Life is a three
days' trip to the sea-shore: one day in going, one day in settling
down, and one day in packing up again."

Byng had one or two colleagues who, under his inspiration, also took
the larger view, and who looked ahead to the consequences yet to flow
from the fiasco at Doornkop, which became a tragedy. What would happen
to the conspirators of Johannesburg? What would happen to Jameson and
Willoughby and Bobby White and Raleigh Grey? Who was to go to South
Africa to help in holding things together, and to prevent the worst
happening, if possible? At this point they had arrived when they saw--



   . . . The dull dank morn stare in,
   Like a dim drowned face with oozy eyes.


A more miserable morning seldom had broken, even in England.

"I will go. I must go," remarked Byng at last, though there was a
strange sinking of the heart as he said it. Even yet the perfume of
Jasmine's cloak stole to his senses to intoxicate them. But it was his
duty to offer to go; and he felt that he could do good by going, and
that he was needed at Johannesburg. He, more than all of them, had
been in open conflict with Oom Paul in the the past, had fought him
the most vigorously, and yet for him the old veldschoen Boer had some
regard and much respect, in so far as he could respect a Rooinek at
all.

"I will go," Byng repeated, and looked round the table at haggard
faces, at ashen faces, at the faces of men who had smoked to quiet
their nerves, or drunk hard all night to keep up their courage. How
many times they had done the same in olden days, when the millions
were not yet arrived, and their only luxury was companionship and
champagne--or something less expensive.

As Byng spoke, Krool entered the room with a great coffee-pot and a
dozen small white bowls. He heard Byng's words, and for a moment his
dark eyes glowed with a look of evil satisfaction. But his immobile
face showed nothing, and he moved like a spirit among them his lean
hand putting a bowl before each person, like a servitor of Death
passing the hemlock-brew.

At his entrance there was instant silence, for, secret as their
conference must be, this half-caste, this Hottentot-Boer, must hear
nothing and know nothing. Not one of them but resented his being
Byng's servant. Not one but felt him a danger at any time, and
particularly now. Once Barry Whalen, the most outwardly brusque and
apparently frank of them all, had urged Byng to give Krool up, but
without avail; and now Barry eyed the half-caste with a resentful
determination. He knew that Krool had heard Byng's words, for he was
sitting opposite the double doors, and had seen the malicious eyes
light up. Instantly, however, that light vanished. They all might have
been wooden men, and Krool but a wooden servitor, so mechanical and
concentrated were his actions. He seemed to look at nobody; but some
of them shrank a little as he leaned over and poured the brown,
steaming liquid and the hot milk into the bowls. Only once did the
factotum look at anybody directly, and that was at Byng just as he was
about to leave the room. Then Barry Whalen saw him glance searchingly
at his master's face in a mirror, and again that baleful light leaped
up in his eyes.

When he had left the room, Barry Whalen said, impulsively: "Byng, it's
all damn foolery your keeping that fellow about you. It's dangerous,
'specially now."

"Coffee's good, isn't it? Think there's poison in it?" Byug asked with
a contemptuous little laugh. "Sugar--what?" He pushed the great bowl
of sugar over the polished table towards Barry.

"Oh, he makes you comfortable enough, but--"

"But he makes you uncomfortable, Barry? Well, we're bound to get on
one another's nerves one way or another in this world when the east
wind blows; and if it isn't the east wind, it's some other wind. We're
living on a planet which has to take the swipes of the universe,
because it has permitted that corrupt, quarrelsome, and pernicious
beast, man, to populate the hemispheres. Krool is staying on with me,
Barry."

"We're in heavy seas, and we don't want any wreckers on the shore,"
was the moody and nervously indignant reply.

"Well, Krool's in the heavy seas, all right, too--with me."

Barry Whalen persisted. "We're in for complications, Byng. England has
to take a hand in the game now with a vengeance. We don't want any
spies. He's more Boer than native."

"There'll be nothing Krool can get worth spying for. If we keep our
mouths shut to the outside world, we'll not need fear any spies. I'm
not afraid of Krool. We'll not be sold by him. Though some one inside
will sell us perhaps--as the Johannesburg game was sold by some one
inside."

There was a painful silence, and more than one man looked at his
fellows furtively.

"We will do nothing that will not bear the light of day, and then we
need not fear any spying," continued Byng.

"If we have secret meetings and intentions which we don't make public,
it is only what governments themselves have; and we keep them quiet to
prevent any one taking advantage of us; but our actions are
justfiable. I'm going to do nothing I'm ashamed of; and when it's
necessary, or when and if it seems right to do so, I'll put all my
cards on the table. But when I do, I'll see that it's a full hand--if
I can."

There was a silence for a moment after he had ended, then some one
said:

"You think it's best that you should go? You want to go to
Johannesburg?"

"I didn't say anything about wanting to go. I said I'd go because one
of us--or two of us--ought to go. There's plenty to do here; but if I
can be any more use out there, why, Wallstein can stay here, and--"

He got no further, for Wallstein, to whom he had just referred, and
who had been sitting strangely impassive, with his eyes approvingly
fixed on Byng, half rose from his chair and fell forward, his thick,
white hands sprawling on the mahogany table, his fat, pale face
striking the polished wood with a thud. In an instant they were all on
their feet and at his side.

Barry Whalen lifted up his head and drew him back into the chair, then
three of them lifted him upon a sofa. Barry's hand felt the breast of
the prostrate figure, and Byng's fingers sought his wrist. For a
moment there was a dreadful silence, and then Byng and Whalen looked
at each other and nodded.

"Brandy!" said Byng, peremptorily.

"He's not dead?" whispered some one.

"Brandy--quick," urged Byng, and, lifting up the head a little, he
presently caught the glass from Whalen's hand and poured some brandy
slowly between the bluish lips. "Some one ring for Krool," he added.

A moment later Krool entered. "The doctor--my doctor and his own--and
a couple of nurses," Byng said, sharply, and Krool nodded and
vanished. "Perhaps it's only a slight heart-attack, but it's best to
be on the safe side."

"Anyhow, it shows that Wallstein needs to let up for a while,"
whispered Fleming.

"It means that some one must do Wallstein's work here," said Barry
Whalen. "It means that Byng stays in London," he added, as Krool
entered the room again with a rug to cover Wallstein.

Barry saw Krool's eyes droop before his words, and he was sure that
the servant had reasons for wishing his master to go to South
Africa. The others present, however, only saw a silent, magically
adept figure stooping over the sick man, adjusting the body to greater
ease, arranging skilfully the cushion under the head, loosening and
removing the collar and the boots, and taking possession of the room,
as though he himself were the doctor; while Byng looked on with
satisfaction.

"Useful person, eh?" he said, meaningly, in an undertone to Barry
Whalen.

"I don't think he's at home in England," rejoined Barry, as meaningly
and very stubbornly: "He won't like your not going to South Africa."

"Am I not going to South Africa?" Byng asked, mechanically, and
looking reflectively at Krool.

"Wallstein's a sick man, Byng. You can't leave London. You're the only
real politician among us. Some one else must go to Johannesburg."

"You--Barry?"

"You know I can't, Byng--there's my girl. Besides, I don't carry
enough weight, anyhow, and you know that too."

Byng remembered Whalen's girl--stricken down with consumption a few
months before. He caught Whalen's arm in a grip of friendship. "All
right, dear old man," he said, kindly. "Fleming shall go, and I'll
stay. Yes, I'll stay here, and do Wallstein's work."

He was still mechanically watching Krool attend to the sick man, and
he was suddenly conscious of an arrest of all motion in the
half-caste's lithe frame. Then Krool turned, and their eyes met. Had
he drawn Krool's eyes to his--the master-mind influencing the
subservient intelligence?

"Krool wants to go to South Africa," he said to himself with a
strange, new sensation which he did not understand, though it was not
quite a doubt. He reassured himself. "Well, it's natural he
should. It's his home.... But Fleming must go to Johannesburg. I'm
needed most here."

There was gratitude in his heart that Fate had decreed it so. He was
conscious of the perfume from Jasmine's cloak searching his senses,
even in this hour when these things that mattered--the things of
Fate--were so enormously awry.



CHAPTER V

A WOMAN TELLS HER STORY


"Soon he will speak you. Wait here, madame."

Krool passed almost stealthily out.

Al'mah looked round the rather formal sitting-room, with its somewhat
incongruous furnishing--leopard-skins from Bechuanaland; lion-skins
from Matabeleland; silver-mounted tusks of elephants from Eastern Cape
Colony and Portuguese East Africa; statues and statuettes of classical
subjects; two or three Holbeins, a Rembrandt, and an El Greco on the
walls; a piano, a banjo, and a cornet; and, in the corner, a little
roulette-table. It was a strange medley, in keeping, perhaps, with the
incongruously furnished mind of the master of it all; it was
expressive of tastes and habits not yet settled and consistent.

Al'mah's eyes had taken it all in rather wistfully, while she had
waited for Krool's return from his master; but the wistfulness was due
to personal trouble, for her eyes were clouded and her motions
languid. But when she saw the banjo, the cornet, and the
roulette-table, a deep little laugh rose to her full red lips.

"How like a subaltern, or a colonial civil servant!" she said to
herself.

She reflected a moment, then pursued the thought further: "But there
must be bigness in him, as well as presence of mind and depth of
heart--yes, I'm sure his nature is deep."

She remembered the quick, protecting hands which had wrapped her round
with Jasmine Grenfel's cloak, and the great arms in which she had
rested, the danger over.

"There can't be much wrong with a nature like his, though Adrian hates
him so. But, of course, Adrian would. Besides, Adrian will never get
over the drop in the mining-stock which ruined him--Rudyard Byng's
mine.... It's natural for Adrian to hate him, I suppose," she added
with a heavy sigh.

Mentally she took to comparing this room with Adrian Fellowes'
sitting-room overlooking the Thames Embankment, where everything was
in perfect taste and order, where all was modulated, harmonious,
soigne and artistic. Yet, somehow, the handsome chambers which hung
over the muddy river with its wonderful lights and shades, its mists
and radiance, its ghostly softness and greyness, lacked in something
that roused imagination, that stirred her senses here--the vital being
in her.

It was power, force, experience, adventure. They were all here. She
knew the signs: the varied interests, the primary emotions, music,
art, hunting, prospecting, fighting, gambling. They were mixed with
the solid achievement of talent and force in the business of
life. Here was a model of a new mining-drill, with a picture of the
stamps working in the Work-and-Wonder mine, together with a model of
the Kaffir compound at Kimberley, with the busy, teeming life behind
the wire boundaries.

Thus near was Byng to the ways of a child, she thought, thus near to
the everlasting intelligence and the busy soul of a constructive and
creative Deity--if there was a Deity. Despite the frequent laughter on
her tongue and in her eyes, she doubted bitterly at times that there
was a Deity. For how should happen the awful tragedies which
encompassed men and peoples, if there was a Deity. No benign Deity
could allow His own created humanity to be crushed in bleeding masses,
like the grapes trampled in the vats of a vineyard. Whole cities
swallowed up by earthquake; islands swept of their people by a tidal
wave; a vast ship pierced by an iceberg and going down with its
thousand souls; provinces spread with the vile elements of a plague
which carpeted the land with dead; mines flooded by water or
devastated by fire; the little new-born babe left without the rightful
breast to feed it; the mother and her large family suddenly deprived
of the breadwinner; old men who had lived like saints, giving their
all to their own and to the world, driven to the degradation of the
poorhouse in the end--ah, if one did not smile, one would die of
weeping, she thought.

Al'mah had smiled her way through the world; with a quick word of
sympathy for any who were hurt by the blows of life or time; with an
open hand for the poor and miserable,--now that she could afford
it--and hiding her own troubles behind mirth and bonhommie; for her
humour, as her voice, was deep and strong like that of a man. It was
sometimes too pronounced, however, Adrian Fellowes had said; and
Adrian was an acute observer, who took great pride in her. Was it not
to Adrian she had looked first for approval the night of her triumph
at Covent Garden--why, that was only a few days ago, and it seemed a
hundred days, so much had happened since. It was Adrian's handsome
face which had told her then of the completeness of her triumph.

The half-caste valet entered again. "Here come, madame," he said with
something very near a smile; for he liked this woman, and his dark,
sensual soul would have approved of his master liking her.

"Soon the Baas, madame," he said as he placed a chair for her, and
with the gliding footstep of a native left the room.

"Sunny creature!" she remarked aloud, with a little laugh, and looked
round. Instantly her face lighted with interest. Here was nothing of
that admired disorder, that medley of incongruous things which marked
the room she had just left; but perfect order, precision, and balance
of arrangement, the most peaceful equipoise. There was a great carved
oak-table near to sun-lit windows, and on it were little regiments of
things, carefully arranged--baskets with papers in elastic bands;
classified and inscribed reference-books, scales, clips, pencils; and
in one clear space, with a bunch of violets before it, the photograph
of a woman in a splendid silver frame--a woman of seventy or so,
obviously Rudyard Byng's mother.

Al'mah's eyes softened. Here was insight into a nature of which the
world knew so little. She looked further. Everywhere were signs of
disciplined hours and careful hands--cabinets with initialed drawers,
shelves filled with books. There is no more impressive and revealing
moment with man or woman than when you stand in a room empty of their
actual presence, but having, in every inch of it, the pervasive
influences of the absent personality. A strange, almost solemn
quietness stole over Al'mah's senses. She had been admitted to the
inner court, not of the man's house, but of his life. Her eyes
travelled on with the gratified reflection that she had been admitted
here. Above the books were rows of sketches--rows of sketches!

Suddenly, as her eyes rested on them, she turned pale and got to her
feet. They were all sketches of the veld, high and low; of natives; of
bits of Dutch architecture; of the stoep with its Boer farmer and his
vrouw; of a kopje with a dozen horses or a herd of cattle grazing; of
a spruit, or a Kaffir's kraal; of oxen leaning against the disselboom
of a cape-wagon; of a herd of steinboks, or a little colony of
meerkats in the karoo.

Her hand went to her heart with a gesture of pain, and a little cry of
misery escaped her lips.

Now there was a quick footstep, and Byng entered with a cordial smile
and an outstretched hand.

"Well, this is a friendly way to begin the New Year," he said,
cheerily, taking her hand. "You certainly are none the worse for our
little unrehearsed drama the other night. I see by the papers that you
have been repeating your triumph. Please sit down. Do you mind my
having a little toast while we talk? I always have my petit dejeuner
here; and I'm late this morning."

"You look very tired," she said as she sat down.

Krool here entered with a tray, placing it on a small table by the big
desk. He was about to pour out the tea, but Byng waved him away.

"Send this note at once by hand," he said, handing him an envelope. It
was addressed to Jasmine Grenfel.

"Yes, I'm tired--rather," he added to his guest with a sudden
weariness of manner. "I've had no sleep for three nights--working all
the time, every hour; and in this air of London, which doesn't feed
you, one needs plenty of sleep. You can't play with yourself here as
you can on the high veld, where an hour or two of sleep a day will
do. On-saddle and off-saddle, in-span and outspan, plenty to eat and a
little sleep; and the air does the rest. It has been a worrying time."

"The Jameson Raid--and all the rest?"

"Particularly all the rest. I feel easier in my mind about Dr. Jim and
the others. England will demand--so I understand," he added with a
careful look at her, as though he had said too much--"the right to try
Jameson and his filibusters from Matabeleland here in England; but
it's different with the Jo'burgers. They will be arrested--"

"They have been arrested," she intervened.

"Oh, is it announced?" he asked without surprise.

"It was placarded an hour ago," she replied, heavily.

"Well, I fancied it would be," he remarked. "They'll have a close
squeak. The sympathy of the world is with Kruger--so far."

"That is what I have come about," she said, with an involuntary and
shrinking glance at the sketches on the walls.

"What you have come about?" he said, putting down his cup of tea and
looking at her intently." How are you concerned? Where do you come
in?"

"There is a man--he has been arrested with the others; with Farrar,
Phillips, Hammond, and the rest--"

"Oh, that's bad! A relative, or--"

"Not a relative, exactly," she replied in a tone of irony. Rising, she
went over to the wall and touched one of the water-colour sketches.

"How did you come by these?" she asked.

"Blantyre's sketches? Well, it's all I ever got for all Blantyre owed
me, and they're not bad. They're lifted out of the life. That's why I
bought them. Also because I liked to think I got something out of
Blantyre; and that he would wish I hadn't. He could paint a bit--
don't you think so?"

"He could paint a bit--always," she replied.

A silence followed. Her back was turned to him, her face was towards
the pictures.

Presently he spoke, with a little deferential anxiety in the
tone. "Are you interested in Blantyre?" he asked, cautiously. Getting
up, he came over to her.

"He has been arrested--as I said--with the others."

"No, you did not say so. So they let Blantyre into the game, did
they?" he asked almost musingly; then, as if recalling what she had
said, he added: "Do you mind telling me exactly what is your interest
in Blantyre?"

She looked at him straight in the eyes. For a face naturally so full
of humour, hers was strangely dark with stormy feeling now.

"Yes, I will tell you as much as I can--enough for you to understand,"
she answered.

He drew up a chair to the fire, and she sat down. He nodded at her
encouragingly. Presently she spoke.

"Well, at twenty-one I was studying hard, and he was painting--"

"Blantyre?"

She inclined her head. "He was full of dreams--beautiful, I thought
them; and he was ambitious. Also he could talk quite marvellously."

"Yes, Blantyre could talk--once," Byng intervened, gently.

"We were married secretly."

Byng made a gesture of amazement, and his face became shocked and
grave. "Married! Married! You were married to Blantyre?"

"At a registry office in Chelsea. One month, only one month it was,
and then he went away to Madeira to paint--'a big commission,' he
said; and he would send for me as soon as he could get money in
hand--certainly in a couple of months. He had taken most of my
half-year's income--I had been left four hundred a year by my mother."

Byng muttered a malediction under his breath and leaned towards her
sympathetically.

With an effort she continued. "From Madeira he wrote to tell me he was
going on to South Africa, and would not be home for a year. From South
Africa he wrote saying he was not coming back; that I could divorce
him if I liked. The proof, he said, would be easy; or I needn't
divorce him unless I liked, since no one knew we were married."

For an instant there was absolute silence, and she sat with her
fingers pressed tight to her eyes. At last she went on, her face
turned away from the great kindly blue eyes bent upon her, from the
face flushed with honourable human sympathy.

"I went into the country, where I stayed for nearly three years,
till--till I could bear it no longer; and then I began to study and
sing again."

"What were you doing in the country?" he asked in a low voice.

"There was my baby," she replied, her hands clasping and unclasping in
pain. "There was my little Nydia."

"A child--she is living?" he asked gently.

"No, she died two years ago," was the answer in a voice which tried to
be firm.

"Does Blantyre know?"

"He knew she was born, nothing more."

"We were married secretly."

"And after all he has done, and left undone, you want to try and save
him now?"

He was thinking that she still loved the man. "That offscouring!" he
said to himself. "Well, women beat all! He treats her like a
Patagonian; leaves her to drift with his child not yet born; rakes the
hutches of the towns and the kraals of the veld for women--always
women, black or white, it didn't matter; and yet, by gad, she wants
him back!"

She seemed to understand what was passing in his mind. Rising, with a
bitter laugh which he long remembered, she looked at him for a moment
in silence, then she spoke, her voice shaking with scorn:

"You think it is love for him that prompts me now?" Her eyes blazed,
but there was a contemptuous laugh at her lips, and she nervously
pulled at the tails of her sable muff. "You are wrong--absolutely. I
would rather bury myself in the mud of the Thames than let him touch
me. Oh, I know what his life must have been--the life of him that you
know! With him it would either be the sewer or the sycamore-tree of
Zaccheus; either the little upper chamber among the saints or eating
husks with the swine. I realize him now. He was easily susceptible to
good and evil, to the clean and the unclean; and he might have been
kept in order by some one who would give a life to building up his
character; but his nature was rickety, and he has gone down and not
up."

"Then why try to save him? Let Oom Paul have him. He'll do no more
harm, if--"

"Wait a minute," she urged. "You are a great man"--she came close to
him--"and you ought to understand what I mean, without my saying it. I
want to save him for his own sake, not for mine--to give him a
chance. While there's life there's hope. To go as he is, with the mud
up to his lips--ah, can't you see! He is the father of my dead
child. I like to feel that he may make some thing of his life and of
himself yet. That's why I haven't tried to divorce him, and--"

"If you ever want to do so--" he interrupted, meaningly.

"Yes, I know. I have always been sure that nothing could be quite so
easy; but I waited, on the chance of something getting hold of him
which would lift him out of himself, give him something to think of so
much greater than himself, some cause, perhaps--"

"He had you and your unborn child," he intervened.

"Me--!" She laughed bitterly. "I don't think men would ever be better
because of me. I've never seen that. I've seen them show the worst of
human nature because of me--and it wasn't inspiring. I've not met many
men who weren't on the low levels."

"He hasn't stood his trial for the Johannesburg conspiracy yet. How do
you propose to help him? He is in real danger of his life."

She laughed coldly, and looked at him with keen, searching eyes. "You
ask that, you who know that in the armory of life there's one
all-powerful weapon?"

He nodded his head whimsically. "Money? Well, whatever other weapons
you have, you must have that, I admit. And in the Transvaal--"

"Then here," she said, handing him an envelope--"here is what may
help."

He took it hesitatingly. "I warn you," he remarked, "that if money is
to be used at all, it must be a great deal. Kruger will put up the
price to the full capacity of the victim."

"I suppose this victim has nothing," she ventured, quietly.

"Nothing but what the others give him, I should think. It may be a
very costly business, even if it is possible, and you--"

"I have twenty thousand pounds," she said.

"Earned by your voice?" he asked, kindly.

"Every penny of it."

"Well, I wouldn't waste it on Blantyre, if I were you. No, by Heaven,
you shall not do it, even if it can be done! It is too horrible."

"I owe it to myself to do it. After all, he is still my husband. I
have let it be so; and while it is so, and while"--her eyes looked
away, her face suffused slightly, her lips tightened--"while things
are as they are, I am bound--bound by something, I don't know what,
but it is not love, and it is not friendship--to come to his
rescue. There will be legal expenses--"

Byng frowned. "Yes, but the others wouldn't see him in a hole--yet I'm
not sure, either, Blantyre being Blantyre. In any case, I'm ready to
do anything you wish."

She smiled gratefully. "Did you ever know any one to do a favor who
wasn't asked to repeat it--paying one debt by contracting another,
finding a creditor who will trust, and trading on his trust? Yet I'd
rather owe you two debts than most men one." She held out her hand to
him. "Well, it doesn't do to mope--'The merry heart goes all the day,
the sad one tires in a mile-a.' And I am out for all day. Please wish
me a happy new year."

He took her hand in both of his. "I wish you to go through this year
as you ended the last--in a blaze of glory."

"Yes, really a blaze if not of glory," she said, with bright tears,
yet laughing, too, a big warm humour shining in her strong face with
the dark brown eyes and the thick, heavy eyebrows under a low, broad
forehead like his own. They were indeed strangely alike in many ways
both of mind and body.

"They say we end the year as we begin it," he said, cheerily. "You
proved to Destiny that you were entitled to all she could give in the
old year, and you shall have the best that's to be had in 1897. You
are a woman in a million, and--"

"May I come and breakfast with you some morning?" she asked, gaily.

"Well, if ever I'm thought worthy of that honour, don't hesitate. As
the Spanish say, It is all yours." He waved a hand to the
surroundings.

"No, it is all yours," she said, reflectively, her eyes slowly roaming
about her. "It is all you. I'm glad to have been here, to be as near
as this to your real life. Real life is so comforting after the mock
kind so many of us live; which singers and actors live anyhow."

She looked round the room again. "I feel--I don't know why it is, but
I feel that when I'm in trouble I shall always want to come to this
room. Yes, and I will surely come; for I know there's much trouble in
store for me. You must let me come. You are the only man I would go to
like this, and you can't think what it means to me--to feel that I'm
not misunderstood, and that it seems absolutely right to come. That's
because any woman could trust you--as I do. Good-bye."

In another moment she had gone, and he stood beside the table with the
envelope she had left with him. Presently he opened it, and unfolded
the cheque which was in it. Then he gave an exclamation of
astonishment.

"Seven thousand pounds!" he exclaimed. "That's a better estimate of
Krugerism than I thought she had. It'll take much more than that,
though, if it's done at all; but she certainly has sense. It's seven
thousand times too much for Blantyre," he added, with an exclamation
of disgust. "Blantyre--that outsider!" Then he fell to thinking of all
she had told him. "Poor girl--poor girl!" he said aloud. "But she must
not come here, just the same. She doesn't see that it's not the thing,
just because she thinks I'm a Sir Galahad--me!" He glanced at the
picture of his mother, and nodded toward it tenderly. "So did she
always. I might have turned Kurd and robbed caravans, or become a Turk
and kept concubines, and she'd never have seen that it was so. But
Al'mah mustn't come here any more, for her own sake.... I'd find it
hard to explain if ever, by any chance--"

He fell to thinking of Jasmine, and looked at the clock. It was only
ten, and he would not see Jasmine till six; but if he had gone to
South Africa he would not have seen her at all! Fate and Wallstein had
been kind.

Presently, as he went to the hall to put on his coat and hat to go
out, he met Barry Whalen. Barry looked at him curiously; then, as
though satisfied, he said: "Early morning visitor, eh? I just met her
coming away. Card of thanks for kind services au theatre, eh?"

"Well, it isn't any business of yours what it is, Barry," came the
reply in tones which congealed.

"No, perhaps not," answered his visitor, testily, for he had had a
night of much excitement, and, after all, this was no way to speak to
a friend, to a partner who had followed his lead always. Friendship
should be allowed some latitude, and he had said hundreds of things
less carefully to Byng in the past. The past--he was suddenly
conscious that Byng had changed within the past few days, and that he
seemed to have put restraint on himself. Well, he would get back at
him just the same for the snub.

"It's none of my business," he retorted, "but it's a good deal of
Adrian Fellowes' business--"

"What is a good deal of Adrian Fellowes' business?"

"Al'mah coming to your rooms. Fellowes is her man. Going to marry her,
I suppose," he added, cynically.

Byng's jaw set and his eyes became cold. "Still, I'd suggest your
minding your own business, Barry. Your tongue will get you into
trouble some day.... You've seen Wallstein this morning--and Fleming?"

Barry replied sullenly, and the day's pressing work began, with the
wires busy under the seas.



CHAPTER VI

WITHIN THE POWER-HOUSE


At a few moments before six o'clock Byng was shown into Jasmine's
sitting-room. As he entered, the man who sat at the end of the front
row of stalls the first night of "Manassa" rose to his feet. It was
Adrian Fellowes, slim, well groomed, with the colour of an apple in
his cheeks, and his gold-brown hair waving harmoniously over his
unintellectual head.

"But, Adrian, you are the most selfish man I've ever known," Jasmine
was saying as Byng entered.

Either Jasmine did not hear the servant announce Byng, or she
pretended not to do so, and the words were said so distinctly that
Byng heard them as he came forward.

"Well, he is selfish," she added to Byng, as she shook hands. "I've
known him since I was a child, and he has always had the best of
everything and given nothing for it." Turning again to Fellowes, she
continued: "Yes, it's true. The golden apples just fall into your
hands."

"Well, I wish I had the apples, since you give me the reputation,"
Fellowes replied, and, shaking hands with Byng, who gave him an
enveloping look and a friendly greeting, he left the room.

"Such a boy--Adrian," Jasmine said, as they sat down.

"Boy--he looks thirty or more!" remarked Byng in a dry tone.

"He is just thirty. I call him a boy because he is so young
in most things that matter to people. He is the most sumptuous
person--entirely a luxury. Did you ever see such colouring--like a
woman's! But selfish, as I said, and useful, too, is Adrian. Yes, he
really is very useful. He would be a private secretary beyond price to
any one who needed such an article. He has tact--as you saw--and would
make a wonderful master of ceremonies, a splendid comptroller of the
household and equerry and lord-chamberlain in one. There, if ever you
want such a person, or if--"

She paused. As she did so she was sharply conscious of the contrast
between her visitor and Ian Stafford in outward appearance. Byng's
clothes were made by good hands, but they were made by tailors who
knew their man was not particular, and that he would not "try on." The
result was a looseness and carelessness of good things--giving him, in
a way, the look of shambling power. Yet in spite of the tie a little
crooked, and the trousers a little too large and too short, he had
touches of that distinction which power gives. His large hands with
the square-pointed fingers had obtrusive veins, but they were not
common.

"Certainly," he intervened, smiling indulgently; "if ever I want a
comptroller, or an equerry, or a lord-chamberlain, I'll remember
'Adrian.' In these days one can never tell. There's the Sahara. It
hasn't been exploited yet. It has no emperor."

"I like you in this mood," she said, eagerly. "You seem on the surface
so tremendously practical and sensible. You frighten me a little, and
I like to hear you touch things off with raillery. But, seriously, if
you can ever put anything in that boy's way, please do so. He has had
bad luck--in your own Rand mine. He lost nearly everything in that,
speculating, and--"

Byng's face grew serious again. "But he shouldn't have speculated; he
should have invested. It wants brains, good fortune, daring and wealth
to speculate. But I will remember him, if you say so. I don't like to
think that he has been hurt in any enterprise of mine. I'll keep him
in mind. Make him one of my secretaries perhaps."

Then Barry Whalen's gossip suddenly came to his mind, and he added:
"Fellowes will want to get married some day. That face and manner will
lead him into ways from which there's only one outlet."

"Matrimony?" She laughed. "Oh dear, no, Adrian is much too selfish to
marry."

"I thought that selfishness was one of the elements of successful
marriages. I've been told so."

A curious look stole into her eyes. All at once she wondered if his
words had any hidden meaning, and she felt angrily self-conscious; but
she instantly put the reflection away, for if ever any man travelled
by the straight Roman road of speech and thought, it was he. He had
only been dealing in somewhat obvious worldly wisdom.

"You ought not to give encouragement to such ideas by repeating them,"
she rejoined with raillery. "This is an age of telepathy and
suggestion, and the more silent we are the safer we are. Now, please,
tell me everything--of the inside, I mean--about Cecil Rhodes and the
Raiders. Is Rhodes overwhelmed? And Mr. Chamberlain--you have seen
him? The papers say you have spent many hours at the Colonial
Office. I suppose you were with him at six o'clock last evening,
instead of being here with me, as you promised."

He shook his head. "Rhodes? The bigger a man is the greater the crash
when he falls; and no big man falls alone."

She nodded. "There's the sense of power, too, which made everything
vibrate with energy, which gave a sense of great empty places
filled--of that power withdrawn and collapsed. Even the bad great man
gone leaves a sense of desolation behind. Power--power, that is the
thing of all," she said, her eyes shining and her small fingers
interlacing with eager vitality: "power to set waves of influence in
motion which stir the waters on distant shores. That seems to me the
most wonderful thing."

Her vitality, her own sense of power, seemed almost incongruous. She
was so delicately made, so much the dresden-china shepherdess, that
intensity seemed out of relation to her nature. Yet the tiny hands
playing before her with natural gestures like those of a child had,
too, a decision and a firmness in keeping with the perfectly modelled
head and the courageous poise of the body. There was something regnant
in her, while, too, there was something sumptuous and sensuous and
physically thrilling to the senses. To-day she was dressed in an
exquisite blue gown, devoid of all decoration save a little chinchilla
fur, which only added to its softness and richness. She wore no
jewelry whatever except a sapphire brooch, and her hair shone and
waved like gossamer in the sun.

"Well, I don't know," he rejoined, admiration unbounded in his eyes
for the picture she was of maidenly charm and womanly beauty, "I
should say that goodness was a more wonderful thing. But power is the
most common ambition, and only a handful of the hundreds of millions
get it in any large way. I used to feel it tremendously when I first
heard the stamps pounding the quartz in the mills on the Rand. You
never heard that sound? In the clear height of that plateau the air
reverberates greatly; and there's nothing on earth which so much gives
a sense of power--power that crushes--as the stamps of a great mine
pounding away night and day. There they go, thundering on, till it
seems to you that some unearthly power is hammering the world into
shape. You get up and go to the window and look out into the
night. There's the deep blue sky--blue like nothing you ever saw in
any other sky, and the stars so bright and big, and so near, that you
feel you could reach up and pluck one with your hand; and just over
the little hill are the lights of the stamp-mills, the smoke and the
mad red flare, the roar of great hammers as they crush, crush, crush;
while the vibration of the earth makes you feel that you are living in
a world of Titans."

"And when it all stops?" she asked, almost breathlessly. "When the
stamps pound no more, and the power is withdrawn? It is empty and
desolate--and frightening?"

"It is anything you like. If all the mills all at once, with the
thousands of stamps on the Rand reef, were to stop suddenly, and the
smoke and the red flare were to die, it would be frightening in more
ways than one. But I see what you mean. There might be a sense of
peace, but the minds and bodies which had been vibrating with the stir
of power would feel that the soul had gone out of things, and they
would dwindle too."

"If Rhodes should fall, if the stamps on the Rand should cease--?"

He got to his feet. "Either is possible, maybe probable; and I don't
want to think of it. As you say, there'd be a ghastly sense of
emptiness and a deadly kind of peace." He smiled bitterly.

She rose now also, and fingering some flowers in a vase, arranging
them afresh, said: "Well, this Jameson Raid, if it is proved that
Cecil Rhodes is mixed up in it, will it injure you greatly--I mean
your practical interests?"

He stood musing for a moment. "It's difficult to say at this
distance. One must be on the spot to make a proper estimate. Anything
may happen."

She was evidently anxious to ask him a question, but hesitated. At
last she ventured, and her breath came a little shorter as she spoke.

"I suppose you wish you were in South Africa now. You could do so much
to straighten things out, to prevent the worst. The papers say you
have a political mind--the statesman's intelligence, the Times
said. That letter you wrote, that speech you made at the Chamber of
Commerce dinner--"

She watched him, dreading what his answer might be. There was silence
for a moment, then he answered: "Fleming is going to South Africa, not
myself. I stay here to do Wallstein's work. I was going, but Wallstein
was taken ill suddenly. So I stay--I stay."

She sank down in her chair, going a little pale from excitement. The
whiteness of her skin gave a delicate beauty to the faint rose of her
cheeks--that rose-pink which never was to fade entirely from her face
while life was left to her.

"If it had been necessary, when would you have gone?" she asked.

"At once. Fleming goes to-morrow," he added.

She looked slowly up at him. "Wallstein is a new name for a special
Providence," she murmured, and the colour came back to her face. "We
need you here. We--"

Suddenly a thought flashed into his mind and suffused his face. He was
conscious of that perfume which clung to whatever she touched. It
stole to his senses and intoxicated them. He looked at her with
enamoured eyes. He had the heart of a boy, the impulsiveness of a
nature which had been unschooled in women's ways. Weaknesses in other
directions had taught him much, but experiences with her sex had been
few. The designs of other women had been patent to him, and he had
been invincible to all attack; but here was a girl who, with her
friendly little fortune and her beauty, could marry with no
difficulty; who, he had heard, could pick and choose, and had so far
rejected all comers; and who, if she had shown preference at all, had
shown it for a poor man like Ian Stafford. She had courage and
simplicity and a downright mind; that was clear. And she was
capable. She had a love for big things, for the things that
mattered. Every word she had ever said to him had understanding, not
of the world alone, and of life, but of himself, Rudyard Byng. She
grasped exactly what he would say, and made him say things he would
never have thought of saying to any one else. She drew him out, made
the most of him, made him think. Other women only tried to make him
feel. If he had had a girl like this beside him during the last ten
years, how many wasted hours would have been saved, how many bottles
of champagne would not have been opened, how many wild nights would
have been spent differently!

Too good, too fine for him--yes, a hundred times, but he would try to
make it up to her, if such a girl as this could endure him. He was not
handsome, he was not clever, so he said to himself, but he had a
little power. That he had to some degree rough power, of course, but
power; and she loved power, force. Had she not said so, shown it, but
a moment before? Was it possible that she was really interested in
him, perhaps because he was different from the average Englishman and
not of a general pattern? She was a woman of brains, of great
individuality, and his own individuality might influence her. It was
too good to be true; but there had ever been something of the gambler
in him, and he had always plunged. If he ever had a conviction he
acted on it instantly, staked everything, when that conviction got
into his inner being. It was not, perhaps, a good way, and it had
failed often enough; but it was his way, and he had done according to
the light and the impulse that were in him. He had no diplomacy, he
had only purpose.

He came over to her. "If I had gone to South Africa would you have
remembered my name for a month?" he asked with determination and
meaning.

"My friends never suffer lunar eclipse," she answered, gaily. "Dear
sir, I am called Hold-Fast. My friends are century-flowers and are
always blooming."

"You count me among your friends?"

"I hope so. You will let me make all England envious of me, won't you?
I never did you any harm, and I do want to have a hero in my tiny
circle."

"A hero--you mean me? Well, I begin to think I have some courage when
I ask you to let me inside your 'tiny' circle. I suppose most people
would think it audacity, not courage."

"You seem not to be aware what an important person you are--how almost
sensationally important. Why, I am only a pebble on a shore like
yours, a little unknown slip of a girl who babbles, and babbles in
vain."

She got to her feet now. "Oh, but believe me, believe me," she said,
with sweet and sudden earnestness, "I am prouder than I can say that
you will let me be a friend of yours! I like men who have done things,
who do things. My grandfather did big, world-wide things, and--"

"Yes, I know; I met your grandfather once. He was a big man, big as
can be. He had the world by the ear always."

"He spoiled me for the commonplace," she replied. "If I had lived in
Pizarro's time, I'd have gone to Peru with him, the splendid robber."

He answered with the eager frankness and humour of a boy. "If you mean
to be a friend of mine, there are those who will think that in one way
you have fulfilled your ambition, for they say I've spoiled the
Peruvians, too."

"I like you when you say things like that," she murmured. "If you said
them often--"

She looked at him archly, and her eyes brimmed with amusement and
excitement.

Suddenly he caught both her hands in his and his eyes burned. "Will
you--"

He paused. His courage forsook him. Boldness had its limit. He feared
a repulse which could never be overcome. "Will you, and all of you
here, come down to my place in Wales next week?" he blundered out.

She was glad he had faltered. It was too bewildering. She dared not
yet face the question she had seen he was about to ask. Power--yes, he
could give her that; but power was the craving of an ambitious
soul. There were other things. There was the desire of the heart, the
longing which came with music and the whispering trees and the bright
stars, the girlish dreams of ardent love and the garlands of youth and
joy--and Ian Stafford.

Suddenly she drew herself together. She was conscious that the servant
was entering the room with a letter.

"The messenger is waiting," the servant said.

With an apology she opened the note slowly as Byng turned to the
fire. She read the page with a strange, tense look, closing her eyes
at last with a slight sense of dizziness. Then she said to the
servant:

"Tell the messenger to wait. I will write an answer."

"I am sure we shall be glad to go to you in Wales next week," she
added, turning to Byng again. "But won't you be far away from the
centre of things in Wales?"

"I've had the telegraph and a private telephone wire to London put
in. I shall be as near the centre as though I lived in Grosvenor
Square; and there are always special trains."

"Special trains--oh, but it's wonderful to have power to do things
like that! When do you go down?" she asked.

"To-morrow morning."

She smiled radiantly. She saw that he was angry with himself for his
cowardice just now, and she tried to restore him. "Please, will you
telephone me when you arrive at your castle? I should like the
experience of telephoning by private wire to Wales."

He brightened. "Certainly, if you really wish it. I shall arrive at
ten to-morrow night, and I'll telephone you at eleven."

"Splendid--splendid! I'll be alone in my room then. I've got a
telephone instrument there, and so we could say good-night."

"So we can say good-night," he repeated in a low voice, and he held
out his hand in good-bye. When he had gone, with a new, great hope in
his heart, she sat down and tremblingly re-opened the note she had
received a moment before.

"I am going abroad" it read--"to Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and
St. Petersburg. I think I've got my chance at last. I want to see you
before I go--this evening, Jasmine. May I?"

It was signed "Ian."

"Fate is stronger than we are," she murmured; "and Fate is not kind to
you, Ian," she added, wearily, a wan look coming into her face.

"Mio destino," she said at last--"mio destino!" But who was her
destiny--which of the two who loved her?




BOOK II




CHAPTER VII

THREE YEARS LATER


"Extra speshul--extra speshul--all about Kruger an' his guns!"

The shrill, acrid cry rang down St. James's Street, and a newsboy with
a bunch of pink papers under his arm shot hither and thither on the
pavement, offering his sensational wares to all he met.

"Extra speshul--extra speshul--all about the war wot's comin'--all
about Kruger's guns!"

From an open window on the second floor of a building in the street a
man's head was thrust out, listening.

"The war wot's comin'!" he repeated, with a bitter sort of smile. "And
all about Kruger's guns. So it is coming, is it, Johnny Bull; and you
do know all about his guns, do you? If it is, and you do know, then a
shattering big thing is coming, and you know quite a lot, Johnny
Bull."

He hummed to himself an impromptu refrain to an impromptu tune:



"Then you know quite a lot, Johnny Bull, Johnny Bull,
Then you know quite a lot, Johnny Bull!"


Stepping out of the French window upon a balcony now, he looked down
the street. The newsboy was almost below. He whistled, and the lad
looked up. In response to a beckoning finger the gutter-snipe took the
doorway and the staircase at a bound. Like all his kind, he was a good
judge of character, and one glance had assured him that he was
speeding upon a visit of profit. Half a postman's knock--a sharp,
insistent stroke--and he entered, his thin weasel-like face thrust
forward, his eyes glittering. The fire in such eyes is always cold,
for hunger is poor fuel to the native flame of life.

"Extra speshul, m'lord--all about Kruger's guns."

He held out the paper to the figure that darkened the window, and he
pronounced the g in Kruger soft, as in Scrooge.

The hand that took the paper deftly slipped a shilling into the cold,
skinny palm. At its first touch the face of the paper-vender fell, for
it was the same size as a halfpenny; but even before the swift fingers
had had a chance to feel the coin, or the glance went down, the face
regained its confidence, for the eyes looking at him were generous. He
had looked at so many faces in his brief day that he was an expert
observer.

"Thank y' kindly," he said; then, as the fingers made assurance of the
fortune which had come to him, "Ow, thank ye werry much, y'r gryce,"
he added.

Something alert and determined in the face of the boy struck the giver
of the coin as he opened the paper to glance at its contents, and he
paused to scan him more closely. He saw the hunger in the lad's eyes
as they swept over the breakfast-table, still heavy with uneaten
breakfast--bacon, nearly the whole of an omelette, and rolls, toast,
marmalade and honey.

"Wait a second," he said, as the boy turned toward the door.

"Yes, y'r gryce."

"Had your breakfast?"

"I has me brekfist w'en I sells me pypers." The lad hugged the
remaining papers closer under his arms, and kept his face turned
resolutely away from the inviting table. His host correctly
interpreted the action.

"Poor little devil--grit, pure grit!" he said under his breath. "How
many papers have you got left?" he asked.

The lad counted like lightning. "Ten," he answered. "I'll soon get 'em
off now. Luck's wiv me dis mornin'." The ghost of a smile lighted his
face.

"I'll take them all," the other said, handing over a second shilling.

The lad fumbled for change and the fumbling was due to honest
agitation. He was not used to this kind of treatment.

"No, that's all right," the other interposed.

"But they're only a h'ypenny," urged the lad, for his natural cupidity
had given way to a certain fine faculty not too common in any grade of
human society.

"Well, I'm buying them at a penny this morning. I've got some friends
who'll be glad to give a penny to know all about Kruger's guns." He
too softened the g in Kruger in consideration of his visitor's
idiosyncrasies.

"You won't be mykin' anythink on them, y'r gryce," said the lad with a
humour which opened the doors of Ian Stafford's heart wide; for to him
heaven itself would be insupportable if it had no humorists.

"I'll get at them in other ways," Stafford rejoined. "I'll get my
profit, never fear. Now what about breakfast? You've sold all your
papers, you know."

"I'm fair ready for it, y'r gryce," was the reply, and now the lad's
glance went eagerly towards the door, for the tension of labour was
relaxed, and hunger was scraping hard at his vitals.

"Well, sit down--this breakfast isn't cold yet.... But, no, you'd
better have a wash-up first, if you can wait," Stafford added, and
rang a bell.

"Wot, 'ere--brekfist wiv y'r gryce 'ere?"

"Well, I've had mine"--Stafford made a slight grimace--" and there's
plenty left for you, if you don't mind eating after me."

"I dusted me clothes dis mornin'," said the boy, with an attempt to
justify his decision to eat this noble breakfast. "An' I washed me
'ends--but pypers is muck," he added.

A moment later he was in the fingers of Gleg the valet in the
bath-room, and Stafford set to work to make the breakfast piping hot
again. It was an easy task, as heaters were inseparable from his
bachelor meals, and, though this was only the second breakfast he had
eaten since his return to England after three years' absence,
everything was in order.

For Gleg was still more the child of habit--and decorous habit--than
himself. It was not the first time that Gleg had had to deal with his
master's philanthropic activities. Much as he disapproved of them, he
could discriminate; and there was that about the newsboy which somehow
disarmed him. He went so far as to heap the plate of the lad, and
would have poured the coffee too, but that his master took the pot
from his hand and with a nod and a smile dismissed him; and his
master's smile was worth a good deal to Gleg. It was an exacting if
well-paid service, for Ian Stafford was the most particular man in
Europe, and he had grown excessively so during the past three years,
which, as Gleg observed, had brought great, if quiet, changes in
him. He had grown more studious, more watchful, more exclusive in his
daily life, and ladies of all kinds he had banished from direct
personal share in his life. There were no more little tea-parties and
dejeuners chez lui, duly chaperoned by some gracious cousin or
aunt--for there was no embassy in Europe where he had not relatives.

"'Ipped--a bit 'ipped. 'E 'as found 'em out, the 'uzzies," Gleg had
observed; for he had decided that the general cause of the change in
his master was Woman, though he did not know the particular woman who
had 'ipped him.

As the lad ate his wonderful breakfast, in which nearly half a pot of
marmalade and enough butter for three ordinary people figured,
Stafford read the papers attentively, to give his guest a fair chance
at the food and to overcome his self-consciousness. He got an
occasional glance at the trencherman, however, as he changed the
sheets, stepped across the room to get a cigarette, or poked the small
fire--for, late September as it was, a sudden cold week of rain had
come and gone, leaving the air raw; and a fire was welcome.

At last, when he realized that the activities of the table were
decreasing, he put down his paper. "Is it all right?" he asked. "Is
the coffee hot?"

"I ain't never 'ad a meal like that, y'r gryce, not never any time,"
the boy answered, with a new sort of fire in his eyes.

"Was there enough?"

"I've left some," answered his guest, looking at the jar of marmalade
and half a slice of toast. "I likes the coffee hot--tykes y'r longer
to drink it," he added.

Ian Stafford chuckled. He was getting more than the worth of his
money. He had nibbled at his own breakfast, with the perturbations of
a crossing from Flushing still in his system, and its equilibrium not
fully restored; and yet, with the waste of his own meal and the
neglect of his own appetite, he had given a great and happy half-hour
to a waif of humanity.

As he looked at the boy he wondered how many thousands there were like
him within rifle-shot from where he sat, and he thought each of them
would thank whatever gods they knew for such a neglected meal. The
words from the scare-column of the paper he held smote his sight:

"War Inevitable--Transvaal Bristling with Guns and Loaded to the
Nozzle with War Stores--Milner and Kruger No Nearer a Settlement--
Sullen and Contemptuous Treatment of British Outlander."
. . . And so on.

And if war came, if England must do this ugly thing, fulfil her bitter
and terrible task, then what about such as this young outlander here,
this outcast from home and goodly toil and civilized conditions, this
sickly froth of the muddy and dolorous stream of lower England? So
much withdrawn from the sources of the possible relief, so much less
with which to deal with their miseries--perhaps hundreds of millions,
mopped up by the parched and unproductive soil of battle and disease
and loss.

He glanced at the paper again. "Britons Hold Your Own," was the
heading of the chief article. "Yes, we must hold our own," he said,
aloud, with a sigh. "If it comes, we must see it through; but the
breakfasts will be fewer. It works down one way or another--it all
works down to this poor little devil and his kind."

"Now, what's your name?" he asked.

"Jigger," was the reply.

"What else?"

"Nothin', y'r gryce."

"Jigger--what?"

"It's the only nyme I got," was the reply.

"What's your father's or your mother's name?"

"I ain't got none. I only got a sister."

"What's her name?"

"Lou," he answered." That's her real name. But she got a fancy name
yistiddy. She was took on at the opera yistiddy, to sing with a
hunderd uvver girls on the styge. She's Lulu Luckingham now."

"Oh--Luckingham!" said Stafford, with a smile, for this was a name of
his own family, and of much account in circles he frequented. "And who
gave her that name? Who were her godfathers and godmothers?"

"I dunno, y'r gryce. There wasn't no religion in it. They said she'd
have to be called somefink, and so they called her that. Lou was
always plenty for 'er till she went there yistiddy."

"What did she do before yesterday?"

"Sold flowers w'en she could get 'em to sell. 'Twas when she couldn't
sell her flowers that she piped up sort of dead wild--for she 'adn't
'ad nothin' to eat, an' she was fair crusty. It was then a gentleman,
'e 'eard 'er singin' hot, an' he says, 'That's good enough for a
start,' 'e says, 'an' you come wiv me,' he says. 'Not much,' Lou says,
'not if I knows it. I seed your kind frequent.' But 'e stuck to it,
an' says, 'It's stryght, an' a lydy will come for you to-morrer, if
you'll be 'ere on this spot, or tell me w'ere you can be found.' An'
Lou says, says she, 'You buy my flowers, so's I kin git me
bread-baskit full, an' then I'll think it over.' An' he bought 'er
flowers, an' give 'er five bob. An' Lou paid rent for both of us wiv
that, an' 'ad brekfist; an' sure enough the lydy come next dy an' took
her off. She's in the opery now, an' she'll 'ave 'er brekfist
reg'lar. I seed the lydy meself. Her picture 's on the 'oardings--"

Suddenly he stopped. "W'y, that's 'er--that's 'er!" he said, pointing
to the mantel-piece.

Stafford followed the finger and the glance. It was Al'mah's portrait
in the costume she had worn over three years ago, the night when
Rudyard Byng had rescued her from the flames. He had bought it
then. It had been unpacked again by Gleg, and put in the place it had
occupied for a day or two before he had gone out of England to do his
country's work--and to face the bitterest disillusion of his life; to
meet the heaviest blow his pride and his heart had ever known.

"So that's the lady, is it?" he said, musingly, to the boy, who nodded
assent.

"Go and have a good look at it," urged Stafford.

The boy did so. "It's 'er--done up for the opery," he declared.

"Well, Lulu Luckingham is all right, then. That lady will be good to
her."

"Right. As soon as I seed her, I whispers to Lou 'You keep close to
that there wall,' I sez. 'There's a chimbey in it, an' you'll never be
cold,' I says to Lou."

Stafford laughed softly at the illustration. Many a time the lad
snuggled up to a wall which had a warm chimney, and he had got his
figure of speech from real life.

"Well, what's to become of you?" Stafford asked.

"Me--I'll be level wiv me rent to-day," he answered, turning over the
two shillings and some coppers in his pocket; "an' Lou and me's got a
fair start."

Stafford got up, came over, and laid a hand on the boy's
shoulder. "I'm going to give you a sovereign," he said--"twenty
shillings, for your fair start; and I want you to come to me here next
Sunday-week to breakfast, and tell me what you've done with it."

"Me--y'r gryce!" A look of fright almost came into the lad's
face. "Twenty bob--me!"

The sovereign was already in his hand, and now his face suffused. He
seemed anxious to get away, and looked round for his cap. He couldn't
do here what he wanted to do. He felt that he must burst.

"Now, off you go. And you be here at nine o'clock on Sunday-week with
the papers, and tell me what you've done."

"Gawd--my Gawd!" said the lad, huskily. The next minute he was out in
the hall, and the door was shut behind him. A moment later, hearing a
whoop, Stafford went to the window and, looking down, he saw his late
visitor turning a cart-wheel under the nose of a policeman, and then,
with another whoop, shooting down into the Mall, making Lambeth way.

With a smile he turned from the window. "Well, we shall see," he
said. "Perhaps it will be my one lucky speculation. Who knows--who
knows!"

His eye caught the portrait of Al'mah on the mantelpiece. He went over
and stood looking at it musingly.

"You were a good girl," he said, aloud. "At any rate, you wouldn't
pretend. You'd gamble with your immortal soul, but you wouldn't sell
it--not for three millions, not for a hundred times three millions. Or
is it that you are all alike, you women? Isn't there one of you that
can be absolutely true? Isn't there one that won't smirch her soul and
kill the faith of those that love her for some moment's excitement,
for gold to gratify a vanity, or to have a wider sweep to her skirts?
Vain, vain, vain--and dishonourable, essentially dishonourable. There
might be tragedies, but there wouldn't be many intrigues if women
weren't so dishonourable--the secret orchard rather than the open
highway and robbery under arms.... Whew, what a world!"

He walked up and down the room for a moment, his eyes looking straight
before him; then he stopped short. "I suppose it's natural that,
coming back to England, I should begin to unpack a lot of old
memories, empty out the box-room, and come across some useless and
discarded things. I'll settle down presently; but it's a thoroughly
useless business turning over old stock. The wise man pitches it all
into the junk-shop, and cuts his losses."

He picked up the Morning Post and glanced down the middle page--the
social column first--with the half-amused reflection that he hadn't
done it for years, and that here were the same old names reappearing,
with the same brief chronicles. Here, too, were new names, some of
them, if not most of them, of a foreign turn to their syllables--New
York, Melbourne, Buenos Ayres, Johannesburg. His lip curled a little
with almost playful scorn. At St. Petersburg, Vienna, and elsewhere he
had been vaguely conscious of these social changes; but they did not
come within the ambit of his daily life, and so it had not
mattered. And there was no reason why it should matter now. His
England was a land the original elements of which would not change,
had not changed; for the old small inner circle had not been invaded,
was still impervious to the wash of wealth and snobbery and push. That
refuge had its sequestered glades, if perchance it was unilluminating
and rather heavily decorous; so that he could let the climbers, the
toadies, the gold-spillers, and the bribers have the middle of the
road.

It did not matter so much that London was changing fast. The old clock
on the tower of St. James's would still give the time to his step as
he went to and from the Foreign Office, and there were quiet places
like Kensington Gardens where the bounding person would never think to
stray. Indeed, they never strayed; they only rushed and pushed where
their spreading tails could be seen by the multitude. They never got
farther west than Rotten Row, which was in possession of three classes
of people--those who sat in Parliament, those who had seats on the
Stock Exchange, and those who could not sit their horses. Three years
had not done it all, but it had done a good deal; and he was more
keenly alive to the changes and developments which had begun long
before he left and had increased vastly since. Wealth was more and
more the master of England--new-made wealth; and some of it was too
ostentatious and too pretentious to condone, much less indulge.

All at once his eye, roaming down the columns, came upon the following
announcement:

"Mr. and Mrs. Rudyard Byng have returned to town from Scotland for a
few days, before proceeding to Wales, where they are presently to
receive at Glencader Castle the Duke and Duchess of Sheffield, the
Prince and Princess of Cleaves, M. Santon, the French Foreign
Minister, the Slavonian Ambassador, the Earl and Countess of
Tynemouth, and Mr. Tudor Tempest."

"'And Mr. Tudor Tempest,'" Ian repeated to himself. "Well, she
would. She would pay that much tribute to her own genius. Four-fifths
to the claims of the body and the social nervous system, and one-fifth
to the desire of the soul. Tempest is a literary genius by what he has
done, and she is a genius by nature, and with so much left undone. The
Slavonian Ambassador--him, and the French Foreign Minister! That looks
like a useful combination at this moment--at this moment. She has a
gift for combinations, a wonderful skill, a still more wonderful
perception--and a remarkable unscrupulousness. She's the naturally
ablest woman I have ever known; but she wants to take short-cuts to a
worldly Elysium, and it can't be done, not even with three times three
millions--and three millions was her price."

Suddenly he got up and went over to a table where were several
dispatch-boxes. Opening one, he drew forth from the bottom, where he
had placed it nearly three years ago, a letter. He looked at the long,
sliding handwriting, so graceful and fine, he caught the perfume which
had intoxicated Rudyard Byng, and, stooping down, he sniffed the
dispatch-box. He nodded.

"She's pervasive in everything," he murmured. He turned over several
other packets of letters in the box. "I apologize," he said,
ironically, to these letters. "I ought to have banished her long ago,
but, to tell you the truth, I didn't realize how much she'd influence
everything--even in a box." He laughed cynically, and slowly opened
the one letter which had meant so much to him.

There was no show of agitation. His eye was calm; only his mouth
showed any feeling or made any comment. It was a little supercilious
and scornful. Sitting down by the table, he spread the letter out, and
read it with great deliberation. It was the first time he had looked
at it since he received it in Vienna and had placed it in the
dispatch-box.

"Dear Ian," it ran, "our year of probation--that is the word isn't
it?--is up; and I have decided that our ways must lie apart. I am
going to marry Rudyard Byng next month. He is very kind and very
strong, and not too ragingly clever. You know I should chafe at being
reminded daily of my own stupidity by a very clever man. You and I
have had so many good hours together, there has been such confidence
between us, that no other friendship can ever be the same; and I shall
always want to go to you, and ask your advice, and learn to be
wise. You will not turn a cold shoulder on me, will you? I think you
yourself realized that my wish to wait a year before giving a final
answer was proof that I really had not that in my heart which would
justify me in saying what you wished me to say. Oh yes, you knew; and
the last day when you bade me good-bye you almost said as much! I was
so young, so unschooled, when you first asked me, and I did not know my
own mind; but I know it now, and so I go to Rudyard Byng for better or
for worse--"

He suddently stopped reading, sat back in his char, and laughed
sardonically.

"For richer, for poorer'--now to have launched out on the first
phrase, and to have jibbed at the second was distinctly stupid. The
quotation could only have been carried off with audacity of the ripest
kind. 'For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and
in health, till death us do part, amen--' That was the way to have
done it, if it was to be done at all. Her cleverness forsook her when
she wrote that letter. 'Our year of probation'--she called it
that. Dear, dear, what a poor prevaricator the best prevaricator is!
She was sworn to me, bound to me, wanted a year in which to have her
fling before she settled down, and she threw me over--like that."

He did not read the rest of the letter, but got up, went over to the
fire, threw it in, and watched it burn.

"I ought to have done so when I received it," he said, almost kindly
now. "A thing like that ought never to be kept a minute. It's a
terrible confession, damning evidence, a self-made exposure, and to
keep it is too brutal, too hard on the woman. If anything had
happened to me and it had been read, 'Not all the King's horses nor
all the King's men could put Humpty Dumpty together again.'"

Then he recalled the brief letter he had written her in reply. Unlike
him, she had not kept his answer, when it came into her hands, but,
tearing it up into fifty fragments, had thrown it into the waste-
basket, and paced her room in shame, anger and humiliation. Finally,
she had taken the waste-basket and emptied it into the flames. She had
watched the tiny fragments burn in a fire not hotter than that in her
own eyes, which presently were washed by a flood of bitter tears and
passionate and unavailing protest. For hours she had sobbed, and when
she went out into the world the next day, it was with his every word
ringing in her ears, as they had rung ever since: the sceptic comment
at every feast, the ironical laughter behind every door, the whispered
detraction in every loud accent of praise.

"Dear Jasmine," his letter had run, "it is kind of you to tell me of
your intended marriage before it occurs, for in these distant lands
news either travels slowly or does not reach one at all. I am
fortunate in having my information from the very fountain of first
knowledge. You have seen and done much in the past year; and the end
of it all is more fitting than the most meticulous artist could desire
or conceive. You will adorn the new sphere into which you enter. You
are of those who do not need training or experience: you are a genius,
whose chief characteristic is adaptability. Some people, to whom
nature and Providence have not been generous live up to things; to you
it is given to live down to them; and no one can do it so well. We
have had good times together--happy conversations and some cheerful
and entertaining dreams and purposes. We have made the most of
opportunity, each in his and her own way. But, my dear Jasmine, don't
ever think that you will need to come to me for advice and to learn to
be wise. I know of no one from whom I could learn, from whom I have
learned, so I much. I am deeply your debtor for revelations which
never could have come to me without your help. There is a wonderful
future before you, whose variety let Time, not me, attempt to
reveal. I shall watch your going on"--(he did not say goings
on)--"your Alpine course, with clear memories of things and hours
dearer to me than all the world, and with which I would not have
parted for the mines of the Rand. I lose them now for nothing--and
less than nothing. I shall be abroad for some years, and, meanwhile, a
new planet will swim into the universe of matrimony. I shall see the
light shining, but its heavenly orbit will not be within my
calculations. Other astronomers will watch, and some no doubt will
pray, and I shall read in the annals the bright story of the flower
that was turned into a star!

"Always yours sincerely,
IAN STAFFORD."

From the filmy ashes of her letter to him Stafford now turned away
to his writing-table. There he sat for a while and answered several
notes, among them one to Alice Mayhew, now the Countess of Tynemouth,
whose red parasol still hung above the mantel-piece, a relic of the
Zambesi--and of other things.

Periodically Lady Tynemouth's letters had come to him while he was
abroad, and from her, in much detail, he had been informed of the rise
of Mrs. Byng, of her great future, her "delicious" toilettes, her
great entertainments for charity, her successful attempts to gather
round her the great figures in the political and diplomatic world; and
her partial rejection of Byng's old mining and financial confreres and
their belongings. It had all culminated in a visit of royalty to their
place in Suffolk, from which she had emerged radiantly and delicately
aggressive, and sweeping a wider circle with her social scythe.

Ian had read it all unperturbed. It was just what he knew she could
and would do; and he foresaw for Byng, if he wanted it, a peerage in
the not distant future. Alice Tynemouth was no gossip, and she was not
malicious. She had a good, if wayward, heart, was full of sentiment,
and was a constant and helpful friend. He, therefore, accepted her
invitation now to spend the next week-end with her and her husband;
and then, with letters to two young nephews in his pocket, he prepared
to sally forth to buy them presents, and to get some sweets for the
children of a poor invalid cousin to whom for years he had been a
generous friend. For children he had a profound love, and if he had
married, he would not have been content with a childless home--with a
childless home like that of Rudyard Byng. That news also had come to
him from Alice Tynemouth, who honestly lamented that Jasmine Byng had
no "balance-wheel," which was the safety and the anchor of women "like
her and me," Lady Tynemouth's letter had said.

Three millions then--and how much more now?--and big houses, and no
children. It was an empty business, or so it seemed to him, who had
come of a large and agreeably quarrelsome and clever family, with whom
life had been checkered but never dull.

He took up his hat and stick, and went towards the door. His eyes
caught Al'mah's photograph as he passed.

"It was all done that night at the opera," he said. "Jasmine made up
her mind then to marry him, . . . I wonder what the end will
be.... Sad little, bad little girl.... The mess of pottage at the
last? Quien sabe!"



CHAPTER VIII

"HE SHALL NOT TREAT ME SO"


The air of the late September morning smote Stafford's cheeks
pleasantly, and his spirits rose as he walked up St. James's
Street. His step quickened imperceptibly to himself, and he nodded to
or shook hands with half a dozen people before he reached
Piccadilly. Here he completed the purchases for his school-boy
nephews, and then he went to a sweet-shop in Regent Street to get
chocolates for his young relatives. As he entered the place he was
suddenly brought to a standstill, for not two dozen yards away at a
counter was Jasmine Byng.

She did not see him enter, and he had time to note what matrimony, and
the three years and the three million pounds, had done to her. She was
radiant and exquisite, a little paler, a little more complete, but
increasingly graceful and perfectly appointed. Her dress was of dark
green, of a most delicate shade, and with the clinging softness and
texture of velvet. She wore a jacket of the same material, and a
single brilliant ornament at her throat relieved the simplicity. In
the hat, too, one big solitary emerald shone against the lighter
green.

She was talking now with animation and amusement to the shop-girl who
was supplying her with sweets, and every attendant was watching her
with interest and pleasure. Stafford reflected that this was always
her way: wherever she went she attracted attention, drew interest,
magnetized the onlooker. Nothing had changed in her. nothing of charm
and beauty and eloquence,--how eloquent she had always been!--of
esprit, had gone from her; nothing. Presently she turned her face full
toward him, still not seeing him, half hidden as he was behind some
piled-up tables in the centre of the shop.

Nothing changed? Yes, instantly he was aware of a change, in the eyes,
at the mouth. An elusive, vague, distant kind of disturbance--he could
not say trouble--had stolen into her eyes, had taken possession of the
corners of the mouth; and he was conscious of something exotic,
self-indulgent, and "emancipated." She had always been self-indulgent
and selfish, and, in a wilful, innocent way, emancipated, in the old
days; but here was a different, a fuller, a more daring expression of
these qualities.... Ah, he had it now! That elusive something was a
lurking recklessness, which, perhaps, was not bold enough yet to leap
into full exercise, or even to recognize itself.

So this was she to whom he had given the best of which he had been
capable--not a very noble or priceless best, he was willing to
acknowledge, but a kind of guarantee of the future, the nucleus of
fuller things. As he looked at her now his heart did not beat faster,
his pulses did not quicken, his eye did not soften, he did not even
wish himself away. Love was as dead as last year's leaves--so dead
that no spirit of resentment, or humiliation, or pain of heart was in
his breast at this sight of her again. On the contrary, he was
conscious of a perfect mastery of himself, of being easily superior to
the situation.

Love was dead; youth was dead; the desire that beats in the veins of
the young was dead; his disillusion and disappointment and contempt
for one woman had not driven him, as it so often does, to other
women--to that wild waste which leaves behind it a barren and
ill-natured soil exhausted of its power, of its generous and native
health. There was a strange apathy in his senses, an emotional
stillness, as it were, the atrophy of all the passionate elements of
his nature. But because of this he was the better poised, the more
evenly balanced, the more perceptive. His eyes were not blurred or
dimmed by any stress of emotion, his mind worked in a cool quiet, and
his forward tread had leisurely decision and grace. He had sunk one
part of himself far below the level of activity or sensation, while
new resolves, new powers of mind, new designs were set in motion to
make his career a real and striking success. He had the most friendly
ear and the full confidence of the Prime Minister, who was also
Foreign Secretary--he had got that far; and now, if one of his great
international schemes could but be completed, an ambassadorship would
be his reward, and one of first-class importance. The three years had
done much for him in a worldly way, wonderfully much.

As he looked at the woman who had shaken his life to the centre--not
by her rejection of him, but by the fashion of it, the utter
selfishness and cold-blooded calculation of it, he knew that love's
fires were out, and that he could meet her without the agitation of a
single nerve. He despised her, but he could make allowance for her. He
knew the strain that was in her, got from her brilliant and rather
plangent grandfather. He knew the temptation of a vast fortune, the
power that it would bring--and the notoriety, too, again an
inheritance from her grandfather. He was not without magnanimity, and
he could the more easily exercise it because his pulses of emotion
were still.

She was by nature the most brilliantly endowed woman he had ever met,
the most naturally perceptive and artistic, albeit there was a touch
of gorgeousness to the inherent artistry which time, training and
experience would have chastened. Would have chastened? Was it not,
then, chastened? Looking at her now, he knew that it was not. It was
still there, he felt; but how much else was also there--of charm, of
elusiveness, of wit, of mental adroitness, of joyous eagerness to
discover a new thought or a new thing! She was a creature of rare
splendour, variety and vanity.

Why should he deny himself the pleasure of her society? His
intellectual side would always be stimulated by her, she would always
"incite him to mental riot," as she had often said. Time had flown,
love had flown, and passion was dead; but friendship stayed. Yes,
friendship stayed--in spite of all. Her conduct had made him blush for
her, had covered him with shame, but she was a woman, and therefore
weak--he had come to that now. She was on a lower plateau of honour,
and therefore she must be--not forgiven--that was too banal; but she
must be accepted as she was. And, after all, there could be no more
deception; for opportunity and occasion no longer existed. He would go
and speak to her now.

At that moment he was aware that she had caught sight of him, and that
she was startled. She had not known of his return to England, and she
was suddenly overwhelmed by confusion. The words of the letter he had
written her when she had thrown him over rushed through her brain now,
and hurt her as much as they did the first day they had been
received. She became a little pale, and turned as though to find some
other egress from the shop. There being none, there was but one
course, and that was to go out as though she had not seen him. He had
not even been moved at all at seeing her; but with her it was
different. She was disturbed--in her vanity? In her peace? In her
pride? In her senses? In her heart? In any, or each, or all? But she
was disturbed: her equilibrium was shaken. He had scorched her soul by
that letter to her, so gently cold, so incisive, so subtly cruel, so
deadly in its irony, so final--so final.

She was ashamed, and no one else in the world but Ian Stafford could
so have shamed her. Power had been given to her, the power of great
riches--the three millions had been really four--and everything and
everybody, almost, was deferential towards her. Had it brought her
happiness, or content, or joy? It had brought her excitement--much of
that--and elation, and opportunity to do a thousand things, and to
fatigue herself in a thousand ways; but had it brought happiness?

If it had, the face of this man who was once so much to her, and whom
she had flung into outer darkness, was sufficient to cast a cloud over
it. She felt herself grow suddenly weak, but she determined to go out
of the place without appearing to see him.

He was conscious of it all, saw it out of a corner of his eye, and as
she started forward, he turned, deliberately walked towards her, and,
with a cheerful smile, held out his hand.

"Now, what good fortune!" he said, spiritedly. "Life plays no tricks,
practices no deception this time. In a book she'd have made us meet on
a grand staircase or at a court ball."

As he said this, he shook her hand warmly, and again and again, as
would be fitting with old friends. He had determined to be master of
the situation, and to turn the moment to the credit of his
account--not hers; and it was easy to do it, for love was dead, and
the memory of love atrophied.

Colour came back to her face. Confusion was dispelled, a quick and
grateful animation took possession of her, to be replaced an instant
after by the disconcerting reflection that there was in his face or
manner not the faintest sign of emotion or embarrassment. From his
attitude they might have been good friends who had not met for some
time; nothing more.

"Yes, what a place to meet!" she said. "It really ought to have been
at a green-grocer's, and the apotheosis of the commonplace would have
been celebrated. But when did you return? How long do you remain in
England?"

Ah, the sense of relief to feel that he was not reproaching her for
anything, not impeaching her by an injured tone and manner, which so
many other men had assumed with infinitely less right or cause than
he!

"I came back thirty-six hours ago, and I stay at the will of the
master-mind," he answered.

The old whimsical look came into her face, the old sudden flash which
always lighted her eyes when a daring phrase was born in her mind, and
she instantly retorted:

"The master-mind--how self-centred you are!"

Whatever had happened, certainly the old touch of intellectual
diablerie was still hers, and he laughed good-humoredly. Yes, she
might be this or that, she might be false or true, she might be one
who had sold herself for mammon, and had not paid tribute to the one
great natural principle of being, to give life to the world, man and
woman perpetuating man and woman; but she was stimulating and
delightful without effort.

"And what are you doing these days?" he asked. "One never hears of you
now."

This was cruel, but she knew that he was "inciting her to riot," and
she replied: "That's because you are so secluded--in your kindergarten
for misfit statesmen. Abandon knowledge, all ye who enter there!"

It was the old flint and steel, but the sparks were not bright enough
to light the tinder of emotion. She knew it, for he was cool and
buoyant and really unconcerned, and she was feverish--and determined.

"You still make life worth living," he answered, gaily.

"It is not an occupation I would choose," she replied. "It is sure to
make one a host of enemies."

"So many of us make our careers by accident," he rejoined.

"Certainly I made mine not by design," she replied instantly; and
there was an undercurrent of meaning in it which he was not slow to
notice; but he disregarded her first attempt to justify, however
vaguely, her murderous treatment of him.

"But your career is not yet begun," he remarked.

Her eyes flashed--was it anger, or pique, or hurt, or merely the fire
of intellectual combat?

"I am married," she said, defiantly, in direct retort.

"That is not a career--it is casual exploration in a dark continent,"
he rejoined.

"Come and say that to my husband," she replied, boldly. Suddenly a
thought lighted her eyes. "Are you by any chance free to-morrow night
to dine with us--quite, quite en famille' Rudyard will be glad to see
you--and hear you," she added, teasingly.

He was amused. He felt how much he had really piqued her and provoked
her by showing her so plainly that she had lost every vestige of the
ancient power over him; and he saw no reason why he should not spend
an evening where she sparkled.

"I am free, and will come with pleasure," he replied.

"That is delightful," she rejoined, "and please bring a box of bons
mots with you. But you will come, then--?" She was going to add,
"Ian," but she paused.

"Yes, I'll come--Jasmine," he answered, coolly, having read her
hesitation aright.

She flushed, was embarrassed and piqued, but with a smile and a nod
she left him.

In her carriage, however, her breath came quick and fast, her tiny
hand clenched, her face flushed, and there was a devastating fire in
her eyes.

"He shall not treat me so. He shall show some feeling. He shall--he
shall--he shall!" she gasped, angrily.



CHAPTER IX

THE APPIAN WAY


"Cape to Cairo be damned!"

The words were almost spat out. The man to whom they were addressed
slowly drew himself up from a half-recumbent position in his
desk-chair, from which he had been dreamily talking into the ceiling,
as it were, while his visitor leaned against a row of bookshelves and
beat the floor impatiently with his foot.

At the rude exclamation, Byng straightened himself, and looked fixedly
at his visitor. He had been dreaming out loud again the dream which
Rhodes had chanted in the ears of all those who shared with him the
pioneer enterprises of South Africa. The outburst which had broken in
on his monologue was so unexpected that for a moment he could scarcely
realize the situation. It was not often, in these strenuous and
perilous days--and for himself less often than ever before, so had
London and London life worked upon him--that he, or those who shared
with him the vast financial responsibilities of the Rand, indulged in
dreams or prophecies; and he resented the contemptuous phrase just
uttered, and the tone of the speaker even more.

Byng's blank amazement served only to incense his visitor
further. "Yes, be damned to it, Byng!" he continued. "I'm sick of the
British Empire and the All Red, and the 'immense future.' What I want
is the present. It's about big enough for you and me and the rest of
us. I want to hold our own in Johannesburg. I want to pull thirty-five
millions a year out of the eighty miles of reef, and get enough native
labour to do it. I want to run the Rand like a business concern, with
Kruger gone to Holland; and Leyds gone to blazes. That's what I want
to see, Mr. Invincible Rudyard Byng."

The reply to this tirade was deliberate and murderously
bitter. "That's what you want to see, is it, Mr. Blasphemous Barry
Whalen? Well, you can want it with a little less blither and a little
more manners."

A hard and ugly look was now come into the big clean-shaven face which
had become sleeker with good living, and yet had indefinably coarsened
in the three years gone since the Jameson raid; and a gloomy anger
looked out of the deep-blue eyes as he slowly went on:

"It doesn't matter what you want--not a great deal, if the others
agree generally on what ought to be done; and I don't know that it
matters much in any case. What have you come to see me about?"

"I know I'm not welcome here, Byng. It isn't the same as it used to
be. It isn't--"

Byng jerked quickly to his feet and lunged forward as though he would
do his visitor violence; but he got hold of himself in time, and, with
a sudden and whimsical toss of the head, characteristic of him, he
burst into a laugh.

"Well, I've been stung by a good many kinds of flies in my time, and I
oughtn't to mind, I suppose," he growled.... "Oh, well, there," he
broke off; "you say you're not welcome here? If you really feel that,
you'd better try to see me at my chambers--or at the office in London
Wall. It can't be pleasant inhaling air that chills or stifles
you. You take my advice, Barry, and save yourself annoyance. But let
me say in passing that you are as welcome here as anywhere, neither
more nor less. You are as welcome as you were in the days when we
trekked from the Veal to Pietersburg and on into Bechuanaland, and
both slept in the cape-wagon under one blanket. I don't think any more
of you than I did then, and I don't think any less, and I don't want
to see you any more or any fewer. But, Barry"--his voice changed, grew
warmer, kinder--" circumstances are circumstances. The daily lives of
all of us are shaped differently--yours as well as mine--here in this
pudding-faced civilization and in the iron conventions of London town;
and we must adapt ourselves accordingly. We used to flop down on our
Louis Quinze furniture on the Vaal with our muddy boots on--in our
front drawing-room. We don't do it in Thamesfontein, my noble
buccaneer--not even in Barry Whalen's mansion in Ladbroke Square,
where Barry Whalen, Esq., puts his silk hat on the hall table, and--
and, 'If you please, sir, your bath is ready'! . . . Don't be an
idiot-child, Barry, and don't spoil my best sentences when I let
myself go. I don't do it often these days--not since Jameson spilt the
milk and the can went trundling down the area. It's little time we get
for dreaming, these sodden days, but it's only dreams that do the
world's work and our own work in the end. It's dreams that do it,
Barry; it's dreams that drive us on, that make us see beyond the
present and the stupefying, deadening grind of the day. So it'll be
Cape to Cairo in good time, dear lad, and no damnation, if you
please.... Why, what's got into you? And again, what have you come to
see me about, anyhow? You knew we were to meet at dinner at
Wallstein's to-night. Is there anything that's skulking at our heels
to hurt us?"

The scowl on Barry Whalen's dissipated face cleared a little. He came
over, rested both hands on the table and leaned forward as he spoke,
Byng resuming his seat meanwhile.

Barry's voice was a little thick with excitement, but he weighed his
words too. "Byng, I wanted you to know beforehand what Fleming intends
to bring up to-night--a nice kind of reunion, isn't it, with war ahead
as sure as guns, and the danger of everything going to smash, in spite
of Milner and Jo?"

A set look came into Byng's face. He caught the lapels of his big,
loose, double-breasted jacket, and spread his feet a little, till he
looked as though squaring himself to resist attack.

"Go on with your story," he interposed. "What is Fleming going to
say--or bring up, you call it?"

"He's going to say that some one is betraying us--all we do that's of
any importance and most we say that counts--to Kruger and Leyds. He's
going to say that the traitor is some one inside our circle."

Byng started, and his hands clutched at the chairback, then he became
quiet and watchful. "And whom does Fleming--or you--suspect?" he
asked, with lowering eyelids and a slumbering malice in his eyes.

Barry straightened himself and looked Byng rather hesitatingly in the
face; then he said, slowly:

"I don't know much about Fleming's suspicions. Mine, though, are at
least three years old, and you know them.

"Krool?"

"Krool--for sure."

"What would be Krool's object in betraying us, even if he knew all we
say and do?"

"Blood is thicker than water, Byng, and double pay to a poor man is a
consideration."

"Krool would do nothing that injured me, Barry. I know men. What sort
of thing has been given away to Brother Boer?"

Barry took from his pocket a paper and passed it over. Byng scanned it
very carefully and slowly, and his face darkened as he read; for there
were certain things set down of which only he and Wallstein and one or
two others knew; which only he and one high in authority in England
knew, besides Wallstein. His face slowly reddened with anger. London
life, and its excitements multiplied by his wife and not avoided by
himself, had worn on him, had affected his once sunny and even temper,
had given him greater bulk, with a touch of flabbiness under the chin
and at the neck, and had slackened the firmness of the muscles.
Presently he got up, went over to a table, and helped himself to brandy
and soda, motioning to Barry to do the same. There were two or three
minutes' silence, and then he said:

"There's something wrong, certainly, but it isn't Krool. No, it isn't
Krool."

"Nevertheless, if you're wise you'll ship him back beyond the Vaal, my
friend."

"It isn't Krool. I'll stake my life on that. He's as true to me as I
am to myself; and, anyhow, there are things in this Krool couldn't
know." He tossed the paper into the fire and watched it burn.

He had talked over many, if not all, of these things with Jasmine, and
with no one else; but Jasmine would not gossip. He had never known her
to do so. Indeed, she had counselled extreme caution so often to
himself that she would, in any case, be innocent of having
babbled. But certainly there had been leakage--there had been leakage
regarding most critical affairs. They were momentous enough to cause
him to say reflectively now, as he watched the paper burn:

"You might as well carry dynamite in your pocket as that."

"You don't mind my coming to see you?" Barry asked, in an anxious
tone.

He could not afford to antagonize Byng; in any case, his heart was
against doing so; though, like an Irishman, he had risked everything
by his maladroit and ill-mannered attack a little while ago.

"I wanted to warn you, so's you could be ready when Fleming jumped
in," Barry continued.

"No; I'm much obliged, Barry," was Byng's reply, in a voice where
trouble was well marked, however. "Wait a minute," he continued, as
his visitor prepared to leave. "Go into the other room"--he
pointed. "Glue your ear to the door first, then to the wall, and tell
me if you can hear anything--any word I say."

Barry did as he was bidden. Presently Byng spoke in a tone rather
louder than in ordinary conversation to an imaginary interlocutor for
some minutes. Then Barry Whalen came back into the room.

"Well?" Byng asked. "Heard anything?"

"Not a word--scarcely a murmur."

"Quite so. The walls are thick, and those big mahogany doors fit like
a glove. Nothing could leak through. Let's try the other door, leading
into the hall." They went over to it. "You see, here's an inside
baize-door as well. There's not room for a person to stand between the
two. I'll go out now, and you stay. Talk fairly loud."

The test produced the same result.

"Maybe I talk in my sleep," remarked Byng, with a troubled, ironical
laugh.

Suddenly there shot into Barry Whalen's mind a thought which startled
him, which brought the colour to his face with a rush. For years he
had suspected Krool, had considered him a danger. For years he had
regarded Byng as culpable, for keeping as his servant one whom the
Partners all believed to be a spy; but now another, a terrible thought
came to him, too terrible to put into words--even in his own mind.

There were two other people besides Krool who were very close to
Byng. There was Mrs. Byng for one; there was also Adrian Fellowes, who
had been for a long time a kind of handy-man of the great house, doing
the hundred things which only a private secretary, who was also a kind
of master-of-ceremonies and lord-in-waiting, as it were, could
do. Yes, there was Adrian Fellowes, the private secretary; and there
was Mrs. Byng, who knew so much of what her husband knew! And the
private secretary and the wife necessarily saw much of each
other. What came to Barry's mind now stunned him, and he mumbled out
some words of good-bye with an almost hang-dog look to his face; for
he had a chivalrous heart and mind, and he was not prone to be
malicious.

"We'll meet at eight, then?" said Byng, taking out his watch. "It's a
quarter past seven now. Don't fuss, Barry. We'll nose out the spy,
whoever he is, or wherever to be found. But we won't find him here, I
think--not here, my friend."

Suddenly Barry Whalen turned at the door. "Oh, let's go back to the
veld and the Rand!" he burst out, passionately. "This is no place for
us, Byng--not for either of us. You are getting flabby, and I'm
spoiling my temper and my manners. Let's get out of this infernal
jack-pot. Let's go where we'll be in the thick of the broiling when it
comes. You've got a political head, and you've done more than any one
else could do to put things right and keep them right; but it's no
good. Nothing'll be got except where the red runs. And the red will
run, in spite of all Jo or Milner or you can do. And when it comes,
you and I will be sick if we're not there--yes, even you with your
millions, Byng."

With moist eyes Byng grasped the hand of the rough-hewn comrade of the
veld, and shook it warmly.

"England has got on your nerves, Barry," he said, gently." But we're
all right in London. The key-board of the big instrument is here."

"But the organ is out there, Byng, and it's the organ that makes the
music, not the keys. We're all going to pieces here, every one of
us. I see it. Herr Gott, I see it plain enough! We're in the wrong
shop. We're not buying or selling; we're being sold. Baas--big Baas,
let's go where there's room to sling a stone; where we can see what's
going on round us; where there's the long sight and the strong sight;
where you can sell or get sold in the open, not in the alleyways;
where you can have a run for your money."

Byng smiled benevolently. Yet something was stirring his senses
strangely. The smell of the karoo was in his nostrils. "You're not
ending up as you began, Barry," he replied. "You started off like an
Israelite on the make, and you're winding up like Moody and Sankey."

"Well, I'm right now in the wind-up. I'm no better, I'm no worse, than
the rest of our fellows, but I'm Irish--I can see. The Celt can
always see, even if he can't act. And I see dark days coming for this
old land. England is wallowing. It's all guzzle and feed and finery,
and nobody cares a copper about anything that matters--"

"About Cape to Cairo, eh?"

"Byng, that was one of my idiocies. But you think over what I say,
just the same. I'm right. We're rotten cotton stuff now in these
isles. We've got fatty degeneration of the heart, and in all the rest
of the organs too."

Again Byng shook him by the hand warmly. "Well, Wallstein will give us
a fat dinner to-night, and you can moralize with lime-light effects
after the foie gras, Barry."

Closing the door slowly behind his friend, whom he had passed into the
hands of the dark-browed Krool, Byng turned again to his desk. As he
did so he caught sight of his face in the mirror over the
mantel-piece. A shadow swept over it; his lips tightened.

"Barry was right," he murmured, scrutinizing himself. "I've
degenerated. We've all degenerated. What's the matter, anyhow? What is
the matter? I've got everything--everything--everything."

Hearing the door open behind him, he turned to see Jasmine in evening
dress smiling at him. She held up a pink finger in reproof.

"Naughty boy," she said. "What's this I hear--that you have thrown me
over--me--to go and dine with the Wallstein! It's nonsense! You can't
go. Ian Stafford is coming to dine, as I told you."

His eyes beamed protectingly, affectionately, and yet, somehow, a
little anxiously, on her "But I must go, Jasmine. It's the first time
we've all been together since the Raid, and it's good we should be in
the full circle once again. There's work to do--more than ever there
was. There's a storm coming up on the veld, a real jagged lightning
business, and men will get hurt, hosts beyond recovery. We must
commune together, all of us. If there's the communion of saints,
there's also the communion of sinners. Fleming is back, and Wolff is
back, and Melville and Reuter and Hungerford are back, but only for a
few days, and we all must meet and map things out. I forgot about the
dinner. As soon as I remembered it I left a note on your
dressing-table."

With sudden emotion he drew her to him, and buried his face in her
soft golden hair. "My darling, my little jasmine-flower," he
whispered, softly, "I hate leaving you, but--"

"But it's impossible, Ruddy, my man. How can I send Ian Stafford away?
It's too late to put him off."

"There's no need to put him off or to send him away--such old friends
as you are. Why shouldn't he dine with you a deux? I'm the only person
that's got anything to say about that."

She expressed no surprise, she really felt none. He had forgotten
that, coming up from Scotland, he had told her of this dinner with his
friends, and at the moment she asked Ian Stafford to dine she had
forgotten it also; but she remembered it immediately afterwards, and
she had said nothing, done nothing.

As Byng spoke, however, a curious expression emerged from the far
depths of her eyes--emerged, and was instantly gone again to the
obscurity whence it came. She had foreseen that he would insist on
Stafford dining with her; but, while showing no surprise--and no
perplexity--there was a touch of demureness in her expression as she
answered:

"I don't want to seem too conventional, but--"

"There should be a little latitude in all social rules," he
rejoined. "What nonsense! You are prudish, Jasmine. Allow yourself
some latitude."

"Latitude, not license," she returned. Having deftly laid on him the
responsibility for this evening's episode, this excursion into the
dangerous fields of past memory and sentiment and perjured faith, she
closed the book of her own debit and credit with a smile of
satisfaction.

"Let me look at you," he said, standing her off from him.

Holding her hand, he turned her round like a child to be
inspected. "Well, you're a dream," he added, as she released herself
and swept into a curtsey, coquetting with her eyes as she did
so. "You're wonderful in blue--a flower in the azure," he added. "I
seem to remember that gown before--years ago--"

She uttered an exclamation of horror. "Good gracious, you wild and
ruthless ruffian! A gown--this gown--years ago! My bonny boy, do you
think I wear my gowns for years?"

"I wear my suits for years. Some I've had seven years. I've got a
frock-coat I bought for my brother Jim's wedding, ten years ago, and
it looks all right--a little small now, but otherwise 'most as good as
new."

"What a lamb, what a babe, you are, Ruddy! Like none that ever
lived. Why, no woman wears her gowns two seasons, and some of them
rather hate wearing them two times."

"Then what do they do with them--after the two times?"

"Well, for a while, perhaps, they keep them to look at and gloat over,
if they like them; then, perhaps, they give them away to their poor
cousins or their particular friends--"

"Their particular friends--?"

"Why, every woman has some friends poorer than herself who love her
very much, and she is good to them. Or there's the Mart--"

"Wait. What's 'the Mart'?"

"The place where ladies can get rid of fine clothes at a wicked
discount."

"And what becomes of them then?"

"They are bought by ladies less fortunate."

"Ladies who wear them?"

"Why, what else would they do? Wear them--of course, dear child."

Byng made a gesture of disgust. "Well, I call it sickening. To me
there's something so personal and intimate about clothes. I think I
could kill any woman that I saw wearing clothes of yours--of yours."

She laughed mockingly. "My beloved, you've seen them often enough, but
you haven't known they were mine; that's all."

"I didn't recognize them, because no one could wear your clothes like
you. It would be a caricature. That's a fact, Jasmine."

She reached up and swept his cheek with a kiss. "What a darling you
are, little big man! Yet you never make very definite remarks about my
clothes."

He put his hands on his hips and looked her up and down
approvingly. "Because I only see a general effect, but I always
remember colour. Tell me, have you ever sold your clothes to the Mart,
or whatever the miserable coffin-shop is called?"

"Well, not directly."

"What do you mean by 'not directly'?"

"Well, I didn't sell them, but they were sold for me." She hesitated,
then went on hurriedly. "Adrian Fellowes knew of a very sad case--a
girl in the opera who had had misfortune, illness, and bad luck; and
he suggested it. He said he didn't like to ask for a cheque, because
we were always giving, but selling my old wardrobe would be a sort of
lucky find--that's what he called it."

Byng nodded, with a half-frown, however. "That was ingenious of
Fellowes, and thoughtful, too. Now, what does a gown cost, one like
that you have on?"

"This--let me see. Why, fifty pounds, perhaps. It's not a ball gown,
of course."

He laughed mockingly. "Why, 'of course,' And what does a ball gown
cost--perhaps?" There was a cynical kind of humour in his eye.

"Anything from fifty to a hundred and fifty--maybe," she replied, with
a little burst of merriment.

"And how much did you get for the garments you had worn twice, and
then seen them suddenly grow aged in their extreme youth?"

"Ruddy, do not be nasty--or scornful. I've always worn my gowns more
than twice--some of them a great many times, except when I detested
them. And anyhow, the premature death of a gown is very, very good for
trade. That influences many ladies, of course."

He burst out laughing, but there was a satirical note in the gaiety,
or something still harsher.

"'We deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us,'" he
answered. "It's all such a hollow make-believe."

"What is?"

She gazed at him inquiringly, for this mood was new to her. She was
vaguely conscious of some sort of change in him--not exactly toward
her, but a change, nevertheless.

"The life we rich people lead is a hollow make-believe, Jasmine," he
said, with sudden earnestness. "I don't know what's the matter, but
we're not getting out of life all we ought to get; and we're not
putting into it all we ought to put in. There's a sense of
emptiness--of famine somewhere."

He caught the reflection of his face in the glass again, and his brow
contracted. "We get sordid and sodden, and we lose the proportions of
life. I wanted Dick Wilberforce to do something with me the other day,
and he declined. 'Why, my dear fellow,' I said, 'you know you want to
do it?' 'Of course I do,' he answered, 'but I can't afford that kind
of thing, and you know it.' Well, I did know it, but I had
forgotten. I was only thinking of what I myself could afford to do. I
was setting up my own financial standard, and was forgetting the other
fellows who hadn't my standard. What's the result? We drift apart,
Wilberforce and I--well, I mean Wilberforce as a type. We drift into
sets of people who can afford to do certain things, and we leave such
a lot of people behind that we ought to have clung to, and that we
would have clung to, if we hadn't been so much thinking of ourselves,
or been so soddenly selfish."

A rippling laugh rang through the room. "Boanerges--oh, Boanerges
Byng! 'Owever can you be so heloquent!"

Jasmine put both hands on his shoulders and looked up at him with that
look which had fascinated him--and so many others--in their day. The
perfume which had intoxicated him in the first days of his love of
her, and steeped his senses in the sap of youth and Eden, smote them
again, here on the verge of the desert before him. He suddenly caught
her in his arms and pressed her to him almost roughly.

"You exquisite siren--you siren of all time," he said, with a note of
joy in which there was, too, a stark cry of the soul. He held her face
back from him.... "If you had lived a thousand years ago you would
have had a thousand lovers, Jasmine. Perhaps you did--who knows! And
now you come down through the centuries purified by Time, to be my
jasmine-flower."

His lip trembled a little. There was a strange melancholy in his eyes,
belying the passion and rapture of his words.

In all their days together she had never seen him in this mood. She
had heard him storm about things at times, had watched his big
impulses working; had drawn the thunder from his clouds; but there was
something moving in him now which she had never seen before. Perhaps
it was only a passing phase, even a moment's mood, but it made a
strange impression on her. It was remembered by them both long after,
when life had scattered its vicissitudes before their stumbling feet
and they had passed through flood and fire.

She drew back and looked at him steadily, reflectively, and with an
element of surprise in her searching look. She had never thought him
gifted with perception or insight, though he had eloquence and an eye
for broad effects. She had thought him curiously ignorant of human
nature, born to be deceived, full of child-like illusions, never
understanding the real facts of life, save in the way of business--and
politics. Women he never seemed by a single phrase or word to
understand, and yet now he startled her with a sudden revelation and
insight of which she had not thought him capable.

"If you had lived a thousand years ago you would have had a thousand
lovers. Perhaps you did--who knows! . . . And now you come down
through the centuries purified by Time--"

The words slowly repeated themselves in her brain. Many and many a
time she had imagined herself as having lived centuries ago, and again
and again in her sleep these imaginings had reflected themselves in
wild dreams of her far past--once as a priestess of Isis, once as a
Slavonian queen, once as a peasant in Syria, and many times as a
courtezan of Alexandria or Athens--many times as that: one of the
gifted, beautiful, wonderful women whose houses were the centres of
culture, influence, and power. She had imagined herself, against her
will, as one of these women, such as Cleopatra, for whom the world
were well lost; and who, at last, having squeezed the orange dry, but
while yet the sun was coming towards noon, in scorn of Life and Time
had left the precincts of the cheerful day without a lingering
look.... Often and often such dreams, to her anger and confusion, had
haunted her, even before she was married; and she had been alternately
humiliated and fascinated by them. Years ago she had told Ian Stafford
of one of the dreams of a past life--that she was a slave in Athens
who saved her people by singing to the Tyrant; and Ian had made her
sing to him, in a voice quite in keeping with her personality,
delicate and fine and wonderfully high in its range, bird-like in its
quality, with trills like a lark--a little meretricious but
captivating. He had also written for her two verses which were as
sharp and clear in her mind as the letter he wrote when she had thrown
him over so dishonourably:


"Your voice I knew, its cadences and trill;
It stilled the tumult and the overthrow
When Athens trembled to the people's will;
I knew it--'twas a thousand years ago.

"I see the fountains, and the gardens where
You sang the fury from the Satrap's brow;
I feel the quiver of the raptured air
I heard you in the Athenian grove--I hear you now."


As the words flashed into her mind now she looked at her husband
steadfastly. Were there, then, some unexplored regions in his nature,
where things dwelt, of which she had no glimmering of knowledge? Did
he understand more of women than she thought? Could she then really
talk to him of a thousand things of the mind which she had ever ruled
out of any commerce between them, one half of her being never opened
up to his sight? Not that he was deficient in intellect, but, to her
thought, his was a purely objective mind; or was it objective because
it had not been trained or developed subjectively? Had she ever really
tried to find a region in his big nature where the fine allusiveness
and subjectivity of the human mind could have free life and
untrammelled exercise, could gambol in green fields of imagination and
adventure upon strange seas of discovery? A shiver of pain, of
remorse, went through her frame now, as he held her at arm's length
and looked at her.... Had she started right? Had she ever given their
natures a chance to discover each other? Warmth and passion and youth
and excitement and variety--oh, infinite variety there had been!--but
had the start been a fair one, had she, with a whole mind and a full
soul of desire, gone to him first and last? What had been the
governing influence in their marriage where she was concerned?

Three years of constant motion, and never an hour's peace; three years
of agitated waters, and never in all that time three days alone
together. What was there to show for the three years? That for which
he had longed with a great longing had been denied him; for he had
come of a large family, and had the simple primitive mind and
heart. Even in his faults he had ever been primitively simple and
obvious. She had been energetic, helping great charities, aiding in
philanthropic enterprises, with more than a little shrewdness
preventing him from being robbed right and left by adventurers of all
descriptions; and yet--and yet it was all so general, so soulless, her
activity in good causes. Was there a single afflicted person, one
forlorn soul whom she had directly and personally helped, or sheltered
from the storm for a moment, one bereaved being whose eyes she had
dried by her own direct personal sympathy?

Was it this which had been more or less vaguely working in his mind a
little while before when she had noticed a change in him; or was it
that he was disappointed that they were two and no more--always two,
and no more? Was it that which was working in his mind, and making him
say hard things about their own two commendable selves?

"If you had lived a thousand years ago you would have had a thousand
lovers.... And now you come down through the centuries purlfied by
Time, to be my jasmine-flower"--

She did not break the silence for some time, but at last she said:
"And what were you a thousand years ago, my man?"

He drew a hot hand across a troubled brow. "I? I was the Satrap whose
fury you soothed away, or I was the Antony you lured from fighting
Caesar."

It was as though he had read those lines written by Ian Stafford long
ago.

Again that perfume of hers caught his senses, and his look softened
wonderfully. A certain unconscious but underlying discontent appeared
to vanish from his eyes, and he said, abruptly: "I have it--I have
it. This dress is like the one you wore the first night that we
met. It's the same kind of stuff, it's just the same colour and the
same style. Why, I see it all as plain as can be--there at the
opera. And you wore blue the day I tried to propose to you and
couldn't, and asked you down to Wales instead. Lord, how I funked it!"
He laughed, happily almost. "Yes, you wore blue the first time we
met--like this."

"It was the same skirt, and a different bodice, of course both those
first times," she answered. Then she stepped back and daintily
smoothed out the gown she was wearing, smiling at him as she did that
day three years ago. She had put on this particular gown, remembering
that Ian Stafford had said charming things about that other blue gown
just before he bade her good-bye three years ago. That was why she
wore blue this night--to recall to Ian what it appeared he had
forgotten. And presently she would dine alone with Ian in her
husband's house--and with her husband's blessing. Pique and pride were
in her heart, and she meant Ian Stafford to remember. No man was
adamantine; at least she had never met one--not one, neither bishop
nor octogenarian.

"Come, Ruddy, you must dress, or you'll be late," she continued,
lightly, touching his cheek with her fingers; "and you'll come down
and apologize, and put me right with Ian Stafford, won't you?"

"Certainly. I won't be five minutes. I'll--"

There was a tap at the door and a footman, entering, announced that
Mr. Stafford was in the drawing-room.

"Show him into my sitting-room," she said. "The drawing-room, indeed,"
she added to her husband--"it is so big, and I am so small. I feel
sometimes as though I wanted to live in a tiny, tiny house."

Her words brought a strange light to his eyes. Suddenly he caught her
arm.

"Jasmine," he said, hurriedly, "let us have a good talk over
things--over everything. I want to see if we can't get more out of
life than we do. There's something wrong. What is it? I don't know;
but perhaps we could find out if we put our heads together--eh?" There
was a strange, troubled longing in his look.

She nodded and smiled. "Certainly--to-night when you get back," she
said. "We'll open the machine and find what's wrong with it." She
laughed, and so did he.

As she went down the staircase she mused to herself and there was a
shadow in her eyes and over her face.

"Poor Ruddy! Poor Ruddy!" she said.

Once again before she entered the sitting-room, as she turned and
looked back, she said:

"Poor boy . . . Yet he knew about a thousand years ago!" she added
with a nervous little laugh, and with an air of sprightly eagerness
she entered to Ian Stafford.



CHAPTER X

AN ARROW FINDS A BREAST


As he entered the new sphere of Jasmine's influence, charm, and
existence, Ian Stafford's mind became flooded by new impressions. He
was not easily moved by vastness or splendour. His ducal grandfather's
houses were palaces, the estates were a fair slice of two counties,
and many of his relatives had sumptuous homes stored with priceless
legacies of art. He had approached the great house which Byng had
built for himself with some trepidation; for though Byng came of
people whose names counted for a good deal in the north of England,
still, in newly acquired fortunes made suddenly in new lands there was
something that coarsened taste--an unmodulated, if not a garish,
elegance which "hit you in the eye," as he had put it to himself. He
asked himself why Byng had not been content to buy one of the great
mansions which could always be had in London for a price, where time
had softened all the outlines, had given that subdued harmony in
architecture which only belongs to age. Byng could not buy with any
money those wonderful Adam's mantels, over-mantels and ceilings which
had a glory quite their own. There must, therefore, be an air of
newness in the new mansion, which was too much in keeping with the new
money, the gold as yet not worn smooth by handling, the staring,
brand-new sovereigns looking like impostors.

As he came upon the great house, however, in the soft light of
evening, he was conscious of no violence done to his artistic
sense. It was a big building, severely simple in design, yet with the
rich grace, spacious solidity, and decorative relief of an Italian
palace: compact, generous, traditionally genuine and wonderfully
proportionate.

"Egad, Byng, you had a good architect--and good sense!" he said to
himself. "It's the real thing; and he did it before Jasmine came on
the scene too."

The outside of the house was Byng's, but the inside would, in the
essentials, of course, be hers; and he would see what he would see.

When the door opened, it came to him instantly that the inside and
outside were in harmony. How complete was that harmony remained to be
seen, but an apparently unstudied and delightful reticence was
noticeable at once. The newness had been rubbed off the gold somehow,
and the old furniture--Italian, Spanish--which relieved the
spaciousness of the entrance gave an air of Time and Time's eloquence
to this three-year-old product of modern architectural skill.

As he passed on, he had more than a glimpse of the ball-room, which
maintained the dignity and the refined beauty of the staircase and the
hallways; and only in the insistent audacity and intemperate colouring
of some Rubens pictures did he find anything of that inherent tendency
to exaggeration and Oriental magnificence behind the really delicate
artistic faculties possessed by Jasmine.

The drawing-room was charming. It was not quite perfect, however. It
was too manifestly and studiously arranged, and it had the finnicking
exactness of the favourite gallery of some connoisseur. For its
nobility of form, its deft and wise softness of colouring, its
half-smothered Italian joyousness of design in ceiling and cornice,
the arrangement of choice and exquisite furniture was too careful, too
much like the stage. He smiled at the sight of it, for he saw and knew
that Jasmine had had his playful criticism of her occasionally
flamboyant taste in mind, and that she had over-revised, as it
were. She had, like a literary artist, polished and refined and
stippled the effect, till something of personal touch had gone, and
there remained classic elegance without the sting of life and the
idiosyncrasy of its creator's imperfections. No, the drawing-room
would not quite do, though it was near the perfect thing. His judgment
was not yet complete, however. When he was shown into Jasmine's
sitting-room his breath came a little quicker, for here would be the
real test; and curiosity was stirring greatly in him.

Yes, here was the woman herself, wilful, original, delightful, with a
flower-like delicacy joined to a determined and gorgeous
audacity. Luxury was heaped on luxury, in soft lights from Indian
lamps and lanterns, in the great divan, the deep lounge, the piled-up
cushions, the piano littered with incongruous if artistic bijouterie;
but everywhere, everywhere, books in those appealing bindings and with
that paper so dear to every lover of literature. Instinctively he
picked them up one by one, and most of them were affectionately marked
by marginal notes of criticism, approval, or reference; and all
showing the eager, ardent mind of one who loved books. He noticed,
however, that most of the books he had seen before, and some of them
he had read with her in the days which were gone forever. Indeed, in
one of them he found some of his own pencilled marginal notes, beneath
which she had written her insistent opinions, sometimes with amazing
point. There were few new books, and they were mostly novels; and it
was borne in on him that not many of these annotated books belonged to
the past three years. The millions had come, the power and the place;
but something had gone with their coming.

He was turning over the pages of a volume of Browning when she
entered; and she had an instant to note the grace and manly dignity of
his figure, the poise of the intellectual head--the type of a perfect,
well-bred animal, with the accomplishment of a man of purpose and
executive design. A little frown of trouble came to her forehead, but
she drove it away with a merry laugh, as he turned at the rustle of
her skirts and came forward.

He noted her blue dress, he guessed the reason she had put it on; and
he made an inward comment of scorn. It was the same blue, and it was
near the same style of the dress she wore the last time he saw
her. She watched to see whether it made any impression on him, and was
piqued to observe that he who had in that far past always swept her
with an admiring, discriminating, and deferential glance, now only
gave her deference of a courteous but perfunctory kind. It made the
note to all she said and did that evening--the daring, the brilliance,
the light allusion to past scenes and happenings, the skilful comment
on the present, the joyous dominance of a position made supreme by
beauty and by gold; behind which were anger and bitterness, and wild
and desperate revolt.

For, if love was dead in him, and respect, and all that makes man's
association with woman worth while, humiliation and the sting of
punishment and penalty were alive in her, flaying her spirit, rousing
that mad streak which was in her grandfather, who had had many a
combat, the outcome of wild elements of passion in him. She was not
happy; she had never been happy since she married Rudyard Byng; yet
she had said to herself so often that she might have been at peace, in
a sense, had it not been for the letter which Ian Stafford had written
her, when she turned from him to the man she married.

The passionate resolve to compel him to reproach himself in soul for
his merciless, if subtle, indictment of her to bring him to the old
place where he had knelt in spirit so long ago--ah, it was so
long!--came to her. Self-indulgent and pitifully mean as she had been,
still this man had influenced her more than any other in the world--in
that region where the best of herself lay, the place to which her eyes
had turned always when she wanted a consoling hour. He belonged to her
realm of the imagination, of thought, of insight, of intellectual
passions and the desires of the soul. Far above any physical
attraction Ian had ever possessed for her was the deep conviction that
he gave her mind what no one else gave it, that he was the being who
knew the song her spirit sang.... He should not go forever from her
and with so cynical a completeness. He should return; he should not
triumph in his self-righteousness, be a living reproach to her always
by his careless indifference to everything that had ever been between
them. If he treated her so because of what she had done to him, with
what savagery might not she be treated, if all that had happened in
the last three years were open as a book before him!

Her husband--she had not thought of that. So much had happened in the
past three years; there had been so much adulation and worship and
daring assault upon her heart--or emotions--from quarters of unusual
distinction, that the finest sense of her was blunted, and true
proportions were lost. Rudyard ought never to have made that five
months' visit to South Africa a year before, leaving her alone to make
the fight against the forces round her. Those five months had brought
a change in her, had made her indignant at times against Rudyard.

"Why did he go to South Africa? Why did he not take me with him? Why
did he leave me here alone?" she had asked herself. She did not
realize that there would have been no fighting at all, that all the
forces contending against her purity and devotion would never have
gathered at her feet and washed against the shores of her resolution,
if she had loved Rudyard Byng when she married him as she might have
loved him, ought to have loved him.

The faithful love unconsciously announces its fidelity, and men
instinctively are aware of it, and leave it unassailed. It is the
imperfect love which subtly invites the siege, which makes the call
upon human interest, selfishness, or sympathy, so often without
intended unscrupulousness at first. She had escaped the suspicion, if
not the censure, of the world--or so she thought; and in the main she
was right. But she was now embarked on an enterprise which never would
have been begun, if she had not gambled with her heart and soul three
years ago; if she had not dragged away the veil from her inner self,
putting her at the mercy of one who could say, "I know you--what you
are."

Just before they went to the dining-room Byng came in and cheerily
greeted Stafford, apologizing for having forgotten his engagement to
dine with Wallstein.

"But you and Jasmine will have much to talk about," he said--"such old
friends as you are; and fond of books and art and music and all that
kind of thing.... Glad to see you looking so well, Stafford," he
continued. "They say you are the coming man. Well, au revoir. I hope
Jasmine will give you a good dinner." Presently he was gone--in a
heavy movement of good-nature and magnanimity.

"Changed--greatly changed, and not for the better," said Ian Stafford
to himself." This life has told on him. The bronze of the veld has
vanished, and other things are disappearing."

At the table with the lights and the flowers and the exquisite
appointments, with appetite flattered and tempted by a dinner of rare
simplicity and perfect cooking, Jasmine was radiant, amusing, and
stimulating in her old way. She had never seemed to him so much a
mistress of delicate satire and allusiveness. He rose to the combat
with an alacrity made more agile by considerable abstinence, for
clever women were few, and real talk was the rarest occurrence in his
life, save with men in his own profession chiefly.

But later, in her sitting-room, after the coffee had come, there was a
change, and the transition was made with much skill and
sensitiveness. Into Jasmine's voice there came another and more
reflective note, and the drift of the conversation changed. Books
brought the new current; and soon she had him moving almost
unconsciously among old scenes, recalling old contests of ideas, and
venturing on bold reproductions of past intellectual ideals. But
though they were in this dangerous field of the past, he did not once
betray a sign of feeling, not even when, poring over Coventry
Patmore's poems, her hand touched his, and she read the lines which
they had read together so long ago, with no thought of any
significance to themselves:



"With all my will, but much against my heart,
We two now part.
My very Dear,
Our solace is the sad road lies so clear. . .
Go thou to East, I West.
We will not say
There's any hope, it is so far away. . ."



He read the verses with a smile of quiet enjoyment, saying, when he
had finished:

"A really moving and intimate piece of work. I wonder what their story
was--a hopeless love, of course. An affaire--an 'episode'--London
ladies now call such things."

"You find London has changed much since you went away--in three years
only?" she asked.

"Three years--why, it's an eternity, or a minute, as you are obliged
to live it. In penal servitude it is centuries, in the Appian Way of
pleasure it is a sunrise moment. Actual time has nothing to do with
the clock."

She looked up to the little gold-lacquered clock on the
mantel-piece. "See, it is going to strike," she said. As she spoke,
the little silver hammer softly struck. "That is the clock-time, but
what time is it really--for you, for instance?"

"In Elysium there is no time," he murmured with a gallantry so
intentionally obvious and artificial that her pulses beat with anger.

"It is wonderful, then, how you managed the dinner-hour so
exactly. You did not miss it by a fraction."

"It is only when you enter Elysium that there is no time. It was eight
o'clock when I arrived--by the world's time. Since then I have been
dead to time--and the world."

"You do not suggest that you are in heaven?" she asked, ironically.

"Nothing so extreme as that. All extremes are violent."

"Ah, the middle place--then you are in purgatory?"

"But what should you be doing in purgatory? Or have you only come with
a drop of water to cool the tongue of Dives?" His voice trailed along
so coolly that it incensed her further.

"Certainly Dives' tongue is blistering," she said with great effort to
still the raging tumult within her. "Yet I would not cool it if I
could."

Suddenly the anger seemed to die out of her, and she looked at him as
she did in the days before Rudyard Byng came across her path--eagerly,
childishly, eloquently, inquiringly. He was the one man who satisfied
the intellectual and temperamental side of her; and he had taught her
more than any one else in the world. She realized that she had "Tossed
him violently like a ball into a far country," and that she had not
now a vestige of power over him--either of his senses or his mind;
that he was master of the situation. But was it so that there was a
man whose senses could not be touched when all else failed? She was
very woman, eager for the power which she had lost, and power was hard
to get--by what devious ways had she travelled to find it!

As they leaned over a book of coloured prints of Gainsborough, Romney,
and Vandyke, her soft, warm breast touched his arm and shoulder, a
strand of her cobweb, golden hair swept his cheek, and a sigh came
from her lips, so like those of that lass who caught and held her
Nelson to the end, and died at last in poverty, friendless, homeless,
and alone. Did he fancy that he heard a word breathing through her
sigh--his name, Ian? For one instant the wild, cynical desire came
over him to turn and clasp her in his arms, to press those lips which
never but once he had kissed, and that was when she had plighted her
secret troth to him, and had broken it for three million pounds. Why
not? She was a woman, she was beautiful, she was a siren who had lured
him and used him and tossed him by. Why not? All her art was now used,
the art of the born coquette which had been exquisitely cultivated
since she was a child, to bring him back to her feet--to the feet of
the wife of Rudyard Byng. Why not? For an instant he had the dark
impulse to treat her as she deserved, and take a kiss "as long as my
exile, as sweet as my revenge"; but then the bitter memory came that
this was the woman to whom he had given the best of which he was
capable and the promise of that other best which time and love and
life truly lived might accomplish; and the wild thing died in him.

The fever fled, and his senses became as cold as the statue of
Andromeda on the pedestal at his hand. He looked at her. He did not
for the moment realize that she was in reality only a girl, a child in
so much; wilful, capricious, unregulated in some ways, with the
hereditary taint of a distorted moral sense, and yet able, intuitive
and wise, in so many aspects of life and conversation. Looking, he
determined that she should never have that absolution which any
outward or inward renewal of devotion would give her. Scorn was too
deep--that arrogant, cruel, adventitious attribute of the sinner who
has not committed the same sin as the person he despises--

"Sweet is the refuge of scorn."

His scorn was too sweet; and for the relish of it on his tongue, the
price must be paid one way or another. The sin of broken faith she had
sinned had been the fruit of a great temptation, meaning more to a
woman, a hundred times, than to a man. For a man there is always
present the chance of winning a vast fortune and the power that it
brings; but it can seldom come to a woman except through marriage. It
ill became him to be self-righteous, for his life had not been
impeccable--



"The shaft of slander shot
Missed only the right blot!"



Something of this came to him suddenly now as she drew away from him
with a sense of humiliation, and a tear came unbidden to her eye.

She wiped the tear away, hastily, as there came a slight tapping at
the door, and Krool entered, his glance enveloping them both in one
lightning survey--like the instinct of the dweller in wild places of
the earth, who feels danger where all is most quiet, and ever scans
the veld or bush with the involuntary vigilance belonging to the
life. His look rested on Jasmine for a moment before he spoke, and
Stafford inwardly observed that here was an enemy to the young wife
whose hatred was deep. He was conscious, too, that Jasmine realized
the antipathy. Indeed, she had done so from the first days she had
seen Krool, and had endeavoured, without success, to induce Byng to
send the man back to South Africa, and to leave him there last year
when he went again to Johannesburg. It was the only thing in which
Byng had proved invulnerable, and Krool had remained a menace which
she vaguely felt and tried to conquer, which, in vain, Adrian Fellowes
had endeavoured to remove. For in the years in which Fellowes had been
Byng's secretary his relations with Krool seemed amiable and he had
made light of Jasmine's prejudices.

"The butler is out and they come me," Krool said. "Mr. Stafford's
servant is here. There is a girl for to see him, if he will let. The
boy, Jigger, his name. Something happens."

Stafford frowned, then turned to Jasmine. He told her who Jigger was,
and of the incident the day before, adding that he had no idea of the
reason for the visit; but it must be important, or nothing would have
induced his servant to fetch the girl.

"I will come," he said to Krool, but Jasmine's curiosity was roused.

"Won't you see her here?" she asked.

Stafford nodded assent, and presently Krool showed the girl into the
room.

For an instant she stood embarrassed and confused, then she addressed
herself to Stafford. "I'm Lou--Jigger's sister," she said, with white
lips. "I come to ask if you'd go to him. 'E's been hurt bad--knocked
down by a fire-engine, and the doctor says 'e can't live. 'E made yer
a promise, and 'e wanted me to tell yer that 'e meant to keep it; but
if so be as you'd come, and wouldn't mind a-comin', 'e'd tell yer
himself. 'E made that free becos 'e had brekfis wiv ye. 'E's all
right--the best as ever--the top best."  Suddenly the tears flooded
her eyes and streamed down her pale cheeks. "Oh, 'e was the best--my
Gawd, 'e was the best! If it 'd make 'im die happy, you'd come, y'r
gryce, wouldn't y'r?"

Child of the slums as she was, she was exceedingly comely and was
simply and respectably dressed. Her eyes were big and brown like
Stafford's; her face was a delicate oval, and her hair was a deep
black, waving freely over a strong, broad forehead. It was her speech
that betrayed her; otherwise she was little like the flower-girl that
Adrian Fellowes had introduced to Al'mah, who had got her a place in
the chorus of the opera and had also given her personal care and
friendly help.

"Where is he? In the hospital?" Stafford asked.

"It was just beside our own 'ome it 'appened. We got two rooms now,
Jigger and me. 'E was took in there. The doctor come, but 'e says it
ain't no use. 'E didn't seem to care much, and 'e didn't give no 'ope,
not even when I said I'd give him all me wages for a year."

Jasmine was beside her now, wiping her tears and holding her hand, her
impulsive nature stirred, her heart throbbing with desire to
help. Suddenly she remembered what Rudyard had said up-stairs three
hours ago, that there wasn't a single person in the world to whom they
had done an act which was truly and purely personal during the past
three years: and she had a tremulous desire to help this crude,
mothering, passionately pitiful girl.

"What will you do?" Jasmine said to Stafford.

"I will go at once. Tell my servant to have up a cab," he said to
Krool, who stood outside the door.

"Truly, 'e will be glad," the girl exclaimed. "'E told me about the
suvring, and Sunday-week for brekfis," she murmured. "You'll never
miss the time, y'r gryce. Gawd knows you'll not miss it--an' 'e ain't
got much left."

"I will go, too--if you will let me," said Jasmine to Stafford. "You
must let me go. I want to help--so much."

"No, you must not come," he replied. "I will pick up a surgeon in
Harley Street, and we'll see if it is as hopeless as she says. But you
must not come to-night. To-morrow, certainly, to-morrow, if you
will. Perhaps you can do some good then. I will let you know."

He held out his hand to say good-bye, as the girl passed out with
Jasmine's kiss on her cheek and a comforting assurance of help.

Jasmine did not press her request. First there was the fact that
Rudyard did not know, and might strongly disapprove; and secondly,
somehow, she had got nearer to Stafford in the last few minutes than
in all the previous hours since they had met again. Nowhere, by all
her art, had she herself touched him, or opened up in his nature one
tiny stream of feeling; but this girl's story and this piteous
incident had softened him, had broken down the barriers which had
checked and baffled her. There was something almost gentle in his
smile as he said good-bye, and she thought she detected warmth in the
clasp of his hand.

Left alone, she sat in the silence, pondering as she had not pondered
in the past three years. These few days in town, out of the season,
were sandwiched between social functions from which their lives were
never free. They had ever passed from event to event like minor
royalties with endless little ceremonies and hospitalities; and there
had been so little time to meditate--had there even been the wish?

The house was very still, and the far-off, muffled rumble of omnibuses
and cabs gave a background of dignity to this interior peace and
luxurious quiet. For long she sat unmoving--nearly two hours--alone
with her inmost thoughts. Then she went to the little piano in the
corner where stood the statue of Andromeda, and began to play
softly. Her fingers crept over the keys, playing snatches of things
she knew years before, improvising soft, passionate little
movements. She took no note of time. At last the clock struck twelve,
and still she sat there playing. Then she began to sing a song which
Alice Tynemouth had written and set to music two years before. It was
simply yet passionately written, and the wail of anguished
disappointment, of wasted chances was in it--



"Once in the twilight of the Austrian hills,
A word came to me, beautiful and good;
If I had spoken it, that message of the stars,
Love would have filled thy blood:
Love would have sent thee pulsing to my arms,
Thy heart a nestling bird;
A moment fled--it passed:
I seek in vain
For that forgotten word."



In the last notes the voice rose in passionate pain, and died away
into an aching silence.

She leaned her arms on the piano in front of her and laid her forehead
on them.

"When will it all end--what will become of me!" she cried in pain that
strangled her heart. "I am so bad--so bad. I was doomed from the
beginning. I always felt it so--always, even when things were
brightest. I am the child of black Destiny. For me--there is nothing,
nothing, for me. The straight path was before me, and I would not walk
in it."

With a gesture of despair, and a sudden faintness, she got up and went
over to the tray of spirits and liqueurs which had been brought in
with the coffee. Pouring out a liqueur-glass of brandy, she was about
to drink it, when her ear became attracted by a noise without, a
curious stumbling, shuffling sound. She put down the glass, went to
the door that opened into the hall, and looked out and down. One light
was still burning below, and she could see distinctly. A man was
clumsily, heavily, ascending the staircase, holding on to the
balustrade. He was singing to himself, breaking into the maudlin
harmony with an occasional laugh--



"For this is the way we do it on the veld,
When the band begins to play;
With one bottle on the table and one below the belt,
When the band begins to play--"



It was Rudyard, and he was drunk--almost helplessly drunk.

A cry of pain rose to her lips, but her trembling hand stopped
it. With a shudder she turned back to her sitting-room. Throwing
herself on the divan where she had sat with Ian Stafford, she buried
her face in her arms. The hours went by.



CHAPTER XI

IN WALES, WHERE JIGGER PLAYS HIS PART


"Really, the unnecessary violence with which people take their own
lives, or the lives of others, is amazing. They did it better in olden
days in Italy and the East. No waste or anything--all scientifically
measured."

With a confident and satisfied smile Mr. Mappin, the celebrated
surgeon, looked round the little group of which he was the centre at
Glencader, Rudyard Byng's castle in Wales.

Rudyard blinked at him for a moment with ironical amusement, then
remarked: "When you want to die, does it matter much whether you kill
yourself with a bludgeon or a pin, take gas from a tap or cyanide of
potassium, jump in front of a railway train or use the revolting
razor? You are dead neither less nor more, and the shock to the world
is the same. It's only the housemaid or the undertaker that notices
any difference. I knew a man at Vleifontein who killed himself by
jumping into the machinery of a mill. It gave a lot of trouble to all
concerned. That was what he wanted--to end his own life and exasperate
the foreman."

"Rudyard, what a horrible tale!" exclaimed his wife, turning again to
the surgeon, eagerly. "It is most interesting, and I see what you
mean. It is, that if we only really knew, we could take our own lives
or other people's with such ease and skill that it would be hard to
detect it?"

The surgeon nodded. "Exactly, Mrs. Byng. I don't say that the expert
couldn't find what the cause of death was, if suspicion was aroused;
but it could be managed so that 'heart failure' or some such silly
verdict would be given, because there was no sign of violence, or of
injury artificially inflicted."

"It is fortunate the world doesn't know these ways to euthanasia,"
interposed Stafford. "I fancy that murders would be more numerous than
suicides, however. Suicide enthusiasts would still pursue their
melodramatic indulgences--disfiguring themselves unnecessarily."

Adrian Fellowes, the amiable, ever-present secretary and "chamberlain"
of Rudyard's household, as Jasmine teasingly called him, whose
handsome, unintellectual face had lighted with amusement at the
conversation, now interposed. "Couldn't you give us some idea how it
can be done, this smooth passage of the Styx?" he asked. "We'll
promise not to use it."

The surgeon looked round the little group reflectively. His eyes
passed from Adrian to Jasmine, who stood beside him, to Byng, and to
Ian Stafford, and stimulated by their interest, he gave a pleased
smile of gratified vanity. He was young, and had only within the past
three years got to the top of the tree at a bound, by a certain
successful operation in royal circles.

Drawing out of his pocket a small case, he took from it a needle and
held it up. "Now that doesn't look very dangerous, does it?" he
asked. "Yet a firm pressure of its point could take a life, and there
would be little possibility of finding how the ghastly trick was done
except by the aroused expert."

"If you will allow me," he said, taking Jasmine's hand and poising the
needle above her palm. "Now, one tiny thrust of this steel point,
which has been dipped in a certain acid, would kill Mrs. Byng as
surely as though she had been shot through the heart. Yet it would
leave scarcely the faintest sign. No blood, no wound, just a tiny
pin-prick, as it were; and who would be the wiser? Imagine an average
coroner's jury and the average examination of the village doctor, who
would die rather than expose his ignorance, and therefore gives 'heart
failure' as the cause of death."

Jasmine withdrew her hand with a shudder. "Please, I don't like being
so near the point," she said.

"Woman-like," interjected Byng ironically.

"How does it happen you carry this murdering asp about with you,
Mr. Mappin?" asked Stafford.

The surgeon smiled. "For an experiment to-morrow. Don't start. I have
a favorite collie which must die. I am testing the poison with the
minimum. If it kills the dog it will kill two men."

He was about to put the needle back into the case when Adrian Fellowes
held out a hand for it. "Let me look at it," he said. Turning the
needle over in his palm, he examined it carefully. "So near and yet so
far," he remarked. "There are a good many people who would pay a high
price for the little risk and the dead certainty. You wouldn't,
perhaps, tell us what the poison is, Mr. Mappin? We are all very
reliable people here, who have no enemies, and who want to keep their
friends alive. We should then be a little syndicate of five, holding a
great secret, and saving numberless lives every day by not giving the
thing away. We should all be entitled to monuments in Parliament
Square."

The surgeon restored the needle to the case. "I think one monument
will be sufficient," he said. "Immortality by syndicate is too modern,
and this is an ancient art." He tapped the case." Turkey and the
Mongol lands have kept the old cult going. In England, it's only for
the dog!" He laughed freely but noiselessly at his own joke.

This talk had followed the news brought by Krool to the Baas, that the
sub-manager of the great mine, whose chimneys could be seen from the
hill behind the house, had thrown himself down the shaft and been
smashed to a pulp. None of them except Byng had known him, and the
dark news had brought no personal shock.

They had all gathered in the library, after paying an afternoon visit
to Jigger, who had been brought down from London in a special
carriage, and was housed near the servants' quarters with a nurse. On
the night of Jigger's accident Ian Stafford on his way from Jasmine's
house had caught Mr. Mappin, and the surgeon had operated at once,
saving the lad's life. As it was necessary to move him in any case, it
was almost as easy, and no more dangerous, to bring him to Glencader
than to take him to a London hospital.

Under the surgeon's instructions Jasmine had arranged it all, and
Jigger had travelled like royalty from Paddington into Wales, and
there had captured the household, as he had captured Stafford at
breakfast in St. James's Street.

Thinking that perhaps this was only a whim of Jasmine's, and merely
done because it gave a new interest to a restless temperament,
Stafford had at first rejected the proposal. When, however, the
surgeon said that if the journey was successfully made, the
after-results would be all to the good, Stafford had assented, and had
allowed himself to be included in the house-party at Glencader.

It was a triumph for Jasmine, for otherwise Stafford would not have
gone. Whether she would have insisted on Jigger going to Glencader if
it had not meant that Ian would go also, it would be hard to say. Her
motives were not unmixed, though there had been a real impulse to do
all she could. In any case, she had lessened the distance between Ian
and herself, and that gave her wilful mind a rather painful
pleasure. Also, the responsibility for Jigger's well-being, together
with her duties as hostess, had prevented her from dwelling on that
scene in the silent house at midnight which had shocked her so--her
husband reeling up the staircase, singing a ribald song.

The fullest significance of this incident had not yet come home to
her. She had fought against dwelling on it, and she was glad that
every moment since they had come to Glencader had been full; that
Rudyard had been much away with the shooters, and occupied in trying
to settle a struggle between the miners and the proprietors of the
mine itself, of whom he was one. Still, things that Rudyard had said
before he left the house to dine with Wallstein, leaving her with
Stafford, persistently recurred to her mind.

"What's the matter?" had been Rudyard's troubled cry. "We've got
everything--everything, and yet--!" Her eyes were not opened. She had
had a shock, but it had not stirred the inner, smothered life; there
had been no real revelation. She was agitated and disturbed--no
more. She did not see that the man she had married to love and to
cherish was slowly changing--was the change only a slow one
now?--before her eyes; losing that brave freshness which had so
appealed to London when he first came back to civilization. Something
had been subtracted from his personality which left it poorer,
something had been added which made it less appealing. Something had
given way in him. There had been a subsidence of moral energy, and
force had inwardly declined, though to all outward seeming he had
played a powerful and notable part in the history of the last three
years, gaining influence in many directions, without suffering
excessive notoriety.

On the day Rudyard married Jasmine he would have cut off his hand
rather than imagine that he would enter his wife's room helpless from
drink and singing a song which belonged to loose nights on the Limpopo
and the Vaal.

As the little group drew back, their curiosity satisfied, Mr. Mappin,
putting the case carefully into his pocket again, said to Jasmine:

"The boy is going on so well that I am not needed longer. Mr. Wharton,
my locum tenens, will give him every care."

"When did you think of going?" Jasmine asked him, as they all moved on
towards the hall, where the other guests were assembled.

"To-morrow morning early, if I may. No night travel for me, if I can
help it."

"I am glad you are not going to-night," she answered,
graciously. "Al'mah is arriving this afternoon, and she sings for us
this evening. Is it not thrilling?"

There was a general murmur of pleasure, vaguely joined by Adrian
Fellowes, who glanced quickly round the little group, and met an
enigmatical glance from Byng's eye. Byng was remembering what Barry
Whalen had told him three years ago, and he wondered if Jasmine was
cognizant of it all. He thought not; for otherwise she would scarcely
bring Al'mah to Glencader and play Fellowes' game for him.

Jasmine, in fact, had not heard. Days before she had wondered that
Adrian had tried to discourage her invitation to Al'mah. While it was
an invitation, it was also an engagement, on terms which would have
been adequate for Patti in her best days. It would, if repeated a few
times, reimburse Al'mah for the sums she had placed in Byng's hands at
the time of the Raid, and also, later still, to buy the life of her
husband from Oom Paul. It had been insufficient, not because of the
value of the article for sale, but because of the rapacity of the
vender. She had paid half the cruel balance demanded; Byng and his
friends had paid the rest without her knowledge; and her husband had
been set free.

Byng had only seen Al'mah twice since the day when she first came to
his rooms, and not at all during the past two years, save at the
opera, where she tightened the cords of captivity to her gifts around
her admirers. Al'mah had never met Mrs. Byng since the day after that
first production of "Manassa," when Rudyard rescued her, though she
had seen her at the opera again and again. She cared nothing for
society or for social patronage or approval, and the life that Jasmine
led had no charms for her. The only interest she had in it was that it
suited Adrian from every standpoint. He loved the splendid social
environment of which Jasmine was the centre, and his services were
well rewarded.

When she received Jasmine's proposal to sing at Glencader she had
hesitated to accept it, for society had no charms for her; but at
length three considerations induced her to do so. She wanted to see
Rudyard Byng, for South Africa and its shadow was ever present with
her; and she dreaded she knew not what. Blantyre was still her
husband, and he might return--and return still less a man than when he
deserted her those sad long years ago. Also, she wanted to see Jigger,
because of his sister Lou, whose friendless beauty, so primitively
set, whose transparent honesty appealed to her quick, generous
impulses. Last of all she wanted to see Adrian in the surroundings and
influences where his days had been constantly spent during the past
three years.

Never before had she had the curiosity to do so. Adrian had, however,
deftly but clearly tried to dissuade her from coming to Glencader, and
his reasons were so new and unconvincing that, for the first
time,--she had a nature of strange trustfulness once her faith was
given--a vague suspicion concerning Adrian perplexed and troubled
her. His letter had arrived some hours after Jasmine's, and then her
answer was immediate--she would accept. Adrian heard of the acceptance
first through Jasmine, to whom he had spoken of his long
"acquaintance" with the great singer.

From Byng's look, as they moved towards the hall, Adrian gathered that
rumour had reached a quarter where he had much at stake; but it did
not occur to him that this would be to his disadvantage. Byng was a
man of the world. Besides, he had his own reasons for feeling no
particular fear where Byng was concerned. His glance ran from Byng's
face to that of Jasmine; but, though her eyes met his, there was
nothing behind her glance which had to do with Al'mah.

In the great hall whose windows looked out on a lovely, sunny valley
still as green as summer, the rest of the house-party were gathered,
and Jigger's visitors were at once surrounded.

Among the visitors were Alice, Countess of Tynemouth, also the
Slavonian ambassador, whose extremely pale face, stooping shoulders,
and bald head with the hair carefully brushed over from each side in a
vain attempt to cover the baldness, made him seem older than he really
was. Count Landrassy had lived his life in many capitals up to the
limit of his vitality, and was still covetous of notice from the sex
who had, in a checkered career, given him much pleasure, and had
provided him with far more anxiety. But he was almost uncannily able
and astute, as every man found who entered the arena of diplomacy to
treat with him or circumvent him. Suavity, with an attendant mordant
wit, and a mastery of tactics unfamiliar to the minds and capacities
of Englishmen, made him a great factor in the wide world of haute
politique; but it also drew upon him a wealth of secret hatred and
outward attention. His follies were lashed by the tongues of virtue
and of slander; but his abilities gave him a commanding place in the
arena of international politics.

As Byng and his party approached, the eyes of the ambassador and of
Lady Tynemouth were directed towards Ian Stafford. The glance of the
former was ironical and a little sardonic. He had lately been deeply
engaged in checkmating the singularly skilful and cleverly devised
negotiations by which England was to gain a powerful advantage in
Europe, the full significance of which even he had not yet
pierced. This he knew, but what he apprehended with the instinct of an
almost scientific sense became unduly important to his mind. The
author of the profoundly planned international scheme was this young
man, who had already made the chancelleries of Europe sit up and look
about them in dismay; for its activities were like those of
underground wires; and every area of diplomacy, the nearest, the most
remote, was mined and primed, so that each embassy played its part
with almost startling effect. Tibet and Persia were not too far, and
France was not too near to prevent the incalculably smooth working of
a striking and far-reaching political move. It was the kind of thing
that England's Prime Minister, with his extraordinary frankness, with
his equally extraordinary secretiveness, insight and immobility,
delighted in; and Slavonia and its ambassador knew, as an American
high in place had colloquially said, "that they were up against a
proposition which would take some moving."

The scheme had taken some moving. But it had not yet succeeded; and if
M. Mennaval, the ambassador of Moravia, influenced by Count Landrassy,
pursued his present tactics on behalf of his government, Ian
Stafford's coup would never be made, and he would have to rise to fame
in diplomacy by slower processes. It was the daily business of the
Slavonian ambassador to see that M. Mennaval of Moravia was not
captured either by tactics, by smooth words, or all those arts which
lay beneath the outward simplicity of Ian Stafford and of those who
worked with him.

With England on the verge of war, the outcome of the negotiations was
a matter of vital importance. It might mean the very question of
England's existence as an empire. England in a conflict with South
Africa, the hour long desired by more than one country, in which she
would be occupied to the limit of her capacity, with resources taxed
to the utmost, army inadequate, and military affairs in confusion,
would come, and with it the opportunity to bring the Titan to her
knees. This diplomatic scheme of Ian Stafford, however, would prevent
the worst in any case, and even in the disasters of war, would be
working out advantages which, after the war was done, would give
England many friends and fewer enemies, give her treaties and new
territory, and set her higher than she was now by a political metre.

Count Landrassy had thought at first, when Ian Stafford came to
Glencader, that this meeting had been purposely arranged; but through
Byng's frankness and ingenuous explanations he saw that he was
mistaken. The two subtle and combating diplomats had not yet conversed
save in a general way by the smoking-room fire.

Lady Tynemouth's eyes fell on Ian with a different meaning. His coming
to Glencader had been a surprise to her. He had accepted an invitation
to visit her in another week, and she had only come to know later of
the chance meeting of Ian and Jasmine in London, and the subsequent
accident to Jigger which had brought Ian down to Wales. The man who
had saved her life on her wedding journey, and whose walls were still
garish with the red parasol which had nearly been her death, had a
place quite his own in her consideration. She had, of course, known of
his old infatuation for Jasmine, though she did not know all; and she
knew also that he had put Jasmine out of his life completely when she
married Byng; which was not a source of regret to her. She had written
him about Jasmine, again and again,--of what she did and what the
world said--and his replies had been as casual and as careless as the
most jealous woman could desire; though she was not consciously
jealous, and, of course, had no right to be.

She saw no harm in having a man as a friend on a basis of intimacy
which drew the line at any possibility of divorce-court
proceedings. Inside this line she frankly insisted on latitude, and
Tynemouth gave it to her without thought or anxiety. He was too fond
of outdoor life, of racing and hunting and shooting and polo and
travel, to have his eye unnerved by any such foolishness as jealousy.

"Play the game--play the game, Alice, and so will I, and the rest of
the world be hanged!" was what Tynemouth had said to his wife; and it
would not have occurred to him to suspect Stafford, or to read one of
his letters to Lady Tynemouth. He had no literary gifts; in truth, he
had no "culture," and he looked upon his wife's and Stafford's
interest in literature and art as a game of mystery he had never
learned. Inconsequent he thought it in his secret mind, but played by
nice, clever, possible, "livable" people; and, therefore, not to be
pooh-poohed openly or kicked out of the way. Besides, it "gave Alice
something to do, and prevented her from being lonely--and all that
kind of thing."

Thus it was that Lady Tynemouth, who had played the game all round
according to her lights, and thought no harm of what she did, or of
her weakness for Ian Stafford--of her open and rather gushing
friendship for him--had an almost honest dislike to seeing him
brought into close relations again with the woman who had
dishonourably treated him. Perhaps she wanted his friendship wholly
for herself; but that selfish consideration did not overshadow the
feeling that Jasmine had cheated at cards, as it were; and that Ian
ought not to be compelled to play with her again.

"But men, even the strongest, are so weak," she had said to Tynemouth
concerning it, and he had said in reply, "And the weakest are so
strong--sometimes."

At which she had pulled his shoulder, and had said with a delighted
laugh, "Tynie, if you say clever things like that I'll fall in love
with you."

To which he had replied: "Now, don't take advantage of a moment's
aberration, Alice; and for Heaven's sake don't fall in love wiv me"
(he made a v of a th, like Jigger). "I couldn't go to Uganda if you
did."

To which she had responded, "Dear me, are you going to Uganda?" and
was told with a nod that next month he would be gone. This
conversation had occurred on the day of their arrival at Glencader;
and henceforth Alice had forcibly monopolized Stafford whenever and
wherever possible. So far, it had not been difficult, because Jasmine
had, not ostentatiously, avoided being often with Stafford. It seemed
to Jasmine that she must not see much of him alone. Still there was
some new cause to provoke his interest and draw him to herself. The
Jigger episode had done much, had altered the latitudes of their
association, but the perihelion of their natures was still far off;
and she was apprehensive, watchful, and anxious.

This afternoon, however, she felt that she must talk with him. Waiting
and watching were a new discipline for her, and she was not yet the
child of self-denial. Fate, if there be such a thing, favoured her,
however, for as they drew near to the fireplace where the ambassador
and Alice Tynemouth and her husband stood, Krool entered, came forward
to Byng, and spoke in a low tone to him.

A minute afterward, Byng said to them all: "Well, I'm sorry, but I'm
afraid we can't carry out our plans for the afternoon. There's trouble
again at the mine, and I am needed, or they think I am. So I must go
there--and alone, I'm sorry to say; not with you all, as I had
hoped. Jasmine, you must plan the afternoon. The carriages are
ready. There's the Glen o' Smiling, well worth seeing, and the
Murderer's Leap, and Lover's Land--something for all tastes," he
added, with a dry note to his voice.

"Take care of yourself, Ruddy man," Jasmine said, as he left them
hurriedly, with an affectionate pinch of her arm. "I don't like these
mining troubles," she added to the others, and proceeded to arrange
the afternoon.

She did it so deftly that she and Ian and Adrian Fellowes were the
only ones left behind out of a party of twelve. She had found it
impossible to go on any of the excursions, because she must stay and
welcome Al'mah. She meant to drive to the station herself, she
said. Adrian stayed behind because he must superintend the
arrangements of the ball-room for the evening, or so he said; and Ian
Stafford stayed because he had letters to write--ostensibly; for he
actually meant to go and sit with Jigger, and to send a code message
to the Prime Minister, from whom he had had inquiries that morning.

When the others had gone, the three stood for a moment silent in the
hall, then Adrian said to Jasmine, "Will you give me a moment in the
ball-room about those arrangements?"

Jasmine glanced out of the corner of her eye at Ian. He showed no sign
that he wanted her to remain. A shadow crossed her face, but she
laughingly asked him if he would come also.

"If you don't mind--!" he said, shaking his head in negation; but he
walked with them part of the way to the ball-room, and left them at
the corridor leading to his own little sitting-room.

A few minutes later, as Jasmine stood alone at a window looking down
into the great stone quadrangle, she saw him crossing toward the
servants' quarters.

"He is going to Jigger," she said, her heart beating faster. "Oh, but
he is 'the best ever,'" she added, repeating Lou's words--"the best
ever!"

Her eye brightened with intention. She ran down the corridor, and
presently made her way to the housekeeper's room.



CHAPTER XII

THE KEY IN THE LOCK


A quarter of an hour later Jasmine softly opened the door of the room
where Jigger lay, and looked in. The nurse stood at the foot of the
bed, listening to talk between Jigger and Ian, the like of which she
had never heard. She was smiling, for Jigger was original, to say the
least of it, and he had a strange, innocent, yet wise philosophy. Ian
sat with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped, leaning towards the
gallant little sufferer, talking like a boy to a boy, and getting
revelations of life of which he had never even dreamed.

Jasmine entered with a little tray in one hand, bearing a bowl of
delicate broth, while under an arm was a puzzle-box, which was one of
the relics of a certain house-party in which a great many smart people
played at the simple life, and sought to find a new sensation in
making believe they were the village rector's brood of innocents. She
was dressed in a gown almost as simple in make as that of the nurse,
but of exquisite material--the soft green velvet which she had worn
when she met Ian in the sweetshop in Regent Street. Her hair was a
perfect gold, wavy and glistening and prettily fine, and her eyes were
shining--so blue, so deep, so alluring.

The boy saw her first, and his eyes grew bigger with welcome and
interest.

"It's her--me lydy," he said with a happy gasp, for she seemed to him
like a being from another sphere. When she came near him the faint,
delicious perfume exhaling from her garments was like those
flower-gardens and scented fields to which he had once been sent for a
holiday by some philanthropic society.

Ian rose as the nurse came forward quickly to relieve Jasmine of the
tray and the box. His first glance was enigmatical--almost
suspicious--then, as he saw the radiance in her face and the burden
she carried, a new light came into his eyes. In this episode of Jigger
she had shown all that gentle charm, sympathy, and human feeling which
he had once believed belonged so much to her. It seemed to him in the
old days that at heart she was simple, generous, and capable of the
best feelings of woman, and of living up to them; and there began to
grow at the back of his mind now the thought that she had been carried
away by a great temptation--the glitter and show of power and all that
gold can buy, and a large circle for the skirts of woman's pride and
vanity. If she had married him instead of Byng, they would now be
living in a small house in Curzon Street, or some such fashionable
quarter, with just enough to enable them to keep their end up with
people who had five thousand a year--with no box at the opera, or
house in the country, or any of the great luxuries, and with a
thriving nursery which would be a promise of future expense--if she
had married him! . . . A kinder, gentler spirit was suddenly awake in
him, and he did not despise her quite so much. On her part, she saw
him coming nearer, as, standing in the door of a cottage in a valley,
one sees trailing over the distant hills, with the light behind, a
welcome and beloved figure with face turned towards the home in the
green glade.

A smile came to his lips, as suspicion stole away ashamed, and he
said: "This will not do. Jigger will be spoiled. We shall have to see
Mr. Mappin about it."

As she yielded to him the puzzle-box, which she had refused to the
nurse, she said: "And pray who sets the example? I am a very imitative
person. Besides, I asked Mr. Mappin about the broth, so it's all
right; and Jigger will want the puzzle-box when you are not here," she
added, quizzically.

"Diversion or continuity?" he asked, with a laugh, as she held the
bowl of soup to Jigger's lips. At this point the nurse had discreetly
left the room.

"Continuity, of course," she replied. "All diplomatists are puzzles,
some without solution."

"Who said I was a diplomatist?" he asked, lightly.

"Don't think that I'm guilty of the slander," she rejoined. "It was
the Moravian ambassador who first suggested that what you were by
profession you were by nature."

Jasmine felt Ian hold his breath for a moment, then he said in a low
tone, "M. Mennaval--you know him well?"

She did not look towards him, but she was conscious that he was eying
her intently. She put aside the bowl, and began to adjust Jigger's
pillow with deft fingers, while the lad watched her with a worship
worth any money to one attacked by ennui and stale with purchased
pleasures.

"I know him well--yes, quite well," she replied. "He comes sometimes
of an afternoon, and if he had more time--or if I had--he would no
doubt come oftener. But time is the most valuable thing I have, and I
have less of it than anything else."

"A diminishing capital, too," he returned with a laugh; while his mind
was suddenly alert to an idea which had flown into his vision, though
its full significance did not possess him yet.

"The Moravian ambassador is not very busy," he added with an undertone
of meaning.

"Perhaps; but I am," she answered with like meaning, and looked him in
the eyes, steadily, serenely, determinedly. All at once there had
opened out before her a great possibility. Both from the Count
Landrassy and from the Moravian ambassador she had had hints of some
deep, international scheme of which Ian Stafford was the
engineer-in-chief, though she did not know definitely what it
was. Both ambassadors had paid their court to her, each in a different
way, and M. Mennaval would have been as pertinacious as he was vain
and somewhat weak (albeit secretive, too, with the feminine instinct
so strong in him) if she had not checked him at all points. From what
Count Landrassy had said, it would appear that Ian Stafford's future
hung in the balance--dependent upon the success of his great
diplomatic scheme.

Could she help Ian? Could she help him? Had the time come when she
could pay her debt, the price of ransom from the captivity in which he
held her true and secret character? It had been vaguely in her mind
before; but now, standing beside Jigger's bed, with the lad's feverish
hand in hers, there spread out before her a vision of a lien lifted,
of an ugly debt redeemed, of freedom from this man's scorn. If she
could do some great service for him, would not that wipe out the
unsettled claim? If she could help to give him success, would not
that, in the end, be more to him than herself? For she would soon
fade, the dust would soon gather over her perished youth and beauty;
but his success would live on, ever freshening in his sight, rising
through long years to a great height, and remaining fixed and
exalted. With a great belief she believed in him and what he could
do. He was a Sisyphus who could and would roll the-huge stone to the
top of the hill--and ever with easier power.

The old touch of romance and imagination which had been the governing
forces of her grandfather's life, the passion of an idea, however
essentially false and meretricious and perilous to all that was worth
while keeping in life, set her pulses beating now. As a child her
pulses used to beat so when she had planned with her good-for-nothing
brother some small escapade looming immense in the horizon of her
enjoyment. She had ever distorted or inflamed the facts of life by an
overheated fancy, by the spirit of romance, by a gift--or curse--of
imagination, which had given her also dark visions of a miserable end,
of a clouded and piteous close to her brief journey. "I am
doomed--doomed," had been her agonized cry that day before Ian
Stafford went away three years ago, and the echo of that cry was often
in her heart, waking and sleeping. It had come upon her the night when
Rudyard reeled, intoxicated, up the staircase. She had the penalties
of her temperament shadowing her footsteps always, dimming the
radiance which broke forth for long periods, and made her so rare and
wonderful a figure in her world. She was so young, and so exquisite,
that Fate seemed harsh and cruel in darkening her vision, making
pitfalls for her feet.

Could she help him? Had her moment come when she could force him to
smother his scorn and wait at her door for bounty? She would make the
effort to know.

"But, yes, I am very busy," she repeated. "I have little interest in
Moravia--which is fortunate; for I could not find the time to study
it."

"If you had interest in Moravia, you would find the time with little
difficulty," he answered, lightly, yet thinking ironically that he
himself had given much time and study to Moravia, and so far had not
got much return out of it. Moravia was the crux of his diplomacy.
Everything depended on it; but Landrassy, the Slavonian ambassador,
had checkmated him at every move towards the final victory.

"It is not a study I would undertake con amore," she said, smiling
down at Jigger, who watched her with sharp yet docile eyes. Then,
suddenly turning towards him again, she said:

"But you are interested in Moravia--do you find it worth the time?"

"Did Count Landrassy tell you that?" he asked.

"And also the ambassador for Moravia; but only in the vaguest and
least consequential way," she replied.

She regarded him steadfastly. "It is only just now--is it a kind of
telepathy'--that I seem to get a message from what we used to call the
power-house, that you are deeply interested in Moravia and
Slavonia. Little things which have been said seem to have new meaning
now, and I feel"--she smiled significantly--"that I am standing on the
brink of some great happening, and only a big secret, like a cloud,
prevents me from seeing it, realizing it. Is it so?" she added, in a
low voice.

He regarded her intently. His look held hers. It would seem as though
he tried to read the depths of her soul; as though he was asking if
what had once proved so false could in the end prove true; for it came
to him with sudden force, with sure conviction, that she could help
him as no one else could; that at this critical moment, when he was
trembling between success and failure, her secret influence might be
the one reinforcement necessary to conduct him to victory. Greater and
better men than himself had used women to further their vast purposes;
could one despise any human agency, so long as it was not
dishonourable, in the carrying out of great schemes?

It was for Britain--for her ultimate good, for the honour and glory of
the Empire, for the betterment of the position of all men of his race
in all the world, their prestige, their prosperity, their patriotism;
and no agency should be despised. He knew so well what powers of
intrigue had been used against him, by the embassy of Slavonia and
those of other countries. His own methods had been simple and direct;
only the scheme itself being intricate, complicated, and reaching
further than any diplomatist, except his own Prime Minister, had
dreamed. If carried, it would recast the international position in the
Orient, necessitating new adjustments in Europe, with cession of
territory and gifts for gifts in the way of commercial treaties and
the settlement of outstanding difficulties.

His key, if it could be made to turn in the lock, would open the door
to possibilities of prodigious consequence.

He had been three years at work, and the end must come soon. The
crisis was near. A game can only be played for a given time, then it
works itself out, and a new one must take its place. His top was
spinning hard, but already the force of the gyration was failing, and
he must presently make his exit with what the Prime Minister called
his Patent, or turn the key in the lock and enter upon his kingdom. In
three months--in two months--in one month--it might be too late, for
war was coming; and war would destroy his plans, if they were not
furfilled now. Everything must be done before war came, or be forever
abandoned.

This beautiful being before him could help him. She had brains, she
was skilful, inventive, supple, ardent, yet intellectually
discreet. She had as much as told him that the ambassador of Moravia
had paid her the compliment of admiring her with some ardour. It would
not grieve him to see her make a fool and a tool of the impressionable
yet adroit diplomatist, whose vanity was matched by his unreliability,
and who had a passion for philandering--unlike Count Landrassy, who
had no inclination to philander, who carried his citadels by direct
attack in great force. Yes, Jasmine could help him, and, as in the
dead years when it seemed that she would be the courier star of his
existence, they understood each other without words.

"It is so," he said at last, in a low voice, his eyes still regarding
her with almost painful intensity.

"Do you trust me--now--again?" she asked, a tremor in her voice and
her small hand clasping ever and ever tighter the fingers of the lad,
whose eyes watched her with such dog-like adoration.

A mournful smile stole to his lips--and stayed. "Come where we can be
quiet and I will tell you all," he said. "You can help me, maybe."

"I will help you," she said, firmly, as the nurse entered the room
again and, approaching the bed, said, "I think he ought to sleep now";
and forthwith proceeded to make Jigger comfortable.

When Stafford bade Jigger good-bye, the lad said: "I wish I could 'ear
the singing to-night, y'r gryce. I mean the primmer donner. Lou says
she's a fair wonder."

"We will open your window," Jasmine said, gently. "The ball-room is
just across the quadrangle, and you will be able to hear perfectly."

"Thank you, me lydy," he answered, gratefully, and his eyes closed.

"Come," said Jasmine to Stafford. "I will take you where we can talk
undisturbed."

They passed out, and both were silent as they threaded the corridors
and hallways; but in Jasmine's face was a light of exaltation and of
secret triumph.

"We must give Jigger a good start in life," she said, softly, as they
entered her sitting-room. Jigger had broken down many barriers between
her and the man who, a week ago, had been eternities distant from her.

"He's worth a lot of thought," Ian answered, as the pleasant room
enveloped him, and they seated themselves on a big couch before the
fire.

Again there was a long silence; then, not looking at her, but gazing
into the fire, Ian Stafford slowly unfolded the wide and wonderful
enterprise of diplomacy in which his genius was employed. She listened
with strained attention, but without moving. Her eyes were fixed on
his face, and once, as the proposed meaning of the scheme was made
dear by the turn of one illuminating phrase, she gave a low
exclamation of wonder and delight. That was all until, at last,
turning to her as though from some vision that had chained him, he saw
the glow in her eyes, the profound interest, which was like the
passion of a spirit moved to heroic undertaking. Once again it was as
in the years gone by--he trusted her, in spite of himself; in spite of
himself he had now given his very life into her hands, was making her
privy to great designs which belonged to the inner chambers of the
chancelleries of Europe.

Almost timorously, as it seemed, she put out her hand and touched his
shoulder. "It is wonderful--wonderful," she said. "I can, I will help
you. Will let you let me win back your trust--Ian?"

"I want your help, Jasmine," he replied, and stood up. "It is the last
turn of the wheel. It may be life or death to me professionally."

"It shall be life," she said, softly.

He turned slowly from her and went towards the door.

"Shall we not go for a walk," she intervened--"before I drive to the
station for Al'mah?"

He nodded, and a moment afterward they were passing along the
corridors. Suddenly, as they passed a window, Ian stopped. "I thought
Mr. Mappin went with the others to the Glen?" he said.

"He did," was the reply.

"Who is that leaving his room?" he continued, as she followed his
glance across the quadrangle. "Surely, it's Fellowes," he added.

"Yes, it looked like Mr. Fellowes," she said, with a slight frown of
wonder.



CHAPTER XIII

"I WILL NOT SING"



"I will not sing--it's no use, I will not." Al'mah's eyes were vivid
with anger, and her lips, so much the resort of humour, were set in
determination. Her words came with low vehemence.

Adrian Fellowes' hand nervously appealed to her. His voice was coaxing
and gentle.

"Al'mah, must I tell Mrs. Byng that?" he asked. "There are a hundred
people in the ball-room. Some of them have driven thirty miles to hear
you. Besides, you are bound in honour to keep your engagement."

"I am bound to keep nothing that I don't wish to keep--you
understand!" she replied, with a passionate gesture. "I am free to do
what I please with my voice and with myself. I will leave here in the
morning. I sang before dinner. That pays my board and a little over,"
she added, with bitterness. "I prefer to be a paying guest. Mrs. Byng
shall not be my paying hostess."

Fellowes shrugged his shoulders, but his lips twitched with
excitement. "I don't know what has come over you, Al'mah," he said
helplessly and with an anxiety he could not disguise. "You can't do
that kind of thing. It isn't fair, it isn't straight business; from a
social standpoint, it isn't well-bred."

"Well-bred!" she retorted with a scornful laugh and a look of angry
disdain. "You once said I had the manners of Madame Sans Gene, the
washer-woman--a sickly joke, it was. Are you going to be my guide in
manners? Does breeding only consist in having clothes made in Savile
Row and eating strawberries out of season at a pound a basket?"

"I get my clothes from the Stores now, as you can see," he said, in a
desperate attempt to be humorous, for she was in a dangerous
mood. Only once before had he seen her so, and he could feel the air
charged with catastrophe. "And I'm eating humble pie in season now at
nothing a dish," he added. "I really am; and it gives me shocking
indigestion."

Her face relaxed a little, for she could seldom resist any touch of
humour, but the stubborn and wilful light in her eyes remained.

"That sounds like last year's pantomime," she said, sharply, and, with
a jerk of her shoulders, turned away.

"For God's sake wait a minute, Al'mah!" he urged, desperately. "What
has upset you? What has happened? Before dinner you were yourself;
now--" he threw up his hands in despair--"Ah, my dearest, my star--"

She turned upon him savagely, and it seemed as though a storm of
passion would break upon him; but all at once she changed, came up
close to him, and looked him steadily in the eyes.

"I do not think I trust you," she said, quite quietly.

His eyes could not meet hers fairly. He felt them shrinking from her
inquisition. "You have always trusted me till now. What has happened?"
he asked, apprehensively and with husky voice.

"Nothing has happened," she replied in a low, steady
voice. "Nothing. But I seem to realize you to-night. It came to me
suddenly, at dinner, as I listened to you, as I saw you talk--I had
never before seen you in surroundings like these. But I realized you
then: I had a revelation. You need not ask me what it was. I do not
know quite. I cannot tell. It is all vague, but it is startling, and
it has gone through my heart like a knife. I tell you this, and I tell
you quite calmly, that if you prove to be what, for the first time, I
have a vision you are, I shall never look upon your face again if I
can help it. If I come to know that you are false in nature and in
act, that all you have said to me is not true, that you have degraded
me--Oh," she fiercely added, breaking off and speaking with infinite
anger and scorn--"it was only love, honest and true, however mistaken,
which could make what has been between us endurable in my eyes! What I
have thought was true love, and its true passion, helped me to forget
the degradation and the secret shame--only the absolute honesty of
that love could make me forget. But suppose I find it only imitation;
suppose I see that it is only selfishness, only horrible, ugly
self-indulgence; suppose you are a man who plays with a human soul! If
I find that to be so, I tell you I shall hate you; and I shall hate
myself; but I shall hate you more--a thousand times more."

She paused with agony and appealing, with confusion and vague horror
in her face. Her look was direct and absorbing, her eyes like wells of
sullen fire.

"Al'mah," he replied with fluttered eagerness, "let us talk of this
later--not now--later. I will answer anything--everything. I can and I
will prove to you that this is only a mad idea of yours, that--"

"No, no, no, not mad," she interrupted. "There is no madness in it. I
had a premonition before I came. It was like a cloud on my soul. It
left me when we met here, when I heard your voice again; and for a
moment I was happy. That was why I sang before dinner that song of
Lassen's, 'Thine Eyes So Blue and Tender.' But it has come
back. Something deep within me says, 'He is not true.' Something
whispers, 'He is false by nature; it is not in him to be true to
anything or anybody.'"

He made an effort to carry off the situation lightly. With a great
sense of humour, she had also an infinite capacity for taking things
seriously--with an almost sensational gravity. Yet she had always
responded to his cheerful raillery when he had declined to be
tragical. He essayed the old way now.

"This is just absurd, old girl;"--she shrank--"you really are
mad. Your home is Colney Hatch or thereabouts. Why, I'm just what I
always was to you--your constant slave, your everlasting lover, and
your friend. I'll talk it all over with you later. It's impossible
now. They're ready for you in the ball-room. The accompanist is
waiting. Do, do, do be reasonable. I will see you--afterwards--late."

A determined poignant look came into her eyes. She drew still farther
away from him. "You will not, you shall not, see me 'afterwards--late.'
No, no, no; I will trust my instinct now. I am natural, I am true,
I hide nothing. I take my courage in both hands. I do not hide my head
in the sands. I have given, because I chose to give, and I made and make
no presences to myself. I answer to myself, and I do not play false with
the world or with you. Whatever I am the world can know, for I deceive
no one, and I have no fears. But you--oh, why, why is it I feel now,
suddenly, that you have the strain of the coward in you! Why it comes
to me now I do not know; but it is here"--she pressed her hand
tremblingly to her heart--"and I will not act as though it wasn't
here. I'm not of this world."

She waved a hand towards the ball-room. "I am not of the world that
lives in terror of itself. Mine is a world apart, where one acts and
lives and sings the passion and sorrows and joys of others--all
unreal, unreal. The one chance of happiness we artists have is not to
act in our own lives, but to be true--real and true. For one's own
life as well as one's work to be all grease-paint--no, no, no. I have
hid all that has been between us, because of things that have nothing
to do with fear or courage, and for your sake; but I haven't acted, or
pretended. I have not flaunted my private life, my wretched sin--"

"The sin of an angel--"

She shrank from the blatant insincerity of the words, and still more
from the tone. Why had it not all seemed insincere before?

"But I was true in all I did, and I believed you were," she continued.

"And you don't believe it now?"

"To-night I do not. What I shall feel to-morrow I cannot tell. Maybe I
shall go blind again, for women are never two days alike in their
minds or bodies." She threw up her hands with a despairing
helplessness. "But we shall not meet till to-morrow, and then I go
back to London. I am going to my room now. You may tell Mrs. Byng that
I am not well enough to sing--and indeed I am not well," she added,
huskily. "I am sick at heart with I don't know what; but I am wretched
and angry and dangerous--and bad."

Her eyes fastened his with a fateful bitterness and gloom. "Where is
Mr. Byng?" she added, sharply. "Why was he not at dinner?"

He hailed the change of idea gladly. He spoke quickly, eagerly. "He
was kept at the mine. There's trouble--a strike. He was needed. He has
great influence with the men, and the masters, too. You heard
Mrs. Byng say why he had not returned."

"No; I was thinking of other things. But I wanted--I want to see
him. When will he be back?"

"At any moment, I should think. But, Al'mah, no matter what you feel
about me, you must keep your engagement to sing here. The people in
there, a hundred of the best people of the county--"

"The best people of the county--such abject snobbery!" she retorted,
sharply. "Do you think that would influence me? You ought to know me
well enough--but that's just it, you do not know me. I realize it at
last. Listen now. I will not sing to-night, and you will go and tell
Mrs. Byng so."

Once again she turned away, but her exit was arrested by another
voice, a pleasant voice, which said:

"But just one minute, please. Mr. Fellowes is quite
right.... Fellowes, won't you go and say that Madame Al'mah will be
there in five minutes?"

It was Ian Stafford. He had come at Jasmine's request to bring Al'mah,
and he had overheard her last words. He saw that there had been a
scene, and conceived that it was the kind of quarrel which could be
better arranged by a third disinterested person.

After a moment's hesitation, with an anxious yet hopeful look,
Fellowes disappeared, Al'mah's brown eyes following him with dark
inquisition. Presently she looked at Ian Stafford with a flash of
malice. Did this elegant and diplomatic person think that all he had
to do was to speak, and she would succumb to his blandishment? He
should see.

He smiled, and courteously motioned her to a chair.

"You said to Mr. Fellowes that I should sing in five minutes," she
remarked maliciously and stubbornly, but she moved forward to the
chair, nevertheless.

"Yes, but there is no reason why we should not sit for three out of
the five minutes. Energy should be conserved in a tiring world."

"I have some energy to spare--the overflow," she returned with a
protesting flash of the eyes, as, however, she slowly seated herself.

"We call it power and magnetism in your case," he answered in that
low, soothing voice which had helped to quiet storms in more than one
chancellerie of Europe. . . . "What are you going to sing to-night?"
he added.

"I am not going to sing," she answered, nervously. "You heard what I
said to Mr. Fellowes."

"I was an unwilling eavesdropper; I heard your last words. But surely
you would not be so unoriginal, so cliche, as to say the same thing to
me that you said to Mr. Fellowes!"

His smile was winning and his humour came from a deep well. On the
instant she knew it to be real, and his easy confidence, his
assumption of dominancy had its advantage.

"I'll say it in a different way to you, but it will be the same
thing. I shall not sing to-night," she retorted, obstinately.

"Then a hundred people will go hungry to bed," he rejoined. "Hunger is
a dreadful thing--and there are only three minutes left out of the
five," he added, looking at his watch.

"I am not the baker or the butler," she replied with a smile, but her
firm lips did not soften.

He changed his tactics with adroitness. If he failed now, it would be
final. He thought he knew where she might be really vulnerable.

"Byng will be disappointed and surprised when he hears of the famine
that the prima donna has left behind her. Byng is one of the best that
ever was. He is trying to do his fellow-creatures a good turn down
there at the mine. He never did any harm that I ever heard of--and
this is his house, and these are his guests. He would, I'll stake my
life, do Al'mah a good turn if he could, even if it cost him something
quite big. He is that kind of a man. He would be hurt to know that you
had let the best people of the county be parched, when you could give
them drink."

"You said they were hungry a moment ago," she rejoined, her resolution
slowly breaking under the one influence which could have softened her.

"They would be both hungry and thirsty," he urged. "But, between
ourselves, would you like Byng to come home from a hard day's work, as
it were, and feel that things had gone wrong here while he was away on
humanity's business? Just try to imagine him having done you a
service--"

"He has done me more than one service," she interjected. "You know it
as well as I do. You were there at the opera, three years ago, when he
saved me from the flames, and since then--"

Stafford looked at his watch again with a smile. "Besides, there's a
far more important reason why you should sing to-night. I promised
some one who's been hurt badly, and who never heard you sing, that he
should hear you to-night. He is lying there now, and--"

"Jigger?" she asked, a new light in her eyes, something fleeing from
her face and leaving a strange softness behind it.

"Quite so," he replied. "That's a lad really worth singing for.
He's an original, if ever there was one. He worships you for what
you have done for his sister, Lou. I'd undergo almost any
humiliation not to disappoint Jigger. Byng would probably get over
his disappointment--he'd only feel that he hadn't been used fairly,
and he's used to that; but Jigger wouldn't sleep to-night, and it's
essential that he should. Think of how much happiness and how much
pain you can give, just by trilling a simple little song with your
little voice oh, madame la cantatrice?"

Suddenly her eyes filled with tears. She brushed them away hastily.
"I've been upset and angry and disturbed--and I don't know what," she
said, abruptly. "One of my black moods was on me. They only come once
in a blue moon; but they almost kill me when they do." . . . She
stopped and looked at him steadily for a moment, the tears still in
her eyes. "You are very understanding and gentle--and sensible," she
added, with brusque frankness and cordiality. "Yes, I will sing for
Rudyard Byng and for Jigger; and a little too for a very clever
diplomatist." She gave a spasmodic laugh.

"Only half a minute left," he rejoined with gay raillery. "I said
you'd sing to them in five minutes, and you must. This way."

He offered her his arm, she took it, and in cheerful silence he
hurried her to the ball-room.

Before her first song he showed her the window which looked across to
that out of which Jigger gazed with trembling eagerness. The blinds
and curtains were up at these windows, and Jigger could see her as she
sang.

Never in all her wonderful career had Al'mah sung so well--with so
much feeling and an artist's genius--not even that night of all when
she made her debut. The misery, the gloom, the bitterness of the past
hour had stirred every fibre of her being, and her voice told with
thrilling power the story of a soul.

Once after an outburst of applause from the brilliant audience, there
came a tiny echo of it from across the courtyard. It was Jigger,
enraptured by a vision of heaven and the sounds of it. Al'mah turned
towards the window with a shining face, and waved a kiss out of the
light and glory where she was, to the sufferer in the darkness. Then,
after a whispered word to the accompanist she began singing Gounod's
memorable song, "There is a Green Hill Far Away." It was not what the
audience expected; it was in strangest contrast to all that had gone
before; it brought a hush like a benediction upon the great
chamber. Her voice seemed to ache with the plaintive depth of the
song, and the soft night filled its soul with melody.

A wonderful and deep solemnity was suddenly diffused upon the assembly
of world-worn people, to most of whom the things that mattered were
those which gave them diversion. They were wont to swim with the tide
of indolence, extravagance, self-seeking, and sordid pleasure now
flowing through the hardy isles, from which had come much of the
strength of the Old World and the vision and spirit of the New World.

Why had she chosen this song? Because, all at once, as she thought of
Jigger lying there in the dark room, she had a vision of her own child
lying near to death in the grasp of pneumonia five years ago; and the
misery of that time swept over her--its rebellion, its hideous fear,
its bitter loneliness. She recalled how a woman, once a great singer,
now grown old in years as in sorrow, had sung this very song to her
then, in the hour of her direst apprehension. She sang it now to her
own dead child, and to Jigger. When she ceased, there was not a sound
save of some woman gently sobbing. Others were vainly trying to choke
back their tears.

Presently, as Al'mah stood still in the hush which was infinitely more
grateful to her than any applause, she saw Krool advancing hurriedly
up the centre aisle. He was drawn and haggard, and his eyes were
sunken and wild. Turning at the platform, he said in a strange, hollow
voice:

"At the mine--an accident. The Baas he go down to save--he not come
up."

With a cry Jasmine staggered to her feet. Ian Stafford was beside her
in an instant.

"The Baas--the Baas!" said Krool, insistently, painfully. "I have the
horses--come."



CHAPTER XIV

THE BAAS


There had been an explosion in the Glencader Mine, and twenty men had
been imprisoned in the stark solitude of the underground world. Or was
it that they lay dead in that vast womb of mother-earth which takes
all men of all time as they go, and absorbs them into her fruitful
body, to produce other men who will in due days return to the same
great mother to rest and be still? It mattered little whether
malevolence had planned the outrage in the mine, or whether accident
alone had been responsible; the results were the same. Wailing,
woebegone women wrung their hands, and haggard, determined men stood
by with bowed heads, ready to offer their lives to save those other
lives far down below, if so be it were possible.

The night was serene and quiet, clear and cold, with glimmering stars
and no moon, and the wide circle of the hills was drowsy with night
and darkness. All was at peace in the outer circle, but at the centre
was travail and storm and outrage and death. What nature had made
beautiful, man had made ugly by energy and all the harsh necessities
of progress. In the very heart of this exquisite and picturesque
country-side the ugly, grim life of the miner had established itself,
and had then turned an unlovely field of industrial activity into a
cock-pit of struggle between capital and labour. First, discontent,
fed by paid agitators and scarcely steadied by responsible and
level-headed labour agents and leaders; then active disturbance and
threatening; then partial strike, then minor outrages, then some
foolishness on the part of manager or man, and now tragedy darkening
the field, adding bitterness profound to the discontent and strife.

Rudyard Byng had arrived on the scene in the later stages of the
struggle, when a general strike with all its attendant miseries, its
dangers and provocations, was hovering. Many men in his own mine in
South Africa had come from this very district, and he was known to be
the most popular of all the capitalists on the Rand. His generosity to
the sick and poor of the Glencader Mine had been great, and he had
given them a hospital and a club with adequate endowment. Also, he had
been known to take part in the rough sports of the miners, and had
afterwards sat and drunk beer with them--as much as any, and carying
it better than any.

If there was any one who could stay the strike and bring about a
settlement it was he; and it is probable he would have stayed it, had
it not been for a collision between a government official and a
miners' leader. Things had grown worse, until the day of catastrophe,
when Byng had been sent for by the leaders of both parties to the
quarrel. He had laboured hours after hour in the midst of grave unrest
and threats of violence, for some of the men had taken to drinking
heavily--but without success. Still he had stayed on, going here and
there, mostly among the men themselves, talking to them in little
groups, arguing simply with them, patiently dealing with facts and
figures, quietly showing them the economic injustice which lay behind
their full demands, and suggesting compromises.

He was received with good feeling, but in the workers' view it was
"class against class--labour against capital, the man against the
master." In their view Byng represented class, capital and master, not
man; his interests were not identical with theirs; and though some
were disposed to cheer him, the majority said he was "as good a sort
as that sort can be," but shrugged their shoulders and remained
obstinate. The most that he did during the long afternoon and evening
was to prevent the worst; until, as he sat eating a slice of ham in a
miner's kitchen, there came the explosion: the accident or
crime--which, like the lances in an angry tumour, let out the fury,
enmity, and rebellion, and gave human nature its chance again. The
shock of the explosion had been heard at Glencader, but nothing was
thought of it, as there had been much blasting in the district for
days.

"There's twenty men below," said the grimy manager who had brought the
news to Byng. Together they sped towards the mine, little groups
running beside them, muttering those dark sayings which, either as
curses or laments, are painful comments on the relations of life on
the lower levels with life on the higher plateaux.

Among the volunteers to go below, Byng was of the first, and against
the appeal of the mine-manager, and of others who tried to dissuade
him, he took his place with two miners with the words:

"I know this pit better than most; and I'd rather be down there
knowing the worst, than waiting to learn it up here. I'm going; so
lower away, lads."

He had disappeared, and for a long time there was no sign; but at last
there came to the surface three of the imprisoned miners and two dead
bodies, and these were followed by others still alive; but Byng did
not come up. He remained below, leading the search, the first in the
places of danger and exploration, the last to retreat from any peril
of falling timbers or from fresh explosion. Twelve of the twenty men
were rescued. Six were dead, and their bodies were brought to the
surface and to the arms of women whose breadwinners were gone; whose
husbands or sons or brothers had been struck out into darkness without
time to strip themselves of the impedimenta of the soul. Two were left
below, and these were brothers who had married but three months
before. They were strong, buoyant men of twenty-five, with life just
begun, and home still welcome and alluring--warm-faced, bonny women to
meet them at the door, and lay the cloth, and comfort their beds, and
cheer them away to work in the morning. These four lovers had been the
target for the good-natured and half-affectionate scoffing of the
whole field; for the twins, Jabez and Jacob, were as alike as two
peas, and their wives were cousins, and were of a type in mind, body,
and estate. These twin toilers were left below, with Rudyard Byng
forcing his way to the place where they had worked. With him was one
other miner of great courage and knowledge, who had gone with other
rescue parties in other catastrophes.

It was this man who was carried to the surface when another small
explosion occurred. He brought the terrible news that Byng, the
rescuer of so many, was himself caught by falling timbers and
imprisoned near a spot where Jabez and Jacob Holyhoke were entombed.

Word had gone to Glencader, and within an hour and a half Jasmine,
Al'mah, Stafford, Lord Tynemouth, the Slavonian Ambassador, Adrian
Fellowes, Mr. Tudor Tempest and others were at the pit's mouth,
stricken by the same tragedy which had made so many widows and orphans
that night. Already two attempts had been made to descend, but they
had not been successful. Now came forward a burly and dour-looking
miner, called Brengyn, who had been down before, and had been in
command. His look was forbidding, but his face was that of a man on
whom you could rely; and his eyes had a dogged, indomitable
expression. Behind him were a dozen men, sullen and haggard, their
faces showing nothing of that pity in their hearts which drove them to
risk all to save the lives of their fellow-workers. Was it all pity
and humanity? Was there also something of that perdurable cohesion of
class against class; the powerful if often unlovely unity of faction,
the shoulder-to-shoulder combination of war; the tribal fanaticism
which makes brave men out of unpromising material? Maybe something of
this element entered into the heroism which had been displayed; but
whatever the impulse or the motive, the act and the end were the
same--men's lives were in peril, and they were risking their own to
rescue them.

When Jasmine and her friends arrived, Ian Stafford addressed himself
to the groups of men at the pit's mouth, asking for news. Seeing
Brengyn approach Jasmine, he hurried over, recognizing in the stalwart
miner a leader of men.

"It's a chance in a thousand," he heard Brengyn say to Jasmine, whose
white face showed no trace of tears, and who held herself with
courage. There was something akin in the expression of her face and
that of other groups of women, silent, rigid and bitter, who stood
apart, some with children's hands clasped in theirs, facing the worst
with regnant resolution. All had that horrible quietness of despair so
much more poignant than tears and wailing. Their faces showed the
weariness of labour and an ill-nourished daily life, but there was the
same look in them as in Jasmine's. There was no class in this
communion of suffering and danger.

"Not one chance in a thousand," Brengyn added, heavily. "I know where
they are, but--"

"You think they are--dead?" Jasmine asked in a hollow voice.

"I think, alive or dead, it's all against them as goes down to bring
them out. It's more lives to be wasted."

Stafford heard, and he stepped forward. "If there's a chance in a
thousand, it's good enough for a try," he said. "If you were there,
Mr. Byng would take the chance in the thousand for you."

Brengyn looked Stafford up and down slowly. "What is it you've got to
say?" he asked, gloomily.

"I am going down, if there's anybody will lead," Stafford replied. "I
was brought up in a mining country. I know as much as most of you
about mines, and I'll make one to follow you, if you'll lead--you've
been down, I know."

Brengyn's face changed. "Mr. Byng isn't our class, he's with capital,"
he said, "but he's a man. He went down to help save men of my class,
and to any of us he's worth the risk. But how many of his own class is
taking it on?"

"I, for one," said Lord Tynemouth, stepping forward.

"I--I," answered three other men of the house-party.

Al'mah, who was standing just below Jasmine, had her eyes fixed on
Adrian Fellowes, and when Brengyn called for volunteers, her heart
almost stood still in suspense. Would Adrian volunteer?

Brengyn's look rested on Adrian for an instant, but Adrian's eyes
dropped. Brengyn had said one chance in a thousand, and Adrian said to
himself that he had never been lucky--never in all his life. At games
of chance he had always lost. Adrian was for the sure thing always.

Al'mah's face flushed with anger and shame at the thing she saw, and a
weakness came over her, as though the springs of life had been
suddenly emptied.

Brengyn once again fastened the group from Glencader with his
eyes. "There's a gentleman in danger," he said, grimly, again. "How
many gentlemen volunteer to go down--ay, there's five!" he added, as
Stafford and Tynemouth and the others once again responded.

Jasmine saw, but at first did not fully realize what was
happening. But presently she understood that there was one near, owing
everything to her husband, who had not volunteered to help to save
him--on the thousandth chance. She was stunned and stricken.

"Oh, for God's sake, go!" she said, brokenly, but not looking at
Adrian Fellowes, and with a heart torn by misery and shame.

Brengyn turned to the men behind him, the dark, determined toilers who
sustained the immortal spirit of courage and humanity on thirty
shillings a week and nine hours' work a day. "Who's for it, mates?" he
asked, roughly. "Who's going wi' me?"

Every man answered hoarsely, "Ay," and every hand went up. Brengyn's
back was on Fellowes, Al'mah, and Jasmine now. There was that which
filled the cup of trembling for Al'mah in the way he nodded to the
men.

"Right, lads," he said with a stern joy in his voice. "But there's
only one of you can go, and I'll pick him. Here, Jim," he added to a
small, wiry fellow not more than five feet four in height--"here, Jim
Gawley, you're comin' wi' me, an' that's all o' you as can come. No,
no," he added, as there was loud muttering and dissent. "Jim's got no
missis, nor mother, and he's tough as leather and can squeeze in small
places, and he's all right, too, in tight corners." Now he turned to
Stafford and Tynemouth and the others. "You'll come wi' me," he said
to Stafford--" if you want. It's a bad look-out, but we'll have a
try. You'll do what I say?" he sharply asked Stafford, whose face was
set.

"You know the place," Stafford answered. "I'll do what you say."

"My word goes?"

"Right. Your word goes. Let's get on."

Jasmine took a step forward with a smothered cry, but Alice Tynemouth
laid a hand on her arm.

"He'll bring Rudyard back, if it can be done," she whispered.

Stafford did not turn round. He said something in an undertone to
Tynemouth, and then, without a glance behind, strode away beside
Brengyn and Jim Gawley to the pit's mouth.

Adrian Fellowes stepped up to Tynemouth. "What do you think the
chances are?" he asked in a low tone.

"Go to--bed!" was the gruff reply of the irate peer, to whom cowardice
was the worst crime on earth, and who was enraged at being left
behind. Also he was furious because so many working-men had responded
to Brengyn's call for volunteers and Adrian Fellowes had shown the
white feather. In the obvious appeal to the comparative courage of
class his own class had suffered.

"Or go and talk to the women," he added to Fellowes. "Make 'em
comfortable. You've got a gift that way."

Turning on his heel, Lord Tynemouth hastened to the mouth of the pit
and watched the preparations for the descent.

Never was night so still; never was a sky so deeply blue, nor stars so
bright and serene. It was as though Peace had made its habitation on
the wooded hills, and a second summer had come upon the land, though
wintertime was near. Nature seemed brooding, and the generous odour of
ripened harvests came over the uplands to the watchers in the
valley. All was dark and quiet in the sky and on the hills; but in the
valley were twinkling lights and the stir and murmur of troubled
life--that sinister muttering of angry and sullen men which has struck
terror to the hearts of so many helpless victims of revolution, when
it has been the mutterings of thousands and not of a few rough,
discontented toilers. As Al'mah sat near to the entrance of the mine,
wrapped in a warm cloak, and apart from the others who watched and
waited also, she seemed to realize the agony of the problem which was
being worked out in these labour-centres where, between capital and
the work of men's hands, there was so apparent a gulf of
disproportionate return.

The stillness of the night was broken now by the hoarse calls of the
men, now by the wailing of women, and Al'mah's eyes kept turning to
those places where lights were shining, which, as she knew, were
houses of death or pain. For hours she and Jasmine and Lady Tynemouth
had gone from cottage to cottage where the dead and wounded were, and
had left everywhere gifts, and the promises of gifts, in the attempt
to soften the cruelty of the blow to those whose whole life depended
on the weekly wage. Help and the pledge of help had lightened many a
dark corner that night; and an unexplainable antipathy which had
suddenly grown up in Al'mah's mind against Jasmine after her arrival
at Glencader was dissipated as the hours wore on.

Pale of face, but courageous and solicitous, Jasmine, accompanied by
Al'mah, moved among the dead and dying and the bitter and bereaved
living, with a gentle smile and a soft word or touch of the hand. Men
near to death, or suffering torture, looked gratefully at her or tried
to smile; and more than once Mr. Mappin, whose hands were kept busy
and whose skill saved more than a handful of lives that night, looked
at her in wonder.

Jasmine already had a reputation in the great social world for being
of a vain lightness, having nothing of that devotion to good works
which Mr. Mappin had seen so often on those high levels where the rich
and the aristocratic lived. There was, then, more than beauty and wit
and great social gift, gaiety and charm, in this delicate personality?
Yes, there was something good and sound in her, after all. Her
husband's life was in infinite danger,--had not Brengyn said that his
chances were only one in a thousand?--death stared her savagely in the
face; yet she bore herself as calmly as those women who could not
afford the luxury of tears or the self-indulgence of a despairing
indolence; to whom tragedy was but a whip of scorpions to drive them
into action. How well they all behaved, these society butterflies--
Jasmine, Lady Tynemouth, and the others! But what a wonderful
motherliness and impulsive sympathy steadied by common sense did
Al'mah the singing-woman show!

Her instinct was infallible, her knowledge of how these poor people
felt was intuitive, and her great-heartedness was to be seen in every
motion, heard in every tone of her voice. If she had not had this work
of charity to do, she felt she would have gone shrieking through the
valley, as, this very midnight, she had seen a girl with streaming
hair and bare breast go crying through the streets, and on up the
hills to the deep woods, insane with grief and woe.

Her head throbbed. She felt as though she also could tear the
coverings from her own bosom to let out the fever which was there; for
in her life she had loved two men who had trampled on her
self-respect, had shattered all her pride of life, had made her
ashamed to look the world in the face. Blantyre, her husband, had been
despicable and cruel, a liar and a deserter; and to-night she had seen
the man to whom she had given all that was left of her heart and faith
disgrace himself and his class before the world by a cowardice which
no woman could forgive.

Adrian Fellowes had gone back to Glencader to do necessary things, to
prepare the household for any emergency; and she was grateful for the
respite. If she had been thrown with him in the desperate mood of the
moment, she would have lost her self-control. Happily, fate had taken
him away for a few hours; and who could tell what might not happen in
a few hours? Meanwhile, there was humanity's work to be done.

About four o'clock in the morning, when she came out from a cottage
where she had assisted Mr. Mappin in a painful and dangerous
operation, she stood for a moment in reverie, looking up at the hills,
whose peace had been shrilly broken a few hours before by that
distracted waif of the world, fleeing from the pain of life.

An ample star of rare brilliancy came stealing up over the trees
against the sky-line, twinkling and brimming with light.

"No," she said, as though in reply to an inner voice, "there's nothing
for me--nothing. I have missed it all." Her hands clasped her breast
in pain, and she threw her face upwards. But the light of the star
caught her eyes, and her hands ceased to tremble. A strange quietness
stole over her.

"My child, my lost beloved child," she whispered.

Her eyes swam with tears now, the lines of pain at her mouth relaxed,
the dark look in her eyes stole away. She watched the star with
sorrowful eyes. "How much misery does it see!" she said. Suddenly, she
thought of Rudyard Byng. "He saved my life," she murmured. "I owe
him--ah, Adrian might have paid the debt!" she cried, in pain. "If he
had only been a man to-night--"

At that moment there came a loud noise up the valley from the pit's
mouth--a great shouting. An instant later two figures ran past
her. One was Jasmine, the other was a heavy-footed miner. Gathering
her cloak around her Al'mah sped after them.

A huddled group at the pit's mouth, and men and women running toward
it; a sharp voice of command, and the crowd falling back, making way
for men who carried limp bodies past; then suddenly, out of wild
murmurs and calls, a cry of victory like the call of a muezzin from
the tower of a mosque--a resonant monotony, in which a dominant
principle cries.

A Welsh preaching hillman, carried away by the triumph of the moment,
gave the great tragedy the bugle-note of human joy and pride.

Ian Stafford and Brengyn and Jim Gawley had conquered. The limp bodies
carried past Al'mah were not dead. They were living, breathing men
whom fresh air and a surgeon's aid would soon restore. Two of them
were the young men with the bonny wives who now with murmured
endearments grasped their cold hands. Behind these two was carried
Rudyard Byng, who could command the less certain concentration of a
heart. The men whom Rudyard had gone to save could control a greater
wealth, a more precious thing than anything he had. The boundaries of
the interests of these workers were limited, but their souls were
commingled with other souls bound to them by the formalities; and
every minute of their days, every atom of their forces, were moving
round one light, the light upon the hearthstone. These men were
carried ahead of Byng now, as though by the ritual of nature taking
their rightful place in life's procession before him.

Something of what the working-women felt possessed Jasmine, but it was
an impulse born of the moment, a flood of feeling begotten by the
tragedy. It had in it more of remorse than aught else; it was, in
part, the agitation of a soul surprised into revelation. Yet there
was, too, a strange, deep, undefined pity welling up in her
heart,--pity for Rudyard, and because of what she did not say directly
even to her own soul. But pity was there, with also a sense of
inevitableness, of the continuance of things which she was too weak to
alter.

Like the two women of the people ahead, she held Rudyard's hand, as
she walked beside him, till he was carried into the manager's office
near by. She was conscious that on the other side of Rudyard was a
tall figure that staggered and swayed as it moved on, and that two
dark eyes were turned towards her ever and anon.

Into those eyes she had looked but once since the rescue, but all that
was necessary of gratitude was said in that one glance: "You have
saved Rudyard--you, Ian," it said.

With Al'mah it was different. In the light of the open door of the
manager's office, she looked into Ian Stafford's face. "He saved my
life, you remember," she said; "and you have saved his. I love you."

"I love you!" Greatness of heart was speaking, not a woman's
emotions. The love she meant was of the sort which brings no darkness
in its train. Men and women can speak of it without casting down their
eyes or feeling a flush in their cheeks.

To him came also the two women whose husbands, Jacob and Jabez, were
restored to them.

"Man, we luv ye," one said, and the other laid a hand on his breast
and nodded assent, adding, "Ay, we luv ye."

That was all; but greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down
his life for his friend--and for his enemies, maybe. Enemies these two
rescued men were in one sense--young socialists--enemies to the
present social order, with faces set against the capitalist and the
aristocrat and the landlord; yet in the crisis of life dipping their
hands in the same dish, drinking from the same cup, moved by the same
sense of elementary justice, pity, courage, and love.

"Man, we luv ye!" And the women turned away to their own--to their
capital, which in the slump of Fate had suffered no loss. It was
theirs, complete and paying large dividends.

To the crowd, Brengyn, with gruff sincerity, said, loudly: "Jim
Gawley, he done as I knowed he'd do. He done his best, and he done it
prime. We couldn't ha' got on wi'out him. But first there was Mr. Byng
as had sense and knowledge more than any; an' he couldn't be denied;
an' there was Mr. Stafford--him--" pointing to Ian, who, with misty
eyes, was watching the women go back to their men. "He done his bit
better nor any of us. And Mr. Byng and Jacob and Jabez, they can thank
their stars that Mr. Stafford done his bit. Jim's all right an' I done
my duty, I hope, but these two that ain't of us, they done
more--Mr. Byng and Mr. Stafford. Here's three cheers, lads--no, this
ain't a time for cheerin'; but ye all ha' got hands."

His hand caught Ian's with the grip of that brotherhood which is as
old as Adam, and the hand of miner after miner did the same.

The strike was over--at a price too big for human calculation; but it
might have been bigger still.

Outside the open door of the manager's office Stafford watched and
waited till he saw Rudyard, with a little laugh, get slowly to his
feet and stretch his limbs heavily. Then he turned away gloomily to
the darkness of the hills. In his soul there was a depression as deep
as in that of the singing-woman.

"Al'mah had her debt to pay, and I shall have mine," he said, wearily.




BOOK III




CHAPTER XV

THE WORLD WELL LOST


People were in London in September and October who seldom arrived
before November. War was coming. Hundreds of families whose men were
in the army came to be within touch of the War Office and Aldershot,
and the capital of the Empire was overrun by intriguers, harmless and
otherwise. There were ladies who hoped to influence officers in high
command in favour of their husbands, brothers, or sons; subalterns of
title who wished to be upon the staff of some famous general; colonels
of character and courage and scant ability, craving commands;
high-placed folk connected with great industrial, shipping, or
commercial firms, who were used by these firms to get "their share" of
contracts and other things which might be going; and patriotic
amateurs who sought to make themselves notorious through some civilian
auxiliary to war organization, like a voluntary field hospital or a
home of convalescence. But men, too, of the real right sort, longing
for chance of work in their profession of arms; ready for anything,
good for anything, brave to a miracle: and these made themselves fit
by hard riding or walking or rowing, or in some school of physical
culture, that they might take a war job on, if, and when, it was
going.

Among all these Ian Stafford moved with an undercurrent of agitation
and anxiety unseen in his face, step, motion, or gesture. For days he
was never near the Foreign Office, and then for days he was there
almost continuously; yet there was scarcely a day when he did not see
Jasmine. Also there were few days in the week when Jasmine did not see
M. Mennaval, the ambassador for Moravia--not always at her own house,
but where the ambassador chanced to be of an evening, at a fashionable
restaurant, or at some notable function. This situation had not been
difficult to establish; and, once established, meetings between the
lady and monsieur were arranged with that skill which belongs to woman
and to diplomacy.

Once or twice at the beginning Jasmine's chance question concerning
the ambassador's engagements made M. Mennaval keen to give information
as to his goings and comings. Thus if they met naturally, it was also
so constantly that people gossiped; but at first, certainly, not to
Jasmine's grave disadvantage, for M. Mennaval was thought to be less
dangerous than impressionable.

In that, however, he was somewhat maligned, for his penchant for
beautiful and "select" ladies had capacities of development almost
unguessed. Previously Jasmine had never shown him any marked
preference; and when, at first, he met her in town on her return from
Wales he was no more than watchfully courteous and admiring. When,
however, he found her in a receptive mood, and evidently taking
pleasure in his society, his vanity expanded greatly. He at once
became possessed by an absorbing interest in the woman who, of all
others in London, had gifts which were not merely physical, but of a
kind that stimulate the mind and rouse those sensibilities so easily
dulled by dull and material people. Jasmine had her material side; but
there was in her the very triumph of the imaginative also; and through
it the material became alive, buoyant and magnetic.

Without that magnetic power which belonged to the sensuous part of her
she would not have gained control of M. Mennaval's mind, for it was
keen, suspicious, almost abnormally acute; and, while lacking real
power, it protected itself against the power of others by assembled
and well-disciplined adroitness and evasions.

Very soon, however, Jasmine's sensitive beauty, which in her desire to
intoxicate him became voluptuousness, enveloped his brain in a mist of
rainbow reflections. Under her deft questions and suggestions he
allowed her to see the springs of his own diplomacy and the machinery
inside the Moravian administration. She caught glimpses of its
ambitions, its unscrupulous use of its position in international
relations, to gain advantage for itself, even by a dexterity which
might easily bear another name, and by sudden disregard of
international attachments not unlike treachery.

Rudyard was too busy to notice the more than cavalier attitude of
M. Mennaval; and if he had noticed it, there would have been no
intervention. Of late a lesion of his higher moral sense made him
strangely insensitive to obvious things. He had an inborn chivalry,
but the finest, truest chivalry was not his--that which carefully
protects a woman from temptation, by keeping her unostentatiously away
from it; which remembers that vanity and the need for admiration drive
women into pitfalls out of which they climb again maimed for life, if
they climb at all.

He trusted Jasmine absolutely, while there was, at the same time, a
great unrest in his heart and life--an unrest which the accident at
the Glencader Mine, his own share in a great rescue, and her gratitude
for his safety did little to remove. It produced no more than a
passing effect upon Jasmine or upon himself. The very convention of
making light of bravery and danger, which has its value, was in their
case an evil, preventing them from facing the inner meaning of it
all. If they had been less rich, if their house had been small, if
their acquaintances had been fewer, if . . .

It was not by such incidents that they were to be awakened, and with
the wild desire to make Stafford grateful to her, and owe her his
success, the tragedy yonder must, in the case of Jasmine, have been
obscured and robbed of its force. At Glencader Jasmine had not got
beyond desire to satisfy a vanity, which was as deep in her as life
itself. It was to regain her hold upon a man who had once acknowledged
her power and, in a sense, had bowed to her will. But that had
changed, and, down beneath all her vanity and wilfulness, there was
now a dangerous regard and passion for him which, under happy
circumstances, might have transformed her life--and his. Now it all
served to twist her soul and darken her footsteps. On every hand she
was engaged in a game of dissimulation, made the more dangerous by the
thread of sincerity and desire running through it all. Sometimes she
started aghast at the deepening intrigue gathering in her path; at the
deterioration in her husband; and at the hollow nature of her home
life; but the excitement of the game she was playing, the ardour of
the chase, was in her veins, and her inherited spirit of great daring
kept her gay with vitality and intellectual adventure.

Day after day she had strengthened the cords by which she was drawing
Ian to her; and in the confidence begotten of her services to him, of
her influence upon M. Mennaval and the progress of her efforts, a new
intimacy, different from any they had ever known, grew and
thrived. Ian scarcely knew how powerful had become the feeling between
them. He only realized that delight which comes from working with
another for a cherished cause, the goal of one's life, which has such
deeper significance when the partner in the struggle is a woman. They
both experienced that most seductive of all influences, a secret
knowledge and a pact of mutual silence and purpose.

"You trust me now?" Jasmine asked at last one day, when she had been
able to assure Ian that the end was very near, that M. Mennaval had
turned his face from Slavonia, and had carried his government with
him--almost. In the heir-apparent to the throne of Moravia, whose
influence with the Moravian Prime Minister was considerable, there
still remained one obdurate element; but Ian's triumph only lacked the
removal of this one obstructive factor, and thereafter England would
be secure from foreign attack, if war came in South Africa. In that
case Ian's career might culminate at the head of the Foreign Office
itself, or as representative of the throne in India, if he chose that
splendid sphere.

"You do trust me, Ian?" Jasmine repeated, with a wistfulness as near
reality as her own deceived soul could permit.

With a sincerity as deep as one can have who embarks on enterprises in
which one regrets the means in contemplation of the end, Ian replied:

"Yes, yes, I trust you, Jasmine, as I used to do when I was twenty and
you were five. You have brought back the boy in me. All the dreams of
youth are in my heart again, all the glow of the distant sky of
hope. I feel as though I lived upon a hill-top, under some greenwood
tree, and--"

"And 'sported with Amaryllis in the shade,'" she broke in with a
little laugh of triumph, her eyes brighter than he had ever seen
them. They were glowing with a fire of excitement which was like a
fever devouring the spirit, with little dark, flying banners of fate
or tragedy behind.

Strange that he caught the inner meaning of it as he looked into her
eyes now. In the depths of those eyes, where long ago he had drowned
his spirit, it was as though he saw an army of reckless battalions
marching to a great battle; but behind all were the black wings of
vultures--pinions of sorrow following the gay brigades. Even as he
gazed at her, something ominous and threatening caught his heart, and,
with the end of his great enterprise in sight, a black premonition
smothered him.

But with a smile he said: "Well, it does look as though we are near
the end of the journey."

"And 'journeys end in lovers' meeting,'" she whispered softly, lowered
her eyes, and then raised them again to his.

The light in them blinded him. Had he not always loved her--before any
one came, before Rudyard came, before the world knew her? All that he
had ever felt in the vanished days rushed upon him with intolerable
force. Through his life-work, through his ambition, through helping
him as no one else could have done at the time of crisis, she had
reached the farthest confines of his nature. She had woven, thread by
thread, the magic carpet of that secret companionship by which the
best as the worst of souls are sometimes carried into a land
enchanted--for a brief moment, before Fate stoops down and hangs a
veil of plague over the scene of beauty, passion, and madness.

Her eyes, full of liquid fire, met his. They half closed as her body
swayed slightly towards him.

With a cry, almost rough in its intensity, he caught her in his arms
and buried his face in the soft harvest of her hair. "Jasmine--Jasmine,
my love!" he murmured.

Suddenly she broke from him. "Oh no--oh no, Ian! The work is not
done. I can't take my pay before I have earned it--such pay--such
pay."

He caught her hands and held them fast. "Nothing can alter what is. It
stands. Whatever the end, whatever happens to the thing I want to do,
I--"

He drew her closer.

"You say this before we know what Moravia will do; you--oh, Ian, tell
me it is not simply gratitude, and because I tried to help you; not
only because--"

He interrupted her with a passionate gesture. "It belonged at first
to what you were doing for me. Now it is by itself, that which, for
good or ill, was to be between you and me--the foreordained thing."

She drew back her head with a laugh of vanity and pride and bursting
joy. "Ah, it doesn't matter now!" she said. "It doesn't matter."

He looked at her questioningly.

"Nothing matters now," she repeated, less enigmatically. She stretched
her arms up joyously, radiantly.

"The world well lost!" she cried.

Her reckless mood possessed him also. They breathed that air which
intoxicates, before it turns heavy with calamity and stifles the whole
being; by which none ever thrived, though many have sought nourishment
in daring draughts of it.

"The world well lost!" he repeated; and his lips sought hers.

Her determined patience had triumphed. Hour by hour, by being that to
his plans, to his work of life, which no one else could be, she had
won back what she had lost when the Rand had emptied into her lap its
millions, at the bidding of her material soul. With infinite tact and
skill she had accomplished her will. The man she had lost was hers
again. What it must mean, what it must do, what price must be paid for
this which her spirit willed had never yet been estimated. But her
will had been supreme, and she took all out of the moment which was
possible to mortal pleasure.

Like the Columbus, however, who plants his flag upon the cliffs of a
new land, and then, leaving his vast prize unharvested, retreats upon
the sea by which he came, so Ian suddenly realized that here was no
abiding-place for his love. It was no home for his faith, for those
joys which the sane take gladly, when it is right to take them, and
the mad long for and die for when their madness becomes unbearable.

A cloud suddenly passed over him, darkened his eyes, made his bones
like water. For, whatever might come, he knew in his heart of hearts
that the "old paths" were the only paths which he could tread in
peace--or tread at all without the ruin of all he had slowly builded.

Jasmine, however, did not see his look or realize the sudden physical
change which passed over him, leaving him cold and numbed; for a
servant now entered with a note.

Seeing the handwriting on the envelope, with an exclamation of
excitement and surprise, Jasmine tore the letter open. One glance was
sufficient.

"Moravia is ours--ours, Ian!" she cried, and thrust the letter into
his hands.

 "Dearest lady," it ran, "the Crown has intervened successfully. The
Heir Apparent has been set aside. The understanding may now be
ratified. May I dine with you to-night?

 "Yours, M.

 "P.S.--You are the first to know, but I have also sent a note to our
young friend, Ian Stafford. Mais, he cannot say, 'Alone I did it.'

 "M."

"Thank God--thank God, for England!" said Ian solemnly, the greater
thing in him deeply stirred. "Now let war come, if it must; for we can
do our work without interference."

"Thank God," he repeated, fervently, and the light in his eyes was
clearer and burned brighter than the fire which had filled them during
the past few moments.

Then he clasped her in his arms again.

As Ian drove swiftly in a hansom to the Foreign Office, his brain
putting in array and reviewing the acts which must flow from this
international agreement now made possible, the note Mennaval had
written Jasmine flashed before his eyes: "Dearest lady.... May I dine
with you to-night? . . . M."

His face flushed. There was something exceedingly familiar--more in
the tone of the words than the words themselves--which irritated and
humiliated him. What she had done for him apparently warranted this
intimate, self-assured tone on the part of Mennaval, the
philanderer. His pride smarted. His rose of triumph had its thorns.

A letter from Mennaval was at the Foreign Office awaiting him. He
carried it to the Prime Minister, who read it with grave satisfaction.

"It is just in time, Stafford," he remarked. "You ran it close. We
will clinch it instantly. Let us have the code."

As the Prime Minister turned over the pages of the code, he said,
dryly: "I hear from Pretoria, through Mr. Byng, that President Kruger
may send the ultimatum tomorrow. I fear he will have the laugh on us,
for ours is not ready. We have to make sure of this thing first.... I
wonder how Landrassy will take it."

He chuckled deeply. "Landrassy made a good fight, but you made a
better one, Stafford. I shouldn't wonder if you got on in diplomacy,"
he added, with quizzical humour.... "Ah, here is the code! Now to
clinch it all before Oom Paul's challenge arrives."



CHAPTER XVI

THE COMING OF THE BAAS


"The Baas--where the Baas?"

Barry Whalen turned with an angry snort to the figure in the
doorway. "Here's the sweet Krool again," he said. "Here's the
faithful, loyal offspring of the Vaal and the karoo, the bulwark of
the Baas.... For God's sake smile for once in your life!" he growled
with an oath, and, snatching up a glass of whiskey and water, threw
the contents at the half-caste.

Krool did not stir, and some of the liquid caught him in the
face. Slowly he drew out an old yellow handkerchief and wiped his
cheeks, his eyes fixed with a kind of impersonal scrutiny on Barry
Whalen and the scene before him.

The night was well forward, and an air of recklessness and dissipation
pervaded this splendid room in De Lancy Scovel's house. The air was
thick with tobacco-smoke, trays were scattered about, laden with stubs
of cigars and ashes, and empty and half-filled glasses were
everywhere. Some of the party had already gone, their gaming instinct
satisfied for the night, their pockets lighter than when they came;
and the tables where they had sat were in a state of disorder more
suggestive of a "dive" than of the house of one who lived in Grosvenor
Square.

No servant came to clear away the things. It was a rule of the
establishment that at midnight the household went to bed, and the host
and his guests looked after themselves thereafter. The friends of De
Lancy Scovel called him "Cupid," because of his cherubic face, but he
was more gnome than cherub at heart. Having come into his fortune by
being a henchman to abler men than himself, he was almost over-zealous
to retain it, knowing that he could never get it again; yet he was
hospitable with the income he had to spend. He was the Beau Brummel of
that coterie which laid the foundation of prosperity on the Rand; and
his house was a marvel of order and crude elegance--save when he had
his roulette and poker parties, and then it was the shambles of
murdered niceties. Once or twice a week his friends met here; and it
was not mendaciously said that small fortunes were lost and won within
these walls "between drinks."

The critical nature of things on the Rand did not lessen the gaming or
the late hours, the theatrical entertainments and social functions at
which Al'mah or another sang at a fabulous fee; or from which a dancer
took away a pocketful of gold--partly fee. Only a few of all the
group, great and small, kept a quiet pace and cherished their nerves
against possible crisis or disaster; and these were consumed by inward
anxiety, because all the others looked to them for a lead, for policy,
for the wise act and the manoevre that would win.

Rudyard Byng was the one person who seemed equally compacted of both
elements. He was a powerful figure in the financial inner circle; but
he was one of those who frequented De Lancy Scovel's house; and he
had, in his own house, a roulette-table and a card-room like a
banqueting-hall. Wallstein, Wolff, Barry Whalen, Fleming, Hungerford,
Reuter, and the others of the inner circle he laughed at in a
good-natured way for coddling themselves, and called them--not without
some truth--valetudinarians. Indeed, the hard life of the Rand in the
early days, with the bad liqueur and the high veld air, had brought to
most of the Partners inner physical troubles of some kind; and their
general abstention was not quite voluntary moral purpose.

Of them all, except De Lancy Scovel, Rudyard was most free from any
real disease or physical weakness which could call for the care of a
doctor. With a powerful constitution, he had kept his general health
fairly, though strange fits of depression had consumed him of late,
and the old strong spring and resilience seemed going, if not gone,
from his mind and body. He was not that powerful virile animal of the
day when he caught Al'mah in his arms and carried her off the stage at
Covent Garden. He was vaguely conscious of the great change in him,
and Barry Whalen, who, with all his faults, would have gone to the
gallows for him, was ever vividly conscious of it, and helplessly
resented the change. At the time of the Jameson Raid Rudyard Byng had
gripped the situation with skill, decision, and immense resource,
giving as much help to the government of the day as to his colleagues
and all British folk on the Rand.

But another raid was nearing, a raid upon British territory this
time. The Rand would be the centre of a great war; and Rudyard Byng
was not the man he had been, in spite of his show of valour and vigour
at the Glencader Mine. Indeed, that incident had shown a certain
physical degeneracy--he had been too slow in recovering from the few
bad hours spent in the death-trap. The government at Whitehall still
consulted him, still relied upon his knowledge and his natural tact;
but secret as his conferences were with the authorities, they were not
so secret that criticism was not viciously at work. Women jealous of
Jasmine, financiers envious of Rudyard, Imperial politicians resentful
of his influence, did their best to present him in the worst light
possible. It was more than whispered that he sat too long over his
wine, and that his desire for fiery liquid at other than meal-times
was not in keeping with the English climate, but belonged to lands of
drier weather and more absorptive air.

"What damned waste!" was De Lancy Scovel's attempt at wit as Krool
dried his face and put the yellow handkerchief back into his
pocket. The others laughed idly and bethought themselves of their own
glasses, and the croupier again set the ball spinning and drew their
eyes.

"Faites vos jeux!" the croupier called, monotonously, and the jingle
of coins followed.

"The Baas--where the Baas?" came again the harsh voice from the
doorway.

"Gone--went an hour ago," said De Lancy Scovel, coming forward. "What
is it, Krool?"

"The Baas--"

"The Baas!" mocked Barry Whalen, swinging round again. "The Baas is
gone to find a rope to tie Oom Paul to a tree, as Oom Paul tied you at
Lichtenburg."

Slowly Krool's eyes went round the room, and then settled on Barry
Whalen's face with owl-like gravity. "What the Baas does goes good,"
he said. "When the Baas ties, Alles zal recht kom."

He turned away now with impudent slowness, then suddenly twisted his
body round and made a grimace of animal-hatred at Barry Whalen, his
teeth showing like those of a wolf.

"The Baas will live long as he want," he added, "but Oom Paul will
have your heart--and plenty more," he added, malevolently, and moved
into the darkness without, closing the door behind him.

A shudder passed through the circle, for the uncanny face and the
weird utterance had the strange reality of fate. A gloom fell on the
gamblers suddenly, and they slowly drew into a group, looking half
furtively at one another.

The wheel turned on the roulette-table, the ball clattered.

"Rien ne va plus!" called the croupier; but no coins had fallen on the
green cloth, and the wheel stopped spinning for the night, as though
by common consent.

"Krool will murder you some day, Barry," said Fleming, with
irritation. "What's the sense in saying things like that to a
servant?"

"How long ago did Rudyard leave?" asked De Lancy Scovel, curiously. "I
didn't see him go. He didn't say good-night to me. Did he to you--to
any of you?"

"Yes, he said to me he was going," rejoined Barry Whalen.

"And to me," said Melville, the Pole, who in the early days on the
Rand had been a caterer. His name then had been Joseph Sobieski, but
this not fitting well with the English language, he had searched the
directory of London till he found the impeachably English combination
of Clifford Melville. He had then cut his hair and put himself into
the hands of a tailor in Conduit Street, and they had turned him
into--what he was.

"Yes, Byng thed good-night to me--deah old boy," he repeated. "'I'm so
damned thleepy, and I have to be up early in the morning,' he thed to
me."

"Byng's example's good enough. I'm off," said Fleming, stretching up
his arms and yawning.

"Byng ought to get up earlier in the morning--much earlier,"
interposed De Lancy Scovel, with a meaning note in his voice.

"Why?" growled out Barry Whalen.

"He'd see the Outlander early-bird after the young domestic worm," was
the slow reply.

For a moment a curious silence fell upon the group. It was as though
some one had heard what had been said--some one who ought not to have
heard.

That is exactly what had happened. Rudyard had not gone home. He had
started to do so; but, remembering that he had told Krool to come at
twelve o'clock if any cables arrived, that he might go himself to the
cable-office, if necessary, and reply, he passed from the hallway into
a little room off the card-room, where there was a sofa, and threw
himself down to rest and think. He knew that the crisis in South
Africa must come within a few hours; that Oom Paul would present an
ultimatum before the British government was ready to act; and that
preparations must be made on the morrow to meet all chances and
consequences. Preparations there had been, but conditions altered from
day to day, and what had been arranged yesterday morning required
modification this evening.

He was not heedless of his responsibilities because he was at the
gaming-table; but these were days when he could not bear to be
alone. Yet he could not find pleasure in the dinner-parties arranged
by Jasmine, though he liked to be with her--liked so much to be with
her, and yet wondered how it was he was not happy when he was beside
her. This night, however, he had especially wished to be alone with
her, to dine with her a deux, and he had been disappointed to find
that she had arranged a little dinner and a theatre-party. With a sigh
he had begged her to arrange her party without him, and, in unusual
depression, he had joined "the gang," as Jasmine called it, at De
Lancy Scovel's house.

Here he moved in a kind of gloom, and had a feeling as though he were
walking among pitfalls. A dread seemed to descend upon him and deaden
his natural buoyancy. At dinner he was fitful in conversation, yet
inclined to be critical of the talk around him. Upon those who talked
excitedly of war and its consequences, with perverse spirit he fell
like a sledge-hammer, and proved their information or judgment
wrong. Then, again, he became amiable and almost sentimental in his
attitude toward them all, gripping the hands of two or three with a
warmth which more than surprised them. It was as though he was
subconsciously aware of some great impending change. It may be there
whispered through the clouded space that lies between the
dwelling-house of Fate and the place where a man's soul lives the
voice of that Other Self, which every man has, warning him of
darkness, or red ruin, or a heartbreak coming on.

However that may be, he had played a good deal during the evening, had
drunk more than enough brandy and soda, had then grown suddenly
heavy-hearted and inert. At last he had said good-night, and had
fallen asleep in the little dark room adjoining the card-room.

Was it that Other Self which is allowed to come to us as our trouble
or our doom approaches, who called sharply in his ear as De Lancy
Scovel said, "Byng ought to get up earlier in the morning--much
earlier."

Rudyard wakened upon the words without stirring--just a wide opening
of the eyes and a moveless body. He listened with, as it were, a new
sense of hearing, so acute, so clear, that it was as though his
friends talked loudly in his very ears.

"He'd see the Outlander early-bird after the young domestic worm."

His heart beat so loud that it seemed his friends must hear it, in the
moment's silence following these suggestive words.

"Here, there's enough of this," said Barry Whalen, sharply, upon the
stillness. "It's nobody's business, anyhow. Let's look after
ourselves, and we'll have enough to do, or I don't know any of us."

"But it's no good pretending," said Fleming. "There isn't one of us
but 'd put ourselves out a great deal for Byng. It isn't human nature
to sit still and do naught, and say naught, when things aren't going
right for him in the place where things matter most.

"Can't he see? Doesn't he see--anything?" asked a little wizened
lawyer, irritably, one who had never been married, the solicitor of
three of their great companies.

"See--of course he doesn't see. If he saw, there'd be hell--at least,"
replied Barry Whalen, scornfully.

"He's as blind as a bat," sighed Fleming.

"He got into the wrong garden and picked the wrong flower--wrong for
him," said another voice. "A passion-flower, not the flower her name
is," added De Lancy Scovel, with a reflective cynicism.

"They they there's no doubt about it--she's throwing herself
away. Ruddy isn't in it, deah old boy, so they they," interposed
Clifford Melville, alias Joseph Sobieski of Posen." Diplomathy is all
very well, but thith kind of diplomathy is not good for the thoul." He
laughed as only one of his kidney can laugh.

Upon the laugh there came a hoarse growl of anger. Barry Whalen was
standing above Mr. Clifford Melville with rage in every fibre, threat
in every muscle.

"Shut up--curse you, Sobieski! It's for us, for any and every one, to
cut the throats of anybody that says a word against her. We've all got
to stand together. Byng forever, is our cry, and Byng's wife is
Byng--before the world. We've got to help him--got to help him, I
say."

"Well, you've got to tell him first. He's got to know it first,"
interposed Fleming; "and it's not a job I'm taking on. When Byng's
asleep he takes a lot of waking, and he's asleep in this thing."

"And the world's too wide awake," remarked De Lancy Scovel,
acidly. "One way or another Byng's got to be waked. It's only him can
put it right."

No one spoke for a moment, for all saw that Barry Whalen was about to
say something important, coming forward to the table impulsively for
the purpose, when a noise from the darkened room beyond fell upon the
silence.

De Lancy Scovel heard, Fleming heard, others heard, and turned towards
the little room. Sobieski touched Barry Whalen's arm, and they all
stood waiting while a hand slowly opened wide the door of the little
room, and, white with a mastered agitation, Byng appeared.

For a moment he looked them all full in the face, yet as though he did
not see them; and then, without a word, as they stepped aside to make
way for him, he passed down the room to the outer hallway.

At the door he turned and looked at them again. Scorn, anger, pride,
impregnated with a sense of horror, were in his face. His white lips
opened to speak, but closed again, and, turning, he stepped out of
their sight.

No one followed. They knew their man.

"My God, how he hates us!" said Barry Whalen, and sank into a chair at
the table, with his head between his hands.

The cheeks of the little wizened lawyer glistened with tears, and De
Lancy Scovel threw open a window and leaned out, looking into the
night remorsefully.



CHAPTER XVII

IS THERE NO HELP FOR THESE THINGS?


Slowly, heavily, like one drugged, Rudyard Byng made his way through
the streets, oblivious of all around him. His brain was like some
engine pounding at high pressure, while all his body was cold and
lethargic. His anger at those he left behind was almost madness, his
humiliation was unlike anything he had ever known. In one sense he was
not a man of the world. All his thoughts and moods and habits had been
essentially primitive, even in the high social and civilized
surroundings of his youth; and when he went to South Africa, it was to
come into his own--the large, simple, rough, adventurous life. His
powerful and determined mind was confined in its scope to the big
essential things. It had a rare political adroitness, but it had
little intellectual subtlety. It had had no preparation for the
situation now upon him, and its accustomed capacity was suddenly
paralyzed. Like some huge ship staggered by the sea, it took its
punishment with heavy, sullen endurance. Socially he had never, as it
were, seen through a ladder; and Jasmine's almost uncanny brilliance
of repartee and skill in the delicate contest of the mind had ever
been a wonder to him, though less so of late than earlier in their
married life. Perhaps this was because his senses were more used to
it, more blunted; or was it because something had gone from her--that
freshness of mind and body, that resilience of temper and spirit,
without which all talk is travail and weariness? He had never thought
it out, though he was dimly conscious of some great loss--of the light
gone from the evening sky.

Yes, it was always in the evening that he had most longed to see "his
girl"; when the day's work was done; when the political and financial
stress had subsided; or when he had abstracted himself from it all and
turned his face towards home. For the big place in Park Lane had
really been home to him, chiefly because, or alone because, Jasmine
had made it what it was; because in every room, in every corner, was
the product of her taste and design. It had been home because it was
associated with her. But of late ever since his five months' visit to
South Africa without her the year before--there had come a change, at
first almost imperceptible, then broadening and deepening.

At first it had vexed and surprised him; but at length it had become a
feeling natural to, and in keeping with, a scheme of life in which
they saw little of each other, because they saw so much of other
people. His primitive soul had rebelled against it at first, not
bitterly, but confusedly; because he knew that he did not know why it
was; and he thought that if he had patience he would come to
understand it in time. But the understanding did not come, and on that
ominous, prophetic day before they went to Glencader, the day when Ian
Stafford had dined with Jasmine alone after their meeting in Regent
Street, there had been a wild, aching protest against it all. Not
against Jasmine--he did not blame her; he only realized that she was
different from what he had thought she was; that they were both
different from what they had been; and that--the light had gone from
the evening sky.

But from first to last he had always trusted her. It had never crossed
his mind, when she "made up" to men in her brilliant, provoking,
intoxicating way, that there was any lack of loyalty to him. It simply
never crossed his mind. She was his wife, his girl, his flower which
he had plucked; and there it was, for the universe to see, for the
universe to heed as a matter of course. For himself, since he had
married her, he had never thought of another woman for an instant,
except either to admire or to criticize her; and his criticism was, as
Jasmine had said, "infantile." The sum of it was, he was married to
the woman of his choice, she was married to the man of her choice; and
there it was, there it was, a great, eternal, settled fact. It was not
a thing for speculation or doubt or reconsideration.

Always, when he had been troubled of late years, his mind had
involuntarily flown to South Africa, as a bird flies to its nest in
the distant trees for safety, from the spoiler or from the storm. And
now, as he paced the streets with heavy, almost blundering tread,--so
did the weight of slander drag him down--his thoughts suddenly saw a
picture which had gone deep down into his soul in far-off days. It was
after a struggle with Lobengula, when blood had been shed and lives
lost, and the backbone of barbarism had been broken south of the
Zambesi for ever and ever and ever. He had buried two companions in
arms whom he had loved in that way which only those know who face
danger on the plain, by the river, in the mountain, or on the open
road together. After they had been laid to rest in the valley where
the great baboons came down to watch the simple cortege pass, where a
stray lion stole across the path leading to the grave, he had gone on
alone to a spot in the Matoppos, since made famous and sacred.

Where John Cecil Rhodes sleeps on that high plateau of convex hollow
stone, with the great natural pillars standing round like sentinels,
and all the rugged unfinished hills tumbling away to an unpeopled
silence, he came that time to rest his sorrowing soul. The woods, the
wild animal life, had been left behind, and only a peaceful middle
world between God and man greeted his stern eyes.

Now, here in London, at that corner where the lonely white statue
stands by Londonderry House, as he moved in a dream of pain, with vast
weights like giant manacles hampering every footstep, inwardly raging
that into his sweet garden of home the vile elements of slander had
been thrown, yet with a terrible and vague fear that something had
gone terribly wrong with him, that far-off day spent at the Matoppos
flashed upon his sight.

Through streets upon streets he had walked, far, far out of his way,
subconsciously giving himself time to recover before he reached his
home; until the green quiet of Hyde Park, the soft depths of its empty
spaces, the companionable and commendable trees, greeted his
senses. Then, here, suddenly there swam before his eyes the bright sky
over those scarred and jagged hills beyond the Matoppos, purple and
grey, and red and amethyst and gold, and his soul's sight went out
over the interminable distance of loneliness and desolation which only
ended where the world began again, the world of fighting men. He saw
once more that tumbled waste of primeval creation, like a crazed sea
agitated by some Horror underneath, and suddenly transfixed in its
plunging turmoil--a frozen concrete sorrow, with all active pain
gone. He heard the loud echo of his feet upon that hollow plateau of
rock, with convex skin of stone laid upon convex skin, and then
suddenly the solid rock which gave no echo under his tread, where
Rhodes lies buried. He saw all at once, in the shining horizon at
different points, black, angry, marauding storms arise and roar and
burst: while all the time above his head there was nothing but sweet
sunshine, into which the mists of the distant storms drifted, and
rainbows formed above him. Upon those hollow rocks the bellow of the
storms was like the rumbling of the wheels of a million gun-carriages;
and yet high overhead there were only the bright sun and faint drops
of rain falling like mystic pearls.

And then followed--he could hear it again, so plainly, as his eyes now
sought the friendly shades of the beeches and the elms yonder in Hyde
Park!--upon the air made denser by the storm, the call of a lonely
bird from one side of the valley. The note was deep and strong and
clear, like the bell-bird of the Australian salt-bush plains beyond
the Darling River, and it rang out across the valley, as though a soul
desired its mate; and then was still. A moment, and there came across
the valley from the other side, stealing deep sweetness from the
hollow rocks, the answer of the bird which had heard her master's
call. Answering, she called too, the viens ici of kindred things; and
they came nearer and nearer and nearer, until at last their two voices
were one.

In that wild space there had been worked out one of the great wonders
of creation, and under the dim lamps of Park Lane, in his black,
shocked mood, Rudyard recalled it all by no will of his own. Upon his
eye and brain the picture had been registered, and in its appointed
time, with an automatic suggestion of which he was ignorant and
innocent, it came to play its part and to transform him.

The thought of it all was like a cool hand laid upon his burning
brow. It gave him a glimpse of the morning of life.

The light was gone from the evening sky: but was it gone forever?

As he entered his house now he saw upon a Spanish table in the big
hall a solitary bunch of white roses--a touch of simplicity in an area
of fine artifice. Regarding it a moment, black thoughts receded, and
choosing a flower from the vase he went slowly up the stairs to
Jasmine's room.

He would give her this rose as the symbol of his faith and belief in
her, and then tell her frankly what he had heard at De Lancy Scovel's
house.

For the moment it did not occur to him that she might not be at
home. It gave him a shock when he opened the door and found her room
empty. On her bed, like a mesh of white clouds, lay the soft linen and
lace and the delicate clothes of the night; and by the bed were her
tiny blue slippers to match the blue dressing-gown. Some gracious
things for morning wear hung over a chair; an open book with a little
cluster of violets and a tiny mirror lay upon a table beside a sofa; a
footstool was placed at a considered angle for her well-known seat on
the sofa where the soft-blue lamp-shade threw the light upon her book;
and a little desk with dresden-china inkstand and penholder had little
pockets of ribbon-tied letters and bills--even business had an air of
taste where Jasmine was. And there on a table beside her bed was a
large silver-framed photograph of himself turned at an angle toward
the pillow where she would lay her head.

How tender and delicate and innocent it all was! He looked round the
room with new eyes, as though seeing everything for the first
time. There was another photograph of himself on her dressing-table.
It had no companion there; but on another table near were many
photographs; four of women, the rest of men: celebrities, old friends
like Ian Stafford--and M. Mennaval.

His face hardened. De Lancy Scovel's black slander swept through his
veins like fire again, his heart came up in his throat, his fingers
clinched.

Presently, as he stood with clouded face and mist in his eyes,
Jasmine's maid entered, and, surprised at seeing him, retreated again,
but her eyes fastened for a moment strangely on the white rose he held
in his hand. Her glance drew his own attention to it again. Going over
to the gracious and luxurious bed, with its blue silk canopy, he laid
the white rose on her pillow. Somehow it was more like an offering to
the dead than a lover's tribute to the living. His eyes were fogged,
his lips were set. But all he was then in mind and body and soul he
laid with the rose on her pillow.

As he left the rose there, his eyes wandered slowly over this retreat
of rest and sleep: white robe-de-nuit, blue silk canopy, blue
slippers, blue dressing-gown--all blue, the colour in which he had
first seen her.

Slowly he turned away at last and went to his own room. But the
picture followed him. It kept shining in his eyes. Krool's face
suddenly darkened it.

"You not ring, Baas," Krool said.

Without a word Rudyard waved him away, a sudden and unaccountable fury
in his mind. Why did the sight of Krool vex him so?

"Come back," he said, angrily, before the door of the bedroom closed.

Krool returned.

"Weren't there any cables? Why didn't you come to Mr. Scovel's at
midnight, as I told you?"

"Baas, I was there at midnight, but they all say you come home,
Baas. There the cable--two." He pointed to the dressing-table.

Byng snatched them, tore them open, read them.

One had the single word, "Tomorrow." The other said, "Prepare." The
code had been abandoned. Tragedy needs few words.

They meant that to-morrow Kruger's ultimatum would be delivered and
that the worst must be faced.

He glanced at the cables in silence, while Krool watched him narrowly,
covertly, with a depth of purpose which made his face uncanny.

"That will do, Krool; wake me at seven," he said, quietly, but with
suppressed malice in his tone.

Why was it that at that moment he could, with joy, have taken Krool by
the neck and throttled him? All the bitterness, anger and rage that he
had felt an hour ago concentrated themselves upon Krool--without
reason, without cause. Or was it that his deeper Other Self had
whispered something to his mind about Krool--something terrible and
malign?

In this new mood he made up his mind that he would not see Jasmine
till the morning. How late she was! It was one o'clock, and yet this
was not the season. She had not gone to a ball, nor were these the
months of late parties.

As he tossed in his bed and his head turned restlessly on his pillow,
Krool's face kept coming before him, and it was the last thing he saw,
ominous and strange, before he fell into a heavy but troubled sleep.

Perhaps the most troubled moment of the night came an hour after he
went to bed.

Then it was that a face bent over him for a minute, a fair face, with
little lines contracting the ripe lips, which were redder than usual,
with eyes full of a fevered brightness. But how harmonious and sweetly
ordered was the golden hair above! Nothing was gone from its lustre,
nothing robbed it of its splendour. It lay upon her forehead like a
crown. In its richness it seemed a little too heavy for the tired face
beneath, almost too imperial for so slight and delicate a figure.

Rudyard stirred in his sleep, murmuring as she leaned over him; and
his head fell away from her hand as she stretched out her fingers with
a sudden air of pity--of hopelessness, as it might seem from her
look. His face restlessly turned to the wall--a vexed, stormy, anxious
face and head, scarred by the whip of that overlord more cruel and
tyrannous than Time, the Miserable Mind.

She drew back with a little shudder. "Poor Ruddy!" she said, as she
had said that evening when Ian Stafford came to her after the
estranging and scornful years, and she had watched Rudyard leave
her--to her fate and to her folly.

"Poor Ruddy!"

With a sudden frenzied motion of her hands she caught her breath, as
though some pain had seized her. Her eyes almost closed with the shame
that reached out from her heart, as though to draw the veil of her
eyelids over the murdered thing before her--murdered hope, slaughtered
peace: the peace of that home they had watched burn slowly before
their eyes in the years which the locust had eaten.

Which the locust had eaten--yes, it was that. More than once she had
heard Rudyard tell of a day on the veld when the farmer surveyed his
abundant fields with joy, with the gay sun flaunting it above; and
suddenly there came a white cloud out of the west, which made a weird
humming, a sinister sound. It came with shining scales glistening in
the light and settled on the land acre upon acre, morgen upon morgen;
and when it rose again the fields, ready for the harvest, were like a
desert--the fields which the locust had eaten. So had the years been,
in which Fortune had poured gold and opportunity and unlimited choice
into her lap. She had used them all; but she had forgotten to look for
the Single Secret, which, like a key, unlocks all doors in the House
of Happiness.

"Poor Ruddy!" she said, but even as she said it for the second time a
kind of anger seemed to seize her.

"Oh, you fool--you fool!" she whispered, fiercely. "What did you know
of women! Why didn't you make me be good? Why didn't you master
me--the steel on the wrist--the steel on the wrist!"

With a little burst of misery and futile rage she went from the room,
her footsteps uneven, her head bent. One of the open letters she
carried dropped from her hand onto the floor of the hall outside. She
did not notice it. But as she passed inside her door a shadowy figure
at the end of the hall watched her, saw the letter drop, and moved
stealthily forward towards it. It was Krool.

How heavy her head was! Her worshipping maid, near dead with fatigue,
watched her furtively, but avoided the eyes in the mirror which had a
half-angry look, a look at once disturbed and elated, reckless and
pitiful. Lablanche was no reader of souls, but there was something
here beyond the usual, and she moved and worked with unusual
circumspection and lightness of touch. Presently she began to unloose
the coils of golden hair; but Jasmine stopped her with a gesture of
weariness.

"No, don't," she said. "I can't stand your touch tonight,
Lablanche. I'll do the rest myself. My head aches so. Good-night."

"I will be so light with it, madame," Lablanche said, protestingly.

"No, no. Please go. But the morning, quite early."

"The hour, madame?"

"When the letters come, as soon as the letters come, Lablanche--the
first post. Wake me then."

She watched the door close, then turned to the mirror in front of her
and looked at herself with eyes in which brooded a hundred thoughts
and feelings: thoughts contradictory, feelings opposed, imaginings
conflicting, reflections that changed with each moment; and all under
the spell of a passion which had become in the last few hours the most
powerful influence her life had ever known. Right or wrong, and it was
wrong, horribly wrong; wise or unwise, and how could the wrong be
wise! she knew she was under a spell more tyrannous than death,
demanding more sacrifices than the gods of Hellas.

Self-indulgent she had been, reckless and wilful and terribly modern,
taking sweets where she found them. She had tried to squeeze the
orange dry, in the vain belief that Wealth and Beauty can take what
they want, when they want it, and that happiness will come by
purchase; only to find one day that the thing you have bought, like a
slave that revolts, stabs you in your sleep, and you wake with
wide-eyed agony only to die, or to live--with the light gone from the
evening sky.

Suddenly, with the letters in her hand with which she had entered the
room, she saw the white rose on her pillow. Slowly she got up from the
dressing-table and went over to the bed in a hushed kind of way. With
a strange, inquiring, half-shrinking look she regarded the flower. One
white rose. It was not there when she left. It had been brought from
the hall below, from the great bunch on the Spanish table. Those white
roses, this white rose, had come from one who, selfish as he was, knew
how to flatter a woman's vanity. From that delicate tribute of
flattery and knowledge Rudyard had taken this flowering stem and
brought it to her pillow.

It was all too malevolently cynical. Her face contracted in pain and
shame. She had a soul to which she had never given its chance. It had
never bloomed. Her abnormal wilfulness, her insane love of pleasure,
her hereditary impulses, had been exercised at the expense of the
great thing in her, the soul so capable of memorable and beautiful
deeds.

As she looked at the flower, a sense of the path by which she had
come, of what she had left behind, of what was yet to chance,
shuddered into her heart.

That a flower given by Adrian Fellowes should be laid upon her pillow
by her husband, by Rudyard Byng, was too ghastly or too devilishly
humorous for words; and both aspects of the thing came to her. Her
face became white, and almost mechanically she put the letters she
held on a writing-table near; then coming to the bed again she looked
at the rose with a kind of horror. Suddenly, however, she caught it
up, and bursting into a laugh which was shrill and bitter she threw it
across the room. Still laughing hysterically, with her golden hair
streaming about her head, folding her round like a veil which reached
almost to her ankles, she came back to the chair at the dressing-table
and sat down.

Slowly drawing the wonderful soft web of hair over her shoulders, she
began to weave it into one wide strand, which grew and grew in length
till it was like a great rope of spun gold. Inch by inch, foot by foot
it grew, until at last it lay coiled in her lap like a golden serpent,
with a kind of tension which gave it life, such as Medusa's hair must
have known as the serpent-life entered into it. There is--or was--in
Florence a statue of Medusa, seated, in her fingers a strand of her
hair, which is beginning to coil and bend and twist before her
horror-stricken eyes; and this statue flashed before Jasmine's eyes as
she looked at the loose ends of gold falling beyond the blue ribbon
with which she had tied the shining rope.

With the mad laughter of a few moments before still upon her lips, she
held the flying threads in her hand, and so strained was her mind that
it would not have caused her surprise if they had wound round her
fingers or given forth forked tongues. She laughed again--a low and
discordant laugh it was now.

"Such imaginings--I think I must be mad," she murmured.

Then she leaned her elbows on the dressing-table and looked at herself
in the glass.

"Am I not mad?" she asked herself again. Then there stole across her
face a strange, far-away look, bringing a fresh touch of beauty to it,
and flooding it for a moment with that imaginative look which had been
her charm as a girl, a look of far-seeing and wonder and strange
light.

"I wonder--if I had had a mother!" she said, wistfully, her chin in
her hand. "If my mother had lived, what would I have been?"

She reached out to a small table near, and took from it a miniature at
which she looked with painful longing. "My dear, my very dear, you
were so sweet, so good," she said. "Am I your daughter, your own
daughter--me? Ah, sweetheart mother, come back to me! For God's sake
come--now. Speak to me if you can. Are you so very far away?
Whisper--only whisper, and I shall hear.

"Oh, she would, she would, if she could!" her voice wailed, softly.
"She would if she could, I know. I was her youngest child, her only
little girl. But there is no coming back. And maybe there is no going
forth; only a blackness at the last, when all stops--all stops, for
ever and ever and ever, amen! . . .Amen--so be it. Ah, I even can't
believe in that! I can't even believe in God and Heaven and the
hereafter. I am a pagan, with a pagan's heart and a pagan's ways."

She shuddered again and closed her eyes for a moment. "Ruddy had a
glimpse, one glimpse, that day, the day that Ian came back. Ruddy said
to me that day, 'If you had lived a thousand years ago you would have
had a thousand lovers.' . . . And it is true--by all the gods of all
the worlds, it is true. Pleasure, beauty, is all I ever cared
for--pleasure, beauty, and the Jasmine-flower. And Ian--and Ian, yes,
Ian! I think I had soul enough for one true thing, even if I was not
true."

She buried her face in her hands for a moment, as though to hide a
great burning.

"But, oh, I wonder if I did ever love Ian, even! I wonder.... Not
then, not then when I deserted him and married Rudyard, but now--now?
Do--do I love him even now, as we were to-day with his arms round me,
or is it only beauty and pleasure and--me? . . . Are they really happy
who believe in God and live like--like her?" She gazed at her mother's
portrait again. "Yes, she was happy, but only for a moment, and then
she was gone--so soon. And I shall never see her, I who never saw her
with eyes that recall.... And if I could see her, would I? I am a
pagan--would I try to be like her, if I could? I never really prayed,
because I never truly felt there was a God that was not all space, and
that was all soul and understanding. And what is to come of it, or
what will become of me? . . . I can't go back, and going on is
madness. Yes, yes, it is madness, I know--madness and badness--and
dust at the end of it all. Beauty gone, pleasure gone.... I do not
even love pleasure now as I did. It has lost its flavour; and I do not
even love beauty as I did. How well I know it! I used to climb hills
to see a sunset; I used to walk miles to find the wood anemones and
the wild violets; I used to worship a pretty child . . . a pretty
child!"

She shrank back in her chair and pondered darkly. "A pretty
child.... Other people's pretty children, and music and art and trees
and the sea, and the colours of the hills, and the eyes of wild
animals . . and a pretty child. I wonder, I wonder if--"

But she got no farther with that thought. "I shall hate everything on
earth if it goes from me, the beauty of things; and I feel that it is
going. The freshness of sense has gone, somehow. I am not stirred as I
used to be, not by the same things. If I lose that sense I shall kill
myself. Perhaps that would be the easiest way now. Just the overdose
of--"

She took a little phial from the drawer of the dressing-table. "Just
the tiny overdose and 'good-bye, my lover, good-bye.'" Again that hard
little laugh of bitterness broke from her. "Or that needle Mr. Mappin
had at Glencader. A thrust of the point, and in an instant gone, and
no one to know, no one to discover, no one to add blame to blame, to
pile shame upon shame. Just blackness--blackness all at once, and no
light or anything any more. The fruit all gone from the trees, the
garden all withered, the bower all ruined, the children all dead--the
pretty children all dead forever, the pretty children that never were
born, that never lived in Jasmine's garden."

As there had come to Rudyard premonition of evil, so to-night, in the
hour of triumph, when, beyond peradventure, she had got for Ian
Stafford what would make his career great, what through him gave
England security in her hour of truth, there came now to her something
of the real significance of it all.

She had got what she wanted. Her pride had been appeased, her vanity
satisfied, her intellect flattered, her skill approved, and Ian was
hers. But the cost?

Words from Swinburne's threnody on Baudelaire came to her mind. How
often she had quoted them for their sheer pagan beauty! It was the
kind of beauty which most appealed to her, which responded to the
element of fatalism in her, the sense of doom always with her since
she was a child, in spite of her gaiety, her wit, and her native
eloquence. She had never been happy, she had never had a real
illusion, never aught save the passion of living, the desire to
conquer unrest:

"And now, no sacred staff shall break in blossom,
No choral salutation lure to light
The spirit sick with perfume and sweet night,
And Love's tired eyes and hands and barren bosom.
There is no help for these things, none to mend and none to mar
Not all our songs, oh, friend, can make Death clear or make Life durable
But still with rose and ivy and wild vine,
And with wild song about this dust of thine,
At least I fill a place where white dreams dwell,
And wreathe an unseen shrine."

"'And Love's tired eyes and hands and barren bosom. . . . There is no
help for these things, none to mend and none to mar....'" A sob rose
in her throat. "Oh, the beauty of it, the beauty and the misery and
the despair of it!" she murmured.

Slowly she wound and wound the coil of golden hair about her neck,
drawing it tighter, fold on fold, tighter and tighter.

"This would be the easiest way--this," she whispered. "By my own hair!
Beauty would have its victim then. No one would kiss it any more,
because it killed a woman. . . . No one would kiss it any more."

She felt the touch of Ian Stafford's lips upon it, she felt his face
buried in it. Her own face suffused, then Adrian Fellowes' white rose,
which Rudyard had laid upon her pillow, caught her eye where it lay on
the floor. With a cry as of a hurt animal she ran to her bed, crawled
into it, and huddled down in the darkness, shivering and afraid.

Something had discovered her to herself for the first time. Was it her
own soul? Had her Other Self, waking from sleep in the eternal spaces,
bethought itself and come to whisper and warn and help? Or was it
Penalty, or Nemesis, or that Destiny which will have its toll for all
it gives of beauty, or pleasure, or pride, or place, or pageantry?

"Love's tired eyes and hands and barren bosom"--

The words kept ringing in her ears. They soothed her at last into a
sleep which brought no peace, no rest or repose.



CHAPTER XVIII

LANDRASSY'S LAST STROKE


Midnight--one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock. Big Ben boomed the
hours, and from St. James's Palace came the stroke of the quarters,
lighter, quicker, almost pensive in tone. From St. James's Street
below came no sounds at last. The clatter of the hoofs of horses had
ceased, the rumble of drays carrying their night freights, the shouts
of the newsboys making sensation out of rumours made in a newspaper
office, had died away. Peace came, and a silver moon gave forth a soft
light, which embalmed the old thoroughfare, and added a tenderness to
its workaday dignity. In only one window was there a light at three
o'clock. It was the window of Ian Stafford's sitting-room.

He had not left the Foreign Office till nearly ten o'clock, then had
had a light supper at his club, had written letters there, and after a
long walk up and down the Mall had, with reluctant feet, gone to his
chambers.

The work which for years he had striven to do for England had been
accomplished. The Great Understanding was complete. In the words of
the secretary of the American Embassy, "Mennaval had delivered the
goods," and an arrangement had been arrived at, completed this very
night, which would leave England free to face her coming trial in
South Africa without fear of trouble on the flank or in the rear.

The key was turned in the lock, and that lock had been the original
device and design of Ian Stafford. He had done a great work for
civilization and humanity; he had made improbable, if not impossible,
a European war. The Kaiser knew it, Franz Joseph knew it, the Czar
knew it; the White House knew it, and its master nodded with
satisfaction, for John Bull was waking up--"getting a move on."
America might have her own family quarrel with John Bull, but when it
was John Bull versus the world, not even James G. Blaine would have
been prepared to see the old lion too deeply wounded. Even Landrassy,
ambassador of Slavonia, had smiled grimly when he met Ian Stafford on
the steps of the Moravian Embassy. He was artist enough to appreciate
a well-played game, and, in any case, he had had done all that mortal
man could in the way of intrigue and tact and device. He had worked
the international press as well as it had ever been worked; he had
distilled poison here and rosewater there; he had again and again
baffled the British Foreign Office, again and again cut the ground
from under Ian Stafford's feet; and if he could have staved off the
pact, the secret international pact, by one more day, he would have
gained the victory for himself, for his country, for the alliance
behind him.

One day, but one day, and the world would never have heard of Ian
Stafford. England would then have approached her conflict with the cup
of trembling at her lips, and there would be a new disposition of
power in Europe, a new dominating force in the diplomacy and the
relations of the peoples of the world. It was Landrassy's own last
battle-field of wit and scheming, of intellect and ambition. If he
failed in this, his sun would set soon. He was too old to carry on
much longer. He could not afford to wait. He was at the end of his
career, and he had meant this victory to be the crown of his long
services to Slavonia and the world.

But to him was opposed a man who was at the beginning of his career,
who needed this victory to give him such a start as few men get in
that field of retarded rewards, diplomacy. It had been a man at the
end of the journey, and a man at the beginning, measuring skill,
playing as desperate a game as was ever played. If Landrassy
won--Europe a red battle-field, England at bay; if Ian Stafford
won--Europe at peace, England secure. Ambition and patriotism
intermingled, and only He who made human nature knew how much was pure
patriotism and how much pure ambition. It was a great stake. On this
day of days to Stafford destiny hung shivering, each hour that passed
was throbbing with unparalleled anxiety, each minute of it was to be
the drum-beat of a funeral march or the note of a Te Deum.

Not more uncertain was the roulette-wheel spinning in De Lancy
Scovel's house than the wheel of diplomacy which Ian Stafford had set
spinning. Rouge et noire--it was no more, no less. But Ian had won;
England had won. Black had been beaten.

Landrassy bowed suavely to Ian as they met outside Mennaval's door in
the early evening of this day when the business was accomplished, the
former coming out, the latter going in.

"Well, Stafford," Landrassy said in smooth tones and with a jerk of
the head backward, "the tables are deserted, the croupier is going
home. But perhaps you have not come to play?"

Ian smiled lightly. "I've come to get my winnings--as you say," he
retorted.

Landrassy seemed to meditate pensively. "Ah yes, ah yes, but I'm not
sure that Mennaval hasn't bolted with the bank and your winnings,
too!"

His meaning was clear--and hateful. Before Ian had a chance to reply,
Landrassy added in a low, confidential voice, saturated with sardonic
suggestion, "To tell you the truth, I had ceased to reckon with women
in diplomacy. I thought it was dropped with the Second Empire; but you
have started a new dispensation--evidemment, evidemment. Still
Mennaval goes home with your winnings. Eh bien, we have to pay for our
game! Allons gai!"

Before Ian could reply--and what was there to say to insult couched in
such highly diplomatic language?--Landrassy had stepped sedately away,
swinging his gold-headed cane and humming to himself.

"Duelling had its merits," Ian said to himself, as soon as he had
recovered from the first effect of the soft, savage insolence. "There
is no way to deal with our Landrassys except to beat them, as I have
done, in the business of life."

He tossed his head with a little pardonable pride, as it were, to
soothe his heart, and then went in to Mennaval. There, in the
arrangements to be made with Moravia he forgot the galling incident;
and for hours afterward it was set aside. When, however, he left his
club, his supper over, after scribbling letters which he put in his
pocket absent-mindedly, and having completed his work at the Foreign
Office, it came back to his mind with sudden and scorching force.

Landrassy's insult to Jasmine rankled as nothing had ever rankled in
his mind before, not even that letter which she had written him so
long ago announcing her intended marriage to Byng. He was fresh from
the first triumph of his life: he ought to be singing with joy,
shouting to the four corners of the universe his pride, walking on
air, finding the world a good, kind place made especially for him--his
oyster to open, his nut which he had cracked; yet here he was fresh
from the applause of his chief, with a strange heaviness at his heart,
a gloom upon his mind.

Victory in his great fight--and love; he had them both and so he said
to himself as he opened the door of his rooms and entered upon their
comfort and quiet. He had love, and he had success; and the one had
helped to give him the other, helped in a way which was wonderful, and
so brilliantly skilful and delicate. As he poured out a glass of
water, however, the thought stung him that the nature of the success
and its value depended on the nature of the love and its value. As the
love was, so was the success, no higher, no different, since the one,
in some deep way, begot the other. Yes, it was certain that the thing
could not have been done at this time without Jasmine, and if not at
this time, then the chances were a thousand to one that it never could
be done at any time; for Britain's enemies would be on her back while
she would have to fight in South Africa. The result of that would mean
a shattered, humiliated land, with a people in pawn to the will of a
rising power across the northern sea. That it had been prevented just
in the nick of time was due to Jasmine, his fate, the power that must
beat in his veins till the end of all things.

Yet what was the end to be? To-day he had buried his face in her
wonderful cloud of hair and had kissed her; and with it, almost on the
instant, had come the end of his great struggle for England and
himself; and for that he was willing to pay any price that time and
Nemesis might demand--any price save one.

As he thought of that one price his lips tightened, his brow clouded,
his eyes half closed with shame.

Rudyard Byng was his friend, whose bread he had eaten, whom he had
known since they were boys at school. He remembered acutely Rudyard's
words to him that fateful night when he had dined with Jasmine
alone--"You will have much to talk about, to say to each other, such
old friends as you are." He recalled how Rudyard had left them,
trusting them, happy in the thought that Jasmine would have a pleasant
evening with the old friend who had first introduced him to her, and
that the old friend would enjoy his eager hospitality. Rudyard had
blown his friend's trumpet wherever men would listen to him; had
proclaimed Stafford as the coming man: and this was what he had done
to Rudyard!

This was what he had done; but what did he propose to do? What of the
future? To go on in miserable intrigue, twisting the nature, making
demands upon life out of all those usual ways in which walk love and
companionship--paths that lead through gardens of poppies, maybe, but
finding grey wilderness at the end? Never, never the right to take the
loved one by the hand before all the world and say: "We two are one,
and the reckoning of the world must be made with both." Never to have
the right to stand together in pride before the wide-eyed many and
say: "See what you choose to see, say what you choose to say, do what
you choose to do, we do not care." The open sharing of worldly
success; the inner joys which the world may not see--these things
could not be for Jasmine and for him.

Yet he loved her. Every fibre in his being thrilled to the thought of
her. But as his passion beat like wild music in his veins, a blindness
suddenly stole into his sight, and in deep agitation he got up, opened
the window, and looked out into the night. For long he stood gazing
into the quiet street, and watched a daughter of the night, with
dilatory steps and neglected mien, go up towards the more frequented
quarter of Piccadilly. Life was grim in so much of it, futile in more,
feeble at the best, foolish in the light of a single generation or a
single century or a thousand years. It was only reasonable in the vast
proportions of eternity. It had only little sips of happiness to give,
not long draughts of joy. Who drank deep, long draughts--who of all
the men and women he had ever known? Who had had the primrose path
without the rain of fire, the cinders beneath the feet, the gins and
the nets spread for them?

Yet might it not be that here and there people were permanently happy?
And had things been different, might not he and Jasmine have been of
the radiant few? He desired her above all things; he was willing to
sacrifice all--all for her, if need be; and yet there was that which
he could not, would not face. All or nothing--all or nothing. If he
must drink of the cup of sorrow and passion mixed, then it would be
from the full cup.

With a stifled exclamation he sat down and began to write. Again and
again he stopped to think, his face lined and worn and old; then he
wrote on and on. Ambition, hope, youth, the Foreign Office, the
chancelleries of Europe, the perils of impending war, were all
forgotten, or sunk into the dusky streams of subconsciousness. One
thought dominated him. He was playing the game that has baffled all
men, the game of eluding destiny; and, like all men, he must break his
heart in the playing.

"Jasmine," he wrote, "this letter, this first real letter of love
which I have ever written you, will tell you how great that love
is. It will tell you, too, what it means to me, and what I see before
us. To-day I surrendered to you all of me that would be worth your
keeping, if it was so that you might take and keep it. When I kissed
you, I set the seal upon my eternal offering to you. You have given me
success. It is for that I thank you with all my soul, but it is not
for that I love you. Love flows from other fountains than
gratitude. It rises from the well which has its springs at the
beginning of the world, where those beings lived who loved before
there were any gods at all, or any faiths, or any truths save the
truth of being.

"But it is because what I feel belongs to something in me deeper than
I have ever known that, since we parted a few hours ago, I see all in
a new light. You have brought to me what perhaps could only have come
as it did--through fire and cloud and storm. I did not will it so,
indeed, I did not wish it so, as you know; but it came in spite of
all. And I shall speak to you of it as to my own soul. I want no
illusions, no self-deception, no pretense to be added to my debt to
you. With wide-open eyes I want to look at it. I know that this love
of mine for you is my fate, the first and the last passion of my
soul. And to have known it with all its misery,--for misery there must
be; misery, Jasmine, there is--to have known it, to have felt it, the
great overwhelming thing, goes far to compensate for all the loss it
so terribly exposes. It has brought me, too, the fruit of life's
ambition. With the full revelation of all that I feel for you came
that which gives me place in the world, confers on me the right to
open doors which otherwise were closed to me. You have done this for
me, but what have I done for you? One thing at least is forced upon
me, which I must do now while I have the sight to see and the mind to
understand.

"I cannot go on with things as they are. I cannot face Rudyard and
give myself to hourly deception. I think that yesterday, a month ago,
I could have done so, but not now. I cannot walk the path which will
be paved with things revolting to us both. My love for you, damnable
as it would seem in the world's eyes, prevents it. It is not small
enough to be sustained or made secure in its furfilment by the devices
of intrigue. And I know that if it is so with me, it must be a
thousand times so with you. Your beauty would fade and pass under the
stress and meanness of it; your heart would reproach me even when you
smiled; you would learn to hate me even when you were resting upon my
hungry heart. You would learn to loathe the day when you said, Let me
help you. Yet, Jasmine, I know that you are mine; that you were mine
long ago, even when you did not know, and were captured by opportunity
to do what, with me, you felt you could not do. You were captured by
it; but it has not proved what it promised. You have not made the best
of the power into which you came, and you could not do so, because the
spring from which all the enriching waters of married life flow was
dry. Poor Jasmine--poor illusion of a wild young heart which reached
out for the golden city of the mirage!

"But now.... Two ways spread out, and only two, and one of these two I
must take--for your sake. There is the third way, but I will not take
it--for your sake and for my own. I will not walk in it ever. Already
my feet are burned by the fiery path, already I am choked by the smoke
and the ashes. No. I cannot atone for what has been, but I can try and
gather up the chances that are left.

"You must come with me away--away, to start life afresh, somewhere,
somehow; or I must go alone on some enterprise from which I shall not
return. You cannot bear what is, but, together, having braved the
world, we could look into each other's eyes without shrinking, knowing
that we had been at least true to each other, true at the last to the
thing that binds us, taking what Fate gave without repining, because
we had faced all that the world could do against us. It would mean
that I should leave diplomacy forever, give up all that so far has
possessed me in the business of life; but I should not lament. I have
done the one big thing I wanted to do, I have cut a swath in the
field. I have made some principalities and powers reckon with me. It
may be I have done all I was meant to do in doing that--it may be. In
any case, the thing I did would stand as an accomplished work--it
would represent one definite and original thing; one piece of work in
design all my own, in accomplishment as much yours as mine.... To go
then--together--with only the one big violence to the conventions of
the world, and take the law into our own hands? Rudyard, who
understands Life's violence, would understand that; what he could
never understand would be perpetual artifice, unseemly secretiveness.
He himself would have been a great filibuster in the olden days;
he would have carried off the wives and daughters of the chiefs and
kings he conquered; but he would never have stolen into the secret
garden at night and filched with the hand of the sneak-thief--never.

"To go with me--away, and start afresh. There will be always work to
do, always suffering humanity to be helped. We should help because we
would have suffered, we should try to set right the one great mistake
you made in not coming to me and so furfilling the old promise. To set
that error right, even though it be by wronging Rudyard by one great
stroke--that is better than hourly wronging him now with no surcease
of that wrong. No, no, this cannot go on. You could not have it so. I
seem to feel that you are writing to me now, telling me to begone
forever, saying that you had given me gifts--success and love; and now
to go and leave you in peace.

"Peace, Jasmine, it is that we cry for, pray for, adjure the heavens
for in the end. And all this vast, passionate love of mine is the
strife of the soul for peace, for fruition.

"That peace we may have in another way: that I should go forever, now,
before the terrible bond of habit has done its work, and bound us in
chains that never fall, that even remain when love is dead and gone,
binding the cold cadre to the living pain. To go now, with something
accomplished, and turn my back forever on the world, with one last
effort to do the impossible thing for some great cause, and fail and
be lost forever--do you not understand? Face it, Jasmine, and try to
see it in its true light.... I have a friend, John Caxton--you know
him. He is going to the Antarctic to find the futile thing, but the
necessary thing so far as the knowledge of the world is
concerned. With him, then, that long quiet and in the far white spaces
to find peace--forever.

"You? . . . Ah, Jasmine, habit, the habit of enduring me, is not
fixed, and in my exit there would be the agony of the moment, and then
the comforting knowledge that I had done my best to set things
right. Perhaps it is the one way to set things right; the fairest to
you, the kindest, and that which has in it most love. The knowledge of
a great love ended--yours and mine--would help you to give what you
can give with fuller soul. And, maybe, to be happy with Rudyard at the
last! Maybe, to be happy with him, without this wonderful throbbing
pulse of being, but with quiet, and to get a measure of what is due to
you in the scheme of things. Destiny gives us in life so much and no
more: to some a great deal in a little time, to others a little over a
great deal of time, but never the full cup and the shining sky over
long years. One's share small it must be, but one's share! And it may
be, in what has come to-day, in the hour of my triumph, in the
business of life, in the one hour of revealing love, it may be I have
had my share.... And if that is so, then peace should be my goal, and
peace I can have yonder in the snows. No one would guess that it was
not accident, and I should feel sure that I had stopped in time to
save you from the worst. But it must be the one or the other.

"The third way I cannot, will not, take, nor would you take it
willingly. It would sear your heart and spirit, it would spoil all
that makes you what you are. Jasmine, once for all I am your lover and
your friend. I give you love and I give you friendship--whatever
comes; always that, always friendship. Tempus fugit sed amicitia est.

"In my veins is a river of fire, and my heart is wrenched with pain;
but in my soul is that which binds me to you, together or apart, in
life, in death.... Good-night.... Good-morrow.

"Your Man,

"IAN.

"P.S.--I will come for your reply at eleven to-morrow.

"IAN."

He folded the letter slowly and placed it in an envelope which was
lying loose on the desk with the letters he had written at the
Trafalgar Club, and had forgotten to post. When he had put the letter
inside the envelope and stamped it, he saw that the envelope was one
carrying the mark of the Club. By accident he had brought it with the
letters written there. He hesitated a moment, then refrained from
opening the letter again, and presently went out into the night and
posted all his letters.



CHAPTER XIX

TO-MORROW . . . PREPARE!


Krool did not sleep. What he read in a letter he had found in a
hallway, what he knew of those dark events in South Africa, now to
culminate in a bitter war, and what, with the mysterious psychic
instinct of race, he divined darkly and powerfully, all kept his eyes
unsleeping and his mind disordered. More than any one, he knew of the
inner story of the Baas' vrouw during the past week and years; also he
had knowledge of what was soon to empty out upon the groaning earth
the entrails of South Africa; but how he knew was not to be
discovered. Even Rudyard, who thought he read him like a book, only
lived on the outer boundaries of his character. Their alliance was
only the durable alliance of those who have seen Death at their door,
and together have driven him back.

Barry Whalen had regarded Krool as a spy; all Britishers who came and
went in the path to Rudyard's door had their doubts or their dislike
of him; and to every servant of the household he was a dark and
isolated figure. He never interfered with the acts of his
fellow-servants, except in so far as those acts affected his master's
comfort; and he paid no attention to their words except where they
affected himself.

"When you think it's a ghost, it's only Krool wanderin' w'ere he ain't
got no business," was the angry remark of the upper-housemaid, whom
his sudden appearance had startled in a dim passage one day.

"Lor'! what a turn you give me, Mr. Krool, spookin' about where
there's no call for you to be," she had said to him, and below stairs
she had enlarged upon his enormities greatly.

"And Mrs. Byng, she not like him better as we do," was the comment of
Lablanche, the lady's maid. "A snake in the grass--that is what Madame
think."

Slowly the night passed for Krool. His disturbed brain was like some
dark wood through which flew songless birds with wings of night;
through which sped the furtive dwellers of the grass and the
earth-covert. The real and the imaginative crowded the dark
purlieus. He was the victim of his blood, his beginnings off there
beyond the Vaal, where the veld was swept by the lightning and the
storm, the home of wild dreams, and of a loneliness terrible and
strange, to which the man who once had tasted its awful pleasures
returned and returned again, until he was, at the last, part of its
loneliness, its woeful agitations and its reposeless quiet.

It was not possible for him to think or be like pure white people, to
do as they did. He was a child of the kopje, the spruit, and the dun
veld, where men dwelt with weird beings which were not men--presences
that whispered, telling them of things to come, blowing the warnings
of Destiny across the waste, over thousands and thousands of
miles. Such as he always became apart and lonely because of this
companionship of silence and the unseen. More and more they withdrew
themselves, unwittingly and painfully, from the understanding and
companionship of the usual matter-of-fact, commonplace, sensible
people--the settler, the emigrant, and the British man. Sinister they
became, but with the helplessness of those in whom the under-spirit of
life has been working, estranging them, even against their will, from
the rest of the world.

So Krool, estranged, lonely, even in the heart of friendly, pushing,
jostling London, still was haunted by presences which whispered to
him, not with the old clearness of bygone days, but with confused
utterances and clouded meaning; and yet sufficient in dark suggestion
for him to know that ill happenings were at hand, and that he would be
in the midst of them, an instrument of Fate. All night strange shapes
trooped past his clouded eyes, and more than once, in a half-dream, he
called out to his master to help him as he was helped long ago when
that master rescued him from death.

Long before the rest of the house was stirring, Krool wandered hither
and thither through the luxurious rooms, vainly endeavouring to occupy
himself with his master's clothes, boots, and belongings. At last he
stole into Byng's room and, stooping, laid something on the floor;
then reclaiming the two cables which Rudyard had read, crumpled up,
and thrown away, he crept stealthily from the room. His face had a
sombre and forbidding pleasure as he read by the early morning light
the discarded messages with their thunderous warnings--"To-morrow
. . . Prepare!"

He knew their meaning well enough. "To-morrow" was here, and it would
bring the challenge from Oom Paul to try the might of England against
the iron courage of those to whom the Vierkleur was the symbol of
sovereignty from sea to sea and the ruin of the Rooinek.

"Prepare!" He knew vastly more than those responsible men in position
or in high office, who should know a thousand times as much more. He
knew so much that was useful--to Oom Paul; but what he knew he did not
himself convey, though it reached those who welcomed it eagerly and
grimly. All that he knew, another also near to the Baas also knew, and
knew it before Krool; and reaped the reward of knowing.

Krool did not himself need to betray the Baas direct; and, with the
reasoning of the native in him, he found it possible to let another be
the means and the messenger of betrayal. So he soothed his conscience.

A little time before they had all gone to Glencader, however, he had
discovered something concerning this agent of Paul Kruger in the heart
of the Outlander camp, whom he employed, which had roused in him the
worst passions of an outcast mind. Since then there had been no
trafficking with the traitor--the double traitor, whom he was now
plotting to destroy, not because he was a traitor to his country, but
because he was a traitor to the Baas. In his evil way, he loved his
master as a Caliban might love an Apollo. That his devotion took forms
abnormal and savage in their nature was due to his origin and his
blood. That he plotted to secure the betrayal of the Baas' country and
the Outlander interest, while he would have given his life for the
Baas, was but the twisted sense of a perverted soul.

He had one obsession now--to destroy Adrian Fellowes, his agent for
Paul Kruger in the secret places of British policy and in the house of
the Partners, as it were. But how should it be done? What should be
the means? On the very day in which Oom Paul would send his ultimatum,
the means came to his hand.

"Prepare!" the cable to the Baas had read. The Baas would be prepared
for the thunderbolt to be hurled from Pretoria; but he would have no
preparation for the thunderbolt which would fall at his feet this day
in this house, where white roses welcomed the visitor at the door-way
and the beauty of Titians and Botticellis and Rubens' and Goyas
greeted him in the luxuriant chambers. There would be no preparation
for that war which rages most violently at a fireside and in the human
heart.



CHAPTER XX

THE FURNACE DOOR


It was past nine o'clock when Rudyard wakened. It was nearly ten
before he turned to leave his room for breakfast. As he did so he
stooped and picked up an open letter lying on the floor near the door.

His brain was dazed and still surging with the terrible thoughts which
had agonized him the night before. He was as in a dream, and was only
vaguely conscious of the fugitive letter. He was wondering whether he
would go at once to Jasmine or wait until he had finished
breakfast. Opening the door of his room, he saw the maid entering to
Jasmine with a gown over her arm.

No, he would not go to her till she was alone, till she was dressed
and alone. Then he would tell her all, and take her in his arms, and
talk with her--talk as he had never talked before. Slowly, heavily, he
went to his study, where his breakfast was always eaten. As he sat
down he opened, with uninterested inquiry, the letter he had picked up
inside the door of his room. As he did so he vaguely wondered why
Krool had overlooked it as he passed in and out. Perhaps Krool had
dropped it. His eyes fell on the opening words. . . His face turned
ashen white. A harsh cry broke from him.

At eleven o'clock to the minute Ian Stafford entered Byng's mansion
and was being taken to Jasmine's sitting-room, when Rudyard appeared
on the staircase, and with a peremptory gesture waved the servant
away. Ian was suddenly conscious of a terrible change in Rudyard's
appearance. His face was haggard and his warm colour had given place
to a strange blackish tinge which seemed to underlie the pallor--the
deathly look to be found in the faces of those stricken with a mortal
disease. All strength and power seemed to have gone from the face,
leaving it tragic with uncontrolled suffering. Panic emotion was
uppermost, while desperate and reckless purpose was in his eyes. The
balance was gone from the general character and his natural force was
like some great gun loose from its fastenings on the deck of a
sea-stricken ship. He was no longer the stalwart Outlander who had
done such great work in South Africa and had such power in political
London and in international finance. The demoralization which had
stealthily gone on for a number of years was now suddenly a debacle of
will and body. Of the superb physical coolness and intrepid mind with
which he had sprung upon the stage of Covent Garden Opera House to
rescue Al'mah nothing seemed left; or, if it did remain, it was
shocked out of its bearings. His eyes were almost glassy as he looked
at Ian Stafford, and animal-like hatred was the dominating note of his
face and carriage.

"Come with me, Stafford: I want to speak to you," he said,
hoarsely. "You've arrived when I wanted you--at the exact time."

"Yes, I said I would come at eleven," responded Stafford,
mechanically. "Jasmine expects me at eleven."

"In here," Byng said, pointing to a little morning-room.

As Stafford entered, he saw Krool's face, malign and sombre, show in a
doorway of the hall. Was he mistaken in thinking that Krool flashed a
look of secret triumph and yet of obscure warning? Warning? There was
trouble, strange and dreadful trouble, here; and the wrenching thought
had swept into his brain that he was the cause of it all, that he was
to be the spring and centre of dreadful happenings.

He was conscious of something else purely objective as he entered the
room--of music, the music of a gay light opera being played in the
adjoining room, from which this little morning-room was separated only
by Indian bead-curtains. He saw idle sunlight play upon these beads,
as he sat down at the table to which Rudyard motioned him. He was also
subconsciously aware who it was that played the piano beyond there
with such pleasant skill. Many a time thereafter, in the days to come,
he would be awakened in the night by the sound of that music, a
love-song from the light opera "A Lady of London," which had just
caught the ears of the people in the street.

Of one thing he was sure: the end of things had come--the end of all
things that life meant to him had come. Rudyard knew! Rudyard, sitting
there at the other side of the table and leaning toward him with a
face where, in control of all else, were hate and panic emotion--he
knew.

The music in the next room was soft, persistent and searching. As Ian
waited for Rudyard to speak he was conscious that even the words of
the silly, futile love-song:

"Not like the roses shall our love be, dear
Never shall its lovely petals fade,
Singing, it will flourish till the world's last year
Happy as the song-birds in the glade."

Through it all now came Rudyard's voice.

"I have a letter here," the voice said, and he saw Rudyard slowly take
it from his pocket. "I want you to read it, and when you have read it,
I want you to tell me what you think of the man who wrote it."

He threw a letter down on the table--a square white envelope with the
crest of the Trafalgar Club upon it. It lay face downward, waiting for
his hand.

So it had come. His letter to Jasmine which told all--Rudyard had read
it. And here was the end of everything--the roses faded before they
had bloomed an hour. It was not for them to flourish "till the world's
last year."

His hand reached out for the letter. With eyes almost blind he raised
it, and slowly and mechanically took the document of tragedy from the
envelope. Why should Rudyard insist on his reading it? It was a
devilish revenge, which he could not resent. But time--he must have
time; therefore he would do Rudyard's bidding, and read this thing he
had written, look at it with eyes in which Penalty was gathering its
mists.

So this was the end of it all--friendship gone with the man before
him; shame come to the woman he loved; misery to every one; a
home-life shattered; and from the souls of three people peace banished
for evermore.

He opened out the pages with a slowness that seemed almost apathy,
while the man opposite clinched his hands on the table spasmodically.
Still the music from the other room with cheap, flippant sensuousness
stole through the burdened air:

"Singing, it will flourish till the world's last year--"

He looked at the writing vaguely, blindly. Why should this be exacted
of him, this futile penalty? Then all at once his sight cleared; for
this handwriting was not his--this letter was not his; these wild,
passionate phrases--this terrible suggestiveness of meaning, these
references to the past, this appeal for further hours of love
together, this abjectly tender appeal to Jasmine that she would wear
one of his white roses when he saw her the next day--would she not see
him between eleven and twelve o'clock?--all these words were not his.

They were written by the man who was playing the piano in the next
room; by the man who had come and gone in this house like one who had
the right to do so; who had, as it were, fed from Rudyard Byng's hand;
who lived on what Byng paid him; who had been trusted with the
innermost life of the household and the life and the business of the
master of it.

The letter was signed, Adrian.

His own face blanched like the face of the man before him. He had
braced himself to face the consequences of his own letter to the woman
he loved, and he was face to face with the consequences of another
man's letter to the same woman, to the woman who had two lovers. He
was face to face with Rudyard's tragedy, and with his own.... She,
Jasmine, to whom he had given all, for whom he had been ready to give
up all--career, fame, existence--was true to none, unfaithful to all,
caring for none, but pretending to care for all three--and for how
many others? He choked back a cry.

"Well--well?" came the husband's voice across the table. "There's one
thing to do, and I mean to do it." He waved a hand towards the
music-room. "He's in the next room there. I mean to kill him--to kill
him--now. I wanted you to know why, to know all, you, Stafford, my old
friend and hers. And I'm going to do it now. Listen to him there!"

His words came brokenly and scarce above a whisper, but they were
ghastly in their determination, in their loathing, their blind
fury. He was gone mad, all the animal in him alive, the brain tossing
on a sea of disorder.

"Now!" he said, suddenly, and, rising, he pushed back his chair. "Give
that to me."

He reached out his hand for the letter, but his confused senses were
suddenly arrested by the look in Ian Stafford's face, a look so
strange, so poignant, so insistent, that he paused. Words could not
have checked his blind haste like that look. In the interval which
followed, the music from the other room struck upon the ears of both,
with exasperating insistence:

"Not like the roses shall our love be, dear--"

Stafford made no motion to return the letter. He caught and held
Rudyard's eyes.

"You ask me to tell you what I think of the man who wrote this
letter," he said, thickly and slowly, for he was like one paralyzed,
regaining his speech with blanching effort: "Byng, I think what you
think--all you think; but I would not do what you want to do."

As he had read the letter the whole horror of the situation burst upon
him. Jasmine had deceived her husband when she turned to himself, and
that was to be understood--to be understood, if not to be pardoned. A
woman might marry, thinking she cared, and all too soon, sometimes
before the second day had dawned, learn that shrinking and repugnance
which not even habit can modify or obscure. A girl might be mistaken,
with her heart and nature undeveloped, and with that closer intimate
life with another of another sex still untried. With the transition
from maidenhood to wifehood, fateful beyond all transitions, yet
unmade, she might be mistaken once; as so many have been in the
revelations of first intimacy; but not twice, not the second time. It
was not possible to be mistaken in so vital a thing twice. This was
merely a wilful, miserable degeneracy. Rudyard had been
wronged--terribly wronged--by himself, by Jasmine; but he had loved
Jasmine since she was a child, before Rudyard came--in truth, he all
but possessed her when Rudyard came; and there was some explanation,
if no excuse, for that betrayal; but this other, it was incredible, it
was monstrous. It was incredible but yet it was true. Thoughts that
overturned all his past, that made a melee of his life, rushed and
whirled through his mind as he read the letter with assumed
deliberation when he saw what it was. He read slowly that he might
make up his mind how to act, what to say and do in this crisis. To
do--what? Jasmine had betrayed him long ago when she had thrown him
over for Rudyard, and now she had betrayed him again after she had
married Rudyard, and betrayed Rudyard, too; and for whom this second
betrayal? His heart seemed to shrink to nothingness. This business
dated far beyond yesterday. The letter furnished that sure evidence.

What to do? Like lightning his mind was made up. What to do? Ah, but
one thing to do--only one thing to do--save her at any cost, somehow
save her! Whatever she was, whatever she had done, however she had
spoiled his life and destroyed forever his faith, yet he too had
betrayed this broken man before him, with the look in his eyes of an
animal at bay, ready to do the last irretrievable thing. Even as her
shameless treatment of himself smote him; lowered him to that dust
which is ground from the heels of merciless humanity--even as it
sickened his soul beyond recovery in this world, up from the lowest
depths of his being there came the indestructible thing. It was the
thing that never dies, the love that defies injury, shame, crime,
deceit, and desertion, and lives pityingly on, knowing all, enduring
all, desiring no touch, no communion, yet prevailing--the
indestructible thing.

He knew now in a flash what he had to do. He must save her. He saw
that Rudyard was armed, and that the end might come at any
moment. There was in the wronged husband's eyes the wild, reckless,
unseeing thing which disregards consequences, which would rush blindly
on the throne of God itself to snatch its vengeance. He spoke again:
and just in time.

"I think what you think, Byng, but I would not do what you want to
do. I would do something else."

His voice was strangely quiet, but it had a sharp insistence which
caused Rudyard to turn back mechanically to the seat he had just
left. Stafford saw the instant's advantage which, if he did not
pursue, all would be lost. With a great effort he simulated intense
anger and indignation.

"Sit down, Byng," he said, with a gesture of authority. He leaned over
the table, holding the other's eyes, the letter in one clinched
hand. "Kill him--," he said, and pointed to the other room, from which
came the maddening iteration of the jingling song--"you would kill him
for his hellish insolence, for this infamous attempt to lead your wife
astray, but what good will it do to kill him?"

"Not him alone, but her too," came the savage, uncontrolled voice from
the uncontrolled savagery of the soul.

Suddenly a great fear shot up in Stafford's heart. His breath came in
sharp, breaking gasps. Had he--had he killed Jasmine?

"You have not--not her?"

"No--not yet." The lips of the avenger suddenly ceased twitching, and
they shut with ominous certainty.

An iron look came into Stafford's face. He had his chance now. One
word, one defense only! It would do all, or all would be lost--sunk in
a sea of tragedy. Diplomacy had taught him the gift of control of face
and gesture, of meaning in tone and word. He made an effort greater
than he had ever put forward in life. He affected an enormous and
scornful surprise.

"You think--you dare to think that she--that Jasmine--"

"Think, you say! The letter--that letter--"

"This letter--this letter, Byng--are you a fool? This letter, this
preposterous thing from the universal philanderer, the effeminate
erotic! It is what it is, and it is no more. Jasmine--you know
her. Indiscreet--yes; always indiscreet in her way, in her own way,
and always daring. A coquette always. She has coquetted all her life;
she cannot help it. She doesn't even know it. She led him on from
sheer wilfulness. What did it matter to her that he was of no account!
She led him on, to be at her feet like the rest, like bigger and
better men--like us all. Was there ever a time when she did not want
to master us? She has coquetted since--ah, you do not know as I do,
her old friend! She has coquetted since she was a little
child. Coquetted, and no more. We have all been her slaves--yes, long
before you came--all of us. Look at Mennaval! She--"

With a distracted gesture Byng interrupted. "The world believes the
worst. Last night, by accident, I heard at De Lancy Scovel's house
that she and Mennaval--and now this--!"

But into the rage, the desperation in the wild eyes, was now creeping
an eager look--not of hope, but such a look as might be in eyes that
were striving to see through darkness, looking for a glimmer of day in
the black hush of morning before the dawn. It was pitiful to see the
strong man tossing on the flood of disordered understanding, a willing
castaway, yet stretching out a hand to be saved.

"Oh, last night, Mennaval, you say, and to-day--this!" Stafford held
up the letter. "This means nothing against her, except indiscretion,
and indiscretion which would have been nothing if the man had not been
what he is. He is of the slime. He does not matter, except that he has
dared--!"

"He has dared, by God--!"

All Byng's rage came back, the lacerated pride, the offended manhood,
the self-esteem which had been spattered by the mud of slander, by the
cynical defense, or the pitying solicitude of his friends--of De Lancy
Scovel, Barry Whalen, Sobieski the Polish Jew, Fleming, Wolff, and the
rest. The pity of these for him--for Rudyard Byng, because the flower
in his garden, his Jasmine-flower, was swept by the blast of calumny!
He sprang from his chair with an ugly oath.

But Stafford stepped in front of him. "Sit down, Byng, or damn
yourself forever. If she is innocent--and she is--do you think she
would ever live with you again, after you had dragged her name into
the dust of the criminal courts and through the reek of the ha'penny
press? Do you think Jasmine would ever forgive you for suspecting her?
If you want to drive her from you forever, then kill him, and go and
tell her that you suspect her. I know her--I have known her all her
life, long before you came. I care what becomes of her. She has many
who care what becomes of her--her father, her brother, many men, and
many women who have seen her grow up without a mother. They understand
her, they believe in her, because they have known her over all the
years. They know her better than you. Perhaps they care for her--
perhaps any one of them cares for her far more than you do."

Now there came a new look into the big, staring eyes. Byng was as one
fascinated; light was breaking in on his rage, his besmirched pride,
his vengeance; hope was stealing tremblingly into his face.

"She was more to me than all the world--than twenty worlds. She--"

He hesitated, then his voice broke and his body suddenly shook
violently, as tears rose in the far, deep wells of feeling and tried
to reach the fevered eyes. He leaned his head in his big, awkward
hands.

Stafford saw the way of escape for Jasmine slowly open out, and went
on quickly. "You have neglected her "--Rudyard's head came up in angry
protest--"not wilfully; but you have neglected her. You have been too
easy. You should lead, not follow, where a woman is concerned. All
women are indiscreet, all are a little dishonourable on opportunity;
but not in the big way, only in the small, contemptible way, according
to our code. We men are dishonourable in the big way where they are
concerned. You have neglected her, Byng, because you have not said,
'This way, Jasmine. Come with me. I want you; and you must came, and
come now.' She wanted your society, wanted you all the time; but while
you did not have her on the leash she went playing--playing. That is
it, and that is all. And now, if you want to keep her, if you want her
to live on with you, I warn you not to tell her you know of the insult
this letter contains, nor ever say what would make her think you
suspected her. If you do, you will bid good-bye to her forever. She
has bold blood in her veins, rash blood. Her grandfather--"

"I know--I know." The tone was credulous, understanding now. Hope
stole into the distorted face.

"She would resent your suspicion. She, then, would do the mad thing,
not you. She would be as frenzied as you were a moment ago; and she
would not listen to reason. If you dared to hint outside in the world,
that you believed her guilty, there are some of her old friends who
would feel like doing to you what you want to do to that libertine in
there, to Al'mah's lover--"

"Good God, Stafford--wait!"

"I don't mean Barry Whalen, Fleming, De Lancy Scovel, and the
rest. They are not her old friends, and they weren't yours once--that
breed; but the others who are the best, of whom you come, over there
in Herefordshire, in Dorset, in Westmorland, where your and her people
lived, and mine. You have been too long among the Outlanders,
Byng. Come back, and bring Jasmine with you. And as for this letter--"

Byng reached out his hand for it.

"No, it contains an insult to your wife. If you get it into your
hands, you will read it again, and then you will do some foolish
thing, for you have lost grip of yourself. Here is the only place for
such stuff--an outburst of sensuality!"

He threw the letter suddenly into the fire. Rudyard sprang to his feet
as though to reclaim it, but stood still bewildered, as he saw
Stafford push it farther into the coals.

Silent, they watched shrivel such evidence as brings ruin upon men and
women in courts of law.

"Leave the whole thing--leave Fellowes to me," Stafford said, after a
slight pause. "I will deal with him. He shall leave the country
to-night. I will see to that. He shall go for three years at least. Do
not see him. You will not contain yourself, and for your own chance of
happiness with the woman you love, you must do nothing, nothing at all
now."

"He has keys, papers--"

"I will see to that; I will see to everything. Now go, at once. There
is enough for you to do. The war, Oom Paul's war, will be on us to
day. Do you hear, Byng--to-day! And you have work to do for this your
native country and for South Africa, your adopted country. England and
the Transvaal will be at each other's throat before night. You have
work to do. Do it. You are needed. Go, and leave this wretched
business in my hands. I will deal with Fellowes--adequately."

The rage had faded from Byng's fevered eyes, and now there was a
moisture in them, a look of incalculable relief. To believe in
Jasmine, that was everything to him. He had not seen her yet, not
since he left the white rose on her pillow last night--Adrian
Fellowes' tribute; and after he had read the letter, he had had no
wish to see her till he had had his will and done away with Fellowes
forever. Then he would see her--for the last time: and she should die,
too,--with himself. That had been his purpose. Now all was changed. He
would not see her now, not till Fellowes was gone forever. Then he
would come again, and say no word which would let her think he knew
what Fellowes had written. Yes, Stafford was right. She must not know,
and they must start again, begin life again together, a new
understanding in his heart, new purposes in their existence. In these
few minutes Stafford had taught him much, had showed him where he had
been wrong, had revealed to him Jasmine's nature as he never really
understood it.

At the door, as Stafford helped him on with a light overcoat, he took
a revolver from his pocket.

"That's the proof of what I meant to do," he said; "and this is proof
of what I mean to do," he added, as he handed over the revolver and
Stafford's fingers grasped it with a nervous force which he
misinterpreted.

"Ah yes," he exclaimed, sadly, "you don't quite trust me yet--not
quite, Stafford; and I don't wonder; but it's all right.... You've
been a good, good friend to us both," he added. "I wish Jasmine might
know how good a friend you've been. But never mind. We'll pay the debt
sometime, somehow, she and I. When shall I see you again?"

At that moment a clear voice rang out cheerily in the
distance. "Rudyard--where are you, Ruddy?" it called.

A light broke over Byng's haggard face. "Not yet?" he asked Stafford.

"No, not yet," was the reply, and Byng was pushed through the open
door into the street.

"Ruddy--where are you, Ruddy?" sang the voice like a morning song.

Then there was silence, save for the music in the room beyond the
little room where the two men had sat a few moments ago.

The music was still poured forth, but the tune was changed. Now it was
"Pagliacci"--that wonderful passage where the injured husband pours
out his soul in agony.

Stafford closed the doors of the little room where he and Byng had
sat, and stood an instant listening to the music. He shuddered as the
passionate notes swept over his senses. In this music was the note of
the character of the man who played--sensuous emotion, sensual
delight. There are men who by nature are as the daughters of the
night, primary prostitutes, with no minds, no moral sense; only a
sensuous organization which has a gift of shallow beauty, while the
life is never deep enough for tears nor high enough for real joy.

In Stafford's pocket was the revolver which Byng had given him. He
took it out, and as he did so, a flush swept over his face, and every
nerve of his body tingled.

"That way out?" he thought. "How easy--and how selfish.... If one's
life only concerned oneself.... But it's only partly one's own from
first to last." . . . Then his thoughts turned again to the man who
was playing "Pagliacci." "I have a greater right to do it than Byng,
and I'd have a greater joy in doing it; but whatever he is, it is not
all his fault." Again he shuddered. "No man makes love like that to a
woman unless she lets him, . . . until she lets him." Then he looked
at the fire where the cruel testimony had shrivelled into smoke. "If
it had been read to a jury . . . Ah, my God! How many he must have
written her like that ... How often...."

With an effort he pulled himself together. "What does it matter now!
All things have come to an end for me. There is only one way. My
letter to her showed it. But this must be settled first. Then to see
her for the last time, to make her understand...."

He went to the beaded curtain, raised it, and stepped into the flood
of warm sunlight. The voluptuous, agonizing music came in a wave over
him. Tragedy, poignant misery, rang through every note, swelled in a
stream which drowned the senses. This man-devil could play, Stafford
remarked, cynically, to himself.

"A moment--Fellowes," he said, sharply.

The music frayed into a discord and stopped.



CHAPTER XXI

THE BURNING FIERY FURNACE


There was that in Stafford's tone which made Fellowes turn with a
start. It was to this room that Fellowes had begged Jasmine to come
this morning, in the letter which Krool had so carefully placed for
his master to find, after having read it himself with minute
scrutiny. It was in this room they had met so often in those days when
Rudyard was in South Africa, and where music had been the medium of an
intimacy which had nothing for its warrant save eternal vanity and
curiosity, the evil genius of the race of women. Here it was that
Krool's antipathy to Jasmine and fierce hatred of Fellowes had been
nurtured. Krool had haunted the room, desiring the end of it all; but
he had been disarmed by a smiling kindness on Jasmine's part, which
shook his purpose again and again.

It had all been a problem which Krool's furtive mind failed to
master. If he went to the Baas with his suspicions, the chance was
that he would be flayed with a sjambok and turned into the streets; if
he warned Jasmine, the same thing might happen, or worse. But fate had
at last played into his hands, on the very day that Oom Paul had
challenged destiny, when all things were ready for the ruin of the
hated English.

Fate had sent him through the hallway between Jasmine's and Rudyard's
rooms in the moment when Jasmine had dropped Fellowes' letter; and he
had seen it fall. He knew not what it was, but it might be of
importance, for he had seen Fellowes' handwriting on an envelope among
those waiting for Jasmine's return home. In a far dark corner he had
waited till he saw Lablanche enter her mistress' room hurriedly,
without observing the letter. Then he caught it up and stole away to
the library, where he read it with malevolent eyes.

He had left this fateful letter where Rudyard would see it when he
rose in the morning. All had worked out as he had planned, and now,
with his ear against the door which led from the music-room, he
strained to hear what passed between Stafford and Fellowes.

"Well, what is it?" asked Fellowes, with an attempt to be casual,
though there was that in Stafford's face which gave him anxiety, he
knew not why. He had expected Jasmine, and, instead, here was
Stafford, who had been so much with her of late; who, with Mennaval,
had occupied so much of her time that she had scarcely spoken to him,
and, when she did so, it was with a detachment which excluded him from
intimate consideration.

His face wore a mechanical smile, as his pale blue eyes met the dark
intensity of Stafford's. But slowly the peach-bloom of his cheeks
faded and his long, tapering fingers played nervously with the
leather-trimming of the piano-stool.

"Anything I can do for you, Stafford?" he added, with attempted
nonchalance.

"There is nothing you can do for me," was the meaning reply, "but
there is something you can do advantageously for yourself, if you will
think it worth while."

"Most of us are ready to do ourselves good turns. What am I to do?"

"You will wish to avoid it, and yet you will do yourself a good turn
in not avoiding it."

"Is that the way you talk in diplomatic circles--cryptic, they call
it, don't they?"

Stafford's chin hardened, and a look of repulsion and disdain crossed
over his face.

"It is more cryptic, I confess, than the letter which will cause you
to do yourself a good turn."

Now Fellowes' face turned white. "What letter?" he asked, in a sharp,
querulous voice.

"The letter you wrote Mrs. Byng from the Trafalgar Club yesterday."

Fellowes made a feint, an attempt at bravado. "What business is it of
yours, anyhow? What rights have you got in Mrs. Byng's letters?"

"Only what I get from a higher authority."

"Are you in sweet spiritual partnership with the Trinity?"

"The higher authority I mean is Mr. Byng. Let us have no tricks with
words, you fool."

Fellowes made an ineffective attempt at self-possession.

"What the devil . . . why should I listen to you?" There was a peevish
stubbornness in the tone.

"Why should you listen to me? Well, because I have saved your
life. That should be sufficient reason for you to listen."

"Damnation--speak out, if you've got anything to say! I don't see what
you mean, and you are damned officious. Yes, that's it--damned
officious." The peevishness was becoming insolent recklessness.

Slowly Stafford drew from his pocket the revolver Rudyard had given
him. As Fellowes caught sight of the glittering steel he fell back
against the piano-stool, making a clatter, his face livid.

Stafford's lips curled with contempt. "Don't squirm so, Fellowes. I'm
not going to use it. But Mr. Byng had it, and he was going to use
it. He was on his way to do it when I appeared. I stopped him . . . I
will tell you how. I endeavoured to make him believe that she was
absolutely innocent, that you had only been an insufferably insolent,
presumptuous, and lecherous cad--which is true. I said that, though
you deserved shooting, it would only bring scandal to Rudyard Byng's
honourable wife, who had been insulted by the lover of Al'mah and the
would-be betrayer of an honest girl--of Jigger's sister.... Yes, you
may well start. I know of what stuff you are, how you had the soul and
body of one of the most credulous and wonderful women in the world in
your hands, and you went scavenging. From Al'mah to the flower-girl!
. . . I think I should like to kill you myself for what you tried to
do to Jigger's sister; and if it wasn't here"--he handled the little
steel weapon with an eager fondness--" I think I'd do it. You are a
pest."

Cowed, shivering, abject, Fellowes nervously fell back. His body
crashed upon the keys of the piano, producing a hideous
discord. Startled, he sprang aside and with trembling hands made
gestures of appeal.

"Don't--don't! Can't you see I'm willing! What is it you want me to
do? I'll do it. Put it away.... Oh, my God--Oh!" His bloodless lips
were drawn over his teeth in a grimace of terror.

With an exclamation of contempt Stafford put the weapon back into his
pocket again. "Pull yourself together," he said. "Your life is safe
for the moment; but I can say no more than that. After I had proved
the lady's innocence--you understand, after I had proved the lady's
innocence to him--"

"Yes, I understand," came the hoarse reply.

"After that, I said I would deal with you; that he could not be
trusted to do so. I said that you would leave England within
twenty-four hours, and that you would not return within three
years. That was my pledge. You are prepared to fulfil it?"

"To leave England! It is impossible--"

"Perhaps to leave it permanently, and not by the English Channel,
either, might be worse," was the cold, savage reply. "Mr. Byng made
his terms."

Fellowes shivered. "What am I to do out of England--but, yes, I'll go,
I'll go," he added, as he saw the look in Stafford's face and thought
of the revolver so near to Stafford's hand.

"Yes, of course you will go," was the stern retort. "You will go, just
as I say."

"What shall I do abroad?" wailed the weak voice.

"What you have always done here, I suppose--live on others," was the
crushing reply. "The venue will be changed, but you won't change, not
you. If I were you, I'd try and not meet Jigger before you go. He
doesn't know quite what it is, but he knows enough to make him
reckless."

Fellowes moved towards the door in a stumbling kind of way. "I have
some things up-stairs," he said.

"They will be sent after you to your chambers. Give me the keys to the
desk in the secretary's room."

"I'll go myself, and--"

"You will leave this house at once, and everything will be sent after
you--everything. Have no fear. I will send them myself, and your
letters and private papers will not be read.... You feel you can rely
on me for that--eh?"

"Yes . . . I'll go now . . . abroad . . . where?"

"Where you please outside the United Kingdom."

Fellowes passed heavily out through the other room, where his letter
had been read by Stafford, where his fate had been decided. He put on
his overcoat nervously and went to the outer door.

Stafford came up to him again. "You understand, there must be no
attempt to communicate here.... You will observe this?"

Fellowes nodded. "Yes, I will.... Good-night," he added, absently.

"Good-day," answered Stafford, mechanically.

The outer door shut, and Stafford turned again to the little room
where so much had happened which must change so many lives, bring so
many tears, divert so many streams of life.

How still the house seemed now! It had lost all its charm and
homelikeness. He felt stifled. Yet there was the warm sun streaming
through the doorway of the music-room, making the beaded curtains
shine like gold.

As he stood in the doorway of the little morning-room, looking in with
bitter reflection and dreading beyond words what now must come--his
meeting with Jasmine, the story he must tell her, and the exposure of
a truth so naked that his nature revolted from it, he heard a footstep
behind him. It was Krool.

Stafford looked at the saturnine face and wondered how much he knew;
but there was no glimmer of revelation in Krool's impassive look. The
eyes were always painful in their deep animal-like glow, and they
seemed more than usually intense this morning; that was all.

"Will you present my compliments to Mrs. Byng, and say--"

Krool, with a gesture, stopped him.

"Mrs. Byng is come now," he said, making a gesture towards the
staircase. Then he stole away towards the servants' quarters of the
house. His work had been well done, of its kind, and he could now
await consequences.

Stafford turned to the staircase and saw--in blue, in the old
sentimental blue--Jasmine slowly descending, a strange look of
apprehension in her face.

Immediately after calling out for Rudyard a little while before, she
had discovered the loss of Adrian Fellowes' letter. Hours before this
she had read and re-read Ian's letter, that document of pain and
purpose, of tragical, inglorious, fatal purpose. She was suddenly
conscious of an air of impending catastrophe about her now. Or was it
that the catastrophe had come? She had not asked for Adrian Fellowes'
letter, for if any servant had found it, and had not returned it, it
was useless asking; and if Rudyard had found it--if Rudyard had found
it . . . !

Where was Rudyard? Why had he not come to her, Why had he not eaten
the breakfast which still lay untouched on the table of his study?
Where was Rudyard?

Ian's eyes looked straight into hers as she came down the staircase,
and there was that in them which paralyzed her. But she made an effort
to ignore the apprehension which filled her soul.

"Good-morning. Am I so very late?" she said, gaily, to him, though
there was a hollow note in her voice.

"You are just in time," he answered in an even tone which told
nothing.

"Dear me, what a gloomy face! What has happened? What is it? There
seems to be a Cassandra atmosphere about the place--and so early in
the day, too."

"It is full noon--and past," he said, with acute meaning, as her
daintily shod feet met the floor of the hallway and glided towards
him. How often he had admired that pretty flitting of her feet!

As he looked at her he was conscious, with a new force, of the wonder
of that hair on a little head as queenly as ever was given to the
modern world. And her face, albeit pale, and with a strange
tremulousness in it now, was like that of some fairy dame painted by
Greuze. All last night's agony was gone from the rare blue eyes, whose
lashes drooped so ravishingly betimes, though that droop was not there
as she looked at Ian now.

She beat a foot nervously on the floor. "What is it--why this
Euripidean air in my simple home? There's something wrong, I see. What
is it? Come, what is it, Ian?"

Hesitatingly she laid a hand upon his arm, but there was no
loving-kindness in his look. The arms which yesterday--only
yesterday--had clasped her passionately and hungrily to his breast now
hung inert at his side. His eyes were strange and hard.

"Will you come in here," he said, in an arid voice, and held wide the
door of the room where he and Rudyard had settled the first chapter of
the future and closed the book of the past.

She entered with hesitating step. Then he shut the door with an
accentuated softness, and came to the table where he had sat with
Rudyard. Mechanically she took the seat which Rudyard had occupied,
and looked at him across the table with a dread conviction stealing
over her face, robbing it of every vestige of its heavenly colour,
giving her eyes a staring and solicitous look.

"Well, what is it? Can't you speak and have it over?" she asked, with
desperate impatience.

"Fellowes' letter to you--Rudyard found it," he said, abruptly.

She fell back as though she had been struck, then recovered
herself. "You read it?" she gasped.

"Rudyard made me read it. I came in when he was just about to kill
Fellowes."

She gave a short, sharp cry, which with a spasm of determination her
fingers stopped.

"Kill him--why?" she asked in a weak voice, looking down at her
trembling hands which lay clasped on the table before her.

"The letter--Fellowes' letter to you."

"I dropped it last night," she said, in a voice grown strangely
impersonal and colourless. "I dropped it in Rudyard's room, I
suppose."

She seemed not to have any idea of excluding the terrible facts, but
to be speaking as it were to herself and of something not vital,
though her whole person was transformed into an agony which congealed
the lifeblood.

Her voice sounded tuneless and ragged. "He read it--Rudyard read a
letter which was not addressed to him! He read a letter addressed to
me--he read my letter.... It gave me no chance."

"No chance--?"

A bitter indignation was added to the cheerless discord of her
tones. "Yes, I had a chance, a last chance--if he had not read the
letter. But now, there is no chance.... You read it, too. You read the
letter which was addressed to me. No matter what it was--my letter,
you read it."

"Rudyard said to me in his terrible agitation, 'Read that letter, and
then tell me what you think of the man who wrote it.' . . . I thought
it was the letter I wrote to you, the letter I posted to you last
night. I thought it was my letter to you."

Her eyes had a sudden absent look. It was as though she were speaking
in a trance. "I answered that letter--your letter. I answered it this
morning. Here is the answer . . . here." She laid a letter on the
table before him, then drew it back again into her lap. "Now it does
not matter. But it gives me no chance...."

There was a world of despair and remorse in her voice. Her face was
wan and strained. "No chance, no chance," she whispered.

"Rudyard did not kill him?" she asked, slowly and cheerlessly, after a
moment, as though repeating a lesson. "Why?"

"I stopped him. I prevented him."

"You prevented him--why?" Her eyes had a look of unutterable confusion
and trouble. "Why did you prevent it--you?"

"That would have hurt you--the scandal, the grimy press, the world."

Her voice was tuneless, and yet it had a strange, piteous
poignancy. "It would have hurt me--yes. Why did you not want to hurt
me?"

He did not answer. His hands had gone into his pockets, as though to
steady their wild nervousness, and one had grasped the little weapon
of steel which Rudyard had given him. It produced some strange,
malignant effect on his mind. Everything seemed to stop in him, and he
was suddenly possessed by a spirit which carried him into that same
region where Rudyard had been. It was the region of the abnormal. In
it one moves in a dream, majestically unresponsive to all outward
things, numb, unconcerned, disregarding all except one's own agony,
which seems to neutralize the universe and reduce all life's problems
to one formula of solution.

"What did you say to him that stopped him?" she asked in a whisper of
awed and dreadful interest, as, after an earthquake, a survivor would
speak in the stillness of dead and unburied millions.

"I said the one thing to say," he answered after a moment,
involuntarily laying the pistol on the table before him--doing it, as
it were, without conscious knowledge.

It fascinated Jasmine, the ugly, deadly little vehicle of
oblivion. Her eyes fastened on it, and for an instant stared at it
transfixed; then she recovered herself and spoke again.

"What was the one thing to say?" she whispered.

"That you were innocent--absolutely, that--"

Suddenly she burst into wild laughter--shrill, acrid, cheerless,
hysterical, her face turned upward, her hands clasped under her chin,
her body shaking with what was not laughter, but the terrifying
agitation of a broken organism.

He waited till she had recovered somewhat, and then he repeated his
words.

"I said that you were innocent absolutely; that Fellowes' letter was
the insolence and madness of a voluptuary, that you had only been
wilful and indiscreet, and that--"

In a low, mechanical tone from which was absent any agitation, he told
her all he had said to Rudyard, and what Rudyard had said to
him. Every word had been burned into his brain, and nearly every word
was now repeated, while she sat silent, looking at her hands clasped
on the table before her. When he came to the point where Rudyard went
from the house, leaving Stafford to deal with Fellowes, she burst
again into laughter, mocking, wilful, painful.

"You were left to set things right, to be the lord high
executioner--you, Ian!"

How strange his name sounded on her lips now--foreign, distant,
revealing the nature of the situation more vividly than all the words
which had been said, than all that had been done.

"Rudyard did not think of killing you, I suppose," she went on,
presently, with a bitter motion of the lips, and a sardonic note
creeping into the voice.

"No, I thought of that," he answered, quietly, "as you know." His eyes
sought the weapon on the table involuntarily. "That would have been
easy enough," he added. "I was not thinking of myself, or of Fellowes,
but only of you--and Rudyard."

"Only of me--and Rudyard," she repeated with drooping eyes, which
suddenly became alive again with feeling and passion and
wildness. "Wasn't it rather late for that?"

The words stung him beyond endurance. He rose and leaned across the
table towards her.

"At least I recognized what I had done, what you had done, and I tried
to face it. I did not disguise it. My letter to you proves that. But
nevertheless I was true to you. I did not deceive you--ever. I loved
you--ah, I loved you as few women have been loved! . . . But you, you
might have made a mistake where Rudyard was concerned, made the
mistake once, but if you wronged him, you wronged me infinitely
more. I was ready to give up all, throw all my life, my career, to the
winds, and prove myself loyal to that which was more than all; or I
was willing to eliminate myself from the scene forever. I was willing
to pay the price--any price--just to stand by what was the biggest
thing in my life. But you were true to nothing--to nothing--to
nobody."

"If one is untrue--once, why be true at all ever?" she said with an
aching laugh, through which tears ran, though none dropped from her
eyes. "If one is untrue to one, why not to a thousand?"

Again a mocking laugh burst from her. "Don't you see? One kiss, a
wrong? Why not, then, a thousand kisses! The wrong came in the moment
that the one kiss was given. It is the one that kills, not the
thousand after."

There came to her mind again--and now with what sardonic
force--Rudyard's words that day before they went to Glencader: "If you
had lived a thousand years ago you would have had a thousand lovers."

"And so it is all understood between you and Rudyard," she added,
mechanically. "That is what you have arranged for me--that I go on
living as before with Rudyard, while I am not to know from him
anything has happened; but to accept what has been arranged for me,
and to be repentant and good and live in sackcloth. It has been
arranged, has it, that Rudyard is to believe in me?"

"That has not been arranged."

"It has been arranged that I am to live with him as before, and that
he is to pretend to love me as before, and--"

"He does love you as before. He has never changed. He believed in you,
was so pitifully eager to believe in you even when the letter--"

"Where is the letter?"

He pointed to the fire.

"Who put it in the fire?" she asked. "You?"

He inclined his head.

"Ah yes, always so clever! A burst of indignation at his daring to
suspect me even for an instant, and with a flourish into the fire, the
evidence. Here is yours--your letter. Would you like to put it into
the fire also?" she asked, and drew his letter from the folds of her
dress.

"But, no, no, no--" She suddenly sprang to her feet, and her eyes had
a look of agonized agitation. "When I have learned every word by
heart, I will burn it myself--for your sake." Her voice grew softer,
something less discordant came into it. "You will never
understand. You could never understand me, or that letter of Adrian
Fellowes to me, and that he could dare to write me such a letter. You
could never understand it. But I understand you. I understand your
letter. It came while I was--while I was broken. It healed me,
Ian. Last night I wanted to kill myself. Never mind why. You would not
understand. You are too good to understand. All night I was in
torture, and then this letter of yours--it was a revelation. I did not
think that a man lived like you, so true, so kind, so mad. And so I
wrote you a letter, ah, a letter from my soul! and then came down to
this--the end of all. The end of everything--forever."

"No, the beginning if you will have it so.... Rudyard loves you . . ."

She gave a cry of agony. "For God's sake--oh, for God's sake, hush!
. . . You think that now I could . . ."

"Begin again with new purpose."

"Purpose! Oh, you fool! You fool! You fool--you who are so wise
sometimes! You want me to begin again with Rudyard: and you do not
want me to begin again--with you?"

He was silent, and he looked her in the eyes steadily.

"You do not want me to begin again with you, because you believe
me--because you believed the worst from that letter, from Adrian
Fellowes' letter.... You believed, yet you hypnotized Rudyard into not
believing. But did you, after all? Was it not that he loves me, and
that he wanted to be deceived, wanted to be forced to do what he has
done? I know him better than you. But you are right, he would have
spoken to me about it if you had not warned him."

"Then begin again--"

"You do not want me any more." The voice had an anguish like the cry
of the tragic music in "Elektra." "You do not want what you wanted
yesterday--for us together to face it all, Ian. You do not want it?
You hate me."

His face was disturbed by emotion, and he did not speak for a moment.

In that moment she became transformed. With a sudden tragic motion she
caught the pistol from the table and raised it, but he wrenched it
from her hand.

"Do you think that would mend anything?" he asked, with a new pity in
his heart for her." That would only hurt those who have been hurt
enough already. Be a little magnanimous. Do not be selfish. Give
others a chance."

"You were going to do it as an act of unselfishness," she moaned.
"You were going to die in order to mend it all. Did you think of me in
that? Did you think I would or could consent to that? You believed in
me, of course, when you wrote it. But did you think that was
magnanimous--when you had got a woman's love, then to kill yourself in
order to cure her? Oh, how little you know! . . . But you do not want
me now. You do not believe in me now. You abhor me. Yet if that letter
had not fallen into Rudyard's hands we might perhaps have now been on
our way to begin life again together. Does that look as though there
was some one else that mattered--that mattered?"

He held himself together with all his power and will. "There is one
way, and only one way," he said, firmly. "Rudyard loves you. Begin
again with him." His voice became lower. "You know the emptiness of
your home. There is a way to make some recompense to him. You can pay
your debt. Give him what he wants so much. It would be a link. It
would bind you. A child . . ."

"Oh, how you loathe me!" she said, shudderingly. "Yesterday--and now
. . . No, no, no," she added, " I will not, cannot live with
Rudyard. I cannot wrench myself from one world into another like
that. I will not live with him any more.... There--listen."

Outside the newsboys were calling:

"Extra speshul! Extra speshul! All about the war! War declared! Extra
speshul!"

"War! That will separate many," she added. "It will separate Rudyard
and me.... No, no, there will be no more scandal.... But it is the way
of escape--the war."

"The way of escape for us all, perhaps," he answered, with a light of
determination in his eyes. "Good-bye," he added, after a slight
pause. "There is nothing more to say."

He turned to go, but he did not hold out his hand, nor even look at
her.

"Tell me," she said, in a strange, cold tone, "tell me, did Adrian
Fellowes--did he protect me? Did he stand up for me? Did he defend
me?"

"He was concerned only for himself," Ian answered, hesitatingly.

Her face hardened. Pitiful, haggard lines had come into it in the last
half-hour, and they deepened still more.

"He did not say one word to put me right?"

Ian shook his head in negation. "What did you expect?" he said.

She sank into a chair, and a strange cruelty came into her eyes,
something so hard that it looked grotesque in the beautiful setting of
her pain-worn, exquisite face.

So utter was her dejection that he came back from the door and bent
over her.

"Jasmine," he said, gently, "we have to start again, you and I--in
different paths. They will never meet. But at the end of the
road--peace. Peace the best thing of all. Let us try and find it,
Jasmine."

"He did not try to protect me. He did not defend me," she kept saying
to herself, and was only half conscious of what Ian said to her.

He touched her shoulder. "Nothing can set things right between you and
me, Jasmine," he added, unsteadily, "but there's Rudyard--you must
help him through. He heard scandal about Mennaval last night at De
Lancy Scovel's. He didn't believe it. It rests with you to give it all
the lie.... Good-bye."

In a moment he was gone. As the door closed she sprang to her
feet. "Ian--Ian--come back," she cried. "Ian, one word--one word."

But the door did not open again. For a moment she stood like one
transfixed, staring at the place whence he had vanished, then, with a
moan, she sank in a heap on the floor, and rocked to and fro like one
demented.

Once the door opened quietly, and Krool's face showed, sinister and
furtive, but she did not see it, and the door closed again softly.

At last the paroxysms passed, and a haggard face looked out into the
world of life and being with eyes which were drowned in misery.

"He did not defend me--the coward!" she murmured; then she rose with a
sudden effort, swayed, steadied herself, and arranged her hair in the
mirror over the mantelpiece. "The low coward!" she said again. "But
before he leaves . . . before he leaves England . . . "

As she turned to go from the room, Rudyard's portrait on the wall met
her eyes. "I can't go on, Rudyard," she said to it. "I know that now."

Out in the streets, which Ian Stafford travelled with hasty steps, the
newsboys were calling:

"War declared! All about the war!"

"That is the way out for me," Stafford said, aloud, as he hastened
on. "That opens up the road.... I'm still an artillery officer."

He directed his swift steps toward Pall Mall and the War Office.



CHAPTER XXII

IN WHICH FELLOWES GOES A JOURNEY


Kruger's ultimatum, expected though it was, shook England as nothing
had done since the Indian mutiny, but the tremour of national
excitement presently gave way to a quiet, deep determination.

An almost Oriental luxury had gone far to weaken the fibre of that
strong and opulent middle-class who had been the backbone of England,
the entrenched Philistines. The value of birth as a moral asset which
had a national duty and a national influence, and the value of money
which had a social responsibility and a communal use, were unrealized
by the many nouveaux riches who frequented the fashionable purlieus;
who gave vast parties where display and extravagance were the
principal feature; who ostentatiously offered large sums to public
objects. Men who had made their money where copper or gold or oil or
wool or silver or cattle or railways made commercial kings, supported
schemes for the public welfare brought them by fine ladies, largely
because the ladies were fine; and they gave substantial sums--upon
occasion--for these fine ladies' fine causes. Rich men, or reputed
rich men, whose wives never appeared, who were kept in secluded
quarters in Bloomsbury or Maida Vale, gave dinners at the Savoy or the
Carlton which the scrapings of the aristocracy attended; but these
gave no dinners in return.

To get money to do things, no matter how,--or little matter how; to
be in the swim, and that swim all too rapidly washing out the real
people--that was the almost universal ambition. But still the real
people, however few or many, in the time of trouble came quietly
into the necessary and appointed places with the automatic
precision of the disciplined friend of the state and of humanity;
and behind them were folk of the humbler sort, the lower middle-
class, the labouring-man. Of these were the landpoor peer, with his
sense of responsibility cultivated by daily life and duty in his
county, on the one hand; the professional man of all professions,
the little merchant, the sailor, the clerk and artisan, the digger
and delver, on the other; and, in between, those people in the
shires who had not yet come to be material and gross, who had
old-fashioned ideas of the duty of the citizen and the Christian.
In the day of darkness these came and laid what they had at the
foot of the altar of sacrifice.

This at least the war did: it served as a sieve to sift the people,
and it served as the solvent of many a life-problem.

Ian Stafford was among the first to whom it offered "the way out," who
went to it for the solution of their own set problem. Suddenly, as he
stood with Jasmine in the little room where so many lives were tossed
into the crucible of Fate that morning, the newsboy's voice shouting,
"War declared!" had told him the path he must tread.

He had astonished the War Office by his request to be sent to the
Front with his old arm, the artillery, and he was himself astonished
by the instant assent that was given. And now on this October day he
was on his way to do two things--to see whether Adrian Fellowes was
keeping his promise, and to visit Jigger and his sister.

There had not been a week since the days at Glencader when he had not
gone to the sordid quarters in the Mile End Road to see Jigger, and to
hear from him how his sister was doing at the opera, until two days
before, when he had learned from Lou herself what she had suffered at
the hands of Adrian Fellowes. That problem would now be settled
forever; but there remained the question of Jigger, and that must be
settled, whatever the other grave problems facing him. Jigger must be
cared for, must be placed in a position where he could have his start
in life. Somehow Jigger was associated with all the movements of his
life now, and was taken as part of the problem. What to do? He thought
of it as he went eastward, and it did not seem easy to settle
it. Jigger himself, however, cut the Gordian knot.

When he was told that Stafford was going to South Africa, and that it
was a question as to what he--Jigger--should now do, in what sphere
of life his abnormally "cute" mind must run, he answered, instantly.

"I'm goin' wiv y'r gryce," he said. "That's it--stryght. I'm goin'
out there wiv you."

Ian shook his head and smiled sadly. "I'm afraid that's not for you,
Jigger. No, think again."

"Ain't there work in Souf Afriker--maybe not in the army itself, y'r
gryce? Couldn't I have me chanct out there? Lou's all right now, I
bet; an' I could go as easy as can be."

"Yes, Lou will be all right now," remarked Stafford, with a reflective
irony.

"I ain't got no stiddy job here, and there's work in Souf Afriker,
ain't they? Couldn't I get a job holdin' horses, or carryin' a flag,
or cleanin' the guns, or nippin' letters about--couldn't I, y'r gryce?
I'm only askin' to go wiv you, to work, same as ever I did before I
was run over. Ain't I goin' wiv you, y'r gryce?"

With a sudden resolve Stafford laid a hand on his shoulder. "Yes, you
are going 'wiv' me, Jigger. You just are, horse, foot, and
artillery. There'll be a job somewhere. I'll get you something to do,
or--"

"Or bust, y'r gryce?"

So the problem lessened, and Ian's face cleared a little. If all the
difficulties perplexing his life would only clear like that! The babe
and the suckling had found the way so simple, so natural; and it was a
comforting way, for he had a deep and tender regard for this quaint,
clever waif who had drifted across his path.

To-morrow he would come and fetch Jigger: and Jigger's face followed
him into the coming dusk, radiant and hopeful and full of life--of
life that mattered. Jigger would go out to "Souf Afriker" with all his
life before him, but he, Ian Stafford, would go with all his life
behind him, all mile-stones passed except one.

So, brooding, he walked till he came to an underground station, and
there took a train to Charing Cross. Here he was only a little
distance away from the Embankment, where was to be found Adrian
Fellowes; and with bent head he made his way among the motley crowd in
front of the station, scarcely noticing any one, yet resenting the
jostle and the crush. Suddenly in the crowd in front of him he saw
Krool stealing along with a wide-awake hat well down over his
eyes. Presently the sinister figure was lost in the confusion. It did
not occur to him that perhaps Krool might be making for the same
destination as himself; but the sight of the man threw his mind into
an eddy of torturing thoughts.

The flare of light, white and ghastly, at Charing Cross was shining on
a moving mass of people, so many of whom were ghastly also--derelicts
of humanity, ruins of womanhood, casuals, adventurers, scavengers of
life, prowlers who lived upon chance, upon cards, upon theft, upon
women, upon libertines who waited in these precincts for some foolish
and innocent woman whom they could entrap. Among them moved also the
thousand other good citizens bent upon catching trains or wending
their way home from work; but in the garish, cruel light, all, even
the good, looked evil in a way, and furtive and unstable. To-night,
the crowd were far more restless than usual, far more irritating in
their purposeless movements. People sauntered, jerked themselves
forward, moved in and out, as it were, intent on going everywhere and
nowhere; and the excitement possessing them, the agitation in the air,
made them seem still more exasperating, and bewildering. Newsboys with
shrill voices rasped the air with invitations to buy, and everywhere
eager, nervous hands held out their half-pennies for the flimsy
sensational rags.

Presently a girl jostled Stafford, then apologized with an endearing
word which brought a sick sensation to his brain; but he only shook
his head gravely at her. After all, she had a hard trade and it led
nowhere--nowhere.

"Coming home with me, darling?" she added in response to his
meditative look. Anything that was not actual rebuff was invitation to
her blunted sense. "Coming home with me--?"

Home! A wave of black cynicism, of sardonic mirth passed through
Stafford's brain. Home--where the business of this poor wayfarer's
existence was carried on, where the shopkeeper sold her wares in the
inner sanctuary! Home.... He shook the girl's hand from his elbow and
hastened on.

Yet why should he be angered with her, he said to himself. It was not
moral elevation which had made him rough with her, but only that word
Home she used.... The dire mockery of it burned his mind like a
corrosive acid. He had had no home since his father died years
ago,--his mother had died when he was very young--and his eldest
brother had taken possession of the family mansions, placing them in
the control of his foreign wife, who sat in his mother's chair and in
her place at table.

He had wished so often in the past for a home of his own, where he
could gather round him young faces and lose himself in promoting the
interests of those for whom he had become forever responsible. He had
longed for the Englishman's castle, for his own little realm of
interest where he could be supreme; and now it was never to be.

The idea gained in sacred importance as it receded forever from all
possibility. In far-off days it had been associated with a vision in
blue, with a face like a dresden-china shepherdess and hair like
Aphrodite's. Laughter and wit and raillery had been part of the
picture; and long evenings in the winter-time, when they two would
read the books they both loved, and maybe talk awhile of world events
in which his work had place; in which his gifts were found, shaping,
influencing, producing. The garden, the orchard--he loved
orchards--the hedges of flowering ivy and lilacs; and the fine grey
and chestnut horses driven by his hand or hers through country lanes;
the smell of the fallen leaves in the autumn evenings; or the sting of
the bracing January wind across the moors or where the woodcock
awaited its spoiler. All these had been in the vision. It was all over
now. He had seen an image, it had vanished, and he was in the desert
alone.

A band was playing "The Banks o' Garry Owen," and the tramp of
marching men came to his ears. The crowd surged round him, pushed him,
forced him forward, carried him on, till the marching men came near,
were alongside of him--a battalion of Volunteers, going to the war to
see "Kruger's farmers bite the dust!"--a six months' excursion, as
they thought. Then the crowd, as it cheered jostled him against the
wall of the shops, and presently he found himself forced down
Buckingham Street. It was where he wished to go in order to reach
Adrian Fellowes' apartments. He did not notice, as he was practically
thrown into the street, that Krool was almost beside him.

The street was not well lighted, and he looked neither to right nor
left. He was thinking hard of what he would say to Adrian Fellowes,
if, and when, he saw him.

But not far behind him was a figure that stole along in the darker
shadows of the houses, keeping at some distance. The same figure
followed him furtively till he came into that part of the Embankment
where Adrian Fellowes' chambers were; then it fell behind a little,
for here the lights were brighter. It hung in the shadow of a door-way
and watched him as he approached the door of the big building where
Adrian Fellowes lived.

Presently, as he came nearer, Stafford saw a hansom standing before
the door. Something made him pause for a moment, and when, in the
pause, the figure of a woman emerged from the entrance and hastily got
into the hansom, he drew back into the darkness of a doorway, as the
man did who was now shadowing him; and he waited till it turned round
and rolled swiftly away. Then he moved forward again. When not far
from the entrance, however, another cab--a four-wheeler--discharged
its occupant at a point nearer to the building than where he
waited. It was a woman. She paid the cabman, who touched his hat with
quick and grateful emphasis, and, wheeling his old crock round,
clattered away. The woman glanced along the empty street swiftly, and
then hurried to the doorway which opened to Adrian Fellowes' chambers.

Instantly Stafford recognized her. It was Jasmine, dressed in black
and heavily veiled. He could not mistake the figure--there was none
other like it; or the turn of her head--there was only one such head
in all England. She entered the building quickly.

There was nothing to do but wait until she came out again. No passion
stirred in him, no jealousy, no anger. It was all dead. He knew why
she had come; or he thought he knew. She would tell the man who had
said no word in defense of her, done nothing to protect her, who let
the worst be believed, without one protest of her innocence, what she
thought of him. She was foolish to go to him, but women do mad things,
and they must not be expected to do the obviously sensible thing when
the crisis of their lives has come. Stafford understood it all.

One thing he was certain Jasmine did not know--the intimacy between
Fellowes and Al'mah. He himself had been tempted to speak of it in
their terrible interview that morning; but he had refrained. The
ignominy, the shame, the humiliation of that would have been beyond
her endurance. He understood; but he shrank at the thought of the
nature of the interview which she must have, at the thought of the
meeting at all.

He would have some time to wait, no doubt, and he made himself easy in
the doorway, where his glance could command the entrance she had
used. He mechanically took out a cigar-case, but after looking at the
cigars for a moment put them away again with a sigh. Smoking would not
soothe him. He had passed beyond the artificial.

His waiting suddenly ended. It seemed hardly three minutes after
Jasmine's entrance when she appeared in the doorway again, and, after
a hasty glance up and down the street, sped away as swiftly as she
could, and, at the corner, turned up sharply towards the Strand. Her
movements had been agitated, and, as she hurried on, she thrust her
head down into her muff as a woman would who faced a blinding rain.

The interview had been indeed short. Perhaps Fellowes had already gone
abroad. He would soon find out.

He mounted the deserted staircase quickly and knocked at Fellowes'
door. There was no reply. There was a light, however, and he knocked
again. Still there was no answer. He tried the handle of the door. It
turned, the door gave, and he entered. There was no sound. He knocked
at an inner door. There was no reply, yet a light showed in the
room. He turned the handle. Entering the room, he stood still and
looked round. It seemed empty, but there were signs of packing, of
things gathered together hastily.

Then, with a strange sudden sense of a presence in the room, he looked
round again. There in a far corner of the large room was a couch, and
on it lay a figure--Adrian Fellowes, straight and still--and sleeping.

Stafford went over. "Fellowes," he said, sharply.

There was no reply. He leaned over and touched a shoulder. "Fellowes!"
he exclaimed again, but something in the touch made him look closely
at the face half turned to the wall. Then he knew.

Adrian Fellowes was dead.

Horror came upon Stafford, but no cry escaped him. He stooped once
more and closely looked at the body, but without touching it. There
was no sign of violence, no blood, no disfigurement, no distortion,
only a look of sleep--a pale, motionless sleep.

But the body was warm yet. He realized that as his hand had touched
the shoulder. The man could only have been dead a little while.

Only a little while: and in that little while Jasmine had left the
house with agitated footsteps.

"He did not die by his own hand," Stafford said aloud.

He rang the bell loudly. No one answered. He rang and rang again, and
then a lazy porter came.



CHAPTER XXIII

"MORE WAS LOST AT MOHACKSFIELD"


Eastminster House was ablaze. A large dinner had been fixed for this
October evening, and only just before half-past eight Jasmine entered
the drawing-room to receive her guests. She had completely forgotten
the dinner till very late in the afternoon, when she observed
preparations for which she had given instructions the day before. She
was about to leave the house upon the mission which had drawn her
footsteps in the same direction as those of Ian Stafford, when the
butler came to her for information upon some details. These she gave
with an instant decision which was part of her equipment, and then,
when the butler had gone, she left the house on foot to take a cab at
the corner of Piccadilly.

When she returned home, the tables in the dining-room were decorated,
the great rooms were already lighted, and the red carpet was being
laid down at the door. The footmen looked up with surprise as she came
up the steps, and their eyes followed her as she ascended the
staircase with marked deliberation.

"Well, that's style for you," said the first footman. "Takin' an
airin' on shanks' hosses."

"And a quarter of an hour left to put on the tirara," sniggered the
second footman. "The lot is asked for eight-thirty."

"Swells, the bunch, windin' up with the brother of an
Emperor--'struth!"

"I'll bet the Emperor's brother ain't above takin' a tip about shares
on the Rand, me boy."

"I'll bet none of 'em ain't. That's why they come--not forgetting th'
grub and the fizz."

"What price a title for the Byng Baas one of these days! They like
tips down there where the old Markis rumbles through his beard--and a
lot of hands to be greased. And grease it costs a lot, political
grease does. But what price a title--Sir Rudyard Byng, Bart., wot oh!"

"Try another shelf higher up, and it's more like it. Wot a head for a
coronet 'ers! W'y--"

But the voice of the butler recalled them from the fields of
imagination, and they went with lordly leisure upon the business of
the household.

Socially this was to be the day of Jasmine's greatest triumph. One of
the British royal family was, with the member of another great
reigning family, honouring her table--though the ladies of neither
were to be present; and this had been a drop of chagrin in her
cup. She had been unaware of the gossip there had been of
late,--though it was unlikely the great ladies would have known of
it--and she would have been slow to believe what Ian had told her this
day, that men had talked lightly of her at De Lancy Scovel's
house. Her eyes had been shut; her wilful nature had not been
sensitive to the quality of the social air about her. People
came--almost "everybody" came--to her house, and would come, of
course, until there was some open scandal; until her husband
intervened. Yet everybody did not come. The royal princesses had not
found it convenient to come; and this may have meant nothing, or very
much indeed. To Jasmine, however, as she hastily robed herself for
dinner, her mind working with lightning swiftness, it did not matter
at all; if all the kings and queens of all the world had promised to
come and had not come, it would have meant nothing to her this night
of nights.

In her eyes there was the look of one who has seen some horrible
thing, though she gave her orders with coherence and decision as
usual, and with great deftness she assisted her maid in the hasty
toilette. Her face was very pale, save for one or two hectic spots
which took the place of the nectarine bloom so seldom absent from her
cheeks, and in its place was a new, shining, strange look like a most
delicate film--the transfiguring kind of look which great joy or great
pain gives.

Coming up the staircase from the street, she had seen Krool enter her
husband's room more hastily than usual, and had heard him greeted
sharply--something that sounded strange to her ears, for Rudyard was
uniformly kind to Krool. Never had Rudyard's voice sounded as it did
now. Of course it was her imagination, but it was like a voice which
came from some desolate place, distant, arid and alien. That was not
the voice in which he had wooed her on the day when they heard of
Jameson's Raid. That was not the voice which had spoken to her in
broken tones of love on the day Ian first dined with her after her
marriage--that fateful, desperate day. This was a voice which had a
cheerless, fretful note, a savage something in it. Presently they two
would meet, and she knew how it would be--an outward semblance, a
superficial amenity and confidence before their guests; the smile of
intimacy, when there was no intimacy, and never, never, could be
again; only acting, only make-believe, only the artifice of deceit.

Yet when she was dressed--in pure white, with only a string of pearls,
the smallest she had, round her neck--she was like that white flower
which had been placed on her pillow last night.

Turning to leave the bedroom she caught sight of her face and figure
again in the big mirror, and she seemed to herself like some other
woman. There was that strange, distant look of agony in her eyes, that
transfiguring look in the face; there was the figure somehow gone
slimmer in these few hours; and there was a frail appearance which did
not belong to her.

As she was about to leave the room to descend the stairs, there came a
knock at the door. A bunch of white violets was handed in, with a
pencilled note in Rudyard's handwriting.

White violets--white violets!

The note read, "Wear these to-night, Jasmine."

White violets--how strange that he should send them! These they send
for the young, the innocent, and the dead. Rudyard had sent them to
her--from how far away! He was there just across the hallway, and yet
he might have been in Bolivia, so far as their real life was
concerned.

She was under no illusion. This day, and perhaps a few, a very few
others, must be lived under the same roof, in order that they could
separate without scandal; but things could never go on as in the
past. She had realized that the night before, when still that chance
of which she had spoken to Stafford was hers; when she had wound the
coil of her wonderful hair round her throat, and had imagined that
self-destruction which has tempted so many of more spiritual make than
herself. It was melodramatic, emotional, theatrical, maybe; but the
emotional, the theatrical, the egotistic mortal has his or her
tragedy, which is just as real as that which comes to those of more
spiritual vein, just as real as that which comes to the more classical
victim of fate. Jasmine had the deep defects of her qualities. Her
suffering was not the less acute because it found its way out with
impassioned demonstration.

There was, however, no melodrama in the quiet trembling with which she
took the white violets, the symbol of love and death. She was sure
that Rudyard was not aware of their significance and meaning, but that
did not modify the effect upon her. Her trouble just now was too deep
for tears, too bitter for words, too terrible for aught save numb
endurance. Nothing seemed to matter in a sense, and yet the little
routine of life meant so much in its iron insistence. The habits of
convention are so powerful that life's great issues are often obscured
by them. Going to her final doom a woman would stop to give the last
careful touch to her hair--the mechanical obedience to long habit. It
is not vanity, not littleness, but habit; never shown with subtler
irony than in the case of Madame de Langrois, who, pacing the path to
her execution at Lille, stooped, picked up a pin from the ground, and
fastened it in her gown--the tyranny of habit.

Outside her own room Jasmine paused for a moment and looked at the
closed door of Rudyard's room. Only a step--and yet she was kept apart
from him by a shadow so black, so overwhelming, that she could not
penetrate it. It smothered her sight. No, no, that little step could
not be taken; there was a gulf between them which could not be
bridged.

There was nothing to say to Rudyard except what could be said upon the
surface, before all the world, as it were; things which must be said
through an atmosphere of artificial sounds, which would give no
response to the agonized cries of the sentient soul. She could make
believe before the world, but not alone with Rudyard. She shrank
within herself at the idea of being alone with him.

As she went down-stairs a scene in a room on the Thames Embankment,
from which she had come a half hour ago, passed before her vision. It
was as though it had been imprinted on the film of her eye and must
stay there forever.

When would the world know that Adrian Fellowes lay dead in the room on
the Embankment? And when they knew it, what would they say? They would
ask how he died--the world would ask how he died. The Law would ask
how he died.

How had he died? Who killed him? Or did he die by his own hand? Had
Adrian Fellowes, the rank materialist, the bon viveur, the man-luxury,
the courage to kill himself by his own hand? If not, who killed him?
She shuddered. They might say that she killed him.

She had seen no one on the staircase as she had gone up, but she had
dimly seen another figure outside in the terrace as she came out, and
there was the cabman who drove her to the place. That was all.

Now, entering the great drawing-room of her own house she shuddered as
though from an icy chill. The scene there on the Embankment--her own
bitter anger, her frozen hatred; then the dead man with his face
turned to the wall; the stillness, the clock ticking, her own cold
voice speaking to him, calling; then the terrified scrutiny, the touch
of the wrist, the realization, the moment's awful horror, the silence
which grew more profound, the sudden paralysis of body and
will.... And then--music, strange, soft, mysterious music coming from
somewhere inside the room, music familiar and yet unnatural, a song
she had heard once before, a pathetic folk-song of eastern Europe,
"More Was Lost at Mohacksfield." It was a tale of love and loss and
tragedy and despair.

Startled and overcome, she had swayed, and would have fallen, but that
with an effort of the will she had caught at the table and saved
herself. With the music still creeping in unutterable melancholy
through the room, she had fled, closing the door behind her very
softly as though not to disturb the sleeper. It had followed her down
the staircase and into the street, the weird, unnatural music.

It was only when she had entered a cab in the Strand that she realized
exactly what the music was. She remembered that Fellowes had bought a
music-box which could be timed to play at will--even days ahead, and
he had evidently set the box to play at this hour. It did so, a
strange, grim commentary on the stark thing lying on the couch,
nerveless as though it had been dead a thousand years. It had ceased
to play before Stafford entered the room, but, strangely enough, it
began again as he said over the dead body, "He did not die by his own
hand."

Standing before the fireplace in the drawing-room, awaiting the first
guest, Jasmine said to herself: "No, no, he had not the courage to
kill himself."

Some one had killed him. Who was it? Who killed
him--Rudyard--Ian--who? But how? There was no sign of violence. That
much she had seen. He lay like one asleep. Who was it killed him?

"Lady Tynemouth."

Back to the world from purgatory again. The butler's voice broke the
spell, and Lady Tynemouth took her friend in her arms and kissed her.

"So handsome you look, my darling--and all in white. White violets,
too. Dear, dear, how sweet, and oh, how triste! But I suppose it's
chic. Certainly, it is stunning. And so simple. Just the weeny, teeny
string of pearls, like a young under-secretary's wife, to show what
she might do if she had a fair chance. Oh, you clever, wonderful
Jasmine!"

"My dressmaker says I have no real taste in colours, so I
compromised," was Jasmine's reply, with a really good imitation of a
smile.

As she babbled on, Lady Tynemouth had been eyeing her friend with
swift inquiry, for she had never seen Jasmine look as she did
to-night, so ethereal, so tragically ethereal, with dark lines under
the eyes, the curious transparency of the skin, and the feverish
brightness and far-awayness of the look. She was about to say
something in comment, but other guests entered, and it was
impossible. She watched, however, from a little distance, while
talking gaily to other guests; she watched at the dinner-table, as
Jasmine, seated between her two royalties, talked with gaiety, with
pretty irony, with respectful badinage; and no one could be so daring
with such ceremonious respect at the same time as she. Yet through it
all Lady Tynemouth saw her glance many times with a strange, strained
inquiry at Rudyard, seated far away opposite her; at another big,
round table.

"There's something wrong here," Lady Tynemouth said to herself, and
wondered why Ian Stafford was not present. Mennaval was there, eagerly
seeking glances. These Jasmine gave with a smiling openness and
apparent good-fellowship, which were not in the least compromising.
Lady Tynemouth saw Mennaval's vain efforts, and laughed to herself,
and presently she even laughed with her neighbour about them.

"What an infant it is!" she said to her table companion. "Jasmine Byng
doesn't care a snap of her finger about Mennaval."

"Does she care a snap for anybody?" asked the other. Then he added,
with a kind of query in the question apart from the question itself:
"Where is the great man--where's Stafford to-night?"

"Counting his winnings, I suppose." Lady Tynemouth's face grew
soft. "He has done great things for so young a man. What a distance he
has gone since he pulled me and my red umbrella back from the Zambesi
Falls!"

Then proceeded a gay conversation, in which Lady Tynemouth was quite
happy. When she could talk of Ian Stafford she was really enjoying
herself. In her eyes he was the perfect man, whom other women tried to
spoil, and whom, she flattered herself, she kept sound and unspoiled
by her frank platonic affection.

"Our host seems a bit abstracted to-night," said her table companion
after a long discussion about what Stafford had done and what he still
might do.

"The war--it means so much to him," said Lady Tynemouth. Yet she had
seen the note of abstraction too, and it had made her wonder what was
happening in this household.

The other demurred.

"But I imagine he has been prepared for the war for some time. He
didn't seem excessively worried about it before dinner, yet he seemed
upset too, so pale and anxious-looking."

"I'll make her talk, make her tell me what it is, if there is
anything," said Lady Tynemouth to herself. "I'll ask myself to stay
with her for a couple of days."

Superficial as Lady Tynemouth seemed to many, she had real sincerity,
and she was a friend in need to her friends. She loved Jasmine as much
as she could love any woman, and she said now, as she looked at
Jasmine's face, so alert, so full of raillery, yet with such an
undertone of misery:

"She looks as if she needed a friend."

After dinner she contrived to get her arm through that of her hostess,
and gave it an endearing pressure. "May I come to you for a few days,
Jasmine?" she asked.

"I was going to ask if you would have me," answered Jasmine, with a
queer little smile. "Rudyard will be up to his ears for a few days,
and that's a chance for you and me to do some shopping, and some other
things together, isn't it?"

She was thinking of appearances, of the best way to separate from
Rudyard for a little while, till the longer separation could be
arranged without scandal. Ian Stafford had said that things could go
on in this house as before, that Rudyard would never hint to her what
he knew, or rather what the letter had told him or left untold: but
that was impossible. Whatever Rudyard was willing to do, there was
that which she could not do. Twenty-four hours had accomplished a
complete revolution in her attitude towards life and in her sense of
things. Just for these immediate days to come, when the tragedy of
Fellowes' death would be made a sensation of the hour, there must be
temporary expedients; and Lady Tynemouth had suggested one which had
its great advantages.

She could not bear to remain in Rudyard's house; and in his heart of
hearts Rudyard would wish the same, even if he believed her innocent;
but if she must stay for appearance' sake, then it would be good to
have Lady Tynemouth with her. Rudyard would be grateful for time to
get his balance again. This bunch of violets was the impulse of a big,
magnanimous nature; but it would be followed by the inevitable
reaction, which would be the real test and trial.

Love and forgiveness--what had she to do with either! She did not wish
forgiveness because of Adrian Fellowes. No heart had been involved in
that episode. It had in one sense meant nothing to her. She loved
another man, and she did not wish forgiveness of him either. No, no,
the whole situation was impossible. She could not stay here. For his
own sake Rudyard would not, ought not, to wish her to stay. What might
the next few days bring forth?

Who had killed Adrian Fellowes? He was not man enough to take his own
life--who had killed him? Was it her husband, after all? He had said
to Ian Stafford that he would do nothing, but, with the maggot of
revenge and jealousy in their brains, men could not be trusted from
one moment to another.

The white violets? Even they might be only the impulse of the moment,
one of those acts of madness of jealous and revengeful people. Men had
kissed their wives and then killed them--fondled them, and then
strangled them. Rudyard might have made up his mind since morning to
kill Fellowes, and kill herself, also. Fellowes was gone, and now
might come her turn. White violets were the flowers of death, and the
first flowers he had ever given her were purple violets, the flowers
of life and love.

If Rudyard had killed Adrian Fellowes, there would be an end to
everything. If he was suspected, and if the law stretched out its hand
of steel to clutch him--what an ignominious end to it all; what a mean
finish to life, to opportunity, to everything worth doing!

And she would have been the cause of everything.

The thought scorched her soul.

Yet she talked on gaily to her guests until the men returned from
their cigars; as though Penalty and Nemesis were outside even the
range of her imagination; as though she could not hear the snap of the
handcuffs on Rudyard's--or Ian's--wrists.

Before and after dinner only a few words had passed between her and
Rudyard, and that was with people round them. It was as though they
spoke through some neutralizing medium, in which all real personal
relation was lost. Now Rudyard came to her, however, and in a
matter-of-fact voice said: "I suppose Al'mah will be here. You haven't
heard to the contrary, I hope? These great singers are so whimsical."

There was no time for Jasmine to answer, for through one of the far
entrances of the drawing-room Al'mah entered. Her manner was
composed--if possible more composed than usual, and she looked around
her calmly. At that moment a servant handed Byng a letter. It
contained only a few words, and it ran:

"DEAR BYNG,--Fellowes is gone. I found him dead in his rooms. An
inquest will be held to-morrow. There are no signs of violence;
neither of suicide or anything else. If you want me, I shall be at my
rooms after ten o'clock to-night. I have got all his papers." Yours
ever,

"IAN STAFFORD."

Jasmine watched Rudyard closely as he read. A strange look passed over
his face, but his hand was steady as he put the note in his
pocket. She then saw him look searchingly at Al'mah as he went forward
to greet her.

On the instant Rudyard had made up his mind what to do. It was clear
that Al'mah did not know that Fellowes was dead, or she would not be
here; for he knew of their relations, though he had never told
Jasmine. Jasmine did not suspect the truth, or Al'mah would not be
where she was; and Fellowes would never have written to Jasmine the
letter for which he had paid with his life.

Al'mah was gently appreciative of the welcome she received from both
Byng and Jasmine, and she prepared to sing.

"Yes, I think I am in good voice," she said to Jasmine,
presently. Then Rudyard went, giving his wife's arm a little familiar
touch as he passed, and said:

"Remember, we must have some patriotic things tonight. I'm sure Al'mah
will feel so, too. Something really patriotic and stirring. We shall
need it--yes we shall need cheering very badly before we've
done. We're not going to have a walk-over in South Africa. Cheering up
is what we want, and we must have it."

Again he cast a queer, inquiring look at Al'mah, to which he got no
response, and to himself he said, grimly: "Well, it's better she
should not know it--here."

His mind was in a maze. He moved as in a dream. He was pale, but he
had an air of determination. Once he staggered with dizziness, then he
righted himself and smiled at some one near. That some one winked at
his neighbour.

"It's true, then, what we hear about him," the neighbour said, and
suggestively raised fingers to his mouth.

Al'mah sang as perhaps she had seldom sung. There was in her voice an
abandon and tragic intensity, a wonderful resonance and power, which
captured her hearers as they had never been captured before. First she
sang a love-song, then a song of parting. Afterwards came a lyric of
country, which stirred her audience deeply. It was a challenge to
every patriot to play his part for home and country. It was an appeal
to the spirit of sacrifice; it was an inspiration and an
invocation. Men's eyes grew moist.

And now another, a final song, a combination of all--of love, and loss
and parting and ruin, and war and patriotism and destiny. With the
first low notes of it Jasmine rose slowly from her seat, like one in a
dream, and stood staring blindly at Al'mah. The great voice swelled
out in a passion of agony, then sank away into a note of despair that
gripped the heart.

"But more was lost at Mohacksfield--"

Jasmine had stood transfixed while the first words were sung, then, as
the last line was reached, staring straight in front of her, as though
she saw again the body of Adrian Fellowes in the room by the river,
she gave a cry, which sounded half laughter and half torture, and fell
heavily on the polished floor.

Rudyard ran forward and lifted her in his arms. Lady Tynemouth was
beside him in an instant.

"Yes, that's right--you come," he said to her, and he carried the limp
body up-stairs, the white violets in her dress crushed against his
breast.

"Poor child--the war, of course; it means so much to them."

Thus, a kindly dowager, as she followed the Royalties down-stairs.



CHAPTER XXIV

ONE WHO CAME SEARCHING


"A lady to see you, sir."

"A lady? What should we be doing with ladies here, Gleg?"

"I'm sure I have no use for them, sir," replied Gleg, sourly. He was
in no good humour. That very morning he had been told that his master
was going to South Africa, and that he would not be needed there, but
that he should remain in England, drawing his usual pay. Instead of
receiving this statement with gratitude, Gleg had sniffed in a manner
which, in any one else, would have been impertinence; and he had not
even offered thanks.

"Well, what do you think she wants? She looks respectable?"

"I don't know about that, sir. It's her ladyship, sir."

"It's what 'ladyship,' Gleg?"

"Her ladyship, sir--Lady Tynemouth."

Stafford looked at Gleg meditatively for a minute, and then said
quietly:

"Let me see, you have been with me sixteen years, Gleg. You've
forgotten me often enough in that time, but you've never forgotten
yourself before. Come to me to-morrow at noon.... I shall allow you a
small pension. Show her ladyship in."

Gone waxen in face, Gleg crept out of the room.

"Seven-and-six a week, I suppose," he said to himself as he went down
the stairs. "Seven-and-six for a bit of bonhommy."

With great consideration he brought Lady Tynemouth up, and shut the
door with that stillness which might be reverence, or something at its
antipodes.

Lady Tynemouth smiled cheerily at Ian as she held out her hand.

"Gleg disapproves of me very greatly. He thinks I am no better than I
ought to be."

"I am sure you are," answered Stafford, drily.

"Well, if you don't know, Ian, who does? I've put my head in the
lion's mouth before, just like this, and the lion hasn't snapped
once," she rejoined, settling herself cozily in a great, green
leather-chair. "Nobody would believe it; but there it is. The world
couldn't think that you could be so careless of your opportunities, or
that I would pay for the candle without burning it."

"On the contrary, I think they would believe anything you told them."

She laughed happily. "Wouldn't you like to call me Alice, 'same as
ever,' in the days of long ago? It would make me feel at home after
Gleg's icy welcome."

He smiled, looked down at her with admiration, and quoted some lines
of Swinburne, alive with cynicism:

"And the worst and the best of this is,
That neither is most to blame
If she has forgotten my kisses,
And I have forgotten her name."

Lady Tynemouth made a plaintive gesture. "I should probably be able
to endure the bleak present, if there had been any kisses in the sunny
past," she rejoined, with mock pathos. "That's the worst of our
friendship, Ian. I'm quite sure the world thinks I'm one of your spent
flames, and there never was any fire, not so big as the point of a
needle, was there? It's that which hurts so now, little Ian
Stafford--not so much fire as would burn on the point of a needle."

"'On the point of a needle,'" Ian repeated, half-abstractedly. He went
over to his writing-desk, and, opening a blotter, regarded it
meditatively for an instant. As he did so she tapped the floor
impatiently with her umbrella, and looked at him curiously, but with a
little quirk of humour at the corners of her mouth.

"The point of a needle might carry enough fire to burn up a good
deal," he said, reflectively. Then he added, slowly: "Do you remember
Mr. Mappin and his poisoned needle at Glencader?"

"Yes, of course. That was a day of tragedy, when you and Rudyard Byng
won a hundred Royal Humane Society medals, and we all felt like
martyrs and heroes. I had the most creepy dreams afterwards. One night
it was awful. I was being tortured with Mr. Mappin's needle horribly
by--guess whom? By that half-caste Krool, and I waked up with a
little scream, to find Tynie busy pinching me. I had been making such
a wurra-wurra, as he called it."

"Well, it is a startling idea that there's poison powerful enough to
make a needle-point dipped in it deadly."

"I don't believe it a bit, but--"

Pausing, she flicked a speck of fluff from her black dress--she was
all in black, with only a stole of pure white about her
shoulders. "But tell me," she added, presently--"for it's one of the
reasons why I'm here now--what happened at the inquest to-day? The
evening papers are not out, and you were there, of course, and gave
evidence, I suppose. Was it very trying? I'm sure it was, for I've
never seen you look so pale. You are positively haggard, Ian. You
don't mind that from an old friend, do you? You look terribly ill,
just when you should look so well."

"Why should I look so well?" He gazed at her steadily. Had she any
glimmering of the real situation? She was staying now in Byng's house,
and two days had gone since the world had gone wrong; since Jasmine
had sunk to the floor unconscious as Al'mah sang, "More was lost at
Mohacksfield."

"Why should you look so well? Because you are the coming man, they
say. It makes me so proud to be your friend--even your neglected, if
not quite discarded, friend. Every one says you have done such
splendid work for England, and that now you can have anything you
want. The ball is at your feet. Dear man, you ought to look like a
morning-glory, and not as you do. Tell me, Ian, are you ill, or is it
only the reaction after all you've done?"

"No doubt it's the reaction," he replied.

"I know you didn't like Adrian Fellowes much," she remarked, watching
him closely. "He behaved shockingly at the Glencader Mine
affair--shockingly. Tynie was for pitching him out of the house, and
taking the consequences; but, all the same, a sudden death like that
all alone must have been dreadful. Please tell me, what was the
verdict?"

"Heart failure was the verdict; with regret for a promising life cut
short, and sympathy with the relatives."

"I never heard that he had heart trouble," was the meditative
response. "But--well, of course, it was heart failure. When the heart
stops beating, there's heart failure. What a silly verdict!"

"It sounded rather worse than silly," was Ian's comment.

"Did--did they cut him up, to see if he'd taken morphia, or an
overdose of laudanum or veronal or something? I had a friend who died
of taking quantities of veronal while you were abroad so long--a South
American, she was."

He nodded. "It was all quite in order. There were no signs of poison,
they said, but the heart had had a shock of some kind. There had been
what they called lesion, and all that kind of thing, and not
sufficient strength for recovery."

"I suppose Mr. Mappin wasn't present?" she asked, curiously. "I know
it is silly in a way, but don't you remember how interested
Mr. Fellowes was in that needle? Was Mr. Mappin there?"

"There was no reason why he should be there."

"What witnesses were called?"

"Myself and the porter of Fellowes' apartments, his banker, his
doctor--"

"And Al'mah?" she asked, obliquely.

He did not reply at once, but regarded her inquiringly.

"You needn't be afraid to speak about Al'mah," she continued. "I saw
something queer at Glencader. Then I asked Tynie, and he told me
that--well, all about her and Adrian Fellowes. Was Al'mah there? Did
she give evidence?"

"She was there to be called, if necessary," he responded, "but the
coroner was very good about it. After the autopsy the authorities said
evidence was unnecessary, and--"

"You arranged that, probably?"

"Yes; it was not difficult. They were so stupid--and so kind."

She smoothed out the folds of her dress reflectively, then got up as
if with sudden determination, and came near to him. Her face was pale
now, and her eyes were greatly troubled.

"Ian," she said, in a low voice, "I don't believe that Adrian Fellowes
died a natural death, and I don't believe that he killed himself. He
would not have that kind of courage, even in insanity. He could never
go insane. He could never care enough about anything to do
so. He--did--not--kill--himself. There, I am sure of it. And he did
not die a natural death, either."

"Who killed him?" Ian asked, his face becoming more drawn, but his
eyes remaining steady and quiet.

She put her hand to her eyes for a moment. "Oh, it all seems so
horrible! I've tried to shake it off, and not to think my thoughts,
and I came to you to get fresh confidence; but as soon as I saw your
face I knew I couldn't have it. I know you are upset too, perhaps not
by the same thoughts, but through the same people."

"Tell me all you think or know. Be quite frank," he said, heavily. "I
will tell you why later. It is essential that you should be wholly
frank with me."

"As I have always been. I can't be anything else. Anyhow, I owe you so
much that you have the right to ask me what you will.... There it is,
the fatal thing," she added.

Her eyes were raised to the red umbrella which had nearly carried her
over into the cauldron of the Zambesi Falls.

"No, it is the world that owes me a heavy debt," he responded,
gallantly. "I was merely selfish in saving you."

Her eyes filled with tears, which she brushed away with a little
laugh.

"Ah, how I wish it was that! I am just mean enough to want you to want
me, while I didn't want you. That's the woman, and that's all women,
and there's no getting away from it. But still I would rather you had
saved me than any one else who wasn't bound, like Tynie, to do so."

"Well, it did seem absurd that you should risk so much to keep a
sixpenny umbrella," he rejoined, drily.

"How we play on the surface while there's so much that is wearing our
hearts out underneath," she responded, wearily. "Listen, Ian, you know
what I mean. Whoever killed Adrian Fellowes, or didn't, I am sure that
Jasmine saw him dead. Three nights ago when she fainted and went ill
to bed, I stayed with her, slept in the same room, in the bed beside
hers. The opiate the doctor gave her was not strong enough, and two or
three times she half waked, and--and it was very painful. It made my
heart ache, for I knew it wasn't all dreams. I am sure she saw Adrian
Fellowes lying dead in his room.... Ian, it is awful, but for some
reason she hated him, and she saw him lying dead. If any one knows the
truth, you know. Jasmine cares for you--no, no, don't mind my saying
it. She didn't care a fig for Mennaval, or any of the others, but she
does care for you--cares for you. She oughtn't to, but she does, and
she should have married you long ago before Rudyard Byng came. Please
don't think I am interfering, Ian. I am not. You never had a better
friend than I am. But there's something ghastly wrong. Rudyard is
looking like a giant that's had blood-letting, and he never goes near
Jasmine, except when some one is with her. It's a bad sign when two
people must have some third person about to insulate their
self-consciousness and prevent those fatal moments when they have to
be just their own selves, and have it out."

"You think there's been trouble between them?" His voice was quite
steady, his manner composed.

"I don't think quite that. But there is trouble in that
palace. Rudyard is going to South Africa."

"Well, that is not unnatural. I should expect him to do so. I am going
to South Africa also."

For a moment she looked at him without speaking, and her face slowly
paled. "You are going to the Front--you?"

"Yes--'Back to the army again, sergeant, back to the army again.' I
was a gunner, you know, and not a bad one, either, if I do say it."

"You are going to throw up a great career to go to the Front? When you
have got your foot at the top of the ladder, you climb down?" Her
voice was choking a little.

He made a little whimsical gesture. "There's another ladder to
climb. I'll have a try at it, and do my duty to my country, too. I'll
have a double-barrelled claim on her, if possible."

"I know that you are going because you will not stay when Rudyard
goes," she rejoined, almost irritably.

"What a quixotic idea! Really you are too impossible and
wrong-headed."

He turned an earnest look upon her. "No, I give you my word, I am not
going because Rudyard is going. I didn't know he was going till you
told me. I got permission to go three hours after Kruger's message
came."

"You are only feckless--only feckless, as the Scotch say," she
rejoined with testy sadness. "Well, since everybody is going, I am
going too. I am going with a hospital-ship."

"Well, that would pay off a lot of old debts to the Almighty," he
replied, in kindly taunt.

"I haven't been worse than most women, Ian," she replied. "Women
haven't been taught to do things, to pay off their debts. Men run up
bills and pay them off, and run them up again and again and pay them
off; but we, while we run up bills, our ways of paying them off are so
few, and so uninteresting."

Suddenly she took from her pocket a letter. "Here is a letter for
you," she said. "It was lying on Jasmine's table the night she was
taken ill. I don't know why I did it, but I suppose I took it up so
that Rudyard should not see it; and then I didn't say anything to
Jasmine about it at once. She said nothing, either; but to-day I told
her I'd seen the letter addressed to you, and had posted it. I said it
to see how she would take it. She only nodded, and said nothing at
first. Then after a while she whispered, 'Thank you, my dear,' but in
such a queer tone. Ian, she meant you to have the letter, and here it
is."

She put it into his hands. He remembered it. It was the letter which
Jasmine had laid on the table before him at that last interview when
the world stood still. After a moment's hesitation he put it in his
pocket.

"If she wished me to have it--" he said in a low voice.

"If not, why, then, did she write it? Didn't she say she was glad I
posted it?"

A moment followed, in which neither spoke. Lady Tynemouth's eyes were
turned to the window; Stafford stood looking into the fire.

"Tynie is sure to go to South Africa with his Yeomanry," she continued
at last. "He'll be back in England next week. I can be of use out
there, too. I suppose you think I'm useless because I've never had to
do anything, but you are quite wrong. It's in me. If I'd been driven
to work when I was a girl, if I'd been a labourer's daughter, I'd have
made hats--or cream-cheeses. I'm not really such a fool as you've
always thought me, Ian; at any rate, not in the way you've thought
me."

His look was gentle, as he gazed into her eyes. "I've never thought
you anything but a very sensible and alluring woman, who is only
wilfully foolish at times," he said. "You do dangerous things."

"But you never knew me to do a really wrong thing, and if you haven't,
no one has."

Suddenly her face clouded and her lips trembled. "But I am a good
friend, and I love my friends. So it all hurts. Ian, I'm most
upset. There's something behind Adrian Fellowes' death that I don't
understand. I'm sure he didn't kill himself; but I'm also sure that
some one did kill him." Her eyes sought his with an effort and with
apprehension, but with persistency too. "I don't care what the jury
said--I know I'm right."

"But it doesn't matter now," he answered, calmly. "He will be buried
to-morrow, and there's an end of it all. It will not even be the usual
nine days' wonder. I'd forget it, if I were you."

"I can't easily forget it while you remember it," she rejoined,
meaningly. "I don't know why or how it affects you, but it does affect
you, and that's why I feel it; that's why it haunts me."

Gleg appeared. "A gentleman to see you, sir," he said, and handed Ian
a card.

"Where is he?"

"In the dining-room, sir."

"Very good. I will see him in a moment."

When they were alone again, Lady Tynemouth held out her hand. "When do
you start for South Africa?" she asked.

"In three days. I join my battery in Natal."

"You will hear from me when I get to Durban," she said, with a shy,
inquiring glance.

"You are really going?"

"I mean to organize a hospital-ship and go."

"Where will you get the money?"

"From some social climber," she replied, cynically. His hand was on
the door-knob, and she laid her own on it gently. "You are ill, Ian,"
she said. "I have never seen you look as you do now."

"I shall be better before long," he answered. "I never saw you look so
well."

"That's because I am going to do some work at last," she
rejoined. "Work at last. I'll blunder a bit, but I'll try a great
deal, and perhaps I'll do some good.... And I'll be there to nurse you
if you get fever or anything," she added, laughing nervously--"you and
Tynie."

When she was gone he stood looking at the card in his hand, with his
mind seeing something far beyond. Presently he rang for Gleg.

"Show Mr. Mappin in," he said.



CHAPTER XXV

WHEREIN THE LOST IS FOUND


In a moment the great surgeon was seated, looking reflectively round
him. Soon, however, he said brusquely, "I hope your friend Jigger is
going on all right?"

"Yes, yes, thanks to you."

"No, no, Mr. Stafford, thanks to you and Mrs. Byng chiefly. It was
care and nursing that did it. If I could have hospitals like Glencader
and hospital nurses like Mrs. Byng and Al'mah and yourself, I'd have
few regrets at the end of the year. That was an exciting time at
Glencader."

Stafford nodded, but said nothing. Presently, after some reference to
the disaster at the mine at Glencader and to Stafford's and Byng's
bravery, Mr. Mappin said. "I was shocked to hear of Mr. Fellowes'
death. I was out of town when it happened--a bad case at Leeds; but I
returned early this morning." He paused, inquiringly but Ian said
nothing, and he continued, "I have seen the body."

"You were not at the inquest, I think," Ian remarked, casually.

"No, I was not in time for that, but I got permission to view the
body."

"And the verdict--you approve?"

"Heart failure--yes." Mr. Mappin's lip curled. "Of course. But he had
no heart trouble. His heart wasn't even weak. His life showed that."

"His life showed--?" Ian's eyebrows went up.

"He was very much in society, and there's nothing more strenuous than
that. His heart was all right. Something made it fail, and I have been
considering what it was."

"Are you suggesting that his death was not natural?"

"Quite artificial, quite artificial, I should say."

Ian took a cigarette, and lighted it slowly. "According to your
theory, he must have committed suicide. But how? Not by an effort of
the will, as they do in the East, I suppose?"

Mr. Mappin sat up stiffly in his chair. "Do you remember my showing
you all at Glencader a needle which had on its point enough poison to
kill a man?"

"And leave no trace--yes."

"Do you remember that you all looked at it with interest, and that
Mr. Fellowes examined it more attentively than any one else?"

"I remember."

"Well, I was going to kill a collie with it next day."

"A favourite collie grown old, rheumatic--yes, I remember."

"Well, the experiment failed."

"The collie wasn't killed by the poison?"

"No, not by the poison, Mr. Stafford."

"So your theory didn't work except on paper."

"I think it worked, but not with the collie."

There was a pause, while Stafford looked composedly at his visitor,
and then he said: "Why didn't it work with the collie?"

"It never had its chance."

"Some mistake, some hitch?"

"No mistake, no hitch; but the wrong needle."

"The wrong needle! I should not say that carelessness was a habit with
you." Stafford's voice was civil and sympathetic.

"Confidence breeds carelessness," was Mr. Mappin's enigmatical retort.

"You were over-confident then?"

"Quite clearly so. I thought that Glencader was beyond reproach."

There was a slight pause, and then Stafford, flicking away some
cigarette ashes, continued the catechism. "What particular form of
reproach do you apply to Glencader?"

"Thieving."

"That sounds reprehensible--and rude."

"If you were not beyond reproach, it would be rude, Mr. Stafford."

Stafford chafed at the rather superior air of the expert, whose habit
of bedside authority was apt to creep into his social conversation;
but, while he longed to give him a shrewd thrust, he forbore. It was
hard to tell how much he might have to do to prevent the man from
making mischief. The compliment had been smug, and smugness irritated
Stafford.

"Well, thanks for your testimonial," he said, presently, and then he
determined to cut short the tardy revelation, and prick the bubble of
mystery which the great man was so slowly blowing.

"I take it that you think some one at Glencader stole your needle, and
so saved your collie's life," he said.

"That is what I mean," responded Mr. Mappin, a little discomposed that
his elaborate synthesis should be so sharply brought to an end.

There was almost a grisly raillery in Stafford's reply. "Now, the
collie--were you sufficiently a fatalist to let him live, or did you
prepare another needle, or do it in the humdrum way?"

"I let the collie live."

"Hoping to find the needle again?" asked Stafford, with a smile.

"Perhaps to hear of it again."

"Hello, that is rather startling! And you have done so?

"I think so. Yes, I may say that."

"Now how do you suppose you lost that needle?"

"It was taken from my pocket-case, and another substituted.

"Returning good for evil. Could you not see the difference in the
needles?"

"There is not, necessarily, difference in needles. The substitute was
the same size and shape, and I was not suspicious."

"And what form does your suspicion take now?"

The great man became rather portentously solemn--he himself would have
said "becomingly grave." "My conviction is that Mr. Fellowes took my
needle."

Stafford fixed the other with his gaze. "And killed himself with it?"

Mr. Mappin frowned. "Of that I cannot be sure, of course."

"Could you not tell by examining the body?"

"Not absolutely from a superficial examination."

"You did not think a scientific examination necessary?"

"Yes, perhaps; but the official inquest is over, the expert analysis
or examination is finished by the authorities, and the superficial
proofs, while convincing enough to me, are not complete and final; and
so, there you are."

Stafford got and held his visitor's eyes, and with slow emphasis said:
"You think that Fellowes committed suicide with your needle?"

"No, I didn't say that."

"Then I fear my intelligence must be failing rapidly. You said--"

"I said I was not sure that he killed himself. I am sure that he was
killed by my needle; but I am not sure that he killed himself. Motive
and all that kind of thing would come in there."

"Ah--and all that kind of thing! Why should you discard motive for his
killing himself?"

"I did not say I discarded motive, but I think Mr. Fellowes the last
man in the world likely to kill himself."

"Why, then, do you think he stole the needle?"

"Not to kill himself."

Stafford turned his head away a little. "Come now; this is too
tall. You are going pretty far in suggesting that Fellowes took your
needle to kill some one else."

"Perhaps. But motive might not be so far to seek."

"What motive in this case?" Stafford's eyes narrowed a little with the
inquiry.

"Well, a woman, perhaps."

"You know of some one, who--"

"No. I am only assuming from Mr. Fellowes' somewhat material nature
that there must be a woman or so."

"Or so--why 'or so?'" Stafford pressed him into a corner.

"There comes the motive--one too many, when one may be suspicious, or
jealous, or revengeful, or impossible."

"Did you see any mark of the needle on the body?"

"I think so. But that would not do more than suggest further delicate,
detailed, and final examination."

"You have no trace of the needle itself?"

"None. But surely that isn't strange. If he had killed himself, the
needle would probably have been found. If he did not kill himself, but
yet was killed by it, there is nothing strange in its not being
recovered."

Stafford took on the gravity of a dry-as-dust judge. "I suppose that
to prove the case it would be necessary to produce the needle, as your
theory and your invention are rather new."

"For complete proof the needle would be necessary, though not
indispensable."

Stafford was silent for an instant, then he said: "You have had a look
for the little instrument of passage?"

"I was rather late for that, I fear."

"Still, by chance, the needle might have been picked up. However, it
would look foolish to advertise for a needle which had traces of atric
acid on it, wouldn't it?"

Mr. Mappin looked at Stafford quite coolly, and then, ignoring the
question, said, deliberately: "You discovered the body, I hear. You
didn't by any chance find the needle, I suppose?"

Stafford returned his look with a cool stare. "Not by any chance," he
said, enigmatically.

He had suddenly decided on a line of action which would turn this
astute egoist from his half-indicated purpose. Whatever the means of
Fellowes' death, by whomsoever caused, or by no one, further inquiry
could only result in revelations hurtful to some one. As Mr. Mappin
had surmised, there was more than one woman,--there may have been a
dozen, of course--but chance might just pitch on the one whom
investigation would injure most.

If this expert was quieted, and Fellowes was safely bestowed in his
grave, the tragic incident would be lost quickly in the general
excitement and agitation of the nation. The war-drum would drown any
small human cries of suspicion or outraged innocence. Suppose some one
did kill Adrian Fellowes? He deserved to die, and justice was
satisfied, even if the law was marauded. There were at least four
people who might have killed Fellowes without much remorse. There was
Rudyard, there was Jasmine, there was Lou the erstwhile
flower-girl--and himself. It was necessary that Mappin, however,
should be silenced, and sent about his business.

Stafford suddenly came over to the table near to his visitor, and with
an assumed air of cold indignation, though with a little natural
irritability behind all, said "Mr. Mappin, I assume that you have not
gone elsewhere with your suspicions?"

The other shook his head in negation.

"Very well, I should strongly advise you, for your own reputation as
an expert and a man of science, not to attempt the rather cliche
occupation of trying to rival Sherlock Holmes. Your suspicions may
have some distant justification, but only a man of infinite skill,
tact, and knowledge, with an almost abnormal gift for tracing elusive
clues and, when finding them, making them fit in with fact--only a man
like yourself, a genius at the job, could get anything out of it. You
are not prepared to give the time, and you could only succeed in
causing pain and annoyance beyond calculation. Just imagine a Scotland
Yard detective with such a delicate business to do. We have no Hamards
here, no French geniuses who can reconstruct crimes by a kind of
special sense. Can you not see the average detective blundering about
with his ostentatious display of the obvious; his mind, which never
traced a motive in its existence, trying to elucidate a clue? Well, it
is the business of the Law to detect and punish crime. Let the Law do
it in its own way, find its own clues, solve the mysteries given it to
solve. Why should you complicate things? The official fellows could
never do what you could do, if you were a detective. They haven't the
brains or initiative or knowledge. And since you are not a detective,
and can't devote yourself to this most delicate problem, if there be
any problem at all, I would suggest--I imitate your own rudeness--that
you mind your own business."

He smiled, and looked down at his visitor with inscrutable eyes.

At the last words Mr. Mappin flushed and looked consequential; but
under the influence of a smile, so winning that many a chancellerie of
Europe had lost its irritation over some skilful diplomatic stroke
made by its possessor, he emerged from his atmosphere of offended
dignity and feebly returned the smile.

"You are at once complimentary and scathing, Mr. Stafford," he said;
"but I do recognize the force of what you say. Scotland Yard is
beneath contempt. I know of cases--but I will not detain you with them
now. They bungle their work terribly at Scotland Yard. A detective
should be a man of imagination, of initiative, of deep knowledge of
human nature. In the presence of a mystery he should be ready to find
motives, to construct them and put them into play, as though they were
real--work till a clue was found. Then, if none is found, find another
motive and work on that. The French do it. They are marvels. Hamard is
a genius, as you say. He imagines, he constructs, he pursues, he
squeezes out every drop of juice in the orange.... You see, I agree
with you on the whole, but this tragedy disturbed me, and I thought
that I had a real clue. I still believe I have, but cui bono?"

"Cui bono indeed, if it is bungled. If you could do it all yourself,
good. But that is impossible. The world wants your skill to save life,
not to destroy it. Fellowes is dead--does it matter so infinitely,
whether by his own hand or that of another?"

"No, I frankly say I don't think it does matter infinitely. His type
is no addition to the happiness of the world."

They looked at each other meaningly, and Mappin responded once again
to Stafford's winning smile.

It pleased him prodigiously to feel Stafford lay a firm hand on his
arm and say: "Can you, perhaps, dine with me to-night at the
Travellers' Club? It makes life worth while to talk to men like you
who do really big things."

"I shall be delighted to come for your own reasons," answered the
great man, beaming, and adjusting his cuffs carefully.

"Good, good. It is capital to find you free." Again Stafford caught
the surgeon's arm with a friendly little grip.

Suddenly, however, Mr. Mappin became aware that Stafford had turned
desperately white and worn. He had noticed this spent condition when
he first came in, but his eyes now rediscovered it. He regarded
Stafford with concern.

"Mr. Stafford," he said, "I am sure you do not realize how much below
par you are.... You have been under great strain--I know, we all know,
how hard you have worked lately. Through you, England launches her
ship of war without fear of complications; but it has told on you
heavily. Nothing is got without paying for it. You need rest, and you
need change."

"Quite so--rest and change. I am going to have both now," said
Stafford with a smile, which was forced and wan.

"You need a tonic also, and you must allow me to give you one," was
the brusque professional response.

With quick movement he went over to Stafford's writing-table, and
threw open the cover of the blotter.

In a flash Stafford was beside him, and laid a hand upon the blotter,
saying with a smile, of the kind which had so far done its work--

"No, no, my friend, I will not take a tonic. It's only a good sleep I
want; and I'll get that to-night. But I give my word, if I'm not all
right to-morrow, if I don't sleep, I'll send to you and take your
tonic gladly."

"You promise?"

"I promise, my dear Mappin."

The great man beamed again: and he really was solicitous for his
new-found friend.

"Very well, very well--Stafford," he replied. "It shall be as you
say. Good-bye, or, rather, au revoir!"

"A la bonne heure!" was the hearty response, as the door opened for
the great surgeon's exit.

When the door was shut again, and Stafford was alone, he staggered
over to the writing-desk. Opening the blotter, he took something up
carefully and looked at it with a sardonic smile.

"You did your work quite well," he said, reflectively.

It was such a needle as he had seen at Glencader in Mr. Mappin's
hand. He had picked it up in Adrian Fellowes' room.

"I wonder who used you," he said in a hard voice. "I wonder who used
you so well. Was it--was it Jasmine?"

With a trembling gesture he sat down, put the needle in a drawer,
locked it, and turned round to the fire again.

"Was it Jasmine?" he repeated, and he took from his pocket the letter
which Lady Tynemouth had given him. For a moment he looked at it
unopened--at the beautiful, smooth handwriting so familiar to his
eyes; then he slowly broke the seal, and took out the closely written
pages.



CHAPTER XXVI

JASMINE'S LETTER


"Ian, oh, Ian, what strange and dreadful things you have written to
me!" Jasmine's letter ran--the letter which she told him she had
written on that morning when all was lost. "Do you realize what you
have said, and, saying it, have you thought of all it means to me? You
have tried to think of what is best, I know, but have you thought of
me? When I read your letter first, a flood of fire seemed to run
through my veins; then I became as though I had been dipped in ether,
and all the winds of an arctic sea were blowing over me.

"To go with you now, far away from the world in which we live and in
which you work, to begin life again, as you say--how sweet and
terrible and glad it would be! But I know, oh, I know myself and I
know you! I am like one who has lived forever. I am not good, and I am
not foolish, I am only mad; and the madness in me urges me to that
visionary world where you and I could live and work and wander, and be
content with all that would be given us--joy, seeing, understanding,
revealing, doing.

"But Ian, it is only a visionary world, that world of which you
speak. It does not exist. The overmastering love, the desire for you
that is in me, makes for me the picture as it is in your mind; but
down beneath all, the woman in me, the everlasting woman, is sure
there is no such world.

"Listen, dear child--I call you that, for though I am only twenty-five
I seem as aged as the Sphinx, and, like the Sphinx that begets
mockery, so my soul, which seems to have looked out over unnumbered
centuries, mocks at this world which you would make for you and
me. Listen, Ian. It is not a real world, and I should not--and that is
the pitiful, miserable part of it--I should not make you happy, if I
were in that world with you. To my dire regret I know it. Suddenly you
have roused in me what I can honestly say I have never felt
before--strange, reckless, hungry feelings. I am like some young
dweller of the jungle which, cut off from its kind tries, with a
passion that eats and eats and eats away his very flesh to get back to
its kind, to his mate, to that other wild child of nature which waits
for the one appeasement of primeval desire.

"Ian, I must tell you the whole truth about myself as I understand
it. I am a hopeless, painful contradiction; I have always been so. I
have always wanted to be good, but something has always driven me
where the flowers have a poisonous sweetness, where the heart grows
bad. I want to cry to you, Ian, to help me to be good; and yet
something drives me on to want to share with you the fruit which turns
to dust and ashes in the long end. And behind all that again, some
tiny little grain of honour in me says that I must not ask you to help
me; says that I ought never to look into your eyes again, never touch
your hand, nor see you any more; and from the little grain of honour
comes the solemn whisper, 'Do not ruin him; do not spoil his life.'

"Your letter has torn my heart, so that it can never again be as it
was before, and because there is some big, noble thing in you, some
little, not ignoble thing is born in me. Ian, you could never know the
anguished desire I have to be with you always, but, if I keep sane at
all, I will not go--no, I will not go with you, unless the madness
carries me away. It would kill you. I know, because I have lived so
many thousands of years. My spirit and my body might be satisfied, the
glory in having you all my own would be so great; but there would be
no joy for you. To men like you, work is as the breath of life. You
must always be fighting for something, always climbing higher, because
you see some big thing to do which is so far above you.

"Yes, men like you get their chance sooner or later, because you work,
and are ready to take the gifts of Fate when they appear and before
they pass. You will be always for climbing, if some woman does not
drag you back. That woman may be a wife, or it may be a loving and
living ghost of a wife like me. Ian, I could not bear to see what
would come at last--the disappointment in your face the look of hope
gone from your eyes; your struggle to climb, and the struggle of no
avail. Sisyphus had never such a task as you would have on the hill of
life, if I left all behind here and went with you. You would try to
hide it; but I would see you growing older hourly before my eyes. You
would smile--I wonder if you know what sort of wonderful, alluring
thing your smile is, Ian?--and that smile would drive me to kill
myself, and so hurt you still more. And so it is always an everlasting
circle of penalty and pain when you take the laws of life you get in
the mountains in your hands and break them in pieces on the rocks in
the valleys, and make new individual laws out of harmony with the
general necessity.

"Isn't it strange, Ian, that I who can do wrong so easily still know
so well and value so well what is right? It is my mother in me and my
grandfather in me, both of them fighting for possession. Let me empty
out my heart before you, because I know--I do not know why, but I do
know, as I write--that some dark cloud lowers, gathers round us, in
which we shall be lost, shall miss the touch of hand and never see
each other's face again. I know it, oh so surely! I did not really
love you years ago, before I married Rudyard; I did not love you when
I married him; I did not love him, I could not really love any one. My
heart was broken up in a thousand pieces to give away in little bits
to all who came. But I cared for you more than I cared for any one
else--so much more; because you were so able and powerful, and were
meant to do such big things; and I had just enough intelligence to
want to understand you; to feel what you were thinking, to grasp its
meaning, however dimly. Yet I have no real intellect. I am only quick
and rather clever--sharp, as Jigger would say, and with some cunning,
too. I have made so many people believe that I am brilliant. When I
think and talk and write, I only give out in a new light what others
like you have taught me; give out a loaf where you gave me a crumb;
blow a drop of water into a bushel of bubbles. No, I did not love you,
in the big way, in those old days, and maybe it is not love I feel for
you now; but it is a great and wonderful thing, so different from the
feeling I once had. It is very powerful, and it is also very cruel,
because it smothers me in one moment, and in the next it makes me want
to fly to you, heedless of consequences.

"And what might those consequences be, Ian, and shall I let you face
them? The real world, your world, England, Europe, would have no more
use for all your skill and knowledge and power, because there would be
a woman in the way. People who would want to be your helpers, and to
follow you, would turn away when they saw you coming; or else they
would say the superficial things which are worse than blows in the
face to a man who wants to feel that men look to him to help solve the
problems perplexing the world. While it may not be love I feel for
you, whatever it is, it makes me a little just and unselfish now. I
will not--unless a spring-time madness drives me to it to-day--I will
not go with you.

"As for the other solution you offer, deceiving the world as to your
purposes, to go far away upon some wild mission, and to die!

"Ah, no, you must not cheat the world so; you must not cheat yourself
so! And how cruel it would be to me! Whatever I deserve--and in
leaving you to marry Rudyard I deserved heavy punishment--still I do
not deserve the torture which would follow me to the last day of my
life if, because of me, you sacrificed that which is not yours alone,
but which belongs to all the world. I loathe myself when I think of
the old wrong that I did you; but no leper woman could look upon
herself with such horror as I should upon myself, if, for the new
wrong I have done you, you were to take your own life.

"These are so many words, and perhaps they will not read to you as
real. That is perhaps because I am only shallow at the best; am only,
as you once called me, 'a little burst of eloquence.' But even I can
suffer, and I believe that even I can love. You say you cannot go on
as things are; that I must go with you or you must die; and yet you do
not wish me to go with you. You have said that, too. But do you not
wonder what would become of me, if either of these alternatives is
followed? A little while ago I could deceive Rudyard, and put myself
in pretty clothes with a smile, and enjoy my breakfast with him and
look in his face boldly, and enjoy the clothes, and the world and the
gay things that are in it, perhaps because I had no real moral
sense. Isn't it strange that out of the thing which the world would
condemn as most immoral, as the very degradation of the heart and soul
and body, there should spring up a new sense that is moral--perhaps
the first true glimmering of it? Oh, dear love of my life, comrade of
my soul, something has come to me which I never had before, and for
that, whatever comes, my lifelong gratitude must be yours! What I now
feel could never have come except through fire and tears, as you
yourself say, and I know so well that the fire is at my feet, and the
tears--I wept them all last night, when I too wanted to die.

"You are coming at eleven to-day, Ian--at eleven. It is now eight. I
will try and send this letter to reach you before you leave your
rooms. If not, I will give it to you when you come--at eleven. Why did
you not say noon--noon--twelve of the clock? The end and the
beginning! Why did you not say noon, Ian? The light is at its zenith
at noon, at twelve; and the world is dark at twelve--at
midnight. Twelve at noon; twelve at night; the light and the
dark--which will it be for us, Ian? Night or noon? I wonder, oh, I
wonder if, when I see you I shall have the strength to say, 'Yes, go,
and come again no more.' Or whether, in spite of everything, I shall
wildly say, 'Let us go away together.' Such is the kind of woman that
I am. And you--dear lover, tell me truly what kind of man are you?

"Your JASMINE."

He read the letter slowly, and he stopped again and again as though to
steady himself. His face became strained and white, and once he poured
brandy and drank it off as though it were water. When he had finished
the letter he went heavily over to the fire and dropped it in. He
watched it burn, until only the flimsy carbon was left.

"If I had not gone till noon," he said aloud, in a nerveless
voice--"if I had not gone till noon . . . Fellowes--did she--or was it
Byng?"

He was so occupied with his thoughts that he was not at first
conscious that some one was knocking.

"Come in," he called out at last.

The door opened and Rudyard Byng entered.

"I am going to South Africa, Stafford," he said, heavily. "I hear that
you are going, too; and I have come to see whether we cannot go out
together."



CHAPTER XXVII

KROOL


"A message from Mr. Byng to say that he may be a little late, but he
says will you go on without him? He will come as soon as possible."

The footman, having delivered himself, turned to withdraw, but Barry
Whalen called him back, saying, "Is Mr. Krool in the house?"

The footman replied in the affirmative. "Did you wish to see him,
sir?" he asked.

"Not at present. A little later perhaps," answered Barry, with a
glance round the group, who eyed him curiously.

At a word the footman withdrew. As the door closed, little black, oily
Sobieski dit Melville said with an attempt at a joke, "Is 'Mr.' Krool
to be called into consultation?"

"Don't be so damned funny, Melville," answered Barry. "I didn't ask
the question for nothing."

"These aren't days when anybody guesses much," remarked Fleming. "And
I'd like to know from Mr. Kruger, who knows a lot of things, and
doesn't gas, whether he means the mines to be safe."

They all looked inquiringly at Wallstein, who in the storms which
rocked them all kept his nerve and his countenance with a power almost
benign. His large, limpid eye looked little like that belonging to an
eagle of finance, as he had been called.

"It looked for a while as though they'd be left alone," said
Wallstein, leaning heavily on the table," but I'm not so sure now." He
glanced at Barry Whalen significantly, and the latter surveyed the
group enigmatically.

"There's something evidently waiting to be said," remarked Wolff, the
silent Partner in more senses than one. "What's the use of waiting?"

Two or three of those present looked at Ian Stafford, who, standing by
the window, seemed oblivious of them all. Byng had requested him to be
present, with a view to asking his advice concerning some
international aspect of the situation, and especially in regard to
Holland and Germany. The group had welcomed the suggestion eagerly,
for on this side of the question they were not so well equipped as on
others. But when it came to the discussion of inner local policy there
seemed hesitation in speaking freely before him. Wallstein, however,
gave a reassuring nod and said, meaningly:

"We took up careful strategical positions, but our camp has been
overlooked from a kopje higher than ours."

"We have been the victims of treachery for years," burst out Fleming,
with anger. "Nearly everything we've done here, nearly everything the
Government has done here, has been known to Kruger--ever since the
Raid."

"I think it could have been stopped," said the once Sobieski, with an
ugly grimace, and an attempt at an accent which would suit his new
name. "Byng's to blame. We ought to have put down our feet from the
start. We're Byng-ridden."

"Keep a civil tongue, Israel," snarled Barry Whalen. "You know nothing
about it, and that is the state in which you most shine--in your
natural state of ignorance, like the heathen in his blindness. But
before Byng comes I'd better give you all some information I've got."

"Isn't it for Byng to hear?" asked Fleming.

"Very much so; but it's for you all to decide what's to be
done. Perhaps Mr. Stafford can help us in the matter, as he has been
with Byng very lately." Wallstein looked inquiringly towards Stafford.

The group nodded appreciatively, and Stafford came forward to the
table, but without seating himself. "Certainly you may command me," he
said. "What is the mystery?"

In short and abrupt sentences Barry Whalen, with an occasional
interjection and explanation from Wallstein, told of the years of
leakage in regard to their plans, of moves circumvented by information
which could only have been got by treacherous means either in South
Africa or in London.

"We didn't know for sure which it was," said Barry, "but the proof has
come at last. One of Kruger's understrappers from Holland was
successfully tapped, and we've got proof that the trouble was here in
London, here in this house where we sit--Byng's home."

There was a stark silence, in which more than one nodded
significantly, and looked round furtively to see how the others took
the news.

"Here is absolute proof. There were two in it here--Adrian Fellowes
and Krool."

"Adrian Fellowes!"

It was Ian Stafford's voice, insistent and inquiring.

"Here is the proof, as I say." Barry Whalen leaned forward and pushed
a paper over on the table, to which were attached two or three smaller
papers and some cablegrams. "Look at them. Take a good look at them
and see how we've been done--done brown. The hand that dipped in the
same dish, as it were, has handed out misfortune to us by the
bucketful. We've been carted in the house of a friend."

The group, all standing, leaned over, as Barry Whalen showed them the
papers, one by one, then passed them round for examination.

"It's deadly," said Fleming. "Men have had their throats cut or been
hanged for less. I wouldn't mind a hand in it myself."

"We warned Byng years ago," interposed Barry, "but it was no use. And
we've paid for it par and premium."

"What can be done to Krool?" asked Fleming.

"Nothing particular--here," said Barry Whalen, ominously.

"Let's have the dog in," urged one of the group.

"Without Byng's permission?" interjected Wallstein.

There was a silence. The last time any of them, except Wallstein, had
seen Byng, was on the evening when he had overheard the slanders
concerning Jasmine, and none had pleasant anticipation of this meeting
with him now. They recalled his departure when Barry Whalen had said,
"God, how he hates us." He was not likely to hate them less, when they
proved that Fellowes and Krool had betrayed him and them all. They had
a wholesome fear of him in more senses than one, because, during the
past few years, while Wallstein's health was bad, Byng's position had
become more powerful financially, and he could ruin any one of them,
if he chose. A man like Byng in "going large" might do the Samson
business. Besides, he had grown strangely uncertain in his temper of
late, and, as Barry Whalen had said, "It isn't good to trouble a
wounded bull in the ring."

They had him on the hip in one way through the exposure of Krool, but
they were all more or less dependent on his financial movements. They
were all enraged at Byng because he had disregarded all warnings
regarding Krool; but what could they do? Instinctively they turned now
to Stafford, whose reputation for brains and diplomacy was so great
and whose friendship with Byng was so close.

Stafford had come to-day for two reasons: to do what he could to help
Byng--for the last time; and to say to Byng that they could not travel
together to South Africa. To make the long journey with him was beyond
his endurance. He must put the world between Rudyard and himself; he
must efface all companionship. With this last act, begotten of the
blind confidence Rudyard had in him, their intercourse must cease
forever. This would be easy enough in South Africa. Once at the Front,
it was as sure as anything on earth that they would never meet
again. It was torture to meet him, and the day of the inquest, when
Byng had come to his rooms after his interview with Lady Tynemouth and
Mr. Mappin, he had been tried beyond endurance.

"Shall we have Krool in without Byng's permission? Is it wise?" asked
Wallstein again. He looked at Stafford, and Stafford instantly
replied:

"It would be well to see Krool, I think. Your action could then be
decided by Krool's attitude and what he says."

Barry Whalen rang the bell, and the footman came. After a brief
waiting Krool entered the room with irritating deliberation and closed
the door behind him.

He looked at no one, but stood contemplating space with a composure
which made Barry Whalen almost jump from his seat in rage.

"Come a little closer," said Wallstein in a soothing voice, but so
Wallstein would have spoken to a man he was about to disembowel.

Krool came nearer, and now he looked round at them all slowly and
inquiringly. As no one spoke for a moment he shrugged his shoulders.

"If you shrug your shoulders again, damn you, I'll sjambok you here as
Kruger did at Vleifontein," said Barry Whalen in a low, angry
voice. "You've been too long without the sjambok."

"This is not the Vaal, it is Englan'," answered Krool, huskily. "The
Law--here!"

"Zo you stink ze law of England would help you--eh?" asked Sobieski,
with a cruel leer, relapsing into his natural vernacular.

"I mean what I say, Krool," interposed Barry Whalen, fiercely,
motioning Sobieski to silence. "I will sjambok you till you can't
move, here in England, here in this house, if you shrug your shoulders
again, or lift an eyebrow, or do one damned impudent thing."

He got up and rang a bell. A footman appeared. "There is a
rhinoceros-hide whip, on the wall of Mr. Byng's study. Bring it here,"
he said, quietly, but with suppressed passion.

"Don't be crazy, Whalen," said Wallstein, but with no great force, for
he would richly have enjoyed seeing the spy and traitor under the
whip. Stafford regarded the scene with detached, yet deep and
melancholy interest.

While they waited, Krool seemed to shrink a little; but as he watched
like some animal at bay, Stafford noticed that his face became
venomous and paler, and some sinister intention showed in his eyes.

The whip was brought and laid upon the table beside Barry Whalen, and
the footman disappeared, looking curiously at the group and at Krool.

Barry Whalen's fingers closed on the whip, and now a look of fear
crept over Krool's face. If there was one thing calculated to stir
with fear the Hottentot blood in him, it was the sight of the
sjambok. He had native tendencies and predispositions out of
proportion to the native blood in him--maybe because he had ever been
treated more like a native than a white man by his Boer masters in the
past.

As Stafford viewed the scene, it suddenly came home to him how strange
was this occurrence in Park Lane. It was medieval, it belonged to some
land unslaked of barbarism. He realized all at once how little these
men around him represented the land in which they were living, and how
much they were part of the far-off land which was now in the throes of
war.

To these men this was in one sense an alien country. Through the
dulled noises of London there came to their ears the click of the
wheels of a cape-wagon, the crack of the Kaffir's whip, the creak of
the disselboom. They followed the spoor of a company of elephants in
the East country, they watched through the November mist the blesbok
flying across the veld, a herd of quaggas taking cover with the
rheebok, or a cloud of locusts sailing out of the sun to devastate the
green lands. Through the smoky smell of London there came to them the
scent of the wattle, the stinging odour of ten thousand cattle, the
reek of a native kraal, the sharp sweetness of orange groves, the
aromatic air of the karoo, laden with the breath of a thousand wild
herbs. Through the drizzle of the autumn rain they heard the wild
thunderbolt tear the trees from earthly moorings. In their eyes was
the livid lightning that searched in spasms of anger for its prey,
while there swept over the brown, aching veld the flood which filled
the spruits, which made the rivers seas, and ploughed fresh channels
through the soil. The luxury of this room, with its shining mahogany
tables, its tapestried walls, its rare fireplace and massive
overmantel brought from Italy, its exquisite stained-glass windows,
was only part of a play they were acting; it was not their real life.

And now there was not one of them that saw anything incongruous in the
whip of rhinoceros-hide lying on the table, or clinched in Barry
Whalen's hand. On the contrary, it gave them a sense of supreme
naturalness. They had lived in a land where the sjambok was the symbol
of progress. It represented the forward movement of civilization in
the wilderness. It was the vierkleur of the pioneer, without which the
long train of capewagons, with the oxen in longer coils of effort,
would never have advanced; without which the Kaffir and the Hottentot
would have sacrificed every act of civilization. It prevented crime,
it punished crime, it took the place of the bowie-knife and the
derringer of that other civilization beyond the Mississippi; it was
the lock to the door in the wild places, the open sesame to the
territories where native chiefs ruled communal tribes by playing
tyrant to the commune. It was the rod of Aaron staying the plague of
barbarism. It was the sceptre of the veldt. It drew blood, it ate
human flesh, it secured order where there was no law, and it did the
work of prison and penitentiary. It was the symbol of authority in the
wilderness.

It was race.

Stafford was the only man present who saw anything incongruous in the
scene, and yet his travels in the East his year in Persia, Tibet and
Afghanistan, had made him understand things not revealed to the wise
and prudent of European domains. With Krool before them, who was of
the veld and the karoo, whose natural habitat was but a cross between
a krall and the stoep of a dopper's home, these men were instantly
transported to the land where their hearts were in spite of all,
though the flesh-pots of the West End of London had turned them into
by-paths for a while. The skin had been scratched by Krool's insolence
and the knowledge of his treachery, and the Tartar showed--the sjambok
his scimitar.

In spite of himself, Stafford was affected by it all. He
understood. This was not London; the scene had shifted to
Potchefstroom or Middleburg, and Krool was transformed too. The
sjambok had, like a wizard's wand, as it were, lifted him away from
England to spaces where he watched from the grey rock of a kopje for
the glint of an assegai or the red of a Rooinek's tunic: and he had
done both in his day.

"We've got you at last, Krool," said Wallstein. "We have been some
time at it, but it's a long lane that has no turning, and we have
you--"

"Like that--like that, jackal!" interjected Barry Whalen, opening and
shutting his lean fingers with a gesture of savage possession.

"What?" asked Krool, with a malevolent thrust forward of his
head. "What?"

"You betrayed us to Kruger," answered Wallstein, holding the
papers. "We have here the proof at last."

"You betrayed England and her secrets, and yet you think that the
English law would protect you against this," said Barry Whalen,
harshly, handling the sjambok.

"What I betray?" Krool asked again. "What I tell?"

With great deliberation Wallstein explained.

"Where proof?" Krool asked, doggedly.

"We have just enough to hang you," said Wallstein, grimly, and lifted
and showed the papers Barry Whalen had brought.

An insolent smile crossed Krool's face.

"You find out too late. That Fellowes is dead. So much you get, but
the work is done. It not matter now. It is all done--altogether. Oom
Paul speaks now, and everything is his--from the Cape to the Zambesi,
everything his. It is too late. What can to do?" Suddenly ferocity
showed in his face. "It come at last. It is the end of the English
both sides the Vaal. They will go down like wild hogs into the sea
with Joubert and Botha behind them. It is the day of Oom Paul and
Christ. The God of Israel gives to his own the tents of the Rooineks."

In spite of the fierce passion of the man, who had suddenly disclosed
a side of his nature hitherto hidden--the savage piety of the copper
Boer impregnated with stereotyped missionary phrasing, Ian Stafford
almost laughed outright. In the presence of Jews like Sobieski it
seemed so droll that this half-caste should talk about the God of
Israel, and link Oom Paul's name with that of Christ the great
liberator as partners in triumph.

In all the years Krool had been in England he had never been inside a
place of worship or given any sign of that fanaticism which, all at
once, he made manifest. He had seemed a pagan to all of his class, had
acted as a pagan.

Barry Whalen, as well as Ian Stafford, saw the humour of the
situation, while they were both confounded by the courageous malice of
the traitor. It came to Barry's mind at the moment, as it came to Ian
Stafford's, that Krool had some card to play which would, to his mind,
serve him well; and, by instinct, both found the right clue. Barry's
anger became uneasiness, and Stafford's interest turned to anxiety.

There was an instant's pause after Krool's words, and then Wolff the
silent, gone wild, caught the sjambok from the hands of Barry
Whalen. He made a movement towards Krool, who again suddenly shrank,
as he would not have shrunk from a weapon of steel.

"Wait a minute," cried Fleming, seizing the arm of his friend. "One
minute. There's something more." Turning to Wallstein, he said, "If
Krool consents to leave England at once for South Africa, let him
go. Is it agreed? He must either be dealt with adequately, or get
out. Is it agreed?"

"I do what I like," said Krool, with a snarl, in which his teeth
showed glassily against his drawn lips. "No one make me do what I not
want."

"The Baas--you have forgotten him," said Wallstein.

A look combined of cunning, fear and servility crossed Krool's face,
but he said, morosely:

"The Baas--I will do what I like."

There was a singular defiance and meaning in his tone, and the moment
seemed critical, for Barry Whalen's face was distorted with
fury. Stafford suddenly stooped and whispered a word in Wallstein's
ear, and then said:

"Gentlemen, if you will allow me, I should like a few words with Krool
before Mr. Byng comes. I think perhaps Krool will see the best course
to pursue when we have talked together. In one sense it is none of my
business, in another sense it is everybody's business. A few minutes,
if you please, gentlemen." There was something almost authoritative in
his tone.

"For Byng's sake--his wife--you understand," was all Stafford had said
under his breath, but it was an illumination to Wallstein, who
whispered to Stafford.

"Yes, that's it. Krool holds some card, and he'll play it now."

By his glance and by his word of assent, Wallstein set the cue for the
rest, and they all got up and went slowly into the other room. Barry
Whalen was about to take the sjambok, but Stafford laid his hand upon
it, and Barry and he exchanged a look of understanding.

"Stafford's a little bit of us in a way," said Barry in a whisper to
Wallstein as they left the room. "He knows, too, what a sjambok's
worth in Krool's eyes."

When the two were left alone, Stafford slowly seated himself, and his
fingers played idly with the sjambok.

"You say you will do what you like, in spite of the Baas?" he asked,
in a low, even tone.

"If the Baas hurt me, I will hurt. If anybody hurt me, I will hurt."

"You will hurt the Baas, eh? I thought he saved your life on the
Limpopo."

A flush stole across Krool's face, and when it passed again he was
paler than before. "I have save the Baas," he answered, sullenly.

"From what?"

"From you."

With a powerful effort, Stafford controlled himself. He dreaded what
was now to be said, but he felt inevitably what it was.

"How--from me?"

"If that Fellowes' letter come into his hands first, yours would not
matter. She would not go with you."

Stafford had far greater difficulty in staying his hand than had Barry
Whalen, for the sjambok seemed the only reply to the dark
suggestion. He realized how, like the ostrich, he had thrust his head
into the sand, imagining that no one knew what was between himself and
Jasmine. Yet here was one who knew, here was one who had, for whatever
purpose, precipitated a crisis with Fellowes to prevent a crisis with
himself.

Suddenly Stafford thought of an awful possibility. He fastened the
gloomy eyes of the man before him, that he might be able to see any
stir of emotion, and said: "It did not come out as you expected?"

"Altogether--yes."

"You wished to part Mr. and Mrs. Byng. That did not happen."

"The Baas is going to South Africa."

"And Mr. Fellowes?"

"He went like I expec'."

"He died--heart failure, eh?"

A look of contempt, malevolence, and secret reflection came into
Krool's face. "He was kill," he said.

"Who killed him?"

Krool was about to shrug his shoulders, but his glance fell on the
sjambok, and he made an ugly gesture with his lean fingers. "There was
yourself. He had hurt you--you went to him.... Good! There was the
Baas, he went to him. The dead man had hurt him.... Good!"

Stafford interrupted him by an exclamation. "What's that you say--the
Baas went to Mr. Fellowes?"

"As I tell the vrouw, Mrs. Byng, when she say me go from the house
to-day--I say I will go when the Baas send me."

"The Baas went to Mr. Fellowes--when?"

"Two hours before you go, and one hour before the vrouw, she go."

Like some animal looking out of a jungle, so Krool's eyes glowed from
beneath his heavy eyebrows, as he drawled out the words.

"The Baas went--you saw him?"

"With my own eyes."

"How long was he there?"

"Ten minutes."

"Mrs. Byng--you saw her go in?"

"And also come out."

"And me--you followed me--you saw me, also?"

"I saw all that come, all that go in to him."

With a swift mind Stafford saw his advantage--the one chance, the one
card he could play, the one move he could make in checkmate, if, and
when, necessary. "So you saw all that came and went. And you came and
went yourself!"

His eyes were hard and bright as he held Krool's, and there was a
sinister smile on his lips.

"You know I come and go--you say me that?" said Krool, with a sudden
look of vague fear and surprise. He had not foreseen this.

"You accuse yourself. You saw this person and that go out, and you
think to hold them in your dirty clutches; but you had more reason
than any for killing Mr. Fellowes."

"What?" asked Krool, furtively.

"You hated him because he was a traitor like yourself. You hated him
because he had hurt the Baas."

"That is true altogether, but--"

"You need not explain. If any one killed Mr. Fellowes, why not you?
You came and went from his rooms, too."

Krool's face was now yellowish pale. "Not me . . . it was not me."

"You would run a worse chance than any one. Your character would damn
you--a partner with him in crime. What jury in the world but would
convict you on your own evidence? Besides, you knew--"

He paused to deliver a blow on the barest chance. It was an insidious
challenge which, if it failed, might do more harm to others, might do
great harm, but he plunged. "You knew about the needle."

Krool was cowed and silent. On a venture Stafford had struck straight
home.

"You knew that Mr. Fellowes had stolen the needle from Mr. Mappin at
Glencader," he added.

"How you know that?" asked Krool, in a husky, ragged voice.

"I saw him steal it--and you?"

"No. He tell me."

"What did he mean to do with it?"

A look came into Krool's eyes, malevolent and barbaric.

"Not to kill himself," he reflected. "There is always some one a man
or a woman want kill."

There was a hideous commonplaceness in the tone which struck a chill
to Stafford's heart.

"No doubt there is always some one you want to kill. Now listen,
Krool. You think you've got a hold over me--over Mrs. Byng. You
threaten. Well, I have passed through the fire of the coroner's
inquest. I have nothing to fear. You have. I saw you in the street as
you watched. You came behind me--"

He remembered now the footsteps that paused when he did, the figure
behind his in the dark, as he watched for Jasmine to come out from
Fellowes' rooms, and he determined to plunge once more.

"I recognized you, and I saw you in the Strand just before that. I did
not speak at the inquest, because I wanted no scandal. If I had
spoken, you would have been arrested. Whatever happened your chances
were worse than those of any one. You can't frighten me, or my friends
in there, or the Baas, or Mrs. Byng. Look after your own skin. You are
the vile scum of the earth,"--he determined to take a strong line now,
since he had made a powerful impression on the creature before
him--"and you will do what the Baas likes, not what you like. He saved
your life. Bad as you are, the Baas is your Baas for ever and ever,
and what he wants to do with you he will do. When his eyes look into
yours, you will think the lightning speaks. You are his slave. If he
hates you, you will die; if he curses you, you will wither."

He played upon the superstitious element, the native strain again. It
was deeper in Krool than anything else.

"Do you think you can defy them?" Stafford went on, jerking a finger
towards the other room. "They are from the veld. They will have you as
sure as the crack of a whip. This is England, but they are from the
veld. On the veld you know what they would do to you. If you speak
against the Baas, it is bad for you; if you speak against the Baas'
vrouw it will be ten times worse. Do you hear?"

There was a strange silence, in which Stafford could feel Krool's soul
struggling in the dark, as it were--a struggle as of black spirits in
the grey dawn.

"I wait the Baas speak," Krool said at last, with a shiver.

There was no time for Stafford to answer. Wallstein entered the room
hurriedly. "Byng has come. He has been told about him," he said in
French to Stafford, and jerking his head towards Krool.

Stafford rose. "It's all right," he answered in the same language. "I
think things will be safe now. He has a wholesome fear of the Baas."

He turned to Krool. "If you say to the Baas what you have said to me
about Mr. Fellowes or about the Baas's vrouw, you will have a bad
time. You will think that wild hawks are picking out your vitals. If
you have sense, you will do what I tell you."

Krool's eyes were on the door through which Wallstein had come. His
gaze was fixed and tortured. Stafford had suddenly roused in him some
strange superstitious element. He was like a creature of a lower order
awaiting the approach of the controlling power. It was, however, the
door behind him which opened, and he gave a start of surprise and
terror. He knew who it was. He did not turn round, but his head bent
forward, as though he would take a blow from behind, and his eyes
almost closed. Stafford saw with a curious meticulousness the long
eyelashes touch the grey cheek.

"There's no fight in him now," he said to Byng in French. "He was
getting nasty, but I've got him in order. He knows too much. Remember
that, Byng."

Byng's look was as that of a man who had passed through some chamber
of torture, but the flabbiness had gone suddenly from his face, and
even from his figure, though heavy lines had gathered round the mouth
and scarred the forehead. He looked worn and much thinner, but there
was a look in his eyes which Stafford had never seen there--a new look
of deeper seeing, of revelation, of realization. With all his ability
and force, Byng had been always much of a boy, so little at one with
the hidden things--the springs of human conduct, the contradictions of
human nature, the worst in the best of us, the forces that emerge
without warning in all human beings, to send them on untoward courses
and at sharp tangents to all the habits of their existence and their
character. In a real sense he had been very primitive, very objective
in all he thought and said and did. With imagination, and a sensitive
organization out of keeping with his immense physique, it was still
only a visualizing sense which he had, only a thing that belongs to
races such as those of which Krool had come.

A few days of continuous suffering begotten by a cataclysm, which had
rent asunder walls of life enclosing vistas he had never before seen;
these had transformed him. Pain had given him dignity of a savage
kind, a grim quiet which belonged to conflict and betokened grimmer
purpose. In the eyes was the darkness of the well of despair; but at
his lips was iron resolution.

In reply to Stafford he said quietly: "All right, I understand. I know
how to deal with Krool."

As Stafford withdrew, Byng came slowly down the room till he stood at
the end of the table opposite to Krool.

Standing there, he looked at the Boer with hard eyes.

"I know all, Krool," he said. "You sold me and my country--you tried
to sell me and my country to Oom Paul. You dog, that I snatched from
the tiger death, not once but twice."

"It is no good. I am a Hottentot. I am for the Boer, for Oom Paul. I
would have die for you, but--"

"But when the chance came to betray the thing I cared for more than I
would twenty lives--my country--you tried to sell me and all who
worked with me."

"It would be same to you if the English go from the Vaal," said the
half-caste, huskily, not looking into the eyes fixed on him. "But it
matter to me that the Boer keep all for himself what he got for
himself. I am half Boer. That is why."

"You defend it--tell me, you defend it?"

There was that in the voice, some terrible thing, which drew Krool's
eyes in spite of himself, and he met a look of fire and wrath.

"I tell why. If it was bad, it was bad. But I tell why, that is
all. If it is not good, it is bad, and hell is for the bad; but I tell
why."

"You got money from Oom Paul for the man--Fellowes?" It was hard for
him to utter the name.

Krool nodded.

"Every year--much?"

Again Krool nodded.

"And for yourself--how much?"

"Nothing for myself; no money, Baas."

"Only Oom Paul's love!"

Krool nodded again.

"But Oom Paul flayed you at Vleifontein; tied you up and skinned you
with a sjambok.... That didn't matter, eh? And you went on loving
him. I never touched you in all the years. I gave you your life
twice. I gave you good money. I kept you in luxury--you that fed in
the cattle-kraal; you that had mealies to eat and a shred of biltong
when you could steal it; you that ate a steinbok raw on the Vaal, you
were so wild for meat . . . I took you out of that, and gave you
this."

He waved an arm round the room, and went on: "You come in and go out
of my room, you sleep in the same cart with me, you eat out of the
same dish on trek, and yet you do the Judas trick. Slim--god of gods,
how slim!  You are the snake that crawls in the slime. It's the native
in you, I suppose.... But see, I mean to do to you as Oom Paul
did. It's the only thing you understand. It's the way to make you
straight and true, my sweet Krool."

Still keeping his eyes fixed on Krool's eyes, his hand reached out and
slowly took the sjambok from the table. He ran the cruel thing through
his fingers as does a prison expert the cat-o'-nine-tails before
laying on the lashes of penalty. Into Krool's eyes a terror crept
which never had been there in the old days on the veld when Oom Paul
had flayed him. This was not the veld, and he was no longer the
veld-dweller with skin like the rhinoceros, all leather and bone and
endurance. And this was not Oom Paul, but one whom he had betrayed,
whose wife he had sought to ruin, whose subordinate he had turned into
a traitor. Oom Paul had been a mere savage master; but here was a
master whose very tongue could excoriate him like Oom Paul's sjambok;
whom, at bottom, he loved in his way as he had never loved anything;
whom he had betrayed, not realizing the hideous nature of his deed;
having argued that it was against England his treachery was directed,
and that was a virtue in his eyes; not seeing what direct injury could
come to Byng through it. He had not seen, he had not understood, he
was still uncivilized; he had only in his veins the morality of the
native, and he had tried to ruin his master's wife for his master's
sake; and when he had finished with Fellowes as a traitor, he was
ready to ruin his confederate--to kill him--perhaps did kill him!

"It's the only way to deal with you, Hottentot dog!"

The look in Krool's eyes only increased Byng's lust of
punishment. What else was there to do? Without terrible scandal there
was no other way to punish the traitor, but if there had been another
way he would still have done this. This Krool understood; behind every
command the Baas had ever given him this thing lay--the sjambok, the
natural engine of authority.

Suddenly Byng said with a voice of almost guttural anger: "You dropped
that letter on my bedroom floor--that letter, you understand?
. . . Speak."

"I did it, Baas."

Byng was transformed. Slowly he laid down the sjambok, and as slowly
took off his coat, his eyes meanwhile fastening those of the wretched
man before him. Then he took up the sjambok again.

"You know what I am going to do with you?"

"Yes, Baas."

It never occurred to Byng that Krool would resist; it did not occur to
Krool that he could resist. Byng was the Baas, who at that moment was
the Power immeasurable. There was only one thing to do--to obey.

"You were told to leave my house by Mrs. Byng, and you did not go."

"She was not my Baas."

"You would have done her harm, if you could?"

"So, Baas."

With a low cry Byng ran forward, the sjambok swung through the air,
and the terrible whip descended on the crouching half-caste.

Krool gave one cry and fell back a little, but he made no attempt to
resist.

Suddenly Byng went to a window and threw it open.

"You can jump from there or take the sjambok. Which?" he said with a
passion not that of a man wholly sane. "Which?"

Krool's wild, sullen, trembling look sought the window, but he had no
heart for that enterprise--thirty feet to the pavement below.

"The sjambok, Baas," he said.

Once again Byng moved forward on him, and once again Krool's cry rang
out, but not so loud. It was like that of an animal in torture.

In the next room, Wallstein and Stafford and the others heard it, and
understood. Whispering together they listened, and Stafford shrank
away to the far side of the room; but more than one face showed
pleasure in the sound of the whip and the moaning.

It went on and on.

Barry Whalen, however, was possessed of a kind of fear, and presently
his face became troubled. This punishment was terrible. Byng might
kill the man, and all would be as bad as could be. Stafford came to
him.

"You had better go in," he said. "We ought to intervene. If you don't,
I will. Listen...."

It was a strange sound to hear in this heart of civilization. It
belonged to the barbaric places of the earth, where there was no law,
where every pioneer was his own cadi.

With set face Barry Whalen entered the room. Byng paused for an
instant and looked at him with burning, glazed eyes that scarcely
realized him.

"Open that door," he said, presently, and Barry Whalen opened the door
which led into the big hall.

"Open all down to the street," Byng said, and Barry Whalen went
forward quickly.

Like some wild beast Krool crouched and stumbled and moaned as he ran
down the staircase, through the outer hall, while a servant with
scared face saw Byng rain savage blows upon the hated figure.

On the pavement outside the house, Krool staggered, stumbled, and fell
down; but he slowly gathered himself up, and turned to the doorway,
where Byng stood panting with the sjambok in his hand.

"Baas!--Baas!" Krool said with livid face, and then he crept painfully
away along the street wall.

A policeman crossed the road with a questioning frown and the apparent
purpose of causing trouble, but Barry Whalen whispered in his ear, and
told him to call that evening and he would hear all about
it. Meanwhile a five-pound note in a quick palm was a guarantee of
good faith.

Presently a half-dozen people began to gather near the door, but the
benevolent policeman moved them on.

At the top of the staircase Jasmine met her husband. She shivered as
he came up towards her.

"Will you come to me when you have finished your business?" she said,
and she took the sjambok gently from his hand.

He scarcely realized her. He was in a dream; but he smiled at her, and
nodded, and passed on to where the others awaited him.



CHAPTER XXVIII

"THE BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM"


Slowly Jasmine returned to her boudoir. Laying the sjambok on the
table among the books in delicate bindings and the bowls of flowers,
she stood and looked at it with confused senses for a long time. At
last a wan smile stole to her lips, but it did not reach her
eyes. They remained absorbed and searching, and were made painfully
sad by the wide, dark lines under them. Her fair skin was fairer than
ever, but it was delicately faded, giving her a look of pensiveness,
while yet there was that in her carriage and at her mouth which
suggested strength and will and new forces at work in her. She carried
her head, weighted by its splendour of golden hair, as an Eastern
woman carries a goulah of water. There was something pathetic yet
self-reliant in the whole figure. The passion slumbering in the eyes,
however, might at any moment burst forth in some wild relinquishment
of control and self-restraint.

"He did what I should have liked to do," she said aloud. "We are not
so different, after all. He is primitive at bottom, and so am I. He
gets carried away by his emotions, and so do I."

She took up the whip, examined it, felt its weight, and drew it with a
swift jerk through the air.

"I did not even shrink when Krool came stumbling down the stairs, with
this cutting his flesh," she said to herself. "Somehow it all seemed
natural and right. What has come to me? Are all my finer senses dead?
Am I just one of the crude human things who lived a million years ago,
and who lives again as crude as those; with only the outer things
changed? Then I wore the skins of wild animals, and now I do the same,
just the same; with what we call more taste perhaps, because we have
ceased to see the beauty in the natural thing."

She touched the little band of grey fur at the sleeve of her clinging
velvet gown. "Just a little distance away--that is all."

Suddenly a light flashed up in her eyes, and her face flushed as
though some one had angered her. She seized the whip again. "Yes, I
could have seen him whipped to death before my eyes--the coward, the
abject coward. He did not speak for me; he did not defend me; he did
not deny. He let Ian think--death was too kind to him. How dared he
hurt me so! . . . Death is so easy a way out, but he would not have
taken it. No, no, no, it was not suicide; some one killed him. He
could never have taken his own life--never. He had not the
courage.... No; he died of poison or was strangled. Who did it? Who
did it? Was it Rudyard? Was it. . . ? Oh, it wears me out--thinking,
thinking, thinking!"

She sat down and buried her face in her hands. "I am doomed--doomed,"
she moaned. "I was doomed from the start. It must always have been so,
whatever I did. I would do it again, whatever I did; I know I would do
it again, being what I was. It was in my veins, in my blood from the
start, from the very first days of my life."

All at once there flashed through her mind again, as on that night so
many centuries ago, when she had slept the last sleep of her life as
it was, Swinburne's lines on Baudelaire:

"There is no help for these things, none to mend and none to mar; Not
all our songs, oh, friend, can make death clear Or make life
durable...."

"'There is no help for these things,'" she repeated with a sigh which
seemed to tear her heart in twain. "All gone--all. What is there left
to do? If death could make it better for any one, how easy! But
everything would be known--somehow the world would know, and every one
would suffer more. Not now--no, not now. I must live on, but not
here. I must go away. I must find a place to go where Rudyard will not
come. There is no place so far but it is not far enough. I am
twenty-five, and all is over--all is done for me. I have nothing that
I want to keep, there is nothing that I want to do except to go--to go
and to be alone. Alone, always alone now. It is either that, or be
Jezebel, or--"

The door opened, and the servant brought a card to her. "His
Excellency, the Moravian ambassador," the footman said.

"Monsieur Mennaval?" she asked, mechanically, as though scarcely
realizing what he had said.

"Yes, ma'am, Mr. Mennaval."

"Please say I am indisposed, and am sorry I cannot receive him
to-day," she said.

"Very good, ma'am." The footman turned to go, then came back.

"Shall I tell the maid you want her?" he asked, respectfully.

"No, why should you?" she asked.

"I thought you looked a bit queer, ma'am," he responded, hastily. "I
beg your pardon, ma'am."

She rewarded him with a smile. "Thank you, James, I think I should
like her after all. Ask her to come at once."

When he had gone she leaned back and shut her eyes. For a moment she
was perfectly motionless, then she sat up again and looked at the card
in her hand.

"M. Mennaval--M. Mennaval," she said, with a note so cynical that it
betrayed more than her previous emotion, to such a point of despair
her mind had come.

M. Mennaval had played his part, had done his service, had called out
from her every resource of coquetry and lure; and with wonderful art
she had cajoled him till he had yielded to influence, and Ian had
turned the key in the international lock. M. Mennaval had been used
with great skill to help the man who was now gone from her forever,
whom perhaps she would never see again; and who wanted never to see
her again, never in all time or space. M. Mennaval had played his game
for his own desire, and he had lost; but what had she gained where
M. Mennaval had lost? She had gained that which now Ian despised,
which he would willingly, so far as she was concerned, reject with
contempt.... And yet, and yet, while Ian lived he must still be
grateful to her that, by whatever means, she had helped him to do what
meant so much to England. Yes, he could not wholly dismiss her from
his mind; he must still say, "This she did for me--this thing, in
itself not commendable, she did for me; and I took it for my country."

Her eyes were open, and her garden had been invaded by those
revolutionaries of life and time, Nemesis, Penalty, Remorse. They
marauded every sacred and secret corner of her mind and soul. They
came with whips to scourge her. Nothing was private to her inner self
now. Everything was arrayed against her. All life doubled backwards on
her, blocking her path.

M. Mennaval--what did she care for him! Yet here he was at her door
asking payment for the merchandise he had sold to her: his judgment,
his reputation as a diplomatist, his freedom, the respect of the
world--for how could the world respect a man at whom it laughed, a man
who had hoped to be given the key to a secret door in a secret garden!

As Jasmine sat looking at the card, the footman entered again with a
note.

"His Excellency's compliments," he said, and withdrew.

She opened the letter hesitatingly, held it in her hand for a moment
without reading it, then, with an impulsive effort, did so. When she
had finished, she gave a cry of anger and struck her tiny clinched
hand upon her knee.

The note ran:

"Chere amie, you have so much indisposition in these days. It is all
too vexing to your friends. The world will be surprised, if you allow
a migraine to come between us. Indeed, it will be shocked. The world
understands always so imperfectly, and I have no gift of
explanation. Of course, I know the war has upset many, but I thought
you could not be upset so easily--no, it cannot be the war; so I must
try and think what it is. If I cannot think by tomorrow at five
o'clock, I will call again to ask you. Perhaps the migraine will be
better. But, if you will that migraine to be far away, it will fly,
and then I shall be near. Is it not so? You will tell me to-morrow at
five, will you not, belle amie?

"A toi,  M. M."

The words scorched her eyes. They angered her, scourged her. One of
life's Revolutionaries was insolently ravaging the secret place where
her pride dwelt. Pride--what pride had she now? Where was the room for
pride or vanity? . . . And all the time she saw the face of a dead man
down by the river--a face now beneath the sod. It flashed before her
eyes at moments when she least could bear it, to agitate her soul.

M. Mennaval--how dare he write to her so! "Chere amie" and "A
toi"--how strange the words looked now, how repulsive and strange!  It
did not seem possible that once before he had written such words to
her. But never before had these epithets or others been accompanied by
such meaning as his other words conveyed.

"I will not see him to-morrow. I will not see him ever again, if I can
help it," she said bitterly, and trembling with agitation. "I shall go
where I shall not be found. I will go to-night."

The door opened. Her maid entered. "You wanted me, madame?" asked the
girl, in some excitement and very pale.

"Yes, what is the matter? Why so agitated?" Jasmine asked.

The maid's eyes were on the sjambok. She pointed to it. "It was that,
madame. We are all agitated. It was terrible. One had never seen
anything like that before in one's life, madame--never. It was like
the days--yes, of slavery. It was like the galleys of Toulon in the
old days. It was--"

"There, don't be so eloquent, Lablanche. What do you know of the
galleys of Toulon or the days of slavery?"

"Madame, I have heard, I have read, I--"

"Yes, but did you love Krool so?"

The girl straightened herself with dramatic indignation. "Madame, that
man, that creature, that toad--!"

"Then why so exercised? Were you so pained at his punishment? Were all
the household so pained?"

"Every one hated him, madame," said the girl, with energy.

"Then let me hear no more of this impudent nonsense," Jasmine said,
with decision.

"Oh, madame, to speak to me like this!" Tears were ready to do needful
service.

"Do you wish to remain with me, Lablanche?"

"Ah, madame, but yes--"

"Then my head aches, and I don't want you to make it worse.... And,
see, Lablanche, there is that grey walking-suit; also the mauve
dressing-gown, made by Loison; take them, if you can make them fit
you; and be good."

"Madame, how kind--ah, no one is like you, madame--!"

"Well, we shall see about that quite soon. Put out at once every gown
of mine for me to see, and have trunks ready to pack immediately; but
only three trunks, not more."

"Madame is going away?"

"Do as I say, Lablanche. We go to-night. The grey gown and the mauve
dressing-gown that Loison made, you will look well in them. Quick,
now, please."

In a flutter Lablanche left the room, her eyes gleaming.

She had had her mind on the grey suit for some time, but the mauve
dressing-gown as well--it was too good to be true.

She almost ran into Lady Tynemouth's arms as the door opened. With a
swift apology she sped away, after closing the door upon the visitor.

Jasmine rose and embraced her friend, and Lady Tynemouth subsided into
a chair with a sigh.

"My dear Jasmine, you look so frail," she said. "A short time ago I
feared you were going to blossom into too ripe fruit, now you look
almost a little pinched. But it quite becomes you, mignonne--quite.
You have dark lines under your eyes, and that transparency of skin--
it is quite too fetching. Are you glad to see me?"

"I would have seen no one to-day, no one, except you or Rudyard."

"Love and duty," said Lady Tynemouth, laughing, yet acutely alive to
the something so terribly wrong, of which she had spoken to Ian
Stafford.

"Why is it my duty to see you, Alice?" asked Jasmine, with the dry
glint in her tone which had made her conversation so pleasing to men.

"You clever girl, how you turn the tables on me," her friend replied,
and then, seeing the sjambok on the table, took it up. "What is this
formidable instrument? Are you flagellating the saints?"

"Not the saints, Alice."

"You don't mean to say you are going to scourge yourself?"

Then they both smiled--and both immediately sighed. Lady Tynemouth's
sympathy was deeply roused for Jasmine, and she meant to try and win
her confidence and to help her in her trouble, if she could; but she
was full of something else at this particular moment, and she was not
completely conscious of the agony before her.

"Have you been using this sjambok on Mennaval?" she asked with an
attempt at lightness. "I saw him leaving as I came in. He looked
rather dejected--or stormy, I don't quite know which."

"Does it matter which? I didn't see Mennaval today."

"Then no wonder he looked dejected and stormy. But what is the history
of this instrument of torture?" she asked, holding up the sjambok
again.

"Krool."

"Krool! Jasmine, you surely don't mean to say that you--"

"Not I--it was Rudyard. Krool was insolent--a half-caste, you know."

"Krool--why, yes, it was he I saw being helped into a cab by a
policeman just down there in Piccadilly. You don't mean that
Rudyard--"

She pushed the sjambok away from her.

"Yes--terribly."

"Then I suppose the insolence was terrible enough to justify it."

"Quite, I think." Jasmine's voice was calm.

"But of course it is not usual--in these parts."

"Rudyard is not usual in these parts, or Krool either. It was a touch
of the Vaal."

Lady Tynemouth gave a little shudder. "I hope it won't become
fashionable. We are altogether too sensational nowadays. But,
seriously, Jasmine, you are not well. You must do something. You must
have a change."

"I am going to do something--to have a change."

"That's good. Where are you going, dear?"

"South.... And how are you getting on with your hospital-ship?"

Lady Tynemouth threw up her hands. "Jasmine, I'm in despair. I had set
my heart upon it. I thought I could do it easily, and I haven't done
it, after trying as hard as can be. Everything has gone wrong, and now
Tynie cables I mustn't go to South Africa. Fancy a husband forbidding
a wife to come to him."

"Well, perhaps it's better than a husband forbidding his wife to leave
him."

"Jasmine, I believe you would joke if you were dying."

"I am dying."

There was that in the tone of Jasmine's voice which gave her friend a
start. She eyed her suddenly with a great anxiety.

"And I'm not jesting," Jasmine added, with a forced smile. "But tell
me what has gone wrong with all your plans. You don't mind what
Tynemouth says. Of course you will do as you like."

"Of course; but still Tynie has never 'issued instructions' before,
and if there was any time I ought to humour him it is now. He's so
intense about the war! But I can't explain everything on paper to him,
so I've written to say I'm going to South Africa to explain, and that
I'll come back by the next boat, if my reasons are not convincing."

In other circumstances Jasmine would have laughed. "He will find you
convincing," she said, meaningly.

"I said if he found my reasons convincing."

"You will be the only reason to him."

"My dear Jasmine, you are really becoming sentimental. Tynie would
blush to discover himself being silly over me. We get on so well
because we left our emotions behind us when we married."

"Yours, I know, you left on the Zambesi," said Jasmine, deliberately.

A dull fire came into Lady Tynemouth's eyes, and for an instant there
was danger of Jasmine losing a friend she much needed; but Lady
Tynemouth had a big heart, and she knew that her friend was in a mood
when anything was possible, or everything impossible.

So she only smiled, and said, easily: "Dearest Jasmine, that umbrella
episode which made me love Ian Stafford for ever and ever without even
amen came after I was married, and so your pin doesn't prick, not a
weeny bit. No, it isn't Tynie that makes me sad. It's the Climbers who
won't pay."

"The Climbers? You want money for--"

"Yes, the hospital-ship; and I thought they'd jump at it; but they've
all been jumping in other directions. I asked the Steuvenfeldts, the
Boulters, the Felix Fowles, the Brutons, the Sheltons, and that fellow
Mackerel, who has so much money he doesn't know what to do with it and
twenty others; and Mackerel was the only one who would give me
anything at all large. He gave me ten thousand pounds. But I want
fifty--fifty, my beloved. I'm simply broken-hearted. It would do so
much good, and I could manage the thing so well, and I could get other
splendid people to help me to manage it--there's Effie Lyndhall and
Mary Meacham. The Mackerel wanted to come along, too, but I told him
he could come out and fetch us back--that there mustn't be any scandal
while the war was on. I laugh, my dear, but I could cry my eyes out. I
want something to do--I've always wanted something to do. I've always
been sick of an idle life, but I wouldn't do a hundred things I might
have done. This thing I can do, however, and, if I did it, some of my
debt to the world would be paid. It seems to me that these last
fifteen years in England have been awful. We are all restless; we all
have been going, going--nowhere; we have all been doing,
doing--nothing; we have all been thinking, thinking, thinking--of
ourselves. And I've been a playbody like the rest; I've gone with the
Climbers because they could do things for me; I've wanted more and
more of everything--more gadding, more pleasure, more excitement. It's
been like a brass-band playing all the time, my life this past ten
years. I'm sick of it. It's only some big thing that can take me out
of it. I've got to make some great plunge, or in a few years more I'll
be a middle-aged peeress with nothing left but a double chin, a tongue
for gossip, and a string of pearls. There must be a bouleversement of
things as they are, or good-bye to everything except emptiness. Don't
you see, Jasmine, dearest?"

"Yes yes, I see." Jasmine got up, went to her desk, opened a drawer,
took out a book, and began to write hastily. "Go on," she said as she
wrote; "I can hear what you are saying."

"But are you really interested?"

"Even Tynemouth would find you interesting and convincing. Go on."

"I haven't anything more to say, except that nothing lies between me
and flagellation and the sack cloth,"--she toyed with the
sjambok--"except the Climbers; and they have failed me. They won't
play--or pay."

Jasmine rose from the desk and came forward with a paper in her
hand. "No, they have not failed you, Alice," she said, gently. "The
Climbers seldom really disappoint you. The thing is, you must know how
to talk to them, to say the right thing, the flattering, the tactful,
and the nice sentimental thing,--they mostly have middle-class
sentimentality--and then you get what you want. As you do
now. There...."

She placed in her friend's hand a long, narrow slip of paper. Lady
Tynemouth looked astonished, gazed hard at the paper, then sprang to
her feet, pale and agitated.

"Jasmine--you--this--sixty thousand pounds!" she cried. "A cheque for
sixty thousand pounds--Jasmine!"

There was a strange brilliance in Jasmine's eyes, a hectic flush on
her cheek.

"It must not be cashed for forty-eight hours; but after that the money
will be there."

Lady Tynemouth caught Jasmine's shoulders in her trembling yet strong
fingers, and looked into the wild eyes with searching inquiry and
solicitude.

"But, Jasmine, it isn't possible. Will Rudyard--can you afford it?"

"That will not be Rudyard's money which you will get. It will be all
my own."

"But you yourself are not rich. Sixty thousand pounds--why?"

"It is because it is a sacrifice to me that I give it; because it is
my own; because it is two-thirds of what I possess. And if all is
needed before we have finished, then all shall go."

Alice Tynemouth still held the shoulders, still gazed into the eyes
which burned and shone, which seemed to look beyond this room into
some world of the soul or imagination. "Jasmine, you are not crazy,
are you?" she asked, excitedly. "You will not repent of this? It is
not a sudden impulse?"

"Yes, it is a sudden impulse; it came to me all at once. But when it
came I knew it was the right thing, the only thing to do. I will not
repent of it. Have no fear. It is final. It is sure. It means that,
like you, I have found a rope to drag myself out of this stream which
sweeps me on to the rapids."

"Jasmine, do you mean that you will--that you are coming, too?"

"Yes, I am going with you. We will do it together. You shall lead, and
I shall help. I have a gift for organization. My grandfather? he--"

"All the world knows that. If you have anything of his gift, we shall
not fail. We shall feel that we are doing something for our
country--and, oh, so much for ourselves! And we shall be near our
men. Tynie and Ruddy Byng will be out there, and we shall be ready for
anything if necessary. But Rudyard, will he approve?" She held up the
cheque.

Jasmine made a passionate gesture. "There are times when we must do
what something in us tells us to do, no matter what the
consequences. I am myself. I am not a slave. If I take my own way in
the pleasures of life, why should I not take it in the duties and the
business of life?"

Her eyes took on a look of abstraction, and her small hand closed on
the large, capable hand of her friend. "Isn't work the secret of life?
My grandfather used to say it was. Always, always, he used to say to
me, 'Do something, Jasmine. Find a work to do, and do it. Make the
world look at you, not for what you seem to be, but for what you
do. Work cures nearly every illness and nearly every trouble'--that is
what he said. And I must work or go mad. I tell you I must work,
Alice. We will work together out there where great battles will be
fought."

A sob caught her in the throat, and Alice Tynemouth wrapped her round
with tender arms. "It will do you good, darling," she said, softly."
It will help you through--through it all, whatever it is."

For an instant Jasmine felt that she must empty out her heart; tell
the inner tale of her struggle; but the instant of weakness passed as
suddenly as it came, and she only said--repeating Alice Tynemouth's
words: "Yes, through it all, through it all, whatever it is." Then she
added: "I want to do something big. I can, I can. I want to get out of
this into the open world. I want to fight. I want to balance things
somehow--inside myself...."

All at once she became very quiet. "But we must do business like
business people. This money: there must be a small committee of
business men, who--"

Alice Tynemouth finished the sentence for her. "Who are not Climbers?"

"Yes. But the whole organization must be done by ourselves--all the
practical, unfinancial work. The committee will only be like careful
trustees."

There was a new light in Jasmine's eyes. She felt for the moment that
life did not end in a cul de sac. She knew that now she had found a
way for Rudyard and herself to separate without disgrace, without
humiliation to him. She could see a few steps ahead. When she gave
Lablanche instructions to put out her clothes a little while before,
she did not know what she was going to do; but now she knew. She knew
how she could make it easier for Rudyard when the inevitable hour
came,--and it was here--which should see the end of their life
together. He need not now sacrifice himself so much for her sake.

She wanted to be alone, and, as if divining her thought, Lady
Tynemouth embraced her, and a moment later there was no sound in the
room save the ticking of the clock and the crackle of the fire.

How silent it was! The world seemed very far away. Peace seemed to
have taken possession of the place, and Jasmine's stillness as she sat
by the fire staring into the embers was a part of it. So lost was she
that she was not conscious of an opening door and of a footstep. She
was roused by a low voice.

"Jasmine!"

She did not start. It was as though there had come a call, for which
she had waited long, and she appeared to respond slowly to it, as one
would to a summons to the scaffold. There was no outward agitation
now, there was only a cold stillness which seemed little to belong to
the dainty figure which had ever been more like a decoration than a
living utility in the scheme of things. The crisis had come which she
had dreaded yet invited--that talk which they two must have before
they went their different ways. She had never looked Rudyard in the
eyes direct since the day when Adrian Fellowes died. They had met, but
never quite alone; always with some one present, either the servants
or some other. Now they were face to face.

On Rudyard's lips was a faint smile, but it lacked the old bonhomie
which was part of his natural equipment; and there were still sharp,
haggard traces of the agitation which had accompanied the expulsion of
Krool.

For an instant the idea possessed her that she would tell him
everything there was to tell, and face the consequences, no matter
what they might be. It was not in her nature to do things by halves,
and since catastrophe was come, her will was to drink the whole cup to
the dregs. She did not want to spare herself. Behind it all lay
something of that terrible wilfulness which had controlled her life so
far. It was the unlovely soul of a great pride. She did not want to be
forgiven for anything. She did not want to be condoned. There was a
spirit of defiance which refused to accept favours, preferring
punishment to the pity or the pardon which stooped to make it easier
for her. It was a dangerous pride, and in the mood of it she might
throw away everything, with an abandonment and recklessness only known
to such passionate natures.

The mood came on her all at once as she stood and looked at
Rudyard. She read, or she thought she read in his eyes, in his smile,
the superior spirit condescending to magnanimity, to compassion; and
her whole nature was instantly up in arms. She almost longed on the
instant to strip herself bare, as it were, and let him see her as she
really was, or as, in her despair, she thought she really was. The
mood in which she had talked to Lady Tynemouth was gone, and in its
place a spirit of revolt was at work. A certain sullenness which
Rudyard and no one else had ever seen came into her eyes, and her lips
became white with an ominous determination. She forgot him and all
that he would suffer if she told him the whole truth; and the whole
truth would, in her passion, become far more than the truth: she was
again the egoist, the centre of the universe. What happened to her was
the only thing which mattered in all the world. So it had ever been;
and her beauty and her wit and her youth and the habit of being
spoiled had made it all possible, without those rebuffs and that
confusion which fate provides sooner or later for the egoist.

"Well," she said, sharply, "say what you wish to say. You have wanted
to say it badly. I am ready."

He was stunned by what seemed to him the anger and the repugnance in
her tone.

"You remember you asked me to come, Jasmine, when you took the sjambok
from me."

He nodded towards the table where it lay, then went forward and picked
it up, his face hardening as he did so.

Like a pendulum her mood swung back. By accident he had said the one
thing which could have moved her, changed her at the moment. The
savage side of him appealed to her. What he lacked in brilliance and
the lighter gifts of raillery and eloquence and mental give-and-take,
he had balanced by his natural forces--from the power-house, as she
had called it long ago. Pity, solicitude, the forced smile,
magnanimity, she did not want in this black mood. They would have made
her cruelly audacious, and her temper would have known no license; but
now, suddenly, she had a vision of him as he stamped down the
staircase, his coat off, laying the sjambok on the shoulders of the
man who had injured her so, who hated her so, and had done so over all
the years. It appealed to her.

In her heart of hearts she was sure he had done it directly or
indirectly for her sake; and that was infinitely more to her than that
he should stoop from the heights to pick her up. He was what he was
because Heaven had made him so; and she was what she was because
Heaven had forgotten to make her otherwise; and he could not know or
understand how she came to do things that he would not do. But she
could know and understand why his hand fell on Krool like that of Cain
on Abel. She softened, changed at once.

"Yes, I remember," she said. "I've been upset. Krool was insolent, and
I ordered him to go. He would not."

"I've been a fool to keep him all these years. I didn't know what he
was--a traitor, the slimmest of the slim, a real Hottentot-Boer. I was
pigheaded about him, because he seemed to care so much about me. That
counts for much with the most of us."

"Alice Tynemouth saw a policeman help him into a cab in Piccadilly and
take him away. Will there be trouble?"

A grim look crossed his face. "I think not," he responded. "There are
reasons. He has been stealing information for years, and sending it to
Kruger, he and--"

He stopped short, and into his face came a look of sullen reticence.

"Yes, he and--and some one else? Who else?" Her face was white. She
had a sudden intuition.

He met her eyes. "Adrian Fellowes--what Fellowes knew, Krool knew, and
one way or another, by one means or another, Fellowes knew a great
deal."

The knowledge of Adrian Fellowes' treachery and its full significance
had hardly come home to him, even when he punished Krool, so shaken
was he by the fact that the half-caste had been false to
him. Afterwards, however, as the Partners all talked together
up-stairs, the enormity of the dead man's crime had fastened on him,
and his brain had been stunned by the terrible thought that directly
or indirectly Jasmine had abetted the crime. Things he had talked over
with her, and with no one else, had got to Kruger's knowledge, as the
information from South Africa showed. She had at least been
indiscreet, had talked to Fellowes with some freedom or he could not
have known what he did. But directly, knowingly abetted Fellowes? Of
course, she had not done that; but her foolish confidences had abetted
treachery, had wronged him, had helped to destroy his plans, had
injured England.

He had savagely punished Krool for insolence to her and for his
treachery, but a new feeling had grown up in him in the last
half-hour. Under the open taunts of his colleagues, a deep resentment
had taken possession of him that his work, so hard to do, so important
and critical, should have been circumvented by the indiscretions of
his wife.

Upon her now this announcement came with crushing force. Adrian
Fellowes had gained from her--she knew it all too well now--that which
had injured her husband; from which, at any rate, he ought to have
been immune. Her face flushed with a resentment far greater than that
of Rudyard's, and it was heightened by a humiliation which overwhelmed
her. She had been but a tool in every sense, she, Jasmine Byng, one
who ruled, had been used like a--she could not form the comparison in
her mind--by a dependent, a hanger-on of her husband's bounty; and it
was through her, originally, that he had been given a real chance in
life by Rudyard.

"I am sorry," she said, calmly, as soon as she could get her voice.
"I was the means of your employing him."

"That did not matter," he said, rather nervously. "There was no harm
in that, unless you knew his character before he came to me."

"You think I did?"

"I cannot think so. It would have been too ruthless--too wicked."

She saw his suffering, and it touched her. "Of course I did not know
that he could do such a thing--so shameless. He was a low coward. He
did not deserve decent burial," she added. "He had good fortune to die
as he did."

"How did he die?" Rudyard asked her, with a face so unlike what it had
always been, so changed by agitation, that it scarcely seemed his. His
eyes were fixed on hers.

She met them resolutely. Did he ask her in order to see if she had any
suspicion of himself? Had he done it? If he had, there would be some
mitigation of her suffering. Or was it Ian Stafford who had done it?
One or the other--but which?

"He died without being made to suffer," she said. "Most people who do
wrong have to suffer."

"But they live on," he said, bitterly.

"That is no great advantage unless you want to live," she replied. "Do
you know how he died?" she added, after a moment, with sharp scrutiny.

He shook his head and returned her scrutiny with added poignancy. "It
does not matter. He ceases to do any more harm. He did enough."

"Yes, quite enough," she said, with a withered look, and going over to
her writing-table, stood looking at him questioningly. He did not
speak again, however.

Presently she said, very quietly, "I am going away."

"I do not understand."

"I am going to work."

"I understand still less."

She took from the writing-table her cheque-book, and handed it to
him. He looked at it, and read the counterfoil of the cheque she had
given to Alice Tynemouth.

He was bewildered. "What does this mean?" he asked.

"It is for a hospital-ship."

"Sixty thousand pounds! Why, it is nearly all you have."

"It is two-thirds of what I have."

"Why--in God's name, why?"

"To buy my freedom," she answered, bitterly.

"From what?"

"From you."

He staggered back and leaned heavily against a bookcase.

"Freedom from me!" he exclaimed, hoarsely.

He had had terribly bitter and revengeful feelings during the last
hour, but all at once his real self emerged, the thing that was
deepest in him. "Freedom from me? Has it come to that?"

"Yes, absolutely. Do you remember the day you first said to me that
something was wrong with it all,--the day that Ian Stafford dined
after his return from abroad? Well, it has been all wrong--cruelly
wrong. We haven't made the best of things together, when everything
was with us to do so. I have spoiled it all. It hasn't been what you
expected."

"Nor what you expected?" he asked, sharply.

"Nor what I expected; but you are not to blame for that."

Suddenly all he had ever felt for her swept through his being, and
sullenness fled away. "You have ceased to love me, then.... See, that
is the one thing that matters, Jasmine. All else disappears beside
that. Do you love me? Do you love me still? Do you love me, Jasmine?
Answer that."

He looked like the ghost of his old dead self, pleading to be
recognized.

His misery oppressed her. "What does one know of one's self in the
midst of all this--of everything that has nothing to do with love?"
she asked.

What she might have said in the dark mood which was coming on her
again it is hard to say, but from beneath the window of the room which
looked on Park Lane, there came the voice of a street-minstrel,
singing to a travelling piano, played by sympathetic fingers, the
song:

"She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps, And lovers
around her are sighing--"

The simple pathos of the song had nothing to do with her own
experience or her own case, but the flood of it swept through her
veins like tears. She sank into a chair and listened for a moment with
eyes shining, then she sprang up in an agitation which made her
tremble and her face go white.

"No, no, no, Rudyard, I do not love you," she said, swiftly. "And
because I do not love you, I will not stay. I never loved you, never
truly loved you at any time. I never knew myself--that is all that I
can say. I never was awake till now. I never was wholly awake till I
saw you driving Krool into the street with the sjambok."

She flung up her hands. "For God's sake, let me be truthful at last. I
don't want to hurt you--I have hurt you enough, but I do not love you;
and I must go. I am going with Alice Tynemouth. We are going together
to do something. Maybe I shall learn what will make life possible."

He reached out his arms towards her with a sudden tenderness.

"No, no, no, do not touch me," she cried. "Do not come near me. I must
be alone now, and from now on and on.... You do not understand, but I
must be alone. I must work it out alone, whatever it is."

She got up with a quick energy, and went over to the writing-table
again. "It may take every penny I have got, but I shall do it, because
it is the thing I feel I must do."

"You have millions, Jasmine," he said, in a low, appealing voice.

She looked at him almost fiercely again. "No, I have what is my own,
my very own, and no more," she responded, bitterly. "You will do your
work, and I will do mine. You will stay here. There will be no
scandal, because I shall be going with Alice Tynemouth, and the world
will not misunderstand."

"There will be no scandal, because I am going, too," he said, firmly.

"No, no, you cannot, must not, go," she urged.

"I am going to South Africa in two days," he replied. "Stafford was
going with me, but he cannot go for a week or so. He will help you, I
am sure, with forming your committee and arranging, if you will insist
on doing this thing. He is still up-stairs there with the rest of
them. I will get him down now, I--"

"Ian Stafford is here--in this house?" she asked, with staring
eyes. What inconceivable irony it all was! She could have shrieked
with that laughter which is more painful far than tears.

"Yes, he is up-stairs. I made him come and help us--he knows the
international game. He will help you, too. He is a good friend--you
will know how good some day."

She went white and leaned against the table.

"No, I shall not need him," she said. "We have formed our committee."

"But when I am gone, he can advise you, he can--"

"Oh--oh!" she murmured, and swayed forward, fainting.

He caught her and lowered her gently into a chair.

"You are only mad," he whispered to ears which heard not as he bent
over her. "You will be sane some day."





BOOK IV




CHAPTER XXIX

THE MENACE OF THE MOUNTAIN


Far away, sharply cutting the ether, rise the great sterile peaks and
ridges. Here a stark, bare wall like a prison which shuts in a city of
men forbidden the blithe world of sun and song and freedom; yonder, a
giant of a lost world stretched out in stony ease, sleeping on, while
over his grey quiet, generations of men pass. First came savage,
warring, brown races alien to each other; then following, white races
with faces tanned and burnt by the sun, and smothered in unkempt beard
and hair--men restless and coarse and brave, and with ancient sins
upon them; but with the Bible in their hands and the language of the
prophets on their lips; with iron will, with hatred as deep as their
race-love is strong; they with their cattle and their herds, and the
clacking wagons carrying homes and fortunes, whose women were
housewives and warriors too. Coming after these, men of fairer aspect,
adventurous, self-willed, intent to make cities in the wilderness; to
win open spaces for their kinsmen, who had no room to swing the hammer
in the workshops of their far-off northern island homes; or who,
having room, stood helpless before the furnaces where the fires had
left only the ashes of past energies.

Up there, these mountains which, like Marathon, look on the sea. But
lower the gaze from the austere hills, slowly to the plains
below. First the grey of the mountains, turning to brown, then the
bare bronze rock giving way to a tumbled wilderness of boulders, where
lizards lie in the sun, where the meerkat startles the gazelle. Then
the bronze merging into a green so deep and strong that it resembles a
blanket spread upon the uplands, but broken by kopjes, shelterless and
lonely, rising here and there like watch-towers. After that, below and
still below, the flat and staring plain, through which runs an ugly
rift turning and twisting like a snake, and moving on and on, till
lost in the arc of other hills away to the east and the south: a river
in the waste, but still only a muddy current stealing between banks
baked and sterile, a sinister stream, giving life to the veld, as some
gloomy giver of good gifts would pay a debt of atonement.

On certain Dark Days of 1899-1900, if you had watched these turgid
waters flow by, your eyes would have seen tinges of red like blood;
and following the stain of red, gashed lifeless things, which had been
torn from the ranks of sentient beings.

Whereupon, lifting your eyes from the river, you would have seen the
answer to your question--masses of men mounted and unmounted, who
moved, or halted, or stood like an animal with a thousand legs
controlled by one mind. Or again you would have observed those myriad
masses plunging across the veld, still in cohering masses, which shook
and broke and scattered, regathering again, as though drawn by a
magnet, but leaving stark remnants in their wake.

Great columns of troops which had crossed the river and pushed on into
a zone of fierce fire, turn and struggle back again across the stream;
other thousands of men, who had not crossed, succour their wounded,
and retreat steadily, bitterly to places of safety, the victims of
blunders from which come the bloody punishment of valour.

Beyond the grey mountains were British men and women waiting for
succour from forces which poured death in upon them from the
malevolent kopjes, for relief from the ravages of disease and
hunger. They waited in a straggling town of the open plain circled by
threatening hills, where the threat became a blow, and the blow was
multiplied a million times. Gaunt, fighting men sought to appease the
craving of starvation by the boiled carcasses of old horses; in caves
and dug-outs, feeble women, with undying courage, kept alive the
flickering fires of life in their children; and they smiled to cheer
the tireless, emaciated warriors who went out to meet death, or with a
superior yet careful courage stayed to receive or escape it.

When night came, across the hills and far away in the deep blue, white
shaking streams of light poured upward, telling the besieged forces
over there at Lordkop that rescue would come, that it was moving on to
the mountain. How many times had this light in the sky flashed the
same grave pledge in the mystic code of the heliograph, "We are
gaining ground--we will reach you soon." How many times, however, had
the message also been, "Not yet--but soon."

Men died in this great camp from wounds and from fever, and others
went mad almost from sheer despair; yet whenever the Master Player
called, they sprang to their places with a new-born belief that he who
had been so successful in so many long-past battles would be right in
the end with his old rightness, though he had been wrong so often on
the Dreitval.

Others there were who were sick of the world and wished "to be well
out of it"--as they said to themselves. Some had been cruelly injured,
and desire of life was dead in them; others had given injury, and
remorse had slain peace. Others still there were who, having done evil
all their lives, knew that they could not retrace their steps, and yet
shrank from a continuance of the old bad things.

Some indeed, in the red futile sacrifice, had found what they came to
find; but some still were left whose recklessness did not
avail. Comrades fell beside them, but, unscathed, they went on
fighting. Injured men were carried in hundreds to the hospitals, but
no wounds brought them low. Bullets were sprayed around them, but none
did its work for them. Shells burst near, yet no savage shard
mutilated their bodies.

Of these was Ian Stafford.

Three times he had been in the fore-front of the fight where Death
came sweeping down the veld like rain, but It passed him by. Horses
and men fell round his guns, yet he remained uninjured.

He was patient. If Death would not hasten to meet him, he would
wait. Meanwhile, he would work while he could, but with no thought
beyond the day, no vision of the morrow.

He was one of the machines of war. He was close to his General, he was
the beloved of his men, still he was the man with no future; though he
studied the campaign with that thoroughness which had marked his last
years in diplomacy.

He was much among his own wounded, much with others who were comforted
by his solicitude, by the courage of his eye, and the grasp of his
firm, friendly hand. It was at what the soldiers called the Stay
Awhile Hospital that he came in living touch again with the life he
had left behind.

He knew that Rudyard Byng had come to South Africa; but he knew no
more. He knew that Jasmine had, with Lady Tynemouth, purchased a ship
and turned it into a hospital at a day's notice; but as to whether
these two had really come to South Africa, and harboured at the Cape,
or Durban, he had no knowledge. He never looked at the English
newspapers which arrived at Dreitval River. He was done with that old
world in which he once worked; he was concerned only for this narrow
field where an Empire's fate was being solved.

Night, the dearest friend of the soldier, had settled on the veld. A
thousand fires were burning, and there were no sounds save the
murmuring voices of myriads of men, and the stamp of hoofs where the
Cavalry and Mounted Infantry horses were picketed. Food and fire, the
priceless comfort of a blanket on the ground, and a saddle or kit for
a pillow gave men compensation for all the hardships and dangers of
the day; and they gave little thought to the morrow.

The soldier lives in the present. His rifle, his horse, his boots, his
blanket, the commissariat, a dry bit of ground to sleep on--these are
the things which occupy his mind. His heroism is incidental, the
commonplace impulse of the moment. He does things because they are
there to do, not because some great passion, some exaltation, seizes
him. His is the real simple life. So it suddenly seemed to Stafford as
he left his tent, after he had himself inspected every man and every
horse in his battery that lived through the day of death, and made his
way towards the Stay Awhile Hospital.

"This is the true thing," he said to himself as he gazed at the wide
camp. He turned his face here and there in the starlight, and saw
human life that but now was moving in the crash of great guns, the
shrieking of men terribly wounded, the agony of mutilated horses, the
bursting of shells, the hissing scream of the pom-pom, and the
discordant cries of men fighting an impossible fight.

"There is no pretense here," he reflected. "It is life reduced down to
the bare elements. There is no room for the superficial thing. It's
all business. It's all stark human nature."

At that moment his eye caught one of those white messages of the sky
flashing the old bitter promise, "We shall reach you soon." He forgot
himself, and a great spirit welled up in him.

"Soon!" The light in the sky shot its message over the hills.

That was it--the present, not the past. Here was work, the one thing
left to do.

"And it has to be done," he said aloud, as he walked on swiftly, a
spring to his footstep. Presently he mounted and rode away across the
veld. Buried in his thoughts, he was only subconsciously aware of what
he saw until, after near an hour's riding, he pulled rein at the door
of the Stay Awhile Hospital, which was some miles in the rear of the
main force.

As he entered, a woman in a nurse's garb passed him swiftly. He
scarcely looked at her; he was only conscious that she was in great
haste. Her eyes seemed looking at some inner, hidden thing, and,
though they glanced at him, appeared not to see him or to realize more
than that some one was passing. But suddenly, to both, after they had
passed, there came an arrest of attention. There was a consciousness,
which had nothing to do with the sight of the eyes, that a familiar
presence had gone by. Each turned quickly, and their eyes came back
from regarding the things of the imagination, and saw each other face
to face. The nurse gave an exclamation of pleasure and ran forward.

Stafford held out a hand. It seemed to him, as he did it, that it
stretched across a great black gulf and found another hand in the
darkness beyond.

"Al'mah!" he said, in a voice of protest as of companionship.

Of all those he had left behind, this was the one being whom to meet
was not disturbing. He wished to encounter no one of that inner circle
of his tragic friendship; but he realized that Al'mah had had her
tragedy too, and that her suffering could not be less than his
own. The same dark factor had shadowed the lives of both. Adrian
Fellowes had injured them both through the same woman, had shaken, if
not shattered, the fabric of their lives. However much they two were
blameworthy, they had been sincere, they had been honourable in their
dishonour, they had been "falsely true." They were derelicts of life,
with the comradeship of despair as a link between them.

"Al'mah," he said again, gently. Then, with a bitter humour, he added,
"You here--I thought you were a prima donna!"

The flicker of a smile crossed her odd, fine, strong face. "This is
grand opera," she said. "It is the Nibelungen Ring of England."

"To end in the Twilight of the Gods?" he rejoined with a hopeless kind
of smile.

They turned to the outer door of the hospital and stepped into the
night. For a moment they stood looking at the great camp far away to
right and left, and to the lone mountains yonder, where the Boer
commandoes held the passes and trained their merciless armament upon
all approaches. Then he said at last: "Why have you come here? You had
your work in England."

"What is my work?" she asked.

"To heal the wounded," he answered.

"I am trying to do that," she replied.

"You are trying to heal bodies, but it is a bigger, greater thing to
heal the wounded mind."

"I am trying to do that too. It is harder than the other."

"Whose minds are you trying to heal?" he questioned, gently.

"'Physician heal thyself' was the old command, wasn't it? But that is
harder still."

"Must one always be a saint to do a saintly thing?" he asked.

"I am not clever," she replied, "and I can't make phrases. But must
one always be a sinner to do a wicked thing? Can't a saint do a wicked
thing, and a sinner do a good thing without being called the one or
the other?"

"I don't think you need apologize for not being able to make
phrases. I suppose you'd say there is neither absolute saintliness nor
absolute wickedness, but that life is helplessly composite of both,
and that black really may be white. You know the old phrase, 'Killing
no murder.'"

She seemed to stiffen, and her lips set tightly for a minute; then, as
though by a great effort, she laughed bitterly.

"Murder isn't always killing," she replied. "Don't you remember the
protest in Macbeth, 'Time was, when the brains were out the man would
die'?" Then, with a little quick gesture towards the camp, she added,
"When you think of to-day, doesn't it seem that the brains are out,
and yet that the man still lives? I'm not a soldier, and this awful
slaughter may be the most wonderful tactics, but it's all beyond my
little mind."

"Your littleness is not original enough to attract notice," he replied
with kindly irony. "There is almost an epidemic of it. Let us hope we
shall have an antidote soon."

There was a sudden cry from inside the hospital. Al'mah shut her eyes
for a moment, clinched her fingers, and became very pale; then she
recovered herself, and turned her face towards the door, as though
waiting for some one to come out.

"What is the matter?" he asked. "Some bad case?"

"Yes--very bad," she replied.

"One you've been attending?"

"Yes."

"What arm--the artillery?" he asked with sudden interest.

"Yes, the artillery."

He turned towards the door of the hospital again. "One of my men? What
battery? Do you know?"

"Not yours--Schiller's."

"Schiller's! A Boer?"

She nodded. "A Boer spy, caught by Boer bullets as he was going back."

"When was that?"

"This morning early."

"The little business at Wortmann's Drift?"

She nodded. "Yes, there."

"I don't quite understand. Was he in our lines--a Boer spy?"

"Yes. But he wore British uniform, he spoke English. He was an
Englishman once."

Suddenly she came up close to him, and looked into his face
steadily. "I will tell you all," she said scarce above a whisper. "He
came to spy, but he came also to see his wife. She had written to ask
him not to join the Boers, as he said he meant to do; or, if he had,
to leave them and join his own people. He came, but not to join his
fellow-countrymen. He came to get money from his wife; and he came to
spy."

An illuminating thought shot into Stafford's mind. He remembered
something that Byng once told him.

"His wife is a nurse?" he asked in a low tone.

"She is a nurse."

"She knew, then, that he was a spy?" he asked.

"Yes, she knew. I suppose she ought to be tried by court-martial. She
did not expose him. She gave him a chance to escape. But he was shot
as he tried to reach the Boer lines."

"And was brought back here to his wife--to you! Did he let them"--he
nodded towards the hospital--"know he was your husband?"

When she spoke again her voice showed strain, but it did not
tremble. "Of course. He would not spare me. He never did. It was
always like that."

He caught her hand in his. "You have courage enough for a hundred," he
said.

"I have suffered enough for a hundred," she responded.

Again that sharp cry rang out, and again she turned anxiously towards
the door.

"I came to South Africa on the chance of helping him in some way," she
replied. "It came to me that he might need me."

"You paid the price of his life once to Kruger--after the Raid, I've
heard," he said.

"Yes, I owed him that, and as much more as was possible," she
responded with a dark, pained look.

"His life is in danger--an operation?" he questioned.

"Yes. There is one chance; but they could not give him an anaesthetic,
and they would not let me stay with him. They forced me away--out
here." She appeared to listen again. "That was his voice--that
crying," she added presently.

"Wouldn't it be better he should go? If he recovers there would only
be--"

"Oh yes, to be tried as a spy--a renegade Englishman! But he would
rather live in spite of that, if it was only for an hour."

"To love life so much as that--a spy!" Stafford reflected.

"Not so much love of life as fear of--" She stopped short.

"To fear--silence and peace!" he remarked darkly, with a shrug of his
shoulders. Then he added: "Tell me, if he does not die, and if--if he
is pardoned by any chance, do you mean to live with him again?"

A bitter laugh broke from her. "How do I know? What does any woman
know what she will do until the situation is before her! She may mean
to do one thing and do the complete opposite. She may mean to hate,
and will end by loving. She may mean to kiss and will end by
killing. She may kiss and kill too all in one moment, and still not be
inconsistent. She would have the logic of a woman. How do I know what
I would do--what I will do!"

The door of the hospital opened. A surgeon came out, and seeing
Al'mah, moved towards the two. Stafford went forward hurriedly, but
Al'mah stood like one transfixed. There was a whispered word, and then
Stafford came back to her.

"You will not need to do anything," he said.

"He is gone--like that!" she whispered in an awed voice. "Death,
death--so many die!" She shuddered.

Stafford passed her arm through his, and drew her towards the door of
the hospital.

A half-hour later Stafford emerged again from the hospital, his head
bent in thought. He rode slowly back to his battery, unconscious of
the stir of life round him, of the shimmering white messages to the
besieged town beyond the hills. He was thinking of the tragedy of the
woman he had left tearless and composed beside the bedside of the man
who had so vilely used her. He was reflecting how her life, and his
own, and the lives of at least three others, were so tangled together
that what twisted the existence of one disturbed all. In one sense the
woman he had just left in the hospital was nothing to him, and yet now
she seemed to be the only living person to whom he was drawn.

He remembered the story he had once heard in Vienna of a man and a
woman who both had suffered betrayal, who both had no longer a single
illusion left, who had no love for each other at all, in whom indeed
love was dead--a mangled murdered thing; and yet who went away to
Corfu together, and there at length found a pathway out of despair in
the depths of the sea. Between these two there had never been even the
faint shadow of romance or passion; but in the terrible mystery of
pain and humiliation, they had drawn together to help each other,
through a breach of all social law, in pity of each other. He
apprehended the real meaning of the story when Vienna was alive with
it, but he understood far, far better now.

A pity as deep as any feeling he had ever known had come to him as he
stood with Al'mah beside the bed of her dead renegade man; and it
seemed to him that they two also might well bury themselves in the
desert together, and minister to each other's despair. It was only the
swift thought of a moment, which faded even as it saw the light; but
it had its origin in that last flickering sense of human companionship
which dies in the atmosphere of despair. "Every man must live his dark
hours alone," a broken-down actor once said to Stafford as he tried to
cheer him when the last thing he cared for had been taken from
him--his old, faded, misshapen wife; when no faces sent warm glances
to him across the garish lights. "It is no use," this Roscius had
said, "every man must live his dark hours alone."

That very evening, after the battle of the Dreitval, Jigger,
Stafford's trumpeter, had said a thing to him which had struck a chord
that rang in empty chambers of his being. He had found Jigger sitting
disconsolate beside a gun, which was yet grimy and piteous with the
blood of men who had served it, and he asked the lad what his trouble
was.

In reply Jigger had said, "When it 'it 'm 'e curled up like a bit o'
shaving. An' when I done what I could 'e says, 'It's a speshul for one
now, an' it's lonely goin',' 'e says. When I give 'im a drink 'e says,
'It 'd do me more good later, little 'un'; an' 'e never said no more
except, 'One at a time is the order--only one.'"

Not even his supper had lifted the cloud from Jigger's face, and
Stafford had left the lad trying to compose a letter to the mother of
the dead man, who had been an especial favourite with the trumpeter
from the slums.

Stafford was roused from his reflections by the grinding, rumbling
sound of a train. He turned his face towards the railway line.

"A troop-train--more food for the dragons," he said to himself. He
could not see the train itself, but he could see the head-light of the
locomotive, and he could hear its travail as it climbed slowly the
last incline to the camp.

"Who comes there!" he said aloud, and in his mind there swept a
premonition that the old life was finding him out, that its invisible
forces were converging upon him. But did it matter? He knew in his
soul that he was now doing the right thing, that he had come out in
the open where all the archers of penalty had a fair target for their
arrows. He wished to be "Free among the dead that are wounded and that
lie in the grave and are out of remembrance;" but he would do no more
to make it so than tens of thousands of other men were doing on these
battle-fields.

"Who comes there!" he said again, his eyes upon the white, round light
in the distance, and he stood still to try and make out the black,
winding, groaning thing.

Presently he heard quick footsteps.

A small, alert figure stopped short, a small, abrupt hand
saluted. "The General Commanding 'as sent for you, sir."

It was trumpeter Jigger of the Artillery.

"Are you the General's orderly, then?" asked Stafford quizzically.

"The orderly's gone w'ere 'e thought 'e'd find you, and I've come
w'ere I know'd you'd be, sir."

"Where did he think he'd find me?"

"Wiv the 'osses, sir."

A look of gratification crossed Stafford's face. He was well known in
the army as one who looked after his horses and his men. "And what
made you think I was at the hospital, Jigger?"

"Becos you'd been to the 'osses, sir."

"Did you tell the General's orderly that?"

"No, your gryce--no, sir," he added quickly, and a flush of
self-reproach came to his face, for he prided himself on being a real
disciplinarian, a disciple of the correct thing. "I thought I'd like
'im to see our 'osses, an' 'ow you done 'em, an' I'd find you as quick
as 'e could, wiv a bit to the good p'r'aps."

Stafford smiled. "Off you go, then. Find that orderly. Say, Colonel
Stafford's compliments to the General Commanding and he will report
himself at once. See that you get it straight, trumpeter."

Jigger would rather die than not get it straight, and his salute made
that quite plain.

"It's made a man of him, anyhow," Stafford said to himself, as he
watched the swiftly disappearing figure. "He's as straight as a nail,
body and mind--poor little devil.... How far away it all seems!"

A quarter of an hour later he was standing beside the troop-train
which he had seen labouring to its goal. It was carrying the old
regiment of the General Officer Commanding, who had sent Stafford to
its Colonel with an important message. As the two officers stood
together watching the troops detrain and make order out of the chaos
of baggage and equipment, Stafford's attention was drawn to a woman
some little distance away, giving directions about her impedimenta.

"Who is the lady?" he asked, while in his mind was a sensible stir of
recognition.

"Ah, there's something like the real thing!" his companion replied.
"She is doing a capital bit of work. She and Lady Tynemouth have got a
hospital-ship down at Durban. She's come to link it up better with the
camp. It's Rudyard Byng's wife. They're both at it out here."

"Who comes there!" Stafford had exclaimed a moment before with a sense
of premonition.

Jasmine had come.

He drew back in the shadow as she turned round towards them.

"To the Stay Awhile--right!" he heard a private say in response to her
directions.

He saw her face, but not clearly. He had glimpse of a Jasmine not so
daintily pretty as of old, not so much of a dresden-china shepherdess;
but with the face of a woman who, watching the world with
understanding eyes, and living with an understanding heart, had taken
on something of the mysterious depths of the Life behind life. It was
only a glimpse he had, but it was enough. It was more than enough.

"Where is Byng?" he asked his fellow-officer.

"He's been up there with Tain's Brigade for a fortnight. He was in
Kimberley, but got out before the investment, went to Cape Town, and
came round here--to be near his wife, I suppose."

"He is soldiering, then?"

"He was a Colonel in the Rand Rifles once. He's with the South African
Horse now in command of the regiment attached to Tain. Tain's out of
your beat--away on the right flank there."

Presently Stafford saw Jasmine look in their direction; then, on
seeing Stafford's companion, came forward hastily. The Colonel left
Stafford and went to meet her.

A moment afterwards, she turned and looked at Stafford. Her face was
now deadly pale, but it showed no agitation. She was in the light of
an electric lamp, and he was in the shadow. For one second only she
gazed at him, then she turned and moved away to the cape-cart awaiting
her. The Colonel saw her in, then returned to Stafford.

"Why didn't you come and be introduced?" the Colonel asked. "I told
her who you were."

"Hospital-ships are not in my line," Stafford answered
casually. "Women and war don't go together."

"She's a nurse, she's not a woman," was the paradoxical reply.

"She knows Byng is here?"

"I suppose so. It looks like a clever bit of strategy--junction of
forces. There's a lot of women at home would like the chance she
has--at a little less cost."

"What is the cost?"

"Well, that ship didn't cost less than a hundred thousand pounds."

"Is that all?"

The Colonel looked at Stafford in surprise: but Stafford was not
thinking of the coin.



CHAPTER XXX

"AND NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET!"


As the cape-cart conveying Jasmine to the hospital moved away from the
station, she settled down into the seat beside the driver with the
helplessness of one who had received a numbing blow. Her body swayed
as though she would faint, and her eyes closed, and stayed closed for
so long a time, that Corporal Shorter, who drove the rough little pair
of Argentines, said to her sympathetically:

"It's all right, ma'am. We'll be there in a jiffy. Don't give way."

This friendly solicitude had immediate effect. Jasmine sat up, and
thereafter held herself as though she was in her yellow salon yonder
in London.

"Thank you," she replied serenely to Corporal Shorter. "It was a long,
tiring journey, and I let myself go for a moment."

"A good night's rest'll do you a lot of good, ma'am," he
ventured. Then he added, "Beggin' pardon, ain't you Mrs. Colonel
Rudyard Byng?"

She turned and looked at the man inquiringly. "Yes, I am Mrs. Byng."

"Thank you, ma'am. Now how did I know? Why," he chuckled, "I saw a big
B on your hand-bag, and I knew you was from the hospital-ship--they
told me that at the Stay Awhile; and the rest was easy, ma'am. I had a
mate along o' your barge. He was one of them the Boers got at Talana
Hill. They chipped his head-piece nicely--just like the 4.7's flay the
kopjes up there. My mate's been writing to me about you. We're a long
way from home, Joey and me, and a bit o' kindness is a bit of all
right to us."

"Where is your home?" Jasmine asked, her fatigue and oppression
lifting.

He chuckled as though it were a joke, while he answered: "Australia
onct and first. My mate, Joey Clynes, him that's on your ship, we was
both born up beyond Bendigo. When we cut loose from the paternal
leash, so to speak, we had a bit of boundary-riding, rabbit-killing,
shearing and sun-downing--all no good, year by year. Then we had a bit
o' luck and found a mob of warrigals--horses run wild, you know. We
stalked 'em for days in the droughttime to a water-course, and got
'em, and coaxed 'em along till the floods come; then we sold 'em, and
with the hard tin shipped for to see the world. So it was as of
old. And by and by we found ourselves down here, same as all the rest,
puttin' in a bit o' time for the Flag."

Jasmine turned on him one of those smiles which had made her so many
friends in the past--a smile none the less alluring because it had
lost that erstime flavour of artifice and lure which, however hidden,
had been part of its power. Now it was accompanied by no slight
drooping of the eyelids. It brightened a look which was direct and
natural.

"It's a good thing to have lived in the wide distant spaces of the
world," she responded. "A man couldn't easily be mean or small where
life is so simple and so large."

His face flushed with pleasure. She was so easy to get on with, he
said to himself; and she certainly had a wonderfully kind smile. But
he felt too that she needed greater wisdom, and he was ready to give
it--a friendly characteristic of the big open spaces "where life is so
simple and so large."

"Well, that might be so 'long o' some continents," he remarked, "but
it wasn't so where Joey Clynes and me was nourished, so to speak. I
tripped up on a good many mean things from Bendigo to Thargomindah and
back around. The back-blocks has its tricks as well as the towns, as
you would see if you come across a stock-rider with a cheque to be
broke in his hand. I've seen six months' wages go bung in a day with a
stock-rider on the gentle jupe. But again, peradventure, I've seen a
man that had lost ten thousand sheep tramp fifty miles in a blazing
sun with a basket of lambs on his back, savin' them two switherin'
little papillions worth nothin' at all, at the risk of his own
life--just as mates have done here on this salamanderin' veld; same as
Colonel Byng did to-day along o' Wortmann's Drift."

Jasmine had been trying to ask a question concerning her husband ever
since the man had mentioned his name, and had not been able to do
so. She had never spoken of him directly to any one since she had left
England; had never heard from him; had written him no word; was, so
far as the outer acts of life were concerned, as distant from him as
Corporal Shorter was from his native Bendigo. She had been busy as she
had never before been in her life, in a big, comprehensive, useful
way. It had seemed to her in England, as she carried through the
negotiations for the Valoria, fitted it out for the service it was to
render, directed its administration over the heads of the committee
appointed, for form's sake, to assist Lady Tynemouth and herself, that
the spirit of her grandfather was over her, watching her, inspiring
her. This had become almost an obsession with her. Her grandfather had
had belief in her, delight in her; and now the innumerable talks she
had had with him, as to the way he had done things, gave her
confidence and a key to what she had to do. It was the first real
work; for what she did for Ian Stafford in diplomacy was only playing
upon the weakness of human nature with a skilled intelligence, with an
instinctive knowledge of men and a capacity for managing them. The
first real pride she had ever felt soothed her angry soul.

Her grandfather had been more in her mind than any one else--than
either Rudyard or Ian Stafford. Towards both of these her mind had
slowly and almost unconsciously changed, and she wished to think about
neither. There had been a revolution in her nature, and all her tragic
experience, her emotions, and her faculties, had been shaken into a
crucible where the fire of pain and revolt burned on and on and
on. From the crucible there had come as yet no precipitation of life's
elements, and she scarcely knew what was in her heart. She tried to
smother every thought concerning the past. She did not seek to find
her bearings, or to realize in what country of the senses and the
emotions she was travelling.

One thing was present, however, at times, and when it rushed over her
in its fulness, it shook her as the wind shakes the leaf on a tree--a
sense of indignation, of anger, or resentment. Against whom?  Against
all. Against Rudyard, against Ian Stafford; but most of all, a
thousand times most against a dead man, who had been swept out of
life, leaving behind a memory which could sting murderously.

Now, when she heard of Rudyard's bravery at Wortmann's Drift, a
curious thrill of excitement ran through her veins, or it would be
truer to say that a sensation new and strange vibrated in her
blood. She had heard many tales of valour in this war, and more than
one hero of the Victoria Cross had been in her charge at Durban; but
as a child's heart might beat faster at the first words of a wonderful
story, so she felt a faint suffocation in the throat and her brooding
eyes took on a brighter, a more objective look, as she heard the tale
of Wortmann's Drift.

"Tell me about it," she said, yet turned her head away from her eager
historian.

Corporal Shorter's words were addressed to the smallest pink ear he
had ever seen except on a baby, but he was only dimly conscious of
that. He was full of a man's pride in a man's deed.

"Well, it was like this," he recited. "Gunter's horse bolted--Dick
Gunter's in the South African Horse same as Colonel Byng--his lot. Old
Gunter's horse gits away with him into the wide open. I s'pose there'd
been a hunderd Boers firing at the runaway for three minutes, and at
last off comes Gunter. He don't stir for a minute or more, then we see
him pick himself up a bit quick, but settle back again. And while we
was lookin' and tossin' pennies like as to his chances out there, a
grey New Zealand mare nips out across the veld stretchin' every
string. We knowed her all right, that grey mare--a regular
Mrs. Mephisto, w'ich belongs to Colonel Byng. Do the Boojers fire at
him? Don't they! We could see the spots of dust where the bullets
struck, spittin', spittin', spittin', and Lord knows how many hunderd
more there was that didn't hit the ground. An' the grey mare gets
there. As cool as a granadillar, down drops Colonel Byng beside old
Gunter; down goes the grey mare--Colonel Byng had taught her that
trick, like the Roosian Cossack hosses. Then up on her rolls old
Gunter, an' up goes Colonel Byng, and the grey mare switchin' her
bobtail, as if she was havin' a bit of mealies in the middle o' the
day. But when they was both on, then the band begun to play. Men was
fightin' of course, but it looked as if the whole smash stopped to see
what the end would be. It was a real pretty race, an' the grey mare
takin' it as free as if she was carryin' a little bit of a pipkin like
me instead of twenty-six stone. She's a flower, that grey mare! Once
she stumbled, an' we knowed it wasn't an ant-bear's hole she'd found
in the veld, and that she'd been hurt. But they know, them hosses,
that they must do as their Baases do; and they fight right on. She
come home with the two all right. She switched round a corner and over
a nose of land where that crossfire couldn't hit the lot; an' there
was the three of 'em at 'ome for a cup o' tea. Why, ma'am, that done
the army as much good to-day, that little go-to-the-devil, you
mud-suckers! as though we'd got Schuster's Hill. 'Twas what we
needed--an' we got it. It took our eyes off the nasty little fact that
half of a regiment was down, an' the other half with their job not
done as it was ordered. It made the S.A.'s and the Lynchesters and the
Gessex lot laugh. Old Gunter's all right. He's in the Stay Awhile
now. You'll be sure to see him. And Colonel Byng's all right, too,
except a little bit o' splinter--"

"A bit of splinter--" Her voice was almost peremptory.

"A chip off his wrist like, but he wasn't thinkin' of that when he got
back. He was thinkin' of the grey mare; and she was hit in three
places, but not to mention. One bullet cut through her ear and through
Colonel Byng's hat as he stooped over her neck; but the luck was with
them. They was born to do a longer trek together. A little bit of the
same thing in both of 'em, so to speak. The grey mare has a temper
like a hunderd wildcats, and Colonel Byng can let himself go too, as
you perhaps know, ma'am. We've seen him let loose sometimes when there
was shirkers about, but he's all right inside his vest. And he's a
good feeder. His men get their tucker all right. He knows when to shut
his eyes. He's got a way to make his bunch--and they're the
hardest-bit bunch in the army--do anything he wants 'em to. He's as
hard himself as ever is, but he's all right underneath the
epidermotis."

All at once there flashed before Jasmine's eyes the picture of Rudyard
driving Krool out of the house in Park Lane with a sjambok. She heard
again the thud of the rhinoceros-whip on the cringing back of the
Boer; she heard the moan of the victim as he stumbled across the
threshold into the street; and again she felt that sense of
suffocation, that excitement which the child feels on the brink of a
wonderful romance, the once-upon-a-time moment.

They were nearing the hospital. The driver silently pointed to it. He
saw that he had made an impression, and he was content with it. He
smiled to himself.

"Is Colonel Byng in the camp?" she asked.

"He's over--'way over, miles and miles, on the left wing with Kearey's
brigade now. But old Gunter's here, and you're sure to see Colonel
Byng soon--well, I should think."

She had no wish to see Colonel Byng soon. Three days would suffice to
do what she wished here, and then she would return to Durban to her
work there--to Alice Tynemouth, whose friendship and wonderful
tactfulness had helped her in indefinable ways, as a more obvious
sympathy never could have done. She would have resented one word which
would have suggested that a tragedy was slowly crushing out her life.

Never a woman in the world was more alone. She worked and smiled with
eyes growing sadder, yet with a force hardening in her which gave her
face a character it never had before. Work had come at the right
moment to save her from the wild consequences of a nature maddened by
a series of misfortunes and penalties, for which there had been no
warning and no preparation.

She was not ready for a renewal of the past. Only a few minutes before
she had been brought face to face with Ian Stafford, had seen him look
at her out of the shadow there at the station, as though she was an
infinite distance away from him; and she had realized with overwhelming
force how changed her world was. Ian Stafford, who but a few short
months ago had held her in his arms and whispered unforgettable things,
now looked at her as one looks at the image of a forgotten thing. She
recalled his last words to her that awful day when Rudyard had read
the fatal letter, and the world had fallen:

"Nothing can set things right between you and me, Jasmine," he had
said. "But there is Rudyard. You must help him through. He heard
scandal about Mennaval last night at De Lancy Scovel's. He didn't
believe it. It rests with you to give it all the lie. Good-bye."

That had been the end--the black, bitter end. Since then Ian had never
spoken a word to her, nor she to him; but he had stood there in the
shadow at the station like a ghost, reproachful, unresponsive,
indifferent. She recalled now the day when, after three years'
parting, she had left him cool, indifferent, and self-contained in the
doorway of the sweet-shop in Regent Street; how she had entered her
carriage, had clinched her hands, and cried with wilful passion: "He
shall not treat me so. He shall show some feeling. He shall! He
shall!"

Here was indifference again, but of another land. Hers was not a
woman's vanity, in fury at being despised. Vanity, maybe, was still
there, but so slight that it made no contrast to the proud turmoil of
a nature which had been humiliated beyond endurance; which, for its
mistakes, had received accruing penalties as precise as though they
had been catalogued; which had waked to find that a whole lifetime had
been an error; and that it had no anchor in any set of principles or
impelling habits.

And over all there hung the shadow of a man's death, with its black
suspicion. When Ian Stafford looked at her from the shadow of the
railway-station, the question had flashed into his mind, Did she kill
him? Around Adrian Fellowes' death there hung a cloud of mystery which
threw a sinister shadow on the path of three people. In the middle of
the night, Jasmine started from her sleep with the mystery of the
man's death torturing her, and with the shuddering question, Which? on
her fevered lips. Was it her husband--was it Ian Stafford? As he
galloped over the veld, or sat with his pipe beside the camp-fire,
Rudyard Byng was also drawn into the frigid gloom of the ugly thought,
and his mind asked the question, Did she kill him? It was as though
each who had suffered from the man in life was destined to be menaced
by his shade, till it should be exorcised by that person who had taken
the useless life, saying, "It was I; I did it!"

As Jasmine entered the hospital, it seemed to her excited imagination
as though she was entering a House of Judgment: as though here in a
court of everlasting equity she would meet those who had played their
vital parts in her life.

What if Rudyard was here! What if in these few days while she was to
be here he was to cross her path! What would she say? What would she
do? What could be said or done? Bitterness and resentment and dark
suspicion were in her mind--and in his. Her pride was less wilful and
tempestuous than on the day when she drove him from her; when he said
things which flayed her soul, and left her body as though it had been
beaten with rods. Her bitterness, her resentment had its origin in the
fact that he did not understand--and yet in his crude big way he had
really understood better than Ian Stafford. She felt that Rudyard
despised her now a thousand times more than ever he had hinted at in
that last stifling scene in Park Lane; and her spirit rebelled against
it. She would rather that he had believed everything against her, and
had made an open scandal, because then she could have paid any debt
due to him by the penalty most cruel a woman can bear. But pity,
concession, the condescension of a superior morality, were impossible
to her proud mind.

As for Ian Stafford, he had left her stripped bare of one single
garment of self-respect. His very kindness, his chivalry in defending
her; his inflexible determination that all should be over between them
forever, that she should be prevailed upon to be to Rudyard more than
she had ever been--it all drove her into a deeper isolation. This
isolation would have been her destruction but that something bigger
than herself, a passion to do things, lifted to idealism a mind which
in the past had grown materialistic, which, in gaining wit and mental
skill, had missed the meaning of things, the elemental sense.

Corporal Shorter's tale of Rudyard's heroism had stirred her; but she
could not have said quite what her feeling was with regard to it. She
only knew vaguely that she was glad of it in a more personal than
impersonal way. When she shook hands with the cheerful non-com. at the
door of the hospital, she gave him a piece of gold which he was loth
to accept till she said: "But take it as a souvenir of Colonel Byng's
little ride with 'Old Gunter.'"

With a laugh, he took it then, and replied, "I'll not smoke it, I'll
not eat it, and I'll not drink it. I'll wear it for luck and
God-bless-you!"



CHAPTER XXXI

THE GREY HORSE AND ITS RIDER


It was almost midnight. The camp was sleeping. The forces of
destruction lay torpid in the starry shadow of the night. There was no
moon, but the stars gave a light that relieved the gloom. They were so
near to the eye that it might seem a lancer could pick them from their
nests of blue. The Southern Cross hung like a sign of hope to guide
men to a new Messiah.

In vain Jasmine had tried to sleep. The day had been too much for
her. All that happened in the past four years went rushing past, and
she saw herself in scenes which were so tormenting in their reality
that once she cried out as in a nightmare. As she did so, she was
answered by a choking cry of pain like her own, and, waking, she
started up from her couch with poignant apprehension; but presently
she realized that it was the cry of some wounded patient in the ward
not far from the room where she lay.

It roused her, however, from the half wakefulness which had been
excoriated by burning memories, and, hurriedly rising, she opened wide
the window and looked out into the night. The air was sharp, but it
soothed her hot face and brow, and the wild pulses in her wrists
presently beat less vehemently. She put a firm hand on herself, as she
was wont to do in these days, when there was no time for brooding on
her own troubles, and when, with the duties she had taken upon
herself, it would be criminal to indulge in self-pity.

Looking out of the window now into the quiet night, the watch-fires
dotting the plain had a fascination for her greater than the wonder of
the southern sky and its plaque of indigo sprinkled with silver dust
and diamonds. Those fires were the bulletins of the night, telling
that around each of them men were sleeping, or thinking of other
scenes, or wondering whether the fight to-morrow would be their last
fight, and if so, what then? They were to the army like the candle in
the home of the cottager. Those little groups of men sleeping around
their fires were like a family, where men grow to serve each other as
brother serves brother, knowing each other's foibles, but preserving
each other's honour for the family's pride, risking life to save each
other.

As Jasmine gazed into the gloom, spattered with a delicate radiance
which did not pierce the shadows, but only made lively the darkness,
she was suddenly conscious of the dull regular thud of horses' hoofs
upon the veld. Troops of Mounted Infantry were evidently moving to
take up a new position at the bidding of the Master Player. The sound
was like the rub-a-dub of muffled hammers. The thought forced itself
on her mind that here were men secretly hastening to take part in the
grim lottery of life and death, from which some, and maybe many, would
draw the black ticket of doom, and so pass from the game before the
game was won.

The rumbling roll of hoofs grew distinct. Now they seemed to be almost
upon her, and presently they emerged into view from the right, where
their progress had been hidden by the hospital-building. When they
reached the hospital there came a soft command and, as the troop
passed, every face was turned towards the building. It was men full of
life and the interest of the great game paying passing homage to their
helpless comrades in this place of healing.

As they rode past, a few of the troopers had a glimpse of the figure
dimly outlined at the window. Some made kindly jests, cheffing each
other--"Your fancy, old sly-boots? Arranged it all, eh? Watch me,
Lizzie, as I pass, and wave your lily-white hand!"

But others pressed their lips tightly, for visions of a woman
somewhere waiting and watching flashed before their eyes; while others
still had only the quiet consciousness of the natural man, that a
woman looks at them; and where women are few and most of them are
angels,--the battle-field has no shelter for any other--such looks
have deep significance.

The troop went by steadily, softly and slowly. After they had all gone
past, two horsemen detached from the troop came after. Presently one
of them separated from his companion and rode on. The other came
towards the hospital at a quick trot, drew bridle very near Jasmine's
window, slid to the ground, said a soft word to his charger, patted
its neck, and, turning, made for the door of the hospital. For a
moment Jasmine stood looking out, greatly moved, she scarcely knew
why, by this little incident of the night, and then suddenly the
starlight seemed to draw round the patient animal standing at
attention, as it were.

Then she saw it was a grey horse.

Its owner, as Corporal Shorter predicted, had come to see "Old
Gunter," ere he went upon another expedition of duty. Its owner was
Rudyard Byng.

That was why so strange a coldness, as of apprehension or anxiety, had
passed through Jasmine when the rider had come towards her out of the
night. Her husband was here. If she called, he would come. If she
stretched out her hand, she could touch him. If she opened a door, she
would be in his presence. If he opened the door behind her, he could--

She stepped back hastily into the room, and drew her night-robe
closely about her with sudden flushing of the face. If he should enter
her room--she felt in the darkness for her dressing-gown. It was not
on the chair beside her bed. She moved hastily, and blundered against
a table. She felt for the foot of the bed. The dressing-gown was not
there. Her brain was on fire. Where was her dressing-gown? She tried
to button the night-dress over her palpitating breast, but abandoned
it to throw back her head and gather her golden hair away from her
shoulders and breast. All this in the dark, in the safe dusk of her
own room.... Where was her dressing-gown? Where was her maid? Why
should she be at such a disadvantage! She reached for the table again
and found a match-box. She would strike a light, and find her
dressing-gown. Then she abruptly remembered that she had no
dressing-gown with her; that she had travelled with one single
bag--little more than a hand-bag--and it contained only the emergency
equipment of a nurse. She had brought no dressing-gown; only the light
outer rain-proof coat which should serve a double purpose. She had
forgotten for a moment that she was not in her own house, that she was
an army-woman, living a soldier's life. She felt her way to the wall,
found the rain-proof coat, and, with trembling fingers, put it on. As
she did so a wave of weakness passed over her, and she swayed as
though she would fall; but she put a hand on herself and fought her
growing agitation.

She turned towards the bed, but stopped abruptly, because she heard
footsteps in the hall outside--footsteps she knew, footsteps which for
years had travelled towards her, day and night, with eagerness; the
quick, urgent footsteps of a man of decision, of impulse, of
determination. It was Rudyard's footsteps outside her door, Rudyard's
voice speaking to some one; then Rudyard's footsteps pausing; and
afterwards a dead silence. She felt his presence; she imagined his
hand upon her door. With a little smothered gasp, she made a move
forward as though to lock the door; then she remembered that it had no
lock. With strained and startled eyes, she kept her gaze turned on the
door, expecting to see it open before her. Her heart beat so hard she
could hear it pounding against her breast, and her temples were
throbbing.

The silence was horrible to her. Her agitation culminated. She could
bear it no longer. Blindly she ran to another door which led into the
sitting-room of the matron, used for many purposes--the hold-all of
the odds and ends of the hospital life; where surgeons consulted,
officers waited, and army authorities congregated for the business of
the hospital. She found the door, opened it and entered hastily. One
light was burning--a lamp with a green shade. She shut the door behind
her quickly and leaned against it, closing her eyes with a sense of
relief. Presently some movement in the room startled her. She opened
her eyes. A figure stood between the green lamp and the farther door.

It was her husband.

Her senses had deceived her. His footsteps had not stopped before her
bedroom-door. She had not heard the handle of the door of her bedroom
turn, but the handle of the door of this room. The silence which had
frightened her had followed his entrance here.

She hastily drew the coat about her. The white linen of her
night-dress showed. She thrust it back, and instinctively drew behind
the table, as though to hide her bare ankles.

He had started back at seeing her, but had instantly recovered
himself. "Well, Jasmine," he said quietly, "we've met in a queer
place."

All at once her hot agitation left her, and she became cold and
still. She was in a maelstrom of feeling a minute before, though she
could not have said what the feeling meant; now she was dominated by a
haunting sense of injury, roused by resentment, not against him, but
against everything and everybody, himself included. All the work of
the last few months seemed suddenly undone--to go for nothing. Just as
a drunkard in his pledge made reformation, which has done its work for
a period, feels a sudden maddening desire to indulge his passion for
drink, and plunges into a debauch,--the last maddening degradation
before his final triumph,--so Jasmine felt now the restrictions and
self-control of the past few months fall away from her. She emerged
from it all the same woman who had flung her married life, her man,
and her old world to the winds on the day that Krool had been driven
into the street. Like Krool, she too had gone out into the
unknown--into a strange land where "the Baas" had no habitation.

Rudyard's words seemed to madden her, and there was a look of scrutiny
and inquiry in his eyes which she saw--and saw nothing else
there. There was the inquisition in his look which had been there in
their last interview when he had said as plainly as man could say,
"What did it mean--that letter from Adrian Fellowes?"

It was all there in his eyes now--that hateful inquiry, the piercing
scrutiny of a judge in the Judgment House, and there came also into
her eyes, as though in consequence, a look of scrutiny too.

"Did you kill Adrian Fellowes? Was it you?" her disordered mind asked.

She had mistaken the look in his eyes. It was the same look as the
look in hers, and in spite of all the months that had gone, both asked
the same question as in the hour when they last parted. The dead man
stood between them, as he had never stood in life--of infinitely more
importance than he had ever been in life. He had never come between
Rudyard and herself in the old life in any vital sense, not in any
sense that finally mattered. He had only been an incident; not part of
real life, but part of a general wastage of character; not a
disintegrating factor in itself. Ah, no, not Adrian Fellowes, not him!
It enraged her that Rudyard should think the dead man had had any sway
over her. It was a needless degradation, against which she revolted
now.

"Why have you come here--to this room?" she asked coldly.

As a boy flushes when he has been asked a disconcerting question which
angers him or challenges his innocence, so Rudyard's face suffused;
but the flush faded as quickly as it came. His eyes then looked at her
steadily, the whites of them so white because of his bronzed face and
forehead, the glance firmer by far than in his old days in
London. There was none of that unmanageable emotion in his features,
the panic excitement, the savage disorder which were there on the day
when Adrian Fellowes' letter brought the crisis to their lives; none
of the barbaric storm which drove Krool down the staircase under the
sjambok. Here was force and iron strength, though the man seemed
older, his thick hair streaked with grey, while there was a deep
fissure between the eyebrows. The months had hardened him physically,
had freed him from all superfluous flesh; and the flabbiness had
wholly gone from his cheeks and chin. There was no sign of a luxurious
life about him. He was merely the business-like soldier with work to
do. His khaki fitted him as only uniform can fit a man with a physique
without defect. He carried in his hand a short whip of
rhinoceros-hide, and as he placed his hands upon his hips and looked
at Jasmine meditatively, before he answered her question, she recalled
the scene with Krool. Her eyes were fascinated by the whip in his
hand. It seemed to her, all at once, as though she was to be the
victim of his wrath, and that the whip would presently fall upon her
shoulders, as he drove her out into the veld. But his eyes drew hers
to his own presently, and even while he spoke to her now, the illusion
of the sjambok remained, and she imagined his voice to be
intermingling with the dull thud of the whip on her shoulders.

"I came to see one of my troop who was wounded at Wortmann's Drift,"
he answered her.

"Old Gunter," she said mechanically.

"Old Gunter, if you like," he returned, surprised. "How did you know?"

"The world gossips still," she rejoined bitterly.

"Well, I came to see Gunter."

"On the grey mare," she said again like one in a dream.

"On the grey mare. I did not know that you were here, and--"

"If you had known I was here, you would not have come?" she asked with
a querulous ring to her voice.

"No, I should not have come if I had known, unless people in the camp
were aware that I knew. Then I should have felt it necessary to come."

"Why?" She knew; but she wanted him to say.

"That the army should not talk and wonder. If you were here, it is
obvious that I should visit you."

"The army might as well wonder first as last," she rejoined. "That
must come."

"I don't know anything that must come in this world," he replied. "We
don't control ourselves, and must lies in the inner Mystery where we
cannot enter. I had only to deal with the present. I could not come to
the General and go again, knowing that you were here, without seeing
you. We ought to do our work here without unnecessary cross-firing
from our friends. There's enough of that from our foes."

"What right had you to enter my room?" she rejoined stubbornly.

"I am not in your room. Something--call it anything you like--made us
meet on this neutral ground."

"You might have waited till morning," she replied perversely.

"In the morning I shall be far from here. Before daybreak I shall be
fighting. War waits for no one--not even for you," he added, with more
sarcasm than he intended.

Her feelings were becoming chaos again. He was going into
battle. Bygone memories wakened, and the first days of their lives
together came rushing upon her; but her old wild spirit was up in arms
too against the irony of his last words, "Not even for you." Added to
this was the rushing remembrance that South Africa had been the medium
of all her trouble. If Rudyard had not gone to South Africa, that one
five months a year and more ago, when she was left alone, restless,
craving for amusement and excitement and--she was going to say
romance, but there was no romance in those sordid hours of
pleasure-making, when she plucked the fruit as it lay to her hand--ah,
if only Rudyard had not gone to South Africa then! That five months
held no romance. She had never known but one romance, and it was over
and done. The floods had washed it away.

"You are right. War does not wait even for me," she exclaimed. "It
came to meet me, to destroy me, when I was not armed. It came in the
night as you have come, and found me helpless as I am now."

Suddenly she clasped her hands and wrung them, then threw them above
her head in a gesture of despair. "Why didn't God or Destiny, or
whatever it is, stop you from coming here! There is nothing between us
worth keeping, and there can never be. There is a black sea between
us. I never want to see you any more."

In her agitation the coat had fallen away from her white night-
dress, and her breast showed behind the parted folds of the linen.
Involuntarily his eyes saw. What memories passed through him were
too vague to record; but a heavy sigh escaped him, followed,
however, by a cloud which gathered on his brow. The shadow of a
man's death thrust itself between them. This war might have never
been, had it not been for the treachery of the man who had been
false to everything and every being that had come his way.
Indirectly this vast struggle in which thousands of lives were
being lost had come through his wife's disloyalty, however
unintentional, or in whatever degree. Whenever he thought of it,
his pulses beat faster with indignation, and a deep resentment
possessed him.

It was a resentment whose origin was not a mere personal wrong to him,
but the betrayal of all that invaded his honour and the honour of his
country. The map was dead--so much. He had paid a price--too small.

And Jasmine, as she looked at her husband now, was, oppressed by the
same shadow--the inescapable thing. That was what she meant when she
said, "There is a black sea between us."

What came to her mind when she saw his glance fall on her breast, she
could not have told. But a sudden flame of anger consumed her. The
passion of the body was dead in her--atrophied. She was as one through
whose veins had passed an icy fluid which stilled all the senses of
desire, but never had her mind been so passionate, so alive. In the
months lately gone, there had been times when her mind was in a
paroxysm of rebellion and resentment and remorse; but in this red
corner of the universe, from which the usual world was shut out, from
which all domestic existence, all social organization, habit or the
amenities of social intercourse were excluded, she had been able to
restore her equilibrium. Yet now here, all at once, there was an
invasion of this world of rigid, narrow organization, where there was
no play; where all men's acts were part of a deadly mortal issue;
where the human being was only part of a scheme which allowed nothing
of the flexible adaptations of the life of peace, the life of cities,
of houses: here was the sudden interposition of a purely personal
life, of domestic being--of sex. She was conscious of no reasoning, of
no mental protest which could be put into words: she was only
conscious of emotions which now shook her with their power, now left
her starkly cold, her brain muffled, or again aflame with a suffering
as intense as that of Procrustes on his bed of iron.

This it was that seized her now. The glance of his eyes at her bared
breast roused her. She knew not why, except that there was an
indefinable craving for a self respect which had been violated by
herself and others; except that she longed for the thing which she
felt he would not give her. The look in his eye offered her nothing of
that.

That she mistook what really was in his eyes was not material, though
he was thinking of days when he believed he had discovered the secret
of life--a woman whose life was beautiful; diffusing beauty,
contentment, inspiration and peace. She did not know that his look was
the wistful look backward, with no look forward; and that alone. She
was living a life where new faculties of her nature were being
exercised or brought into active being; she was absorbed by it all; it
was part of her scheme for restoring herself, for getting surcease of
anguish; but here, all at once, every entrenchment was overrun, the
rigidity of the unit was made chaos, and she was tossed by the Spirit
of Confusion upon a stormy sea of feeling.

"Will you not go?" she asked in a voice of suppressed passion. "Have
you no consideration? It is past midnight."

His anger flamed, but he forced back the words upon his lips, and said
with a bitter smile: "Day and night are the same to me always
now. What else should be in war? I am going." He looked at the watch
at his wrist. "It is half-past one o'clock. At five our work
begins--not an eight-hour day. We have twenty-four-hour days here
sometimes. This one may be shorter. You never can tell. It may be a
one-hour day--or less."

Suddenly he came towards her with hands outstretched. "Dear
wife--Jasmine--" he exclaimed.

Pity, memory, a great magnanimity carried him off his feet for a
moment, and all that had happened seemed as nothing beside this fact
that they might never see each other again; and peace appeared to him
the one thing needful after all. The hatred and conflict of the world
seemed of small significance beside the hovering presence of an enemy
stronger than Time.

She was still in a passion of rebellion against the inevitable--that
old impatience and unrealized vanity which had helped to destroy her
past. She shrank back in blind misunderstanding from him, for she
scarcely heard his words. She mistook what he meant. She was
bewildered, distraught.

"No, no--coward!" she cried.

He stopped short as though he had been shot. His face turned
white. Then, with an oath, he went swiftly to the window which opened
to the floor and passed through it into the night.

An instant later he was on his horse.

A moment of dumb confusion succeeded, then she realized her madness,
and the thing as it really was. Running to the window, she leaned out.

She called, but only the grey mare's galloping came back to her
awe-struck ears.

With a cry like that of an animal in pain, she sank on her knees on
the floor, her face turned towards the stars.

"Oh, my God, help me!" she moaned.

At least here was no longer the cry of doom.



CHAPTER XXXII

THE WORLD'S FOUNDLING


At last day came. Jasmine was crossing the hallway of the hospital on
her way to the dining-room when there came from the doorway of a ward
a figure in a nurse's dress. It startled her by some familiar
motion. Presently the face turned in her direction, but without seeing
her. Jasmine recognized her then. She went forward quickly and touched
the nurse's arm.

"Al'mah--it is Al'mah?" she said.

Al'mah's face turned paler, and she swayed slightly, then she
recovered herself. "Oh, it is you, Mrs. Byng!" she said, almost
dazedly.

After an instant's hesitation she held out a hand. "It's a queer place
for it to happen," she added.

Jasmine noticed the hesitation and wondered at the words. She searched
the other's face. What did Al'mah's look mean? It seemed composite of
paralyzing surprise, of anxiety, of apprehension. Was there not also a
look of aversion?

"Everything seems to come all at once," Al'mah continued, as though in
explanation.

Jasmine had no inkling as to what the meaning of the words was; and,
with something of her old desire to conquer those who were alien to
her, she smiled winningly.

"Yes, things concentrate in life," she rejoined.

"I've noticed that," was the reply. "Fate seems to scatter, and then
to gather in all at once, as though we were all feather-toys on
strings."

After a moment, as Al'mah regarded her with vague wonder, though now
she smiled too, and the anxiety, apprehension, and pain went from her
face, Jasmine said: "Why did you come here? You had a world to work
for in England."

"I had a world to forget in England," Al'mah replied. Then she added
suddenly, "I could not sing any longer."

"Your voice--what happened to it?" Jasmine asked.

"One doesn't sing with one's voice only. The music is far behind the
voice."

They had been standing in the middle of the hallway. Suddenly Al'mah
caught at Jasmine's sleeve. "Will you come with me?" she said.

She led the way into a room which was almost gay with veld
everlastings, pictures from illustrated papers, small flags of the
navy and the colonies, the Boer Vierkleur and the Union Jack.

"I like to have things cheerful here," Al'mah said almost gaily.
"Sometimes I have four or five convalescents in here, and they like a
little gaiety. I sing them things from comic operas--Offenbach,
Sullivan, and the rest; and if they are very sentimentally inclined I
sing them good old-fashioned love-songs full of the musician's
tricks. How people adore illusions! I've had here an old Natal
sergeant, over sixty, and he was as cracked as could be about songs
belonging to the time when we don't know that it's all illusion, and
that there's no such thing as Love, nor ever was; but only a kind of
mirage of the mind, a sort of phantasy that seizes us, in which we do
crazy things, and sometimes, if the phantasy is strong enough, we do
awful things. But still the illusions remain in spite of everything,
as they did with the old sergeant. I've heard the most painful stories
here from men before they died, of women that were false, and injuries
done, many, many years ago; and they couldn't see that it wasn't real
at all, but just phantasy."

"All the world's mad," responded Jasmine wearily, as Al'mah paused.

Al'mah nodded. "So I laugh a good deal, and try to be cheerful, and it
does more good than being too sympathetic. Sympathy gets to be mere
snivelling very often. I've smiled and laughed a great deal out here;
and they say it's useful. The surgeons say it, and the men say it too
sometimes."

"Are you known as Nurse Grattan?" Jasmine asked with sudden
remembrance.

"Yes, Grattan was my mother's name. I am Nurse Grattan here."

"So many have whispered good things of you. A Scottish Rifleman said
to me a week ago, 'Ech, she's aye see cheery!' What a wonderful thing
it is to make a whole army laugh. Coming up here three officers spoke
of you, and told of humorous things you had said. It's all quite
honest, too. It's a reputation made out of new cloth. No one knows who
you are?"

Al'mah flushed. "I don't know quite who I am myself. I think sometimes
I'm the world's foundling."

Suddenly a cloud passed over her face again, and her strong whimsical
features became drawn.

"I seem almost to lose my identity at times; and then it is I try most
to laugh and be cheerful. If I didn't perhaps I should lose my
identity altogether. Do you ever feel that?"

"No; I often wish I could."

Al'mah regarded her steadfastly. "Why did you come here?" she
asked. "You had the world at your feet; and there was plenty to do in
London. Was it for the same reason that brought me here? Was it
something you wanted to forget there, some one you wanted to help
here?"

Jasmine saw the hovering passion in the eyes fixed on her, and
wondered what this woman had to say which could be of any import to
herself; yet she felt there was something drawing nearer which would
make her shrink.

"No," Jasmine answered, "I did not come to forget, but to try and
remember that one belongs to the world, to the work of the world, to
the whole people, and not to one of the people; not to one man, or to
one family, or to one's self. That's all."

Al'mah's face was now very haggard, but her eyes were burning. "I do
not believe you," she said straightly. "You are one of those that have
had a phantasy. I had one first fifteen years ago, and it passed, yet
it pursued me till yesterday--till yesterday evening. Now it's gone;
that phantasy is gone forever. Come and see what it was."

She pointed to the door of another room.

There was something strangely compelling in her tone, in her
movements. Jasmine followed her, fascinated by the situation, by the
look in the woman's face. The door opened upon darkness, but Jasmine
stepped inside, with Almah's fingers clutching her sleeve. For a
moment nothing was visible; then, Jasmine saw, dimly, a coffin on two
chairs.

"That was the first man I ever loved--my husband," Al'mah said
quietly, pointing at the coffin. "There was another, but you took him
from me--you and others."

Jasmine gave a little cry which she smothered with her hand; and she
drew back involuntarily towards the light of the hallway. The smell of
disinfectants almost suffocated her. A cloud of mystery and
indefinable horror seemed to envelop her; then a light flooded through
her brain. It was like a stream of fire. But with a voice strangely
calm, she said, "You mean Adrian Fellowes?"

Al'mah's face was in the shadow, but her voice was full of storm. "You
took him from me, but you were only one," she said sharply and
painfully. "I found it out at last. I suspected first at
Glencader. Then at last I knew. It was an angry, contemptuous letter
from you. I had opened it. I understood. When everything was clear,
when there was no doubt, when I knew he had tried to hurt little
Jigger's sister, when he had made up his mind to go abroad, then, I
killed him. Then--I killed him."

Jasmine's cheek was white as Al'mah's apron; but she did not
shrink. She came a step nearer, and peered into Al'mah's face, as
though to read her inmost mind, as though to see if what she said was
really true. She saw not a quiver of agitation, not the faintest
horror of memory; only the reflective look of accomplished purpose.

"You--are you insane?" Jasmine exclaimed in a whisper. "Do you know
what you have said?"

Al'mah smoothed her apron softly. "Perfectly. I do not think I am
insane. I seem not to be. One cannot do insane things here. This is
the place of the iron rule. Here we cure madness--the madness of war
and other madnesses."

"You had loved him, yet you killed him!"

"You would have killed him though you did not love him. Yes, of
course--I know that. Your love was better placed; but it was like a
little bird caught by the hawk in the upper air--its flight was only a
little one before the hawk found it. Yes, you would have killed
Adrian, as I did if you had had the courage. You wanted to do it, but
I did it. Do you remember when I sang for you on the evening of that
day he died? I sang, 'More Was Lost at Mohacksfield.' As soon as I saw
your face that evening I felt you knew all. You had been to his rooms
and found him dead. I was sure of that. You remember how La Tosca
killed Scarpia? You remember how she felt? I felt so--just like
that. I never hesitated. I knew what I wanted to do, and I did it."

"How did you kill him?" Jasmine asked in that matter-of-fact way which
comes at those times when the senses are numbed by tragedy.

"You remember the needle--Mr. Mappin's needle? I knew Adrian had
it. He showed it to me. He could not keep the secret. He was too
weak. The needle was in his pocket-book--to kill me with some day
perhaps. He certainly had not the courage to kill himself.... I went
to see him. He was dressing. The pocket-book lay on the table. As I
said, he had showed it to me. While he was busy I abstracted the
needle. He talked of his journey abroad. He lied--nothing but lies,
about himself, about everything. When he had said enough,--lying was
easier to him than anything else--I told him the truth. Then he went
wild. He caught hold of me as if to strangle me.... He did not realize
the needlepoint when it caught him. If he did, it must have seemed to
him only the prick of a pin.... But in a few minutes it was all
over. He died quite peacefully. But it was not very easy getting him
on the sofa. He looked sleeping as he lay there. You saw. He would
never lie any more to women, to you or to me or any other. It is a
good thing to stop a plague, and the simplest way is the best. He was
handsome, and his music was very deceiving. It was almost good of its
kind, and it was part of him. When I look back I find only misery. Two
wicked men hurt me. They spoiled my life, first one and then another;
and I went from bad to worse. At least he"--she pointed to the other
room--"he had some courage at the very last. He fought, he braved
death. The other--you remember the Glencader Mine. Your husband and
Ian Stafford went down, and Lord Tynemouth was ready to go, but Adrian
would not go. Then it was I began to hate him. That was the
beginning. What happened had to be. I was to kill him; and I did. It
avenged me, and it avenged your husband. I was glad of that, for
Rudyard Byng had done so much for me: not alone that he saved me at
the opera, you remember, but other good things. I did his work for him
with Adrian."

"Have you no fear--of me?" Jasmine asked.

"Fear of--you? Why?"

"I might hate you--I might tell."

Al'mah made a swift gesture of protest. "Do not say foolish things.
You would rather die than tell. You should be grateful to me. Some
one had to kill him. There was Rudyard Byng, Ian Stafford, or
yourself. It fell to me. I did your work. You will not tell; but it
would not matter if you did. Nothing would happen--nothing at
all. Think it out, and you will see why."

Jasmine shuddered violently. Her body was as cold as ice.

"Yes, I know. What are you going to do after the war?"

"Back to Covent Garden perhaps; or perhaps there will be no 'after the
war.' It may all end here. Who knows--who cares!"

Jasmine came close to her. For an instant a flood of revulsion had
overpowered her; but now it was all gone.

"We pay for all the wrong we do. We pay for all the good we get"--once
Ian Stafford had said that, and it rang in her ears now. Al'mah would
pay, and would pay here--here in this world. Meanwhile, Al'mah was a
woman who, like herself, had suffered.

"Let me be your friend; let me help you," Jasmine said, and she took
both of Almah's hands in her own.

Somehow Jasmine's own heart had grown larger, fuller, and kinder all
at once. Until lately she had never ached to help the world or any
human being in all her life; there had never been any of the divine
pity which finds its employ in sacrifice. She had been kind, she had
been generous, she had in the past few months given service unstinted;
but it was more as her own cure for her own ills than yearning
compassion for all those who were distressed "in mind, body, or
estate."

But since last evening, in the glimmer of the stars, when Rudyard went
from her with bitter anger on his lips, and a contempt which threw her
far behind him,--since that hour, when, in her helplessness, she had
sunk to the ground with an appeal to Something outside herself, her
heart had greatly softened. Once before she had appealed to the
Invisible--that night before her catastrophe, when she wound her
wonderful hair round her throat and drew it tighter and tighter, and
had cried out to the beloved mother she had never known. But her
inborn, her cultivated, her almost invincible egoism, had not even
then been scattered by the bitter helplessness of her life.

That cry last night was a cry to the Something behind all. Only in the
last few hours--why, she knew not--her heart had found a new
sense. She felt her soul's eyes looking beyond herself. The Something
that made her raise her eyes to the stars, which seemed a pervading
power, a brooding tenderness and solicitude, had drawn her mind away
into the mind of humanity. Her own misery now at last enabled her to
see, however dimly, the woes of others; and it did not matter whether
the woes were penalties or undeserved chastisement; the new-born pity
of her soul made no choice and sought no difference.

As the singing-woman's hands lay in hers, a flush slowly spread over
Al'mah's face, and behind the direct power of her eyes there came a
light which made them aglow with understanding.

"I always thought you selfish--almost meanly selfish," Al'mah said
presently. "I thought you didn't know any real life, any real
suffering--only the surface, only disappointment at not having your
own happiness; but now I see that was all a mask. You understand why I
did what I did?"

"I understand."

"I suppose there would be thousands who would gladly see me in prison
and on the scaffold--if they knew--"

Pain travelled across Jasmine's face. She looked Al'mah in the eyes
with a look of reproof and command. "Never, never again speak of that
to me or to any living soul," she said. "I will try to forget it; you
must put it behind you." . . . Suddenly she pointed to the other room
where Al'mah's husband lay dead. "When is he to be buried?" she asked.

"In an hour." A change came over Al'mah's face again, and she stood
looking dazedly at the door of the room, behind which the dead man
lay. "I cannot realize it. It does not seem real," she said. "It was
all so many centuries ago, when I was young and glad."

Jasmine admonished her gently and drew her away.

A few moments later an officer approached them from one of the
wards. At that moment the footsteps of the three were arrested by the
booming of artillery. It seemed as though all the guns of both armies
were at work.

The officer's eyes blazed, and he turned to the two women with an
impassioned gesture.

"Byng and the S.A.'s have done their trick," he said. "If they hadn't,
that wouldn't be going on. It was to follow--a general assault--if
Byng pulled it off. Old Blunderbuss has done it this time. His
combination's working all right--thanks to Byng's lot."

As he hurried on he was too excited to see Jasmine's agitation.

"Wait!" Jasmine exclaimed, as he went quickly down the hallway. But
her voice was scarcely above a whisper, and he did not hear.

She wanted to ask him if Rudyard was safe. She did not realize that he
could not know.

But the thunder of artillery told her that Rudyard had had his
fighting at daybreak, as he had said.



CHAPTER XXXIII

"ALAMACHTIG!"


When Rudyard flung himself on the grey mare outside Jasmine's window
at the Stay Awhile Hospital, and touched her flank with his heel, his
heart was heavy with passion, his face hard with humiliation and
defeat. He had held out the hand of reconciliation, and she had met it
with scorn. He had smothered his resentment, and let the light of
peace in upon their troubles, and she had ruthlessly drawn a black
curtain between them. He was going upon as dangerous a task as could
be set a soldier, from which he might never return, and she had not
even said a God-be-with-you--she who had lain in his bosom, been so
near, so dear, so cherished:

"For Time and Change estrange, estrange--
And, now they have looked and seen us,
Oh, we that were dear, we are all too near,
With the thick of the world between us!"

How odd it seemed that two beings who had been all in all to each
other, who in the prime of their love would have died of protesting
shame, if they had been told that they would change towards each
other, should come to a day when they would be less to each other than
strangers, less and colder and farther off! It is because some cannot
bear this desecration of ideals, this intolerable loss of life's
assets, that they cling on and on, long after respect and love have
gone, after hope is dead.

There had been times in the past few months when such thoughts as
these vaguely possessed Rudyard's mind; but he could never, would
never, feel that all was over, that the book of Jasmine's life was
closed to him; not even when his whole nature was up in arms against
the injury she had done him.

But now, as the grey mare reached out to achieve the ground his
troopers had covered before him, his brain was in a storm of
feeling. After all, what harm had he done her, that he should be
treated so? Was he the sinner? Why should he make the eternal
concession? Why should he be made to seem the one needing forgiveness?
He did not know why. But at the bottom of everything lay a
something--a yearning--which would not be overwhelmed. In spite of
wrong and injury, it would live on and on; and neither Time nor crime,
nor anything mortal could obliterate it from his heart's oracles.

The hoofs of the grey mare fell like the soft thud of a hammer in the
sand, regular and precise. Presently the sound and the motion lulled
his senses. The rage and humiliation grew less, his face cooled. His
head, which had been bent, lifted and his face turned upwards to the
stars. The influence of an African night was on him. None that has not
felt it can understand it so cold, so sweet, so full of sleep, so
stirring with an underlife. Many have known the breath of the pampas
beyond the Amazon; the soft pungency of the wattle blown across the
salt-bush plains of Australia; the friendly exhilaration of the
prairie or the chaparral; the living, loving loneliness of the desert;
but yonder on the veld is a life of the night which possesses all the
others have, and something of its own besides; something which gets
into the bones and makes for forgetfulness of the world. It lifts a
man away from the fret of life, and sets his feet on the heights where
lies repose.

The peace of the stars crept softly into Rudyard's heart as he
galloped gently on to overtake his men. His pulses beat slowly once
again, his mind regained its poise. He regretted the oath he uttered,
as he left Jasmine; he asked himself if, after all, everything was
over and done.

How good the night suddenly seemed! No, it was not all over--unless,
unless, indeed, in this fight coming on with the daybreak, Fate should
settle it all by doing with him as it had done with so many thousands
of others in this war. But even then, would it be all over? He was a
primitive man, and he raised his face once more to the heavens. He was
no longer the ample millionaire, sitting among the flesh-pots; he was
a lean, simple soldier eating his biscuit as though it were the
product of the chef of the Cafe Voisin; he was the fighter sleeping in
a blanket in the open; he was a patriot after his kind; he was the
friend of his race and the lover of one woman.

Now he drew rein. His regiment was just ahead. Daybreak was not far
off, and they were near the enemy's position. In a little while, if
they were not surprised, they would complete a movement, take a hill,
turn the flank of the foe, and, if designed supports came up, have the
Boers at a deadly disadvantage. Not far off to the left of him and his
mounted infantry there were coming on for this purpose two batteries
of artillery and three thousand infantry--Leary's brigade, which had
not been in the action the day before at Wortmann's Drift.

But all depended on what he was able to do, what he and his
hard-bitten South Africans could accomplish. Well, he had no
doubt. War was part chance, part common sense, part the pluck and luck
of the devil. He had ever been a gambler in the way of taking chances;
he had always possessed ballast even when the London life had
enervated, had depressed him; and to men of his stamp pluck is a
commonplace: it belongs as eyes and hands and feet belong.

Dawn was not far away, and before daybreak he must have the hill which
was the key to the whole position, which commanded the left flank of
the foe. An hour or so after he got it, if the artillery and infantry
did their portion, a great day's work would be done for England; and
the way to the relief of the garrison beyond the mountains would be
open. The chance to do this thing was the reward he received for his
gallant and very useful fight at Wortmann's Drift twenty-four hours
before. It would not do to fail in justifying the choice of the Master
Player, who had had enough bad luck in the campaign so far.

The first of his force to salute him in the darkness was his next in
command, Barry Whalen. They had been together in the old Rand Rifles,
and had, in the words of the Kaffir, been as near as the flea to the
blanket, since the day when Rudyard discovered that Barry Whalen was
on the same ship bound for the seat of war. They were not youngsters,
either of them; but they had the spring of youth in them, and a deep
basis of strength and force; and they knew the veld and the veld
people. There was no trick of the veldschoen copper for which they
were not ready; and for any device of Kruger's lambs they were
prepared to go one better. As Barry Whalen had said, "They'll have to
get up early in the morning if they want to catch us."

This morning the Boers would not get up early enough; for Rudyard's
command had already reached the position from which they could do
their work with good chances in their favour; and there had been no
sign of life from the Boer trenches in the dusk--naught of what
chanced at Magersfontein. Not a shot had been fired, and there would
certainly have been firing if the Boer had known; for he could not
allow the Rooinek to get to the point where his own position would be
threatened or commanded. When Kruger's men did discover the truth,
there would be fighting as stiff as had been seen in this struggle for
half a continent.

"Is it all right?" whispered Rudyard, as Barry VVhalen drew up by him.

"Not a sound from them--not a sign."

"Their trenches should not be more than a few hundred yards on, eh?"

"Their nearest trenches are about that. We are just on the left of
Hetmeyer's Kopje."

"Good. Let Glossop occupy the kopje with his squadrons, while we take
the trenches. If we can force them back on their second line of
trenches, and keep them there till our supports come up, we shall be
all right."

"When shall we begin, sir?" asked Barry.

"Give orders to dismount now. Get the horses in the lee of the kopje,
and we'll see what Brother Boer thinks of us after breakfast."

Rudyard took out a repeating-watch, and held it in his closed palm. As
it struck, he noted the time.

His words were abrupt but composed. "Ten minutes more and we shall
have the first streak of dawn. Then move. We shall be on them before
they know it."

Barry Whalen made to leave, then turned back. Rudyard understood. They
clasped hands. It was the grip of men who knew each other--knew each
other's faults and weaknesses, yet trusted with a trust which neither
disaster nor death could destroy.

"My girl--if anything happens to me," Barry said.

"You may be sure--as if she were my own," was Rudyard's reply. "If I
go down, find my wife at the Stay Awhile Hospital. Tell her that the
day I married her was the happiest day of my life, and that what I
said then I thought at the last. Everything else is straightened
out--and I'll not forget your girl, Barry. She shall be as my own if
things should happen that way."

"God bless you, old man," whispered Barry. "Goodbye." Then he
recovered himself and saluted. "Is that all, sir?"

"Au revoir, Barry," came the answer; then a formal return of the
salute. "That is all," he added brusquely.

They moved forward to the regiment, and the word to dismount was given
softly. When the forces crept forward again, it was as infantrymen,
moving five paces apart, and feeling their way up to the Boer
trenches.

Dawn. The faintest light on the horizon, as it were a soft, grey
glimmer showing through a dark curtain. It rises and spreads slowly,
till the curtain of night becomes the veil of morning, white and
kind. Then the living world begins to move. Presently the face of the
sun shines through the veil, and men's bodies grow warm with active
being, and the world stirs with busy life. On the veld, with the first
delicate glow, the head of a meerkat, or a springbok, is raised above
the gray-brown grass; herds of cattle move uneasily. Then a bird takes
flight across the whitening air, another, and then another; the
meerkat sits up and begs breakfast of the sun; lizards creep out upon
the stones; a snake slides along obscenely foraging. Presently man and
beast and all wild things are afoot or a-wing, as though the world was
new-created; as though there had never been any mornings before, and
this was not the monotonous repetition of a million mornings, when all
things living begin the world afresh.

But nowhere seems the world so young and fresh and glad as on the
sun-warmed veld. Nowhere do the wild roses seem so pure, or are the
aloes so jaunty and so gay. The smell of the karoo bush is sweeter
than attar, and the bog-myrtle and mimosa, where they shelter a house
or fringe a river, have a look of Arcady. It is a world where any
mysterious thing may happen--a world of five thousand years ago--the
air so light, so sweetly searching and vibrating, that Ariel would
seem of the picture, and gleaming hosts of mailed men, or vast
colonies of green-clad archers moving to virgin woods might
belong. Something frightens the timid spirit of a springbok, and his
flight through the grass is like a phrase of music on a wilful
adventure; a bird hears the sighing of the breeze in the mimosa leaves
or the swaying shrubs, and in disdain of such slight performance
flings out a song which makes the air drunken with sweetness.

A world of light, of commendable trees, of grey grass flecked with
flowers, of life having the supreme sense of a freedom which has known
no check. It is a life which cities have not spoiled, and where man is
still in touch with the primeval friends of man; where the wildest
beast and the newest babe of a woman have something in common.

Drink your fill of the sweet intoxicating air with eyes shut till the
lungs are full and the heart beats with new fulness; then open them
upon the wide sunrise and scan the veld so full of gracious odour. Is
it not good and glad? And now face the hills rising nobly away there
to the left, the memorable and friendly hills. Is it not--

Upon the morning has crept suddenly a black cloud, although the sun is
shining brilliantly. A moment before the dawn all was at peace on the
veld and among the kopjes, and only the contented sighing of men and
beasts broke the silence, or so it seemed; but with the glimmer of
light along the horizon came a change so violent that all the circle
of vision was in a quiver of trouble. Affrighted birds, in fluttering
bewilderment, swept and circled aimlessly through the air with
strange, half-human cries; the jackal and the meerkat, the springbok
and the rheebok, trembled where they stood, with heads uplifted,
vaguely trying to realize the Thing which was breaking the peace of
their world; useless horses which had been turned out of the armies of
Boers and British galloped and stumbled and plunged into space in
alarm; for they knew what was darkening the morning. They had suffered
the madness of battle, and they realized it at its native first value.

There was a battle forward on the left flank of the Boer Army. Behind
Hetmeyer's Kopje were the horses of the men whom Rudyard Byng had
brought to take a position and hold it till support came and this
flank of the Farmer's Army was turned; but the men themselves were at
work on the kopjes--the grim work of dislodging the voortrekker people
from the places where they burrowed like conies among the rocks.

Just before dawn broke Byng's men were rushing the outer
trenches. These they cleared with the wild cries of warriors whose
blood was in a tempest. Bayonets dripped red, rifles were fired at
hand-to-hand range, men clubbed their guns and fought as men fought in
the days when the only fighting was man to man, or one man to many
men. Here every "Boojer" and Rooinek was a champion. The Boer fell
back because he was forced back by men who were men of the veld like
himself; and the Briton pressed forward because he would not be
denied; because he was sick of reverses; of going forward and falling
back; of taking a position with staggering loss and then abandoning
it; of gaining a victory and then not following it up; of having the
foe in the hollow of the hand and hesitating to close it with a
death-grip; of promising relief to besieged men, and marking time when
you had gained a foothold, instead of gaining a foothold farther on.

Byng's men were mostly South-Africans born, who had lived and worked
below the Zambesi all their lives; or else those whose blood was in a
fever at the thought that a colony over which the British flag flew
should be trod by the feet of an invader, who had had his own liberty
and independence secured by that flag, but who refused to white men
the status given to "niggers" in civilized states. These fighters
under Byng had had their fill of tactics and strategy which led
nowhere forward; and at Wortmann's Drift the day before they had done
a big thing for the army with a handful of men. They could ride like
Cossacks, they could shoot like William Tell, and they had a mind to
be the swivel by which the army of Queen Victoria should swing from
almost perpetual disaster, in large and small degree, to victory.

From the first trenches on and on to the second trenches higher up!
But here the Boer in his burrow with his mauser rifle roaring, and his
heart fierce with hatred and anger at the surprise, laid down to the
bloody work with an ugly determination to punish remorselessly his
fellow-citizens of the veld and the others. It was a fire which only
bullet-proof men could stand, and these were but breasts of flesh and
muscle, though the will was iron.

Up, up, and up, struggled these men of the indomitable will. Step by
step, while man after man fell wounded or dead, they pushed forward,
taking what cover was possible; firing as steadily as at Aldershot;
never wasting shots, keeping the eye vigilant for the black slouch hat
above the rocks, which told that a Boer's head was beneath it, and
might be caught by a lightning shot.

Step by step, man by man, troop by troop, they came nearer to the
hedges of stone behind which an inveterate foe with grim joy saw a
soldier fall to his soft-nosed bullet; while far down behind these men
of a forlorn hope there was hurrying up artillery which would
presently throw its lyddite and its shrapnel on the top of the hill up
where hundreds of Boers held, as they thought, an impregnable
position. At last with rushes which cost them almost as dearly in
proportion as the rush at Balaclava cost the Light Brigade, Byng's men
reached the top, mad with the passion of battle, vengeful in spirit
because of the comrades they had lost; and the trenches emptied before
them. As they were forsaken, men fought hand to hand and as savagely
as ever men fought in the days of Rustum.

In one corner, the hottest that the day saw, Rudyard and Barry Whalen
and a scattered handful of men threw themselves upon a greatly larger
number of the enemy. For a moment a man here and there fought for his
life against two or three of the foe. Of these were Rudyard and Barry
Whalen. The khaki of the former was shot through in several places, he
had been slashed in the cheek by a bullet, and a bullet had also
passed through the muscle of his left forearm; but he was scarcely
conscious of it. It seemed as though Fate would let no harm befall
him; but, in the very moment, when on another part of the ridge his
men were waving their hats in victory, three Boers sprang up before
him, ragged and grim and old, but with the fire of fanaticism and
race-hatred in their eyes. One of them he accounted for, another he
wounded, but the wounded voortrekker--a giant of near seven feet
clubbed his rifle, and drove at him. Rudyard shot at close quarters
again, but his pistol missed fire.

Just as the rifle of his giant foe swung above him, Byng realized that
the third Boer was levelling a rifle directly at his breast. His eyes
involuntarily closed as though to draw the curtain of life itself,
but, as he did so, he heard a cry--the wild, hoarse cry of a voice he
knew so well.

"Baas! Baas!" it called.

Then two shots came simultaneously, and the clubbed rifle brought him
to the ground.

"Baas! Baas!"

The voice followed him, as he passed into unconsciousness.

Barry Whalen had seen Rudyard's danger, but had been unable to do
anything. His hands were more than full, his life in danger; but in
the instant that he had secured his own safety, he heard the cry of
"Baas! Baas!" Then he saw the levelled rifle fall from the hands of
the Boer who had aimed at Byng, and its owner collapse in a heap. As
Rudyard fell beneath the clubbed rifle he heard the cry, "Baas! Baas!"
again, and saw an unkempt figure darting among the rocks. His own
pistol brought down the old Boer who had felled Byng, and then he
realized who it was had cried out, "Baas!"

The last time he had heard that voice was in Park Lane, when Byng,
with sjambok, drove a half-caste valet into the street.

It was the voice of Krool. And Krool was now bending over Rudyard's
body, raising his head and still murmuring, "Baas--Baas!"

Krool's rifle had saved Rudyard from death by killing one of his own
fellow-fighters. Much as Barry Whalen loathed the man, this act showed
that Krool's love for the master who had sjamboked him was stronger
than death.

Barry, himself bleeding from slight wounds, stooped over his
unconscious friend with a great anxiety.

"No, it is nothing," Krool said, with his hand on Rudyard's
breast. "The left arm, it is hurt, the head not get all the
blow. Alamachtig, it is good! The Baas--it is right with the Baas."

Barry Whalen sighed with relief. He set about to restore Rudyard, as
Krool prepared a bandage for the broken head.

Down in the valley the artillery was at work. Lyddite and shrapnel and
machine-guns were playing upon the top of the ridge above them, and
the infantry--Humphrey's and Blagdon's men--were hurrying up the slope
which Byng's pioneers had cleared, and now held. From this position
the enemy could be driven from their main position on the summit,
because they could be swept now by artillery fire from a point as high
as their own.

"A good day's work, old man," said Barry Whalen to the still
unconscious figure. "You've done the trick for the Lady at Windsor
this time. It's a great sight better business than playing baccarat at
DeLancy Scovel's."

Cheering came from everywhere, cries of victory filled the air. As he
looked down the valley Barry could see the horses they had left behind
being brought, under cover of the artillery and infantry fire, to the
hill they had taken. The grey mare would be among them. But Rudyard
would not want the grey mare yet awhile. An ambulance-cart was the
thing for him.

Barry would have given much for a flask of brandy. A tablespoonful
would bring Rudyard back. A surgeon was not needed, however. Krool's
hands had knowledge. Barry remembered the day when Wallstein was taken
ill in Rudyard's house, and how Krool acted with the skill of a
Westminster sawbones.

Suddenly a bugle-call sounded, loud and clear and very near them. Byng
had heard that bugle call again and again in this engagement, and once
he had seen the trumpeter above the trenches, sounding the advance
before more than a half-dozen men had reached the defences of the
Boers. The same trumpeter was now running towards them. He had been
known in London as Jigger. In South Africa he was familiarly called
Little Jingo.

His face was white as he leaned over Barry Whalen to look at Rudyard,
but suddenly the blood came back to his cheek.

"He wants brandy," Jigger said.

"Well, go and get it," said Barry sharply.

"I've got it here," was the reply; and he produced a flask.

"Well, I'm damned!" said Barry. "You'll have a gun next, and fire it
too!"

"A 4.7," returned Jigger impudently.

As the flask was at Rudyard's lips, Barry Whalen said to Krool, "What
do you stay here as--deserter or prisoner? It's got to be one or the
other."

"Prisoner," answered Krool. Then he added, "See--the Baas."

Rudyard's eyes were open.

"Prisoner--who is a prisoner?" he asked feebly.

"Me, Baas," whispered Krool, leaning over him.

"He saved your life, Colonel," interposed Barry Whalen.

"I thought it was the brandy," said Jigger with a grin.



CHAPTER XXXIV

"THE ALPINE FELLOW"


To all who fought in the war a change of some sort had come. Those who
emerged from it to return to England or her far Dominions, or to stay
in the land of the veld, of the kranz and the kloof and the spruit,
were never the same again. Something came which, to a degree,
transformed them, as the salts of the water and the air permeate the
skin and give the blood new life. None escaped the salt of the air of
conflict.

The smooth-faced young subaltern who but now had all his life before
him, realized the change when he was swept by the leaden spray of
death on Spion Kop, and received in his face of summer warmth, or in
his young exultant heart, the quietus to all his hopes, impulses and
desires. The young find no solace or recompense in the philosophy of
those who regard life as a thing greatly over-estimated.

Many a private grown hard of flesh and tense of muscle, with his scant
rations and meagre covering in the cold nights, with his long marches
and fruitless risks and futile fightings, when he is shot down, has
little consolation, save in the fact that the thing he and his
comrades and the regiment and the army set out to do is done. If he
has to do so, he gives his life with a stony sense of loss which has
none of the composure of those who have solace in thinking that what
they leave behind has a constantly decreasing value. And here and
there some simple soul, more gifted than his comrades, may touch off
the meaning of it all, as it appears to those who hold their lives in
their hands for a nation's sake, by a stroke of mordant comment.

So it was with that chess-playing private from New Zealand of whom
Barry Whalen told Ian Stafford. He told it a few days after Rudyard
Byng had won that fight at Hetmeyer's Kopje, which had enabled the
Master Player to turn the flank of the Boers, though there was yet
grim frontal work to do against machines of Death, carefully hidden
and masked on the long hillsides, which would take staggering toll of
Britain's manhood.

"From behind Otago there in New Zealand, he came," began Barry, "as
fine a fella of thirty-three as ever you saw. Just come, because he
heard old Britain callin'. Down he drops the stock-whip, away he
shoves the plough, up he takes his little balance from the bank,
sticks his chess-box in his pocket, says 'so-long' to his girl, and
treks across the world, just to do his whack for the land that gave
him and all his that went before him the key to civilization, and how
to be happy though alive.... He was the real thing, the ne plus ultra,
the I-stand-alone. The other fellas thought him the best of the
best. He was what my father used to call 'a wide man.' He was in and
out of a fight with a quirk at the corner of his mouth, as much as to
say, 'I've got the hang of this, and it's different from what I
thought; but that doesn't mean it hasn't got to be done, and done in
style. It's the has-to-be.' And when they got him where he breathes,
he fished out the little ivory pawn and put it on a stone at his head,
to let it tell his fellow-countrymen how he looked at it--that he was
just a pawn in the great game. The game had to be played, and won, and
the winner had to sacrifice his pawns. He was one of the
sacrifices. Well, I'd like a tombstone the same as that fella from New
Zealand, if I could win it as fair, and see as far."

Stafford raised his head with a smile of admiration. "Like the
ancients, like the Oriental Emperors to-day, he left his message. An
Alexander, with not one world conquered."

"I'm none so sure of that," was Barry's response. "A man that could
put such a hand on himself as he did has conquered a world. He didn't
want to go, but he went as so many have gone hereabouts. He wanted to
stay, but he went against his will, and--and I wish that the
grub-hunters, and tuft-hunters, and the blind greedy majority in
England could get hold of what he got hold of. Then life 'd be a
different thing in Thamesfontein and the little green islands."

"You were meant for a Savonarola or a St. Francis, my bold grenadier,"
said Stafford with a friendly nod.

"I was meant for anything that comes my way, and to do everything that
was hard enough."

Stafford waved a hand. "Isn't this hard enough--a handful of guns and
fifteen hundred men lost in a day, and nothing done that you can put
in an envelope and send 'to the old folks at 'ome?'"

"Well, that's all over, Colonel. Byng has turned the tide by turning
the Boer flank. I'm glad he's got that much out of his big
shindy. It'll do him more good than his millions. He was oozing away
like a fat old pine-tree in London town. He's got all his balsam in
his bones now. I bet he'll get more out of this thing than anybody,
more that's worth having. He doesn't want honours or promotion; he
wants what 'd make his wife sorry to be a widow; and he's getting it."

"Let us hope that his wife won't be put to the test," responded
Stafford evenly.

Barry looked at him a little obliquely. "She came pretty near it when
we took Hetmeyer's Kopje."

"Is he all right again?" Stafford asked; then added quickly, "I've had
so much to do since the Hetmeyer business that I have not seen Byng."

Barry spoke very carefully and slowly. "He's over at Brinkwort's Farm
for a while. He didn't want to go to the hospital, and the house at
the Farm is good enough for anybody. Anyhow, you get away from the
smell of disinfectants and the business of the hospital. It's a
snigger little place is Brinkwort's Farm. There's an orchard of
peaches and oranges, and there are pomegranate hedges, and plenty of
nice flowers in the garden, and a stoep made for candidates for
Stellenbosch--as comfortable as the room of a Rand director."

"Mrs. Byng is with him?" asked Stafford, his eyes turned towards
Brinkwort's Farm miles away. He could see the trees, the kameel-thorn,
the blue-gums, the orange and peach trees surrounding it, a clump or
cloud of green in the veld.

"No, Mrs. Byng's not with him," was the reply.

Stafford stirred uneasily, a frown gathered, his eyes took on a look
of sombre melancholy. "Ah," he said at length, "she has returned to
Durban, then?"

"No. She got a chill the night of the Hetmeyer coup, and she's in bed
at the hospital."

Stafford controlled himself. "Is it a bad chill?" he asked
heavily. "Is she dangerously ill?" His voice seemed to thicken.

"She was; but she's not so bad that a little attention from a friend
would make her worse. She never much liked me; but I went just the
same, and took her some veld-roses."

"You saw her?" Stafford's voice was very low.

"Yes, for a minute. She's as thin as she once wasn't," Barry answered,
"but twice as beautiful. Her eyes are as big as stars, and she can
smile still, but it's a new one--a war-smile, I expect. Everything
gets a turn of its own at the Front."

"She was upset and anxious about Byng, I suppose?" Stafford asked,
with his head turned away from this faithfulest of friends, who would
have died for the man now sitting on the stoep of Brinkwort's house,
looking into the bloom of the garden.

"Naturally," was the reply. Barry Whalen thought carefully of what he
should say, because the instinct of the friend who loved his friend
had told him that, since the night at De Lancy Scovel's house when the
name of Mennaval had been linked so hatefully with that of Byng's
wife, there had been a cloud over Rudyard's life; and that Rudyard and
Jasmine were not the same as of yore.

"Naturally she was upset," he repeated. "She made Al'mah go and nurse
Byng."

"Al'mah," repeated Stafford mechanically. "Al'mah!" His mind rushed
back to that night at the opera, when Rudyard had sprung from the box
to the stage and had rescued Al'mah from the flames. The world had
widened since then.

Al'mah and Jasmine had been under the same roof but now; and Al'mah
was nursing Jasmine's husband--surely life was merely farce and
tragedy.

At this moment an orderly delivered a message to Barry Whalen. He rose
to go, but turned back to Stafford again.

"She'd be glad to see you, I'm certain," he said. "You never can tell
what a turn sickness will take in camp, and she's looking pretty
frail. We all ought to stand by Byng and whatever belongs to Byng. No
need to say that to you; but you've got a lot of work and
responsibility, and in the rush you mightn't realize that she's more
ill than the chill makes her. I hope you won't mind my saying so in my
stupid way."

Stafford rose and grasped his hand, and a light of wonderful
friendliness and comradeship shone in his eyes.

"Beau chevalier! Beau chevalier!" was all he said, and impulsive Barry
Whalen went away blinking; for hard as iron as he was physically, and
a fighter of courage, his temperament got into his eyes or at his lips
very easily.

Stafford looked after him admiringly. "Lucky the man who has such a
friend," he said aloud--"Sans peur et sans reproche! He could not
betray a "--the waving of wings above him caught his eye--"he could
not betray an aasvogel." His look followed the bird of prey, the
servitor of carrion death, as it flew down the wind.

He had absorbed the salt of tears and valour. He had been enveloped in
the Will that makes all wills as one, the will of a common purpose;
and it had changed his attitude towards his troubles, towards his
past, towards his future.

What Barry had said to him, and especially the tale of the New
Zealander, had revealed the change which had taken place. The War had
purged his mind, cleared his vision. When he left England he was
immersed in egoism, submerged by his own miseries. He had isolated
himself in a lazaretto of self-reproach and resentment. The universe
was tottering because a woman had played him false. Because of this
obsession of self, he was eager to be done with it all, to pay a price
which he might have paid, had it been possible to meet Rudyard pistol
or sword in hand, and die as many such a man has done, without trying
to save his own life or to take the life of another. That he could not
do. Rudyard did not know the truth, had not the faintest knowledge
that Jasmine had been more to himself than an old and dear friend. To
pay the price in any other way than by eliminating himself from the
equation was to smirch her name, be the ruin of a home, and destroy
all hope for the future.

It had seemed to him that there was no other way than to disappear
honourably through one of the hundred gates which the war would open
to him--to go where Death ambushed the reckless or the brave, and take
the stroke meant for him, on a field of honour all too kind to himself
and soothing to those good friends who would mourn his going, those
who hoped for him the now unattainable things.

In a spirit of stoic despair he had come to the seat of war. He had
invited Destiny to sweep him up in her reaping, by placing himself in
the ambit of her scythe; but the sharp reaping-hook had passed him by.

The innumerable exits were there in the wall of life and none had
opened to him; but since the evening when he saw Jasmine at the
railway station, there had been an opening of doors in his soul
hitherto hidden. Beyond these doors he saw glimpses of a new
world--not like the one he had lived in, not so green, so various, or
tumultuous, but it had the lure of that peace, not sterile or
somnolent, which summons the burdened life, or the soul with a
vocation, to the hood of a monk--a busy self-forgetfulness.

Looking after Barry Whalen's retreating figure he saw this new, grave
world opening out before him; and as the vision floated before his
eyes, Barry's appeal that he should visit Jasmine at the hospital came
to him.

Jasmine suffered. He recalled Barry's words: "She's as thin as she
once wasn't, but twice as beautiful. Her eyes are as big as stars, and
she can smile still, but it's a new one--a war-smile, I
expect. Everything gets a turn of its own at the Front."

Jasmine suffered in body. He knew that she suffered in mind also. To
go to her? Was that his duty? Was it his desire? Did his heart cry out
for it either in pity--or in love?

In love? Slowly a warm flood of feeling passed through him. It was
dimly borne in on him, as he gazed at the hospital in the distance,
that this thing called Love, which seizes upon our innermost selves,
which takes up residence in the inner sanctuary, may not be
dislodged. It stays on when the darkness comes, reigning in the
gloom. Even betrayal, injury, tyranny, do not drive it forth. It
continues. No longer is the curtain drawn aside for tribute, for
appeal, or for adoration, but It remains until the last footfall dies
in the temple, and the portals ate closed forever.

For Stafford the curtain was drawn before the shrine; but love was
behind the curtain still.

He would not go to her as Barry had asked. There in Brinkwort's house
in the covert of peaches and pomegranates was the man and the only man
who should, who must, bring new bloom to her cheek. Her suffering
would carry her to Rudyard at the last, unless it might be that one or
the other of them had taken Adrian Fellowes' life. If either had done
that, there could be no reunion.

He did not know what Al'mah had told Jasmine, the thing which had
cleared Jasmine's vision, and made possible a path which should lead
from the hospital to the house among the orchard-trees at Brinkwort's
Farm.

No, he would not, could not go to Jasmine--unless, it might be, she
was dying. A sudden, sharp anxiety possessed him. If, as Barry Whalen
suggested, one of those ugly turns should come, which illnesses take
in camp, and she should die without a friend near her, without Rudyard
by her side! He mounted his horse, and rode towards the hospital.

His inquiries at the hospital relieved his mind. "If there is no turn
for the worse, no complications, she will go on all right, and will be
convalescent in a few days," the medicine-man had said.

He gave instructions for a message to be sent to him if there was any
change for the worse. His first impulse, to tell them not to let her
know he had inquired, he set aside. There must not be subterfuge or
secrecy any longer. Let Destiny take her course.

As he left the hospital, he heard a wounded Boer prisoner say to a
Tommy who had fought with him on opposite sides in the same
engagement, "Alles zal recht kom!" All will come right, was the
English of it.

Out of the agony of conflict would all come right--for Boer, for
Briton, for Rudyard, for Jasmine, for himself, for Al'mah?

As he entered his tent again, he was handed his mail, which had just
arrived. The first letter he touched had the postmark of Durban. The
address on the envelope was in the handwriting of Lady Tynemouth.

He almost shrank from opening it, because of the tragedy which had
come to the husband of the woman who had been his faithful friend over
so many years. At an engagement a month before, Tynemouth had been
blinded by shrapnel, and had been sent to Durban. To the two letters
he had written there had come no answer until now; and he felt that
this reply would be a plaint against Fate, a rebellion against the
future restraint and trial and responsibility which would be put upon
the wife, who was so much of the irresponsible world.

After a moment, however, he muttered a reproach against his own
darkness of spirit and his lack of faith in her womanliness, and
opened the envelope.

It was not the letter he had imagined and feared. It began by thanking
him for his own letter, and then it plunged into the heart of her
trouble:

".... Tynie is blind. He will never see again. But his face seems to
me quite beautiful. It shines, Ian: beauty comes from within. Poor old
Tynie, who would have thought that the world he loved couldn't make
that light in his face! I never saw it there--did you? It is just
giving up one's self to the Inevitable. I suppose we mostly are giving
up ourselves to Ourselves, thinking always of our own pleasure and
profit and pride, never being content, pushing on and on...., Ian, I'm
not going to push on any more. I've done with the Climbers. There's
too much of the Climbers in us all--not social climbing, I mean, but
wanting to get somewhere that has something for us, out in the big
material world. When I look at Tynie--he's lying there so
peaceful--you might think it is a prison he is in. It isn't. He's set
free into a world where he had never been. He's set free in a world of
light that never blinds us. If he'd lived to be a hundred with the
sight of his eyes, he'd never have known that there's a world that
belongs to Allah,--I love that word, it sounds so great and yet so
friendly, so gentler than the name by which we call the First One in
our language and our religion--and that world is inside
ourselves.... Tynie is always thinking of other people now, wondering
what they are doing and how they are doing it. He was talking about
you a little while ago, and so admiringly. It brought the tears to my
eyes. Oh, I am so glad, Ian, that our friendship has always been so
much on the surface, so 'void of offence'--is that the phrase? I can
look at it without wincing; and I am glad. It never was a thing of
importance to you, for I am not important, and there was no weight of
life in it or in me. But even the butterfly has its uses, and maybe I
was meant to play a little part in your big life. I like to think it
was so. Sometimes a bright day gets a little more interest from the
drone of the locust or the glow of a butterfly's wings. I'm not sure
that the locust's droning and the bright flutter of the butterfly's
wings are not the way Nature has of fastening the soul to the meaning
of it all. I wonder if you ever heard the lines--foolish they read,
but they are not:

"'All summer long there was one little butterfly,
Flying ahead of me,
Wings red and yellow, a pretty little fellow,
Flying ahead of me.
One little butterfly, one little butterfly,
What can his message be?--
All summer long, there was one little butterfly
Flying ahead of me.'

"It may be so that the poet meant the butterfly to mean the joy of
things, the hope of things, the love of things flying ahead to draw us
on and on into the sunlight and up the steeps, and over the higher
hills.

"Ian, I would like to be such a butterfly in your eyes at this moment;
perhaps the insignificant means of making you see the near thing to
do, and by doing it get a step on towards the Far Thing. You used
always to think of the Far Thing. Ah, what ambition you had when I
first knew you on the Zambesi, when the old red umbrella, but for you,
would have carried me over into the mist and the thunder! Well, you
have lost that ambition. I know why you came out here. No one ever
told me. The thing behind the words in your letter tells me plainer
than words. The last time I saw you in London--do you remember when it
was? It was the day that Rudyard Byng drove Krool into Park Lane with
the sjambok. Well, that last time, when I met you in the hall as we
were both leaving a house of trouble, I felt the truth. Do you
remember the day I went to see you when Mr. Mappin came? I felt the
truth then more. I often wondered how I could ever help you in the old
days. That was an ambition of mine. But I had no brains--no brains
like Jasmine's and many another woman; and I was never able to do
anything. But now I feel as I never felt anything before in my life.
I feel that my time and my chance have come. I feel like a prophetess,
like Miriam,--or was it Deborah?--and that I must wind the horn of
warning as you walk on the edge of the precipice.

"Ian, it's only little souls who do the work that should be left to
Allah, and I don't believe that you can take the reins out of Allah's
hands,--He lets you do it, of course, if you insist, for a wilful
child must be taught his lesson--without getting smashed up at a sharp
corner that you haven't learnt to turn. Ian, there's work for you to
do. Even Tynie thinks that he can do some work still. He sees he can,
as he never did before; and he talks of you as a man who can do
anything if you will. He says that if England wanted a strong man
before the war she will want a stronger man afterwards to pick up the
pieces, and put them all together again. He says that after we win,
reconstruction in South Africa will be a work as big as was ever given
to a man, because, if it should fail, 'down will go the whole Imperial
show'--that's Tynie's phrase. And he says, why shouldn't you do it
here, or why shouldn't you be the man who will guide it all in
England?  You found the key to England's isolation, to her foreign
problem,--I'm quoting Tynie--which meant that the other nations keep
hands off in this fight; well, why shouldn't you find another key,
that to the future of this Empire? You got European peace for England,
and now the problem is how to make this Empire a real thing. Tynie
says this, not me. His command of English is better than mine, but
neither of us would make a good private secretary, if we had to write
letters with words of over two syllables. I've told you what Tynie
says, but he doesn't know at all what I know; he doesn't see the
danger I see, doesn't realize the mad thing in your brain, the sad
thing weighing down your heart--and hers.

"Ian, I feel it on my own heart, and I want it lifted away. Your
letter has only one word in it really. That word is Finis. I say, it
must not, shall not, be Finis. Look at the escapes you have had in
this war. Is not that enough to prove that you have a long way to go
yet, and that you have to 'make good' the veld as you trek. To outspan
now would be a crime. It would spoil a great life, it would darken
memory--even mine, Ian. I must speak the truth. I want you, we all
want you, to be the big man you are at heart. Do not be a Lassalle. It
is too small. If one must be a slave, then let it be to something
greater than one's self, higher--toweringly unattainably
higher. Believe me, neither the girl you love nor any woman on earth
is entitled to hold in slavery the energies and the mind and hopes of
a man who can do big things--or any man at all.

"Ian, Tynie and I have our trials, but we are going to live them
down. At first Tynie wanted to die, but he soon said he would see it
through--blind at forty. You have had your trials, you have them
still; but every gift of man is yours, and every opportunity. Will you
not live it all out to the end?  Allah knows the exit He wants for us,
and He must resent our breaking a way out of the prison of our own
making.

"You've no idea how this life of work with Jasmine has brought things
home to me--and to Jasmine too. When I see the multitude of broken and
maimed victims of war, well, I feel like Jeremiah; but I feel sad too
that these poor fellows and those they love must suffer in order to
teach us our lesson--us and England. Dear old friend, great man, I am
going to quote a verse Tynie read to me last night--oh, how strange
that seems! Yet it was so in a sense, he did read to me. Tynie made me
say the words from the book, but he read into them all that they were,
he that never drew a literary breath. It was a poem Jasmine quoted to
him a fortnight ago--Browning's 'Grammarian,' and he stopped me at
these words:

"'Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights:
Wait ye the warning?
Our low life was the level's and the night's;
He's for the morning.'

"Tynie stopped me there, and said, 'That's Stafford. He's the Alpine
fellow!' . . ."

A few sentences more and then the letter ended on a note of courage,
solicitude and friendship. And at the very last she said:

"It isn't always easy to find the key to things, but you will find it,
not because you are so clever, but because at heart you are so
good.... We both send our love, and don't forget that England hasn't
had a tenth of her share of Ian Stafford...."

Then there followed a postscript which ran:

"I always used to say, 'When my ship comes home,' I'd have this or
that. Well, here is the ship--mine and Jasmine's, and it has come Home
for me, and for Jasmine, too, I hope."

Stafford looked out over the veld. He saw the light of the sun, the
joy of summer, the flowers, the buoyant hills, where all the guns were
silent now; he saw a blesbok in the distance leaping to join its
fellows of a herd which had strayed across the fields of war; he felt
that stir of vibrant life in the air which only the new lands know;
and he raised his head with the light of resolve growing in his eyes.

"Don't forget that England hasn't had a tenth of her share of Ian
Stafford," Alice Tynemouth had said.

Looking round, he saw men whose sufferings were no doubt as great as
his own or greater; but they were living on for others' sakes. Despair
retreated before a woman's insight.

"The Alpine fellow" wanted to live now.



CHAPTER XXXV

AT BRINKWORT'S FARM


"What are you doing here, Krool?" The face of the half-caste had grown
more furtive than it was in the London days, and as he looked at
Stafford now, it had a malignant expression which showed through the
mask of his outward self-control.

"I am prisoner," Krool answered thickly.

"When--where?" Stafford inquired, his eye holding the other's.

"At Hetmeyer's Kopje."

"But what are you--a prisoner--doing here at Brinkwort's Farm?"

"I was hurt. They take me hospital, but the Baas, he send for me."

"They let you come without a guard ?"

"No--not. They are outside"--Krool jerked a finger towards the rear of
the house--"with the biltong and the dop."

"You are a liar, Krool. There may be biltong, but there is no dop."

"What matters!" Krool's face had a leer. He looked impudently at
Stafford, and Stafford read the meaning behind the unveiled insolence:
Krool knew what no one else but Jasmine and himself knew with absolute
certainty. Krool was in his own country, more than half a savage, with
the lust of war in his blood, with memories of a day in Park Lane when
the sjambok had done its ugly work, and Ian Stafford had, as Krool
believed, placed it in the hands of the Baas.

It might be that this dark spirit, this Nibelung of the tragedy of the
House of Byng, would even yet, when the way was open to a
reconstructed life for Jasmine and Rudyard, bring catastrophe.

The thought sickened him, and then black anger took possession of
him. The look he cast on the bent figure before him in the threadbare
frock-coat which had been taken from the back of some dead Boer, with
the corded breeches stuck in boots too large for him, and the khaki
hat which some vanished Tommy would never wear again, was resolute and
vengeful.

Krool must not stay at Brinkwort's Farm. He must be removed. If the
Caliban told Rudyard what he knew, there could be but one end to it
all; and Jasmine's life, if not ruined, must ever be, even at the
best, lived under the cover of magnanimity and compassion. That would
break her spirit, would take from her the radiance of temperament
which alone could make life tolerable to her or to others who might
live with her under the same roof. Anxiety possessed him, and he
swiftly devised means to be rid of Krool before harm could be done. He
was certain harm was meant--there was a look of semi-insanity in
Krool's eyes. Krool must be put out of the way before he could speak
with the Baas.... But how?

With a great effort Stafford controlled himself. Krool must be got rid
of at once, must be sent back to the prisoners' quarters and kept
there. He must not see Byng now. In a few more hours the army would
move on, leaving the prisoners behind, and Rudyard would presently
move on with the army. This was Byng's last day at Brinkwort's Farm,
to which he himself had come to-day lest Rudyard should take note of
his neglect, and their fellow-officers should remark that the old
friendship had grown cold, and perhaps begin to guess at the reason
why.

"You say the Baas sent for you?" he asked presently.

"Yes."

"To sjambok you again?"

Krool made a gesture of contempt. "I save the Baas at Hetmeyer's
Kopje. I kill Piet Graaf to do it."

There was a look of assurance in the eyes of the mongrel, which sent a
wave of coldness through Stafford's veins and gave him fresh anxiety.

He was in despair. He knew Byng's great, generous nature, and he
dreaded the inconsistency which such men show--forgiving and
forgetting when the iron penalty should continue and the chains of
punishment remain.

He determined to know the worst. "Traitor all round!" he said
presently with contempt. "You saved the Baas by killing Piet
Graaf--have you told the Baas that? Has any one told the Baas that?
The sjambok is the Baas' cure for the traitor, and sometimes it kills
to cure. Do you think that the Baas would want his life through the
killing of Piet Graaf by his friend Krool, the slim one from the
slime?"

As a sudden tempest twists and bends a tree, contorts it, bows its
branches to the dust, transforms it from a thing of beauty to a hag of
Walpurgis, so Stafford's words transformed Krool. A passion of rage
possessed him. He looked like one of the creatures that waited on
Wotan in the nether places. He essayed to speak, but at first could
not. His body bent forward, and his fingers spread out in a spasm of
hatred, then clinched with the stroke of a hammer on his knees, and
again opened and shut in a gesture of loathsome cruelty.

At length he spoke, and Stafford listened intently, for now Caliban
was off his guard, and he knew the worst that was meant.

"Ah, you speak of traitor--you! The sjambok for the traitor, eh?  The
sjambok--fifty strokes, a hunderd strokes--a t'ousand!  Krool--Krool
is a traitor, and the sjambok for him. What did he do?  What did Krool
do? He help Oom Paul against the Rooinek--against the Philistine. He
help the chosen against the children of Hell.

"What did Krool do? He tell Oom Paul how the thieves would to come in
the night to sold him like sheep to a butcher, how the t'ousand wolves
would swarm upon the sheepfold, and there would be no homes for the
voortrekker and his vrouw, how the Outlander would sit on our stoeps
and pick the peaches from our gardens. And he tell him other things
good for him to hear."

Stafford was conscious of the smell of orchard blossoms blown through
the open window, of the odour of the pomegranate in the hedge; but his
eyes were fascinated by the crouching passion of the figure before him
and the dissonance of the low, unhuman voice. There was no pause in
the broken, turgid torrent, which was like a muddy flood pouring over
the boulders of a rapid.

"Who the traitor is? Is it the man that tries to save his homeland
from the wolf and the worm? I kill Piet Graaf to save the Baas. The
Baas an' I, we understand--on the Limpopo we make the unie. He is the
Baas, and I am his slave. All else nothing is. I kill all the people
of the Baas' country, but I die for the Baas. The Baas kill me if he
will it. So it was set down in the bond on the Limpopo. If the Baas
strike, he strike; if he kill, he kill. It is in the bond, it is set
down. All else go. Piet Graaf, he go. Oom Paul, he go. Joubert,
Cronje, Botha, they all go, if the Baas speak. It is written so. On
the Limpopo it is written. All must go, if the Baas speak--one, two,
three, a t'ousand. Else the bond is water, and the spirits come in the
night, and take you to the million years of torment. It is nothing to
die--pain! But only the Baas is kill me. It is written so. Only the
Baas can hurt me. Not you, nor all the verdomde Rooineks out
there"--he pointed to the vast camp out on the veld--"nor the Baas'
vrouw. Do I not know all about the Baas' vrouw! She cannot hurt
me.. ." He spat on the ground. "Who is the traitor? Is it Krool? Did
Krool steal from the Baas? Krool is the Baas' slave; it is only the
friend of the Baas that steal from him--only him is traitor. I kill
Piet Graaf to save the Baas. No one kills you to save the Baas! I saw
you with your arms round the Baas' vrouw. So I go tell the Baas
all. If he kill me--it is the Baas. It is written."

He spat on the ground again, and his eyes grown red with his passion
glowered on Stafford like those of some animal of the jungle.

Stafford's face was white, and every nerve in his body seemed suddenly
to be wrenched by the hand of torture. What right had he to resent
this abominable tirade, this loathsome charge by such a beast? Yet he
would have shot where he stood the fellow who had spoken so of "the
Baas' vrouw," if it had not come to him with sudden conviction that
the end was not to be this way. Ever since he had read Alice
Tynemouth's letter a new spirit had been working in him. He must do
nothing rash. There was enough stain on his hands now without the
added stain of blood. But he must act; he must prevent Krool from
telling the Baas. Yonder at the hospital was Jasmine, and she and her
man must come together here in this peaceful covert before Rudyard
went forward with the army. It must be so.

Two sentries were beyond the doorway. He stepped quickly to the stoep
and summoned them. They came. Krool watched with eyes that, at first,
did not understand.

Stafford gave an order. "Take the prisoner to the guard. They will at
once march him back to the prisoners' camp."

Now Krool understood, and he made as if to spring on Stafford, but a
pistol suddenly faced him, and he knew well that what Stafford would
not do in cold blood, he would do in the exercise of his duty and as a
soldier before these Rooinek privates. He stood still; he made no
resistance.

But suddenly his voice rang out in a guttural cry--"Baas!"

In an instant a hand was clapped on his mouth, and his own dirty
neckcloth provided a gag.

The storm was over. The native blood in him acknowledged the logic
of superior force, and he walked out quietly between the sentries.
Stafford's move was regular from a military point of view. He was
justified in disposing of a dangerous and recalcitrant prisoner.
He could find a sufficient explanation if he was challenged.

As he turned round from the doorway through which Krool had
disappeared, he saw Al'mah, who had entered from another room during
the incident.

A light came to Stafford's face. They two derelicts of life had much
in common--the communion of sinners who had been so much sinned
against.

"I heard his last words about you and--her," she said in a low voice.

"Where is Byng?" he asked anxiously.

"In the kloof near by. He will be back presently."

"Thank God!"

Al'mah's face was anxious. "I don't know what you are going to say to
him, or why you have come," she said, "but--"

"I have come to congratulate him on his recovery."

"I understand. I want to say some things to you. You should know them
before you see him. There is the matter of Adrian Fellowes."

"What about Adrian Fellowes?" Stafford asked evenly, yet he felt his
heart give a bound and his brain throb.

"Does it matter to you now? At the inquest you were--concerned."

"I am more concerned now," he rejoined huskily.

He suddenly held out a hand to her with a smile of rare
friendliness. There came over him again the feeling he had at the
hospital when they talked together last, that whatever might come of
all the tragedy and sorrow around them they two must face
irretrievable loss.

She hesitated a moment, and then as she took his outstretched hand she
said, "Yes, I will take it while I can."

Her eyes went slowly round the room as though looking for
something--some point where they might rest and gather courage maybe,
then they steadied to his firmly.

"You knew Adrian Fellowes did not die a natural death--I saw that at
the inquest."

"Yes, I knew."

"It was a poisoned needle."

"I know. I found the needle."

"Ah! I threw it down afterwards. I forgot about it."

Slowly the colour left Stafford's face, as the light of revelation
broke in upon his brain. Why had he never suspected her? His brain was
buzzing with sounds which came from inner voices--voices of old
thoughts and imaginings, like little beings in a dark forest hovering
on the march of the discoverer. She was speaking, but her voice seemed
to come through a clouded medium from a great distance to him.

"He had hurt me more than any other--than my husband or her. I did
it. I would do it again.... I had been good to him.... I had suffered,
I wanted something for all I had lost, and he was . . ."

Her voice trailed away into nothing, then rose again presently. "I am
not sorry. Perhaps you wonder at that. But no, I do not hate myself
for it--only for all that went before it. I will pay, if I have to
pay, in my own way.... Thousands of women die who are killed by hands
that carry no weapon. They die of misery and shame and regret.... This
one man died because ..."

He did not hear, or if he heard he did not realize what she was saying
now. One thought was ringing through his mind like bells pealing. The
gulf of horrible suspicion between Rudyard and Jasmine was closed. So
long as it yawned, so long as there was between them the accounting
for Adrian Fellowes' death, they might have come together, but there
would always have been a black shadow between--the shadow that hangs
over the scaffold.

"They should know the truth," he said almost peremptorily.

"They both know," she rejoined calmly. "I told him this evening. On
the day I saw you at the hospital, I told her."

There was silence for a moment, and then he said: "She must come here
before he joins his regiment."

"I saw her last night at the hospital," Al'mah answered. "She was
better. She was preparing to go to Durban. I did not ask her if she
was coming, but I was sure she was not. So, just now, before you came,
I sent a message to her. It will bring her.... It does not matter what
a woman like me does."

"What did you say to her?"

"I wrote, 'If you wish to see him before the end, come quickly.' She
will think he is dying."

"If she resents the subterfuge?"

"Risks must be taken. If he goes without their meeting--who can tell!
Now is the time--now. I want to see it. It must be."

He reached out both hands and took hers, while she grew pale. Her eyes
had a strange childishly frightened look.

"You are a good woman, Al'mah," he said.

A quivering, ironical laugh burst from her lips. Then, suddenly, her
eyes were suffused.

"The world would call it the New Goodness then," she replied in a
voice which told how deep was the well of misery in her being.

"It is as old as Allah," he replied.

"Or as old as Cain?" she responded, then added quickly, "Hush! He is
coming."

An instant afterwards she was outside among the peach trees, and
Rudyard and Stafford faced each other in the room she had just left.

As Al'mah stood looking into the quivering light upon the veld, her
fingers thrust among the blossoms of a tree which bent over her, she
heard horses' hoofs, and presently there came round the corner of the
house two mounted soldiers who had brought Krool to Brinkwort's
Farm. Their prisoner was secured to a stirrup-leather, and the
neckcloth was still binding his mouth.

As they passed, Krool turned towards the house, eyes showing like
flames under the khaki trooper's hat, which added fresh incongruity to
the frock-coat and the huge top-boots.

The guard were now returning to their post at the door-way.

"What has happened?" she asked, with a gesture towards the departing
Krool.

"A bit o' lip to Colonel Stafford, ma'am," answered one of the
guard. "He's got a tongue like a tanner's vat, that goozer. Wants a
lump o' lead in 'is baskit 'e does."

"'E done a good turn at Hetmeyer's Kopje," added the Second. "If it
hadn't been for 'im the S.A.'s would have had a new Colonel"--he
jerked his head towards the house, from which came the murmur of men's
voices talking earnestly.

"Whatever 'e done it for, it was slim, you can stake a tidy lot on
that, ma'am," interjected the First. "He's the bottom o' the sink,
this half-caste Boojer is."

The Second continued: "If I 'ad my way 'e'd be put in front at the
next push-up, just where the mausers of his pals would get 'im. 'E's
done a lot o' bitin' in 'is time--let 'im bite the dust now, I
sez. I'm fair sick of treatin' that lot as if they was square
fighters. Why, 'e'd fire on a nurse or an ambulanche, that tyke
would."

"There's lots like him in yonder," urged the First, as a hand was
jerked forward towards the hills, "and we're goin' to get 'em this
time--goin' to get 'em on the shovel. Their schanses and their kranzes
and their ant-bear dugouts ain't goin' to help them this mop-up. We're
goin' to get the tongue in the hole o' the buckle this time. It's over
the hills and far away, and the Come-in-Elizas won't stop us. When the
howitzers with their nice little balls of lyddite physic get opening
their bouquets to-morrow--"

"Who says to-morrow?" demanded the Second.

"I says to-morrow. I know. I got ears, and 'im that 'as ears to 'ear
let 'im 'ear--that's what the Scripture saith. I was brought up on the
off side of a vicarage."

He laughed eagerly at his own joke, chuckling till his comrade
followed up with a sharp challenge.

"I bet you never heard nothin' but your own bleatin's--not about wot
the next move is, and w'en it is."

The First made quick retort. "Then you lose your bet, for I 'eard
Colonel Byng get 'is orders larst night--w'en you was sleepin' at
your post, Willy. By to-morrow this time you'll see the whole outfit
at it. You'll see the little billows of white rolling over the
hills--that's shrapnel. You'll hear the rippin', zippin', zimmin'
thing in the air wot makes you sick; for you don't know who it's goin'
to 'it. That's shells. You'll hear a thousand blankets being
shook--that's mausers and others. You'll see regiments marching out o'
step, an' every man on his own, which is not how we started this war,
not much. And where there's a bit o' rock, you say, 'Ere's a friend,
and you get behind it like a man. And w'en there's nothing to get
behind, you get in front, and take your chances, and you get
there--right there, over the trenches, over the bloomin' Amalakites,
over the hills and far away, where they want the relief they're goin'
to get, or I'm a pansy blossom."

"Well, to-morrow can't come quick enough for me," answered the
Second. He straightened out his shoulders and eyed the hills in front
of him with a calculating air, as though he were planning the tactics
of the fight to come.

"We'll all be in it--even you, ma'am," insinuated the First to Al'mah
with a friendly nod. "But I'd ruther 'ave my job nor yours. I've done
a bit o' nursin'--there was Bob Critchett that got a splinter o' shell
in 'is 'ead, and there was Sergeant Hoyle and others. But it gits me
where I squeak that kind o' thing do."

Suddenly they brought their rifles to the salute, as a footstep
sounded smartly on the stoep. It was Stafford coming from the house.

He acknowledged the salute mechanically. His eyes were fastened on the
distance. They had a rapt, shining look, and he walked like one in a
pleasant dream. A moment afterwards he mounted his horse with the
lightness of a boy, and galloped away.

He had not seen Al'mah as he passed.

In her fingers was crushed a bunch of orange blossoms. A heavy sigh
broke from her lips. She turned to go within, and, as she did so, saw
Rudyard Byng looking from the doorway towards the hospital where
Jasmine was.

"Will she come?" Al'mah asked herself, and mechanically she wiped the
stain of the blossoms from her fingers.



CHAPTER XXXVI

SPRINGS OF HEALING


Dusk had almost come, yet Jasmine had not arrived at Brinkwort's Farm,
the urgency of Al'mah's message notwithstanding. As things stood, it
was a matter of life and death; and to Al'mah's mind humanity alone
should have sent Jasmine at once to her husband's side. Something of
her old prejudice against Jasmine rose up again. Perhaps behind it all
was involuntary envy of an invitation to happiness so freely laid at
Jasmine's feet, but withheld from herself by Fate. Never had the
chance to be happy or the obvious inducement to be good ever been
hers. She herself had nothing, and Jasmine still had a chance for all
to which she had no right. Her heart beat harder at the thought of
it. She was of those who get their happiness first in making others
happy--as she would have done with Blantyre, if she had had a chance;
as even she tried to do with the man whom she had sent to his account
with the firmness and fury of an ancient Greek. The maternal, the
protective sense was big in her, and indirectly it had governed her
life. It had sent her to South Africa--to protect the wretch who had
done his best to destroy her; it had made her content at times as she
did her nurse's work in what dreadful circumstances! It was the source
of her revolt at Jasmine's conduct and character.

But was it also that, far beneath her criticism of Jasmine, which was,
after all, so little in comparison with the new-found affection she
really had for her, there lay a kinship, a sympathy, a soul's
rapprochement with Rudyard, which might, in happier circumstances,
have become a mating such as the world knew in its youth? Was that
also in part the cause of her anxiety for Rudyard, and of her sharp
disapproval of Jasmine? Did she want to see Rudyard happy, no matter
at what cost to Jasmine? Was it the everlasting feminine in her which
would make a woman sacrifice herself for a man, if need be, in order
that he might be happy? Was it the ancient tyrannical soul in her
which would make a thousand women sacrifice themselves for the man she
herself set above all others?

But she was of those who do not know what they are, or what they think
and feel, till some explosion forces open the doors of their souls and
they look upon a new life over a heap of ruins.

She sat in the gathering dusk, waiting, while hope slowly
waned. Rudyard also, on the veranda, paced weakly, almost stumblingly,
up and down, his face also turning towards the Stay Awhile
Hospital. At length, with a heavy sigh, he entered the house and sat
down in a great arm-chair, from which old Brinkwort the Boer had laid
down the law for his people.

Where was Jasmine? Why did she not hasten to Brinkwort's Farm?

A Staff Officer from the General Commanding had called to congratulate
Jasmine on her recovery, and to give fresh instructions which would
link her work at Durban effectively with the army as it now moved on
to the relief of the town beyond the hills. Al'mah's note had arrived
while the officer was with Jasmine, and it was held back until he
left. It was then forgotten by the attendant on duty, and it lay for
three hours undelivered. Then when it was given to her, no mention was
made of the delay.

When the Staff Officer left her, he had said to himself that hers was
one of the most alluring and fascinating faces he had ever seen; and
he, like Stafford, though in another sphere--that of the Secret
Intelligence Department--had travelled far and wide in the
world. Perfectly beautiful he did not call her, though her face was as
near that rarity as any he had known. He would only have called a
woman beautiful who was tall, and she was almost petite; but that was
because he himself was over-tall, and her smallness seemed to be
properly classed with those who were pretty, not the handsome or the
beautiful. But there was something in her face that haunted him--a
wistful, appealing delicacy, which yet was associated with an instant
readiness of intellect, with a perspicuous judgment and a gift of
organization. And she had eyes of blue which were "meant to drown
those who hadn't life-belts," as he said.

In one way or another he put all this to his fellow officers, and said
that the existence of two such patriots as Byng and Jasmine in one
family was unusual.

"Pretty fairly self-possessed, I should say," said Rigby, the youngest
officer present at mess. "Her husband under repair at Brinkwort's
Farm, in the care of the blue-ribbon nurse of the army, who makes a
fellow well if he looks at her, and she studying organization at the
Stay Awhile with a staff-officer."

The reply of the Staff Officer was quick and cutting enough for any
officers' mess.

"I see by the latest papers from England, that Balfour says we'll
muddle through this war somehow," he said. "He must have known you,
Rigby. With the courage of the damned you carry a fearsome lot of
impedimenta, and you muddle quite adequately. The lady you have
traduced has herself been seriously ill, and that is why she is not at
Brinkwort's Farm. What a malicious mind you've got! Byng would think
so."

"If Rigby had been in your place to-day," interposed a gruff major,
"the lady would surely have had a relapse. Convalescence is no time
for teaching the rudiments of human intercourse."

Pale and angry, Rigby, who was half Scotch and correspondingly
self-satisfied, rejoined stubbornly: "I know what I know. They haven't
met since she came up from Durban. Sandlip told me that--"

The Staff Officer broke the sentence. "What Sandlip told you is what
Nancy woutd tell Polly and Polly would tell the cook--and then Rigby
would know. But statement number one is an Ananiasism, for Byng saw
his wife at the hospital the night before Hetmeyer's Kopje. I can't
tell what they said, though, nor what was the colour of the lady's
pegnoir, for I am neither Nancy nor Polly nor the cook--nor Rigby."

With a maddened gesture Rigby got to his feet, but a man at his side
pulled him down. "Sit still, Baby Bunting, or you'll not get over the
hills to-morrow," he said, and he offered Rigby a cigar from Rigby's
own cigar-case, cutting off the end, handing it to him and lighting a
match.

"Gun out of action: record the error of the day," piped the thin
precise voice of the Colonel from the head of the table.

A chorus of quiet laughter met the Colonel's joke, founded on the
technical fact that the variation in the firing of a gun, due to any
number of causes, though apparently firing under the same conditions,
is carted officially "the error of the day" in Admiralty reports.

"Here the incident closed," as the newspapers say, but Rigby the
tactless and the petty had shown that there was rumour concerning the
relations of Byng and his wife, which Jasmine, at least, imagined did
not exist.

When Jasmine read the note Al'mah had sent her, a flush stole slowly
over her face, and then faded, leaving a whiteness, behind which was
the emanation, not of fear, but of agitation and of shock.

It meant that Rudyard was dying, and that she must go to him. That she
must go to him? Was that the thought in her mind--that she must go to
him?

If she wished to see him again before he went! That midnight, when he
was on his way to Hetmeyer's Kopje, he had flung from her room into
the night, and ridden away angrily on his grey horse, not hearing her
voice faintly calling after him. Now, did she want to see him--the
last time before he rode away again forever, on that white horse
called Death? A shudder passed through her.

"Ruddy! Poor Ruddy!" she said, and she did not remember that those
were the pitying, fateful words she used on the day when Ian Stafford
dined with her alone after Rudyard made his bitter protest against the
life they lived. "We have everything--everything," he had said, "and
yet--"

Now, however, there was an anguished sob in her voice. With the
thought of seeing him, her fingers tremblingly sought the fine-spun
strands of hair which ever lay a little loose from the wonder of its
great coiled abundance, and then felt her throat, as though to adjust
the simple linen collar she wore, making exquisite contrast to the
soft simplicity of her dark-blue gown.

She found the attendant who had given her the letter, and asked if the
messenger was waiting, and was only then informed that he had been
gone three hours or more.

Three hours or more! It might be that Rudyard was gone forever without
hearing what she had to say, or knowing whether she desired
reconciliation and peace.

She at once gave orders for a cape-cart to take her over to
Brinkwort's Farm. The attendant respectfully said that he must have
orders. She hastened to the officer in charge of the hospital, and
explained. His sympathy translated itself into instant action.
Fortunately there was a cart at the door. In a moment she was
ready, and the cart sped away into the night across the veld.

She had noticed nothing as she mounted the cart--neither the driver
nor the horses; but, as they hurried on, she was roused by a familiar
voice saying, "'E done it all right at Hetmeyer's Kopje--done it
brown. First Wortmann's Drift, and then Hetmeyer's Kopje, and he'll be
over the hills and through the Boers and into Lordkop with the rest of
the hold-me-backs."

She recognized him--the first person who had spoken to her of her
husband on her arrival, the cheerful Corporal Shorter, who had told
her of Wortmann's Drift and the saving of "Old Gunter."

She touched his arm gently. "I am glad it is you," she said in a low
tone.

"Not so glad as I am," he answered. "It's a purple shame that you
should ha' been took sick when he was mowed down, and that some one
else should be healin' 'is gapin' wounds besides 'is lawful wife, and
'er a rifle-shot away! It's a fair shame, that's wot it is. But all's
well as ends well, and you're together at the finish."

She shrank from his last words. Her heart seemed to contract; it hurt
her as though it was being crushed in a vise. She was used to that
pain now. She had felt it--ah, how many times since the night she
found Adrian Fellowes' white rose on her pillow, laid there by the man
she had sworn at the altar to love, honor, and obey! Her head
drooped. "At the finish"--how strange and new and terrible it was!
The world stood still for her.

"You'll go together to Lordkop, I expeck," she heard her companion's
voice say, and at first she did not realize its meaning; then slowly
it came to her. "At the finish" in his words meant the raising of the
siege of Lordkop, it meant rescue, victory, restoration. He had not
said that Rudyard was dead, that the Book of Rudyard and Jasmine was
closed forever. Her mind was in chaos, her senses in confusion. She
seemed like one in a vague shifting, agonizing dream.

She was unconscious of what her friendly Corporal was saying. She only
answered him mechanically now and then; and he, seeing that she was
distraught, talked on in a comforting kind of way, telling her
anecdotes of Rudyard, as they were told in that part of the army to
which he belonged.

What was she going to do when she arrived? What could she do if
Rudyard was dead? If Rudyard was still alive, she would make him
understand that she was not the Jasmine of the days "before the
flood"--before that storm came which uprooted all that ever was in her
life except the old, often anguished, longing to be good, and the
power which swept her into bye and forbidden paths. If he was gone,
deaf to her voice and to any mortal sound, then--there rushed into her
vision the figure of Ian Stafford, but she put that from her with a
trembling determination. That was done forever. She was as sure of it
as she was sure of anything in the world. Ian had not forgiven her,
would never forgive her. He despised her, rejected her, abhorred
her. Ian had saved her from the result of Rudyard's rash retaliation
and fury, and had then repulsed her, bidden her stand off from him
with a magnanimity and a chivalry which had humiliated her. He had
protected her from the shame of an open tragedy, and then had shut the
door in her face. Rudyard, with the same evidence as Ian held,--the
same letter as proof--he, whatever he believed or thought, he had
forgiven her. Only a few nights ago, that night before the fight at
Hetmeyer's Kopje, he had opened his arms to her and called her his
wife. In Rudyard was some great good thing, something which could not
die, which must live on. She sat up straight in the seat of the cart,
her hands clinched.

No, no, no, Rudyard was not dead, and he should not die. It mattered
not what Al'mah had written, she must have her chance to prove
herself; his big soul must have its chance to run a long course, must
not be cut off at the moment when so much had been done; when there
was so much to do. Ian should see that she was not "just a little
burst of eloquence," as he had called her, not just a strumpet, as he
thought her; but a woman now, beyond eloquence, far distant from the
poppy-fields of pleasure. She was young enough for it to be a virtue
in her to avoid the poppy-fields. She was not twenty-six years of age,
and to have learned the truth at twenty-six, and still not to have
been wholly destroyed by the lies of life, was something which might
be turned to good account.

She was sharply roused, almost shocked out of her distraction. Bright
lights appeared suddenly in front of her, and she heard the voice of
her Corporal saying: "We're here, ma'am, where old Brinkwort built a
hospital for one, and that one's yours, Mrs. Byng."

He clucked to his horses and they slackened. All at once the lights
seemed to grow larger, and from the garden of Brinkwort's house came
the sharp voice of a soldier saying:

"Halt! Who goes there?"

"A friend," was the Corporal's reply.

"Advance, friend, and give the countersign," was brusquely returned.

A moment afterwards Jasmine was in the sweet-smelling garden, and the
lights of the house were flaring out upon her.

She heard at the same time the voices of the sentry and of Corporal
Shorter in low tones of badinage, and she frowned. It was cruel that
at the door of the dead or the dying there should be such levity.

All at once a figure came between her and the light. Instinctively she
knew it was Al'mah.

"Al'mah! Al'mah!" she said painfully, and in a voice scarce above a
whisper.

The figure of the singing-woman bent over her protectingly, as it
might almost seem, and her hands were caught in a warm clasp.

"Am I in time?" Jasmine asked, and the words came from her in gasps.

Al'mah had no repentance for her deception. She saw an agitation which
seemed to her deeper and more real than any emotion ever shown by
Jasmine, not excepting the tragical night at the Glencader Mine and
the morning of the first meeting at the Stay Awhile Hospital. The
butterfly had become a thrush that sang with a heart in its throat.

She gathered Jasmine's eyes to her own. It seemed as though she never
would answer. To herself she even said, why should she hurry, since
all was well, since she had brought the two together living, who had
been dead to each other these months past, and, more than all, had
been of the angry dead? A little more pain and regret could do no
harm, but only good. Besides, now that she was face to face with the
result of her own deception, she had a sudden fear that it might go
wrong. She had no remorse for the act, but only a faint apprehension
of the possible consequences. Suppose that in the shock of discovery
Jasmine should throw everything to the winds, and lose herself in
arrant egotism once more! Suppose--no, she would suppose nothing. She
must believe that all she had done was for the best.

She felt how cold were the small delicate hands in her own strong warm
fingers, she saw the frightened appeal of the exquisite haunting eyes,
and all at once realized the cause of that agitation--the fear that
death had come without understanding, that the door had been forever
shut against the answering voices.

"You are in time," she said gently, encouragingly, and she tightened
the grasp of her hands.

As the volts of an electric shock quivering through a body are
suddenly withdrawn, and the rigidity becomes a ghastly inertness, so
Jasmine's hands, and all her body, seemed released. She felt as though
she must fall, but she reasserted her strength, and slowly regained
her balance, withdrawing her hands from those of Al'mah.

"He is alive--he is alive--he is alive," she kept repeating to herself
like one in a dream. Then she added hastily, with an effort to bear
herself with courage: "Where is he? Take me."

Al'mah motioned, and in a moment they were inside the house. A sense
of something good and comforting came over Jasmine. Here was an old,
old room furnished in heavy and simple Dutch style, just as old Elias
Brinkwort had left it. It had the grave and heavy hospitableness of a
picture of Teniers or Jan Steen. It had the sense of home, the welcome
of the cradle and the patriarch's chair. These were both here as they
were when Elias Brinkwort and his people went out to join the Boer
army in the hills, knowing that the verdomde Rooinek would not loot
his house or ravage his belongings.

To Jasmine's eyes, it brought a new strange sense, as though all at
once doors had been opened up to new sensations of life. Almost
mechanically, yet with a curious vividness and permanency of vision,
her eyes drifted from the patriarch's chair to the cradle in the
corner; and that picture would remain with her till she could see no
more at all. Unbidden and unconscious there came upon her lips a faint
smile, and then a door in front of her was opened, and she was inside
another room--not a bedroom as she had expected, but a room where the
Dutch simplicity and homely sincerity had been invaded by something
English and military. This she felt before her eyes fell on a man
standing beside a table, fully dressed. Though shaken and worn, it was
a figure which had no affinity with death.

As she started back Al'mah closed the door behind her, and she found
herself facing Rudyard, looking into his eyes.

Al'mah had miscalculated. She did not realize Jasmine as she really
was--like one in a darkened room who leans out to the light and
sun. The old life, the old impetuous egoism, the long years of self
were not yet gone from a character composite of impulse, vanity and
intensity. This had been too daring an experiment with one of her
nature, which had within the last few months become as strangely,
insistently, even fanatically honest, as it had been elusive in the
past. In spite of a tremulous effort to govern herself and see the
situation as it really was--an effort of one who desired her good to
bring her and Rudyard together, the ruse itself became magnified to
monstrous proportions, and her spirit suddenly revolted. She felt that
she had been inveigled; that what should have been her own voluntary
act of expiation and submission, had been forced upon her, and pride,
ever her most secret enemy, took possession of her.

"I have been tricked," she said, with eyes aflame and her body
trembling. "You have trapped me here!" There was scorn and indignation
in her voice.

He did not move, but his eyes were intent upon hers and persistently
held them. He had been near to death, and his vision had been more
fully cleared than hers. He knew that this was the end of all or the
beginning of all things for them both; and though anger suddenly
leaped at the bottom of his heart, he kept it in restraint, the
primitive thing of which he had had enough.

"I did not trick you, Jasmine," he answered, in a low voice. "The
letter was sent without my knowledge or permission. Al'mah thought she
was doing us both a good turn. I never deceived you--never. I should
not have sent for you in any case. I heard you were ill and I tried to
get up and go to you; but it was not possible. Besides, they would not
let me. I wanted to go to you again, because, somehow, I felt that
midnight meeting in the hospital was a mistake; that it ended as you
would not really wish it to end."

Again, with wonderful intuition for a man who knew so little of women,
as he thought, he had said the one thing which could have cooled the
anger that drowned the overwhelming gratitude she felt at his being
alive--overwhelming, in spite of the fact that her old mad temperament
had flooded it for the moment.

He would have gone to her--that was what he had said. In spite of her
conduct that midnight, when he was on his way to Hetmeyer's Kopje, he
would have come again to her! How, indeed, he must have loved her; or
how magnanimous, how impossibly magnanimous, he was!

How thin and worn he was, and how large the eyes were in the face
grown hollow with suffering! There were liberal streaks of grey also
at his temples, and she noted there was one strand all white just in
the centre of his thick hair. A swift revulsion of feeling in her
making for peace was, however, sharply arrested by the look in his
eyes. It had all the sombreness of reproach--of immitigable
reproach. Could she face that look now and through the years to come?
It were easier to live alone to the end with her own remorse, drinking
the cup that would not empty, on and on, than to live with that look
in his eyes.

She turned her head away from him. Her glance suddenly caught a
sjambok lying along two nails on the wall. His eyes followed hers, and
in the minds of both was the scene when Rudyard drove Krool into the
street under just such a whip of rhinoceros-hide.

Something of the old spirit worked in her in spite of
all. Idiosyncrasy may not be cauterized, temperament must assert
itself, or the personality dies. Was he to be her master--was that the
end of it all? She had placed herself so completely in his power by
her wilful waywardness and errors. Free from blame, she would have
been ruler over him; now she must be his slave!

"Why did you not use it on me?" she asked, in a voice almost like a
cry, though it had a ring of bitter irony. "Why don't you use it now?
Don't you want to?"

"You were always so small and beautiful," he answered, slowly. "A
twenty-stamp mill to crush a bee!"

Again resentment rose in her, despite the far-off sense of joy she had
in hearing him play with words. She could forgive almost anything for
that--and yet she was real and had not merely the dilettante soul. But
why should he talk as though she was a fly and he an eagle?  Yet there
was admiration in his eyes and in his words. She was angry with
herself--and with him. She was in chaos again.

"You treat me like a child, you condescend--"

"Oh, for God's sake--for God's sake!" he interrupted, with a sudden
storm in his face; but suddenly, as though by a great mastery of the
will, he conquered himself, and his face cleared.

"You must sit down, Jasmine," he said, hurriedly. "You look tired. You
haven't got over your illness yet."

He hastily stepped aside to get her a chair, but, as he took hold of
it, he stumbled and swayed in weakness, born of an excitement far
greater than her own; for he was thinking of the happiness of two
people, not of the happiness of one; and he realized how critical was
this hour. He had a grasp of the bigger things, and his talk with
Stafford of a few hours ago was in his mind--a talk which, in its
brevity, still had had the limitlessness of revelation. He had made a
promise to one of the best friends that man--or woman--ever had, as he
thought; and he would keep it. So he said to himself. Stafford
understood Jasmine, and Stafford had insisted that he be not deceived
by some revolt on the part of Jasmine, which would be the outcome of
her own humiliation, of her own anger with herself for all the trouble
she had caused. So he said to himself.

As he staggered with the chair she impulsively ran to aid him.

"Rudyard," she exclaimed, with concern, "you must not do that. You
have not the strength. It is silly of you to be up at all. I wonder at
Al'mah and the doctor!"

She pushed him to a big arm-chair beside the table and gently pressed
him down into the seat. He was very weak, and his hand trembled on the
chair-arm. She reached out, as if to take it; but, as though the act
was too forward, her fingers slipped to his wrist instead, and she
felt his pulse with the gravity of a doctor.

Despite his weakness a look of laughter crept into his eyes and stayed
there. He had read the little incident truly. Presently, seeing the
whiteness of his face but not the look in his eyes, she turned to the
table, and pouring out a glass of water from a pitcher there, held it
to his lips.

"Here, Rudyard," she said, soothingly, "drink this. You are faint. You
shouldn't have got up simply because I was coming."

As he leaned back to drink from the glass she caught the gentle humour
of his look, begotten of the incident of a moment before.

There was no reproach in the strong, clear eyes of blue which even
wounds and illness had not faced--only humour, only a hovering joy,
only a good-fellowship, and the look of home. She suddenly thought of
the room from which she had just come, and it seemed, not
fantastically to her, that the look in his eyes belonged to the other
room where were the patriarch's chair and the baby's cradle. There was
no offending magnanimity, no lofty compassion in his blameless eyes,
but a human something which took no account of the years that the
locust had eaten, the old mad, bad years, the wrong and the shame of
them. There was only the look she had seen the day he first visited
her in her own home, when he had played with words she had used in the
way she adored, and would adore till she died; when he had said, in
reply to her remark that he would turn her head, that it wouldn't make
any difference to his point of view if she did turn her head! Suddenly
it was all as if that day had come back, although his then giant
physical strength had gone; although he had been mangled in the
power-house of which they had spoken that day. Come to think of it,
she too had been working in the "power-house" and had been mangled
also; for she was but a thread of what she was then, but a wisp of
golden straw to the sheaf of the then young golden wheat.

All at once, in answer to the humour in his eyes, to the playful
bright look, the tragedy and the passion which had flown out from her
old self like the flame that flares out of an opened furnace-door,
sank back again, the door closed, and all her senses were cooled as by
a gentle wind.

Her eyes met his, and the invitation in them was like the call of the
thirsty harvester in the sunburnt field. With an abandon, as startling
as it was real and true to her nature, she sank down to the floor and
buried her face in her hands at his feet. She sobbed deeply, softly.

With an exclamation of gladness and welcome he bent over her and drew
her close to him, and his hands soothed her trembling shoulders.

"Peace is the best thing of all, Jasmine," he whispered. "Peace."

They were the last words that Ian had addressed to her. It did not
make her shrink now that both had said to her the same thing, for both
knew her, each in his own way, better than she had ever known herself;
and each had taught her in his own way, but by what different means!

All at once, with a start, she caught Rudyard's arm with a little
spasmodic grasp.

"I did not kill Adrian Fellowes," she said, like a child eager to be
absolved from a false imputation. She looked up at him simply,
bravely.

"Neither did I," he answered gravely, and the look in his eyes did not
change. She noted that.

"I know. It was--"

She paused. What right had she to tell!

"Yes, we both know who did it," he added. "Al'mah told me."

She hid her head in her hands again, while he hung over her wisely
waiting and watching.

Presently she raised her head, but her swimming eyes did not seek
his. They did not get so high. After one swift glance towards his own,
they dropped to where his heart might be, and her voice trembled as
she said:

"Long ago Alice Tynemouth said I ought to marry a man who would master
me. She said I needed a heavy hand over me--and the shackles on my
wrists."

She had forgotten that these phrases were her own; that she had used
them concerning herself the night before the tragedy.

"I think she was right," she added. "I had never been mastered, and I
was all childish wilfulness and vanity. I was never worth while. You
took me too seriously, and vanity did the rest."

"You always had genius," he urged, gently, "and you were so
beautiful."

She shook her head mournfully. "I was only an imitation always--only a
dresden-china imitation of the real thing I might have been, if I had
been taken right in time. I got wrong so early. Everything I said or
did was mostly imitation. It was made up of other people's acts and
words. I could never forget anything I'd ever heard; it drowned any
real thing in me. I never emerged--never was myself."

"You were a genius," he repeated again. "That's what genius does. It
takes all that ever was and makes it new."

She made a quick spasmodic protest of her hand. She could not bear to
have him praise her. She wanted to tell him all that had ever been,
all that she ought to be sorry for, was sorry for now almost beyond
endurance. She wanted to strip her soul bare before him; but she
caught the look of home in his eyes, she was at his knees at peace,
and what he thought of her meant so much just now--in this one hour,
for this one hour. She had had such hard travelling, and here was a
rest-place on the road.

He saw that her soul was up in battle again, but he took her arms, and
held them gently, controlling her agitation. Presently, with a great
sigh, her forehead drooped upon his hands. They were in a vast theatre
of war, and they were part of it; but for the moment sheer waste of
spirit and weariness of soul made peace in a turbulent heart.

"It's her real self--at last," he kept saying to himself, "She had to
have her chance, and she has got it."

Outside in a dark corner of the veranda, Al'mah was in reverie. She
knew from the silence within that all was well. The deep peace of the
night, the thing that was happening in the house, gave her a moment's
surcease from her own problem, her own arid loneliness. Her mind went
back to the night when she had first sung "Manassa" at Covent
Garden. The music shimmered in her brain. She essayed to hum some
phrases of the opera which she had always loved, but her voice had no
resonance or vibration. It trailed away into a whisper.

"I can't sing any more. What shall I do when the war ends? Or is it
that I am to end here with the war?" she whispered to herself....
Again reverie deepened. Her mind delivered itself up to an obsession.
"No, I am not sorry I killed him," she said firmly after a long time,
"If a price must be paid, I will pay it."

Buried in her thoughts, she was scarcely conscious of voices near
by. At last they became insistent to her ears, They were the voices of
sentries off duty--the two who had talked to her earlier in the
evening, after Ian Stafford had left.

"This ain't half bad, this night ain't," said one. "There's a lot o'
space in a night out here."

"I'd like to be 'longside o' some one I know out by 'Ampstead 'Eath,"
rejoined the other.

"I got a girl in Camden Town," said the First victoriously.

"I got kids--somewheres, I expect," rejoined the Second with a
flourish of pride and self-assertion.

"Oh, a donah's enough for me!" returned the First.

"You'll come to the other when you don't look for it neither,"
declared his friend in a voice of fatality.

"You ain't the only fool in the world, mate, of course. But 'struth, I
like this business better. You've got a good taste in your mouth in
the morning 'ere."

"Well, I'll meet you on 'Ampstead 'Eath when the war is over, son,"
challenged the Second.

"I ain't 'opin' and I ain't prophesyin' none this heat," was the quiet
reply. "We've got a bit o' hell in front of us yet. I'll talk to you
when we're in Lordkop."

"I'll talk to your girl in Camden Town, if you 'appen to don't," was
the railing reply.

"She couldn't stand it not but the once," was the retort; and then
they struck each other with their fists in rough play, and laughed,
and said good-night in the vernacular.



CHAPTER XXXVII

UNDER THE GUN


They had left him for dead in a dreadful circle of mangled gunners who
had fallen back to cover in a donga, from a fire so stark that it
seemed the hillside itself was discharging myriad bolts of death, as a
waterwheel throws off its spray. No enemy had been visible, but far
away in front--that front which must be taken--there hung over the
ridge of the hills veils of smoke like lace. Hideous sounds tortured
the air--crackling, snapping, spitting sounds like the laughter of
animals with steel throats. Never was ill work better done than when,
on that radiant veld, the sky one vast turquoise vault, beneath which
quivered a shimmer of quicksilver light, the pom-poms, the maulers,
and the shrapnel of Kruger's men mowed down Stafford and his battery,
showered them, drowned them in a storm of lead.

"Alamachtig," said a Rustenburg dopper who, at the end of the day,
fell into the hands of the English, "it was like cutting alfalfa with
a sickle! Down they tumbled, horses and men, mashed like mealies in
the millstones. A damn lot of good horses was killed this time. The
lead-grinders can't pick the men and leave the horses. It was a
verdomde waste of good horses. The Rooinek eats from a bloody basin
this day."

Alamachtig!

At the moment Ian Stafford fell the battle was well launched. The air
was shrieking with the misery of mutilated men and horses and the
ghoulish laughter of pom-poms. When he went down it seemed to him that
human anger had reached its fullest expression. Officers and men alike
were in a fury of determination and vengeance. He had seen no fear, no
apprehension anywhere, only a defiant anger which acted swiftly,
coolly. An officer stepped over the lacerated, shattered body of a
comrade of his mess with the abstracted impassiveness of one who finds
his way over a puddle in the road; and here were puddles too--puddles
of blood. A gunner lifted away the corpse of his nearest friend from
the trail and strained and wrenched at his gun with the intense
concentration of one who kneads dough in a trough. The sobbing agony
of those whom Stafford had led rose up from the ground around him, and
voices cried to be put out of pain and torture. These begrimed men
around him, with jackets torn by bullets, with bandaged head stained
with blood or dragging leg which left a track of blood behind, were
not the men who last night were chatting round the camp-fires and
making bets as to where the attack would begin to-day.

Stafford was cool enough, however. It was as though an icy liquid had
been poured into his veins. He thought more clearly than he had ever
done, even in those critical moments of his past when cool thinking
was indispensable. He saw the mistake that had been made in giving his
battery work which might have been avoided, and with the same result
to the battle; but he also saw the way out of it, and he gave orders
accordingly. When the horses were lashed to a gallop to take up the
new position, which, if they reached, would give them shelter against
this fiendish rain of lead, and also enable them to enfilade the foe
at advantage, something suddenly brought confusion to his senses, and
the clear thinking stopped. His being seemed to expand suddenly to an
enormity of chaos and then as suddenly to shrink, dwindle, and fall
back into a smother--as though, in falling, blankets were drawn
roughly over his head and a thousand others were shaken in the air
around him. And both were real in their own way. The thousand blankets
flapping in the air were the machine guns of the foe following his
battery into a zone of less dreadful fire, and the blankets that
smothered him were wrappings of unconsciousness which save us from the
direst agonies of body and mind.

The last thing he saw, as his eyes, with a final effort of power,
sought to escape from this sudden confusion, was a herd of springboks
flinging themselves about in the circle of fire, caught in the
struggle of the two armies, and, like wild birds in a hurricane,
plunging here and there in flight and futile motion. As
unconsciousness enwrapped him the vision of these distraught denizens
of the veld was before his eyes. Somehow, in a lightning
transformation, he became one with them and was mingled with them.

Time passed.

When his eyes opened again, slowly, heavily, the same vision was
before him--the negative left on the film of his sight by his last
conscious glance at the world.

He raised himself on his elbow and looked out over the veld. The
springboks were still distractedly tossing here and there, but the
army to which he belonged had moved on. It was now on its way up the
hill lying between them and the Besieged City. He was dimly conscious
of this, for the fight round him had ceased, the storm had gone
forward. There was noise, great noise, but he was outside of it, in a
kind of valley of awful inactivity. All round him was the debris of a
world in which he had once lived and moved and worked. How many
years--or centuries--was it since he had been in that harvest of
death? There was no anomaly. It was not that time had passed; it was
that his soul had made so far a journey.

In his sleep among the guns and the piteous, mutilated dead, he had
gone a pilgrimage to a Distant Place and had been told the secret of
the world. Yet when he first waked, it was not in his mind--only that
confusion out of which he had passed to nothingness with the vision of
the distracted springboks. Suddenly a torturing thirst came, and it
waked him fully to the reality of it all. He was lying in his own
blood, in the swath which the battle had cut.

His work was done. This came to him slowly, as the sun clears away the
mists of morning. Something--Some One--had reached out and touched him
on the shoulder, had summoned him.

When he left Brinkwort's Farm yesterday, it was with the desire to
live, to do large things. He and Rudyard had clasped hands, and
Rudyard had made a promise to him, which gave him hope that the broken
roof-tree would be mended, the shattered walls of home restored. It
had seemed to him then that his own mistake was not irreparable, and
that the way was open to peace, if not to happiness.

When he first came to this war he had said, "I will do this," and, "I
will do that," and he had thought it possible to do it in his own time
and because he willed it. He had put himself deliberately in the way
of the Scythe, and had thrown himself into its arc of death.

To have his own way by tricking Destiny into giving him release and
absolution without penalty--that had been his course. In the hour when
he had ceased to desire exit by breaking through the wall and not by
the predestined door, the reply of Destiny to him had been: "It is not
for you to choose." He had wished to drink the cup of release, had
reached out to take it, but presently had ceased to wish to drink
it. Then Destiny had said: "Here is the dish--drink it."

He closed his eyes to shut out the staring light, and he wished in a
vague way that he might shut out the sounds of the battle--the
everlasting boom and clatter, the tearing reverberations. But he
smiled too, for he realized that his being where he was alone meant
that the army had moved on over that last hill; and that there would
soon be the Relief for which England prayed.

There was that to the good; and he had taken part in it all. His
battery, a fragment of what it had been when it galloped out to do its
work in the early morning, had had its glorious share in the great
day's work.

He had had the most critical and dangerous task of this memorable
day. He had been on the left flank of the main body, and his battery
had suddenly faced a terrific fire from concealed riflemen who had not
hitherto shown life at this point. His promptness alone had saved the
battery from annihilation. His swift orders secured the gallant
withdrawal of the battery into a zone of comparative safety and
renewed activity, while he was left with this one abandoned gun and
his slain men and fellow-officers.

But somehow it all suddenly became small and distant and insignificant
to his senses. He did not despise the work, for it had to be done. It
was big to those who lived, but in the long movement of time it was
small, distant, and subordinate.

If only the thirst did not torture him, if only the sounds of the
battle were less loud in his ears! It was so long since he waked from
that long sleep, and the world was so full of noises, the air so arid,
and the light of the sun so fierce. Darkness would be peace. He longed
for darkness.

He thought of the spring that came from the rocks in the glen behind
the house, where he was born in Derbyshire. He saw himself stooping
down, kneeling to drink, his face, his eyes buried in the water, as he
gulped down the good stream. Then all at once it was no longer the
spring from the rock in which he laved his face and freshened his
parched throat; a cool cheek touched his own, lips of tender freshness
swept his brow, silken hair with a faint perfume of flowers brushed
his temples, his head rested on a breast softer than any pillow he had
ever known.

"Jasmine!" he whispered, with parched lips and closed
eyes. "Jasmine--water," he pleaded, and sank away again intothat dream
from which he had but just wakened.

It had not been all a vision. Water was here at his tongue, his head
was pillowed on a woman's breast, lips touched his forehead.

But it was not Jasmine's breast; it was not Jasmine's hand which held
the nozzle of the water-bag to his parched lips.

Through the zone of fire a woman and a young surgeon had made their
way from the attending ambulance that hovered on the edge of battle to
this corner of death in the great battle-field. It mattered not to the
enemy, who still remained in the segment of the circle where they
first fought, whether it was man or woman who crossed this zone of
fire. No heed could be given now to Red Cross work, to ambulance,
nurse, or surgeon. There would come a time for that, but not yet. Here
were two races in a life-and-death grip; and there could be no give
and take for the wounded or the dead until the issue of the day was
closed.

The woman who had come through the zone of fire was Al'mah. She had no
right to be where she was. As a nurse her place was not the
battle-field; but she had had a premonition of Stafford's tragedy, and
in the night had concealed herself in the blankets of an ambulance and
had been carried across the veld to that outer circle of battle where
wait those who gather up the wreckage, who provide the salvage of
war. When she was discovered there was no other course but to allow
her to remain; and so it was that as the battle moved on she made her
way to where the wounded and dead lay.

A sorely wounded officer, able with the help of a slightly injured
gunner to get out of the furnace of fire, had brought word of
Stafford's death but with the instinct of those to whom there come
whisperings, visions of things, Al'mah felt she must go and find the
man with whose fate, in a way, her own had been linked; who, like
herself, had been a derelict upon the sea of life; the grip of whose
hand, the look of whose eyes the last time she saw him, told her that
as a brother loves so he loved her.

Hundreds saw the two make their way across the veld, across the
lead-swept plain; but such things in the hour of battle are
commonplaces; they are taken as part of the awful game. Neither mauser
nor shrapnel nor maxim brought them down as they made their way to the
abandoned gun beside which Stafford lay. Yet only one reached
Stafford's side, where he was stretched among his dead comrades. The
surgeon stayed his course at three-quarters of the distance to care
for a gunner whose mutilations were robbed of half their horror by a
courage and a humour which brought quick tears to Al'mah's eyes. With
both legs gone the stricken fellow asked first for a match to light
his cutty pipe and then remarked: "The saint's own luck that there it
was with the stem unbroke to give me aise whin I wanted it!

"Shure, I thought I was dead," he added as the surgeon stooped over
him, "till I waked up and give meself the lie, and got a grip o' me
pipe, glory be!"

With great difficulty Al'mah dragged Stafford under the horseless gun,
left behind when the battery moved on. Both forces had thought that
nothing could live in that gray-brown veld, and no effort at first was
made to rescue or take it. By every law of probability Al'mah and the
young surgeon ought to be lying dead with the others who had died,
some with as many as twenty bullet wounds in their bodies, while the
gunner, who had served this gun to the last and then, alone, had stood
at attention till the lead swept him down, had thirty wounds to his
credit for England's sake. Under the gun there was some shade, for she
threw over it a piece of tarpaulin and some ragged, blood-stained
jackets lying near--jackets of men whose wounds their comrades had
tried hastily to help when the scythe of war cut them down.

There was shade now, but there was not safety, for the ground was
spurting dust where bullets struck, and even bodies of dead men were
dishonoured by the insult of new wounds and mutilations.

Al'mah thought nothing of safety, but only of this life which was
ebbing away beside her. She saw that a surgeon could do nothing, that
the hurt was internal and mortal; but she wished him not to die until
she had spoken with him once again and told him all there was to
tell--all that had happened after he left Brinkwort's Farm yesterday.

She looked at the drawn and blanched face and asked herself if that
look of pain and mortal trouble was the precursor of happiness and
peace. As she bathed the forehead of the wounded man, it suddenly came
to her that here was the only tragedy connected with Stafford's going:
his work was cut short, his usefulness ended, his hand was fallen from
the lever that lifted things.

She looked away from the blanched face to the field of battle, towards
the sky above it. Circling above were the vile aasvogels, the
loathsome birds which followed the track of war, watching, waiting
till they could swoop upon the flesh blistering in the sun.
Instinctively she drew nearer to the body of the dying man,
as though to protect it from the evil flying things. She forced
between his lips a little more water.

"God make it easy!" she said.

A bullet struck a wheel beside her, and with a ricochet passed through
the flesh of her forearm. A strange look came into her eyes, suffusing
them. Was her work done also? Was she here to find the solution of all
her own problems--like Stafford--like Stafford? Stooping, she
reverently kissed the bloodless cheek. A kind of exaltation possessed
her. There was no fear at all. She had a feeling that he would need
her on the journey he was about to take, and there was no one else who
could help him now. Who else was there beside herself--and Jigger?

Where was Jigger? What had become of Jigger? He would surely have been
with Stafford if he had not been hurt or killed. It was not like
Jigger to be absent when Stafford needed him.

She looked out from under the gun, as though expecting to find him
coming--to see him somewhere on this stricken plain. As she did so she
saw the young surgeon, who had stayed to help the wounded gunner,
stumbling and lurching towards the gun, hands clasping his side, and
head thrust forward in an attitude of tense expectation, as though
there was a goal which must be reached.

An instant later she was outside hastening towards him. A bullet spat
at her feet, another cut the skirt of her dress, but all she saw was
the shambling figure of the man who, but a few minutes before, was so
flexible and alert with life, eager to relieve the wounds of those who
had fallen. Now he also was in dire need.

She had almost reached him when, with a stiff jerk sideways and an
angular artion of the figure, he came to the ground like a log,
ungainly and rigid.

"They got me! I'm hit--twice," he said, with grey lips; with eyes that
stared at her and through her to something beyond; but he spoke in an
abrupt, professional, commonplace tone. "Shrapnel and mauler," he
added, his hands protecting the place where the shrapnel had found
him. His staring blue eyes took on a dull cloud, and his whole figure
seemed to sink and shrink away. As though realizing and resisting, if
not resenting this dissolution of his forces, his voice rang out
querulously, and his head made dogmatic emphasis.

"They oughtn't to have done it," the petulant voice insisted. "I
wasn't fighting." Suddenly the voice trailed away, and all emphasis,
accent, and articulation passed from the sentient figure. Yet his lips
moved once again. "Ninety-nine Adelphi Terrace--first floor," he said
mechanically, and said no more.

As mechanically as he had spoken, Al'mah repeated the last
words. "Ninety-nine Adelphi Terrace, first floor," she said slowly.

They were chambers next to those where Adrian Fellowes had lived and
died. She shuddered.

"So he was not married," she said reflectively, as she left the
lifeless body and went back to the gun where Stafford lay.

Her arm through which the bullet had passed was painful, but she took
no heed of it. Why should she? Hundreds, maybe thousands, were being
killed off there in the hills. She saw nothing except the debris of
Ian Stafford's life drifting out to the shoreless sea.

He lived still, but remained unconscious, and she did not relax her
vigil. As she watched and waited the words of the young surgeon kept
ringing in her ears, a monotonous discord, "Ninety-nine Adelphi
Terrace--first floor!" Behind it all was the music of the song she had
sung at Rudyard Byng's house the evening of the day Adrian Fellowes
had died--"More was lost at Mohacksfield."

The stupefaction that comes with tragedy crept over her. As the victim
of an earthquake sits down amid vast ruins, where the dead lie
unnumbered, speechless, and heedless, so she sat and watched the face
of the man beside her, and was not conscious that the fire of the
armies was slackening, that bullets no longer spattered the veld or
struck the gun where she sat; that the battle had been carried over
the hills.

In time help would come, so she must wait. At least she had kept
Stafford alive. So far her journey through Hades had been
justified. He would have died had it not been for the water and brandy
she had forced between his lips, for the shade in which he lay beneath
the gun. In the end they would come and gather the dead and
wounded. When the battle was over they would come, or, maybe, before
it was over.

But through how many hours had there been the sickening monotony of
artillery and rifle-fire, the bruit of angry metal, in which the roar
of angrier men was no more than a discord in the guttural harmony. Her
senses became almost deadened under the strain. Her cheeks grew
thinner, her eyes took on a fixed look. She seemed like one in a
dream. She was only conscious in an isolated kind of way. Louder than
all the noises of the clanging day was the beating of her heart. Her
very body seemed to throb, the pulses in her temples were like hammers
hurting her brain.

At last she was roused by the sound of horses' hoofs.

So the service-corps were coming at last to take up the wounded and
bury the dead. There were so many dead, so few wounded!

The galloping came nearer and nearer. It was now as loud as thunder
almost. It stopped short. She gave a sigh of relief. Her vigil was
ended. Stafford was still alive. There was yet a chance for him to
know that friends were with him at the last, and also what had
happened at Brinkwort's Farm after he had left yesterday.

She leaned out to see her rescuers. A cry broke from her. Here was one
man frantically hitching a pair of artillery-horses to the gun and
swearing fiercely in the Taal as he did so.

The last time she had seen that khaki hat, long, threadbare
frock-coat, huge Hessian boots and red neckcloth was at Brinkwort's
Farm. The last time she had seen that malevolent face was when its
owner was marched away from Brinkwort's Farm yesterday.

It was Krool.

An instant later she had dragged Stafford out from beneath the gun,
for it was clear that the madman intended to ride off with it.

When Krool saw her first he was fastening the last hook of the traces
with swift, trained fingers. He stood dumfounded for a moment. The
superstitious, half-mystical thing in him came trembling to his eyes;
then he saw Stafford's body, and he realized the situation. A look of
savage hatred came into his face, and he made a step forward with
sudden impulse, as though he would spring upon Stafford. His hand was
upon a knife at his belt. But the horses plunged and strained, and he
saw in the near distance a troop of cavalry.

With an obscene malediction at the body, he sprang upon a horse. A
sjambok swung, and with a snort, which was half a groan, the trained
horses sprang forward.

"The Rooinek's gun for Oom Paul!" he shouted back over his shoulder.

Most prisoners would have been content to escape and save their skins,
but a more primitive spirit lived in Krool. Escape was not enough for
him. Since he had been foiled at Brinkwort's Farm and could not reach
Rudyard Byng; since he would be shot the instant he was caught after
his escape--if he was caught--he would do something to gall the pride
of the verdomde English. The gun which the Boers had not dared to
issue forth and take, which the British could not rescue without heavy
loss while the battle was at its height--he would ride it over the
hills into the Boers' camp.

There was something so grotesque in the figure of the half-caste, with
his copper-coat flying behind him as the horses galloped away, that a
wan smile came to Al'mah's lips. With Stafford at her feet in the
staring sun she yet could not take her eyes from the man, the horses,
and the gun. And not Al'mah alone shaded and strained eyes to follow
the tumbling, bouncing gun. Rifles, maxims, and pom-poms opened fire
upon it. It sank into a hollow and was partially lost to sight; it
rose again and jerked forward, the dust rising behind it like surf. It
swayed and swung, as the horses wildly took the incline of the hills,
Krool's sjambok swinging above them; it struggled with the forces that
dragged it higher and higher up, as though it were human and
understood that it was a British gun being carried into the Boer
lines.

At first a battery of the Boers, fighting a rear-guard action, had
also fired on it, but the gunners saw quickly that a single British
gun was not likely to take up an advance position and attack alone,
and their fire died away. Thinking only that some daring Boer was
doing the thing with a thousand odds against him, they roared approval
as the gun came nearer and nearer.

Though the British poured a terrific fire after the flying battery of
one gun, there was something so splendid in the episode; the horses
were behaving so gallantly,--horses of one of their own batteries
daringly taken by Krool under the noses of the force--that there was
scarcely a man who was not glad when, at last, the gun made a sudden
turn at a kopje, and was lost to sight within the Boer lines, leaving
behind it a little cloud of dust.

Tommy Atkins had his uproarious joke about it, but there was one man
who breathed a sigh of relief when he heard of it. That was Barry
Whalen. He had every reason to be glad that Krool was out of the way,
and that Rudyard Byng would see him no more. Sitting beside the still
unconscious Ian Stafford on the veld, Al'mah's reflections were much
the same as those of Barry Whalen.

With the flight of Krool and the gun came the end of Al'mah's
vigil. The troop of cavalry which galloped out to her was followed by
the Red Cross wagons.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

"PHEIDIPPIDES"


At dawn, when the veld breathes odours of a kind pungency and
fragrance, which only those know who have made it their bed and
friend, the end came to the man who had lain under the gun.

"Pheidippides!" the dying Stafford said, with a grim touch of the
humour which had ever been his. He was thinking of the Greek runner
who brought the news of victory to Athens and fell dead as he told it.

It almost seemed from the look on Stafford's face that, in very truth,
he was laying aside the impedimenta of the long march and the battle,
to carry the news to that army of the brave in Walhalla who had died
for England before they knew that victory was hers.

"Pheidippides," he repeated, and Rudyard Byng, whose eyes were so much
upon the door, watching and waiting for some one to come, pressed his
hand and said: "You know the best, Stafford. So many didn't. They had
to go before they knew."

"I have my luck," Stafford replied, but yet there was a wistful look
in his face.

His eyes slowly closed, and he lay so motionless that Al'mah and
Rudyard thought he had gone. He scarcely seemed to notice when Al'mah
took the hand that Rudyard had held, and the latter, with quick,
noiseless steps, left the room.

What Rudyard had been watching and waiting for was come.

Jasmine was at the door. His message had brought her in time.

"Is it dangerous?" she asked, with a face where tragedy had written
self-control.

"As bad as can be," he answered. "Go in and speak to him, Jasmine. It
will help him."

He opened the door softly. As Jasmine entered, Al'mah with a glance of
pity and friendship at the face upon the bed, passed into another
room.

There was a cry in Jasmine's heart, but it did not reach her lips.

She stole to the bed and laid her fingers upon the hand lying white
and still upon the coverlet.

At once the eyes of the dying man opened. This was a touch that would
reach to the farthest borders of his being--would bring him back from
the Immortal Gates. Through the mist of his senses he saw her. He half
raised himself. She pillowed his head on her breast. He smiled. A
light transfigured his face.

"All's well," he said, with a long sigh, and his body sank slowly
down.

"Ian! Ian!" she cried, but she knew that he could not hear.



CHAPTER XXXIX

"THE ROAD IS CLEAR"


The Army had moved on over the hills, into the valley of death and
glory, across the parched veld to the town of Lordkop, where an
emaciated, ragged garrison had kept faith with all the heroes from
Caractacus to Nelson. Courageous legions had found their way to the
petty dorp, with its corrugated iron roofs, its dug-outs, its
improvised forts, its fever hospitals, its Treasure House of Britain,
where she guarded the jewels of her honour.

The menace of the hills had passed, heroes had welcomed heroes and
drunk the cup of triumph; but far back in the valleys beyond the hills
from which the army had come, there were those who must drink the cup
of trembling, the wine of loss.

As the trumpets of victory attended the steps of those remnants of
brigades which met the remnants of a glorious garrison in the streets
of Lordkop, drums of mourning conducted the steps of those who came to
bury the dust of one who had called himself Pheidippides as he left
the Day Path and took the Night Road.

Gun-carriage and reversed arms and bay charger, faithful comrades with
bent heads, the voice of victory over the grave--"I am the
resurrection and the life"--the volleys of honour, the proud salut of
the brave to the vanished brave, the quivering farewells of the few
who turn away from the fresh-piled earth with their hearts dragging
behind--all had been; and all had gone. Evening descended upon the
veld with a golden radiance which soothed like prayer.

By the open window at the foot of a bed in the Stay Awhile Hospital a
woman gazed into the saffron splendour with an intentness which seemed
to make all her body listen. Both melancholy and purpose marked the
attitude of the figure.

A voice from the bed at the foot of which she stood drew her gaze away
from the sunset sky to meet the bright, troubled eyes.

"What is it, Jigger?" the woman asked gently, and she looked to see
that the framework which kept the bedclothes from a shattered leg was
properly in its place.

"'E done a lot for me," was the reply. "A lot 'e done, and I dunno how
I'll git along now."

There was great hopelessness in the tone.

"He told me you would always have enough to help you get on,
Jigger. He thought of all that."

"'Ere, oh, 'ere it ain't that," the lad said in a sudden passion of
protest, the tears standing in his eyes. "It ain't that! Wot's money,
when your friend wot give it ain't 'ere! I never done nothing for
'im--that's wot I feel. Nothing at all for 'im."

"You are wrong," was the soft reply. "He told me only a few days ago
that you were like a loaf of bread in the cupboard--good for all the
time."

The tears left the wide blue eyes. "Did 'e say that--did 'e?" he
asked, and when she nodded and smiled, he added, "'E's 'appy now,
ain't 'e?" His look questioned her eagerly.

For an instant she turned and gazed at the sunset, and her eyes took
on a strange mystical glow. A colour came to her face, as though from
strong flush of feeling, then she turned to him again, and answered
steadily:

"Yes, he is happy now."

"How do you know?" the lad asked with awe in his face, for he believed
in her utterly. Then, without waiting for her to answer, he added: "Is
it, you hear him say so, as I hear you singin' in my sleep
sometimes--singin', singin', as you did at Glencader, that first time
I ever 'eerd you? Is it the same as me in my sleep?"

"Yes, it is like that--just like that," she answered, taking his hand,
and holding it with a motherly tenderness.

"Ain't you never goin' to sing again?" he added.

She was silent, looking at him almost abstractedly.

"This war'll be over pretty soon now," he continued, "and we'll all
have to go back to work."

"Isn't this work?" Al'mah asked with a smile, which had in it
something of her old whimsical self.

"It ain't play, and it ain't work," he answered with a sage frown of
intellectual effort." It's a cut above 'em both--that's my fancy."

"It would seem like that," was the response. "What are you going to do
when you get back to England?" she inquired.

"I thought I'd ask you that," he replied anxiously. "Couldn't I be a
scene-shifter or somefink at the opery w'ere you sing?"

"I'm going to sing again, am I?" she asked.

"You'd have to be busy," he protested admiringly.

"Yes, I'll have to be busy," she replied, her voice ringing a little,
"and we'll have to find a way of being busy together."

"His gryce'd like that," he responded.

She turned her face slowly to the evening sky, where grey clouds
became silver and piled up to a summit of light. She was silent for a
long time.

"If work won't cure, nothing will," she said in a voice scarce above a
whisper. Her body trembled a little, and her eyes closed, as though to
shut out something that pained her sight.

"I wish you'd sing somethin'--same as you did that night at Glencader,
about the green hill far away," whispered the little trumpeter from
the bed.

She looked at him for a moment meditatively, then shook her head, and
turned again to the light in the evening sky.

"P'raps she's makin' up a new song," Jigger said to himself.

On a kopje overlooking the place where Ian Stafford had been laid to
sleep to the call of the trumpets, two people sat watching the sun go
down. Never in the years that had gone had there been such silence
between them as they sat together. Words had been the clouds in which
the lightning of their thoughts had been lost; they had been the
disguises in which the truth of things masqueraded. They had not dared
to be silent, lest the truth should stalk naked before them. Silence
would have revealed their unhappiness; they would not have dared to
look closely and deeply into each other's face, lest revelation should
force them to say, "It has been a mistake; let us end it." So they had
talked and talked and acted, and yet had done nothing and been
nothing.

Now they were silent, because they had tossed into the abyss of Time
the cup of trembling, and had drunk of the chalice of peace. Over the
grave into which, this day, they had thrown the rock-roses and sprigs
of the karoo bush, they had, in silence, made pledges to each other,
that life's disguises should be no more for them; that the door should
be wide open between the chambers where their souls dwelt, each in its
own pension of being, with its own individual sense, but with the same
light, warmth, and nutriment, and with the free confidence which
exempts life from its confessions. There should be no hidden things
any more.

There was a smile on the man's face as he looked out over the
valley. With this day had come triumph for the flag he loved, for the
land where he was born, and also the beginning of peace for the land
where he had worked, where he had won his great fortune. He had helped
to make this land what it was, and in battle he had helped to save it
from disaster.

But there had come another victory--the victory of Home. The
coincidence of all the vital values had come in one day, almost in one
hour.

Smiling, he laid his hand upon the delicate fingers of the woman
beside him, as they rested on her knee. She turned and looked at him
with an understanding which is the beginning of all happiness; and a
colour came to her cheeks such as he had not seen there for more days
than he could count. Her smile answered his own, but her eyes had a
sadness which would never wholly leave them. When he had first seen
those eyes he had thought them the most honest he had ever
known. Looking at them now, with confidence restored, he thought again
as he did that night at the opera the year of the Raid.

"It's all before us still, Jasmine," he said with a ring of purpose
and a great gentleness in his tone.

Her hand trembled, the shadows deepened in her eyes, but determination
gathered at her lips.

Some deep-cherished, deferred resolve reasserted itself.

"But I cannot--I cannot go on until you know all, Rudyard, and then
you may not wish to go on," she said. Her voice shook, and the colour
went from her lips. "I must be honest now--at last, about
everything. I want to tell you--"

He got to his feet. Stooping, he raised her, and looked her squarely
in the eyes.

"Tell me nothing, Jasmine," he said. Then he added in a voice of
finality, "There is nothing to tell." Holding both her hands tight in
one of his own, he put his fingers on her lips.

"A fresh start for a long race--the road is clear," he said firmly.

Looking into his eyes, she knew that he read her life and soul, that
in his deep primitive way he understood her as she had been and as she
was, and yet was content to go on. Her head drooped upon his breast.

A trumpet-call rang out piercingly sweet across the valley. It echoed
and echoed away among the hills.

He raised his head to listen. Pride, vision and power were in his
eyes.

"It's all before us still, Jasmine," he said again.

Her fingers tightened on his.

THE END



GLOSSARY:

AASVOGEL Vulture.

ALFALFA Lucerne.

BILTONG Strips of dried meat.

DISSELBOOM The single shaft of an ox-wagon.

DONGA A gulley or deep fissure in the soil.

DOPPER A dissenter from the Dutch Reformed Church, but generally
applied to Dutchmen in South Africa.

DORP Settlement or town.

KAROO The highlands of the interior of South Africa.

KOPJE A rounded hillock.

KLOOF A gap or pass in mountains.

KRAAL Native hut; also a walled inclosure for cattle.

KRANZES Rocky precipices.

MEERKAT A species of ichneumon.

ROOINEK Literally, "red-neck"; term applied to British soldiers by the
Boers.

SCHANSES Intrenchments (or fissures on hills).

SJAMBOK A stick or whip made from hippopotamus or rhinoceros hide.

SPRUIT A small stream.

STOEP Veranda of a Dutch house.

TAAL South African Dutch.

TREK To move from place to place with belongings.

VELD An open grassy plain.

VELDSCHOEN Rough untanned leather shoes.

VERDOMDE Damned.

VIERKLEUR The national flag (four colours) of the late South African
Republics.

VOORTREKKER Pioneer.

VROUW Wife.






PIERRE AND HIS PEOPLE

TALES OF THE FAR NORTH

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 1.



CONTENTS

Volume 1.
THE PATROL OF THE CYPRESS HILLS
GOD'S GARRISON
A HAZARD OF THE NORTH

Volume 2.
A PRAIRIE VAGABOND
SHE OF THE TRIPLE CHEVRON
THREE OUTLAWS

Volume 3.
SHON MCGANN'S TOBOGAN RIDE
PERE CHAMPAGNE
THE SCARLET HUNTER
THE STONE

Volume 4.
THE TALL MASTER
THE CRIMSON FLAG
THE FLOOD
IN PIPI VALLEY

Volume 5.
ANTOINE AND ANGELIQUE
THE CIPHER
A TRAGEDY OF NOBODIES
A SANCTUARY OF THE PLAINS




GENERAL INTRODUCTION

With each volume of this subscription edition (1912) there is a special
introduction, setting forth, in so far as seemed possible, the relation
of each work to myself, to its companion works, and to the scheme of my
literary life. Only one or two things, therefore, need be said here, as I
wish God-speed to this edition, which, I trust, may help to make old
friends warmer friends and new friends more understanding.  Most of the
novels and most of the short stories were suggested by incidents or
characters which I had known, had heard of intimately, or, as in the case
of the historical novels, had discovered in the works of historians.  In
no case are the main characters drawn absolutely from life; they are not
portraits; and the proof of that is that no one has ever been able to
identify, absolutely, any single character in these books.  Indeed, it
would be impossible for me to restrict myself to actual portraiture.  It
is trite to say that photography is not art, and photography has no charm
for the artist, or the humanitarian indeed, in the portrayal of life.
At its best it is only an exhibition of outer formal characteristics,
idiosyncrasies, and contours.  Freedom is the first essential of the
artistic mind.  As will be noticed in the introductions and original
notes to several of these volumes, it is stated that they possess
anachronisms; that they are not portraits of people living or dead, and
that they only assume to be in harmony with the spirit of men and times
and things.  Perhaps in the first few pages of 'The Right of Way'
portraiture is more nearly reached than in any other of these books, but
it was only the nucleus, if I may say so, of a larger development which
the original Charley Steele never attained.  In the novel he grew to
represent infinitely more than the original ever represented in his short
life.

That would not be strange when it is remembered that the germ of The
'Right of Way' was growing in my mind over a long period of years, and
it must necessarily have developed into a larger conception than the
original character could have suggested.  The same may be said of the
chief characters in 'The Weavers'.  The story of the two brothers--David
Claridge and Lord Eglington--in that book was brewing in my mind for
quite fifteen years, and the main incidents and characters of other
novels in this edition had the same slow growth.  My forthcoming novel,
called 'The Judgment House', had been in my mind for nearly twenty years
and only emerged when it was full grown, as it were; when I was so
familiar with the characters that they seemed as real in all ways as
though they were absolute people and incidents of one's own experience.

Little more need be said.  In outward form the publishers have made this
edition beautiful.  I should be ill-content if there was not also an
element of beauty in the work of the author.  To my mind truth alone
is not sufficient.  Every work of art, no matter how primitive in
conception, how tragic or how painful, or even how grotesque in design
--like the gargoyles on Notre Dame must have, too, the elements of
beauty--that which lures and holds, the durable and delightful thing.
I have a hope that these books of mine, as faithful to life as I could
make them, have also been touched here and there by the staff of beauty.
Otherwise their day will be short indeed; and I should wish for them a
day a little longer at least than my day and span.

I launch the ship.  May it visit many a port!  May its freight never lie
neglected on the quays!




INTRODUCTION

So far as my literary work is concerned 'Pierre and His People' may be
likened to a new city built upon the ashes of an old one.  Let me
explain.  While I was in Australia I began a series of short stories
and sketches of life in Canada which I called 'Pike Pole Sketches on the
Madawaska'.  A very few of them were published in Australia, and I
brought with me to England in 1889 about twenty of them to make into a
volume.  I told Archibald Forbes, the great war correspondent, of my wish
for publication, and asked him if he would mind reading the sketches and
stories before I approached a publisher.  He immediately consented, and
one day I brought him the little brown bag containing the tales.

A few days afterwards there came an invitation to lunch, and I went to
Clarence Gate, Regent's Park, to learn what Archibald Forbes thought of
my tales.  We were quite merry at luncheon, and after luncheon, which for
him was a glass of milk and a biscuit, Forbes said to me, "Those stories,
Parker--you have the best collection of titles I have ever known."  He
paused.  I understood.  To his mind the tales did not live up to their
titles.  He hastily added, "But I am going to give you a letter of
introduction to Macmillan.  I may be wrong."  My reply was: "You need not
give me a letter to Macmillan unless I write and ask you for it."

I took my little brown bag and went back to my comfortable rooms in an
old-fashioned square.  I sat down before the fire on this bleak winter's
night with a couple of years' work on my knee.  One by one I glanced
through the stories and in some cases read them carefully, and one by one
I put them in the fire, and watched them burn.  I was heavy at heart, but
I felt that Forbes was right, and my own instinct told me that my ideas
were better than my performance--and Forbes was right.  Nothing was left
of the tales; not a shred of paper, not a scrap of writing.  They had all
gone up the chimney in smoke.  There was no self-pity.  I had a grim kind
of feeling regarding the thing, but I had no regrets, and I have never
had any regrets since.  I have forgotten most of the titles, and indeed
all the stories except one.  But Forbes and I were right; of that I am
sure.

The next day after the arson I walked for hours where London was busiest.
The shop windows fascinated me; they always did; but that day I seemed,
subconsciously, to be looking for something.  At last I found it.  It was
a second-hand shop in Covent Garden.  In the window there was the uniform
of an officer of the time of Wellington, and beside it--the leather coat
and fur cap of a trapper of the Hudson's Bay Company!  At that window I
commenced to build again upon the ashes of last night's fire.  Pretty
Pierre, the French half-breed, or rather the original of him as I knew
him when a child, looked out of the window at me.  So I went home, and
sitting in front of the fire which had received my manuscript the night
before, with a pad upon my knee, I began to write 'The Patrol of the
Cypress Hills' which opens 'Pierre and His People'.

The next day was Sunday.  I went to service at the Foundling Hospital in
Bloomsbury, and while listening superficially to the sermon I was also
reading the psalms.  I came upon these words, "Free among the Dead like
unto them that are wounded and lie in the grave, that are out of
remembrance," and this text, which I used in the story 'The Patrol of the
Cypress Hills', became, in a sense, the text for all the stories which
came after.  It seemed to suggest the lives and the end of the lives of
the workers of the pioneer world.

So it was that Pierre and His People chiefly concerned those who had been
wounded by Fate, and had suffered the robberies of life and time while
they did their work in the wide places.  It may be that my readers have
found what I tried, instinctively, to convey in the pioneer life I
portrayed--"The soul of goodness in things evil."  Such, on the whole,
my observation had found in life, and the original of Pierre, with all
his mistakes, misdemeanours, and even crimes, was such an one as I would
have gone to in trouble or in hour of need, knowing that his face would
never be turned from me.

These stories made their place at once.  The 'Patrol of the Cypress
Hills' was published first in 'The Independent' of New York and in
'Macmillan's Magazine' in England.  Mr. Bliss Carman, then editor of 'The
Independent', eagerly published several of them--'She of the Triple
Chevron' and others.  Mr. Carman's sympathy and insight were a great help
to me in those early days.  The then editor of 'Macmillan's Magazine',
Mr. Mowbray Morris, was not, I think, quite so sure of the merits of the
Pierre stories.  He published them, but he was a little credulous
regarding them, and he did not pat me on the back by any means.  There
was one, however, who made the best that is in 'Pierre and His People'
possible; this was the unforgettable W. E. Henley, editor of The
'National Observer'.  One day at a sitting I wrote a short story called
'Antoine and Angelique', and sent it to him almost before the ink was
dry.  The reply came by return of post: "It is almost, or quite, as good
as can be.  Send me another."  So forthwith I sent him 'God's Garrison',
and it was quickly followed by 'The Three Outlaws', 'The Tall Master',
'The Flood', 'The Cipher', 'A Prairie Vagabond', and several others.  At
length came 'The Stone', which brought a telegram of congratulation, and
finally 'The Crimson Flag'.  The acknowledgment of that was a postcard
containing these all too-flattering words: "Bravo, Balzac!"  Henley would
print what no other editor would print; he gave a man his chance to do
the boldest thing that was in him, and I can truthfully say that the
doors which he threw open gave freedom to an imagination and an
individuality of conception, for which I can never be sufficiently
grateful.

These stories and others which appeared in 'The National Observer', in
'Macmillan's', in 'The English Illustrated Magazine' and others made many
friends; so that when the book at length came out it was received with
generous praise, though not without some criticism.  It made its place,
however, at once, and later appeared another series, called 'An
Adventurer of the North', or, as it is called in this edition, 'A Romany
of the Snows'.  Through all the twenty stories of this second volume the
character of Pierre moved; and by the time the last was written there was
scarcely an important magazine in the English-speaking world which had
not printed one or more of them.  Whatever may be thought of the stories
themselves, or of the manner in which the life of the Far North was
portrayed, of one thing I am sure: Pierre was true to the life--to his
race, to his environment, to the conditions of pioneer life through which
he moved.  When the book first came out there was some criticism from
Canada itself, but that criticism has long since died away, and it never
was determined.

Plays have been founded on the 'Pierre' series, and one in particular,
'Pierre of the Plains', had a considerable success, with Mr. Edgar
Selwyn, the adapter, in the main part.  I do not know whether, if I were
to begin again, I should have written all the Pierre stories in quite the
same way.  Perhaps it is just as well that I am not able to begin again.
The stories made their own place in their own way, and that there is
still a steady demand for 'Pierre and His People' and 'A Romany of the
Snows' seems evidence that the editor of an important magazine in New
York who declined to recommend them for publication to his firm (and
later published several of the same series) was wrong, when he said that
the tales "seemed not to be salient."  Things that are not "salient" do
not endure.  It is twenty years since 'Pierre and His People' was
produced--and it still endures.  For this I cannot but be deeply
grateful.  In any case, what 'Pierre' did was to open up a field which
had not been opened before, but which other authors have exploited since
with success and distinction.  'Pierre' was the pioneer of the Far North
in fiction; that much may be said; and for the rest, Time is the test,
and Time will have its way with me as with the rest.




NOTE

It is possible that a Note on the country portrayed in these stories may
be in keeping.  Until 1870, the Hudson's Bay Company--first granted its
charter by King Charles II--practically ruled that vast region stretching
from the fiftieth parallel of latitude to the Arctic Ocean--a handful of
adventurous men entrenched in forts and posts, yet trading with, and
mostly peacefully conquering, many savage tribes.  Once the sole master
of the North, the H. B. C. (as it is familiarly called) is reverenced by
the Indians and half-breeds as much as, if not more than, the Government
established at Ottawa.  It has had its forts within the Arctic Circle; it
has successfully exploited a country larger than the United States.  The
Red River Valley, the Saskatchewan Valley, and British Columbia, are now
belted by a great railway, and given to the plough; but in the far north
life is much the same as it was a hundred years ago.  There the trapper,
clerk, trader, and factor are cast in the mould of another century,
though possessing the acuter energies of this.  The 'voyageur' and
'courier de bois' still exist, though, generally, under less picturesque
names.

The bare story of the hardy and wonderful career of the adventurers
trading in Hudson's Bay,--of whom Prince Rupert was once chiefest,--and
the life of the prairies, may be found in histories and books of travel;
but their romances, the near narratives of individual lives, have waited
the telling.  In this book I have tried to feel my way towards the heart
of that life--worthy of being loved by all British men, for it has given
honest graves to gallant fellows of our breeding.  Imperfectly, of
course, I have done it; but there is much more to be told.

When I started Pretty Pierre on his travels, I did not know--nor did he
--how far or wide his adventurers and experiences would run.  They have,
however, extended from Quebec in the east to British Columbia in the
west, and from the Cypress Hills in the south to the Coppermine River
in the north.  With a less adventurous man we had had fewer happenings.
His faults were not of his race, that is, French and Indian,--nor were
his virtues; they belong to all peoples.  But the expression of these
is affected by the country itself.  Pierre passes through this series of
stories, connecting them, as he himself connects two races, and here and
there links the past of the Hudson's Bay Company with more modern life
and Canadian energy pushing northward.  Here is something of romance
"pure and simple," but also traditions and character, which are the
single property of this austere but not cheerless heritage of our race.

All of the tales have appeared in magazines and journals--namely, 'The
National Observer', 'Macmillan's', 'The National Review', and 'The
English Illustrated'; and 'The Independent of New York'.  By the courtesy
of the proprietors of these I am permitted to republish.

                                        G. P.

HARPENDEN,
HERTFORDSHIRE,
July, 1892.





BOOK 1.

THE PATROL OF THE CYPRESS HILLS
GOD'S GARRISON
A HAZARD OF THE NORTH



THE PATROL OF THE CYPRESS HILLS

"He's too ha'sh," said old Alexander Windsor, as he shut the creaking
door of the store after a vanishing figure, and turned to the big iron
stove with outstretched hands; hands that were cold both summer and
winter.  He was of lean and frigid make.

"Sergeant Fones is too ha'sh," he repeated, as he pulled out the damper
and cleared away the ashes with the iron poker.

Pretty Pierre blew a quick, straight column of cigarette smoke into the
air, tilted his chair back, and said: "I do not know what you mean by
'ha'sh,' but he is the devil.  Eh, well, there was more than one devil
made sometime in the North West."  He laughed softly.

"That gives you a chance in history, Pretty Pierre," said a voice from
behind a pile of woollen goods and buffalo skins in the centre of the
floor.  The owner of the voice then walked to the window.  He scratched
some frost from the pane and looked out to where the trooper in dog-skin
coat, gauntlets and cap, was mounting his broncho.  The old man came and
stood near the young man,--the owner of the voice,--and said again: "He's
too ha'sh."

"Harsh you mean, father," added the other.

"Yes, harsh you mean, Old Brown Windsor,--quite harsh," said Pierre.

Alexander Windsor, storekeeper and general dealer, was sometimes called
"Old Brown Windsor" and sometimes "Old Aleck," to distinguish him from
his son, who was known as "Young Aleck."

As the old man walked back again to the stove to warm his hands, Young
Aleck continued: "He does his duty, that's all.  If he doesn't wear kid
gloves while at it, it's his choice.  He doesn't go beyond his duty.
You can bank on that.  It would be hard to exceed that way out here."

"True, Young Aleck, so true; but then he wears gloves of iron, of ice.
That is not good.  Sometime the glove will be too hard and cold on a
man's shoulder, and then!--Well, I should like to be there," said Pierre,
showing his white teeth.

Old Aleck shivered, and held his fingers where the stove was red hot.

The young man did not hear this speech; from the window he was watching
Sergeant Fones as he rode towards the Big Divide.  Presently he said:
"He's going towards Humphrey's place.  I--" He stopped, bent his brows,
caught one corner of his slight moustache between his teeth, and did not
stir a muscle until the Sergeant had passed over the Divide.

Old Aleck was meanwhile dilating upon his theme before a passive
listener.  But Pierre was only passive outwardly.  Besides hearkening to
the father's complaints he was closely watching the son.  Pierre was
clever, and a good actor.  He had learned the power of reserve and
outward immobility.  The Indian in him helped him there.  He had heard
what Young Aleck had just muttered; but to the man of the cold fingers he
said: "You keep good whisky in spite of the law and the iron glove, Old
Aleck."  To the young man: "And you can drink it so free, eh, Young
Aleck?"

The half-breed looked out of the corners of his eyes at the young man,
but he did not raise the peak of his fur cap in doing so, and his glances
askance were not seen.

Young Aleck had been writing something with his finger-nail on the frost
of the pane, over and over again.  When Pierre spoke to him thus he
scratched out the word he had written, with what seemed unnecessary
force.  But in one corner it remained:

"Mab--"

Pierre added: "That is what they say at Humphrey's ranch."

"Who says that at Humphrey's?--Pierre, you lie!" was the sharp and
threatening reply.  The significance of this last statement had been
often attested on the prairies by the piercing emphasis of a six-
chambered revolver.  It was evident that Young Aleck was in earnest.
Pierre's eyes glowed in the shadow, but he idly replied:

"I do not remember quite who said it.  Well, 'mon ami,' perhaps I lie;
perhaps.  Sometimes we dream things, and these dreams are true.  You call
it a lie--'bien!'  Sergeant Fones, he dreams perhaps Old Aleck sells
whisky against the law to men you call whisky runners, sometimes to
Indians and half-breeds--halfbreeds like Pretty Pierre.  That was a dream
of Sergeant Fones; but you see he believes it true.  It is good sport,
eh?  Will you not take--what is it?--a silent partner?  Yes; a silent
partner, Old Aleck.  Pretty Pierre has spare time, a little, to make
money for his friends and for himself, eh?"

When did not Pierre have time to spare?  He was a gambler.  Unlike the
majority of half-breeds, he had a pronounced French manner, nonchalant
and debonair.

The Indian in him gave him coolness and nerve.  His cheeks had a tinge of
delicate red under their whiteness, like those of a woman.  That was why
he was called Pretty Pierre.  The country had, however, felt a kind of
weird menace in the name.  It was used to snakes whose rattle gave notice
of approach or signal of danger.  But Pretty Pierre was like the death-
adder, small and beautiful, silent and deadly.  At one time he had made
a secret of his trade, or thought he was doing so.  In those days he was
often to be seen at David Humphrey's home, and often in talk with Mab
Humphrey; but it was there one night that the man who was ha'sh gave him
his true character, with much candour and no comment.

Afterwards Pierre was not seen at Humphrey's ranch.  Men prophesied that
he would have revenge some day on Sergeant Fones; but he did not show
anything on which this opinion could be based.  He took no umbrage at
being called Pretty Pierre the gambler.  But for all that he was
possessed of a devil.

Young Aleck had inherited some money through his dead mother from his
grandfather, a Hudson's Bay factor.  He had been in the East for some
years, and when he came back he brought his "little pile" and an
impressionable heart with him.  The former Pretty Pierre and his friends
set about to win; the latter, Mab Humphrey won without the trying.  Yet
Mab gave Young Aleck as much as he gave her.  More.  Because her love
sprang from a simple, earnest, and uncontaminated life.  Her purity and
affection were being played against Pierre's designs and Young Aleck's
weakness.  With Aleck cards and liquor went together.  Pierre seldom
drank.

But what of Sergeant Fones?  If the man that knew him best--the
Commandant--had been asked for his history, the reply would have been:
"Five years in the Service, rigid disciplinarian, best non-commissioned
officer on the Patrol of the Cypress Hills."  That was all the Commandant
knew.

A soldier-policeman's life on the frontier is rough, solitary, and
severe.  Active duty and responsibility are all that make it endurable.
To few is it fascinating.  A free and thoughtful nature would, however,
find much in it, in spite of great hardships, to give interest and even
pleasure.  The sense of breadth and vastness, and the inspiration of pure
air could be a very gospel of strength, beauty, and courage, to such an
one--for a time.  But was Sergeant Fones such an one?  The Commandant's
scornful reply to a question of the kind would have been: "He is the best
soldier on the Patrol."

And so with hard gallops here and there after the refugees of crime or
misfortune, or both, who fled before them like deer among the passes of
the hills, and, like deer at bay, often fought like demons to the death;
with border watchings, and protection and care and vigilance of the
Indians; with hurried marches at sunrise, the thermometer at fifty
degrees below zero often in winter, and open camps beneath the stars, and
no camp at all, as often as not, winter and summer; with rough barrack
fun and parade and drill and guard of prisoners; and with chances now and
then to pay homage to a woman's face, the Mounted Force grew full of the
Spirit of the West and became brown, valiant, and hardy, with wind and
weather.  Perhaps some of them longed to touch, oftener than they did,
the hands of children, and to consider more the faces of women,--for
hearts are hearts even under a belted coat of red on the Fiftieth
Parallel,--but men of nerve do not blazon their feelings.

No one would have accused Sergeant Fones of having a heart.  Men of keen
discernment would have seen in him the little Bismarck of the Mounted
Police.  His name carried farther on the Cypress Hills Patrol than any
other; and yet his officers could never say that he exceeded his duty
or enlarged upon the orders he received.  He had no sympathy with crime.
Others of the force might wink at it; but his mind appeared to sit
severely upright upon the cold platform of Penalty, in beholding breaches
of the statutes.  He would not have rained upon the unjust as the just if
he had had the directing of the heavens.  As Private Gellatly put it:
"Sergeant Fones has the fear o' God in his heart, and the law of the land
across his saddle, and the newest breech-loading at that!"  He was part
of the great machine of Order, the servant of Justice, the sentinel in
the vestibule of Martial Law.  His interpretation of duty worked upward
as downward.  Officers and privates were acted on by the force known as
Sergeant Fones.  Some people, like Old Brown Windsor, spoke hardly and
openly of this force.  There were three people who never did--Pretty
Pierre, Young Aleck, and Mab Humphrey.  Pierre hated him; Young Aleck
admired in him a quality lying dormant in himself--decision; Mab Humphrey
spoke unkindly of no one.  Besides--but no!

What was Sergeant Fones's country?  No one knew.  Where had he come from?
No one asked him more than once.  He could talk French with Pierre,
--a kind of French that sometimes made the undertone of red in the
Frenchman's cheeks darker.  He had been heard to speak German to a German
prisoner, and once, when a gang of Italians were making trouble on a line
of railway under construction, he arrested the leader, and, in a few
swift, sharp words in the language of the rioters, settled the business.
He had no accent that betrayed his nationality.

He had been recommended for a commission.  The officer in command had
hinted that the Sergeant might get a Christmas present.  The officer had
further said: "And if it was something that both you and the Patrol would
be the better for, you couldn't object, Sergeant."  But the Sergeant only
saluted, looking steadily into the eyes of the officer.  That was his
reply.  Private Gellatly, standing without, heard Sergeant Fones say, as
he passed into the open air, and slowly bared his forehead to the winter
sun:

"Exactly."

And Private Gellatly cried, with revolt in his voice, "Divils me own, the
word that a't to have been full o' joy was like the clip of a rifle-
breech."

Justice in a new country is administered with promptitude and vigour,
or else not administered at all.  Where an officer of the Mounted Police-
Soldiery has all the powers of a magistrate, the law's delay and the
insolence of office have little space in which to work.  One of the
commonest slips of virtue in the Canadian West was selling whisky
contrary to the law of prohibition which prevailed.  Whisky runners were
land smugglers.  Old Brown Windsor had, somehow, got the reputation of
being connected with the whisky runners; not a very respectable business,
and thought to be dangerous.  Whisky runners were inclined to resent
intrusion on their privacy with a touch of that biting inhospitableness
which a moonlighter of Kentucky uses toward an inquisitive, unsympathetic
marshal.  On the Cypress Hills Patrol, however, the erring servants of
Bacchus were having a hard time of it.  Vigilance never slept there in
the days of which these lines bear record.  Old Brown Windsor had,
in words, freely espoused the cause of the sinful.  To the careless
spectator it seemed a charitable siding with the suffering; a proof that
the old man's heart was not so cold as his hands.  Sergeant Fones thought
differently, and his mission had just been to warn the store-keeper that
there was menacing evidence gathering against him, and that his
friendship with Golden Feather, the Indian Chief, had better cease at
once.  Sergeant Fones had a way of putting things.  Old Brown Windsor
endeavoured for a moment to be sarcastic.  This was the brief dialogue in
the domain of sarcasm:

"I s'pose you just lit round in a friendly sort of way, hopin' that I'd
kenoodle with you later."

"Exactly."

There was an unpleasant click to the word.  The old man's hands got
colder.  He had nothing more to say.

Before leaving, the Sergeant said something quietly and quickly to Young
Aleck.  Pierre observed, but could not hear.  Young Aleck was uneasy;
Pierre was perplexed.  The Sergeant turned at the door, and said in
French: "What are your chances for a Merry Christmas at Pardon's Drive,
Pretty Pierre?"  Pierre answered nothing.  He shrugged his shoulders, and
as the door closed, muttered, "Il est le diable."  And he meant it.  What
should Sergeant Fones know of that intended meeting at Pardon's Drive on
Christmas Day?  And if he knew, what then?  It was not against the law to
play euchre.  Still it perplexed Pierre.  Before the Windsors, father and
son, however, he was, as we have seen, playfully cool.

After quitting Old Brown Windsor's store, Sergeant Fones urged his stout
broncho to a quicker pace than usual.  The broncho was, like himself,
wasteful of neither action nor affection.  The Sergeant had caught him
wild and independent, had brought him in, broken him, and taught him
obedience.  They understood each other; perhaps they loved each other.
But about that even Private Gellatly had views in common with the general
sentiment as to the character of Sergeant Fones.  The private remarked
once on this point "Sarpints alive! the heels of the one and the law of
the other is the love of them.  They'll weather together like the Divil
and Death."

The Sergeant was brooding; that was not like him.  He was hesitating;
that was less like him.  He turned his broncho round as if to cross the
Big Divide and to go back to Windsor's store; but he changed his mind
again, and rode on toward David Humphrey's ranch.  He sat as if he had
been born in the saddle.  His was a face for the artist, strong and
clear, and having a dominant expression of force.  The eyes were deepset
and watchful.  A kind of disdain might be traced in the curve of the
short upper lip, to which the moustache was clipped close--a good fit,
like his coat.  The disdain was more marked this morning.

The first part of his ride had been seen by Young Aleck, the second part
by Mab Humphrey.  Her first thought on seeing him was one of apprehension
for Young Aleck and those of Young Aleck's name.  She knew that people
spoke of her lover as a ne'er-do-weel; and that they associated his name
freely with that of Pretty Pierre and his gang.  She had a dread of
Pierre, and, only the night before, she had determined to make one last
great effort to save Aleck, and if he would not be saved--strange that,
thinking it all over again, as she watched the figure on horseback coming
nearer, her mind should swerve to what she had heard of Sergeant Fones's
expected promotion.  Then she fell to wondering if anyone had ever given
him a real Christmas present; if he had any friends at all; if life meant
anything more to him than carrying the law of the land across his saddle.
Again he suddenly came to her in a new thought, free from apprehension,
and as the champion of her cause to defeat the half-breed and his gang,
and save Aleck from present danger or future perils.

She was such a woman as prairies nurture; in spirit broad and thoughtful
and full of energy; not so deep as the mountain woman, not so
imaginative, but with more persistency, more daring.  Youth to her was a
warmth, a glory.  She hated excess and lawlessness, but she could
understand it.  She felt sometimes as if she must go far away into the
unpeopled spaces, and shriek out her soul to the stars from the fulness
of too much life.  She supposed men had feelings of that kind too, but
that they fell to playing cards and drinking instead of crying to the
stars.  Still, she preferred her way.

Once, Sergeant Fones, on leaving the house, said grimly after his
fashion: "Not Mab but Ariadne--excuse a soldier's bluntness.....
Good-bye!" and with a brusque salute he had ridden away.  What he meant
she did not know and could not ask.  The thought instantly came to her
mind: Not Sergeant Fones; but who?  She wondered if Ariadne was born on
the prairie.  What knew she of the girl who helped Theseus, her lover, to
slay the Minotaur?  What guessed she of the Slopes of Naxos?  How old was
Ariadne?  Twenty?  For that was Mab's age.  Was Ariadne beautiful? She
ran her fingers loosely through her short brown hair, waving softly
about her Greek-shaped head, and reasoned that Ariadne must have been
presentable, or Sergeant Fones would not have made the comparison.
She hoped Ariadne could ride well, for she could.

But how white the world looked this morning, and how proud and brilliant
the sky!  Nothing in the plane of vision but waves of snow stretching to
the Cypress Hills; far to the left a solitary house, with its tin roof
flashing back the sun, and to the right the Big Divide.  It was an old-
fashioned winter, not one in which bare ground and sharp winds make life
outdoors inhospitable.  Snow is hospitable-clean, impacted snow; restful
and silent.  But there was one spot in the area of white, on which Mab's
eyes were fixed now, with something different in them from what had been
there.  Again it was a memory with which Sergeant Fones was associated.
One day in the summer just past she had watched him and his company put
away to rest under the cool sod, where many another lay in silent
company, a prairie wanderer, some outcast from a better life gone by.
Afterwards, in her home, she saw the Sergeant stand at the window,
looking out towards the spot where the waves in the sea of grass were
more regular and greener than elsewhere, and were surmounted by a high
cross.  She said to him--for she of all was never shy of his stern ways:

"Why is the grass always greenest there, Sergeant Fones?"

He knew what she meant, and slowly said: "It is the Barracks of the
Free."

She had no views of life save those of duty and work and natural joy and
loving a ne'er-do-weel, and she said: "I do not understand that."

And the Sergeant replied: "'Free among the Dead like unto them that are
wounded and lie in the grave, who are out of remembrance.'"

But Mab said again: "I do not understand that either."

The Sergeant did not at once reply.  He stepped to the door and gave a
short command to some one without, and in a moment his company was
mounted in line; handsome, dashing fellows; one the son of an English
nobleman, one the brother of an eminent Canadian politician, one related
to a celebrated English dramatist.  He ran his eye along the line, then
turned to Mab, raised his cap with machine-like precision, and said: "No,
I suppose you do not understand that.  Keep Aleck Windsor from Pretty
Pierre and his gang.  Good-bye."

Then he mounted and rode away.  Every other man in the company looked
back to where the girl stood in the doorway; he did not.  Private
Gellatly said, with a shake of the head, as she was lost to view: "Devils
bestir me, what a widdy she'll make!"  It was understood that Aleck
Windsor and Mab Humphrey were to be married on the coming New Year's Day.
What connection was there between the words of Sergeant Fones and those
of Private Gellatly?  None, perhaps.

Mab thought upon that day as she looked out, this December morning, and
saw Sergeant Fones dismounting at the door.  David Humphrey, who was
outside, offered to put up the Sergeant's horse; but he said: "No, if
you'll hold him just a moment, Mr. Humphrey, I'll ask for a drink of
something warm, and move on.  Miss Humphrey is inside, I suppose?"

"She'll give you a drink of the best to be had on your patrol, Sergeant,"
was the laughing reply.  "Thanks for that, but tea or coffee is good
enough for me," said the Sergeant.  Entering, the coffee was soon in the
hand of the hardy soldier.  Once he paused in his drinking and scanned
Mab's face closely.  Most people would have said the Sergeant had an
affair of the law in hand, and was searching the face of a criminal; but
most people are not good at interpretation.  Mab was speaking to the
chore-girl at the same time and did not see the look.  If she could have
defined her thoughts when she, in turn, glanced into the Sergeant's face,
a moment afterwards, she would have said, "Austerity fills this man.
Isolation marks him for its own."  In the eyes were only purpose,
decision, and command.  Was that the look that had been fixed upon her
face a moment ago?  It must have been.  His features had not changed a
breath.  Mab began their talk.

"They say you are to get a Christmas present of promotion, Sergeant
Fones."

"I have not seen it gazetted," he answered enigmatically.

"You and your friends will be glad of it."

"I like the service."

"You will have more freedom with a commission."  He made no reply, but
rose and walked to the window, and looked out across the snow, drawing on
his gauntlets as he did so.

She saw that he was looking where the grass in summer was the greenest!

He turned and said:

"I am going to barracks now.  I suppose Young Aleck will be in quarters
here on Christmas Day, Miss Mab?"

"I think so," and she blushed.

"Did he say he would be here?"

"Yes."

"Exactly."

He looked toward the coffee.  Then: "Thank you.....Good-bye."

"Sergeant?"

"Miss Humphrey!"

"Will you not come to us on Christmas Day?"

His eyelids closed swiftly and opened again.  "I shall be on duty."

"And promoted?"

"Perhaps."

"And merry and happy?"--she smiled to herself to think of Sergeant Fones
being merry and happy.

"Exactly."

The word suited him.

He paused a moment with his fingers on the latch, and turned round as if
to speak; pulled off his gauntlet, and then as quickly put it on again.
Had he meant to offer his hand in good-bye?  He had never been seen to
take the hand of anyone except with the might of the law visible in
steel.

He opened the door with the right hand, but turned round as he stepped
out, so that the left held it while he faced the warmth of the room and
the face of the girl.  The door closed.

Mounted, and having said good-bye to Mr. Humphrey, he turned towards the
house, raised his cap with soldierly brusqueness, and rode away in the
direction of the barracks.

The girl did not watch him.  She was thinking of Young Aleck, and of
Christmas Day, now near.  The Sergeant did not look back.

Meantime the party at Windsor's store was broken up.  Pretty Pierre and
Young Aleck had talked together, and the old man had heard his son say:
"Remember, Pierre, it is for the last time."  Then they talked after this
fashion:

"Ah, I know, 'mon ami;'  for the last time!  'Eh, bien,' you will spend
Christmas Day with us too--no?  You surely will not leave us on the day
of good fortune?  Where better can you take your pleasure for the last
time?  One day is not enough for farewell.  Two, three; that is the magic
number.  You will, eh? no?  Well, well, you will come to-morrow--and--eh,
'mon ami,' where do you go the next day?  Oh, 'pardon,' I forgot, you
spend the Christmas Day--I know.  And the day of the New Year?  Ah, Young
Aleck, that is what they say--the devil for the devil's luck.  So."

"Stop that, Pierre."  There was fierceness in the tone.  "I spend the
Christmas Day where you don't, and as I like, and the rest doesn't
concern you.  I drink with you, I play with you--'bien!'  As you say
yourself, 'bien,' isn't that enough?"

"'Pardon!'  We will not quarrel.  No; we spend not the Christmas Day
after the same fashion, quite.  Then, to-morrow at Pardon's Drive!
Adieu!"

Pretty Pierre went out of one door, a malediction between his white
teeth, and Aleck went out of another door with a malediction upon his
gloomy lips.  But both maledictions were levelled at the same person.
Poor Aleck.

"Poor Aleck!"  That is the way we sometimes think of a good nature gone
awry; one that has learned to say cruel maledictions to itself, and
against which demons hurl their deadly maledictions too.  Alas, for the
ne'er-do-weel!

That night a stalwart figure passed from David Humphrey's door, carrying
with him the warm atmosphere of a good woman's love.  The chilly outer
air of the world seemed not to touch him, Love's curtains were drawn so
close.  Had one stood within "the Hunter's Room," as it was called, a
little while before, one would have seen a man's head bowed before a
woman, and her hand smoothing back the hair from the handsome brow where
dissipation had drawn some deep lines.  Presently the hand raised the
head until the eyes of the woman looked full into the eyes of the man.

"You will not go to Pardon's Drive again, will you, Aleck?"

"Never again after Christmas Day, Mab.  But I must go to-morrow.  I have
given my word."

"I know.  To meet Pretty Pierre and all the rest, and for what?  Oh,
Aleck, isn't the suspicion about your father enough, but you must put
this on me as well?"

"My father must suffer for his wrong-doing if he does wrong, and I for
mine."

There was a moment's silence.  He bowed his head again.

"And I have done wrong to us both.  Forgive me, Mab."

She leaned over and caressed his hair.  "I forgive you, Aleck."

A thousand new thoughts were thrilling through him.  Yet this man had
given his word to do that for which he must ask forgiveness of the woman
he loved.  But to Pretty Pierre, forgiven or unforgiven, he would keep
his word.  She understood it better than most of those who read this
brief record can.  Every sphere has its code of honour and duty peculiar
to itself.

"You will come to me on Christmas morning, Aleck?"

"I will come on Christmas morning."

"And no more after that of Pretty Pierre?"

"And no more of Pretty Pierre."

She trusted him; but neither could reckon with unknown forces.

Sergeant Fones, sitting in the barracks in talk with Private Gellatly,
said at that moment in a swift silence, "Exactly."

Pretty Pierre, at Pardon's Drive, drinking a glass of brandy at that
moment, said to the ceiling:

"No more of Pretty Pierre after to-morrow night, monsieur!  Bien!  If it
is for the last time, then it is for the last time.  So....so."

He smiled.  His teeth were amazingly white.

The stalwart figure strode on under the stars, the white night a lens for
visions of days of rejoicing to come.  All evil was far from him.  The
dolorous tide rolled back in this hour from his life, and he revelled in
the light of a new day.

"When I've played my last card to-morrow night with Pretty Pierre, I'll
begin the world again," he whispered.

And Sergeant Fones in the barracks said just then, in response to a
further remark of Private Gellatly,--"Exactly."

Young Aleck fell to singing:

                   "Out from your vineland come
                       Into the prairies wild;
                    Here will we make our home,
                       Father, mother, and child;
                    Come, my love, to our home,
                       Father, mother, and child,
                       Father, mother, and--"

He fell to thinking again--"and child--and child,"--it was in his ears
and in his heart.

But Pretty Pierre was singing softly to himself in the room at Pardon's
Drive:

              "Three good friends with the wine at night
                    Vive la compagnie!
               Two good friends when the sun grows bright
                    Vive la compagnie!
                    Vive la, vive la, vive l'amour!
                    Vive la, vive la, vive l'amour!
               Three good friends, two good friends
                    Vive la compagnie!"

What did it mean?

Private Gellatly was cousin to Idaho Jack, and Idaho Jack disliked Pretty
Pierre, though he had been one of the gang.  The cousins had seen each
other lately, and Private Gellatly had had a talk with the man who was
ha'sh.  It may be that others besides Pierre had an idea of what it
meant.

In the house at Pardon's Drive the next night sat eight men, of whom
three were Pretty Pierre, Young Aleck, and Idaho Jack.  Young Aleck's
face was flushed with bad liquor and the worse excitement of play.  This
was one of the unreckoned forces.  Was this the man that sang the tender
song under the stars last night?  Pretty Pierre's face was less pretty
than usual; the cheeks were pallid, the eyes were hard and cold.  Once he
looked at his partner as if to say, "Not yet."  Idaho Jack saw the look;
he glanced at his watch; it was eleven o'clock.  At that moment the door
opened, and Sergeant Fones entered.  All started to their feet, most with
curses on their lips; but Sergeant Fones never seemed to hear anything
that could make a feature of his face alter.  Pierre's hand was on his
hip, as if feeling for something.  Sergeant Fones saw that; but he walked
to where Aleck stood, with his unplayed cards still in his hand, and,
laying a hand on his shoulder, said, "Come with me."

"Why should I go with you?"--this with a drunken man's bravado.

"You are my prisoner."

Pierre stepped forward.  "What is his crime?" he exclaimed.

"How does that concern you, Pretty Pierre?"

"He is my friend."

"Is he your friend, Aleck?"

What was there in the eyes of Sergeant Fones that forced the reply,--
"To-night, yes; to-morrow, no."

"Exactly.  It is near to-morrow; come."

Aleck was led towards the door.  Once more Pierre's hand went to his hip;
but he was looking at the prisoner, not at the Sergeant.  The Sergeant
saw, and his fingers were at his belt.  He opened the door.  Aleck passed
out.  He followed.  Two horses were tied to a post.  With difficulty
Aleck was mounted.  Once on the way his brain began slowly to clear, but
he grew painfully cold.  It was a bitter night.  How bitter it might have
been for the ne'er-do-weel let the words of Idaho Jack, spoken in a long
hour's talk next day with Old Brown Windsor, show.  "Pretty Pierre, after
the two were gone, said, with a shiver of curses,--'Another hour and it
would have been done, and no one to blame.  He was ready for trouble.
His money was nearly finished.  A little quarrel easily made, the door
would open, and he would pass out.  His horse would be gone, he could not
come back; he would walk.  The air is cold, quite, quite cold; and the
snow is a soft bed.  He would sleep well and sound, having seen Pretty
Pierre for the last time.  And now--'  The rest was French and furtive."

From that hour Idaho Jack and Pretty Pierre parted company.

Riding from Pardon's Drive, Young Aleck noticed at last that they were
not going towards the barracks.  He said: "Why do you arrest me?"

The Sergeant replied: "You will know that soon enough.  You are now going
to your own home.  Tomorrow you will keep your word and go to David
Humphrey's place; the next day I will come for you.  Which do you choose:
to ride with me to-night to the barracks and know why you are arrested,
or go, unknowing, as I bid you, and keep your word with the girl?"

Through Aleck's fevered brain, there ran the words of the song he sang
before--

                   "Out from your vineland come
                       Into the prairies wild;
                    Here will we make our home,
                       Father, mother, and child."

He could have but one answer.

At the door of his home the Sergeant left him with the words, "Remember
you are on parole."

Aleck noticed as the Sergeant rode away that the face of the sky had
changed, and slight gusts of wind had come up.  At any other time his
mind would have dwelt upon the fact.  It did not do so now.

Christmas Day came.  People said that the fiercest night, since the
blizzard day of 1863, had been passed.  But the morning was clear and
beautiful.  The sun came up like a great flower expanding.  First the
yellow, then the purple, then the red, and then a mighty shield of roses.
The world was a blanket of drift, and down, and glistening silver.

Mab Humphrey greeted her lover with such a smile as only springs to a
thankful woman's lips.  He had given his word and had kept it; and the
path of the future seemed surer.

He was a prisoner on parole; still that did not depress him.  Plans for
coming days were talked of, and the laughter of many voices filled the
house.  The ne'er-do-weel was clothed and in his right mind.  In the
Hunter's Room the noblest trophy was the heart of a repentant prodigal.

In the barracks that morning a gazetted notice was posted, announcing,
with such technical language as is the custom, that Sergeant Fones was
promoted to be a lieutenant in the Mounted Police Force of the North West
Territory.  When the officer in command sent for him he could not be
found.  But he was found that morning; and when Private Gellatly, with
a warm hand, touching the glove of "iron and ice" that, indeed, now said:
"Sergeant Fones, you are promoted, God help you!" he gave no sign.
Motionless, stern, erect, he sat there upon his horse, beside a stunted
larch tree.  The broncho seemed to understand, for he did not stir, and
had not done so for hours;--they could tell that.  The bridle rein was
still in the frigid fingers, and a smile was upon the face.

A smile upon the face of Sergeant Fones!

Perhaps he smiled that he was going to the Barracks of the Free--

"Free among the Dead like unto them that are wounded and lie in the
grave, that are out of remembrance."

In the wild night he had lost his way, though but a few miles from the
barracks.

He had done his duty rigidly in that sphere of life where he had lived so
much alone among his many comrades.  Had he exceeded his duty once in
arresting Young Aleck?

When, the next day, Sergeant Fones lay in the barracks, over him the flag
for which he had sworn to do honest service, and his promotion papers in
his quiet hand, the two who loved each other stood beside him for many a
throbbing minute.  And one said to herself, silently: "I felt sometimes"
--but no more words did she say even to herself.

Old Aleck came in, and walked to where the Sergeant slept, wrapped close
in that white frosted coverlet which man wears but once.  He stood for a
moment silent, his fingers numbly clasped.

Private Gellatly spoke softly: "Angels betide me, it's little we knew the
great of him till he wint away; the pride, and the law--and the love of
him."

In the tragedy that faced them this Christmas morning one at least had
seen "the love of him."  Perhaps the broncho had known it before.

Old Aleck laid a palm upon the hand he had never touched when it had
life.  "He's--too--ha'sh," he said slowly.

Private Gellatly looked up wonderingly.  But the old man's eyes were wet.







GOD'S GARRISON

Twenty years ago there was trouble at Fort o' God.  "Out of this place we
get betwixt the suns," said Gyng the Factor.  "No help that falls abaft
tomorrow could save us.  Food dwindles, and ammunition's nearly gone, and
they'll have the cold steel in our scalp-locks if we stay.  We'll creep
along the Devil's Causeway, then through the Red Horn Woods, and so
across the plains to Rupert House.  Whip in the dogs, Baptiste, and be
ready all of you at midnight."

"And Grah the Idiot--what of him"? asked Pretty Pierre.

"He'll have to take his chance.  If he can travel with us, so much the
better for him"; and the Factor shrugged his shoulders.

"If not, so much the worse, eh"? returned Pretty Pierre.

"Work the sum out to suit yourself.  We've got our necks to save.  God'll
have to help the Idiot if we can't."

"You hear, Grah Hamon, Idiot," said Pierre an hour afterwards, "we're
going to leave Fort o' God and make for Rupert House.  You've a dragging
leg, you're gone in the savvy, you have to balance yourself with your
hands as you waddle along, and you slobber when you talk; but you've got
to cut away with us quick across the Beaver Plains, and Christ'll have to
help you if we can't.  That's what the Factor says, and that's how the
case stands, Idiot--'bien?'"

"Grah want pipe--bubble--bubble--wind blow," muttered the daft one.

Pretty Pierre bent over and said slowly: "If you stay here, Grah, the
Indian get your scalp; if you go, the snow is deep and the frost is like
a badger's tooth, and you can't be carried."

"Oh, Oh!--my mother dead--poor Annie--by God, Grah want pipe--poor Grah
sleep in snow-bubble, bubble--Oh, Oh!--the long wind, fly away."

Pretty Pierre watched the great head of the Idiot as it swung heavily on
his shoulders, and then said: "'Mais,' like that, so!" and turned away.

When the party were about to sally forth on their perilous path to
safety, Gyng stood and cried angrily: "Well, why hasn't some one bundled
up that moth-eaten Caliban?  Curse it all, must I do everything myself?"

"But you see," said Pierre, "the Caliban stays at Fort o' God."

"You've got a Christian heart in you, so help me, Heaven!" replied the
other.  "No, sir, we give him a chance,--and his Maker too for that
matter, to show what He's willing to do for His misfits."

Pretty Pierre rejoined, "Well, I have thought.  The game is all against
Grah if he go; but there are two who stay at Fort o' God."

And that is how, when the Factor and his half-breeds and trappers stole
away in silence towards the Devil's Causeway, Pierre and the Idiot
remained behind.  And that is why the flag of the H. B. C. still flew
above Fort o' God in the New Year's sun just twenty years ago to-day.

The Hudson's Bay Company had never done a worse day's work than when they
promoted Gyng to be chief factor.  He loathed the heathen and he showed
his loathing.  He had a heart harder than iron, a speech that bruised
worse than the hoof of an angry moose.  And when at last he drove away a
band of wandering Sioux, foodless, from the stores, siege and ambush took
the place of prayer, and a nasty portion fell to Fort o' God.  For the
Indians found a great cache of buffalo meat, and, having sent the women
and children south with the old men, gave constant and biting assurances
to Gyng that the heathen hath his hour, even though he be a dog which is
refused those scraps from the white man's table which give life in the
hour of need.  Besides all else, there was in the Fort the thing which
the gods made last to humble the pride of men--there was rum.

And the morning after Gyng and his men had departed, because it was a day
when frost was master of the sun, and men grew wild for action, since to
stand still was to face indignant Death, they, who camped without,
prepared to make a sally upon the wooden gates.  Pierre saw their intent,
and hid in the ground some pemmican and all the scanty rum.  Then he
looked at his powder and shot, and saw that there was little left.  If he
spent it on the besiegers, how should they fare for beast and fowl in
hungry days?  And for his rifle he had but a brace of bullets.  He rolled
these in his hand, looking upon them with a grim smile.  And the Idiot,
seeing, rose and sidled towards him, and said: "Poor Grah want pipe--
bubble--bubble."  Then a light of childish cunning came into his eyes,
and he touched the bullets blunderingly, and continued: "Plenty, plenty
b'longs Grah--give poor Grah pipe--plenty, plenty, give you these."

And Pretty Pierre after a moment replied: "So that's it, Grah?--you've
got bullets stowed away?  Well, I must have them.  It's a one-sided game
in which you get the tricks; but here's the pipe, Idiot--my only pipe for
your dribbling mouth--my last good comrade.  Now show me the bullets.
Take me to them, daft one, quick."

A little later the Idiot sat inside the store, wrapped in loose furs, and
blowing bubbles; while Pretty Pierre, with many handfuls of bullets by
him, waited for the attack.

"Eh," he said, as he watched from a loophole, "Gyng and the others have
got safely past the Causeway, and the rest is possible.  Well, it hurts
an idiot as much to die, perhaps, as a half-breed or a factor.  It is
good to stay here.  If we fight, and go out swift like Grah's bubbles,
it is the game.  If we starve and sleep as did Grah's mother, then it
also is the game.  It is great to have all the chances against and then
to win.  We shall see."

With a sharp relish in his eye he watched the enemy coming slowly
forward.  Yet he talked almost idly to himself: "I have a thought of so
long ago.  A woman--she was a mother, and it was on the Madawaska River,
and she said: 'Sometimes I think a devil was your father, an angel
sometimes.  You were begot in an hour between a fighting and a mass:
between blood and heaven.  And when you were born you made no cry.  They
said that was a sign of evil.  You refused the breast, and drank only of
the milk of wild cattle.  In baptism you flung your hand before your face
that the water might not touch, nor the priest's finger make a cross upon
the water.  And they said it were better if you had been born an idiot
than with an evil spirit; and that your hand would be against the loins
that bore you.  But Pierre, ah Pierre, you love your mother, do you
not?'" .  .  .  And he standing now, his eye closed with the gate-chink
in front of Fort o' God, said quietly: "She was of the race that hated
these--my mother; and she died of a wound they gave her at the Tete
Blanche Hill.  Well, for that you die now, Yellow Arm, if this gun has a
bullet cold enough."

A bullet pinged through the sharp air, as the Indians swarmed towards the
gate, and Yellow Arm, the chief, fell.  The besiegers paused; and then,
as if at the command of the fallen man, they drew back, bearing him to
the camp, where they sat down and mourned.

Pierre watched them for a time; and, seeing that they made no further
move, retired into the store, where the Idiot muttered and was happy
after his kind.  "Grah got pipe--blow away--blow away to Annie--pretty
soon."

"Yes, Grah, there's chance enough that you'll blow away to Annie pretty
soon," remarked the other.

"Grah have white eagles--fly, fly on the wind--oh, oh, bubble, bubble!"
and he sent the filmy globes floating from the pipe that a camp of river-
drivers had given the half-breed winters before.

Pierre stood and looked at the wandering eyes, behind which were the
torturings of an immense and confused intelligence; a life that fell
deformed before the weight of too much brain, so that all tottered from
the womb into the gutters of foolishness, and the tongue mumbled of chaos
when it should have told marvellous things.  And the half-breed, the
thought of this coming upon him, said: "Well, I think the matters of hell
have fallen across the things of heaven, and there is storm.  If for one
moment he could think clear, it would be great."

He bethought him of a certain chant, taught him by a medicine man in
childhood, which, sung to the waving of a torch in a place of darkness,
caused evil spirits to pass from those possessed, and good spirits to
reign in their stead.  And he raised the Idiot to his feet, and brought
him, maundering, to a room where no light was.  He kneeled before him
with a lighted torch of bear's fat and the tendons of the deer, and
waving it gently to and fro, sang the ancient rune, until the eye of the
Idiot, following the torch at a tangent as it waved, suddenly became
fixed upon the flame, when it ceased to move.  And the words of the chant
ran through Grah's ears, and pierced to the remote parts of his being;
and a sickening trouble came upon his face, and the lips ceased to drip,
and were caught up in twinges of pain.  .  .  .  The chant rolled on:
"Go forth, go forth upon them, thou, the Scarlet Hunter!  Drive them
forth into the wilds, drive them crying forth!  Enter in, O enter in, and
lie upon the couch of peace, the couch of peace within my wigwam, thou
the wise one!  Behold, I call to thee!"

And Pierre, looking upon the Idiot, saw his face glow, and his eye stream
steadily to the light, and he said, "What is it that you see, Grah?--
speak!"

All pitifulness and struggle had gone from the Idiot's face, and a strong
calm fell upon it, and the voice of a man that God had created spoke
slowly: "There is an end of blood.  The great chief Yellow Arm is fallen.
He goeth to the plains where his wife will mourn upon his knees, and his
children cry, because he that gathered food is gone, and the pots are
empty on the fire.  And they who follow him shall fight no more.  Two
shall live through bitter days, and when the leaves shall shine in the
sun again, there shall good things befal.  But one shall go upon a long
journey with the singing birds in the path of the white eagle.  He shall
travel, and not cease until he reach the place where fools, and children,
and they into whom a devil entered through the gates of birth, find the
mothers who bore them.  But the other goeth at a different time--"
At this point the light in Pretty Pierre's hand flickered and went out,
and through the darkness there came a voice, the voice of an idiot, that
whimpered: "Grah want pipe--Annie, Annie dead."

The angel of wisdom was gone, and chaos spluttered on the lolling lips
again; the Idiot sat feeling for the pipe that he had dropped.

And never again through the days that came and went could Pierre, by any
conjuring, or any swaying torch, make the fool into a man again.  The
devils of confusion were returned forever.  But there had been one
glimpse of the god.  And it was as the Idiot had said when he saw with
the eyes of that god: no more blood was shed.  The garrison of this fort
held it unmolested.  The besiegers knew not that two men only stayed
within the walls; and because the chief begged to be taken south to die,
they left the place surrounded by its moats of ice and its trenches of
famine; and they came not back.

But other foes more deadly than the angry heathen came, and they were
called Hunger and Loneliness.  The one destroyeth the body and the other
the brain.  But Grah was not lonely, nor did he hunger.  He blew his
bubbles, and muttered of a wind whereon a useless thing--a film of water,
a butterfly, or a fool--might ride beyond the reach of spirit, or man,
or heathen.  His flesh remained the same, and grew not less; but that of
Pierre wasted, and his eye grew darker with suffering.  For man is only
man, and hunger is a cruel thing.  To give one's food to feed a fool, and
to search the silent plains in vain for any living thing to kill, is a
matter for angels to do and bear, and not mere mortals.  But this man had
a strength of his own like to his code of living, which was his own and
not another's.  And at last, when spring leaped gaily forth from the grey
cloak of winter, and men of the H. B. C. came to relieve Fort o' God, and
entered at its gates, a gaunt man, leaning on his rifle, greeted them
standing like a warrior, though his body was like that of one who had
lain in the grave.  He answered to the name of Pierre without pride, but
like a man and not as a sick woman.  And huddled on the floor beside him
was an idiot fondling a pipe, with a shred of pemmican at his lips.

As if in irony of man's sacrifice, the All Hail and the Master of Things
permitted the fool to fulfil his own prophecy, and die of a sudden
sickness in the coming-on of summer.  But he of God's Garrison that
remained repented not of his deed.  Such men have no repentance, neither
of good nor evil.






A HAZARD OF THE NORTH

Nobody except Gregory Thorne and myself knows the history of the Man and
Woman, who lived on the Height of Land, just where Dog Ear River falls
into Marigold Lake.  This portion of the Height of Land is a lonely
country.  The sun marches over it distantly, and the man of the East--
the braggart--calls it outcast; but animals love it; and the shades of
the long-gone trapper and 'voyageur' saunter without mourning through its
fastnesses.  When you are in doubt, trust God's dumb creatures--and the
happy dead who whisper pleasant promptings to us, and whose knowledge is
mighty.  Besides, the Man and Woman lived there, and Gregory Thorne says
that they could recover a lost paradise.  But Gregory Thorne is an
insolent youth.  The names of these people were John and Audrey
Malbrouck; the Man was known to the makers of backwoods history as
Captain John.  Gregory says about that--but no, not yet!--let his first
meeting with the Man and the Woman be described in his own words, unusual
and flippant as they sometimes are; for though he is a graduate of
Trinity College, Cambridge, and a brother of a Right Honourable, he has
conceived it his duty to emancipate himself in the matter of style in
language; and he has succeeded.

"It was autumn," he said, "all colours; beautiful and nippy on the Height
of Land; wild ducks, the which no man could number, and bear's meat
abroad in the world.  I was alone.  I had hunted all day, leaving my mark
now and then as I journeyed, with a cache of slaughter here, and a blazed
hickory there.  I was hungry as a circus tiger--did you ever eat slippery
elm bark?--yes, I was as bad as that.  I guessed from what I had been
told, that the Malbrouck show must be hereaway somewhere.  I smelled the
lake miles off--oh, you could too if you were half the animal I am; I
followed my nose and the slippery-elm between my teeth, and came at a
double-quick suddenly on the fair domain.  There the two sat in front of
the house like turtle-doves, and as silent as a middy after his first
kiss.  Much as I ached to get my tooth into something filling, I wished
that I had 'em under my pencil, with that royal sun making a rainbow of
the lake, the woods all scarlet and gold, and that mist of purple--eh,
you've seen it?--and they sitting there monarchs of it all, like that
duffer of a king who had operas played for his solitary benefit.  But
I hadn't a pencil and I had a hunger, and I said 'How!' like any other
Injin--insolent, wasn't it?  Then the Man rose, and he said I was
welcome, and she smiled an approving but not very immediate smile, and
she kept her seat,--she kept her seat, my boy,--and that was the first
thing that set me thinking.  She didn't seem to be conscious that there
was before her one of the latest representatives from Belgravia, not she!
But when I took an honest look at her face, I understood.  I'm glad that
I had my hat in my hand, polite as any Frenchman on the threshold of a
blanchisserie: for I learned very soon that the Woman had been in
Belgravia too, and knew far more than I did about what was what.  When
she did rise to array the supper table, it struck me that if Josephine
Beauharnais had been like her, she might have kept her hold on Napoleon,
and saved his fortunes; made Europe France; and France the world. I could
not understand it.  Jimmy Haldane had said to me when I was asking for
Malbrouck's place on the compass,--'Don't put on any side with them, my
Greg, or you'll take a day off for penitence.'  They were both tall and
good to look at, even if he was a bit rugged, with neck all wire and
muscle, and had big knuckles.  But she had hands like those in a picture
of Velasquez, with a warm whiteness and educated--that's it, educated
hands.

"She wasn't young, but she seemed so.  Her eyes looked up and out at you
earnestly, yet not inquisitively, and more occupied with something in her
mind, than with what was before her.  In short, she was a lady; not one
by virtue of a visit to the gods that rule o'er Buckingham Palace, but by
the claims of good breeding and long descent.  She puzzled me, eluded me
--she reminded me of someone; but who?  Someone I liked, because I felt a
thrill of admiration whenever I looked at her--but it was no use, I
couldn't remember.  I soon found myself talking to her according to St.
James--the palace, you know--and at once I entered a bet with my beloved
aunt, the dowager--who never refuses to take my offer, though she seldom
wins, and she's ten thousand miles away, and has to take my word for it--
that I should find out the history of this Man and Woman before another
Christmas morning, which wasn't more than two months off.  You know
whether or not I won it, my son."

I had frequently hinted to Gregory that I was old enough to be his
father, and that in calling me his son, his language was misplaced; and I
repeated it at that moment.  He nodded good-humouredly, and continued:

"I was born insolent, my s--my ancestor.  Well, after I had cleared a
space at the supper table, and had, with permission, lighted my pipe,
I began to talk.  .  .  Oh yes, I did give them a chance occasionally;
don't interrupt.  .  .  .  I gossiped about England, France, the
universe.  From the brief comments they made I saw they knew all about
it, and understood my social argot, all but a few words--is there
anything peculiar about any of my words?  After having exhausted Europe
and Asia I discussed America; talked about Quebec, the folklore of the
French Canadians, the 'voyageurs' from old Maisonneuve down.  All the
history I knew I rallied, and was suddenly bowled out.  For Malbrouck
followed my trail from the time I began to talk, and in ten minutes he
had proved me to be a baby in knowledge, an emaciated baby; he eliminated
me from the equation.  He first tripped me on the training of naval
cadets; then on the Crimea; then on the taking of Quebec; then on the
Franco-Prussian War; then, with a sudden round-up, on India.  I had been
trusting to vague outlines of history; I felt when he began to talk that
I was dealing with a man who not only knew history, but had lived it.
He talked in the fewest but directest words, and waxed eloquent in a
blunt and colossal way.  But seeing his wife's eyes fixed on him
intently, he suddenly pulled up, and no more did I get from him
on the subject.  He stopped so suddenly that in order to help over the
awkwardness, though I'm not really sure there was any, I began to hum a
song to myself.  Now, upon my soul, I didn't think what I was humming;
it was some subterranean association of things, I suppose--but that
doesn't matter here.  I only state it to clear myself of any unnecessary
insolence.  These were the words I was maundering with this noble voice
of mine:

             "'The news I bring, fair Lady,
               Will make your tears run down

               Put off your rose-red dress so fine
               And doff your satin gown!

               Monsieur Malbrouck is dead, alas!
               And buried, too, for aye;

               I saw four officers who bore
               His mighty corse away.
                    .............
               We saw above the laurels,
               His soul fly forth amain.

               And each one fell upon his face
               And then rose up again.

               And so we sang the glories,
               For which great Malbrouck bled;
               Mironton, Mironton, Mirontaine,
               Great Malbrouck, he is dead.'

"I felt the silence grow peculiar, uncomfortable.  I looked up.  Mrs.
Malbrouck was rising to her feet with a look in her face that would make
angels sorry--a startled, sorrowful thing that comes from a sleeping
pain.  What an ass I was!  Why, the Man's name was Malbrouck; her name
was Malbrouck--awful insolence!  But surely there was something in the
story of the song itself that had moved her.  As I afterward knew,
that was it.  Malbrouck sat still and unmoved, though I thought I saw
something stern and masterful in his face as he turned to me; but again
instantly his eyes were bent on his wife with a comforting and
affectionate expression.  She disappeared into the house.  Hoping to make
it appear that I hadn't noticed anything, I dropped my voice a little and
went on, intending, however, to stop at the end of the verse:

             "'Malbrouck has gone a-fighting,
               Mironton, Mironton, Mirontaine!'

"I ended there; because Malbrouck's heavy hand was laid on my shoulder,
and he said: 'If you please, not that song.'

"I suspect I acted like an idiot.  I stammered out apologies, went down
on my litanies, figuratively speaking, and was all the same confident
that my excuses were making bad infernally worse.  But somehow the old
chap had taken a liking to me.--No, of course you couldn't understand
that.  Not that he was so old, you know; but he had the way of retired
royalty about him, as if he had lived life up to the hilt, and was all
pulse and granite.  Then he began to talk in his quiet way about hunting
and fishing; about stalking in the Highlands and tiger-hunting in India;
and wound up with some wonderful stuff about moose-hunting, the sport of
Canada.  This made me itch like sin, just to get my fingers on a trigger,
with a full moose-yard in view.  I can feel it now--the bound in the
blood as I caught at Malbrouck's arm and said: 'By George, I must kill
moose; that's sport for Vikings, and I was meant to be a Viking--or a
gladiator.'  Malbrouck at once replied that he would give me some moose-
hunting in December if I would come up to Marigold Lake.  I couldn't
exactly reply on the instant, because, you see, there wasn't much chance
for board and lodging thereabouts, unless--but he went on to say that I
should make his house my 'public,'perhaps he didn't say it quite in those
terms, that he and his wife would be glad to have me.  With a couple of
Indians we could go north-west, where the moose-yards were, and have some
sport both exciting and prodigious.  Well, I'm a muff, I know, but I
didn't refuse that.  Besides, I began to see the safe side of the bet I
had made with my aunt, the dowager, and I was more than pleased with what
had come to pass so far.  Lucky for you, too, you yarn-spinner, that the
thing did develop so, or you wouldn't be getting fame and shekels out of
the results of my story.

"Well, I got one thing out of the night's experience; and it was that the
Malbroucks were no plebs., that they had had their day where plates are
blue and gold and the spoons are solid coin.  But what had sent them up
here among the moose, the Indians, and the conies--whatever THEY are?
How should I get at it?  Insolence, you say?  Yes, that.  I should come
up here in December, and I should mulct my aunt in the price of a new
breech-loader.  But I found out nothing the next morning, and I left
with a paternal benediction from Malbrouck, and a smile from his wife
that sent my blood tingling as it hadn't tingled since a certain season
in London, which began with my tuneful lyre sounding hopeful numbers and
ended with it hanging on the willows.

"When I thought it all over, as I trudged back on yesterday's track, I
concluded that I had told them all my history from my youth up until now,
and had got nothing from them in return.  I had exhausted my family
records, bit by bit, like a curate in his first parish; and had gone so
far as to testify that one of my ancestors had been banished to Australia
for political crimes.  Distinctly they had me at an advantage, though,
to be sure, I had betrayed Mrs. Malbrouck into something more than
a suspicion of emotion.

"When I got back to my old camp, I could find out nothing from the other
fellows; but Jacques Pontiac told me that his old mate, Pretty Pierre,
who in recent days had fallen from grace, knew something of these people
that no one else guessed, because he had let them a part of his house
in the parish of St. Genevieve in Quebec, years before.  Pierre had
testified to one fact, that a child--a girl--had been born to Mrs.
Malbrouck in his house, but all further knowledge he had withheld.
Pretty Pierre was off in the Rocky Mountains practising his profession
--chiefly poker--and was not available for information.  What did I,
Gregory Thorne, want of the information anyway?  That's the point, my
son.  Judging from after-developments I suppose it was what the foolish
call occult sympathy.  Well, where was that girl-child?  Jacques Pontiac
didn't know.  Nobody knew.  And I couldn't get rid of Mrs. Malbrouck's
face; it haunted me; the broad brow, deep eyes, and high-bred sweetness
--all beautifully animal.  Don't laugh: I find astonishing likenesses
between the perfectly human and the perfectly animal.  Did you never see
how beautiful and modest the faces of deer are; how chic and sensitive is
the manner of a hound; nor the keen, warm look in the eye of a well-bred
mare?  Why, I'd rather be a good horse of blood and temper than half the
fellows I know.  You are not an animal lover as I am; yes, even when I
shoot them or fight them I admire them, just as I'd admire a swordsman
who, in 'quart,' would give me death by the wonderful upper thrust.  It's
all a battle; all a game of love and slaughter, my son, and both go
together.

"Well, as I say, her face followed me.  Watch how the thing developed.
By the prairie-track I went over to Fort Desire, near the Rockies, almost
immediately after this, to see about buying a ranch with my old chum at
Trinity, Polly Cliffshawe--Polydore, you know.  Whom should I meet in a
hut on the ranch but Jacques's friend, Pretty Pierre.  This was luck; but
he was not like Jacques Pontiac, he was secretive as a Buddhist deity.
He had a good many of the characteristics that go to a fashionable
diplomatist: clever, wicked, cool, and in speech doing the vanishing
trick just when you wanted him.  But my star of fortune was with me.  One
day Silverbottle, an Indian, being in a murderous humour, put a bullet in
Pretty Pierre's leg, and would have added another, only I stopped it
suddenly.  While in his bed he told me what he knew of the Malbroucks.

"This is the fashion of it.  John and Audrey Malbrouck had come to Quebec
in the year 1865, and sojourned in the parish of St. Genevieve, in the
house of the mother of Pretty Pierre.  Of an inquiring turn of mind, the
French half-breed desired to know concerning the history of these English
people, who, being poor, were yet gentle, and spoke French with a grace
and accent which was to the French-Canadian patois as Shakespeare's
English is to that of Seven Dials.  Pierre's methods of inquisitiveness
were not strictly dishonest.  He did not open letters, he did not besiege
dispatch-boxes, he did not ask impudent questions; he watched and
listened.  In his own way he found out that the man had been a soldier in
the ranks, and that he had served in India.  They were most attached to
the child, whose name was Marguerite.  One day a visitor, a lady, came to
them.  She seemed to be the cause of much unhappiness to Mrs. Malbrouck.
And Pierre was alert enough to discover that this distinguished-looking
person desired to take the child away with her.  To this the young mother
would not consent, and the visitor departed with some chillingly-polite
phrases, part English, part French, beyond the exact comprehension of
Pierre, and leaving the father and mother and little Marguerite happy.
Then, however, these people seemed to become suddenly poorer, and
Malbrouck began farming in a humble, but not entirely successful way.
The energy of the man was prodigious; but his luck was sardonic.  Floods
destroyed his first crops, prices ran low, debt accumulated, foreclosure
of mortgage occurred, and Malbrouck and the wife and child went west.

"Five years later, Pretty Pierre saw them again at Marigold Lake:
Malbrouck as agent for the Hudson's Bay Company--still poor, but
contented.  It was at this period that the former visitor again appeared,
clothed in purple and fine linen, and, strange as it may seem, succeeded
in carrying off the little child, leaving the father and mother broken,
but still devoted to each other.

"Pretty Pierre closed his narration with these words: ''Bien,' that
Malbrouck, he is great.  I have not much love of men, but he--well, if he
say,--"See, Pierre, I go to the home of the white bear and the winter
that never ends; perhaps we come back, perhaps we die; but there will be
sport for men--" 'voila!' I would go.  To know one strong man in this
world is good.  Perhaps, some time I will go to him--yes, Pierre, the
gambler, will go to him, and say: It is good for the wild dog that he
live near the lion.  And the child, she was beautiful; she had a light
heart and a sweet way.'"

It was with this slight knowledge that Gregory Thorne set out on his
journey over the great Canadian prairie to Marigold Lake, for his
December moose-hunt.

Gregory has since told me that, as he travelled with Jacques Pontiac
across the Height of Land to his destination, he had uncomfortable
feelings; presentiments, peculiar reflections of the past, and melancholy
--a thing far from habitual with him.  Insolence is all very well, but
you cannot apply it to indefinite thoughts; it isn't effective with vague
presentiments.  And when Gregory's insolence was taken away from him, he
was very like other mortals; virtue had gone out of him; his brown cheek
and frank eye had lost something of their charm.  It was these unusual
broodings that worried him; he waked up suddenly one night calling,
"Margaret!  Margaret!" like any childlike lover.  And that did not
please him.  He believed in things that, as he said himself, "he could
get between his fingers;" he had little sympathy with morbid
sentimentalities.  But there was an English Margaret in his life; and he,
like many another childlike man, had fallen in love, and with her--very
much in love indeed; and a star had crossed his love to a degree that
greatly shocked him and pleased the girl's relatives.  She was the
granddaughter of a certain haughty dame of high degree, who regarded
icily this poorest of younger sons, and held her darling aloof.  Gregory,
very like a blunt unreasoning lover, sought to carry the redoubt by wild
assault; and was overwhelmingly routed.  The young lady, though finding
some avowed pleasure in his company, accompanied by brilliant
misunderstanding of his advances and full-front speeches, had never given
him enough encouragement to warrant his playing young Lochinvar in Park
Lane; and his cup became full when, at the close of the season, she was
whisked off to the seclusion of a country-seat, whose walls to him were
impregnable.  His defeat was then, and afterwards, complete.  He pluckily
replied to the derision of his relatives with multiplied derision,
demanded his inheritance, got his traps together, bought a fur coat,
and straightway sailed the wintry seas to Canada.

His experiences had not soured his temper.  He believed that every dog
has his day, and that Fate was very malicious; that it brought down the
proud, and rewarded the patient; that it took up its abode in marble
halls, and was the mocker at the feast.  All this had reference, of
course, to the time when he should--rich as any nabob--return to London,
and be victorious over his enemy in Park Lane.  It was singular that he
believed this thing would occur; but he did.  He had not yet made his
fortune, but he had been successful in the game of buying and selling
lands, and luck seemed to dog his path.  He was fearless, and he had a
keen eye for all the points of every game--every game but love.

Yet he was born to succeed in that game too.  For though his theory was,
that everything should be treated with impertinence before you could get
a proper view of it, he was markedly respectful to people.  Few could
resist him; his impudence of ideas was so pleasantly mixed with
delicately suggested admiration of those to whom he talked.  It was
impossible that John Malbrouck and his wife could have received him
other than they did; his was the eloquent, conquering spirit.



II.

By the time he reached Lake Marigold he had shaken off all those hovering
fancies of the woods, which, after all, might only have been the
whisperings of those friendly and far-seeing spirits who liked the lad
as he journeyed through their lonely pleasure-grounds.  John Malbrouck
greeted him with quiet cordiality, and Mrs. Malbrouck smiled upon him
with a different smile from that with which she had speeded him a month
before; there was in it a new light of knowledge, and Gregory could not
understand it.  It struck him as singular that the lady should be dressed
in finer garments than she wore when he last saw her; though certainly
her purple became her.  She wore it as if born to it; and with an air
more sedately courteous than he had ever seen, save at one house in Park
Lane.  Had this rustle of fine trappings been made for him?  No; the
woman had a mind above such snobbishness, he thought.  He suffered for
a moment the pang of a cynical idea; but the eyes of Mrs. Malbrouck were
on him and he knew that he was as nothing before her.  Her eyes--how they
were fixed upon him!  Only two women had looked so truthfully at him
before: his dead mother and--Margaret.  And Margaret--why, how strangely
now at this instant came the thought that she was like his Margaret!
Wonder sprang to his eyes.  At that moment a door opened and a girl
entered the room--a girl lissome, sweet-faced, well-bred of manner,
who came slowly towards them.

"My daughter, Mr. Thorne," the mother briefly remarked.  There was no
surprise in the girl's face, only an even reserve of pleasure, as she
held out her hand and said: "Mr. Gregory Thorne and I are old enemies."
Gregory Thorne's nerve forsook him for an instant.  He knew now the
reason of his vague presentiments in the woods; he understood why, one
night, when he had been more childlike than usual in his memory of the
one woman who could make life joyous for him, the voice of a voyageur,
not Jacques's nor that of any one in camp, sang:

              "My dear love, she waits for me,
                  None other my world is adorning;
               My true love I come to thee,
                  My dear, the white star of the morning.
               Eagles spread out your wings,
                  Behold where the red dawn is breaking!
               Hark, 'tis my darling sings,
                  The flowers, the song-birds awaking;
               See, where she comes to me,
                  My love, ah, my dear love!"

And here she was.  He raised her hand to his lips, and said: "Miss
Carley, you have your enemy at an advantage."

"Miss Carley in Park Lane, Margaret Malbrouck here in my old home," she
replied.

There ran swiftly through the young man's brain the brief story that
Pretty Pierre had told him.  This, then, was the child who had been
carried away, and who, years after, had made captive his heart in London
town!  Well, one thing was clear, the girl's mother here seemed inclined
to be kinder to him than was the guardian grandmother--if she was the
grandmother--because they had their first talk undisturbed, it may be
encouraged; amiable mothers do such deeds at times.

"And now pray, Mr. Thorne," she continued, "may I ask how came you here
in my father's house after having treated me so cavalierly in London?--
not even sending a P.P.C. when you vanished from your worshippers in
Vanity Fair."

"As for my being here, it is simply a case of blind fate; as for my
friends, the only one I wanted to be sorry for my going was behind
earthworks which I could not scale in order to leave my card, or--or
anything else of more importance; and being left as it were to the
inclemency of a winter world, I fled from--"

She interrupted him.  "What! the conqueror, you, flying from your
Moscow?"

He felt rather helpless under her gay raillery; but he said:

"Well, I didn't burn my kremlin behind me."

"Your kremlin?"

"My ships, then: they--they are just the same," he earnestly pleaded.
Foolish youth, to attempt to take such a heart by surprise and storm!

"That is very interesting," she said, "but hardly wise.  To make fortunes
and be happy in new countries, one should forget the old ones.
Meditation is the enemy of action."

"There's one meditation could make me conquer the North Pole, if I could
but grasp it definitely."

"Grasp the North Pole?  That would be awkward for your friends and
gratifying to your enemies, if one may believe science and history.  But,
perhaps, you are in earnest after all, poor fellow!  for my father tells
me you are going over the hills and far away to the moose-yards.  How
valiant you are, and how quickly you grasp the essentials of fortune-
making!"

"Miss Malbrouck, I am in earnest, and I've always been in earnest in one
thing at least.  I came out here to make money, and I've made some, and
shall make more; but just now the moose are as brands for the burning,
and I have a gun sulky for want of exercise."

"What an eloquent warrior-temper!  And to whom are your deeds of valour
to be dedicated?  Before whom do you intend to lay your trophies of the
chase?"

"Before the most provoking but worshipful lady that I know."

"Who is the sylvan maid?  What princess of the glade has now the homage
of your impressionable heart, Mr. Thorne?"

And Gregory Thorne, his native insolence standing him in no stead, said
very humbly:

"You are that sylvan maid, that princess--ah, is this fair to me, is it
fair, I ask you?"

"You really mean that about the trophies"? she replied.  "And shall you
return like the mighty khans, with captive tigers and lions, led by
stalwart slaves, in your train, or shall they be captive moose or
grizzlies?"

"Grizzlies are not possible here," he said, with cheerful seriousness,
"but the moose is possible, and more, if you would be kinder--Margaret."

"Your supper, see, is ready," she said.  "I venture to hope your appetite
has not suffered because of long absence from your friends."

He could only dumbly answer by a protesting motion of the hand, and his
smile was not remarkably buoyant.

The next morning they started on their moose-hunt.  Gregory Thorne was
cast down when he crossed the threshold into the winter morning without
hand-clasp or god-speed from Margaret Malbrouck; but Mrs. Malbrouck was
there, and Gregory, looking into her eyes, thought how good a thing it
would be for him, if some such face looked benignly out on him every
morning, before he ventured forth into the deceitful day.  But what was
the use of wishing!  Margaret evidently did not care.  And though the air
was clear and the sun shone brightly, he felt there was a cheerless wind
blowing on him; a wind that chilled him; and he hummed to himself
bitterly a song of the voyageurs:

              "O, O, the winter wind, the North wind,
                  My snow-bird, where art thou gone?
               O, O, the wailing wind the night wind,
                  The cold nest; I am alone.
               O, O, my snow-bird!

              "O, O, the waving sky, the white sky,
                  My snow-bird thou fliest far;
               O, O, the eagle's cry, the wild cry,
                  My lost love, my lonely star.
               O, O, my snow-bird!"

He was about to start briskly forward to join Malbrouck and his Indians,
who were already on their way, when he heard his name called, and,
turning, he saw Margaret in the doorway, her fingers held to the tips of
her ears, as yet unused to the frost.  He ran back to where she stood,
and held out his hand.  "I was afraid," he bluntly said, "that you
wouldn't forsake your morning sleep to say good-bye to me."

"It isn't always the custom, is it," she replied, "for ladies to send the
very early hunter away with a tally-ho?  But since you have the grace to
be afraid of anything, I can excuse myself to myself for fleeing the
pleasantest dreams to speed you on your warlike path."

At this he brightened very much, but she, as if repenting she had given
him so much pleasure, added: "I wanted to say good-bye to my father, you
know; and--" she paused.

"And"? he added.

"And to tell him that you have fond relatives in the old land who would
mourn your early taking off; and, therefore, to beg him, for their sakes,
to keep you safe from any outrageous moose that mightn't know how the
world needed you."

"But there you are mistaken," he said; "I haven't anyone who would
really care, worse luck!  except the dowager; and she, perhaps, would be
consoled to know that I had died in battle,--even with a moose,--and was
clear of the possibility of hanging another lost reputation on the family
tree, to say nothing of suspension from any other kind of tree.  But, if
it should be the other way; if I should see your father in the path of an
outrageous moose--what then?"

"My father is a hunter born," she responded; "he is a great man," she
proudly added.

"Of course, of course," he replied.  "Good-bye.  I'll take him your
love.--Good-bye!" and he turned away.

"Good-bye," she gaily replied; and yet, one looking closely would have
seen that this stalwart fellow was pleasant to her eyes, and as she
closed the door to his hand waving farewell to her from the pines, she
said, reflecting on his words:

"You'll take him my love, will you?  But, Master Gregory, you carry a
freight of which you do not know the measure; and, perhaps, you never
shall, though you are very brave and honest, and not so impudent as you
used to be,--and I'm not so sure that I like you so much better for that
either, Monsieur Gregory."

Then she went and laid her cheek against her mother's, and said: "They've
gone away for big game, mother dear; what shall be our quarry?"

"My child," the mother replied, "the story of our lives since last you
were with me is my only quarry.  I want to know from your own lips all
that you have been in that life which once was mine also, but far away
from me now, even though you come from it, bringing its memories without
its messages."

"Dear, do you think that life there was so sweet to me?  It meant as
little to your daughter as to you.  She was always a child of the wild
woods.  What rustle of pretty gowns is pleasant as the silken shiver of
the maple leaves in summer at this door?  The happiest time in that life
was when we got away to Holwood or Marchurst, with the balls and calls
all over."

Mrs. Malbrouck smoothed her daughter's hand gently and smiled
approvingly.

"But that old life of yours, mother; what was it?  You said that you
would tell me some day.  Tell me now.  Grandmother was fond of me--poor
grandmother!  But she would never tell me anything.  How I longed to be
back with you!.... Sometimes you came to me in my sleep, and called to me
to come with you; and then again, when I was gay in the sunshine, you
came, and only smiled but never beckoned; though your eyes seemed to me
very sad, and I wondered if mine would not also become sad through
looking in them so--are they sad, mother?"  And she laughed up brightly
into her mother's face.

"No, dear; they are like the stars.  You ask me for my part in that life.
I will tell you soon, but not now.  Be patient.  Do you not tire of this
lonely life?  Are you truly not anxious to return to--"

"'To the husks that the swine did eat?'  No, no, no; for, see: I was born
for a free, strong life; the prairie or the wild wood, or else to live in
some far castle in Welsh mountains, where I should never hear the voice
of the social Thou must!--oh, what a must! never to be quite free or
natural.  To be the slave of the code.  I was born--I know not how! but
so longing for the sky, and space, and endless woods.  I think I never
saw an animal but I loved it, nor ever lounged the mornings out at
Holwood but I wished it were a hut on the mountain side, and you and
father with me."  Here she whispered, in a kind of awe: "And yet to think
that Holwood is now mine, and that I am mistress there, and that I must
go back to it--if only you would go back with me.... ah, dear, isn't it
your duty to go back with me"? she added, hesitatingly.

Audrey Malbrouck drew her daughter hungrily to her bosom, and said: "Yes,
dear, I will go back, if it chances that you need me; but your father and
I have lived the best days of our lives here, and we are content.
But, my Margaret, there is another to be thought of too, is there not?
And in that case is my duty then so clear?"

The girl's hand closed on her mother's, and she knew her heart had been
truly read.



III.

The hunters pursued their way, swinging grandly along on their snow-
shoes, as they made for the Wild Hawk Woods.  It would seem as if
Malbrouck was testing Gregory's strength and stride, for the march that
day was a long and hard one.  He was equal to the test, and even Big
Moccasin, the chief, grunted sound approval.  But every day brought out
new capacities for endurance and larger resources; so that Malbrouck,
who had known the clash of civilisation with barbarian battle, and deeds
both dour and doughty, and who loved a man of might, regarded this youth
with increasing favour.  By simple processes he drew from Gregory his
aims and ambitions, and found the real courage and power behind the front
of irony--the language of manhood and culture which was crusted by free
and easy idioms.  Now and then they saw moose-tracks, but they were some
days out before they came to a moose-yard--a spot hoof-beaten by the
moose; his home, from which he strays, and to which he returns at times
like a repentant prodigal.  Now the sport began.  The dog-trains were put
out of view, and Big Moccasin and another Indian went off immediately to
explore the country round about.  A few hours, and word was brought that
there was a small herd feeding not far away.  Together they crept
stealthily within range of the cattle.  Gregory Thorne's blood leaped as
he saw the noble quarry, with their wide-spread horns, sniffing the air,
in which they had detected something unusual.  Their leader, a colossal
beast, stamped with his forefoot, and threw back his head with a snort.

"The first shot belongs to you, Mr. Thorne," said Malbrouck.  "In the
shoulder, you know.  You have him in good line.  I'll take the heifer."

Gregory showed all the coolness of an old hunter, though his lips
twitched slightly with excitement.  He took a short but steady aim, and
fired.  The beast plunged forward and then fell on his knees.  The others
broke away.  Malbrouck fired and killed a heifer, and then all ran in
pursuit as the moose made for the woods.

Gregory, in the pride of his first slaughter, sprang away towards the
wounded leader, which, sunk to the earth, was shaking its great horns to
and fro.  When at close range, he raised his gun to fire again, but the
moose rose suddenly, and with a wild bellowing sound rushed at Gregory,
who knew full well that a straight stroke from those hoofs would end his
moose-hunting days.  He fired, but to no effect.  He could not, like a
toreador, jump aside, for those mighty horns would sweep too wide a
space.  He dropped on his knees swiftly, and as the great antlers almost
touched him, and he could feel the roaring breath of the mad creature in
his face, he slipped a cartridge in, and fired as he swung round; but at
that instant a dark body bore him down.  He was aware of grasping those
sweeping horns, conscious of a blow which tore the flesh from his chest;
and then his knife--how came it in his hand?--with the instinct of the
true hunter.  He plunged it once, twice, past a foaming mouth, into that
firm body, and then both fell together; each having fought valiantly
after his kind.

Gregory dragged himself from beneath the still heaving body, and
stretched to his feet; but a blindness came, and the next knowledge he
had was of brandy being poured slowly between his teeth, and of a voice
coming through endless distances: "A fighter, a born fighter," it said.
"The pluck of Lucifer--good boy!"

Then the voice left those humming spaces of infinity, and said: "Tilt him
this way a little, Big Moccasin.  There, press firmly, so.  Now the band
steady--together--tighter--now the withes--a little higher up--cut them
here."  There was a slight pause, and then: "There, that's as good as an
army surgeon could do it.  He'll be as sound as a bell in two weeks.  Eh,
well, how do you feel now?  Better?  That's right!  Like to be on your
feet, would you?  Wait.  Here, a sup of this.  There you are.  .  .  .
Well?"

"Well," said the young man, faintly, "he was a beauty."

Malbrouck looked at him a moment, thoughtfully, and then said: "Yes, he
was a beauty."

"I want a dozen more like him, and then I shall be able to drop 'em as
neat as, you do."

"H'm!  the order is large.  I'm afraid we shall have to fill it at some
other time;" and Malbrouck smiled a little grimly.

"What! only one moose to take back to the Height of Land, to--" something
in the eye of the other stopped him.

"To?  Yes, to"? and now the eye had a suggestion of humour.

"To show I'm not a tenderfoot."

"Yes, to show you're not a tenderfoot.  I fancy that will be hardly
necessary.  Oh, you will be up, eh?  Well!"

"Well, I'm a tottering imbecile.  What's the matter with my legs?--my
prophetic soul, it hurts!  Oh, I see; that's where the old warrior's hoof
caught me sideways.  Now, I'll tell you what, I'm going to have another
moose to take back to Marigold Lake."

"Oh?"

"Yes.  I'm going to take back a young, live moose."

"A significant ambition.  For what?--a sacrifice to the gods you have
offended in your classic existence?"

"Both.  A peace-offering, and a sacrifice to--a goddess."

"Young man," said the other, the light of a smile playing on his lips,
"'Prosperity be thy page!'  Big Moccasin, what of this young live moose?"

The Indian shook his head doubtfully.

"But I tell you I shall have that live moose, if I have to stay here to
see it grow."

And Malbrouck liked his pluck, and wished him good luck.  And the good
luck came.  They travelled back slowly to the Height of Land, making a
circuit.  For a week they saw no more moose; but meanwhile Gregory's hurt
quickly healed.  They had now left only eight days in which to get back
to Dog Ear River and Marigold Lake.  If the young moose was to come
it must come soon.  It came soon.

They chanced upon a moose-yard, and while the Indians were beating the
woods, Malbrouck and Gregory watched.

Soon a cow and a young moose came swinging down to the embankment.
Malbrouck whispered: "Now if you must have your live moose, here's a
lasso.  I'll bring down the cow.  The young one's horns are not large.
Remember, no pulling.  I'll do that.  Keep your broken chest and bad arm
safe.  Now!"

Down came the cow with a plunge into the yard-dead.  The lasso, too, was
over the horns of the calf, and in an instant Malbrouck was swinging away
with it over the snow.  It was making for the trees--exactly what
Malbrouck desired.  He deftly threw the rope round a sapling, but not too
taut, lest the moose's horns should be injured.  The plucky animal now
turned on him.  He sprang behind a tree, and at that instant he heard the
thud of hoofs behind him.  He turned to see a huge bull-moose bounding
towards him.  He was between two fires, and quite unarmed.  Those hoofs
had murder in them.  But at the instant a rifle shot rang out, and he
only caught the forward rush of the antlers as the beast fell.

The young moose now had ceased its struggles, and came forward to the
dead bull with that hollow sound of mourning peculiar to its kind.
Though it afterwards struggled once or twice to be free, it became docile
and was easily taught, when its anger and fear were over.

And Gregory Thorne had his live moose.  He had also, by that splendid
shot, achieved with one arm, saved Malbrouck from peril, perhaps from
death.

They drew up before the house at Marigold Lake on the afternoon of the
day before Christmas, a triumphal procession.  The moose was driven, a
peaceful captive with a wreath of cedar leaves around its neck--the
humourous conception of Gregory Thorne.  Malbrouck had announced their
coming by a blast from his horn, and Margaret was standing in the doorway
wrapped in furs, which may have come originally from Hudson's Bay,
but which had been deftly re-manufactured in Regent Street.

Astonishment, pleasure, beamed in her eyes.  She clapped her hands gaily,
and cried: "Welcome, welcome, merry-men all!"  She kissed her father; she
called to her mother to come and see; then she said to Gregory, with arch
raillery, as she held out her hand: "Oh, companion of hunters, comest
thou like Jacques in Arden from dropping the trustful tear upon the prey
of others, or bringest thou quarry of thine own?  Art thou a warrior
sated with spoil, master of the sports, spectator of the fight, Prince,
or Pistol?  Answer, what art thou?"

And he, with a touch of his old insolence, though with something of irony
too, for he had hoped for a different fashion of greeting, said:

"All, lady, all!  The Olympian all!  The player of many parts.  I am
Touchstone, Jacques, and yet Orlando too."

"And yet Orlando too, my daughter," said Malbrouck, gravely.  "He saved
your father from the hoofs of a moose bent on sacrifice.  Had your father
his eye, his nerve, his power to shoot with one arm a bull moose at long
range, so!--he would not refuse to be called a great hunter, but wear the
title gladly."

Margaret Malbrouck's face became anxious instantly.  "He saved you from
danger--from injury, father"? she slowly said, and looked earnestly at
Gregory; "but why to shoot with one arm only?"

"Because in a fight of his own with a moose--a hand-to-hand fight--he had
a bad moment with the hoofs of the beast."

And this young man, who had a reputation for insolence, blushed, so that
the paleness which the girl now noticed in his face was banished; and to
turn the subject he interposed:

"Here is the live moose that I said I should bring.  Now say that he's a
beauty, please.  Your father and I--"

But Malbrouck interrupted:

"He lassoed it with his one arm, Margaret.  He was determined to do it
himself, because, being a superstitious gentleman, as well as a hunter,
he had some foolish notion that this capture would propitiate a goddess
whom he imagined required offerings of the kind."

"It is the privilege of the gods to be merciful," she said.  "This peace-
offering should propitiate the angriest, cruellest goddess in the
universe; and for one who was neither angry nor really cruel--well, she
should be satisfied.... altogether satisfied," she added, as she put her
cheek against the warm fur of the captive's neck, and let it feel her
hand with its lips.

There was silence for a minute, and then with his old gay spirit all
returned, and as if to give an air not too serious to the situation,
Gregory, remembering his Euripides, said:

          ". . . . . . . .let the steer bleed,
          And the rich altars, as they pay their vows,
          Breathe incense to the gods: for me, I rise
          To better life, and grateful own the blessing."

"A pagan thought for a Christmas Eve," she said to him, with her fingers
feeling for the folds of silken flesh in the throat of the moose; "but
wounded men must be humoured.  And, mother dear, here are our Argonauts
returned; and--and now I think I will go."

With a quick kiss on her father's cheek--not so quick but he caught the
tear that ran through her happy smile--she vanished into the house.

That night there was gladness in this home.  Mirth sprang to the lips of
the men like foam on a beaker of wine, so that the evening ran towards
midnight swiftly.  All the tale of the hunt was given by Malbrouck to
joyful ears; for the mother lived again her youth in the sunrise of this
romance which was being sped before her eyes; and the father, knowing
that in this world there is nothing so good as courage, nothing so base
as the shifting eye, looked on the young man, and was satisfied, and told
his story well;--told it as a brave man would tell it, bluntly as to
deeds done, warmly as to the pleasures of good sport, directly as to all.
In the eye of the young man there had come the glance of larger life, of
a new-developed manhood.  When he felt that dun body crashing on him, and
his life closing with its strength, and ran the good knife home, there
flashed through his mind how much life meant to the dying, how much it
ought to mean to the living; and then this girl, this Margaret, swam
before his eyes--and he had been graver since.

He knew, as truly as if she had told him, that she could never mate with
any man who was a loiterer on God's highway, who could live life without
some sincerity in his aims.  It all came to him again in this room, so
austere in its appointments, yet so gracious, so full of the spirit of
humanity without a note of ennui, or the rust of careless deeds.  As this
thought grew he looked at the face of the girl, then at the faces of the
father and mother, and the memory of his boast came back--that he would
win the stake he laid, to know the story of John and Audrey Malbrouck
before this coming Christmas morning.  With a faint smile at his own past
insolent self, he glanced at the clock.  It was eleven.  "I have lost my
bet," he unconsciously said aloud.

He was roused by John Malbrouck remarking: "Yes, you have lost your bet?
Well, what was it"? The youth, the childlike quality in him," flushed
his face deeply, and then, with a sudden burst of frankness, he said:

"I did not know that I had spoken.  As for the bet, I deserve to be
thrashed for ever having made it; but, duffer as I am, I want you to know
that I'm something worse than duffer.  The first time I met you I made a
bet that I should know your history before Christmas Day.  I haven't a
word to say for myself.  I'm contemptible.  I beg your pardon; for your
history is none of my business.  I was really interested; that's all; but
your lives, I believe it, as if it was in the Bible, have been great--
yes, that's the word!  and I'm a better chap for having known you,
though, perhaps, I've known you all along, because, you see, I've--I've
been friends with your daughter--and-well, really I haven't anything else
to say, except that I hope you'll forgive me, and let me know you
always."

Malbrouck regarded him for a moment with a grave smile, and then looked
toward his wife.  Both turned their glances quickly upon Margaret, whose
eyes were on the fire.  The look upon her face was very gentle; something
new and beautiful had come to reign there.

A moment, and Malbrouck spoke: "You did what was youthful and curious,
but not wrong; and you shall not lose your hazard.  I--"

"No, do not tell me," Gregory interrupted; "only let me be pardoned."

"As I said, lad, you shall not lose your hazard.  I will tell you the
brief tale of two lives."

"But, I beg of you!  For the instant I forgot.  I have more to confess."
And Gregory told them in substance what Pretty Pierre had disclosed to
him in the Rocky Mountains.

When he had finished, Malbrouck said: "My tale then is briefer still: I
was a common soldier, English and humble by my mother, French and noble
through my father--noble, but poor.  In Burmah, at an outbreak among the
natives, I rescued my colonel from immediate and horrible death, though
he died in my arms from the injuries he received.  His daughter too, it
was my fortune, through God's Providence, to save from great danger.  She
became my wife.  You remember that song you sang the day we first met
you?

"It brought her father back to mind painfully.  When we came to England
her people--her mother--would not receive me.  For myself I did not care;
for my wife, that was another matter.  She loved me and preferred to go
with me anywhere; to a new country, preferably.  We came to Canada.

"We were forgotten in England.  Time moves so fast, even if the records
in red-books stand.  Our daughter went to her grandmother to be brought
up and educated in England--though it was a sore trial to us both--that
she might fill nobly that place in life for which she is destined.  With
all she learned she did not forget us.  We were happy save in her
absence.  We are happy now; not because she is mistress of Holwood and
Marchurst--for her grandmother and another is dead--but because such as
she is our daughter, and--"

He said no more.  Margaret was beside him, and her fingers were on his
lips.

Gregory came to his feet suddenly, and with a troubled face.

"Mistress of Holwood and Marchurst!" he said; and his mind ran over his
own great deficiencies, and the list of eligible and anxious suitors that
Park Lane could muster.  He had never thought of her in the light of a
great heiress.

But he looked down at her as she knelt at her father's knee, her eyes
upturned to his, and the tide of his fear retreated; for he saw in them
the same look she had given him when she leaned her cheek against the
moose's neck that afternoon.

When the clock struck twelve upon a moment's pleasant silence, John
Malbrouck said to Gregory Thorne:

"Yes, you have won your Christmas hazard, my boy."

But a softer voice than his whispered: "Are you--content--Gregory?"

The Spirits of Christmas-tide, whose paths lie north as well as south,
smiled as they wrote his answer on their tablets; for they knew, as the
man said, that he would always be content, and--which is more in the
sight of angels--that the woman would be content also.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Awkward for your friends and gratifying to your enemies
Carrying with him the warm atmosphere of a good woman's love
Freedom is the first essential of the artistic mind
I was born insolent
Knowing that his face would never be turned from me
Likenesses between the perfectly human and the perfectly animal
Longed to touch, oftener than they did, the hands of children
Meditation is the enemy of action
My excuses were making bad infernally worse
Nothing so good as courage, nothing so base as the shifting eye
She wasn't young, but she seemed so
The Barracks of the Free
The gods made last to humble the pride of men--there was rum
The soul of goodness in things evil
Time is the test, and Time will have its way with me
Where I should never hear the voice of the social Thou must






PIERRE AND HIS PEOPLE

TALES OF THE FAR NORTH

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.


A PRAIRIE VAGABOND
SHE OF THE TRIPLE CHEVRON
THREE OUTLAWS




A PRAIRIE VAGABOND

Little Hammer was not a success.  He was a disappointment to the
missionaries; the officials of the Hudson's Bay Company said he was
"no good;" the Mounted Police kept an eye on him; the Crees and Blackfeet
would have nothing to do with him; and the half-breeds were profane
regarding him.  But Little Hammer was oblivious to any depreciation
of his merits, and would not be suppressed.  He loved the Hudson's Bay
Company's Post at Yellow Quill with an unwavering love; he ranged the
half-breed hospitality of Red Deer River, regardless of it being thrown
at him as he in turn threw it at his dog; he saluted Sergeant Gellatly
with a familiar How! whenever he saw him; he borrowed tabac of the half-
breed women, and, strange to say, paid it back--with other tabac got by
daily petition, until his prayer was granted, at the H. B. C. Post.  He
knew neither shame nor defeat, but where women were concerned he kept his
word, and was singularly humble.  It was a woman that induced him to be
baptised.  The day after the ceremony he begged "the loan of a dollar for
the love of God" from the missionary; and being refused, straightway, and
for the only time it was known of him, delivered a rumbling torrent of
half-breed profanity, mixed with the unusual oaths of the barracks.  Then
he walked away with great humility.  There was no swagger about Little
Hammer.  He was simply unquenchable and continuous.  He sometimes got
drunk; but on such occasions he sat down, or lay down, in the most
convenient place, and, like Caesar beside Pompey's statue, wrapped his
mantle about his face and forgot the world.  He was a vagabond Indian,
abandoned yet self-contained, outcast yet gregarious.  No social
ostracism unnerved him, no threats of the H. B. C. officials moved him;
and when in the winter of 187_ he was driven from one place to another,
starving and homeless, and came at last emaciated and nearly dead to the
Post at Yellow Quill, he asked for food and shelter as if it were his
right, and not as a mendicant.

One night, shortly after his reception and restoration, he was sitting
in the store silently smoking the Company's tabac.  Sergeant Gellatly
entered.  Little Hammer rose, offered his hand, and muttered, "How!"

The Sergeant thrust his hand aside, and said sharply: "Whin I take y'r
hand, Little Hammer, it'll be to put a grip an y'r wrists that'll stay
there till y'are in quarters out of which y'll come nayther winter nor
summer.  Put that in y'r pipe and smoke it, y' scamp!"

Little Hammer had a bad time at the Post that night.  Lounging half-
breeds reviled him; the H. B. C. officials rebuked him; and travellers
who were coming and going shared in the derision, as foolish people do
where one is brow-beaten by many.  At last a trapper entered, whom
seeing, Little Hammer drew his blanket up about his head.  The trapper
sat down very near Little Hammer, and began to smoke.  He laid his plug-
tabac and his knife on the counter beside him.  Little Hammer reached
over and took the knife, putting it swiftly within his blanket.  The
trapper saw the act, and, turning sharply on the Indian, called him a
thief.  Little Hammer chuckled strangely and said nothing; but his eyes
peered sharply above the blanket.  A laugh went round the store.  In an
instant the trapper, with a loud oath, caught at the Indian's throat; but
as the blanket dropped back he gave a startled cry.  There was the flash
of a knife, and he fell back dead.  Little Hammer stood above him,
smiling, for a moment, and then, turning to Sergeant Gellatly, held
out his arms silently for the handcuffs.

The next day two men were lost on the prairies.  One was Sergeant
Gellatly; the other was Little Hammer.  The horses they rode travelled so
close that the leg of the Indian crowded the leg of the white man; and
the wilder the storm grew, the closer still they rode.  A 'poudre' day,
with its steely air and fatal frost, was an ill thing in the world; but
these entangling blasts, these wild curtains of snow, were desolating
even unto death.  The sun above was smothered; the earth beneath was
trackless; the compass stood for loss all round.

What could Sergeant Gellatly expect, riding with a murderer on his left
hand: a heathen that had sent a knife through the heart of one of the
lords of the North?  What should the gods do but frown, or the elements
be at, but howling on their path?  What should one hope for but that
vengeance should be taken out of the hands of mortals, and be delivered
to the angry spirits?

But if the gods were angry at the Indian, why should Sergeant Gellatly
only sway to and fro, and now laugh recklessly, and now fall sleepily
forward on the neck of his horse; while the Indian rode straight, and
neither wavered nor wandered in mind, but at last slipped from his horse
and walked beside the other?  It was at this moment that the soldier
heard, "Sergeant Gellatly, Sergeant Gellatly," called through the blast;
and he thought it came from the skies, or from some other world.  "Me
darlin'," he said, "have y' come to me?"  But the voice called again:
"Sergeant Gellatly, keep awake!  keep awake!  You sleep, you die; that's
it.  Holy.  Yes.  How!"  Then he knew that it was Little Hammer calling
in his ear, and shaking him; that the Indian was dragging him from his
horse .  .  .  his revolver, where was it?  he had forgotten .  .  .  he
nodded .  .  .  nodded.  But Little Hammer said: "Walk, hell! you walk,
yes;" and Little Hammer struck him again and again; but one arm of the
Indian was under his shoulder and around him, and the voice was anxious
and kind.  Slowly it came to him that Little Hammer was keeping him alive
against the will of the spirits--but why should they strike him instead
of the Indian?  Was there any sun in the world?  Had there ever been? or
fire or heat anywhere, or anything but wind and snow in all God's
universe?  .  .  .  Yes, there were bells ringing--soft bells of a
village church; and there was incense burning--most sweet it was! and the
coals in the censer--how beautiful, how comforting!  He laughed with joy
again, and he forgot how cold, how maliciously cold, he had been; he
forgot how dreadful that hour was before he became warm; when he was
pierced by myriad needles through the body, and there was an incredible
aching at his heart.

And yet something kept thundering on his body, and a harsh voice shrieked
at him, and there were many lights dancing over his shut eyes; and then
curtains of darkness were dropped, and centuries of oblivion came; and
then--then his eyes opened to a comforting silence, and some one was
putting brandy between his teeth, and after a time he heard a voice say:
"'Bien,' you see he was a murderer, but he save his captor.  'Voila,'
such a heathen!  But you will, all the same, bring him to justice--you
call it that?  But we shall see."

Then some one replied, and the words passed through an outer web of
darkness and an inner haze of dreams.  "The feet of Little Hammer were
like wood on the floor when you brought the two in, Pretty Pierre--and
lucky for them you found them.  .  .  .  The thing would read right in a
book, but it's not according to the run of things up here, not by a
damned sight!"

"Private Bradshaw," said the first voice again, "you do not know Little
Hammer, nor that story of him.  You wait for the trial.  I have something
to say.  You think Little Hammer care for the prison, the rope?--Ah, when
a man wait five years to kill--so! and it is done, he is glad sometimes
when it is all over.  Sergeant Gellatly there will wish he went to sleep
forever in the snow, if Little Hammer come to the rope.  Yes, I think."

And Sergeant Gellatly's brain was so numbed that he did not grasp the
meaning of the words, though he said them over and over again.  .  .  .
Was he dead?  No, for his body was beating, beating .  .  .  well, it
didn't matter .  .  .  nothing mattered .  .  .  he was sinking to
forgetfulness .  .  .  sinking.

So, for hours, for weeks--it might have been for years--and then he woke,
clear and knowing, to "the unnatural, intolerable day"--it was that to
him, with Little Hammer in prison.  It was March when his memory and
vigour vanished; it was May when he grasped the full remembrance of
himself, and of that fight for life on the prairie: of the hands that
smote him that he should not sleep; of Little Hammer the slayer, who had
driven death back discomfited, and brought his captor safe to where his
own captivity and punishment awaited him.

When Sergeant Gellatly appeared in court at the trial he refused to bear
witness against Little Hammer.  "D' ye think--does wan av y' think--that
I'll speak a word agin the man--haythen or no haythen--that pulled me out
of me tomb and put me betune the barrack quilts?  Here's the stripes aff
me arm, and to gaol I'll go; but for what wint before I clapt the iron on
his wrists, good or avil, divil a word will I say.  An' here's me left
hand, and there's me right fut, and an eye of me too, that I'd part with,
for the cause of him that's done a trick that your honour wouldn't do--
an' no shame to y' aither--an' y'd been where Little Hammer was with me."

His honour did not reply immediately, but he looked meditatively at
Little Hammer before he said quietly,--"Perhaps not, perhaps not."

And Little Hammer, thinking he was expected to speak, drew his blanket up
closely about him and grunted, "How!"

Pretty Pierre, the notorious half-breed, was then called.  He kissed the
Book, making the sign of the Cross swiftly as he did so, and unheeding
the ironical, if hesitating, laughter in the court.  Then he said:
"'Bien,' I will tell you the story-the whole truth.  I was in the Stony
Plains.  Little Hammer was 'good Injin' then.  .  .  .  Yes, sacre!  it
is a fool who smiles at that.  I have kissed the Book.  Dam!  .  .  .  He
would be chief soon when old Two Tails die.  He was proud, then, Little
Hammer.  He go not to the Post for drink; he sell not next year's furs
for this year's rations; he shoot straight."

Here Little Hammer stood up and said: "There is too much talk.  Let me
be.  It is all done.  The sun is set--I care not--I have killed him;"
and then he drew his blanket about his face and sat down.

But Pierre continued: "Yes, you killed him-quick, after five years--that
is so; but you will not speak to say why.  Then, I will speak.  The
Injins say Little Hammer will be great man; he will bring the tribes
together; and all the time Little Hammer was strong and silent and wise.
Then Brigley the trapper--well, he was a thief and coward.  He come to
Little Hammer and say, 'I am hungry and tired.'  Little Hammer give him
food and sleep.  He go away.  'Bien,' he come back and say,--'It is far
to go; I have no horse.'  So Little Hammer give him a horse too.  Then he
come back once again in the night when Little Hammer was away, and before
morning he go; but when Little Hammer return, there lay his bride--only
an Injin girl, but his bride-dead!  You see?  Eh?  No?  Well, the Captain
at the Post he says it was the same as Lucrece.--I say it was like hell.
It is not much to kill or to die--that is in the game; but that other,
'mon Dieu!'  Little Hammer, you see how he hide his head: not because he
kill the Tarquin, that Brigley, but because he is a poor 'vaurien' now,
and he once was happy and had a wife.  .  .  .  What would you do, judge
honourable?  .  .  .  Little Hammer, I shake your hand--so--How!"

But Little Hammer made no reply.

The judge sentenced Little Hammer to one month in gaol.  He might have
made it one thousand months--it would have been the same; for when, on
the last morning of that month, they opened the door to set him free, he
was gone.  That is, the Little Hammer whom the high gods knew was gone;
though an ill-nourished, self-strangled body was upright by the wall.
The vagabond had paid his penalty, but desired no more of earth.

Upon the door was scratched the one word: How!






SHE OF THE TRIPLE CHEVRON

Between Archangel's Rise and Pardon's Drive there was but one house.  It
was a tavern, and it was known as Galbraith's Place.  There was no man in
the Western Territories to whom it was not familiar.  There was no
traveller who crossed the lonely waste but was glad of it, and would go
twenty miles out of his way to rest a night on a corn-husk bed which Jen
Galbraith's hands had filled, to eat a meal that she had prepared, and to
hear Peter Galbraith's tales of early days on the plains, when buffalo
were like clouds on the horizon, when Indians were many and hostile, and
when men called the great western prairie a wedge of the American desert.

It was night on the prairie.  Jen Galbraith stood in the doorway of the
tavern sitting-room and watched a mighty beacon of flame rising before
her, a hundred yards away.  Every night this beacon made a circle of
light on the prairie, and Galbraith's Place was in the centre of the
circle.  Summer and winter it burned from dusk to daylight.  No hand fed
it but that of Nature.  It never failed; it was a cruse that was never
empty.  Upon Jen Galbraith it had a weird influence.  It grew to be to
her a kind of spiritual companion, though, perhaps, she would not so have
named it.  This flaming gas, bubbling up from the depths of the earth on
the lonely plains, was to her a mysterious presence grateful to her; the
receiver of her thoughts, the daily necessity in her life.  It filled her
too with a kind of awe; for, when it burned, she seemed not herself
alone, but another self of her whom she could not quite understand.  Yet
she was no mere dreamer.  Upon her practical strength of body and mind
had come that rugged poetical sense, which touches all who live the life
of mountain and prairie.  She showed it in her speech; it had a measured
cadence.  She expressed it in her body; it had a free and rhythmic
movement.  And not Jen alone, but many another dweller on the prairie,
looked upon it with a superstitious reverence akin to worship.  A
blizzard could not quench it.  A gale of wind only fed its strength.  A
rain-storm made a mist about it, in which it was enshrined like a god.
Peter Galbraith could not fully understand his daughter's fascination for
this Prairie Star, as the North-West people called it.  It was not
without its natural influence upon him; but he regarded it most as a
comfortable advertisement, and he lamented every day that this never-
failing gas well was not near a large population, and he still its owner.
He was one of that large family in the earth who would turn the best
things in their lives into merchandise.  As it was, it brought much grist
to his mill; for he was not averse to the exercise of the insinuating
pleasures of euchre and poker in his tavern; and the hospitality which
ranchmen, cowboys, and travellers sought at his hand was often prolonged,
and also remunerative to him.

Pretty Pierre, who had his patrol as gamester defined, made semi-annual
visits to Galbraith's Place.  It occurred generally after the rounding-up
and branding seasons, when the cowboys and ranchmen were "flush" with
money.  It was generally conceded that Monsieur Pierre would have made an
early excursion to a place where none is ever "ordered up," if he had not
been free with the money which he so plentifully won.

Card-playing was to him a science and a passion.  He loved to win for
winning's sake.  After that, money, as he himself put it, was only fit
to be spent for the good of the country, and that men should earn more.
Since he put his philosophy into instant and generous practice, active
and deadly prejudice against him did not have lengthened life.

The Mounted Police, or as they are more poetically called, the Riders of
the Plains, watched Galbraith's Place, not from any apprehension of
violent events, but because Galbraith was suspected of infringing the
prevailing law of Prohibition, and because for some years it had been a
tradition and a custom to keep an eye on Pierre.

As Jen Galbraith stood in the doorway looking abstractedly at the beacon,
her fingers smoothing her snowy apron the while, she was thinking thus to
herself: "Perhaps father is right.  If that Prairie Star were only at
Vancouver or Winnipeg instead of here, our Val could be something, more
than a prairie-rider.  He'd have been different, if father hadn't started
this tavern business.  Not that our Val is bad.  He isn't; but if he had
money he could buy a ranch,--or something."

Our Val, as Jen and her father called him, was a lad of twenty-two, one
year younger than Jen.  He was prairie-rider, cattle-dealer, scout,
cowboy, happy-go-lucky vagrant,--a splendid Bohemian of the plains.  As
Jen said, he was not bad; but he had a fiery, wandering spirit, touched
withal by the sunniest humour.  He had never known any curb but Jen's
love and care.  That had kept him within bounds so far.  All men of the
prairie spoke well of him.  The great new lands have codes and standards
of morals quite their own.  One enthusiastic admirer of this youth said,
in Jen's hearing, "He's a Christian--Val Galbraith!"  That was the
western way of announcing a man as having great civic and social virtues.
Perhaps the respect for Val Galbraith was deepened by the fact that there
was no broncho or cayuse that he could not tame to the saddle.

Jen turned her face from the flame and looked away from the oasis of
warmth it made, to where the light shaded away into darkness, a darkness
that was unbroken for many a score of miles to the north and west.  She
sighed deeply and drew herself up with an aggressive motion as though she
was freeing herself of something.  So she was.  She was trying to shake
off a feeling of oppression.  Ten minutes ago the gaslighted house behind
her had seemed like a prison.  She felt that she must have air, space,
and freedom.

She would have liked a long ride on the buffalo-track.  That, she felt,
would clear her mind.  She was no romantic creature out of her sphere, no
exotic.  She was country-born and bred, and her blood had been charged by
a prairie instinct passing through three generations.  She was part of
this life.  Her mind was free and strong, and her body was free and
healthy.  While that freedom and health was genial, it revolted against
what was gross or irregular.  She loved horses and dogs, she liked to
take a gun and ride away to the Poplar Hills in search of game, she found
pleasure in visiting the Indian Reservation, and talking to Sun-in-the-
North, the only good Indian chief she knew, or that anyone else on the
prairies knew.  She loved all that was strong and untamed, all that was
panting with wild and glowing life.  Splendidly developed, softly sinewy,
warmly bountiful, yet without the least physical over-luxuriance or
suggestiveness, Jen, with her tawny hair and dark-brown eyes, was a
growth of unrestrained, unconventional, and eloquent life.  Like Nature
around her, glowing and fresh, yet glowing and hardy.  There was,
however, just a strain of pensiveness in her, partly owing to the fact
that there were no women near her, that she had, virtually, lived her
life as a woman alone.

As she thus looked into the undefined horizon two things were happening:
a traveller was approaching Galbraith's Place from a point in that
horizon; and in the house behind her someone was singing.  The traveller
sat erect upon his horse.  He had not the free and lazy seat of the
ordinary prairie-rider.  It was a cavalry seat, and a military manner.
He belonged to that handful of men who patrol a frontier of near a
thousand miles, and are the security of peace in three hundred thousand
miles of territory--the Riders of the Plains, the North-West Mounted
Police.

This Rider of the Plains was Sergeant Thomas Gellatly, familiarly known
as Sergeant Tom.  Far away as he was he could see that a woman was
standing in the tavern door.  He guessed who it was, and his blood
quickened at the guessing.  But reining his horse on the furthest edge of
the lighted circle, he said, debatingly: "I've little time enough to get
to the Rise, and the order was to go through, hand the information to
Inspector Jules, and be back within forty-eight hours.  Is it flesh and
blood they think I am?  Me that's just come back from a journey of a
hundred miles, and sent off again like this with but a taste of sleep and
little food, and Corporal Byng sittin' there at Fort Desire with a pipe
in his mouth and the fat on his back like a porpoise.  It's famished I am
with hunger, and thirty miles yet to do; and she, standin' there with a
six months' welcome in her eye. . .  .  It's in the interest of Justice
if I halt at Galbraith's Place for half-an-hour, bedad!  The blackguard
hid away there at Soldier's Knee will be arrested all the sooner; for
horse and man will be able the better to travel.  I'm glad it's not me
that has to take him whoever he is.  It's little I like leadin' a fellow-
creature towards the gallows, or puttin' a bullet into him if he won't
come.  .  .  .  Now what will we do, Larry, me boy?  "this to the
broncho--"Go on without bite or sup, me achin' behind and empty before,
and you laggin' in the legs, or stay here for the slice of an hour and
get some heart into us?  Stay here is it, me boy?  then lave go me fut
with your teeth and push on to the Prairie Star there."  So saying,
Sergeant Tom, whose language in soliloquy, or when excited, was more
marked by a brogue than at other times, rode away towards Galbraith's
Place.

In the tavern at that moment, Pretty Pierrre was sitting on the bar-
counter, where temperance drinks were professedly sold, singing to
himself.  His dress was singularly neat, if coarse, and his slouch hat
was worn with an air of jauntiness according well with his slight make
and almost girlish delicacy of complexion.  He was puffing a cigarette,
in the breaks of the song.  Peter Galbraith, tall, gaunt, and sombre-
looking, sat with his chair tilted back against the wall, rather
nervously pulling at the strips of bark of which the yielding chair-seat
was made.  He may or may not have been listening to the song which had
run through several verses.  Where it had come from, no one knew; no one
cared to know.  The number of its verses were legion.  Pierre had a sweet
voice, of a peculiarly penetrating quality; still it was low and well-
modulated, like the colour in his cheeks, which gave him his name.

These were the words he was singing as Sergeant Tom rode towards the
tavern:

         "The hot blood leaps in his quivering breast
               Voila!  'Tis his enemies near!
          There's a chasm deep on the mountain crest
               Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear!
          They follow him close and they follow him fast,
               And he flies like a mountain deer;
          Then a mad, wild leap and he's safe at last!
               Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear!
          A cry and a leap and the danger's past
               Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear!"

At the close of the verse, Galbraith said: "I don't like that song.  I--I
don't like it.  You're not a father, Pierre."

"No, I am not a father.  I have some virtue of that.  I have spared the
world something, Pete Galbraith."

"You have the Devil's luck; your sins never get YOU into trouble."

A curious fire flashed in the half-breed's eyes, and he said, quietly:
"Yes, I have great luck; but I have my little troubles at times--at
times."

"They're different, though, from this trouble of Val's."  There was
something like a fog in the old man's throat.

"Yes, Val was quite foolish, you see.  If he had killed a white man--
Pretty Pierre, for instance--well, there would have been a show of
arrest, but he could escape.  It was an Injin.  The Government cherish
the Injin much in these days.  The redskin must be protected.  It must be
shown that at Ottawa there is justice.  That is droll--quite.  Eh, bien!
Val will not try to escape.  He waits too long-near twenty-four hours.
Then, it is as you see.  .  .  .  You have not told her?"  He nodded
towards the door of the sittingroom.

"Nothing.  It'll come on Jen soon enough if he doesn't get away, and bad
enough if he does, and can't come back to us.  She's fond of him--as fond
of him as a mother.  Always was wiser than our Val or me, Jen was.  More
sense than a judge, and proud but not too proud, Pierre--not too proud.
She knows the right thing to do, like the Scriptures; and she does it
too.  .  .  .  Where did you say he was hid?"

"In the Hollow at Soldier's Knee.  He stayed too long at Moose Horn.
Injins carried the news on to Fort Desire.  When Val started south for
the Border other Injins followed, and when a halt was made at Soldier's
Knee they pushed across country over to Fort Desire.  You see, Val's
horse give out.  I rode with him so far.  My horse too was broke up.
What was to be done?  Well, I knew a ranchman not far from Soldier's
Knee.  I told Val to sleep, and I would go on and get the ranchman to
send him a horse, while I come on to you.  Then he could push on to the
Border.  I saw the ranchman, and he swore to send a horse to Val
to-night.  He will keep his word.  He knows Val.  That was at noon to-
day, and I am here, you see, and you know all.  The danger?  Ah, my
friend,--the Police Barracks at Archangel's Rise!  If word is sent down
there from Fort Desire before Val passes, they will have out a big
patrol, and his chances,--well, you know them, the Riders of the Plains.
But Val, I think will have luck, and get into Montana before they can
stop him.  I hope; yes."

"If I could do anything, Pierre!  Can't we--"

The half-breed interrupted: "No, we can't do anything, Galbraith.  I have
done all.  The ranchman knows me.  He will keep his word, by the Great
Heaven!"  It would seem as if Pierre had reasons for relying on the
ranchman other than ordinary prairie courtesy to law-breakers.

"Pierre, tell me the whole story over, slow and plain.  It don't seem
nateral to think of it; but if you go over it again, perhaps I can get
the thing more reas'nable in my mind.  No, it ain't nateral to me,
Pierre--our Val running away."  The old man leaned forward and put his
elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.

"Eh, well, it was an Injin.  So much.  It was in self-defence--a little,
but of course to prove that.  There is the difficulty.  You see, they
were all drinking, and the Injin--he was a chief---proposed--he proposed
that Val should sell him his sister, Jen Galbraith, to be the chief's
squaw.  He would give him a cayuse.  Val's blood came up quick--quite
quick.  You know Val.  He said between his teeth: 'Look out, Snow Devil,
you Injin dog, or I'll have your heart.  Do you think a white girl is
like a redskin woman, to be sold as you sell your wives and daughters to
the squaw-men and white loafers, you reptile?'  Then the Injin said an
ugly word about Val's sister, and Val shot him dead like lightning....
Yes, that is good to swear, Galbraith.  You are not the only one that
curses the law in this world.  It is not Justice that fills the gaols,
but Law."

The old man rose and walked up and down the room in a shuffling kind of
way.  His best days were done, the spring of his life was gone, and the
step was that of a man who had little more of activity and force with
which to turn the halting wheels of life.  His face was not altogether
good, yet it was not evil.  There was a sinister droop to the eyelids, a
suggestion of cruelty about the mouth; but there was more of good-nature
and passive strength than either in the general expression.  One could
see that some genial influence had dominated what was inherently cruel
and sinister in him.  Still the sinister predisposition was there.

"He can't never come here, Pierre, can he"? he asked, despairingly.

"No, he can't come here, Galbraith.  And look: if the Riders of the
Plains should stop here to-night, or to-morrow, you will be cool--cool,
eh?"

"Yes, I will be quite cool, Pierre."  Then he seemed to think of
something else and looked up half-curiously, half-inquiringly at the
half-breed.

Pierre saw this.  He whistled quietly to himself for a little, and then
called the old man over to where he sat.  Leaning slightly forward he
made his reply to the look that had been bent upon him.  He touched
Galbraith's breast lightly with his delicate fingers, and said: "I have
not much love for the world, Pete Galbraith, and not much love for men
and women altogether; they are fools--nearly all.  Some men--you know--
treat me well.  They drink with me--much.  They would make life a hell
for me if I was poor--shoot me, perhaps, quick!--if--if I didn't shoot
first.  They would wipe me with their feet.  They would spoil Pretty
Pierre."  This he said with a grim kind of humour and scorn, refined in
its suppressed force.  Fastidious as he was in appearance, Pierre was not
vain.  He had been created with a sense of refinement that reduced the
grossness of his life; but he did not trade on it; he simply accepted it
and lived it naturally after his kind.  He was not good at heart, and he
never pretended to be so.  He continued: "No, I have not much love; but
Val, well, I think of him some.  His tongue is straight; he makes no
lies.  His heart is fire; his arms are strong; he has no fear.  He does
not love Pierre; but he does not pretend to love him.  He does not think
of me like the rest.  So much the more when his trouble comes I help him.
I help him to the death if he needs me.  To make him my friend--that is
good.  Eh?  Perhaps.  You see, Galbraith?"

The old man nodded thoughtfully, and after a little pause said: "I have
killed Injins myself;" and he made a motion of his head backward,
suggestive of the past.

With a shrug of his shoulders the other replied "Yes, so have I--
sometimes.  But the government was different then, and there were no
Riders of the Plains."  His white teeth showed menacingly under his
slight moustache.  Then there was another pause.  Pierre was watching the
other.

"What's that you're doing, Galbraith?"

"Rubbin' laudanum on my gums for this toothache.  Have to use it for
nuralgy, too."

Galbraith put the little vial back in his waistcoat pocket, and presently
said: "What will you have to drink, Pretty Pierre?"  That was his way of
showing gratitude.

"I am reform.  I will take coffee, if Jen Galbraith will make some.  Too
much broke glass inside is not good.  Yes."

Galbraith went into the sitting-room to ask Jen to make the coffee.
Pierre, still sitting on the bar-counter, sang to himself a verse of a
rough-and-ready, satirical prairie ballad:

    "The Riders of the Plains, my boys, are twenty thousand strong
          Oh, Lordy, don't they make the prairies howl!
     'Tis their lot to smile on virtue and to collar what is wrong,
          And to intercept the happy flowin' bowl.

     They've a notion, that in glory, when we wicked ones have chains
          They will all be major-generals--and that!
     They're a lovely band of pilgrims are the Riders of the Plains
          Will some sinner please to pass around the hat?"

As he reached the last two lines of the verse the door opened and
Sergeant Tom entered.  Pretty Pierre did not stop singing.  His eyes
simply grew a little brighter, his cheek flushed ever so slightly, and
there was an increase of vigour in the closing notes.

Sergeant Tom smiled a little grimly, then he nodded and said: "Been at it
ever since, Pretty Pierre?  You were singing the same song on the same
spot when I passed here six months ago."

"Eh, Sergeant Tom, it is you?  What brings you so far from your straw-bed
at Fort Desire?"  From underneath his hat-brim Pierre scanned the face of
the trooper closely.

"Business.  Not to smile on virtue, but to collar what is wrong.  I guess
you ought to be ready by this time to go into quarters, Pierre.  You've
had a long innings."

"Not yet, Sergeant Tom, though I love the Irish, and your company would
make me happy.  But I am so innocent, and the world--it cannot spare me
yet.  But I think you come to smile on virtue, all the same, Sergeant
Tom.  She is beautiful is Jen Galbraith.  Ah, that makes your eye bright
--so!  You Riders of the Plains, you do two things at one time.  You make
this hour someone happy, and that hour someone unhappy.  In one hand the
soft glove of kindness, in the other, voila!  the cold glove of steel.
We cannot all be great like that, Sergeant Tom."

"Not great, but clever.  Voila, the Pretty Pierre!  In one hand he holds
the soft paper, the pictures that deceive--kings, queens, and knaves; in
the other, pictures in gold and silver--money won from the pockets of
fools.  And so, as you say, 'bien,' and we each have our way, bedad!"

Sergeant Tom noticed that the half-breed's eyes nearly closed, as if to
hide the malevolence that was in them.  He would not have been surprised
to see a pistol drawn.  But he was quite fearless, and if it was not his
duty to provoke a difficulty, his fighting nature would not shrink from
giving as good as he got.  Besides, so far as that nature permitted, he
hated Pretty Pierre.  He knew the ruin that this gambler had caused here
and there in the West, and he was glad that Fort Desire, at any rate,
knew him less than it did formerly.

Just then Peter Galbraith entered with the coffee, followed by Jen.  When
the old man saw his visitor he stood still with sudden fear; but catching
a warning look from the eye of the half-breed, he made an effort to be
steady, and said: "Well, Jen, if it isn't Sergeant Tom!  And what brings
you down here, Sergeant Tom?  After some scalawag that's broke the law?"

Sergeant Tom had not noticed the blanched anxiety in the father's face;
for his eyes were seeking those of the daughter.  He answered the
question as he advanced towards Jen: "Yes and no, Galbraith; I'm only
takin' orders to those who will be after some scalawag by daylight in
the mornin', or before.  The hand of a traveller to you, Miss Jen."

Her eyes replied to his in one language; her lips spoke another.  "And
who is the law-breaker, Sergeant Tom"? she said, as she took his hand.

Galbraith's eyes strained towards the soldier till the reply came:
"And I don't know that; not wan o' me.  I'd ridden in to Fort Desire from
another duty, a matter of a hundred miles, whin the major says to me,
'There's murder been done at Moose Horn.  Take these orders down to
Archangel's Rise, and deliver them and be back here within forty-eight
hours.'  And here I am on the way, and, if I wasn't ready to drop for
want of a bite and sup, I'd be movin' away from here to the south at this
moment."

Galbraith was trembling with excitement.  Pierre warned him by a look,
and almost immediately afterward gave him a reassuring nod, as if an
important and favourable idea had occurred to him.

Jen, looking at the Sergeant's handsome face, said: "It's six months to a
day since you were here, Sergeant Tom."

"What an almanac you are, Miss!"

Pretty Pierre sipping his coffee here interrupted musingly: "But her
almanac is not always so reliable.  So I think.  When was I here last,
Ma'm'selle?"

With something like menace in her eyes Jen replied: "You were here six
months ago to-day, when you won thirty dollars from our Val; and then
again, just thirty days after that."

"Ah, so!  You remember with a difference."

A moment after, Sergeant Tom being occupied in talking to Jen, Pierre
whispered to Peter Galbraith: "His horse--then the laudanum!"

Galbraith was puzzled for a moment, but soon nodded significantly, and
the sinister droop to his eyes became more marked.  He turned to the
Sergeant and said, "Your horse must be fed as well as yourself, Sergeant
Tom.  I'll look after the beast, and Jen will take care of you.  There's
some fresh coffee, isn't there, Jen?"

Jen nodded an affirmative.  Galbraith knew that the Sergeant would trust
no one to feed his horse but himself, and the offer therefore was made
with design.

Sergeant Tom replied instantly: "No, I'll do it if someone will show me
the grass pile."

Pierre slipped quietly from the counter, and said, "I know the way,
Galbraith.  I will show."

Jen turned to the sitting-room, and Sergeant Tom moved to the tavern
door, followed by Pierre, who, as he passed Galbraith, touched the old
man's waistcoat pocket, and said: "Thirty drops in the coffee."

Then he passed out, singing softly:

         "And he sleepeth so well, and he sleepeth so long
               The fight it was hard, my dear;
          And his foes were many and swift and strong
               Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear!"

There was danger ahead for Sergeant Thomas Gellatly.  Galbraith followed
his daughter to the sitting-room.  She went to the kitchen and brought
bread, and cold venison, and prairie fowl, and stewed dried apples--the
stay and luxury of all rural Canadian homes.  The coffee-pot was then
placed on the table.  Then the old man said: "Better give him some of
that old cheese, Jen, hadn't you?  It's in the cellar."  He wanted to be
rid of her for a few moments.  "S'pose I had," and Jen vanished.

Now was Galbraith's chance.  He took the vial of laudanum from his
pocket, and opened the coffee-pot.  It was half full.  This would not
suit.  Someone else--Jen--might drink the coffee also!  Yet it had to be
done.  Sergeant Tom should not go on.  Inspector Jules and his Riders of
the Plains must not be put upon the track of Val.  Twelve hours would
make all the difference.  Pour out a cup of coffee?--Yes, of course, that
would do.  It was poured out quickly, and then thirty drops of laudanum
were carefully counted into it.  Hark, they are coming back!--Just in
time.  Sergeant Tom and Pierre enter from outside, and then Jen from the
kitchen.  Galbraith is pouring another cup of coffee as they enter, and
he says: "Just to be sociable I'm goin' to have a cup of coffee with you,
Sergeant Tom.  How you Riders of the Plains get waited on hand and foot!"
Did some warning flash through Sergeant Tom's mind or body, some mental.
shock or some physical chill?  For he distinctly shivered, though he was
not cold.  He seemed suddenly oppressed with a sense of danger.  But his
eyes fell on Jen, and the hesitation, for which he did not then try to
account, passed.  Jen, clear-faced and true, invited him to sit and eat,
and he, starting half-abstractedly, responded to her "Draw nigh, Sergeant
Tom," and sat down.  Commonplace as the words were, they thrilled him,
for he thought of a table of his own in a home of his own, and the same
words spoken everyday, but without the "Sergeant,"--simply "Tom."

He ate heartily and sipped his coffee slowly, talking meanwhile to Jen
and Galbraith.  Pretty Pierre watched them all.  Presently the gambler
said: "Let us go and have our game of euchre, Galbraith.  Ma'm'selle can
well take care of Sergeant Tom."

Galbraith drank the rest of his coffee, rose, and passed with Pierre into
the bar-room.  Then the halfbreed said to him, "You were careful--thirty
drops?"

"Yes, thirty drops."  The latent cruelty of the old man's nature was
awake.

"That is right.  It is sleep; not death.  He will sleep so sound for half
a day, perhaps eighteen hours, and then!--Val will have a long start."

In the sitting-room Sergeant Tom was saying: "Where is your brother, Miss
Galbraith?"  He had no idea that the order in his pocket was for the
arrest of that brother.  He merely asked the question to start the talk.

He and Jen had met but five or six times; but the impression left on the
minds of both was pleasant--ineradicable.  Yet, as Sergeant Tom often
asked himself during the past six months, why should he think of her?
The life he led was one of severe endurance, and harshness, and
austerity.  Into it there could not possibly enter anything of home.  He
was but a noncommissioned officer of the Mounted Police, and beyond that
he had nothing.  Ireland had not been kind to him.  He had left her
inhospitable shores, and after years of absence he had but a couple of
hundred dollars laid up--enough to purchase his discharge and something
over, but nothing with which to start a home.  Ranching required capital.
No, it couldn't be thought of; and yet he had thought of it, try as he
would not to do so.  And she?  There was that about this man who had
lived life on two continents, in whose blood ran the warm and chivalrous
Celtic fire, which appealed to her.  His physical manhood was noble, if
rugged; his disposition genial and free, if schooled, but not entirely,
to that reserve which his occupation made necessary--a reserve he would
have been more careful to maintain, in speaking of his mission a short
time back in the bar-room, if Jen had not been there.  She called out the
frankest part of him; she opened the doors of his nature; she attracted
confidence as the sun does the sunflower.

To his question she replied: "I do not know where our Val is.  He went on
a hunting expedition up north.  We never can tell about him, when he will
turn up or where he will be to-morrow.  He may walk in any minute.  We
never feel uneasy.  He always has such luck, and comes out safe and sound
wherever he is.  Father says Val's a hustler, and that nothing can keep
in the road with him.  But he's a little wild--a little.  Still, we don't
hector him, Sergeant Tom; hectoring never does any good, does it?"

"No, hectoring never does any good.  And as for the wildness, if the
heart of him's right, why that's easy out of him whin he's older.  It's a
fine lad I thought him, the time I saw him here.  It's his freedom I wish
I had--me that has to travel all day and part of the night, and thin part
of the day and all night back again, and thin a day of sleep and the same
thing over again.  And that's the life of me, sayin' nothin' of the frost
and the blizzards, and no home to go to, and no one to have a meal for me
like this whin I turn up."  And the sergeant wound up with, "Whooroo!
there's a speech for you, Miss!" and laughed good-humouredly.  For all
that, there was in his eyes an appeal that went straight to Jen's heart.

But, woman-like, she would not open the way for him to say anything more
definite just yet.  She turned the subject.  And yet again, woman-like,
she knew it would lead to the same conclusion:

"You must go to-night?"

"Yes, I must."

"Nothing--nothing would keep you?"

"Nothing.  Duty is duty, much as I'd like to stay, and you givin' me the
bid.  But my orders were strict.  You don't know what discipline means,
perhaps.  It means obeyin' commands if you die for it; and my commands
were to take a letter to Inspector Jules at Archangel's Rise to-night.
It's a matter of murder or the like, and duty must be done, and me that
sleepy, not forgettin' your presence, as ever a man was and looked the
world in the face."

He drank the rest of the coffee and mechanically set the cup down, his
eyes closing heavily as he did so.  He made an effort, however, and
pulled himself together.  His eyes opened, and he looked at Jen steadily
for a moment.  Then he leaned over and touched her hand gently with his
fingers,--Pierre's glove of kindness,--and said: "It's in my heart to
want to stay; but a sight of you I'll have on my way back.  But I must go
on now, though I'm that drowsy I could lie down here and never stir
again."

Jen said to herself: "Poor fellow, poor fellow, how tired he is!  I
wish"--but she withdrew her hand.  He put his hand to his head, and said,
absently: "It's my duty and it's orders, and .  .  .  what was I sayin'?
The disgrace of me if, if .  .  .  bedad!  the sleep's on me; I'm awake,
but I can't open my eyes.  .  .  .  If the orders of me--and a good meal
.  .  .  and the disgrace .  .  .  to do me duty-looked the world in the
face--"

During this speech he staggered to his feet, Jen watching him anxiously
the while.  No suspicion of the cause of his trouble crossed her mind.
She set it down to extreme natural exhaustion.  Presently feeling the
sofa behind him, he dropped upon it, and, falling back, began to breathe
heavily.  But even in this physical stupefaction he made an effort to
reassert himself, to draw himself back from the coming unconsciousness.
His eyes opened, but they were blind with sleep; and as if in a dream,
he said: "My duty .  .  .  disgrace .  .  .  a long sleep .  .  .  Jen,
dearest"--how she started then!--"it must be done .  .  .  my Jen!" and
he said no more.

But these few words had opened up a world for her--a new-created world on
the instant.  Her life was illuminated.  She felt the fulness of a great
thought suffusing her face.  A beautiful dream was upon her.  It had come
to her out of his sleep.  But with its splendid advent there came the
other thing that always is born with woman's love--an almost pathetic
care of the being loved.  In the deep love of women the maternal and
protective sense works in the parallels of mutual regard.  In her life
now it sprang full-statured in action; love of him, care of him; his
honour her honour; his life her life.  He must not sleep like this if it
was his duty to go on.  Yet how utterly worn he must be!  She had seen
men brought in from fighting prairie fires for three days without sleep;
had watched them drop on their beds, and lie like logs for thirty-six
hours.  This sleep of her lover was, therefore, not so strange to her.
but it was perilous to the performance of his duty.

"Poor Sergeant Tom," she said.  "Poor Tom," she added; and then, with a
great flutter at the heart at last, "My Tom!"  Yes, she said that; but
she said it to the beacon, to the Prairie Star, burning outside brighter,
it seemed to her, than it had ever done be fore.  Then she sat down and
watched him for many minutes, thinking at the end of each that she would
wake him.  But the minutes passed, his breathing grew heavier, and he did
not stir.  The Prairie Star made quivering and luminous curtains of red
for the windows, and Jen's mind was quivering in vivid waves of feeling
just the same.  It seemed to her as if she was looking at life now
through an atmosphere charged with some rare, refining essence, and that
in it she stood exultingly.  Perhaps she did not define it so; but that
which we define she felt.  And happy are they who feel it, and, feeling
it, do not lose it in this world, and have the hope of carrying it into
the next.

After a time she rose, went over to him and touched his shoulder.  It
seemed strange to her to do this thing.  She drew back timidly from the
pleasant shock of a new experience.  Then she remembered that he ought to
be on his way, and she shook him gently, then, with all her strength, and
called to him quietly all the time, as if her low tones ought to wake
him, if nothing else could.  But he lay in a deep and stolid slumber.  It
was no use.  She went to her seat and sat down to think.  As she did so,
her father entered the room.

"Did you call, Jen"? he said; and turned to the sofa.  "I was calling to
Sergeant Tom.  He's asleep there; dead-gone, father.  I can't wake him."

"Why should you wake him?  He is tired."

The sinister lines in Galbraith's face had deepened greatly in the last
hour.  He went over and looked closely at the Sergeant, followed
languidly by Pierre, who casually touched the pulse of the sleeping man,
and said as casually:

"Eh, he sleep well; his pulse is like a baby; he was tired, much.
He has had no sleep for one, two, three nights, perhaps; and a good meal,
it makes him comfortable, and so you see!"

Then he touched lightly the triple chevron on Sergeant Tom's arm, and
said:

"Eh, a man does much work for that.  And then, to be moral and the friend
of the law all the time!"  Pierre here shrugged his shoulders.  "It is
easier to be wicked and free, and spend when one is rich, and starve when
one is poor, than to be a sergeant and wear the triple chevron.  But the
sleep will do him good just the same, Jen Galbraith."

"He said that he must go to Archangel's Rise tonight, and be back at Fort
Desire to-morrow night."

"Well, that's nothing to us, Jen," replied Galbraith, roughly.  "He's got
his own business to look after.  He and his tribe are none too good to us
and our tribe.  He'd have your old father up to-morrow for selling a
tired traveller a glass of brandy; and worse than that, ay, a great sight
worse than that, mind you, Jen."

Jen did not notice, or, at least, did not heed, the excited emphasis on
the last words.  She thought that perhaps her father had been set against
the Sergeant by Pierre.

"There, that'll do, father," she said.  "It's easy to bark at a dead
lion.  Sergeant Tom's asleep, and you say things that you wouldn't say if
he was awake.  He never did us any harm, and you know that's true,
father."

Galbraith was about to reply with anger; but he changed his mind and
walked into the bar-room, followed by Pierre.

In Jen's mind a scheme had been hurriedly and clearly formed; and with
her, to form it was to put it into execution.  She went to Sergeant Tom,
opened his coat, felt in the inside pocket, and drew forth an official
envelope.  It was addressed to Inspector Jules at Archangel's Rise.  She
put it back and buttoned up the coat again.  Then she said, with her
hands firmly clenching at her side,--"I'll do it."

She went into the adjoining room and got a quilt, which she threw over
him, and a pillow, which she put under his head.  Then she took his cap
and the cloak which he had thrown over a chair, as if to carry them away.
But another thought occurred to her, for she looked towards the bar-room
and put them down again.  She glanced out of the window and saw that her
father and Pierre had gone to lessen the volume of gas which was feeding
the flame.  This, she knew, meant that her father would go to bed when he
came back to the house; and this suited her purpose.  She waited till
they had entered the bar-room again, and then she went to them, and said:
"I guess he's asleep for all night.  Best leave him where he is.  I'm
going.  Good-night."

When she got back to the sitting-room she said to herself: "How old
father's looking!  He seems broken up to-day.  He isn't what he used to
be."  She turned once more to look at Sergeant Tom, then she went to her
room.

A little later Peter Galbraith and Pretty Pierre went to the sitting-
room, and the old man drew from the Sergeant's pocket the envelope which
Jen had seen.  Pierre took it from him.  "No, Pete Galbraith.  Do not be
a fool.  Suppose you steal that paper.  Sergeant Tom will miss it.  He
will understand.  He will guess about the drug, then you will be in
trouble.  Val will be safe now.  This Rider of the Plains will sleep long
enough for that.  There, I put the paper back.  He sleeps like a log.  No
one can suspect the drug, and it is all as we like.  No, we will not
steal; that is wrong--quite wrong"--here Pretty Pierre showed his teeth.
"We will go to bed.  Come!"

Jen heard them ascend the stairs.  She waited a half-hour, then she stole
into Val's bedroom, and when she emerged again she had a bundle of
clothes across her arm.  A few minutes more and she walked into the
sitting-room dressed in Val's clothes, and with her hair closely wound on
the top of her head.

The house was still.  The Prairie Star made the room light enough for her
purpose.  She took Sergeant Tom's cap and cloak and put them on.  She
drew the envelope from his pocket and put it in her bosom--she showed the
woman there, though for the rest of this night she was to be a Rider of
the Plains, She of the Triple Chevron.

She went towards the door, hesitated, drew back, then paused, stooped
down quickly, tenderly touched the soldier's brow with her lips, and
said: "I'll do it for you.  You shall not be disgraced--Tom."




III

This was at half-past ten o'clock.  At two o'clock a jaded and blown
horse stood before the door of the barracks at Archangel's Rise.  Its
rider, muffled to the chin, was knocking, and at the same time pulling
his cap down closely over his head.  "Thank God the night is dusky," he
said.  We have heard that voice before.  The hat and cloak are those of
Sergeant Tom, but the voice is that of Jen Galbraith.  There is some
danger in this act; danger for her lover, contempt for herself if she is
discovered.  Presently the door opens and a corporal appears.  "Who's
there?  Oh," he added, as he caught sight of the familiar uniform; "where
from?"

"From Fort Desire.  Important orders to Inspector Jules.  Require fresh
horse to return with; must leave mine here.  Have to go back at once."

"I say," said the corporal, taking the papers--"what's your name?"

"Gellatly--Sergeant Gellatly."

"Say, Sergeant Gellatly, this isn't accordin' to Hoyle--come in the night
and go in the night and not stay long enough to have a swear at the
Gover'ment.  Why, you're comin' in, aren't you?  You're comin' across the
door-mat for a cup of coffee and a warm while the horse is gettin' ready,
aren't you, Sergeant--Sergeant Gellatly, Sergeant Gellatly?  I've heard
of you, but--yes; I will hurry.  Here, Waugh, this to Inspector Jules!
If you won't step in and won't drink and will be unsociable, sergeant,
why, come on and you shall have a horse as good as the one you've
brought.  I'm Corporal Galna."

Jen led the exhausted horse to the stables.  Fortunately there was no
lantern used, and therefore little chance for the garrulous corporal to
study the face of his companion, even if he wished to do so.  The risk
was considerable; but Jen Galbraith was fired by that spirit of self-
sacrifice which has held a world rocking to destruction on a balancing
point of safety.

The horse was quickly saddled, Jen meanwhile remaining silent.  While she
was mounting, Corporal Galna drew and struck a match to light his pipe.
He held it up for a moment as though to see the face of Sergeant
Gellatly.  Jen had just given a good-night, and the horse the word and a
touch of the spur at the instant.  Her face, that is, such of it as could
be seen above the cloak and under the cap, was full in the light.  Enough
was seen, however, to call forth, in addition to Corporal Galna's good-
night, the exclamation," Well, I'm blowed!"

As Jen vanished into the night a moment after, she heard a voice calling
--not Corporal Galna's--"Sergeant Gellatly, Sergeant Gellatly!"  She
supposed it was Inspector Jules, but she would not turn back now.  Her
work was done.

A half-hour later Corporal Galna confided to Private Waugh that Sergeant
Gellatly was too damned pretty for the force--wondered if they called him
Beauty at Fort Desire--couldn't call him Pretty Gellatly, for there was
Pretty Pierre who had right of possession to that title--would like to
ask him what soap he used for his complexion--'twasn't this yellow bar-
soap of the barracks, which wouldn't lather, he'd bet his ultimate
dollar.

Waugh, who had sometime seen Sergeant Gellatly, entered into a
disputation on the point.  He said that "Sergeant Tom was good-looking,
a regular Irish thoroughbred; but he wasn't pretty, not much!--guessed
Corporal Galna had nightmare, and finally, as the interest in the theme
increased in fervour, announced that Sergeant Tom could loosen the teeth
of, and knock the spots off, any man among the Riders, from Archangel's
Rise to the Cypress Hills.  Pretty--not much--thoroughbred all over!"

And Corporal Galna replied, sarcastically,--"That he might be able for
spot dispersion of such a kind, but he had two as pretty spots on his
cheek, and as white and touch-no-tobacco teeth as any female ever had."
Private Waugh declared then that Corporal Galna would be saying Sergeant
Gellatly wasn't a man at all, and wore earrings, and put his hair into
papers; and when he could find no further enlargement of sarcasm,
consigned the Corporal to a fiery place of future torment reserved
for lunatics.

At this critical juncture Waugh was ordered to proceed to Inspector
Jules.  A few minutes after, he was riding away toward Soldier's Knee,
with the Inspector and another private, to capture Val Galbraith, the
slayer of Snow Devil, while four other troopers also started off in
different directions.




IV

It was six o'clock when Jen drew rein in the yard at Galbraith's Place.
Through the dank humours of the darkest time of the night she had watched
the first grey streaks of dawn appear.  She had caught her breath with
fear at the thought that, by some accident, she might not get back before
seven o'clock, the hour when her father rose.  She trembled also at the
supposition of Sergeant Tom awaking and finding his papers gone.  But her
fearfulness and excitement was not that of weakness, rather that of a
finely nervous nature, having strong elements of imagination, and,
therefore, great capacities for suffering as for joy; but yet elastic,
vigorous, and possessing unusual powers of endurance.  Such natures
rebuild as fast as they are exhausted.  In the devitalising time
preceding the dawn she had felt a sudden faintness come over her for a
moment; but her will surmounted it, and, when she saw the ruddy streaks
of pink and red glorify the horizon, she felt a sudden exaltation of
physical strength.  She was a child of the light, she loved the warm
flame of the sun, the white gleam of the moon.  Holding in her horse to
give him a five minutes' rest, she rose in her saddle and looked round.
She was alone in her circle of vision, she and her horse.  The long
hillocks of prairie rolled away like the sea to the flushed morning, and
the far-off Cypress Hills broke the monotonous skyline of the south.
Already the air was dissipated of its choking weight, and the vast
solitude was filling with that sense of freedom which night seems to shut
in as with four walls, and day to widen gloriously.  Tears sprang to her
eyes from a sudden rush of feeling; but her lips were smiling.  The world
was so different from what it was yesterday.  Something had quickened her
into a glowing life.

Then she urged the horse on, and never halted till she reached home.  She
unsaddled the animal that had shared with her the hardship of the long,
hard ride, hobbled it, and entered the house quickly.  No one was
stirring.  Sergeant Tom was still asleep.  This she saw, as she hurriedly
passed in and laid the cap and cloak where she had found them.  Then,
once again, she touched the brow of the sleeper with her lips, and went
to her room to divest herself of Val's clothes.  The thing had been done
without anyone knowing of her absence.  But she was frightened as she
looked into the mirror.  She was haggard, and her eyes were bloodshot.
Eight hours or nearly in the saddle, at ten miles an hour, had told on
her severely; as well it might.  Even a prairie-born woman, however,
understands the art and use of grooming better than a man.  Warm water
quickly heated at the gas, with a little acetic acid in it, used
generally for her scouring,--and then cold water with oatmeal flour, took
away in part the dulness and the lines in the flesh.  But the eyes!  Jen
remembered the vial of tincture of myrrh left by a young Englishman a
year ago, and used by him for refreshing his eyes after a drinking bout.
She got it, tried the tincture, and saw and felt an immediate benefit.
Then she made a cup of strong green tea, and in ten minutes was like
herself again.  Now for the horse.  She went quickly out where she could
not be seen from the windows of the house, and gave him a rubbing down
till he was quite dry.  Then she gave him a little water and some feed.
The horse was really the touchstone of discovery.  But Jen trusted in her
star.  If the worst came she would tell the tale.  It must be told anyway
to Sergeant Tom--but that was different now.  Even if the thing became
known it would only be a thing to be teased about by her father and
others, and she could stop that.  Poor girl, as though that was the worst
that was to come from her act!

Sergeant Tom slept deeply and soundly.  He had not stirred.  His
breathing was unnaturally heavy, Jen thought, but, no suspicion of foul
play came to her mind yet.  Why should it?  She gave herself up to a
sweet and simple sense of pride in the deed she had done for him,
disturbed but slightly by the chances of discovery, and the remembrance
of the match that showed her face at Archangel's Rise.  Her hands touched
the flaxen hair of the soldier, and her eyes grew luminous.  One night
had stirred all her soul to its depths.  A new woman had been born in
her.  Val was dear to her--her brother Val; but she realised now that
another had come who would occupy a place that neither father, nor
brother, nor any other could fill.  Yet it was a most weird set of tragic
circumstances.  This man before her had been set to do a task which might
deprive her brother of his life, certainly of his freedom; that would
disgrace him; her father had done a great wrong too, had put in danger
the life of the man she loved, to save his son; she herself in doing this
deed for her lover had placed her brother in jeopardy, had crossed swords
with her father's purposes, had done the one thing that stood between
that father's son and safety; Pretty Pierre, whom she hated and despised,
and thought to be the enemy of her brother and of her home, had proved
himself a friend; and behind it all was the brother's crime committed to
avenge an insult to her name.

But such is life.  Men and women are unwittingly their own executioners,
and the executioners of those they love.




V

An hour passed, and then Galbraith and Pierre appeared.  Jen noticed that
her father went over to Sergeant Tom and rather anxiously felt his pulse.
Once in the night the old man had come down and done the same thing.
Pierre said something in an undertone.  Did they think he was ill?  That
was Jon's thought.  She watched them closely; but the half-breed knew
that she was watching, and the two said nothing more to each other.  But
Pierre said, in a careless way: "It is good he have that sleep.  He was
played out, quite."

Jon replied, a secret triumph at her heart: "But what about his orders,
the papers he was to carry to Archangel's Rise?  What about his being
back at Fort Desire in the time given him?"

"It is not much matter about the papers.  The poor devil that Inspector
Jules would arrest--well, he will get off, perhaps, but that does no one
harm.  Eh, Galbraith?  The law is sometimes unkind.  And as for obeying
orders, why, the prairie is wide, it is a hard ride, horses go wrong;
--a little tale of trouble to Inspector Jules, another at Fort Desire,
and who is to know except Pete Galbraith, Jen Galbraith, and Pierre?
Poor Sergeant Tom.  It was good he sleep so."

Jen felt there was irony behind the smooth words of the gambler.  He had
a habit of saying things, as they express it in that country, between his
teeth.  That signifies what is animal-like and cruel.  Galbraith stood
silent during Pierre's remarks, but, when he had finished, said:

"Yes, it's all right if he doesn't sleep too long; but there's the
trouble--too long!"

Pierre frowned a warning, and then added, with unconcern: "I remember
when you sleep thirty hours, Galbraith--after the prairie fire, three
years ago, eh!"

"Well, that's so; that's so as you say it.  We'll let him sleep till
noon, or longer--or longer, won't we, Pierre?"

"Yes, till noon is good, or longer."

"But he shall not sleep longer if I can wake him," said Jen.  "You do not
think of the trouble all this sleeping may make for him."

"But then--but then, there is the trouble he will make for others, if he
wakes.  Think.  A poor devil trying to escape the law!"

"But we have nothing to do with that, and justice is justice, Pierre."

"Eh, well, perhaps, perhaps!"  Galbraith was silent.

Jen felt that so far as Sergeant Tom's papers were concerned he was safe;
but she felt also that by noon he ought to be on his way back to Fort
Desire--after she had told him what she had done.  She was anxious for
his honour.  That her lover shall appear well before the world, is a
thing deep in the heart of every woman.  It is a pride for which she will
deny herself, even of the presence of that lover.

"Till noon," Jen said, "and then he must go."




VI

Jen watched to see if her father or Pierre would notice that the horse
was changed, had been travelled during the night, or that it was a
different one altogether.  As the morning wore away she saw that they did
not notice the fact.  This ignorance was perhaps owing largely to the
appearance of several ranchmen from near the American border.  They spent
their time in the bar-room, and when they left it was nearly noon.  Still
Sergeant Tom slept.  Jen now went to him and tried to wake him.  She
lifted him to a sitting position, but his head fell on her shoulder.
Disheartened, she laid him down again.  But now at last an undefined
suspicion began to take possession of her.  It made her uneasy; it filled
her with a vague sense of alarm.  Was this sleep natural?  She remembered
that, when her father and others had slept so long after the prairie
fire, she had waked them once to give them drink and a little food, and
they did not breathe so heavily as he was doing.  Yet what could be done?
What was the matter?  There was not a doctor nearer than a hundred miles.
She thought of bleeding,--the old-fashioned remedy still used on the
prairies--but she decided to wait a little.  Somehow she felt that she
would receive no help from her father or Pierre.  Had they anything to
do with this sleep?  Was it connected with the papers?  No, not that, for
they had not sought to take them, and had not made any remark about their
being gone.  This showed their unconcern on that point.  She could not
fathom the mystery, but the suspicion of something irregular deepened.
Her father could have no reason for injuring Sergeant Tom; but Pretty
Pierre--that was another matter.  Yet she remembered too that her father
had appeared the more anxious of the two about the Sergeant's sleep.  She
recalled that he said: "Yes, it's all right, if he doesn't sleep too
long."

But Pierre could play a part, she knew, and could involve others in
trouble, and escape himself.  He was a man with a reputation for
occasional wickednesses of a naked, decided type.  She knew that he was
possessed of a devil, of a very reserved devil, but liable to bold action
on occasions.  She knew that he valued the chances of life or death no
more than he valued the thousand and one other chances of small
importance, which occur in daily experience.  It was his creed that one
doesn't go till the game is done and all the cards are played.  He had a
stoic indifference to events.

He might be capable of poisoning--poisoning! ah, that thought! of
poisoning Sergeant Tom for some cause.  But her father?  The two seemed
to act alike in the matter.  Could her father approve of any harm
happening to Tom?  She thought of the meal he had eaten, of the coffee
he had drunk.  The coffee-was that the key?  But she said to herself that
she was foolish, that her love had made her so.  No, it could not be.

But a fear grew upon her, strive as she would against it.  She waited
silently and watched, and twice or thrice made ineffectual efforts to
rouse him.  Her father came in once.  He showed anxiety; that was
unmistakable, but was it the anxiety of guilt of any kind?  She said
nothing.  At five o'clock matters abruptly came to a climax.  Jen was in
the kitchen, but, hearing footsteps in the sitting-room, she opened the
door quietly.  Her father was bending over Sergeant Tom, and Pierre was
speaking: "No, no, Galbraith, it is all right.  You are a fool.  It could
not kill him."

"Kill him--kill him," she repeated gaspingly to herself.

"You see he was exhausted; he may sleep for hours yet.  Yes, he is safe,
I think."

"But Jen, she suspects something, she--"

"Hush!" said Pretty Pierre.  He saw her standing near.  She had glided
forward and stood with flashing eyes turned, now upon the one, and now
upon the other.  Finally they rested on Galbraith.

"Tell me what you have done to him; what you and Pretty Pierre have done
to him.  You have some secret.  I will know."  She leaned forward,
something of the tigress in the poise of her body.  "I tell you, I will
know."  Her voice was low, and vibrated with fierceness and
determination.  Her eyes glowed, and her nostrils trembled with disdain
and indignation.  As they drew back,--the old man sullenly, the gambler
with a slight gesture of impatience,--she came a step nearer to them and
waited, the cords of her shapely throat swelling with excitement.  A
moment so, and then she said in a tone that suggested menace,
determination:

"You have poisoned him.  Tell me the truth.  Do you hear, father--the
truth, or I will hate you.  I will make you repent it till you die."

"But--" Pierre began.

She interrupted him.  "Do not speak, Pretty Pierre.  You are a devil.
You will lie.  Father--!"  She waited.  "What difference does it make to
you, Jen?"  "What difference--what difference to me?  That you should be
a murderer?"

"But that is not so, that is a dream of yours, Ma'm'selle," said Pierre.

She turned to her father again.  "Father, will you tell the truth to me?
I warn you it will be better for you both."

The old man's brow was sullen, and his lips were twitching nervously.
"You care more for him than you do for your own flesh and blood, Jen.
There's nothing to get mad about like that.  I'll tell you when he's
gone.  .  .  .  Let's--let's wake him," he added, nervously.

He stooped down and lifted the sleeping man to a sitting posture.  Pierre
assisted him.

Jen saw that the half-breed believed Sergeant Tom could be wakened, and
her fear diminished slightly, if her indignation did not.  They lifted
the soldier to his feet.  Pierre pressed the point of a pin deep into his
arm.  Jen started forward, woman-like, to check the action, but drew
back, for she saw heroic measures might be necessary to bring him to
consciousness.  But, nevertheless, her anger broke bounds, and she said:
"Cowards--cowards!  What spite made you do this?"

"Damnation, Jen," said the father, "you'll hector me till I make you
sorry.  What's this Irish policeman to you?  What's he beside your own
flesh and blood, I say again."

"Why does my own flesh and blood do such wicked tricks to an Irish
soldier?  Why does it give poison to an Irish soldier?"

"Poison, Jen?  You needn't speak so ghost-like.  It was only a dose of
laudanum; not enough to kill him.  Ask Pierre."

Inwardly she believed him, and said a Thank-God to herself, but to the
half-breed she remarked: "Yes, ask Pierre--you are behind all this!
It is some evil scheme of yours.  Why did you do it?  Tell the truth for
once."  Her eyes swam angrily with Pierre's.

Pierre was complacent; he admired her wild attacks.  He smiled, and
replied: "My dear, it was a whim of mine; but you need not tell him, all
the same, when he wakes.  You see this is your father's house, though the
whim is mine.  But look: he is waking-the pin is good.  Some cold water,
quick!"

The cold water was brought and dashed into the face of the soldier.  He
showed signs of returning consciousness.  The effect of the laudanum had
been intensified by the thoroughly exhausted condition of the body.

But the man was perfectly healthy, and this helped to resist the danger
of a fatal result.

Pierre kept up an intermittent speech.  "Yes, it was a mere whim of mine.
Eh, he will think he has been an ass to sleep so long, and on duty, and
orders to carry to Archangel's Rise!"  Here he showed his teeth again,
white and regular like a dog's.  That was the impression they gave, his
lips were so red, and the contrast was so great.  One almost expected to
find that the roof of his mouth was black, like that of a well-bred
hound; but there is no evidence available on the point.

"There, that is good," he said.  "Now set him down, Pete Galbraith.
Yes--so, so!  Sergeant Tom, ah, you will wake well, soon.  Now the eyes
a little wider.  Good.  Eh, Sergeant Tom, what is the matter?  It is
breakfast time--quite."

Sergeant Tom's eyes opened slowly and looked dazedly before him for a
minute.  Then they fell on Pierre.  At first there was no recognition,
then they became consciously clearer.  "Pretty Pierre, you here in the
barracks!" he said.  He put his hand to his head, then rubbed his eyes
roughly and looked up again.  This time he saw Jen and her father.  His
bewilderment increased.  Then he added: "What is the matter?  Have I been
asleep?  What--!"  He remembered.  He staggered to his feet and felt his
pockets quickly and anxiously for his letter.  It was gone.

"The letter!" he said.  "My orders!  Who has robbed me?  Faith, I
remember.  I could not keep awake after I drank the coffee.  My papers
are gone, I tell you, Galbraith," he said, fiercely.

Then he turned to Jen: "You are not in this, Jen.  Tell me."

She was silent for a moment, then was about to answer, when he turned
to the gambler and said: "You are at the bottom of this.  Give me my
papers."  But Pierre and Galbraith were as dumbfounded as the Sergeant
himself to know that the letter was gone.  They were stunned beyond
speech when Jen said, flushing: "No, Sergeant Tom, I am the thief.  When
I could not wake you, I took the letter from your pocket and carried it
to Inspector Jules last night,--or, rather, Sergeant Gellatly carried
them.  I wore his cap and cloak and passed for him."

"You carried that letter to Inspector Jules last night, Jen"? said the
soldier, all his heart in his voice.

Jen saw her father blanch, his mouth open blankly, and his lips refuse to
utter the words on them.  For the first time she comprehended some danger
to him, to herself--to Val!

"Father, father," she said,--" what is it?"

Pierre shrugged his shoulders and rejoined: "Eh, the devil!  Such
mistakes of women.  They are fools--all."  The old man put out a shaking
hand and caught his daughter's arm.  His look was of mingled wonder and
despair, as he said, in a gasping whisper, "You carried that letter to
Archangel's Rise?"

"Yes," she answered, faltering now; "Sergeant Tom had said how important
it was, you remember.  That it was his duty to take it to Inspector
Jules, and be back within forty-eight hours.  He fell asleep.  I could
not wake him.  I thought, what if he were my brother--our Val.  So, when
you and Pretty Pierre went to bed, I put on Val's clothes, took Sergeant
Tom's cloak and hat, carried the orders to Jules, and was back here by
six o'clock this morning."

Sergeant Tom's eyes told his tale of gratitude.  He made a step towards
her; but the old man, with a strange ferocity, motioned him back, saying,

"Go away from this house.  Go quick.  Go now, I tell you, or by God,--
I'll--"

Here Pretty Pierre touched his arm.

Sergeant Tom drew back, not because he feared but as if to get a mental
perspective of the situation.  Galbraith again said to his daughter,--
"Jen, you carried them papers?  You! for him--for the Law!"  Then he
turned from her, and with hand clenched and teeth set spoke to the
soldier: "Haven't you heard enough?  Curse you, why don't you go?"

Sergeant Tom replied coolly: "Not so fast, Galbraith.  There's some
mystery in all this.  There's my sleep to be accounted for yet.  You had
some reason, some"--he caught the eyes of Pierre.  He paused.  A light
began to dawn on his mind, and he looked at Jen, who stood rigidly pale,
her eyes fixed fearfully, anxiously, upon him.  She too was beginning to
frame in her mind a possible horror; the thing that had so changed her
father, the cause for drugging the soldier.  There was a silence in which
Pierre first, and then all, detected the sound of horses' hoofs.  Pierre
went to the door and looked out.  He turned round again, and shrugged his
shoulders with an expression of helplessness.  But as he saw Jen was
about to speak, and Sergeant Tom to move towards the door, he put up his
hand to stay them both, and said: "A little--wait!"

Then all were silent.  Jen's fingers nervously clasped and unclasped, and
her eyes were strained towards the door.  Sergeant Tom stood watching her
pityingly; the old man's head was bowed.  The sound of galloping grew
plainer.  It stopped.  An instant and then three horsemen appeared before
the door.  One was Inspector Jules, one was Private Waugh, and the other
between them was--let Jen tell who he was.  With an agonised cry she
rushed from the house and threw herself against the saddle, and with her
arms about the prisoner, cried: "Oh, Val, Val, it was you!  It was you
they were after.  It was you that--oh no, no, no!  My poor Val, and I
can't tell you--I can't tell you!"

Great as was her grief and self-reproach, she felt it would be cruel to
tell him the part she had taken in placing him in this position.  She
hated herself, but why deepen his misery?  His face was pale, but it had
its old, open, fearless look, which dissipation had not greatly marred.
His eyelids quivered, but he smiled, and touching her with his steel-
bound hands, gently said:

"Never mind, Jen.  It isn't so bad.  You see it was this way: Snow Devil
said something about someone that belonged to me, that cares more about
me than I deserve.  Well, he died sudden, and I was there at the time.
That's all.  I was trying with the help of Pretty Pierre to get out of
the country"--and he waved his hand towards the half-breed.

"With Pretty Pierre--Pierre"? she said.

"Yes, he isn't all gambler.  But they were too quick for me, and here I
am.  Jules is a hustler on the march.  But he said he'd stop here and let
me see you and dad as we go up to Fort Desire, and--there, don't mind,
Sis--don't mind it so!"

Her sobs had ceased, but she clung to him as if she could never let him
go.  Her father stood near her, all the lines in his face deepened into
bitterness.  To him Val said: "Why, dad, what's the matter?  Your hand
is shaky.  Don't you get this thing eatin' at your heart.

"It isn't worth it.  That Injin would have died if you'd been in my place,
I guess.  Between you and me, I expect to give Jules the slip before we
get there."  And he laughed at the Inspector, who laughed a little
austerely too, and in his heart wished that it was anyone else he had as
a prisoner than Val Galbraith, who was a favourite with the Riders of the
Plains.

Sergeant Tom had been standing in the doorway regarding this scene, and
working out in his mind the complications that had led to it.  At this
point he came forward, and Inspector Jules said to him, after a curt
salutation:

"You were in a hurry last night, Sergeant Gellatly.  You don't seem so
pushed for time now.  Usual thing.  When a man seems over-zealous--drink,
cards, or women behind it.  But your taste is good, even if, under
present circumstances"--He stopped, for he saw a threatening look in the
eyes of the other, and that other said: "We won't discuss that matter,
Inspector, if you please.  I'm going on to Fort Desire now.  I couldn't
have seen you if I'd wanted to last night."

"That's nonsense.  If you had waited one minute longer at the barracks
you could have done so.  I called to you as you were leaving, but you
didn't turn back."

"No. I didn't hear you."

All were listening to this conversation, and none more curiously than
Private Waugh.  Many a time in days to come he pictured the scene for the
benefit of his comrades.  Pretty Pierre, leaning against the hitching-
post near the bar-room, said languidly:

"But, Inspector, he speaks the truth--quite: that is a virtue of the
Riders of the Plains."  Val had his eyes on the half-breed, and a look of
understanding passed between them.  While Val and his father and sister
were saying their farewells in few words, but with homely demonstrations,
Sergeant Tom brought his horse round and mounted it.  Inspector Jules
gave the word to move on.  As they started, Gellatly, who fell behind the
others slightly, leaned down and whispered: "Forgive me, Jen.  You did
a noble act for me, and the life of me would prove to you that I'm
grateful.  It's sorry, sorry I am.  But I'll do what I can for Val,
as sure as the heart's in me.  Good-bye, Jen."

She looked up with a faint hope in her eyes.  "Goodbye!" she said.
"I believe you .  .  .  Good-bye!"

In a few minutes there was only a cloud of dust on the prairie to tell
where the Law and its quarry were.  And of those left behind, one was a
broken-spirited old man with sorrow melting away the sinister look in his
face; one, a girl hovering between the tempest of bitterness and a storm
of self-reproach; and one a half-breed gambler, who again sat on the bar-
counter smoking a cigarette and singing to himself, as indolently as if
he were not in the presence of a painful drama of life, perhaps a
tragedy.  But was the song so pointless to the occasion, after all, and
was the man so abstracted and indifferent as he seemed?  For thus the
song ran:

         "Oh, the bird in a cage and the bird on a tree
               Voila! 'tis a different fear!
          The maiden weeps and she bends the knee
               Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear!
          But the bird in a cage has a friend in the tree,
               And the maiden she dries her tear:
          And the night is dark and no moon you see
               Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear!
          When the doors are open the bird is free
               Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear!"




VII

These words kept ringing in Jen's ears as she stood again in the doorway
that night with her face turned to the beacon.  How different it seemed
now!  When she saw it last night it was a cheerful spirit of light--a
something suggesting comfort, companionship, aspiration, a friend to the
traveller, and a mysterious, but delightful, association.  In the morning
when she returned from that fortunate, yet most unfortunate, ride, it was
still burning, but its warm flame was exhausted in the glow of the life-
giving sun; the dream and delight of the night robbed of its glamour by
the garish morning; like her own body, its task done, sinking before the
unrelieved scrutiny of the day.  To-night it burned with a different
radiance.  It came in fiery palpitations from the earth.  It made a sound
that was now like the moan of pine trees, now like the rumble of far-off
artillery.  The slight wind that blew spread the topmost crest of flame
into strands of ruddy hair, and, looking at it, Jen saw herself rocked to
and fro by tumultuous emotions, yet fuller of strength and larger of life
than ever she had been.  Her hot veins beat with determination, with a
love which she drove back by another, cherished now more than it had ever
been, because danger threatened the boy to whom she had been as a mother.
In twenty-four hours she had grown to the full stature of love and
suffering.

There were shadows that betrayed less roundness to her face; there were
lines that told of weariness; but in her eyes there was a glowing light
of hope.  She raised her face to the stars and unconsciously paraphrasing
Pierre's song said: "Oh, the God that dost save us, hear!"

A hand touched her arm, and a voice said, huskily, "Jen, I wanted to save
him and--and not let you know of it; that's all.  You're not keepin' a
grudge agin me, my girl?"

She did not move nor turn her head.  "I've no grudge, father; but--if--
if you had told me, 'twouldn't be on my mind that I had made it worse for
Val."

The kindness in the voice reassured him, and he ventured to say: "I
didn't think you'd be carin' for one of the Riders of the Plains, Jen."

Then the old man trembled lest she should resent his words.  She seemed
about to do so, but the flush faded from her brow, and she said, simply:
"I care for Val most, father.  But he didn't know he was getting Val into
trouble."

She suddenly quivered as a wave of emotion passed through her; and she
said, with a sob in her voice: "Oh, it's all scrub country, father, and
no paths, and--and I wish I had a mother!"

The old man sat down in the doorway and bowed his grey head in his arms.
Then, after a moment, he whispered:

"She's been dead twenty-two years, Jen.  The day Val was born she went
away.  I'd a-been a better man if she'd a-lived, Jen; and a better
father."

This was an unusual demonstration between these two.  She watched him
sadly for a moment, and then, leaning over and touching him gently on the
shoulder, said: "It's worse for you than it is for me, father.  Don't
feel so bad.  Perhaps we shall save him yet."

He caught a gleam of hope in her words: "Mebbe, Jen, mebbe!" and he
raised his face to the light.

This ritual of affection was crude and unadorned; but it was real.  They
sat there for half-an-hour, silent.

Then a figure came out of the shadows behind the house and stood before
them.  It was Pierre.

"I go to-morrow morning, Galbraith," he said.  The old man nodded, but
did not reply.

"I go to Fort Desire," the gambler added.

Jen faced him.  "What do you go there for, Pretty Pierre?"

"It is my whim.  Besides, there is Val.  He might want a horse some dark
night."

"Pierre, do you mean that?"

"As much as Sergeant Tom means what he says.  Every man has his friends.
Pretty Pierre has a fancy for Val Galbraith--a little.  It suits him to
go to Fort Desire.  Jen Galbraith, you make a grand ride last night.  You
do a bold thing--all for a man.  We shall see what he will do for you.
And if he does nothing--ah! you can trust the tongue of Pretty Pierre.
He will wish he could die, instead of--Eh, bien, good-night!"  He moved
away.  Jen followed him.  She held out her hand.  It was the first time
she had ever done so to this man.

"I believe you," she said.  "I believe that you mean well to our Val.  I
am sorry that I called you a devil."  He smiled.  "Ma'm'selle, that is
nothing.  You spoke true.  But devils have their friends--and their
whims.  So you see, good-night."

"Mebbe it will come out all right, Jen--mebbe!" said the old man.

But Jen did not reply.  She was thinking hard, her eyes upon the Prairie
Star.  Living life to the hilt greatly illumines the outlook of the mind.
She was beginning to understand that evil is not absolute, and that good
is often an occasion more than a condition.

There was a long silence again.  At last the old man rose to go and
reduce the volume of flame for the night; but Jen stopped him.  "No,
father, let it burn all it can to-night.  It's comforting."

"Mebbe so--mebbe!" he said.

A faint refrain came to them from within the house:

              "When doors are open the bird is free
               Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear!"




VIII

It was a lovely morning.  The prairie billowed away endlessly to the
south, and heaved away in vastness to the north; and the fresh, sharp air
sent the blood beating through the veins.  In the bar-room some early
traveller was talking to Peter Galbraith.  A wandering band of Indians
was camped about a mile away, the only sign of humanity in the waste.
Jen sat in the doorway culling dried apples.  Though tragedies occur in
lives of the humble, they must still do the dull and ordinary task.  They
cannot stop to cherish morbidness, to feed upon their sorrow; they must
care for themselves and labour for others.  And well is it for them that
it is so.

The Indian camp brings unpleasant memories to Jen's mind.  She knows it
belongs to old Sun-in-the-North, and that he will not come to see her
now, nor could she, or would she, go to him.  Between her and that race
there can never again be kindly communion.  And now she sees, for the
first time, two horsemen riding slowly in the track from Fort Desire
towards Galbraith's Place.  She notices that one sits upright, and one
seems leaning forward on his horse's neck.  She shades her eyes with her
hand, but she cannot distinguish who they are.  But she has seen men tied
to their horses ride as that man is riding, when stricken with fever,
bruised by falling timber, lacerated by a grizzly, wounded by a bullet,
or crushed by a herd of buffaloes.  She remembered at that moment the
time that a horse had struck Val with its forefeet, and torn the flesh
from his chest, and how he had been brought home tied to a broncho's
back.

The thought of this drove her into the house, to have Val's bed prepared
for the sufferer, whoever he was.  Almost unconsciously she put on the
little table beside the bed a bunch of everlasting prairie flowers, and
shaded the light to the point of quiet and comfort.

Then she went outside again.  The travellers now were not far away.  She
recognised the upright rider.  It was Pretty Pierre.  The other--she
could not tell.  She called to her father.  She had a fear which she did
not care to face alone.  "See, see, father," she said, "Pretty Pierre
and--and can it be Val?"  For the moment she seemed unable to stir.  But
the old man shook his head, and said: "No, Jen, it can't be.  It ain't
Val."

Then another thought possessed her.  Her lips trembled, and, throwing her
head back as does a deer when it starts to shake off its pursuers by
flight, she ran swiftly towards the riders.  The traveller standing
beside Galbraith said: "That man is hurt, wounded probably.  I didn't
expect to have a patient in the middle of the plains.  I'm a doctor.
Perhaps I can be of use here?"  When a hundred yards away Jen recognised
the recumbent rider.  A thousand thoughts flashed through her brain.
What had happened?  Why was he dressed in civilian's clothes?  A moment,
and she was at his horse's head.  Another, and her warm hand clasped the
pale, moist, and wrinkled one which hung by the horse's neck.  His coat
at the shoulder was stained with blood, and there was a handkerchief
about his head.  This--this was Sergeant Tom Gellatly!

She looked up at Pierre, an agony of inquiry in her eyes, and pointing
mutely to the wounded man.  Pierre spoke with a tone of seriousness not
common to his voice: "You see, Jen Galbraith, it was brave.  Sergeant Tom
one day resigns the Mounted Police.  He leaves the Riders of the Plains.
That is not easy to understand, for he is in much favour with the
officers.  But he buys himself out, and there is the end of the Sergeant
and his triple chevron.  That is one day.  That night, two men on a ferry
are crossing the Saskatchewan at Fort Desire.  They are fired at from the
shore behind.  One man is hit twice.  But they get across, cut the ferry
loose, mount horses, and ride away together.  The man that was hit--yes,
Sergeant Tom.  The other that was not hit was Val Galbraith."

Jen gave a cry of mingled joy and pain, and said, with Tom Gellatly's
cold hand clasped to her bosom: "Val, our Val, is free, is safe."

"Yes, Val is free and safe-quite.  The Riders of the Plains could not
cross the river.  It was too high.  And so Tom Gellatly and Val got away.
Val rides straight for the American border, and the other rides here."
They were now near the house, but Jen said, eagerly: "Go on.  Tell me
all."

"I knew what had happened soon, and I rode away, too, and last night I
found Tom Gellatly lying beside his horse on the prairie.  I have brought
him here to you.  You two are even now, Jen Galbraith."

They were at the tavern door.  The traveller and Pierre lifted, down the
wounded and unconscious man, and brought him and laid him on Val
Galbraith's bed.

The traveller examined the wounds in the shoulder and the head, and said:
"The head is all right.  If I can get the bullet out of the shoulder
he'll be safe enough--in time."

The surgery was skilful but rude, for proper instruments were not at
hand; and in a few hours he, whom we shall still call Sergeant Tom, lay
quietly sleeping, the pallor gone from his face and the feeling of death
from his hand.

It was near midnight when he waked.  Jen was sitting beside him.  He
looked round and saw her.  Her face was touched with the light that shone
from the Prairie Star.  "Jen," he said, and held out his hand.

She turned from the window and stood beside his bed.  She took his
outstretched hand.  "You are better, Sergeant Tom"? she said, gently.

"Yes, I'm better; but it's not Sergeant Tom I am any longer, Jen."

"I forgot that."

"I owed you a great debt, Jen.  I couldn't remain one of the Riders of
the Plains and try to pay it.  I left them.  Then I tried to save Val,
and I did.  I knew how to do it without getting anyone else into trouble.
It is well to know the trick of a lock and the hour that guard is
changed.  I had left, but I relieved guard that night just the same.
It was a new man on watch.  It's only a minute I had; for the regular
relief watch was almost at my heels.  I got Val out just in time.  They
discovered us, and we had a run for it.  Pretty Pierre has told you.
That's right.  Val is safe now--"

In a low strained voice, interrupting him, she said, "Did Val leave you
wounded so on the prairie?"

"Don't let that ate at your heart.  No, he didn't.  I hurried him off,
and he didn't know how bad I was hit.  But I--I've paid my debt, haven't
I, Jen?"  With eyes that could not see for tears, she touched pityingly,
lovingly, the wounds on his head and shoulder, and said: "These pay a
greater debt than you ever owed me.  You risked your life for me--yes,
for me.  You have given up everything to do it.  I can't pay you the
great difference.  No, never!"

"Yes--yes, you can, if you will, Jen.  It's as aisy!  If you'll say what
I say, I'll give you quit of that difference, as you call it, forever and
ever."

"First, tell me.  Is Val quite, quite safe?"

"Yes, he's safe over the border by this time; and to tell you the truth,
the Riders of the Plains wouldn't be dyin' to arrest him again if he was
in Canada, which he isn't.  It's little they wanted to fire at us,
I know, when we were crossin' the river, but it had to be done, you see,
and us within sight.  Will you say what I ask you, Jen?"

She did not speak, but pressed his hand ever so slightly.

"Tom Gellatly, I promise," he said.

"Tom Gellatly, I promise--"

"To give you as much--"

"To give you as much--"

"Love--"

There was a pause, and then she falteringly said, "Love--"

"As you give to me-"

"As you give to me--"

"And I'll take you poor as you are--"

"And I'll take you poor as you are--"

"To be my husband as long as you live--"

"To be my husband as long as you live--"

"So help me, God."

"So help me, God."

She stooped with dropping tears, and he kissed her once.  Then what was
girl in her timidly drew back, while what was woman in her, and therefore
maternal, yearned over the sufferer.

They had not seen the figure of an old man at the door.  They did not
hear him enter.  They only knew of Peter Galbraith's presence when he
said: "Mebbe--mebbe I might say Amen!"






THREE OUTLAWS

The missionary at Fort Anne of the H. B. C. was violently in earnest.
Before he piously followed the latest and most amply endowed batch of
settlers, who had in turn preceded the new railway to the Fort, the word
scandal had no place in the vocabulary of the citizens.  The H. B. C. had
never imported it into the Chinook language, the common meeting-ground of
all the tribes of the North; and the British men and native-born, who
made the Fort their home, or place of sojourn, had never found need for
its use.  Justice was so quickly distributed, men were so open in their
conduct, good and bad, that none looked askance, nor put their actions in
ambush, nor studied innuendo.  But this was not according to the new
dispensation--that is, the dispensation which shrewdly followed the
settlers, who as shrewdly preceded the railway.  And, the dispensation
and the missionary were known also as the Reverend Ezra Badgley, who, on
his own declaration, in times past had "a call" to preach, and in the far
East had served as local preacher, then probationer, then went on
circuit, and now was missionary in a district of which the choice did
credit to his astuteness, and gave room for his piety and for his holy
rage against the Philistines.  He loved a word for righteous mouthing,
and in a moment of inspiration pagan and scandal came to him.  Upon these
two words he stamped, through them he perspired mightily, and with them
he clenched his stubby fingers--such fingers as dug trenches, or snatched
lewdly at soft flesh, in days of barbarian battle.  To him all men were
Pagans who loved not the sound of his voice, nor wrestled with him in
prayer before the Lord, nor fed him with rich food, nor gave him much
strong green tea to drink.  But these men were of opaque stuff, and were
not dismayed, and they called him St. Anthony, and with a prophetic and
deadly patience waited.  The time came when the missionary shook his
denouncing finger mostly at Pretty Pierre, who carefully nursed his
silent wrath until the occasion should arrive for a delicate revenge
which hath its hour with every man, if, hating, he knows how to bide the
will of Fate.

The hour came.  A girl had been found dying on the roadside beyond the
Fort by the drunken doctor of the place and Pierre.  Pierre was with her
when she died.

"An' who's to bury her, the poor colleen"? said Shon McGann afterwards.

Pierre musingly replied: "She is a Protestant.  There is but one man."

After many pertinent and vigorous remarks, Shon added, "A Pagan is it, he
calls you, Pierre, you that's had the holy water on y'r forehead, and the
cross on the water, and that knows the book o' the Mass like the cards in
a pack?  Sinner y' are, and so are we all, God save us!  say I; and
weavin' the stripes for our backs He may be, and little I'd think of Him
failin' in that: but Pagan--faith, it's black should be the white of the
eyes of that preachin' sneak, and a rattle of teeth in his throat--divils
go round me!"

The half-breed, still musing, replied: "An eye for an eye, and a tooth
for a tooth--is that it, Shon?"  "Nivir a word truer by song or by book,
and stand by the text, say I.  For Papist I am, and Papist are you; and
the imps from below in y'r fingers whip poker is the game; and outlaws as
they call us both--you for what it doesn't concern me, and I for a wild
night in ould Donegal--but Pagan, wurra! whin shall it be, Pierre?"

"When shall it to be?"

"True for you.  The teeth in his throat and a lump to his eye, and what
more be the will o' God.  Fightin' there'll be, av coorse; but by you
I'll stand, and sorra inch will I give, if they'll do it with sticks or
with guns, and not with the blisterin' tongue that's lied of me and me
frinds--for frind I call you, Pierre, that loved me little in days gone
by.  And proud I am not of you, nor you of me; but we've tasted the
bitter of avil days together, and divils surround me, if I don't go down
with you or come up with you, whichever it be!  For there's dirt, as I
say on their tongues, and over their shoulder they look at you, and not
with an eye full front."

Pierre was cool, even pensive.  His lips parted slightly once or twice,
and showed a row of white, malicious teeth.  For the rest, he looked as
if he were politely interested but not moved by the excitement of the
other.  He slowly rolled a cigarette and replied: "He says it is a
scandal that I live at Fort Anne.  Well, I was here before he came, and I
shall be here after he goes--yes.  A scandal--tsh!  what is that?  You
know the word 'Raca' of the Book?  Well, there shall be more 'Raca; soon
--perhaps.  No, there shall not be fighting as you think, Shon; but--"
here Pierre rose, came over, and spread his fingers lightly on Shon's
breast "but this thing is between this man and me, Shon McGann, and you
shall see a great matter.  Perhaps there will be blood, perhaps not--
perhaps only an end."  And the half-breed looked up at the Irishman from
under his dark brows so covertly and meaningly that Shon saw visions of a
trouble as silent as a plague, as resistless as a great flood.  This
noiseless vengeance was not after his own heart.  He almost shivered as
the delicate fingers drummed on his breast.

"Angels begird me, Pretty Pierre, but it's little I'd like you for enemy
o' mine; for I know that you'd wait for y'r foe with death in y'r hand,
and pity far from y'r heart; and y'd smile as you pulled the black-cap on
y'r head, and laugh as you drew the life out of him, God knows how!
Arrah, give me, sez I, the crack of a stick, the bite of a gun, or the
clip of a sabre's edge, with a shout in y'r mouth the while!"

Though Pierre still listened lazily, there was a wicked fire in his eyes.
His words now came from his teeth with cutting precision.  "I have a
great thought tonight, Shon McGann.  I will tell you when we meet again.
But, my friend, one must not be too rash--no, not too brutal.  Even the
sabre should fall at the right time, and then swift and still.  Noise is
not battle.  Well, 'au revoir!'  To-morrow I shall tell you many things."
He caught Shon's hand quickly, as quickly dropped it, and went out
indolently singing a favourite song,--"Voici le sabre de mon Pere!"

It was dark.  Pretty Pierre stood still, and thought for a while.  At
last he spoke aloud: "Well, I shall do it, now I have him--so!"  And he
opened and shut his hand swiftly and firmly.  He moved on, avoiding the
more habited parts of the place, and by a roundabout came to a house
standing very close to the bank of the river.  He went softly to the door
and listened.  Light shone through the curtain of a window.  He went to
the window and looked beneath the curtain.  Then he came back to the
door, opened it very gently, stepped inside, and closed it behind him.

A man seated at a table, eating, rose; a man on whom greed had set its
mark--greed of the flesh, greed of men's praise, greed of money.  His
frame was thick-set, his body was heavily nourished, his eye was shifty
but intelligent; and a close observer would have seen something elusive,
something furtive and sinister, in his face.  His lips were greasy with
meat as he stood up, and a fear sprang to his face, so that its fat
looked sickly.  But he said hoarsely, and with an attempt at being brave
--"How dare you enter my house with out knocking?  What do you want?"

The half-breed waved a hand protestingly towards him.  "Pardon!" he
said.  "Be seated, and finish your meal.  Do you know me?"

"Yes, I know you."

"Well, as I said, do not stop your meal.  I have come to speak with you
very quietly about a scandal--a scandal, you understand.  This is Sunday
night, a good time to talk of such things."  Pierre seated himself at the
table, opposite the man.

But the man replied: "I have nothing to say to you.  You are--"

The half-breed interrupted: "Yes, I know, a Pagan fattening--" here he
smiled, and looked at his thin hands--"fattening for the shambles of the
damned, as you have said from the pulpit, Reverend Ezra Badgley.  But you
will permit me--a sinner as you say--to speak to you like this while you
sit down and eat.  I regret to disturb you, but you will sit, eh?"

Pierre's tone was smooth and low, almost deferential, and his eyes, wide
open now, and hot with some hidden purpose, were fixed compellingly on
the man.  The missionary sat, and, having recovered slightly, fumbled
with a knife and fork.  A napkin was still beneath his greasy chin.  He
did not take it away.

Pierre then spoke slowly: "Yes, it is a scandal concerning a sinner--and
a Pagan.  .  .  .  Will you permit me to light a cigarette?  Thank you
.  .  .  .  You have said many harsh things about me: well, as you see,
I am amiable.  I lived at Fort Anne before you came.  They call me Pretty
Pierre.  Why is my cheek so?  Because I drink no wine; I eat not much.
Pardon, pork like that on your plate--no! no!  I do not take green tea
as there in your cup; I do not love women, one or many.  Again, pardon,
I say."

The other drew his brows together with an attempt at pious frowning and
indignation; but there was a cold, sneering smile now turned upon him,
and it changed the frown to anxiety, and made his lips twitch, and the
food he had eaten grow heavy within him.

"I come to the scandal slowly.  The woman?  She was a young girl
travelling from the far East, to search for a man who had--spoiled her.
She was found by me and another.  Ah, you start so!  .  .  .  Will you
not listen?  .  .  .  Well, she died to-night."

Here the missionary gasped, and caught with both hands at the table.

"But before she died she gave two things into my hands: a packet of
letters--a man is a fool to write such letters--and a small bottle of
poison--laudanum, old-fashioned but sure.  The letters were from the man
at Fort Anne--the man, you hear!  The other was for her death, if he
would not take her to his arms again.  Women are mad when they love.
And so she came to Fort Anne, but not in time.  The scandal is great,
because the man is holy--sit down!"

The half-breed said the last two words sharply, but not loudly.  They
both sat down slowly again, looking each other in the eyes.  Then Pierre
drew from his pocket a small bottle and a packet of letters, and held
them before him.  "I have this to say: there are citizens of Fort Anne
who stand for justice more than law; who have no love for the ways of
St.  Anthony.  There is a Pagan, too, an outlaw, who knows when it is
time to give blow for blow with the holy man.  Well, we understand each
other, 'hein?'"

The elusive, sinister look in the missionary's face was etched in strong
lines now.  A dogged sullenness hung about his lips.  He noticed that one
hand only of Pretty Pierre was occupied with the relics of the dead girl;
the other was free to act suddenly on a hip pocket.  "What do you want
me to do"? he said, not whiningly, for beneath the selfish flesh and
shallow outworks there were the elements of a warrior--all pulpy now,
but they were there.

"This," was the reply: "for you to make one more outlaw at Fort Anne by
drinking what is in this bottle--sit down, quick, by God!"  He placed the
bottle within reach of the other.  "Then you shall have these letters;
and there is the fire.  After?  Well, you will have a great sleep, the
good people will find you, they will bury you, weeping much, and no one
knows here but me.  Refuse that, and there is the other, the Law--ah,
the poor girl was so very young!--and the wild Justice which is sometimes
quicker than Law.  Well? well?"

The missionary sat as if paralysed, his face all grey, his eyes fixed on
the half-breed.  "Are you man or devil"? he groaned at length.

With a slight, fantastic gesture Pierre replied: "It was said that a
devil entered into me at birth, but that was mere scandal--'peut-etre.'
You shall think as you will."

There was silence.  The sullenness about the missionary's lips became
charged with a contempt more animal than human.  The Reverend Ezra
Badgley knew that the man before him was absolute in his determination,
and that the Pagans of Fort Anne would show him little mercy, while his
flock would leave him to his fate.  He looked at the bottle.  The silence
grew, so that the ticking of the watch in the missionary's pocket could
be heard plainly, having for its background of sound the continuous swish
of the river.  Pretty Pierre's eyes were never taken off the other, whose
gaze, again, was fixed upon the bottle with a terrible fascination.  An
hour, two hours, passed.  The fire burned lower.  It was midnight; and
now the watch no longer ticked; it had fulfilled its day's work.  The
missionary shuddered slightly at this.  He looked up to see the resolute
gloom of the half-breed's eyes, and that sneering smile, fixed upon him
still.  Then he turned once more to the bottle.  .  .  .  His heavy hand
moved slowly towards it.  His stubby fingers perspired and showed sickly
in the light.  .  .  .  They closed about the bottle.  Then suddenly he
raised it, and drained it at a draught.  He sighed once heavily and as if
a great inward pain was over.  Rising he took the letters silently pushed
towards him, and dropped them into the fire.  He went to the window,
raised it, and threw the bottle into the river.  The cork was left:
Pierre pointed to it.  He took it up with a strange smile and thrust it
into the coals.  Then he sat down by the table, leaning his arms upon it,
his eyes staring painfully before him, and the forgotten napkin still
about his neck.  Soon the eyes closed, and, with a moan on his lips, his
head dropped forward on his arms.  .  .  .  Pierre rose, and, looking at
the figure soon to be breathless as the baked meats about it, said:
"'Bien,' he was not all coward.  No."

Then he turned and went out into the night.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Delicate revenge which hath its hour with every man
Good is often an occasion more than a condition
He does not love Pierre; but he does not pretend to love him
It is not Justice that fills the gaols, but Law
It is not much to kill or to die--that is in the game
Men and women are unwittingly their own executioners
Noise is not battle
She was beginning to understand that evil is not absolute
The Government cherish the Injin much in these days






PIERRE AND HIS PEOPLE

TALES OF THE FAR NORTH

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.


SHON MCGANN'S TOBOGAN RIDE
PERE CHAMPAGNE
THE SCARLET HUNTER
THE STONE




SHON McGANN'S TOBOGAN RIDE

         "Oh, it's down the long side of Farcalladen Rise,
               With the knees pressing hard to the saddle, my men;
          With the sparks from the hoofs giving light to the eyes,
               And our hearts beating hard as we rode to the glen!

          "And it's back with the ring of the chain and the spur,
               And it's back with the sun on the hill and the moor,
          And it's back is the thought sets my pulses astir!
               But I'll never go back to Farcalladen more."


Shon McGann was lying on a pile of buffalo robes in a mountain hut,--an
Australian would call it a humpey,--singing thus to himself with his pipe
between his teeth.  In the room, besides Shon, were Pretty Pierre, Jo
Gordineer, the Hon. Just Trafford, called by his companions simply "The
Honourable," and Prince Levis, the owner of the establishment.  Not that
Monsieur Levis, the French Canadian, was really a Prince.  The name was
given to him with a humorous cynicism peculiar to the Rockies.  We have
little to do with Prince Levis here; but since he may appear elsewhere,
this explanation is made.

Jo Gordineer had been telling The Honourable about the ghost of Guidon
Mountain, and Pretty Pierre was collaborating with their host in the
preparation of what, in the presence of the Law--that is of the North-
West Mounted Police--was called ginger-tea, in consideration of the
prohibition statute.

Shon McGann had been left to himself--an unusual thing; for everyone had
a shot at Shon when opportunity occurred; and never a bull's-eye could
they make on him.  His wit was like the shield of a certain personage of
mythology.

He had wandered on from verse to verse of the song with one eye on the
collaborators and an ear open to The Honourable's polite exclamations of
wonder.  Jo had, however, come to the end of his weird tale--for weird it
certainly was, told at the foot of Guidon Mountain itself, and in a
region of vast solitudes--the pair of chemists were approaching "the
supreme union of unctuous elements," as The Honourable put it, and in the
silence that fell for a moment there crept the words of the singer:

         "And it's down the long side of Farcalladen Rise,
               And it's swift as an arrow and straight as a spear--"

Jo Gordineer interrupted.  "Say, Shon, when'll you be through that
tobogan ride of yours?  Aint there any end to it?"

But Shon was looking with both eyes now at the collaborators, and he sang
softly on:

         "And it's keen as the frost when the summer-time dies,
               That we rode to the glen and with never a fear."

Then he added: "The end's cut off, Joey, me boy; but what's a tobogan
ride, annyway?"

"Listen to that, Pierre.  I'll be eternally shivered if he knows what a
tobogan ride is!"

"Hot shivers it'll be for you, Joey, me boy, and no quinine over the bar
aither," said Shon.

"Tell him what a tobogan ride is, Pierre."

And Pretty Pierre said: "Eh, well, I will tell you.  It is like-no, you
have the word precise, Joseph.  Eh?  What?"

Pierre then added something in French.  Shon did not understand it, but
he saw The Honourable smile, so with a gentle kind of contempt he went on
singing:

         "And it's hey for the hedge, and it's hey for the wall!
               And it's over the stream with an echoing cry;
          And there's three fled for ever from old Donegal,
               And there's two that have shown how bold Irishmen die."

The Honourable then said, "What is that all about, Shon?  I never heard
the song before."

"No more you did.  And I wish I could see the lad that wrote that song,
livin' or dead.  If one of ye's will tell me about your tobogan rides,
I'll unfold about Farcalladen Rise."

Prince Levis passed the liquor.  Pretty Pierre, seated on a candle-box,
with a glass in his delicate fingers, said: "Eh, well, the Honourable has
much language.  He can speak, precise--this would be better with a little
lemon, just a little,--the Honourable, he, perhaps, will tell.  Eh?"

Pretty Pierre was showing his white teeth.  At this stage in his career,
he did not love the Honourable.  The Honourable understood that, but he
made clear to Shon's mind what toboganing is.

And Shon, on his part, with fresh and hearty voice, touched here and
there by a plaintive modulation, told about that ride on Farcalladen
Rise; a tale of broken laws, and fight and fighting, and death and exile;
and never a word of hatred in it all.

"And the writer of the song, who was he"? asked the Honourable.

"A gentleman after God's own heart.  Heaven rest his soul, if he's dead,
which I'm thinkin' is so, and give him the luck of the world if he's
livin', say I.  But it's little I know what's come to him.  In the heart
of Australia I saw him last; and mates we were together after gold.  And
little gold did we get but what was in the heart of him.  And we parted
one day, I carryin' the song that he wrote for me of Farcalladen Rise,
and the memory of him; and him givin' me the word,'I'll not forget you,
Shon, me boy, whatever comes; remember that.  And a short pull of the
Three-Star together for the partin' salute,' says he.  And the Three-Star
in one sup each we took, as solemn as the Mass, and he went away towards
Cloncurry and I to the coast; and that's the last that I saw of him, now
three years gone.  And here I am, and I wish I was with him wherever he
is."

"What was his name"? said the Honourable.

"Lawless."

The fingers of the Honourable trembled on his cigar.  "Very interesting,
Shon," he said, as he rose, puffing hard till his face was in a cloud of
smoke.  "You had many adventures together, I suppose," he continued.

"Adventures we had and sufferin' bewhiles, and fun, too, to the neck and
flowin' over."

"You'll spin us a long yarn about them another night, Shon"? said the
Honourable.

"I'll do it now--a yarn as long as the lies of the Government; and proud
of the chance."

"Not to-night, Shon" (there was a kind of huskiness in the voice of the
Honourable); "it's time to turn in.  We've a long tramp over the glacier
to-morrow, and we must start at sunrise."

The Honourable was in command of the party, though Jo Gordineer was the
guide, and all were, for the moment, miners, making for the little Goshen
Field over in Pipi Valley.--At least Pretty Pierre said he was a miner.

No one thought of disputing the authority of the Honourable, and they all
rose.

In a few minutes there was silence in the hut, save for the oracular
breathing of Prince Levis and the sparks from the fire.  But the
Honourable did not sleep well; he lay and watched the fire through most
of the night.

The day was clear, glowing, decisive.  Not a cloud in the curve of azure,
not a shiver of wind down the canon, not a frown in Nature, if we except
the lowering shadows from the shoulders of the giants of the range.
Crowning the shadows was a splendid helmet of light, rich with the dyes
of the morning; the pines were touched with a brilliant if austere
warmth.  The pride of lofty lineage and severe isolation was regnant over
all.  And up through the splendour, and the shadows, and the loneliness,
and the austere warmth, must our travellers go.  Must go?  Scarcely that,
but the Honourable had made up his mind to cross the glacier and none
sought to dissuade him from his choice; the more so, because there was
something of danger in the business.  Pretty Pierre had merely shrugged
his shoulders at the suggestion, and had said:

"'Nom de Dieu,' the higher we go the faster we live, that is something."

"Sometimes we live ourselves to death too quickly.  In my schooldays I
watched a mouse in a jar of oxygen do that;" said the Honourable.

"That is the best way to die," remarked the halfbreed--"much."

Jo Gordineer had been over the path before.  He was confident of the way,
and proud of his office of guide.

"Climb Mont Blanc, if you will," said the Honourable, "but leave me these
white bastions of the Selkirks."

Even so.  They have not seen the snowy hills of God who have yet to look
upon the Rocky Mountains, absolute, stupendous, sublimely grave.

Jo Gordineer and Pretty Pierre strode on together.  They being well away
from the other two, the Honourable turned and said to Shon: "What was the
name of the man who wrote that song of yours, again, Shon?"

"Lawless."

"Yes, but his first name?"

"Duke--Duke Lawless."

There was a pause, in which the other seemed to be intently studying the
glacier above them.  Then he said: "What was he like?--in appearance, I
mean."

"A trifle more than your six feet, about your colour of hair and eyes,
and with a trick of smilin' that would melt the heart of an exciseman,
and O'Connell's own at a joke, barrin' a time or two that he got hold of
a pile of papers from the ould country.  By the grave of St. Shon!  thin
he was as dry of fun as a piece of blotting paper.  And he said at last,
before he was aisy and free again, 'Shon,' says he, 'it's better to burn
your ships behind ye, isn't it?'

"And I, havin' thought of a glen in ould Ireland that I'll never see
again, nor any that's in it, said: 'Not, only burn them to the water's
edge, Duke Lawless, but swear to your own soul that they never lived but
in the dreams of the night.'

"'You're right there, Shon,' says he, and after that no luck was bad
enough to cloud the gay heart of him, and bad enough it was sometimes."

"And why do you fear that he is not alive?"

"Because I met an old mate of mine one day on the Frazer, and he said
that Lawless had never come to Cloncurry; and a hard, hard road it was to
travel."

Jo Gordineer was calling to them, and there the conversation ended.
In a few minutes the four stood on the edge of the glacier.  Each man had
a long hickory stick which served as alpenstock, a bag hung at his side,
and tied to his back was his gold-pan, the hollow side in, of course.
Shon's was tied a little lower down than the others.

They passed up this solid river of ice, this giant power at endless
strife with the high hills, up towards its head.  The Honourable was the
first to reach the point of vantage, and to look down upon the vast and
wandering fissures, the frigid bulwarks, the great fortresses of ice, the
ceaseless snows, the aisles of this mountain sanctuary through which
Nature's splendid anthems rolled.  Shon was a short distance below, with
his hand over his eyes, sweeping the semi-circle of glory.

Suddenly there was a sharp cry from Pierre: "Mon Dieu!  Look!"

Shon McGann had fallen on a smooth pavement of ice.  The gold-pan was
beneath him, and down the glacier he was whirled-whirled, for Shon had
thrust his heels in the snow and ice, and the gold-pan performed a series
of circles as it sped down the incline.  His fingers clutched the ice and
snow, but they only left a red mark of blood behind.  Must he go the
whole course of that frozen slide, plump into the wild depths below?

"'Mon Dieu!--mon Dieu!'"  said Pretty Pierre, piteously.  The face of the
Honourable was set and tense.

Jo Gordineer's hand clutched his throat as if he choked.  Still Shon
sped.  It was a matter of seconds only.  The tragedy crowded to the awful
end.

But, no.

There was a tilt in the glacier, and the gold-pan, suddenly swirling,
again swung to the outer edge, and shot over.

As if hurled from a catapult, the Irishman was ejected from the white
monster's back.  He fell on a wide shelf of ice, covered with light snow,
through which he was tunnelled, and dropped on another ledge below, near
the path by which he and his companions had ascended.  "Shied from the
finish, by God!" said Jo Gordineer.  "'Le pauvre Shon!'"  added Pretty
Pierre.

The Honourable was making his way down, his brain haunted by the words,
"He'll never go back to Farcalladen more."

But Jo was right.

For Shon McGann was alive.  He lay breathless, helpless, for a moment;
then he sat up and scanned his lacerated fingers: he looked up the path
by which he had come; he looked down the path he seemed destined to go;
he started to scratch his head, but paused in the act, by reason of his
fingers.

Then he said: "It's my mother wouldn't know me from a can of cold meat
if I hadn't stopped at this station; but wurrawurra, what a car it was to
come in!"  He examined his tattered clothes and bare elbows; then he
unbuckled the gold-pan, and no easy task was it with his ragged fingers.
"'Twas not for deep minin' I brought ye," he said to the pan, "nor for
scrapin' the clothes from me back."

Just then the Honourable came up.  "Shon, my man .  .  .  alive, thank
God!  How is it with you?"

"I'm hardly worth the lookin' at.  I wouldn't turn my back to ye for a
ransom."

"It's enough that you're here at all."

"Ah, 'voila!'  this Irishman!" said Pretty Pierre, as his light fingers
touched Shon's bruised arm gently.  This from Pretty Pierre!

There was that in the voice which went to Shon's heart.  Who could have
guessed that this outlaw of the North would ever show a sign of sympathy
or friendship for anybody?  But it goes to prove that you can never be
exact in your estimate of character.  Jo Gordineer only said jestingly:
"Say, now, what are you doing, Shon, bringing us down here, when we might
be well into the Valley by this time?"

"That in your face and the hair aff your head," said Shon; "it's little
you know a tobogan ride when you see one.  I'll take my share of the
grog, by the same token."

The Honourable uncorked his flask.  Shon threw back his head with a
laugh.

         "For it's rest when the gallop is over, me men!
          And it's here's to the lads that have ridden their last;
          And it's here's--"

But Shon had fainted with the flask in his hand and this snatch of a song
on his lips.

They reached shelter that night.  Had it not been for the accident, they
would have got to their destination in the Valley; but here they were
twelve miles from it.  Whether this was fortunate or unfortunate may be
seen later.  Comfortably bestowed in this mountain tavern, after they had
toasted and eaten their venison and lit their pipes, they drew about the
fire.

Besides the four, there was a figure that lay sleeping in a corner on a
pile of pine branches, wrapped in a bearskin robe.  Whoever it was slept
soundly.

"And what was it like--the gold-pan flyer--the tobogan ride, Shon?"
remarked Jo Gordineer.

"What was it like?--what was it like"? replied Shon.  "Sure, I couldn't
see what it was like for the stars that were hittin' me in the eyes.
There wasn't any world at all.  I was ridin' on a streak of lightnin',
and nivir a rubber for the wheels; and my fingers makin' stripes of blood
on the snow; and now the stars that were hittin' me were white, and thin
they were red, and sometimes blue--"

"The Stars and Stripes," inconsiderately remarked Jo Gordineer.

"And there wasn't any beginning to things, nor any end of them; and whin
I struck the snow and cut down the core of it like a cat through a glass,
I was willin' to say with the Prophet of Ireland--"

"Are you going to pass the liniment, Pretty Pierre?"  It was Jo Gordineer
said that.

What the Prophet of Israel did say--Israel and Ireland were identical to
Shon--was never told.

Shon's bubbling sarcasm was full-stopped by the beneficent savour that,
rising now from the hands of the four, silenced all irrelevant speech.
It was a function of importance.  It was not simply necessary to say How!
or Here's reformation! or I look towards you!  As if by a common
instinct, the Honourable, Jo Gordineer, and Pretty Pierre, turned towards
Shon and lifted their glasses.  Jo Gordineer was going to say: "Here's a
safe foot in the stirrups to you," but he changed his mind and drank in
silence.

Shon's eye had been blazing with fun, but it took on, all at once, a
misty twinkle.  None of them had quite bargained for this.  The feeling
had come like a wave of soft lightning, and had passed through them.  Did
it come from the Irishman himself?  Was it his own nature acting through
those who called him "partner"?

Pretty Pierre got up and kicked savagely at the wood in the big
fireplace.  He ostentatiously and needlessly put another log of Norfolk-
pine upon the fire.

The Honourable gaily suggested a song.

"Sing us 'Avec les Braves Sauvages,' Pierre," said Jo Gordineer.

But Pierre waved his fingers towards Shon: "Shon, his song--he did not
finish--on the glacier.  It is good we hear all.  'Hein?'"

And so Shon sang:

         "Oh it's down the long side of Farcalladen Rise."

The sleeper on the pine branches stirred nervously, as if the song were
coming through a dream to him.  At the third verse he started up, and an
eager, sun-burned face peered from the half-darkness at the singer.  The
Honourable was sitting in the shadow, with his back to the new actor in
the scene.

         "For it's rest when the gallop is over, my men I
          And it's here's to the lads that have ridden their last!
          And it's here's--"

Shon paused.  One of those strange lapses of memory came to him which
come at times to most of us concerning familiar things.  He could get no
further than he did on the mountain side.  He passed his hand over his
forehead, stupidly:--"Saints forgive me; but it's gone from me, and sorra
the one can I get it; me that had it by heart, and the lad that wrote it
far away.  Death in the world, but I'll try it again!

         "For it's rest when the gallop is over, my men!
          And it's here's to the lads that have ridden their last!
          And it's here's--"

Again he paused.

But from the half-darkness there came a voice, a clear baritone:

         "And here's to the lasses we leave in the glen,
          With a smile for the future, a sigh for the past."

At the last words the figure strode down into the firelight.

"Shon, old friend, don't you know me?"

Shon had started to his feet at the first note of the voice, and stood as
if spellbound.

There was no shaking of hands.  Both men held each other hard by the
shoulders, and stood so for a moment looking steadily eye to eye.

Then Shon said: "Duke Lawless, there's parallels of latitude and
parallels of longitude, but who knows the tomb of ould Brian Borhoime?"

Which was his way of saying, "How come you here"? Duke Lawless turned to
the others before he replied.  His eyes fell on the Honourable.  With a
start and a step backward, and with a peculiar angry dryness in his
voice, he said:

"Just Trafford!"

"Yes," replied the Honourable, smiling, "I have found you."

"Found me!  And why have you sought me?  Me, Duke Lawless?  I should have
thought--"

The Honourable interrupted: "To tell you that you are Sir Duke Lawless."

"That?  You sought me to tell me that?"

"I did."

"You are sure?  And for naught else?"

"As I live, Duke."

The eyes fixed on the Honourable were searching.  Sir Duke hesitated,
then held out his hand.  In a swift but cordial silence it was taken.
Nothing more could be said then.  It is only in plays where gentlemen
freely discuss family affairs before a curious public.  Pretty Pierre was
busy with a decoction.  Jo Gordineer was his associate.  Shon had drawn
back, and was apparently examining the indentations on his gold-pan.

"Shon, old fellow, come here," said Sir Duke Lawless.

But Shon had received a shock.  "It's little I knew Sir Duke Lawless--"
he said.

"It's little you needed to know then, or need to know now, Shon, my
friend.  I'm Duke Lawless to you here and henceforth, as ever I was then,
on the wallaby track."

And Shon believed him.  The glasses were ready.

"I'll give the toast," said the Honourable with a gentle gravity.  "To
Shon McGann and his Tobogan Ride!"

"I'll drink to the first half of it with all my heart," said Sir Duke.
"It's all I know about."

"Amen to that divorce," rejoined Shon.

"But were it not for the Tobogan Ride we shouldn't have stopped here,"
said the Honourable; "and where would this meeting have been?"

"That alters the case," Sir Duke remarked.  "I take back the 'Amen,'"
said Shon.



II

Whatever claims Shon had upon the companionship of Sir Duke Lawless,
he knew there were other claims that were more pressing.  After the toast
was finished, with an emphasised assumption of weariness, and a hint of a
long yarn on the morrow, he picked up his blanket and started for the
room where all were to sleep.  The real reason of this early departure
was clear to Pretty Pierre at once, and in due time it dawned upon Jo
Gordineer.

The two Englishmen, left alone, sat for a few moments silent and smoking
hard.  Then the Honourable rose, got his knapsack, and took out a small
number of papers, which he handed to Sir Duke, saying, "By slow postal
service to Sir Duke Lawless.  Residence, somewhere on one of five
continents."

An envelope bearing a woman's writing was the first thing that met Sir
Duke's eye.  He stared, took it out, turned it over, looked curiously at
the Honourable for a moment, and then began to break the seal.

"Wait, Duke.  Do not read that.  We have something to say to each other
first."

Sir Duke laid the letter down.  "You have some explanation to make," he
said.

"It was so long ago; mightn't it be better to go over the story again?"

"Perhaps."

"Then it is best you should tell it.  I am on my defence, you know."

Sir Duke leaned back, and a frown gathered on his forehead.  Strikingly
out of place on his fresh face it seemed.  Looking quickly from the fire
to the face of the Honourable and back again earnestly, as if the full
force of what was required came to him, he said: "We shall get the
perspective better if we put the tale in the third person.  Duke Lawless
was the heir to the title and estates of Trafford Court.  Next in
succession to him was Just Trafford, his cousin.  Lawless had an income
sufficient for a man of moderate tastes.  Trafford had not quite that,
but he had his profession of the law.  At college they had been fast
friends, but afterwards had drifted apart, through no cause save
difference of pursuits and circumstances.  Friends they still were and
likely to be so always.  One summer, when on a visit to his uncle,
Admiral Sir Clavel Lawless, at Trafford Court, where a party of people
had been invited for a month, Duke Lawless fell in love with Miss Emily
Dorset.  She did him the honour to prefer him to any other man--at least,
he thought so.  Her income, however, was limited like his own.  The
engagement was not announced, for Lawless wished to make a home before he
took a wife.  He inclined to ranching in Canada, or a planter's life in
Queensland.  The eight or ten thousand pounds necessary was not, however,
easy to get for the start, and he hadn't the least notion of discounting
the future, by asking the admiral's help.  Besides, he knew his uncle did
not wish him to marry unless he married a woman plus a fortune.  While
things were in this uncertain state, Just Trafford arrived on a visit to
Trafford Court.  The meeting of the old friends was cordial.  Immediately
on Trafford's arrival, however, the current of events changed.  Things
occurred which brought disaster.  It was noticeable that Miss Emily
Dorset began to see a deal more of Admiral Lawless and Just Trafford,
and a deal less of the younger Lawless.  One day Duke Lawless came back
to the house unexpectedly, his horse having knocked up on the road.
On entering the library he saw what turned the course of his life."
Sir Duke here paused, sighed, shook the ashes out of his pipe with a
grave and expressive anxiety which did not properly belong to the action,
and remained for a moment, both arms on his knees, silent, and looking at
the fire.  Then he continued:

"Just Trafford sat beside Emily Dorset in an attitude of--say,
affectionate consideration.  She had been weeping, and her whole manner
suggested very touching confidences.  They both rose on the entrance of
Lawless; but neither tried to say a word.  What could they say?  Lawless
apologised, took a book from the table which he had not come for, and
left."

Again Sir Duke paused.

"The book was an illustrated Much Ado About Nothing," said the
Honourable.

"A few hours after, Lawless had an interview with Emily Dorset.
He demanded, with a good deal of feeling, perhaps,--for he was romantic
enough to love the girl,--an explanation.  He would have asked it of
Trafford first if he had seen him.  She said Lawless should trust her;
that she had no explanation at that moment to give.  If he waited--but
Lawless asked her if she cared for him at all, if she wished or intended
to marry him?  She replied lightly, 'Perhaps, when you become Sir Duke
Lawless.'  Then Lawless accused her of heartlessness, and of encouraging
both his uncle and Just Trafford.  She amusingly said, 'Perhaps she had,
but it really didn't matter, did it?'  For reply, Lawless said her
interest in the whole family seemed active and impartial.  He bade her
not vex herself at all about him, and not to wait until he became Sir
Duke Lawless, but to give preference to seniority and begin with the
title at once; which he has reason since to believe that she did.  What
he said to her he has been sorry for, not because he thinks it was
undeserved, but because he has never been able since to rouse himself to
anger on the subject, nor to hate the girl and Just Trafford as he ought.
Of the dead he is silent altogether.  He never sought an explanation from
Just Trafford, for he left that night for London, and in two days was on
his way to Australia.  The day he left, however, he received a note from
his banker saying that L8000 had been placed to his credit by Admiral
Lawless.  Feeling the indignity of what he believed was the cause of the
gift, Lawless neither acknowledged it nor used it, not any penny of it.
Five years have gone since then, and Lawless has wandered over two
continents, a self-created exile.  He has learned much that he didn't
learn at Oxford; and not the least of all, that the world is not so bad
as is claimed for it, that it isn't worth while hating and cherishing
hate, that evil is half-accidental, half-natural, and that hard work in
the face of nature is the thing to pull a man together and strengthen him
for his place in the universe.  Having burned his ships behind him, that
is the way Lawless feels.  And the story is told."

Just Trafford sat looking musingly but imperturbably at Sir Duke for a
minute; then he said:

"That is your interpretation of the story, but not the story.  Let us
turn the medal over now.  And, first, let Trafford say that he has the
permission of Emily Dorset--"

Sir Duke interrupted: "Of her who was Emily Dorset."

"Of Miss Emily Dorset, to tell what she did not tell that day five years
ago.  After this other reading of the tale has been rendered, her letter
and those documents are there for fuller testimony.  Just Trafford's part
in the drama begins, of course, with the library scene.  Now Duke Lawless
had never known Trafford's half-brother, Hall Vincent.  Hall was born in
India, and had lived there most of his life.  He was in the Indian
Police, and had married a clever, beautiful, but impossible kind of girl,
against the wishes of her parents.  The marriage was not a very happy
one.  This was partly owing to the quick Lawless and Trafford blood,
partly to the wife's wilfulness.  Hall thought that things might go
better if he came to England to live.  On their way from Madras to
Colombo he had some words with his wife one day about the way she
arranged her hair, but nothing serious.  This was shortly after tiffin.
That evening they entered the harbour at Colombo; and Hall going to his
cabin to seek his wife, could not find her; but in her stead was her
hair, arranged carefully in flowing waves on the pillow, where through
the voyage her head had lain.  That she had cut it off and laid it there
was plain; but she could not be found, nor was she ever found.  The large
porthole was open; this was the only clue.  But we need not go further
into that.  Hall Vincent came home to England.  He told his brother the
story as it has been told to you, and then left for South America, a
broken-spirited man.  The wife's family came on to England also.  They
did not meet Hall Vincent; but one day Just Trafford met at a country
seat in Devon, for the first time, the wife's sister.  She had not known
of the relationship between Hall Vincent and the Traffords; and on a
memorable afternoon he told her the full story of the married life and
the final disaster, as Hall had told it to him."

Sir Duke sprang to his feet.  "You mean, Just, that--"

"I mean that Emily Dorset was the sister of Hall Vincent's wife."

Sir Duke's brown fingers clasped and unclasped nervously.  He was about
to speak, but the Honourable said: "That is only half the story--wait.

"Emily Dorset would have told Lawless all in due time, but women don't
like to be bullied ever so little, and that, and the unhappiness of the
thing, kept her silent in her short interview with Lawless.  She could
not have guessed that Lawless would go as he did.  Now, the secret of her
diplomacy with the uncle--diplomacy is the best word to use--was Duke
Lawless's advancement.  She knew how he had set his heart on the ranching
or planting life.  She would have married him without a penny, but she
felt his pride in that particular, and respected it.  So, like a clever
girl, she determined to make the old chap give Lawless a cheque on his
possible future.  Perhaps, as things progressed, the same old chap got an
absurd notion in his head about marrying her to Just Trafford, but that
was meanwhile all the better for Lawless.  The very day that Emily Dorset
and Just Trafford succeeded in melting Admiral Lawless's heart to the
tune of eight thousand, was the day that Duke Lawless doubted his friend
and challenged the loyalty of the girl he loved."

Sir Duke's eyes filled.  "Great Heaven!  Just--" he said.

"Be quiet for a little.  You see she had taken Trafford into her scheme
against his will, for he was never good at mysteries and theatricals, and
he saw the danger.  But the cause was a good one, and he joined the sweet
conspiracy, with what result these five years bear witness.  Admiral
Lawless has been dead a year and a half, his wife a year.  For he married
out of anger with Duke Lawless; but he did not marry Emily Dorset, nor
did he beget a child."

"In Australia I saw a paragraph speaking of a visit made by him and Lady
Lawless to a hospital, and I thought--"

"You thought he had married Emily Dorset and--well, you had better read
that letter now."

Sir Duke's face was flushing with remorse and pain.  He drew his hand
quickly across his eyes.  "And you've given up London, your profession,
everything, just to hunt for me, to tell me this--you who would have
profited by my eternal absence!  What a beast and ass I've been!"

"Not at all; only a bit poetical and hasty, which is not unnatural in the
Lawless blood.  I should have been wild myself, maybe, if I had been in
your position; only I shouldn't have left England, and I should have
taken the papers regularly and have asked the other fellow to explain.
The other fellow didn't like the little conspiracy.  Women, however, seem
to find that kind of thing a moral necessity.  By the way, I wish when
you go back you'd send me out my hunting traps.  I've made up my mind
to--oh, quite so--read the letter--I forgot!"

Sir Duke opened the letter and read it, putting it away from him now and
then as if it hurt him, and taking it up a moment after to continue the
reading.  The Honourable watched him.

At last Sir Duke rose.  "Just--"

"Yes?  Go on."

"Do you think she would have me now?"

"Don't know.  Your outfit is not so beautiful as it used to be."

"Don't chaff me."

"Don't be so funereal, then."

Under the Honourable's matter of fact air Sir Duke's face began to clear.
"Tell me, do you think she still cares for me?"

"Well, I don't know.  She's rich now--got the grandmother's stocking.
Then there's Pedley, of the Scots Guards; he has been doing loyal service
for a couple of years.  What does the letter say?"

"It only tells the truth, as you have told it to me, but from her
standpoint; not a word that says anything but beautiful reproach and
general kindness.  That is all."

"Quite so.  You see it was all four years ago, and Pedley--"

But the Honourable paused.  He had punished his friend enough.  He
stepped forward and laid his hand on Sir Duke's shoulder.  "Duke, you
want to pick up the threads where they were dropped.  You dropped them.
Ask me nothing about the ends that Emily Dorset held.  I conspire no
more.  But go you and learn your fate.  If one remembers, why should the
other forget?"

Sir Duke's light heart and eager faith came back with a rush.  "I'll
start for England at once.  I'll know the worst or the best of it before
three months are out."  The Honourable's slow placidity turned.

"Three months.--Yes, you may do it in that time.  Better go from Victoria
to San Francisco and then overland.  You'll not forget about my hunting
traps, and--oh, certainly, Gordineer; come in."

"Say," said Gordineer.  "I don't want to disturb the meeting, but Shon's
in chancery somehow; breathing like a white pine, and thrashing about!
He's red-hot with fever."

Before he had time to say more, Sir Duke seized the candle and entered
the room.  Shon was moving uneasily and suppressing the groans that shook
him.  "Shon, old friend, what is it?"

"It's the pain here, Lawless," laying his hand on his chest.

After a moment Sir Duke said, "Pneumonia!"

From that instant thoughts of himself were sunk in the care and thought
of the man who in the heart of Queensland had been mate and friend and
brother to him.  He did not start for England the next day, nor for many
a day.

Pretty Pierre and Jo Gordineer and his party carried Sir Duke's letters
over into the Pipi Valley, from where they could be sent on to the coast.
Pierre came back in a few days to see how Shon was, and expressed his
determination of staying to help Sir Duke, if need be.

Shon hovered between life and death.  It was not alone the pneumonia
that racked his system so; there was also the shock he had received in
his flight down the glacier.  In his delirium he seemed to be always
with Lawless:

"'For it's down the long side of Farcalladen Rise'--It's share and share
even, Lawless, and ye'll ate the rest of it, or I'll lave ye--Did ye say
ye'd found water--Lawless--water!--Sure you're drinkin' none yourself--
I'll sing it again for you then--'And it's back with the ring of the
chain and the spur'--'But burn all your ships behind you'--'I'll never go
back to Farcalladen more!'"

Sir Duke's fingers had a trick of kindness, a suggestion of comfort,
a sense of healing, that made his simple remedies do more than natural
duty.  He was doctor, nurse,--sleepless nurse,--and careful apothecary.
And when at last the danger was past and he could relax watching, he
would not go, and he did not go, till they could all travel to the Pipi
Valley.

In the blue shadows of the firs they stand as we take our leave of one
of them.  The Honourable and Sir Duke have had their last words, and Sir
Duke has said he will remember about the hunting traps.  They understand
each other.  There is sunshine in the face of all--a kind of Indian
summer sunshine, infused with the sadness of a coming winter; and theirs
is the winter of parting.  Yet it is all done quietly.

"We'll meet again, Shon," said Sir Duke, "and you'll remember your
promise to write to me."

"I'll keep my promise, and I hope the news that'll please you best is
what you'll send us first from England.  And if you should go to ould
Donegal--I've no words for me thoughts at all!"

"I know them.  Don't try to say them.  We've not had the luck together,
all kinds and all weathers, for nothing."

Sir Duke's eyes smiled a good-bye into the smiling eyes of Shon.  They
were much alike, these two, whose stations were so far apart.  Yet
somewhere, in generations gone, their ancestors may have toiled, feasted,
or governed, in the same social hemisphere; and here in the mountains
life was levelled to one degree again.

Sir Duke looked round.  The pines were crowding up elate and warm towards
the peaks of the white silence.  The river was brawling over a broken
pathway of boulders at their feet; round the edge of a mighty mountain
crept a mule train; a far-off glacier glistened harshly in the lucid
morning, yet not harshly either, but with the rugged form of a vast
antiquity, from which these scarred and grimly austere hills had grown.
Here Nature was filled with a sense of triumphant mastery--the mastery
of ageless experience.  And down the great piles there blew a wind of
stirring life, of the composure of great strength, and touched the four,
and the man that mounted now was turned to go.  A quick good-bye from him
to all; a God-speed-you from the Honourable; a wave of the hand between
the rider and Shon, and Sir Duke Lawless was gone.

"You had better cook the last of that bear this morning, Pierre," said
the Honourable.  And their life went on.

                    ........................

It was eight months after that, sitting in their hut after a day's
successful mining, the Honourable handed Shon a newspaper to read.
A paragraph was marked.  It concerned the marriage of Miss Emily Dorset
and Sir Duke Lawless.

And while Shon read, the Honourable called into the tent: "Have you any
lemons for the whisky, Pierre?"

A satisfactory reply being returned, the Honourable proceeded: "We'll
begin with the bottle of Pommery, which I've been saving months for
this."

The royal-flush toast of the evening belonged to Shon.

"God bless him!  To the day when we see him again!"

And all of them saw that day.






PERE CHAMPAGNE

"Is it that we stand at the top of the hill and the end of the travel has
come, Pierre?  Why don't you spake?"

"We stand at the top of the hill, and it is the end."

"And Lonely Valley is at our feet and Whiteface Mountain beyond?"

"One at our feet, and the other beyond, Shon McGann."

"It's the sight of my eyes I wish I had in the light of the sun this
mornin'.  Tell me, what is't you see?"

"I see the trees on the foot-hills, and all the branches shine with
frost.  There is a path--so wide!--between two groves of pines.  On
Whiteface Mountain lies a glacier-field . . .  and all is still." . . .

"The voice of you is far-away-like, Pierre--it shivers as a hawk cries.
It's the wind, the wind, maybe."

"There's not a breath of life from hill or valley."

"But I feel it in my face."

"It is not the breath of life you feel."

"Did you not hear voices coming athwart the wind? . . .  Can you see the
people at the mines?"

"I have told you what I see."

"You told me of the pine-trees, and the glacier, and the snow--"

"And that is all."

"But in the Valley, in the Valley, where all the miners are?"

"I cannot see them."

"For love of heaven, don't tell me that the dark is fallin' on your eyes
too."

"No, Shon, I am not growing blind."

"Will you not tell me what gives the ache to your words?"

"I see in the Valley--snow . . . snow."

"It's a laugh you have at me in your cheek, whin I'd give years of my
ill-spent life to watch the chimney smoke come curlin' up slow through
the sharp air in the Valley there below."

"There is no chimney and there is no smoke in all the Valley."

"Before God, if you're a man, you'll put your hand on my arm and tell me
what trouble quakes your speech."

"Shon McGann, it is for you to make the sign of the Cross . . . there,
while I put my hand on your shoulder--so!"

"Your hand is heavy, Pierre."

"This is the sight of the eyes that see.  In the Valley there is snow;
in the snow of all that was, there is one poppet-head of the mine that
was called St. Gabriel .  .  .  upon the poppet-head there is the figure
of a woman."

"Ah!"

"She does not move--"

"She will never move?"

"She will never move."

"The breath o' my body hurts me.  .  .  .  There is death in the Valley,
Pierre?"

"There is death."

"It was an avalanche--that path between the pines?"

"And a great storm after."

"Blessed be God that I cannot behold that thing this day!  .  .  .  And
the woman, Pierre, the woman aloft?"

"She went to watch for someone coming, and as she watched, the avalanche
came--and she moves not."

"Do we know that woman?"

"Who can tell?"

"What was it you whispered soft to yourself, then, Pierre?"

"I whispered no word."

"There, don't you hear it, soft and sighin'?  .  .  .  Nathalie!"

"'Mon Dieu!'  It is not of the world."

"It's facin' the poppet-head where she stands I'd be."

"Your face is turned towards her."

"Where is the sun?"

"The sun stands still above her head."

"With the bitter over, and the avil past, come rest for her and all that
lie there."

"Eh, 'bien,' the game is done!"

"If we stay here we shall die also."

"If we go we die, perhaps."  .  .  .

"Don't spake it.  We will go, and we will return when the breath of
summer comes from the South."

"It shall be so."

"Hush!  Did you not hear--?"

"I did not hear.  I only see an eagle, and it flies towards Whiteface
Mountain."

And Shon McGann and Pretty Pierre turned back from the end of their
quest--from a mighty grave behind to a lonely waste before; and though
one was snow-blind, and the other knew that on him fell the chiefer
weight of a great misfortune, for he must provide food and fire and be as
a mother to his comrade--they had courage; without which, men are as the
standing straw in an unreaped field in winter; but having become like the
hooded pine, that keepeth green in frost, and hath the bounding blood in
all its icy branches.

And whence they came and wherefore was as thus:

A French Canadian once lived in Lonely Valley.  One day great fortune
came to him, because it was given him to discover the mine St. Gabriel.
And he said to the woman who loved him, "I will go with mules and much
gold, that I have hewn and washed and gathered, to a village in the East
where my father and my mother are.  They are poor, but I will make them
rich; and then I will return to Lonely Valley, and a priest shall come
with me, and we will dwell here at Whiteface Mountain, where men are men
and not children."  And the woman blessed him, and prayed for him, and
let him go.

He travelled far through passes of the mountains, and came at last where
new cities lay upon the plains, and where men were full of evil and of
lust of gold.  And he was free of hand and light of heart; and at a place
called Diamond City false friends came about him, and gave him champagne
wine to drink, and struck him down and robbed him, leaving him for dead.

And he was found, and his wounds were all healed: all save one, and that
was in the brain.  Men called him mad.

He wandered through the land, preaching to men to drink no wine, and to
shun the sight of gold.  And they laughed at him, and called him Pere
Champagne.

But one day much gold was found at a place called Reef o' Angel; and
jointly with the gold came a plague which scars the face and rots the
body; and Indians died by hundreds and white men by scores; and Pere
Champagne, of all who were not stricken down, feared nothing, and did not
flee, but went among the sick and dying, and did those deeds which gold
cannot buy, and prayed those prayers which were never sold.  And who can
count how high the prayers of the feckless go!

When none was found to bury the dead, he gave them place himself beneath
the prairie earth,--consecrated only by the tears of a fool,--and for
extreme unction he had but this: "God be merciful to me, a sinner!"

Now it happily chanced that Pierre and Shon McGann, who travelled
westward, came upon this desperate battle-field, and saw how Pere
Champagne dared the elements of scourge and death; and they paused and
laboured with him--to save where saving was granted of Heaven, and to
bury when the Reaper reaped and would not stay his hand.  At last the
plague ceased, because winter stretched its wings out swiftly o'er the
plains from frigid ranges in the West.  And then Pere Champagne fell ill
again.

And this last great sickness cured his madness: and he remembered whence
he had come, and what befell him at Diamond City so many moons ago.  And
he prayed them, when he knew his time was come, that they would go to
Lonely Valley and tell his story to the woman whom he loved; and say that
he was going to a strange but pleasant Land, and that there he would
await her coming.  He begged them that they would go at once, that she
might know, and not strain her eyes to blindness, and be sick at heart
because he came not.  And he told them her name, and drew the coverlet up
about his head and seemed to sleep; but he waked between the day and
dark, and gently cried: "The snow is heavy on the mountain .  .  .  and
the Valley is below. . . . 'Gardez,  mon  Pere!' . . .  Ah,  Nathalie!"
And they buried him between the dark and dawn.

Though winds were fierce, and travel full of peril, they kept their word,
and passed along wide steppes of snow, until they entered passes of the
mountains, and again into the plains; and at last one 'poudre' day, when
frost was shaking like shreds of faintest silver through the air, Shon
McGann's sight fled.  But he would not turn back--a promise to a dying
man was sacred, and he could follow if he could not lead; and there was
still some pemmican, and there were martens in the woods, and wandering
deer that good spirits hunted into the way of the needy; and Pierre's
finger along the gun was sure.

Pierre did not tell Shon that for many days they travelled woods where no
sunshine entered; where no trail had ever been, nor foot of man had trod:
that they had lost their way.  Nor did he make his comrade know that one
night he sat and played a game of solitaire to see if they would ever
reach the place called Lonely Valley.  Before the cards were dealt, he
made a sign upon his breast and forehead.  Three times he played, and
three times he counted victory; and before three suns had come and gone,
they climbed a hill that perched over Lonely Valley.  And of what they
saw and their hearts felt we know.

And when they turned their faces eastward they were as men who go to meet
a final and a conquering enemy; but they had kept their honour with the
man upon whose grave-tree Shon McGann had carved beneath his name these
words:

                    "A Brother of Aaron."

Upon a lonely trail they wandered, the spirits of lost travellers
hungering in their wake--spirits that mumbled in cedar thickets, and
whimpered down the flumes of snow.  And Pierre, who knew that evil things
are exorcised by mighty conjuring, sang loudly, from a throat made thin
by forced fasting, a song with which his mother sought to drive away the
devils of dreams that flaunted on his pillow when a child: it was the
song of the Scarlet Hunter.  And the charm sufficed; for suddenly of a
cheerless morning they came upon a trapper's hut in the wilderness, where
their sufferings ceased, and the sight of Shon's eyes came back.  When
strength returned also, they journeyed to an Indian village, where a
priest laboured.  Him they besought; and when spring came they set forth
to Lonely Valley again that the woman and the smothered dead--if it might
chance so--should be put away into peaceful graves.  But thither coming
they only saw a grey and churlish river; and the poppet-head of the mine
of St. Gabriel, and she who had knelt thereon, were vanished into
solitudes, where only God's cohorts have the rights of burial.  .  .  .

But the priest prayed humbly for their so swiftly summoned souls.






THE SCARLET HUNTER

"News out of Egypt!" said the Honourable Just Trafford.  "If this is
true, it gives a pretty finish to the season.  You think it possible,
Pierre?  It is every man's talk that there isn't a herd of buffaloes in
the whole country; but this-eh?"

Pierre did not seem disposed to answer.  He had been watching a man's
face for some time; but his eyes were now idly following the smoke of his
cigarette as it floated away to the ceiling in fading circles.  He seemed
to take no interest in Trafford's remarks, nor in the tale that Shangi
the Indian had told them; though Shangi and his tale were both
sufficiently uncommon to justify attention.

Shon McGann was more impressionable.  His eyes swam; his feet shifted
nervously with enjoyment; he glanced frequently at his gun in the corner
of the hut; he had watched Trafford's face with some anxiety, and
accepted the result of the tale with delight.  Now his look was occupied
with Pierre.

Pierre was a pretty good authority in all matters concerning the prairies
and the North.  He also had an instinct for detecting veracity, having
practised on both sides of the equation.  Trafford became impatient, and
at last the half-breed, conscious that he had tried the temper of his
chief so far as was safe, lifted his eyes, and, resting them casually on
the Indian, replied: "Yes, I know the place.  .  .  .  No, I have not
been there, but I was told-ah, it was long ago!  There is a great valley
between hills, the Kimash Hills, the hills of the Mighty Men.  The woods
are deep and dark; there is but one trail through them, and it is old.
On the highest hill is a vast mound.  In that mound are the forefathers
of a nation that is gone.  Yes, as you say, they are dead, and there is
none of them alive in the valley--which is called the White Valley--where
the buffalo are.  The valley is green in summer, and the snow is not deep
in winter; the noses of the buffalo can find the tender grass.  The Injin
speaks the truth, perhaps.  But of the number of buffaloes, one must see.
The eye of the red man multiplies."

Trafford looked at Pierre closely.  "You seem to know the place very
well.  It is a long way north where--ah yes, you said you had never been
there; you were told.  Who told you?"

The half-breed raised his eyebrows slightly as he replied: "I can
remember a long time, and my mother, she spoke much and sang many songs
at the campfires."  Then he puffed his cigarette so that the smoke
clouded his face for a moment, and went on,--"I think there may be
buffaloes."

"It's along the barrel of me gun I wish I was lookin' at thim now," said
McGann.

"'Tiens,' you will go"? inquired Pierre of Trafford.  "To have a shot at
the only herd of wild buffaloes on the continent!  Of course I'll go.
I'd go to the North Pole for that.  Sport and novelty I came here to see;
buffalo-hunting I did not expect.  I'm in luck, that's all.  We'll start
to-morrow morning, if we can get ready, and Shangi here will lead us; eh,
Pierre?"

The half-breed again was not polite.  Instead of replying he sang almost
below his breath the words of a song unfamiliar to his companions, though
the Indian's eyes showed a flash of understanding.  These were the words:

    "They ride away with a waking wind, away, away!
     With laughing lip and with jocund mind at break of day.
     A rattle of hoofs and a snatch of song, they ride, they ride!
     The plains are wide and the path is long,--so long, so wide!"

Just Trafford appeared ready to deal with this insolence, for the half-
breed was after all a servant of his, a paid retainer.  He waited,
however.  Shon saw the difficulty, and at once volunteered a reply.
"It's aisy enough to get away in the mornin', but it's a question how far
we'll be able to go with the horses.  The year is late; but there's dogs
beyand, I suppose, and bedad, there y' are!"

The Indian spoke slowly: "It is far off.  There is no colour yet in the
leaf of the larch.  The river-hen still swims northward.  It is good that
we go.  There is much buffalo in the White Valley."

Again Trafford looked towards his follower, and again the half-breed,
as if he were making an effort to remember, sang abstractedly:

    "They follow, they follow a lonely trail, by day, by night,
     By distant sun, and by fire-fly pale, and northern light.
     The ride to the Hills of the Mighty Men, so swift they go!
     Where buffalo feed in the wilding glen in sun and snow."

"Pierre," said Trafford, sharply, "I want an answer to my question."

"'Mais, pardon,' I was thinking .  .  .  well, we can ride until the deep
snows come, then we can walk; and Shangi, he can get the dogs, maybe, one
team of dogs."

"But," was the reply, "one team of dogs will not be enough.  We'll bring
meat and hides, you know, as well as pemmican.  We won't cache any
carcases up there.  What would be the use?  We shall have to be back in
the Pipi Valley by the spring-time."

"Well," said the half-breed with a cold decision, "one team of dogs will
be enough; and we will not cache, and we shall be back in the Pipi Valley
before the spring, perhaps."  But this last word was spoken under his
breath.

And now the Indian spoke, with his deep voice and dignified manner:
"Brothers, it is as I have said, the trail is lonely and the woods are
deep and dark.  Since the time when the world was young, no white man
hath been there save one, and behold sickness fell on him; the grave is
his end.  It is a pleasant land, for the gods have blessed it to the
Indian forever.  No heathen shall possess it.  But you shall see the
White Valley and the buffalo.  Shangi will lead, because you have been
merciful to him, and have given him to sleep in your wigwam, and to eat
of your wild meat.  There are dogs in the forest.  I have spoken."

Trafford was impressed, and annoyed too.  He thought too much sentiment
was being squandered on a very practical and sportive thing.  He disliked
functions; speech-making was to him a matter for prayer and fasting.  The
Indian's address was therefore more or less gratuitous, and he hastened
to remark: "Thank you, Shangi; that's very good, and you've put it
poetically.  You've turned a shooting-excursion into a mediaeval romance.
But we'll get down to business now, if you please, and make the romance a
fact, beautiful enough to send to the 'Times' or the New York 'Call'.
Let's see, how would they put it in the Call?--'Extraordinary Discovery
--Herd of buffaloes found in the far North by an Englishman and his
Franco-Irish Party--Sport for the gods--Exodus of 'brules' to White
Valley!'--and so on, screeching to the end."

Shon laughed heartily.  "The fun of the world is in the thing," he said;
"and a day it would be for a notch on a stick and a rasp of gin in the
throat.  And if I get the sight of me eye on a buffalo-ruck, it's down on
me knees I'll go, and not for prayin' aither.  Here's both hands up for a
start in the mornin'!"

Long before noon next day they were well on their way.  Trafford could
not understand why Pierre was so reserved, and, when speaking, so
ironical.  It was noticeable that the half-breed watched the Indian
closely, that he always rode behind him, that he never drank out of the
same cup.  The leader set this down to the natural uncertainty of
Pierre's disposition.  He had grown to like Pierre, as the latter had
come in course to respect him.  Each was a man of value after his kind.
Each also had recognised in the other qualities of force and knowledge
having their generation in experiences which had become individuality,
subterranean and acute, under a cold surface.  It was the mutual
recognition of these equivalents that led the two men to mutual trust,
only occasionally disturbed, as has been shown; though one was regarded
as the most fastidious man of his set in London, the fairest-minded of
friends, the most comfortable of companions; while the other was an
outlaw, a half-heathen, a lover of but one thing in this world, the
joyous god of Chance.  Pierre was essentially a gamester.  He would have
extracted satisfaction out of a death-sentence which was contingent on
the trumping of an ace.  His only honour was the honour of the game.

Now, with all the swelling prairie sloping to the clear horizon, and the
breath of a large life in their nostrils, these two men were caught up
suddenly, as it were, by the throbbing soul of the North, so that the
subterranean life in them awoke and startled them.  Trafford conceived
that tobacco was the charm with which to exorcise the spirits of the
past.  Pierre let the game of sensations go on, knowing that they pay
themselves out in time.  His scheme was the wiser.  The other found that
fast riding and smoking were not sufficient.  He became surrounded by the
ghosts of yesterdays; and at length he gave up striving with them, and
let them storm upon him, until a line of pain cut deeply across his
forehead, and bitterly and unconsciously he cried aloud,--"Hester, ah,
Hester!"

But having spoken, the spell was broken, and he was aware of the beat of
hoofs beside him, and Shangi the Indian looking at him with a half smile.
Something in the look thrilled him; it was fantastic, masterful.  He
wondered that he had not noticed this singular influence before.  After
all, he was only a savage with cleaner buckskin than his race usually
wore.  Yet that glow, that power in the face--was he Piegan, Blackfoot,
Cree, Blood?  Whatever he was, this man had heard the words which broke
so painfully from him.

He saw the Indian frame her name upon his lips, and then came the words,
"Hester--Hester Orval!"

He turned sternly, and said, "Who are you?  What do you know of Hester
Orval?"

The Indian shook his head gravely, and replied, "You spoke her name, my
brother."

"I spoke one word of her name.  You have spoken two."

"One does not know what one speaks.  There are words which are as sounds,
and words which are as feelings.  Those come to the brain through the
ear; these to the soul through sign, which is more than sound.  The
Indian hath knowledge, even as the white man; and because his heart is
open, the trees whisper to him; he reads the language of the grass and
the wind, and is taught by the song of the bird, the screech of the hawk,
the bark of the fox.  And so he comes to know the heart of the man who
hath sickness, and calls upon someone, even though it be a weak woman,
to cure his sickness; who is bowed low as beside a grave, and would stand
upright.  Are not my words wise?  As the thoughts of a child that dreams,
as the face of the blind, the eye of the beast, or the anxious hand of
the poor, are they not simple, and to be understood?"

Just Trafford made no reply.  But behind, Pierre was singing in the
plaintive measure of a chant:

              "A hunter rideth the herd abreast,
               The Scarlet Hunter from out of the West,
               Whose arrows with points of flame are drest,
               Who loveth the beast of the field the best,
               The child and the young bird out of the nest,
               They ride to the hunt no more, no more!"

They travelled beyond all bounds of civilisation; beyond the northernmost
Indian villages, until the features of the landscape became more rugged
and solemn, and at last they paused at a place which the Indian called
Misty Mountain, and where, disappearing for an hour, he returned with a
team of Eskimo dogs, keen, quick-tempered, and enduring.  They had all
now recovered from the disturbing sentiments of the first portion of the
journey; life was at full tide; the spirit of the hunter was on them.

At length one night they camped in a vast pine grove wrapped in coverlets
of snow and silent as death.  Here again Pierre became moody and alert
and took no part in the careless chat at the camp-fire led by Shon
McGann.  The man brooded and looked mysterious.  Mystery was not pleasing
to Trafford.  He had his own secrets, but in the ordinary affairs of life
he preferred simplicity.  In one of the silences that fell between Shon's
attempts to give hilarity to the occasion, there came a rumbling far-off
sound, a sound that increased in volume till the earth beneath them
responded gently to the vibration.  Trafford looked up inquiringly at
Pierre, and then at the Indian, who, after a moment, said slowly: "Above
us are the hills of the Mighty Men, beneath us is the White Valley.  It
is the tramp of buffalo that we hear.  A storm is coming, and they go to
shelter in the mountains."

The information had come somewhat suddenly, and McGann was the first to
recover from the pleasant shock: "It's divil a wink of sleep I'll get
this night, with the thought of them below there ripe for slaughter, and
the tumble of fight in their beards."

Pierre, with a meaning glance from his half-closed eyes, added: "But it
is the old saying of the prairies that you do not shout dinner till you
have your knife in the loaf.  Your knife is not yet in the loaf, Shon
McGann."

The boom of the trampling ceased, and now there was a stirring in the
snow-clad tree tops, and a sound as if all the birds of the North were
flying overhead.  The weather began to moan and the boles of the pines to
quake.  And then there came war,--a trouble out of the north, a wave of
the breath of God to show inconsequent man that he who seeks to live by
slaughter hath slaughter for his master.

They hung over the fire while the forest cracked round them, and the
flame smarted with the flying snow.  And now the trees, as if the
elements were closing in on them, began to break close by, and one
lurched forward towards them.  Trafford, to avoid its stroke, stepped
quickly aside right into the line of another which he did not see.
Pierre sprang forward and swung him clear, but was himself struck
senseless by an outreaching branch.

As if satisfied with this achievement, the storm began to subside.  When
Pierre recovered consciousness Trafford clasped his hand and said,--
"You've a sharp eye, a quick thought, and a deft arm, comrade."

"Ah, it was in the game.  It is good play to assist your partner," the
half-breed replied sententiously.  Through all, the Indian had remained
stoical.  But McGann, who swore by Trafford--as he had once sworn by
another of the Trafford race--had his heart on his lips, and said:

         "There's a swate little cherub that sits up aloft,
          Who cares for the soul of poor Jack!"

It was long after midnight ere they settled down again, with the wreck of
the forest round them.  Only the Indian slept; the others were alert and
restless.  They were up at daybreak, and on their way before sunrise,
filled with desire for prey.  They had not travelled far before they
emerged upon a plateau.  Around them were the hills of the Mighty Men--
austere, majestic; at their feet was a vast valley on which the light
newly-fallen snow had not hidden all the grass.  Lonely and lofty, it was
a world waiting chastely to be peopled!  And now it was peopled, for
there came from a cleft of the hills an army of buffaloes lounging slowly
down the waste, with tossing manes and hoofs stirring the snow into a
feathery scud.

The eyes of Trafford and McGann swam; Pierre's face was troubled, and
strangely enough he made the sign of the cross.

At that instant Trafford saw smoke issuing from a spot on the mountain
opposite.  He turned to the Indian: "Someone lives there"? he said.

"It is the home of the dead, but life is also there."

"White man, or Indian?"

But no reply came.  The Indian pointed instead to the buffalo rumbling
down the valley.  Trafford forgot the smoke, forgot everything except
that splendid quarry.  Shon was excited.  "Sarpints alive," he said,
"look at the troops of thim!  Is it standin' here we are with our tongues
in our cheeks, whin there's bastes to be killed, and mate to be got, and
the call to war on the ground below!  Clap spurs with your heels, sez I,
and down the side of the turf together and give 'em the teeth of our
guns!"  The Irishman dashed down the slope.  In an instant, all followed,
or at least Trafford thought all followed, swinging their guns across
their saddles to be ready for this excellent foray.  But while Pierre
rode hard, it was at first without the fret of battle in him, and he
smiled strangely, for he knew that the Indian had disappeared as they
rode down the slope, though how and why he could not tell.  There ran
through his head tales chanted at camp-fires when he was not yet in
stature so high as the loins that bore him.  They rode hard, and yet they
came no nearer to that flying herd straining on with white streaming
breath and the surf of snow rising to their quarters.  Mile upon mile,
and yet they could not ride these monsters down!

Now Pierre was leading.  There was a kind of fury in his face, and he
seemed at last to gain on them.  But as the herd veered close to a wall
of stalwart pines, a horseman issued from the trees and joined the
cattle.  The horseman was in scarlet from head to foot; and with his
coming the herd went faster, and ever faster, until they vanished into
the mountain-side; and they who pursued drew in their trembling horses
and stared at each other with wonder in their faces.

"In God's name what does it mean"? Trafford cried.

"Is it a trick of the eye or the hand of the devil"? added Shon.

"In the name of God we shall know perhaps.  If it is the hand of the
devil it is not good for us," remarked Pierre.

"Who was the man in scarlet who came from the woods"? asked Trafford of
the half-breed.

"'Voila,' it is strange!  There is an old story among the Indians!  My
mother told many tales of the place and sang of it, as I sang to you.
The legend was this:--In the hills of the North which no white man, nor
no Injin of this time hath seen, the forefathers of the red men sleep;
but some day they will wake again and go forth and possess all the land;
and the buffalo are for them when that time shall come, that they may
have the fruits of the chase, and that it be as it was of old, when the
cattle were as clouds on the horizon.  And it was ordained that one of
these mighty men who had never been vanquished in fight, nor done an evil
thing, and was the greatest of all the chiefs, should live and not die,
but be as a sentinel, as a lion watching, and preserve the White Valley
in peace until his brethren waked and came into their own again.  And him
they called the Scarlet Hunter; and to this hour the red men pray to him
when they lose their way upon the plains, or Death draws aside the
curtains of the wigwam to call them forth."

"Repeat the verses you sang, Pierre," said Trafford.  The half-breed did
so.  When he came to the words, "Who loveth the beast of the field the
best," the Englishman looked round.  "Where is Shangi"? he asked.
McGann shook his head in astonishment and negation.  Pierre explained:
"On the mountain-side where we ride down he is not seen--he vanish . . .
'mon Dieu,' look!"

On the slope of the mountain stood the Scarlet Hunter with drawn bow.
From it an arrow flew over their heads with a sorrowful twang, and fell
where the smoke rose among the pines; then the mystic figure disappeared.

McGann shuddered, and drew himself together.  "It is the place of
spirits," he said; "and it's little I like it, God knows; but I'll follow
that Scarlet Hunter, or red devil, or whatever he is, till I drop, if the
Honourable gives the word.  For flesh and blood I'm not afraid of; and
the other we come to, whether we will or not, one day."

But Trafford said: "No, we'll let it stand where it is for the present.
Something has played our eyes false, or we're brought here to do work
different from buffalo-hunting.  Where that arrow fell among the smoke
we must go first.  Then, as I read the riddle, we travel back the way we
came.  There are points in connection with the Pipi Valley superior to
the hills of the Mighty Men."

They rode away across the glade, and through a grove of pines upon a
hill, till they stood before a log but with parchment windows.

Trafford knocked, but there was no response.  He opened the door and
entered.  He saw a figure rise painfully from a couch in a corner,--the
figure of a woman young and beautiful, but wan and worn.  She seemed
dazed and inert with suffering, and spoke mournfully: "It is too late.
Not you, nor any of your race, nor anything on earth can save him.  He is
dead--dead now."

At the first sound of her voice Trafford started.  He drew near to her,
as pale as she was, and wonder and pity were in his face.  "Hester," he
said, "Hester Orval!"

She stared at him like one that had been awakened from an evil dream,
then tottered towards him with the cry,--"Just, Just, have you come to
save me?  O Just!"  His distress was sad to see, for it was held in deep
repression, but he said calmly and with protecting gentleness: "Yes, I
have come to save you.  Hester, how is it you are here in this strange
place--you?"

She sobbed so that at first she could not answer; but at last she cried:
"O Just, he is dead .  .  .  in there, in there!  .  .  .  Last night, it
was last night; and he prayed that I might go with him.  But I could not
die unforgiven, and I was right, for you have come out of the world to
help me, and to save me."

"Yes, to help you and to save you,--if I can," he added in a whisper to
himself, for he was full of foreboding.  He was of the earth, earthy, and
things that had chanced to him this day were beyond the natural and
healthy movements of his mind.  He had gone forth to slay, and had been
foiled by shadows; he had come with a tragic, if beautiful, memory
haunting him, and that memory had clothed itself in flesh and stood
before him, pitiful, solitary,--a woman.  He had scorned all legend and
superstition, and here both were made manifest to him.  He had thought of
this woman as one who was of this world no more, and here she mourned
before him and bade him go and look upon her dead, upon the man who had
wronged him, into whom, as he once declared, the soul of a cur had
entered,--and now what could he say?  He had carried in his heart the
infinite something that is to men the utmost fulness of life, which,
losing, they must carry lead upon their shoulders where they thought the
gods had given pinions.

McGann and Pierre were nervous.  This conjunction of unusual things was
easier to the intelligences of the dead than the quick.  The outer air
was perhaps less charged with the unnatural, and with a glance towards
the room where death was quartered, they left the hut.

Trafford was alone with the woman through whom his life had been turned
awry.  He looked at her searchingly; and as he looked the mere man in him
asserted itself for a moment.  She was dressed in coarse garments; it
struck him that her grief had a touch of commonness about it; there was
something imperfect in the dramatic setting.  His recent experiences had
had a kind of grandeur about them; it was not thus that he had remembered
her in the hour when he had called upon her in the plains, and the Indian
had heard his cry.  He felt, and was ashamed in feeling, that there was
a grim humour in the situation.  The fantastic, the melodramatic, the
emotional, were huddled here in too marked a prominence; it all seemed,
for an instant, like the tale of a woman's first novel.  But immediately
again there was roused in him the latent force of loyalty to himself and
therefore to her; the story of her past, so far as he knew it, flashed
before him, and his eyes grew hot.

He remembered the time he had last seen her in an English country-house
among a gay party in which royalty smiled, and the subject was content
beneath the smile.  But there was one rebellious subject, and her name
was Hester Orval.  She was a wilful girl who had lived life selfishly
within the lines of that decorous yet pleasant convention to which she
was born.  She was beautiful,--she knew that, and royalty had graciously
admitted it.  She was warm-thoughted, and possessed the fatal strain of
the artistic temperament.  She was not sure that she had a heart; and
many others, not of her sex, after varying and enthusiastic study of the
matter, were not more confident than she.  But it had come at last that
she had listened with pensive pleasure to Trafford's tale of love; and
because to be worshipped by a man high in all men's, and in most women's,
esteem, ministered delicately to her sweet egotism, and because she was
proud of him, she gave him her hand in promise, and her cheek in
privilege, but denied him--though he knew this not--her heart and the
service of her life.  But he was content to wait patiently for that
service, and he wholly trusted her, for there was in him some fine spirit
of the antique world.

There had come to Falkenstowe, this country-house and her father's home,
a man who bore a knightly name, but who had no knightly heart; and he
told Ulysses' tales, and covered a hazardous and cloudy past with that
fascinating colour which makes evil appear to be good, so that he roused
in her the pulse of art, which she believed was soul and life, and her
allegiance swerved.  And when her mother pleaded with her, and when her
father said stern things, and even royalty, with uncommon use, rebuked
her gently, her heart grew hard; and almost on the eve of her wedding-day
she fled with her lover, and married him, and together they sailed away
over the seas.

The world was shocked and clamorous for a matter of nine days, and then
it forgot this foolish and awkward circumstance; but Just Trafford never
forgot it.  He remembered all vividly until the hour, a year later, when
London journals announced that Hester Orval and her husband had gone down
with a vessel wrecked upon the Alaskan and Canadian coast.  And there new
regret began, and his knowledge of her ended.

But she and her husband had not been drowned; with a sailor they had
reached the shore in safety.  They had travelled inland from the coast
through the great mountains by unknown paths, and as they travelled, the
sailor died; and they came at last through innumerable hardships to the
Kimash Hills, the hills of the Mighty Men, and there they stayed.  It was
not an evil land; it had neither deadly cold in winter nor wanton heat in
summer.  But they never saw a human face, and everything was lonely and
spectral.  For a time they strove to go eastwards or southwards but the
mountains were impassable, and in the north and west there was no hope.
Though the buffalo swept by them in the valley they could not slay them,
and they lived on forest fruits until in time the man sickened.  The
woman nursed him faithfully, but still he failed; and when she could go
forth no more for food, some unseen dweller of the woods brought buffalo
meat, and prairie fowl, and water from the spring, and laid them beside
her door.

She had seen the mounds upon the hill, the wide couches of the sleepers,
and she remembered the things done in the days when God seemed nearer to
the sons of men than now; and she said that a spirit had done this thing,
and trembled and was thankful.  But the man weakened and knew that he
should die, and one night when the pain was sharp upon him he prayed
bitterly that he might pass, or that help might come to snatch him from
the grave.  And as they sobbed together, a form entered at the door,--
a form clothed in scarlet,--and he bade them tell the tale of their lives
as they would some time tell it unto heaven.  And when the tale was told
he said that succour should come to them from the south by the hand of
the Scarlet Hunter, that the nation sleeping there should no more be
disturbed by their moaning.  And then he had gone forth, and with his
going there was a storm such as that in which the man had died, the storm
that had assailed the hunters in the forest yesterday.

This was the second part of Hester Orval's life as she told it to Just
Trafford.  And he, looking into her eyes, knew that she had suffered, and
that she had sounded her husband's unworthiness.  Then he turned from her
and went into the room where the dead man lay.  And there all hardness
passed from him, and he understood that in the great going forth man
reckons to the full with the deeds done in that brief pilgrimage called
life; and that in the bitter journey which this one took across the dread
spaces between Here and There, he had repented of his sins, because they,
and they only, went with him in mocking company; the good having gone
first to plead where evil is a debtor and hath a prison.  And the woman
came and stood beside Trafford, and whispered, "At first--and at the
last--he was kind."

But he urged her gently from the room: "Go away," he said; "go away.  We
cannot judge him.  Leave me alone with him."

They buried him upon the hill-side, far from the mounds where the Mighty
Men waited for their summons to go forth and be the lords of the North
again.  At night they buried him when the moon was at its full; and he
had the fragrant pines for his bed, and the warm darkness to cover him;
and though he is to those others resting there a heathen and an alien,
it may be that he sleeps peacefully.

When Trafford questioned Hester Orval more deeply of her life there, the
unearthly look quickened in her eyes, and she said: "Oh, nothing, nothing
is real here, but suffering; perhaps it is all a dream, but it has
changed me, changed me.  To hear the tread of the flying herds, to see no
being save him, the Scarlet Hunter, to hear the voices calling in the
night!  .  .  .  Hush!  There, do you not hear them?  It is midnight--
listen!"

He listened, and Pierre and Shon McGann looked at each other
apprehensively, while Shon's fingers felt hurriedly along the beads of a
rosary which he did not hold.  Yes, they heard it, a deep sonorous sound:
"Is the daybreak come?"  "It is still the night," came the reply as of
one clear voice.  And then there floated through the hills more softly:
"We sleep--we sleep!"  And the sounds echoed through the valley--"Sleep
--sleep!"

Yet though these things were full of awe, the spirit of the place held
them there, and the fever of the hunter descended on them hotly.  In the
morning they went forth, and rode into the White Valley where the buffalo
were feeding, and sought to steal upon them; but the shots from their
guns only awoke the hills, and none were slain.  And though they rode
swiftly, the wide surf of snow was ever between them and the chase, and
their striving availed nothing.  Day after day they followed that flying
column, and night after night they heard the sleepers call from the
hills.  The desire of the thing wasted them, and they forgot to eat and
ceased to talk among themselves.  But one day Shon McGann, muttering aves
as he rode, gained on the cattle, until once again the Scarlet Hunter
came forth from a cleft of the mountains, and drove the herd forward with
swifter feet.  But the Irishman had learned the power in this thing, and
had taught Trafford, who knew not those availing prayers, and with these
sacred conjurations on their lips they gained on the cattle length by
length, though the Scarlet Hunter rode abreast of the thundering horde.
Within easy range, Trafford swung his gun shoulder-wards to fire, but at
that instant a cloud of snow rose up between him and his quarry so that
they all were blinded.  And when they came into the clear sun again the
buffalo were gone; but flaming arrows from some unseen hunter's bow came
singing over their heads towards the south; and they obeyed the sign,
and went back to where Hester wore her life out with anxiety for them,
because she knew the hopelessness of their quest.  Women are nearer to
the heart of things.  And now she begged Trafford to go southwards before
winter froze the plains impassably, and the snow made tombs of the
valleys.  Thereupon he gave the word to go, and said that he had done
wrong--for now the spell was falling from him.

But she, seeing his regret, said: "Ah, Just, it could not have been
different.  The passion of it was on you as it was on us, as if to teach
us that hunger for happiness is robbery, and that the covetous desire of
man is not the will of the gods.  The herds are for the Mighty Men when
they awake, not for the stranger and the Philistine."

"You have grown wise, Hester," he replied.

"No, I am sick in brain and body; but it may be that in such sickness
there is wisdom."

"Ah," he said, "it has turned my head, I think.  Once I laughed at all
such fanciful things as these.  This Scarlet Hunter, how many times have
you seen him?"

"But once."

"What were his looks?"

"A face pale and strong, with noble eyes; and in his voice there was
something strange."

Trafford thought of Shangi, the Indian,--where had he gone?  He had
disappeared as suddenly as he had come to their camp in the South.

As they sat silent in the growing night, the door opened and the Scarlet
Hunter stood before them.  "There is food," he said, "on the threshold--
food for those who go upon a far journey to the South in the morning.
Unhappy are they who seek for gold at the rainbow's foot, who chase the
fire-fly in the night, who follow the herds in the White Valley.  Wise
are they who anger not the gods, and who fly before the rising storm.
There is a path from the valley for the strangers, the path by which they
came; and when the sun stares forth again upon the world, the way shall
be open, and there shall be safety for you until your travel ends in the
quick world whither you go.  You were foolish; now you are wise.  It is
time to depart; seek not to return, that we may have peace and you
safety.  When the world cometh to her spring again we shall meet."  Then
he turned and was gone, with Trafford's voice ringing after him,--"
Shangi!  Shangi!"

They ran out swiftly, but he had vanished.  In the valley where the
moonlight fell in icy coldness a herd of cattle was moving, and their
breath rose like the spray from sea-beaten rocks, and the sound of their
breathing was borne upwards to the watchers.

At daybreak they rode down into the valley.  All was still.  Not a trace
of life remained; not a hoofmark in the snow, nor a bruised blade of
grass.  And when they climbed to the plateau and looked back, it seemed
to Trafford and his companions, as it seemed in after years, that this
thing had been all a fantasy.  But Hester's face was beside them, and it
told of strange and unsubstantial things.  The shadows of the middle
world were upon her.  And yet again when they turned at the last there
was no token.  It was a northern valley, with sun and snow, and cold blue
shadows, and the high hills,--that was all.

Then Hester said: "O Just, I do not know if this is life or death--and
yet it must be death, for after death there is forgiveness to those who
repent, and your face is forgiving and kind."

And he--for he saw that she needed much human help and comfort--gently
laid his hand on hers and replied: "Hester, this is life, a new life for
both of us.  Whatever has been was a dream; whatever is now"--and he
folded her hand in his--"is real; and there is no such thing as
forgiveness to be spoken of between us.  There shall be happiness
for us yet, please God!"

"I want to go to Falkenstowe.  Will--will my mother forgive me?"

"Mothers always forgive, Hester, else half the world had slain itself in
shame."

And then she smiled for the first time since he had seen her.  This was
in the shadows of the scented pines; and a new life breathed upon her,
as it breathed upon them all, and they knew that the fever of the White
Valley had passed away from them forever.

After many hardships they came in safety to the regions of the south
country again; and the tale they told, though doubted by the race of
pale-faces, was believed by the heathen; because there was none among
them but, as he cradled at his mother's breasts, and from his youth up,
had heard the legend of the Scarlet Hunter.

For the romance of that journey, it concerned only the man and woman to
whom it was as wine and meat to the starving.  Is not love more than
legend, and a human heart than all the beasts of the field or any joy of
slaughter?






THE STONE

The Stone hung on a jutting crag of Purple Hill.  On one side of it, far
beneath, lay the village, huddled together as if, through being close
compacted, its handful of humanity should not be a mere dust in the
balance beside Nature's portentousness.  Yet if one stood beside The
Stone, and looked down, the flimsy wooden huts looked like a barrier at
the end of a great flume.  For the hill hollowed and narrowed from The
Stone to the village, as if giants had made this concave path by
trundling boulders to that point like a funnel where the miners' houses
now formed a cul-de-sac.  On the other side of the crag was a valley
also; but it was lonely and untenanted; and at one flank of The Stone
were serried legions of trees.

The Stone was a mighty and wonderful thing.  Looked at from the village
direct, it had nothing but the sky for a background.  At times, also, it
appeared to rest on nothing; and many declared that they could see clean
between it and the oval floor of the crag on which it rested.  That was
generally in the evening, when the sun was setting behind it.  Then the
light coiled round its base, between it and its pedestal, thus making it
appear to hover above the hill-point, or, planet-like, to be just
settling on it.  At other times, when the light was perfectly clear and
not too strong, and the village side of the crag was brighter than the
other, more accurate relations of The Stone to its pedestal could be
discovered.  Then one would say that it balanced on a tiny base, a toe of
granite.  But if one looked long, especially in the summer, when the air
throbbed, it evidently rocked upon that toe; if steadily, and very long,
he grew tremulous, perhaps afraid.  Once, a woman who was about to become
a mother went mad, because she thought The Stone would hurtle down the
hill at her great moment and destroy her and her child.  Indians would
not live either on the village side of The Stone or in the valley beyond.
They had a legend that, some day, one, whom they called The Man Who
Sleeps, would rise from his hidden couch in the mountains, and, being
angry that any dared to cumber his playground, would hurl The Stone upon
them that dwelt at Purple Hill.  But white men pay little heed to Indian
legends.  At one time or another every person who had come to the village
visited The Stone.  Colossal as it was, the real base on which its weight
rested was actually very small: the view from the village had not been
all deceitful.  It is possible, indeed, that at one time it had really
rocked, and that the rocking had worn for it a shallow cup, or socket, in
which it poised.  The first man who came to Purple Valley prospecting had
often stopped his work and looked at The Stone in a half-fear that it
would spring upon him unawares.  And yet he had as often laughed at
himself for doing so, since, as he said, it must have been there hundreds
of thousands of years.  Strangers, when they came to the village, went to
sleep somewhat timidly the first night of their stay, and not
infrequently left their beds to go and look at The Stone, as it hung
there ominously in the light of the moon; or listened towards it if it
was dark.  When the moon rose late, and The Stone chanced to be directly
in front of it, a black sphere seemed to be rolling into the light to
blot it out.

But none who lived in the village looked upon The Stone in quite the same
fashion as did that first man who had come to the valley.  He had seen it
through three changing seasons, with no human being near him, and only
occasionally a shy, wandering elk, or a cloud of wild ducks whirring down
the pass, to share his companionship with it.  Once he had waked in the
early morning, and, possessed of a strange feeling, had gone out to look
a The Stone.  There, perched upon it, was an eagle; and though he said to
himself that an eagle's weight was to The Stone as a feather upon the
world, he kept his face turned towards it all day; for all day the eagle
stayed.  He was a man of great stature and immense strength.  The thews
of his limbs stood out like soft unbreakable steel.  Yet, as if to cast
derision on his strength and great proportions, God or Fate turned his
bread to ashes, gave failure into his hands where he hugely grasped at
fortune, and hung him about with misery.  He discovered gold, but others
gathered it.  It was his daughter that went mad, and gave birth to a dead
child in fearsome thought of The Stone.  Once, when he had gone over the
hills to another mining field, and had been prevented from coming back by
unexpected and heavy snows, his wife was taken ill, and died alone of
starvation, because none in the village remembered of her and her needs.
Again, one wild night, long after, his only son was taken from his bed
and lynched for a crime that was none of his, as was discovered by his
murderers next day.  Then they killed horribly the real criminal, and
offered the father such satisfaction as they could.  They said that any
one of them was ready there to be killed by him; and they threw a weapon
at his feet.  At this he stood looking upon them for a moment, his great
breast heaving, and his eyes glowering; but presently he reached out his
arms, and taking two of them by the throat, brought their heads together
heavily, breaking their skulls; and, with a cry in his throat like a
wounded animal, left them, and entered the village no more.  But it
became known that he had built a rude but on Purple Hill, and that he had
been seen standing beside The Stone or sitting among the boulders below
it, with his face bent upon the village.  Those who had come near to him
said that he had greatly changed; that his hair and beard had grown long
and strong, and, in effect, that he looked like some rugged fragment of
an antique world.

The time came when they associated The Man with The Stone: they grew to
speak of him simply as The Man.  There was something natural and apt in
the association.  Then they avoided these two singular dwellers on the
height.  What had happened to The Man when he lived in the village became
almost as great a legend as the Indian fable concerning The Stone.  In
the minds of the people one seemed as old as the other.  Women who knew
the awful disasters which had befallen The Man brooded at times most
timidly, regarding him as they did at first--and even still--The Stone.
Women who carried life unborn about with them had a strange dread of both
The Stone and The Man.  Time passed on, and the feeling grew that The
Man's grief must be a terrible thing, since he lived alone with The Stone
and God.  But this did not prevent the men of the village from digging
gold, drinking liquor, and doing many kinds of evil.  One day, again,
they did an unjust and cruel thing.  They took Pierre, the gambler, whom
they had at first sought to vanquish at his own art, and, possessed
suddenly of the high duty of citizenship, carried him to the edge of a
hill and dropped him over, thinking thereby to give him a quick death,
while the vultures would provide him a tomb.  But Pierre was not killed,
though to his grave--unprepared as yet--he would bear an arm which should
never be lifted higher than his shoulder.  When he waked from the
crashing gloom which succeeded the fall, he was in the presence of a
being whose appearance was awesome and massive--an outlawed god: whose
hair and beard were white, whose eye was piercing, absorbing, painful,
in the long perspective of its woe.  This being sat with his great hand
clasped to the side of his head.  The beginning of his look was the
village, and--though the vision seemed infinite--the village was the end
of it too.  Pierre, looking through the doorway beside which he lay, drew
in his breath sharply, for it seemed at first as if The Man was an
unnatural fancy, and not a thing.  Behind The Man was The Stone, which
was not more motionless nor more full of age than this its comrade.
Indeed, The Stone seemed more a thing of life as it poised above the
hill: The Man was sculptured rock.  His white hair was chiselled on his
broad brow, his face was a solemn pathos petrified, his lips were curled
with an iron contempt, an incalculable anger.

The sun went down, and darkness gathered about The Man.  Pierre reached
out his hand, and drank the water and ate the coarse bread that had been
put near him.  He guessed that trees or protruding ledges had broken his
fall, and that he had been rescued and brought here.  As he lay thinking,
The Man entered the doorway, stooping much to do so.  With flints he
lighted a wick which hung from a wooden bowl of bear's oil; then
kneeling, held it above his head, and looked at Pierre.  And Pierre, who
had never feared anyone, shrank from the look in The Man's eyes.  But
when the other saw that Pierre was awake, a distant kindness came upon
his face, and he nodded gravely; but he did not speak.  Presently a great
tremor as of pain shook all his limbs, and he set the candle on the
ground, and with his stalwart hands arranged afresh the bandages about
Pierre's injured arm and leg.  Pierre spoke at last.

"You are The Man"? he said.  The other bowed his head.

"You saved me from those devils in the valley?"  A look of impregnable
hardness came into The Man's face, but he pressed Pierre's hand for
answer; and though the pressure was meant to be gentle, Pierre winced
painfully.  The candle spluttered, and the hut filled with a sickly
smoke.  The Man brought some bear skins and covered the sufferer, for,
the season being autumn, the night was cold.  Pierre, who had thus spent
his first sane and conscious hour in many days, fell asleep.  What time
it was when he waked he was not sure, but it was to hear a metallic
click-click come to him through the clear air of night.  It was a
pleasant noise as of steel and rock: the work of some lonely stone-cutter
of the hills.  The sound reached him with strange, increasing
distinctness.  Was this Titan that had saved him sculpturing some figure
from the metal hill?  Click-click!  it vibrated as regularly as the keen
pulse of a watch.  He lay and wondered for a long time, but fell asleep
again; and the steely iteration went on in his dreams.

In the morning The Man came to him, and cared for his hurts, and gave him
food; but still would speak no word.  He was gone nearly all day in the
hills; yet when evening came he sought the place where Pierre had seen
him the night before, and the same weird scene was re-enacted.  And again
in the night the clicking sound went on; and every night it was renewed.
Pierre grew stronger, and could, with difficulty, stand upon his feet.
One night he crept out, and made his way softly, slowly towards the
sound.  He saw The Man kneeling beside The Stone, he saw a hammer rise
and fall upon a chisel; and the chisel was at the base of The Stone.  The
hammer rose and fell with perfect but dreadful precision.  Pierre turned
and looked towards the village below, whose lights were burning like a
bunch of fire-flies in the gloom.  Again he looked at The Stone and The
Man.

Then the thing came to him sharply.  The Man was chiselling away the
socket of The Stone, bringing it to that point of balance where the touch
of a finger, the wing of a bird, or the whistle of a north-west wind,
would send it down upon the offending and unsuspecting village.

The thought held him paralysed.  The Man had nursed his revenge long past
the thought of its probability by the people beneath.  He had at first
sat and watched the village, hated, and mused dreadfully upon the thing
he had determined to do.  Then he had worked a little, afterwards more,
and now, lastly, since he had seen what they had done to Pierre, with the
hot but firm eagerness of an avenging giant.  Pierre had done some sad
deeds in his time, and had tasted some sweet revenges, but nothing like
to this had ever entered his brain.  In that village were men who--as
they thought--had cast him to a death fit only for a coward or a cur.
Well, here was the most exquisite retaliation.  Though his hand should
not be in the thing, he could still be the cynical and approving
spectator.

But yet: had all those people hovering about those lights below done harm
to him?  He thought there were a few--and they were women--who would not
have followed his tumbril to his death with cries of execration.  The
rest would have done so,--most of them did so, not because he was a
criminal, but because he was a victim, and because human nature as it is
thirsts inordinately at times for blood and sacrifice--a living strain of
the old barbaric instinct.  He remembered that most of these people were
concerned in having injured The Man.  The few good women there had vile
husbands; the few pardonable men had hateful wives: the village of Purple
Hill was an ill affair.

He thought: now doubtfully, now savagely, now with irony.

The hammer and steel clicked on.

He looked at the lights of the village again.  Suddenly there came
to his mind the words of a great man who sought to save a city manifold
centuries ago.  He was not sure that he wished to save this village; but
there was a grim, almost grotesque, fitness in the thing that he now
intended.  He spoke out clearly through the night:

"'Oh, let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once:
Peradventure ten righteous shall be found there.'"

The hammer stopped.  There was a silence, in which the pines sighed
lightly.  Then, as if speaking was a labour, The Man replied in a deep,
harsh voice:

"I will not spare it for ten's sake."

Again there was a silence, in which Pierre felt his maimed body bend
beneath him; but presently the voice said,--"Now!"

At this the moon swung from behind a cloud.  The Man stood behind The
Stone.  His arm was raised to it.  There was a moment's pause--it seemed
like years to Pierre; a wind came softly crying out of the west, the moon
hurried into the dark, and then a monster sprang from its pedestal upon
Purple Hill, and, with a sound of thunder and an awful speed, raced upon
the village below.  The boulders of the hillside crumbled after it.

And Pierre saw the lights go out.

The moon shone out again for an instant, and Pierre saw that The Man
stood where The Stone had been; but when he reached the place The Man was
gone.  Forever!




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

At first--and at the last--he was kind
Courage; without which, men are as the standing straw
Evil is half-accidental, half-natural
Fascinating colour which makes evil appear to be good
Had the luck together, all kinds and all weathers
Hunger for happiness is robbery
If one remembers, why should the other forget
Instinct for detecting veracity, having practised on both sides
Mothers always forgive
The higher we go the faster we live
The Injin speaks the truth, perhaps--eye of red man multipies
The world is not so bad as is claimed for it
Whatever has been was a dream; whatever is now is real
You do not shout dinner till you have your knife in the loaf






PIERRE AND HIS PEOPLE

TALES OF THE FAR NORTH

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 4.


THE TALL MASTER
THE CRIMSON FLAG
THE FLOOD
IN PIPI VALLEY




THE TALL MASTER

The story has been so much tossed about in the mouths of Indians, and
half-breeds, and men of the Hudson's Bay Company, that you are pretty
sure to hear only an apocryphal version of the thing as you now travel in
the North.  But Pretty Pierre was at Fort Luke when the battle occurred,
and, before and after, he sifted the business thoroughly.  For he had a
philosophical turn, and this may be said of him, that he never lied
except to save another from danger.  In this matter he was cool and
impartial from first to last, and evil as his reputation was in many ways
there were those who believed and trusted him.  Himself, as he travelled
here and there through the North, had heard of the Tall Master.  Yet he
had never met anyone who had seen him; for the Master had dwelt, it was
said, chiefly among the strange tribes of the Far-Off Metal River whose
faces were almost white, and who held themselves aloof from the southern
races.  The tales lost nothing by being retold, even when the historians
were the men of the H. B. C.;---Pierre knew what accomplished liars may
be found among that Company of Adventurers trading in Hudson's Bay, and
how their art had been none too delicately engrafted by his own people.
But he was, as became him, open to conviction, especially when,
journeying to Fort Luke, he heard what John Hybar, the Chief Factor--
a man of uncommon quality--had to say.  Hybar had once lived long among
those Indians of the Bright Stone, and had seen many rare things among
them.  He knew their legends of the White Valley and the Hills of the
Mighty Men, and how their distinctive character had imposed itself on the
whole Indian race of the North, so that there was none but believed, even
though vaguely, in a pleasant land not south but Arcticwards; and Pierre
himself, with Shon McGann and Just Trafford, had once had a strange
experience in the Kimash Hills.  He did not share the opinion of Lazenby,
the Company's clerk at Fort Luke, who said, when the matter was talked of
before him, that it was all hanky-panky,--which was evidence that he had
lived in London town, before his anxious relatives, sending him forth
under the delusive flag of adventure and wild life, imprisoned him in the
Arctic regions with the H. B. C.

Lazenby admired Pierre; said he was good stuff, and voted him amusing,
with an ingenious emphasis of heathen oaths; but advised him, as only an
insolent young scoundrel can, to forswear securing, by the seductive game
of poker or euchre, larger interest on his capital than the H. B. C.;
whose record, he insisted, should never be rivalled by any single man in
any single lifetime.  Then he incidentally remarked that he would like to
empty the Company's cash-box once--only once;--thus reconciling the
preacher and the sinner, as many another has done.  Lazenby's morals were
not bad, however.  He was simply fond of making them appear terrible;
even when in London he was more idle than wicked.  He gravely suggested
at last, as a kind of climax, that he and Pierre should go out on the pad
together.  This was a mere stroke of pleasantry on his part, because, the
most he could loot in that far North were furs and caches of buffalo
meat; and a man's capacity and use for them were limited.  Even Pierre's
especial faculty and art seemed valueless so far Polewards; but he had
his beat throughout the land, and he kept it like a perfect patrolman.
He had not been at Fort Luke for years, and he would not be there again
for more years; but it was certain that he would go on reappearing till
he vanished utterly.  At the end of the first week of this visit at Fort
Luke, so completely had he conquered the place, that he had won from the
Chief Factor the year's purchases of skins, the stores, and the Fort
itself; and every stitch of clothing owned by Lazenby: so that, if he had
insisted on the redemption of the debts, the H. B. C. and Lazenby had
been naked and hungry in the wilderness.  But Pierre was not a hard
creditor.  He instantly and nonchalantly said that the Fort would be
useless to him, and handed it back again with all therein, on a most
humorously constructed ninety-nine years' lease; while Lazenby was left
in pawn.  Yet Lazenby's mind was not at certain ease; he had a wholesome
respect for Pierre's singularities, and dreaded being suddenly called
upon to pay his debt before he could get his new clothes made, maybe, in
the presence of Wind Driver, chief of the Golden Dogs, and his demure and
charming daughter, Wine Face, who looked upon him with the eye of
affection--a matter fully, but not ostentatiously, appreciated by
Lazenby.  If he could have entirely forgotten a pretty girl in South
Kensington, who, at her parents' bidding, turned her shoulder on him, he
would have married Wine Face; and so he told Pierre.  But the half-breed
had only a sardonic sympathy for such weakness.  Things changed at once
when Shon McGann arrived.  He should have come before, according to a
promise given Pierre, but there were reasons for the delay; and these
Shon elaborated in his finely picturesque style.

He said that he had lost his way after he left the Wapiti Woods, and
should never have found it again, had it not been for a strange being who
came upon him and took him to the camp of the White Hand Indians, and
cared for him there, and sent him safely on his way again to Fort Luke.

"Sorra wan did I ever see like him," said Shon,  with a face that was
divil this minute and saint the next; pale in the cheek, and black in the
eye, and grizzled hair flowin' long at his neck and lyin' like snakes on
his shoulders; and whin his fingers closed on yours, bedad!  they didn't
seem human at all, for they clamped you so cold and strong."

"'For they clamped you so cold and strong,'" replied Pierre, mockingly,
yet greatly interested, as one could see by the upward range of his eye
towards Shon.  "Well, what more?"

"Well, squeeze the acid from y'r voice, Pierre; for there's things that
better become you: and listen to me, for I've news for all here at the
Fort, before I've done, which'll open y'r eyes with a jerk."

"With a wonderful jerk, hold! let us prepare, messieurs, to be waked with
an Irish jerk!" and Pierre pensively trifled with the fringe on Shon's
buckskin jacket, which was whisked from his fingers with smothered anger.
For a few moments he was silent; but the eager looks of the Chief Factor
and Lazenby encouraged him to continue.  Besides, it was only Pierre's
way--provoking Shon was the piquant sauce of his life.

"Lyin' awake I was," continued Shon, "in the middle of the night, not
bein' able to sleep for a pain in a shoulder I'd strained, whin I heard a
thing that drew me up standin'.  It was the sound of a child laughin'; so
wonderful and bright, and at the very door of me tent it seemed.  Then it
faded away till it was only a breath, lovely, and idle, and swingin'.  I
wint to the door and looked out.  There was nothin' there, av coorse."
"And why 'av coorse'"? rejoined Pierre.  The Chief Factor was intent on
what Shon was saying, while Lazenby drummed his fingers on the table, his
nose in the air.

"Divils me darlin', but ye know as well as I, that there's things in the
world neither for havin' nor handlin'.  And that's wan of thim, says I to
meself.  .  .  .  I wint back and lay down, and I heard the voice singin'
now and comin' nearer and nearer, and growin' louder and louder, and then
there came with it a patter of feet, till it was as a thousand children
were dancin' by me door.  I was shy enough, I'll own; but I pulled aside
the curtain of the tent to see again: and there was nothin' beyand for
the eye.  But the singin' was goin' past and recedin' as before, till it
died away along the waves of prairie grass.  I wint back and give Grey
Nose, my Injin bed-fellow, a lift wid me fut.  'Come out of that,' says
I, 'and tell me if dead or alive I am.'  He got up, and there was the
noise soft and grand again, but with it now the voices of men, the flip
of birds' wings and the sighin' of tree tops, and behind all that the
long wash of a sea like none I ever heard.  .  .  .  'Well,' says I to
the Injin grinnin' before me, 'what's that, in the name o' Moses?'
'That,' says he, laughin' slow in me face, 'is the Tall Master--him that
brought you to the camp.' Thin I remimbered all the things that's been
said of him, and I knew it was music I'd been hearin' and not children's
voices nor anythin' else at all.

"'Come with me,' says Grey Nose; and he took me to the door of a big tent
standin' alone from the rest.

"'Wait a minute,' says he, and he put his hand on the tent curtain; and at
that there was a crash, as a million gold hammers were fallin' on silver
drums.  And we both stood still; for it seemed an army, with swords
wranglin' and bridle-chains rattlin', was marchin' down on us.  There was
the divil's own uproar, as a battle was comin' on; and a long line of
spears clashed.  But just then there whistled through the larrup of sound
a clear voice callin', gentle and coaxin', yet commandin' too; and the
spears dropped, and the pounding of horsehoofs ceased, and then the army
marched away; far away; iver so far away, into--"

"Into Heaven!" flippantly interjected Lazenby.  "Into Heaven, say I, and
be choked to you! for there's no other place for it; and I'll stand by
that, till I go there myself, and know the truth o' the thing."  Pierre
here spoke.  "Heaven gave you a fine trick with words, Shon McGann.  I
sometimes think Irishmen have gifts for only two things--words and women.
.  .  .  'Bien,' what then?"

Shon was determined not to be angered.  The occasion was too big.  "Well,
Grey Nose lifted the curtain and wint in.  In a minute he comes out.
'You can go in,' says he.  So in I wint, the Injin not comin', and there
in the middle of the tint stood the Tall Master, alone.  He had his
fiddle to his chin, and the bow hoverin' above it.  He looked at me for a
long time along the thing; then, all at once, from one string I heard the
child laughin' that pleasant and distant, though the bow seemed not to be
touchin'.  Soon it thinned till it was the shadow of a laugh, and I
didn't know whin it stopped, he smilin' down at the fiddle bewhiles.
Then he said without lookin' at me,--'It is the spirit of the White
Valley and the Hills of the Mighty Men; of which all men shall know, for
the North will come to her spring again one day soon, at the remaking of
the world.  They thought the song would never be found again, but I have
given it a home here.'  And he bent and kissed the strings.  After, he
turned sharply as if he'd been spoken to, and looked at someone beside
him; someone that I couldn't see.  A cloud dropped upon his face, he
caught the fiddle hungrily to his breast, and came limpin' over to me--
for there was somethin' wrong with his fut--and lookin' down his hook-
nose at me, says he,--'I've a word for them at Fort Luke, where you're
goin', and you'd better be gone at once; and I'll put you on your way.
There's to be a great battle.  The White Hands have an ancient feud with
the Golden Dogs, and they have come from where the soft Chinook wind
ranges the Peace River, to fight until no man of all the Golden Dogs be
left, or till they themselves be destroyed.  It is the same north and
south,' he wint on; 'I have seen it all in Italy, in Greece, in--' but
here he stopped and smiled strangely.  After a minute he wint on: 'The
White Hands have no quarrel with the Englishmen of the Fort, and I would
warn them, for Englishmen were once kind to me--and warn also the Golden
Dogs.  So come with me at once,' says he.  And I did.  And he walked with
me till mornin', carryin' the fiddle under his arm, but wrapped in a
beautiful velvet cloth, havin' on it grand figures like the arms of a
king or queen.  And just at the first whisk of sun he turned me into a
trail and give me good-bye, sayin' that maybe he'd follow me soon, and,
at any rate, he'd be there at the battle.  Well, divils betide me!  I got
off the track again; and lost a day; but here I am; and there's me story
to take or lave as you will."

Shon paused and began to fumble with the cards on the table before him,
looking the while at the others.

The Chief Factor was the first to speak.  "I don't doubt but he told you
true about the White Hands and the Golden Dogs," he said; "for there's
been war and bad blood between them beyond the memory of man--at least
since the time that the Mighty Men lived, from which these date their
history.  But there's nothing to be done to-night; for if we tell old
Wind Driver, there'll be no sleeping at the Fort.  So we'll let the thing
stand."

"You believe all this poppy-cock, Chief"? said Lazenby to the Factor,
but laughing in Shon's face the while.  The Factor gravely replied:
"I knew of the Tall Master years ago on the Far-Off Metal River; and
though I never saw him I can believe these things--and more.  You do not
know this world through and through, Lazenby; you have much to learn."

Pierre said nothing.  He took the cards from Shon and passed them to and
fro in his hand.  Mechanically he dealt them out, and as mechanically
they took them up and in silence began to play.

The next day there was commotion and excitement at Fort Luke.  The Golden
Dogs were making preparations for the battle.  Pow-wow followed pow-wow,
and paint and feathers followed all.  The H. B. C. people had little to
do but look to their guns and house everything within the walls of the
Fort.

At night, Shon, Pierre, and Lazenby were seated about the table in the
common-room, the cards lying dealt before them, waiting for the Factor to
come.  Presently the door opened and the Factor entered, followed by
another.  Shon and Pierre sprang to their feet.

"The Tall Master," said Shon with a kind of awe; and then stood still.

Their towering visitor slowly unloosed something he carried very
carefully and closely beneath his arm, and laid it on the table, dropping
his compass-like fingers softly on it.  He bowed gravely to each, yet the
bow seemed grotesque, his body was so ungainly.  With the eyes of all
drawn to him absolutely, he spoke in a low sonorous tone: "I have
followed the traveller fast"--his hand lifted gently towards Shon--"for
there are weighty concerns abroad, and I have things to say and do before
I go again to my people--and beyond.  .  .  .  I have hungered for the
face of a white man these many years, and his was the first I saw;"--
again he tossed a long finger towards the Irishman--"and it brought back
many things.  I remember.  .  .  .  "  He paused, then sat down; and they
all did the same.  He looked at them one by one with distant kindness.
"I remember," he continued, and his strangely articulated fingers folded
about the thing on the table beside him, "when"--here the cards caught
his eye.  His face underwent a change.  An eager fantastic look shot from
his eye, "when I gambled this away at Lucca,"--his hand drew the bundle
closer to him--"but I won it back again--at a price!" he gloomily added,
glancing sideways as to someone at his elbow.

He remained, eyes hanging upon space for a moment, then he recollected
himself and continued: "I became wiser; I never risked it again; but I
loved the game always.  I was a gamester from the start--the artist is
always so when he is greatest,--like nature herself.  And once, years
after, I played with a mother for her child--and mine.  And yet once
again at Parma with"--here he paused, throwing that sharp sidelong
glance--"with the greatest gamester, for the infinite secret of Art: and
I won it; but I paid the price!  .  .  .  I should like to play now."

He reached his hand, drew up five cards, and ran his eye through them.
"Play!" he said.  "The hand is good--very good.  .  .  .  Once when I
played with the Princess--but it is no matter; and Tuscany is far away!
.  .  .  Play!" he repeated.

Pierre instantly picked up the cards, with an air of cool satisfaction.
He had either found the perfect gamester or the perfect liar.  He knew
the remedy for either.

The Chief Factor did not move.  Shon and Lazenby followed Pierre's
action.  By their positions Lazenby became his partner.  They played in
silence for a minute, the Tall Master taking all.  "Napoleon was a
wonderful player, but he lost with me," he said slowly as he played a
card upon three others and took them.

Lazenby was so taken back by this remark that, presently, he trumped
his partner's ace, and was rewarded by a talon-like look from the Tall
Master's eye; but it was immediately followed by one of saturnine
amusement.

They played on silently.

"Ah, you are a wonderful player!" he presently said to Pierre, with a
look of keen scrutiny.  "Come, I will play with you--for values--the
first time in seventy-five years; then, no more!"

Lazenby and Shon drew away beside the Chief Factor.  The two played.
Meanwhile Lazenby said to Shon: "The man's mad.  He talks about Napoleon
as if he'd known him--as if it wasn't three-fourths of a century ago.
Does he think we're all born idiots?  Why, he's not over sixty years old
now.  But where the deuce did he come from with that Italian face?  And
the funniest part of it is, he reminds me of someone.  Did you notice how
he limped--the awkward beggar!"

Lazenby had unconsciously lifted his voice, and presently the Tall Master
turned and said to him: "I ran a nail into my foot at Leyden seventy-odd
years ago."

"He's the devil himself," rejoined Lazenby, and he did not lower his
voice.

"Many with angelic gifts are children of His Dark Majesty," said the Tall
Master, slowly; and though he appeared closely occupied with the game, a
look of vague sadness came into his face.

For a half-hour they played in silence, the slight, delicate-featured
half-breed, and the mysterious man who had for so long been a thing of
wonder in the North, a weird influence among the Indians.

There was a strange, cold fierceness in the Tall Master's face.  He now
staked his precious bundle against the one thing Pierre prized--the gold
watch received years ago for a deed of heroism on the Chaudiere.  The
half-breed had always spoken of it as amusing, but Shon at least knew
that to Pierre it was worth his right hand.

Both men drew breath slowly, and their eyes were hard.  The stillness
became painful; all were possessed by the grim spirit of Chance.  .  .  .
The Tall Master won.  He came to his feet, his shambling body drawn
together to a height.  Pierre rose also.  Their looks clinched.  Pierre
stretched out his hand.  "You are my master at this," he said.

The other smiled sadly.  "I have played for the last time.  I have not
forgotten how to win.  If I had lost, uncommon things had happened.
This,"--he laid his hand on the bundle and gently undid it,--"is my
oldest friend, since the warm days at Parma . . .  all dead . . . all
dead."  Out of the velvet wrapping, broidered with royal and ducal arms,
and rounded by a wreath of violets--which the Chief Factor looked at
closely--he drew his violin.  He lifted it reverently to his lips.

"My good Garnerius!" he said.  "Three masters played you, but I am chief
of them all.  They had the classic soul, but I the romantic heart--'les
grandes caprices.'"  His head lifted higher.  "I am the master artist of
the world.  I have found the core of Nature.  Here in the North is the
wonderful soul of things.  Beyond this, far beyond, where the foolish
think is only inviolate ice, is the first song of the Ages in a very
pleasant land.  I am the lost Master, and I shall return, I shall return
.  .  .  but not yet .  .  .  not yet."

He fetched the instrument to his chin with a noble pride.  The ugliness
of his face was almost beautiful now.

The Chief Factor's look was fastened on him with bewilderment; he was
trying to remember something: his mind went feeling, he knew not why,
for a certain day, a quarter of a century before, when he unpacked a box
of books and papers from England.  Most of them were still in the Fort.
The association of this man with these things fretted him.

The Tall Master swung his bow upward, but at that instant there came a
knock, and, in response to a call, Wind Driver and Wine Face entered.
Wine Face was certainly a beautiful girl; and Lazenby might well have
been pardoned for throwing in his fate with such a heathen, if he
despaired of ever seeing England again.  The Tall Master did not turn
towards these.  The Indians sat gracefully on a bearskin before the fire.
The eyes of the girl were cast shyly upon the Man as he stood there
unlike an ordinary man; in his face a fine hardness and the cold light of
the North.  He suddenly tipped his bow upward and brought it down with a
most delicate crash upon the strings.  Then softly, slowly, he passed
into a weird fantasy.  The Indians sat breathless.  Upon them it acted
more impressively than the others: besides, the player's eye was
searching them now; he was playing into their very bodies.  And they
responded with some swift shocks of recognition crossing their faces.
Suddenly the old Indian sprang up.  He thrust his arms out, and made, as
if unconsciously, some fantastic yet solemn motions.  The player smiled
in a far-off fashion, and presently ran the bow upon the strings in an
exquisite cry; and then a beautiful avalanche of sound slid from a
distance, growing nearer and nearer, till it swept through the room, and
imbedded all in its sweetness.

At this the old Indian threw himself forward at the player's feet.  "It
is the song of the White Weaver, the maker of the world--the music from
the Hills of the Mighty Men.  .  .  .  I knew it--I knew it--but never
like that.  .  .  .  It was lost to the world; the wild cry of the lofty
stars.  .  .  ."  His face was wet.

The girl too had risen.  She came forward as if in a dream and reverently
touched the arm of the musician, who paused now, and was looking at them
from under his long eyelashes.  She said whisperingly: "Are you a spirit?
Do you come from the Hills of the Mighty Men?"

He answered gravely: "I am no spirit.  But I have journeyed in the Hills
of the Mighty Men and along their ancient hunting-grounds.  This that I
have played is the ancient music of the world--the music of Jubal and his
comrades.  It comes humming from the Poles; it rides laughing down the
planets; it trembles through the snow; it gives joy to the bones of the
wind.  .  .  .  And I am the voice of it," he added; and he drew up his
loose unmanageable body till it looked enormous, firm, and dominant.

The girl's fingers ran softly over to his breast.  "I will follow you,"
she said, "when you go again to the Happy Valleys."

Down from his brow there swept a faint hue of colour, and, for a breath,
his eyes closed tenderly with hers.  But he straightway gathered back his
look again, his body shrank, not rudely, from her fingers, and he
absently said: "I am old-in years the father of the world.  It is a man's
life gone since, at Genoa, she laid her fingers on my breast like that.
.  .  .  These things can be no more .  .  .  until the North hath its
summer again; and I stand young--the Master--upon the summits of my
renown."

The girl drew slowly back.  Lazenby was muttering under his breath now;
he was overwhelmed by this change in Wine Face.  He had been impressed to
awe by the Tall Master's music, but he was piqued, and determined not to
give in easily.  He said sneeringly that Maskelyne and Cooke in music had
come to life, and suggested a snake-dance.

The Tall Master heard these things, and immediately he turned to Lazenby
with an angry look on his face.  His brows hung heavily over the dull
fire of his eyes; his hair itself seemed like Medusa's, just quivering
into savage life; the fingers spread out white and claw-like upon the
strings as he curved his violin to his chin, whereof it became, as it
were, a piece.  The bow shot out and down upon the instrument with a
great clangour.  There eddied into a vast arena of sound the prodigious
elements of war.  Torture rose from those four immeasurable chords;
destruction was afoot upon them; a dreadful dance of death supervened.

Through the Chief Factor's mind there flashed--though mechanically, and
only to be remembered afterwards--the words of a schoolday poem.  It
shuttled in and out of the music:

                   "Wheel the wild dance,
                    While lightnings glance,
                    And thunders rattle loud;
                    And call the brave to bloody grave,
                    To sleep without a shroud."

The face of the player grew old and drawn.  The skin was wrinkled, but
shone, the hair spread white, the nose almost met the chin, the mouth was
all malice.  It was old age with vast power: conquest volleyed from the
fingers.

Shon McGann whispered aves, aching with the sound; the Chief Factor
shuddered to his feet; Lazenby winced and drew back to the wall, putting
his hand before his face as though the sounds were striking him; the old
Indian covered his head with his arms upon the floor.  Wine Face knelt,
her face all grey, her fingers lacing and interlacing with pain.  Only
Pierre sat with masterful stillness, his eyes never moving from the face
of the player; his arms folded; his feet firmly wedded to the floor.  The
sound became strangely distressing.  It shocked the flesh and angered the
nerves.  Upon Lazenby it acted singularly.  He cowered from it, but
presently, with a look of madness in his eyes, rushed forward, arms
outstretched, as though to seize this intolerable minstrel.  There was a
sudden pause in the playing; then the room quaked with noise, buffeting
Lazenby into stillness.  The sounds changed instantly again, and music of
an engaging sweetness and delight fell about them as in silver drops--an
enchanting lyric of love.  Its exquisite tenderness subdued Lazenby, who,
but now, had a heart for slaughter.  He dropped on his knees, threw his
head into his arms, and sobbed hard.  The Tall Master's fingers crept
caressingly along one of those heavenly veins of sound, his bow poising
softly over it.  The farthest star seemed singing.

At dawn the next day the Golden Dogs were gathered for war before the
Fort.  Immediately after the sun rose, the foe were seen gliding darkly
out of the horizon.  From another direction came two travellers.  These
also saw the White Hands bearing upon the Fort, and hurried forward.
They reached the gates of the Fort in good time, and were welcomed.  One
was a chief trader from a fort in the west.  He was an old man, and had
been many years in the service of the H. B. C.; and, like Lazenby, had
spent his early days in London, a connoisseur in all its pleasures; the
other was a voyageur.  They had posted on quickly to bring news of this
crusade of the White Hands.

The hostile Indians came steadily to within a few hundred yards of the
Golden Dogs.  Then they sent a brave to say that they had no quarrel with
the people of the Fort; and that if the Golden Dogs came on they would
battle with them alone; since the time had come for "one to be as both,"
as their Medicine Men had declared since the days of the Great Race.
And this signified that one should destroy the other.

At this all the Golden Dogs ranged into line.  The sun shone brightly,
the long hedge of pine woods in the distance caught the colour of the
sky, the flowers of the plains showed handsomely as a carpet of war.  The
bodies of the fighters glistened.  You could see the rise and fall of
their bare, strenuous chests.  They stood as their forefathers in battle,
almost naked, with crested head, gleaming axe, scalp-knife, and bows and
arrows.  At first there was the threatening rustle of preparation; then
a great stillness came and stayed for a moment; after which, all at once,
there sped through the air a big shout of battle, and the innumerable
twang of flying arrows; and the opposing hosts ran upon each other.

Pierre and Shon McGann, watching from the Fort, cried out with
excitement.

"Divils me darlin'!" called Shon, "are we gluin' our eyes to a chink in
the wall, whin the tangle of battle goes on beyand?  Bedad, I'll not
stand it!  Look at them twistin' the neck o' war!  Open the gates, open
the gates say I, and let us have play with our guns."

"Hush!  'Mon Dieu!'"  interrupted Pierre.  "Look!  The Tall Master!"

None at the Fort had seen the Tall Master since the night before.  Now he
was covering the space between the walls and the battle, his hair
streaming behind him.

When he came near to the vortex of fight he raised his violin to his
chin, and instantly a piercingly sweet call penetrated the wild uproar.
The Call filled it, drained through it, wrapped it, overcame it; so that
it sank away at last like the outwash of an exhausted tide: the weft of
battle stayed unfinished in the loom.

Then from the Indian lodges came the women and children.  They drew near
to the unearthly luxury of that Call, now lifting with an unbounded joy.
Battleaxes fell to the ground; the warriors quieted even where they stood
locked with their foes.  The Tall Master now drew away from them, facing
the north and west.  That ineffable Call drew them after him with grave
joy; and they brought their dead and wounded along.  The women and
children glided in among the men and followed also.  Presently one girl
ran away from the rest and came close into the great leader's footsteps.

At that instant, Lazenby, from the wall of the Fort, cried out madly,
sprang down, opened the gates, and rushed towards the girl, crying: "Wine
Face!  Wine Face!"

She did not look behind.  But he came close to her and caught her by the
waist.  "Come back!  Come back!  O my love, come back!" he urged; but
she pushed him gently from her.

"Hush!  Hush!" she said.  "We are going to the Happy Valleys.  Don't you
hear him calling"? .  .  .  And Lazenby fell back.

The Tall Master was now playing a wonderful thing, half dance, half
carnival; but with that Call still beating through it.  They were passing
the Fort at an angle.  All within issued forth to see.  Suddenly the old
trader who had come that morning started forward with a cry; then stood
still.  He caught the Factor's arm; but he seemed unable to speak yet;
his face was troubled, his eyes were hard upon the player.

The procession passed the empty lodges, leaving the ground strewn with
their weapons, and not one of their number stayed behind.  They passed
away towards the high hills of the north-west-beautiful austere barriers.

Still the trader gazed, and was pale, and trembled.  They watched long.
The throng of pilgrims grew a vague mass; no longer an army of
individuals; and the music came floating back with distant charm.
At last the old man found voice.  "My God, it is--"

The Factor touched his arm, interrupting him, and drew a picture from his
pocket--one but just now taken from that musty pile of books, received so
many years before.  He showed it to the old man.

"Yes, yes," said the other, "that is he.  .  .  .  And the world buried
him forty years ago!"

Pierre, standing near, added with soft irony: "There are strange things
in the world.  He is the gamester of the world.  'Mais' a grand comrade
also."

The music came waving back upon them delicately but the pilgrims were
fading from view.

Soon the watchers were alone with the glowing day.






THE CRIMSON FLAG

Talk and think as one would, The Woman was striking to see; with
marvellous flaxen hair and a joyous violet eye.  She was all pulse and
dash; but she was as much less beautiful than the manager's wife as Tom
Liffey was as nothing beside the manager himself; and one would care
little to name the two women in the same breath if the end had been
different.  When The Woman came to Little Goshen there were others of her
class there, but they were of a commoner sort and degree.  She was the
queen of a lawless court, though she never, from first to last, spoke to
one of those others who were her people; neither did she hold commerce
with any of the ordinary miners, save Pretty Pierre, but he was more
gambler than miner,--and he went, when the matter was all over, and told
her some things that stripped her soul naked before her eyes.  Pierre had
a wonderful tongue.  It was only the gentlemen-diggers--and there were
many of them at Little Goshen--who called upon her when the lights were
low; and then there was a good deal of muffled mirth in the white house
among the pines.  The rougher miners made no quarrel with this, for the
gentlemen-diggers were popular enough, they were merely sarcastic and
humorous, and said things which, coming to The Woman's ears, made her
very merry; for she herself had an abundant wit, and had spent wild hours
with clever men.  She did not resent the playful insolence that sent a
dozen miners to her house in the dead of night with a crimson flag, which
they quietly screwed to her roof; and paint, with which they deftly put a
wide stripe of scarlet round the cornice, and another round the basement.
In the morning, when she saw what had been done, she would not have the
paint removed nor the flag taken down; for, she said, the stripes looked
very well, and the other would show that she was always at home.

Now, the notable thing was that Heldon, the manager, was in The Woman's
house on the night this was done.  Tom Liffey, the lumpish guide and
trapper, saw him go in; and, days afterwards, he said to Pierre: "Divils
me own, but this is a bad hour for Heldon's wife--she with a face like a
princess and eyes like the fear o' God.  Nivir a wan did I see like her,
since I came out of Erin with a clatter of hoofs behoind me and a squall
on the sea before.  There's wimmin there wid cheeks like roses and
buthermilk, and a touch that'd make y'r heart pound on y'r ribs; but none
that's grander than Heldon's wife.  To lave her for that other, standin'
hip-high in her shame, is temptin' the fires of Heaven, that basted the
sinners o' Sodom."

Pierre, pausing between the whiffs of a cigarette, said: "So?  But you
know more of catching foxes in winter, and climbing mountains in summer,
and the grip of the arm of an Injin girl, than of these things.  You are
young, quite young in the world, Tom Liffey."

"Young I may be with a glint o' grey at me temples from a night o'
trouble beyand in the hills; but I'm the man, an' the only man, that's
climbed to the glacier-top--God's Playground, as they call it: and nivir
a dirty trick have I done to Injin girl or any other; and be damned to
you there!"

"Sometimes I think you are as foolish as Shon McGann," compassionately
replied the half-breed.

"You have almighty virtue, and you did that brave trick of the glacier;
but great men have fallen.  You are not dead yet.  Still, as you say,
Heldon's wife is noble to see.  She is grave and cold, and speaks little;
but there is something in her which is not of the meek of the earth.
Some women say nothing, and suffer and forgive, and take such as Heldon
back to their bosoms; but there are others--I remember a woman--bien, it
is no matter, it was long ago; but they two are as if born of one mother;
and what comes of this will be mad play--mad play."

"Av coorse his wife may not get to know of it, and--"

"Not get to know it!  'Tsh, you are a child--"

"Faith, I'll say what I think, and that in y'r face!  Maybe he'll tire of
the handsome rip--for handsome she is, like a yellow lily growin' out o'
mud--and go back to his lawful wife, that believes he's at the mines,
when he's drinkin' and colloguin' wid a fly-away."

Pierre slowly wheeled till he had the Irishman straight in his eye.  Then
he said in a low, cutting tone: "I suppose your heart aches for the
beautiful lady, eh?"  Here he screwed his slight forefinger into Tom's
breast; then he added sharply: "'Nom de Dieu,' but you make me angry!
You talk too much.  Such men get into trouble.  And keep down the riot of
that heart of yours, Tom Liffey, or you'll walk on the edge of knives one
day.  And now take an inch of whisky and ease the anxious soul. 'Voila!'"
After a moment he added: "Women work these things out for themselves."
Then the two left the hut, and amiably strolled together to the centre of
the village, where they parted.  It was as Pierre had said: the woman
would work the thing out for herself.  Later that evening Heldon's wife
stood cloaked and veiled in the shadows of the pines, facing the house
with The Crimson Flag.  Her eyes shifted ever from the door to the flag,
which was stirred by the light breeze.  Once or twice she shivered as
with cold, but she instantly stilled again, and watched.  It was
midnight.  Here and there beyond in the village a light showed, and
straggling voices floated faintly towards her.  For a long time no sound
came from the house.  But at last she heard a laugh.  At that she drew
something from her pocket, and held it firmly in her hand.  Once she
turned and looked at another house far up on the hill, where lights were
burning.  It was Heldon's house--her home.  A sharp sound as of anguish
and anger escaped her; then she fastened her eyes on the door in front of
her.

At that moment Tom Liffey was standing with his hands on his hips looking
at Heldon's home on the hill; and he said some rumbling words, then
strode on down the road, and suddenly paused near the wife.  He did not
see her.  He faced the door at which she was looking, and shook his fist
at it.

"A murrain on y'r sowl!" said he, "as there's plague in y'r body, and
hell in the slide of y'r feet, like the trail of the red spider.  And out
o' that come ye, Heldon, for I know y're there.  Out of that, ye beast!
.  .  .  But how can ye go back--you that's rolled in that sewer--to the
loveliest woman that ever trod the neck o' the world!  Damned y' are in
every joint o' y'r frame, and damned is y'r sowl, I say, for bringing
sorrow to her; and I hate you as much for that, as I could worship her
was she not your wife and a lady o' blood, God save her!"

Then shaking his fist once more, he swung away slowly down the road.
During this the wife's teeth held together as though they were of a
piece.  She looked after Tom Liffey and smiled; but it was a dreadful
smile.

"He worships me, that common man--worships me," she said.  "This man who
was my husband has shamed me, left me.  Well--"

The door of the house opened; a man came out.  His wife leaned a little
forward, and something clicked ominously in her hand.  But a voice came
up the road towards them through the clear air--the voice of Tom Liffey.
The husband paused to listen; the wife mechanically did the same.  The
husband remembered this afterwards: it was the key to, and the beginning
of, a tragedy.  These are the words the Irishman sang:

              "She was a queen, she stood up there before me,
               My blood went roarin' when she touched my hand;
               She kissed me on the lips, and then she swore me
               To die for her--and happy was the land."

A new and singular look came into her face.  It trans formed her.
"That," she said in a whisper to herself--"that!  He knows the way."

As her husband turned towards his home, she turned also.  He heard the
rustle of garments, and he could just discern the cloaked figure in the
shadows.  He hurried on; the figure flitted ahead of him.  A fear
possessed him in spite of his will.  He turned back.  The figure stood
still for a moment, then followed him.  He braced himself, faced about,
and walked towards it: it stopped and waited.  He had not the courage.
He went back again swiftly towards the house he had left.  Again he
looked behind him.  The figure was standing, not far, in the pines.  He
wheeled suddenly towards the house, turned a key in the door, and
entered.

Then the wife went to that which had been her home: Heldon did not go
thither until the first flush of morning.  Pierre, returning from an all-
night sitting at cards, met him, and saw the careworn look on his face.
The half-breed smiled.  He knew that the event was doubling on the man.
When Heldon reached his house, he went to his wife's room.  It was
locked.  Then he walked down to his mines with a miserable shame and
anger at his heart.  He did not pass The Crimson Flag.  He went by
another way.

That evening, in the dusk, a woman knocked at Tom Liffey's door.  He
opened it.

"Are you alone"? she said.  "I am alone, lady."

"I will come in," she added.  "You will--come in"? he faltered.

She drew near him, and reached out and gently caught his hand.

"Ah!" he said, with a sound almost like a sob in its intensity, and the
blood flushed to his hair.

He stepped aside, and she entered.  In the light of the candle her eye
burned into his, but her face wore a shining coldness.  She leaned
towards him.

"You said you could worship me," she whispered, "and you cursed him.
Well--worship me--altogether--and that will curse him, as he has killed
me."

"Dear lady!" he said, in an awed, overwhelmed murmur; and he fell back
to the wall.

She came towards him.  "Am I not beautiful"? she urged.  She took his
hand.  His eye swam with hers.  But his look was different from hers,
though he could not know that.  His was the madness of a man in a dream;
hers was a painful thing.  The Furies dwelt in her.  She softly lifted
his hand above his head, and whispered: "Swear."  And she kissed him.
Her lips were icy, though he did not think so.  The blood tossed in his
veins.  He swore: but, doing so, he could not conceive all that would be
required of him.  He was hers, body and soul, and she had resolved on a
grim thing.  .  .  .  In the darkness, they left the hut and passed into
the woods, and slowly up through the hills.

Heldon returned to his home that night to find it empty.  There were no
servants.  There was no wife.  Her cat and dog lay dead upon the
hearthrug.  Her clothing was cut into strips.  Her wedding-dress was a
charred heap on the fireplace.  Her jewellery lay molten with it.  Her
portrait had been torn from its frame.

An intolerable fear possessed him.  Drops of sweat hung on his forehead
and his hands.  He fled towards the town.  He bit his finger-nails till
they bled as he passed the house in the pines.  He lifted his arm as if
the flappings of The Crimson Flag were blows in his face.

At last he passed Tom Liffey's hut.  He saw Pierre, coming from it.  The
look on the gambler's face was one, of gloomy wonder.  His fingers
trembled as he lighted a cigarette, and that was an unusual thing.  The
form of Heldon edged within the light.  Pierre dropped the match and said
to him,--"You are looking for your wife?"

Heldon bowed his head.  The other threw open the door of the hut.  "Come
in here," he said.  They entered.  Pierre pointed to a woman's hat on the
table.  "Do you know that"? he asked, huskily, for he was moved.  But
Heldon only nodded dazedly.  Pierre continued: "I was to have met Tom
Liffey here--to-night.  He is not here.  You hoped--I suppose--to see
your wife in your--home.  She is not there.  He left a word on paper for
me.  I have torn it up.  Writing is the enemy of man.  But I know where
he is gone.  I know also where your wife has gone."

Heldon's face was of a hateful paleness.  .  .  .  They passed out into
the night.

"Where are you going"? Heldon said.

"To God's Playground, if we can get there."

"To God's Playground?  To the glacier-top?  You are mad."

"No, but he and she were mad.  Come on."  Then he whispered something,
and Heldon gave a great cry, and they plunged into the woods.

In the morning the people of Little Goshen, looking towards the glacier,
saw a flag (they knew afterwards that it was crimson) flying on it.  Near
it were two human figures.  A miner, looking through a field-glass, said
that one figure was crouching by the flag-staff, and that it was a woman.
The other figure near was a man.  As the morning wore on, they saw upon a
crag of ice below the sloping glacier two men looking upwards towards the
flag.  One of them seemed to shriek out, and threw up his hands, and made
as if to rush forward; but the other drew him back.

Heldon knew what revenge and disgrace may be at their worst.  In vain he
tried to reach God's Playground.  Only one man knew the way, and he was
dead upon it--with Heldon's wife: two shameless suicides.  .  .  .  When
he came down from the mountain the hair upon his face was white, though
that upon his head remained black as it had always been.  And those
frozen figures stayed there like statues with that other crimson flag:
until, one day, a great-bodied wind swept out of the north, and, in pity,
carried them down a bottomless fissure.

But long before this happened, The Woman had fled from Little Goshen in
the night, and her house was burned to the ground.






THE FLOOD

Wendling came to Fort Anne on the day that the Reverend Ezra Badgley and
an unknown girl were buried.  And that was a notable thing.  The man had
been found dead at his evening meal; the girl had died on the same day;
and they were buried side by side.  This caused much scandal, for the man
was holy, and the girl, as many women said, was probably evil altogether.
At the graves, when the minister's people saw what was being done, they
piously protested; but the Factor, to whom Pierre had whispered a word,
answered them gravely that the matter should go on: since none knew but
the woman was as worthy of heaven as the man.  Wendling chanced to stand
beside Pretty Pierre.

"Who knows!" he said aloud, looking hard at the graves, "who knows!....
She died before him, but the dead can strike."

Pierre did not answer immediately, for the Factor was calling the earth
down on both coffins; but after a moment he added: "Yes, the dead can
strike."  And then the eyes of the two men caught and stayed, and they
knew that they had things to say to each other in the world.

They became friends.  And that, perhaps, was not greatly to Wendling's
credit; for in the eyes of many Pierre was an outcast as an outlaw.
Maybe some of the women disliked this friendship most; since Wendling was
a handsome man, and Pierre was never known to seek them, good or bad; and
they blamed him for the other's coldness, for his unconcerned yet
respectful eye.

"There's Nelly Nolan would dance after him to the world's end," said Shon
McGann to Pierre one day; "and the Widdy Jerome herself, wid her flamin'
cheeks and the wild fun in her eye, croons like a babe at the breast as
he slides out his cash on the bar; and over on Gansonby's Flat there's--"

"There's many a fool, 'voila,'" sharply interjected Pierre, as he pushed
the needle through a button he was sewing on his coat.

"Bedad, there's a pair of fools here, anyway, I say; for the women might
die without lift at waist or brush of lip, and neither of ye'd say,
'Here's to the joy of us, goddess, me own!'"

Pierre seemed to be intently watching the needlepoint as it pierced up
the button-eye, and his reply was given with a slowness corresponding to
the sedate passage of the needle.  "Wendling, you think, cares nothing
for women?  Well, men who are like that cared once for one woman, and
when that was over--But, pshaw!  I will not talk.  You are no thinker,
Shon McGann.  You blunder through the world.  And you'll tremble as much
to a woman's thumb in fifty years as now."

"By the holy smoke," said Shon, "though I tremble at that, maybe, I'll
not tremble, as Wendling, at nothing at all."  Here Pierre looked up
sharply, then dropped his eyes on his work again.  Shon lapsed suddenly
into a moodiness.

"Yes," said Pierre, "as Wendling, at nothing at all?  Well?"

"Well, this, Pierre, for you that's a thinker from me that's none.  I was
walking with him in Red Glen yesterday.  Sudden he took to shiverin', and
snatched me by the arm, and a mad look shot out of his handsome face.
'Hush!' says he.  I listened.  There was a sound like the hard rattle of
a creek over stones, and then another sound behind that.  'Come quick,'
says he, the sweat standin' thick on him; and he ran me up the bank--for
it was at the beginnin' of the Glen where the sides were low--and there
we stood pantin' and starin' flat at each other.  'What's that?  and
what's got its hand on ye?  for y' are cold as death, an' pinched in the
face, an' you've bruised my arm,' said I.  And he looked round him slow
and breathed hard, then drew his fingers through the sweat on his cheek.
'I'm not well, and I thought I heard--you heard it; what was it like?'
said he; and he peered close at me.  'Like water,' said I; 'a little
creek near, and a flood comin' far off.' 'Yes, just that,' said he; 'it's
some trick of wind in the place, but it makes a man foolish, and an inch
of brandy would be the right thing.'  I didn't say no to that.  And on we
came, and brandy we had with a wish in the eye of Nelly Nolan that'd warm
the heart of a tomb.  .  .  .  And there's a cud for your chewin',
Pierre.  Think that by the neck and the tail, and the divil absolve ye."

During this, Pierre had finished with the button.  He had drawn on his
coat and lifted his hat, and now lounged, trying the point of the needle
with his forefinger.  When Shon ended, he said with a sidelong glance:
"But what did you think of all that, Shon?"

"Think!  There it was!  What's the use of thinkin'?  There's many a trick
in the world with wind or with spirit, as I've seen often enough in ould
Ireland, and it's not to be guessed by me."  Here his voice got a little
lower and a trifle solemn.  "For, Pierre," spoke he, "there's what's more
than life or death, and sorra wan can we tell what it is; but we'll know
some day whin--"

"When we've taken the leap at the Almighty Ditch," said Pierre, with a
grave kind of lightness.  "Yes, it is all strange.  But even the Almighty
Ditch is worth the doing: nearly everything is worth the doing; being
young, growing old, fighting, loving--when youth is on--hating, eating,
drinking, working, playing big games.  All is worth it except two
things."

"And what are they, bedad?"

"Thy neighbour's wife and murder.  Those are horrible.  They double on a
man one time or another; always."

Here, as in curiosity, Pierre pierced his finger with the needle, and
watched the blood form in a little globule.  Looking at it meditatively
and sardonically, he said: "There is only one end to these.  Blood for
blood is a great matter; and I used to wonder if it would not be terrible
for a man to see his death coming on him drop by drop, like that."  He
let the spot of blood fall to the floor.  "But now I know that there is a
punishment worse than that .  .  .  'mon Dieu!' worse than that," he
added.

Into Shon's face a strange look had suddenly come.  "Yes, there's
something worse than that, Pierre."

"So, 'bien?'"

Shon made the sacred gesture of his creed.  "To be punished by the dead.
And not see them--only hear them."  And his eyes steadied firmly to the
other's.

Pierre was about to reply, but there came the sound of footsteps through
the open door, and presently Wendling entered slowly.  He was pale and
worn, and his eyes looked out with a searching anxiousness.  But that did
not render him less comely.  He had always dressed in black and white,
and this now added to the easy and yet severe refinement of his person.
His birth and breeding had occurred in places unfrequented by such as
Shon and Pierre; but plains and wild life level all; and men are friends
according to their taste and will, and by no other law.  Hence these with
Wendling.  He stretched out his hand to each without a word.  The hand-
shake was unusual; he had little demonstration ever.  Shon looked up
surprised, but responded.  Pierre followed with a swift, inquiring look;
then, in the succeeding pause, he offered cigarettes.  Wendling took one;
and all, silent, sat down.  The sun streamed intemperately through the
doorway, making a broad ribbon of light straight across the floor to
Wendling's feet.  After lighting his cigarette, he looked into the
sunlight for a moment, still not speaking.  Shon meanwhile had started
his pipe, and now, as if he found the silence awkward,--"It's a day for
God's country, this," he said: "to make man a Christian for little or
much, though he play with the Divil betunewhiles."  Without looking at
them, Wendling said, in a low voice: "It was just such a day, down there
in Quebec, when It happened.  You could hear the swill of the river, the
water licking the piers, and the saws in the Big Mill and the Little Mill
as they marched through the timber, flashing their teeth like bayonets.
It's a wonderful sound on a hot, clear day--that wild, keen singing of
the saws, like the cry of a live thing fighting and conquering.  Up from
the fresh-cut lumber in the yards there came a smell like the juice of
apples, and the sawdust, as you thrust your hand into it, was as cool and
soft as the leaves of a clove-flower in the dew.  On these days the town
was always still.  It looked sleeping, and you saw the heat quivering up
from the wooden walls and the roofs of cedar shingles as though the
houses were breathing."

Here he paused, still intent on the shaking sunshine.  Then he turned to
the others as if suddenly aware that he had been talking to them.  Shon
was about to speak, but Pierre threw a restraining glance, and, instead,
they all looked through the doorway and beyond.  In the settlement below
they saw the effect that Wendling had described.  The houses breathed.
A grasshopper went clacking past, a dog at the door snapped up a fly; but
there seemed no other life of day.  Wendling nodded his head towards the
distance.  "It was quiet, like that.  I stood and watched the mills and
the yards, and listened to the saws, and looked at the great slide, and
the logs on the river: and I said ever to myself that it was all mine--
all.  Then I turned to a big house on the hillock beyond the cedars,
whose windows were open, with a cool dusk lying behind them.  More than
all else, I loved to think I owned that house and what was in it. . . .
She was a beautiful woman.  And she used to sit in a room facing the
mill--though the house fronted another way--thinking of me, I did not
doubt, and working at some delicate needle-stuff.  There never had been a
sharp word between us, save when I quarrelled bitterly with her brother,
and he left the mill and went away.  But she got over that mostly, though
the lad's name was, never mentioned between us.  That day I was so hungry
for the sight of her that I got my field-glass--used to watch my vessels
and rafts making across the bay--and trained it on the window where I
knew she sat.  I thought, it would amuse her, too, when I went back at
night, if I told her what she had been doing.  I laughed to myself at the
thought of it as I adjusted the glass.  .  .  .  I looked.  .  .  .
There was no more laughing.  .  .  .  I saw her, and in front of her a
man, with his back half on me.  I could not recognise him, though at the
instant I thought he was something familiar.  I failed to get his face at
all.  Hers I found indistinctly.  But I saw him catch her playfully by
the chin!  After a little they rose.  He put his arm about her and kissed
her, and he ran his fingers through her hair.  She had such fine golden
hair--so light, and it lifted to every breath.  Something got into my
brain.  I know now it was the maggot which sent Othello mad.  The world
in that hour was malicious, awful.  .  .  .

"After a time--it seemed ages, she and everything had receded so far--
I went .  .  .  home.  At the door I asked the servant who had been
there.  She hesitated, confused, and then said the young curate of the
parish.  I was very cool: for madness is a strange thing; you see
everything with an intense aching clearness--that is the trouble. . . .
She was more kind than common.  I do not think I was unusual.  I was
playing a part well, my grandmother had Indian blood like yours, Pierre,
and I was waiting.  I was even nicely critical of her to myself.  I
balanced the mole on her neck against her general beauty; the curve of
her instep, I decided, was a little too emphatic.  I passed her backwards
and forwards, weighing her at every point; but yet these two things were
the only imperfections.  I pronounced her an exceeding piece of art--and
infamy.  I was much interested to see how she could appear perfect in her
soul.  I encouraged her to talk.  I saw with devilish irony that an angel
spoke.  And, to cap it all, she assumed the fascinating air of the
mediator--for her brother; seeking a reconciliation between us.  Her
amazing art of person and mind so worked upon me that it became
unendurable; it was so exquisite--and so shameless.  I was sitting where
the priest had sat that afternoon; and when she leaned towards me I
caught her chin lightly and trailed my fingers through her hair as he
had done: and that ended it, for I was cold, and my heart worked with
horrible slowness.  Just as a wave poises at its height before breaking
upon the shore, it hung at every pulse-beat, and then seemed to fall over
with a sickening thud.  I arose, and acting still, spoke impatiently of
her brother.  Tears sprang to her eyes.  Such divine dissimulation,
I thought--too good for earth.  She turned to leave the room, and I did
not stay her.  Yet we were together again that night.  .  .  .  I was
only waiting."

The cigarette had dropped from his fingers to the floor, and lay there
smoking.  Shon's face was fixed with anxiety; Pierre's eyes played
gravely with the sunshine.  Wendling drew a heavy breath, and then went
on.

"Again, next day, it was like this-the world draining the heat.  .  .  .
I watched from the Big Mill.  I saw them again.  He leaned over her chair
and buried his face in her hair.  The proof was absolute now.  .  .  .
I started away, going a roundabout, that I might not be seen.  It took me
some time.  I was passing through a clump of cedar when I saw them making
towards the trees skirting the river.  Their backs were on me.  Suddenly
they diverted their steps--towards the great slide, shut off from water
this last few months, and used as a quarry to deepen it.  Some petrified
things had been found in the rocks, but I did not think they were going
to these.  I saw them climb down the rocky steps; and presently they were
lost to view.  The gates of the slide could be opened by machinery from
the Little Mill.  A terrible, deliciously malignant thought came to me.
I remember how the sunlight crept away from me and left me in the dark.
I stole through that darkness to the Little Mill.  I went to the
machinery for opening the gates.  Very gently I set it in motion, facing
the slide as I did so.  I could see it through the open sides of the
mill.  I smiled to think what the tiny creek, always creeping through a
faint leak in the gates and falling with a granite rattle on the stones,
would now become.  I pushed the lever harder--harder.  I saw the gates
suddenly give, then fly open, and the river sprang roaring massively
through them.  I heard a shriek through the roar.  I shuddered; and a
horrible sickness came on me.  .  .  .  And as I turned from the
machinery, I saw the young priest coming at me through a doorway! . . .
It was not the priest and my wife that I had killed; but my wife and her
brother.  .  .  ."

He threw his head back as though something clamped his throat.  His voice
roughened with misery.  "The young priest buried them both, and people
did not know the truth.  They were even sorry for me.  But I gave up the
mills--all; and I became homeless .  .  .  this."

Now he looked up at the two men, and said: "I have told you because you
know something, and because there will, I think, be an end soon."  He got
up and reached out a trembling hand for a cigarette.  Pierre gave him
one.  "Will you walk with me"? he asked.

Shon shook his head.  "God forgive you," he replied, "I can't do it."

But Wendling and Pierre left the hut together.  They walked for an hour,
scarcely speaking, and not considering where they went.  At last Pierre
mechanically turned to go down into Red Glen.  Wendling stopped short,
then, with a sighing laugh, strode on.  "Shoo has told you what happened
here"? he said.

Pierre nodded.

"And you know what came once when you walked with me....  The dead can
strike," he added.  Pierre sought his eye.  "The minister and the girl
buried together that day," he said, "were--"

He stopped, for behind him he heard the sharp, cold trickle of water.
Silent they walked on.  It followed them.  They could not get out of the
Glen now until they had compassed its length--the walls were high.  The
sound grew.  The men faced each other.

"Good-bye," said Wendling; and he reached out his hand swiftly.  But
Pierre heard a mighty flood groaning on them, and he blinded as he
stretched his arm in response.  He caught at Wendling's shoulder, but
felt him lifted and carried away, while he himself stood still in a
screeching wind and heard impalpable water rushing over him.  In a minute
it was gone; and he stood alone in Red Glen.

He gathered himself up and ran.  Far down, where the Glen opened to the
plain, he found Wendling.  The hands were wrinkled; the face was cold;
the body was wet: the man was drowned and dead.






IN PIPI VALLEY

"Divils me darlins, it's a memory I have of a time whin luck wasn't
foldin' her arms round me, and not so far back aither, and I on the
wallaby track hot-foot for the City o' Gold."

Shon McGann said this in the course of a discussion on the prosperity of
Pipi Valley.  Pretty Pierre remarked nonchalantly in reply,--"The wallaby
track--eh--what is that, Shon?"

"It's a bit of a haythen y' are, Pierre.  The wallaby track?  That's the
name in Australia for trampin' west through the plains of the Never-Never
Country lookin' for the luck o' the world; as, bedad, it's meself that
knows it, and no other, and not by book or tellin' either, but with the
grip of thirst at me throat and a reef in me belt every hour to quiet the
gnawin'."  And Shon proceeded to light his pipe afresh.

"But the City o' Gold-was there much wealth for you there, Shon?"

Shon laughed, and said between the puffs of smoke, "Wealth for me, is it?
Oh, mother o' Moses! wealth of work and the pride of livin' in the heart
of us, and the grip of an honest hand betunewhiles; and what more do y'
want, Pierre?"

The Frenchman's drooping eyelids closed a little more, and he replied,
meditatively: "Money?  No, that is not Shon McGann.  The good fellowship
of thirst?--yes, a little.  The grip of the honest hand, quite, and the
clinch of an honest waist?  Well, 'peut-etre.'

"Of the waist which is not honest?--tsh! he is gay--and so!"

The Irishman took his pipe from his mouth, and held it poised before him.
He looked inquiringly and a little frowningly at the other for a moment,
as if doubtful whether to resent the sneer that accompanied the words
just spoken; but at last he good-humouredly said: "Blood o' me bones, but
it's much I fear the honest waist hasn't always been me portion--Heaven
forgive me!"

"'Nom de pipe,' this Irishman!" replied Pierre.  "He is gay; of good
heart; he smiles, and the women are at his heels; he laughs, and they are
on their knees--Such a fool he is!"

Still Shon McGann laughed.

"A fool I am, Pierre, or I'd be in ould Ireland at this minute, with a
roof o' me own over me and the friends o' me youth round me, and brats
on me knee, and the fear o' God in me heart."

"'Mais,' Shon," mockingly rejoined the Frenchman, "this is not Ireland,
but there is much like that to be done here.  There is a roof, and there
is that woman at Ward's Mistake, and the brats--eh, by and by?"

Shon's face clouded.  He hesitated, then replied sharply: "That woman, do
y' say, Pierre, she that nursed me when the Honourable and meself were
taken out o' Sandy Drift, more dead than livin'; she that brought me back
to life as good as ever, barrin' this scar on me forehead and a stiffness
at me elbow, and the Honourable as right as the sun, more luck to him!
which he doesn't need at all, with the wind of fortune in his back and
shiftin' neither to right nor left.  --That woman!  faith, y'd better not
cut the words so sharp betune yer teeth, Pierre."

"But I will say more--a little--just the same.  She nursed you--well,
that is good; but it is good also, I think, you pay her for that, and
stop the rest.  Women are fools, or else they are worse.  This one?  She
is worse.  Yes; you will take my advice, Shon McGann."  The Irishman came
to his feet with a spring, and his words were angry.

"It doesn't come well from Pretty Pierre, the gambler, to be revilin'
a woman; and I throw it in y'r face, though I've slept under the same
blanket with ye, an' drunk out of the same cup on manny a tramp, that you
lie dirty and black when ye spake ill--of my wife."

This conversation had occurred in a quiet corner of the bar-room of the
Saints' Repose.  The first few sentences had not been heard by the others
present; but Shon's last speech, delivered in a ringing tone, drew the
miners to their feet, in expectation of seeing shots exchanged at once.
The code required satisfaction, immediate and decisive.  Shon was not
armed, and some one thrust a pistol towards him; but he did not take it.
Pierre rose, and coming slowly to him, laid a slender finger on his
chest, and said:

"So! I did not know that she was your wife.  That is a surprise."

The miners nodded assent.  He continued:

"Lucy Rives your wife!  Hola, Shon McGann, that is such a joke."

"It's no joke, but God's truth, and the lie is with you, Pierre."

Murmurs of anticipation ran round the room; but the half-breed said:
"There will be satisfaction altogether; but it is my whim to prove what
I say first; then"--fondling his revolver--"then we shall settle.  But,
see: you will meet me here at ten o'clock to-night, and I will make it,
I swear to you, so clear, that the woman is vile."

The Irishman suddenly clutched the gambler, shook him like a dog, and
threw him against the farther wall.  Pierre's pistol was levelled from
the instant Shon moved; but he did not use it.  He rose on one knee after
the violent fall, and pointing it at the other's head, said coolly: "I
could kill you, my friend, so easy!  But it is not my whim.  Till ten
o'clock is not long to wait, and then, just here, one of us shall die.
Is it not so?"  The Irishman did not flinch before the pistol.  He said
with low fierceness, "At ten o'clock, or now, or any time, or at any
place, y'll find me ready to break the back of the lies y've spoken, or
be broken meself.  Lucy Rives is my wife, and she's true and straight as
the sun in the sky.  I'll be here at ten o'clock, and as ye say, Pierre,
one of us makes the long reckoning for this."  And he opened the door and
went out.

The half-breed moved to the bar, and, throwing down a handful of silver,
said: "It is good we drink after so much heat.  Come on, come on,
comrades."

The miners responded to the invitation.  Their sympathy was mostly with
Shon McGann; their admiration was about equally divided; for Pretty
Pierre had the quality of courage in as active a degree as the Irishman,
and they knew that some extraordinary motive, promising greater
excitement, was behind the Frenchman's refusal to send a bullet
through Shon's head a moment before.

King Kinkley, the best shot in the Valley next to Pierre, had watched the
unusual development of the incident with interest; and when his glass had
been filled he said, thoughtfully: "This thing isn't according to Hoyle.
There's never been any trouble just like it in the Valley before.  What's
that McGann said about the lady being his wife?  If it's the case, where
hev we been in the show?  Where was we when the license was around?  It
isn't good citizenship, and I hev my doubts."

Another miner, known as the Presbyterian, added: "There's some
skulduggery in it, I guess.  The lady has had as much protection as if
she was the sister of every citizen of the place, just as much as Lady
Jane here (Lady Jane, the daughter of the proprietor of the Saints'
Repose, administered drinks), and she's played this stacked hand on us,
has gone one better on the sly."

"Pierre," said King Kinkley, "you're on the track of the secret, and
appear to hev the advantage of the lady: blaze it--blaze it out."

Pierre rejoined, "I know something; but it is good we wait until ten
o'clock.  Then I will show you all the cards in the pack.  Yes, so,
'bien sur.'"

And though there was some grumbling, Pierre had his way.  The spirit of
adventure and mutual interest had thrown the French half-breed, the
Irishman, and the Hon. Just Trafford together on the cold side of the
Canadian Rockies; and they had journeyed to this other side, where the
warm breath from the Pacific passed to its congealing in the ranges.
They had come to the Pipi field when it was languishing.  From the moment
of their coming its luck changed; it became prosperous.  They conquered
the Valley each after his kind.  The Honourable--he was always called
that--mastered its resources by a series of "great lucks," as Pierre
termed it, had achieved a fortune, and made no enemies; and but two
months before the day whose incidents are here recorded, had gone to the
coast on business.  Shon had won the reputation of being a "white man,"
to say nothing of his victories in the region of gallantry.  He made no
wealth; he only got that he might spend.  Irishman-like he would barter
the chances of fortune for the lilt of a voice or the clatter of a pretty
foot.

Pierre was different.  "Women, ah, no!" he would say, "they make men
fools or devils."

His temptation lay not that way.  When the three first came to the Pipi,
Pierre was a miner, simply; but nearly all his life he had been something
else, as many a devastated pocket on the east of the Rockies could bear
witness; and his new career was alien to his soul.  Temptation grew
greatly on him at the Pipi, and in the days before he yielded to it he
might have been seen at midnight in his but playing solitaire.  Why he
abstained at first from practising his real profession is accounted for
in two ways: he had tasted some of the sweets of honest companionship
with the Honourable and Shon, and then he had a memory of an ugly night
at Pardon's Drive a year before, when he stood over his own brother's
body, shot to death by accident in a gambling row having its origin with
himself.  These things had held him back for a time; but he was weaker
than his ruling passion.

The Pipi was a young and comparatively virgin field; the quarry was at
his hand.  He did not love money for its own sake; it was the game that
enthralled him.  He would have played his life against the treasury of a
kingdom, and, winning it with loaded double sixes, have handed back the
spoil as an unredeemable national debt.

He fell at last, and in falling conquered the Pipi Valley; at the same
time he was considered a fearless and liberal citizen, who could shoot as
straight as he played well.  He made an excursion to another field,
however, at an opportune time, and it was during this interval that the
accident to Shon and the Honourable had happened.  He returned but a few
hours before this quarrel with Shon occurred, and in the Saints' Repose,
whither he had at once gone, he was told of the accident.  While his
informant related the incident and the romantic sequence of Shon's
infatuation, the woman passed the tavern and was pointed out to Pierre.
The half-breed had not much excitableness in his nature, but when he saw
this beautiful woman with a touch of the Indian in her contour, his pale
face flushed, and he showed his set teeth under his slight moustache.
He watched her until she entered a shop, on the signboard of which was
written--written since he had left a few months ago--Lucy Rives,
Tobacconist.

Shon had then entered the Saints' Repose; and we know the rest.  A couple
of hours after this nervous episode, Pierre might have been seen standing
in the shadow of the pines not far from the house at Ward's Mistake,
where, he had been told, Lucy Rives lived with an old Indian woman.  He
stood, scarcely moving, and smoking cigarettes, until the door opened.
Shon came out and walked down the hillside to the town.  Then Pierre went
to the door, and without knocking, opened it, and entered.  A woman
started up from a seat where she was sewing, and turned towards him.
As she did so, the work, Shon's coat, dropped from her hands, her face
paled, and her eyes grew big with fear.  She leaned against a chair for
support--this man's presence had weakened her so.  She stood silent, save
for a slight moan that broke from her lips, as Pierre lighted a cigarette
coolly, and then said to an old Indian woman who sat upon the floor
braiding a basket: "Get up, Ikni, and go away."

Ikni rose, came over, and peered into the face of the half-breed.  Then
she muttered: "I know you--I know you.  The dead has come back again."
She caught his arm with her bony fingers as if to satisfy herself that he
was flesh and blood, and shaking her head dolefully, went from the room.
When the door closed behind her there was silence, broken only by an
exclamation from the man.

The other drew her hand across her eyes, and dropped it with a motion of
despair.  Then Pierre said, sharply: "Bien?"

"Francois," she replied, "you are alive!"

"Yes, I am alive, Lucy."

She shuddered, then grew still again and whispered: "Why did you let it
be thought that you were drowned?  Why?  Oh, why"? she moaned.

He raised his eyebrows slightly, and between the puffs of smoke, said:

"Ah yes, my Lucy, why?  It was so long ago.  Let me see: so--so--ten
years.  Ten years is a long time to remember, eh?"

He came towards her.  She drew back; but her hand remained on the chair.
He touched the plain gold ring on her finger, and said:

"You still wear it.  To think of that--so loyal for a woman!  How she
remembers, holy Mother!  .  .  .  But shall I not kiss you, yes, just
once after eight years--my wife?"

She breathed hard and drew back against the wall, dazed and frightened,
and said:

"No, no, do not come near me; do not speak to me--ah, please, stand back,
for a moment--please!"

He shrugged his shoulders slightly, and continued, with mock tenderness:

"To think that things come round so!  And here you have a home.  But that
is good.  I am tired of much travel and life all alone.  The prodigal
goes not to the home, the home comes to the prodigal."  He stretched up
his arms as if with a feeling of content.

"Do you--do you not know," she said, "that--that--"

He interrupted her:

"Do I not know, Lucy, that this is your home?  Yes.  But is it not all
the same?  I gave you a home ten years ago--to think, ten years ago!
We quarrelled one night, and I left you.  Next morning my boat was found
below the White Cascade--yes, but that was so stale a trick!  It was not
worthy of Francois Rives.  He would do it so much better now; but he was
young then; just a boy, and foolish.  Well, sit down, Lucy, it is a long
story, and you have much to tell, how much--who knows?"  She came slowly
forward and said with a painful effort:

"You did a great wrong, Francois.  You have killed me.

"Killed you, Lucy, my wife!  Pardon!  Never in those days did you look so
charming as now--never.  But the great surprise of seeing your husband,
it has made you shy, quite shy.  There will be much time now for you to
change all that.  It is quite pleasant to think on, Lucy.  .  .  .  You
remember the song we used to sing on the Chaudiere at St. Antoine?  See,
I have not forgotten it--

                  "'Nos amants sont en guerre,
                    Vole, mon coeur, vole.'"

He hummed the lines over and over, watching through his half-shut eyes
the torture he was inflicting.

"Oh, Mother of God," she whispered, "have mercy!  Can you not see, do you
not know?  I am not as you left me."

"Yes, my wife, you are just the same; not an hour older.  I am glad that
you have come to me.  But how they will envy Pretty Pierre!"

"Envy--Pretty-Pierre," she repeated, in distress; "are you Pretty Pierre?
Ah, I might have known, I might have known!"

"Yes, and so!  Is not Pretty Pierre as good a name as Francois Rives?
Is it not as good as Shon McGann?"

"Oh, I see it all, I see it all now!" she said mournfully.  "It was with
you he quarrelled, and about me.  He would not tell me what it was.  You
know, then, that I am--that I am married--to him?"

"Quite.  I know all that; but it is no marriage."  He rose to his feet
slowly, dropping the cigarette from his lips as he did so.  "Yes," he
continued, "and I know that you prefer Shon McGann to Pretty Pierre."

She spread out her hands appealingly.

"But you are my wife, not his.  Listen: do you know what I shall do?
I will tell you in two hours.  It is now eight o'clock.  At ten o'clock
Shon McGann will meet me at the Saints' Repose.  Then you shall know....
Ah, it is a pity!  Shon was my good friend, but this spoils all that.
Wine--it has danger; cards--there is peril in that sport; women--they
make trouble most of all."

"O God," she piteously said, "what did I do?  There was no sin in me.
I was your faithful wife, though you were cruel to me.  You left me,
cheated me, brought this upon me.  It is you that has done this
wickedness, not I."  She buried her face in her hands, falling on her
knees beside the chair.

He bent above her: "You loved the young avocat better, eight years ago."

She sprang to her feet.  "Ah, now I understand,' she said.  "That was why
you quarrelled with me; why you deserted me.  You were not man enough to
say what made you so much the--so wicked and hard, so--"

"Be thankful, Lucy, that I did not kill you then," he interjected.

"But it is a lie," she cried; "a lie!"

She went to the door and called the Indian woman.  "Ikni," she said.
"He dares to say evil of Andre and me.  Think--of Andre!"

Ikni came to him, put her wrinkled face close to his, and said: "She was
yours, only yours; but the spirits gave you a devil.  Andre, oh, oh,
Andre!  The father of Andre was her father--ah, that makes your sulky
eyes to open.  Ikni knows how to speak.  Ikni nursed them both.  If you
had waited you should have known.  But you ran away like a wolf from a
coal of fire; you shammed death like a fox; you come back like the snake
to crawl into the house and strike with poison tooth, when you should be
with the worms in the ground.  But Ikni knows--you shall be struck with
poison too, the Spirit of the Red Knife waits for you.  Andre was her
brother."

He pushed her aside savagely: "Be still!" he said.  "Get out-quick.
'Sacre'--quick!"

When they were alone again he continued with no anger in his tone: "So,
Andre the avocat and you--that, eh?  Well, you see how much trouble has
come; and now this other--a secret too.  When were you married to Shon
McGann?"

"Last night," she bitterly replied; "a priest came over from the Indian
village."

"Last night," he musingly repeated.  "Last night I lost two thousand
dollars at the Little Goshen field.  I did not play well last night;
I was nervous.  In ten years I had not lost so much at one game as I did
last night.  It was a punishment for playing too honest, or something;
eh, what do you think, Lucy--or something, 'hein?'"

She said nothing, but rocked her body to and fro.

"Why did you not make known the marriage with Shon?"

"He was to have told it to-night," she said.

There was silence for a moment, then a thought flashed into his eyes, and
he rejoined with a jarring laugh, "Well, I will play a game to-night,
Lucy Rives; such a game that Pretty Pierre will never be forgotten in the
Pipi Valley--a beautiful game, just for two.  And the other who will
play--the wife of Francois Rives shall see if she will wait; but she must
be patient, more patient than her husband was ten years ago."

"What will you do--tell me, what will you do?"

"I will play a game of cards--just one magnificent game; and the cards
shall settle it.  All shall be quite fair, as when you and I played in
the little house by the Chaudiere--at first, Lucy,--before I was a
devil."

Was this peculiar softness to his last tones assumed or real?  She looked
at him inquiringly; but he moved away to the window, and stood gazing
down the hillside towards the town below.  His eyes smarted.

"I will die," she said to herself in whispers--"I will die."  A minute
passed, and then Pierre turned and said to her: "Lucy, he is coming up
the hill.  Listen.  If you tell him that I have seen you, I will shoot
him on sight, dead.  You would save him, for a little, for an hour or
two--or more?  Well, do as I say; for these things must be according to
the rules of the game, and I myself will tell him all at the Saints'
Repose.  He gave me the lie there, and I will tell him the truth before
them all there.  Will you do as I say?"

She hesitated an instant, and then replied: "I will not tell him."

"There is only one way, then," he continued.  "You must go at once from
here into the woods behind there, and not see him at all.  Then at ten
o'clock you will come to the Saints' Repose, if you choose, to know how
the game has ended."

She was trembling, moaning, no longer.  A set look had come into her
face; her eyes were steady and hard.  She quietly replied: "Yes, I shall
be there."

He came to her, took her hand, and drew from her finger the wedding-ring
which last night Shon McGann had placed there.  She submitted passively.
Then, with an upward wave of his fingers, he spoke in a mocking
lightness, but without any of the malice which had first appeared in his
tones, words from an old French song:

                   "I say no more, my lady
                    Mironton, Mironton, Mirontaine!
                    I say no more, my lady,
                    As nought more can be said."

He opened the door, motioned to the Indian woman, and, in a few moments,
the broken-hearted Lucy Rives and her companion were hidden in the pines;
and Pretty Pierre also disappeared into the shadow of the woods as Shon
McGann appeared on the crest of the hill.

The Irishman walked slowly to the door, and pausing, said to himself:
"I couldn't run the big risk, me darlin', without seein' you again, God
help me!  There's danger ahead which little I'd care for if it wasn't for
you."

Then he stepped inside the house--the place was silent; he called, but no
one answered; he threw open the doors of the rooms, but they were empty;
he went outside and called again, but no reply came, except the flutter
of a night-hawk's wings and the cry of a whippoorwill.  He went back into
the house and sat down with his head between his hands.  So, for a
moment, and then he raised his head, and said with a sad smile: "Faith,
Shon, me boy, this takes the life out of you! the empty house where she
ought to be, and the smile of her so swate, and the hand of her that
falls on y'r shoulder like a dove on the blessed altar-gone, and lavin'
a chill on y'r heart like a touch of the dead.  Sure, nivir a wan of me
saw any that could stand wid her for goodness, barrin' the angel that
kissed me good-bye with one foot in the stirrup an' the troopers behind
me, now twelve years gone, in ould Donegal, and that I'll niver see
again, she lyin' where the hate of the world will vex the heart of her no
more, and the masses gone up for her soul.  Twice, twice in y'r life,
Shon McGann, has the cup of God's joy been at y'r lips, and is it both
times that it's to spill?--Pretty Pierre shoots straight and sudden, and
maybe it's aisy to see the end of it; but as the just God is above us,
I'll give him the lie in his throat betimes for the word he said agin me
darlin'.  What's the avil thing that he has to say?  What's the divil's
proof he would bring?  And where is she now?  Where are you, Lucy?  I
know the proof I've got in me heart that the wreck of the world couldn't
shake, while that light, born of Heaven, swims up to your eyes whin you
look at me!"

He rose to his feet again and walked to and fro; he went once more to the
doors; he looked here and there through the growing dusk, but to no
purpose.  She had said that she would not go to her shop this night; but
if not, then where could she have gone and Ikni, too?  He felt there was
more awry in his life than he cared to put into thought or speech.  He
picked up the sewing she had dropped and looked at it as one would regard
a relic of the dead; he lifted her handkerchief, kissed it, and put it in
his breast.  He took a revolver from his pocket and examined it closely,
looked round the room as though to fasten it in his memory, and then
passed out, closing the door behind him.  He walked down the hillside and
went to her shop in the one street of the town, but she was not there,
nor had the lad in charge seen her.

Meanwhile, Pretty Pierre had made his way to the Saints' Repose, and was
sitting among the miners indolently smoking.  In vain he was asked to
play cards.  His one reply was, "No, pardon, no!  I play one game only
to-night, the biggest game ever played in Pipi Valley."  In vain, also,
was he asked to drink.  He refused the hospitality, defying the danger
that such lack of good-fellowship might bring forth.  He hummed in
patches to himself the words of a song that the 'brules' were wont to
sing when they hunted the buffalo:

                  "'Voila!'  it is the sport to ride--
                         Ah, ah the brave hunter!

                    To thrust the arrow in his hide,
                    To send the bullet through his side
                         'Ici,' the buffalo, 'joli!'
                              Ah, ah the buffalo!"

He nodded here and there as men entered; but he did not stir from his
seat.  He smoked incessantly, and his eyes faced the door of the bar-room
that entered upon the street.  There was no doubt in the minds of any
present that the promised excitement would occur.  Shon McGann was as
fearless as he was gay.  And Pipi Valley remembered the day in which he
had twice risked his life to save two women from a burning building--Lady
Jane and another.  And Lady Jane this evening was agitated, and once or
twice furtively looked at something under the bar-counter; in fact, a
close observer would have noticed anger or anxiety in the eyes of the
daughter of Dick Waldron, the keeper of the Saints' Repose.  Pierre would
certainly have seen it had he been looking that way.  An unusual
influence was working upon the frequenters of the busy tavern.  Planned,
premeditated excitement was out of their line.  Unexpectedness was the
salt of their existence.  This thing had an air of system not in accord
with the suddenness of the Pipi mind.  The half-breed was the only one
entirely at his ease; he was languid and nonchalant; the long lashes of
his half-shut eyelids gave his face a pensive look.  At last King Kinkley
walked over to him and said: "There's an almighty mysteriousness about
this event which isn't joyful, Pretty Pierre.  We want to see the muss
cleared up, of course; we want Shon McGann to act like a high-toned
citizen, and there's a general prejudice in favour of things bein' on the
flat of your palm, as it were.  Now this thing hangs fire, and there's a
lack of animation about it, isn't there?"

To this, Pretty Pierre replied: "What can I do?  This is not like other
things; one had to wait; great things take time.  To shoot is easy; but
to shoot is not all, as you shall see if you have a little patience.
Ah, my friend, where there is a woman, things are different. I throw a
glass in your face, we shoot, someone dies, and there it is quite plain
of reason; you play a card which was dealt just now, I call you--
something, and the swiftest finger does the trick; but in such as this,
one must wait for the sport."

It was at this point that Shon McGann entered, looked round, nodded to
all, and then came forward to the table where Pretty Pierre sat.  As the
other took out his watch, Shon said firmly but quietly: "Pierre, I gave
you the lie to-day concerning me wife, and I'm here, as I said I'd be,
to stand by the word I passed then."

Pierre waved his fingers lightly towards the other, and slowly rose.
Then he said in sharp tones: "Yes, Shon McGann, you gave me the lie.
There is but one thing for that in Pipi Valley.  You choked me; I would
not take that from a saint of heaven; but there was another thing to do
first.  Well, I have done it; I said I would bring proofs--I have them."
He paused, and now there might have been seen a shining moisture on his
forehead, and his words came menacingly from between his teeth, while the
room became breathlessly still, save that in the silence a sleeping dog
sighed heavily: "Shon McGann," he added, "you are living with my wife."

Twenty men drew in a sharp breath of excitement, and Shon came a step
nearer the other, and said in a strange voice: "I--am--living--with--
your--wife?"

"As I say, with my wife, Lucy Rives.  Francois Rives was my name ten
years ago.  We quarrelled.  I left her, and I never saw her again until
to-night.  You went to see her two hours ago.  You did not find her.
Why?  She was gone because her husband, Pierre, told her to go.  You want
a proof?  You shall have it.  Here is the wedding-ring you gave her last
night."

He handed it over, and Shon saw inside it his own name and hers.

"My God!" he said.  "Did she know?  Tell me she didn't know, Pierre?"

"No, she did not know.  I have truth to speak to night.  I was jealous,
mad, and foolish, and I left her.  My boat was found upset.  They
believed I was drowned.  'Bien,' she waited until yesterday, and then
she took you--but she was my wife; she is my wife--and so you see!"

The Irishman was deadly pale.

"It's an avil heart y' had in y' then, Pretty Pierre, and it's an avil
day that brought this thing to pass, and there's only wan way to the end
of it."

"So, that is true.  There is only one way," was the reply; "but what
shall that way be?  Someone must go: there must be no mistake.  I have
to propose.  Here on this table we lay a revolver.  We will give up these
which we have in our pockets.  Then we will play a game of euchre, and
the winner of the game shall have the revolver.  We will play for a life.
That is fair, eh--that is fair"? he said to those around.

King Kinkley, speaking for the rest, replied: "That's about fair.  It
gives both a chance, and leaves only two when it's over.  While the woman
lives, one of you is naturally in the way.  Pierre left her in a way that
isn't handsome; but a wife's a wife, and though Shon was all in the glum
about the thing, and though the woman isn't to be blamed either, there's
one too many of you, and there's got to be a vacation for somebody.
Isn't that so?"

The rest nodded assent.  They had been so engaged that they did not see
a woman enter the bar from behind, and crouch down beside Lady Jane,
a woman whom the latter touched affectionately on the shoulder and
whispered to once or twice, while she watched the preparations for the
game.

The two men sat down, Shon facing the bar and Pierre with his back to it.

The game began, neither man showing a sign of nervousness, though Shon
was very pale.  The game was to finish for ten points.  Men crowded about
the tables silent but keenly excited; cigars were chewed instead of
smoked, and liquor was left undrunk.  At the first deal Pierre made a
march, securing two.  At the next Shon made a point, and at the next also
a march.  The half-breed was playing a straight game.  He could have
stacked the cards, but he did not do so; deft as he was he might have
cheated even the vigilant eyes about him, but it was not so; he played as
squarely as a novice.  At the third, at the fourth, deal he made a march;
at the fifth, sixth, and seventh deals, Shon made a march, a point, and a
march.  Both now had eight points.  At the next deal both got a point,
and both stood at nine!

Now came the crucial play.

During the progress of the game nothing had been heard save the sound of
a knuckle on the table, the flip flip of the pasteboard, or the rasp of a
heel on the floor.  There was a set smile on Shon's face--a forgotten
smile, for the rest of the face was stern and tragic.  Pierre smoked
cigarettes, pausing, while his opponent was shuffling and dealing, to
light them.

Behind the bar as the game proceeded the woman who knelt beside Lady Jane
listened to every sound.  Her eyes grew more agonised as the numbers,
whispered to her by her companion, climbed to the fatal ten.

The last deal was Shon's; there was that much to his advantage.  As he
slowly dealt, the woman--Lucy Rives--rose to her feet behind Lady Jane.
So absorbed were all that none saw her.  Her eyes passed from Pierre to
Shon, and stayed.

When the cards were dealt, with but one point for either to gain, and so
win and save his life, there was a slight pause before the two took them
up.  They did not look at one another; but each glanced at the revolver,
then at the men nearest them, and lastly, for an instant, at the cards
themselves, with their pasteboard faces of life and death turned
downward.  As the players picked them up at last and spread them out fan-
like, Lady Jane slipped something into the hand of Lucy Rives.

Those who stood behind Shon McGann stared with anxious astonishment at
his hand; it contained only nine and ten spots.  It was easy to see the
direction of the sympathy of Pipi Valley.  The Irishman's face turned a
slight shade paler, but he did not tremble or appear disturbed.

Pierre played his biggest card and took the point.  He coolly counted
one, and said, "Game.  I win."  The crowd drew back.  Both rose to their
feet.  In the painful silence the half-breed's hand was gently laid on
the revolver.  He lifted it, and paused slightly, his eyes fixed to the
steady look in those of Shon McGann.  He raised the revolver again, till
it was level with Shon's forehead, till it was even with his hair!  Then
there was a shot, and someone fell--not Shon, but Pierre, saying, as they
caught him, "Mon Dieu!  Mon Dieu!  From behind!"

Instantly there was another shot, and someone crashed against the bottles
in the bar.  The other factor in the game, the wife, had shot at Pierre,
and then sent a bullet through her own lungs.

Shon stood for a moment as if he was turned to stone, and then his head
dropped in his arms upon the table.  He had seen both shots fired, but
could not speak in time.

Pierre was severely but not dangerously wounded in the neck.

But the woman--?  They brought her out from behind the counter.  She
still breathed; but on her eyes was the film of coming death.  She turned
to where Shon sat.  Her lips framed his name, but no voice came forth.
Someone touched him on the shoulder.  He looked up and caught her last
glance.  He came and stooped beside her; but she had died with that one
glance from him, bringing a faint smile to her lips.  And the smile
stayed when the life of her had fled--fled through the cloud over her
eyes, from the tide-beat of her pulse.  It swept out from the smoke and
reeking air into the open world, and beyond, into those untried paths
where all must walk alone, and in what bitterness, known only to the
Master of the World who sees these piteous things, and orders in what
fashion distorted lives shall be made straight and wholesome in the
Places of Readjustment.

Shon stood silent above the dead body.

One by one the miners went out quietly.  Presently Pierre nodded towards
the door, and King Kinkley and another lifted him and carried him towards
it.  Before they passed into the street he made them turn him so that he
could see Shon.  He waved his hand towards her that had been his wife,
and said: "She should have shot but once and straight, Shon McGann, and
then!--Eh, 'bien!'"

The door closed, and Shon McGann was left alone with the dead.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Irishmen have gifts for only two things--words and women
More idle than wicked
Reconciling the preacher and the sinner, as many another has






PIERRE AND HIS PEOPLE

TALES OF THE FAR NORTH

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 5.


ANTOINE AND ANGELIQUE
THE CIPHER
A TRAGEDY OF NOBODIES
A SANCTUARY OF THE PLAINS




ANTOINE AND ANGELIQUE

"The birds are going south, Antoine--see--and it is so early!"

"Yes, Angelique, the winter will be long."

There was a pause, and then: "Antoine, I heard a child cry in the night,
and I could not sleep."

"It was a devil-bird, my wife; it flies slowly, and the summer is dead."

"Antoine, there was a rushing of wings by my bed before the morn was
breaking."

"The wild-geese know their way in the night, Angelique; but they flew by
the house and not near thy bed."

"The two black squirrels have gone from the hickory tree."

"They have hidden away with the bears in the earth; for the frost comes,
and it is the time of sleep."

"A cold hand was knocking at my heart when I said my aves last night, my
Antoine."

"The heart of a woman feels many strange things: I cannot answer, my
wife."

"Let us go also southward, Antoine, before the great winds and the wild
frost come."

"I love thee, Angelique, but I cannot go."

"Is not love greater than all?"

"To keep a pledge is greater."

"Yet if evil come?"

"There is the mine."

"None travels hither; who should find it?"

He said to me, my wife: 'Antoine, will you stay and watch the mine until
I come with the birds northward, again?' and I said: 'I will stay, and
Angelique will stay; I will watch the mine.'"

"This is for his riches, but for our peril, Antoine."

"Who can say whither a woman's fancy goes?  It is full of guessing.  It
is clouds and darkness to-day, and sunshine--so much--to-morrow.  I
cannot answer."

"I have a fear; if my husband loved me--"

"There is the mine," he interrupted firmly.

"When my heart aches so--"

"Angelique, there is the mine."

"Ah, my Antoine!"

And so these two stayed on the island of St. Jean, in Lake Superior,
through the purple haze of autumn, into the white brilliancy of winter,
guarding the Rose Tree Mine, which Falding the Englishman and his
companions had prospected and declared to be their Ophir.

But St. Jean was far from the ways of settlement, and there was little
food and only one hut, and many things must be done for the Rose Tree
Mine in the places where men sell their souls for money; and Antoine and
Angelique, French peasants from the parish of Ste. Irene in Quebec, were
left to guard the place of treasure, until, to the sound of the laughing
spring, there should come many men and much machinery, and the sinking of
shafts in the earth, and the making, of riches.

But when Antoine and Angelique were left alone in the waste, and God
began to draw the pale coverlet of frost slowly across land and water,
and to surround St. Jean with a stubborn moat of ice, the heart of the
woman felt some coming danger, and at last broke forth in words of timid
warning.  When she once had spoken she said no more, but stayed and
builded the heaps of earth about the house, and filled every crevice
against the inhospitable Spirit of Winds, and drew her world closer and
closer within those two rooms where they should live through many months.

The winter was harsh, but the hearts of the two were strong.  They loved;
and Love is the parent of endurance, the begetter of courage.  And every
day, because it seemed his duty, Antoine inspected the Rose Tree Mine;
and every day also, because it seemed her duty, Angelique said many aves.
And one prayer was much with her--for spring to come early that the child
should not suffer: the child which the good God was to give to her and
Antoine.

In the first hours of each evening Antoine smoked, and Angelique sang the
old songs which their ancestors learned in Normandy.  One night Antoine's
face was lighted with a fine fire as he talked of happy days in the
parish of Ste. Irene; and with that romantic fervour of his race which
the stern winters of Canada could not kill, he sang, 'A la Claire
Fontaine,' the well-beloved song-child of the 'voyageurs'' hearts.

And the wife smiled far away into the dancing flames--far away, because
the fire retreated, retreated to the little church where they two were
wed; and she did as most good women do--though exactly why, man the
insufficient cannot declare--she wept a little through her smiles.  But
when the last verse came, both smiles and tears ceased.  Antoine sang it
with a fond monotony:

              "Would that each rose were growing
               Upon the rose-tree gay,
               And that the fatal rose-tree
               Deep in the ocean lay.
               'I ya longtemps que je t'aime
               Jamais je ne t'oublierai."

Angelique's heart grew suddenly heavy.  From the rose-tree of the song
her mind fled and shivered before the leafless rose-tree by the mine; and
her old dread came back.

Of course this was foolish of Angelique; of course the wise and great
throw contumely on all such superstition; and knowing women will smile
at each other meaningly, and with pity for a dull man-writer, and will
whisper, "Of course, the child."  But many things, your majesties, are
hidden from your wisdom and your greatness, and are given to the simple
--to babes, and the mothers of babes.

It was upon this very night that Falding the Englishman sat with other
men in a London tavern, talking joyously.  "There's been the luck of
Heaven," he said, "in the whole exploit.  We'd been prospecting for
months.  As a sort of try in a back-water we rowed over one night to an
island and pitched tents.  Not a dozen yards from where we camped was a
rose-tree-think of it, Belgard, a rose-tree on a rag-tag island of Lake
Superior!  'There's luck in odd numbers, says Rory O'More.'  'There's
luck here,' said I; and at it we went just beside the rose-tree.  What's
the result?  Look at that prospectus: a company with a capital of two
hundred thousand; the whole island in our hands in a week; and Antoine
squatting on it now like Bonaparte on Elbe."

"And what does Antoine get out of this"? said Belgard.

"Forty dollars a month and his keep."

"Why not write him off twenty shares to propitiate the gods--gifts unto
the needy, eh!--a thousand-fold--what?"

"Yes; it might be done, Belgard, if--"

But someone just then proposed the toast, "The Rose Tree Mine!" and the
souls of these men waxed proud and merry, for they had seen the
investor's palm filled with gold, the maker of conquest.  While Antoine
was singing with his wife, they were holding revel within the sound of
Bow Bells.  And far into the night, through silent Cheapside, a rolling
voice swelled through much laughter thus:

                   "Gai Ion la, gai le rosier,
                    Du joli mois de Mai."

The next day there were heavy heads in London; but the next day, also,
a man lay ill in the hut on the island of St. Jean.

Antoine had sung his last song.  He had waked in the night with a start
of pain, and by the time the sun was halting at noon above the Rose Tree
Mine, he had begun a journey, the record of which no man has ever truly
told, neither its beginning nor its end; because that which is of the
spirit refuseth to be interpreted by the flesh.  Some signs there be, but
they are brief and shadowy; the awe of It is hidden in the mind of him
that goeth out lonely unto God.

When the call goes forth, not wife nor child nor any other can hold the
wayfarer back, though he may loiter for an instant on the brink.  The
poor medicaments which Angelique brings avail not; these soothing hands
and healing tones, they pass through clouds of the middle place between
heaven and earth to Antoine.  It is only when the second midnight comes
that, with conscious, but pensive and far-off, eyes, he says to her:
"Angelique, my wife."

For reply her lips pressed his cheek, and her fingers hungered for his
neck.  Then: "Is there pain now Antoine?"

"There is no pain, Angelique."

He closed his eyes slowly; her lips framed an ave.  "The mine," he said,
"the mine--until the spring."

"Yes, Antoine, until the spring."

"Have you candles--many candles, Angelique?"

"There are many, my husband."

"The ground is as iron; one cannot dig, and the water under the ice is
cruel--is it not so, Angelique?"

"No axe could break the ground, and the water is cruel," she said.

"You will see my face until the winter is gone, my wife."

She bowed her head, but smoothed his hand meanwhile, and her throat was
quivering.

He partly slept--his body slept, though his mind was feeling its way to
wonderful things.  But near the morning his eyes opened wide, and he
said: "Someone calls out of the dark, Angelique."

And she, with her hand on her heart, replied: "It is the cry of a dog,
Antoine."

"But there are footsteps at the door, my wife."

"Nay, Antoine; it is the snow beating upon the window."

"There is the sound of wings close by--dost thou not hear them,
Angelique?"

"Wings--wings," she falteringly said: "it is the hot blast through the
chimney; the night is cold, Antoine."

"The night is very cold," he said; and he trembled. . . "I hear, O my
wife, I hear the voice of a little child . . . the voice is like thine,
Angelique."

And she, not knowing what to reply, said softly:

"There is hope in the voice of a child;" and the mother stirred within
her; and in the moment he knew also that the Spirits would give her the
child in safety, that she should not be alone in the long winter.

The sounds of the harsh night had ceased--the snapping of the leafless
branches, the cracking of the earth, and the heaving of the rocks: the
Spirits of the Frost had finished their work; and just as the grey
forehead of dawn appeared beyond the cold hills, Antoine cried out
gently: "Angelique .  .  .  Ah, mon Capitaine .  .  .  Jesu" .  .  .
and then, no more.

Night after night Angelique lighted candles in the place where Antoine
smiled on in his frozen silence; and masses were said for his soul--the
masses Love murmurs for its dead.  The earth could not receive him; its
bosom was adamant; but no decay could touch him; and she dwelt alone with
this, that was her husband, until one beautiful, bitter day, when, with
no eye save God's to see her, and no human comfort by her, she gave birth
to a man-child.  And yet that night she lighted the candles at the dead
man's head and feet, dragging herself thither in the cold; and in her
heart she said that the smile on Antoine's face was deeper than it had
been before.

In the early spring, when the earth painfully breathed away the frost
that choked it, with her child for mourner, and herself for sexton and
priest, she buried Antoine with maimed rites: but hers were the prayers
of the poor, and of the pure in heart; and she did not fret because,
in the hour that her comrade was put away into the dark, the world was
laughing at the thought of coming summer.

Before another sunrise, the owners of the island of St. Jean claimed what
was theirs; and because that which had happened worked upon their hearts,
they called the child St. Jean, and from that time forth they made him to
enjoy the goodly fruits of the Rose Tree Mine.





THE CIPHER

Hilton was staying his horse by a spring at Guidon Hill when he first
saw her.  She was gathering may-apples; her apron was full of them.  He
noticed that she did not stir until he rode almost upon her.  Then she
started, first without looking round, as does an animal, dropping her
head slightly to one side, though not exactly appearing to listen.
Suddenly she wheeled on him, and her big eyes captured him.  The look
bewildered him.  She was a creature of singular fascination.  Her face
was expressive.  Her eyes had wonderful light.  She looked happy, yet
grave withal; it was the gravity of an uncommon earnestness.  She gazed
through everything, and beyond.  She was young--eighteen or so.

Hilton raised his hat, and courteously called a good-morning at her.  She
did not reply by any word, but nodded quaintly, and blinked seriously and
yet blithely on him.  He was preparing to dismount.  As he did so he
paused, astonished that she did not speak at all.  Her face did not have
a familiar language; its vocabulary was its own.  He slid from his horse,
and, throwing his arm over its neck as it stooped to the spring, looked
at her more intently, but respectfully too.  She did not yet stir, but
there came into her face a slight inflection of confusion or perplexity.
Again he raised his hat to her, and, smiling, wished her a good-morning.
Even as he did so a thought sprung in him.  Understanding gave place to
wonder; he interpreted the unusual look in her face.

Instantly he made a sign to her.  To that her face responded with a
wonderful speech--of relief and recognition.  The corners of her apron
dropped from her fingers, and the yellow may-apples fell about her feet.
She did not notice this.  She answered his sign with another, rapid,
graceful, and meaning.  He left his horse and advanced to her, holding
out his hand simply--for he was a simple and honest man.  Her response to
this was spontaneous.  The warmth of her fingers invaded him.  Her eyes
were full of questioning.  He gave a hearty sign of admiration.  She
flushed with pleasure, but made a naive, protesting gesture.

She was deaf and dumb.

Hilton had once a sister who was a mute.  He knew that amazing primal
gesture-language of the silent race, whom God has sent like one-winged
birds into the world.  He had watched in his sister just such looks of
absolute nature as flashed from this girl.  They were comrades on the
instant; he reverential, gentle, protective; she sanguine, candid,
beautifully aboriginal in the freshness of her cipher-thoughts.  She saw
the world naked, with a naked eye.  She was utterly natural.  She was the
maker of exquisite, vital gesture-speech.

She glided out from among the may-apples and the long, silken grass, to
charm his horse with her hand.  As she started to do so, he hastened to
prevent her, but, utterly surprised, he saw the horse whinny to her
cheek, and arch his neck under her white palm--it was very white.  Then
the animal's chin sought her shoulder and stayed placid.  He had never
done so to anyone before save Hilton.  Once, indeed, he had kicked a
stableman to death.  He lifted his head and caught with playful shaking
lips at her ear.  Hilton smiled; and so, as we said, their comradeship
began.

He was a new officer of the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Guidon.  She was
the daughter of a ranchman.  She had been educated by Father Corraine,
the Jesuit missionary, Protestant though she was.  He had learned the
sign-language while assistant-priest in a Parisian chapel for mutes.  He
taught her this gesture-tongue, which she, taking, rendered divine; and,
with this, she learned to read and write.

Her name was Ida.

Ida was faultless.  Hilton was not; but no man is.  To her, however, he
was the best that man can be.  He was unselfish and altogether honest,
and that is much for a man.

When Pierre came to know of their friendship he shook his head
doubtfully.  One day he was sitting on the hot side of a pine near his
mountain hut, soaking in the sun.  He saw them passing below him, along
the edge of the hill across the ravine.  He said to someone behind him
in the shade, who was looking also," What will be the end of that, eh?"

And the someone replied: "Faith, what the Serpent in the Wilderness
couldn't cure."

"You think he'll play with her?"

"I think he'll do it without wishin' or willin', maybe.  It'll be a case
of kiss and ride away."

There was silence.  Soon Pierre pointed down again.  She stood upon a
green mound with a cool hedge of rock behind her, her feet on the margin
of solid sunlight, her forehead bared.  Her hair sprinkled round her as
she gently threw back her head.  Her face was full on Hilton.  She was
telling him something.  Her gestures were rhythmical, and admirably
balanced.  Because they were continuous or only regularly broken, it was
clear she was telling him a story.  Hilton gravely, delightedly, nodded
response now and then, or raised his eyebrows in fascinated surprise.
Pierre, watching, was only aware of vague impressions--not any distinct
outline of the tale.  At last he guessed it as a perfect pastoral-birds,
reaping, deer, winds, sundials, cattle, shepherds, hunting.  To Hilton it
was a new revelation.  She was telling him things she had thought, she
was recalling her life.

Towards the last, she said in gesture: "You can forget the winter, but
not the spring.  You like to remember the spring.  It is the beginning.
When the daisy first peeps, when the tall young deer first stands upon
its feet, when the first egg is seen in the oriole's nest, when the sap
first sweats from the tree, when you first look into the eye of your
friend--these you want to remember.  .  .  ."

She paused upon this gesture--a light touch upon the forehead, then the
hands stretched out, palms upward, with coaxing fingers.  She seemed lost
in it.  Her eyes rippled, her lips pressed slightly, a delicate wine
crept through her cheek, and tenderness wimpled all.  Her soft breast
rose modestly to the cool texture of her dress.  Hilton felt his blood
bound joyfully; he had the wish of instant possession.  But yet he could
not stir, she held him so; for a change immediately passed upon her.  She
glided slowly from that almost statue-like repose into another gesture.
Her eyes drew up from his, and looked away to plumbless distance, all
glowing and childlike, and the new ciphers slowly said:

"But the spring dies away.  We can only see a thing born once.  And it
may be ours, yet not ours.  I have sighted the perfect Sharon-flower, far
up on Guidon, yet it was not mine; it was too distant; I could not reach
it.  I have seen the silver bullfinch floating along the canon.  I called
to it, and it came singing; and it was mine, yet I could not hear its
song, and I let it go; it could not be happy so with me.  .  .  .
I stand at the gate of a great city, and see all, and feel the great
shuttles of sounds, the roar and clack of wheels, the horses' hoofs
striking the ground, the hammer of bells; all: and yet it is not mine;
it is far, far away from me.  It is one world, mine is another; and
sometimes it is lonely, and the best things are not for me.  But I have
seen them, and it is pleasant to remember, and nothing can take from us
the hour when things were born, when we saw the spring--nothing--never!"

Her manner of speech, as this went on, became exquisite in fineness,
slower, and more dream-like, until, with downward protesting motions of
the hand, she said that "nothing--never!"  Then a great sigh surged up
her throat, her lips parted slightly, showing the warm moist whiteness of
her teeth, her hands falling lightly, drew together and folded in front
of her.  She stood still.

Pierre had watched this scene intently, his chin in his hands, his elbows
on his knees.  Presently he drew himself up, ran a finger meditatively
along his lip, and said to himself: "It is perfect.  She is carved from
the core of nature.  But this thing has danger for her.  .  .  .
'bien!'  .  .  .  ah!"

A change in the scene before him caused this last expression of surprise.

Hilton, rousing from the enchanting pantomime, took a step towards her;
but she raised her hand pleadingly, restrainingly, and he paused.  With
his eyes he asked her mutely why.  She did not answer, but, all at once
transformed into a thing of abundant sprightliness, ran down the
hillside, tossing up her arms gaily.  Yet her face was not all
brilliance.  Tears hung at her eyes.  But Hilton did not see these.
He did not run, but walked quickly, following her; and his face had a
determined look.  Immediately, a man rose up from behind a rock on the
same side of the ravine, and shook clenched fists after the departing
figures; then stood gesticulating angrily to himself, until, chancing
to look up, he sighted Pierre, and straightway dived into the underbrush.
Pierre rose to his feet, and said slowly: "Hilton, here may be trouble
for you also.  It is a tangled world."

Towards evening Pierre sauntered to the house of Ida's father.  Light of
footstep, he came upon the girl suddenly.  They had always been friends
since the day when, at uncommon risk, he rescued her dog from a freshet
on the Wild Moose River.  She was sitting utterly still, her hands folded
in her lap.  He struck his foot smartly on the ground.  She felt the
vibration, and looked up.  He doffed his hat, and she held out her hand.
He smiled and took it, and, as it lay in his, looked at it for a moment
musingly.  She drew it back slowly.  He was then thinking that it was the
most intelligent hand he had ever seen.  .  .  .  He determined to play a
bold and surprising game.  He had learned from her the alphabet of the
fingers--that is, how to spell words.  He knew little gesture-language.
He, therefore, spelled slowly: "Hawley is angry, because you love
Hilton."  The statement was so matter-of-fact, so sudden, that the girl
had no chance.  She flushed and then paled.  She shook her head firmly,
however, and her fingers slowly framed the reply: "You guess too much.
Foolish things come to the idle."

"I saw you this afternoon," he silently urged.

Her fingers trembled slightly.  "There was nothing to see."  She knew he
could not have read her gestures.  "I was telling a story."

"You ran from him--why?"  His questioning was cruel that he might in the
end be kind.

"The child runs from its shadow, the bird from its nest, the fish jumps
from the water--that is nothing."  She had recovered somewhat.

But he: "The shadow follows the child, the bird comes back to its nest,
the fish cannot live beyond the water.  But it is sad when the child, in
running, rushes into darkness, and loses its shadow; when the nest falls
from the tree; and the hawk catches the happy fish.  .  .  .  Hawley saw
you also."

Hawley, like Ida, was deaf and dumb.  He lived over the mountains, but
came often.  It had been understood that, one day, she should marry him.
It seemed fitting.  She had said neither yes nor no.  And now?

A quick tremor of trouble trailed over her face, then it became very
still.  Her eyes were bent upon the ground steadily.  Presently a bird
hopped near, its head coquetting at her.  She ran her hand gently along
the grass towards it.  The bird tripped on it.  She lifted it to her
chin, at which it pecked tenderly.  Pierre watched her keenly-admiring,
pitying.  He wished to serve her.  At last, with a kiss upon its head,
she gave it a light toss into the air, and it soared, lark-like, straight
up, and hanging over her head, sang the day into the evening.  Her eyes
followed it.  She could feel that it was singing.  She smiled and lifted
a finger lightly towards it.  Then she spelled to Pierre this: "It is
singing to me.  We imperfect things love each other."

"And what about loving Hawley, then"? Pierre persisted.  She did not
reply, but a strange look came upon her, and in the pause Hilton came
from the house and stood beside them.  At this, Pierre lighted a
cigarette, and with a good-natured nod to Hilton, walked away.

Hilton stooped over her, pale and eager.  "Ida," he gestured, "will you
answer me now?  Will you be my wife?"

She drew herself together with a little shiver.  "No," was her steady
reply.  She ruled her face into stillness, so that it showed nothing of
what she felt.  She came to her feet wearily, and drawing down a cool
flowering branch of chestnut, pressed it to her cheek.  "You do not love
me"? he asked nervously.

"I am going to marry Luke Hawley," was her slow answer.  She spelled the
words.  She used no gesture to that.  The fact looked terribly hard and
inflexible so.  Hilton was not a vain man, and he believed he was not
loved.  His heart crowded to his throat.

"Please go away, now," she begged with an anxious gesture.  While the
hand was extended, he reached and brought it to his lips, then quickly
kissed her on the forehead, and walked away.  She stood trembling, and as
the fingers of one hand hung at her side, they spelled mechanically these
words: "It would spoil his life.  I am only a mute--a dummy!"

As she stood so, she felt the approach of someone.  She did not turn
instantly, but with the aboriginal instinct, listened, as it were, with
her body; but presently faced about--to Hawley.  He was red with anger.
He had seen Hilton kiss her.  He caught her smartly by the arm, but, awed
by the great calmness of her face, dropped it, and fell into a fit of
sullenness.  She spoke to him: he did not reply.  She touched his arm: he
still was gloomy.  All at once the full price of her sacrifice rushed
upon her; and overpowered her.  She had no help at her critical hour, not
even from this man she had intended to bless.  There came a swift
revulsion, all passions stormed in her at once.  Despair was the
resultant of these forces.  She swerved from him immediately, and ran
hard towards the high-banked river!

Hawley did not follow her at once: he did not guess her purpose.  She had
almost reached the leaping-place, when Pierre shot from the trees, and
seized her.  The impulse of this was so strong, that they slipped, and
quivered on the precipitous edge: but Pierre righted then, and presently
they were safe.

Pierre held her hard by both wrists for a moment.  Then, drawing her
away, he loosed her, and spelled these words slowly: "I understand.  But
you are wrong.  Hawley is not the man.  You must come with me.  It is
foolish to die."

The riot of her feelings, her momentary despair, were gone.  It was
even pleasant to be mastered by Pierre's firmness.  She was passive.
Mechanically she went with him.  Hawley approached.  She looked at
Pierre.  Then she turned on the other.  "Yours is not the best love," she
signed to him; "it does not trust; it is selfish."  And she moved on.

But, an hour later, Hilton caught her to his bosom, and kissed her full
on the lips.  .  .  .  And his right to do so continues to this day.






A TRAGEDY OF NOBODIES

At Fort Latrobe sentiment was not of the most refined kind.  Local
customs were pronounced and crude in outline; language was often highly
coloured, and action was occasionally accentuated by a pistol shot.  For
the first few months of its life the place was honoured by the presence
of neither wife, nor sister, nor mother.  Yet women lived there.

When some men did bring wives and children, it was noticed that the girl
Blanche was seldom seen in the streets.  And, however it was, there grew
among the men a faint respect for her.  They did not talk of it to each
other, but it existed.  It was known that Blanche resented even the most
casual notice from those men who had wives and homes.  She gave the
impression that she had a remnant of conscience.

"Go home," she said to Harry Delong, who asked her to drink with him on
New Year's Day.  "Go home, and thank God that you've got a home--and a
wife."

After Jacques, the long-time friend of Pretty Pierre, came to Fort
Latrobe, with his sulky eye and scrupulously neat attire, Blanche
appeared to withdraw still more from public gaze, though no one saw any
connection between these events.  The girl also became fastidious in her
dress, and lost all her former dash and smart aggression of manner.  She
shrank from the women of her class, for which, as might be expected, she
was duly reviled.  But the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air
have nests, nor has it been written that a woman may not close her ears,
and bury herself in darkness, and travel alone in the desert with her
people--those ghosts of herself, whose name is legion, and whose slow
white fingers mock more than the world dare at its worst.

Suddenly, she was found behind the bar of Weir's Tavern at Cedar Point,
the resort most frequented by Jacques.  Word went about among the men
that Blanche was taking a turn at religion, or, otherwise, reformation.
Soldier Joe was something sceptical on this point from the fact that she
had developed a very uncertain temper.  This appeared especially
noticeable in her treatment of Jacques.  She made him the target for her
sharpest sarcasm.  Though a peculiar glow came to his eyes at times, he
was never roused from his exasperating coolness.  When her shafts were
unusually direct and biting, and the temptation to resent was keen, he
merely shrugged his shoulders, almost gently, and said: "Eh, such women!"

Nevertheless, there were men at Fort Latrobe who prophesied trouble,
for they knew there was a deep strain of malice in the French half-breed
which could be the more deadly because of its rare use.  He was not
easily moved, he viewed life from the heights of a philosophy which could
separate the petty from the prodigious.  His reputation was not wholly
disquieting; he was of the goats, he had sometimes been found with the
sheep, he preferred to be numbered with the transgressors.  Like Pierre,
his one passion was gambling.  There were legends that once or twice in
his life he had had another passion, but that some Gorgon drew out his
heartstrings painfully, one by one, and left him inhabited by a pale
spirit now called Irony, now Indifference--under either name a fret and
an anger to women.

At last Blanche's attacks on Jacques called out anxious protests from
men like rollicking Soldier Joe, who said to her one night, "Blanche,
there's a devil in Jacques.  Some day you'll startle him, and then he'll
shoot you as cool as he empties the pockets of Freddy Tarlton over
there."

And Blanche replied: "When he does that, what will you do, Joe?"

"Do?  Do?"  The man stroked his beard softly.  "Why, give him ditto--
cold."

"Well, then, there's nothing to row about, is there?"  And Soldier Joe
was not on the instant clever enough to answer her sophistry; but when
she left him and he had thought awhile, he said, convincingly:

"But where would you be then, Blanche?  .  .  .  That's the point."

One thing was known and certain: Blanche was earning her living by
honest, if not high-class, labour.  Weir the tavern-keeper said she was
"worth hundreds" to him.  But she grew pale, her eyes became peculiarly
brilliant, her voice took a lower key, and lost a kind of hoarseness it
had in the past.  Men came in at times merely to have a joke at her
expense, having heard of her new life; but they failed to enjoy their own
attempts at humour.  Women of her class came also, some with half-
uncertain jibes, some with a curious wistfulness, and a few with scornful
oaths; but the jibes and oaths were only for a time.  It became known
that she had paid the coach fare of Miss Dido (as she was called) to the
hospital at Wapiti, and had raised a subscription for her maintenance
there, heading it herself with a liberal sum.  Then the atmosphere round
her became less trying; yet her temper remained changeable, and had it
not been that she was good-looking and witty, her position might have
been insecure.  As it was, she ruled in a neutral territory where she was
the only woman.  One night, after an inclement remark to Jacques, in the
card-room, Blanche came back to the bar, and not noticing that, while she
was gone, Soldier Joe had entered and laid himself down on a bench in a
corner, she threw her head passionately forward on her arms as they
rested on the counter, and cried: "O my God! my God!"

Soldier Joe lay still as if sleeping, and when Blanche was called away
again he rose, stole out, went down to Freddy Tarlton's office, and
offered to bet Freddy two to one that Blanche wouldn't live a year.
Joe's experience of women was limited.  He had in his mind the case
of a girl who had accidentally smothered her child; and so he said:

"Blanche has something on her mind that's killing her, Freddy.  When
trouble fixes on her sort it kills swift and sure.  They've nothing to
live for but life, and it isn't good enough, you see, for--for--"
Joe paused to find out where his philosophy was taking him.

Freddy Tarlton finished the sentence for him: "For an inner sorrow is a
consuming fire."

Fort Latrobe soon had an unexpected opportunity to study Soldier Joe's
theory.  One night Jacques did not appear at Weir's Tavern as he had
engaged to do, and Soldier Joe and another went across the frozen river
to his log-hut to seek him.  They found him by a handful of fire,
breathing heavily and nearly unconscious.  One of the sudden and
frequently fatal colds of the mountains had fastened on him, and he had
begun a war for life.  Joe started back at once for liquor and a doctor,
leaving his comrade to watch by the sick man.

He could not understand why Blanche should stagger and grow white when he
told her; nor why she insisted on taking the liquor herself.  He did not
yet guess the truth.

The next day all Fort Latrobe knew that Blanche was nursing Jacques, on
what was thought to be his no-return journey.  The doctor said it was a
dangerous case, and he held out little hope.  Nursing might bring
him through, but the chance was very slight.  Blanche only occasionally
left the sick man's bedside to be relieved by Soldier Joe and Freddy
Tarlton.  It dawned on Joe at last, it had dawned on Freddy before, what
Blanche meant by the heart-breaking words uttered that night in Weir's
Tavern.  Down through the crust of this woman's heart had gone something
both joyful and painful.  Whatever it was, it made Blanche a saving
nurse, a good apothecary; for, one night the doctor pronounced Jacques
out of danger, and said that a few days would bring him round if he was
careful.

Now, for the first time, Jacques fully comprehended all Blanche had done
for him, though he had ceased to wonder at her changed attitude to him.
Through his suffering and his delirium had come the understanding of it.
When, after the crisis, the doctor turned away from the bed, Jacques
looked steadily into Blanche's eyes, and she flushed, and wiped the wet
from his brow with her handkerchief.  He took the handkerchief from her
fingers gently before Soldier Joe came over to the bed.

The doctor had insisted that Blanche should go to Weir's Tavern and get
the night's rest, needed so much, and Joe now pressed her to keep her
promise.  Jacques added an urging word, and after a time she started.
Joe had forgotten to tell her that a new road had been made on the ice
since she had crossed, and that the old road was dangerous.  Wandering
with her thoughts she did not notice the spruce bushes set up for signal,
until she had stepped on a thin piece of ice.  It bent beneath her.  She
slipped: there was a sudden sinking, a sharp cry, then another, piercing
and hopeless--and it was the one word--"Jacques!"  Then the night was
silent as before.  But someone had heard the cry.  Freddy Tarlton was
crossing the ice also, and that desolating Jacques! had reached his ears.
When he found her he saw that she had been taken and the other left.
But that other, asleep in his bed at the sacred moment when she parted,
suddenly waked, and said to Soldier Joe: "Did you speak, Joe?  Did you
call me?"

But Joe, who had been playing cards with himself, replied, "I haven't
said a word."

And Jacques then added: "Perhaps I dream--perhaps."

On the advice of the doctor and Freddy Tarlton, the bad news was kept
from Jacques.  When she did not come the next day, Joe told him that she
couldn't; that he ought to remember she had had no rest for weeks, and
had earned a long rest.  And Jacques said that was so.

Weir began preparations for the funeral, but Freddy Tarlton took them out
of his hands--Freddy Tarlton, who visited at the homes of Fort Latrobe.
But he had the strength of his convictions such as they were.  He began
by riding thirty miles and back to ask the young clergyman at Purple Hill
to come and bury Blanche.  She'd reformed and been baptised, Freddy said
with a sad sort of humour.  And the clergyman, when he knew all, said
that he would come.  Freddy was hardly prepared for what occurred when he
got back.  Men were waiting for him, anxious to know if the clergyman was
coming.  They had raised a subscription to cover the cost of the funeral,
and among them were men such as Harry Delong.

"You fellows had better not mix yourselves up in this," said Freddy.

But Harry Delong replied quickly: "I am going to see the thing through."
And the others endorsed his words.  When the clergyman came, and looked
at the face of this Magdalene, he was struck by its comeliness and quiet.
All else seemed to have been washed away.  On her breast lay a knot of
white roses--white roses in this winter desert.

One man present, seeing the look of wonder in the clergyman's eyes, said
quietly: "My--my wife sent them.  She brought the plant from Quebec.  It
has just bloomed.  She knows all about her."

That man was Harry Delong.  The keeper of his home understood the other
homeless woman.  When she knew of Blanche's death she said: "Poor girl,
poor girl!" and then she had gently added, "Poor Jacques!"

And Jacques, as he sat in a chair by the fire four days after the
tragedy, did not know that the clergyman was reading over a grave on
the hillside, words which are for the hearts of the quick as for the
untenanted dead.

To Jacques's inquiries after Blanche, Soldier Joe had made changing and
vague replies.  At last he said that she was ill; then, that she was very
ill, and again, that she was better, almighty better--now.  The third day
following the funeral, Jacques insisted that he would go and see her.
The doctor at length decided he should be taken to Weir's Tavern, where,
they declared, they would tell him all.  And they took him, and placed
him by the fire in the card-room, a wasted figure, but fastidious in
manner and scrupulously neat in person as of old.  Then he asked for
Blanche; but even now they had not the courage for it.  The doctor
nervously went out, as if to seek her; and Freddy Tarlton said, "Jacques,
let us have a little game, just for quarters, you know.  Eh?"

The other replied without eagerness: "Voila, one game, then!"

They drew him to the table, but he played listlessly.  His eyes shifted
ever to the door.  Luck was against him.  Finally he pushed over a silver
piece, and said: "The last.  My money is all gone.  'Bien!'"  He lost
that too.

Just then the door opened, and a ranchman from Purple Hill entered.  He
looked carelessly round, and then said loudly:

"Say, Joe, so you've buried Blanche, have you?  Poor old girl!"

There was a heavy silence.  No one replied.  Jacques started to his feet,
gazed around searchingly, painfully, and presently gave a great gasp.
His hands made a chafing motion in the air, and then blood showed on his
lips and chin.  He drew a handkerchief from his breast.

"Pardon!  .  .  .  Pardon!" he faintly cried in apology, and put it to
his mouth.

Then he fell backwards in the arms of Soldier Joe, who wiped a moisture
from the lifeless cheek as he laid the body on a bed.

In a corner of the stained handkerchief they found the word,

Blanche.






A SANCTUARY OF THE PLAINS

Father Corraine stood with his chin in his hand and one arm supporting
the other, thinking deeply.  His eyes were fixed on the northern horizon,
along which the sun was casting oblique rays; for it was the beginning of
the winter season.

Where the prairie touched the sun it was responsive and radiant; but on
either side of this red and golden tapestry there was a tawny glow and
then a duskiness which, curving round to the north and east, became blue
and cold--an impalpable but perceptible barrier rising from the earth,
and shutting in Father Corraine like a prison wall.  And this shadow
crept stealthily on and invaded the whole circle, until, where the
radiance had been, there was one continuous wall of gloom, rising are
upon are to invasion of the zenith, and pierced only by some intrusive
wandering stars.

And still the priest stood there looking, until the darkness closed down
on him with an almost tangible consistency.  Then he appeared to remember
himself, and turned away with a gentle remonstrance of his head, and
entered the hut behind him.  He lighted a lamp, looked at it doubtfully,
blew it out, set it aside, and lighted a candle.  This he set in the one
window of the room which faced the north and west.

He went to a door opening into the only other room in the hut, and with
his hand on the latch looked thoughtfully and sorrowfully at something in
the corner of the room where he stood.  He was evidently debating upon
some matter,--probably the removal of what was in the corner to the other
room.  If so, he finally decided to abandon the intention.  He sat down
in a chair, faced the candle, again dropped his chin upon his hand, and
kept his eyes musingly on the light.  He was silent and motionless a long
time, then his lips moved, and he seemed to repeat something to himself
in whispers.

Presently he took a well-worn book from his pocket, and read aloud from
it softly what seemed to be an office of his Church.  His voice grew
slightly louder as he continued, until, suddenly, there ran through the
words a deep sigh which did not come from himself.  He raised his head
quickly, started to his feet, and turning round, looked at that something
in the corner.  It took the form of a human figure, which raised itself
on an elbow and said: "Water--water--for the love of God!"

Father Corraine stood painfully staring at the figure for a moment, and
then the words broke from him "Not dead--not dead--wonderful!"  Then he
stepped quickly to a table, took therefrom a pannikin of water, and
kneeling, held it to the lips of the gasping figure of a woman, throwing
his arm round the shoulder, and supporting the head on his breast.  Again
he spoke "Alive--alive!  Blessed be Heaven!"

The hands of the woman seized the hand of the priest, which held the
pannikin, and kissed it, saying faintly: "You are good to me.  .  .  .
But I must sleep--I must sleep--I am so tired; and I've--very far--to go
--across the world."

This was said very slowly, then the head thick with brown curls dropped
again on the priest's breast, heavy with sleep.  Father Corraine,
flushing slightly at first, became now slightly pale, and his brow was a
place of war between thankfulness and perplexity.  But he said something
prayerfully, then closed his lips firmly, and gently laid the figure
down, where it was immediately clothed about with slumber.  Then he rose,
and standing with his eyes bent upon the sleeper and his fingers clasping
each other tightly before him, said: "Poor girl!  So, she is alive.  And
now what will come of it?"

He shook his grey head in doubt, and immediately began to prepare some
simple food and refreshment for the sufferer when she should awake.  In
the midst of doing so he paused and repeated the words, "And what will
come of it?"  Then he added: "There was no sign of pulse nor heart-beat
when I found her.  But life hides itself where man cannot reach it."

Having finished his task, he sat down, drew the book of holy offices
again from his bosom, and read it, whisperingly, for a time; then fell to
musing, and, after a considerable time, knelt down as if in prayer.
While he knelt, the girl, as if startled from her sleep by some inner
shock, opened her eyes wide and looked at him, first with bewilderment,
then with anxiety, then with wistful thankfulness.  "Oh, I thought--
I thought when I awoke before that it was a woman.  But it is the good
Father Corraine--Corraine, yes, that was the name."

The priest's clean-shaven face, long hair, and black cassock had, in her
first moments of consciousness, deceived her.  Now a sharp pain brought
a moan to her lips; and this drew the priest's attention.  He rose, and
brought her some food and drink.  "My daughter," he said, "you must take
these."  Something in her face touched his sensitive mind, and he said,
solemnly: "You are alone with me and God, this hour.  Be at peace.  Eat."

Her eyes swam with instant tears.  "I know--I am alone--with God," she
said.  Again he gently urged the food upon her, and she took a little;
but now and then she put her hand to her side as if in pain.  And once,
as she did so, she said: "I've far to go and the pain is bad.  Did they
take him away?"

Father Corraine shook his head.  "I do not know of whom you speak," he
replied.  "When I went to my door this morning I found you lying there.
I brought you in, and, finding no sign of life in you, sent Featherfoot,
my Indian, to Fort Cypress for a trooper to come; for I feared that there
had been ill done to you, somehow.  This border-side is but a rough
country.  It is not always safe for a woman to travel alone."

The girl shuddered.  "Father," she said  "Father Corraine, I believe you
are?"  (Here the priest bowed his head.)  "I wish to tell you all, so
that if ever any evil did come to me, if I should die without doin'
what's in my heart to do, you would know, and would tell him if you ever
saw him, how I remembered, and kept rememberin' him always, till my heart
got sick with waitin', and I came to find him far across the seas."

"Tell me your tale, my child," he patiently said.  Her eyes were on the
candle in the window questioningly.  "It is for the trooper--to guide
him," the other remarked.  "'Tis past time that he should be here.  When
you are able you can go with him to the Fort.  You will be better cared
for there, and will be among women."

"The man--the man who was kind to me--I wish I knew of him," she said.

"I am waiting for your story, my child.  Speak of your trouble, whether
it be of the mind and body, or of the soul."

"You shall judge if it be of the soul," she answered.

"I come from far away.  I lived in old Donegal since the day that I was
born there, and I had a lover, as brave and true a lad as ever trod the
world.  But sorrow came.  One night at Farcalladen Rise there was a crack
of arms and a clatter of fleeing hoofs, and he that I loved came to me
and said a quick word of partin', and with a kiss--it's burnin' on my
lips yet--askin' pardon, father, for speech of this to you--and he was
gone, an outlaw, to Australia.  For a time word came from him.  Then I
was taken ill and couldn't answer his letters, and a cousin of my own,
who had tried to win my love, did a wicked thing.  He wrote a letter to
him and told him I was dyin', and that there was no use of farther words
from him.  And never again did word come to me from him.  But I waited,
my heart sick with longin' and full of hate for the memory of the man
who, when struck with death, told me of the cruel deed he had done
between us two."

She paused, as she had to do several times during the recital, through
weariness or pain; but, after a moment, proceeded.  "One day, one
beautiful day, when the flowers were like love to the eye, and the larks
singin' overhead, and my thoughts goin' with them as they swam until they
were lost in the sky, and every one of them a prayer for the lad livin'
yet, as I hoped, somewhere in God's universe--there rode a gentleman down
Farcalladen Rise.  He stopped me as I walked, and said a kind good-day to
me; and I knew when I looked into his face that he had word for me--the
whisperin' of some angel, I suppose, and I said to him as though he had
asked me for it, 'My name is Mary Callen, sir.'

"At that he started, and the colour came quick to his face; and he said:
'I am Sir Duke Lawless.  I come to look for Mary Callen's grave.  Is
there a Mary Callen dead, and a Mary Callen livin'? and did both of them
love a man that went from Farcalladen Rise one wild night long ago?'

"'There's but one Mary Callen,' said I, 'but the heart of me is dead,
until I hear news that brings it to life again?'

"'And no man calls you wife?' he asked.

"'No man, Sir Duke Lawless,' answered I.  'And no man ever could, save
him that used to write me of you from the heart of Australia; only there
was no Sir to your name then.'

"'I've come to that since,' said he.

"'Oh, tell me,' I cried, with a quiverin' at my heart, 'tell me, is he
livin'?'

"And he replied: 'I left him in the Pipi Valley of the Rocky Mountains a
year ago.'

"'A year ago!' said I, sadly.

"'I'm ashamed that I've been so long in comin' here,' replied he; 'but,
of course, he didn't know that you were alive, and I had been parted from
a lady for years--a lover's quarrel--and I had to choose between courtin'
her again and marryin' her, or comin' to Farcalladen Rise at once.  Well,
I went to the altar first.'

"'Oh, sir, you've come with the speed of the wind, for now that I've news
of him, it is only yesterday that he went away, not years agone.  But
tell me, does he ever think of me?' I questioned.

"'He thinks of you,' he said, 'as one for whom the masses for the dead
are spoken; but while I knew him, first and last, the memory of you was
with him.'

"With that he got off his horse, and said: 'I'll walk with you to his
father's home.'

"'You'll not do that,' I replied; 'for it's level with the ground.  God
punish them that did it!  And they're lyin' in the glen by the stream
that he loved and galloped over many a time.'

"'They are dead--they are dead, then,' said he, with his bridle swung
loose on his arm and his hat off reverently.

"'Gone home to Heaven together,' said I, 'one day and one hour, and a
prayer on their lips for the lad; and I closin' their eyes at the last.
And before they went they made me sit by them and sing a song that's
common here with us; for manny and manny of the strength and pride of
Farcalladen Rise have sailed the wide seas north and south, and
otherwhere, and comin' back maybe and maybe not.'

"'Hark,' he said, very gravely, 'and I'll tell you what it is, for I've
heard him sing it, I know, in the worst days and the best days that ever
we had, when luck was wicked and big against us and we starvin' on the
wallaby track; or when we found the turn in the lane to brighter days.'

"And then with me lookin' at him full in the eyes, gentleman though he
was,--for comrade he had been with the man I loved,--he said to me there,
so finely and kindly, it ought to have brought the dead back from their
graves to hear, these words:

   "'You'll travel far and wide, dear, but you'll come back again,
     You'll come back to your father and your mother in the glen,
     Although we should be lyin' 'neath the heather grasses then
     You'll be comin' back, my darlin'!'

     "'You'll see the icebergs sailin' along the wintry foam,
     The white hair of the breakers, and the wild swans as they roam;
     But you'll not forget the rowan beside your father's home--
     You'll be comin' back, my darlin'.'"

Here the girl paused longer than usual, and the priest dropped his
forehead in his hand sadly.

"I've brought grief to your kind heart, father," she said.

"No, no," he replied, "not sorrow at all; but I was born on the Liffey
side, though it's forty years and more since I left it, and I'm an old
man now.  That song I knew well, and the truth and the heart of it too.
.  .  .  I am listening."

"Well, together we went to the grave of the father and mother, and the
place where the home had been, and for a long time he was silent, as
though they who slept beneath the sod were his, and not another's;
but at last he said:

"'And what will you do?  I don't quite know where he is, though; when
last I heard from him and his comrades, they were in the Pipi Valley.'

"My heart was full of joy; for though I saw how touched he was because of
what he saw, it was all common to my sight, and I had grieved much, but
had had little delight; and I said:

"'There's only one thing to be done.  He cannot come back here, and I
must go to him--that is,' said I, 'if you think he cares for me still,
--for my heart quakes at the thought that he might have changed.'

"'I know his heart,' said he, 'and you'll find him, I doubt not, the
same, though he buried you long ago in a lonely tomb,--the tomb of a
sweet remembrance, where the flowers are everlastin'.'  Then after more
words he offered me money with which to go; but I said to him that the
love that couldn't carry itself across the sea by the strength of the
hands and the sweat of the brow was no love at all; and that the harder
was the road to him the gladder I'd be, so that it didn't keep me too
long, and brought me to him at last.

"He looked me up and down very earnestly for a minute, and then he said:
'What is there under the roof of heaven like the love of an honest woman!
It makes the world worth livin' in.'

"'Yes,' said I, 'when love has hope, and a place to lay its head.'

"'Take this,' said he--and he drew from his pocket his watch--'and carry
it to him with the regard of Duke Lawless, and this for yourself'--
fetching from his pocket a revolver and putting it into my hands; 'for
the prairies are but rough places after all, and it's better to be safe
than--worried.  .  .  .  Never fear though but the prairies will bring
back the finest of blooms to your cheek, if fair enough it is now, and
flush his eye with pride of you; and God be with you both, if a sinner
may say that, and breakin' no saint's prerogative.'  And he mounted to
ride away, havin' shaken my hand like a brother; but he turned again
before he went, and said: 'Tell him and his comrades that I'll shoulder
my gun and join them before the world is a year older, if I can.  For
that land is God's land, and its people are my people, and I care not
who knows it, whatever here I be.'

"I worked my way across the sea, and stayed awhile in the East earning
money to carry me over the land and into the Pipi Valley.  I joined a
party of emigrants that were goin' westward, and travelled far with them.
But they quarrelled and separated, I goin' with these that I liked best.
One night though, I took my horse and left; for I knew there was evil in
the heart of a man who sought me continually, and the thing drove me mad.
I rode until my horse could stumble no farther, and then I took the
saddle for a pillow and slept on the bare ground.  And in the morning I
got up and rode on, seein' no house nor human being for manny and manny a
mile.  When everything seemed hopeless I came suddenly upon a camp.  But
I saw that there was only one man there, and I should have turned back,
but that I was worn and ill, and, moreover, I had ridden almost upon him.
But he was kind.  He shared his food with me, and asked me where I was
goin'.  I told him, and also that I had quarrelled with those of my party
and had left them nothing more.  He seemed to wonder that I was goin' to
Pipi Valley; and when I had finished my tale he said: 'Well, I must tell
you that I am not good company for you.  I have a name that doesn't pass
at par up here.  To speak plain truth, troopers are looking for me, and
--strange as it may be--for a crime which I didn't commit.  That is the
foolishness of the law.  But for this I'm making for the American border,
beyond which, treaty or no treaty, a man gets refuge.'

"He was silent after that, lookin' at me thoughtfully the while, but in a
way that told me I might trust him, evil though he called himself.  At
length he said: 'I know a good priest, Father Corraine, who has a cabin
sixty miles or more from here, and I'll guide you to him, if so be you
can trust a half-breed and a gambler, and one men call an outlaw.  If
not, I'm feared it'll go hard with you; for the Cypress Hills are not
easy travel, as I've known this many a year.  And should you want a name
to call me, Pretty Pierre will do, though my godfathers and godmothers
did different for me before they went to Heaven.'  And nothing said he
irreverently, father."

Here the priest looked up and answered: "Yes, yes, I know him well--an
evil man, and yet he has suffered too .  .  .  Well, well, my daughter?"

"At that he took his pistol from his pocket and handed it.  'Take that,'
he said.  'It will make you safer with me, and I'll ride ahead of you,
and we shall reach there by sundown, I hope.'

"And I would not take his pistol, but, shamed a little, showed him the
one Sir Duke Lawless gave me.  'That's right,' he said, 'and, maybe, it's
better that I should carry mine, for, as I said, there are anxious
gentlemen lookin' for me, who wish to give me a quiet but dreary home.
And see,' he added, 'if they should come you will be safe, for they sit
in the judgment seat, and the statutes hang at their saddles, and I'll
say this for them, that a woman to them is as a saint of God out here
where women and saints are few.'

"I do not speak as he spoke, for his words had a turn of French; but I
knew that, whatever he was, I should travel peaceably with him.  Yet I
saw that he would be runnin' the risk of his own safety for me, and I
told him that I could not have him do it; but he talked me lightly down,
and we started.  We had gone but a little distance, when there galloped
over a ridge upon us, two men of the party I had left, and one, I saw,
was the man I hated; and I cried out and told Pretty Pierre.  He wheeled
his horse, and held his pistol by him.  They said that I should come with
them, and they told a dreadful lie--that I was a runaway wife; but Pierre
answered them they lied.  At this, one rode forward suddenly, and
clutched me at my waist to drag me from my horse.  At this, Pierre's
pistol was thrust in his face, and Pierre bade him cease, which he did;
but the other came down with a pistol showin', and Pierre, seein' they
were determined, fired; and the man that clutched at me fell from his
horse.  Then the other drew off; and Pierre got down, and stooped, and
felt the man's heart, and said to the other: 'Take your friend away, for
he is dead; but drop that pistol of yours on the ground first.' And the
man did so; and Pierre, as he looked at the dead man, added: 'Why did he
make me kill him?'

"Then the two tied the body to the horse, and the man rode away with it.
We travelled on without speakin' for a long time, and then I heard him
say absently: 'I am sick of that.  When once you have played shuttlecock
with human life, you have to play it to the end--that is the penalty.
But a woman is a woman, and she must be protected.'  Then afterward he
turned and asked me if I had friends in Pipi Valley; and because what he
had done for me had worked upon me, I told him of the man I was goin' to
find.  And he started in his saddle, and I could see by the way he
twisted the mouth of his horse that I had stirred him."

Here the priest interposed: "What is the name of the man in Pipi Valley
to whom you are going?"

And the girl replied: "Ah, father, have I not told you?  It is Shon
McGann--of Farcalladen Rise."

At this, Father Corraine seemed suddenly troubled, and he looked
strangely and sadly at her.  But the girl's eyes were fastened on the
candle in the window, as if she saw her story in it; and she continued:
"A colour spread upon him, and then left him pale; and he said: 'To Shon
McGann--you are going to him?  Think of that--that!' For an instant I
thought a horrible smile played upon his face, and I grew frightened, and
said to him: 'You know him.  You are not sorry that you are helping me?
You and Shon McGann are not enemies?'

"After a moment the smile that struck me with dread passed, and he said,
as he drew himself up with a shake: 'Shon McGann and I were good friends-
as good as ever shared a blanket or split a loaf, though he was free of
any evil, and I failed of any good....  Well, there came a change.  We
parted.  We could meet no more; but who could have guessed this thing?
Yet, hear me--I am no enemy of Shon McGann, as let my deeds to you
prove.' And he paused again, but added presently: 'It's better you should
have come now than two years ago.

"And I had a fear in my heart, and to this asked him why.  'Because then
he was a friend of mine,' he said, 'and ill always comes to those who are
such.' I was troubled at this, and asked him if Shon was in Pipi Valley
yet.  'I do not know,' said he, 'for I've travelled long and far from
there; still, while I do not wish to put doubt into your mind, I have a
thought he may be gone.  .  .  .  He had a gay heart,' he continued, 'and
we saw brave days together.'

"And though I questioned him, he told me little more, but became silent,
scannin' the plains as we rode; but once or twice he looked at me in a
strange fashion, and passed his hand across his forehead, and a grey look
came upon his face.  I asked him if he was not well.  'Only a kind of
fightin' within,' he said; 'such things soon pass, and it is well they
do, or we should break to pieces.'

"And I said again that I wished not to bring him into danger.  And he
replied that these matters were accordin' to Fate; that men like him must
go on when once the die is cast, for they cannot turn back.  It seemed to
me a bitter creed, and I was sorry for him.  Then for hours we kept an
almost steady silence, and comin' at last to the top of a rise of land he
pointed to a spot far off on the plains, and said that you, father, lived
there; and that he would go with me still a little way, and then leave
me.  I urged him to go at once, but he would not, and we came down into
the plains.  He had not ridden far when he said sharply:

"'The Riders of the Plains, those gentlemen who seek me, are there--see!
Ride on or stay, which you please.  If you go you will reach the priest,
if you stay here where I shall leave you, you will see me taken perhaps,
and it may be fightin' or death; but you will be safe with them.  On the
whole, it is best, perhaps, that you should ride away to the priest.
They might not believe all that you told them, ridin' with me as you
are.'

"But I think a sudden madness again came upon me.  Rememberin' what
things were done by women for refugees in old Donegal, and that this man
had risked his life for me, I swung my horse round nose and nose with
his, and drew my revolver, and said that I should see whatever came to
him.  He prayed me not to do so wild a thing; but when I refused, and
pushed on along with him, makin' at an angle for some wooded hills, I saw
that a smile played upon his face.  We had almost reached the edge of the
wood when a bullet whistled by us.  At that the smile passed and a
strange look came upon him, and he said to me:

"'This must end here.  I think you guess I have no coward's blood; but I
am sick to the teeth of fightin'.  I do not wish to shock you, but I
swear, unless you turn and ride away to the left towards the priest's
house, I shall save those fellows further trouble by killin' myself here;
and there,' said he, 'would be a pleasant place to die--at the feet of a
woman who trusted you.'

"I knew by the look in his eye he would keep his word.  "'Oh, is this
so?' I said.

"'It is so,' he replied, 'and it shall be done quickly, for the courage
to death is on me.'

"'But if I go, you will still try to escape?' I said.  And he answered
that he would.  Then I spoke a God-bless-you, at which he smiled and
shook his head, and leanin' over, touched my hand, and spoke low: 'When
you see Shon McGann, tell him what I did, and say that we are even now.
Say also that you called Heaven to bless me.' Then we swung away from
each other, and the troopers followed after him, but let me go my way;
from which, I guessed, they saw I was a woman.  And as I rode I heard
shots, and turned to see; but my horse stumbled on a hole and we fell
together, and when I waked, I saw that the poor beast's legs were broken.
So I ended its misery, and made my way as best I could by the stars to
your house; but I turned sick and fainted at the door, and knew no more
until this hour.  .  .  .  You thought me dead, father?"

The priest bowed his head, and said: "These are strange, sad things, my
child; and they shall seem stranger to you when you hear all."

"When I hear all!  Ah, tell me, father, do you know Shon McGann?  Can you
take me to him?"

"I know him, but I do not know where he is.  He left the Pipi Valley
eighteen months ago, and I never saw him afterwards; still I doubt not he
is somewhere on the plains, and we shall find him--we shall find him,
please Heaven."

"Is he a good lad, father?"

"He is brave, and he was always kind.  He came to me before he left the
valley--for he had trouble--and said to me: 'Father, I am going away, and
to what place is far from me to know, but wherever it is, I'll live a
life that's fit for men, and not like a loafer on God's world;' and he
gave me money for masses to be said--for the dead."

The girl put out her hand.  "Hush!  hush!" she said.  "Let me think.
Masses for the dead....  What dead?  Not for me; he thought me dead long,
long ago."

"No; not for you," was the slow reply.

She noticed his hesitation, and said: "Speak.  I know that there is
sorrow on him.  Someone--someone--he loved?"

"Someone he loved," was the reply.

"And she died?"  The priest bowed his head.

"She was his wife--Shon's wife"? and Mary Callen could not hide from her
words the hurt she felt.

"I married her to him, but yet she was not his wife."  There was a keen
distress in the girl's voice.  "Father, tell me, tell me what you mean."

"Hush, and I will tell you all.  He married her, thinking, and she
thinking, that she was a widowed woman.  But her husband came back.
A terrible thing happened.  The woman believing, at a painful time, that
he who came back was about to take Shon's life, fired at him, and wounded
him, and then killed herself."

Mary Callen raised herself upon her elbow, and looked at the priest in
piteous bewilderment.  "It is dreadful," she said.  .  .  .  "Poor woman!
.  .  .  And he had forgotten--forgotten me.  I was dead to him, and am
dead to him now.  There's nothing left but to draw the cold sheet of the
grave over me.  Better for me if I had never come--if I had never come,
and instead were lyin' by his father and mother beneath the rowan."

The priest took her wrist firmly in his.  "These are not brave nor
Christian words, from a brave and Christian girl.  But I know that grief
makes one's words wild.  Shon McGann shall be found.  In the days when I
saw him most and best, he talked of you as an angel gone, and he had
never sought another woman had he known that you lived.  The Mounted
Police, the Riders of the Plains, travel far and wide.  But now, there
has come from the farther West a new detachment to Fort Cypress, and they
may be able to help us.  But listen.  There is something more.  The man
Pretty Pierre, did he not speak puzzling words concerning himself and
Shon McGann?  And did he not say to you at the last that they were even
now?  Well, can you not guess?"

Mary Callen's bosom heaved painfully and her eyes stared so at the candle
in the window that they seemed to grow one with the flame.  At last a new
look crept into them; a thought made the lids close quickly as though it
burned them.  When they opened again they were full of tears that shone
in the shadow and dropped slowly on her cheeks and flowed on and on,
quivering too in her throat.

The priest said: "You understand, my child?"

And she answered: "I understand.  Pierre, the outlaw, was her husband."

Father Corraine rose and sat beside the table, his book of offices open
before him.  At length he said: "There is much that might be spoken; for
the Church has words for every hour of man's life, whatever it be; but
there comes to me now a word to say, neither from prayer nor psalm, but
from the songs of a country where good women are; where however poor the
fireside, the loves beside it are born of the love of God, though the
tongue be angry now and then, the foot stumble, and the hand quick at a
blow."  Then, with a soft, ringing voice, he repeated:

 "'New friends will clasp your hand, dear, new faces on you smile--
   You'll bide with them and love them, but you'll long for us the while;

   For the word across the water, and the farewell by the stile--
   For the true heart's here, my darlin'.'"

Mary Callen's tears flowed afresh at first; but soon after the voice
ceased she closed her eyes and her sobs stopped, and Father Corraine sat
down and became lost in thought as he watched the candle.  Then there
went a word among the spirits watching that he was not thinking of the
candle, or of them that the candle was to light on the way, nor even of
this girl near him, but of a summer forty years gone when he was a goodly
youth, with the red on his lip and the light in his eye, and before him,
leaning on a stile, was a lass with--

               " .  .  .  cheeks like the dawn of day."

And all the good world swam in circles, eddying ever inward until it
streamed intensely and joyously through her eyes "blue as the fairy
flax."  And he had carried the remembrance of this away into the world
with him, but had never gone back again.  He had travelled beyond the
seas to live among savages and wear out his life in self-denial; and now
he had come to the evening of his life, a benignant figure in a lonely
land.  And as he sat here murmuring mechanically bits of an office, his
heart and mind were with a sacred and distant past.  Yet the spirits
recorded both these things on their tablets, as though both were worthy
of their remembrance.

He did not know that he kept repeating two sentences over and over to
himself:

"'Quoniam ipse liberavit me de laqueo venantium et a verbo aspero.
Quoniam angelis suis mandavit de te: ut custodiant te in omnibus viis
tuis.'"

These he said at first softly to himself, but unconsciously his voice
became louder, so that the girl heard, and she said:

"Father Corraine, what are those words?  I do not understand them, but
they sound comforting."

And he, waking from his dream, changed the Latin into English, and said:

   "'For he hath delivered me from the snare of the hunter, and from the
         sharp sword.
     For he hath given his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all
          thy ways.'"

"The words are good," she said.  He then told her he was going out, but
that he should be within call, saying, at the same time, that someone
would no doubt arrive from Fort Cypress soon: and he went from the house.
Then the girl rose slowly, crept lamely to a chair and sat down.
Outside, the priest paced up and down, stopping now and then, and
listening as if for horses' hoofs.  At last he walked some distance away
from the house, deeply lost in thought, and he did not notice that a man
came slowly, heavily, to the door of the hut, and opening it, entered.

Mary Callen rose from her seat with a cry in which was timidity, pity,
and something of horror; for it was Pretty Pierre.  She recoiled, but
seeing how he swayed with weakness, and that his clothes had blood upon
them, she helped him to a chair.  He looked up at her with an enigmatical
smile, but he did not speak.  "Oh," she whispered, "you are wounded!"

He nodded; but still he did not speak.  Then his lips moved dryly.  She
brought him water.  He drank deeply, and a sigh of relief escaped him.
"You got here safely," he now said.  "I am glad of that--though you, too,
are hurt."

She briefly told him how, and then he said: "Well, I suppose you know all
of me now?"

"I know what happened in Pipi Valley," she said, timidly and wearily.
"Father Corraine told me."

"Where is he?"

When she had answered him, he said: "And you are willing to speak with me
still?"

"You saved me," was her brief, convincing reply.  "How did you escape?
Did you fight?"

"No," he said.  "It is strange.  I did not fight at all.  As I said to
you, I was sick of blood.  These men were only doing their duty.  I might
have killed two or three of them, and have escaped, but to what good?
When they shot my horse, my good Sacrament,--and put a bullet into this
shoulder, I crawled away still, and led them a dance, and doubled on
them; and here I am."

"It is wonderful that they have not been here," she said.

"Yes, it is wonderful; but be very sure they will be with that candle in
the window.  Why is it there?"

She told him.  He lifted his brows in stoic irony, and said: "Well, we
shall have an army of them soon."  He rose again to his feet.  "I do not
wish to die, and I always said that I would never go to prison.  Do you
understand?"

"Yes," she replied.  She went immediately to the window, took the candle
from it, and put it behind an improvised shade.  No sooner was this done
than Father Corraine entered the room, and seeing the outlaw, said "You
have come here, Pierre?"  And his face showed wonder and anxiety.

"I have come, mon pere, for sanctuary."

"For sanctuary!  But, my son, if I vex not Heaven by calling you so,
why"--he saw Pierre stagger slightly.  "But you are wounded."  He put his
arm round the other's shoulder, and supported him till he recovered
himself.  Then he set to work to bandage anew the wound, from which
Pierre himself had not unskilfully extracted the bullet.  While doing so,
the outlaw said to him:

"Father Corraine, I am hunted like a coyote for a crime I did not commit.
But if I am arrested they will no doubt charge me with other things--
ancient things.  Well, I have said that I should never be sent to gaol,
and I never shall; but I do not wish to die at this moment, and I do not
wish to fight.  What is there left?"

"How do you come here, Pierre?"

He lifted his eyes heavily to Mary Callen, and she told Father Corraine
what had been told her.  When she had finished, Pierre added:

"I am no coward, as you will witness; but as I said, neither gaol nor
death do I wish.  Well, if they should come here, and you said, Pierre is
not here, even though I was in the next room, they would believe you, and
they would not search.  Well, I ask such sanctuary."

The priest recoiled and raised his hand in protest.  Then, after a
moment, he said:

"How do you deserve this?  Do you know what you ask?"

"Ah, oui, I know it is immense, and I deserve nothing: and in return I
can offer nothing, not even that I will repent.  And I have done no good
in the world; but still perhaps I am worth the saving, as may be seen in
the end.  As for you, well, you will do a little wrong so that the end
will be right.  So?"

The priest's eyes looked out long and sadly at the man from under his
venerable brows, as though he would see through him and beyond him to
that end; and at last he spoke in a low, firm voice:

"Pierre, you have been a bad man; but sometimes you have been generous,
and of a few good acts I know--"

"No, not good," the other interrupted.  "I ask this of your charity."

"There is the law, and my conscience."

"The law! the law!" and there was sharp satire in the half-breed's voice.
"What has it done in the West?  Think, 'mon pere!'  Do you not know a
hundred cases where the law has dealt foully?  There was more justice
before we had law.  Law--"  And he named over swiftly, scornfully, a
score of names and incidents, to which Father Corraine listened intently.
"But," said Pierre, gently, at last, "but for your conscience, m'sieu',
that is greater than law.  For you are a good man and a wise man; and you
know that I shall pay my debts of every kind some sure day.  That should
satisfy your justice, but you are merciful for the moment, and you will
spare until the time be come, until the corn is ripe in the ear.  Why
should I plead?  It is foolish.  Still, it is my whim, of which, perhaps,
I shall be sorry tomorrow .  .  .  Hark!" he added, and then shrugged
his shoulders and smiled.  There were sounds of hoof beats coming faintly
to them.  Father Corraine threw open the door of the other room of the
hut, and said "Go in there--Pierre.  We shall see .  .  .  we shall see."

The outlaw looked at the priest, as if hesitating; but, after, nodded
meaningly to himself, and entered the room and shut the door.  The priest
stood listening.  When the hoof-beats stopped, he opened the door, and
went out.  In the dark he could see that men were dismounting from their
horses.  He stood still and waited.  Presently a trooper stepped forward
and said warmly, yet brusquely, as became his office: "Father Corraine,
we meet again!"

The priest's face was overswept by many expressions, in which marvel and
trouble were uppermost, while joy was in less distinctness.

"Surely," he said, "it is Shon McGann."

"Shon McGann, and no other.--I that laughed at the law for many a year,
though never breaking it beyond repair,--took your advice, Father
Corraine, and here I am, holding that law now as my bosom friend at the
saddle's pommel.  Corporal Shon McGann, at your service."

They clasped hands, and the priest said: "You have come at my call from
Fort Cypress?"

"Yes.  But not these others.  They are after a man that's played ducks
and drakes with the statutes--Heaven be merciful to him, I say.  For
there's naught I treasure against him; the will of God bein' in it all,
with some doin' of the Devil, too, maybe."

Pretty Pierre, standing with ear to the window of the dark room, heard
all this, and he pressed his upper lip hard with his forefinger, as if
something disturbed him.

Shon continued.  "I'm glad I wasn't sent after him as all these here
know; for it's little I'd like to clap irons on his wrists, or whistle
him to come to me with a Winchester or a Navy.  So I'm here on my
business, and they're here on theirs.  Though we come together it's
because we met each other hereaway.  They've a thought that, maybe,
Pretty Pierre has taken refuge with you.  They'll little like to disturb
you, I know.  But with dead in your house, and you givin' the word of
truth, which none other could fall from your lips, they'll go on their
way to look elsewhere."

The priest's face was pinched, and there was a wrench at his heart.  He
turned to the others.  A trooper stepped forward.

"Father Corraine," he said, "it is my duty to search your house; but not
a foot will I stretch across your threshold if you say no, and give the
word that the man is not with you."

"Corporal McGann," said the priest, "the woman whom I thought was dead
did not die, as you shall see.  There is no need for inquiry.  But she
will go with you to Fort Cypress.  As for the other, you say that Father
Corraine's threshold is his own, and at his own command.  His home is now
a sanctuary--for the afflicted."  He went towards the door.  As he did
so, Mary Callen, who had been listening inside the room with shaking
frame and bursting heart, dropped on her knees beside the table, her head
in her arms.  The door opened.  "See," said the priest, "a woman who is
injured and suffering."

"Ah," rejoined the trooper, "perhaps it is the woman who was riding with
the half-breed.  We found her dead horse."

The priest nodded.  Shon McGann looked at the crouching figure by the
table pityingly.  As he looked he was stirred, he knew not why.  And she,
though she did not look, knew that his gaze was on her; and all her will
was spent in holding her eyes from his face, and from crying out to him.

"And Pretty Pierre," said the trooper, "is not here with her?"

There was an unfathomable sadness in the priest's eyes, as, with a slight
motion of the hand towards the room, he said: "You see--he is not here."

The trooper and his men immediately mounted; but one of them, young Tim
Kearney, slid from his horse, and came and dropped on his knee in front
of the priest.

"It's many a day," he said, "since before God or man I bent a knee--more
shame to me for that, and for mad days gone; but I care not who knows it,
I want a word of blessin' from the man that's been out here like a saint
in the wilderness, with a heart like the Son o' God."

The priest looked at the man at first as if scarce comprehending this act
so familiar to him, then he slowly stretched out his hand, said some
words in benediction, and made the sacred gesture.  But his face had a
strange and absent look, and he held the hand poised, even when the man
had risen and mounted his horse.  One by one the troopers rode through
the faint belt of light that stretched from the door, and were lost in
the darkness, the thud of their horses' hoofs echoing behind them.  But a
change had come over Corporal Shon McGann.  He looked at Father Corraine
with concern and perplexity.  He alone of those who were there had caught
the unreal note in the proceedings.  His eyes were bent on the darkness
into which the men had gone, and his fingers toyed for an instant with
his whistle; but he said a hard word of himself under his breath, and
turned to meet Father Corraine's hand upon his arm.

"Shon McGann," the priest said, "I have words to say to you concerning
this poor girl,"

"You wish to have her taken to the Fort, I suppose?  What was she doing
with Pretty Pierre?"

"I wish her taken to her home."

"Where is her home, father?"  And his eyes were cast with trouble on the
girl, though he could assign no cause for that.

"Her home, Shon,"--the priest's voice was very gentle--"her home was
where they sing such words as these of a wanderer:

   "'You'll hear the wild birds singin' beneath a brighter sky,'
     The roof-tree of your home, dear, it will be grand and high;
     But you'll hunger for the hearthstone where a child you used to lie,
     You'll be comin' back, my darlin'."'

During these words Shon's face ran white, then red; and now he stepped
inside the door like one in a dream, and the girl's face was lifted to
his as though he had called her.  "Mary--Mary Callen!" he cried.  His
arms spread out, then dropped to his side, and he fell on his knees by
the table facing her, and looked at her with love and horror warring in
his face; for the remembrance that she had been with Pierre was like the
hand of the grave upon him.  Moving not at all, she looked at him, a numb
despondency in her face.  Suddenly Shon's look grew stern, and he was
about to rise; but Father Corraine put a hand on his shoulder, and said:
"Stay where you are, man--on your knees.  There is your place just now.
Be not so quick to judge, and remember your own sins before you charge
others without knowledge.  Listen now to me."

And he spoke Mary Callen's tale as he knew it, and as she had given it to
him, not forgetting to mention that she had been told the thing which had
occurred in Pipi Valley.

The heroic devotion of this woman, and Pretty Pierre's act of friendship
to her, together with the swift panorama of his past across the seas,
awoke the whole man in Shon, as the staunch life that he had lately led
rendered it possible.  There was a grave, kind look upon his face when he
rose at the ending of the tale, and came to her, saying:

"Mary, it is I who need forgiveness.  Will you come now to the home you
wanted"? and he stretched his arms to her.  .  .  .

An hour after, as the three sat there, the door of the other room opened,
and Pretty Pierre came out silently, and was about to pass from the hut;
but the priest put a hand on his arm, and said:

"'Where do you go, Pierre?"

Pierre shrugged his shoulder slightly:

"I do not know.  'Mon Dieu!'--that I have put this upon you!--you that
never spoke but the truth."

"You have made my sin of no avail," the priest replied; and he motioned
towards Shon McGann, who was now risen to his feet, Mary clinging to his
arm.  "Father Corraine," said Shon, "it is my duty to arrest this man;
but I cannot do it, would not do it, if he came and offered his arms for
the steel.  I'll take the wrong of this now, sir, and such shame as there
is in that falsehood on my shoulders.  And she here and I, and this man
too, I doubt not, will carry your sin--as you call it--to our graves,
without shame."

Father Corraine shook his head sadly, and made no reply, for his soul was
heavy.  He motioned them all to sit down.  And they sat there by the
light of a flickering candle, with the door bolted and a cassock hung
across the window, lest by any chance this uncommon thing should be seen.
But the priest remained in a shadowed corner, with a little book in his
hand, and he was long on his knees.  And when morning came they had
neither slept nor changed the fashion of their watch, save for a moment
now and then, when Pierre suffered from the pain of his wound, and
silently passed up and down the little room.

The morning was half gone when Shon McGann and Mary Callen stood beside
their horses, ready to mount and go; for Mary had persisted that she
could travel--joy makes such marvellous healing.  When the moment of
parting came, Pierre was not there.  Mary whispered to her lover
concerning this.  The priest went to the door of the but and called him.
He came out slowly.

"Pierre," said Shon, "there's a word to be said between us that had best
be spoken now, though it's not aisy.  It's little you or I will care to
meet again in this world.  There's been credit given and debts paid by
both of us since the hour when we first met; and it needs thinking to
tell which is the debtor now, for deeds are hard to reckon; but, before
God, I believe it's meself;" and he turned and looked fondly at Mary
Callen.

And Pierre replied: "Shon McGann, I make no reckoning close; but we will
square all accounts here, as you say, and for the last time; for never
again shall we meet, if it's within my will or doing.  But I say I am the
debtor; and if I pay not here, there will come a time!" and he caught
his shoulder as it shrunk in pain of his wound.  He tapped the wound
lightly, and said with irony: "This is my note of hand for my debt, Shon
McGann.  Eh, bien!"

Then he tossed his fingers indolently towards Shon, and turning his eyes
slowly to Mary Callen, raised his hat in good-bye.  She put out her hand
impulsively to him, but Pierre, shaking his head, looked away.  Shon put
his hand gently on her arm.  "No, no," he said in a whisper, "there can
be no touch of hands between us."

And Pierre, looking up, added: "C'est vrai.  That is the truth.  You go--
home.  I got to hide.  So--so."  And he turned and went into the hut.

The others set their faces northward, and Father Corraine walked beside
Mary Callen's horse, talking quietly of their future life, and speaking,
as he would never speak again, of days in that green land of their birth.
At length, upon a dividing swell of the prairie, he paused to say
farewell.

Many times the two turned to see, and he was there, looking after them;
his forehead bared to the clear inspiring wind, his grey hair blown back,
his hands clasped.  Before descending the trough of a great landwave,
they turned for the last time, and saw him standing motionless, the one
solitary being in all their wide horizon.

But outside the line of vision there sat a man in a prairie hut, whose
eyes travelled over the valley of blue sky stretching away beyond the
morning, whose face was pale and cold.  For hours he sat unmoving, and
when, at last, someone gently touched him on the shoulder, he only shook
his head, and went on thinking.  He was busy with the grim ledger of his
life.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

An inner sorrow is a consuming fire
Philosophy which could separate the petty from the prodigious
Remember your own sins before you charge others





ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "PIERRE AND HIS PEOPLE":

An inner sorrow is a consuming fire
At first--and at the last--he was kind
Awkward for your friends and gratifying to your enemies
Carrying with him the warm atmosphere of a good woman's love
Courage; without which, men are as the standing straw
Delicate revenge which hath its hour with every man
Evil is half-accidental, half-natural
Fascinating colour which makes evil appear to be good
Freedom is the first essential of the artistic mind
Good is often an occasion more than a condition
Had the luck together, all kinds and all weathers
He does not love Pierre; but he does not pretend to love him
Hunger for happiness is robbery
I was born insolent
If one remembers, why should the other forget
Instinct for detecting veracity, having practised on both sides
Irishmen have gifts for only two things--words and women
It is not Justice that fills the gaols, but Law
It is not much to kill or to die--that is in the game
Knowing that his face would never be turned from me
Likenesses between the perfectly human and the perfectly animal
Longed to touch, oftener than they did, the hands of children
Meditation is the enemy of action
Men and women are unwittingly their own executioners
More idle than wicked
Mothers always forgive
My excuses were making bad infernally worse
Noise is not battle
Nothing so good as courage, nothing so base as the shifting eye
Philosophy which could separate the petty from the prodigious
Reconciling the preacher and the sinner, as many another has
Remember your own sins before you charge others
She was beginning to understand that evil is not absolute
She wasn't young, but she seemed so
The soul of goodness in things evil
The Injin speaks the truth, perhaps--eye of red man multipies
The Government cherish the Injin much in these days
The gods made last to humble the pride of men--there was rum
The higher we go the faster we live
The Barracks of the Free
The world is not so bad as is claimed for it
Time is the test, and Time will have its way with me
Whatever has been was a dream; whatever is now is real
Where I should never hear the voice of the social Thou must
You do not shout dinner till you have your knife in the loaf






A ROMANY OF THE SNOWS, Complete

BEING A CONTINUATION OF THE PERSONAL HISTORIES OF "PIERRE AND HIS PEOPLE"
AND THE LAST EXISTING RECORDS OF PRETTY PIERRE

By Gilbert Parker




CONTENTS

Volume 1.
ACROSS THE JUMPING SANDHILLS
A LOVELY BULLY
THE FILIBUSTER
THE GIFT OF THE SIMPLE KING

Volume 2.
MALACHI
THE LAKE OF THE GREAT SLAVE
THE RED PATROL
THE GOING OF THE WHITE SWAN
AT BAMBER'S BOOM

Volume 3.
THE BRIDGE HOUSE
THE EPAULETTES
THE HOUSE WITH THE BROKEN SHUTTER
THE FINDING OF FINGALL
THREE COMMANDMENTS IN THE VULGAR TONGUE

Volume 4.
LITTLE BABICHE
AT POINT O' BUGLES
THE SPOIL OF THE PUMA
THE TRAIL OF THE SUN DOGS
THE PILOT OF BELLE AMOUR

Volume 5.
THE CRUISE OF THE "NINETY-NINE"
A ROMANY OF THE SNOWS
THE PLUNDERER




     To SIR WILLIAM C. VAN HORNE.

     MY DEAR SIR WILLIAM,

     To the public it will seem fitting that these new tales of "Pierre
     and His People" should be inscribed to one whose notable career is
     inseparably associated with the life and development of the Far
     North.

     But there is a deeper and more personal significance in this
     dedication, for some of the stories were begotten in late gossip by
     your fireside; and furthermore, my little book is given a kind of
     distinction, in having on its fore-page the name of one well known
     as a connoisseur of art and a lover of literature.

               Believe me,

                    DEAR SIR WILLIAM,

                         Sincerely yours,

                              GILBERT PARKER.

     7 PARK PLACE.
     ST. JAMES'S.
     LONDON.  S. W.




INTRODUCTION

It can hardly be said that there were two series of Pierre stories.
There never was but one series, in fact.  Pierre moved through all the
thirty-nine stories of Pierre and His People and A Romany of the Snows
without any thought on my part of putting him out of existence in one
series and bringing him to life again in another.  The publication of the
stories was continuous, and at the time that Pierre and His People
appeared several of those which came between the covers of A Romany of
the Snows were passing through the pages of magazines in England and
America.  All of the thirty-nine stories might have appeared in one
volume under the title of Pierre and His People, but they were published
in two volumes with different titles in England, and in three volumes in
America, simply because there was enough material for the two and the
three volumes.  In America The Adventurer of the North was broken up into
two volumes at the urgent request of my then publishers, Messrs. Stone &
Kimball, who had the gift of producing beautiful books, but perhaps had
not the same gift of business.  These two American volumes succeeding
Pierre were published under the title of An Adventurer of the North and A
Romany of the Snows respectively.  Now, the latter title, A Romany of the
Snows, was that which I originally chose for the volume published in
England as An Adventurer of the North.  I was persuaded to reject the
title, A Romany of the Snows, by my English publisher, and I have never
forgiven myself since for being so weak.  If a publisher had the
infallible instinct for these things he would not be a publisher--
he would be an author; and though an author may make mistakes like
everybody else, the average of his hits will be far higher than the
average of his misses in such things.  The title, An Adventurer of the
North, is to my mind cumbrous and rough, and difficult in the mouth.
Compare it with some of the stories within the volume itself: for
instance, The Going of the White Swan, A Lovely Bully, At Bamber's Boom,
At Point o' Bugles, The Pilot of Belle Amour, The Spoil of the Puma, A
Romany of the Snows, and The Finding of Fingall.  There it was, however;
I made the mistake and it sticks; but the book now will be published in
this subscription edition under the title first chosen by me, A Romany of
the Snows.  It really does express what Pierre was.

Perhaps some of the stories in A Romany of the Snows have not the
sentimental simplicity of some of the earlier stories in Pierre and His
People, which take hold where a deeper and better work might not seize
the general public; but, reading these later stories after twenty years,
I feel that I was moving on steadily to a larger, firmer command of my
material, and was getting at closer grips with intimate human things.
There is some proof of what I say in the fact that one of the stories in
A Romany of the Snows, called The Going of the White Swan, appropriately
enough published originally in Scribner's Magazine, has had an
extraordinary popularity.  It has been included in the programmes of
reciters from the Murrumbidgee to the Vaal, from John O'Groat's to Land's
End, and is now being published as a separate volume in England and
America.  It has been dramatised several times, and is more alive to-day
than it was when it was published nearly twenty years ago.  Almost the
same may be said of The Three Commandments in the Vulgar Tongue.

It has been said that, apart from the colour, form, and setting, the
incidents of these Pierre stories might have occurred anywhere.  That
is true beyond a doubt, and it exactly represents my attitude of mind.
Every human passion, every incident springing out of a human passion
to-day, had its counterpart in the time of Amenhotep.  The only
difference is in the setting, is in the language or dialect which
is the vehicle of expression, and in race and character, which are the
media of human idiosyncrasy.  There is nothing new in anything that one
may write, except the outer and visible variation of race, character, and
country, which reincarnates the everlasting human ego and its scena.

The atmosphere of a story or novel is what temperament is to a man.
Atmosphere cannot be created; it is not a matter of skill; it is a matter
of personality, of the power of visualisation, of feeling for the thing
which the mind sees.  It has been said that my books possess atmosphere.
This has often been said when criticism has been more or less acute upon
other things; but I think that in all my experience there has never been
a critic who has not credited my books with that quality; and I should
say that Pierre and His People and A Romany of the Snows have an
atmosphere in which the beings who make the stories live seem natural to
their environment.  It is this quality which gives vitality to the
characters themselves.  Had I not been able to create atmosphere which
would have given naturalness to Pierre and his friends, some of the
characters, and many of the incidents, would have seemed monstrosities
--melodramatic episodes merely.  The truth is, that while the episode,
which is the first essential of a short story, was always in the very
forefront of my imagination, the character or characters in the episode
meant infinitely more to me.  To my mind the episode was always the
consequence of character.  That almost seems a paradox; but apart from
the phenomena of nature, as possible incidents in a book, the episodes
which make what are called "human situations" are, in most instances, the
sequence of character and are incidental to the law of the character set
in motion.  As I realise it now, subconsciously, my mind and imagination
were controlled by this point of view in the days of the writing of
Pierre and His People.

In the life and adventures of Pierre and his people I came, as I think,
to a certain command of my material, without losing real sympathy with
the simple nature of things.  Dexterity has its dangers, and one of its
dangers is artificiality.  It is very difficult to be skilful and to ring
true.  If I have not wholly succeeded in A Romany of the Snows, I think I
have not wholly failed, as the continued appeal of a few of the stories
would seem to show.




ACROSS THE JUMPING SANDHILLS

"Here now, Trader; aisy, aisy!  Quicksands I've seen along the sayshore,
and up to me half-ways I've been in wan, wid a double-and-twist in the
rope to pull me out; but a suckin' sand in the open plain--aw, Trader,
aw! the like o' that niver a bit saw I."

So said Macavoy the giant, when the thing was talked of in his presence.

"Well, I tell you it's true, and they're not three miles from Fort
O'Glory.  The Company's--[Hudson's Bay Company]--men don't talk about it
--what's the use!  Travellers are few that way, and you can't get the
Indians within miles of them.  Pretty Pierre knows all about them--better
than anyone else almost.  He'll stand by me in it--eh, Pierre?"

Pierre, the half-breed gambler and adventurer, took no notice, and was
silent for a time, intent on his cigarette; and in the pause Mowley the
trapper said: "Pierre's gone back on you, Trader.  P'r'aps ye haven't
paid him for the last lie.  I go one better, you stand by me--my treat
--that's the game!"

"Aw, the like o' that," added Macavoy reproachfully.  "Aw, yer tongue to
the roof o' yer mouth, Mowley.  Liars all men may be, but that's wid
wimmin or landlords.  But, Pierre, aff another man's bat like that--aw,
Mowley, fill your mouth wid the bowl o' yer pipe."

Pierre now looked up at the three men, rolling another cigarette as he
did so; but he seemed to be thinking of a distant matter.  Meeting the
three pairs of eyes fixed on him, his own held them for a moment
musingly; then he lit his cigarette, and, half reclining on the bench
where he sat, he began to speak, talking into the fire as it were.

"I was at Guidon Hill, at the Company's post there.  It was the fall of
the year, when you feel that there is nothing so good as life, and the
air drinks like wine.  You think that sounds like a woman or a priest?
Mais, no.  The seasons are strange.  In the spring I am lazy and sad; in
the fall I am gay, I am for the big things to do.  This matter was in the
fall.  I felt that I must move.  Yet, what to do?  There was the thing.
Cards, of course.  But that's only for times, not for all seasons.
So I was like a wild dog on a chain.  I had a good horse--Tophet, black
as a coal, all raw bones and joint, and a reach like a moose.  His legs
worked like piston-rods.  But, as I said, I did not know where to go or
what to do.  So we used to sit at the Post loafing: in the daytime
watching the empty plains all panting for travellers, like a young
bride waiting her husband for the first time."

Macavoy regarded Pierre with delight.  He had an unctuous spirit,
and his heart was soft for women--so soft that he never had had one on
his conscience, though he had brushed gay smiles off the lips of many.
But that was an amiable weakness in a strong man.  "Aw, Pierre," he said
coaxingly, "kape it down; aisy, aisy.  Me heart's goin' like a trip-
hammer at thought av it; aw yis, aw yis, Pierre."

"Well, it was like that to me--all sun and a sweet sting in the air.
At night to sit and tell tales and such things; and perhaps a little
brown brandy, a look at the stars, a half-hour with the cattle--the same
old game.  Of course, there was the wife of Hilton the factor--fine,
always fine to see, but deaf and dumb.  We were good friends, Ida and me.
I had a hand in her wedding.  Holy, I knew her when she was a little
girl.  We could talk together by signs.  She was a good woman; she had
never guessed at evil.  She was quick, too, like a flash, to read and
understand without words.  A face was a book to her.

"Eh bien.  One afternoon we were all standing outside the Post,
when we saw someone ride over the Long Divide.  It was good for the eyes.
I cannot tell quite how, but horse and rider were so sharp and clear-cut
against the sky, that they looked very large and peculiar--there was
something in the air to magnify.  They stopped for a minute on the top of
the Divide, and it seemed like a messenger out of the strange country at
the farthest north--the place of legends.  But, of course, it was only a
traveller like ourselves, for in a half-hour she was with us.

"Yes, it was a girl dressed as a man.  She did not try to hide it; she
dressed so for ease.  She would make a man's heart leap in his mouth--
if he was like Macavoy, or the pious Mowley there."

Pierre's last three words had a touch of irony, for he knew that the
Trapper had a precious tongue for Scripture when a missionary passed that
way, and a bad name with women to give it point.  Mowley smiled sourly;
but Macavoy laughed outright, and smacked his lips on his pipe-stem
luxuriously.

"Aw now, Pierre--all me little failin's--aw!" he protested.

Pierre swung round on the bench, leaning upon the other elbow, and,
cherishing his cigarette, presently continued:

"She had come far and was tired to death, so stiff that she could hardly
get from her horse; and the horse too was ready to drop.  Handsome enough
she looked, for all that, in man's clothes and a peaked cap, with a
pistol in her belt.  She wasn't big built--just a feathery kind of
sapling--but she was set fair on her legs like a man, and a hand that was
as good as I have seen, so strong, and like silk and iron with a horse.
Well, what was the trouble?--for I saw there was trouble.  Her eyes had
a hunted look, and her nose breathed like a deer's in the chase.  All at
once, when she saw Hilton's wife, a cry came from her and she reached out
her hands.  What would women of that sort do?  They were both of a kind.
They got into each other's arms.  After that there was nothing for us men
but to wait.  All women are the same, and Hilton's wife was like the
rest.  She must get the secret first; then the men should know.  We had
to wait an hour.  Then Hilton's wife beckoned to us.  We went inside.
The girl was asleep.  There was something in the touch of Hilton's wife
like sleep itself--like music.  It was her voice--that touch.  She could
not speak with her tongue, but her hands and face were words and music.
Bien, there was the girl asleep, all clear of dust and stain; and that
fine hand it lay loose on her breast, so quiet, so quiet.  Enfin, the
real story--for how she slept there does not matter--but it was good to
see when we knew the story."

The Trapper was laughing silently to himself to hear Pierre in this
romantic mood.  A woman's hand--it was the game for a boy, not an
adventurer; for the Trapper's only creed was that women, like deer, were
spoils for the hunter.  Pierre's keen eye noted this, but he was above
petty anger.  He merely said: "If a man have an eye to see behind the
face, he understands the foolish laugh of a man, or the hand of a good
woman, and that is much.  Hilton's wife told us all.  She had rode two
hundred miles from the south-west, and was making for Fort Micah, sixty
miles farther north.  For what?  She had loved a man against the will of
her people.  There had been a feud, and Garrison--that was the lover's
name--was the last on his own side.  There was trouble at a Company's
post, and Garrison shot a half-breed.  Men say he was right to shoot him,
for a woman's name must be safe up here.  Besides, the half-breed drew
first.  Well, Garrison was tried, and must go to jail for a year.  At the
end of that time he would be free.  The girl Janie knew the day.  Word
had come to her.  She made everything ready.  She knew her brothers were
watching--her three brothers and two other men who had tried to get her
love.  She knew also that they five would carry on the feud against
the one man.  So one night she took the best horse on the ranch and
started away towards Fort Micah.  Alors, you know how she got to Guidon
Hill after two days' hard riding--enough to kill a man, and over fifty
yet to do.  She was sure her brothers were on her track.  But if she
could get to Fort Micah, and be married to Garrison before they came;
she wanted no more.

"There were only two horses of use at Hilton's Post then; all the rest
were away, or not fit for hard travel.  There was my Tophet, and a lean
chestnut, with a long propelling gait, and not an ounce of loose skin on
him.  There was but one way: the girl must get there.  Allons, what is
the good?  What is life without these things?  The girl loves the man:
she must have him in spite of all.  There was only Hilton and his wife
and me at the Post, and Hilton was lame from a fall, and one arm in a
sling.  If the brothers followed, well, Hilton could not interfere--
he was a Company's man; but for myself, as I said, I was hungry for
adventure, I had an ache in my blood for something.  I was tingling to
the toes, my heart was thumping in my throat.  All the cords of my legs
were straightening as if I was in the saddle.

"She slept for three hours.  I got the two horses saddled.  Who could
tell but she might need help?  I had nothing to do; I knew the shortest
way to Fort Micah, every foot--and then it is good to be ready for all
things.  I told Hilton's wife what I had done.  She was glad.  She made a
gesture at me as to a brother, and then began to put things in a bag for
us to carry.  She had settled all how it was to be.  She had told the
girl.  You see, a man may be--what is it they call me?--a plunderer, and
yet a woman will trust him, comme ca!"

"Aw yis, aw yis, Pierre; but she knew yer hand and yer tongue niver wint
agin a woman, Pierre.  Naw, niver a wan.  Aw swate, swate, she was, wid a
heart--a heart, Hilton's wife, aw yis!"

Pierre waved Macavoy into silence.  "The girl waked after three hours
with a start.  Her hand caught at her heart.  'Oh,' she said, still
staring at us, 'I thought that they had come!'  A little after she and
Hilton's wife went to another room.  All at once there was a sound of
horses outside, and then a knock at the door, and four men come in.
They were the girl's hunters.

"It was hard to tell what to do all in a minute; but I saw at once the
best thing was to act for all, and to get all the men inside the house.
So I whispered to Hilton, and then pretended that I was a great man in
the Company.  I ordered Hilton to have the horses cared for, and, not
giving the men time to speak, I fetched out the old brown brandy,
wondering all the time what could be done.  There was no sound from the
other room, though I thought I heard a door open once.  Hilton played the
game well, and showed nothing when I ordered him about, and agreed word
for word with me when I said no girl had come, laughing when they told
why they were after her.  More than one of them did not believe at first;
but, pshaw, what have I been doing all my life to let such fellows doubt
me?  So the end of it was that I got them all inside the house.  There
was one bad thing--their horses were all fresh, as Hilton whispered to
me.  They had only rode them a few miles--they had stole or bought them
at the first ranch to the west of the Post.  I could not make up my mind
what to do.  But it was clear I must keep them quiet till something
shaped.

"They were all drinking brandy when Hilton's wife come into the room.
Her face was, mon Dieu!  so innocent, so childlike.  She stared at the
men; and then I told them she was deaf and dumb, and I told her why they
had come.  Voila, it was beautiful--like nothing you ever saw.  She shook
her head so innocent, and then told them like a child that they were
wicked to chase a girl.  I could have kissed her feet.  Thunder, how she
fooled them!  She said, would they not search the house?  She said all
through me, on her fingers and by signs.  And I told them at once.  But
she told me something else--that the girl had slipped out as the last man
came in, had mounted the chestnut, and would wait for me by the iron
spring, a quarter of a mile away.  There was the danger that some one of
the men knew the finger-talk, so she told me this in signs mixed up with
other sentences.

"Good!  There was now but one thing--for me to get away.  So I said,
laughing, to one of the men.  'Come, and we will look after the horses,
and the others can search the place with Hilton.'  So we went out to
where the horses were tied to the railing, and led them away to the
corral.

"Of course you will understand how I did it.  I clapped a hand on his
mouth, put a pistol at his head, and gagged and tied him.  Then I got my
Tophet, and away I went to the spring.  The girl was waiting.  There were
few words.  I gripped her hand, gave her another pistol, and then we got
away on a fine moonlit trail.  We had not gone a mile when I heard a
faint yell far behind.  My game had been found out.  There was nothing to
do but to ride for it now, and maybe to fight.  But fighting was not
good; for I might be killed, and then the girl would be caught just the
same.  We rode on--such a ride, the horses neck and neck, their hoofs
pounding the prairie like drills, rawbone to rawbone, a hell-to-split
gait.  I knew they were after us, though I saw them but once on the crest
of a Divide about three miles behind.  Hour after hour like that, with
ten minutes' rest now and then at a spring or to stretch our legs.  We
hardly spoke to each other; but, nom de Dieu!  my heart was warm to this
girl who had rode a hundred and fifty miles in twenty-four hours.  Just
before dawn, when I was beginning to think that we should easy win the
race if the girl could but hold out, if it did not kill her, the chestnut
struck a leg into the crack of the prairie, and horse and girl spilt on
the ground together.  She could hardly move, she was so weak, and her
face was like death.  I put a pistol to the chestnut's head, and ended
it.  The girl stooped and kissed the poor beast's neck, but spoke
nothing.  As I helped her on my Tophet I put my lips to the sleeve of her
dress.  Mother of Heaven!  what could a man do--she was so dam' brave.

"Dawn was just breaking oozy and grey at the swell of the prairie over
the Jumping Sandhills.  They lay quiet and shining in the green-brown
plain; but I knew that there was a churn beneath which could set those
swells of sand in motion, and make glory-to-God of an army.  Who can tell
what it is?  A flood under the surface, a tidal river-what?  No man
knows.  But they are sea monsters on the land.  Every morning at sunrise
they begin to eddy and roll--and who ever saw a stranger sight?  Bien, I
looked back.  There were those four pirates coming on, about three miles
away.  What was there to do?  The girl and myself on my blown horse were
too much.  Then a great idea come to me.  I must reach and cross the
Jumping Sandhills before sunrise.  It was one deadly chance.

"When we got to the edge of the sand they were almost a mile behind.  I
was all sick to my teeth as my poor Tophet stepped into the silt.  Sacre,
how I watched the dawn!  Slow, slow, we dragged over that velvet powder.
As we reached the farther side I could feel it was beginning to move.
The sun was showing like the lid of an eye along the plain.  I looked
back.  All four horsemen were in the sand, plunging on towards us.  By
the time we touched the brown-green prairie on the farther side the sand
was rolling behind us.  The girl had not looked back.  She seemed too
dazed.  I jumped from the horse, and told her that she must push on alone
to the Fort, that Tophet could not carry both, that I should be in no
danger.  She looked at me so deep--ah, I cannot tell how! then stooped
and kissed me between the eyes--I have never forgot.  I struck Tophet,
and she was gone to her happiness; for before 'lights out!' she reached
the Fort and her lover's arms.

"But I stood looking back on the Jumping Sandhills.  So, was there ever
a sight like that--those hills gone like a smelting-floor, the sunrise
spotting it with rose and yellow, and three horses and their riders
fighting what cannot be fought?--What could I do?  They would have got
the girl and spoiled her life, if I had not led them across, and they
would have killed me if they could.  Only one cried out, and then but
once, in a long shriek.  But after, all three were quiet as they fought,
until they were gone where no man could see, where none cries out so we
can hear.  The last thing I saw was a hand stretching up out of the
sands."

There was a long pause, painful to bear.  The Trader sat with eyes fixed
humbly as a dog's on Pierre.  At last Macavoy said: "She kissed ye,
Pierre, aw yis, she did that!  Jist betune the eyes.  Do yees iver see
her now, Pierre?"

But Pierre, looking at him, made no answer.






A LOVELY BULLY

He was seven feet and fat.  He came to Fort O'Angel at Hudson's Bay, an
immense slip of a lad, very much in the way, fond of horses, a wonderful
hand at wrestling, pretending a horrible temper, threatening tragedies
for all who differed from him, making the Fort quake with his rich roar,
and playing the game of bully with a fine simplicity.  In winter he
fattened, in summer he sweated, at all times he ate eloquently.

It was a picture to see him with the undercut of a haunch of deer or
buffalo, or with a whole prairie-fowl on his plate, his eyes measuring it
shrewdly, his coat and waistcoat open, and a clear space about him--for
he needed room to stretch his mighty limbs, and his necessity was
recognised by all.

Occasionally he pretended to great ferocity, but scowl he ever so much,
a laugh kept idling in his irregular bushy beard, which lifted about his
face in the wind like a mane, or made a kind of underbrush through which
his blunt fingers ran at hide-and-seek.

He was Irish, and his name was Macavoy.  In later days, when Fort O'Angel
was invaded by settlers, he had his time of greatest importance.

He had been useful to the Chief Trader at the Fort in the early days, and
having the run of the Fort and the reach of his knife, was little likely
to discontinue his adherence.  But he ate and drank with all the dwellers
at the Post, and abused all impartially.  "Malcolm," said he to the
Trader, "Malcolm, me glutton o' the H.B.C., that wants the Far North for
your footstool--Malcolm, you villain, it's me grief that I know you, and
me thumb to me nose in token.  "Wiley and Hatchett, the principal
settlers, he abused right and left, and said, "Wasn't there land in the
East and West, that you steal the country God made for honest men--you
robbers o' the wide world!  Me tooth on the Book, and I tell you what,
it's only me charity that kapes me from spoilin' ye.  For a wink of me
eye, an' away you'd go, leaving your tails behind you--and pass that
shoulder of bear, you pirates, till I come to it sideways, like a hog to
war."

He was even less sympathetic with Bareback the chief and his braves.
"Sons o' Anak y'are; here today and away to-morrow, like the clods of the
valley--and that's your portion, Bareback.  It's the word o' the
Pentytook--in pieces you go, like a potter's vessel.  Don't shrug your
shoulders at me, Bareback, you pig, or you'll think that Ballzeboob's
loose on the mat.  But take a sup o' this whisky, while you swear wid
your hand on your chest, 'Amin' to the words o' Tim Macavoy."

Beside Macavoy, Pierre, the notorious, was a child in height.  Up to
the time of the half-breed's coming the Irishman had been the most
outstanding man at Fort O'Angel, and was sure of a good-natured homage,
acknowledged by him with a jovial tyranny.

Pierre put a flea in his ear.  He was pensively indifferent to him even
in his most royal moments.  He guessed the way to bring down the gusto
and pride of this Goliath, but, for a purpose, he took his own time,
nodding indolently to Macavoy when he met him, but avoiding talk with
him.

Among the Indian maidens Macavoy was like a king or khan; for they count
much on bulk and beauty, and he answered to their standards--especially
to Wonta's.  It was a sight to see him of a summer day, sitting in the
shade of a pine, his shirt open, showing his firm brawny chest, his arms
bare, his face shining with perspiration, his big voice gurgling in his
beard, his eyes rolling amiably upon the maidens as they passed or
gathered near demurely, while he declaimed of mighty deeds in patois
or Chinook to the braves.

Pierre's humour was of the quietest, most subterranean kind.  He knew
that Macavoy had not an evil hair in his head; that vanity was his
greatest weakness, and that through him there never would have been
more half-breed population.  There was a tradition that he had a wife
somewhere--based upon wild words he had once said when under the
influence of bad liquor; but he had roared his accuser the lie when the
thing was imputed to him.

At Fort Ste. Anne Pierre had known an old woman, by name of Kitty Whelan,
whose character was all tatters.  She had told him that many years agone
she had had a broth of a lad for a husband; but because of a sharp word
or two across the fire, and the toss of a handful of furniture, he had
left her, and she had seen no more of him.  "Tall, like a chimney he
was," said she, "and a chest like a wall, so broad, and a voice like a
huntsman's horn, though only a b'y, an' no hair an his face; an' little I
know whether he is dead or alive; but dead belike, for he's sure to come
rap agin' somethin' that'd kill him; for he, the darlin', was that aisy
and gentle, he wouldn't pull his fightin' iron till he had death in his
ribs."

Pierre had drawn from her that the name of this man whom she had cajoled
into a marriage (being herself twenty years older), and driven to
deserting her afterwards, was Tim Macavoy.  She had married Mr. Whelan on
the assumption that Macavoy was dead.  But Mr. Whelan had not the nerve
to desert her, and so he departed this life, very loudly lamented by Mrs.
Whelan, who had changed her name with no right to do so.  With his going
her mind dwelt greatly upon the virtues of her mighty vanished Tim: and
ill would it be for Tim if she found him.

Pierre had travelled to Fort O'Angel almost wholly because he had Tim
Macavoy in his mind: in it Mrs. Whelan had only an incidental part; his
plans journeyed beyond her and her lost consort.  He was determined on an
expedition to capture Fort Comfort, which had been abandoned by the great
Company, and was now held by a great band of the Shunup Indians.

Pierre had a taste for conquest for its own sake, though he had no
personal ambition.  The love of adventure was deep in him; he adored
sport for its own sake; he had had a long range of experiences--some
discreditable--and now he had determined on a new field for his talent.

He would establish a kingdom, and resign it.  In that case he must have a
man to take his place.  He chose Macavoy.

First he must humble the giant to the earth, then make him into a great
man again, with a new kind of courage.  The undoing of Macavoy seemed a
civic virtue.  He had a long talk with Wonta, the Indian maiden most
admired by Macavoy.  Many a time the Irishman had cast an ogling, rolling
eye on her, and had talked his loudest within her ear-shot, telling of
splendid things he had done: making himself like another Samson as to
the destruction of men, and a Hercules as to the slaying of cattle.

Wonta had a sense of humour also, and when Pierre told her what was
required of her, she laughed with a quick little gurgle, and showed as
handsome a set of teeth as the half-breed's; which said much for her.
She promised to do as he wished.  So it chanced when Macavoy was at his
favourite seat beneath the pine, talking to a gaping audience, Wonta and
a number of Indian girls passed by.  Pierre was leaning against a door
smoking, not far away.  Macavoy's voice became louder.

"'Stand them up wan by wan,' says I, 'and give me a leg loose, and a fist
free; and at that--'"

"At that there was thunder and fire in the sky, and because the great
Macavoy blew his breath over them they withered like the leaves," cried
Wonta, laughing; but her laugh had an edge.

Macavoy stopped short, open-mouthed, breathing hard in his great beard.
He was astonished at Wonta's raillery; the more so when she presently
snapped her fingers, and the other maidens, laughing, did the same.  Some
of the half-breeds snapped their fingers also in sympathy, and shrugged
their shoulders.  Wonta came up to him softly, patted him on the head,
and said: "Like Macavoy there is nobody.  He is a great brave.  He is not
afraid of a coyote, he has killed prairie-hens in numbers as pebbles by
the lakes.  He has a breast like a fat ox,"--here she touched the skin of
his broad chest,--"and he will die if you do not fight him."

Then she drew back, as though in humble dread, and glided away with the
other maidens, Macavoy staring after her, with a blustering kind of shame
in his face.  The half-breeds laughed, and, one by one, they got up, and
walked away also.  Macavoy looked round: there was no one near save
Pierre, whose eye rested on him lazily.  Macavoy got to his feet,
muttering.  This was the first time in his experience at Fort O'Angel
that he had been bluffed--and by a girl; one for whom he had a very soft
place in his big heart.  Pierre came slowly over to him.

"I'd have it out with her," said he.  "She called you a bully and a
brag."

"Out with her?" cried Macavoy.  "How can ye have it out wid a woman?"

"Fight her," said Pierre pensively.

"Fight her?  fight her?  Holy smoke!  How can you fight a woman?"

"Why, what--do you--fight?" asked Pierre innocently.

Macavoy grinned in a wild kind of fashion.  "Faith, then, y'are a fool.
Bring on the divil an' all his angels, say I, and I'll fight thim where I
stand."

Pierre ran his fingers down Macavoy's arm, and said "There's time enough
for that.  I'd begin with the five."

"What five, then?"

"Her half-breed lovers: Big Eye, One Toe, Jo-John, Saucy Boy, and Limber
Legs."

"Her lovers?  Her lovers, is it?  Is there truth on y'r tongue?"

"Go to her father's tent at sunset, and you'll find one or all of them
there."

"Oh, is that it?" said the Irishman, opening and shutting his fists.
"Then I'll carve their hearts out, an' ate thim wan by wan this night."

"Come down to Wiley's," said Pierre; "there's better company there than
here."

Pierre had arranged many things, and had secured partners in his little
scheme for humbling the braggart.  He so worked on the other's good
nature that by the time they reached the settler's place, Macavoy was
stretching himself with a big pride.  Seated at Wiley's table, with
Hatchett and others near, and drink going about, someone drew the giant
on to talk, and so deftly and with such apparent innocence did Pierre, by
a word here and a nod there, encourage him, that presently he roared at
Wiley and Hatchett:

"Ye shameless buccaneers that push your way into the tracks of honest
men, where the Company's been three hundred years by the will o' God--
if it wasn't for me, ye Jack Sheppards--"

Wiley and Hatchett both got to their feet with pretended rage, saying
he'd insulted them both, that he was all froth and brawn, and giving him
the lie.

Utterly taken aback, Macavoy could only stare, puffing in his beard, and
drawing in his legs, which had been spread out at angles.  He looked from
Wiley to the impassive Pierre.  "Buccaneers, you callus," Wiley went on;
"well, we'll have no more of that, or there'll be trouble at Fort
O'Angel."

"Ah, sure y'are only jokin'," said Macavoy, "for I love ye, ye
scoundrels.  It's only me fun."

"For fun like that you'll pay, ruffian!" said Hatchett, bringing down
his fist on the table with a bang.

Macavoy stood up.  He looked confounded, but there was nothing of the
coward in his face.  "Oh, well," said he, "I'll be goin', for ye've got
y'r teeth all raspin'."

As he went the two men laughed after him mockingly.  "Wind like a bag,"
said Hatchett.  "Bone like a marrow-fat pea," added Wiley.

Macavoy was at the door, but at that he turned.  "If ye care to sail
agin' that wind, an' gnaw on that bone, I'd not be sayin' you no."

"Will to-night do--at sunset?" said Wiley.

"Bedad, then, me b'ys, sunset'll do--an' not more than two at a time," he
added softly, all the roar gone from his throat.  Then he went out,
followed by Pierre.

Hatchett and Wiley looked at each other and laughed a little confusedly.
"What's that he said?" muttered Wiley.  "Not more than two at a time,
was it?"

"That was it.  I don't know that it's what we bargained for, after all."
He looked round on the other settlers present, who had been awed by the
childlike, earnest note in Macavoy's last words.  They shook their heads
now a little sagely; they weren't so sure that Pierre's little game was
so jovial as it had promised.

Even Pierre had hardly looked for so much from his giant as yet.  In a
little while he had got Macavoy back to his old humour.

"What was I made for but war!" said the Irishman, "an' by war to kape
thim at peace, wherever I am."  Soon he was sufficiently restored in
spirits to go with Pierre to Bareback's lodge, where, sitting at the tent
door, with idlers about, he smoked with the chief and his braves.  Again
Pierre worked upon him adroitly, and again he became loud in speech, and
grandly patronising.

"I've stood by ye like a father, ye loafers," he said, "an' I give you my
word, ye howlin' rogues--"

Here Bareback and a half-dozen braves came up suddenly from the ground,
and the chief said fiercely: "You speak crooked things.  We are no
rogues.  We will fight."

Macavoy's face ran red to his hair.  He scratched his head a little
foolishly, and gathered himself up.  "Sure, 'twas only me tasin',
darlins," he said, "but I'll be comin' again, when y'are not so narvis."
He turned to go away.

Pierre made a sign to Bareback, and the Indian touched the giant on the
arm.  "Will you fight?" said he.

"Not all o' ye at once," said Macavoy slowly, running his eye carefully
along the half-dozen; "not more than three at a toime," he added with a
simple sincerity, his voice again gone like the dove's.  "At what time
will it be convaynyint for ye?" he asked.

"At sunset," said the chief, "before the Fort."  Macavoy nodded and
walked away with Pierre, whose glance of approval at the Indians did
not make them thoroughly happy.

To rouse the giant was not now so easy.  He had already three engagements
of violence for sunset.  Pierre directed their steps by a roundabout to
the Company's stores, and again there was a distinct improvement in the
giant's spirits.  Here at least he could be himself, he thought, here no
one should say him nay.  As if nerved by the idea, he plunged at once
into boisterous raillery of the Chief Trader.  "Oh, ho," he began, "me
freebooter, me captain av the looters av the North!"  The Trader snarled
at him.  "What d'ye mean, by such talk to me, sir?  I've had enough--
we've all had enough--of your brag and bounce; for you're all sweat and
swill-pipe, and I give you this for your chewing, that though by the
Company's rules I can't go out and fight you, you may have your pick of
my men for it.  I'll take my pay for your insults in pounded flesh--Irish
pemmican!"

Macavoy's face became mottled with sudden rage.  He roared, as, perhaps,
he had never roared before: "Are ye all gone mad-mad-mad?  I was jokin'
wid ye, whin I called ye this or that.  But by the swill o' me pipe, and
the sweat o' me skin, I'll drink the blood o' yees, Trader, me darlin'.
An' all I'll ask is, that ye mate me to-night whin the rest o' the pack
is in front o' the Fort--but not more than four o' yees at a time--for
little scrawney rats as y'are, too many o' yees wad be in me way."  He
wheeled and strode fiercely out.  Pierre smiled gently.

"He's a great bully that, isn't he, Trader?  There'll be fun in front of
the Fort to-night.  For he's only bragging, of course--eh?"

The Trader nodded with no great assurance, and then Pierre said as a
parting word: "You'll be there, of course--only four av ye!" and hurried
out after Macavoy, humming to himself--

         "For the King said this, and the Queen said that,
          But he walked away with their army, O!"

So far Pierre's plan had worked even better than he expected, though
Macavoy's moods had not been altogether after his imaginings.  He drew
alongside the giant, who had suddenly grown quiet again.  Macavoy turned
and looked down at Pierre with the candour of a schoolboy, and his voice
was very low:

"It's a long time ago, I'm thinkin'," he said, "since I lost me frinds--
ages an' ages ago.  For me frinds are me inimies now, an' that makes a
man old.  But I'll not say that it cripples his arm or humbles his back."
He drew his arm up once or twice and shot it out straight into the air
like a catapult.  "It's all right," he added, very softly, "an', Half-
breed, me b'y, if me frinds have turned inimies, why, I'm thinkin' me
inimy has turned frind, for that I'm sure you were, an' this I'm certain
y 'are.  So here's the grip av me fist, an' y'll have it."  Pierre
remembered that disconcerting, iron grip of friendship for many a day.
He laughed to himself to think how he was turning the braggart into a
warrior.  "Well," said Pierre, "what about those five at Wonta's tent?"

"I'll be there whin the sun dips below the Little Red Hill," he said, as
though his thoughts were far away, and he turned his face towards Wonta's
tent.  Presently he laughed out loud.  "It's manny along day," he said,
"since--"

Then he changed his thoughts.  "They've spoke sharp words in me teeth,"
he continued, "and they'll pay for it.  Bounce! sweat! brag! wind! is it?
There's dancin' beyant this night, me darlins!"

"Are you sure you'll not run away when they come on?" said Pierre, a
little ironically.

"Is that the word av a frind?" replied Macavoy, a hand fumbling in his
hair.

"Did you never run away when faced?" Pierre asked pitilessly.

"I never turned tail from a man, though, to be sure, it's been more talk
than fight up here: Fort Ste. Anne's been but a graveyard for fun these
years."

"Eh, well," persisted Pierre, "but did you never turn tail from a slip of
a woman?"

The thing was said idly.  Macavoy gathered his beard in his mouth,
chewing it confusedly.  "You've a keen tongue for a question," was his
reply.  "What for should anny man run from a woman?"

"When the furniture flies, an' the woman knows more of the world in a day
than the man does in a year; and the man's a hulking bit of an Irishman--
bien, then things are so and so!"

Macavoy drew back dazed, his big legs trembling.  "Come into the shade of
these maples," said Pierre, "for the sun has set you quaking a little,"
and he put out his hand to take Macavoy's arm.

The giant drew away from the hand, but walked on to the trees.  His face
seemed to have grown older by years on the moment.  "What's this y'are
sayin' to me?" he asked hoarsely.  "What do you know av--av that woman?"

"Malahide is a long way off," said Pierre, "but when one travels why
shouldn't the other?"

Macavoy made a helpless motion with his lumbering hand.  "Mother o'
saints," he said, "has it come to that, after all these years?  Is she--
tell me where she is, me frind, and you'll niver want an arm to fight for
ye, an' the half av a blanket, while I have wan!"

"But you'll run as you did before, if I tell you, an' there'll be no
fighting to-night, accordin' to the word you've given."

"No fightin', did ye say?  an' run away, is it?  Then this in your eye,
that if ye'll bring an army, I'll fight till the skin is in rags on me
bones, whin it's only men that's before me; but woman--and that wan!
Faith, I'd run, I'm thinkin', as I did, you know when--Don't tell me that
she's here, man; arrah, don't say that!"

There was something pitiful and childlike in the big man's voice, so much
so that Pierre, calculating gamester as he was, and working upon him as
he had been for many weeks, felt a sudden pity, and dropping his fingers
on the other's arm, said: "No, Macavoy, my friend, she is not here; but
she is at Fort Ste. Anne--or was when I left there."

Macavoy groaned.  "Does she know that I'm here?" he asked.

"I think not.  Fort Ste. Anne is far away, and she may not hear."

"What--what is she doing?"

"Keeping your memory and Mr. Whelan's green."  Then Pierre told him
somewhat bluntly what he knew of Mrs. Macavoy.

"I'd rather face Ballzeboob himself than her," said Macavoy.  "An' she's
sure to find me."

"Not if you do as I say."

"An' what is it ye say, little man?"

"Come away with me where she'll not find you."

"An' where's that, Pierre darlin'?"

"I'll tell you that when to-night's fighting's over.  Have you a mind
for Wonta?" he continued.

"I've a mind for Wonta an' many another as fine, but I'm a married man,"
he said, "by priest an' by book; an' I can't forget that, though the
woman's to me as the pit below."

Pierre looked curiously at him.  "You're a wonderful fool," he said, "but
I'm not sure that I like you less for that.  There was Shon M'Gann--but
it is no matter."  He sighed and continued: "When to-night is over, you
shall have work and fun that you've been fattening for this many a year,
and the woman'll not find you, be sure of that.  Besides--" he whispered
in Macavoy's ear.

"Poor divil, poor divil, she'd always a throat for that; but it's a
horrible death to die, I'm thinkin'."  Macavoy's chin dropped on his
breast.

When the sun was falling below Little Red Hill, Macavoy came to Wonta's
tent.  Pierre was not far away.  What occurred in the tent Pierre never
quite knew, but presently he saw Wonta run out in a frightened way,
followed by the five half-breeds, who carried themselves awkwardly.
Behind them again, with head shaking from one side to the other,
travelled Macavoy; and they all marched away towards the Fort.  "Well,"
said Pierre to Wonta, "he is amusing, eh?--so big a coward, eh?"

"No, no," she said, "you are wrong.  He is no coward.  He is a great
brave.  He spoke like a little child, but he said he would fight them
all when--"

"When their turn came," interposed Pierre, with a fine "bead" of humour
in his voice; "well, you see he has much to do."  He pointed towards the
Fort, where people were gathering fast.  The strange news had gone
abroad, and the settlement, laughing joyously, came to see Macavoy
swagger; they did not think there would be fighting.

Those whom Macavoy had challenged were not so sure.  When the giant
reached the open space in front of the Fort, he looked slowly round him.
A great change had come over him.  His skin seemed drawn together more
firmly, and running himself up finely to his full height, he looked no
longer the lounging braggart.  Pierre measured him with his eye, and
chuckled to himself.  Macavoy stripped himself of his coat and waistcoat,
and rolled up his sleeves.  His shirt was flying at the chest.

He beckoned to Pierre.

"Are you standin' me frind in this?" he said.  "Now and after," said
Pierre.

His voice was very simple.  "I never felt as I do since the day the
coast-guardsmin dropped on me in Ireland far away, an' I drew blood an
every wan o' them--fine beautiful b'ys they looked--stretchen' out on the
ground wan by wan.  D'ye know the double-an'-twist?" he suddenly added,
"for it's a honey trick whin they gather in an you, an' you can't be
layin' out wid yer fists.  It plays the divil wid the spines av thim.
Will ye have a drop av drink--cold water, man--near, an' a sponge betune
whiles?  For there's manny in the play--makin' up for lost time.  Come
on," he added to the two settlers, who stood not far away, "for ye began
the trouble, an' we'll settle accordin' to a, b, c."

Wiley and Hatchett were there.  Responding to his call, they stepped
forward, though they had now little relish for the matter.  They were
pale, but they stripped their coats and waistcoats, and Wiley stepped
bravely in front of Macavoy.  The giant looked down on him, arms folded.
"I said two of you," he crooned, as if speaking to a woman.  Hatchett
stepped forward also.  An instant after the settlers were lying on the
ground at different angles, bruised and dismayed, and little likely to
carry on the war.  Macavoy took a pail of water from the ground, drank
from it lightly, and waited.  None other of his opponents stirred.
"There's three Injins," he said, "three rid divils, that wants showin'
the way to their happy huntin' grounds.  .  .  .  Sure, y'are comin',
ain't you, me darlins?" he added coaxingly, and he stretched himself,
as if to make ready.

Bareback, the chief, now harangued the three Indians, and they stepped
forth warily.  They had determined on strategic wrestling, and not on the
instant activity of fists.  But their wiliness was useless, for Macavoy's
double-and-twist came near to lessening the Indian population of Fort
O'Angel.  It only broke a leg and an arm, however.  The Irishman came out
of the tangle of battle with a wild kind of light in his eye, his beard
all torn, and face battered.  A shout of laughter, admiration and wonder
went up from the crowd.  There was a moment's pause, and then Macavoy,
whose blood ran high, stood forth again.  The Trader came to him.

"Must this go on?" he said; "haven't you had your fill of it?"

Had he touched Macavoy with a word of humour the matter might have ended
there; but now the giant spoke loud, so all could hear.

"Had me fill av it, Trader, me angel?  I'm only gittin' the taste av it.
An' ye'll plaze bring on yer men--four it was--for the feed av Irish
pemmican."

The Trader turned and swore at Pierre, who smiled enigmatically.
Soon after, two of the best fighters of the Company's men stood forth.
Macavoy shook his head.  "Four, I said, an' four I'll have, or I'll ate
the heads aff these."

Shamed, the Trader sent forth two more.  All on an instant the four made
a rush on the giant; and there was a stiff minute after, in which it was
not clear that he was happy.  Blows rattled on him, and one or two he got
on the head, just as he tossed a man spinning senseless across the grass,
which sent him staggering backwards for a moment, sick and stunned.

Pierre called over to him swiftly: "Remember Malahide!"

This acted on him like a charm.  There never was seen such a shattered
bundle of men as came out from his hands a few minutes later.  As for
himself, he had but a rag or two on him, but stood unmindful of his
state, and the fever of battle untameable on him.  The women drew away.

"Now, me babes o' the wood," he shouted, "that sit at the feet av the
finest Injin woman in the North,--though she's no frind o' mine--and
aren't fit to kiss her moccasin, come an wid you, till I have me fun wid
your spines."

But a shout went up, and the crowd pointed.  There were the five half-
breeds running away across the plains.

The game was over.

"Here's some clothes, man; for Heaven's sake put them on," said the
Trader.

Then the giant became conscious of his condition, and like a timid girl
he hurried into the clothing.

The crowd would have carried him on their shoulders, but he would have
none of it.

"I've only wan frind here," he said, "an' it's Pierre, an' to his shanty
I go an' no other."

"Come, mon ami," said Pierre, "for to-morrow we travel far."

"And what for that?" said Macavoy.

Pierre whispered in his ear: "To make you a king, my lovely bully."






THE FILIBUSTER

Pierre had determined to establish a kingdom, not for gain, but for
conquest's sake.  But because he knew that the thing would pall, he took
with him Macavoy the giant, to make him king instead.  But first he made
Macavoy from a lovely bully, a bulk of good-natured brag, into a Hercules
of fight; for, having made him insult--and be insulted by--near a score
of men at Fort O'Angel, he also made him fight them by twos, threes, and
fours, all on a summer's evening, and send them away broken.  Macavoy
would have hesitated to go with Pierre, were it not that he feared a
woman.  Not that he had wronged her; she had wronged him: she had married
him.  And the fear of one's own wife is the worst fear in the world.

But though his heart went out to women, and his tongue was of the race
that beguiles, he stood to his "lines" like a man, and people wondered.
Even Wonta, the daughter of Foot-in-the-Sun, only bent him, she could not
break him to her will.  Pierre turned her shy coaxing into irony--that
was on the day when all Fort O'Angel conspired to prove Macavoy a child
and not a warrior.  But when she saw what she had done, and that the
giant was greater than his years of brag, she repented, and hung a dead
coyote at Pierre's door as a sign of her contempt.

Pierre watched Macavoy, sitting with a sponge of vinegar to his head,
for he had had nasty joltings in his great fight.  A little laugh came
crinkling up to the half-breed's lips, but dissolved into silence.

"We'll start in the morning," he said.

Macavoy looked up.  "Whin you plaze; but a word in your ear; are you sure
she'll not follow us?"

"She doesn't know.  Fort Ste. Anne is in the south, and Fort Comfort,
where we go, is far north."

"But if she kem!" the big man persisted.

"You will be a king; you can do as other kings have done," Pierre
chuckled.

The other shook his head.  "Says Father Nolan to me, says he, "tis till
death us do part, an' no man put asunder'; an' I'll stand by that, though
I'd slice out the bist tin years av me life, if I niver saw her face
again."

"But the girl, Wonta--what a queen she'd make!"

"Marry her yourself, and be king yourself, and be damned to you!  For
she, like the rest, laughed in me face, whin I told thim of the day whin
I--"

"That's nothing.  She hung a dead coyote at my door.  You don't know
women.  There'll be your breed and hers abroad in the land one day."

Macavoy stretched to his feet--he was so tall that he could not stand
upright in the room.  He towered over Pierre, who blandly eyed him.
"I've another word for your ear," he said darkly.  "Keep clear av the
likes o' that wid me.  For I've swallowed a tribe av divils.  It's
fightin' you want.  Well, I'll do it--I've an itch for the throats av
men, but a fool I'll be no more wid wimin, white or red--that hell-cat
that spoilt me life an' killed me child, or--"

A sob clutched him in the throat.

"You had a child, then?" asked Pierre gently.

"An angel she was, wid hair like the sun, an' 'd melt the heart av an
iron god: none like her above or below.  But the mother, ah, the mother
of her!  One day whin she'd said a sharp word, wid another from me, an'
the child clinging to her dress, she turned quick and struck it, meanin'
to anger me.  Not so hard the blow was, but it sent the darlin's head
agin' the chimney-stone, and that was the end av it.  For she took to her
bed, an' agin' the crowin' o' the cock wan midnight, she gives a little
cry an' snatched at me beard.  'Daddy,' says she, 'daddy, it hurts!'
An' thin she floats away, wid a stitch av pain at her lips."

Macavoy sat down now, his fingers fumbling in his beard.  Pierre was
uncomfortable.  He could hear of battle, murder, and sudden death
unmoved--it seemed to him in the game; but the tragedy of a child, a mere
counter yet in the play of life--that was different.  He slid a hand over
the table, and caught Macavoy's arm.  "Poor little waif!" he said.

Macavoy gave the hand a grasp that turned Pierre sick, and asked: "Had ye
iver a child av y'r own, Pierre-iver wan at all?"

"Never," said Pierre dreamily, "and I've travelled far.  A child--a child
--is a wonderful thing.  .  .  .  Poor little waif!"

They both sat silent for a moment.  Pierre was about to rise, but Macavoy
suddenly pinned him to his seat with this question: "Did y' iver have a
wife, thin, Pierre?"

Pierre turned pale.  A sharp breath came through his teeth.  He spoke
slowly: "Yes, once."

"And she died?" asked the other, awed.

"We all have our day," he replied enigmatically, "and there are worse
things than death.  .  .  .  Eh, well, mon ami, let us talk of other
things.  To-morrow we go to conquer.  I know where I can get five men I
want.  I have ammunition and dogs."

A few minutes afterwards Pierre was busy in the settlement.  At the
Fort he heard strange news.  A new batch of settlers was coming from the
south, and among them was an old Irishwoman who called herself now Mrs.
Whelan, now Mrs. Macavoy.  She talked much of the lad she was to find,
one Tim Macavoy, whose fame Gossip had brought to her at last.

She had clung on to the settlers, and they could not shake her off.
"She was comin'," she said, "to her own darlin' b'y, from whom she'd been
parted manny a year, believin' him dead, or Tom Whelan had nivir touched
hand o' hers."

The bearer of the news had but just arrived, and he told it only to the
Chief Trader and Pierre.  At a word from Pierre the man promised to hold
his peace.  Then Pierre went to Wonta's lodge.  He found her with her
father alone, her head at her knees.  When she heard his voice she looked
up sharply, and added a sharp word also.

"Wait," he said; "women are such fools.  You snapped your fingers in his
face, and laughed at him.  Bien, that is nothing.  He has proved himself
great.  That is something.  He will be greater still, if the other woman
does not find him.  She should die, but then some women have no sense."

"The other woman!" said Wonta, starting to her feet; "who is the other
woman?"

Old Foot-in-the-Sun waked and sat up, but seeing that it was Pierre,
dropped again to sleep.  Pierre, he knew, was no peril to any woman.
Besides, Wonta hated the half-breed, as he thought.

Pierre told the girl the story of Macavoy's life; for he knew that she
loved the man after her heathen fashion, and that she could be trusted.

"I do not care for that," she said, when he had finished; "it is
nothing.  I would go with him.  I should be his wife, the other should
die.  I would kill her, if she would fight me.  I know the way of knives,
or a rifle, or a pinch at the throat--she should die!"

"Yes, but that will not do.  Keep your hands free of her."

Then he told her that they were going away.  She said she would go also.
He said no to that, but told her to wait and he would come back for her.

Though she tried hard to follow them, they slipped away from the Fort in
the moist gloom of the morning, the brown grass rustling, the prairie-
hens fluttering, the osiers soughing as they passed, the Spirit of the
North, ever hungry, drawing them on over the long Divides.  They did not
see each other's faces till dawn.  They were guided by Pierre's voice;
none knew his comrades.  Besides Pierre and Macavoy, there were five
half-breeds--Noel, Little Babiche, Corvette, Josh, and Jacques Parfaite.
When they came to recognise each other, they shook hands, and marched on.
In good time they reached that wonderful and pleasant country between the
Barren Grounds and the Lake of Silver Shallows.  To the north of it was
Fort Comfort, which they had come to take.  Macavoy's rich voice roared
as of old, before his valour was questioned--and maintained--at Fort
O'Angel.  Pierre had diverted his mind from the woman who, at Fort
O'Angel, was even now calling heaven and earth to witness that "Tim
Macavoy was her Macavoy and no other, an' she'd find him--the divil and
darlin', wid an arm like Broin Borhoime, an' a chest you could build a
house on--if she walked till Doomsday!"

Macavoy stood out grandly, his fat all gone to muscle, blowing through
his beard, puffing his cheek, and ready with tale or song.  But now that
they were facing the business of their journey, his voice got soft and
gentle, as it did before the Fort, when he grappled his foes two by two
and three by three, and wrung them out.  In his eyes there was the thing
which counts as many men in any soldier's sight, when he leads in battle.
As he said himself, he was made for war, like Malachi o' the Golden
Collar.

Pierre guessed that just now many of the Indians would be away for the
summer hunt, and that the Fort would perhaps be held by only a few score
of braves, who, however, would fight when they might easier play.  He had
no useless compunctions about bloodshed.  A human life he held to be a
trifle in the big sum of time, and that it was of little moment when a
man went, if it seemed his hour.  He lived up to his creed, for he had
ever held his own life as a bird upon a housetop, which a chance stone
might drop.

He was glad afterwards that he had decided to fight, for there was one
in Fort Comfort against whom he had an old grudge--the Indian, Young Eye,
who, many years before, had been one to help in killing the good Father
Halen, the priest who dropped the water on his forehead and set the cross
on top of that, when he was at his mother's breasts.  One by one the
murderers had been killed, save this man.  He had wandered north, lived
on the Coppermine River for a long time, and at length had come down
among the warring tribes at the Lake of Silver Shallows.

Pierre was for direct attack.  They crossed the lake in their canoes, at
a point about five miles from the Fort, and, so far as they could tell,
without being seen.  Then ammunition went round, and they marched upon
the Fort.  Pierre eyed Macavoy--measured him, as it were, for what he was
worth.  The giant seemed happy.  He was humming a tune softly through his
beard.  Suddenly Jose paused, dropped to the foot of a pine, and put his
ear to it.  Pierre understood.  He had caught at the same thing.  "There
is a dance on," said Jose, "I can hear the drum."

Pierre thought a minute.  "We will reconnoitre," he said presently.

"It is near night now," remarked Little Babiche.  "I know something of
these.  When they have a great snake dance at night, strange things
happen."  Then he spoke in a low tone to Pierre.

They halted in the bush, and Little Babiche went forward to spy upon the
Fort.  He came back just after sunset, reporting that the Indians were
feasting.  He had crept near, and had learned that the braves were
expected back from the hunt that night, and that the feast was for
their welcome.

The Fort stood in an open space, with tall trees for a background.  In
front, here and there, were juniper and tamarac bushes.  Pierre laid his
plans immediately, and gave the word to move on.  Their presence had not
been discovered, and if they could but surprise the Indians the Fort
might easily be theirs.  They made a detour, and after an hour came upon
the Fort from behind.  Pierre himself went forward cautiously, leaving
Macavoy in command.  When he came again he said:

"It's a fine sight, and the way is open.  They are feasting and dancing.
If we can enter without being seen, we are safe, except for food; we must
trust for that.  Come on."

When they arrived at the margin of the woods a wonderful scene was before
them.  A volcanic hill rose up on one side, gloomy and stern, but the
reflection of the fires reached it, and made its sides quiver--the rock
itself seemed trembling.  The sombre pines showed up, a wall all round,
and in the open space, turreted with fantastic fires, the Indians swayed
in and out with weird chanting, their bodies mostly naked, and painted in
strange colours.  The earth itself was still and sober.  Scarce a star
peeped forth.  A purple velvet curtain seemed to hang all down the sky,
though here and there the flame bronzed it.  The Indian lodges were
empty, save where a few children squatted at the openings.  The seven
stood still with wonder, till Pierre whispered to them to get to the
ground and crawl close in by the walls of the Fort, following him.  They
did so, Macavoy breathing hard--too hard; for suddenly Pierre clapped a
hand on his mouth.

They were now near the Fort, and Pierre had seen an Indian come from the
gate.  The brave was within a few feet of them.  He had almost passed
them, for they were in the shadow, but Jose had burst a puffball with his
hand, and the dust, flying up, made him sneeze.  The Indian turned and
saw them.  With a low cry and the spring of a tiger Pierre was at his
throat; and in another minute they were struggling on the ground.
Pierre's hand never let go.  His comrades did not stir; he had warned
them to lie still.  They saw the terrible game played out within arm's
length of them.  They heard Pierre say at last, as the struggles of the
Indian ceased: "Beast!  You had Father Halen's life.  I have yours."

There was one more wrench of the Indian's limbs, and then he lay still.

They crawled nearer the gate, still hidden in the shadows and the grass.
Presently they came to a clear space.  Across this they must go, and
enter the Fort before they were discovered.  They got to their feet, and
ran with wonderful swiftness, Pierre leading, to the gate.  They had just
reached it when there was a cry from the walls, on which two Indians were
sitting.  The Indians sprang down, seized their spears, and lunged at the
seven as they entered.  One spear caught Little Babiche in the arm as he
swung aside, but with the butt of his musket Noel dropped him.  The other
Indian was promptly handled by Pierre himself.  By this time Corvette and
Jose had shut the gates, and the Fort was theirs--an easy conquest.  The
Indians were bound and gagged.

The adventurers had done it all without drawing the attention of the
howling crowd without.  The matter was in its infancy, however.  They
had the place, but could they hold it?  What food and water were there
within?  Perhaps they were hardly so safe besieged as besiegers.  Yet
there was no doubt on Pierre's part.  He had enjoyed the adventure so far
up to the hilt.  An old promise had been kept, and an old wrong avenged.

"What's to be done now?" said Macavoy.  "There'll be hell's own racket;
and they'll come on like a flood."

"To wait," said Pierre, "and dam the flood as it comes.  But not a bullet
till I give the word.  Take to the chinks.  We'll have them soon."

He was right: they came soon.  Someone had found the dead body of Young
Eye; then it was discovered that the gate was shut.  A great shout went
up.  The Indians ran to their lodges for spears and hatchets, though the
weapons of many were within the Fort, and soon they were about the place,
shouting in impotent rage.  They could not tell how many invaders were in
the Fort; they suspected it was the Little Skins, their ancient enemies.
But Young Eye, they saw, had not been scalped.  This was brought to the
old chief, and he called to his men to fall back.  They had not seen one
man of the invaders; all was silent and dark within the Fort; even the
two torches which had been burning above the gate were down.  At that
moment, as if to add to the strangeness, a caribou came suddenly through
the fires, and, passing not far from the bewildered Indians, plunged into
the trees behind the Fort.

The caribou is credited with great powers.  It is thought to understand
all that is said to it, and to be able to take the form of a spirit.  No
Indian will come near it till it is dead, and he that kills it out of
season is supposed to bring down all manner of evil.

So at this sight they cried out--the women falling to the ground with
their faces in their arms--that the caribou had done this thing.  For a
moment they were all afraid.  Besides, as a brave showed, there was no
mark on the body of Young Eye.

Pierre knew quite well that this was a bull caribou, travelling wildly
till he found another herd.  He would carry on the deception.  "Wail for
the dead, as your women do in Ireland.  That will finish them," he said
to Macavoy.

The giant threw his voice up and out, so that it seemed to come from over
the Fort to the Indians, weird and crying.  Even the half-breeds standing
by felt a light shock of unnatural excitement.  The Indians without drew
back slowly from the Fort, leaving a clear space between.  Macavoy had
uncanny tricks with his voice, and presently he changed the song into a
shrill, wailing whistle, which went trembling about the place and then
stopped suddenly.

"Sure, that's a poor game, Pierre," he whispered; "an' I'd rather be
pluggin' their hides wid bullets, or givin' the double-an'-twist.  It's
fightin' I come for, and not the trick av Mother Kilkevin."

Pierre arranged a plan of campaign at once.  Every man looked to his gun,
the gates were slowly opened, and Macavoy stepped out.  Pierre had thrown
over the Irishman's shoulders the great skin of a musk-ox which he had
found inside the stockade.  He was a strange, immense figure, as he
walked into the open space, and, folding his arms, looked round.  In the
shadow of the gate behind were Pierre and the halfbreeds, with guns
cocked.

Macavoy had lived so long in the north that he knew enough of all the
languages to speak to this tribe.  When he came out a murmur of wonder
ran among the Indians.  They had never seen anyone so tall, for they were
not great of stature, and his huge beard and wild shock of hair were a
wonderful sight.  He remained silent, looking on them.  At last the old
chief spoke.  "Who are you?"

"I am a great chief from the Hills of the Mighty Men, come to be your
king," was his reply.

"He is your king," cried Pierre in a strange voice from the shadow of the
gate, and he thrust out his gun-barrel, so that they could see it.

The Indians now saw Pierre and the half-breeds in the gateway, and they
had not so much awe.  They came a little nearer, and the women stopped
crying.  A few of the braves half-raised their spears.  Seeing this,
Pierre instantly stepped forward to the giant.  He looked a child in
stature thereby.  He spoke quickly and well in the Chinook language.

"This is a mighty man from the Hills of the Mighty Men.  He has come to
rule over you, to give all other tribes into your hands; for he has
strength like a thousand, and fears nothing of gods nor men.  I have the
blood of red men in me.  It is I who have called this man from his
distant home.  I heard of your fighting and foolishness: also that
warriors were to come from the south country to scatter your wives and
children, and to make you slaves.  I pitied you, and I have brought you a
chief greater than any other.  Throw your spears upon the ground, and all
will be well; but raise one to throw, or one arrow, or axe, and there
shall be death among you, so that as a people you shall die.  The spirits
are with us.  .  .  .  Well?"

The Indians drew a little nearer, but they did not drop their spears, for
the old chief forbade them.

"We are no dogs nor cowards," he said, "though the spirits be with you,
as we believe.  We have seen strange things"--he pointed to Young Eye--
"and heard voices not of men; but we would see great things as well as
strange.  There are seven men of the Little Skins tribe within a lodge
yonder.  They were to die when our braves returned from the hunt, and for
that we prepared the feast.  But this mighty man, he shall fight them all
at once, and if he kills them he shall be our king.  In the name of my
tribe I speak.  And this other," pointing to Pierre, "he shall also fight
with a strong man of our tribe, so that we shall know if you are all
brave, and not as those who crawl at the knees of the mighty."

This was more than Pierre had bargained for.  Seven men at Macavoy, and
Indians too, fighting for their lives, was a contract of weight.  But
Macavoy was blowing in his beard cheerfully enough.

"Let me choose me ground," he said, "wid me back to the wall, an' I'll
take thim as they come."

Pierre instantly interpreted this to the Indians, and said for himself
that he would welcome their strongest man at the point of a knife when he
chose.

The chief gave an order, and the Little Skins were brought.  The fires
still burned brightly, and the breathing of the pines, as a slight wind
rose and stirred them, came softly over.  The Indians stood off at the
command of the chief.  Macavoy drew back to the wall, dropped the musk-ox
skin to the ground, and stripped himself to the waist.  But in his
waistband there was what none of these Indians had ever seen--a small
revolver that barked ever so softly.  In the hands of each Little Skin
there was put a knife, and they were told their cheerful exercise.  They
came on cautiously, and then suddenly closed in, knives flashing.  But
Macavoy's little bulldog barked, and one dropped to the ground.  The
others fell back.  The wounded man drew up, made a lunge at Macavoy, but
missed him.  As if ashamed, the other six came on again at a spring.  But
again the weapon did its work smartly, and one more came down.  Now the
giant put it away, ran in upon the five, and cut right and left.  So
sudden and massive was his rush that they had no chance.  Three fell at
his blows, and then he drew back swiftly to the wall.  "Drop your
knives," he said, as they cowered, "or I'll kill you all."  They did so.
He dropped his own.

"Now come on, ye scuts!" he cried, and suddenly he reached and caught
them, one with each arm, and wrestled with them, till he bent the one
like a willow-rod, and dropped him with a broken back, while the other
was at his mercy.  Suddenly loosing him, he turned him towards the woods,
and said: "Run, ye rid divil, run for y'r life!"

A dozen spears were raised, but the rifles of Pierre's men came in
between: the Indian reached cover and was gone.  Of the six others, two
had been killed, the rest were severely wounded, and Macavoy had not a
scratch.

Pierre smiled grimly.  "You've been doing all the fighting, Macavoy," he
said.

"There's no bein' a king for nothin'," he replied, wiping blood from his
beard.

"It's my turn now, but keep your rifles ready, though I think there's no
need."

Pierre had but a short minute with the champion, for he was an expert
with the knife.  He carried away four fingers of the Indian's fighting
hand, and that ended it; for the next instant the point was at the red
man's throat.  The Indian stood to take it like a man; but Pierre loved
that kind of courage, and shot the knife into its sheath instead.

The old chief kept his word, and after the spears were piled, he shook
hands with Macavoy, as did his braves one by one, and they were all moved
by the sincerity of his grasp: their arms were useless for some time
after.  They hailed as their ruler, King Macavoy I.; for men are like
dogs--they worship him who beats them.  The feasting and dancing went on
till the hunters came back.  Then there was a wild scene, but in the end
all the hunters, satisfied, came to greet their new king.

The king himself went to bed in the Fort that night, Pierre and his
bodyguard--by name Noel, Little Babiche, Corvette, Jose, and Parfaite
--its only occupants, singing joyfully:

              "Did yees iver hear tell o' Long Barney,
               That come from the groves o' Killarney?
               He wint for a king, oh, he wint for a king,
               But he niver keen back to Killarney
               Wid his crown, an' his soord, an' his army!"

As a king Macavoy was a success, for the brag had gone from him.  Like
all his race he had faults as a subject, but the responsibility of ruling
set him right.  He found in the Fort an old sword and belt, left by some
Hudson's Bay Company's man, and these he furbished up and wore.

With Pierre's aid he drew up a simple constitution, which he carried in
the crown of his cap, and he distributed beads and gaudy trappings as
marks of honour.  Nor did he forget the frequent pipe of peace, made
possible to all by generous gifts of tobacco.  Anyone can found a kingdom
abaft the Barren Grounds with tobacco, beads, and red flannel.

For very many weeks it was a happy kingdom.  But presently Pierre yawned,
and was ready to return.  Three of the half-breeds were inclined to go
with him.  Jose and Little Babiche had formed alliances which held them
there--besides, King Macavoy needed them.

On the eve of Pierre's departure a notable thing occurred.

A young brave had broken his leg in hunting, had been picked up by a band
of another tribe, and carried south.  He found himself at last at Fort
O'Angel.  There he had met Mrs. Whelan, and for presents of tobacco, and
purple and fine linen, he had led her to her consort.  That was how the
king and Pierre met her in the yard of Fort Comfort one evening of early
autumn.  Pierre saw her first, and was for turning the King about and
getting him away; but it was too late.  Mrs. Whelan had seen him, and she
called out at him:

"Oh, Tim!  me jool, me king, have I found ye, me imp'ror!"

She ran at him, to throw her arms round him.  He stepped back, the red of
his face going white, and said, stretching out his hand, "Woman, y'are me
wife, I know, whativer y' be; an' y've right to have shelter and bread av
me; but me arms, an' me bed, are me own to kape or to give; and, by God,
ye shall have nayther one nor the other!  There's a ditch as wide as hell
betune us."

The Indians had gathered quickly; they filled the yard, and crowded the
gate.  The woman went wild, for she had been drinking.  She ran at
Macavoy and spat in his face, and called down such a curse on him as,
whoever hears, be he one that's cursed or any other, shudders at till he
dies.  Then she fell in a fit at his feet.  Macavoy turned to the
Indians, stretched out his hands and tried to speak, but could not.  He
stooped down, picked up the woman, carried her into the Fort, and laid
her on a bed of skins.

"What will you do?" asked Pierre.

"She is my wife," he answered firmly.

"She lived with Whelan."

"She must be cared for," was the reply.  Pierre looked at him with a
curious quietness.  "I'll get liquor for her," he said presently.  He
started to go, but turned and felt the woman's pulse.  "You would keep
her?" he asked.

"Bring the liquor."  Macavoy reached for water, and dipping the sleeve
of his shirt in it, wetted her face gently.

Pierre brought the liquor, but he knew that the woman would die.  He
stayed with Macavoy beside her all the night.  Towards morning her eyes
opened, and she shivered greatly.

"It's bither cold," she said.  "You'll put more wood on the fire, Tim,
for the babe must be kept warrum."

She thought she was at Malahide.

"Oh, wurra, wurra, but 'tis freezin'!" she said again.  "Why d'ye kape
the door opin whin the child's perishin'?"

Macavoy sat looking at her, his trouble shaking him.

"I'll shut the door meself, thin," she added; "for 'twas I that lift it
opin, Tim."  She started up, but gave a cry like a wailing wind, and fell
back.

"The door is shut," said Pierre.

"But the child--the child!" said Macavoy, tears running down his face
and beard.






THE GIFT OF THE SIMPLE KING

Once Macavoy the giant ruled a tribe of Northern people, achieving the
dignity by the hands of Pierre, who called him King Macavoy.  Then came
a time when, tiring of his kingship, he journeyed south, leaving all
behind, even his queen, Wonta, who, in her bed of cypresses and yarrow,
came forth no more into the morning.  About Fort Guidon they still
gave him his title, and because of his guilelessness, sincerity, and
generosity, Pierre called him "The Simple King."  His seven feet and
over shambled about, suggesting unjointed power, unshackled force.
No one hated Macavoy, many loved him, he was welcome at the fire and
the cooking-pot; yet it seemed shameful to have so much man useless--
such an engine of life, which might do great things, wasting fuel.
Nobody thought much of that at Fort Guidon, except, perhaps, Pierre,
who sometimes said, "My simple king, some day you shall have your great
chance again; but not as a king--as a giant, a man--voila!"

The day did not come immediately, but it came.  When Ida, the deaf and
dumb girl, married Hilton, of the H.B.C., every man at Fort Guidon, and
some from posts beyond, sent her or brought her presents of one kind or
another.  Pierre's gift was a Mexican saddle.  He was branding Ida's name
on it with the broken blade of a case-knife when Macavoy entered on him,
having just returned from a vagabond visit to Fort Ste. Anne.

"Is it digging out or carvin' in y'are?" he asked, puffing into his
beard.

Pierre looked up contemptuously, but did not reply to the insinuation,
for he never saw an insult unless he intended to avenge it; and he would
not quarrel with Macavoy.

"What are you going to give?" he asked.

"Aw, give what to who, hop-o'-me-thumb?" Macavoy said, stretching
himself out in the doorway, his legs in the sun, head in the shade.

"You've been taking a walk in the country, then?" Pierre asked, though
he knew.

"To Fort Ste. Anne: a buryin', two christ'nin's, an' a weddin'; an'
lashin's av grog an' swill-aw that, me button o' the North!"

"La la!  What a fool you are, my simple king!  You've got the things end
foremost.  Turn your head to the open air, for I go to light a cigarette,
and if you breathe this way, there will be a grand explode."

"Aw, yer thumb in yer eye, Pierre!  It's like a baby's, me breath is,
milk and honey it is--aw yis; an' Father Corraine, that was doin' the
trick for the love o' God, says he to me, 'Little Tim Macavoy,'--aw yis,
little Tim Macavoy,--says he, 'when are you goin' to buckle to, for the
love o' God?' says he.  Ashamed I was, Pierre, that Father Corraine
should spake to me like that, for I'd only a twig twisted at me hips to
kape me trousies up, an' I thought 'twas that he had in his eye!  'Buckle
to,' says I, 'Father Corraine?  Buckle to, yer riv'rince?'--feelin' I was
at the twigs the while.  'Ay, little Tim Macavoy,' he says, says he,
'you've bin 'atin' the husks av idleness long enough; when are you goin'
to buckle to?  You had a kingdom and ye guv it up,' says he; 'take a
field, get a plough, and buckle to,' says he, 'an' turn back no more'--
like that, says Father Corraine; and I thinkin' all the time 'twas the
want o' me belt he was drivin' at."

Pierre looked at him a moment idly, then said:  "Such a tom-fool!  And
where's that grand leather belt of yours, eh, my monarch?"

A laugh shook through Macavoy's beard.  "For the weddin' it wint: buckled
the two up wid it for better or worse--an' purty they looked, they did,
standin' there in me cinch, an' one hole left--aw yis, Pierre."

"And what do you give to Ida?" Pierre asked, with a little emphasis of
the branding-iron.

Macavoy got to his feet.  "Ida!  Ida!" said he.  "Is that saddle for
Ida?  Is it her and Hilton that's to ate aff one dish togither?  That
rose o' the valley, that bird wid a song in her face and none an her
tongue.  That daisy dot av a thing, steppin' through the world like a
sprig o' glory.  Aw, Pierre, thim two!--an' I've divil a scrap to give,
good or bad.  I've nothin' at all in the wide wurruld but the clothes an
me back, an' thim hangin' on the underbrush!"--giving a little twist to
the twigs.  "An' many a meal an' many a dipper o' drink she's guv me,
little smiles dancin' at her lips."

He sat down in the doorway again, with his face turned towards Pierre,
and the back of his head in the sun.  He was a picture of perfect health,
sumptuous, huge, a bull in beauty, the heart of a child looking out of
his eyes, but a sort of despair, too, in his bearing.

Pierre watched him with a furtive humour for a time, then he said
languidly: "Never mind your clothes, give yourself."

"Yer tongue in yer cheek, me spot o' vinegar.  Give meself!  What's that
for?  A purty weddin' gift, says I?  Handy thing to have in the house!
Use me for a clothes-horse, or shtand me in the garden for a fairy bower-
aw yis, wid a hole in me face that'd ate thim out o' house and home!"

Pierre drew a piece of brown paper towards him, and wrote on it with a
burnt match.  Presently he held it up.  "Voila, my simple king, the thing
for you to do: a grand gift, and to cost you nothing now.  Come, read it
out, and tell me what you think."

Macavoy took the paper, and in a large, judicial way, read slowly:

"On demand, for value received, I promise to pay to .  .  .  IDA HILTON .
.  .  or order, meself, Tim Macavoy, standin' seven foot three on me bare
fut, wid interest at nothin' at all."

Macavoy ended with a loud smack of the lips.  "McGuire!" he said, and
nothing more.

McGuire was his strongest expression.  In the most important moments of
his career he had said it, and it sounded deep, strange, and more
powerful than many usual oaths.  A moment later he said again "McGuire!"
Then he read the paper once more out loud.  "What's that, me Frinchman?"
he asked.  "What Ballzeboob's tricks are y'at now?"

Pierre was complacently eyeing his handiwork on the saddle.  He now
settled back with his shoulders to the wall, and said: "See, then, it's
a little promissory note for a wedding-gift to Ida.  When she says some
day, 'Tim Macavoy, I want you to do this or that, or to go here or there,
or to sell you or trade you, or use you for a clothes-horse, or a bridge
over a canyon, or to hold up a house, or blow out a prairie-fire, or be
my second husband,' you shall say, 'Here I am'; and you shall travel from
Heaven to Halifax, but you shall come at the call of this promissory."

Pierre's teeth glistened behind a smile as he spoke, and Macavoy broke
into a roar of laughter.  "Black's the white o' yer eye," he said at
last, "an' a joke's a joke.  Seven fut three I am, an' sound av wind an'
limb--an' a weddin'-gift to that swate rose o' the valley!  Aisy, aisy,
Pierre.  A bit o' foolin' 'twas ye put on the paper, but truth I'll make
it, me cock o' the walk.  That's me gift to her an' Hilton, an' no other.
An' a dab wid red wax it shall have, an' what more be the word o' Freddy
Tarlton the lawyer?"

"You're a great man," said Pierre with a touch of gentle irony, for his
natural malice had no play against the huge ex-king of his own making.
With these big creatures--he had connived with several in his time--he
had ever been superior, protective, making them to feel that they were as
children beside him.  He looked at Macavoy musingly, and said to himself:
"Well, why not?  If it is a joke, then it is a joke; if it is a thing to
make the world stand still for a minute sometime, so much the better.  He
is all waste now.  By the holy, he shall do it.  It is amusing, and it
may be great by and by."

Presently Pierre said aloud: "Well, my Macavoy, what will you do?  Send
this good gift?"

"Aw yis, Pierre; I shtand by that from the crown av me head to the sole
av me fut sure.  Face like a mornin' in May, and hands like the tunes of
an organ, she has.  Spakes wid a look av her eye and a twist av her purty
lips an' swaying body, an' talkin' to you widout a word.  Aw motion--
motion--motion; yis, that's it.  An' I've seen her an tap av a hill wid
the wind blowin' her hair free, and the yellow buds on the tree, and the
grass green beneath her feet, the world smilin' betune her and the sun:
pictures--pictures, aw yis!  Promissory notice on demand is it anny
toime?  Seven fut three on me bare toes--but Father o' Sin! when she
calls I come, yis."

"On your oath, Macavoy?" asked Pierre; "by the book av the Mass?"

Macavoy stood up straight till his head scraped the cobwebs between the
rafters, the wild indignation of a child in his eye.  "D'ye think I'm a
thafe to stale me own word?  Hut!  I'll break ye in two, ye wisp o'
straw, if ye doubt me word to a lady.  There's me note av hand, and ye
shall have me fist on it, in writin', at Freddy Tarlton's office, wid a
blotch av red an' the Queen's head at the bottom.  McGuire!" he said
again, and paused, puffing his lips through his beard.

Pierre looked at him a moment, then waving his fingers idly, said, "So,
my straw-breaker!  Then tomorrow morning at ten you will fetch your
wedding-gift.  But come so soon now to M'sieu' Tarlton's office, and we
will have it all as you say, with the red seal and the turn of your fist
--yes.  Well, well, we travel far in the world, and sometimes we see
strange things, and no two strange things are alike--no; there is only
one Macavoy in the world, there was only one Shon McGann.  Shon McGann
was a fine fool, but he did something at last, truly yes: Tim Macavoy,
perhaps, will do something at last on his own hook.  Hey, I wonder!"
He felt the muscles of Macavoy's arm musingly, and then laughed up in
the giant's face.  "Once I made you a king, my own, and you threw it all
away; now I make you a slave, and we shall see what you will do.  Come
along, for M'sieu' Tarlton."

Macavoy dropped a heavy hand on Pierre's shoulder.  "'Tis hard to be a
king, Pierre, but 'tis aisy to be a slave for the likes o' her.  I'd kiss
her dirty shoe sure!"

As they passed through the door, Pierre said, "Dis done, perhaps, when
all is done, she will sell you for old bones and rags.  Then I will buy
you, and I will burn your bones and the rags, and I will scatter to the
four winds of the earth the ashes of a king, a slave, a fool, and an
Irishman--truly!"

"Bedad, ye'll have more earth in yer hands then, Pierre, than ye'll ever
earn, and more heaven than ye'll ever shtand in."

Half an hour later they were in Freddy Tarlton's office on the banks of
the Little Big Swan, which tumbled past, swelled by the first rain of the
early autumn.  Freddy Tarlton, who had a gift of humour, entered into the
spirit of the thing, and treated it seriously; but in vain did he protest
that the large red seal with Her Majesty's  head on it was unnecessary;
Macavoy insisted, and wrote his name across it with a large
indistinctness worthy of a king.  Before the night was over everybody at
Guidon Hill, save Hilton and Ida, knew what gift would come from Macavoy
to the wedded pair.



II

The next morning was almost painfully beautiful, so delicate in its
clearness, so exalted by the glory of the hills, so grand in the
limitless stretch of the green-brown prairie north and south.  It was a
day for God's creatures to meet in, and speed away, and having flown
round the boundaries of that spacious domain, to return again to the nest
of home on the large plateau between the sea and the stars.  Gathered
about Ida's home was everybody who lived within a radius of a hundred
miles.  In the large front room all the presents were set: rich furs from
the far north, cunningly carved bowls, rocking-chairs made by hand,
knives, cooking utensils, a copy of Shakespeare in six volumes from the
Protestant missionary who performed the ceremony, a nugget of gold from
the Long Light River; and outside the door, a horse, Hilton's own present
to his wife, on which was put Pierre's saddle, with its silver mounting
and Ida's name branded deep on pommel and flap.  When Macavoy arrived,
a cheer went up, which was carried on waves of laughter into the house
to Hilton and Ida, who even then were listening to the first words of the
brief service which begins, "I charge you both if you do know any just
cause or impediment--" and so on.

They did not turn to see what it was, for just at that moment they
themselves were the very centre of the universe.  Ida being deaf and
dumb, it was necessary to interpret to her the words of the service by
signs, as the missionary read it, and this was done by Pierre himself,
the half-breed Catholic, the man who had brought Hilton and Ida together,
for he and Ida had been old friends.  After Father Corraine had taught
her the language of signs, Pierre had learned them from her, until at
last his gestures had become as vital as her own.  The delicate precision
of his every movement, the suggestiveness of look and motion, were suited
to a language which was nearer to the instincts of his own nature than
word of mouth.  All men did not trust Pierre, but all women did; with
those he had a touch of Machiavelli, with these he had no sign of
Mephistopheles, and few were the occasions in his life when he showed
outward tenderness to either: which was equally effective.  He had
learnt, or knew by instinct, that exclusiveness as to men and
indifference as to women are the greatest influences on both.  As he
stood there, slowly interpreting to Ida, by graceful allusive signs, the
words of the service, one could not think that behind his impassive face
there was any feeling for the man or for the woman.  He had that
disdainful smile which men acquire who are all their lives aloof from the
hopes of the hearthstone and acknowledge no laws but their own.

More than once the eyes of the girl filled with tears, as the pregnancy
of some phrase in the service came home to her.  Her face responded to
Pierre's gestures, as do one's nerves to the delights of good music, and
there was something so unique, so impressive in the ceremony, that the
laughter which had greeted Macavoy passed away, and a dead silence;
beginning from where the two stood, crept out until it covered all the
prairie.  Nothing was heard except Hilton's voice in strong tones saying,
"I take thee to be my wedded wife," etc.; but when the last words of the
service were said, and the newmade bride turned to her husband's embrace,
and a little sound of joy broke from her lips, there was plenty of noise
and laughter again, for Macavoy stood in the doorway, or rather outside
it, stooping to look in upon the scene.  Someone had lent him the cinch
of a broncho and he had belted himself with it, no longer carrying his
clothes about "on the underbrush."  Hilton laughed and stretched out his
hand.  "Come in, King," he said, "come and wish us joy."

Macavoy parted the crowd easily, forcing his way, and instantly was
stooping before the pair--for he could not stand upright in the room.

"Aw, now, Hilton, is it you, is it you, that's pluckin' the rose av the
valley, snatchin' the stars out av the sky!  aw, Hilton, the like o'
that!  Travel down I did yesterday from Fort Ste. Anne, and divil a word
I knew till Pierre hit me in the eye wid it last night--and no time for a
present, for a wedding-gift--no, aw no!"

Just here Ida reached up and touched him on the shoulder.  He smiled down
on her, puffing and blowing in his beard, bursting to speak to her, yet
knowing no word by signs to say; but he nodded his head at her, and he
patted Hilton's shoulder, and he took their hands and joined them
together, hers on top of Hilton's, and shook them in one of his own till
she almost winced.  Presently, with a look at Hilton, who nodded in
reply, Ida lifted her cheek to Macavoy to kiss--Macavoy, the idle, ill-
cared-for, boisterous giant.  His face became red like that of a child
caught in an awkward act, and with an absurd shyness he stooped and
touched her cheek.  Then he turned to Hilton, and blurted out, "Aw, the
rose o' the valley, the pride o' the wide wurruld!  aw, the bloom o' the
hills!  I'd have kissed her dirty shoe.  McQuire!"

A burst of laughter rolled out on the clear air of the prairie, and the
hills seemed to stir with the pleasure of life.  Then it was that
Macavoy, following Hilton and Ida outside, suddenly stopped beside the
horse, drew from his pocket the promissory note that Pierre had written,
and said, "Yis, but all the weddin'-gifts aren't in.  'Tis nothin' I had
to give-divil a cent in the wurruld, divil a pound av baccy, or a pot for
the fire, or a bit av linin for the table; nothin' but meself and me
dirty clothes, standin' seven fut three an me bare toes.  What was I to
do?  There was only meself to give, so I give it free and hearty, and
here it is wid the Queen's head an it, done in Mr. Tarlton's office.
Ye'd better had had a dog, or a gun, or a ladder, or a horse, or a
saddle, or a quart o' brown brandy; but such as it is I give it ye--
I give it to the rose o' the valley and the star o' the wide wurruld."

In a loud voice he read the promissory note, and handed it to Ida.  Men
laughed till there were tears in their eyes, and a keg of whisky was
opened; but somehow Ida did not laugh.  She and Pierre had seen a serious
side to Macavoy's gift: the childlike manliness in it.  It went home to
her woman's heart without a touch of ludicrousness, without a sound of
laughter.



III

After a time the interest in this wedding-gift declined at Fort Guidon,
and but three people remembered it with any singular distinctness--Ida,
Pierre, and Macavoy.  Pierre was interested, for in his primitive mind he
knew that, however wild a promise, life is so wild in its events, there
comes the hour for redemption of all I O U's.

Meanwhile, weeks, months, and even a couple of years passed, Macavoy and
Pierre coming and going, sometimes together, sometimes not, in all manner
of words at war, in all manner of fact at peace.  And Ida, out of the
bounty of her nature, gave the two vagabonds a place at her fireside
whenever they chose to come.  Perhaps, where speech was not given, a gift
of divination entered into her instead, and she valued what others found
useless, and held aloof from what others found good.  She had powers
which had ever been the admiration of Guidon Hill.  Birds and animals
were her friends--she called them her kinsmen.  A peculiar sympathy
joined them; so that when, at last, she tamed a white wild duck, and made
it do the duties of a carrier-pigeon, no one thought it strange.

Up in the hills, beside the White Sun River, lived her sister and her
sister's children; and, by and by, the duck carried messages back and
forth, so that when, in the winter, Ida's health became delicate, she had
comfort in the solicitude and cheerfulness of her sister, and the gaiety
of the young birds of her nest, who sent Ida many a sprightly message and
tales of their good vagrancy in the hills.  In these days Pierre and
Macavoy were little at the Post, save now and then to sit with Hilton
beside the fire, waiting for spring and telling tales.  Upon Hilton had
settled that peaceful, abstracted expectancy which shows man at his best,
as he waits for the time when, through the half-lights of his fatherhood,
he shall see the broad fine dawn of motherhood spreading up the world--
which, all being said and done, is that place called Home.  Something
gentle came over him while he grew stouter in body and in all other ways
made a larger figure among the people of the West.

As Pierre said, whose wisdom was more to be trusted than his general
morality, "It is strange that most men think not enough of themselves
till a woman shows them how.  But it is the great wonder that the woman
does not despise him for it.  Quel caractere!  She has so often to show
him his way like a babe, and yet she says to him, Mon grand homme! my
master! my lord!  Pshaw!  I have often thought that women are half
saints, half fools, and men half fools, half rogues.  But Quelle vie!--
what life! without a woman you are half a man; with one you are bound to
a single spot in the world, you are tied by the leg, your wing is
clipped--you cannot have all.  Quelle vie--what life!"

To this Macavoy said: "Spit-spat!  But what the devil good does all yer
thinkin' do ye, Pierre?  It's argufy here and argufy there, an' while yer
at that, me an' the rest av us is squeezin' the fun out o' life.  Aw, go
'long wid ye.  Y'are only a bit o' hell and grammar, annyway.  Wid all
yer cuttin' and carvin' things to see the internals av thim, I'd do more
to the call av a woman's finger than for all the logic and knowalogy y'
ever chewed--an' there y'are, me little tailor o' jur'sprudince!"

"To the finger call of Hilton's wife, eh?"

Macavoy was not quite sure what Pierre's enigmatical tone meant.  A wild
light showed in his eyes, and his tongue blundered out: "Yis, Hilton's
wife's finger, or a look av her eye, or nothin' at all.  Aisy, aisy, ye
wasp!  Ye'd go stalkin' divils in hell for her yerself, so ye would.  But
the tongue av ye--but, it's gall to the tip."

"Maybe, my king.  But I'd go hunting because I wanted; you because you
must.  You're a slave to come and to go, with a Queen's seal on the
promissory."

Macavoy leaned back and roared.  "Aw, that!  The rose o' the valley--the
joy o' the wurruld!  S't, Pierre--" his voice grew softer on a sudden, as
a fresh thought came to him--"did y' ever think that the child might be
dumb like the mother?"

This was a day in the early spring, when the snows were melting in the
hills, and freshets were sweeping down the valleys far and near.  That
night a warm heavy rain came on, and in the morning every stream and
river was swollen to twice its size.  The mountains seemed to have
stripped themselves of snow, and the vivid sun began at once to colour
the foothills with green.  As Pierre and Macavoy stood at their door,
looking out upon the earth cleansing itself, Macavoy suddenly said: "Aw,
look, look, Pierre--her white duck off to the nest on Champak Hill!"

They both shaded their eyes with their hands.  Circling round two or
three times above the Post, the duck then stretched out its neck to the
west, and floated away beyond Guidon Hill, and was hid from view.

Pierre, without a word, began cleaning his rifle, while Macavoy smoked,
and sat looking into the distance, surveying the sweet warmth and light.
His face blossomed with colour, and the look of his eyes was that of an
irresponsible child.  Once or twice he smiled and puffed in his beard,
but perhaps that was involuntary, or was, maybe, a vague reflection of
his dreams, themselves most vague, for he was only soaking in sun and air
and life.

Within an hour they saw the wild duck-again passing the crest of Guidon,
and they watched it sailing down to the Post, Pierre idly fondling the
gun, Macavoy half roused from his dreams.  But presently they were
altogether roused, the gun was put away, and both were on their feet;
for after the pigeon arrived there was a stir at the Post, and Hilton
could be seen running from the store to his house, not far away.

"Something's wrong there," said Pierre.

"D'ye think 'twas the duck brought it?" asked Macavoy.

Without a word Pierre started away towards the Post, Macavoy following.
As they did so, a half-breed boy came from the house, hurrying towards
them.

Inside the house Hilton's wife lay in her bed, her great hour coming on
before the time, because of ill news from beyond the Guidon.  There was
with her an old Frenchwoman, who herself, in her time, had brought many
children into the world, whose heart brooded tenderly, if uncouthly, over
the dumb girl.  She it was who had handed to Hilton the paper the wild
duck had brought, after Ida had read it and fallen in a faint on the
floor.

The message that had felled the young wife was brief and awful.  A cloud-
burst had fallen on Champak Hill, had torn part of it away, and a part of
this part had swept down into the path that led to the little house,
having been stopped by some falling trees and a great boulder.  It
blocked the only way to escape above, and beneath, the river was creeping
up to sweep away the little house.  So, there the mother and her children
waited (the father was in the farthest north), facing death below and
above.  The wild duck had carried the tale in its terrible simplicity.
The last words were, "There mayn't be any help for me and my sweet
chicks, but I am still hoping, and you must send a man or many.  But send
soon, for we are cut off, and the end may come any hour."

Macavoy and Pierre were soon at the Post, and knew from Hilton all there
was to know.  At once Pierre began to gather men, though what one or many
could do none could say.  Eight white men and three Indians watched the
wild duck sailing away again from the bedroom window where Ida lay, to
carry a word of comfort to Champak Hill.  Before it went, Ida asked for
Macavoy, and he was brought to her bedroom by Hilton.  He saw a pale,
almost unearthly, yet beautiful face, flushing and paling with a coming
agony, looking up at him; and presently two trembling hands made those
mystic signs which are the primal language of the soul.  Hilton
interpreted to him this: "I have sent for you.  There is no man so big or
strong as you in the north.  I did not know that I should ever ask you to
redeem the note.  I want my gift, and I will give you your paper with the
Queen's head on it.  Those little lives, those pretty little dears, you
will not see them die.  If there is a way, any way, you will save them.
Sometimes one man can do what twenty cannot.  You were my wedding-gift:
I claim you now."

She paused, and then motioned to the nurse, who laid the piece of brown
paper in Macavoy's hand.  He held it for a moment as delicately as if it
were a fragile bit of glass, something that his huge fingers might crush
by touching.  Then he reached over and laid it on the bed beside her and
said, looking Hilton in the eyes, "Tell her, the slip av a saint she is,
if the breakin' av me bones, or the lettin' av me blood's what'll set all
right at Champak Hill, let her mind be aisy--aw yis!"

Soon afterwards they were all on their way--all save Hilton, whose duty
was beside this other danger, for the old nurse said that, "like as not,"
her life would hang upon the news from Champak Hill; and if ill came, his
place was beside the speechless traveller on the Brink.

In a few hours the rescuers stood on the top of Champak Hill, looking
down.  There stood the little house, as it were, between two dooms.  Even
Pierre's face became drawn and pale as he saw what a very few hours or
minutes might do.  Macavoy had spoken no word, had answered no question
since they had left the Post.  There was in his eye the large
seriousness, the intentness which might be found in the face of a brave
boy, who had not learned fear, and yet saw a vast ditch of danger at
which he must leap.  There was ever before him the face of the dumb wife;
there was in his ears the sound of pain that had followed him from
Hilton's house out into the brilliant day.

The men stood helpless, and looked at each other.  They could not say to
the river that it must rise no farther, and they could not go to the
house, nor let a rope down, and there was the crumbled moiety of the hill
which blocked the way to the house: elsewhere it was sheer precipice
without trees.

There was no corner in these hills that Macavoy and Pierre did not know,
and at last, when despair seemed to settle on the group, Macavoy, having
spoken a low word to Pierre, said: "There's wan way, an' maybe I can an'
maybe I can't, but I'm fit to try.  I'll go up the river to an aisy p'int
a mile above, get in, and drift down to a p'int below there, thin climb
up and loose the stuff."

Every man present knew the double danger: the swift headlong river, and
the sudden rush of rocks and stones, which must be loosed on the side of
the narrow ravine opposite the little house.  Macavoy had nothing to say
to the head-shakes of the others, and they did not try to dissuade him;
for women and children were in the question, and there they were below
beside the house, the children gathered round the mother, she waiting--
waiting.

Macavoy, stripped to the waist, and carrying only a hatchet and a coil of
rope tied round him, started away alone up the river.  The others waited,
now and again calling comfort to the woman below, though their words
could not be heard.  About half an hour passed, and then someone called
out: "Here he comes!"  Presently they could see the rough head and the
bare shoulders of the giant in the wild churning stream.  There was only
one point where he could get a hold on the hillside--the jutting bole of
a tree just beneath them, and beneath the dyke of rock and trees.

It was a great moment.  The current swayed him out, but he plunged
forward, catching at the bole.  His hand seized a small branch.  It held
him an instant, as he was swung round, then it snapt.  But the other hand
clenched the bole, and to a loud cheer, which Pierre prompted, Macavoy
drew himself up.  After that they could not see him.  He alone was
studying the situation.

He found the key-rock to the dyked slide of earth.  To loosen it was to
divert the slide away, or partly away, from the little house.  But it
could not be loosened from above, if at all, and he himself would be in
the path of the destroying hill.

"Aisy, aisy, Tim Macavoy," he said to himself.  "It's the woman and the
darlins av her, an' the rose o' the valley down there at the Post!"

A minute afterwards, having chopped down a hickory sapling, he began to
pry at the boulder which held the mass.  Presently a tree came crashing
down, and a small rush of earth followed it, and the hearts of the men
above and the woman and children below stood still for an instant.  An
hour passed as Macavoy toiled with a strange careful skill and a
superhuman concentration.  His body was all shining with sweat, and sweat
dripped like water from his forehead.  His eyes were on the keyrock and
the pile, alert, measuring, intent.  At last he paused.  He looked round
at the hills-down at the river, up at the sky-humanity was shut away from
his sight.  He was alone.  A long hot breath broke from his pressed lips,
stirring his big red beard.  Then he gave a call, a long call that echoed
through the hills weirdly and solemnly.

It reached the ears of those above like a greeting from an outside world.
They answered, "Right, Macavoy!"

Years afterwards these men told how then there came in reply one word,
ringing roundly through the hills--the note and symbol of a crisis, the
fantastic cipher of a soul:

"M'Guire!"

There was a loud booming sound, the dyke was loosed, the ravine split
into the swollen stream its choking mouthful of earth and rock; and a
minute afterwards the path was clear to the top of Champak Hill.  To it
came the unharmed children and their mother, who, from the warm peak sent
the wild duck "to the rose o' the valley," which, till the message came,
was trembling on the stem of life.  But Joy, that marvellous healer, kept
it blooming with a little Eden bird nestling near, whose happy tongue was
taught in after years to tell of the gift of the Simple King; who had
redeemed, on demand, the promissory note for ever.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

A human life he held to be a trifle in the big sum of time
Fear of one's own wife is the worst fear in the world
He never saw an insult unless he intended to avenge it
Liars all men may be, but that's wid wimmin or landlords
Men are like dogs--they worship him who beats them
She valued what others found useless
Women are half saints, half fools






A ROMANY OF THE SNOWS

BEING A CONTINUATION OF THE PERSONAL HISTORIES OF "PIERRE AND HIS PEOPLE"
AND THE LAST EXISTING RECORDS OF PRETTY PIERRE

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.


MALACHI
THE LAKE OF THE GREAT SLAVE
THE RED PATROL
THE GOING OF THE WHITE SWAN
AT BAMBER'S BOOM




MALACHI

"He'll swing just the same to-morrow.  Exit Malachi!" said Freddy
Tarlton gravely.

The door suddenly opened on the group of gossips, and a man stepped
inside and took the only vacant seat near the fire.  He glanced at none,
but stretched out his hands to the heat, looking at the coals with
drooping introspective eyes.

"Exit Malachi," he said presently in a soft ironical voice, but did not
look up.

"By the holy poker, Pierre, where did you spring from?" asked Tarlton
genially.

"The wind bloweth where it listeth, and--" Pierre responded, with a
little turn of his fingers.

"And the wind doesn't tell where it's been, but that's no reason Pierre
shouldn't," urged the other.

Pierre shrugged his shoulders, but made no answer.  "He was a tough,"
said a voice from the crowd.  "To-morrow he'll get the breakfast he's
paid for."  Pierre turned and looked at the speaker with a cold
inquisitive stare.  "Mon Dieu!" he said presently, "here's this Gohawk
playing preacher.  What do you know of Malachi, Gohawk?  What do any of
you know about Malachi?  A little of this, a little of that, a drink
here, a game of euchre there, a ride after cattle, a hunt behind Guidon
Hill!--But what is that?  You have heard the cry of the eagle, you have
seen him carry off a lamb, you have had a pot-shot at him, but what do
you know of the eagle's nest?  Mais non.

"The lamb is one thing, the nest is another.  You don't know the eagle
till you've been there.  And you, Gohawk, would not understand, if you
saw the nest.  Such cancan!"

"Shut your mouth!" broke out Gohawk.  "D'ye think I'm going to stand
your--"

Freddy Tarlton laid a hand on his arm.  "Keep quiet, Gohawk.  What good
will it do?"  Then he said, "Tell us about the nest, Pierre; they're
hanging him for the lamb in the morning."

"Who spoke for him at the trial?" Pierre asked.

"I did," said Tarlton.  "I spoke as well as I could, but the game was
dead against him from the start.  The sheriff was popular, and young;
young--that was the thing; handsome too, and the women, of course!  It
was sure from the start; besides, Malachi would say nothing--didn't seem
to care."

"No, not to care," mused Pierre.  "What did you say for him to the jury
--I mean the devil of a thing to make them sit up and think, 'Poor
Malachi!'--like that."

"Best speech y'ever heard," Gohawk interjected; "just emptied the words
out, split 'em like peas, by gol! till he got to one place right before
the end.  Then he pulled up sudden, and it got so quiet you could 'a
heard a pin drop.  'Gen'lemen of the jury,' says Freddy Tarlton here--
gen'lemen, by gol!  all that lot--Lagan and the rest!  'Gen'lemen of the
jury,' he says, 'be you danged well sure that you're at one with God
A'mighty in this; that you've got at the core of justice here; that
you've got evidence to satisfy Him who you've all got to satisfy some
day, or git out.  Not evidence as to shootin', but evidence as to what
that shootin' meant, an' whether it was meant to kill, an' what for.
The case is like this, gen'lemen of the jury,' says Freddy Tarlton here.
'Two men are in a street alone.  There's a shot, out comes everybody, and
sees Fargo the sheriff laid along the ground, his mouth in the dust, and
a full-up gun in his fingers.  Not forty feet away stands Malachi with a
gun smokin' in his fist.  It seems to be the opinion that it was
cussedness--just cussedness--that made Malachi turn the sheriff's boots
to the sun.  For Malachi was quarrelsome.  I'll give you a quarter on
that.  And the sheriff was mettlesome, used to have high spirits, like as
if he's lift himself over the fence with his bootstraps.  So when Malachi
come and saw the sheriff steppin' round in his paten' leathers, it give
him the needle, and he got a bead on him--and away went Sheriff Fargo--
right away!  That seems to be the sense of the public.'  And he stops
again, soft and quick, and looks the twelve in the eyes at once.  'But,'
says Freddy Tarlton here, 'are you goin' to hang a man on the little you
know?  Or are you goin' to credit him with somethin' of what you don't
know?  You haint got the inside of this thing, and Malachi doesn't let
you know it, and God keeps quiet.  But be danged well sure that you've
got the bulge on iniquity here; for gen'lemen with pistols out in the
street is one thing, and sittin' weavin' a rope in a court-room for a
man's neck is another thing,' says Freddy Tarlton here.  'My client has
refused to say one word this or that way, but don't be sure that Some One
that knows the inside of things won't speak for him in the end.'  Then he
turns and looks at Malachi, and Malachi was standin' still and steady
like a tree, but his face was white, and sweat poured on his forehead.
'If God has no voice to be heard for my client in this court-room to-day,
is there no one on earth--no man or woman--who can speak for one who
won't speak for himself?' says Freddy Tarlton here.  Then, by gol!  for
the first time Malachi opened.  'There's no one,' he says.  'The speakin'
is all for the sheriff.  But I spoke once, and the sheriff didn't
answer.'  Not a bit of beg-yer-pardon in it.  It struck cold.  'I leave
his case in the hands of twelve true men,' says Freddy Tarlton here, and
he sits down."

"So they said he must walk the air?" suggested Pierre.

"Without leavin' their seats," someone added instantly.

"So.  But that speech of 'Freddy Tarlton here'?"  "It was worth twelve
drinks to me, no more, and nothing at all to Malachi," said Tarlton.
"When I said I'd come to him to-night to cheer him up, he said he'd
rather sleep.  The missionary, too, he can make nothing of him.  'I don't
need anyone here,' he says.  'I eat this off my own plate.'  And that's
the end of Malachi."

"Because there was no one to speak for him--eh?  Well, well."

"If he'd said anything that'd justify the thing--make it a manslaughter
business or a quarrel--then!  But no, not a word, up or down, high or
low.  Exit Malachi!" rejoined Freddy Tarlton sorrowfully.  "I wish he'd
given me half a chance."

"I wish I'd been there," said Pierre, taking a match from Gohawk, and
lighting his cigarette.

"To hear his speech?" asked Gohawk, nodding towards Tarlton.

"To tell the truth about it all.  T'sh, you bats, you sheep, what have
you in your skulls?  When a man will not speak, will not lie to gain a
case for his lawyer--or save himself, there is something!  Now, listen to
me, and I will tell you the story of Malachi.  Then you shall judge.

"I never saw such a face as that girl had down there at Lachine in
Quebec.  I knew her when she was a child, and I knew Malachi when he was
on the river with the rafts, the foreman of a gang.  He had a look all
open then as the sun--yes.  Happy?  Yes, as happy as a man ought to be.
Well, the mother of the child died, and Malachi alone was left to take
care of the little Norice.  He left the river and went to work in the
mills, so that he might be with the child; and when he got to be foreman
there he used to bring her to the mill.  He had a basket swung for her
just inside the mill not far from him, right where she was in the shade;
but if she stretched out her hand it would be in the sun.  I've seen a
hundred men turn to look at her where she swung, singing to herself, and
then chuckle to themselves afterwards as they worked.

"When Trevoor, the owner, come one day, and saw her, he swore, and was
going to sack Malachi, but the child--that little Norice--leaned over the
basket, and offered him an apple.  He looked for a minute, then he
reached up, took the apple, turned round, and went out of the mill
without a word--so.  Next month when he come he walked straight to her,
and handed up to her a box of toys and a silver whistle.  'That's to call
me when you want me,' he said, as he put the whistle to her lips, and
then he put the gold string of it round her neck.  She was a wise little
thing, that Norice, and noticed things.  I don't believe that Trevoor or
Malachi ever knew how sweet was the smell of the fresh sawdust till she
held it to their noses; and it was she that had the saws--all sizes--
start one after the other, making so strange a tune.  She made up a
little song about fairies and others to sing to that tune.  And no one
ever thought much about Indian Island, off beyond the sweating, baking
piles of lumber, and the blistering logs and timbers in the bay, till she
told stories about it.  Sure enough, when you saw the shut doors and open
windows of those empty houses, all white without in the sun and dark
within, and not a human to be seen, you could believe almost anything.
You can think how proud Malachi was.  She used to get plenty of presents
from the men who had no wives or children to care for--little silver and
gold things as well as others.  She was fond of them, but no, not vain.
She loved the gold and silver for their own sake."

Pierre paused.  "I knew a youngster once," said Gohawk, "that--"

Pierre waved his hand.  "I am not through, M'sieu' Gohawk the talker.
Years went on.  Now she took care of the house of Malachi.  She wore the
whistle that Trevoor gave her.  He kept saying to her still, 'If ever you
need me, little Norice, blow it, and I will come.'  He was droll, that
M'sieu' Trevoor, at times.  Well, she did not blow, but still he used to
come every year, and always brought her something.  One year he brought
his nephew, a young fellow of about twenty-three.  She did not whistle
for him either, but he kept on coming.  That was the beginning of 'Exit
Malachi.'  The man was clever and bad, the girl believing and good.  He
was young, but he knew how to win a woman's heart.  When that is done,
there is nothing more to do--she is yours for good or evil; and if a man,
through a woman's love, makes her to sin, even his mother cannot be proud
of him-no.  But the man married Norice, and took her away to Madison,
down in Wisconsin.  Malachi was left alone--Malachi and Trevoor, for
Trevoor felt towards her as a father.

"Alors, sorrow come to the girl, for her husband began to play cards
and to drink, and he lost much money.  There was the trouble--the two
together.  They lived in a hotel.  One day a lady missed a diamond
necklace from her room.  Norice had been with her the evening before.
Norice come into her own room the next afternoon, and found detectives
searching.  In her own jewel-case, which was tucked away in the pocket
of an old dress, was found the necklace.  She was arrested.  She said
nothing--for she waited for her husband, who was out of town that day.
He only come in time to see her in court next morning.  She did not deny
anything; she was quiet, like Malachi.  The man played his part well.
He had hid the necklace where he thought it would be safe, but when it
was found, he let the wife take the blame--a little innocent thing.
People were sorry for them both.  She was sent to jail.  Her father was
away in the Rocky Mountains, and he did not hear; Trevoor was in Europe.
The husband got a divorce, and was gone.  Norice was in jail for over
a year, and then she was set free, for her health went bad, and her mind
was going, they thought.  She did not know till she come out that she was
divorced.  Then she nearly died.  But then Trevoor come."

Freddy Tarlton's hands were cold with excitement, and his fingers
trembled so he could hardly light a cigar.

"Go on, go on, Pierre," he said huskily.

"Trevoor said to her--he told me this himself--'Why did you not whistle
for me, Norice?  A word would have brought me from Europe.' 'No one could
help me, no one at all,' she answered.  Then Trevoor said, 'I know who
did it, for he has robbed me too.'  She sank in a heap on the floor.
'I could have borne it and anything for him, if he hadn't divorced me,'
she said.  Then they cleared her name before the world.  But where was
the man?  No one knew.  At last Malachi, in the Rocky Mountains, heard of
her trouble, for Norice wrote to him, but told him not to do the man any
harm, if he ever found him--ah, a woman, a woman!  .  .  .  But Malachi
met the man one day at Guidon Hill, and shot him in the street."

"Fargo the sheriff!" roared half-a-dozen voices.  "Yes; he had changed
his name, had come up here, and because he was clever and spent money,
and had a pull on someone,--got it at cards perhaps,--he was made
sheriff."

"In God's name, why didn't Malachi speak?" said Tarlton; "why didn't he
tell me this?"

"Because he and I had our own plans.  The one evidence he wanted was
Norice.  If she would come to him in his danger, and in spite of his
killing the man, good.  If not, then he would die.  Well, I went to find
her and fetch her.  I found her.  There was no way to send word, so we
had to come on as fast as we could.  We have come just in time."

"Do you mean to say, Pierre, that she's here?" said Gohawk.

Pierre waved his hand emphatically.  "And so we came on with a pardon."

Every man was on his feet, every man's tongue was loosed, and each
ordered liquor for Pierre, and asked him where the girl was.  Freddy
Tarlton wrung his hand, and called a boy to go to his rooms and bring
three bottles of wine, which he had kept for two years, to drink when he
had won his first big case.

Gohawk was importunate.  "Where is the girl, Pierre?" he urged.

"Such a fool as you are, Gohawk!  She is with her father."

A half-hour later, in a large sitting-room, Freddy Tarlton was making
eloquent toasts over the wine.  As they all stood drinking to Pierre,
the door opened from the hall-way, and Malachi stood before them.  At his
shoulder was a face, wistful, worn, yet with a kind of happiness too; and
the eyes had depths which any man might be glad to drown his heart in.

Malachi stood still, not speaking, and an awe or awkwardness fell on the
group at the table.

But Norice stepped forward a little, and said: "May we come in?"

In an instant Freddy Tarlton was by her side, and had her by the hand,
her and her father, drawing them over.

His ardent, admiring look gave Norice thought for many a day.

And that night Pierre made an accurate prophecy.






THE LAKE OF THE GREAT SLAVE

When Tybalt the tale-gatherer asked why it was so called, Pierre said:
"Because of the Great Slave;" and then paused.

Tybalt did not hurry Pierre, knowing his whims.  If he wished to tell,
he would in his own time; if not, nothing could draw it from him.  It was
nearly an hour before Pierre, eased off from the puzzle he was solving
with bits of paper and obliged Tybalt.  He began as if they had been
speaking the moment before:

"They have said it is legend, but I know better.  I have seen the records
of the Company, and it is all there.  I was at Fort O'Glory once, and in
a box two hundred years old the factor and I found it.  There were other
papers, and some of them had large red seals, and a name scrawled along
the end of the page."

Pierre shook his head, as if in contented musing.  He was a born story-
teller.  Tybalt was aching with interest, for he scented a thing of note.

"How did any of those papers, signed with a scrawl, begin?" he asked.

"'To our dearly-beloved,' or something like that," answered Pierre.
"There were letters also.  Two of them were full of harsh words, and
these were signed with the scrawl."

"What was that scrawl?" asked Tybalt.

Pierre stooped to the sand, and wrote two words with his finger.  "Like
that," he answered.

Tybalt looked intently for an instant, and then drew a long breath.
"Charles Rex," he said, hardly above his breath.

Pierre gave him a suggestive sidelong glance.  "That name was droll, eh?"

Tybalt's blood was tingling with the joy of discovery.  "It is a great
name," he said shortly.

"The Slave was great--the Indians said so at the last."

"But that was not the name of the Slave?"

"Mais non.  Who said so!  Charles Rex--like that! was the man who wrote
the letters."

"To the Great Slave?"

Pierre made a gesture of impatience.  "Very sure."

"Where are those letters now?"

"With the Governor of the Company."  Tybalt cut the tobacco for his pipe
savagely.  "You'd have liked one of those papers?" asked Pierre
provokingly.

"I'd give five hundred dollars for one," broke out Tybalt.

Pierre lifted his eyebrows.  "T'sh, what's the good of five hundred
dollars up here?  What would you do with a letter like that?"

Tybalt laughed with a touch of irony, for Pierre was clearly "rubbing it
in."

"Perhaps for a book?" gently asked Pierre.

"Yes, if you like."

"It is a pity.  But there is a way."

"How?"

"Put me in the book.  Then--"

"How does that touch the case?"

Pierre shrugged a shoulder gently, for he thought Tybalt was unusually
obtuse.  Tybalt thought so himself before the episode ended.

"Go on," he said, with clouded brow, but interested eye.  Then, as if
with sudden thought: "To whom were the letters addressed, Pierre?"

"Wait!" was the reply.  "One letter said: 'Good cousin, We are evermore
glad to have thee and thy most excelling mistress near us.  So, fail us
not at our cheerful doings, yonder at Highgate.'  Another--a year after--
said: 'Cousin, for the sweetening of our mind, get thee gone into some
distant corner of our pasturage--the farthest doth please us most.  We
would not have thee on foreign ground, for we bear no ill-will to our
brother princes, and yet we would not have thee near our garden of good
loyal souls, for thou hast a rebel heart and a tongue of divers tunes.
Thou lovest not the good old song of duty to thy prince.  Obeying us,
thy lady shall keep thine estates untouched; failing obedience, thou wilt
make more than thy prince unhappy.  Fare thee well.' That was the way of
two letters," said Pierre.

"How do you remember so?"

Pierre shrugged a shoulder again.  "It is easy with things like that."

"But word for word?"

"I learned it word for word."

"Now for the story of the Lake--if you won't tell me the name of the
man."

"The name afterwards-perhaps.  Well, he came to that farthest corner of
the pasturage, to the Hudson's Bay country, two hundred years ago.  What
do you think?  Was he so sick of all, that he would go so far he could
never get back?  Maybe those 'cheerful doings' at Highgate, eh?  And the
lady--who can tell?"

Tybalt seized Pierre's arm.  "You know more.  Damnation, can't you see
I'm on needles to hear? Was there anything in the letters about the lady?
Anything more than you've told?"

Pierre liked no man's hand on him.  He glanced down at the eager fingers,
and said coldly:

"You are a great man; you can tell a story in many ways, but I in one way
alone, and that is my way--mais oui!"

"Very well, take your own time."

"Bien.  I got the story from two heads.  If you hear a thing like that
from Indians, you call it 'legend'; if from the Company's papers, you
call it 'history.'  Well, in this there is not much difference.  The
papers tell precise the facts; the legend gives the feeling, is more
true.  How can you judge the facts if you don't know the feeling?  No!
what is bad turns good sometimes, when you know the how, the feeling, the
place.  Well, this story of the Great Slave--eh?  .  .  .  There is a
race of Indians in the far north who have hair so brown like yours,
m'sieu', and eyes no darker.  It is said they are of those that lived at
the Pole, before the sea swamped the Isthmus, and swallowed up so many
islands.  So.  In those days the fair race came to the south for the
first time, that is, far below the Circle.  They had their women with
them.  I have seen those of to-day: fine and tall, with breasts like
apples, and a cheek to tempt a man like you, m'sieu'; no grease in the
hair--no, M'sieu' Tybalt."

Tybalt sat moveless under the obvious irony, but his eyes were fixed
intently on Pierre, his mind ever travelling far ahead of the tale.

"Alors: the 'good cousin' of Charles Rex, he made a journey with two men
to the Far-off Metal River, and one day this tribe from the north come on
his camp.  It was summer, and they were camping in the Valley of the
Young Moon, more sweet, they say, than any in the north.  The Indians
cornered them.  There was a fight, and one of the Company's men was
killed, and five of the other.  But when the king of the people of the
Pole saw that the great man was fair of face, he called for the fight to
stop.

"There was a big talk all by signs, and the king said for the great
man to come and be one with them, for they liked his fair face--their
forefathers were fair like him.  He should have the noblest of their
women for his wife, and be a prince among them.  He would not go: so they
drew away again and fought.  A stone-axe brought the great man to the
ground.  He was stunned, not killed.  Then the other man gave up, and
said he would be one of them if they would take him.  They would have
killed him but for one of their women.  She said that he should live to
tell them tales of the south country and the strange people, when they
came again to their camp-fires.  So they let him live, and he was one of
them.  But the chief man, because he was stubborn and scorned them, and
had killed the son of their king in the fight, they made a slave, and
carried him north a captive, till they came to this lake--the Lake of the
Great Slave.

"In all ways they tried him, but he would not yield, neither to wear
their dress nor to worship their gods.  He was robbed of his clothes,
of his gold-handled dagger, his belt of silk and silver, his carbine
with rich chasing, and all, and he was among them almost naked,--it was
summer, as I said, yet defying them.  He was taller by a head than any
of them, and his white skin rippled in the sun like soft steel."

Tybalt was inclined to ask Pierre how he knew all this, but he held his
peace.  Pierre, as if divining his thoughts, continued:

"You ask how I know these things.  Very good: there are the legends, and
there were the papers of the Company.  The Indians tried every way, but
it was no use; he would have nothing to say to them.  At last they came
to this lake.  Now something great occurred.  The woman who had been the
wife of the king's dead son, her heart went out in love of the Great
Slave; but he never looked at her.  One day there were great sports, for
it was the feast of the Red Star.  The young men did feats of strength,
here on this ground where we sit.  The king's wife called out for the
Great Slave to measure strength with them all.  He would not stir.  The
king commanded him; still he would not, but stood among them silent and
looking far away over their heads.  At last, two young men of good height
and bone threw arrows at his bare breast.  The blood came in spots.  Then
he gave a cry through his beard, and was on them like a lion.  He caught
them, one in each arm, swung them from the ground, and brought their
heads together with a crash, breaking their skulls, and dropped them at
his feet.  Catching up a long spear, he waited for the rest.  But they
did not come, for, with a loud voice, the king told them to fall back,
and went and felt the bodies of the men.  One of them was dead; the other
was his second son--he would live.

"'It is a great deed,' said the king, 'for these were no children, but
strong men.'

"Then again he offered the Great Slave women to marry, and fifty tents of
deerskin for the making of a village.  But the Great Slave said no, and
asked to be sent back to Fort O'Glory.

"The king refused.  But that night, as he slept in his tent, the girl-
widow came to him, waked him, and told him to follow her.  He came forth,
and she led him softly through the silent camp to that wood which we see
over there.  He told her she need not go on.  Without a word, she reached
over and kissed him on the breast.  Then he understood.  He told her that
she could not come with him, for there was that lady in England--his
wife, eh?  But never mind, that will come.  He was too great to save his
life, or be free at the price.  Some are born that way.  They have their
own commandments, and they keep them.

"He told her that she must go back.  She gave a little cry, and sank down
at his feet, saying that her life would be in danger if she went back.

"Then he told her to come, for it was in his mind to bring her to Fort
O'Glory, where she could marry an Indian there.  But now she would not go
with him, and turned towards the village.  A woman is a strange creature
--yes, like that!  He refused to go and leave her.  She was in danger,
and he would share it, whatever it might be.  So, though she prayed him
not, he went back with her; and when she saw that he would go in spite of
all, she was glad: which is like a woman.

"When he entered the tent again, he guessed her danger, for he stepped
over the bodies of two dead men.  She had killed them.  As she turned at
the door to go to her own tent, another woman faced her.  It was the wife
of the king, who had suspected, and had now found out.  Who can tell what
it was?  Jealousy, perhaps.  The Great Slave could tell, maybe, if he
could speak, for a man always knows when a woman sets him high.  Anyhow,
that was the way it stood.  In a moment the girl was marched back to her
tent, and all the camp heard a wicked lie of the widow of the king's son.

"To it there was an end after the way of their laws.

"The woman should die by fire, and the man, as the king might will.  So
there was a great gathering in the place where we are, and the king sat
against that big white stone, which is now as it was then.  Silence was
called, and they brought the girl-widow forth.  The king spoke:

"'Thou who hadst a prince for thy husband, didst go in the night to the
tent of the slave who killed thy husband; whereby thou also becamest a
slave, and didst shame the greatness which was given thee.  Thou shalt
die, as has been set in our laws.'

"The girl-widow rose, and spoke.  'I did not know, O king, that he whom
thou madest a slave slew my husband, the prince of our people, and thy
son.  That was not told me.  But had I known it, still would I have set
him free, for thy son was killed in fair battle, and this man deserves
not slavery or torture.  I did seek the tent of the Great Slave, and it
was to set him free--no more.  For that did I go, and, for the rest, my
soul is open to the Spirit Who Sees.  I have done naught, and never did,
nor ever will, that might shame a king, or the daughter of a king, or the
wife of a king, or a woman.  If to set a great captive free is death for
me, then am I ready.  I will answer all pure women in the far Camp of the
Great Fires without fear.  There is no more, O king, that I may say, but
this: she who dies by fire, being of noble blood, may choose who shall
light the faggots--is it not so?'

"Then the king replied: 'It is so.  Such is our law.'

"There was counselling between the king and his oldest men, and so long
were they handling the matter backwards and forwards that it seemed she
might go free.  But the king's wife, seeing, came and spoke to the king
and the others, crying out for the honour of her dead son; so that in a
moment of anger they all cried out for death.

"When the king said again to the girl that she must die by fire, she
answered: 'It is as the gods will.  But it is so, as I said, that I may
choose who shall light the fires?'

"The king answered yes, and asked her whom she chose.  She pointed
towards the Great Slave.  And all, even the king and his councillors,
wondered, for they knew little of the heart of women.  What is a man with
a matter like that?  Nothing--nothing at all.  They would have set this
for punishment: that she should ask for it was beyond them.  Yes, even
the king's wife--it was beyond her.  But the girl herself, see you, was
it not this way?--If she died by the hand of him she loved, then it would
be easy, for she could forget the pain, in the thought that his heart
would ache for her, and that at the very last he might care, and she
should see it.  She was great in her way also--that girl, two hundred
years ago.

"Alors, they led her a little distance off,--there is the spot, where
you see the ground heave a little, and the Great Slave was brought up.
The king told him why the girl was to die.  He went like stone, looking,
looking at them.  He knew that the girl's heart was like a little
child's, and the shame and cruelty of the thing froze him silent for a
minute, and the colour flew from his face to here and there on his body,
as a flame on marble.  The cords began to beat and throb in his neck and
on his forehead, and his eyes gave out fire like flint on an arrow-head.

"Then he began to talk.  He could not say much, for he knew so little of
their language.  But it was 'No!' every other word.  'No--no--no--no!'
the words ringing from his chest.  'She is good!' he said.  'The other-
no!' and he made a motion with his hand.  'She must not die--no!  Evil?
It is a lie!  I will kill each man that says it, one by one, if he dares
come forth.  She tried to save me--well?'  Then he made them know that he
was of high place in a far country, and that a man like him would not
tell a lie.  That pleased the king, for he was proud, and he saw that the
Slave was of better stuff than himself.  Besides, the king was a brave
man, and he had strength, and more than once he had laid his hand on the
chest of the other, as one might on a grand animal.  Perhaps, even then,
they might have spared the girl was it not for the queen.  She would not
hear of it.  Then they tried the Great Slave, and he was found guilty.
The queen sent him word to beg for pardon.  So he stood out and spoke to
the queen.  She sat up straight, with pride in her eyes, for was it not a
great prince, as she thought, asking?  But a cloud fell on her face, for
he begged the girl's life.  Since there must be death, let him die, and
die by fire in her place!  It was then two women cried out: the poor girl
for joy--not at the thought that her life would be saved, but because she
thought the man loved her now, or he would not offer to die for her; and
the queen for hate, because she thought the same.  You can guess the
rest: they were both to die, though the king was sorry for the man.

"The king's speaker stood out and asked them if they had anything to say.
The girl stepped forward, her face without any fear, but a kind of noble
pride in it, and said: 'I am ready, O king.'

"The Great Slave bowed his head, and was thinking much.  They asked him
again, and he waved his hand at them.  The king spoke up in anger, and
then he smiled and said: 'O king, I am not ready; if I die, I die.' Then
he fell to thinking again.  But once more the king spoke: 'Thou shalt
surely die, but not by fire, nor now; nor till we have come to our great
camp in our own country.  There thou shalt die.  But the woman shall die
at the going down of the sun.  She shall die by fire, and thou shalt
light the faggots for the burning.'

"The Great Slave said he would not do it, not though he should die a
hundred deaths.  Then the king said that it was the woman's right to
choose who should start the fire, and he had given his word, which
should not be broken.

"When the Great Slave heard this he was wild for a little, and then he
guessed altogether what was in the girl's mind.  Was not this the true
thing in her, the very truest?  Mais oui!  That was what she wished--
to die by his hand rather than by any other; and something troubled his
breast, and a cloud came in his eyes, so that for a moment he could not
see.  He looked at the girl, so serious, eye to eye.  Perhaps she
understood.  So, after a time, he got calm as the farthest light in the
sky, his face shining among them all with a look none could read.  He sat
down, and wrote upon pieces of bark with a spear-point--those bits of
bark I have seen also at Fort O'Glory.  He pierced them through with
dried strings of the slippery-elm tree, and with the king's consent gave
them to the Company's man, who had become one of the people, telling him,
if ever he was free, or could send them to the Company, he must do so.
The man promised, and shame came upon him that he had let the other
suffer alone; and he said he was willing to fight and die if the Great
Slave gave the word.  But he would not; and he urged that it was right
for the man to save his life.  For himself, no.  It could never be; and
if he must die, he must die.

"You see, a great man must always live alone and die alone, when there
are only such people about him.  So, now that the letters were written,
he sat upon the ground and thought, looking often towards the girl, who
was placed apart, with guards near.  The king sat thinking also.  He
could not guess why the Great Slave should give the letters now, since
he was not yet to die, nor could the Company's man show a reason when the
king asked him.  So the king waited, and told the guards to see that the
Great Slave did not kill himself.

"But the queen wanted the death of the girl, and was glad beyond telling
that the Slave must light the faggots.  She was glad when she saw the
young braves bring a long sapling from the forest, and, digging a hole,
put it stoutly in the ground, and fetch wood, and heap it about.

"The Great Slave noted that the bark of the sapling had not been
stripped, and more than once he measured, with his eye, the space between
the stake and the shores of the Lake: he did this most private, so that
no one saw but the girl.

"At last the time was come.  The Lake was all rose and gold out there in
the west, and the water so still so still.  The cool, moist scent of the
leaves and grass came out from the woods and up from the plain, and the
world was so full of content that a man's heart could cry out, even as
now, while we look--eh, is it not good?  See the deer drinking on the
other shore there!"  Suddenly Pierre became silent, as if he had
forgotten the story altogether.  Tybalt was impatient, but he did not
speak.  He took a twig, and in the sand he wrote "Charles Rex."  Pierre
glanced down and saw it.

"There was beating of the little drums," he continued, "and the crying of
the king's speaker; and soon all was ready, and the people gathered at a
distance, and the king and the queen, and the chief men nearer; and the
girl was brought forth.

"As they led her past the Great Slave, she looked into his eyes, and
afterwards her heart was glad, for she knew that at the last he would be
near her, and that his hand should light the fires.  Two men tied her to
the stake.  Then the king's man cried out again, telling of her crime,
and calling for her death.  The Great Slave was brought near.  No one
knew that the palms of his hands had been rubbed in the sand for a
purpose.  When he was brought beside the stake, a torch was given him by
his guards.  He looked at the girl, and she smiled at him, and said:
'Good-bye.  Forgive.  I die not afraid, and happy.'

"He did not answer, but stooped and lit the sticks here and there.  All
at once he snatched a burning stick, and it and the torch he thrust, like
lightning, in the faces of his guards, blinding them.  Then he sprang to
the stake, and, with a huge pull, tore it from the ground, girl and all,
and rushed to the shore of the Lake, with her tied so in his arms.

"He had been so swift that, at first, no one stirred.  He reached the
shore, rushed into the water, dragging a boat out with one hand as he did
so, and, putting the girl in, seized a paddle and was away with a start.
A few strokes, and then he stopped, picked up a hatchet that was in the
boat with many spears, and freed the girl.  Then he paddled on, trusting,
with a small hope, that through his great strength he could keep ahead
till darkness came, and then, in the gloom, they might escape.  The girl
also seized an oar, and the canoe--the king's own canoe--came on like a
swallow.

"But the tribe was after them in fifty canoes, some coming straight
along, some spreading out to close in later.  It was no equal game, for
these people were so quick and strong with the oars, and they were a
hundred or more to two.  There could be but one end.  It was what the
Great Slave had looked for: to fight till the last breath.  He should
fight for the woman who had risked all for him--just a common woman of
the north, but it seemed good to lose his life for her; and she would
be happy to die with him.

"So they stood side by side when the spears and arrows fell round them,
and they gave death and wounds for wounds in their own bodies.  When, at
last, the Indians climbed into the canoe, the Great Slave was dead of
many wounds, and the woman, all gashed, lay with her lips to his wet, red
cheek.  She smiled as they dragged her away; and her soul hurried after
his to the Camp of the Great Fires."

It was long before Tybalt spoke, but at last he said: If I could but tell
it as you have told it to me, Pierre!"  Pierre answered: "Tell it with
your tongue, and this shall be nothing to it, for what am I?  What
English have I, a gipsy of the snows?  But do not write it, mais non!
Writing wanders from the matter.  The eyes, and the tongue, and the time,
that is the thing.  But in a book--it will sound all cold and thin.  It
is for the north, for the camp-fire, for the big talk before a man rolls
into his blanket, and is at peace.  No, no writing, monsieur.  Speak it
everywhere with your tongue."

"And so I would, were my tongue as yours.  Pierre, tell me more about the
letters at Fort O'Glory.  You know his name--what was it?"

"You said five hundred dollars for one of those letters.  Is it not?"

"Yes."  Tybalt had a new hope.

"T'sh!  What do I want of five hundred dollars!  But, here, answer me a
question: Was the lady--his wife, she that was left in England--a good
woman?  Answer me out of your own sense, and from my story.  If you say
right you shall have a letter--one that I have by me."

Tybalt's heart leapt into his throat.  After a little he said huskily:
"She was a good woman--he believed her that, and so shall I."

"You think he could not have been so great unless, eh?  And that 'Charles
Rex,' what of him?"

"What good can it do to call him bad now?"  Without a word, Pierre drew
from a leather wallet a letter, and, by the light of the fast-setting
sun, Tybalt read it, then read it again, and yet again.

"Poor soul! poor lady!" he said.  "Was ever such another letter written
to any man?  And it came too late; this, with the king's recall, came too
late!"

"So--so.  He died out there where that wild duck flies--a Great Slave.
Years after, the Company's man brought word of all."

Tybalt was looking at the name on the outside of the letter.

"How do they call that name?" asked Pierre.  "It is like none I've seen
--no."

Tybalt shook his head sorrowfully, and did not answer.






THE RED PATROL

St. Augustine's, Canterbury, had given him its licentiate's hood, the
Bishop of Rupert's Land had ordained him, and the North had swallowed him
up.  He had gone forth with surplice, stole, hood, a sermon-case, the
prayer-book, and that other Book of all.  Indian camps, trappers' huts,
and Company's posts had given him hospitality, and had heard him with
patience and consideration.  At first he wore the surplice, stole, and
hood, took the eastward position, and intoned the service, and no man
said him nay, but watched him curiously and was sorrowful--he was so
youthful, clear of eye, and bent on doing heroical things.

But little by little there came a change.  The hood was left behind at
Fort O'Glory, where it provoked the derision of the Methodist missionary
who followed him; the sermon-case stayed at Fort O'Battle; and at last
the surplice itself was put by at the Company's post at Yellow Quill.
He was too excited and in earnest at first to see the effect of his
ministrations, but there came slowly over him the knowledge that he was
talking into space.  He felt something returning on him out of the air
into which he talked, and buffeting him.  It was the Spirit of the North,
in which lives the terror, the large heart of things, the soul of the
past.  He awoke to his inadequacy, to the fact that all these men to whom
he talked, listened, and only listened, and treated him with a gentleness
which was almost pity--as one might a woman.  He had talked doctrine, the
Church, the sacraments, and at Fort O'Battle he faced definitely the
futility of his work.  What was to blame--the Church--religion--himself?

It was at Fort O'Battle that he met Pierre, and heard a voice say over
his shoulder, as he walked out into the icy dusk: "The voice of one
crying in the wilderness .  .  .  and he had sackcloth about his loins,
and his food was locusts and wild honey."

He turned to see Pierre, who in the large room of the Post had sat and
watched him as he prayed and preached.  He had remarked the keen, curious
eye, the musing look, the habitual disdain at the lips.  It had all
touched him, confused him; and now he had a kind of anger.

"You know it so well, why don't you preach yourself?" he said
feverishly.

"I have been preaching all my life," Pierre answered drily.

"The devil's games: cards and law-breaking; and you sneer at men who try
to bring lost sheep into the fold."

"The fold of the Church--yes, I understand all that," Pierre answered.
"I have heard you and the priests of my father's Church talk.  Which is
right?  But as for me, I am a missionary.  Cards, law-breaking--these are
what I have done; but these are not what I have preached."

"What have you preached?" asked the other, walking on into the fast-
gathering night, beyond the Post and the Indian lodges, into the wastes
where frost and silence lived.

Pierre waved his hand towards space.  "This," he said suggestively.

"What's this?" asked the other fretfully.

"The thing you feel round you here."

"I feel the cold," was the petulant reply.

"I feel the immense, the far off," said Pierre slowly.

The other did not understand as yet.  "You've learned big words," he said
disdainfully.

"No; big things," rejoined Pierre sharply--"a few."

"Let me hear you preach them," half snarled Sherburne.

"You will not like to hear them--no."

"I'm not likely to think about them one way or another," was the
contemptuous reply.

Pierre's eyes half closed.  The young, impetuous half-baked college man.
To set his little knowledge against his own studious vagabondage!  At
that instant he determined to play a game and win; to turn this man into
a vagabond also; to see John the Baptist become a Bedouin.  He saw the
doubt, the uncertainty, the shattered vanity in the youth's mind, the
missionary's half retreat from his cause.  A crisis was at hand.  The
youth was fretful with his great theme, instead of being severe upon
himself.  For days and days Pierre's presence had acted on Sherburne
silently but forcibly.  He had listened to the vagabond's philosophy,
and knew that it was of a deeper--so much deeper--knowledge of life than
he himself possessed, and he knew also that it was terribly true; he was
not wise enough to see that it was only true in part.  The influence had
been insidious, delicate, cunning, and he himself was only "a voice
crying in the wilderness," without the simple creed of that voice.  He
knew that the Methodist missionary was believed in more, if less liked,
than himself.  Pierre would work now with all the latent devilry of his
nature to unseat the man from his saddle.

"You have missed the great thing, alors, though you have been up here two
years," he said.  "You do not feel, you do not know.  What good have you
done?  Who has got on his knees and changed his life because of you?  Who
has told his beads or longed for the Mass because of you?  Tell me, who
has ever said, 'You have showed me how to live'?  Even the women, though
they cry sometimes when you sing-song the prayers, go on just the same
when the little 'bless-you' is over.  Why?  Most of them know a better
thing than you tell them.  Here is the truth: you are little--eh, so very
little.  You never lied--direct; you never stole the waters that are
sweet; you never knew the big dreams that come with wine in the dead of
night; you never swore at your own soul and heard it laugh back at you;
you never put your face in the breast of a woman--do not look so wild at
me!--you never had a child; you never saw the world and yourself through
the doors of real life.  You never have said, 'I am tired; I am sick
of all; I have seen all.'  You have never felt what came after--
understanding.  Chut, your talk is for children--and missionaries.
You are a prophet without a call, you are a leader without a man to lead,
you are less than a child up here.  For here the children feel a peace in
their blood when the stars come out, and a joy in their brains when the
dawn comes up and reaches a yellow hand to the Pole, and the west wind
shouts at them.  Holy Mother! we in the far north, we feel things, for
all the great souls of the dead are up there at the Pole in the pleasant
land, and we have seen the Scarlet Hunter and the Kimash Hills.  You have
seen nothing.  You have only heard, and because, like a child, you have
never sinned, you come and preach to us!"

The night was folding down fast, all the stars were shooting out into
their places, and in the north the white lights of the aurora were flying
to and fro.  Pierre had spoken with a slow force and precision, yet, as
he went on, his eyes almost became fixed on those shifting flames, and a
deep look came into them, as he was moved by his own eloquence.  Never in
his life had he made so long a speech at once.  He paused, and then said
suddenly: "Come, let us run."

He broke into a long, sliding trot, and Sherburne did the same.  With
their arms gathered to their sides they ran for quite two miles without a
word, until the heavy breathing of the clergyman brought Pierre up
suddenly.

"You do not run well," he said; "you do not run with the whole body.  You
know so little.  Did you ever think how much such men as Jacques Parfaite
know?  The earth they read like a book, the sky like an animal's ways,
and a man's face like--like the writing on the wall."

"Like the writing on the wall," said Sherburne, musing; for, under the
other's influence, his petulance was gone.  He knew that he was not a
part of this life, that he was ignorant of it; of, indeed, all that was
vital in it and in men and women.

"I think you began this too soon.  You should have waited; then you might
have done good.  But here we are wiser than you.  You have no message--
no real message--to give us; down in your heart you are not even sure of
yourself."

Sherburne sighed.  "I'm of no use," he said.  "I'll get out.  I'm no good
at all."

Pierre's eyes glistened.  He remembered how, the day before, this youth
had said hot words about his card-playing; had called him--in effect--
a thief; had treated him as an inferior, as became one who was of St.
Augustine's, Canterbury.

"It is the great thing to be free," Pierre said, "that no man shall look
for this or that of you.  Just to do as far as you feel, as far as you
are sure--that is the best.  In this you are not sure--no.  Hein, is it
not?"

Sherburne did not answer.  Anger, distrust, wretchedness, the spirit of
the alien, loneliness, were alive in him.  The magnetism of this deep
penetrating man, possessed of a devil, was on him, and in spite of every
reasonable instinct he turned to him for companionship.

"It's been a failure," he burst out, "and I'm sick of it--sick of it;
but I can't give it up."

Pierre said nothing.  They had come to what seemed a vast semicircle of
ice and snow, a huge amphitheatre in the plains.  It was wonderful: a
great round wall on which the northern lights played, into which the
stars peered.  It was open towards the north, and in one side was a
fissure shaped like a Gothic arch.  Pierre pointed to it, and they did
not speak till they had passed through it.  Like great seats the steppes
of snow ranged round, and in the centre was a kind of plateau of ice, as
it might seem a stage or an altar.  To the north there was a great
opening, the lost arc of the circle, through which the mystery of the
Pole swept in and out, or brooded there where no man may question it.
Pierre stood and looked.  Time and again he had been here, and had asked
the same question: Who had ever sat on those frozen benches and looked
down at the drama on that stage below?  Who played the parts?  Was it a
farce or a sacrifice?  To him had been given the sorrow of imagination,
and he wondered and wondered.  Or did they come still--those strange
people, whoever they were--and watch ghostly gladiators at their fatal
sport?  If they came, when was it?  Perhaps they were there now unseen.
In spite of himself he shuddered.  Who was the keeper of the house?


Through his mind there ran--pregnant to him for the first tine--a chanson
of the Scarlet Hunter, the Red Patrol, who guarded the sleepers in the
Kimash Hills against the time they should awake and possess the land once
more: the friend of the lost, the lover of the vagabond, and of all who
had no home:

              "Strangers come to the outer walls--
                  (Why do the sleepers stir?)
               Strangers enter the Judgment House--
                  (Why do the sleepers sigh?)
               Slow they rise in their judgment seats,
               Sieve and measure the naked souls,
               Then with a blessing return to sleep--
                  (Quiet the Judgment House.)
               Lone and sick are the vagrant souls--
                  (When shall the world come home?)"

He reflected upon the words, and a feeling of awe came over him, for he
had been in the White Valley and had seen the Scarlet Hunter.  But there
came at once also a sinister desire to play a game for this man's life-
work here.  He knew that the other was ready for any wild move; there was
upon him the sense of failure and disgust; he was acted on by the magic
of the night, the terrible delight of the scene, and that might be turned
to advantage.

He said: "Am I not right?  There is something in the world greater than
the creeds and the book of the Mass.  To be free and to enjoy, that is
the thing.  Never before have you felt what you feel here now.  And I
will show you more.  I will teach you how to know, I will lead you
through all the north and make you to understand the big things of life.
Then, when you have known, you can return if you will.  But now--see:
I will tell you what I will do.  Here on this great platform we will play
a game of cards.  There is a man whose life I can ruin.  If you win I
promise to leave him safe; and to go out of the far north for ever, to go
back to Quebec"--he had a kind of gaming fever in his veins.  "If I win,
you give up the Church, leaving behind the prayerbook, the Bible and all,
coming with me to do what I shall tell you, for the passing of twelve
moons.  It is a great stake--will you play it?  Come"--he leaned forward,
looking into the other's face--"will you play it?  They drew lots--those
people in the Bible.  We will draw lots, and see, eh?--and see?"

"I accept the stake," said Sherburne, with a little gasp.

Without a word they went upon that platform, shaped like an altar, and
Pierre at once drew out a pack of cards, shuffling them with his mittened
hands.  Then he knelt down and said, as he laid out the cards one by one
till there were thirty: "Whoever gets the ace of hearts first, wins--
hein?"

Sherburne nodded and knelt also.  The cards lay back upwards in three
rows.  For a moment neither stirred.  The white, metallic stars saw it,
the small crescent moon beheld it, and the deep wonder of night made it
strange and dreadful.  Once or twice Sherburne looked round as though he
felt others present, and once Pierre looked out to the wide portals, as
though he saw some one entering.  But there was nothing to the eye--
nothing.  Presently Pierre said: "Begin."

The other drew a card, then Pierre drew one, then the other, then Pierre
again; and so on.  How slow the game was!  Neither hurried, but both,
kneeling, looked and looked at the card long before drawing and turning
it over.  The stake was weighty, and Pierre loved the game more than he
cared about the stake.  Sherburne cared nothing about the game, but all
his soul seemed set upon the hazard.  There was not a sound out of the
night, nothing stirring but the Spirit of the North.  Twenty, twenty-five
cards were drawn, and then Pierre paused.

"In a minute all will be settled," he said.  "Will you go on, or will you
pause?"

But Sherburne had got the madness of chance in his veins now, and he
said: "Quick, quick, go on!"  Pierre drew, but the great card held back.
Sherburne drew, then Pierre again.  There were three left.  Sherburne's
face was as white as the snow around him.  His mouth was open, and a
little white cloud of frosted breath came out.  His hand hungered for the
card, drew back, then seized it.  A moan broke from him.  Then Pierre,
with a little weird laugh, reached out and turned over the ace of hearts!

They both stood up.  Pierre put the cards in his pocket.

"You have lost," he said.

Sherburne threw back his head with a reckless laugh.  The laugh seemed to
echo and echo through the amphitheatre, and then from the frozen seats,
the hillocks of ice and snow, there was a long, low sound, as of sorrow,
and a voice came after:

"Sleep--sleep!  Blessed be the just and the keepers of vows."

Sherburne stood shaking, as though he had seen a host of spirits.  His
eyes on the great seats of judgment, he said to Pierre:

"See, see, how they sit there, grey and cold and awful!"

But Pierre shook his head.

"There is nothing," he said, "nothing;" yet he knew that Sherburne was
looking upon the men of judgment of the Kimash Hills, the sleepers.  He
looked round, half fearfully, for if here were those great children of
the ages, where was the keeper of the house, the Red Patrol?

Even as he thought, a figure in scarlet with a noble face and a high
pride of bearing stood before them, not far away.  Sherburne clutched his
arm.

Then the Red Patrol, the Scarlet Hunter spoke: "Why have you sinned your
sins and broken your vows within our house of judgment?  Know ye not that
in the new springtime of the world ye shall be outcast, because ye have
called the sleepers to judgment before their time?  But I am the hunter
of the lost.  Go you," he said to Sherburne, pointing, "where a sick man
lies in a hut in the Shikam Valley.  In his soul find thine own again."
Then to Pierre: "For thee, thou shalt know the desert and the storm and
the lonely hills; thou shalt neither seek nor find.  Go, and return no
more."

The two men, Sherburne falteringly, stepped down and moved to the open
plain.  They turned at the great entrance and looked back.  Where they
had stood there rested on his long bow the Red Patrol.  He raised it, and
a flaming arrow flew through the sky towards the south.  They followed
its course, and when they looked back a little afterwards, the great
judgment-house was empty, and the whole north was silent as the sleepers.

At dawn they came to the hut in the Shikam Valley, and there they found a
trapper dying.  He had sinned greatly, and he could not die without
someone to show him how, to tell him what to say to the angel of the
cross-roads.

Sherburne, kneeling by him, felt his own new soul moved by a holy fire,
and, first praying for himself, he said to the sick man: "For if we
confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins,
and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

Praying for both, his heart grew strong, and he heard the sick man say,
ere he journeyed forth to the crossroads:

"You have shown me the way.  I have peace."

"Speak for me in the Presence," said Sherburne softly.

The dying man could not answer, but that moment, as he journeyed forth on
the Far Trail, he held Sherburne's hand.






THE GOING OF THE WHITE SWAN

"Why don't she come back, father?"

The man shook his head, his hand fumbled with the wolf-skin robe covering
the child, and he made no reply.  "She'd come if she knew I was hurted,
wouldn't she?"

The father nodded, and then turned restlessly toward the door, as though
expecting someone.  The look was troubled, and the pipe he held was not
alight, though he made a pretence of smoking.

"Suppose the wild cat had got me, she'd be sorry when she comes, wouldn't
she?"

There was no reply yet, save by gesture, the language of primitive man;
but the big body shivered a little, and the uncouth hand felt for a place
in the bed where the lad's knee made a lump under the robe.  He felt the
little heap tenderly, but the child winced.

"S-sh, but that hurts!  This wolf-skin's most too much on me, isn't it,
father?"

The man softly, yet awkwardly too, lifted the robe, folded it back, and
slowly uncovered the knee.  The leg was worn away almost to skin and
bone, but the knee itself was swollen with inflammation.  He bathed it
with some water, mixed with vinegar and herbs, then drew down the deer-
skin shirt at the child's shoulder, and did the same with it.  Both
shoulder and knee bore the marks of teeth--where a huge wild cat had made
havoc--and the body had long red scratches.

Presently the man shook his head sorrowfully, and covered up the small
disfigured frame again, but this time with a tanned skin of the caribou.
The flames of the huge wood fire dashed the walls and floor with a
velvety red and black, and the large iron kettle, bought of the Company
at Fort Sacrament, puffed out geysers of steam.

The place was a low but with parchment windows and rough mud-mortar
lumped between the logs.  Skins hung along two sides, with bullet-holes
and knife-holes showing: of the great grey wolf, the red puma, the bronze
hill-lion, the beaver, the bear, and the sable; and in one corner was a
huge pile of them.  Bare of the usual comforts as the room was, it had a
sort of refinement also, joined to an inexpressible loneliness; you could
scarce have told how or why.

"Father," said the boy, his face pinched with pain for a moment, "it
hurts so all over, every once in a while."

His fingers caressed the leg just below the knee.  "Father," he suddenly
added, "what does it mean when you hear a bird sing in the middle of the
night?"  The woodsman looked down anxiously into the boy's face.  "It
hasn't no meaning, Dominique.  There ain't such a thing on the Labrador
Heights as a bird singin' in the night.  That's only in warm countries
where there's nightingales.  So--bien sur!"

The boy had a wise, dreamy, speculative look.  "Well, I guess it was a
nightingale--it didn't sing like any I ever heard."

The look of nervousness deepened in the woodsman's face.  "What did it
sing like, Dominique?"

"So it made you shiver.  You wanted it to go on, and yet you didn't want
it.  It was pretty, but you felt as if something was going to snap inside
of you."

"When did you hear it, my son?"

"Twice last night--and--and I guess it was Sunday the other time.  I
don't know, for there hasn't been no Sunday up here since mother went
away--has there?"

"Mebbe not."

The veins were beating like live cords in the man's throat and at his
temples.

"'Twas just the same as Father Corraine bein' here, when mother had
Sunday, wasn't it?"

The man made no reply, but a gloom drew down his forehead, and his lips
doubled in as if he endured physical pain.  He got to his feet and paced
the floor.  For weeks he had listened to the same kind of talk from this
wounded, and, as he thought, dying son, and he was getting less and less
able to bear it.  The boy at nine years of age was, in manner of speech,
the merest child, but his thoughts were sometimes large and wise.  The
only white child within a compass of three hundred miles or so; the
lonely life of the hills and plains, so austere in winter, so melted to a
sober joy in summer; listening to the talk of his elders at camp-fires
and on the hunting-trail, when, even as an infant almost, he was swung in
a blanket from a tree or was packed in the torch-crane of a canoe; and,
more than all, the care of a good, loving--if passionate--little mother:
all these had made him far wiser than his years.  He had been hours upon
hours each day alone with the birds, and squirrels, and wild animals, and
something of the keen scent and instinct of the animal world had entered
into his body and brain, so that he felt what he could not understand.

He saw that he had worried his father, and it troubled him.  He thought
of something.  "Daddy," he said, "let me have it."

A smile struggled for life in the hunter's face, as he turned to the wall
and took down the skin of a silver fox.  He held it on his palm for a
moment, looking at it in an interested, satisfied way, then he brought it
over and put it into the child's hands; and the smile now shaped itself,
as he saw an eager pale face buried in the soft fur.

"Good!  good!" he said involuntarily.

"Bon! bon!" said the boy's voice from the fur, in the language of his
mother, who added a strain of Indian blood to her French ancestry.

The two sat there, the man half-kneeling on the low bed, and stroking the
fur very gently.  It could scarcely be thought that such pride should be
spent on a little pelt by a mere backwoodsman and his nine-year-old son.
One has seen a woman fingering a splendid necklace, her eyes fascinated
by the bunch of warm, deep jewels--a light not of mere vanity, or hunger,
or avarice in her face--only the love of the beautiful thing.  But this
was an animal's skin.  Did they feel the animal underneath it yet, giving
it beauty, life, glory?

The silver-fox skin is the prize of the north, and this one was of the
boy's own harvesting.  While his father was away he saw the fox creeping
by the hut.  The joy of the hunter seized him, and guided his eye over
the sights of his father's rifle, as he rested the barrel on the window-
sill, and the animal was his!  Now his finger ran into the hole made by
the bullet, and he gave a little laugh of modest triumph.  Minutes passed
as they studied, felt, and admired the skin, the hunter proud of his son,
the son alive with a primitive passion, which inflicts suffering to get
the beautiful thing.  Perhaps the tenderness as well as the wild passion
of the animal gets into the hunter's blood, and tips his fingers at times
with an exquisite kindness--as one has noted in a lion fondling her
young, or in tigers as they sport upon the sands of the desert.  This boy
had seen his father shoot a splendid moose, and as it lay dying, drop
down and kiss it in the neck for sheer love of its handsomeness.  Death
is no insult.  It is the law of the primitive world--war, and love in
war.

They sat there for a long time, not speaking, each busy in his own way:
the boy full of imaginings, strange, half-heathen, half-angelic feelings;
the man roaming in that savage, romantic, superstitious atmosphere which
belongs to the north, and to the north alone.  At last the boy lay back
on the pillow, his finger still in the bullet-hole of the pelt.  His eyes
closed, and he seemed about to fall asleep, but presently looked up and
whispered: "I haven't said my prayers, have I?"

The father shook his head in a sort of rude confusion.

"I can pray out loud if I want to, can't I?"

"Of course, Dominique."  The man shrank a little.

"I forget a good many times, but I know one all right, for I said it when
the bird was singing.  It isn't one out of the book Father Corraine sent
mother by Pretty Pierre; it's one she taught me out of her own head.
P'r'aps I'd better say it."

"P'r'aps, if you want to."  The voice was husky.  The boy began:

"O bon Jesu, who died to save us from our sins, and to lead us to Thy
country, where there is no cold, nor hunger, nor thirst, and where no one
is afraid, listen to Thy child.  .  .  .  When the great winds and rains
come down from the hills, do not let the floods drown us, nor the woods
cover us, nor the snow-slide bury us; and do not let the prairie-fires
burn us.  Keep wild beasts from killing us in our sleep, and give us good
hearts that we may not kill them in anger."

His finger twisted involuntarily into the bullet-hole in the pelt, and he
paused a moment.

"Keep us from getting lost, O gracious Saviour."  Again there was a
pause, his eyes opened wide, and he said:

"Do you think mother's lost, father?"

A heavy broken breath came from the father, and he replied haltingly:
"Mebbe, mebbe so."

Dominique's eyes closed again.  "I'll make up some," he said slowly.
"And if mother's lost, bring her back again to us, for everything's going
wrong."

Again he paused, then went on with the prayer as it had been taught him.

"Teach us to hear Thee whenever Thou callest, and to see Thee when Thou
visitest us, and let the blessed Mary and all the saints speak often to
Thee for us.  O Christ, hear us.  Lord, have mercy upon us.  Christ have
mercy upon us.  Amen."

Making the sign of the cross, he lay back, and said "I'll go to sleep
now, I guess."

The man sat for a long time looking at the pale, shining face, at the
blue veins showing painfully dark on the temples and forehead, at the
firm little white hand, which was as brown as a butternut a few weeks
before.  The longer he sat, the deeper did his misery sink into his soul.
His wife had gone, he knew not where, his child was wasting to death, and
he had for his sorrows no inner consolation.  He had ever had that touch
of mystical imagination inseparable from the far north, yet he had none
of that religious belief which swallowed up natural awe and turned it to
the refining of life, and to the advantage of a man's soul.  Now it was
forced in upon him that his child was wiser than himself, wiser and
safer.  His life had been spent in the wastes, with rough deeds and
rugged habits, and a youth of hardship, danger, and almost savage
endurance, had given him a half-barbarian temperament, which could
strike an angry blow at one moment and fondle to death at the next.

When he married sweet Lucette Barbond his religion reached little farther
than a belief in the Scarlet Hunter of the Kimash Hills and those voices
that could be heard calling in the night, till their time of sleep be
past, and they should rise and reconquer the north.

Not even Father Corraine, whose ways were like those of his Master, could
ever bring him to a more definite faith.  His wife had at first striven
with him, mourning yet loving.  Sometimes the savage in him had broken
out over the little creature, merely because barbaric tyranny was in him
--torture followed by the passionate kiss.  But how was she philosopher
enough to understand the cause?

When she fled from their hut one bitter day, as he roared some wild words
at her, it was because her nerves had all been shaken from threatened
death by wild beasts (of which he did not know), and his violence drove
her mad.  She had run out of the house, and on, and on, and on--and she
had never come back.  That was weeks ago, and there had been no word nor
sign of her since.  The man was now busy with it all, in a slow, cumbrous
way.  A nature more to be touched by things seen than by things told, his
mind was being awakened in a massive kind of fashion.  He was viewing
this crisis of his life as one sees a human face in the wide searching
light of a great fire.  He was restless, but he held himself still by a
strong effort, not wishing to disturb the sleeper.  His eyes seemed to
retreat farther and farther back under his shaggy brows.

The great logs in the chimney burned brilliantly, and a brass crucifix
over the child's head now and again reflected soft little flashes of
light.  This caught the hunter's eye.  Presently there grew up in him a
vague kind of hope that, somehow, this symbol would bring him luck--that
was the way he put it to himself.  He had felt this--and something more--
when Dominique prayed.  Somehow, Dominique's prayer was the only one he
had ever heard that had gone home to him, had opened up the big sluices
of his nature, and let the light of God flood in.  No, there was another:
the one Lucette made on the day that they were married, when a wonderful
timid reverence played through his hungry love for her.

Hours passed.  All at once, without any other motion or gesture, the
boy's eyes opened wide with a strange, intense look.

"Father," he said slowly, and in a kind of dream, "when you hear a sweet
horn blow at night, is it the Scarlet Hunter calling?"

"P'r'aps.  Why, Dominique?"  He made up his mind to humour the boy,
though it gave him strange aching forebodings.  He had seen grown men
and women with these fancies--and they had died.

"I heard one blowing just now, and the sounds seemed to wave over my
head.  Perhaps he's calling someone that's lost."

"Mebbe."

"And I heard a voice singing--it wasn't a bird tonight."

"There was no voice, Dominique."

"Yes, yes."  There was something fine in the grave, courteous certainty
of the lad.  "I waked and you were sitting there thinking, and I shut my
eyes again, and I heard the voice.  I remember the tune and the words."

"What were the words?"  In spite of himself the hunter felt awed.

"I've heard mother sing them, or something most like them:

              "Why does the fire no longer burn?
                    (I am so lonely.)
               Why does the tent-door swing outward?
                    (I have no home.)
               Oh, let me breathe hard in your face!
                    (I am so lonely.)
               Oh, why do you shut your eyes to me?
                    (I have no home.)"

The boy paused.

"Was that all, Dominique?"

"No, not all."

              "Let us make friends with the stars;
                    (I am so lonely.)
               Give me your hand, I will hold it.
                    (I have no home.)
               Let us go hunting together.
                    (I am so lonely.)
               We will sleep at God's camp to-night.
                    (I have no home.)"

Dominique did not sing, but recited the words with a sort of chanting
inflection.

"What does it mean when you hear a voice like that, father?"

"I don't know.  Who told--your mother--the song?"

"Oh, I don't know.  I suppose she just made them up--she and God. . . .
There!  There it is again?  Don't you hear it--don't you hear it, daddy?"

"No, Dominique, it's only the kettle singing."

"A kettle isn't a voice.  Daddy--"  He paused a little, then went on,
hesitatingly--"I saw a white swan fly through the door over your
shoulder, when you came in to-night."

"No, no, Dominique; it was a flurry of snow blowing over my shoulder."

"But it looked at me with two shining eyes."

"That was two stars shining through the door, my son."

"How could there be snow flying and stars shining too, father?"

"It was just drift-snow on a light wind, but the stars were shining
above, Dominique."

The man's voice was anxious and unconvincing, his eyes had a hungry,
hunted look.  The legend of the White Swan had to do with the passing of
a human soul.  The swan had come in--would it go out alone?  He touched
the boy's hand--it was hot with fever; he felt the pulse--it ran high;
he watched the face--it had a glowing light.  Something stirred within
him, and passed like a wave to the farthest courses of his being.
Through his misery he had touched the garment of the Master of Souls.
As though a voice said to him there, "Someone hath touched me," he got to
his feet, and, with a sudden blind humility, lit two candles, placed them
on a shelf in a corner before a porcelain figure of the Virgin, as he had
seen his wife do.  Then he picked a small handful of fresh spruce twigs
from a branch over the chimney, and laid them beside the candles.  After
a short pause he came slowly to the head of the boy's bed.  Very solemnly
he touched the foot of the Christ on the cross with the tips of his
fingers, and brought them to his lips with an indescribable reverence.
After a moment, standing with eyes fixed on the face of the crucified
figure, he said, in a shaking voice:

"Pardon, bon Jesu!  Sauvez mon enfant!  Ne me laissez pas seul!"

The boy looked up with eyes again grown unnaturally heavy, and said:

"Amen!  .  .  .  Bon Jesu !  .  .  .  Encore!  Encore, mon pere!"

The boy slept.  The father stood still by the bed for a time, but at last
slowly turned and went toward the fire.

Outside, two figures were approaching the hut--a man and a woman; yet at
first glance the man might easily have been taken for a woman, because of
the long black robe which he wore, and because his hair fell loose on his
shoulders and his face was clean-shaven.

"Have patience, my daughter," said the man.  "Do not enter till I call
you.  But stand close to the door, if you will, and hear all."

So saying he raised his hand as in a kind of benediction, passed to the
door, and after tapping very softly, opened it, entered, and closed it
behind him-not so quickly, however, but that the woman caught a glimpse
of the father and the boy.  In her eyes there was the divine look of
motherhood.

"Peace be to this house!" said the man gently as he stepped forward from
the door.

The father, startled, turned shrinkingly on him, as if he had seen a
spirit.

"M'sieu' le cure!" he said in French, with an accent much poorer than
that of the priest, or even of his own son.  He had learned French from
his wife; he himself was English.

The priest's quick eye had taken in the lighted candles at the little
shrine, even as he saw the painfully changed aspect of the man.

"The wife and child, Bagot?" he asked, looking round.  "Ah, the boy!"
he added, and going toward the bed, continued, presently, in a low voice:
"Dominique is ill?"

Bagot nodded, and then answered: "A wild-cat and then fever, Father
Corraine."

The priest felt the boy's pulse softly, then with a close personal look
he spoke hardly above his breath, yet distinctly too:

"Your wife, Bagot?"

"She is not here, m'sieu'."  The voice was low and gloomy.

"Where is she, Bagot?"

"I do not know, m'sieu'."

"When did you see her last?"

"Four weeks ago, m'sieu'."

"That was September, this is October--winter.  On the ranches they let
their cattle loose upon the plains in winter, knowing not where they go,
yet looking for them to return in the spring.  But a woman--a woman and a
wife--is different.  .  .  .  Bagot, you have been a rough, hard man, and
you have been a stranger to your God, but I thought you loved your wife
and child!"

The hunter's hands clenched, and a wicked light flashed up into his eyes;
but the calm, benignant gaze of the other cooled the tempest in his
veins.  The priest sat down on the couch where the child lay, and took
the fevered hand in his very softly.

"Stay where you are, Bagot," he said; "just there where you are, and tell
me what your trouble is, and why your wife is not here.  .  .  .  Say all
honestly--by the name of the Christ!" he added, lifting up a large iron
crucifix that hung on his breast.

Bagot sat down on a bench near the fireplace, the light playing on his
bronzed, powerful face, his eyes shining beneath his heavy brows like two
coals.  After a moment he began:

"I don't know how it started.  I'd lost a lot of pelts--stolen they were,
down on the Child o' Sin River.  Well, she was hasty and nervous, like as
not--she always was brisker and more sudden than I am.  I--I laid my
powder-horn and whisky-flask-up there!"

He pointed to the little shrine of the Virgin, where now his candles were
burning.  The priest's grave eyes did not change expression at all, but
looked out wisely, as though he understood everything before it was told.

Bagot continued: "I didn't notice it, but she had put some flowers there.
She said something with an edge, her face all snapping angry, threw the
things down, and called me a heathen and a wicked heretic--and I don't
say now but she'd a right to do it.  But I let out then, for them stolen
pelts were rasping me on the raw.  I said something pretty rough, and
made as if I was goin' to break her in two--just fetched up my hands,
and went like this!--"  With a singular simplicity he made a wild gesture
with his hands, and an animal-like snarl came from his throat.  Then he
looked at the priest with the honest intensity of a boy.

"Yes, that is what you did--what was it you said which was 'pretty
rough'?"

There was a slight hesitation, then came the reply: "I said there was
enough powder spilt on the floor to kill all the priests in heaven."

A fire suddenly shot up into Father Corraine's face, and his lips
tightened for an instant, but presently he was as before, and he said:

"How that will face you one day, Bagot!  Go on.  What else?"

Sweat began to break out on Bagot's face, and he spoke as though he were
carrying a heavy weight on his shoulders, low and brokenly.

"Then I said, 'And if virgins has it so fine, why didn't you stay one?'"

"Blasphemer!" said the priest in a stern, reproachful voice, his face
turning a little pale, and he brought the crucifix to his lips.  "To the
mother of your child--shame!  What more?"

She threw up her hands to her ears with a wild cry, ran out of the
house, down the hills, and away.  I went to the door and watched her as
long as I could see her, and waited for her to come back--but she never
did.

"I've hunted and hunted, but I can't find her."  Then, with a sudden
thought, "Do you know anything of her, m'sieu'?"

The priest appeared not to hear the question.  Turning for a moment
toward the boy who now was in a deep sleep, he looked at him intently.
Presently he spoke.

"Ever since I married you and Lucette Barbond, you have stood in the way
of her duty, Bagot.  How well I remember that first day when you knelt
before me!  Was ever so sweet and good a girl--with her golden eyes and
the look of summer in her face, and her heart all pure!  Nothing had
spoiled her--you cannot spoil such women--God is in their hearts.  But
you, what have you cared?  One day you would fondle her, and the next you
were a savage--and she, so gentle, so gentle all the time.  Then, for her
religion and the faith of her child--she has fought for it, prayed for
it, suffered for it.  You thought you had no need, for you had so much
happiness, which you did not deserve--that was it.  But she: with all a
woman suffers, how can she bear life--and man--without God?  No, it is
not possible.  And you thought you and your few superstitions were enough
for her.--Ah, poor fool!  She should worship you!  So selfish, so small,
for a man who knows in his heart how great God is.--You did not love
her."

"By the Heaven above, yes!" said Bagot, half starting to his feet.

"Ah, 'by the Heaven above,' no! nor the child.  For true love is
unselfish and patient, and where it is the stronger, it cares for the
weaker; but it was your wife who was unselfish, patient, and cared for
you.  Every time she said an ave she thought of you, and her every thanks
to the good God had you therein.  They know you well in heaven, Bagot--
through your wife.  Did you ever pray--ever since I married you to her?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"An hour or so ago."

Once again the priest's eyes glanced towards the lighted candles.

Presently he said: "You asked me if I had heard anything of your wife.
Listen, and be patient while you listen.  .  .  .  Three weeks ago I was
camping on the Sundust Plains, over against the Young Sky River.  In the
morning, as I was lighting a fire outside my tent, my young Cree Indian
with me, I saw coming over the crest of a land-wave, from the very lips
of the sunrise, as it were, a band of Indians.  I could not quite make
them out.  I hoisted my little flag on the tent, and they hurried on to
me.  I did not know the tribe--they had come from near Hudson's Bay.
They spoke Chinook, and I could understand them.  Well, as they came
near I saw that they had a woman with them."

Bagot leaned forward, his body strained, every muscle tense.  "A woman?"
he said, as if breathing gave him sorrow--"my wife?"

"Your wife."

"Quick!  Quick!  Go on--oh, go on, m'sieu'--good father."

"She fell at my feet, begging me to save her.  .  .  .  I waved her off."

The sweat dropped from Bagot's forehead, a low growl broke from him,
and he made such a motion as a lion might make at its prey.

"You wouldn't--wouldn't save her--you coward!"  He ground the words out.

The priest raised his palm against the other's violence.  "Hush!  .  .  .
She drew away, saying that God and man had deserted her.  .  .  .  We had
breakfast, the chief and I.  Afterwards, when the chief had eaten much
and was in good humour, I asked him where he had got the woman.  He said
that he had found her on the plains she had lost her way.  I told him
then that I wanted to buy her.  He said to me, 'What does a priest want
of a woman?'  I said that I wished to give her back to her husband.  He
said that he had found her, and she was his, and that he would marry her
when they reached the great camp of the tribe.  I was patient.  It would
not do to make him angry.  I wrote down on a piece of bark the things
that I would give him for her: an order on the Company at Fort o' Sin for
shot, blankets, and beads.  He said no."

The priest paused.  Bagot's face was all swimming with sweat, his body
was rigid, but the veins of his neck knotted and twisted.

"For the love of God, go on!" he said hoarsely.  "Yes, 'for the love of
God.'  I have no money, I am poor, but the Company will always honour my
orders, for I pay sometimes, by the help of Christ.  Bien, I added some
things to the list: a saddle, a rifle, and some flannel.  But no, he
would not.  Once more I put many things down.  It was a big bill--
it would keep me poor for five years.--To save your wife, John Bagot,
you who drove her from your door, blaspheming, and railing at such as I.
.  .  .  I offered the things, and told him that was all that I could
give.  After a little he shook his head, and said that he must have the
woman for his wife.  I did not know what to add.  I said--'She is white,
and the white people will never rest till they have killed you all, if
you do this thing.  The Company will track you down.'  Then he said, 'The
whites must catch me and fight me before they kill me.' .  .  .  What was
there to do?"

Bagot came near to the priest, bending over him savagely.

"You let her stay with them--you with hands like a man!"

"Hush!" was the calm, reproving answer.  "I was one man, they were
twenty."

"Where was your God to help you, then?"

"Her God and mine was with me."

Bagot's eyes blazed.  "Why didn't you offer rum--rum?  They'd have done
it for that--one--five--ten kegs of rum!"

He swayed to and fro in his excitement, yet their voices hardly rose
above a hoarse whisper all the time.  "You forget," answered the priest,
"that it is against the law, and that as a priest of my order, I am vowed
to give no rum to an Indian."

"A vow?  A vow?  Name of God! what is a vow beside a woman--my wife?"

His misery and his rage were pitiful to see.

"Perjure my soul?  Offer rum?  Break my vow in the face of the enemies of
God's Church?  What have you done for me that I should do this for you,
John Bagot?"

"Coward!" was the man's despairing cry, with a sudden threatening
movement.  "Christ Himself would have broke a vow to save her."

The grave, kind eyes of the priest met the other's fierce gaze, and
quieted the wild storm that was about to break.

"Who am I that I should teach my Master?" he said solemnly.  "What would
you give Christ, Bagot, if He had saved her to you?"

The man shook with grief, and tears rushed from his eyes, so suddenly and
fully had a new emotion passed through him.

"Give--give?" he cried; "I would give twenty years of my life!"

The figure of the priest stretched up with a gentle grandeur.  Holding
out the iron crucifix, he said: "On your knees and swear it, John Bagot."

There was something inspiring, commanding, in the voice and manner, and
Bagot, with a new hope rushing through his veins, knelt and repeated his
words.

The priest turned to the door, and called, "Madame Lucette!"

The boy, hearing, waked, and sat up in bed suddenly.  "Mother!  mother!"
he cried, as the door flew open.  The mother came to her husband's arms,
laughing and weeping, and an instant afterwards was pouring out her love
and anxiety over her child.

Father Corraine now faced the man, and with a soft exaltation of voice
and manner, said:

"John Bagot, in the name of Christ, I demand twenty years of your life--
of love and obedience of God.  I broke my vow, I perjured my soul, I
bought your wife with ten kegs of rum!"

The tall hunter dropped again to his knees, and caught the priest's hand
to kiss it.

"No, no--this!" the priest said, and laid his iron crucifix against the
other's lips.

Dominique's voice came clearly through the room: "Mother, I saw the white
swan fly away through the door when you came in."

"My dear, my dear," she said, "there was no white swan."  But she clasped
the boy to her breast protectingly, and whispered an ave.

"Peace be to this house," said the voice of the priest.  And there was
peace: for the child lived, and the man has loved, and has kept his vow,
even unto this day.

For the visions of the boy, who can know the divers ways in which God
speaks to the children of men?






AT BAMBER'S BOOM

His trouble came upon him when he was old.  To the hour of its coming he
had been of shrewd and humourous disposition.  He had married late in
life, and his wife had died, leaving him one child--a girl.  She grew to
womanhood, bringing him daily joy.  She was beloved in the settlement;
and there was no one at Bamber's Boom, in the valley of the Madawaska,
but was startled and sorry when it turned out that Dugard, the river-
boss, was married.  He floated away down the river, with his rafts and
drives of logs, leaving the girl sick and shamed.  They knew she was sick
at heart, because she grew pale and silent; they did not know for some
months how shamed she was.  Then it was that Mrs. Lauder, the sister of
the Roman Catholic missionary, Father Halen, being a woman of notable
character and kindness, visited her and begged her to tell all.

Though the girl--Nora--was a Protestant, Mrs. Lauder did this: but it
brought sore grief to her.  At first she could hardly bear to look at
the girl's face, it was so hopeless, so numb to the world: it had the
indifference of despair.  Rumour now became hateful fact.  When the old
man was told, he gave one great cry, then sat down, his hands pressed
hard between his knees, his body trembling, his eyes staring before him.

It was Father Halen who told him.  He did it as man to man, and not as a
priest, having travelled fifty miles for the purpose.  "George Magor,"
said he, "it's bad, I know, but bear it--with the help of God.  And be
kind to the girl."

The old man answered nothing.  "My friend," the priest continued, "I hope
you'll forgive me for telling you.  I thought 'twould be better from me,
than to have it thrown at you in the settlement.  We've been friends one
way and another, and my heart aches for you, and my prayers go with you."

The old man raised his sunken eyes, all their keen humour gone, and spoke
as though each word were dug from his heart.  "Say no more, Father
Halen."  Then he reached out, caught the priest's hand in his gnarled
fingers, and wrung it.

The father never spoke a harsh word to the girl.  Otherwise he seemed to
harden into stone.  When the Protestant missionary came, he would not see
him.  The child was born before the river-drivers came along again the
next year with their rafts and logs.  There was a feeling abroad that it
would be ill for Dugard if he chanced to camp at Bamber's Boom.  The look
of the old man's face was ominous, and he was known to have an iron will.

Dugard was a handsome man, half French, half Scotch, swarthy and
admirably made.  He was proud of his strength, and showily fearless in
danger.  For there were dangerous hours to the river life: when, for
instance, a mass of logs became jammed at a rapids, and must be loosened;
or a crib struck into the wrong channel, or, failing to enter a slide
straight, came at a nasty angle to it, its timbers wrenched and tore
apart, and its crew, with their great oars, were plumped into the busy
current.  He had been known to stand singly in some perilous spot when
one log, the key to the jam, must be shifted to set free the great
tumbled pile.  He did everything with a dash.  The handspike was waved
and thrust into the best leverage, the long robust cry, "O-hee-hee-hoi!"
rolled over the waters, there was a devil's jumble of logs, and he played
a desperate game with them, tossing here, leaping there, balancing
elsewhere, till, reaching the smooth rush of logs in the current, he ran
across them to the shore as they spun beneath his feet.

His gang of river-drivers, with their big drives of logs, came sweeping
down one beautiful day of early summer, red-shifted, shouting, good-
tempered.  It was about this time that Pierre came to know Magor.

It was the old man's duty to keep the booms of several great lumbering
companies, and to watch the logs when the river-drivers were engaged
elsewhere.  Occasionally he took a place with the men, helping to make
cribs and rafts.  Dugard worked for one lumber company, Magor for others.
Many in the settlement showed Dugard how much he was despised.  Some
warned him that Magor had said he would break him into pieces; it seemed
possible that Dugard might have a bad hour with the people of Bamber's
Boom.  Dugard, though he swelled and strutted, showed by a furtive eye
and a sinister watchfulness that he felt himself in an atmosphere of
danger.  But he spoke of his wickedness lightly as, "A slip--a little
accident, mon ami."

Pierre said to him one day: "Bien, Dugard, you are a bold man to come
here again.  Or is it that you think old men are cowards?"

Dugard, blustering, laid his hand suddenly upon his case-knife.

Pierre laughed softly, contemptuously, came over, and throwing out his
perfectly formed but not robust chest in the fashion of Dugard, added:
"Ho, ho, monsieur the butcher, take your time at that.  There is too much
blood in your carcass.  You have quarrels plenty on your hands without
this.  Come, don't be a fool and a scoundrel too."

Dugard grinned uneasily, and tried to turn the thing off as a joke, and
Pierre, who laughed still a little more, said: "It would be amusing to
see old Magor and Dugard fight.  It would be--so equal."  There was a
keen edge to Pierre's tones, but Dugard dared not resent it.

One day Magor and Dugard must meet.  The square-timber of the two
companies had got tangled at a certain point, and gangs from both must
set them loose.  They were camped some distance from each other.  There
was rivalry between them, and it was hinted that if any trouble came from
the meeting of Magor and Dugard the gangs would pay off old scores with
each other.  Pierre wished to prevent this.  It seemed to him that the
two men should stand alone in the affair.  He said as much here and there
to members of both camps, for he was free of both: a tribute to his
genius at poker.

The girl, Nora, was apprehensive--for her father; she hated the other man
now.  Pierre was courteous to her, scrupulous in word and look, and fond
of her child.  He had always shown a gentleness to children, which seemed
little compatible with his character; but for this young outlaw in the
world he had something more.  He even laboured carefully to turn the
girl's father in its favour; but as yet to little purpose.  He was
thought ful of the girl too.  He only went to the house when he knew her
father was present, or when she was away.  Once while he was there,
Father Halen and his sister, Mrs. Lauder, came.  They found Pierre with
the child, rocking the cradle, and humming as he did so an old song of
the coureurs de bois:

              "Out of the hills comes a little white deer,
                  Poor little vaurien, o, ci, ci!
               Come to my home, to my home down here,
               Sister and brother and child o' me
                  Poor little, poor little vaurien!"

Pierre was alone, save for the old woman who had cared for the home since
Nora's trouble came.  The priest was anxious lest any harm should come
from Dugard's presence at Bamber's Boom.  He knew Pierre's doubtful
reputation, but still he knew he could speak freely and would be answered
honestly.  "What will happen?" he abruptly asked.

"What neither you nor I should try to prevent, m'sieu'," was Pierre's
reply.

"Magor will do the man injury?"

"What would you have?  Put the matter on your own hearthstone, eh? . . .
Pardon, if I say these things bluntly."  Pierre still lightly rocked the
cradle with one foot.

"But vengeance is in God's hands."

"M'sieu'," said the half-breed, "vengeance also is man's, else why did
we ten men from Fort Cypress track down the Indians who murdered your
brother, the good priest, and kill them one by one?"

Father Halen caught his sister as she swayed, and helped her to a chair,
then turned a sad face on Pierre.  "Were you--were you one of that ten?"
he asked, overcome; and he held out his hand.

The two river-driving camps joined at Mud Cat Point, where was the crush
of great timber.  The two men did not at first come face to face, but it
was noticed by Pierre, who smoked on the bank while the others worked,
that the old man watched his enemy closely.  The work of undoing the
great twist of logs was exciting, and they fell on each other with a
great sound as they were pried off, and went sliding, grinding, into the
water.  At one spot they were piled together, massive and high.  These
were left to the last.

It was here that the two met.  Old Magor's face was quiet, if a little
haggard; and his eyes looked out from under his shaggy brows piercingly.
Dugard's manner was swaggering, and he swore horribly at his gang.
Presently he stood at a point alone, working at an obstinate log.  He was
at the foot of an incline of timber, and he was not aware that Magor had
suddenly appeared at the top of that incline.  He heard his name called
out sharply.  Swinging round, he saw Magor thrusting a handspike under a
huge timber, hanging at the top of the incline.  He was standing in a
hollow, a kind of trench.  He was shaken with fear, for he saw the old
man's design.  He gave a cry and made as if to jump out of the way, but
with a laugh Magor threw his whole weight on the handspike, the great
timber slid swiftly down and crushed Dugard from his thighs to his feet,
breaking his legs terribly.  The old man called down at him: "A slip--a
little accident, mon ami!"  Then, shouldering his handspike, he made his
way through the silent gangs to the shore, and so on homewards.

Magor had done what he wished.  Dugard would be a cripple for life; his
beauty was all spoiled and broken: there was much to do to save his life.



II

Nora also about this time took to her bed with fever.  Again and again
Pierre rode thirty miles and back to get ice for her head.  All were kind
to her now.  The vengeance upon Dugard seemed to have wiped out much of
her shame in the eyes of Bamber's Boom.  Such is the way of the world.
He that has the last blow is in the eye of advantage.  When Nora began to
recover, the child fell ill also.  In the sickness of the child the old
man had a great temptation--far greater than that concerning Dugard.  As
the mother grew better the child became much worse.  One night the doctor
came, driving over from another settlement, and said that if the child
got sleep till morning it would probably live, for the crisis had come.
He left an opiate to procure the sleep, the same that had been given to
the mother.  If it did not sleep, it would die.  Pierre was present at
this time.

All through the child's illness the old man's mind had been tossed to and
fro.  If the child died, the living stigma would be gone; there would be
no reminder of his daughter's shame in the eyes of the world.  They could
go away from Bamber's Boom, and begin life again somewhere.  But, then,
there was the child itself which had crept into his heart,--he knew not
how, and would not be driven out.  He had never, till it was taken ill,
even touched it, nor spoken to it.  To destroy its life!--Well, would it
not be better for the child to go out of all possible shame, into peace,
the peace of the grave?

This night he sat down beside the cradle, holding the bottle of medicine
and a spoon in his hand.  The hot, painful face of the child fascinated
him.  He looked from it to the bottle, and back, then again to the
bottle.  He started, and the sweat stood out on his forehead.  For though
the doctor had told him in words the proper dose, he had by mistake
written on the label the same dose as for the mother!  Here was the
responsibility shifted in any case.  More than once the old man uncorked
the bottle, and once he dropped out the opiate in the spoon steadily; but
the child opened its suffering eyes at him, its little wasted hand
wandered over the coverlet, and he could not do it just then.  But again
the passion for its destruction came on him, because he heard his
daughter moaning in the other room.  He said to himself that she would be
happier when it was gone.  But as he stooped over the cradle, no longer
hesitating, the door softly opened, and Pierre entered.  The old man
shuddered, and drew back from the cradle.  Pierre saw the look of guilt
in the old man's face, and his instinct told him what was happening.  He
took the bottle from the trembling hand, and looked at the label.

"What is the proper dose?" he asked, seeing that a mistake had been made
by the doctor.

In a hoarse whisper Magor told him.  "It may be too late," Pierre added.
He knelt down, with light fingers opened the child's mouth, and poured
the medicine in slowly.  The old man stood for a time rigid, looking at
them both.  Then he came round to the other side of the cradle, and
seated himself beside it, his eyes fixed on the child's face.  For a long
time they sat there.  At last the old man said: "Will he die, Pierre?"

"I am afraid so," answered Pierre painfully.  "But we shall see."  Then
early teaching came to him, never to be entirely obliterated, and he
added: "Has the child been baptised?"

The old man shook his head.  "'Will you do it?" asked Pierre
hesitatingly.

"I can't--I can't," was the reply.

Pierre smiled a little ironically, as if at himself, got some water in a
cup, came over, and said: "Remember, I'm a Papist!"

A motion of the hand answered him.

He dipped his fingers in the water, and dropped it ever so lightly on the
child's forehead.

"George Magor,"--it was the old man's name,--"I baptise thee in the name
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen."  Then he
drew the sign of the cross on the infant's forehead.

Sitting down, he watched beside the child.  After a little he heard a
long choking sigh.  Looking up, he saw tears slowly dropping from Magor's
eyes.

And to this day the child and the mother of the child are dear to the old
man's heart.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Bad turns good sometimes, when you know the how
How can you judge the facts if you don't know the feeling?
Put the matter on your own hearthstone






A ROMANY OF THE SNOWS

BEING A CONTINUATION OF THE PERSONAL HISTORIES OF "PIERRE AND HIS PEOPLE"
AND THE LAST EXISTING RECORDS OF PRETTY PIERRE

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.


THE BRIDGE HOUSE
THE EPAULETTES
THE HOUSE WITH THE BROKEN SHUTTER
THE FINDING OF FINGALL
THREE COMMANDMENTS IN THE VULGAR TONGUE




THE BRIDGE HOUSE

It stood on a wide wall between two small bridges.  These were approaches
to the big covered bridge spanning the main channel of the Madawaska
River, and when swelled by the spring thaws and rains, the two flanking
channels divided at the foundations of the house, and rustled away
through the narrow paths of the small bridges to the rapids.  You could
stand at any window in the House and watch the ugly, rushing current,
gorged with logs, come battering at the wall, jostle between the piers,
and race on to the rocks and the dam and the slide beyond.  You stepped
from the front door upon the wall, which was a road between the bridges,
and from the back door into the river itself.

The House had once been a tavern.  It looked a wayfarer, like its patrons
the river-drivers, with whom it was most popular.  You felt that it had
no part in the career of the village on either side, but was like a rock
in a channel, at which a swimmer caught or a vagrant fish loitered.

Pierre knew the place, when, of a night in the springtime or early
summer, throngs of river-drivers and their bosses sauntered at its doors,
or hung over the railing of the wall, as they talked and smoked.

The glory of the Bridge House suddenly declined.  That was because
Finley, the owner, a rich man, came to hate the place--his brother's
blood stained the barroom floor.  He would have destroyed the house but
that John Rupert, the beggared gentleman came to him, and wished to rent
it for a dwelling.

Mr. Rupert was old, and had been miserably poor for many years, but he
had a breeding and a manner superior to anyone at Bamber's Boom.  He was
too old for a labourer, he had no art or craftsmanship; his little money
was gone in foolish speculations, and he was dependent on his
granddaughter's slight earnings from music teaching and needlework.  But
he rented an acre of ground from Finley, and grew vegetables; he gathered
driftwood from the river for his winter fire, and made up the accounts of
the storekeeper occasionally.  Yet it was merely keeping off starvation.
He was not popular.  He had no tongue for the meaningless village talk.
People held him in a kind of awe, and yet they felt a mean satisfaction
when they saw him shouldering driftwood, and piling it on the shore to be
dragged away--the last resort of the poor, for which they blush.

When Mr. Rupert asked for the House, Finley knew the chances were he
would not get the rental; yet, because he was sorry for the old man, he
gave it to him at a low rate.  He closed up the bar-room, however, and it
was never opened afterwards.

So it was that Mr. Rupert and Judith, his granddaughter, came to live
there.  Judith was a blithe, lissome creature, who had never known
comfort or riches: they were taken from her grandfather before she was
born, and her father and mother both died when she was a little child.
But she had been taught by her grandmother, when she lived, and by her
grandfather, and she had felt the graces of refined life.  Withal, she
had a singular sympathy for the rude, strong life of the river.  She was
glad when they came to live at the Bridge House, and shamed too: glad
because they could live apart from the other villagers; shamed because it
exposed her to the curiosity of those who visited the House, thinking it
was still a tavern.  But that was only for a time.

One night Jules Brydon, the young river-boss, camped with his men at
Bamber's Boom.  He was of parents Scotch and French, and the amalgamation
of races in him made a striking product.  He was cool and indomitable,
yet hearty and joyous.  It was exciting to watch him at the head of his
men, breaking up a jam of logs, and it was a delight to hear him of an
evening as he sang:

              "Have you heard the cry of the Long Lachine,
               When happy is the sun in the morning?
               The rapids long and the banks of green,
               As we ride away in the morning,
                  On the froth of the Long Lachine?"

One day, soon after they came, the dams and booms were opened above,
and forests of logs came riding down to Bamber's Boom.  The current was
strong, and the logs came on swiftly.  As Brydon's gang worked, they saw
a man out upon a small raft of driftwood, which had been suddenly caught
in the drive of logs, and was carried out towards the middle channel.
The river-drivers laughed, for they failed to see that the man was old,
and that he could not run across the rolling logs to the shore.  The old
man, evidently hopeless, laid down his pike-pole, folded his hands, and
drifted with the logs.  The river-drivers stopped laughing.  They began
to understand.

Brydon saw a woman standing at a window of the House waving her arms,
and there floated up the river the words, "Father!  father!"  He caught
up a pikepole, and ran over that spinning floor of logs to the raft.  The
old man's face was white, but there was no fear in his eyes.

"I cannot run the logs," he said at once; "I never did; I am too old, and
I slip.  It's no use.  It is my granddaughter at that window.  Tell her
that I'll think of her to the last.  .  .  .  Good-bye!"

Brydon was eyeing the logs.  The old man's voice was husky; he could not
cry out, but he waved his hand to the girl.

"Oh, save him!" came from her faintly.

Brydon's eyes were now on the covered bridge.  Their raft was in the
channel, coming straight between two piers.  He measured his chances.  He
knew if he slipped, doing what he intended, that both might be drowned,
and certainly Mr. Rupert; for the logs were close, and to drop among them
was a bad business.  If they once closed over there was an end of
everything.

"Keep quite still," he said, "and when I throw you catch."

He took the slight figure in his arms, sprang out upon the slippery logs,
and ran.  A cheer went up from the men on the shore, and the people who
were gathering on the bridges, too late to be of service.  Besides, the
bridge was closed, and there was only a small opening at the piers.  For
one of these piers Brydon was making.  He ran hard.  Once he slipped and
nearly fell, but recovered.  Then a floating tree suddenly lunged up and
struck him, so that he dropped upon a knee; but again he was up, and
strained for the pier.  He was within a few feet of it as they came to
the bridge.  The people gave a cry of fear, for they saw that there was
no chance of both making it; because, too, at the critical moment a space
of clear water showed near the pier.  But Brydon raised John Rupert up,
balanced himself, and tossed him at the pier, where two river-drivers
stood stretching out their arms.  An instant afterwards the old man was
with his granddaughter.  But Brydon slipped and fell; the roots of a tree
bore him down, and he was gone beneath the logs!

There was a cry of horror from the watchers, then all was still.  But
below the bridge they saw an arm thrust up between the logs, and then
another arm crowding them apart.  Now a head and shoulders appeared.
Luckily the piece of timber which Brydon grasped was square, and did not
roll.  In a moment he was standing on it.  There was a wild shout of
encouragement.  He turned his battered, blood-stained face to the bridge
for an instant, and, with a wave of the hand and a sharp look towards the
rapids below, once more sprang out.  It was a brave sight, for the logs
were in a narrower channel and more riotous.  He rubbed the blood out of
his eyes that he might see his way.  The rolling forest gave him no
quarter, but he came on, rocking with weakness, to within a few rods of
the shore.  Then a half-dozen of his men ran out on the logs,--they were
packed closely here,--caught him up, and brought him to dry ground.

They took him to the Bridge House.  He was hurt more than he or they
thought.  The old man and the girl met them at the door.  Judith gave a
little cry when she saw the blood and Brydon's bruised face.  He lifted
his head as though her eyes had drawn his, and, their looks meeting,
he took his hat off.  Her face flushed; she dropped her eyes.  Her
grandfather seized Brydon's big hand, and said some trembling words of
thanks.  The girl stepped inside, made a bed for him upon the sofa, and
got him something to drink.  She was very cool; she immediately asked
Pierre to go for the young doctor who had lately come to the place, and
made ready warm water with which she wiped Brydon's blood-stained face
and hands, and then gave him some brandy.  His comrades standing round
watched her admiringly, she was so deft and delicate.  Brydon, as if to
be nursed and cared for was not manly, felt ashamed, and came up quickly
to a sitting posture, saying, "Pshaw!  I'm all right!"  But he turned
sick immediately, and Judith's arms caught his head and shoulders as he
fell back.  His face turned, and was pillowed on her bosom.  At this she
blushed, but a look of singular dignity came into her face.  Those
standing by were struck with a kind of awe; they were used mostly to the
daughters of habitants and fifty-acre farmers.  Her sensitive face spoke
a wonderful language: a divine gratitude and thankfulness; and her eyes
had a clear moisture which did not dim them.  The situation was trying to
the river-drivers--it was too refined; and they breathed more freely when
they got outside and left the girl, her grandfather, Pierre, and the
young doctor alone with the injured man.

That was how the thing began.  Pierre saw the conclusion of events from
the start.  The young doctor did not.  From the hour when he bound up
Brydon's head, Judith's fingers aiding him, he felt a spring in his blood
new to him.  When he came to know exactly what it meant, and acted, it
was too late.  He was much surprised that his advances were gently
repulsed.  He pressed them hard: that was a mistake.  He had an idea,
not uncommon in such cases, that he was conferring an honour.  But he was
very young.  A gold medal in anatomy is likely to turn a lad's head at
the start.  He falls into the error that the ability to demonstrate the
medulla oblongata should likewise suffice to convince the heart of a
maid.  Pierre enjoyed the situation; he knew life all round; he had boxed
the compass of experience.

He believed in Judith.  The old man interested him: he was a wreck out of
an unfamiliar life.

"Well, you see," Pierre said to Brydon one day, as they sat on the high
cross-beams of the little bridge, "you can't kill it in a man--what he
was born.  Look, as he piles up the driftwood over there.  Broken down,
eh?  Yes, but then there is something--a manner, an eye.  He piles the
wood like champagne bottles.  On the raft, you remember, he took off his
hat to death.  That's different altogether from us."

He gave a sidelong glance at Brydon, and saw a troubled look.

"Yes," Brydon said, "he is different; and so is she."

"She is a lady," Pierre said, with slow emphasis.  "She couldn't hide it
if she tried.  She plays the piano, and looks all silk in calico.  Made
for this?"--he waved his hand towards the Bridge House.  "No, no!  made
for--"

He paused, smiled enigmatically, and dropped a bit of wood on the swift
current.

Brydon frowned, then said: "Well, made for what, Pierre?"

Pierre looked over Brydon's shoulder, towards a pretty cottage on the
hillside.  "Made for homes like that, not this," he said, and he nodded
first towards the hillside, then to the Bridge House.  (The cottage
belonged to the young doctor.) A growl like an animal's came from Brydon,
and he clinched the other's shoulder.  Pierre glanced at the hand, then
at Brydon's face, and said sharply: "Take it away."

The hand dropped; but Brydon's face was hot, and his eyes were hard.

Pierre continued: "But then women are strange.  What you expect they will
not--no.  Riches?--it is nothing; houses like that on the hill, nothing.
They have whims.  The hut is as good as the house, with the kitchen in
the open where the river welts and washes, and a man--the great man of
the world to them--to play the little game of life with.  .  .  .  Pshaw!
you are idle: move; you are thick in the head: think hard; you like the
girl: speak."

As he said this, there showed beneath them the front timbers of a small
crib of logs with a crew of two men, making for the rapids and the slide
below.  Here was an adventure, for running the rapids with so slight a
craft and small a crew was smart work.  Pierre, measuring the distance,
and with a "Look out, below!" swiftly let himself down by his arms as
far as he could, and then dropped to the timbers, as lightly as if it
were a matter of two feet instead of twelve.  He waved a hand to Brydon,
and the crib shot on.  Brydon sat eyeing it abstractedly till it ran into
the teeth of the rapids, the long oars of the three men rising and
falling to the monotonous cry.  The sun set out the men and the craft
against the tall dark walls of the river in strong relief, and Brydon was
carried away from what Pierre had been saying.  He had a solid pleasure
in watching, and he sat up with a call of delight when he saw the crib
drive at the slide.  Just glancing the edge, she shot through safely.
His face blazed.

"A pretty sight!" said a voice behind him.

Without a word he swung round, and dropped, more heavily than Pierre,
beside Judith.

"It gets into our bones," he said.  "Of course, though it ain't the same
to you," he added, looking down at her over his shoulder.  "You don't
care for things so rough, mebbe?"

"I love the river," she said quietly.

"We're a rowdy lot, we river-drivers.  We have to be.  It's a rowdy
business."

"I never noticed that," she replied, gravely smiling.  "When I was small
I used to go to the river-drivers' camps with my brother, and they were
always kind to us.  They used to sing and play the fiddle, and joke; but
I didn't think then that they were rowdy, and I don't now.  They were
never rough with us."

"No one'd ever be rough with you," was the reply.  "Oh yes," she said
suddenly, and turned her head away.  She was thinking of what the young
doctor had said to her that morning; how like a foolish boy he had acted:
upbraiding her, questioning her, saying unreasonable things, as young
egoists always do.  In years she was younger than he, but in wisdom much
older: in all things more wise and just.  He had not struck her, but with
his reckless tongue he had cut her to the heart.  "Oh yes," she repeated,
and her eyes ran up to his face and over his great stalwart body; and
then she leaned over the railing and looked into the water.

"I'd break the man into pieces that was rough with you," he said between
his teeth.

"Would you?" she asked in a whisper.  Then, not giving him a chance to
reply, "We are very poor, you know, and some people are rough with the
poor--and proud.  I remember," she went on, simply, dreamily, and as if
talking to herself, "the day when we first came to the Bridge House.  I
sat down on a box and looked at the furniture--it was so little--and
cried.  Coming here seemed the last of what grandfather used to be.  I
couldn't help it.  He sat down too, and didn't say anything.  He was very
pale, and I saw that his eyes ached as he looked at me.  Then I got angry
with myself, and sprang up and went to work--and we get along pretty
well."

She paused and sighed; then, after a minute: "I love the river.  I don't
believe I could be happy away from it.  I should like to live on it, and
die on it, and be buried in it."

His eyes were on her eagerly.  But she looked so frail and dainty that
his voice, to himself, sounded rude.  Still, his hand blundered along the
railing to hers, and covered it tenderly--for so big a hand.  She drew
her fingers away, but not very quickly.  "Don't!" she said, "and--and
someone is coming!"

There were footsteps behind them.  It was her grandfather, carrying
a board fished from the river.  He grasped the situation, and stood
speechless with wonder.  He had never thought of this.  He was a
gentleman, in spite of all, and this man was a common river-boss.
Presently he drew himself up with an air.  The heavy board was still in
his arms.  Brydon came over and took the board, looking him squarely in
the eyes.

"Mr. Rupert," he said, "I want to ask something."  The old man nodded.

"I helped you out of a bad scrape on the river?"  Again the old man
nodded.

"Well, mebbe, I saved your life.  For that I'm going to ask you to draw
no more driftwood from the Madawaska--not a stick, now or ever."

"It is the only way we can keep from freezing in winter."  Mr. Rupert
scarcely knew what he said.  Brydon looked at Judith, who turned away,
then answered: "I'll keep you from freezing, if you'll let me, you--and
Judith."

"Oh, please let us go into the house," Judith said hastily.

She saw the young doctor driving towards them out of the covered bridge!

When Brydon went to join his men far down the river he left a wife behind
him at the Bridge House, where she and her grandfather were to stay until
the next summer.  Then there would be a journey from Bamber's Boom to a
new home.

In the late autumn he came, before he went away to the shanties in the
backwoods, and again in the winter just before the babe was born.  Then
he went far up the river to Rice Lake and beyond, to bring down the
drives of logs for his Company.  June came, and then there was a sudden
sorrow at the Bridge House.  How great it was, Pierre's words as he stood
at the door one evening will testify.  He said to the young doctor: "Save
the child, and you shall have back the I O U on your house."  Which was
also evidence that the young doctor had fallen into the habit of
gambling.

The young doctor looked hard at him.  He had a selfish nature.  "You can
only do what you can do," he said.

Pierre's eyes were sinister.  "If you do not save it, one would guess
why."

The other started, flushed, was silent, and then said: "You think I'm a
coward.  We shall see.  There is a way, but it may fail."

And though he sucked the diphtheria poison from the child's throat, it
died the next night.

Still, the cottage that Pierre and Company had won was handed back with
such good advice as only a worldwise adventurer can give.

Of the child's death its father did not know.  They were not certain
where he was.  But when the mother took to her bed again, the young
doctor said it was best that Brydon should come.  Pierre had time and
inclination to go for him.  But before he went he was taken to Judith's
bedside.  Pierre had seen life and death in many forms, but never
anything quite like this: a delicate creature floating away upon a summer
current travelling in those valleys which are neither of this life nor
of that; but where you hear the echoes of both, and are visited by
solicitous spirits.  There was no pain in her face--she heard a little,
familiar voice from high and pleasant hills, and she knew, so wise are
the dying, that her husband was travelling after her, and that they would
be all together soon.  But she did not speak of that.  For the knowledge
born of such a time is locked up in the soul.

Pierre was awe-stricken.  Unconsciously he crossed himself.

"Tell him to come quickly," she said, "if you find him,"--her fingers
played with the coverlet,--"for I wish to comfort him.  .  .  .  Someone
said that you were bad, Pierre.  I do not believe it.  You were sorry
when my baby went away.  I am--going away--too.  But do not tell him
that.  Tell him I cannot walk about.  I want him to carry me--to carry
me.  Will you?"  Pierre put out his hand to hers creeping along the
coverlet to him; but it was only instinct that guided him, for he could
not see.  He started on his journey with his hat pulled down over his
eyes.

One evening when the river was very high and it was said that Brydon's
drives of logs would soon be down, a strange thing happened at the Bridge
House.

The young doctor had gone, whispering to Mr. Rupert that he would come
back later.  He went out on tiptoe, as from the presence of an angel.
His selfishness had dropped away from him.  The evening wore on, and in
the little back room a woman's voice said:

"Is it morning yet, father?"

"It is still day.  The sun has not set, my child."

"I thought it had gone, it seemed so dark."

"You have been asleep, Judith.  You have come out of the dark."

"No, I have come out into the darkness--into the world."

"You will see better when you are quite awake."

"I wish I could see the river, father.  Will you go and look?"

Then there was a silence.  "Well?" she asked.

"It is beautiful," he said, "and the sun is still bright."

"You see as far as Indian Island?"

"I can see the white comb of the reef beyond it, my dear."

"And no one--is coming?"

"There are men making for the shore, and the fires are burning, but no
one is--coming this way.  .  .  .  He would come by the road, perhaps."

"Oh no, by the river.  Pierre has not found him.  Can you see the Eddy?"

"Yes.  It is all quiet there; nothing but the logs tossing round it."

"We used to sit there--he and I--by the big cedar tree.  Everything was
so cool and sweet.  There was only the sound of the force-pump and the
swallowing of the Eddy.  They say that a woman was drowned there, and
that you can see her face in the water, if you happen there at sunrise,
weeping and smiling also: a picture in the water.  .  .  .  Do you think
it true, father?"

"Life is so strange, and who knows what is not life, my child?"

"When baby was dying I held it over the water beneath that window, where
the sunshine falls in the evening; and it looked down once before its
spirit passed like a breath over my face.  Maybe, its look will stay, for
him to see when he comes.  It was just below where you stand....  Father,
can you see its face?"  "No, Judith; nothing but the water and the
sunshine."

"Dear, carry me to the window."

When this was done she suddenly leaned forward with shining eyes and
anxious fingers.  "My baby!  My baby!" she said.

She looked up the river, but her eyes were fading, she could not see far.
"It is all a grey light," she said, "I cannot see well."  Yet she smiled.
"Lay me down again, father," she whispered.

After a little she sank into a slumber.  All at once she started up.
"The river, the beautiful river!" she cried out gently.  Then, at the
last, "Oh, my dear, my dear!"

And so she came out of the valley into the high hills.  Later he was left
alone with his dead.  The young doctor and others had come and gone.  He
would watch till morning.  He sat long beside her, numb to the world.  At
last he started, for he heard a low clear call behind the House.  He went
out quickly to the little platform, and saw through the dusk a man
drawing himself up.  It was Brydon.  He caught the old man's shoulders
convulsively.  "How is she?" he asked.  "Come in, my son," was the low
reply.  The old man saw a grief greater than his own.  He led the husband
to the room where the wife lay beautiful and still.  "She is better, as
you see," he said bravely.

The hours went, and the two sat near the body, one on either side.  They
knew not what was going on in the world.

As they mourned, Pierre and the young doctor sat silent in that cottage
on the hillside.  They were roused at last.  There came up to Pierre's
keen ears the sound of the river.

"Let us go out," he said; "the river is flooding.  You can hear the
logs."

They came out and watched.  The river went swishing, swilling past, and
the dull boom of the logs as they struck the piers of the bridge or some
building on the shore came rolling to them.

"The dams and booms have burst!" Pierre said.  He pointed to the camps
far up the river.  By the light of the camp-fires there appeared a wide
weltering flood of logs and debris.  Pierre's eyes shifted to the Bridge
House.  In one room was a light.  He stepped out and down, and the other
followed.  They had almost reached the shore, when Pierre cried out
sharply: "What's that?"

He pointed to an indistinct mass bearing down upon the Bridge House.  It
was a big shed that had been carried away, and, jammed between timbers,
had not broken up.  There was no time for warning.  It came on swiftly,
heavily.  There was a strange, horrible, grinding sound, and then they
saw the light of that one room move on, waving a little to and fro-on to
the rapids, the cohorts of logs crowding hard after.

Where the light was two men had started to their feet when the crash
came.  They felt the House move.  "Run-save yourself!" cried the old man
quietly.  "We are lost!"

The floor rocked.

"Go," he said again.  "I will stay with her."

"She is mine," Brydon said; and he took her in his arms.  "I will not
go."

They could hear the rapids below.  The old man steadied himself in the
deep water on the floor, and caught out yearningly at the cold hands.

"Come close, come close," said Brydon.  "Closer; put your arms round
her."

The old man did so.  They were locked in each other's arms--dead and
living.

The old man spoke, with a piteous kind of joy: "We therefore commit her
body to the deep--!"

The three were never found.






THE EPAULETTES

Old Athabasca, chief of the Little Crees, sat at the door of his lodge,
staring down into the valley where Fort Pentecost lay, and Mitawawa his
daughter sat near him, fretfully pulling at the fringe of her fine
buckskin jacket.  She had reason to be troubled.  Fyles the trader had
put a great indignity upon Athabasca.  A factor of twenty years before,
in recognition of the chief's merits and in reward of his services, had
presented him with a pair of epaulettes, left in the Fort by some officer
in Her Majesty's service.  A good, solid, honest pair of epaulettes, well
fitted to stand the wear and tear of those high feasts and functions at
which the chief paraded them upon his broad shoulders.  They were the
admiration of his own tribe, the wonder of others, the envy of many
chiefs.  It was said that Athabasca wore them creditably, and was no more
immobile and grand-mannered than became a chief thus honoured above his
kind.

But the years went, and there came a man to Fort Pentecost who knew not
Athabasca.  He was young, and tall and strong, had a hot temper, knew
naught of human nature, was possessed by a pride more masterful than his
wisdom, and a courage stronger than his tact.  He was ever for high-
handedness, brooked no interference, and treated the Indians more as
Company's serfs than as Company's friends and allies.  Also, he had an
eye for Mitawawa, and found favour in return, though to what depth it
took a long time to show.  The girl sat high in the minds and desires of
the young braves, for she had beauty of a heathen kind, a deft and dainty
finger for embroidered buckskin, a particular fortune with a bow and
arrow, and the fleetest foot.  There were mutterings because Fyles the
white man came to sit often in Athabasca's lodge.  He knew of this, but
heeded not at all.  At last Konto, a young brave who very accurately
guessed at Fyles' intentions, stopped him one day on the Grey Horse
Trail, and in a soft, indolent voice begged him to prove his regard in
a fight without weapons, to the death, the survivor to give the other
burial where he fell.  Fyles was neither fool nor coward.  It would have
been foolish to run the risk of leaving Fort and people masterless for an
Indian's whim; it would have been cowardly to do nothing.  So he whipped
out a revolver, and bade his rival march before him to the Fort; which
Konto very calmly did, begging the favour of a bit of tobacco as he went.

Fyles demanded of Athabasca that he should sit in judgment, and should at
least banish Konto from his tribe, hinting the while that he might have
to put a bullet into Konto's refractory head if the thing were not done.
He said large things in the name of the H.B.C., and was surprised
that Athabasca let them pass unmoved.  But that chief, after long
consideration, during which he drank Company's coffee and ate Company's
pemmican, declared that he could do nothing: for Konto had made a fine
offer, and a grand chance of a great fight had been missed.  This was in
the presence of several petty officers and Indians and woodsmen at the
Fort.  Fyles had vanity and a nasty temper.  He swore a little, and with
words of bluster went over and ripped the epaulettes from the chief's
shoulders as a punishment, a mark of degradation.  The chief said
nothing.  He got up, and reached out his hands as if to ask them back;
and when Fyles refused, he went away, drawing his blanket high over his
shoulders.  It was wont before to lie loosely about him, to show his
badges of captaincy and alliance.

This was about the time that the Indians were making ready for the
buffalo, and when their chief took to his lodge, and refused to leave it,
they came to ask him why.  And they were told.  They were for making
trouble, but the old chief said the quarrel was his own: he would settle
it in his own way.  He would not go to the hunt.  Konto, he said, should
take his place; and when his braves came back there should be great
feasting, for then the matter would be ended.

Half the course of the moon and more, and Athabasca came out of his
lodge--the first time in the sunlight since the day of his disgrace.
He and his daughter sat silent and watchful at the door.  There had been
no word between Fyles and Athabasca, no word between Mitawawa and Fyles.
The Fort was well-nigh tenantless, for the half-breeds also had gone
after buffalo, and only the trader, a clerk, and a half-breed cook
were left.

Mitawawa gave a little cry of impatience: she had held her peace so long
that even her slow Indian nature could endure no more.  "What will my
father Athabasca do?" she asked.  "With idleness the flesh grows soft,
and the iron melts from the arm."

"But when the thoughts are stone, the body is as that of the Mighty Men
of the Kimash Hills.  When the bow is long drawn, beware the arrow."

"It is no answer," she said: "what will my father do?"

"They were of gold," he answered, "that never grew rusty.  My people were
full of wonder when they stood before me, and the tribes had envy as they
passed.  It is a hundred moons and one red midsummer moon since the Great
Company put them on my shoulders.  They were light to carry, but it was
as if I bore an army.  No other chief was like me.  That is all over.
When the tribes pass they will laugh, and my people will scorn me if
I do not come out to meet them with the yokes of gold."

"But what will my father do?" she persisted.

"I have had many thoughts, and at night I have called on the Spirits who
rule.  From the top of the Hill of Graves I have beaten the soft drum,
and called, and sung the hymn which wakes the sleeping Spirits: and I
know the way."

"What is the way?" Her eyes filled with a kind of fear or trouble,
and many times they shifted from the Fort to her father, and back again.
The chief was silent.  Then anger leapt into her face.

"Why does my father fear to speak to his child?" she said.  "I will
speak plain.  I love the man: but I love my father also."

She stood up, and drew her blanket about her, one hand clasped proudly on
her breast.  "I cannot remember my mother; but I remember when I first
looked down from my hammock in the pine tree, and saw my father sitting
by the fire.  It was in the evening like this, but darker, for the pines
made great shadows.  I cried out, and he came and took me down, and laid
me between his knees, and fed me with bits of meat from the pot.  He
talked much to me, and his voice was finer than any other.  There is no
one like my father--Konto is nothing: but the voice of the white man,
Fyles, had golden words that our braves do not know, and I listened.
Konto did a brave thing.  Fyles, because he was a great man of the
Company, would not fight, and drove him like a dog.  Then he made my
father as a worm in the eyes of the world.  I would give my life for
Fyles the trader, but I would give more than my life to wipe out my
father's shame, and to show that Konto of the Little Crees is no dog.
I have been carried by the hands of the old men of my people, I have
ridden the horses of the young men: their shame is my shame."

The eyes of the chief had never lifted from the Fort: nor from his look
could you have told that he heard his daughter's words.  For a moment he
was silent, then a deep fire came into his eyes, and his wide heavy brows
drew up so that the frown of anger was gone.  At last, as she waited, he
arose, put out a hand and touched her forehead.

"Mitawawa has spoken well," he said.  "There will be an end.  The yokes
of gold are mine: an honour given cannot be taken away.  He has stolen;
he is a thief.  He would not fight Konto: but I am a chief and he shall
fight me.  I am as great as many men--I have carried the golden yokes: we
will fight for them.  I thought long, for I was afraid my daughter loved
the man more than her people: but now I will break him in pieces.  Has
Mitawawa seen him since the shameful day?"

"He has come to the lodge, but I would not let him in unless he brought
the epaulettes.  He said he would bring them when Konto was punished.
I begged of him as I never begged of my own father, but he was hard as
the ironwood tree.  I sent him away.  Yet there is no tongue like his in
the world; he is tall and beautiful, and has the face of a spirit."

From the Fort Fyles watched the two.  With a pair of field-glasses he
could follow their actions, could almost read their faces.  "There'll be
a lot of sulking about those epaulettes, Mallory," he said at last,
turning to his clerk.  "Old Athabasca has a bee in his bonnet."

"Wouldn't it be just as well to give 'em back, sir?"  Mallory had been at
Fort Pentecost a long time, and he understood Athabasca and his Indians.
He was a solid, slow-thinking old fellow, but he had that wisdom of the
north which can turn from dove to serpent and from serpent to lion in the
moment.

"Give 'em back, Mallory?  I'll see him in Jericho first, unless he goes
on his marrow-bones and kicks Konto out of the camp."

"Very well, sir.  But I think we'd better keep an eye open."

"Eye open, be hanged!  If he'd been going to riot he'd have done so
before this.  Besides, the girl--!"  Mallory looked long and earnestly at
his master, whose forehead was glued to the field-glass.  His little eyes
moved as if in debate, his slow jaws opened once or twice.  At last he
said: "I'd give the girl the go-by, Mr. Fyles, if I was you, unless I
meant to marry her."  Fyles suddenly swung round.  "Keep your place,
blast you, Mallory, and keep your morals too.  One'd think you were a
missionary."  Then with a sudden burst of anger: "Damn it all, if my men
don't stand by me against a pack of treacherous Indians, I'd better get
out."

"Your men will stand by you, sir: no fear.  I've served three traders
here, and my record is pretty clean, Mr. Fyles.  But I'll say it to your
face, whether you like it or not, that you're not as good a judge of the
Injin as me, or even Duc the cook: and that's straight as I can say it,
Mr. Fyles."

Fyles paced up and down in anger--not speaking; but presently threw up
the glass, and looked towards Athabasca's lodge.  "They're gone," he said
presently; "I'll go and see them to-morrow.  The old fool must do what
I want, or there'll be ructions."

The moon was high over Fort Pentecost when Athabasca entered the silent
yard.  The dogs growled, but Indian dogs growl without reason, and no one
heeds them.  The old chief stood a moment looking at the windows, upon
which slush-lights were throwing heavy shadows.  He went to Fyles'
window: no one was in the room.  He went to another: Mallory and Duc were
sitting at a table.  Mallory had the epaulettes, looking at them and
fingering the hooks by which Athabasca had fastened them on.  Duc was
laughing: he reached over for an epaulette, tossed it up, caught it and
threw it down with a guffaw.  Then the door opened, and Athabasca walked
in, seized the epaulettes, and went swiftly out again.  Just outside the
door Mallory clapped a hand on one shoulder, and Duc caught at the
epaulettes.

Athabasca struggled wildly.  All at once there was a cold white flash,
and Duc came huddling to Mallory's feet.  For a brief instant Mallory and
the Indian fell apart, then Athabasca with a contemptuous fairness tossed
his knife away, and ran in on his man.  They closed; strained, swayed,
became a tangled wrenching mass; and then Mallory was lifted high into
the air, and came down with a broken back.

Athabasca picked up the epaulettes, and hurried away, breathing hard, and
hugging them to his bare red-stained breast.  He had nearly reached the
gate when he heard a cry.  He did not turn, but a heavy stone caught him
high in the shoulders, and he fell on his face and lay clutching the
epaulettes in his outstretched hands.

Fyles' own hands were yet lifted with the effort of throwing, when he
heard the soft rush of footsteps, and someone came swiftly into his
embrace.  A pair of arms ran round his shoulders--lips closed with his--
something ice-cold and hard touched his neck--he saw a bright flash at
his throat.

In the morning Konto found Mitawawa sitting with wild eyes by her
father's body.  She had fastened the epaulettes on its shoulders.
Fyles and his men made a grim triangle of death at the door of the Fort.






THE HOUSE WITH THE BROKEN SHUTTER

              "He stands in the porch of the world--
                  (Why should the door be shut?)
               The grey wolf waits at his heel,
                  (Why is the window barred?)
               Wild is the trail from the Kimash Hills,
               The blight has fallen on bush and tree,
               The choking earth has swallowed the streams,
               Hungry and cold is the Red Patrol:
                  (Why should the door be shut?)
               The Scarlet Hunter has come to bide--
                  (Why is the window barred?)"

Pierre stopped to listen.  The voice singing was clear and soft, yet
strong--a mezzo-soprano without any culture save that of practice and
native taste.  It had a singular charm--a sweet, fantastic sincerity.
He stood still and fastened his eyes on the house, a few rods away.  It
stood on a knoll perching above Fort Ste. Anne.  Years had passed since
Pierre had visited the Fort, and he was now on his way to it again, after
many wanderings.  The house had stood here in the old days, and he
remembered it very well, for against it John Marcey, the Company's man,
was shot by Stroke Laforce, of the Riders of the Plains.  Looking now,
he saw that the shutter, which had been pulled off to bear the body away,
was hanging there just as he had placed it, with seven of its slats
broken and a dark stain in one corner.  Something more of John Marcey
than memory attached to that shutter.  His eyes dwelt on it long he
recalled the scene: a night with stars and no moon, a huge bonfire to
light the Indians, at their dance, and Marcey, Laforce, and many others
there, among whom was Lucille, the little daughter of Gyng the Factor.
Marcey and Laforce were only boys then, neither yet twenty-three, and
they were friendly rivals with the sweet little coquette, who gave her
favors with a singular impartiality and justice.  Once Marcey had given
her a gold spoon.  Laforce responded with a tiny, fretted silver basket.
Laforce was delighted to see her carrying her basket, till she opened it
and showed the spoon inside.  There were many mock quarrels, in one of
which Marcey sent her a letter by the Company's courier, covered with
great seals, saying, "I return you the hairpin, the egg-shell, and the
white wolf's tooth.  Go to your Laforce, or whatever his ridiculous name
may be."

In this way the pretty game ran on, the little goldenhaired, golden-
faced, golden-voiced child dancing so gayly in their hearts, but nestling
in them too, after her wilful fashion, until the serious thing came--the
tragedy.

On the mad night when all ended, she was in the gayest, the most elf-like
spirits.  All went well until Marcey dug a hole in the ground, put a
stone in it, and, burying it, said it was Laforce's heart.  Then Laforce
pretended to ventriloquise, and mocked Marcey's slight stutter.  That was
the beginning of the trouble, and Lucille, like any lady of the world,
troubled at Laforce's unkindness, tried to smooth things over--tried very
gravely.  But the playful rivalry of many months changed its composition
suddenly as through some delicate yet powerful chemical action, and the
savage in both men broke out suddenly.  Where motives and emotions are
few they are the more vital, their action is the more violent.  No one
knew quite what the two young men said to each other, but presently,
while the Indian dance was on, they drew to the side of the house, and
had their duel out in the half-shadows, no one knowing, till the shots
rang on the night, and John Marcey, without a cry, sprang into the air
and fell face upwards, shot through the heart.

They tried to take the child away, but she would not go; and when they
carried Marcey on the shutter she followed close by, resisting her
father's wishes and commands.  And just before they made a prisoner of
Laforce, she said to him very quietly--so like a woman she was--"I will
give you back the basket, and the riding-whip, and the other things, and
I will never forgive you--never--no, never!"

Stroke Laforce had given himself up, had himself ridden to Winnipeg,
a thousand miles, and told his story.  Then the sergeant's stripes had
been stripped from his arm, he had been tried, and on his own statement
had got twelve years' imprisonment.  Ten years had passed since then--
since Marcey was put away in his grave, since Pierre left Fort Ste.
Anne, and he had not seen it or Lucille in all that time.  But he knew
that Gyng was dead, and that his widow and her child had gone south or
east somewhere; of Laforce after his sentence he had never heard.

He stood looking at the house from the shade of the solitary pine-tree
near it, recalling every incident of that fatal night.  He had the gift
of looking at a thing in its true proportions, perhaps because he had
little emotion and a strong brain, or perhaps because early in life his
emotions were rationalised.  Presently he heard the voice again:

              "He waits at the threshold stone--
                  (Why should the key-hole rust?)
               The eagle broods at his side,
                  (Why should the blind be drawn?)
               Long has he watched, and far has he called
               The lonely sentinel of the North:
               "Who goes there?" to the wandering soul:
               Heavy of heart is the Red Patrol
                  (Why should the key-hole rust?)
               The Scarlet Hunter is sick for home,
                  (Why should the blind be drawn?)"

Now he recognised the voice.  Its golden timbre brought back a young
girl's golden face and golden hair.  It was summer, and the window with
the broken shutter was open.  He was about to go to it, when a door of
the house opened, and a girl appeared.  She was tall, with rich, yellow
hair falling loosely about her head; she had a strong, finely cut chin
and a broad brow, under which a pair of deep blue eyes shone-violet blue,
rare and fine.  She stood looking down at the Fort for a few moments,
unaware of Pierre's presence.  But presently she saw him leaning against
the tree, and she started as from a spirit.

"Monsieur!" she said--"Pierre!" and stepped forward again from the
doorway.

He came to her, and "Ah, p'tite Lucille," he said, "you remember me, eh?
--and yet so many years ago!"

"But you remember me," she answered, "and I have changed so much!"

"It is the man who should remember, the woman may forget if she will."

Pierre did not mean to pay a compliment; he was merely thinking.

She made a little gesture of deprecation.  "I was a child," she said.

Pierre lifted a shoulder slightly.  "What matter?  It is sex that I mean.
What difference to me--five, or forty, or ninety?  It is all sex.  It is
only lovers, the hunters of fire-flies, that think of age--mais oui!"

She had a way of looking at you before she spoke, as though she were
trying to find what she actually thought.  She was one after Pierre's own
heart, and he knew it; but just here he wondered where all that ancient
coquetry was gone, for there were no traces of it left; she was steady of
eye, reposeful, rich in form and face, and yet not occupied with herself.
He had only seen her for a minute or so, yet he was sure that what she
was just now she was always, or nearly so, for the habits of a life leave
their mark, and show through every phase of emotion and incident whether
it be light or grave.

"I think I understand you," she said.  "I think I always did a little,
from the time you stayed with Grah the idiot at Fort o' God, and fought
the Indians when the others left.  Only--men said bad things of you, and
my father did not like you, and you spoke so little to me ever.  Yet I
mind how you used to sit and watch me, and I also mind when you rode the
man down who stole my pony, and brought them both back."

Pierre smiled--he was pleased at this.  "Ah, my young friend," he said,
"I do not forget that either, for though he had shaved my ear with a
bullet, you would not have him handed over to the Riders of the Plains
--such a tender heart!"

Her eyes suddenly grew wide.  She was childlike in her amazement, indeed,
childlike in all ways, for she was very sincere.  It was her great
advantage to live where nothing was required of her but truth, she had
not suffered that sickness, social artifice.

"I never knew," she said, "that he had shot at you--never!  You did not
tell that."

"There is a time for everything--the time for that was not till now."

"What could I have done then?"

"You might have left it to me.  I am not so pious that I can't be
merciful to the sinner.  But this man--this Brickney--was a vile
scoundrel always, and I wanted him locked up.  I would have shot him
myself, but I was tired of doing the duty of the law.  Yes, yes," he
added, as he saw her smile a little.  "It is so.  I have love for
justice, even I, Pretty Pierre.  Why not justice on myself?  Ha!  The
law does not its duty.  And maybe some day I shall have to do its work on
myself.  Some are coaxed out of life, some are kicked out, and some open
the doors quietly for themselves, and go a-hunting Outside."

"They used to talk as if one ought to fear you," she said, "but"--she
looked him straight in the eyes--"but maybe that's because you've never
hid any badness."

"It is no matter, anyhow," he answered.  "I live in the open, I walk in
the open road, and I stand by what I do to the open law and the gospel.
It is my whim--every man to his own saddle."

"It is ten years," she said abruptly.

"Ten years less five days," he answered as sententiously.

"Come inside," she said quietly, and turned to the door.

Without a word he turned also, but instead of going direct to the door
came and touched the broken shutter and the dark stain on one corner with
a delicate forefinger.  Out of the corner of his eye he could see her on
the doorstep, looking intently.

He spoke as if to himself: "It has not been touched since then--no.
It was hardly big enough for him, so his legs hung over.  Ah, yes, ten
years--  Abroad, John Marcey!"  Then, as if still musing, he turned to
the girl: "He had no father or mother--no one, of course; so that it
wasn't so bad after all.  If you've lived with the tongue in the last
hole of the buckle as you've gone, what matter when you go!  C'est egal
--it is all the same."

Her face had become pale as he spoke, but no muscle stirred; only her
eyes filled with a deeper color, and her hand closed tightly on the door-
jamb.  "Come in, Pierre," she said, and entered.  He followed her.
"My mother is at the Fort," she added, "but she will be back soon."

She placed two chairs not far from the open door.  They sat, and Pierre
slowly rolled a cigarette and lighted it.

"How long have you lived here?" he asked presently.

"It is seven years since we came first," she replied.  "After that night
they said the place was haunted, and no one would live in it, but when my
father died my mother and I came for three years.  Then we went east, and
again came back, and here we have been."

"The shutter?" Pierre asked.

They needed few explanations--their minds were moving with the same
thought.

"I would not have it changed, and of course no one cared to touch it.
So it has hung there."

"As I placed it ten years ago," he said.

They both became silent for a time, and at last he said: "Marcey had no
one,--Sergeant Laforce a mother."

"It killed his mother," she whispered, looking into the white sunlight.
She was noting how it was flashed from the bark of the birch-trees near
the Fort.

"His mother died," she added again, quietly.  "It killed her--the gaol
for him!"

"An eye for an eye," he responded.

"Do you think that evens John Marcey's death?" she sighed.

"As far as Marcey's concerned," he answered.  "Laforce has his own
reckoning besides."

"It was not a murder," she urged.

"It was a fair fight," he replied firmly, "and Laforce shot straight."
He was trying to think why she lived here, why the broken shutter still
hung there, why the matter had settled so deeply on her.  He remembered
the song she was singing, the legend of the Scarlet Hunter, the fabled
Savior of the North.

              "Heavy of heart is the Red Patrol--
                  (Why should the key-hole rust?)
               The Scarlet Hunter is sick for home,
                  (Why should the blind be drawn?)"

He repeated the words, lingering on them.  He loved to come at the truth
of things by allusive, far-off reflections, rather than by the sharp
questioning of the witness-box.  He had imagination, refinement in such
things.  A light dawned on him as he spoke the words--all became clear.
She sang of the Scarlet Hunter, but she meant someone else!
That was it--

              "Hungry and cold is the Red Patrol--
                  (Why should the door be shut?)
               The Scarlet Hunter has come to bide,
                  (Why is the window barred?)"

But why did she live here?  To get used to a thought, to have it so near
her, that if the man--if Laforce himself came, she would have herself
schooled to endure the shadow and the misery of it all?  Ah, that was it!
The little girl, who had seen her big lover killed, who had said she
would never forgive the other, who had sent him back the fretted-silver
basket, the riding-whip, and other things, had kept the criminal in her
mind all these years; had, out of her childish coquetry, grown into--
what?  As a child she had been wise for her years--almost too wise.
What had happened?  She had probably felt sorrow for Laforce at first,
and afterwards had shown active sympathy, and at last--no, he felt that
she had not quite forgiven him, that, whatever was, she had not hidden
the criminal in her heart.  But why did she sing that song?  Her heart
was pleading for him--for the criminal.  Had she and her mother gone to
Winnipeg to be near Laforce, to comfort him?  Was Laforce free now, and
was she unwilling?  It was so strange that she should thus have carried
on her childhood into her womanhood.  But he guessed her--she had
imagination.

"His mother died in my arms in Winnipeg," she said abruptly at last.
"I'm glad I was some comfort to her.  You see, it all came through me--
I was so young and spoiled and silly--John Marcey's death, her death,
and his long years in prison.  Even then I knew better than to set the
one against the other.  Must a child not be responsible?  I was--I am!"

"And so you punish yourself?"

"It was terrible for me--even as a child.  I said that I could never
forgive, but when his mother died, blessing me, I did.  Then there came
something else."

"You saw him, there amie?"

"I saw him--so changed, so quiet, so much older--all grey at the temples.
At first I lived here that I might get used to the thought of the thing
--to learn to bear it; and afterwards that I might learn--" She paused,
looking in half-doubt at Pierre.

"It is safe; I am silent," he said.

"That I might learn to bear--him," she continued.

"Is he still--" Pierre paused.

She spoke up quickly.  "Oh no, he has been free two years."

"Where is he now?"

"I don't know."  She waited for a minute, then said again, "I don't know.
When he was free, he came to me, but I--I could not.  He thought, too,
that because he had been in gaol, that I wouldn't--be his wife.  He
didn't think enough of himself, he didn't urge anything.  And I wasn't
ready--no--no--no--how could I be!  I didn't care so much about the gaol,
but he had killed John Marcey.  The gaol--what was that to me!  There was
no real shame in it unless he had done a mean thing.  He had been wicked
--not mean.  Killing is awful, but not shameful.  Think--the difference--
if he had been a thief!"

Pierre nodded.  "Then some one should have killed him!" he said.
"Well, after?"

"After--after--ah, he went away for a year.  Then he came back; but no,
I was always thinking of that night I walked behind John Marcey's body
to the Fort.  So he went away again, and we came here, and here we have
lived."

"He has not come here?"

"No; once from the far north he sent me a letter by an Indian, saying
that he was going with a half-breed to search for a hunting party,
an English gentleman and two men who were lost.  The name of one
of the men was Brickney."

Pierre stopped short in a long whiffing of smoke.  "Holy!" he said,
"that thief Brickney again.  He would steal the broad road to hell if he
could carry it.  He once stole the quarters from a dead man's eyes.  Mon
Dieu! to save Brickney's life, the courage to do that--like sticking your
face in the mire and eating!--But, pshaw!--go on, p'tite Lucille."

"There is no more.  I never heard again."

"How long was that ago?"

"Nine months or more."

"Nothing has been heard of any of them?"

"Nothing at all.  The Englishman belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company,
but they have heard nothing down here at Fort Ste. Anne."

"If he saves the Company's man, that will make up the man he lost for
them, eh--you think that, eh?"  Pierre's eyes had a curious ironical
light.

"I do not care for the Company," she said.  "John Marcey's life was his
own."

"Good!" he added quickly, and his eyes admired her.  "That is the thing.
Then, do not forget that Marcey took his life in his hands himself, that
he would have killed Laforce if Laforce hadn't killed him."

"I know, I know," she said, "but I should have felt the same if John
Marcey had killed Stroke Laforce."

"It is a pity to throw your life away," he ventured.  He said this for a
purpose.  He did not think she was throwing it away.

She was watching a little knot of horsemen coming over a swell of the
prairie far off.  She withdrew her eyes and fixed them on Pierre.  "Do
you throw your life away if you do what is the only thing you are told
to do?"

She placed her hand on her heart--that had been her one guide.

Pierre got to his feet, came over, and touched her on the shoulder.

"You have the great secret," he said quietly.  "The thing may be all
wrong to others, but if it's right to yourself--that's it--mais oui!
If he comes," he added "if he comes back, think of him as well as Marcey.
Marcey is sleeping--what does it matter?  If he is awake, he has better
times, for he was a man to make another world sociable.  Think of
Laforce, for he has his life to live, and he is a man to make this
world sociable.

               'The Scarlet Hunter is sick for home--
                  (Why should the door be shut?)'"

Her eyes had been following the group of horsemen on the plains.  She
again fixed them on Pierre, and stood up.

"It is a beautiful legend--that," she said.

"But?--but?" he asked.

She would not answer him.  "You will come again," she said; "you will--
help me?"

"Surely, p'tite Lucille, surely, I will come.  But to help--ah,
that would sound funny to the Missionary at the Fort and to others!"

"You understand life," she said, "and I can speak to you."

"It's more to you to understand you than to be good, eh?"

"I guess it's more to any woman," she answered.  They both passed out of
the house.  She turned towards the broken shutter.  Then their eyes met.
A sad little smile hovered at her lips.

"What is the use?" she said, and her eyes fastened on the horsemen.

He knew now that she would never shudder again at the sight of it,
or at the remembrance of Marcey's death.

"But he will come," was the reply to her, and her smile almost settled
and stayed.

They parted, and as he went down the hill he saw far over, coming up,
a woman in black, who walked as if she carried a great weight.  "Every
shot that kills ricochets," he said to himself:

"His mother dead--her mother like that!"

He passed into the Fort, renewing acquaintances in the Company's store,
and twenty minutes after he was one to greet the horsemen that Lucille
had seen coming over the hills.  They were five, and one had to be helped
from his horse.  It was Stroke Laforce, who had been found near dead at
the Metal River by a party of men exploring in the north.

He had rescued the Englishman and his party, but within a day of the
finding the Englishman died, leaving him his watch, a ring, and a cheque
on the H. B. C.  at Winnipeg.  He and the two survivors, one of whom was
Brickney, started south.  One night Brickney robbed him and made to get
away, and on his seizing the thief he was wounded.  Then the other man
came to his help and shot Brickney: after that weeks of wandering, and
at last rescue and Fort Ste. Anne.

A half-hour after this Pierre left Laforce on the crest of the hill above
the Fort, and did not turn to go down till he had seen the other pass
within the house with the broken shutter.  And later he saw a little
bonfire on the hill.  The next evening he came to the house again
himself.  Lucille rose to meet him.

"'Why should the door be shut?"' he quoted smiling.

"The door is open," she answered quickly and with a quiet joy.

He turned to the motion of her hand, and saw Laforce asleep on a couch.

Soon afterwards, as he passed from the house, he turned towards the
window.  The broken shutter was gone.

He knew now the meaning of the bonfire the night before.






THE FINDING OF FINGALL

"Fingall!  Fingall!--Oh, Fingall!"

A grey mist was rising from the river, the sun was drinking it
delightedly, the swift blue water showed underneath it, and the top of
Whitefaced Mountain peaked the mist by a hand-length.  The river brushed
the banks like rustling silk, and the only other sound, very sharp and
clear in the liquid monotone, was the crack of a woodpecker's beak on a
hickory tree.

It was a sweet, fresh autumn morning in Lonesome Valley.  Before night
the deer would bellow reply to the hunters' rifles, and the mountain-goat
call to its unknown gods; but now there was only the wild duck skimming
the river, and the high hilltop rising and fading into the mist, the
ardent sun, and again that strange cry--

"Fingall!--Oh, Fingall!  Fingall!"

Two men, lounging at a fire on a ledge of the hills, raised their eyes to
the mountain-side beyond and above them, and one said presently:

"The second time.  It's a woman's voice, Pierre."  Pierre nodded, and
abstractedly stirred the coals about with a twig.

"Well, it is a pity--the poor Cynthie," he said at last.

"It is a woman, then.  You know her, Pierre--her story?"

"Fingall!  Fingall!--Oh, Fingall!"

Pierre raised his head towards the sound; then after a moment, said:

"I know Fingall."

"And the woman?  Tell me."

"And the girl.  Fingall was all fire and heart, and devil-may-care.
She--she was not beautiful except in the eye, but that was like a flame
of red and blue.  Her hair, too--then--would trip her up, if it hung
loose.  That was all, except that she loved him too much.  But women--
et puis, when a woman gets a man between her and the heaven above and the
earth beneath, and there comes the great hunger, what is the good!  A man
cannot understand, but he can see, and he can fear.  What is the good!
To play with life, that is not much; but to play with a soul is more than
a thousand lives.  Look at Cynthie."

He paused, and Lawless waited patiently.  Presently Pierre continued:

Fingall was gentil; he would take off his hat to a squaw.  It made no
difference what others did; he didn't think--it was like breathing to
him.  How can you tell the way things happen?  Cynthie's father kept the
tavern at St. Gabriel's Fork, over against the great saw-mill.  Fingall
was foreman of a gang in the lumberyard.  Cynthie had a brother--Fenn.
Fenn was as bad as they make, but she loved him, and Fingall knew it
well, though he hated the young skunk.  The girl's eyes were like two
little fire-flies when Fingall was about.

"He was a gentleman, though he had only half a name--Fingall--like that.
I think he did not expect to stay; he seemed to be waiting for something
--always when the mail come in he would be there; and afterwards you
wouldn't see him for a time.  So it seemed to me that he made up his mind
to think nothing of Cynthie, and to say nothing."

"Fingall!  Fingall!--Oh, Fingall!"

The strange, sweet, singing voice sounded nearer.  "She's coming this
way, Pierre," said Lawless.

"I hope not to see her.  What is the good!"

"Well, let us have the rest of the story."

"Her brother Fenn was in Fingall's gang.  One day there was trouble.
Fenn called Fingall a liar.  The gang stopped piling; the usual thing did
not come.  Fingall told him to leave the yard, and they would settle some
other time.  That night a wicked thing happened.  We were sitting in the
bar-room when we heard two shots and then a fall.  We ran into the other
room; there was Fenn on the floor, dying.  He lifted himself on his
elbow, pointed at Fingall--and fell back.  The father of the boy stood
white and still a few feet away.  There was no pistol showing--none at
all.

"The men closed in on Fingall.  He did not stir--he seemed to be thinking
of something else.  He had a puzzled, sorrowful look.  The men roared
round him, but he waved them back for a moment, and looked first at the
father, then at the son.  I could not understand at first.  Someone
pulled a pistol out of Fingall's pocket and showed it.  At that moment
Cynthie came in.  She gave a cry.  By the holy!  I do not want to hear a
cry like that often.  She fell on her knees beside the boy, and caught
his head to her breast.  Then with a wild look she asked who did it.
They had just taken Fingall out into the bar-room.  They did not tell
her his name, for they knew that she loved him.

"'Father,' she said all at once, 'have you killed the man that killed
Fenn?'

"The old man shook his head.  There was a sick colour in his face.

"'Then I will kill him,' she said.

"She laid her brother's head down, and stood up.  Someone put in her hand
the pistol, and told her it was the same that had killed Fenn.  She took
it, and came with us.  The old man stood still where he was; he was like
stone.  I looked at him for a minute and thought; then I turned round and
went to the bar-room; and he followed.  Just as I got inside the door,
I saw the girl start back, and her hand drop, for she saw that it was
Fingall; he was looking at her very strange.  It was the rule to empty
the gun into a man who had been sentenced; and already Fingall had heard
his, 'God-have-mercy!'  The girl was to do it.

"Fingall said to her in a muffled voice, 'Fire--Cynthie!'

"I guessed what she would do.  In a kind of a dream she raised the pistol
up--up--up, till I could see it was just out of range of his head, and
she fired.  One!  two!  three!  four!  five!  Fingall never moved a
muscle; but the bullets spotted the wall at the side of his head.  She
stopped after the five; but the arm was still held out, and her finger
was on the trigger; she seemed to be all dazed.  Only six chambers were
in the gun, and of course one chamber was empty.  Fenn had its bullet in
his lungs, as we thought.  So someone beside Cynthie touched her arm,
pushing it down.  But there was another shot, and this time, because of
the push, the bullet lodged in Fingall's skull."

Pierre paused now, and waved with his hand towards the mist which hung
high up like a canopy between the hills.

"But," said Lawless, not heeding the scene, "what about that sixth
bullet?"

"Holy, it is plain!  Fingall did not fire the shot.  His revolver was
full, every chamber, when Cynthie first took it."

"Who killed the lad?"

"Can you not guess?  There had been words between the father and the
boy: both had fierce blood.  The father, in a mad minute, fired; the boy
wanted revenge on Fingall, and, to save his father, laid it on the other.
The old man?  Well, I do not know whether he was a coward, or stupid, or
ashamed--he let Fingall take it."

"Fingall took it to spare the girl, eh?"

"For the girl.  It wasn't good for her to know her father killed his own
son."

"What came after?"

"The worst.  That night the girl's father killed himself, and the two
were buried in the same grave.  Cynthie--"

"Fingall!  Fingall!--Oh, Fingall!"

"You hear?  Yes, like that all the time as she sat on the floor,
her hair about her like a cloud, and the dead bodies in the next room.
She thought she had killed Fingall, and she knew now that he was
innocent.  The two were buried.  Then we told her that Fingall was not
dead.  She used to come and sit outside the door, and listen to his
breathing, and ask if he ever spoke of her.  What was the good of lying?
If we said he did, she'd have come in to him, and that would do no good,
for he wasn't right in his mind.  By and by we told her he was getting
well, and then she didn't come, but stayed at home, just saying his name
over to herself.  Alors, things take hold of a woman--it is strange!
When Fingall was strong enough to go out, I went with him the first time.
He was all thin and handsome as you can think, but he had no memory,
and his eyes were like a child's.  She saw him, and came out to meet him.
What does a woman care for the world when she loves a man?  Well, he just
looked at her as if he'd never seen her before, and passed by without a
sign, though afterwards a trouble came in his face.  Three days later he
was gone, no one knew where.  That is two years ago.  Ever since she has
been looking for him."

"Is she mad?"

"Mad?  Holy Mother! it is not good to have one thing in the head all the
time!  What do you think?  So much all at once!  And then--"

"Hush, Pierre!  There she is!" said Lawless, pointing to a ledge of rock
not far away.

The girl stood looking out across the valley, a weird, rapt look in her
face, her hair falling loose, a staff like a shepherd's crook in one
hand, the other hand over her eyes as she slowly looked from point to
point of the horizon.

The two watched her without speaking.  Presently she saw them.  She gazed
at them for a minute, then descended to them.  Lawless and Pierre rose,
doffing their hats.  She looked at both a moment, and her eyes settled on
Pierre.  Presently she held out her hand to him. "I knew you--yesterday,"
she said.

Pierre returned the intensity of her gaze with one kind and strong.

"So--so, Cynthie," he said; "sit down and eat."

He dropped on a knee and drew a scone and some fish from the ashes.  She
sat facing them, and, taking from a bag at her side some wild fruits, ate
slowly, saying nothing.  Lawless noticed that her hair had become grey at
her temples, though she was but one-and-twenty years old.  Her face,
brown as it was, shone with a white kind of light, which may, or may not,
have come from the crucible of her eyes, where the tragedy of her life
was fusing.  Lawless could not bear to look long, for the fire that
consumes a body and sets free a soul is not for the sight of the quick.
At last she rose, her body steady, but her hands having that tremulous
activity of her eyes.

"Will you not stay, Cynthie?" asked Lawless very kindly.

She came close to him, and, after searching his eyes, said with a smile
that almost hurt him, "When I have found him, I will bring him to your
camp-fire.  Last night the Voice said that he waits for me where the mist
rises from the river at daybreak, close to the home of the White Swan.
Do you know where is the home of the White Swan?  Before the frost comes
and the red wolf cries, I must find him.  Winter is the time of sleep.

"I will give him honey and dried meat.  I know where we shall live
together.  You never saw such roses!  Hush! I have a place where we can
hide."

Suddenly her gaze became fixed and dream-like, and she said slowly:
"In all time of our tribulation, in all time of our wealth, in the hour
of death, and in the Day of Judgment, Good Lord, deliver us!"

"Good Lord, deliver us!" repeated Lawless in a low voice.  Without
looking at them, she slowly turned away and passed up the hill-side, her
eyes scanning the valley as before.

"Good Lord, deliver us!" again said Lawless.  "Where did she get it?"

"From a book which Fingall left behind."

They watched her till she rounded a cliff, and was gone; then they
shouldered their kits and passed up the river on the trail of the wapiti.

One month later, when a fine white surf of frost lay on the ground,
and the sky was darkened often by the flight of the wild geese southward,
they came upon a hut perched on a bluff, at the edge of a clump of pines.
It was morning, and Whitefaced Mountain shone clear and high, without a
touch of cloud or mist from its haunches to its crown.

They knocked at the hut door, and, in answer to a voice, entered.  The
sunlight streamed in over a woman, lying upon a heap of dried flowers in
a corner.  A man was kneeling beside her.  They came near, and saw that
the woman was Cynthie.

"Fingall!" broke out Pierre, and caught the kneeling man by the
shoulder.  At the sound of his voice the woman's eyes opened.

"Fingall!--Oh, Fingall!" she said, and reached up a hand.

Fingall stooped and caught her to his breast: "Cynthie! poor girl!  Oh,
my poor Cynthie!" he said.  In his eyes, as in hers, was a sane light,
and his voice, as hers, said indescribable things.

Her head sank upon his shoulder, her eyes closed; she slept.  Fingall
laid her down with a sob in his throat; then he sat up and clutched
Pierre's hand.

"In the East, where the doctors cured me, I heard all," he said, pointing
to her, "and I came to find her.  I was just in time; I found her
yesterday."

"She knew you?" whispered Pierre.

"Yes, but this fever came on."  He turned and looked at her, and,
kneeling, smoothed away the hair from the quiet face.  "Poor girl!"
he said; "poor girl!"

"She will get well?" asked Pierre.

"God grant it!" Fingall replied.  "She is better--better."

Lawless and Pierre softly turned and stole away, leaving the man alone
with the woman he loved.

The two stood in silence, looking upon the river beneath.  Presently a
voice crept through the stillness.  "Fingall!  Oh, Fingall!--Fingall!"

It was the voice of a woman returning from the dead.






THREE COMMANDMENTS IN THE VULGAR TONGUE


I

"Read on, Pierre," the sick man said, doubling the corner of the wolf-
skin pillow so that it shaded his face from the candle.

Pierre smiled to himself, thinking of the unusual nature of his
occupation, raised an eyebrow as if to someone sitting at the other side
of the fire,--though the room was empty save for the two--and went on
reading:

     "Woe to the multitude of many people, which make a noise like the
     noise of the seas; and to the rushing of nations, that make a
     rushing like the rushing of mighty waters!

     "The nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters: but God
     shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, and shall be chased
     as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like a rolling
     thing before the whirlwind.

     "And behold at evening-tide trouble; and before the morning he is
     not.  This is the portion of them that spoil us, and the lot of them
     that rob us."

The sick man put up his hand, motioning for silence, and Pierre, leaving
the Bible open, laid it at his side.  Then he fell to studying the figure
on the couch.  The body, though reduced by a sudden illness, had an
appearance of late youth, a firmness of mature manhood; but the hair was
grey, the beard was grizzled, and the face was furrowed and seamed as
though the man had lived a long, hard life.  The body seemed thirty years
old, the head sixty; the man's exact age was forty-five.  His most
singular characteristic was a fine, almost spiritual intelligence, which
showed in the dewy brightness of the eye, in the lighted face, in the
cadenced definiteness of his speech.  One would have said, knowing
nothing of him, that he was a hermit; but again, noting the firm,
graceful outlines of his body, that he was a soldier.  Within the past
twenty-four hours he had had a fight for life with one of the terrible
"colds" which, like an unstayed plague, close up the courses of the body,
and carry a man out of the hurly-burly, without pause to say how much or
how little he cares to go.

Pierre, whose rude skill in medicine was got of hard experiences here and
there, had helped him back into the world again, and was himself now a
little astonished at acting as Scripture reader to a Protestant invalid.
Still, the Bible was like his childhood itself, always with him in
memory, and Old Testament history was as wine to his blood.  The lofty
tales sang in his veins: of primitive man, adventure, mysterious and
exalted romance.  For nearly an hour, with absorbing interest, he had
read aloud from these ancient chronicles to Fawdor, who held this Post of
the Hudson's Bay Company in the outer wilderness.

Pierre had arrived at the Post three days before, to find a half-breed
trapper and an Indian helpless before the sickness which was hurrying to
close on John Fawdor's heart and clamp it in the vice of death.  He had
come just in time.  He was now ready to learn, by what ways the future
should show, why this man, of such unusual force and power, should have
lived at a desolate post in Labrador for twenty-five years.

"'This is the portion of them that spoil us, and the lot of them that rob
us--'"  Fawdor repeated the words slowly, and then said: "It is good to
be out of the restless world.  Do you know the secret of life, Pierre?"

Pierre's fingers unconsciously dropped on the Bible at his side, drumming
the leaves.  His eyes wandered over Fawdor's face, and presently he
answered, "To keep your own commandments."

"The ten?" asked the sick man, pointing to the Bible.  Pierre's fingers
closed the book.  "Not the ten, for they do not fit all; but one by one
to make your own, and never to break--comme ca!"

"The answer is well," returned Fawdor; "but what is the greatest
commandment that a man can make for himself?"

"Who can tell?  What is the good of saying, 'Thou shalt keep holy the
Sabbath day,' when a man lives where he does not know the days?  What is
the good of saying, 'Thou shalt not steal,' when a man has no heart to
rob, and there is nothing to steal?  But a man should have a heart, an
eye for justice.  It is good for him to make his commandments against
that wherein he is a fool or has a devil.  Justice,--that is the thing."

"'Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour'?" asked
Fawdor softly.

"Yes, like that.  But a man must put it in his own words, and keep the
law which he makes.  Then life does not give a bad taste in the mouth."

"What commandments have you made for yourself, Pierre?"

The slumbering fire in Pierre's face leaped up.  He felt for an instant
as his father, a chevalier of France, might have felt if a peasant had
presumed to finger the orders upon his breast.  It touched his native
pride, so little shown in anything else.  But he knew the spirit behind
the question, and the meaning justified the man.  "Thou shalt think with
the minds of twelve men, and the heart of one woman," he said, and
paused.

"Justice and mercy," murmured the voice from the bed.

"Thou shalt keep the faith of food and blanket."  Again Pierre paused.

"And a man shall have no cause to fear his friend," said the voice again.

The pause was longer this time, and Pierre's cold, handsome face took on
a kind of softness before he said, "Remember the sorrow of thine own
wife."

"It is a good commandment," said the sick man, "to make all women safe
whether they be true--or foolish."

"The strong should be ashamed to prey upon the weak.  Pshaw!  such a
sport ends in nothing.  Man only is man's game."

Suddenly Pierre added: "When you thought you were going to die, you gave
me some papers and letters to take to Quebec.  You will get well.  Shall
I give them back?  Will you take them yourself?"

Fawdor understood: Pierre wished to know his story.  He reached out a
hand, saying, "I will take them myself.  You have not read them?"

"No.  I was not to read them till you died--bien?" He handed the packet
over.

"I will tell you the story," Fawdor said, turning over on his side, so
that his eyes rested full on Pierre.

He did not begin at once.  An Esquimau dog, of the finest and yet wildest
breed, which had been lying before the fire, stretched itself, opened its
red eyes at the two men, and, slowly rising, went to the door and sniffed
at the cracks.  Then it turned, and began pacing restlessly around the
room.  Every little while it would stop, sniff the air, and go on again.
Once or twice, also, as it passed the couch of the sick man, it paused,
and at last it suddenly rose, rested two feet on the rude headboard of
the couch, and pushed its nose against the invalid's head.  There was
something rarely savage and yet beautifully soft in the dog's face,
scarred as it was by the whips of earlier owners.  The sick man's hand
went up and caressed the wolfish head.  "Good dog, good Akim!" he said
softly in French.  "Thou dost know when a storm is on the way; thou dost
know, too, when there is a storm in my heart."

Even as he spoke a wind came crying round the house, and the parchment
windows gave forth a soft booming sound.  Outside, Nature was trembling
lightly in all her nerves; belated herons, disturbed from the freshly
frozen pool, swept away on tardy wings into the night and to the south;
a herd of wolves, trooping by the hut, passed from a short, easy trot to
a low, long gallop, devouring, yet fearful.  It appeared as though the
dumb earth were trying to speak, and the mighty effort gave it pain,
from which came awe and terror to living things.

So, inside the house, also, Pierre almost shrank from the unknown sorrow
of this man beside him, who was about to disclose the story of his life.
The solitary places do not make men glib of tongue; rather, spare of
words.  They whose tragedy lies in the capacity to suffer greatly, being
given the woe of imagination, bring forth inner history as a mother gasps
life into the world.

"I was only a boy of twenty-one," Fawdor said from the pillow, as he
watched the dog noiselessly travelling from corner to corner, "and I had
been with the Company three years.  They had said that I could rise fast;
I had done so.  I was ambitious; yet I find solace in thinking that I saw
only one way to it,--by patience, industry, and much thinking.  I read a
great deal, and cared for what I read; but I observed also, that in
dealing with men I might serve myself and the Company wisely.

"One day the governor of the Company came from England, and with him a
sweet lady, his young niece, and her brother.  They arranged for a tour
to the Great Lakes, and I was chosen to go with them in command of the
boatmen.  It appeared as if a great chance had come to me, and so said
the factor at Lachine on the morning we set forth.  The girl was as
winsome as you can think; not of such wonderful beauty, but with a face
that would be finer old than young; and a dainty trick of humour had she
as well.  The governor was a testy man; he could not bear to be crossed
in a matter; yet, in spite of all, I did not think he had a wilful
hardness.  It was a long journey, and we were set to our wits to make it
always interesting; but we did it somehow, for there were fishing and
shooting, and adventure of one sort and another, and the lighter things,
such as singing and the telling of tales, as the boatmen rowed the long
river.

"We talked of many things as we travelled, and I was glad to listen to
the governor, for he had seen and read much.  It was clear he liked to
have us hang upon his tales and his grand speeches, which seemed a little
large in the mouth; and his nephew, who had a mind for raillery, was now
and again guilty of some witty impertinence; but this was hard to bring
home to him, for he could assume a fine childlike look when he pleased,
confusing to his accusers.  Towards the last he grew bolder, and said
many a biting thing to both the governor and myself, which more than once
turned his sister's face pale with apprehension, for she had a nice sense
of kindness.  Whenever the talk was at all general, it was his delight to
turn one against the other.  Though I was wary, and the girl understood
his game, at last he had his way.

"I knew Shakespeare and the Bible very well, and, like most bookish young
men, phrase and motto were much on my tongue, though not always given
forth.  One evening, as we drew to the camp-fire, a deer broke from the
woods and ran straight through the little circle we were making, and
disappeared in the bushes by the riverside.  Someone ran for a rifle; but
the governor forbade, adding, with an air, a phrase with philosophical
point.  I, proud of the chance to show I was not a mere backwoodsman at
such a sport, capped his aphorism with a line from Shakespeare's
Cymbeline.

"'Tut, tut!' said the governor smartly; 'you haven't it well, Mr. Fawdor;
it goes this way,' and he went on to set me right.  His nephew at that
stepped in, and, with a little disdainful laugh at me, made some galling
gibe at my 'distinguished learning.'  I might have known better than to
let it pique me, but I spoke up again, though respectfully enough, that
I was not wrong.  It appeared to me all at once as if some principle were
at stake, as if I were the champion of our Shakespeare; so will vanity
delude us.

"The governor--I can see it as if it were yesterday--seemed to go like
ice, for he loved to be thought infallible in all such things as well as
in great business affairs, and his nephew was there to give an edge to
the matter.  He said, curtly, that I would probably come on better in the
world if I were more exact and less cock-a-hoop with myself.  That stung
me, for not only was the young lady looking on with a sort of superior
pity, as I thought, but her brother was murmuring to her under his breath
with a provoking smile.  I saw no reason why I should be treated like a
schoolboy.  As far as my knowledge went it was as good as another man's,
were he young or old, so I came in quickly with my reply.  I said that
his excellency should find me more cock-a-hoop with Shakespeare than with
myself.  'Well, well,' he answered, with a severe look, 'our Company has
need of great men for hard tasks.'  To this I made no answer, for I got
a warning look from the young lady,--a look which had a sort of reproach
and command too.  She knew the twists and turns of her uncle's temper,
and how he was imperious and jealous in little things.  The matter
dropped for the time; but as the governor was going to his tent for the
night, the young lady said to me hurriedly, 'My uncle is a man of great
reading--and power, Mr. Fawdor.  I would set it right with him, if I were
you.'  For the moment I was ashamed.  You cannot guess how fine an eye
she had, and how her voice stirred one!  She said no more, but stepped
inside her tent; and then I heard the brother say over my shoulder, 'Oh,
why should the spirit of mortal be proud!'  Afterwards, with a little
laugh and a backward wave of the hand, as one might toss a greeting to
a beggar, he was gone also, and I was left alone."

Fawdor paused in his narrative.  The dog had lain down by the fire again,
but its red eyes were blinking at the door, and now and again it growled
softly, and the long hair at its mouth seemed to shiver with feeling.
Suddenly through the night there rang a loud, barking cry.  The dog's
mouth opened and closed in a noiseless snarl, showing its keen, long
teeth, and a ridge of hair bristled on its back.  But the two men made
no sign or motion.  The cry of wild cats was no new thing to them.

Presently the other continued: "I sat by the fire and heard beasts howl
like that, I listened to the river churning over the rapids below, and I
felt all at once a loneliness that turned me sick.  There were three
people in a tent near me; I could even hear the governor's breathing; but
I appeared to have no part in the life of any human being, as if I were a
kind of outlaw of God and man.  I was poor; I had no friends; I was at
the mercy of this great Company; if I died, there was not a human being
who, so far as I knew, would shed a tear.  Well, you see I was only a
boy, and I suppose it was the spirit of youth hungering for the huge,
active world and the companionship of ambitious men.  There is no one so
lonely as the young dreamer on the brink of life.  "I was lying by the
fire.  It was not a cold night, and I fell asleep at last without
covering.  I did not wake till morning, and then it was to find the
governor's nephew building up the fire again.  'Those who are born
great,' said he, 'are bound to rise.'  But perhaps he saw that I had had
a bad night, and felt that he had gone far enough, for he presently said,
in a tone more to my liking, 'Take my advice, Mr. Fawdor; make it right
with my uncle.  It isn't such fast rising in the Company that you can
afford to quarrel with its governor.  I'd go on the other tack: don't be
too honest.'  I thanked him, and no more was said; but I liked him
better, for I saw that he was one of those who take pleasure in dropping
nettles more to see the weakness of human nature than from malice.

"But my good fortune had got a twist, and it was not to be straightened
that day; and because it was not straightened then it was not to be at
all; for at five o'clock we came to the Post at Lachine, and here the
governor and the others were to stop.  During all the day I had waited
for my chance to say a word of apology to his excellency, but it was no
use; nothing seemed to help me, for he was busy with his papers and
notes, and I also had to finish up my reports.  The hours went by, and
I saw my chances drift past.  I knew that the governor held the thing
against me, and not the less because he saw me more than once that day in
speech with his niece.  For she appeared anxious to cheer me, and indeed
I think we might have become excellent friends had our ways run together.
She could have bestowed her friendship on me without shame to herself,
for I had come of an old family in Scotland, the Sheplaws of Canfire,
which she knew, as did the governor also, was a more ancient family than
their own.  Yet her kindness that day worked me no good, and I went far
to make it worse, since, under the spell of her gentleness, I looked at
her far from distantly, and at the last, as she was getting from the
boat, returned the pressure of her hand with much interest.  I suppose
something of the pride of that moment leaped up in my eye, for I saw the
governor's face harden more and more, and the brother shrugged an
ironical shoulder.  I was too young to see or know that the chief thing
in the girl's mind was regret that I had so hurt my chances; for she
knew, as I saw only too well afterwards, that I might have been rewarded
with a leaping promotion in honour of the success of the journey.  But
though the boatmen got a gift of money and tobacco and spirits, nothing
came to me save the formal thanks of the governor, as he bowed me from
his presence.

"The nephew came with his sister to bid me farewell.  There was little
said between her and me, and it was a long, long time before she knew the
end of that day's business.  But the brother said, 'You've let, the
chance go by, Mr. Fawdor.  Better luck next time, eh?  And,' he went on,
'I'd give a hundred editions the lie, but I'd read the text according to
my chief officer.  The words of a king are always wise while his head is
on,' he declared further, and he drew from his scarf a pin of pearls and
handed it to me.  'Will you wear that for me, Mr. Fawdor?' he asked; and
I, who had thought him but a stripling with a saucy pride, grasped his
hand and said a God-keep-you.  It does me good now to think I said
it.  I did not see him or his sister again.

"The next day was Sunday.  About two o'clock I was sent for by the
governor.  When I got to the Post and was admitted to him, I saw that my
misadventure was not over.  'Mr. Fawdor,' said he coldly, spreading out a
map on the table before him, 'you will start at once for Fort Ungava, at
Ungava Bay, in Labrador.'  I felt my heart stand still for a moment, and
then surge up and down, like a piston-rod under a sudden rush of steam.
'You will proceed now,' he went on, in his hard voice, 'as far as the
village of Pont Croix.  There you will find three Indians awaiting you.
You will go on with them as far as Point St. Saviour and camp for the
night, for if the Indians remain in the village they may get drunk.  The
next morning, at sunrise, you will move on.  The Indians know the trail
across Labrador to Fort Ungava.  When you reach there, you will take
command of the Post and remain till further orders.  Your clothes are
already at the village.  I have had them packed, and you will find there
also what is necessary for the journey.  The factor at Ungava was there
ten years; he has gone--to heaven.'

"I cannot tell what it was held my tongue silent, that made me only bow
my head in assent, and press my lips together.  I knew I was pale as
death, for as I turned to leave the room I caught sight of my face in a
little mirror tacked on the door, and I hardly recognised myself.

"'Good-day, Mr. Fawdor,' said the governor, handing me the map.  'There
is some brandy in your stores; be careful that none of your Indians get
it.  If they try to desert, you know what to do.'  With a gesture of
dismissal he turned, and began to speak with the chief trader.

"For me, I went from that room like a man condemned to die.  Fort Ungava
in Labrador,--a thousand miles away, over a barren, savage country, and
in winter too; for it would be winter there immediately!  It was an exile
to Siberia, and far worse than Siberia; for there are many there to share
the fellowship of misery, and I was likely to be the only white man at
Fort Ungava.  As I passed from the door of the Post the words of
Shakespeare which had brought all this about sang in my ears."  He ceased
speaking, and sank back wearily among the skins of his couch.  Out of the
enveloping silence Pierre's voice came softly:

"Thou shalt judge with the minds of twelve men, and the heart of one
woman."



II

"The journey to the village of Pont Croix was that of a man walking over
graves.  Every step sent a pang to my heart,--a boy of twenty-one, grown
old in a moment.  It was not that I had gone a little lame from a hurt
got on the expedition with the governor, but my whole life seemed
suddenly lamed.  Why did I go?  Ah, you do not know how discipline gets
into a man's bones, the pride, the indignant pride of obedience!  At that
hour I swore that I should myself be the governor of that Company one
day,--the boast of loud-hearted youth.  I had angry visions, I dreamed
absurd dreams, but I did not think of disobeying.  It was an unheard-of
journey at such a time, but I swore that I would do it, that it should go
into the records of the Company.

"I reached the village, found the Indians, and at once moved on to the
settlement where we were to stay that night.  Then my knee began to pain
me.  I feared inflammation; so in the dead of night I walked back to the
village, roused a trader of the Company, got some liniment and other
trifles, and arrived again at St. Saviour's before dawn.  My few clothes
and necessaries came in the course of the morning, and by noon we were
fairly started on the path to exile.

"I remember that we came to a lofty point on the St. Lawrence just before
we plunged into the woods, to see the great stream no more.  I stood and
looked back up the river towards the point where Lachine lay.  All that
went to make the life of a Company's man possible was there; and there,
too, were those with whom I had tented and travelled for three long
months,--eaten with them, cared for them, used for them all the woodcraft
that I knew.  I could not think that it would be a young man's lifetime
before I set eyes on that scene again.  Never from that day to this have
I seen the broad, sweet river where I spent the three happiest years of
my life.  I can see now the tall shining heights of Quebec, the pretty
wooded Island of Orleans, the winding channel, so deep, so strong.  The
sun was three-fourths of its way down in the west, and already the sky
was taking on the deep red and purple of autumn.  Somehow, the thing that
struck me most in the scene was a bunch of pines, solemn and quiet, their
tops burnished by the afternoon light.  Tears would have been easy then.
But my pride drove them back from my eyes to my angry heart.  Besides,
there were my Indians waiting, and the long journey lay before us.  Then,
perhaps because there was none nearer to make farewell to, or I know not
why, I waved my hand towards the distant village of Lachine, and, with
the sweet maid in my mind who had so gently parted from me yesterday, I
cried, 'Good-bye, and God bless you.'"

He paused.  Pierre handed him a wooden cup, from which he drank, and then
continued:

"The journey went forward.  You have seen the country.  You know what it
is: those bare ice-plains and rocky unfenced fields stretching to all
points, the heaving wastes of treeless country, the harsh frozen lakes.
God knows what insupportable horror would have settled on me in that
pilgrimage had it not been for occasional glimpses of a gentler life--for
the deer and caribou which crossed our path.  Upon my soul, I was so full
of gratitude and love at the sight that I could have thrown my arms round
their necks and kissed them.  I could not raise a gun at them.  My
Indians did that, and so inconstant is the human heart that I ate
heartily of the meat.  My Indians were almost less companionable to me
than any animal would have been.  Try as I would, I could not bring
myself to like them, and I feared only too truly that they did not like
me.  Indeed, I soon saw that they meant to desert me,--kill me, perhaps,
if they could, although I trusted in the wholesome and restraining fear
which the Indian has of the great Company.  I was not sure that they were
guiding me aright, and I had to threaten death in case they tried to
mislead me or desert me.  My knee at times was painful, and cold, hunger,
and incessant watchfulness wore on me vastly.  Yet I did not yield to my
miseries, for there entered into me then not only the spirit of
endurance, but something of that sacred pride in suffering which
was the merit of my Covenanting forefathers.

"We were four months on that bitter travel, and I do not know how it
could have been made at all, had it not been for the deer that I had
heart to eat and none to kill.  The days got shorter and shorter, and we
were sometimes eighteen hours in absolute darkness.  Thus you can imagine
how slowly we went.  Thank God, we could sleep, hid away in our fur bags,
more often without a fire than with one,--mere mummies stretched out on a
vast coverlet of white, with the peering, unfriendly sky above us; though
it must be said that through all those many, many weeks no cloud perched
in the zenith.  When there was light there was sun, and the courage of it
entered into our bones, helping to save us.  You may think I have been
made feeble-minded by my sufferings, but I tell you plainly that, in the
closing days of our journey, I used to see a tall figure walking beside
me, who, whenever I would have spoken to him, laid a warning finger on
his lips; but when I would have fallen, he spoke to me, always in the
same words.  You have heard of him, the Scarlet Hunter of the Kimash
Hills.  It was he, the Sentinel of the North, the Lover of the Lost.
So deep did his words go into my heart that they have remained with
me to this hour."

"I saw him once in the White Valley," Pierre said in a low voice.  "What
was it he said to you?"

The other drew a long breath, and a smile rested on his lips.  Then,
slowly, as though liking to linger over them, he repeated the words of
the Scarlet Hunter:

        "'O son of man, behold!
          If thou shouldest stumble on the nameless trail,
          The trail that no man rides,
          Lift up thy heart,
          Behold, O son of man, thou hast a helper near!

        "'O son of man, take heed!
          If thou shouldst fall upon the vacant plain,
          The plain that no man loves,
          Reach out thy hand,
          Take heed, O son of man, strength shall be given thee!

        "'O son of man, rejoice!
          If thou art blinded even at the door,
          The door of the Safe Tent,
          Sing in thy heart,
          Rejoice, O son of man, thy pilot leads thee home?'

"I never seemed to be alone after that--call it what you will, fancy or
delirium.  My head was so light that it appeared to spin like a star, and
my feet were so heavy that I dragged the whole earth after me.  My
Indians seldom spoke.  I never let them drop behind me, for I did not
trust their treacherous natures.  But in the end, as it would seem, they
also had but one thought, and that to reach Fort Ungava; for there was no
food left, none at all.  We saw no tribes of Indians and no Esquimaux,
for we had not passed in their line of travel or settlement.

"At last I used to dream that birds were singing near me,--a soft,
delicate whirlwind of sound; and then bells all like muffled silver rang
through the aching, sweet air.  Bits of prayer and poetry I learned when
a boy flashed through my mind; equations in algebra; the tingling scream
of a great buzz-saw; the breath of a racer as he nears the post under the
crying whip; my own voice dropping loud profanity, heard as a lad from
a blind ferryman; the boom! boom! of a mass of logs as they struck a
house on a flooding river and carried it away.  .  .  .

"One day we reached the end.  It was near evening, and we came to the top
of a wooded knoll.  My eyes were dancing in my head with fatigue and
weakness, but I could see below us, on the edge of the great bay, a large
hut, Esquimau lodges and Indian tepees near it.  It was the Fort, my
cheerless prison-house."

He paused.  The dog had been watching him with its flaming eyes; now it
gave a low growl, as though it understood, and pitied.  In the interval
of silence the storm without broke.  The trees began to quake and cry,
the light snow to beat upon the parchment windows, and the chimney to
splutter and moan.  Presently, out on the bay they could hear the young
ice break and come scraping up the shore.  Fawdor listened a while, and
then went on, waving his hand to the door as he began: "Think! this, and
like that always: the ungodly strife of nature, and my sick, disconsolate
life."

"Ever since?" asked Pierre.  "All the time."

"Why did you not go back?"

"I was to wait for orders, and they never came."

"You were a free man, not a slave."

"The human heart has pride.  At first, as when I left the governor at
Lachine, I said, 'I will never speak, I will never ask nor bend the knee.
He has the power to oppress; I can obey without whining, as fine a man as
he.'"

"Did you not hate?"

"At first, as only a banished man can hate.  I knew that if all had gone
well I should be a man high up in the Company, and here I was, living
like a dog in the porch of the world, sometimes without other food for
months than frozen fish; and for two years I was in a place where we had
no fire,--lived in a snow-house, with only blubber to eat.  And so year
after year, no word!"

"The mail came once every year from the world?"  "Yes, once a year the
door of the outer life was opened.  A ship came into the bay, and by that
ship I sent out my reports.  But no word came from the governor, and no
request went from me.  Once the captain of that ship took me by the
shoulders, and said, 'Fawdor, man, this will drive you mad.  Come away to
England,--leave your half-breed in charge,--and ask the governor for a
big promotion.'  He did not understand.  Of course I said I could not go.
Then he turned on me, he was a good man,--and said, 'This will either
make you madman or saint, Fawdor.'  He drew a Bible from his pocket and
handed it to me.  'I've used it twenty years,' he said, 'in evil and out
of evil, and I've spiked it here and there; it's a chart for heavy seas,
and may you find it so, my lad.'

"I said little then; but when I saw the sails of his ship round a cape
and vanish, all my pride and strength were broken up, and I came in a
heap to the ground, weeping like a child.  But the change did not come
all at once.  There were two things that kept me hard."

"The girl?"

"The girl, and another.  But of the young lady after.  I had a half-breed
whose life I had saved.  I was kind to him always; gave him as good to
eat and drink as I had myself; divided my tobacco with him; loved him as
only an exile can love a comrade.  He conspired with the Indians to seize
the Fort and stores, and kill me if I resisted.  I found it out."

"Thou shalt keep the faith of food and blanket," said Pierre.  "What did
you do with him?"

"The fault was not his so much as of his race and his miserable past.  I
had loved him.  I sent him away; and he never came back."

"Thou shalt judge with the minds of twelve men, and the heart of one
woman."

"For the girl.  There was the thing that clamped my heart.  Never a
message from her or her brother.  Surely they knew, and yet never,
thought I, a good word for me to the governor.  They had forgotten the
faith of food and blanket.  And she--she must have seen that I could have
worshipped her, had we been in the same way of life.  Before the better
days came to me I was hard against her, hard and rough at heart."

"Remember the sorrow of thine own wife."  Pierre's voice was gentle.

"Truly, to think hardly of no woman should be always in a man's heart.
But I have known only one woman of my race in twenty-five years!"

"And as time went on?"

"As time went on, and no word came, I ceased to look for it.  But I
followed that chart spiked with the captain's pencil, as he had done it
in season and out of season, and by and by I ceased to look for any word.
I even became reconciled to my life.  The ambitious and aching cares of
the world dropped from me, and I stood above all--alone in my suffering,
yet not yielding.  Loneliness is a terrible thing.  Under it a man--"

"Goes mad or becomes a saint--a saint!"  Pierre's voice became reverent.

Fawdor shook his head, smiling gently.  "Ah no, no.  But I began to
understand the world, and I loved the north, the beautiful hard north."

"But there is more?"

"Yes, the end of it all.  Three days before you came I got a packet of
letters, not by the usual yearly mail.  One announced that the governor
was dead.  Another--"

"Another?" urged Pierre.

--"was from Her.  She said that her brother, on the day she wrote, had by
chance come across my name in the Company's records, and found that I had
been here a quarter of a century.  It was the letter of a good woman.
She said she thought the governor had forgotten that he had sent me here
--as now I hope he had, for that would be one thing less for him to think
of, when he set out on the journey where the only weight man carries is
the packload of his sins.  She also said that she had written to me twice
after we parted at Lachine, but had never heard a word, and three years
afterwards she had gone to India.  The letters were lost, I suppose,
on the way to me, somehow--who can tell?  Then came another thing, so
strange, that it seemed like the laughter of the angels at us.  These
were her words: 'And, dear Mr. Fawdor, you were both wrong in that
quotation, as you no doubt discovered long ago.'  Then she gave me the
sentence as it is in Cymbeline.  She was right, quite right.  We were
both wrong.  Never till her letter came had I looked to see.  How vain,
how uncertain, and fallible, is man!"

Pierre dropped his cigarette, and stared at Fawdor.  "The knowledge of
books is foolery," he said slowly.  "Man is the only book of life.  Go
on."

"There was another letter, from the brother, who was now high up in the
Company, asking me to come to England, and saying that they wished to
promote me far, and that he and his sister, with their families, would be
glad to see me."

"She was married then?"

The rashness of the suggestion made Fawdor wave his hand impatiently.
He would not reply to it.  "I was struck down with all the news," he
said.  "I wandered like a child out into a mad storm.  Illness came; then
you, who have nursed me back to life.  .  .  .  And now I have told all."

"Not all, bien sur.  What will you do?"

"I am out of the world; why tempt it all again?  See how those twenty-
five years were twisted by a boy's vanity and a man's tyranny!"

"But what will you do?" persisted Pierre.  "You should see the faces of
women and children again.  No man can live without that sight, even as a
saint."

Suddenly Fawdor's face was shot over with a storm of feeling.  He lay
very still, his thoughts busy with a new world which had been disclosed
to him.  "Youth hungers for the vanities," he said, "and the middle-aged
for home."  He took Pierre's hand.  "I will go," he added.  "A door will
open somewhere for me."

Then he turned his face to the wall.  The storm had ceased, the wild dog
huddled quietly on the hearth, and for hours the only sound was the
crackling of the logs as Pierre stirred the fire.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Advantage to live where nothing was required of her but truth
Don't be too honest
Every shot that kills ricochets
Not good to have one thing in the head all the time
Remember the sorrow of thine own wife
Secret of life: to keep your own commandments
She had not suffered that sickness, social artifice
Some people are rough with the poor--and proud
They whose tragedy lies in the capacity to suffer greatly
Think with the minds of twelve men, and the heart of one woman
Youth hungers for the vanities






A ROMANY OF THE SNOWS

BEING A CONTINUATION OF THE PERSONAL HISTORIES OF "PIERRE AND HIS PEOPLE"
AND THE LAST EXISTING RECORDS OF PRETTY PIERRE

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 4.


LITTLE BABICHE
AT POINT O' BUGLES
THE SPOIL OF THE PUMA
THE TRAIL OF THE SUN DOGS
THE PILOT OF BELLE AMOUR




LITTLE BABICHE

"No, no, m'sieu' the governor, they did not tell you right.  I was with
him, and I have known Little Babiche fifteen years--as long as I've known
you.  .  .  .  It was against the time when down in your world there they
have feastings, and in the churches the grand songs and many candles on
the altars.  Yes, Noel, that is the word--the day of the Great Birth.
You shall hear how strange it all was--the thing, the time, the end of
it."

The governor of the great Company settled back in a chair, his powerful
face seamed by years, his hair grey and thick still, his keen, steady
eyes burning under shaggy brows.  He had himself spent long solitary
years in the wild fastnesses of the north.  He fastened his dark eyes on
Pierre, and said: "Monsieur Pierre, I shall be glad to hear.  It was at
the time of Noel--yes?"

Pierre began: "You have seen it beautiful and cold in the north, but
never so cold and beautiful as it was last year.  The world was white
with sun and ice, the frost never melting, the sun never warming--just
a glitter, so lovely, so deadly.  If only you could keep the heart warm,
you were not afraid.  But if once--just for a moment--the blood ran out
from the heart and did not come in again, the frost clamped the doors
shut, and there was an end of all.  Ah, m'sieu', when the north clinches
a man's heart in anger there is no pain like it--for a moment."

"Yes, yes; and Little Babiche?"

"For ten years he carried the mails along the route of Fort St. Mary,
Fort O'Glory, Fort St. Saviour, and Fort Perseverance within the circle-
just one mail once a year, but that was enough.  There he was with his
Esquimaux dogs on the trail, going and coming, with a laugh and a word
for anyone that crossed his track.  'Good-day, Babiche'  'Good-day,
m'sieu'.'  'How do you, Babiche?'  'Well, thank the Lord, m'sieu'.'
'Where to and where from, Babiche?'  'To the Great Fort by the old trail,
from the Far-off River, m'sieu'.'  'Come safe along, Babiche.'  'Merci,
m'sieu'; the good God travels north, m'sieu'.'  'Adieu, Babiche.' 'Adieu,
m'sieu'.' That is about the way of the thing, year after year.  Sometimes
a night at a hut or a post, but mostly alone--alone, except for the dogs.
He slept with them, and they slept on the mails--to guard: as though
there should be highwaymen on the Prairie of the Ten Stars!  But no, it
was his way, m'sieu'.  Now and again I crossed him on the trail, for have
I not travelled to every corner of the north?  We were not so great
friends, for--well, Babiche is a man who says his aves, and never was a
loafer, and there was no reason why he should have love for me; but we
were good company when we met.  I knew him when he was a boy down on the
Chaudiere, and he always had a heart like a lion-and a woman.  I had seen
him fight, I had seen him suffer cold, and I had heard him sing.

"Well, I was up last fall to Fort St. Saviour.  Ho, how dull was it!
Macgregor, the trader there, has brains like rubber.  So I said, I will
go down to Fort O'Glory.  I knew someone would be there--it is nearer the
world.  So I started away with four dogs and plenty of jerked buffalo,
and so much brown brandy as Macgregor could squeeze out of his eye!
Never, never were there such days--the frost shaking like steel and
silver as it powdered the sunlight, the white level of snow lifting and
falling, and falling and lifting, the sky so great a travel away, the air
which made you cry out with pain one minute and gave you joy the next.
And all so wild, so lonely!  Yet I have seen hanging in those plains
cities all blue and red with millions of lights showing, and voices,
voices everywhere, like the singing of soft masses.  After a time in that
cold up there you are no longer yourself--no.  You move in a dream.  "Eh
bien, m'sieu', there came, I thought, a dream to me one evening--well,
perhaps one afternoon, for the days are short--so short, the sun just
coming over a little bend of sky, and sinking down like a big orange
ball.  I come out of a tumble of little hills, and there over on the
plains I saw a sight!  Ragged hills of ice were thrown up, as if they'd
been heaved out by the breaking earth, jutting here and there like
wedges--like the teeth of a world.  Alors, on one crag, shaped as an
anvil, I saw what struck me like a blow, and I felt the blood shoot out
of my heart and leave it dry.  I was for a minute like a pump with no
water in its throat to work the piston and fetch the stream up.  I got
sick and numb.  There on that anvil of snow and ice I saw a big white
bear, one such as you shall see within the Arctic Circle, his long nose
fetching out towards that bleeding sun in the sky, his white coat
shining.  But that was not the thing--there was another.  At the feet of
the bear was a body, and one clawed foot was on that body--of a man.  So
clear was the air, the red sun shining on the face as it was turned
towards me, that I wonder I did not at once know whose it was.  You
cannot think, m'sieu', what that was like--no.  But all at once I
remembered the Chant of the Scarlet Hunter.  I spoke it quick, and the
blood came creeping back in here."  He tapped his chest with his slight
forefinger.

"What was the chant?" asked the governor, who had scarce stirred a
muscle since the tale began.  Pierre made a little gesture of
deprecation.  "Ah, it is perhaps a thing of foolishness, as you may
think--"

"No, no.  I have heard and seen in my day," urged the governor.

"So?  Good.  Yes, I remember, you told me years ago, m'sieu'.  .  .  .

     "The blinding Trail and Night and Cold are man's: mine is the trail
     that finds the Ancient Lodge.  Morning and Night they travel with
     me; my camp is set by the pines, its fires are burning--are burning.
     The lost, they shall sit by my fires, and the fearful ones shall
     seek, and the sick shall abide.  I am the Hunter, the Son of the
     North; I am thy lover where no man may love thee.  With me thou
     shalt journey, and thine the Safe Tent.

"As I said, the blood came back to my heart.  I turned to my dogs, and
gave them a cut with the whip to see if I dreamed.  They sat back and
snarled, and their wild red eyes, the same as mine, kept looking at the
bear and the quiet man on the anvil of ice and snow.  Tell me, can you
think of anything like it?--the strange light, the white bear of the
Pole, that has no friends at all except the shooting stars, the great ice
plains, the quick night hurrying on, the silence--such silence as no man
can think!  I have seen trouble flying at me in a hundred ways, but this
was different--yes.  We come to the foot of the little hill.  Still the
bear not stir.  As I went up, feeling for my knives and my gun, the dogs
began to snarl with anger, and for one little step I shivered, for the
thing seem not natural.  I was about two hundred feet away from the bear
when it turned slow round at me, lifting its foot from the body.  The
dogs all at once come huddling about me, and I dropped on my knee to take
aim, but the bear stole away from the man and come moving down past us at
an angle, making for the plain.  I could see his deep shining eyes, and
the steam roll from his nose in long puffs.  Very slow and heavy, like as
if he see no one and care for no one, he shambled down, and in a minute
was gone behind a boulder.  I ran on to the man--"

The governor was leaning forward, looking intently, and said now: "It's
like a wild dream--but the north--the north is near to the Strangest of
All!"

"I knelt down and lifted him up in my arms, all a great bundle of furs
and wool, and I got my hand at last to his wrist.  He was alive.  It was
Little Babiche!  Part of his face was frozen stiff.  I rubbed out the
frost with snow, and then I forced some brandy into his mouth, good old
H.B.C.  brandy,--and began to call to him: 'Babiche!  Babiche!  Come
back, Babiche!  The wolf's at the pot, Babiche!'  That's the way to call
a hunter to his share of meat.  I was afraid, for the sleep of cold is
the sleep of death, and it is hard to call the soul back to this world.
But I called, and kept calling, and got him on his feet, with my arm
round him.  I gave him more brandy; and at last I almost shrieked in his
ear.  Little by little I saw his face take on the look of waking life.
It was like the dawn creeping over white hills and spreading into day.
I said to myself: What a thing it will be if I can fetch him back!
For I never knew one to come back after the sleep had settled on them.
It is too comfortable--all pain gone, all trouble, the world forgot, just
a kind weight in all the body, as you go sinking down, down to the
valley, where the long hands of old comrades beckon to you, and their
soft, high voices cry, 'Hello!  hello-o!'"  Pierre nodded his head
towards the distance, and a musing smile divided his lips on his white
teeth.  Presently he folded a cigarette, and went on:

"I had saved something to the last, as the great test, as the one thing
to open his eyes wide, if they could be opened at all.  Alors, there was
no time to lose, for the wolf of Night was driving the red glow-worm down
behind the world, and I knew that when darkness came altogether--darkness
and night--there would be no help for him.  Mon Dieu!  how one sleeps in
the night of the north, in the beautiful wide silence!  .  .  .  So,
m'sieu', just when I thought it was the time, I called, 'Corinne!
Corinne!'  Then once again I said, 'P'tite Corinne!  P'tite Corinne!
Come home!  come home!  P'tite Corinne!'  I could see the fight in the
jail of sleep.  But at last he killed his jailer; the doors in his brain
flew open, and his mind came out through his wide eyes.  But he was blind
a little and dazed, though it was getting dark quick.  I struck his back
hard, and spoke loud from a song that we used to sing on the Chaudiere--
Babiche and all of us, years ago.  Mon Dieu!  how I remember those days--

             "'Which is the way that the sun goes?
               The way that my little one come.
               Which is the good path over the hills?
               The path that leads to my little one's home--
               To my little one's home, m'sieu', m'sieu'!'

"That did it.  'Corinne, ma p'tite Corinne!' he said; but he did not look
at me--only stretch out his hands.  I caught them, and shook them, and
shook him, and made him take a step forward; then I slap him on the back
again, and said loud: 'Come, come, Babiche, don't you know me?  See
Babiche, the snow's no sleeping-bunk, and a polar bear's no good friend.'
'Corinne!' he went on, soft and slow.  'Ma p'tite Corinne!' He smiled to
himself; and I said, 'Where've you been, Babiche?  Lucky I found you, or
you'd have been sleeping till the Great Mass.'  Then he looked at me
straight in the eyes, and something wild shot out of his.  His hand
stretched over and caught me by the shoulder, perhaps to steady himself,
perhaps because he wanted to feel something human.  Then he looked round
slow-all round the plain, as if to find something.  At that moment a
little of the sun crept back, and looked up over the wall of ice, making
a glow of yellow and red for a moment; and never, north or south, have I
seen such beauty--so delicate, so awful.  It was like a world that its
Maker had built in a fit of joy, and then got tired of, and broke in
pieces, and blew out all its fires, and left--ah yes--like that!
And out in the distance I--I only saw a bear travelling eastwards."

The governor said slowly:

     And I took My staff Beauty, and cut it asunder, that I might break
     My covenant which I had made with all the people.

"Yes--like that."  Pierre continued: "Babiche turned to me with a little
laugh, which was a sob too.  'Where is it, Pierre?' said he.  I knew he
meant the bear.  'Gone to look for another man,' I said, with a gay look,
for I saw that he was troubled.  'Come,' said he at once.  As we went, he
saw my dogs.  He stopped short and shook a little, and tears came into
his eyes.  'What is it, Babiche?' said I.  He looked back towards the
south.  'My dogs--Brandy-wine, Come-along, 'Poleon, and the rest--died
one night all of an hour.  One by one they crawl over to where I lay in
my fur bag, and die there, huddling by me--and such cries--such cries!
There was poison or something in the frozen fish I'd given them.  I loved
them every one; and then there was the mails, the year's mails--how
should they be brought on?  That was a bad thought, for I had never
missed--never in ten years.  There was one bunch of letters which the
governor said to me was worth more than all the rest of the mails put
together, and I was to bring it to Fort St. Saviour, or not show my face
to him again.  I leave the dogs there in the snow, and come on with the
sled, carrying all the mails.  Ah, the blessed saints, how heavy the sled
got, and how lonely it was!  Nothing to speak to--no one, no thing, day
after day.  At last I go to cry to the dogs, "Come-along!  'Poleon!
Brandy-wine!"--like that!  I think I see them there, but they never bark
and they never snarl, and they never spring to the snap of the whip....
I was alone.  Oh, my head!  my head!  If there was only something alive
to look at, besides the wide white plain, and the bare hills of ice, and
the sun-dogs in the sky!  Now I was wild, next hour I was like a child,
then I gnash my teeth like a wolf at the sun, and at last I got on my
knees.  The tears froze my eyelids shut, but I kept saying, "Ah, my great
Friend, my Jesu, just something, something with the breath of life!
Leave me not all alone!" and I got sleepier all the time.

"'I was sinking, sinking, so quiet and easy, when all at once I felt
something beside me; I could hear it breathing, but I could not open my
eyes at first, for, as I say, the lashes were froze.  Something touch me,
smell me, and a nose was push against my chest.  I put out my hand ver'
soft and touch it.  I had no fear, I was so glad I could have hug it, but
I did not--I drew back my hand quiet and rub my eyes.  In a little I can
see.  There stand the thing--a polar bear--not ten feet away, its red
eyes shining.  On my knees I spoke to it, talk to it, as I would to a
man.  It was like a great wild dog, fierce, yet kind, and I fed it with
the fish which had been for Brandy-wine and the rest--but not to kill it!
and it did not die.  That night I lie down in my bag--no, I was not
afraid!  The bear lie beside me, between me and the sled.  Ah, it was
warm!  Day after day we travel together, and camp together at night--ah,
sweet Sainte Anne, how good it was, myself and the wild beast such
friends, alone in the north!  But to-day--a little while ago--something
went wrong with me, and I got sick in the head, a swimming like a tide
wash in and out.  I fall down-asleep.  When I wake I find you here beside
me--that is all.  The bear must have drag me here.'"

Pierre stuck a splinter into the fire to light another cigarette, and
paused as if expecting the governor to speak, but no word coming, he
continued: "I had my arm around him while we talked and come slowly down
the hill.  Soon he stopped and said, 'This is the place.' It was a cave
of ice, and we went in.  Nothing was there to see except the sled.
Babiche stopped short.  It come to him now that his good comrade was
gone.  He turned, and looked out, and called, but there was only the
empty night, the ice, and the stars.  Then he come back, sat down on the
sled, and the tears fall.  .  .  .  I lit my spirit-lamp, boiled coffee,
got pemmican from my bag, and I tried to make him eat.  No.  He would
only drink the coffee.  At last he said to me, 'What day is this,
Pierre?'  'It is the day of the Great Birth, Babiche,' I said.  He made
the sign of the cross, and was quiet, so quiet!  but he smile to himself,
and kept saying in a whisper: 'Ma p'tite Corinne!  Ma p'tite Corinne!'
The next day we come on safe, and in a week I was back at Fort St.
Saviour with Babiche and all the mails, and that most wonderful letter
of the governor's."

"The letter was to tell a factor that his sick child in the hospital at
Quebec was well," the governor responded quietly.  "Who was 'Ma p'tite
Corinne,' Pierre?"

"His wife--in heaven; and his child--on the Chaudiere, m'sieu'.  The
child came and the mother went on the same day of the Great Birth.  He
has a soft heart--that Babiche!"

"And the white bear--so strange a thing!"

"M'sieu', who can tell?  The world is young up here.  When it was all
young, man and beast were good comrades, maybe."

"Ah, maybe.  What shall be done with Little Babiche, Pierre?"

"He will never be the same again on the old trail, m'sieu'!"

There was silence for a long time, but at last the governor said, musing,
almost tenderly, for he never had a child: "Ma p'tite Corinne!--Little
Babiche shall live near his child, Pierre.  I will see to that."

Pierre said no word, but got up, took off his hat to the governor, and
sat down again.






AT POINT O' BUGLES

"John York, John York, where art thou gone, John York?"

"What's that, Pierre?" said Sir Duke Lawless, starting to his feet and
peering round.

"Hush!" was Pierre's reply.  "Wait for the rest.  .  .  .  There!"

"King of my heart, king of my heart, I am out on the trail of thy
bugles."

Sir Duke was about to speak, but Pierre lifted a hand in warning, and
then through the still night there came the long cry of a bugle, rising,
falling, strangely clear, echoing and echoing again, and dying away.  A
moment, and the call was repeated, with the same effect, and again a
third time; then all was still, save for the flight of birds roused from
the desire of night, and the long breath of some animal in the woods
sinking back to sleep.

Their camp was pitched on the south shore of Hudson's Bay, many leagues
to the west of Rupert House, not far from the Moose River.  Looking north
was the wide expanse of the bay, dotted with sterile islands here and
there; to the east were the barren steppes of Labrador, and all round
them the calm, incisive air of a late September, when winter begins to
shake out his frosty curtains and hang them on the cornice of the north,
despite the high protests of the sun.  The two adventurers had come
together after years of separation, and Sir Duke had urged Pierre to fare
away with him to Hudson's Bay, which he had never seen, although he had
shares in the great Company, left him by his uncle the admiral.

They were camped in a hollow, to the right a clump of hardy trees, with
no great deal of foliage, but some stoutness; to the left a long finger
of land running out into the water like a wedge, the most eastern point
of the western shore of Hudson's Bay.  It was high and bold, and,
somehow, had a fine dignity and beauty.  From it a path led away north to
a great log-fort called King's House.

Lawless saw Pierre half rise and turn his head, listening.  Presently he,
too, heard the sound-the soft crash of crisp grass under the feet.  He
raised himself to a sitting posture and waited.

Presently a tall figure came out of the dusk into the light of their
fire, and a long arm waved a greeting at them.  Both Lawless and Pierre
rose to their feet.  The stranger was dressed in buckskin, he carried a
rifle, and around his shoulder was a strong yellow cord, from which hung
a bugle.

"How!" he said, with a nod, and drew near the fire, stretching out his
hands to the blaze.

"How!" said Lawless and Pierre.

After a moment Lawless drew from his blanket a flask of brandy, and
without a word handed it over the fire.  The fingers of the two men met
in the flicker of flames, a sort of bond by fire, and the stranger raised
the flask.

"Chin-chin," he said, and drank, breathing a long sigh of satisfaction
afterwards as he handed it back; but it was Pierre that took it, and
again fingers touched in the bond of fire.  Pierre passed the flask to
Lawless, who lifted it.

"Chin-chin," he said, drank, and gave the flask to Pierre again, who did
as did the others, and said "Chin-chin" also.

By that salutation of the east, given in the far north, Lawless knew that
he had met one who had lighted fires where men are many and close to the
mile as holes in a sieve.

They all sat down, and tobacco went round, the stranger offering his,
while the two others, with true hospitality, accepted.

"We heard you over there--it was you?" said Lawless, nodding towards
Point o' Bugles, and glancing at the bugle the other carried.

"Yes, it was I," was the reply.  "Someone always does it twice a year: on
the 25th September and the 25th March.  I've done it now without a break
for ten years, until it has got to be a sort of religion with me, and the
whole thing's as real as if King George and John York were talking.  As I
tramp to the point or swing away back, in summer barefooted, in winter on
my snowshoes, to myself I seem to be John York on the trail of the king's
bugles.  I've thought so much about the whole thing, I've read so many of
John York's letters--and how many times one of the King's!--that now I
scarcely know which is the bare story, and which the bit's I've dreamed
as I've tramped over the plains or sat in the quiet at King's House,
spelling out little by little the man's life, from the cues I found in
his journal, in the Company's papers, and in that one letter of the
King's."

Pierre's eyes were now more keen than those of Lawless: for years he had
known vaguely of this legend of Point o' Bugles.

"You know it all," he said--"begin at the beginning: how and when you
first heard, how you got the real story, and never mind which is taken
from the papers and which from your own mind--if it all fits in it is all
true, for the lie never fits in right with the square truth.  If you have
the footprints and the handprints you can tell the whole man; if you have
the horns of a deer you know it as if you had killed it, skinned it, and
potted it."

The stranger stretched himself before the fire, nodding at his hosts as
he did so, and then began:

"Well, a word about myself first," he said, "so you'll know just where
you are.  I was full up of life in London town and India, and that's a
fact.  I'd plenty of friends and little money, and my will wasn't equal
to the task of keeping out of the hands of the Jews.  I didn't know what
to do, but I had to go somewhere, that was clear.  Where?  An accident
decided it.  I came across an old journal of my great-grandfather, John
York,--my name's Dick Adderley,--and just as if a chain had been put
round my leg and I'd been jerked over by the tipping of the world, I had
to come to Hudson's Bay.  John York's journal was a thing to sit up
nights to read.  It came back to England after he'd had his fill of
Hudson's Bay and the earth beneath, and had gone, as he himself said on
the last page of the journal, to follow the king's buglers in 'the land
that is far off.'  God and the devil were strong in old John York.
I didn't lose much time after I'd read the journal.  I went to Hudson's
Bay house in London, got a place in the Company, by the help of the
governor himself, and came out.  I've learned the rest of the history of
old John York--the part that never got to England; for here at King's
House there's a holy tradition that the real John York belongs to it and
to it alone."

Adderley laughed a little.  "King's House guards John York's memory, and
it's as fresh and real here now as though he'd died yesterday; though
it's forgotten in England, and by most who bear his name, and the present
Prince of Wales maybe never heard of the roan who was a close friend of
the Prince Regent, the First Gentleman of Europe."

"That sounds sweet gossip," said Lawless, with a smile; "we're waiting."

Adderley continued: "John York was an honest man, of wholesome sport,
jovial, and never shirking with the wine, commendable in his appetite,
of rollicking soul and proud temper, and a gay dog altogether--gay, but
to be trusted, too, for he had a royal heart.  In the coltish days of the
Prince Regent he was a boon comrade, but never did he stoop to flattery,
nor would he hedge when truth should be spoken, as ofttimes it was needed
with the royal blade, for at times he would forget that a prince was yet
a man, topped with the accident of a crown.  Never prince had truer
friend, and so in his best hours he thought, himself, and if he ever was
just and showed his better part, it was to the bold country gentleman who
never minced praise or blame, but said his say and devil take the end of
it.  In truth, the Prince was wilful, and once he did a thing which might
have given a twist to the fate of England.  Hot for the love of women,
and with some dash of real romance in him too, else even as a prince he
might have had shallower love and service,--he called John York one day
and said:

"'To-night at seven, Squire John, you'll stand with me while I put the
seal on the Gates of Eden;' and, when the other did not guess his import,
added: 'Sir Mark Selby is your neighbour--his daughter's for my arms to-
night.  You know her, handsome Sally Selby--she's for your prince, for
good or ill.'

"John York did not understand at first, for he could not think the Prince
had anything in mind but some hot escapade of love.  When Mistress
Selby's name was mentioned his heart stood still, for she had been his
choice, the dear apple of his eye, since she had bloomed towards
womanhood.  He had set all his hopes upon her, tarrying till she should
have seen some little life before he asked her for his wife.  He had her
father's Godspeed to his wooing, for he was a man whom all men knew
honest and generous as the sun, and only choleric with the mean thing.
She, also, had given him good cause to think that he should one day take
her to his home, a loved and honoured wife.  His impulse, when her name
passed the Prince's lips, was to draw his sword, for he would have called
an emperor to account; but presently he saw the real meaning of the
speech: that the Prince would marry her that night."

Here the story-teller paused again, and Pierre said softly, inquiringly:

"You began to speak in your own way, and you've come to another way--like
going from an almanac to the Mass."

The other smiled.  "That's so.  I've heard it told by old Shearton at
King's House, who speaks as if he'd stepped out of Shakespeare, and
somehow I seem to hear him talking, and I tell it as he told it last year
to the governor of the Company.  Besides, I've listened these seven years
to his style."

"It's a strange beginning--unwritten history of England," said Sir Duke
musingly.

"You shall hear stranger things yet," answered Adderley.  "John York
could hardly believe it at first, for the thought of such a thing never
had place in his mind.  Besides, the Prince knew how he had looked upon
the lady, and he could not have thought his comrade would come in between
him and his happiness.  Perhaps it was the difficulty, adding spice to
the affair, that sent the Prince to the appeal of private marriage to win
the lady, and John York always held that he loved her truly then, the
first and only real affection of his life.  The lady--who can tell what
won her over from the honest gentleman to the faithless prince?  That
soul of vanity which wraps about the real soul of every woman fell down
at last before the highest office in the land, and the gifted bearer of
the office.  But the noble spirit in her brought him to offer marriage,
when he might otherwise have offered, say, a barony.  There is a record
of that and more in John York's Memoirs which I will tell you, for they
have settled in my mind like an old song, and I learned them long ago.
I give you John York's words written by his own hands:

"'I did not think when I beheld thee last, dearest flower of the world's
garden, that I should see thee bloom in that wide field, rank with the
sorrows of royal favour.  How did my foolish eyes fill with tears when I
watched thee, all rose and gold in thy cheeks and hair, the light falling
on thee through the chapel window, putting thy pure palm into my
prince's, swearing thy life away, selling the very blossoms of earth's
orchards for the brier beauty of a hidden vineyard!  I saw the flying
glories of thy cheeks, the halcyon weather of thy smile, the delicate
lifting of thy bosom, the dear gaiety of thy step, and, at that moment,
I mourned for thy sake that thou wert not the dullest wench in the land,
for then thou hadst been spared thy miseries, thou hadst been saved the
torture-boot of a lost love and a disacknowledged wifedom.  Yet I could
not hide from me that thou wert happy at that great moment, when he swore
to love and cherish thee, till death you parted.

"Ah, George, my prince, my king, how wickedly thou didst break thy vows
with both of us who loved thee well, through good and ill report--for
they spake evil of thee, George; ay, the meanest of thy subjects spake
lightly of their king--when with that sweet soul secretly hid away in
the farthest corner of thy kingdom, thou soughtst divorce from thy later
Caroline, whom thou, unfaithful, didst charge with infidelity.  When, at
last, thou didst turn again to the partner of thy youth, thy true wife in
the eyes of God, it was too late.  Thou didst promise me that thou
wouldst never take another wife, never put our dear heart away, though
she could not--after our miserable laws--bear thee princes.  Thou didst
break thy promise, yet she forgave thee, and I forgave thee, for well we
knew that thou wouldst pay a heavy reckoning, and that in the hour when
thou shouldst cry to us we might not come to thee; that in the days when
age and sorrow and vast troubles should oppress thee, thou wouldst long
for the true hearts who loved thee for thyself and not for aught thou
wudst give, or aught that thou wert, save as a man.

"'When thou didst proclaim thy purpose to take Caroline to wife, I
pleaded with thee, I was wroth with thee.  Thy one plea was succession.
Succession!  Succession!  What were a hundred dynasties beside that
precious life, eaten by shame and sorrow?  It were easy for others, not
thy children, to come after thee, to rule as well as thee, as must even
now be the case, for thou hast no lawful child save that one in the
loneliest corner of thy English vineyard--alack! alack!  I warned thee
George, I pleaded, and thou didst drive me out with words ill-suited to
thy friend who loved thee.

"'I did not fear thee, I would have forced thee to thy knees or made thee
fight me, had not some good spirit cried to my heart that thou wert her
husband, and that we both had loved thee.  I dared not listen to the
brutal thing thou hintedst at--that now I might fatten where I had
hungered.  Thou hadst to answer for the baseness of that thought to the
King of kings, when thou wentest forth alone, no subject, courtier,
friend, wife, or child to do thee service, journeying--not en prince,
George; no, not en prince!  but as a naked soul to God.

"'Thou saidst to me: "Get thee gone, John York, where I shall no more see
thee."  And when I returned, "Wouldst thou have me leave thy country,
sir?" thou answeredst: "Blow thy quarrelsome soul to the stars where my
farthest bugle cries."  Then I said: "I go, sir, till thou callest me
again--and after; but not till thou hast honoured the child of thy honest
wedlock; till thou hast secured thy wife to the end of her life against
all manner of trouble save the shame of thy disloyalty."  There was no
more for me to do, for my deep love itself forbade my staying longer
within reach of the noble deserted soul.  And so I saw the chastened
glory of her face no more, nor evermore beheld her perfectness.'"

Adderley paused once more, and, after refilling his pipe in silence,
continued:

"That was the heart of the thing.  His soul sickened of the rank world,
as he called it, and he came out to the Hudson's Bay country, leaving his
estates in care of his nephew, but taking many stores and great chests of
clothes and a shipload of furniture, instruments of music, more than a
thousand books, some good pictures, and great stores of wine.  Here he
came and stayed, an officer of the Company, building King's House, and
filling it with all the fine things he had brought with him, making in
this far north a little palace in the wilderness.  Here he lived, his
great heart growing greater in this wide sinewy world, King's House a
place of pilgrimage for all the Company's men in the north; a noble
gentleman in a sweet exile, loving what he could no more, what he did no
more, see.

"Twice a year he went to that point yonder and blew this bugle, no man
knew why or wherefore, year in, year out, till 1817.  Then there came a
letter to him with great seals, which began: 'John York, John York,
where art thou gone, John York?'  There followed a score of sorrowful
sentences, full of petulance, too, for it was as John York foretold, his
prince longed for the 'true souls' whom he had cast off.  But he called
too late, for the neglected wife died from the shock of her prince's
longing message to her, and when, by the same mail, John York knew that,
he would not go back to England to the King.  But twice every year he
went to yonder point and spoke out the King's words to him: 'John York,
John York, where art thou gone, John York?' and gave the words of his own
letter in reply: 'King of my heart, king of my heart, I am out on the
trail of thy bugles.'  To this he added three calls of the bugle, as you
have heard."

Adderley handed the bugle to Lawless, who looked at it with deep interest
and passed it on to Pierre.  "When he died," Adderley continued, "he left
the house, the fittings, and the stores to the officers of the Company
who should be stationed there, with a sum of money yearly, provided that
twice in twelve months the bugle should be blown as you have heard it,
and those words called out."

"Why did he do that?" asked Lawless, nodding towards the point.

"Why do they swing the censers at the Mass?" interjected Pierre.  "Man
has signs for memories, and one man seeing another's sign will remember
his own."

"You stay because you like it--at King's House?" asked Lawless of
Adderley.

The other stretched himself lazily to the fire and, "I am at home," he
said.  "I have no cares.  I had all there was of that other world; I've
not had enough of this.  You'll come with me to King's House to-morrow?"
he added.

To their quick assent he rejoined: "You'll never want to leave.  You'll
stay on."

To this Lawless replied, shaking his head: "I have a wife and child in
England."

But Pierre did not reply.  He lifted the bugle, mutely asking a question
of Adderley, who as mutely replied, and then, with it in his hand, left
the other two beside the fire.

A few minutes later they heard, with three calls of the bugle from the
point afterwards, Pierre's voice: "John York, John York, where art thou
gone, John York?"

Then came the reply:

"King of my heart, king of my heart, I am out on the trail of thy
bugles."






THE SPOIL OF THE PUMA

Just at the point where the Peace River first hugs the vast outpost hills
of the Rockies, before it hurries timorously on, through an unexplored
region, to Fort St. John, there stood a hut.  It faced the west, and was
built half-way up Clear Mountain.  In winter it had snows above it and
below it; in summer it had snow above it and a very fair stretch of trees
and grass, while the river flowed on the same, winter and summer.  It was
a lonely country.  Travelling north, you would have come to the Turnagain
River; west, to the Frying Pan Mountains; south, to a goodly land.  But
from the hut you had no outlook towards the south; your eye came plump
against a hard lofty hill, like a wall between heaven and earth.  It is
strange, too, that, when you are in the far north, you do not look
towards the south until the north turns an iron hand upon you and refuses
the hospitality of food and fire; your eyes are drawn towards the Pole by
that charm--deadly and beautiful--for which men have given up three
points of the compass, with their pleasures and ease, to seek a grave
solitude, broken only by the beat of a musk-ox's hoofs, the long breath
of the caribou, or the wild cry of the puma.

Sir Duke Lawless had felt this charm, and had sworn that one day he would
again leave his home in Devon and his house in Pont Street, and, finding
Pierre, Shon M'Gann, and others of his old comrades, together they would
travel into those austere yet pleasant wilds.  He kept his word, found
Shon M'Gann, and on an autumn day of a year not so long ago lounged in
this hut on Clear Mountain.  They had had three months of travel and
sport, and were filled, but not sated, with the joy of the hunter.  They
were very comfortable, for their host, Pourcette, the French Canadian,
had fire and meat in plenty, and, if silent, was attentive to their
comfort--a little, black-bearded, grey-headed man, with heavy brows over
small vigilant eyes, deft with his fingers, and an excellent sportsman,
as could be told from the skins heaped in all the corners of the large
hut.

The skins were not those of mere foxes or martens or deer, but of
mountain lions and grizzlies.  There were besides many soft, tiger-like
skins, which Sir Duke did not recognise.  He kept looking at them, and at
last went over and examined one.

"What's this, Monsieur Pourcette?" he said, feeling it as it lay on the
top of the pile.

The little man pushed the log on the fireplace with his moccasined foot
before he replied: "Of a puma, m'sieu'."

Sir Duke smoothed it with his hand.  "I didn't know there were pumas
here."

"Faith, Sir Duke--"

Sir Duke Lawless turned on Shon quickly.  "You're forgetting again, Shon.
There's no 'Sir Dukes' between us.  What you were to me years ago on the
wally-by-track and the buffalo-trail, you are now, and I'm the same also:
M'Gann and Lawless, and no other."

"Well, then, Lawless, it's true enough as he says it, for I've seen more
than wan skin brought in, though I niver clapped eye on the beast alive.
There's few men go huntin' them av their own free will, not more than
they do grizzlies; but, bedad, this French gintleman has either the luck
o' the world, or the gift o' that man ye tould me of, that slew the wild
boars in anciency.  Look at that, now: there's thirty or forty puma-
skins, and I'd take my oath there isn't another man in the country that's
shot half that in his lifetime."

Pourcette's eyes were on the skins, not on the men, and he did not appear
to listen.  He sat leaning forward, with a strange look on his face.
Presently he got up, came over, and stroked the skins softly.  A queer
chuckling noise came from his throat.

"It was good sport?" asked Lawless, feeling a new interest in him.

"The grandest sport--but it is not so easy," answered the old man.  "The
grizzly comes on you bold and strong; you know your danger right away,
and have it out.  So.  But the puma comes--God, how the puma comes!"  He
broke off, his eyes burning bright under his bushy brows and his body
arranging itself into an attitude of expectation and alertness.

"You have travelled far.  The sun goes down.  You build a fire and cook
your meat, and then good tea and the tabac.  It is ver' fine.  You hear
the loon crying on the water, or the last whistle of the heron up the
pass.  The lights in the sky come out and shine through a thin mist--
there is nothing like that mist, it is so fine and soft.  Allons.  You
are sleepy.  You bless the good God.  You stretch pine branches, wrap in
your blanket, and lie down to sleep.  If it is winter and you have a
friend, you lie close.  It is all quiet.  As you sleep, something comes.
It slides along the ground on its belly, like a snake.  It is a pity if
you have not ears that feel--the whole body as ears.  For there is a
swift lunge, a snarl--ah, you should hear it! the thing has you by the
throat, and there is an end!"

The old man had acted all the scenes: a sidelong glance, a little
gesture, a movement of the body, a quick, harsh breath--without emphatic
excitement, yet with a reality and force that fascinated his two
listeners.  When he paused, Shon let go a long breath, and Lawless looked
with keen inquiry at their entertainer.  This almost unnatural, yet
quiet, intensity had behind it something besides the mere spirit of the
sportsman.  Such exhibitions of feeling generally have an unusual
personal interest to give them point and meaning.

"Yes, that's wonderful, Pourcette," he said; "but that's when the puma
has things its own way.  How is it when these come off?"  He stroked the
soft furs under his hand.

The man laughed, yet without a sound--the inward, stealthy laugh, as from
a knowledge wicked in its very suggestiveness.  His eyes ran from Lawless
to Shon, and back again.  He put his hand on his mouth, as though for
silence, stole noiselessly over to the wall, took down his gun quietly,
and turned round.  Then he spoke softly:

"To kill the puma, you must watch--always watch.  You will see his yellow
eyes sometimes in a tree: you must be ready before he springs.  You will
hear his breath at night as you pretend to sleep, and you wait till you
see his foot steal out of the shadow--then you have him.  From a mountain
wall you watch in the morning, and, when you see him, you follow, and
follow, and do not rest till you have found him.  You must never miss
fire, for he has great strength and a mad tooth.  But when you have got
him, he is worth all.  You cannot eat the grizzly--he is too thick and
coarse; but the puma--well, you had him from the pot to-night.  Was he
not good?"

Lawless's brows ran up in surprise.  Shon spoke quickly:

"Heaven above!" he burst out.  "Was it puma we had betune the teeth?
And what's puma but an almighty cat?  Sure, though, it wint as tinder
as pullets, for all that--but I wish you hadn't tould us."

The old man stood leaning on his gun, his chin on his hands, as they
covered the muzzle, his eyes fixed on something in his memory, the vision
of incidents he had lived or seen.

Lawless went over to the fire and relit his pipe.  Shon followed him.
They both watched Pourcette.  "D'ye think he's mad?" asked Shon in a
whisper.  Lawless shook his head: "Mad?  No.  But there's more in this
puma-hunting than appears.  How long has he lived here, did he say?"

"Four years; and, durin' that time, yours and mine are the only white
faces he has seen, except one."

"Except one.  Well, whose was the one?  That might be interesting.  Maybe
there's a story in that."

"Faith, Lawless, there's a story worth the hearin', I'm thinkin', to
every white man in this country.  For the three years I was in the
mounted police, I could count a story for all the days o' the calendar
--and not all o' them would make you happy to hear."

Pourcette turned round to them.  He seemed to be listening to Shon's
words.  Going to the wall, he hung up the rifle; then he came to the fire
and stood holding out his hands to the blaze.  He did not look in the
least mad, but like a man who was dominated by some one thought, more
or less weird.  Short and slight, and a little bent, but more from habit
--the habit of listening and watching--than from age, his face had a
stern kind of earnestness and loneliness, and nothing at all of insanity.

Presently Lawless went to a corner and from his kit drew forth a flask.
The old man saw, and immediately brought out a wooden cup.  There were
two on the shelf, and Shon pointed to the other.  Pourcette took no
notice.  Shon went over to get it, but Pourcette laid a hand on his arm:
"Not that."

"For ornamint!" said Shon, laughing, and then his eyes were arrested by
a suit of buckskin and a cap of beaver, hanging on the wall.  He turned
them over, and then suddenly drew back his hand, for he saw in the back
of the jacket a knife-slit.  There was blood also on the buckskin.

"Holy Mary!" he said, and retreated.  Lawless had not noticed; he was
pouring out the liquor.  He had handed the cup first to Pourcette, who
raised it towards a gun hung above the fireplace, and said something
under his breath.

"A dramatic little fellow," thought Lawless; "the spirit of his
forefathers--a good deal of heart, a little of the poseur."

Then hearing Shon's exclamation, he turned.

"It's an ugly sight," said Shon, pointing to the jacket.  They both
looked at Pourcette, expecting him to speak.  The old man reached to the
coat, and, turning it so that the cut and the blood were hid, ran his
hand down it caressingly.  "Ah, poor Jo!  poor Jo Gordineer!" he said;
then he came over once more to the fire, sat down, and held out his hands
to the fire, shaking his head.

"For God's sake, Lawless, give me a drink!" said Shon.  Their eyes met,
and there was the same look in the faces of both.  When Shon had drunk,
he said: "So, that's what's come to our old friend, Jo: dead--killed or
murdered--"

"Don't speak so loud," said Lawless.  "Let us get the story from him
first."

Years before, when Shon M'Gann and Pierre and Lawless had sojourned in
the Pipi Valley, Jo Gordineer had been with them, as stupid and true a
man as ever drew in his buckle in a hungry land, or let it out to munch
corn and oil.  When Lawless returned to find Shon and others of his
companions, he had asked for Gordineer.  But not Shon nor anyone else
could tell aught of him; he had wandered north to outlying goldfields,
and then had disappeared completely.  But there, as it would seem, his
coat and cap hung, and his rifle, dust-covered, kept guard over the fire.

Shon went over to the coat, did as Pourcette had done, and said: "Is it
gone y'are, Jo, wid your slow tongue and your big heart?  Wan by wan the
lads are off."

Pourcette, without any warning, began speaking, but in a very quiet tone
at first, as if unconscious of the others:

"Poor Jo Gordineer!  Yes, he is gone.  He was my friend--so tall, and
such a hunter!  We were at the Ding Dong goldfields together.  When luck
went bad, I said to him: 'Come, we will go where there is plenty of wild
meat, and a summer more beautiful than in the south.'  I did not want to
part from him, for once, when some miner stole my claim, and I fought, he
stood by me.  But in some things he was a little child.  That was from
his big heart.  Well, he would go, he said; and we came away."

He suddenly became silent; and shook his head, and spoke under his
breath.

"Yes," said Lawless quietly, "you went away.  What then?"

He looked up quickly, as though just aware of their presence, and
continued:

"Well, the other followed, as I said, and--"

"No, Pourcette," interposed Lawless, "you didn't say.  Who was the other
that followed?"

The old man looked at him gravely, and a little severely, and continued:

"As I said, Gawdor followed--he and an Indian.  Gawdor thought we were
going for gold, because I had said I knew a place in the north where
there was gold in a river--I know the place, but that is no matter.  We
did not go for gold just then.  Gawdor hated Jo Gordineer.  There was a
half-breed girl.  She was fine to look at.  She would have gone to
Gordineer if he had beckoned, any time; but he waited--he was very slow,
except with his finger on a gun; he waited too long.

"Gawdor was mad for the girl.  He knew why her feet came slow to the door
when he knocked.  He would have quarrelled with Jo, if he had dared;
Gordineer was too quick a shot.  He would have killed him from behind;
but it was known in the camp that he was no friend of Gordineer, and it
was not safe."

Again Pourcette was silent.  Lawless put on his knee a new pipe, filled
with tobacco.  The little man took it, lighted it, and smoked on in
silence for a time undisturbed.  Shon broke the silence, by a whisper to
Lawless:

"Jo was a quiet man, as patient as a priest; but when his blood came up,
there was trouble in the land.  Do you remimber whin--"

Lawless interrupted him and motioned towards Pourcette.  The old man,
after a few puffs, held the pipe on his knee, disregarding it.  Lawless
silently offered him some more whisky, but he shook his head.  Presently,
he again took up the thread:

"Bien, we travelled slow up through the smoky river country, and beyond
into a wild land.  We had bully sport as we went.  Sometimes I heard
shots far away behind us; but Gordineer said it was my guess, for we saw
nobody.  But I had a feeling.  Never mind.  At last we come to the Peace
River.  It was in the early autumn like this, when the land is full of
comfort.  What is there like it?  Nothing.  The mountains have colours
like a girl's eyes; the smell of the trees is sweet like a child's
breath, and the grass feels for the foot and lifts it with a little soft
spring.  We said we could live here for ever.  We built this house high
up, as you see, first, because it is good to live high--it puts life in
the blood; and, as Gordineer said, it is noble to look far over the
world, every time your house-door is open, or the parchment is down from
the window.  We killed wapiti and caribou without number, and cached them
for our food.  We caught fish in the river, and made tea out of the brown
berry--it is very good.  We had flour, a little, which we had brought
with us, and I went to Fort St. John and got more.  Since then, down in
the valley, I have wheat every summer; for the Chinook winds blow across
the mountains and soften the bitter cold.

"Well, for that journey to Fort St. John.  When I got back I found Gawdor
with Gordineer.  He said he had come north to hunt.  His Indian had left,
and he had lost his way.  Gordineer believed him.  He never lied himself.
I said nothing, but watched.  After a time he asked where the gold-field
was.  I told him, and he started away--it was about fifty miles to the
north.  He went, and on his way back he come here.  He say he could not
find the place, and was going south.  I know he lied.  At this time I saw
that Gordineer was changed.  He was slow in the head, and so, when he
began thinking up here, it made him lonely.  It is always in a fine land
like this, where game is plenty, and the heart dances for joy in your
throat, and you sit by the fire--that you think of some woman who would
be glad to draw in and tie the strings of the tent-curtain, or fasten the
latch of the door upon you two alone."

Perhaps some memory stirred within the old man, other than that of his
dead comrade, for he sighed, muffled his mouth in his beard, and then
smiled in a distant way at the fire.  The pure truth of what he said came
home to Shon M'Gann and Sir Duke Lawless; for both, in days gone by, had
sat at camp-fires in silent plains, and thought upon women from whom they
believed they were parted for ever, yet who were only kept from them for
a time, to give them happier days.  They were thinking of these two women
now.  They scarcely knew how long they sat there thinking.  Time passes
swiftly when thoughts are cheerful, or are only tinged with the soft
melancholy of a brief separation.  Memory is man's greatest friend and
worst enemy.

At last the old man continued: "I saw the thing grew on him.  He was not
sulky, but he stare much in the fire at night.  In the daytime he was
differen'.  A hunter thinks only of his sport.  Gawdor watched him.
Gordineer's hand was steady; his nerve was all right.  I have seen him
stand still till a grizzly come within twice the length of his gun.  Then
he would twist his mouth, and fire into the mortal spot.  Once we were
out in the Wide Wing pass.  We had never had such a day.  Gordineer make
grand shots, better than my own; and men have said I can shoot like the
devil--ha! ha!"  He chuckled to himself noiselessly, and said in a
whisper "Twenty grizzlies, and fifty pumas!"

Then he rubbed his hands softly on his knees, and spoke aloud again:
"Ici, I was proud of him.  We were standing together on a ledge of rock.
Gawdor was not far away.  Gawdor was a poor hunter, and I knew he was
wild at Gordineer's great luck....  A splendid bull-wapiti come out on a
rock across the gully.  It was a long shot.  I did not think Gordineer
could make it; I was not sure that I could--the wind was blowing and the
range was long.  But he draw up his gun like lightning, and fire all at
once.  The bull dropped clean over the cliff, and tumbled dead upon the
rocks below.  It was fine.  But, then, Gordineer slung his gun under his
arm, and say: 'That is enough.  I am going to the hut.'

"He went away.  That night he did not talk.  The next morning, when I
say, 'We will be off again to the pass,' he shake his head.  He would
not go.  He would shoot no more, he said.  I understood: it was the girl.
He was wide awake at last.  Gawdor understanded also.  He know that
Gordineer would go to the south--to her.

"I was sorry; but it was no use.  Gawdor went with me to the pass.  When
we come back, Jo was gone.  On a bit of birch-bark he had put where he
was going, and the way he would take.  He said he would come back to me
--ah, the brave comrade!  Gawdor say nothing, but his looks were black.
I had a feeling.  I sat up all night, smoking.  I was not afraid, but I
know Gawdor had found the valley of gold, and he might put a knife in me,
because to know of such a thing alone is fine.  Just at dawn, he got up
and go out.  He did not come back.

"I waited, and at last went to the pass.  In the afternoon, just as I was
rounding the corner of a cliff, there was a shot--then another.  The
first went by my head; the second caught me along the ribs, but not to
great hurt.  Still, I fell from the shock, and lost some blood.  It was
Gawdor; he thought he had killed me.

"When I come to myself I bound up the little furrow in the flesh, and
start away.  I know that Gawdor would follow Gordineer.  I follow him,
knowing the way he must take.  I have never forget the next night.
I had to travel hard, and I track him by his fires and other things.
When sunset come, I do not stop.  I was in a valley, and I push on.
There was a little moon.  At last I saw a light ahead-a camp-fire, I
know.  I was weak, and could have dropped; but a dread was on me.

"I come to the fire.  I saw a man lying near it.  Just as I saw him, he
was trying to rise.  But, as he did so, something sprang out of the
shadow upon him, at his throat.  I saw him raise his hand, and strike it
with a knife.  The thing let go, and then I fire--but only scratched, I
think.  It was a puma.  It sprang away again, into the darkness.  I ran
to the man, and raised him.  It was my friend.  He looked up at me and
shake his head.  He was torn at the throat....  But there was something
else--a wound in the back.  He was stooping over the fire when he was
stabbed, and he fell.  He saw that it was Gawdor.  He had been left for
dead, as I was.  Nom de Dieu!  just when I come and could have save him,
the puma come also.  It is the best men who have such luck.  I have seen
it often.  I used to wonder they did not curse God."

He crossed himself and mumbled something.  Lawless rose, and walked up
and down the room once or twice, pulling at his beard and frowning.  His
eyes were wet.  Shon kept blowing into his closed hand and blinking at
the fire.  Pourcette got up and took down the gun from the chimney.  He
brushed off the dust with his coat-sleeve, and fondled it, shaking his
head at it a little.  As he began to speak again, Lawless sat down.

"Now I know why they do not curse.  Something curses for them.  Jo give
me a word for her, and say 'Well, it is all right; but I wish I had
killed the puma.'  There was nothing more.  .  .  .  I followed Gawdor
for days.  I know that he would go and get someone, and go back to the
gold.  I thought at last I had missed him; but no.  I had made up my mind
what to do when I found him.  One night, just as the moon was showing
over the hills, I come upon him.  I was quiet as a puma.  I have a stout
cord in my pocket, and another about my body.  Just as he was stooping
over the fire, as Gordineer did, I sprang upon him, clasping him about
the neck, and bringing him to the ground.  He could not get me off.  I am
small, but I have a grip.  Then, too, I had one hand at his throat.  It
was no use to struggle.  The cord and a knife were in my teeth.  It was a
great trick, but his breath was well gone, and I fastened his hands.  It
was no use to struggle.  I tied his feet and legs.  Then I carried him to
a tree and bound him tight.  I unfastened his hands again and tied them
round the tree.  Then I built a great fire not far away.  He begged at
first and cried.  But I was hard.  He got wild, and at last when I leave
him he cursed!  It was like nothing I ever heard.  He was a devil.  .  .
I come back after I have carry the message to the poor girl--it is a sad
thing to see the first great grief of the young!  Gawdor was not there.
The pumas and others had been with him.

"There was more to do.  I wanted to kill that puma which set its teeth in
the throat of my friend.  I hunted the woods where it had happened,
beating everywhere, thinking that, perhaps, it was dead.  There was not
much blood on the leaves, so I guessed that it had not died.  I hunted
from that spot, and killed many--many.  I saw that they began to move
north.  At last I got back here.  From here I have hunted and killed them
slow; but never that one with a wound in the shoulder from Jo's knife.
Still, I can wait.  There is nothing like patience for the hunter and
for the man who would have blood for blood."

He paused, and Lawless spoke.  "And when you have killed that puma,
Pourcette--if you ever do-what then?"

Pourcette fondled the gun, then rose and hung it up again before he
replied.

"Then I will go to Fort St. John, to the girl--she is there with her
father--and sell all the skins to the factor, and give her the money."
He waved his hand round the room.  "There are many skins here, but I have
more cached not far away.  Once a year I go to the Fort for flour and
bullets.  A dog-team and a bois-brule bring them, and then I am alone as
before.  When all that is done I will come back."

"And then, Pourcette?" said Shon.

"Then I will hang that one skin over the chimney where his gun is--and go
out and kill more pumas.  What else can one do?  When I stop killing I
shall be killed.  A million pumas and their skins are not worth the life
of my friend."

Lawless looked round the room, at the wooden cup, the gun, the
bloodstained clothes on the wall, and the skins.  He got up, came over,
and touched Pourcette on the shoulder.

"Little man," he said, "give it up, and come with me.  Come to Fort St.
John, sell the skins, give the money to the girl, and then let us travel
to the Barren Grounds together, and from there to the south country
again.  You will go mad up here.  You have killed enough--Gawdor and many
pumas.  If Jo could speak, he would say, Give it up.  I knew Jo.  He was
my good friend before he was yours--mine and M'Gann's here--and we
searched for him to travel with us.  He would have done so, I think, for
we had sport and trouble of one kind and another together.  And he would
have asked you to come also.  Well, do so, little man.  We haven't told
you our names.  I am Sir Duke Lawless, and this is Shon M'Gann."

Pourcette nodded: "I do not know how it come to me, but I was sure from
the first you are his friends.  He speak often of you and of two others
--where are they?"

Lawless replied, and, at the name of Pretty Pierre, Shon hid his forehead
in his hand, in a troubled way.  "And you will come with us," said
Lawless, "away from this loneliness?"

"It is not lonely," was the reply.  "To hear the thrum of the pigeon, the
whistle of the hawk, the chatter of the black squirrel, and the long cry
of the eagle, is not lonely.  Then, there is the river and the pines--all
music; and for what the eye sees, God has been good; and to kill pumas is
my joy.  .  .  .  So, I cannot go.  These hills are mine.  Few strangers
come, and none stop but me.  Still, to-morrow or any day, I will show you
the way to the valley where the gold is.  Perhaps riches is there,
perhaps not, you shall find."

Lawless saw that it was no use to press the matter.  The old man had but
one idea, and nothing could ever change it.  Solitude fixes our hearts
immovably on things--call it madness, what you will.  In busy life we
have no real or lasting dreams, no ideals.  We have to go to the primeval
hills and the wild plains for them.  When we leave the hills and the
plains, we lose them again.  Shon was, however, for the valley of gold.
He was a poor man, and it would be a joyful thing for him if one day he
could empty ample gold into his wife's lap.  Lawless was not greedy, but
he and good gold were not at variance.

"See," said Shon, "the valley's the thing.  We can hunt as we go, and if
there's gold for the scrapin', why, there y'are--fill up and come again.
If not, divil the harm done.  So here's thumbs up to go, say I.  But I
wish, Lawless, I wish that I'd niver known how Jo wint off, an' I wish
we were all t'gither agin, as down in the Pipi Valley."

"There's nothing stands in this world, Shon, but the faith of comrades
and the truth of good women.  The rest hangs by a hair.  I'll go to the
valley with you.  It's many a day since I washed my luck in a gold-pan."

"I will take you there," said Pourcette, suddenly rising, and, with
shy abrupt motions grasping their hands and immediately letting them
go again.  "I will take you to-morrow."  Then he spread skins upon the
floor, put wood upon the fire, and the three were soon asleep.

The next morning, just as the sun came laboriously over the white peak of
a mountain, and looked down into the great gulch beneath the hut, the
three started.  For many hours they crept along the side of the mountain,
then came slowly down upon pine-crested hills, and over to where a small
plain stretched out.  It was Pourcette's little farm.  Its position was
such that it caught the sun always, and was protected from the north and
east winds.  Tall shafts of Indian corn with their yellow tassels were
still standing, and the stubble of the field where the sickle had been
showed in the distance like a carpet of gold.  It seemed strange to
Lawless that this old man beside him should be thus peaceful in his
habits, the most primitive and arcadian of farmers, and yet one whose
trade was blood--whose one purpose in life was destruction and vengeance.

They pushed on.  Towards the end of the day they came upon a little herd
of caribou, and had excellent sport.  Lawless noticed that Pourcette
seemed scarcely to take any aim at all, so swift and decisive was his
handling of the gun.  They skinned the deer and cached them, and took up
the journey again.  For four days they travelled and hunted alternately.
Pourcette had shot two mountain lions, but they had seen no pumas.

On the morning of the fifth day they came upon the valley where the gold
was.  There was no doubt about it.  A beautiful little stream ran through
it, and its bed was sprinkled with gold--a goodly sight to a poor man
like Shon, interesting enough to Lawless.  For days, while Lawless and
Pourcette hunted, Shon laboured like a galley-slave, making the little
specks into piles, and now and again crowning a pile with a nugget.  The
fever of the hunter had passed from him, and another fever was on him.
The others urged him to come away.  The winter would soon be hard on
them; he must go, and he and Lawless would return in the spring.

Prevailing on him at last, they started back to Clear Mountain.  The
first day Shon was abstracted.  He carried the gold he had gathered in a
bag wound about his body.  It was heavy, and he could not travel fast.
One morning, Pourcette, who had been off in the hills, came to say that
he had sighted a little herd of wapiti.  Shon had fallen and sprained his
arm the evening before (gold is heavy to carry), and he did not go with
the others.  He stayed and dreamed of his good fortune, and of his home.
In the late afternoon he lay down in the sun beside the camp-fire and
fell asleep from much thinking.  Lawless and Pourcette had little
success.  The herd had gone before they arrived.  They beat the hills,
and turned back to camp at last, without fret, like good sportsmen.  At a
point they separated, to come down upon the camp at different angles, in
the hope of still getting a shot.  The camp lay exposed upon a platform
of the mountain.

Lawless came out upon a ledge of rock opposite the camp, a gulch lying
between.  He looked across.  He was in the shadow, the other wall of the
gulch was in the sun.  The air was incomparably clear and fresh, with an
autumnal freshness.  Everything stood out distinct and sharply outlined,
nothing flat or blurred.  He saw the camp, and the fire, with the smoke
quivering up in a diffusing blue column, Shon lying beside it.  He leaned
upon his rifle musingly.  The shadows of the pines were blue and cold,
but the tops of them were burnished with the cordial sun, and a glacier-
field, somehow, took on a rose and violet light, reflected, maybe, from
the soft-complexioned sky.  He drew in a long breath of delight, and
widened his line of vision.

Suddenly, something he saw made him lurch backward.  At an angle in
almost equal distance from him and Shon, upon a small peninsula of rock,
a strange thing was happening.  Old Pourcette was kneeling, engaged with
his moccasin.  Behind him was the sun, against which he was abruptly
defined, looking larger than usual.  Clear space and air soft with colour
were about him.  Across this space, on a little sloping plateau near him,
there crept an animal.  It seemed to Lawless that he could see the lithe
stealthiness of its muscles and the ripple of its skin.  But that was
imagination, because he was too far away.  He cried out, and swung his
gun shoulderwards in desperation.  But, at the moment, Pourcette turned
sharply round, saw his danger, caught his gun, and fired as the puma
sprang.  There had been no chance for aim, and the beast was only
wounded.  It dropped upon the man.  He let the gun fall; it rolled and
fell over the cliff.  Then came a scene, wicked in its peril to
Pourcette, for whom no aid could come, though two men stood watching the
great fight--Shon M'Gann, awake now, and Lawless--with their guns silent
in their hands.  They dare not fire, for fear of injuring the man, and
they could not reach him in time to be of help.

There against the weird solitary sky the man and the puma fought.  When
the animal dropped on him, Pourcette caught it by the throat with both
hands, and held back its fangs; but its claws were furrowing the flesh of
his breast and legs.  His long arms were of immense strength, and though
the pain of his torn flesh was great he struggled grandly with the beast,
and bore it away, from his body.  As he did so he slightly changed the
position of one hand.  It came upon a welt-a scar.  When he felt that,
new courage and strength seemed given him.  He gave a low growl like an
animal, and then, letting go one hand, caught at the knife in his belt.
As he did so the puma sprang away from him, and crouched upon the rock,
making ready for another leap.  Lawless and Shon could see its tail
curving and beating.  But now, to their astonishment, the man was the
aggressor.  He was filled with a fury which knows nothing of fear.  The
welt his fingers had felt burned them.

He came slowly upon the puma.  Lawless could see the hard glitter of his
knife.  The puma's teeth sawed together, its claws picked at the rocks,
its body curved for a spring.  The man sprang first, and ran the knife
in; but not into a mortal corner.  Once more they locked.  The man's
fingers were again at the puma's throat, and they swayed together, the
claws of the beast making surface havoc.  But now as they stood up, to
the eyes of the fearful watchers inextricably mixed, the man lunged again
with his knife, and this time straight into the heart of the murderer.
The puma loosened, quivered, fell back dead.  The man rose to his feet
with a cry, and his hands stretched above his head, as it were in a kind
of ecstasy.  Shon forgot his gold and ran; Lawless hurried also.

When the two men got to the spot they found Pourcette binding up his
wounds.  He came to his feet, heedless of his hurts, and grasped their
hands.  "Come, come, my friends, and see," he cried.

He pulled forward the loose skin on the puma's breast and showed them the
scar of a knife-wound above the one his own knife had made.

"I've got the other murderer," he said; "Gordineer's knife went in here.
Sacre, but it is good!"

Pourcette's flesh needed little medicine; he did not feel his pain and
stiffness.  When they reached Clear Mountain, bringing with them the skin
which was to hang above the fireplace, Pourcette prepared to go to Fort
St. John, as he had said he would, to sell all the skins and give the
proceeds to the girl.

"When that's done," said Lawless, "you will have no reason for staying
here.  If you will come with us after, we will go to the Fort with you.
We three will then come back in the spring to the valley of gold for
sport and riches."

He spoke lightly, yet seriously too.  The old man shook his head.
"I have thought," he said.  "I cannot go to the south.  I am a hunter
now, nothing more.  I have been long alone; I do not wish for change.
I shall remain at Clear Mountain when these skins have gone to Fort St.
John, and if you come to me in the spring or at any time, my door will
open to you, and I will share all with you.  Gordineer was a good man.
You are good men.  I'll remember you, but I can't go with you--no.

"Some day you would leave me to go to the women who wait for you, and then
I should be alone again.  I will not change--vraiment!"

On the morning they left, he took Jo Gordineer's cup from the shelf, and
from a hidden place brought out a flask half filled with liquor.  He
poured out a little in the cup gravely, and handed it to Lawless, but
Lawless gave it back to him.

"You must drink from it," he said, "not me."

He held out the cup of his own flask.  When each of the three had a
share, the old man raised his long arm solemnly, and said in a tone so
gentle that the others hardly recognised his voice: "To a lost comrade!"
They drank in silence.

"A little gentleman!" said Lawless, under his breath.  When they were
ready to start, Lawless said to him at the last: "What will you do here,
comrade, as the days go on?"

"There are pumas in the mountains," he replied.  They parted from him
upon the ledge where the great fight had occurred, and travelled into the
east.  Turning many times, they saw him still standing there.  At a point
where they must lose sight of him, they looked for the last time.  He was
alone with his solitary hills, leaning on his rifle.  They fired two
shots into the air.  They saw him raise his rifle, and two faint reports
came in reply.  He became again immovable: as much a part of those hills
as the shining glacier; never to leave them.

In silence the two rounded the cliff, and saw him no more.





THE TRAIL OF THE SUN DOGS

Swell, you see," said Jacques Parfaite, as he gave Whiskey Wine, the
leading dog, a cut with the whip and twisted his patois to the uses of
narrative, "he has been alone there at the old Fort for a long time.  I
remember when I first see him.  It was in the summer.  The world smell
sweet if you looked this way or that.  If you drew in your breath quick
from the top of a hill you felt a great man.  Ridley, the chief trader,
and myself have come to the Fort on our way to the Mackenzie River.  In
the yard of the Fort the grass have grown tall, and sprung in the cracks
under the doors and windows; the Fort have not been use for a long time.
Once there was plenty of buffalo near, and the caribou sometimes; but
they were all gone--only a few.  The Indians never went that way, only
when the seasons were the best.  The Company have close the Post; it did
not pay.  Still, it was pleasant after a long tramp to come to even an
empty fort.  We know dam' well there is food buried in the yard or under
the floor, and it would be droll to open the place for a day--Lost Man's
Tavern, we called it.  Well--"

"Well, what?" said Sir Duke Lawless, who had travelled up to the Barren
Grounds for the sake of adventure and game; and, with his old friend,
Shon M'Gann, had trusted himself to the excellent care of Jacques
Parfaite, the half-breed.

Jacques cocked his head on one side and shook it wisely and mysteriously.
"Tres bien, we trailed through the long grass, pried open the shutters
and door, and went in.  It is cool in the north of an evening, as you
know.  We build a fire, and soon there is very fine times.  Ridley pried
up the floor, and we found good things.  Holy!  but it was a feast.  We
had a little rum also.  As we talk and a great laugh swim round, there
come a noise behind us like shuffling feet.  We got to our legs quick.
Mon Dieu, a strange sight!  A man stand looking at us with something in
his face that make my fingers cold all at once--a look--well you would
think it was carved in stone--it never change.  Once I was at Fort Garry;
the Church of St. Mary is there.  They have a picture in it of the great
scoundrel Judas as he went to hang himself.  Judas was a fool--what was
thirty dollars!--you give me hunder' to take you to the Barren Grounds.
Pah!"

The half-breed chuckled, shook his head sagely, swore half-way through
his vocabulary at Whiskey Wine, gratefully received a pipe of tobacco
from Shon M'Gann, and continued: "He come in on us slow and still, and
push out long thin hands, the fingers bent like claws, towards the pot.
He was starving.  Yes, it was so; but I nearly laugh.  It was spring--
a man is a fool to starve in the spring.  But he was differen'.  There
was a cause.  The factor give him soup from the pot and a little rum.  He
was mad for meat, but that would have kill him--yes.  He did not look at
you like a man.

"When you are starving, you are an animal.  But there was something more
with this.--He made the flesh creep, he was so thin, and strange, and
sulky--eh, is that a word when the face looks dark and never smiles?  So.
He would not talk.  When we ask him where he come from, he points to the
north; when we ask him where he is going, he shake his head as he not
know.  A man is mad not to know where he travel to up here; something
comes quick to him unless, and it is not good to die too soon.  The
trader said, 'Come with us.'  He shake his head, No.  'P'r'aps you want
to stay here,' said Ridley loud, showing his teeth all in a minute.  He
nod.  Then the trader laugh thick in his throat and give him more soup.
After, he try to make the man talk; but he was stubborn like that dirty
Whiskey Wine--ah, sacre bleu!"

Whiskey Wine had his usual portion of whip and anathema before Jacques
again took up the thread.  "It was no use.  He would not talk.  When the
trader get angry once more, he turned to me, and the look in his face
make me sorry.  I swore--Ridley did not mind that, I was thick friends
with him.  I say, 'Keep still.  It is no good.  He has had bad times.
He has been lost, and seen mad things.  He will never be again like when
God make him.'  Very well, I spoke true.  He was like a sun dog."

"What's that ye say, Parfaite?" said Shon--"a sun dog?"

Sir Duke Lawless, puzzled, listened eagerly for the reply.

The half-breed in delight ran before them, cracking his whip and jingling
the bells at his knees.  "Ah, that's it!  It is a name we have for some.
You do not know?  It is easy.  In the high-up country"--pointing north"--
you see sometimes many suns.  But it is not many after all; it is only
one; and the rest are the same as your face in looking-glasses--one, two,
three, plenty.  You see?"

"Yes," said Sir Duke, "reflections of the real sun."  Parfaite tapped him
on the arm.  "So: you have the thing.  Well, this man is not himself--he
have left himself where he seen his bad times.  It makes your flesh creep
sometimes when you see the sun dogs in the sky--this man did the same.
You shall see him tonight."

Sir Duke looked at the little half-breed, and wondered that the product
of so crude a civilisation should be so little crude in his imagination.
"What happened?" he asked.

"Nothing happened.  But the man could not sleep.  He sit before the fire,
his eyes moving here and there, and sometimes he shiver.  Well, I watch
him.  In the morning we leave him there, and he has been there ever
since--the only man at the Fort.  The Indians do not go; they fear him;
but there is no harm in him.  He is old now.  In an hour we'll be there."

The sun was hanging, with one shoulder up like a great red peering dwarf,
on the far side of a long hillock of stunted pines, when the three
arrived at the Fort.  The yard was still as Parfaite had described it--
full of rank grass, through which one path trailed to the open door.  On
the stockade walls grass grew, as though where men will not live like men
Nature labours to smother.  The shutters of the window were not open;
light only entered through narrow openings in them, made for the needs of
possible attacks by Indians in the far past.  One would have sworn that
anyone dwelling there was more like the dead than the living.  Yet it
had, too, something of the peace of the lonely graveyard.  There was no
one in the Fort; but there were signs of life--skins piled here and
there, a few utensils, a bench, a hammock for food swung from the
rafters, a low fire burning in the chimney, and a rude spear stretched on
the wall.

"Sure, the place gives you shivers!" said Shon.  "Open go these windows.
Put wood on the fire, Parfaite; cook the meat that we've brought, and no
other, me boy; and whin we're filled wid a meal and the love o' God,
bring in your Lost Man, or Sun Dog, or whativer's he by name or nature."

While Parfaite and Shon busied themselves, Lawless wandered out with his
gun, and, drawn on by the clear joyous air of the evening, walked along a
path made by the same feet that had travelled the yard of the Fort.  He
followed it almost unconsciously at first, thinking of the strange
histories that the far north hoards in its fastnesses, wondering what
singular fate had driven the host of this secluded tavern--farthest from
the pleasant south country, nearest to the Pole--to stand, as it were,
a sentinel at the raw outposts of the world.  He looked down at the trail
where he was walking with a kind of awe, which even his cheerful common
sense could not dismiss.

He came to the top of a ridge on which were a handful of meagre trees.
Leaning on his gun, he looked straight away into the farthest distance.
On the left was a blurred edge of pines, with tops like ungainly tendrils
feeling for the sky.  On the right was a long bare stretch of hills
veiled in the thin smoke of the evening, and between, straight before
him, was a wide lane of unknown country, billowing away to where it froze
into the vast archipelago that closes with the summit of the world.  He
experienced now that weird charm which has drawn so many into Arctic
wilds and gathered the eyes of millions longingly.  Wife, child, London,
civilisation, were forgotten for the moment.  He was under a spell which,
once felt, lingers in your veins always.

At length his look drew away from the glimmering distance, and he
suddenly became conscious of human presence.  Here, almost at his feet,
was a man, also looking out along that slumbering waste.  He was dressed
in skins, his arms were folded across his breast, his chin bent low, and
he gazed up and out from deep eyes shadowed by strong brows.  Lawless saw
the shoulders of the watcher heave and shake once or twice, and then a
voice with a deep aching trouble in it spoke; but at first he could catch
no words.  Presently, however, he heard distinctly, for the man raised
his hands high above his head, and the words fell painfully: "Am I my
brother's keeper?"

Then a low harsh laugh came from him, and he was silent again.  Lawless
did not move.  At last the man turned round, and, seeing him standing
motionless, his gun in his hands, he gave a hoarse cry.  Then he stood
still.  "If you have come to kill, do not wait," he said; "I am ready."

At the sound of Lawless's reassuring voice he recovered, and began,
in stumbling words, to excuse himself.  His face was as Jacques Parfaite
had described it: trouble of some terrible kind was furrowed in it, and,
though his body was stalwart, he looked as if he had lived a century.
His eyes dwelt on Sir Duke Lawless for a moment, and then, coming nearer,
he said, "You are an Englishman?"

Lawless held out his hand in greeting, yet he was not sorry when the
other replied: "The hand of no man in greeting.  Are you alone?"

When he had been told, he turned towards the Fort, and silently they made
their way to it.  At the door he turned and said to Lawless, "My name--to
you--is Detmold."

The greeting between Jacques and his sombre host was notable for
its extreme brevity; with Shon McGann for its hesitation--Shon's
impressionable Irish nature was awed by the look of the man, though he
had seen some strange things in the north.  Darkness was on them by this
time, and the host lighted bowls of fat with wicks of deer's tendons, and
by the light of these and the fire they ate their supper.  Parfaite
beguiled the evening with tales of the north, always interesting to
Lawless; to which Shon added many a shrewd word of humour--for he had
recovered quickly from his first timidity in the presence of the
stranger.

As time went on Jacques saw that their host's eyes were frequently fixed
on Sir Duke in a half-eager, musing way, and he got Shon away to bed and
left the two together.

"You are a singular man.  Why do you live here?" said Lawless.  Then he
went straight to the heart of the thing.  "What trouble have you had, of
what crime are you guilty?"

The man rose to his feet, shaking, and walked to and fro in the room for
a time, more than once trying to speak, but failing.  He beckoned to
Lawless, and opened the door.  Lawless took his hat and followed him
along the trail they had travelled before supper until they came to the
ridge where they had met.  The man faced the north, the moon glistening
coldly on his grey hair.  He spoke with incredible weight and slowness:

"I tell you--for you are one who understands men, and you come from a
life that I once knew well.  I know of your people.  I was of good
family--"

"I know the name," said Sir Duke quietly, at the same time fumbling in
his memory for flying bits of gossip and history which he could not
instantly find.

"There were two brothers of us.  I was the younger.  A ship was going to
the Arctic Sea."  He pointed into the north.  "We were both young and
ambitious.  He was in the army, I the navy.  We went with the expedition.
At first it was all beautiful and grand, and it seemed noble to search
for those others who had gone into that land and never come back.  But
our ship got locked in the ice, and then came great trouble.  A year went
by and we did not get free; then another year began.  .  .  .  Four of us
set out for the south.  Two died.  My brother and I were left--"

Lawless exclaimed.  He now remembered how general sympathy went out to a
well-known county family when it was announced that two of its members
were lost in the Arctic regions.

Detmold continued: "I was the stronger.  He grew weaker and weaker.  It
was awful to live those days: the endless snow and cold, the long nights
when you could only hear the whirring of meteors, the bright sun which
did not warm you, nor even when many suns, the reflections of itself,
followed it--the mocking sun dogs, no more the sun than I am what my
mother brought into the world.  .  .  .  We walked like dumb men, for the
dreadful cold fills the heart with bitterness.  I think I grew to hate
him because he could not travel faster, that days were lost, and death
crept on so pitilessly.  Sometimes I had a mad wish to kill him.  May you
never know suffering that begets such things!  I laughed as I sat beside
him, and saw him sink to sleep and die.  .  .  .  I think I could have
saved him.  When he was gone I--what do men do sometimes when starvation
is on them, and they have a hunger of hell to live?  I did that shameless
thing--and he was my brother!  .  .  .  I lived, and was saved."

Lawless shrank away from the man, but words of horror got no farther than
his throat.  And he was glad afterwards that it was so; for when he
looked again at this woful relic of humanity before him he felt a strange
pity.

"God's hand is on me to punish," said the man.  "It will never be lifted.
Death were easy: I bear the infamy of living."

Lawless reached out and caught him gently by the shoulders.  "Poor
fellow!  poor Detmold!" he said.  For an instant the sorrowful face
lighted, the square chin trembled, and the hands thrust out towards
Lawless, but suddenly dropped.

"Go," he said humbly, "and leave me here.  We must not meet again.  .  .
I have had one moment of respite.  .  .  .  Go."

Without a word, Lawless turned and made his way to the Fort.  In the
morning the three comrades started on their journey again; but no one
sped them on their way or watched them as they went.






THE PILOT OF BELLE AMOUR

He lived in a hut on a jutting crag of the Cliff of the King.  You could
get to it by a hard climb up a precipitous pathway, or by a ladder of
ropes which swung from his cottage door down the cliff-side to the sands.
The bay that washed the sands was called Belle Amour.  The cliff was
huge, sombre; it had a terrible granite moroseness.  If you travelled
back from its edge until you stood within the very heart of Labrador, you
would add step upon step of barrenness and austerity.

Only at seasons did the bay share the gloom of the cliff.  When out of
its shadow it was, in summer, very bright and playful, sometimes
boisterous, often idle, coquetting with the sands.  There was a great
difference between the cliff and the bay: the cliff was only as it
appeared, but the bay was a shameless hypocrite.  For under one shoulder
it hid a range of reefs, and, at a spot where the shadows of the cliff
never reached it, and the sun played with a grim kind of joy, a long
needle of rock ran up at an angle under the water, waiting to pierce
irresistibly the adventurous ship that, in some mad moment, should creep
to its shores.

The man was more like the cliff than the bay: stern, powerful, brooding.
His only companions were the Indians, who in summer-time came and went,
getting stores of him, which he in turn got from a post of the Hudson's
Bay Company, seventy miles up the coast.  At one time the Company,
impressed by the number of skins brought to them by the pilot, and the
stores he bought of them, had thought of establishing a post at Belle
Amour; but they saw that his dealings with them were fair and that he had
small gain, and they decided to use him as an unofficial agent, and reap
what profit was to be had as things stood.  Kenyon, the Company's agent,
who had the Post, was keen to know why Gaspard the pilot lived at Belle
Amour.  No white man sojourned near him, and he saw no one save now and
then a priest who travelled silently among the Indians, or some
fisherman, hunter, or woodsman, who, for pleasure or from pure adventure,
ran into the bay and tasted the hospitality tucked away on a ledge of the
Cliff of the King.

To Kenyon, Gaspard was unresponsive, however adroit the catechism.
Father Corraine also, who sometimes stepped across the dark threshold of
Gaspard's hut, would have, for the man's soul's sake, dug out the heart
of his secret; but Gaspard, open with food, fire, blanket, and tireless
attendance, closed like the doors of a dungeon when the priest would have
read him.  At the name of good Ste. Anne he would make the sacred
gesture, and would take a blessing when the priest passed from his hut
to go again into the wilds; but when pressed to disclose his mind and
history, he would always say: "M'sieu', I have nothing to confess."
After a number of years the priest ceased to ask him, and he remained
with the secret of his life, inscrutable and silent.

Being vigilant, one would have seen, however, that he lived in some land
of memory or anticipation, beyond his life of daily toil and usual
dealing.  The hut seemed to have been built at a point where east and
west and south the great gulf could be seen and watched.  It seemed
almost ludicrous that a man should call himself a pilot on a coast and at
a bay where a pilot was scarce needed once a year.  But he was known as
Gaspard the pilot, and on those rare occasions when a vessel did anchor
in the bay, he performed his duties with such a certainty as to leave
unguessed how many deathtraps crouched near that shore.  At such times,
however, Gaspard seemed to look twenty years younger.  A light would come
into his face, a stalwart kind of pride sit on him, though beneath there
lurked a strange, sardonic look in his deep eyes--such a grim furtiveness
as though he should say: "If I but twist my finger we are all for the
fishes."  But he kept his secret and waited.  He never seemed to tire of
looking down the gulf, as though expecting some ship.  If one appeared
and passed on, he merely nodded his head, hung up his glass, returned to
his work, or, sitting by the door, talked to himself in low, strange
tones.  If one came near, making as if it would enter the bay, a hungry
joy possessed him.  If a storm was on, the joy was the greater.  No pilot
ever ventured to a ship on such rough seas as Gaspard ventured for small
profit or glory.

Behind it all lay his secret.  There came one day a man who discovered
it.

It was Pierre, the half-breed adventurer.  There was no point in all the
wild northland which Pierre had not touched.  He loved it as he loved the
game of life.  He never said so of it, but he never said so of the game
of life, and he played it with a deep subterranean joy.  He had had his
way with the musk-ox in the Arctic Circle; with the white bear at the
foot of Alaskan Hills; with the seal in Baffin's Bay; with the puma on
the slope of the Pacific; and now at last he had come upon the trail of
Labrador.  Its sternness, its moodiness pleased him.  He smiled at it the
comprehending smile of the man who has fingered the nerves and the heart
of men and things.  As a traveller, wandering through a prison, looks
upon its grim cells and dungeons with the eye of unembarrassed freedom,
finding no direful significance in the clank of its iron, so Pierre
travelled down with a handful of Indians through the hard fastnesses of
that country, and, at last, alone, came upon the bay of Belle Amour.

There was in him some antique touch of refinement and temperament which,
in all his evil days and deeds and moments of shy nobility, could find
its way into the souls of men with whom the world had had an awkward
hour.  He was a man of little speech, but he had that rare persuasive
penetration which unlocked the doors of trouble, despair, and tragedy.
Men who would never have confessed to a priest confessed to him.  In his
every fibre was the granite of the Indian nature, which looked upon
punishment with stoic satisfaction.

In the heart of Labrador he had heard of Gaspard, and had travelled to
that point in the compass where he could find him.  One day when the sun
was fighting hard to make a pathway of light in front of Gaspard's hut,
Pierre rounded a corner of the cliff and fronted Gaspard as he sat there,
his eyes idling gloomily with the sea.  They said little to each other--
in new lands hospitality has not need of speech.  When Gaspard and Pierre
looked each other in the eyes they knew that one word between them was as
a hundred with other men.  The heart knows its confessor, and the
confessor knows the shadowed eye that broods upon some ghostly secret;
and when these are face to face there comes a merciless concision of
understanding.

"From where away?" said Gaspard, as he handed some tobacco to Pierre.

"From Hudson's Bay, down the Red Wolf Plains, along the hills, across the
coast country, here."

"Why?"  Gaspard eyed Pierre's small kit with curiosity; then flung up a
piercing, furtive look.  Pierre shrugged his shoulders.

"Adventure, adventure," he answered.  "The land"--he pointed north, west,
and east--"is all mine.  I am the citizen of every village and every camp
of the great north."

The old man turned his head towards a spot up the shore of Belle Amour,
before he turned to Pierre again, with a strange look, and said: "Where
do you go?"

Pierre followed his gaze to that point in the shore, felt the
undercurrent of vague meaning in his voice, guessed what was his cue, and
said: "Somewhere, sometime; but now only Belle Amour.  I have had a long
travel.  I have found an open door.  I will stay--if you please--hein?
If you please?"

Gaspard brooded.  "It is lonely," he replied.  "This day it is all
bright; the sun shines and the little gay waves crinkle to the shore.
But, mon Dieu!  sometimes it is all black and ugly with storm.  The waves
come grinding, booming in along the gridiron rocks"--he smiled a grim
smile--"break through the teeth of the reefs, and split with a roar of
hell upon the cliff.  And all the time, and all the time,"--his voice got
low with a kind of devilish joy,--"there is a finger--Jesu! you should
see that finger of the devil stretch up from the bowels of the earth,
waiting, waiting for something to come out of the storm.  And then--and
then you can hear a wild laugh come out of the land, come up from the
sea, come down from the sky--all waiting, waiting for something!  No, no,
you would not stay here."

Pierre looked again to that point in the shore towards which Gaspard's
eyes had been cast.  The sun was shining hard just then, and the stern,
sharp rocks, tumbling awkwardly back into the waste behind, had an
insolent harshness.  Day perched garishly there.  Yet now and then the
staring light was broken by sudden and deep shadows--great fissures in
the rocks and lanes between.  These gave Pierre a suggestion, though why,
he could not say.  He knew that when men live lives of patient, gloomy
vigilance, they generally have something to watch and guard.  Why should
Gaspard remain here year after year?  His occupation was nominally a
pilot in a bay rarely touched by vessels, and then only for shelter.
A pilot need not take his daily life with such brooding seriousness.
In body he was like flexible metal, all cord and muscle.  He gave the
impression of bigness, though he was small in stature.  Yet, as Pierre
studied him, he saw something that made him guess the man had had about
him one day a woman, perhaps a child; no man could carry that look
unless.  If a woman has looked at you from day to day, something of her,
some reflection of her face, passes to yours and stays there; and if a
child has held your hand long, or hung about your knees, it gives you a
kind of gentle wariness as you step about your home.

Pierre knew that a man will cherish with a deep, eternal purpose a memory
of a woman or a child, when, no matter how compelling his cue to remember
where a man is concerned, he will yield it up in the end to time.
Certain speculations arranged themselves definitely in Pierre's mind:
there was a woman, maybe a child once; there was some sorrowful mystery
about them; there was a point in the shore that had held the old man's
eyes strangely; there was the bay with that fantastic "finger of the
devil" stretching up from the bowels of the world.  Behind the symbol lay
the Thing what was it?

Long time he looked out upon the gulf, then his eyes drew into the bay
and stayed there, seeing mechanically, as a hundred fancies went through
his mind.  There were reefs of which the old man had spoken.  He could
guess from the colour and movement of the water where they were.  The
finger of the devil--was it not real?  A finger of rock, waiting as the
old man said--for what?

Gaspard touched his shoulder.  He rose and went with him into the gloomy
cabin.  They ate and drank in silence.  When the meal was finished they
sat smoking till night fell.  Then the pilot lit a fire, and drew his
rough chair to the door.  Though it was only late summer, it was cold in
the shade of the cliff.  Long time they sat.  Now and again Pierre
intercepted the quick, elusive glance of his silent host.  Once the pilot
took the pipe from his mouth, and leaned his hands on his knees as if
about to speak.  But he did not.

Pierre saw that the time was ripe for speech.  So he said, as though he
knew something: "It is a long time since it happened?"

Gaspard, brooding, answered: "Yes, a long time--too long."  Then,
as if suddenly awakened to the strangeness of the question, he added,
in a startled way: " What do you know?  Tell me quick what you know."

"I know nothing except what comes to me here, pilot,"--Pierre touched his
forehead," but there is a thing--I am not sure what.  There was a woman--
perhaps a child; there is something on the shore; there is a hidden point
of rock in the bay; and you are waiting for a ship--for the ship, and it
does not come--isn't that so?"

Gaspard got to his feet, and peered into Pierre's immobile face.  Their
eyes met.

"Mon Dieu!" said the pilot, his hand catching the smoke away from
between them, "you are a droll man; you have a wonderful mind.  You are
cold like ice, and still there is in you a look of fire."

"Sit down," answered Pierre quietly, "and tell me all.  Perhaps I could
think it out little by little; but it might take too long--and what is
the good?"

Slowly Gaspard obeyed.  Both hands rested on his knees, and he stared
abstractedly into the fire.  Pierre thrust forward the tobacco-bag.  His
hand lifted, took the tobacco, and then his eyes came keenly to Pierre's.
He was about to speak. . . .  "Fill your pipe first," said the half-breed
coolly.  The old man did so abstractedly.  When the pipe was lighted,
Pierre said: "Now!"

"I have never told the story, never--not even to Pere Corraine.  But I
know, I have it here"--he put his hand to his forehead, as did Pierre--
"that you will be silent."  Pierre nodded.

"She was fine to see.  Her eyes were black as beads; and when she laugh
it was all music.  I was so happy!  We lived on the island of the Aux
Coudres, far up there at Quebec.  It was a wild place.  There were
smugglers and others there--maybe pirates.  But she was like a saint of
God among all.  I was lucky man.  I was pilot, and took ships out to sea,
and brought them in safe up the gulf.  It is not all easy, for there are
mad places.  Once or twice when a wild storm was on I could not land at
Cap Martin, and was carried out to sea and over to France.  .  .  .
Well, that was not so bad; there was plenty to eat and drink, nothing to
do.  But when I marry it was differen'.  I was afraid of being carried
away and leave my wife--the belle Mamette--alone long time.  You see,
I was young, and she was ver' beautiful."

He paused and caught his hand over his mouth as though to stop a sound:
the lines of his face deepened.  Presently he puffed his pipe so hard
that the smoke and the sparks hid him in a cloud through which he spoke.
"When the child was born--Holy Mother! have you ever felt the hand of
your own child in yours, and looked at the mother, as she lies there all
pale and shining between the quilts?"

He paused.  Pierre's eyes dropped to the floor.  Gaspard continued:
"Well, it is a great thing, and the babe was born quick one day when we
were all alone.  A thing like that gives you wonder.  Then I could not
bear to go away with the ships, and at last I said: 'One month, and then
the ice fills the gulf, and there will be no more ships for the winter.
That will be the last for me.  I will be pilot no more-no.'  She was ver'
happy, and a laugh ran over her little white teeth.  Mon Dieu, I stop
that laugh pretty quick--in fine way!"

He seemed for an instant to forget his great trouble, and his face went
to warm sunshine like a boy's; but it was as sun playing on a scarred
fortress.  Presently the light faded out of his face and left it like
iron smouldering from the bellows.

"Well," he said, "you see there was a ship to go almost the last of the
season, and I said to my wife, 'Mamette, it is the last time I shall be
pilot.  You must come with me and bring the child, and they will put us
off at Father Point, and then we will come back slow to the village on
the good Ste. Anne and live there ver' quiet.'  When I say that to her
she laugh back at me and say, 'Beau!  beau!' and she laugh in the child's
eyes, and speak--nom de Dieu! she speak so gentle and light--and say to
the child: 'Would you like go with your father a pretty journey down the
gulf?' And the little child laugh back at her, and shake its soft brown
hair over its head.  They were both so glad to go.  I went to the captain
of the ship.  I say to him, 'I will take my wife and my little child, and
when we come to Father Point we will go ashore.'  Bien, the captain laugh
big, and it was all right.  That was long time ago--long time."

He paused again, threw his head back with a despairing toss, his chin
dropped on his breast, his hands clasped between his knees, and his pipe,
laid beside him on the bench, was forgotten.

Pierre quietly put some wood upon the fire, opened his kit, drew out
from it a little flask of rum and laid it upon the bench beside the pipe.
A long time passed.  At last Gaspard roused himself with a long sigh,
turned and picked up the pipe, but, seeing the flask of rum, lifted it,
and took one long swallow before he began to fill and light his pipe.
There came into his voice something of iron hardness as he continued his
story.

"Alors, we went into the boat.  As we travelled down the gulf a great
storm came out of the north.  We thought it would pass, but it stayed on.
When we got to the last place where the pilot could land, the waves were
running like hills to the shore, and no boat could live between the ship
and the point.  For myself, it was nothing--I am a strong man and a great
swimmer.  But when a man has a wife and a child, it is differen'.  So the
ship went on out into the ocean with us.  Well, we laugh a little, and
think what a great brain I had when I say to my wife: 'Come and bring the
child for the last voyage of Gaspard the pilot.'  You see, there we were
on board the ship, everything ver' good, plenty to eat, much to drink, to
smoke, all the time.  The sailors, they were ver' funny, and to see them
take my child, my little Babette, and play with her as she roll on the
deck--merci, it was gran'!  So I say to my wife:

"'This will be bon voyage for all.'  But a woman, she has not the mind
like a man.  When a man laugh in the sun and think nothing of evil, a
woman laugh too, but there come a little quick sob to her lips.  You ask
her why, and she cannot tell.  She know that something will happen.  A
man has great idee, a woman great sight.  So my wife, she turn her face
away all sad from me then, and she was right--she was right!

"One day in the ocean we pass a ship--only two days out.  The ship signal
us.  I say to my wife: 'Ha, ha!  now we can go back, maybe, to the good
Ste. Anne.'  Well, the ships come close together, and the captain of the
other ship he have something importan' with ours.  He ask if there will
be chance of pilot into the gulf, because it is the first time that he
visit Quebec.  The captain swing round and call to me.  I go up.  I bring
my wife and my little Babette; and that was how we sail back to the great
gulf.

"When my wife step on board that ship I see her face get pale, and
something strange in her eyes.  I ask her why; she do not know, but she
hug Babette close to her breast with a kind of fear.  A long, low, black
ship, it could run through every sea.  Soon the captain come to me and
say: 'You know the coast, the north coast of the gulf, from Labrador to
Quebec?' I tell him yes.  'Well,' he say, 'do you know of a bay where few
ships enter safe?'  I think a moment and I tell him of Belle Amour.  Then
he say, ver' quick: 'That is the place; we will go to the bay of Belle
Amour.' He was ver' kind to my face; he give my wife and child good
berth, plenty to eat and drink, and once more I laugh; but my wife--there
was in her face something I not understan'.  It is not easy to understan'
a woman.  We got to the bay.  I had pride: I was young.  I was the best
pilot in the St. Lawrence, and I took in the ship between the reefs of
the bay, where they run like a gridiron, and I laugh when I swing the
ship all ver' quick to the right, after we pass the reefs, and make a
curve round--something.  The captain pull me up and ask why.  But I never
tell him that.  I not know why I never tell him.  But the good God put
the thought into my head, and I keep it to this hour, and it never leave
me, never--never!"

He slowly rubbed his hands up and down his knees, took another sip of
rum, and went on:

"I brought the ship close up to the shore, and we go to anchor.  All that
night I see the light of a fire on the shore.  So I slide down and swim
to the shore.  Under a little arch of rocks something was going on.
I could not tell, but I know from the sound that they are to bury
something.  Then, all at once, it come to me--this is a pirate ship!
I come closer and closer to the light, and then I see a dreadful thing.
There was the captain and the mate, and another.  They turn quick upon
two other men--two sailors--and kill them.  Then they take the bodies
and wound them round some casks in a great hole, and cover it all up.
I understan'.  It is the old legend that a dead body will keep gold all
to itself, so that no one shall find it.  Mon Dieu!"--his voice dropped
low and shook in his throat--"I give one little cry at the sight, and
then they see me.  There were three.  They were armed; they sprang upon
me and tied me.  Then they fling me beside the fire, and they cover up
the hole with the gold and the bodies.

"When that was done they take me back to the ship, then with pistols at
my head they make me pilot the ship out into the bay again.  As we went
they make a chart of the place.  We travel along the coast for one day;
and then a great storm of snow come, and the captain say to me: 'Steer
us into harbour.'  When we are at anchor, they take me and my wife, and
little child and put us ashore alone, with a storm and the bare rocks and
the dreadful night, and leave us there, that we shall never tell the
secret of the gold.  That night my wife and my child die in the snow."

Here his voice became strained and slow.  "After a long time I work my
way to an Injin camp.  For months I was a child in strength, all my flesh
gone.  When the spring come I went and dug a deeper grave for my wife,
and p'tite Babette, and leave them there, where they had died.  But I
come to the bay of Belle Amour, because I knew some day the man with the
devil's heart would come back for his gold, and then would arrive my
time--the hour of God!"

He paused.  "The hour of God," he repeated slowly.  "I have waited
twenty years, but he has not come; yet I know that he will come.  I feel
it here"--he touched his forehead; "I know it here"--he tapped his heart.
"Once where my heart was, there is only one thing, and it is hate, and I
know--I know--that he will come.  And when he comes--"  He raised his arm
high above his head, laughed wildly, paused, let the hand drop, and then
fell to staring into the fire.

Pierre again placed the flask of rum between his fingers.  But Gaspard
put it down, caught his arms together across his breast, and never turned
his face from the fire.  Midnight came, and still they sat there silent.
No man had a greater gift in waiting than Pierre.  Many a time his life
had been a swivel, upon which the comedies and tragedies of others had
turned.  He neither loved nor feared men: sometimes he pitied them.  He
pitied Gaspard.  He knew what it is to have the heartstrings stretched
out, one by one, by the hand of a Gorgon, while the feet are chained to
the rocking world.

Not till the darkest hour of the morning did the two leave their silent
watch and go to bed.  The sun had crept stealthily to the door of the but
before they rose again.  Pierre laid his hand upon Gaspard's shoulder as
they travelled out into the morning, and said: "My friend, I understand.
Your secret is safe with me; you shall take me to the place where the
gold is buried, but it shall wait there until the time is ripe.  What is
gold to me?  Nothing.  To find gold--that is the trick of any fool.  To
win it or to earn it is the only game.  Let the bodies rot about the
gold.  You and I will wait.  I have many friends in the northland, but
there is no face in any tent door looking for me.  You are alone: well,
I will stay with you.  Who can tell--perhaps it is near at hand--the hour
of God!"

The huge hard hand of Gaspard swallowed the small hand of Pierre, and, in
a voice scarcely above a whisper, he answered: "You shall be my comrade.
I have told you all, as I have never told it to my God.  I do not fear
you about the gold--it is all cursed.  You are not like other men; I will
trust you.  Some time you also have had the throat of a man in your
fingers, and watched the life spring out of his eyes, and leave them all
empty.  When men feel like that, what is gold--what is anything!  There
is food in the bay and on the hills.

"We will live together, you and I.  Come and I will show you the place of
hell."

Together they journeyed down the crag and along the beach to the place
where the gold, the grim god of this world, was fortressed and bastioned
by its victims.

The days went on; the weeks and months ambled by.  Still the two
lived together.  Little speech passed between them, save that speech
of comrades, who use more the sign than the tongue.  It seemed to Pierre
after a time that Gaspard's wrongs were almost his own.  Yet with this
difference: he must stand by and let the avenger be the executioner;
he must be the spectator merely.

Sometimes he went inland and brought back moose, caribou, and the skins
of other animals, thus assisting Gaspard in his dealings with the great
Company.  But again there were days when he did nothing but lie on the
skins at the hut's door, or saunter in the shadows and the sunlight.  Not
since he had come to Gaspard had a ship passed the bay or sought to
anchor in it.

But there came a day.  It was the early summer.  The snow had shrunk
from the ardent sun, and had swilled away to the gulf, leaving the tender
grass showing.  The moss on the rocks had changed from brown to green,
and the vagrant birds had fluttered back from the south.  The winter's
furs had been carried away in the early spring to the Company's post,
by a detachment of coureurs de bois.  There was little left to do.  This
morning they sat in the sun looking out upon the gulf.  Presently Gaspard
rose and went into the hut.  Pierre's eyes still lazily scanned the
water.  As he looked he saw a vessel rounding a point in the distance.
Suppose this was the ship of the pirate and murderer?  The fancy diverted
him.  His eyes drew away from the indistinct craft--first to the reefs,
and then to that spot where the colossal needle stretched up under the
water.  It was as Pierre speculated.  Brigond, the French pirate, who had
hidden his gold at such shameless cost, was, after twenty years in the
galleys at Toulon, come back to find his treasure.  He had doubted little
that he would find it.  The lonely spot, the superstition concerning dead
bodies, the supposed doom of Gaspard, all ran in his favour.  His little
craft came on, manned by as vile a mob as ever mutinied or built a
wrecker's fire.

When the ship got within a short distance of the bay, Pierre rose and
called.  Gaspard came to the door.  "There's work to do, pilot," he said.
Gaspard felt the thrill of his voice, and flashed a look out to the gulf.
He raised his hands with a gasp.  "I feel it," he said: "it is the hour
of God!"

He started to the rope ladder of the cliff, then wheeled suddenly and
came back to Pierre.  "You must not come," he said.  "Stay here and
watch; you shall see great things."  His voice had a round, deep tone.
He caught both Pierre's hands in his and added: "It is for my wife and
child; I have no fear.  Adieu, my friend!  When you see the good Pere
Corraine say to him--but no, it is no matter--there is One greater!"

Once again he caught Pierre hard by the shoulder, then ran to the cliff
and swung down the ladder.  All at once there shot through Pierre's body
an impulse, and his eyes lighted with excitement.  He sprang towards the
cliff.  "Gaspard, come back!" he called; then paused, and, with an
enigmatical smile, shrugged his shoulders, drew back, and waited.

The vessel was hove to outside the bay, as if hesitating.  Brigond was
considering whether it were better, with his scant chart, to attempt the
bay, or to take small boats and make for the shore.  He remembered the
reefs, but he did not know of the needle of rock.  Presently he saw
Gaspard's boat coming.  "Someone who knows the bay," he said; "I see a
hut on the cliff."

"Hello, who are you?" Brigond called down as Gaspard drew alongside.

"A Hudson's Bay Company's man," answered Gaspard.

"How many are there of you?"

"Myself alone."

"Can you pilot us in?"

"I know the way."

"Come up."

Gaspard remembered Brigond, and he veiled his eyes lest the hate he felt
should reveal him.  No one could have recognised him as the young pilot
of twenty years before.  Then his face was cheerful and bright, and in
his eye was the fire of youth.  Now a thick beard and furrowing lines hid
all the look of the past.  His voice, too, was desolate and distant.

Brigond clapped him on the shoulder.  "How long have you lived off
there?" he asked, as he jerked his finger towards the shore.

"A good many years."

"Did anything strange ever happen there?"  Gaspard felt his heart
contract again, as it did when Brigond's hand touched his shoulder.

"Nothing strange is known."

A vicious joy came into Brigond's face.  His fingers opened and shut.
"Safe, by the holy heaven!" he grunted.

"'By the holy heaven!'" repeated Gaspard, under his breath.

They walked forward.  Almost as they did so there came a big puff of wind
across the bay: one of those sudden currents that run in from the ocean
and the gulf stream.  Gaspard saw, and smiled.  In a moment the vessel's
nose was towards the bay, and she sailed in, dipping a shoulder to the
sudden foam.  On she came past reef and bar, a pretty tumbril to the
slaughter.  The spray feathered up to her sails, the sun caught her on
deck and beam; she was running dead for the needle of rock.

Brigond stood at Gaspard's side.  All at once Gaspard made the sacred
gesture and said, in a low tone, as if only to himself: "Pardon, mon
capitaine, mon Jesu!" Then he turned triumphantly, fiercely, upon
Brigond.  The pirate was startled.  "What's the matter?" he said.

Not Gaspard, but the needle rock replied.  There was a sudden shock; the
vessel stood still and shivered; lurched, swung shoulder downwards,
reeled and struggled.  Instantly she began to sink.

"The boats!  lower the boats!" cried Brigond.  "This cursed fool has run
us on a rock!"

The waves, running high, now swept over the deck.  Brigond started aft,
but Gaspard sprang before him.  "Stand back!" he called.  "Where you are
you die!"

Brigond, wild with terror and rage, ran at him.  Gaspard caught him as he
came.  With vast strength he lifted him and dashed him to the deck.  "Die
there, murderer!" he cried.

Brigond crouched upon the deck, looking at him with fearful eyes.  "Who-
are you?" he asked.

"I am Gaspard the pilot.  I have waited for you twenty years.  Up there,
in the snow, my wife and child died.  Here, in this bay, you die."

There was noise and racketing behind them, but they two heard nothing.
The one was alone with his terror, the other with his soul.  Once, twice,
thrice, the vessel heaved, then went suddenly still.

Gaspard understood.  One look at his victim, then he made the sacred
gesture again, and folded his arms.  Pierre, from the height of the
cliff, looking down, saw the vessel dip at the bow, and then the waters
divided and swallowed it up.

"Gaspard should have lived," he said.  "But--who can tell!  Perhaps
Mamette was waiting for him."




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Have you ever felt the hand of your own child in yours
Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy
Solitude fixes our hearts immovably on things
When a man laugh in the sun and think nothing of evil






A ROMANY OF THE SNOWS

BEING A CONTINUATION OF THE PERSONAL HISTORIES OF "PIERRE AND HIS PEOPLE"
AND THE LAST EXISTING RECORDS OF PRETTY PIERRE

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 5.


THE CRUISE OF THE "NINETY-NINE"
A ROMANY OF THE SNOWS
THE PLUNDERER




THE CRUISE OF THE "NINETY-NINE"

I.  THE SEARCH

She was only a big gulf yawl, which a man and a boy could manage at a
pinch, with old-fashioned high bulwarks, but lying clean in the water.
She had a tolerable record for speed, and for other things so important
that they were now and again considered by the Government at Quebec.
She was called the Ninety-Nine.  With a sense of humour the cure had
called her so, after an interview with her owner and captain, Tarboe the
smuggler.  When he said to Tarboe at Angel Point that he had come to seek
the one sheep that was lost, leaving behind him the other ninety-and-nine
within the fold at Isle of Days, Tarboe had replied that it was a
mistake--he was the ninety-nine, for he needed no repentance, and
immediately offered the cure some old brown brandy of fine flavour.
They both had a whimsical turn, and the cure did not ask Tarboe how he
came by such perfect liquor.  Many high in authority, it was said, had
been soothed even to the winking of an eye when they ought to have sent
a Nordenfeldt against the Ninety-Nine.

The day after the cure left Angel Point he spoke of Tarboe and his craft
as the Ninety-and-Nine; and Tarboe hearing of this--for somehow he heard
everything--immediately painted out the old name, and called her the
Ninety-Nine, saying that she had been so blessed by the cure.  Afterwards
the Ninety-Nine had an increasing reputation for exploit and daring.  In
brief, Tarboe and his craft were smugglers, and to have trusted gossip
would have been to say that the boat was as guilty as the man.

Their names were much more notorious than sweet; and yet in Quebec men
laughed as they shrugged their shoulders at them; for as many jovial
things as evil were told of Tarboe.  When it became known that a
dignitary of the Church had been given a case of splendid wine, which
had come in a roundabout way to him, men waked in the night and laughed,
to the annoyance of their wives; for the same dignitary had preached
a powerful sermon against smugglers and the receivers of stolen goods.
It was a sad thing for monsignor to be called a Ninety-Niner, as were all
good friends of Tarboe, high and low.  But when he came to know, after
the wine had been leisurely drunk and becomingly praised, he brought his
influence to bear in civic places, so that there was nothing left to do
but to corner Tarboe at last.

It was in the height of summer, when there was little to think of in the
old fortressed city, and a dart after a brigand appealed to the romantic
natures of the idle French folk, common and gentle.

Through clouds of rank tobacco smoke, and in the wash of their bean soup,
the habitants discussed the fate of "Black Tarboe," and officers of the
garrison and idle ladies gossiped at the Citadel and at Murray Bay of the
freebooting gentlemen, whose Ninety-Nine had furnished forth many a table
in the great walled city.  But Black Tarboe himself was down at
Anticosti, waiting for a certain merchantman.  Passing vessels saw the
Ninety-Nine anchored in an open bay, flying its flag flippantly before
the world--a rag of black sheepskin, with the wool on, in profane keeping
with its name.

There was no attempt at hiding, no skulking behind a point, or scurrying
from observation, but an indolent and insolent waiting--for something.
"Black Tarboe's getting reckless," said one captain coming in, and
another, going out, grinned as he remembered the talk at Quebec, and
thought of the sport provided for the Ninety-Nine when she should come up
stream; as she must in due time, for Tarboe's home was on the Isle of
Days, and was he not fond and proud of his daughter Joan to a point of
folly?  He was not alone in his admiration of Joan, for the cure at Isle
of Days said high things of her.

Perhaps this was because she was unlike most other girls, and women too,
in that she had a sense of humour, got from having mixed with choice
spirits who visited her father and carried out at Angel Point a kind of
freemasonry, which had few rites and many charges and countercharges.
She had that almost impossible gift in a woman--the power of telling a
tale whimsically.  It was said that once, when Orvay Lafarge, a new
Inspector of Customs, came to spy out the land, she kept him so amused
by her quaint wit, that he sat in the doorway gossiping with her, while
Tarboe and two others unloaded and safely hid away a cargo of liquors
from the Ninety-Nine.  And one of the men, as cheerful as Joan herself,
undertook to carry a little keg of brandy into the house, under the very
nose of the young inspector, who had sought to mark his appointment by
the detection and arrest of Tarboe single-handed.  He had never met
Tarboe or Tarboe's daughter when he made his boast.  If his superiors had
known that Loco Bissonnette, Tarboe's jovial lieutenant, had carried the
keg of brandy into the house in a water-pail, not fifteen feet from where
Lafarge sat with Joan, they might have asked for his resignation.  True,
the thing was cleverly done, for Bissonnette made the water spill quite
naturally against his leg, and when he turned to Joan and said in a
crusty way that he didn't care if he spilled all the water in the pail,
he looked so like an unwilling water-carrier that Joan for one little
moment did not guess.  When she understood, she laughed till the tears
came to her eyes, and presently, because Lafarge seemed hurt, gave him to
understand that he was upon his honour if she told him what it was.  He
consenting, she, still laughing, asked him into the house, and then drew
the keg from the pail, before his eyes, and, tapping it, gave him some
liquor, which he accepted without churlishness.  He found nothing in this
to lessen her in his eyes, for he knew that women have no civic virtues.
He drank to their better acquaintance with few compunctions; a matter not
scandalous, for there is nothing like a witty woman to turn a man's head,
and there was not so much at stake after all.  Tarboe had gone on for
many a year till his trade seemed like the romance of law rather than its
breach.  It is safe to say that Lafarge was a less sincere if not a less
blameless customs officer from this time forth.  For humour on a woman's
lips is a potent thing, as any man knows that has kissed it off in
laughter.

As we said, Tarboe lay rocking in a bight at Anticosti, with an empty
hold and a scanty larder.  Still, he was in no ill-humour, for he smoked
much and talked more than common.  Perhaps that was because Joan was with
him--an unusual thing.  She was as good a sailor as her father, but she
did not care, nor did he, to have her mixed up with him in his smuggling.
So far as she knew, she had never been on board the Ninety-Nine when it
carried a smuggled cargo.  She had not broken the letter of the law.
Her father, on asking her to come on this cruise, had said that it
was a pleasure trip to meet a vessel in the gulf.

The pleasure had not been remarkable, though there had been no bad
weather.  The coast of Anticosti is cheerless, and it is possible even to
tire of sun and water.  True, Bissonnette played the concertina with
passing sweetness, and sang as little like a wicked smuggler as one might
think.  But there were boundaries even to that, as there were to his
love-making, which was, however, so interwoven with laughter that it was
impossible to think the matter serious.  Sometimes of an evening Joan
danced on deck to the music of the concertina--dances which had their
origin largely with herself fantastic, touched off with some unexpected
sleight of foot--almost uncanny at times to Bissonnette, whose
temperament could hardly go her distance when her mood was as this.

Tarboe looked on with a keener eye and understanding, for was she not
bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh?  Who was he that he should fail
to know her?  He saw the moonlight play on her face and hair, and he
waved his head with the swaying of her body, and smacked his lips in
thought of the fortune which, smuggling days over, would carry them up to
St. Louis Street, Quebec, there to dwell as in a garden of good things.

After many days had passed, Joan tired of the concertina, of her own
dancing, of her father's tales, and became inquisitive.  So at last she
said:

"Father, what's all this for?"

Tarboe did not answer her at once, but, turning to Bissonnette, asked
him to play "The Demoiselle with the Scarlet Hose."  It was a gay little
demoiselle according to Bissonnette, and through the creaking, windy
gaiety Tarboe and his daughter could talk without being heard by the
musician.  Tarboe lit another cigar--that badge of greatness in the
eyes of his fellow-habitants, and said:

"What's all this for, Joan?  Why, we're here for our health."  His teeth
bit on the cigar with enjoyable emphasis.

"If you don't tell me what's in the wind, you'll be sorry.  Come, where's
the good?  I've got as much head as you have, father, and--"

"Mon Dieu!  Much more.  That's not the question.  It was to be a surprise
to you."

"Pshaw!  You can only have one minute of surprise, and you can have
months of fun looking out for a thing.  I don't want surprises; I want
what you've got--the thing that's kept you good-tempered while we lie
here like snails on the rocks."

"Well, my cricket, if that's the way you feel, here you are.  It is a
long story, but I will make it short.  Once there was a pirate called
Brigond, and he brought into a bay on the coast of Labrador a fortune in
some kegs--gold, gold!  He hid it in a cave, wrapping around it the dead
bodies of two men.  It is thought that one can never find it so.  He hid
it, and sailed away.  He was captured, and sent to prison in France for
twenty years.  Then he come back with a crew and another ship, and sailed
into the bay, but his ship went down within sight of the place.  And so
the end of him and all.  But wait.  There was one man, the mate on the
first voyage.  He had been put in prison also.  He did not get away as
soon as Brigond.  When he was free, he come to the captain of a ship that
I know, the Free-and-Easy, that sails to Havre, and told him the story,
asking for passage to Quebec.  The captain--Gobal--did not believe it,
but said he would bring him over on the next voyage.  Gobal come to me
and told me all there was to tell.  I said that it was a true story, for
Pretty Pierre told me once he saw Brigond's ship go down in the bay; but
he would not say how, or why, or where.  Pierre would not lie in a thing
like that, and--"

"Why didn't he get the gold himself?"

"What is money to him?  He is as a gipsy.  To him the money is cursed.
He said so.  Eh bien! some wise men are fools, one way or another.  Well,
I told Gobal I would give the man the Ninety-Nine for the cruise and
search, and that we should divide the gold between us, if it was found,
taking out first enough to make a dot for you and a fine handful for
Bissonnette.  But no, shake not your head like that.  It shall be so.
Away went Gobal four months ago, and I get a letter from him weeks past,
just after Pentecost, to say he would be here some time in the first of
July, with the man.

"Well, it is a great game.  The man is a pirate, but it does not matter--
he has paid for that.  I thought you would be glad of a fine adventure
like that, so I said to you, Come."

"But, father--"

"If you do not like you can go on with Gobal in the Free-and-Easy, and
you shall be landed at the Isle of Days.  That's all.  We're waiting here
for Gobal.  He promised to stop just outside this bay and land our man on
us.  Then, blood of my heart, away we go after the treasure!"

Joan's eyes flashed.  Adventure was in her as deep as life itself.  She
had been cradled in it, reared in it, lived with it, and here was no law-
breaking.  Whose money was it?  No one's: for who should say what ship it
was, or what people were robbed by Brigond and those others?  Gold--that
was a better game than wine and brandy, and for once her father would be
on a cruise which would not be, as it were, sailing in forbidden waters.

"When do you expect Gobal?" she asked eagerly.  "He ought to have been
here a week ago.  Maybe he has had a bad voyage, or something."

"He's sure to come?"

"Of course.  I found out about that.  She's got a big consignment to
people in Quebec.  Something has gone wrong, but she'll be here--yes."

"What will you do if you get the money?" she asked.  Tarboe laughed
heartily.  "My faith!  Come play up those scarlet hose, Bissonnette!
My faith, I'll go into Parliament at Quebec.  Thunder!  I will have sport
with them.  I'll reform the customs.  There shan't be any more smuggling.
The people of Quebec shall drink no more good wine--no one except Black
Tarboe, the member for Isle of Days."

Again he laughed, and his eyes spilt fire like revolving wheels.  For a
moment Joan was quiet; her face was shining like the sun on a river.  She
saw more than her father, for she saw release.  A woman may stand by a
man who breaks the law, but in her heart she always has bitterness, for
that the world shall speak well of herself and what she loves is the
secret desire of every woman.  In her heart she never can defy the world
as does a man.

She had carried off the situation as became the daughter of a daring
adventurer, who in more stirring times might have been a Du Lhut or a Rob
Roy, but she was sometimes tired of the fighting, sometimes wishful that
she could hold her position easier.  Suppose the present good cure should
die and another less considerate arrive, how hard might her position
become!  Then, she had a spirit above her station, as have most people
who know the world and have seen something of its forbidden side; for it
is notable that wisdom comes not alone from loving good things, but from
having seen evil as well as good.  Besides Joan was not a woman to go
singly to her life's end.

There was scarcely a man on Isle of Days and in the parish of Ste.
Eunice, on the mainland, but would gladly have taken to wife the daughter
of Tarboe the smuggler, and it is likely that the cure of either parish
would not have advised against it.

Joan had had the taste of the lawless, and now she knew, as she sat and
listened to Bissonnette's music, that she also could dance for joy, in
the hope of a taste of the lawful.  With this money, if it were got,
there could be another life--in Quebec.  She could not forbear laughing
now as she remembered that first day she had seen Orvay Lafarge, and she
said to Bissonnette: "Loce, do you mind the keg in the water-pail?"
Bissonnette paused on an out-pull, and threw back his head with a
soundless laugh, then played the concertina into contortions.

"That Lafarge!  H'm!  He is very polite; but pshaw, it is no use that,
in whisky-running!  To beat a great man, a man must be great.  Tarboe
Noir can lead M'sieu' Lafarge all like that!"

It seemed as if he were pulling the nose of the concertina.  Tarboe began
tracing a kind of maze with his fingers on the deck, his eyes rolling
outward like an endless puzzle.  But presently he turned sharp on Joan.

"How many times have you met him?" he asked.  "Oh, six or seven--eight
or nine, perhaps."

Her father stared.  "Eight or nine?  By the holy!  Is it like that?
Where have you seen him?"

"Twice at our home, as you know; two or three times at dances at the
Belle Chatelaine, and the rest when we were at Quebec in May.  He is
amusing, M'sieu' Lafarge."

"Yes, two of a kind," remarked Tarboe drily; and then he told his schemes
to Joan, letting Bissonnette hang up the "The Demoiselle with the Scarlet
Hose," and begin "The Coming of the Gay Cavalier."  She entered into his
plans with spirit, and together they speculated what bay it might be, of
the many on the coast of Labrador.

They spent two days longer waiting, and then at dawn a merchantman
came sauntering up to anchor.  She signalled to the Ninety-Nine.  In five
minutes Tarboe was climbing up the side of the Free-and-Easy, and
presently was in Gobal's cabin, with a glass of wine in his hand.

"What kept you, Gobal?" he asked.  "You're ten days late, at least."

"Storm and sickness--broken mainmast and smallpox."  Gobal was not
cheerful.

Tarboe caught at something.  "You've got our man?"  Gobal drank off his
wine slowly.  "Yes," he said.  "Well?--Why don't you fetch him?"

"You can see him below."

"The man has legs, let him walk here.  Hello, my Gobal, what's the
matter?  If he's here bring him up.  We've no time to lose."

"Tarboe, the fool got smallpox, and died three hours ago--the tenth man
since we started.  We're going to give him to the fishes.  They're
putting him in his linen now."

Tarboe's face hardened.  Disaster did not dismay him, it either made him
ugly or humourous, and one phase was as dangerous as the other.

"D'ye mean to say," he groaned, "that the game is up?  Is it all
finished?  Sweat o' my soul, my skin crawls like hot glass!  Is it the
end, eh?  The beast, to die!"

Gobal's eyes glistened.  He had sent up the mercury, he would now bring
it down.

"Not such a beast as you think.  Alive pirate, a convict, as comrade in
adventure, is not sugar in the teeth.  This one was no better than the
worst.  Well, he died.  That was awkward.  But he gave me the chart of
the bay before he died--and that was damn square."

Tarboe held out his hand eagerly, the big fingers bending claw-like.

"Give it me, Gobal," he said.

"Wait.  There's no hurry.  Come along, there's the bell: they're going to
drop him."

He coolly motioned, and passed out from the cabin to the ship's side.
Tarboe kept his tongue from blasphemy, and his hand from the captain's
shoulder, for he knew only too well that Gobal held the game in his
hands.  They leaned over and saw two sailors with something on a plank.

"We therefore commit his body to the deep, in the knowledge of the
Judgment Day--let her go!" grunted Gobal; and a long straight canvas
bundle shot with a swishing sound beneath the water.  "It was rough on
him too," he continued.  "He waited twenty years to have his chance
again.  Damn me, if I didn't feel as if I'd hit him in the eye, somehow,
when he begged me to keep him alive long enough to have a look at the
rhino.  But it wasn't no use.  He had to go, and I told him so.

"Then he did the fine thing: he give me the chart.  But he made me swear
on a book of the Mass that if we got the gold we'd send one-half his
share to a woman in Paris, and the rest to his brother, a priest at
Nancy.  I'll keep my word--but yes!  Eh, Tarboe?"

"You can keep your word for me!  What, you think, Gobal, there is no
honour in Black Tarboe, and you've known me ten years!  Haven't I always
kept my word like a clock?"

Gobal stretched out his hand.  "Like the sun-sure.  That's enough.  We'll
stand by my oath.  You shall see the chart."

Going again inside the cabin, Gobal took out a map grimed with ceaseless
fingering, and showed it to Tarboe, putting his finger on the spot where
the treasure lay.

"The Bay of Belle Amour!" cried Tarboe, his eyes flashing.  "Ah, I know
it!  That's where Gaspard the pilot lived.  It's only forty leagues or so
from here."  His fingers ran here and there on the map.  "Yes, yes," he
continued, "it's so, but he hasn't placed the reef right.  Ah, here is
how Brigond's ship went down!  There's a needle of rock in the bay.  It
isn't here."

Gobal handed the chart over.  "I can't go with you, but I take your word;
I can say no more.  If you cheat me I'll kill you; that's all."

"Let me give a bond," said Tarboe quickly.  "If I saw much gold perhaps
I couldn't trust myself, but there's someone to be trusted, who'll swear
for me.  If my daughter Joan give her word--"

"Is she with you?"

"Yes, in the Ninety-Nine, now.  I'll send Bissonnette for her.  Yes, yes,
I'll send, for gold is worse than bad whisky when it gets into a man's
head.  Joan will speak for me."

Ten minutes later Joan was in Gobal's cabin, guaranteeing for her father
the fulfilment of his bond.  An hour afterwards the Free-and-Easy was
moving up stream with her splintered mast and ragged sails, and the
Ninety-Nine was looking up and over towards the Bay of Belle Amour.  She
reached it in the late afternoon of the next day.  Bissonnette did not
know the object of the expedition, but he had caught the spirit of the
affair, and his eyes were like spots of steel as he held the sheet or
took his turn at the tiller.  Joan's eyes were now on the sky, now on the
sail, and now on the land, weighing as wisely as her father the advantage
of the wind, yet dwelling on that cave where skeletons kept ward over the
spoils of a pirate ship.

They arrived, and Tarboe took the Ninety-Nine warily in on a little wind
off the land.  He came near sharing the fate of Brigond, for the yawl
grazed the needle of the rock that, hiding away in the water, with a nose
out for destruction, awaits its victims.  They reached safe anchorage,
but by the time they landed it was night, with, however, a good moon
showing.

All night they searched, three silent, eager figures, drawing step by
step nearer the place where the ancient enemy of man was barracked about
by men's bodies.  It was Joan who, at last, as dawn drew up, discovered
the hollow between two great rocks where the treasure lay.  A few
minutes' fierce digging, and the kegs of gold were disclosed, showing
through the ribs of two skeletons.  Joan shrank back, but the two men
tossed aside the rattling bones, and presently the kegs were standing
between them on the open shore.  Bissonnette's eyes were hungry--he knew
now the wherefore of the quest.  He laughed outright, a silly, loud,
hysterical laugh.  Tarboe's eyes shifted from the sky to the river, from
the river to the kegs, from the kegs to Bissonnette.  On him they stayed
a moment.  Bissonnette shrank back.  Tarboe was feeling for the first
time in his life the deadly suspicion which comes with ill-gotten wealth.
This passed as his eyes and Joan's met, for she had caught the melodrama,
the overstrain; Bissonnette's laugh had pointed the situation; and her
sense of humour had prevailed.  "La, la," she said, with a whimsical
quirk of the head, and no apparent relevancy:

          "Lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home,
          Your house is on fire, and your children all gone."

The remedy was good.  Tarboe's eyes came again to their natural
liveliness, and Bissonnette said:

"My throat's like a piece of sand-paper."

Tarboe handed over a brandy flask, after taking a pull himself, and then
sitting down on one of the kegs, he said: "It is as you see, and now
Angel Point very quick.  To get it there safe, that's the thing!"  Then,
scanning the sky closely: "It's for a handsome day, and the wind goes to
bear us up fine.  Good!  Well, for you, Bissonnette, there shall be a
thousand dollars, you shall have the Belle Chatelaine Inn and the little
lady at Point Pierrot.  For the rest, you shall keep a quiet tongue, eh?
If not, my Bissonnette, we shall be the best of strangers, and you shall
not be happy.  Hein?"

Bissonnette's eyes flashed.  "The Belle Chatelaine?  Good!  That is
enough.  My tongue is tied; I cannot speak; it is fastened with a
thousand pegs."

"Very good, a thousand gold pegs, and you shall never pull them.  The
little lady will have you with them, not without; and unless you stand by
me, no one shall have you at any price--by God!"

He stood up, but Joan put out her hand.  "You have been speaking, now it
is my turn.  Don't cry cook till you have the venison home.  What is
more, I gave my word to Gobal, and I will keep it.  I will be captain.
No talking!  When you've got the kegs in the cellar at Angel Point, good!
But now--come, my comrades, I am your captain!"

She was making the thing a cheerful adventure, and the men now swung the
kegs on their shoulders and carried them to the boat.  In another half-
hour they were under way in the gaudy light of an orange sunrise, a
simmering wind from the sea lifting them up the river, and the grey-red
coast of Labrador shrinking sullenly back.

About this time, also, a Government cutter was putting out from under the
mountain-wall at Quebec, its officer in command having got renewed orders
from the Minister to bring in Tarboe the smuggler.  And when Mr. Martin,
the inspector in command of the expedition, was ordered to take with him
Mr. Orvay Lafarge and five men, "effectively armed," it was supposed by
the romantic Minister that the matter was as good as done.

What Mr. Orvay Lafarge did when he got the word, was to go straight to
his hat-peg, then leave the office, walk to the little club where he
spent leisure hours, called office hours by people who wished to be
precise as well as suggestive,--sit down, and raise a glass to his lips.
After which he threw himself back in his chair and said: "Well, I'm
particularly damned!"  A few hours later they were away on their doubtful
exploit.




II.  THE DEFENCE

On the afternoon of the second day after she left Labrador, the Ninety-
Nine came rippling near Isle of Fires, not sixty miles from her
destination, catching a fair wind on her quarter off the land.  Tarboe
was in fine spirits, Joan was as full of songs as a canary, and
Bissonnette was as busy watching her as in keeping the nose of the
Ninety-Nine pointing for Cap de Gloire.  Tarboe was giving the sail full
to the wind, and thinking how he would just be able to reach Angel Point
and get his treasure housed before mass in the morning.

Mass!  How many times had he laughed as he sat in church and heard the
cure have his gentle fling at smuggling!  To think that the hiding-place
for his liquor was the unused, almost unknown, cellar of that very
church, built a hundred years before as a refuge from the Indians, which
he had reached by digging a tunnel from the shore to its secret passage!
That was why the customs officers never found anything at Angel Point,
and that was why Tarboe much loved going to mass.  He sometimes thought
he could catch the flavour of the brands as he leaned his forehead on the
seat before him.  But this time he would go to mass with a fine handful
of those gold pieces in his pocket, just to keep him in a commendable
mood.  He laughed out loud at the thought of doing so within a stone's
throw of a fortune and nose-shot of fifty kegs of brandy.

As he did so, Bissonnette gave a little cry.  They were coming on to
Cap de Gloire at the moment, and Tarboe and Joan, looking, saw a boat
standing off towards the mainland, as if waiting for them.  Tarboe gave
a roar, and called to Joan to take the tiller.  He snatched a glass and
levelled it.

"A Government tug!" he said, "and tete de Diable!  there's your tall
Lafarge among 'em, Joan!  I'd know him by his height miles off."

Joan lost colour a trifle and then got courage.  "Pshaw," she said, "what
does he want?"

"Want?  Want?  He wants the Ninety-Nine and her cargo; but by the sun of
my soul, he'll get her across the devil's gridiron!  See here, my girl,
this ain't any sport with you aboard.  Bissonnette and I could make a
stand for it alone, but what's to become of you?  I don't want you mixed
up in the mess."

The girl was eyeing the Government boat.  "But I'm in it, and I can't be
out of it, and I don't want to be out now that I am in.  Let me see the
glass."  She took it in one hand.  "Yes, it must be M'sieu' Lafarge,"
she said, frowning.  "He might have stayed out of this."

"When he's got orders, he has to go," answered her father; "but he must
look out, for a gun is a gun, and I don't pick and choose.  Besides, I've
no contraband this cruise, and I'll let no one stick me up."

"There are six or seven of them," said Joan debatingly.

"Bring her up to the wind," shouted Tarboe to Bissonnette.  The mainsail
closed up several points, the Ninety-Nine slackened her pace and edged in
closer to the land.  "Now, my girl," said Tarboe, "this is how it stands.
If we fight, there's someone sure to be hurt, and if I'm hurt, where'll
you be?"

Bissonnette interposed.  "We've got nothing contraband.  The gold is
ours."

"Trust that crew--but no!" cried Tarboe, with an oath.  "The Government
would hold the rhino for possible owners, and then give it to a convent
or something.  They shan't put foot here.  They've said war, and they'll
get it.  They're signalling us to stop, and they're bearing down.  There
goes a shot!"

The girl had been watching the Government boat coolly.  Now that it began
to bear on, she answered her father's question.

"Captain," she said, like a trusted mate, "we'll bluff them."  Her eyes
flashed with the intelligence of war.  "Here, quick, I'll take the
tiller.  They haven't seen Bissonnette yet; he sits low.  Call all hands
on deck--shout!  Then, see: Loce will go down the middle hatch, get a
gun, come up with it on his shoulder, and move on to the fo'castle.  Then
he'll drop down the fo'castle hatch, get along to the middle hatch, and
come up again with the gun, now with his cap, now without it, now with
his coat, now without it.  He'll do that till we've got twenty or thirty
men on deck!  They'll think we've been laying for them, and they'll not
come on--you see!"

Tarboe ripped out an oath.  "It's a great game," he said, and a moment
afterwards, in response to his roars, Bissonnette came up the hatch with
his gun showing bravely; then again and again, now with his cap, now
without, now with his coat, now with none, anon with a tarpaulin over his
shoulders grotesquely.  Meanwhile Tarboe trained his one solitary little
cannon on the enemy, roaring his men into place.

From the tug it seemed that a large and well-armed crew were ranging
behind the bulwarks of the Ninety-Nine.  Mr. Martin, the inspector, saw
with alarm Bissonnette's constantly appearing rifle.

"They've arranged a plant for us, Mr. Lafarge.  What do you think we'd
better do?" he asked.

"Fight!" answered Lafarge laconically.  He wished to put himself on
record, for he was the only one on board who saw through the ruse.

"But I've counted at least twenty men, all armed, and we've only five."

"As you please, sir," said Lafarge bluntly, angry at being tricked, but
inwardly glad to be free of the business, for he pictured to himself that
girl at the tiller--he had seen her as she went aft--in a police court at
Quebec.  Yet his instinct for war and his sense of duty impelled him to
say: "Still, sir, fight!"

"No, no, Mr. Lafarge," excitedly rejoined his chief.  "I cannot risk it.
We must go back for more men and bring along a Gatling.  Slow down!" he
called.  Lafarge turned on his heel with an oath, and stood watching the
Ninety-Nine.

"She'll laugh at me till I die!" he said to himself presently, as the
tug turned up stream and pointed for Quebec.  "Well, I'm jiggered!" he
added, as a cannon shot came ringing over the water after them.  He was
certain also that he heard loud laughter.  No doubt he was right; for as
the tug hurried on, Tarboe ran to Joan, hugged her like a bear, and
roared till he ached.  Then she paid out the sheet, they clapped on all
sail, and travelled in the track of the enemy.

Tarboe's spirit was roused.  He was not disposed to let his enemy off on
even such terms, so he now turned to Joan and said: "What say you to a
chase of the gentleman?"

Joan was in a mood for such a dare-devil adventure.  For three people,
one of whom was a girl, to give chase to a well-manned, well-armed
Government boat was too good a relish to be missed.  Then, too, it had
just occurred to her that a parley would be amusing, particularly if she
and Lafarge were the truce-bearers.  So she said: "That is very good."

"Suppose they should turn and fight?" suggested Bissonnette.

"That's true--here's m'am'selle," agreed Tarboe.  "But, see," said Joan.
"If we chase them and call upon them to surrender--and after all, we can
prove that we had nothing contraband--what a splendid game it'll be!"
Mischief flicked in her eyes.

"Good!" said Tarboe.  "To-morrow I shall be a rich man, and then they'll
not dare to come again."

So saying, he gave the sail to the wind, and away the Ninety-Nine went
after the one ewe lamb of the Government.

Mr. Martin saw her coming, and gave word for all steam.  It would be a
pretty game, for the wind was in Tarboe's favour, and the general
advantage was not greatly with the tug.  Mr. Martin was now anxious
indeed to get out of the way of the smuggler.  Lafarge made one
restraining effort, then settled into an ironical mood.  Yet a half-dozen
times he was inclined to blurt out to Martin what he believed was the
truth.  A man, a boy, and a girl to bluff them that way!  In his bones he
felt that it was the girl who was behind this thing.  Of one matter he
was sure--they had no contraband stuff on board, or Tarboe would not have
brought his daughter along.  He could not understand the attitude, for
Tarboe would scarcely have risked the thing out of mere bravado.  Why not
call a truce?  Perhaps he could solve the problem.  They were keeping a
tolerably safe distance apart, and there was no great danger of the
Ninety-Nine overhauling them even if it so willed; but Mr. Martin did not
know that.

What he said to his chief had its effect, and soon there was a white flag
flying on the tug.  It was at once answered with a white handkerchief of
Joan's.  Then the tug slowed up, the Ninety-Nine came on gaily, and at a
good distance came up to the wind, and stood off.

"What do you want?" asked Tarboe through his speaking-tube.

"A parley," called Mr. Martin.

"Good; send an officer," answered Tarboe.

A moment after, Lafarge was in a boat rowing over to meet another boat
rowed by Joan alone, who, dressed in a suit of Bissonnette's, had
prevailed on her father to let her go.

The two boats nearing each other, Joan stood up, saluting, and Lafarge
did the same.

"Good-day, m'sieu'," said Joan, with assumed brusqueness, mischief
lurking about her mouth.  "What do you want?"

"Good-day, monsieur; I did not expect to confer with you."

"M'sieu'," said Joan, with well-acted dignity, "if you prefer to confer
with the captain or Mr. Bissonnette, whom I believe you know in the
matter of a pail, and--"

"No, no; pardon me, monsieur," said Lafarge more eagerly than was good
for the play, "I am glad to confer with you, you will understand--you
will understand--"  He paused.

"What will I understand?"

"You will understand that I understand!"  Lafarge waved meaningly towards
the Ninety-Nine, but it had no effect at all.  Joan would not give the
game over into his hands.

"That sounds like a charade or a puzzle game.  We are gentlemen on a
serious errand, aren't we?"

"Yes," answered Lafarge, "perfect gentlemen on a perfectly serious
errand!"

"Very well, m'sieu'.  Have you come to surrender?"  The splendid
impudence of the thing stunned Lafarge, but he said: "I suppose one or
the other ought to surrender; and naturally," he added with slow point,
"it should be the weaker."

"Very well.  Our captain is willing to consider conditions.  You came
down on us to take us--a quiet craft sailing in free waters.  You attack
us without cause.  We summon all hands, and you run.  We follow, you
ask for truce.  It is granted.  We are not hard--no.  We only want our
rights.  Admit them; we'll make surrender easy, and the matter is over."

Lafarge gasped.  She was forcing his hand.  She would not understand his
oblique suggestions.  He saw only one way now, and that was to meet her,
boast for boast.

"I haven't come to surrender," he said, "but to demand."

"M'sieu'," Joan said grandly, "there's nothing more to say.  Carry word
to your captain that we'll overhaul him by sundown, and sink him before
supper."

Lafarge burst out laughing.

"Well, by the Lord, but you're a swashbuckler, Joan--"

"M'sieu'--"

"Oh, nonsense!  I tell you, nonsense!  Let's have over with this, my
girl.  You're the cleverest woman on the continent, but there's a limit
to everything.  Here, tell me now, and if you answer me straight I'll say
no more."

"M'sieu', I am here to consider conditions, not to--" "Oh, for God's
sake, Joan!  Tell me now, have you got anything contraband on board?
There'll be a nasty mess about the thing, for me and all of us, and why
can't we compromise?  I tell you honestly we'd have come on, if I hadn't
seen you aboard."

Joan turned her head back with a laugh.  "My poor m'sieu'!  You have such
bad luck.  Contraband?  Let me see?  Liquors and wines and tobacco are
contraband.  Is it not so?" Lafarge nodded.

"Is money--gold--contraband?"

"Money?  No; of course not, and you know it.  Why won't you be sensible?
You're getting me into a bad hole, and--"

"I want to see how you'll come out.  If you come out well--" She paused
quaintly.

"Yes, if I come out well--"

"If you come out very well, and we do not sink you before supper, I may
ask you to come and see me."

"H'm!  Is that all?  After spoiling my reputation, I'm to be let come and
see you."

"Isn't that enough to start with?  What has spoiled your reputation?"

"A man, a boy, and a slip of a girl."  He looked meaningly enough at her
now.  She laughed.  "See," he added; "give me a chance.  Let me search
the Ninety-Nine for contraband,--that's all I've got to do with,--and
then I can keep quiet about the rest.  If there's no contraband, whatever
else there is, I'll hold my tongue."

"I've told you what there is."

He did not understand.  "Will you let me search?"  Joan's eyes flashed.
"Once and for all, no, Orvay Lafarge.  I am the daughter of a man whom
you and your men would have killed or put in the dock.  He's been a
smuggler, and I know it.  Who has he robbed?  Not the poor, not the
needy; but a rich Government that robs also.  Well, in the hour when he
ceases to be a smuggler for ever, armed men come to take him.  Why didn't
they do so before?  Why so pious all at once?  No; I am first the
daughter of my father, and afterwards--"

"And afterwards?"

"What to-morrow may bring forth."

Lafarge became very serious.  "I must go back.  Mr. Martin is signalling,
and your father is calling.  I do not understand, but you're the one
woman in the world for my money, and I'm ready to stand by that and leave
the customs to-morrow if need be."

Joan's eyes blazed, her cheek was afire.  "Leave it to-day.  Leave it
now.  Yes; that's my one condition.  If you want me, and you say you do,
come aboard the Ninety-Nine, and for to-day be one of us-to-morrow what
you will."

"What I will?  What I will, Joan?  Do you mean it?"

"Yes.  Pshaw!  Your duty?  Don't I know how the Ministers and the
officers have done their duty at Quebec?  It's all nonsense.  You must
make your choice once for all now."

Lafarge stood a moment thinking.  "Joan, I'll do it.  I'd go hunting in
hell at your bidding.  But see.  Everything's changed.  I couldn't fight
against you, but I can fight for you.  All must be open now.  You've said
there's no contraband.  Well, I'll tell Mr. Martin so, but I'll tell him
also that you've only a crew of two--"

"Of three, now!"

"Of three!  I will do my duty in that, then resign and come over to you,
if I can."

If you can?  You mean that they may fire on you?"

"I can't tell what they may do.  But I must deal fair."

Joan's face was grave.  "Very well, I will wait for you here."

"They might hit you."

"But no.  They can't hit a wall.  Go on, my dear."  They saluted, and,
as Lafarge turned away, Joan said, with a little mocking laugh,
"Tell him that he must surrender, or we'll sink him before supper."

Lafarge nodded, and drew away quickly towards the tug.  His interview
with Mr. Martin was brief, and he had tendered his resignation, though it
was disgracefully informal, and was over the side of the boat again and
rowing quickly away before his chief recovered his breath.  Then Mr.
Martin got a large courage.  He called on his men to fire when Lafarge
was about two hundred and fifty feet from the tug.  The shots rattled
about him.  He turned round coolly and called out, "Coward-we'll sink you
before supper!"

A minute afterwards there came another shot, and an oar dropped from his
hand.  But now Joan was rowing rapidly towards him, and presently was
alongside.

"Quick, jump inhere," she said.  He did so, and she rowed on quickly.
Tarboe did not understand, but now his blood was up, and as another
volley sent bullets dropping around the two he gave the Ninety-Nine to
the wind, and she came bearing down smartly to them.  In a few moments
they were safely on board, and Joan explained.  Tarboe grasped Lafarge's
unmaimed hand,--the other Joan was caring for,--and swore that fighting
was the only thing left now.

Mr. Martin had said the same, but when he saw the Ninety-Nine determined,
menacing, and coming on, he became again uncertain, and presently gave
orders to make for the lighthouse on the opposite side of the river.  He
could get over first, for the Ninety-Nine would not have the wind so much
in her favour, and there entrench himself; for even yet Bissonnette amply
multiplied was in his mind--Lafarge had not explained that away.  He was
in the neighbourhood of some sunken rocks of which he and his man at the
wheel did not know accurately, and in making what he thought was a clear
channel he took a rock with great force, for they were going full steam
ahead.  Then came confusion, and in getting out the one boat it was
swamped and a man nearly drowned.  Meanwhile the tug was fast sinking.

While they were throwing off their clothes, the Ninety-Nine came down,
and stood off.  On one hand was the enemy, on the other the water, with
the shore half a mile distant.

"Do you surrender?" called out Tarboe.

"Can't we come aboard without that?" feebly urged Mr. Martin.

"I'll see you damned first, Mr. Martin.  Come quick, or I'll give you
what for."

"We surrender," answered the officer gently.

A few minutes later he and his men were on board, with their rifles
stacked in a corner at Bissonnette's hand.

Then Tarboe brought the Ninety-Nine close to the wreck, and with his
little cannon put a ball into her.  This was the finish.  She shook her
nose, shivered, shot down like a duck, and was gone.

Mr. Martin was sad even to tears.

"Now, my beauties," said Tarboe, "now that I've got you safe, I'll show
you the kind of cargo I've got."  A moment afterwards he hoisted a keg on
deck.  "Think that's whisky?" he asked.  "Lift it, Mr. Martin."  Mr.
Martin obeyed.  "Shake it," he added.

Mr. Martin did so.  "Open it, Mr. Martin."  He held out a hatchet-hammer.
The next moment a mass of gold pieces yellowed to their eyes.  Mr. Martin
fell back, breathing hard.

"Is that contraband, Mr. Martin?"

"Treasure-trove," humbly answered the stricken officer.

"That's it, and in a month, Mr. Martin, I'll be asking the chief of your
department to dinner."

Meanwhile Lafarge saw how near he had been to losing a wife and a
fortune.  Arrived off Isle of Day; Tarboe told Mr. Martin and his men
that if they said "treasure-trove" till they left the island their live
would not be worth "a tinker's damn."  When the had sworn, he took them
to Angel Point, fed then royally, gave them excellent liquor to drink,
and sent them in a fishing-smack with Bissonnette to Quebec where,
arriving, they told strange tales.

Bissonnette bore a letter to a certain banker in Quebec, who already had
done business with Tarboe, and next midnight Tarboe himself, with Gobal,
Lafarge, Bissonnette, and another, came knocking at the banker's door,
each carrying a keg on his shoulder and armed to the teeth.  And, what
was singular two stalwart police-officers walked behind with comfortable
and approving looks.

A month afterwards Lafarge and Joan were married in the parish church at
Isle of Days, and it was said that Mr. Martin, who, for some strange
reason, was allowed to retain his position in the customs, sent a
present.  The wedding ended with a sensation, for just as the benediction
was pronounced a loud report was heard beneath the floor of the church.
There was great commotion, but Tarboe whispered in the curb's ear, and he
blushing, announced that it was the bursting of a barrel.  A few minutes
afterwards the people of the parish knew the old hiding-place of Tarboe's
contraband, and, though the cure rebuked them, they roared with laughter
at the knowledge.

"So droll, so droll, our Tarboe there!" they shouted, for already they
began to look upon him as their Seigneur.

In time the cure forgave him also.

Tarboe seldom left Isle of Days, save when he went to visit his daughter,
in St. Louis Street, Quebec, not far from the Parliament House, where
Orvay Lafarge is a member of the Ministry.  The ex-smuggler was a member
of the Assembly for three months, but after defeating his own party on a
question of tariff, he gave a portrait of himself to the Chamber, and
threw his seat into the hands of his son-in-law.  At the Belle
Chatelaine, where he often goes, he sometimes asks Bissonnette to play
"The Demoiselle with the Scarlet Hose."






ROMANY OF THE SNOWS

I

When old Throng the trader, trembling with sickness and misery, got on
his knees to Captain Halby and groaned, "She didn't want to go; they
dragged her off; you'll fetch her back, won't ye?--she always had a fancy
for you, cap'n," Pierre shrugged a shoulder and said:

"But you stole her when she was in her rock-a-by, my Throng--you and your
Manette."

"Like a match she was--no bigger," continued the old man.  "Lord, how
that stepmother bully-ragged her, and her father didn't care a darn.
He'd half a dozen others--Manette and me hadn't none.  We took her and
used her like as if she was an angel, and we brought her off up here.
Haven't we set store by her?  Wasn't it 'cause we was lonely an' loved
her we took her?  Hasn't everybody stood up and said there wasn't anyone
like her in the North?  Ain't I done fair by her always--ain't I?  An'
now, when this cough 's eatin' my life out, and Manette 's gone, and
there ain't a soul but Duc the trapper to put a blister on to me, them
brutes ride up from over the border, call theirselves her brothers, an'
drag her off!"

He was still on his knees.  Pierre reached over and lightly kicked a
moccasined foot.

"Get up, Jim Throng," he said.  "Holy! do you think the law moves because
an old man cries?  Is it in the statutes?--that's what the law says.
Does it come within the act?  Is it a trespass--an assault and battery?
--a breach of the peace?--a misdemeanour?  Victoria--So and So: that's
how the law talks.  Get on your knees to Father Corraine, not to Captain
Halby, Jimmy Throng."

Pierre spoke in a half-sinister, ironical way, for between him and
Captain Halby's Riders of the Plains there was no good feeling.  More
than once he had come into conflict with them, more than once had they
laid their hands on him--and taken them off again in due time.  He had
foiled them as to men they wanted; he had defied them--but he had helped
them too, when it seemed right to him; he had sided with them once or
twice when to do so was perilous to himself.  He had sneered at them, he
did not like them, nor they him.  The sum of it was, he thought them
brave--and stupid; and he knew that the law erred as often as it set
things right.

The Trader got up and stood between the two men, coughing much, his face
straining, his eyes bloodshot, as he looked anxiously from Pierre to
Halby.  He was the sad wreck of a strong man.  Nothing looked strong
about him now save his head, which, with its long grey hair, seemed badly
balanced by the thin neck, through which the terrible cough was hacking.

"Only half a lung left," he stammered, as soon as he could speak, "an'
Duc can't fix the boneset, camomile, and whisky, as she could.  An' he
waters the whisky--curse-his-soul!"  The last three words were spoken
through another spasm of coughing.  "An' the blister--how he mucks the
blister!"

Pierre sat back on the table, laughing noiselessly, his white teeth
shining.  Halby, with one foot on a bench, was picking at the fur on his
sleeve thoughtfully.  His face was a little drawn, his lips were tight-
pressed, and his eyes had a light of excitement.  Presently he
straightened himself, and, after a half-malicious look at Pierre,
he said to Throng:

"Where are they, do you say?"

"They're at"--the old man coughed hard--"at Fort O'Battle."

"What are they doing there?"

"Waitin' till spring, when they'll fetch their cattle up an' settle
there."

"They want--Lydia--to keep house for them?"  The old man writhed.

"Yes, God's sake, that's it!  An' they want Liddy to marry a devil
called Borotte, with a thousand cattle or so--Pito the courier told me
yesterday.  Pito saw her, an' he said she was white like a sheet, an'
called out to him as he went by.  Only half a lung I got, an' her boneset
and camomile 'd save it for a bit, mebbe--mebbe!"

"It's clear," said Halby, "that they trespassed, and they haven't proved
their right to her."

"Tonnerre, what a thinker!" said Pierre, mocking.  Halby did not notice.
His was a solid sense of responsibility.

"She is of age?" he half asked, half mused.

"She's twenty-one," answered the old man, with difficulty.

"Old enough to set the world right," suggested Pierre, still mocking.

"She was forced away, she regarded you as her natural protector, she
believed you her father: they broke the law," said the soldier.

"There was Moses, and Solomon, and Caesar, and Socrates, and now....!"
murmured Pierre in assumed abstraction.

A red spot burned on Halby's high cheekbone for a minute, but he
persistently kept his temper.

"I'm expected elsewhere," he said at last.  "I'm only one man, yet I wish
I could go to-day--even alone.  But--"

"But you have a heart," said Pierre.  "How wonderful--a heart!  And
there's the half a lung, and the boneset and camomile tea, and the
blister, and the girl with an eye like a spot of rainbow, and the sacred
law in a Remington rifle!  Well, well!  And to do it in the early
morning--to wait in the shelter of the trees till some go to look after
the horses, then enter the house, arrest those inside, and lay low for
the rest."

Halby looked over at Pierre astonished.  Here was raillery and good
advice all in a piece.

"It isn't wise to go alone, for if there's trouble and I should go down,
who's to tell the truth?  Two could do it; but one--no, it isn't wise,
though it would look smart enough."

"Who said to go alone?" asked Pierre, scrawling on the table with a
burnt match.

"I have no men."

Pierre looked up at the wall.

"Throng has a good Snider there," he said.  "Bosh!  Throng can't go."

The old man coughed and strained.

"If it wasn't--only-half a lung, and I could carry the boneset 'long with
us."

Pierre slid off the table, came to the old man, and, taking him by the
arms, pushed him gently into a chair.  "Sit down; don't be a fool,
Throng," he said.  Then he turned to Halby: "You're a magistrate--
make me a special constable; I'll go, monsieur le capitaine--of no
company."

Halby stared.  He knew Pierre's bravery, his ingenuity and daring.  But
this was the last thing he expected: that the malicious, railing little
half-breed would work with him and the law.  Pierre seemed to understand
his thoughts, for he said: "It is not for you.  I am sick for adventure,
and then there is mademoiselle--such a finger she has for a ven'son
pudding."

Without a word Halby wrote on a leaf in his notebook, and presently
handed the slip to Pierre.  "That's your commission as a special
constable," he said, "and here's the seal on it."  He handed over a
pistol.

Pierre raised his eyebrows at it, but Halby continued: "It has the
Government mark.  But you'd better bring Throng's rifle too."

Throng sat staring at the two men, his hands nervously shifting on his
knees.  "Tell Liddy," he said, "that the last batch of bread was sour--
Duc ain't no good-an' that I ain't had no relish sence she left.  Tell
her the cough gits lower down all the time.  'Member when she tended that
felon o' yourn, Pierre?"

Pierre looked at a sear on his finger and nodded.  "She cut it too young;
but she had the nerve!  When do you start, captain?  It's an eighty-mile
ride."

"At once," was the reply.  "We can sleep to-night in the Jim-a-long-Jo"
(a hut which the Company had built between two distant posts), "and get
there at dawn day after to-morrow.  The snow is light and we can travel
quick.  I have a good horse, and you--"

"I have my black Tophet.  He'll travel with your roan as on one snaffle-
bar.  That roan--you know where he come from?"

"From the Dolright stud, over the Border."

"That's wrong.  He come from Greystop's paddock, where my Tophet was
foaled; they are brothers.  Yours was stole and sold to the Gover'ment;
mine was bought by good hard money.  The law the keeper of stolen goods,
eh?  But these two will go cinch to cinch all the way, like two brothers
--like you and me."

He could not help the touch of irony in his last words: he saw the
amusing side of things, and all humour in him had a strain of the
sardonic.

"Brothers-in-law for a day or two," answered Halby drily.

Within two hours they were ready to start.  Pierre had charged Duc the
incompetent upon matters for the old man's comfort, and had himself, with
a curious sort of kindness, steeped the boneset and camomile in whisky,
and set a cup of it near his chair.  Then he had gone up to Throng's
bedroom and straightened out and shook and "made" the corn-husk bed,
which had gathered into lumps and rolls.  Before he came down he opened
a door near by and entered another room, shutting the door, and sitting
down on a chair.  A stovepipe ran through the room, and it was warm,
though the window was frosted and the world seemed shut out.  He looked
round slowly, keenly interested.  There was a dressing-table made of an
old box; it was covered with pink calico, with muslin over this.  A cheap
looking-glass on it was draped with muslin and tied at the top with a bit
of pink ribbon.  A common bone comb lay near the glass, and beside it a
beautiful brush with an ivory back and handle.  This was the only
expensive thing in the room.  He wondered, but did not go near it yet.
There was a little eight-day clock on a bracket which had been made by
hand--pasteboard darkened with umber and varnished; a tiny little set of
shelves made of the wood of cigar-boxes; and--alas, the shifts of poverty
to be gay!--an easy-chair made of the staves of a barrel and covered with
poor chintz.  Then there was a photograph or two, in little frames made
from the red cedar of cigar-boxes, with decorations of putty, varnished,
and a long panel screen of birch-bark of Indian workmanship.  Some
dresses hung behind the door.  The bedstead was small, the frame was of
hickory, with no footboard, ropes making the support for the husk tick.
Across the foot lay a bedgown and a pair of stockings.

Pierre looked long, at first curiously; but after a little his forehead
gathered and his lips drew in a little, as if he had a twinge of pain.
He got up, went over near the bed, and picked up a hairpin.  Then he came
back to the chair and sat down, turning it about in his fingers, still
looking abstractedly at the floor.

"Poor Lucy!" he said presently; "the poor child!  Ah, what a devil I was
then--so long ago!"

This solitary room--Lydia's--had brought back the time he went to the
room of his own wife, dead by her own hand after an attempt to readjust
the broken pieces of life, and sat and looked at the place which had been
hers, remembering how he had left her with her wet face turned to the
wall, and never saw her again till she was set free for ever.  Since
that time he had never sat in a room sacred to a woman alone.

"What a fool, what a fool, to think!" he said at last, standing up; "but
this girl must be saved.  She must have her home here again."

Unconsciously he put the hairpin in his pocket, walked over to the
dressing-table and picked up the hair-brush.  On its back was the legend,
"L. T.  from C. H."  He gave a whistle.

"So-so?" he said, "'C. H.'  M'sieu' le capitaine, is it like that?"

A year before, Lydia had given Captain Halby a dollar to buy her a hair-
brush at Winnipeg, and he had brought her one worth ten dollars.  She had
beautiful hair, and what pride she had in using this brush!  Every Sunday
morning she spent a long time in washing, curling, and brushing her hair,
and every night she tended it lovingly, so that it was a splendid rich
brown like her eye, coiling nobly above her plain, strong face with its
good colour.

Pierre, glancing in the glass, saw Captain Halby's face looking over his
shoulder.  It startled him, and he turned round.  There was the face
looking out from a photograph that hung on the wall in the recess where
the bed was.  He noted now that the likeness hung where the girl could
see it the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning.

"So far as that, eh!" he said.  "And m'sieu' is a gentleman, too.  We
shall see what he will do: he has his chance now, once for all."

He turned, came to the door, softly opened it, passed out, and shut it,
then descended the stairs, and in half an hour was at the door with
Captain Halby, ready to start.  It was an exquisite winter day, even in
its bitter coldness.  The sun was shining clear and strong, all the
plains glistened and shook like quicksilver, and the vast blue cup of sky
seemed deeper than it had ever been.  But the frost ate the skin like an
acid, and when Throng came to the door Pierre drove him back instantly
from the air.

"I only-wanted--to say--to Liddy," hacked the old man, "that I'm
thinkin'--a little m'lasses 'd kinder help--the boneset an' camomile.
Tell her that the cattle 'll all be hers--an'--the house, an' I ain't
got no one but--"

But Pierre pushed him back and shut the door, saying: "I'll tell her what
a fool you are, Jimmy Throng."  The old man, as he sat down awkwardly in
his chair, with Duc stolidly lighting his pipe and watching him, said to
himself: "Yes, I be a durn fool; I be, I be!" over and over again.  And
when the dog got up from near the stove and came near to him, he added:
"I be, Touser; I be a durn fool, for I ought to ha' stole two or three,
an' then I'd not be alone, an' nothin' but sour bread an' pork to eat.
I ought to ha' stole three."

"Ah, Manette ought to have given you some of your own, it's true, that!"
said Duc stolidly.  "You never was a real father, Jim."

"Liddy got to look like me; she got to look like Manette and me, I tell
ye!" said the old man hoarsely.  Duc laughed in his stupid way.  "Look
like you?  Look like you, Jim, with a face to turn milk sour?  Ho, ho!"

Throng rose, his face purple with anger, and made as if to catch Duc by
the throat, but a fit of coughing seized him, and presently blood showed
on his lips.  Duc, with a rough gentleness, wiped off the blood and put
the whisky-and-herbs to the sick man's lips, saying, in a fatherly way:

"For why you do like that?  You're a fool, Jimmy!"

"I be, I be," said the old man in a whisper, and let his hand rest on
Duc's shoulder.

"I'll fix the bread sweet next time, Jimmy."

"No, no," said the husky voice peevishly.  "She'll do it--Liddy'll do it.
Liddy's comin'."

"All right, Jimmy.  All right."

After a moment Throng shook his head feebly and said, scarcely above a
whisper:

"But I be a durn fool--when she's not here."

Duc nodded and gave him more whisky and herbs.  "My feet's cold," said
the old man, and Duc wrapped a bearskin round his legs.



II

For miles Pierre and Halby rode without a word.  Then they got down and
walked for a couple of miles, to bring the blood into their legs again.

"The old man goes to By-by bientot," said Pierre at last.

"You don't think he'll last long?"

"Maybe ten days; maybe one.  If we don't get the girl, out goes his
torchlight straight."

"She's been very good to him."

"He's been on his knees to her all her life."

"There'll be trouble out of this, though."

"Pshaw!  The girl is her own master."

"I mean, someone will probably get hurt over there."  He nodded in the
direction of Fort O'Battle.

"That's in the game.  The girl is worth fighting for, hein?"

"Of course, and the law must protect her.  It's a free country."

"So true, my captain," murmured Pierre drily.  "It is wonderful what a
man will do for the law."

The tone struck Halby.  Pierre was scanning the horizon abstractedly.

"You are always hitting at the law," he said.  "Why do you stand by it
now?"

"For the same reason as yourself."

"What is that?"

"She has your picture in her room, she has my lucky dollar in her
pocket."

Halby's face flushed, and then he turned and looked steadily into
Pierre's eyes.

"We'd better settle this thing at once.  If you're going to Fort O'Battle
because you've set your fancy there, you'd better go back now.  That's
straight.  You and I can't sail in the same boat.  I'll go alone, so give
me the pistol."

Pierre laughed softly, and waved the hand back.  "T'sh!  What a high-
cock-a-lorum!  You want to do it all yourself--to fill the eye of the
girl alone, and be tucked away to By-by for your pains--mais, quelle
folie!  See: you go for law and love; I go for fun and Jimmy Throng.
The girl?  Pshaw!  she would come out right in the end, without you or
me.  But the old man with half a lung--that's different.  He must have
sweet bread in his belly when he dies, and the girl must make it for him.
She shall brush her hair with the ivory brush by Sunday morning."

Halby turned sharply.

"You've been spying," he said.  "You've been in her room--you--"

Pierre put out his hand and stopped the word on Halby's lips.

"Slow, slow," he said; "we are both--police to-day.  Voila! we must not
fight.  There is Throng and the girl to think of."  Suddenly, with a soft
fierceness, he added: "If I looked in her room, what of that?  In all the
North is there a woman to say I wrong her?  No.  Well, what if I carry
her room in my eye; does that hurt her or you?"

Perhaps something of the loneliness of the outlaw crept into Pierre's
voice for an instant, for Halby suddenly put a hand on his shoulder and
said: "Let's drop the thing, Pierre."

Pierre looked at him musingly.

"When Throng is put to By-by what will you do?" he asked.

"I will marry her, if she'll have me."

"But she is prairie-born, and you!"

"I'm a prairie-rider."

After a moment Pierre said, as if to himself: "So quiet and clean, and
the print calico and muslin, and the ivory brush!"

It is hard to say whether he was merely working on Halby that he be true
to the girl, or was himself softhearted for the moment.  He had a curious
store of legend and chanson, and he had the Frenchman's power of applying
them, though he did it seldom.  But now he said in a half monotone:

              "Have you seen the way I have built my nest?
                  (O brave and tall is the Grand Seigneur!)
               I have trailed the East, I have searched the West,
                  (O clear of eye is the Grand Seigneur!)
               From South and North I have brought the best:
               The feathers fine from an eagle's crest,
               The silken threads from a prince's vest,
               The warm rose-leaf from a maiden's breast
                  (O long he bideth, the Grand Seigneur!)."

They had gone scarce a mile farther when Pierre, chancing to turn round,
saw a horseman riding hard after them.  They drew up, and soon the man--
a Rider of the Plains--was beside them.  He had stopped at Throng's to
find Halby, and had followed them.  Murder had been committed near the
border, and Halby was needed at once.  Halby stood still, numb with
distress, for there was Lydia.  He turned to Pierre in dismay.  Pierre's
face lighted up with the spirit of fresh adventure.  Desperate
enterprises roused him; the impossible had a charm for him.

"I will go to Fort O'Battle," he said.  "Give me another pistol."

"You cannot do it alone," said Halby, hope, however, in his voice.

"I will do it, or it will do me, voila!" Pierre replied.  Halby passed
over a pistol.

"I'll never forget it, on my honour, if you do it," he said.

Pierre mounted his horse and said, as if a thought had struck him: "If I
stand for the law in this, will you stand against it some time for me?"

Halby hesitated, then said, holding out his hand, "Yes, if it's nothing
dirty."

Pierre smiled.  "Clean tit for clean tat," he said, touching Halby's
fingers, and then, with a gesture and an au revoir, put his horse to the
canter, and soon a surf of snow was rising at two points on the prairie,
as the Law trailed south and east.

That night Pierre camped in the Jim-a-long-Jo, finding there firewood in
plenty, and Tophet was made comfortable in the lean-to.  Within another
thirty hours he was hid in the woods behind Fort O'Battle, having
travelled nearly all night.  He saw the dawn break and the beginning of
sunrise as he watched the Fort, growing every moment colder, while his
horse trembled and whinnied softly, suffering also.  At last he gave a
little grunt of satisfaction, for he saw two men come out of the Fort and
go to the corral.  He hesitated a minute longer, then said: "I'll not
wait," patted his horse's neck, pulled the blanket closer round him, and
started for the Fort.  He entered the yard--it was empty.  He went to the
door of the Fort, opened it, entered, shut it, locked it softly, and put
the key in his pocket.  Then he passed through into a room at the end of
the small hallway.  Three men rose from seats by the fire as he did so,
and one said: "Hullo, who're you?"  Another added: "It's Pretty Pierre."

Pierre looked at the table laid for breakfast, and said: "Where's Lydia
Throng?"

The elder of the three brothers replied: "There's no Lydia Throng here.
There's Lydia Bontoff, though, and in another week she'll be Lydia
something else."

"What does she say about it herself?"  "You've no call to know."

"You stole her, forced her from Throng's-her father's house."

"She wasn't Throng's; she was a Bontoff--sister of us.

"Well, she says Throng, and Throng it's got to be."

"What have you got to say about it?"

At that moment Lydia appeared at the door leading from the kitchen.

"Whatever she has to say," answered Pierre.

"Who're you talking for?"

"For her, for Throng, for the law."

"The law--by gosh, that's good!  You, you darned gambler; you scum!"
said Caleb, the brother who knew him.

Pierre showed all the intelligent, resolute coolness of a trained officer
of the law.  He heard a little cry behind him, and stepping sideways, and
yet not turning his back on the men, he saw Lydia.

"Pierre!  Pierre!" she said in a half-frightened way, yet with a sort of
pleasure lighting up her face; and she stepped forward to him.  One of
the brothers was about to pull her away, but Pierre whipped out his
commission.  "Wait," he said.  "That's enough.  I'm for the law;
I belong to the mounted police.  I have come for the girl you stole."

The elder brother snatched the paper and read.  Then he laughed loud and
long.  "So you've come to fetch her away," he said, "and this is how you
do it!"--he shook the paper.  "Well, by--" Suddenly he stopped.  "Come,"
he said, "have a drink, and don't be a dam' fool.  She's our sister,--old
Throng stole her, and she's goin' to marry our partner.  Here, Caleb,
fish out the brandy-wine," he added to his younger brother, who went to a
cupboard and brought the bottle.

Pierre, waving the liquor away, said quietly to the girl: "You wish to go
back to your father, to Jimmy Throng?"  He then gave her Throng's
message, and added: "He sits there rocking in the big chair and coughing
--coughing!  And then there's the picture on the wall upstairs and the
little ivory brush--"

She put out her hands towards him.  "I hate them all here," she said.
"I never knew them.  They forced me away.  I have no father but Jimmy
Throng.  I will not stay," she flashed out in sudden anger to the others;
"I'll kill myself and all of you before I marry that Borotte."

Pierre could hear a man tramping about upstairs.  Caleb knocked on the
stove-pipe, and called to him to come down.  Pierre guessed it was
Borotte.  This would add one more factor to the game.  He must move at
once.  He suddenly slipped a pistol into the girl's hand, and with a
quick word to her, stepped towards the door.  The elder brother sprang
between--which was what he looked for.  By this time every man had a
weapon showing, snatched from wall and shelf.

Pierre was cool.  He said: "Remember, I am for the law.  I am not one
man.  You are thieves now; if you fight and kill, you will get the rope,
every one.  Move from the door, or I'll fire.  The girl comes with me."
He had heard a door open behind him, now there was an oath and a report,
and a bullet grazed his cheek and lodged in the wall beyond.  He dared
not turn round, for the other men were facing him.  He did not move, but
the girl did.  "Coward!" she said, and raised her pistol at Borotte,
standing with her back against Pierre's.

There was a pause, in which no one stirred, and then the girl, slowly
walking up to Borotte, her pistol levelled, said: "You low coward--to
shoot a man from behind; and you want to be a decent girl's husband!
These men that say they're my brothers are brutes, but you're a sneak.
If you stir a step I'll fire."

The cowardice of Borotte was almost ridiculous.  He dared not harm the
girl, and her brothers could not prevent her harming him.  Here there
came a knocking at the front door.  The other brothers had come, and
found it locked.  Pierre saw the crisis, and acted instantly.  "The girl
and I--we will fight you to the end," he said, "and then what's left of
you the law will fight to the end.  Come," he added, "the old man can't
live a week.  When he's gone then you can try again.  She will have what
he owns.  Quick, or I arrest you all, and then--"

"Let her go," said Borotte; "it ain't no use."  Presently the elder
brother broke out laughing.  "Damned if I thought the girl had the pluck,
an' damned if I thought Borotte was a crawler.  Put an eye out of him,
Liddy, an' come to your brother's arms.  Here," he added to the others,
"up with your popguns; this shindy's off; and the girl goes back till the
old man tucks up.  Have a drink," he added to Pierre, as he stood his
rifle in a corner and came to the table.

In half an hour Pierre and the girl were on their way, leaving Borotte
quarrelling with the brothers, and all drinking heavily.  The two arrived
at Throng's late the next afternoon.  There had been a slight thaw during
the day, and the air was almost soft, water dripping from the eaves down
the long icicles.

When Lydia entered, the old man was dozing in his chair.  The sound of an
axe out behind the house told where Duc was.  The whisky-and-herbs was
beside the sick man's chair, and his feet were wrapped about with
bearskins.  The girl made a little gesture of pain, and then stepped
softly over and, kneeling, looked into Throng's face.  The lips were
moving.

"Dad," she said, "are you asleep?"

"I be a durn fool, I be," he said in a whisper, and then he began to
cough.  She took his' hands.  They were cold, and she rubbed them softly.
"I feel so a'mighty holler," he said, gasping, "an' that bread's sour
agin."  He shook his head pitifully.

His eyes at last settled on her, and he recognised her.  He broke into a
giggling laugh; the surprise was almost too much for his feeble mind and
body.  His hands reached and clutched hers.  "Liddy!  Liddy!" he
whispered, then added peevishly, "the bread's sour, an' the boneset and
camomile's no good.  .  .  .  Ain't tomorrow bakin'-day?" he added.

"Yes, dad," she said, smoothing his hands.

"What damned--liars--they be--Liddy!  You're my gel, ain't ye?"

"Yes, dad.  I'll make some boneset liquor now."

"Yes, yes," he said, with childish eagerness and a weak, wild smile.

"That's it--that's it."

She was about to rise, but he caught her shoulder.  "I bin a good dad to
ye, hain't I, Liddy?" he whispered.

"Always."

"Never had no ma but Manette, did ye?"

"Never, dad."

"What danged liars they be!" he said, chuckling.  She kissed him, and
moved away to the fire to pour hot water and whisky on the herbs.

His eyes followed her proudly, shining like wet glass in the sun.  He
laughed--such a wheezing, soundless laugh!

"He!  he!  he!  I ain't no--durn--fool--bless--the Lord!" he said.

Then the shining look in his eyes became a grey film, and the girl turned
round suddenly, for the long, wheezy breathing had stopped.  She ran to
him, and, lifting up his head, saw the look that makes even the fool seem
wise in his cold stillness.  Then she sat down on the floor, laid her
head against the arm of his chair, and wept.

It was very quiet inside.  From without there came the twang of an axe,
and a man's voice talking to his horse.  When the man came in, he lifted
the girl up, and, to comfort her, bade her go look at a picture hanging
in her little room.  After she was gone he lifted the body, put it on a
couch, and cared for it.






THE PLUNDERER

It was no use: men might come and go before her, but Kitty Cline had
eyes for only one man.  Pierre made no show of liking her, and thought,
at first, that hers was a passing fancy.  He soon saw differently.  There
was that look in her eyes which burns conviction as deep as the furnace
from which it comes: the hot, shy, hungering look of desire; most
childlike, painfully infinite.  He would rather have faced the cold mouth
of a pistol; for he felt how it would end.  He might be beyond wish to
play the lover, but he knew that every man can endure being loved.  He
also knew that some are possessed--a dream, a spell, what you will--for
their life long.  Kitty Cline was one of these.

He thought he must go away, but he did not.  From the hour he decided to
stay misfortune began.  Willie Haslam, the clerk at the Company's Post,
had learned a trick or two at cards in the east, and imagined that he
could, as he said himself, "roast the cock o' the roost"--meaning Pierre.
He did so for one or two evenings, and then Pierre had a sudden increase
of luck (or design), and the lad, seeing no chance of redeeming the
I O U, representing two years' salary, went down to the house where Kitty
Cline lived, and shot himself on the door-step.

He had had the misfortune to prefer Kitty to the other girls at Guidon
Hill--though Nellie Sanger would have been as much to him, if Kitty had
been easier to win.  The two things together told hard against Pierre.
Before, he might have gone; in the face of difficulty he certainly would
not go.  Willie Haslam's funeral was a public function: he was young,
innocent-looking, handsome, and the people did not know what Pierre would
not tell now--that he had cheated grossly at cards.  Pierre was sure,
before Liddall, the surveyor, told him, that a movement was apace to
give him trouble--possibly fatal.

"You had better go," said Liddall.  "There's no use tempting Providence."

"They are tempting the devil," was the cool reply; "and that is not all
joy, as you shall see."

He stayed.  For a time there was no demonstration on either side.
He came and went through the streets, and was found at his usual haunts,
to observers as cool and nonchalant as ever.  He was a changed man,
however.  He never got away from the look in Kitty Cline's eyes.  He felt
the thing wearing on him, and he hesitated to speculate on the result;
but he knew vaguely that it would end in disaster.  There is a kind of
corrosion which eats the granite out of the blood, and leaves fever.

"What is the worst thing that can happen a man, eh?" he said to Liddall
one day, after having spent a few minutes with Kitty Cline.

Liddall was an honest man.  He knew the world tolerably well.  In writing
once to his partner in Montreal he had spoken of Pierre as "an admirable,
interesting scoundrel."  Once when Pierre called him "mon ami," and asked
him to come and spend an evening in his cottage, he said:

"Yes, I will go.  But--pardon me--not as your friend.  Let us be plain
with each other.  I never met a man of your stamp before--"

"A professional gambler--yes?  Bien?"

"You interest me; I like you; you have great cleverness--"

"A priest once told me I had a great brain-there is a difference.  Well?"

"You are like no man I ever met before.  Yours is a life like none
I ever knew.  I would rather talk with you than with any other man in the
country, and yet--"

"And yet you would not take me to your home?  That is all right.  I
expect nothing.  I accept the terms.  I know what I am and what you are.
I like men who are square.  You would go out of your way to do me a good
turn."

It was on his tongue to speak of Katy Cline, but he hesitated: it was not
fair to the girl, he thought, though what he had intended was for her
good.  He felt he had no right to assume that Liddall knew how things
were.  The occasion slipped by.

But the same matter had been in his mind when, later, he asked, "What is
the worst thing that can happen to a man?"

Liddall looked at him long, and then said: "To stand between two fires."

Pierre smiled: it was an answer after his own heart.  Liddall remembered
it very well in the future.

"What is the thing to do in such a case?" Pierre asked.

"It is not good to stand still."

"But what if you are stunned, or do not care?"

"You should care.  It is not wise to strain a situation."

Pierre rose, walked up and down the room once or twice, then stood still,
his arms folded, and spoke in a low tone.  "Once in the Rockies I was
lost.  I crept into a cave at night.  I knew it was the nest of some wild
animal; but I was nearly dead with hunger and fatigue.  I fell asleep.
When I woke--it was towards morning--I saw two yellow stars glaring where
the mouth of the cave had been.  They were all hate: like nothing you
could imagine: passion as it is first made--yes.  There was also a
rumbling sound.  It was terrible, and yet I was not scared.  Hate need
not disturb you.--I am a quick shot.  I killed that mountain lion, and I
ate the haunch of deer I dragged from under her .  .  .  "

He turned now, and, facing the doorway, looked out upon the village, to
the roof of a house which they both knew.  "Hate," he said, "is not the
most wonderful thing.  I saw a woman look once as though she could lose
the whole world--and her own soul.  She was a good woman.  The man was
bad--most: he never could be anything else.  A look like that breaks the
nerve.  It is not amusing.  In time the man goes to pieces.  But before
that comes he is apt to do strange things.  Eh-so!"

He sat down, and, with his finger, wrote musingly in the dust upon the
table.

Liddall looked keenly at him, and replied more brusquely than he felt:
"Do you think it fair to stay--fair to her?"

"What if I should take her with me?"  Pierre flashed a keen, searching
look after the words.

"It would be useless devilry."

"Let us drink," said Pierre, as he came to his feet quickly: "then for
the House of Lords" (the new and fashionable tavern).

They separated in the street, and Pierre went to the House of Lords
alone.  He found a number of men gathered before a paper pasted on a
pillar of the veranda.  Hearing his own name, he came nearer.  A ranch
man was reading aloud an article from a newspaper printed two hundred
miles away.  The article was headed, "A Villainous Plunderer."  It had
been written by someone at Guidon Hill.  All that was discreditable in
Pierre's life it set forth with rude clearness; he was credited with
nothing pardonable.  In the crowd there were mutterings unmistakable to
Pierre.  He suddenly came among them, caught a revolver from his pocket,
and shot over the reader's shoulder six times into the pasted strip of
newspaper.

The men dropped back.  They were not prepared for warlike measures at
the moment.  Pierre leaned his back against the pillar and waited.  His
silence and coolness, together with an iron fierceness in his face, held
them from instant demonstration against him; but he knew that he must
face active peril soon.  He pocketed his revolver and went up the hill to
the house of Kitty Cline's mother.  It was the first time he had ever
been there.  At the door he hesitated, but knocked presently, and was
admitted by Kitty, who, at sight of him, turned faint with sudden joy,
and grasped the lintel to steady herself.

Pierre quietly caught her about the waist, and shut the door.  She
recovered, and gently disengaged herself.  He made no further advance,
and they stood looking at each other for a minute: he, as one who had
come to look at something good he was never to see again; she, as at
something she hoped to see for ever.  They had never before been where
no eyes could observe them.  He ruled his voice to calmness.

"I am going away," he said, "and I have come to say good-bye."

Her eyes never wavered from his.  Her voice was scarce above a whisper.

"Why do you go?  Where are you going?"

"I have been here too long.  I am what they call a villain and a
plunderer.  I am going to-mon Dieu, I do not know!"  He shrugged his
shoulders, and smiled with a sort of helpless disdain.

She leaned her hands on the table before her.  Her voice was still that
low, clear murmur.

"What people say doesn't matter."  She staked her all upon her words.
She must speak them, though she might hate herself afterwards.  "Are you
going--alone?"

"Where I may have to go I must travel alone."

He could not meet her eyes now; he turned his head away.  He almost hoped
she would not understand.  "Sit down," he added; "I want to tell you of
my life."

He believed that telling it as he should, she would be horror-stricken,
and that the deep flame would die out of her eyes.  Neither he nor she
knew how long they sat there, he telling with grim precision of the life
he had led.  Her hands were clasped before her, and she shuddered once or
twice, so that he paused; but she asked him firmly to go on.

When all was told he stood up.  He could not see her face, but he heard
her say:

"You have forgotten many things that were not bad.  Let me say them."
She named things that would have done honour to a better man.  He was
standing in the moonlight that came through the window.  She stepped
forward, her hands quivering out to him.  "Oh, Pierre," she said, "I know
why you tell me this: but it makes no difference-none!  I will go with
you wherever you go."

He caught her hands in his.  She was stronger than he was now.  Her eyes
mastered him.  A low cry broke from him, and he drew her almost fiercely
into his arms.

"Pierre!  Pierre!" was all she could say.

He kissed her again and again upon the mouth.  As he did so, he heard
footsteps and muffled voices without.  Putting her quickly from him, he
sprang towards the door, threw it open, closed it behind him, and drew
his revolvers.  A half-dozen men faced him.  Two bullets whistled by his
head, and lodged in the door.  Then he fired swiftly, shot after shot,
and three men fell.  His revolvers were empty.  There were three men
left.  The case seemed all against him now, but just here a shot, and
then another, came from the window, and a fourth man fell.  Pierre sprang
upon one, the other turned and ran.  There was a short sharp struggle:
then Pierre rose up--alone.

The girl stood in the doorway.  "Come, my dear," he said,  you must go
with me now."

"Yes, Pierre," she cried, a mad light in her face, "I have killed men
too--for you."

Together they ran down the hillside, and made for the stables of the
Fort.  People were hurrying through the long street of the town, and
torches were burning, but they came by a roundabout to the stables
safely.  Pierre was about to enter, when a man came out.  It was Liddall.
He kept his horses there, and he had saddled one, thinking that Pierre
might need it.

There were quick words of explanation, and then, "Must the girl go too?"
he asked.  "It will increase the danger--besides--"

"I am going wherever he goes," she interrupted hoarsely.  "I have killed
men; he and I are the same now."

Without a word Liddall turned back, threw a saddle on another horse, and
led it out quickly.  "Which way?" he asked; "and where shall I find the
horses?"

"West to the mountains.  The horses you will find at Tete Blanche Hill,
if we get there.  If not, there is money under the white pine at my
cottage.  Goodbye!"

They galloped away.  But there were mounted men in the main street, and
one, well ahead of the others, was making towards the bridge over which
they must pass.  He reached it before they did, and set his horse
crosswise in its narrow entrance.  Pierre urged his mare in front of the
girl's, and drove straight at the head and shoulders of the obstructing
horse.  His was the heavier animal, and it bore the other down.  The
rider fired as he fell, but missed, and, in an instant, Pierre and the
girl were over.  The fallen man fired the second time, but again missed.
They had a fair start, but the open prairie was ahead of them, and there
was no chance to hide.  Riding must do all, for their pursuers were in
full cry.  For an hour they rode hard.  They could see their hunters not
very far in the rear.  Suddenly Pierre started and sniffed the air.

"The prairie's on fire," he said exultingly, defiantly.  Almost as he
spoke, clouds ran down the horizon, and then the sky lighted up.  The
fire travelled with incredible swiftness: they were hastening to meet it.
It came on wave-like, hurrying down at the right and the left as if to
close in on them.  The girl spoke no word; she had no fear: what Pierre
did she would do.  He turned round to see his pursuers: they had wheeled
and were galloping back the way they came.  His horse and hers were
travelling neck and neck.  He looked at her with an intense, eager gaze.

"Will you ride on?" he asked eagerly.  "We are between two fires."  He
smiled, remembering his words to Liddall.

"Ride on," she urged in a strong, clear voice, a kind of wild triumph in
it.  "You shall not go alone."

There ran into his eyes now the same infinite look that had been in hers
--that had conquered him.  The flame rolling towards them was not
brighter or hotter.

"For heaven or hell, my girl!" he cried, and they drove their horses on
--on.

Far behind upon a Divide the flying hunters from Guidon Hill paused for a
moment.  They saw with hushed wonder and awe a man and woman, dark and
weird against the red light, ride madly into the flickering surf of fire.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

All humour in him had a strain of the sardonic
In her heart she never can defy the world as does a man
Some wise men are fools, one way or another






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "ROMANY OF THE SNOWS":

A human life he held to be a trifle in the big sum of time
Advantage to live where nothing was required of her but truth
All humour in him had a strain of the sardonic
Bad turns good sometimes, when you know the how
Don't be too honest
Every shot that kills ricochets
Fear of one's own wife is the worst fear in the world
Have you ever felt the hand of your own child in yours
He never saw an insult unless he intended to avenge it
How can you judge the facts if you don't know the feeling?
In her heart she never can defy the world as does a man
Liars all men may be, but that's wid wimmin or landlords
Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy
Men are like dogs--they worship him who beats them
Not good to have one thing in the head all the time
Put the matter on your own hearthstone
Remember the sorrow of thine own wife
Secret of life: to keep your own commandments
She valued what others found useless
She had not suffered that sickness, social artifice
Solitude fixes our hearts immovably on things
Some people are rough with the poor--and proud
Some wise men are fools, one way or another
They whose tragedy lies in the capacity to suffer greatly
Think with the minds of twelve men, and the heart of one woman
When a man laugh in the sun and think nothing of evil
Women are half saints, half fools
Youth hungers for the vanities






NORTHERN LIGHTS, Complete

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 1.



CONTENTS

Volume 1.
A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS
ONCE AT RED MAN'S RIVER
THE STROKE OF THE HOUR
BUCKMASTER'S BOY

Volume 2.
TO-MORROW
QU'APPELLE
THE STAKE AND THE PLUMB-LINE

Volume 3.
WHEN THE SWALLOWS HOMEWARD FLY
GEORGE'S WIFE
MARCILE

Volume 4.
A MAN, A FAMINE, AND A HEATHEN BOY
THE HEALING SPRINGS AND THE PIONEERS
THE LITTLE WIDOW OF JANSEN
WATCHING THE RISE OF ORION

Volume 5.
THE ERROR OF THE DAY
THE WHISPERER
AS DEEP AS THE SEA




INTRODUCTION

This book, Northern Lights, belongs to an epoch which is a generation
later than that in which Pierre and His People moved. The conditions
under which Pierre and Shon McGann lived practically ended with the
advent of the railway.  From that time forwards, with the rise of towns
and cities accompanied by an amazing growth of emigration, the whole life
lost much of that character of isolation and pathetic loneliness which
marked the days of Pierre.  When, in 1905, I visited the Far West again
after many years, and saw the strange new life with its modern episode,
energy, and push, and realised that even the characteristics which marked
the period just before the advent, and just after the advent, of the
railway were disappearing, I determined to write a series of stories
which would catch the fleeting characteristics and hold something of the
old life, so adventurous, vigorous, and individual, before it passed
entirely and was forgotten.  Therefore, from 1905 to 1909, I kept drawing
upon all those experiences of others, from the true tales that had been
told me, upon the reminiscences of Hudson's Bay trappers and hunters, for
those incidents natural to the West which imagination could make true.
Something of the old atmosphere had gone, and there was a stir and a
murmur in all the West which broke that grim yet fascinating loneliness
of the time of Pierre.

Thus it is that Northern Lights is written in a wholly different style
from that of Pierre and His People, though here and there, as for
instance in A Lodge in the Wilderness, Once at Red Man's River, The
Stroke of the Hour, Qu'appelle, and Marcile, the old note sounds, and
something of the poignant mystery, solitude, and big primitive incident
of the earlier stories appears.  I believe I did well--at any rate for
myself and my purposes--in writing this book, and thus making the human
narrative of the Far West and North continuous from the time of the
sixties onwards.  So have I assured myself of the rightness of my
intention, that I shall publish a novel presently which will carry on
this human narrative of the West into still another stage-that of the
present, when railways are intersecting each other, when mills and
factories are being added to the great grain elevators in the West, and
when hundreds and thousands of people every year are moving across the
plains where, within my own living time, the buffalo ranged in their
millions, and the red men, uncontrolled, set up their tepees.




NOTE

The tales in this book belong to two different epochs in the life of the
Far West.  The first five are reminiscent of "border days and deeds"--
of days before the great railway was built which changed a waste into a
fertile field of civilisation.  The remaining stories cover the period
passed since the Royal North-West Mounted Police and the Pullman car
first startled the early pioneer, and sent him into the land of the
farther North, or drew him into the quiet circle of civic routine and
humdrum occupation.

G. P.




Volume 1.

A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS
ONCE AT RED MAN'S RIVER
THE STROKE OF THE HOUR
BUCKMASTER'S BOY




A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS

"Hai--Yai, so bright a day, so clear!" said Mitiahwe as she entered the
big lodge and laid upon a wide, low couch, covered with soft skins, the
fur of a grizzly which had fallen to her man's rifle.  "Hai-yai, I wish
it would last for ever--so sweet!" she added, smoothing the fur
lingeringly, and showing her teeth in a smile.

"There will come a great storm, Mitiahwe.  See, the birds go south so
soon," responded a deep voice from a corner by the doorway.

The young Indian wife turned quickly, and, in a defiant fantastic mood
--or was it the inward cry against an impending fate, the tragic future
of those who will not see, because to see is to suffer?--she made some
quaint, odd motions of the body which belonged to a mysterious dance of
her tribe, and, with flashing eyes, challenged the comely old woman
seated on a pile of deer-skins.

"It is morning, and the day will last for ever," she said nonchalantly,
but her eyes suddenly took on a faraway look, half apprehensive, half
wondering.  The birds were indeed going south very soon, yet had there
ever been so exquisite an autumn as this, had her man ever had so
wonderful a trade--her man with the brown hair, blue eyes, and fair,
strong face?

"The birds go south, but the hunters and buffalo still go north,"
Mitiahwe urged searchingly, looking hard at her mother--Oanita, the Swift
Wing.

"My dream said that the winter will be dark and lonely, that the ice will
be thick, the snow deep, and that many hearts will be sick because of the
black days and the hunger that sickens the heart," answered Swift Wing.

Mitiahwe looked into Swift Wing's dark eyes, and an anger came upon her.
"The hearts of cowards will freeze," she rejoined, "and to those that
will not see the sun the world will be dark," she added.  Then suddenly
she remembered to whom she was speaking, and a flood of feeling ran
through her; for Swift Wing had cherished her like a fledgeling in the
nest till her young white man came from "down East."  Her heart had leapt
up at sight of him, and she had turned to him from all the young men of
her tribe, waiting in a kind of mist till he, at last, had spoken to her
mother, and then one evening, her shawl over her head, she had come along
to his lodge.

A thousand times as the four years passed by she had thought how good it
was that she had become his wife--the young white man's wife, rather than
the wife of Breaking Rock, son of White Buffalo, the chief, who had four
hundred horses, and a face that would have made winter and sour days for
her.  Now and then Breaking Rock came and stood before the lodge, a
distance off, and stayed there hour after hour, and once or twice he came
when her man was with her; but nothing could be done, for earth and air
and space were common to them all, and there was no offence in Breaking
Rock gazing at the lodge where Mitiahwe lived.  Yet it seemed as though
Breaking Rock was waiting--waiting and hoping.  That was the impression
made upon all who saw him, and even old White Buffalo, the chief, shook
his head gloomily when he saw Breaking Rock, his son, staring at the big
lodge which was so full of happiness, and so full also of many luxuries
never before seen at a trading post on the Koonce River.  The father of
Mitiahwe had been chief, but because his three sons had been killed in
battle the chieftainship had come to White Buffalo, who was of the same
blood and family.  There were those who said that Mitiahwe should have
been chieftainess; but neither she nor her mother would ever listen to
this, and so White Buffalo, and the tribe loved Mitiahwe because of her
modesty and goodness.  She was even more to White Buffalo than Breaking
Rock, and he had been glad that Dingan the white man--Long Hand he was
called--had taken Mitiahwe for his woman.  Yet behind this gladness of
White Buffalo, and that of Swift Wing, and behind the silent watchfulness
of Breaking Rock, there was a thought which must ever come when a white
man mates with an Indian maid, without priest or preacher, or writing, or
book, or bond.

Yet four years had gone; and all the tribe, and all who came and went,
half-breeds, traders, and other tribes, remarked how happy was the white
man with his Indian wife.  They never saw anything but light in the eyes
of Mitiahwe, nor did the old women of the tribe who scanned her face as
she came and went, and watched and waited too for what never came--not
even after four years.

Mitiahwe had been so happy that she had not really missed what never
came; though the desire to have something in her arms which was part of
them both had flushed up in her veins at times, and made her restless
till her man had come home again.  Then she had forgotten the unseen for
the seen, and was happy that they two were alone together--that was the
joy of it all, so much alone together; for Swift Wing did not live with
them, and, like Breaking Rock, she watched her daughter's life, standing
afar off, since it was the unwritten law of the tribe that the wife's
mother must not cross the path or enter the home of her daughter's
husband.  But at last Dingan had broken through this custom, and insisted
that Swift Wing should be with her daughter when he was away from home,
as now on this wonderful autumn morning, when Mitiahwe had been singing
to the Sun, to which she prayed for her man and for everlasting days with
him.

She had spoken angrily but now, because her soul sharply resented the
challenge to her happiness which her mother had been making.  It was her
own eyes that refused to see the cloud, which the sage and bereaved woman
had seen and conveyed in images and figures of speech natural to the
Indian mind.

"Hai-yai," she said now, with a strange touching sigh breathing in the
words, "you are right, my mother, and a dream is a dream; also, if it be
dreamt three times, then is it to be followed, and it is true.  You have
lived long, and your dreams are of the Sun and the Spirit."  She shook a
little as she laid her hand on a buckskin coat of her man hanging by the
lodge-door; then she steadied herself again, and gazed earnestly into her
mother's eyes.  "Have all your dreams come true, my mother?" she asked
with a hungering heart.  "There was the dream that came out of the dark
five times, when your father went against the Crees, and was wounded, and
crawled away into the hills, and all our warriors fled--they were but a
handful, and the Crees like a young forest in number!  I went with my
dream, and found him after many days, and it was after that you were
born, my youngest and my last.  There was also"--her eyes almost closed,
and the needle and thread she held lay still in her lap--"when two of
your brothers were killed in the drive of the buffalo.  Did I not see it
all in my dream, and follow after them to take them to my heart?  And
when your sister was carried off, was it not my dream which saw the
trail, so that we brought her back again to die in peace, her eyes seeing
the Lodge whither she was going, open to her, and the Sun, the Father,
giving her light and promise--for she had wounded herself to die that the
thief who stole her should leave her to herself.  Behold, my daughter,
these dreams have I had, and others; and I have lived long and have seen
the bright day break into storm, and the herds flee into the far hills
where none could follow, and hunger come, and--"

"Hai-yo, see, the birds flying south," said the girl with a gesture
towards the cloudless sky.  "Never since I lived have they gone south so
soon."  Again she shuddered slightly, then she spoke slowly: "I also have
dreamed, and I will follow my dream.  I dreamed"--she knelt down beside
her mother, and rested her hands in her mother's lap--"I dreamed that
there was a wall of hills dark and heavy and far away, and that whenever
my eyes looked at them they burned with tears; and yet I looked and
looked, till my heart was like lead in my breast; and I turned from them
to the rivers and the plains that I loved.  But a voice kept calling to
me, 'Come, come!  Beyond the hills is a happy land.  The trail is hard,
and your feet will bleed, but beyond is the happy land.'  And I would not
go for the voice that spoke, and at last there came an old man in my
dream and spoke to me kindly, and said, 'Come with me, and I will show
thee the way over the hills to the Lodge where thou shalt find what thou
hast lost.'  And I said to him, 'I have lost nothing;' and I would not
go.  Twice I dreamed this dream, and twice the old man came, and three
times I dreamed it; and then I spoke angrily to him, as but now I did to
thee; and behold he changed before my eyes, and I saw that he was now
become--"she stopped short, and buried her face in her hands for a
moment, then recovered herself--"Breaking Rock it was, I saw before me,
and I cried out and fled.  Then I waked with a cry, but my man was beside
me, and his arm was round my neck; and this dream, is it not a foolish
dream, my mother?"

The old woman sat silent, clasping the hands of her daughter firmly, and
looking out of the wide doorway towards the trees that fringed the river;
and presently, as she looked, her face changed and grew pinched all at
once, and Mitiahwe, looking at her, turned a startled face towards the
river also.

"Breaking Rock!" she said in alarm, and got to her feet quickly.

Breaking Rock stood for a moment looking towards the lodge, then came
slowly forward to them.  Never in all the four years had he approached
this lodge of Mitiahwe, who, the daughter of a chief, should have married
himself, the son of a chief!  Slowly but with long slouching stride
Breaking Rock came nearer.  The two women watched him without speaking.
Instinctively they knew that he brought news, that something had
happened; yet Mitiahwe felt at her belt for what no Indian girl would be
without; and this one was a gift from her man, on the anniversary of the
day she first came to his lodge.

Breaking Rock was at the door now, his beady eyes fixed on Mitiahwe's,
his figure jerked to its full height, which made him, even then, two
inches less than Long Hand.  He spoke in a loud voice:

"The last boat this year goes down the river tomorrow.  Long Hand, your
man, is going to his people.  He will not come back.  He has had enough
of the Blackfoot woman.  You will see him no more."  He waved a hand to
the sky.  "The birds are going south.  A hard winter is coming quick.
You will be alone.  Breaking Rock is rich.  He has five hundred horses.
Your man is going to his own people.  Let him go.  He is no man.  It is
four years, and still there are but two in your lodge.  How!"

He swung on his heel with a chuckle in his throat, for he thought he had
said a good thing, and that in truth he was worth twenty white men.  His
quick ear caught a movement behind him, however, and he saw the girl
spring from the lodge door, something flashing from her belt.  But now
the mother's arms were round her, with cries of protest, and Breaking
Rock, with another laugh, slipped away swiftly toward the river.

"That is good," he muttered.  "She will kill him perhaps, when she goes
to him.  She will go, but he will not stay.  I have heard."

As he disappeared among the trees Mitiahwe disengaged herself from her
mother's arms, went slowly back into the lodge, and sat down on the great
couch where, for so many moons, she had lain with her man beside her.

Her mother watched her closely, though she moved about doing little
things.  She was trying to think what she would have done if such a thing
had happened to her, if her man had been going to leave her.  She assumed
that Dingan would leave Mitiahwe, for he would hear the voices of his
people calling far away, even as the red man who went East into the great
cities heard the prairies and the mountains and the rivers and his own
people calling, and came back, and put off the clothes of civilisation,
and donned his buckskins again, and sat in the Medicine Man's tent, and
heard the spirits speak to him through the mist and smoke of the sacred
fire.  When Swift Wing first gave her daughter to the white man she
foresaw the danger now at hand, but this was the tribute of the lower
race to the higher, and--who could tell!  White men had left their Indian
wives, but had come back again, and for ever renounced the life of their
own nations, and become great chiefs, teaching useful things to their
adopted people, bringing up their children as tribesmen--bringing up
their children!  There it was, the thing which called them back, the
bright-eyed children with the colour of the brown prairie in their faces,
and their brains so sharp and strong.  But here was no child to call
Dingan back, only the eloquent, brave, sweet face of Mitiahwe.  .  .  .
If he went!  Would he go?  Was he going?  And now that Mitiahwe had been
told that he would go, what would she do?  In her belt was--but, no, that
would be worse than all, and she would lose Mitiahwe, her last child, as
she had lost so many others.  What would she herself do if she were in
Mitiahwe's place?  Ah, she would make him stay somehow--by truth or by
falsehood; by the whispered story in the long night, by her head upon his
knee before the lodge-fire, and her eyes fixed on his, luring him, as the
Dream lures the dreamer into the far trail, to find the Sun's hunting-
ground where the plains are filled with the deer and the buffalo and the
wild horse; by the smell of the cooking-pot and the favourite spiced
drink in the morning; by the child that ran to him with his bow and
arrows and the cry of the hunter--but there was no child; she had
forgotten.  She was always recalling her own happy early life with her
man, and the clean-faced papooses that crowded round his knee--one wife
and many children, and the old Harvester of the Years reaping them so
fast, till the children stood up as tall as their father and chief.  That
was long ago, and she had had her share--twenty-five years of happiness;
but Mitiahwe had had only four.  She looked at Mitiahwe, standing still
for a moment like one rapt, then suddenly she gave a little cry.
Something had come into her mind, some solution of the problem,
and she ran and stooped over the girl and put both hands on her head.

"Mitiahwe, heart's blood of mine," she said, "the birds go south, but
they return.  What matter if they go so soon, if they return soon.  If
the Sun wills that the winter be dark, and he sends the Coldmaker to
close the rivers and drive the wild ones far from the arrow and the gun,
yet he may be sorry, and send a second summer--has it not been so, and
Coldmaker has hurried away--away!  The birds go south, but they will
return, Mitiahwe."

"I heard a cry in the night while my man slept," Mitiahwe answered,
looking straight before her, "and it was like the cry of a bird-calling,
calling, calling."

"But he did not hear--he was asleep beside Mitiahwe.  If he did not wake,
surely it was good luck.  Thy breath upon his face kept him sleeping.
Surely it was good luck to Mitiahwe that he did not hear."

She was smiling a little now, for she had thought of a thing which would,
perhaps, keep the man here in this lodge in the wilderness; but the time
to speak of it was not yet.  She must wait and see.

Suddenly Mitiahwe got to her feet with a spring, and a light in her eyes.
"Hai-yai!" she said with plaintive smiling, ran to a corner of the
lodge, and from a leather bag drew forth a horse-shoe and looked at it,
murmuring to herself.

The old woman gazed at her wonderingly.  "What is it, Mitiahwe?" she
asked.

"It is good-luck.  So my man has said.  It is the way of his people.
It is put over the door, and if a dream come it is a good dream; and if a
bad thing come, it will not enter; and if the heart prays for a thing hid
from all the world, then it brings good-luck.  Hai-yai!  I will put it
over the door, and then--"All at once her hand dropped to her side, as
though some terrible thought had come to her, and, sinking to the floor,
she rocked her body backward and forward for a time, sobbing.  But
presently she got to her feet again, and, going to the door of the lodge,
fastened the horseshoe above it with a great needle and a string of
buckskin.

"Oh great Sun," she prayed, "have pity on me and save me!  I cannot live
alone.  I am only a Blackfoot wife; I am not blood of his blood.  Give,
O great one, blood of his blood, bone of his bone, soul of his soul, that
he will say, This is mine, body of my body, and he will hear the cry and
will stay.  O great Sun, pity me!"  The old woman's heart beat faster as
she listened.  The same thought was in the mind of both.  If there were
but a child, bone of his bone, then perhaps he would not go; or, if he
went, then surely he would return, when he heard his papoose calling in
the lodge in the wilderness.

As Mitiahwe turned to her, a strange burning light in her eyes, Swift
Wing said: "It is good.  The white man's Medicine for a white man's wife.
But if there were the red man's Medicine too--"

"What is the red man's Medicine?" asked the young wife, as she smoothed
her hair, put a string of bright beads around her neck, and wound a red
sash round her waist.

The old woman shook her head, a curious half-mystic light in her eyes,
her body drawn up to its full height, as though waiting for something.
"It is an old Medicine.  It is of winters ago as many as the hairs of the
head.  I have forgotten almost, but it was a great Medicine when there
were no white men in the land.  And so it was that to every woman's
breast there hung a papoose, and every woman had her man, and the red men
were like leaves in the forest--but it was a winter of winters ago, and
the Medicine Men have forgotten; and thou hast no child!  When Long Hand
comes, what will Mitiahwe say to him?"

Mitiahwe's eyes were determined, her face was set, she flushed deeply,
then the colour fled.  "What my mother would say, I will say.  Shall the
white man's Medicine fail?  If I wish it, then it will be so: and I will
say so."

"But if the white man's Medicine fail?"--Swift Wing made a gesture toward
the door where the horse-shoe hung.  "It is Medicine for a white man,
will it be Medicine for an Indian?"

"Am I not a white man's wife?"

"But if there were the Sun Medicine also, the Medicine of the days long
ago?"

"Tell me.  If you remember--Kai!  but you do remember--I see it in your
face.  Tell me, and I will make that Medicine also, my mother."

"To-morrow, if I remember it--I will think, and if I remember it,
to-morrow I will tell you, my heart's blood.  Maybe my dream will come
to me and tell me.  Then, even after all these years, a papoose--"

"But the boat will go at dawn to-morrow, and if he go also--"

"Mitiahwe is young, her body is warm, her eyes are bright, the songs she
sings, her tongue--if these keep him not, and the Voice calls him still
to go, then still Mitiahwe shall whisper, and tell him--"

"Hai-yo-hush," said the girl, and trembled a little, and put both hands
on her mother's mouth.

For a moment she stood so, then with an exclamation suddenly turned and
ran through the doorway, and sped toward the river, and into the path
which would take her to the post, where her man traded with the Indians
and had made much money during the past six years, so that he could have
had a thousand horses and ten lodges like that she had just left.  The
distance between the lodge and the post was no more than a mile, but
Mitiahwe made a detour, and approached it from behind, where she could
not be seen.  Darkness was gathering now, and she could see the glimmer
of the light of lamps through the windows, and as the doors opened and
shut.  No one had seen her approach, and she stole through a door which
was open at the rear of the warehousing room, and went quickly to another
door leading into the shop.  There was a crack through which she could
see, and she could hear all that was said.  As she came she had seen
Indians gliding through the woods with their purchases, and now the shop
was clearing fast, in response to the urging of Dingan and his partner,
a Scotch half-breed.  It was evident that Dingan was at once abstracted
and excited.

Presently only two visitors were left, a French halfbreed call Lablache,
a swaggering, vicious fellow, and the captain of the steamer, Ste. Anne,
which was to make its last trip south in the morning--even now it would
have to break its way through the young ice.  Dingan's partner dropped a
bar across the door of the shop, and the four men gathered about the
fire.  For a time no one spoke.  At last the captain of the Ste. Anne
said: "It's a great chance, Dingan.  You'll be in civilisation again, and
in a rising town of white people--Groise 'll be a city in five years, and
you can grow up and grow rich with the place.  The Company asked me to
lay it all before you, and Lablache here will buy out your share of the
business, at whatever your partner and you prove its worth.  You're
young; you've got everything before you.  You've made a name out here for
being the best trader west of the Great Lakes, and now's your time.  It's
none of my affair, of course, but I like to carry through what I'm set to
do, and the Company said, 'You bring Dingan back with you.  The place is
waiting for him, and it can't wait longer than the last boat down.'
You're ready to step in when he steps out, ain't you, Lablache?"

Lablache shook back his long hair, and rolled about in his pride.  "I
give him cash for his share to-night someone is behin' me, share, yes!
It is worth so much, I pay and step in--I take the place over.  I take
half the business here, and I work with Dingan's partner.  I take your
horses, Dingan, I take you lodge, I take all in your lodge--everyt'ing."

His eyes glistened, and a red spot came to each cheek as he leaned
forward.  At his last word Dingan, who had been standing abstractedly
listening, as it were, swung round on him with a muttered oath, and the
skin of his face appeared to tighten.  Watching through the crack of the
door, Mitiahwe saw the look she knew well, though it had never been
turned on her, and her heart beat faster.  It was a look that came into
Dingan's face whenever Breaking Rock crossed his path, or when one or two
other names were mentioned in his presence, for they were names of men
who had spoken of Mitiahwe lightly, and had attempted to be jocular about
her.

As Mitiahwe looked at him, now unknown to himself, she was conscious of
what that last word of Lablache's meant.  Everyt'ing meant herself.
Lablache--who had neither the good qualities of the white man nor the
Indian, but who had the brains of the one and the subtilty of the other,
and whose only virtue was that he was a successful trader, though he
looked like a mere woodsman, with rings in his ears, gaily decorated
buckskin coat and moccasins, and a furtive smile always on his lips!
Everyt'ing!--Her blood ran cold at the thought of dropping the lodge-
curtain upon this man and herself alone.  For no other man than Dingan
had her blood run faster, and he had made her life blossom.  She had seen
in many a half-breed's and in many an Indian's face the look which was
now in that of Lablache, and her fingers gripped softly the thing in her
belt that had flashed out on Breaking Rock such a short while ago.  As
she looked, it seemed for a moment as though Dingan would open the door
and throw Lablache out, for in quick reflection his eyes ran from the man
to the wooden bar across the door.

"You'll talk of the shop, and the shop only, Lablache," Dingan said
grimly.  "I'm not huckstering my home, and I'd choose the buyer if I was
selling.  My lodge ain't to be bought, nor anything in it--not even the
broom to keep it clean of any half-breeds that'd enter it without leave."

There was malice in the words, but there was greater malice in the tone,
and Lablache, who was bent on getting the business, swallowed his ugly
wrath, and determined that, if he got the business, he would get the
lodge also in due time; for Dingan, if he went, would not take the lodge-
or the woman with him; and Dingan was not fool enough to stay when he
could go to Groise to a sure fortune.

The captain of the Ste. Anne again spoke.  "There's another thing the
Company said, Dingan.  You needn't go to Groise, not at once.  You can
take a month and visit your folks down East, and lay in a stock of home-
feelings before you settle down at Groise for good.  They was fair when I
put it to them that you'd mebbe want to do that.  'You tell Dingan,' they
said, 'that he can have the month glad and grateful, and a free ticket on
the railway back and forth.  He can have it at once,' they said."

Watching, Mitiahwe could see her man's face brighten, and take on a look
of longing at this suggestion; and it seemed to her that the bird she
heard in the night was calling in his ears now.  Her eyes went blind a
moment.

"The game is with you, Dingan.  All the cards are in your hands; you'll
never get such another chance again; and you're only thirty," said the
captain.

"I wish they'd ask me," said Dingan's partner with a sigh, as he looked
at Lablache.  "I want my chance bad, though we've done well here--good
gosh, yes, all through Dingan."

"The winters, they go queeck in Groise," said Lablache.  "It is life all
the time, trade all the time, plenty to do and see--and a bon fortune to
make, bagosh!"

"Your old home was in Nove Scotia, wasn't it, Dingan?" asked the captain
in a low voice.  "I kem from Connecticut, and I was East to my village
las' year.  It was good seein' all my old friends again; but I kem back
content, I kem back full of home-feelin's and content.  You'll like the
trip, Dingan.  It'll do you good."  Dingan drew himself up with a start.
"All right.  I guess I'll do it.  Let's figure up again," he said to his
partner with a reckless air.

With a smothered cry Mitiahwe turned and fled into the darkness, and back
to the lodge.  The lodge was empty.  She threw herself upon the great
couch in an agony of despair.

A half-hour went by.  Then she rose, and began to prepare supper.  Her
face was aflame, her manner was determined, and once or twice her hand
went to her belt, as though to assure herself of something.

Never had the lodge looked so bright and cheerful; never had she prepared
so appetising a supper; never had the great couch seemed so soft and rich
with furs, so homelike and so inviting after a long day's work.  Never
had Mitiahwe seemed so good to look at, so graceful and alert and
refined--suffering does its work even in the wild woods, with "wild
people."  Never had the lodge such an air of welcome and peace and home
as to-night; and so Dingan thought as he drew aside the wide curtains of
deerskin and entered.

Mitiahwe was bending over the fire and appeared not to hear him.
"Mitiahwe," he said gently.

She was singing to herself to an Indian air the words of a song Dingan
had taught her:

    "Open the door: cold is the night, and my feet are heavy,
     Heap up the fire, scatter upon it the cones and the scented leaves;
     Spread the soft robe on the couch for the chief that returns,
     Bring forth the cup of remembrance--"

It was like a low recitative, and it had a plaintive cadence, as of a
dove that mourned.

"Mitiahwe," he said in a louder voice, but with a break in it too; for it
all rushed upon him, all that she had been to him--all that had made the
great West glow with life, made the air sweeter, the grass greener, the
trees more companionable and human: who it was that had given the waste
places a voice.  Yet--yet, there were his own people in the East, there
was another life waiting for him, there was the life of ambition and
wealth, and, and home--and children.

His eyes were misty as she turned to him with a little cry of surprise,
how much natural and how much assumed--for she had heard him enter--it
would have been hard to say.  She was a woman, and therefore the daughter
of pretence even when most real.  He caught her by both arms as she shyly
but eagerly came to him.  "Good girl, good little girl," he said.  He
looked round him.  "Well, I've never seen our lodge look nicer than it
does to-night; and the fire, and the pot on the fire, and the smell of
the pine-cones, and the cedar-boughs, and the skins, and--"

"And everything," she said, with a queer little laugh, as she moved away
again to turn the steaks on the fire.  Everything!  He started at the
word.  It was so strange that she should use it by accident, when but a
little while ago he had been ready to choke the wind out of a man's body
for using it concerning herself.

It stunned him for a moment, for the West, and the life apart from the
world of cities, had given him superstition, like that of the Indians,
whose life he had made his own.

Herself--to leave her here, who had been so much to him?  As true as the
sun she worshipped, her eyes had never lingered on another man since she
came to his lodge; and, to her mind, she was as truly sacredly married to
him as though a thousand priests had spoken, or a thousand Medicine Men
had made their incantations.  She was his woman and he was her man.  As
he chatted to her, telling her of much that he had done that day, and
wondering how he could tell her of all he had done, he kept looking round
the lodge, his eye resting on this or that; and everything had its own
personal history, had become part of their lodge-life, because it had a
use as between him and her, and not a conventional domestic place.  Every
skin, every utensil, every pitcher and bowl and pot and curtain, had been
with them at one time or another, when it became of importance and
renowned in the story of their days and deeds.

How could he break it to her--that he was going to visit his own people,
and that she must be alone with her mother all winter, to await his
return in the spring?  His return?  As he watched her sitting beside him,
helping him to his favourite dish, the close, companionable trust and
gentleness of her, her exquisite cleanness and grace in his eyes, he
asked himself if, after all, it was not true that he would return in the
spring.  The years had passed without his seriously thinking of this
inevitable day.  He had put it off and off, content to live each hour as
it came and take no real thought for the future; and yet, behind all was
the warning fact that he must go one day, and that Mitiahwe could not go
with him.  Her mother must have known that when she let Mitiahwe come to
him.  Of course; and, after all, she would find another mate, a better
mate, one of her own people.

But her hand was in his now, and it was small and very warm, and suddenly
he shook with anger at the thought of one like Breaking Rock taking her
to his wigwam; or Lablache--this roused him to an inward fury; and
Mitiahwe saw and guessed the struggle that was going on in him, and she
leaned her head against his shoulder, and once she raised his hand to her
lips, and said, "My chief!"

Then his face cleared again, and she got him his pipe and filled it, and
held a coal to light it; and, as the smoke curled up, and he leaned back
contentedly for the moment, she went to the door, drew open the curtains,
and, stepping outside, raised her eyes to the horseshoe.  Then she said
softly to the sky: "O Sun, great Father, have pity on me, for I love him,
and would keep him.  And give me bone of his bone, and one to nurse at my
breast that is of him.  O Sun, pity me this night, and be near me when I
speak to him, and hear what I say!"

"What are you doing out there, Mitiahwe?" Dingan cried; and when she
entered again he beckoned her to him.  "What was it you were saying?  Who
were you speaking to?" he asked.  "I heard your voice."

"I was thanking the Sun for his goodness to me.  I was speaking for the
thing that is in my heart, that is life of my life," she added vaguely.

"Well, I have something to say to you, little girl," he said, with an
effort.

She remained erect before him waiting for the blow--outwardly calm,
inwardly crying out in pain.  "Do you think you could stand a little
parting?" he asked, reaching out and touching her shoulder.

"I have been alone before--for five days," she answered quietly.

"But it must be longer this time."

"How long?" she asked, with eyes fixed on his.  "If it is more than a
week I will go too."

"It is longer than a month," he said.  "Then I will go."

"I am going to see my people," he faltered.

"By the Ste. Anne?"

He nodded.  "It is the last chance this year; but I will come back--
in the spring."

As he said it he saw her shrink, and his heart smote him.  Four years
such as few men ever spent, and all the luck had been with him, and the
West had got into his bones!  The quiet, starry nights, the wonderful
days, the hunt, the long journeys, the life free of care, and the warm
lodge; and, here, the great couch--ah, the cheek pressed to his, the lips
that whispered at his ear, the smooth arm round his neck.  It all rushed
upon him now.  His people?  His people in the East, who had thwarted his
youth, vexed and cramped him, saw only evil in his widening desires, and
threw him over when he came out West--the scallywag, they called him, who
had never wronged a man or-or a woman!  Never--wronged-a-woman?  The
question sprang to his lips now.  Suddenly he saw it all in a new light.
White or brown or red, this heart and soul and body before him were all
his, sacred to him; he was in very truth her "Chief."

Untutored as she was, she read him, felt what was going on in him.  She
saw the tears spring to his eyes.  Then, coming close to him she said
softly, slowly: "I must go with you if you go, because you must be with
me when--oh, hai-yai, my chief, shall we go from here?  Here in this
lodge wilt thou be with thine own people--thine own, thou and I--and
thine to come."  The great passion in her heart made the lie seem very
truth.

With a cry he got to his feet, and stood staring at her for a moment,
scarcely comprehending; then suddenly he clasped her in his arms.

"Mitiahwe--Mitiahwe, oh, my little girl!" he cried.  "You and me--and
our own--our own people!"  Kissing her, he drew her down beside him on
the couch.  "Tell me again--it is so at last?" he said, and she
whispered in his ear once more.

In the middle of the night he said to her, "Some day, perhaps, we will
go East--some day, perhaps."

"But now?" she asked softly.

"Not now--not if I know it," he answered.  "I've got my heart nailed to
the door of this lodge."

As he slept she got quietly out, and, going to the door of the lodge,
reached up a hand and touched the horse-shoe.

"Be good Medicine to me," she said.  Then she prayed.  "O Sun, pity me
that it may be as I have said to him.  O pity me, great Father!"

In the days to come Swift Wing said that it was her Medicine; when her
hand was burned to the wrist in the dark ritual she had performed with
the Medicine Man the night that Mitiahwe fought for her man--but Mitiahwe
said it was her Medicine, the horse-shoe, which brought one of Dingan's
own people to the lodge, a little girl with Mitiahwe's eyes and form and
her father's face.  Truth has many mysteries, and the faith of the woman
was great; and so it was that, to the long end, Mitiahwe kept her man.
But truly she was altogether a woman, and had good fortune.






ONCE AT RED MAN'S RIVER

"It's got to be settled to-night, Nance.  This game is up here, up for
ever.  The redcoat police from Ottawa are coming, and they'll soon be
roostin' in this post; the Injuns are goin', the buffaloes are most gone,
and the fur trade's dead in these parts.  D'ye see?"

The woman did not answer the big, broad-shouldered man bending over her,
but remained looking into the fire with wide, abstracted eyes and a face
somewhat set.

"You and your brother Bantry's got to go.  This store ain't worth a cent
now.  The Hudson's Bay Company'll come along with the redcoats, and
they'll set up a nice little Sunday-school business here for what they
call 'agricultural settlers.'  There'll be a railway, and the Yankees'll
send up their marshals to work with the redcoats on the border, and--"

"And the days of smuggling will be over," put in the girl in a low voice.
"No more bull-wackers and muleskinners 'whooping it up'; no more
Blackfeet and Piegans drinking alcohol and water, and cutting each
others' throats.  A nice quiet time coming on the border, Abe, eh?"

The man looked at her queerly.  She was not prone to sarcasm, she had not
been given to sentimentalism in the past; she had taken the border-life
as it was, had looked it straight between the eyes.  She had lived up to
it, or down to it, without any fuss, as good as any man in any phase of
the life, and the only white woman in this whole West country.  It was
not in the words, but in the tone, that Abe Hawley found something
unusual and defamatory.

"Why, gol darn it, Nance, what's got into you?  You bin a man out West,
as good a pioneer as ever was on the border.  But now you don't sound
friendly to what's been the game out here, and to all of us that've been
risking our lives to get a livin'."

"What did I say?" asked the girl, unmoved.

"It ain't what you said, it's the sound o' your voice."

"You don't know my voice, Abe.  It ain't always the same.  You ain't
always about; you don't always hear it."

He caught her arm suddenly.  "No, but I want to hear it always.  I want
to be always where you are, Nance.  That's what's got to be settled
to-day--to-night."

"Oh, it's got to be settled to-night!" said the girl meditatively,
kicking nervously at a log on the fire.  "It takes two to settle a thing
like that, and there's only one says it's got to be settled.  Maybe it
takes more than two--or three--to settle a thing like that."  Now she
laughed mirthlessly.

The man started, and his face flushed with anger; then he put a hand on
himself, drew a step back, and watched her.

"One can settle a thing, if there's a dozen in it.  You see, Nance, you
and Bantry's got to close out.  He's fixing it up to-night over at
Dingan's Drive, and you can't go it alone when you quit this place.  Now,
it's this way: you can go West with Bantry, or you can go North with me.
Away North there's buffalo and deer, and game aplenty, up along the
Saskatchewan, and farther up on the Peace River.  It's going to be all
right up there for half a lifetime, and we can have it in our own way
yet.  There'll be no smuggling, but there'll be trading, and land to get;
and, mebbe, there'd be no need of smuggling, for we can make it, I know
how--good white whiskey--and we'll still have this free life for our own.
I can't make up my mind to settle down to a clean collar and going to
church on Sundays, and all that.  And the West's in your bones too.  You
look like the West--"

The girl's face brightened with pleasure, and she gazed at him steadily.

"You got its beauty and its freshness, and you got its heat and cold--"

She saw the tobacco-juice stain at the corners of his mouth, she became
conscious of the slight odour of spirits in the air, and the light in her
face lowered in intensity.

"You got the ways of the deer in your walk, the song o' the birds in your
voice; and you're going North with me, Nance, for I bin talkin' to you
stiddy four years.  It's a long time to wait on the chance, for there's
always women to be got, same as others have done--men like Dingan with
Injun girls, and men like Tobey with half-breeds.  But I ain't bin
lookin' that way.  I bin lookin' only towards you."  He laughed eagerly,
and lifted a tin cup of whiskey standing on a table near.  "I'm lookin'
towards you now, Nance.  Your health and mine together.  It's got to be
settled now.  You got to go to the 'Cific Coast with Bantry, or North
with me."

The girl jerked a shoulder and frowned a little.  He seemed so sure of
himself.

"Or South with Nick Pringle, or East with someone else," she said
quizzically.  "There's always four quarters to the compass, even when Abe
Hawley thinks he owns the world and has a mortgage on eternity.  I'm not
going West with Bantry, but there's three other points that's open."

With an oath the man caught her by the shoulders, and swung her round to
face him.  He was swelling with anger.  "You--Nick Pringle, that trading
cheat, that gambler!  After four years, I--"

"Let go my shoulders," she said quietly.  "I'm not your property.  Go and
get some Piegan girl to bully.  Keep your hands off.  I'm not a bronco
for you to bit and bridle.  You've got no rights.  You--"  Suddenly she
relented, seeing the look in his face, and realising that, after all, it
was a tribute to herself that she could keep him for four years and rouse
him to such fury--"but yes, Abe," she added, "you have some rights.
We've been good friends all these years, and you've been all right out
here.  You said some nice things about me just now, and I liked it, even
if it was as if you learned it out of a book.  I've got no po'try in me;
I'm plain homespun.  I'm a sapling, I'm not any prairie-flower, but I
like when I like, and I like a lot when I like.  I'm a bit of hickory,
I'm not a prairie-flower--"

"Who said you was a prairie-flower?  Did I?  Who's talking about prairie-
flowers--"

He stopped suddenly, turned round at the sound of a footstep behind him,
and saw, standing in a doorway leading to another room, a man who was
digging his knuckles into his eyes and stifling a yawn.  He was a
refined-looking stripling of not more than twenty-four, not tall, but
well made, and with an air of breeding, intensified rather than hidden by
his rough clothes.

"Je-rick-ety!  How long have I slept?" he said, blinking at the two
beside the fire.  "How long?" he added, with a flutter of anxiety in his
tone.

"I said I'd wake you," said the girl, coming forwards.  "You needn't have
worried."

"I don't worry," answered the young man.  "I dreamed myself awake, I
suppose.  I got dreaming of redcoats and U. S. marshals, and an ambush in
the Barfleur Coulee, and--" He saw a secret, warning gesture from the
girl, and laughed, then turned to Abe and looked him in the face.  "Oh, I
know him!  Abe Hawley's all O. K.--I've seen him over at Dingan's Drive.
Honour among rogues.  We're all in it.  How goes it--all right?" he added
carelessly to Hawley, and took a step forwards, as though to shake hands.
Seeing the forbidding look by which he was met, however, he turned to the
girl again, as Hawley muttered something they could not hear.

"What time is it?" he asked.

"It's nine o'clock," answered the girl, her eyes watching his every
movement, her face alive.

"Then the moon's up almost?"

"It'll be up in an hour."

"Jerickety!  Then I've got to get ready."  He turned to the other room
again and entered.

"College pup!" said Hawley under his breath savagely.  "Why didn't you
tell me he was here?"

"Was it any of your business, Abe?" she rejoined quietly.

"Hiding him away here--"

"Hiding?  Who's been hiding him?  He's doing what you've done.  He's
smuggling--the last lot for the traders over by Dingan's Drive.  He'll
get it there by morning.  He has as much right here as you.  What's got
into you, Abe?"

"What does he know about the business?  Why, he's a college man from the
East.  I've heard o' him.  Ain't got no more sense for this life than a
dicky-bird.  White-faced college pup!  What's he doing out here?  If
you're a friend o' his, you'd better look after him.  He's green."

"He's going East again," she said, "and if I don't go West with Bantry,
or South over to Montana with Nick Pringle, or North--"

"Nancy--"  His eyes burned, his lips quivered.

She looked at him and wondered at the power she had over this bully of
the border, who had his own way with most people, and was one of the most
daring fighters, hunters, and smugglers in the country.  He was cool,
hard, and well-in-hand in his daily life, and yet, where she was
concerned, "went all to pieces," as someone else had said about himself
to her.

She was not without the wiles and tact of her sex.  "You go now, and come
back, Abe," she said in a soft voice.  "Come back in an hour.  Come back
then, and I'll tell you which way I'm going from here."

He was all right again.  "It's with you, Nancy," he said eagerly.  "I bin
waiting four years."

As he closed the door behind him the "college pup" entered the room
again.  "Oh, Abe's gone!" he said excitedly.  "I hoped you'd get rid of
the old rip-roarer.  I wanted to be alone with you for a while.  I don't
really need to start yet.  With the full moon I can do it before
daylight."  Then, with quick warmth, "Ah, Nancy, Nancy, you're a flower--
the flower of all the prairies," he added, catching her hand and laughing
into her eyes.

She flushed, and for a moment seemed almost bewildered.  His boldness,
joined to an air of insinuation and understanding, had influenced her
greatly from the first moment they had met two months ago, as he was
going South on his smuggling enterprise.  The easy way in which he had
talked to her, the extraordinary sense he seemed to have of what was
going on in her mind, the confidential meaning in voice and tone and
words had, somehow, opened up a side of her nature hitherto unexplored.
She had talked with him freely then, for it was only when he left her
that he said what he instinctively knew she would remember till they met
again.  His quick comments, his indirect but acute questions, his
exciting and alluring reminiscences of the East, his subtle yet seemingly
frank compliments, had only stimulated a new capacity in her, evoked
comparisons of this delicate-looking, fine-faced gentleman with the men
of the West by whom she was surrounded.  But later he appeared to stumble
into expressions of admiration for her, as though he was carried off his
feet and had been stunned by her charm.  He had done it all like a
master.  He had not said that she was beautiful--she knew she was not--
but that she was wonderful, and fascinating, and with "something about
her" he had never seen in all his life, like her own prairies, thrilling,
inspiring, and adorable.  His first look at her had seemed full of
amazement.  She had noticed that, and thought it meant only that he was
surprised to find a white girl out here among smugglers, hunters, squaw-
men, and Indians.  But he said that the first look at her had made him
feel things-feel life and women different from ever before; and he had
never seen anyone like her, nor a face with so much in it.  It was all
very brilliantly done.

"You make me want to live," he had said, and she, with no knowledge
of the nuances of language, had taken it literally, and had asked him
if it had been his wish to die; and he had responded to her mistaken
interpretation of his meaning, saying that he had had such sorrow he had
not wanted to live.  As he said it his face looked, in truth, overcome by
some deep inward care; so that there came a sort of feeling she had never
had so far for any man--that he ought to have someone to look after him.
This was the first real stirring of the maternal and protective spirit
in her towards men, though it had shown itself amply enough regarding
animals and birds.  He had said he had not wanted to live, and yet he
had come out West in order to try and live, to cure the trouble that had
started in his lungs.  The Eastern doctors had told him that the rough
outdoor life would cure him, or nothing would, and he had vanished from
the college walls and the pleasant purlieus of learning and fashion into
the wilds.  He had not lied directly to her when he said that he had had
deep trouble; but he had given the impression that he was suffering from
wrongs which had broken his spirit and ruined his health.  Wrongs there
certainly had been in his life, by whomever committed.

Two months ago he had left this girl with her mind full of memories of
what he had said to her, and there was something in the sound of the
slight cough following his farewell words which had haunted her ever
since.  Her tremendous health and energy, the fire of life burning so
brightly in her, reached out towards this man living on so narrow a
margin of force, with no reserve for any extra strain, with just enough
for each day's use and no more.  Four hours before he had come again with
his team of four mules and an Indian youth, having covered forty miles
since his last stage.  She was at the door and saw him coming while he
was yet along distance off.  Some instinct had told her to watch that
afternoon, for she knew of his intended return and of his dangerous
enterprise.  The Indians had trailed south and east, the traders had
disappeared with them, her brother Bantry had gone up and over to
Dingan's Drive, and, save for a few loiterers and last hangers-on, she
was alone with what must soon be a deserted post; its walls, its great
enclosed yard, and its gun-platforms (for it had been fortified) left for
law and order to enter upon, in the persons of the red-coated watchmen of
the law.

Out of the South, from over the border, bringing the last great smuggled
load of whiskey which was to be handed over at Dingan's Drive, and then
floated on Red Man's River to settlements up North, came the "college
pup," Kelly Lambton, worn out, dazed with fatigue, but smiling too, for
a woman's face was ever a tonic to his blood since he was big enough to
move in life for himself.  It needed courage--or recklessness--to run the
border now; for, as Abe Hawley had said, the American marshals were on
the pounce, the red-coated mounted police were coming west from Ottawa,
and word had winged its way along the prairie that these redcoats were
only a few score miles away, and might be at Fort Fair Desire at any
moment.  The trail to Dingan's Drive lay past it.  Through Barfleur
Coulee, athwart a great open stretch of country, along a wooded belt, and
then, suddenly, over a ridge, Dingan's Drive and Red Man's River would be
reached.

The Government had a mind to make an example, if necessary, by killing
some smugglers in conflict, and the United States marshals had been
goaded by vanity and anger at one or two escapes "to have something for
their money," as they said.  That, in their language, meant, "to let the
red run," and Kelly Lambton had none too much blood to lose.

He looked very pale and beaten as he held Nance Machell's hands now, and
called her a prairie-flower, as he had done when he left her two months
before.  On his arrival but now he had said little, for he saw that she
was glad to see him, and he was dead for sleep, after thirty-six hours of
ceaseless travel and watching and danger.  Now, with the most perilous
part of his journey still before him, and worn physically as he was, his
blood was running faster as he looked into the girl's face, and something
in her abundant force and bounding life drew him to her.  Such vitality
in a man like Abe Hawley would have angered him almost, as it did a
little time ago, when Abe was there; but possessed by the girl, it roused
in him a hunger to draw from the well of her perfect health, from the
unused vigour of her being, something for himself.  The touch of her
hands warmed him, in the fulness of her life, in the strong eloquence of
face and form, he forgot she was not beautiful.  The lightness passed
from his words, and his face became eager.

"Flower, yes, the flower of the life of the West--that's what I mean,"
he said.  "You are like an army marching.  When I look at you, my blood
runs faster.  I want to march too.  When I hold your hand I feel that
life's worth living--I want to do things."

She drew her hand away rather awkwardly.  She had not now that command of
herself which had ever been easy with the men of the West, except,
perhaps, with Abe Hawley when--

But with an attempt, only half-meant, to turn the topic, she said: "You
must be starting if you want to get through to-night.  If the redcoats
catch you this side of Barfleur Coulee, or in the Coulee itself, you'll
stand no chance.  I heard they was only thirty miles north this
afternoon.  Maybe they'll come straight on here to-night, instead of
camping.  If they have news of your coming, they might.  You can't tell."

"You're right."  He caught her hand again.  "I've got to be going now.
But Nance--Nance--Nancy, I want to stay here, here with you; or to take
you with me."

She drew back.  "What do you mean?" she asked.  "Take me with you--me--
where?"

"East--away down East."

Her brain throbbed, her pulses beat so hard.  She scarcely knew what to
say, did not know what she said.  "Why do you do this kind of thing?  Why
do you smuggle?" she asked.  "You wasn't brought up to this."

"To get this load of stuff through is life and death to me," he answered.
"I've made six thousand dollars out here.  That's enough to start me
again in the East, where I lost everything.  But I've got to have six
hundred dollars clear for the travel--railways and things; and I'm having
this last run to get it.  Then I've finished with the West, I guess.  My
health's better; the lung is closed up, I've only got a little cough now
and again; and I'm off East.  I don't want to go alone."  He suddenly
caught her in his arms.  "I want you--you, to go with me, Nancy--Nance!"

Her brain swam.  To leave the West behind, to go East to a new life
full of pleasant things, as this man's wife!  Her great heart rose, and
suddenly the mother in her as well as the woman in her was captured by
his wooing.  She had never known what it was to be wooed like this.

She was about to answer, when there came a sharp knock at the door
leading from the backyard, and Lambton's Indian lad entered.  "The
soldier--he come--many.  I go over the ridge; I see.  They come quick
here," he said.

Nance gave a startled cry, and Lambton turned to the other room for his
pistols, overcoat, and cap, when there was the sound of horses' hoofs,
the door suddenly opened, and an officer stepped inside.

"You're wanted for smuggling, Lambton," he said brusquely.  "Don't stir!"
In his hand was a revolver.

"Oh, bosh!  Prove it," answered the young man, pale and startled, but
cool in speech and action.  "We'll prove it all right.  The stuff is
hereabouts."  The girl said something to the officer in the Chinook
language.  She saw he did not understand.  Then she spoke quickly to
Lambton in the same tongue.

"Keep him here a bit," she said.  "His men haven't come yet.  Your outfit
is well hid.  I'll see if I can get away with it before they find it.
They'll follow, and bring you with them, that's sure.  So if I have luck
and get through, we'll meet at Dingan's Drive."

Lambton's face brightened.  He quickly gave her a few directions in
Chinook, and told her what to do at Dingan's if she got there first.
Then she was gone.  The officer did not understand what Nance had said,
but he realised that, whatever she intended to do, she had an advantage
over him.  With an unnecessary courage he had ridden on alone to make his
capture, and, as it proved, without prudence.  He had got his man, but he
had not got the smuggled whiskey and alcohol he had come to seize.  There
was no time to be lost.  The girl had gone before he realised it.  What
had she said to the prisoner?  He was foolish enough to ask Lambton, and
Lambton replied coolly: "She said she'd get you some supper, but she
guessed it would have to be cold--What's your name?  Are you a colonel,
or a captain, or only a principal private?"

"I am Captain MacFee, Lambton.  And you'll now bring me where your outfit
is.  March!"

The pistol was still in his hand, and he had a determined look in
his eye.  Lambton saw it.  He was aware of how much power lay in the
threatening face before him, and how eager that power was to make itself
felt, and provide "Examples"; but he took his chances.

"I'll march all right," he answered, "but I'll march to where you tell
me.  You can't have it both ways.  You can take me, because you've found
me, and you can take my outfit too when you've found it; but I'm not
doing your work, not if I know it."

There was a blaze of anger in the eyes of the officer, and it looked for
an instant as though something of the lawlessness of the border was going
to mark the first step of the Law in the Wilderness, but he bethought
himself in time, and said quietly, yet in a voice which Lambton knew he
must heed:

"Put on your things-quick."

When this was accomplished, and MacFee had secured the smuggler's
pistols, he said again, "March, Lambton."

Lambton marched through the moonlit night towards the troop of men who
had come to set up the flag of order in the plains and hills, and as he
went his keen ear heard his own mules galloping away down towards the
Barfleur Coulee.  His heart thumped in his breast.  This girl, this
prairie-flower, was doing this for him, was risking her life, was
breaking the law for him.  If she got through, and handed over the
whiskey to those who were waiting for it, and it got bundled into the
boats going North before the redcoats reached Dingan's Drive, it would
be as fine a performance as the West had ever seen; and he would be six
hundred dollars to the good.  He listened to the mules galloping, till
the sounds had died into the distance, but he saw now that his captor
had heard too, and that the pursuit would be desperate.

A half-hour later it began, with MacFee at the head, and a dozen troopers
pounding behind, weary, hungry, bad-tempered, ready to exact payment for
their hardships and discouragement.

They had not gone a dozen miles when a shouting horseman rode furiously
on them from behind.  They turned with carbines cocked, but it was Abe
Hawley who cursed them, flung his fingers in their faces, and rode on
harder and harder.  Abe had got the news from one of Nancy's half-breeds,
and, with the devil raging in his heart, had entered on the chase.  His
spirit was up against them all; against the Law represented by the
troopers camped at Fort Fair Desire, against the troopers and their
captain speeding after Nancy Machell--his Nonce, who was risking her
life and freedom for the hated, pale-faced smuggler riding between the
troopers; and his spirit was up against Nance herself.

Nance had said to him, "Come back in an hour," and he had come back to
find her gone.  She had broken her word.  She had deceived him.  She had
thrown the four years of his waiting to the winds, and a savage lust was
in his heart, which would not be appeased till he had done some evil
thing to someone.

The girl and the Indian lad were pounding through the night with ears
strained to listen for hoof-beats coming after, with eyes searching
forward into the trail for swollen creeks and direful obstructions.
Through Barfleur Coulee it was a terrible march, for there was no road,
and again and again they were nearly overturned, while wolves hovered in
their path, ready to reap a midnight harvest.  But once in the open
again, with the full moonlight on their trail, the girl's spirits rose.
If she could do this thing for the man who had looked into her eyes as no
one had ever done, what a finish to her days in the West!  For they were
finished, finished for ever, and she was going--she was going East; not
West with Bantry, nor South with Nick Pringle, nor North with Abe Hawley,
ah, Abe Hawley, he had been a good friend, he had a great heart, he was
the best man of all the western men she had known; but another man had
come from the East, a man who had roused something in her never felt
before, a man who had said she was wonderful; and he needed someone to
take good care of him, to make him love life again.  Abe would have been
all right if Lambton had never come, and she had meant to marry Abe in
the end; but it was different now, and Abe must get over it.  Yet she had
told Abe to come back in an hour.  He was sure to do it; and, when he had
done it, and found her gone on this errand, what would he do?  She knew
what he would do.  He would hurt someone.  He would follow too.  But at
Dingan's Drive, if she reached it before the troopers and before Abe,
and did the thing she had set out to do; and, because no whiskey could
be found, Lambton must go free; and they all stood there together, what
would be the end?  Abe would be terrible; but she was going East, not
North, and when the time came she would face it and put things right
somehow.

The night seemed endless to her fixed and anxious eyes and mind, yet dawn
came, and there had fallen no sound of hoof-beats on her ear.  The ridge
above Dingan's Drive was reached and covered, but yet there was no sign
of her pursuers.  At Red Man's River she delivered her load of contraband
to the traders waiting for it, and saw it loaded into the boats and
disappear beyond the wooded bend above Dingan's.

Then she collapsed into the arms of her brother Bantry, and was carried,
fainting, into Dingan's Lodge.  A half-hour later MacFee and his troopers
and Lambton came.  MacFee grimly searched the post and the shore, but he
saw by the looks of all that he had been foiled.  He had no proof of
anything, and Lambton must go free.

"You've fooled us," he said to Nance sourly, yet with a kind of
admiration too.  "Through you they got away with it.  But I wouldn't
try it again, if I were you."

"Once is enough," answered the girl laconically, as Lambton, set free,
caught both her hands in his and whispered in her ear.

MacFee turned to the others.  "You'd better drop this kind of thing," he
said.  "I mean business."  They saw the troopers by the horses, and
nodded.

"Well, we was about quit of it anyhow," said Bantry.  "We've had all we
want out here."

A loud laugh went up, and it was still ringing when there burst into the
group, out of the trail, Abe Hawley, on foot.

He looked round the group savagely till his eyes rested on Nance and
Lambton.  "I'm last in," he said in a hoarse voice.  "My horse broke its
leg cutting across to get here before her--"  He waved a hand towards
Nance.  "It's best stickin' to old trails, not tryin' new ones."  His
eyes were full of hate as he looked at Lambton.  "I'm keeping to old
trails.  I'm for goin' North, far up, where these two-dollar-a-day and
hash-and-clothes people ain't come yet."  He made a contemptuous gesture
toward MacFee and his troopers.  "I'm goin' North--" He took a step
forward and fixed his bloodshot eyes on Nance.  "I say I'm goin' North.
You comin' with me, Nance?"  He took off his cap to her.

He was haggard, his buckskins were torn, his hair was dishevelled, and
he limped a little; but he was a massive and striking figure, and MacFee
watched him closely, for there was that in his eyes which meant trouble.
"You said, 'Come back in an hour,' Nance, and I come back, as I said I
would," he went on.  "You didn't stand to your word.  I've come to git
it.  I'm goin' North, Nance, and I bin waitin' for four years for you to
go with me.  Are you comin'?"

His voice was quiet, but it had a choking kind of sound, and it struck
strangely in the ears of all.  MacFee came nearer.

"Are you comin' with me, Nance, dear?"

She reached a hand towards Lambton, and he took it, but she did not
speak.  Something in Abe's eyes overwhelmed her--something she had never
seen before, and it seemed to stifle speech in her.  Lambton spoke
instead.

"She's going East with me," he said.  "That's settled."

MacFee started.  Then he caught Abe's arm.  "Wait!" he said
peremptorily.  "Wait one minute."  There was something in his voice
which held Abe back for the instant.

"You say she is going East with you," MacFee said sharply to Lambton.
"What for?"  He fastened Lambton with his eyes, and Lambton quailed.
"Have you told her you've got a wife--down East?  I've got your history,
Lambton.  Have you told her that you've got a wife you married when you
were at college--and as good a girl as ever lived?"

It had come with terrible suddenness even to Lambton, and he was too
dazed to make any reply.  With a cry of shame and anger Nancy started
back.  Growling with rage and hate, Abe Hawley sprang toward Lambton,
but the master of the troopers stepped between.

No one could tell who moved first, or who first made the suggestion,
for the minds of all were the same, and the general purpose was
instantaneous; but in the fraction of a minute Lambton, under menace,
was on his hands and knees crawling to the riverside.  Watchful, but not
interfering, the master of the troopers saw him set adrift in a canoe
without a paddle, while he was pelted with mud from the shore.

The next morning at sunrise Abe Hawley and the girl he had waited for so
long started on the North trail together, MacFee, master of the troopers
and justice of the peace, handing over the marriage lines.






THE STROBE OF THE HOUR

"They won't come to-night--sure."

The girl looked again towards the west, where, here and there, bare
poles, or branches of trees, or slips of underbrush marked a road made
across the plains through the snow.  The sun was going down golden red,
folding up the sky a wide soft curtain of pink and mauve and deep purple
merging into the fathomless blue, where already the stars were beginning
to quiver.  The house stood on the edge of a little forest, which had
boldly asserted itself in the wide flatness.  At this point in the west
the prairie merged into an undulating territory, where hill and wood
rolled away from the banks of the Saskatchewan, making another England in
beauty.  The forest was a sort of advance-post of that land of beauty.

Yet there was beauty too on this prairie, though there was nothing to the
east but snow and the forest so far as eye could see.  Nobility and peace
and power brooded over the white world.

As the girl looked, it seemed as though the bosom of the land rose and
fell.  She had felt this vibrating life beat beneath the frozen surface.
Now, as she gazed, she smiled sadly to herself, with drooping eyelids
looking out from beneath strong brows.

"I know you--I know you," she said aloud.  "You've got to take your toll.
And when you're lying asleep like that, or pretending to, you reach up-
and kill.  And yet you can be kind-ah, but you can be kind and beautiful!
But you must have your toll one way or t'other."  She sighed and paused;
then, after a moment, looking along the trail--"I don't expect they'll
come to-night, and mebbe not to-morrow, if--if they stay for THAT."

Her eyes closed, she shivered a little.  Her lips drew tight, and her
face seemed suddenly to get thinner.  "But dad wouldn't--no, he couldn't,
not considerin'--"  Again she shut her eyes in pain.

Her face was now turned from the western road by which she had expected
her travellers, and towards the east, where already the snow was taking
on a faint bluish tint, a reflection of the sky deepening nightwards in
that half-circle of the horizon.  Distant and a little bleak and
cheerless the half-circle was looking now.

"No one--not for two weeks," she said, in comment on the eastern trail,
which was so little frequented in winter, and this year had been less
travelled than ever.  "It would be nice to have a neighbour," she added,
as she faced the west and the sinking sun again.  "I get so lonely--just
minutes I get lonely.  But it's them minutes that seem to count more than
all the rest when they come.  I expect that's it--we don't live in
months and years, but just in minutes.  It doesn't take long for an
earthquake to do its work--it's seconds then.  .  .  .  P'r'aps dad won't
even come to-morrow," she added, as she laid her hand on the latch.  "It
never seemed so long before, not even when he's been away a week."  She
laughed bitterly.  "Even bad company's better than no company at all.
Sure.  And Mickey has been here always when dad's been away past times.
Mickey was a fool, but he was company; and mebbe he'd have been better
company if he'd been more of a scamp and less a fool.  I dunno, but I
really think he would.  Bad company doesn't put you off so."

There was a scratching at the inside of the door.  "My, if I didn't
forget Shako," she said, "and he dying for a run!"

She opened the door quickly, and out jumped a Russian dog of almost full
breed, with big, soft eyes like those of his mistress, and with the air
of the north in every motion--like his mistress also.

"Come, Shako, a run--a run!"

An instant after she was flying off on a path towards the woods, her
short skirts flying and showing limbs as graceful and shapely as those of
any woman of that world of social grace which she had never seen; for she
was a prairie girl through and through, born on the plains and fed on its
scanty fare--scanty as to variety, at least.  Backwards and forwards they
ran, the girl shouting like a child of ten,--she was twenty-three, her
eyes flashing, her fine white teeth showing, her hands thrown up in sheer
excess of animal life, her hair blowing about her face-brown, strong
hair, wavy and plentiful.

Fine creature as she was, her finest features were her eyes and her
hands.  The eyes might have been found in the most savage places; the
hands, however, only could have come through breeding.  She had got them
honestly; for her mother was descended from an old family of the French
province.  That was why she had the name of Loisette--and had a touch of
distinction.  It was the strain of the patrician in the full blood of the
peasant; but it gave her something which made her what she was--what she
had been since a child, noticeable and besought, sometimes beloved.  It
was too strong a nature to compel love often, but it never failed to
compel admiration.  Not greatly a creature of words, she had become moody
of late; and even now, alive with light and feeling and animal life, she
suddenly stopped her romp and run, and called the dog to her.

"Heel, Shako!" she said, and made for the door of the little house,
which looked so snug and home-like.  She paused before she came to the
door, to watch the smoke curling up from the chimney straight as a
column, for there was not a breath of air stirring.  The sun was almost
gone and the strong bluish light was settling on everything, giving even
the green spruce trees a curious burnished tone.

Swish!  Thud!  She faced the woods quickly.  It was only a sound that she
had heard how many hundreds of times!  It was the snow slipping from some
broad branch of the fir trees to the ground.  Yet she started now.
Something was on her mind, agitating her senses, affecting her self-
control.

"I'll be jumping out of my boots when the fire snaps, or the frost cracks
the ice, next," she said aloud contemptuously.  "I dunno what's the
matter with me.  I feel as if someone was hiding somewhere ready to pop
out on me.  I haven't never felt like that before."

She had formed the habit of talking to herself, for it had seemed at
first, as she was left alone when her father went trapping or upon
journeys for the Government, that by and by she would start at the sound
of her own voice, if she didn't think aloud.  So she was given to
soliloquy, defying the old belief that people who talked to themselves
were going mad.  She laughed at that.  She said that birds sang to
themselves and didn't go mad, and crickets chirruped, and frogs croaked,
and owls hooted, and she would talk and not go crazy either.  So she
talked to herself and to Shako when she was alone.

How quiet it was inside when her light supper was eaten, bread and beans
and pea-soup--she had got this from her French mother.  Now she sat, her
elbows on her knees, her chin on her hands, looking into the fire.  Shako
was at her feet upon the great musk-ox rug, which her father had got on
one of his hunting trips in the Athabasca country years ago.  It belonged
as she belonged.  It breathed of the life of the north-land, for the
timbers of the hut were hewn cedar; the rough chimney, the seats, and the
shelves on which a few books made a fair show beside the bright tins and
the scanty crockery, were of pine; and the horned heads of deer and
wapiti made pegs for coats and caps, and rests for guns and rifles.  It
was a place of comfort; it had an air of well-to-do thrift, even as the
girl's dress, though plain, was made of good sound stuff, grey, with a
touch of dark red to match the auburn of her hair.

A book lay open in her lap, but she had scarcely tried to read it.  She
had put it down after a few moments fixed upon it.  It had sent her
thoughts off into a world where her life had played a part too big for
books, too deep for the plummet of any save those who had lived through
the storm of life's trials; and life when it is bitter to the young is
bitter with an agony the old never know.  At last she spoke to herself.

"She knows now.  Now she knows what it is, how it feels--your heart like
red-hot coals, and something in your head that's like a turnscrew, and
you want to die and can't, for you've got to live and suffer."

Again she was quiet, and only the dog's heavy breathing, the snap of the
fire, or the crack of a timber in the deadly frost broke the silence.
Inside it was warm and bright and home-like; outside it was twenty
degrees below zero, and like some vast tomb where life itself was
congealed, and only the white stars, low, twinkling, and quizzical,
lived-a life of sharp corrosion, not of fire.

Suddenly she raised her head and listened.  The dog did the same.  None
but those whose lives are lived in lonely places can be so acute, so
sensitive to sound.  It was a feeling delicate and intense, the whole
nature getting the vibration.  You could have heard nothing had you been
there; none but one who was of the wide spaces could have done so.  But
the dog and the woman felt, and both strained towards the window.  Again
they heard, and started to their feet.  It was far, far away, and still
you could not have heard; but now they heard clearly--a cry in the night,
a cry of pain and despair.  The girl ran to the window and pulled aside
the bearskin curtain which had completely shut out the light.  Then she
stirred the fire, threw a log upon it, snuffed the candles, hastily put
on her moccasins, fur coat, wool cap, and gloves, and went to the door
quickly, the dog at her heels.  Opening it, she stepped out into the
night.

"Qui va la?  Who is it?  Where?" she called, and strained towards the
west.  She thought it might be her father or Mickey the hired man, or
both.

The answer came from the east, out of the homeless, neighbourless, empty
east--a cry, louder now.  There were only stars, and the night was dark,
though not deep dark.  She sped along the prairie road as fast as she
could, once or twice stopping to call aloud.  In answer to her calls the
voice sounded nearer and nearer.  Now suddenly she left the trail and
bore away northward.  At last the voice was very near.  Presently a
figure appeared ahead, staggering towards her.

"Qui va la?  Who is it?" she asked.

"Ba'tiste Caron," was the reply in English, in a faint voice.  She was
beside him in an instant.

"What has happened?  Why are you off the trail?" she said, and supported
him.

"My Injun stoled my dogs and run off," he replied.  "I run after.  Then,
when I am to come to the trail"--he paused to find the English word, and
could not--"encore to this trail I no can.  So.  Ah, bon Dieu, it has
so awful!"  He swayed and would have fallen, but she caught him, bore
him up.  She was so strong, and he was as slight as a girl, though tall.

"When was that?" she asked.

"Two nights ago," he answered, and swayed.  "Wait," she said, and pulled
a flask from her pocket.  "Drink this-quick."

He raised it to his lips, but her hand was still on it, and she only let
him take a little.  Then she drew it away, though she had almost to use
force, he was so eager for it.  Now she took a biscuit from her pocket.

"Eat; then some more brandy after," she urged.  "Come on; it's not far.
See, there's the light," she added cheerily, raising her head towards the
hut.

"I saw it just when I have fall down--it safe me.  I sit down to die--
like that!  But it safe me, that light--so.  Ah, bon Dieu, it was so far,
and I want eat so!"  Already he had swallowed the biscuit.

"When did you eat last?" she asked, as she urged him on.

"Two nights--except for one leetla piece of bread--O--O--I fin' it in my
pocket.  Grace!  I have travel so far.  Jesu, I think it ees ten thousan'
miles I go.  But I mus' go on, I mus' go--O--certainement."

The light came nearer and nearer.  His footsteps quickened, though he
staggered now and then, and went like a horse that has run its race, but
is driven upon its course again, going heavily with mouth open and head
thrown forwards and down.

"But I mus' to get there, an' you-you will to help me, eh?"

Again he swayed, but her strong arm held him up.  As they ran on, in a
kind of dog-trot, her hand firm upon his arm--he seemed not to notice it
--she became conscious, though it was half dark, of what sort of man she
had saved.  He was about her own age, perhaps a year or two older, with
little, if any, hair upon his face, save a slight moustache.  His eyes,
deep sunken as they were, she made out were black, and the face, though
drawn and famished, had a handsome look.  Presently she gave him another
sip of brandy, and he quickened his steps, speaking to himself the while.

"I haf to do it--if I lif.  It is to go, go, go, till I get."

Now they came to the hut where the firelight flickered on the window-
pane; the door was flung open, and, as he stumbled on the threshold, she
helped him into the warm room.  She almost pushed him over to the fire.

Divested of his outer coat, muffler, cap, and leggings, he sat on a bench
before the fire, his eyes wandering from the girl to the flames, and his
hands clasping and unclasping between his knees.  His eyes dilating with
hunger, he watched her preparations for his supper; and when at last--and
she had been but a moment--it was placed before him, his head swam, and
he turned faint with the stress of his longing.  He would have swallowed
a basin of pea-soup at a draught, but she stopped him, holding the basin
till she thought he might venture again.  Then came cold beans, and some
meat which she toasted at the fire and laid upon his plate.  They had not
spoken since first entering the house, when tears had shone in his eyes,
and he had said:

"You have safe--ah, you have safe me, and so I will do it yet by help bon
Dieu--yes."

The meat was done at last, and he sat with a great dish of tea beside
him, and his pipe alight.

"What time, if please?" he asked.  "I t'ink nine hour, but no sure."

"It is near nine," she said.  She hastily tidied up the table after his
meal, and then came and sat in her chair over against the wall of the
rude fireplace.  "Nine--dat is good.  The moon rise at 'leven; den I go.
I go on," he said, "if you show me de queeck way."

"You go on--how can you go on?" she asked, almost sharply.

"Will you not to show me?" he asked.  "Show you what?" she asked
abruptly.

"The queeck way to Askatoon," he said, as though surprised that she
should ask.  "They say me if I get here you will tell me queeck way to
Askatoon.  Time, he go so fas', an' I have loose a day an' a night, an'
I mus' get Askatoon if I lif--I mus' get dere in time.  It is all safe to
de stroke of de hour, mais, after, it is--bon Dieu--it is hell then.  Who
shall forgif me--no!"

"The stroke of the hour--the stroke of the hour!"  It beat into her
brain.  Were they both thinking of the same thing now?

"You will show me queeck way.  I mus' be Askatoon in two days, or it is
all over," he almost moaned.  "Is no man here--I forget dat name, my head
go round like a wheel; but I know dis place, an' de good God He help me
fin' my way to where I call out, bien sur.  Dat man's name I have
forget."

"My father's name is John Alroyd," she answered absently, for there were
hammering at her brain the words, "The stroke of the hour."

"Ah, now I get--yes.  An' your name, it is Loisette Alroy'--ah, I have it
in my mind now--Loisette.  I not forget dat name, I not forget you--no."

"Why do you want to go the 'quick' way to Askatoon?" she asked.

He puffed a moment at his pipe before he answered her.  Presently he
said, holding out his pipe, "You not like smoke, mebbe?"

She shook her head in negation, making an impatient gesture.

"I forget ask you," he said.  "Dat journee make me forget.  When Injun
Jo, he leave me with the dogs, an' I wake up all alone, an' not know my
way--not like Jo, I think I die, it is so bad, so terrible in my head.
Not'ing but snow, not'ing.  But dere is de sun; it shine.  It say to me,
'Wake up, Ba'tiste; it will be all right bime-bye.'  But all time I t'ink
I go mad, for I mus' get Askatoon before--dat."

She started.  Had she not used the same word in thinking of Askatoon.
"That," she had said.

"Why do you want to go the 'quick' way to Askatoon?" she asked again,
her face pale, her foot beating the floor impatiently.

"To save him before dat!" he answered, as though she knew of what he was
speaking and thinking.  "What is that?" she asked.  She knew now,
surely, but she must ask it nevertheless.

"Dat hanging--of Haman," he answered.  He nodded to himself.  Then he
took to gazing into the fire.  His lips moved as though talking to
himself, and the hand that held the pipe lay forgotten on his knee.
"What have you to do with Haman?" she asked slowly, her eyes burning.

"I want safe him--I mus' give him free."  He tapped his breast.  "It is
hereto mak' him free."  He still tapped his breast.

For a moment she stood frozen still, her face thin and drawn and white;
then suddenly the blood rushed back into her face, and a red storm raged
in her eyes.

She thought of the sister, younger than herself, whom Rube Haman had
married and driven to her grave within a year--the sweet Lucy, with the
name of her father's mother.  Lucy had been all English in face and
tongue, a flower of the west, driven to darkness by this horse-dealing
brute, who, before he was arrested and tried for murder, was about to
marry Kate Wimper.  Kate Wimper had stolen him from Lucy before Lucy's
first and only child was born, the child that could not survive the warm
mother-life withdrawn, and so had gone down the valley whither the
broken-hearted mother had fled.  It was Kate Wimper, who, before that,
had waylaid the one man for whom she herself had ever cared, and drawn
him from her side by such attractions as she herself would keep for an
honest wife, if such she ever chanced to be.  An honest wife she would
have been had Kate Wimper not crossed the straight path of her life.  The
man she had loved was gone to his end also, reckless and hopeless, after
he had thrown away his chance of a lifetime with Loisette Alroyd.  There
had been left behind this girl, to whom tragedy had come too young, who
drank humiliation with a heart as proud as ever straightly set its course
through crooked ways.

It had hurt her, twisted her nature a little, given a fountain of
bitterness to her soul, which welled up and flooded her life sometimes.
It had given her face no sourness, but it put a shadow into her eyes.

She had been glad when Haman was condemned for murder, for she believed
he had committed it, and ten times hanging could not compensate for that
dear life gone from their sight--Lucy, the pride of her father's heart.
She was glad when Haman was condemned, because of the woman who had
stolen him from Lucy, because of that other man, her lover, gone out of
her own life.  The new hardness in her rejoiced that now the woman, if
she had any heart at all, must have it bowed down by this supreme
humiliation and wrung by the ugly tragedy of the hempen rope.

And now this man before her, this man with a boy's face, with the dark
luminous eyes, whom she had saved from the frozen plains, he had that in
his breast which would free Haman, so he had said.  A fury had its birth
in her at that moment.  Something seemed to seize her brain and master
it, something so big that it held all her faculties in perfect control,
and she felt herself in an atmosphere where all life moved round her
mechanically, she herself the only sentient thing, so much greater than
all she saw, or all that she realised by her subconscious self.
Everything in the world seemed small.  How calm it was even with the fury
within!

"Tell me," she said quietly--"tell me how you are able to save Haman?"

"He not kill Wakely.  It is my brudder Fadette dat kill and get away.
Haman he is drunk, and everyt'ing seem to say Haman he did it, an'
everyone know Haman is not friend to Wakely.  So the juree say he must be
hanging.  But my brudder he go to die with hawful bad cold queeck, an' he
send for the priest an' for me, an' tell all.  I go to Governor with the
priest, an' Governor gif me dat writing here."  He tapped his breast,
then took out a wallet and showed the paper to her.  "It is life of dat
Haman, voici!  And so I safe him for my brudder.  Dat was a bad boy,
Fadette.  He was bad all time since he was a baby, an' I t'ink him pretty
lucky to die on his bed, an' get absolve, and go to purgatore.  If he not
have luck like dat he go to hell, an' stay there."

He sighed, and put the wallet back in his breast carefully, his eyes
half-shut with weariness, his handsome face drawn and thin, his limbs lax
with fatigue.

"If I get Askatoon before de time for dat, I be happy in my heart, for
dat brudder off mine he get out of purgatore bime-bye, I t'ink."

His eyes were almost shut, but he drew himself together with a great
effort, and added desperately, "No sleep.  If I sleep it is all smash.
Man say me I can get Askatoon by dat time from here, if I go queeck way
across lak'--it is all froze now, dat lak'--an' down dat Foxtail Hills.
Is it so, ma'm'selle?"

"By the 'quick' way if you can make it in time," she said; "but it is no
way for the stranger to go.  There are always bad spots on the ice--it is
not safe.  You could not find your way."

"I mus' get dere in time," he said desperately.  "You can't do it--
alone," she said.  "Do you want to risk all and lose?"

He frowned in self-suppression.  "Long way, I no can get dere in time?"
he asked.

She thought a moment.  "No; it can't be done by the long way.  But there
is another way--a third trail, the trail the Gover'ment men made a year
ago when they came to survey.  It is a good trail.  It is blazed in the
woods and staked on the plains.  You cannot miss.  But--but there is so
little time."  She looked at the clock on the wall.  "You cannot leave
here much before sunrise, and--"

"I will leef when de moon rise, at eleven," he interjected.

"You have had no sleep for two nights, and no food.  You can't last it
out," she said calmly.

The deliberate look on his face deepened to stubbornness.

"It is my vow to my brudder--he is in purgatore.  An' I mus' do it," he
rejoined, with an emphasis there was no mistaking.  "You can show me dat
way?"

She went to a drawer and took out a piece of paper.  Then, with a point
of blackened stick, as he watched her and listened, she swiftly drew his
route for him.

"Yes, I get it in my head," he said.  "I go dat way, but I wish--I wish
it was dat queeck way.  I have no fear, not'ing.  I go w'en dat moon
rise--I go, bien sur."

"You must sleep, then, while I get some food for you."  She pointed to a
couch in a corner.  "I will wake you when the moon rises."

For the first time he seemed to realise her, for a moment to leave the
thing which consumed him, and put his mind upon her.

"You not happy--you not like me here?" he asked simply; then added
quickly, "I am not bad man like me brudder--no."

Her eyes rested on him for a moment as though realising him, while some
thought was working in her mind behind.

"No, you are not a bad man," she said.  "Men and women are equal on the
plains.  You have no fear--I have no fear."

He glanced at the rifles on the walls, then back at her.  "My mudder, she
was good woman.  I am glad she did not lif to know what Fadette do."  His
eyes drank her in for a minute, then he said: "I go sleep now, t'ank you
--till moontime."

In a moment his deep breathing filled the room, the only sound save for
the fire within and the frost outside.

Time went on.  The night deepened.

                    .........................

Loisette sat beside the fire, but her body was half-turned from it
towards the man on the sofa.  She was not agitated outwardly, but within
there was that fire which burns up life and hope and all the things that
come between us and great issues.  It had burned up everything in her
except one thought, one powerful motive.  She had been deeply wronged,
and justice had been about to give "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth."  But the man lying there had come to sweep away the scaffolding
of justice--he had come for that.

Perhaps he might arrive at Askatoon before the stroke of the hour,
but still he would be too late, for in her pocket now was the Governor's
reprieve.  The man had slept soundly.  His wallet was still in his
breast; but the reprieve was with her.

If he left without discovering his loss, and got well on his way, and
discovered it then, it would be too late.  If he returned--she only saw
one step before her, she would wait for that, and deal with it when it
came.  She was thinking of Lucy, of her own lover ruined and gone.  She
was calm in her madness.

At the first light of the moon she roused him.  She had put food into his
fur-coat pocket, and after he had drunk a bowl of hot pea-soup, while she
told him his course again, she opened the door, and he passed out into
the night.  He started forward without a word, but came back again and
caught her hand.

"Pardon," he said; "I go forget everyt'ing except dat.  But I t'ink what
you do for me, it is better than all my life.  Bien sur, I will come
again, when I get my mind to myself.  Ah, but you are beautibul," he
said, "an' you not happy.  Well, I come again--yes, a Dieu."

He was gone into the night, with the moon silvering the sky, and the
steely frost eating into the sentient life of this northern world.
Inside the house, with the bearskin blind dropped at the window again,
and the fire blazing high, Loisette sat with the Governor's reprieve in
her hand.  Looking at it, she wondered why it had been given to Ba'tiste
Caron, and not to a police-officer.  Ah yes, it was plain--Ba'tiste was a
woodsman and plainsman, and could go far more safely than a constable,
and faster.  Ba'tiste had reason for going fast, and he would travel
night and day--he was travelling night and day indeed.  And now Ba'tiste
might get there, but the reprieve would not.  He would not be able to
stop the hanging of Haman--the hanging of Rube Haman.

A change came over her.  Her eyes blazed, her breast heaved now.  She had
been so quiet, so cold and still.  But life seemed moving in her once
again.  The woman, Kate Wimper, who had helped to send two people to
their graves, would now drink the dregs of shame, if she was capable of
shame--would be robbed of her happiness, if so be she loved Rube Haman.

She stood up, as though to put the paper in the fire, but paused suddenly
at one thought--Rube Haman was innocent of murder.

Even so, he was not innocent of Lucy's misery and death, of the death of
the little one who only opened its eyes to the light for an instant, and
then went into the dark again.  But truly she was justified!  When Haman
was gone things would go on just the same--and she had been so bitter,
her heart had been pierced as with a knife these past three years.  Again
she held out her hand to the fire, but suddenly she gave a little cry and
put her hand to her head.  There was Ba'tiste!

What was Ba'tiste to her?  Nothing-nothing at all.  She had saved his
life--even if she wronged Ba'tiste, her debt would be paid.  No, she
would not think of Ba'tiste.  Yet she did not put the paper in the fire,
but in the pocket of her dress.  Then she went to her room, leaving the
door open.  The bed was opposite the fire, and, as she lay there--she did
not take off her clothes, she knew not why-she could see the flames.  She
closed her eyes, but could not sleep, and more than once when she opened
them she thought she saw Ba'tiste sitting there as he had sat hours
before.  Why did Ba'tiste haunt her so?  What was it he had said in his
broken English as he went away?--that he would come back; that she was
"beautibul."

All at once as she lay still, her head throbbing, her feet and hands icy
cold, she sat up listening.  "Ah-again!" she cried.  She sprang from her
bed, rushed to the door, and strained her eyes into the silver night.
She called into the icy void, "Qui va la?  Who goes?"

She leaned forwards, her hand at her ear, but no sound came in reply.
Once more she called, but nothing answered.  The night was all light and
frost and silence.

She had only heard, in her own brain, the iteration of Ba'tiste's
calling.  Would he reach Askatoon in time, she wondered, as she shut the
door?  Why had she not gone with him and attempted the shorter way the
quick way, he had called it?  All at once the truth came back upon her,
stirring her now.  It would do no good for Ba'tiste to arrive in time.
He might plead to them all and tell the truth about the reprieve, but it
would not avail--Rube Haman would hang.  That did not matter--even though
he was innocent; but Ba'tiste's brother would be so long in purgatory.
And even that would not matter; but she would hurt Ba'tiste--Ba'tiste--
Ba'tiste.  And Ba'tiste he would know that she--and he had called her
"beautibul," that she had--

With a cry she suddenly clothed herself for travel.  She put some food
and drink in a leather bag and slung them over her shoulder.  Then she
dropped on a knee and wrote a note to her father, tears falling from her
eyes.  She heaped wood on the fire and moved towards the door.  All at
once she turned to the crucifix on the wall which had belonged to her
mother, and, though she had followed her father's Protestant religion,
she kissed the feet of the sacred figure.

"Oh, Christ, have mercy on me, and bring me safe to my journey's end-in
time," she said breathlessly; then she went softly to the door, leaving
the dog behind.

It opened, closed, and the night swallowed her.  Like a ghost she sped
the quick way to Askatoon.  She was six hours behind Ba'tiste, and, going
hard all the time, it was doubtful if she could get there before the
fatal hour.

On the trail Ba'tiste had taken there were two huts where he could rest,
and he had carried his blanket slung on his shoulder.  The way she went
gave no shelter save the trees and caves which had been used to cache
buffalo meat and hides in old days.  But beyond this there was danger in
travelling by night, for the springs beneath the ice of the three lakes
she must, cross made it weak and rotten even in the fiercest weather, and
what would no doubt have been death to Ba'tiste would be peril at least
to her.  Why had she not gone with him?

"He had in his face what was in Lucy's," she said to herself, as she sped
on.  "She was fine like him, ready to break her heart for those she cared
for.  My, if she had seen him first instead of--"

She stopped short, for the ice gave way to her foot, and she only sprang
back in time to save herself.  But she trotted on, mile after mile, the
dog-trot of the Indian, head bent forwards, toeing in, breathing steadily
but sharply.

The morning came, noon, then a fall of snow and a keen wind, and despair
in her heart; but she had passed the danger-spots, and now, if the storm
did not overwhelm her, she might get to Askatoon in time.  In the midst
of the storm she came to one of the caves of which she had known.  Here
was wood for a fire, and here she ate, and in weariness unspeakable fell
asleep.  When she waked it was near sun-down, the storm had ceased, and,
as on the night before, the sky was stained with colour and drowned in
splendour.

"I will do it--I will do it, Ba'tiste!" she called, and laughed aloud
into the sunset.  She had battled with herself all the way, and she had
conquered.  Right was right, and Rube Haman must not be hung for what he
did not do.  Her heart hardened whenever she thought of the woman, but
softened again when she thought of Ba'tiste, who had to suffer for the
deed of a brother in "purgatore."  Once again the night and its silence
and loneliness followed her, the only living thing near the trail till
long after midnight.  After that, as she knew, there were houses here and
there where she might have rested, but she pushed on unceasing.

At daybreak she fell in with a settler going to Askatoon with his dogs.
Seeing how exhausted she was, he made her ride a few miles upon his
sledge; then she sped on ahead again till she came to the borders of
Askatoon.

People were already in the streets, and all were tending one way.  She
stopped and asked the time.  It was within a quarter of an hour of the
time when Haman was to pay another's penalty.  She spurred herself on,
and came to the jail blind with fatigue.  As she neared the jail she saw
her father and Mickey.  In amazement her father hailed her, but she would
not stop.  She was admitted to the prison on explaining that she had a
reprieve.  Entering a room filled with excited people, she heard a cry.

It came from Ba'tiste.  He had arrived but ten minutes before, and, in
the Sheriff's presence had discovered his loss.  He had appealed in vain.

But now, as he saw the girl, he gave a shout of joy which pierced the
hearts of all.

"Ah, you haf it!  Say you haf it, or it is no use--he mus' hang.  Spik-
spik!  Ah, my brudder--it is to do him right!  Ah, Loisette--bon Dieu,
merci!"

For answer she placed the reprieve in the hands of the Sheriff.  Then she
swayed and fell fainting at the feet of Ba'tiste.

She had come at the stroke of the hour.

When she left for her home again the Sheriff kissed her.

And that was not the only time he kissed her.  He did it again six months
later, at the beginning of the harvest, when she and Ba'tiste Caron
started off on the long trail of life together.  None but Ba'tiste knew
the truth about the loss of the reprieve, and to him she was "beautibul"
just the same, and greatly to be desired.






BUCKMASTER'S BOY

"I bin waitin' for him, an' I'll git him of it takes all winter.  I'll
git him--plumb."

The speaker smoothed the barrel of his rifle with mittened hand, which
had, however, a trigger-finger free.  With black eyebrows twitching over
sunken grey eyes, he looked doggedly down the frosty valley from the
ledge of high rock where he sat.  The face was rough and weather-beaten,
with the deep tan got in the open life of a land of much sun and little
cloud, and he had a beard which, untrimmed and growing wild, made him
look ten years older than he was.

"I bin waitin' a durn while," the mountain-man added, and got to his feet
slowly, drawing himself out to six and a half feet of burly manhood.  The
shoulders were, however, a little stooped, and the head was thrust
forwards with an eager, watchful look--a habit become a physical
characteristic.

Presently he caught sight of a hawk sailing southward along the peaks of
the white icebound mountains above, on which the sun shone with such
sharp insistence, making sky and mountain of a piece in deep purity and
serene stillness.

"That hawk's seen him, mebbe," he said, after a moment.  "I bet it went
up higher when it got him in its eye.  Ef it'd only speak and tell me
where he is--ef he's a day, or two days, or ten days north."

Suddenly his eyes blazed and his mouth opened in superstitious amazement,
for the hawk stopped almost directly overhead at a great height, and
swept round in a circle many times, waveringly, uncertainly.  At last it
resumed its flight southward, sliding down the mountains like a winged
star.

The mountaineer watched it with a dazed expression for a moment longer,
then both hands clutched the rifle and half swung it to position
involuntarily.

"It's seen him, and it stopped to say so.  It's seen him, I tell you, an'
I'll git him.  Ef it's an hour, or a day, or a week, it's all the same.
I'm here watchin', waitin' dead on to him, the poison skunk!"

The person to whom he had been speaking now rose from the pile of cedar
boughs where he had been sitting, stretched his arms up, then shook
himself into place, as does a dog after sleep.  He stood for a minute
looking at the mountaineer with a reflective, yet a furtively sardonic,
look.  He was not above five feet nine inches in height, and he was slim
and neat; and though his buckskin coat and breeches were worn and even
frayed in spots, he had an air of some distinction and of concentrated
force.  It was a face that men turned to look at twice and shook their
heads in doubt afterwards--a handsome, worn, secretive face, in as
perfect control as the strings of an instrument under the bow of a great
artist.  It was the face of a man without purpose in life beyond the
moment--watchful, careful, remorselessly determined, an adventurer's
asset, the dial-plate of a hidden machinery.

Now he took the handsome meerschaum pipe from his mouth, from which he
had been puffing smoke slowly, and said in a cold, yet quiet voice, "How
long you been waitin', Buck?"

"A month.  He's overdue near that.  He always comes down to winter at
Fort o' Comfort, with his string of half-breeds, an' Injuns, an' the
dogs."

"No chance to get him at the Fort?"

"It ain't so certain.  They'd guess what I was doin' there.  It's surer
here.  He's got to come down the trail, an' when I spot him by the
Juniper clump"--he jerked an arm towards a spot almost a mile farther up
the valley--"I kin scoot up the underbrush a bit and git him--plumb.  I
could do it from here, sure, but I don't want no mistake.  Once only,
jest one shot, that's all I want, Sinnet."

He bit off a small piece of tobacco from a black plug Sinnet offered him,
and chewed it with nervous fierceness, his eyebrows working, as he looked
at the other eagerly.  Deadly as his purpose was, and grim and unvarying
as his vigil had been, the loneliness had told on him, and he had grown
hungry for a human face and human companionship.  Why Sinnet had come he
had not thought to inquire.  Why Sinnet should be going north instead of
south had not occurred to him.  He only realised that Sinnet was not the
man he was waiting for with murder in his heart; and all that mattered to
him in life was the coming of his victim down the trail.  He had welcomed
Sinnet with a sullen eagerness, and had told him in short, detached
sentences the dark story of a wrong and a waiting revenge, which brought
a slight flush to Sinnet's pale face and awakened a curious light in his
eyes.

"Is that your shack--that where you shake down?" Sinnet said, pointing
towards a lean-to in the fir trees to the right.

"That's it.  I sleep there.  It's straight on to the Juniper clump, the
front door is."  He laughed viciously, grimly.  "Outside or inside, I'm
on to the Juniper clump.  Walk into the parlour?" he added, and drew
open a rough-made door, so covered with green cedar boughs that it seemed
of a piece with the surrounding underbrush and trees.  Indeed, the little
but was so constructed that it could not be distinguished from the woods
even a short distance away.

"Can't have a fire, I suppose?" Sinnet asked.

"Not daytimes.  Smoke 'd give me away if he suspicioned me," answered the
mountaineer.  "I don't take no chances.  Never can tell."

"Water?" asked Sinnet, as though interested in the surroundings, while
all the time he was eyeing the mountaineer furtively--as it were, prying
to the inner man, or measuring the strength of the outer man.  He lighted
a fresh pipe and seated himself on a rough bench beside the table in the
middle of the room, and leaned on his elbows, watching.

The mountaineer laughed.  It was not a pleasant laugh to hear.  "Listen,"
he said.  "You bin a long time out West.  You bin in the mountains a good
while.  Listen."

There was silence.  Sinnet listened intently.  He heard the faint drip,
drip, drip of water, and looked steadily at the back wall of the room.

"There--rock?" he said, and jerked his head towards the sound.

"You got good ears," answered the other, and drew aside a blanket which
hung on the back wall of the room.  A wooden trough was disclosed hanging
under a ledge of rock, and water dripped into it softly, slowly.

"Almost providential, that rock," remarked Sinnet.  "You've got your well
at your back door.  Food--but you can't go far, and keep your eye on the
Bend too," he nodded towards the door, beyond which lay the frost-touched
valley in the early morning light of autumn.

"Plenty of black squirrels and pigeons come here on account of the
springs like this one, and I get 'em with a bow and arrow.  I didn't call
myself Robin Hood and Daniel Boone not for nothin' when I was knee-high
to a grasshopper."  He drew from a rough cupboard some cold game, and put
it on the table, with some scones and a pannikin of water.  Then he
brought out a small jug of whiskey and placed it beside his visitor.
They began to eat.

"How d'ye cook without fire?" asked Sinnet.  "Fire's all right at
nights.  He'd never camp 'twixt here an' Juniper Bend at night.  The next
camp's six miles north from here.  He'd only come down the valley
daytimes.  I studied it 'all out, and it's a dead sure thing.  From
daylight till dusk I'm on to him.  I got the trail in my eye."

He showed his teeth like a wild dog, as his look swept the valley.  There
was something almost revolting in his concentrated ferocity.

Sinnet's eyes half closed as he watched the mountaineer, and the long,
scraggy hands and whipcord neck seemed to interest him greatly.  He
looked at his own slim brown hands with a half smile, and it was almost
as cruel as the laugh of the other.  Yet it had, too, a knowledge and an
understanding which gave it humanity.

"You're sure he did it?" Sinnet asked presently, after drinking a very
small portion of liquor, and tossing some water from the pannikin after
it.  "You're sure Greevy killed your boy, Buck?"

"My name's Buckmaster, ain't it--Jim Buckmaster?  Don't I know my own
name?  It's as sure as that.  My boy said it was Greevy when he was
dying.  He told Bill Ricketts so, and Bill told me afore he went East.
Bill didn't want to tell, but he said it was fair I should know, for my
boy never did nobody any harm--an' Greevy's livin' on.  But I'll git him.
Right's right."

"Wouldn't it be better for the law to hang him, if you've got the proof,
Buck?  A year or so in jail, an' a long time to think over what's going
round his neck on the scaffold--wouldn't that suit you, if you've got the
proof?"

A rigid, savage look came into Buckmaster's face.

"I ain't lettin' no judge and jury do my business.  I'm for certain sure,
not for p'r'aps!  An' I want to do it myself.  Clint was only twenty.
Like boys we was together.  I was eighteen when I married, an' he come
when she went--jest a year--jest a year.  An' ever since then we lived
together, him an' me, an' shot together, an' trapped together, an' went
gold-washin' together on the Cariboo, an' eat out of the same dish, an'
slept under the same blanket, and jawed together nights--ever since he
was five, when old Mother Lablache had got him into pants, an' he was fit
to take the trail."

The old man stopped a minute, his whipcord neck swelling, his lips
twitching.  He brought a fist down on the table with a bang.  "The
biggest little rip he was, as full of fun as a squirrel, an' never a
smile-o-jest his eyes dancin', an' more sense than a judge.  He laid hold
o' me, that cub did--it was like his mother and himself together; an' the
years flowin' in an' peterin' out, an' him gettin' older, an' always jest
the same.  Always on rock-bottom, always bright as a dollar, an' we
livin' at Black Nose Lake, layin' up cash agin' the time we was to go
South, an' set up a house along the railway, an' him to git married.  I
was for his gittin' married same as me, when we had enough cash.  I use
to think of that when he was ten, and when he was eighteen I spoke to him
about it; but he wouldn't listen--jest laughed at me.  You remember how
Clint used to laugh sort of low and teasin' like--you remember that laugh
o' Clint's, don't you?"

Sinnet's face was towards the valley and Juniper Bend, but he slowly
turned his head and looked at Buckmaster strangely out of his half-shut
eyes.  He took the pipe from his mouth slowly.

"I can hear it now," he answered slowly.  "I hear it often, Buck."

The old man gripped his arm so suddenly that Sinnet was startled,--in so
far as anything could startle anyone who had lived a life of chance and
danger and accident, and his face grew a shade paler; but he did not
move, and Buckmaster's hand tightened convulsively.

"You liked him, an' he liked you; he first learnt poker off you, Sinnet.
He thought you was a tough, but he didn't mind that no more than I did.
It ain't for us to say what we're goin' to be, not always.  Things in
life git stronger than we are.  You was a tough, but who's goin' to judge
you!  I ain't; for Clint took to you, Sinnet, an' he never went wrong in
his thinkin'.  God! he was wife an' child to me--an' he's dead--dead--
dead."

The man's grief was a painful thing to see.  His hands gripped the table,
while his body shook with sobs, though his eyes gave forth no tears.  It
was an inward convulsion, which gave his face the look of unrelieved
tragedy and suffering--Laocoon struggling with the serpents of sorrow and
hatred which were strangling him.

"Dead an' gone," he repeated, as he swayed to and fro, and the table
quivered in his grasp.  Presently, however, as though arrested by a
thought, he peered out of the doorway towards Juniper Bend.  "That hawk
seen him--it seen him.  He's comin', I know it, an' I'll git him--plumb."
He had the mystery and imagination of the mountain-dweller.

The rifle lay against the wall behind him, and he turned and touched it
almost caressingly.  "I ain't let go like this since he was killed,
Sinnet.  It don't do.  I got to keep myself stiddy to do the trick when
the minute comes.  At first I usen't to sleep at nights, thinkin' of
Clint, an' missin' him, an' I got shaky and no good.  So I put a cinch on
myself, an' got to sleepin' again--from the full dusk to dawn, for Greevy
wouldn't take the trail at night.  I've kept stiddy."  He held out his
hand as though to show that it was firm and steady, but it trembled with
the emotion which had conquered him.  He saw it, and shook his head
angrily.

"It was seein' you, Sinnet.  It burst me.  I ain't seen no one to speak
to in a month, an' with you sittin' there, it was like Clint an' me
cuttin' and comin' again off the loaf an' the knuckle-bone of ven'son."

Sinnet ran a long finger slowly across his lips, and seemed meditating
what he should say to the mountaineer.  At length he spoke, looking into
Buckmaster's face.  "What was the story Ricketts told you?  What did your
boy tell Ricketts?  I've heard, too, about it, and that's why I asked you
if you had proofs that Greevy killed Clint.  Of course, Clint should
know, and if he told Ricketts, that's pretty straight; but I'd like to
know if what I heard tallies with what Ricketts heard from Clint.
P'r'aps it'd ease your mind a bit to tell it.  I'll watch the Bend--don't
you trouble about that.  You can't do these two things at one time.  I'll
watch for Greevy; you give me Clint's story to Ricketts.  I guess you
know I'm feelin' for you, an' if I was in your place I'd shoot the man
that killed Clint, if it took ten years.  I'd have his heart's blood--all
of it.  Whether Greevy was in the right or in the wrong, I'd have him--
plumb."

Buckmaster was moved.  He gave a fierce exclamation and made a gesture
of cruelty.  "Clint right or wrong?  There ain't no question of that.
My boy wasn't the kind to be in the wrong.  What did he ever do but what
was right?  If Clint was in the wrong I'd kill Greevy jest the same, for
Greevy robbed him of all the years that was before him--only a sapling he
was, an' all his growin' to do, all his branches to widen an' his roots
to spread.  But that don't enter in it, his bein' in the wrong.  It was
a quarrel, and Clint never did Greevy any harm.  It was a quarrel over
cards, an' Greevy was drunk, an' followed Clint out into the prairie in
the night and shot him like a coyote.  Clint hadn't no chance, an' he
jest lay there on the ground till morning, when Ricketts and Steve Joicey
found him.  An' Clint told Ricketts who it was."

"Why didn't Ricketts tell it right out at once?" asked Sinnet.

"Greevy was his own cousin--it was in the family, an' he kept thinkin' of
Greevy's gal, Em'ly.  Her--what'll it matter to her!  She'll get married,
an she'll forgit.  I know her, a gal that's got no deep feelin' like
Clint had for me.  But because of her Ricketts didn't speak for a year.
Then he couldn't stand it any longer, an' he told me--seein' how I
suffered, an' everybody hidin' their suspicions from me, an' me up here
out o' the way, an' no account.  That was the feelin' among 'em--what was
the good of making things worse!  They wasn't thinkin' of the boy or of
Jim Buckmaster, his father.  They was thinkin' of Greevy's gal--to save
her trouble."

Sinnet's face was turned towards Juniper Bend, and the eyes were fixed,
as it were, on a still more distant object--a dark, brooding, inscrutable
look.

"Was that all Ricketts told you, Buck?"  The voice was very quiet, but
it had a suggestive note.

"That's all Clint told Bill before he died.  That was enough."

There was a moment's pause, and then, puffing out long clouds of smoke,
and in a tone of curious detachment, as though he were telling of
something that he saw now in the far distance, or as a spectator of a
battle from a far vantage-point might report to a blind man standing
near, Sinnet said:

"P'r'aps Ricketts didn't know the whole story; p'r'aps Clint didn't know
it all to tell him; p'r'aps Clint didn't remember it all.  P'r'aps he
didn't remember anything except that he and Greevy quarrelled, and that
Greevy and he shot at each other in the prairie.  He'd only be thinking
of the thing that mattered most to him--that his life was over, an' that
a man had put a bullet in him, an'--"

Buckmaster tried to interrupt him, but he waved a hand impatiently, and
continued: "As I say, maybe he didn't remember everything; he had been
drinkin' a bit himself, Clint had.  He wasn't used to liquor, and
couldn't stand much.  Greevy was drunk, too, and gone off his head with
rage.  He always gets drunk when he first comes South to spend the winter
with his girl Em'ly."  He paused a moment, then went on a little more
quickly.  "Greevy was proud of her--couldn't even bear her being crossed
in any way; and she has a quick temper, and if she quarrelled with
anybody Greevy quarrelled too."

"I don't want to know anything about her," broke in Buckmaster roughly.
"She isn't in this thing.  I'm goin' to git Greevy.  I bin waitin' for
him, an' I'll git him."

"You're going to kill the man that killed your boy, if you can, Buck; but
I'm telling my story in my own way.  You told Ricketts's story; I'll tell
what I've heard.  And before you kill Greevy you ought to know all there
is that anybody else knows--or suspicions about it."

"I know enough.  Greevy done it, an' I'm here."  With no apparent
coherence and relevancy Sinnet continued, but his voice was not so even
as before.  "Em'ly was a girl that wasn't twice alike.  She was
changeable.  First it was one, then it was another, and she didn't seem
to be able to fix her mind.  But that didn't prevent her leadin' men on.
She wasn't changeable, though, about her father.  She was to him what
your boy was to you.  There she was like you, ready to give everything up
for her father."

"I tell y' I don't want to hear about her," said Buckmaster, getting
to his feet and setting his jaws.  "You needn't talk to me about her.
She'll git over it.  I'll never git over what Greevy done to me or
to Clint--jest twenty, jest twenty!  I got my work to do."

He took his gun from the wall, slung it into the hollow of his arm, and
turned to look up the valley through the open doorway.

The morning was sparkling with life--the life and vigour which a touch of
frost gives to the autumn world in a country where the blood tingles to
the dry, sweet sting of the air.  Beautiful, and spacious, and buoyant,
and lonely, the valley and the mountains seemed waiting, like a new-born
world, to be peopled by man.  It was as though all had been made ready
for him--the birds whistling and singing in the trees, the whisk of the
squirrels leaping from bough to bough, the peremptory sound of the
woodpecker's beak against the bole of a tree, the rustle of the leaves as
a wood-hen ran past--a waiting, virgin world.

Its beauty and its wonderful dignity had no appeal to Buckmaster.  His
eyes and mind were fixed on a deed which would stain the virgin wild with
the ancient crime that sent the first marauder on human life into the
wilderness.

As Buckmaster's figure darkened the doorway Sinnet seemed to waken as
from a dream, and he got swiftly to his feet.

"Wait--you wait, Buck.  You've got to hear all.  You haven't heard my
story yet.  Wait, I tell you."  His voice was so sharp and insistent, so
changed, that Buckmaster turned from the doorway and came back into the
room.

"What's the use of my hearin'?  You want me not to kill Greevy, because
of that gal.  What's she to me?"

"Nothing to you, Buck, but Clint was everything to her."

The mountaineer stood like one petrified.

"What's that--what's that you say?  It's a damn lie!"

"It wasn't cards--the quarrel, not the real quarrel.  Greevy found Clint
kissing her.  Greevy wanted her to marry Gatineau, the lumber-king.  That
was the quarrel."

A snarl was on the face of Buckmaster.  "Then she'll not be sorry when I
git him.  It took Clint from her as well as from me."  He turned to the
door again.  "But, wait, Buck, wait one minute and hear--"  He was
interrupted by a low, exultant growl, and he saw Buckmaster's rifle
clutched as a hunter, stooping, clutches his gun to fire on his prey.

"Quick, the spy-glass!" he flung back at Sinnet.  "It's him--but I'll
make sure."

Sinnet caught the telescope from the nails where it hung, and looked out
towards Juniper Bend.  "It's Greevy--and his girl, and the half-breeds,"
he said, with a note in his voice that almost seemed agitation, and yet
few had ever seen Sinnet agitated.  "Em'ly must have gone up the trail in
the night."

"It's my turn now," the mountaineer said hoarsely, and, stooping, slid
away quickly into the undergrowth.  Sinnet followed, keeping near him,
neither speaking.  For a half mile they hastened on, and now and then
Buckmaster drew aside the bushes, and looked up the valley, to keep
Greevy and his bois brulees in his eye.  Just so had he and his son and
Sinnet stalked the wapiti and the red deer along these mountains; but
this was a man that Buckmaster was stalking now, with none of the joy of
the sport which had been his since a lad; only the malice of the avenger.
The lust of a mountain feud was on him; he was pursuing the price of
blood.

At last Buckmaster stopped at a ledge of rock just above the trail.
Greevy would pass below, within three hundred yards of his rifle.  He
turned to Sinnet with cold and savage eyes.  "You go back," he said.
"It's my business.  I don't want you to see.  You don't want to see,
then you won't know, and you won't need to lie.  You said that the man
that killed Clint ought to die.  He's going to die, but it's none o' your
business.  I want to be alone.  In a minute he'll be where I kin git him
--plumb.  You go, Sinnet-right off.  It's my business."

There was a strange, desperate look in Sinnet's face; it was as hard as
stone, but his eyes had a light of battle in them.

"It's my business right enough, Buck," he said, "and you're not going to
kill Greevy.  That girl of his has lost her lover, your boy.  It's broke
her heart almost, and there's no use making her an orphan too.  She can't
stand it.  She's had enough.  You leave her father alone--you hear me,
let up!"  He stepped between Buckmaster and the ledge of rock from which
the mountaineer was to take aim.

There was a terrible look in Buckmaster's face.  He raised his single-
barrelled rifle, as though he would shoot Sinnet; but, at the moment, he
remembered that a shot would warn Greevy, and that he might not have time
to reload.  He laid his rifle against a tree swiftly.

"Git away from here," he said, with a strange rattle in his throat.
"Git away quick; he'll be down past here in a minute."

Sinnet pulled himself together as he saw Buckmaster snatch at a great
clasp-knife in his belt.  He jumped and caught Buckmaster's wrist in a
grip like a vice.

"Greevy didn't kill him, Buck," he said.  But the mountaineer was gone
mad, and did not grasp the meaning of the words.  He twined his left arm
round the neck of Sinnet, and the struggle began, he fighting to free
Sinnet's hand from his wrist, to break Sinnet's neck.  He did not realise
what he was doing.  He only knew that this man stood between him and the
murderer of his boy, and all the ancient forces of barbarism were alive
in him.  Little by little they drew to the edge of the rock, from which
there was a sheer drop of two hundred feet.  Sinnet fought like a panther
for safety, but no sane man's strength could withstand the demoniacal
energy that bent and crushed him.  Sinnet felt his strength giving.  Then
he said in a hoarse whisper, "Greevy didn't kill him.  I killed him,
and--"

At that moment he was borne to the ground with a hand on his throat, and
an instant after the knife went home.

Buckmaster got to his feet and looked at his victim for an instant, dazed
and wild; then he sprang for his gun.  As he did so the words that Sinnet
had said as they struggled rang in his ears, "Greevy didn't kill him; I
killed him!"

He gave a low cry and turned back towards Sinnet, who lay in a pool of
blood.

Sinnet was speaking.  He went and stooped over him.  "Em'ly threw me over
for Clint," the voice said huskily, "and I followed to have it out with
Clint.  So did Greevy, but Greevy was drunk.  I saw them meet.  I was
hid.  I saw that Clint would kill Greevy, and I fired.  I was off my
head--I'd never cared for any woman before, and Greevy was her father.
Clint was off his head too. He had called me names that day--a cardsharp,
and a liar, and a thief, and a skunk, he called me, and I hated him just
then.  Greevy fired twice wide.  He didn't know but what he killed Clint,
but he didn't.  I did.  So I tried to stop you, Buck--"

Life was going fast, and speech failed him; but he opened his eyes again
and whispered, "I didn't want to die, Buck.  I am only thirty-five, and
it's too soon; but it had to be.  Don't look that way, Buck.  You got the
man that killed him--plumb.  But Em'ly didn't play fair with me--made a
fool of me, the only time in my life I ever cared for a woman.  You leave
Greevy alone, Buck, and tell Em'ly for me I wouldn't let you kill her
father."

"You--Sinnet--you, you done it!  Why, he'd have fought for you.  You--
done it--to him--to Clint!"  Now that the blood-feud had been satisfied,
a great change came over the mountaineer.  He had done his work, and the
thirst for vengeance was gone.  Greevy he had hated, but this man had
been with him in many a winter's hunt.  His brain could hardly grasp the
tragedy--it had all been too sudden.

Suddenly he stooped down.  "Sinnet," he said, "ef there was a woman in
it, that makes all the difference.  Sinnet, of--"

But Sinnet was gone upon a long trail that led into an illimitable
wilderness.  With a moan the old man ran to the ledge of rock.  Greevy
and his girl were below.

"When there's a woman in it--!" he said, in a voice of helplessness and
misery, and watched Em'ly till she disappeared from view.  Then he
turned, and, lifting up in his arms the man he had killed, carried him
into the deeper woods.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Even bad company's better than no company at all
Future of those who will not see, because to see is to suffer
I like when I like, and I like a lot when I like
It ain't for us to say what we're goin' to be, not always
Things in life git stronger than we are
We don't live in months and years, but just in minutes






NORTHERN LIGHTS

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.


TO-MORROW
QU'APPELLE
THE STAKE AND THE PLUMB-LINE




TO-MORROW

"My, nothing's the matter with the world to-day!  It's so good it almost
hurts."

She raised her head from the white petticoat she was ironing, and gazed
out of the doorway and down the valley with a warm light in her eyes and
a glowing face.  The snow-tipped mountains far above and away, the fir-
covered, cedar-ranged foothills, and, lower down, the wonderful maple and
ash woods, with their hundred autumn tints, all merging to one soft, red
tone, the roar of the stream tumbling down the ravine from the heights,
the air that braced the nerves--it all seemed to be part of her, the
passion of life corresponding to the passion of living in her.

After watching the scene dreamily for a moment, she turned and laid the
iron she had been using upon the hot stove near.  Taking up another, she
touched it with a moistened finger to test the heat, and, leaning above
the table again, passed it over the linen for a few moments, smiling at
something that was in her mind.  Presently she held the petticoat up,
turned it round, then hung it in front of her, eyeing it with critical
pleasure.

"To-morrow!" she said, nodding at it.  "You won't be seen, I suppose,
but I'll know you're nice enough for a queen--and that's enough to know."

She blushed a little, as though someone had heard her words and was
looking at her, then she carefully laid the petticoat over the back of a
chair.  "No queen's got one whiter, if I do say it," she continued,
tossing her head.

In that, at any rate, she was right, for the water of the mountain
springs was pure, the air was clear, and the sun was clarifying; and
little ornamented or frilled as it was, the petticoat was exquisitely
soft and delicate.  It would have appealed to more eyes than a woman's.

"To-morrow!"  She nodded at it again and turned again to the bright world
outside.  With arms raised and hands resting against the timbers of the
doorway, she stood dreaming.  A flock of pigeons passed with a whir not
far away, and skirted the woods making down the valley.  She watched
their flight abstractedly, yet with a subconscious sense of pleasure.
Life--they were Life, eager, buoyant, belonging to this wild region,
where still the heart could feel so much at home, where the great world
was missed so little.

Suddenly, as she gazed, a shot rang out down the valley, and two of the
pigeons came tumbling to the ground, a stray feather floating after.
With a startled exclamation she took a step forward.  Her brain became
confused and disturbed.  She had looked out on Eden, and it had been
ravaged before her eyes.  She had been thinking of to-morrow, and this
vast prospect of beauty and serenity had been part of the pageant in
which it moved.  Not the valley alone had been marauded, but that "To-
morrow," and all it meant to her.

Instantly the valley had become clouded over for her, its glory and its
grace despoiled.  She turned back to the room where the white petticoat
lay upon the chair, but stopped with a little cry of alarm.

A man was standing in the centre of the room.  He had entered stealthily
by the back door, and had waited for her to turn round.  He was haggard
and travel stained, and there was a feverish light in his eyes.  His
fingers trembled as they adjusted his belt, which seemed too large for
him.  Mechanically he buckled it tighter.

"You're Jenny Long, ain't you?" he asked.  "I beg pardon for sneakin'
in like this, but they're after me, some ranchers and a constable--one
o' the Riders of the Plains.  I've been tryin' to make this house all
day.  You're Jenny Long, ain't you?"

She had plenty of courage, and, after the first instant of shock, she had
herself in hand.  She had quickly observed his condition, had marked the
candour of the eye and the decision and character of the face, and doubt
of him found no place in her mind.  She had the keen observation of the
dweller in lonely places, where every traveller has the potentialities of
a foe, while the door of hospitality is opened to him after the custom of
the wilds.  Year in, year out, since she was a little girl and came to
live here with her Uncle Sanger when her father died--her mother had gone
before she could speak--travellers had halted at this door, going North
or coming South, had had bite and sup, and bed, may be, and had passed
on, most of them never to be seen again.  More than that, too, there had
been moments of peril, such as when, alone, she had faced two wood-
thieves with a revolver, as they were taking her mountain-pony with them,
and herself had made them "hands-up," and had marched them into a
prospector's camp five miles away.

She had no doubt about the man before her.  Whatever he had done, it was
nothing dirty or mean--of that she was sure.

"Yes, I'm Jenny Long," she answered.  "What have you done?  What are they
after you for?"

"Oh! to-morrow," he answered, "to-morrow I got to git to Bindon.
It's life or death.  I come from prospecting two hundred miles up North.
I done it in two days and a half.  My horse dropped dead--I'm near dead
myself.  I tried to borrow another horse up at Clancey's, and at
Scotton's Drive, but they didn't know me, and they bounced me.
So I borrowed a horse off Weigall's paddock, to make for here--to you.
I didn't mean to keep that horse.  Hell, I'm no horse-stealer!  But I
couldn't explain to them, except that I had to git to Bindon to save a
man's life.  If people laugh in your face, it's no use explainin'.
I took a roan from Weigall's, and they got after me.  'Bout six miles
up they shot at me an' hurt me."

She saw that one arm hung limp at his side and that his wrist was wound
with a red bandana.

She started forward.  "Are you hurt bad?  Can I bind it up or wash it for
you?  I've got plenty of hot water here, and it's bad letting a wound get
stale."

He shook his head.  "I washed the hole clean in the creek below.  I
doubled on them.  I had to go down past your place here, and then work
back to be rid of them.  But there's no telling when they'll drop on to
the game, and come back for me.  My only chance was to git to you.  Even
if I had a horse, I couldn't make Bindon in time.  It's two days round
the gorge by trail.  A horse is no use now--I lost too much time since
last night.  I can't git to Bindon to-morrow in time, if I ride the
trail."

"The river?" she asked abruptly.

"It's the only way.  It cuts off fifty mile.  That's why I come to you."

She frowned a little, her face became troubled, and her glance fell on
his arm nervously.  "What've I got to do with it?" she asked almost
sharply.

"Even if this was all right,"--he touched the wounded arm--" I couldn't
take the rapids in a canoe.  I don't know them, an' it would be sure
death.  That's not the worst, for there's a man at Bindon would lose his
life--p'r'aps twenty men--I dunno; but one man sure.  To-morrow, it's go
or stay with him.  He was good--Lord, but he was good!--to my little gal
years back.  She'd only been married to me a year when he saved her,
riskin' his own life.  No one else had the pluck.  My little gal, only
twenty she was, an' pretty as a picture, an' me fifty miles away when the
fire broke out in the hotel where she was.  He'd have gone down to hell
for a friend, an' he saved my little gal.  I had her for five years after
that.  That's why I got to git to Bindon to-morrow.  If I don't, I don't
want to see to-morrow.  I got to go down the river to-night."

She knew what he was going to ask her.  She knew he was thinking what all
the North knew, that she was the first person to take the Dog Nose Rapids
in a canoe, down the great river scarce a stone's-throw from her door;
and that she had done it in safety many times.  Not in all the West and
North were there a half-dozen people who could take a canoe to Bindon,
and they were not here.  She knew that he meant to ask her to paddle him
down the swift stream with its murderous rocks, to Bindon.  She glanced
at the white petticoat on the chair, and her lips tightened.  To-morrow-
tomorrow was as much to her here as it would be to this man before her,
or the man he would save at Bindon.  "What do you want?" she asked,
hardening her heart.  "Can't you see?  I want you to hide me here till
tonight.  There's a full moon, an' it would be as plain goin' as by day.
They told me about you up North, and I said to myself, 'If I git to Jenny
Long, an' tell her about my friend at Bindon, an' my little gal, she'll
take me down to Bindon in time.'  My little gal would have paid her own
debt if she'd ever had the chance.  She didn't--she's lying up on Mazy
Mountain.  But one woman'll do a lot for the sake of another woman.  Say,
you'll do it, won't you?  If I don't git there by to-morrow noon, it's no
good."

She would not answer.  He was asking more than he knew.  Why should she
be sacrificed?  Was it her duty to pay the "little gal's debt," to save
the man at Bindon?  To-morrow was to be the great day in her own life.
The one man in all the world was coming to marry her to-morrow.  After
four years' waiting, after a bitter quarrel in which both had been to
blame, he was coming from the mining town of Selby to marry her to-
morrow.

"What will happen?  Why will your friend lose his life if you don't get
to Bindon?"

"By noon to-morrow, by twelve o'clock noon; that's the plot; that's what
they've schemed.  Three days ago, I heard.  I got a man free from trouble
North--he was no good, but I thought he ought to have another chance, and
I got him free.  He told me of what was to be done at Bindon.  There'd
been a strike in the mine, an' my friend had took it in hand with
knuckle-dusters on.  He isn't the kind to fell a tree with a jack-knife.
Then three of the strikers that had been turned away--they was the
ringleaders--they laid a plan that'd make the devil sick.  They've put a
machine in the mine, an' timed it, an' it'll go off when my friend comes
out of the mine at noon to-morrow."

Her face was pale now, and her eyes had a look of pain and horror.  Her
man--him that she was to marry--was the head of a mine also at Selby,
forty miles beyond Bindon, and the horrible plot came home to her with
piercing significance.

"Without a second's warning," he urged, "to go like that, the man that
was so good to my little gal, an' me with a chance to save him, an'
others too, p'r'aps.  You won't let it be.  Say, I'm pinnin' my faith to
you.  I'm--"

Suddenly he swayed.  She caught him, held him, and lowered him gently in
a chair.  Presently he opened his eyes.  "It's want o' food, I suppose,"
he said.  "If you've got a bit of bread and meat--I must keep up."

She went to a cupboard, but suddenly turned towards him again.  Her ears
had caught a sound outside in the underbush.  He had heard also, and he
half staggered to his feet.

"Quick-in here!" she said, and, opening a door, pushed him inside.  "Lie
down on my bed, and I'll bring you vittles as quick as I can," she added.
Then she shut the door, turned to the ironing-board, and took up the
iron, as the figure of a man darkened the doorway.

"Hello, Jinny, fixin' up for to-morrow?" the man said, stepping inside,
with a rifle under his arm and some pigeons in his hand.

She nodded and gave him an impatient, scrutinising glance.  His face had
a fatuous kind of smile.

"Been celebrating the pigeons?" she asked drily, jerking her head
towards the two birds, which she had seen drop from her Eden skies a
short time before.

"I only had one swig of whiskey, honest Injun!" he answered.  "I s'pose
I might have waited till to-morrow, but I was dead-beat.  I got a bear
over by the Tenmile Reach, and I was tired.  I ain't so young as I used
to be, and, anyhow, what's the good!  What's ahead of me?  You're going
to git married to-morrow after all these years we bin together, and
you're going down to Selby from the mountains, where I won't see you, not
once in a blue moon.  Only that old trollop, Mother Massy, to look after
me."

"Come down to Selby and live there.  You'll be welcome by Jake and me."

He stood his gun in the corner and, swinging the pigeons in his hand,
said: "Me live out of the mountains?  Don't you know better than that?
I couldn't breathe; and I wouldn't want to breathe.  I've got my shack
here, I got my fur business, and they're still fond of whiskey up North!"
He chuckled to himself, as he thought of the illicit still farther up the
mountain behind them.  "I make enough to live on, and I've put a few
dollars by, though I won't have so many after to-morrow, after I've given
you a little pile, Jinny."

"P'r'aps there won't be any to-morrow, as you expect," she said slowly.

The old man started.  "What, you and Jake ain't quarrelled again?  You
ain't broke it off at the last moment, same as before?  You ain't had a
letter from Jake?"  He looked at the white petticoat on the chairback,
and shook his head in bewilderment.

"I've had no letter," she answered.  "I've had no letter from Selby for a
month.  It was all settled then, and there was no good writing, when he
was coming to-morrow with the minister and the licence.  Who do you
think'd be postman from Selby here?  It must have cost him ten dollars to
send the last letter."

"Then what's the matter?  I don't understand," the old man urged
querulously.  He did not want her to marry and leave him, but he wanted
no more troubles; he did not relish being asked awkward questions by
every mountaineer he met, as to why Jenny Long didn't marry Jake Lawson.

"There's only one way that I can be married tomorrow," she said at last,
"and that's by you taking a man down the Dog Nose Rapids to Bindon to-
night."

He dropped the pigeons on the floor, dumbfounded.  "What in--"

He stopped short, in sheer incapacity, to go further.  Jenny had not
always been easy to understand, but she was wholly incomprehensible now.

She picked up the pigeons and was about to speak, but she glanced at the
bedroom door, where her exhausted visitor had stretched himself on her
bed, and beckoned her uncle to another room.

"There's a plate of vittles ready for you in there," she said.  "I'll
tell you as you eat."

He followed her into the little living-room adorned by the trophies of
his earlier achievements with gun and rifle, and sat down at the table,
where some food lay covered by a clean white cloth.

"No one'll ever look after me as you've done, Jinny," he said, as he
lifted the cloth and saw the palatable dish ready for him.  Then he
remembered again about to-morrow and the Dog Nose Rapids.

"What's it all about, Jinny?  What's that about my canoeing a man down to
Bindon?"

"Eat, uncle," she said more softly than she had yet spoken, for his words
about her care of him had brought a moisture to her eyes.  "I'll be back
in a minute and tell you all about it."

"Well, it's about took away my appetite," he said.  "I feel a kind of
sinking."  He took from his pocket a bottle, poured some of its contents
into a tin cup, and drank it off.

"No, I suppose you couldn't take a man down to Bindon," she said, as she
saw his hand trembling on the cup.  Then she turned and entered the other
room again.  Going to the cupboard, she hastily heaped a plate with food,
and, taking a dipper of water from a pail near by, she entered her
bedroom hastily and placed what she had brought on a small table, as her
visitor rose slowly from the bed.

He was about to speak, but she made a protesting gesture.

"I can't tell you anything yet," she said.  "Who was it come?" he asked.

"My uncle--I'm going to tell him."

"The men after me may git here any minute," he urged anxiously.

"They'd not be coming into my room," she answered, flushing slightly.

"Can't you hide me down by the river till we start?" he asked, his eyes
eagerly searching her face.  He was assuming that she would take him down
the river: but she gave no sign.

"I've got to see if he'll take you first," she answered.

"He--your uncle, Tom Sanger?  He drinks, I've heard.  He'd never git to
Bindon."

She did not reply directly to his words.  "I'll come back and tell you.
There's a place you could hide by the river where no one could ever find
you," she said, and left the room.

As she stepped out, she saw the old man standing in the doorway of the
other room.  His face was petrified with amazement.

"Who you got in that room, Jinny?  What man you got in that room?  I
heard a man's voice.  Is it because o' him that you bin talkin' about no
weddin' to-morrow?  Is it one o' the others come back, puttin' you off
Jake again?"

Her eyes flashed fire at his first words, and her breast heaved with
anger, but suddenly she became composed again and motioned him to a
chair.

"You eat, and I'll tell you all about it, Uncle Tom," she said, and,
seating herself at the table also, she told him the story of the man who
must go to Bindon.

When she had finished, the old man blinked at her for a minute without
speaking, then he said slowly: "I heard something 'bout trouble down at
Bindon yisterday from a Hudson's Bay man goin' North, but I didn't take
it in.  You've got a lot o' sense, Jinny, an' if you think he's tellin'
the truth, why, it goes; but it's as big a mixup as a lariat in a steer's
horns.  You've got to hide him sure, whoever he is, for I wouldn't hand
an Eskimo over, if I'd taken him in my home once; we're mountain people.
A man ought to be hung for horse-stealin', but this was different.  He
was doing it to save a man's life, an' that man at Bindon was good to his
little gal, an' she's dead."

He moved his head from side to side with the air of a sentimental
philosopher.  He had all the vanity of a man who had been a success in a
small, shrewd, culpable way--had he not evaded the law for thirty years
with his whiskey-still?

"I know how he felt," he continued.  "When Betsy died--we was only four
years married--I could have crawled into a knot-hole an' died there.  You
got to save him, Jinny, but"--he came suddenly to his feet--"he ain't
safe here.  They might come any minute, if they've got back on his trail.
I'll take him up the gorge.  You know where."

"You sit still, Uncle Tom," she rejoined.  "Leave him where he is a
minute.  There's things must be settled first.  They ain't going to look
for him in my bedroom, be they?"

The old man chuckled.  "I'd like to see 'em at it.  You got a temper,
Jinny; and you got a pistol too, eh?"  He chuckled again.  "As good a
shot as any in the mountains.  I can see you darin' 'em to come on.  But
what if Jake come, and he found a man in your bedroom"--he wiped the
tears of laughter from his eyes--"why, Jinny--!"

He stopped short, for there was anger in her face.  "I don't want to hear
any more of that.  I do what I want to do," she snapped out.

"Well, well, you always done what you wanted; but we got to git him up
the hills, till it's sure they're out o' the mountains and gone back.
It'll be days, mebbe."

"Uncle Tom, you've took too much to drink," she answered.  "You don't
remember he's got to be at Bindon by to-morrow noon.  He's got to save
his friend by then."

"Pshaw!  Who's going to take him down the river to-night?  You're goin'
to be married to-morrow.  If you like, you can give him the canoe.  It'll
never come back, nor him neither!"

"You've been down with me," she responded suggestively.  "And you went
down once by yourself."

He shook his head.  "I ain't been so well this summer.  My sight ain't
what it was.  I can't stand the racket as I once could.  'Pears to me I'm
gettin' old.  No, I couldn't take them rapids, Jinny, not for one frozen
minute."

She looked at him with trouble in her eyes, and her face lost some of its
colour.  She was fighting back the inevitable, even as its shadow fell
upon her.  "You wouldn't want a man to die, if you could save him, Uncle
Tom--blown up, sent to Kingdom Come without any warning at all; and
perhaps he's got them that love him--and the world so beautiful."

"Well, it ain't nice dyin' in the summer, when it's all sun, and there's
plenty everywhere; but there's no one to go down the river with him.
What's his name?"

Her struggle was over.  She had urged him, but in very truth she was
urging herself all the time, bringing herself to the axe of sacrifice.

"His name's Dingley.  I'm going down the river with him--down to Bindon."

The old man's mouth opened in blank amazement.  His eyes blinked
helplessly.

"What you talkin' about, Jinny!  Jake's comin' up with the minister, an'
you're goin' to be married at noon to-morrow."

"I'm takin' him"--she jerked her head towards the room where Dingley was
--"down Dog Nose Rapids to-night.  He's risked his life for his friend,
thinkin' of her that's dead an' gone, and a man's life is a man's life.
If it was Jake's life in danger, what'd I think of a woman that could
save him, and didn't?"

"Onct you broke off with Jake Lawson--the day before you was to be
married; an' it's took years to make up an' agree again to be spliced.
If Jake comes here to-morrow, and you ain't here, what do you think he'll
do?  The neighbours are comin' for fifty miles round, two is comin' up a
hundred miles, an' you can't--Jinny, you can't do it.  I bin sick of
answerin' questions all these years 'bout you and Jake, an' I ain't goin'
through it again.  I've told more lies than there's straws in a tick."

She flamed out.  "Then take him down the river yourself--a man to do a
man's work.  Are you afeard to take the risk?"

He held out his hands slowly and looked at them.  They shook a little.
"Yes, Jinny," he said sadly, "I'm afeard.  I ain't what I was.  I made a
mistake, Jinny.  I've took too much whiskey.  I'm older than I ought to
be.  I oughtn't never to have had a whiskey-still, an' I wouldn't have
drunk so much.  I got money--money for you, Jinny, for you an' Jake, but
I've lost what I'll never git back.  I'm afeard to go down the river with
him.  I'd go smash in the Dog Nose Rapids.  I got no nerve.  I can't hunt
the grizzly any more, nor the puma, Jinny.  I got to keep to common
shootin', now and henceforth, amen!  No, I'd go smash in Dog Nose
Rapids."

She caught his hands impulsively.  "Don't you fret, Uncle Tom.  You've
bin a good uncle to me, and you've bin a good friend, and you ain't the
first that's found whiskey too much for him.  You ain't got an enemy in
the mountains.  Why, I've got two or three--"

"Shucks!  Women--only women whose beaux left 'em to follow after you.
That's nothing, an' they'll be your friends fast enough after you're
married tomorrow."

"I ain't going to be married to-morrow.  I'm going down to Bindon
to-night.  If Jake's mad, then it's all over, and there'll be more
trouble among the women up here."

By this time they had entered the other room.  The old man saw the white
petticoat on the chair.  "No woman in the mountains ever had a petticoat
like that, Jinny.  It'd make a dress, it's that pretty an' neat.  Golly,
I'd like to see it on you, with the blue skirt over, and just hitched up
a little."

"Oh, shut up--shut up!" she said in sudden anger, and caught up the
petticoat as though she would put it away; but presently she laid it down
again and smoothed it with quick, nervous fingers.  "Can't you talk sense
and leave my clothes alone?  If Jake comes, and I'm not here, and he
wants to make a fuss, and spoil everything, and won't wait, you give him
this petticoat.  You put it in his arms.  I bet you'll have the laugh on
him.  He's got a temper."

"So've you, Jinny, dear, so've you," said the old man, laughing.  "You're
goin' to have your own way, same as ever--same as ever."




II

A moon of exquisite whiteness silvering the world, making shadows on the
water as though it were sunlight and the daytime, giving a spectral look
to the endless array of poplar trees on the banks, glittering on the foam
of the rapids.  The spangling stars made the arch of the sky like some
gorgeous chancel in a cathedral as vast as life and time.  Like the day
which was ended, in which the mountain-girl had found a taste of Eden,
it seemed too sacred for mortal strife.  Now and again there came the
note of a night-bird, the croak of a frog from the shore; but the serene
stillness and beauty of the primeval North was over all.

For two hours after sunset it had all been silent and brooding, and then
two figures appeared on the bank of the great river.  A canoe was softly
and hastily pushed out from its hidden shelter under the overhanging
bank, and was noiselessly paddled out to midstream, dropping down the
current meanwhile.

It was Jenny Long and the man who must get to Bindon.  They had waited
till nine o'clock, when the moon was high and full, to venture forth.
Then Dingley had dropped from her bedroom window, had joined her under
the trees, and they had sped away, while the man's hunters, who had come
suddenly, and before Jenny could get him away into the woods, were
carousing inside.  These had tracked their man back to Tom Sanger's
house, and at first they were incredulous that Jenny and her uncle had
not seen him.  They had prepared to search the house, and one had laid
his finger on the latch of her bedroom door; but she had flared out with
such anger that, mindful of the supper she had already begun to prepare
for them, they had desisted, and the whiskey-jug which the old man
brought out distracted their attention.

One of their number, known as the Man from Clancey's, had, however, been
outside when Dingley had dropped from the window, and had seen him from a
distance.  He had not given the alarm, but had followed, to make the
capture by himself.  But Jenny had heard the stir of life behind them,
and had made a sharp detour, so that they had reached the shore and were
out in mid-stream before their tracker got to the river.  Then he called
to them to return, but Jenny only bent a little lower and paddled on,
guiding the canoe towards the safe channel through the first small rapids
leading to the great Dog Nose Rapids.

A rifle-shot rang out, and a bullet "pinged" over the water and
splintered the side of the canoe where Dingley sat.  He looked calmly
back, and saw the rifle raised again, but did not stir, in spite of
Jenny's warning to lie down.

"He'll not fire on you so long as he can draw a bead on me," he said
quietly.

Again a shot rang out, and the bullet sang past his head.

"If he hits me, you go straight on to Bindon," he continued.  "Never mind
about me.  Go to the Snowdrop Mine.  Get there by twelve o'clock, and
warn them.  Don't stop a second for me--"

Suddenly three shots rang out in succession--Tom Sanger's house had
emptied itself on the bank of the river--and Dingley gave a sharp
exclamation.

"They've hit me, but it's the same arm as before," he growled.  "They got
no right to fire at me.  It's not the law.  Don't stop," he added
quickly, as he saw her half turn round.

Now there were loud voices on the shore.  Old Tom Sanger was threatening
to shoot the first man that fired again, and he would have kept his word.

"Who you firin' at?" he shouted.  "That's my niece, Jinny Long, an' you
let that boat alone.  This ain't the land o' lynch law.  Dingley ain't
escaped from gaol.  You got no right to fire at him."

"No one ever went down Dog Nose Rapids at night," said the Man from
Clancey's, whose shot had got Dingley's arm.  "There ain't a chance of
them doing it.  No one's ever done it."

The two were in the roaring rapids now, and the canoe was jumping through
the foam like a racehorse.  The keen eyes on the bank watched the canoe
till it was lost in the half-gloom below the first rapids, and then they
went slowly back to Tom Sanger's house.

"So there'll be no wedding to-morrow," said the Man from Clancey's.

"Funerals, more likely," drawled another.

"Jinny Long's in that canoe, an' she ginerally does what she wants to,"
said Tom Sanger sagely.

"Well, we done our best, and now I hope they'll get to Bindon," said
another.

Sanger passed the jug to him freely.  Then they sat down and talked of
the people who had been drowned in Dog Nose Rapids and of the last
wedding in the mountains.




III

It was as the Man from Clancey's had said, no one had ever gone down Dog
Nose Rapids in the nighttime, and probably no one but Jenny Long would
have ventured it.  Dingley had had no idea what a perilous task had been
set his rescuer.  It was only when the angry roar of the great rapids
floated up-stream to them, increasing in volume till they could see the
terror of tumbling waters just below, and the canoe shot forward like a
snake through the swift, smooth current which would sweep them into the
vast caldron, that he realised the terrible hazard of the enterprise.

The moon was directly overhead when they drew upon the race of rocks and
fighting water and foam.  On either side only the shadowed shore,
forsaken by the races which had hunted and roamed and ravaged here--not
a light, nor any sign of life, or the friendliness of human presence to
make their isolation less complete, their danger, as it were, shared by
fellow-mortals.  Bright as the moon was, it was not bright enough for
perfect pilotage.  Never in the history of white men had these rapids
been ridden at nighttime.  As they sped down the flume of the deep,
irresistible current, and were launched into the trouble of rocks and
water, Jenny realised how great their peril was, and how different the
track of the waters looked at nighttime from daytime.  Outlines seemed
merged, rocks did not look the same, whirlpools had a different vortex,
islands of stone had a new configuration.  As they sped on, lurching,
jumping, piercing a broken wall of wave and spray like a torpedo,
shooting an almost sheer fall, she came to rely on a sense of intuition
rather than memory, for night had transformed the waters.

Not a sound escaped either.  The man kept his eyes fixed on the woman;
the woman scanned the dreadful pathway with eyes deep-set and burning,
resolute, vigilant, and yet defiant too, as though she had been trapped
into this track of danger, and was fighting without great hope, but with
the temerity and nonchalance of despair.  Her arms were bare to the
shoulder almost, and her face was again and again drenched; but second
succeeded second, minute followed minute in a struggle which might well
turn a man's hair grey, and now, at last-how many hours was it since they
had been cast into this den of roaring waters!--at last, suddenly, over a
large fall, and here smooth waters again, smooth and untroubled, and
strong and deep.  Then, and only then, did a word escape either; but the
man had passed through torture and unavailing regret, for he realised
that he had had no right to bring this girl into such a fight.  It was
not her friend who was in danger at Bindon.  Her life had been risked
without due warrant.  "I didn't know, or I wouldn't have asked it," he
said in a low voice.  "Lord, but you are a wonder--to take that hurdle
for no one that belonged to you, and to do it as you've done it.  This
country will rise to you."  He looked back on the raging rapids far
behind, and he shuddered.  "It was a close call, and no mistake.  We must
have been within a foot of down-you-go fifty times.  But it's all right
now, if we can last it out and git there."  Again he glanced back, then
turned to the girl.  "It makes me pretty sick to look at it," he
continued.  "I bin through a lot, but that's as sharp practice as I
want."

"Come here and let me bind up your arm," she answered.  "They hit you--
the sneaks!  Are you bleeding much?"

He came near her carefully, as she got the big canoe out of the current
into quieter water.  She whipped the scarf from about her neck, and with
his knife ripped up the seam of his sleeve.  Her face was alive with the
joy of conflict and elated with triumph.  Her eyes were shining.  She
bathed the wound--the bullet had passed clean through the fleshy part of
the arm--and then carefully tied the scarf round it over her
handkerchief.

"I guess it's as good as a man could do it," she said at last.

"As good as any doctor," he rejoined.

"I wasn't talking of your arm," she said.

"'Course not.  Excuse me.  You was talkin' of them rapids, and I've got
to say there ain't a man that could have done it and come through like
you.  I guess the man that marries you'll get more than his share of
luck."

"I want none of that," she said sharply, and picked up her paddle again,
her eyes flashing anger.

He took a pistol from his pocket and offered it to her.  "I didn't mean
any harm by what I said.  Take this if you think I won't know how to
behave myself," he urged.

She flung up her head a little.  "I knew what I was doing before I
started," she said.  "Put it away.  How far is it, and can we do it in
time?"

"If you can hold out, we can do it; but it means going all night and all
morning; and it ain't dawn yet, by a long shot."

Dawn came at last, and the mist of early morning, and the imperious and
dispelling sun; and with mouthfuls of food as they drifted on, the two
fixed their eyes on the horizon beyond which lay Bindon.  And now it
seemed to the girl as though this race to save a life or many lives was
the one thing in existence.  To-morrow was to-day, and the white
petticoat was lying in the little house in the mountains, and her wedding
was an interminable distance off, so had this adventure drawn her into
its risks and toils and haggard exhaustion.

Eight, nine, ten, eleven o'clock came, and then they saw signs of
settlement.  Houses appeared here and there upon the banks, and now and
then a horseman watched them from the shore, but they could not pause.
Bindon--Bindon--Bindon--the Snowdrop Mine at Bindon, and a death-dealing
machine timed to do its deadly work, were before the eyes of the two
voyageurs.

Half-past eleven, and the town of Bindon was just beyond them.  A quarter
to twelve, and they had run their canoe into the bank beyond which were
the smokestacks and chimneys of the mine.  Bindon was peacefully pursuing
its way, though here and there were little groups of strikers who had not
resumed work.

Dingley and the girl scrambled up the bank.  Trembling with fatigue, they
hastened on.  The man drew ahead of her, for she had paddled for fifteen
hours, practically without ceasing, and the ground seemed to rise up at
her.  But she would not let him stop.

He hurried on, reached the mine, and entered, shouting the name of his
friend.  It was seven minutes to twelve.

A moment later, a half-dozen men came rushing from that portion of the
mine where Dingley had been told the machine was placed, and at their
head was Lawson, the man he had come to save.

The girl hastened on to meet them, but she grew faint and leaned against
a tree, scarce conscious.  She was roused by voices.

"No, it wasn't me, it wasn't me that done it; it was a girl.  Here she
is--Jenny Long!  You got to thank her, Jake."

Jake! Jake!  The girl awakened to full understanding now.  Jake--what
Jake?  She looked, then stumbled forward with a cry.

"Jake--it was my Jake!" she faltered.  The mine-boss caught her in his
arms.  "You, Jenny!  It's you that's saved me!"

Suddenly there was a rumble as of thunder, and a cloud of dust and stone
rose from the Snowdrop Mine.  The mine-boss tightened his arm round the
girl's waist.  "That's what I missed, through him and you, Jenny," he
said.

"What was you doing here, and not at Selby, Jake?" she asked.

"They sent for me-to stop the trouble here."

"But what about our wedding to-day?" she asked with a frown.

"A man went from here with a letter to you three days ago," he said,
"asking you to come down here and be married.  I suppose he got drunk,
or had an accident, and didn't reach you.  It had to be.  I was needed
here--couldn't tell what would happen."

"It has happened out all right," said Dingley, "and this'll be the end of
it.  You got them miners solid now.  The strikers'll eat humble pie after
to-day."

"We'll be married to-day, just the same," the mine-boss said, as he gave
some brandy to the girl.

But the girl shook her head.  She was thinking of a white petticoat in a
little house in the mountains.  "I'm not going to be married to-day," she
said decisively.

"Well, to-morrow," said the mine-boss.

But the girl shook her head again.  "To-day is tomorrow," she answered.
"You can wait, Jake.  I'm going back home to be married."






QU'APPELLE

(Who calls?)


"But I'm white; I'm not an Indian.  My father was a white man.  I've been
brought up as a white girl.  I've had a white girl's schooling."

Her eyes flashed as she sprang to her feet and walked up and down the
room for a moment, then stood still, facing her mother,--a dark-faced,
pock-marked woman, with heavy, somnolent eyes, and waited for her to
speak.  The reply came slowly and sullenly--

"I am a Blackfoot woman.  I lived on the Muskwat River among the braves
for thirty years.  I have killed buffalo.  I have seen battles.  Men,
too, I have killed when they came to steal our horses and crept in on our
lodges in the night-the Crees!  I am a Blackfoot.  You are the daughter
of a Blackfoot woman.  No medicine can cure that.  Sit down.  You have no
sense.  You are not white.  They will not have you.  Sit down."

The girl's handsome face flushed; she threw up her hands in an agony of
protest.  A dreadful anger was in her panting breast, but she could not
speak.  She seemed to choke with excess of feeling.  For an instant she
stood still, trembling with agitation, then she sat down suddenly on a
great couch covered with soft deerskins and buffalo robes.  There was
deep in her the habit of obedience to this sombre but striking woman.
She had been ruled firmly, almost oppressively, and she had not yet
revolted.  Seated on the couch, she gazed out of the window at the flying
snow, her brain too much on fire for thought, passion beating like a
pulse in all her lithe and graceful young body, which had known the
storms of life and time for only twenty years.

The wind shrieked and the snow swept past in clouds of blinding drift,
completely hiding from sight the town below them, whose civilisation had
built itself many habitations and was making roads and streets on the
green-brown plain, where herds of buffalo had stamped and streamed and
thundered not long ago.  The town was a mile and a half away, and these
two were alone in a great circle of storm, one of them battling against a
tempest which might yet overtake her, against which she had set her face
ever since she could remember, though it had only come to violence since
her father died two years before--a careless, strong, wilful white man,
who had lived the Indian life for many years, but had been swallowed at
last by the great wave of civilisation streaming westward and northward,
wiping out the game and the Indian, and overwhelming the rough, fighting,
hunting, pioneer life.  Joel Renton had made money, by good luck chiefly,
having held land here and there which he had got for nothing, and had
then almost forgotten about it, and, when reminded of it, still held on
to it with that defiant stubbornness which often possesses improvident
and careless natures.  He had never had any real business instinct, and
to swagger a little over the land he held and to treat offers of purchase
with contempt was the loud assertion of a capacity he did not possess.
So it was that stubborn vanity, beneath which was his angry protest
against the prejudice felt by the new people of the West for the white
pioneer who married an Indian, and lived the Indian life,--so it was that
this gave him competence and a comfortable home after the old trader had
been driven out by the railway and the shopkeeper.  With the first land
he sold he sent his daughter away to school in a town farther east and
south, where she had been brought in touch with a life that at once
cramped and attracted her; where, too, she had felt the first chill
of racial ostracism, and had proudly fought it to the end, her weapons
being talent, industry, and a hot, defiant ambition.

There had been three years of bitter, almost half-sullen, struggle,
lightened by one sweet friendship with a girl whose face she had since
drawn in a hundred different poses on stray pieces of paper, on the walls
of the big, well-lighted attic to which she retreated for hours every
day, when she was not abroad on the prairies, riding the Indian pony that
her uncle the Piegan Chief, Ice Breaker, had given her years before.
Three years of struggle, and then her father had died, and the refuge for
her vexed, defiant heart was gone.  While he lived she could affirm the
rights of a white man's daughter, the rights of the daughter of a pioneer
who had helped to make the West; and her pride in him had given a glow to
her cheek and a spring to her step which drew every eye.  In the chief
street of Portage la Drome men would stop their trafficking and women
nudge each other when she passed, and wherever she went she stirred
interest, excited admiration, or aroused prejudice--but the prejudice did
not matter so long as her father, Joel Renton, lived.  Whatever his
faults, and they were many--sometimes he drank too much, and swore a
great deal, and bullied and stormed--she blinked at them all, for he was
of the conquering race, a white man who had slept in white sheets and
eaten off white tablecloths, and used a knife and fork, since he was
born; and the women of his people had had soft petticoats and fine
stockings, and silk gowns for festal days, and feathered hats of velvet,
and shoes of polished leather, always and always, back through many
generations.  She had held her head high, for she was of his women, of
the women of his people, with all their rights and all their claims.  She
had held it high till that stormy day--just such a day as this, with the
surf of snow breaking against the house--when they carried him in out of
the wild turmoil and snow, laying him on the couch where she now sat, and
her head fell on his lifeless breast, and she cried out to him in vain to
come back to her.

Before the world her head was still held high, but in the attic-room,
and out on the prairies far away, where only the coyote or the prairie-
hen saw, her head drooped, and her eyes grew heavy with pain and sombre
protest.  Once in an agony of loneliness, and cruelly hurt by a
conspicuous slight put upon her at the Portage by the wife of the Reeve
of the town, who had daughters twain of pure white blood got from behind
the bar of a saloon in Winnipeg, she had thrown open her window at night
with the frost below zero, and stood in her thin nightdress, craving the
death which she hoped the cold would give her soon.  It had not availed,
however, and once again she had ridden out in a blizzard to die, but had
come upon a man lost in the snow, and her own misery had passed from her,
and her heart, full of the blood of plainsmen, had done for another what
it would not do for itself.  The Indian in her had, with strange, sure
instinct, found its way to Portage la Drome, the man with both hands and
one foot frozen, on her pony, she walking at his side, only conscious
that she had saved one, not two, lives that day.

Here was another such day, here again was the storm in her heart which
had driven her into the plains that other time, and here again was that
tempest of white death outside.

"You have no sense.  You are not white.  They will not have you.  Sit
down--"

The words had fallen on her ears with a cold, deadly smother.  There came
a chill upon her which stilled the wild pulses in her, which suddenly
robbed the eyes of their brightness and gave a drawn look to the face.

"You are not white.  They will not have you, Pauline."  The Indian mother
repeated the words after a moment, her eyes grown still more gloomy; for
in her, too, there was a dark tide of passion moving.  In all the
outlived years this girl had ever turned to the white father rather than
to her, and she had been left more and more alone.  Her man had been kind
to her, and she had been a faithful wife, but she had resented the
natural instinct of her half-breed child, almost white herself and with
the feelings and ways of the whites, to turn always to her father, as
though to a superior guide, to a higher influence and authority.  Was
not she herself the descendant of Blackfoot and Piegan chiefs through
generations of rulers and warriors?  Was there not Piegan and Blackfoot
blood in the girl's veins?  Must only the white man's blood be reckoned
when they made up their daily account and balanced the books of their
lives, credit and debtor,--misunderstanding and kind act, neglect and
tenderness, reproof and praise, gentleness and impulse, anger and
caress,--to be set down in the everlasting record?  Why must the Indian
always give way--Indian habits, Indian desires, the Indian way of doing
things, the Indian point of view, Indian food, Indian medicine?  Was it
all bad, and only that which belonged to white life good?

"Look at your face in the glass, Pauline," she added at last.  "You are
good-looking, but it isn't the good looks of the whites.  The lodge of a
chieftainess is the place for you.  There you would have praise and
honour; among the whites you are only a half-breed.  What is the good?
Let us go back to the life out there beyond the Muskwat River--up beyond.
There is hunting still, a little, and the world is quiet, and nothing
troubles.  Only the wild dog barks at night, or the wolf sniffs at the
door and all day there is singing.  Somewhere out beyond the Muskwat the
feasts go on, and the old men build the great fires, and tell tales, and
call the wind out of the north, and make the thunder speak; and the young
men ride to the hunt or go out to battle, and build lodges for the
daughters of the tribe; and each man has his woman, and each woman has in
her breast the honour of the tribe, and the little ones fill the lodge
with laughter.  Like a pocket of deerskin is every house, warm and small
and full of good things.  Hai-yai, what is this life to that!  There you
will be head and chief of all, for there is money enough for a thousand
horses; and your father was a white man, and these are the days when the
white man rules.  Like clouds before the sun are the races of men, and
one race rises and another falls.  Here you are not first, but last; and
the child of the white father and mother, though they be as the dirt that
flies from a horse's heels, it is before you.  Your mother is a
Blackfoot."

As the woman spoke slowly and with many pauses, the girl's mood changed,
and there came into her eyes a strange, dark look deeper than anger.  She
listened with a sudden patience which stilled the agitation in her breast
and gave a little touch of rigidity to her figure.  Her eyes withdrew
from the wild storm without and gravely settled on her mother's face,
and with the Indian woman's last words understanding pierced, but did not
dispel, the sombre and ominous look in her eyes.  There was silence for
a moment, and then she spoke almost as evenly as her mother had done.

"I will tell you everything.  You are my mother, and I love you; but you
will not see the truth.  When my father took you from the lodges and
brought you here, it was the end of the Indian life.  It was for you to
go on with him, but you would not go.  I was young, but I saw, and I said
that in all things I would go with him.  I did not know that it would be
hard, but at school, at the very first, I began to understand.  There was
only one, a French girl--I loved her--a girl who said to me, 'You are as
white as I am, as anyone, and your heart is the same, and you are
beautiful.'  Yes, Manette said I was beautiful."

She paused a moment, a misty, far-away look came into her eyes, her
fingers clasped and unclasped, and she added:

"And her brother, Julien,--he was older,--when he came to visit Manette,
he spoke to me as though I was all white, and was good to me.  I have
never forgotten, never.  It was five years ago, but I remember him.  He
was tall and strong, and as good as Manette--as good as Manette.  I loved
Manette, but she suffered for me, for I was not like the others, and my
ways were different--then.  I had lived up there on the Warais among the
lodges, and I had not seen things--only from my father, and he did so
much in an Indian way.  So I was sick at heart, and sometimes I wanted to
die; and once--But there was Manette, and she would laugh and sing, and
we would play together, and I would speak French and she would speak
English, and I learned from her to forget the Indian ways.  What were
they to me?  I had loved them when I was of them, but I came on to a
better life.  The Indian life is to the white life as the parfleche pouch
to--to this."  She laid her hand upon a purse of delicate silver mesh
hanging at her waist.  "When your eyes are opened you must go on, you
cannot stop.  There is no going back.  When you have read of all there is
in the white man's world, when you have seen, then there is no returning.
You may end it all, if you wish, in the snow, in the river, but there is
no returning.  The lodge of a chief--ah, if my father had heard you say
that--!"

The Indian woman shifted heavily in her chair, then shrank away from the
look fixed on her.  Once or twice she made as if she would speak, but
sank down in the great chair, helpless and dismayed.

"The lodge of a chief!" the girl continued in a low, bitter voice.
"What is the lodge of a chief?  A smoky fire, a pot, a bed of skins, aih-
yi!  If the lodges of the Indians were millions, and I could be head of
all, and rule the land, yet would I rather be a white girl in the hut of
her white man, struggling for daily bread among the people who sweep the
buffalo out, but open up the land with the plough, and make a thousand
live where one lived before.  It is peace you want, my mother, peace and
solitude, in which the soul goes to sleep.  Your days of hope are over,
and you want to drowse by the fire.  I want to see the white men's cities
grow, and the armies coming over the hill with the ploughs and the
reapers and the mowers, and the wheels and the belts and engines of the
great factories, and the white woman's life spreading everywhere; for I
am a white man's daughter.  I can't be both Indian and white.  I will not
be like the sun when the shadow cuts across it and the land grows dark.
I will not be half-breed.  I will be white or I will be Indian; and I
will be white, white only.  My heart is white, my tongue is white, I
think, I feel, as white people think and feel.  What they wish, I wish;
as they live, I live; as white women dress, I dress."

She involuntarily drew up the dark red skirt she wore, showing a white
petticoat and a pair of fine stockings on an ankle as shapely as she had
ever seen among all the white women she knew.  She drew herself up with
pride, and her body had a grace and ease which the white woman's
convention had not cramped.

Yet, with all her protests, no one would have thought her English.
She might have been Spanish, or Italian, or Roumanian, or Slav, though
nothing of her Indian blood showed in purely Indian characteristics, and
something sparkled in her, gave a radiance to her face and figure which
the storm and struggle in her did not smother.  The white women of
Portage la Drome were too blind, too prejudiced, to see all that she
really was, and admiring white men could do little, for Pauline would
have nothing to do with them till the women met her absolutely as an
equal; and from the other halfbreeds, who intermarried with each other
and were content to take a lower place than the pure whites, she held
aloof, save when any of them was ill or in trouble.  Then she recognised
the claim of race, and came to their doors with pity and soft impulses to
help them.  French and Scotch and English half-breeds, as they were, they
understood how she was making a fight for all who were half-Indian, half-
white, and watched her with a furtive devotion, acknowledging her
superior place, and proud of it.

"I will not stay here," said the Indian mother with sullen stubbornness.
"I will go back beyond the Warais.  My life is my own life, and I will do
what I like with it."

The girl started, but became composed again on the instant.  "Is your
life all your own, mother?" she asked.  "I did not come into the world
of my own will.  If I had I would have come all white or all Indian.  I
am your daughter, and I am here, good or bad--is your life all your own?"

"You can marry and stay here, when I go.  You are twenty.  I had my man,
your father, when I was seventeen.  You can marry.  There are men.  You
have money.  They will marry you--and forget the rest."

With a cry of rage and misery the girl sprang to her feet and started
forwards, but stopped suddenly at sound of a hasty knocking and a voice
asking admittance.  An instant later, a huge, bearded, broad-shouldered
man stepped inside, shaking himself free of the snow, laughing half-
sheepishly as he did so, and laying his fur-cap and gloves with
exaggerated care on the wide window-sill.

"John Alloway," said the Indian woman in a voice of welcome, and with a
brightening eye, for it would seem as though he came in answer to her
words of a few moments before.  With a mother's instinct she had divined
at once the reason for the visit, though no warning thought crossed the
mind of the girl, who placed a chair for their visitor with a heartiness
which was real--was not this the white man she had saved from death in
the snow a year ago?  Her heart was soft towards the life she had kept in
the world.  She smiled at him, all the anger gone from her eyes, and
there was almost a touch of tender anxiety in her voice as she said "What
brought you out in this blizzard?  It wasn't safe.  It doesn't seem
possible you got here from the Portage."

The huge ranchman and auctioneer laughed cheerily.  "Once lost, twice get
there," he exclaimed, with a quizzical toss of the head, thinking he had
said a good thing.  "It's a year ago to the very day that I was lost out
back"--he jerked a thumb over his shoulder--"and you picked me up and
brought me in; and what was I to do but come out on the anniversary and
say thank you?  I'd fixed up all year to come to you, and I wasn't to be
stopped, 'cause it was like the day we first met, old Coldmaker hitting
the world with his whips of frost, and shaking his ragged blankets of
snow over the wild west."

"Just such a day," said the Indian woman after a pause.  Pauline remained
silent, placing a little bottle of cordial before their visitor, with
which he presently regaled himself, raising his glass with an air.

"Many happy returns to us both!" he said, and threw the liquor down his
throat, smacked his lips, and drew his hand down his great moustache and
beard like some vast animal washing its face with its paw.  Smiling
and yet not at ease, he looked at the two women and nodded his head
encouragingly, but whether the encouragement was for himself or for
them he could not have told.

His last words, however, had altered the situation.  The girl had caught
at a suggestion in them which startled her.  This rough white plainsman
was come to make love to her, and to say--what?  He was at once awkward
and confident, afraid of her, of her refinement, grace, beauty, and
education, and yet confident in the advantage of his position, a white
man bending to a half-breed girl.  He was not conscious of the
condescension and majesty of his demeanour, but it was there, and
his untutored words and ways must make it all too apparent to the girl.
The revelation of the moment made her at once triumphant and humiliated.
This white man had come to make love to her, that was apparent; but that
he, ungrammatical, crude, and rough, should think he had but to put out
his hand, and she in whom every subtle emotion and influence had delicate
response, whose words and ways were as far removed from his as day from
night, would fly to him, brought the flush of indignation to her cheek.
She responded to his toast with a pleasant nod, however, and said:

"But if you will keep coming in such wild storms, there will not be many
anniversaries."  Laughing, she poured out another glass of liquor for
him.

"Well, now, p'r'aps you're right, and so the only thing to do is not to
keep coming, but to stay--stay right where you are."

The Indian woman could not see her daughter's face, which was turned to
the fire, but she herself smiled at John Alloway, and nodded her head
approvingly.  Here was the cure for her own trouble and loneliness.
Pauline and she, who lived in different worlds, and yet were tied to each
other by circumstances they could not control, would each work out her
own destiny after her own nature, since John Alloway had come a-wooing.
She would go back on the Warais, and Pauline would remain at the Portage,
a white woman with her white man.  She would go back to the smoky fires
in the huddled lodges; to the venison stew and the snake dance; to the
feasts of the Medicine Men, and the long sleeps in the summer days, and
the winter's tales, and be at rest among her own people; and Pauline
would have revenge of the wife of the prancing Reeve, and perhaps the
people would forget who her mother was.

With these thoughts flying through her sluggish mind, she rose and moved
heavily from the room, with a parting look of encouragement at Alloway,
as though to say, a man that is bold is surest.

With her back to the man, Pauline watched her mother leave the room, saw
the look she gave Alloway.  When the door was closed she turned and
looked Alloway in the eyes.

"How old are you?" she asked suddenly.

He stirred in his seat nervously.  "Why, fifty, about," he answered with
confusion.

"Then you'll be wise not to go looking for anniversaries in blizzards,
when they're few at the best," she said with a gentle and dangerous
smile.

"Fifty-why, I'm as young as most men of thirty," he responded with an
uncertain laugh.  "I'd have come here to-day if it had been snowing
pitchforks and chain-lightning.  I made up my mind I would.  You saved my
life, that's dead sure; and I'd be down among the: moles if it wasn't for
you and that Piegan pony of yours.  Piegan ponies are wonders in a storm-
seem to know their way by instinct.  You, too--why, I bin on the plains
all my life, and was no better than a baby that day; but you--why, you
had Piegan in you, why, yes--"

He stopped short for a moment, checked by the look in her face, then went
blindly on: "And you've got Blackfoot in you, too; and you just felt your
way through the tornado and over the blind prairie like a, bird reaching
for the hills.  It was as easy to you as picking out a moverick in a
bunch of steers to me.  But I never could make out what you was doing on
the prairie that terrible day.  I've thought of it a hundred times.  What
was you doing, if it ain't cheek to ask?"

"I was trying to lose a life," she answered quietly, her eyes dwelling
on his face, yet not seeing him; for it all came back on her, the agony
which had driven her out into the tempest to be lost evermore.

He laughed.  "Well, now, that's good," he said; "that's what they call
speaking sarcastic.  You was out to save, and not to lose, a life; that
was proved to the satisfaction of the court."  He paused and chuckled to
himself, thinking he had been witty, and continued:  "And I was that
court, and my judgment was that the debt of that life you saved had to be
paid to you within one calendar year, with interest at the usual per cent
for mortgages on good security.  That was my judgment, and there's no
appeal from it.  I am the great Justinian in this case."

"Did you ever save anybody's life?" she asked, putting the bottle of
cordial away, as he filled his glass for the third time.

"Twice certain, and once dividin' the honours," he answered, pleased at
the question.

"And did you expect to get any pay, with or without interest?" she
added.

"Me?  I never thought of it again.  But yes--by gol, I did!  One case was
funny, as funny can be.  It was Ricky Wharton over on the Muskwat River.
I saved his life right enough, and he came to me a year after and said,
You saved my life, now what are you going to do with it?  I'm stony
broke.  I owe a hundred dollars, and I wouldn't be owing it if you hadn't
saved my life.  When you saved it I was five hunderd to the good, and
I'd have left that much behind me.  Now I'm on the rocks, because you
insisted on saving my life; and you just got to take care of me.'
I 'insisted!'  Well, that knocked me silly, and I took him on--blame me,
if I didn't keep Ricky a whole year, till he went north looking for gold.
Get pay--why, I paid!  Saving life has its responsibilities, little gal."

"You can't save life without running some risk yourself, not as a rule,
can you?" she said, shrinking from his familiarity.

"Not as a rule," he replied.  "You took on a bit of risk with me, you and
your Piegan pony."

"Oh, I was young," she responded, leaning over the table, and drawing
faces on a piece of paper before her.  "I could take more risks, I was
only nineteen!"

"I don't catch on," he rejoined.  "If it's sixteen or--"

"Or fifty," she interposed.

"What difference does it make?  If you're done for, it's the same at
nineteen as fifty, and vicey-versey."

"No, it's not the same," she answered.  "You leave so much more that you
want to keep, when you go at fifty."

"Well, I dunno.  I never thought of that."

"There's all that has belonged to you.  You've been married, and have
children, haven't you?"

He started, frowned, then straightened himself.  "I got one girl--she's
east with her grandmother," he said jerkily.

"That's what I said; there's more to leave behind at fifty," she replied,
a red spot on each cheek.  She was not looking at him, but at the face of
a man on the paper before her--a young man with abundant hair, a strong
chin, and big, eloquent eyes; and all around his face she had drawn the
face of a girl many times, and beneath the faces of both she was writing
Manette and Julien.

The water was getting too deep for John Alloway.

He floundered towards the shore.  "I'm no good at words," he said--
"no good at argyment; but I've got a gift for stories--round the fire of
a night, with a pipe and a tin basin of tea; so I'm not going to try and
match you.  You've had a good education down at Winnipeg.  Took every
prize, they say, and led the school, though there was plenty of fuss
because they let you do it, and let you stay there, being half-Indian.
You never heard what was going on outside, I s'pose.  It didn't matter,
for you won out.  Blamed foolishness, trying to draw the line between red
and white that way.  Of course, it's the women always, always the women,
striking out for all-white or nothing.  Down there at Portage they've
treated you mean, mean as dirt.  The Reeve's wife--well, we'll fix that
up all right.  I guess John Alloway ain't to be bluffed.  He knows too
much and they all know he knows enough.  When John Alloway, 32 Main
Street, with a ranch on the Katanay, says, 'We're coming--Mr. and Mrs.
John Alloway is coming,' they'll get out their cards visite, I guess."

Pauline's head bent lower, and she seemed laboriously etching lines into
the faces before her--Manette and Julien, Julien and Manette; and there
came into her eyes the youth and light and gaiety of the days when Julien
came of an afternoon and the riverside rang with laughter; the dearest,
lightest days she had ever spent.

The man of fifty went on, seeing nothing but a girl over whom he was
presently going to throw the lasso of his affection, and take her home
with him, yielding and glad, a white man, and his half-breed girl--but
such a half-breed!

"I seen enough of the way some of them women treated you," he continued,
"and I sez to myself, Her turn next.  There's a way out, I sez, and John
Alloway pays his debts.  When the anniversary comes round I'll put things
right, I sez to myself.  She saved my life, and she shall have the rest
of it, if she'll take it, and will give a receipt in full, and open a new
account in the name of John and Pauline Alloway.  Catch it?  See--
Pauline?"

Slowly she got to her feet.  There was a look in her eyes such as had
been in her mother's a little while before, but a hundred times
intensified: a look that belonged to the flood and flow of generations of
Indian life, yet controlled in her by the order and understanding of
centuries of white men's lives, the pervasive, dominating power of race.

For an instant she kept her eyes towards the window.  The storm had
suddenly ceased, and a glimmer of sunset light was breaking over the
distant wastes of snow.

"You want to pay a debt you think you owe," she said, in a strange,
lustreless voice, turning to him at last.  "Well, you have paid it.  You
have given me a book to read which I will keep always.  And I give you a
receipt in full for your debt."

"I don't know about any book," he answered dazedly.  "I want to marry you
right away."

"I am sorry, but it is not necessary," she replied suggestively.
Her face was very pale now.

"But I want to.  It ain't a debt.  That was only a way of putting it.
I want to make you my wife.  I got some position, and I can make the West
sit up, and look at you and be glad."

Suddenly her anger flared out, low and vivid and fierce, but her words
were slow and measured.  "There is no reason why I should marry you--not
one.  You offer me marriage as a prince might give a penny to a beggar.
If my mother were not an Indian woman, you would not have taken it all
as a matter of course.  But my father was a white man, and I am a white
man's daughter, and I would rather marry an Indian, who would think me
the best thing there was in the light of the sun, than marry you.  Had I
been pure white you would not have been so sure, you would have asked,
not offered.  I am not obliged to you.  You ought to go to no woman as
you came to me.  See, the storm has stopped.  You will be quite safe
going back now.  The snow will be deep, perhaps, but it is not far."

She went to the window, got his cap and gloves, and handed them to him.
He took them, dumbfounded and overcome.

"Say, I ain't done it right, mebbe, but I meant well, and I'd be good to
you and proud of you, and I'd love you better than anything I ever saw,"
he said shamefacedly, but eagerly and honestly too.

"Ah, you should have said those last words first," she answered.

"I say them now."

"They come too late; but they would have been too late in any case," she
added.  "Still, I am glad you said them."

She opened the door for him.

"I made a mistake," he urged humbly.  "I understand better now.  I never
had any schoolin'."

"Oh, it isn't that," she answered gently.  "Goodbye."

Suddenly he turned.  "You're right--it couldn't ever be," he said.
"You're--you're great.  And I owe you my life still."

He stepped out into the biting air.

For a moment Pauline stood motionless in the middle of the room, her gaze
fixed upon the door which had just closed; then, with a wild gesture of
misery and despair, she threw herself upon the couch in a passionate
outburst of weeping.  Sobs shook her from head to foot, and her hands,
clenched above her head, twitched convulsively.

Presently the door opened and her mother looked in eagerly.  At what she
saw her face darkened and hardened for an instant, but then the girl's
utter abandonment of grief and agony convinced and conquered her.
Some glimmer of the true understanding of the problem which Pauline
represented got into her heart, and drove the sullen selfishness from
her face and eyes and mind.  She came over heavily and, sinking upon her
knees, swept an arm around the girl's shoulder.  She realised what had
happened, and probably this was the first time in her life that she had
ever come by instinct to a revelation of her daughter's mind, or of the
faithful meaning of incidents of their lives.

"You said no to John Alloway," she murmured.  Defiance and protest spoke
in the swift gesture of the girl's hands.  "You think because he was
white that I'd drop into his arms!  No--no--no!"

"You did right, little one."

The sobs suddenly stopped, and the girl seemed to listen with all her
body.  There was something in her Indian mother's voice she had never
heard before--at least, not since she was a little child, and swung in a
deer-skin hammock in a tamarac tree by Renton's Lodge, where the chiefs
met, and the West paused to rest on its onward march.  Something of the
accents of the voice that crooned to her then was in the woman's tones
now.

"He offered it like a lump of sugar to a bird--I know.  He didn't know
that you have great blood--yes, but it is true.  My man's grandfather,
he was of the blood of the kings of England.  My man had the proof.  And
for a thousand years my people have been chiefs.  There is no blood in
all the West like yours.  My heart was heavy, and dark thoughts came to
me, because my man is gone, and the life is not my life, and I am only an
Indian woman from the Warais, and my heart goes out there always now.
But some great Medicine has been poured into my heart.  As I stood at the
door and saw you lying there, I called to the Sun.  'O great Spirit,' I
said, 'help me to understand; for this girl is bone of my bone and flesh
of my flesh, and Evil has come between us!'  And the Sun Spirit poured
the Medicine into my spirit, and there is no cloud between us now.  It
has passed away, and I see.  Little white one, the white life is the only
life, and I will live it with you till a white man comes and gives you a
white man's home.  But not John Alloway--shall the crow nest with the
oriole?"

As the woman spoke with slow, measured voice, full of the cadences of a
heart revealing itself, the girl's breath at first seemed to stop, so
still she lay; then, as the true understanding of the words came to her,
she panted with excitement, her breast heaved, and the blood flushed her
face.  When the slow voice ceased, and the room became still, she lay
quiet for a moment, letting the new thing find secure lodgment in her
thought; then, suddenly, she raised herself and threw her arms round her
mother in a passion of affection.

"Lalika!  O mother Lalika!" she said tenderly, and kissed her again and
again.  Not since she was a little girl, long before they left the
Warais, had she called her mother by her Indian name, which her father
had humorously taught her to do in those far-off happy days by the
beautiful, singing river and the exquisite woods, when, with a bow
and arrow, she had ranged a young Diana who slew only with love.

"Lalika, mother Lalika, it is like the old, old times," she added softly.
"Ah, it does not matter now, for you understand!"

"I do not understand altogether," murmured the Indian woman gently.
"I am not white, and there is a different way of thinking; but I will
hold your hand, and we will live the white life together."

Cheek to cheek they saw the darkness come, and, afterwards, the silver
moon steal up over a frozen world, in which the air bit like steel and
braced the heart like wine.  Then, at last, before it was nine o'clock,
after her custom, the Indian woman went to bed, leaving her daughter
brooding peacefully by the fire.

For a long time Pauline sat with hands clasped in her lap, her gaze on
the tossing flames, in her heart and mind a new feeling of strength and
purpose.  The way before her was not clear, she saw no further than this
day, and all that it had brought; yet she was as one that has crossed a
direful flood and finds herself on a strange shore in an unknown country,
with the twilight about her, yet with so much of danger passed that there
was only the thought of the moment's safety round her, the camp-fire to
be lit, and the bed to be made under the friendly trees and stars.

For a half-hour she sat so, and then, suddenly, she raised her head
listening, leaning towards the window, through which the moonlight
streamed.  She heard her name called without, distinct and strange--
"Pauline!  Pauline!"

Starting up, she ran to the door and opened it.  All was silent and
cruelly cold.  Nothing but the wide plain of snow and the steely air.
But as she stood intently listening, the red glow from the fire behind
her, again came the cry--"Pauline!" not far away.  Her heart beat hard,
and she raised her head and called--why was it she should call out in a
language not her own?  "Qu'appelle?  Qu'appelle?"

And once again on the still night air came the trembling appeal--
"Pauline!"

"Qu'appelle?  Qu'appelle?" she cried, then, with a gasping murmur of
understanding and recognition she ran forwards in the frozen night
towards the sound of the voice.  The same intuitive sense which had made
her call out in French, without thought or reason, had revealed to her
who it was that called; or was it that even in the one word uttered there
was the note of a voice always remembered since those days with Manette
at Winnipeg?

Not far away from the house, on the way to Portage la Drome, but a little
distance from the road, was a crevasse, and towards this she sped, for
once before an accident had happened there.  Again the voice called as
she sped--"Pauline!" and she cried out that she was coming.  Presently
she stood above the declivity, and peered over.  Almost immediately below
her, a few feet down, was a man lying in the snow.  He had strayed from
the obliterated road, and had fallen down the crevasse, twisting his foot
cruelly.  Unable to walk he had crawled several hundred yards in the
snow, but his strength had given out, and then he had called to the
house, on whose dark windows flickered the flames of the fire, the name
of the girl he had come so far to see.  With a cry of joy and pain at
once she recognised him now.  It was as her heart had said--it was
Julien, Manette's brother.  In a moment she was beside him, her arm
around his shoulder.

"Pauline!" he said feebly, and fainted in her arms.  An instant later
she was speeding to the house, and, rousing her mother and two of the
stablemen, she snatched a flask of brandy from a cupboard and hastened
back.

An hour later Julien Labrosse lay in the great sitting-room beside the
fire, his foot and ankle bandaged, and at ease, his face alight with all
that had brought him there.  And once again the Indian mother with a sure
instinct knew why he had come, and saw that now her girl would have a
white woman's home, and, for her man, one of the race like her father's
race, white and conquering.

"I'm sorry to give trouble," Julien said, laughing--he had a trick
of laughing lightly; "but I'll be able to get back to the Portage
to-morrow."

To this the Indian mother said, however: "To please yourself is a great
thing, but to please others is better; and so you will stay here till you
can walk back to the Portage, M'sieu' Julien."

"Well, I've never been so comfortable," he said--"never so--happy.  If
you don't mind the trouble!"  The Indian woman nodded pleasantly, and
found an excuse to leave the room.  But before she went she contrived
to place near his elbow one of the scraps of paper on which Pauline had
drawn his face, with that of Manette.  It brought a light of hope and
happiness into his eyes, and he thrust the paper under the fur robes of
the couch.

"What are you doing with your life?" Pauline asked him, as his eyes
sought hers a few moments later.

"Oh, I have a big piece of work before me," he answered eagerly, "a great
chance--to build a bridge over the St.  Lawrence, and I'm only thirty!
I've got my start.  Then, I've made over the old Seigneury my father left
me, and I'm going to live in it.  It will be a fine place, when I've done
with it--comfortable and big, with old oak timbers and walls, and deep
fireplaces, and carvings done in the time of Louis Quinze, and dark red
velvet curtains for the drawingroom, and skins and furs.  Yes, I must
have skins and furs like these here."  He smoothed the skins with his
hand.

"Manette, she will live with you?" Pauline asked.  "Oh no, her husband
wouldn't like that.  You see, Manette is to be married.  She told me to
tell you all about it."

He told her all there was to tell of Manette's courtship, and added that
the wedding would take place in the spring.

"Manette wanted it when the leaves first flourish and the birds come
back," he said gaily; "and so she's not going to live with me at the
Seigneury, you see.  No, there it is, as fine a house, good enough for
a prince, and I shall be there alone, unless--"

His eyes met hers, and he caught the light that was in them, before the
eyelids drooped over them and she turned her head to the fire.  "But the
spring is two months off yet," he added.

"The spring?" she asked, puzzled, yet half afraid to speak.

"Yes, I'm going into my new house when Manette goes into her new house--
in the spring.  And I won't go alone if--"

He caught her eyes again, but she rose hurriedly and said: "You must
sleep now.  Good-night."  She held out her hand.

"Well, I'll tell you the rest to-morrow-to-morrow night when it's quiet
like this, and the stars shine," he answered.  "I'm going to have a home
of my own like this--ah, bien sur, Pauline."

That night the old Indian mother prayed to the Sun.  "O great Spirit,"
she said, "I give thanks for the Medicine poured into my heart.  Be good
to my white child when she goes with her man to the white man's home
far away.  O great Spirit, when I return to the lodges of my people, be
kind to me, for I shall be lonely; I shall not have my child; I shall not
hear my white man's voice.  Give me good Medicine, O Sun and great
Father, till my dream tells me that my man comes from over the hills for
me once more."






THE STAKE AND THE PLUMB-LINE

She went against all good judgment in marrying him; she cut herself off
from her own people, from the life in which she had been an alluring and
beautiful figure.  Washington had never had two such seasons as those in
which she moved; for the diplomatic circle who had had "the run of the
world" knew her value, and were not content without her.  She might have
made a brilliant match with one ambassador thirty years older than
herself--she was but twenty-two; and there were at least six attaches
and secretaries of legation who entered upon a tournament for her heart
and hand; but she was not for them.  All her fine faculties of tact and
fairness, of harmless strategy, and her gifts of wit and unexpected
humour were needed to keep her cavaliers constant and hopeful to the
last; but she never faltered, and she did not fail.  The faces of old men
brightened when they saw her, and one or two ancient figures who, for
years, had been seldom seen at social functions now came when they knew
she was to be present.  There were, of course, a few women who said she
would coquette with any male from nine to ninety; but no man ever said
so; and there was none, from first to last, but smiled with pleasure at
even the mention of her name, so had her vivacity, intelligence, and fine
sympathy conquered them.  She was a social artist by instinct.  In their
hearts they all recognised how fair and impartial she was; and she drew
out of every man the best that was in him.  The few women who did not
like her said that she chattered; but the truth was she made other people
talk by swift suggestion or delicate interrogation.

After the blow fell, Freddy Hartzman put the matter succinctly, and told
the truth faithfully, when he said, "The first time I met her, I told her
all I'd ever done that could be told, and all I wanted to do; including a
resolve to carry her off to some desert place and set up a Kingdom of
Two.  I don't know how she did it.  I was like a tap, and poured myself
out; and when it was all over, I thought she was the best talker I'd ever
heard.  But yet she'd done nothing except look at me and listen, and put
in a question here and there, that was like a baby asking to see your
watch.  Oh, she was a lily-flower, was Sally Seabrook, and I've never
been sorry I told her all my little story!  It did me good.  Poor
darling--it makes me sick sometimes when I think of it.  Yet she'll win
out all right--a hundred to one she'll win out.  She was a star."

Freddy Hartzman was in an embassy of repute; he knew the chancelleries
and salons of many nations, and was looked upon as one of the ablest and
shrewdest men in the diplomatic service.  He had written one of the best
books on international law in existence, he talked English like a native,
he had published a volume of delightful verse, and had omitted to publish
several others, including a tiny volume which Sally Seabrook's charms had
inspired him to write.  His view of her was shared by most men who knew
the world, and especially by the elderly men who had a real knowledge of
human nature, among whom was a certain important member of the United
States executive called John Appleton.  When the end of all things at
Washington came for Sally, these two men united to bear her up, that her
feet should not stumble upon the stony path of the hard journey she had
undertaken.

Appleton was not a man of much speech, but his words had weight; for he
was not only a minister; he came of an old family which had ruled the
social destinies of a state, and had alternately controlled and disturbed
its politics.  On the day of the sensation, in the fiery cloud of which
Sally disappeared, Appleton delivered himself of his mind in the matter
at a reception given by the President.

"She will come back--and we will all take her back, be glad to have her
back," he said.  "She has the grip of a lever which can lift the eternal
hills with the right pressure.  Leave her alone--leave her alone.  This
is a democratic country, and she'll prove democracy a success before
she's done."

The world knew that John Appleton had offered her marriage, and he had
never hidden the fact.  What they did not know was that she had told him
what she meant to do before she did it.  He had spoken to her plainly,
bluntly, then with a voice that was blurred and a little broken, urging
her against the course towards which she was set; but it had not availed;
and, realising that he had come upon a powerful will underneath the sunny
and so human surface, he had ceased to protest, to bear down upon her
mind with his own iron force.  When he realised that all his reasoning
was wasted, that all worldly argument was vain, he made one last attempt,
a forlorn hope, as though to put upon record what he believed to be the
truth.

"There is no position you cannot occupy," he said.  "You have the perfect
gift in private life, and you have a public gift.  You have a genius for
ruling.  Say, my dear, don't wreck it all.  I know you are not for me,
but there are better men in the country than I am.  Hartzman will be a
great man one day--he wants you.  Young Tilden wants you; he has
millions, and he will never disgrace them or you, the power which they
can command, and the power which you have.  And there are others.  Your
people have told you they will turn you off; the world will say things--
will rend you.  There is nothing so popular for the moment as the fall of
a favourite.  But that's nothing--it's nothing at all compared with the
danger to yourself.  I didn't sleep last night thinking of it.  Yet I'm
glad you wrote me; it gave me time to think, and I can tell you the truth
as I see it.  Haven't you thought that he will drag you down, down, down,
wear out your soul, break and sicken your life, destroy your beauty--you
are beautiful, my dear, beyond what the world sees, even.  Give it up--
ah, give it up, and don't break our hearts!  There are too many people
loving you for you to sacrifice them--and yourself, too.  .  .  . You've
had such a good time!"

"It's been like a dream," she interrupted, in a faraway voice, "like a
dream, these two years."

"And it's been such a good dream," he urged; "and you will only go to a
bad one, from which you will never wake.  The thing has fastened on him;
he will never give it up.  And penniless, too--his father has cast him
off.  My girl, it's impossible.  Listen to me.  There's no one on earth
that would do more for you than I would--no one."

"Dear, dear friend!" she cried with a sudden impulse, and caught his
hand in hers and kissed it before he could draw it back.  "You are so
true, and you think you are right.  But, but"--her eyes took on a deep,
steady, far-away look--"but I will save him; and we shall not be
penniless in the end.  Meanwhile I have seven hundred dollars a year of
my own.  No one can touch that.  Nothing can change me now--and I have
promised."

When he saw her fixed determination, he made no further protest, but
asked that he might help her, be with her the next day, when she was to
take a step which the wise world would say must lead to sorrow and a
miserable end.

The step she took was to marry Jim Templeton, the drunken, cast-off son
of a millionaire senator from Kentucky, who controlled railways, and
owned a bank, and had so resented his son's inebriate habits that for
five years he had never permitted Jim's name to be mentioned in his
presence.  Jim had had twenty thousand dollars left him by his mother,
and a small income of three hundred dollars from an investment which had
been made for him when a little boy.  And this had carried him on; for,
drunken as he was, he had sense enough to eke out the money, limiting
himself to three thousand dollars a year.  He had four thousand dollars
left, and his tiny income of three hundred, when he went to Sally
Seabrook, after having been sober for a month, and begged her to marry
him.

Before dissipation had made him look ten years older than he was, there
had been no handsomer man in all America.  Even yet he had a remarkable
face; long, delicate, with dark brown eyes, as fair a forehead as man
could wish, and black, waving hair, streaked with grey-grey, though he
was but twenty-nine years of age.

When Sally was fifteen and he twenty-two, he had fallen in love with her
and she with him; and nothing had broken the early romance.  He had
captured her young imagination, and had fastened his image on her heart.
Her people, seeing the drift of things, had sent her to a school on the
Hudson, and the two did not meet for some time.  Then came a stolen
interview, and a fastening of the rivets of attraction--for Jim had gifts
of a wonderful kind.  He knew his Horace and Anacreon and Heine and
Lamartine and Dante in the originals, and a hundred others; he was a
speaker of power and grace; and he had a clear, strong head for business.
He was also a lawyer, and was junior attorney to his father's great
business.  It was because he had the real business gift, not because
he had a brilliant and scholarly mind, that his father had taken him
into his concerns, and was the more unforgiving when he gave way to
temptation.  Otherwise, he would have pensioned Jim off, and dismissed
him from his mind as a useless, insignificant person; for Horace,
Anacreon, and philosophy and history were to him the recreations of the
feeble-minded.  He had set his heart on Jim, and what Jim could do and
would do by and by in the vast financial concerns he controlled, when he
was ready to slip out and down; but Jim had disappointed him beyond
calculation.

In the early days of their association Jim had left his post and taken to
drink at critical moments in their operations.  At first, high words had
been spoken; then there came the strife of two dissimilar natures, and
both were headstrong, and each proud and unrelenting in his own way.
Then, at last, had come the separation, irrevocable and painful; and Jim
had flung out into the world, a drunkard, who, sober for a fortnight or a
month, or three months, would afterward go off on a spree, in which he
quoted Sappho and Horace in taverns, and sang bacchanalian songs with a
voice meant for the stage--a heritage from an ancestor who had sung upon
the English stage a hundred years before.  Even in his cups, even after
his darling vice had submerged him, Jim Templeton was a man marked out
from his fellows, distinguished and very handsome.  Society, however, had
ceased to recognise him for a long time, and he did not seek it.  For two
or three years he practised law now and then.  He took cases, preferably
criminal cases, for which very often he got no pay; but that, too, ceased
at last.  Now, in his quiet, sober intervals he read omnivorously, and
worked out problems in physics for which he had a taste, until the old
appetite surged over him again.  Then his spirits rose, and he was the
old brilliant talker, the joyous galliard until, in due time, he became
silently and lethargically drunk.

In one of his sober intervals he had met Sally Seabrook in the street.
It was the first time in four years, for he had avoided her, and though
she had written to him once or twice, he had never answered her--shame
was in his heart.  Yet all the time the old song was in Sally's ears.
Jim Templeton had touched her in some distant and intimate corner of her
nature where none other had reached; and in all her gay life, when men
had told their tale of admiration in their own way, her mind had gone
back to Jim, and what he had said under the magnolia trees; and his voice
had drowned all others.  She was not blind to what he had become, but a
deep belief possessed her that she, of all the world, could save him.
She knew how futile it would look to the world, how wild a dream it
looked even to her own heart, how perilous it was; but, play upon the
surface of things as she had done so much and so often in her brief
career, she was seized of convictions having origin, as it might seem,
in something beyond herself.

So when she and Jim met in the street, the old true thing rushed upon
them both, and for a moment they stood still and looked at each other.
As they might look who say farewell forever, so did each dwell upon the
other's face.  That was the beginning of the new epoch.  A few days more,
and Jim came to her and said that she alone could save him; and she meant
him to say it, had led him to the saying, for the same conviction was
burned deep in her own soul.  She knew the awful risk she was taking,
that the step must mean social ostracism, and that her own people would
be no kinder to her than society; but she gasped a prayer, smiled at Jim
as though all were well, laid her plans, made him promise her one thing
on his knees, and took the plunge.

Her people did as she expected.  She was threatened with banishment from
heart and home--with disinheritance; but she pursued her course; and the
only person who stood with her and Jim at the altar was John Appleton,
who would not be denied, and who had such a half-hour with Jim before
the ceremony as neither of them forgot in the years that the locust ate
thereafter.  And, standing at the altar, Jim's eyes were still wet, with
new resolves in his heart and a being at his side meant for the best man
in the world.  As he knelt beside her, awaiting the benediction, a sudden
sense of the enormity of this act came upon him, and for her sake he
would have drawn back then, had it not been too late.  He realised that
it was a crime to put this young, beautiful life in peril; that his own
life was a poor, contemptible thing, and that he had been possessed of
the egotism of the selfish and the young.

But the thing was done, and a new life was begun.  Before they were
launched upon it, however, before society had fully grasped the
sensation, or they had left upon their journey to northern Canada, where
Sally intended they should work out their problem and make their home,
far and free from all old associations, a curious thing happened.  Jim's
father sent an urgent message to Sally to come to him.  When she came,
he told her she was mad, and asked her why she had thrown her life away.

"Why have you done it?" he said.  "You--you knew all about him; you
might have married the best man in the country.  You could rule a
kingdom; you have beauty and power, and make people do what you want:
and you've got a sot."

"He is your son," she answered quietly.

She looked so beautiful and so fine as she stood there, fearless and
challenging before him, that he was moved.  But he would not show it.

"He was my son--when he was a man," he retorted grimly.

"He is the son of the woman you once loved," she answered.

The old man turned his head away.

"What would she have said to what you did to Jim?"  He drew himself
around sharply.  Her dagger had gone home, but he would not let her know
it.

"Leave her out of the question--she was a saint," he said roughly.

"She cannot be left out; nor can you.  He got his temperament naturally;
he inherited his weakness from your grandfather, from her father.  Do you
think you are in no way responsible?"

He was silent for a moment, but then said stubbornly: "Why--why have you
done it?  What's between him and me can't be helped; we are father and
son; but you--you had no call, no responsibility."

"I love Jim.  I always loved him, ever since I can remember, as you did.
I see my way ahead.  I will not desert him.  No one cares what happens to
him, no one but me.  Your love wouldn't stand the test; mine will."

"Your folks have disinherited you,--you have almost nothing, and I will
not change my mind.  What do you see ahead of you?"

"Jim--only Jim--and God."

Her eyes were shining, her hands were clasped together at her side in the
tenseness of her feeling, her indomitable spirit spoke in her face.

Suddenly the old man brought his fist down on the table with a bang.
"It's a crime--oh, it's a crime, to risk your life so!  You ought to have
been locked up.  I'd have done it."

"Listen to me," she rejoined quietly.  "I know the risk.  But do you
think that I could have lived my life out, feeling that I might have
saved Jim, and didn't try?  You talk of beauty and power and ruling--you
say what others have said to me.  Which is the greater thing, to get what
pleases one, or to work for something which is more to one than all else
in the world?  To save one life, one intellect, one great man--oh, he has
the making of a great man in him!--to save a soul, would not life be well
lost, would not love be well spent in doing it?"

"Love's labour lost," said the old man slowly, cynically, but not without
emotion.

"I have ambition," she continued.  "No girl was ever more ambitious, but
my ambition is to make the most and best of myself.  Place?--Jim and I
will hold it yet.  Power?--it shall be as it must be; but Jim and I will
work for it to fulfil ourselves.  For me--ah, if I can save him--and I
mean to do so--do you think that I would not then have my heaven on
earth?  You want money--money--money, power, and to rule; and these are
to you the best things in the world.  I make my choice differently,
though I would have these other things if I could; and I hope I shall.
But Jim first--Jim first, your son, Jim--my husband, Jim."

The old man got to his feet slowly.  She had him at bay.  "But you are
great," he said, "great!  It is an awful stake--awful.  Yet if you win,
you'll have what money can't buy.  And listen to me.  We'll make the
stake bigger.  It will give it point, too, in another way.  If you keep
Jim sober for four years from the day of your marriage, on the last day
of that four years I'll put in your hands for you and him, or for your
child--if you have one--five millions of dollars.  I am a man of my word.
While Jim drinks I won't take him back; he's disinherited.  I'll give him
nothing now or hereafter.  Save him for four years,--if he can do that he
will do all, and there's five millions as sure as the sun's in heaven.
Amen and amen."

He opened the door.  There was a strange soft light in her eyes as she
came to go.

"Aren't you going to kiss me?" she said, looking at him whimsically.

He was disconcerted.  She did not wait, but reached up and kissed him on
the cheek.  "Good-by," she said with a smile.  "We'll win the stake.
Good-by."

An instant, and she was gone.  He shut the door, then turned and looked
in a mirror on the wall.  Abstractedly he touched the cheek she had
kissed.  Suddenly a change passed over his face.  He dropped in a chair,
and his fist struck the table as he said: "By God, she may do it, she may
do it!  But it's life and death--it's life and death."

Society had its sensation, and then the veil dropped.  For a long time
none looked behind it except Jim's father.  He had too much at stake not
to have his telescope upon them.  A detective followed them to keep Jim's
record.  But this they did not know.




II

From the day they left Washington Jim put his life and his fate in his
wife's hands.  He meant to follow her judgment, and, self-willed and
strong in intellect as he was, he said that she should have a fair chance
of fulfilling her purpose.  There had been many pour parlers as to what
Jim should do.  There was farming.  She set that aside, because it meant
capital, and it also meant monotony and loneliness; and capital was
limited, and monotony and loneliness were bad for Jim, deadening an
active brain which must not be deprived of stimulants--stimulants of a
different sort, however, from those which had heretofore mastered it.
There was the law.  But Jim would have to become a citizen of Canada,
change his flag, and where they meant to go--to the outskirts--there
would be few opportunities for the law; and with not enough to do there
would be danger.  Railway construction?  That seemed good in many ways,
but Jim had not the professional knowledge necessary; his railway
experience with his father had only been financial.  Above all else he
must have responsibility, discipline, and strict order in his life.

"Something that will be good for my natural vanity, and knock the
nonsense out of me," Jim agreed, as they drew farther and farther away
from Washington and the past, and nearer and nearer to the Far North and
their future.  Never did two more honest souls put their hands in each
other's, and set forth upon the thorniest path to a goal which was their
hearts' desire.  Since they had become one, there had come into Sally's
face that illumination which belongs only to souls possessed of an idea
greater than themselves, outside themselves--saints, patriots; faces
which have been washed in the salt tears dropped for others' sorrows,
and lighted by the fire of self-sacrifice.  Sally Seabrook, the high-
spirited, the radiant, the sweetly wilful, the provoking, to concentrate
herself upon this narrow theme--to reconquer the lost paradise of one
vexed mortal soul!

What did Jim's life mean?--It was only one in the millions coming and
going, and every man must work out his own salvation.  Why should she
cramp her soul to this one issue, when the same soul could spend itself
upon the greater motives and in the larger circle?  A wide world of
influence had opened up before her; position, power, adulation, could all
have been hers, as John Appleton and Jim's father had said.  She might
have moved in well-trodden ways, through gardens of pleasure, lived a
life where all would be made easy, where she would be shielded at every
turn, and her beauty would be flattered by luxury into a constant glow.
She was not so primitive, so unintellectual, as not to have thought of
this, else her decision would have had less importance; she would have
been no more than an infatuated emotional woman with a touch of second
class drama in her nature.  She had thought of it all, and she had made
her choice.  The easier course was the course for meaner souls, and she
had not one vein of thin blood nor a small idea in her whole nature.  She
had a heart and mind for great issues.  She believed that Jim had a great
brain, and would and could accomplish great things.  She knew that he had
in him the strain of hereditary instinct--his mother's father had ended
a brief life in a drunken duel on the Mississippi, and Jim's boyhood had
never had discipline or direction, or any strenuous order.  He might
never acquire order, and the power that order and habit and the daily
iteration of necessary thoughts and acts bring; but the prospect did not
appal her.  She had taken the risk with her eyes wide open; had set her
own life and happiness in the hazard.  But Jim must be saved, must be
what his talents, his genius, entitled him to be.  And the long game must
have the long thought.

So, as they drew into the great Saskatchewan Valley, her hand in his,
and hope in his eyes, and such a look of confidence and pride in her as
brought back his old strong beauty of face, and smoothed the careworn
lines of self-indulgence, she gave him his course: as a private he must
join the North-West Mounted Police, the red-coated riders of the plains,
and work his way up through every stage of responsibility, beginning at
the foot of the ladder of humbleness and self-control.  She believed that
he would agree with her proposal; but her hands clasped his a little more
firmly and solicitously--there was a faint, womanly fear at her heart--
as she asked him if he would do it.  The life meant more than occasional
separation; it meant that there would be periods when she would not be
with him; and there was great danger in that; but she knew that the risks
must be taken, and he must not be wholly reliant on her presence for his
moral strength.

His face fell for a moment when she made the suggestion, but it cleared
presently, and he said with a dry laugh: "Well, I guess they must make me
a sergeant pretty quick.  I'm a colonel in the Kentucky Carbineers!"

She laughed, too; then a moment afterwards, womanlike, wondered if she
was right, and was a little frightened.  But that was only because she
was not self-opinionated, and was anxious, more anxious than any woman
in all the North.

It happened as Jim said; he was made a sergeant at once--Sally managed
that; for, when it came to the point, and she saw the conditions in which
the privates lived, and realised that Jim must be one of them and clean
out the stables, and groom his horse and the officers' horses, and fetch
and carry, her heart failed her, and she thought that she was making her
remedy needlessly heroical.  So she went to see the Commissioner, who was
on a tour of scrutiny on their arrival at the post, and, as better men
than he had done in more knowing circles, he fell under her spell.  If
she had asked for a lieutenancy, he would probably have corrupted some
member of Parliament into securing it for Jim.

But Jim was made a sergeant, and the Commissioner and the captain of the
troop kept their eyes on him.  So did other members of the troop who did
not quite know their man, and attempted, figuratively, to pinch him here
and there.  They found that his actions were greater than his words, and
both were in perfect harmony in the end, though his words often seemed
pointless to their minds, until they understood that they had conveyed
truths through a medium more like a heliograph than a telephone.  By and
by they begin to understand his heliographing, and, when they did that,
they began to swear by him, not at him.

In time it was found that the troop never had a better disciplinarian
than Jim.  He knew when to shut his eyes, and when to keep them open.  To
non-essentials he kept his eyes shut; to essentials he kept them very
wide open.  There were some men of good birth from England and elsewhere
among them, and these mostly understood him first.  But they all
understood Sally from the beginning, and after a little they were glad
enough to be permitted to come, on occasion, to the five-roomed little
house near the barracks, and hear her talk, then answer her questions,
and, as men had done at Washington, open out their hearts to her.  They
noticed, however, that while she made them barley-water, and all kinds
of soft drinks from citric acid, sarsaparilla and the like, and had one
special drink of her own invention, which she called cream-nectar, no
spirits were to be had.  They also noticed that Jim never drank a drop of
liquor, and by and by, one way or another, they got a glimmer of the real
truth, before it became known who he really was or anything of his story.
And the interest in the two, and in Jim's reformation, spread through the
country, while Jim gained reputation as the smartest man in the force.

They were on the outskirts of civilisation; as Jim used to say, "One
step ahead of the procession."  Jim's duty was to guard the columns of
settlement and progress, and to see that every man got his own rights and
not more than his rights; that justice should be the plumb-line of march
and settlement.  His principle was embodied in certain words which he
quoted once to Sally from the prophet Amos: "And the Lord said unto me,
Amos, what seest thou?  And I said, A plumbline."

On the day that Jim became a lieutenant his family increased by one.
It was a girl, and they called her Nancy, after Jim's mother.  It was
the anniversary of their marriage, and, so far, Jim had won, with what
fightings and strugglings and wrestlings of the spirit only Sally and
himself knew.  And she knew as well as he, and always saw the storm
coming before it broke--a restlessness, then a moodiness, then a hungry,
eager, helpless look, and afterwards an agony of longing, a feverish
desire to break away and get the thrilling thing which would still the
demon within him.

There had been moments when his doom seemed certain--he knew and she knew
that if he once got drunk again he would fall never to rise.  On one
occasion, after a hard, long, hungry ride, he was half-mad with desire,
but even as he seized the flask that was offered to him by his only
enemy, the captain of B Troop, at the next station eastward, there came
a sudden call to duty, two hundred Indians having gone upon the war-path.
It saved him; it broke the spell.  He had to mount and away, with the
antidote and stimulant of responsibility driving him on.

Another occasion was equally perilous to his safety.  They had been idle
for days in a hot week in summer, waiting for orders to return from the
rail-head where they had gone to quell a riot, and where drink and
hilarity were common.  Suddenly--more suddenly than it had ever come, the
demon of his thirst had Jim by the throat.  Sergeant Sewell, of the grey-
stubble head, who loved him more than his sour heart had loved anybody in
all his life, was holding himself ready for the physical assault he must
make upon his superior officer, if he raised a glass to his lips, when
salvation came once again.  An accident had occurred far down on the
railway line, and the operator of the telegraph-office had that very day
been stricken down with pleurisy and pneumonia.  In despair the manager
had sent to Jim, eagerly hoping that he might help them, for the Riders
of the Plains were a sort of court of appeal for every trouble in the Far
North.

Instantly Jim was in the saddle with his troop.  Out of curiosity he
had learned telegraphy when a boy, as he had learned many things, and,
arrived at the scene of the accident, he sent messages and received them-
-by sound, not on paper as did the official operator, to the amazement
and pride of the troop.  Then, between caring for the injured in the
accident, against the coming of the relief train, and nursing the sick
operator through the dark moments of his dangerous illness, he passed a
crisis of his own disease triumphantly; but not the last crisis.

So the first and so the second and third years passed in safety.




III

"PLEASE, I want to go, too, Jim."

Jim swung round and caught the child up in his arms.  "Say, how dare you
call your father Jim--eh, tell me that?"

"It's what mummy calls you--it's pretty."

"I don't call her 'mummy' because you do, and you mustn't call me Jim
because she does--do you hear?"  The whimsical face lowered a little,
then the rare and beautiful dark blue eyes raised slowly, shaded by the
long lashes, and the voice said demurely, "Yes--Jim."

"Nancy--Nancy," said a voice from the corner in reproof, mingled with
suppressed laughter.  "Nancy, you musn't be saucy.  You must say 'father'
to--"

"Yes, mummy.  I'll say father to--Jim."

"You imp--you imp of delight," said Jim, as he strained the dainty little
lass to his breast, while she appeared interested in a wave of his black
hair, which she curled around her finger.

Sally came forwards with the little parcel of sandwiches she had been
preparing, and put them in the saddle-bags lying on a chair at the door,
in readiness for the journey Jim was about to make.  Her eyes were
glistening, and her face had a heightened colour.  The three years which
had passed since she married had touched her not at all to her
disadvantage, rather to her profit.  She looked not an hour older;
motherhood had only added to her charm, lending it a delightful gravity.
The prairie life had given a shining quality to her handsomeness, an air
of depth and firmness, an exquisite health and clearness to the colour
in her cheeks.  Her step was as light as Nancy's, elastic and buoyant--
a gliding motion which gave a sinuous grace to the movements of her body.
There had also come into her eyes a vigilance such as deaf people
possess, a sensitive observation imparting a deeper intelligence to the
face.

Here was the only change by which you could guess the story of her life.
Her eyes were like the ears of an anxious mother who can never sleep till
every child is abed; whose sense is quick to hear the faintest footstep
without or within; and who, as years go on, and her children grow older
and older, must still lie awake hearkening for the late footstep on the
stair.  In Sally's eyes was the story of the past three years: of love
and temptation and struggle, of watchfulness and yearning and anxiety, of
determination and an inviolable hope.  Her eyes had a deeper look than
that in Jim's.  Now, as she gazed at him, the maternal spirit rose up
from the great well of protectiveness in her and engulfed both husband
and child.  There was always something of the maternal in her eyes when
she looked at Jim.  He did not see it--he saw only the wonderful blue,
and the humour which had helped him over such difficult places these past
three years.  In steadying and strengthening Jim's will, in developing
him from his Southern indolence into Northern industry and sense of
responsibility, John Appleton's warnings had rung in Sally's ears, and
Freddy Hartzman's forceful and high-minded personality had passed before
her eyes with an appeal powerful and stimulating; but always she came to
the same upland of serene faith and white-hearted resolve; and Jim became
dearer and dearer.

The baby had done much to brace her faith in the future and comfort her
anxious present.  The child had intelligence of a rare order.  She would
lie by the half-hour on the floor, turning over the leaves of a book
without pictures, and, before she could speak, would read from the pages
in a language all her own.  She made a fairy world for herself, peopled
by characters to whom she gave names, to whom she assigned curious
attributes and qualities.  They were as real to her as though flesh and
blood, and she was never lonely, and never cried; and she had buried
herself in her father's heart.  She had drawn to her the roughest men in
the troop, and for old Sewell, the grim sergeant, she had a specially
warm place.

"You can love me if you like," she had said to him at the very start,
with the egotism of childhood; but made haste to add, "because I love
you, Gri-Gri."  She called him Gri-Gri from the first, but they knew only
long afterwards that "gri-gri" meant "grey-grey," to signify that she
called him after his grizzled hairs.

What she had been in the life-history of Sally and Jim they both knew.
Jim regarded her with an almost superstitious feeling.  Sally was his
strength, his support, his inspiration, his bulwark of defence; Nancy was
the charm he wore about his neck--his mascot, he called her.  Once, when
she was ill, he had suffered as he had never done before in his life.  He
could not sleep nor eat, and went about his duties like one in a dream.
When his struggles against his enemy were fiercest, he kept saying over
her name to himself, as though she could help him.  Yet always it was
Sally's hand he held in the darkest hours, in his brutal moments; for in
this fight between appetite and will there are moments when only the
animal seems to exist, and the soul disappears in the glare and gloom of
the primal emotions.  Nancy he called his "lucky sixpence," but he called
Sally his "guinea-girl."

From first to last his whimsicality never deserted him.  In his worst
hours, some innate optimism and humour held him steady in his fight.
It was not depression that possessed him at the worst, but the violence
of an appetite most like a raging pain which men may endure with a smile
upon their lips.  He carried in his face the story of a conflict, the
aftermath of bitter experience; and through all there pulsed the glow of
experience.  He had grown handsomer, and the graceful decision of his
figure, the deliberate certainty of every action, heightened the force of
a singular personality.  As in the eyes of Sally, in his eyes was a long
reflective look which told of things overcome, and yet of dangers
present.  His lips smiled often, but the eyes said: "I have lived, I have
seen, I have suffered, and I must suffer more.  I have loved, I have been
loved under the shadow of the sword.  Happiness I have had, and golden
hours, but not peace--never peace.  My soul has need of peace."

In the greater, deeper experience of their lives, the more material side
of existence had grown less and less to them.  Their home was a model of
simple comfort and some luxury, though Jim had insisted that Sally's
income should not be spent, except upon the child, and should be saved
for the child, their home being kept on his pay and on the tiny income
left by his mother.  With the help of an Indian girl, and a half-breed
for outdoor work and fires and gardening, Sally had cared for the house
herself.  Ingenious and tasteful, with a gift for cooking and an educated
hand, she had made her little home as pretty as their few possessions
would permit.  Refinement covered all, and three or four-score books were
like so many friends to comfort her when Jim was away; like kind and
genial neighbours when he was at home.  From Browning she had written
down in her long sliding handwriting, and hung up beneath Jim's looking-
glass, the heartening and inspiring words:

         "One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
               Never doubted clouds would break,
          Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
          Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
               Sleep to wake."

They had lived above the sordid, and there was something in the nature of
Jim's life to help them to it.  He belonged to a small handful of men who
had control over an empire, with an individual responsibility and
influence not contained in the scope of their commissions.  It was a
matter of moral force and character, and of uniform, symbolical only of
the great power behind; of the long arm of the State; of the insistence
of the law, which did not rely upon force alone, but on the certainty of
its administration.  In such conditions the smallest brain was bound to
expand, to take on qualities of judgment and temperateness which would
never be developed in ordinary circumstances.  In the case of Jim
Templeton, who needed no stimulant to his intellect, but rather a
steadying quality, a sense of proportion, the daily routine, the command
of men, the diverse nature of his duties, half civil, half military, the
personal appeals made on all sides by the people of the country for
advice, for help, for settlement of disputes, for information which his
well-instructed mind could give--all these modified the romantic
brilliance of his intellect, made it and himself more human.

It had not come to him all at once.  His intellect at first stood in his
way.  His love of paradox, his deep observation, his insight, all made
him inherently satirical, though not cruelly so; but satire had become
pure whimsicality at last; and he came to see that, on the whole, the
world was imperfect, but also, on the whole, was moving towards
perfection rather than imperfection.  He grew to realise that what seemed
so often weakness in men was tendency and idiosyncrasy rather than evil.
And in the end he thought better of himself as he came to think better
of all others.  For he had thought less of all the world because he had
thought so little of himself.  He had overestimated his own faults, had
made them into crimes in his own eyes, and, observing things in others of
similar import, had become almost a cynic in intellect, while in heart he
had remained, a boy.

In all that he had changed a great deal.  His heart was still the heart
of a boy, but his intellect had sobered, softened, ripened--even in this
secluded and seemingly unimportant life; as Sally had said and hoped it
would.  Sally's conviction had been right.  But the triumph was not yet
achieved.  She knew it.  On occasion the tones of his voice told her, the
look that came into his eyes proclaimed it to her, his feverishness and
restlessness made it certain.  How many a night had she thrown her arm
over his shoulder, and sought his hand and held it while in the dark
silence, wide-eyed, dry-lipped, and with a throat like fire he had held
himself back from falling.  There was liquor in the house--the fight
would not have been a fight without it.  She had determined that he
should see his enemy and meet him in the plains and face him down; and he
was never many feet away from his possible disaster.  Yet for long over
three years all had gone well.  There was another year.  Would he last
out the course?

At first the thought of the great stake for which she was playing in
terms of currency, with the head of Jim's father on every note, was much
with her.  The amazing nature of the offer of five millions of dollars
stimulated her imagination, roused her; gold coins are counters in the
game of success, signs and tokens.  Money alone could not have lured her;
but rather what it represented--power, width of action, freedom to help
when the heart prompted, machinery for carrying out large plans, ability
to surround with advantage those whom we love.  So, at first, while yet
the memories of Washington were much with her, the appeal of the millions
was strong.  The gallant nature of the contest and the great stake braced
her; she felt the blood quicken in her pulse.

But, all through, the other thing really mastered her: the fixed idea
that Jim must be saved.  As it deepened, the other life that she had
lived became like the sports in which we shared when children, full of
vivacious memory, shining with impulse and the stir of life, but not to
be repeated--days and deeds outgrown.  So the light of one idea shone in
her face.  Yet she was intensely human too; and if her eyes had not been
set on the greater glory, the other thought might have vulgarised her
mind, made her end and goal sordid--the descent of a nature rather than
its ascension.

When Nancy came, the lesser idea, the stake, took on a new importance,
for now it seemed to her that it was her duty to secure for the child its
rightful heritage.  Then Jim, too, appeared in a new light, as one who
could never fulfil himself unless working through the natural channels of
his birth, inheritance, and upbringing.  Jim, drunken and unreliable,
with broken will and fighting to find himself--the waste places were for
him, until he was the master of his will and emotions.  Once however,
secure in ability to control himself, with cleansed brain and purpose
defined, the widest field would still be too narrow for his talents--and
the five, yes, the fifty millions of his father must be his.

She had never repented having married Jim; but twice in those three years
she had broken down and wept as though her heart would break.  There were
times when Jim's nerves were shaken in his struggle against the unseen
foe, and he had spoken to her querulously, almost sharply.  Yet in her
tears there was no reproach for him, rather for herself--the fear that
she might lose her influence over him, that she could not keep him close
to her heart, that he might drift away from her in the commonplaces and
monotony of work and domestic life.  Everything so depended on her being
to him not only the one woman for whom he cared, but the woman without
whom he could care for nothing else.

"Oh, my God, give me his love," she had prayed.  "Let me keep it yet a
little while.  For his sake, not for my own, let me have the power to
hold his love.  Make my mind always quiet, and let me blow neither hot
nor cold.  Help me to keep my temper sweet and cheerful, so that he will
find the room empty where I am not, and his footsteps will quicken when
he comes to the door.  Not for my sake, dear God, but for his, or my
heart will break--it will break unless Thou dost help me to hold him.
O Lord, keep me from tears; make my face happy that I may be goodly to
his eyes, and forgive the selfishness of a poor woman who has little,
and would keep her little and cherish it, for Christ's sake."

Twice had she poured out her heart so, in the agony of her fear that she
should lose favour in Jim's sight--she did not know how alluring she was,
in spite of the constant proofs offered her.  She had had her will with
all who came her way, from governor to Indian brave.  Once, in a journey
they had made far north, soon after they came, she had stayed at a
Hudson's Bay Company's post for some days, while there came news of
restlessness among the Indians, because of lack of food, and Jim had
gone farther north to steady the tribes, leaving her with the factor
and his wife and a halfbreed servant.

While she and the factor's wife were alone in the yard of the post one
day, an Indian--chief, Arrowhead, in warpaint and feathers, entered
suddenly, brandishing a long knife.  He had been drinking, and there
was danger in his black eyes.  With a sudden inspiration she came forward
quickly, nodded and smiled to him, and then pointed to a grindstone
standing in the corner of the yard.  As she did so, she saw Indians
crowding into the gate armed with knives, guns, bows, and arrows.  She
beckoned to Arrowhead, and he followed her to the grindstone.  She poured
some water on the wheel and began to turn it, nodding at the now
impassive Indian to begin.  Presently he nodded also, and put his knife
on the stone.  She kept turning steadily, singing to herself the while,
as with anxiety she saw the Indians drawing closer and closer in from the
gate.  Faster and faster she turned, and at last the Indian lifted his
knife from the stone.  She reached out her hand with simulated interest,
felt the edge with her thumb, the Indian looking darkly at her the while.
Presently, after feeling the edge himself, he bent over the stone again,
and she went on turning the wheel still singing softly.  At last he
stopped again and felt the edge.  With a smile which showed her fine
white teeth, she said, "Is that for me?" making a significant sign across
her throat at the same time.

The old Indian looked at her grimly, then slowly shook his head in
negation.

"I go hunt Yellow Hawk to-night," he said.  "I go fight; I like marry you
when I come back.  How!" he said and turned away towards the gate.

Some of his braves held back, the blackness of death in their looks.
He saw.  "My knife is sharp," he said.  "The woman is brave.  She shall
live--go and fight Yellow Hawk, or starve and die."

Divining their misery, their hunger, and the savage thought that had come
to them, Sally had whispered to the factor's wife to bring food, and the
woman now came running out with two baskets full, and returned for more.
Sally ran forward among the Indians and put the food into their hands.
With grunts of satisfaction they seized what she gave, and thrust it into
their mouths, squatting on the ground.  Arrowhead looked on stern and
immobile, but when at last she and the factor's wife sat down before the
braves with confidence and an air of friendliness, he sat down also;
yet, famished as he was, he would not touch the food.  At last Sally,
realising his proud defiance of hunger, offered him a little lump of
pemmican and a biscuit, and with a grunt he took it from her hands and
ate it.  Then, at his command a fire was lit, the pipe of peace was
brought out, and Sally and the factor's wife touched their lips to it,
and passed it on.

So was a new treaty of peace and loyalty made with Arrowhead and his
tribe by a woman without fear, whose life had seemed not worth a minute's
purchase; and, as the sun went down, Arrowhead and his men went forth to
make war upon Yellow Hawk beside the Nettigon River.  In this wise had
her influence spread in the land.

                    .......................

Standing now with the child in his arms and his wife looking at him with
a shining moisture of the eyes, Jim laughed outright.  There came upon
him a sudden sense of power, of aggressive force--the will to do.  Sally
understood, and came and laughingly grasped his arm.

"Oh, Jim," she said playfully, "you are getting muscles like steel.  You
hadn't these when you were colonel of the Kentucky Carbineers!"

"I guess I need them now," he said, smiling, and with the child still in
his arms drew her to a window looking northward.  As far as the eye could
see, nothing but snow, like a blanket spread over the land.  Here and
there in the wide expanse a tree silhouetted against the sky, a tracery
of eccentric beauty, and off in the far distance a solitary horseman
riding towards the postriding hard.

"It was root, hog, or die with me, Sally," he continued, "and I rooted.
.  .  .  I wonder--that fellow on the horse--I have a feeling about him.
See, he's been riding hard and long-you can tell by the way the horse
drops his legs.  He sags a bit himself.  .  .  .  But isn't it beautiful,
all that out there--the real quintessence of life."

The air was full of delicate particles of frost on which the sun
sparkled, and though there was neither bird nor insect, nor animal,
nor stir of leaf, nor swaying branch or waving grass, life palpitated
in the air, energy sang its song in the footstep that crunched the frosty
ground, that broke the crusted snow; it was in the delicate wind that
stirred the flag by the barracks away to the left; hope smiled in the
wide prospect over which the thrilling, bracing air trembled.  Sally had
chosen right.

"You had a big thought when you brought me here, guinea-girl," he added
presently.  "We are going to win out here"--he set the child down--"you
and I and this lucky sixpence."  He took up his short fur coat.  "Yes,
we'll win, honey."  Then, with a brooding look in his face, he added:

             "'The end comes as came the beginning,
               And shadows fail into the past;
               And the goal, is it not worth the winning,
               If it brings us but home at the last?

             "'While far through the pain of waste places
               We tread, 'tis a blossoming rod
               That drives us to grace from disgraces,
               From the fens to the gardens of God!'"

He paused reflectively.  "It's strange that this life up here makes you
feel that you must live a bigger life still, that this is only the wide
porch to the great labour-house--it makes you want to do things.  Well,
we've got to win the stake first," he added with a laugh.

"The stake is a big one, Jim--bigger than you think."

"You and her and me--me that was in the gutter."

"What is the gutter, dadsie?" asked Nancy.

"The gutter--the gutter is where the dish-water goes, midget," he
answered with a dry laugh.

"Oh, I don't think you'd like to be in the gutter," Nancy said solemnly.

"You have to get used to it first, miss," answered Jim.  Suddenly Sally
laid both hands on Jim's shoulders and looked him in the eyes.  "You must
win the stake Jim.  Think--now!"

She laid a hand on the head of the child.  He did not know that he was
playing for a certain five millions, perhaps fifty millions, of dollars.
She had never told him of his father's offer.  He was fighting only for
salvation, for those he loved, for freedom.  As they stood there, the
conviction had come upon her that they had come to the last battle-field,
that this journey which Jim now must take would decide all, would give
them perfect peace or lifelong pain.  The shadow of battle was over them,
but he had no foreboding, no premonition; he had never been so full of
spirits and life.

To her adjuration Jim replied by burying his face in her golden hair, and
he whispered:  "Say, I've done near four years, my girl.  I think I'm all
right now--I think.  This last six months, it's been easy--pretty fairly
easy."

"Four months more, only four months more--God be good to us!" she said
with a little gasp.

If he held out for four months more, the first great stage in their life
--journey would be passed, the stake won.

"I saw a woman get an awful fall once," Jim said suddenly.  "Her bones
were broken in twelve places, and there wasn't a spot on her body without
injury.  They set and fixed up every broken bone except one.  It was
split down.  They didn't dare perform the operation; she couldn't stand
it.  There was a limit to pain, and she had reached the boundary.  Two
years went by, and she got better every way, but inside her leg those
broken pieces of bone were rubbing against each other.  She tried to
avoid the inevitable operation, but nature said, 'You must do it, or
die in the end.'  She yielded.  Then came the long preparations for the
operation.  Her heart shrank, her mind got tortured.  She'd suffered too
much.  She pulled herself together, and said, 'I must conquer this
shrinking body of mine, by my will.  How shall I do it?'  Something
within her said, 'Think and do for others.  Forget yourself.'  And so,
as they got her ready for her torture, she visited hospitals, agonised
cripple as she was, and smiled and talked to the sick and broken, telling
them of her own miseries endured and dangers faced, of the boundary of
human suffering almost passed; and so she got her courage for her own
trial.  And she came out all right in the end.  Well, that's the way I've
felt sometimes.  But I'm ready for my operation now whenever it comes,
and it's coming,

I know.  Let it come when it must."  He smiled.  There came a knock at
the door, and presently Sewell entered.  "The Commissioner wishes you to
come over, sir," he said.

"I was just coming, Sewell.  Is all ready for the start?"

"Everything's ready, sir, but there's to be a change of orders.
Something's happened--a bad job up in the Cree country, I think."

A few minutes later Jim was in the Commissioner's office.  The murder of
a Hudson's Bay Company's man had been committed in the Cree country.  The
stranger whom Jim and Sally had seen riding across the plains had brought
the news for thirty miles, word of the murder having been carried from
point to point.  The Commissioner was uncertain what to do, as the Crees
were restless through want of food and the absence of game, and a force
sent to capture Arrowhead, the chief who had committed the murder, might
precipitate trouble.  Jim solved the problem by offering to go alone and
bring the chief into the post.  It was two hundred miles to the Cree
encampment, and the journey had its double dangers.

Another officer was sent on the expedition for which Jim had been
preparing, and he made ready to go upon his lonely duty.  His wife did
not know till three days after he had gone what the nature of his mission
was.




IV

Jim made his journey in good weather with his faithful dogs alone, and
came into the camp of the Crees armed with only a revolver.  If he had
gone with ten men, there would have been an instant melee, in which
he would have lost his life.  This is what the chief had expected, had
prepared for; but Jim was more formidable alone, with power far behind
him which could come with force and destroy the tribe, if resistance was
offered, than with fifty men.  His tongue had a gift of terse and
picturesque speech, powerful with a people who had the gift of
imagination.  With five hundred men ready to turn him loose in the plains
without dogs or food, he carried himself with a watchful coolness and
complacent determination which got home to their minds with great force.

For hours the struggle for the murderer went on, a struggle of mind over
inferior mind and matter.  Arrowhead was a chief whose will had never
been crossed by his own people, and to master that will by a superior
will, to hold back the destructive force which, to the ignorant minds
of the braves, was only a natural force of defence, meant a task needing
more than authority behind it.  For the very fear of that authority put
in motion was an incentive to present resistance to stave off the day of
trouble.  The faces that surrounded Jim were thin with hunger, and the
murder that had been committed by the chief had, as its origin, the
foolish replies of the Hudson's Bay Company's man to their demand for
supplies.  Arrowhead had killed him with his own hand.

But Jim Templeton was of a different calibre.  Although he had not been
told it, he realised that, indirectly, hunger was the cause of the crime
and might easily become the cause of another; for their tempers were
sharper even than their appetites.  Upon this he played; upon this he
made an exhortation to the chief.  He assumed that Arrowhead had become
violent, because of his people's straits, that Arrowhead's heart yearned
for his people and would make sacrifice for them.  Now, if Arrowhead came
quietly, he would see that supplies of food were sent at once, and that
arrangements were made to meet the misery of their situation.  Therefore,
if Arrowhead came freely, he would have so much in his favour before his
judges; if he would not come quietly, then he must be brought by force;
and if they raised a hand to prevent it, then destruction would fall upon
all--all save the women and children.  The law must be obeyed.  They
might try to resist the law through him, but, if violence was shown,
he would first kill Arrowhead, and then destruction would descend like a
wind out of the north, darkness would swallow them, and their bones would
cover the plains.

As he ended his words a young brave sprang forwards with hatchet raised.
Jim's revolver slipped down into his palm from his sleeve, and a bullet
caught the brave in the lifted arm.  The hatchet dropped to the ground.

Then Jim's eyes blazed, and he turned a look of anger on the chief, his
face pale and hard, as he said: "The stream rises above the banks; come
with me, chief, or all will drown.  I am master, and I speak.  Ye are
hungry because ye are idle.  Ye call the world yours, yet ye will not
stoop to gather from the earth the fruits of the earth.  Ye sit idle in
the summer, and women and children die round you when winter comes.
Because the game is gone, ye say.  Must the world stand still because a
handful of Crees need a hunting-ground?  Must the makers of cities and
the wonders of the earth, who fill the land with plenty--must they stand
far off, because the Crees and their chief would wander over millions of
acres, for each man a million, when by a hundred, ay, by ten, each white
man would live in plenty, and make the land rejoice.  See.  Here is the
truth.  When the Great Spirit draws the game away so that the hunting is
poor, ye sit down and fill your hearts with murder, and in the blackness
of your thoughts kill my brother.  Idle and shiftless and evil ye are,
while the earth cries out to give you of its plenty, a great harvest from
a little seed, if ye will but dig and plant, and plough and sow and reap,
and lend your backs to toil.  Now hear and heed.  The end is come.

"For this once ye shall be fed--by the blood of my heart, ye shall be fed!
And another year ye shall labour, and get the fruits of your labour, and
not stand waiting, as it were, till a fish shall pass the spear, or a
stag water at your door, that ye may slay and eat.  The end is come, ye
idle men.  O chief, harken!  One of your braves would have slain me, even
as you slew my brother--he one, and you a thousand.  Speak to your people
as I have spoken, and then come and answer for the deed done by your
hand.  And this I say that right shall be done between men and men.
Speak."

Jim had made his great effort, and not without avail.  Arrowhead rose
slowly, the cloud gone out of his face, and spoke to his people, bidding
them wait in peace until food came, and appointing his son chief in his
stead until his return.

"The white man speaks truth, and I will go," he said.  "I shall return,"
he continued, "if it be written so upon the leaves of the Tree of Life;
and if it be not so written, I shall fade like a mist, and the tepees
will know me not again.  The days of my youth are spent, and my step no
longer springs from the ground.  I shuffle among the grass and the fallen
leaves, and my eyes scarce know the stag from the doe.  The white man is
master--if he wills it we shall die, if he wills it we shall live.  And
this was ever so.  It is in the tale of our people.  One tribe ruled, and
the others were their slaves.  If it is written on the leaves of the Tree
of Life that the white man rule us for ever, then it shall be so.  I have
spoken.  Now, behold I go."

Jim had conquered, and together they sped away with the dogs through the
sweet-smelling spruce woods where every branch carried a cloth of white,
and the only sound heard was the swish of a blanket of snow as it fell to
the ground from the wide webs of green, or a twig snapped under the load
it bore.  Peace brooded in the silent and comforting forest, and Jim and
Arrowhead, the Indian ever ahead, swung along, mile after mile, on their
snow-shoes, emerging at last upon the wide white prairie.

A hundred miles of sun and fair weather, sleeping at night in the open in
a trench dug in the snow, no fear in the thoughts of Jim, nor evil in the
heart of the heathen man.  There had been moments of watchfulness, of
uncertainty, on Jim's part, the first few hours of the first night after
they left the Cree reservation; but the conviction speedily came to Jim
that all was well; for the chief slept soundly from the moment he lay
down in his blankets between the dogs.  Then Jim went to sleep as in his
own bed, and, waking, found Arrowhead lighting a fire from a little load
of sticks from the sledges.  And between murderer and captor there sprang
up the companionship of the open road which brings all men to a certain
land of faith and understanding, unless they are perverted and vile.
There was no vileness in Arrowhead.  There were no handcuffs on his
hands, no sign of captivity; they two ate out of the same dish, drank
from the same basin, broke from the same bread.  The crime of Arrowhead,
the gallows waiting for him, seemed very far away.  They were only two
silent travellers, sharing the same hardship, helping to give material
comfort to each other--in the inevitable democracy of those far places,
where small things are not great nor great things small; where into men's
hearts comes the knowledge of the things that matter; where, from the
wide, starry sky, from the august loneliness, and the soul of the life
which has brooded there for untold generations, God teaches the values of
this world and the next.

One hundred miles of sun and fair weather, and then fifty miles of
bitter, aching cold, with nights of peril from the increasing chill,
so that Jim dared not sleep lest he should never wake again, but die
benumbed and exhausted.  Yet Arrowhead slept through all.  Day after day
so, and then ten miles of storm such as come only to the vast barrens of
the northlands; and woe to the traveller upon whom the icy wind and the
blinding snow descended!  Woe came upon Jim Templeton and Arrowhead, the
heathen.

In the awful struggle between man and nature that followed, the captive
became the leader.  The craft of the plains, the inherent instinct, the
feeling which was more than eyesight became the only hope.  One whole day
to cover ten miles--an endless path of agony, in which Jim went down
again and again, but came up blinded by snow and drift, and cut as with
lashes by the angry wind.  At the end of the ten miles was a Hudson's Bay
Company's post and safety; and through ten hours had the two struggled
towards it, going off at tangents, circling on their own tracks; but the
Indian, by an instinct as sure as the needle to the pole, getting the
direction to the post again, in the moments of direst peril and
uncertainty.  To Jim the world became a sea of maddening forces which
buffeted him; a whirlpool of fire in which his brain was tortured, his
mind was shrivelled up; a vast army rending itself, each man against the
other.  It was a purgatory of music, broken by discords; and then at
last--how sweet it all was, after the eternity of misery--"Church bells
and voices low," and Sally singing to him, Nancy's voice calling!  Then,
nothing but sleep--sleep, a sinking down millions of miles in an ether of
drowsiness which thrilled him; and after--no more.

None who has suffered up to the limit of what the human body and soul
may bear can remember the history of those distracted moments when the
struggle became one between the forces in nature and the forces in man,
between agonised body and smothered mind, yet with the divine
intelligence of the created being directing, even though subconsciously,
the fight.

How Arrowhead found the post in the mad storm he could never have told.
Yet he found it, with Jim unconscious on the sledge and with limbs
frozen, all the dogs gone but two, the leathers over the Indian's
shoulders as he fell against the gate of the post with a shrill cry that
roused the factor and his people within, together with Sergeant Sewell,
who had been sent out from headquarters to await Jim's arrival there.  It
was Sewell's hand which first felt Jim's heart and pulse, and found that
there was still life left, even before it could be done by the doctor
from headquarters, who had come to visit a sick man at the post.

For hours they worked with snow upon the frozen limbs to bring back life
and consciousness.  Consciousness came at last with half delirium, half
understanding; as emerging from the passing sleep of anaesthetics, the
eye sees things and dimly registers them, before the brain has set them
in any relation to life or comprehension.

But Jim was roused at last, and the doctor presently held to his lips a
glass of brandy.  Then from infinite distance Jim's understanding
returned; the mind emerged, but not wholly, from the chaos in which it
was travelling.  His eyes stood out in eagerness.

"Brandy!  brandy!" he said hungrily.

With an oath Sewell snatched the glass from the doctor's hand, put it on
the table, then stooped to Jim's ear and said hoarsely: "Remember--Nancy.
For God's sake, sir, don't drink."

Jim's head fell back, the fierce light went out of his eyes, the face
became greyer and sharper.  "Sally--Nancy--Nancy," he whispered, and his
fingers clutched vaguely at the quilt.

"He must have brandy or he will die.  The system is pumped out.  He must
be revived," said the doctor.  He reached again for the glass of spirits.

Jim understood now.  He was on the borderland between life and death; his
feet were at the brink.  "No--not--brandy, no!" he moaned.  "Sally-
Sally, kiss me," he said faintly, from the middle world in which he was.

"Quick, the broth!" said Sewell to the factor, who had been preparing
it.  "Quick, while there's a chance."  He stooped and called into Jim's
ear: "For the love of God, wake up, sir.  They're coming--they're both
coming--Nancy's coming.  They'll soon be here."  What matter that he
lied, a life was at stake.

Jim's eyes opened again.  The doctor was standing with the brandy in
his hand.  Half madly Jim reached out.  "I must live until they come,"
he cried; "the brandy--give it me!  Give it--ah, no, no, I must not!"
he added, gasping, his lips trembling, his hands shaking.

Sewell held the broth to his lips.  He drank a little, yet his face
became greyer and greyer; a bluish tinge spread about his mouth.

"Have you nothing else, sir?" asked Sewell in despair.  The doctor put
down the brandy, went quickly to his medicine-case, dropped into a glass
some liquid from a phial, came over again, and poured a little between
the lips; then a little more, as Jim's eyes opened again; and at last
every drop in the glass trickled down the sinewy throat.

Presently as they watched him the doctor said: "It will not do.  He must
have brandy.  It has life-food in it."

Jim understood the words.  He knew that if he drank the brandy the
chances against his future were terrible.  He had made his vow, and he
must keep it.  Yet the thirst was on him; his enemy had him by the throat
again, was dragging him down.  Though his body was so cold, his throat
was on fire.  But in the extremity of his strength his mind fought on--
fought on, growing weaker every moment.  He was having his last fight.
They watched him with an aching anxiety, and there was anger in the
doctor's face.  He had no patience with these forces arrayed against him.

At last the doctor whispered to Sewell: "It's no use; he must have the
brandy, or he can't live an hour."

Sewell weakened; the tears fell down his rough, hard cheeks.  "It'll ruin
him-it's ruin or death."

"Trust a little more in God, and in the man's strength.  Let us give him
the chance.  Force it down his throat--he's not responsible," said the
physician, to whom saving life was more than all else.

Suddenly there appeared at the bedside Arrowhead, gaunt and weak, his
face swollen, the skin of it broken by the whips of storm.

"He is my brother," he said, and, stooping, laid both hands, which he had
held before the fire for a long time, on Jim's heart.  "Take his feet,
his hands, his, legs, and his head in your hands," he said to them all.
"Life is in us; we will give him life."

He knelt down and kept both hands on Jim's heart, while the others, even
the doctor, awed by his act, did as they were bidden.  "Shut your eyes.
Let your life go into him.  Think of him, and him alone.  Now!" said
Arrowhead in a strange voice.

He murmured, and continued murmuring, his body drawing closer and closer
to Jim's body, while in the deep silence, broken only by the chanting of
his low monotonous voice, the others pressed Jim's hands and head and
feet and legs--six men under the command of a heathen murderer.

The minutes passed.  The colour came back to Jim's face, the skin of his
hands filled up, they ceased twitching, his pulse got stronger, his eyes
opened with a new light in them.

"I'm living, anyhow," he said at last with a faint smile.  "I'm hungry--
broth, please."

The fight was won, and Arrowhead, the pagan murderer, drew over to the
fire and crouched down beside it, his back to the bed, impassive and
still.  They brought him a bowl of broth and bread, which he drank
slowly, and placed the empty bowl between his knees.  He sat there
through the night, though they tried to make him lie down.

As the light came in at the windows, Sewell touched him on the shoulder,
and said: "He is sleeping now."

"I hear my brother breathe," answered Arrowhead.  "He will live."

All night he had listened, and had heard Jim's breath as only a man who
has lived in waste places can hear.  "He will live.  What I take with one
hand I give with the other."

He had taken the life of the factor; he had given Jim his life.  And when
he was tried three months later for murder, some one else said this for
him, and the hearts of all, judge and jury, were so moved they knew not
what to do.

But Arrowhead was never sentenced, for, at the end of the first day's
trial, he lay down to sleep and never waked again.  He was found the next
morning still and cold, and there was clasped in his hands a little doll
which Nancy had given him on one of her many visits to the prison during
her father's long illness.  They found a piece of paper in his belt with
these words in the Cree language: "With my hands on his heart at the post
I gave him the life that was in me, saving but a little until now.
Arrowhead, the chief, goes to find life again by the well at the root
of the tree.  How!"




V

On the evening of the day that Arrowhead made his journey to "the well
at the root of the tree" a stranger knocked at the door of Captain
Templeton's cottage; then, without awaiting admittance, entered.

Jim was sitting with Nancy on his knee, her head against his shoulder,
Sally at his side, her face alight with some inner joy.  Before the knock
came to the door Jim had just said, "Why do your eyes shine so, Sally?
What's in your mind?"  She had been about to answer, to say to him what
had been swelling her heart with pride, though she had not meant to tell
him what he had forgotten--not till midnight.  But the figure that
entered the room, a big man with deep-set eyes, a man of power who had
carried everything before him in the battle of life, answered for her.

"You have won the stake, Jim," he said in a hoarse voice.  "You and she
have won the stake, and I've brought it--brought it."

Before they could speak he placed in Sally's hands bonds for five million
dollars.

"Jim--Jim, my son!" he burst out.  Then, suddenly, he sank into a chair
and, putting his head in his hands, sobbed aloud.

"My God, but I'm proud of you--speak to me, Jim.  You've broken me up."
He was ashamed of his tears, but he could not wipe them away.

"Father, dear old man!" said Jim, and put his hands on the broad
shoulders.

Sally knelt down beside him, took both the great hands from the tear-
stained face, and laid them against her cheek.  But presently she put
Nancy on his knees.

"I don't like you to cry," the child said softly; "but to-day I cried
too, 'cause my Indian man is dead."

The old man could not speak, but he put his cheek down to hers.  After a
minute, "Oh, but she's worth ten times that!" he said as Sally came
close to him with the bundle he had thrust into her hands.

"What is it?" said Jim.

"It's five million dollars--for Nancy," she said.  "Five-million--what?"

"The stake, Jim," said Sally.  "If you did not drink for four years--
never touched a drop--we were to have five million dollars."

"You never told him, then--you never told him that?" asked the old man.

"I wanted him to win without it," she said.  "If he won, he would be the
stronger; if he lost, it would not be so hard for him to bear."

The old man drew her down and kissed her cheek.  He chuckled, though the
tears were still in his eyes.  "You are a wonder--the tenth wonder of the
world!" he declared.

Jim stood staring at the bundle in Nancy's hands.  "Five millions--five
million dollars!"--he kept saying to himself.

"I said Nancy's worth ten times that, Jim."  The old man caught his hand
and pressed it.  "But it was a damned near thing, I tell you," he added.
"They tried to break me and my railways and my bank.  I had to fight the
combination, and there was one day when I hadn't that five million
dollars there, nor five.  Jim, they tried to break the old man.  And if
they'd broken me, they'd have made me out a scoundrel to her--to this
wife of yours who risked everything for both of us, for both of us, Jim;
for she'd given up the world to save you, and she was playing like a soul
in Hell for Heaven.  If they'd broken me, I'd never have lifted my head
again.  When things were at their worst I played to save that five
millions,--her stake and mine,--I played for that.  I fought for it as a
man fights his way out of a burning house.  And I won--I won.  And it was
by fighting for that five millions I saved fifty--fifty millions, son.
They didn't break the old man, Jim.  They didn't break him--not much."

"There are giants in the world still," said Jim, his own eyes full.
He knew now his father and himself, and he knew the meaning of all the
bitter and misspent life of the old days.  He and his father were on a
level of understanding at last.

"Are you a giant?" asked Nancy, peering up into her grandfather's eyes.

The old man laughed, then sighed.  "Perhaps I was once, more or less, my
dear--" saying to her what he meant for the other two.  "Perhaps I was;
but I've finished.  I'm through.  I've had my last fight."

He looked at his son.  "I pass the game on to you, Jim.  You can do it.
I knew you could do it as the reports came in this year.  I've had a
detective up here for four years.  I had to do it.  It was the devil in
me.

"You've got to carry on the game, Jim; I'm done.  I'll stay home and
potter about.  I want to go back to Kentucky, and build up the old place,
and take care of it a bit-your mother always loved it.  I'd like to have
it as it was when she was there long ago.  But I'll be ready to help you
when I'm wanted, understand."

"You want me to run things--your colossal schemes?  You think--?"

"I don't think.  I'm old enough to know."




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

I don't think.  I'm old enough to know
Knew when to shut his eyes, and when to keep them open
Nothing so popular for the moment as the fall of a favourite
That he will find the room empty where I am not
The temerity and nonchalance of despair






NORTHERN LIGHTS

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.


WHEN THE SWALLOWS HOMEWARD FLY
GEORGE'S WIFE
MARCILE




WHEN THE SWALLOWS HOMEWARD FLY

The arrogant sun had stalked away into the evening, trailing behind him
banners of gold and crimson, and a swift twilight was streaming over the
land.  As the sun passed, the eyes of two men on a high hill followed it,
and the look of one was like a light in a window to a lost traveller.
It had in it the sense of home and the tale of a journey done.  Such a
journey this man had made as few have ever attempted, and fewer
accomplished.  To the farthermost regions of snow and ice, where the
shoulder of a continent juts out into the northwestern Arctic seas, he
had travelled on foot and alone, save for his dogs, and for Indian
guides, who now and then shepherded him from point to point.  The vast
ice-hummocks had been his housing, pemmican, the raw flesh of fish, and
even the fat and oil of seals had been his food.  Ever and ever through
long months the everlasting white glitter of the snow and ice, ever and
ever the cold stars, the cloudless sky, the moon at full, or swung like a
white sickle in the sky to warn him that his life must be mown like
grass.  At night to sleep in a bag of fur and wool, by day the steely
wind, or the air shaking with a filmy powder of frost; while the
illimitably distant sun made the tiny flakes sparkle like silver--a
poudre day, when the face and hands are most like to be frozen, and all
so still and white and passionless, yet aching with energy.  Hundreds
upon hundreds of miles that endless trail went winding to the farthest
North-west.  No human being had ever trod its lengths before, though
Indians or a stray Hudson's Bay Company man had made journeys over part
of it during the years that have passed since Prince Rupert sent his
adventurers to dot that northern land with posts and forts, and trace
fine arteries of civilisation through the wastes.

Where this man had gone none other had been of white men from the Western
lands, though from across the wide Pacific, from the Eastern world,
adventurers and exiles had once visited what is now known as the Yukon
Valley.  So this man, browsing in the library of his grandfather, an
Eastern scholar, had come to know; and for love of adventure, and because
of the tale of a valley of gold and treasure to be had, and because he
had been ruined by bad investments, he had made a journey like none ever
essayed before.  And on his way up to those regions, where the veil
before the face of God is very thin and fine, and men's hearts glow
within them, where there was no oasis save the unguessed deposit of a
great human dream that his soul could feel, the face of a girl had
haunted him.  Her voice--so sweet a voice that it rang like muffled
silver in his ears, till, in the everlasting theatre of the Pole, the
stars seemed to repeat it through millions of echoing hills, growing
softer and softer as the frost hushed it to his ears-had said to him late
and early, "You must come back with the swallows."  Then she had sung a
song which had been like a fire in his heart, not alone because of the
words of it, but because of the soul in her voice, and it had lain like a
coverlet on his heart to keep it warm:

              "Adieu!  The sun goes awearily down,
               The mist creeps up o'er the sleepy town,
               The white sail bends to the shuddering mere,
               And the reapers have reaped and the night is here.

               Adieu!  And the years are a broken song,
               The right grows weak in the strife with wrong,
               The lilies of love have a crimson stain,
               And the old days never will come again.

               Adieu!  Where the mountains afar are dim
               'Neath the tremulous tread of the seraphim,
               Shall not our querulous hearts prevail,
               That have prayed for the peace of the Holy Grail.

               Adieu!  Sometime shall the veil between
               The things that are and that might have been
               Be folded back for our eyes to see,
               And the meaning of all shall be clear to me."

It had been but an acquaintance of five days while he fitted out for his
expedition, but in this brief time it had sunk deep into his mind that
life was now a thing to cherish, and that he must indeed come back;
though he had left England caring little if, in the peril and danger of
his quest, he ever returned.  He had been indifferent to his fate till he
came to the Valley of the Saskatchewan, to the town lying at the foot of
the maple hill beside the great northern stream, and saw the girl whose
life was knit with the far north, whose mother's heart was buried in the
great wastes where Sir John Franklin's expedition was lost; for her
husband had been one of the ill-fated if not unhappy band of lovers of
that civilisation for which they had risked all and lost all save
immortality.  Hither the two had come after he had been cast away on the
icy plains, and as the settlement had crept north, had gone north with
it, always on the outer edge of house and field, ever stepping northward.
Here, with small income but high hearts and quiet souls, they had lived
and laboured.  And when this newcomer from the old land set his face
northward to an unknown destination, the two women had prayed as the
mother did in the old days when the daughter was but a babe at her knee,
and it was not yet certain that Franklin and his men had been cast away
for ever.  Something in him, his great height, his strength of body,
his clear, meditative eyes, his brave laugh, reminded her of him--her
husband--who, like Sir Humphrey Gilbert, had said that it mattered little
where men did their duty, since God was always near to take or leave as
it was His will.  When Bickersteth went, it was as though one they had
known all their lives had passed; and the woman knew also that a new
thought had been sown in her daughter's mind, a new door opened in her
heart.

And he had returned.  He was now looking down into the valley where the
village lay.  Far, far over, two days' march away, he could see the
cluster of houses, and the glow of the sun on the tin spire of the little
Mission Church where he had heard the girl and her mother sing, till the
hearts of all were swept by feeling and ravished by the desire for "the
peace of the Holy Grail."  The village was, in truth, but a day's march
away from him, but he was not alone, and the journey could not be
hastened.  Beside him, his eyes also upon the sunset and the village,
was a man in a costume half-trapper, half-Indian, with bushy grey beard
and massive frame, and a distant, sorrowful look, like that of one whose
soul was tuned to past suffering.  As he sat, his head sunk on his
breast, his elbow resting on a stump of pine--the token of a progressive
civilisation--his chin upon his hand, he looked like the figure of Moses
made immortal by Michael Angelo.  But his strength was not like that of
the man beside him, who was thirty years younger.  When he walked, it was
as one who had no destination, who had no haven towards which to travel,
who journeyed as one to whom the world is a wilderness, and one tent or
one hut is the same as another, and none is home.

Like two ships meeting hull to hull on the wide seas, where a few miles
of water will hide them from each other, whose ports are thousands of
miles apart, whose courses are not the same, they two had met, the elder
man, sick and worn, and near to death, in the poor hospitality of an
Indian's tepee.  John Bickersteth had nursed the old man back to
strength, and had brought him southward with him--a silent companion, who
spoke in monosyllables, who had no conversation at all of the past, and
little of the present; but who was a woodsman and an Arctic traveller of
the most expert kind; who knew by instinct where the best places for
shelter and for sleeping might be found; who never complained, and was
wonderful with the dogs.  Close as their association was, Bickersteth had
felt concerning the other that his real self was in some other sphere or
place towards which his mind was always turning, as though to bring it
back.

Again and again had Bickersteth tried to get the old man to speak about
the past, but he had been met by a dumb sort of look, a straining to
understand.  Once or twice the old man had taken his hands in both of his
own, and gazed with painful eagerness into his face, as though trying to
remember or to comprehend something that eluded him.  Upon these
occasions the old man's eyes dropped tears in an apathetic quiet, which
tortured Bickersteth beyond bearing.  Just such a look he had seen in the
eyes of a favourite dog when he had performed an operation on it to save
its life--a reproachful, non-comprehending, loving gaze.

Bickersteth understood a little of the Chinook language, which is
familiar to most Indian tribes, and he had learned that the Indians knew
nothing exact concerning the old man; but rumours had passed from tribe
to tribe that this white man had lived for ever in the farthest north
among the Arctic tribes, and that he passed from people to people,
disappearing into the untenanted wilderness, but reappearing again among
stranger tribes, never resting, and as one always seeking what he could
not find.

One thing had helped this old man in all his travels and sojourning.
He had, as it seemed to the native people, a gift of the hands; for when
they were sick, a few moments' manipulation of his huge, quiet fingers
vanquished pain.  A few herbs he gave in tincture, and these also were
praised; but it was a legend that when he was persuaded to lay on his
hands and close his eyes, and with his fingers to "search for the pain
and find it, and kill it," he always prevailed.  They believed that
though his body was on earth his soul was with Manitou, and that it was
his soul which came into him again, and gave the Great Spirit's healing
to the fingers.  This had been the man's safety through how many years--
or how many generations--they did not know; for legends regarding the
pilgrim had grown and were fostered by the medicine men who, by giving
him great age and supernatural power, could, with more self-respect,
apologise for their own incapacity.

So the years--how many it was impossible to tell, since he did not know
or would not say--had gone on; and now, after ceaseless wandering, his
face was turned towards that civilisation out of which he had come so
long ago--or was it so long ago--one generation, or two, or ten?  It
seemed to Bickersteth at times as though it were ten, so strange, so
unworldly was his companion.  At first he thought that the man remembered
more than he would appear to acknowledge, but he found that after a day
or two everything that happened as they journeyed was also forgotten.

It was only visible things, or sounds, that appeared to open the doors of
memory of the most recent happenings.  These happenings, if not varied,
were of critical moment, since, passing down from the land of unchanging
ice and snow, they had come into March and April storms, and the perils
of the rapids and the swollen floods of May.  Now, in June, two years and
a month since Bickersteth had gone into the wilds, they looked down upon
the goal of one at least--of the younger man who had triumphed in his
quest up in these wilds abandoned centuries ago.

With the joyous thought in his heart, that he had discovered anew one of
the greatest gold-fields of the world, that a journey unparalleled had
been accomplished, he turned towards his ancient companion, and a feeling
of pity and human love enlarged within him.  He, John Bickersteth, was
going into a world again, where--as he believed--a happy fate awaited
him; but what of this old man?  He had brought him out of the wilds, out
of the unknown--was he only taking him into the unknown again?
Were there friends, any friends anywhere in the world waiting for him?
He called himself by no name, he said he had no name.  Whence came he?
Of whom?  Whither was he wending now?  Bickersteth had thought of the
problem often, and he had no answer for it save that he must be taken
care of, if not by others, then by himself; for the old man had saved him
from drowning; had also saved him from an awful death on a March day when
he fell into a great hole and was knocked insensible in the drifting
snow; had saved him from brooding on himself--the beginning of madness--
by compelling him to think for another.  And sometimes, as he had looked
at the old man, his imagination had caught the spirit of the legend of
the Indians, and he had cried out, "O soul, come back and give him
memory--give him back his memory, Manitou the mighty!"

Looking on the old man now, an impulse seized him.  "Dear old man," he
said, speaking as one speaks to a child that cannot understand, "you
shall never want, while I have a penny, or have head or hands to work.
But is there no one that you care for or that cares for you, that you
remember, or that remembers you?"

The old man shook his head though not with understanding, and he laid a
hand on the young man's shoulder, and whispered:

"Once it was always snow, but now it is green, the land.  I have seen it
--I have seen it once."  His shaggy eyebrows gathered over, his eyes
searched, searched the face of John Bickersteth.  "Once, so long ago--
I cannot think," he added helplessly.

"Dear old man," Bickersteth said gently, knowing he would not wholly
comprehend, "I am going to ask her--Alice--to marry me, and if she does,
she will help look after you, too.  Neither of us would have been here
without the other, dear old man, and we shall not be separated.  Whoever
you are, you are a gentleman, and you might have been my father or hers
--or hers."

He stopped suddenly.  A thought had flashed through his mind, a thought
which stunned him, which passed like some powerful current through his
veins, shocked him, then gave him a palpitating life.  It was a wild
thought, but yet why not--why not?  There was the chance, the faint,
far-off chance.  He caught the old man by the shoulders, and looked him
in the eyes, scanned his features, pushed back the hair from the rugged
forehead.

"Dear old man," he said, his voice shaking, "do you know what I'm
thinking?  I'm thinking that you may be of those who went out to the
Arctic Sea with Sir John Franklin--with Sir John Franklin, you
understand.  Did you know Sir John Franklin--is it true, dear old boy, is
it true?  Are you one that has lived to tell the tale?  Did you know Sir
John Franklin--is it--tell me, is it true?"

He let go the old man's shoulders, for over the face of the other there
had passed a change.  It was strained and tense.  The hands were
outstretched, the eyes were staring straight into the west and the coming
night.

"It is--it is--that's it!" cried Bickersteth.  "That's it--love o' God,
that's it!  Sir John Franklin--Sir John Franklin, and all the brave lads
that died up there!  You remember the ship--the Arctic Sea--the ice-
fields, and Franklin--you remember him?  Dear old man, say you remember
Franklin?"

The thing had seized him.  Conviction was upon him, and he watched the
other's anguished face with anguish and excitement in his own.  But--but
it might be, it might be her father--the eyes, the forehead are like
hers; the hands, the long hands, the pointed fingers.  "Come, tell me,
did you have a wife and child, and were they both called Alice--do you
remember?  Franklin--Alice!  Do you remember?"

The other got slowly to his feet, his arms outstretched, the look in his
face changing, understanding struggling for its place, memory fighting
for its own, the soul contending for its mastery.

"Franklin--Alice--the snow," he said confusedly, and sank down.

"God have mercy!" cried Bickersteth, as he caught the swaying body, and
laid it upon the ground.  "He was there--almost."

He settled the old man against the great pine stump and chafed his hands.
"Man, dear man, if you belong to her--if you do, can't you see what it
will mean to me?  She can't say no to me then.  But if it's true, you'll
belong to England and to all the world, too, and you'll have fame
everlasting.  I'll have gold for her and for you, and for your Alice,
too, poor old boy.  Wake up now and remember if you are Luke Allingham
who went with Franklin to the silent seas of the Pole.  If it's you,
really you, what wonder you lost your memory!  You saw them all die,
Franklin and all, die there in the snow, with all the white world round
them.  If you were there, what a travel you have had, what strange things
you have seen!  Where the world is loneliest, God lives most.  If you get
close to the heart of things, it's no marvel you forgot what you were,
or where you came from; because it didn't matter; you knew that you were
only one of thousands of millions who have come and gone, that make up
the soul of things, that make the pulses of the universe beat.  That's
it, dear old man.  The universe would die, if it weren't for the souls
that leave this world and fill it with life.  Wake up!  Wake up,
Allingham, and tell us where you've been and what you've seen."

He did not labour in vain.  Slowly consciousness came back, and the grey
eyes opened wide, the lips smiled faintly under the bushy beard; but
Bickersteth saw that the look in the face was much the same as it had
been before.  The struggle had been too great, the fight for the other
lost self had exhausted him, mind and body, and only a deep obliquity and
a great weariness filled the countenance.  He had come back to the verge,
he had almost again discovered himself; but the opening door had shut
fast suddenly, and he was back again in the night, the incompanionable
night of forgetfulness.

Bickersteth saw that the travail and strife had drained life and energy,
and that he must not press the mind and vitality of this exile of time
and the unknown too far.  He felt that when the next test came the old
man would either break completely, and sink down into another and
everlasting forgetfulness, or tear away forever the veil between himself
and his past, and emerge into a long-lost life.  His strength must be
shepherded, and he must be kept quiet and undisturbed until they came to
the town yonder in the valley, over which the night was slowly settling
down.  There two women waited, the two Alices, from both of whom had gone
lovers into the North.  The daughter was living over again in her young
love the pangs of suspense through which her mother had passed.  Two
years since Bickersteth had gone, and not a sign!

Yet, if the girl had looked from her bedroom window, this Friday night,
she would have seen on the far hill a sign; for there burned a fire
beside which sat two travellers who had come from the uttermost limits of
snow.  But as the fire burned--a beacon to her heart if she had but known
it--she went to her bed, the words of a song she had sung at choir--
practice with tears in her voice and in her heart ringing in her ears.
A concert was to be held after the service on the coming Sunday night,
at which there was to be a collection for funds to build another mission-
house a hundred miles farther North, and she had been practising music
she was to sing.  Her mother had been an amateur singer of great power,
and she was renewing her mother's gift in a voice behind which lay a
hidden sorrow.  As she cried herself to sleep the words of the song which
had moved her kept ringing in her ears and echoing in her heart:

              "When the swallows homeward fly,
               And the roses' bloom is o'er--"

But her mother, looking out into the night, saw on the far hill the fire,
burning like a star, where she had never seen a fire set before, and a
hope shot into her heart for her daughter--a hope that had flamed up and
died down so often during the past year.  Yet she had fanned with
heartening words every such glimmer of hope when it came, and now she
went to bed saying, "Perhaps he will come to-morrow."  In her mind, too,
rang the words of the song which had ravished her ears that night, the
song she had sung the night before her own husband, Luke Allingham, had
gone with Franklin to the Polar seas:

"When the swallows homeward fly--"

As she and her daughter entered the little church on the Sunday evening,
two men came over the prairie slowly towards the town, and both raised
their heads to the sound of the church-bell calling to prayer.  In the
eyes of the younger man there was a look which has come to many in this
world returning from hard enterprise and great dangers, to the familiar
streets, the friendly faces of men of their kin and clan-to the lights of
home.

The face of the older man, however, had another look.

It was such a look as is seldom seen in the faces of men, for it showed
the struggle of a soul to regain its identity.  The words which the old
man had uttered in response to Bickersteth's appeal before he fainted
away, "Franklin--Alice--the snow," had showed that he was on the verge;
the bells of the church pealing in the summer air brought him near it
once again.  How many years had gone since he had heard church-bells?
Bickersteth, gazing at him in eager scrutiny, wondered if, after all, he
might be mistaken about him.  But no, this man had never been born and
bred in the far North.  His was a type which belonged to the civilisation
from which he himself had come.  There would soon be the test of it all.
Yet he shuddered, too, to think what might happen if it was all true, and
discovery or reunion should shake to the centre the very life of the two
long-parted ones.

He saw the look of perplexed pain and joy at once in the face of the old
man, but he said nothing, and he was almost glad when the bell stopped.
The old man turned to him.

"What is it?" he asked.  "I remember--" but he stopped suddenly, shaking
his head.

An hour later, cleared of the dust of travel, the two walked slowly
towards the church from the little tavern where they were lodged.  The
service was now over, but the concert had begun.  The church was full,
and there were people in the porch; but these made way for the two
strangers; and, as Bickersteth was recognised by two or three present,
place was found for them.  Inside, the old man stared round him in a
confused and troubled way, but his motions were quiet and abstracted and
he looked like some old viking, his workaday life done, come to pray ere
he went hence forever.  They had entered in a pause in the concert, but
now two ladies came forward to the chancel steps, and one with her hands
clasped before her, began to sing:

              "When the swallows homeward fly,
               And the roses' bloom is o'er,
               And the nightingale's sweet song
               In the woods is heard no more--"

It was Alice--Alice the daughter--and presently the mother, the other
Alice, joined in the refrain.  At sight of them Bickersteth's eyes had
filled, not with tears, but with a cloud of feeling, so that he went
blind.  There she was, the girl he loved.  Her voice was ringing in his
ears.  In his own joy for one instant he had forgotten the old man beside
him, and the great test that was now upon him.  He turned quickly,
however, as the old man got to his feet.  For an instant the lost exile
of the North stood as though transfixed.  The blood slowly drained from
his face, and in his eyes was an agony of struggle and desire.  For a
moment an awful confusion had the mastery, and then suddenly a clear
light broke into his eyes, his face flushed healthily and shone, his arms
went up, and there rang in his ears the words:

              "Then I think with bitter pain,
               Shall we ever meet again?
               When the swallows homeward fly--"

"Alice--Alice!" he called, and tottered forward up the aisle, followed
by John Bickersteth.

"Alice, I have come back!" he cried again.






GEORGE'S WIFE

"She's come, and she can go back.  No one asked her, no one wants her,
and she's got no rights here.  She thinks she'll come it over me, but
she'll get nothing, and there's no place for her here."

The old, grey-bearded man, gnarled and angular, with overhanging brows
and a harsh face, made this little speech of malice and unfriendliness,
looking out on the snow-covered prairie through the window.  Far in the
distance were a sleigh and horses like a spot in the snow, growing larger
from minute to minute.

It was a day of days.  Overhead, the sun was pouring out a flood of light
and warmth, and though it was bitterly cold, life was beating hard in the
bosom of the West.  Men walked lightly, breathed quickly, and their eyes
were bright with the brightness of vitality and content.  Even the old
man at the window of this lonely house, in a great lonely stretch of
country, with the cedar hills behind it, had a living force which defied
his seventy odd years, though the light in his face was hard and his
voice was harder still.  Under the shelter of the foothills, cold as the
day was, his cattle were feeding in the open, scratching away the thin
layer of snow, and browsing on the tender grass underneath.  An arctic
world in appearance, it had an abounding life which made it friendly and
generous--the harshness belonged to the surface.  So, perhaps, it was
with the old man who watched the sleigh in the distance coming nearer,
but that in his nature on which any one could feed was not so easily
reached as the fresh young grass under the protecting snow.

"She'll get nothing out of me," he repeated, as the others in the room
behind him made no remark, and his eyes ranged gloatingly over the cattle
under the foothills and the buildings which he had gathered together to
proclaim his substantial greatness in the West.  "Not a sous markee," he
added, clinking some coins in his pocket.  "She's got no rights."

"Cassy's got as much right here as any of us, Abel, and she's coming to
say it, I guess."

The voice which spoke was unlike a Western voice.  It was deep and full
and slow, with an organ-like quality.  It was in good keeping with the
tall, spare body and large, fine rugged face of the woman to whom it
belonged.  She sat in a rocking-chair, but did not rock, her fingers busy
with the knitting-needles, her feet planted squarely on the home-made
hassock at her feet.

The old man waited for a minute in a painful silence, then he turned
slowly round, and, with tight-pressed lips, looked at the woman in the
rocking-chair.  If it had been anyone else who had "talked back" at him,
he would have made quick work of them, for he was of that class of tyrant
who pride themselves on being self-made, and have an undue respect for
their own judgment and importance.  But the woman who had ventured to
challenge his cold-blooded remarks about his dead son's wife, now
hastening over the snow to the house her husband had left under a cloud
eight years before, had no fear of him, and, maybe, no deep regard for
him.  He respected her, as did all who knew her--a very reticent,
thoughtful, busy being, who had been like a well of comfort to so many
that had drunk and passed on out of her life, out of time and time's
experiences.  Seventy-nine years saw her still upstanding, strong, full
of work, and fuller of life's knowledge.  It was she who had sent the
horses and sleigh for "Gassy," when the old man, having read the letter
that Cassy had written him, said that she could "freeze at the station"
for all of him.  Aunt Kate had said nothing then, but, when the time
came, by her orders the sleigh and horses were at the station; and the
old man had made no direct protest, for she was the one person he had
never dominated nor bullied.  If she had only talked, he would have worn
her down, for he was fond of talking, and it was said by those who were
cynical and incredulous about him that he had gone to prayer-meetings,
had been a local preacher, only to hear his own voice.  Probably if there
had been any politics in the West in his day, he would have been a
politician, though it would have been too costly for his taste, and
religion was very cheap; it enabled him to refuse to join in many forms
of expenditure, on the ground that he "did not hold by such things."

In Aunt Kate, the sister of his wife, dead so many years ago, he had
found a spirit stronger than his own.  He valued her; he had said more
than once, to those who he thought would never repeat it to her, that
she was a "great woman"; but self-interest was the mainspring of his
appreciation.  Since she had come again to his house--she had lived with
him once before for two years when his wife was slowly dying--it had been
a different place.  Housekeeping had cost less than before, yet the
cooking was better, the place was beautifully clean, and discipline
without rigidity reigned everywhere.  One by one the old woman's boys
and girls had died--four of them--and she was now alone, with not
a single grandchild left to cheer her; and the life out here with Abel
Baragar had been unrelieved by much that was heartening to a woman; for
Black Andy, Abel's son, was not an inspiring figure, though even his
moroseness gave way under her influence.  So it was that when Cassy's
letter came, her breast seemed to grow warmer, and swell with longing to
see the wife of her nephew, who had such a bad reputation in Abel's eyes,
and to see George's little boy, who was coming too.  After all, whatever
Cassy was, she was the mother of Abel's son's son; and Aunt Kate was too
old and wise to be frightened by tales told of Cassy or any one else.
So, having had her own way so far regarding Cassy's coming, she looked
Abel calmly in the eyes, over the gold-rimmed spectacles which were her
dearest possession--almost the only thing of value she had.  She was not
afraid of Abel's anger, and he knew it; but his eldest son, Black Andy,
was present, and he must make a show of being master of the situation.

"Aunt Kate," he said, "I didn't make a fuss about you sending the horses
and sleigh for her, because women do fool things sometimes.  I suppose
curiosity got the best of you.  Anyhow, mebbe it's right Cassy should
find out, once for all, how things stand, and that they haven't altered
since she took George away, and ruined his life, and sent him to his
grave.  That's why I didn't order Mick back when I saw him going out with
the team."

"Cassy Mavor," interjected a third voice from a corner behind the great
stove--"Cassy Mavor, of the variety-dance-and-song, and a talk with the
gallery between!"

Aunt Kate looked over at Black Andy, and stopped knitting, for there was
that in the tone of the sullen ranchman which stirred in her a sudden
anger, and anger was a rare and uncomfortable sensation to her.  A flush
crept slowly over her face, then it died away, and she said quietly to
Black Andy--for she had ever prayed to be master of the demon of temper
down deep in her, and she was praying now:

"She earnt her living by singing and dancing, and she's brought up
George's boy by it, and singing and dancing isn't a crime.  David danced
before the Lord.  I danced myself when I was a young girl, and before I
joined the church.  'Twas about the only pleasure I ever had; 'bout the
only one I like to remember.  There's no difference to me 'twixt making
your feet handy and clever and full of music, and playing with your
fingers on the piano or on a melodeon at a meeting.  As for singing, it's
God's gift; and many a time I wisht I had it.  I'd have sung the
blackness out of your face and heart, Andy."  She leaned back again and
began to knit very fast.  "I'd like to hear Cassy sing, and see her dance
too."

Black Andy chuckled coarsely, "I often heard her sing and saw her dance
down at Lumley's before she took George away East.  You wouldn't have
guessed she had consumption.  She knocked the boys over down to Lumley's.
The first night at Lumley's done for George."

Black Andy's face showed no lightening of its gloom as he spoke, but
there was a firing up of the black eyes, and the woman with the knitting
felt that--for whatever reason--he was purposely irritating his father.

"The devil was in her heels and in her tongue," Andy continued.  "With
her big mouth, red hair, and little eyes, she'd have made anybody laugh.
I laughed."

"You laughed!" snapped out his father with a sneer.

Black Andy's eyes half closed with a morose look, then he went on.  "Yes,
I laughed at Cassy.  While she was out here at Lumley's getting cured,
accordin' to the doctor's orders, things seemed to get a move on in the
West.  But it didn't suit professing Christians like you, dad."  He
jerked his head towards the old man and drew the spittoon near with his
feet.

"The West hasn't been any worse off since she left," snarled the old man.

"Well, she took George with her," grimly retorted Black Andy.

Abel Baragar's heart had been warmer towards his dead son George than
to any one else in the world.  George had been as fair of face and hair
as Andrew was dark; as cheerful and amusing as Andrew was gloomy and
dispiriting; as agile and dexterous of mind and body as his brother was
slow and angular; as emotional and warm-hearted as the other was
phlegmatic and sour--or so it seemed to the father and to nearly all
others.

In those old days they had not been very well off.  The railway was not
completed, and the West had not begun "to move."  The old man had bought
and sold land and cattle and horses, always living on a narrow margin of
safety, but in the hope that one day the choice bits of land he was
shepherding here and there would take a leap up in value; and his
judgment had been right.  His prosperity had all come since George went
away with Cassy Mavor.  His anger at George had been the more acute,
because the thing happened at a time when his affairs were on the edge of
a precipice.  He had won through it, but only by the merest shave, and it
had all left him with a bad spot in his heart, in spite of his "having
religion."  Whenever he remembered George, he instinctively thought of
those black days when a Land and Cattle Syndicate was crowding him over
the edge into the chasm of failure, and came so near doing it.  A few
thousand dollars less to put up here and there, and he would have been
ruined; his blood became hotter whenever he thought of it.  He had had to
fight the worst of it through alone, for George, who had been useful as a
kind of buyer and seller, who was ever all things to all men, and ready
with quip and jest, and not a little uncertain as to truth--to which the
old man shut his eyes when there was a "deal" on--had, in the end, been
of no use at all, and had seemed to go to pieces just when he was most
needed.  His father had put it all down to Cassy Mavor, who had unsettled
things since she had come to Lumley's, and being a man of very few ideas,
he cherished those he had with an exaggerated care.  Prosperity had not
softened him; it had given him an arrogance unduly emphasised by a
reputation for rigid virtue and honesty.  The indirect attack which
Andrew now made on George's memory roused him to anger, as much because
it seemed to challenge his own judgment as cast a slight on the name of
the boy whom he had cast off, yet who had a firmer hold on his heart than
any human being ever had.  It had only been pride which had prevented him
from making it up with George before it was too late; but, all the more,
he was set against the woman who "kicked up her heels for a living"; and,
all the more, he resented Black Andy, who, in his own grim way, had
managed to remain a partner with him in their present prosperity, and had
done so little for it.

"George helped to make what you've got, Andy," he said darkly now.  "The
West missed George.  The West said, 'There was a good man ruined by a
woman.' The West'd never think anything or anybody missed you, 'cept
yourself.  When you went North, it never missed you; when you come back,
its jaw fell.  You wasn't fit to black George's boots."

Black Andy's mouth took on a bitter sort of smile, and his eyes drooped
furtively, as he struck the damper of the stove heavily with his foot,
then he replied slowly:

"Well, that's all right; but if I wasn't fit to black his boots, it ain't
my fault.  I git my nature honest, as he did.  We wasn't any cross-
breeds, I s'pose.  We got the strain direct, and we was all right on her
side."  He jerked his head towards Aunt Kate, whose face was growing
pale.  She interposed now.

"Can't you leave the dead alone?" she asked in a voice ringing a little.
"Can't you let them rest?  Ain't it enough to quarrel about the living?
Cassy'll be here soon," she added, peering out of the window, "and if I
was you, I'd try and not make her sorry she ever married a Baragar.  It
ain't a feeling that'd make a sick woman live long."

Aunt Kate did not strike often, but when she did, she struck hard.  Abel
Baragar staggered a little under this blow, for, at the moment, it seemed
to him that he saw his dead wife's face looking at him from the chair
where her sister now sat.  Down in his ill-furnished heart, where there
had been little which was companionable, there was a shadowed corner.
Sophy Baragar had been such a true-hearted, brave-souled woman, and he
had been so impatient and exacting with her, till the beautiful face,
which had been reproduced in George, had lost its colour and its fire,
had become careworn and sweet with that sweetness which goes early out of
the world.  In all her days the vanished wife had never hinted at as much
as Aunt Kate suggested now, and Abel Baragar shut his eyes against the
thing which he was seeing.  He was not all hard, after all.

Aunt Kate turned to Black Andy now.

"Mebbe Cassy ain't for long," she said.  "Mebbe she's come out for what
she came out for before.  It seems to me it's that, or she wouldn't have
come; because she's young yet, and she's fond of her boy, and she'd not
want to bury herself alive out here with us.  Mebbe her lungs is bad
again."

"Then she's sure to get another husband out here," said the old man,
recovering himself.  "She got one before easy, on the same ticket."  With
something of malice he looked over at Black Andy.

"If she can sing and dance as she done nine years ago, I shouldn't
wonder," answered Black Andy smoothly.  These two men knew each other;
they had said hard things to each other for many a year, yet they lived
on together unshaken by each other's moods and bitternesses.

"I'm getting old,--I'm seventy-nine,--and I ain't for long," urged Aunt
Kate, looking Abel in the eyes.  "Some day soon I'll be stepping out and
away.  Then things'll go to sixes and sevens, as they did after Sophy
died.  Some one ought to be here that's got a right to be here, not a
hired woman."

Suddenly the old man raged out.

"Her--off the stage, to look after this!  Her, that's kicked up her heels
for a living!  It's--no, she's no good.  She's common.  She's come, and
she can go.  I ain't having sweepings from the streets living here as if
they had rights."

Aunt Kate set her lips.

"Sweepings!  You've got to take that back, Abel.  It's not Christian.
You've got to take that back."

"He'll take it back all right before we've done, I guess," remarked Black
Andy.  "He'll take a lot back."

"Truth's truth, and I'll stand by it, and--"

The old man stopped, for there came to them now, clearly, the sound of
sleigh bells.  They all stood still for an instant, silent and attentive,
then Aunt Kate moved towards the door.

"Cassy's come," she said.  "Cassy and George's boy've come."

Another instant and the door was opened on the beautiful, white,
sparkling world, and the low sleigh, with its great warm buffalo robes,
in which the small figures of a woman and a child were almost lost,
stopped at the door.  Two whimsical but tired eyes looked over a rim of
fur at the old woman in the doorway, then Cassy's voice rang out.

"Hello, that's Aunt Kate, I know!  Well, here we are, and here's my boy.
Jump, George!"

A moment later, and the gaunt old woman folded both mother and son in her
arms and drew them into the room.  The door was shut, and they all faced
each other.

The old man and Black Andy did not move, but stood staring at the trim
figure in black, with the plain face, large mouth, and tousled red hair,
and the dreamy-eyed, handsome little boy beside her.

Black Andy stood behind the stove, looking over at the new-comers with
quizzical, almost furtive eyes, and his father remained for a moment with
mouth open, gazing at his dead son's wife and child, as though not quite
comprehending the scene.  The sight of the boy had brought back, in some
strange, embarrassing way, a vision of thirty years before, when George
was a little boy in buckskin pants and jacket, and was beginning to ride
the prairie with him.  This boy was like George, yet not like him.  The
face was George's, the sensuous, luxurious mouth; but the eyes were not
those of a Baragar, nor yet those of Aunt Kate's family; and they were
not wholly like the mother's.  They were full and brimming, while hers
were small and whimsical; yet they had her quick, humourous flashes and
her quaintness.

"Have I changed so much?  Have you forgotten me?" Cassy asked, looking
the old man in the eyes.  "You look as strong as a bull."  She held out
her hand to him and laughed.

"Hope I see you well," said Abel Baragar mechanically, as he took the
hand and shook it awkwardly.

"Oh, I'm all right," answered the nonchalant little woman, undoing her
jacket.  "Shake hands with your grandfather, George.  That's right--don't
talk too much," she added, with a half-nervous little laugh, as the old
man, with a kind of fixed smile, and the child shook hands in silence.

Presently she saw Black Andy behind the stove.  "Well, Andy, have you
been here ever since?" she asked, and, as he came forward, she suddenly
caught him by both arms, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him.  "Last time I
saw you, you were behind the stove at Lumley's.  Nothing's ever too warm
for you," she added.  "You'd be shivering on the Equator.  You were
always hugging the stove at Lumley's."

"Things was pretty warm there, too, Cassy," he said, with a sidelong look
at his father.

She saw the look, her face flashed with sudden temper, then her eyes fell
on her boy, now lost in the arms of Aunt Kate, and she curbed herself.

"There were plenty of things doing at Lumley's in those days," she said
brusquely.  "We were all young and fresh then," she added, and then
something seemed to catch her voice, and she coughed a little--a hard,
dry, feverish cough.  "Are the Lumleys all right?  Are they still there,
at the Forks?" she asked, after the little paroxysm of coughing.

"Cleaned out--all scattered.  We own the Lumleys' place now," replied
Black Andy, with another sidelong glance at his father, who, as he put
some more wood on the fire and opened the damper of the stove wider,
grimly watched and listened.

"Jim, and Lance, and Jerry, and Abner?" she asked almost abstractedly.

"Jim's dead-shot by a U. S. marshal by mistake for a smuggler," answered
Black Andy suggestively.  "Lance is up on the Yukon, busted; Jerry is one
of our, hands on the place; and Abner is in jail."

"Abner-in jail!" she exclaimed in a dazed way.  "What did he do?  Abner
always seemed so straight."

"Oh, he sloped with a thousand dollars of the railway people's money.
They caught him, and he got seven years."

"He was married, wasn't he?" she asked in a low voice.  "Yes, to Phenie
Tyson.  There's no children, so she's all right, and divorce is cheap
over in the States, where she is now."

"Phenie Tyson didn't marry Abner because he was a saint, but because he
was a man, I suppose," she replied gravely.  "And the old folks?"

"Both dead.  What Abner done sent the old man to his grave.  But Abner's
mother died a year before."

"What Abner done killed his father," said Abel Baragar with dry emphasis.
"Phenie Tyson was extravagant-wanted this and that, and nothin' was too
good for her.  Abner spoilt his life gettin' her what she wanted; and it
broke old Ezra Lumley's heart."

George's wife looked at him for a moment with her eyes screwed up, and
then she laughed softly.  "My, it's curious how some folks go up and some
go down!  It must be lonely for Phenie waiting all these years for Abner
to get free.  .  .  .  I had the happiest time in my life at Lumley's.
I was getting better of my-cold.  While I was there I got lots of
strength stored up, to last me many a year when I needed it; and, then,
George and I were married at Lumley's.  .  .  ."

Aunt Kate came slowly over with the boy, and laid a hand on Cassy's
shoulder, for there was an undercurrent to the conversation which boded
no good.  The very first words uttered had plunged Abel Baragar and his
son's wife into the midst of the difficulty which she had hoped might,
after all, be avoided.

"Come, and I'll show you your room, Cassy," she said.  "It faces south,
and you'll get the sun all day.  It's like a sun-parlour.  We're going to
have supper in a couple of hours, and you must rest some first.  Is the
house warm enough for you?"

The little, garish woman did not reply directly, but shook back her red
hair and caught her boy to her breast and kissed him; then she said in
that staccato manner which had given her words on the stage such point
and emphasis, "Oh, this house is a'most too warm for me, Aunt Kate!"

Then she moved towards the door with the grave, kindly old woman, her
son's hand in her own.

"You can see the Lumleys' place from your window, Cassy," said Black Andy
grimly.  "We got a mortgage on it, and foreclosed it, and it's ours now;
and Jerry Lumley's stock-riding for us.  Anyhow, he's better off than
Abner, or Abner's wife."

Cassy turned at the door and faced him.  Instinctively she caught at some
latent conflict with old Abel Baragar in what Black Andy had said, and
her face softened, for it suddenly flashed into her mind that he was not
against her.

"I'm glad to be back West," she said.  "It meant a lot to me when I was
at Lumley's."  She coughed a little again, but turned to the door with a
laugh.

"How long have you come to stay here--out West?" asked the old man
furtively.

"Why, there's plenty of time to think of that!" she answered brusquely,
and she heard Black Andy laugh derisively as the door closed behind her.

In a blaze of joy the sun swept down behind the southern hills, and the
windows of Lumley's house at the Forks, catching the oblique rays,
glittered and shone like flaming silver.  Nothing of life showed, save
the cattle here and there, creeping away to the shelter of the foothills
for the night.  The white, placid snow made a coverlet as wide as the
vision of the eye, save where spruce and cedar trees gave a touch of
warmth and refuge here and there.  A wonderful, buoyant peace seemed to
rest upon the wide, silent expanse.  The birds of song were gone South
over the hills, and the living wild things of the prairies had stolen
into winter quarters.  Yet, as Cassy Mavor looked out upon the exquisite
beauty of the scene, upon the splendid outspanning of the sun along the
hills, the deep plangent blue of the sky and the thrilling light, she saw
a world in agony and she heard the moans of the afflicted.  The sun shone
bright on the windows of Lumley's house, but she could hear the crying of
Abner's wife, and of old Ezra and Eliza Lumley, when their children were
stricken or shamed; when Abel Baragar drew tighter and tighter the chains
of the mortgage, which at last made them tenants in the house once their
own.  Only eight years ago, and all this had happened.  And what had not
happened to her, too, in those eight years!

With George--reckless, useless, loving, lying George--she had left
Lumley's with her sickness cured, as it seemed, after a long year in the
West, and had begun life again.  What sort of life had it been?  "Kicking
up her heels on the stage," as Abel Baragar had said; but, somehow, not
as it was before she went West to give her perforated lung to the healing
air of the plains, and to live outdoors with the men--a man's life.  Then
she had never put a curb on her tongue, or greatly on her actions, except
that, though a hundred men quarrelled openly, or in their own minds,
about her, no one had ever had any right to quarrel about her.  With a
tongue which made men gasp with laughter, with as comic a gift as ever
woman had, and as equally comic a face, she had been a good-natured
little tyrant in her way.  She had given a kiss here and there, and had
taken one, but always there had been before her mind the picture of a
careworn woman who struggled to bring up her three children honestly, and
without the help of charity, and, with a sigh of content and weariness,
had died as Cassy made her first hit on the stage and her name became a
household word.  And Cassy, garish, gay, freckled, witty and whimsical,
had never forgotten those days when her mother prayed and worked her
heart out to do her duty by her children.  Cassy Mavor had made her
following, had won her place, was the idol of "the gallery"; and yet she
was "of the people," as she had always been, until her first sickness
came, and she had gone out to Lumley's, out along the foothills of the
Rockies.

What had made her fall in love with George Baragar?

She could not have told, if she had been asked.  He was wayward, given to
drink at times, given also to card-playing and racing; but he had a way
with him which few women could resist and which made men his friends; and
he had a sense of humour akin to her own.  In any case, one day she let
him catch her up in his arms, and there was the end of it.  But no, not
the end, after all.  It was only the beginning of real life for her.  All
that had gone before seemed but playing on the threshold, though it had
meant hard, bitter hard work, and temptation, and patience, and endurance
of many kinds.  And now George was gone for ever.  But George's little
boy lay there on the bed in a soft sleep, with all his life before him.

She turned from the warm window and the buoyant, inspiring scene to the
bed.  Stooping over, she kissed the sleeping boy with an abrupt
eagerness, and made a little awkward, hungry gesture of love over him,
and her face flushed hot with the passion of motherhood in her.

"All I've got now," she murmured.  "Nothing else left--nothing else at
all."

She heard the door open behind her, and she turned round.  Aunt Kate was
entering with a bowl in her hands.

"I heard you moving about, and I've brought you something hot to drink,"
she said.

"That's real good of you, Aunt Kate," was the cheerful reply.  "But it's
near supper-time, and I don't need it."

"It's boneset tea--for your cold," answered Aunt Kate gently, and put it
on the high dressing-table made of a wooden box and covered with muslin.
"For your cold, Cassy," she repeated.

The little woman stood still a moment gazing at the steaming bowl, lines
growing suddenly around her mouth, then she looked at Aunt Kate
quizzically.  "Is my cold bad--so bad that I need boneset?" she asked in
a queer, constrained voice.

"It's comforting, is boneset tea, even when there's no cold, 'specially
when the whiskey's good, and the boneset and camomile has steeped some
days."

"Have you been steeping them some days?" Cassy asked softly, eagerly.

Aunt Kate nodded, then tried to explain.

"It's always good to be prepared, and I didn't know but what the cold you
used to have might be come back," she said.  "But I'm glad if it ain't,
if that cough of yours is only one of the measly little hacks people get
in the East, where it's so damp."

Cassy was at the window again, looking out at the dying radiance of the
sun.  Her voice seemed hollow and strange and rather rough, as she said
in reply:

"It's a real cold, deep down, the same as I had nine years ago, Aunt
Kate; and it's come to stay, I guess.  That's why I came back West.  But
I couldn't have gone to Lumley's again, even if they were at the Forks
now, for I'm too poor.  I'm a back-number now.  I had to give up singing
and dancing a year ago, after George died.  So I don't earn my living any
more, and I had to come to George's father with George's boy."

Aunt Kate had a shrewd mind, and it was tactful, too.  She did not
understand why Cassy, who had earned so much money all these years,
should be so poor now, unless it was that she hadn't saved--that she and
George hadn't saved.  But, looking at the face before her, and the child
on the bed, she was convinced that the woman was a good woman, that,
singer and dancer as she was, there was no reason why any home should be
closed to her, or any heart should shut its doors before her.  She
guessed a reason for this poverty of Cassy Mavor, but it only made her
lay a hand on the little woman's shoulders and look into her eyes.

"Cassy," she said gently, "you was right to come here.  There's trials
before you, but for the boy's sake you must bear them.  Sophy, George's
mother, had to bear them, and Abel was fond of her, too, in his way.
He's stored up a lot of things to say, and he'll say them; but you'll
keep the boy in your mind, and be patient, won't you, Cassy?  You got
rights here, and it's comfortable, and there's plenty, and the air will
cure your lung as it did before.  It did all right before, didn't it?"
She handed the bowl of boneset tea.  "Take it; it'll do you good, Cassy,"
she added.

Cassy said nothing in reply.  She looked at the bed where her boy lay,
she looked at the angular face of the woman, with its brooding
motherliness, at the soft, grey hair, and, with a little gasp of feeling,
she raised the bowl to her lips and drank freely.  Then, putting it down,
she said:

"He doesn't mean to have us, Aunt Kate, but I'll try and keep my temper
down.  Did he ever laugh in his life?"

"He laughs sometimes--kind o' laughs."

"I'll make him laugh real, if I can," Cassy rejoined.  "I've made a lot
of people laugh in my time."

The old woman leaned suddenly over, and drew the red, ridiculous head to
her shoulder with a gasp of affection, and her eyes were full of tears.

"Cassy," she exclaimed, "Cassy, you make me cry."  Then she turned and
hurried from the room.

Three hours later the problem was solved in the big sitting-room where
Cassy had first been received with her boy.  Aunt Kate sat with her feet
on a hassock, rocking gently and watching and listening.  Black Andy was
behind the great stove with his chair tilted back, carving the bowl of a
pipe; the old man sat rigid by the table, looking straight before him and
smacking his lips now and then as he was won't to do at meeting; while
Cassy, with her chin in her hands and elbows on her knees, gazed into the
fire and waited for the storm to break.

Her little flashes of humour at dinner had not brightened things,
and she had had an insane desire to turn cart-wheels round the room,
so implacable and highly strained was the attitude of the master of the
house, so unctuous was the grace and the thanksgiving before and after
the meal.  Abel Baragar had stored up his anger and his righteous
antipathy for years, and this was the first chance he had had of visiting
his displeasure on the woman who had "ruined" George, and who had now
come to get "rights," which he was determined she should not have.  He
had steeled himself against seeing any good in her whatever.  Self-will,
self-pride, and self-righteousness were big in him, and so the supper had
ended in silence, and with a little attack of coughing on the part of
Cassy, which made her angry at herself.  Then the boy had been put to
bed, and she had come back to await the expected outburst.  She could
feel it in the air, and while her blood tingled in a desire to fight this
tyrant to the bitter end, she thought of her boy and his future, and she
calmed the tumult in her veins.

She did not have to wait very long.  The querulous voice of the old man
broke the silence.

"When be you goin' back East?  What time did you fix for goin'?" he
asked.

She raised her head and looked at him squarely.  "I didn't fix any time
for going East again," she replied.  "I came out West this time to stay."

"I thought you was on the stage," was the rejoinder.

"I've left the stage.  My voice went when I got a bad cold again, and I
couldn't stand the draughts of the theatre, and so I couldn't dance,
either.  I'm finished with the stage.  I've come out here for good and
all.

"Where did you think of livin' out here?"

"I'd like to have gone to Lumley's, but that's not possible, is it?
Anyway, I couldn't afford it now.  So I thought I'd stay here, if there
was room for me."

"You want to board here?"

"I didn't put it to myself that way.  I thought perhaps you'd be glad to
have me.  I'm handy.  I can cook, I can sew, and I'm quite cheerful and
kind.  Then there's George--little George.  I thought you'd like to have
your grandson here with you."

"I've lived without him--or his father--for eight years, an' I could bear
it a while yet, mebbe."

There was a half-choking sound from the old woman in the rocking-chair,
but she did not speak, though her knitting dropped into her lap.

"But if you knew us better, perhaps you'd like us better," rejoined Cassy
gently.  "We're both pretty easy to get on with, and we see the bright
side of things.  He has a wonderful disposition, has George."

"I ain't goin' to like you any better," said the old man, getting to his
feet.  "I ain't goin' to give you any rights here.  I've thought it out,
and my mind's made up.  You can't come it over me.  You ruined my boy's
life and sent him to his grave.  He'd have lived to be an old man out
here; but you spoiled him.  You trapped him into marrying you, with your
kicking and your comic songs, and your tricks of the stage, and you
parted us--parted him and me for ever."

"That was your fault.  George wanted to make it up."

"With you!"  The old man's voice rose shrilly, the bitterness and passion
of years was shooting high in the narrow confines of his mind.  The
geyser of his prejudice and antipathy was furiously alive.  "To come back
with you that ruined him and broke up my family, and made my life like
bitter aloes!  No!  And if I wouldn't have him with you, do you think
I'll have you without him?  By the God of Israel, no!"

Black Andy was now standing up behind the stove intently watching, his
face grim and sombre; Aunt Kate sat with both hands gripping the arms of
the rocker.

Cassy got slowly to her feet.  "I've been as straight a woman as your
mother or your wife ever was," she said, "and all the world knows it.
I'm poor--and I might have been rich.  I was true to myself before I
married George, and I was true to George after, and all I earned he
shared; and I've got little left.  The mining stock I bought with what
I saved went smash, and I'm poor as I was when I started to work for
myself.  I can work awhile yet, but I wanted to see if I could fit in out
here, and get well again, and have my boy fixed in the house of his
grandfather.  That's the way I'm placed, and that's how I came.  But
give a dog a bad name--ah, you shame your dead boy in thinking bad of me!
I didn't ruin him.  I didn't kill him.  He never came to any bad through
me.  I helped him; he was happy.  Why, I--" She stopped suddenly, putting
a hand to her mouth.  "Go on, say what you want to say, and let's
understand once for all," she added with a sudden sharpness.

Abel Baragar drew himself up.  "Well, I say this.  I'll give you three
thousand dollars, and you can go somewhere else to live.  I'll keep the
boy here.  That's what I've fixed in my mind to do.  You can go, and the
boy stays.  I ain't goin' to live with you that spoiled George's life."

The eyes of the woman dilated, she trembled with a sudden rush of anger,
then stood still, staring in front of her without a word.  Black Andy
stepped from behind the stove.

"You are going to stay here, Cassy," he said; "here where you have rights
as good as any, and better than any, if it comes to that."  He turned to
his father.  "You thought a lot of George," he added.  "He was the apple
of your eye.  He had a soft tongue, and most people liked him; but George
was foolish--I've known it all these years.  George was pretty foolish.
He gambled, he bet at races, he speculated--wild.  You didn't know it.
He took ten thousand dollars of your money, got from the Wonegosh farm he
sold for you.  He--"

Cassy Mavor started forwards with a cry, but Black Andy waved her down.

"No, I'm going to tell it.  George lost your ten thousand dollars, dad,
gambling, racing, speculating.  He told her--Cassy-two days after they
was married, and she took the money she earned on the stage, and give it
to him to pay you back on the quiet through the bank.  You never knew,
but that's the kind of boy your son George was, and that's the kind of
wife he had.  George told me all about it when I was East six years ago."

He came over to Cassy and stood beside her.  "I'm standing by George's
wife," he said, taking her hand, while she shut her eyes in her misery--
had she not hid her husband's wrong-doing all these years?  "I'm standing
by her.  If it hadn't been for that ten thousand dollars she paid back
for George, you'd have been swamped when the Syndicate got after you,
and we wouldn't have had Lumley's place, nor this, nor anything.  I guess
she's got rights here, dad, as good as any."

The old man sank slowly into a chair.  "George--George stole from me--
stole money from me!" he whispered.  His face was white.  His pride and
vainglory were broken.  He was a haggard, shaken figure.  His self-
righteousness was levelled in the dust.

With sudden impulse, Cassy stole over to him, and took his hand and held
it tight.

"Don't!  Don't feel so bad!" she said.  "He was weak and wild then.
But he was all right afterwards.  He was happy with me."

"I've owed Cassy this for a good many years, dad," said Black Andy, "and
it had to be paid.  She's got better stuff in her than any Baragar."

                    .........................

An hour later, the old man said to Cassy at the door of her room: "You
got to stay here and git well.  It's yours, the same as the rest of us
--what's here."

Then he went downstairs and sat with Aunt Kate by the fire.

"I guess she's a good woman," he said at last.  "I didn't use her right."

"You've been lucky with your women-folk," Aunt Kate answered quietly.

"Yes, I've been lucky," he answered.  "I dunno if I deserve it.  Mebbe
not.  Do you think she'll git well?"

"It's a healing air out here," Aunt Kate answered, and listened to the
wood of the house snapping in the sharp frost.






MARCILE

That the day was beautiful, that the harvest of the West had been a great
one, that the salmon-fishing had been larger than ever before, that gold
had been found in the Yukon, made no difference to Jacques Grassette, for
he was in the condemned cell of Bindon Jail, living out those days which
pass so swiftly between the verdict of the jury and the last slow walk
with the Sheriff.

He sat with his back to the stone wall, his hands on his knees, looking
straight before him.  All that met his physical gaze was another stone
wall, but with his mind's eye he was looking beyond it into spaces far
away.  His mind was seeing a little house with dormer windows, and a
steep roof on which the snow could not lodge in winter-time; with a
narrow stoop in front where one could rest of an evening, the day's work
done; the stone-and-earth oven near by in the open, where the bread for a
family of twenty was baked; the wooden plough tipped against the fence,
to wait the "fall" cultivation; the big iron cooler in which the sap from
the maple trees was boiled, in the days when the snow thawed and spring
opened the heart of the wood; the flash of the sickle and the scythe hard
by; the fields of the little narrow farm running back from the St.
Lawrence like a riband; and, out on the wide stream, the great rafts with
their riverine population floating down to Michelin's mill-yards.

For hours he had sat like this, unmoving, his gnarled red hands clamping
each leg as though to hold him steady while he gazed; and he saw himself
as a little lad, barefooted, doing chores, running after the shaggy,
troublesome pony which would let him catch it when no one else could,
and, with only a halter on, galloping wildly back to the farmyard, to be
hitched up in the carriole which had once belonged to the old Seigneur.
He saw himself as a young man, back from "the States" where he had been
working in the mills, regarded austerely by little Father Roche, who had
given him his first Communion--for, down in Massachusetts he had learned
to wear his curly hair plastered down on his forehead, smoke bad cigars,
and drink "old Bourbon," to bet and to gamble, and be a figure at horse-
races.

Then he saw himself, his money all gone, but the luck still with him,
at Mass on the Sunday before going to the backwoods lumber-camp for the
winter, as boss of a hundred men.  He had a way with him, and he had
brains, had Jacques Grassette, and he could manage men, as Michelin the
lumber-king himself had found in a great river-row and strike, when
bloodshed seemed certain.  Even now the ghost of a smile played at his
lips, as he recalled the surprise of the old habitants and of Father
Roche when he was chosen for this responsible post; for to run a great
lumber-camp well, hundreds of miles from civilisation, where there is no
visible law, no restraints of ordinary organised life, and where men, for
seven months together, never saw a woman or a child, and ate pork and
beans, and drank white whisky, was a task of administration as difficult
as managing a small republic new-created out of violent elements of
society.  But Michelin was right, and the old Seigneur, Sir Henri
Robitaille, who was a judge of men, knew he was right, as did also
Hennepin the schoolmaster, whose despair Jacques had been, for he never
worked at his lessons as a boy, and yet he absorbed Latin and mathematics
by some sure but unexplainable process.  "Ah! if you would but work,
Jacques, you vaurien, I would make a great man of you," Hennepin had said
to him more than once; but this had made no impression on Jacques.  It
was more to the point that the ground-hogs and black squirrels and
pigeons were plentiful in Casanac Woods.

And so he thought as he stood at the door of the Church of St. Francis on
that day before going "out back" to the lumber-camp.  He had reached the
summit of greatness--to command men.  That was more than wealth or
learning, and as he spoke to the old Seigneur going in to Mass, he still
thought so, for the Seigneur's big house and the servants and the great
gardens had no charm for him.  The horses--that was another thing; but
there would be plenty of horses in the lumber-camp; and, on the whole, he
felt himself rather superior to the old Seigneur, who now was Lieutenant-
Governor of the province in which lay Bindon Jail.

At the door of the Church of St.  Francis he had stretched himself up
with good-natured pride, for he was by nature gregarious and friendly,
but with a temper quick and strong, and even savage when roused; though
Michelin the lumber-king did not know that when he engaged him as boss,
having seen him only at the one critical time, when his superior brain
and will saw its chance to command, and had no personal interest in the
strife.  He had been a miracle of coolness then, and his six-foot-two of
pride and muscle was taking natural tribute at the door of the Church of
St. Francis, where he waited till nearly everyone had entered, and Father
Roche's voice could be heard in the Mass.

Then had happened the real event of his life: a blackeyed, rose-checked
girl went by with her mother, hurrying in to Mass.  As she passed him
their eyes met, and his blood leapt in his veins.  He had never seen her
before, and, in a sense, he had never seen any woman before.  He had
danced with many a one, and kissed a few in the old days among the flax-
beaters, at the harvesting, in the gaieties of a wedding, and also down
in Massachusetts.  That, however, was a different thing, which he forgot
an hour after; but this was the beginning of the world for him; for he
knew now, of a sudden, what life was, what home meant, why "old folks"
slaved for their children, and mothers wept when girls married or sons
went away from home to bigger things; why in there, in at Mass, so many
were praying for all the people, and thinking only of one.  All in a
moment it came--and stayed; and he spoke to her, to Marcile, that very
night, and he spoke also to her father, Valloir the farrier, the next
morning by lamplight, before he started for the woods.  He would not be
gainsaid, nor take no for an answer, nor accept, as a reason for refusal,
that she was only sixteen, and that he did not know her, for she had been
away with a childless aunt since she was three.  That she had fourteen
brothers and sisters who had to be fed and cared for did not seem to
weigh with the farrier.  That was an affair of le bon Dieu, and enough
would be provided for them all as heretofore--one could make little
difference; and though Jacques was a very good match, considering his
prospects and his favour with the lumber-king, Valloir had a kind of fear
of him, and could not easily promise his beloved Marcile, the flower of
his flock, to a man of whom the priest so strongly disapproved.  But it
was a new sort of Jacques Grassette who, that morning, spoke to him
with the simplicity and eagerness of a child; and the suddenly conceived
gift of a pony stallion, which every man in the parish envied Jacques,
won Valloir over; and Jacques went "away back" with the first timid kiss
of Marcile Valloir burning on his cheek.

"Well, bagosh, you are a wonder!" said Jacques' father, when he told him
the news, and saw Jacques jump into the carriole and drive away.

Here in prison, this, too, Jacques saw--this scene; and then the wedding
in the spring, and the tour through the parishes for days together, lads
and lasses journeying with them; and afterwards the new home with a
bigger stoop than any other in the village, with some old gnarled crab-
apple trees and lilac bushes, and four years of happiness, and a little
child that died; and all the time Jacques rising in the esteem of
Michelin the lumber-king, and sent on inspections, and to organise camps;
for weeks, sometimes for months, away from the house behind the lilac
bushes--and then the end of it all, sudden and crushing and unredeemable.

Jacques came back one night and found the house empty.  Marcile had gone
to try her luck with another man.

That was the end of the upward career of Jacques Grassette.  He went out
upon a savage hunt which brought him no quarry, for the man and the woman
had disappeared as completely as though they had been swallowed by the
sea.  And here, at last, he was waiting for the day when he must settle
a bill for a human life taken in passion and rage.

His big frame seemed out of place in the small cell, and the watcher
sitting near him, to whom he had not addressed a word nor replied to a
question since the watching began, seemed an insignificant factor in the
scene.  Never had a prisoner been more self-contained, or rejected more
completely all those ministrations of humanity which relieve the horrible
isolation of the condemned cell.  Grassette's isolation was complete.  He
lived in a dream, did what little there was to do in a dark abstraction,
and sat hour after hour, as he was sitting now, piercing, with a brain at
once benumbed to all outer things and afire with inward things, those
realms of memory which are infinite in a life of forty years.

"Sacre!" he muttered at last, and a shiver seemed to pass through him
from head to foot; then an ugly and evil oath fell from his lips, which
made his watcher shrink back appalled, for he also was a Catholic, and
had been chosen of purpose, in the hope that he might have an influence
on this revolted soul.  It had, however, been of no use, and Grassette
had refused the advances and ministrations of the little good priest,
Father Laflamme, who had come from the coast of purpose to give him the
offices of the Church.  Silent, obdurate, sullen, he had looked the
priest straight in the face and had said in broken English, "Non, I pay
my bill.  Nom de diable, I will say my own Mass, light my own candle, go
my own way.  I have too much."

Now, as he sat glooming, after his outbreak of oaths, there came a
rattling noise at the door, the grinding of a key in the lock, the
shooting of bolts, and a face appeared at the little wicket in the door.
Then the door opened and the Sheriff stepped inside, accompanied by a
white-haired, stately old man.  At sight of this second figure--the
Sheriff had come often before, and would come for one more doleful walk
with him--Grassette started.  His face, which had never whitened in all
the dismal and terrorising doings of the capture and the trial and
sentence, though it had flushed with rage more than once, now turned a
little pale, for it seemed as if this old man had stepped out of the
visions which had just passed before his eyes.

"His Honour, the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Henri Robitaille, has come to
speak with you.  .  .  .  Stand up," the Sheriff added sharply, as
Grassette kept his seat.

Grassette's face flushed with anger, for the prison had not broken his
spirits; then he got up slowly.  "I not stand up for you," he growled at
the Sheriff; "I stand up for him."  He jerked his head towards Sir Henri
Robitaille.  This grand Seigneur, with Michelin, had believed in him in
those far-off days which he had just been seeing over again, and all his
boyhood and young manhood was rushing back on him.  But now it was the
Governor who turned pale, seeing who the criminal was.

"Jacques Grassette!" he cried in consternation and emotion, for under
another name the murderer had been tried and sentenced, nor had his
identity been established--the case was so clear, the defence had been
perfunctory, and Quebec was very far away.

"M'sieu'!" was the respectful response, and Grassette's fingers
twitched.

"It was my sister's son you killed, Grassette," said the Governor in a
low, strained voice.

"Nom de Dieu!" said Grassette hoarsely.

"I did not know, Grassette," the Governor went on "I did not know it was
you."

"Why did you come, m'sieu'?"

"Call him 'your Honour,"' said the Sheriff sharply.  Grassette's face
hardened, and his look turned upon the Sheriff was savage and forbidding.
"I will speak as it please me.  Who are you?  What do I care?  To hang
me--that is your business; but, for the rest, you spik to me differen'.
Who are you?  Your father kep' a tavern for thieves, vous savez bien!"
It was true that the Sheriff's father had had no savoury reputation in
the West.

The Governor turned his head away in pain and trouble, for the man's rage
was not a thing to see--and they both came from the little parish of St.
Francis, and had passed many an hour together.

"Never mind, Grassette," he said gently.  "Call me what you will.  You've
got no feeling against me; and I can say with truth that I don't want
your life for the life you took."

Grassette's breast heaved.  "He put me out of my work, the man I kill.
He pass the word against me, he hunt me out of the mountains, he call--
tete de diable! he call me a name so bad.  Everything swim in my head,
and I kill him."

The Governor made a protesting gesture.  "I understand.  I am glad his
mother was dead.  But do you not think how sudden it was?  Now here, in
the thick of life, then, out there, beyond this world in the darkin
purgatory."

The brave old man had accomplished what everyone else, priest, lawyer,
Sheriff and watcher, had failed to do: he had shaken Grassette out of his
blank isolation and obdurate unrepentance, had touched some chord of
recognisable humanity.

"It is done--well, I pay for it," responded Grassette, setting his jaw.
"It is two deaths for me.  Waiting and remembering, and then with the
Sheriff there the other--so quick, and all."

The Governor looked at him for some moments without speaking.  The
Sheriff intervened again officiously.

"His Honour has come to say something important to you," he remarked
oracularly.

"Hold you--does he need a Sheriff to tell him when to spik?" was
Grassette's surly comment.  Then he turned to the Governor.  "Let us
speak in French," he said in patois.  "This rope-twister will not
understan'.  He is no good--I spit at him."

The Governor nodded, and, despite the Sheriff's protest, they spoke in
French, Grassette with his eyes intently fixed on the other, eagerly
listening.

"I have come," said the Governor, "to say to you, Grassette, that you
have still a chance of life."

He paused, and Grassette's face took on a look of bewilderment and vague
anxiety.  A chance of life--what did it mean?

"Reprieve?" he asked in a hoarse voice.

The Governor shook his head.  "Not yet; but there is a chance.  Something
has happened.  A man's life is in danger, or it may be he is dead; but
more likely he is alive.  You took a life; perhaps you can save one now.
Keeley's Gulch--the mine there."

"They have found it--gold?" asked Grassette, his eyes staring.  He was
forgetting for a moment where and what he was.

"He went to find it, the man whose life is in danger.  He had heard from
a trapper who had been a miner once.  While he was there, a landslip
came, and the opening to the mine was closed up--"

"There were two ways in.  Which one did he take?" cried Grassette.

"The only one he could take, the only one he or anyone else knew.  You
know the other way in--you only, they say."

"I found it--the easier, quick way in; a year ago I found it."

"Was it near the other entrance?" Grassette shook his head.  "A mile
away."

"If the man is alive--and we think he is--you are the only person that
can save him.  I have telegraphed the Government.  They do not promise,
but they will reprieve, and save your life, if you find the man."

"Alive or dead?"

"Alive or dead, for the act would be the same.  I have an order to take
you to the Gulch, if you will go; and I am sure that you will have your
life, if you do it.  I will promise--ah yes, Grassette, but it shall be
so!  Public opinion will demand it.  You will do it?"

"To go free--altogether?"

"Well, but if your life is saved, Grassette?"

The dark face flushed, then grew almost repulsive again in its
sullenness.

"Life--and this, in prison, shut in year after year.  To do always what
some one else wills, to be a slave to a warder.  To have men like that
over me that have been a boss of men--wasn't it that drove me to kill?--
to be treated like dirt.  And to go on with this, while outside there is
free life, and to go where you will at your own price-no!  What do I care
for life!  What is it to me!  To live like this--ah, I would break my
head against these stone walls, I would choke myself with my own hands!
If I stayed here, I would kill again, I would kill--kill."

"Then to go free altogether--that would be the wish of all the world,
if you save this man's life, if it can be saved.  Will you not take the
chance?  We all have to die some time or other, Grassette, some sooner,
some later; and when you go, will you not want to take to God in your
hands a life saved for a life taken?  Have you forgotten God, Grassette?
We used to remember Him in the Church of St. Francis down there at home."

There was a moment's silence, in which Grassette's head was thrust
forwards, his eyes staring into space.  The old Seigneur had touched a
vulnerable corner in his nature.

Presently he said in a low voice: "To be free altogether.  .  .  .  What
is his name?  Who is he?"

"His name is Bignold," the Governor answered.  He turned to the Sheriff
inquiringly.  "That is it, is it not?" he asked in English again.

"James Tarran Bignold," answered the Sheriff.

The effect of these words upon Grassette was remarkable.  His body
appeared to stiffen, his face became rigid, he stared at the Governor
blankly, appalled, the colour left his face, and his mouth opened with a
curious and revolting grimace.  The others drew back, startled, and
watched him.

"Sang de Dieu!" he murmured at last, with a sudden gesture of misery and
rage.

Then the Governor understood: he remembered that the name just given by
the Sheriff and himself was the name of the Englishman who had carried
off Grassette's wife years ago.  He stepped forwards and was about to
speak, but changed his mind.  He would leave it all to Grassette; he
would not let the Sheriff know the truth, unless Grassette himself
disclosed the situation.  He looked at Grassette with a look of poignant
pity and interest combined.  In his own placid life he had never had any
tragic happening, his blood had run coolly, his days had been blessed by
an urbane fate; such scenes as this were but a spectacle to him; there
was no answering chord of human suffering in his own breast, to make him
realise what Grassette was undergoing now; but he had read widely, he had
been an acute observer of the world and its happenings, and he had a
natural human sympathy which had made many a man and woman eternally
grateful to him.

What would Grassette do?  It was a problem which had no precedent, and
the solution would be a revelation of the human mind and heart.  What
would the man do?

"Well, what is all this, Grassette?" asked the Sheriff brusquely.  His
official and officious intervention, behind which was the tyranny of the
little man, given a power which he was incapable of wielding wisely,
would have roused Grassette to a savage reply a half-hour before, but now
it was met by a contemptuous wave of the hand, and Grassette kept his
eyes fixed on the Governor.

"James Tarran Bignold!" Grassette said harshly, with eyes that searched
the Governor's face; but they found no answering look there.  The
Governor, then, did not remember that tragedy of his home and hearth, and
the man who had made of him an Ishmael.  Still, Bignold had been almost a
stranger in the parish, and it was not curious if the Governor had
forgotten.

"Bignold!" he repeated, but the Governor gave no response.

"Yes, Bignold is his name, Grassette," said the Sheriff.  "You took a
life, and now, if you save one, that'll balance things.  As the Governor
says, there'll be a reprieve anyhow.  It's pretty near the day, and this
isn't a bad world to kick in, so long as you kick with one leg on the
ground, and--"

The Governor hastily intervened upon the Sheriff's brutal remarks.
"There is no time to be lost, Grassette.  He has been ten days in the
mine."

Grassette's was not a slow brain.  For a man of such physical and bodily
bulk, he had more talents than are generally given.  If his brain had
been slower, his hand also would have been slower to strike.  But his
intelligence had been surcharged with hate these many years, and since
the day he had been deserted, it had ceased to control his actions--a
passionate and reckless wilfulness had governed it.  But now, after the
first shock and stupefaction, it seemed to go back to where it was before
Marcile went from him, gather up the force and intelligence it had then,
and come forwards again to this supreme moment, with all that life's
harsh experiences had done for it, with the education that misery and
misdoing give.  Revolutions are often the work of instants, not years,
and the crucial test and problem by which Grassette was now faced had
lifted him into a new atmosphere, with a new capacity alive in him.
A moment ago his eyes had been bloodshot and swimming with hatred and
passion; now they grew, almost suddenly, hard and lurking and quiet,
with a strange, penetrating force and inquiry in them.

"Bignold--where does he come from?  What is he?" he asked the Sheriff.

"He is an Englishman; he's only been out here a few months.  He's been
shooting and prospecting; but he's a better shooter than prospector.
He's a stranger; that's why all the folks out here want to save him if
it's possible.  It's pretty hard dying in a strange land far away from
all that's yours.  Maybe he's got a wife waiting for him over there."

"Nom de Dieu!" said Grassette with suppressed malice, under his breath.

"Maybe there's a wife waiting for him, and there's her to think of.  The
West's hospitable, and this thing has taken hold of it; the West wants to
save this stranger, and it's waiting for you, Grassette, to do its work
for it, you being the only man that can do it, the only one that knows
the other secret way into Keeley's Gulch.  Speak right out, Grassette.
It's your chance for life.  Speak out quick."

The last three words were uttered in the old slave-driving tone, though
the earlier part of the speech had been delivered oracularly, and had
brought again to Grassette's eyes the reddish, sullen look which had made
them, a little while before, like those of some wounded, angered animal
at bay; but it vanished slowly, and there was silence for a moment.  The
Sheriff's words had left no vestige of doubt in Grassette's mind.  This
Bignold was the man who had taken Marcile away, first to the English
province, then into the States, where he had lost track of them, then
over to England.  Marcile--where was Marcile now?

In Keeley's Gulch was the man who could tell him, the man who had ruined
his home and his life.  Dead or alive, he was in Keeley's Gulch, the man
who knew where Marcile was; and if he knew where Marcile was, and if she
was alive, and he was outside these prison walls, what would he do to
her?  And if he was outside these prison walls, and in the Gulch,
and the man was there alive before him, what would he do?

Outside these prison walls-to be out there in the sun, where life would
be easier to give up, if it had to be given up!  An hour ago he had been
drifting on a sea of apathy, and had had his fill of life.  An hour ago
he had had but one desire, and that was to die fighting, and he had even
pictured to himself a struggle in this narrow cell where he would compel
them to kill him, and so in any case let him escape the rope.  Now he
was suddenly brought face to face with the great central issue of his
life, and the end, whatever that end might be, could not be the same in
meaning, though it might be the same concretely.  If he elected to let
things be, then Bignold would die out there in the Gulch, starved,
anguished, and alone.  If he went, he could save his own life by saving
Bignold, if Bignold was alive; or he could go--and not save Bignold's
life or his own!  What would he do?

The Governor watched him with a face controlled to quietness, but with
an anxiety which made him pale in spite of himself.

"What will you do, Grassette?" he said at last in a low voice, and with
a step forwards to him.  "Will you not help to clear your conscience by
doing this thing?  You don't want to try and spite the world by not doing
it.  You can make a lot of your life yet, if you are set free.  Give
yourself, and give the world a chance.  You haven't used it right.  Try
again."

Grassette imagined that the Governor did not remember who Bignold was,
and that this was an appeal against his despair, and against revenging
himself on the community which had applauded his sentence.  If he went
to the Gulch, no one would know or could suspect the true situation,
everyone would be unprepared for that moment when Bignold and he would
face each other--and all that would happen then.

Where was Marcile?  Only Bignold knew.  Alive or dead?  Only Bignold
knew.

"Bien, I will do it, m'sieu'," he said to the Governor.  "I am to go
alone--eh?"

The Sheriff shook his head.  "No, two warders will go with you--and
myself."

A strange look passed over Grassette's face.  He seemed to hesitate for
a moment, then he said again: "Bon, I will go."

"Then there is, of course, the doctor," said the Sheriff.

"Bon," said Grassette.  "What time is it?"  "Twelve o'clock," answered
the Sheriff, and made a motion to the warder to open the door of the
cell.

"By sundown!" Grassette said, and he turned with a determined gesture to
leave the cell.

At the gate of the prison, a fresh, sweet air caught his face.
Involuntarily he drew in a great draught of it, and his eyes seemed
to gaze out, almost wonderingly, over the grass and the trees to the
boundless horizon.  Then he became aware of the shouts of the crowd--
shouts of welcome.  This same crowd had greeted him with shouts of
execration when he had left the Court House after his sentence.  He stood
still for a moment and looked at them, as it were only half comprehending
that they were cheering him now, and that voices were saying, "Bravo,
Grassette!  Save him, and we'll save you."

Cheer upon cheer, but he took no notice.  He walked like one in a dream,
a long, strong step.  He turned neither to left nor right, not even when
the friendly voice of one who had worked with him bade him: "Cheer up,
and do the trick."  He was busy working out a problem which no one but
himself could solve.  He was only half conscious of his surroundings; he
was moving in a kind of detached world of his own, where the warders and
the Sheriff and those who followed were almost abstract and unreal
figures.  He was living with a past which had been everlasting distant,
and had now become a vivid and buffeting present.  He returned no answers
to the questions addressed to him, and would not talk, save when for a
little while they dismounted from their horses, and sat under the shade
of a great ash-tree for a few moments, and snatched a mouthful of
luncheon.  Then he spoke a little and asked some questions, but lapsed
into a moody silence afterwards.  His life and nature were being passed
through a fiery crucible.  In all the years that had gone, he had had an
ungovernable desire to kill both Bignold and Marcile if he ever met them,
a primitive, savage desire to blot them out of life and being.  His
fingers had ached for Marcile's neck, that neck in which he had lain his
face so often in the transient, unforgettable days of their happiness.
If she was alive now--if she was still alive!  Her story was hidden there
in Keeley's Gulch with Bignold, and he was galloping hard to reach his
foe.  As he went, by some strange alchemy of human experience, by that
new birth of his brain, the world seemed different from what it had ever
been before, at least since the day when he had found an empty home and a
shamed hearthstone.  He got a new feeling toward it, and life appealed to
him as a thing that might have been so well worth living.  But since that
was not to be, then he would see what he could do to get compensation for
all that he had lost, to take toll for the thing that had spoiled him,
and given him a savage nature and a raging temper, which had driven him
at last to kill a man who, in no real sense, had injured him.

Mile after mile they journeyed, a troop of interested people coming
after, the sun and the clear sweet air, the waving grass, the occasional
clearings where settlers had driven in the tent-pegs of home, the forest
now and then swallowing them, the mountains rising above them like a
blank wall, and then suddenly opening out before them; and the rustle and
scamper of squirrels and coyotes; and over their heads the whistle of
birds, the slow beat of wings of great wild-fowl.  The tender sap of
youth was in this glowing and alert new world, and, by sudden contrast
with the prison walls which he had just left behind, the earth seemed
recreated, unfamiliar, compelling and companionable.  Strange that in all
the years that had been since he had gone back to his abandoned home to
find Marcile gone, the world had had no beauty, no lure for him.  In the
splendour of it all, he had only raged and stormed, hating his fellowman,
waiting, however hopelessly, for the day when he should see Marcile and
the man who had taken her from him.  And yet now, under the degradation
of his crime and its penalty, and the unmanning influence of being the
helpless victim of the iron power of the law, rigid, ugly and
demoralising--now with the solution of his life's great problem here
before him in the hills, with the man for whom he had waited so long
caverned in the earth, but a hand-reach away, as it were, his wrongs had
taken a new manifestation in him, and the thing that kept crying out in
him every moment was, Where is Marcile?

It was four o'clock when they reached the pass which only Grassette knew,
the secret way into the Gulch.  There was two hours' walking through the
thick, primeval woods, where few had ever been, except the ancient tribes
which had once lorded it here; then came a sudden drop into the earth,
a short travel through a dim cave, and afterward a sheer wall of stone
enclosing a ravine where the rocks on either side nearly met overhead.

Here Grassette gave the signal to shout aloud, and the voice of the
Sheriff called out:  "Hello, Bignold!

"Hello!  Hello, Bignold!  Are you there?--Hello!"  His voice rang out
clear and piercing, and then came a silence-a long, anxious silence.
Again the voice rang out: "Hello!  Hello-o-o!  Bignold!  Bigno-o-ld!"

They strained their ears.  Grassette was flat on the ground, his ear to
the earth.  Suddenly he got to his feet, his face set, his eyes
glittering.

"He is there beyon'--I hear him," he said, pointing farther down the
Gulch.  "Water--he is near it."

"We heard nothing," said the Sheriff, "not a sound."  "I hear ver' good.
He is alive.  I hear him--so," responded Grassette; and his face had a
strange, fixed look which the others interpreted to be agitation at the
thought that he had saved his own life by finding Bignold--and alive;
which would put his own salvation beyond doubt.

He broke away from them and hurried down the Gulch.  The others followed
hard after, the Sheriff and the warders close behind; but he outstripped
them.

Suddenly he stopped and stood still, looking at something on the ground.
They saw him lean forwards and his hands stretch out with a fierce
gesture.  It was the attitude of a wild animal ready to spring.

They were beside him in an instant, and saw at his feet Bignold worn to a
skeleton, with eyes starting from his head, and fixed on Grassette in
agony and stark fear.

The Sheriff stooped to lift Bignold up, but Grassette waved them back
with a fierce gesture, standing over the dying man.

"He spoil my home.  He break me--I have my bill to settle here," he said
in a voice hoarse and harsh.  "It is so?  It is so--eh?  Spik!" he said
to Bignold.

"Yes," came feebly from the shrivelled lips.  "Water!  Water!" the
wretched man gasped.  "I'm dying!"

A sudden change came over Grassette.  "Water--queeck!" he said.

The Sheriff stooped and held a hatful of water to Bignold's lips, while
another poured brandy from a flask into the water.

Grassette watched them eagerly.  When the dying man had swallowed a
little of the spirit and water, Grassette leaned over him again, and the
others drew away.  They realised that these two men had an account to
settle, and there was no need for Grassette to take revenge, for Bignold
was going fast.

"You stan' far back," said Grassette, and they fell away.

Then he stooped down to the sunken, ashen face, over which death was fast
drawing its veil.  "Marcile--where is Marcile?" he asked.

The dying man's lips opened.  "God forgive me--God save my soul!" he
whispered.  He was not concerned for Grassette now.

"Queeck-queeck, where is Marcile?" Grassette said sharply.  "Come back,
Bignold.  Listen--where is Marcile?"

He strained to hear the answer.  Bignold was going, but his eyes opened
again, however, for this call seemed to pierce to his soul as it
struggled to be free.

"Ten years--since--I saw her," he whispered.  "Good girl--Marcile.  She
loves you, but she--is afraid."  He tried to say something more, but his
tongue refused its office.

"Where is she-spik!" commanded Grassette in a tone of pleading and agony
now.

Once more the flying spirit came back.  A hand made a motion towards his
pocket, then lay still.

Grassette felt hastily in the dead man's pocket, drew forth a letter,
and with half-blinded eyes read the few lines it contained.  It was dated
from a hospital in New York, and was signed:  "Nurse Marcile."

With a moan of relief Grassette stood staring at the dead man.  When the
others came to him again, his lips were moving, but they did not hear
what he was saying.  They took up the body and moved away with it up the
ravine.

"It's all right, Grassette.  You'll be a freeman," said the Sheriff.

Grassette did not answer.  He was thinking how long it would take him to
get to Marcile, when he was free.

He had a true vision of beginning life again with Marcile.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Being a man of very few ideas, he cherished those he had
Self-will, self-pride, and self-righteousness were big in him
Tyranny of the little man, given a power






NORTHERN LIGHTS

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 4.



A MAN, A FAMINE, AND A HEATHEN BOY
THE HEALING SPRINGS AND THE PIONEERS
THE LITTLE WIDOW OF JANSEN
WATCHING THE RISE OF ORION




A MAN, A FAMINE, AND A HEATHEN BOY

Athabasca in the Far North is the scene of this story--Athabasca, one of
the most beautiful countries in the world in summer, but a cold, bare
land in winter.  Yet even in winter it is not so bleak and bitter as the
districts south-west of it, for the Chinook winds steal through from the
Pacific and temper the fierceness of the frozen Rockies.  Yet forty and
fifty degrees below zero is cold after all, and July strawberries in this
wild North land are hardly compensation for seven months of ice and snow,
no matter how clear and blue the sky, how sweet the sun during its short
journey in the day.  Some days, too, the sun may not be seen even when
there is no storm, because of the fine, white, powdered frost in the air.

A day like this is called a poudre day; and woe to the man who tempts it
unthinkingly, because the light makes the delicate mist of frost shine
like silver.  For that powder bites the skin white in short order, and
sometimes reckless men lose ears, or noses, or hands under its sharp
caress.  But when it really storms in that Far North, then neither man
nor beast should be abroad--not even the Eskimo dogs; though times and
seasons can scarcely be chosen when travelling in Athabasca, for a storm
comes unawares.  Upon the plains you will see a cloud arising, not in the
sky, but from the ground--a billowy surf of drifting snow; then another
white billow from the sky will sweep down and meet it, and you are caught
between.

He who went to Athabasca to live a generation ago had to ask himself if
the long winter, spent chiefly indoors, with, maybe, a little trading
with the Indians, meagre sport, and scant sun, savages and half-breeds
the only companions, and out of all touch with the outside world, letters
coming but once a year; with frozen fish and meat, always the same, as
the staple items in a primitive fare; with danger from starvation and
marauding tribes; with endless monotony, in which men sometimes go mad--
he had to ask himself if these were to be cheerfully endured because, in
the short summer, the air is heavenly, the rivers and lakes are full of
fish, the flotilla of canoes of the fur-hunters is pouring down, and all
is gaiety and pleasant turmoil; because there is good shooting in the
autumn, and the smell of the land is like a garden, and hardy fruits and
flowers are at hand.

That is a question which was asked William Rufus Holly once upon a time.

William Rufus Holly, often called "Averdoopoy," sometimes "Sleeping
Beauty," always Billy Rufus, had had a good education.  He had been to
high school and to college, and he had taken one or two prizes en route
to graduation; but no fame travelled with him, save that he was the
laziest man of any college year for a decade.  He loved his little
porringer, which is to say that he ate a good deal; and he loved to read
books, which is not to say that he loved study; he hated getting out of
bed, and he was constantly gated for morning chapel.  More than once he
had sweetly gone to sleep over his examination papers.  This is not to
say that he failed at his examinations--on the contrary, he always
succeeded; but he only did enough to pass and no more; and he did not
wish to do more than pass.  His going to sleep at examinations was
evidence that he was either indifferent or self-indulgent, and it
certainly showed that he was without nervousness.  He invariably roused
himself, or his professor roused him, a half-hour before the papers
should be handed in, and, as it were by a mathematical calculation,
he had always done just enough to prevent him being plucked.

He slept at lectures, he slept in hall, he slept as he waited his turn
to go to the wicket in a cricket match, and he invariably went to sleep
afterwards.  He even did so on the day he had made the biggest score,
in the biggest game ever played between his college and the pick of the
country; but he first gorged himself with cake and tea.  The day he took
his degree he had to be dragged from a huge grandfather's chair, and
forced along in his ragged gown--"ten holes and twelve tatters"--to the
function in the convocation hall.  He looked so fat and shiny, so balmy
and sleepy when he took his degree and was handed his prize for a poem on
Sir John Franklin, that the public laughed, and the college men in the
gallery began singing:

                   "Bye O, my baby,
                    Father will come to you soo-oon!"

He seemed not to care, but yawned in his hand as he put his prize book
under his arm through one of the holes in his gown, and in two minutes
was back in his room, and in another five was fast asleep.

It was the general opinion that William Rufus Holly, fat, yellow-haired,
and twenty-four years old, was doomed to failure in life, in spite of the
fact that he had a little income of a thousand dollars a year, and had
made a century in an important game of cricket.  Great, therefore, was
the surprise of the college, and afterward of the Province, when, at the
farewell dinner of the graduates, Sleeping Beauty announced, between his
little open-eyed naps, that he was going Far North as a missionary.

At first it was thought he was joking, but when at last, in his calm and
dreamy look, they saw he meant what he said, they rose and carried him
round the room on a chair, making impromptu songs as they travelled.
They toasted Billy Rufus again and again, some of them laughing till they
cried at the thought of Averdoopoy going to the Arctic regions.  But an
uneasy seriousness fell upon these "beautiful, bountiful, brilliant
boys," as Holly called them later, when in a simple, honest, but indolent
speech he said he had applied for ordination.

Six months later William Rufus Holly, a deacon in holy orders, journeyed
to Athabasca in the Far North.  On his long journey there was plenty of
time to think.  He was embarked on a career which must for ever keep him
in the wilds; for very seldom indeed does a missionary of the North ever
return to the crowded cities or take a permanent part in civilised life.

What the loneliness of it would be he began to feel, as for hours and
hours he saw no human being on the plains; in the thrilling stillness of
the night; in fierce storms in the woods, when his half-breed guides bent
their heads to meet the wind and rain, and did not speak for hours; in
the long, adventurous journey on the river by day, in the cry of the
plaintive loon at night; in the scant food for every meal.  Yet what the
pleasure would be he felt in the joyous air, the exquisite sunshine, the
flocks of wild-fowl flying North, honking on their course; in the song of
the half-breeds as they ran the rapids.  Of course, he did not think
these things quite as they are written here--all at once and all
together; but in little pieces from time to time, feeling them rather
than saying them to himself.

At least he did understand how serious a thing it was, his going as a
missionary into the Far North.  Why did he do it?  Was it a whim, or the
excited imagination of youth, or that prompting which the young often
have to make the world better?  Or was it a fine spirit of adventure with
a good heart behind it?  Perhaps it was a little of all these; but there
was also something more, and it was to his credit.

Lazy as William Rufus Holly had been at school and college, he had still
thought a good deal, even when he seemed only sleeping; perhaps he
thought more because he slept so much, because he studied little and read
a great deal.  He always knew what everybody thought--that he would never
do anything but play cricket till he got too heavy to run, and then would
sink into a slothful, fat, and useless middle and old age; that his life
would be a failure.  And he knew that they were right; that if he stayed
where he could live an easy life, a fat and easy life he would lead; that
in a few years he would be good for nothing except to eat and sleep--no
more.  One day, waking suddenly from a bad dream of himself so fat as to
be drawn about on a dray by monstrous fat oxen with rings through their
noses, led by monkeys, he began to wonder what he should do--the hardest
thing to do; for only the hardest life could possibly save him from
failure, and, in spite of all, he really did want to make something of
his life.  He had been reading the story of Sir John Franklin's Arctic
expedition, and all at once it came home to him that the only thing for
him to do was to go to the Far North and stay there, coming back about
once every ten years to tell the people in the cities what was being done
in the wilds.  Then there came the inspiration to write his poem on Sir
John Franklin, and he had done so, winning the college prize for poetry.
But no one had seen any change in him in those months; and, indeed, there
had been little or no change, for he had an equable and practical, though
imaginative, disposition, despite his avoirdupois, and his new purpose
did not stir him yet from his comfortable sloth.

And in all the journey West and North he had not been stirred greatly
from his ease of body, for the journey was not much harder than playing
cricket every day, and there were only the thrill of the beautiful air,
the new people, and the new scenes to rouse him.  As yet there was no
great responsibility.  He scarcely realised what his life must be, until
one particular day.  Then Sleeping Beauty waked wide up, and from that
day lost the name.  Till then he had looked and borne himself like any
other traveller, unrecognised as a parson or "mikonaree."  He had not had
prayers in camp en route, he had not preached, he had held no meetings.
He was as yet William Rufus Holly, the cricketer, the laziest dreamer of
a college decade.  His religion was simple and practical; he had never
had any morbid ideas; he had lived a healthy, natural, and honourable
life, until he went for a mikonaree, and if he had no cant, he had not a
clear idea of how many-sided, how responsible, his life must be--until
that one particular day.  This is what happened then.

From Fort O'Call, an abandoned post of the Hudson's Bay Company on the
Peace River, nearly the whole tribe of the Athabasca Indians in
possession of the post now had come up the river, with their chief,
Knife-in-the-Wind, to meet the mikonaree.  Factors of the Hudson's Bay
Company, coureurs de bois, and voyageurs had come among them at times,
and once the renowned Father Lacombe, the Jesuit priest, had stayed with
them three months; but never to this day had they seen a Protestant
mikonaree, though once a factor, noted for his furious temper, his powers
of running, and his generosity, had preached to them.  These men,
however, were both over fifty years old.  The Athabascas did not hunger
for the Christian religion, but a courier from Edmonton had brought them
word that a mikonaree was coming to their country to stay, and they put
off their stoical manner and allowed themselves the luxury of curiosity.
That was why even the squaws and papooses came up the river with the
braves, all wondering if the stranger had brought gifts with him, all
eager for their shares; for it had been said by the courier of the tribe
that "Oshondonto," their name for the newcomer, was bringing mysterious
loads of well-wrapped bales and skins.  Upon a point below the first
rapids of the Little Manitou they waited with their camp-fires burning
and their pipe of peace.

When the canoes bearing Oshondonto and his voyageurs shot the rapids to
the song of the river,

                   "En roulant, ma boule roulant,
                    En roulant, ma boule!"

with the shrill voices of the boatmen rising to meet the cry of the
startled water-fowl, the Athabascas crowded to the high banks.  They
grunted "How!" in greeting, as the foremost canoe made for the shore.

But if surprise could have changed the countenances of Indians, these
Athabascas would not have known one another when the missionary stepped
out upon the shore.  They had looked to see a grey-bearded man like the
chief factor who quarrelled and prayed; but they found instead a round-
faced, clean-shaven youth, with big, good-natured eyes, yellow hair, and
a roundness of body like that of a month-old bear's cub.  They expected
to find a man who, like the factor, could speak their language, and they
found a cherub sort of youth who talked only English, French, and
Chinook--that common language of the North--and a few words of their own
language which he had learned on the way.

Besides, Oshondonto was so absent-minded at the moment, so absorbed in
admiration of the garish scene before him, that he addressed the chief in
French, of which Knife-in-the-Wind knew but the one word cache, which all
the North knows.

But presently William Rufus Holly recovered himself, and in stumbling
Chinook made himself understood.  Opening a bale, he brought out beads
and tobacco and some bright red flannel, and two hundred Indians sat
round him and grunted "How!" and received his gifts with little comment.
Then the pipe of peace went round, and Oshondonto smoked it becomingly.

But he saw that the Indians despised him for his youth, his fatness, his
yellow hair as soft as a girl's, his cherub face, browned though it was
by the sun and weather.

As he handed the pipe to Knife-in-the-Wind, an Indian called Silver
Tassel, with a cruel face, said grimly:

"Why does Oshondonto travel to us?"

William Rufus Holly's eyes steadied on those of the Indian as he replied
in Chinook: "To teach the way to Manitou the Mighty, to tell the
Athabascas of the Great Chief who died to save the world."

"The story is told in many ways; which is right?  There was the factor,
Word of Thunder.  There is the song they sing at Edmonton--I have heard."

"The Great Chief is the same Chief," answered the missionary.  "If you
tell of Fort O'Call, and Knife-in-the-Wind tells of Fort O'Call, he and
you will speak different words, and one will put in one thing and one
will leave out another; men's tongues are different.  But Fort O'Call is
the-same, and the Great Chief is the same."

"It was a long time ago," said Knife-in-the-Wind sourly, "many thousand
moons, as the pebbles in the river, the years."

"It is the same world, and it is the same Chief, and it was to save us,"
answered William Rufus Holly, smiling, yet with a fluttering heart, for
the first test of his life had come.

In anger Knife-in-the-Wind thrust an arrow into the ground and said:

"How can the white man who died thousands of moons ago in a far country
save the red man to-day?"

"A strong man should bear so weak a tale," broke in Silver Tassel
ruthlessly.  "Are we children that the Great Chief sends a child as
messenger?"

For a moment Billy Rufus did not know how to reply, and in the pause
Knife-in-the-Wind broke in two pieces the arrow he had thrust in the
ground in token of displeasure.

Suddenly, as Oshondonto was about to speak, Silver Tassel sprang to his
feet, seized in his arms a lad of twelve who was standing near, and
running to the bank, dropped him into the swift current.

"If Oshondonto be not a child, let him save the lad," said Silver Tassel,
standing on the brink.

Instantly William Rufus Holly was on his feet.  His coat was off before
Silver Tassel's words were out of his mouth, and crying, "In the name of
the Great White Chief!" he jumped into the rushing current.  "In the
name of your Manitou, come on, Silver Tassel!" he called up from the
water, and struck out for the lad.

Not pausing an instant, Silver Tassel sprang into the flood, into the
whirling eddies and dangerous current below the first rapids and above
the second.

Then came the struggle for Wingo of the Cree tribe, a waif among the
Athabascas, whose father had been slain as they travelled, by a wandering
tribe of Blackfeet.  Never was there a braver rivalry, although the odds
were with the Indian-in lightness, in brutal strength.  With the
mikonaree, however, were skill, and that sort of strength which the world
calls "moral," the strength of a good and desperate purpose.  Oshondonto
knew that on the issue of this shameless business--this cruel sport of
Silver Tassel--would depend his future on the Peace River.  As he shot
forward with strong strokes in the whirling torrent after the helpless
lad, who, only able to keep himself afloat, was being swept down towards
the rapids below, he glanced up to the bank along which the Athabascas
were running.  He saw the garish colours of their dresses; he saw the
ignorant medicine man, with his mysterious bag, making incantations; he
saw the tepee of the chief, with its barbarous pennant above; he saw the
idle, naked children tearing at the entrails of a calf; and he realised
that this was a deadly tournament between civilisation and barbarism.

Silver Tassel was gaining on him, they were both overhauling the boy; it
was now to see which should reach Wingo first, which should take him to
shore.  That is, if both were not carried under before they reached him;
that is, if, having reached him, they and he would ever get to shore;
for, lower down, before it reached the rapids, the current ran horribly
smooth and strong, and here and there were jagged rocks just beneath the
surface.

Still Silver Tassel gained on him, as they both gained on the boy.
Oshondonto swam strong and hard, but he swam with his eye on the struggle
for the shore also; he was not putting forth his utmost strength, for he
knew it would be bitterly needed, perhaps to save his own life by a last
effort.

Silver Tassel passed him when they were about fifty feet from the boy.
Shooting by on his side, with a long stroke and the plunge of his body
like a projectile, the dark face with the long black hair plastering it
turned towards his own, in fierce triumph Silver Tassel cried "How!" in
derision.

Billy Rufus set his teeth and lay down to his work like a sportsman.  His
face had lost its roses, and it was set and determined, but there was no
look of fear upon it, nor did his heart sink when a cry of triumph went
up from the crowd on the banks.  The white man knew by old experience in
the cricket-field and in many a boat-race that it is well not to halloo
till you are out of the woods.  His mettle was up, he was not the
Reverend William Rufus Holly, missionary, but Billy Rufus, the champion
cricketer, the sportsman playing a long game.

Silver Tassel reached the boy, who was bruised and bleeding and at his
last gasp, and throwing an arm round him, struck out for the shore.  The
current was very strong, and he battled fiercely as Billy Rufus, not far
above, moved down toward them at an angle.  For a few yards Silver Tassel
was going strong, then his pace slackened, he seemed to sink lower in the
water, and his stroke became splashing and irregular.  Suddenly he struck
a rock, which bruised him badly, and, swerving from his course, he lost
his stroke and let go the boy.

By this time the mikonaree had swept beyond them, and he caught the boy
by his long hair as he was being swept below.  Striking out for the
shore, he swam with bold, strong strokes, his judgment guiding him well
past rocks beneath the surface.  Ten feet from shore he heard a cry of
alarm from above.  It concerned Silver Tassel, he knew, but he could not
look round yet.

In another moment the boy was dragged up the bank by strong hands, and
Billy Rufus swung round in the water towards Silver Tassel, who, in his
confused energy, had struck another rock, and, exhausted now, was being
swept towards the rapids.  Silver Tassel's shoulder scarcely showed, his
strength was gone.  In a flash Billy Rufus saw there was but one thing to
do.  He must run the rapids with Silver Tassel-there was no other way.
It would be a fight through the jaws of death; but no Indian's eyes had
a better sense for river-life than William Rufus Holly's.

How he reached Silver Tassel, and drew the Indian's arm over his own
shoulder; how they drove down into the boiling flood; how Billy Rufus's
fat body was battered and torn and ran red with blood from twenty flesh
wounds; but how by luck beyond the telling he brought Silver Tassel
through safely into the quiet water a quarter of a mile below the rapids,
and was hauled out, both more dead than alive, is a tale still told by
the Athabascas around their camp-fire.  The rapids are known to-day as
the Mikonaree Rapids.

The end of this beginning of the young man's career was that Silver
Tassel gave him the word of eternal friendship, Knife-in-the-Wind took
him into the tribe, and the boy Wingo became his very own, to share his
home, and his travels, no longer a waif among the Athabascas.

After three days' feasting, at the end of which the missionary held his
first service and preached his first sermon, to the accompaniment of
grunts of satisfaction from the whole tribe of Athabascas, William Rufus
Holly began his work in the Far North.

The journey to Fort O'Call was a procession of triumph, for, as it was
summer, there was plenty of food, the missionary had been a success, and
he had distributed many gifts of beads and flannel.

All went well for many moons, although converts were uncertain and
baptisms few, and the work was hard and the loneliness at times terrible.
But at last came dark days.

One summer and autumn there had been poor fishing and shooting, the
caches of meat were fewer on the plains, and almost nothing had come up
to Fort O'Call from Edmonton, far below.  The yearly supplies for the
missionary, paid for out of his private income--the bacon, beans, tea,
coffee and flour--had been raided by a band of hostile Indians, and he
viewed with deep concern the progress of the severe winter.  Although
three years of hard, frugal life had made his muscles like iron, they had
only mellowed his temper, increased his flesh and rounded his face; nor
did he look an hour older than on the day when he had won Wingo for his
willing slave and devoted friend.

He never resented the frequent ingratitude of the Indians; he said little
when they quarrelled over the small comforts his little income brought
them yearly from the South.  He had been doctor, lawyer, judge among
them, although he interfered little in the larger disputes, and was
forced to shut his eyes to intertribal enmities.  He had no deep faith
that he could quite civilise them; he knew that their conversion was only
on the surface, and he fell back on his personal influence with them.  By
this he could check even the excesses of the worst man in the tribe, his
old enemy, Silver Tassel of the bad heart, who yet was ready always to
give a tooth for a tooth, and accepted the fact that he owed Oshondonto
his life.

When famine crawled across the plains to the doors of the settlement and
housed itself at Fort O'Call, Silver Tassel acted badly, however, and
sowed fault-finding among the thoughtless of the tribe.

"What manner of Great Spirit is it who lets the food of his chief
Oshondonto fall into the hands of the Blackfeet?" he said.  "Oshondonto
says the Great Spirit hears.  What has the Great Spirit to say?  Let
Oshondonto ask."

Again, when they all were hungrier, he went among them with complaining
words.  "If the white man's Great Spirit can do all things, let him give
Oshondonto and the Athabascas food."

The missionary did not know of Silver Tassel's foolish words, but he saw
the downcast face of Knife-in-the-Wind, the sullen looks of the people;
and he unpacked the box he had reserved jealously for the darkest days
that might come.  For meal after meal he divided these delicacies among
them--morsels of biscuit, and tinned meats, and dried fruits.  But his
eyes meanwhile were turned again and again to the storm raging without,
as it had raged for this the longest week he had ever spent.  If it would
but slacken, a boat could go out to the nets set in the lake near by some
days before, when the sun of spring had melted the ice.  From the hour
the nets had been set the storm had raged.  On the day when the last
morsel of meat and biscuit had been given away the storm had not abated,
and he saw with misgiving the gloomy, stolid faces of the Indians round
him.  One man, two children, and three women had died in a fortnight.  He
dreaded to think what might happen, his heart ached at the looks of gaunt
suffering in the faces of all; he saw, for the first time, how black and
bitter Knife-in-the-Wind looked as Silver Tassel whispered to him.

With the colour all gone from his cheeks, he left the post and made his
way to the edge of the lake where his canoe was kept.  Making it ready
for the launch, he came back to the Fort.  Assembling the Indians, who
had watched his movements closely, he told them that he was going through
the storm to the nets on the lake, and asked for a volunteer to go with
him.

No one replied.  He pleaded-for the sake of the women and children.

Then Knife-in-the-Wind spoke.  "Oshondonto will die if he goes.  It is a
fool's journey--does the wolverine walk into an empty trap?"

Billy Rufus spoke passionately now.  His genial spirit fled; he
reproached them.

Silver Tassel spoke up loudly.  "Let Oshondonto's Great Spirit carry him
to the nets alone, and back again with fish for the heathen the Great
Chief died to save."

"You have a wicked heart, Silver Tassel.  You know well that one man
can't handle the boat and the nets also.  Is there no one of you--?"

A figure shot forwards from a corner.  "I will go with Oshondonto," came
the voice of Wingo, the waif of the Crees.

The eye of the mikonaree flashed round in contempt on the tribe.  Then
suddenly it softened, and he said to the lad:  "We will go together,
Wingo."

Taking the boy by the hand, he ran with him through the rough wind to the
shore, launched the canoe on the tossing lake, and paddled away through
the tempest.

The bitter winds of an angry spring, the sleet and wet snow of a belated
winter, the floating blocks of ice crushing against the side of the boat,
the black water swishing over man and boy, the harsh, inclement world
near and far.  .  .  .  The passage made at last to the nets; the brave
Wingo steadying the canoe--a skilful hand sufficing where the strength of
a Samson would not have availed; the nets half full, and the breaking cry
of joy from the lips of the waif-a cry that pierced the storm and brought
back an answering cry from the crowd of Indians on the far shore.  .  .
The quarter-hour of danger in the tossing canoe; the nets too heavy to be
dragged, and fastened to the thwarts instead; the canoe going shoreward
jerkily, a cork on the waves with an anchor behind; heavier seas and
winds roaring down on them as they slowly near the shore; and at last, in
one awful moment, the canoe upset, and the man and the boy in the water.
.  .  .  Then both clinging to the upturned canoe as it is driven nearer
and nearer shore....  The boy washed off once, twice, and the man with
his arm round clinging-clinging, as the shrieking storm answers to the
calling of the Athabascas on the shore, and drives craft and fish and man
and boy down upon the banks; no savage bold enough to plunge in to their
rescue.  .  .  .  At last a rope thrown, a drowning man's wrists wound
round it, his teeth set in it--and now, at last, a man and a heathen boy,
both insensible, being carried to the mikonaree's but and laid upon two
beds, one on either side of the small room, as the red sun goes slowly
down.  .  .  .  The two still bodies on bearskins in the hut, and a
hundred superstitious Indians flying from the face of death.  .  .  .
The two alone in the light of the flickering fire; the many gone to feast
on fish, the price of lives.

But the price was not yet paid, for the man waked from insensibility--
waked to see himself with the body of the boy beside him in the red light
of the fires.

For a moment his heart stopped beating, he turned sick and faint.
Deserted by those for whom he risked his life!  .  .  .  How long had he
lain there?  What time was it?  When was it that he had fought his way to
the nets and back again-hours maybe?  And the dead boy there, Wingo, who
had risked his life, also dead--how long?  His heart leaped--ah!  not
hours, only minutes maybe.  It was sundown as unconsciousness came on
him--Indians would not stay with the dead after sundown.  Maybe it was
only ten minutes-five minutes--one minute ago since they left him!.  .  .

His watch!  Shaking fingers drew it out, wild eyes scanned it.  It was
not stopped.  Then it could have only been minutes ago.  Trembling to his
feet, he staggered over to Wingo, he felt the body, he held a mirror to
the lips.  Yes, surely there was light moisture on the glass.

Then began another fight with death--William Rufus Holly struggling to
bring to life again Wingo, the waif of the Crees.

The blood came back to his own heart with a rush as the mad desire to
save this life came on him.  He talked to the dumb face, he prayed in a
kind of delirium, as he moved the arms up and down, as he tilted the
body, as he rubbed, chafed and strove.  He forgot he was a missionary,
he almost cursed himself.  "For them--for cowards, I risked his life,
the brave lad with no home.  Oh, God!  give him back to me!" he sobbed.
"What right had I to risk his life for theirs?  I should have shot the
first man that refused to go....  Wingo, speak!  Wake up!  Come back!"

The sweat poured from him in his desperation and weakness.  He said to
himself that he had put this young life into the hazard without cause.
Had he, then, saved the lad from the rapids and Silver Tassel's brutality
only to have him drag fish out of the jaws of death for Silver Tassel's
meal?

It seemed to him that he had been working for hours, though it was in
fact only a short time, when the eyes of the lad slowly opened and closed
again, and he began to breathe spasmodically.  A cry of joy came from the
lips of the missionary, and he worked harder still.  At last the eyes
opened wide, stayed open, saw the figure bent over him, and the lips
whispered, "Oshondonto--my master," as a cup of brandy was held to his
lips.

He had conquered the Athabascas for ever.  Even Silver Tassel
acknowledged his power, and he as industriously spread abroad the
report that the mikonaree had raised Wingo from the dead, as he had sown
dissension during the famine.  But the result was that the missionary had
power in the land, and the belief in him was so great, that, when Knife-
in-the-Wind died, the tribe came to ask him to raise their chief from the
dead.  They never quite believed that he could not--not even Silver
Tassel, who now rules the Athabascas and is ruled by William Rufus Holly:
which is a very good thing for the Athabascas.

Billy Rufus the cricketer had won the game, and somehow the Reverend
William Rufus Holly the missionary never repented the strong language he
used against the Athabascas, as he was bringing Wingo back to life,
though it was not what is called "strictly canonical."





THE HEALING SPRINGS AND THE PIONEERS

He came out of the mysterious South one summer day, driving before him a
few sheep, a cow, and a long-eared mule which carried his tent and other
necessaries, and camped outside the town on a knoll, at the base of which
was a thicket of close shrub.  During the first day no one in Jansen
thought anything of it, for it was a land of pilgrimage, and hundreds
came and went on their journeys in search of free homesteads and good
water and pasturage.  But when, after three days, he was still there,
Nicolle Terasse, who had little to do, and an insatiable curiosity, went
out to see him.  He found a new sensation for Jansen.  This is what he
said when he came back:

"You want know 'bout him, bagosh!  Dat is somet'ing to see, dat man--
Ingles is his name.  Sooch hair--mooch long an' brown, and a leetla beard
not so brown, an' a leather sole onto his feet, and a grey coat to his
anklesyes, so like dat.  An' his voice--voila, it is like water in a
cave.  He is a great man--I dunno not; but he spik at me like dis,
'Is dere sick, and cripple, and stay in-bed people here dat can't get
up?' he say.  An' I say, 'Not plenty, but some-bagosh!  Dere is dat Miss
Greet, an' ole Ma'am Drouchy, an' dat young Pete Hayes--an' so on.'
'Well, if they have faith I will heal them,' he spik at me.  'From de
Healing Springs dey shall rise to walk,' he say.  Bagosh, you not t'ink
dat true?  Den you go see."

So Jansen turned out to see, and besides the man they found a curious
thing.  At the foot of the knoll, in a space which he had cleared, was a
hot spring that bubbled and rose and sank, and drained away into the
thirsty ground.  Luck had been with Ingles the Faith Healer.  Whether he
knew of the existence of this spring, or whether he chanced upon it, he
did not say; but while he held Jansen in the palm of his hand, in the
feverish days that followed, there were many who attached mysterious
significance to it, who claimed for it supernatural origin.  In any case,
the one man who had known of the existence of this spring was far away
from Jansen, and he did not return till a day of reckoning came for the
Faith Healer.

Meanwhile Jansen made pilgrimage to the Springs of Healing, and at
unexpected times Ingles suddenly appeared in the town, and stood at
street corners; and in his "Patmian voice," as Flood Rawley the lawyer
called it, warned the people to flee their sins, and purifying their
hearts, learn to cure all ills of mind and body, the weaknesses of the
sinful flesh and the "ancient evil" in their souls, by faith that saves.

"'Is not the life more than meat'" he asked them.  "And if, peradventure,
there be those among you who have true belief in hearts all purged of
evil, and yet are maimed, or sick of body, come to me, and I will lay my
hands upon you, and I will heal you."  Thus he cried.

There were those so wrought upon by his strange eloquence and spiritual
passion, so hypnotised by his physical and mental exaltation, that they
rose up from the hand-laying and the prayer eased of their ailments.
Others he called upon to lie in the hot spring at the foot of the hill
for varying periods, before the laying on of hands, and these also,
crippled, or rigid with troubles' of the bone, announced that they were
healed.

People flocked from other towns, and though, to some who had been cured,
their pains and sickness returned, there were a few who bore perfect
evidence to his teaching and healing, and followed him, "converted and
consecrated," as though he were a new Messiah.  In this corner of the
West was such a revival as none could remember--not even those who had
been to camp meetings in the East in their youth, and had seen the Spirit
descend upon hundreds and draw them to the anxious seat.

Then came the great sensation--the Faith Healer converted Laura Sloly.
Upon which Jansen drew its breath painfully; for, while it was willing
to bend to the inspiration of the moment, and to be swept on a tide of
excitement into that enchanted field called Imagination, it wanted to
preserve its institutions--and Laura Sloly had come to be an institution.
Jansen had always plumed itself, and smiled, when she passed; and even
now the most sentimentally religious of them inwardly anticipated the
time when the town would return to its normal condition; and that
condition would not be normal if there were any change in Laura Sloly.
It mattered little whether most people were changed or not because one
state of their minds could not be less or more interesting than another;
but a change in Laura.  Sloly could not be for the better.

Her father had come to the West in the early days, and had prospered by
degrees until a town grew up beside his ranch; and though he did not
acquire as much permanent wealth from this golden chance as might have
been expected, and lost much he did make by speculation, still he had his
rich ranch left, and it, and he, and Laura were part of the history of
Jansen.  Laura had been born at Jansen before even it had a name.  Next
to her father she was the oldest inhabitant, and she had a prestige which
was given to no one else.

Everything had conspired to make her a figure of moment and interest.
She was handsome in almost a mannish sort of way, being of such height
and straightness, and her brown eyes had a depth and fire in which more
than a few men had drowned themselves.  Also, once she had saved a
settlement by riding ahead of a marauding Indian band to warn their
intended victims, and had averted another tragedy of pioneer life.
Pioneers proudly told strangers to Jansen of the girl of thirteen who
rode a hundred and twenty miles without food, and sank inside the
palisade of the Hudson's Bay Company's fort, as the gates closed upon the
settlers taking refuge, the victim of brain fever at last.  Cerebrospinal
meningitis, the doctor from Winnipeg called it, and the memory of that
time when men and women would not sleep till her crisis was past, was
still fresh on the tongues of all.

Then she had married at seventeen, and, within a year, had lost both her
husband and her baby, a child bereaved of her Playmates--for her husband
had been but twenty years old and was younger far than she in everything.
And since then, twelve years before, she had seen generations of lovers
pass into the land they thought delectable; and their children flocked to
her, hung about her, were carried off by her to the ranch, and kept for
days, against the laughing protests of their parents.  Flood Rawley
called her the Pied Piper of Jansen, and indeed she had a voice that
fluted and piped, and yet had so whimsical a note, that the hardest faces
softened at the sound of it; and she did not keep its best notes for the
few.  She was impartial, almost impersonal; no woman was her enemy, and
every man was her friend--and nothing more.  She had never had an
accepted lover since the day her Playmates left her.  Every man except
one had given up hope that he might win her; and though he had been gone
from Jansen for two years, and had loved her since the days before the
Playmates came and went, he never gave up hope, and was now to return and
say again what he had mutely said for years--what she understood, and he
knew she understood.

Tim Denton had been a wild sort in his brief day.  He was a rough
diamond, but he was a diamond, and was typical of the West--its heart,
its courage, its freedom, and its force; capable of exquisite gentleness,
strenuous to exaggeration, with a very primitive religion; and the only
religion Tim knew was that of human nature.  Jansen did not think Tim
good enough--not within a comet shot--for Laura Sloly; but they thought
him better than any one else.

But now Laura was a convert to the prophet of the Healing Springs,
and those people who still retain their heads in the eddy of religious
emotion were in despair.  They dreaded to meet Laura; they kept away from
the "protracted meetings," but were eager to hear about her and what she
said and did.  What they heard allayed their worst fears.  She still
smiled, and seemed as cheerful as before, they heard, and she neither
spoke nor prayed in public, but she led the singing always.  Now the
anxious and the sceptical and the reactionary ventured out to see and
hear; and seeing and hearing gave them a satisfaction they hardly dared
express.  She was more handsome than ever, and if her eyes glistened with
a light they had never seen before, and awed them, her lips still smiled,
and the old laugh came when she spoke to them.  Their awe increased.
This was "getting religion" with a difference.

But presently they received a shock.  A whisper grew that Laura was in
love with the Faith Healer.  Some woman's instinct drove straight to the
centre of a disconcerting possibility, and in consternation she told her
husband; and Jansen husbands had a freemasonry of gossip.  An hour, and
all Jansen knew, or thought they knew; and the "saved" rejoiced; and the
rest of the population, represented by Nicolle Terasse at one end and
Flood Rawley at the other, flew to arms.  No vigilance committee was ever
more determined and secret and organised than the unconverted civic
patriots, who were determined to restore Jansen to its old-time
condition.  They pointed out cold-bloodedly that the Faith Healer had
failed three times where he had succeeded once; and that, admitting the
successes, there was no proof that his religion was their cause.  There
were such things as hypnotism and magnetism and will-power, and abnormal
mental stimulus on the part of the healed--to say nothing of the Healing
Springs.

Carefully laying their plans, they quietly spread the rumour that Ingles
had promised to restore to health old Mary Jewell, who had been bedridden
ten years, and had sent word and prayed to have him lay his hands upon
her--Catholic though she was.  The Faith Healer, face to face with this
supreme and definite test, would have retreated from it but for Laura
Sloly.  She expected him to do it, believed that he could, said that he
would, herself arranged the day and the hour, and sang so much exaltation
into him, that at last a spurious power seemed to possess him.  He felt
that there had entered into him something that could be depended on,
not the mere flow of natural magnetism fed by an outdoor life and a
temperament of great emotional force, and chance, and suggestion--
and other things.  If, at first, he had influenced Laura, some ill-
controlled, latent idealism in him, working on a latent poetry and
spirituality in her, somehow bringing her into nearer touch with her
lost Playmates than she had been in the long years that had passed;
she, in turn, had made his unrationalised brain reel; had caught him up
into a higher air, on no wings of his own; had added another lover to her
company of lovers--and the first impostor she had ever had.  She who
had known only honest men as friends, in one blind moment lost her
perspicuous sense; her instinct seemed asleep.  She believed in the man
and in his healing.  Was there anything more than that?

The day of the great test came, hot, brilliant, vivid.  The air was of
a delicate sharpness, and, as it came toward evening, the glamour of an
August when the reapers reap was upon Jansen; and its people gathered
round the house of Mary Jewell to await the miracle of faith.  Apart
from the emotional many who sang hymns and spiritual songs were a few
determined men, bent on doing justice to Jansen though the heavens might
fall.  Whether or no Laura Sloly was in love with the Faith Healer,
Jansen must look to its own honour--and hers.  In any case, this
peripatetic saint at Sloly's Ranch--the idea was intolerable;
women must be saved in spite of themselves.

Laura was now in the house by the side of the bedridden Mary Jewell,
waiting, confident, smiling, as she held the wasted hand on the coverlet.
With her was a minister of the Baptist persuasion, who was swimming with
the tide, and who approved of the Faith Healer's immersions in the hot
Healing Springs; also a medical student who had pretended belief in
Ingles, and two women weeping with unnecessary remorse for human failings
of no dire kind.  The windows were open, and those outside could see.
Presently, in a lull of the singing, there was a stir in the crowd, and
then, sudden loud greetings:

"My, if it ain't Tim Denton!  Jerusalem!  You back, Tim!"

These and other phrases caught the ear of Laura Sloly in the sick-room.
A strange look flashed across her face, and the depth of her eyes was
troubled for a moment, as to the face of the old comes a tremor at the
note of some long-forgotten song.  Then she steadied herself and waited,
catching bits of the loud talk which still floated towards her from
without.

"What's up?  Some one getting married--or a legacy, or a saw-off?  Why,
what a lot of Sunday-go-to-meeting folks to be sure!" Tim laughed
loudly.

After which the quick tongue of Nicolle Terasse: "You want know?  Tiens,
be quiet; here he come.  He cure you body and soul, ver' queeck--yes."

The crowd swayed and parted, and slowly, bare head uplifted, face looking
to neither right nor left, the Faith Healer made his way to the door of
the little house.  The crowd hushed.  Some were awed, some were
overpoweringly interested, some were cruelly patient.  Nicolle Terasse
and others were whispering loudly to Tim Denton.  That was the only
sound, until the Healer got to the door.  Then, on the steps, he turned
to the multitude.

"Peace be to you all, and upon this house," he said and stepped through
the doorway.

Tim Denton, who had been staring at the face of the Healer, stood for an
instant like one with all his senses arrested.  Then he gasped, and
exclaimed, "Well, I'm eternally--" and broke off with a low laugh,
which was at first mirthful, and then became ominous and hard.

"Oh, magnificent--magnificent--jerickety!" he said into the sky above
him.

His friends who were not "saved," closed in on him to find the meaning
of his words, but he pulled himself together, looked blankly at them, and
asked them questions.  They told him so much more than he cared to hear,
that his face flushed a deep red--the bronze of it most like the colour
of Laura Sloly's hair; then he turned pale.  Men saw that he was roused
beyond any feeling in themselves.

"'Sh!" he said.  "Let's see what he can do."  With the many who were
silently praying, as they had been, bidden to do, the invincible ones
leant forwards, watching the little room where healing--or tragedy--was
afoot.  As in a picture, framed by the window, they saw the kneeling
figures, the Healer standing with outstretched arms.  They heard his
voice, sonorous and appealing, then commanding--and yet Mary Jewell did
not rise from her bed and walk.  Again, and yet again, the voice rang
out, and still the woman lay motionless.  Then he laid his hands upon
her, and again he commanded her to rise.

There was a faint movement, a desperate struggle to obey, but Nature and
Time and Disease had their way.  Yet again there was the call.  An agony
stirred the bed.  Then another great Healer came between, and mercifully
dealt the sufferer a blow--Death has a gentle hand sometimes.  Mary
Jewell was bedridden still--and for ever.

Like a wind from the mountains the chill knowledge of death wailed
through the window, and over the heads of the crowd.  All the figures
were upright now in the little room.  Then those outside saw Laura Sloly
lean over and close the sightless eyes.  This done, she came to the door
and opened it, and motioned for the Healer to leave.  He hesitated,
hearing the harsh murmur from the outskirts of the crowd.  Once again she
motioned, and he came.  With a face deadly pale she surveyed the people
before her silently for a moment, her eyes all huge and staring.

Presently she turned to Ingles and spoke to him quickly in a low voice;
then, descending the steps, passed out through the lane made for her by
the crowd, he following with shaking limbs and bowed bead.

Warning words had passed among the few invincible ones who waited where
the Healer must pass into the open, and there was absolute stillness as
Laura advanced.  Their work was to come--quiet and swift and sure; but
not yet.

Only one face Laura saw, as she led the way to the moment's safety--Tim
Denton's; and it was as stricken as her own.  She passed, then turned,
and looked at him again.  He understood; she wanted him.

He waited till she sprang into her waggon, after the Healer had mounted
his mule and ridden away with ever-quickening pace into the prairie.
Then he turned to the set, fierce men beside him.

"Leave him alone," he said, "leave him to me.  I know him.  You hear?
Ain't I no rights?  I tell you I knew him--South.  You leave him to me."

They nodded, and he sprang into his saddle and rode away.  They watched
the figure of the Healer growing smaller in the dusty distance.

"Tim'll go to her," one said, "and perhaps they'll let the snake get off.
Hadn't we best make sure?"

"Perhaps you'd better let him vamoose," said Flood Rawley anxiously.
"Jansen is a law-abiding place!" The reply was decisive.  Jansen had its
honour to keep.  It was the home of the Pioneers--Laura Sloly was a
Pioneer.

Tim Denton was a Pioneer, with all the comradeship which lay in the word,
and he was that sort of lover who has seen one woman, and can never see
another--not the product of the most modern civilisation.  Before Laura
had had Playmates he had given all he had to give; he had waited and
hoped ever since; and when the ruthless gossips had said to him before
Mary Jewell's house that she was in love with the Faith Healer, nothing
changed in him.  For the man, for Ingles, Tim belonged to a primitive
breed, and love was not in his heart.  As he rode out to Sloly's Ranch,
he ground his teeth in rage.  But Laura had called him to her, and:
"Well, what you say goes, Laura," he muttered at the end of a long hour
of human passion and its repression.  "If he's to go scot-free, then he's
got to go; but the boys yonder'll drop on me, if he gets away.  Can't you
see what a swab he is, Laura?"

The brown eyes of the girl looked at him gently.  The struggle between
them was over; she had had her way--to save the preacher, impostor though
he was; and now she felt, as she had never felt before in the same
fashion, that this man was a man of men.

"Tim, you do not understand," she urged.  "You say he was a landsharp in
the South, and that he had to leave-"

"He had to vamoose, or take tar and feathers."

"But he had to leave.  And he came here preaching and healing; and he is
a hypocrite and a fraud--I know that now, my eyes are opened.  He didn't
do what he said he could do, and it killed Mary Jewell--the shock; and
there were other things he said he could do, and he didn't do them.
Perhaps he is all bad, as you say--I don't think so.  But he did some
good things, and through him I've felt as I've never felt before about
God and life, and about Walt and the baby--as though I'll see them again,
sure.  I've never felt that before.  It was all as if they were lost in
the hills, and no trail home, or out to where they are.  Like as not God
was working in him all the time, Tim; and he failed because he counted
too much on the little he had, and made up for what he hadn't by what he
pretended."

"He can pretend to himself, or God Almighty, or that lot down there"--he
jerked a finger towards the town--"but to you, a girl, and a Pioneer--"

A flash of humour shot into her eyes at his last words, then they filled
with tears, through which the smile shone.  To pretend to "a Pioneer"--
the splendid vanity and egotism of the West!

"He didn't pretend to me, Tim.  People don't usually have to pretend to
like me."

"You know what I'm driving at."

"Yes, yes, I know.  And whatever he is, you've said that you will save
him.  I'm straight, you know that.  Somehow, what I felt from his
preaching--well, everything got sort of mixed up with him, and he was--
was different.  It was like the long dream of Walt and the baby, and he a
part of it.  I don't know what I felt, or what I might have felt for him.
I'm a woman--I can't understand.  But I know what I feel now.  I never
want to see him again on earth--or in Heaven.  It needn't be necessary
even in Heaven; but what happened between God and me through him stays,
Tim; and so you must help him get away safe.  It's in your hands--you say
they left it to you."

"I don't trust that too much."

Suddenly he pointed out of the window towards the town.  "See, I'm right;
there they are, a dozen of 'em mounted.  They're off, to run him down."

Her face paled; she glanced towards the Hill of Healing.  "He's got an
hour's start," she said; "he'll get into the mountains and be safe."

"If they don't catch him 'fore that."

"Or if you don't get to him first," she said, with nervous insistence.

He turned to her with a hard look; then, as he met her soft, fearless,
beautiful eyes, his own grew gentle.  "It takes a lot of doing.  Yet I'll
do it for you, Laura," he said.  "But it's hard on the Pioneers."  Once
more her humour flashed, and it seemed to him that "getting religion" was
not so depressing after all--wouldn't be, anyhow, when this nasty job was
over.  "The Pioneers will get over it, Tim," she rejoined.  "They've
swallowed a lot in their time.  Heaven's gate will have to be pretty
wide to let in a real Pioneer," she added.  "He takes up so much room--
ah, Timothy Denton!" she added, with an outburst of whimsical merriment.

"It hasn't spoiled you--being converted, has it?" he said, and gave a
quick little laugh, which somehow did more for his ancient cause with her
than all he had ever said or done.  Then he stepped outside and swung
into his saddle.

It had been a hard and anxious ride, but Tim had won, and was keeping his
promise.  The night had fallen before he got to the mountains, which he
and the Pioneers had seen the Faith Healer enter.  They had had four
miles' start of Tim, and had ridden fiercely, and they entered the gulch
into which the refugee had disappeared still two miles ahead.

The invincibles had seen Tim coming, but they had determined to make a
sure thing of it, and would themselves do what was necessary with the
impostor, and take no chances.  So they pressed their horses, and he saw
them swallowed by the trees, as darkness gathered.  Changing his course,
he entered the familiar hills, which he knew better than any pioneer of
Jansen, and rode a diagonal course over the trail they would take.  But
night fell suddenly, and there was nothing to do but to wait till
morning.  There was comfort in this--the others must also wait, and the
refugee could not go far.  In any case, he must make for settlement or
perish, since he had left behind his sheep and his cow.

It fell out better than Tim hoped.  The Pioneers were as good hunters as
was he, their instinct was as sure, their scouts and trackers were many,
and he was but one.  They found the Faith Healer by a little stream,
eating bread and honey, and, like an ancient woodlander drinking from a
horn--relics of his rank imposture.  He made no resistance.  They tried
him formally, if perfunctorily; he admitted his imposture, and begged for
his life.  Then they stripped him naked, tied a bit of canvas round his
waist, fastened him to a tree, and were about to complete his punishment
when Tim Denton burst upon them.

Whether the rage Tim showed was all real or not; whether his accusations
of bad faith came from so deeply wounded a spirit as he would have them
believe, he was not likely to tell; but he claimed the prisoner as his
own, and declined to say what he meant to do.

When, however, they saw the abject terror of the Faith Healer as he
begged not to be left alone with Tim--for they had not meant death,
and Ingles thought he read death in Tim's ferocious eyes--they laughed
cynically, and left it to Tim to uphold the honour of Jansen and the
Pioneers.

As they disappeared, the last thing they saw was Tim with his back to
them, his hands on his hips, and a knife clasped in his fingers.

"He'll lift his scalp and make a monk of him," chuckled the oldest and
hardest of them.

"Dat Tim will cut his heart out, I t'ink-bagosh!" said Nicolle Terasse,
and took a drink of white-whiskey.  For a long time Tim stood looking at
the other, until no sound came from the woods, whither the Pioneers had
gone.  Then at last, slowly, and with no roughness, as the terror-
stricken impostor shrank and withered, he cut the cords.

"Dress yourself," he said shortly, and sat down beside the stream, and
washed his face and hands, as though to cleanse them from contamination.
He appeared to take no notice of the other, though his ears keenly noted
every movement.

The impostor dressed nervously, yet slowly; he scarce comprehended
anything, except that he was not in immediate danger.  When he had
finished, he stood looking at Tim, who was still seated on a log plunged
in meditation.

It seemed hours before Tim turned round, and now his face was quiet,
if set and determined.  He walked slowly over, and stood looking at his
victim for some time without speaking.  The other's eyes dropped, and
a greyness stole over his features.  This steely calm was even more
frightening than the ferocity which had previously been in his captor's
face.  At length the tense silence was broken.

"Wasn't the old game good enough?  Was it played out?  Why did you take
to this?  Why did you do it, Scranton?"

The voice quavered a little in reply.  "I don't know.  Something sort of
pushed me into it."

"How did you come to start it?"

There was a long silence, then the husky reply came.  "I got a sickener
last time--"

"Yes, I remember, at Waywing."

"I got into the desert, and had hard times--awful for a while.  I hadn't
enough to eat, and I didn't know whether I'd die by hunger, or fever, or
Indians--or snakes."

"Oh, you were seeing snakes!" said Tim grimly.

"Not the kind you mean; I hadn't anything to drink--"

"No, you never did drink, I remember--just was crooked, and slopped over
women.  Well, about the snakes?"

"I caught them to eat, and they were poison-snakes often.  And I wasn't
quick at first to get them safe by the neck--they're quick, too."

Tim laughed inwardly.  "Getting your food by the sweat of your brow--and
a snake in it, same as Adam!  Well, was it in the desert you got your
taste for honey, too, same as John the Baptist--that was his name, if I
recomember?"  He looked at the tin of honey on the ground.

"Not in the desert, but when I got to the grass-country."

"How long were you in the desert?"

"Close to a year."

Tim's eyes opened wider.  He saw that the man was speaking the truth.

"Got to thinking in the desert, and sort of willing things to come to
pass, and mooning along, you, and the sky, and the vultures, and the hot
hills, and the snakes, and the flowers--eh?"

"There weren't any flowers till I got to the grass-country."

"Oh, cuss me, if you ain't simple for your kind!  I know all about that.
And when you got to the grass-country, you just picked up the honey, and
the flowers, and a calf, and a lamb, and a mule here and there, 'without
money and without price,' and walked on--that it?"

The other shrank before the steel in the voice, and nodded his head.

"But you kept thinking in the grass-country of what you'd felt and said
and done--and willed, in the desert, I suppose?"

Again the other nodded.

"It seemed to you in the desert, as if you'd saved your own life a
hundred times, as if you'd just willed food and drink and safety to come;
as if Providence had been at your elbow?"

"It was like a dream, and it stayed with me.  I had to think in the
desert things I'd never thought before," was the half-abstracted answer.

"You felt good in the desert?"  The other hung his head in shame.

"Makes you seem pretty small, doesn't it?  You didn't stay long enough,
I guess, to get what you were feeling for; you started in on the new
racket too soon.  You never got really possessed that you was a sinner.
I expect that's it."

The other made no reply.

"Well, I don't know much about such things.  I was loose brought up; but
I've a friend"--Laura was before his eyes--"that says religion's all
right, and long ago as I can remember my mother used to pray three times
a day--with grace at meals, too.  I know there's a lot in it for them
that need it; and there seems to be a lot of folks needing it, if I'm to
judge by folks down there at Jansen, specially when there's the laying-on
of hands and the Healing Springs.  Oh, that was a pigsty game, Scranton,
that about God giving you the Healing Springs, like Moses and the rock!
Why, I discovered them springs myself two years ago, before I went South,
and I guess God wasn't helping me any--not after I've kept out of His way
as I have.  But, anyhow, religion's real; that's my sense of it; and you
can get it, I bet, if you try.  I've seen it got.  A friend of mine got
it--got it under your preaching; not from you; but you was the accident
that brought it about, I expect.  It's funny--it's merakilous, but it's
so.  Kneel down!" he added, with peremptory suddenness.  "Kneel,
Scranton!"

In fear the other knelt.

"You're going to get religion now--here.  You're going to pray for what
you didn't get--and almost got--in the desert.  You're going to ask
forgiveness for all your damn tricks, and pray like a fanning-mill for
the spirit to come down.  You ain't a scoundrel at heart--a friend of
mine says so.  You're a weak vessel, cracked, perhaps.  You've got to
be saved, and start right over again--and 'Praise God from whom all
blessings flow!'  Pray--pray, Scranton, and tell the whole truth,
and get it--get religion.  Pray like blazes.  You go on, and pray out
loud.  Remember the desert, and Mary Jewell, and your mother--did you
have a mother, Scranton--say, did you have a mother, lad?"

Tim's voice suddenly lowered before the last word, for the Faith Healer
had broken down in a torrent of tears.

"Oh, my mother--O God!" he groaned.

"Say, that's right--that's right--go on," said the other, and drew back a
little, and sat down on a log.  The man on his knees was convulsed with
misery.  Denton, the world, disappeared.  He prayed in agony.  Presently
Tim moved uneasily, then got up and walked about; and at last, with a
strange, awed look, when an hour was past, he stole back into the shadow
of the trees, while still the wounded soul poured out its misery and
repentance.

Time moved on.  A curious shyness possessed Tim now, a thing which he had
never felt in his life.  He moved about self-consciously, awkwardly,
until at last there was a sudden silence over by the brook.

Tim looked, and saw the face of the kneeling man cleared, and quiet and
shining.  He hesitated, then stepped out, and came over.

"Have you got it?" he asked quietly.  "It's noon now."

"May God help me to redeem my past," answered the other in a new voice.

"You've got it--sure?"  Tim's voice was meditative.  "God has spoken to
me," was the simple answer.  "I've got a friend'll be glad to hear that,"
he said; and once more, in imagination, he saw Laura Sloly standing at
the door of her home, with a light in her eyes he had never seen before.

"You'll want some money for your journey?" Tim asked.

"I want nothing but to go away--far away," was the low reply.

"Well, you've lived in the desert--I guess you can live in the grass-
country," came the dry response.  "Good-bye-and good luck, Scranton."

Tim turned to go, moved on a few steps, then looked back.

"Don't be afraid--they'll not follow," he said.  "I'll fix it for you all
right."

But the man appeared not to hear; he was still on his knees.

Tim faced the woods once more.

He was about to mount his horse when he heard a step behind him.  He
turned sharply--and faced Laura.  "I couldn't rest.  I came out this
morning.  I've seen everything," she said.

"You didn't trust me," he said heavily.

"I never did anything else," she answered.

He gazed half-fearfully into her eyes.  "Well?" he asked.  "I've done my
best, as I said I would."

"Tim," she said, and slipped a hand in his, "would you mind the religion
--if you had me?"






THE LITTLE WIDOW OF JANSEN

Her advent to Jansen was propitious.  Smallpox in its most virulent form
had broken out in the French-Canadian portion of the town, and, coming
with some professional nurses from the East, herself an amateur, to
attend the sufferers, she worked with such skill and devotion that the
official thanks of the Corporation were offered her, together with a tiny
gold watch, the gift of grateful citizens.  But she still remained on at
Jansen, saying always, however, that she was "going East in the spring."

Five years had passed, and still she had not gone East, but remained
perched in the rooms she had first taken, over the Imperial Bank, while
the town grew up swiftly round her.  And even when the young bank manager
married, and wished to take over the rooms, she sent him to the right-
about from his own premises in her gay, masterful way.  The young manager
behaved well in the circumstances, because he had asked her to marry him,
and she had dismissed him with a warning against challenging his own
happiness--that was the way she had put it.  Perhaps he was galled the
less because others had striven for the same prize, and had been thrust
back, with an almost tender misgiving as to their sense of self-
preservation and sanity.  Some of them were eligible enough, and all were
of some position in the West.  Yet she smiled them firmly away, to the
wonder of Jansen, and to its satisfaction,  for was it not a tribute to
all that she would distinguish no particular unit by her permanent
favour?  But for one so sprightly and almost frivolous in manner at
times, the self-denial seemed incongruous.  She was unconventional enough
to sit on the side-walk with a half-dozen children round her blowing
bubbles, or to romp in any garden, or in the street, playing Puss-in-the-
ring; yet this only made her more popular.  Jansen's admiration was at
its highest, however, when she rode in the annual steeplechase with the
best horsemen of the province.  She had the gift of doing as well as of
being.

"'Tis the light heart she has, and slippin' in and out of things like a
humming-bird, no easier to ketch, and no longer to stay," said Finden,
the rich Irish landbroker, suggestively to Father Bourassa, the huge
French-Canadian priest who had worked with her through all the dark weeks
of the smallpox epidemic, and who knew what lay beneath the outer gaiety.
She had been buoyant of spirit beside the beds of the sick, and her words
were full of raillery and humour, yet there was ever a gentle note behind
all; and the priest had seen her eyes shining with tears, as she bent
over some stricken sufferer bound upon an interminable journey.

"Bedad!  as bright a little spark as ever struck off the steel," added
Finden to the priest, with a sidelong, inquisitive look, "but a heart no
bigger than a marrowfat pea-selfishness, all self.  Keepin' herself for
herself when there's manny a good man needin' her.  Mother o' Moses, how
manny!  From Terry O'Ryan, brother of a peer, at Latouche, to Bernard
Bapty, son of a millionaire, at Vancouver, there's a string o' them.  All
pride and self; and as fair a lot they've been as ever entered for the
Marriage Cup.  Now, isn't that so, father?"

Finden's brogue did not come from a plebeian origin.  It was part of his
commercial equipment, an asset of his boyhood spent among the peasants on
the family estate in Galway.

Father Bourassa fanned himself with the black broadbrim hat he wore, and
looked benignly but quizzically on the wiry, sharp-faced Irishman.

"You t'ink her heart is leetla.  But perhaps it is your mind not so big
enough to see--hein?"  The priest laughed noiselessly, showing white
teeth.  "Was it so selfish in Madame to refuse the name of Finden--
n'est-ce pas?"

Finden flushed, then burst into a laugh.  "I'd almost forgotten I was one
of them--the first almost.  Blessed be he that expects nothing, for he'll
get it, sure.  It was my duty, and I did it.  Was she to feel that Jansen
did not price her high?  Bedad, father, I rose betimes and did it, before
anny man should say he set me the lead.  Before the carpet in the parlour
was down, and with the bare boards soundin' to my words, I offered her
the name of Finden."

"And so--the first of the long line!  Bien, it is an honour."  The priest
paused a moment, looked at Finden with a curious reflective look, and
then said: "And so you t'ink there is no one; that she will say yes not
at all--no?"

They were sitting on Father Bourassa's veranda, on the outskirts of the
town, above the great river, along which had travelled millions of bygone
people, fighting, roaming, hunting, trapping; and they could hear it
rushing past, see the swirling eddies, the impetuous currents, the
occasional rafts moving majestically down the stream.  They were facing
the wild North, where civilisation was hacking and hewing and ploughing
its way to newer and newer cities, in an empire ever spreading to the
Pole.

Finden's glance loitered on this scene before he replied.  At length,
screwing up one eye, and with a suggestive smile, he answered: "Sure,
it's all a matter of time, to the selfishest woman.  'Tis not the same
with women as with men; you see, they don't get younger--that's a point.
But"--he gave a meaning glance at the priest--"but perhaps she's not
going to wait for that, after all.  And there he rides, a fine figure of
a man, too, if I have to say it!"

"M'sieu' Varley?" the priest responded, and watched a galloping horseman
to whom Finden had pointed, till he rounded the corner of a little wood.

"Varley, the great London surgeon, sure!  Say, father, it's a hundred to
one she'd take him, if--"

There was a curious look in Father Bourassa's face, a cloud in his eyes.
He sighed.  "London, it is ver' far away," he remarked obliquely.

"What's to that?  If she is with the right man, near or far is nothing."

"So far--from home," said the priest reflectively, but his eyes furtively
watched the other's face.

"But home's where man and wife are."

The priest now looked him straight in the eyes.  "Then, as you say, she
will not marry M'sieu' Varley--hein?"

The humour died out of Finden's face.  His eyes met the priest's eyes
steadily.  "Did I say that?  Then my tongue wasn't making a fool of me,
after all.  How did you guess I knew--everything, father?"

"A priest knows many t'ings--so."

There was a moment of gloom, then the Irishman brightened.  He came
straight to the heart of the mystery around which they had been
maneuvering.  "Have you seen her husband--Meydon--this year?  It isn't
his usual time to come yet."

Father Bourassa's eyes drew those of his friend into, the light of a new
understanding and revelation.  They understood and trusted each other.

"Helas!  He is there in the hospital," he answered, and nodded towards
a building not far away, which had been part of an old Hudson's Bay
Company's fort.  It had been hastily adapted as a hospital for the
smallpox victims.

"Oh, it's Meydon, is it, that bad case I heard of to-day?"

The priest nodded again and 'pointed.  "Voila, Madame Meydon, she is
coming.  She has seen him--her hoosban'."

Finden's eyes followed the gesture.  The little widow of Jansen was
coming from the hospital, walking slowly towards the river.

"As purty a woman, too--as purty and as straight bewhiles.  What is the
matter with him--with Meydon?" Finden asked, after a moment.

"An accident in the woods--so.  He arrive, it is las' night, from Great
Slave Lake."

Finden sighed.  "Ten years ago he was a man to look at twice--before he
did It and got away.  Now his own mother wouldn't know him--bad 'cess to
him!  I knew him from the cradle almost.  I spotted him here by a knife-
cut I gave him in the hand when we were lads together.  A divil of a
timper always both of us had, but the good-nature was with me, and I
didn't drink and gamble and carry a pistol.  It's ten years since he did
the killing, down in Quebec, and I don't suppose the police will get him
now.  He's been counted dead.  I recognised him here the night after I
asked her how she liked the name of Finden.  She doesn't know that I ever
knew him.  And he didn't recognise me-twenty-five years since we met
before!  It would be better if he went under the sod.  Is he pretty sick,
father?"

"He will die unless the surgeon's knife it cure him before twenty-four
hours, and--"

"And Doctor Brydon is sick, and Doctor Hadley away at Winnipeg, and this
is two hundred miles from nowhere!  It looks as if the police'll never
get him, eh?"

"You have not tell any one--never?"

Finden laughed.  "Though I'm not a priest, I can lock myself up as tight
as anny.  There's no tongue that's so tied, when tying's needed, as the
one that babbles most bewhiles.  Babbling covers a lot of secrets."

"So you t'ink it better Meydon should die, as Hadley is away and Brydon
is sick-hein?"

"Oh, I think--"

Finden stopped short, for a horse's hoofs sounded on the turf beside the
house, and presently Varley, the great London surgeon, rounded the corner
and stopped his horse in front of the veranda.

He lifted his hat to the priest.  "I hear there's a bad case at the
hospital," he said.

"It is ver' dangerous," answered Father Bourassa; "but, voila, come in!
There is something cool to drink.  Ah yes, he is ver' bad, that man from
the Great Slave Lake."

Inside the house, with the cooling drinks, Varley pressed his questions,
and presently, much interested, told at some length of singular cases
which had passed through his hands--one a man with his neck broken, who
had lived for six months afterward.

"Broken as a man's neck is broken by hanging--dislocation, really--the
disjointing of the medulla oblongata, if you don't mind technicalities,"
he said.  "But I kept him living just the same.  Time enough for him to
repent in and get ready to go.  A most interesting case.  He was a
criminal, too, and wanted to die; but you have to keep life going if
you can, to the last inch of resistance."

The priest looked thoughtfully out of the window; Finden's eyes were
screwed up in a questioning way, but neither made any response to
Varley's remarks.  There was a long minute's silence.  They were all
three roused by hearing a light footstep on the veranda.

Father Bourassa put down his glass and hastened into the hallway.  Finden
caught a glimpse of a woman's figure, and, without a word, passed
abruptly from the dining-room where they were, into the priest's study,
leaving Varley alone.  Varley turned to look after him, stared, and
shrugged his shoulders.

"The manners of the West," he said good-humouredly, and turned again to
the hallway, from whence came the sound of the priest's voice.  Presently
there was another voice--a woman's.  He flushed slightly and
involuntarily straightened himself.

"Valerie," he murmured.

An instant afterwards she entered the room with the priest.  She was
dressed in a severely simple suit of grey, which set off to advantage her
slim, graceful figure.  There seemed no reason why she should have been
called the little widow of Jansen, for she was not small, but she was
very finely and delicately made, and the name had been but an expression
of Jansen's paternal feeling for her.  She had always had a good deal of
fresh colour, but to-day she seemed pale, though her eyes had a strange
disturbing light.  It was not that they brightened on seeing this man
before her; they had been brighter, burningly bright, when she left the
hospital, where, since it had been built, she had been the one visitor of
authority--Jansen had given her that honour.  She had a gift of smiling,
and she smiled now, but it came from grace of mind rather than from
humour.  As Finden had said, "She was for ever acting, and never doin'
any harm by it."

Certainly she was doing no harm by it now; nevertheless, it was acting.
Could it be otherwise, with what was behind her life--a husband who had
ruined her youth, had committed homicide, had escaped capture, but who
had not subsequently died, as the world believed he had done, so
circumstantial was the evidence.  He was not man enough to make the
accepted belief in his death a fact.  What could she do but act, since
the day she got a letter from the Far North, which took her out to
Jansen, nominally to nurse those stricken with smallpox under Father
Bourassa's care, actually to be where her wretched husband could come
to her once a year, as he had asked with an impossible selfishness?

Each year she had seen him for an hour or less, giving him money,
speaking to him over a gulf so wide that it seemed sometimes as though
her voice could not be heard across it; each year opening a grave to look
at the embalmed face of one who had long since died in shame, which only
brought back the cruellest of all memories, that which one would give
one's best years to forget.  With a fortitude beyond description she had
faced it, gently, quietly, but firmly faced it--firmly, because she had
to be firm in keeping him within those bounds the invasion of which would
have killed her.  And after the first struggle with his unchangeable
brutality it had been easier: for into his degenerate brain there had
come a faint understanding of the real situation and of her.  He had
kept his side of the gulf, but gloating on this touch between the old
luxurious, indulgent life, with its refined vices, and this present
coarse, hard life, where pleasures were few and gross.  The free Northern
life of toil and hardship had not refined him.  He greedily hung over
this treasure, which was not for his spending, yet was his own--as though
in a bank he had hoards of money which he might not withdraw.

So the years had gone on, with their recurrent dreaded anniversaries,
carrying misery almost too great to be borne by this woman mated to the
loathed phantom of a sad, dead life; and when this black day of each year
was over, for a few days afterwards she went nowhere, was seen by none.
Yet, when she did appear again, it was with her old laughing manner, her
cheerful and teasing words, her quick response to the emotions of others.

So it had gone till Varley had come to follow the open air life for four
months, after a heavy illness due to blood-poisoning got in his surgical
work in London.  She had been able to live her life without too great a
struggle till he came.  Other men had flattered her vanity, had given her
a sense of power, had made her understand her possibilities, but nothing
more--nothing of what Varley brought with him.  And before three months
had gone, she knew that no man had ever interested her as Varley had
done.  Ten years before, she would not have appreciated or understood
him, this intellectual, clean-shaven, rigidly abstemious man, whose
pleasures belonged to the fishing-rod and the gun and the horse, and who
had come to be so great a friend of him who had been her best friend--
Father Bourassa.  Father Bourassa had come to know the truth--not from
her, for she had ever been a Protestant, but from her husband, who,
Catholic by birth and a renegade from all religion, had had a moment of
spurious emotion, when he went and confessed to Father Bourassa and got
absolution, pleading for the priest's care of his wife.  Afterwards
Father Bourassa made up his mind that the confession had a purpose behind
it other than repentance, and he deeply resented the use to which he
thought he was being put--a kind of spy upon the beautiful woman whom
Jansen loved, and who, in spite of any outward flippancy, was above
reproach.

In vital things the instinct becomes abnormally acute, and, one day, when
the priest looked at her commiseratingly, she had divined what moved him.
However it was, she drove him into a corner with a question to which he
dare not answer yes, but to which he might not answer no, and did not;
and she realised that he knew the truth, and she was the better for his
knowing, though her secret was no longer a secret.  She was not aware
that Finden also knew.  Then Varley came, bringing a new joy and interest
in her life, and a new suffering also, for she realised that if she were
free, and Varley asked her to marry him, she would consent.

But when he did ask her, she said no with a pang that cut her heart in
two.  He had stayed his four months, and it was now six months, and he
was going at last-tomorrow.  He had stayed to give her time to learn to
say yes, and to take her back with him to London; and she knew that he
would speak again to-day, and that she must say no again; but she had
kept him from saying the words till now.  And the man who had ruined her
life and had poisoned her true spirit was come back broken and battered.
He was hanging between life and death; and now--for he was going
to-morrow--Varley would speak again.

The half-hour she had just spent in the hospital with Meydon had tried
her cruelly.  She had left the building in a vortex of conflicting
emotions, with the call of duty and of honour ringing through a thousand
other voices of temptation and desire, the inner pleadings for a little
happiness while yet she was young.  After she married Meydon, there had
only been a few short weeks of joy before her black disillusion came,
and she had realised how bitter must be her martyrdom.

When she left the hospital, she seemed moving in a dream, as one,
intoxicated by some elixir, might move unheeding among event and accident
and vexing life and roaring multitudes.  And all the while the river
flowing through the endless prairies, high-banked, ennobled by living
woods, lipped with green, kept surging in her ears, inviting her,
alluring her--alluring her with a force too deep and powerful for weak
human nature to bear for long.  It would ease her pain, it said; it would
still the tumult and the storm; it would solve her problem, it would give
her peace.  But as she moved along the river-bank among the trees, she
met the little niece of the priest, who lived in his house, singing as
though she was born but to sing, a song which Finden had written and
Father Bourassa had set to music.  Did not the distant West know Father
Bourassa's gift, and did not Protestants attend Mass to hear him play the
organ afterwards?  The fresh, clear voice of the child rang through the
trees, stealing the stricken heart away from the lure of the river:

    "Will you come back home, where the young larks are singin'?
     The door is open wide, and the bells of Lynn are ringin';
          There's a little lake I know,
          And a boat you used to row
     To the shore beyond that's quiet--will you come back home?

     Will you come back, darlin'?  Never heed the pain and blightin',
     Never trouble that you're wounded, that you bear the scars of
     fightin';
          Here's the luck o' Heaven to you,
          Here's the hand of love will brew you
     The cup of peace--ah, darlin', will you come back home?"

She stood listening for a few moments, and, under the spell of the fresh,
young voice, the homely, heart-searching words, and the intimate
sweetness of the woods, the despairing apathy lifted slowly away.  She
started forwards again with a new understanding, her footsteps quickened.
She would go to Father Bourassa.  He would understand.  She would tell
him all.  He would help her to do what now she knew she must do, ask
Leonard Varley to save her husband's life--Leonard Varley to save her
husband's life!

When she stepped upon the veranda of the priest's house, she did not know
that Varley was inside.  She had no time to think.  She was ushered into
the room where he was, with the confusing fact of his presence fresh upon
her.  She had had but a word or two with the priest, but enough for him
to know what she meant to do, and that it must be done at once.

Varley advanced to meet her.  She shuddered inwardly to think what a
difference there was between the fallen creature she had left behind in
the hospital and this tall, dark, self-contained man, whose name was
familiar in the surgeries of Europe, who had climbed from being the son
of a clockmaker to his present distinguished place.

"Have you come for absolution, also?" he asked with a smile; "or is it
to get a bill of excommunication against your only enemy--there couldn't
be more than one?"

Cheerful as his words were, he was shrewdly observing her, for her
paleness, and the strange light in her eyes, gave him a sense of anxiety.
He wondered what trouble was on her.

"Excommunication?" he repeated.

The unintended truth went home.  She winced, even as she responded with
that quaint note in her voice which gave humour to her speech.  "Yes,
excommunication," she replied; "but why an enemy?  Do we not need to
excommunicate our friends sometimes?"

"That is a hard saying," he answered soberly.  Tears sprang to her eyes,
but she mastered herself, and brought the crisis abruptly.

"I want you to save a man's life," she said, with her eyes looking
straight into his.  "Will you do it?"

His face grew grave and eager.  "I want you to save a man's happiness,"
he answered.  "Will you do it?"

"That man yonder will die unless your skill saves him," she urged.

"This man here will go away unhappy and alone, unless your heart
befriends him," he replied, coming closer to her.

"At sunrise to-morrow he goes."  He tried to take her hand.

"Oh, please, please," she pleaded, with a quick, protesting gesture.
"Sunrise is far off, but the man's fate is near, and you must save him.
You only can do so, for Doctor Hadley is away, and Doctor Brydon is sick,
and in any case Doctor Brydon dare not attempt the operation alone.  It
is too critical and difficult, he says."

"So I have heard," he answered, with a new note in his voice, his
professional instinct roused in spite of himself.  "Who is this man?
What interests you in him?"

"To how many unknown people have you given your skill for nothing--your
skill and all your experience to utter strangers, no matter how low or
poor!  Is it not so?  Well, I cannot give to strangers what you have
given to so many, but I can help in my own way."

"You want me to see the man at once?"

"If you will."

"What is his name?  I know of his accident and the circumstances."

She hesitated for an instant, then said, "He is called Draper--a trapper
and woodsman."

"But I was going away to-morrow at sunrise.  All my arrangements are
made," he urged, his eyes holding hers, his passion swimming in his eyes
again.

"But you will not see a man die, if you can save him?" she pleaded,
unable now to meet his look, its mastery and its depth.

Her heart had almost leaped with joy at the suggestion that he could not
stay; but as suddenly self-reproach and shame filled her mind, and she
had challenged him so.  But yet, what right had she to sacrifice this man
she loved to the perverted criminal who had spoiled her youth and taken
away from her every dear illusion of her life and heart?  By every right
of justice and humanity she was no more the wife of Henry Meydon than if
she had never seen him.  He had forfeited every claim upon her, dragged
in the mire her unspotted life--unspotted, for in all temptation, in her
defenceless position, she had kept the whole commandment; she had, while
at the mercy of her own temperament, fought her way through all, with a
weeping heart and laughing lips.  Had she not longed for a little home
with a great love, and a strong, true man?  Ah, it had been lonely,
bitterly lonely!  Yet she had remained true to the scoundrel, from whom
she could not free herself without putting him in the grasp of the law to
atone for his crime.  She was punished for his crimes; she was denied the
exercise of her womanhood in order to shield him.  Still she remembered
that once she had loved him, those years ago, when he first won her heart
from those so much better than he, who loved her so much more honestly;
and this memory had helped her in a way.  She had tried to be true to it,
that dead, lost thing, of which this man who came once a year to see her,
and now, lying with his life at stake in the hospital, was the repellent
ghost.

"Ah, you will not see him die?" she urged.

"It seems to move you greatly what happens to this man," he said, his
determined dark eyes searching hers, for she baffled him.  If she could
feel so much for a, "casual," why not a little more feeling for him?
Suddenly, as he drew her eyes to him again, there came the conviction
that they were full of feeling for him.  They were sending a message, an
appealing, passionate message, which told him more than he had ever heard
from her or seen in her face before.  Yes, she was his!  Without a spoken
word she had told him so.  What, then, held her back?  But women were a
race by themselves, and he knew that he must wait till she chose to have
him know what she had unintentionally conveyed but now.

"Yes, I am moved," she continued slowly.  "Who can tell what this man
might do with his life, if it is saved!  Don't you think of that?  It
isn't the importance of a life that's at stake; it's the importance of
living; and we do not live alone, do we?"

His mind was made up.  "I will not, cannot promise anything till I have
seen him.  But I will go and see him, and I'll send you word later what
I can do, or not do.  Will that satisfy you?  If I cannot do it, I will
come to say good-by."

Her face was set with suppressed feeling.  She held out her hand to him
impulsively, and was about to speak, but suddenly caught the hand away
again from his thrilling grasp and, turning hurriedly, left the room.
In the hall she met Father Bourassa.

"Go with him to the hospital," she whispered, and disappeared through the
doorway.

Immediately after she had gone, a man came driving hard to bring Father
Bourassa to visit a dying Catholic in the prairie, and it was Finden who
accompanied Varley to the hospital, waited for him till his examination
of the "casual" was concluded, and met him outside.

"Can it be done?" he asked of Varley.  "I'll take word to Father
Bourassa."

"It can be done--it will be done," answered Varley absently.  "I do not
understand the man.  He has been in a different sphere of life.  He tried
to hide it, but the speech--occasionally!  I wonder."

"You wonder if he's worth saving?"

Varley shrugged his shoulders impatiently.  "No, that's not what I
meant."

Finden smiled to himself.  "Is it a difficult case?" he asked.

"Critical and delicate; but it has been my specialty."

"One of the local doctors couldn't do it, I suppose?"

"They would be foolish to try."

"And you are going away at sunrise to-morrow?"

"Who told you that?" Varley's voice was abrupt, impatient.

"I heard you say so-everybody knows it.  .  .  .  That's a bad man
yonder, Varley."  He jerked his thumb towards the hospital.  "A terrible
bad man, he's been.  A gentleman once, and fell down--fell down hard.
He's done more harm than most men.  He's broken a woman's heart and
spoilt her life, and, if he lives, there's no chance for her, none at
all.  He killed a man, and the law wants him; and she can't free herself
without ruining him; and she can't marry the man she loves because of
that villain yonder, crying for his life to be saved.  By Josh and by
Joan, but it's a shame, a dirty shame, it is!"

Suddenly Varley turned and gripped his arm with fingers of steel.

"His name--his real name?"

"His name's Meydon--and a dirty shame it is, Varley."

Varley was white.  He had been leading his horse and talking to Finden.
He mounted quickly now, and was about to ride away, but stopped short
again.  "Who knows--who knows the truth?" he asked.

"Father Bourassa and me--no others," he answered.  "I knew Meydon thirty
years ago."

There was a moment's hesitation, then Varley said hoarsely, "Tell me--
tell me all."

When all was told, he turned his horse towards the wide waste of the
prairie, and galloped away.  Finden watched him till he was lost to view
beyond the bluff.

"Now, a man like that, you can't guess what he'll do," he said
reflectively.  "He's a high-stepper, and there's no telling what
foolishness will get hold of him.  It'd be safer if he got lost on the
prairie for twenty-four hours.  He said that Meydon's only got twenty-
four hours, if the trick isn't done!  Well--"

He took a penny from his pocket.  "I'll toss for it.  Heads he does it,
and tails he doesn't."

He tossed.  It came down heads.  "Well, there's one more fool in the
world than I thought," he said philosophically, as though he had settled
the question; as though the man riding away into the prairie with a dark
problem to be solved had told the penny what he meant to do.

Mrs. Meydon, Father Bourassa, and Finden stood in the little waiting-room
of the hospital at Jansen, one at each window, and watched the wild
thunderstorm which had broken over the prairie.  The white heliographs of
the elements flashed their warnings across the black sky, and the roaring
artillery of the thunder came after, making the circle of prairie and
tree and stream a theatre of anger and conflict.  The streets of Jansen
were washed with flood, and the green and gold things of garden and field
and harvest crumbled beneath the sheets of rain.

The faces at the window of the little room of the hospital, however, were
but half-conscious of the storm; it seemed only an accompaniment of their
thoughts, to typify the elements of tragedy surrounding them.

For Varley there had been but one thing to do.  A life might be saved,
and it was his duty to save it.  He had ridden back from the prairie as
the sun was setting the night before, and had made all arrangements at
the hospital, giving orders that Meydon should have no food whatever till
the operation was performed the next afternoon, and nothing to drink
except a little brandy-and-water.

The operation was performed successfully, and Varley had issued from the
operating-room with the look of a man who had gone through an ordeal
which had taxed his nerve to the utmost, to find Valerie Meydon waiting,
with a piteous, dazed look in her eyes.  But this look passed when she
heard him say, "All right!"  The words brought a sense of relief,
for if he had failed it would have seemed almost unbearable in the
circumstances--the cup of trembling must be drunk to the dregs.

Few words had passed between them, and he had gone, while she remained
behind with Father Bourassa, till the patient should wake from the sleep
into which he had fallen when Varley left.

But within two hours they sent for Varley again, for Meydon was in
evident danger.  Varley had come, and had now been with the patient for
some time.

At last the door opened and Varley came in quickly.  He beckoned to Mrs.
Meydon and to Father Bourassa.  "He wishes to speak with you," he said to
her.  "There is little time."

Her eyes scarcely saw him, as she left the room and passed to where
Meydon lay nerveless, but with wide-open eyes, waiting for her.  The eyes
closed, however, before she reached the bed.  Presently they opened
again, but the lids remained fixed.  He did not hear what she said.

                    ......................

In the little waiting-room, Finden said to Varley, "What happened?"

"Food was absolutely forbidden, but he got it from another patient early
this morning while the nurse was out for a moment.  It has killed him."

"'Twas the least he could do, but no credit's due him.  It was to be.
I'm not envying Father Bourassa nor her there with him."

Varley made no reply.  He was watching the receding storm with eyes which
told nothing.

Finden spoke once more, but Varley did not hear him.  Presently the door
opened and Father Bourassa entered.  He made a gesture of the hand to
signify that all was over.

Outside, the sun was breaking through the clouds upon the Western
prairie, and there floated through the evening air the sound of a child's
voice singing beneath the trees that fringed the river:

    "Will you come back, darlin'?  Never heed the pain and blightin',
     Never trouble that you're wounded, that you bear the scars of
     fightin';
          Here's the luck o' Heaven to you,
          Here's the hand of love will brew you
     The cup of peace-ah, darlin', will you come back home?"






WATCHING THE RISE OF ORION

"In all the wide border his steed was the best," and the name and fame of
Terence O'Ryan were known from Strathcona to Qu'appelle.  He had ambition
of several kinds, and he had the virtue of not caring who knew of it.  He
had no guile, and little money; but never a day's work was too hard for
him, and he took bad luck, when it came, with a jerk of the shoulder and
a good-natured surprise on his clean-shaven face that suited well his
wide grey eyes and large, luxurious mouth.  He had an estate, half ranch,
half farm, with a French Canadian manager named Vigon, an old prospector
who viewed every foot of land in the world with the eye of the
discoverer.  Gold, coal, iron, oil, he searched for them everywhere,
making sure that sooner or later he would find them.  Once Vigon had
found coal.  That was when he worked for a man called Constantine Jopp,
and had given him great profit; but he, the discoverer, had been put off
with a horse and a hundred dollars.  He was now as devoted to Terence
O'Ryan as he had been faithful to Constantine Jopp, whom he cursed waking
and sleeping.

In his time O'Ryan had speculated, and lost; he had floated a coal mine,
and "been had"; he had run for the local legislature, had been elected,
and then unseated for bribery committed by an agent; he had run races at
Regina, and won--he had won for three years in succession; and this had
kept him going and restored his finances when they were at their worst.
He was, in truth, the best rider in the country, and, so far, was the
owner also of the best three-year-old that the West had produced.  He
achieved popularity without effort.  The West laughed at his enterprises
and loved him; he was at once a public moral and a hero.  It was a legend
of the West that his forbears had been kings in Ireland like Brian
Borhoime.  He did not contradict this; he never contradicted anything.
His challenge to all fun and satire and misrepresentation was, "What'll
be the differ a hundred years from now!"

He did not use this phrase, however, towards one experience--the advent
of Miss Molly Mackinder, the heiress, and the challenge that reverberated
through the West after her arrival.  Philosophy deserted him then; he
fell back on the primary emotions of mankind.

A month after Miss Mackinder's arrival at La Touche a dramatic
performance was given at the old fort, in which the officers of the
Mounted Police took part, together with many civilians who fancied
themselves.  By that time the district had realised that Terry O'Ryan
had surrendered to what they called "the laying on of hands" by Molly
Mackinder.  It was not certain, however, that the surrender was complete,
because O'Ryan had been wounded before, and yet had not been taken
captive altogether.  His complete surrender seemed now more certain to
the public because the lady had a fortune of two hundred thousand
dollars, and that amount of money would be useful to an ambitious man in
the growing West.  It would, as Gow Johnson said, "Let him sit back and
view the landscape o'er, before he puts his ploughshare in the mud."

There was an outdoor scene in the play produced by the impetuous
amateurs, and dialogue had been interpolated by three "imps of fame" at
the suggestion of Constantine Jopp, one of the three, who bore malice
towards O'Ryan, though this his colleagues did not know distinctly.  The
scene was a camp-fire--a starlit night, a colloquy between the three,
upon which the hero of the drama, played by Terry O'Ryan, should break,
after having, unknown to them, but in sight of the audience, overheard
their kind of intentions towards himself.

The night came.  When the curtain rose for the third act there was
exposed a star-sown sky, in which the galaxy of Orion was shown with
distinctness, each star sharply twinkling from the electric power behind-
a pretty scene evoking great applause.  O'Ryan had never seen this back
curtain--they had taken care that he should not--and, standing in the
wings awaiting his cue, he was unprepared for the laughter of the
audience, first low and uncertain, then growing, then insistent,
and now a peal of ungovernable mirth, as one by one they understood
the significance of the stars of Orion on the back curtain.

O'Ryan got his cue, and came on to an outburst of applause which shook
the walls.  La Touche rose at him, among them Miss Molly Mackinder in the
front row with the notables.

He did not see the back curtain, or Orion blazing in the ultramarine
blue.  According to the stage directions, he was to steal along the trees
at the wings, and listen to the talk of the men at the fire plotting
against him, who were presently to pretend good comradeship to his face.
It was a vigorous melodrama with some touches of true Western feeling.
After listening for a moment, O'Ryan was to creep up the stage again
towards the back curtain, giving a cue for his appearance.

When the hilarious applause at his entrance had somewhat subsided, the
three took up their parable, but it was not the parable of the play.
They used dialogue not in the original.  It had a significance which the
audience were not slow to appreciate, and went far to turn "The Sunburst
Trail" at this point into a comedy-farce.  When this new dialogue began,
O'Ryan could scarcely trust his ears, or realise what was happening.

"Ah, look," said Dicky Fergus at the fire, "as fine a night as ever I saw
in the West!  The sky's a picture.  You could almost hand the stars down,
they're so near."

"What's that clump together on the right--what are they called in
astronomy?" asked Constantine Jopp, with a leer.

"Orion is the name--a beauty, ain't it?" answered Fergus.

"I've been watching Orion rise," said the third--Holden was his name.
"Many's the time I've watched Orion rising.  Orion's the star for me.
Say, he wipes 'em all out--right out.  Watch him rising now."

By a manipulation of the lights Orion moved up the back curtain slowly,
and blazed with light nearer the zenith.  And La Touche had more than the
worth of its money in this opening to the third act of the play.  O'Ryan
was a favourite, at whom La Touche loved to jeer, and the parable of the
stars convulsed them.

At the first words O'Ryan put a hand on himself and tried to grasp the
meaning of it all, but his entrance and the subsequent applause had
confused him.  Presently, however, he turned to the back curtain, as
Orion moved slowly up the heavens, and found the key to the situation.
He gasped.  Then he listened to the dialogue which had nothing to do with
"The Sunburst Trail."

"What did Orion do, and why does he rise?  Has he got to rise?  Why was
the gent called Orion in them far-off days?" asked Holden.

"He did some hunting in his time--with a club," Fergus replied.  "He kept
making hits, he did.  Orion was a spoiler.  When he took the field there
was no room for the rest of the race.  Why does he rise?  Because it is a
habit.  They could always get a rise out of Orion.  The Athens Eirenicon
said that yeast might fail to rise, but touch the button and Orion would
rise like a bird."

At that instant the galaxy jerked up the back curtain again, and when the
audience could control itself, Constantine Jopp, grinning meanly, asked:

"Why does he wear the girdle?"

"It is not a girdle--it is a belt," was Dicky Fergus's reply.  "The gods
gave it to him because he was a favourite.  There was a lady called
Artemis--she was the last of them.  But he went visiting with Eos,
another lady of previous acquaintance, down at a place called Ortygia,
and Artemis shot him dead with a shaft Apollo had given her; but she
didn't marry Apollo neither.  She laid Orion out on the sky, with his
glittering belt, around him.  And Orion keeps on rising."

"Will he ever stop rising?" asked Holden.

Followed for the conspirators a disconcerting moment; for, when the
laughter had subsided, a lazy voice came from the back of the hall,
"He'll stop long enough to play with Apollo a little, I guess."

It was Gow Johnson who had spoken, and no man knew Terry O'Ryan better,
or could gauge more truly the course he would take.  He had been in many
an enterprise, many a brush with O'Ryan, and his friendship would bear
any strain.

O'Ryan recovered himself from the moment he saw the back curtain, and
he did not find any fun in the thing.  It took a hold on him out of all
proportion to its importance.  He realised that he had come to the
parting of the ways in his life.  It suddenly came upon him that
something had been lacking in him in the past; and that his want of
success in many things had not been wholly due to bad luck.  He had been
eager, enterprising, a genius almost at seeing good things; and yet
others had reaped where he had sown.  He had believed too much in his
fellow-man.  For the first time in his life he resented the friendly,
almost affectionate satire of his many friends.  It was amusing, it was
delightful; but down beneath it all there was a little touch of ridicule.
He had more brains than any of them, and he had known it in a way; he had
led them sometimes, too, as on raids against cattle-stealers, and in a
brush with half-breeds and Indians; as when he stood for the legislature;
but he felt now for the first time that he had not made the most of
himself, that there was something hurting to self-respect in this prank
played upon him.  When he came to that point his resentment went higher.
He thought of Molly Mackinder, and he heard all too acutely the vague
veiled references to her in their satire.  By the time Gow Johnson spoke
he had mastered himself, however, and had made up his mind.  He stood
still for a moment.

"Now, please, my cue," he said quietly and satirically from the trees
near the wings.

He was smiling, but Gow Johnson's prognostication was right; and ere long
the audience realised that he was right.  There was standing before them
not the Terry O'Ryan they had known, but another.  He threw himself fully
into his part--a young rancher made deputy sheriff, who by the occasional
exercise of his duty had incurred the hatred of a small floating
population that lived by fraud, violence, and cattle-stealing.  The
conspiracy was to raid his cattle, to lure him to pursuit, to ambush him,
and kill him.  Terry now played the part with a naturalness and force
which soon lifted the play away from the farcical element introduced into
it by those who had interpolated the gibes at himself.  They had gone a
step too far.

"He's going large," said Gow Johnson, as the act drew near its close,
and the climax neared, where O'Ryan was to enter upon a physical struggle
with his assailants.  "His blood's up.  There'll be hell to pay."

To Gow Johnson the play had instantly become real, and O'Ryan an injured
man at bay, the victim of the act--not of the fictitious characters of
the play, but of the three men, Fergus, Holden, and Constantine Jopp, who
had planned the discomfiture of O'Ryan; and he felt that the victim's
resentment would fall heaviest on Constantine Jopp, the bully, an old
schoolmate of Terry's.

Jopp was older than O'Ryan by three years, which in men is little, but in
boys, at a certain time of life, is much.  It means, generally, weight
and height, an advantage in a scrimmage.  Constantine Jopp had been the
plague and tyrant of O'Ryan's boyhood.  He was now a big, leering fellow
with much money of his own, got chiefly from the coal discovered on his
place by Vigon, the half-breed French Canadian.  He had a sense of dark
and malicious humour, a long horse-like face, with little beady eyes and
a huge frame.

Again and again had Terry fought him as a boy at school, and often he had
been badly whipped, but he had never refused the challenge of an insult
when he was twelve and Jopp fifteen.  The climax to their enmity at
school had come one day when Terry was seized with a cramp while bathing,
and after having gone down twice was rescued by Jopp, who dragged him out
by the hair of the head.  He had been restored to consciousness on the
bank and carried to his home, where he lay ill for days.  During the
course of the slight fever which followed the accident his hair was cut
close to his head.  Impetuous always, his first thought was to go and
thank Constantine Jopp for having saved his life.  As soon as he was able
he went forth to find his rescuer, and met him suddenly on turning a
corner of the street.  Before he could stammer out the gratitude that was
in his heart, Jopp, eyeing him with a sneering smile, said drawlingly:

"If you'd had your hair cut like that I couldn't have got you out, could
I?  Holy, what a sight!  Next time I'll take you by the scruff, putty-
face--bah!"

That was enough for Terry.  He had swallowed the insult, stuttered his
thanks to the jeering laugh of the lank bully, and had gone home and
cried in shame and rage.

It was the one real shadow in his life.  Ill luck and good luck had been
taken with an equable mind; but the fact that he must, while he lived,
own the supreme debt of his life to a boy and afterwards to a man whom he
hated by instinct was a constant cloud on him.  Jopp owned him.  For some
years they did not meet, and then at last they again were thrown together
in the West, when Jopp settled at La Touche.  It was gall and wormwood to
Terry, but he steeled himself to be friendly, although the man was as
great a bully as the boy, as offensive in mind and character; but withal
acute and able in his way, and with a reputation for commercial sharpness
which would be called by another name in a different civilisation.  They
met constantly, and O'Ryan always put a hand on himself, and forced
himself to be friendly.  Once when Jopp became desperately ill there had
been--though he fought it down, and condemned himself in every term of
reproach--a sense of relief in the thought that perhaps his ancient debt
would now be cancelled.  It had gone on so long.  And Constantine Jopp
had never lost an opportunity of vexing him, of torturing him, of giving
veiled thrusts, which he knew O'Ryan could not resent.  It was the
constant pin-prick of a mean soul, who had an advantage of which he could
never be dispossessed--unless the ledger was balanced in some inscrutable
way.

Apparently bent on amusement only, and hiding his hatred from his
colleagues, Jopp had been the instigator and begetter of the huge joke of
the play; but it was the brains of Dick Fergus which had carried it out,
written the dialogue, and planned the electric appliances of the back
curtain--for he was an engineer and electrician.  Neither he nor Holden
had known the old antipathy of Terry and Constantine Jopp.  There was
only one man who knew the whole truth, and that was Gow Johnson, to whom
Terry had once told all.  At the last moment Fergus had interpolated
certain points in the dialogue which were not even included at rehearsal.
These referred to Apollo.  He had a shrewd notion that Jopp had an idea
of marrying Molly Mackinder if he could, cousins though they were; and he
was also aware that Jopp, knowing Molly's liking for Terry, had tried to
poison her mind against him, through suggestive gossip about a little
widow at Jansen, thirty miles away.  He had in so far succeeded that,
on the very day of the performance, Molly had declined to be driven home
from the race-course by Terry, despite the fact that Terry had won the
chief race and owned the only dog-cart in the West.

As the day went on Fergus realised, as had Gow Johnson, that Jopp had
raised a demon.  The air was electric.  The play was drawing near to its
climax--an attempt to capture the deputy sheriff, tie him to a tree, and
leave him bound and gagged alone in the waste.  There was a glitter in
Terry's eyes, belying the lips which smiled in keeping with the character
he presented.  A look of hardness was stamped on his face, and the
outlines of the temples were as sharp as the chin was set and the
voice slow and penetrating.

Molly Mackinder's eyes were riveted on him.  She sat very still, her
hands clasped in her lap, watching his every move.  Instinct told her
that Terry was holding himself in; that some latent fierceness and iron
force in him had emerged into life; and that he meant to have revenge on
Constantine Jopp one way or another, and that soon; for she had heard the
rumour flying through the hall that her cousin was the cause of the
practical joke just played.  From hints she had had from Constantine that
very day she knew that the rumour was the truth; and she recalled now
with shrinking dislike the grimace accompanying the suggestion.  She had
not resented it then, being herself angry with Terry because of the
little widow at Jansen.

Presently the silence in the hall became acute; the senses of the
audience were strained to the utmost.  The acting before them was more
realistic than anything they had ever seen, or were ever likely to see
again in La Touche.  All three conspirators, Fergus, Holden, and Jopp,
realised that O'Ryan's acting had behind it an animal anger which
transformed him.  When he looked into their eyes it was with a steely
directness harder and fiercer than was observed by the audience.  Once
there was occasion for O'Ryan to catch Fergus by the arm, and Fergus
winced from the grip.  When standing in the wings with Terry he ventured
to apologise playfully for the joke, but Terry made no answer; and once
again he had whispered good-naturedly as they stood together on the
stage; but the reply had been a low, scornful laugh.  Fergus realised
that a critical moment was at hand.  The play provided for some dialogue
between Jopp and Terry, and he observed with anxiety that Terry now
interpolated certain phrases meant to warn Constantine, and to excite
him to anger also.

The moment came upon them sooner than the text of the play warranted.
O'Ryan deliberately left out several sentences, and gave a later cue, and
the struggle for his capture was precipitated.  Terry meant to make the
struggle real.  So thrilling had been the scene that to an extent the
audience was prepared for what followed; but they did not grasp the full
reality--that the play was now only a vehicle for a personal issue of a
desperate character.  No one had ever seen O'Ryan angry; and now that the
demon of rage was on him, directed by a will suddenly grown to its full
height, they saw not only a powerful character in a powerful melodrama,
but a man of wild force.  When the three desperadoes closed in on O'Ryan,
and, with a blow from the shoulder which was not a pretence, he sent
Holden into a far corner gasping for breath and moaning with pain, the
audience broke out into wild cheering.  It was superb acting, they
thought.  As most of them had never seen the play, they were not
surprised when Holden did not again join the attack on the deputy
sheriff.  Those who did know the drama--among them Molly Mackinder--
became dismayed, then anxious.  Fergus and Jopp knew well from the blow
O'Ryan had given that, unless they could drag him down, the end must be
disaster to some one.  They were struggling with him for personal safety
now.  The play was forgotten, though mechanically O'Ryan and Fergus
repeated the exclamations and the few phrases belonging to the part.
Jopp was silent, fighting with a malice which belongs to only half-breed,
or half-bred, natures; and from far back in his own nature the distant
Indian strain in him was working in savage hatred.  The two were
desperately hanging on to O'Ryan like pumas on a grizzly, when suddenly,
with a twist he had learned from Ogami the Jap on the Smoky River, the
slim Fergus was slung backward to the ground with the tendons of his arm
strained and the arm itself useless for further work.  There remained now
Constantine Jopp, heavier and more powerful than O'Ryan.

For O'Ryan the theatre, the people, disappeared.  He was a boy again on
the village green, with the bully before him who had tortured his young
days.  He forgot the old debt to the foe who saved his life; he forgot
everything, except that once again, as of old, Constantine Jopp was
fighting him, with long, strong arms trying to bring him to the ground.
Jopp's superior height gave him an advantage in a close grip; the
strength of his gorilla-like arms was difficult to withstand.  Both were
forgetful of the world, and the two other injured men, silent and awed,
were watching the, fight, in which one of them, at least, was powerless
to take part.

The audience was breathless.  Most now saw the grim reality of the scene
before them; and when at last O'Ryan's powerful right hand got a grip
upon the throat of Jopp, and they saw the grip tighten, tighten, and
Jopp's face go from red to purple, a hundred people gasped.  Excited men
made as though to move toward the stage; but the majority still believed
that it all belonged to the play, and shouted "Sit down!"

Suddenly the voice of Gow Johnson was heard "Don't kill him--let go,
boy!"

The voice rang out with sharp anxiety, and pierced the fog of passion and
rage in which O'Ryan was moving.  He realised what he was doing, the real
sense of it came upon him.  Suddenly he let go the lank throat of his
enemy, and, by a supreme effort, flung him across the stage, where Jopp
lay resting on his hands, his bleared eyes looking at Terry with the fear
and horror still in them which had come with that tightening grip on his
throat.

Silence fell suddenly on the theatre.  The audience was standing.  A
woman sobbed somewhere in a far corner, but the rest were dismayed and
speechless.  A few steps before them all was Molly Mackinder, white and
frightened, but in her eyes was a look of understanding as she gazed at
Terry.  Breathing hard, Terry stood still in the middle of the stage, the
red fog not yet gone out of his eyes, his hands clasped at his side,
vaguely realising the audience again.  Behind him was the back curtain in
which the lights of Orion twinkled aggressively.  The three men who had
attacked him were still where he had thrown them.

The silence was intense, the strain oppressive.  But now a drawling voice
came from the back of the hall.  "Are you watching the rise of Orion?"
it said.  It was the voice of Gow Johnson.

The strain was broken; the audience dissolved in laughter; but it was not
hilarious; it was the nervous laughter of relief, touched off by a native
humour always present in the dweller of the prairie.

"I beg your pardon," said Terry quietly and abstractedly to the audience.

And the scene-shifter bethought himself and let down the curtain.

The fourth act was not played that night.  The people had had more than
the worth of their money.  In a few moments the stage was crowded with
people from the audience, but both Jopp and O'Ryan had disappeared.

Among the visitors to the stage was Molly Mackinder.  There was a meaning
smile upon her face as she said to Dicky Fergus:

"It was quite wonderful, wasn't it--like a scene out of the classics--the
gladiators or something?"

Fergus gave a wary smile as he answered: "Yes.  I felt like saying Ave
Caesar, Ave!  and I watched to see Artemis drop her handkerchief."

"She dropped it, but you were too busy to pick it up.  It would have been
a useful sling for your arm," she added with thoughtful malice.  "It
seemed so real--you all acted so well, so appropriately.  And how you
keep it up!" she added, as he cringed when some one knocked against his
elbow, hurting the injured tendons.

Fergus looked at her meditatively before he answered.  "Oh, I think we'll
likely keep it up for some time," he rejoined ironically.

"Then the play isn't finished?" she added.  "There is another act?  Yes,
I thought there was, the programme said four."

"Oh yes, there's another act," he answered, "but it isn't to be played
now; and I'm not in it."

"No, I suppose you are not in it.  You really weren't in the last act.
Who will be in it?"

Fergus suddenly laughed outright, as he looked at Holden expostulating
intently to a crowd of people round him.  "Well, honour bright, I don't
think there'll be anybody in it except little Conny Jopp and gentle Terry
O'Ryan; and Conny mayn't be in it very long.  But he'll be in it for a
while, I guess.  You see, the curtain came down in the middle of a
situation, not at the end of it.  The curtain has to rise again."

"Perhaps Orion will rise again--you think so?"  She laughed in satire;
for Dicky Fergus had made love to her during the last three months with
unsuppressed activity, and she knew him in his sentimental moments; which
is fatal.  It is fatal if, in a duet, one breathes fire and the other
frost.

"If you want my opinion," he said in a lower voice, as they moved towards
the door, while people tried to listen to them--"if you want it straight,
I think Orion has risen--right up where shines the evening star--Oh, say,
now," he broke off, "haven't you had enough fun out of me?  I tell you,
it was touch and go.  He nearly broke my arm--would have done it, if I
hadn't gone limp to him; and your cousin Conny Jopp, little Conny Jopp,
was as near Kingdom Come as a man wants at his age.  I saw an elephant
go 'must' once in India, and it was as like O'Ryan as putty is to dough.
It isn't all over either, for O'Ryan will forget and forgive, and Jopp
won't.  He's your cousin, but he's a sulker.  If he has to sit up nights
to do it, he'll try to get back on O'Ryan.  He'll sit up nights, but
he'll do it, if he can.  And whatever it is, it won't be pretty."

Outside the door they met Gow Johnson, excitement in his eyes.  He heard
Fergus's last words.

"He'll see Orion rising if he sits up nights," Gow Johnson said.  "The
game is with Terry--at last."  Then he called to the dispersing gossiping
crowd: "Hold on--hold on, you people.  I've got news for you.  Folks,
this is O'Ryan's night.  It's his in the starry firmament.  Look at him
shine," he cried, stretching out his arm towards the heavens, where the
glittering galaxy hung near the zenith.  "Terry O'Ryan, our O'Ryan--he's
struck oil--on his ranch it's been struck.  Old Vigon found it.  Terry's
got his own at last.  O'Ryan's in it--in it alone.  Now, let's hear the
prairie-whisper," he shouted, in a great raucous voice.  "Let's hear the
prairie-whisper.  What is it?"

The crowd responded in a hoarse shout for O'Ryan and his fortune.
Even the women shouted--all except Molly Mackinder.  She was wondering if
O'Ryan risen would be the same to her as O'Ryan rising.  She got into her
carriage with a sigh, though she said to the few friends with her:

"If it's true, it's splendid.  He deserves it too.  Oh, I'm glad--I'm so
glad."  She laughed; but the laugh was a little hysterical.

She was both glad and sorry.  Yet as she drove home over the prairie she
was silent.  Far off in the east was a bright light.  It was a bonfire
built on O'Ryan's ranch, near where he had struck oil--struck it rich.
The light grew and grew, and the prairie was alive with people hurrying
towards it.  La Touche should have had the news hours earlier, but the
half-breed French-Canadian, Vigon, who had made the discovery, and had
started for La Touche with the news, went suddenly off his head with
excitement, and had ridden away into the prairie fiercely shouting his
joy to an invisible world.  The news had been brought in later by a
farmhand.

Terry O'Ryan had really struck oil, and his ranch was a scene of decent
revelry, of which Gow Johnson was master.  But the central figure of it
all, the man who had, in truth, risen like a star, had become to La
Touche all at once its notoriety as well as its favourite, its great man
as well as its friend, he was nowhere to be found.  He had been seen
riding full speed into the prairie towards the Kourmash Wood, and the
starlit night had swallowed him.  Constantine Jopp had also disappeared;
but at first no one gave that thought or consideration.

As the night went on, however, a feeling began to stir which it is not
good to rouse in frontier lands.  It is sure to exhibit itself in forms
more objective than are found in great populations where methods of
punishment are various, and even when deadly are often refined.  But
society in new places has only limited resources, and is thrown back on
primary ways and means.  La Touche was no exception, and the keener
spirits, to whom O'Ryan had ever been "a white man," and who so rejoiced
in his good luck now that they drank his health a hundred times in his
own whiskey and cider, were simmering with desire for a public reproval
of Constantine Jopp's conduct.  Though it was pointed out to them by the
astute Gow Johnson that Fergus and Holden had participated in the
colossal joke of the play, they had learned indirectly also the whole
truth concerning the past of the two men.  They realised that Fergus and
Holden had been duped by Jopp into the escapade.  Their primitive sense
of justice exonerated the humourists and arraigned the one malicious man.
As the night wore on they decided on the punishment to be meted out by La
Touche to the man who had not "acted on the square."

Gow Johnson saw, too late, that he had roused a spirit as hard to appease
as the demon roused in O'Ryan earlier in the evening.  He would have
enjoyed the battue of punishment under ordinary circumstances; but he
knew that Miss Molly Mackinder would be humiliated and indignant at the
half-savage penalty they meant to exact.  He had determined that O'Ryan
should marry her; and this might be an obstruction in the path.  It was
true that O'Ryan now would be a rich man--one of the richest in the West,
unless all signs failed; but meanwhile a union of fortunes would only be
an added benefit.  Besides, he had seen that O'Ryan was in earnest, and
what O'Ryan wanted he himself wanted even more strongly.  He was not
concerned greatly for O'Ryan's absence.  He guessed that Terry had ridden
away into the night to work off the dark spirit that was on him, to have
it out with himself.  Gow Johnson was a philosopher.  He was twenty years
older than O'Ryan, and he had studied his friend as a pious monk his
missal.

He was right in his judgment.  When Terry left the theatre he was like
one in a dream, every nerve in his body at tension, his head aflame, his
pulses throbbing.  For miles he rode away into the waste along the
northern trail, ever away from La Touche and his own home.  He did not
know of the great good fortune that had come to him; and if, in this
hour, he had known, he would not have cared.  As he rode on and on
remorse drew him into its grasp.  Shame seized him that he had let
passion be his master, that he had lost his self-control, had taken a
revenge out of all proportion to the injury and insult to himself.  It
did not ease his mind that he knew Constantine Jopp had done the thing
out of meanness and malice; for he was alive to-night in the light of
the stars, with the sweet crisp air blowing in his face, because of an
act of courage on the part of his schooldays' foe.  He remembered now
that, when he was drowning, he had clung to Jopp with frenzied arms and
had endangered the bully's life also.  The long torture of owing this
debt to so mean a soul was on him still, was rooted in him; but suddenly,
in the silent searching night, some spirit whispered in his ear that this
was the price which he must pay for his life saved to the world, a
compromise with the Inexorable Thing.  On the verge of oblivion and the
end, he had been snatched back by relenting Fate, which requires
something for something given, when laws are overridden and doom
defeated.  Yes, the price he was meant to pay was gratitude to one of
shrivelled soul and innate antipathy; and he had not been man enough to
see the trial through to the end!  With a little increased strain put
upon his vanity and pride he had run amuck.  Like some heathen gladiator
he had ravaged in the ring.  He had gone down into the basements of human
life and there made a cockpit for his animal rage, till, in the contest,
brain and intellect had been saturated by the fumes and sweat of fleshly
fury.

How quiet the night was, how soothing to the fevered mind and body, how
the cool air laved the heated head and flushed the lungs of the rheum of
passion!  He rode on and on, farther and farther away from home, his back
upon the scenes where his daily deeds were done.  It was long past
midnight before he turned his horse's head again homeward.

Buried in his thoughts, now calm and determined, with a new life grown up
in him, a new strength different from the mastering force which gave him
a strength in the theatre like one in delirium, he noticed nothing.  He
was only conscious of the omniscient night and its warm penetrating
friendliness; as, in a great trouble, when no words can be spoken, a cool
kind palm steals into the trembling hand of misery and stills it, gives
it strength and life and an even pulse.  He was now master in the house
of his soul, and had no fear or doubt as to the future, or as to his
course.

His first duty was to go to Constantine Jopp, and speak his regret like a
man.  And after that it would be his duty to carry a double debt his life
long for the life saved, for the wrong done.  He owed an apology to La
Touche, and he was scarcely aware that the native gentlemanliness in him
had said through his fever of passion over the footlights: "I beg your
pardon."  In his heart he felt that he had offered a mean affront to
every person present, to the town where his interests lay, where his
heart lay.

Where his heart lay--Molly Mackinder!  He knew now that vanity had
something to do, if not all to do, with his violent acts, and though
there suddenly shot through his mind, as he rode back, a savage thrill at
the remembrance of how he had handled the three, it was only a passing
emotion.  He was bent on putting himself right with Jopp and with La
Touche.  With the former his way was clear; he did not yet see his way as
to La Touche.  How would he be able to make the amende honorable to La
Touche?

By and by he became somewhat less absorbed and enveloped by the
comforting night.  He saw the glimmer of red light afar, and vaguely
wondered what it was.  It was in the direction of O'Ryan's Ranch, but he
thought nothing of it, because it burned steadily.  It was probably a
fire lighted by settlers trailing to the farther north.  While the night
wore on he rode as slowly back to the town as he had galloped from it
like a centaur with a captive.

Again and again Molly Mackinder's face came before him; but he resolutely
shut it out of his thoughts.  He felt that he had no right to think of
her until he had "done the right thing" by Jopp and by La Touche.  Yet
the look in her face as the curtain came down, it was not that of one
indifferent to him or to what he did.  He neared the town half-way
between midnight and morning.  Almost unconsciously avoiding the main
streets, he rode a roundabout way towards the little house where
Constantine Jopp lived.  He could hear loud noises in the streets,
singing, and hoarse shouts.  Then silence came, then shouts, and silence
again.  It was all quiet as he rode up to Jopp's house, standing on the
outskirts of the town.  There was a bright light in the window of a room.

Jopp, then, was still up.  He would not wait till tomorrow.  He would do
the right thing now.  He would put things straight with his foe before he
slept; he would do it at any sacrifice to his pride.  He had conquered
his pride.

He dismounted, threw the bridle over a post, and, going into the garden,
knocked gently at the door.  There was no response.  He knocked again,
and listened intently.  Now he heard a sound-like a smothered cry or
groan.  He opened the door quickly and entered.  It was dark.  In another
room beyond was a light.  From it came the same sound he had heard
before, but louder; also there was a shuffling footstep.  Springing
forward to the half-open door, he pushed it wide, and met the terror-
stricken eyes of Constantine Jopp--the same look that he had seen at
the theatre when his hands were on Jopp's throat, but more ghastly.

Jopp was bound to a chair by a lasso.  Both arms were fastened to the
chair-arm, and beneath them, on the floor, were bowls into which blood
dripped from his punctured wrists.

He had hardly taken it all in--the work of an instant--when he saw
crouched in a corner, madness in his eyes, his half-breed Vigon.  He
grasped the situation in a flash.  Vigon had gone mad, had lain in wait
in Jopp's house, and when the man he hated had seated himself in the
chair, had lassoed him, bound him, and was slowly bleeding him to death.

He had no time to think.  Before he could act Vigon was upon him also,
frenzy in his eyes, a knife clutched in his hand.  Reason had fled, and
he only saw in O'Ryan the frustrator of his revenge.  He had watched the
drip, drip from his victim's wrists with a dreadful joy.

They were man and man, but O'Ryan found in this grisly contest a vaster
trial of strength than in the fight upon the stage a few hours ago.  The
first lunge that Vigon made struck him on the tip of the shoulder, and
drew blood; but he caught the hand holding the knife in an iron grasp,
while the half-breed, with superhuman strength, tried in vain for the
long brown throat of the man for whom he had struck oil.  As they
struggled and twisted, the eyes of the victim in the chair watched them
with agonised emotions.  For him it was life or death.  He could not cry
out--his mouth was gagged; but to O'Ryan his groans were like a distant
echo of his own hoarse gasps as he fought his desperate fight.  Terry was
as one in an awful dream battling with vague impersonal powers which
slowly strangled his life, yet held him back in torture from the final
surrender.

For minutes they struggled.  At last O'Ryan's strength came to the point
of breaking, for Vigon was a powerful man, and to this was added a
madman's energy.  He felt that the end was coming.  But all at once,
through the groans of the victim in the chair, Terry became conscious of
noises outside--such noises as he had heard before he entered the house,
only nearer and louder.  At the same time he heard a horse's hoofs, then
a knock at the door, and a voice calling: "Jopp!  Jopp!"

He made a last desperate struggle, and shouted hoarsely.

An instant later there were footsteps in the room, followed by a cry of
fright and amazement.

It was Gow Johnson.  He had come to warn Constantine Jopp that a crowd
were come to tar and feather him, and to get him away on his own horse.

Now he sprang to the front door, called to the approaching crowd for
help, then ran back to help O'Ryan.  A moment later a dozen men had Vigon
secure, and had released Constantine Jopp, now almost dead from loss of
blood.

As they took the gag from his mouth and tied their handkerchiefs round
his bleeding wrists, Jopp sobbed aloud.  His eyes were fixed on Terry
O'Ryan.  Terry met the look, and grasped the limp hand lying on the
chair-arm.

"I'm sorry, O'Ryan, I'm sorry for all I've done to you," Jopp sobbed.
"I was a sneak, but I want to own it.  I want to be square now.  You can
tar and feather me, if you like.  I deserve it."  He looked at the
others.  "I deserve it," he repeated.

"That's what the boys had thought would be appropriate," said Gow Johnson
with a dry chuckle, and the crowd looked at each other and winked.  The
wink was kindly, however.  "To own up and take your gruel" was the
easiest way to touch the men of the prairie.

A half-hour later the roisterers, who had meant to carry Constantine Jopp
on a rail, carried Terry O'Ryan on their shoulders through the town,
against his will.  As they passed the house where Miss Mackinder lived
some one shouted:

"Are you watching the rise of Orion?"

Many a time thereafter Terry O'Ryan and Molly Mackinder looked at the
galaxy in the evening sky with laughter and with pride.  It had played
its part with Fate against Constantine Jopp and the little widow at
Jansen.  It had never shone so brightly as on the night when Vigon struck
oil on O'Ryan's ranch.  But Vigon had no memory of that.  Such is the
irony of life.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Babbling covers a lot of secrets
Beneath it all there was a little touch of ridicule
What'll be the differ a hundred years from now






NORTHERN LIGHTS

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 5.


THE ERROR OF THE DAY
THE WHISPERER
AS DEEP AS THE SEA




THE ERROR OF THE DAY

The "Error of the Day" may be defined as "The difference between the
distance or range which must be put upon the sights in order to hit the
target and the actual distance from the gun to the target."--Admiralty
Note.

A great naval gun never fires twice alike.  It varies from day to day,
and expert allowance has to be made in sighting every time it is fired.
Variations in atmosphere, condition of ammunition, and the wear of the
gun are the contributory causes to the ever-varying "Error of the Day."

                      .........................

"Say, ain't he pretty?"

"A Jim-dandy-oh, my!"

"What's his price in the open market?"

"Thirty millions-I think not."

Then was heard the voice of Billy Goat--his name was William Goatry

              "Out in the cold world, out in the street;
               Nothing to wear, and nothing to eat,
               Fatherless, motherless, sadly I roam,
               Child of misfortune, I'm driven from home."

A loud laugh followed, for Billy Goat was a popular person at Kowatin in
the Saskatchewan country.  He had an inimitable drollery, heightened by a
cast in his eye, a very large mouth, and a round, good-humoured face;
also he had a hand and arm like iron, and was altogether a great man on a
"spree."

There had been a two days' spree at Kowatin, for no other reason than
that there had been great excitement over the capture and the subsequent
escape of a prairie-rover, who had robbed the contractor's money-chest at
the rail-head on the Canadian Pacific Railroad.  Forty miles from Kowatin
he had been caught by, and escaped from, the tall, brown-eyed man with
the hard-bitten face who leaned against the open window of the tavern,
looking indifferently at the jeering crowd before him.  For a police
officer he was not unpopular with them, but he had been a failure for
once, and, as Billy Goat had said: "It tickled us to death to see a rider
of the plains off his trolley--on the cold, cold ground, same as you and
me."

They did not undervalue him.  If he had been less a man than he was,
they would not have taken the trouble to cover him with their drunken
ribaldry.  He had scored off them in the past in just such sprees as
this, when he had the power to do so, and used the power good-naturedly
and quietly--but used it.

Then, he was Sergeant Foyle of the Royal North-West Mounted Police, on
duty in a district as large as the United Kingdom.  And he had no greater
admirer than Billy Goat, who now reviled him.  Not without cause, in a
way, for he had reviled himself to this extent, that when the prairie-
rover, Halbeck, escaped on the way to Prince Albert, after six months'
hunt for him and a final capture in the Kowatin district, Foyle resigned
the Force before the Commissioner could reproach him or call him to
account.  Usually so exact, so certain of his target, some care had not
been taken, he had miscalculated, and there had been the Error of the
Day.  Whatever it was, it had seemed to him fatal; and he had turned his
face from the barrack yard.

Then he had made his way to the Happy Land Hotel at Kowatin, to begin
life as "a free and independent gent on the loose," as Billy Goat had
said.  To resign had seemed extreme; because, though the Commissioner was
vexed at Halbeck's escape, Foyle was the best non-commissioned officer in
the Force.  He had frightened horse thieves and bogus land-agents and
speculators out of the country; had fearlessly tracked down a criminal or
a band of criminals when the odds were heavy against him.  He carried on
his cheek the scars of two bullets, and there was one white lock in his
brown hair, where an arrow had torn the scalp away as, alone, he drove
into the Post a score of Indians, fresh from raiding the cattle of an
immigrant trailing north.

Now he was out of work, or so it seemed; he had stepped down from his
scarlet-coated dignity, from the place of guardian and guide of
civilisation, into the idleness of a tavern stoop.

As the little group swayed round him, and Billy Goat started another
song, Foyle roused himself as though to move away--he was waiting for
the mail-stage to take him south:

         "Oh, father, dear father, come home with me now,
          The clock in the steeple strikes one;
          You said you were coming right home from the shop
          As soon as your day's work was done.
          Come home--come home--"

The song arrested him, and he leaned back against the window again.  A
curious look came into his eyes, a look that had nothing to do with the
acts of the people before him.  It was searching into a scene beyond this
bright sunlight and the far green-brown grass, and the little oasis of
trees in the distance marking a homestead and the dust of the wagon-
wheels, out on the trail beyond the grain-elevator-beyond the blue
horizon's rim, quivering in the heat, and into regions where this crisp,
clear, life-giving, life-saving air never blew.

         "You said you were coming right home from the shop
          As soon as your day's work was done.
          Come home--come home--"

He remembered when he had first heard this song in a play called 'Ten
Nights in a Bar-room', many years before, and how it had wrenched his
heart and soul, and covered him with a sudden cloud of shame and anger.
For his father had been a drunkard, and his brother had grown up a
drunkard, that brother whom he had not seen for ten years until--until--

He shuddered, closed his eyes, as though to shut out something that the
mind saw.  He had had a rough life, he had become inured to the seamy
side of things--there was a seamy side even in this clean, free, wide
land; and he had no sentimentality; though something seemed to hurt and
shame him now.

         "As soon as your day's work was done.
          Come home--come home--"

The crowd was uproarious.  The exhilaration had become a kind of
delirium.  Men were losing their heads; there was an element of
irresponsibility in the new outbreak likely to breed some violent act,
which every man of them would lament when sober again.

Nettlewood Foyle watched the dust rising from the wheels of the stage,
which had passed the elevator and was nearing the Prairie Home Hotel far
down the street.  He would soon leave behind him this noisy ribaldry of
which he was the centre.  He tossed his cheroot away.  Suddenly he heard
a low voice behind him.

"Why don't you hit out, sergeant?" it said.

He started almost violently, and turned round.  Then his face flushed,
his eyes blurred with feeling and deep surprise, and his lips parted
in a whispered exclamation and greeting.

A girl's face from the shade of the sitting-room was looking out at him,
half-smiling, but with heightened colour and a suppressed agitation.  The
girl was not more than twenty-five, graceful, supple, and strong.  Her
chin was dimpled; across her right temple was a slight scar.  She had
eyes of a wonderful deep blue; they seemed to swim with light.  As Foyle
gazed at her for a moment dumfounded, with a quizzical suggestion and
smiling still a little more, she said:

"You used to be a little quicker, Nett."  The voice appeared to attempt
unconcern; but it quivered from a force of feeling underneath.  It was so
long since she had seen him.

He was about to reply, but, at the instant, a reveller pushed him with a
foot behind the knees so that they were sprung forward.  The crowd
laughed--all save Billy Goat, who knew his man.

Like lightning, and with cold fury in his eyes, Foyle caught the tall
cattleman by the forearm, and, with a swift, dexterous twist, had the
fellow in his power.

"Down--down, to your knees, you skunk," he said in a low, fierce voice.

The knees of the big man bent,--Foyle had not taken lessons of Ogami,
the Jap, for nothing--they bent, and the cattleman squealed, so intense
was the pain.  It was break or bend; and he bent--to the ground and
lay there.  Foyle stood over him for a moment, a hard light in his eyes,
and then, as if bethinking himself, he looked at the other roisterers,
and said:

"There's a limit, and he reached it.  Your mouths are your own, and you
can blow off to suit your fancy, but if any one thinks I'm a tame coyote
to be poked with a stick--!"  He broke off, stooped over, and helped the
man before him to his feet.  The arm had been strained, and the big
fellow nursed it.

"Hell, but you're a twister!" the cattleman said with a grimace of pain.

Billy Goat was a gentleman, after his kind, and he liked Sergeant Foyle
with a great liking.  He turned to the crowd and spoke.

"Say, boys, this mine's worked out.  Let's leave the Happy Land to Foyle.
Boys, what is he--what--is he?  What--is--Sergeant Foyle--boys?"

The roar of the song they all knew came in reply, as Billy Goat waved his
arms about like the wild leader of a wild orchestra:

         "Sergeant Foyle, oh, he's a knocker from the West,
          He's a chase-me-Charley, come-and-kiss-me tiger from the zoo;
          He's a dandy on the pinch, and he's got a double cinch
          On the gent that's going careless, and he'll soon cinch you:
          And he'll soon--and he'll soon--cinch you!"

Foyle watched them go, dancing, stumbling, calling back at him, as they
moved towards the Prairie Home Hotel:

         "And he'll soon-and he'll soon-cinch you!"

His under lip came out, his eyes half-closed, as he watched them.  "I've
done my last cinch.  I've done my last cinch," he murmured.

Then, suddenly, the look in his face changed, the eyes swam as they had
done a minute before at the sight of the girl in the room behind.
Whatever his trouble was, that face had obscured it in a flash, and the
pools of feeling far down in the depths of a lonely nature had been
stirred.  Recognition, memory, tenderness, desire swam in his face, made
generous and kind the hard lines of the strong mouth.  In an instant he
had swung himself over the window-sill.  The girl had drawn away now into
a more shaded corner of the room, and she regarded him with a mingled
anxiety and eagerness.  Was she afraid of something?  Did she fear that
--she knew not quite what, but it had to do with a long ago.

"It was time you hit out, Nett," she said, half shyly.  "You're more
patient than you used to be, but you're surer.  My, that was a twist you
gave him, Nett.  Aren't you glad to see me?" she added hastily, and with
an effort to hide her agitation.

He reached out and took her hand with a strange shyness, and a self-
consciousness which was alien to his nature.  The touch of her hand
thrilled him.  Their eyes met.  She dropped hers.  Then he gathered him
self together.  "Glad to see you?  Of course, of course, I'm glad.  You
stunned me, Jo.  Why, do you know where you are?  You're a thousand miles
from home.  I can't get it through my head, not really.  What brings you
here?  It's ten years--ten years since I saw you, and you were only
fifteen, but a fifteen that was as good as twenty."

He scanned her face closely.  "What's that scar on your forehead, Jo?
You hadn't that--then."

"I ran up against something," she said evasively, her eyes glittering,
"and it left that scar.  Does it look so bad?"

"No, you'd never notice it, if you weren't looking close as I am.  You
see, I knew your face so well ten years ago."

He shook his head with a forced kind of smile.  It became him, however,
for he smiled rarely; and the smile was like a lantern turned on his
face; it gave light and warmth to its quiet strength-or hardness.

"You were always quizzing," she said with an attempt at a laugh--"always
trying to find out things.  That's why you made them reckon with you out
here.  You always could see behind things; always would have your own
way; always were meant to be a success."

She was beginning to get control of herself again, was trying hard to
keep things on the surface.  "You were meant to succeed--you had to,"
she added.

"I've been a failure--a dead failure," he answered slowly.  "So they say.
So they said.  You heard them, Jo."

He jerked his head towards the open window.

"Oh, those drunken fools!" she exclaimed indignantly, and her face
hardened.  "How I hate drink!  It spoils everything."

There was silence for a moment.  They were both thinking of the same
thing--of the same man.  He repeated a question.

"What brings you out here, Jo?" he asked gently.  "Dorland," she
answered, her face setting into determination and anxiety.

His face became pinched.  "Dorl!" he said heavily.  "What for, Jo?
What do you want with Dorl?"

"When Cynthy died she left her five hundred dollars a year to the baby,
and--"

"Yes, yes, I know.  Well, Jo?"

"Well, it was all right for five years--Dorland paid it in; but for five
years he hasn't paid anything.  He's taken it, stolen it from his own
child by his own honest wife.  I've come to get it--anyway, to stop him
from doing it any more.  His own child--it puts murder in my heart, Nett!
I could kill him."

He nodded grimly.  "That's likely.  And you've kept, Dorl's child with
your own money all these years?"

"I've got four hundred dollars a year, Nett, you know; and I've been
dressmaking--they say I've got taste," she added, with a whimsical smile.

Nett nodded his head.  "Five years.  That's twenty-five hundred dollars
he's stolen from his own child.  It's eight years old now, isn't it?"

"Bobby is eight and a half," she answered.

"And his schooling, and his clothing, and everything; and you have to pay
for it all?"

"Oh, I don't mind, Nett, it isn't that.  Bobby is Cynthy's child; and I
love him--love him; but I want him to have his rights.  Dorl must give up
his hold on that money--or--"

He nodded gravely.  "Or you'll set the law on him?"

"It's one thing or the other.  Better to do it now when Bobby is young
and can't understand."

"Or read the newspapers," he commented thoughtfully.

"I don't think I've a hard heart," she continued, "but I'd like to punish
him, if it wasn't that he's your brother, Nett; and if it wasn't for
Bobby.  Dorland was dreadfully cruel, even to Cynthy."

"How did you know he was up here?" he asked.  "From the lawyer that pays
over the money.  Dorland has had it sent out here to Kowatin this two
years.  And he sent word to the lawyer a month ago that he wanted it to
get here as usual.  The letter left the same day as I did, and it got
here yesterday with me, I suppose.  He'll be after it-perhaps to-day.
He wouldn't let it wait long, Dorl wouldn't."

Foyle started.  "To-day--to-day--"

There was a gleam in his eyes, a setting of the lips, a line sinking into
the forehead between the eyes.

"I've been watching for him all day, and I'll watch till he comes.  I'm
going to say some things to him that he won't forget.  I'm going to get
Bobby's money, or have the law do it--unless you think I'm a brute,
Nett."  She looked at him wistfully.

"That's all right.  Don't worry about me, Jo.  He's my brother, but I
know him--I know him through and through.  He's done everything that a
man can do and not be hanged.  A thief, a drunkard, and a brute--and he
killed a man out here," he added hoarsely.  "I found it out myself--
myself.  It was murder."

Suddenly, as he looked at her, an idea seemed to flash into his mind.
He came very near and looked at her closely.  Then he reached over and
almost touched the scar on her forehead.

"Did he do that, Jo?"

For an instant she was silent and looked down at the floor.  Presently
she raised her eyes, her face suffused.  Once or twice she tried to
speak, but failed.  At last she gained courage and said:

"After Cynthy's death I kept house for him for a year, taking care of
little Bobby.  I loved Bobby so--he has Cynthy's eyes.  One day Dorland
--oh, Nett, of course I oughtn't to have stayed there, I know it now; but
I was only sixteen, and what did I understand!  And my mother was dead.
One day--oh, please, Nett, you can guess.  He said something to me.
I made him leave the house.  Before I could make plans what to do,
he came back mad with drink.  I went for Bobby, to get out of the house,
but he caught hold of me.  I struck him in the face, and he threw me
against the edge of the open door.  It made the scar."

Foyle's face was white.  "Why did you never write and tell me that, Jo?
You know that I--" He stopped suddenly.

"You had gone out of our lives down there.  I didn't know where you were
for a long time; and then--then it was all right about Bobby and me,
except that Bobby didn't get the money that was his.  But now--"

Foyle's voice was hoarse and low.  "He made that scar, and he--and you
only sixteen--Oh, my God!"  Suddenly his face reddened, and he choked
with shame and anger.  "And he's my brother!" was all that he could say.

"Do you see him up here ever?" she asked pityingly.

"I never saw him till a week ago."  A moment, then he added: "The letter
wasn't to be sent here in his own name, was it?"

She nodded.  "Yes, in his own name, Dorland W. Foyle.  Didn't he go by
that name when you saw him?"

There was an oppressive silence, in which she saw that something moved
him strangely, and then he answered: "No, he was going by the name of
Halbeck--Hiram Halbeck."

The girl gasped.  Then the whole thing burst upon her.  "Hiram Halbeck!
Hiram Halbeck, the thief--I read it all in the papers--the thief that you
caught, and that got away.  And you've left the Mounted Police because of
it--oh, Nett!"  Her eyes were full of tears, her face was drawn and grey.

He nodded.  "I didn't know who he was till I arrested him," he said.
"Then, afterward, I thought of his child, and let him get away; and for
my poor old mother's sake.  She never knew how bad he was even as a boy.
But I remember how he used to steal and drink the brandy from her
bedside, when she had the fever.  She never knew the worst of him.
But I let him away in the night, Jo, and I resigned, and they thought
that Halbeck had beaten me, had escaped.  Of course I couldn't stay in
the Force, having done that.  But, by the heaven above us, if I had him
here now, I'd do the thing--do it, so help me God!"

"Why should you ruin your life for him?" she said, with an outburst of
indignation.  All that was in her heart welled up in her eyes at the
thought of what Foyle was.  "You must not do it.  You shall not do it.
He must pay for his wickedness, not you.  It would be a sin.  You and
what becomes of you mean so much."  Suddenly with a flash of purpose she
added: "He will come for that letter, Nett.  He would run any kind of
risk to get a dollar.  He will come here for that letter--perhaps today."

He shook his head moodily, oppressed by the trouble that was on him.
"He's not likely to venture here, after what's happened."

"You don't know him as well as I do, Nett.  He is so vain he'd do it,
just to show that he could.  He'd' probably come in the evening.  Does
any one know him here?  So many people pass through Kowatin every day.
Has any one seen him?"

"Only Billy Goatry," he answered, working his way to a solution of the
dark problem.  "Only Billy Goatry knows him.  The fellow that led the
singing--that was Goatry."

"There he is now," he added, as Billy Goat passed the window.

She came and laid a hand on his arm.  "We've got to settle things with
him," she said.  "If Dorl comes, Nett--"

There was silence for a moment, then he caught her hand in his and held
it.  "If he comes, leave him to me, Jo.  You will leave him to me?" he
added anxiously.

"Yes," she answered.  "You'll do what's right-by Bobby?"

"And by Dorl, too," he replied strangely.  There were loud footsteps
without.

"It's Goatry," said Foyle.  "You stay here.  I'll tell him everything.
He's all right; he's a true friend.  He'll not interfere."

The handle of the door turned slowly.  "You keep watch on the post-
office, Jo," he added.

Goatry came round the opening door with a grin.  "Hope I don't intrude,"
he said, stealing a half-leering look at the girl.  As soon as he saw her
face, however, he straightened himself up and took on different manners.
He had not been so intoxicated as he had made, out, and he seemed only
"mellow" as he stood before them, with his corrugated face and queer,
quaint look, the eye with the cast in it blinking faster than the.
other.

"It's all right, Goatry," said Foyle.  "This lady is, one of my family
from the East."

"Goin' on by stage?" Goatry said vaguely, as they shook hands.

She did not reply, for she was looking down the street, and presently she
started as she gazed.  She laid a hand suddenly on Foyle's arm.

"See--he's come," she said in a whisper, and as though not realising
Goatry's presence.  "He's come."

Goatry looked as well as Foyle.  "Halbeck--the devil!" he said.

Foyle turned to him.  "Stand by, Goatry.  I want you to keep a shut
mouth.  I've work to do."

Goatry held out his hand.  "I'm with you.  If you get him this time,
clamp him, clamp him like a tooth in a harrow."

Halbeck had stopped his horse at the post-office door.  Dismounting he
looked quickly round, then drew the reins over the horse's head, letting
them trail, as is the custom of the West.

A few swift words passed between Goatry and Foyle.  "I'll do this myself,
Jo," he whispered to the girl presently.  "Go into another room.  I'll
bring him here."

In another minute Goatry was leading the horse away from the post-office,
while Foyle stood waiting quietly at the door.  The departing footsteps
of the horse brought Halbeck swiftly to the doorway, with a letter in his
hand.

"Hi, there, you damned sucker!" he called after Goatry, and then saw
Foyle waiting.

"What the hell--!" he said fiercely, his hand on something in his hip
pocket.

"Keep quiet, Dorl.  I want to have a little talk with you.  Take your
hand away from that gun--take it away," he added with a meaning not to be
misunderstood.

Halbeck knew that one shout would have the town on him, and he did not
know what card his brother was going to play.  He let his arm drop to his
side.  "What's your game?  What do you want?" he asked surlily.

"Come over to the Happy Land Hotel," Foyle answered, and in the light of
what was in his mind his words had a grim irony.

With a snarl Halbeck stepped out.  Goatry, who had handed the horse over
to the hostler, watched them coming.

"Why did I never notice the likeness before?" Goatry said to himself.
"But, gosh!  what a difference in the men.  Foyle's going to double cinch
him this time, I guess."

He followed them inside the hall of the Happy Land.  When they stepped
into the sitting-room, he stood at the door waiting.  The hotel was
entirely empty, the roisterers at the Prairie Home having drawn off the
idlers and spectators.  The barman was nodding behind the bar, the
proprietor was moving about in the backyard inspecting a horse.  There
was a cheerful warmth everywhere, the air was like an elixir, the pungent
smell of a pine-tree at the door gave a kind of medicament to the indrawn
breath.  And to Billy Goat, who sometimes sang in the choir of a church
not a hundred miles away--for people agreed to forget his occasional
sprees--there came, he knew not why, the words of a hymn he had sung only
the preceding Sunday:

              "As pants the hart for cooling streams,
               When heated in the chase--"

The words kept ringing in his ears as he listened to the conversation
inside the room--the partition was thin, the door thinner, and he heard
much.  Foyle had asked him not to intervene, but only to stand by and
await the issue of this final conference.  He meant, however, to take a
hand in, if he thought he was needed, and he kept his ear glued to the
door.  If he thought Foyle needed him--his fingers were on the handle of
the door.

"Now, hurry up!  What do you want with me?" asked Halbeck of his
brother.

"Take your time," said ex-Sergeant Foyle, as he drew the blind three-
quarters down, so that they could not be seen from the street.

"I'm in a hurry, I tell you.  I've got my plans.  I'm going South.  I've
only just time to catch the Canadian Pacific three days from now, riding
hard."

"You're not going South, Dorl."

"Where am I going, then?" was the sneering reply.  "Not farther than the
Happy Land."

"What the devil's all this?  You don't mean you're trying to arrest me
again, after letting me go?"

"You don't need to ask.  You're my prisoner.  You're my prisoner," he
said in a louder voice--" until you free yourself."

"I'll do that damn quick, then," said the other, his hand flying to his
hip.

"Sit down," was the sharp rejoinder, and a pistol was in his face before
he could draw his own weapon.  "Put your gun on the table," Foyle said
quietly.  Halbeck did so.  There was no other way.

Foyle drew it over to himself.  His brother made a motion to rise.

"Sit still, Dorl," came the warning voice.

White with rage, the freebooter sat still, his dissipated face and heavy
angry lips looking like a debauched and villainous caricature of his
brother before him.

"Yes, I suppose you'd have potted me, Dorl," said the ex-sergeant.

"You'd have thought no more of doing that than you did of killing Linley,
the ranchman; than you did of trying to ruin Jo Byndon, your wife's
sister, when she was sixteen years old, when she was caring for your
child--giving her life for the child you brought into the world."

"What in the name of hell--it's a lie!"

"Don't bluster.  I know the truth."

"Who told you-the truth?"

"She did--to-day--an hour ago."

"She here--out here?"  There was a new cowed note in the voice.

"She is in the next room."

"What did she come here for?"

"To make you do right by your own child.  I wonder what a jury of decent
men would think about a man who robbed his child for five years, and let
that child be fed and clothed and cared for by the girl he tried to
destroy, the girl he taught what sin there was in the world."

"She put you up to this.  She was always in love with you, and you know
it."

There was a dangerous look in Foyle's eyes, and his jaw set hard.  "There
would be no shame in a decent woman caring for me, even if it was true.
I haven't put myself outside the boundary as you have.  You're my
brother, but you're the worst scoundrel in the country--the worst
unhanged.  Put on the table there the letter in your pocket.  It holds
five hundred dollars belonging to your child.  There's twenty-five
hundred dollars more to be accounted for."

The other hesitated, then with an oath threw the letter on the table.
"I'll pay the rest as soon as I can, if you'll stop this damned
tomfoolery," he said sullenly, for he saw that he was in a hole.

"You'll pay it, I suppose, out of what you stole from the C.P.R.
contractor's chest.  No, I don't think that will do."

"You want me to go to prison, then?"

"I think not.  The truth would come out at the trial--the whole truth--
the murder, and all.  There's your child Bobby.  You've done him enough
wrong already.  Do you want him--but it doesn't matter whether you do or
not--do you want him to carry through life the fact that his father was a
jail-bird and a murderer, just as Jo Byndon carries the scar you made
when you threw her against the door?"

"What do you want with me, then?"  The man sank slowly and heavily back
into the chair.

"There is a way--have you never thought of it?  When you threatened
others as you did me, and life seemed such a little thing in others
--can't you think?"

Bewildered, the man looked around helplessly.  In the silence which
followed Foyle's words his brain was struggling to see a way out.
Foyle's further words seemed to come from a great distance.

"It's not too late to do the decent thing.  You'll never repent of all
you've done; you'll never do different."

The old reckless, irresponsible spirit revived in the man; he had both
courage and bravado, he was not hopeless yet of finding an escape from
the net.  He would not beg, he would struggle.

"I've lived as I meant to, and I'm not going to snivel or repent now.
It's all a rotten business, anyhow," he rejoined.

With a sudden resolution the ex-sergeant put his own pistol in his
pocket, then pushed Halbeck's pistol over towards him on the table.
Halbeck's eyes lighted eagerly, grew red with excitement, then a change
passed over them.  They now settled on the pistol, and stayed.  He heard
Foyle's voice.  "It's with you to do what you ought to do.  Of course you
can kill me.  My pistol's in my pocket.  But I don't think you will.
You've murdered one man.  You won't load your soul up with another.
Besides, if you kill me, you will never get away from Kowatin alive.
But it's with you--take your choice.  It's me or you."

Halbeck's fingers crept out and found the pistol.  "Do your duty, Dorl,"
said the ex-sergeant as he turned his back on his brother.

The door of the room opened, and Goatry stepped inside softly.  He had
work to do, if need be, and his face showed it.  Halbeck did not see him.

There was a demon in Halbeck's eyes, as his brother stood, his back
turned, taking his chances.  A large mirror hung on the wall opposite
Halbeck.  Goatry was watching Halbeck's face in the glass, and saw the
danger.  He measured his distance.

All at once Halbeck caught Goatry's face in the mirror.  The dark devilry
faded out of his eyes.  His lips moved in a whispered oath.  Every way
was blocked.

With a sudden wild resolution he raised the pistol to his head.  It
cracked, and he fell back heavily in the chair.  There was a red trickle
at the temple.

He had chosen the best way out.

"He had the pluck," said Goatry, as Foyle swung round with a face of
misery.

A moment afterward came a rush of people.  Goatry kept them back.

"Sergeant Foyle arrested Halbeck, and Halbeck's shot himself," Goatry
explained to them.

A white-faced girl with a scar on her temple made her way into the room.

"Come away-come away, Jo," said the voice of the man she loved; and he
did not let her see the lifeless figure in the chair.

Three days later the plains swallowed them, as they made their way with
Billy Goatry to the headquarters of the Riders of the Plains, where
Sergeant Foyle was asked to reconsider his resignation: which he did.






THE WHISPERER

     "And thou shalt be brought down and shalt speak out of the ground,
     and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be
     as of one that hath a familiar spirit out of the ground, and thy
     speech shall whisper out of the dust."

The harvest was all in, and, as far as eye could observe nothing remained
of the golden sea of wheat which had covered the wide prairie save the
yellow stubble, the bed of an ocean of wealth which had been gathered.
Here, the yellow level was broken by a dark patch of fallow land, there,
by a covert of trees also tinged with yellow, or deepening to crimson and
mauve--the harbinger of autumn.  The sun had not the insistent and
intensive strength of more southerly climes; it was buoyant, confident
and heartening, and it shone in a turquoise vault which covered and
endeared the wide, even world beneath.  Now and then a flock of wild
ducks whirred past, making for the marshes or the innumerable lakes that
vitalised the expanse, or buzzards hunched heavily along, frightened from
some far resort by eager sportsmen.

That was above; but beneath, on a level with the unlifted eye, were
houses here and there, looking in the vastness like dolls' habitations.
Many of the houses stood blank and staring in the expanse, but some had
trees, and others little oases of green.  Everywhere prosperity,
everywhere the strings of life pulled taut, signs that energy had been
straining on the leash.

Yet there was one spot where it seemed that deadness made encampment.
It could not be seen in the sweep of the eye, you must have travelled and
looked vigilantly to find it; but it was there--a lake shimmering in the
eager sun, washing against a reedy shore, a little river running into the
reedy lake at one end and out at, the other, a small, dilapidated house
half hid in a wood that stretched for half a mile or so upon a rising
ground.  In front of the house, not far from the lake, a man was lying
asleep upon the ground, a rough felt hat drawn over his eyes.

Like the house, the man seemed dilapidated also: a slovenly, ill-dressed,
demoralised figure he looked, even with his face covered.  He seemed in a
deep sleep.  Wild ducks settled on the lake not far from him with a swish
and flutter; a coyote ran past, veering as it saw the recumbent figure;
a prairie hen rustled by with a shrill cluck, but he seemed oblivious to
all.  If asleep, he was evidently dreaming, for now and then he started,
or his body twitched, and a muttering came from beneath the hat.

The battered house, the absence of barn or stable or garden, or any token
of thrift or energy, marked the man as an excrescence in this theatre of
hope and fruitful toil.  It all belonged to some degenerate land, some
exhausted civilisation, not to this field of vigour where life rang like
silver.

So the man lay for hour upon hour.  He slept as though he had been upon a
long journey in which the body was worn to helplessness.  Or was it that
sleep of the worn-out spirit which, tortured by remembrance and remorse,
at last sinks into the depths where the conscious vexes the unconscious
--a little of fire, a little of ice, and now and then the turn of the
screw?

The day marched nobly on towards evening, growing out of its blue and
silver into a pervasive golden gleam; the bare, greyish houses on the
prairie were transformed into miniature palaces of light.  Presently a
girl came out of the woods behind, looking at the neglected house with a
half-pitying curiosity.  She carried in one hand a fishing rod which had
been telescoped till it was no bigger than a cane; in the other she
carried a small fishing basket.  Her father's shooting and fishing camp
was a few miles away by a lake of greater size than this which she
approached.  She had tired of the gay company in camp, brought up for
sport from beyond the American border where she also belonged, and she
had come to explore the river running into this reedy lake.  She turned
from the house and came nearer to the lake, shaking her head, as though
compassionating the poor, folk who lived there.  She was beautiful.  Her
hair was brown, going to tawny, but in this soft light which enwrapped
her, she was in a sort of topaz flame.  As she came on, suddenly she
stopped as though transfixed.  She saw the man--and saw also a tragedy
afoot.

The man stirred violently in his sleep, cried out, and started up.  As he
did so, a snake, disturbed in its travel past him, suddenly raised itself
in anger.  Startled out of sleep by some inner torture, the man heard the
sinister rattle he knew so well, and gazed paralysed.

The girl had been but a few feet away when she first saw the man and his
angry foe.  An instant, then, with the instinct of the woods and the
plains, and the courage that has habitation everywhere, dropping her
basket she sprang forward noiselessly.  The short, telescoped fishing rod
she carried swung round her head and completed its next half-circle at
the head of the reptile, even as it was about to strike.  The blow was
sure, and with half-severed head the snake fell dead upon the ground
beside the man.

He was like one who has been projected from one world to another, dazed,
stricken, fearful.  Presently the look of agonised dismay gave way to
such an expression of relief as might come upon the face of a reprieved
victim about to be given to the fire, or to the knife that flays.  The
place of dreams from which he had emerged was like hell, and this was
some world of peace that he had not known these many years.  Always one
had been at his elbow--"a familiar spirit out of the ground"--whispering
in his ear.  He had been down in the abysses of life.

He glanced again at the girl, and realised what she had done: she had
saved his life.  Whether it had been worth saving was another question;
but he had been near to the brink, had looked in, and the animal in him
had shrunk back from the precipice in a confused agony of fear.  He
staggered to his feet.

"Where do you come from?" he said, pulling his coat closer to hide the
ragged waistcoat underneath, and adjusting his worn and dirty hat--in his
youth he had been vain and ambitious and good-looking also.

He asked his question in no impertinent tone, but in the low voice of one
who "shall whisper out of the dust."  He had not yet recovered from the
first impression of his awakening, that the world in which he now stood
was not a real world.

She understood, and half in pity and half in conquered repugnance said:

"I come from a camp beyond"--she indicated the direction by a gesture.
"I had been fishing"--she took up the basket--"and chanced on you--then."
She glanced at the snake significantly.

"You killed it in the nick of time," he said, in a voice that still spoke
of the ground, but with a note of half-shamed gratitude.  "I want to
thank you," he added.  "You were brave.  It would have turned on you if
you had missed.  I know them.  I've killed five."  He spoke very slowly,
huskily.

"Well, you are safe--that is the chief thing," she rejoined, making as
though to depart.  But presently she turned back.  "Why are you so
dreadfully poor--and everything?" she asked gently.

His eye wandered over the lake and back again before he answered her, in
a dull, heavy tone: "I've had bad luck, and, when you get down, there are
plenty to kick you farther."

"You weren't always poor as you are now--I mean long ago, when you were
young."

"I'm not so old," he rejoined sluggishly--"only thirty-four."

She could not suppress her astonishment.  She looked at the hair already
grey, the hard, pinched face, the lustreless eyes.

"Yet it must seem long to you," she said with meaning.  Now he laughed
--a laugh sodden and mirthless.  He was thinking of his boyhood.
Everything, save one or two spots all fire or all darkness, was dim
in his debilitated mind.

"Too far to go back," he said, with a gleam of the intelligence which had
been strong in him once.

She caught the gleam.  She had wisdom beyond her years.  It was the
greater because her mother was dead, and she had had so much wealth to
dispense, for her father was rich beyond counting, and she controlled his
household, and helped to regulate his charities.  She saw that he was not
of the labouring classes, that he had known better days; his speech, if
abrupt and cheerless, was grammatical.

"If you cannot go back, you can go forwards," she said firmly.  "Why
should you be the only man in this beautiful land who lives like this,
who is idle when there is so much to do, who sleeps in the daytime when
there is so much time to sleep at night?"

A faint flush came on the greyish, colourless face.  "I don't sleep at
night," he returned moodily.

"Why don't you sleep?" she asked.

He did not answer, but stirred the body of the snake with his foot.  The
tail moved; he stamped upon the head with almost frenzied violence, out
of keeping with his sluggishness.

She turned away, yet looked back once more--she felt tragedy around her.
"It is never too late to mend," she said, and moved on, but stopped; for
a young man came running from the woods towards her.

"I've had a hunt--such a hunt for you," the young man said eagerly, then
stopped short when he saw to whom she had been talking.  A look of
disgust came upon his face as he drew her away, his hand on her arm.

"In Heaven's name, why did you talk to that man?" he said.  "You ought
not to have trusted yourself near him."

"What has he done?" she asked.  "Is he so bad?"

"I've heard about him.  I inquired the other day.  He was once in a
better position as a ranchman--ten years ago; but he came into some money
one day, and he changed at once.  He never had a good character; even
before he got his money he used to gamble, and was getting a bad name.
Afterwards he began drinking, and he took to gambling harder than ever.
Presently his money all went and he had to work; but his bad habits had
fastened on him, and now he lives from hand to mouth, sometimes working
for a month, sometimes idle for months.  There's something sinister about
him, there's some mystery; for poverty or drink even--and he doesn't
drink much now--couldn't make him what he is.  He doesn't seek company,
and he walks sometimes endless miles talking to himself, going as hard
as he can.  How did you come to speak to him, Grace?"

She told him all, with a curious abstraction in her voice, for she was
thinking of the man from a standpoint which her companion could not
realise.  She was also trying to verify something in her memory.  Ten
years ago, so her lover had just said, the poor wretch behind them had
been a different man; and there had shot into her mind the face of a
ranchman she had seen with her father, the railway king, one evening when
his "special" had stopped at a railway station on his tour through
Montana--ten years ago.  Why did the face of the ranchman which had fixed
itself on her memory then, because he had come on the evening of her
birthday and had spoiled it for her, having taken her father away from
her for an hour--why did his face come to her now?  What had it to do
with the face of this outcast she had just left?

"What is his name?" she asked at last.

"Roger Lygon," he answered.

"Roger Lygon," she repeated mechanically.  Something in the man chained
her thought--his face that moment when her hand saved him and the awful
fear left him, and a glimmer of light came into his eyes.

But her lover beside her broke into song.  He was happy with her.
Everything was before him, her beauty, her wealth, herself.  He could not
dwell upon dismal things; his voice rang out on the sharp sweet evening
air:

         "'Oh, where did you get them, the bonny, bonny roses
          That blossom in your cheeks, and the morning in your eyes?'
          'I got them on the North Trail, the road that never closes,
          That widens to the seven gold gates of paradise.'
          'O come, let us camp in the North Trail together,
          With the night-fires lit and the tent-pegs down.'"

Left alone, the man by the reedy lake stood watching them until they were
out of view.  The song came back to him, echoing across the waters:

         "O come, let us camp on the North Trail together,
          With the night-fires lit and the tent-pegs down."

The sunset glow, the girl's presence, had given him a moment's illusion,
had absorbed him for a moment, acting on his deadened nature like a
narcotic at once soothing and stimulating.  As some wild animal in a
forgotten land, coming upon ruins of a vast civilisation, towers,
temples, and palaces, in the golden glow of an Eastern evening, stands
abashed and vaguely wondering, having neither reason to understand, nor
feeling to enjoy, yet is arrested and abashed, so he stood.  He had lived
the last three years so much alone, had been cut off so completely from
his kind--had lived so much alone.  Yet to-night, at last, he would not
be alone.

Some one was coming to-night, some one whom he had not seen for a long
time.  Letters had passed, the object of the visit had been defined, and
he had spent the intervening days since the last letter had arrived, now
agitated, now apathetic and sullen, now struggling with some invisible
being that kept whispering in his ear, saying to him, "It was the price
of fire, and blood, and shame.  You did it--you--you--you!  You are down,
and you will never get up.  You can only go lower still--fire, and blood,
and shame!"

Criminal as he was he had never become hardened, he had only become
degraded.  Crime was not his vocation.  He had no gift for it; still the
crime he had committed had never been discovered--the crime that he did
with others.  There were himself and Dupont and another.  Dupont was
coming to-night--Dupont who had profited by the crime, and had not spent
his profits, but had built upon them to further profit; for Dupont was
avaricious and prudent, and a born criminal.  Dupont had never had any
compunctions or remorse, had never lost a night's sleep because of what
they two had done, instigated thereto by the other, who had paid them so
well for the dark thing.

The other was Henderley, the financier.  He was worse perhaps than
Dupont, for he was in a different sphere of life, was rich beyond
counting, and had been early nurtured in quiet Christian surroundings.
The spirit of ambition, rivalry, and the methods of a degenerate and
cruel finance had seized him, mastered him; so that, under the cloak of
power--as a toreador hides the blade under the red cloth before his enemy
the toro--he held a sword of capital which did cruel and vicious things,
at last becoming criminal also.  Henderley had incited and paid; the
others, Dupont and Lygon, had acted and received.  Henderley had had no
remorse, none at any rate that weighed upon him; for he had got used to
ruining rivals, and seeing strong men go down, and those who had fought
him come to beg or borrow of him in the end.  He had seen more than one
commit suicide, and those they loved go down and farther down, and he had
helped these up a little, but not enough to put them near his own plane
again; and he could not see--it never occurred to him--that he had done
any evil to them.  Dupont thought upon his crimes now and then, and his
heart hardened, for he had no moral feeling; Henderley did not think at
all.  It was left to the man of the reedy lake to pay the penalty of
apprehension, to suffer the effects of crime upon a nature not naturally
criminal.

Again and again, how many hundreds of times, had Roger Lygon seen in his
sleep--had even seen awake so did hallucination possess him--the new
cattle trail he had fired for scores of miles.  The fire had destroyed
the grass over millions of acres, two houses had been burned and three
people had lost their lives; all to satisfy the savage desire of one man,
to destroy the chance of a cattle trade over a great section of country
for the railway which was to compete with his own--an act which, in the
end, was futile, failed of its purpose.  Dupont and Lygon had been paid
their price, and had disappeared, and been forgotten--they were but pawns
in his game--and there was no proof against Henderley.  Henderley had
forgotten.  Lygon wished to forget, but Dupont remembered, and meant now
to reap fresh profit by the remembrance.

Dupont was coming to-night, and the hatchet of crime was to be dug up
again.  So it had been planned.  As the shadows fell, Lygon roused
himself from his trance with a shiver.  It was not cold, but in him there
was a nervous agitation, making him cold from head to foot; his body
seemed as impoverished as his mind.  Looking with heavy-lidded eyes
across the prairie, he saw in the distance the barracks of the Riders of
the Plains and the jail near by, and his shuddering ceased.  There was
where he belonged, within four stone walls; yet here he was free to go
where he willed, to live as he willed, with no eye upon him.  With no eye
upon him?  There was no eye, but there was the Whisperer whom he could
never drive away.  Morning and night he heard the words, "You--you--you!
Fire, and blood, and shame!"  He had snatched sleep when he could find
it, after long, long hours of tramping over the plains, ostensibly to
shoot wild fowl, but in truth to bring on a great bodily fatigue--and
sleep.  His sleep only came then in the first watches of the night.  As
the night wore on the Whisperer began again, as the cloud of weariness
lifted a little from him, and the senses were released from the heavy
sedative of unnatural exertion.

                    .........................

The dusk deepened.  The moon slowly rose.  He cooked his scanty meal,
and took a deep draught from a horn of whiskey from beneath a board in
the flooring.  He had not the courage to face Dupont without it, nor yet
to forget what he must forget, if he was to do the work Dupont came to
arrange--he must forget the girl who had saved his life and the influence
of those strange moments in which she had spoken down to him, in the
abyss where he had been lying.

He sat in the doorway, a fire gleaming behind him; he drank in the good
air as though his lungs were thirsty for it, and saw the silver glitter
of the moon upon the water.  Not a breath of wind stirred, and the
shining path the moon made upon the reedy lake fascinated his eye.
Everything was so still except that whisper louder in his ear than it had
ever been before.

Suddenly, upon the silver path upon the lake there shot a silent canoe,
with a figure as silently paddling towards him.  He gazed for a moment
dismayed, and then got to his feet with a jerk.

"Dupont," he said mechanically.

The canoe swished among the reeds and rushes, scraped on the shore, and a
tall, burly figure sprang from it, and stood still, looking at the house.

"Qui reste la--Lygon?" he asked.

"Dupont," was the nervous, hesitating reply.  Dupont came forwards
quickly.  "Ah, ben, here we are again--so," he grunted cheerily.

Entering the house they sat before the fire, holding their hands to the
warmth from force of habit, though the night was not cold.

"Ben, you will do it to-night--then?" Dupont said.  "Sacre, it is time!"

"Do what?" rejoined the other heavily.

An angry light leapt into Dupont's eyes.  "You not unnerstan' my letters-
bah!  You know it all right, so queeck."

The other remained silent, staring into the fire with wide, searching
eyes.

Dupont put a hand on him.  "You ketch my idee queeck.  We mus' have more
money from that Henderley--certainlee.  It is ten years, and he t'ink it
is all right.  He t'ink we come no more becos' he give five t'ousan'
dollars to us each.  That was to do the t'ing, to fire the country.
Now we want another ten t'ousan' to us each, to forget we do it for him
--hein?"

Still there was no reply.  Dupont went on, watching the other furtively,
for he did not like this silence.  But he would not resent it till he was
sure there was good cause.

"It comes to suit us.  He is over there at the Old Man Lak', where you
can get at him easy, not like in the city where he lif'.  Over in the
States, he laugh mebbe, becos' he is at home, an' can buy off the law.
But here--it is Canadaw, an' they not care eef he have hunder' meellion
dollar.  He know that--sure.  Eef you say you not care a dam to go to
jail, so you can put him there, too, becos' you have not'ing, an' so dam
seeck of everyt'ing, he will t'ink ten t'ousan' dollar same as one cent
to Nic Dupont--ben sur!"

Lygon nodded his head, still holding his hands to the blaze.  With ten
thousand dollars he could get away into--into another world somewhere,
some world where he could forget; as he forgot for a moment this
afternoon when the girl said to him, "It is never too late to mend."

Now as he thought of her, he pulled his coat together, and arranged the
rough scarf at his neck involuntarily.  Ten thousand dollars--but ten
thousand dollars by blackmail, hush-money, the reward of fire, and blood,
and shame!  Was it to go on?  Was he to commit a new crime?

He stirred, as though to shake off the net that he felt twisting round
him, in the hands of the robust and powerful Dupont, on whom crime sat
so lightly, who had flourished while he, Lygon, had gone lower and lower.
Ten years ago he had been the better man, had taken the lead, was the
master, Dupont the obedient confederate, the tool.  Now, Dupont, once the
rough river-driver, grown prosperous in a large way for him--who might
yet be mayor of his town in Quebec--he held the rod of rule.  Lygon was
conscious that the fifty dollars sent him every New Year for five years
by Dupont had been sent with a purpose, and that he was now Dupont's
tool.  Debilitated, demoralised, how could he, even if he wished,
struggle against this powerful confederate, as powerful in will as in
body?  Yet if he had his own way he would not go to Henderley.  He had
lived with "a familiar spirit" so long, he feared the issue of this next
excursion into the fens of crime.

Dupont was on his feet now.  "He will be here only three days more--I haf
find it so.  To-night it mus' be done.  As we go I will tell you what to
say.  I will wait at the Forks, an' we will come back togedder.  His
cheque will do.  Eef he gif at all, the cheque is all right.  He will not
stop it.  Eef he haf the money, it is better--sacre--yes.  Eef he not
gif--well, I will tell you, there is the other railway man he try to
hurt, how would he like--But I will tell you on the river.  Main'enant--
queeck, we go."

Without a word Lygon took down another coat and put it on.  Doing so he
concealed a weapon quickly as Dupont stooped to pick a coal for his pipe
from the blaze.  Lygon had no fixed purpose in taking a weapon with him;
it was only a vague instinct of caution that moved him.

In the canoe on the river, in an almost speechless apathy, he heard
Dupont's voice giving him instructions.

                    .......................

Henderley, the financier, had just finished his game of whist and
dismissed his friends--it was equivalent to dismissal, rough yet genial
as he seemed to be, so did immense wealth and its accompanying power
affect his relations with those about him.  In everything he was
"considered."  He was in good humour, for he had won all the evening, and
with a smile he rubbed his hands among the notes--three thousand dollars
it was.  It was like a man with a pocket full of money, chuckling over a
coin he has found in the street.  Presently he heard a rustle of the
inner tent-curtain and swung round.  He faced the man from the reedy
lake.

Instinctively he glanced round for a weapon, mechanically his hands
firmly grasped the chair in front of him.

He had been in danger of his life many times, and he had no fear.  He had
been threatened with assassination more than once, and he had got used to
the idea of danger; life to him was only a game.

He kept his nerve; he did not call out; he looked his visitor in the
eyes.

"What are you doing here?  Who are you?" he said.

"Don't you know me?" answered Lygon, gazing intently at him.

Face to face with the man who had tempted him to crime, Lygon had a new
sense of boldness, a sudden feeling of reprisal, a rushing desire to put
the screw upon him.  At sight of this millionaire with the pile of notes
before him there vanished the sickening hesitation of the afternoon, of
the journey with Dupont.  The look of the robust, healthy financier was
like acid in a wound; it maddened him.

"You will know me better soon," Lygon added, his head twitching with
excitement.

Henderley recognised him now.  He gripped the armchair spasmodically,
but presently regained a complete composure.  He knew the game that was
forward here; and he also thought that if once he yielded to blackmail
there would never be an end to it.  He made no pretence, but came
straight to the point.

"You can do nothing; there is no proof," he said with firm assurance.

"There is Dupont," answered Lygon doggedly.

"Who is Dupont?"

"The French Canadian who helped me--I divided with him."

"You said the man who helped you died.  You wrote that to me.  I suppose
you are lying now."

Henderley coolly straightened the notes on the table, smoothing out the
wrinkles, arranging them according to their denominations with an
apparently interested eye; yet he was vigilantly watching the outcast
before him.  To yield to blackmail would be fatal; not to yield to it--
he could not see his way.  He had long ago forgotten the fire, and blood,
and shame.  No Whisperer reminded him of that black page in the history
of his life; he had been immune of conscience.  He could not understand
this man before him.  It was as bad a case of human degradation as ever
he had seen--he remembered the stalwart, if dissipated, ranchman who had
acted on his instigation.  He knew now that he had made a foolish blunder
then, that the scheme had been one of his failures; but he had never
looked on it as with eyes reproving crime.  As a hundred thoughts tending
towards the solution of the problem by which he was faced, flashed
through his mind, and he rejected them all, he repeated mechanically the
phrase, "I suppose you are lying now."

"Dupont is here--not a mile away," was the reply.  "He will give proof.
He would go to jail or to the gallows to put you there, if you do not
pay.  He is a devil--Dupont."

Still the great man could not see his way out.  He must temporise for a
little longer, for rashness might bring scandal or noise; and near by was
his daughter, the apple of his eye.

"What do you want?  How much did you figure you could get out of me,
if I let you bleed me?" he asked sneeringly and coolly.  "Come now, how
much?"

Lygon, in whom a blind hatred of the man still raged, was about to reply,
when he heard a voice calling, "Daddy, Daddy!"

Suddenly the red, half-insane light died down in Lygon's eyes.  He saw
the snake upon the ground by the reedy lake, the girl standing over it--
the girl with the tawny hair.  This was her voice.

Henderley had made a step towards a curtain opening into another room of
the great tent, but before he could reach it the curtain was pushed back,
and the girl entered with a smile.

"May I come in?" she said; then stood still astonished; seeing Lygon.

"Oh!" she exclaimed.  "Oh--you!"

All at once a look came into her face which stirred it as a flying insect
stirs the water of a pool.  On the instant she remembered that she had
seen the man before.

It was ten years ago in Montana on the night of her birthday.  Her father
had been called away to talk with this man, and she had seen him from the
steps of the "special."  It was only the caricature of the once strong,
erect ranchman that she saw, but there was no mistake, she recognised him
now.

Lygon, dumfounded, looked from her to her father, and he saw now in
Henderley's eyes a fear that was not to be misunderstood.

Here was where Henderley could be smitten, could be brought to his knees.
It was the vulnerable part of him.  Lygon could see that he was stunned.
The great financier was in his power.  He looked back again to the girl,
and her face was full of trouble.

A sharp suspicion was in her heart that somehow or other her father was
responsible for this man's degradation and ruin.  She looked Lygon in the
eyes.

"Did you want to see me?" she asked.

She scarcely knew why she said it; but she was sensible of trouble, maybe
of tragedy, somewhere; and she had a vague dread of she knew not what,
for hide it, avoid it, as she had done so often, there was in her heart
an unhappy doubt concerning her father.

A great change had come over Lygon.  Her presence had altered him.  He
was again where she had left him in the afternoon.

He heard her say to her father, "This was the man I told you of--at the
reedy lake.  Did you come to see me?" she repeated.

"I did not know you were here," he answered.  "I came"--he was conscious
of Henderley's staring eyes fixed upon him helplessly--"I came to ask
your father if he would not buy my shack.  There is good shooting at the
lake; the ducks come plenty, sometimes.  I want to get away, to start
again somewhere.  I've been a failure.  I want to get away, right away
south.  If he would buy it I could start again.  I've had no luck."  He
had invented it on the moment, but the girl understood better than Lygon
or Henderley could have dreamed.  She had seen the change pass over
Lygon.  Henderley had a hand on himself again, and the startled look went
out of his eyes.

"What do you want for your shack and the lake?" he asked with restored
confidence.  The fellow no doubt was grateful that his daughter had saved
his life, he thought.

"Five hundred dollars," answered Lygon quickly.  Henderley would have
handed over all that lay on the table before him but that he thought it
better not to do so.  "I'll buy it," he said.  "You seem to have been hit
hard.  Here is the money.  Bring me the deed to-morrow--to-morrow."

"I'll not take the money till I give you the deed," said Lygon.  "It will
do to-morrow.  It's doing me a good turn.  I'll get away and start again
somewhere.  I've done no good up here.  Thank you, sir--thank you."
Before they realised it, the tent-curtain rose and fell, and he was gone
into the night.

The trouble was still deep in the girl's eyes as she kissed her father,
and he, with an overdone cheerfulness, wished her a good night.

The man of iron had been changed into a man of straw once at least in his
lifetime.

Lygon found Dupont at the Forks.

"Eh ben, it is all right--yes?" Dupont asked eagerly as Lygon joined
him.

"Yes, it is all right," answered Lygon.

With an exulting laugh and an obscene oath, Dupont pushed out the canoe,
and they got away into the moonlight.  No word was spoken for some
distance, but Dupont kept giving grunts of satisfaction.

"You got the ten t'ousan' each--in cash or cheque, eh?  The cheque or the
money-hein?"

"I've got nothing," answered Lygon.  Dupont dropped his paddle with a
curse.

"You got not'ing!  You said eet was all right," he growled.

"It is all right.  I got nothing.  I asked for nothing.  I have had
enough.  I have finished."

With a roar of rage Dupont sprang on him, and caught him by the throat as
the canoe swayed and dipped.  He was blind with fury.

Lygon tried with one hand for his knife, and got it, but the pressure on
his throat was growing terrible.  For minutes the struggle continued, for
Lygon was fighting with the desperation of one who makes his last awful
onset against fate and doom.

Dupont also had his knife at work.  At last it drank blood, but as he got
it home, he suddenly reeled blindly, lost his balance, and lurched into
the water with a groan.

Lygon, weapon in hand, and bleeding freely, waited for him to rise and
make for the canoe again.

Ten, twenty, fifty seconds passed.  Dupont did not rise.  A minute went
by, and still there was no stir, no sign.  Dupont would never rise again.
In his wild rage he had burst a blood vessel on the brain.

Lygon bound up his reeking wound as best he could.  He did--it calmly,
whispering to himself the while.

"I must do it.  I must get there if I can.  I will not be afraid to die
then," he muttered to himself.  Presently he grasped an oar and paddled
feebly.

A slight wind had risen, and, as he turned the boat in to face the Forks
again, it helped to carry the canoe to the landing-place.

Lygon dragged himself out.  He did not try to draw the canoe up, but
began this journey of a mile back to the tent he had left so recently.
First, step by step, leaning against trees, drawing himself forwards, a
journey as long to his determined mind as from youth to age.  Would it
never end?  It seemed a terrible climbing up the sides of a cliff, and,
as he struggled fainting on, all sorts of sounds were in his ears, but he
realised that the Whisperer was no longer there.  The sounds he heard did
not torture, they helped his stumbling feet.  They were like the murmur
of waters, like the sounds of the forest and soft, booming bells.  But
the bells were only the beatings of his heart-so loud, so swift.

He was on his knees now crawling on-on-on.  At last there came a light,
suddenly bursting on him from a tent, he was so near.  Then he called,
and called again, and fell forwards on his face.  But now he heard a
voice above him.  It was her voice.  He had blindly struggled on to die
near her, near where she was, she was so pitiful and good.

He had accomplished his journey, and her voice was speaking above him.
There were other voices, but it was only hers that he heard.

"God help him--oh, God help him!" she was saying.  He drew a long quiet
breath.  "I will sleep now," he said clearly.

He would hear the Whisperer no more.






AS DEEP AS THE SEA

"What can I do, Dan?  I'm broke, too.  My last dollar went to pay my last
debt to-day.  I've nothing but what I stand in.  I've got prospects, but
I can't discount prospects at the banks."  The speaker laughed bitterly.
"I've reaped and I'm sowing, the same as you, Dan."

The other made a nervous motion of protest.  "No; not the same as me,
Flood--not the same.  It's sink or swim with me, and if you can't help
me--oh, I'd take my gruel without whining, if it wasn't for Di!  It's
that knocks me over.  It's the shame to her.  Oh, what a cursed ass and
fool--and thief, I've been!"

"Thief-thief?"

Flood Rawley dropped the flaming match with which he was about to light a
cheroot, and stood staring, his dark-blue eyes growing wider, his worn,
handsome face becoming drawn, as swift conviction mastered him.  He felt
that the black words which had fallen from his friend's lips--from the
lips of Diana Welldon's brother--were the truth.  He looked at the plump
face, the full amiable eyes, now misty with fright, at the characterless
hand nervously feeling the golden moustache, at the well-fed, inert body;
and he knew that whatever the trouble or the peril, Dan Welldon could not
surmount it alone.

"What is it?" Rawley asked rather sharply, his fingers running through
his slightly grizzled, black hair, but not excitedly, for he wanted no
scenes; and if this thing could hurt Di Welldon, and action was
necessary, he must remain cool.  What she was to him, Heaven and he only
knew; what she had done for him, perhaps neither understood fully as yet.
"What is it--quick?" he added, and his words were like a sharp grip upon
Dan Welldon's shoulder.  "Racing--cards?"

Dan nodded.  "Yes, over at Askatoon; five hundred on Jibway, the
favourite--he fell at the last fence; five hundred at poker with Nick
Fison; and a thousand in land speculation at Edmonton, on margin.
Everything went wrong."

"And so you put your hand in the railway company's money-chest?"

"It seemed such a dead certainty--Jibway; and the Edmonton corner-blocks,
too.  I'd had luck with Nick before; but--well, there it is, Flood."

"They know--the railway people--Shaughnessy knows?"

"Yes, the president knows.  He's at Calgary now.  They telegraphed him,
and he wired to give me till midnight to pay up, or go to jail.  They're
watching me now.  I can't stir.  There's no escape, and there's no one I
can ask for help but you.  That's why I've come, Flood."

"Lord, what a fool!  Couldn't you see what the end would be, if your
plunging didn't come off?  You--you oughtn't to bet, or speculate, or
play cards, you're not clever enough.  You've got blind rashness, and so
you think you're bold.  And Di--oh, you idiot!  And on a salary of a
thousand dollars a year!"

"I suppose Di would help me; but I couldn't explain."  The weak face
puckered, a lifeless kind of tear gathered in the ox-like eyes.

"Yes, she probably would help you.  She'd probably give you all she's
saved to go to Europe with and study, saved from her pictures sold at
twenty per cent of their value; and she'd mortgage the little income
she's got to keep her brother out of jail.  Of course she would, and of
course you ought to be ashamed of yourself for thinking of it."  Rawley
lighted his cigar and smoked fiercely.

"It would be better for her than my going to jail," stubbornly replied
the other.  "But I don't want to tell her, or to ask her for money.
That's why I've come to you.  You needn't be so hard, Flood; you've not
been a saint; and Di knows it."

Rawley took the cheroot from his mouth, threw back his head, and laughed
mirthlessly, ironically.  Then suddenly he stopped and looked round the
room till his eyes rested on a portrait-drawing which hung on the wall
opposite the window, through which the sun poured.  It was the face of a
girl with beautiful bronzed hair, and full, fine, beautifully modelled
face, with brown eyes deep and brooding, which seemed to have time and
space behind them--not before them.  The lips were delicate and full, and
had the look suggesting a smile which the inward thought has stayed.  It
was like one of the Titian women--like a Titian that hangs on the wall of
the Gallery at Munich.  The head and neck, the whole personality, had an
air of distinction and destiny.  The drawing had been done by a wandering
duchess who had seen the girl sketching in the foothills, when on a visit
to that "Wild West" which has such power to refine and inspire minds not
superior to Nature.  Its replica was carried to a castle in Scotland.
It had been the gift of Diana Welldon on a certain day not long ago, when
Flood Rawley had made a pledge to her, which was as vital to him and to
his future as two thousand dollars were vital to Dan Welldon now.

"You've not been a saint, and Di knows it," repeated the weak brother of
a girl whose fame belonged to the West; whose name was a signal for
cheerful looks; whose buoyant humour and impartial friendliness gained
her innumerable friends; and whose talent, understood by few, gave her a
certain protection, lifting her a little away from the outwardly crude
and provincial life around her.

When Rawley spoke, it was with quiet deliberation, and even gentleness.
"I haven't been a saint, and she knows it, as you say, Dan; but the law
is on my side as yet, and it isn't on yours.  There's the difference."

"You used to gamble yourself; you were pretty tough, and you oughtn't to
walk up my back with hobnailed boots."

"Yes, I gambled, Dan, and I drank, and I raised a dust out here.  My
record was writ pretty big.  But I didn't lay my hands on the ark of the
social covenant, whose inscription is, Thou shalt not steal; and that's
why I'm poor but proud, and no one's watching for me round the corner,
same as you."

Welldon's half-defiant petulance disappeared.  "What's done can't be
undone."  Then, with a sudden burst of anguish: "Oh, get me out of this
somehow!"

"How?  I've got no money.  By speaking to your sister?"

The other was silent.

"Shall I do it?"  Rawley peered anxiously into the other's face, and he
knew that there was no real security against the shameful trouble being
laid bare to her.

"I want a chance to start straight again."

The voice was fluttered, almost whining; it carried no conviction; but
the words had in them a reminder of words that Rawley himself had said to
Diana Welldon but a few months ago, and a new spirit stirred in him.  He
stepped forwards and, gripping Dan's shoulder with a hand of steel, said
fiercely:

"No, Dan.  I'd rather take you to her in your coffin.  She's never known
you, never seen what most of us have seen, that all you have--or nearly
all--is your lovely looks, and what they call a kind heart.  There's only
you two in your family, and she's got to live with you--awhile, anyhow.
She couldn't stand this business.  She mustn't stand it.  She's had
enough to put up with in me; but at the worst she could pass me by on
the other side, and there would be an end.  It would have been said that
Flood Rawley had got his deserts.  It's different with you."  His voice
changed, softened.  "Dan, I made a pledge to her that I'd never play
cards again for money while I lived, and it wasn't a thing to take on
without some cogitation.  But I cogitated, and took it on, and started
life over again--me!  Began practising law again--barrister, solicitor,
notary public--at forty.  And at last I've got my chance in a big case
against the Canadian Pacific.  It'll make me or break me, Dan.  .  .  .
There, I wanted you to see where I stand with Di; and now I want you to
promise me that you'll not leave these rooms till I see you again.  I'll
get you clear; I'll save you, Dan."

"Flood!  Oh, my God, Flood!"  The voice was broken.

"You've got to stay here, and you're to remember not to get the funk,
even if I don't come before midnight.  I'll be here then, if I'm alive.
If you don't keep your word--but, there, you will."  Both hands gripped
the graceful shoulders of the miscreant like a vice.

"So help me, Flood," was the frightened, whispered reply, "I'll make it
up to you somehow, some day.  I'll pay you back."

Rawley caught up his cap from the table.  "Steady--steady.  Don't go at a
fence till you're sure of your seat, Dan," he said.  Then with a long
look at the portrait on the wall, and an exclamation which the other did
not hear, he left the room with a set, determined face.

                    ......................

"Who told you?  What brought you, Flood?" the girl asked, her chin in
her long, white hands, her head turned from the easel to him, a book in
her lap, the sun breaking through the leaves upon her hat, touching the
Titian hair with splendour.

"Fate brought me, and didn't tell me," he answered, with a whimsical
quirk of the mouth, and his trouble lurking behind the sea-deep eyes.

"Wouldn't you have come if you knew I was here?" she urged archly.

"Not for two thousand dollars," he answered, the look of trouble
deepening in his eyes, but his lips were smiling.  He had a quaint sense
of humour, and at his last gasp would have noted the ridiculous thing.
And surely it was a droll malignity of Fate to bring him here to her
whom, in this moment of all moments in his life, he wished far away.
Fate meant to try him to the uttermost.  This hurdle of trial was high
indeed.

"Two thousand dollars--nothing less?" she inquired gaily.  "You are too
specific for a real lover."

"Fate fixed the amount," he added drily.  "Fate--you talk so much of
Fate," she replied gravely, and her eyes looked into the distance.  "You
make me think of it too, and I don't want to do so.  I don't want to feel
helpless, to be the child of Accident and Destiny."

"Oh, you get the same thing in the 'fore-ordination' that old Minister
M'Gregor preaches every Sunday.  'Be elect or be damned,' he says to us
all.  Names aren't important; but, anyhow, it was Fate that led me here."

"Are you sure it wasn't me?" she asked softly.  "Are you sure I wasn't
calling you, and you had to come?"

"Well, it was en route, anyhow; and you are always calling, if I must
tell you," he laughed.  Suddenly he became grave.  "I hear you call me in
the night sometimes, and I start up and say 'Yes, Di!' out of my sleep.
It's a queer hallucination.  I've got you on the brain, certainly."

"It seems to vex you--certainly," she said, opening the book that lay in
her lap, "and your eyes trouble me to-day.  They've got a look that used
to be in them, Flood, before--before you promised; and another look I
don't understand and don't like.  I suppose it's always so.  The real
business of life is trying to understand each other."

"You have wonderful thoughts for one that's had so little chance," he
said.  "That's because you're a genius, I suppose.  Teaching can't give
that sort of thing--the insight."

"What is the matter, Flood?" she asked suddenly again, her breast
heaving, her delicate, rounded fingers interlacing.  "I heard a man say
once that you were 'as deep as the sea.'  He did not mean it kindly, but
I do.  You are in trouble, and I want to share it if I can.  Where were
you going when you came across me here?"

"To see old Busby, the quack-doctor up there," he answered, nodding
towards a shrubbed and wooded hillock behind them.

"Old Busby!" she rejoined in amazement.  "What do you want with him
--not medicine of that old quack, that dreadful man?"

"He cures people sometimes.  A good many out here owe him more than
they'll ever pay him."

"Is he as rich an old miser as they say?"

"He doesn't look rich, does he?" was the enigmatical answer.

"Does any one know his real history?  He didn't come from nowhere.  He
must have had friends once.  Some one must once have cared for him,
though he seems such a monster now."

"Yet he cures people sometimes," he rejoined abstractedly.  "Probably
there's some good underneath.  I'm going to try and see."

"What is it.  What is your business with him?  Won't you tell me?  Is it
so secret?"

"I want him to help me in a case I've got in hand.  A client of mine is
in trouble--you mustn't ask about it; and he can help, I think--I think
so."  He got to his feet.  "I must be going, Di," he added.  Suddenly a
flush swept over his face, and he reached out and took both her hands.
"Oh, you are a million times too good for me!" he said.  "But if all
goes well, I'll do my best to make you forget it."

"Wait--wait one moment," she answered.  "Before you go, I want you to
hear what I've been reading over and over to myself just now.  It is from
a book I got from Quebec, called 'When Time Shall Pass'.  It is a story
of two like you and me.  The man is writing to the woman, and it has
things that you have said to me--in a different way."

"No, I don't talk like a book, but I know a star in a dark night when I
see it," he answered, with a catch in his throat.

"Hush," she said, catching his hand in hers, as she read, while all
around them the sounds of summer--the distant clack of a reaper, the
crack of a whip, the locusts droning, the whir of a young partridge, the
squeak of a chipmunk--were tuned to the harmony of the moment and her
voice:

     "'Night and the sombre silence, oh, my love, and one star shining!
     First, warm, velvety sleep, and then this quick, quiet waking to
     your voice which seems to call me.  Is it--is it you that calls?
     Do you sometimes, even in your dreams, speak to me?  Far beneath
     unconsciousness is there the summons of your spirit to me?  .  .  .
     I like to think so.  I like to think that this thing which has come
     to us is deeper, greater than we are.  Sometimes day and night there
     flash before my eyes--my mind's eyes--pictures of you and me in
     places unfamiliar, landscapes never before seen, activities
     uncomprehended and unknown, bright, alluring glimpses of some second
     being, some possible, maybe never-to-be-realised future, alas!  Yet
     these swift-moving shutters of the soul, or imagination, or reality
     --who shall say which?-give me a joy never before felt in life.  If
     I am not a better man for this love of mine for you, I am more than
     I was, and shall be more than I am.  Much of my life in the past was
     mean and small, so much that I have said and done has been unworthy
     --my love for you is too sharp a light for my gross imperfections of
     the past!  Come what will, be what must, I stake my life, my heart,
     my soul on you--that beautiful, beloved face; those deep eyes in
     which my being is drowned; those lucid, perfect hands that have
     bound me to the mast of your destiny.  I cannot go back, I must go
     forwards: now I must keep on loving you or be shipwrecked.  I did
     not know that this was in me, this tide of love, this current of
     devotion.  Destiny plays me beyond my ken, beyond my dreams.
     "O Cithaeron!"  Turn from me now--or never, O my love!  Loose me
     from the mast, and let the storm and wave wash me out into the sea
     of your forgetfulness now--or never! .  .  .  But keep me, keep me,
     if your love is great enough, if I bring you any light or joy; for I
     am yours to my uttermost note of life.'"

"He knew--he knew!" Rawley said, catching her wrists in his hands and
drawing her to him.  "If I could write, that's what I should have said to
you, beautiful and beloved.  How mean and small and ugly my life was till
you made me over.  I was a bad lot."

"So much hung on one little promise," she said, and drew closer to him.
"You were never bad," she added; then, with an arm sweeping the universe,
"Oh, isn't it all good, and isn't it all worth living?"

His face lost its glow.  Over in the town her brother faced a ruined
life, and the girl beside him, a dark humiliation and a shame which would
poison her life hereafter, unless--his look turned to the little house
where the quack-doctor lived.  He loosed her hands.

"Now for Caliban," he said.

"I shall be Ariel and follow you-in my heart," she said.  "Be sure and
make him tell you the story of his life," she added with a laugh, as his
lips swept the hair behind her ears.

As he moved swiftly away, watching his long strides, she said proudly,
"As deep as the sea."

After a moment she added: "And he was once a gambler, until, until--"
she glanced at the open book, then with sweet mockery looked at her
hands--"until 'those lucid, perfect hands bound me to the mast of your
destiny.'  O vain Diana!  But they are rather beautiful," she added
softly, "and I am rather happy."  There was something like a gay little
chuckle in her throat.

"O vain Diana!" she repeated.

                    .......................

Rawley entered the door of the but on the hill without ceremony.  There
was no need for courtesy, and the work he had come to do could be easier
done without it.

Old Busby was crouched over a table, his mouth lapping milk from a full
bowl on the table.  He scarcely raised his head when Rawley entered--
through the open door he had seen his visitor coming.  He sipped on, his
straggling beard dripping.  There was silence for a time.

"What do you want?" he growled at last.

"Finish your swill, and then we can talk," said Rawley carelessly.  He
took a chair near the door, lighted a cheroot and smoked, watching the
old man, as he tipped the great bowl towards his face, as though it were
some wild animal feeding.  The clothes were patched and worn, the coat-
front was spattered with stains of all kinds, the hair and beard were
unkempt and long, giving him what would have been the look of a mangy
lion, but that the face had the expression of some beast less honourable.
The eyes, however, were malignantly intelligent, the hands, ill-cared
for, were long, well-shaped and capable, but of a hateful yellow colour
like the face.  And through all was a sense of power, dark and almost
mediaeval.  Secret, evilly wise and inhuman, he looked a being apart,
whom men might seek for help in dark purposes.

"What do you want--medicine?" he muttered at last, wiping his beard and
mouth with the palm of his hand, and the palm on his knees.

Rawley looked at the ominous-looking bottles on the shelves above the old
man's head; at the forceps, knives, and other surgical instruments on the
walls--they at least were bright and clean--and, taking the cheroot
slowly from his mouth, he said:

"Shin-plasters are what I want.  A friend of mine has caught his leg in a
trap."

The old man gave an evil chuckle at the joke, for a "shin-plaster" was a
money-note worth a quarter of a dollar.

"I've got some," he growled in reply, "but they cost twenty-five cents
each.  You can have them for your friend at the price."

"I want eight thousand of them from you.  He's hurt pretty bad," was the
dogged, dry answer.

The shaggy eyebrows of the quack drew together, and the eyes peered out
sharply through half-closed lids.  "There's plenty of wanting and not
much getting in this world," he rejoined, with a leer of contempt, and
spat on the floor, while yet the furtive watchfulness of the eyes
indicated a mind ill at ease.

Smoke came in placid puffs from the cheroot--Rawley was smoking very
hard, but with a judicial meditation, as it seemed.

"Yes, but if you want a thing so bad that, to get it, you'll face the
devil or the Beast of Revelations, it's likely to come to you."

"You call me a beast?"  The reddish-brown face grew black like that of a
Bedouin in his rage.

"I said the Beast of Revelations--don't you know the Scriptures?"

"I know that a fool is to be answered according to his folly," was the
hoarse reply, and the great head wagged to and fro in its smarting rage.

"Well, I'm doing my best; and perhaps when the folly is all out, we'll
come to the revelations of the Beast."  There was a silence, in which the
gross impostor shifted heavily in his seat, while a hand twitched across
the mouth, and then caught at the breast of the threadbare black coat
abstractedly.

Rawley leaned forward, one elbow on a knee, the cheroot in his fingers.
He spoke almost confidentially, as to some ignorant and misguided savage
--as he had talked to Indian chiefs in his time, when searching for the
truth regarding some crime:

"I've had a lot of revelations in my time.  A lawyer and a doctor always
do.  And though there are folks who say I'm no lawyer, as there are those
who say with greater truth that you're no doctor, speaking technically,
we've both had 'revelations.'  You've seen a lot that's seamy, and so
have I.  You're pretty seamy yourself.  In fact, you're as bad a man as
ever saved lives--and lost them.  You've had a long tether, and you've
swung on it--swung wide.  But you've had a lot of luck that you haven't
swung high, too."

He paused and flicked away the ash from his cheroot, while the figure
before him swayed animal-like from side to side, muttering.

"You've got brains, a great lot of brains of a kind--however you came by
them," Rawley continued; "and you've kept a lot of people in the West
from passing in their cheques before their time.  You've rooked 'em,
chiselled 'em out of a lot of cash, too.  There was old Lamson--fifteen
hundred for the goitre on his neck; and Mrs. Gilligan for the cancer--two
thousand, wasn't it?  Tincture of Lebanon leaves you called the medicine,
didn't you?  You must have made fifty thousand or so in the last ten
years."

"What I've made I'll keep," was the guttural answer, and the talon-like
fingers clawed the table.

"You've made people pay high for curing them, saving them sometimes; but
you haven't paid me high for saving you in the courts; and there's one
case that you haven't paid me for at all.  That was when the patient
died--and you didn't."

The face of the old man became mottled with a sudden fear, but he jerked
it forwards once or twice with an effort at self-control.  Presently he
steadied to the ordeal of suspense, while he kept saying to himself,
"What does he know--what--which?"

"Malpractice resulting in death--that was poor Jimmy Tearle; and
something else resulting in death--that was the switchman's wife.  And
the law is hard in the West where a woman's in the case--quick and hard.
Yes, you've swung wide on your tether; look out that you don't swing
high, old man."

"You can prove nothing; it's bluff;" came the reply in a tone of malice
and of fear.

"You forget.  I was your lawyer in Jimmy Tearle's case, and a letter's
been found written by the switchman's wife to her husband.  It reached me
the night he was killed by the avalanche.  It was handed over to me by
the post-office, as the lawyer acting for the relatives.  I've read it.
I've got it.  It gives you away."

"I wasn't alone."  Fear had now disappeared, and the old man was
fighting.

"No, you weren't alone; and if the switchman and the switchman's wife
weren't dead and out of it all; and if the other man that didn't matter
any more than you wasn't alive and hadn't a family that does matter,
I wouldn't be asking you peaceably for two thousand dollars as my fee for
getting you off two cases that might have sent you to prison for twenty
years, or, maybe, hung you to the nearest tree."

The heavy body pulled itself together, the hands clinched.  "Blackmail-
you think I'll stand it?"

"Yes, I think you will.  I want two thousand dollars to help a friend in
a hole, and I mean to have it, if you think your neck's worth it."

Teeth, wonderfully white, showed through the shaggy beard.  "If I had to
go to prison--or swing, as you say, do you think I'd go with my mouth
shut?  I'd not pay up alone.  The West would crack--holy Heaven, I know
enough to make it sick.  Go on and see!  I've got the West in my hand."
He opened and shut his fingers with a grimace of cruelty which shook
Rawley in spite of himself.

Rawley had trusted to the inspiration of the moment; he had had no
clearly defined plan; he had believed that he could frighten the old man,
and by force of will bend him to his purposes.  It had all been more
difficult than he had expected.  He kept cool, imperturbable, and
determined, however.  He knew that what the old quack said was true--the
West might shake with scandal concerning a few who, no doubt, in remorse
and secret fear, had more than paid the penalty of their offences.  But
he thought of Di Welldon and of her criminal brother, and every nerve,
every faculty was screwed to its utmost limit of endurance and capacity.

Suddenly the old man gave a new turn to the event.  He got up and,
rummaging in an old box, drew out a dice-box.  Rattling the dice, he
threw them out on the table before him, a strange, excited look crossing
his face.

"Play for it," he said in a harsh, croaking voice.  "Play for the two
thousand.  Win it if you can.  You want it bad.  I want to keep it bad.
It's nice to have; it makes a man feel warm--money does.  I'd sleep in
ten-dollar bills, I'd have my clothes made of them, if I could; I'd have
my house papered with them; I'd eat 'em.  Oh, I know, I know about you--
and her--Diana Welldon!  You've sworn off gambling, and you've kept your
pledge for near a year.  Well, it's twenty years since I gambled--twenty
years.  I gambled with these then."  He shook the dice in the box.  "I
gambled everything I had away--more than two thousand dollars, more than
two thousand dollars."  He laughed a raw, mirthless laugh.  "Well, you're
the greatest gambler in the West.  So was I-in the East.  It pulverised
me at last, when I'd nothing left--and drink, drink, drink.  I gave up
both one night and came out West.

"I started doctoring here.  I've got money, plenty of money--medicine,
mines, land got it for me.  I've been lucky.  Now you come to bluff me--
me!  You don't know old Busby."  He spat on the floor.  "I'm not to be
bluffed.  I know too much.  Before they could lynch me I'd talk.  But to
play you, the greatest gambler in the West, for two thousand dollars--
yes, I'd like the sting of it again.  Twos, fours, double-sixes--the
gentleman's game!"  He rattled the dice and threw them with a flourish
out on the table, his evil face lighting up.  "Come!  You can't have
something for nothing," he growled.

As he spoke, a change came over Rawley's face.  It lost its cool
imperturbability, it grew paler, the veins on the fine forehead stood
out, a new, flaring light came into the eyes.  The old gambler's spirit
was alive.  But even as it rose, sweeping him into that area of fiery
abstraction where every nerve is strung to a fine tension, and the
surrounding world disappears, he saw the face of Diana Welldon, he
remembered her words to him not an hour before, and the issue of the
conflict, other considerations apart, was without doubt.  But there was
her brother and his certain fate, if the two thousand dollars were not
paid in by midnight.  He was desperate.  It was in reality for Diana's
sake.  He approached the table, and his old calm returned.

"I have no money to play with," he said quietly.  With a gasp of
satisfaction, the old man fumbled in the inside of his coat and drew out
layers of ten, fifty, and hundred-dollar bills.  It was lined with them.
He passed a pile over to Rawley--two thousand dollars.  He placed a
similar pile before himself.

As Rawley laid his hand on the bills, the thought rushed through his
mind, "You have it--keep it!" but he put it away from him.  With a
gentleman he might have done it, with this man before him, it was
impossible.  He must take his chances; and it was the only chance in
which he had hope now, unless he appealed for humanity's sake, for the
girl's sake, and told the real truth.  It might avail.  Well, that would
be the last resort.

"For small stakes?" said the grimy quack in a gloating voice.

Rawley nodded and then added, "We stop at eleven o'clock, unless I've
lost or won all before that."

"And stake what's left on the last throw?"

"Yes."

There was silence for a moment, in which Rawley seemed to grow older, and
a set look came to his mouth--a broken pledge, no matter what the cause,
brings heavy penalties to the honest mind.  He shut his eyes for an
instant, and, when he opened them, he saw that his fellow-gambler was
watching him with an enigmatical and furtive smile.  Did this Caliban
have some understanding of what was at stake in his heart and soul?

"Play!" Rawley said sharply, and was himself again.  For hour after hour
there was scarce a sound, save the rattle of the dice and an occasional
exclamation from the old man as he threw a double-six.  As dusk fell, the
door had been shut, and a lighted lantern was hung over their heads.

Fortune had fluctuated.  Once the old man's pile had diminished to two
notes, then the luck had changed and his pile grew larger; then fell
again; but, as the hands of the clock on the wall above the blue medicine
bottles reached a quarter to eleven, it increased steadily throw after
throw.

Now the player's fever was in Rawley's eyes.  His face was deadly pale,
but his hand threw steadily, calmly, almost negligently, as it might
seem.  All at once, at eight minutes to eleven, the luck turned in his
favour, and his pile mounted again.  Time after time he dropped double-
sixes.  It was almost uncanny.  He seemed to see the dice in the box, and
his hand threw them out with the precision of a machine.  Long afterwards
he had this vivid illusion that he could see the dice in the box.  As the
clock was about to strike eleven he had before him three thousand eight
hundred dollars.  It was his throw.

"Two hundred," he said in a whisper, and threw.  He won.

With a gasp of relief, he got to his feet, the money in his hand.  He
stepped backward from the table, then staggered, and a faintness passed
over him.  He had sat so long without moving that his legs bent under
him.  There was a pail of water with a dipper in it on a bench.  He
caught up a dipperful of water, drank it empty, and let it fall in the
pail again with a clatter.

"Dan," he said abstractedly, "Dan, you're all safe now."

Then he seemed to wake, as from a dream, and looked at the man at the
table.  Busby was leaning on it with both hands, and staring at Rawley
like some animal jaded and beaten from pursuit.  Rawley walked back to
the table and laid down two thousand dollars.

"I only wanted two thousand," he said, and put the other two thousand in
his pocket.

The evil eyes gloated, the long fingers clutched the pile, and swept it
into a great inside pocket.  Then the shaggy head bent forwards.

"You said it was for Dan," he said--"Dan Welldon?"

Rawley hesitated.  "What is that to you?" he replied at last.

With a sudden impulse the old impostor lurched round, opened a box, drew
out a roll, and threw it on the table.

"It's got to be known sometime," he said, "and you'll be my lawyer when
I'm put into the ground--you're clever.  They call me a quack.
Malpractice--bah!  There's my diploma--James Clifton Welldon.  Right
enough, isn't it?"

Rawley was petrified.  He knew the forgotten story of James Clifton
Welldon, the specialist, turned gambler, who had almost ruined his own
brother--the father of Dan and Diana--at cards and dice, and had then
ruined himself and disappeared.  Here, where his brother had died, he had
come years ago, and practised medicine as a quack.

"Oh, there's plenty of proof, if it's wanted!" he said.  "I've got it
here."  He tapped the box behind him.  "Why did I do it?  Because it's my
way.  And you're going to marry my niece, and 'll have it all some day.
But not till I've finished with it--not unless you win it from me at dice
or cards.  .  .  .  But no"--something human came into the old,
degenerate face--"no more gambling for the man that's to marry Diana.
There's a wonder and a beauty!"  He chuckled to himself.  "She'll be rich
when I've done with it.  You're a lucky man--ay, you're lucky."

Rawley was about to tell the old man what the two thousand dollars was
for, but a fresh wave of repugnance passed over him, and, hastily
drinking another dipperful of water, he opened the door.  He looked back.
The old man was crouching forward, lapping milk from the great bowl, his
beard dripping.  In disgust he swung round again.  The fresh, clear air
caught his face.

With a gasp of relief he stepped out into the night, closing the door
behind him.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Don't go at a fence till you're sure of your seat
The real business of life is trying to understand each other
You've got blind rashness, and so you think you're bold






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "NORTHERN LIGHTS":

Babbling covers a lot of secrets
Being a man of very few ideas, he cherished those he had
Beneath it all there was a little touch of ridicule
Don't go at a fence till you're sure of your seat
Even bad company's better than no company at all
Future of those who will not see, because to see is to suffer
I like when I like, and I like a lot when I like
I don't think.  I'm old enough to know
It ain't for us to say what we're goin' to be, not always
Knew when to shut his eyes, and when to keep them open
Nothing so popular for the moment as the fall of a favourite
Self-will, self-pride, and self-righteousness were big in him
That he will find the room empty where I am not
The temerity and nonchalance of despair
The real business of life is trying to understand each other
Things in life git stronger than we are
Tyranny of the little man, given a power
We don't live in months and years, but just in minutes
What'll be the differ a hundred years from now
You've got blind rashness, and so you think you're bold






Extensive proofreading done by Andrew Sly

MRS. FALCHION

By Gilbert Parker



INTRODUCTION

This novel was written in the days of the three-decker, and it went out
to sea as such.  Every novel of mine written until 1893 was published in
two or three volumes, and the sale to the libraries was greater than the
sale to the general public.  This book was begun in 1892 at the time when
the Pierre stories were being written, and it was finished in the summer
of 1893.  It did not appear serially; indeed, I made no attempt at serial
publication.  I had a feeling that as it was to be my first novel, it
should be judged as a whole and taken at a gasp, as it were.  I believe
that the reader of Messrs. Methuen & Company was not disposed to publish
the book, but Mr. Methuen himself (or Mr. Stedman as he was then called)
was impressed by it and gave it his friendly confidence.  He was certain
that it would arrest the attention of the critics and of the public,
whether it became popular or not.  I have not a set of those original
three volumes.  I wish I had, because they won for me an almost unhoped-
for pleasure.  The 'Daily Chronicle' gave the volumes over a column of
review, and headed the notice, "A Coming Novelist."  The 'Athenaeum' said
that 'Mrs. Falchion' was a splendid study of character; 'The Pall Mall
Gazette' said that the writing was as good as anything that had been done
in our time, while at the same time it took rather a dark view of my
future as a novelist, because it said I had not probed deep enough into
the wounds of character which I had inflicted.  The article was written
by Mr. George W. Stevens, and he was right in saying that I had not
probed deep enough.  Few very young men--and I was very young then--do
probe very deeply.  At the appearance of 'When Valmond Came to Pontiac',
however, Mr. Stevens came to the conclusion that my future was assured.

I mention these things because they were burnt into my mind at the time.
'Mrs. Falchion' was my first real novel, as I have said, though it had
been preceded by a short novel called 'The Chief Factor', since rescued
from publication and never published in book form in England.  I realised
when I had written 'Mrs. Falchion' that I had not found my metier, and I
was fearful of complete failure.  I had come but a few years before from
the South Seas; I was full of what I had seen and felt; I was eager to
write of it all, and I did write of it; but the thing which was deeper
still in me was the life which 'Pierre and His People', 'The Seats of the
Mighty', 'The Trail of the Sword', 'The Lane That Had no Turning', and
'The Right of Way' portrayed.  That life was destined to give me an
assured place and public, while 'Mrs. Falchion', and the South Sea
stories published in various journals before the time of its production,
and indeed anterior to the writing of the Pierre series, only assured me
attention.

Happily for the book, which has faults of construction, superficialities
as to incident, and with some crudity of plot, it was, in the main, a
study of character.  There was focus, there was illumination in the book,
to what degree I will not try to say; and the attempt to fasten the mind
of the reader upon the central figure, and to present that central figure
in many aspects, safeguarded the narrative from the charge of being a
mere novel of adventure, or, as one writer called it, "an impudent
melodrama, which has its own fascinations."

Reading Mrs. Falchion again after all these years, I seem to realise in
it an attempt to combine the objective and subjective methods of
treatment--to combine analysis of character and motive with arresting
episode.  It is a difficult thing to do, as I have found.  It was not
done on my part wholly by design, but rather by instinct, and I imagine
that this tendency has run through all my works.  It represents the
elements of romanticism and of realism in one, and that kind of
representation has its dangers, to say nothing of its difficulties.
It sometimes alienates the reader, who by instinct and preference is a
realist, and it troubles the reader who wants to read for a story alone,
who cares for what a character does, and not for what a character is or
says, except in so far as it emphasises what it does.  One has to work,
however, in one's own way, after one's own idiosyncrasies, and here is
the book that represents one of my own idiosyncrasies in its most
primitive form.



CONTENTS:

BOOK I

BELOW THE SUN LINE

I.        THE GATES OF THE SEA

II.       "MOTLEY IS YOUR ONLY WEAR"

III.      A TALE OF NO MAN'S SEA

IV.       THE TRAIL OF THE ISHMAELITE

V.        ACCUSING FACES

VI.       MUMMERS ALL

VII.      THE WHEEL COMES FULL CIRCLE

VIII.     A BRIDGE OF PERIL

IX.       "THE PROGRESS OF THE SUNS"

X.        BETWEEN DAY AND DARK




BOOK II

THE SLOPE OF THE PACIFIC

XI.       AMONG THE HILLS OF GOD

XII.      THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME

XIII.     THE SONG OF THE SAW

XIV.      THE PATH OF THE EAGLE

XV.       IN THE TROUGH OF THE WINDS

XVI.      A DUEL IN ARCADY

XVII.     RIDING THE REEFS

XVIII.    THE STRINGS OF DESTINY

XIX.      THE SENTENCE

XX.       AFTER THE STORM

XXI.      IN PORT




BOOK I

BELOW THE SUN LINE



CHAPTER I

THE GATES OF THE SEA

The part I played in Mrs. Falchion's career was not very noble, but I
shall set it forth plainly here, else I could not have the boldness to
write of her faults or those of others.  Of my own history little need be
said in preface.  Soon after graduating with honours as a physician, I
was offered a professional post in a college of medicine in Canada.  It
was difficult to establish a practice in medicine without some capital,
else I had remained in London; and, being in need of instant means, I
gladly accepted the offer.  But six months were to intervene before the
beginning of my duties--how to fill that time profitably was the
question.  I longed to travel, having scarcely been out of England during
my life.  Some one suggested the position of surgeon on one of the great
steamers running between England and Australia.  The idea of a long sea-
voyage was seductive, for I had been suffering from over-study, though
the position itself was not very distinguished.  But in those days I
cared more for pleasing myself than for what might become a newly-made
professor, and I was prepared to say with a renowned Irish dean: "Dignity
and I might be married, for all the relations we are."

I secured the position with humiliating ease and humiliating smallness
of pay.  The steamer's name was the 'Fulvia'.  It was one of the largest
belonging to the Occidental Company.  It carried no emigrants and had a
passenger list of fashionable folk.  On the voyage out to Australia the
weather was pleasant, save in the Bay of Biscay; there was no sickness
on board, and there were many opportunities for social gaiety, the
cultivation of pleasant acquaintances, and the encouragement of that
brisk idleness which aids to health.  This was really the first holiday
in my life, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.  Nothing of unusual interest
occurred on the outward voyage; for one thing, because there were no
unusual people among the passengers; for another, because the vessel
behaved admirably.  The same cannot be said of the return voyage: and
with it my story really begins.  Misfortune followed us out of Sydney
harbour.  We broke a crank-shaft between there and Port Phillip,
Melbourne; a fire in the hold occurred at Adelaide; and at Albany we
buried a passenger who had died of consumption one day out from King
George's Sound.  At Colombo, also, we had a misfortune, but it was of a
peculiar kind, and did not obtrude itself at once; it was found in an
addition to our passenger list.  I had spent a day in exploring Colombo--
visiting Arabi Pasha, inspecting Hindu temples, watching the jugglers and
snake-charmers, evading guides and the sellers of brummagem jewellery,
and idling in the Cinnamon Gardens.  I returned to the ship tired out.
After I had done some official duties, I sauntered to the gangway, and,
leaning against the bulwarks, idly watched the passengers come on board
from the tender.  Two of these made an impression on me.  One was a
handsome and fashionably-dressed woman, who was followed by a maid or
companion (as I fancied), carrying parcels; the other, a shabbily-dressed
man, who was the last to come up from the tender.  The woman was going
down the companion-way when he stepped on deck with a single bag in his
hand, and I noticed that he watched her with a strange look in his eyes.
He stood still as he gazed, and remained so for a moment after she had
gone; then he seemed to recover himself, and started, as I thought,
almost guiltily, when he saw that my attention was attracted.  He
nervously shifted his bag from one hand to the other, and looked round
as though not certain of where he should go.  A steward came to him
officiously, and patronisingly too,--which is the bearing of servants to
shabbily-dressed people,--but he shook his head, caught his bag smartly
away from the steward's fingers, and moved towards the after part of the
ship, reserved for intermediate passengers.  As he went he hesitated,
came to the side of the vessel, looked down at the tender for a moment,
cast his eyes to where the anchor was being weighed, made as if he would
go back to the tender, then, seeing that the ladder was now drawn up,
sighed, and passed on to the second-class companion-way, through which he
disappeared.

I stood commenting idly to myself upon this incident, which, slight
though it was, appeared to have significance of a kind, when Hungerford,
the fifth officer, caught me slyly by the arm and said, "Lucky fellow!
Nothing to do but watch the world go by.  I wish I had you in the North
Atlantic on a whaler, or in the No Man's Sea on a pearl-smack for a
matter of thirty days."

"What would come of that, Hungerford?" said I.

"An exchange of matter for mind, Marmion; muscle for meditation, physics
for philosophy."

"You do me too much honour; at present I've neither mind, meditation,
nor philosophy; I am simply vegetating."

"Which proves you to be demoralised.  I never saw a surgeon on a ship
who wasn't.  They began with mind--more or less--they ate the fruits of
indolence, got precious near being sinful as well as indolent, and ended
with cheap cynicism, with the old 'quid refert'--the thing Hamlet
plagiarised in his, 'But it is no matter.'"

"Isn't this an unusual occupation for you, Hungerford--this Swift-like
criticism?"

"Swift-like, is it?  You see, I've practised on many of your race,
Marmion, and I have it pat now.  You are all of two classes--those who
sicken in soul and leave after one trip, and those who make another trip
and are lost."

"Lost?  How?"

Hungerford pressed his fingers hard on my breastbone, looked at me
enigmatically from under his well-hung brows, and replied: "Brains put
out to seed, morals put out to vegetate--that's 'lost.'"

"What about fifth officers?"

"Fifth officers work like navvies, and haven't time for foolishness.
They've got to walk the bridge, and practise the boats, and be
responsible for luggage--and here I am talking to you like an infallible
undergraduate, while the lascars are in endless confusion with a half-
dozen pieces of baggage, and the first officer foams because I'm not
there to set them right.  I leave you to your dreams.  Good-bye."

Hungerford was younger than myself, but he knew the world, and I was
flattered by these uncommon remarks, because he talked to no one else
on the ship in the same way.  He never sought to make friends, had a
thorough contempt for social trifling, and shrugged his shoulders at the
"swagger" of some of the other officers.  I think he longed for a
different kind of sea-life, so accustomed had he been to adventurous and
hardy ways.  He had entered the Occidental service because he had fallen
in love with a pretty girl, and thought it his duty to become a
"regular," and thus have the chance of seeing her every three months in
London.  He had conceived a liking for me, reciprocated on my part; the
more so, because I knew that behind his blunt exterior there was a warm
and manly heart.  When he left me I went to my cabin and prepared for
dinner, laughing as I did so at his keen, uncompromising criticism, which
I knew was correct enough; for of all official posts that of a ship-
surgeon is least calculated to make a man take a pride in existence.
At its best, it is assisting in the movement of a panorama; at its worst,
worse than a vegetation.  Hungerford's solicitude for myself, however,
was misplaced, because this one voyage would end my career as ship-
surgeon, and, besides, I had not vegetated, but had been interested in
everything that had occurred, humdrum as it was.  With these thoughts,
I looked out of the port-hole, to see the shores of Colombo, Galle Face,
and Mount Lavinia fading in the distance, and heard seven bells--the time
for dinner.  When I took my seat at the table of which I was the head, my
steward handed to me a slip of paper, saying that the chief steward had
given a new passenger, a lady, the seat at my right hand, which had been
vacated at Colombo.  The name on the paper was "Mrs. Falchion."  The seat
was still empty, and I wondered if this was the beautiful passenger who
had attracted me and interested the Intermediate Passenger.  I was
selfish enough to wish so: and it was so.

We had finished the soup before she entered.  The chief steward, with
that anxious civility which beauty can inspire in even so great a
personage, conducted her to her seat beside me.  I confess that though I
was at once absorbed in this occurrence, I noticed also that some of the
ladies present smiled significantly when they saw at whose table Mrs.
Falchion was placed, and looked not a little ironically at the purser,
who, as it was known, always tried to get for his table the newest
addition to the passenger list--when it was a pretty woman.  I believe
that one or two rude people chaffed the chief steward about "favouring
the doctor"; but he had a habit of saying uncomfortable things in a
deferential way, and they did not pursue the subject.  Then they
commiserated the purser, who was an unpleasant little Jew of an envious
turn of mind; and he, as I was told, likened me to Sir John Falstaff.  I
was sensitive in those days, and this annoyed me, particularly that I had
had nothing to do with placing Mrs. Falchion at my table.  We are always
most sensitive when guilty concerning the spirit and not the letter.

One who has lived the cosmopolitan life of London should be quick at
detecting nationalities, but I found it difficult, even after I heard her
speak, to guess at Mrs. Falchion's native land.  There were good reasons
for this, as may be duly seen.  Her appearance in the saloon caused an
instant buzz of admiration and interest, of which she seemed oblivious.
If it was acting, it was good acting; if it was lack of self-
consciousness, it was remarkable.  As I soon came to know, it was the
latter--which, in such a woman, increased the remarkableness.  I was
inclined at first to venture the opinion that she was an actress; but I
discovered that she possessed the attracting power of an actress without
the calculated manner of one; her very lack of self-consciousness was
proof of this emancipation.

When she sat down, I immediately welcomed her by name to my table.
The only surprise she showed at my knowledge of her name and my self-
introduction was to lift her head slightly and look at me, as if
wondering whether I was likely to be an inquisitive and troublesome host;
and also, as I thought, to measure me according to her measure.  It was a
quick look, and the interest she showed was of a passive kind.  She asked
me as she might an old acquaintance--or a waiter--if the soup was good,
and what the fish was like; decided on my recommendation to wait for the
entrees; requested her next neighbour to pass the olives; in an
impersonal way began to talk about the disadvantages of life at sea;
regretted that all ship food tasted alike; wondered if the cook knew how
to make a Russian salad; and added that the menu was a national
compromise.

Now that she was close to me, I could see that her beauty was real and
notable.  Her features were regular, her eyes of a greyish violet, her
chin strong, yet not too strong--the chin of a singer; her hands had that
charming quiet certainty of movement possessed by so few; and her colour
was of the most delightful health.  In this delightful health, in her
bountiful yet perfect physical eloquence, her attractiveness, as it
seemed to me, chiefly lay.  For no one would ever have guessed her to
possess an emotional temperament.  All that was outer was fascinating,
all that was inner suggested coldness.  After experience assured me that
all who came to know her shared this estimate, even in those days when
every man on the ship was willing to be her slave.  She had a compelling
atmosphere, a possessive presence; and yet her mind at this time was
unemotional--like Octavia, the wife of Mark Antony, "of a cold
conversation."  She was striking and unusual in appearance, and yet well
within convention and "good form."  Her dress was simply and modestly
worn, and had little touches of grace and taste which, I understand, many
ladies on board sought to imitate, when they recovered from the first
feeling of envy.

She was an example of splendid life.  I cared to look at her as one would
dwell on the sleek beauty of a deer--as, indeed, I have many a time since
then, in India, watched a tigress asleep on her chain, claws hidden, wild
life latent but slumbering.  I could have staked my life that Mrs.
Falchion was insensible to love or passion, and unimpeachable in the
broad scheme of right and wrong; imperious in requiring homage, incapable
of giving it.  I noticed when she laughed, as she did once at table, that
her teeth were very white and small and square; and, like a schoolgirl,
she had a habit of clicking them together very lightly, but not
conspicuously, as if trying their quality.  This suggested, however,
something a little cruel.  Her appetite was very good.  She was coolly
anxious about the amusements; she asked me if I could get her a list of
the passengers, said that she was never sea-sick, and took a languid
interest in the ladies present.  Her glance at the men was keen at first,
then neutral.

Once again, during the meal, she slowly turned and flashed an inquiring
glance at me.  I caught her eyes.  She did not show the least
embarrassment, and asked me if the band insisted on playing every day.
Before she left the saloon, one could see that many present were talking
about her.  Even the grim old captain followed her with his eyes as she
went.  When she rose, I asked her if she was going on deck.  I did it
casually, as though it was her usual custom to appear there after dinner.
In like fashion she replied that her maid had some unpacking to do, she
had some things to superintend, and, when this was done, she intended to
spend a time on deck.  Then, with a peculiar smile, she passed out.

     [Note by Dr. Marmion appended to his MSS.:--"Many of the
     conversations and monologues in this history, not heard by myself
     when they occurred, were told to me afterwards, or got from the
     diaries and notes of the persons concerned.  Only a few are purely
     imaginary."]




CHAPTER II

"MOTLEY IS YOUR ONLY WEAR"

I went to my cabin, took a book, sat down, and began to smoke.  My
thoughts drifted from the book, and then occurred a strange, incongruous
thing.  It was a remembered incident.  It came like a vision as I was
lighting a fresh cigar:

A boy and a girl in a village chemist's shop; he with a boy's love for
her, she responding in terms, but not in fact.  He passed near her
carrying a measure of sulphuric acid.  She put out her hand suddenly and
playfully, as though to bar his way.  His foot slipped on the oily floor,
and the acid spilled on his hands and the skirt of her dress.  He turned
instantly and plunged his hands into a measure of alcohol standing near
before the acid had more than slightly scalded them.  She glanced at his
startled face; hers was without emotion.  She looked down, and said
petulantly: "You have spoiled my dress; I cannot go into the street."

The boy's clothes were burnt also.  He was poor, and to replace them must
be a trial to him; her father owned the shop, and was well-to-do.  Still,
he grieved most that she should be annoyed, though he saw her injustice.
But she turned away and left him.

Another scene then crossed the disc of smoke:

The boy and girl, now man and woman, standing alone in the chemist's
shop.  He had come out of the big working world, after travel in many
countries.  His fame had come with him.  She was to be married the next
day to a seller of purple and fine linen.  He was smiling a good-bye, and
there was nothing of the old past in the smile.  The flame now was in her
eyes, and she put out both her hands to stop him as he turned to go;
but his face was passionless.  "You have spoiled my heart," she said;
"I cannot go into the world so."

"It is too late; the measures are empty," he replied.

"I love you to-day, I will loathe you to-morrow," was the answer.

But he turned and left her, and she blindly stretched out her hands and
followed him into the darkness, weeping.

Was it the scent of the chemicals in my cabin, coupled with some
subterranean association of things, which brought these scenes vividly
before me at this moment?  What had they to do with Mrs. Falchion?

A time came when the occurrence appeared to me in the light of
prescience, but that was when I began to understand that all ideas, all
reason and philosophy, are the result of outer impression.  The primal
language of our minds is in the concrete.  Afterwards it becomes the
cypher, and even at its highest it is expressed by angles, lines, and
geometrical forms--substances and allusive shapes.  But now, as the scene
shifted by, I had involuntarily thrust forward my hands as did the girl
when she passed out into the night, and, in doing so, touched the curtain
of my cabin door swinging in towards me.  I recovered myself, and a man
timidly stepped inside, knocking as he did so.  It was the Intermediate
Passenger.  His face was pale; he looked ill.

Poor as his dress was, I saw that he had known the influences and
practised the graces of good society, though his manner was hesitating
and anxious now.  I knew at a glance that he was suffering from both
physical pain and mental worry.  Without a word, I took his wrist and
felt his pulse, and he said: "I thought I might venture to come--"

I motioned him not to speak.  I counted the irregular pulse-beats,
then listened to the action of his heart, with my ear to his breast.
There lay his physical trouble.  I poured out a dose of digitalis, and,
handing it to him, asked him to sit down.  As he sat and drank the
medicine, I rapidly studied him.  The chin was firm, and the eyes had a
dogged, persistent look that, when turned on you, saw not you, but
something beyond you.  The head was thrown slightly forward, the eyes
looking up at an angle.  This last action was habitual with him.  It gave
him a peculiar earnestness.  As I noted these peculiarities, my mind was
also with his case; I saw that his life was threatened.  Perhaps he
guessed what was going on in me, for he said in a low, cultured voice:
"The wheels will stop too long some time, and there will be no rebound;"
--referring to the irregular action of his heart.

"Perhaps that is true," I said; "yet it depends a good deal upon yourself
when it will be.  Men can die if they wish without committing suicide.
Look at the Maori, the Tongan, the Malay.  They can also prolong life
(not indefinitely, but in a case like yours considerably), if they
choose.  You can lengthen your days if you do not brood on fatal things
--fatal to you; if you do not worry yourself into the grave."

I knew that something of this was platitude, and that counsel to such a
man must be of a more possible cast, if it is to be followed.  I was
aware also that, in nine cases out of ten, worry is not a voluntary or
constitutional thing, but springs from some extraneous cause.

He smiled faintly, raised his head a little higher, and said:
"Yes, that's just it, I suppose; but then we do not order our own
constitutions; and I believe, Doctor, that you must kill a nerve before
it ceases to hurt.  One doesn't choose to worry, I think, any more than
one chooses to lay bare a nerve."  And then his eyes dropped, as if he
thought he had already said too much.

Again I studied him, repeating my definitions in my mind.  He was not a
drunkard; he might have had no vice, so free was his face from any sign
of dissipation or indulgence; but there was suffering, possibly the marks
of some endured shame.  The suffering and shadows showed the more because
his features were refined enough for a woman.  And altogether it struck
me that he was possessed by some one idea, which gave his looks a kind of
sorrowful eloquence, such as one sees on occasion in the face of a great
actor like Salvini, on the forehead of a devout Buddhist, or in the eyes
of a Jesuit missionary who martyrs himself in the wilds.

I felt at once for the man a sympathy, a brotherliness, the causes of
which I should be at a loss to trace.  Most people have this experience
at one time or another in their lives.  It is not a matter of sex; it may
be between an old man and a little child, a great man and a labourer, a
schoolgirl and an old native woman.  There is in such companionships less
self-interest than in any other.  As I have said, I thought that this man
had a trouble, and I wished to know it; not from curiosity,--though my
mind had a selfish, inquiring strain,--but because I hoped I might be
able to help him in some way.  I put my hand on his shoulder, and
replied: "You will never be better unless you get rid of your worry."

He drew in a sharp breath, and said: "I know that.  I am afraid I shall
never be better."

There was a silence in which we looked at each other steadily, and then
he added, with an intense but quiet misery: "Never--never!"

At that he moved his hand across his forehead wearily, rose, and turned
toward the door.  He swayed as he did so, and would have fallen, but I
caught him as he lost consciousness, and laid him on the cabin sofa.  I
chafed his hands, unloosed his collar, and opened the bosom of his shirt.
As the linen dropped away from his throat, a small portrait on ivory was
exposed on his breast.  I did not look closely at it then, but it struck
me that the woman's head in the portrait was familiar, though the
artistic work was not recent, and the fashion of the hair was of years
before.  When his eyes opened, and he felt his neck bare, he hurriedly
put up his hand and drew the collar close, and at the same time sent a
startled and inquiring look at me.  After a few moments I helped him to
his feet, and, thanking me more with a look than with words, he turned
towards the door again.

"Wait," I said, "until I give you some medicine, and then you shall take
my arm to your cabin."  With a motion of the hand, signifying the
uselessness of remedies, he sat down again.  As I handed him the phial, I
continued: "I know that it is none of my business, but you are suffering.
To help your body, your mind should be helped also.  Can't you tell me
your trouble?  Perhaps I should be able to serve you.  I would if I
could."

It may be that I spoke with a little feeling and an apparent honesty;
for his eyes searched mine in a kind of earnest bewilderment, as if this
could not be true--as if, indeed, life had gone so hard with him that he
had forgotten the way of kindness.  Then he stretched out his hand and
said brokenly: "I am grateful, believe me.  I cannot tell you just now,
but I will soon, perhaps."  His hand was upon the curtain of the door,
when my steward's voice was heard outside, calling my name.  The man
himself entered immediately, and said that Mrs. Falchion sent her
compliments, and would I come at once to see her companion, Miss Caron,
who had injured herself.

The Intermediate Passenger turned towards me a strange look; his lips
opened as if about to speak, but he said nothing.  At the instant there
came to my mind whom the picture on his breast resembled: it was Mrs.
Falchion.

I think he saw this new intelligence in my face, and a meaning smile took
the place of words, as he slowly left the cabin, mutely refusing
assistance.

I went to Mrs. Falchion's cabin, and met her outside the door.  She
looked displeased.  "Justine has hurt herself," she said.  "Please attend
to her; I am going on deck."

The unfeeling nature of this remark held me to the spot for a moment;
then I entered the cabin.  Justine Caron, a delicate but warm-faced girl
of little more than twenty, was sitting on the cabin sofa, her head
supported against the wall, and her hand wound in a handkerchief soaked
in blood.  Her dress and the floor were also stained.  I undid the
handkerchief and found an ugly wound in the palm of the hand.  I called
the steward, and sent him to my dispensary for some necessaries; then I
asked her how it happened.  At the moment I saw the cause--a broken
bottle lying on the floor.  "The ship rolled," she said.  "The bottle
fell from the shelf upon the marble washstand, and, breaking, from there
to the floor.  Madame caught at my arm to save herself from falling; but
I slipped, and was cut on the bottle--so."

As she ended there was a knock, but the curtain was not drawn, and Mrs.
Falchion's voice was heard.  "My dress is stained, Justine."

The half-fainting girl weakly replied: "I am very sorry, madame, indeed."

To this Mrs. Falchion rejoined: "When you have been attended to, you may
go to bed, Justine.  I shall not want you again to-night.  But I shall
change my dress.  It is so unpleasant; I hate blood.  I hope you will be
well in the morning."

To this Justine replied: "Ah, madame, I am sorry.  I could not help it;
but I shall be quite well in the morning, I am sure."  Then she added
quietly to me: "The poor madame!  She will not see suffering.  She hates
pain.  Sickness troubles her.  Shall I be able to use my hand very soon,
monsieur?"

There was a wistful look in her eyes, and guessing why it was there, I
said: "Yes, soon, I hope--in a few days, no doubt."

Her face lighted up, and she said: "Madame likes about her people who are
happy and well."  Then, as if she might have said too much, she hurriedly
added: "But she is very kind;" and, stooping down quickly, her face
whitening with the effort, she caught up the broken glass and threw it
through the port-hole into the sea.

A half-hour later I went on deck, and found Mrs. Falchion comfortably
seated in her deck-chair.  I brought a stool over, and sat down beside
her.  To this hour the quickness with which I got upon friendly terms
with her astonishes me.

"Justine is better?" she said, and her hand made a slight motion of
disgust.

"Yes.  She was not dangerously hurt, of course."

"Let us change the subject, please.  They are going to have a fancy-dress
ball on board, I believe, before we get to Aden.  How tiresome!  Isn't it
a little affectation on the part of the stage-struck committee?  Isn't
it--inconsequent?"

"That depends," I said vaguely, inviting a question.  She idled with a
book in her lap.

"On what?"

"On those who go, what costumes are worn, and how much beauty and art
appear."

"But the trouble!  Does it pay?  What return does one get?"

"If all admire, half are envious, some are jealous, and one is devoted--
isn't that enough?"  I think I was a fool that night.

"You seem to understand women," she said, with a puzzling and not quite
satisfactory smile.  "Yes, all that is something."

Though I was looking at the sea rather than at her, I saw again that
inquiring look in her eyes--such a measuring look as a recruiting
sergeant might give a victim of the Queen's shilling.

After a moment's pause she continued, I thought, abstractedly: "As what
should you go?"

I answered lightly and without premeditation, "As Caius Cassius.  Why
should you not appear as Portia?"

She lifted her eyebrows at me.

"As Portia?"

"As Portia, the wife of Brutus," I blundered on, at the same time
receiving her permission, by a nod, to light my cigar.

"The pious, love-sick wife of Brutus!"  This in a disdainful tone, and
the white teeth clicked softly together.

"Yes, a good disguise," I said banteringly, though I fancy somewhat
tentatively also, and certainly with a touch of rudeness.  I was thinking
at that moment of the Intermediate Passenger, and I was curious.

"And you think of going in the disguise of a gentleman?  Caius Cassius
was that, wasn't he?" she retorted in an ironical tone.

"I suppose he was, though he was punished once for rudeness," I replied
apologetically.

"Quite so," was the decisive reply.

I felt that she was perfectly cool, while I was a little confused, and
ashamed too, that I had attempted to be playfully satirical.  And so,
wondering what I should say next, I remarked in desperation: "Do you like
the sea?"

"I am never ill at sea," was her reply.  "But I do not really like it;
it is treacherous.  The land would satisfy me if--"  She paused.

"Yes, Mrs. Falchion--'if'?"

"If I did not wish to travel," she vaguely added, looking blandly at me.

"You have travelled much?" I ventured.

"A great deal;" and again I saw that scrutiny in her eyes.  It occurred
to me at the moment that she might think I possessed some previous
knowledge of her.

My mind became occupied again with the Intermediate Passenger and the
portrait that he wore at his neck.  I almost laughed to think of the
melodramatic turn which my first conversation with this woman might
chance to take.  I felt that I was dealing with one who was able to meet
cleverly any advance of mine, but I determined to lead the talk into as
deep waters as possible.

"I suppose, too, you are a good practical sailor--that is, you understand
seamanship, if you have travelled much?"  I do not know why I said that,
for it sounded foolish to me afterwards.

"Pretty well," she replied.  "I can manage a sail; I know the argot,
I could tell the shrouds from the bulwarks, and I've rowed a boat in
a choppy sea."

"It is not an accomplishment usual to your sex."

"It was ordinary enough where I spent the early part of my life," was the
idle reply; and she settled herself more comfortably in her chair.

"Yes?  May I ask where that was?" and as I said this, it occurred to me
that she was, perhaps, leading me on, instead of my leading her; to
betray me as to anything I knew about her.

"In the South Seas," she replied.  "My father was a British consul in the
Islands."

"You have not come from the Islands now, I suppose?"

"No," she said a little more softly; "it is years since I was in Samoa.
. . .  My father is buried there."

"You must have found it a romantic life in those half-barbaric places?"

She shifted in her chair.  "Romantic!"  Her tone conveyed a very slight
uneasiness and vagueness.  "I am afraid you must ask some one else about
that sort of thing.  I did not see much romance, but I saw plenty that
was half-barbaric."  Here she laughed slightly.

Just then I saw the lights of a vessel far off.  "See--a vessel!" I said;
and I watched the lights in silence, but thinking.  I saw that she too
was watching idly.

At length, as if continuing the conversation, I said: "Yes, I suppose
life must be somewhat adventurous and dangerous among savage people like
the Samoans, Tongans, and Fijians?"

"Indeed, then," she replied decisively, "you are not to suppose anything
of the kind.  The danger is not alone for the white people."

At this I appeared, as I really was, interested, and begged her to
explain what she meant.  She thought a moment, and then briefly, but
clearly, sketched the life of those islands, showing how, in spite of
missionary labour selfish and unselfish, the native became the victim of
civilisation, the prey of the white trader and beachcomber, who were
protected by men-of-war with convincing Nordenfeldt and Hotchkiss guns;
how the stalwart force of barbaric existence declined, and with it the
crude sense of justice, the practice of communism at its simplest and
purest, the valour of nationality.  These phrases are my own--the
substance, not the fashion, of her speech.

"You do not, then," I said, "believe wholly in the unselfishness of
missionaries, the fair dealing of traders, the perfect impartiality of
justice, as shown through steel-clad cruisers?"

"I have seen too much to be quite fair in judgment, I fear, even to men-
of-war's men;" and she paused, listening to a song which came from the
after-part of the ship.  The air was very still, and a few of the words
of the droll, plaintive ditty came to us.

Quartermaster Stone, as he passed us, hummed it, and some voices of the
first-class passengers near joined in the refrain:

               "Sing, hey, for a rover on the sea,
                    And the old world!"

Some days later I got all of the song from one of the intermediate
passengers, and the last verse of it I give here:

              "I'm a-sailing, I'm a-sailing on the sea,
                  To a harbour where the wind is still;
               Oh, my dearie, do you wait for me?
                  Oh, my dearie, do you love me still?
               Sing, hey, for a rover on the sea,
                    And the old world!"

I noticed that Mrs. Falchion's brow contracted as the song proceeded,
making a deep vertical line between the eyes, and that the fingers of the
hand nearest me closed on the chair-arm firmly.  The hand attracted me.
It was long, the fingers were shapely, but not markedly tapering, and
suggested firmness.  I remarked afterward, when I chanced to shake hands
with her, that her fingers enclosed one's hand; it was not a mere touch
or pressure, but an unemotional and possessive clasp.  I felt sure that
she had heard the song before, else it had not produced even this so
slight effect on her nerves.  I said: "It is a quaint song.  I suppose
you are familiar with it and all of its kind?"

"I fancy I have heard it somewhere," she answered in a cold voice.

I am aware that my next question was not justified by our very short
acquaintance; but this acquaintance had been singular from its beginning,
and it did not seem at that moment as it looks on paper; besides, I had
the Intermediate Passenger in my mind.  "Perhaps your husband is a naval
man?" I asked.

A faint flush passed over her face, and then, looking at me with a
neutral expression and some reserve of manner, she replied: "My husband
was not a naval man."

She said "was not."  That implied his death.

There was no trouble in her manner; I could detect no sign of excitement.
I turned to look at the lights of the approaching vessel, and there,
leaning against the railing that divided the two decks, was the
Intermediate Passenger.  He was looking at us intently.  A moment after
he disappeared.  Beyond doubt there was some intimate association between
these two.

My thoughts were, however, distracted by our vessel signalling the other.
Hungerford was passing just then, and I said: "Have you any idea what
vessel it is, Hungerford?"

"Yes, man-of-war 'Porcupine', bound for Aden, I think."

Mrs. Falchion at this laughed strangely, as she leaned forward looking,
and then, rising quickly, said: "I prefer to walk."

"May I accompany you?" I asked.

She inclined her head, and we joined the promenaders.  The band was
playing, and, for a ship-band, playing very well, the ballet music of
Delibes' 'Sylvia'.  The musicians had caught that unaccentuated and
sensuous swing of the melody which the soft, tropical atmosphere rendered
still more languorous.  With Mrs. Falchion's hand upon my arm, I felt a
sense of capitulation to the music and to her, uncanny in its suddenness.
At this distance of time it seems to me absurd.  I had once experienced
something of the same feeling with the hand of a young medical student,
who, skilled in thought-reading, discovered the number of a bank-note
that was in my mind.

This woman had an attractiveness compelling and delightful, at least in
its earlier application to me.  Both professionally and socially I have
been brought into contact with women of beauty and grace, but never one
who, like Mrs. Falchion, being beautiful, seemed so unconscious of the
fact, so indifferent to those about her, so untouched by another's
emotion, so lacking in sensitiveness of heart; and who still drew people
to her.  I am speaking now of the earlier portion of our acquaintance;
of her as she was up to this period in her life.

I was not alone in this opinion of her, for, as time went on, every
presentable man and woman on the boat was introduced to her; and if some
women criticised and some disliked her, all acknowledged her talent and
her imperial attraction.  Among the men her name was never spoken but
with reserve and respect, and her afternoon teas were like a little
court.  She had no compromising tenderness of manner for man or woman;
she ruled, yet was unapproachable through any avenues of sentiment.  She
had a quiet aplomb, which would be called 'sang-froid' in a man.

"Did you ever see a Spanish-Mexican woman dance?" she asked in one of
the pauses of the music.

"Never: never any good dancing, save what one gets at a London theatre."

"That is graceful," she said, "but not dancing.  You have heard of music
stirring the blood; of savage races--and others--working themselves up to
ecstatic fury?  Maybe you have seen the Dervishes, or the Fijians, or the
Australian aboriginals?  No?  Well, I have, and I have seen--which is so
much more--those Spanish-Mexican women dance.  Did you ever see anything
so thrilling, so splendid, that you felt you must possess it?"--She asked
me that with her hand upon my arm!--"Well, that is it.  I have felt that
way towards a horse which has won a great race, and to a woman who has
carried me with her through the fantastic drama of her dance, until she
stood at the climax, head thrown back, face glowing--a statue.  It is
grand to be eloquent like that, not in words, but in person."

In this was the key to her own nature.  Body and mind she was free
from ordinary morbidness, unless her dislike of all suffering was morbid.
With her this was a dislike of any shock to the senses.  She was selfish
at all points.

These conclusions were pursued at the expense of speech on my part.  At
first she did not appear to regard my silence.  She seemed to have
thoughts of her own; but she shook them off with a little firm motion of
the shoulders, and, with the assumption of a demureness of manner and an
airy petulance, said: "Well, amuse me."

"Amuse you?" was my reply.  "Delighted to do so if I can.  How?"

"Talk to me," was the quick response.

"Would that accomplish the purpose?"  This in a tone of mock protest.

"Please don't be foolish, Dr. Marmion.  I dislike having to explain.
Tell me things."

"About what?"

"Oh, about yourself--about people you have met, and all that; for I
suppose you have seen a good deal and lived a good deal."

"About hospital cases?" I said a little maliciously.

"No, please, no! I abhor everything that is sick and poor and miserable."

"Well," said I, at idle venture, "if not a hospital, what about a gaol?"

I felt the hand on my arm twitch slightly, and then her reply came.

"I said I hated everything that was wretched and wicked.  You are either
dense, or purposely irritating."

"Well, then, a college?"

"A college?  Yes, that sounds better.  But I do not wish descriptions
of being 'gated,' or 'sent down,' or 'ploughed,' and that kind of
commonplace.  I should prefer, unless your vanity leads you irresistibly
in that direction, something with mature life and amusement; or, at
least, life and incident, and good sport--if you do not dwell on the
horrors of killing."

On the instant there came to me the remembrance of Professor Valiant's
wife.  I think it was not what she wanted; but I had a purpose, and I
began:

"Every one at St. Luke's admired and respected Professor Valiant's wife,
she was so frank and cordial and prettily downright.  In our rooms we all
called her a good chap, and a dashed good chap when her husband happened
to be rustier than usual.  He was our professor in science.  It was the
general belief that he chose science for his life-work because it gave
unusual opportunities for torture.  He was believed to be a devoted
vivisectionist; he certainly had methods of cruelty, masterly in their
ingenuity.  He could make a whole class raw with punishment in a few
words; and many a scorching bit of Latin verse was written about his
hooked nose and fishy eye.

"But his highest talents in this direction were reserved for his wife.
His distorted idea of his own importance made him view her as a chattel,
an inferior being; the more so, I believe, because she brought him little
money when he married her.  She was too much the woman to pretend to
kneel to him, and because she would not be his slave, she had a hard time
of it.  He began by insisting that she should learn science, that she
might assist him in his experiments.  She knew that she had no taste for
it, that it was no part of her wifely duty, and she did what suited her
better--followed the hounds.  It was a picture to see her riding across
country.  She could take a fence with a sound hunter like a bird.  And so
it happened that, after a time, they went their own ways pretty well; he
ignoring her, neglecting her, deprecating her by manner, if not by
speech, and making her life more than uncomfortable.

"She was always kind to me.  I was the youngest chap in the college, and
was known as 'Marmy' by every one; and because I was fonder of science
than most other men in the different years, Valiant was more gracious to
me than the rest, though I did not like him.  One day, when I called,
I heard her say to him, not knowing that I was near: 'Whatever you feel,
or however you act towards me in private, I will have respect when others
are present.'

"It was the custom for the professors to invite each student to luncheon
or dinner once during term-time.  Being somewhat of a favourite of both
Professor and Mrs. Valiant however, I lunched with them often.  I need
hardly say that I should not have exceeded the regulation once had it not
been for Mrs. Valiant.  The last time I went is as clear in my memory as
if it were yesterday.  Valiant was more satirical and cold-blooded than
usual.  I noticed a kind of shining hardness in his wife's eyes, which
gave me a strange feeling; yet she was talkative and even gay, I thought,
while I more than once clinched my fist under the table, so much did I
want to pummel him; for I was a lover of hers, in a deferential, boyish
way.

"At last, knowing that she liked the hunt, I asked her if she was going
to the meet on the following Saturday, saying that I intended to follow,
having been offered a horse.  With a steely ring to her voice, and a
further brightening of the eyes, she said: 'You are a stout little
sportsman, Marmy.  Yes, I am going on Major Karney's big horse, Carbine.'

"Valiant looked up, half sneering, half doubtful, I thought, and
rejoined: 'Carbine is a valuable horse, and the fences are stiff in the
Garston country.'

"She smiled gravely, then, with her eyes fixed on her husband, said:
'Carbine is a perfect gentleman.  He will do what I ask him.  I have
ridden him.'

"'The devil you have!' he replied.

"'I am sure,' said I, as I hoped, bravely, and not a little
enthusiastically, 'that Carbine would take any fence you asked him.'

"'Or not, as the case might be.  Thank you, Marmy, for the compliment,'
she said.

"'A Triton among minnows,' remarked Valiant, not entirely under his
breath; 'horses obey, and students admire, and there is no end to her
greatness.'

"'There is an end to everything, Edward,' she remarked a shade sadly and
quietly.

"He turned to me and said: 'Science is a great study, Marmion, but it is
sardonic too; for you shall find that when you reduce even a Triton to
its original elements--'

"'Oh, please let me finish,' she interrupted softly.  'I know the lecture
so well.  It reads this way: "The place of generation must break to give
place to the generated; but the influence spreads out beyond the
fragments, and is greater thus than in the mass--neither matter nor mind
can be destroyed.  The earth was molten before it became cold rock and
quiet world."  There, you see, Marmy, that I am a fellow-student of
yours.'

"Valiant's eyes were ugly to watch; for she had quoted from a lecture of
his, delivered to us that week.  After an instant he said, with slow
maliciousness: 'Oh, ye gods, render me worthy of this Portia, and teach
her to do as Brutus's Portia did, ad eternum!'

"She shuddered a little, then said very graciously, and as if he had
meant nothing but kindness: 'Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks.'
I will leave you now to your cigarettes; and because I must go out soon,
and shall not, I fear, see you again this afternoon, good-bye, Marmy,
till Saturday--till Saturday.'  And she left us.

"I was white and trembling with anger.  He smiled coolly, and was
careful to choose me one of his best cigars, saying as he handed it:
'Conversation is a science, Marmion.  Study it; there is solid
satisfaction in it; it is the only art that brings instant pleasure.
Like the stage, it gets its immediate applause.'

"Well, Mrs. Valiant did ride Carbine on that Saturday.  Such a scene it
was!  I see it now--the mottled plump of hounds upon the scent, the
bright sun showing up the scarlet coats of the whips gloriously, the long
stride of the hunters, ears back and quarters down!  She rode Carbine,
and the fences WERE stiff--so stiff that I couldn't have taken half of
them.  Afterward I was not sorry that I couldn't; for she rode for a fall
that day on Carbine, her own horse, she had bought him of Major Karney a
few days before,--and I heard her last words as she lay beside him,
smiling through the dreadful whiteness of her lips.  'Goodbye, Marmy,'
she whispered.  'Carbine and I go together.  It is better so, in the full
cry and a big field.  Tell the men at Luke's that I hope they will pass
at the coming exams. . . .  I am going up--for my final--Marmy.--
I wonder--if I'll--pass.'  And then the words froze on her lips.

"It was persecution that did it--diabolical persecution and selfishness.
That was the worst day the college ever knew.  At the funeral, when the
provost read, 'For that it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our sister
out of the miseries of this sinful world,' Big Wallington, the wildest
chap among the grads, led off with a gulp in his throat, and we all
followed.  And that gold-spectacled sneak stood there, with a lying
white handkerchief at his eyes.

"I laid myself out to make the college too hot for him.  In a week I had
every man in the place with me, and things came to such a pass that all
of us must be sent down, or Valiant resign.  He resigned.  He found
another professorship; but the thing followed him, and he was obliged to
leave the country."

When I finished the story, Mrs. Falchion was silent for a time, then,
with a slight air of surprise, and in a quite critical way, she said:
"I should think you would act very well, if you used less emotion.  Mrs.
Valiant had a kind of courage, but she was foolish to die.  She should
have stayed and fought him--fought him every way, until she was his
master.  She could have done it; she was clever, I should think.
Still, if she had to die, it was better to go with a good horse that way.
I think I should prefer to go swiftly, suddenly, but without the horror
of blood and bruises, and that sort of thing. . . .  I should like to
meet Professor Valiant.  He was hard, but he was able too. . . .  But
haven't we had enough of horror?  I asked you to amuse me, and you have
merely interested me instead.  Oh!--"

This exclamation, I thought, was caused by the voice of the quartermaster
humming:

              "I'm a-sailing, I'm a-sailing on the sea,
                 To a harbour where the wind is still"--

Almost immediately she said: "I think I will go below."  Then, after a
slight pause: "This is a liberal acquaintance for one day, Dr. Marmion;
and, you know, we were not introduced."

"No, Mrs. Falchion, we were not introduced; but I am in some regards
your host, and I fear we should all be very silent if we waited for
regular introductions here.  The acquaintance gives me pleasure, but it
is not nearly so liberal as I hope it may become."

She did not answer, but smiled at me over her shoulder as she passed down
the staircase, and the next instant I could have bitten my tongue for
playing the cavalier as I had done; for showing, as I think I did, that
she had an influence over me--an influence peculiar to herself, and
difficult to account for when not in her presence.

I sat down, lit a cigar, and went over in my mind all that had been said
between us; all that had occurred in my cabin after dinner; every minute
since we left Colombo was laid bare to its minutest detail.  Lascars
slipped by me in the half-darkness, the voices of two lovers near
alternated with their expressive silences, and from the music saloon
there came the pretty strains of a minuet, played very deftly.  Under the
influence of this music my thoughts became less exact; they drifted.  My
eyes shifted to the lights of the 'Porcupine' in the distance, and from
them again to the figures passing and repassing me on the deck.  The
"All's well" of the look-out seemed to come from an endless distance; the
swish of water against the dividing hull of the 'Fulvia' sounded like a
call to silence from another world; the phosphorescence swimming through
the jarred waters added to the sensation of unreality and dreams.  These
dreams grew, till they were broken by a hand placed on my shoulder, and
I saw that one of the passengers, Clovelly, an English novelist, had
dropped out from the promenade to talk with me.  He saw my mood, however,
and said quietly: "Give me a light for my cigar, will you?  Then, astride
this stool, I'll help you to make inventory of the rest of them.
A pretty study; for, at our best, 'What fools we mortals be!'"

"'Motley is your only wear,'" was my reply; and for a full half-hour,
which, even for a man, is considerable, we spoke no word, but only nodded
when some one of the promenaders noticed us.  There was a bookmaker fresh
from the Melbourne races; an American, Colonel Ryder, whose eloquence had
carried him round the world; a stalwart squatter from Queensland;
a pretty widow, who had left her husband under the sods of Tasmania;
a brace of girls going to join their lovers and be married in England;
a few officers fleeing from India with their livers and their lives;
a family of four lanky lasses travelling "home" to school; a row of
affable ladies, who alternated between envy and gaiety and delight in,
and criticism of, their husbands; a couple of missionaries, preparing
to give us lectures on the infamous gods of the heathen,--gods which,
poor harmless little creatures! might be bought at a few annas a pint at
Aden or Colombo,--and on the Exodus and the Pharaohs--pleasures reserved
for the Red Sea; a commercial traveller, who arranged theatricals, and
cast himself for all the principal parts; a humorous and naive person who
industriously hinted at the opulence of his estates in Ireland; two
stately English ladies of title; a cheerful array of colonial knights and
judges off to Europe for a holiday; and many others, who made little
worlds unto themselves, called cliques by blunt people.

"To my mind, the most interesting persons on the ship," said Clovelly at
last, "are the bookmaker, Miss Treherne, and the lady with whom you have
just been talking--an exceptional type."

"An unusual woman, I fancy," was my reply.  "But which is Miss Treherne?
I am afraid I am not quite sure."

He described her and her father, with whom I had talked--a London Q.C.,
travelling for his health, a notable man with a taste for science, who
spent his idle hours in reading astronomy and the plays of Euripides.

"Why not include the father in the list of the most interesting persons?"
I questioned.

"Because I have met many men like him, but no one quite like his
daughter, or Mrs.--what is her name?"

"Mrs. Falchion."

"Or Mrs. Falchion or the bookmaker."

"What is there so uncommon about Miss Treherne?  She had not struck me as
being remarkable."

"No?  Well, of course, she is not striking after the fashion of Mrs.
Falchion.  But watch her, study her, and you will find her to be the
perfection of a type--the finest expression of a decorous convention, a
perfect product of social conservatism; unaffected, cheerful, sensitive,
composed, very talented, altogether companionable."

"Excuse me," I said, laughing, though I was impressed; "that sounds as if
you had been writing about her, and applying to her the novelist's system
of analysis, which makes an imperfect individual a perfect type.  Now,
frankly, are you speaking of Miss Treherne, or of some one of whom she is
the outline, as it were?"

Clovelly turned and looked at me steadily.  "When you consider a
patient," he said, "do you arrange a diagnosis of a type or of a person?
--And, by the way, 'type' is a priggish word."

"I consider the type in connection with the person."

"Exactly.  The person is the thing.  That clears up the matter of
business and art.  But now, as to Miss Treherne: I want to say that,
having been admitted to her acquaintance and that of her father, I have
thought of them only as friends, and not as 'characters' or 'copy.'"

"I beg your pardon, Clovelly," said I.  "I might have known."

"Now, to prove how magnanimous I am, I shall introduce you to Miss
Treherne, if you will let me.  You've met her father, I suppose?"
he added, and tossed his cigar overboard.

"Yes, I have talked with him.  He is a courteous and able man, I should
think."

We rose.  Presently he continued: "See, Miss Treherne is sitting there
with the Tasmanian widow--what is HER name?"

"Mrs. Callendar," I replied.  "Blackburn, the Queenslander, is joining
them."

"So much the better," he said.  "Come on."

As we passed the music saloon, we paused for an instant to look through
the port-hole at a pale-faced girl with big eyes and a wonderful bright
red dress, singing "The Angels' Serenade," while an excitable bear-leader
turned her music for her.  Near her stood a lanky girl who adored actors
and tenors, and lived in the hope of meeting some of those gentlemen of
the footlights, who plough their way so calmly through the hearts of
maidens fresh from school.

We drew back to go on towards Miss Treherne, when Hungerford touched me
on the arm, and said: "I want to see you for a little while, Marmion, if
Mr. Clovelly will excuse you."

I saw by Hungerford's face that he had something of importance to say,
and, linking my arm in his, I went with him to his cabin, which was near
those of the intermediate passengers.




CHAPTER III

A TALE OF NO MAN'S SEA

Inside the cabin Hungerford closed the door, gripped me by the arm, and
then handed me a cheroot, with the remark: "My pater gave them to me last
voyage home.  Have kept 'em in tea."  And then he added, with no
appearance of consecutiveness: "Hang the bally ship, anyhow!"

I shall not attempt to tone down the crudeness of Hungerford's language.
It contents me to think that the solidity of his character and his worth
will appear even through the crust of free-and-easy idioms, as they will
certainly be seen in his acts;--he was sound at heart and true as steel.

"What is the matter, Hungerford?" I asked lighting the cheroot.

"Everything's the matter.  Captain, with his nose in the air, and
trusting all round to his officers.  First officer, no good--never any
use since they poured the coal on him.  Purser, ought to be on a Chinese
junk.  Second, third, fourth officers, first-rate chaps, but so-so
sailors.  Doctor, frivolling with a lovely filly, pedigree not known.
Why, confound it! nobody takes this business seriously except the
captain, and he sits on a golden throne.  He doesn't know that in any
real danger this swagger craft would be filled with foolishness.
There isn't more than one good boat's crew on board--sailors, lascars,
stewards, and all.  As for the officers, if the surgeon would leave the
lovely ladies to themselves, he'd find cases worth treating, and duties
worth doing.  He should keep himself fit for shocks.  And he can take my
word for it--for I've been at sea since I was a kid, worse luck!--that a
man with anything to do on a ship ought to travel every day nose out for
shipwreck next day, and so on, port to port.  Ship-surgeons, as well as
all other officers, weren't ordained to follow after cambric skirts and
lace handkerchiefs at sea.  Believe me or not as you like, but, for a man
having work to do, woman, lovely woman, is rocks.  Now, I suppose you'll
think I'm insolent, for I'm younger than you are, Marmion, but you know
what a rough-and-tumble fellow I am, and you'll not mind."

"Well, Hungerford," I said, "to what does this lead?"

"To Number 116 Intermediate, for one thing.  It's letting off steam for
another.  I tell you, Marmion, these big ships are too big.  There are
those canvas boats.  They won't work; you can't get them together.
You couldn't launch one in an hour.  And as for the use of the others,
the lascars would melt like snow in any real danger.  There's about one
decent boat's crew on the ship, that's all.  There!  I've unburdened
myself; I feel better."

Presently he added, with a shake of the head: "See here: now-a-days we
trust too much to machinery and chance, and not enough to skill of hand
and brain stuff.  I'd like to show you some of the crews I've had in the
Pacific and the China Sea--but I'm at it again!  I'll now come, Marmion,
to the real reason why I brought you here. . . .  Number 116
Intermediate is under the weather; I found him fainting in the passage.
I helped him into his cabin.  He said he'd been to you to get medicine,
and you'd given him some.  Now, the strange part of the business is, I
know him.  He didn't remember me, however--perhaps because he didn't get
a good look at me.  Coincidence is a strange thing.  I can point to a
dozen in my short life, every one as remarkable, if not as startling, as
this.  Here, I'll spin you a yarn:

"It happened four years ago.  I had no moustache then, was fat like a
whale, and first mate on the 'Dancing Kate', a pearler in the Indian Ocean,
between Java and Australia.  That was sailing, mind you--real seamanship,
no bally nonsense; a fight every weather, interesting all round.  If it
wasn't a deadly calm, it was a typhoon; if it wasn't either, it was want
of food and water.  I've seen us with pearls on board worth a thousand
quid, and not a drop of water nor three square meals in the caboose.  But
that was life for men and not Miss Nancys.  If they weren't saints, they
were sailors, afraid of nothing but God Almighty--and they do respect
Him, even when they curse the winds and the sea.  Well, one day we were
lying in the open sea, about two hundred and fifty miles from Port
Darwin.  There wasn't a breath of air.  The sea was like glass; the sun
was drawing turpentine out of every inch of the 'Dancing Kate'.  The world
was one wild blister.  There wasn't a comfortable spot in the craft, and
all round us was that staring, oily sea.  It was too hot to smoke, and I
used to make a Sede boy do my smoking for me.  I got the benefit of the
smell without any work.  I was lying under the droop of a dingey, making
the Sede boy call on all his gods for wind, with interludes of smoke,
when he chucked his deities and tobacco, and, pointing, shouted, 'Man!
man!'

"I snatched a spy-glass.  Sure enough, there was a boat on the water.
It was moving ever so slowly.  It seemed to stop, and we saw something
lifted and waved, and then all was still again.  I got a boat's crew
together, and away we went in that deadly smother.  An hour's row and we
got within hail of the derelict--as one of the crew said, 'feelin' as if
the immortal life was jerked out of us.'  The dingey lay there on the
glassy surface, not a sign of life about her.  Yet I had, as I said, seen
something waved.  The water didn't even lap its sides.  It was ghostly,
I can tell you.  Our oars licked the water; they didn't attack it.  Now,
I'm going to tell you something, Marmion, that'll make you laugh.  I
don't think I've got any poetry in me, but just then I thought of some
verses I learned when I was a little cove at Wellington--a devilishly
weird thing.  It came to me at that moment like a word in my ear.  It
made me feel awkward for a second.  All sailors are superstitious, you
know.  I'm superstitious about this ship.  Never mind; I'll tell you the
verses, to show you what a queer thing memory is.  The thing was called
'No Man's Sea':

             "'The days are dead in the No Man's Sea,
                 And God has left it alone;
               The angels cover their heads and flee,
                 And the wild four winds have flown.

             "'There's never a ripple upon the tide,
                 There's never a word or sound;
               But over the waste the white wraiths glide,
                 To look for the souls of the drowned.

             "'The No Man's Sea is a gaol of souls,
                 And its gate is a burning sun,
               And deep beneath it a great bell tolls
                 For a death that never is done.

             "'Alas! for any that comes anear,
                 That lies on its moveless breast;
               The grumbling water shall be his bier,
                 And never a place of rest."'

"There are four of the verses.  Well, I made a motion to stop the rowing,
and was mum for a minute.  The men got nervous.  They looked at the boat
in front of us, and then turned round, as though to see if the 'Dancing
Kate' was still in sight.  I spoke, and they got more courage.  I stood up
in the boat, but could see nothing in the dingey.  I gave a sign to go
on, and soon we were alongside.  In the bottom of the dingey lay a man,
apparently dead, wearing the clothes of a convict.  One of the crew gave
a grunt of disgust, the others said nothing.  I don't take to men often,
and to convicts precious seldom; but there was a look in this man's face
which the prison clothes couldn't demoralise--a damned pathetic look,
which seemed to say, 'Not guilty.'

"In a minute I was beside him, and found he wasn't dead.  Brandy brought
him round a little; but he was a bit gone in the head, and muttered all
the way back to the ship.  I had unbuttoned his shirt, and I saw on his
breast a little ivory portrait of a woman.  I didn't let the crew see it;
for the fellow, even in his delirium, appeared to know I had exposed the
thing, and drew the linen close in his fingers, and for a long time held
it at his throat."

"What was the woman's face like, Hungerford?" I asked.

He parried, remarking only that she had the face of a lady, and was
handsome.

I pressed him.  "But did it resemble any one you had ever seen?"

With a slight droop of his eyelids, he said: "Don't ask foolish
questions, Marmion.  Well, the castaway had a hard pull for life.  He
wouldn't have lived at all, if a breeze hadn't come up and let us get
away to the coast.  It was the beginning of the monsoon, and we went
bowling down towards Port Darwin, a crowd of Malay proas in our wake.
However, the poor beggar thought he was going to die, and one night he
told me his story.  He was an escaped convict from Freemantle, Western
Australia.  He had, with others, been taken up to the northern coast to
do some Government work, and had escaped in the dingey.  His crime was
stealing funds belonging to a Squatting and Mining Company.  There was
this extenuating circumstance: he could have replaced the money, which,
as he said, he'd only intended to use for a few weeks.  But a personal
enemy threw suspicion on him, accounts were examined, and though he
showed he'd only used the money while more of his own was on the way to
him, the Company insisted on prosecuting him.  For two reasons: because
it was itself in bad odour, and hoped by this trial to divert public
attention from its own dirty position; and because he had against him not
only his personal enemy, but those who wanted to hit the Company through
him.  He'd filched to be able to meet the large expenses of his wife's
establishment.  Into this he didn't enter minutely, and he didn't blame
her for having so big a menage; he only said he was sorry that he hadn't
been able to support it without having to come, even for a day, to the
stupidity of stealing.  After two years he escaped.  He asked me to write
a letter to his wife, which he'd dictate.  Marmion, you or I couldn't
have dictated that letter if we'd taken a year to do it.  There was no
religion in it, no poppy-cock, but straightforward talk, full of sorrow
for what he'd done, and for the disgrace he'd brought on her.  I remember
the last few sentences as if I'd seen them yesterday.  'I am dying on the
open sea, disgraced, but free,' he said.  'I am not innocent in act, but
I was not guilty of intentional wrong.  I did what I did that you should
have all you wished, all you ought to have.  I ask but this--and I shall
soon ask for nothing--that you will have a kind thought, now and then,
for the man who always loved you, and loves you yet.  I have never blamed
you that you did not come near me in my trouble; but I wish you were here
for a moment before I go away for ever.  You must forgive me now, for you
will be free.  If I were a better man I would say, God bless you.  In my
last conscious moments I will think of you, and speak your name.  And now
good-bye--an everlasting good-bye.  I was your loving husband, and am your
lover until death.'  And it was signed, 'Boyd Madras.'

"However, he didn't die.  Between the captain and myself, we kept life in
him, and at last landed him at Port Darwin; all of us, officers and crew,
swearing to let no one know he was a convict.  And I'll say this for the
crew of the 'Dancing Kate' that, so far as I know, they kept their word.
That letter, addressed in care of a firm of Melbourne bankers, I gave
back to him before we landed.  We made him up a purse of fifty pounds,--
for the crew got to like him,--and left him at Port Darwin, sailing away
again in a few days to another pearl-field farther east.  What happened
to him at Port Darwin and elsewhere, I don't know; but one day I found
him on a fashionable steamer in the Indian Ocean, looking almost as
near to Kingdom Come as when he starved in the dingey on No Man's Sea.
As I said before, I think he didn't recognise me; and he's lying now in
116 Intermediate, with a look on him that I've seen in the face of a man
condemned to death by the devils of cholera or equatorial fever.  And
that's the story, Marmion, which I brought you to hear--told, as you
notice, in fine classical style."

"And why do you tell ME this, Hungerford--a secret you've kept all these
years?  Knowledge of that man's crime wasn't necessary before giving him
belladonna or a hot bath."

Hungerford kept back the whole truth for reasons of his own.  He said:
"Chiefly because I want you to take a decent interest in the chap.  He
looks as if he might go off on the long voyage any tick o' the clock.
You are doctor, parson, and everything else of the kind on board.  I like
the poor devil, but anyhow I'm not in a position to be going around with
ginger-tea in a spoon, or Ecclesiastes under my arm,--very good things.
Your profession has more or less to do with the mind as well as the body,
and you may take my word for it that Boyd Madras's mind is as sick as his
torso.  By the way, he calls himself 'Charles Boyd,' so I suppose we
needn't recall to him his former experiences by adding the 'Madras.'"

Hungerford squeezed my arm again violently, and added: "Look here,
Marmion, we understand each other in this, don't we?  To do what we can
for the fellow, and be mum."

Some of this looks rough and blunt, but as it was spoken there was that
in it which softened it to my ear.  I knew he had told all he thought I
ought to know, and that he wished me to question him no more, nor to
refer to Mrs. Falchion, whose relationship to Boyd Madras--or Charles
Boyd--both of us suspected.

"It was funny about those verses coming to my mind, wasn't it, Marmion?"
he continued.  And he began to repeat one of them, keeping time to the
wave-like metre with his cheroot, winding up with a quick, circular
movement, and putting it again between his lips:

             "'There's never a ripple upon the tide,
                 There's never a breath or sound;
               But over the waste the white wraiths glide,
                 To look for the souls of the drowned."'

Then he jumped off the berth where he had been sitting, put on his
jacket, said it was time to take his turn on the bridge, and prepared to
go out, having apparently dismissed Number 116 Intermediate from his
mind.

I went to Charles Boyd's cabin, and knocked gently.  There was no
response.  I entered.  He lay sleeping soundly--the sleep that comes
after nervous exhaustion.  I had a good chance to study him as he lay
there.  The face was sensitive and well fashioned, but not strong; the
hands were delicate, yet firmly made.  One hand was clinched upon that
portion of his breast where the portrait hung.




CHAPTER IV

THE TRAIL OF THE ISHMAELITE

I went on deck again, and found Clovelly in the smoking-room.  The
bookmaker was engaged in telling tales of the turf, alternated with comic
songs by Blackburn--an occupation which lasted throughout the voyage, and
was associated with electric appeals to the steward to fill the flowing
bowl.  Clovelly came with me, and we joined Miss Treherne and her father.
Mr. Treherne introduced me to his daughter, and Clovelly amiably drew the
father into a discussion of communism as found in the South Sea Islands.

I do not think my conversation with Miss Treherne was brilliant.  She has
since told me that I appeared self-conscious and preoccupied.  This being
no compliment to her, I was treated accordingly.  I could have endorsed
Clovelly's estimate of her so far as her reserve and sedateness were
concerned.  It seemed impossible to talk naturally.  The events of the
day were interrupting the ordinary run of thought, and I felt at a
miserable disadvantage.  I saw, however, that the girl was gifted and
clear of mind, and possessed of great physical charm, but of that fine
sort which must be seen in suitable surroundings to be properly
appreciated.  Here on board ship a sweet gravity and a proud decorum--not
altogether unnecessary--prevented her from being seen at once to the best
advantage.  Even at this moment I respected her the more for it, and was
not surprised, nor exactly displeased, that she adroitly drew her father
and Clovelly into the conversation.  With Clovelly she seemed to find
immediate ground for naive and pleasant talk; on his part, deferential,
original, and attentive; on hers, easy, allusive, and warmed with piquant
humour.  I admired her; saw how cleverly Clovelly was making the most of
her; guessed at the solicitude, studious care, and affection of her
bringing-up; watched the fond pleasure of the father as he listened; and
was angry with myself that Mrs. Falchion's voice rang in my ears at the
same moment as hers.  But it did ring there, and the real value of that
smart tournament of ideas was partially lost to me.

The next morning I went to Boyd Madras's cabin.  He welcomed me
gratefully, and said that he was much better; as he seemed; but he
carried a hectic flush, such as comes to a consumptive person.  I said
little to him beyond what was necessary for the discussion of his case.
I cautioned him about any unusual exertion, and was about to leave, when
an impulse came to me, and I returned and said: "You will not let me help
you in any other way?"

"Yes," he answered; "I shall be very glad of your help, but not just yet.
And, Doctor, believe me, I think medicines can do very little.  Though I
am thankful to you for visiting me, you need not take the trouble, unless
I am worse, and then I will send a steward to you, or go to you myself."

What lay behind this request, unless it was sensitiveness, I could not
tell; but I determined to take my own course, and to visit him when I
thought fit.

Still, I saw him but once or twice on the after-deck in the succeeding
days.  He evidently wished to keep out of sight as much as possible.  I
am ashamed to say there was a kind of satisfaction in this to me; for,
when a man's wife--and I believed she was Boyd Madras's wife--hangs on
your arm, and he himself is denied that privilege, and fares poorly
beside her sumptuousness, and lives as a stranger to her, you can
scarcely regard his presence with pleasure.  And from the sheer force of
circumstances, as it seemed to me then, Mrs. Falchion's hand was often on
my arm; and her voice was always in my ear at meal-times and when I
visited Justine Caron to attend to her wound, or joined in the chattering
recreations of the music saloon.  It was impossible not to feel her
influence; and if I did not yield entirely to it, I was more possessed by
it than I was aware.  I was inquisitive to know beyond doubt that she was
the wife of this man.  I think it was in my mind at the time that,
perhaps, by being with her much, I should be able to do him a service.
But there came a time when I was sufficiently undeceived.  It was all a
game of misery in which some one stood to lose all round.  Who was it:
she, or I, or the refugee of misfortune, Number 116 Intermediate?  She
seemed safe enough.  He or I would suffer in the crash of penalties.

It was a strange situation.  I, the acquaintance of a day, was welcome
within the circle of this woman's favour--though it was an unemotional
favour on her side; he, the husband, as I believed, though only half
the length of the ship away, was as distant from her as the north star.
When I sat with her on deck at night, I seemed to feel Boyd Madras's
face looking at me from the half-darkness of the after-deck; and Mrs.
Falchion, whose keen eyes missed little, remarked once on my gaze in that
direction.  Thereafter I was more careful, but the idea haunted me.  Yet,
I was not the only person who sat with her.  Other men paid her attentive
court.  The difference was, however, that with me she assumed ever so
delicate, yet palpable an air of proprietorship, none the less alluring
because there was no heart in it.  So far as the other passengers were
concerned, there was nothing jarring to propriety in our companionship.
They did not know of Number 116 Intermediate.  She had been announced as
a widow; and she had told Mrs. Callendar that her father's brother, who,
years before, had gone to California, had died within the past two years
and left her his property; and, because all Californians are supposed to
be millionaires, her wealth was counted fabulous.  She was going now to
England, and from there to California in the following year.  People said
that Dr. Marmion knew on which side his bread was buttered.  They may
have said more unpleasant things, but I did not hear them, or of them.

All the time I was conscious of a kind of dishonour, and perhaps it was
that which prompted me (I had fallen away from my intention of visiting
him freely) to send my steward to see how Boyd Madras came on, rather
than go myself.  I was, however, conscious that the position could not--
should not--be maintained long.  The practical outcome of this knowledge
was not tardy.  A new influence came into my life which was to affect it
permanently: but not without a struggle.

A series of concerts and lectures had been arranged for the voyage, and
the fancy-dress ball was to close the first part of the journey--that is,
at Aden.  One night a concert was on in the music saloon.  I had just
come from seeing a couple of passengers who had been suffering from the
heat, and was debating whether to find Mrs. Falchion, who, I knew, was on
the other side of the deck, go in to the concert, or join Colonel Ryder
and Clovelly, who had asked me to come to the smoking-room when I could.
I am afraid I was balancing heavily in favour of Mrs. Falchion, when I
heard a voice that was new to me, singing a song I had known years
before, when life was ardent, and love first came--halcyon days in
country lanes, in lilac thickets, of pleasant Hertfordshire, where our
footsteps met a small bombardment of bursting seed-pods of the furze,
along the green common that sloped to the village.  I thought of all
this, and of HER everlasting quiet.

With a different voice the words of the song would have sent me out of
hearing; now I stood rooted to the spot, as the notes floated out past
me to the nervelessness of the Indian Ocean, every one of them a
commandment from behind the curtain of a sanctuary.

The voice was a warm, full contralto of exquisite culture.
It suggested depths of rich sound behind, from which the singer, if she
chose, might draw, until the room and the deck and the sea ached with
sweetness.  I scarcely dared to look in to see who it was, lest I should
find it a dream.  I stood with my head turned away towards the dusky
ocean.  When, at last, with the closing notes of the song, I went to
the port-hole and looked in, I saw that the singer was Miss Treherne.
There was an abstracted look in her eyes as she raised them, and she
seemed unconscious of the applause following the last chords of the
accompaniment.  She stood up, folding the music as she did so, and
unconsciously raised her eyes toward the port-hole where I was.  Her
glance caught mine, and instantly a change passed over her face.  The
effect of the song upon her was broken; she flushed slightly, and, as I
thought, with faint annoyance.  I know of nothing so little complimentary
to a singer as the audience that patronisingly listens outside a room or
window,--not bound by any sense of duty as an audience,--between whom and
the artists an unnatural barrier is raised.  But I have reason to think
now that Belle Treherne was not wholly moved by annoyance--that she had
seen something unusual, maybe oppressive, in my look.  She turned to her
father.  He adjusted his glasses as if, in his pride, to see her better.
Then he fondly took her arm, and they left the room.

Then I saw Mrs. Falchion's face at the port-hole opposite.  Her eyes were
on me.  An instant before, I had intended following Miss Treherne and her
father; now some spirit of defiance, some unaccountable revolution,
took possession of me, so that I flashed back to her a warm recognition.
I could not have believed it possible, if it had been told of me, that,
one minute affected by beautiful and sacred remembrances, the next I
should be yielding to the unimpassioned tyranny of a woman who could
never be anything but a stumbling-block and an evil influence.  I had yet
to learn that in times of mental and moral struggle the mixed fighting
forces in us resolve themselves into two cohesive powers, and strive for
mastery; that no past thought or act goes for nothing at such a time, but
creeps out from the darkness where we thought it had gone for ever, and
does battle with its kind against the common foe.  There moved before my
sight three women: one, sweet and unsubstantial, wistful and mute and
very young, not of the earth earthy; one, lissom, grave, with gracious
body and warm abstracted eyes, all delicacy, strength, reserve; the other
and last, daring, cold, beautiful, with irresistible charm, silent and
compelling.  And these are the three women who have influenced my life,
who fought in me then for mastery; one from out the unchangeable past,
the others in the tangible and delible present.  Most of us have to pass
through such ordeals before character and conviction receive their final
bias; before human nature has its wild trouble, and then settles into
"cold rock and quiet world;" which any lesser after-shocks may modify,
but cannot radically change.

I tried to think.  I felt that to be wholly a man I should turn from
those eyes drawing me on.  I recalled the words of Clovelly, who had said
to me that afternoon, half laughingly: "Dr. Marmion, I wonder how many
of us wish ourselves transported permanently to that time when we didn't
know champagne from 'alter feiner madeira' or dry hock from sweet
sauterne; when a pretty face made us feel ready to abjure all the sinful
lusts of the flesh and become inheritors of the kingdom of heaven?  Egad!
I should like to feel it once again.  But how can we, when we have been
intoxicated with many things; when we are drunk with success and
experience; have hung on the fringe of unrighteousness; and know the
world backward, and ourselves mercilessly?"

Was I, like the drunkard, coming surely to the time when I could
no longer say yes to my wisdom, or no to my weakness?  I knew that,
an hour before, in filling a phial with medicine, I found I was doing
it mechanically, and had to begin over again, making an effort to keep my
mind to my task.  I think it is an axiom that no man can properly perform
the business of life who indulges in emotional preoccupation.

These thoughts, which take so long to write, passed then through my mind
swiftly; but her eyes were on me with a peculiar and confident
insistence--and I yielded.  On my way to her I met Clovelly and Colonel
Ryder.  Hungerford was walking between them.  Colonel Ryder said: "I've
been saving that story for you, Doctor; better come and get it while it's
hot."

This was a promised tale of the taking of Mobile in the American Civil
War.

At any other time the invitation would have pleased me mightily; for,
apart from the other two, Hungerford's brusque and original conversation
was always a pleasure--so were his cheroots; but now I was under an
influence selfish in its source.  At the same time I felt that Hungerford
was storing up some acute criticism of me, and that he might let me hear
it any moment.  I knew, numbering the order of his duties, that he could
have but a very short time to spare for gossip at this juncture, yet I
said that I could not join them for half an hour or so.  Hungerford had a
fashion of looking at me searchingly from under his heavy brows, and I
saw that he did so now with impatience, perhaps contempt.  I was certain
that he longed to thrash me.  That was his idea of punishment and
penalty.  He linked his arm in those of the other two men, and they moved
on, Colonel Ryder saying that he would keep the story till I came and
would wait in the smoking-room for me.

The concert was still on when I sat down beside Mrs. Falchion.  "You
seemed to enjoy Miss Treherne's singing?" she said cordially enough as
she folded her hands in her lap.

"Yes, I thought it beautiful.  Didn't you?"

"Pretty, most pretty; and admirable in technique and tone; but she has
too much feeling to be really artistic.  She felt the thing, instead of
pretending to feel it--which makes all the difference.  She belongs to
a race of delightful women, who never do any harm, whom everybody calls
good, and who are very severe on those who do not pretend to be good.
Still, all of that pleasant race will read their husband's letters and
smuggle.  They have no civic virtues.  Yet they would be shocked to bathe
on the beach without a machine, as American women do,--and they look for
a new fall of Jerusalem when one of their sex smokes a cigarette after
dinner.  Now, I do not smoke cigarettes after dinner, so I can speak
freely.  But, at the same time, I do not smuggle, and I do bathe on the
beach without a machine--when I am in a land where there are no sharks
and no taboo.  If morally consumptive people were given a few years in
the South Seas, where they could not get away from nature, there would
be more strength and less scandal in society."

I laughed.  "There is a frank note for Mr. Clovelly, who thinks he knows
the world and my sex thoroughly.  He says as much in his books.--Have you
read his 'A Sweet Apocalypse'?  He said more than as much to me.  But he
knows a mere nothing about women--their amusing inconsistencies; their
infidelity in little things and fidelity in big things; their self-
torturings; their inability to comprehend themselves; their periods of
religious insanity; their occasional revolts against the restraints of
a woman's position, known only to themselves in their dark hours; ah,
really, Dr. Marmion, he is ignorant, I assure you.  He has only got two
or three kinds of women in his mind, and the representatives of these
fooled him, as far as he went with them, to their hearts' content.
Believe me, there is no one quite so foolish as the professional student
of character.  He sees things with a glamour; he is impressionable; he
immediately begins to make a woman what he wishes her to be for his book,
not what she is; and women laugh at him when they read his books, or pity
him if they know him personally.  I venture to say that I could make Mr.
Clovelly use me in a novel--not 'A Sweet Apocalypse'--as a placid lover
of fancy bazaars and Dorcas societies, instead of a very practical
person, who has seen life without the romantic eye, and knows as well the
working of a buccaneering craft--through consular papers and magisterial
trials, of course--as of a colonial Government House.  But it is not
worth while trying to make him falsify my character.  Besides, you are
here to amuse me."

This speech, as she made it, was pleasantly audacious and clever.  I
laughed, and made a gesture of mock dissent, and she added: "Now I have
finished my lecture.  Please tie my shoe-lace there, and then, as I said,
amuse me.  Oh, you can, if you choose!  You are clever when you like to
be.  Only, this time, do not let it be a professor's wife who foolishly
destroys herself, and cuts short what might have been a brilliant
career."

On the instant I determined to probe deeper into her life, and try her
nerve, by telling a story with enough likeness to her own (if she was the
wife of Boyd Madras) to affect her acutely; though I was not sure I could
succeed.  A woman who triumphs over sea-sickness, whom steam from the
boilers never affects, nor the propeller-screw disturbs, has little to
fear from the words of a man who is neither adroit, eloquent, nor
dramatic.  However, I determined to try what I could do.  I said: "I
fancy you would like something in the line of adventure; but my career
has not run in that direction, so I shall resort to less exciting fields,
and, I fear, also, a not very cheerful subject."

"Oh, never mind!" said she.  "What you wish, so long as it is not
conventional and hackneyed.  But I know you will not be prosy, so go on,
please."

"Well," I began, "once, in the hospital, I attended a man--Anson was his
name--who, when he thought he was going to die, confided to me his life's
secret.  I liked the man; he was good-looking, amiable, but hopelessly
melancholy.  He was dying as much from trouble as disease.  No counsel
or encouragement had any effect upon him; he did, as I have seen so many
do--he resigned himself to the out-going tide.  Well, for the secret.
He had been a felon.  His crime had been committed through ministering to
his wife's vanity."

Here I paused.  I felt Mrs. Falchion's eyes searching me.
I raised mine steadily to hers with an impersonal glance, and saw
that she had not changed colour in the least.  But her eyes were busy.

I proceeded: "When he was disgraced she did not come near him.
When he went to her, after he was released" (here I thought it best to
depart from any close resemblance to Mrs. Falchion's own story), "and was
admitted to her, she treated him as an absolute stranger--as one who had
intruded, and might be violent.  She said that she and her maid were
alone in the house, and hinted that he had come to disturb them.  She
bade him go, or she must herself go.  He called her by his own name, and
begged her, by the memory of their dead child, to speak kindly to him.
She said he was quite mistaken in her name, that she was Mrs. Glave, not
Mrs. Anson, and again insisted that he should go.  He left her, and at
last, broken-hearted, found his way, in illness and poverty to the
hospital, where, toward the last, he was cared for by a noble girl,
a companion of his boyhood and his better days, who urged his wife to
visit him.  She left him alone, said unpleasant things to the girl, did
not come to see her husband when he was dead, and provided nothing for
his burial.  You see that, like you, she hated suffering and misery--and
criminals.  The girl and her mother paid the expenses of the funeral,
and, with myself, were the only mourners.  I am doubtful if the wife
knows even where he lies.  I admit that the story sounds melodramatic;
but truth is more drama than comedy, I fancy.  Now, what do you think of
it all, Mrs. Falchion?"

I had felt her shrink a little at the earlier part of my story, as if
she feared that her own tale was to be brutally bared before her; but
that soon passed, and she languidly tapped the chair-arm as the narrative
continued.  When it was finished, she leaned over slightly, and with
these same fingers tapped my arm.  I thrilled involuntarily.

"He died, did he?" she said.  "That was the most graceful thing he could
do.  So far as my knowledge of the world is concerned, men of his class
do NOT die.  They live, and they never rise above their degradation.
They had not brains or courage enough to keep them out of gaol, and they
have not pluck or brains enough to succeed--afterwards.  Your friend
Anson was quite gentlemanly in his action at the last.  He had some sense
of the fitness of things.  He could not find a place in the world without
making other people uncomfortable, and causing trouble.  If he had lived,
he would always have added to the blight on his wife's career, and have
been an arrow--not a thorn--in her side.  Very likely he would have
created a scandal for the good young girl who nursed him.  He made the
false step, and compelled society to reject him.  It did not want to do
so; it never does.  It is long-suffering; it tries not to see and
acknowledge things until the culprit himself forces it to take action.
Then it says: 'Now you have openly and inconsiderately broken our bond of
mutual forbearance.  You make me send you away.  Go, then, behind stone
walls, and please do not come to me again.  If you do, you will only be a
troublesome ghost.  You will cause awkwardness and distress.'  So, Mr.
Anson--I must be polite to him--did the most reasonable and proper thing.
He disappeared from the play before it actually became tragedy.  There
was no tragedy in his death--death is a magnificent ally; it untangles
knots.  The tragedy was in his living--in the perpetual ruin of his
wife's life, renewed every morning.  He disappeared.  Then the play
became drama, with only a little shadow of tragedy behind it.  Now,
frankly, am I not right?"

"Mrs. Falchion," I said, "your argument is clever, but it is only
incidentally true.  You draw life, society and men no more correctly than
the author of 'A Sweet Apocalypse' would draw you.  The social law you
sketch when reduced to its bare elements, is remorseless.  It does not
provide for repentance, for restitution, for recovering a lost paradise.
It makes an act final, a sin irrevocable."

"Well, since we are beginning to talk like a couple of books by a pair of
priggish philosophers, I might as well say that I think sin is final so
far as the domestic and social machinery of the world is concerned.  What
his religious belief requires of a man is one thing, what his fellow-men
require of him is another.  The world says, You shall have latitude
enough to swing in freely, but you must keep within the code.  As soon
as you break the law openly, and set the machinery of public penalty in
motion, there is an end of you, so far as this world is concerned.  You
may live on, but you have been broken on the wheel, and broken you always
will be.  It is not a question of right or wrong, of kindness or cruelty,
but of general expediency and inevitableness.  To all effect, Mr. Anson
was dead before he breathed his last.  He died when he passed within the
walls of a gaol--condemned for theft."

There was singular scorn in her last few words, and, dissent as I did
from her merciless theories, I was astonished at her adroitness and
downrightness--enchanted by the glow of her face.  To this hour, knowing
all her life as I do, I can only regard her as a splendid achievement of
nature, convincing even when at the most awkward tangents with the
general sense and the straitest interpretation of life; convincing even
in those other and later incidents, which showed her to be acting not
so much by impulse as by the law of her nature.  Her emotions were
apparently rationalised at birth--to be derationalised and broken up by a
power greater than herself before her life had worked itself out.  I had
counted her clever; I had not reckoned with her powers of reasoning.
Influenced as I was by emotion when in her presence, I resorted to a
personal application of my opinions--the last and most unfair resort of
a disputant.  I said I would rather be Anson dead than Mrs. Anson living;
I would rather be the active than the passive sinner; the victim, than a
part of that great and cruel machine of penalty.

"The passive sinner!" she replied.  "Why, what wrong did she do?"

The highest moral conceptions worked dully in her.  Yet she seemed then,
as she always appeared to be, free from any action that should set the
machine of penalty going against herself.  She was inexorable, but she
had never, knowingly, so much as slashed the hem of the moral code.

"It was to give his wife pleasure that Anson made the false step," I
urged.

"Do you think she would have had the pleasure at the price?  The man was
vain and selfish to run any risk, to do anything that might endanger her
safety--that is, her happiness and comfort."

"But suppose he knew that she loved ease and pleasure?--that he feared
her anger or disdain if he did not minister to her luxuries?"

"Then he ought not to have married that kind of a woman."  The hardness
in her voice was matched at that moment by the coldness of her face.

"That is begging the question," I replied.  "What would such a selfish
woman do in such a case, if her pleasure could not be gratified?"

"You must ask that kind of woman," was her ironical answer.

I rashly felt that her castle of strength was crumbling.  I ventured
farther.

"I have done so."

She turned slightly toward me, yet not nervously, as I had expected.

"What did she say?"

"She declined to answer directly."

There was a pause, in which I felt her eyes searching my face.  I fear
I must have learned dissimulation well; for, after a minute, I looked
at her, and saw, from the absence of any curious anxiety, that I had
betrayed nothing.  She looked me straight in the eyes and said: "Dr.
Marmion, a man must not expect to be forgiven, who has brought shame on a
woman."

"Not even when he has repented and atoned?"

"Atoned!  How mad you are!  How can there be atonement?  You cannot wipe
things out--on earth.  We are of the earth.  Records remain.  If a man
plays the fool, the coward, and the criminal, he must expect to wear the
fool's cap, the white feather, and the leg-chain until his life's end.
And now, please, let us change the subject.  We have been bookish long
enough."  She rose with a gesture of impatience.

I did not rise.  "Pardon me, Mrs. Falchion," I urged, "but this interests
me so.  I have thought much of Anson lately.  Please, let us talk a
little longer.  Do sit down."

She sat down again with an air of concession rather than of pleasure.

"I am interested," I said, "in looking at this question from a woman's
standpoint.  You see, I am apt to side with the miserable fellow who made
a false step--foolish, if you like--all for love of a selfish and
beautiful woman."

"She was beautiful?"

"Yes, as you are."  She did not blush at that rank compliment, any more
than a lioness would, if you praised the astonishing sleekness and beauty
of its skin.

"And she had been a true wife to him before that?"

"Yes, in all that concerned the code."

"Well?--Well, was not that enough?  She did what she could, as long as
she could."  She leaned far back in the chair, her eyes half shut.

"Don't you think--as a woman, not as a theorist--that Mrs. Anson might
at least have come to him when he was dying?"

"It would only have been uncomfortable for her.  She had no part in his
life; she could not feel with him.  She could do nothing."

"But suppose she had loved him?  By that memory, then, of the time when
they took each other for better or for worse, until death should part
them?"

"Death did part them when the code banished him; when he passed from a
free world into a cage.  Besides, we are talking about people marrying,
not about their loving."

"I will admit," I said, with a little raw irony, "that I was not exact in
definition."

Here I got a glimpse into her nature which rendered after events not so
marvellous to me as they might seem to others.  She thought a moment
quite indolently, and then continued: "You make one moralise like George
Eliot.  Marriage is a condition, but love must be an action.  The one is
a contract, the other is complete possession, a principle--that is, if it
exists at all.  I do not know."

She turned the rings round mechanically on her finger; and among them was
a wedding-ring!  Her voice had become low and abstracted, and now she
seemed to have forgotten my presence, and was looking out upon the
humming darkness round us, through which now and again there rang a
boatswain's whistle, or the loud laugh of Blackburn, telling of a joyous
hour in the smoking-room.

I am now about to record an act of madness, of folly, on my part.  I
suppose most men have such moments of temptation, but I suppose, also,
that they act more sensibly and honourably than I did then.  Her hand had
dropped gently on the chair-arm, near to my own, and though our fingers
did not touch, I felt mine thrilled and impelled toward hers.  I do not
seek to palliate my action.  Though the man I believed to be her husband
was below, I yielded myself to an imagined passion for her.  In that
moment I was a captive.  I caught her hand and kissed it hotly.

"But you might know what love is," I said.  "You might learn--learn of
me.  You--"

Abruptly and with surprise she withdrew her hand, and, without any
visible emotion save a quicker pulsation of her breast, which might have
been indignation, spoke.  "But even if I might learn, Dr. Marmion, be
sure that neither your college nor Heaven gave you the knowledge to
instruct me. . . .  There: pardon me, if I speak harshly; but this is
most inconsiderate of you, most impulsive--and compromising.  You are
capable of singular contrasts.  Please let us be friends, friends simply.
You are too interesting for a lover, really you are."

Her words were a cold shock to my emotion--my superficial emotion;
though, indeed, for that moment she seemed adorable to me.  Without any
apparent relevancy, but certainly because my thoughts in self-reproach
were hovering about cabin 116 Intermediate, I said, with a biting shame,
"I do not wonder now!"

"You do not wonder at what?" she questioned; and she laid her hand
kindly on my arm.

I put the hand away a little childishly, and replied, "At men going to
the devil."  But this was not what I thought.

"That does not sound complimentary to somebody.  May I ask you what you
mean?" she said calmly.  "I mean that Anson loved his wife, and she did
not love him; yet she held him like a slave, torturing him at the same
time."

"Does it not strike you that this is irrelevant?  You are not my husband
--not my slave.  But, to be less personal, Mr. Anson's wife was not
responsible for his loving her.  Love, as I take it, is a voluntary
thing.  It pleased him to love her--he would not have done it if it did
not please him; probably his love was an inconvenient thing domestically
--if he had no tact."

"Of that," I said, "neither you nor I can know with any certainty.  But,
to be scriptural, she reaped where she had not sowed, and gathered where
she had not strawed.  If she did not make the man love her,--I believe
she did, as I believe you would, perhaps unconsciously, do,--she used his
love, and was therefore better able to make all other men admire her.
She was richer in personal power for that experience; but she was not
grateful for it nor for his devotion."

"You mean, in fact, that I--for you make the personal application--shall
be better able henceforth to win men's love, because--ah, surely, Dr.
Marmion, you do not dignify this impulse, this foolishness of yours, by
the name of love!"  She smiled a little satirically at the fingers I had
kissed.

I was humiliated, and annoyed with her and with myself, though, down
in my mind, I knew that she was right.  "I mean," said I, "that I can
understand how men have committed suicide because of just such things.
My wonder is that Anson, poor devil! did not do it."  I knew I was
talking foolishly.

"He hadn't the courage, my dear sir.  He was gentlemanly enough to die,
but not to be heroic to that extent.  For it does need a strong dash of
heroism to take one's own life.  As I conceive it, suicide would have
been the best thing for him when he sinned against the code.  The world
would have pitied him then, would have said, He spared us the trial of
punishing him.  But to pay the vulgar penalty of prison--ah!"

She shuddered and then almost coldly continued: "Suicide is an act of
importance; it shows that a man recognises, at least, the worthlessness
of his life.  He does one dramatic and powerful thing; he has an instant
of great courage, and all is over.  If it had been a duel in which, of
intention, he would fire wide, and his assailant would fire to kill, so
much the better; so much the more would the world pity.  But either is
superior, as a final situation, than death with a broken heart--I suppose
that is possible?--and disgrace, in a hospital."

"You seem to think only of the present, only of the code and the world;
and as if there were no heroism in a man living down his shame, righting
himself heroically at all points possible, bearing his penalty, and
showing the courage of daily wearing the sackcloth of remorse and
restitution."

"Oh," she persisted, "you make me angry.  I know what you wish to
express; I know that you consider it a sin to take one's life, even in
'the high Roman fashion.'  But, frankly, I do not, and I fear--or rather,
I fancy--that I never shall.  After all, your belief is a pitiless one;
for, as I have tried to say, the man has not himself alone to consider,
but those to whom his living is a perpetual shame and menace and cruelty
insupportable--insupportable!  Now, please, let us change the subject
finally; and"--here she softly laughed--"forgive me if I have treated
your fancied infatuation lightly or indifferently.  I want you for a
friend--at least, for a friendly acquaintance.  I do not want you for
a lover."

We both rose.  I was not quite content with her nor with myself yet.  I
felt sure that while she did not wish me for a lover, she was not averse
to my playing the devoted cavalier, who should give all, while she should
give nothing.  I knew that my punishment had already begun.  We paced the
deck in silence; and once, as we walked far aft, I saw, leaning upon the
railing of the intermediate deck, and looking towards us--Boyd Madras;
and the words of that letter which he wrote on the No Man's Sea came to
me.

At length she said: "You have made no reply to my last remark.  Are we
to be friends, and not lovers?  Or shall you cherish enmity against me?
Or, worse still,"--and here she laughed, I thought, a little ironically,
--"avoid me, and be as icy as you have been--fervid?"

"Mrs. Falchion," I said, "your enemy I do not wish to be--I could not be
if I wished; but, for the rest, you must please let me see what I may
think of myself to-morrow.  There is much virtue in to-morrow," I added.
"It enables one to get perspective."

"I understand," she said; and then was silent.  We walked the deck slowly
for several minutes.  Then we were accosted by two ladies of a committee
that had the fancy-dress ball in hand.  They wished to consult Mrs.
Falchion in certain matters of costume and decoration, for which, it had
been discovered, she had a peculiar faculty.  She turned to me half
inquiringly, and I bade her good-night, inwardly determined (how easy it
is after having failed to gratify ourselves!) that the touch of her
fingers should never again make my heart beat faster.

I joined Colonel Ryder and Clovelly in the smoking-room.  Hungerford,
as I guessed gladly, was gone.  I was too much the coward to meet his eye
just then.  Colonel Ryder was estimating the amount he would wager--if he
were in the habit of betting--that the 'Fulvia' could not turn round in
her tracks in twenty minutes, while he parenthetically endorsed
Hungerford's remarks to me--though he was ignorant of them--that lascars
should not be permitted on English passenger ships.  He was supported by
Sir Hayes Craven, a shipowner, who further said that not one out of ten
British sailors could swim, while not five out of ten could row a boat
properly.  Ryder's anger was great, because Clovelly remarked with mock
seriousness that the lascars were picturesque, and asked the American if
he had watched them listlessly eating rice and curry as they squatted
between decks; whether he had observed the Serang, with his silver
whistle, who ruled them, and despised us "poor white trash;" and if he
did not think it was a good thing to have fatalists like them as sailors
--they would be cool in time of danger.

Colonel Ryder's indignation was curbed, however, by the bookmaker,
who, having no views, but seeing an opportunity for fun, brought up
reinforcements of chaff and slang, easily construable into profanity,
and impregnated with terse humour.  Many of the ladies had spoken of the
bookmaker as one of the best-mannered men on board.  So he was to all
appearance.  None dressed with better taste, nor carried himself with
such an air.  There was even a deferential tone in his strong language, a
hesitating quaintness, which made it irresistible.  He was at the service
of any person on board needing championship.  His talents were varied.
He could suggest harmonies in colour to the ladies at one moment, and at
the next, in the seclusion of the bar counter, arrange deadly harmonies
in liquor.  He was an authority on acting; he knew how to edit a
newspaper; he picked out the really nice points in the sermons delivered
by the missionaries in the saloon; he had some marvellous theories about
navigation; and his trick with a salad was superb.  He now convulsed the
idlers in the smoking-room with laughter, and soon deftly drew off the
discussion to the speed of the vessel, arranging a sweep-stake
immediately, upon the possibilities of the run.  He instantly proposed to
sell the numbers by auction.  He was the auctioneer.  With his eye-glass
at his eye, and Bohemian pleasantry falling from his lips, he ran the
prices up.  He was selling Clovelly's number, and had advanced it beyond
the novelist's own bidding, when suddenly the screw stopped, the engines
ceased working, and the 'Fulvia' slowed down.

The numbers remained unsold.  Word came to us that an accident had
happened to the machinery, and that we should be hove-to for a day,
or longer, to accomplish necessary repairs.  How serious the accident
to the machinery was no one knew.




CHAPTER V

ACCUSING FACES

While we were hove-to, the 'Porcupine' passed us.  In all probability it
would now get to Aden ahead of us; and herein lay a development of the
history of Mrs. Falchion.  I was standing beside Belle Treherne as the
ship came within hail of us and signalled to see what was the matter.
Mrs. Falchion was not far from us.  She was looking intently at the
vessel through marine-glasses, and she did not put them down until it had
passed.  Then she turned away with an abstracted light in her eyes and a
wintry smile; and the look and the smile continued when she sat down in
her deck-chair and leaned her cheek meditatively on the marine-glass.
But I saw now that something was added to the expression of her face--a
suggestion of brooding or wonder.  Belle Treherne, noticing the direction
of my glances, said: "Have you known Mrs. Falchion long?"

"No, not long," I replied.  "Only since she came on board."

"She is very clever, I believe."

I felt my face flushing, though, reasonably, there was no occasion for
it, and I said: "Yes, she is one of the ablest women I have ever met."

"She is beautiful, too--very beautiful."  This very frankly.

"Have you talked with her?" asked I.

"Yes, a little this morning, for the first time.  She did not speak much,
however."  Here Miss Treherne paused, and then added meditatively: "Do
you know, she impressed me as having singular frankness and singular
reserve as well?  I think I admired it.  There is no feeling in her
speech, and yet it has great candour.  I never before met any one like
her.  She does not wear her heart upon her sleeve, I imagine."

A moment of irony came over me; that desire to say what one really does
not believe (a feminine trait), and I replied: "Are both those articles
necessary to any one?  A sleeve?--well, one must be clothed.  But a
heart?--a cumbrous thing, as I take it."

Belle Treherne turned, and looked me steadily in the eyes for an instant,
as if she had suddenly awakened from abstraction, and slowly said, while
she drew back slightly: "Dr. Marmion, I am only a girl, I know, and
inexperienced, but I hoped most people of education and knowledge of
life were free from that kind of cynicism to be read of in books."  Then
something in her thoughts seemed to chill her words and manner, and her
father coming up a moment after, she took his arm, and walked away with a
not very cordial bow to me.

The fact is, with a woman's quick intuition, she had read in my tone
something suggestive of my recent experience with Mrs. Falchion.  Her
fine womanliness awoke; the purity of her thoughts, rose in opposition to
my flippancy and to me; and I knew that I had raised a prejudice not easy
to destroy.

This was on a Friday afternoon.

On the Saturday evening following, the fancy-dress ball was to occur.
The accident to the machinery and our delay were almost forgotten in the
preparations therefor.  I had little to do; there was only one sick man
on board, and my hand could not cure his sickness.  How he fared, my
uncomfortable mind, now bitterly alive to a sense of duty, almost
hesitated to inquire.  Yet a change had come.  A reaction had set in for
me.  Would it be permanent?  I dared scarcely answer that question, with
Mrs. Falchion at my right hand at table, with her voice at my ear.  I was
not quite myself yet; I was struggling, as it were, with the effects of a
fantastic dream.

Still, I had determined upon my course.  I had made resolutions.  I had
ended the chapter of dalliance.  I had wished to go to 116 Intermediate
and let its occupant demand what satisfaction he would.  I wanted to say
to Hungerford that I was an ass; but that was even harder still.  He was
so thorough and uncompromising in nature, so strong in moral fibre, that
I felt his sarcasm would be too outspoken for me just at present.
In this, however, I did not give him credit for a fine sense of
consideration, as after events showed.  Although there had been no spoken
understanding between us that Mrs. Falchion was the wife of Boyd Madras,
the mind of one was the other's also.  I understood exactly why he told
me Boyd Madras's story: it was a warning.  He was not the man to harp on
things.  He gave the hint, and there the matter ended, so far as he was
concerned, until a time might come when he should think it his duty to
refer to the subject again.  Some time before, he had shown me the
portrait of the girl who had promised to be his wife.  She, of course,
could trust HIM anywhere, everywhere.

Mrs. Falchion had seen the change in me, and, I am sure, guessed the new
direction of my thoughts, and knew that I wished to take refuge in a new
companionship--a thing, indeed, not easily to be achieved, as I felt now;
for no girl of delicate and proud temper would complacently regard a
hasty transference of attention from another to herself.  Besides, it
would be neither courteous nor reasonable to break with Mrs. Falchion
abruptly.  The error was mine, not hers.  She had not my knowledge of the
immediate circumstances, which made my position morally untenable.  She
showed unembarrassed ignorance of the change.  At the same time I caught
a tone of voice and a manner which showed she was not actually oblivious,
but was touched in that nerve called vanity; and from this much feminine
hatred springs.

I made up my mind to begin a course of scientific reading, and was seated
in my cabin, vainly trying to digest a treatise on the pathology of the
nervous system, when Hungerford appeared at the door.  With a nod, he
entered, threw himself down on the cabin sofa, and asked for a match.
After a pause, he said: "Marmion, Boyd Madras, alias Charles Boyd, has
recognised me."

I rose to get a cigar, thus turning my face from him, and said: "Well?"

"Well, there isn't anything very startling.  I suppose he wishes I had
left him in the dingey on No Man's Sea.  He's a fool."

"Indeed, why?"

"Marmion, are your brains softening?  Why does he shadow a woman who
wouldn't lift her finger to save him from battle, murder, or sudden
death?"

"From the code," I said, in half soliloquy.

"From the what?"

"Oh, never mind, Hungerford.  I suppose he is shadowing--Mrs. Falchion?"

He eyed me closely.

"I mean the woman that chucked his name; that turned her back on him when
he was in trouble; that hopes he is dead, if she doesn't believe that he
is actually; that would, no doubt, treat him as a burglar if he went to
her, got down on his knees, and said: 'Mercy, my girl, I've come back to
you a penitent prodigal.  Henceforth I shall be as straight as the sun,
so help me Heaven and your love and forgiveness!'"

Hungerford paused, as if expecting me to reply; but, leaning forward on
my knees and smoking hard, I remained silent.  This seemed to anger him,
for he said a little roughly: "Why doesn't he come out and give you
blazes on the promenade deck, and corner her down with a mighty cheek,
and levy on her for a thousand pounds?  Both you and she would think more
of him.  Women don't dislike being bullied, if it is done in the right
way--haven't I seen it the world over, from lubra to dowager?  I tell
you, man--sinning or not--was meant to be woman's master and lover, and
just as much one as the other."

At this point Hungerford's manner underwent a slight change, and he
continued: "Marmion, I wouldn't have come near you, only I noticed you
have altered your course, and are likely to go on a fresh tack.  It isn't
my habit to worry a man.  I gave you a signal, and you didn't respond at
first.  Well, we have come within hail again; and now, don't you think
that you might help to straighten this tangle, and try to arrange a
reconciliation between those two?

"The scheme is worth trying.  Nobody need know but you and me.  It
wouldn't be much of a sacrifice to her to give him a taste of the thing
she swore to do--how does it run?--'to have and to hold from this day
forward'?--I can't recall it; but it's whether the wind blows fair or
foul, or the keel scrapes the land or gives to the rock, till the sea
gulps one of 'em down for ever.  That's the sense of the thing, Marmion,
and the contract holds between the two, straight on into the eternal
belly.  Whatever happens, a husband is a husband, and a wife a wife.  It
seems to me that, in the sight of Heaven, it's he that's running fair in
the teeth of the wind, every timber straining, and she that's riding with
it, well coaled, flags flying, in an open channel, and passing the
derelict without so much as, 'Ahoy there!'"

Now, at this distance of time, I look back, and see Hungerford, "the
rowdy sailor," as he called himself, lying there, his dark grey eyes
turned full on me; and I am convinced that no honester, more sturdy-
minded man ever reefed a sail, took his turn upon the bridge, or walked
the dry land in the business of life.  It did not surprise me, a year
after, when I saw in public prints that he was the hero of--but that must
be told elsewhere.  I was about to answer him then as I knew he would
wish, when a steward appeared and said: "Mr. Boyd, 116 Intermediate,
wishes you would come to him, sir, if you would be so kind."

Hungerford rose, and, as I made ready to go, urged quietly: "You've got
the charts and soundings, Marmion, steam ahead!" and, with a swift but
kindly clench of my shoulder, he left me.  In that moment there came a
cowardly feeling, a sense of shamefacedness, and then, hard upon it, and
overwhelming it, a determination to serve Boyd Madras so far as lay in my
power, and to be a man, and not a coward or an idler.

When I found him he was prostrate.  In his eyes there was no anger, no
indignation, nor sullenness--all of which he might reasonably have felt;
and instantly I was ashamed of the thought which, as I came to him,
flashed through my mind, that he might do some violent thing.  Not that
I had any fear of violence; but I had an active dislike of awkward
circumstances.  I felt his fluttering pulse, and noted the blue line on
his warped lips.  I gave him some medicine, and then sat down.  There was
a silence.  What could I say?  A dozen thoughts came to my mind, but I
rejected them.  It was difficult to open up the subject.  At last he put
his hand upon my arm and spoke:

"You told me one night that you would help me if you could.  I ought to
have accepted your offer at first; it would have been better.--No, please
don't speak just yet.  I think I know what you would say.  I knew that
you meant all you urged upon me; that you liked me.  I was once worthy
of men's liking, perhaps, and I had good comrades; but that is all over.
You have not come near me lately, but it wasn't because you felt any
neglect, or wished to take back your words; but--because of something
else. . . .  I understand it all.  She has great power.  She always
had.  She is very beautiful.  I remember when--but I will not call it
back before you, though, God knows, I go over it all every day and every
night, until it seems that only the memory of her is real, and that she
herself is a ghost.  I ought not to have crossed her path again, even
unknown to her.  But I have done it, and now I cannot go out of that path
without kneeling before her once again, as I did long ago.  Having seen
her, breathed the same air, I must speak or die; perhaps it will be both.
That is a power she has: she can bend one to her will, although she
often, involuntarily, wills things that are death to others.  One MUST
care for her, you understand; it is natural, even when it is torture to
do so."

He put his hand on his side and moved as if in pain.  I reached over and
felt his pulse, then took his hand and pressed it, saying: "I will be
your friend now, Madras, in so far as I can."

He looked up at me gratefully, and replied: "I know that--I know that.
It is more than I deserve."

Then he began to speak of his past.  He told me of Hungerford's kindness
to him on the 'Dancing Kate', of his luckless days at Port Darwin, of his
search for his wife, his writing to her, and her refusal to see him.  He
did not rail against her.  He apologised for her, and reproached himself.
"She is most singular," he continued, "and different from most women.
She never said she loved me, and she never did, I know.  Her father urged
her to marry me; he thought I was a good man."

Here he laughed a little bitterly.  "But it was a bad day for her.
She never loved any one, I think, and she cannot understand what love
is, though many have cared for her.  She is silent where herself is
concerned.  I think there was some trouble--not love, I am sure of that
--which vexed her, and made her a little severe at times; something
connected with her life, or her father's life, in Samoa.  One can only
guess, but white men take what are called native wives there very often
--and who can tell?  Her father--but that is her secret! . . .  While
I was right before the world, she was a good wife to me in her way.  When
I went wrong, she treated me as if I were dead, and took her old name.
But if I could speak to her quietly once more, perhaps she would listen.
It would be no good at all to write.  Perhaps she would never begin the
world with me again, but I should like to hear her say, 'I forgive you.
Good-bye.'  There would be some comfort in a kind farewell from her.
You can see that, Dr. Marmion?"

He paused, waiting for me to speak.  "Yes, I can see that," I said; and
then I added: "Why did you not speak to her before you both came on board
at Colombo?"

"I had no chance.  I only saw her in the street, an hour before the ship
sailed.  I had scarcely time to take my passage."

Pain here checked his utterance, and when he recovered, he turned again
to me, and continued: "To-morrow night there is to be a fancy-dress ball
on board.  I have been thinking.  I could go in a good disguise.  I could
speak to her, and attract no notice; and if she will not listen to me,
why, then, that ends it.  I shall know the worst, and to know the worst
is good."

"Yes," said I; "and what do you wish me to do?"

"I wish to go in a disguise, of course; to dress in your cabin, if you
will let me.  I cannot dress here, it would attract attention; and I am
not a first-class passenger."

"I fear," I replied, "that it is impossible for me to assist you to the
privileges of a first-class passenger.  You see, I am an officer of the
ship.  But still I can help you.  You shall leave this cabin to-night.
I will arrange so that you may transfer yourself to one in the first-
class section. . . .  No, not a word; it must be as I wish in this.
You are ill; I can do you that kindness at least, and then, by right, you
can attend the ball, and, after it, your being among the first-class
passengers can make little difference; for you will have met and spoken
then, either to peace or otherwise."

I had very grave doubts of any reconciliation; the substance of my
notable conversation with Mrs. Falchion was so prominent in my mind.
I feared she would only reproduce the case of Anson and his wife.  I was
also afraid of a possible scene--which showed that I was not yet able to
judge of her resources.  After a time, in which we sat silent, I said to
Madras: "But suppose she should be frightened?--should--should make a
scene?"

He raised himself to a sitting posture.  "I feel better," he said.  Then,
answering my question: "You do not know her quite.  She will not stir a
muscle.  She has nerve.  I have seen her in positions of great peril and
trial.  She is not emotional, though I truly think she will wake one day
and find her heart all fire but not for me.  Still, I say that all will
be quite comfortable, so far as any demonstration on her part is
concerned.  She will not be melodramatic, I do assure you."

"And the disguise--your dress?" inquired I.

He rose from the berth slowly, and, opening a portmanteau, drew from it a
cloth of white and red, fringed with gold.  It was of beautiful texture,
and made into the form of a toga or mantle.  He said: "I was a seller of
such stuffs in Colombo, and these I brought with me, because I could not
dispose of them without sacrifice when I left hurriedly.  I have made
them into a mantle.  I could go as--a noble Roman, perhaps!"  Then a
slight, ironical smile crossed his lips, and he stretched out his thin
but shapely arms, as if in derision of himself.

"You will go as Menelaus the Greek," said I.

"I as Menelaus the Greek?"  The smile became a little grim.

"Yes, as Menelaus; and I will go as Paris."  I doubt not that my voice
showed a good deal of self-scorn at the moment; but there was a kind of
luxury in self-abasement before him.  "Your wife, I know, intends to go
as Helen of Troy.  It is all mumming.  Let it stand so, as Menelaus and
Helen and Paris before there was any Trojan war, and as if there never
could be any--as if Paris went back discomfited, and the other two were
reconciled."

His voice was low and broken.  "I know you exaggerate matters, and
condemn yourself beyond reason," he replied.  "I will do as you say.
But, Dr. Marmion, it will not be all mumming, as you shall see."

A strange look came upon his face at this.  I could not construe it;
and, after a few words of explanation regarding his transference to the
forward part of the ship, I left him.  I found the purser, made the
necessary arrangements for him, and then sought my cabin, humbled in many
ways.  I went troubled to bed.  After a long wakefulness, I dozed away
into that disturbed vestibule of sleep where the world's happenings
mingle with the visions of unconsciousness.  I seemed to see a man's
heart beating in his bosom in growing agonies, until, with one last
immense palpitation, it burst, and life was gone.  Then the dream
changed, and I saw a man in the sea, drowning, who seemed never to drown
entirely, his hands ever beating the air and the mocking water.  I
thought that I tried many times to throw him a lighted buoy in the half-
shadow, but some one held me back, and I knew that a woman's arms were
round me.

But at last the drowning man looked up and saw the woman so, and, with a
last quiver of the arms, he sank from sight.  When he was gone, the
woman's arms dropped away from me; but when I turned to speak to her,
she, too, had gone.

I awoke.

Two stewards were talking in the passage, and one was saying, "She'll get
under way by daybreak, and it will be a race with the 'Porcupine' to Aden.
How the engines are kicking below!"




CHAPTER VI

MUMMERS ALL

The next day was beautiful, if not enjoyable.  Stirring preparations
were being made for the ball.  Boyd Madras was transferred to a cabin far
forward, but he did not appear at any meal in the saloon, or on deck.  In
the morning I was busy in the dispensary.  While I was there, Justine
Caron came to get some medicine that I had before given her.  Her hand
was now nearly well.  Justine had nerves, and it appeared to me that her
efforts to please her mistress, and her occasional failures, were wearing
her unduly.  I said to her: "You have been worried, Miss Caron?"

"Oh, no, Doctor," she quickly replied.

I looked at her a little sceptically, and she said at last: "Well,
perhaps a little.  You see, madame did not sleep well last night, and I
read to her.  It was a little difficult, and there was not much choice of
books."

"What did you read?" I asked mechanically, as I prepared her medicine.

"Oh, some French novel first--De Maupassant's; but madame said he was
impertinent--that he made women fools and men devils.  Then I tried some
modern English tales, but she said they were silly.  I knew not what to
do.  But there was Shakespeare.  I read Antony and Cleopatra, and she
said that the play was grand, but the people were foolish except when
they died--their deaths were magnificent.  Madame is a great critic; she
is very clever."

"Yes, yes, I know that; but when did she fall asleep?"

"About four o'clock in the morning.  I was glad, because she is very
beautiful when she has much sleep."

"And you--does not sleep concern you in this matter of madame?"

"For me," she said, looking away, "it is no matter.  I have no beauty.
Besides, I am madame's servant,"--she blushed slightly at this,"--and she
is generous with money."

"Yes, and you like money so much?"

Her eyes flashed a little defiantly as she looked me in the face.  "It is
everything to me."

She paused as if to see the effect upon me, or to get an artificial
(I knew it was artificial) strength to go on, then she added: "I love
money.  I work for it; I would bear all for it--all that a woman could
bear.  I--"  But here she paused again, and, though the eyes still
flashed, the lips quivered.  Hers was not the face of cupidity.  It was
sensitive, yet firm, as with some purpose deep as her nature was by
creation and experience, and always deepening that nature.  I suddenly
got the conviction that this girl had a sorrow of some kind in her life,
and that this unreal affection for money was connected with it.  Perhaps
she saw my look of interest, for she hurriedly continued: "But, pardon
me, I am foolish.  I shall be better when the pain is gone.  Madame is
kind; she will let me sleep this afternoon, perhaps."

I handed her the medicine, and then asked: "How long have you known Mrs.
Falchion, Miss Caron?"

"Only one year."

"Where did you join her?"

"In Australia."

"In Australia?  You lived there?"

"No, monsieur, I did not live there."

A thought came to my mind--the nearness of New Caledonia to Australia,
and New Caledonia was a French colony--a French penal colony!  I smiled
as I said the word penal to myself.  Of course the word could have no
connection with a girl like her, but still she might have lived in the
colony.  So I added quietly: "You perhaps had come from New Caledonia?"

Her look was candid, if sorrowful.  "Yes, from New Caledonia."

Was she, thought I, the good wife of some convict--some political
prisoner?--the relative of some refugee of misfortune?  Whatever she was,
I was sure that she was free from any fault.  She evidently thought that
I might suspect something uncomplimentary of her, for she said: "My
brother was an officer at Noumea.  He is dead.  I am going to France,
when I can."

I tried to speak gently to her.  I saw that her present position must
be a trial.  I advised her to take more rest, or she would break down
altogether, for she was weak and nervous; I hinted that she might have
to give up entirely, if she continued to tax herself heedlessly; and,
finally, that I would speak to Mrs. Falchion about her.  I was scarcely
prepared for her action then.  Tears came to her eyes, and she said to
me, her hand involuntarily clasping my arm: "Oh no, no!  I ask you not to
speak to madame.  I will sleep--I will rest.  Indeed, I will.  This
service is so much to me.  She is most generous.  It is because I am so
altogether hers, night and day, that she pays me well.  And the money is
so much.  It is my honour--my dead brother's honour.  You are kind at
heart; you will make me strong with medicine, and I will ask God to bless
you.  I could not suffer such poverty again.  And then, it is my honour!"

I felt that she would not have given way thus had not her nerves been
shaken, had she not lived so much alone, and irregularly, so far as her
own rest and comfort were concerned, and at such perpetual cost to her
energy.  Mrs. Falchion, I knew, was selfish, and would not, or could not,
see that she was hard upon the girl, by such exactions as midnight
reading and loss of sleep.  She demanded not merely physical but mental
energy--a complete submission of both; and when this occurred with a
sensitive, high-strung girl, she was literally feeding on another's life-
blood.  If she had been told this, she, no doubt, would have been very
much surprised.

I reassured Justine.  I told her that I should say nothing directly
to Mrs. Falchion, for I saw she was afraid of unpleasantness; but I
impressed upon her that she must spare herself, or she would break down,
and extorted a promise that she would object to sitting up after midnight
to read to Mrs. Falchion.

When this was done, she said: "But, you see, it is not madame's fault
that I am troubled."

"I do not wish," I said, "to know any secret,--I am a doctor, not a
priest,--but if there is anything you can tell me, in which I might be
able to help you, you may command me in so far as is possible."
Candidly, I think I was too inquiring in those days.

She smiled wistfully, and replied: "I will think of what you say so
kindly, and perhaps, some day soon, I will tell you of such trouble as
I have.  But, believe me, it is no question of wrong at all, by any one
--now.  The wrong is over.  It is simply that a debt of honour must be
satisfied; it concerns my poor dead brother."

"Are you going to relatives in France?" I asked.

"No; I have no relatives, no near friends.  I am alone in the world.  My
mother I cannot remember; she died when I was very young.  My father had
riches, but they went before he died.  Still, France is home, and I must
go there."  She turned her head away to the long wastes of sea.

Little more passed between us.  I advised her to come often on deck, and
mingle with the passengers; and told her that, when she pleased, I should
be glad to do any service that lay in my power.  Her last words were
that, after we put into Aden, she would possibly take me at my word.

After she had gone, I found myself wondering at my presentiment that Aden
was to be associated with critical points in the history of some of us;
and from that moment I began to connect Justine Caron with certain events
which, I felt sure, were marshalling to an unhappy conclusion.  I
wondered, too, what part I should play in the development of the comedy,
tragedy, or whatever it was to be.  In this connection I thought of Belle
Treherne, and of how I should appear in her eyes if that little scene
with Mrs. Falchion, now always staring me in the face, were rehearsed
before her.  I came quickly to my feet, with a half-imprecation at
myself; and a verse of a crude sea-song was in my ears:

              "You can batten down cargo, live and dead,
               But you can't put memory out of sight;
               You can paint the full sails overhead,
               But you can't make a black deed white. . . ."

Angry, I said to myself: "It wasn't a black deed; it was foolish, it was
infatuation, it was not right, but it is common to shipboard; and I lost
my head, that was all."

Some time later I was still at work in the dispensary, when I heard Mr.
Treherne's voice calling to me from outside.  I drew back the curtain.
He was leaning on his daughter's arm, while in one hand he carried a
stick.  "Ah, Doctor, Doctor," cried he, "my old enemy, sciatica, has me
in its grip, and why, in this warm climate, I can't understand.  I'm
afraid I shall have to heave-to, like the 'Fulvia', and lay up for repairs.
And, by the way, I'm glad we are on our course again."  He entered, and
sat down.  Belle Treherne bowed to me gravely, and smiled slightly.  The
smile was not peculiarly hospitable.  I knew perfectly well that to
convince her of the reality of my growing admiration for her would be no
easy task; but I was determined to base my new religion of the affections
upon unassailable canons, and I felt that now I could do best by waiting
and proving myself.

While I was arranging some medicine for Mr. Treherne, and advising him
on care against chills in a hot climate, he suddenly broke in with: "Dr.
Marmion, Captain Ascott tells me that we shall get to Aden by Tuesday
morning next.  Now, I was asked by a friend of mine in London to visit
the grave of a son of his--a newspaper correspondent--who was killed in
one of the expeditions against the native tribes, and was buried in the
general cemetery at Aden.  On the way out I was not able to fulfil the
commission, because we passed Aden in the night.  But there will be
plenty of time to do so on Tuesday, I am told.  This, however, is my
difficulty: I cannot go unless I am better, and I'm afraid there is no
such luck as that in store for me.  These attacks last a week, at least.
I wish my daughter, however, to go.  One of the ladies on board will go
with her--Mrs. Callendar, I believe; and I am going to be so bold as to
ask you to accompany them, if you will.  I know you better than any
officer on board; and, besides, I should feel safer and better satisfied
if she went under the protection of an officer,--these barbarous places,
you know!--though, of course, it may be asking too much of you, or what
is impossible."

I assented with pleasure.  Belle Treherne was looking at the Latin names
on the bottles at the time, and her face showed no expression either of
pleasure or displeasure.  Mr. Treherne said bluffly: "Dr. Marmion, you
are kind--very kind, and, upon my word, I'm much obliged."  He then
looked at his daughter as if expecting her to speak.

She looked up and said conventionally: "You are very kind, Dr. Marmion,
and I am much obliged."  Then I thought her eyes twinkled with amusement
at her own paraphrase of her father's speech, and she added: "Mrs.
Callendar and myself will be much honoured indeed, and feel very
important in having an officer to attend us.  Of course everybody else
will be envious, and, again of course, that will add to our vanity."

At this she would have gone; but her father, who was suffering just
enough pain to enjoy anything that would divert his attention from it,
fell into conversation upon a subject of mutual interest, in which his
daughter joined on occasion, but not with enthusiasm.  Yet, when they
came to go, she turned and said kindly, almost softly, as her fingers
touched mine: "I almost envy you your profession, Dr. Marmion.  It opens
doors to so much of humanity and life."

"There is no sin," I laughingly said, "in such a covetousness, and,
believe me, it can do no harm to me, at least."  Then I added gravely:
"I should like my profession, in so far as I am concerned, to be worth
your envy."  She had passed through the door before the last words were
said, but I saw that her look was not forbidding.

                    .........................

Is there unhappiness anywhere?  There is not a vexing toss of the sea,
not a cloud in the sky.  Is not catastrophe dead, and the arrows of
tragedy spilled?  Peace broadens into deep, perfumed dusk towards Arabia;
languor spreads towards the unknown lands of the farthest south.  No
anxious soul leans out from the casement of life; the time is heavy with
delightful ease.  There is no sound that troubles; the world goes by and
no one heeds; for it is all beyond this musky twilight and this pleasant
hour.  In this palace on the sea Mirth trails in and out with airy and
harmonious footsteps.  Even the clang-clang of eight bells has music--not
boisterous nor disturbing, but muffled in the velvety air.  Then, through
this hemisphere of jocund quiet, there sounds the "All's well" of the
watch.

But, look!  Did you see a star fall just then, and the long avenue of
expiring flame behind it?--Do not shudder; it is nothing.  No cry of pain
came through that brightness.  There was only the "All's well" from the
watchers.

The thud of the engines falls on a padded atmosphere, and the lascars
move like ghosts along the decks.  The long, smooth promenade is canopied
and curtained, and hung with banners, and gay devices of the gorgeous
East are contributing to the federation of pleasure.

And now, through a festooned doorway, there come the people of many lands
to inhabit the gay court.  Music follows their footsteps: Hamlet and
Esther; Caractacus and Iphigenia; Napoleon and Hermione; The Man in the
Iron Mask and Sappho; Garibaldi and Boadicea; an Arab sheikh and Joan of
Arc; Mahomet and Casablanca; Cleopatra and Hannibal--a resurrected world.
But the illusion is short and slight.  This world is very sordid--of
shreds and patches, after all.  It is but a pretty masquerade, in which
feminine vanity beats hard against strangely-clothed bosoms; and
masculine conceit is shown in the work of the barber's curling-irons and
the ship-carpenter's wooden swords and paper helmets.  The pride of these
folk is not diminished because Hamlet's wig gets awry, or a Roman has
trouble with his foolish garters.  Few men or women can resist mumming;
they fancy themselves as somebody else, dead or living.  Yet these seem
happy in this nonsense.  The indolent days appear to have deadened
hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness.  They shall strut and fret
their hour upon this little stage.  Let that sprightly girl forget the
sudden death which made her an orphan; the nervous broker his faithless
wife; the grey-haired soldier his silly and haunting sins; the bankrupt
his creditors.

"On with the dance, let joy be unconfined!"  For the captain is on the
bridge, the engineer is beneath; we have stout walls, and a ceaseless
sentry-go.  In the intervals of the dance wine passes, and idle things
are said beside the draped and cushioned capstan or in the friendly gloom
of a boat, which, in the name of safety, hangs taut between its davits.
Let this imitation Cleopatra use the Cleopatra's arts; this mellow Romeo
(sometime an Irish landlord) vow to this coy Juliet; this Helen of Troy--
Of all who walked these decks, mantled and wigged in characters not their
own, Mrs. Falchion was the handsomest, most convincing.  With a graceful
swaying movement she passed along the promenade, and even envy praised
her.  Her hand lay lightly on the arm of a brown stalwart native of the
Indian hills, fierce and savage in attire.  Against his wild
picturesqueness and brawny strength, her perfectness of animal beauty,
curbed and rendered delicate by her inner coldness, showed in fine
contrast; and yet both were matched in the fine natural prowess of form.

With a singular affirmation of what had been, after all, but a sadly-
humourous proposal, I had attired myself in a Greek costume--quickly made
by my steward, who had been a tailor--and was about to leave my cabin,
when Hungerford entered, and exclaimed, as he took his pipe from his
mouth in surprise: "Marmion, what does this mean?  Don't you know your
duties better?  No officer may appear at these flare-ups in costume other
than his uniform.  You're the finest example of suburban innocence and
original sin I've seen this last quarter of a century, wherein I've kept
the world--and you--from tottering to destruction."  He reached for one
of my cigars.

Without a word, and annoyed at my own stupidity, I slowly divested myself
of the clothes of Greece; while Hungerford smoked on, humming to himself
occasionally a few bars of The Buccaneer's Bride, but evidently occupied
with something in his mind.  At length he said: "Marmion, I said suburban
innocence and original sin, but you've a grip on the law of square and
compass too.  I'll say that for you, old chap--and I hope you don't think
I'm a miserable prig."

Still I replied nothing, but offered him one of my best cigars, taking
the other one from him, and held the match while he lighted it--which,
between men, is sufficient evidence of good-feeling.  He understood, and
continued: "Of course you'll keep your eye on Mrs. Falchion and Madras
to-night: if he is determined that they shall meet, and you have arranged
it.  I'd like to know how it goes before you turn in, if you don't mind.
And, I say, Marmion, ask Miss Treherne to keep a dance for me--a waltz--
towards the close of the evening, will you?  Excuse me, but she is the
thorough-bred of the ship.  And if I have only one hop down the
promenade, I want it to be with a girl who'll remind me of some one that
is making West Kensington worth inhabiting.  Only think, Marmion, of a
girl like her--a graduate in arts, whose name and picture have been in
all the papers--being willing to make up with me, Dick Hungerford!  She
is as natural and simple as a girl can be, and doesn't throw Greek roots
at you, nor try to convince you of the difference between the songs of
the troubadours and the sonnets of Petrarch.  She doesn't care a rap
whether Dante's Beatrice was a real woman or a principle; whether James
the First poisoned his son; or what's the margin between a sine and a
cosine.  She can take a fence in the hunting-field like a bird--!  Oh,
all right, just hold still, and I'll unfasten it."  And he struggled with
a recalcitrant buckle.  "Well, you'll not forget about Miss Treherne,
will you?  She ought to go just as she is.  Fancy-dress on her would be
gilding the gold; for, though she isn't surpassingly beautiful, she is
very fine, very fine indeed.  There, now, you're yourself again, and look
all the better for it."

By this time I was again in my uniform, and I sat down, and smoked, and
looked at Hungerford.  His long gossip had been more or less detached,
and I had said nothing.  I understood that he was trying, in his blunt,
honest way, to turn my thoughts definitely from Mrs. Falchion to Belle
Treherne; and he never seemed to me such a good fellow as at that moment.
I replied at last: "All right, Hungerford; I'll be your deputation, your
ambassador, to Miss Treherne.  What time shall we see you on deck?"

"About 11.40--just in time to trip a waltz on the edge of eight bells."

"On the edge of Sunday, my boy."

"Yes.  Do you know, it is just four years ago tomorrow since I found Boyd
Madras on the No Man's Sea?"

"Let us not talk of it," said I.

"All right.  I merely stated the fact because it came to me.  I'm mum
henceforth.  And I want to talk about something else.  The first
officer,--I don't know whether you have noticed him lately, but I tell
you this: if we ever get into any trouble with this ship he'll go to
pieces.  Why, the other night, when the engine got tangled, he was as
timid as a woman.  That shock he had with the coal, as I said before,
has broken his nerve, big man as he is."

"Hungerford," I said, "you do not generally croak, but you are earning
the character of the raven for yourself to-night.  The thing is growing
on you.  What IS the use of bringing up unpleasant subjects?  You are an
old woman."  I fear there was the slightest irritation in my voice; but,
truth is, the last few days' experiences had left their mark on me, and
Hungerford's speech and manner had suddenly grown trying.

He stood for a moment looking at me with direct earnestness from under
his strong brows, and then he stepped forward, and, laying his hand upon
my arm, rejoined: "Do not be raw, Marmion.  I'm only a blunt, stupid
sailor; and, to tell you God's truth, as I have told you before, every
sailor is superstitious--every real sailor.  He can't help it--I can't.
I have a special fit on me now.  Why don't I keep it to myself?  Because
I'm selfish, and it does me good to talk.  You and I are in one secret
together, and it has made me feel like sharing this thing with a pal, I
suppose."

I seized his hand and begged his pardon, and called myself unpleasant
names, which he on the instant stopped, and said: "That's all right,
Marmy; shake till the knuckles crack!  I'm off.  Don't forget the dance."
He disappeared down the passage.

Then I went on deck, and the scene which I have so imperfectly described
passed before me.  Mrs. Falchion was surrounded with admirers all the
evening, both men and women; and two of the very stately English ladies
of title, to whom I before referred, were particularly gracious to her;
while she, in turn, bore herself with becoming dignity.  I danced with
her once, and was down on her programme for another dance.  I had also
danced with Belle Treherne, who appeared as Miriam, and was chaperoned by
one of the ladies of title; and I had also "sat out" one dance with her.
Chancing to pass her as the evening wore on, I saw her in conversation
with Mrs. Falchion, who had dismissed her cavalier, preferring to talk,
she said, for dancing was tiresome work on the Indian Ocean.  Belle
Treherne, who up to that moment had never quite liked her, yielded to the
agreeable charm of her conversation and her frank applausive remarks upon
the costumes of the dancers.  She had a good word for every one, and she
drew her companion out to make the most of herself, as women less often
do before women than in the presence of men.  I am certain that her
interest in Belle Treherne was real, and likewise certain that she
cherished no pique against her because I had transferred my allegiance.
Indeed, I am sure that she had no deep feeling of injured pride where I
was concerned.  Such after acidity as she sometimes showed was directed
against the foolish part I had played with her and my action in
subsequent events; it did not proceed from personal feeling or self-
value.

Some time after this meeting I saw Boyd Madras issue from the companion-
way dressed as a Greek.  He wore a false beard, and carried off well his
garments of white and scarlet and gold--a very striking and presentable
man.  He came slowly forward, looking about him steadily, and, seeing me,
moved towards me.  But for his manner I should scarcely have recognised
him.  A dance was beginning; but many eyes were turned curiously, and
even admiringly, to him; for he looked singular and impressive and his
face was given fulness by a beard and flesh paints.  I motioned him aside
where there was shadow, and said: "Well, you have determined to see her?"

"Yes," he said; "and I wish you, if you will, to introduce me to her as
Mr. Charles Boyd.

"You still think this wise?" I asked.

"It is my earnest wish.  I must have an understanding to-night."
He spoke very firmly, and showed no excitement.  His manner was calm
and gentlemanly.

He had a surprising air of decision.  Supporting an antique character, he
seemed for the moment to have put on also something of antique strength
of mind, and to be no longer the timid invalid.  "Then, come with me," I
answered.

We walked in silence for a few minutes, and then, seeing where Mrs.
Falchion was, we advanced to her.  The next dance on her programme was
mine.  In my previous dance with her we had talked as we now did at
table--as we did the first hour I met her--impersonally, sometimes (I am
bold to say) amusingly.  Now I approached her with apologies for being
late.  The man beside her took his leave.  She had only just glanced at
me at first, but now she looked at my companion, and the look stayed,
curious, bewildered.

"It is fitting," I said, "that Greek meet Greek--that Menelaus should be
introduced to Helen.  May I say that when Helen is not Helen she is Mrs.
Falchion, and when Menelaus is not Menelaus he is--Mr. Charles Boyd."

I am afraid my voice faltered slightly, because there came over me
suddenly a nervousness as unexpected as it was inconvenient, and my
words, which began lightly, ended huskily.  Had Madras miscalculated this
woman?

Her eyes were afire, and her face was as pale as marble; all its slight
but healthy glow had fled.  A very faint gasp came from her lips.  I saw
that she recognised him, as he bowed and mentioned her name, following my
introduction.  I knew not what might occur, for I saw danger in her eyes
in reply to the beseeching look in his.  Would melodrama supervene after
all?  She merely bowed towards me, as if to dismiss me, and then she
rose, took his arm, and moved away.  The interview that follows came to
me from Boyd Madras afterwards.

When they had reached the semi-darkness of the forward part of the ship,
she drew her hand quickly away, and, turning to him, said: "What is the
name by which you are called?  One does not always hear distinctly when
being introduced."

He did not understand what she was about to do, but he felt the deadly
coldness in her voice.  "My name is known to you," he replied.  He
steadied himself.

"No, pardon me, I do not know it, for I do not know you. . . .  I
never saw you before."  She leaned her hand carelessly on the bulwarks.

He was shocked, but he drew himself together.  Their eyes were intent on
each other.  "You do know me!  Need I tell you that I am Boyd Madras?"
"Boyd Madras," she said, musing coldly.  "A peculiar name."

"Mercy Madras was your name until you called yourself Mrs. Falchion," he
urged indignantly, yet anxiously too.

"It suits you to be mysterious, Mr.--ah yes, Mr. Boyd Madras; but,
really, you might be less exacting in your demands upon one's
imagination."  Her look was again on him casually.

He spoke breathlessly.  "Mercy--Mercy--for God's sake, don't treat me
like this!  Oh, my wife, I have wronged you every way, but I loved you
always--love you now.  I have only followed you to ask you to forgive me,
after all these years.  I saw you in Colombo just before you came on
board, and I felt that I must come also.  You never loved me.  Perhaps
that is better for you, but you do not know what I suffer.  If you could
give me a chance, and come with me to America--anywhere, and let me start
the world again?  I can--travel straight now, and I will work hard, and be
honest.  I will--" But here sudden pain brought back the doubt concerning
his life and its possibilities.

He leaned against the bulwarks, and made a helpless, despairing motion
with his hand.  "No, no!" he said; and added with a bitter laugh: "Not
to begin the world again, but to end it as profitably and silently as I
can. . . .  But you will listen to me, my wife?  You will say at least
that you forgive me the blight and ill I brought upon you?"

She had listened to him unmoved outwardly.  Her reply was instant.  "You
are more melodramatic than I thought you capable of being--from your
appearance," she said in a hard tone.  "Your acting is very good, but not
convincing.  I cannot respond as would become the unity and sequence of
the play. . . .  I have no husband.  My husband is dead--I buried him
years ago.  I have forgotten his name--I buried that too."

All the suffering and endured scorn of years came to revolt in him.  He
leaned forward now, and caught her wrist.  "Have you no human feeling?"
he said "no heart in you at all?  Look.  I have it in me here suddenly to
kill you as you stand.  You have turned my love to hate.  From your
smooth skin there I could strip those rags, and call upon them all to
look at you--my wife--a felon's wife; mine to have and to hold--to hold,
you hear!--as it was sworn at the altar.  I bare my heart to you,
repenting, and you mock it, torture it, with your undying hate and
cruelty.  You have no heart, no life.  This white bosom is all of you
--all of your power to make men love you--this, and your beauty.  All
else, by God, is cruel as the grave!"

His voice had sunk to a hoarse whisper.  She had not sought to remove his
hand, nor struggled in the least; and once it seemed as if this new
development of his character, this animal fierceness, would conquer her:
she admired courage.  It was not so.  He trembled with weakness before he
had finished.  He stopped too soon; he lost.

"You will find such parts exhausting to play," she murmured, as he let
her arm fall.  "It needs a strong physique to endure exaggerated, nervous
sentiment.  And now, please, let us perform less trying scenes."  Then,
with a low, cold anger, she continued: "It is only a coward that will dog
a woman who finds his presence insupportable to her.  This woman cannot,
if she would, endure this man's presence; it is her nature.  Well, why
rush blindly at the impossible?  She wishes to live her spoiled life
alone.  The man can have no part in it--never, never!  But she has money.
If in that way--"

He stretched out his hand protestingly, the fingers spread in excitement.
"No more--not another word!" he said.  "I ask for forgiveness, for one
word of kindness--and I am offered money! the fire that burned me to eat,
instead of bread!  I had a wife once," he added in a kind of troubled
dream, looking at her as if she were very far away, "and her name was
Mercy--her name was Mercy--Mercy Madras.  I loved her.  I sinned for her
sake.  A message came that she was dead to me; but I could not believe
that it was so altogether, for I had knelt at her feet and worshipped
her.  I went to her, but she sent me away angrily.  Years passed.  'She
will have relented now,' I said, and I followed her, and found her as I
thought.  But it was not she; it was a wicked ghost in her beautiful
body--nothing more.  And then I turned away and cursed all things,
because I knew that I should never see my wife again.  Mercy Madras
was dead. . . .  Can you not hear the curses?"

Still she was unmoved.  She said with a cruel impatience in her voice:
"Yes, Mercy Madras is dead.  How then can she forgive?  What could her
ghost--as you call her--do, but offer the thing which her husband--when
he was living--loved so well that he sold himself into bondage, and
wrecked his world and hers for it--Money?  Well, money is at his
disposal, as she said before--"

But she spoke no more.  The man in him straight way shamed her into
silence with a look.  She bowed her head, yet not quite in shame, for
there was that in her eyes which made her appear as if his suffering was
a gratuitous infliction.  But at this moment he was stronger, and he drew
her eyes up by the sheer force of his will.  "I need no money now," he
coldly declared.  "I need nothing--not even you; and can you fancy that,
after waiting all these years for this hour, money would satisfy me?
Do you know," he continued slowly and musingly, "I can look upon you now
--yes, at this moment--with more indifference than you ever showed to me?
A moment ago I loved you: now I think you horrible; because you are no
woman; you have a savage heart.  And some day you will suffer as I do, so
terribly that even the brazen serpent could not cure you.  Then you will
remember me."

He was about to leave her, but he had not taken two steps before he
turned, with all the anger and the passion softened in his eyes, and
said, putting his hand out towards yet not to touch her, "Good-bye--for
the last time."  And then the look was such as might be turned upon a
forgiven executioner.

"Good-night," she replied, and she did not look into his eyes, but out to
sea.  Her eyes remained fixed upon its furtive gloom.  She too was
furtive and gloomy at this moment.  They were both sleek, silent, and
remorseless.  There was a slight rustle to her dress as she changed her
position.  It was in grim keeping with the pitiless rustle of the sea.

And so they parted.  I saw him move on towards the companion-way, and
though I felt instinctively that all had gone ill with him, I was
surprised to see how erect he walked.  After a minute I approached her.
She heard me coming, and presently turned to me with a curious smile.
"Who is Mr. Charles Boyd?" she asked.  "I did not pierce his disguise.
I could not tell whether I had met him on board before.  Have I?  But my
impression is that I had not seen him on the ship."

"No, you had not seen him," I replied.  "He had a fancy to travel, until
yesterday, with the second-class passengers.  Now he has a first-class
cabin--in his proper place, in fact."

"You think so--in his proper place?"  The suggestion was not pleasant.

"Assuredly.  Why do you speak in that way?" was my indignant reply.

She took my arm as we moved on.  "Because he was slightly rude to me."

I grew bold, and determined to bring her to some sort of reckoning.

"How rude were you to him?"

"Not rude at all.  It is not worth while being so--to anybody," was her
chilly answer.

"I was under the impression you had met him before," I said gravely.

"Indeed?  And why?"  She raised her eyebrows at me.  I pushed the matter
to a conclusion.  "He was ill the other day--he has heart trouble.  It
was necessary for me to open the clothes about his neck.  On his breast
I saw a little ivory portrait of a woman's head."

"A woman's head," she repeated absently, and her fingers idly toyed with
a jingling ornament in her belt.  In an idle moment I had sketched the
head, as I remembered it, on a sheet of paper, and now I took it from my
pocket and handed it to her.  We were standing near a port-hole of the
music saloon, from which light streamed.

"That is the head," said I.

She deliberately placed the paper in the belt of light, and, looking at
it, remarked mechanically: "This is the head, is it?"  She showed no
change of countenance, and handed it back to me as if she had seen no
likeness.  "It is very interesting," she said, "but one would think you
might make better use of your time than by surreptitiously sketching
portraits from sick men's breasts.  One must have plenty of leisure to do
that sort of thing, I should think.  Be careful that you do not get into
mischief, Dr. Marmion."  She laughed.  "Besides, where was the special
peculiarity in that portrait that you should treasure it in pencil so
conventionally?--Your drawing is not good.--Where was the point or need?"

"I have no right to reply to that directly," I responded.  "But this
man's life is not for always, and if anything happened to him it would
seem curious to strangers to find that on his breast--because, of course,
more than I would see it there."

"If anything happened?  What should happen?  You mean, on board ship?"
There was a little nervousness in her tone now.

"I am only hinting at an awkward possibility," I replied.

She looked at me scornfully.  "When did you see that picture on his
breast?"  I told her.  "Ah! before THAT day?" she rejoined.  I knew
that she referred to the evening when I had yielded foolishly to the
fascination of her presence.  The blood swam hotly in my face.  "Men are
not noble creatures," she continued.

"I am afraid you would not give many their patents of nobility if you had
power to bestow them," I answered.

"Most men at the beginning, and very often ever after, are ignoble
creatures.  Yet I should confer the patents of nobility, if it were my
prerogative; for some would succeed in living up to them.  Vanity would
accomplish that much.  Vanity is the secret of noblesse oblige; not
radical virtue--since we are beginning to be bookish again."

"To what do you reduce honour and right?" returned I.

"As I said to you on a memorable occasion," she answered very drily, "to
a code."

"That is," rejoined I, "a man does a good action, lives an honourable
life, to satisfy a social canon--to gratify, say, a wife or mother, who
believes in him, and loves him?"

"Yes."  She was watching Belle Treherne promenading with her father.  She
drew my attention to it by a slight motion of the hand, but why I could
not tell.

"But might not a man fall by the same rule of vanity?" I urged.  "That
he shall appear well in their eyes, that their vanity in turn should be
fed, might he not commit a crime, and so bring misery?"

"Yes, it is true either way--pleasure or misery.  Please come to the
saloon and get me an ice before the next dance."

I was perplexed.  Was she altogether soulless?  Even now, as we passed
among the dancers, she replied to congratulations on her make-up and
appearance with evident pleasure.

An hour later, I was taking Belle Treherne from the arm of Hungerford for
the last waltz, and, in reply to an inquiring glance from him, I shook my
head mournfully.  His face showed solicitude as he walked away.  Perhaps
it did not gratify my vanity that Belle Treherne, as her father limped
forward at the stroke of eight bells to take her below, said to me: "How
downright and thorough Mr. Hungerford is!"  But I frankly admitted that
he was all she might say good of him, and more.

The deck was quickly dismantled, the lights went out, and all the dancers
disappeared.  The masquerade was over; and again, through the darkness,
rose the plaintive "All's well!"  And it kept ringing in my ears until it
became a mocking sound, from which I longed to be free.  It was like the
voice of Lear crying over the body of Cordelia: "Never, never, never,
never, never!"

Something of Hungerford's superstitious feeling possessed me.  I went
below, and involuntarily made my way to Boyd Madras's cabin.

Though the night was not hot, the door was drawn to.  I tapped.  His
voice at once asked who was there, and when I told him, and inquired how
he was, he said he was not ill, and asked me to come to his cabin in the
morning, if I would.  I promised, and bade him good-night.  He responded,
and then, as I turned away from the door, I heard him repeat the good-
night cordially and calmly.




CHAPTER VII

THE WHEEL COMES FULL CIRCLE

The next morning I was up early, and went on deck.  The sun had risen,
and in the moist atmosphere the tints of sky and sea were beautiful.
Everywhere was the warm ocean undulating lazily to the vague horizon.
A few lascars were still cleansing the decks; others were seated on their
haunches between decks, eating curry from a calabash; a couple of
passengers were indolently munching oranges; and Stone the quartermaster
was inspecting the work lately done by the lascars.  Stone gave me a
pleasant good-morning, and we walked together the length of the deck
forward.  I had got about three-fourths of the length back again, when I
heard a cry from aft--a sharp call of "Man overboard!"  In a moment I had
travelled the intermediate deck, and was at the stern, looking below,
where, in the swirling waters, was the head of a man.  With cries of "Man
overboard!"  I threw two or three buoys after the disappearing head,
above which a bare arm thrust itself.  I heard the rush of feet behind
me, and in a moment Hungerford and Stone were beside me.  The signal was
given for the engines to stop; stewards and lascars came running on deck
in response to Hungerford's call, and the first officer now appeared.
Very soon a crew was gathered on the after-deck, about a boat on the port
side.

Passengers by this time showed in various stages of dressing--
women wringing their hands, men gesticulating.  If there is anything
calculated to send a thrill of awe through a crowd, it is the cry of "Man
overboard!"  And when one looked below, and saw above the drowning head
two white arms thrust from the sea, a horrible thing was brought home to
each of us.  Besides, the scene before us on the deck was not reassuring.
There was trouble in getting the boat lowered.  The first officer was
excited, the lascars were dazed, the stewards were hurried without being
confident; only Hungerford, Stone, and the gunner were collected.  The
boat should have been launched in a minute, but still it hung between its
davits; its course downward was interrupted; something was wrong with the
ropes, "A false start, by --- !" said the bookmaker, looking through his
eye-glass.  Colonel Ryder's face was stern, Clovelly was pale and
anxious, as moment after moment went, and the boat was not yet free.
Ages seemed to pass before the boat was let down even with the bulwarks,
and a crew of ten, with Hungerford in command, were in it, ready to be
lowered.  Whether the word was given to lower, or whether it was any
one's fault, may never perhaps be known; but, as the boat hung there,
suddenly it shot down at the stern, some one having let go the ropes at
that end; and the bow being still fast, it had fallen like a trap-door.
It seemed, on the instant, as if the whole crew were tossed into the
water; but some had successfully clutched the boat's side, and Hungerford
hung by a rope with one hand.  In the eddying water, however, about the
reversing screw, were two heads, and farther off was a man struggling.
The face of one of the men near the screw was upturned for a moment; it
was that of Stone the quartermaster.

A cry went up from the passengers, and they swayed forward to the
suspended boat; but Colonel Ryder turned almost savagely upon them.
"Keep quiet!" he said.  "Stand back!  What can you do?  Give the
officers a chance."  He knew that there had been a false start, and bad
work indeed; but he also saw that the task of the officers must not be
made harder.  His sternness had effect.  The excited passengers drew
back, and I took his place in front of them.  When the first effort had
been made to lower the boat, I asked the first officer if I could
accompany the crew, but he said no.  I could, therefore, do nothing but
wait.  A change came on the crowd.  It became painfully silent, none
speaking save in whispers, and all watching with anxious faces either the
receding heads in the water or the unfortunate boat's crew.  Hungerford
showed himself a thorough sailor.  Hanging to the davit, he quietly,
reassuringly, gave the order for righting the boat, virtually taking the
command out of the hands of the first officer, who was trembling with
nervousness.  Hungerford was right; this man's days as a sailor were
over.  The accident from which he had suffered had broken his nerve,
stalwart as he was.  But Hungerford was as cool as if this were ordinary
boat-practice.  Soon the boat was drawn up again, and others took the
place of those who had disappeared.  Then it was lowered safely, and,
with Hungerford erect in the bows, it was pulled swiftly along the path
we had come.

At length, too, the great ship turned round, but not in her tracks.  It
is a pleasant fiction that these great steamers are easily managed.  They
can go straight ahead, but their huge proportions are not adapted for
rapid movement.  However, the work of rescue was begun.  Sailors were
aloft on watch, Captain Ascott was on the bridge, sweeping the sea with
his glass; order was restored.  But the ship had the feeling of a home
from which some familiar inmate had been taken, to return no more.
Children clasped their mothers' hands and said, "Mother, was it the poor
quartermaster?" and men who the day before had got help from the petty
officers in the preparation of costumes, said mournfully: "Fife the
gunner was one of them."

But who was the man first to go overboard--and who was it first gave
the alarm?  There were rumours, but no one was sure.  All at once I
remembered something peculiar in that cry of "Man overboard!" and it
shocked me.  I hurried below, and went to the cabin of Boyd Madras.  It
was empty; but on a shelf lay a large envelope, addressed to Hungerford
and myself.  I tore it open.  There was a small packet, which I knew
contained the portrait he had worn on his bosom, addressed to Mrs.
Falchion; and the other was a single sheet directed to me, fully written
upon, and marked in the corner: "To be made public."

So, he had disappeared from the play?  He had made his exit?  He had
satisfied the code at last?  Before opening the letter addressed to me,
I looked round.  His clothes were folded upon one of the berths; but the
garments of masquerade were not in the cabin.  Had he then gone out of
the world in the garb of a mummer?  Not altogether, for the false beard
he had worn the night before lay beside the clothes.  But this terrible
earnestness of his would look strange in last night's disguise.

I opened the packet addressed to Hungerford and myself, and saw that it
contained a full and detailed account of his last meeting with his wife.
The personal letter was short.  He said that his gratitude was
unspeakable, and now must be so for ever.  He begged us not to let the
world know who he was, nor his relationship to Mrs. Falchion, unless she
wished it; he asked me to hand privately to her the packet bearing her
name.  Lastly, he requested that the paper for the public be given to the
captain of the 'Fulvia'.

Going out into the passage, I found a steward, who hurriedly told me that
just before the alarm was given he had seen Boyd Madras going aft in that
strange costume, which he mistook for a dressing-gown, and he had come to
see if, by any chance, it was he who had gone overboard.  I told him that
it was.  He disappeared, and soon the whole ship knew it.  I went to the
captain, gave him the letter, and told him only what was necessary to
tell.  He was on the bridge, and was occupied with giving directions, so
he asked me the substance of the letter, and handed it back to me,
requesting me to make a copy of it soon and leave it in his cabin.  I
then took all the papers to my cabin, and locked them up.  I give here
the substance of the letter which was to be made public:

     Because you know how much I have suffered physically while on board
     this ship, and because you have been kind to me, I wish, through
     you, to say my last word to the world: though, indeed, this may seem
     a strange form for gratitude to take.  Dying men, however, make few
     apologies, and I shall make none.  My existence, as you know, is an
     uncertain quantity, and may be cut short at any moment in the
     ordinary course of things.  But I have no future in the active
     concerns of life; no past on which to dwell with satisfaction; no
     friends to mourn for my misfortunes in life, nor for my death,
     whether it be peaceful or violent; therefore, I have fewer
     compunctions in ending a mistaken career and a worthless life.

     Some one will profit by my death: who it is matters not, for it is
     no friend of mine.  My death adjusts a balance, perhaps not nicely,
     yet it does it.  And this is all I have to say. . . .  I am
     going.  Farewell. . . .

After a brief farewell to me added, there came the subscription "Charles
Boyd;" and that was all.  Why he cried out "Man overboard" (for now I
recognised that it was his voice which gave the alarm), I do not know,
except that he wished his body to be recovered, and to receive burial.

Just here, some one came fumbling at the curtain of my cabin.  I heard a
gasp--"Doctor--my head! quick!"

I looked out.  As I drew the curtain a worthless lascar sailor fell
fainting into my cabin.  He had been drinking a good deal, and the horror
and excitement of the accident had brought on an apoplectic fit.  This in
a very hot climate is suddenly fatal.  In three minutes, in spite of me,
he was dead.  Postponing report of the matter, I went on deck again among
the passengers.

I expected that Mrs. Falchion would be among them, for the news must have
gone to every part of the ship; but she was not there.  On the outskirts
of one of the groups, however, I saw Justine Caron.  I went to her, and
asked her if Mrs. Falchion had risen.  She said that she had not: that
she had been told of the disaster, and had appeared shocked; but had
complained of a headache, and had not risen.  I then asked Justine if
Mrs. Falchion had been told who the suicide was, and was answered in the
negative.  At that moment a lady came to me and said in an awed whisper:
"Dr. Marmion, is it true that the man who committed suicide was a second-
class passenger, and that he appeared at the ball last night, and danced
with Mrs. Falchion?"

I knew that my reply would soon become common property, so I said:

"He was a first-class passenger, though until yesterday he travelled
second-class.  I knew him.  His name was Charles Boyd.  I introduced him
to Mrs. Falchion last night, but he did not stay long on deck, because he
felt ill.  He had heart trouble.  You may guess that he was tired of
life."  Then I told her of the paper which was for the public, and she
left me.

The search for the unfortunate men went on.  No one could be seen near
the floating buoys which were here and there picked up by Hungerford's
boat.  The long undulations of the water had been broken up in a large
area about the ship, but the sea was still comparatively smooth.  We were
steaming back along the track we had come.  There was less excitement on
board than might be expected.  The tropical stillness of the air, the
quiet suddenness of the tragedy itself, the grim decisiveness of
Hungerford, the watchful silence of a few men like Colonel Ryder and
Clovelly, had effect upon even the emotion of those women, everywhere
found, who get a morbid enjoyment out of misery.

Nearly all were watching the rescue boat, though a few looked over the
sides of the ship as if they expected to find bodies floating about.
They saw sharks, instead, and a trail of blood, and this sent them away
sickened from the bulwarks.  Then they turned their attention again upon
the rescue party.  It was impossible not to note what a fine figure
Hungerford made, as he stood erect in the bow, his hand over his eyes,
searching the water.  Presently we saw him stop the boat, and something
was drawn in.  He signalled the ship.  He had found one man--but dead or
alive?  The boat was rapidly rowed back to the ship, Hungerford making
efforts for resuscitation.  Arrived at the vessel, the body was passed up
to me.

It was that of Stone the quartermaster.  I worked to bring back life, but
it was of no avail.  A minute after, a man in the yards signalled that he
saw another.  It was not a hundred yards away, and was floating near the
surface.  It was a strange sight, for the water was a vivid green, and
the man wore garments of white and scarlet, and looked a part of some
strange mosaic: as one has seen astonishing figures set in balls of solid
glass.  This figure framed in the sea was Boyd Madras.  The boat was
signalled, it drew near, and two men dragged the body in, as a shark
darted forward, just too late, to seize it.  The boat drew alongside the
'Fulvia'.  I stood at the gangway to receive this castaway.  I felt his
wrist and heart.  As I did so I chanced to glance up at the passengers,
who were looking at this painful scene from the upper deck.  There,
leaning over the railing, stood Mrs. Falchion, her eyes fixed with a
shocking wonder at the drooping, weird figure.  Her lips parted, but at
first they made no sound.  Then, she suddenly drew herself up with a
shudder.  "Horrible!  horrible!" she said, and turned away.

I had Boyd Madras taken to an empty cabin next to mine, which I used for
operations, and there Hungerford and myself worked to resuscitate him.
We allowed no one to come near.  I had not much hope of bringing life
back, but still we worked with a kind of desperation, for it seemed to
Hungerford and myself that somehow we were responsible to humanity for
him.  His heart had been weak, but there had been no organic trouble:
only some functional disorder, which open-air life and freedom from
anxiety might have overcome.  Hungerford worked with an almost fierce
persistence.  Once he said: "By God, I will bring him back, Marmion, to
face that woman down when she thinks she has got the world on the hip!"

I cannot tell what delight we felt when, after a little time, I saw a
quiver of the eyelids and a slight motion of the chest.  Presently a
longer breath came, and the eyes opened; at first without recognition.
Then, in a few moments, I knew that he was safe--desperately against his
will, but safe.

His first sentient words startled me.  He gasped, "Does she think I am
drowned?"

"Yes."

"Then she must continue to do so!"

"Why?"

"Because"--here he spoke faintly, as if sudden fear had produced
additional weakness--"because I had rather die a thousand deaths than
meet her now; because she hates me.  I must begin the world again.  You
have saved my life against my will: I demand that you give that life its
only chance of happiness."

As his words came to me, I remembered with a start the dead lascar, and,
leading Hungerford to my cabin, I pointed to the body, and whispered that
the sailor's death was only known to me.  "Then this is the corpse of
Boyd Madras, and we'll bury it for him," he said with quick bluntness.
"Do not report this death to Captain Ascott--he would only raise
objections to the idea.  This lascar was in my watch.  It will be
supposed he fell overboard during the accident to the boat.  Perhaps some
day the funeral of this nigger will be a sensation and surprise to her
blessed ladyship on deck."

I suggested that it seemed underhand and unprofessional, but the
entreating words of the resuscitated man in the next room conquered my
objections.

It was arranged that Madras should remain in the present cabin, of which
I had a key, until we reached Aden; then he should, by Hungerford's aid,
disappear.

We were conspirators, but we meant harm to nobody.  I covered up the face
of the dead lascar and wrapped round him the scarlet and gold cloth that
Madras had worn.  Then I got a sailor, who supposed Boyd Madras was
before him, and the body was soon sewed in its shotted shroud and carried
to where Stone the quartermaster lay.

At this day I cannot suppose I would do these things, but then it seemed
right to do as Madras wished: he was, under a new name, to begin life
afresh.

After giving directions for the disposition of the bodies, I went on
deck.  Mrs. Falchion was still there.  Some one said to her: "Did you
know the man who committed suicide?"

"He was introduced to me last night by Dr. Marmion," she replied, and she
shuddered again, though her face showed no remarkable emotion.  She had
had a shock to the senses, not to the heart.

When I came to her on the deck, Justine was saying to her: "Madame, you
should not have come.  You should not see such painful things when you
are not well."

She did not reply to this.  She looked up at me and said: "A strange
whim, to die in those fanciful rags.  It is dreadful to see; but he had
the courage."

I replied: "They have as much courage who make men do such things and
then live on."

Then I told her briefly that I held the packet for her, that I guessed
what was in it, and that I would hand it to her later.  I also said that
he had written to me the record of last night's meeting with her, and
that he had left a letter which was to be made public.  As I said these
things we were walking the decks, and, because eyes were on both of us,
I tried to show nothing more unusual in manner than the bare tragedy
might account for.

"Well," she said, with a curious coldness, "what use shall you make of
your special knowledge?"

"I intend," I said, "to respect his wish, that your relationship to him
be kept unknown, unless you declare otherwise."

"That is reasonable.  If he had always been as reasonable!  And," she
continued, "I do not wish the relationship to be known: practically there
is none. . . .  Oh!  oh!" she added, with a sudden change in her
voice, "why did he do as he did, and make everything else impossible--
impossible!  .  .  .  Send me, or give me the packet, when you wish: and
now please leave me, Dr. Marmion."

The last few words were spoken with some apparent feeling, but I knew she
was thinking of herself most, and I went from her angry.

I did not see her again before the hour that afternoon when we should
give the bodies of the two men to the ocean.  No shroud could be prepared
for gunner Fife and able-seaman Winter, whose bodies had no Christian
burial, but were swallowed by the eager sea, not to be yielded up even
for a few hours.  We were now steaming far beyond the place where they
were lost.

The burial was an impressive sight, as burials at sea mostly are.  The
lonely waters stretching to the horizon helped to make it so.  There was
a melancholy majesty in the ceremony.

The clanging bell had stopped.  Captain Ascott was in his place at the
head of the rude draped bier.  In the silence one only heard the swish of
water against the 'Fulvia's' side, as we sped on towards Aden.  People do
not know how beautiful, how powerful, is the burial service in the Book
of Common Prayer, who have only heard it recited by a clergyman.  To hear
it read by a hardy man, whose life is among stern duties, is to receive a
new impression.  He knows nothing of lethargic monotone; he interprets as
he reads.  And when the man is the home-spun captain of a ship, who sees
before him the poor shell of one that served him for ten years, "The Lord
gave and the Lord hath taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord," has
a strange significance.  It is only men who have borne the shock of toil
and danger, and have beaten up against the world's buffetings, that are
fit to say last words over those gone down in the storm or translated in
the fiery chariot of duty.

The engines suddenly stopped.  The effect was weird.  Captain Ascott's
fingers trembled, and he paused for an instant and looked down upon the
dead, then out sorrowfully to the waiting sea, before he spoke the words,
"We therefore commit their bodies to the deep."  But, the moment they
were uttered, the bier was lifted, there was a swift plunge, and only the
flag and the empty boards were left.  The sobbing of women now seemed
almost unnatural; for around us was the bright sunlight, the gay dresses
of the lascars, the sound of the bell striking the hours, and children
playing on the deck.  The ship moved on.

And Mrs. Falchion?  As the burial service was read, she had stood, and
looked, not at the bier, but straight out to sea, calm and apparently
unsympathetic, though, as she thought, her husband was being buried.
When, however, the weighted body divided the water with a swingeing
sound, her face suddenly suffused, as though shame had touched her or
some humiliating idea had come.  But she turned to Justine almost
immediately, and soon after said calmly: "Bring a play of Moliere, and
read to me, Justine."

I had the packet her supposed dead husband had left for her in my pocket.
I joined her, and we paced the deck, at first scarcely speaking, while
the passengers dispersed, some below, some to the smoking-rooms, some
upon deck-chairs to doze through the rest of the lazy afternoon.  The
world had taken up its orderly course again.  At last, in an unfrequented
corner of the deck, I took the packet from my pocket and handed it to
her.  "You understand?" I asked.

"Yes, I understand.  And now, may I beg that for the rest of your natural
life"--here she paused, and bit her lip in vexation that the unlucky
phrase had escaped her--"you will speak of this no more?"

"Mrs. Boyd Madras," I said (here she coloured indignantly),--"pardon me
for using the name, but it is only this once,--I shall never speak of the
matter to you again, nor to any one else, unless there is grave reason."

We walked again in silence.  Passing the captain's cabin, we saw a number
of gentlemen gathered about the door, while others were inside.  We
paused, to find what the incident was.  Captain Ascott was reading the
letter which Boyd Madras had wished to be made public.  (I had given it
to him just before the burial, and he was acting as though Boyd Madras
was really dead--he was quite ignorant of our conspiracy.) I was about to
move on, but Mrs. Falchion touched my arm.  "Wait," she said.  She stood
and heard the letter through.  Then we walked on, she musing.  Presently
she said: "It is a pity--a pity."

I looked at her inquiringly, but she offered no explanation of the
enigmatical words.  But, at this moment, seeing Justine waiting, she
excused herself, and soon I saw her listening to Moliere.  Later in the
day I saw her talking with Miss Treherne, and it struck me that she had
never looked so beautiful as then, and that Miss Treherne had never
seemed so perfect a product of a fine convention.  But, watching them
together, one who had had any standard of good life could never have
hesitated between the two.  It was plain to me that Mrs. Falchion was
bent upon making a conquest of this girl who so delicately withstood her;
and Belle Treherne has told me since, that, when in her presence, and
listening to her, she was irresistibly drawn to her; though at the same
time she saw there was some significant lack in her nature; some hardness
impossible to any one who had ever known love.  She also told me that on
this occasion Mrs. Falchion did not mention my name, nor did she ever in
their acquaintance, save in the most casual fashion.  Her conversation
with Miss Treherne was always far from petty gossip or that smart comedy
in which some women tell much personal history, with the guise of
badinage and bright cynicism.  I confess, though, it struck me
unpleasantly at the time, that this fresh, high-hearted creature should
be in familiar conversation with a woman who, it seemed to me, was the
incarnation of cruelty.

Mrs. Falchion subscribed most liberally to the fund raised for the
children of the quartermaster and munificently to that for the crew which
had, under Hungerford, performed the rescue work.  The only effect of
this was to deepen the belief that she was very wealthy, and could spend
her money without affectation; for it was noticeable that she, of all on
board, showed the least outward excitement at the time of the disaster.
It occurred to me that once or twice I had seen her eyes fixed on
Hungerford inquisitively, and not free from antipathy.  It was something
behind her usual equanimity.  Her intuitive observation had led her to
trace his hand in recent events.  Yet I know she admired him too for his
brave conduct.  The day following the tragedy we were seated at dinner.
The captain and most of the officers had risen, but Mrs. Falchion, having
come in late, was still eating, and I remained seated also.  Hungerford
approached me, apologising for the interruption.  He remarked that he was
going on the bridge, and wished to say something to me before he went.
It was an official matter, to which Mrs. Falchion apparently did not
listen.  When he was about to turn away, he bowed to her rather
distantly; but she looked up at him and said, with an equivocal smile:

"Mr. Hungerford, we often respect brave men whom we do not like."

Then he, understanding her, but refusing to recognise the compliment, not
altogether churlishly replied: "And I might say the same of women, Mrs.
Falchion; but there are many women we dislike who are not brave."

"I think I could recognise a brave man without seeing his bravery," she
urged.

"But I am a blundering sailor," he rejoined, "who only believes his
eyes."

"You are young yet," she replied.

"I shall be older to-morrow," was his retort.

"Well, perhaps you will see better to-morrow," she rejoined, with
indolent irony.

"If I do, I'll acknowledge it," he added.  Then Hungerford smiled at me
inscrutably.  We two held a strange secret.




CHAPTER VIII

A BRIDGE OF PERIL

No more delightful experience may be had than to wake up in the harbour
of Aden some fine morning--it is always fine there--and get the first
impression of that mighty fortress, with its thousand iron eyes, in
strong repose by the Arabian Sea.  Overhead was the cloudless sun, and
everywhere the tremulous glare of a sandy shore and the creamy wash of
the sea, like fusing opals.  A tiny Mohammedan mosque stood gracefully
where the ocean almost washed its steps, and the Resident's house, far up
the hard hillside, looked down upon the harbour from a green coolness.
The place had a massive, war-like character.  Here was a battery with
earthworks; there, a fort; beyond, a signal-staff.  Hospitals, hotels,
and stores were incidents in the picture.  Beyond the mountain-wall and
lofty Jebel Shamsan, rising in fine pink and bronze, and at the end of a
high-walled path between the great hills, lay the town of Aden proper.
Above the town again were the mighty Tanks, formed out of clefts in the
mountains, and built in the times when the Phoenicians made Aden a great
mart, the richest spot in all Arabia.

Over to the left, on the opposite side of the harbour, were wide
bungalows shining in the sun, and flanking the side of the ancient
aqueduct, the gigantic tomb of an Arab sheikh.  In the harbour were the
men-of-war of all nations, and Arab dhows sailed slowly in, laden with
pilgrims for Mecca--masses of picturesque sloth and dirt--and disease
also; for more than one vessel flew the yellow flag.  As we looked, a
British man-of-war entered the gates of the harbour in the rosy light.
It was bringing back the disabled and wounded from a battle, in which a
handful of British soldiers were set to punish thirty times their number
in an unknown country.  But there was another man-of-war in port with
which we were familiar.  We passed it far out on the Indian Ocean.  It
again passed us, and reached Aden before we did.  The 'Porcupine' lay not
far from the 'Fulvia', and as I leaned over the bulwarks, idly looking at
her, a boat shot away from her side, and came towards us.  As it drew
near, I saw that it was filled with luggage--a naval officer's, I knew it
to be.  As the sailors hauled it up, I noticed that the initials upon the
portmanteaus were G. R.  The owner was evidently an officer going home on
leave, or invalided.  It did not, however, concern me, as I thought, and
I turned away to look for Mr. Treherne, that I might fulfil my promise to
escort his daughter and Mrs. Callendar to the general cemetery at Aden;
for I knew he was not fit to do the journey, and there was nothing to
prevent my going.

A few hours later I stood with Miss Treherne and Mrs. Callendar in the
graveyard beside the fortress-wall, placing wreaths of artificial flowers
and one or two natural roses--a chance purchase from a shop at the port--
on the grave of the young journalist.  Miss Treherne had brought some
sketching materials, and both of us (for, as has been suggested, I had a
slight gift for drawing) made sketches of the burial-place.  Having done
this, we moved away to other parts of the cemetery, looking at the
tombstones, many of which told sad tales enough of those who died far
away from home and friends.  As we wandered on, I noticed a woman
kneeling beside a grave.  It grew upon me that the figure was familiar.
Presently I saw who it was, for the face lifted.  I excused myself, went
over to her, and said:--"Miss Caron, you are in trouble?"

She looked up, her eyes swimming with tears and pointed to the tombstone.
On it I read:

                        Sacred to the Memory of
                             HECTOR CARON,
                       Ensign in the French Navy.

                  Erected by his friend, Galt Roscoe,
                                H.B.M.N.

Beneath this was the simple line:

                      "Why, what evil hath he done?"

"He was your brother?" I asked.

"Yes, monsieur, my one brother."  Her tears dropped slowly.

"And Galt Roscoe, who was he?" asked I.

Through her grief her face was eloquent.  "I never saw him--never knew
him," she said.  "He saved my poor Hector from much suffering; he nursed
him, and buried him here when he died, and then--that!" pointing to the
tombstone.  "He made me love the English," she said.  "Some day I shall
find him, and I shall have money to pay him back all he spent--all."  Now
I guessed the meaning of the scene on board the 'Fulvia', when she had been
so anxious to preserve her present relations with Mrs. Falchion.  This
was the secret--a beautiful one.  She rose.  "They disgraced Hector in
New Caledonia," she said, "because he refused to punish a convict at Ile
Nou who did not deserve it.  He determined to go to France to represent
his case.  He left me behind, because we were poor.  He went to Sydney.
There he came to know this good man,"--her finger gently felt his name
upon the stone,--"who made him a guest upon his ship; and so he came on
towards England.  In the Indian Ocean he was taken ill: and this was the
end."

She mournfully sank again beside the grave, but she was no longer
weeping.

"What was this officer's vessel?" I said presently.  She drew from her
dress a letter.  "It is here.  Please read it all.  He wrote that to me
when Hector died."

The superscription to the letter was--H.B.M.S. Porcupine.

I might have told her then that the 'Porcupine' was in the
harbour at Aden, but I felt that things would work out to due ends
without my help--which, indeed, they began to do immediately.  As we
stood there in silence, I reading over and over again the line upon the
pedestal, I heard footsteps behind, and, turning, I saw a man approaching
us, who, from his manner, though he was dressed in civilian's clothes, I
guessed to be an officer of the navy.  He was of more than middle height,
had black hair, dark blue eyes, straight, strongly-marked brows, and was
clean-shaven.  He was a little ascetic-looking, and rather interesting
and uncommon, and yet he was unmistakably a sea-going man.  It was a face
that one would turn to look at again and again--a singular personality.
And yet my first glance told me that he was not one who had seen much
happiness.  Perhaps that was not unattractive in itself, since people who
are very happy, and show it, are often most selfish too, and repel where
they should attract.  He was now standing near the grave, and his eyes
were turned from one to the other of us, at last resting on Justine.

Presently I saw a look of recognition.  He stepped quickly forward.
"Mademoiselle, will you pardon me?" he said very gently, "but you remind
me of one whose grave I came to see."  His hand made a slight motion
toward Hector Caron's resting-place.  Her eyes were on him with an
inquiring earnestness.  "Oh, monsieur, is it possible that you are my
brother's friend and rescuer?"

"I am Roscoe.  He was my good friend," he said to her, and he held out
his hand.  She took it, and kissed it impulsively.  He flushed, and drew
it back quickly and shyly.

"Some day I shall be able to repay you for all your goodness," she said.
"I am only grateful now--grateful altogether.  And you will tell me all
you knew of him--all that he said and did before he died?"

"I will gladly tell you all I know," he answered, and he looked at her
compassionately, and yet with a little scrutiny, as though to know more
of her and how she came to be in Aden.  He turned to me inquiringly.

I interpreted his thought by saying: "I am the surgeon of the 'Fulvia'.
I chanced upon Miss Caron here.  She is travelling by the 'Fulvia'."

With a faint voice, Justine here said: "Travelling--with my mistress."

"As companion to a lady," I preferred to add in explanation, for I wished
not to see her humble herself so.  A look of understanding came into
Roscoe's face.  Then he said: "I am glad that I shall see more of you; I
am to travel by the 'Fulvia' also to London."

"Yet I am afraid I shall see very little of you," she quietly replied.

He was about to say something to her, but she suddenly swayed and would
have fallen, but that he caught her and supported her.  The weakness
lasted only for a moment, and then, steadying herself, she said to both
of us: "I hope you will say nothing of this to madame?  She is kind, most
kind, but she hates illness--and such things."

Galt Roscoe looked at me to reply, his face showing clearly that he
thought "madame" an extraordinary woman.  I assured Justine that we would
say nothing.  Then Roscoe cordially parted from us, saying that he would
look forward to seeing us both on the ship; but before he finally went,
he put on the grave a small bouquet from his buttonhole.  Then I excused
myself from Justine, and, going over to Miss Treherne, explained to her
the circumstances, and asked her if she would go and speak to the
afflicted girl.  She and Mrs. Callendar had been watching the incident,
and they eagerly listened to me.  I think this was the moment that I
first stood really well with Belle Treherne.  Her sympathy for the
bereaved girl flooded many barriers between herself and me.

"Oh," she said quickly, "indeed I will go to her, poor girl!  Will you
come also, Mrs. Callendar?"

But Mrs. Callendar timidly said she would rather Miss Treherne went
without her; and so it was.  While Miss Treherne was comforting the
bereaved girl, I talked to Mrs. Callendar.  I fear that Mrs. Callendar
was but a shallow woman; for, after a moment of excitable interest in
Justine, she rather naively turned the talk upon the charms of Europe.
And, I fear, not without some slight cynicism, I followed her where she
led; for, as I said to myself, it did not matter what direction our idle
tongues took, so long as I kept my mind upon the two beside that grave:
but it gave my speech a spice of malice.  I dwelt upon Mrs. Callendar's
return to her native heath--that is, the pavements of Bond Street and
Piccadilly, although I knew that she was a native of Tasmania.  At this
she smiled egregiously.

At length Miss Treherne came to us and said that Justine insisted she
was well enough to go back to the vessel alone, and wished not to be
accompanied.  So we left her there.

A score of times I have stopped when preparing my notes for this tale
from my diary and those of Mrs. Falchion and Galt Roscoe, to think how,
all through the events recorded here, and many others omitted, Justine
Caron was like those devoted and, often, beautiful attendants of the
heroes and heroines of tragedy, who, when all is over, close the eyes,
compose the bodies, and cover the faces of the dead, pronouncing with
just lips the benediction, fittest in their mouths.  Their loves, their
deeds, their lives, however good and worthy, were clothed in modesty and
kept far up the stage, to be, even when everything was over, not always
given the privilege to die as did their masters, but, like Horatio, bade
to live and be still the loyal servant:

          "But in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
               To tell my story."

There was no reason why we should go to the ship immediately, and I
proposed that we should first explore the port-town, and then visit the
city of Aden--five miles away beyond the hills--and the Tanks.  To this
the ladies consented.

Somauli policemen patrolled the streets; Somauli, Arab, and Turkish
guides impeded the way; Arabs in plain white, Arab sheikhs in blue and
white, and gold, lounged languidly about, or drank their coffee in the
shade of the bazaars.  Children of the desert, nearly naked, sprinkled
water before the doors of the bazaars and stores and upon the hot
thoroughfare, from long leather bottles; caravans of camels, with dusty
stride, swung up the hillside and beyond into the desert; the Jewish
water-carrier with his donkey trudged down the pass from the cool
fountains in the volcanic hills; a guard of eunuchs marched by with the
harem of a Mohammedan; in the doorways of the houses goats and donkeys
fed.  Jews, with greasy faces, red-hemmed skirt, and hungry look, moved
about, offering ostrich feathers for sale, everywhere treated worse than
the Chinaman in Oregon or at Port Darwin.  We saw English and Australian
passengers of the 'Fulvia' pelting the miserable members of a despised race
with green fruit about the streets, and afterwards from the deck of the
ship.  A number of these raised their hats to us as they passed; but
Belle Treherne's acknowledgment was chilly.

"It is hard to be polite to cowards," she said.

After having made some ruinous bargains in fezes, Turkish cloths and
perfume, I engaged a trap, and we started for Aden.  The journey was not
one of beauty, but it had singular interest.  Every turn of the wheels
carried us farther and farther away from a familiar world to one of
yesterday.  White-robed warriors of the desert, with lances, bent their
brows upon us as they rode away towards the endless sands, and vagabonds
of Egypt begged for alms.  In about three-quarters of an hour we had
passed the lofty barriers of Jebel Shamsan and its comrades, and were
making clouds of dust in the streets of Aden.  In spite of the
cantonments, the British Government House, and the European Church, it
was an Oriental town pure and simple, where the slow-footed hours
wandered by, leaving apathy in their train; where sloth and surfeit sat
in the market-places; idle women gossiped in their doorways; and naked
children rolled in the sun.  Yet how, in the most unfamiliar places, does
one wake suddenly to hear or see some most familiar thing, and learn
again that the ways of all people and nations are not, after all, so far
apart!  Here three naked youths, with trays upon their heads, cried aloud
at each doorway what, interpreted, was: "Pies!  Hot pies!  Pies all hot!"
or, "Crum-pet!  Crumpet!  Won't you buy-uy a crum-pet!"

One sees the same thing in Kandy, in Calcutta, in Tokio, in Istamboul, in
Teheran, in Queensland, in London.

To us the great Tanks overlooking the place were more interesting than
the town itself, and we drove thither.  At Government House and here were
the only bits of green that we had seen; they were, in fact, the only
spots of verdure on the peninsula of Aden.  It was a very sickly green,
from which wan and dusty fig trees rose.  In their scant shadow, or in
the shelter of an overhanging ledge of rock, Arabs offered us draughts
of cool water, and oranges.  There were people in the sickly gardens, and
others were inspecting the Tanks.  Passengers from the ship had brought
luncheon-baskets to this sad oasis.

As we stood at the edge of one of the Tanks, Miss Treherne remarked with
astonishment that they were empty.  I explained to her that Aden did not
have the benefits conferred even on the land of the seven fat and seven
lean kine--that there had not been rain there for years, and that when it
did come it was neither prolonged nor plentiful.  Then came questions as
to how long ago the Tanks were built.

"Thirteen hundred years!" she exclaimed.  "How strange to feel it so!
It is like looking at old graves.  And how high the walls are, closing up
the gorge between the hills."

At that moment Mrs. Callendar drew our attention to Mrs. Falchion and a
party from the ship.  Mrs. Falchion was but a few paces from us, smiling
agreeably as she acknowledged our greetings.  Presently two of her party
came to us and asked us to share their lunch.  I would have objected, and
I am certain Belle Treherne would gladly have done so, but Mrs. Callendar
was anxious to accept, therefore we expressed our gratitude and joined
the group.  On second thoughts I was glad that we did so, because,
otherwise, my party must have been without refreshments until they
returned to the ship--the restaurants at Aden are not to be trusted.  To
me Mrs. Falchion was pleasantly impersonal, to Miss Treherne delicately
and actively personal.  At the time I had a kind of fear of her interest
in the girl, but I know now that it was quite sincere, though it began
with a motive not very lofty--to make Belle Treherne her friend, and so
annoy me, and also to study, as would an anatomist, the girl's life.

We all moved into the illusive shade of the fig and magnolia trees, and
lunch was soon spread.  As we ate, conversation turned upon the annoying
persistency of Eastern guides, and reference was made to the exciting
circumstances attending the engagement of Amshar, the guide of Mrs.
Falchion's party.  Among a score of claimants, Amshar had had one
particular opponent--a personal enemy--who would not desist even when
the choice had been made.  He, indeed, had been the first to solicit the
party, and was rejected because of his disagreeable looks.  He had even
followed the trap from the Port of Aden.  As one of the gentlemen was
remarking on the muttered anger of the disappointed Arab, Mrs. Falchion.
said: "There he is now at the gate of the garden."

His look was sullenly turned upon our party.  Blackburn, the Queenslander
said, "Amshar, the other fellow is following up the game," and pointed to
the gate.

Amshar understood the gesture at least, and though he gave a toss of the
head, I noticed that his hand trembled as he handed me a cup of water,
and that he kept his eyes turned on his opponent.

"One always feels unsafe with these cut-throat races," said Colonel
Ryder, "as some of us know, who have had to deal with the nigger of South
America.  They think no more of killing a man--"

"Than an Australian squatter does of dispersing a mob of aboriginals or
kangaroos," said Clovelly.

Here Mrs. Callendar spoke up briskly.  "I don't know what you mean by
'dispersing.'"

"You know what a kangaroo battue is, don't you?"

"But that is killing, slaughtering kangaroos by the hundred."

"Well, and that is aboriginal dispersion," said the novelist.  "That is
the aristocratic method of legislating the native out of existence."

Blackburn here vigorously protested.  "Yes, it's very like a novelist, on
the hunt for picturesque events, to spend his forensic soul upon 'the
poor native,'--upon the dirty nigger, I choose to call him: the meanest,
cruellest, most cowardly, and murderous--by Jove, what a lot of
adjectives!--of native races.  But we fellows, who have lost some of the
best friends we ever had--chums with whom we've shared blanket and
tucker--by the crack of a nulla-nulla in the dark, or a spear from the
scrub, can't find a place for Exeter Hall and its 'poor native' in our
hard hearts.  We stand in such a case for justice.  It is a new country.
Not once in fifty times would law reach them.  Reprisal and dispersion
were the only things possible to men whose friends had been massacred,
and--well, they punished tribes for the acts of individuals."

Mrs. Falchion here interposed.  "That is just what England does.  A
British trader is killed.  She sweeps a native town out of existence with
Hotchkiss guns--leaves it naked and dead.  That is dispersion too; I have
seen it, and I know how far niggers as a race can be trusted, and how
much they deserve sympathy.  I agree with Mr. Blackburn."

Blackburn raised his glass.  "Mrs. Falchion," he said, "I need no further
evidence to prove my case.  Experience is the best teacher."

"As I wish to join the chorus to so notable a compliment, will somebody
pass the claret?" said Colonel Ryder, shaking the crumbs of a pate from
his coat-collar.  When his glass was filled, he turned towards Mrs.
Falchion, and continued: "I drink to the health of the best teacher."
And every one laughingly responded.  This impromptu toast would have been
drunk with more warmth, if we could have foreseen an immediate event.
Not less peculiar were Mrs. Falchion's words to Hungerford the evening
before, recorded in the last sentence of the preceding chapter.

Cigars were passed, and the men rose and strolled away.  We wandered
outside the gardens, passing the rejected guide as we did so.  "I don't
like the look in his eye," said Clovelly.

Colonel Ryder laughed.  "You've always got a fine vision for the
dramatic."

We passed on.  I suppose about twenty minutes had gone when, as we were
entering the garden again, we heard loud cries.  Hurrying forward towards
the Tanks, we saw a strange sight.

There, on a narrow wall dividing two great tanks, were three people--
Mrs. Falchion, Amshar, and the rejected Arab guide.  Amshar was crouching
behind Mrs. Falchion, and clinging to her skirts in abject fear.  The
Arab threatened with a knife.  He could not get at Amshar without
thrusting Mrs. Falchion aside, and, as I said, the wall was narrow.  He
was bent like a tiger about to spring.

Seeing Mrs. Falchion and Amshar apart from the others,--Mrs. Falchion
having insisted on crossing this narrow and precipitous wall,--he had
suddenly rushed after them.  As he did so, Miss Treherne saw him, and
cried out.  Mrs. Falchion faced round swiftly, and then came this tragic
situation.

Some one must die.

Seeing that Mrs. Falchion made no effort to dislodge Amshar from her
skirts, the Arab presently leaped forward.  Mrs. Falchion's arms went out
suddenly, and she caught the wrist that held the dagger.  Then there was
an instant's struggle.  It was Mrs. Falchion's life now, as well as
Amshar's.  They swayed.  They hung on the edge of the rocky chasm.  Then
we lost the gleam of the knife, and the Arab shivered, and toppled over.
Mrs. Falchion would have gone with him, but Amshar caught her about the
waist, and saved her from the fall which would have killed her as
certainly as it killed the Arab lying at the bottom of the tank.  She had
managed to turn the knife in the Arab's hand against his own breast, and
then suddenly pressed her body against it; but the impulse of the act
came near carrying her over also.

Amshar was kneeling at her feet, and kissing her gown gratefully.  She
pushed him away with her foot, and, coolly turning aside, began to
arrange her hair.  As I approached her, she glanced down at the Arab.
"Horrible!  horrible!" she said.  I remembered that these were her words
when her husband was lifted from the sea to the 'Fulvia'.

Not ungently, she refused my hand or any assistance, and came down among
the rest of the party.  I could not but feel a strange wonder at the
powerful side of her character just shown--her courage, her cool daring.
In her face now there was a look of annoyance, and possibly disgust, as
well as of triumph--so natural in cases of physical prowess.  Everybody
offered congratulations, but she only showed real pleasure, and that
mutely, at those of Miss Treherne.  To the rest of us she said: "One had
to save one's self, and Amshar was a coward."

And so this woman, whose hardness of heart and excessive cruelty
Hungerford and I were keeping from the world, was now made into a
heroine, around whom a halo of romance would settle whenever her name
should be mentioned.  Now, men, eligible and ineligible, would increase
their homage.  It seemed as if the stars had stopped in their courses to
give her special fortune.

That morning I had thought her appearance at this luncheon-party was
little less than scandalous, for she knew, if others did not, who Boyd
Madras was.  After the occurrence with the Arab, the other event was
certainly much less prominent, and here, after many years, I can see that
the act was less in her than it would have been in others.  For, behind
her outward hardness, there was a sort of justice working, an iron thing,
but still not unnatural in her.

Belle Treherne awakened also to a new perception of her character, and a
kind of awe possessed her, so masculine seemed her courage, yet so
womanly and feminine her manner.  Mrs. Callendar was loud in her
exclamations of delight and wonder at Mrs. Falchion's coolness; and the
bookmaker, with his usual impetuosity, offered to take bets at four to
one that we should all be detained to give evidence in the matter.

Clovelly was silent.  He occasionally adjusted his glasses, and looked at
Mrs. Falchion as if he had suddenly come to a full stop in his opinions
regarding her.  This, I think, was noticed by her, and enjoyed too, for
she doubtless remembered her conversation with me, in which she had said
that Clovelly thought he understood her perfectly.  Colonel Ryder, who
was loyal at all times, said she had the nerve of a woman from Kentucky.
Moreover, he had presence of mind, for he had immediately sent off a
native to inform the authorities of what had occurred; so that before we
had got half-way to the town we were met by policemen running towards us,
followed by a small detachment of Indian soldiers.  The officer in
command of the detachment stopped us, and said that the governor would be
glad if we would come to Government House for an hour, while an inquiry
was being held.

To this we cheerfully consented, of course; and, in a room where punkahs
waved and cool claret-cup awaited us, we were received by the governor,
who was full of admiration of Mrs. Falchion.  It was plain, however, that
he was surprised at her present equanimity.  Had she no nerves at all?

"I can only regret exceedingly," said the governor, "that your visit to
Aden has had such a tragical interruption; but since it has occurred,
I am glad to have the privilege of meeting a lady so brave as Mrs.
Falchion."--The bookmaker had introduced us all with a naivete that,
I am sure, amused the governor, as it certainly did his aide-de-camp.
"We should not need to fear the natives if we had soldiers as fearless,"
his excellency continued.

At this point the inquiry began, and, after it was over, the governor
said that there the matter ended so far as we were concerned, and then he
remarked gallantly that the Government of Aden would always remain Mrs.
Falchion's debtor.  She replied that it was a debt she would be glad to
preserve unsettled for ever.  After this pretty exchange of compliments,
the governor smiled, and offered her his arm to the door, where our 'char
a bans' awaited us.

So impressed was the bookmaker with the hospitable reception the governor
had given us, that he offered him his cigar-case with its contents, said
he hoped they would meet again, and asked his excellency if he thought of
coming to Australia.  The governor declined the cigars graciously,
ignored the hoped-for pleasure of another meeting, and trusted that it
might fall to his lot to visit Australia some day.  Thereupon the
bookmaker insisted on the aide-de-camp accepting the cigar-case, and gave
him his visiting-card.  The aide-de-camp lost nothing by his good-humoured
acceptance, if he smoked, because, as I knew, the cigars were very good
indeed.  Bookmakers, gamblers and Jews are good judges of tobacco.  And
the governor's party lost nothing in dignity because, as the traps
wheeled away, they gave a polite little cheer for Mrs. Falchion.  I, at
first, was fearful how Belle Treherne would regard the gaucheries of the
bookmaker, but I saw that he was rather an object of interest to her than
otherwise; for he was certainly amusing.

As we drove through Aden, a Somauli lad ran from the door of a house, and
handed up a letter to the driver of my trap.  It bore my name, and was
handed over to me.  I recognised the handwriting.  It was that of Boyd
Madras.  He had come ashore by Hungerford's aid in the night.  The letter
simply gave an address in England that would always find him, and stated
that he intended to take another name.




CHAPTER IX

"THE PROGRESS OF THE SUNS"

News of the event had preceded us to the 'Fulvia', and, as we scrambled out
on the ship's stairs, cheers greeted us.  Glancing up, I saw Hungerford,
among others, leaning over the side, and looking at Mrs. Falchion in a
curious cogitating fashion, not unusual to him.  The look was non-
committal, yet earnest.  If it was not approval, it was not condemnation;
but it might have been slightly ironical, and that annoyed me.  It seemed
impossible for him--and it was so always, I believe--to get out of his
mind the thought of the man he had rescued on No Man's Sea.  I am sure
it jarred upon him that the band foolishly played a welcome when Mrs.
Falchion stepped on the deck.  As I delivered Miss Treherne into the
hands of her father, who was anxiously awaiting us, Hungerford said in my
ear: "A tragedy queen, Marmion."  He said it so distinctly that Mrs.
Falchion heard it, and she gave him a searching look.  Their eyes met and
warred for a moment, and then he added: "I remember!  Yes, I can respect
the bravery of a woman whom I do not like."

"And this is to-morrow," she said, "and a man may change his mind, and
that may be fate--or a woman's whim."  She bowed, turned away, and went
below, evidently disliking the reception she had had, and anxious to
escape inquiries and congratulations.  Nor did she appear again until the
'Fulvia' got under way about six o'clock in the evening.  As we moved out
of the harbour we passed close to the 'Porcupine' and saw its officers
grouped on the deck, waving adieus to some one on our deck, whom I
guessed, of course, to be Galt Roscoe.

At this time Mrs. Falchion was standing near me.  "For whom is that
demonstration?" she said.

"For one of her officers, who is a passenger by the 'Fulvia'," I replied.
"You remember we passed the 'Porcupine' in the Indian Ocean?"

"Yes, I know that very well," she said, with a shade of meaning.  "But"--
here I thought her voice had a touch of breathlessness--"but who is the
officer?  I mean, what is his name?"

"He stands in the group near the door of the captain's cabin, there.  His
name is Galt Roscoe, I think."

A slight exclamation escaped her.  There was a chilly smile on her lips,
and her eyes sought the group until it rested on Galt Roscoe.  In a
moment she said "You have met him?"

"In the cemetery this morning, for the first time."

"Everybody seems to have had business this morning at the cemetery.
Justine Caron spent hours there.  To me it is so foolish, heaping up a
mound, and erecting a tombstone over--what?--a dead thing, which, if one
could see it, would be dreadful."

"You would prefer complete absorption--as of the ocean?" I brutally
retorted.

She appeared not to notice the innuendo.  "Yes, what is gone is gone.
Graves are idolatry.  Gravestones are ghostly.  It is people without
imagination who need these things, together with crape and black-edged
paper.  It is all barbaric ritual.  I know you think I am callous, but I
cannot help that.  For myself, I wish the earth close about me, and level
green grass above me, and no one knowing of the place; or else, fire or
the sea."

"Mrs. Falchion," said I, "between us there need be no delicate words.
You appear to have neither imagination, nor idolatry, nor remembrances,
nor common womanly kindness."

"Indeed!" she said.  "Yet you might know me better."  Here she touched
my arm with the tips of her fingers, and, in spite of myself, I felt my
pulse beat faster.  It seemed to me that in her presence, even now,
I could not quite trust myself.  "Indeed!" she repeated.  "And who made
you omniscient, Dr. Marmion?  You hardly do yourself justice.  You hold a
secret.  You insist on reminding me of the fact.  Is that in perfect
gallantry?  Do you know me altogether, from your knowledge of that one
thing?  You are vain.  Or does the secret wear on you, and--Mr.
Hungerford?  Was it necessary to seek HIS help in keeping it?"

I told her then the true history of Hungerford's connection with Boyd
Madras, and also begged her pardon for showing just now my knowledge of
her secret.  At this she said, "I suppose I should be grateful," and was
there a slightly softer cadence to her voice?

"No, you need not be grateful," I said.  "We are silent, first, because
he wished it; then because you are a woman."

"You define your reasons with astonishing care and taste," she replied.

"Oh, as to taste!--" said I; but then I bit my tongue.

At that she said, her lips very firm and pale, "I could not pretend
to a grief I did not feel.  I acted no lie.  He died as we had lived--
estranged.  I put up no memorials."

But I, thinking of my mother lying in her grave, a woman after God's own
heart, who loved me more than I deserved, repeated almost unconsciously
these lines (clipped from a magazine):

              "Sacred the ring, the faded glove,
               Once worn by one we used to love;
               Dead warriors in their armour live,
               And in their relics saints survive.

              "Oh, Mother Earth, henceforth defend
               All thou hast garnered of my friend,
               From winter's wind and driving sleet,
               From summer's sun and scorching heat.

              "Within thine all-embracing breast
               Is hid one more forsaken nest;
               While, in the sky, with folded wings,
               The bird that left it sits and sings."

I paused; the occasion seemed so little suited to the sentiment, for
around us was the idle excitement of leaving port.  I was annoyed with
myself for my share in the conversation so far.  Mrs. Falchion's eyes had
scarcely left that group around the captain's door, although she had
appeared acutely interested in what I was saying.  Now she said:

"You recite very well.  I feel impressed, but I fancy it is more your
voice than those fine sentiments; for, after all, you cannot glorify the
dead body.  Look at the mummy of Thothmes at Boulak, and think what
Cleopatra must look like now.  And please let us talk about something
else.  Let us--"  She paused.

I followed the keen, shaded glance of her eyes, and saw, coming from the
group by the captain's door, Galt Roscoe.  He moved in our direction.
Suddenly he paused.  His look was fixed upon Mrs. Falchion.  A flush
passed over his face, not exactly confusing, but painful, and again it
left him pale, and for a moment he stood motionless.  Then he came
forward to us.  He bowed to me, then looked hard at her.  She held out
her hand.

"Mr. Roscoe, I think?" she said.  "An old friend," she added, turning to
me.  He gravely took her extended hand and said:

"I did not think to see you here, Miss--"

"MRS. Falchion," she interrupted clearly.

"MRS. Falchion!" he said, with surprise.  "It is so many years since we
had met, and--"

"And it is so easy to forget things?  But it isn't so many, really--only
seven, the cycle for constitutional renewal.  Dear me, how erudite that
sounds! . . .  So, I suppose, we meet the same, yet not the same."

"The same, yet not the same," he repeated after her, with an attempt at
lightness, yet abstractedly.

"I think you gentlemen know each other?" she said.

"Yes; we met in the cemetery this morning.  I was visiting the grave of a
young French officer."

"I know," she said--"Justine Caron's brother.  She has told me; but she
did not tell me your name."

"She has told you?" he said.

"Yes.  She is--my companion."  I saw that she did not use the word that
first came to her.

"How strangely things occur!  And yet," he added musingly, "I suppose,
after all, coincidence is not so strange in these days of much travel,
particularly with people whose lives are connected--more or less."

"Whose lives are connected--more or less," she repeated after him, in a
steely tone.

It seemed to me that I had received my cue to leave.  I bowed myself
away, and went about my duties.  As we steamed bravely through the
Straits of Babelmandeb, with Perim on our left, rising lovely through the
milky haze, I came on deck again, and they were still near where I had
left them an hour before.  I passed, glancing at them as I did so.  They
did not look towards me.  His eyes were turned to the shore, and hers
were fixed on him.  I saw an expression on her lips that gave her face
new character.  She was speaking, as I thought, clearly and mercilessly.
I could not help hearing her words as I passed them.

"You are going to be that--you!"  There was a ring of irony in her tone.
I heard nothing more in words, but I saw him turn to her somewhat
sharply, and I caught the deep notes of his voice as he answered her.
When, a moment after, I looked back, she had gone below.

Galt Roscoe had a seat at Captain Ascott's table, and I did not see
anything of him at meal-times, but elsewhere I soon saw him a great deal.
He appeared to seek my company.  I was glad of this, for I found that he
was an agreeable man, and had distinct originality of ideas, besides
being possessed of very considerable culture.  He also had that social
aplomb so much a characteristic of the naval officer.  Yet, man of the
world as he was, he had a strain of asceticism which puzzled me.  It did
not make him eccentric, but it was not a thing usual with the naval man.
Again, he wished to be known simply as Mr. Roscoe, not as Captain Roscoe,
which was his rank.  He said nothing about having retired, yet I guessed
he had done so.  One evening, however, soon after we had left Aden, we
were sitting in my cabin, and the conversation turned upon a recent novel
dealing with the defection of a clergyman of the Church of England
through agnosticism.  The keenness with which he threw himself into the
discussion and the knowledge he showed, surprised me.  I knew (as most
medical students get to know, until they know better) some scientific
objections to Christianity, and I put them forward.  He clearly and
powerfully met them.  I said at last, laughingly: "Why, you ought to take
holy orders."

"That is what I am going to do," he said very seriously, "when I get to
England.  I am resigning the navy."  At that instant there flashed
through my mind Mrs. Falchion's words: "You are going to be that--you!"

Then he explained to me that he had been studying for two years, and
expected to go up for deacon's orders soon after his return to England.
I cannot say that I was greatly surprised, for I had known a few, and had
heard of many, men who had exchanged the navy for the Church.  It struck
me, however, that Galt Roscoe appeared to view the matter from a stand-
point not professional; the more so, that he expressed his determination
to go to the newest part of a new country, to do the pioneer work of the
Church.  I asked him where he was going, and he said to the Rocky
Mountains of Canada.  I told him that my destination was Canada also.  He
warmly expressed the hope that we should see something of each other
there.  This friendship of ours may seem to have been hastily hatched,
but it must be remembered that the sea is a great breeder of friendship.
Two men who have known each other for twenty years find that twenty days
at sea bring them nearer than ever they were before, or else estrange
them.

It was on this evening that, in a lull of the conversation, I casually
asked him when he had known Mrs. Falchion.  His face was inscrutable, but
he said somewhat hurriedly, "In the South Sea Islands," and then changed
the subject.  So, there was some mystery again?  Was this woman never to
be dissociated from enigma?  In those days I never could think of her
save in connection with some fatal incident in which she was scathless,
and some one else suffered.

It may have been fancy, but I thought that, during the first day or two
after leaving Aden, Galt Roscoe and Mrs. Falchion were very little
together.  Then the impression grew that this was his doing, and again
that she waited with confident patience for the time when he would seek
her--because he could not help himself.  Often when other men were paying
her devoted court I caught her eyes turned in his direction, and I
thought I read in her smile a consciousness of power.  And it so was.
Very soon he was at her side.  But I also noticed that he began to look
worn, that his conversation with me lagged.  I think that at this time
I was so much occupied with tracing personal appearances to personal
influences that I lost to some degree the physician's practical keenness.
My eyes were to be opened.  He appeared to be suffering, and she seemed
to unbend to him more than she ever unbent to me, or any one else on
board.  Hungerford, seeing this, said to me one day in his blunt way:
"Marmion, old Ulysses knew what he was about when he tied himself to the
mast."

But the routine of the ship went on as before.  Fortunately, Mrs.
Falchion's heroism at Aden had taken the place of the sensation attending
Boyd Madras's suicide.  Those who tired of thinking of both became mildly
interested in Red Sea history.  Chief among these was the bookmaker.  As
an historian the bookmaker was original.  He cavalierly waved aside all
such confusing things as dates: made Moses and Mahomet contemporaneous,
incidentally referred to King Solomon's visits to Cleopatra, and with sad
irreverence spoke of the Exodus and the destruction of Pharaoh's horses
and chariots as "the big handicap."  He did not mean to be irreverent or
unhistorical.  He merely wished to enlighten Mrs. Callendar, who said he
was very original, and quite clever at history.  His really startling
points, however, were his remarks upon the colours of the mountains of
Egypt and the sunset tints to be seen on the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.
To him the grey, and pink, and melancholy gold only brought up visions
of a race at Epsom or Flemington--generally Flemington, where the staring
Australian sun pours down on an emerald course, on a score of horses
straining upon the start, the colours of the jockeys' coats and caps
changing in the struggle like a kaleidoscope, and making strange
harmonies of colour.  The comparison between the mountains of Egypt and
a race-course might seem most absurd, if one did not remember that the
bookmaker had his own standards, and that he thought he was paying
unusual honour to the land of the Fellah.  Clovelly plaintively said,
as he drank his hock and seltzer, that the bookmaker was hourly saving
his life; and Colonel Ryder admitted at last that Kentucky never produced
anything quite like him.

The evening before we came to the Suez Canal I was walking with Miss
Treherne and her father.  I had seen Galt Roscoe in conversation with
Mrs. Falchion.  Presently I saw him rise to go away.  A moment after,
in passing, I was near her.  She sprang up, caught my arm, and pointed
anxiously.  I looked, and saw Galt Roscoe swaying as he walked.

"He is ill--ill," she said.

I ran forward and caught him as he was falling.  Ill?

Of course he was ill.  What a fool I had been!  Five minutes with him
assured me that he had fever.  I had set his haggard appearance down to
some mental trouble--and I was going to be a professor in a medical
college!

Yet I know now that a troubled mind hastened the fever.




CHAPTER X

BETWEEN DAY AND DARK

From the beginning Galt Roscoe's fever was violent.  It had been hanging
about him for a long time, and was the result of malarial poisoning.  I
devoutly wished that we were in the Mediterranean instead of the Red Sea,
where the heat was so great; but fortunately we should soon be there.
There was no other case of sickness on board, and I could devote plenty
of time to him.  Offers of assistance in nursing were numerous, but I
only encouraged those of the bookmaker, strange as this may seem; yet he
was as gentle and considerate as a woman in the sick-room.  This was on
the first evening of his attack.  After that I had reasons for dispensing
with his generous services.  The night after Roscoe was taken ill we were
passing through the canal, the search-light of the 'Fulvia' sweeping the
path ahead of it and glorifying everything it touched.  Mud barges were
fairy palaces; Arab punts beautiful gondolas; the ragged Egyptians on the
banks became picturesque; and the desolate country behind them had a wide
vestibule of splendour.  I stood for half an hour watching this scene,
then I went below to Roscoe's cabin and relieved the bookmaker.  The sick
man was sleeping from the effects of a sedative draught.  The bookmaker
had scarcely gone when I heard a step behind me, and I turned and saw
Justine Caron standing timidly at the door, her eyes upon the sleeper.
She spoke quietly.  "Is he very ill?"

I answered that he was, but also that for some days I could not tell how
dangerous his illness might be.  She went to the berth where he lay, the
reflected light from without playing weirdly on his face, and smoothed
the pillow gently.

"If you are willing, I will watch for a time," she said.  "Everybody is
on deck.  Madame said she would not need me for a couple of hours.  I
will send a steward for you if he wakes; you need rest yourself."

That I needed rest was quite true, for I had been up all the night
before; still I hesitated.  She saw my hesitation, and added:

"It is not much that I can do, still I should like to do it.  I can at
least watch."  Then, very earnestly: "He watched beside Hector."

I left her with him, her fingers moving the small bag of ice about his
forehead to allay the fever and her eyes patiently regarding him.  I went
on deck again.  I met Miss Treherne and her father.  They both inquired
for the sick man, and I told Belle--for she seemed much interested--the
nature of such malarial fevers, the acute forms they sometimes take, and
the kind of treatment required.  She asked several questions, showing a
keen understanding of my explanations, and then, after a moment's
silence, said meditatively: "I think I like men better when they are
doing responsible work; it is difficult to be idle--and important too."

I saw very well that, with her, I should have to contend for a long time
against those first few weeks of dalliance on the 'Fulvia'.

Clovelly joined us, and for the first time--if I had not been so
egotistical it had appeared to me before--I guessed that his somewhat
professional interest in Belle Treherne had developed into a very
personal thing.  And with that thought came also the conception of what
a powerful antagonist he would be.  For it improves some men to wear
glasses; and Clovelly had a delightful, wheedling tongue.  It was
allusive, contradictory (a thing pleasing to women), respectful yet
playful, bold yet reverential.  Many a time I have longed for Clovelly's
tongue.  Unfortunately for me, I learned some of his methods without his
art;  and of this I am occasionally reminded at this day.  A man like
Clovelly is dangerous as a rival when he is not in earnest; when he IS in
earnest, it becomes a lonely time for the other man--unless the girl is
perverse.

I left the two together, and moved about the deck, trying to think
closely about Roscoe's case, and to drive Clovelly's invasion from my
mind.  I succeeded, and was only roused by Mrs. Falchion's voice beside
me.

"Does he suffer much?" she murmured.

When answered, she asked nervously how he looked--it was impossible that
she should consider misery without shrinking.  I told her that he was
only flushed and haggard as yet and that he was little wasted.  A thought
flashed to her face.  She was about to speak, but paused.  After a
moment, however, she remarked evenly: "He is likely to be delirious?"

"It is probable," I replied.

Her eyes were fixed on the search-light.  The look in them was
inscrutable.  She continued quietly: "I will go and see him, if you will
let me.  Justine will go with me."

"Not now," I replied.  "He is sleeping.  To-morrow, if you will."

I did not think it necessary to tell her that Justine was at that moment
watching beside him.  We walked the deck together in silence.

"I wonder," she said, "that you care to walk with me.  Please do not make
the matter a burden."

She did not say this with any invitation to courteous protest on my part,
but rather with a cold frankness--for which, I confess, I always admired
her.  I said now: "Mrs. Falchion, you have suggested what might easily be
possible in the circumstances, but I candidly admit that I have never yet
found your presence disagreeable; and I suppose that is a comment upon my
weakness.  Though, to speak again with absolute truth, I think I do not
like you at this present."

"Yes, I fancy I can understand that," she said.  "I can understand how,
for instance, one might feel a just and great resentment, and have in
one's hand the instrument of punishment, and yet withhold one's hand
and protect where one should injure."

At this moment these words had no particular significance to me, but
there chanced a time when they came home with great force.  I think,
indeed, that she was speaking more to herself than to me.  Suddenly she
turned to me.

"I wonder," she said, "if I am as cruel as you think me--for, indeed,
I do not know.  But I have been through many things."

Here her eyes grew cold and hard.  The words that followed seemed in no
sequence.  "Yet," she said, "I will go and see him to-morrow. . . .
Good-night."  After about an hour I went below to Galt Roscoe's cabin.
I drew aside the curtain quietly.  Justine Caron evidently had not heard
me.  She was sitting beside the sick man, her fingers still smoothing
away the pillow from his fevered face and her eyes fixed on him.  I spoke
to her.  She rose.  "He has slept well," she said.  And she moved to the
door.

"Miss Caron," I said, "if Mrs. Falchion is willing, you could help me to
nurse Mr. Roscoe?"

A light sprang to her eyes.  "Indeed, yes," she said.

"I will speak to her about it, if you will let me?"  She bowed her head,
and her look was eloquent of thanks.  After a word of good-night we
parted.

I knew that nothing better could occur to my patient than that Justine
Caron should help to nurse him.  This would do far more for him than
medicine--the tender care of a woman--than many pharmacopoeias.

Hungerford had insisted on relieving me for a couple of hours at
midnight.  He said it would be a good preparation for going on the bridge
at three o'clock in the morning.  About half-past two he came to my cabin
and waked me, saying: "He is worse--delirious; you had better come."

He was indeed delirious.  Hungerford laid his hand on my shoulder.
"Marmion," he said, "that woman is in it.  Like the devil, she is
ubiquitous.  Mr. Roscoe's past is mixed up with hers somehow.  I don't
suppose men talk absolute history in delirium, but there is no reason,
I fancy, why they shouldn't paraphrase.  I should reduce the number of
nurses to a minimum if I were you."

A determined fierceness possessed me at the moment.  I said to him: "She
shall nurse him, Hungerford--she, and Justine Caron, and myself."

"Plus Dick Hungerford," he added.  "I don't know quite how you intend to
work this thing, but you have the case in your hands, and what you've
told me about the French girl shows that she is to be trusted.  But as
for myself, Marmion M.D., I'm sick--sick--sick of this woman, and all her
words and works.  I believe that she has brought bad luck to this ship;
and it's my last voyage on it; and--and I begin to think you're a damned
good fellow--excuse the insolence of it; and--good-night."

For the rest of the night I listened to Galt Roscoe's wild words.  He
tossed from side to side, and murmured brokenly.  Taken separately, and
as they were spoken, his words might not be very significant, but pieced
together, arranged, and interpreted through even scant knowledge of
circumstances, they were sufficient to give me a key to difficulties
which, afterwards, were to cause much distress.  I arrange some of the
sentences here to show how startling were the fancies--or remembrances
--that vexed him.

"But I was coming back--I was coming back--I tell you I should have
stayed with her for ever. . . .  See how she trembles!--Now her breath
is gone--There is no pulse--Her heart is still--My God, her heart is
still!--Hush! cover her face. . . .  Row hard, you devils!--A hundred
dollars if you make the point in time. . . .  Whereaway?--Whereaway?--
Steady now!--Let them have it across the bows!--Low! low!--fire low! . . .
She is dead--she is dead!"

These things he would say over and over again breathlessly, then he would
rest a while, and the trouble would begin again.  "It was not I that did
it--no, it was not I.  She did it herself!--She plunged it in, deep,
deep, deep!  You made me a devil! . . .  Hush! I WILL tell!--I know
you--yet--Mercy--Mercy--Falchion--"

Yes, it was best that few should enter his cabin.  The ravings of a sick
man are not always counted ravings, no more than the words of a well man
are always reckoned sane.  At last I got him into a sound sleep, and
by that time I was thoroughly tired out.  I called my own steward, and
asked him to watch for a couple of hours while I rested.  I threw myself
down and slept soundly for an hour beyond that time, the steward having
hesitated to wake me.

By that time we had passed into the fresher air of the Mediterranean, and
the sea was delightfully smooth.  Galt Roscoe still slept, though his
temperature was high.

My conference with Mrs. Falchion after breakfast was brief, but
satisfactory.  I told her frankly that Roscoe had been delirious, that he
had mentioned her name, and that I thought it best to reduce the number
of nurses and watchers.  I made my proposition about Justine Caron.  She
shook her head a little impatiently, and said that Justine had told her,
and that she was quite willing.  Then I asked her if she would not also
assist.  She answered immediately that she wished to do so.  As if to
make me understand why she did it, she added: "If I did not hear the
wild things he says, some one else would; and the difference is that
I understand them, and the some one else would interpret them with
the genius of the writer of a fairy book."

And so it happened that Mrs. Falchion came to sit many hours a day beside
the sick couch of Galt Roscoe, moistening his lips, cooling his brow,
giving him his medicine.  After the first day, when she was, I thought,
alternating between innate disgust of misery and her womanliness and
humanity,--in these days more a reality to me,--she grew watchful and
silently solicitous at every turn of the malady.  What impressed me most
was that she was interested and engrossed more, it seemed, in the malady
than in the man himself.

And yet she baffled me even when I had come to this conclusion.

During most of his delirium she remained almost impassive, as if she had
schooled herself to be calm and strong in nerve; but one afternoon she
did a thing that upset all my opinions of her for a moment.  Looking
straight at her with staring, unconscious eyes, he half rose in his bed,
and said in a low, bitter tone: "I hate you.  I once loved you--but I
hate you now!"  Then he laughed scornfully, and fell back on the pillow.
She had been sitting very quietly, musing.  His action had been
unexpected, and had broken upon a silence.  She rose to her feet quickly,
gave a sharp indrawn breath, and pressed her hand against her side, as
though a sudden pain had seized her.  The next moment, however, she was
composed again, and said in explanation that she had been half asleep,
and he had startled her.  But I had seen her under what seemed to me more
trying conditions, and she had not shown any nervousness such as this.

The passengers, of course, talked.  Many "true histories" of Mrs.
Falchion's devotion to the sick man were abroad; but it must be said,
however, that all of them were romantically creditable to her.  She had
become a rare product even in the eyes of Miss Treherne, and more
particularly her father, since the matter at the Tanks.  Justine Caron
was slyly besieged by the curious, but they went away empty; for Justine,
if very simple and single-minded, was yet too much concerned for both
Galt Roscoe and Mrs. Falchion to give the inquiring the slightest clue.
She knew, indeed, little herself, whatever she may have guessed.  As for
Hungerford, he was dumb.  He refused to consider the matter.  But he
roundly maintained once or twice, without any apparent relevance, that
a woman was like a repeating decimal--you could follow her, but you never
could reach her.  He usually added to this: "Minus one, Marmion," meaning
thus to exclude the girl who preferred him to any one else.  When I
ventured to suggest that Miss Treherne might also be excepted, he said,
with maddening suggestion: "She lets Mrs. Falchion fool her, doesn't she?
And she isn't quite sure the splendour of a medical professor's position
is superior to that of an author."

In these moments, although I tried to smile on him, I hated him a little.
I sought to revenge myself on him by telling him to help himself to a
cigar, having first placed the box of Mexicans near him.  He invariably
declined them, and said he would take one of the others from the tea-box
--my very best, kept in tea for sake of dryness.  If I reversed the
process he reversed his action.  His instinct regarding cigars was
supernatural, and I almost believe that he had--like the Black Dwarf's
cat--the "poo'er" of reading character and interpreting events--an uncanny
divination.

I knew by the time we reached Valetta that Roscoe would get well; but he
recognised none of us until we arrived at Gibraltar.  Justine Caron and
myself had been watching beside him.  As the bells clanged to "slow down"
on entering the harbour, his eyes opened with a gaze of sanity and
consciousness.  He looked at me, then at Justine.

"I have been ill?" he said.

Justine's eyes were not entirely to be trusted.  She turned her head
away.

"Yes, you have been very ill," I replied, "but you are better."

He smiled feebly, adding: "At least, I am grateful that I did not die at
sea."  Then he closed his eyes.  After a moment he opened them, and said,
looking at Justine: "You have helped to nurse me, have you not?"  His
wasted fingers moved over the counterpane towards her.

"I could do so little," she murmured.

"You have more than paid your debt to me," he gently replied.  "For I
live, you see, and poor Hector died."

She shook her head gravely, and rejoined: "Ah no, I can never pay the
debt I owe to you and to God--now."  He did not understand this, I know.
But I did.  "You must not talk any more," I said to him.

But Justine interposed.  "He must be told that the nurse who has done
most for him is Mrs. Falchion."  His brows contracted as if he were
trying to remember something.  He moved his head wearily.

"Yes, I think I remember," he said, "about her being with me, but nothing
clearly--nothing clearly.  She is very kind."

Justine here murmured: "Shall I tell her?"

I was about to say no; but Roscoe nodded, and said quietly, "Yes, yes."

Then I made no objection, but urged that the meeting should only be for
a moment.  I determined not to leave them alone even for that moment.
I did not know what things connected with their past--whatever it was--
might be brought up, and I knew that entire freedom from excitement was
necessary.  I might have spared myself any anxiety on the point.  When
she came she was perfectly self-composed, and more as she seemed when I
first knew her, though I will admit that I thought her face more possible
to emotion than in the past.

It seems strange to write of a few weeks before as the past; but so much
had occurred that the days might easily have been months and the weeks
years.

She sat down beside him and held out her hand.  And as she did so,
I thought of Boyd Madras and of that long last night of his life, and
of her refusal to say to him one comforting word, or to touch his hand
in forgiveness and friendship.  And was this man so much better than Boyd
Madras?  His wild words in delirium might mean nothing, but if they meant
anything, and she knew of that anything, she was still a heartless,
unnatural woman, as I had once called her.

Roscoe took her hand and held it briefly.  "Dr. Marmion says that you
have helped to nurse me through my illness," he whispered.  "I am most
grateful."

I thought she replied with the slightest constraint in her voice.  "One
could not let an old acquaintance die without making an effort to save
him."

At that instant I grew scornful, and longed to tell him of her husband.
But then a husband was not an acquaintance.  I ventured instead: "I am
sorry, but I must cut short all conversation for the present.  When he
is a little better, he will be benefited by your brightest gossip,
Mrs. Falchion."

She rose smiling, but she did not again take his hand, though I thought
he made a motion to that end.  But she looked down at him steadily for
a moment.  Beneath her look his face flushed, and his eyes grew hot with
light; then they dropped, and the eyelids closed on them.  At that she
said, with an incomprehensible airiness: "Good-night.  I am going now to
play the music of 'La Grande Duchesse' as a farewell to Gibraltar.  They
have a concert on to-night."

And she was gone.

At the mention of La Grande Duchesse he sighed, and turned his head away
from her.  What it all meant I did not know, and she had annoyed me as
much as she had perplexed me; her moods were like the chameleon's
colours.  He lay silent for a long time, then he turned to me and said:
"Do you remember that tale in the Bible about David and the well of
Bethlehem?"  I had to confess my ignorance.

"I think I can remember it," he continued.  And though I urged him not to
tax himself, he spoke slowly thus:

     "And David was in an hold, and the garrison of the Philistines was
     then in Bethlehem.

     "And David longed, and said, Oh that one would give me to drink of
     the water of the well of Bethlehem that is at the gate!

     "And the three brake through the host of the Philistines, and drew
     water out of the well of Bethlehem that was by the gate, and took
     and brought it to David; nevertheless, he would not drink thereof,
     but poured it out unto the Lord.

     "And he said, My God forbid it me that I should do this; is not this
     the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of their lives?
     Therefore he would not drink it."

He paused a moment, and then added: "One always buys back the past at a
tremendous price.  Resurrections give ghosts only."

"But you must sleep now," I urged.  And then, because I knew not what
else more fitting, I added: "Sleep, and

               "'Let the dead past bury its dead.'"

"Yes, I will sleep," he answered.






MRS. FALCHION

By Gilbert Parker


BOOK II.

THE SLOPE OF THE PACIFIC


CHAPTER XI

AMONG THE HILLS OF GOD

"Your letters, sir," said my servant, on the last evening of the college
year.  Examinations were over at last, and I was wondering where I should
spend my holidays.  The choice was very wide; ranging from the Muskoka
lakes to the Yosemite Valley.  Because it was my first year in Canada, I
really preferred not to go beyond the Dominion.  With these thoughts in
my mind I opened my letters.  The first two did not interest me;
tradesmen's bills seldom do.  The third brought a thumping sensation of
pleasure--though it was not from Miss Treherne.  I had had one from her
that morning, and this was a pleasure which never came twice in one day,
for Prince's College, Toronto, was a long week's journey from London,
S.W.  Considering, however, that I did receive letters from her once a
week, it may be concluded that Clovelly did not; and that, if he had, it
would have been by a serious infringement of my rights.  But, indeed, as
I have learned since, Clovelly took his defeat in a very characteristic
fashion, and said on an important occasion some generous things about me.

The letter that pleased me so much was from Galt Roscoe, who, as he had
intended, was settled in a new but thriving district of British Columbia,
near the Cascade Mountains.  Soon after his complete recovery he had been
ordained in England, had straightway sailed for Canada, and had gone to
work at once.  This note was an invitation to spend the holiday months
with him, where, as he said, a man "summering high among the hills of
God" could see visions and dream dreams, and hunt and fish too--
especially fish.  He urged that he would not talk parish concerns at me;
that I should not be asked to be godfather to any young mountaineers; and
that the only drawback, so far as my own predilections were concerned,
was the monotonous health of the people.  He described his summer cottage
of red pine as being built on the edge of a lovely ravine; he said that
he had the Cascades on one hand with their big glacier fields, and mighty
pine forests on the other; while the balmiest breezes of June awaited
"the professor of pathology and genial saw-bones."  At the end of the
letter he hinted something about a pleasant little secret for my ear when
I came; and remarked immediately afterwards that there were one or two
delightful families at Sunburst and Viking, villages in his parish.  One
naturally associated the little secret with some member of one of these
delightful families.  Finally, he said he would like to show me how it
was possible to transform a naval man into a parson.

My mind was made up.  I wrote to him that I would start at once.  Then
I began to make preparations, and meanwhile fell to thinking again about
him who was now the Reverend Galt Roscoe.  After the 'Fulvia' reached
London I had only seen him a few times, he having gone at once into the
country to prepare for ordination.  Mrs. Falchion and Justine Caron I had
met several times, but Mrs. Falchion forbore inquiring for Galt Roscoe:
from which, and from other slight but significant matters, I gathered
that she knew of his doings and whereabouts.  Before I started for
Toronto she said that she might see me there some day, for she was going
to San Francisco to inspect the property her uncle had left her, and in
all probability would make a sojourn in Canada.  I gave her my address,
and she then said she understood that Mr. Roscoe intended taking a
missionary parish in the wilds.  In his occasional letters to me while we
all were in England Roscoe seldom spoke of her, but, when he did, showed
that he knew of her movements.  This did not strike me at the time as
anything more than natural.  It did later.

Within a couple of weeks I reached Viking, a lumbering town with great
saw-mills, by way of San Francisco and Vancouver.  Roscoe met me at the
coach, and I was taken at once to the house among the hills.  It stood on
the edge of a ravine, and the end of the verandah looked over a verdant
precipice, beautiful but terrible too.  It was uniquely situated; a nest
among the hills, suitable either for work or play.  In one's ears was the
low, continuous din of the rapids, with the music of a neighbouring
waterfall.

On the way up the hills I had a chance to observe Roscoe closely.
His face had not that sturdy buoyancy which his letter suggested.  Still,
if it was pale, it had a glow which it did not possess before, and even a
stronger humanity than of old.  A new look had come into his eyes,
a certain absorbing earnestness, refining the past asceticism.
A more amiable and unselfish comrade man never had.

The second day I was there he took me to call upon a family at Viking,
the town with a great saw-mill and two smaller ones, owned by James
Devlin, an enterprising man who had grown rich at lumbering, and who
lived here in the mountains many months in each year.

Mr. James Devlin had a daughter who had had some advantages in the East
after her father had become rich, though her earlier life was spent
altogether in the mountains.  I soon saw where Roscoe's secret was to
be found.  Ruth Devlin was a tall girl of sensitive features, beautiful
eyes, and rare personality.  Her life, as I came to know, had been one of
great devotion and self-denial.  Before her father had made his fortune,
she had nursed a frail-bodied, faint-hearted mother, and had cared for,
and been a mother to, her younger sisters.  With wealth and ease came a
brighter bloom to her cheek, but it had a touch of care which would never
quite disappear, though it became in time a beautiful wistfulness rather
than anxiety.  Had this responsibility come to her in a city, it might
have spoiled her beauty and robbed her of her youth altogether; but in
the sustaining virtue of a life in the mountains, warm hues remained on
her cheek and a wonderful freshness in her nature.  Her family worshipped
her--as she deserved.

That evening Roscoe confided to me that he had not asked Ruth Devlin to
be his wife, nor had he, indeed, given her definite tokens of his love.
But the thing was in his mind as a happy possibility of the future.  We
talked till midnight, sitting at the end of the verandah overlooking the
ravine.  This corner, called the coping, became consecrated to our many
conversations.  We painted and sketched there in the morning (when we
were not fishing or he was not at his duties), received visitors, and
smoked in the evening, inhaling the balsam from the pines.  An old man
and his wife kept the house for us, and gave us to eat of simple but
comfortable fare.  The trout-fishing was good, and many a fine trout was
broiled for our evening meal; and many a fine string of trout found its
way to the tables of Roscoe's poorest parishioners, or else to furnish
the more fashionable table at which Ruth Devlin presided.  There were
excursions up the valley, and picnics on the hill-sides, and occasional
lunches and evening parties at the summer hotel, a mile from us farther
down the valley, at which tourists were beginning to assemble.

Yet, all the time, Roscoe was abundantly faithful to his duties at Viking
and in the settlement called Sunburst, which was devoted to salmon-
fishing.  Between Viking and Sunburst there was a great jealousy and
rivalry; for the salmon-fishers thought that the mills, though on a
tributary stream, interfered, by the sawdust spilled in the river, with
the travel and spawning of the salmon.  It needed all the tact of both
Mr. Devlin and Roscoe to keep the places from open fighting.  As it was,
the fire smouldered.  When Sunday came, however, there seemed to be truce
between the villages.  It appeared to me that one touched the primitive
and idyllic side of life: lively, sturdy, and simple, with nature about
us at once benignant and austere.  It is impossible to tell how fresh,
bracing, and inspiring was the climate of this new land.  It seemed to
glorify humanity, to make all who breathed it stalwart, and almost
pardonable even in wrong-doing.  Roscoe was always received respectfully,
and even cordially, among the salmon-fishers of Sunburst, as among the
mill-men and river-drivers of Viking: not the less so, because he had an
excellent faculty for machinery, and could talk to the people in their
own colloquialisms.  He had, besides, though there was little exuberance
in his nature, a gift of dry humour, which did more than anything else,
perhaps, to make his presence among them unrestrained.

His little churches at Viking and Sunburst were always well attended--
often filled to overflowing--and the people gave liberally to the
offertory: and I never knew any clergyman, however holy, who did not view
such a proceeding with a degree of complacency.  In the pulpit Roscoe was
almost powerful.  His knowledge of the world, his habits of directness,
his eager but not hurried speech, his unconventional but original
statements of things, his occasional literary felicity and unusual tact,
might have made him distinguished in a more cultured community.  Yet
there was something to modify all this: an occasional indefinable
sadness, a constant note of pathetic warning.  It struck me that I never
had met a man whose words and manner were at times so charged with
pathos; it was artistic in its searching simplicity.  There was some
unfathomable fount in his nature which was even beyond any occurrence of
his past; some radical, constitutional sorrow, coupled with a very
strong, practical, and even vigorous nature.

One of his most ardent admirers was a gambler, horse-trader, and watch-
dealer, who sold him a horse, and afterwards came and offered him thirty
dollars, saying that the horse was worth that much less than Roscoe had
paid for it, and protesting that he never could resist the opportunity of
getting the best of a game.  He said he did not doubt but that he would
do the same with one of the archangels.  He afterwards sold Roscoe a
watch at cost, but confessed to me that the works of the watch had been
smuggled.  He said he was so fond of the parson that he felt he had to
give him a chance of good things.  It was not uncommon for him to
discourse of Roscoe's quality in the bar-rooms of Sunburst and Viking,
in which he was ably seconded by Phil Boldrick, an eccentric, warm-
hearted fellow, who was so occupied in the affairs of the villages
generally, and so much an advisory board to the authorities, that he
had little time left to progress industrially himself.

Once when a noted bully came to Viking, and, out of sheer bravado and
meanness, insulted Roscoe in the streets, two or three river-drivers came
forward to avenge the insult.  It was quite needless, for the clergyman
had promptly taken the case in his own hands.  Waving them back, he said
to the bully: "I have no weapon, and if I had, I could not take your
life, nor try to take it; and you know that very well.  But I propose to
meet your insolence--the first shown me in this town."

Here murmurs of approbation went round.

"You will, of course, take the revolver from your pocket, and throw it on
the ground."

A couple of other revolvers were looking the bully in the face, and he
sullenly did as he was asked.

"You have a knife: throw that down."

This also was done under the most earnest emphasis of the revolvers.
Roscoe calmly took off his coat.  "I have met such scoundrels as you on
the quarter-deck," he said, "and I know what stuff is in you.  They call
you beachcombers in the South Seas.  You never fight fair.  You bully
women, knife natives, and never meet any one in fair fight.  You have
mistaken your man this time."

He walked close up to the bully, his face like steel, his thumbs caught
lightly in his waistcoat pockets; but it was noticeable that his hands
were shut.

"Now," he said, "we are even as to opportunity.  Repeat, if you please,
what you said a moment ago."

The bully's eye quailed, and he answered nothing.  "Then, as I said, you
are a coward and a cur, who insults peaceable men and weak women.  If I
know Viking right, it has no room for you."  Then he picked up his coat,
and put it on.

"Now," he added, "I think you had better go; but I leave that to the
citizens of Viking."

What they thought is easily explained.  Phil Boldrick, speaking for all,
said: "Yes, you had better go--quick; but on the hop like a cur, mind
you: on your hands and knees, jumping all the way."

And, with weapons menacing him, this visitor to Viking departed,
swallowing as he went the red dust disturbed by his hands and feet.

This established Roscoe's position finally.  Yet, with all his popularity
and the solid success of his work, he showed no vanity or egotism, nor
ever traded on the position he held in Viking and Sunburst.  He seemed to
have no ambition further than to do good work; no desire to be known
beyond his own district; no fancy, indeed, for the communications of his
labours to mission papers and benevolent ladies in England--so much the
habit of his order.  He was free from professional mannerisms.

One evening we were sitting in the accustomed spot--that is, the coping.
We had been silent for a long time.  At last Roscoe rose, and walked up
and down the verandah nervously.

"Marmion," said he, "I am disturbed to-day, I cannot tell you how:
a sense of impending evil, an anxiety."

I looked up at him inquiringly, and, of purpose, a little sceptically.

He smiled something sadly and continued: "Oh, I know you think it
foolishness.  But remember that all sailors are more or less
superstitious: it is bred in them; it is constitutional, and
I am afraid there's a good deal of the sailor in me yet."

Remembering Hungerford, I said: "I know that sailors are superstitious,
the most seasoned of them are that.  But it means nothing.  I may think
or feel that there is going to be a plague, but I should not enlarge the
insurance on my life because of it."

He put his hand on my shoulder and looked down at me earnestly.  "But,
Marmion, these things, I assure you, are not matters of will, nor yet
morbidness.  They occur at the most unexpected times.  I have had such
sensations before, and they were followed by strange matters."

I nodded, but said nothing.  I was still thinking of Hungerford.  After a
slight pause he continued somewhat hesitatingly:

"I dreamed last night, three times, of events that occurred in my past;
events which I hoped would never disturb me in the life I am now
leading."

"A life of self-denial," ventured I.  I waited a minute, and then added:
"Roscoe, I think it only fair to tell you--I don't know why I haven't
done so before--that when you were ill you were delirious, and talked of
things that may or may not have had to do with your past."

He started, and looked at me earnestly.  "They were unpleasant things?"

"Trying things; though all was vague and disconnected," I replied.

"I am glad you tell me this," he remarked quietly.  "And Mrs. Falchion and
Justine Caron--did they hear?"  He looked off to the hills.

"To a certain extent, I am sure.  Mrs. Falchion's name was generally
connected with--your fancies....  But really no one could place any
weight on what a man said in delirium, and I only mention the fact
to let you see exactly on what ground I stand with you."

"Can you give me an idea--of the thing I raved about?"

"Chiefly about a girl called Alo, not your wife, I should judge--who was
killed."

At that he spoke in a cheerless voice: "Marmion, I will tell you all the
story some day; but not now.  I hoped that I had been able to bury it,
even in memory, but I was wrong.  Some things--such things--never die.
They stay; and in our cheerfulest, most peaceful moments confront us,
and mock the new life we are leading.  There is no refuge from memory and
remorse in this world.  The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with
or without repentance."  He turned again from me and set a sombre face
towards the ravine.  "Roscoe," I said, taking his arm, "I cannot believe
that you have any sin on your conscience so dark that it is not wiped out
now."

"God bless you for your confidence.  But there is one woman who, I fear,
could, if she would, disgrace me before the world.  You understand," he
added, "that there are things we repent of which cannot be repaired.  One
thinks a sin is dead, and starts upon a new life, locking up the past,
not deceitfully, but believing that the book is closed, and that no good
can come of publishing it; when suddenly it all flames out like the
letters in Faust's book of conjurations."

"Wait," I said.  "You need not tell me more, you must not--now; not until
there is any danger.  Keep your secret.  If the woman--if THAT woman--
ever places you in danger, then tell me all.  But keep it to yourself
now.  And don't fret because you have had dreams."

"Well, as you wish," he replied after a long time.  As he sat in silence,
I smoking hard, and he buried in thought, I heard the laughter of people
some distance below us in the hills.  I guessed it to be some tourists
from the summer hotel.  The voices came nearer.

A singular thought occurred to me.  I looked at Roscoe.  I saw that he
was brooding, and was not noticing the voices, which presently died away.
This was a relief to me.  We were then silent again.




CHAPTER XII

THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME

Next day we had a picnic on the Whi-Whi River, which, rising in the far
north, comes in varied moods to join the Long Cloud River at Viking.

     [Dr. Marmion, in a note of his MSS., says that he has purposely
     changed the names of the rivers and towns mentioned in the second
     part of the book, because he does not wish the locale to be too
     definite.]

Ruth Devlin, her young sister, and her aunt Mrs. Revel, with Galt Roscoe
and myself, constituted the party.  The first part of the excursion had
many delights.  The morning was fresh and sweet, and we were all in
excellent spirits.  Roscoe's depression had vanished; but there was an
amiable seriousness in his manner which, to me, portended that the faint
roses in Ruth Devlin's cheeks would deepen before the day was done,
unless something inopportune happened.

As we trudged gaily up the canon to the spot where we were to take a big
skiff, and cross the Whi-Whi to our camping-ground, Ruth Devlin, who was
walking with me, said: "A large party of tourists arrived at Viking
yesterday, and have gone to the summer hotel; so I expect you will be gay
up here for some time to come.  Prepare, then, to rejoice."

"Don't you think it is gay enough as it is?" I answered.  "Behold this
festive throng."

"Oh, it is nothing to what there might be.  This could never make Viking
and 'surrounding country' notorious as a pleasure resort.  To attract
tourists you must have enough people to make romances and tragedies,--
without loss of life, of course,--merely catastrophes of broken hearts,
and hair-breadth escapes, and mammoth fishing and shooting achievements,
such as men know how to invent,"--it was delightful to hear her voice
soften to an amusing suggestiveness, "and broken bridges and land-slides,
with many other things which you can supply, Dr. Marmion.  No, I am
afraid that Viking is too humdrum to be notable."

She laughed then very lightly and quaintly.  She had a sense of humour.

"Well, but, Miss Devlin," said I, "you cannot have all things at once.
Climaxes like these take time.  We have a few joyful things.  We have
splendid fishing achievements,--please do not forget that basket of trout
I sent you the other morning,--and broken hearts and such tragedies are
not impossible; as, for instance, if I do not send you as good a basket
of trout to-morrow evening; or if you should remark that there was
nothing in a basket of trout to--"

"Now," she said, "you are becoming involved and--inconsiderate.
Remember, I am only a mountain girl."

"Then let us only talk of the other tragedies.  But are you not a little
callous to speak of such things as if you thirsted for their occurrence?"

"I am afraid you are rather silly," she replied.  "You see, some of the
land up here belongs to me.  I am anxious that it should 'boom'--that is
the correct term, is it not?--and a sensation is good for 'booming.'
What an advertisement would ensue if the lovely daughter of an American
millionaire should be in danger of drowning in the Long Cloud, and a
rough but honest fellow--a foreman on the river, maybe a young member of
the English aristocracy in disguise--perilled his life for her!  The
place of peril would, of course, be named Lover's Eddy, or the Maiden's
Gate--very much prettier, I assure you, than such cold-blooded things as
the Devil's Slide, where we are going now, and much more attractive to
tourists."

"Miss Devlin," laughed I, "you have all the eagerness of the incipient
millionaire.  May I hope to see you in Lombard Street some day, a very
Katherine among capitalists?--for, from your remarks, I judge that you
would--I say it pensively--'wade through slaughter to a throne.'"

Galt Roscoe, who was just ahead with Mrs. Revel and Amy Devlin, turned
and said: "Who is that quoting so dramatically?  Now, this is a picnic
party, and any one who introduces elegies, epics, sonnets, 'and such,'
is guilty of breaking the peace at Viking and its environs.  Besides,
such things should always be left to the parson.  He must not be
outflanked, his thunder must not be stolen.  The scientist has unlimited
resources; all he has to do is to be vague, and look prodigious; but the
parson must have his poetry as a monopoly, or he is lost to sight, and
memory."

"Then," said I, "I shall leave you to deal with Miss Devlin yourself,
because she is the direct cause of my wrong-doing.  She has expressed the
most sinister sentiments about Viking and your very extensive parish.
Miss Devlin," I added, turning to her, "I leave you to your fate, and I
cannot recommend you to mercy, for what Heaven made fair should remain
tender and merciful, and--"

"'So young and so untender!'" she interjected, with a rippling laugh.
"Yet Cordelia was misjudged very wickedly, and traduced very ungallantly,
and so am I.  And I bid you good-day, sir."

Her delicate laugh rings in my ears as I write.  I think that sun and
clear skies and hills go far to make us cheerful and harmonious.
Somehow, I always remember her as she was that morning.

She was standing then on the brink of a new and beautiful experience, at
the threshold of an acknowledged love.  And that is a remarkable time to
the young.

There was something thrilling about the experiences of that morning,
and I think we all felt it.  Even the great frowning precipices seemed
to have lost their ordinary gloom, and when some young white eagles rose
from a crag and flew away, growing smaller as they passed, until they
were one with the snow of the glacier on Mount Trinity, or a wapiti
peeped out from the underwood and stole away with glancing feet down the
valley; we could scarcely refrain from doing some foolish thing out of
sheer delight.  At length we emerged from a thicket of Douglas pine upon
the shore of the Whi-Whi, and, loosening our boat, were soon moving
slowly on the cool current.  For an hour or more we rowed down the river
towards the Long Cloud, and then drew into the shade of a little island
for lunch.  When we came to the rendezvous, where picnic parties
generally feasted, we found a fire still smoking and the remnants of a
lunch scattered about.  A party of picnickers had evidently been there
just before us.  Ruth suggested that it might be some of the tourists
from the hotel.  This seemed very probable.

There were scraps of newspaper on the ground, and among them was an empty
envelope.  Mechanically I picked it up, and read the superscription.
What I saw there I did not think necessary to disclose to the other
members of the party; but, as unconcernedly as possible, for Ruth
Devlin's eyes were on me, I used it to light a cigar--inappropriately,
for lunch would soon be ready.

"What was the name on the envelope?" she said.  "Was there one?"

I guessed she had seen my slight start.  I said evasively: "I fancy there
was, but a man who is immensely interested in a new brand of cigar--"

"You are a most deceitful man," she said.  "And, at the least, you are
selfish in holding your cigar more important than a woman's curiosity.
Who can tell what romance was in the address on that envelope--"

"What elements of noble tragedy, what advertisement for a certain
property in the Whi-Whi Valley," interrupted Roscoe, breaking off the
thread of a sailor's song he was humming, as he tended the water-kettle
on the fire.

This said, he went on with the song again.  I was struck by the wonderful
change in him now.  Presentiments were far from him, yet I, having read
that envelope, knew that they were not without cause.  Indeed, I had an
inkling of that the night before, when I heard the voices on the hill.
Ruth Devlin stopped for a moment in the preparations to ask Roscoe what
he was humming.  I, answering for him, told her that it was an old
sentimental sea-song of common sailors, often sung by officers at
their jovial gatherings.  At this she pretended to look shocked, and
straightway demanded to hear the words, so that she could pronounce
judgment on her spiritual pastor and master.

He good-naturedly said that many of these old sailor songs were amusing,
and that he often found himself humming them.  To this I could testify,
and he sang them very well indeed--quietly, but with the rolling tone of
the sailor, jovial yet fascinating.  At our united request, his humming
became distinct.  Three of the verses I give here:

              "The 'Lovely Jane' went sailing down
                 To anchor at the Spicy Isles;
               And the wind was fair as ever was blown,
                 For the matter of a thousand miles.

              "Then a storm arose as she crossed the line,
                 Which it caused her masts to crack;
               And she gulped her fill of the whooping brine,
                 And she likewise sprained her back.

              "And the capting cried, 'If it's Davy Jones,
                 Then it's Davy Jones,' says he,
              'Though I don't aspire to leave my bones
                 In the equatorial sea.'"

What the further history of the 'Lovely Jane' was we were not informed,
for Ruth Devlin announced that the song must wait, though it appeared to
be innocuous and child-like in its sentiments, and that lunch would be
served between the acts of the touching tragedy.  When lunch was over,
and we had again set forth upon the Whi-Whi, I asked Ruth to sing an old
French-Canadian song which she had once before sung to us.  Many a time
the woods of the West had resounded to the notes of 'En Roulant ma
Boule', as the 'voyageurs' traversed the long paths of the Ottawa, St.
Lawrence, and Mississippi; brave light-hearted fellows, whose singing
days were over.

By the light of coming events there was something weird and pathetic in
this Arcadian air, sung as it was by her.  Her voice was a mezzo-soprano
of rare bracing quality, and she had enough natural sensibility to give
the antique refinement of the words a wistful charm, particularly
apparent in these verses:

              "Ah, cruel Prince, my heart you break,
               In killing thus my snow-white drake.

              "My snow-white drake, my love, my King,
               The crimson life-blood stains his wing.

              "His golden bill sinks on his breast,
               His plumes go floating east and west--

              "En roulant ma boule:
                 Rouli, roulant, ma boule roulant,
               En roulant ma boule roulant,
                 En roulant ma boule!"

As she finished the song we rounded an angle in the Whi-Whi.  Ahead of
us lay the Snow Rapids and the swift channel at one side of the rapids
which, hurrying through a rocky archway, was known as the Devil's Slide.
There was one channel through the rapids by which it was perfectly safe
to pass, but that sweep of water through the Devil's Slide was sometimes
a trap of death to even the most expert river-men.  A half-mile below the
rapids was the confluence of the two rivers.  The sight of the tumbling
mass of white water, and the gloomy and colossal grandeur of the Devil's
Slide, a buttress of the hills, was very fine.

But there was more than scenery to interest us here, for, moving quickly
towards the Slide, was a boat with three people in it.  They were
evidently intending to attempt that treacherous passage, which culminated
in a series of eddies, a menace to even the best oarsman ship.  They
certainly were not aware of their danger, for there came over the water
the sound of a man's laughing voice, and the two women in the boat were
in unconcerned attitudes.  Roscoe shouted to them, and motioned them
back, but they did not appear to understand.

The man waved his hat to us, and rowed on.  There was but one thing for
us to do: to make the passage quickly through the safe channel of the
rapids, and to be of what service we could on the other side of the
Slide, if necessary.  We bent to the oars, and the boat shot through the
water.  Ruth held the rudder firmly, and her young sister and Mrs. Revel
sat perfectly still.  But the man in the other boat, thinking, doubtless,
that we were attempting a race, added his efforts to the current of the
channel.  I am afraid that I said some words below my breath scarcely
proper to be spoken in the presence of maidens and a clerk in holy
orders.  Roscoe was here, however, a hundred times more sailor than
parson.  He spoke in low, firm tones, as he now and then suggested a
direction to Ruth Devlin or myself.  Our boat tossed and plunged in the
rapids, and the water washed over us lightly once or twice, but we went
through the passage safely, and had turned towards the Slide before the
other boat got to the rocky archway.

We rowed hard.  The next minute was one of suspense, for we saw the boat
shoot beneath the archway.  Presently it emerged, a whirling plaything in
treacherous eddies.  The man wildly waved his arm, and shouted to us.
The women were grasping the sides of the boat, but making no outcry.  We
could not see the faces of the women plainly yet.  The boat ran forward
like a race-horse; it plunged hither and thither.  An oar snapped in the
rocks, and the other one shot from the man's hand.  Now the boat swung
round and round, and dipped towards the hollow of a whirlpool.  When we
were within a few rods of them, it appeared to rise from the water, was
hurled on a rock, and overturned.  Mrs. Revel buried her face in her
hands, and Ruth gave a little groan, but she held the rudder firmly, as
we swiftly approached the forms struggling in the water.  All,
fortunately, had grasped the swamped boat, and were being carried down
the stream towards us.  The man was caring resolutely for himself, but
one, of the women had her arm round the other, supporting her.  We
brought our skiff close to the swirling current.  I called out words of
encouragement, and was preparing to jump into the water, when Roscoe
exclaimed in a husky voice: "Marmion, it is Mrs. Falchion."

Yes, it was Mrs. Falchion; but I had known that before.  We heard her
words to her companion: "Justine, do not look so.  Your face is like
death.  It is hateful."

Then the craft veered towards the smoother water where we were.  This was
my opportunity.  Roscoe threw me a rope, and I plunged in and swam
towards the boat.  I saw that Mrs. Falchion recognised me; but she made
no exclamation, nor did Justine Caron.  Their companion, however, on the
other side of the boat, was eloquent in prayers to be rescued.  I caught
the bow of the boat as it raced past me, and with all my strength swung
it towards the smoother water.  I ran the rope I had brought, through the
iron ring at the bow, and was glad enough of that; for their lives
perhaps depended on being able to do it.  It had been a nice calculation
of chances, but it was done.  Roscoe immediately bent to the oars, I
threw an arm around Justine, and in a moment Roscoe had towed us into
safer quarters.  Then he drew in the rope.  As he did so, Mrs. Falchion
said: "Justine would drown so easily if one would let her."

These were her first words to me.  I am sure I never can sufficiently
admire the mere courage of the woman and her presence of mind in danger.
Immediately afterwards she said--and subsequently it seemed to me
marvellous: "You are something more than the chorus to the play this
time, Dr. Marmion."

A minute after, and Justine was dragged into our boat, and was followed
by Mrs. Falchion, whose first words to Roscoe were: "It is not such a
meeting as one would plan."

And he replied: "I am glad no harm has come to you."

The man was duly helped in.  A poor creature he was, to pass from this
tale as he entered it, ignominiously and finally here.  I even hide his
nationality, for his race are generally more gallant.  But he was
wealthy, had an intense admiration for Mrs. Falchion, and had managed to
secure her in his boat, to separate from the rest of the picnic party--
chiefly through his inefficient rowing.

Dripping with water as Mrs. Falchion was, she did not, strange to say,
appear at serious disadvantage.  Almost any other woman would have done
so.  She was a little pale, she must have felt miserable, but she
accepted Ruth Devlin's good offices--as did Justine Caron those of Mrs.
Revel--with much self-possession, scanning her face and form critically
the while, and occasionally turning a glance on Roscoe, who was now cold
and impassive.  I never knew a man who could so banish expression from
his countenance when necessary.  Speaking to Belle Treherne long
afterwards of Mrs. Falchion's self-possessed manner on this occasion,
and of how she rose superior to the situation, I was told that I must
have regarded the thing poetically and dramatically, for no woman could
possibly look self-possessed in draggled skirts.  She said that I always
magnified certain of Mrs. Falchion's qualities.

That may be so, and yet it must be remembered that I was not predisposed
towards her, and that I wished her well away from where Roscoe was.

As for Justine Caron, she lay with her head on Mrs. Revel's lap, and
looked from beneath heavy eyelids at Roscoe with such gratitude and--but,
no, she is only a subordinate in the story, and not a chief factor, and
what she said or did here is of no vital consequence at this moment!  We
rowed to a point near the confluence of the two rivers, where we could
leave our boats to be poled back through the rapids or portaged past
them.

On the way Mrs. Falchion said to Roscoe: "I knew you were somewhere in
the Rockies; and at Vancouver, when I came from San Francisco, I heard
of your being here.  I had intended spending a month somewhere in the
mountains, so I came to Viking, and on to the summer hotel: but really
this is too exciting for recreation."

This was spoken with almost gay outward manner, but there was a note in
her words which I did not like, nor did I think that her eye was very
kind, especially when she looked at Ruth Devlin and afterwards at Roscoe.

We had several miles to go, and it was nightfall--for which Mrs. Falchion
expressed herself as profoundly grateful--when we arrived at the hotel.
Our parting words were as brief as, of necessity, they had been on our
journey through the mountains, for the ladies had ridden the horses which
we had sent over for ourselves from Viking, and we men walked in front.
Besides, the thoughts of some of us were not at all free from misgiving.
The spirit possessing Roscoe the night before seemed to enter into all
of us, even into Mrs. Falchion, who had lost, somewhat, the aplomb with
which she had held the situation in the boat.  But at the door of the
hotel she said cheerfully: "Of course, Dr. Marmion will find it necessary
to call on his patients to-morrow--and the clergyman also on his new
parishoners."

The reply was left to me.  I said gravely: "Let us be thankful that both
doctor and clergyman are called upon to use their functions; it might
easily have been only the latter."

"Oh, do not be funereal!" she replied.  "I knew that we were not to
drown at the Devil's Slide.  The drama is not ended yet, and the chief
actors cannot go until 'the curtain.'--Though I am afraid that is not
quite orthodox, is it, Mr. Roscoe?"

Roscoe looked at her gravely.  "It may not be orthodox as it is said, but
it is orthodox, I fancy, if we exchange God for fate, and Providence for
chance. . . .  Good-night."

He said this wearily.  She looked up at him with an ironical look, then
held out her hand, and quickly bade him good-night.  Partings all round
were made, and, after some injunctions to Mrs. Falchion and Justine Caron
from myself as to preventives against illness, the rest of us started for
Sunburst.

As we went, I could not help but contrast Ruth and Amy Devlin, these two
gentle yet strong mountain girls, with the woman we had left.  Their
lives were far from that dolorous tide which, sweeping through a selfish
world, leaves behind it the stain of corroding passions; of cruelties,
ingratitude, hate, and catastrophe.  We are all ambitious, in one way or
another.  We climb mountains over scoria that frays and lava that burns.
We try to call down the stars, and when, now and then, our conjuring
succeeds, we find that our stars are only blasting meteors.  One moral
mishap lames character for ever.  A false start robs us of our natural
strength, and a misplaced or unrighteous love deadens the soul and
shipwrecks just conceptions of life.

A man may be forgiven for a sin, but the effect remains; it has found its
place in his constitution, and it cannot be displaced by mere penitence,
nor yet forgiveness.  A man errs, and he must suffer; his father erred,
and he must endure; or some one sinned against the man, and he hid the
sin--But here a hand touched my shoulder!  I was startled, for my
thoughts had been far away.  Roscoe's voice spoke in my ear: "It is as
she said; the actors come together for 'the curtain.'"

Then his eyes met those of Ruth Devlin turned to him earnestly and
inquiringly.  And I felt for a moment hard against Roscoe, that he should
even indirectly and involuntarily, bring suffering into her life.  In
youth, in early manhood, we do wrong.  At the time we seem to be injuring
no one but ourselves; but, as we live on, we find that we were wronging
whomsoever should come into our lives in the future.  At the instant I
said angrily to myself: "What right has he to love a girl like that, when
he has anything in his life that might make her unhappy, or endanger her
in ever so little!"

But I bit my tongue, for it seemed to me that I was pharisaical; and I
wondered rather scornfully if I should have been so indignant were the
girl not so beautiful, young, and ingenuous.  I tried not to think
further of the matter, and talked much to Ruth,--Gait Roscoe walked with
Mrs. Revel and Amy Devlin,--but I found I could not drive it from my mind.
This was not unnatural, for was not I the "chorus to the play"?




CHAPTER XIII

THE SONG OF THE SAW

There was still a subdued note to Roscoe's manner the next morning.
He was pale.  He talked freely however of the affairs of Viking and
Sunburst, and spoke of business which called him to Mr. Devlin's great
saw mill that day.  A few moments after breakfast we were standing in the
doorway.  "Well," he said, "shall we go?"

I was not quite sure where he meant to go, but I took my hat and joined
him.  I wondered if it would be to the summer hotel or the great mill.
My duty lay in the direction of the hotel.  When we stepped out, he
added: "Let us take the bridle-path along the edge of the ravine to the
hotel."

The morning was beautiful.  The atmosphere of the woods was of soft,
diffusive green--the sunlight filtering through the transparent leaves.
Bowers of delicate ferns and vines flanked the path, and an occasional
clump of giant cedars invited us: the world was eloquent.

Several tourists upon the verandah of the hotel remarked us with
curiosity as we entered.  A servant said that Mrs. Falchion would be glad
to see us; and we were ushered into her sitting-room.  She carried no
trace of yesterday's misadventure.  She appeared superbly well.  And yet,
when I looked again, when I had time to think upon and observe detail,
I saw signs of change.  There was excitement in the eyes, and a slight
nervous darkness beneath them, which added to their charm.  She rose,
smiling, and said: "I fear I am hardly entitled to this visit, for I am
beyond convalescence, and Justine is not in need of shrift or diagnosis,
as you see."

I was not so sure of Justine Caron as she was, and when I had paid my
respects to her, I said a little priggishly (for I was young), still not
too solemnly: "I cannot allow you to pronounce for me upon my patients,
Mrs. Falchion; I must make my own inquiries."

But Mrs. Falchion was right.  Justine Caron was not suffering much from
her immersion; though, speaking professionally, her temperature was
higher than the normal.  But that might be from some impulse of the
moment, for Justine was naturally a little excitable.

We walked aside, and, looking at me with a flush of happiness in her
face, she said: "You remember one day on the 'Fulvia' when I told you
that money was everything to me; that I would do all I honourably could
to get it?"

I nodded.  She continued: "It was that I might pay a debt--you know it.
Well, money is my god no longer, for I can pay all I owe.  That is, I can
pay the money, but not the goodness, the noble kindness.  He is most
good, is he not?  The world is better that such men as Captain Galt
Roscoe live--ah, you see I cannot quite think of him as a clergyman.
I wonder if I ever shall!"  She grew suddenly silent and abstracted, and,
in the moment's pause, some ironical words in Mrs. Falchion's voice
floated across the room to me: "It is so strange to see you so.  And you
preach, and baptise; and marry, and bury, and care for the poor and--ah,
what is it?--'all those who, in this transitory life, are in sorrow,
need, sickness, or any other adversity'? . . . And do you never long for
the flesh-pots of Egypt?  Never long for"--here her voice was not quite
so clear--"for the past?"

I was sure that, whatever she was doing, he had been trying to keep the
talk, as it were, on the surface.  I was equally sure that, to her last
question, he would make no reply.  Though I was now speaking to Justine
Caron, I heard him say quite calmly and firmly: "Yes, I preach, baptise,
marry, and bury, and do all I can for those who need help."

"The people about here say that you are good and charitable.  You have
won the hearts of the mountaineers.  But you always had a gift that
way."--I did not like her tone.--"One would almost think you had founded
a new dispensation.  And if I had drowned yesterday, you would,
I suppose, have buried me, and have preached a little sermon about me.
--You could have done that better than any one else! . . .  What
would you have said in such a case?"

There was an earnest, almost a bitter, protest in the reply.

"Pardon me, if I cannot answer your question.  Your life was saved, and
that is all we have to consider, except to be grateful to Providence.
The duties of my office have nothing to do with possibilities."

She was evidently torturing him, and I longed to say a word that would
torture her.  She continued: "And the flesh-pots--you have not answered
about them: do you not long for them--occasionally?"

"They are of a period," he answered, "too distant for regret."

"And yet," she replied softly, "I fancied sometimes in London last year,
that you had not outgrown that antique time--those lotos-days."

He made no reply at once, and in the pause Justine and I passed out to
the verandah.

"How long does Mrs. Falchion intend remaining here, Miss Caron?" I said.

Her reply was hesitating: "I do not quite know; but I think some time.
She likes the place; it seems to amuse her."

"And you--does it amuse you?"

"It does not matter about me.  I am madame's servant; but, indeed, it
does not amuse me particularly."

"Do you like the place?"

The reply was somewhat hurried, and she glanced at me a little nervously.
"Oh yes," she said, "I like the place, but--"

Here Roscoe appeared at the door and said, "Mrs. Falchion wishes to see
Viking and Mr. Devlin's mills, Marmion.  She will go with us."

In a little time we were on our way to Viking.  I walked with Mrs.
Falchion, and Roscoe with Justine.  I was aware of a new element in Mrs.
Falchion's manner.  She seemed less powerfully attractive to me than in
the old days, yet she certainly was more beautiful.  It was hard to trace
the new characteristic.  But at last I thought I saw it in a decrease of
that cold composure, that impassiveness, so fascinating in the past.
In its place had come an allusive, restless something, to be found in
words of troublesome vagueness, in variable moods, in an increased
sensitiveness of mind and an undercurrent of emotional bitterness--she
was emotional at last!  She puzzled me greatly, for I saw two spirits
in her: one pitiless as of old; the other human, anxious, not unlovely.

At length we became silent, and walked so side by side for a time.  Then,
with that old delightful egotism and selfishness--delightful in its very
daring--she said: "Well, amuse me!"

"And is it still the end of your existence," I rejoined--"to be amused?"

"What is there else to do?" she replied with raillery.

"Much.  To amuse others, for instance; to regard human beings as
something more than automata."

"Has Mr. Roscoe made you a preaching curate?  I helped Amshar at the
Tanks."

"One does not forget that.  Yet you pushed Amshar with your foot."

"Did you expect me to kiss the black coward?  Then, I nursed Mr. Roscoe
in his illness."

"And before that?"

"And before that I was born into the world, and grew to years of
knowledge, and learned what fools we mortals be, and--and there--is that
Mr. Devlin's big sawmill?"

We had suddenly emerged on a shelf of the mountainside, and were looking
down into the Long Cloud Valley.  It was a noble sight.  Far to the north
were foothills covered with the glorious Norfolk pine, rising in steppes
till they seemed to touch white plateaus of snow, which again billowed to
glacier fields whose austere bosoms man's hand had never touched; and
these suddenly lifted up huge, unapproachable shoulders, crowned with
majestic peaks that took in their teeth the sun, the storm, and the
whirlwinds of the north, never changing countenance from day to year and
from year to age.

Facing this long line of glory, running irregularly on towards that sea
where Franklin and M'Clintock led their gay adventurers,--the bold
ships,--was another shore, not so high or superior, but tall and sombre
and warm, through whose endless coverts of pine there crept and idled the
generous Chinook winds--the soothing breath of the friendly Pacific.
Between these shores the Long Cloud River ran; now boisterous, now soft,
now wallowing away through long channels, washing gorges always dark as
though shaded by winter, and valleys always green as favoured by summer.
Creeping along a lofty narrow path upon that farther shore was a mule
train, bearing packs which would not be opened till, through the great
passes of the mountain, they were spilled upon the floors of fort and
post on the east side of the Rockies.

Not far from where the mule train crept along was a great hole in the
mountain-side, as though antique giants of the hills had tunnelled
through to make themselves a home or to find the eternal secret of the
mountains.  Near to this vast dark cavity was a hut--a mere playhouse,
it seemed, so small was it, viewed from where we stood.  From the edge
of a cliff just in front of this hut, there swung a long cable, which
reached almost to the base of the shore beneath us; and, even as we
looked, we saw what seemed a tiny bucket go swinging slowly down that
strange hypotenuse.  We watched it till we saw it get to the end of its
journey in the valley beneath, not far from the great mill to which we
were bound.

"How mysterious!" said Mrs. Falchion.  "What does it mean?  I never saw
anything like that before.  What a wonderful thing!"

Roscoe explained.  "Up there in that hut," he said, "there lives a man
called Phil Boldrick.  He is a unique fellow, with a strange history.  He
has been miner, sailor, woodsman, river-driver, trapper, salmon-fisher;
--expert at the duties of each of these, persistent at none.  He has a
taste for the ingenious and the unusual.  For a time he worked in Mr.
Devlin's mill.  It was too tame for him.  He conceived the idea of
supplying the valley with certain necessaries, by intercepting the mule
trains as they passed across the hills, and getting them down to Viking
by means of that cable.  The valley laughed at him; men said it was
impossible.  He went to Mr. Devlin, and Mr. Devlin came to me.  I have,
as you know, some knowledge of machinery and engineering.  I thought the
thing feasible but expensive, and told Mr. Devlin so.  However, the
ingenuity of the thing pleased Mr. Devlin, and, with that singular
enterprise which in other directions has made him a rich man, he
determined on its completion.  Between us we managed it.  Boldrick
carries on his aerial railway with considerable success, as you see."

"A singular man," said Mrs. Falchion.  "I should like to see him.  Come,
sit down here and tell me all you know about him, will you not?"

Roscoe assented.  I arranged a seat for us, and we all sat.

Roscoe was about to begin, when Mrs. Falchion said, "Wait a minute.  Let
us take in this scene first."

We were silent.  After a moment I turned to Mrs. Falchion, and said: "It
is beautiful, is it not?"

She drew in a long breath, her eyes lighted up, and she said, with a
strange abandon of gaiety: "Yes, it is delightful to live."

It seemed so, in spite of the forebodings of my friend and my own
uneasiness concerning him, Ruth Devlin, and Mrs. Falchion.  The place was
all peace: a very monotony of toil and pleasure.  The heat drained
through the valley back and forth in visible palpitations upon the roofs
of the houses, the mills, and the vast piles of lumber: all these seemed
breathing.  It looked a busy Arcady.  From beneath us life vibrated with
the regularity of a pulse: distance gave a kind of delighted ease to
toil.  Event appeared asleep.

But when I look back now, after some years, at the experiences of that
day, I am astonished by the running fire of events, which, unfortunately,
were not all joy.

As I write I can hear that keen wild singing of the saw come to us
distantly, with a pleasant, weird elation.  The big mill hung above the
river, its sides all open, humming with labour, as I had seen it many a
time during my visit to Roscoe.  The sun beat in upon it, making a broad
piazza of light about its sides.  Beyond it were pleasant shadows,
through which men passed and repassed at their work.  Life was busy all
about it.  Yet the picture was bold, open, and strong.  Great iron hands
reached down into the water, clamped a massive log or huge timber,
lightly drew it up the slide from the water, where, guided by the hand-
spikes of the men, it was laid upon its cradle and carried slowly to the
devouring teeth of the saws: there to be sliced through rib and bone in
moist sandwiched layers, oozing the sweet sap of its fibre; and carried
out again into the open to be drained to dry bones under the exhaust-
pipes of the sun: piles upon piles; houses with wide chinks through which
the winds wandered, looking for tenants and finding none.

To the north were booms of logs, swilling in the current, waiting for
their devourer.  Here and there were groups of river-drivers and their
foremen, prying twisted heaps of logs from the rocks or the shore into
the water.  Other groups of river-drivers were scattered upon the banks,
lifting their huge red canoes high up on the platforms, the spring's and
summer's work of river-driving done; while others lounged upon the grass,
or wandered lazily through the village, sporting with the Chinamen, or
chaffing the Indian idling in the sun--a garish figure stoically watching
the inroads of civilisation.  The town itself was squat but amiable:
small houses and large huts; the only place of note and dignity, the new
town hall, which was greatly overshadowed by the big mill, and even by
the two smaller ones flanking it north and south.

But Viking was full of men who had breathed the strong life of the hills,
had stolen from Nature some of her brawny strength, and set themselves up
before her as though a man were as great as a mountain and as good a
thing to see.  It was of such a man that Galt Roscoe was to tell us.  His
own words I will not give, but will speak of Phil Boldrick as I remember
him and as Roscoe described him to us.

Of all the men in the valley, none was so striking as Phil Boldrick.
Of all faces his was the most singular; of all characters his the most
unique; of all men he was the most unlucky, save in one thing--the regard
of his fellows.  Others might lay up treasures, not he; others lose money
at gambling, not he--he never had much to lose.  But yet he did all
things magniloquently.  The wave of his hand was expansive, his stride
was swaying and decisive, his over-ruling, fraternal faculty was always
in full swing.  Viking was his adopted child; so much so that a gentleman
river-driver called it Philippi; and by that name it sometimes went, and
continues still so among those who knew it in the old days.

Others might have doubts as to the proper course to pursue under certain
circumstances; it was not so with Phil.  They might argue a thing out
orally, he did so mentally, and gave judgment on it orally.  He was
final, not oracular.  One of his eyes was of glass, and blue; the other
had an eccentricity, and was of a deep and meditative grey.  It was a
wise and knowing eye.  It was trained to many things--like one servant in
a large family.  One side of his face was solemn, because of the gay but
unchanging blue eye, the other was gravely humourous, shrewdly playful.
His fellow citizens respected him; so much so, that they intended to give
him an office in the new-formed corporation; which means that he had
courage and downrightness, and that the rough, straightforward gospel
of the West was properly interpreted by him.

If a stranger came to the place, Phil was sent first to reconnoitre; if
any function was desirable, Phil was requested to arrange it; if justice
was to be meted out, Phil's opinion had considerable weight--for he had
much greater leisure than other more prosperous men; if a man was taken
ill (this was in the days before a doctor came), Phil was asked to
declare if he would "shy from the finish."

I heard Roscoe more than once declare that Phil was as good as two
curates to him.  Not that Phil was at all pious, nor yet possessed of
those abstemious qualities in language and appetite by which good men are
known; but he had a gift of civic virtue--important in a wicked world,
and of unusual importance in Viking.  He had neither self-consciousness
nor fear; and while not possessed of absolute tact in a social way, he
had a knack of doing the right thing bluntly, or the wrong thing with an
air of rightness.  He envied no man, he coveted nothing; had once or
twice made other men's fortunes by prospecting, but was poor himself.
And in all he was content, and loved life and Viking.

Immediately after Roscoe had reached the mountains Phil had become his
champion, declaring that there was not any reason why a man should not
be treated sociably because he was a parson.  Phil had been a great
traveller, as had many who settled at last in these valleys to the
exciting life of the river: salmon-catching or driving logs.  He had
lived for a time in Lower California and Mexico, and had given Roscoe the
name of The Padre: which suited the genius and temper of the rude
population.  And so it was that Roscoe was called The Padre by every one,
though he did not look the character.

As he told his story of Phil's life I could not help but contrast him
with most of the clergymen I knew or had seen.  He had the admirable ease
and tact of a cultured man of the world, and the frankness and warmth of
a hearty nature, which had, however, some inherent strain of melancholy.
Wherever I had gone with him I had noticed that he was received with
good-humoured deference by his rough parishioners and others who were
such only in the broadest sense.  Perhaps he would not have succeeded so
well if he had worn clerical clothes.  As it was, of a week day, he could
not be distinguished from any respectable layman.  The clerical uniform
attracts women more than men, who, if they spoke truly, would resent it.
Roscoe did not wear it, because he thought more of men than of function,
of manliness than clothes; and though this sometimes got him into trouble
with his clerical brethren who dearly love Roman collar, and coloured
stole, and the range of ritual from a lofty intoning to the eastward
position, he managed to live and himself be none the worse, while those
who knew him were certainly the better.

When Roscoe had finished his tale, Mrs. Falchion said: "Mr. Boldrick must
be a very interesting man;" and her eyes wandered up to the great hole in
the mountain-side, and lingered there.  "As I said, I must meet him," she
added; "men of individuality are rare."  Then: "That great 'hole in the
wall' is, of course, a natural formation."

"Yes," said Roscoe.  "Nature seems to have made it for Boldrick.  He uses
it as a storehouse."

"Who watches it while he is away?" she said.  "There is no door to the
place, of course."

Roscoe smiled enigmatically.  "Men do not steal up here: that is the
unpardonable crime; any other may occur and go unpunished; not it."

The thought seemed to strike Mrs. Falchion.  "I might have known!" she
said.  "It is the same in the South Seas among the natives--Samoans,
Tongans, Fijians, and others.  You can--as you know, Mr. Roscoe,"--her
voice had a subterranean meaning,--" travel from end to end of those
places, and, until the white man corrupts them, never meet with a case of
stealing; you will find them moral too in other ways until the white man
corrupts them.  But sometimes the white man pays for it in the end."

Her last words were said with a kind of dreaminess, as though they had no
purpose; but though she sat now idly looking into the valley beneath, I
could see that her eyes had a peculiar glance, which was presently turned
on Roscoe, then withdrawn again.  On him the effect was so far disturbing
that he became a little pale, but I noticed that he met her glance
unflinchingly and then looked at me, as if to see in how far I had been
affected by her speech.  I think I confessed to nothing in my face.

Justine Caron was lost in the scene before us.  She had, I fancy,
scarcely heard half that had been said.  Roscoe said to her presently:
"You like it, do you not?"

"Like it?" she said.  "I never saw anything so wonderful."

"And yet it would not be so wonderful without humanity there," rejoined
Mrs. Falchion.  "Nature is never complete without man.  All that would
be splendid without the mills and the machinery and Boldrick's cable,
but it would not be perfect: it needs man--Phil Boldrick and Company in
the foreground.  Nature is not happy by itself: it is only brooding and
sorrowful.  You remember the mountain of Talili in Samoa, Mr. Roscoe, and
the valley about it: how entrancing yet how melancholy it is.  It always
seems to be haunted, for the natives never live in the valley.  There is
a tradition that once one of the white gods came down from heaven, and
built an altar, and sacrificed a Samoan girl--though no one ever knew
quite why: for there the tradition ends."

I felt again that there was a hidden meaning in her words; but Roscoe
remained perfectly still.  It seemed to me that I was little by little
getting the threads of his story.  That there was a native girl; that the
girl had died or been killed; that Roscoe was in some way--innocently I
dared hope--connected with it; and that Mrs. Falchion held the key to the
mystery, I was certain.  That it was in her mind to use the mystery,
I was also certain.  But for what end I could not tell.  What had passed
between them in London the previous winter I did not know: but it seemed
evident that she had influenced him there as she did on the 'Fulvia', had
again lost her influence, and was now resenting the loss, out of pique or
anger, or because she really cared for him.  It might be that she cared.

She added after a moment: "Add man to nature, and it stops sulking: which
goes to show that fallen humanity is better than no company at all."

She had an inherent strain of mockery, of playful satire, and she told
me once, when I knew her better, that her own suffering always set her
laughing at herself, even when it was greatest.  It was this
characteristic which made her conversation very striking, it was so
sharply contrasted in its parts; a heartless kind of satire set against
the most serious and acute statements.  One never knew when she would
turn her own or her interlocutor's gravity into mirth.

Now no one replied immediately to her remarks, and she continued: "If I
were an artist I should wish to paint that scene, given that the lights
were not so bright and that mill machinery not so sharply defined.  There
is almost too much limelight, as it were; too much earnestness in the
thing.  Either there should be some side-action of mirth to make it less
intense, or of tragedy to render it less photographic; and unless, Dr.
Marmion, you would consent to be solemn, which would indeed be droll;
or that The Padre there--how amusing they should call him that!--should
cease to be serious, which, being so very unusual, would be tragic, I do
not know how we are to tell the artist that he has missed a chance of
immortalising himself."

Roscoe said nothing, but smiled at her vivacity, while he deprecated her
words by a wave of his hand.  I also was silent for a moment; for there
had come to my mind, while she was speaking and I was watching the scene,
something that Hungerford had said to me once on board the 'Fulvia'.
"Marmion," said he, "when everything at sea appears so absolutely
beautiful and honest that it thrills you, and you're itching to write
poetry, look out.  There's trouble ahead.  It's only the pretty pause in
the happy scene of the play before the villain comes in and tumbles
things about.  When I've been on the bridge," he continued, "of a night
that set my heart thumping, I knew, by Jingo! it was the devil playing
his silent overture.  Don't you take in the twaddle about God sending
thunderbolts; it's that old war-horse down below.--And then I've kept a
sharp lookout, for I knew as right as rain that a company of waterspouts
would be walking down on us, or a hurricane racing to catch us
broadsides.  And what's gospel for sea is good for land, and you'll find
it so, my son."

I was possessed of the same feeling now as I looked at the scene before
us, and I suppose I seemed moody, for immediately Mrs. Falchion said:
"Why, now my words have come true; the scene can be made perfect.  Pray
step down to the valley, Dr. Marmion, and complete the situation, for you
are trying to seem serious, and it is irresistibly amusing--and
professional, I suppose; one must not forget that you teach the young
'sawbones' how to saw."

I was piqued, annoyed.  I said, though I admit it was not cleverly said:
"Mrs. Falchion, I am willing to go and complete that situation, if you
will go with me; for you would provide the tragedy--plenty of it; there
would be the full perihelion of elements; your smile is the incarnation
of the serious."

She looked at me full in the eyes.  "Now that," she said, "is a very good
'quid pro quo'--is that right?--and I have no doubt that it is more or
less true; and for a doctor to speak truth and a professor to be under
stood is a matter for angels.  And I actually believe that, in time, you
will be free from priggishness, and become a brilliant conversationalist;
and--suppose we wander on to our proper places in the scene. . . .
Besides, I want to see that strange man, Mr. Boldrick."




CHAPTER XIV

THE PATH OF THE EAGLE

We travelled slowly down the hillside into the village, and were about to
turn towards the big mill when we saw Mr. Devlin and Ruth riding towards
us.  We halted and waited for them.  Mr. Devlin was introduced to Mrs.
Falchion by his daughter, who was sweetly solicitous concerning Mrs.
Falchion and Justine Caron, and seemed surprised at finding them abroad
after the accident of the day before.  Ruth said that her father and
herself had just come from the summer hotel, where they had gone to call
upon Mrs. Falchion.  Mrs. Falchion heartily acknowledged the courtesy.
She seemed to be playing no part, but was apparently grateful all round;
yet I believe that even already Ruth had caught at something in her
presence threatening Roscoe's peace; whilst she, from the beginning, had,
with her more trained instincts, seen the relations between the clergyman
and his young parishioner.--But what had that to do with her?

Between Roscoe and Ruth there was the slightest constraint, and I thought
that it gave a troubled look to the face of the girl.  Involuntarily, the
eyes of both were attracted to Mrs. Falchion.  I believe in that moment
there was a kind of revelation among the three.  While I talked to Mr.
Devlin I watched them, standing a little apart, Justine Caron with us.
It must have been a painful situation for them; to the young girl because
a shadow was trailing across the light of her first love; to Roscoe
because the shadow came out of his past; to Mrs. Falchion because she was
the shadow.  I felt that trouble was at hand.  In this trouble I knew
that I was to play a part; for, if Roscoe had his secret and Mrs.
Falchion had the key to it, I also held a secret which, in case of
desperate need, I should use.  I did not wish to use it, for though
it was mine it was also another's.  I did not like the look in Mrs.
Falchion's eyes as she glanced at Ruth: I was certain that she resented
Roscoe's regard for Ruth and Ruth's regard for Roscoe; but, up to that
moment, I had not thought it possible that she cared for him deeply.
Once she had influenced me, but she had never cared for me.

I could see a change in her.  Out of it came that glance at Ruth, which
seemed to me the talon-like hatred that shot from the eyes of Goneril and
Regan: and I was sure that if she loved Roscoe there would be mad trouble
for him and for the girl.  Heretofore she had been passionless, but there
was a dormant power in her which had only to be wickedly aroused to wreck
her own and others' happiness.  Hers was one of those volcanic natures,
defying calculation and ordinary conceptions of life; having the fullest
capacity for all the elementary passions--hatred, love, cruelty, delight,
loyalty, revolt, jealousy.  She had never from her birth until now felt
love for any one.  She had never been awakened.  Even her affection for
her father had been dutiful rather than instinctive.  She had provoked
love, but had never given it.  She had been self-centred, compulsive,
unrelenting.  She had unmoved seen and let her husband go to his doom--
it was his doom and death so far as she knew.

Yet, as I thought of this, I found myself again admiring her.  She was
handsome, independent, distinctly original, and possessing capacity for
great things.  Besides, so far, she had not been actively vindictive--
simply passively indifferent to the sufferings of others.  She seemed to
regard results more than means.  All she did not like she could empty
into the mill of the destroying gods: just as General Grant poured
hundreds of thousands of men into the valley of the James, not thinking
of lives but victory, not of blood but triumph.  She too, even in her
cruelty, seemed to have a sense of wild justice which disregarded any
incidental suffering.

I could see that Mr. Devlin was attracted by her, as every man had been
who had ever met her; for, after all, man is but a common slave to
beauty: virtue he respects, but beauty is man's valley of suicide.
Presently she turned to Mr. Devlin, having, as it seemed to me, made
Roscoe and Ruth sufficiently uncomfortable.  With that cheerful
insouciance which was always possible to her on the most trying
occasions, she immediately said, as she had often said to me, that she
had come to Mr. Devlin to be amused for the morning, perhaps the whole
day.  It was her way, her selfish way, to make men her slaves.

Mr. Devlin gallantly said that he was at her disposal, and with a kind of
pride added that there was plenty in the valley which would interest her;
for he was a frank, bluff man, who would as quickly have spoken
disparagingly of what belonged to himself, if it was not worthy,
as have praised it.

"Where shall we go first?" he said.  "To the mill?"

"To the mill, by all means," Mrs. Falchion replied; "I have never been in
a great saw-mill, and I believe this is very fine.  Then," she added,
with a little wave of the hand towards the cable running down from Phil
Boldrick's eyrie in the mountains, "then I want to see all that cable can
do--all, remember."

Mr. Devlin laughed.  "Well, it hasn't many tricks, but what it does it
does cleverly, thanks to The Padre."

"Oh yes," responded Mrs. Falchion, still looking at the cable; "The
Padre, I know, is very clever."

"He is more than clever," bluffly replied Mr. Devlin, who was not keen
enough to see the faint irony in her tones.

"Yes," responded Mrs. Falchion in the same tone of voice, "he is more
than clever.  I have been told that he was once very brave.  I have been
told that once in the South Seas he did his country a great service."

She paused.  I could see Ruth's eyes glisten and her face suffuse, for
though she read the faint irony in the tone, still she saw that the tale
which Mrs. Falchion was evidently about to tell, must be to Galt Roscoe's
credit.  Mrs. Falchion turned idly upon Ruth and saw the look in her
face.  An almost imperceptible smile came upon her lips.  She looked
again at the cable and Phil Boldrick's eyrie, which seemed to have a
wonderful attraction for her.  Not turning away from it, save now and
then to glance indolently at Mr. Devlin or Ruth, and once enigmatically
at myself, she said:

"Once upon a time--that is the way, I believe, to begin a pretty story--
there were four men-of-war idling about a certain harbour of Samoa.  One
of the vessels was the flag-ship, with its admiral on board.  On one of
the other vessels was an officer who had years before explored this
harbour.  It was the hurricane season.  He advised the admiral not to
enter the harbour, for the indications foretold a gale, and himself was
not sure that his chart was in all respects correct, for the harbour had
been hurriedly explored and sounded.  But the admiral gave orders, and
they sailed in.

"That day a tremendous hurricane came crying down upon Samoa.  It swept
across the island, levelled forests of cocoa palms, battered villages to
pieces, caught that little fleet in the harbour, and played with it in a
horrible madness.  To right and left were reefs, behind was the shore,
with a monstrous surf rolling in; before was a narrow passage.  One
vessel made its way out--on it was the officer who had surveyed the
harbour.  In the open sea there was safety.  He brought his vessel down
the coast a little distance, put a rope about him and in the wild surf
made for the shore.  I believe he could have been court-martialled for
leaving his ship, but he was a man who had taken a great many risks of
one kind and another in his time.  It was one chance out of a hundred;
but he made it--he got to the shore, travelled down to the harbour where
the men-of-war were careening towards the reefs, unable to make the
passage out, and once again he tied a rope about him and plunged into the
surf to try for the admiral's ship.  He got there terribly battered.
They tell how a big wave lifted him and landed him upon the quarter-deck
just as big waves are not expected to do.  Well, like the hero in any
melodrama of the kind, he very prettily piloted monsieur the admiral and
his fleet out to the open sea."

She paused, smiling in an inscrutable sort of way, then turned and said
with a sudden softness in her voice, though still with the air of one who
wished not to be taken with too great a seriousness: "And, ladies and
gentlemen, the name of the ship that led the way was the 'Porcupine'; and
the name of the hero was Commander Galt Roscoe, R.N.; and 'of such is the
kingdom of heaven!'"

There was silence for a moment.  The tale had been told adroitly, and
with such tact as to words that Roscoe could not take offence--need not,
indeed, as he did not, I believe, feel any particular self-consciousness.
I am not sure but he was a little glad that such evidence should have
been given at the moment, when a kind of restraint had come between him
and Ruth, by one who he had reason to think was not wholly his friend
might be his enemy.  It was a kind of offset to his premonitions and to
the peril over which he might stumble at any moment.

To me the situation was almost inexplicable; but the woman herself was
inexplicable: at this moment the evil genius of us all, at that doing
us all a kind of crude, superior justice.  I was the first to speak.

"Roscoe," I said, "I never had heard of this, although I remember the
circumstance as told in the newspapers.  But I am glad and proud that I
have a friend with such a record."

"And, only think," said Mrs. Falchion, "he actually was not court-
martialled for abandoning his ship to save an admiral and a fleet.  But
the ways of the English Admiralty are wonderful.  They go out of their
way to avoid a court-martial sometimes, and they go out of their way to
establish it sometimes."

By this time we had started towards the mill.  Roscoe walked ahead with
Ruth Devlin.  Mr. Devlin, Mrs. Falchion, Justine Caron and myself walked
together.

Mrs. Falchion presently continued, talking, as it seemed to me, at the
back of Roscoe's head:

"I have known the Admiralty to force an officer to resign the navy
because he had married a native wife.  But I never knew the Admiralty to
court-martial an officer because he did not marry a native wife whom he
OUGHT to have married: but, as I said, the ways of the Admiralty are past
admiration."

I could see Roscoe's hand clinch at his side, and presently he said over
his shoulder at her: "Your memory and your philosophy are as wonderful
as the Admiralty are inscrutable."

She laughed.  "You have not lost your old gift of retort," she said.
"You are still amusing."

"Well, come," said Mr. Devlin cheerfully, "let's see if there isn't
something even more amusing than Mr. Roscoe in Viking.  I will show you,
Mrs. Falchion, the biggest saw that ever ate the heart out of a Norfolk
pine."

At the mill Mrs. Falchion was interested.  She asked questions concerning
the machinery which mightily pleased Mr. Devlin, they were so apt and
intelligent; and herself assisted in giving an immense log to the teeth
of the largest saw, which, with its six upright blades, ate, and was
never satisfied.  She stooped and ran her ungloved hand into the sawdust,
as sweet before the sun has dried it as the scent of a rose.  The rich
smell of the fresh-cut lumber filled the air, and suggested all kinds of
remote and pleasant things.  The industry itself is one of the first that
comes with the invasion of new territory, and makes one think of man's
first work in the world: to fell the tree and till the soil.  It is
impossible to describe that fierce, jubilant song of the saw, which even
when we were near was never shrill or shrieking: never drowning our
voices, but vibrant and delightful.  To Mrs. Falchion it was new; she was
impressed.

"I have seen," she said to Mr. Devlin, "all sorts of enterprises, but
never anything like this.  It all has a kind of rough music.  It is
enjoyable."

Mr. Devlin beamed.  "I have just added something to the mill that will
please you," he said.

She looked interested.  We all gathered round.  I stood between Mrs.
Falchion and Ruth Devlin, and Roscoe beside Justine Caron.

"It is the greatest mill-whistle in the country," he continued.  "It will
be heard from twelve to twenty-five miles, according to the condition of
the atmosphere.  I want big things all round, and this is a masterpiece,
I guess.  Now, I'll let you hear it if you like.  I didn't expect to use
it until to-night at nine o'clock, when, also for the first time, I am to
light the mills by electricity; a thing that's not been attempted yet in
any saw-mill on the Continent.  We're going to work night and day for a
couple of months."

"This is all very wonderful.  And are you indebted to Mr. Roscoe in these
things too?--Everybody seems to need him here."

"Well," said the mill-owner, laughing, "the whistle is my own.  It's the
sort of thing I would propose--to blow my trumpet, as it were; but the
electricity and the first experiments in it I owe to The Padre."

"As I thought," she said, and turned to Roscoe.  "I remember," she added,
"that you had an electrical search-light on the 'Porcupine', and that you
were fond of electricity.  Do you ever use search-lights here?  I should
think they might be of use in your parish.  Then, for a change, you could
let the parish turn it upon you, for the sake of contrast and
edification."

For the moment I was exceedingly angry.  Her sarcasm was well veiled,
but I could feel the sardonic touch beneath the smiling surface.  This
innuendo seemed so gratuitous.  I said to her, almost beneath my breath,
that none of the others could hear: "How womanly!"

She did no more than lift her eyebrows in acknowledgment, and went on
talking lightly to Mr. Devlin.  Roscoe was cool, but I could see now in
his eyes a kind of smouldering anger; which was quite to my wish.
I hoped he would be meek no longer.

Presently Ruth Devlin said: "Would it not be better to wait till to-
night, when the place is lighted, before the whistle is blown?  Then you
can get a better first impression.  And if Mrs. Falchion will come over
to our home at Sunburst, we will try and amuse her for the rest of the
day--that is, after she has seen all here."

Mrs. Falchion seemed struck by the frankness of the girl, and for an
instant debated, but presently said: "No, thank you.  When all is seen
now, I will go to the hotel, and then will join you all here in the
evening, if that seems feasible.  Perhaps Dr. Marmion will escort me
here.  Mr. Roscoe, of course, has other duties."

"I shall be happy," I said, maliciously smiling, "to guide you to the
sacrifice of the saw."

She was not disturbed.  She touched Mr. Devlin's arm, and, looking archly
at him, nodded backwards towards me.  "'Beware the anaconda!'" she said.

It was impossible not to be amused; her repartee was always so
unrestrained.  She disarmed one by what would have been, in a man,
insolent sang-froid: in her it was piquancy, daring.

Presently she added: "But if we are to have no colossal whistle and no
electric light till evening, there is one thing I must have: and that is
your remarkable Phil Boldrick, who seems to hold you all in the palm of
his hand, and lives up there like a god on his Olympus."

"Well, suppose you go and call on him," said Roscoe, with a touch of dry
humour, his eye on the cable that reached to Boldrick's perch.

She saw her opportunity, and answered promptly: "Yes, I will call on him
immediately,"--here she turned towards Ruth,--"if Miss Devlin and
yourself will go with me."

"Nonsense," interposed Mr. Devlin.  "Besides, the cage will only hold two
easily.  Anyhow, it's absurd."

"Why is it absurd?  Is there any danger?" queried Mrs. Falchion.

"Not unless there's an idiot at the machinery."

"I should expect you to manage it," she persisted.

"But no woman has ever done it."

"I will make the record."  And, turning to Ruth: "You are not afraid?"

"No, I am not afraid," said the girl bravely, though she acknowledged to
me afterwards that while she was not afraid of anything where her own
skill was called in question, such as mountain-climbing, or even puma-
hunting, she did not joyfully anticipate swinging between heaven and
earth on that incline.  "I will go," she added,  "if my father will let
me. . . .  May I?" she continued, turning to him.

Perhaps something of the father's pride came up in him, perhaps he had
just got some suspicion that between his daughter and Mrs. Falchion there
was a subterranean rivalry.  However it was, he gave a quick, quizzical
look at both of them, then glanced at Roscoe, and said: "I'll make no
objections, if Ruth would like to introduce you to Phil.  And, as Mrs.
Falchion suggested, I'll 'turn the crank.'"

I could see that Roscoe had a bad moment.  But presently he appeared to
me perfectly willing that Ruth should go.  Maybe he was as keen that she
should not appear at a disadvantage beside Mrs. Falchion as was her
father.

A signal was given, and the cage came slowly down the cable to the mill.
We could see Boldrick, looking little bigger than a child at the other
end, watching our movements.  At the last moment Mr. Devlin and Roscoe
seemed apprehensive, but the women were cool and determined.  I noticed
Mrs. Falchion look at Ruth curiously once or twice after they entered the
cage, and before they started, and what she saw evidently gave her a
higher opinion of the girl, for she laid her hand on Ruth's arm suddenly,
and said: "We will show these mere men what nerve is."

Ruth nodded, then 'bon voyage' was said, and the signal was given.  The
cage ascended at first quickly, then more slowly, swaying up and down a
little on the cable, and climbing higher and higher through the air to
the mountain-side.  What Boldrick thought when he saw the two ascending
towards him, he expressed to Mr. Devlin later in the day in vigorous
language: what occurred at his but Ruth Devlin told me afterwards.  When
the cage reached him, he helped the two passengers out, and took them to
his hut.  With Ruth he had always been a favourite, and he welcomed her
with admiring and affectionate respect.

"Never b'lieved you could have done it, Miss Devlin--never!  Not but what
I knew you weren't afraid of anything on the earth below, or the waters
under the earth; but when you get swinging there over the world, and not
high enough to get a hold on heaven, it makes you feel as if things was
droppin' away from you like.  But, by gracious! you did it like an eagle--
you and your friend."

By this time he was introduced, and at the name of Mrs. Falchion,
he cocked his head, and looked quizzically, as if trying to remember
something, then drew his hand once or twice across his forehead.
After a moment he said: "Strange, now, ma'am, how your name strikes me.
It isn't a common name, and I've heerd it before somewhere--somewhere.
It isn't your face that I've seen before--for I'd have remembered it if
it was a thousand years ago," he added admiringly.  "But I've heard some
one use it; and I can't tell where."

She looked curiously at him, and said: "Don't try to remember, and it
will come to you in good time.  But show us everything about your place
before we go back, won't you, please?"

He showed them his hut, where he lived, quite alone.  It was supplied
with bare necessaries, and with a counter, behind which were cups and a
few bottles.  In reference to this, Boldrick said: "Temperance drinks for
the muleteers, tobacco and tea and sugar and postage stamps and things.
They don't gargle their throats with anything stronger than coffee at
this tavern."

Then he took them to the cave in which puma, bear, and wapiti skins were
piled, together with a few stores and the kits of travellers who had left
their belongings in Boldrick's keeping till they should come again.
After Mrs. Falchion and Ruth had seen all, they came out upon the
mountain-side and waved their handkerchiefs to us, who were still
watching from below.  Then Boldrick hoisted a flag on his hut, which he
used on gala occasions, to celebrate the event, and, not content with
this, fired a 'feu de joie', managed in this way:  He took two anvils
used by the muleteers and expressmen to shoe their animals, and placed
one on the other, putting powder between.  Then Mrs. Falchion thrust a
red-hot iron into the powder, and an explosion ensued.  I was for a
moment uneasy, but Mr. Devlin reassured me, and instantly a shrill
whistle from the little mills answered the salute.

Just before they got into the cage, Mrs. Falchion turned to Boldrick,
and said: "You have not been trying to remember where you heard my name
before?  Well, can you not recall it now?"

Boldrick shook his head.  "Perhaps you will recall it before I see you
again," she said.

They started.  As they did so, Mrs. Falchion said suddenly, looking at
Boldrick keenly: "Were you ever in the South Seas?"

Boldrick stood for an instant open-mouthed, and then exclaimed loudly,
as the cage swung down the incline: "By Jingo!  No, ma'am, I was never
there, but I had a pal who come from Samoa."

She called back at him: "Tell me of him when we meet again.  What was his
name?"

They were too far down the cable now for Boldrick's reply to reach them
distinctly.  The descent seemed even more adventurous than the ascent,
and, in spite of myself, I could not help a thrill of keen excitement.
But they were both smiling when the cage reached us, and both had a very
fine colour.

"A delightful journey, a remarkable reception, and a very singular man
is your Mr. Boldrick," said Mrs. Falchion.

"Yes," replied Mr. Devlin, "you'll know Boldrick a long time before you
find his limits.  He is about the most curious character I ever knew, and
does the most curious things.  But straight--straight as a die, Mrs.
Falchion!"

"I fancy that Mr. Boldrick and I would be very good friends indeed," said
Mrs. Falchion; "and I purpose visiting him again.  It is quite probable
that we shall find we have had mutual acquaintances."  She looked at
Roscoe meaningly as she said this, but he was occupied with Ruth.

"You were not afraid?" Roscoe said to Ruth.  "Was it not a strange
sensation?"

"Frankly, at first I was a little afraid, because the cage swings on the
cable, and it makes you uncomfortable.  But I enjoyed it before we got to
the end."

Mrs. Falchion turned to Mr. Devlin.  "I find plenty here to amuse me,"
she said, "and I am glad I came.  To-night I want to go up that cable and
call on Mr. Boldrick again, and see the mills and the electric light, and
hear your whistle, from up there.  Then, of course, you must show us the
mill working at night, and afterwards--may I ask it?--you must all come
and have supper with me at the summer hotel."

Ruth dropped her eyes.  I saw she did not wish to go.  Fortunately
Mr. Devlin extricated her.  "I'm afraid that will be impossible,
Mrs. Falchion," he said: "much obliged to you all the same.  But I am
going to be at the mill pretty near all night, and shouldn't be able
to go, and I don't want Ruth to go without me."

"Then it must be another time," said Mrs. Falchion.

"Oh, whenever it's convenient for Ruth, after a day or two, I'll be ready
and glad.  But I tell you what: if you want to see something fine, you
must go down as soon as possible to Sunburst.  We live there, you know,
not here at Viking.  It's funny, too, because, you see, there's a feud
between Viking and Sunburst--we are all river-men and mill-hands at
Viking, and they're all salmon-fishers and fruit-growers at Sunburst.
By rights I ought to live here, but when I started I thought I'd build my
mills at Sunburst, so I pitched my tent down there.  My wife and the
girls got attached to the place, and though the mills were built at
Viking, and I made all my money up here, I live at Sunburst and spend my
shekels there.  I guess if I didn't happen to live at Sunburst, people
would be trailing their coats and making Donnybrook fairs every other day
between these two towns.  But that's neither here nor there.  Take my
advice, Mrs. Falchion, and come to Sunburst and see the salmon-fishers
at work, both day and night.  It is about the biggest thing in the way
of natural picturesqueness that you'll see--outside my mills.  Indians,
half-breeds, white men, Chinamen--they are all at it in weirs and cages,
or in the nets, and spearing by torch-light!--Don't you think I would do
to run a circus, Mrs. Falchion?--Stand at the door, and shout: 'Here's
where you get the worth of your money'?"

Mrs. Falchion laughed.  "I am sure you and I will be good friends; you
are amusing.  And, to be perfectly frank with you, I am very weary of
trying to live in the intellectual altitudes of Dr. Marmion--and The
Padre."

I had never seen her in a greater strain of gaiety.  It had almost a kind
of feverishness--as if she relished fully the position she held towards
Roscoe and Ruth, her power over their future, and her belief (as I think
was in her mind then) that she could bring back to her self Roscoe's old
allegiance.  That she believed this, I was convinced; that she would
never carry it out, was just as strong: for I, though only the chorus in
the drama, might one day find it in my power to become, for a moment, one
of the principal actors--from which position I had declined one day when
humiliated before Mrs. Falchion on the 'Fulvia'.  Boyd Madras was in my
mind.

After a few minutes we parted, agreeing to meet again in the valley in
the evening.  I had promised, as Mrs. Falchion had suggested, to escort
her and Justine Caron from the summer hotel to the mill.  Roscoe had
duties at both Viking and Sunburst and would not join us until we all met
in the evening.  Mr. Devlin and Ruth rode away towards Sunburst.  Mrs.
Falchion, Justine, and myself travelled slowly up the hillside, talking
chiefly upon the events of the morning.  Mrs. Falchion appeared to
admire greatly the stalwart character of Mr. Devlin; in a few swift,
complimentary words disposed of Ruth; and then made many inquiries
concerning Roscoe's work, my own position, and the length of my stay
in the mountains; and talked upon many trivial matters, never once
referring--as it seemed to me, purposely--to our past experiences on
the 'Fulvia', nor making any inquiry concerning any one except Belle
Treherne.

She showed no surprise when I told her that I expected to marry Miss
Treherne.  She congratulated me with apparent frankness, and asked for
Miss Treherne's address, saying she would write to her.  As soon as she
had left Roscoe's presence she had dropped all enigmatical words and
phrases, and, during this hour I was with her, was the tactful,
accomplished woman of the world, with the one present object: to make her
conversation agreeable, and to keep things on the surface.  Justine Caron
scarcely spoke during the whole of our walk, although I addressed myself
to her frequently.  But I could see that she watched Mrs. Falchion's face
curiously; and I believe that at this time her instinct was keener by far
to read what was in Mrs. Falchion's mind than my own, though I knew much
more of the hidden chain of events connecting Mrs. Falchion's life and
Galt Roscoe's.

I parted from them at the door of the hotel, made my way down to Roscoe's
house at the ravine, and busied myself for the greater part of the day in
writing letters, and reading on the coping.  About sunset I called for
Mrs. Falchion, and found her and Justine Caron ready and waiting.  There
was nothing eventful in our talk as we came down the mountain-side
towards Viking--Justine Caron's presence prevented that.  It was dusk
when we reached the valley.  As yet the mills were all dark.  The only
lights visible were in the low houses lining the banks of the river.
Against the mountainside there seemed to hang one bunch of flame like a
star, large, red, and weird.  It was a torch burning in front of Phil
Boldrick's hut.  We made our way slowly to the mill, and found Mr.
Devlin, Ruth, and Roscoe, with Ruth's sister, and one or two other
friends, expecting us.

"Well," said Mr. Devlin heartily, "I have kept the show waiting for you.
The house is all dark, but I guess you'll see a transformation scene
pretty quick.  Come out," he continued, "and let us get the front seats.
They are all stalls here; nobody has a box except Boldrick, and it is up
in the flies."

"Mr. Devlin," said Mrs. Falchion, "I purpose to see this show not only
from the stalls, but from the box in the flies.  Therefore, during the
first act, I shall be here in front of the foot-lights.  During the
second act I shall be aloft like Tom Bowling--"

"In other words--" began Mr. Devlin.

"In other words," added Mrs. Falchion, "I am going to see the valley and
hear your great horn blow from up there!"  She pointed towards the star
in front of Phil's hut.

"All right," said Mr. Devlin; "but you will excuse me if I say that I
don't particularly want anybody to see this performance from where Tom
Bowling bides."

We left the office and went out upon the platform, a little distance from
the mill.  Mr. Devlin gave a signal, touched a wire, and immediately it
seemed as if the whole valley was alight.  The mill itself was in a blaze
of white.  It was transfigured--a fairy palace, just as the mud barges in
the Suez Canal had been transformed by the search-light of the 'Fulvia'.
For the moment, in the wonder of change from darkness to light, the
valley became the picture of a dream.  Every man was at his post in the
mill, and in an instant work was going on as we had seen it in the
morning.  Then, all at once, there came a great roar, as it were, from
the very heart of the mill--a deep diapason, dug out of the throat of the
hills: the big whistle.

"It sounds mournful--like a great animal in pain," said Mrs. Falchion.
"You might have got one more cheerful."

"Wait till it gets tuned up," said Mr. Devlin.  "It hasn't had a chance
to get the burs out of its throat.  It will be very fine as soon as the
engine-man knows how to manage it."

"Yes," said Ruth, interposing, "a little toning down would do it good--
it is shaking the windows in your office; feel this platform tremble!"

"Well, I bargained for a big whistle and I've got it: and I guess they'll
know if ever there's a fire in the town!"  Just as he said this, Roscoe
gave a cry and pointed.

We all turned, and saw a sight that made Ruth Devlin cover her face with
her hands and Mrs. Falchion stand horror-stricken.  There, coming down
the cable with the speed of lightning, was the cage.  In it was a man--
Phil Boldrick.  With a cry and a smothered oath, Mr. Devlin sprang
towards the machinery, Roscoe with him.  There was nobody near it, but
they saw a boy whose duty it was that night to manage the cable, running
towards it.  Roscoe was the first to reach the lever; but it was too
late.  He partially stopped the cage, but only partially.  It came with
a dull, sickening thud to the ground, and Phil Boldrick--Phil Boldrick's
broken, battered body--was thrown out.

A few minutes later Boldrick was lying in Mr. Devlin's office.

Ill luck for Viking in the hour of her success.  Phil's shattered hulk is
drifting.  The masts have gone by the board, the pilot from the captain's
side.  Only the man's "unconquerable soul" is on the bridge, watching the
craft dip at the bow till the waters, their sport out, should hugely
swallow it.

We were all gathered round.  Phil had asked to see the lad who, by
neglecting the machinery for a moment, had wrecked his life.  "My boy,"
he said, "you played an ugly game.  It was a big mistake.  I haven't any
grudge agen you, but be glad I'm not one that'd haunt you for your cussed
foolishness. . . .  There, now, I feel better; that's off my mind!"

"If you're wanting to show remorse or anything," he continued, "there's
my friend, Mr. Roscoe, The Padre--he's all right, you understand!--Are
you there? . . .  Why don't you speak?"  He stretched out his hand.
The lad took it, but he could not speak: he held it and sobbed.

Then Phil understood.  His brow wrinkled with a sudden trouble.  He said:
"There, never mind.  I'm dying, but it isn't what I expected.  It doesn't
smart nor tear much; not more than river-rheumatism.  P'r'aps I wouldn't
mind it at all if I could see."

For Phil was entirely blind now.  The accident had destroyed his
remaining eye.  Being blind, he had already passed that first corridor
of death--darkness.  Roscoe stooped over him, took his hand, and spoke
quietly to him.  Phil knew the voice, and said with a faint smile: "Do
you think they'd plant me with municipal honours--honours to pardners?"

"We'll see to that, Phil," said Mr. Devlin from behind the clergyman.

Phil recognised the voice.  "You think that nobody'll kick at making it
official?"

"Not one, Phil."

"And maybe they wouldn't mind firin' a volley--Lights out, as it were:
and blow the big whistle?  It'd look sociable, wouldn't it?"

"There'll be a volley and the whistle, Phil--if you have to go," said Mr.
Devlin.

There was a silence, then the reply came musingly: "I guess I hev to go.
. . . I'd hev liked to see the corporation runnin' longer, but maybe
I can trust the boys."

A river-driver at the door said in a deep voice: "By the holy! yes, you
can trust us."

"Thank you kindly. . . .  If it doesn't make any difference to the
rest, I'd like to be alone with The Padre for a little--not for religion,
you understand, for I go as I stayed, and I hev my views,--but for
private business."

Slowly, awkwardly, the few river-drivers passed out--Devlin and Mrs.
Falchion and Ruth and I with them--for I could do nothing now for him--he
was broken all to pieces.  Roscoe told me afterwards what happened then.

"Padre," he said to Roscoe, "are we alone?"

"Quite alone, Phil."

"Well, I hevn't any crime to tell, and the business isn't weighty; but I
hev a pal at Danger Mountain--"  He paused.

"Yes, Phil?"

"He's low down in s'ciety; but he's square, and we've had the same
blanket for many a day together.  I crossed him first on the Panama
level.  I was broke--stony broke.  He'd been shipwrecked, and was ditto.
He'd been in the South Seas; I in Nicaragua.  We travelled up through
Mexico and Arizona, and then through California to the Canadian Rockies.
At last we camped at Danger Mountain, a Hudson's Bay fort, and stayed
there.  It was a roughish spot, but we didn't mind that.  Every place
isn't Viking.  One night we had a difference--not a quarrel, mind you,
but a difference.  He was for lynchin' a fellow called Piccadilly,
a swell that'd come down in the world, bringin' the worst tricks of
his tribe with him.  He'd never been a bony fidy gentleman--just an
imitation.  He played sneak with the daughter of Five Fingers, an Injin
chief.  We'd set store by that girl.  There wasn't one of us rough nuts
but respected her.  She was one of the few beautiful Injin women I've
seen.  Well, it come out that Piccadilly had ruined her, and one morning
she was found dead.  It drove my pal well-nigh crazy.  Not that she was
anything partik'ler to him; but the thing took hold of him unusual."

Now that I know all concerning Roscoe's past life, I can imagine that
this recital must have been swords at his heart.  The whole occurrence is
put down minutely in his diary, but there is no word of comment upon it.

Phil had been obliged to stop for pain, and, after Roscoe had adjusted
the bandages, he continued:

"My pal and the others made up their minds they'd lynch Piccadilly; they
wouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt--for it wasn't certain that
the girl hadn't killed herself. . . .  Well, I went to Piccadilly, and
give him the benefit.  He left, and skipped the rope.  Not, p'r'aps, that
he ought to hev got away, but once he'd showed me a letter from his
mother,--he was drunk too, at the time,--and I remembered when my brother
Rodney was killed in the Black Hills, and how my mother took it; so I
give him the tip to travel quick."

He paused and rested.  Then presently continued: "Now, Padre, I've got
four hundred dollars--the most I ever had at one time in my life.  And
I'd like it to go to my old pal--though we had that difference, and
parted.  I guess we respect each other about the same as we ever did.
And I wish you'd write it down so that the thing would be municipal."

Roscoe took pencil and paper and said: "What's his name, Phil?"

"Sam--Tonga Sam."

"But that isn't all his name?"

"No, I s'pose not, but it's all he ever had in general use.  He'd got it
because he'd been to the Tonga Islands and used to yarn about them.  Put
'Tonga Sam, Phil Boldrick's Pal at Danger Mountain, ult'--add the 'ult,'
it's c'rrect.--That'll find him.  And write him these words, and if you
ever see him say them to him--'Phil Boldrick never had a pal that crowded
Tonga Sam.'"

When the document was written, Roscoe read it aloud, then both signed it,
Roscoe guiding the battered hand over the paper.

This done, there was a moment's pause, and then Phil said: "I'd like to
be in the open.  I was born in the open--on the Madawaska.  Take me out,
Padre."

Roscoe stepped to the door, and silently beckoned to Devlin and myself.
We carried him out, and put him beside a pine tree.

"Where am I now?" he said.  "Under the white pine, Phil."  "That's
right.  Face me to the north."

We did so.  Minutes passed in silence.  Only the song of the saw was
heard, and the welting of the river.  "Padre," he said at last hurriedly,
"lift me up, so's I can breathe."

This was done.

"Am I facin' the big mill?"

"Yes."

"That's c'rrect.  And the 'lectric light is burnin' in the mill and in
the town, an' the saws are all goin'?"

"Yes."

"By gracious, yes--you can hear 'em!  Don't they scrunch the stuff,
though!"  He laughed a little.  "Mr. Devlin an' you and me hev been
pretty smart, hevn't we?"

Then a spasm caught him, and after a painful pause he called: "It's the
biggest thing in cables. . . .  Stand close in the cage. . . .  Feel
her swing!--Safe, you bet, if he stands by the lever. . . ."

His face lighted with the last gleam of living, and he said slowly: "I
hev a pal--at Danger Mountain."




CHAPTER XV

IN THE TROUGH OF THE WINDS

The three days following the events recorded in the preceding chapter
were notable to us all.  Because my own affairs and experiences are of
the least account, I shall record them first: they will at least throw
a little light on the history of people who appeared previously in this
tale, and disappeared suddenly when the 'Fulvia' reached London, to make
room for others.

The day after Phil Boldrick's death I received a letter from Hungerford,
and also one from Belle Treherne.  Hungerford had left the Occidental
Company's service, and had been fortunate enough to get the position of
first officer on a line of steamers running between England and the West
Indies.  The letter was brusque, incisive, and forceful, and declared
that, once he got his foot firmly planted in his new position, he would
get married and be done with it.  He said that Clovelly the novelist had
given a little dinner at his chambers in Piccadilly, and that the guests
were all our fellow-passengers by the 'Fulvia'; among them Colonel Ryder,
the bookmaker, Blackburn the Queenslander, and himself.

This is extracted from the letter:

     . . . Clovelly was in rare form.--Don't run away with the idea
     that he's eating his heart out because you came in just ahead in the
     race for Miss Treherne.  For my part--but, never mind!--You had
     phenomenal luck, and you will be a phenomenal fool if you don't
     arrange for an early marriage.  You are a perfect baby in some
     things.  Don't you know that the time a woman most yearns for a man
     is when she has refused him?  And Clovelly is here on the ground,
     and they are in the same set, and though I'd take my oath she would
     be loyal to you if you were ten thousand miles from here for ten
     years, so far as a promise is concerned, yet remember that a promise
     and a fancy are two different things.  We may do what's right for
     the fear o' God, and not love Him either.  Marmion, let the marriage
     bells be rung early--a maiden's heart is a ticklish thing. . . .

     But Clovelly was in rare form, as I said; and the bookmaker, who
     had for the first time read a novel of his, amiably quoted from it,
     and criticised it during the dinner, till the place reeked with
     laughter.  At first every one stared aghast ("stared aghast!"--how
     is that for literary form?); but when Clovelly gurgled, and then
     haw-hawed till he couldn't lift his champagne, the rest of us
     followed in a double-quick.  And the bookmaker simply sat calm and
     earnest with his eye-glass in his eye, and never did more than
     gently smile.  "See here," he said ever so candidly of Clovelly's
     best character, a serious, inscrutable kind of a man, the dignified
     figure in the book--"I liked the way you drew that muff.  He was
     such an awful outsider, wasn't he?  All talk, and hypocrite down to
     his heels.  And when you married him to that lady who nibbled her
     food in public and gorged in the back pantry, and went 'slumming'
     and made shoulder-strings for the parson--oh, I know the kind!"--
     [This was Clovelly's heroine, whom he had tried to draw, as he said
     himself, "with a perfect sincerity and a lovely worldly-mindedness,
     and a sweet creation altogether."]  "I said, that's poetic justice,
     that's the refinement of retribution.  Any other yarn-spinner would
     have killed the male idiot by murder, or a drop from a precipice, or
     a lingering fever; but Clovelly did the thing with delicate torture.
     He said, 'Go to blazes,' and he fixed up that marriage--and there
     you are!  Clovelly, I drink to you; you are a master!"

     Clovelly acknowledged beautifully, and brought off a fine thing
     about the bookmaker having pocketed L5000 at the Derby, then
     complimented Colonel Ryder on his success as a lecturer in London
     (pretty true, by the way), and congratulated Blackburn on his coming
     marriage with Mrs. Callendar, the Tasmanian widow.  What he said of
     myself I am not going to repeat; but it was salaaming all round,
     with the liquor good, and fun bang over the bulwarks.

     How is Roscoe?  I didn't see as much of him as you did, but I liked
     him.  Take my tip for it, that woman will make trouble for him some
     day.  She is the biggest puzzle I ever met.  I never could tell
     whether she liked him or hated him; but it seems to me that either
     would be the ruin of any "Christom man."  I know she saw something
     of him while she was in London, because her quarters were next to
     those of my aunt the dowager (whose heart the gods soften at my
     wedding!) in Queen Anne's Mansions, S.W., and who actually liked
     Mrs. F., called on her, and asked her to dinner, and Roscoe too,
     whom she met at her place.  I believe my aunt would have used her
     influence to get him a good living, if he had played his cards
     properly; but I expect he wouldn't be patronised, and he went for a
     "mickonaree," as they say in the South Seas. . . .  Well, I'm off
     to the Spicy Isles, then back again to marry a wife.  "Go thou and
     do likewise."

     By the way, have you ever heard of or seen Boyd Madras since he
     slipped our cable at Aden and gave the world another chance?
     I trust he will spoil her wedding--if she ever tries to have one.
     May I be there to see!

Because we shall see nothing more of Hungerford till we finally dismiss
the drama, I should like to say that this voyage of his to the West
Indies made his fortune--that is, it gave him command of one of the
finest ships in the English merchant service.  In a storm a disaster
occurred to his vessel, his captain was washed overboard, and he was
obliged to take command.  His skill, fortitude, and great manliness,
under tragical circumstances, sent his name booming round the world; and,
coupled, as it was, with a singular act of personal valour, he had his
pick of all vacancies and possible vacancies in the merchant service, boy
(or little more) as he was.  I am glad to say that he is now a happy
husband and father too.

The letter from Belle Treherne mentioned having met Clovelly several
times of late, and, with Hungerford's words hot in my mind, I determined,
though I had perfect confidence in her, as in myself, to be married at
Christmas-time.  Her account of the courtship of Blackburn and Mrs.
Callendar was as amusing as her description of an evening which the
bookmaker had spent with her father, when he said he was going to marry
an actress whom he had seen at Drury Lane Theatre in a racing drama.
This he subsequently did, and she ran him a break-neck race for many a
day, but never making him unhappy or less resourceful.  His verdict, and
his only verdict, upon Mrs. Falchion had been confided to Blackburn, who
in turn confided it to Clovelly, who passed it on to me.

He said: "A woman is like a horse.  Make her beautiful, give her a high
temper and a bit of bad luck in her youth, and she'll take her revenge
out of life; even though she runs straight, and wins straight every time;
till she breaks her heart one day over a lost race.  After that she is
good to live with for ever.  A heart-break for that kind is their
salvation: without it they go on breaking the hearts of others."

As I read Belle's and Hungerford's letters my thoughts went back again
--as they did so often indeed--to the voyage of the 'Fulvia', and then to
Mrs. Falchion's presence in the Rocky Mountains.  There was a strange
destiny in it all, and I had no pleasant anticipations about the end;
for, even if she could or did do Roscoe no harm, so far as his position
was concerned, I saw that she had already begun to make trouble between
him and Ruth.

That day which saw poor Boldrick's death put her in a conflicting light
to me.  Now I thought I saw in her unusual gentleness, again an unusual
irony, an almost flippant and cruel worldliness; and though at the time
she was most touched by the accident, I think her feeling of horror at it
made her appear to speak in a way which showed her unpleasantly to Mr.
Devlin and his daughter.  It may be, however, that Ruth Devlin saw
further into her character than I guessed, and understood the strange
contradictions of her nature.  But I shall, I suppose, never know
absolutely about that; nor does it matter much now.

The day succeeding Phil's death was Sunday, and the little church at
Viking was full.  Many fishers had come over from Sunburst.  It was
evident that people expected Roscoe to make some reference to Phil's
death in his sermon, or, at least, have a part of the service
appropriate.  By a singular chance the first morning lesson was David's
lamentation for Saul and Jonathan.  Roscoe had a fine voice.  He read
easily, naturally--like a cultivated layman, not like a clergyman; like a
man who wished to convey the simple meaning of what he read, reverently,
honestly.  On the many occasions when I heard him read the service,
I noticed that he never changed the opening sentence, though there were,
of course, others from which to choose.  He drew the people to their feet
always with these words, spoken as it were directly to them:

     "When the wicked man turneth away from the wickedness that he hath
     committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save
     his soul alive."

I noticed this morning that he instantly attracted the attention of every
one, and held it, with the first words of the lesson:

     "The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the
     mighty fallen!"

It seemed to me as if the people at first almost tried to stop breathing,
so intense was the feeling.  Mrs. Falchion was sitting very near me, and
though she had worn her veil up at first, as I uncharitably put it then,
to disconcert him, she drew it rather quickly down as his reading
proceeded; but, so far as I could see, she never took her eyes off
his face through the whole service; and, impelled in spite of myself,
I watched her closely.  Though Ruth Devlin was sitting not far from her,
she scarcely looked that way.

Evidently the text of the sermon was not chosen that it might have some
association with Phil's death, but there was a kind of simple grandeur,
and certainly cheerful stalwartness, in his interpretation and practical
rendering of the text:

     "Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah?
     . . . travelling in the greatness of his strength?  I that speak
     in righteousness, mighty to save."

A man was talking to men sensibly, directly, quietly.  It was impossible
to resist the wholesome eloquence of his temperament; he was a revelation
of humanity: what he said had life.

I said to myself, as I had before, Is it possible that this man ever did
anything unmanly?

After the service, James Devlin--with Ruth--came to Roscoe and myself,
and asked us to lunch at his house.  Roscoe hesitated, but I knew it was
better for him not to walk up the hills and back again immediately after
luncheon; so I accepted for us both; and Ruth gave me a grateful look.
Roscoe seemed almost anxious not to be alone with Ruth--not from any
cowardly feeling, but because he was perplexed by the old sense of coming
catastrophe, which, indeed, poor fellow, he had some cause to feel.  He
and Mr. Devlin talked of Phil's funeral and the arrangements that had
been made, and during the general conversation Ruth and I dropped behind.

Quite abruptly she said to me: "Who is Mrs. Falchion?"

"A widow--it is said--rich, unencumbered," I as abruptly answered.

"But I suppose even widows may have pedigrees, and be conjugated in the
past tense," was the cool reply.  She drew herself up a little proudly.

I was greatly astonished.  Here was a girl living most of her life in
these mountains, having only had a few years of social life in the East,
practising with considerable skill those arts of conversation so much
cultivated in metropolitan drawing-rooms.  But I was a very dull fellow
then, and had yet to learn that women may develop in a day to wonderful
things.

"Well," I said in reply, "I suppose not.  But I fear I cannot answer
regarding the pedigree, nor a great deal about the past, for I only met
her under two years ago."

"And yet I have imagined that you knew her pretty well, and that Mr.
Roscoe knew her even better--perhaps," she said suggestively.

"That is so," I tried to say with apparent frankness, "for she lived in
the South Seas with her father, and Roscoe knew her there."

"She is a strange woman, and quite heartless in some ways; and yet, do
you know, I like her while I dislike her; and I cannot tell why."

"Do not try to tell," I answered, "for she has the gift of making people
do both.--I think she likes and dislikes herself--as well as others."

"As well--as others," she replied slowly.  "Yes, I think I have noticed
that.  You see," she added, "I do not look at people as most girls of my
age: and perhaps I am no better for that.  But Mrs. Falchion's
introduction to me occurred in such peculiar circumstances, and the
coincidence of your knowing her was so strange, that my interest is
not unnatural, I suppose."

"On the contrary," I said, "I am only surprised that you have restrained
your curiosity so much and so long.  It was all very strange; though the
meeting was quite to be expected, as Mrs. Falchion herself explained that
day.  She had determined on coming over to the Pacific Coast; this place
was in her way; it is a fashionable resort; and she stood a good chance
of finding old friends."

"Yes--of finding--old friends," was the abstracted reply.  "I like Miss
Caron, her companion, very much better than--most women I have met."

This was not what she was going to say, but she checked herself, lest
she might be suspected of thinking uncharitably of Mrs. Falchion.  I,
of course, agreed with her, and told her the story of Galt Roscoe and
Hector Caron, and of Justine's earnestness regarding her fancied debt
to Roscoe.

I saw that the poison of anxiety had entered the girl's mind; and it
might, perhaps, bear fruit of no engaging quality.  In her own home,
however, it was a picture to see her with her younger sisters and
brothers, and invalid mother.  She went about very brightly and sweetly
among them, speaking to them as if she was mother to them all, angel of
them all, domestic court for them all; as indeed she was.  Here there
seemed no disturbing element in her; a close observer might even have
said (and in this case I fancy I was that) that she had no mind or heart
for anything or anybody but these few of her blood and race.  Hers was a
fine nature--high, wholesome, unselfish.  Yet it struck me sadly also,
to see how the child-like in her, and her young spirit, had been so early
set to the task of defence and protection: a mother at whose breasts
a child had never hung; maternal, but without the relieving joys of
maternity.

I knew that she would carry through her life that too watchful, too
anxious tenderness; that to her last day she would look back and not
remember that she had a childhood once; because while yet a child she had
been made into a woman.

Such of the daughters of men make life beautiful; but themselves are
selfish who do not see the almost intolerable pathos of unselfishness
and sacrifice.  At the moment I was bitter with the thought that, if Mrs.
Falchion intended anything which could steal away this girl's happiness
from her, even for a time, I should myself seek to retaliate--which was,
as may appear, in my power.  But I could not go to Mrs. Falchion now and
say: "You intend some harm to these two: for God's sake go away and leave
them alone!"  I had no real ground for making such a request.  Besides,
if there was any catastrophe, any trouble, coming, or possible, that
might hasten it, or, at least, give it point.

I could only wait.  I had laid another plan, and from a telegram I had
received in answer to one I had sent, I believed it was working.  I did
not despair.  I had, indeed, sent a cable to my agent in England, which
was to be forwarded to the address given me by Boyd Madras at Aden.
I had got a reply saying that Boyd Madras had sailed for Canada by the
Allan Line of steamers.  I had then telegraphed to a lawyer I knew in
Montreal, and he had replied that he was on the track of the wanderer.

All Viking and Sunburst turned out to Phil Boldrick's funeral.
Everything was done that he had requested.  The great whistle roared
painfully, revolvers and guns were fired over his grave, and the new-
formed corporation appeared.  He was buried on the top of a foot-hill,
which, to this day, is known as Boldricks' Own.  The grave was covered by
an immense flat stone bearing his name.  But a flagstaff was erected
near, no stouter one stands on Beachy Head or elsewhere,--and on it was
engraved:

                             PHIL BOLDRICK,

                   Buried with Municipal Honours on
                    the Thirtieth day of June 1883.

               This to his Memory, and for the honour of
                          Viking and Sunburst.

"Padre," said a river-driver to Galt Roscoe after the rites were
finished, "that was a man you could trust."

"Padre," added another, "that was a man you could bank on, and draw your
interest reg'lar.  He never done a mean thing, and he never pal'd with a
mean man.  He wasn't for getting his teeth on edge like some in the valley.
He didn't always side with the majority, and he had a gift of doin' things
on the square."

Others spoke in similar fashion, and then Viking went back to work, and
we to our mountain cottage.

Many days passed quietly.  I saw that Galt Roscoe wished to speak
to me on the subject perplexing him, but I did not help him.  I knew
that it would come in good time, and the farther off it was the better.
I dreaded to hear what he had to tell, lest, in spite of my confidence in
him, it should really be a thing which, if made public, must bring ruin.
During the evenings of these days he wrote much in his diary--the very
book that lies by me now.  Writing seemed a relief to him, for he was
more cheerful afterwards.  I know that he had received letters from the
summer hotel, but whether they were from Mrs. Falchion or Justine Caron I
was not then aware, though I afterwards came to know that one of them was
from Justine, asking him if she might call on him.  He guessed that the
request was connected with Hector Caron's death; and, of course, gave his
consent.  During this time he did not visit Ruth Devlin, nor did he
mention her name.  As for myself, I was sick of the whole business,
and wished it well over, whatever the result.

I make here a few extracts from Roscoe's diary, to show the state of his
mind at this period:

     Can a man never get away from the consequences of his wickedness,
     even though he repents?  . . . Restitution is necessary as well
     as repentance; but when one cannot make restitution, when it is
     impossible--what then?  I suppose one has to reply, Well, you have
     to suffer, that is all. . . .  Poor Alo!  To think that after all
     these years, you can strike me!

     There is something malicious in the way Mercy Falchion crosses my
     path.  What she knows, she knows; and what she can do if she
     chooses, I must endure.  I cannot love Mercy Falchion again, and
     that, I suppose, is the last thing she would wish now.  I cannot
     bring Alo back.  But how does that concern her!  Why does she hate
     me so?  For, underneath her kindest words,--and they are kind
     sometimes,--I can detect the note of enmity, of calculating scorn.
     . . . I wish I could go to Ruth and tell her all, and ask her to
     decide if she can take a man with such a past. . . .  What a
     thing it is to have had a clean record of unflinching manliness at
     one's back!

I add another extract:

     Phil's story of Danger Mountain struck like ice at my heart.  There
     was a horrible irony in the thing: that it should be told to me, of
     all the world, and at such a time.  Some would say, I suppose, that
     it was the arrangement of Providence.  Not to speak it profanely, it
     seems to be the achievement of the devil.  The torture was too
     malicious for God. . . .

     Phil's letter has gone to his pal at Danger Mountain. . . .

The fourth day after the funeral Justine Caron came to see Galt Roscoe.
This was the substance of their conversation, as I came to know long
afterwards.

"Monsieur," she said, "I have come to pay something of a debt which I owe
to you.  It is a long time since you gave my poor Hector burial, but I
have never forgotten, and I have brought you at last--you must not shake
your head so--the money you spent. . . .  But you MUST take it.  I
should be miserable if you did not.  The money is all that I can repay;
the kindness is for memory and gratitude always."

He looked at her wonderingly, earnestly, she seemed so unworldly,
standing there, her life's ambition not stirring beyond duty to her dead.
If goodness makes beauty, she was beautiful; and yet, besides all that,
she had a warm, absorbing eye, a soft, rounded cheek, and she carried in
her face the light of a cheerful, engaging spirit.

"Will it make you happier if I take the money?" he said at last, and his
voice showed how she had moved him.

"So much happier!" she answered, and she put a roll of notes into his
hand.

"Then I will take it," he replied, with a manner not too serious, and he
looked at the notes carefully; "but only what I actually spent, remember;
what I told you when you wrote me at Hector's death; not this ample
interest.  You forget, Miss Caron, that your brother was my friend."

"No I cannot forget that.  It lives with me," she rejoined softly.  But
she took back the surplus notes.  "And I have my gratitude left still,"
she added, smiling.

"Believe me, there is no occasion for gratitude.  Why, what less could
one do?"

"One could pass by on the other side."

"He was not fallen among thieves," was his reply; "he was among
Englishmen, the old allies of the French."

"But the Priests and the Levites, people of his own country--Frenchmen--
passed him by.  They were infamous in falsehood, cruel to him and to me.
--You are an Englishman; you have heart and kindness."

He hesitated, then he gravely said: "Do not trust Englishmen more than
you trust your own countrymen.  We are selfish even in our friendships
often.  We stick to one person, and to benefit that one we sacrifice
others.  Have you found all Englishmen--and WOMEN unselfish?"  He looked
at her steadily; but immediately repented that he had asked the question,
for he had in his mind one whom they both knew, too well, perhaps; and he
added quickly: "You see, I am not kind."

They were standing now in the sunlight just outside the house.  His hands
were thrust down in the pockets of his linen coat; her hands opening and
shutting her parasol slightly.  They might, from their appearance, have
been talking of very inconsequent things.

Her eyes lifted sorrowfully to his.  "Ah, monsieur," she rejoined, "there
are two times when one must fear a woman."  She answered his question
more directly than he could have conjectured.  But she felt that she must
warn him.

"I do not understand," he said.

"Of course you do not.  Only women themselves understand that the two
times when one must fear a woman are when she hates, and when she loves--
after a kind.  When she gets wicked or mad enough to hate, either through
jealousy or because she cannot love where she would, she is merciless.
She does not know the honour of the game.  She has no pity.  Then,
sometimes when she loves in a way, she is, as you say, most selfish.
I mean a love which--is not possible.  Then she does some mad act--all
women are a little mad sometimes.  Most of us wish to be good, but we are
quicksilver. . . ."

Roscoe's mind had been working fast.  He saw she meant to warn him
against Mrs. Falchion.  His face flushed slightly.  He knew that Justine
had thought well of him, and now he knew also that she suspected
something not creditable or, at least, hazardous in his life.

"And the man--the man whom the woman hates?"

"When the woman hates--and loves too, the man is in danger."

"Do you know of such a man?" he almost shrinkingly said.

"If I did I would say to him, The world is wide.  There is no glory in
fighting a woman who will not be fair in battle.  She will say what may
appear to be true, but what she knows in her own heart to be false--false
and bad."

Roscoe now saw that Justine had more than an inkling of his story.

He said calmly: "You would advise that man to flee from danger?"

"Yes, to flee," she replied hurriedly, with a strange anxiety in her
eyes; "for sometimes a woman is not satisfied with words that kill.  She
becomes less than human, and is like Jael."

Justine knew that Mrs. Falchion held a sword over Roscoe's career;
she guessed that Mrs. Falchion both cared for him and hated him too;
but she did not know the true reason of the hatred--that only came out
afterwards.  Woman-like, she exaggerated in order that she might move
him; but her motive was good, and what she said was not out of keeping
with the facts of life.

"The man's life even might be in danger?" he asked.

"It might."

"But surely that is not so dreadful," he still said calmly.

"Death is not the worst of evils."

"No, not the worst; one has to think of the evil word as well.  The evil
word can be outlived; but the man must think of those who really love
him--who would die to save him--and whose hearts would break if he
were killed.  Love can outlive slander, but it is bitter when it has to
outlive both slander and death.  It is easy to love with joy so long as
both live, though there are worlds between.  Thoughts fly and meet; but
Death makes the great division. . . .  Love can only live in the
pleasant world."

Very abstractedly he said: "Is it a pleasant world to you?"

She did not reply directly to that, but answered: "Monsieur, if you know
of such a man as I speak of, warn him to fly."  And she raised her eyes
from the ground and looked earnestly at him.  Now her face was slightly
flushed, she looked almost beautiful.

"I know of such a man," he replied, "but he will not go.  He has to
answer to his own soul and his conscience.  He is not without fear, but
it is only fear for those who care for him, be they ever so few.  And he
hopes that they will be brave enough to face his misery, if it must come.
For we know that courage has its hour of comfort. . . .  When such a
man as you speak of has his dark hour he will stand firm."

Then with a great impulse he added: "This man whom I know did wrong, but
he was falsely accused of doing a still greater.  The consequence of the
first thing followed him.  He could never make restitution.  Years went
by.  Some one knew that dark spot in his life--his Nemesis."

"The worst Nemesis in this life, monsieur, is always a woman," she
interrupted.

"Perhaps she is the surest," he continued.  "The woman faced him in the
hour of his peace and--" he paused.  His voice was husky.

"Yes, 'and,' monsieur?"

"And he knows that she would ruin him, and kill his heart and destroy his
life."

"The waters of Marah are bitter," she murmured, and she turned her face
away from him to the woods.  There was no trouble there.  The birds were
singing, black squirrels were jumping from bough to bough, and they could
hear the tapping of the woodpecker.  She slowly drew on her gloves, as if
for occupation.

He spoke at length as though thinking aloud: "But he knows that, whatever
comes, life has had for him more compensations than he deserves.  For, in
his trouble, a woman came, and said kind words, and would have helped him
if she could."

"There were TWO women," she said solemnly.

"Two women?" he repeated slowly.

"The one stayed in her home and prayed, and the other came."

"I do not understand," he said: and he spoke truly.

"Love is always praying for its own, therefore one woman prayed at home.
The other woman who came was full of gratitude, for the man was noble,
she owed him a great debt, and she believed in him always.  She knew that
if at any time in his life he had done wrong, the sin was without malice
or evil."

"The woman is gentle and pitiful with him, God knows."

She spoke quietly now, and her gravity looked strange in one so young.

"God knows she is just, and would see him fairly treated.  She is so far
beneath him! and yet one can serve a friend though one is humble and
poor."

"How strange," he rejoined, "that the man should think himself miserable
who is befriended in such a way!  Mademoiselle, he will carry to his
grave the kindness of this woman."

"Monsieur," she added humbly, yet with a brave light in her eyes, "it is
good to care whether the wind blows bitter or kind.  Every true woman is
a mother, though she have no child.  She longs to protect the suffering,
because to protect is in her so far as God is. . . .  Well, this woman
cares that way. . . ."  She held out her hand to say good-bye.  Her
look was simple, direct, and kind.  Their parting words were few and
unremarkable.

Roscoe watched Justine Caron as she passed out into the shade of the
woods, and he said to himself: "Gratitude like that is a wonderful
thing."  He should have said something else, but he did not know,
and she did not wish him to know: and he never knew.




CHAPTER XVI

A DUEL IN ARCADY

The more I thought of Mrs. Falchion's attitude towards Roscoe, the more
I was puzzled.  But I had at last reduced the position to this: Years
ago Roscoe had cared for her and she had not cared for him.  Angered
or indignant at her treatment of him, Roscoe's affections declined
unworthily elsewhere.  Then came a catastrophe of some kind, in which
Alo (whoever she was) suffered.  The secret of this catastrophe Mrs.
Falchion, as I believe, held.  There was a parting, a lapse of years,
and then the meeting on the 'Fulvia': with it, partial restoration of Mrs.
Falchion's influence, then its decline, and then a complete change of
position.  It was now Mrs. Falchion that cared, and Roscoe that shunned.
It perplexed me that there seemed to be behind Mrs. Falchion's present
regard for Roscoe some weird expression of vengeance, as though somehow
she had been wronged, and it was her duty to punish.  In no other way was
the position definable.  That Roscoe would never marry her was certain to
my mind.  That he could not marry her now was also certain--to me; I had
the means to prevent it.  That she wished to marry him I was not sure,
though she undoubtedly cared for him.  Remained, therefore,
the supposition that if he cared for her she would do him no harm,
as to his position.  But if he married Ruth, disaster would come--
Roscoe himself acknowledged that she held the key of his fortunes.

Upon an impulse, and as a last resort, I had taken action whereby in
some critical moment I might be able to wield a power over Mrs. Falchion.
I was playing a blind game, but it was the only card I held.  I had heard
from the lawyer in Montreal that Madras, under another name, had gone to
the prairie country to enter the mounted police.  I had then telegraphed
to Winnipeg, but had got no answer.

I had seen her many times, but we had never, except very remotely,
touched upon the matter which was uppermost in both our minds.  It was
not my wish to force the situation.  I knew that my opportunity would
come wherein to spy upon the mind of the enemy.  It came.  On the evening
that Justine Caron called upon Roscoe, I accidentally met Mrs. Falchion
in the grounds of the hotel.  She was with several people, and as I spoke
to her she made a little gesture of invitation.  I went over, was
introduced to her companions, and then she said:

"Dr. Marmion, I have not yet made that visit to the salmon-fishers at
Sunburst.  Unfortunately, on the days when I called on Miss Devlin, my
time was limited.  But now I have a thirst for adventure, and time hangs
heavy.  Will you perform your old office of escort, and join a party,
which we can make up here, to go there to-morrow?"

I had little love for Mrs. Falchion, but I consented, because it seemed
to me the chance had come for an effective talk with her; and I suggested
that we should go late in the afternoon of the next day, and remain till
night and see the Indians, the half-breeds, and white fishermen working
by torch-light on the river.  The proposition was accepted with delight.

Then the conversation turned upon the feud that existed between Viking
and Sunburst, the river-drivers and the fishers.  During the last few
days, owing to the fact that there were a great many idle river-men
about, the river-driving for the season being done, there had been more
than one quarrel of a serious nature at Sunburst.  It had needed a great
deal of watchfulness on the part of Mr. Devlin and his supporters to
prevent fighting.  In Sunburst itself, Mr. Devlin had much personal
influence.  He was a man of exceedingly strong character, bold, powerful,
persuasive.  But this year there had been a large number of rough,
adventurous characters among the river-men, and they seemed to take
delight in making sport of, and even interfering with, the salmon-
fishers.  We talked of these things for some time, and then I took my
leave.  As I went, Mrs. Falchion stepped after me, tapped me on the arm,
and said in a slow, indolent tone:

"Whenever you and I meet, Dr. Marmion, something happens--something
strange.  What particular catastrophe have you arranged for to-morrow?
For you are, you know, the chorus to the drama."

"Do not spoil the play by anticipation," I said.

"One gets very weary of tragedy," she retorted.  "Comedy would be a
relief.  Could you not manage it?"

"I do not know about to-morrow," I said, "as to a comedy.  But I promise
you that one of these days I will present to you the very finest comedy
imaginable."

"You speak oracularly," she said; "still you are a professor, and
professors always pose.  But now, to be perfectly frank with you, I do
not believe that any comedy you could arrange would be as effective as
your own."

"You have read 'Much Ado about Nothing'," I said.

"Oh, it is as good as that, is it?" she asked.

"Well, it has just as good a final situation," I answered.  She seemed
puzzled, for she saw I spoke with some undercurrent of meaning.  "Mrs.
Falchion," I said to her suddenly and earnestly, "I wish you to think
between now and to-morrow of what I am just going to say to you."

"It sounds like the task set an undergraduate, but go on," she said.

"I wish you to think," said I, "of the fact that I helped to save your
life."

She flushed; an indignant look shot into her face, and her voice
vibrating, she said:

"What man would have done less?"  Then, almost immediately after, as
though repenting of what she had said, she continued in a lower tone
and with a kind of impulsiveness uncommon to her: "But you had courage,
and I appreciate that; still, do not ask too much.  Good-night."

We parted at that, and did not meet again until the next afternoon, when
I joined her and her party at the summer hotel.  Together we journeyed
down to Sunburst.

It was the height of the salmon-fishing season.  Sunburst lay cloyed
among the products of field and forest and stream.  At Viking one got the
impression of a strong pioneer life, vibrant, eager, and with a touch of
Arcady.  But viewed from a distance Sunburst seemed Arcady itself.  It
was built in green pastures, which stretched back on one side of the
river, smooth, luscious, undulating to the foot-hills.  This was on one
side of the Whi-Whi River.  On the other side was a narrow margin, and
then a sheer wall of hills in exquisite verdure.  The houses were of
wood, and chiefly painted white, sweet and cool in the vast greenness.
Cattle wandered shoulders deep in the rich grass, and fruit of all kinds
was to be had for the picking.  The population was strangely mixed.
Men had drifted here from all parts of the world, sometimes with their
families, sometimes without them.  Many of them had settled here after
mining at the Caribou field and other places on the Frazer River.
Mexican, Portuguese, Canadian, Californian, Australian, Chinaman, and
coolie lived here, side by side, at ease in the quiet land, following a
primitive occupation with primitive methods.

One could pick out the Indian section of the village, because not far
from it was the Indian graveyard, with its scaffolding of poles and brush
and its offerings for the dead.  There were almost interminable rows of
scaffolding on the river's edge and upon the high bank where hung the
salmon drying in the sun.  The river, as it ambled along, here over
shallows, there over rapids and tiny waterfalls, was the pathway for
millions and millions of salmon upon a pilgrimage to the West and North--
to the happy hunting grounds of spawn.  They came in droves so thick at
times that, crowding up the little creeks which ran into the river, they
filled them so completely as to dam up the water and make the courses a
solid mass of living and dead fish.  In the river itself they climbed the
rapids and leaped the little waterfalls with incredible certainty; except
where man had prepared his traps for them.  Sometimes these traps were
weirs or by-washes, made of long lateral tanks of wicker-work.  Down
among the boulders near the shore, scaffoldings were raised, and from
these the fishermen with nets and wicker-work baskets caught the fish as
they came up.

We wandered about during the afternoon immensely interested in all
that we saw.  During that time the party was much together, and my
conversation with Mrs.  Falchion was general.  We had supper at a quiet
little tavern, idled away an hour in drinking in the pleasant scene; and
when dusk came went out again to the banks of the river.

From the time we left the tavern to wander by the river I managed to be a
good deal alone with Mrs. Falchion.  I do not know whether she saw that I
was anxious to speak with her privately, but I fancy she did.  Whatever
we had to say must, in the circumstances, however serious, be kept
superficially unimportant.  And, as it happened, our serious conference
was carried on with an air of easy gossip, combined with a not artificial
interest in all we saw.  And there was much to see.  Far up and down the
river the fragrant dusk was spotted with the smoky red light of torches,
and the atmosphere shook with shadows, through which ran the song of the
river, more amiable than the song of the saw, and the low, weird cry of
the Indians and white men as they toiled for salmon in the glare of the
torches.  Here upon a scaffolding a half-dozen swung their nets and
baskets in the swift river, hauling up with their very long poles thirty
or forty splendid fish in an hour; there at a small cascade, in great
baskets sunk into the water, a couple of Indians caught and killed the
salmon that, in trying to leap the fall, plumped into the wicker cage;
beyond, others, more idle and less enterprising, speared the finny
travellers, thus five hundred miles from home--the brave Pacific.

Upon the banks the cleaning and curing went on, the women and children
assisting, and as the Indians and half-breeds worked they sang either the
wild Indian melodies, snatches of brave old songs of the 'voyageurs' of a
past century, or hymns taught by the Jesuit missionaries in the persons
of such noble men as Pere Lacombe and Pere Durieu, who have wandered up
and down the vast plains of both sides of the Rockies telling an old
story in a picturesque, heroic way.  These old hymns were written in
Chinook, that strange language,--French, English, Spanish, Indian,
arranged by the Hudson's Bay Company, which is, like the wampum-belt,
a common tongue for tribes and peoples not speaking any language but
their own.  They were set to old airs--lullabies, chansons, barcarolles,
serenades, taken out of the folk-lore of many lands.  Time and again had
these simple arcadian airs been sung as a prelude to some tribal act that
would not bear the search-light of civilisation--little by the Indians
east of the Rockies, for they have hard hearts and fierce tongues, but
much by the Shuswaps, Siwashes, and other tribes of the Pacific slope,
whose natures are for peace more than for war; who, one antique day,
drifted across from Japan or the Corea, and never, even in their wild,
nomadic state, forgot their skill and craft in wood and gold and silver.

We sat on the shore and watched the scene for a time, saying nothing.
Now and again, as from scaffolding to scaffolding, from boat to boat, and
from house to house, the Chinook song rang and was caught up in a slow
monotone, so not interfering with the toil, there came the sound of an
Indian drum beaten indolently, or the rattle of dry hard sticks--a
fantastic accompaniment.

"Does it remind you of the South Seas?" I asked Mrs. Falchion, as, with
her chin on her hand, she watched the scene.

She drew herself up, almost with an effort, as though she had been lost
in thought, and looked at me curiously for a moment.  She seemed trying
to call back her mind to consider my question.  Presently she answered
me: "Very little.  There is something finer, stronger here.  The
atmosphere has more nerve, the life more life.  This is not a land for
the idle or vicious, pleasant as it is."

"What a thinker you are, Mrs. Falchion!"

She seemed to recollect herself suddenly.  Her voice took on an
inflection of satire.  "You say it with the air of a discoverer.  With
Columbus and Hervey and you, the world--" She stopped, laughing softly
at the thrust, and moved the dust about with her foot.

"In spite of the sarcasm, I am going to add that I feel a personal
satisfaction in your being a woman who does think, and acts more on
thought than impulse."

"'Personal satisfaction' sounds very royal and august.  It is long,
I imagine, since you took a--personal satisfaction--in me."

I was not to be daunted.  "People who think a good deal and live a fresh,
outdoor life--you do that--naturally act most fairly and wisely in time
of difficulty--and contretemps."

"But I had the impression that you thought I acted unfairly and unwisely
--at such times."

We had come exactly where I wanted.  In our minds we were both looking at
those miserable scenes on the 'Fulvia', when Madras sought to adjust the
accounts of life and sorely muddled them.

"But," said I, "you are not the same woman that you were."

"Indeed, Sir Oracle," she answered: "and by what necromancy do you know?"

"By none.  I think you are sorry now--I hope you are--for what--"

She interrupted me indignantly.  "You go too far.  You are almost--
unbearable.  You said once that the matter should be buried, and yet here
you work for an opportunity, Heaven knows why, to place me at a
disadvantage!"

"Pardon me," I answered; "I said that I would never bring up those
wretched scenes unless there was cause.  There is cause."

She got to her feet.  "What cause--what possible cause can there be?"

I met her eye firmly.  "I am bound to stand by my friend," I said.
"I can and I will stand by him."

"If it is a game of drawn swords, beware!" she retorted.  "You speak to
me as if I were a common adventuress.  You mistake me, and forget that
you--of all men--have little margin of high morality on which to
speculate."

"No, I do not forget that," I said, "nor do I think of you as an
adventuress.  But I am sure you hold a power over my friend, and--"

She stopped me.  "Not one word more on the subject.  You are not to
suppose this or that.  Be wise do not irritate and annoy a woman like me.
It were better to please me than to preach to me."

"Mrs. Falchion," I said firmly, "I wish to please you--so well that some
day you will feel that I have been a good friend to you as well as to
him--"

Again she interrupted me.  "You talk in foolish riddles.  No good can
come of this."

"I cannot believe that," I urged; "for when once your heart is moved by
the love of a man, you will be just, and then the memory of another man
who loved you and sinned for you--"

"Oh, you coward!" she broke out scornfully--"you coward to persist in
this!"

I made a little motion of apology with my hand, and was silent.  I was
satisfied.  I felt that I had touched her as no words of mine had ever
touched her before.  If she became emotional, was vulnerable in her
feelings, I knew that Roscoe's peace might be assured.  That she loved
Roscoe now I was quite certain.  Through the mists I could see a way,
even if I failed to find Madras and arrange another surprising situation.
She was breathing hard with excitement.

Presently she said with incredible quietness, "Do not force me to do hard
things.  I have a secret."

"I have a secret too," I answered.  "Let us compromise."

"I do not fear your secret," she answered.  She thought I was referring
to her husband's death.  "Well," I replied, "I honestly hope you never
will.  That would be a good day for you."

"Let us go," she said; then, presently: "No, let us sit here and forget
that we have been talking."

I was satisfied.  We sat down.  She watched the scene silently, and
I watched her.  I felt that it would be my lot to see stranger things
happen to her than I had seen before; but all in a different fashion.
I had more hope for my friend, for Ruth Devlin, for--!

I then became silent even to myself.  The weltering river, the fishers
and their labour and their songs, the tall dark hills, the deep gloomy
pastures, the flaring lights, were then in a dream before me; but I was
thinking, planning.

As we sat there, we heard noises, not very harmonious, interrupting the
song of the salmon-fishers.  We got up to see.  A score of river-drivers
were marching down through the village, mocking the fishers and making
wild mirth.  The Indians took little notice, but the half-breeds and
white fishers were restless.

"There will be trouble here one day," said Mrs. Falchion.

"A free fight which will clear the air," I said.

"I should like to see it--it would be picturesque, at least," she added
cheerfully; "for I suppose no lives would be lost."

"One cannot tell," I answered; "lives do not count so much in new lands."

"Killing is hateful, but I like to see courage."

And she did see it.




CHAPTER XVII

RIDING THE REEFS

The next afternoon Roscoe was sitting on the coping deep in thought, when
Ruth rode up with her father, dismounted, and came upon him so quietly
that he did not hear her.  I was standing in the trees a little distance
away.

She spoke to him once, but he did not seem to hear.  She touched his arm.
He got to his feet.

"You were so engaged that you did not hear me," she said.

"The noise of the rapids!" he answered, after a strange pause, "and your
footstep is very light."

She leaned her chin on her hand, rested against the rail of the coping,
looked meditatively into the torrent below, and replied: "Is it so
light?"  Then after a pause: "You have not asked me how I came,
who came with me, or why I am here."

"It was first necessary for me to conceive the delightful fact that you
are here," he said in a dazed, and, therefore, not convincing tone.

She looked him full in the eyes.  "Please do not pay me the ill
compliment of a compliment," she said.  "Was it the sailor who spoke then
or the--or yourself?  It is not like you."

"I did not mean it as a compliment," he replied.  "I was thinking about
critical and important things."

"'Critical and important' sounds large," she returned.

"And the awakening was sudden," he continued.  "You must make allowance,
please, for--"

"For the brusque appearance of a very unimaginative, substantial, and
undreamlike person?  I do.  And now, since you will not put me quite at
my ease by assuming, in words, that I have been properly 'chaperoned'
here, I must inform you that my father waits hard by--is, as my riotous
young brother says, 'without on the mat.'"

"I am very glad," he replied with more politeness than exactness.

"That I was duly escorted, or that my father is 'without on the mat'?
. . . However, you do not appear glad one way or the other.  And now
I must explain our business.  It is to ask your company at dinner (do
consider yourself honoured--actually a formal dinner party in the
Rockies!) to meet the lieutenant-governor, who is coming to see our
famous Viking and Sunburst. . . .  But you are expected to go out
where my father feeds his--there, see--his horse on your 'trim parterre.'
And now that I have done my duty as page and messenger without a word of
assistance, Mr. Roscoe, will you go and encourage my father to hope that
you will be vis-a-vis to his excellency?"  She lightly beat the air with
her whip, while I took a good look at the charming scene.

Roscoe looked seriously at the girl for an instant.  He understood too
well the source of such gay social banter.  He knew it covered a hurt.
He said to her: "Is this Ruth Devlin or another?"

And she replied very gravely: "It is Ruth Devlin and another too," and
she looked down to the chasm beneath with a peculiar smile; and her eyes
were troubled.

He left her and went and spoke to her father whom I had joined, but,
after a moment, returned to Ruth.  Ruth turned slightly to meet him as he
came.  "And is the prestige of the house of Devlin to be supported?" she
said; "and the governor to be entertained with tales of flood and field?"

His face had now settled into a peculiar calmness.  He said with a touch
of mock irony: "The sailor shall play his part--the obedient retainer of
the house of Devlin."

"Oh," she said, "you are malicious now!  You turn your long accomplished
satire on a woman."  And she nodded to the hills opposite, as if to tell
them that it was as they had said to her: those grand old hills with
which she had lived since childhood, to whom she had told all that had
ever happened to her.

"No, indeed no," he replied, "though I am properly rebuked.  I fear I am
malicious--just a little, but it is all inner-self-malice: 'Rome turned
upon itself.'"

"But one cannot always tell when irony is intended for the speaker of it.
Yours did not seem applied to yourself," was her slow answer, and she
seemed more interested in Mount Trinity than in him.

"No?"  Then he said with a playful sadness: "A moment ago you were not
completely innocent of irony, were you?"

"But a man is big and broad, and should not--he should be magnanimous,
leaving it to woman, whose life is spent among little things, to be
guilty of littlenesses.  But see how daring I am--speaking like this to
you who know so much more than I do. . . .  Surely, you are still only
humorous, when you speak of irony turned upon yourself--the irony so icy
to your friends?"

She had developed greatly.  Her mind had been sharpened by pain.  The
edge of her wit had become poignant, her speech rendered logical and
allusive.  Roscoe was wise enough to understand that the change in her
had been achieved by the change in himself; that since Mrs. Falchion
came, Ruth had awakened sharply to a distress not exactly definable.
She felt that though he had never spoken of love to her, she had a right
to share his troubles.  The infrequency of his visits to her of late, and
something in his manner, made her uneasy and a little bitter.  For there
was an understanding between them, though it had been unspoken and
unwritten.  They had vowed without priest or witness.  The heart speaks
eloquently in symbols first, and afterwards in stumbling words.

It seemed to Roscoe at this moment, as it had seemed for some time, that
the words would never be spoken.  And was this all that had troubled her
--the belief that Mrs. Falchion had some claim upon his life?  Or had she
knowledge, got in some strange way, of that wretched shadow in his past?

This possibility filled him with bitterness.  The old Adam in him awoke,
and he said within himself "God in heaven, must one folly, one sin, kill
me and her too?  Why me more than another!  . . . And I love her, I
love her!"

His eyes flamed until their blue looked all black, and his brows grew
straight over them sharply, making his face almost stern. . . .  There
came swift visions of renouncing his present life; of going with her--
anywhere: to tell her all, beg her forgiveness, and begin life over
again, admitting that this attempt at expiation was a mistake; to have
his conscience clear of secret, and trust her kindness.  For now he was
sure that Mrs. Falchion meant to make his position as a clergyman
impossible; to revenge herself on him for no wrong that, as far as he
knew, he ever did directly to her.  But to tell this girl, or even
her father or mother, that he had been married, after a shameful,
unsanctified fashion, to a savage, with what came after, and the awful
thing that happened--he who ministered at the altar!  Now that he looked
the thing in the face it shocked him.  No, he could not do it.

She said to him, while he looked at her as though he would read her
through and through, though his mind was occupied with a dreadful
possibility beyond her:

"Why do you look so?  You are stern.  You are critical.  Have I--
disimproved so?"

The words were full of a sudden and natural womanly fear, that something
in herself had fallen in value.  They had a pathos so much the more
moving because she sought to hide it.

There swam before his eyes the picture of happiness from which she
herself had roused him when she came.  He involuntarily, passionately,
caught her hand and pressed it to his lips twice; but spoke nothing.

"Oh! oh!--please!" she said.  Her voice was low and broken, and she
spoke appealingly.  Could he not see that he was breaking her heart,
while filling it also with unbearable joy?  Why did he not speak and make
this possible, and not leave it a thing to flush her cheeks, and cause
her to feel he had acted on a knowledge he had no right to possess till
he had declared himself in speech?  Could he not have spared her that?--
This Christian gentleman, whose worth had compassed these mountains and
won the dwellers among them--it was bitter.  Her pride and injured heart
rose up and choked her.

He let go her hand.  Now his face was partly turned from her, and she saw
how thin and pale it was.  She saw, too, what I had seen during the past
week, that his hair had become almost white about the temples; and the
moveless sadness of his position struck her with unnatural force, so
that, in spite of herself, tears came suddenly to her eyes, and a slight
moan broke from her.  She would have run away; but it was too late.

He saw the tears, the look of pity, indignation, pride, and love in her
face.

"My love!" he cried passionately.  He opened his arms to her.

But she stood still.  He came very close to her, spoke quickly, and
almost despairingly: "Ruth, I love you, and I have wronged you; but here
is your place, if you will come."

At first she seemed stunned, and her face was turned to her mountains,
as though the echo of his words were coming back to her from them, but
the thing crept into her heart and flooded it.  She seemed to wake, and
then all her affection carried her into his arms, and she dried her eyes
upon his breast.

After a time he whispered, "My dear, I have wronged you.  I should not
have made you care for me."

She did not seem to notice that he spoke of wrong.  She said: "I was
yours, Galt, even from the beginning, I think, though I did not quite
know it.  I remember what you read in church the first Sunday you came,
and it has always helped me; for I wanted to be good."

She paused and raised her eyes to his, and then with sweet solemnity she
said: "The words were:

     "'The Lord God is my strength, and He will make my feet like hinds'
     feet, and He will make me to walk upon mine high places.'"

"Ruth," he answered, "you have always walked on the high places.  You
have never failed.  And you are as safe as the nest of the eagle, a noble
work of God."

"No, I am not noble; but I should like to be so.  Most women like
goodness.  It is instinct with us, I suppose.  We had rather be good than
evil, and when we love we can do good things; but we quiver like the
compass-needle between two poles.  Oh, believe me! we are weak; but we
are loving."

"Your worst, Ruth, is as much higher than my best as the heaven is--"

"Galt, you hurt my fingers!" she interrupted.

He had not noticed the almost fierce strength of his clasp.  But his life
was desperately hungry for her.  "Forgive me, dearest.--As I said, better
than my best; for, Ruth, my life was--wicked, long ago.  You cannot
understand how wicked!"

"You are a clergyman and a good man," she said, with pathetic negation.

"You give me a heart unsoiled, unspotted of the world.  I have been in
some ways worse than the worst men in the valley there below."

"Galt, Galt, you shock me!" she said.

"Why did I speak?  Why did I kiss your hand as I did?  Because at the
moment it was the only honest thing to do; because it was due you that I
should say: 'Ruth, I love you, love you so much'"--here she nestled close
to him--"'so well, that everything else in life is as nothing beside it
--nothing! so well that I could not let you share my wretchedness.'"

She ran her hand along his breast and looked up at him with swimming
eyes.

"And you think that this is fair to me? that a woman gives the heart for
pleasant weather only?  I do not know what your sorrow may be, but it is
my right to share it.  I am only a woman; but a woman can be strong for
those she loves.  Remember that I have always had to care for others--
always; and I can bear much.  I will not ask what your trouble is, I only
ask you"--here she spoke slowly and earnestly, and rested her hand on his
shoulder--"to say to me that you love no other woman; and that--that no
other woman has a claim upon you.  Then I shall be content to pity you,
to help you, to love you.  God gives women many pains, but none so great
as the love that will not trust utterly; for trust is our bread of life.
Yes, indeed, indeed!"

"I dare not say," he said, "that it is your misfortune to love me, for in
this you show how noble a woman can be.  But I will say that the cup is
bitter-sweet for you. . . .  I cannot tell you now what my trouble is;
but I can say that no other living woman has a claim upon me. . . .
My reckoning is with the dead."

"That is with God," she whispered, "and He is just and merciful too. . . .
Can it not be repaired here?"  She smoothed back his hair, then let her
fingers stray lightly on his cheek.

It hurt him like death to reply.  "No, but there can be punishment here."

She shuddered slightly.  "Punishment, punishment," she repeated
fearfully--"what punishment?"

"I do not quite know."  Lines of pain grew deeper in his face. . . .
"Ruth, how much can a woman forgive?"

"A mother, everything."  But she would say no more.  He looked at her
long and earnestly, and said at last: "Will you believe in me no matter
what happens?"

"Always, always."  Her smile was most winning.

"If things should appear dark against me?"

"Yes, if you give me your word."

"If I said to you that I did a wrong; that I broke the law of God, though
not the laws of man?"

There was a pause in which she drew back, trembling slightly, and looked
at him timidly and then steadily, but immediately put her hands bravely
in his, and said: "Yes."

"I did not break the laws of man."

"It was when you were in the navy?" she inquired, in an awe-stricken
tone.

"Yes, years ago."

"I know.  I feel it.  You must not tell me.  It was a woman, and this
other woman, this Mrs. Falchion knows, and she would try to ruin you,
or"--here she seemed to be moved suddenly by a new thought--"or have you
love her.  But she shall not, she shall not--neither!  For I will love
you, and God will listen to me, and answer me."

"Would to Heaven I were worthy of you!  I dare not think of where you
might be called to follow me, Ruth."

"'Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge:
thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God,'" she rejoined in a
low voice.

"'Thy God my God!'" he repeated after her slowly.  He suddenly wondered
if his God was her God; whether now, in his trouble, he had that comfort
which his creed and profession should give him.  For the first time he
felt acutely that his choice of this new life might have been more a
reaction from the past, a desire for expiation, than radical belief that
this was the right and only thing for him to do.  And when, some time
after, he bade Ruth good-bye, as she went with her father, it came to him
with appalling conviction that his life had been a mistake.  The twist of
a great wrong in a man's character distorts his vision; and if he has a
tender conscience he magnifies his misdeeds.

In silence Roscoe and I watched the two ride down the slope.  I guessed
what had happened: afterwards I was told all.  I was glad of it, though
the end was not yet promising.  When we turned to go towards the house
again, a man lounged out of the trees towards us.  He looked at me, then
at Roscoe, and said:

"I'm Phil Boldrick's pal from Danger Mountain."  Roscoe held out his
hand, and the man took it, saying: "You're The Padre, I suppose, and Phil
was soft on you.  Didn't turn religious, did he?  He always had a streak
of God A'mighty in him; a kind of give-away-the-top-of-your-head chap;
friend o' the widow and the orphan, and divvy to his last crust with a
pal.  I got your letter, and come over here straight to see that he's
been tombed accordin' to his virtues; to lay out the dollars he left me
on the people he had on his visitin' list; no loafers, no gophers, not
one; but to them that stayed by him I stay, while prog and liquor last."

I saw Roscoe looking at him in an abstracted way, and, as he did not
reply, I said: "Phil had many friends and no enemies."  Then I told him
the tale of his death and funeral, and how the valley mourned for him.

While I spoke he stood leaning against a tree, shaking his head and
listening, his eyes occasionally resting on Roscoe with a look as
abstracted and puzzled as that on Roscoe's face.  When I had finished he
drew his hand slowly down his beard and a thick sound came from behind
his fingers.  But he did not speak.

Then I suggested quietly that Phil's dollars could be put to a better use
than for prog and liquor.

He did not reply to this at all; but after a moment's pause, in which he
seemed to be studying the gambols of a squirrel in a pine tree, he rubbed
his chin nervously, and more in soliloquy than conversation said: "I
never had but two pals that was pals through and through.  And one was
Phil and the other was Jo--Jo Brackenbury."

Here Roscoe's hand, which had been picking at the bark of a poplar,
twitched suddenly.

The man continued: "Poor Jo went down in the 'Fly Away' when she swung
with her bare ribs flat before the wind, and swamped and tore upon the
bloody reefs at Apia. . . .  God, how they gnawed her!  And never a
rag holdin' nor a stick standin', and her pretty figger broke like a tin
whistle in a Corliss engine.  And Jo Brackenbury, the dandiest rip, the
noisiest pal that ever said 'Here's how!' went out to heaven on a tearing
sea."

"Jo Brackenbury--" Roscoe repeated musingly.  His head was turned away
from us.

"Yes, Jo Brackenbury; and Captain Falchion said to me" (I wonder that I
did not start then) "when I told him how the 'Fly Away' went down to Davy,
and her lovers went aloft, reefed close afore the wind--'Then,' says he,
'they've got a damned sound seaman on the Jordan, and so help me! him
that's good enough to row my girl from open sea, gales poundin' and
breakers showin' teeth across the bar to Maita Point, is good enough for
use where seas is still and reefs ain't fashionable.'"

Roscoe's face looked haggard as it now turned towards us.  "If you will
meet me," he said to the stranger, "to-morrow morning, in Mr. Devlin's
office at Viking, I will hand you over Phil Boldrick's legacy."

The man made as if he would shake hands with Roscoe, who appeared not to
notice the motion, and then said: "I'll be there.  You can bank on that;
and, as we used to say down in the Spicy Isles, where neither of you have
been, I s'pose, Talofa!"

He swung away down the hillside.

Roscoe turned to me.  "You see, Marmion, all things circle to a centre.
The trail seems long, but the fox gets killed an arm's length from his
hole."

"Not always.  You take it too seriously," I said.  "You are no fox."

"That man will be in at the death," he persisted.

"Nonsense, Roscoe. He does not know you.  What has he to do with you?
This is overwrought nerves.  You are killing yourself with worry."

He was motionless and silent for a minute.  Then he said very quietly:
"No, I do not think that I really worry now.  I have known"--here he laid
his hand upon my shoulder and his eyes had a shining look--"what it is to
be happy, unspeakably happy, for a moment; and that stays with me.  I am
a coward no longer."

He drew his finger tips slowly across his forehead.  Then he continued:
"To-morrow I shall be angry with myself, no doubt, for having that
moment's joy, but I cannot feel so now.  I shall probably condemn myself
for cruel selfishness; but I have touched life's highest point this
afternoon, Marmion."

I drew his hand down from my shoulder and pressed it.  It was cold.
He withdrew his eyes from the mountain, and said: "I have had dreams,
Marmion, and they are over.  I lived in one: to expiate--to wipe out--
a past, by spending my life for others.  The expiation is not enough.
I lived in another: to win a woman's love; and I have, and was caught up
by it for a moment, and it was wonderful.  But it is over now, quite
over. . . .  And now for her sake renunciation must be made, before
I have another dream--a long one, Marmion."

I had forebodings, but I pulled myself together and said firmly: "Roscoe,
these are fancies.  Stop it, man.  You are moody.  Come, let us walk, and
talk of other things."

"No, we will not walk," he said, "but let us sit there on the coping and
be quiet--quiet in that roar between the hills."  Suddenly he swung
round, caught me by the shoulders and held me gently so.

"I have a pain at my heart, Marmion, as if I'd heard my death sentence;
such as a soldier feels who knows that Death looks out at him from iron
eyes.  You smile: I suppose you think I am mad."

I saw that it was best to let him speak his mind.  So I answered: "Not
mad, my friend.  Say on what you like.  Tell me all you feel.  Only, for
God's sake be brave, and don't give up until there's occasion.  I am sure
you exaggerate your danger, whatever it is."

"Listen for a minute," said he: "I had a brother Edward, as good a lad
as ever was; a boisterous, healthy fellow.  We had an old nurse in our
family who came from Irish hills, faithful and kind to us both.  There
came a change over Edward.  He appeared not to take the same interest in
his sports.  One day he came to me, looking a bit pale, and said: 'Galt,
I think I should like to study for the Church.'  I laughed at it, yet it
troubled me in a way, for I saw he was not well.  I told Martha, the
nurse.  She shook her head sadly, and said: 'Edward is not for the
Church, but you, my lad.  He is for heaven.'

"'For heaven, Martha?' laughed I.

"'In truth for heaven,' she replied, 'and that soon.  The look of his eye
is doom.  I've seen it since I swaddled him, and he will go suddenly.'

"I was angry, and I said to her,--though she thought she spoke the
truth,--'This is only Irish croaking.  We'll have the banshee next.'

"She got up from her chair and answered me solemnly: 'Galt Roscoe, I HAVE
heard the banshee wail, and sorrow falls upon your home.  And don't you
be so hard with me that have loved you, and who suffers for the lad that
often and often lay upon my breast.  Don't be so hard; for your day of
trouble comes too.  You, not he, will be priest at the altar.  Death will
come to him like a swift and easy sleep; but you will feel its hand upon
your heart and know its hate for many a day, and bear the slow pangs of
it until your life is all crushed, and you go from the world alone, Love
crying after you and not able to save you, not even the love of woman--
weaker than death. . . .  And, in my grave, when that day comes beside
a great mountain in a strange land, I will weep and pray for you; for I
was mother to you too, when yours left you alone bewhiles, never, in this
world, to come back.'

"And, Marmion, that night towards morning, as I lay in the same room with
Edward, I heard his breath stop sharply.  I jumped up and drew aside the
curtains to let in the light, and then I knew that the old woman spoke
true. . . .  And now! . . .  Well, I am like Hamlet--and I can say
with him: 'But thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart
--but it is no matter!"' . . . .

I tried to laugh and talk away his brooding, but there was little use,
his convictions were so strong.  Besides, what can you do with a
morbidness which has its origin in fateful circumstances?

I devoutly wished that a telegram would come from Winnipeg to let me know
if Boyd Madras, under his new name, could be found.  I was a hunter on a
faint trail.




CHAPTER XVIII

THE STRINGS OF DESTINY

When Phil's pal left us he went wandering down the hillside, talking to
himself.  Long afterwards he told me how he felt, and I reproduce his
phrases as nearly as I can.

"Knocked 'em, I guess," he said, "with that about Jo Brackenbury. . . .
Poor Jo!  Stuck together, him and me did, after she got the steel in her
heart."  . . . He pulled himself together, shuddering. . . .  "Went
back on me, she did, and took up with a cursed swell, and got it cold--
cold.  And I?  By Judas!  I never was shut of that.  I've known women,
many of 'em, all countries, but she was different.  I expect now, after
all these years, that if I got my hand on the devil that done for her,
I'd rattle his breath in his throat.  There's things that clings.  She
clings, Jo Brackenbury clings, and Phil Boldrick clings; and they're
gone, and I'm left to go it alone.  To play the single hand--what!--by
Jiminy!"

He exclaimed thus on seeing two women approach from the direction of the
valley.  He stood still, mouth open, staring.  They drew near, almost
passed him.  But one of them, struck by his intense gaze, suddenly turned
and came towards him.

"Miss Falchion!  Miss Falchion!" he cried.  Then, when she hesitated as
if with an effort of memory, he added: "Don't you know me?"

"Ah," she replied abruptly, "Sam Kilby!  Are you Sam Kilby, Jo
Brackenbury's friend, from Samoa?"

"Yes, miss, I'm Jo Brackenbury's friend; and I've rowed you across the
reefs with him more than once I guess so!  But it's a long way from Apia
to the Rockies, and it's funny to meet here."

"When did you come here--and from where?"

"I come to-day from the Hudson's Bay post at Danger Mountain.  I'm Phil
Boldrick's pal."

"Ah," she said again, with a look in her eyes not pleasant to see, "and
what brings you up here in the hills?"  Hers was more than an ordinary
curiosity.

"I come to see the Padre who was with Phil--when he left.  And the
Padre's a fair square sort, as I reckon him, but melancholy, almighty
melancholy."

"Yes, melancholy, I suppose," she said, "and fair square, as you say.
And what did you say and do?"

"Why, we yarned about Phil, and where I'd get the legacy to-morrow; and
I s'pose I had a strong breeze on the quarter, for I talked as free as if
we'd grubbed out of the same dough-pan since we was kiddies."

"Yes?"

"Yes siree; I don't know how it was, but I got to reelin' off about Jo--
queer, wasn't it?  And I told 'em how he went down in the 'Fly Away', and
how the lovely ladies--you remember how we used to call the whitecaps
lovely ladies--fondled him out to sea and on to heaven."

"And what did--the Padre--think of that?"

"Well, he's got a heart, I should say, and that's why Phil cottoned to
him, maybe,--for he looked as if he'd seen ghosts.  I guess he'd never
had a craft runnin' 'tween a sand-bar and a ragged coral bank; nor seen a
girl like the 'Fly Away' take a buster in her teeth; nor a man-of-war
come bundlin' down upon a nasty glacis, the captain on the bridge,
engines goin' for all they're worth, every man below battened in, and
every Jack above watchin' the fight between the engines and the
hurricane. . . .  Here she rolls six fathoms from the glacis that'll
rip her copper garments off, and the quiverin' engines pull her back; and
she swings and struggles and trembles between hell in the hurricane and
God A'mighty in the engines; till at last she gets her nose at the neck
of the open sea and crawls out safe and sound. . . .  I guess he'd
have more marble in his cheeks, if he saw likes o' that, Miss Falchion?"

Kilby paused and wiped his forehead.

She had listened calmly.  She did not answer his question.  She said:
"Kilby, I am staying at the summer hotel up there.  Will you call on me--
let me see . . . . say, to-morrow afternoon?--Some one will tell you the
way, if you do not know it. . . .  Ask for MRS. Falchion, Kilby, not
Miss Falchion. . . .  You will come?"

"Why, yes," he replied, "you can count on me; for I'd like to hear of
things that happened after I left Apia--and how it is that you are Mrs.
Falchion, for that's mighty queer."

"You shall hear all that and more."  She held out her hand to him and
smiled.  He took it, and she knew that now she was gathering up the
strings of destiny.

They parted.

The two passed on, looking, in their cool elegance, as if life were the
most pleasant thing; as though the very perfume of their garments would
preserve them from that plague called trouble.

"Justine," said Mrs. Falchion, "there is one law stranger than all; the
law of coincidence.  Perhaps the convenience of modern travel assists it,
but fate is in it also.  Events run in circles.  People connected with
them travel that way also.  We pass and re-pass each other many times,
but on different paths, until we come close and see each other face to
face."

She was speaking almost the very words which Roscoe had spoken to me.
But perhaps there was nothing strange in that.

"Yes, madame," replied Justine; "it is so, but there is a law greater
than coincidence."

"What, Justine?"

"The law of love, which is just and merciful, and would give peace
instead of trouble."

Mrs. Falchion looked closely at Justine, and, after a moment, evidently
satisfied, said: "What do you know of love?"

Justine tried hard for composure, and answered gently: "I loved my
brother Hector."

"And did it make you just and merciful and--an angel?"

"Madame, you could answer that better.  But it has not made me be at war;
it has made me patient."

"Your love--for your brother--has made you that?"  Again she looked
keenly, but Justine now showed nothing but earnestness.

"Yes, madame."

Mrs. Falchion paused for a moment, and seemed intent on the beauty of the
pine-belted hills, capped by snowy peaks, and wrapped in a most hearty
yet delicate colour.  The red of her parasol threw a warm soft ness upon
her face.  She spoke now without looking at Justine.

"Justine, did you ever love any one besides your brother?--I mean another
man."

Justine was silent for a moment, and then she said: "Yes, once."  She was
looking at the hills now, and Mrs. Falchion at her.

"And you were happy?"  Here Mrs. Falchion abstractedly toyed with a piece
of lace on Justine's arm.  Such acts were unusual with her.

"I was happy--in loving."

"Why did you not marry?"

"Madame--it was impossible--quite."  This, with hesitation and the
slightest accent of pain.

"Why impossible?  You have good looks, you were born a lady; you have a
foolish heart--the fond are foolish."  She watched the girl keenly, the
hand ceased to toy with the lace, and caught the arm itself--"Why
impossible?"

"Madame, he did not love me, he never could."

"Did he know of your love?"

"Oh no, no!"  This with trouble in her voice.

"And you have never forgotten?"

The catechism was merciless; but Mrs. Falchion was not merely malicious.
She was inquiring of a thing infinitely important to her.  She was
searching the heart of another, not only because she was suspicious, but
because she wanted to know herself better.

"It is easy to remember."

"Is it long since you saw him?"

The question almost carried terror with it, for she was not quite sure
why Mrs. Falchion questioned her.  She lifted her eyes slowly, and there
was in them anxiety and joy.  "It seems," she said, "like years."

"He loves some one else, perhaps?"

"Yes, I think so, madame."

"Did you hate her?"

"Oh no; I am glad for him."

Here Mrs. Falchion spoke sharply, almost bitterly.  Even through her soft
colour a hardness appeared.  "You are glad for him?  You would see
another woman in his arms and not be full of anger?"

"Quite."

"Justine, you are a fool."

"Madame, there is no commandment against being a fool."

"Oh, you make me angry with your meekness!"  Here Mrs. Falchion caught a
twig from a tree by her, snapped it in her fingers, and petulantly threw
its pieces to the ground.  "Suppose that the man had once loved you, and
afterwards loved another--then again another?"

"Madame, that would be my great misfortune, but it might be no wrong in
him."

"How not a wrong in him?"

"It may have been my fault.  There must be love in both--great love, for
it to last."

"And if the woman loved him not at all?"

"Where, then, could be the wrong in him?"

"And if he went from you,"--here her voice grew dry and her words were
sharp,--"and took a woman from the depths of--oh, no matter what! and
made her commit--crime--and was himself a criminal?"

"It is horrible to think of; but I should ask myself how much I was to
blame. . . .  What would you ask yourself, madame?"

"You have a strain of the angel in you, Justine.  You would forgive Judas
if he said, 'Peccavi.'  I have a strain of Satan--it was born in me--
I would say, You have sinned, now suffer."

"God give you a softer heart," said Justine, with tender boldness and
sincerity.

At this Mrs. Falchion started slightly, and trouble covered her face.
She assumed, however, a tone almost brusque, artificially airy and
unimportant.

"There, that will do, thank you. . . .  We have become serious and
incomprehensible.  Let us talk of other things.  I want to be gay. . . .
Amuse me."

Arrived at the hotel, she told Justine that she must not be disturbed
till near dinner-time, and withdrew to her sitting-room.  There she sat
and thought, as she had never done in her life before.  She thought upon
everything that had happened since the day when she met Galt Roscoe on
the 'Fulvia'; of a certain evening in England, before he took orders,
when he told her, in retort to some peculiarly cutting remark of hers,
that she was the evil genius of his life: that evening when her heart
grew hard, as she had once said it should always be to him, and she
determined again, after faltering many times, that just such a genius she
would be; of the strange meeting in the rapids at the Devil's Slide, and
the irony of it; and the fact that he had saved her life--on that she
paused a while; of Ruth Devlin--and here she was swayed by conflicting
emotions; of the scene at the mill, and Phil Boldrick's death and
funeral; of the service in the church where she meant to mock him, and,
instead, mocked herself; of the meeting with Tonga Sam; of all that
Justine had said to her: then again of the far past in Samoa, with which
Galt Roscoe was associated, and of that first vow of vengeance for a
thing he had done; and how she had hesitated to fulfil it year after year
till now.

Passing herself slowly back and forth before her eyes, she saw that she
had lived her life almost wholly alone; that no woman had ever cherished
her as a friend, and that on no man's breast had she ever laid her head
in trust and love.  She had been loved, but it had never brought her
satisfaction.  From Justine there was devotion; but it had, as she
thought, been purchased, paid for, like the labour of a ploughboy.  And
if she saw now in Justine's eyes a look of friendship, a note of personal
allegiance, she knew it was because she herself had grown more human.

Her nature had been stirred.  Her natural heart was struggling against
her old bitterness towards Galt Roscoe and her partial hate of Ruth
Devlin.  Once Roscoe had loved her, and she had not loved him.  Then, on
a bitter day for him, he did a mad thing.  The thing became--though
neither of them knew it at the time, and he not yet--a great injury to
her, and this had called for the sharp retaliation which she had the
power to use.  But all had not happened as she expected; for something
called Love had been conceived in her very slowly, and was now being
born, and sent, trembling for its timid life, into the world.

She closed her eyes with weariness, and pressed her hands to her temples.

She wondered why she could not be all evil or all good.  She spoke and
acted against Ruth Devlin, and yet she pitied her.  She had the nettle to
sting Roscoe to death, and yet she hesitated to use it.  She had said to
herself that she would wait till the happiest moment of his life, and
then do so.  Well, his happiest moment had come.  Ruth Devlin's heart was
all out, all blossomed--beside Mrs. Falchion's like some wild flower to
the aloe. . . .  Only now she had come to know that she had a heart.
Something had chilled her at her birth, and when her mother died, a
stranger's kiss closed up all the ways to love, and left her an icicle.
She was twenty-eight years old, and yet she had never kissed a face in
joy or to give joy.  And now, when she had come to know herself, and
understand what others understand when they are little children in their
mother's arms, she had to bow to the spirit that denies.  She drew
herself up with a quiver of the body.

"O God!" she said, "do I hate him or love him!"  Her head dropped in her
hands.  She sat regardless of time, now scarcely stirring, desperately
quiet.  The door opened softly and Justine entered.  "Madame," she said,
"pardon me; I am so sorry, but Miss Devlin has come to see you, and I
thought--"

"You thought, Justine, that I would see her."  There was unmistakable
irony in her voice.  "Very well. . . .  Show her in."

She rose, stretched out her arms as if to free herself of a burden,
smoothed her hair, composed herself, and waited, the afternoon sun just
falling across her burnished shoes, giving her feet of gold.  She chanced
to look down at them.  A strange memory came to her: words that she had
heard Roscoe read in church.  The thing was almost grotesque in its
association.  "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who
bringeth glad tidings, who publisheth peace!"

Ruth Devlin entered, saying, "I have come, to ask you if you will dine
with us next Monday evening?"

Then she explained the occasion of the dinner party, and said: "You see,
though it is formal, I am asking our guests informally;" and she added as
neutrally and as lightly as she could--"Mr. Roscoe and Dr. Marmion have
been good enough to say that they will come.  Of course, a dinner party
as it should be is quite impossible to us simple folk, but when a
lieutenant-governor commands, we must do the best we can--with the
help of our friends."

Mrs. Falchion was delighted, she said, and then they talked of trivial
matters, Ruth smoothing out the folds of her riding-dress with her whip
more earnestly, in preoccupation, than the act called for.  At last she
said, in the course of the formal talk: "You have travelled much?"

"Yes, that has been my lot," was the reply; and she leaned back in the
gold-trimmed cane chair, her feet still in the belt of sunlight.

"I have often wished that I might travel over the ocean," said Ruth, "but
here I remain--what shall I say?--a rustic in a bandbox, seeing the world
through a pin-hole.  That is the way my father puts it.  Except, of
course, that I think it very inspiring to live out here among wonderful
mountains, which, as Mr. Roscoe says, are the most aristocratic of
companions."

Some one in the next room was playing the piano idly yet expressively.
The notes of Il Trovatore kept up a continuous accompaniment to their
talk, varying, as if by design, with its meaning and importance, and yet
in singular contrast at times to their thoughts and words.  It was almost
sardonic in its monotonous persistence.

"Travel is not all, believe me, Miss Devlin," was the indolent reply.
"Perhaps the simpler life is the happier.  The bandbox is not the worst
that may come to one--when one is born to it.  I am not sure but it is
the best.  I doubt that when one has had the fever of travel and the
world, the bandbox is permanently habitable again."

Mrs. Falchion was keen; she had found her opportunity.

On the result of this duel, if Ruth Devlin but knew it, depends her own
and another's happiness.  It is not improbable, however, that something
of this was in her mind.  She shifted her chair so that her face was not
so much in the light.  But the belt of sunlight was broadening from Mrs.
Falchion's feet to her dress.

"You think not?" Ruth asked slowly.

The reply was not important in tone.  Mrs. Falchion had picked up a paper
knife and was bending it to and fro between her fingers.

"I think not.  Particularly with a man, who is, we will say, by nature,
adventurous and explorative.  I think if, in some mad moment, I
determined to write a novel, it should be of such a man.  He flies wide
and far; he sees all; he feeds on novelty; he passes from experience to
experience--liberal pleasures of mind and sense all the way.  Well, he
tires of Egypt and its flesh-pots.  He has seen as he hurried on--I hope
I am not growing too picturesque--too much of women, too many men.  He
has been unwise--most men are.  Perhaps he has been more than unwise;
he has made a great mistake, a social mistake--or crime--less or more.
If it is a small one, the remedy is not so difficult.  Money, friends,
adroitness, absence, long retirement, are enough.  If a great one, and he
is sensitive--and sated--he flies, he seeks seclusion.  He is afflicted
with remorse.  He is open to the convincing pleasures of the simple and
unadorned life; he is satisfied with simple people.  The snuff of the
burnt candle of enjoyment he calls regret, repentance.  He gives himself
the delights of introspection, and wishes he were a child again--yes,
indeed it is so, dear Miss Devlin."

Ruth sat regarding her, her deep eyes glowing.  Mrs. Falchion
continued: "In short, he finds the bandbox, as you call it, suited to his
renunciations.  Its simplicities, which he thinks is regeneration, are
only new sensations.  But--you have often noticed the signification of
a 'but,'" she added, smiling, tapping her cheek lightly with the ivory
knife--"but the hour arrives when the bandbox becomes a prison, when the
simple hours cloy.  Then the ordinary incident is merely gauche, and
expiation a bore.

"I see by your face that you understand quite what I mean. . . .
Well, these things occasionally happen.  The great mistake follows the
man, and, by a greater misery, breaks the misery of the bandbox; or the
man himself, hating his captivity, becomes reckless, does some mad thing,
and has a miserable end.  Or again, some one who holds the key to his
mistake comes in from the world he has left, and considers--considers,
you understand!--whether to leave him to work out his servitude, or,
mercifully--if he is not altogether blind--permit him the means of escape
to his old world, to the life to which he was born--away from the bandbox
and all therein. . . .  I hope I have not tired you--I am sure I have."

Ruth saw the full meaning of Mrs. Falchion's words.  She realised that
her happiness, his happiness--everything--was at stake.  All Mrs.
Falchion's old self was battling with her new self.  She had determined
to abide by the result of this meeting.  She had spoken in a half gay
tone, but her words were not everything; the woman herself was there,
speaking in every feature and glance.  Ruth had listened with an
occasional change of colour, but also with an outward pride to which she
seemed suddenly to have grown.  But her heart was sick and miserable.
How could it be otherwise, reading, as she did, the tale just told her in
a kind, of allegory, in all its warning, nakedness, and vengeance?  But
she detected, too, an occasional painful movement of Mrs. Falchion's
lips, a kind of trouble in the face.  She noticed it at first vaguely
as she listened to the music in the other room; but at length she
interpreted it aright, and she did not despair.  She did not then follow
her first impulse to show that she saw the real meaning of that speech,
and rise and say, "You are insulting," and bid her good-day.

After all, where was the ground for the charge of insult?  The words had
been spoken impersonally.  So, after a moment, she said, as she drew a
glove from a hand slightly trembling: "And you honestly think it is the
case: that one having lived such a life as you describe so unusually,
would never be satisfied with a simple life?"

"My dear, never--not such a man as I describe.  I know the world."

"But suppose not quite such an one; suppose one that had not been so--
intense; so much the social gladiator; who had business of life as well,"
--here the girl grew pale, for this was a kind of talk unfamiliar and
painful to her, but to be endured for her cause,--"as well as 'the flesh-
pots of Egypt;' who had made no wicked mistakes--would he necessarily end
as you say?"

"I am speaking of the kind of man who had made such mistakes, and he
would end as I say.  Few men, if any, would leave the world for--the
bandbox, shall I still say?  without having a Nemesis."

"But the Nemesis need not, as you say yourself, be inevitable.  The
person who holds the key of his life, the impersonation of his mistake--"

"His CRIMINAL mistake," Mrs. Falchion interrupted, her hand with the
ivory knife now moveless in that belt of sunlight across her knees.

"His criminal mistake," Ruth repeated, wincing--"might not it become
changed into mercy, and the man be safe?"

"Safe?  Perhaps.  But he would tire of the pin-hole just the same. . . .
My dear, you do not know life."

"But, Mrs. Falchion," said the girl, now very bravely, "I know the
crude elements of justice.  That is one plain thing taught here in the
mountains.  We have swift reward and punishment--no hateful things called
Nemesis.  The meanest wretch here in the West, if he has a quarrel,
avenges himself openly and at once.  Actions are rough and ready,
perhaps, but that is our simple way.  Hate is manly--and womanly too--
when it is open and brave.  But when it haunts and shadows, it is not
understood here."

Mrs. Falchion sat during this speech, the fingers of one hand idly
drumming the arm of her chair, as idly as when on board the 'Fulvia' she
listened to me telling that story of Anson and his wife.  Outwardly her
coolness was remarkable.  But she was really admiring, and amazed at
Ruth's adroitness and courage.  She appreciated fully the skilful duel
that had kept things on the surface, and had committed neither of them
to anything personal.  It was a battle--the tragical battle of a drawing-
room.

When Ruth had ended, she said slowly: "You speak very earnestly.  You do
your mountains justice; but each world has its code.  It is good for some
men to be followed by a slow hatred--it all depends on themselves.  There
are some who wish to meet their fate and its worst, and others who would
forget it.  The latter are in the most danger always."

Ruth rose.

She stepped forward slightly, so that her feet also were within the
sunlight.  The other saw this; it appeared to interest her.  Ruth looked
--as such a girl can look--with incredible sincerity into Mrs. Falchion's
eyes, and said: "Oh, if I knew such a man, I would be sorry--sorry for
him; and if I also knew that his was only a mistake and not a crime, or,
if the crime itself had been repented of, and atonement made, I would beg
some one--some one better than I--to pray for him.  And I would go to the
person who had his life and career at disposal, and would say to her, if
it were a woman, oh, remember that it is not he alone who would suffer!
I would beg that woman--if it were a woman--to be merciful, as she one
day must ask for mercy."

The girl as she stood there, all pale, yet glowing with the white light
of her pain, was beautiful, noble, compelling.  Mrs. Falchion now rose
also.  She was altogether in the sunlight now.  From the piano in the
next room came a quick change of accompaniment, and a voice was heard
singing, as if to the singer's self, 'Il balen del suo sorris'.  It is
hard to tell how far such little incidents affected her in what she did
that afternoon; but they had their influence.  She said: "You are
altruistic--or are you selfish, or both? . . .  And should the woman
--if it were a woman--yield, and spare the man, what would you do?"

"I would say that she had been merciful and kind, and that one in this
world would pray for her when she needed prayers most."

"You mean when she was old,"--Mrs. Falchion shrank a little at the sound
of her own words.  Now her careless abandon was gone; she seemed to be
following her emotions.  "When she was old," she continued, "and came to
die?  It is horrible to grow old, except one has been a saint--and a
mother. . . .  And even then--have you ever seen them, the women of
that Egypt of which we spoke--powdered, smirking over their champagne,
because they feel for an instant a false pulse of their past?--See how
eloquent your mountains make me!--I think that would make one hard and
cruel; and one would need the prayers of a churchful of good women, even
as good--as you."

She could not resist a touch of irony in the last words, and Ruth, who
had been ready to take her hand impulsively, was stung.  But she replied
nothing; and the other, after waiting, added, with a sudden and wonderful
kindness: "I say what is quite true.  Women might dislike you--many of
them would--though you could not understand why; but you are good, and
that, I suppose, is the best thing in the world.  Yes, you are good," she
said musingly, and then she leaned forward and quickly kissed the girl's
cheek.  "Good-bye," she said, and then she turned her head resolutely
away.

They stood there both in the sunlight, both very quiet, but their
hearts were throbbing with new sensations.  Ruth knew that she had
conquered, and, with her eyes all tearful, she looked steadily,
yearningly at the woman before her; but she knew it was better she should
say little now, and, with a motion of the hand in good-bye,--she could do
no more,--she slowly went to the door.  There she paused and looked back,
but the other was still turned away.

For a minute Mrs. Falchion stood looking at the door through which the
girl had passed, then she caught close the curtains of the window, and
threw herself upon the sofa with a sobbing laugh.

"To her--I played the game of mercy to her!" she cried.  "And she has his
love, the love which I rejected once, and which I want now--to my shame!
A hateful and terrible love.  I, who ought to say to him, as I so long
determined: 'You shall be destroyed.  You killed my sister, poor Alo; if
not with a knife yourself you killed her heart, and that is just the
same.'  I never knew until now what a heart is when killed."

She caught her breast as though it hurt her, and, after a moment,
continued: "Do hearts always ache so when they love?  I was the wife of a
good man oh! he WAS a good man, who sinned for me.  I see it now!--and I
let him die--die alone!"  She shuddered.  "Oh, now I see, and I know what
love such as his can be!  I am punished--punished! for my love is
impossible, horrible."

There was a long silence, in which she sat looking at the floor, her face
all grey with pain.  At last the door of the room softly opened, and
Justine entered.

"May I come in, madame?" she said.

"Yes, come, Justine."  The voice was subdued, and there was in it what
drew the girl swiftly to the side of Mrs. Falchion.  She spoke no word,
but gently undid the other's hair, and smoothed and brushed it softly.

At last Mrs. Falchion said: "Justine, on Monday we will leave here."

The girl was surprised, but she replied without comment: "Yes, madame;
where do we go?"

There was a pause; then: "I do not know.  I want to go where I shall get
rested.  A village in Italy or--" she paused.

"Or France, madame?"  Justine was eager.

Mrs. Falchion made a gesture of helplessness.  "Yes, France will do. . . .
The way around the world is long, and I am tired."  Minutes passed, and
then she slowly said: "Justine, we will go to-morrow night."

"Yes, madame, to-morrow night--and not next Monday."

There was a strange only half-veiled melancholy in Mrs. Falchion's next
words: "Do you think, Justine, that I could be happy anywhere?"

"I think anywhere but here, madame."

Mrs. Falchion rose to a sitting posture, and looked at the girl fixedly,
almost fiercely.  A crisis was at hand.  The pity, gentleness, and honest
solicitude of Justine's face conquered her, and her look changed to one
of understanding and longing for companionship: sorrow swiftly welded
their friendship.

Before Mrs. Falchion slept that night, she said again: "We will leave
here to-morrow, Justine, for ever."

And Justine replied: "Yes, madame, for ever."




CHAPTER XIX

THE SENTENCE

The next morning Roscoe was quiet and calm, but he looked ten years older
than when I had first seen him.  After breakfast he said to me: "I have
to go to the valley to pay Phil Boldrick's friend the money, and to see
Mr. Devlin.  I shall be back, perhaps, by lunchtime.  Will you go with
me, or stay here?"

"I shall try to get some fishing this morning, I fancy," I said.
"And possibly I shall idle a good deal, for my time with you here is
shortening, and I want to have a great store of laziness behind me for
memory, when I've got my nose to the grindstone."

He turned to the door, and said: "Marmion, I wish you weren't going.  I
wish that we might be comrades under the same roof till--" He paused and
smiled strangely.

"Till the finish," I added, "when we should amble grey-headed, sans
everything, out of the mad old world?  I imagine Miss Belle Treherne
would scarcely fancy that. . . .  Still, we can be friends just the
same.  Our wives won't object to an occasional bout of loafing together,
will they?"

I was determined not to take him too seriously.  He said nothing, and in
a moment he was gone.

I passed the morning idly enough, yet thinking, too, very much about my
friend.  I was anxiously hoping that the telegram from Winnipeg would
come.  About noon it came.  It was not known quite in what part of the
North-west, Madras (under his new name) was, for the corps of mounted
police had been changed about recently.  My letter had, however, been
forwarded into the wilds.

I saw no immediate way but to go to Mrs. Falchion and make a bold bid
for his peace.  I had promised Madras never to let her know that he was
alive, but I would break the promise if Madras himself did not come.
After considerable hesitation I started.  It must be remembered that the
events of the preceding chapter were only known to me afterwards.

Justine Caron was passing through the hall of the hotel when I arrived.
After greetings, she said that Mrs. Falchion might see me, but that they
were very busy; they were leaving in the evening for the coast.  Here
was a pleasant revelation!  I was so confused with delight at the
information, that I could think of nothing more sensible to say than
that the unexpected always happens.  By this time we were within Mrs.
Falchion's sitting-room.  And to my remark, Justine replied "Yes, it is
so.  One has to reckon most with the accidents of life.  The expected is
either pleasant or unpleasant; there is no middle place."

"You are growing philosophic," said I playfully.  "Monsieur," she said
gravely, "I hope as I live and travel, I grow a little wiser."  Still she
lingered, her hand upon the door.

"I had thought that you were always wise."

"Oh no, no!  How can you say so?  I have been very foolish sometimes."
. . . She came back towards me.  "If I am wiser I am also happier,"
she added.

In that moment we understood each other; that is, I read how unselfish
this girl could be, and she knew thoroughly the source of my anxiety,
and was glad that she could remove it.

"I would not speak to any one save you," she said, "but do you not also
think that it is good we go?"

"I have been thinking so, but I hesitated to say so," was my reply.

"You need not hesitate," she said earnestly.  "We have both understood,
and I know that you are to be trusted."

"Not always," I said, remembering that one experience of mine with Mrs.
Falchion on the 'Fulvia'.  Holding the back of a chair, and looking
earnestly at me, she continued: "Once, on the vessel, you remember, in a
hint so very little, I made it appear that madame was selfish. . . .
I am sorry.  Her heart was asleep.  Now, it is awake.  She is unselfish.
The accident of our going away is hers.  She goes to leave peace behind."
"I am most glad," said I.  "And you think there will be peace?"

"Surely, since this has come, that will come also."

"And you--Mademoiselle?"  I should not have asked that question had I
known more of the world.  It was tactless and unkind.

"For me it is no matter at all.  I do not come in anywhere.  As I said,
I am happy."

And turning quickly, yet not so quickly but that I saw her cheeks were
flushed, she passed out of the room.  In a moment Mrs. Falchion entered.
There was something new in her carriage, in her person.  She came towards
me, held out her hand, and said, with the same old half-quizzical tone:
"Have you, with your unerring instinct, guessed that I was leaving, and
so come to say good-bye?"

"You credit me too highly.  No, I came to see you because I had an
inclination.  I did not guess that you were going until Miss Caron told
me."

"An inclination to see me is not your usual instinct, is it?  Was it some
special impulse, based on a scientific calculation--at which, I suppose,
you are an adeptor curiosity?  Or had it a purpose?  Or were you bored,
and therefore sought the most startling experience you could conceive?"
She deftly rearranged some flowers in a jar.

"I can plead innocence of all directly; I am guilty of all indirectly: I
was impelled to come.  I reasoned--if that is scientific--on what I
should say if I did come, knowing how inclined I was to--"

"To get beyond my depth," she interrupted, and she motioned me to a
chair.

"Well, let it be so," said I.  "I was curious to know what kept you in
this sylvan, and I fear, to you, half-barbaric spot.  I was bored with
myself; and I had some purpose in coming, or I should not have had the
impulse."

She was leaning back in her chair easily, not languidly.  She seemed
reposeful, yet alert.

"How wonderfully you talk!" she said, with good-natured mockery.  "You
are scientifically frank.  You were bored with yourself.--Then there is
some hope for your future wife. . . .  We have had many talks in our
acquaintance, Dr. Marmion, but none so interesting as this promises to
be.  But now tell me what your purpose was in coming.  'Purpose' seems
portentous, but quite in keeping."

I noticed here the familiar, almost imperceptible click of the small
white teeth.

Was I so glad she was going that I was playful, elated?  "My purpose,"
said I, "has no point now; for even if I were to propose to amuse you--I
believe that was the old formula--by an idle day somewhere, by an
excursion, an--"

"An autobiography," she broke in soothingly.

"Or an autobiography," I repeated stolidly, "you would not, I fancy, be
prepared to accept my services.  There would be no chance--now that you
are going away--for me to play the harlequin--"

"Whose office you could do pleasantly if it suited you--these adaptable
natures!"

"Quite so.  But it is all futile now, as I say."

"Yes, you mentioned that before.--Well?"

"It is well," I replied, dropping into a more meaning tone.

"You say it patriarchally, but yet flatteringly."  Here she casually
offered me a flower.  I mechanically placed it in my buttonhole.  She
seemed delighted at confusing me.  But I kept on firmly.

"I do not think," I rejoined gravely now, "that there need be any
flattery between us."

"Why?--We are not married."

"That is as radically true as it is epigrammatic," blurted I.

"And truth is more than epigram?"

"One should delight in truth; I do delight in epigram; there seems little
chance for choice here."

It seemed to me that I had said quite what I wished there, but she only
looked at me enigmatically.

She arranged a flower in her dress as she almost idly replied, though she
did not look me full in the face as she had done before: "Well, then, let
me add to your present delight by saying that you may go play till
doomsday, Dr. Marmion.  Your work is done."

"I do not understand."

Her eyes were on me now with the directness she could so well use at
need.

"I did not suppose you would, despite your many lessons at my hands.  You
have been altruistic, Dr. Marmion; I fear critical people would say that
you meddled.  I shall only say that you are inquiring--scientific, or
feminine--what you please!  . . .  You can now yield up your portfolio
of--foreign affairs--of war--shall I say?  and retire into sedative
habitations, which, believe me, you become best. . . .  What concerns
me need concern you no longer.  The enemy retreats.  She offers truce--
without conditions.  She retires. . . .  Is that enough for even you,
Professor Marmion?"

"Mrs. Falchion," I said, finding it impossible to understand why she had
so suddenly determined to go away (for I did not know all the truth until
afterwards--some of it long afterwards), "it is more than I dared to hope
for, though less, I know, than you have heart to do if you willed so.  I
know that you hold some power over my friend."

"Do not think," she said, "that you have had the least influence.  What
you might think, or may have intended to do, has not moved me in the
least.  I have had wrongs that you do not know.  I have changed--that is
all.  I admit I intended to do Galt Roscoe harm.

"I thought he deserved it.  That is over.  After to-night, it is not
probable that we shall meet again.  I hope that we shall not; as,
doubtless, is your own mind."

She kept looking at me with that new deep look which I had seen when she
first entered the room.

I was moved, and I saw that just at the last she had spoken under
considerable strain.  "Mrs. Falchion," said I, "I have THOUGHT harder
things of you than I ever SAID to any one.  Pray believe that, and
believe, also, that I never tried to injure you.  For the rest, I can
make no complaint.  You do not like me.  I liked you once, and do now,
when you do not depreciate yourself of purpose. . . .  Pardon me, but
I say this very humbly too. . . .  I suppose I always shall like you,
in spite of myself.  You are one of the most gifted and fascinating women
that I ever met.  I have been anxious for my friend.  I was concerned to
make peace between you and your husband--"

"The man who WAS my husband," she interrupted musingly.

"Your husband--whom you so cruelly treated.  But I confess I have found
it impossible to withhold admiration of you."

For a long time she did not reply, but she never took her eyes off my
face, as she leaned slightly forward.  Then at last she spoke more gently
than I had ever heard her, and a glow came upon her face.

"I am only human.  You have me at advantage.  What woman could reply
unkindly to a speech like that?  I admit I thought you held me utterly
bad and heartless, and it made me bitter. . . .  I had no heart--once.
I had only a wrong, an injury, which was in my mind; not mine, but
another's, and yet mine.  Then strange things occurred. . . .  At last
I relented.  I saw that I had better go.  Yesterday I saw that; and I am
going--that is all. . . .  I wished to keep the edge of my intercourse
with you sharp and uncompanionable to the end; but you have forced me at
my weakest point. . . ."  Here she smiled somewhat painfully. . . .
"Believe me, that is the way to turn a woman's weapon upon herself.  You
have learned much since we first met. . . .  Here is my hand in
friendliness, if you care to take it; and in good-bye, should we not meet
again more formally before I go."

"I wish now that your husband, Boyd Madras, were here," I said.

She answered nothing, but she did not resent it, only shuddered a little.

Our hands grasped silently.  I was too choked to speak, and I left her.
At that moment she blinded me to all her faults.  She was a wonderful
woman.

                    .....................

Galt Roscoe had walked slowly along the forest-road towards the valley,
his mind in that state of calm which, in some, might be thought numbness
of sensation, in others fortitude--the prerogative of despair.  He came
to the point of land jutting out over the valley, where he had stood with
Mrs. Falchion, Justine, and myself, on the morning of Phil Boldrick's
death.

He looked for a long time, and then, slowly descending the hillside, made
his way to Mr. Devlin's office.  He found Phil's pal awaiting him there.
After a few preliminaries, the money was paid over, and Kilby said:

"I've been to see his camping-ground.  It's right enough.  Viking has
done it noble. . . .  Now, here's what I'm goin' to do: I'm goin' to
open bottles for all that'll drink success to Viking.  A place that's
stood by my pal, I stand by--but not with his money, mind you!  No, that
goes to you, Padre, for hospital purposes.  My gift an' his. . . .
So, sit down and write a receipt, or whatever it's called, accordin' to
Hoyle, and you'll do me proud."

Roscoe did as he requested, and handed the money over to Mr. Devlin for
safe keeping, remarking, at the same time, that the matter should be
announced on a bulletin outside the office at once.

As Kilby stood chewing the end of a cigar and listening to the brief
conversation between Roscoe and Mr. Devlin, perplexity crossed his face.
He said, as Roscoe turned round: "There's something catchy about your
voice, Padre.  I don't know what; but it's familiar like.  You never was
on the Panama level, of course?"

"Never."

"Nor in Australia?"

"Yes, in 1876."

"I wasn't there then."

Roscoe grew a shade paler, but he was firm and composed.  He was
determined to answer truthfully any question that was asked him, wherever
it might lead.

"Nor in Samoa?"

There was the slightest pause, and then the reply came:

"Yes, in Samoa."

"Not a missionary, by gracious!  Not a mickonaree in Samoa?"

"No."  He said nothing further.  He did not feel bound to incriminate
himself.

"No?  Well, you wasn't a beachcomber, nor trader, I'll swear.  Was you
there in the last half of the Seventies?  That's when I was there."

"Yes."  The reply was quiet.

"By Jingo!"  The man's face was puzzled.  He was about to speak again;
but at that moment two river-drivers--boon companions, who had been
hanging about the door--urged him to come to the tavern.  This distracted
him.  He laughed, and said that he was coming, and then again, though
with less persistency, questioned Roscoe.  .  "You don't remember me, I
suppose?"

"No, I never saw you, so far as I know, until yesterday."

"No?  Still, I've heard your voice.  It keeps swingin' in my ears; and I
can't remember. . . .  I can't remember! . . .  But we'll have a
spin about it again, Padre."  He turned to the impatient men.  "All
right, bully-boys, I'm comin'."

At the door he turned and looked again at Roscoe with a sharp, half-
amused scrutiny, then the two parted.  Kilby kept his word.  He was
liberal to Viking; and Phil's memory was drunk, not in silence, many
times that day.  So that when, in the afternoon, he made up his mind to
keep his engagement with Mrs. Falchion, and left the valley for the
hills, he was not entirely sober.  But he was apparently good-natured.
As he idled along he talked to himself, and finally broke out into
singing:

             "'Then swing the long boat down the drink,
               For the lads as pipe to go;
               But I sink when the 'Lovely Jane' does sink,
               To the mermaids down below.'

             "'The long boat bides on its strings,' says we,
               'An' we bides where the long boat bides;
               An' we'll bluff this equatorial sea,
               Or swallow its hurricane tides.'

              "But the 'Lovely Jane' she didn't go down,
               An' she anchored at the Spicy Isles;
               An' she sailed again to Wellington Town--
               A matter of a thousand miles."

It will be remembered that this was part of the song sung by Galt Roscoe
on the Whi-Whi River, the day we rescued Mrs. Falchion and Justine Caron.
Kilby sang the whole song over to himself until he reached a point
overlooking the valley.  Then he stood silent for a time, his glance upon
the town.  The walk had sobered him a little.  "Phil, old pal," he said
at last, "you ain't got the taste of raw whiskey with you now.  When a
man loses a pal he loses a grip on the world equal to all that pal's grip
was worth. . . .  I'm drunk, and Phil's down there among the worms--
among the worms! . . .  Ah!" he added in disgust, and, dashing his
hand across his eyes, struck off into the woods again, making his way to
the summer hotel, where he had promised to meet Mrs. Falchion.  He
inquired for her, creating some astonishment by his uncouth appearance
and unsteady manner.

He learned from Justine that Mrs. Falchion had gone to see Roscoe, and
that he would probably meet her if he went that way.  This he did.  He
was just about to issue into a partly open space by a ravine near the
house, when he heard voices, and his own name mentioned.  He stilled and
listened.

"Yes, Galt Roscoe," said a voice, "Sam Kilby is the man that loved Alo--
loved her not as you did.  He would have given her a home, have made her
happy, perhaps.  You, when Kilby was away, married her--in native
fashion--which is no marriage--and KILLED her."

"No, no, I did not kill her--that is not so.  As God is my Judge, that is
not so."

"You did not kill her with the knife? . . .  Well, I will be honest
now, and say that I believe that, whatever I may have hinted or said
before.  But you killed her just the same when you left her."

"Mercy Falchion," he said desperately, "I will not try to palliate my
sin.  But still I must set myself right with you in so far as I can.  The
very night Alo killed herself I had made up my mind to leave the navy.
I was going to send in my papers, and come back to Apia, and marry her as
Englishmen are married.  While I remained in the navy I could not, as you
know, marry her.  It would be impossible to an English officer.  I
intended to come back and be regularly married to her."

"You say that now," was the cold reply.

"But it is the truth, the truth indeed.  Nothing that you might say could
make me despise myself more than I do; but I have told you all, as I
shall have to tell it one day before a just God.  You have spared me: He
will not."

"Gait Roscoe," she replied, "I am not merciful, nor am I just.  I
intended to injure you, though you will remember I saved your life that
night by giving you a boat for escape across the bay to the 'Porcupine',
which was then under way.  The band on board, you also remember, was
playing the music of La Grande Duchesse.  You fired on the natives who
followed.  Well, Sam Kilby was with them.  Your brother officers did not
know the cause of the trouble.  It was not known to any one in Apia
exactly who it was that Kilby and the natives had tracked from Alo's
hut."

He drew his hand across his forehead dazedly.

"Oh, yes I remember!" he said.  "I wish I had faced the matter there and
then.  It would have been better."

"I doubt that," she replied.  "The natives who saw you coming from Alo's
hut did not know you.  You wisely came straight to the Consul's office--
my father's house.  And I helped you, though Alo, half-caste Alo, was--
my sister!"

Roscoe started back.  "Alo--your--sister!" he exclaimed in horror.

"Yes, though I did not know it till afterwards, not till just before my
father died.  Alo's father was my father; and her mother had been
honestly married to my father by a missionary; though for my sake it had
never been made known.  You remember, also, that you carried on your
relations with Alo secretly, and my father never suspected it was you."

"Your sister!"  Roscoe was white and sick.

"Yes.  And now you understand my reason for wishing you ill, and for
hating you to the end."

"Yes," he said despairingly, "I see."

She was determined to preserve before him the outer coldness of her
nature to the last.

"Let us reckon together," she said.  "I helped to--in fact, I saved your
life at Apia.  You helped to save my life at the Devil's Slide.  That is
balanced.  You did me--the honour to say that you loved me once.  Well,
one of my race loved you.  That is balanced also.  My sister's death came
through you.  There is no balance to that.  What shall balance Alo's
death? . . .  I leave you to think that over.  It is worth thinking
about.  I shall keep your secret, too.  Kilby does not know you.  I doubt
that he ever saw you, though, as I said, he followed you with the natives
that night in Apia.  He was to come to see me to-day.  I think I intended
to tell him all, and shift--the duty--of punishment on his shoulders,
which I do not doubt he would fulfil.  But he shall not know.  Do not ask
why.  I have changed my mind, that is all.  But still the account remains
a long one.  You will have your lifetime to reckon with it, free from any
interference on my part; for, if I can help it, we shall never meet again
in this world--never. . . .  And now, good-bye."

Without a gesture of farewell she turned and left him standing there, in
misery and bitterness, but in a thankfulness too, more for Ruth's sake
than his own.  He raised his arms with a despairing motion, then let them
drop heavily to his side. . . .

And then two strong hands caught his throat, a body pressed hard against
him, and he was borne backward--backward--to the cliff!




CHAPTER XX

AFTER THE STORM

I was sitting on the verandah, writing a letter to Belle Treherne.  The
substantial peace of a mountain evening was on me.  The air was clear,
and full of the scent of the pines and cedars, and the rumble of the
rapids came musically down the canon.  I lifted my head and saw an eagle
sailing away to the snow-topped peak of Trinity, and then turned to watch
the orioles in the trees.  The hour was delightful.  It made me feel how
grave mere living is, how noble even the meanest of us becomes sometimes
--in those big moments when we think the world was built for us.  It is
half egotism, half divinity; but why quarrel with it?

I was young, ambitious; and Love and I were at that moment the only
figures in the universe really deserving attention!  I looked on down a
lane of cedars before me, seeing in imagination a long procession of
pleasant things; of--  As I looked, another procession moved through the
creatures of my dreams, so that they shrank away timidly, then utterly,
and this new procession came on and on, until--I suddenly rose, and
started forward fearfully, to see--unhappy reality!--the body of Galt
Roscoe carried towards me.

Then a cold wind seemed to blow from the glacier above and killed all the
summer.  A man whispered to me: "We found him at the bottom of the ravine
yonder.  He'd fallen over, I suppose."

I felt his heart.  "He is not dead, thank God!" I said.

"No, sir," said the other, "but he's all smashed."  They brought him in
and laid him on his bed.  I sent one of the party for the doctor at
Viking, and myself set to work, with what appliances I had, to deal with
the dreadful injuries.  When the doctor came, together we made him into
the semblance of a man again.  His face was but slightly injured, though
his head had received severe hurts.  I think that I alone saw the marks
on his throat; and I hid them.  I guessed the cause, but held my peace.

I had sent round at once to James Devlin (but asked him not to come till
morning), and also to Mrs. Falchion; but I begged her not to come at all.
I might have spared her that; for, as I afterwards knew, she had no
intention of coming.  She had learned of the accident on her way to
Viking, and had turned back; but only to wait and know the worst or the
best.

About midnight I was left alone with Roscoe.  Once, earlier in the
evening, he had recognised me and smiled faintly, but I had shaken my
head, and he had said nothing.  Now, however, he was looking at me
earnestly.  I did not speak.  What he had to tell me was best told in his
own time.

At last he said faintly:  "Marmion, shall I die soon?"

I knew that frankness was best, and I replied: "I cannot tell, Roscoe.
There is a chance of your living."

He moved his head sadly.  "A very faint chance?"

"Yes, a faint one, but--"

"Yes?  'But'?"  He looked at me as though he wished it over.

"But it rests with you whether the chance is worth anything.  If you are
content to die, it is gone."

"I am content to die," he replied.

"And there," said I, "you are wrong and selfish.  You have Ruth to live
for.  Besides, if you are given the chance, you commit suicide if you do
not take it."

There was a long pause, and then he said: "You are right; I will live if
I can, Marmion."

"And now YOU are right."  I nodded soothingly to him, and then asked him
to talk no more; for I knew that fever would soon come on.

He lay for a moment silent, but at length whispered: "Did you know it was
not a fall I had?"  He raised his chin and stretched his throat slightly,
with a kind of trembling.

"I thought it was not a fall," I replied.

"It was Phil's pal--Kilby."

"I thought that."

"How could you--think it?  Did--others--think so?" he asked anxiously.

"No, not others; I alone.  They thought it accident; they could have no
ground for suspicion.  But I had; and, besides, there were marks on your
throat."

"Nothing must happen to him, you understand.  He had been drinking, and
--and he was justified.  I wronged him in Samoa, him and Mrs. Falchion."

I nodded and put my fingers on my lips.

Again there was silence.  I sat and watched him, his eyes closed, his
body was motionless.  He slept for hours so, and then he waked rather
sharply, and said half deliriously: "I could have dragged him with me,
Marmion."

"But you did not.  Yes, I understand.  Go to sleep again, Roscoe."

Later on the fever came, and he moaned and moved his head about his
pillow.  He could not move his body--it was too much injured.

There was a source of fear in Kilby.  Would he recklessly announce what
he had done, and the cause of it?  After thinking it over and over, I
concluded that he would not disclose his crimes.  My conclusions were
right, as after events showed.

As for Roscoe, I feared that if he lived he must go through life maimed.
He had a private income; therefore if he determined to work no more in
the ministry, he would, at least, have the comforts of life.

Ruth Devlin came.  I went to Roscoe and told him that she wished to see
him.  He smiled sorrowfully and said: "To what end, Marmion?  I am a
drifting wreck.  It will only shock her."  I think he thought she would
not love him now if he lived--a crippled man.

"But is this noble?  Is it just to her?" said I.

After a long time he answered: "You are right again, quite right.  I am
selfish.  When one is shaking between life and death, one thinks most of
one's self."

"She will help to bring you back from those places, Roscoe."

"If I am delirious ever, do not let her come, will you, Marmion?  Promise
me that."  I promised.

I went to her.  She was very calm and womanly.  She entered the room,
went quietly to his bedside, and, sitting down, took his hand.  Her smile
was pitiful and anxious, but her words were brave.

"My dearest," she said, "I am so sorry.  But you will soon be well, so we
must be as patient and cheerful as we can."

His eyes answered, but he did not speak.  She leaned over and kissed his
cheek.  Then he said: "I hope I may get well."

"This was the shadow over you," she ventured.  "This was your
presentiment of trouble--this accident."

"Yes, this was the shadow."

Some sharp thought seemed to move her, for her eyes grew suddenly hard,
and she stooped and whispered: "Was SHE there--when--it happened, Galt?"

He shrank from the question, but he said immediately: "No, she was not
there."

"I am glad," she added, "that it was only an accident."

Her eyes grew clear of their momentary hardness.  There is nothing in
life like the anger of one woman against another concerning a man.

Justine Caron came to the house, pale and anxious, to inquire.  Mrs.
Falchion, she said, was not going away until she knew how Mr. Roscoe's
illness would turn.

"Miss Caron," I said to her, "do you not think it better that she should
go?"

"Yes, for him; but she grieves now."

"For him?"

"Not alone for him," was the reply.  There was a pause, and then she
continued: "Madame told me to say to you that she did not wish Mr. Roscoe
to know that she was still here."

I assured her that I understood, and then she added mournfully: "I cannot
help you now, monsieur, as I did on board the 'Fulvia'.  But he will be
better cared for in Miss Devlin's hands, the poor lady! . . .  Do you
think that he will live?"

"I hope so.  I am not sure."

Her eyes went to tears; and then I tried to speak more encouragingly.

All day people came to inquire, chief among them Mr. Devlin, whose big
heart split itself in humanity and compassion.  "The price of the big
mill for the guarantee of his life!" he said over and over again.  "We
can't afford to let him go."

Although I should have been on my way back to Toronto, I determined to
stay until Roscoe was entirely out of danger.  It was singular, but in
this illness, though the fever was high, he never was delirious.  It
would almost seem as if, having paid his penalty, the brain was at rest.

While Roscoe hovered between life and death, Mr. Devlin, who persisted
that he would not die, was planning for a new hospital and a new church,
of which Roscoe should be president and padre respectively.  But the
suspense to us all, for many days, was very great; until, one morning
when the birds were waking the cedars, and the snow on Mount Trinity was
flashing coolness down the hot valley, he waked and said to me: "Marmion,
old friend; it is morning at last."

"Yes, it is morning," said I.  "And you are going to live now?  You are
going to be reasonable and give the earth another chance?"

"Yes, I believe I shall live now."

To cheer him, I told him what Mr. Devlin intended and had planned; how
river-drivers and salmon-fishers came every day from the valley to
inquire after him.  I did not tell him that there had been one or two
disturbances between the river-drivers and the salmon-fishers.  I tried
to let him see that there need be no fresh change in his life.  At length
he interrupted me.

"Marmion," he said, "I understand what you mean.  It would be cowardly of
me to leave here now if I were a whole man.  I am true in intention, God
knows, but I must carry a crippled arm for the rest of my life, must I
not? . . . . and a crippled Padre is not the kind of man for this
place.  They want men straight on their feet."

"Do you think," I answered, "that they will not be able to stand the
test?  You gave them--shall I say it?--a crippled mind before; you give
them a crippled body now.  Well, where do you think the odds lie?  I
should fancy with you as you are."

There was a long silence in which neither of us moved.  At last he turned
his face towards the window, and, not looking at me, said lingeringly:
"This is a pleasant place."

I knew that he would remain.

I had not seen Mrs. Falchion during Roscoe's illness; but every day
Justine came and inquired, or a messenger was sent.  And when, this
fortunate day, Justine herself came, and I told her that the crisis was
past, she seemed infinitely relieved and happy.  Then she said:

"Madame has been ill these three days also; but now I think she will be
better; and we shall go soon."

"Ask her," said I, "not to go yet for a few days.  Press it as a favour
to me."  Then, on second thought, I sat down and wrote Mrs. Falchion a
note, hinting that there were grave reasons why she should stay a little
longer: things connected with her own happiness.  Truth is, I had
received a note that morning which had excited me.  It referred to Mrs.
Falchion.  For I was an arch-plotter--or had been.

I received a note in reply which said that she would do as I wished.
Meanwhile I was anxiously awaiting the arrival of some one.

That night a letter came to Roscoe.  After reading it shrinkingly he
handed it to me.  It said briefly:

     I'm not sorry I did it, but I'm glad I hevn't killed you.  I was
     drunk and mad.  If I hadn't hurt you, I'd never hev forgive myself.
     I reckon now, there's no need to do any forgivin' either side.
     We're square--though maybe you didn't kill her after all.  Mrs.
     Falchion says you didn't.  But you hurt her.  Well, I've hurt you.
     And you will never hear no more of Phil's pal from Danger Mountain.

Immediately after sunset of this night, a storm swept suddenly down the
mountains, and prevented Ruth and her father from going to Viking.  I
left them talking to Roscoe, he wearing such a look on his face as I like
to remember now, free from distress of mind--so much more painful than
distress of body.  As I was leaving the room, I looked back and saw Ruth
sitting on a stool beside Roscoe's chair, holding the unmaimed hand in
hers; the father's face shining with pleasure and pride.  Before I went
out, I turned again to look at them, and, as I did so, my eye fell on the
window against which the wind and rain were beating.  And through the wet
there appeared a face, shocking in its paleness and misery--the face of
Mrs. Falchion.  Only for an instant, and then it was gone.

I opened the door and went out upon the verandah.  As I did so, there was
a flash of lightning, and in that flash a figure hurried by me.  One
moment, and there was another flash; and I saw the figure in the beating
rain, making toward the precipice.

Then I heard a cry, not loud, but full of entreaty and sorrow.  I moved
quickly toward it.  In another white gleam I saw Justine with her arms
about the figure, holding it back from the abyss.  She said with
incredible pleading:

"No, no, madame, not that!  It is wicked--wicked."

I came and stood beside them.

The figure sank upon the ground and buried a pitiful face in the wet
grass.

Justine leaned over her.

She sobbed as one whose harvest of the past is all tears.  Nothing human
could comfort her yet.

I think she did not know that I was there.  Justine lifted her face to
me, appealing.

I turned and stole silently away.




CHAPTER XXI

IN PORT

That night I could not rest.  It was impossible to rid myself of the
picture of Mrs. Falchion as I had seen her by the precipice in the storm.
What I had dared to hope for had come.  She had been awakened; and with
the awakening had risen a new understanding of her own life and the lives
of others.  The storm of wind and rain that had swept down the ravine was
not wilder than her passions when I left her with Justine in the dark
night.

All had gone well where the worst might have been.  Roscoe's happiness
was saved to him.  He felt that the accident to him was the penalty he
paid for the error of his past; but in the crash of penalties Mrs.
Falchion, too, was suffering; and, so far as she knew, must carry with
her the remorse of having seen, without mercy, her husband sink to a
suicide's grave.  I knew that she was paying a great price now for a
mistaken past.  I wished that I might make her remorse and sorrow less.
There was a way, but I was not sure that all would be as I wished.  Since
a certain dreadful day on the 'Fulvia', Hungerford and I had held a secret
in our hands.  When it seemed that Mrs. Falchion would bring a great
trouble and shame into Roscoe's life, I determined to use the secret.  It
must be used now only for Mrs. Falchion's good.  As I said in the last
chapter, I had received word that somebody was coming whose presence must
take a large place in the drama of these events: and I hoped the best.

Until morning I lay and planned the best way to bring things to a
successful issue.  The morning came--beautiful after a mad night.  Soon
after I got up I received a note, brought by a boy from Viking, which
gave me a thrill of excitement.  The note requested me to go to Sunburst.
But first I sent a note to Mrs. Falchion, begging her in the name of our
new friendship not to leave the mountains that day.  I also asked that
she would meet me in Sunburst that evening at eight o'clock, at a place
indicated by me.  I asked for a reply by the messenger I sent, and urged
her to ask no questions, but to trust me as one who only wished to do her
a great service, as I hoped her compliance would make possible.  I waited
for the reply, and it bore but the one word--"Yes."

Greatly pleased, I started down the valley.  It was still early when I
reached Sunburst.  I went directly to the little tavern from whence the
note had come, and remained an hour or more.  The result of that hour's
conversation with the writer of the note was memorable, as was the hour
itself.  I began to hope fondly for the success of my scheme.

From the tavern I went to the village, with an elation hardly disturbed
by the fact that many of the salmon-fishers were sullen, because of
foolish depredations committed the evening before by idle river-men and
mill-hands of Viking.  Had I not been so occupied with Mrs. Falchion and
an event wherein she must figure, I should have taken more seriously the
mutterings of the half-breeds, the moroseness of the Indians, and the
nervous threatenings of the white fishers: the more so because I knew
that Mr. Devlin had started early that morning for the Pacific Coast, and
would not be back for some days.

No two classes of people could be more unlike than the salmon-fishers of
Sunburst and the mill-hands and river-drivers of Viking.  The life of the
river-men was exciting, hardy, and perilous; tending to boisterousness,
recklessness, daring, and wild humour: that of the salmon-fishers was
cheerful, picturesque, infrequently dangerous, mostly simple and quiet.
The river-driver chose to spend his idle hours in crude, rough
sprightliness; the salmon-fisher loved to lie upon the shore and listen
to the village story-teller,--almost official when successful,--who
played upon the credulity and imagination of his listeners.  The river-
driver loved excitement for its own sake, and behind his boisterousness
there was little evil.  When the salmon-fisher was roused, his anger
became desperately serious.  It was not his practice to be boisterous for
the sake of boisterousness.

All this worked for a crisis.

From Sunburst I went over to Viking, and for a time watched a handful of
river-drivers upon a little island in the centre of the river, working to
loosen some logs and timber and foist them into the water, to be driven
down to the mill.  I stood interested, because I had nothing to do of any
moment for a couple of hours.  I asked an Indian on the bank to take his
canoe and paddle me over to the island.  He did so.  I do not know why I
did not go alone; but the Indian was near me, his canoe was at his hand,
and I did the thing almost mechanically.  I landed on the island and
watched with great interest the men as they pried, twisted and tumbled
the pile to get at the key-log which, found and loosened, would send the
heap into the water.

I was sorry I brought the Indian with me, for though the river-drivers
stopped their wild sing-song cry for a moment to call a "How!" at me,
they presently began to toss jeering words at the Indian.  They had
recognised him--I had not--as a salmon-fisher and one of the Siwash tribe
from Sunburst.  He remained perfectly silent, but I could see sullenness
growing on his face.  He appeared to take no notice of his scornful
entertainers, but, instead of edging away, came nearer and nearer to the
tangle of logs--came, indeed, very close to me, as I stood watching four
or five men, with the foreman close by, working at a huge timber.  At a
certain moment the foreman was in a kind of hollow.  Just behind him,
near to the Indian, was a great log, which, if loosened by a slight
impulse, must fall into the hollow where the foreman stood.  The foreman
had his face to us; the backs of the other men were on us.  Suddenly the
foreman gave a frightened cry, and I saw at the same instant the Indian's
foot thrust out upon the big log.  Before the foreman had time to get out
of the hollow, it slid down, caught him just above the ankle and broke
the leg.

I wheeled, to see the Indian in his canoe making for the shore.  He was
followed by the curses of the foreman and the gang.  The foreman was very
quiet, but I could see that there was danger in his eye, and the
exclamations of the men satisfied me that they were planning an inter-
municipal difficulty.

I improvised bandages, set the leg directly, and in a little while we got
to the shore on a hastily constructed raft.  After seeing the foreman
safely cared for, and giving Mr. Devlin's manager the facts of the
occurrence, more than sated with my morning's experience, I climbed the
mountain side, and took refuge from the heat in the coolness of Roscoe's
rooms.

In the afternoon I received a note from Mrs. Falchion, saying that on the
following day she would start for the coast; that her luggage would be
taken to Sunburst at once; and that, her engagement with me fulfilled,
she would spend a night there, not returning again to the hills.  I was
preparing for my own departure, and was kept very busy until evening.
Then I went quickly down into the valley,--for I was late,--and trudged
eagerly on to Sunburst.  As I neared the village I saw that there were
fewer lights--torches and fires--than usual on the river.  I noticed also
that there were very few fishers on the banks or in the river.  But still
the village seemed noisy, and, although it was dusk, I could make out
much stir in the one street along which the cottages and huts ambled for
nearly a mile.

All at once it came to me strongly that the friction between the two
villages had consummated in the foreman's injury, and was here coming to
a painful crisis.  My suspicions had good grounds.  As I hurried on I saw
that the lights usually set on the banks of the river were scattered
through the town.  Bonfires were being lighted, and torches were flaring
in front of the Indian huts.  Coming closer, I saw excited groups of
Indians, half-breeds, and white men moving here and there; and then, all
at once, there came a cry--a kind of roar--from farther up the village,
and the men gathered themselves together, seizing guns, sticks, irons,
and other weapons, and ran up the street.  I understood.  I was
moderately swift of foot those days.  I came quickly after them, and
passed them.  As I did so I inquired of one or two fishers what was the
trouble.

They told me, as I had guessed, that they expected an attack on the
village by the mill-hands and river-drivers of Viking.

The situation was critical.  I could foresee a catastrophe which would
for ever unsettle the two towns, and give the valley an unenviable
reputation.  I was certain that, if Roscoe or Mr. Devlin were present,
a prohibitive influence could be brought to bear; that some one of strong
will could stand, as it were, in the gap between them, and prevent a
pitched battle, and, possibly, bloodshed.  I was sure that at Viking the
river-drivers had laid their plans so secretly that the news of them
would scarcely reach the ears of the manager of the mill, and that,
therefore, his influence, as Mr. Devlin's, would not be available.

Remained only myself--as I first thought.  I was unknown to a great
number of the men of both villages, and familiar with but very few--
chiefly those with whom I had a gossiping acquaintance.  Yet, somehow,
I felt that if I could but get a half-dozen men to take a firm stand with
me, I might hold the rioters in check.

As I ran by the side of the excitable fishers, I urged upon one or two of
them the wisdom and duty of preventing a conflict.  Their reply was--and
it was very convincing--that they were not forcing a struggle, but were
being attacked, and in the case would fight.  My hasty persuasion
produced but little result.  But I kept thinking hard.  Suddenly it came
to me that I could place my hand upon a man whose instincts in the matter
would be the same as mine; who had authority; knew the world; had been in
dangerous positions in his lifetime; and owed me something.  I was sure
that I could depend upon him: the more so that once frail of body he had
developed into a strong, well-controlled man.

Even as I thought of him, I was within a few rods of the house where he
was.  I looked, and saw him standing in the doorway.  I ran and called to
him.  He instantly joined me, and we ran on together: the fishermen
shouting loudly as they watched the river-drivers come armed down the
hill-slope into the village.

I hastily explained the situation to my friend, and told him what we must
do.  A word or two assured me of all I wished to know.  We reached the
scene of the disorder.  The fishermen were bunched together, the river on
the one side, the houses and hills on the other.  The river-drivers had
halted not many yards away, cool, determined and quiet, save for a little
muttering.  In their red shirts, top boots, many of them with long black
hair and brass earrings, they looked a most formidable crowd.  They had
evidently taken the matter seriously, and were come with the intention of
carrying their point, whatever it might be.  Just as we reached the space
between the two parties, the massive leader of the river-drivers stepped
forward, and in a rough but collected voice said that they had come
determined to fight, if fighting were necessary, but that they knew what
the end of the conflict would be, and they did not wish to obliterate
Sunburst entirely if Sunburst accepted the conditions of peace.

There seemed no leader to the fishermen.

My friend said to me quickly: "You speak first."  Instantly I stepped
forward and demanded to know what the terms of peace were.  As soon as I
did so, there were harsh mutterings among the river-drivers.  I explained
at once, waving back some of the fisher-men who were clamouring about me,
that I had nothing whatever to do with the quarrel; that I happened to be
where I was by accident, as I had happened by accident to see the
difficulty of the morning.  But I said that it was the duty of every man
who was a good citizen and respected the laws of his country, to see, in
so far as it was possible, that there should be no breach of those laws.
I spoke in a clear strong voice, and I think I produced some effect upon
both parties to the quarrel.  The reply of the leader was almost
immediate.  He said that all they demanded was the Indian who had so
treacherously injured the foreman of their gangs.  I saw the position at
once, and was dumfounded.  For a moment I did not speak.

I was not prepared for the scene that immediately followed.  Some one
broke through the crowd at my back, rushed past me, and stood between the
two forces.  It was the Indian who had injured the foreman.  He was naked
to the waist, and painted and feathered after the manner of his tribe
going to battle.  There was a wild light in his eye, but he had no
weapon.  He folded his arms across his breast, and said:

"Well, you want me.  Here I am.  I will fight with any man all alone,
without a gun or arrow or anything.  I will fight with my arms--to kill."

I saw revolvers raised at him instantly, but at that the man, my friend,
who stood beside me, sprang in front of the Indian.

"Stop--stop!" he cried.  "In the name of the law!  I am a sergeant of
the mounted police of Canada.  My jurisdiction extends from Winnipeg to
Vancouver.  You cannot have this man except over my body: and for my body
every one of you will pay with your lives; for every blow struck this
night, there will be a hundred blows struck upon the river-drivers and
mill-hands of this valley.  Take care!  Behind me is the law of the land
--her police and her soldiery."

He paused.  There was almost complete silence.  He continued:

"This man is my prisoner; I arrest him."--He put his hand upon the
Indian's shoulder.--"For the crime he committed this morning he shall
pay: but to the law, not to you.  Put up your revolvers, men.  Go back to
Viking.  Don't risk your lives; don't break the law and make yourselves
criminals and outlaws.  Is it worth it?  Be men.  You have been the
aggressors.  There isn't one of you but feels that justice which is the
boast of every man of the West.  You wanted to avenge the crime of this
morning.  But the vengeance is the law's.--Stand back--Stand back!" he
said, and drew his revolver, as the leader of the river-drivers stepped
forward.  "I will kill the first man that tries to lay his hand upon my
prisoner.  Don't be mad.  I am not one man, I am a whole country."

I shall never forget the thrill that passed through me as I saw a man
who, but a handful of months before, was neck deep in his grave, now
blossomed out into a strong, defiant soldier.

There was a pause.  At last the leader of the river-drivers spoke.
"See," he said, "Sergeant, I guess you're right.  You're a man, so help
me!  Say, boys," he continued, turning to his followers, "let him have
the Injin.  I guess he's earned him."

So saying he wheeled, the men with him, and they tramped up the slope
again on their way back to Viking.  The man who had achieved this turned
upon the fishers.

"Back to your homes!" he said.  "Be thankful that blood was not shed
here to-night, and let this be a lesson to you.  Now, go."

The crowd turned, slowly shambled down the riverside, and left us three
standing there.

But not alone.  Out of the shadow of one of the houses came two women.
They stepped forward into the light of the bonfire burning near us.  One
of the women was very pale.

It was Mrs. Falchion.

I touched the arm of the man standing beside me.  He wheeled and saw her
also.  A cry broke from his lips, but he stood still.  A whole life-time
of sorrow, trouble, and love looked out of his eyes.  Mrs. Falchion came
nearer.  Clasping her hands upon her breast, she peered up into his face,
and gasped:

"Oh--oh--I thought that you were drowned--and dead!  I saw you buried in
the sea.  No--no--it cannot be you!  I have heard and seen all within
these past few minutes.  YOU are so strong and brave, so great a man!...
Oh, tell me, tell me, are you in truth my husband?"

He spoke.

"I was your husband, Mercy Falchion.  I was drowned, but this man"--he
turned and touched my shoulder--"this man brought me back to life.  I
wanted to be dead to the world.  I begged him to keep my secret.  A
sailor's corpse was buried in my shroud, and I lived.  At Aden I stole
from the boat in the night.  I came to America--to Canada--to begin a new
life under a new name, never to see you again. . . .  Do not, do not
speak to me--unless I am not to lose you again; unless I am to know that
now you forgive me--that you forgive me--and wish me to live--my wife!"

She put both her hands out, a strange, sorrowful look in her eyes, and
said: "I have sinned--I have sinned."

He took her hands in his.

"I know," he said, "that you do not love me yet; but you may some day."

"No," she said, "I do not love you; but . . . . I am glad you live.  Let
us--go home."


THE END.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

A heart-break for that kind is their salvation
A man may be forgiven for a sin, but the effect remains
A man you could bank on, and draw your interest reg'lar
Aboriginal dispersion
All he has to do is to be vague, and look prodigious (Scientist)
And even envy praised her
Audience that patronisingly listens outside a room or window
But to pay the vulgar penalty of prison--ah!
Death is a magnificent ally; it untangles knots
Death is not the worst of evils
Engrossed more, it seemed, in the malady than in the man
Every true woman is a mother, though she have no child
Fear a woman are when she hates, and when she loves
For a man having work to do, woman, lovely woman, is rocks
He didn't always side with the majority
He had neither self-consciousness nor fear
Her own suffering always set her laughing at herself
It is difficult to be idle--and important too
It is hard to be polite to cowards
Jews everywhere treated worse than the Chinaman
Learned what fools we mortals be
Love can outlive slander
Men do not steal up here: that is the unpardonable crime
One always buys back the past at a tremendous price
One doesn't choose to worry
Saying uncomfortable things in a deferential way
She had provoked love, but had never given it
Slow-footed hours wandered by, leaving apathy in their train
"Still the end of your existence," I rejoined--"to be amused?"
That anxious civility which beauty can inspire
The happy scene of the play before the villain comes in
The ravings of a sick man are not always counted ravings
The sea is a great breeder of friendship
The tender care of a woman--than many pharmacopoeias
The threshold of an acknowledged love
There are things we repent of which cannot be repaired
There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world
Think that a woman gives the heart for pleasant weather only?
Thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart
Time a woman most yearns for a man is when she has refused him
Vanity; and from this much feminine hatred springs
Very severe on those who do not pretend to be good
What is gone is gone  Graves are idolatry
Who get a morbid enjoyment out of misery
Would look back and not remember that she had a childhood






CUMNER'S SON AND OTHER SOUTH SEA FOLK, Complete

by Gilbert Parker



CONTENTS

Volume 1.
CUMNER'S SON

Volume 2.
THE HIGH COURT OF BUDGERY-GAR
AN EPIC IN YELLOW
DIBBS, R.N.
A LITTLE MASQUERADE
DERELICT
OLD ROSES
MY WIFE'S LOVERS
THE STRANGERS' HUT

Volume 3.
THE PLANTER'S WIFE
BARBARA GOLDING
THE LONE CORVETTE

Volume 4.
A SABLE SPARTAN
A VULGAR FRACTION
HOW PANGO WANGO WAS ANNEXED
AN AMIABLE REVENGE
THE BLIND BEGGAR AND THE LITTLE RED PEG
A FRIEND OF THE COMMUNE

Volume 5.
A PAGAN OF THE SOUTH





INTRODUCTION

In a Foreword to Donovan Pasha, published in 1902, I used the following
words:

"It is now twelve years since I began giving to the public tales of life
in lands well known to me.  The first of them were drawn from Australia
and the islands of the southern Pacific, where I had lived and roamed in
the middle and late eighties.  .  .  .  Those tales of the Far South were
given out with some prodigality.  They did not appear in book form,
however; for at the time I was sending out these antipodean sketches I
was also writing--far from the scenes where they were laid--a series of
Canadian tales, many of which appeared in the 'Independent' of New York,
in the 'National Observer', edited by Mr. Henley, and in the 'Illustrated
London News'.  On the suggestion of my friend Mr. Henley, the Canadian
tales, Pierre and His People, were published first; with the result that
the stories of the southern hemisphere were withheld from publication,
though they have been privately printed and duly copyrighted.  Some day I
may send them forth, but meanwhile I am content to keep them in my care."

These stories made the collection published eventually under the title of
Cumner's Son, in 1910.  They were thus kept for nearly twenty years
without being given to the public in book form.  In 1910 I decided,
however, that they should go out and find their place with my readers.
The first story in the book, Cumner's Son, which represents about four
times the length of an ordinary short story, was published in Harper's
Weekly, midway between 1890 and 1900.  All the earlier stories belonged
to 1890, 1891, 1892, and 1893.  The first of these to be published was
'A Sable Spartan', 'An Amiable Revenge', 'A Vulgar Fraction', and 'How
Pango Wango Was Annexed'.  They were written before the Pierre series,
and were instantly accepted by Mr. Frederick Greenwood, that great
journalistic figure of whom the British public still takes note, and for
whom it has an admiring memory, because of his rare gifts as an editor
and publicist, and by a political section of the public, because Mr.
Greenwood recommended to Disraeli the purchase of the Suez Canal shares.
Seventeen years after publishing these stories I had occasion to write to
Frederick Greenwood, and in my letter I said: "I can never forget that
you gave me a leg up in my first struggle for recognition in the literary
world."  His reply was characteristic; it was in keeping with the modest,
magnanimous nature of the man.  He said: "I cannot remember that there
was any day when you required a leg up."

While still contributing to the 'Anti-Jacobin', which had a short life
and not a very merry one, I turned my attention to a weekly called 'The
Speaker', to which I have referred elsewhere, edited by Mr. Wemyss Reid,
afterwards Sir Wemyss Reid, and in which Mr. Quiller-Couch was then
writing a striking short story nearly every week.  Up to that time I had
only interviewed two editors.  One was Mr. Kinloch-Cooke, now Sir Clement
Kinloch-Cooke, who at that time was editor of the 'English Illustrated
Magazine', and a very good, courteous, and generous editor he was, and he
had a very good magazine; the other was an editor whose name I do not
care to mention, because his courtesy was not on the same expansive level
as his vanity.

One bitter winter's day in 1891 I went to Wemyss Reid to tell him,
if he would hear me, that I had in my mind a series of short stories of
Australia and the South Seas, and to ask him if he could give them a
place in 'The Speaker'.  It was a Friday afternoon, and as I went into
the smudgy little office I saw a gentleman with a small brown bag
emerging from another room.

At that moment I asked for Mr. Wemyss Reid.  The gentleman with the
little brown bag stood and looked sharply at me, but with friendly if
penetrating eyes.  "I am Wemyss Reid--you wish to see me?" he said.
"Will you give me five minutes?" I asked.  "I am just going to the
train, but I will spare you a minute," he replied.  He turned back into
another smudgy little room, put his bag on the table, and said: "Well?"
I told him quickly, eagerly, what I wished to do, and I said to him at
last: "I apologise for seeking you personally, but I was most anxious
that my work should be read by your own eyes, because I think I should be
contented with your judgment, whether it was favourable or unfavourable."
Taking up his bag again, he replied, "Send your stories along.  If I
think they are what I want I will publish them.  I will read them
myself."  He turned the handle of the door, and then came back to me and
again looked me in the eyes.  "If I cannot use them--and there might be
a hundred reasons why I could not, and none of them derogatory to your
work--" he said, "do not be discouraged.  There are many doors.  Mine is
only one.  Knock at the others.  Good luck to you."

I never saw Wemyss Reid again, but he made a friend who never forgot him,
and who mourned his death.  It was not that he accepted my stories; it
was that he said what he did say to a young man who did not yet know what
his literary fortune might be.  Well, I sent him a short story called,
'An Epic in Yellow'.  Proofs came by return of post.  This story was
followed by 'The High Court of Budgery-Gar', 'Old Roses', 'My Wife's
Lovers', 'Derelict', 'Dibbs, R.N.', 'A Little Masquerade', and 'The
Stranger's Hut'.  Most, if not all, of these appeared before the Pierre
stories were written.

They did not strike the imagination of the public in the same way as the
Pierre series, but they made many friends.  They were mostly Australian,
and represented the life which for nearly four years I knew and studied
with that affection which only the young, open-eyed enthusiast, who
makes his first journey in the world, can give.  In the same year, for
'Macmillan's Magazine', I wrote 'Barbara Golding' and 'A Pagan of the
South', which was originally published as 'The Woman in the Morgue'.
'A Friend of the Commune' was also published in the 'English Illustrated
Magazine', and 'The Blind Beggar and the Little Red Peg' found a place in
the 'National Observer' after W. E. Henley had ceased to be its editor,
and Mr. J. C. Vincent, also since dead, had taken his place.  'The Lone
Corvette' was published in 'The Westminster Gazette' as late as 1893.

Of certain of these stories, particularly of the Australian group,
I have no doubt.  They were lifted out of the life of that continent with
sympathy and care, and most of the incidents were those which had come
under my own observation.  I published them at last in book form, because
I felt that no definitive edition of my books ought to appear--and I had
then a definitive edition in my mind--without these stories which
represented an early phase in my work.  Whatever their degree of merit,
they possess freshness and individuality of outlook.  Others could no
doubt have written them better, but none could have written them with
quite the same touch or turn or individuality; and, after all, what we
want in the art of fiction is not a story alone, not an incident of life
or soul simply as an incident, but the incident as seen with the eye--
and that eye as truthful and direct as possible--of one individual
personality.  George Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson might each have
chosen the same subject and the same story, and each have produced a
masterpiece, and yet the world of difference between the way it was
presented by each was the world of difference between the eyes that saw.
So I am content to let these stories speak little or much, but still to
speak for me.




CUMNER'S SON

I

THE CHOOSING OF THE MESSENGER

There was trouble at Mandakan.  You could not have guessed it from
anything the eye could see.  In front of the Residency two soldiers
marched up and down sleepily, mechanically, between two ten-pounders
marking the limit of their patrol; and an orderly stood at an open door,
lazily shifting his eyes from the sentinels to the black guns, which gave
out soft, quivering waves of heat, as a wheel, spinning, throws off
delicate spray.  A hundred yards away the sea spread out, languid and
huge.  It was under-tinged with all the colours of a morning sunrise over
Mount Bobar not far beyond, lifting up its somnolent and massive head
into the Eastern sky.  "League-long rollers" came in as steady as columns
of infantry, with white streamers flying along the line, and hovering a
moment, split, and ran on the shore in a crumbling foam, like myriads of
white mice hurrying up the sand.

A little cloud of tobacco smoke came curling out of a window of the
Residency.  It was sniffed up by the orderly, whose pipe was in barracks,
and must lie there untouched until evening at least; for he had stood at
this door since seven that morning, waiting orders; and he knew by the
look on Colonel Cumner's face that he might be there till to-morrow.

But the ordinary spectator could not have noticed any difference in
the general look of things.  All was quiet, too, in the big native city.
At the doorways the worker in brass and silver hammered away at his
metal, a sleepy, musical assonance.  The naked seller of sweetmeats went
by calling his wares in a gentle, unassertive voice; in dark doorways
worn-eyed women and men gossiped in voices scarce above a whisper; and
brown children fondled each other, laughing noiselessly, or lay asleep on
rugs which would be costly elsewhere.  In the bazaars nothing was
selling, and no man did anything but mumble or eat, save the few scholars
who, cross-legged on their mats, read and laboured towards Nirvana.
Priests in their yellow robes and with bare shoulders went by, oblivious
of all things.

Yet, too, the keen observer could have seen gathered into shaded corners
here and there, a few sombre, low-voiced men talking covertly to each
other.  They were not the ordinary gossipers; in the faces of some were
the marks of furtive design, of sinister suggestion.  But it was all so
deadly still.

The gayest, cheeriest person in Mandakan was Colonel Cumner's son.
Down at the opal beach, under a palm-tree, he sat, telling stories of his
pranks at college to Boonda Broke, the half-breed son of a former Dakoon
who had ruled the State of Mandakan when first the English came.  The
saddest person in Mandakan was the present Dakoon, in his palace by the
Fountain of the Sweet Waters, which was guarded by four sacred warriors
in stone and four brown men armed with the naked kris.

The Dakoon was dying, though not a score of people in the city knew it.
He had drunk of the Fountain of Sweet Waters, also of the well that is by
Bakbar; he had eaten of the sweetmeat called the Flower of Bambaba, his
chosen priests had prayed, and his favourite wife had lain all day and
all night at the door of his room, pouring out her soul; but nothing came
of it.

And elsewhere Boonda Broke was showing Cumner's Son how to throw a kris
towards one object and make it hit another.  He gave an illustration by
aiming at a palm-tree and sticking a passing dog behind the shoulder.
The dog belonged to Cumner's Son, and the lad's face suddenly blazed with
anger.  He ran to the dog, which had silently collapsed like a punctured
bag of silk, drew out the kris, then swung towards Boonda Broke, whose
cool, placid eyes met his without emotion.

"You knew that was my dog," he said quickly in English, "and--and I tell
you what, sir, I've had enough of you.  A man that'd hit a dog like that
would hit a man the same way."

He was standing with the crimson kris in his hand above the dog.  His
passion was frank, vigorous, and natural.

Boonda Broke smiled passively.

"You mean, could hit a man the same way, honoured lord."

"I mean what I said," answered the lad, and he turned on his heel; but
presently he faced about again, as though with a wish to give his foe the
benefit of any doubt.  Though Boonda Broke was smiling, the lad's face
flushed again with anger, for the man's real character had been revealed
to him on the instant, and he was yet in the indignant warmth of the new
experience.  If he had known that Boonda Broke had cultivated his
friendship for months, to worm out of him all the secrets of the
Residency, there might have been a violent and immediate conclusion to
the incident, for the lad was fiery, and he had no fear in his heart; he
was combative, high-tempered, and daring.  Boonda Broke had learned no
secrets of him, had been met by an unconscious but steady resistance, and
at length his patience had given way in spite of himself.  He had white
blood in his veins--fighting Irish blood--which sometimes overcame his
smooth, Oriental secretiveness and cautious duplicity; and this was one
of those occasions.  He had flung the knife at the dog with a wish in his
heart that it was Cumner's Son instead.  As he stood looking after the
English lad, he said between his teeth with a great hatred, though his
face showed no change:

"English dog, thou shalt be dead like thy brother there when I am Dakoon
of Mandakan."

At this moment he saw hurrying towards him one of those natives who, a
little while before, had been in close and furtive talk in the Bazaar.

Meanwhile the little cloud of smoke kept curling out of the Governor's
door, and the orderly could catch the fitful murmur of talk that followed
it.  Presently rifle shots rang out somewhere.  Instantly a tall, broad-
shouldered figure, in white undress uniform, appeared in the doorway and
spoke quickly to the orderly.  In a moment two troopers were galloping
out of the Residency Square and into the city.  Before two minutes had
passed one had ridden back to the orderly, who reported to the Colonel
that the Dakoon had commanded the shooting of five men of the tribe of
the outlaw hill-chief, Pango Dooni, against the rear wall of the Palace,
where the Dakoon might look from his window and see the deed.

The Colonel sat up eagerly in his chair, then brought his knuckles down
smartly on the table.  He looked sharply at the three men who sat with
him.

"That clinches it," said he.  "One of those fellows was Pango Dooni's
nephew, another was his wife's brother.  It's the only thing to do--some
one must go to Pango Dooni, tell him the truth, ask him to come down and
save the place, and sit up there in the Dakoon's place.  He'll stand by
us, and by England."

No one answered at first.  Every face was gloomy.  At last a grey-haired
captain of artillery spoke his mind in broken sentences:

"Never do--have to ride through a half-dozen sneaking tribes--Pango
Dooni, rank robber--steal like a barrack cat--besides, no man could get
there.  Better stay where we are and fight it out till help comes."

"Help!" said Cumner bitterly.  "We might wait six months before a man-
of-war put in.  The danger is a matter of hours.  A hundred men, and a
score of niggers--what would that be against thirty thousand natives?"

"Pango Dooni is as likely to butcher us as the Dakoon," said McDermot,
the captain of artillery.  Every man in the garrison had killed at least
one of Pango Dooni's men, and every man of them was known from the Kimar
Gate to the Neck of Baroob, where Pango Dooni lived and ruled.

The Colonel was not to be moved.  "I'd ride the ninety miles myself, if
my place weren't here--no, don't think I doubt you, for I know you all!
But consider the nest of murderers that'll be let loose here when the
Dakoon dies.  Better a strong robber with a strong robber's honour to
perch there in the Palace, than Boonda Broke and his cut-throats--"

"Honour--honour?--Pango Dooni!" broke out McDermot the gunner
scornfully.

"I know the man," said the Governor gruffly; "I know the man, I tell you,
and I'd take his word for ten thousand pounds, or a thousand head of
cattle.  Is there any of you will ride to the Neck of Baroob for me?
For one it must be, and no more--we can spare scarce that, God knows!"
he added sadly.  "The women and children--"

"I will go," said a voice behind them all; and Cumner's Son stepped
forward.  "I will go, if I may ride the big sorrel from the Dakoon's
stud."

The Colonel swung round in his chair and stared mutely at the lad.  He
was only eighteen years old, but of good stature, well-knit, and straight
as a sapling.

Seeing that no one answered him, but sat and stared incredulously, he
laughed a little, frankly and boyishly.  "The kris of Boonda Broke is
for the hearts of every one of us," said he.  "He may throw it soon--
to-night--to-morrow.  No man can leave here--all are needed; but a boy
can ride; he is light in the saddle, and he may pass where a man would be
caught in a rain of bullets.  I have ridden the sorrel of the Dakoon
often; he has pressed it on me; I will go to the master of his stud, and
I will ride to the Neck of Baroob."

"No, no," said one after the other, getting to his feet, "I will go."

The Governor waved them down.  "The lad is right," said he, and he looked
him closely and proudly in the eyes.  "By the mercy of God, you shall
ride the ride," said he.  "Once when Pango Dooni was in the city, in
disguise, aye, even in the Garden of the Dakoon, the night of the Dance
of the Yellow Fire, I myself helped him to escape, for I stand for a
fearless robber before a cowardly saint."  His grey moustache and
eyebrows bristled with energy as he added: "The lad shall go.  He shall
carry in his breast the bracelet with the red stone that Pango Dooni gave
me.  On the stone is written the countersign that all hillsmen heed, and
the tribe-call I know also."

"The danger--the danger--and the lad so young!" said McDermot; but yet
his eyes rested lovingly on the boy.

The Colonel threw up his head in anger.  "If I, his father, can let him
go, why should you prate like women?  The lad is my son, and he shall win
his spurs--and more, and more, maybe," he added.

He took from his pocket Pango Dooni's gift and gave it to the lad, and
three times he whispered in his ear the tribe-call and the countersign
that he might know them.  The lad repeated them three times, and, with
his finger, traced the countersign upon the stone.

That night he rode silently out of the Dakoon's palace yard by a quiet
gateway, and came, by a roundabout, to a point near the Residency.

He halted under a flame-tree, and a man came out of the darkness and laid
a hand upon his knee.

"Ride straight and swift from the Kimar Gate.  Pause by the Koongat
Bridge an hour, rest three hours at the Bar of Balmud, and pause again
where the roof of the Brown Hermit drums to the sorrel's hoofs.  Ride for
the sake of the women and children and for your own honour.  Ride like a
Cumner, lad."

The last sound of the sorrel's hoofs upon the red dust beat in the
Colonel's ears all night long, as he sat waiting for news from the
Palace, the sentinels walking up and down, the orderly at the door, and
Boonda Broke plotting in the town.




II

"REST AT THE KOONGAT BRIDGE AN HOUR"

There was no moon, and but few stars were shining.  When Cumner's Son
first set out from Mandakan he could scarcely see at all, and he kept his
way through the native villages more by instinct than by sight.  As time
passed he saw more clearly; he could make out the figures of natives
lying under trees or rising from their mats to note the flying horseman.
Lights flickered here and there in the houses and by the roadside.  A
late traveller turned a cake in the ashes or stirred some rice in a
calabash; an anxious mother put some sandalwood on the coals and added
incense, that the gods might be good to the ailing child on the mat; and
thrice, at forges in the village, he saw the smith languidly beating iron
into shape, while dark figures sat on the floor near by, and smoked and
murmured to each other.

These last showed alertness at the sound of the flying sorrel's hoofs,
and all at once a tall, keen-eyed horseman sprang to the broad doorway
and strained his eyes into the night after Cumner's Son.  He waited a few
moments; then, as if with a sudden thought, he ran to a horse tethered
near by and vaulted into the saddle.  At a word his chestnut mare got
away with telling stride in pursuit of the unknown rider, passing up the
Gap of Mandakan like a ghost.

Cumner's Son had a start by about half a mile, but Tang-a-Dahit rode a
mare that had once belonged to Pango Dooni, and Pango Dooni had got her
from Colonel Cumner the night he escaped from Mandakan.

For this mare the hill-chief had returned no gift save the gold bracelet
which Cumner's Son now carried in his belt.

The mare leaned low on her bit, and travelled like a thirsty hound to
water, the sorrel tugged at the snaffle, and went like a bullmoose
hurrying to his herd,

              "That long low gallop that can tire
               The hounds' deep hate or hunter's fire."

The pace was with the sorrel.  Cumner's Son had not looked behind after
the first few miles, for then he had given up thought that he might be
followed.  He sat in his saddle like a plainsman; he listened like a
hillsman; he endured like an Arab water-carrier.  There was not an ounce
of useless flesh on his body, and every limb, bone, and sinew had been
stretched and hardened by riding with the Dakoon's horsemen, by
travelling through the jungle for the tiger and the panther, by throwing
the kris with Boonda Broke, fencing with McDermot, and by sabre practice
with red-headed Sergeant Doolan in the barracks by the Residency Square.
After twenty miles' ride he was dry as a bone, after thirty his skin was
moist but not damp, and there was not a drop of sweat on the skin-leather
of his fatigue cap.  When he got to Koongat Bridge he was like a racer
after practice, ready for a fight from start to finish.  Yet he was not
foolhardy.  He knew the danger that beset him, for he could not tell,
in the crisis come to Mandakan, what designs might be abroad.  He now saw
through Boonda Broke's friendship for him, and he only found peace for
his mind upon the point by remembering that he had told no secrets, had
given no information of any use to the foes of the Dakoon or the haters
of the English.

On this hot, long, silent ride he looked back carefully, but he could not
see where he had been to blame; and, if he were, he hoped to strike a
balance with his own conscience for having been friendly to Boonda Broke,
and to justify himself in his father's eyes.  If he came through all
right, then "the Governor"--as he called his father, with the friendly
affection of a good comrade, and as all others in Mandakan called him
because of his position--the Governor then would say that whatever harm
he had done indirectly was now undone.

He got down at the Koongat Bridge, and his fingers were still in the
sorrel's mane when he heard the call of a bittern from the river bank.
He did not loose his fingers, but stood still and listened intently, for
there was scarcely a sound of the plain, the river, or jungle he did not
know, and his ear was keen to balance 'twixt the false note and the true.
He waited for the sound again.  From that first call he could not be sure
which had startled him--the night was so still--the voice of a bird or
the call between men lying in ambush.  He tried the trigger of his pistol
softly, and prepared to mount.  As he did so, the call rang out across
the water again, a little louder, a little longer.

Now he was sure.  It was not from a bittern--it was a human voice,
of whose tribe he knew not--Pango Dooni's, Boonda Broke's, the Dakoon's,
or the segments of peoples belonging to none of these--highway robbers,
cattle-stealers, or the men of the jungle, those creatures as wild and
secret as the beasts of the bush and more cruel and more furtive.

The fear of the ambushed thing is the worst fear of this world--the sword
or the rifle-barrel you cannot see and the poisoned wooden spear which
the men of the jungle throw gives a man ten deaths, instead of one.

Cumner's Son mounted quickly, straining his eyes to see and keeping his
pistol cocked.  When he heard the call a second time he had for a moment
a thrill of fear, not in his body, but in his brain.  He had that fatal
gift, imagination, which is more alive than flesh and bone, stronger than
iron and steel.  In his mind he saw a hundred men rise up from ambush,
surround him, and cut him down.  He saw himself firing a half-dozen
shots, then drawing his sword and fighting till he fell; but he did fall
in the end, and there was an end of it.  It seemed like years while these
visions passed through his mind, but it was no longer than it took to
gather the snaffle-rein close to the sorrel's neck, draw his sword,
clinch it in his left hand with the rein, and gather the pistol snugly in
his right.  He listened again.  As he touched the sorrel with his knee he
thought he heard a sound ahead.

The sorrel sprang forward, sniffed the air, and threw up his head.  His
feet struck the resounding timbers of the bridge, and, as they did so, he
shied; but Cumner's Son, looking down sharply, could see nothing to
either the right or left--no movement anywhere save the dim trees on the
banks waving in the light wind which had risen.  A crocodile slipped off
a log into the water--he knew that sound; a rank odour came from the
river bank--he knew the smell of the hippopotamus.

These very things gave him new courage.  Since he came from Eton to
Mandakan he had hunted often and well, and once he had helped to quarry
the Little Men of the Jungle when they carried off the wife and daughter
of a soldier of the Dakoon.  The smell and the sound of wild life roused
all the hunter in him.  He had fear no longer; the primitive emotion of
fighting or self-defence was alive in him.

He had left the bridge behind by twice the horse's length, when, all at
once, the call of the red bittern rang out the third time, louder than
before; then again; and then the cry of a grey wolf came in response.

His peril was upon him.  He put spurs to the sorrel.  As he did so, dark
figures sprang up on all sides of him.  Without a word he drove the
excited horse at his assailants.  Three caught his bridle-rein, and
others snatched at him to draw him from his horse.

"Hands off!" he cried, in the language of Mandakan, and levelled his
pistol.

"He is English!" said a voice.  "Cut him down!"

"I am the Governor's son," said the lad.  "Let go."  "Cut him down!"
snarled the voice again.

He fired twice quickly.

Then he remembered the tribe-call given his father by Pango Dooni.
Rising in his saddle and firing again, he called it out in a loud voice.
His plunging horse had broken away from two of the murderers; but one
still held on, and he slashed the hand free with his sword.

The natives were made furious by the call, and came on again, striking at
him with their krises.  He shouted the tribe-call once more, but this
time it was done involuntarily.  There was no response in front of him;
but one came from behind.  There was clattering of hoofs on Koongat
Bridge, and the password of the clan came back to the lad, even as a kris
struck him in the leg and drew out again.  Once again he called, and
suddenly a horseman appeared beside him, who clove through a native's
head with a broadsword, and with a pistol fired at the fleeing figures;
for Boonda Broke's men who were thus infesting the highway up to Koongat
Bridge, and even beyond, up to the Bar of Balmud, hearing the newcomer
shout the dreaded name of Pango Dooni, scattered for their lives, though
they were yet twenty to two.  One stood his ground, and it would have
gone ill for Cumner's Son, for this thief had him at fatal advantage, had
it not been for the horseman who had followed the lad from the forge-fire
to Koongat Bridge.  He stood up in his stirrups and cut down with his
broadsword, so that the blade was driven through the head and shoulders
of his foe as a woodsman splits a log half through, and grunts with the
power of his stroke.

Then he turned to the lad.

"What stranger calls by the word of our tribe?" he asked.

"I am Cumner's Son," was the answer, "and my father is brother-in-blood
with Pango Dooni.  I ride to Pango Dooni for the women and children's
sake."

"Proof!  Proof!  If you be Cumner's Son, another word should be yours."

The Colonel's Son took out the bracelet from his breast.  "It is safe hid
here," said he, "and hid also under my tongue.  If you be from the Neck
of Baroob you will know it when I speak it;" and he spoke reverently the
sacred countersign.

By a little fire kindled in the road, the bodies of their foe beside
them, they vowed to each other, mingling their blood from dagger pricks
in the arm.  Then they mounted again and rode towards the Neck of Baroob.

In silence they rode awhile, and at last the hillsman said: "If fathers
be brothers-in-blood, behold it is good that sons be also."

By this the lad knew that he was now brother-in-blood to the son of Pango
Dooni.




III

THE CODE OF THE HILLS

"You travel near to Mandakan!" said the lad.  "Do you ride with a
thousand men?"

"For a thousand men there are ten thousand eyes to see; I travel alone
and safe," answered Tang-a-Dahit.

"To thrust your head in the tiger's jaw," said Cumner's Son.  "Did you
ride to be in at the death of the men of your clan?"

"A man will ride for a face that he loves, even to the Dreadful Gates,"
answered Tang-a-Dahit.  "But what is this of the men of my clan?"

Then the lad told him of those whose heads hung on the rear Palace wall,
where the Dakoon lay dying, and why he rode to Pango Dooni.

"It is fighting and fighting, naught but fighting," said Tang-a-Dahit
after a pause; "and there is no peace.  It is fighting and fighting, for
honour, and glory, and houses and cattle, but naught for love, and naught
that there may be peace."

Cumner's Son turned round in his saddle as if to read the face of the
man, but it was too dark.

"And naught that there maybe peace."  Those were the words of a hillsman
who had followed him furiously in the night ready to kill, who had cloven
the head of a man like a piece of soap, and had been riding even into
Mandakan where a price was set on his head.

For long they rode silently, and in that time Cumner's Son found new
thoughts; and these thoughts made him love the brown hillsman as he had
never loved any save his own father.

"When there is peace in Mandakan," said he at last, "when Boonda Broke is
snapped in two like a pencil, when Pango Dooni sits as Dakoon in the
Palace of Mandakan--"

"There is a maid in Mandakan," interrupted Tanga-Dahit, "and these two
years she has lain upon her bed, and she may not be moved, for the bones
of her body are as the soft stems of the lily, but her face is a perfect
face, and her tongue has the wisdom of God."

"You ride to her through the teeth of danger?"

"She may not come to me, and I must go to her," answered the hillsman.

There was silence again for a long time, for Cumner's Son was turning
things over in his mind; and all at once he felt that each man's acts
must be judged by the blood that is in him and the trail by which he has
come.

The sorrel and the chestnut mare travelled together as on one snaffle-
bar, step by step, for they were foaled in the same stable.  Through
stretches of reed-beds and wastes of osiers they passed, and again by a
path through the jungle where the briar-vines caught at them like eager
fingers, and a tiger crossed their track, disturbed in his night's rest.
At length out of the dank distance they saw the first colour of dawn.

"Ten miles," said Tang-a-Dahit, "and we shall come to the Bar of Balmud.
Then we shall be in my own country.  See, the dawn comes up!  'Twixt here
and the Bar of Balmud our danger lies.  A hundred men may ambush there,
for Boonda Broke's thieves have scattered all the way from Mandakan to
our borders."

Cumner's Son looked round.  There were hills and defiles everywhere, and
a thousand places where foes could hide.  The quickest way, but the most
perilous, lay through the long defile between the hills, flanked by
boulders and rank scrub.  Tang-a-Dahit pointed out the ways that they
might go--by the path to the left along the hills, or through the green
defile; and Cumner's Son instantly chose the latter way.

"If the fight were fair," said the hillsman, "and it were man to man, the
defile is the better way; but these be dogs of cowards who strike from
behind rocks.  No one of them has a heart truer than Boonda Broke's, the
master of the carrion.  We will go by the hills.  The way is harder but
more open, and if we be prospered we will rest awhile at the Bar of
Balmud, and at noon we will tether and eat in the Neck of Baroob."

They made their way through the medlar trees and scrub to the plateau
above, and, the height gained, they turned to look back.  The sun was up,
and trailing rose and amber garments across the great Eastern arch.
Their path lay towards it, for Pango Dooni hid in the hills, where the
sun hung a roof of gold above his stronghold.

"Forty to one!" said Tang-a-Dahit suddenly.  "Now indeed we ride for our
lives!"

Looking down the track of the hillsman's glance Cumner's Son saw a bunch
of horsemen galloping up the slope.  Boonda Broke's men!

The sorrel and the mare were fagged, the horses of their foes were fresh;
and forty to one were odds that no man would care to take.  It might be
that some of Pango Dooni's men lay between them and the Bar of Balmud,
but the chance was faint.

"By the hand of Heaven," said the hillsman, "if we reach to the Bar of
Balmud, these dogs shall eat their own heads for dinner!"

They set their horses in the way, and gave the sorrel and mare the bit
and spur.  The beasts leaned again to their work as though they had just
come from a feeding-stall and knew their riders' needs.  The men rode
light and free, and talked low to their horses as friend talks to friend.
Five miles or more they went so, and then the mare stumbled.  She got to
her feet again, but her head dropped low, her nostrils gaped red and
swollen, and the sorrel hung back with her, for a beast, like a man, will
travel farther two by two than one by one.  At another point where they
had a long view behind they looked back.  Their pursuers were gaining.
Tang-a-Dahit spurred his horse on.

"There is one chance," said he, "and only one.  See where the point juts
out beyond the great medlar tree.  If, by the mercy of God, we can but
make it!"

The horses gallantly replied to call and spur.  They rounded a curve
which made a sort of apse to the side of the valley, and presently they
were hid from their pursuers.  Looking back from the thicket they saw the
plainsmen riding hard.  All at once Tang-a-Dahit stopped.

"Give me the sorrel," said he.  "Quick--dismount!"  Cumner's Son did as
he was bid.  Going a little to one side, the hillsman pushed through a
thick hedge of bushes, rolled away a rock, and disclosed an opening which
led down a steep and rough-hewn way to a great misty valley beneath,
where was never a bridle-path or causeway over the brawling streams and
boulders.

"I will ride on.  The mare is done, but the sorrel can make the Bar of
Balmud."

Cumner's Son opened his mouth to question, but stopped, for the eyes of
the hillsman flared up, and Tang-a-Dahit said:

"My arm in blood has touched thy arm, and thou art in my hills and not in
thine own country.  Thy life is my life, and thy good is my good.  Speak
not, but act.  By the high wall of the valley where no man bides there is
a path which leads to the Bar of Balmud; but leave it not, whether it go
up or down or be easy or hard.  If thy feet be steady, thine eye true,
and thy heart strong, thou shalt come by the Bar of Balmud among my
people."

Then he caught the hand of Cumner's Son in his own and kissed him between
the eyes after the manner of a kinsman, and, urging him into the hole,
rolled the great stone into its place again.  Mounting the sorrel he rode
swiftly out into the open, rounded the green point full in view of his
pursuers, and was hid from them in an instant.  Then, dismounting, he
swiftly crept back through the long grass into the thicket again, mounted
the mare, and drove her at laboured gallop also around the curve, so that
it seemed to the plainsmen following that both men had gone that way.  He
mounted the sorrel again, and loosing a long sash from his waist drew it
through the mare's bit.  The mare, lightened of the weight, followed
well.  When the plainsmen came to the cape of green, they paused not by
the secret place, for it seemed to them that two had ridden past and not
one.

The Son of Pango Dooni had drawn pursuit after himself, for it is the law
of the hills that a hillsman shall give his life or all that he has for a
brother-in-blood.

When Cumner's Son had gone a little way he understood it all!  And he
would have turned back, but he knew that the hillsman had ridden far
beyond his reach.  So he ran as swiftly as he could; he climbed where it
might seem not even a chamois could find a hold; his eyes scarcely seeing
the long, misty valley, where the haze lay like a vapour from another
world.  There was no sound anywhere save the brawling water or the lonely
cry of the flute-bird.  Here was the last refuge of the hillsmen if they
should ever be driven from the Neck of Baroob.  They could close up every
entrance, and live unscathed; for here was land for tilling, and wood,
and wild fruit, and food for cattle.

Cumner's Son was supple and swift, and scarce an hour had passed ere he
came to a steep place on the other side, with rough niches cut in the
rocks, by which a strong man might lift himself up to safety.  He stood a
moment and ate some coffee-beans and drank some cold water from a stream
at the foot of the crag, and then began his ascent.  Once or twice he
trembled, for he was worn and tired; but he remembered the last words of
Tang-a-Dahit, and his fingers tightened their hold.  At last, with a
strain and a gasp, he drew himself up, and found himself on a shelf of
rock with all the great valley spread out beneath him.  A moment only he
looked, resting himself, and then he searched for a way into the hills;
for everywhere there was a close palisade of rocks and saplings.  At last
he found an opening scarce bigger than might let a cat through; but he
laboured hard, and at last drew himself out and looked down the path
which led into the Bar of Balmud--the great natural escarpment of giant
rocks and monoliths and medlar trees, where lay Pango Dooni's men.

He ran with all his might, and presently he was inside the huge defence.
There was no living being to be seen; only the rock-strewn plain and the
woods beyond.

He called aloud, but nothing answered; he called again the tribe-call of
Pango Dooni's men, and a hundred armed men sprang up.

"I am a brother-in-blood of Pango Dooni's Son," said he.  "Tang-a-Dahit
rides for his life to the Bar of Balmud.  Ride forth if ye would save
him."

"The lad speaks with the tongue of a friend," said a scowling hillsman,
advancing, "yet how know we but he lies?"

"Even by this," said Cumner's Son, and he spoke the sacred countersign
and showed again the bracelet of Pango Dooni, and told what had happened.
Even as he spoke the hillsmen gave the word, and two score men ran down
behind the rocks, mounted, and were instantly away by the road that led
to the Koongat Bridge.

The tall hillsman turned to the lad.

"You are beaten by travel," said he.  "Come, eat and drink, and rest."

"I have sworn to breakfast where Pango Dooni bides, and there only will
I rest and eat," answered the lad.

"The son of Pango Dooni knows the lion's cub from the tame dog's whelp.
You shall keep your word.  Though the sun ride fast towards noon, faster
shall we ride in the Neck of Baroob," said the hillsman.

It was half-way towards noon when the hoof-beats drummed over the Brown
Hermit's cave, and they rested not there; but it was noon and no more
when they rode through Pango Dooni's gates and into the square where he
stood.

The tall hillsman dropped to the ground, and Cumner's Son made to do the
same.  Yet he staggered, and would have fallen, but the hillsman ran an
arm around his shoulder.  The lad put by the arm, and drew him self up.
He was most pale.  Pango Dooni stood looking at him, without a word, and
Cumner's Son doffed his cap.  There was no blood in his lips, and his
face was white and drawn.

"Since last night what time the bugle blows in the Palace yard, I have
ridden," said he.

At the sound of his voice the great chief started.  "The voice I know,
but not the face," said he.

"I am Cumner's Son," replied the lad, and once more he spoke the sacred
countersign.




IV

BY THE OLD WELL OF JAHAR

To Cumner's Son when all was told, Pango Dooni said: "If my son be dead
where those jackals swarm, it is well he died for his friend.  If he be
living, then it is also well.  If he be saved, we will march to Mandakan,
with all our men, he and I, and it shall be as Cumner wills, if I stay in
Mandakan or if I return to my hills."

"My father said in the council-room, 'Better the strong robber than the
weak coward,' and my father never lied," said the lad dauntlessly.  The
strong, tall chief, with the dark face and fierce eyes, roused in him the
regard of youth for strong manhood.

"A hundred years ago they stole from my fathers the State of Mandakan,"
answered the chief, "and all that is here and all that is there is mine.
If I drive the kine of thieves from the plains to my hills, the cattle
were mine ere I drove them.  If I harry the rich in the midst of the
Dakoon's men, it is gaining my own over naked swords.  If I save your
tribe and Cumner's men from the half-bred jackal Boonda Broke, and hoist
your flag on the Palace wall, it is only I who should do it."

Then he took the lad inside the house, with the great wooden pillars and
the high gates, and the dark windows all barred up and down with iron,
and he led him to a court-yard where was a pool of clear water.  He made
him bathe in it, and dark-skinned natives brought him bread dipped in
wine, and when he had eaten they laid him on skins and rubbed him dry,
and rolled him in soft linen, and he drank the coffee they gave him, and
they sat by and fanned him until he fell asleep.

                    .......................

The red birds on the window-sill sang through his sleep into his dreams.
In his dreams he thought he was in the Dakoon's Palace at Mandakan with a
thousand men before him, and three men came forward and gave him a sword.
And a bird came flying through the great chambers and hung over him,
singing in a voice that he understood, and he spoke to the three and to
the thousand, in the words of the bird, and said:

"It is fighting, and fighting for honour and glory and houses and kine,
but naught for love, and naught that there may be peace."

And the men said in reply: "It is all for love and it is all for peace,"
and they still held out the sword to him.  So he took it and buckled it
to his side, and the bird, flying away out of the great window of the
chamber, sang: "Peace!  Peace!  Peace!"  And Pango Dooni's Son standing
by, with a shining face, said, "Peace!  Peace!" and the great Cumner
said, "Peace!" and a woman's voice, not louder than a bee's, but clear
above all others, said, "Peace!"

                    ......................

He awoke and knew it was a dream; and there beside him stood Pango Dooni,
in his dress of scarlet and gold and brown, his broadsword buckled on, a
kris at his belt, and a rich jewel in his cap.

"Ten of my captains and three of my kinsmen are come to break bread with
Cumner's Son," said he.  "They would hear the tale of our kinsmen who
died against the Palace wall, by the will of the sick Dakoon."

The lad sprang to his feet fresh and well, the linen and skins falling
away from his lithe, clean body and limbs, and he took from the slaves
his clothes.  The eye of the chief ran up and down his form, from his
keen blue eyes to his small strong ankle.

"It is the body of a perfect man," said he.  "In the days when our State
was powerful and great, when men and not dogs ruled at Mandakan, no man
might be Dakoon save him who was clear of mote or beam; of true bone and
body, like a high-bred yearling got from a perfect stud.  But two such
are there that I have seen in Mandakan to-day, and they are thyself and
mine own son."

The lad laughed.  "I have eaten good meat," said he, "and I have no muddy
blood."

When they came to the dining-hall, the lad at first was abashed, for
twenty men stood up to meet him, and each held out his hand and spoke the
vow of a brother-in-blood, for the ride he had made and his honest face
together acted on them.  Moreover, whom the head of their clan honoured
they also willed to honour.  They were tall, barbaric-looking men, and
some had a truculent look, but most were of a daring open manner, and
careless in speech and gay at heart.

Cumner's Son told them of his ride and of Tang-a-Dahit, and, at last, of
the men of their tribe who died by the Palace wall.  With one accord they
rose in their places and swore over bread and a drop of blood of their
chief that they would not sheathe their swords again till a thousand of
Boonda Broke's and the Dakoon's men lay where their own kinsmen had
fallen.  If it chanced that Tang-a-Dahit was dead, then they would never
rest until Boonda Broke and all his clan were blotted out.  Only Pango
Dooni himself was silent, for he was thinking much of what should be done
at Mandakan.

They came out upon the plateau where the fortress stood, and five hundred
mounted men marched past, with naked swords and bare krises in their
belts, and then wheeled suddenly and stood still, and shot their swords
up into the air the full length of the arm, and called the battle-call of
their tribe.  The chief looked on unmoved, save once when a tall trooper
rode near him.  He suddenly called this man forth.

"Where hast thou been, brother?" he asked.

"Three days was I beyond the Bar of Balmud, searching for the dog who
robbed my mother; three days did I ride to keep my word with a foe, who
gave me his horse when we were both unarmed and spent, and with broken
weapons could fight no more; and two days did I ride to be by a woman's
side when her great sickness should come upon her.  This is all, my lord,
since I went forth, save this jewel which I plucked from the cap of a
gentleman from the Palace.  It was toll he paid even at the gates of
Mandakan."

"Didst thou do all that thou didst promise?"

"All, my lord."

"Even to the woman?"  The chief's eye burned upon the man.

"A strong male child is come into the world to serve my lord," said the
trooper, and he bowed his head.  "The jewel is thine and not mine,
brother," said the chief softly, and the fierceness of his eyes abated;
"but I will take the child."

The trooper drew back among his fellows, and the columns rode towards the
farther end of the plateau.  Then all at once the horses plunged into
wild gallop, and the hillsmen came thundering down towards the chief and
Cumner's Son, with swords waving and cutting to right and left, calling
aloud, their teeth showing, death and valour in their eyes.  The chief
glanced at Cumner's Son.  The horses were not twenty feet from the lad,
but he did not stir a muscle.  They were not ten feet from him, and
swords flashed before his eyes, but still he did not stir a hair's
breadth.  In response to a cry the horses stopped in full career, not
more than three feet from him.  Reaching out he could have stroked the
flaming nostril of the stallion nearest him.

Pango Dooni took from his side a short gold-handled sword and handed it
to him.

"A hundred years ago," said he, "it hung in the belt of the Dakoon of
Mandakan; it will hang as well in thine."  Then he added, for he saw a
strange look in the lad's eyes: "The father of my father's father wore it
in the Palace, and it has come from his breed to me, and it shall go from
me to thee, and from thee to thy breed, if thou wilt honour me."

The lad stuck it in his belt with pride, and taking from his pocket a
silver-mounted pistol, said:

"This was the gift of a fighting chief to a fighting chief when they met
in a beleaguered town, with spoil, and blood, and misery, and sick women
and children round them; and it goes to a strong man, if he will take the
gift of a lad."

At that moment there was a cry from beyond the troopers, and it was
answered from among them by a kinsman of Pango Dooni, and presently, the
troopers parting, down the line came Tang-a-Dahit, with bandaged head and
arm.

In greeting, Pango Dooni raised the pistol which Cumner's Son had given
him and fired it into the air.  Straightway five hundred men did the
same.

Dismounting, Tang-a-Dahit stood before his father.  "Have the Dakoon's
vermin fastened on the young bull at last?" asked Pango Dooni, his eyes
glowering.  "They crawled and fastened, but they have not fed," answered
Tang-a-Dahit in a strong voice, for his wounds had not sunk deep.  "By
the Old Well of Jahar, which has one side to the mountain wall, and one
to the cliff edge, I halted and took my stand.  The mare and the sorrel
of Cumner's Son I put inside the house that covers the well, and I lifted
two stones from the floor and set them against the entrance.  A beggar
lay dead beside the well, and his dog licked his body.  I killed the cur,
for, following its master, it would have peace, and peace is more than
life.  Then, with the pole of the waterpail, I threw the dead dog across
the entrance upon the paving stones, for these vermin of plainsmen will
not pass where a dead dog lies, as my father knows well.  They came not
by the entrance, but they swarmed elsewhere, as ants swarm upon a
sandhill, upon the roofs, and at the little window where the lamp burns.

"I drove them from the window and killed them through the doorway, but
they were forty to one.  In the end the pest would have carried me to
death, as a jackal carries the broken meats to his den, if our hillsmen
had not come.  For an hour I fought, and five of them I killed and seven
wounded, and then at the shouts of our hillsmen they fled at last.  Nine
of them fell by the hands of our people.  Thrice was I wounded, but my
wounds are no deeper than the scratches of a tiger's cub."

"Hadst thou fought for thyself the deed were good," said Pango Dooni,
"but thy blood was shed for another, and that is the pride of good men.
We have true men here, but thou art a true chief and this shalt thou
wear."

He took the rich belt from his waist, and fastened it round the waist of
his son.

"Cumner's Son carries the sword that hung in the belt.  We are for war,
and the sword should be out of the belt.  When we are at peace again ye
shall put the sword in the belt once more, and hang it upon the wall of
the Palace at Mandakan, even as ye who are brothers shall never part."

Two hours Tang-a-Dahit rested upon skins by the bathing pool, and an hour
did the slaves knead him and rub him with oil, and give him food and
drink; and while yet the sun was but half-way down the sky, they poured
through the Neck of Baroob, over five hundred fighting men, on horses
that would kneel and hide like dogs, and spring like deer, and that knew
each tone of their masters' voices.  By the Bar of Balmud they gathered
another fifty hillsmen, and again half-way beyond the Old Well of Jahar
they met two score more, who had hunted Boonda Broke's men, and these
moved into column.  So that when they came to Koongat Bridge, in the
country infested by the men of the Dakoon, seven hundred stalwart and
fearless men rode behind Pango Dooni.  From the Neck of Baroob to Koongat
Bridge no man stayed them, but they galloped on silently, swiftly,
passing through the night like a cloud, upon which the dwellers by the
wayside gazed in wonder and in fear.

At Koongat Bridge they rested for two hours, and drank coffee, and broke
bread, and Cumner's Son slept by the side of Tang-a-Dahit, as brothers
sleep by their mother's bed.  And Pango Dooni sat on the ground near them
and pondered, and no man broke his meditation.  When the two hours were
gone, they mounted again and rode on through the dark villages towards
Mandakan.

It was just at the close of the hour before dawn that the squad of
troopers who rode a dozen rods before the columns, heard a cry from the
dark ahead.  "Halt-in the name of the Dakoon!"




V

CHOOSE YE WHOM YE WILL SERVE

The company drew rein.  All they could see in the darkness was a single
mounted figure in the middle of the road.  The horseman rode nearer.

"Who are you?" asked the leader of the company.

"I keep the road for the Dakoon, for it is said that Cumner's Son has
ridden to the Neck of Baroob to bring Pango Dooni down."

By this time the chief and his men had ridden up.  The horseman
recognised the robber chief, and raised his voice.

"Two hundred of us rode out to face Pango Dooni in this road.  We had not
come a mile from the Palace when we fell into an ambush, even two
thousand men led by Boonda Broke, who would steal the roof and bed of the
Dakoon before his death.  For an hour we fought but every man was cut
down save me."

"And you?" asked Pango Dooni.

"I come to hold the road against Pango Dooni, as the Dakoon bade me."

Pango Dooni laughed.  "Your words are large," said he.  "What could you,
one man, do against Pango Dooni and his hillsman?"

"I could answer the Dakoon here or elsewhere, that I kept the road till
the hill-wolves dragged me down."

"We be the wolves from the hills," answered Pango Dooni.  "You would
scarce serve a scrap of flesh for one hundred, and we are seven."

"The wolves must rend me first," answered the man, and he spat upon the
ground at Pango Dooni's feet.

A dozen men started forward, but the chief called them back.

"You are no coward, but a fool," said he to the horseman.  "Which is it
better: to die, or to turn with us and save Cumner and the English, and
serve Pango Dooni in the Dakoon's Palace?"

"No man knows that he must die till the stroke falls, and I come to fight
and not to serve a robber mountaineer."

Pango Dooni's eyes blazed with anger.  "There shall be no fighting, but a
yelping cur shall be hung to a tree," said he.

He was about to send his men upon the stubborn horseman when the fellow
said:

"If you be a man you will give me a man to fight.  We were two hundred.
If it chance that one of a company shall do as the Dakoon hath said, then
is all the company absolved; and beyond the mists we can meet the Dakoon
with open eyes and unafraid when he saith, 'Did ye keep your faith?'"

"By the word of a hillsman, but thou shalt have thy will," said the
chief.  "We are seven hundred men--choose whom to fight."

"The oldest or the youngest," answered the man.  "Pango Dooni or Cumner's
Son."

Before the chief had time to speak, Cumner's Son struck the man with the
flat of his sword across the breast.

The man did not lift his arm, but looked at the lad steadily for a
moment.  "Let us speak together before we fight," said he, and to show
his good faith he threw down his sword.

"Speak," said Cumner's Son, and laid his sword across the pommel of his
saddle.

"Does a man when he dies speak his heart to the ears of a whole tribe?"

"Then choose another ear than mine," said Cumner's Son.  "In war I have
no secrets from my friends."

A look of satisfaction came into Pango Dooni's face.  "Speak with the man
alone," said he, and he drew back.

Cumner's Son drew a little to one side with the man, who spoke quickly
and low in English.

"I have spoken the truth," said he.  "I am Cushnan Di"--he drew himself
up--"and once I had a city of my own and five thousand men, but a plague
and then a war came, and the Dakoon entered upon my city.  I left my
people and hid, and changed myself that no one should know me, and I came
to Mandakan.  It was noised abroad that I was dead.  Little by little I
grew in favour with the Dakoon, and little by little I gathered strong
men about me-two hundred in all at last.  It was my purpose, when the day
seemed ripe, to seize upon the Palace as the Dakoon had seized upon
my little city.  I knew from my father, whose father built a new portion
of the Palace, of a secret way by the Aqueduct of the Failing Fountain,
even into the Palace itself.  An army could ride through and appear in
the Palace yard like the mist-shapes from the lost legions.  When I had a
thousand men I would perform this thing, I thought.

"But day by day the Dakoon drew me to him, and the thing seemed hard to
do, even now before I had the men.  Then his sickness came, and I could
not strike an ailing man.  When I saw how he was beset by traitors, in my
heart I swore that he should not suffer by my hands.  I heard of your
riding to the Neck of Baroob--the men of Boonda Broke brought word.  So I
told the Dakoon, and I told him also that Boonda Broke was ready to steal
into his Palace even before he died.  He started up, and new life seemed
given him.  Calling his servants, he clothed himself, and he came forth
and ordered out his troops.  He bade me take my men to keep the road
against Pango Dooni.  Then he ranged his men before the Palace, and
scattered them at points in the city to resist Boonda Broke.

"So I rode forth, but I came first to my daughter's bedside.  She lies in
a little house not a stone's throw from the Palace, and near to the
Aqueduct of the Falling Fountain.  Once she was beautiful and tall and
straight as a bamboo stem, but now she is in body no more than a piece of
silken thread.  Yet her face is like the evening sky after a rain.  She
is much alone, and only in the early mornings may I see her.  She is
cared for by an old woman of our people, and there she bides, and thinks
strange thoughts, and speaks words of wisdom.

"When I told her what the Dakoon bade me do, and what I had sworn to
perform when the Dakoon was dead, she said:

"'But no.  Go forth as the Dakoon hath bidden.  Stand in the road and
oppose the hillsmen.  If Cumner's Son be with them, thou shalt tell him
all.  If he speak for the hillsmen and say that all shall be well with
thee, and thy city be restored when Pango Dooni sits in the Palace of the
Dakoon, then shalt thou join with them, that there may be peace in the
land, for Pango Dooni and the son of Pango Dooni be brave strong men.
But if he will not promise for the hillsmen, then shalt thou keep the
secret of the Palace, and abide the will of God."'

"Dost thou know Pango Dooni's son?" asked the lad, for he was sure that
this man's daughter was she of whom Tang-a-Dahit had spoken.

"Once when I was in my own city and in my Palace I saw him.  Then my
daughter was beautiful, and her body was like a swaying wand of the
boolda tree.  But my city passed, and she was broken like a trailing
vine, and the young man came no more."

"But if he came again now?"

"He would not come."

"But if he had come while she lay there like a trailing vine, and
listened to her voice, and thought upon her words and loved her still.
If for her sake he came secretly, daring death, wouldst thou stand--"

The man's eyes lighted.  "If there were such truth in any man," he
interrupted, "I would fight, follow him, and serve him, and my city
should be his city, and the knowledge of my heart be open to his eye."

Cumner's Son turned and called to Pango Dooni and his son, and they came
forward.  Swiftly he told them all.  When he had done so the man sprang
from his horse, and taking off the thin necklet of beaten gold he wore
round his throat, without a word he offered it to Tang-a-Dahit, and Tang-
a-Dahit kissed him on the cheek and gave him the thick, loose chain of
gold he wore.

"For this was it you risked your life going to Mandakan," said Pango
Dooni, angrily, to his son; "for a maid with a body like a withered
gourd."  Then all at once, with a new look in his face, he continued
softly: "Thou hast the soul of a woman, but thy deeds are the deeds
of a man.  As thy mother was in heart so art thou."

                    ......................

Day was breaking over Mandakan, and all the city was a tender pink.
Tower and minaret were like inverted cups of ruddy gold, and the streets
all velvet dust, as Pango Dooni, guided by Cushnan Di, halted at the wood
of wild peaches, and a great thicket near to the Aqueduct of the Failing
Fountain, and looked out towards the Palace of the Dakoon.  It was the
time of peach blossoms, and all through the city the pink and white
petals fell like the gay crystals of a dissolving sunrise.  Yet there
rose from the midst of it a long, rumbling, intermittent murmur, and here
and there marched columns of men in good order, while again disorderly
bands ran hither and hither with krises waving in the sun, and the red
turban of war wound round their heads.

They could not see the front of the Palace, nor yet the Residency Square,
but, even as they looked, a cannonade began, and the smoke of the guns
curled through the showering peach-trees.  Hoarse shoutings and cries
came rolling over the pink roofs, and Cumner's Son could hear through all
the bugle-call of the artillery.

A moment later Cushnan Di was leading them through a copse of pawpaw
trees to a secluded garden by the Aqueduct, overgrown with vines and
ancient rose trees, and cherry shrubs.  After an hour's labour with
spades, while pickets guarded all approach, an opening was disclosed
beneath the great flag-stones of a ruined building.  Here was a wide
natural corridor overhung with stalactites, and it led on into an
artificial passage which inclined gradually upwards till it came into a
mound above the level by which they entered.  Against this mound was
backed a little temple in the rear of the Palace.  A dozen men had
remained behind to cover up the entrance again.  When these heard Pango
Dooni and the others in the Palace yard they were to ride straight for a
gate which should be opened to them.

There was delay in opening the stone door which led into the temple, but
at last they forced their way.  The place was empty, and they rode
through the Palace yard, pouring out like a stream of spectral horsemen
from the altar of the temple.  Not a word was spoken as Pango Dooni and
his company galloped towards the front of the Palace.  Hundreds of the
Dakoon's soldiers and terrified people who had taken refuge in the great
court-yard, ran screaming into corners, or threw themselves in terror
upon the ground.  The walls were lined with soldiers, but not one raised
his hand to strike--so sudden was the coming of the dreaded hillsman.
They knew him by the black flag and the yellow sunburst upon it.

Presently Pango Dooni gave the wild battle-call of his tribe, and every
one of his seven hundred answered him as they rode impetuously to the
Palace front.  Two thousand soldiers of the Dakoon, under command of his
nephew, Gis-yo-Bahim, were gathered there.  They were making ready to
march out and defend the Palace.  When they saw the flag and heard the
battle-cry there was a movement backward, as though this handful of men
were an overwhelming army coming at them.  Scattered and disorderly
groups of men swayed here and there, and just before the entrance of the
Palace was a wailing group, by which stood two priests with their yellow
robes and bare shoulders, speaking to them.  From the walls the soldiers
paused from resisting the swarming herds without.

"The Dakoon is dead!" cried Tang-a-Dahit.

As if in response came the wailing death-cry of the women of the Palace
through the lattice windows, and it was taken up by the discomfited crowd
before the Palace door.

"The Lord of all the Earth, the great Dakoon, is dead."

Pango Dooni rode straight upon the group, who fled at his approach, and,
driving the priests indoors, he called aloud:

"The Dakoon is living.  Fear not!"

For a moment there was no reply, and he waved his men into place before
the Palace, and was about to ride down upon the native army, but Cumner's
Son whispered to him, and an instant after the lad was riding alone upon
the dark legions.  He reined in his horse not ten feet away from the
irregular columns.

"You know me," said he.  "I am Cumner's Son.  I rode into the hills at
the Governor's word to bring a strong man to rule you.  Why do ye stand
here idle?  My father, your friend, fights with a hundred men at
the Residency.  Choose ye between Boonda Broke, the mongrel, and Pango
Dooni, the great hillsman.  If ye choose Boonda Broke, then shall your
city be levelled to the sea, and ye shall lose your name as a people.
Choose!"

One or two voices cried out; then from the people, and presently from the
whole dark battalions, came the cry: "Long live Pango Dooni!"

Pango Dooni rode down with Tang-a-Dahit and Cushnan Di.  He bade all but
five hundred mounted men to lay down their arms.  Then he put over them a
guard of near a hundred of his own horsemen.  Gathering the men from the
rampart he did the same with these, reserving only one hundred to remain
upon the walls under guard of ten hillsmen.  Then, taking his own six
hundred men and five hundred of the Dakoon's horsemen, he bade the gates
to be opened, and with Cushnan Di marched out upon the town, leaving
Tanga-Dahit and Cumner's Son in command at the Palace.

At least four thousand besiegers lay before the walls, and, far beyond,
they could see the attack upon the Residency.

The gates of the Palace closed on the last of Pango Dooni's men, and with
a wild cry they rode like a monstrous wave upon the rebel mob.  There was
no preparation to resist the onset.  The rush was like a storm out of the
tropics, and dread of Pango Dooni's name alone was as death among them.

The hillsmen clove the besiegers through like a piece of pasteboard, and
turning, rode back again through the broken ranks, their battle-call
ringing high above the clash of steel.  Again they turned at the Palace
wall, and, gathering impetus, they rode at the detached and battered
segments of the miserable horde, and once more cut them down, then
furiously galloped towards the Residency.

They could hear one gun firing intermittently, and the roars of Boonda
Broke's men.  They did not call or cry till within a few hundred yards of
the Residency Square.  Then their battle-call broke forth, and Boonda
Broke turned to see seven hundred bearing down on his ten thousand, the
black flag with the yellow sunburst over them.

Cumner, the Governor, and McDermot heard the cry of the hillsmen, too,
and took heart.

Boonda Broke tried to divide his force, so that half of them should face
the hillsmen, and half the Residency; but there was not time enough; and
his men fought as they were attacked, those in front against Pango Dooni,
those behind against Cumner.  The hillsmen rode upon the frenzied rebels,
and were swallowed up by the great mass of them, so that they seemed
lost.  But slowly, heavily, and with ferocious hatred, they drove their
hard path on.  A head and shoulders dropped out of sight here and there;
but the hillsmen were not counting their losses that day, and when Pango
Dooni at last came near to Boonda Broke the men he had lost seemed found
again, for it was like water to the thirsty the sight of this man.

But suddenly there was a rush from the Residency Square, and thirty men,
under the command of Cumner, rode in with sabres drawn.

There was a sudden swaying movement of the shrieking mass between Boonda
Broke and Pango Dooni, and in the confusion and displacement Boonda Broke
had disappeared.

Panic and flight came after, and the hillsmen and the little garrison
were masters of the field.

"I have paid the debt of the mare," said Pango Dooni, laughing.

"No debt is paid till I see the face of my son," answered Cumner
anxiously.

Pango Dooni pointed with his sword.  "In the Palace yard," said he.

"In the Palace yard, alive?" asked Cumner.  Pango Dooni smiled.  "Let us
go and see."

Cumner wiped the sweat and dust and blood from his face, and turned to
McDermot.

"Was I right when I sent the lad?" said he proudly.  "The women and
children are safe."




VI

CONCERNING THE DAUGHTER OF CUSHNAN DI

The British flag flew half-mast from the Palace dome, and two others flew
behind it; one the black and yellow banner of the hillsmen, the other the
red and white pennant of the dead Dakoon.  In the Palace yard a thousand
men stood at attention, and at their head was Cushnan Di with fifty
hillsmen.  At the Residency another thousand men encamped, with a hundred
hillsmen and eighty English, under the command of Tang-a-Dahit and
McDermot.  By the Fountain of the Sweet Waters, which is over against the
Tomb where the Dakoon should sleep, another thousand men were patrolled,
with a hundred hillsmen, commanded by a kinsman of Pango Dooni.  Hovering
near were gloomy, wistful crowds of people, who drew close to the mystery
of the House of Death, as though the soul of a Dakoon were of more moment
than those of the thousand men who had fallen that day.  Along the line
of the Bazaar ranged another thousand men, armed only with krises, under
the command of the heir of the late Dakoon, and with these were a hundred
and fifty mounted hillsmen, watchful and deliberate.  These were also
under the command of a kinsman of Pango Dooni.

It was at this very point that the danger lay, for the nephew of the
Dakoon, Gis-yo-Bahim, was a weak but treacherous man, ill-fitted to rule;
a coward, yet ambitious; distrusted by the people, yet the heir to the
throne.  Cumner and Pango Dooni had placed him at this point for no other
reason than to give him his chance for a blow, if he dared to strike it,
at the most advantageous place in the city.  The furtive hangers-on, cut-
throats, mendicants, followers of Boonda Broke, and haters of the
English, lurked in the Bazaars, and Gis-yo-Bahim should be tempted for
the first and the last time.  Crushed now, he could never rise again.
Pango Dooni had carefully picked the hillsmen whom he had sent to the
Bazaar, and their captain was the most fearless and the wariest fighter
from the Neck of Baroob, save Pango Dooni himself.

Boonda Broke was abroad still.  He had escaped from the slaughter before
the Residency and was hidden somewhere in the city.  There were yet in
Mandakan ten thousand men who would follow him that would promise the
most, and Boonda Broke would promise the doors of Heaven as a gift to the
city, and the treasures of Solomon to the people, if it might serve his
purposes.  But all was quiet save where the mourners followed their dead
to the great funeral pyres, which were set on three little hills just
outside the city.  These wailed as they passed by.  The smoke of the
burnt powder had been carried away by a gentle wind, and in its place was
the pervasive perfume of the peach and cherry trees, and the aroma of the
gugan wood which was like cut sandal in the sun after a rain.  In the
homes of a few rich folk there was feasting also, for it mattered little
to them whether Boonda Broke or Pango Dooni ruled in Mandakan, so that
their wealth was left to them.  But hundreds of tinkling little bells
broke the stillness.  These were carried by brown bare-footed boys, who
ran lightly up and down the streets, calling softly: "Corn and tears and
wine for the dead!"  It was the custom for mourners to place in the hands
of the dead a bottle of tears and wine, and a seed of corn, as it is
written in the Proverbs of Dol:

"When thou journeyest into the Shadows, take not sweetmeats with thee,
but a seed of corn and a bottle of tears and wine; that thou mayest have
a garden in the land whither thou goest."

It was yet hardly night when the pyres were lighted on the little hills
and a warm glow was thrown over all the city, made warmer by roseate-hued
homes and the ruddy stones and velvety dust of the streets.  At midnight
the Dakoon was to be brought to the Tomb with the Blue Dome.  Now in the
Palace yard his body lay under a canopy, the flags of Mandakan and
England over his breast, twenty of his own naked body-guard stood round,
and four of his high chiefs stood at his head and four at his feet, and
little lads ran softly past, crying: "Corn and tears and wine for the
dead!"  And behind all these again were placed the dark battalions and
the hillsmen.  It went abroad through the city that Pango Dooni and
Cumner paid great homage to the dead Dakoon, and the dread of the
hillsmen grew less.

But in one house there had been no fear, for there, by the Aqueduct of
the Failing Fountain, lived Cushnan Di, a fallen chief, and his daughter
with the body like a trailing vine; for one knew the sorrow of
dispossession and defeat and the arm of a leader of men, and the other
knew Tang-a-Dahit and the soul that was in him.

This night, while yet there was an hour before the body of the dead
Dakoon should go to the Tomb with the Blue Dome, the daughter of Cushnan
Di lay watching for her door to open; for she knew what had happened in
the city, and there was one whom her spirit longed for.  An old woman sat
beside her with hands clasped about her knees.

"Dost thou hear nothing?" said a voice from the bed.  "Nothing but the
stir of the mandrake trees, beloved."

"Nay, but dost thou not hear a step?"

"Naught, child of the heaven-flowers, but a dog's foot in the moss."

"Thou art sure that my father is safe?"

"The Prince is safe, angel of the high clouds.  He led the hillsmen by
the secret way into the Palace yard."  There was silence for a moment,
and then the girl's voice said again: "Hush!  but there was a footstep--
I heard a breaking twig."

Her face lighted, and the head slightly turned towards the door.  But the
body did not stir.  It lay moveless, save where the bosom rose and fell
softly, quivering under the white robe.  A great wolf-dog raised its head
at the foot of the bed and pointed its ears, looking towards the door.

The face of the girl was beautiful.  A noble peace was upon it, and the
eyes were like lamps of dusky fire, as though they held all the strength
of the nerveless body.  The love burning in them was not the love of a
maid for a man, but that which comes after, through pain and trouble and
wisdom.  It was the look that lasts after death, the look shot forward
from the Hereafter upon a living face which has looked into the great
mystery, but has not passed behind the curtains.

There was a knock upon the door, and, in response to a summons, Tang-a-
Dahit stepped inside.  A beautiful smile settled upon the girl's face,
and her eyes brooded tenderly upon the young hillsman.

"I am here, Mami," said he.

"Friend of my heart," she answered.  "It is so long!"

Then he told her how, through Cumner's Son, he had been turned from his
visit two days before, and of the journey down, and of the fighting, and
of all that had chanced.

She smiled, and assented with her eyes--her father had told her.  "My
father knows that thou dost come to me, and he is not angry," she said.

Then she asked him what was to be the end of all, and he shook his head.
"The young are not taken into counsel," he answered, "neither I nor
Cumner's Son."

All at once her eyes brightened as though a current of light had been
suddenly sent through them.  "Cumner's Son," said she--"Cumner's Son, and
thou--the future of Mandakan is all with ye; neither with Cumner, nor
with Pango Dooni, nor with Cushnan Di.  To the old is given counsel, and
device, and wisdom, and holding; but to the young is given hope, and
vision, and action, and building, and peace."

"Cumner's Son is without," said he.  "May I fetch him to thee?"

She looked grave, and shrank a little, then answered yes.

"So strong, so brave, so young!" she said, almost under her breath, as
the young man entered.  Cumner's Son stood abashed at first to see this
angelic head, so full of light and life, like nothing he had ever seen,
and the nerveless, moveless body, like a flower with no roots.

"Thou art brave," said she, "and thy heart is without fear, for thou hast
no evil in thee.  Great things shall come to thee, and to thee," she
added, turning to Tang-a-Dahit, "but by different ways."

Tang-a-Dahit looked at her as one would look at the face of a saint; and
his fingers, tired yet with the swinging of the sword, stroked the white
coverlet of her couch gently and abstractedly.  Once or twice Cumner's
Son tried to speak, but failed; and at last all he could say was: "Thou
art good--thou art good!" and then he turned and stole quietly from the
room.

At midnight they carried the Dakoon to the resting-place of his fathers.
A thousand torches gleamed from the Palace gates through the Street of
Divers Pities, and along the Path by the Bazaar to the Tomb with the Blue
Dome.  A hundred hillsmen rode before, and a hundred behind, and between
were two thousand soldiers of Mandakan on foot and fifty of the late
Dakoon's body-guard mounted and brilliant in scarlet and gold.  Behind
the gun-carriage, which bore the body, walked the nephew of the great
Dakoon, then came a clear space, and then Pango Dooni, and Cumner, and
behind these twenty men of the artillery, at whose head rode McDermot and
Cumner's Son.

As they passed the Path by the Bazaar every eye among the hillsmen and
among the handful of British was alert.  Suddenly a savage murmuring
among the natives in the Bazaar broke into a loud snarl, and it seemed as
if a storm was about to break; but as suddenly, at a call from Cumner,
the hillsmen, the British, and a thousand native soldiers, faced the
Bazaar in perfect silence, their lances, swords, and rifles in a pose of
menace.  The whole procession stood still for a moment.  In the pause the
crowds in the Bazaar drew back, then came a loud voice calling on them to
rescue the dead Dakoon from murderers and infidels; and a wave of dark
bodies moved forward, but suddenly cowered before the malicious stillness
of the hillsmen and the British, and the wave retreated.

Cumner's Son had recognised the voice, and his eye followed its direction
with a perfect certainty.  Even as he saw the figure of Boonda Broke
disguised as a native soldier the half-breed's arm was raised, and a kris
flew from his hands, aimed at the heart of Pango Dooni.  But as the kris
flew the youth spurred his horse out of the ranks and down upon the
murderer, who sprang back into the Bazaar.  The lad fearlessly rode
straight into the Bazaar, and galloped down upon the fugitive, who
suddenly swung round to meet him with naked kris; but, as he did so, a
dog ran across his path, tripped him up, and he half fell.  Before he
could recover himself a pistol was at his head.  "March!" said the lad;
and even as ten men of the artillery rode through the crowd to rescue
their Colonel's son, he marched the murderer on.  But a sudden frenzy
possessed Boonda Broke.  He turned like lightning on the lad, and raised
his kris to throw; but a bullet was quicker, and he leaped into the air
and fell dead without a cry, the kris dropping from his hand.

As Cumner's Son came forth into the path the hills men and artillery
cheered him, the native troops took it up, and it was answered by the
people in all the thoroughfare.

Pango Dooni had also seen the kris thrown at himself, but he could not
escape it, though he half swung round.  It struck him in the shoulder,
and quivered where it struck, but he drew it out and threw it down.  A
hillsman bound up the wound, and he rode on to the Tomb.

The Dakoon was placed in his gorgeous house of death, and every man
cried: "Sleep, lord of the earth!"  Then Cumner stood up in his saddle,
and cried aloud:

"To-morrow, when the sun stands over the gold dome of the Palace, ye
shall come to hear your Dakoon speak in the hall of the Heavenly Hours."

No man knew from Cumner's speech who was to be Dakoon, yet every man in
Mandakan said in the quiet of his home that night:

"To-morrow Pango Dooni will be Dakoon.  We will be as the stubble of the
field before him.  But Pango Dooni is a strong man."




VII

THE RED PLAGUE

              "He promised he'd bring me a basket of posies,
                  A garland of lilies, a garland of roses,
               A little straw hat to set off the blue ribbons
                  That tie up my bonnie brown hair."

This was the song McDermot sang to himself as he walked up the great
court-yard of the Palace, past the lattice windows, behind which the
silent women of the late Dakoon's household still sat, passive and grief-
stricken.  How knew they what the new Dakoon would do--send them off into
the hills, or kill them?  McDermot was in a famous humour, for he had
just come from Pango Dooni, the possessor of a great secret, and he had
been paid high honour.  He looked round on the court-yard complacently,
and with an air of familiarity and possession which seemed hardly
justified by his position.  He noted how the lattices stirred as he
passed through this inner court-yard where few strangers were ever
allowed to pass, and he cocked his head vaingloriously.  He smiled at the
lizards hanging on the foundation stones, he paused to dip his finger in
the basin of a fountain, he eyed good-humouredly the beggars--old
pensioners of the late Dakoon--seated in the shade with outstretched
hands.  One of them drew his attention, a slim, cadaverous-looking wretch
who still was superior to his fellows, and who sat apart from them,
evidently by their wish as much as by his own.

McDermot was still humming the song to himself as he neared the group;
but he stopped short, as he heard the isolated beggar repeat after him in
English:

         "He promised he'd bring me a bunch of blue ribbons,
          To tie up my bonnie brown hair."

He was startled.  At first he thought it might be an Englishman in
disguise, but the brown of the beggar's face was real, and there was no
mistaking the high narrow forehead, the slim fingers, and the sloe-black
eyes.  Yet he seemed not a native of Mandakan.  McDermot was about to ask
him who he was, when there was a rattle of horse's hoofs, and Cumner's
Son galloped excitedly up the court-yard.

"Captain, captain," said he, "the Red Plague is on the city!"

McDermot staggered back in consternation.  "No, no," cried he, "it is not
so, sir!"

"The man, the first, lies at the entrance of the Path by the Bazaar.  No
one will pass near him, and all the city goes mad with fear.  What's to
be done?  What's to be done?  Is there no help for it?" the lad cried in
despair.  "I'm going to Pango Dooni.  Where is he?  In the Palace?"

McDermot shook his head mournfully, for he knew the history of this
plague, the horror of its ravages, the tribes it had destroyed.

The beggar leaned back against the cool wall and laughed.  McDermot
turned on him in his fury, and would have kicked him, but Cumner's Son,
struck by some astute intelligence in the man's look, said:

"What do you know of the Red Plague?"

Again the beggar laughed.  "Once I saved the city of Nangoon from the
plague, but they forgot me, and when I complained and in my anger went
mad at the door of the Palace, the Rajah drove me from the country.  That
was in India, where I learned to speak English; and here am I at the door
of a Palace again!"

"Can you save the city from the plague?" asked Cumner's Son, coming
closer and eagerly questioning.  "Is the man dead?" asked the beggar.

"Not when I saw him--he had just been taken."

"Good.  The city may be saved if--" he looked at Cumner's Son, "if thou
wilt save him with me.  If he be healed there is no danger; it is the
odour of death from the Red Plague which carries death abroad."

"Why do you ask this?" asked McDermot, nodding towards Cumner's Son.

The beggar shrugged his shoulders.  "That he may not do with me as did
the Rajah of Nangoon."

"He is not Dakoon," said McDermot.

"Will the young man promise me?"

"Promise what?" asked Cumner's Son.

"A mat to pray on, a house, a servant, and a loaf of bread, a bowl of
goat's milk, and a silver najil every day till I die."

"I am not Dakoon," said the lad, "but I promise for the Dakoon--he will
do this thing to save the city."

"And if thou shouldst break thy promise?"

"I keep my promises," said the lad stoutly.

"But if not, wilt thou give thy life to redeem it?"

"Yes."

The beggar laughed again and rose.  "Come," said he.

"Don't go--it's absurd!" said McDermot, laying a hand on the young man's
arm.  "The plague cannot be cured."

"Yes, I will go," answered Cumner's Son.  "I believe he speaks the truth.
Go you to Pango Dooni and tell him all."

He spurred his horse and trotted away, the beggar running beside him.
They passed out of the court-yard, and through the Gate by the Fountain
of Sweet Waters.

They had not gone far when they saw Cumner, the Governor, and six men of
the artillery riding towards them.  The Governor stopped, and asked him
where he was going.

The young man told him all.

The Colonel turned pale.  "You would do this thing!" said he dumfounded.
"Suppose this rascal," nodding towards the beggar, "speaks the truth; and
suppose that, after all, the sick man should die and--"

"Then the lad and myself would be the first to follow him," interrupted
the beggar, "and all the multitude would come after, from the babe on the
mat to the old man by the Palace gates.  But if the sick man lives--"

The Governor looked at his son partly in admiration, partly in pain, and
maybe a little of anger.

"Is there no one else?  I tell you I--"

"There is no one else; the lad or death for the city!  I can believe the
young; the old have deceived me," interposed the beggar again.

"Time passes," said Cumner's Son anxiously.  "The man may die.  You say
yes to my going, sir?" he asked his father.

The Governor frowned, and the skin of his cheeks tightened.

"Go-go, and good luck to you, boy."  He made as if to ride on, but
stopped short, flung out his hand, and grasped the hand of his son.
"God be with you, lad," said he; then his jaws closed tightly, and
he rode on.  It was easier for the lad than for him.

When he told the story to Pango Dooni the chief was silent for a moment;
then he said:

"Until we know whether it be death or life, whether Cumner's Son save the
city or lose his life for its sake, we will not call the people together
in the Hall of the Heavenly Hours.  I will send the heralds abroad, if it
be thy pleasure, Cumner."

At noon--the hour when the people had been bidden to cry, "Live, Prince
of the Everlasting Glory!"--they were moving restlessly, fearfully
through the Bazaar and the highways, and watching from a distance a
little white house, with blue curtains, where lay the man who was sick
with the Red Plague, and where watched beside his bed Cumner's Son and
the beggar of Nangoon.  No one came near.

From the time the sick man had been brought into the house, the beggar
had worked with him, giving him tinctures which he boiled with sweetmeat
called the Flower of Bambaba, while Cumner's Son rubbed an ointment into
his body.  Now and again the young man went to the window and looked out
at the lines of people hundreds of yards away, and the empty spaces where
the only life that showed was a gay-plumaged bird that drifted across the
sunlight, or a monkey that sat in the dust eating a nut.  All at once the
awe and danger of his position fell upon him.  Imagination grew high in
him in a moment--that beginning of fear and sorrow and heart-burning;
yet, too, the beginning of hope and wisdom and achievement.  For the
first time in his life that knowledge overcame him which masters us all
sometimes.  He had a desire to fly the place; he felt like running from
the house, shrieking as he went.  A sweat broke out on his forehead, his
lips clung to his teeth, his mouth was dry, his breast seemed to
contract, and breathing hurt him.

"What a fool I was!  What a fool I was to come here!" he said.

He buried his head in his arms as he leaned against the wall, and his
legs trembled.  From that moment he passed from headlong, daring, lovable
youth, to manhood; understanding, fearful, conscientious, and morally
strong.  Just as abject as was his sudden fear, so triumphant was his
reassertion of himself.

"It was the only way," he said to himself, suddenly wresting his head
from his protecting arms.  "There's a chance of life, anyhow, chance for
all of us."  He turned away to the sick man's bed, to see the beggar
watching him with cold, passive eyes and a curious, half-sneering smile.
He braced himself and met the passive, scrutinising looks firmly.  The
beggar said nothing, but motioned to him to lift the sick man upright,
while he poured some tincture down his throat, and bound the head and
neck about with saturated linen.

There came a knocking at the door.  The beggar frowned, but Cumner's Son
turned eagerly.  He had only been in this room ten hours, but it seemed
like years in which he had lived alone-alone.  But he met firmly the
passive, inquisitorial eyes of the healer of the plague, and he turned,
dropped another bar across the door, and bade the intruder to depart.

"It is I, Tang-a-Dahit.  Open!" came a loud, anxious voice.

"You may not come in."

"I am thy brother-in-blood, and my life is thine."

"Then keep it safe for those who prize it.  Go back to the Palace."

"I am not needed there.  My place is with thee."

"Go, then, to the little house by the Aqueduct."  There was silence for
a moment, and then Tang-a-Dahit said:

"Wilt thou not let me enter?"

The sudden wailing of the stricken man drowned Tang-a-Dahit's words, and
without a word Cumner's Son turned again to the victim of the Red Plague.

All day the people watched from afar, and all day long soldiers and
hillsmen drew a wide cordon of quarantine round the house.  Terror seized
the people when the sun went down, and to the watchers the suspense grew.
Ceaseless, alert, silent, they had watched and waited, and at last the
beggar knelt with his eyes fixed on the sleeper, and did not stir.  A
little way off from him stood Cumner's Son-patient, pale, worn, older by
ten years than he was three days before.

In the city dismay and misery ruled.  Boonda Broke and the dead Dakoon
were forgotten.  The people were in the presence of a monster which could
sweep them from their homes as a hail-storm scatters the hanging nests of
wild bees.  In a thousand homes little red lights of propitiation were
shining, and the sweet boolda wood was burning at a thousand shrines.
Midnight came, then the long lethargic hours after; then that moment when
all cattle of the field and beasts of the forest wake and stand upon
their feet, and lie down again, and the cocks crow, and the birds flutter
their wings, and all resign themselves to sleep once more.  It was in
this hour that the sick man opened his eyes and raised his head, as
though the mysterious influence of primitive life were rousing him.
He said nothing and did nothing, but lay back and drew in a long, good
breath of air, and afterwards fell asleep.

The beggar got to his feet.  "The man is safe," said he.

"I will go and tell them," said Cumner's Son gladly, and he made as if to
open the door.

"Not till dawn," commanded the beggar.  "Let them suffer for their sins.
We hold the knowledge of life and death in our hands."

"But my father, and Tang-a-Dahit, and Pango Dooni."

"Are they without sin?" asked the beggar scornfully.  "At dawn,
only at dawn!"

So they sat and waited till dawn.  And when the sun was well risen, the
beggar threw wide open the door of the house, and called aloud to the
horsemen far off, and Cumner's Son waved with his hand; and McDermot came
galloping to them.  He jumped from his horse and wrung the boy's hand,
then that of the beggar, then talked in broken sentences, which were
spattered by the tears in his throat.  He told Cumner's Son that his face
was as that of one who had lain in a grave, and he called aloud in a
blustering voice, and beckoned for troopers to come.  The whole line
moved down on them, horsemen and soldiers and people.

The city was saved from the Red Plague, and the people, gone mad with
joy, would have carried Cumner's Son to the Palace on their shoulders,
but he walked beside the beggar to his father's house, hillsmen in front
and English soldiers behind; and wasted and ghostly, from riding and
fighting and watching, he threw himself upon the bed in his own room, and
passed, as an eyelid blinks, into a deep sleep.

But the beggar sat down on a mat with a loaf of bread, a bowl of goat's
milk, and a long cigar which McDermot gave him, and he received idly all
who came, even to the sick man, who ere the day was done was brought to
the Residency, and, out of danger and in his right mind, lay in the shade
of a banyan tree, thinking of nothing save the joy of living.




VIII

THE CHOOSING OF THE DAKOON

It was noon again.  In the Hall of the Heavenly Hours all the chiefs and
great people of the land were gathered, and in the Palace yard without
were thousands of the people of the Bazaars and the one-storied houses.
The Bazaars were almost empty, the streets deserted.  Yet silken banners
of gorgeous colours flew above the pink terraces, and the call of the
silver horn of Mandakan, which was made first when Tubal Cain was young,
rang through the long vacant avenues.  A few hundred native troops and a
handful of hillsmen rode up and down, and at the Residency fifty men kept
guard under command of Sergeant Doolan of the artillery--his superior
officers and the rest of his comrades were at the Palace.

In the shade of a banyan tree sat the recovered victim of the Red Plague
and the beggar of Nangoon, playing a game of chuck-farthing, taught them
by Sergeant Doolan, a bowl of milk and a calabash of rice beside them,
and cigarettes in their mouths.  The beggar had a new turban and robe,
and he sat on a mat which came from the Palace.

He had gone to the Palace that morning as Colonel Cumner had commanded,
that he might receive the thanks of the Dakoon for the people of
Mandakan; but he had tired of the great place, and had come back to play
at chuck-farthing.  Already he had won everything the other possessed,
and was now playing for his dinner.  He was still chuckling over his
victory when an orderly and two troopers arrived with a riderless horse,
bearing the command of Colonel Cumner for the beggar to appear at once at
the Palace.  The beggar looked doubtfully at the orderly a moment, then
rose with an air of lassitude and languidly mounted the horse.  Before he
had got half-way to the Palace he suddenly slid from the horse and said:

"Why should I go?  The son of the great Cumner promised for the Dakoon.
He tells the truth.  Light of my soul, but truth is the greatest of all!
I go to play chuck-farthing."

So saying, he turned and ran lazily back to the Residency and sat down
beneath the banyan tree.  The orderly had no commands to bring him by
force, so he returned to the Palace, and entered it as the English
Governor was ending his speech to the people.  "We were in danger," said
Cumner, "and the exalted chief, Pango Dooni, came to save us.  He
shielded us from evil and death and the dagger of the mongrel chief,
Boonda Broke.  Children of heavenly Mandakan, Pango Dooni has lived at
variance with us, but now he is our friend.  A strong man should rule in
the Palace of Mandakan as my brother and the friend of my people.  I
speak for Pango Dooni.  For whom do you speak?"

As he had said, so said all the people in the Hall of the Heavenly Hours,
and it was taken up with shouts by the people in the Palace yard.  Pango
Dooni should be Dakoon!

Pango Dooni came forward and said: "If as ye say I have saved ye, then
will ye do after my desire, if it be right.  I am too long at variance
with this Palace to sit comfortably here.  Sometime, out of my bitter
memories, I should smite ye.  Nay, let the young, who have no wrongs to
satisfy, let the young who have dreams and visions and hopes, rule; not
the old lion of the hills, who loves too well himself and his rugged ease
of body and soul.  But if ye owe me any debt, and if ye mean me thanks,
then will ye make my son Dakoon.  For he is braver than I, and between ye
there is no feud.  Then will I be your friend, and because my son shall
be Dakoon I will harry ye no more, but bide in my hills, free and
friendly, and ready with sword and lance to stand by the faith and fealty
that I promise.  If this be your will, and the will of the great Cumner,
speak."

Cumner bowed his head in assent, and the people called in a loud voice
for Tang-a-Dahit.

The young man stepped forth, and baring his head, said:

"It is meet that the race be to the swift, to those who have proven their
faith and their swords; who have the gift for ruling, and the talent of
the sword to sustain it.  For me, if ye will hear me, I will go another
way.  I will not rule.  My father hath passed on this honour to me, but I
yield it up to one who hath saved ye from a double death, even to the
great Cumner's Son.  He rode, as ye know, through peril to Pango Dooni,
bearing the call for help, and he hath helped to save the whole land from
the Red Plague.  But for him Mandakan would be only a place of graves.
Speak, children of heavenly Mandakan, whom will ye choose?"  When
Cumner's Son stood forth he was pale and astounded before the cries of
greeting that were carried out through the Palace yard, through the
highways, and even to the banyan tree where sat the beggar of Nangoon.

"I have done nothing, I have done nothing," said he sincerely.  "It was
Pango Dooni, it was the beggar of Nangoon.  I am not fit to rule."

He turned to his father, but saw no help in his eyes for refusal.  The
lad read the whole story of his father's face, and he turned again to the
people.

"If ye will have it so, then, by the grace of God, I will do right by
this our land," said he.

A half-hour later he stood before them, wearing the costly robe of yellow
feathers and gold and perfect silk of the Dakoon of Mandakan.

"The beggar of Nangoon who saved our city, bid him come near," he said;
but the orderly stepped forward and told his story of how the beggar had
returned to his banyan tree.

"Then tell the beggar of Nangoon," said he, "that if he will not visit
me, I will visit him; and all that I promised for the Dakoon of Mandakan
I will fulfil.  Let Cushnan Di stand forth," he added, and the old man
came near.  "The city which was yours is yours, again, and all that was
taken from it shall be restored," said he.

Then he called him by his real name, and the people were amazed.

Cushnan Di, as he had been known to them, said quietly:

"If my Lord will give me place near him as general of his armies and
keeper of the gates, I will not ask that my city be restored, and I will
live near to the Palace--"

"Nay, but in the Palace," interrupted Cumner's Son, "and thy daughter
also, who hath the wisdom of heaven, that there be always truth shining
in these high places."

An hour later the Dakoon passed through the Path by the Bazaar.

"Whither goes the Dakoon?" asked a native chief of McDermot.

"To visit a dirty beggar in the Residency Square, and afterwards to the
little house of Cushnan Di," was the reply.




IX

THE PROPHET OF PEACE

The years went by.

In the cool of a summer evening a long procession of people passed
through the avenues of blossoming peach and cherry trees in Mandakan,
singing a high chant or song.  It was sacred, yet it was not solemn;
peaceful, yet not sombre; rather gentle, aspiring, and clear.  The people
were not of the city alone, but they had been gathered from all parts of
the land--many thousands, who were now come on a pilgrimage to Mandakan.

At the head of the procession was a tall, lithe figure, whose face shone,
and whose look was at once that of authority and love.  Three years'
labour had given him these followers and many others.  His dreams were
coming true.

"Fighting, fighting, naught but fighting for honour and glory and homes
and kine, but naught for love, and naught that there may be peace."--This
was no longer true; for the sword of the young Dakoon was ever lifted for
love and for peace.

The great procession stopped near a little house by the Aqueduct of the
Failing Fountain, and spread round it, and the leader stepped forward to
the door of the little house and entered.  A silence fell upon the crowd,
for they were to look upon the face of a dying girl, who chose to dwell
in her little home rather than in a palace.

She was carried forth on a litter, and set down, and the long procession
passed by her as she lay.  She smiled at all an ineffable smile of peace,
and her eyes had in them the light of a good day drawing to its close.
Only once did she speak, and that was when all had passed, and a fine
troop of horsemen came riding up.

This was the Dakoon of Mandakan and his retinue.  When he dismounted and
came to her, and bent over her, he said something in a low tone for her
ear alone, and she smiled at him, and whispered the one word "Peace!"

Then the Dakoon, who once was known only as Cumner's Son, turned and
embraced the prophet Sandoni, as he was now called, though once he had
been called Tang-a-Dahit the hillsman.

"What message shall I bear thy father?" asked the Dakoon, after they had
talked a while.

Sandoni told him, and then the Dakoon said:

"Thy father and mine, who are gone to settle a wild tribe of the hills in
a peaceful city, send thee a message."  And he held up his arm, where a
bracelet shone.

The Prophet read thereon the Sacred Countersign of the hillsmen.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Ate some coffee-beans and drank some cold water
His courtesy was not on the same expansive level as his vanity






CUMNER'S SON AND OTHER SOUTH SEA FOLK

(AUSTRALIANA)

by Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.


THE HIGH COURT OF BUDGERY-GAR
AN EPIC IN YELLOW
DIBBS, R.N.
A LITTLE MASQUERADE
DERELICT
OLD ROSES
MY WIFE'S LOVERS
THE STRANGERS' HUT



THE HIGH COURT OF BUDGERY-GAR

We were camped on the edge of a billabong.  Barlas was kneading a damper,
Drysdale was tenderly packing coals about the billy to make the water
boil, and I was cooking the chops.  The hobbled horses were picking the
grass and the old-man salt-bush near, and Bimbi, the black boy, was
gathering twigs and bark for the fire.  That is the order of merit--
Barlas, Drysdale, myself, the horses and Bimbi.  Then comes the Cadi all
by himself.  He is given an isolated and indolent position, because he
was our guest and also because, in a way, he represented the Government.
And though bushmen do not believe much in a far-off Government--even
though they say when protesting against a bad Land Law, "And your
Petitioners will ever Pray," and all that kind of yabber-yabber--they
give its representative the lazy side of the fire and a fig of the best
tobacco when he bails up a camp as the Cadi did ours.  Stewart Ruttan,
the Cadi, was the new magistrate at Windowie and Gilgan, which stand for
a huge section of the Carpentaria country.  He was now on his way to
Gilgan to try some cases there.  He was a new chum, though he had lived
in Australia for years.  As Barlas said, he'd been kept in a cultivation-
paddock in Sydney and Brisbane; and he was now going to take the business
of justice out of the hands of Heaven and its trusted agents the bushmen,
and reduce the land to the peace of the Beatitudes by the imposing reign
of law and summary judgments.  Barlas had just said as much, though in
different language.

I knew by the way that Barlas dropped the damper on the hot ashes and
swung round on his heel that he was in a bad temper.  "And so you think,
Cadi," said he, "that we squatters and bushmen are a strong, murderous
lot; that we hunt down the Myalls--[Aborigines]--like kangaroos or
dingoes, and unrighteously take justice in our own hands instead of
handing it over to you?"

"I think," said the Cadi, "that individual and private revenge should
not take the place of the Courts of Law.  If the blacks commit
depredations--"

"Depredations!" interjected Drysdale with sharp scorn.

"If they commit depredations and crimes," the Cadi continued, "they
should be captured as criminals are captured elsewhere and be brought in
and tried.  In that way respect would be shown to British law and--"
here he hesitated slightly, for Barlas's face was not pleasant to see--
"and the statutes."

But Barlas's voice was almost compassionate as he said: "Cadi, every man
to his trade, and you've got yours.  But you haven't learned yet that
this isn't Brisbane or Melbourne.  You haven't stopped to consider how
many police would be necessary for this immense area of country if you
are really to be of any use.  And see here,"--his face grew grim and
dark, "you don't know what it is to wait for the law to set things right
in this Never Never Land.  There isn't a man in the Carpentaria and Port
Darwin country but has lost a friend by the cowardly crack of a waddy in
the dead of night or a spear from behind a tree.  Never any fair
fighting, but red slaughter and murder--curse their black hearts!"
Barlas gulped down what seemed very like a sob.

Drysdale and I knew how strongly Barlas felt.  He had been engaged to be
married to a girl on the Daly River, and a week before the wedding she
and her mother and her two brothers were butchered by blacks whom they
had often befriended and fed.  We knew what had turned Barlas's hair grey
and spoiled his life.

Drysdale took up the strain: "Yes, Cadi, you've got the true missionary
gospel, the kind of yabber they fire at each other over tea and buns at
Darling Point and Toorak--all about the poor native and the bad, bad men
who don't put peas in their guns, and do sometimes get an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth.  .  .  .  Come here, Bimbi."  Bimbi came.

"Yes, master," Bimbi said.

"You kill that black-fellow mother belonging to you?"

"Yes, master."

"Yes," Drysdale continued, "Bimbi went out with a police expedition
against his own tribe, and himself cut his own mother's head off.  As a
race, as a family, the blacks have no loyalty.  They will track their own
brothers down for the whites as ruthlessly as they track down the whites.
As a race they are treacherous and vile, though as individuals they may
have good points."

"No, Cadi," once more added Barlas, "we can get along very well without
your consolidated statutes or High Courts or Low Courts just yet.  They
are too slow.  Leave the black devils to us.  You can never prove
anything against them in a court of law.  We've tried that.  Tribal
punishment is the only proper thing for individual crime.  That is what
the nations practise in the islands of the South Seas.  A trader or a
Government official is killed.  Then a man-of-war sweeps a native village
out of existence with Hotchkiss guns.  Cadi, we like you; but we say to
you, Go back to your cultivation-paddock at Brisbane, and marry a wife
and beget children before the Lord, and feed on the Government, and let
us work out our own salvation.  We'll preserve British justice and the
statutes, too.  .  .  .  There, the damper, as Bimbi would say, is
'corbon budgery', and your chop is done to a turn, Cadi.  And now let's
talk of something that doesn't leave a bad taste in the mouth."

The Cadi undoubtedly was more at home with reminiscences of nights at the
Queensland Club and moonlight picnics at lovely Humpy Bong and champagne
spreads in a Government launch than at dispensing law in the Carpentaria
district.  And he had eager listeners.  Drysdale's open-mouthed, admiring
"My word!" as he puffed his pipe, his back against an ironbark tree, was
most eloquent of long banishment from the delights of the "cultivation-
paddock"; and Barlas nodded frequently his approval, and was less grim
than usual.  Yet, peaceful as we were, it might have puzzled a stranger
to see that all of us were armed--armed in this tenantless, lonely
wilderness!  Lonely and tenantless enough it seemed.  There was the range
of the Copper-mine hills to the south, lighted by the wan moon; and
between and to the west a rough scrub country, desolating beyond words,
and where even edible snakes would be scarce; spots of dead-finish,
gidya, and brigalow-bush to north and east, and in the trees by the
billabong the cry of the cockatoo and the laughing-jackass.  It was
lonely, but surely it was safe.  Yes, perhaps it was safe!

It was late when we turned in, our heads upon our saddles, for the Cadi
had been more than amusing--he had been confidential, and some political
characters were roughly overhauled for our benefit, while so-called
Society did not escape flagellation.  Next morning the Cadi left us.  He
gave us his camps--Bora Bora, Budgery-Gar, Wintelliga, and Gilgan--since
we were to go in his direction also soon.  He turned round in his saddle
as he rode off, and said gaily: "Gentlemen, I hope you'll always help to
uphold the majesty of the law as nobly as you have sustained its envoy
from your swags."

Drysdale and I waved our hands to him, but Barlas muttered something
between his teeth.  We had two days of cattle-hunting in the Copper-mine
hills, and then we started westward, in the tracks of the Cadi, to make
for Barlas's station.  The second day we camped at Bora Bora Creek.  We
had just hobbled the horses, and were about to build a fire, when Bimbi
came running to us.  "Master, master," he said to Drysdale, "that fellow
Cadi yarraman mumkull over there.  Plenty myall mandowie!"--(" Master,
master, the Cadi's horse is dead over there, and there are plenty of
black fellows' tracks about.")

We found the horse pierced with spears.  The Cadi had evidently mounted
and tried to get away.  And soon, by a clump of the stay-a-while bush,
we discovered, alas!  the late companion of our camp-fire.  He was gashed
from head to foot, and naked.

We buried him beneath a rustling sandal-tree, and on its bark carved the
words:

"Sacred to the memory of Stewart Ruttan."

And beneath, Barlas added the following:

"The Cadi sleeps.  The Law regards him not."

In a pocket of the Cadi's coat, which lay near, we found the picture of a
pretty girl.  On it was written:

"To dearest Stewart, from Alice."

Barlas's face was stern and drawn.  He looked at us from under his shaggy
brows.

"There's a Court to be opened," he said.  "Do you stand for law or
justice?"

"For justice," we replied.

Four days later in a ravine at Budgery-Gar a big camp of blacks were
feasting.  With loathsome pantomime they were re-enacting the murders
they had committed within the past few days; murders of innocent white
women and children, and good men and true--among them the Cadi, God help
him!  Great fires were burning in the centre of the camp, and the bodies
of the black devils writhed with hideous colour in the glare.  Effigies
of murdered whites were speared and mangled with brutal cries, and then
black women of the camp were brought out, and mockeries of unnameable
horrors were performed.  Hell had emptied forth its carrion.

But twelve bitter white men looked down upon this scene from the scrub
and rocks above, and their teeth were set.  Barlas, their leader, turned
to them and said: "This court is open.  Are you ready?"

The click of twelve rifles was the reply.

When these twelve white jurymen rode away from the ravine there was not
one but believed that justice had been done by the High Court of Budgery-
Gar.






AN EPIC IN YELLOW

There was a culminating growth of irritation on board the Merrie Monarch.
The Captain was markedly fitful and, to a layman's eye, unreliable at the
helm; the Hon. Skye Terryer was smoking violently, and the Newspaper
Correspondent--representing an American syndicate--chewed his cigar in
silence.

"Yes," Gregson, the Member of Parliament, continued, "if I had my way I'd
muster every mob of Chinamen in Australia, I'd have one thundering big
roundup, and into the Pacific and the Indian Sea they'd go, to the crack
of a stock-whip or of something more convincing."  The Hon. Skye Terryer
was in agreement with the Squatting Member in the principle of his
argument if not in the violence of his remedies.  He was a young
travelling Englishman; one of that class who are Radicals at twenty,
Independents at thirty, and Conservatives at forty.  He had not yet
reached the intermediate stage.  He saw in this madcap Radical Member one
of the crude but strong expressions of advanced civilisation.  He had the
noble ideal of Australia as a land trodden only by the Caucasian.  The
Correspondent, much to our surprise, had by occasional interjections at
the beginning of the discussion showed that he was not antipathetic to
Mongolian immigration.  The Captain?

"Yes, I'd give 'em Botany Bay, my word!" added the Member as an anti-
climax.

The Captain let go the helm with a suddenness which took our breath away,
apparently regardless that we were going straight as an arrow on the
Island of Pentecost, the shore of which, in its topaz and emerald tints,
was pretty enough to look at but not to attack, end on.  He pushed both
hands down deep into his pockets and squared himself for war.

"Gregson," he said, "that kind of talk may be good enough for Parliament
and for labour meetings, but it is not proper diet for the Merrie
Monarch.  It's a kind of political gospel that's no better than the creed
of the Malay who runs amuck.  God's Providence--where would your Port
Darwin Country have been without the Chinaman?  What would have come to
tropical agriculture in North Queensland if it had not been for the same?
And what would all your cities do for vegetables to eat and clean shirts
to their backs if it was not for the Chinkie?  As for their morals, look
at the police records of any well-regulated city where they are--well-
regulated, mind you, not like San Francisco!  I pity the morals of a man
and the stupidity of him and the benightedness of him that would drive
the Chinaman out at the point of the bayonet or by the crack of a rifle.
I pity that man, and--and I wash my hands of him."

And having said all this with a strong Scotch accent the Captain
opportunely turned to his duty and prevented us from trying conclusions
with the walls of a precipice, over which fell silver streams of water
like giant ropes up which the Naiads might climb to the balmy enclosures
where the Dryads dwelt.  The beauty of the scene was but a mechanical
impression, to be remembered afterward when thousands of miles away, for
the American Correspondent now at last lit his cigar and took up the
strain.

"Say, the Captain's right," he said.  "You English are awful prigs and
hypocrites, politically; as selfish a lot as you'll find on the face of
the globe.  But in this matter of the Chinaman there isn't any difference
between a man from Oregon and one from Sydney, only the Oregonian isn't
a prig and a hypocrite; he's only a brute, a bragging, hard-handed brute.
He got the Chinaman to build his railways--he couldn't get any other race
to do it--same fix as the planter in North Queensland with the
Polynesian; and to serve him in pioneer times and open up the country,
and when that was done he turns round and says: 'Out you go, you Chinkie
--out you go and out you stay!  We're going to reap this harvest all
alone; we're going to Chicago you clean off the table!'  And Washington,
the Home of Freedom and Tammany Tigers, shoves a prohibitive Bill through
the Legislature, as Parkes did in Sydney; only Parkes talked a lot of
Sunday-school business about the solidarity of the British race, and
Australia for the Australians, and all that patter; and the Oregonian
showed his dirty palm of selfishness straight out, and didn't blush
either.  'Give 'em Botany Bay!  Give'em the stock-whip and the rifle!'
That's a nice gospel for the Anglo-Saxon dispensation."

The suddenness of the attack overwhelmed the Member, but he was choking
with wrath.  Had he not stone-walled in the New South Wales Parliament
for nine hours, and been placed on a Royal Commission for that service?
"My word!"  But the box of cigars was here amiably passed, and what
seemed like a series of international complications was stayed.  It was
perhaps fortunate, however, that at this moment a new interest sprang up.
We were rounding a lofty headland crowned with groves of cocoa-palms and
bananas and with trailing skirts of flowers and vines, when we saw ahead
of us a pretty little bay, and on the shore a human being plainly not a
Polynesian.  Up the hillside that rose suddenly from the beach was a
thatched dwelling, not built open all round like most native houses, and
apparently having but one doorway.  In front of the house, and near it,
was a tall staff, and on the staff the British Flag.

In a moment we, too, had the British Flag flying at our mast-head.

Long ago I ceased to wonder at coincidences, still I confess I was
scarcely prepared for the Correspondent's exclamation, as, taking the
marine glass from his eyes, he said: "Well, I'm decalogued if it ain't
a Chinaman!"

It certainly was so.  Here on the Island of Pentecost, in the New
Hebrides, was a Celestial washing clothes on the beach as much at home
as though he were in Tacoma or Cooktown.  The Member's "My oath!"
Skye Terryer's "Ah!" and the Captain's chuckle were as weighty with
importance as though the whole question of Chinese immigration were now
to be settled.  As we hove-to and dropped anchor, a boat was pushed out
into the surf by a man who had hurriedly come down the beach from the
house.  In a moment or two he was alongside.  An English face and an
English voice greeted us, and in the doorway of the house were an English
woman and her child.

What pleasure this meeting gave to us and to the trader--for such he was,
those only can know who have sailed these Southern Seas through long and
nerveless tropic days, and have lived, as this man did with his wife and
child, for months never seeing a white face, and ever in danger of an
attack from cannibal tribes, who, when apparently most disposed to amity,
are really planning a massacre.  Yet with that instinct of gain so strong
in the Anglo-Saxon, this trader had dared the worst for the chance of
making money quickly and plentifully by the sale of copra to occasional
vessels.  The Chinaman had come with the trader from Queensland, and we
were assured was "as good as gold."  If colour counted, he looked it.  At
this the pro-Mongolian magnanimously forbore to show any signs of
triumph.  The Correspondent, on the contrary, turned to the Chinaman and
began chaffing him; he continued it as the others, save myself, passed on
towards the house.

This was the close of the dialogue: "Well, John, how are you getting on?"

"Welly good," was John's reply; "thirletty dollars a month, and learn the
plan of salvation."

The Correspondent laughed.

"Well, you good Englishman, John?  You like British flag?  You fight?"

And John, blinking jaundicely, replied: "John allee samee Linglishman-
muchee fightee blimeby--nigger no eatee China boy;" and he chuckled.

A day and a night we lingered in the little Bay of Vivi, and then we left
it behind; each of us, however, watching till we could see the house on
the hillside and the flag no longer, and one at least wondering if that
secret passage into the hills from the palm-thatched home would ever be
used as the white dwellers fled for their lives.

We had promised that, if we came near Pentecost again on our cruise, we
would spend another idle day in the pretty bay.  Two months passed and
then we kept our word.  As we rounded the lofty headland the
Correspondent said: "Say, I'm hankering after that baby!"  But the
Captain at the moment hoarsely cried: "God's love!  but where are the
house and the flag?"

There was no house and there was no flag above the Bay of Vivi.

Ten minutes afterwards we stood beside the flag-staff, and at our feet
lay a moaning, mangled figure.  It was the Chinaman, and over his gashed
misery were drawn the folds of the flag that had flown on the staff.
What horror we feared for those who were not to be seen needs no telling
here.

As for the Chinaman, it was as he said; the cannibals would not "eatee
Chinee boy."  They were fastidious.  They had left him, disdaining even
to take his head for a trophy.

Hours after, on board the Merrie Monarch, we learned in fragments the sad
story.  It was John Chinaman that covered the retreat of the wife and
child into the hills when the husband had fallen.

The last words that the dying Chinkie said were these: "Blitish flag
wellee good thing keepee China boy walm; plentee good thing China boy
sleepee in all a-time."

So it was.  With rude rites and reverent hands, we lowered him to the
deep from the decks of the Merrie Monarch, and round him was that flag
under which he had fought for English woman and English child so
valorously.

              "And he went like a warrior into his rest
               With the Union Jack around him."

That was the paraphrasing epitaph the Correspondent wrote for him in the
pretty Bay of Vivi, and when he read it, we all drank in silence to the
memory of "a Chinkie."

We found the mother and the child on the other side of the island ere a
week had passed, and bore them away in safety.  They speak to-day of a
member of a despised race, as one who showed

              "The constant service of the antique world."






DIBBS, R.N.

"Now listen to me, Neddie Dibbs," she said, as she bounced the ball
lightly on her tennis-racket, "you are very precipitate.  It's only four
weeks since you were court-martialed, and you escaped being reduced by
the very closest shave; and yet you come and make love to me, and want
me to marry you.  You don't lack confidence, certainly."

Commander Dibbs, R.N.  was hurt; but he did not become dramatic.  He felt
the point of his torpedo-cut beard, and smiled up pluckily at her--she
was much taller than he.

"I know the thing went against me rather," he said, but it was all wrong,
I assure you.  It's cheeky, of course, to come to you like this so soon
after, but for two years I've been looking forward up there in the China
Sea to meeting you again.  You don't know what a beast of a station it
is--besides, I didn't think you'd believe the charge."

"The charge was that you had endangered the safety of one of her
Majesty's cruisers by trying to run through an unexplored opening
in the Barrier Reef.  Was that it?"

"That was it."

"And you didn't endanger her?"

"Yes, I did, but not wilfully, of course, nor yet stupidly."

"I read the evidence, and, frankly, it looked like stupidity."

"I haven't been called stupid usually, have I"

"No.  I've heard you called many things, but never that."

Every inch of his five-feet-five was pluck.  He could take her shots
broadside, and laugh while he winced.  "You've heard me called a good
many things not complimentary, I suppose, for I know I'm not much to look
at, and I've an edge to my tongue sometimes.  What is the worst thing you
ever said of me?" he added a little bitterly.

"What I say to you now--though, by the way, I've never said it before--
that your self-confidence is appalling.  Don't you know that I'm very
popular, that they say I'm clever, and that I'm a tall, good-looking
girl?"

She looked down at him, and said it with such a delightful naivete,
through which a tone of raillery ran, that it did not sound as it may
read.  She knew her full value, but no one had ever accused her of
vanity--she was simply the most charming, outspoken girl in the biggest
city of Australia.

"Yes, I know all that," he replied with an honest laugh.  "When you were
a little child,--according to your mother, and were told you were not
good, you said: 'No, I'm not good--I'm only beautiful.'"

Dibbs had a ready tongue, and nothing else he said at the moment could
have had so good an effect.  She laughed softly and merrily.  "You have
awkward little corners in your talk at times.  I wonder they didn't
reduce you at the court-martial.  You were rather keen with your words
once or twice there."

A faint flush ran over Dibbs's face, but he smiled through it, and didn't
give away an inch of self-possession.  "If the board had been women, I'd
have been reduced right enough--women don't go by evidence, but by their
feelings; they don't know what justice really is, though by nature
they've some undisciplined generosity."

"There again you are foolish.  I'm a woman.  Now why do you say such
things to me, especially when--when you are aspiring!  Properly, I ought
to punish you.  But why did you say those sharp things at your trial?
They probably told against you."

"I said them because I felt them, and I hate flummery and thick-
headedness.  I was as respectful as I could be; but there were things
about the trial I didn't like--irregular things, which the Admiral
himself, who knows his business, set right."

"I remember the Admiral said there were points about the case that he
couldn't quite understand, but that they could only go by such testimony
as they had."

"Exactly," he said sententiously.

She wheeled softly on him, and looked him full in the eyes.  "What other
testimony was there to offer?"

"We are getting a long way from our starting-point," he answered
evasively.  "We were talking of a more serious matter."

"But a matter with which this very thing has to do, Neddie Dibbs.
There's a mystery somewhere.  I've asked Archie; but he won't say a word
about it, except that he doesn't think you were to blame."

"Your brother is a cautious fellow."  Then, hurriedly: "He is quite right
to express no opinion as to any mystery.  Least said soonest mended."

"You mean that it is proper not to discuss professional matters in
society?"

"That's it."  A change had passed over Dibbs's face--it was slightly
paler, but his voice was genial and inconsequential.

"Come and sit down at the Point," she said.

They went to a cliff which ran out from one corner of the garden, and sat
down on a bench.  Before them stretched the harbour, dotted with sails;
men-of-war lay at anchor, among them the little Ruby, Commander Dibbs's
cruiser.  Pleasure-steamers went hurrying along to many shady harbours;
a tall-masted schooner rode grandly in between the Heads, balanced with
foam; and a beach beneath them shone like opal: it was a handsome sight.

For a time they were silent.  At last he said: "I know I haven't much to
recommend me.  I'm a little beggar--nothing to look at; I'm pretty poor;
I've had no influence to push me on; and just at the critical point in my
career--when I was expecting promotion--I get this set-back, and lose
your good opinion, which is more to me, though I say it bluntly like a
sailor, than the praise of all the Lords of the Admiralty, if it could
be got.  You see, I always was ambitious; I was certain I'd be a captain;
I swore I'd be an admiral one day; and I fell in love with the best girl
in the world, and said I'd not give up thinking I would marry her until
and unless I saw her wearing another man's name--and I don't know that
I should even then."

"Now that sounds complicated--or wicked," she said, her face turned away
from him.

"Believe me, it is not complicated; and men marry widows sometimes."

"You are shocking," she said, turning on him with a flush to her cheek
and an angry glitter in her eye.  "How dare you speak so cold-bloodedly
and thoughtlessly?"

"I am not cold-blooded or thoughtless, nor yet shocking.  I only speak
what is in my mind with my usual crudeness.  I know it sounds insolent of
me, but, after all, it is only being bold with the woman for whom--half-
disgraced, insignificant, but unquenchable fellow as I am--I'd do as much
as, and, maybe, dare more for than any one of the men who would marry her
if they could."

"I like ambitious men," she said relenting, and meditatively pushing
the grass with her tennis-racket; "but ambition isn't everything, is it?
There must be some kind of fulfilment to turn it into capital, as it
were.  Don't let me hurt your feelings, but you haven't done a great
deal yet, have you?"

"No, I haven't.  There must be occasion.  The chance to do something big
may start up any time, however.  You never can tell when things will come
your way.  You've got to be ready, that's all."

"You are very confident."

"You'll call me a prig directly, perhaps, but I can't help that.  I've
said things to you that I've never said to any one in the world, and I
don't regret saying them."

She looked at him earnestly.  She had never been made love to in this
fashion.  There was no sentimentalism in it, only straightforward
feeling, forceful, yet gentle.  She knew he was aware that the Admiral of
his squadron had paid, and was paying, court to her; that a titled aide-
de-camp at Government House was conspicuously attentive; that one of the
richest squatters in the country was ready to make astonishing
settlements at any moment; and that there was not a young man of note
acquainted with her who did not offer her gallant service-in the ball-
room.  She smiled as she thought of it.  He was certainly not large, but
no finer head was ever set on a man's shoulders, powerful, strongly
outlined, nobly balanced.  The eyes were everywhere; searching,
indomitable, kind.  It was a head for a sculptor.  Ambition became it
well.  She had studied that head from every stand-point, and had had the
keenest delight in talking to the man.  But, as he said, that was two
years before, and he had had bad luck since then.

She suddenly put this question to him: "Tell me all the truth about that
accident to the Ruby.  You have been hiding something.  The Admiral was
right, I know.  Some evidence was not forthcoming that would have thrown
a different light on the affair."

"I can tell you nothing," he promptly replied.

"I shall find out one day," she said.

"I hope not; though I'm grateful that you wish to do so."

He rose hurriedly to his feet; he was looking at the harbour below.
He raised the field-glass he had carried from the veranda to his eyes.
He was watching a yacht making across the bay towards them.

She spoke again.  "You are going again to-morrow?"

"Yes; all the ships of the squadron but one get away."

"How long shall you be gone?"

"Six months at least----  Great God!"

He had not taken the glasses from his eyes as they talked, but had
watched the yacht as she came on to get under the lee of the high shore
at their right.  He had noticed that one of those sudden fierce winds,
called Southerly Busters, was sweeping down towards the craft, and would
catch it when it came round sharp, as it must do.  He recognised the boat
also.  It belonged to Laura Harman's father, and her brother Archie was
in it.  The gale caught the yacht as Dibbs foresaw, and swamped her.
He dropped the glass, cried to the girl to follow, and in a minute had
scrambled down the cliff, and thrown off most of his things.  He had
launched a skiff by the time the girl reached the shore.  She got in
without a word.  She was deadly pale, but full of nerve.  They rowed hard
to where they could see two men clinging to the yacht; there had been
three in it.  The two men were not hauled in, for the gale was blowing
too hard, but they clung to the rescuing skiff.  The girl's brother was
not to be seen.  Instantly Dibbs dived under the yacht.  It seemed an
incredible time before he reappeared; but when he did, he had a body with
him.  Blood was coming from his nose, the strain of holding his breath
had been so great.  It was impossible to get the insensible body into the
skiff.  He grasped the side, and held the boy's head up.  The girl rowed
hard, but made little headway.  Other rescue boats arrived presently,
however, and they were all got to shore safely.

Lieutenant Archie Harman did not die.  Animation was restored after great
difficulty, but he did not sail away with the Ruby next morning to the
Polynesian Islands.  Another man took his place.

Little was said between Commander Dibbs and Laura Harman at parting late
that night.  She came from her brother's bedside and laid her hand upon
his arm.  "It is good," she said, "for a man to be brave as well as
ambitious.  You are sure to succeed; and I shall be proud of you, for--
for you saved my brother's life, you see," she timidly added; and she
was not often timid.

                    .........................

Five months after, when the Ruby was lying with the flag-ship off one
of the Marshall Islands, a packet of letters was brought from Fiji by a
trading-schooner.  One was for Commander Dibbs.  It said in brief: "You
saved my brother's life--that was brave.  You saved his honour--that was
noble.  He has told me all.  He will resign and clear you when the
Admiral returns.  You are a good man."

"He ought to be kicked," Dibbs said to himself.  "Did the cowardly beggar
think I did it for him--blast him!"

He raged inwardly; but he soon had something else to think of, for a
hurricane came down on them as they lay in a trap of coral with only one
outlet, which the Ruby had surveyed that day.  He took his ship out
gallantly, but the flag-ship dare not attempt it--Dibbs was the only man
who knew the passage thoroughly.  He managed to land on the shore below
the harbour, and then, with a rope round him, essayed to reach the flag-
ship from the beach.  It was a wild chance, but he got there badly
battered.  Still, he took her with her Admiral out to the open safely.

That was how Dibbs became captain of a great iron-clad.

Archie Harman did not resign; Dibbs would not let him.  Only Archie's
sister knew that he was responsible for the accident to the Ruby, which
nearly cost Dibbs his reputation; for he and Dibbs had surveyed the
passage in the Barrier Reef when serving on another ship, and he had
neglected instructions and wrongly and carelessly interpreted the chart.
And Dibbs had held his tongue.

One evening Laura Harman said to Captain Dibbs: "Which would you rather
be--Admiral of the Fleet or my husband?"  Her hand was on his arm at the
time.

He looked up at her proudly, and laughed slyly.  "I mean to be both, dear
girl."

"You have an incurable ambition," she said.






A LITTLE MASQUERADE

"Oh, nothing matters," she said, with a soft, ironical smile, as she
tossed a bit of sugar to the cockatoo.

"Quite so," was his reply, and he carefully gathered in a loose leaf of
his cigar.  Then, after a pause: "And yet, why so?  It's a very pretty
world one way and another."

"Yes, it's a pretty world at times."

At that moment they were both looking out over a part of the world known
as the Nindobar Plains, and it was handsome to the eye.  As far as could
be seen was a carpet of flowers under a soft sunset.  The homestead by
which they sat was in a wilderness of blossoms.  To the left was a high
rose-coloured hill, solemn and mysterious; to the right--afar off--
a forest of gum-trees, pink and purple against the horizon.  At their
feet, beyond the veranda, was a garden joyously brilliant, and bright-
plumaged birds flitted here and there.

The two looked out for a long time, then, as if by a mutual impulse,
suddenly turned their eyes on each other.  They smiled, and, somehow,
that smile was not delightful to see.  The girl said presently: "It is
all on the surface."

Jack Sherman gave a little click of the tongue peculiar to him, and said:
"You mean that the beautiful birds have dreadful voices; that the flowers
are scentless; that the leaves of the trees are all on edge and give no
shade; that where that beautiful carpet of blossoms is there was a
blazing quartz plain six months ago, and there's likely to be the same
again; that, in brief, it's pretty, but hollow."  He made a slight
fantastic gesture, as though mocking himself for so long a speech, and
added: "Really, I didn't prepare this little oration."

She nodded, and then said: "Oh, it's not so hollow,--you would not call
it that exactly, but it's unsatisfactory."

"You have lost your illusions."

"And before that occurred you had lost yours."

"Do I betray it, then?"  He laughed, not at all bitterly, yet not with
cheerfulness.

"And do you think that you have such acuteness, then, and I--"  Nellie
Hayden paused, raised her eyebrows a little coldly, and let the cockatoo
bite her finger.

"I did not mean to be egotistical.  The fact is I live my life alone, and
I was interested for the moment to know how I appeared to others.  You
and I have been tolerably candid with each other since we met, for the
first time, three days ago; I knew you would not hesitate to say what was
in your mind, and I asked out of honest curiosity.  One fancies one hides
one's self, and yet--you see!"

"Do you find it pleasant, then, to be candid and free with some one?....
Why with me?"  She looked him frankly in the eyes.

"Well, to be more candid.  You and I know the world very well, I fancy.
You were educated in Europe, travelled, enjoyed--and suffered."  The girl
did not even blink, but went on looking at him steadily.  "We have both
had our hour with the world; have learned many sides of the game.  We
haven't come out of it without scars of one kind or another.  Knowledge
of the kind is expensive."

"You wanted to say all that to me the first evening we met, didn't you?"
There was a smile of gentle amusement on her face.

"I did.  From the moment I saw you I knew that we could say many things
to each other 'without pre liminaries.'  To be able to do that is a great
deal."

"It is a relief to say things, isn't it?"

"It is better than writing them, though that is pleasant, after its
kind."

"I have never tried writing--as we talk.  There's a good deal of vanity
at the bottom of it though, I believe."

"Of course.  But vanity is a kind of virtue, too."  He leaned over
towards her, dropping his arms on his knees and holding her look.
"I am very glad that I met you.  I intended only staying here over night,
but--"

"But I interested you in a way--you see, I am vain enough to think that.
Well, you also interested me, and I urged my aunt to press you to stay.
It has been very pleasant, and when you go it will be very humdrum again;
our conversation, mustering, rounding-up, bullocks, and rabbits.  That,
of course, is engrossing in a way, but not for long at a time."

He did not stir, but went on looking at her.  "Yes, I believe it has been
pleasant for you, else it had not been so pleasant for me.  Honestly, I
don't believe I shall ever get you out of my mind."

"That is either slightly rude or badly expressed," she said.  "Do you
wish, then, to get me out of your mind?"

"No, no----  You are very keen.  I wish to remember you always.  But what
I felt at the moment was this.  There are memories which are always
passive and delightful.  We have no wish to live the scenes of which they
are over again, the reflection is enough.  There are others which cause
us to wish the scenes back again, with a kind of hunger; and yet they
won't or can't come back.  I wondered of what class this memory would
be."

The girl flushed ever so slightly, and her fingers clasped a little
nervously, but she was calm.  Her voice was even; it had, indeed, a
little thrilling ring of energy.  "You are wonderfully daring," she
replied, "to say that to me.  To a school-girl it might mean so much: to
me--!"  She shook her head at him reprovingly.

He was not in the least piqued.  "I was absolutely honest in that.
I said nothing but what I felt.  I would give very much to feel confident
one way or the other--forgive me, for what seems incredible egotism.  If
I were five years younger I should have said instantly that the memory
would be one--"

"Which would disturb you, make you restless, cause you to neglect your
work, fill you with regret; and yet all too late--isn't that it?"  She
laughed lightly and gave a lump of sugar to the cockatoo.

"You read me accurately.  But why touch your words with satire?"

"I believe I read you better than you read me.  I didn't mean to be
satirical.  Don't you know that what often seems irony directed towards
others is in reality dealt out to ourselves?  Such irony as was in my
voice was for myself."

"And why for yourself?" he asked quietly, his eyes full of interest.
He was cutting the end of a fresh cigar.  "Was it"--he was about to
strike a match, but paused suddenly--"was it because you had thought the
same thing?"

She looked for a moment as though she would read him through and through;
as though, in spite of all their candour, there was some lingering
uncertainty as to his perfect straightforwardness; then, as if satisfied,
she said at last: "Yes, but with a difference.  I have no doubt which
memory it will be.  You will not wish to be again on the plains of
Nindobar."

"And you," he said musingly, "you will not wish me here?"  There was no
real vanity in the question.  He was wondering how little we can be sure
of what we shall feel to-morrow from what we feel to-day.  Besides, he
knew that a wise woman is wiser than a wise man.

"I really don't think I shall care particularly.  Probably, if we met
again here, there would be some jar to our comradeship--I may call it
that, I suppose?"

"Which is equivalent to saying that good-bye in most cases, and always in
cases such as ours, is a, little tragical, because we can never meet
quite the same again."

She bowed her head, but did not reply.  Presently she glanced up at him
kindly.  "What would you give to have back the past you had before you
lost your illusions, before you had--trouble?"

"I do not want it back.  I am not really disillusionised.  I think that
we should not make our own personal experience a law unto the world.  I
believe in the world in spite--of trouble.  You might have said trouble
with a woman--I should not have minded."  He was smoking now, and the
clouds twisted about his face so that only his eyes looked through
earnestly.  "A woman always makes laws from her personal experience.  She
has not the faculty of generalisation--I fancy that's the word to use."

She rose now with a little shaking motion, one hand at her belt, and
rested a shoulder against a pillar of the veranda.  He rose also at once,
and said, touching her hand respectfully with his finger tips: "We may be
sorry one day that we did not believe in ourselves more."

"Oh, no," she said, turning and smiling at him, "I think not.  You will
be in England hard at work, I here hard at living; our interests will lie
far apart.  I am certain about it all.  We might have been what my cousin
calls 'trusty pals'--no more."

"I wish to God I felt sure of that."

She held out her hand to him.  "I believe you are honest in this.
I expect both of us have played hide-and-seek with sentiment in our time;
but it would be useless for us to masquerade with each other: we are of
the world, very worldly."

"Quite useless--here comes your cousin!  I hope I don't look as agitated
as I feel."

"You look perfectly cool, and I know I do.  What an art this living is!
My cousin comes about the boarhunt to-morrow."

"Shall you join us?"

"Of course.  I can handle a rifle.  Besides, it is your last day here."

"Who can tell what to-morrow may bring forth?" he said.

                    ........................

The next day the boar-hunt occurred.  They rode several miles to a little
lake and a scrub of brigalow, and, dismounting, soon had exciting sport.
Nellie was a capital shot, and, without loss of any womanliness, was a
thorough sportsman.  To-day, however, there was something on her mind,
and she was not as alert and successful as usual.  Sherman kept with her
as much as possible--the more so because he saw that her cousins,
believing she was quite well able to take care of herself, gave her to
her own resources.  Presently, however, following an animal, he left her
a distance behind.

On the edge of a little billabong she came upon a truculent boar.  It
turned on her, but she fired, and it fell.  Seeing another ahead, she
pushed on quickly to secure it, too.  As she went she half-cocked her
rifle.  Had her mind been absolutely intent on the sport, she had full
cocked it.  All at once she heard the thud of feet behind her.  She
turned swiftly, and saw the boar she had shot bearing upon her, its long
yellow tusks standing up like daggers.  A sweeping thrust from one of
them leaves little chance of life.

She dropped upon a knee, swung her rifle to her shoulder, and pulled the
trigger.  The rifle did not go off.  For an instant she did not grasp the
trouble.  With singular presence of mind, however, she neither lowered
her rifle nor took her eye from the beast; she remained immovable.  It
was all a matter of seconds.  Evidently cowed, the animal, when within a
few feet of her, swerved to the right, then made as though to come down
on her again.  But, meanwhile, she had discovered her mistake, and cocked
her rifle.  She swiftly trained it on the boar, and fired.  It was hit,
but did not fall; and came on.  Then another shot rang out from behind
her, and the boar fell so near her that its tusk caught her dress.

Jack Sherman had saved her.

She was very white when she faced him.  She could not speak.  That night,
however, she spoke very gratefully and almost tenderly.

To something that he said gently to her then about a memory, she replied:
"Tell me now as candidly as if to your own soul, did you feel at the
critical moment that life would be horrible and empty without me?"

"I thought only of saving you," he said honestly.

"Then I was quite right; you will never have any regret," she said.

"I wonder, ah, I wonder!" he added sorrowfully.  But the girl was sure.

The regret was hers; though he never knew that.  It is a lonely life on
the dry plains of Nindobar.






DERELICT

He was very drunk; and because of that Victoria Lindley, barmaid at
O'Fallen's, was angry--not at him but at O'Fallen, who had given him the
liquor.

She knew more about him than any one else.  The first time she saw him he
was not sober.  She had left the bar-room empty; and when she came back
he was there with others who had dropped in, evidently attracted by his
unusual appearance--he wore an eyeglass--and he had been saying something
whimsically audacious to Dicky Merritt, who, slapping him on the
shoulder, had asked him to have a swizzle.

Dicky Merritt had a ripe sense of humour, and he was the first to grin.
This was followed by loud laughs from others, and these laughs went out
where the dust lay a foot thick and soft like precipitated velvet, and
hurrying over the street, waked the Postmaster and roused the Little
Milliner, who at once came to their doors.  Catching sight of each other,
they nodded, and blushed, and nodded again; and then the Postmaster,
neglecting the business of the country, went upon his own business into
the private sitting-room of the Little Milliner; for those wandering
laughs from O'Fallen's had done the work set for them by the high powers.

Over in the hot bar-room the man with the eye-glass was being frankly
"intr'juced" to Dicky Merritt and Company, Limited, by Victoria Lindley,
who, as hostess of this saloon, was, in his eyes, on a footing of
acquaintance.  To her he raised his hat with accentuated form, and
murmured his name--"Mr. Jones--Mr. Jones."  Forthwith, that there might
be no possible unpleasantness--for even such hostesses have their duties
of tact--she politely introduced him as Mr. Jones.

He had been a man of innumerable occupations--nothing long: caretaker
of tanks, rabbit-trapper, boundary-rider, cook at a shearers' camp, and,
in due time, he became book-keeper at O'Fallen's.  That was due to Vic.
Mr. Jones wrote a very fine hand--not in the least like a business man--
when he was moderately sober, and he also had an exceedingly caustic wit
when he chose to use it.  He used it once upon O'Fallen, who was a rough,
mannerless creature, with a good enough heart, but easily irritated by
the man with the eye-glass, whose superior intellect and manner, even
when drunk, were too noticeable.  He would never have employed him were
it not for Vic, who was worth very much money to him in the course of the
year.  She was the most important person within a radius of a hundred and
fifty miles, not excepting Rembrandt, the owner of Bomba Station, which
was twenty miles square, nor the parson at Magari, ninety miles south, by
the Ring-Tail Billabong.  For both Rembrandt and the parson had, and
showed, a respect for her, which might appear startling were it seen in
Berkeley Square or the Strand.

When, therefore, O'Fallen came raging into the barroom one morning, with
the gentle remark that "he'd roast the tongue of her fancy gent if he
didn't get up and git," he did a foolish thing.  It was the first time
that he had insulted Victoria, and it was the last.  She came out white
and quiet from behind the bar-counter, and, as he retreated from her into
a corner, said: "There is not a man who drinks over this bar, or puts
his horse into your shed, who wouldn't give you the lie to that and
thrash you as well--you coward!"  Her words came on low and steady: "Mr.
Jones will go now, of course, but I shall go also."

This awed O'Fallen.  To lose Vic was to lose the reputation of his house.
He instantly repented, but she turned her shoulder on him, and went into
the little hot office, where the book-keeper was, leaving him
gesticulating as he swore at himself in the glass behind the bar.  When
she entered the room she found Mr. Jones sitting rigid on his stool,
looking at the open ledger before him.  She spoke his name.  He nodded
ever so slightly, but still looked hard at the book.  She knew his
history.  Once he had told it to her.  It happened one day when he had
resigned his position as boundary-rider, in which he was practically
useless.  He had been drinking, and, as he felt for the string of his
eye-glass, his fingers caught another thin black cord which protruded
slightly from his vest.  He drew it out by mistake, and a small gold
cross shone for a moment against the faded black coat.  His fingers felt
for it to lift it to his eye as though it were his eye-glass, but dropped
it suddenly.  He turned pale for a minute, then caught it as suddenly
again, and thrust it into his waistcoat.  But Vic had seen, and she had
very calm, intelligent eyes, and a vast deal of common sense, though she
had only come from out Tibbooburra way.  She kept her eyes on him kindly,
knowing that he would speak in time.  They were alone, for most of the
people of Wadgery were away at a picnic.  There is always one moment when
a man who has a secret, good or bad, fatal or otherwise, feels that he
must tell it or die.  And Mr. Jones told Vic, and she said what she
could, though she knew that a grasp of her firm hands was better than any
words; and she was equally sure in her own mind that word and grasp would
be of no avail in the end.

She saw that the beginning of the end had come as she looked at him
staring at the ledger, yet exactly why she could not tell.  She knew that
he had been making a fight since he had been book-keeper, and that now he
felt that he had lost.  She guessed also that he had heard what O'Fallen
said to her, and what she had replied.

"You ought not to have offended him," she tried to say severely.

"It had to come," he said with a dry, crackling laugh, and he fastened
his eye-glass in his eye.  "I wasn't made for this.  I could only do one
thing, and--"  He laughed that peculiar laugh again, got down from the
stool, and held out his hand to her.

"What do you intend?" she said.  "I'm going, of course.  Good-bye!"
"But not at once?" she said very kindly.

"Perhaps not just at once," he answered with a strange smile.

She did not know what to say or do; there are puzzling moments even for a
wise woman, and there is nothing wiser than that.

He turned at the door.  "God bless you!" he said.  Then, as if caught in
an act to be atoned for, he hurried out into the street.  From the door
she watched him till the curtains of dust rose up about him and hid him
from sight.  When he came back to Wadgery months after he was a terrible
wreck; so much so that Vic could hardly look at him at first; and she
wished that she had left O'Fallen's as she threatened, and so have no
need to furnish any man swizzles.  She knew he would never pull himself
together now.  It was very weak of him, and horrible, but then .  .  .
When that thirst gets into the blood, and there's something behind the
man's life too--as Dicky Merritt said, "It's a case for the little black
angels."

Vic would not give him liquor.  He got it, however, from other sources.
He was too far gone to feel any shame now.  His sensibilities were all
blunted.  One day he babbled over the bar-counter to O'Fallen, desiring
greatly that they should be reconciled.  To that end he put down the last
shilling he had for a swizzle, and was so outrageously offended when
O'Fallen refused to take it, that the silver was immediately swept into
the till; and very soon, with his eye-glass to his eye, Mr. Jones was
drunk.

That was the occasion mentioned in the first sentence of this history,
when Vic was very angry.

The bar-room was full.  Men were wondering why it was that the Postmaster
and the Little Milliner, who went to Magari ten days before, to get
married by the parson there, had not returned.  While they talked and
speculated, the weekly coach from Magari came up slowly to the door, and,
strange to say, without a blast from the driver's horn.  Dicky Merritt
and Company rushed out to ask news of the two truants, and were met with
a warning wave of the driver's hand, and a "Sh-h!  sh--!" as he motioned
towards the inside of the coach.  There they found the Postmaster and the
Little Milliner mere skeletons, and just alive.  They were being cared
for by a bushman, who had found them in the plains, delirious and nearly
naked.  They had got lost, there being no regular road over the plains,
and their horse, which they had not tethered properly, had gone large.
They had been days without food and water when they were found near the
coach-track.

They were carried into O'Fallen's big sitting-room.  Dicky brought the
doctor, who said that they both would die, and soon.  Hours passed.  The
sufferers at last became sane and conscious, as though they could not go
without something being done.  The Postmaster lifted a hand to his
pocket.  Dicky Merritt took out of it a paper.  It was the marriage
licence.  The Little Milliner's eyes were painful to see; she was not
dying happy.  The Postmaster, too, moved his head from side to side in
trouble.  He reached over and took her hand.  She drew it back,
shuddering a little.  "The ring!  The ring!" she whispered.

"It is lost," he said.

Vic, who was at the woman's head, understood.  She stooped, said
something in her ear, then in that of the Postmaster, and left the room.
When she came back, two minutes later, Mr. Jones was with her.  What she
had done to him to sober him no one ever knew.  But he had a book in his
hand, and on the dingy black of his waistcoat there shone a little gold
cross.  He came to where the two lay.  Vic drew from her finger a ring.
What then occurred was never forgotten by any who saw it; and you could
feel the stillness, it was so great, after a high, sing-song voice said:
"Those whom God hath joined let no man put asunder."

The two lying cheek by cheek knew now that they could die in peace.

The sing-song voice rose again in the ceremony of blessing, but suddenly
it quavered and broke, the man rose, dropping the prayer-book to the
floor, and ran quickly out of the room and into the dust of the street,
and on, on into the plains.

"In the name of God, who is he?" said Dicky Merritt to Victoria Lindley.

"He was the Reverend Jones Leverton, of Harfordon-Thames," was her reply.

"Once a priest, always a priest," added Dicky.  "He'll never come back,"
said the girl, tears dropping from her eyes.

And she was right.






OLD ROSES

It was a barren country, and Wadgery was generally shrivelled with heat,
but he always had roses in his garden, on his window-sill, or in his
button-hole.  Growing flowers under difficulties was his recreation.
That was why he was called Old Roses.  It was not otherwise inapt, for
there was something antique about him, though he wasn't old; a flavour,
an old-fashioned repose and self-possession.  He was Inspector of Tanks
for this God-forsaken country.  Apart from his duties he kept mostly to
himself, though when not travelling he always went down to O'Fallen's
Hotel once a day for a glass of whisky and water--whisky kept especially
for him; and as he drank this slowly he talked to Victoria Lindley the
barmaid, or to any chance visitors whom he knew.  He never drank with any
one, nor asked any one to drink; and, strange to say, no one resented
this.  As Vic said: "He was different."  Dicky Merritt, the solicitor,
who was hail-fellow with squatter, homestead lessee, cockatoo-farmer, and
shearer, called him "a lively old buffer."  It was he, indeed, who gave
him the name of Old Roses.  Dicky sometimes went over to Long Neck
Billabong, where Old Roses lived, for a reel, as he put it, and he always
carried away a deep impression of the Inspector's qualities.

"Had his day," said Dicky in O'Fallen's sitting-room one night, "in
marble halls, or I'm a Jack.  Run neck and neck with almighty swells
once.  Might live here for a thousand years and he'd still be the
nonesuch of the back-blocks.  I'd patent him--file my caveat for him
to-morrow, if I could, bully Old Roses!"

Victoria Lindley, the barmaid, lifted her chin slightly from her hands,
as she leaned through the opening between the bar and the sitting-room,
and said: "Mr. Merritt, Old Roses is a gentleman; and a gentleman is a
gentleman till he--"

"Till he humps his bluey into the Never Never Land, Vic?  But what do you
know about gentlemen, anyway?  You were born only five miles from the
jumping-off place, my dear."

"Oh," was the quiet reply, "a woman--the commonest woman--knows a
gentleman by instinct.  It isn't what they do, it's what they don't do;
and Old Roses doesn't do lots of things."

"Right you are, Victoria, right you are again!  You do Tibbooburra
credit.  Old Roses has the root of the matter in him--and there you
have it."

Dicky had a profound admiration for Vic.  She had brains, was perfectly
fearless, no man had ever taken a liberty with her, and every one in the
Wadgery country who visited O'Fallen's had a wholesome respect for her
opinion.

About this time news came that the Governor, Lord Malice, would pass
through Wadgery on his tour up the back-blocks.  A great function was
necessary.  It was arranged.  Then came the question of the address of
welcome to be delivered at the banquet.  Dicky Merritt and the local
doctor were named for the task, but they both declared they'd only "make
rot of it," and suggested Old Roses.

They went to lay the thing before him.  They found him in his garden.  He
greeted them, smiling in his quiet, enigmatical way, and listened.  While
Dicky spoke, a flush slowly passed over him, and then immediately left
him pale; but he stood perfectly still, his hand leaning against a sandal
tree, and the coldness of his face warmed up again slowly.  His head
having been bent attentively as he listened, they did not see anything
unusual.

After a moment of inscrutable deliberation, he answered that he would do
as they wished.  Dicky hinted that he would require some information
about Lord Malice's past career and his family's history, but he assured
them that he did not need it; and his eyes idled ironically with Dicky's
face.

When the two had gone, Old Roses sat in his room, a handful of letters,
a photograph, and a couple of decorations spread out before him, his
fingers resting on them, his look engaged with a far horizon.

The Governor came.  He was met outside the township by the citizens and
escorted in--a dusty and numerous cavalcade.  They passed the Inspector's
house.  The garden was blooming, and on the roof a flag was flying.
Struck by the singular character of the place Lord Malice asked who lived
there, and proposed stopping for a moment to make the acquaintance of its
owner; adding, with some slight sarcasm, that if the officers of the
Government were too busy to pay their respects to their Governor, their
Governor must pay his respects to them.  But Old Roses was not in the
garden nor in the house, and they left without seeing him.  He was
sitting under a willow at the billabong, reading over and over to himself
the address to be delivered before the Governor in the evening.  As he
read his face had a wintry and inhospitable look.

The night came.  Old Roses entered the dining-room quietly with the
crowd, far in the Governor's wake.  According to his request, he was
given a seat in a distant corner, where he was quite inconspicuous.  Most
of the men present were in evening dress.  He wore a plain tweed suit,
but carried a handsome rose in his button-hole.  It was impossible to put
him at a disadvantage.  He looked distinguished as he was.  He appeared
to be much interested in Lord Malice.  The early proceedings were
cordial, for the Governor and his suite made themselves agreeable, and
talk flowed amiably.  After a time there was a rattle of knives and
forks, and the Chairman rose.  Then, after a chorus of "hear, hears,"
there was general silence.  The doorways of the room were filled by the
women-servants of the hotel.  Chief among them was Vic, who kept her eyes
fixed on Old Roses.  She knew that he was to read the address and speak,
and she was more interested in him and in his success than in Lord Malice
and his suite.  Her admiration of him was great.  He had always treated
her as though she had been born a lady, and it had done her good.

"And I call upon Mr. Adam Sherwood to speak to the health of His
Excellency, Lord Malice."

In his modest corner Old Roses stretched to his feet.  The Governor
glanced over carelessly.  He only saw a figure in grey, with a rose in
his button-hole.  The Chairman whispered that it was the owner of the
house and garden which had interested His Excellency that afternoon.
His Excellency looked a little closer, but saw only a rim of iron-grey
hair above the paper held before Old Roses' face.

Then a voice came from behind the paper: "Your Excellency--"

At the first words the Governor started, and his eyes flashed
searchingly, curiously at the paper that walled the face, and at the
iron-grey hair.  The voice rose distinct and clear, with modulated
emphasis.  It had a peculiarly penetrating quality.  A few in the room
--and particularly Vic--were struck by something in the voice: that it
resembled another voice.  She soon found the trail.  Her eyes also
fastened on the paper.  Then she moved and went to another door.  Here
she could see behind the paper at an angle.  Her eyes ran from the
screened face to that of the Governor.  His Excellency had dropped the
lower part of his face in his hand, and he was listening intently.  Vic
noticed that his eyes were painfully grave and concerned.  She also
noticed other things.

The address was strange.  It had been submitted to the Committee, and
though it struck them as out-of the-wayish, it had been approved.  It
seemed different when read as Old Roses was reading it.  The words
sounded inclement as they were chiselled out by the speaker's voice.
Dicky Merritt afterwards declared that many phrases were interpolated
by Old Roses at the moment.

The speaker referred intimately and with peculiar knowledge to the family
history of Lord Malice, to certain more or less private matters which did
not concern the public, to the antiquity of the name, and the high duty
devolving upon one who bore the Earldom of Malice.  He dwelt upon the
personal character of His Excellency's antecedents, and praised their
honourable services to the country.  He referred to the death of Lord
Malice's eldest brother in Burmah, but he did it strangely.  Then, with
acute incisiveness, he drew a picture of what a person in so exalted a
position as a Governor should be and should not be.  His voice assuredly
at this point had a touch of scorn.  The aides-de-camp were nervous, the
Chairman apprehensive, the Committee ill at ease.  But the Governor now
was perfectly still, though, as Vic Lindley thought, rather pinched and
old-looking.  His fingers toyed with a wine-glass, but his eyes never
wavered from that paper and the grey hair.

Presently the voice of the speaker changed.

"But," said he, "in Lord Malice we have--the perfect Governor; a man of
blameless and enviable life, and possessed abundantly of discreetness,
judgment, administrative ability and power; the absolute type of English
nobility and British character."

He dropped the paper from before his face, and his eyes met those of the
Governor, and stayed.  Lord Malice let go a long choking breath, which
sounded like immeasurable relief.  During the rest of the speech--
delivered in a fine-tempered voice--he sat as in a dream, his eyes
intently upon the other, who now seemed to recite rather than read.  He
thrilled all by the pleasant resonance of his tones, and sent the blood
aching delightfully through Victoria Lindley's veins.

When he sat down there was immense applause.  The Governor rose in reply.
He spoke in a low voice, but any one listening outside would have said
that Old Roses was still speaking.  By this resemblance the girl, Vic,
had trailed to others.  It was now apparent to many, but Dicky said
afterwards that it was simply a case of birth and breeding--men used to
walking red carpet grew alike, just as stud-owners and rabbit-catchers
did.

The last words of the Governor's reply were delivered in a convincing
tone as his eyes hung on Old Roses' face.

"And, as I am indebted to you, gentlemen, for the feelings of loyalty to
the Throne which prompted this reception and the address just delivered,
so I am indebted to Mr.--Adam Sherwood for his admirable words and the
unusual sincerity and eloquence of his speech; and to both you and him
for most notable kindness."

Immediately after the Governor's speech Old Roses stole out; but as he
passed through the door where Vic stood, his hand brushed against hers.
Feeling its touch, he grasped it eagerly for an instant as though he were
glad of the friendliness in her eyes.

It was just before dawn of the morning that the Governor knocked at the
door of the house by Long Neck Billabong.  The door opened at once, and
he entered without a word.

He and Old Roses stood face to face.  His countenance was drawn and worn,
the other's cold and calm.  "Tom, Tom," Lord Malice said, "we thought you
were dead--"

"That is, Edward, having left me to my fate in Burmah--you were only half
a mile away with a column of stout soldiers and hillmen--you waited till
my death was reported, and seemed assured, and then came on to England:
to take the title, just vacant by our father's death, and to marry
my intended wife, who, God knows, appeared to have little care which
brother it was!  You got both.  I was long a prisoner.  When I got free,
I learned all; I bided my time.  I was waiting till you had a child.
Twelve years have gone: you have no child.  But I shall spare you awhile
longer.  If your wife should die, or you should yet have a child, I shall
return."

The Governor lifted his head wearily from the table where he now sat.
"Tom," he said in a low, heavy voice, "I was always something of a
scoundrel, but I've repented of that thing every day of my life since.
It has been knives--knives all the way.  I am glad--I can't tell you how
glad--that you are alive."

He stretched out his hand with a motion of great relief.  "I was afraid
you were going to speak to-night--to tell all, even though I was your
brother.  You spared me for the sake--"

"For the sake of the family name," the other interjected stonily.

"For the sake of our name.  But I would have taken my punishment, in
thankfulness, because you are alive."

"Taken it like a man, your Excellency," was the low rejoinder.  He
laughed bitterly.

"You will not wipe the thing out, Tom?  You will not wipe it out, and
come back, and take your own--now?" said the other anxiously.

The other dried the perspiration from his forehead.  "I will come back in
my own time; and it can never be wiped out.  For you shook all my faith
in my old world.  That's the worst thing that can happen a man.  I only
believe in the very common people now--those who are not put upon their
honour.  One doesn't expect it of them, and, unlikely as it is, one isn't
often deceived.  I think we'd better talk no more about it."

"You mean I had better go."

"I think so.  I am going to marry soon."  The other started nervously.

"You needn't be so shocked.  I will come back one day, but not till your
wife dies, or you have a child, as I said."

The Governor rose to his feet, and went to the door.  "Whom do you intend
marrying?" he asked in a voice far from vice-regal, only humbled and
disturbed.  The reply was instant and keen: "A bar-maid."

The other's hand dropped from the door.  But Old Roses, passing over,
opened it, and, waiting for the other to pass through, said: "I do not
doubt but there will be issue.  Good-day, my lord!"

The Governor passed out from the pale light of the lamp into the grey and
moist morning.  He turned at a point where the house would be lost to
view, and saw the other still standing there.  The voice of Old Roses
kept ringing in his ears sardonically.  He knew that his punishment must
go on and on; and it did.

Old Roses married Victoria Lindley from "out Tibbooburra way," and there
was comely issue, and that issue is now at Eton; for Esau came into his
birthright, as he said he would, at his own time.  But he and his wife
have a way of being indifferent to the gay, astonished world; and,
uncommon as it may seem, he has not tired of her.






MY WIFE'S LOVERS

There were three of them in 1886, the big drought year: old Eversofar,
Billy Marshall, and Bingong.  I never was very jealous of them, not even
when Billy gave undoubted ground for divorce by kissing her boldly in the
front garden, with Eversofar and Bingong looking on--to say nothing of
myself.  So far as public opinion went it could not matter, because we
were all living at Tilbar Station in the Tibbooburra country, and the
nearest neighbour to us was Mulholland of Nimgi, a hundred miles away.
Billy was the son of my manager, John Marshall, and, like his father,
had an excellent reputation as a bushman, and, like his mother, was very
good-looking.  He was very much indeed about my house, suggesting
improvements in household arrangements; making remarks on my wife's
personal appearance--with corresponding disparagement of myself; riding
with my wife across the plains; shooting kangaroos with her by night; and
secretly instructing her in the mysteries of a rabbit-trap, with which,
he was sure, he could make "dead loads of metal" (he was proficient in
the argot of the back-blocks); and with this he would buy her a beautiful
diamond ring, and a horse that had won the Melbourne Cup, and an air-gun!
Once when she was taken ill, and I was away in the South, he used to sit
by her bedside, fanning her hour after hour, being scarcely willing to
sleep at night; and was always on hand, smoothing her pillow, and issuing
a bulletin to Eversofar and Bingong the first thing in the morning.
I have no doubt that Eversofar and Bingong cared for her just as much as
he did; but, from first to last, they never had his privileges, and were
always subordinate to him in showing her devotion.  He was sound and
frank with them.  He told Eversofar that, of course, she only was kind to
him, and let him have a hut all to himself, because he was old and had
had a bad time out on the farthest back-station (that was why he was
called Eversofar), and had once carried Bingong with a broken leg, on his
back, for twenty miles.  As for Bingong, he was only a black fellow, aged
fifteen, and height inconsiderable.  So, of the three, Billy had his own
way, and even shamelessly attempted to lord it over me.

Most husbands would consider my position painful, particularly when
I say that my wife accepted the attention of all three lovers with calm
pleasure, and that of Billy with a shocking indifference to my feelings.
She never tried to explain away any circumstance, no matter how awkward
it might look if put down in black and white.  Billy never quailed before
my look; he faced me down with his ingenuous smile; he patted me on the
arms approvingly; or, with apparent malice, asked me questions difficult
to answer, when I came back from a journey to Brisbane--for a man
naturally finds it hard to lay bare how he spent all his time in town.
Because he did it so suavely and naively, one could not be resentful.  It
might seem that matters had reached a climax, when, one day, Mulholland
came over, and, seeing my wife and her lovers together watering the
garden and teaching cockatoos, said to me that Billy had the advantage of
me on my own ground.  It may not be to my credit that I only grinned, and
forbore even looking foolish.  Yet I was very fond of my wife all the
time.  We stood pretty high on the Charwon Downs, and though it was
terribly hot at times, it was healthy enough; and she never lost her
prettiness, though, maybe, she lacked bloom.

I think I never saw her look better than she did that day when Mulholland
was with me.  She had on the lightest, softest kind of stuff, with
sleeves reaching only a little below her elbow--her hands and arms never
got sunburnt in the hottest weather--her face smiled out from under the
coolest-looking hat imaginable, and her hair, though gathered, had a
happy trick of always lying very loose and free about the head, saving
her from any primness otherwise possible, she was so neat.  Mulholland
and I were sitting in the veranda.  I glanced up at the thermometer, and
it registered a hundred in the shade!  Mechanically I pushed the lime-
juice towards Mulholland, and pointed to the water-bag.  There was
nothing else to do except grumble at the drought.  Yet there my wife was,
a picture of coolness and delight; the intense heat seemed only to make
her the more refreshing to the eye.  Water was not abundant, but we still
felt justified in trying to keep her bushes and flowers alive; and she
stood there holding the hose and throwing the water in the cheerfulest
shower upon the beds.  Billy stood with his hands on his hips watching
her, very hot, very self-contained.  He was shining with perspiration;
and he looked the better of it.  Eversofar was camped beneath a sandal-
tree teaching a cockatoo, also hot and panting, but laughing low through
his white beard; and Bingong, black, hatless--less everything but a pair
of trousers which only reached to his knees--was dividing his time
between the cockatoo and my wife.

Presently Bingong sighted an iguana and caught it, and the three gathered
about it in the shade of the sandal.  After a time the interest in the
iguana seemed to have shifted to something else; and they were all
speaking very earnestly.  At last I saw Billy and my wife only talking.
Billy was excited, and apparently indignant.  I could not hear what they
were saying, but I saw he was pale, and his compatriots in worship rather
frightened; for he suddenly got into a lofty rage.  It was undoubtedly a
quarrel.  Mulholland saw, too, and said to me: "This looks as if there
would be a chance for you yet."  He laughed.  So did I.

Soon I saw by my wife's face that she was saying something sarcastical.
Then Billy drew himself up very proudly, and waving his hand in a grand
way, said loudly, so that we could hear: "It's as true as gospel; and
you'll be sorry for this-like anything and anything!"  Then he stalked
away from her, raising his hat proudly, but immediately turned, and
beckoning to Eversofar and Bingong added: "Come on with me to barracks,
you two."

They started away towards him, looking sheepishly at my wife as they did
so; but Billy finding occasion to give counter-orders, said: "But you
needn't come until you put the cockatoos away, and stuck the iguana in
a barrel, and put the hose up for--for her."

He watched them obey his orders, his head in the air the while, and when
they had finished, and were come towards him, he again took off his hat,
and they all left her standing alone in the garden.

Then she laughed a little oddly to herself, and stood picking to pieces
the wet leaves of a geranium, looking after the three.  After a little
she came slowly over to us.  "Well," said I, feigning great irony, "all
loves must have their day, both old and new.  You see how they've
deserted you.  Yet you smile at it!"

"Indeed, my lord and master," she said, "it is not a thing to laugh at.
It's very serious."

"And what has broken the charm of your companionship?" I asked.

"The mere matter of the fabled Bunyip.  He claimed that he had seen it,
and I doubted his word.  Had it been you it would not have mattered.  You
would have turned the other cheek, you are so tame.  But he has fire and
soul, and so we quarrelled."

"And your other lovers turned tail," I maliciously, said.

"Which only shows how superior he is," was her reply.  "If you had been
in the case they would never have left me."

"Oh, oh!" blurted Mulholland, "I am better out of this; for I little
care to be called as a witness in divorce."  He rose from his chair, but
I pushed him back, and he did not leave till "the cool of the evening."

The next morning, at breakfast-time, a rouseabout brought us a piece of
paper which had been nailed to the sandal-tree.  On it was written:

"We have gone for the Bunyip.  We travel on foot!  Farewell and
Farewell!"

We had scarcely read it, when John Marshall and his wife came in
agitation, and said that Billy's bed had not been slept in during the
night.  From the rouseabout we found that Eversofar and Bingong were also
gone.  They had not taken horses, doubtless because Billy thought it
would hardly be valiant and adventurous enough, and because neither
Bingong nor Eversofar owned one, and it might look criminal to go off
with mine.  We suspected that they had headed for the great Debil-devil
Waterhole, where, it was said, the Bunyip appeared: that mysterious
animal, or devil, or thing, which nobody has ever seen, but many have
pretended to see.  Now, this must be said of Billy, that he never had the
feeling of fear--he was never even afraid of me.  He had often said he
had seen a Bunyip, and that he'd bring one home some day, but no one
took him seriously.  It showed what great influence he had over his
companions, that he could induce them to go with him; for Bingong, being
a native, must naturally have a constitutional fear of the Debil-debil,
as the Bunyip is often called.  The Debil-debil Waterhole was a long way
off, and through a terrible country--quartz plains, ragged scrub, and
little or no water all the way.  Then, had they taken plenty of food with
them?  So far as we could see, they had taken some, but we could not tell
how much.

My wife smiled at the business at first; then became worried as the day
wore on, and she could see the danger and hardship of wandering about
this forsaken country without a horse and with uncertain water.  The day
passed.  They did not return.  We determined on a search the next
morning.  At daybreak, Marshall and I and the rouseabout started on good
horses, each going at different angles, but agreeing to meet at the Debil
debil Waterhole, and to wait there for each other.  If any one of us did
not come after a certain time, we were to conclude that he had found the
adventurers and was making his way back with them.  After a day of
painful travel and little water, Marshall and I arrived, almost within an
hour of each other.  We could see no sign of anybody having been at the
lagoon.  We waited twelve hours, and were about to go, leaving a mark
behind us to show we had been there, when we saw the rouseabout and his
exhausted horse coming slowly through the bluebush to us.  He had
suffered much for want of water.

We all started back again at different angles, our final rendezvous being
arranged for the station homestead, the rouseabout taking a direct line,
and making for the Little Black Billabong on the way.  I saw no sign of
the adventurers.  I sickened with the heat, and my eyes became inflamed.
I was glad enough when, at last, I drew rein in the home paddock.  I
couldn't see any distance, though I was not far from the house.  But when
I got into the garden I saw that others had just arrived.  It was the
rouseabout with my wife's lovers.  He had found Billy nursing Eversofar
in the shade of a stunted brigalow, while Bingong was away hunting for
water.  Billy himself had pushed his cause as bravely as possible, and
had in fact visited the Little Black Billabong, where--he always
maintains--he had seen the great Bunyip.  But after watching one night,
they tried to push on to the Debil-debil Waterhole.  Old Eversofar, being
weak and old, gave in, and Billy became a little delirious--he has denied
it, but Bingong says it is so; yet he pulled himself together as became
the leader of an expedition, and did what he could for Eversofar until
the rouseabout came with food and water.  Then he broke down and cried--
he denies this also.  They tied the sick man on the horse and trudged
back to the station in a bad plight.

As I came near the group I heard my wife say to Billy, who looked sadly
haggard and ill, that she was sure he would have got the Bunyip if it
hadn't been for the terrible drought; and at that, regardless of my
presence, he took her by the arms and kissed her, and then she kissed him
several times.

Perhaps I ought to have mentioned before that Billy was just nine years
old.






THE STRANGERS' HUT

I had come a long journey across country with Glenn, the squatter,
and now we were entering the homestead paddock of his sheep-station,
Winnanbar.  Afar to the left was a stone building, solitary in a waste
of saltbush and dead-finish scrub.  I asked Glenn what it was.

He answered, smilingly: "The Strangers' Hut.  Sundowners and that lot
sleep there; there's always some flour and tea in a hammock, under the
roof, and there they are with a pub of their own.  It's a fashion we have
in Australia."

"It seems all right, Glenn," I said with admiration.  "It's surer than
Elijah's ravens."

"It saves us from their prowling about the barracks, and camping on the
front veranda."

"How many do you have of a week?"

"That depends.  Sundowners are as uncertain as they are unknown
quantities.  After shearing-time they're thickest; in the dead of summer
fewest.  This is the dead of summer," and, for the hundredth time in our
travel, Glenn shook his head sadly.

Sadness was ill-suited to his burly form and bronzed face, but it was
there.  He had some trouble, I thought, deeper than drought.  It was too
introspective to have its origin solely in the fact that sheep were dying
by thousands, that the stock-routes were as dry of water as the hard sky
above us, and that it was a toss-up whether many families in the West
should not presently abandon their stations, driven out by a water-
famine--and worse.

After a short silence Glenn stood up in the trap, and, following the
circle of the horizon with his hand, said: "There's not an honest blade
of grass in all this wretched West.  This whole business is gambling with
God."

"It is hard on women and children that they must live here," I remarked,
with my eyes on the Strangers' Hut.

"It's harder for men without them," he mournfully replied; and at that
moment I began to doubt whether Glenn, whom I had heard to be a bachelor,
was not tired of that calm but chilly state.  He followed up this speech
immediately by this: "Look at that drinking-tank!"

The thing was not pleasant in the eye.  Sheep were dying and dead by
thousands round it, and the crows were feasting horribly.  We became
silent again.

The Strangers' Hut, and its unique and, to me, awesome hospitality, was
still in my mind.  It remained with me until, impelled by curiosity, I
wandered away towards it in the glow and silence of the evening.  The
walk was no brief matter, but at length I stood near the lonely public,
where no name of guest is ever asked, and no bill ever paid.  And then I
fell to musing on how many life-histories these grey walls had sheltered
for a fitful hour, how many stumbling wayfarers had eaten and drunken in
this Hotel of Refuge.  I dropped my glances on the ground; a bird, newly
dead, lay at my feet, killed by the heat.

At that moment I heard a child's crying.  I started forward, then
faltered.  Why, I could not tell, save that the crying seemed so a part
of the landscape that it might have come out of the sickly sunset, out of
the yellow sky, out of the aching earth about me.  To follow it might be
like pursuing dreams.  The crying ceased.

Thus for a moment, and then I walked round to the door of the hut.  At
the sound of slight moaning I paused again.  Then I crossed the threshold
resolutely.

A woman with a child in her arms sat on a rude couch.  Her lips were
clinging to the infant's forehead.  At the sound of my footsteps she
raised her head.

"Ah!" she said, and, trembling, rose to her feet.  She was fair-haired
and strong, if sad, of face.  Perhaps she never had been beautiful, but
in health her face must have been persistent in its charm.  Even now it
was something noble.

With that patronage of compassion which we use towards those who are
unfortunate and humble, I was about to say to her, "My poor woman!" but
there was something in her manner so above her rude surroundings that I
was impelled to this instead: "Madam, you are ill.  Can I be of service
to you?"

Then I doffed my hat.  I had not done so before, and I blushed now as I
did it, for I saw that she had compelled me.  She sank back upon the
couch again as though the effort to achieve my courtesy had unnerved her,
and she murmured simply and painfully: "Thank you very much: I have
travelled far."

"May I ask how far?"

"From Mount o' Eden, two hundred miles and more, I think"; and her eyes
sought the child's face, while her cheek grew paler.  She had lighted a
tiny fire on the hearthstone and had put the kettle on the wood.  Her
eyes were upon it now with the covetousness of thirst and hunger.  I
kneeled, and put in the tin of water left behind by some other pilgrim,
a handful of tea from the same source--the outcast and suffering giving
to their kind.  I poured out for her soon a little of the tea.  Then I
asked for her burden.  She gave it to my arms--a wan, wise-faced child.

"Madam," I said, "I am only a visitor here, but, if you feel able, and
will come with me to the homestead, you shall, I know, find welcome and
kindness, or, if you will wait, there are horses, and you shall be
brought--yes, indeed," I added, as she shook her head in sad negation,
"you will be welcome."

I was sure that, whatever ill chances had befallen the mother of this
child, she was one of those who are found in the sight of the Perfect
Justice sworn for by the angels.  I knew also that Glenn would see that
she should be cordially sheltered and brought back to health; for men
like Glenn, I said to myself, are kinder in their thought of suffering
women than women themselves-are kinder, juster, and less prone to think
evil.

She raised her head, and answered: "I think that I could walk; but this,
you see, is the only hospitality that I can accept, save, it may be, some
bread and a little meat, that the child suffer no more, until I reach
Winnanbar, which, I fear, is still far away."

"This," I replied, "is Winnanbar; the homestead is over there, beyond the
hill."

"This is--Winnanbar?" she whisperingly said, "this--is--Winnanbar!
I did not think--I was-so near."  .  .  .  A thankful look came to her
face.  She rose, and took the child again and pressed it to her breast,
and her eyes brooded upon it.  "Now she is beautiful," I thought, and
waited for her to speak.

"Sir--" she said at last, and paused.  In the silence a footstep sounded
without, and then a form appeared in the doorway.  It was Glenn.

"I followed you," he said to me; "and--!"  He saw the woman, and a low
cry broke from her.

"Agnes!  Agnes!" he cried, with something of sternness and a little
shame.

"I have come--to you--again-Robert," she brokenly, but not abjectly,
said.

He came close to her and looked into her face, then into the face of the
child, with a sharp questioning.  She did not flinch, but answered his
scrutiny clearly and proudly.  Then, after a moment, she turned a
disappointed look upon me, as though to say that I, a stranger, had read
her aright at once, while this man held her afar in the cold courts of
his judgment ere he gave her any welcome or said a word of pity.

She sank back on the bench, and drew a hand with sorrowful slowness
across her brow.  He saw a ring upon her finger.  He took her hand and
said: "You are married, Agnes?"

"My husband is dead, and the sister of this poor one also," she replied;
and she fondled the child and raised her eyes to her brother's.

His face now showed compassion.  He stooped and kissed her cheek.  And it
seemed to me at that moment that she could not be gladder than I.

"Agnes," he said, "can you forgive me?"

"He was only a stock-rider," she murmured, as if to herself, "but he was
well-born.  I loved him.  You were angry.  I went away with him in the
night .  .  .  far away to the north.  God was good--"  Here she brushed
her lips tenderly across the curls of the child.  "Then the drought came
and sickness fell and .  .  .  death .  .  .  and I was alone with my
baby--"

His lips trembled and his hand was hurting my arm, though he knew it not.

"Where could I go?" she continued.

Glenn answered pleadingly now: "To your unworthy brother, God bless you
and forgive me, dear!--though even here at Winnanbar there is drought
and famine and the cattle die."

"But my little one shall live!" she cried joyfully.  That night Glenn of
Winnanbar was a happy man, for rain fell on the land, and he held his
sister's child in his arms.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

It isn't what they do, it's what they don't do
No, I'm not good--I'm only beautiful
Should not make our own personal experience a law unto the world
Undisciplined generosity
Women don't go by evidence, but by their feelings
You have lost your illusions
You've got to be ready, that's all






CUMNER'S SON AND OTHER SOUTH SEA FOLK

by Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.


THE PLANTER'S WIFE
BARBARA GOLDING
THE LONE CORVETTE



THE PLANTER'S WIFE

I

She was the daughter of a ruined squatter, whose family had been pursued
with bad luck; he was a planter, named Houghton.  She was not an uncommon
woman; he was not an unusual man.  They were not happy, they might never
be; he was almost sure they would not be; she had long ceased to think
they could be.  She had told him when she married him that she did not
love him.  He had been willing to wait for her love, believing that by
patience and devotion he could win it.  They were both sorry for each
other now.  They accepted things as they were, but they knew there was
danger in the situation.  She loved some one else, and he knew it, but he
had never spoken to her of it--he was of too good stuff for that.  He was
big and burly, and something awkward in his ways.  She was pretty, clear-
minded, kind, and very grave.  There were days when they were both bitter
at heart.  On one such day they sat at luncheon, eating little, and
looking much out of the door across the rice fields and banana
plantations to the Hebron Mountains.  The wife's eyes fixed on the hills
and stayed.  A road ran down the hill towards a platform of rock which
swept smooth and straight to the sheer side of the mountain called White
Bluff.  At first glance it seemed that the road ended at the cliff--
a mighty slide to destruction.  Instead, however, of coming straight to
the cliff it veered suddenly, and ran round the mountain side, coming
down at a steep but fairly safe incline.  The platform or cliff was
fenced off by a low barricade of fallen trees, scarcely noticeable from
the valley below.  The wife's eyes had often wandered to the spot with a
strange fascination, as now.  Her husband looked at her meditatively.
He nodded slightly, as though to himself.  She looked up.  Their
understanding of each other's thoughts was singular.

"Tom," she said, "I will ride the chestnut, Bowline, to that fence some
day.  It will be a big steeplechase."  He winced, but answered slowly.
"You have meant to say that for a long time past.  I am glad it has been
said at last."

She was struck by the perfect quietness of his tone.  Her eyes sought his
face and rested for a moment, half bewildered, half pitying.

"Yes, it has been in my mind often--often," she said.  "It's a horrible
thought," he gravely replied; "but it is better to be frank.  Still,
you'll never do it, Alice--you'll never dare to do it."

"Dare, dare," she answered, springing to her feet, and a shuddering sigh
broke from her.  "The thing itself is easy enough, Tom."

"And why haven't you done it?" he asked in a hard voice, but still
calmly.

She leaned one hand upon the table, the other lay at her cheek, and her
head bent forward at him.  "Because," she answered, "because I have tried
to be thoughtful for you."

"Oh, as to that," he said--"as to that!" and he shrugged his shoulders
slightly.

"You don't care a straw," she said sharply, "you never did."

He looked up suddenly at her, a great bitterness in his face, and laughed
strangely, as he answered: "Care!  Good God!  Care!  .  .  .  What's the
use of caring?  It's been all a mistake; all wrong."

"That is no news," she said wearily.  "You discovered that long ago."

He looked out of the door across the warm fields again; he lifted his
eyes to that mountain road; he looked down at her.  "I haven't any hope
left now, Alice.  Let's be plain with each other.  We've always been
plain, but let us be plainer still.  There are those rice fields out
there, that banana plantation, and the sugar-cane stretching back as far
as the valley goes--it's all mine, all mine.  I worked hard for it.  I
had only one wish with it all, one hope through it all, and it was, that
when I brought you here as my wife, you would come to love me--some time.
Well, I've waited, and waited.  It hasn't come.  We're as far apart to-
day as we were the day I married you.  Farther, for I had hope then, but
I've no hope now, none at all."

They both turned towards the intemperate sunlight and the great hill.
The hollowness of life as they lived it came home to them with an aching
force.  Yet she lifted her fan from the table and fanned herself gently
with it, and he mechanically lit a cigar.  Servants passed in and out
removing the things from the table.  Presently they were left alone.
The heavy breath of the palm trees floated in upon them; the fruit of the
passion-flower hung temptingly at the window; they could hear the sound
of a torrent just behind the house.  The day was droning luxuriously,
yet the eyes of both, as by some weird influence, were fastened upon the
hill; and presently they saw, at the highest point where the road was
visible, a horseman.  He came slowly down until he reached the spot where
the road was barricaded from the platform of the cliff.  Here he paused.
He sat long, looking, as it appeared, down into the valley.  The husband
rose and took down a field-glass from a shelf; he levelled it at the
figure.

"Strange, strange," he said to himself; "he seems familiar, and yet--"

She rose and reached out her hand for the glass.  He gave it to her.  She
raised it to her eyes, but, at that moment, the horseman swerved into the
road again, and was lost to view.  Suddenly Houghton started; an
enigmatical smile passed across his face.

"Alice," said he, "did you mean what you said about the steeplechase--
I mean about the ride down the White Bluff road?"

"I meant all I said," was her bitter reply.

"You think life is a mistake?" he rejoined.

"I think we have made a mistake," was her answer; "a deadly mistake, and
it lasts all our lives."

He walked to the door, trained the glass again on the hill, then
afterwards turned round, and said:

"If ever you think of riding the White Bluff road--straight for the cliff
itself and over--tell me, and I'll ride it with you.  If it's all wrong
as it is, it's all wrong for both, and, maybe, the worst of what comes
after is better than the worst of what is here."

They had been frank with each other in the past, but never so frank as
this.  He was determined that they should be still more frank; and so was
she.  "Alice," he said--

"Wait a minute," she interjected.  "I have something to say, Tom.  I
never told you--indeed, I thought I never should tell you; but now I
think it's best to do so.  I loved a man once--with all my soul."

"You love him still," was the reply; and he screwed and unscrewed the
field-glass in his hand, looking bluntly at her the while.  She nodded,
returning his gaze most earnestly and choking back a sob.

"Well, it's a pity, it's a pity," he replied.  "We oughtn't to live
together as it is.  It's all wrong; it's wicked--I can see that now."

"You are not angry with me?" she answered in surprise.

"You can't help it, I suppose," he answered drearily.

"Do you really mean," she breathlessly said, "that we might as well die
together, since we can't live together and be happy?"

"There's nothing in life that gives me a pleasant taste in the mouth, so
what's the good?  Mind you, my girl, I think it a terrible pity that you
should have the thought to die; and if you could be happy living, I'd die
myself to save you.  But can you?  That's the question--can you be happy,
even if I went and you stayed?"

"I don't think so," she said thoughtfully, and without excitement.

"No, I don't think so."

"The man's name was Cayley--Cayley," he said to her bluntly.

"How did you know?" she asked, astonished.  "You never saw him."

"Oh, yes, I've seen him," was the reply--"seen him often.  I knew him
once."

"I do not understand you," she rejoined.

"I knew it all along," he continued, "and I've waited for you to tell
me."

"How did you know?"

"Cayley told me."

"When did he tell you?"

"The morning that I married you."  His voice was thick with misery.

She became white and dazed.  "Before--or after?" she asked.  He paused a
moment, looking steadily at her, and answered, "Before."

She drew back as though she had been struck.  "Good God!" she cried.
"Why did he not--" she paused.

"Why did he not marry you himself?" he rejoined.

"You must ask him that yourself, if you do not know."

"And yet you married me, knowing all--that he loved me," she gasped.

"I would have married you then, knowing a thousand times that."

She cowered, but presently advanced to him.  "You have sinned as much as
I," she said.  "Do you dare pay the penalty?"

"Do I dare ride with you to the cliff--and beyond?"  Her lips framed a
reply, but no sound came.

"But we will wait till to-morrow," he said absently.

"Why not to-day?" she painfully asked.

"We will wait till to-morrow," he urged, and his eyes followed the trail
of a horseman on the hill.

"Why not while we have courage?" she persisted, as though the suspense
hurt her."

"But we will wait till to-morrow, Alice," he again repeated.

"Very well," she answered, with the indifference of despair.

He stood in the doorway and watched a horseman descending into valley.

"Strange things may chance before to-morrow," he said to himself, and he
mechanically lighted another cigar.  She idled with her fan.




II

He did not leave the house that afternoon.  He kept his post on the
veranda, watching the valley.  With an iron kind of calmness he was
facing a strange event.  It was full of the element of chance, and he had
been taking chances all his life.  With the chances of fortune he had
won; with the chances of love and happiness he had lost.  He knew that
the horseman on the mountain-side was Cayley; he knew that Cayley would
not be near his home without a purpose.  Besides, Cayley had said he
would come--he had said it in half banter, half threat.  Houghton had had
too many experiences backward and forward in the world, to be afflicted
with littleness of mind.  He had never looked to get an immense amount of
happiness out of life, but he thought that love and marriage would give
him a possible approach to content.  He had chanced it, and he had lost.
At first he had taken it with a dreadful bitterness; now he regarded it
with a quiet, unimpassioned despair.  He regarded his wife, himself, and
Cayley, as an impartial judge would view the extraordinary claims of
three desperate litigants.  He thought it all over as he sat there
smoking.  When the servants came to him to ask him questions or his men
ventured upon matters of business, he answered them directly, decisively,
and went on thinking.  His wife had come to take coffee with him at
the usual hour of the afternoon.  There was no special strain of manner
or of speech.  The voices were a little lower, the tones a little more
decided, their eyes did not meet; that was all.  When coffee-drinking was
over the wife retired to her room.  Still Houghton smoked on.  At length
he saw the horseman entering into the grove of palms before the door.  He
rose deliberately from his seat and walked down the pathway.

"Good day to you, Houghton," the horseman said; "we meet again, you see."

"I see."

"You are not overjoyed."

"There's no reason why I should be glad.  Why have you come?"

"You remember our last meeting five years ago.  You were on your way to
be married.  Marriage is a beautiful thing, Houghton, when everything is
right and square, and there's love both sides.  Well, everything was
right and square with you and the woman you were going to marry; but
there was not love both sides."

While they had been talking thus, Houghton had, of purpose, led his
companion far into the shade of the palms.  He now wheeled upon Cayley,
and said sternly: "I warn you to speak with less insolence; we had better
talk simply."

Cayley was perfectly cool.  "We will talk simply.  As I said, you had
marriage without love.  The woman loved another man.  That other man
loved the woman--that good woman.  In youthful days at college he had
married, neither wisely nor well, a beggar-maid without those virtues
usually credited to beggar-maidens who marry gentlemen.  Well, Houghton,
the beggar-maid was supposed to have died.  She hadn't died; she had
shammed.  Meanwhile, between her death and her resurrection, the man came
to love that good woman.  And so, lines got crossed; things went wrong.
Houghton, I loved Alice before she was your wife.  I should have married
her but for the beggar-maid."

"You left her without telling her why."

"I told her that things must end, and I went away."

"Like a coward," rejoined Houghton.  "You should have told her all."

"What difference has it made?" asked Cayley gloomily.

"My happiness and hers.  If you had told her all, there had been an end
of mystery.  Mystery is dear to a woman's heart.  She was not different
in that respect from others.  You took the surest way to be remembered."

Cayley's fingers played with his horse's mane; his eyes ran over the
ground debatingly; then he lifted them suddenly, and said: "Houghton, you
are remarkably frank with me; what do you mean by it?"

"I'll tell you if you will answer me this question: Why have you come
here?"

The eyes of both men crossed like swords, played with each other for a
moment, and then fixed to absolute determination.  Cayley answered
doggedly: "I came to see your wife, because I'm not likely ever to see
her or you again.  I wanted one look of her before I went away.  There,
I'm open with you."

"It is well to be open with me," Houghton replied.  He drew Cayley aside
to an opening in the trees, where the mountain and the White Bluff road
could be seen, and pointed.  "That would make a wonderful leap," he said,
"from the top of the hill down to the cliff edge--and over!"

"A dreadful steeplechase," said Cayley.

Houghton lowered his voice.  "Two people have agreed to take that fence."

Cayley frowned.  "What two people?"

"My wife and I"

"Why?"

"Because there has been a mistake, and to live is misery."

"Has it come to that?" Cayley asked huskily.  "Is there no way--no
better way?  Are you sure that Death mends things?"  Presently he put his
hand upon Houghton's arm, as if with a sudden, keen resolve.  "Houghton,"
he said, "you are a man--I have become a villain.  A woman sent me once
on the high road to the devil; then an angel came in and made a man of me
again; but I lost the angel, and another man found her, and I took the
highway with the devil again.  I was born a gentleman--that you know.
Now I am .  .  ."  He hesitated.  A sardonic smile crept across his face.

"Yes, you are--?" interposed Houghton.

"I am--a man who will give you your wife's love."

"I do not understand," Houghton responded.  Cayley drew Houghton back
from where they stood and away from the horse.

"Look at that horse," he said.  "Did you ever see a better?"

"Never," answered Houghton, running him over with his eye, "never."

"You notice the two white feet and the star on the forehead.  Now,
listen.  Firefoot, here!"

"My God!" said Houghton, turning upon him with staring eyes, "you are--"

"Whose horse is that?" interjected Cayley.  Firefoot laid his head upon
Cayley's shoulder.

Houghton looked at them both for a moment.  "It is the horse of Hyland
the bushranger," he said.  "All Queensland knows Firefoot."  Then he
dazedly added: "Are you Hyland?"

"A price is set on my head," the bushranger answered with a grim smile.

Houghton stood silent for a moment, breathing hard.  Then he rejoined:
"You are bold to come here openly."

"If I couldn't come here openly I would not come at all," answered the
other.  "After what I have told you," he added, "will you take me in and
let me speak with your wife?"

Houghton's face turned black, and he was about to answer angrily, but
Cayley said: "On my honour--I will play a fair game," he said.

For an instant their eyes were fixed on each other; then, with a gesture
for Cayley to follow, Houghton went towards the house.

Five, minutes later Houghton said to his wife: "Alice, a stranger has
come."

"Who is it?" she asked breathlessly, for she read importance in his
tone.

"It is the horseman we saw on the hillside."  His eyes passed over her
face pityingly.  "I will go and bring him."

She caught his arm.  "Who is it?  Is it any one I know?"

"It is some one you know," he answered, and left the room.  Bewildered,
anticipating, yet dreading to recognise her thoughts, she sat down and
waited in a painful stillness.

Presently the door opened, and Cayley entered.  She started to her feet
with a stifled, bitter cry: "Oh, Harry!"

He hurried to her with arms outstretched, for she swayed; but she
straightway recovered herself, and, leaning against a chair, steadied
to his look.

"Why have you come here?" she whispered.  "To say good-bye for always,"
was his reply.

"And why--for always?" She was very white and quiet.

"Because we are not likely ever to meet again."

"Where are you going?" she anxiously asked.  "God knows!"

Strange sensations were working in her.  What would be the end of this?
Her husband, knowing all, had permitted this man to come to her alone.
She had loved him for years; though he had deserted her years ago, she
loved him still--did she love him still?

"Will you not sit down?" she said with mechanical courtesy.

A stranger would not have thought from their manner that there were lives
at stake.  They both sat, he playing with the leaves of an orchid, she
opening and shutting her fan absently.  But she was so cold she could
hardly speak.  Her heart seemed to stand still.

"How has the world used you since we met last?" she tried to say
neutrally.

"Better, I fear, than I have used it," he answered quietly.

"I do not quite see.  How could you ill-use the world?"  There was faint
irony in her voice now.  A change seemed to have come upon her.

"By ill-using any one person we ill-use society--the world"--he meaningly
replied.

"Whom have you ill-used?"  She did not look at him.

"Many--you chiefly."

"How have you--most-ill-used me?"

"By letting you think well of me--you have done so, have you not?"

She did not speak, but lowered her head, and caught her breath slightly.
There was a silence.  Then she said: "There was no reason why I should--
But you must not say these things to me.  My husband--"

"Your husband knows all."

"But that does not alter it," she urged firmly.  "Though he may be
willing you should speak of these things, I am not."

"Your husband is a good fellow," he rejoined.  "I am not."

"You are not?" she asked wearily.

"No.  What do you think was the reason that, years ago, I said we could
never be married, and that we must forget each other?"

"I cannot tell.  I supposed it was some duty of which I could not know.
There are secret and sacred duties which we sometimes do not tell, even
to our nearest and dearest .  .  .  but I said we should not speak of
these things, and we must not."  She rose to her feet.  "My husband is
somewhere near.  I will call him.  There are so many things that men can
talk of-pleasant and agreeable things--"

He had risen with her, and as her hand was stretched out to ring, stayed
it.  "No, never mind your husband just now.  I think he knows what I am
going to say to you."

"But, oh, you must not--must not!" she urged.

"Pardon me, but I must," was his reply.

"As I said, you thought I was a good fellow.  Well, I am not; not at all.
I will tell you why I left you.  I was--already married."

He let the bare unrelieved fact face her, and shock her.

"You were--already married--when--you loved me," she said, her face
showing misery and shame.

He smiled a little bitterly when he saw the effect of his words, but said
clearly: "Yes.  You see I was a villain."

She shuddered a little, and then said simply: "Your face was not the face
of a bad man.  Are you telling me the truth?"

He nodded.

"Then you were wicked with me," she said at last, with a great sigh,
looking him straight in the eyes.  "But you--you loved me?" she said
with injured pride and a piteous appeal in her voice.  "Ah, I know you
loved me!"

"I will tell you when you know all," he answered evenly.

"Is there more to tell?" she asked heavily, and shrinking from him now.

"Much more.  Please, come here."  He went towards the open window of the
room, and she followed.  He pointed out to where his horse stood in the
palms.

"That is my horse," he said.  He whistled to the horse, which pricked up
its ears and trotted over to the window.  "The name of my horse," he
said, "maybe familiar to you.  He is called Firefoot."

"Firefoot!" she answered dazedly, "that is the name of Hyland's horse--
Hyland the bushranger."

"This is Hyland's horse," he said, and he patted the animal's neck gently
as it thrust its head within the window.

"But you said it was your horse," she rejoined slowly, as though the
thing perplexed her sorely.

"It is Hyland's horse; it is my horse," he urged without looking at her.
His courage well-nigh failed him.  Villain as he was, he loved her, and
he saw the foundations of her love for him crumbling away before him.  In
all his criminal adventures he had cherished this one thing.

She suddenly gave a cry of shame and agony, a low trembling cry, as
though her heart-strings were being dragged out.  She drew back from him
--back to the middle of the room.

He came towards her, reaching out his arms.  "Forgive me," he said.

"Oh, no, never!" she cried with horror.

The cry had been heard outside, and Houghton entered the room, to find
his wife, all her strength gone, turning a face of horror upon Cayley.
She stretched out her arms to her husband with a pitiful cry.  "Tom," she
said, "Tom, take me away."

He took her gently in his arms.

Cayley stood with his hand upon his horse's neck.  "Houghton," he said in
a low voice, "I have been telling your wife what I was, and who I am.
She is shocked.  I had better go."

The woman's head had dropped on her husband's shoulder.  Houghton waited
to see if she would look up.  But she did not.

"Well, good-bye to you both," Cayley said, stepped through the window,
and vaulted on his horse's back.  "I'm going to see if the devil's as
black as he's painted."  Then, setting spurs to his horse, he galloped
away through the palms to the gate.

                    ......................

A year later Hyland the bushranger was shot in a struggle with the
mounted police sent to capture him.

The planter's wife read of it in England, whither she had gone on a
visit.

"It is better so," she said to herself, calmly.  "And he wished it, I am
sure."

For now she knew the whole truth, and she did not love her husband less
--but more.






BARBARA GOLDING

The last time John Osgood saw Barbara Golding was on a certain summer
afternoon at the lonely Post, Telegraph, and Customs Station known as
Rahway, on the Queensland coast.  It was at Rahway also that he first and
last saw Mr. Louis Bachelor.  He had had excellent opportunities for
knowing Barbara Golding; for many years she had been governess (and
something more) to his sisters Janet, Agnes and Lorna.  She had been
engaged in Sydney as governess simply, but Wandenong cattle station was
far up country, and she gradually came to perform the functions of
milliner and dressmaker, encouraged thereto by the family for her
unerring taste and skill.  Her salary, however, had been proportionately
increased, and it did not decline when her office as governess became
practically a sinecure as her pupils passed beyond the sphere of the
schoolroom.  Perhaps George Osgood, father of John Osgood, and owner of
Wandenong, did not make an allowance to Barbara Golding for her services
as counsellor and confidant of his family; but neither did he subtract
anything from her earnings in those infrequent years when she journeyed
alone to Sydney on those mysterious visits which so mightily puzzled the
good people of Wandenong.  The boldest and most off-hand of them,
however, could never discover what Barbara Golding did not choose to
tell.  She was slight, almost frail in form, and very gentle of manner;
but she also possessed that rare species of courtesy which, never
declining to fastidiousness nor lapsing into familiarity, checked all
curious intrusion, was it ever so insinuating; and the milliner and
dressmaker was not less self-poised and compelling of respect than the
governess and confidant.

In some particulars the case of Louis Bachelor was similar.  Besides
being the Post, Telegraph, and Customs Officer, and Justice of the Peace
at Rahway, he was available and valuable to the Government as a
meteorologist.  The Administration recognised this after a few years of
voluntary and earnest labour on Louis Bachelor's part.  It was not,
however, his predictions concerning floods or droughts that roused this
official appreciation, but the fulfilment of those predictions.  At
length a yearly honorarium was sent to him, and then again, after a
dignified delay, there was forwarded to him a suggestion from the Cabinet
that he should come to Brisbane and take a more important position.  It
was when this patronage was declined that the Premier (dropping for a
moment into that bushman's jargon which came naturally to him) said,
irritably, that Louis Bachelor was a "old fossil who didn't know when
he'd got his dover in the dough," which, being interpreted into the slang
of the old world, means, his knife into the official loaf.  But the
fossil went on as before, known by name to the merest handful of people
in the colony, though they all profited, directly or indirectly, by his
scientific services.  He was as unknown to the dwellers at Wandenong as
they were to him, or he again to the citizens of the moon.

It was the custom for Janet and Agnes Osgood to say that Barbara Golding
had a history.  On every occasion the sentiment was uttered with that
fresh conviction in tone which made it appear to be born again.  It
seemed to have especially pregnant force one evening after Janet had been
consulting Barbara on the mysteries of the garment in which she was to be
married to Druce Stephens, part owner of Booldal Station.  "Aggie,"
remarked the coming bride, "Barbara's face flushed up ever so pink when I
said to her that she seemed to know exactly what a trousseau ought to be.
I wonder!  She is well-bred enough to have been anybody; and the Bishop
of Adelaide recommended her, you know."

Soon after this Druce Stephens arrived at Wandenong and occupied the
attention of Janet until suppertime, when he startled the company by the
tale of his adventures on the previous evening with Roadmaster, the
mysterious bushranger, whose name was now in every man's mouth; who
apparently worked with no confederates--a perilous proceeding, though it
reduced the chances of betrayal.  Druce was about to camp on the plains
for the night, in preference to riding on to a miserable bush-tavern a
few miles away, when he was suddenly accosted in the scrub by a gallant-
looking fellow on horseback, who, from behind his mask, asked him to give
up what money he had about him, together with his watch and ring.  The
request was emphasised by the presence of a revolver held at an easy but
suggestive angle.  The disadvantage to the squatter was obvious.  He
merely asked that he should be permitted to keep the ring, as it had many
associations, remarking at the same time that he would be pleased to give
an equivalent for it if the bushranger would come to Wandenong.  At the
mention of Wandenong the highwayman asked his name.  On being told, he
handed back the money, the watch, and the ring, and politely requested a
cigar, saying that the Osgoods merited consideration at his hands, and
that their friends were safe from molestation.  Then he added, with some
grim humour, that if Druce had no objection to spending an hour with
Roadmaster over a fire and a billy of tea, he would be glad of his
company; for bushranging, according to his system, was but dull work.
The young squatter consented, and together they sat for two hours, the
highwayman, however, never removing his mask.  They talked of many
things, and at last Druce ventured to ask his companion about the death
of Blood Finchley, the owner of Tarawan sheep-run.  At this Roadmaster
became weary, and rose to leave; but as if on second thought, he said
that Finchley's companion, whom he allowed to go unrobbed and untouched,
was both a coward and a liar; that the slain man had fired thrice
needlessly, and had wounded him in the neck (the scar of which he showed)
before he drew trigger.  Druce then told him that besides a posse of
police, a number of squatters and bushmen had banded to hunt him down,
and advised him to make for the coast if he could, and leave the country.
At this Roadmaster laughed, and said that his fancy was not sea-ward yet,
though that might come; and then, with a courteous wave of his hand, he
jumped on his horse and rode away.

The Osgoods speculated curiously and futilely on Roadmaster's identity,
as indeed the whole colony had done.  And here it may be said that people
of any observation (though, of necessity, they were few, since Rahway
attracted only busy sugar-planters and their workmen) were used to speak
of Louis Bachelor as one who must certainly have a history.  The person
most likely to have the power of inquisition into his affairs was his
faithful aboriginal servant, Gongi.  But records and history were only
understood by Gongi when they were restricted to the number of heads
taken in tribal battle.  At the same time he was a devoted slave to the
man who, at the risk of his own life, had rescued him from the murderous
spears of his aboriginal foes.  That was a kind of record within Gongi's
comprehension, from the contemplation of which he turned to speak of
Louis Bachelor as "That fellow budgery marmi b'longin' to me," which, in
civilised language, means "my good master."  Gongi often dilated on this
rescue, and he would, for purposes of illustration, take down from his
master's wall an artillery officer's sabre and show how his assailants
had been dispersed.

From the presence of this sword it was not unreasonably assumed that
Louis Bachelor had at some time been in the army.  He was not, however,
communicative on this point, though he shrewdly commented on European
wars and rumours of wars when they occurred.  He also held strenuous
opinions of the conduct of Government and the suppression of public
evils, based obviously upon military views of things.  .  For bushrangers
he would have a modern Tyburn, but this and other tragic suggestions
lacked conviction when confronted with his verdicts given as Justice of
the Peace.  He pronounced judgments in a grand and airy fashion, but as
if he were speaking by a card, the Don Quixote whose mercy would be
vaster than his wrath.  This was the impression he gave, to, John Osgood
on the day when the young squatter introduced himself to Rahway, where he
had come on a mission to its one official.  The young man's father had a
taste for many things; astronomy was his latest, and he had bought from
the Government a telescope which, excellent in its day, had been
superseded by others of later official purchase.  He had brought it to
Wandenong, had built a home for it, and had got it into trouble.  He had
then sent to Brisbane for assistance, and the astronomer of the
Government had referred him to the postmaster at Rahway, "Prognosticator"
of the meteorological column in The Courier, who would be instructed to
give Mr. Osgood every help, especially as the occultation of Venus was
near.  Men do not send letters by post in a new country when personal
communication is possible, and John Osgood was asked by his father to go
to Rahway.  When John wished for the name of this rare official, the
astronomer's letter was handed over with a sarcastic request that the
name might be deciphered; but the son was not more of an antiquary than
his father, and he had to leave without it.  He rode to the coast, and
there took a passing steamer to Rahway.  From the sea Rahway looked a
tropical paradise.  The bright green palisades of mangrove on the right
crowded down to the water's edge; on the left was the luxuriance of a
tropical jungle; in the centre was an are of opal shore fringed with
cocoa-palms, and beyond the sea a handful of white dwellings.  Behind was
a sweeping monotony of verdure stretching back into the great valley of
the Popri, and over all the heavy languor of the South.

But the beauty was a delusion.  When John Osgood's small boat swept up
the sands on the white crest of a league-long roller, how different was
the scene!  He saw a group of dilapidated huts, a tavern called The
Angel's Rest, a blackfellow's hut, and the bareness of three Government
offices, all built on piles, that the white ants should not humble them
suddenly to the dust; a fever-making mangrove swamp, black at the base as
the filthiest moat, and tenanted by reptiles; feeble palms, and a sickly
breath creeping from the jungle to mingle with the heavy scent of the
last consignment of augar from the Popri valley.  It brought him to a
melancholy standstill, disturbed at last by Gongi touching him on the arm
and pointing towards the post-office.  His language to Gongi was strong;
he called the place by names that were not polite; and even on the
threshold of the official domain said that the Devil would have his last
big muster there.  But from that instant his glibness declined.  The
squatters are the aristocracy of Australia, and rural postmasters are not
always considered eligible for a dinner-party at Government House; but
when Louis Bachelor came forward to meet his visitor the young fellow's
fingers quickly caught his hat from his head, and an off-hand greeting
became a respectful salute.

At first the young man was awed by the presence of the grizzled
gentleman, and he struggled with his language to bring it up to the
classic level of the old meteorologist's speech.  Before they had spoken
a dozen words John Osgood said to himself: "What a quaint team he and the
Maid of Honour would make!  It's the same kind of thing in both, with the
difference of sex and circumstance."  The nature of his visitor's
business pleased the old man, and infused his courtesy with warmth.  Yes,
he would go to Wandenong with pleasure; the Government had communicated
with him about it; a substitute had been offered; he was quite willing to
take his first leave in four years; astronomy was a great subject, he had
a very good and obedient telescope of his own, though not nearly so large
as that at Wandenong; he would telegraph at once to Brisbane for the
substitute to be sent on the following day, and would be ready to start
in twenty-four hours.  After visiting Wandenong he would go to Brisbane
for some scientific necessaries--and so on through smooth parentheses of
talk.  Under all the bluntness of the Bush young Osgood had a refinement
which now found expression in an attempt to make himself agreeable--not a
difficult task, since, thanks to his father's tastes and a year or two at
college, he had a smattering of physical science.  He soon won his way to
the old man's heart, and to his laboratory, which had been developed
through years of patience and ingenious toil in this desolate spot.

Left alone that evening in Louis Bachelor's sitting-room, John Osgood's
eyes were caught by a portrait on the wall, the likeness of a beautiful
girl.  Something about the face puzzled him.  Where had he seen it?  More
than a little of an artist, he began to reproduce the head on paper.  He
put it in different poses; he added to it; he took away from it; he gave
it a child's face, preserving the one striking expression; he made it
that of a woman--of an elderly, grave woman.  Why, what was this?
Barbara Golding!  He would not spoil the development of the drama, of
which he now held the fluttering prologue, by any blunt treatment; he
would touch this and that nerve gently to see what past connection there
was between:

          "These dim blown birds beneath an alien sky."

He mooned along in this fashion, a fashion in which his bushmen friends
would not have known him, until his host entered.  Then, in that
auspicious moment when his own pipe and his companion's cigarette were
being lighted, he said: "I've been amusing myself with drawing since you
left, sir, and I've produced this," handing over the paper.

Louis Bachelor took the sketch, and, walking to the window for better
light, said: "Believe me, I have a profound respect for the artistic
talent.  I myself once had--ah!"  He sharply paused as he saw the
pencilled head, and stood looking fixedly at it.  Presently he turned
slowly, came to the portrait on the wall, and compared it with that in
his hand.  Then, with a troubled face, he said: "You have much talent,
but it is--it is too old--much too old--and very sorrowful."

"I intended the face to show age and sorrow, Mr. Bachelor.  Would not the
original of that have both?"

"She had sorrow--she had sorrow, but," and he looked sadly at the sketch
again, "it is too old for her.  Her face was very young--always very
young."

"But has she not sorrow now, sir?" the other persisted gently.

The grey head was shaken sadly, and the unsteady voice meditatively
murmured: "Such beauty, such presence!  I was but five-and-thirty then."
There was a slight pause, and then, with his hand touching the young
man's shoulder, Louis Bachelor continued: "You are young; you have a good
heart; I know men.  You have the sympathy of the artist--why should I not
speak to you?  I have been silent about it so long.  You have brought the
past back, I know not how, so vividly!  I dream here, I work here; men
come with merchandise and go again; they only bind my tongue; I am not of
them: but you are different, as it seems to me, and young.  God gave me a
happy youth.  My eyes were bright as yours, my heart as fond.  You love--
is it not so?  Ah, you smile and blush like an honest man.  Well, so much
the more I can speak now.  God gave me then strength and honour and love
--blessed be His name!  And then He visited me with sorrow, and, if I
still mourn, I have peace, too, and a busy life."  Here he looked at the
sketch again.

"Then I was a soldier.  She was my world.  Ah, true, love is a great
thing--a great thing!  She had a brother.  They two with their mother
were alone in the world, and we were to be married.  One day at Gibraltar
I received a letter from her saying that our marriage could not be; that
she was going away from England; that those lines were her farewell; and
that she commended me to the love of Heaven.  Such a letter it was--so
saintly, so unhappy, so mysterious!  When I could get leave I went to
England.  She--they--had gone, and none knew whither; or, if any of her
friends knew, none would speak.  I searched for her everywhere.  At last
I came to Australia, and I am here, no longer searching, but waiting, for
there is that above us!"  His lips moved as if in prayer.  "And this is
all I have left of her, except memory," he said, tenderly touching the
portrait.

Warmly, yet with discreet sympathy, the young man rejoined: "Sir, I
respect, and I hope I understand, your confidence."  Then, a little
nervously: "Might I ask her name?"

The reply was spoken to the portrait: "Barbara--Barbara Golding."

With Louis Bachelor the young squatter approached Wandenong homestead in
some excitement.  He had said no word to his companion about that Barbara
Golding who played such a gracious part in the home of the Osgoods.  He
had arranged the movement of the story to his fancy, but would it occur
in all as he hoped?  With an amiability that was almost malicious in its
adroit suggestiveness, though, to be sure, it was honest, he had induced
the soldier to talk of his past.  His words naturally, and always,
radiated to the sun, whose image was now hidden, but for whose memory no
superscription on monument or cenotaph was needed.  Now it was a scrap of
song, then a tale, and again a verse, by which the old soldier was
delicately worked upon, until at last, as they entered the paddocks of
Wandenong, stars and telescopes and even Governments had been forgotten
in the personal literature of sentiment.

Yet John Osgood was not quite at his ease.  Now that it was at hand, he
rather shrank from the meeting of these ancient loves.  Apart from all
else, he knew that no woman's nerves are to be trusted.  He hoped fortune
would so favour him that he could arrange for the meeting of the two
alone, or, at least, in his presence only.  He had so far fostered this
possibility by arriving at the station at nightfall.  What next?  He
turned and looked at the soldier, a figure out of Hogarth, which even
dust and travel left unspoiled.  It was certain that the two should meet
where John Osgood, squatter and romancer, should be prompter, orchestra,
and audience, and he alone.  Vain lad!

When they drew rein the young man took his companion at once to his own
detached quarters known as the Barracks, and then proceeded to the house.
After greetings with his family he sought Barbara Golding, who was in the
schoolroom, piously employed, Agnes said, in putting the final touches to
Janet's trousseau.  He went across the square to the schoolroom, and,
looking through the window, saw that she was quite alone.  A few moments
later he stood at the schoolroom door with Louis Bachelor.  With his hand
on the latch he hesitated.  Was it not fairer to give some warning to
either?  Too late!  He opened the door and they entered.  She was sewing,
and a book lay open beside her, a faded, but stately little figure whose
very garments had an air.  She rose, seeing at first only John Osgood,
who greeted her and then said: "Miss Golding, I have brought you an old
friend."

Then he stepped back and the two were face to face.  Barbara Golding's
cheeks became pale, but she did not stir; the soldier, with an
exclamation of surprise half joyful, half pathetic, took a step forward,
and then became motionless also.  Their eyes met and stayed intent.  This
was not quite what the young man had expected.  At length the soldier
bowed low, and the woman responded gravely.  At this point Osgood
withdrew to stand guard at the door.

Barbara Golding's eyes were dim with tears.  The soldier gently said,
"I received--" and then paused.  She raised her eyes to his.  "I received
a letter from you five-and-twenty years ago."

"Yes, five-and-twenty years ago."

"I hope you cannot guess what pain it gave me."

"Yes," she answered faintly, "I can conceive it, from the pain it gave to
me."

There was a pause, and then he stepped forward and, holding out his hand,
said: "Will you permit me?"  He kissed her fingers courteously, and she
blushed.  "I have waited," he added, "for God to bring this to pass."
She shook her head sadly, and her eyes sought his beseechingly, as though
he should spare her; but perhaps he could not see that.

"You spoke of a great obstacle then; has it been removed?"

"It is still between us," she murmured.

"Is it likely ever to vanish?"

"I--I do not know."

"You can not tell me what it is?"

"Oh, you will not ask me," she pleaded.

He was silent a moment, then spoke.  "Might I dare to hope, Barbara, that
you still regard me with--" he hesitated.

The fires of a modest valour fluttered in her cheeks, and she pieced out
his sentence: "With all my life's esteem."  But she was a woman, and she
added: "But I am not young now, and I am very poor."

"Barbara," he said; "I am not rich and I am old; but you, you have not
changed; you are beautiful, as you always were."

The moment was crucial.  He stepped towards her, but her eyes held him
back.  He hoped that she would speak, but she only smiled sadly.  He
waited, but, in the waiting, hope faded, and he only said, at last, in a
voice of new resolve grown out of dead expectancy: "Your brother--is he
well?"

"I hope so," she somewhat painfully replied.  "Is he in Australia?"

"Yes.  I have not seen him for years, but he is here."  As if a thought
had suddenly come to him, he stepped nearer, and made as if he would
speak; but the words halted on his lips, and he turned away again.  She
glided to his side and touched his arm.  "I am glad that you trust me,"
she faltered.

"There is no more that need be said," he answered.  And now, woman-like,
denying, she pitied, too.  "If I ever can, shall--shall I send for you
to tell you all?" she murmured.

"You remember I told you that the world had but one place for me, and
that was by your side; that where you are, Barbara--"

"Hush, oh hush!" she interrupted gently.  "Yes, I remember everything."

"There is no power can alter what is come of Heaven," he said, smiling
faintly.

She looked with limpid eyes upon him as he bowed over her hand, and she
spoke with a sweet calm: "God be with you, Louis."

Strange as it may seem, John Osgood did not tell his sisters and his
family of this romance which he had brought to the vivid close of a first
act.  He felt the more so because Louis Bachelor had said no word about
it, but had only pressed his hand again and again--that he was somehow
put upon his honour, and he thought it a fine thing to stand on a
platform of unspoken compact with this gentleman of a social school
unfamiliar to him; from which it may be seen that cattle-breeding and
bullock-driving need not make a man a boor.  What his sisters guessed
when they found that Barbara Golding and the visitor were old friends is
another matter; but they could not pierce their brother's reserve on the
point.

No one at Wandenong saw the parting between the two when Louis Bachelor,
his task with the telescope ended, left again for the coast; but indeed
it might have been seen by all men, so outwardly formal was it, even as
their brief conversations had been since they met again.  But is it not
known by those who look closely upon the world that there is nothing so
tragic as the formal?

John Osgood accompanied his friend to the sea, but the name of Barbara
Golding was not mentioned, nor was any reference made to her until the
moment of parting.  Then the elder man said: "Sir, your consideration and
delicacy of feeling have moved me, and touched her.  We have not been
blind to your singular kindness of heart and courtesy, and--God bless
you, my friend!"

On his way back to Wandenong, Osgood heard exciting news of Roadmaster.
The word had been passed among the squatters who had united to avenge
Finchley's death that the bushranger was to be shot on sight, that he
should not be left to the uncertainty of the law.  The latest exploit of
the daring freebooter had been to stop on the plains two members of a
Royal Commission of Inquiry.  He had relieved them of such money as was
in their pockets, and then had caused them to write sumptuous cheques on
their banks, payable to bearer.  These he had cashed in the very teeth of
the law, and actually paused in the street to read a description of
himself posted on a telegraph-pole.  "Inaccurate, quite inaccurate," he
said to a by-stander as he drew his riding-whip slowly along it, and
then, mounting his horse, rode leisurely away into the plains.  Had he
been followed it would have been seen that he directed his course to that
point in the horizon where Wandenong lay, and held to it.

It would not perhaps have been pleasant to Agnes Osgood had she known
that, as she hummed a song under a she-oak, a mile away from the
homestead, a man was watching her from a clump of scrub near by; a man
who, however gentlemanly his bearing, had a face where the devil of
despair had set his foot, and who carried in his pocket more than one
weapon of inhospitable suggestion.  But the man intended no harm to her,
for, while she sang, something seemed to smooth away the active evil of
his countenance, and to dispel a threatening alertness that marked the
whole personality.

Three hours later this same man crouched by the drawing-room window of
the Wandenong homestead and looked in, listening to the same voice, until
Barbara Golding entered the room and took a seat near the piano, with her
face turned full towards him.  Then he forgot the music and looked long
at the face, and at last rose, and stole silently to where his horse was
tied in the scrub.  He mounted, and turning towards the house muttered:
"A little more of this, and good-bye to my nerves!  But it's pleasant to
have the taste of it in my mouth for a minute.  How would it look in
Roadmaster's biography, that a girl just out of school brought the rain
to his eyes?"  He laughed a little bitterly, and then went on: "Poor
Barbara!  She mustn't know while I'm alive.  Stretch out, my nag; we've
a long road to travel to-night."

This was Edward Golding, the brother whom Barbara thought was still in
prison at Sydney under another name, serving a term of ten years for
manslaughter.  If she had read the papers more carefully she would have
known that he had been released two years before his time was up.  It was
eight years since she had seen him.  Twice since then she had gone to
visit him, but he would not see her.  Bad as he had been, his desire was
still strong that the family name should not be publicly reviled.  At his
trial his real name had not been made known; and at his request his
sister sent him no letters.  Going into gaol a reckless man he came out a
constitutional criminal; with the natural instinct for crime greater than
the instinct for morality.  He turned bushranger for one day, to get
money to take him out of the country; but having once entered the lists
he left them no more, and, playing at deadly joust with the law, soon
became known as Roadmaster, the most noted bushranger since the days of
Captain Starlight.

It was forgery on the name of his father's oldest friend that had driven
him from England.  He had the choice of leaving his native land for ever
or going to prison, and he chose the former.  The sorrow of the crime
killed his mother.  From Adelaide, where he and Barbara had made their
new home, he wandered to the far interior and afterwards to Sydney; then
came his imprisonment on a charge of manslaughter, and now he was free-
but what a freedom!

With the name of Roadmaster often heard at Wandenong, Barbara Golding's
heart had no warning instinct of who the bushranger was.  She thought
only and continuously of the day when her brother should be released, to
begin the race of life again with her.  She had yet to learn in what
manner they come to the finish who make a false start.

Louis Bachelor, again in his place Rahway, tried to drive away his
guesses at the truth by his beloved science.  When sleep would not come
at night he rose and worked in his laboratory; and the sailors of many a
passing vessel saw the light of his lamp in the dim hours before dawn,
and spoke of fever in the port of Rahway.  Nor did they speak without
reason; fever was preparing a victim for the sacrifice at Rahway, and
Louis Bachelor was fed with its poison till he grew haggard and weak.

One night he was sending his weather prognostications to Brisbane, when
a stranger entered from the shore.  The old man did not at first look up,
and the other leisurely studied him as the sounder clicked its message.
When the key was closed the new-comer said: "Can you send a message to
Brisbane for me?"

"It is after hours; I cannot," was the reply.  "But you were just sending
one."

"That was official," and the elder man passed his hand wearily along his
forehead.  He was very pale.  The other drew the telegraph-forms towards
him and wrote on one, saying as he did so: "My business is important;"
then handing over what he had written, and, smiling ironically, added:
"Perhaps you will consider that official."

Louis Bachelor took the paper and read as follows: To the Colonial
Secretary, Brisbane.  I am here tonight; to-morrow find me.  Roadmaster."
He read it twice before he fully comprehended it.  Then he said, as if
awakening from a dream: "You are--"

"I am Roadmaster," said the other.

But now the soldier and official in the other were awake.  He drew
himself up, and appeared to measure his visitor as a swordsman would his
enemy.  "What is your object in coming here?" he asked.

"For you to send that message if you choose.  That you may arrest me
peaceably if you wish; or there are men at The Angel's Rest and a
Chinaman or two here who might care for active service against
Roadmaster."  He laughed carelessly.

"Am I to understand that you give yourself up to me?"

"Yes, to you, Louis Bachelor, Justice of the Peace, to do what you will
with for this night," was the reply.  The soldier's hands trembled, but
it was from imminent illness, not from fear or excitement.  He came
slowly towards the bushranger who, smiling, said as he advanced: "Yes,
arrest me!"

Louis Bachelor raised his hand, as though to lay it on the shoulder of
the other; but something in the eyes of the highwayman stayed his hand.

"Proceed, Captain Louis Bachelor," said Roadmaster in a changed tone.

The hand fell to the old man's side.  "Who are you?" he faintly
exclaimed.  "I know you yet I cannot quite remember."

More and more the voice and manner of the outlaw altered as he replied
with mocking bitterness: "I was Edward Golding, gentleman; I became
Edward Golding, forger; I am Roadmaster, convicted of manslaughter, and
bushranger."

The old man's state was painful to see.  "You--you--that, Edward!" he
uttered brokenly.

"All that.  Will you arrest me now?"

"I--cannot."

The bushranger threw aside all bravado and irony, and said: "I knew you
could not.  Why did I come?  Listen--but first, will you shelter me here
to-night?"

The soldier's honourable soul rose up against this thing, but he said
slowly at last: "If it is to save you from peril, yes."

Roadmaster laughed a little and rejoined: "By God, sir, you're a man!
But it isn't likely that I'd accept it of you, is it?  You've had it
rough enough, without my putting a rock in your swag that would spoil you
for the rest of the tramp.  You see, I've even forgotten how to talk like
a gentleman.  And now, sir, I want to show you, for Barbara's sake, my
dirty logbook."

Here he told the tale of his early sin and all that came of it.  When he
had finished the story he spoke of Barbara again.  "She didn't want to
disgrace you, you understand," he said.  "You were at Wandenong; I know
that, never mind how.  She'd marry you if I were out of the way.  Well,
I'm going to be out of the way.  I'm going to leave this country, and
she's to think I'm dead, you see."

At this point Louis Bachelor swayed, and would have fallen, but that the
bushranger's arms were thrown round him and helped him to a chair.  "I'm
afraid that I am ill," he said; "call Gongi.  Ah!" He had fainted.

The bushranger carried him to a bed, and summoned Gongi and the woman
from the tavern, and in another hour was riding away through the valley
of the Popri.  Before thirty-six hours had passed a note was delivered to
a station-hand at Wandenong addressed to Barbara Golding, and signed by
the woman from The Angel's Rest.  Within another two days Barbara Golding
was at the bedside of Captain Louis Bachelor, battling with an enemy that
is so often stronger than love and always kinder than shame.

In his wanderings the sick man was ever with his youth and early manhood,
and again and again he uttered Barbara's name in caressing or entreaty;
though it was the Barbara of far-off days that he invoked; the present
one he did not know.  But the night in which the crisis, the fortunate
crisis, of the fever occurred, he talked of a great flood coming from the
North, and in his half-delirium bade them send to headquarters, and
mournfully muttered of drowned plantations and human peril.  Was this
instinct and knowledge working through the disordered fancies of fever?
Or was it mere coincidence that the next day a great storm and flood did
sweep through the valley of the Popri, putting life in danger and
submerging plantations?

It was on this day that Roadmaster found himself at bay in the mangrove
swamp not far from the port of Rahway, where he had expected to find a
schooner to take him to the New Hebrides.  It had been arranged for by a
well-paid colleague in crime; but the storm had delayed the schooner, and
the avenging squatters and bushmen were closing in on him at last.  There
was flood behind him in the valley, a foodless swamp on the left of him,
open shore and jungle on the right, the swollen sea before him; and the
only avenue of escape closed by Blood Finchley's friends.  He had been
eluding his pursuers for days with little food and worse than no sleep.
He knew that he had played his last card and lost; but he had one thing
yet to do, that which even the vilest do, if they can, before they pay
the final penalty--to creep back for a moment into their honest past,
however dim and far away.  With incredible skill he had passed under the
very rifles of his hunters, and now stood almost within the stream of
light which came from the window of the sick man's room, where his sister
was.  There was to be no more hiding, no more strategy.  He told Gongi
and another that he was Roadmaster, and bade them say to his pursuers,
should they appear, that he would come to them upon the shore when his
visit to Louis Bachelor, whom he had known in other days, was over,
indicating the place at some distance from the house where they would
find him.

He entered the house.  The noise of the opening door brought his sister
to the room.

At last she said: "Oh, Edward, you are free at last!"

"Yes, I am free at last," he quietly replied.

"I have always prayed for you, Edward, and for this."

"I know that, Barbara; but prayer cannot do anything, can it?  You see,
though I was born a gentleman, I had a bad strain in me.  I wonder if,
somewhere, generations back, there was a pirate or a gipsy in our
family."  He had been going to say highwayman, but paused in time.
"I always intended to be good and always ended by being bad.  I wanted to
be of the angels and play with the devils also.  I liked saints--you are
a saint, Barbara--but I loved all sinners too.  I hope when--when I die,
that the little bit of good that's in me will go where you are.  For the
rest of me, it must be as it may."

"Don't speak like that, Edward, please, dear.  Yes, you have been wicked,
but you have been punished, oh, those long, long years!"

"I've lost a great slice of life by both the stolen waters and the rod,
but I'm going to reform now, Barbara."

"You are going to reform?  Oh, I knew you would!  God has answered my
prayer."  Her eyes lighted.

He did not speak at once, for his ears, keener than hers, were listening
to a confused sound of voices coming from the shore.  At length he spoke
firmly: "Yes, I'm going to reform, but it's on one condition."

Her eyes mutely asked a question, and he replied: "That you marry him,"
pointing to the inner room, "if he lives."

"He will live, but I--I cannot tell him, Edward," she sadly said.

"He knows."

"He knows!  Did you dare to tell him?"  It was the lover, not the sister,
who spoke then.

"Yes.  And he knows also that I'm going to reform--that I'm going away."

Her face was hid in her hand.  "And I kept it from him five-and-twenty
years!  .  .  .  Where are you going, Edward?"

"To the Farewell Islands," he slowly replied.

And she, thinking he meant some island group in the Pacific, tearfully
inquired: "Are they far away?"

"Yes, very far away, my girl."

"But you will write to me or come to see me again--you will come to see
me again, sometimes, Edward?"

He paused.  He knew not at first what to reply, but at length he said,
with a strangely determined flash of his dark eyes: "Yes, Barbara, I will
come to see you again--if I can."  He stooped and kissed her.  "Goodbye,
Barbara."

"But, Edward, must you go to-night?"

"Yes, I must go now.  They are waiting for me.  Good-bye."

She would have stayed him but he put her gently back, and she said
plaintively: "God keep you, Edward.  Remember you said that you would
come again to me."

"I shall remember," he said quietly, and he was gone.  Standing in the
light from the window of the sick man's room he wrote a line in Latin on
a slip of paper, begging of Louis Bachelor the mercy of silence, and gave
it to Gongi, who whispered that he was surrounded.  This he knew; he had
not studied sounds in prison through the best years of his life for
nothing.  He asked Gongi to give the note to his master when he was
better, and when it could be done unseen of any one.  Then he turned and
walked coolly towards the shore.

A few minutes later he lay upon a heap of magnolia branches breathing his
life away.  At the same moment of time that a rough but kindly hand
closed the eyes of the bushranger, the woman from The Angel's Rest and
Louis Bachelor saw the pale face of Roadmaster peer through the bedroom
window at Barbara Golding sitting in a chair asleep; and she started and
said through her half-wakefulness, looking at the window: "Where are you
going, Edward?"






THE LONE CORVETTE

     "And God shall turn upon them violently, and toss them like a ball
     into a large country."--ISAIH.

"Poor Ted, poor Ted!  I'd give my commission to see him once again."

"I believe you would, Debney."

"I knew him to the last button of his nature, and any one who knew him
well could never think hardly of him.  There were five of us brothers,
and we all worshipped him.  He could run rings round us in everything,
at school, with sports, in the business of life, in love."

Debney's voice fell with the last few words, and there was a sorrowful
sort of smile on his face.  His look was fastened on the Farilone
Islands, which lay like a black, half-closed eyelid across the disc of
the huge yellow sun, as it sank in the sky straight out from the Golden
Gate.  The long wash of the Pacific was in their ears at their left,
behind them was the Presidio, from which they had come after a visit to
the officers, and before them was the warm, inviting distance of waters,
which lead, as all men know, to the Lotos Isles.

Debney sighed and shook his head.  "He was, by nature, the ablest man I
ever knew.  Everything in the world interested him."

"There lay the trouble, perhaps."

"Nowhere else.  All his will was with the wholesome thing, but his brain,
his imagination were always hunting.  He was the true adventurer at the
start.  That was it, Mostyn."

"He found the forbidden thing more interesting than--the other?"

"Quite so.  Unless a thing was really interesting, stood out, as it were,
he had no use for it--nor for man nor woman."

"Lady Folingsby, for instance."

"Do you know, Mostyn, that even to-day, whenever she meets me, I can see
one question in her eyes: 'Where is he?'  Always, always that.  He found
life and people so interesting that he couldn't help but be interesting
himself.  Whatever he was, I never knew a woman speak ill of him. . . .
Once a year there comes to me a letter from an artist girl in Paris,
written in language that gets into my eyes.  There is always the one
refrain: 'He will return some day.  Say to him that I do not forget.'"

"Whatever his faults, he was too big to be anything but kind to a woman,
was Ted."

"I remember the day when his resignation was so promptly accepted by
the Admiralty.  He walked up to the Admiral--Farquhar it was, on the
Bolingbroke--and said: 'Admiral, if I'd been in your place I'd have done
the same.  I ought to resign, and I have.  Yet if I had to do it over
again, I'd be the same.  I don't repent.  I'm out of the Navy now, and it
doesn't make any difference what I say, so I'll have my preachment out.
If I were Admiral Farquhar, and you were Edward Debney, ex-commander, I'd
say: "Debney, you're a damned good fellow and a damned bad officer."'

"The Admiral liked Edward, in spite of all, better than any man in the
Squadron, for Ted's brains were worth those of any half-dozen officers
he had.  He simply choked, and then, before the whole ship, dropped
both hands on his shoulders, and said: 'Debney, you're a damned good
fellow and a damned bad officer, and I wish to God you were a damned bad
fellow and a damned good officer--for then there were no need to part.'
At that they parted.  But as Edward was leaving, the Admiral came forward
again, and said: 'Where are you going, Debney?'  'I'm going nowhere,
sir,' Ted answered.  'I'm being tossed into strange waters--a lone
corvette of no squadron.'  He stopped, smiled, and then said--it was so
like him, for, with all his wildness, he had the tastes of a student:
'You remember that passage in Isaiah, sir, "And God shall turn upon them
violently, and toss them like a ball into a large country"?'

"There wasn't a man but had a kind thought for him as he left, and
there was rain in the eyes of more than one A.B.  Well, from that day he
disappeared, and no one has seen him since.  God knows where he is; but
I was thinking, as I looked out there to the setting sun, that his wild
spirit would naturally turn to the South, for civilised places had no
charm for him."

"I never knew quite why he had to leave the Navy."

"He opened fire on a French frigate off Tahiti which was boring holes in
an opium smuggler."

Mostyn laughed.  "Of course; and how like Ted it was--an instinct to side
with the weakest."

"Yes, coupled with the fact that the Frenchman's act was mere brutality,
and had not sufficient motive or justification.  So Ted pitched into
him."

"Did the smuggler fly the British flag?"

"No, the American; and it was only the intervention of the United States
which prevented serious international trouble.  Out of the affair came
Ted a shipwreck."

"Have you never got on his track?"

"Once I thought I had at Singapore, but nothing came of it.  No doubt he
changed his name.  He never asked for, never got, the legacy my poor
father left him."

"What was it made you think you had come across him at Singapore?"

"Oh, certain significant things."

"What was he doing?"

Debney looked at his old friend for a moment debatingly, then said
quietly: "Slave-dealing, and doing it successfully, under the noses of
men-of-war of all nations."

"But you decided it was not he after all?"

"I doubted.  If Ted came to that, he would do it in a very big way.  It
would appeal to him on some grand scale, with real danger and, say, a few
scores of thousands of pounds at stake--not unless."

Mostyn lit a cigar, and, thrusting his hands into his pockets, regarded
the scene before him with genial meditation--the creamy wash of the sea
at their feet, the surface of the water like corrugated silver stretching
to the farther sky, with that long lane of golden light crossing it to
the sun, Alcatras, Angel Island, Saucilito, the rocky fortresses, and the
men-of-war in the harbour, on one of which flew the British ensign--the
Cormorant, commanded by Debney.

"Poor Ted!" said Mostyn at last; "he might have been anything."

"Let us get back to the Cormorant," responded Debney sadly.  "And see,
old chap, when you get back to England, I wish you'd visit my mother for
me, for I shall not see her for another year, and she's always anxious--
always since Ted left."

Mostyn grasped the other's hand, and said: "It's the second thing I'll do
on landing, my boy."

Then they talked of other things, but as they turned at the Presidio for
a last look at the Golden Gate, Mostyn said musingly: "I wonder how many
millions' worth of smuggled opium have come in that open door?"

Debney shrugged a shoulder.  "Try Nob Hill, Fifth Avenue, and the Champs
Elysees.  What does a poor man-o'-war's-man know of such things?"

An hour later they were aboard the Cormorant dining with a number of men
asked to come and say good-bye to Mostyn, who was starting for England
the second day following, after a pleasant cruise with Debney.

Meanwhile, from far beyond that yellow lane of light running out from
Golden Gate, there came a vessel, sailing straight for harbour.  She was
an old-fashioned cruiser, carrying guns, and when she passed another
vessel she hoisted the British flag.  She looked like a half-obsolete
corvette, spruced up, made modern by every possible device, and all her
appointments were shapely and in order.  She was clearly a British man-
of-war, as shown in her trim-dressed sailors, her good handful of
marines; but her second and third lieutenants seemed little like
Englishmen.  There was gun-drill and cutlass-drill every day, and, what
was also singular, there was boat-drill twice a day, so that the crew of
this man-of-war, as they saw Golden Gate ahead of them, were perhaps more
expert at boat-drill than any that sailed.  They could lower and raise a
boat with a wonderful expertness in a bad sea, and they rowed with clock-
like precision and machine-like force.

Their general discipline did credit to the British Navy.  But they were
not given to understand that by their Commander, Captain Shewell, who had
an eye like a spot of steel and a tongue like aloes or honey as the mood
was on him.  It was clear that he took his position seriously, for he was
as rigid and exact in etiquette as an admiral of the old school, and his
eye was as keen for his officers as for his men; and that might have
seemed strange too, if one had seen him two years before commanding a
schooner with a roving commission in the South Seas.  Then he was more
genial of eye and less professional of face.  Here he could never be
mistaken for anything else than the commander of a man-of-war--it was in
his legs, in the shoulder he set to the wind, in the tone of his orders,
in his austere urbanity to his officers.  Yet there was something else in
his eye, in his face, which all this professionalism could not hide, even
when he was most professional--some elusive, subterranean force or
purpose.

This was most noticeable when he was shut away from the others in his
cabin.  Then his whole body seemed to change.  The eye became softer, and
yet full of a sort of genial devilry, the body had a careless alertness
and elasticity, the whole man had the athletic grace of a wild animal,
and his face had a hearty sort of humour, which the slightly-lifting lip,
in its insolent disdain, could not greatly modify.  He certainly seemed
well pleased with himself, and more than once, as he sat alone, he
laughed outright, and once he said aloud, as his fingers ran up and down
a schedule--not a man-o'-war's schedule--laughing softly:

"Poor old Farquhar, if he could see me now!"  Then, to himself: "Well, as
I told him, I was violently tossed like a ball into the large country;
and I've had a lot of adventure and sport.  But here's something more
the biggest game ever played between nations by a private person--with
fifty thousand pounds as the end thereof, if all goes well with my lone
corvette."

The next evening, just before dusk, after having idled about out of sight
of the signal station nearly all day, Captain Shewell entered Golden Gate
with the Hornet-of no squadron.  But the officers at the signal station
did not know that, and simply telegraphed to the harbour, in reply to the
signals from the corvette, that a British man-of-war was coming.  She
came leisurely up the bay, with Captain Shewell on the bridge.  He gave a
low whistle as he saw the Cormorant in the distance.  He knew the harbour
well, and saw that the Cormorant had gone to a new anchorage, not the
same as British men-of-war took formerly.  He drew away to the old
anchorage--he need not be supposed to know that a change was expected;
besides--and this was important to Captain Shewell--the old anchorage
was near the docks; and it was clear, save for one little life-boat
and a schooner which was making out as he came up.

As the Hornet came to anchor the Cormorant saluted her, and she replied
instantly.  Customs officers who were watching the craft from the shore
or from their boats put down their marine glasses contentedly when they
saw and heard the salutes.  But two went out to the Hornet, were received
graciously by Captain Shewell, who, over a glass of wine in his cabin-
appropriately hung with pictures of Nelson and Collingwood--said that he
was proceeding to Alaska to rescue a crew shipwrecked which had taken
refuge on a barren island, and that he was leaving the next day as soon
as he could get some coal; though he feared it would be difficult coaling
up that night.  He did not need a great deal, he said--which was, indeed,
the case--but he did need some, and for the Hornet's safety he must have
it.  After this, with cheerful compliments, and the perfunctory
declaration on his part that there was nothing dutiable on board, the
officers left him, greatly pleased with his courtesy, saluted by the
sailors standing at the gangway as they left the ship's side.  The
officers did not notice that one of these sailors winked an eye at
another, and that both then grinned, and were promptly ordered aft by the
second lieutenant.

As soon as it was very dark two or three boats pushed out from the
Hornet, and rowed swiftly to shore, passing a Customs boat as they went,
which was saluted by the officers in command.  After this, boats kept
passing backward and forward for a long time between the Hornet and the
shore, which was natural, seeing that a first night in port is a sort of
holiday for officers and men.  If these sailors had been watched closely,
however, it would have been seen that they visited but few saloons on
shore, and drank little, and then evidently as a blind.  Close watching
would also have discovered the fact that there were a few people on shore
who were glad to see the safe arrival of the Hornet, and who, about one
o'clock in the morning, almost fell on the neck of Captain Shewell as
they bade him good bye.  Then, for the rest of the night, coal was
carried out to the Hornet in boats and barges.

By daybreak her coal was aboard, then came cleaning up, and preparations
to depart.  Captain Shewell's eye was now much on the Cormorant.  He had
escaped one danger, he had landed half a million dollars' worth of opium
in the night, under the very nose of the law, and while Customs boats
were patrolling the bay; there was another danger--the inquisitiveness of
the Cormorant.  It was etiquette for him to call upon the captain of the
Cormorant, and he ought to have done so the evening before, but he had
not dared to run the risk, nor could he venture this morning.  And yet if
the Cormorant discovered that the Hornet was not a British man-of-war,
but a bold and splendid imposture, made possible by a daring ex-officer
of the British Navy, she might open fire, and he could make but a sorry
fight, for he was equipped for show rather than for deadly action.  He
had got this ex-British man-of-war two years before, purchased in Brazil
by two adventurous spirits in San Francisco, had selected his crew
carefully, many of them deserters from the British Navy, drilled them,
and at last made this bold venture under the teeth of a fortress, and at
the mouth of a warship's guns.

Just as he was lifting anchor to get away, he saw a boat shoot out from
the side of the Cormorant.  Captain Debney, indignant at the lack of
etiquette, and a little suspicious also now--for there was no Hornet in
the Pacific Squadron, though there was a Hornet, he knew, in the China
Squadron--was coming to visit the discourteous commander.

He was received with the usual formalities, and was greeted at once by
Captain Shewell.  As the eyes of the two men met both started, but
Captain Debney was most shaken.  He turned white, and put out his hand to
the bulwark to steady himself.  But Captain Shewell held the hand that
had been put out; shook it, pressed it.  He tried to urge Captain Debney
forward, but the other drew back to the gangway.

"Pull yourself together, Dick, or there'll be a mess," said Shewell
softly.

"My God, how could you do it?" replied his brother aghast.

Meanwhile the anchor had been raised, and the Hornet was moving towards
the harbour mouth.  "You have ruined us both," said Richard Debney.
"Neither, Dick!  I'll save your bacon."  He made a sign, the gangway was
closed, he gave the word for full steam ahead, and the Hornet began to
race through the water before Captain Debney guessed his purpose.

"What do you mean to do?" he asked sternly, as he saw his own gig
falling astern.

"To make it hard for you to blow me to pieces.  You've got to do it, of
course, if you can, but I must get a start."

"How far do you intend carrying me?"

"To the Farilones, perhaps."

Richard Debney's face had a sick look.  "Take me to your cabin," he
whispered.

What was said behind the closed door no man in this world knows, and it
is well not to listen too closely to those who part, knowing that they
will never meet again.  They had been children in the one mother's arms;
there was nothing in common between them now except that ancient love.

Nearing the Farilones, Captain Debney was put off in an open boat.
Standing there alone, he was once more a naval officer, and he called out
sternly: "Sir, I hope to sink you and your smuggling craft within four-
and-twenty hours!"

Captain Shewell spoke no word, but saluted deliberately, and watched his
brother's boat recede, till it was a speck upon the sea, as it moved
towards Golden Gate.

"Good old Dick!" he said at last, as he turned away toward the bridge.
"And he'll do it, if he can!"

But he never did, for as the Cormorant cleared the harbour that evening
there came an accident to her machinery, and with two days' start the
Hornet was on her way to be sold again to a South American Republic.

And Edward Debney, once her captain?  What does it matter?




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Answered, with the indifference of despair
Mystery is dear to a woman's heart
Never looked to get an immense amount of happiness out of life
There is nothing so tragic as the formal






CUMNER'S SON AND OTHER SOUTH SEA FOLK

by Gilbert Parker

Volume 4.


A SABLE SPARTAN
A VULGAR FRACTION
HOW PANGO WANGO WAS ANNEXED
AN AMIABLE REVENGE
THE BLIND BEGGAR AND THE LITTLE RED PEG
A FRIEND OF THE COMMUNE




A SABLE SPARTAN

Lady Tynemouth was interested; his Excellency was amused.  The interest
was real, the amusement was not ironical.  Blithelygo, seeing that he
had at least excited the attention of the luncheon party, said half-
apologetically: "Of course my experience is small, but in many parts
of the world I have been surprised to see how uniform revolutionises
the savage.  Put him into Convention, that is clothes, give him
Responsibility, that is a chance to exercise vanity and power, and you
make him a Britisher--a good citizen to all intents and purposes."

Blithelygo was a clever fellow in his way.  He had a decided instinct for
military matters, and for good cigars and pretty women.  Yet he would
rather give up both than an idea which had got firmly fixed in his mind.
He was very deferential in his remarks, but at the same time he was quite
willing to go into a minority which might not include pretty Miss Angel
who sat beside him, if he was not met by conclusive good arguments.

In the slight pause which followed his rather long speech, his Excellency
passed the champagne cup, and Lady Tynemouth said: "But I suppose it
depends somewhat on the race, doesn't it, Mr. Travers?  I am afraid mere
uniforming would scarcely work successfully--among the Bengalese, for
instance."

"A wretched crew," said Major Warham; "awful liars, awful scoundrels,
need kicking every morning."

"Of course," said Blithelygo, "there must be some consideration of race.
But look at the Indian Mutiny.  Though there was revolt, look at those
who 'fought with us faithful and few'; look at the fidelity of the
majority of the native servants.  Look at the native mounted police in
Australia; at the Sikhs in the Settlements and the Native States; at the
Indian scouts of the United States and Canada; and look at these very
Indian troops at your door, your Excellency!  I think my principle holds
good; give uniform, give responsibility--under European surveillance of
course--get British civilisation."

His Excellency's eyes had been wandering out of the window, over the
white wall and into the town where Arabia, India, Africa, the Islands of
the South and Palestine were blended in a quivering, radiant panorama.
Then they rose until they fell upon Jebel Shamsan, in its intoxicating
red and opal far away, and upon the frowning and mighty rampart that
makes Aden one of the most impregnable stations of the Empire.  The
amusement in his eyes had died away; and as he dipped his fingers in the
water at his side and motioned for a quickening of the punkahs, he said:
"There is force in what you say.  It would be an unpleasant look-out for
us here and in many parts of the world if we could not place reliance on
the effect of uniform; but"--and the amused look came again to his eyes--
"we somehow get dulled to the virtues of Indian troops and Somauli
policemen.  We can't get perspective, you see."

Blithelygo good-naturedly joined in the laugh that went round the table;
for nearly all there had personal experience of "uniformed savages."
As the ladies rose Miss Angel said naively to Blithelygo: "You ought to
spend a month in Aden, Mr. Blithelygo.  Don't go by the next boat, then
you can study uniforms here."

We settled down to our cigars.  Major Warham was an officer from Bombay.
He had lived in India for twenty years: long enough to be cynical of
justice at the Horse Guards or at the India Office: to become in fact
bitter against London, S.W., altogether.  It was he that proposed a walk
through the town.

The city lay sleepy and listless beneath a proud and distant sky of
changeless blue.  Idly sat the Arabs on the benches outside the low-
roofed coffee-houses; lazily worked the makers of ornaments in the
bazaars; yawningly pounded the tinkers; greedily ate the children; the
city was cloyed with ease.  Warham, Blithelygo and myself sat in the
evening sun surrounded by gold-and-scarlet bedizened gentry of the
desert, and drank strong coffee and smoked until we too were satisfied,
if not surfeited; animals like the rest.  Silence fell on us.  This was a
new life to two of us; to Warham it was familiar, therefore comfortable
and soporific.  I leaned back and languidly scanned the scene; eyes
halfshut, senses half-awake.  An Arab sheikh passed swiftly with his
curtained harem; and then went filing by in orderly and bright array a
number of Mahommedans, the first of them bearing on a cushion of red
velvet, and covered with a cloth of scarlet and gold, a dead child to
burial.  Down from the colossal tanks built in the mountain gorges that
were old when Mahomet was young, there came donkeys bearing great
leathern bottles such as the Israelites carried in their forty years'
sojourning.  A long line of swaying camels passed dustily to the desert
that burns even into this city of Aden, built on a volcano; groups of
Somaulis, lithe and brawny, moved chattering here and there; and a
handful of wandering horsemen, with spears and snowy garments, were being
swallowed up in the mountain defiles.

The day had been long, the coffee and cigarettes had been heavy, and we
dozed away in the sensuous atmosphere.  Then there came, as if in a
dream, a harsh and far-off murmur of voices.  It grew from a murmur to a
sharp cry, and from a sharp cry to a roar of rage.  In a moment we were
on our feet, and dashing away toward the sound.

The sight that greeted us was a strange one, and horribly picturesque.
In front of a low-roofed house of stone was a crowd of Mahommedans fierce
with anger and loud in imprecation.  Knives were flashing; murder was
afoot.  There stood, with his back to the door of the house, a Somauli
policeman, defending himself against this raging little mob.  Not
defending himself alone.  Within the house he had thrust a wretched Jew,
who had defiled a Mahommedan mosque; and he was here protecting him
against these nervous champions of the faith.

Once, twice, thrice, they reached him; but he fought on with his
unwounded arm.  We were unarmed and helpless; no Somaulis were near.
Death glittered in these white blades.  But must this Spartan die?

Now there was another cry, a British cheer, a gleam of blue and red, a
glint of steel rounding the corner at our left, and the Mahommedans broke
away, with a parting lunge at the Somauli.  British soldiers took the
place of the bloodthirsty mob.

Danger over, the Somauli sank down on the threshold, fainting from loss
of blood.  As we looked at him gashed all over, but not mortally wounded,
Blithelygo said with glowing triumph: "British, British, you see!"

At that moment the door of the house opened, and out crawled to the feet
of the officer in command the miserable Israelite with his red hemmed
skirt and greasy face.  For this cowardly creature the Somauli policeman
had perilled his life.  Sublime!  How could we help thinking of the talk
at his Excellency's table?

Suddenly the Somauli started up and looked round anxiously.  His eyes
fell on the Jew.  His countenance grew peaceful.  He sank back again into
the arms of the surgeon and said, pointing to the son of Abraham: "He owe
me for a donkey."

Major Warham looking at Blithelygo said with a chilled kind of lustre to
his voice: "British, so British, don't you know!"






A VULGAR FRACTION

Sometimes when, like Mirza, I retire to my little Hill of Bagdad for
meditation, there comes before me the bright picture of Hawaii with its
coral-bulwarked islands and the memory of an idle sojourn on their
shores.  I remember the rainbow-coloured harbour of Honolulu Hilo, the
simply joyous Arcadie at the foot of Mauna Loa, and Mauna Kea which
lifted violet shoulders to the morning, the groves of cocoa-palms and
tamarinds, the waterfalls dropping over sheer precipices a thousand feet
into the ocean, the green embrasures where the mango, the guava, and the
lovi lovi grow, and where the hibiscus lifts red hands to the light.
I call to mind the luau where Kalakua, the King, presided over the
dispensation of stewed puppy, lifted to one's lips by brown but fair
fingers, of live shrimps, of poi and taro and balls of boiled sea-weed
stuffed with Heaven knows what; and to crown all, or to drown all, the
insinuating liquor kava, followed when the festival was done by the
sensuous but fascinating hula hula, danced by maidens of varying
loveliness.  Of these Van Blaricom, the American, said, "they'd capture
Chicago in a week with that racket," and he showed Blithelygo his
calculations as to profits.

The moments that we enjoyed the most, however, were those that came when
feast and serenade were over, when Hawaii Ponoi, the National Anthem, was
sung, and we lay upon the sands and watched the long white coverlet of
foam folding towards the shore, and saw visions and dreamed dreams.  But
at times we also breathed a prayer--a prayer that somebody or something
would come and carry off Van Blaricom, whose satire, born and nurtured in
Chicago, was ever turned against Hawaii and all that therein was.

There are times when I think I had a taste of Paradise in Hawaii--but a
Paradise not without a Satanic intruder in the shape of that person from
Illinois.  Nothing escaped his scorn.  One day we saw from Diamond Head
three water-spouts careering to the south, a splendid procession of the
powers of the air.  He straightway said to Kalakua, that "a Michigan
cyclone had more git-up-and-git about it than them three black cats with
their tails in the water."  He spent hours in thinking out rudely caustic
things to repeat about this little kingdom.  He said that the Government
was a Corliss-engine running a sewing machine.  He used to ask the
Commander of the Forces when the Household Cavalry were going into summer
camp--they were twelve.  The only thing that appeared to impress him
seriously was Molokai, the desolate island where the lepers made their
cheerless prison-home.  But the reason for his gravity appeared when he
said to Blithelygo and myself: "There'd be a fortune in that menagerie if
it was anchored in Lake Michigan."  On that occasion he was answered in
strong terms.  It was the only time I ever heard Blithelygo use
profanity.  But the American merely dusted his patent leather shoes with
a gay silk kerchief, adjusted his clothes on his five-foot frame as he
stood up; and said: "Say you ought to hear my partner in Chicago when he
lets out.  He's an artist!"

This Man from the West was evidently foreordained to play a part in the
destinies of Blithelygo and myself, for during two years of travel he
continuously crossed our path.  His only becoming quality was his ample
extravagance.  Perhaps it was the bountiful impetus he gave to the
commerce of Honolulu, and the fact that he talked of buying up a portion
of one of the Islands for sugar-planting, that induced the King to be
gracious to him.  However that might be, when Blithelygo and I joined his
Majesty at Hilo to visit the extinct volcano of Kilauea, there was the
American coolly puffing his cigar and quizzically feeling the limbs and
prodding the ribs of the one individual soldier who composed the King's
body-guard.  He was not interested in our arrival further than to give us
a nod.  In a pause that followed our greetings, he said to his Majesty,
while jerking his thumb towards the soldier: "King, how many of 'em have
you got in your army?"

His Majesty blandly but with dignity turned to his aide-de-camp and
raised his eyebrows inquiringly.  The aide-de-camp answered: "Sixty."

"Then we've got 1/60th of the standing army with us, eh?" drawled Van
Blaricom.

The aide-de-camp bowed affirmatively.  The King was scanning Mauna Loa.
The American winked at us.  The King did not see the wink, but he had
caught a tone in the voice of the invader, which brought, as I thought,
a slight flush to his swarthy cheek.  The soldier-his name was Lilikalu
--looked from his King to the critic of his King's kingdom and standing
army, and there was a glow beneath his long eyelashes which suggested
that three-quarters of a century of civilisation had not quite drawn the
old savage spirit from the descendants of Lailai, the Hawaiian Eve.

During the journey up the Forty-Mile Track to Kilauea, the American
enveloped 1/60th of his Majesty's standing army with his Michigan Avenue
and peanut-stand wit, and not always, it was observed, out of the hearing
of the King, who nevertheless preserved a marked unconsciousness.
Majesty was at a premium with two of us on that journey.  Only once was
the Chicagonian's wit not stupid as well as offensive.  It chanced thus.
The afternoon in which we reached the volcano was suffocatingly hot, and
the King's bodyguard had discarded all clothing--brief when complete--
save what would not count in any handicap.  He was therefore at peace,
while the rest of us, Royalty included, were inwardly thinking that after
this the orthodox future of the wicked would have no terrors.  At a
moment when the body-guard appeared to be most ostentatious in his
freedom from clothing the American said to his Majesty: "King, do you
know what 1/60th of your standing army is?"  The reply was a low and
frigid: "No."

"It's a vulgar fraction."

                    .....................

There were seven of us walking on the crater of the volcano: great banks
of sulphur on the right, dark glaciers of lava on the left, high walls of
scoria and volcanic crust enveloping us all about.  We were four thousand
feet above the level of the sea.  We were standing at the door of the
House of Pele, the Goddess of Fire.  We knocked, but she would not open.
The flames were gone from her hearthstone, her smoke was gorging the
throat of the suffering earth.

"Say, she was awful sick while she was about it," said the American as he
stumbled over the belched masses of lava.

That was one day.  But two days after we stood at Pele threshold again.
Now red scoria and pumice and sulphur boiled and rolled where the hard
lava had frayed our boots.  Within thirty-six hours Kilauea has sprung
from its flameless sleep into sulphurous life and red roaring grandeur.
Though Pele came but slowly, she came; and a lake of fire beat at the
lofty sides of the volcanic cup.  The ruby spray flashed up to the sky,
and geysers of flame hurled long lances at the moon.

"King," said the American, "why don't you turn it into an axe-factory?"

At last the time came when we must leave this scene of marvel and terror,
and we retired reluctantly.  There were two ways by which we might return
to the bridle path that led down the mountain.  The American desired to
take the one by which we had not come; the rest of us, tired out,
preferred to go as we came--the shortest way.  A compromise was made by
his Majesty sending 1/60th of the standing army with the American, who
gaily said he would join us, "horse, foot and cavalry," in the bridle-
path.  We reached the meeting-point first, but as we looked back we saw
with horror that two streams of fire were flowing down the mountain side.
We were to the left of them both, and safe; but between them, and
approaching us, were Van Blaricom and the native soldier.  The two men
saw their danger, and pushed swiftly down the mountainside and towards
us, but more swiftly still these narrow snake-like streams came on.

Presently the streams veered towards each other and joined.  The two men
were on an island with a shore of fire.  There was one hope--the shore
was narrow yet.  But in running the American fell, spraining his ankle
badly.  We were speechless, but the King's lips parted with a moan, as he
said: "Lilikalu can jump the stream, but the other--!"

They were now at the margin of that gleaming shore, the American wringing
his hands.  It was clear to him that unless a miracle happened he would
see his beloved Chicago no more; for the stream behind them was rapidly
widening.

I think I see that 1/60th of his Majesty's infantry as he looked down
upon the slight and cowering form of the American.  His moment of
vengeance had come.  A second passed, marked by the splashing roar of the
waves in the hill above us, and then the soldier-naked, all save the
boots he wore-seized the other in his arms, stepped back a few paces, and
then ran forward and leaped across the barrier of flame.  Not quite
across!  One foot and ankle sank into the molten masses, with a shiver of
agony, he let the American fall on the safe ground.  An instant later and
he lay at our feet, helpless and maimed for many a day; and the standing
army of the King was deprived of 1/60th of its strength.






HOW PANGO WANGO WAS ANNEXED

Blithelygo and I were at Levuka, Fiji, languidly waiting for some
"trader" or mail-steamer to carry us away anywhere.  Just when we were
bored beyond endurance and when cigars were running low, a Fijian came to
us and said: "That fellow, white fellow, all a-same a-you, long a-shore.
Pleni sail.  Pleni Melican flag."

We went to the beach, and there was Jude Van Blaricom, our American.  We
had left him in New Zealand at the Pink Terraces, bidding him an eternal
farewell.  We wished it so.  But we had met him afterwards at Norfolk
Island, and again at Sydney, and we knew now that we should never cease
to meet him during our sojourn on this earth.

An hour later we were on board his yacht, Wilderness, being introduced to
MacGregor, the captain, to Mr. Dagmar Caramel, C.M.G., his guest, and to
some freshly made American cocktails.  Then we were shown over the
Wilderness.  She looked as if she had been in the hands of a Universal
Provider.  Evidently the American had no intention of roughing it.  His
toilet requisites were a dream.  From the dazzling completeness of the
snug saloon we were taken aft to see two coops filled with fowls.  "Say,"
said the American, "how's that for fresh meat?"  Though a little ashamed
of it, we then and there accepted the Chicagonian's invitation to take a
cruise with him in the South Pacific.  For days the cruise was pleasant
enough, and then things began to drag.  Fortunately there came a new
interest in the daily routine.  One day Van Blaricom was seen standing
with the cook before the fowl coops deeply interested; and soon after he
had triumphantly arranged what he called "The Coliseum."  This was an
enclosure of canvas chiefly, where we had cock-fights daily.  The
gladiators were always ready for the arena.  One was called U. S., after
General U. S. Grant, and the other Bob Lee, after General Robert Lee.

"Go it, U. S.  Lift your skewers, you bobtail.  Give it to him, you've
got him in Andersonville, U. S."  Thus, day by day, were the warriors
encouraged by Van Blaricom.

There is nothing very elegant or interesting in the record so far, but it
all has to do with the annexation of Pango Wango, and, as Blithelygo long
afterwards remarked, it shows how nations sometimes acquire territory.
Yes, this Coliseum of ours had as much to do with the annexation as had
the American's toilet requisites his hair-oil and perfume bottles.  In
the South Pacific, a thousand miles from land, Van Blaricom was redolent
of new-mown hay and heliotrope.

It was tropically hot.  We were in the very middle of the hurricane
season.  The air had no nerve.  Even the gladiators were relaxing their
ardour; and soon the arena was cleared altogether, for we were in the
midst of a hurricane.  It was a desperate time, but just when it seemed
most desperate the wheel of doom turned backward and we were saved.  The
hurricane found us fretful with life by reason of the heat, it left us
thankful for being let to live at all; though the Wilderness appeared
little better than a drifting wreck.  Our commissariat was gone, or
almost gone, we hadn't any masts or sails to speak of, and the cook
informed us that we had but a few gallons of fresh water left; yet,
strange to say, the gladiators remained to us.  When the peril was over
it surprised me to remember that Van Blaricom had been comparatively cool
through it all; for I had still before me a certain scene at the volcano
of Kilauea.  I was to be still more surprised.

We were by no means out of danger.  MacGregor did not know where we were;
the fresh water was vanishing rapidly, and our patch of sail was hardly
enough to warrant a breeze taking any interest in it.  We had been saved
from immediate destruction, but it certainly seemed like exchanging
Tophet for a slow fire.  When the heat was greatest and the spiritual
gloom thickest the American threw out the sand-bags, as it were, and hope
mounted again.

"Say, MacGregor," he said, "run up the American flag.  There's luck in
the old bandana."

This being done, he added: "Bring along the cigars; we'll have out U. S.
and Bob Lee in the saloon."

Our Coliseum was again open to the public at two shillings a head.  That
had been the price from the beginning.  The American was very business-
like in the matter, but this admission fee was our only contribution to
the expenses of that cruise.  Sport could only allay, it could not banish
our sufferings.  We became as haggard and woe-begone a lot as ever ate
provisions impregnated with salt; we turned wistfully from claret to a
teaspoonful of water, and had tongues like pieces of blotting-paper.  One
morning we were sitting at breakfast when we heard a cock-crow, then
another and another.  MacGregor sprang to his feet crying: "Land!"  In a
moment we were on deck.  There was no land to be seen, but MacGregor
maintained that a cock was a better look-out than a human being any time,
and in this case he was right.  In a few hours we did sight land.

Slowly we came nearer to the island.  MacGregor was not at all sure where
it was, but guessed it might be one of the Solomon Islands.  When within
a few miles of it Blithelygo unfeelingly remarked that its population
might be cannibalistic.  MacGregor said it was very likely; but we'd have
to be fattened first, and that would give us time to turn round.  The
American said that the Stars and Stripes and the Coliseum had brought us
luck so far, and he'd take the risk if we would.

The shore was crowded with natives, and as we entered the bay we saw
hundreds take to the water in what seemed fearfully like war-canoes.  We
were all armed with revolvers, and we had half a dozen rifles handy.  As
the islanders approached we could see that they also were armed; and a
brawny race they looked, and particularly bloodthirsty.  In the largest
canoe stood a splendid-looking fellow, evidently a chief.  On the shore
near a large palm-thatched house a great group was gathered, and the
American, levelling his glass, said: "Say, it's a she-queen or something
over there."

At that moment the canoes drew alongside, and while MacGregor adjured us
to show no fear, he beckoned the chief to come aboard.  An instant, and a
score of savages, armed with spears and nulla-nullas were on deck.
MacGregor made signs that we were hungry, Blithelygo that we were
thirsty, and the American, smoking all the while, offered the chief a
cigar.  The cigar was refused, but the headman ordered a couple of
natives ashore, and in five minutes we had wild bananas and fish to eat,
and water to drink.  But that five minutes of waiting were filled with
awkward incidents.  Blithelygo, meaning to be hospitable, had brought up
a tumbler of claret for the headman.  With violent language, MacGregor
stopped its presentation; upon which the poison of suspicion evidently
entered the mind of the savage, and he grasped his spear threateningly.
Van Blaricom, who wore a long gold watch-chain, now took it off and
offered it to the chief, motioning him to put it round his neck.  The
hand was loosened on the spear, and the Chicagonian stepped forward and
put the chain over the head of the native.  As he did so the chief
suddenly thrust his nose forward and sniffed violently at the American.

What little things decide the fate of nations and men!  This was a race
whose salutation was not nose-rubbing, but smelling, and the American had
not in our worst straits failed to keep his hair sleek with hair-oil,
verbena scented, and to perfume himself daily with new-mown hay or
heliotrope.  Thus was he of goodly savour to the chief, and the eyes of
the savage grew bright.  At that moment the food and drink came.  During
the repast the chief chuckled in his own strange way, and, when we
slackened in our eating, he still motioned to us to go on.

Van Blaricom, who had been smiling, suddenly looked grave.  "By the great
horn-spoons," he said, "they have begun already!  They're fattening us!"

MacGregor nodded affirmatively, and then Van Blaricom's eyes wandered
wildly from the chief to that group on the shore where he thought he had
seen the "she-queen."  At that moment the headman came forward again,
again sniffed at him, and again chuckled, and all the natives as they
looked on us chuckled also.  It was most unpleasant.  Suddenly I saw the
American start.  He got up, turned to us, and said: "I've got an idea.
MacGregor, get U. S.  and Bob Lee."  Then he quietly disappeared, the
eyes of the savages suspiciously following him.  In a moment he came
back, bearing in his arms a mirror, a bottle of hair-oil, a couple of
bottles of perfume, a comb and brush, some variegated bath towels, and an
American flag.  First he let the chief sniff at the bottles, and then,
pointing to the group on the shore, motioned to be taken over.  In a few
moments he and MacGregor were being conveyed towards the shore in the
gathering dusk.

Four hours passed.  It was midnight.  There was noise of drums and
shouting on the shore, which did not relieve our suspense.  Suddenly
there was a commotion in the canoes that still remained near the
Wilderness.  The headman appeared before us, and beckoned to Blithelygo
and myself to come.  The beckoning was friendly, and we hoped that
affairs had taken a more promising turn.

In a space surrounded with palms and ti-trees a great fire was burning.
There was a monotonous roll of the savage tom-tom and a noise of shouting
and laughter.  Yes, we were safe, and the American had done it.  The
Coliseum was open, MacGregor was ring-master, and U. S.  and Bob Lee were
at work.  This show, with other influences, had conquered Pango Wango.
The American flag was hoisted on a staff, and on a mighty stump there sat
Van Blaricom, almost innocent of garments, I grieve to say, with one whom
we came to know as Totimalu, Queen of Pango Wango, a half circle of
savages behind them.  Van Blaricom and MacGregor had been naturalised by
having their shoulders lanced with a spear-point, and then rubbed against
the lanced shoulders of the chiefs.  The taking of Pango Wango had not
been, I fear, a moral victory.  Van Blaricom was smoking a cigar, and was
writing on a piece of paper, using the back of a Pango Wango man as a
desk.  The Queen's garments were chiefly variegated bath-towels, and she
was rubbing her beaming countenance and ample bosom with hair-oil and
essence of new-mown hay.

Van Blaricom nodded to us nonchalantly, saying: "It's all right--she's
Totimalu, the Queen.  Sign here, Queen," and he motioned for the obese
beauty to hold the pencil.  She did so, and then he stood up, and, while
the cock-fight still went on, he read, with a fine Chicago fluency, what
proved to be a proclamation.  As will be seen, it was full of ellipses
and was fragmentary in its character, though completely effective in fact:

     Know all men by these Presents, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
     Seeing that all men are born free and equal (vide United States
     Constitution), et cetera.  We, Jude Van Blaricom, of the city of
     Chicago, with and by the consent of Queen Totimalu, do, in the name
     of George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, and the State
     of Illinois, and by the Grace of Heaven, et cetera, et cetera, et
     cetera, hereby annex the Kingdom of Pango Wango to be of the
     territory of the American Union, to have and to hold from this day
     forth (vide Constitution of the United States), et cetera.

     Signed, JUDE VAN BLARICOM, TOTIMALU  X  (her mark).

"Beat the drums, you niggers!" he cried, and patted Totimalu's shoulder.
"Come and join the royal party, gentlemen, and pay your respects.  Shake!
That's right."

Thus was Pango Wango annexed.






AN AMIABLE REVENGE

Whenever any one says to me that civilisation is a failure, I refer him
to certain records of Tonga, and tell him the story of an amiable
revenge.  He is invariably convinced that savages can learn easily the
forms of convention and the arts of government--and other things.  The
Tongans once had a rough and coarsely effective means for preserving
order and morality, but the whole scheme was too absurdly simple.  Now,
with a Constitution and a Sacred Majesty, and two Houses of Parliament,
and a native Magistracy, they show that they are capable of becoming
European in its most pregnant meaning.  As the machinery has increased
the grist for the mill has grown.  There was a time when a breach of the
Seventh Commandment was punished in Tonga with death, and it was
therefore rarely committed.  It is no rarity now--so does law and
civilisation provide opportunities for proving their existence.

On landing at Nukalofa, the capital of Tonga, some years ago, I naturally
directed my steps towards the residence of the British consul.  The route
lay along an arc of emerald and opal shore, the swaying cocoa-palms
overhead, and native huts and missionary conventicles hidden away in
coverts of ti-trees, hibiscus bushes, and limes; the sensuous, perfume-
ladened air pervading all.  I had seen the British flag from the coral-
bulwarked harbour, but could not find it now.  Leaving the indolent
village behind, I passed the Palace, where I beheld the sacred majesty of
Tonga on the veranda sleepily flapping the flies from his aged calves,
and I could not find that flag.  Had I passed it?  Was it yet to come?
I leaned against a bread-fruit tree and thought upon it.  The shore was
deserted.  Nobody had taken any notice of me; even the German steamer
Lubeck had not brought a handful of the population to the Quay.

I was about to make up my mind to go back to the Lubeck and sulk, when a
native issued from the grove at my left and blandly gazed upon me as he
passed.  He wore a flesh-coloured vala about the loins, a red pandanus
flower in his ear, and a lia-lia of hibiscus blossoms about his neck.
That was all.  Evidently he was not interested in me, for he walked on.
I choked back my feelings of hurt pride, and asked him in an off-hand
kind of way, and in a sort of pigeon English, if he could tell me where
the British consul lived.  The stalwart subject of King George Tabou
looked at me gravely for an instant, then turned and motioned down the
road.  I walked on beside him, improperly offended by his dignified airs,
his coolness of body and manner, and what I considered the insolent
plumpness and form of his chest and limbs.

He was a harmony in brown and red.  Even his hair was brown.  I had to
admit to myself that in point of comeliness I could not stand the same
scrutiny in the same amount of costume.  Perhaps that made me a little
imperious, a little superior in manner.  Reducing my English to his
comprehension as I measured it--he bowed when I asked him if he
understood--I explained to him many things necessary for the good of his
country.  Remembering where I was, I expressed myself in terms that were
gentle though austere regarding the King, and reproved the supineness and
stupidity of the Crown Prince.  Lamenting the departed puissance of the
sons of Tongatabu, I warmed to my subject, telling this savage who looked
at me with so neutral a countenance how much I deplored the decadence of
his race.  I bade him think of the time when the Tongans, in token of
magnanimous amity, rubbed noses with the white man, and of where those
noses were now--between the fingers of the Caucasian.  He appeared
becomingly attentive, and did me the honour before I began my peroration
to change the pandanus flower from the ear next to me to the other.

I had just rounded off my last sentence when he pointed to a house, half-
native, half-European, in front of which was a staff bearing the British
flag.  With the generosity which marks the Englishman away from home I
felt in my pockets and found a sixpence.  I handed it to my companion;
and with a "Talofa" the only Tongan I knew--I passed into the garden of
the consulate.  The consul himself came to the door when I knocked on the
lintel.  After glancing at my card he shook me by the hand, and then
paused.  His eyes were intently directed along the road by which I had
come.  I looked back, and there stood the stalwart Tongan where I had
left him, gazing at the sixpence I had placed in his hand.  There was a
kind of stupefaction in his attitude.  Presently the consul said somewhat
tartly: "Ah, you've been to the Palace--the Crown Prince has brought you
over!"

It was not without a thrill of nervousness that I saw my royal guide flip
the sixpence into his mouth--he had no pocket--and walk back towards the
royal abode.

I told the consul just how it was.  In turn he told his daughter, the
daughter told the native servants, and in three minutes the place was
echoing with languid but appreciative laughter.  Natives came to the door
to look at me, and after wide-eyed smiling at me for a minute gave place
to others.  Though I too smiled, my thoughts were gloomy; for now it
seemed impossible to go to the Palace and present myself to King George
and the Heir-Apparent.  But the consul, and, still more, the consul's
daughter, insisted; pooh-poohing my hesitation.  At this distance from
the scene and after years of meditation I am convinced that their efforts
to induce me to go were merely an unnatural craving for sensation.

I went--we three went.  Even a bare-legged King has in his own house an
advantage over the European stranger.  I was heated, partly from self-
repression, partly from Scotch tweed.  King George was quite, quite cool,
and unencumbered, save for a trifling calico jacket, a pink lava-lava,
and the august fly-flapper.  But what heated me most, I think, was the
presence of the Crown Prince, who, on my presentation, looked at me as
though he had never seen me before.  He was courteous, however, directing
a tappa cloth to be spread for me.  The things I intended to say to King
George for the good of himself and his kingdom, which I had thought out
on the steamer Lubeck and rehearsed to my guide a few hours before, would
not be tempted forth.  There was silence; for the consul did not seem "to
be on in the scene," and presently the King of Holy Tonga nodded and fell
asleep.  Then the Crown Prince came forward, and beckoned me to go with
him.  He led me to a room which was composed of mats and bamboo pillars
chiefly.  At first I thought there were about ten pillars to support the
roof, but my impression before I left was that there were about ten
thousand.  For which multiplication there were good reasons.

Again a beautiful tappa cloth was spread for me, and then ten maidens
entered, and, sitting in a semi-circle, began to chew a root called kava,
which, when sufficiently masticated, they returned into a calabash, water
being poured on the result.  Meanwhile, the Prince, dreamily and ever so
gently, was rolling some kind of weed between his fingers.  About the
time the maidens had finished, the Crown Prince's cigarette was ready.
A small calabash of the Result was handed to me, and the cigarette
accompanied it.  The Crown Prince sat directly opposite me, lit his own
cigarette, and handed the matches.  I distinctly remember the first half-
dozen puffs of that cigarette, the first taste of kava it had the flavour
of soft soap and Dover's powder.  I have smoked French-Canadian tobacco,
I have puffed Mexican hair-lifters, but Heaven had preserved me till that
hour from the cigarettes of a Crown Prince of Tonga.  As I said, the
pillars multiplied; the mats seemed rising from the floor; the maidens
grew into a leering army of Amazons; but through it all the face of the
Crown Prince never ceased to smile upon me gently.

There were some incidents of that festival which I may have forgotten,
for the consul said afterwards that I was with his Royal Highness about
an hour and a half.  The last thing I remember about the visit was the
voice of the successor to the throne of Holy Tonga asking me blandly in
perfect English: "Will you permit me to show you the way to the consul's
house?"

To my own credit I respectfully declined.






THE BLIND BEGGAR AND THE LITTLE RED PEG

As Sherry and I left the theatre in Mexico City one night, we met a blind
beggar tapping his way home.  Sherry stopped him.  "Good evening," he
said over the blind man's shoulder.

"Good evening, senor," was the reply.  "You are late."

"Si, senor," and the blind man pushed a hand down in his coat pocket.

"He's got his fist on the rhino," said Sherry to me in English.  "He's
not quite sure whether we're footpads or not--poor devil."

"How much has he got?" asked I.

"Perhaps four or five dollars.  Good business, eh?  Got it in big money
mostly, too--had it changed at some cafe."

The blind man was nervous, seemed not to understand us.  He made as if to
move on.  Sherry and I, to reassure him, put a few reals into his hand--
not without an object, for I asked Sherry to make him talk on.
A policeman sauntered near with his large lantern--a superior sort of
Dogberry, but very young, as are most of the policemen in Mexico, save
the Rurales, that splendid company of highwaymen whom Diaz bought over
from being bandits to be the guardians of the peace.  This one eyed us
meaningly, but Sherry gave him a reassuring nod, and our talk went on,
while the blind man was fingering the money we had just given him.
Presently Sherry said to him: "I'm Bingham Sherry," adding some other
particulars--"and you're all right.  I've a friend here who wants to talk
with you.  Come along; we'll take you home--confound the garlic, what a
breath he's got!"

For a moment the blind man seemed to hesitate, then he raised his head
quickly, as if looking into Sherry's face; a light came over it, and he
said, repeating Sherry's name: "Si, senor; si, si, senor.  I know you
now.  You sit in the right-hand corner of the little back-room at the
Cafe Manrique, where you come to drink chocolate.  Is it not?"

"That's where I sit," said Sherry.  "And now, be gad, I believe I
remember you.  Are you Becodar?"

"Si, senor."

"Well, I'm damned!"  Then, turning tome: "Lots of these fellows look so
much alike that I didn't recognise this one.  He's a character.  Had a
queer history.  I'll get him to tell it."

We walked on, one on either side, Sherry using his hat to wave away the
smell of garlic.  Presently he said "Where've you been to-night,
Becodar?"

"I have paid my respects to the Maison Dore, to the Cafe de la Concordia,
to the Cafe Iturbide, senor."

"And how did paying your respects pay you, Becodar?"

"The noble courtesy of these cafes, and the great consideration of the
hidalgos there assembled rendered to me five pesos and a trifle, senor."

"The poor ye have always with you.  He that giveth to the poor lendeth to
the Lord.  Becodar has large transactions with Providence, mio amigo,"
said Sherry.

The beggar turned his sightless eyes to us, as though he would understand
these English words.  Sherry, seeing, said: "We were saying, Becodar,
that the blessed saints know how to take care of a blind man, lest,
having no boot, he stub his toe against a stone."

Off came Becodar's hat.  He tapped the wall.  "Where am I, senor?" he
asked.

Sherry told him.  "Ah!" he said, "the church of Saint Joseph is near."
Then he crossed himself and seemed to hurry his steps.  Presently he
stood still.  We were beside the church.  Against the door, in a niche,
was a figure of the Virgin in stone.  He got to his knees and prayed
fast.  And yet as he prayed I saw his hand go to his pocket, and it
fumbled and felt the money there.

"Begad, he's counting it all," said Sherry, "and now he's giving thanks
for the exact amount, adding his distinguished consideration that the sum
is by three reals greater than any day since Lent began.  He promises to
bring some flowers to-morrow for the shrine, and he also swears to go a
pilgrimage to a church of Mary at Guadaloupe, and to be a kind compadre--
By Jove, there you are!  He's a compadre--a blind compadre!"

A little while afterwards we were in Becodar's house--a low adobe but of
two rooms with a red light burning over the door, to guard against the
plague.  It had a table hanging like a lid from the wall, a stone for
making tortillas, a mortar for grinding red peppers, a crucifix on the
wall, a short sword, a huge pistol, a pair of rusty stirrups, and several
chairs.  The chairs seemed to be systematically placed, and it was quite
wonderful to see how the beggar twisted in and out among them without
stumbling.  I could not understand this, unless it was that he wished to
practise moving about deftly, that he might be at least disadvantage in
the cafes and public resorts.  He never once stirred them, and I was
presently surprised to see that they were all fastened to the floor.
Sherry seemed as astonished as I.  From this strangeness I came to
another.  Looking up at the walls I saw set in the timber a number of
holes cleanly bored.  And in one of the last of these holes was a peg.
Again my eyes shifted.  From a nail in one corner of the room hung a red
and white zarape, a bridle, one of those graceless bits which would
wrench the mouth of the wildest horse to agony, and a sombrero.
Something in these things fascinated me.  I got up and examined them,
while the blind man was in the other room.  Turning them over I saw that
the zarape was pierced with holes-bullet holes.  I saw also that it was
stained a deeper red than its own.  I turned away, questioning Sherry.
He came and looked, but said nothing, lifting a hand in deprecation.  As
we stood so, Becodar appeared again in the doorway, bearing an olla of
pulque and some tortilla sandwiches, made of salad and shreds of meat,
flavoured with garlic.  He paused, his face turned towards us, with an
understanding look.  His instinct was remarkable.  He did not speak, but
came and placed the things he carried near the chairs where we had sat.

Presently I saw some writing on the adobe wall.  The look of it showed
the hand of youth, its bold carelessness, a boy.  Some of it I set down
soon afterwards, and it ran in this fashion: "The most good old compadre!
But I'd like another real."  Again: "One media for a banderilla, two
reals for the bull-fight, five centavos for the sweet oranges, and
nothing for dulces.  I threw a cigar at the toreador.  It was no good,
but the toreador was a king.  Good-night, compadre the blind, who begs."
Again: "If I knew where it was I'd take a real.  Carambo!  No, I
wouldn't.  I'll ask him.  I'll give him the new sword-stick that my
cousin the Rurales gave me.  He doesn't need it now he's not a bandit.
I'm stuffed, and my head swims.  It's the pulque.  Sabe Dios!"  Again:
"Compadre, the most miraculous, that goes tapping your stick along the
wall, and jingles the silver in your pocket, whither do you wander?  Have
you forgotten that I am going to the cock-fight, and want a real?  What
is a cock-fight without a real?  Compadre the brave, who stumbles along
and never falls, I am sitting on your doorstep, and I am writing on your
wall--if I had as much money as you I'd go to every bull-fight.  I'd keep
a fighting-cock myself."  And once again: "If I was blind I'd have money
out of the cafes, but I couldn't see my bulls toss the horses.  I'll be a
bandit, and when I'm old, and if Diaz doesn't put me against the wall and
prod holes in me like Gonzales, they'll take me in the Rurales, same as
Gerado."

"Who is it writes on the wall, Becodar?" asked Sherry of our host, as,
on his knees, he poured out pulque for us.

The old man turned musingly, and made motions of writing, a pleased look
in his face.  "Ah, senor, he who so writes is Bernal--I am his compadre.
He has his mother now, but no father, no father."  He smiled.  "You have
never seen so bold and enterprising, never so handsome a boy.  He can
throw the lasso and use the lariat, and ride--sabe Dios, he can ride!
His cousin Gerado the Rurales taught him.  I do well by him as I may,
who have other things to think on.  But I do well by him."

"What became of his father, Becodar?  Dead?" asked Sherry.

The beggar crossed himself.  "Altogether, senor.  And such a funeral had
he, with the car all draped, and even the mutes with the gold braid on
their black.  I will tell you how it was.  We were great friends,
Bernal's father and me, and when the boy was born, I said, I will be
compadre to him.  ('Godfather, or co-father,' interposed Sherry to me.)
I had my sight then, senors, out of the exalted mercy of the Saints.
Ah, those were great times, when I had my eyes, and no grey hairs,
and could wear my sword, and ride my horses.  There was work to do then,
with sword and horses.  It was revolution here and rebellion there, and
bandits everywhere.  Ah, well, it is no matter; I was speaking of the boy
and his father and myself, the compadre.  We were all great friends.  But
you know the way of men.  One day he and I--Santiago, Bernal's father--
had been drinking mescal.  We quarrelled--I know not why.  It is not well
nor right for a padre and a compadre to fight--there is trouble in Heaven
over that.  But there is a way; and we did it as others have done.  We
took off our sombreros, and put our compadreship on the ground under
them.  That was all right--it was hid there under the hat.  Then we stood
up and fought--such a fight--for half an hour.  Then he cut me in the
thigh--a great gash--and I caught him in the neck the same.  We both came
to the ground then, the fight was over, and we were, of course, good
friends again.  I dragged myself over to him as he lay there, and lifted
his head and sopped the blood at his neck with my scarf.  I did not think
that he was hurt so bad.  But he said: 'I am gone, my Becodar.  I haven't
got five minutes in me.  Put on your compadreship quick.'  I snatched up
the sombrero and put it on, and his I tucked under his head.  So that we
were compadres again.  Ah, senor, senor!  Soon he drew my cheek down to
his and said: 'Adios, compadre: Bernal is thine now.  While your eyes
see, and your foot travels, let him not want a friend.  Adios!'  That was
the end of him.  They had me in Balim for a year, and then I came out to
the boy; and since then for twelve years he has not suffered."

At this point he offered us the pulque and the sandwiches, and I took
both, eating and enjoying as well as I could.  Sherry groaned, but took
the pulque, refusing the sandwiches almost violently.

"How did you lose your sight, Becodar?" asked Sherry presently.

Becodar sat perfectly still for a moment, and then said in a low voice:
"I will tell you.  I will make the story short.  Gentle God, what a thing
it was!  I was for Gonzales then--a loyal gentleman, he called me--I,
a gentleman!  But that was his way.  I was more of a spy for him.  Well,
I found out that a revolution was to happen, so I gave the word to
Gonzales, and with the soldiers came to Puebla.  The leaders were
captured in a house, brought out, and without trial were set against a
wall.  I can remember it so well--so well!  The light was streaming from
an open door upon the wall.  They were brought out, taken across the road
and stood against a wall.  I was standing a distance away, for at the
moment I was sorry, though, to be sure, senor, it was for the cause of
the country then, I thought.  As I stood there looking, the light that
streamed from the doorway fell straight upon a man standing against that
wall.  It was my brother--Alphonso, my brother.  I shrieked and ran
forward, but the rifles spat out at the moment, and the five men fell.
Alphonso--ah, I thank the Virgin every day! he did not know.  His zarape
hangs there on the wall, his sombrero, his sword, and his stirrups."

Sherry shifted nervously in his seat.  "There's stuff for you, amigo,"
he said to me.  "Makes you chilly, doesn't it?  Shot his own brother--
amounts to same thing, doesn't it?  All right, Becodar, we're both sorry,
and will pray for his departed spirit; go ahead, Becodar."

The beggar kept pulling at a piece of black ribbon which was tied to the
arm of the chair in which he now sat.  "Senors, after that I became a
revolutionist--that was the only way to make it up to my brother, except
by masses--I gave candles for every day in the year.  One day they were
all in my house here, sitting just where you sit in those chairs.  Our
leader was Castodilian, the bandit with the long yellow hair.  We had a
keg of powder which we were going to distribute.  All at once Gonzales's
soldiers burst in.  There was a fight, we were overpowered, and
Castodilian dropped his cigar--he had kept it in his mouth all the time
--in the powder-keg.  It killed most of us.  I lost my eyes.  Gonzales
forgave me, if I would promise to be a revolutionist no more.  What was
there to do?  I took the solemn oath at the grave of my mother; and so--
and so, senors."

Sherry had listened with a quizzical intentness, now and again cocking
his head at some dramatic bit, and when Becodar paused he suddenly leaned
over and thrust a dollar into the ever-waiting hand.  Becodar gave a
great sign of pleasure, and fumbled again with the money in his pocket.
Then, after a moment, it shifted to the bit of ribbon that hung from the
chair: "See, senors," he said.  "I tied this ribbon to the chair all
those years ago."

My eyes were on the peg and the holes in the wall.  Sherry questioned
him.  "Why do you spike the wall with the little red peg, Becodar?"

"The Little Red Peg, senor?  Ah!  It is not wonderful you notice that.
There are eight bullet-holes in that zarape"--he pointed to the wall--"
there are eight holes in the wall for the Little Red Peg.  Well, of the
eight men who fired on my brother, two are left, as you may see.  The
others are all gone, this way or that." Sherry shrugged a shoulder.
"There are two left, eh, Becodar?  How will they die, and when?"  Becodar
was motionless as a stone for a moment.  Then he said softly: "I do not
know quite how or when.  But one drinks much mescal, and the other has a
taste for quarrel.  He will get in trouble with the Rurales, and then
good-bye to him!  Four others on furlough got in trouble with the
Rurales, and that was the end.  They were taken at different times for
some fault--by Gerado's company--Gerado, my cousin.  Camping at night,
they tried to escape.  There is the Law of Fire, senors, as you know.
If a man thinks his guard sleeps, and makes a run for it, they do not
chase--they fire; and if he escapes unhurt, good; he is not troubled.
But the Rurales are fine shots!"

"You mean," said Sherry, "that the Rurales--your Gerado, for one--
pretended to sleep--to be careless.  The fellows made a rush for it and
were dropped?  Eh, Becodar, of the Little Red Peg?"

Becodar shrugged a shoulder gently.  "Ah, senor, who can tell?  My Gerado
is a sure shot."

"Egad," said Sherry, "who'd have thought it?  It looks like a sweet
little vendetta, doesn't it?  A blind beggar, too, with his Gerado to
help the thing along.

"'With his Gerado!'  Sounds like a Gatling, or a bomb, or a diabolical
machine, doesn't it?  And yet they talk of this country being
Americanised!  You can't Americanise a country with a real history.
Well, Becodar, that's four.  What of the other two that left for Kingdom
Come?"

Becodar smiled pensively.  He seemed to be enduring a kind of joy, or
else making light of a kind of sorrow.  "Ah, those two!  They were
camping in a valley; they were escorting a small party of people who had
come to look at ruins--Diaz was President then.  Well, a party of Aztecs
on the other side of the river began firing across, not as if doing or
meaning any harm.  By-and-bye the shot came rattling through the tent of
the two.  One got up, and yelled across to them to stop, but a chance
bullet brought him down, and then by some great mistake a lot of bullets
came through the tent, and the other soldier was killed.  It was all a
mistake, of course."

"Yes," cynically said Sherry.  "The Aztecs got rattled, and then the
bullets rattled.  And what was done to the Aztecs?"

"Senor, what could be done?  They meant no harm, as you can see."

"Of course, of course; but you put the Little Red Peg down two holes just
the same, eh, my Becodar--with your Gerado.  I smell a great man in your
Gerado, Becodar.  Your bandit turned soldier is a notable gentleman--
gentlemen all his tribe.  .  .  .  You see," Sherry added to me, "the
country was infested with bandits--some big names in this land had bandit
for their titles one time or another.  Well, along came Diaz, a great
man.  He said to the bandits: 'How much do you make a year at your
trade?'  They told him.

"'Then,' said he, 'I'll give you as much a month and clothe you.  You'll
furnish your own horses and keep them, and hold the country in order.
Put down the banditti, be my boundary-riders, my gentlemen guards, and we
will all love you and cherish you.'  And 'it was so,' as Scripture says.
And this Gerado can serve our good compadre here, and the Little Red Peg
in the wall keeps tally."

"What shall you do with Bernal the boy when he grows up?" added Sherry
presently.

"There is the question for my mind, senor," he answered.  "He would be a
toreador--already has he served the matador in the ring, though I did not
know it, foolish boy!  But I would have him in the Rurales."  Here he
fetched out and handed us a bottle of mescal.  Sherry lifted his glass.

"To the day when the Little Red Peg goes no farther!" he said.  We
drank.

"To the blind compadre and the boy!" I added, and we drank again.

A moment afterwards in the silent street I looked back.  The door was
shut, and the wee scarlet light was burning over it.  I fell to thinking
of the Little Red Peg in the wall.






A FRIEND OF THE COMMUNE

"See, madame--there, on the Hill of Pains, the long finger of the
Semaphore!  One more prisoner has escaped--one more."

"One more, Marie.  It is the life here that on the Hill, this here below;
and yet the sun is bright, the cockatoos are laughing in the palms, and
you hear my linnet singing."

"It turns so slowly.  Now it points across the Winter Valley.  Ah!"

"Yes, across the Winter Valley, where the deep woods are, and beyond to
the Pascal River."

"Towards my home.  How dim the light is now!  I can only see It--like a
long dark finger yonder."

"No, my dear, there is bright sunshine still; there is no cloud at all:
but It is like a finger; it is quivering now, as though it were not
sure."

"Thank God, if it be not sure!  But the hill is cloudy, as I said."

"No, Marie.  How droll you are!  The hill is not cloudy; even at this
distance one can see something glisten beside the grove of pines."

"I know.  It is the White Rock, where King Ovi died."

"Marie, turn your face to me.  Your eyes are full of tears.  Your heart
is tender.  Your tears are for the prisoner who has escaped--the hunted
in the chase."

She shuddered a little and added, "Wherever he is, that long dark finger
on the Hill of Pains will find him out--the remorseless Semaphore."

"No, madame, I am selfish; I weep for myself.  Tell me truly, as--as if
I were your own child--was there no cloud, no sudden darkness, out there,
as we looked towards the Hill of Pains."

"None, dear."

"Then--then--madame, I suppose it was my tears that blinded me for the
moment."

"No doubt it was your tears."

But each said in her heart that it was not tears; each said: "Let not
this thing come, O God!"  Presently, with a caress, the elder woman left
the room; but the girl remained to watch that gloomy thing upon the Hill
of Pains.

As she stood there, with her fingers clasped upon a letter she had drawn
from her pocket, a voice from among the palms outside floated towards
her.

"He escaped last night; the Semaphore shows that they have got upon his
track.  I suppose they'll try to converge upon him before he gets to
Pascal River.  Once there he might have a chance of escape; but he'll
need a lot of luck, poor devil!"

Marie's fingers tightened on the letter.

Then another voice replied, and it brought a flush to the cheek of the
girl, a hint of trouble to her eyes.  It said: "Is Miss Wyndham here
still?"

"Yes, still here.  My wife will be distressed when she leaves us."

"She will not care to go, I should think.  The Hotel du Gouverneur spoils
us for all other places in New Caledonia."

"You are too kind, monsieur; I fear that those who think as you are not
many.  After all, I am little more here than a gaoler--merely a gaoler,
M. Tryon."

"Yet, the Commandant of a military station and the Governor of a Colony."

"The station is a penitentiary; the colony for liberes, ticket-of-leave
men, and outcast Paris; with a sprinkling of gentlemen and officers dying
of boredom.  No, my friend, we French are not colonists.  We emigrate,
we do not colonise.  This is no colony.  We do no good here."

"You forget the nickel mines."

"Quarries for the convicts and for political prisoners of the lowest
class."

"The plantations?"

"Ah, there I crave your pardon.  You are a planter, but you are English.
M. Wyndham is a planter and an owner of mines, but he is English.  The
man who has done best financially in New Caledonia is an Englishman.
You, and a few others like you, French and English, are the only colony
I have.  I do not rule you; you help me to rule."

"We?"

"By being on the side of justice and public morality; by dining with me,
though all too seldom; by giving me a quiet hour now and then beneath
your vines and fig-trees; and so making this uniform less burdensome to
carry.  No, no, monsieur, I know you are about to say something very
gracious: but no, you shall pay your compliments to the ladies."

As they journeyed to the morning-room Hugh Tryon said: "Does M. Laflamme
still come to paint Miss Wyndham?"

"Yes; but it ends to-morrow, and then no more of that.  Prisoners are
prisoners, and though Laflamme is agreeable that makes it the more
difficult."

"Why should he be treated so well, as a first-class prisoner, and others
of the Commune be so degraded here--as Mayer, for instance?"

"It is but a question of degree.  He was an artist and something of a
dramatist; he was not at the Place Vendome at a certain critical moment;
he was not at Montmartre at a particular terrible time; he was not a high
officer like Mayer; he was young, with the face of a patriot.  Well, they
sent Mayer to the galleys at Toulon first; then, among the worst of the
prisoners here--he was too bold, too full of speech; he had not
Laflamme's gift of silence, of pathos.  Mayer works coarsely, severely
here; Laflamme grows his vegetables, idles about Ducos, swings in his
hammock, and appears at inspections the picture of docility.  One day he
sent to me the picture of my wife framed in gold--here it is.  Is it not
charming?  The size of a franc-piece and so perfect!  You know the soft
hearts of women."

"You mean that Madame Solde--"

"She persuaded me to let him come here to paint my portrait.  He has done
so, and now he paints Marie Wyndham.  But--"

"But?--Yes?"

"But these things have their dangers."

"Have their dangers," Hugh Tryon musingly repeated, and then added under
his breath almost, "Escape or--"

"Or something else," the Governor rather sharply interrupted; and then,
as they were entering the room, gaily continued: "Ah, here we come,
mademoiselle, to pay--"

"To pay your surplus of compliments, monsieur le Gouverneur.  I could not
help but hear something of what you said," responded Marie, and gave her
hand to Tryon.

"I leave you to mademoiselle's tender mercies, monsieur," said the
Governor.  "Au revoir!"

When he had gone, Hugh said: "You are gay today."

"Indeed, no, I am sad."

"Wherefore sad?  Is nickel proving a drug?  Or sugar a failure?  Don't
tell me that your father says sugar is falling."  He glanced at the
letter, which she unconsciously held in her hand.

She saw his look, smoothed the letter a little nervously between her
palms, and put it into her pocket, saying: "No, my father has not said
that sugar is falling--but come here, will you?" and she motioned
towards the open window.  When there, she said slowly, "That is what
makes me sad and sorry," and she pointed to the Semaphore upon the Hill
of Pains.

"You are too tender-hearted," he remarked.  "A convict has escaped; he
will be caught perhaps--perhaps not; and things will go on as before."

"Will go on as before.  That is, the 'martinet' worse than the 'knout de
Russe'; the 'poucettes', the 'crapaudine' on neck and ankles and wrists;
all, all as bad as the 'Pater Noster' of the Inquisition, as Mayer said
the other day in the face of Charpentier, the Commandant of the
penitentiary.  How pleasant also to think of the Boulevard de Guillotine!
I tell you it is brutal, horrible.  Think of what prisoners have to
suffer here, whose only crime is that they were of the Commune; that they
were just a little madder than other Frenchmen."

"Pardon me if I say that as brutal things were done by the English in
Tasmania."

"Think of two hundred and sixty strokes of the 'cat.'"

"You concern yourself too much about these things, I fear."

"I only think that death would be easier than the life of half of the
convicts here."

"They themselves would prefer it, perhaps."

"Tell me, who is the convict that has escaped?" she feverishly asked.
"Is it a political prisoner?"

"You would not know him.  He was one of the Commune who escaped shooting
in the Place de la Concorde.  Carbourd, I think, was his name."

"Carbourd, Carbourd," she repeated, and turned her head away towards the
Semaphore.

Her earnestness aroused in Tryon a sudden flame of sympathy which had its
origin, as he well knew, in three years of growing love.  This love
leaped up now determinedly--perhaps unwisely; but what should a blunt
soul like Hugh Tryon know regarding the best or worst time to seek a
woman's heart?  He came close to her now and said: "If you are so kind in
thought for a convict, I dare hope that you would be more kind to me."

"Be kind to you," she repeated, as if not understanding what he said,
nor the look in his eyes.

"For I am a prisoner, too."

"A prisoner?" she rejoined a little tremulously, and coldly.

"In your hands, Marie."  His eyes laid bare his heart.

"Oh!" she replied, in a half-troubled, half-indignant tone, for she was
out of touch with the occasion of his suit, and every woman has in her
mind the time when she should and when she should not be wooed.  "Oh, why
aren't you plain with me?  I hate enigmas."

"Why do I not speak plainly?  Because, because, Marie, it is possible
for a man to be a coward in his speech"--he touched her fingers--"when
he loves."  She quickly drew her hand from his.  "Oh, can't we be friends
without that?"

There was a sound of footsteps at the window.  Both turned, and saw the
political prisoner, Rive Laflamme, followed by a guard.

"He comes to finish my portrait," she said.  "This is the last sitting."

"Marie, must I go like this?  When may I see you again?  When will you
answer me?  You will not make all the hopes to end here?"

It was evident that some deep trouble was on the girl.  She flushed
hotly, as if she were about to reply hotly also, but she changed quickly,
and said, not unkindly: "When M. Laflamme has gone."  And now, as if
repenting of her unreasonable words of a moment before, she added: "Oh,
please don't think me hard.  I am sorry that I grieve you.  I'm afraid
I am not altogether well, not altogether happy."

"I will wait till he has gone," the planter replied.  At the door he
turned as if to say something, but he only looked steadily, sadly at her,
and then was gone.

She stood where he had left her, gazing in melancholy abstraction at the
door through which he had passed.  There were footsteps without in the
hall-way.  The door was opened, and a servant announced M. Laflamme.  The
painter-prisoner entered followed by the soldier.  Immediately afterward
Mrs. Angers, Marie's elderly companion, sidled in gently.

Laflamme bowed low, then turned and said coolly to the soldier: "You may
wait outside to-day, Roupet.  This is my last morning's work.  It is
important, and you splutter and cough.  You are too exhausting for a
studio."

But Roupet answered: "Monsieur, I have my orders."

"Nonsense.  This is the Governor's house.  I am perfectly safe here.
Give your orders a change of scene.  You would better enjoy the
refreshing coolness of the corridors this morning.  You won't?  Oh, yes,
you will.  Here's a cigarette--there, take the whole bunch--I paid too
much for them, but no matter.  Ah, pardon me, mademoiselle.  I forgot
that you cannot smoke here, Roupet; but you shall have them all the same,
there!  Parbleu! you are a handsome rascal, if you weren't so wheezy!
Come, come, Roupet, make yourself invisible."

The eyes of the girl were on the soldier.  They did the work better; a
warrior has a soft place in his heart for a beautiful woman.  He wheeled
suddenly, and disappeared from the room, motioning that he would remain
at the door.

The painting began, and for half an hour or more was continued without a
word.  In the silence the placid Angers had fallen asleep.

Nodding slightly towards her, Rive Laflamme said in a low voice to Marie:
"Her hearing at its best is not remarkable?"

"Not remarkable."

He spoke more softly.  "That is good.  Well, the portrait is done.  It
has been the triumph of my life to paint it.  Not that first joy I had
when I won the great prize in Paris equals it.  I am glad: and yet--and
yet there was much chance that it would never be finished."

"Why?"

"Carbourd is gone."

"Yes, I know-well?"

"Well, I should be gone also were it not for this portrait.  The chance
came.  I was tempted.  I determined to finish this.  I stayed."

"Do you think that he will be caught?"

"Not alive.  Carbourd has suffered too much--the galleys, the corde,
the triangle, everything but the guillotine.  Carbourd has a wife and
children--ah, yes, you know all about it.  You remember that letter she
sent: I can recall every word; can you?"

The girl paused, and then with a rapt sympathy in her face repeated
slowly: "I am ill, and our children cry for food.  The wife calls to her
husband, my darlings say, 'Will father never come home?'"

Marie's eyes were moist.

"Mademoiselle, he was no common criminal.  He would have died for the
cause grandly.  He loved France too wildly.  That was his sin."

"Carbourd is free," she said, as though to herself.

"He has escaped."  His voice was the smallest whisper.  "And now my time
has come."

"When?  And where do you go?"

"To-night, and to join Carbourd, if I can, at the Pascal River.  At King
Ovi's Cave, if possible."

The girl was very pale.  She turned and looked at Angers, who still
slept.  "And then?"

"And then, as I have said to you before, to the coast, to board the
Parroquet, which will lie off the island Saint Jerome three days from now
to carry us away into freedom.  It is all arranged by our 'Underground
Railway.'"

"And you tell me all this--why?" the girl said falteringly.

"Because you said that you would not let a hunted fugitive starve; that
you would give us horses, with which we could travel the Brocken Path
across the hills.  Here is the plan of the river that you drew; at this
point is the King's Cave which you discovered, and is known only to
yourself."

"I ought not to have given it to you; but--"

"Ah, you will not repent of a noble action, of a great good to me--
Marie?"

"Hush, monsieur.  Indeed, you may not speak to me so.  You forget.
I am sorry for you; I think you do not deserve this--banishment; you are
unhappy here; and I told you of the King's Cave-that was all."

"Ah no, that is not all!  To be free, that is good; but only that I may
be a man again; that I may love my art--and you; that I may once again
be proud of France."

"Monsieur, I repeat, you must not speak so.  Do not take advantage of my
willingness to serve you."

"A thousand pardons!  but that was in my heart, and I hoped, I hoped--"

"You must not hope.  I can only know you as M. Laflamme, the--"

"The political convict; ah, yes, I know," he said bitterly: "a convict
over whom the knout is held; who may at any moment be shot down like a
hare: who has but two prayers in all the world: to be free in France once
more, and to be loved by one--"

She interrupted him: "Your first prayer is natural."

"Natural?--Do you know what song we sang in the cages of the ship that
carried us into this evil exile here?  Do you know what brought tears to
the eyes of the guards?--What made the captain and the sailors turn their
heads away from us, lest we should see that their faces were wet?  What
rendered the soldiers who had fought us in the Commune more human for the
moment?  It was this:

                  "'Adieu, patrie!
                    L'onde est en furie,
                    Adieu patrie,
                    Azur!
                    Adieu, maison, treille au fruit mer,

                    Adieu les fruits d'or du vieux mur!
                    Adieu, patrie,
                    Ciel, foret, prairie;
                    Adieu patrie,
                    Azur.'"

"Hush, monsieur!" the girl said with a swift gesture.  He looked and saw
that Angers was waking.  "If I live," he hurriedly whispered, "I shall be
at the King's Cave to-morrow night.  And you--the horses?"

"You shall have my help and the horses."  Then, more loudly: "Au revoir,
monsieur."

At that moment Madame Solde entered the room.  She acknowledged
Laflamme's presence gravely.

"It is all done, madame," he said, pointing to the portrait.

Madame Solde bowed coldly, but said: "It is very well done, monsieur."

"It is my masterpiece," remarked the painter pensively.  "Will you permit
me to say adieu, mesdames?  I go to join my amiable and attentive
companion, Roupet the guard."

He bowed himself out.

Madame Solde drew Marie aside.  Angers discreetly left.

The Governor's wife drew the girl's head back on her shoulder.  "Marie,"
she said, "M. Tryon does not seem happy; cannot you change that?"

With quivering lips the girl laid her head on the Frenchwoman's breast,
and said: "Ah, do not ask me now.  Madame, I am going home to-day."

"To-day?  But, so soon!--I wished--"

"I must go to-day."

"But we had hoped you would stay while M. Tryon--"

"M. Tryon--will--go with me--perhaps."

"Ah, my dear Marie!"  The woman kissed the girl, and wondered.

That afternoon Marie was riding across the Winter Valley to her father's
plantation at the Pascal River.  Angers was driving ahead.  Beside Marie
rode Tryon silent and attentive.  Arrived at the homestead, she said to
him in the shadow of the naoulis: "Hugh Tryon, what would you do to prove
the love you say you have for me?"

"All that a man could do I would do."

"Can you see the Semaphore from here?"

"Yes, there it is clear against the sky--look!"

But the girl did not look.  She touched her eyelids with her finger-tips,
as though they were fevered, and then said: "Many have escaped.  They are
searching for Carbourd and--"

"Yes, Marie?"

"And M. Laflamme--"

"Laflamme!" he said sharply.  Then, noticing how at his brusqueness the
paleness of her face changed to a startled flush for an instant, his
generosity conquered, and he added gently: "Well, I fancied he would try,
but what do you know about that, Marie?"

"He and Carbourd were friends.  They were chained together in the
galleys, they lived--at first--together here.  They would risk life to
return to France."

"Tell me," said he, "what do you know of this?  What is it to you?"

"You wish to know all before you will do what I ask.

"I will do anything you ask, because you will not ask of me what is
unmanly."

"M. Laflamme will escape to-night if possible, and join Carbourd on the
Pascal River, at a safe spot that I know."  She told him of the Cave.

"Yes, yes, I understand.  You would help him.  And I?"

"You will help me.  You will?"

There was a slight pause, and then he said: "Yes, I will.  But think what
this is to an Englishman-to yourself, to be accomplice to the escape of a
French prisoner."

"I gave a promise to a man whom I think deserves it.  He believed he was
a patriot.  If you were in that case, and I were a Frenchwoman, I would
do the same for you."

He smiled rather grimly and said: "If it please you that this man escape,
I shall hope he may, and will help you.  .  .  .  Here comes your
father."

"I could not let my father know," she said.  "He has no sympathy for any
one like that, for any one at all, I think, but me."

"Don't be down-hearted.  If you have set your heart on this, I will try
to bring it about, God knows!  Now let us be less gloomy.  Conspirators
should smile.  That is the cue.  Besides, the world is bright.  Look at
the glow upon the hills."

"I suppose the Semaphore is glistening on the Hill of Pains; but I cannot
see it."

He did not understand her.




II

A few hours after this conversation, Laflamme sought to accomplish his
escape.  He had lately borne a letter from the Commandant, which
permitted him to go from point to point outside the peninsula of Ducos,
where the least punished of the political prisoners were kept.  He
depended somewhat on this for his escape.  Carbourd had been more heroic,
but then Carbourd was desperate.  Laflamme believed more in ability than
force.  It was ability and money that had won over the captain of the
Parroquet, coupled with the connivance of an old member of the Commune,
who was now a guard.  This night there was increased alertness, owing to
the escape of Carbourd; and himself, if not more closely watched, was at
least open to quick suspicion owing to his known friendship for Carbourd.
He strolled about the fortified enclosure, chatting to fellow prisoners,
and waiting for the call which should summon them to the huts.  Through
years of studied good-nature he had come to be regarded as a contented
prisoner.  He had no enemies save one among the guards.  This man Maillot
he had offended by thwarting his continued ill-treatment of a young lad
who had been one of the condemned of the Commune, and whose hammock, at
last, by order of the Commandant, was slung in Laflamme's hut.  For this
kindness and interposition the lad was grateful and devoted.  He had been
set to labour in the nickel mines; but that came near to killing him, and
again through Laflamme's pleading he had been made a prisoner of the
first class, and so relieved of all heavy tasks.  Not even he suspected
the immediate relations of Laflamme and Carbourd; nor that Laflamme was
preparing for escape.

As Laflamme waited for the summons to huts, a squad of prisoners went
clanking by him, manacled.  They had come from road-making.  These never
heard from wife nor child, nor held any commerce with the outside world,
nor had any speech with each other, save by a silent gesture--language
which eluded the vigilance of the guards.  As the men passed, Laflamme
looked at them steadily.  They knew him well.  Some of them remembered
his speeches at the Place Vendome.  They bore him no ill-will that he did
not suffer as they.  He made a swift sign to a prisoner near the rear of
the column.  The man smiled, but gave no answering token.  This was part
of the unspoken vocabulary, and, in this instance, conveyed the two
words: I escape.

A couple of hours later Laflamme rose from a hammock in his hut, and
leant over the young lad, who was sleeping.  He touched him gently.

The lad waked: "Yes, yes, monsieur."

"I am going away, my friend."

"To escape like Carbourd?"

"Yes, I hope, like Carbourd."

"May I not go also, monsieur?  I am not afraid."

"No, lad.  If there must be death one is enough.  You must stay.
Good-bye."

"You will see my mother?  She is old, and she grieves."

"Yes, I will see your mother.  And more; you shall be free.  I will see
to that.  Be patient, little comrade.  Nay, nay, hush!  .  .  .  No,
thanks.  Adieu!"  He put his hands on the lad's shoulder and kissed his
forehead.

"I wish I had died at the Barricades.  But, yes, I will be brave--be sure
of that."

"You shall not die--you shall live in France, which is better.  Once
more, adieu!"  Laflamme passed out.  It was raining.  He knew that if
he could satisfy the first sentinel he should stand a better chance of
escape, since he had had so much freedom of late; and to be passed by one
would help with others.  He went softly, but he was soon challenged.

"Halt!  Who goes there?"

"Condemned of the Commune--by order."

"Whose order?"

"That of the Commandant."

"Advance order."

The sentinel knew him.  "Ah, Laflamme," he said, and raised the point of
his bayonet.  The paper was produced.  It did not entitle him to go about
at night, and certainly not beyond the enclosure without a guard--it was
insufficient.  In unfolding the paper Laflamme purposely dropped it in
the mud.  He hastily picked it up, and, in doing so, smeared it.  He
wiped it, leaving the signature comparatively plain--nothing else.
"Well," said the sentinel, "the signature is right.  Where do you go?"

"To Government House."

"I do not know that I should let you pass.  But--well, look out that the
next sentinel doesn't bayonet you.  You came on me suddenly."

The next sentinel was a Kanaka.  The previous formula was repeated.  The
Kanaka examined the paper long, and then said: "You cannot pass."

"But the other sentinel passed me.  Would you get him into trouble?"

The Kanaka frowned, hesitated, then said: "That is another matter.  Well,
pass."

Twice more the same formula and arguments were used.  At last he heard a
voice in challenge that he knew.  It was that of Maillot.  This was a
more difficult game.  His order was taken with a malicious sneer by the
sentinel.  At that instant Laflamme threw his arms swiftly round the
other, clapped a hand on his mouth, and, with a dexterous twist of leg,
threw him backward, till it seemed as if the spine of the soldier must
break.  It was impossible to struggle against this trick of wrestling,
which Laflamme had learned from a famous Cornish wrestler, in a summer
spent on the English coast.

"If you shout or speak I will kill you!" he said to Maillot, and then
dropped him heavily on the ground, where he lay senseless.  Laflamme
stooped down and felt his heart.  "Alive!" he said, then seized the
rifle and plunged into the woods.  The moon at that moment broke through
the clouds, and he saw the Semaphore like a ghost pointing towards Pascal
River.  He waved his hand towards his old prison, and sped away.

But others were thinking of the Semaphore at this moment, others saw it
indistinct, yet melancholy, in the moonlight.  The Governor and his wife
saw it, and Madame Solde said: "Alfred, I shall be glad when I shall see
that no more."

"You have too much feeling."

"I suppose Marie makes me think more of it to-day.  She wept this morning
over all this misery and punishment."

"You think that.  Well, perhaps something more--"

"What more?"

"Laflamme."

"No, no, it is impossible!"

"Indeed it is as I say.  My wife, you are blind.  I chanced to see
him with her yesterday.  I should have prevented him coming to-day,
but I knew it was his last day with the portrait, and that all should
end here."

"We have done wrong in this--the poor child!  Besides, she has, I fear,
another sorrow coming.  It showed itself to me to-day for the first
time."  Then she whispered to him, and he started and sighed, and said at
last:

"But it must be saved.  By--!  it shall be saved!"  And at that moment
Marie Wyndham was standing in the open window of the library of Pascal
House.  She had been thinking of her recent visit to the King's Cave,
where she had left food, and of the fact that Carbourd was not there.
She raised her face towards the moon and sighed.  She was thinking of
something else.  She was not merely sentimental, for she said, as if she
had heard the words of the Governor and Madame Solde: "Oh! if it could be
saved!"

There was a rustle in the shrubbery near her.  She turned towards the
sound.  A man came quickly towards her.  "I am Carbourd," he said; "I
could not find the way to the Cave.  They were after me.  They have
tracked me.  Tell me quick how to go."

She swiftly gave him directions, and he darted away.  Again there was a
rustle in the leaves, and a man stepped forth.  Something glistened in
his hands--a rifle, though she could not see it plainly.  It was levelled
at the flying figure of Carbourd.  There was a report.  Marie started
forward with her hands on her temples and a sharp cry.  She started
forward--into absolute darkness.  There was a man's footsteps going
swiftly by her.  Why was it so dark?  She stretched out her hands with a
moan.

"Oh!  mother!--oh!  mother!  I am blind!" she cried.

But her mother was sleeping unresponsive beyond the dark-beyond all dark.
It was, perhaps, natural that she should cry to the dead and not to the
living.

Marie was blind.  She had known it was coming, and it had tried her, as
it would have tried any of the race of women.  She had, when she needed
it most, put love from her, and would not let her own heart speak, even
to herself.  She had sought to help one who loved her, and to fully prove
the other--though the proving, she knew, was not necessary--before the
darkness came.  But here it was suddenly sent upon her by the shock of a
rifle shot.  It would have sent a shudder to a stronger heart than hers--
that, in reply to her call on her dead mother, there came from the trees
the shrill laugh of the mopoke--the sardonic bird of the South.

As she stood there, with this tragedy enveloping her, the dull boom of a
cannon came across the valley.  "From Ducos," she said.  "M. Laflamme has
escaped.  God help us all!"  And she turned and groped her way into the
room she had left.

She felt for a chair and sat down.  She must think of what she now was.
She wondered if Carbourd was killed.  She listened and thought not, since
there was no sound without.  But she knew that the house would be roused.
She bowed her head in her hands.  Surely she might weep a little for
herself--she who had been so troubled for others.  It is strange, but she
thought of her flowers and birds, and wondered how she should tend them;
of her own room which faced the north--the English north that she loved
so well; of her horse, and marvelled if he would know that she could not
see him; and, lastly, of a widening horizon of pain, spread before the
eyes of her soul, in which her father and another moved.

It seemed to her that she sat there for hours, it was in reality minutes
only.  A firm step and the opening of a door roused her.  She did not
turn her head--what need?  She knew the step.  There was almost a touch
of ironical smiling at her lips, as she thought how she must hear and
feel things only, in the future.  A voice said: "Marie, are you here?"

"I am here."

"I'll strike a match so that you can see I'm not a bushranger.  There has
been shooting in the grounds.  Did you hear it?"

"Yes.  A soldier firing at Carbourd."

"You saw him?"

"Yes.  He could not find the Cave.  I directed him.  Immediately after he
was fired upon."

"He can't have been hit.  There are no signs of him.  There, that's
lighter and better, isn't it?"

"I do not know."

She had risen, but she did not turn towards him.  He came nearer to her.
The enigmatical tone struck him strangely, but he could find nothing less
commonplace to say than: "You don't prefer the exaggerated gloaming, do
you?"

"No, I do not prefer the gloaming, but why should not one be patient?"

"Be patient!" he repeated, and came nearer still.  "Are you hurt or
angry?"

"I am hurt, but not angry."

"What have I done?--or is it I?"

"It is not you.  You are very good.  It is nobody but God.  I am hurt,
because He is angry, perhaps."

"Tell me what is the matter.  Look at me."  He faced her now-faced her
eyes, looking blindly straight before her.

"Hugh," she said, and she put her hand out slightly, not exactly to him,
but as if to protect him from the blow which she herself must deal: "I am
looking at you now."

"Yes, yes, but so strangely, and not in my eyes."

"I cannot look into your eyes, because, Hugh, I am blind."  Her hand went
further out towards him.

He took it silently and pressed it to his bosom as he saw that she spoke
true; and the shadow of the thing fell on him.  The hand held to his
breast felt how he was trembling from the shock.

"Sit down, Hugh," she said, "and I will tell you all; but do not hold my
hand so, or I cannot."

Sitting there face to face, with deep furrows growing in his countenance,
and a quiet sorrow spreading upon her cheek and forehead, she told the
story how, since her childhood, her sight had played her false now and
then, and within the past month had grown steadily uncertain.  "And now,"
she said at last, "I am blind.  I think I should like to tell my father--
if you please.  Then when I have seen him and poor Angers, if you will
come again!  There is work to be done.  I hoped it would be finished
before this came; but--there, good friend, go; I will sit here quietly."

She could not see his face, but she heard him say: "My love, my love,"
very softly, as he rose to go; and she smiled sadly to herself.  She
folded her hands in her lap, and thought, not bitterly, not listlessly,
but deeply.  She wanted to consider all cheerfully now; she tried to do
so.  She was musing among those flying perceptions, those nebulous facts
of a new life, experienced for the first time; she was now not herself as
she had been; another woman was born; and she was feeling carefully along
the unfamiliar paths which she must tread.  She was not glad that these
words ran through her mind continuously at first:

          "A land of darkness as darkness itself, and of the shadow of
          death without any order, and where the light is darkness."

Her brave nature rose against the moody spirit which sought to take
possession of her, and she cried out in her heart valiantly: "But there
is order, there is order.  I shall feel things as they ought to be.  I
think I could tell now what was true and what was false in man or woman;
it would be in their presence not in their faces."

She stopped speaking.  She heard footsteps.  Her father entered.  Hugh
Tryon had done his task gently, but the old planter, selfish and hard as
he was, loved his daughter; and the meeting was bitter for him.  The prop
of his pride seemed shaken beyond recovery.  But the girl's calm
comforted them all, and poignancy became dull pain.  Before parting for
the night Marie said to Hugh: "This is what I wish you to do for me to
bring over two of your horses to Point Assumption on the river.  There is
a glen beyond that as you know, and from it runs the steep and dangerous
Brocken Path across the hills.  I wish you to wait there until
M. Laflamme and Carbourd come by the river--that is their only chance.
If they get across the hills they can easily reach the sea.  I know that
two of your horses have been over the path; they are sure-footed; they
would know it in the night.  Is it not so?"

"It is so.  There are not a dozen horses in the colony that could be
trusted on it at night, but mine are safe.  I shall do all you wish."

She put out both her hands and felt for his shoulders, and let them rest
there for a moment, saying: "I ask much, and I can give no reward, except
the gratitude of one who would rather die than break a promise.  It isn't
much, but it is all that is worth your having.  Good-night.  Good-bye."

"Good-night.  Good-bye," he gently replied; but he said something beneath
his breath that sounded worth the hearing.

The next morning while her father was gone to consult the chief army-
surgeon at Noumea, Marie strolled with Angers in the grounds.  At length
she said: "Angers, take me to the river, and then on down, until we come
to the high banks."  With her hand on Angers' arm, and in her face that
passive gentleness which grows so sweetly from sightless eyes till it
covers all the face, they passed slowly towards the river.  When they
came to the higher banks covered with dense scrub, Angers paused, and
told Marie where they were.

"Find me the she-oak tree," the girl said; "there is only one, you know."

"Here it is, my dear.  There, your hand is on it now."

"Thank you.  Wait here, Angers, I shall be back presently."

"But oh, my dear--"

"Please do as I say, Angers, and do not worry."  The girl pushed aside
some bushes, and was lost to view.  She pressed along vigilantly by a
descending path, until her feet touched rocky ground.  She nodded to
herself, then creeping between two bits of jutting rock at her right,
immediately stood at the entrance to a cave, hidden completely from the
river and from the banks above.  At the entrance, for which she felt, she
paused and said aloud: "Is there any one here?"  Something clicked far
within the cave.  It sounded like a rifle.  Then stealthy steps were
heard, and a voice said:

"Ah, mademoiselle!"

"You are Carbourd?"

"As you see, mademoiselle."

"You escaped safely then from the rifle-shot?  Where is the soldier?"

"He fell into the river.  He was drowned."

"You are telling me truth?"

"Yes, he stumbled in and sank--on my soul!"

"You did not try to save him?"

"He lied and got me six months in irons once; he called down on my back
one hundred and fifty lashes, a year ago; he had me kept on bread and
water, and degraded to the fourth class, where I could never hear from my
wife and children--never write to them.  I lost one eye in the quarries
because he made me stand too near a lighted fuse--"

"Poor man, poor man!" she said.  "You found the food I left here?"

"Yes, God bless you!  And my wife and children will bless you too, if I
see France again."

"You know where the boat is?"

"I know, mademoiselle."

"When you reach Point Assumption you will find horses there to take you
across the Brocken Path.  M. Laflamme knows.  I hope that you will both
escape; that you will be happy in France with your wife and children."

"You will not come here again?"

"No.  If M. Laflamme should not arrive, and you should go alone, leave
one pair of oars; then I shall know.  Good-bye."

"Good-bye, mademoiselle.  A thousand times I will pray for you.  Ah, mon
Dieu!  take care!--you are on the edge of the great tomb."

She stood perfectly still.  At her feet was a dark excavation where was
the skeleton of Ovi the King.  This was the hidden burial-place of the
modern Hiawatha of these savage islands, unknown even to the natives
themselves, and kept secret with a half-superstitious reverence by this
girl, who had discovered it a few months before.

"I had forgotten," she said.  "Please take my hand and set me right at
the entrance."

"Your hand, mademoiselle?  Mine is so--!  It is not dark."

"I am blind now."

"Blind--blind!  Oh, the pitiful thing!  Since when, mademoiselle?"

"Since the soldier fired on you-the shock.  .  .  .  "

The convict knelt at her feet.  "Ah, mademoiselle, you are a good angel.
I shall die of grief.  To think--for such as me!"

"You will live to love your wife and children.  This is the will of God
with me.  Am I in the path now?  Ah, thank you."

"But, M. Laflamme--this will be a great sorrow to him."

Twice she seemed about to speak, but nothing came save good-bye.
Then she crept cautiously away among the bushes and along the narrow
path, the eyes of the convict following her.  She had done a deed which,
she understood, the world would blame her for if it knew, would call
culpable or foolishly heroic; but she smiled, because she understood also
that she had done that which her own conscience and heart approved, and
she was content.

At this time Laflamme was stealing watchfully through the tropical scrub,
where hanging vines tore his hands, and the sickening perfume of jungle
flowers overcame him more than the hard journey which he had undergone
during the past twelve hours.

Several times he had been within voice of his pursuers, and once a Kanaka
scout passed close to him.  He had had nothing to eat, he had had no
sleep, he suffered from a wound in his neck caused by the broken
protruding branch of a tree; but he had courage, and he was struggling
for liberty--a tolerably sweet thing when one has it not.  He found the
Cave at last, and with far greater ease than Carbourd had done, because
he knew the ground better, and his instinct was keener.  His greeting to
Carbourd was nonchalantly cordial:

"Well, you see, comrade, King Ovi's Cave is a reality."

"So."

"I saw the boat.  The horses?  What do you know?"

"They will be at Point Assumption to-night."

"Then we go to-night.  We shall have to run the chances of rifles along
the shore at a range something short, but we have done that before, at
the Barricades, eh, Carbourd?"

"At the Barricades.  It is a pity that we cannot take Citizen Louise
Michel with us."

"Her time will come."

"She has no children crying and starving at home like--"

"Like yours, Carbourd, like yours.  Well, I am starving here.  Give me
something to eat.  .  .  .  Ah, that is good--excellent!  What more can
we want but freedom!  Till the darkness of tyranny be overpast--overpast,
eh?"

This speech brought another weighty matter to Carbourd's mind.  He said:

"I do not wish to distress you, but--"

"Now, Carbourd, what is the matter?  Faugh!  this place smells musty.
What's that--a tomb?  Speak out, Citizen Carbourd."

"It is this: Mademoiselle Wyndham is blind."  Carbourd told the story
with a great anxiety in his words.

"The poor mademoiselle--is it so?  A thousand pities!  So kind, so young,
so beautiful.  Ah, I am distressed, and I finished her portrait
yesterday!  Yes, I remember her eyes looked too bright, and then again
too dull: but I thought that it was excitement, and so--that!"

Laflamme's regret was real enough up to a certain point, but, in
sincerity and value, it was chasms below that of Hugh Tryon, who, even
now, was getting two horses ready to give the Frenchmen their chance.

After a pause Laflamme said: "She will not come here again, Carbourd?
No?  Ah, well, perhaps it is better so; but I should have liked to speak
my thanks to her."

That night Marie sat by the window of the sitting-room, with the light
burning, and Angers asleep in a chair beside her--sat till long after
midnight, in the thought that Laflamme, if he had reached the Cave,
would, perhaps, dare something to see her and bid her good-bye.  She
would of course have told him not to come, but he was chivalrous, and
then her blindness would touch him.  Yet as the hours went by the thought
came: was he, was he so chivalrous?  was he altogether true?  .  .  .
He did not come.  The next morning Angers took her to where the boat had
been, but it was gone, and no oars were left behind.  So, both had sought
escape in it.

She went to the Cave.  She took Angers with her now.  Upon the wall a
paper was found.  It was a note from M. Laflamme.  She asked Angers to
give it to her without reading it.  She put it in her pocket and kept it
there until she should see Hugh Tryon.  He should read it to her.
She said to herself as she felt the letter in her pocket: "He loved me.
It was the least that I could do.  I am so glad."  Yet she was not
altogether glad either, and disturbing thoughts crossed the parallels
of her pleasure.

The Governor and Madame Solde first brought news of the complete escape
of the prisoners.  The two had fled through the hills by the Brocken
Path, and though pursued after crossing, had reached the coast, and were
taken aboard the Parroquet, which sailed away towards Australia.  It is
probable that Marie's visitors had their suspicions regarding the escape,
but they said nothing, and did not make her uncomfortable.  Just now they
were most concerned for her bitter misfortune.  Madame Solde said to her:
"My poor Marie--does it feel so dreadful, so dark?"

"No, madame, it is not so bad.  There are so many things which one does
not wish to see, and one is spared the pain."

"But you will see again.  When you go to England, to great physicians
there."

"Then I should have three lives, madame: when I could see, when sight
died, and when sight was born again.  How wise I should be!"

They left her sadly, and after a time she heard footsteps that she knew.
She came forward and greeted Tryon.

"Ah," she said, "all's well with them, I know; and you were so good."

"They are safe upon the seas," he gently replied, and he kissed her hand.

"Now you will read this letter for me.  M. Laflamme left it behind in the
Cave."

With a pang he took it, and read thus:

     DEAR FRIEND,--My grief for your misfortune is inexpressible.  If it
     were possible I should say so in person, but there is danger, and we
     must fly at once.  You shall hear from me in full gratitude when I
     am in safety.  I owe you so many thanks, as I give you so much of
     devotion.  But there is the future for all.  Mademoiselle, I kiss
     your hand.

                                   Always yours,
                                        RIVE LAFLAMME.

"Hugh!" she said sadly when he had finished, "I seem to have new
knowledge of things, now that I am blind.  I think this letter is not
altogether real.  You see, that was his way of saying-good-bye."

What Hugh Tryon thought, he did not say.  He had met the Governor on his
way to Pascal House, and had learned some things which were not for her
to know.

She continued: "I could not bear that one who was innocent of any real
crime, who was a great artist, and who believed himself a patriot, should
suffer so here.  When he asked me I helped him.  Yet I suppose I was
selfish, wasn't I?  It was because he loved me."

Hugh spoke breathlessly: "And because--you loved him, Marie?"

Her head was lifted quickly, as though she saw, and was looking him in
the eyes.  "Oh no, oh no," she cried, "I never loved him.  I was sorry
for him--that was all."

"Marie, Marie," he said gently, while she shook her head a little
pitifully, "did you, then, love any one else?"

She was silent for a space and then she said: "Yes--Oh, Hugh, I am so
sorry for your sake that I am blind, and cannot marry you."

"But, my darling, you shall not always be blind, you shall see again.
And you shall marry me also.  As though--life of my life! as though one's
love could live but by the sight of the eyes!"

"My poor Hugh!  But, blind, I could not marry you.  It would not be just
to you."

He smiled with a happy hopeful determination; "But if you should see
again?"

"Oh, then.  .  .  ."

She married him, and in time her sight returned, though not completely.
Tryon never told her, as the Governor had told him, that Rive Laflamme,
when a prisoner in New Caledonia, had a wife in Paris: and he is man
enough to hope that she may never know.

But to this hour he has a profound regret that duels are not in vogue
among Englishmen.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Preserved a marked unconsciousness
Surely she might weep a little for herself
Time when she should and when she should not be wooed
Where the light is darkness






CUMNER'S SON AND OTHER SOUTH SEA FOLK

by Gilbert Parker

Volume 5.



A PAGAN OF THE SOUTH


When Blake Shorland stepped from the steamer Belle Sauvage upon the quay
at Noumea, he proceeded, with the alertness of the trained newspaper
correspondent, to take his bearings.  So this was New Caledonia, the home
of outcast, criminal France, the recent refuge of Communist exiles, of
Rochefort, Louise Michel, Felix Rastoul, and the rest!  Over there to the
left was Ile Nou, the convict prison; on the hill was the Governor's
residence; below, the Government establishments with their red-tiled
roofs; and hidden away in a luxuriance of tropical vegetation lay the
houses of the citizens.  He stroked his black moustache thoughtfully for
a moment, and put his hand to his pocket to see that his letters of
introduction from the French Consul at Sydney to Governor Rapont and his
journalistic credentials were there.  Then he remembered the advice of
the captain of the Belle Sauvage as to the best hotel, and started
towards it.  He had not been shown the way, but his instincts directed
him.  He knew where it ought to be, according to the outlines of the
place.

It proved to be where he thought, and, having engaged rooms, sent for his
luggage, and refreshed himself, he set out to explore the town.  His
prudent mind told him that he ought to proceed at once to Governor Rapont
and present his letters of commendation, for he was in a country where
feeling was running high against English interference with the
deportation of French convicts to New Caledonia, and the intention of
France to annex the New Hebrides.  But he knew also that so soon as these
letters were presented, his freedom of action would be restricted, either
by a courtesy which would be so constant as to become surveillance, or by
an injunction having no such gloss.  He had come to study French
government in New Caledonia, to gauge the extent of the menace that
the convict question bore towards Australia, and to tell his tale to
Australia, and to such other countries as would listen.  The task was not
pleasant, and it had its dangers, too, of a certain kind.  But Shorland
had had difficulty and peril often in his life, and he borrowed no
trouble.  Proceeding along the Rue de l'Alma, and listening to the babble
of French voices round him, he suddenly paused abstractedly, and said to
himself "Somehow it brings back Paris to me, and that last night there,
when I bade Freeman good-bye.  Poor old boy, I'm glad better days are
coming for him.  Sure to be better, if he marries Clare.  Why didn't he
do it seven years ago, and save all that other horrible business?"

Then he moved on, noticing that he was the object of remark, but as it
was daytime, and in the street he felt himself safe.  Glancing up at a
doorway he saw a familiar Paris name--Cafe Voisin.  This was interesting.
It was in the Cafe Voisin that he had touched a farewell glass with Luke
Freeman, the one bosom friend of his life.  He entered this Cafe Voisin
with the thought of how vague would be the society which he would meet in
such a reproduction of a famous Parisian haunt.  He thought of a Cafe
chantant at Port Said, and said to himself, "It can't be worse than
that."  He was right then.  The world had no shambles of ghastly
frivolity and debauchery like those of Port Said.

The Cafe Voisin had many visitors, and Shorland saw at a glance who they
were--liberes, or ticket-of-leave men, a drunken soldier or two, and a
few of that class who with an army are called camp-followers, in an
English town roughs, in a French convict settlement recidivistes.  He
felt at once that he had entered upon a trying experience; but he also
felt that the luck would be with him, as it had been with him so many
times these late years.  He sat down at a small table, and called to a
haggard waitress near to bring him a cup of coffee.  He then saw that
there was another woman in the room.  Leaning with her elbows on the bar
and her chin in her hands, she fixed her eyes on him as he opened and
made a pretence of reading La Nouvelle Caledonie.  Looking up, he met her
eyes again; there was hatred in them if ever he saw it, or what might be
called constitutional diablerie.  He felt that this woman, whoever she
was, had power of a curious kind; too much power for her to be altogether
vile, too physically healthy to be of that class to which the girl who
handed him his coffee belonged.  There was not a sign of gaudiness about
her; not a ring, a necklace, or a bracelet.  Her dress was of cotton,
faintly pink and perfectly clean; her hair was brown, and waving away
loosely from her forehead.  But her eyes--was there a touch of insanity
there?  Perhaps because they were rather deeply set, though large, and
because they seemed to glow in the shadows made by the brows, the strange
intensity was deepened.  But Shorland could not get rid of the feeling of
active malevolence in them.  The mouth was neither small nor sensuous,
the chin was strong without being coarse, the figure was not suggestive.
The hands--confound the woman's eyes!  Why could he not get rid of the
feeling they gave him?  She suddenly turned her head, not moving her chin
from her hands, however, or altering her position, and said something to
a man at her elbow--rather the wreck of a man, one who bore tokens of
having been some time a gallant of the town, now only a disreputable
citizen of a far from reputable French colony.

Immediately a murmur was heard: "A spy, an English spy!"  From the mouths
of absinthe-drinking liberes it passed to the mouths of rum-drinking
recidivistes.  It did not escape Blake Shorland's ears, but he betrayed
no sign.  He sipped his coffee and appeared absorbed in his paper,
thinking carefully of the difficulties of his position.  He knew that
to rise now and make for the door would be of no advantage, for a number
of the excited crowd were between him and it.  To show fear might
precipitate a catastrophe with this drunken mob.  He had nerve and
coolness.

Presently a dirty outcast passed him and rudely jostled his arm as he
drank his coffee.  He begged the other's pardon conventionally in French,
and went on reading.  A moment later the paper was snatched from his
hand, and a red-faced unkempt scoundrel yelled in his face: "Spy of the
devil!  English thief!"

Then he rose quickly and stepped back to the wall, feeling for the spring
in the sword-stick which he held closely pressed to his side.  This same
sword-stick had been of use to him on the Fly River in New Guinea.

"Down with the English spy!" rang through the room, joined to vile
French oaths.  Meanwhile the woman had not changed her position, but
closely watched the tumult which she herself had roused.  She did not
stir when she saw a glass hurled at the unoffending Englishman's head.  A
hand reached over and seized a bottle behind her.  The bottle was raised
and still she did not move, though her fingers pressed her cheeks with a
spasmodic quickness.  Three times Shorland had said, in well-controlled
tones: "Frenchmen, I am no spy," but they gave him the lie with
increasing uproar.  Had not Gabrielle Rouget said that he was an English
spy?  As the bottle was poised in the air with a fiendish cry of "A
baptism! a baptism!" and Shorland was debating on his chances of avoiding
it, and on the wisdom of now drawing his weapon and cutting his way
through the mob, there came from the door a call of "Hold!  hold!" and a
young officer dashed in, his arm raised against the brutal missile in the
hands of the ticket-of-leave man, whose Chauvinism was a matter of
absinthe, natural evil, and Gabrielle Rouget.  "Wretches!  scum of
France!" he cried: "what is this here?  And you, Gabrielle, do you
sleep?  Do you permit murder?"

The woman met the fire in his eyes without flinching, and some one
answered for her.  "He is an English spy."

"Take care, Gabrielle," the young officer went on, "take care--you go too
far!"  Waving back the sullen crowd, now joined by the woman who had not
yet spoken, he said: "Who are you, monsieur?  What is the trouble?"

Shorland drew from his pocket his letters and credentials.  Gabrielle now
stood at the young officer's elbow.  As the papers were handed over, a
photograph dropped from among them and fell to the floor face upward.
Shorland stooped to pick it up, but, as he did so, he heard a low
exclamation from Gabrielle.  He looked up.  She pointed to the portrait,
and said gaspingly: "My God--look! look!"  She leaned forward and touched
the portrait in his hand.  "Look! look!" she said again.  And then she
paused, and a moment after laughed.  But there was no mirth in her
laughter--it was hollow and nervous.  Meanwhile the young officer had
glanced at the papers, and now handed them back, with the words: "All is
right, monsieur--eh, Gabrielle, well, what is the matter?"  But she drew
back, keeping her eyes fixed on the Englishman, and did not answer.

The young officer stretched out his hand.  "I am Alencon Barre,
lieutenant, at your service.  Let us go, monsieur."

But there was some unusual devilry working in that drunken crowd.  The
sight of an officer was not sufficient to awe them into obedience.  Bad
blood had been fired, and it was fed by some cause unknown to Alencon
Barre, but to be understood fully hereafter.  The mass surged forward,
with cries of "Down with the Englishman!"

Alencon Barre drew his sword.  "Villains!" he cried, and pressed the
point against the breast of the leader, who drew back.  Then Gabrielle's
voice was heard: "No, no, my children," she said, "no more of that
to-day--not to-day.  Let the man go."  Her face was white and drawn.

Shorland had been turning over in his mind all the events of the last few
moments, and he thought as he looked at her that just such women had made
a hell of the Paris Commune.  But one thought dominated all others.  What
was the meaning of her excitement when she saw the portrait--the portrait
of Luke Freeman?

He felt that he was standing on the verge of some tragic history.

Barre's sword again made a clear circle round him, and he said: "Shame,
Frenchmen!  This gentleman is no spy.  He is the friend of the Governor--
he is my friend.  He is English?  Well, where is the English flag, there
are the French--good French-protected.  Where is the French flag, there
shall the English--good English--be safe."

As they moved towards the door Gabrielle came forward, and, touching
Shorland's arm, said in English: "You will come again, monsieur?  You
shall be safe altogether.  You will come?"  Looking at her searchingly,
he answered slowly: "Yes, I will come."

As they left the turbulent crowd behind them and stepped into the street,
Barr$ said: "You should have gone at once to the Hotel du Gouverneur and
presented your letters, monsieur, or, at least, have avoided the Cafe
Voisin.  Noumea is the Whitechapel and the Pentonville of France,
remember."

Shorland acknowledged his error, thanked his rescuer, enjoyed the
situation, and was taken to Governor Rapont, by whom he was cordially
received, and then turned over to the hospitality of the officers of the
post.  It was conveyed to him later by letters of commendation from the
Governor that he should be free to go anywhere in the islands and to see
whatever was to be seen, from convict prison to Hotel Dieu.




II

Sitting that night in the rooms of Alencon Barre, this question was put
to Blake Shorland by his host: "What did Gabrielle say to you as we left,
monsieur?  And why did she act so, when she saw the portrait?  I do not
understand English well, and it was not quite clear."

Shorland had a clear conviction that he ought to take Alencon Barre into
his confidence.  If Gabrielle Rouget should have any special connection
with Luke Freeman, there might be need of the active counsel of a friend
like this young officer, whose face bespoke chivalry and gentle birth.
Better that Alencon Barre should know all, than that he should know in
part and some day unwittingly make trouble.  So he raised frank eyes to
those of the other, and told the story of the man whose portrait had so
affected Gabrielle Rouget.

"Monsieur," said he, "I will tell you of this man first, and then it will
be easier to answer your questions."

He took the portrait from his pocket, passed it over, and continued.
"I received this portrait in a letter from England the day that I left
Sydney, as I was getting aboard the boat.  I placed it among those papers
which you read.  It fell out on the floor of the cafe, and you saw the
rest.  The man whose face is before you there, and who sent that to me,
was my best friend in the days when I was at school and college.
Afterwards, when a law-student, and, still later, when I began to
practise my profession, we lived together in a rare old house at Fulham,
with high garden walls and--but I forget, you do not know London perhaps.
Yes?  Well, the house is neither here nor there; but I like to think of
those days and of that home.  Luke Freeman--that was my friend's name--
was an artist and a clever one.  He had made a reputation by his
paintings of Egyptian and Algerian life.  He was brilliant and original,
an indefatigable worker.  Suddenly, one winter, he became less
industrious, fitful in his work, gloomy one day and elated the next,
generally uncomfortable.  What was the matter?  Strange to say, although
we were such friends, we chose different sets of society, and therefore
seldom appeared at the same houses or knew the same people.  He liked
most things continental; he found his social pleasures in that polite
Bohemia which indulges in midnight suppers and permits ladies to smoke
cigarettes after dinner, which dines at rich men's tables and is hob-a-
nob with Russian Counts, Persian Ministers, and German Barons.  That was
not to my taste, save as a kind of dramatic entertainment to be indulged
in at intervals like a Drury Lane pantomime.  But though I had no proof
that such was the case, I knew Luke Freeman's malady to be a woman.  I
taxed him with it.  He did not deny it.  He was painting at the time, I
remember, and he testily and unprofitably drew his brush across the face
of a Copt woman he was working at, and bit off the end of a cigar.  I
asked him if it was another man's wife; he promptly said no.  I asked him
if there were any awkward complications any inconsiderate pressure from
the girl's parents of brothers; and he promptly told me to be damned.
I told him I thought he ought to know that an ambitious man might as well
drown himself at once as get a fast woman in his path.  Then he showed a
faculty for temper and profanity that stunned me.  But the up shot was
that I found the case straight enough to all appearances.  The woman was
a foreigner and not easy to win; was beautiful, had a fine voice, loved
admiration, and possessed a scamp of a brother who, wanted her to marry
a foreigner, so that, according to her father's will, a large portion of
her fortune would come to him....  Were you going to speak?  No?  Very
well.  Things got worse and worse.  Freeman neglected business and
everything else, became a nuisance.  He never offered to take me to see
the lady, and I did not suggest it, did not even know where she lived.
What galled me most in the matter was that Freeman had been for years
attentive to a cousin of mine, Clare Hazard, almost my sister, indeed,
since she had been brought up in my father's house; and I knew that from
a child she had adored him.  However, these things seldom work out
according to the law of Nature, and so I chewed the cud of
dissatisfaction and kept the thing from my cousin as long as I could.
About the time matters seemed at a crisis I was taken ill, and was
ordered south.  My mother and Freeman accompanied me as far as Paris.
Here Freeman left me to return to England, and in the Cafe Voisin, at
Paris--yes, mark that--we had our farewell.  I have never seen him since.
While in Italy I was brought to death's door by my illness; and when I
got up, Clare told me that Freeman was married and had gone to Egypt.
She, poor girl, bore it well.  I was savage, but it was too late.  I was
ordered to go to the South Seas, at least to take a long sea-voyage; and
though I could not well afford it I started for Australia.  On my way out
I stopped off at Port Said to try and find Freeman in Egypt, but failed.
I heard of him at Cairo, and learned also that his wife's brother had
joined them.  Two years passed, and then I got a letter from an old
friend, saying that Freeman's wife had eloped with a Frenchman.  Another
year, and then came a letter from Freeman himself, saying that his wife
was dead; that he had identified her body in the Morgue at Paris--found
drowned, and all that.  He believed that remorse had driven her to
suicide.  But he had no trace of the brother, no trace of the villain
whom he had scoured Europe and America over to find.  Again, another
three years, and now he writes me that he is going to be married to Clare
Hazard on the twenty sixth of this month.  With that information came
this portrait.  I tell you all, M. Barre, because I feel that this woman
Gabrielle has some connection with the past life of my friend Luke
Freeman.  She recognised the face, and you saw the effect.  Now will you
tell me what you know about her?"

Shorland had been much more communicative than was his custom.  But
he knew men.  This man had done him a service, and that made towards
friendship on both sides.  He was an officer and a gentleman, and so he
showed his hand.  Then he wanted information and perhaps much more,
though what that would be he could not yet tell.

M. Barre had smoked cigarettes freely during Shorland's narrative.  At
the end he said with peculiar emphasis: "Your friend's wife was surely a
Frenchwoman?"

"Yes."

"Was her name Laroche?"

"Yes, that was it.  Do you think that Lucile Laroche and Gabrielle--!"

"That Lucile Laroche and Gabrielle Rouget are one?  Yes.  But that Lucile
Laroche was the wife of your friend?  Well, that is another matter.  But
we shall see soon.  Listen.  A scoundrel, Henri Durien, was sent out here
for killing an American at cards.  The jury called it murder, but
recommended him to mercy, and he escaped the guillotine.  He had the
sympathy of the women, the Press did not deal hardly with him, and the
Public Prosecutor did not seem to push the case as he might have done.
But that was no matter to us.  The woman, Gabrielle Rouget, followed
him here, where he is a prisoner for life.  He is engaged in road-making
with other prisoners.  She keeps the Cafe Voisin.  Now here is the point
which concerns your story.  Once, when Gabrielle was permitted to
see Henri, they quarrelled.  I was acting as governor of the prison at
the time, saw the meeting and heard the quarrel.  No one else was near.
Henri accused her of being intimate with a young officer of the post.  I
am sure there was no truth in it, for Gabrielle does not have followers
of that kind.  But Henri had got the idea from some source; perhaps by
the convicts' 'Underground Railway,' which has connection even with the
Hotel du Gouverneur.  Through it the prisoners know all that is going on,
and more.  In response to Henri's accusation Gabrielle replied: 'As I
live, Henri, it is a lie.'  He sardonically rejoined: 'But you do not
live.  You are dead, dead I tell you.  You were found drowned and carried
to the Morgue and properly identified--not by me, curse you, Lucile
Laroche.  And then you were properly buried, and not by me either, nor at
my cost, curse you again.  You are dead, I tell you!'  She looked at him
as she looked at you the other day, dazed and spectre-like, and said:
'Henri, I gave up my life once to a husband to please my brother.

"He was a villain, my brother.  I gave it up a second time to please you,
and because I loved you.  I left behind me name, fortune, Paris, France,
everything, to follow you here.  I was willing to live here, while you
lived, or till you should be free.  And you curse me--you dare to curse
me!  Now I will give you some cause to curse.  You are a devil--I am a
sinner.  Henceforth I shall be devil and sinner too.'  With that she left
him.  Since then she has been both devil and sinner, but not in the way
he meant; simply a danger to the safety of this dangerous community;
a Louise Michel--we had her here too!--without Louise Michel's high
motives.  Gabrielle Rouget may cause a revolt of the convicts some day,
to secure the escape of Henri Durien, or to give them all a chance.  The
Governor does not believe it, but I do.  You noticed what I said about
the Morgue, and that?"

Shorland paced up and down the room for a time, and then said: "Great
heaven, suppose that by some hideous chance this woman, Gabrielle Rouget,
or Lucile Laroche, should prove to be Freeman's wife!  The evidence is so
overwhelming.  There evidently was some trick, some strange mistake,
about the Morgue and the burial.  This is the fourteenth of January;
Freeman is to be married on the twenty-sixth!  Monsieur, if this woman
should be his wife, there never was brewed an uglier scrape.  There is
Freeman--that's pitiful; there is Clare Hazard--that's pitiful and
horrible.  For nothing can be done; no cables from here, the Belle
Sauvage gone, no vessels or sails for two weeks.  Ah well, there's only
one thing to do--find out the truth from Gabrielle if I can, and trust in
Providence."

"Well spoken," said M. Barre.  "Have some more champagne.  I make the
most of the pleasure of your company, and so I break another bottle.
Besides, it may be the last I shall get for a time.  There is trouble
brewing at Bompari--a native insurrection--and we may have to move at any
moment.  However this Gabrielle affair turns out, you have your business
to do.  You want to see the country, to study our life-well, come with
us.  We will house you, feed you as we feed, and you shall have your
tobacco at army prices."

Much as Blake Shorland was moved by the events of the last few hours he
was enough the soldier and the man of the world to face possible troubles
without the loss of appetite, sleep, or nerve.  He had cultivated a habit
of deliberation which saved his digestion and preserved his mental poise;
and he had a faculty for doing the right thing at the right time.  From
his stand-point, his late adventure in the Cafe Voisin was the right
thing, serious as the results might have been or might yet be.  He now
promptly met the French officer's exuberance of spirits with a hearty
gaiety, and drank his wine with genial compliment and happy anecdote.
It was late when they parted; the Frenchman excited, beaming, joyous,
the Englishman responsive, but cool in mind still.




III

After breakfast next morning Shorland expressed to M. Barre his intention
of going to see Gabrielle Rouget.  He was told that he must not go alone;
a guard would be too conspicuous and might invite trouble; he himself
would bear him company.

The hot January day was reflected from the red streets, white houses,
and waxen leaves of the tropical foliage with enervating force.  An
occasional ex-convict sullenly lounged by, touching his cap as he was
required by law; a native here and there leaned idly against a house-wall
or a magnolia tree; ill-looking men and women loitered in the shade.  A
Government officer went languidly by in full uniform--even the Governor
wore uniform at all times to encourage respect--and the cafes were
filling.  Every hour was "absinthe-hour" in Noumea, which had improved on
Paris in this particular.  A knot of men stood at the door of the Cafe
Voisin gesticulating nervously.  One was pointing to a notice posted on
the bulletin-board of the cafe announcing that all citizens must hold
themselves in readiness to bear arms in case the rumoured insurrection
among the natives proved serious.  It was an evil-looking company who
thus discussed Governor Rapont's commands.  As the two passed in,
Shorland noticed that one of the group made a menacing action towards
Alencon Barre.

Gabrielle was talking to an ex-convict as they entered.  Her face looked
worn; there was a hectic spot on each cheek and dark circles round the
eyes.  There was something animal-like about the poise of the head and
neck, something intense and daring about the woman altogether.  Her
companion muttered between his teeth: "The cursed English spy!"

But she turned on him sharply: "Go away, Gaspard, I have business.  So
have you--go." The ex-convict slowly left the cafe still muttering.

"Well, Gabrielle, how are your children this morning?  They look gloomy
enough for the guillotine, eh?" said M. Barre.

"They are much trouble, sometimes--my children."

"Last night, for instance."

"Last night.  But monsieur was unwise.  We do not love the English here.
They do not find it comfortable on English soil, in Australia--my
children!  Not so comfortable as Louis Philippe and Louis Napoleon.
Criminal kings with gold are welcome; criminal subjects without gold--
ah, that is another matter, monsieur.  It is just the same.  They may be
gentlemen--many are; if they escape to Australia or go as liberes, they
are hunted down.  That is English, and they hate the English--
my children."

Gabrielle's voice was directed to M. Barre, but her eyes were on
Shorland.

"Well, Gabrielle, all English are not inhospitable.  My friend here,
we must be hospitable to him.  The coals of fire, you know, Gabrielle.
We owe him some thing for yesterday.  He wishes to speak to you.  Be
careful, Gabrielle.  No communist justice, Citizen Gabrielle."  M. Barre
smiled gaily.

Gabrielle smiled in reply, but it was not a pleasant smile, and she said:
"Treachery, M. Barre--treachery in Noumea?  There is no such thing.  It
is all fair in love and war.  No quarter, no mercy, no hope.  All is fair
where all is foul, M. Barre."

M. Barre shrugged his shoulders pleasantly and replied: "If I had my way
your freedom should be promptly curtailed, Gabrielle.  You are an active
citizen, but you are dangerous, truly."

"I like you better when you do not have your way.  Yet my children do
not hate you, M. Barre.  You speak your thought, and they know what to
expect.  Your family have little more freedom in France than my children
have here."

M. Barre looked at her keenly for an instant, then, lighting a cigarette,
he said: "So, Gabrielle, so!  That is enough.  You wish to speak to
M. Shorland--well!"  He waved his hand to her and walked away from them.
Gabrielle paused a moment, looking sharply at Blake Shorland, then she
said: "Monsieur will come with me?"

She led the way into another room, the boudoir, sitting-room, breakfast-
room, library, all in one.  She parted the curtains at the window,
letting the light fall upon the face of her companion, while hers
remained in the shadow.  He knew the trick, and moved out of the belt of
light.  He felt that he was dealing with a woman of singular astuteness,
with one whose wickedness was unconventional and intrepid.  To his mind
there came on the instant the memory of a Rocky Mountain lioness that he
had seen caged years before; lithe, watchful, nervously powerful,
superior to its surroundings, yet mastered by those surroundings--the
trick of a lock, not a trick of strength.  He thought he saw in Gabrielle
a woman who for a personal motive was trying to learn the trick of the
lock in Noumea, France's farthest prison.  For a moment they looked at
each other steadily, then she said: "That portrait--let me see it."

The hand that she held out was unsteady, and it looked strangely white
and cold.  He drew the photograph from his pocket and handed it to her.
A flush passed across her face as she looked at it, and was followed by
a marked paleness.  She gazed at the portrait for a moment, then her lips
parted and a great sigh broke from her.  She was about to hand it back to
him, but an inspiration seemed to seize her, and she threw it on the
floor and put her heel upon it.  "That is the way I treated him," she
said, and she ground her heel into the face of the portrait.  Then she
took her foot away.  "See, see," she cried, "how his face is scarred and
torn!  I did that.  Do you know what it is to torture one who loves you?
No, you do not.  You begin with shame and regret.  But the sight of your
lover's agonies, his indignation, his anger, madden you and you get the
lust of cruelty.  You become insane.  You make new wounds.  You tear open
old ones.  You cut, you thrust, you bruise, you put acid in the sores--
the sharpest nitric acid; and then you heal with a kiss of remorse, and
that is acid too--carbolic acid, and it smells of death.  They put it in
the room where dead people are.  Have you ever been to the Morgue in
Paris?  They use it there."

She took up the portrait.  "Look," she said, "how his face is torn!
Tell me of him."

"First, who are you?"

She steadied herself.  "Who are you?" she asked.

"I am his friend, Blake Shorland."

"Yes, I remember your name."  She threw her hands up with a laugh, a
bitter hopeless laugh.  Her eyes half closed, so that only light came
from them, no colour.  The head was thrown back with a defiant
recklessness, and then she said: "I was Lucile Laroche, his wife--Luke
Freeman's wife."

"But his wife died.  He identified her in the Morgue."

"I do not know why I speak to you so, but I feel that the time has come
to tell all to you.  That was not his wife in the Morgue.  It was his
wife's sister, my sister whom my brother drowned for her money--he made
her life such a misery!  And he did not try to save her when he knew she
meant to drown herself.  She was not bad; she was a thousand times better
than I am, a million times better than he was.  He was a devil.  But he
is dead now too.  .  .  .  She was taken to the Morgue.  She looked like
me altogether; she wore a ring of mine, and she had a mark on her
shoulder the same as one on mine; her initials were the same.  Luke had
never seen her.  He believed that I lay dead there, and he buried her for
me.  I thought at the time that it would be best I should be dead to him
and to the world.  And so I did not speak.  It was all the same to my
brother.  He got what was left of my fortune, and I got what was left of
hers.  For I was dead, you see--dead, dead, dead!"

She paused again.  Neither spoke for a moment.  Shorland was thinking
what all this meant to Clare Hazard and Luke Freeman.

"Where is he?  What is he doing?" she said at length.  "Tell me.  I was
--I am--his wife."

"Yes, you were--you are--his wife.  But better if you had been that woman
in the Morgue," he said without pity.  What were this creature's feelings
to him?  There was his friend and the true-souled Clare.

"I know, I know," she replied.  "Go on!"

"He is well.  The man that was born when his wife lay before him in the
Morgue has found another woman, a good woman who loves him and--"

"And is married to her?" interrupted Gabrielle, her face taking on again
a shining whiteness.  But, as though suddenly remembering something,
she laughed that strange laugh which might have come from a soul
irretrievably lost.  "And is married to her?"

Blake Shorland thought of the lust of cruelty, of the wounds, and the
acids of torture.  "Not yet," he said; "but the marriage is set for the
twenty-six of this month."

"How I could spoil all that!"

"Yes, you could spoil all that.  But you have spoiled enough already.
Don't you think that if Luke Freeman does marry, you had better be dead
as you have been this last five years?  To have spoiled one life ought to
be enough to satisfy even a woman like you."

Her eyes looked through Blake Shorland's eyes and beyond them to
something else; and then they closed.  When they opened again, she said:
"It is strange that I never thought of his marrying again.  And now I
want to kill her--just for the moment.  That is the selfish devil in me.
Well, what is to be done, monsieur?  There is the Morgue left.  But then
there is no Morgue here.  Ah, well, we can make one, perhaps--we can make
a Morgue, monsieur."

"Can't you see that he ought to be left the rest of his life in peace?"

"Yes, I can see that."

"Well, then!"

"Well--and then, monsieur?  Ah, you did not wish him to marry me.  He
told me so.  'A fickle foreigner,' you said.  And you were right, but it
was not pleasant to me.  I hated you then, though I had never spoken to
you nor seen you; not because I wanted him, but because you interfered.
He said once to me that you had told the truth in that.  But--and then,
monsieur?"

"Then continue to efface yourself.  Continue to be the woman in the
Morgue."

"But others know."

"Yes, Henri Durien knows and M. Barre suspects."

"So, you see."

"But Henri Durien is a prisoner for life; he cannot hear of the marriage
unless you tell him.  M. Barre is a gentleman: he is my friend; his
memory will be dead like you."

"For M. Barre, well!  But the other--Henri.  How do you know that he is
here for life?  Men get pardoned, men get free, men--get free, I tell
you."

Shorland noticed the interrupted word.  He remembered it afterwards all
too distinctly enough.

"The twenty-sixth, the twenty-sixth," she said.

Then a pause, and afterwards with a sudden sharpness: "Come to me on the
twenty-fifth, and I will give you my reply, M. Shorland."

He still held the portrait in his hand.  She stepped forward.  "Let me
see it again," she said.

He handed it to her: "You have spoiled a good face, Gabrielle."

"But the eyes are not hurt," she replied; "see how they look at one."
She handed it back.

"Yes, kindly."

"And sadly.  As though he still remembered Lucile.  Lucile!  I have not
been called that name for a long time.  It is on my grave-stone, you
know.  Ah, perhaps you do not know.  You never saw my grave.  I have.
And on the tombstone is written this: By Luke to Lucile.  And then
beneath, where the grass almost hides it, the line: I have followed my
Star to the last.  You do not know what that line means; I will tell you.
Once, when we were first married, he wrote me some verses, and he called
them, 'My Star, Lucile.'  Here is a verse--ah, why do you not smile, when
I say I will tell you what he wrote?  Chut!  Women such as I have
memories sometimes.  One can admire the Heaven even if one lives in--ah,
you know!  Listen."  And with a voice that seemed far away and not part
of herself she repeated these lines:

         "In my sky of delight there's a beautiful Star;
               'Tis the sun and the moon of my days;
          And the doors of its glory are ever ajar,
          And I live in the glow of its rays.
               'Tis my winter of joy and my summer of rest,
               'Tis my future, my present, my past;
          And though storms fill the East and the clouds haunt the West,
               I shall follow my Star to the last."

"There, that was to Lucile.  What would he write to Gabrielle--to Henri's
Gabrielle?  How droll--how droll!"  Again she laughed that laugh of
eternal recklessness.

It filled Shorland this time with a sense of fear.  He lost sight of
everything--this strange and interesting woman, and the peculiar nature
of the events in which he was sharing, and saw only Clare Hazard's ruined
life, Luke Freeman's despair, and the fatal 26th of January, so near at
hand.  He could see no way out of the labyrinth of disgrace.  It unnerved
him more than anything that had ever happened to him, and he turned
bewildered towards the door.  He saw that while Gabrielle lived, a dead
misfortune would be ever crouching at the threshold of Freeman's home,
that whether the woman agreed to be silent or not, the hurt to Clare
would remain the same.  With an angry bitterness in his voice that he
did not try to hide he said: "There is nothing more to be done now,
Gabrielle, that I can see.  But it is a crime--it is a pity!"

"A pity that he did not tell the truth on the gravestone--that he did not
follow his star to the last, monsieur?  How droll!  And you should see
how green the grass was on my grave!  Yes, it is a pity."

But Shorland, heavy at heart, looked at her and said nothing more.  He
wondered why it was that he did not loathe her.  Somehow, even in her
shame, she compelled a kind of admiration and awe.  She was the wreck of
splendid possibilities.  A poisonous vitality possessed her, but through
it glowed a daring and a candour that belonged to her before she became
wicked, and that now half redeemed her in the eyes of this man, who knew
the worst of her.  Even in her sin she was loyal to the scoundrel for
whom she had sacrificed two lives, her own and another's.  Her brow might
flush with shame of the mad deed that turned her life awry, and of the
degradation of her present surroundings; but her eyes looked straight
into those of Shorland without wavering, with the pride of strength if
not of goodness.

"Yes, there is one thing more," she said.  "Give me that portrait to
keep--until the 25th.  Then you may take it--from the woman in the
Morgue."

Shorland thought for a moment.  She had spoken just now without sneering,
without bravado, without hardness.  He felt that behind this woman's
outward cruelty and varying moods there was something working that
perhaps might be trusted, something in Luke's interest.  He was certain
that this portrait had moved her deeply.  Had she come to that period of
reaction in evil when there is an agonised desire to turn back towards
the good?  He gave the portrait to her.




IV

Sitting in Alencon Barre's room an hour later, Shorland told him in
substance the result of his conference with Gabrielle, and begged his
consideration for Luke if the worst should happen.  Alencon Barre gave
his word as a man of honour that the matter should be sacred to him.
As they sat there, a messenger came from the commandant to say that the
detachment was to start that afternoon for Bompari.  Then a note was
handed to Shorland from Governor Rapont offering him a horse and a native
servant if he chose to go with the troops.  This was what Shorland had
come for--news and adventure.  He did not hesitate, though the shadow of
the twenty-fifth was hanging over him.  He felt his helplessness in the
matter, but determined to try to be back in Noumea on that date.  Not
that he expected anything definite, but because he had a feeling that
where Gabrielle was on that day he ought to be.

For two days they travelled, the friendship between them growing hourly
closer.  It was the swift amalgamation of two kindred natures in the
flame of a perfect sincerity, for even with the dramatic element so
strongly developed in him, the Englishman was downright and true.
His friendship was as tenacious as his head was cool.

On the evening of the third day Shorland noticed that the strap of his
spur was frayed.  He told his native servant to attend to it.  Next
morning as they were starting he saw that the strap had not been mended
or replaced.  His language on the occasion was pointed and confident.
The fact is, he was angry with himself for trusting anything to a
servant.  He was not used to such a luxury, and he made up his mind to
live for the rest of the campaign without a servant, as he had done all
his life long.

The two friends rode side by side for miles through the jungle of fern
and palm, and then began to enter a more open but scrubby country.  The
scouts could be seen half a mile ahead.  Not a sign of natives had been
discovered on the march.  More than once Barre had expressed his anxiety
at this.  He knew it pointed to concentrated trouble ahead, and, just as
they neared the edge of the free country, he rose in his saddle and
looked around carefully.  Shorland imitated his action, and, as he
resumed his seat, he felt his spur-strap break.  He leaned back, and drew
up the foot to take off the spur.  As he did so, he felt a sudden twitch
at his side, and Barre swayed in his saddle with a spear in the groin.
Shorland caught him and prevented him falling to the ground.  A wild cry
rose from the jungle behind and from the clearing ahead, and in a moment
the infuriated French soldiers were in the thick of a hand-to-hand fray
under a rain of spears and clubs.  The spear that had struck Barre would
have struck Shorland had he not bent backward when he did.  As it was the
weapon had torn a piece of cloth from his coat.

A moment, and the wounded man was lifted to the ground.  The surgeon
shook his head in sad negation.  Death already blanched the young
officer's face.  Shorland looked into the misty eyes with a sadness only
known to those who can gauge the regard of men who suffer for each other.
Four days ago this gallant young officer had taken risk for him, had
saved him from injury, perhaps death; to-day the spear meant for him
had stricken down this same young officer, never to rise again.  The
vicarious sacrifice seemed none the less noble to the Englishman because
it was involuntary and an accident.  The only point clear in his mind was
that had he not leant back, Barre would be the whole man and he the
wounded one.

"How goes it, my friend?" said Shorland, bending over him.

Alencon Barre looked up, agony twitching his nostrils and a dry white
line on his lips.  "Ah, mon camarade," he answered huskily, "it is in
action--that is much; it is for France, that is more to me--everything.
They would not let me serve France in Paris, but I die for her in New
Caledonia.  I have lived six-and-twenty years.  I have loved the world.
Many men have been kind, and once there was a woman--and I shall see her
soon, quite soon.  It is strange.  The eyes will become blind, and then
they will open, and--ah!"  His fingers closed convulsively on those of
Blake Shorland.  When the ghastly tremor, the deadly corrosions of the
poisoned spear passed he said: "So--so!  It is the end.  C'est bien,
c'est bien!"

All round them the fight raged, and French soldiers were repeating
English bravery in the Soudan.

"It is not against a great enemy, but it is good," said the wounded man
as he heard the conquering cries of a handful of soldiers punishing ten
times their numbers.  "You remember Prince Eugene and the assegais?"

"I remember."

"Our Houses were enemies, but we were friends, he and I.  And so, and so,
you see, it is the same for both."

Again the teeth of the devouring poison fastened on him, and, when it
left him, a grey pallor had settled upon the face.

Blake Shorland said to him gently: "How do you feel about it all?"

As if in gentle protest the head moved slightly.  "All's well, all's
well," the low voice said.

A pause, in which the cries of the wounded came through the smoke, and
then the dying man, feeling the approach of another convulsion, said:
"A cigarette, mon ami."

Blake Shorland put a cigarette between his lips and lighted it.

"And now a little wine," the fallen soldier added.  The surgeon, who had
come again for a moment, nodded and said: "It may help."

Barre's native servant brought a bottle of champagne intended to be drunk
after the expected victory, but not in this fashion!

Shorland understood.  This brave young soldier of a dispossessed family
wished to show no fear of pain, no lack of outward and physical courage
in the approaching and final shock.  He must do something that was
conventional, natural, habitual, that would take his mind from the thing
itself.  At heart he was right.  The rest was a question of living like a
strong-nerved soldier to the last.  The tobacco-smoke curled feebly from
his lips, and was swallowed up in the clouds of powder-smoke that circled
round them.  With his head on his native servant's knee he watched
Shorland uncork the bottle and pour the wine into the surgeon's medicine-
glass.  It was put in his fingers; he sipped it once and then drank it
all.  "Again," he said.

Again it was filled.  The cigarette was smoked nearly to the end.
Shorland must unburden his mind of one thought, and he said: "You took
what was meant for me, my friend."

"Ah, no, no!  It was the fortune, we will say the good fortune.  C'est
bien!"  Then, "The wine, the wine," he said, and his fingers again
clasped those of Shorland tremblingly.  He took the glass in his right
hand and lifted it.  "God guard all at home, God keep France!" he said.
He was about to place the glass to his lips, when a tremor seized him,
and the glass fell from his hand.  He fell back, his breath quick and
vanishing, his eyes closing, and a faint smile upon his lips.  "It is
always the same with France," he said; "always the same."  And he was
gone.




V

The French had bought their victory dear with the death of Alencon Barre,
their favourite officer.  When they turned their backs upon a quelled
insurrection, there was a gap that not even French buoyancy could fill.
On the morning of the twenty-fifth they neared Noumea.  Shorland thought
of all that day meant to Luke and Clare.  He was helpless to alter the
course of events, to stay a terrible possibility.

"You can never trust a woman of Gabrielle's stamp," he said to himself,
as they rode along through valleys of ferns, grenadillas, and limes.
"They have no baseline of duty; they either rend themselves or rend
others, but rend they must, hearts and not garments.  Henri Durien knows,
and she knows, and Alencon Barre knew, poor boy!  But what Barre knew is
buried with him back there under the palms.  Luke and Clare are to be
married to-morrow-God help them!  And I can see them in their home, he
standing by the fireplace in his old way--it's winter there--and looking
down at Clare; and on the other side of the fireplace sits the sister of
the Woman in the Morgue, waiting for the happiest moment in the lives of
these two before her.  And when it comes, as she did with the portrait,
as she did with him before, she will set her foot upon his face and then
on Clare's; only neither Luke nor Clare will live again after that
crucifixion."  Then aloud: "Hello! what's that?--a messenger riding hard
to meet us!  Smoke in the direction of Noumea and sound of firing!
What's that, doctor?  Convicts revolted, made a break at the prison
and on the way to the quarries at the same moment!  Of course--seized
the time when the post was weakest, helped by ticket-of-leave-men and
led by Henri Durien, Gaspard, and Gabrielle Rouget.  Gabrielle Rouget,
eh!  And this is the twenty-fifth!  Yes, I will take Barre's horse,
captain, thank you; it is fresher than mine.  Away we go!  Egad, they're
at it, doctor!  Hear the rifles!"  Answering to the leader's cry of
"Forward, forward!" the detachment dashed into the streets of this
little Paris, which, after the fashion of its far-away mother, was
dipping its hands in Revolution.  Outcast and criminal France were
arrayed against military France once more.  A handful of guards in the
prison at Ile Nou were bravely holding in check a ruthless mob of
convicts; and a crowd of convicts in the street keeping back a determined
military force.  Part of the newly-arrived reinforcements proceeded to
Ile Nou, part moved towards the barricade.  Shorland went to the
barricade.

The convicts had the Cafe Voisin in their rear.  As the reinforcements
joined the besieging party a cheer arose, and a sally was made upon the
barricade.  It was a hail of fire meeting a slighter rain of fire--a cry
of coming victory cutting through a sullen roar of despair.  The square
in which the convicts were massed was a trench of blood and bodies; but
they fought on.  There was but one hope--to break out, to meet the
soldiers hand to hand and fight for passage to the friendly jungle and
to the sea, where they might trust to that Providence who appears to help
even the wicked sometimes.  As Shorland looked upon the scene he thought
of Alencon Barre's words: "It is always the same with France, always the
same."

The fight grew fiercer, the soldiers pressed nearer.  And now one clear
voice was heard above the din, "Forward, forward, my children!" and some
one sprang upon the outer barricade.  It was the plotter of the revolt,
the leader, the manager of the "Underground Railway," the beloved of the
convicts--Gabrielle Rouget.

The sunlight glorified her flying hair and vivid dress-vivid with the
blood of the fallen.  Her arms, her shoulders, her feet were bare; all
that she could spare from her body had gone to bind the wounds of her
desperate comrades.  In her hands she held a carbine.  As she stood for
an instant unmoving, the firing, as if by magic, ceased.  She raised a
hand.  "We will have the guillotine in Paris," she said; "but not the
hell of exile here."

Then Henri Durien, the convict, sprang up beside her; the man for whom
she had made a life's sacrifice--for whom she had come to this!  His head
was bandaged and clotted with blood; his eyes shone with the fierceness
of an animal at bay.  Close after him crowded the handful of his frenzied
compatriots in crime.

Then a rifle-crack was heard, and Henri Durieu fell at the feet of
Gabrielle.  The wave on the barricade quivered, and then Gabrielle's
voice was heard crying, "Avenge him!  Free yourselves, my children!
Death is better than prison!"

The wave fell in red turmoil on the breakers.  And still Gabrielle stood
alone above the body of Henri Durien; but the carbine was fallen from her
hands.  She stood as one awaiting death, her eyes upon the unmoving form
at her feet.  The soldiers watched her, but no one fired.  Her face was
white; but in the eyes there was a wild triumph.  She wanted death now;
but these French soldiers had not the heart to kill her.

When she saw that, she leaned and thrust a hand into the bleeding bosom
of Henri Durien, and holding it aloft cried: "For this blood men must
die."  Stooping again she seized the carbine and levelled it at the
officer in command.  Before she could pull the trigger some one fired,
and she fell across the body of her lover.  A moment afterwards Shorland
stood beside her.  She was shot through the lungs.

He stooped over her.  "Gabrielle, Gabrielle!" he said.  "Yes, yes,
I know--I saw you.  This is the twenty-fifth.  He will be married
to-morrow-Luke.  I owed it to him to die; I owed it to Henri to die this
way."  She drew the scarred portrait of Luke Freeman from her bosom and
gave it over.

"His eyes made me," she said.  "They haunted me.

"Well, it is all done.  I am sorry, ah!  Never tell him of this.  I go
away--away--with Henri."

She closed her eyes and was still for a moment; so still that he thought
her dead.  But she looked up at him again and said with her last breath:
"I am--the Woman in the Morgue--always--now!"




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

All is fair where all is foul
He borrowed no trouble






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "CUMNER'S SON AND OTHER FOLK":

All is fair where all is foul
Answered, with the indifference of despair
Ate some coffee-beans and drank some cold water
He borrowed no trouble
His courtesy was not on the same expansive level as his vanity
It isn't what they do, it's what they don't do
Mystery is dear to a woman's heart
Never looked to get an immense amount of happiness out of life
No, I'm not good--I'm only beautiful
Preserved a marked unconsciousness
Should not make our own personal experience a law unto the world
Surely she might weep a little for herself
There is nothing so tragic as the formal
Time when she should and when she should not be wooed
Undisciplined generosity
Where the light is darkness
Women don't go by evidence, but by their feelings
You have lost your illusions
You've got to be ready, that's all






WHEN VALMOND CAME TO PONTIAC, Complete

The Story of a Lost Napoleon

By Gilbert Parker




INTRODUCTION

In one sense this book stands by itself.  It is like nothing else I have
written, and if one should seek to give it the name of a class, it might
be called an historical fantasy.

It followed The Trail of the Sword and preceded The Seats of the Mighty,
and appeared in the summer of 1895.  The critics gave it a reception
which was extremely gratifying, because, as it seemed to me, they
realised what I was trying to do; and that is a great deal.  One great
journal said it read as though it had been written at a sitting; another
called it a tour de force, and the grave Athenaeum lauded it in a key
which was likely to make me nervous, since it seemed to set a standard
which I should find it hard to preserve in the future.  But in truth the
newspaper was right which said that the book read as though it was
written at a sitting, and that it was a tour de force.  The facts are
that the book was written, printed, revised, and ready for press in five
weeks.

The manuscript of the book was complete within four weeks.  It possessed
me.  I wrote night and day.  There were times when I went to bed and,
unable to sleep, I would get up at two o'clock or three o'clock in the
morning and write till breakfast time.  A couple of hours' walk after
breakfast, and I would write again until nearly two o'clock.  Then
luncheon; afterwards a couple of hours in the open air, and I would again
write till eight o'clock in the evening.  The world was shut out.  I
moved in a dream.  The book was begun at Hot Springs, in Virginia, in the
annex to the old Hot Springs Hotel.  I could not write in the hotel
itself, so I went to the annex, and in the big building--in the early
spring-time--I worked night and day.  There was no one else in the place
except the old negro caretaker and his wife.  Four-fifths of the book was
written in three weeks there.  Then I went to New York, and at the Lotus
Club, where I had a room, I finished it--but not quite.  There were a few
pages of the book to do when I went for my walk in Fifth Avenue one
afternoon.  I could not shake the thing off, the last pages demanded to
be written.  The sermon which the old Cure was preaching on Valmond's
death was running in my head.  I could not continue my walk.  Then and
there I stepped into the Windsor Hotel, which I was passing, and asked if
there was a stenographer at liberty.  There was.  In the stenographer's
office of the Windsor Hotel, with the life of a caravanserai buzzing
around me, I dictated the last few pages of When Valmond Came to Pontiac.
It was practically my only experience of dictation of fiction.  I had
never been able to do it, and have not been able to do it since, and
I am glad that it is so, for I should have a fear of being led into mere
rhetoric.  It did not, however, seem to matter with this book.  It wrote
itself anywhere.  The proofs of the first quarter of the book were in my
hands before I had finished writing the last quarter.

It took me a long time to recover from the great effort of that five
weeks, but I never regretted those consuming fires which burned up sleep
and energy and ravaged the vitality of my imagination.  The story was
founded on the incident described in the first pages of the book, which
was practically as I experienced it when I was a little child.  The
picture there drawn of Valmond was the memory of just such a man as stood
at the four corners in front of the little hotel and scattered his hot
pennies to the children of the village.  Also, my father used to tell me
as a child a story of Napoleon, whose history he knew as well as any man
living, and something of that story may be found in the fifth chapter of
the book where Valmond promotes Sergeant Lagroin from non-commissioned
rank, first to be captain, then to be colonel, and then to be general,
all in a moment, as it were.

I cannot tell the original story as my father told it to me here,
but it was the tale of how a sergeant in the Old Guard, having shared his
bivouac supper of roasted potatoes with the Emperor, was told by Napoleon
that he should sup with his Emperor when they returned to Versailles.
The old sergeant appeared at Versailles in course of time and demanded
admittance to the Emperor, saying that he had been asked to supper.  When
Napoleon was informed, he had the veteran shown in and, recognising his
comrade of the baked potatoes, said at once that the sergeant should sup
with him.  The sergeant's reply was: "Sire, how can a non-commissioned
officer dine with a general?"  It was then, Napoleon, delighted with the
humour and the boldness of his grenadier, summoned the Old Guard, and had
the sergeant promoted to the rank of captain on the spot.

It was these apparently incongruous things, together with legends that
I had heard and read of Napoleon, which gave me the idea of Valmond.
First, a sketch of about five thousand words was written, and it looked
as though I were going to publish it as a short story; but one day,
sitting in a drawing-room in front of a grand piano, on the back of which
were a series of miniatures of the noted women who had played their part
in Napoleon's life, the incident of the Countess of Carnstadt (I do not
use the real name) at St. Helena associated itself with the picture in my
memory of the philanthropist of the street corner.  Thereupon the whole
story of a son of Napoleon, ignorant of his own birth, but knowing that
a son had been born to Napoleon at St. Helena, flitted through my
imagination; and the story spread out before me all in an hour,
like an army with banners.

The next night--for this happened in New York--I went down to Hot
Springs, Virginia, and began a piece of work which enthralled me as I had
never before been enthralled, and as I have never been enthralled in the
same way since; for it was perilous to health and mental peace.

Fantasy as it is, the book has pictures of French-Canadian life which
are as true as though the story itself was all true.  Characters are in
it like Medallion, the little chemist, the avocat, Lajeunesse the
blacksmith, and Madeleinette, his daughter, which were in some of the
first sketches I ever wrote of French Canada, and subsequently appearing
in the novelette entitled The Lane That Had No Turning.  Indeed, 'When
Valmond Came to Pontiac', historical fantasy as it is, has elements both
of romance and realism.

Of all the books which I have written, perhaps because it cost me so
much, because it demanded so much of me at the time of its writing, I
care for it the most.  It was as good work as I could do.  This much may
at least be said: that no one has done anything quite in the same way or
used the same subject, or given it the same treatment.  Also it may be
said, as the Saturday Review remarked, that it contained one whole, new
idea, and that was the pathetic--unutterably pathetic--incident of a man
driven by the truth in his blood to impersonate himself.




              "Oh, withered is the garland of the war,
               The Soldier's pole is fallen."




WHEN VALMOND CAME TO PONTIAC


CHAPTER I

On one corner stood the house of Monsieur Garon the avocat; on another,
the shop of the Little Chemist; on another, the office of Medallion the
auctioneer; and on the last, the Hotel Louis Quinze.  The chief
characteristics of Monsieur Garon's house were its brass door-knobs,
and the verdant vines that climbed its sides; of the Little Chemist's
shop, the perfect whiteness of the building, the rolls of sober wall-
paper, and the bottles of coloured water in the shop windows; of
Medallion's, the stoop that surrounded three sides of the building,
and the notices of sales tacked up, pasted up, on the front; of the Hotel
Louis Quinze, the deep dormer windows, the solid timbers, and the veranda
that gave its front distinction--for this veranda had been the pride of
several generations of landlords, and its heavy carving and bulky grace
were worth even more admiration than Pontiac gave to it.

The square which the two roads and the four corners made was, on week-
days, the rendezvous of Pontiac, and the whole parish; on Sunday mornings
the rendezvous was shifted to the large church on the hill, beside which
was the house of the Cure, Monsieur Fabre.  Travelling towards the south,
out of the silken haze of a mid-summer day, you would come in time to the
hills of Maine; north, to the city of Quebec and the river St. Lawrence;
east, to the ocean; and west, to the Great Lakes and the land of the
English.  Over this bright province Britain raised her flag, but only
Medallion and a few others loved it for its own sake, or saluted it in
the English tongue.

In the drab velvety dust of these four corners, were gathered, one night
of July a generation ago, the children of the village and many of their
elders.  All the events of that epoch were dated from the evening of this
particular day.  Another day of note the parish cherished, but it was
merely a grave fulfilment of the first.

Upon the veranda-stoop of the Louis Quinze stood a man of apparently
about twenty-eight years of age.  When you came to study him closely,
some sense of time and experience in his look told you that he might be
thirty-eight, though his few grey hairs seemed but to emphasise a certain
youthfulness in him.  His eye was full, singularly clear, almost benign,
and yet at one moment it gave the impression of resolution, at another it
suggested the wayward abstraction of the dreamer.  He was well-figured,
with a hand of peculiar whiteness, suggesting in its breadth more the man
of action than of meditation.  But it was a contradiction; for, as you
saw it rise and fall, you were struck by its dramatic delicacy; as it
rested on the railing of the veranda, by its latent power.  You faced
incongruity everywhere.  His dress was bizarre, his face almost
classical, the brow clear and strong, the profile good to the mouth,
where there showed a combination of sensuousness and adventure.  Yet in
the face there was an illusive sadness, strangely out of keeping with the
long linen coat, frilled shirt, flowered waistcoat, lavender trousers,
boots of enamelled leather, and straw hat with white linen streamers.  It
was a whimsical picture.

At the moment that the Cure and Medallion the auctioneer came down the
street together towards the Louis Quinze, talking amiably, this singular
gentleman was throwing out hot pennies, with a large spoon, from a tray
in his hand, calling on the children to gather them, in French which was
not the French of Pontiac--or Quebec; and this refined accent the Cure
was quick to detect, as Monsieur Garon the avocat, standing on the
outskirts of the crowd, had done, some moments before.  The stranger
seemed only conscious of his act of liberality and the children before
him.  There was a naturalness in his enjoyment which was almost boylike;
a naive sort of exultation possessed him.

He laughed softly to see the children toss the pennies from hand to hand,
blowing to cool them; the riotous yet half-timorous scramble for them,
and burnt fingers thrust into hot, blithe mouths.  And when he saw a fat
little lad of five crowded out of the way by his elders, he stepped down
with a quick word of sympathy, put a half-dozen pennies in the child's
pocket, snatched him up and kissed him, and then returned to the stoop,
where were gathered the landlord, the miller, and Monsieur De la Riviere,
the young Seigneur.  But the most intent spectator of the scene was
Parpon the dwarf, who was grotesquely crouched upon the wide ledge of a
window.

Tray after tray of pennies was brought out and emptied, till at last the
stranger paused, handed the spoon to the landlord, drew out a fine white
handkerchief and dusted his fingers, standing silent for a moment and
smiling upon the crowd.

It was at this point that some young villager called, in profuse
compliment: "Three cheers for the Prince!"  The stranger threw an accent
of pose into his manner, his eye lighted, his chin came up, he dropped
one hand negligently on his hip, and waved the other in acknowledgment.
Presently he beckoned, and from the hotel were brought out four great
pitchers of wine and a dozen tin cups, and, sending the garcon around
with one, the landlord with another, he motioned Parpon the dwarf to bear
a hand.  Parpon shot out a quick, half-resentful look at him, but meeting
a warm, friendly eye, he took the pitcher and went round among the
elders, while the stranger himself courteously drank with the young men
of the village, who, like many wiser folk, thus yielded to the charm of
mystery.  To every one he said a hearty thing, and sometimes touched his
greeting off with a bit of poetry or a rhetorical phrase.  These dramatic
extravagances served him well, for he was among a race of story-tellers
and crude poets.

Parpon, uncouth and furtive, moved through the crowd, dispensing as much
irony as wine:

              "Three bucks we come to a pretty inn,
               'Hostess,' say we, 'have you red wine?'
                         Brave!  Brave!
               'Hostess,' say we, 'have you red wine?'
                         Bravement!
               Our feet are sore and our crops are dry,
                         Bravement!"

This he hummed to the avocat in a tone all silver, for he had that one
gift of Heaven as recompense for his deformity, his long arms, big head,
and short stature, a voice which gave you a shiver of delight and pain
all at once.  It had in it mystery and the incomprehensible.  This
drinking-song, hummed just above his breath, touched some antique memory
in Monsieur Garen the avocat, and he nodded kindly at the dwarf, though
he refused the wine.

"Ah, M'sieu' le Cure," said Parpon, ducking his head to avoid the hand
that Medallion would have laid on it, "we're going to be somebody now
in Pontiac, bless the Lord!  We're simple folk, but we're not neglected.
He wears a ribbon on his breast, M'sieu' le Cure!"

This was true.  Fastened by a gold bar to the stranger's breast was the
ribbon of an order.

The Cure smiled at Parpon's words, and looked curiously and gravely at
the stranger.  Tall Medallion the auctioneer took a glass of the wine,
and, lifting it, said: "Who shall I drink to, Parpon, my dear?  What is
he?"

"Ten to one, a dauphin or a fool," answered Parpon, with a laugh like the
note of an organ.  "Drink to both, Long-legs."  Then he trotted away to
the Little Chemist.

"Hush, my friend!" said he, and he drew the other's ear down to his
mouth.  "Now there'll be plenty of work for you.  We're going to be gay
in Pontiac.  We'll come to you with our spoiled stomachs."  He edged
round the circle, and back to where the miller his master and the young
Seigneur stood.

"Make more fine flour, old man," said he to the miller; "pates are the
thing now."  Then, to Monsieur De la Riviere: "There's nothing like hot
pennies and wine to make the world love you.  But it's too late, too late
for my young Seigneur!" he added in mockery, and again he began to hum
in a sort of amiable derision:

                   "My little tender heart,
                    O gai, vive le roi!
                    My little tender heart,
                    O gai, vive le roi!

                    'Tis for a grand baron,
                    Vive le roi, la reine!
                    'Tis for a grand baron,
                    Vive Napoleon!"

The words of the last two lines swelled out far louder than the dwarf
meant, for few save Medallion and Monsieur De la Riviere had ever heard
him sing.  His concert-house was the Rock of Red Pigeons, his favourite
haunt, his other home, where, it was said, he met the Little Good Folk of
the Scarlet Hills, and had gay hours with them.  And this was a matter of
awe to the timid habitants.

At the words, "Vive Napoleon!" a hand touched him on the shoulder.  He
turned and saw the stranger looking at him intently, his eyes alight.

"Sing it," he said softly, yet with an air of command.  Parpon hesitated,
shrank back.

"Sing it," he insisted, and the request was taken up by others, till
Parpon's face flushed with a sort of pleasurable defiance.  The stranger
stooped and whispered something in his ear.  There was a moment's pause,
in which the dwarf looked into the other's eyes with an intense
curiosity--or incredulity--and then Medallion lifted the little man on to
the railing of the veranda, and over the heads and into the hearts of the
people there passed, in a divine voice, a song known to many, yet coming
as a new revelation to them all:

                   "My mother promised it,
                    O gai, rive le roi!
                    My mother promised it,
                    O gai, vive le roi!

                    To a gentleman of the king,
                    Vive le roi, la reine!
                    To a gentleman of the king,
                    Vive Napoleon!"

This was chanted lightly, airily, with a sweetness almost absurd, coming
as it did from so uncouth a musician.  The last verses had a touch of
pathos, droll yet searching:

                   "Oh, say, where goes your love?
                    O gai, rive le roi!
                    Oh, say, where goes your love?
                    O gai, vive le roi!
                    He rides on a white horse,
                    Vive le roi, la reine!
                    He wears a silver sword,
                    Vive Napoleon!

                    "Oh, grand to the war he goes,
                    O gai, vive le roi!
                    Oh, grand to the war he goes,
                    O gai, vive le roi!
                    Gold and silver he will bring,
                    Vive le roi, la reine;
                    And eke the daughter of a king
                    Vive Napoleon!"
The crowd--women and men, youths and maidens--enthusiastically repeated
again and again the last lines and the refrain, "Vive le roi, la reine!
Vive Napoleon!"

Meanwhile the stranger stood, now looking at the singer with eager eyes,
now searching the faces of the people, keen to see the effect upon them.
His glance found the faces of the Cure, the avocat, and the auctioneer;
and his eyes steadied to Medallion's humorous look, to the Cure's puzzled
questioning, to the avocat's bird-like curiosity.  It was plain they were
not antagonistic (why should they be?); and he--was there any reason why
he should care whether or no they were for him or against him?

True, he had entered the village in the dead of night, with many packages
and much luggage, had roused the people at the Louis Quinze, the driver
who had brought him departing before daybreak gaily, because of the gifts
of gold given him above his wage.  True, this singular gentleman had
taken three rooms in the Louis Quinze, had paid the landlord in advance,
and had then gone to bed, leaving word that he was not to be waked till
three o'clock the next afternoon.  True, the landlord could not by any
hint or indirection discover from whence his midnight visitor came.  But
if a gentleman paid his way, and was generous and polite, and minded his
own business, wherefore should people busy themselves about him?  When he
appeared on the veranda of the inn with the hot pennies, not a half-dozen
people in the village had known aught of his presence in Pontiac.  The
children came first, to scorch their fingers and fill their pockets, and
after them the idle young men, and the habitants in general.

The stranger having warmly shaken Parpon by the hand and again whispered
in his ear, stepped forward.  The last light of the setting sun was
reflected from the red roof of the Little Chemist's shop upon the quaint
figure and eloquent face, which had in it something of the gentleman,
something of the comedian.  The alert Medallion himself did not realise
the touch of the comedian in him, till the white hand was waved
grandiloquently over the heads of the crowd.  Then something in the
gesture corresponded with something in the face, and the auctioneer had
a nut which he could not crack for many a day.  The voice was musical,--
as fine in speaking almost as the dwarf's in singing,--and the attention
of the children was caught by the rich, vibrating tones.  He addressed
himself to them.

"My children," he said, "my name is--Valmond!  We have begun well; let us
be better friends.  I have come from far off to be one of you, to stay
with you for awhile--who knows how long--how long?"  He placed a finger
meditatively on his lips, sending a sort of mystery into his look and
bearing.  "You are French, and so am I.  You are playing on the shores of
life, and so am I.  You are beginning to think and dream, and so am I.
We are only children till we begin to make our dreams our life.  So I am
one with you, for only now do I step from dream to action.  My children,
you shall be my brothers, and together we will sow the seed of action and
reap the grain; we will make a happy garden of flowers, and violets shall
bloom everywhere out of our dream--everywhere.  Violets, my children,
pluck the wild violets, and bring them to me, and I will give you silver
for them, and I will love you.  Never forget," he added, with a swelling
voice, "that you owe your first duty to your mothers, and afterwards to
your country, and to the spirit of France.  I see afar"--he looked
towards the setting sun, and stretched out his arm dramatically, yet
such was the eloquence of his voice and person that not even the young
Seigneur or Medallion smiled--"I see afar," he repeated, "the glory of
our dreams fulfilled; after toil and struggle and loss: and I call upon
you now to unfurl the white banner of justice and liberty and the
restoration."

The women who listened guessed little of what he meant by the fantastic
sermon; but they wiped their eyes in sympathy, and gathered their
children to them, and said, "Poor gentleman, poor gentleman!" and took
him instantly to their hearts.  The men were mystified, but wine and
rhetoric had fired them, and they cheered him--no one knew why.  The
Cure, as he turned to leave, with Monsieur Garon, shook his head in
bewilderment; but even he did not smile, for the man's eloquence had
impressed him; and more than once he looked back at the dispersing crowd
and the quaint figure posing on the veranda.  The avocat was thinking
deeply, and as, in the dusk, he left the Cure at his own door, all that
he ventured was: "Singular--a most singular person!"

"We shall see, we shall see," said the Cure abstractedly, and they said
good-night.

Medallion joined the Little Chemist in his shop door and watched the
habitants scatter, till only Parpon and the stranger were left, and these
two faced each other, and, without a word, passed into the hotel
together.

"H'm, h'm!" said Medallion into space, drumming the door-jamb with his
fingers; "which is it, my Parpon--a dauphin, or a fool?"

He and the Little Chemist talked long, their eyes upon the window
opposite, inside which Monsieur Valmond and Parpon were in conference.
Up the dusty street wandered fitfully the refrain:

                   "To a gentleman of the king,
                    Vive Napoleon!"

And once they dimly saw Monsieur Valmond come to the open window and
stretch out his hand, as if in greeting to the song and the singer.




CHAPTER II

This all happened on a Tuesday, and on Wednesday, and for several days,
Valmond went about making friends.  His pockets were always full of
pennies and silver pieces, and he gave them liberally to the children and
to the poor, though, indeed, there were few suffering poor in Pontiac.
All had food enough to keep them from misery, though often it got no
further than sour milk and bread, with a dash of sugar in it of Sundays,
and now and then a little pork and molasses.  As for homes, every man and
woman had a house of a kind, with its low, projecting roof and dormer
windows, according to the ability and prosperity of the owner.  These
houses were whitewashed, or painted white and red, and had double glass
in winter, after the same measure.  There was no question of warmth, for
in snow-time every house was banked up with earth above the foundations,
the cracks and intersections of windows and doors filled with cloth from
the village looms; and wood was for the chopping far and near.  Within
these air-tight cubes these simple folk baked and were happy, content if
now and then the housewife opened the one pane of glass which hung on a
hinge, or the slit in the sash, to let in the cold air.  As a rule, the
occasional opening of the outer door to admit some one sufficed, for out
rushed the hot blast, and in came the dry, frosty air to brace to their
tasks the cheerful story-teller and singer.

In summer the little fields were broken with wooden ploughs, followed by
the limb of a tree for harrow, and the sickle, the scythe, and the flail
to do their office in due course; and if the man were well-to-do, he
swung the cradle in his rye and wheat, rejoicing in the sweep of the
knife and the fulness of the swathe.  Then, too, there was the driving of
the rivers, when the young men ran the logs from the backwoods to the
great mills near and far: red-shirted, sashed, knee-booted, with rings in
their ears, and wide hats on their heads, and a song in their mouths,
breaking a jamb, or steering a crib, or raft, down the rapids.  And the
voyageur also, who brought furs out of the North down the great lakes,
came home again to Pontiac, singing in his patois:

                   "Nous avons passe le bois,
                    Nous somm's a la rive!"

Or, as he went forth:

                   "Le dieu du jour s'avance;
                    Amis, les vents sont doux;
                    Berces par l'esperance,
                    Partons, embarquons-noun.
                    A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a!"

And, as we know, it was summer when Valmond came to Pontiac.  The river-
drivers were just beginning to return, and by and by the flax swingeing
would begin in the little secluded valley by the river; and one would
see, near and far, the bright sickle flashing across the gold and green
area; and all the pleasant furniture of summer set forth in pride, by the
Mother of the House whom we call Nature.

Valmond was alive to it all, almost too alive, for at first the
flamboyancy of his spirit touched him off with melodrama.  Yet, on the
whole, he seemed at first more natural than involved or obscure.  His
love for children was real, his politeness to women spontaneous.  He was
seen to carry the load of old Madame Degardy up the hill, and place it
at her own door.  He also had offered her a pinch of snuff, which she
acknowledged by gravely offering a pinch of her own from a dirty twist
of brown paper.

One day he sprang over a fence, took from the hands of coquettish Elise
Malboir an axe, and split the knot which she in vain had tried to break.
Not satisfied with this, he piled full of wood the stone oven outside the
house, and carried water for her from the spring.  This came from natural
kindness, for he did not see the tempting look she gave him, nor the
invitation in her eye, as he turned to leave her.  He merely asked her
name.  But after he had gone, as though he had forgotten, or remembered,
something, he leaped the fence again, came up to her with an air of half-
abstraction, half-courtesy, took both her hands in his, and, before she
could recover herself, kissed her on the cheeks in a paternal sort of
way, saying, "Adieu, adieu, my child!" and left her.

The act had condescension in it; yet, too, something unconsciously simple
and primitive.  Parpon the dwarf, who that moment perched himself on the
fence, could not decide which Valmond was just then--dauphin or fool.
Valmond did not see the little man, but swung away down the dusty road,
reciting to himself couplets from 'Le Vieux Drapeau':

              "Oh, come, my flag, come, hope of mine,
               And thou shalt dry these fruitless tears;"

and apparently, without any connection, he passed complacently to an
entirely different song:

              "She loved to laugh, she loved to drink,
               I bought her jewels fine."

Then he added, with a suddenness which seemed to astound himself,--for
afterwards he looked round quickly, as if to see if he had been heard,--
"Elise Malboir--h'm! a pretty name, Elise; but Malboir--tush!  it should
be Malbarre; the difference between Lombardy cider and wine of the
Empire."

Parpon, left behind, sat on the fence with his legs drawn up to his chin,
looking at Elise, till she turned and caught the provoking light of his
eye.  She flushed, then was cool again, for she was put upon her mettle
by the suggestion of his glance.

"Come, lazy-bones," she said; "come fetch me currants from the garden."

"Come, mocking-bird," answered he; "come peck me on the cheek."

She tossed her head and struck straight home.  "It isn't a game of pass
it on from gentleman to beetle."

"You think he's a gentleman?" he asked.

"As sure as I think you're a beetle."

He laughed, took off his cap, and patted himself on the head.  "Parpon,
Parpon!" said he, "if Jean Malboir could see you now, he'd put his foot
on you and crush you--dirty beetle!"

At the mention of her father's name a change passed over Elise; for this
same Parpon, when all men else were afraid, had saved Jean Malboir's life
at a log chute in the hills.  When he died, Parpon was nearer to him than
the priest, and he loved to hear the dwarf chant his wild rhythms of the
Little Good Folk of the Scarlet Hills, more than to listen to holy
prayers.  Elise, who had a warm, impulsive nature, in keeping with her
black eyes and tossing hair, who was all fire and sun and heart and
temper, ran over and caught the dwarf round the neck, and kissed him on
the cheek, dashing the tears out of her eyes, as she said:

"I'm a cat, I'm a bad-tempered thing, Parpon; I hate myself."

He laughed, shook his shaggy head, and pushed her away the length of his
long, strong arms.  "Bosh!" said he; "you're a puss and no cat, and I
like you better for the claws.  If you hate yourself, you'll get a big
penance.  Hate the ugly like Parpon, not the pretty like you.  The one's
no sin, the other is."

She was beside the open door of the oven; and it would be hard to tell
whether her face was suffering from heat or from blushes.  However that
might chance, her mouth was soft and sweet, and her eyes were still wet.

"Who is he, Parpon?" she asked, not looking at him.

"Is he like Duclosse the mealman, or Lajeunesse the blacksmith, or
Garotte the lime-burner-and the rest?"

"Of course not," she answered.

"Is he like the Cure, or Monsieur De la Riviere, or Monsieur Garon, or
Monsieur Medallion?"

"He's different," she said hesitatingly.

"Better or worse?"

"More--more"--she did not know what to say--"more interesting."

"Is he like the Judge Honourable that comes from Montreal, or the grand
Governor, or the General that travels with the Governor?"

"Yes, but different--more--more like us in some things, like them in
others, and more--splendid.  He speaks such fine things!  You mind the
other night at the Louis Quinze.  He is like--"

She paused.  "What is he like?" Parpon asked slyly, enjoying her
difficulty.

"Ah, I know," she answered; "he is a little like Madame the American who
came two years ago.  There is something--something!"

Parpon laughed again.  "Like Madame Chalice from New York--fudge!"  Yet
he eyed her as if he admired her penetration.  "How?" he urged.

"I don't know--quite," she answered, a little pettishly.  "But I used to
see Madame go off in the woods, and she would sit hour by hour, and
listen to the waterfall, and talk to the birds, and at herself too; and
more than once I saw her shut her hands--like that!  You remember what
tiny hands she had?"  (She glanced at her own brown ones unconsciously.)
"And she spoke out, her eyes running with tears--and she all in pretty
silks, and a colour like a rose.  She spoke out like this: 'Oh, if I
could only do something, something, some big thing!  What is all this
silly coming and going to me, when I know, I know I might do it, if I had
the chance!  O Harry, Harry, can't you see!'"

"Harry was her husband.  Ah, what a fisherman was he!" said Parpon,
nodding.  "What did she mean by doing 'big things'?" he added.

"How do I know?" she asked fretfully.  "But Monsieur Valmond seems to me
like her, just the same."

"Monsieur Valmond is a great man," said Parpon slowly.

"You know!" she cried; "you know!  Oh, tell me, what is he?  Who is he?
Where does he come from?  Why is he here?  How long will he stay?  Tell
me, how long will se stay?"  She caught flutteringly at Parpon's
shoulder.  "You remember what I sang the other night?" he asked.

"Yes, yes," she answered quickly.  "Oh, how beautiful it was!  Ah,
Parpon, why don't you sing for us oftener, and all the world would love
you, and--"

"I don't love the world," he retorted gruffly; "and I'll sing for the
devil" (she crossed herself) "as soon as for silly gossips in Pontiac."

"Well, well!" she asked; "what had your song to do with him, with
Monsieur Valmond?"

"Think hard, my dear," he said, with mystery in his look.  Then, breaking
off: "Madame Chalice is coming back to-day; the Manor House is open, and
you should see how they fly round up there."  He nodded towards the hill
beyond.

"Pontiac'll be a fine place by and by," she said, for she had village
patriotism deep in her veins.  Had not her people lived there long before
the conquest by the English?

"But tell me, tell me what your song had to do with Monsieur," she urged
again.  "It's a pretty song, but--"

"Think about it," he answered provokingly.  "Adieu, my child!" he went
on mockingly, using Valmond's words, and catching both her hands as he
had done; then, springing upon a bench by the oven, he kissed her on both
cheeks.  "Adieu, my child!" he said again, and, jumping down, trotted
away out into the road.  Back to her, from the dust he made as he
shuffled away, there came the words:

                   "Gold and silver he will bring,
                    Vive le roi, la reine!
                    And eke the daughter of a king
                    Vive Napoleon!"

She went about her work, the song in her ears, and the words of the
refrain beat in and out, out and in:

"Vive Napoleon."  Her brow was troubled, and she perched her head on
this side and on that, as she tried to guess what the dwarf had meant.
At last she sat down on a bench at the door of her home, and the summer
afternoon spent its glories on her; for the sunflowers and the hollyhocks
were round her, and the warmth gave her face a shining health and
joyousness.  There she brooded till she heard the voice of her mother
calling across the meadow; then she got up with a sigh, and softly
repeated Parpon's words: "He is a great man!"

In the middle of that night she started up from a sound sleep, and, with
a little cry, whispered into the silence: "Napoleon--Napoleon!"

She was thinking of Valmond.  A revelation had come to her out of her
dreams.  But she laughed at it, and buried her face in her pillow and
went to sleep, hoping to dream again.




CHAPTER III

In less than one week Valmond was as outstanding from Pontiac as
Dalgrothe Mountain, just beyond it in the south.  His liberality, his
jocundity, his occasional abstraction, his meditative pose, were all his
own; his humour that of the people.  He was too quick in repartee and
drollery for a bourgeois, too "near to the bone" in point for an
aristocrat, with his touch of the comedian and the peasant also.
Besides, he was mysterious and picturesque, and this is alluring to
women and to the humble, if not to all the world.  It might be his was
the comedian's fascination, but the flashes of grotesqueness rather
pleased the eye than hurt the taste of Pontiac.

Only in one quarter was there hesitation, added to an anxiety almost
painful; for to doubt Monsieur Valmond would have shocked the sense of
courtesy so dear to Monsieur the Cure, Monsieur Garon, the Little
Chemist, and even Medallion the auctioneer, who had taken into his bluff,
odd nature something of the spirit of those old-fashioned gentlemen.
Monsieur De la Riviere, the young Seigneur, had to be reckoned with
independently.

It was their custom to meet once a week, at the house of one or another,
for a "causerie," as the avocat called it.  On the Friday evening of this
particular week, all were seated in the front garden of the Cure's house,
as Valmond came over the hill, going towards the Louis Quinze.  His step
was light, his head laid slightly to one side, as if in pleased and
inquiring reverie, and there was a lifting of one corner of the mouth,
suggesting an amused disdain.  Was it that disdain which comes from
conquest not important enough to satisfy ambition?  The social conquest
of a village--to be conspicuous and attract the groundlings in this tiny
theatre of life, that seemed little!

Valmond appeared not to see the little coterie, but presently turned,
when just opposite the gate, and, raising his hat, half paused.  Then,
without more ado, he opened the gate and advanced to the outstretched
hand of the Cure, who greeted him with a courtly affability.  He shook
hands with, and nodded good-humouredly at, Medallion and the Little
Chemist, bowed to the avocat, and touched off his greeting to Monsieur De
la Riviere with deliberation, not offering his hand--this very reserve a
sign of equality not lost on the young Seigneur.  He had not this
stranger at any particular advantage, as he had wished, he knew scarcely
why.  Valmond took the seat offered him beside the Cure, who remarked
presently:

"My dear friend, Monsieur Garon, was saying just now that the spirit of
France has ever been the Captain of Freedom among the nations."

Valmond glanced quickly from the Cure to the others, a swift, inquisitive
look, then settled back in his chair, and turned, bowing, towards
Monsieur Garon.  The avocat's pale face flushed, his long, thin fingers
twined round each other and untwined, and presently he said, in his
little chirping voice, so quaint as to be almost unreal:

"I was saying that the spirit of France lived always ahead of the time,
was ever first to conceive the feeling of the coming century, and by its
own struggles and sufferings--sometimes too abrupt and perilous--made
easy the way for the rest of the world."

During these words a change passed over Valmond.  His restless body
became still, his mobile face steady and almost set--all the life of him
seemed to have burnt into his eyes; but he answered nothing, and the
Cure, in the pause, was constrained to say:

"Our dear Monsieur Garon knows perfectly the history of France, and is
devoted to the study of the Napoleonic times and of the Great Revolution
--alas for our people and the saints of Holy Church who perished then!"

The avocat lifted a hand in mute disacknowledgment.  Again there was a
silence, and out of the pause Monsieur De la Riviere's voice was heard.

"Monsieur Valmond, how fares this spirit of France now--you come from
France?"

There was a shadow of condescension and ulterior meaning in De la
Riviere's voice, for he had caught the tricks of the poseur in this
singular gentleman.

Valmond did not stir, but looked steadily at De la Riviere, and said
slowly, dramatically, yet with a strange genuineness also:

"The spirit of France, monsieur, the spirit of France looks not forward
only, but backward, for her inspiration.  It is as ready for action now
as when the old order was dragged from Versailles to Paris, and in Paris
to the guillotine, when France got a principle and waited, waited--"

He did not finish his sentence, but threw back his head with a sort of
reflective laugh.

"Waited for what?" asked the young Seigneur, trying to conquer his
dislike.

"For the Man!" came the quick reply.

The avocat rubbed his hands in pleasure.  He instantly divined one who
knew his subject, though he talked this melodramatically: a thing not
uncommon among the habitants and the professional story-tellers, but
scarcely the way of the coterie.

"Ah, yes, yes," he said, "for--?  monsieur, for--?"  He paused, as if to
give himself the delight of hearing their visitor speak.

"For Napoleon," was the abrupt reply.

"Ah, yes, dear Lord, yes--a Napoleon--of--of the Empire.  France can only
cherish an idea when a man is behind it, when a man lives it, embodies
it.  She must have heroes.  She is a poet, a poet--and an actress."

"So said the Man, Napoleon," cried Valmond, getting to his feet.  "He
said that to Barras, to Remusat, to Josephine, to Lucien, to--to another,
when France had for the moment lost her idea--and her man."

The avocat trembled to his feet to meet Valmond, who stood up as he
spoke, his face shining with enthusiasm, a hand raised in broad dramatic
gesture, a dignity come upon him, in contrast to the figure which had
disported itself through the village during the past week.  The avocat
had found a man after his own heart.  He knew that Valmond understood
whereof he spoke.  It was as if an artist saw a young genius use a brush
on canvas for a moment; a swordsman watch an unknown master of the sword.
It was not so much the immediate act, as the divination, the rapport, the
spirit behind the act, which could only come from the soul of the real
thing.

"I thank you, monsieur; I thank you with all my heart," the avocat said.
"It is the true word you have spoken."

Here a lad came running to fetch the Little Chemist, and Medallion and he
departed, but not without the auctioneer having pressed Valmond's hand
warmly, for he was quick of emotion, and, like the avocat, he recognised,
as he thought, the true word behind the dramatic trappings.

Monsieur Garon and Valmond talked on, eager, responsive, Valmond lost in
the discussion of Napoleon, Garon in the man before him.  By pregnant
allusions, by a map drawn hastily on the ground here, and an explosion of
secret history there, did Valmond win to a sort of worship this fine
little Napoleonic scholar, who had devoured every book on his hero which
had come in his way since boyhood.  Student as he was, he had met a man
whose knowledge of the Napoleonic life was vastly more intricate,
searching and vital than his own.  He, Monsieur Garon, spoke as from a
book or out of a library, but this man as from the Invalides, or, since
that is anachronistic, from the lonely rock of St. Helena.  A private
saying of Napoleon's, a word from his letters and biography, a phrase out
of his speeches to his soldiers, sent tears to the avocat's eyes, and for
a moment transformed Valmond.

While they talked, the Cure and the young Seigneur listened, and there
passed into their minds the same wonder that had perplexed Elise Malboir;
so that they were troubled, as was she, each after his own manner and
temperament.  Their reasoning, their feelings were different, but they
were coming to the point the girl had reached when she cried into the
darkness of the night, "Napoleon--Napoleon!"

They sat forgetful of the passing of time, the Cure preening with
pleasure because of Valmond's remarks upon the Church when quoting the
First Napoleon's praise of religion.

Suddenly a carriage came dashing up the hill, with four horses and a
postilion.  The avocat was in the house searching for a book.  De la
Riviere, seeing the carriage first, got to his feet with instant
excitement, and the others turned to look.  As it neared the house, the
Cure took off his baretta, and smiled expectantly, a little red spot
burning on both cheeks.  These deepened as the carriage stopped, and a
lady, a little lady like a golden flower, with sunny eyes and face--how
did she keep so fresh in their dusty roads?--stood up impulsively, and
before any one could reach the gate was entering herself, her blue eyes
swimming with the warmth of a kind heart--or a warm temperament, which
may exist without a kind heart.

Was it the heart, or the temperament, or both, that sent her forward with
hands outstretched, saying: "Ah, my dear, dear Cure, how glad I am to see
you once again!  It is two years too long, dear Cure."

She held his hand in both of hers, and looked up into his eyes with a
smile at once child-like and naive--and masterful; for behind the
simplicity and the girlish manner there was a power, a mind, with which
this sweet golden hair and cheeks like a rose-garden had nothing to do.
The Cure, beaming, touched by her warmth, and by her tiny caressing
fingers, stooped and kissed them both like an old courtier.  He had come
of a good family in France long ago, very long ago,--and even in this
French-Canadian village; where he had taught and served and lingered
forty years, he had kept the graces of his youth, and this beautiful
woman drew them all out.  Since his arrival in Pontiac, he had never
kissed a woman's hand--women had kissed his; and this woman was a
Protestant, like Medallion!

Turning from the Cure, she held out a hand to the young Seigneur with a
little casual air, as if she had but seen him yesterday, and said:
"Monsieur De la Riviere--what, still buried?--and the world waiting for
the great touch!  But we in Pontiac gain what the world loses."

She turned to the Cure again, and said, placing a hand upon his arm:

"I could not pass without stepping in upon my dear old friend, even
though soiled and unpresentable.  But you forgive that, don't you?"

"Madame is always welcome, and always unspotted of the dusty world," he
answered gallantly.

She caught his fingers in hers as might a child, turned full upon
Valmond, and waited.  The Cure instantly presented Valmond to her.  She
looked at him brightly, alluringly, apparently so simply; yet her first
act showed the perception behind that rosy and golden face, and the
demure eyes whose lids languished now and then--to the unknowing with an
air of coquetry, to the knowing--did any know her?--as one would shade
one's eyes to see a landscape clearly, or make out a distant figure.  As
Valmond bowed, a thought seemed to fetch down the pink eyelids, and she
stretched out her hand, which he took and kissed, while she said in
English, though they had been talking in French:

"A traveller too, like myself, Monsieur Valmond?  But Pontiac--why
Pontiac?"

A furtive, inquiring look shot from the eyes of the young Seigneur, a
puzzled glance from the Cure's, as they watched Valmond; for they did not
know that he had knowledge of English; he had not spoken it to Medallion,
who had sent into his talk several English words.  How did this woman
divine it?

A strange suspicion flashed into Valmond's face, but it was gone on the
instant, and he replied quickly:

"Yes, madame, a traveller; and for Pontiac--there is as much earth and
sky about Pontiac as about Paris or London or New York."

"But people count, Monsieur-Valmond."

She hesitated before the name, as if trying to remember, though she
recalled perfectly.  It was her tiny fashion to pique, to appear
unknowing.

"Truly, Madame Chalice," he answered instantly, for he did not yield to
the temptation to pause before her name; "but sometimes the few are as
important to us as the many--eh?"

She almost started at the eh, for it broke in grimly upon the gentlemanly
flavour of his speech.

"If my reasons for coming were only as good as madame's--" he added.

"Who knows!" she said, with her eyes resting idly on his flowered
waistcoat, and dropping to the incongruous enamelled knee-boots with
their red tassels.  She turned to the Cure again, but not till Valmond
had added:

"Or the same--who knows?"

Again she looked at him with drooping eyelids and a slight smile so full
of acid possibilities that De la Riviere drew in a sibilant breath of
delight.  Her movement had been as towards an impertinence; but as she
caught Valmond's eye, something in it, so really boylike, earnest, and
free from insolence, met hers, that, with a little way she had, she laid
back her head slowly, her lips parted in a sweet, ambiguous smile, her
eyes dwelt on him with a humorous interest, or flash of purpose, and she
said softly:

"Nobody knows--eh?"

She could not resist the delicate malice of the exclamation, she imitated
the gaucherie so delightfully.

Valmond did not fail to see her meaning, but he was too wise to show it.

He hardly knew how it was he had answered her unhesitatingly in English,
for it had been his purpose to avoid speaking English in Pontiac.

Presently Madame Chalice caught sight of Monsieur Garon coming from the
house.  When he saw her, he stopped short in delighted surprise.
Gathering up her skirts, she ran to him, put both hands on his shoulders,
kissed him on the cheek, and said:

"Monsieur Garon, Monsieur Garon, my good avocat, my Solon!  are the
coffee, and the history, and the blest madeira still chez-toi?"

There was no jealousy in the Cure; he smiled at the scene with great
benevolence, for he was as a brother to Monsieur Garon.  If he had any
good thing, it was his first wish to share it with him; even to taking
him miles away to some simple home where a happy thing had come to poor
folk--the return of a prodigal son, a daughter's fortunate marriage, or
the birth of a child to childless people; and there together they
exchanged pinches of snuff over the event, and made compliments from the
same mould, nor desired difference of pattern.  To the pretty lady's
words, Monsieur Garon blushed, and his thin hand fluttered to his lips.
As if in sympathy, the Cure's fingers trembled to his cassock cord.
"Madame, dear madame,"--the Cure approved by a caressing nod," we are all
the same here in our hearts and in our homes, and if anything seem good
in them to us, it is because you are pleased.  You bring sunshine and
relish to our lives, dear madame."

The Cure beamed.  This was after his own heart and he had ever said that
his dear avocat would have been a brilliant orator, were it not for his
retiring spirit.

For himself, he was no speaker at all; he could only do his duty and love
his people.  So he had declared over and over again, and the look in his
eyes said the same now.

Madame's eyes were shining with tears.  This admiration of her was too
real to be doubted.

"And yet--and yet"--she said, with a hand in the Cure's and the avocat's,
drawing them near her--"a heretic, a heretic, my dear friends!  How
should I stand in your hearts if I were only of your faith?  Or is it so
that you yearn over the lost sheep, more than over the ninety and nine of
the fold?"

There was a real moisture in her eyes, and in her own heart she wondered,
this fresh and venturing spirit, if she cared for them as they seemed to
care for her--for she felt she had an inherent strain of the actress
temperament, while these honest provincials were wholly real.

But if she made them happy by her gaiety, what matter!  The tears dried,
and she flashed a malicious look at the young Seigneur, as though to say:
"You had your chance, and you made nothing of it, and these simple
gentlemen have done the gracious thing."

Perhaps it was a liberal interpretation of his creed which prompted the
Cure to add with a quaint smile:

"'Thou art not far from the Kingdom,' my daughter."

The avocat, who had no vanity, hastened to add to his former remarks, as
if he had been guilty of an oversight:

"Dear madame, you have flattered my poor gleanings in history; I am happy
to tell you that there is here another and a better pilot in that sea.
It is Monsieur Valmond," he added, his voice chirruping in his pleasure.
"For Napoleon--"

"Ah, Napoleon--yes, Napoleon?" she said, turning to Valmond, with a look
half of interest, half of incredulity.

"--For Napoleon is, through him, a revelation," the avocat went on.  "He
fills in the vague spaces, clears up mysteries of incident, and gives,
instead, mystery of character."

"Indeed," she added, still incredulous, but interested in this bizarre
figure who had so worked upon her old friend, interested because she had
a keen scent for mystery, and instinctively felt it here before her.
Like De la Riviere, she perceived a strange combination of the gentleman
and--something else; but, unlike him, she saw also a light in the face
and eyes that might be genius, poetry, adventure.  For the incongruities,
what did they matter to her?  She wished to probe life, to live it, to
race the whole gamut of inquiry, experiences, follies, loves, and
sacrifices, to squeeze the orange dry, and then to die while yet young,
having gone the full compass, the needle pointing home.  She was as broad
as sumptuous in her nature; so what did a gaucherie matter? or a dash of
the Oriental in a citizen of the Occident?

"Then we must set the centuries right, and so on--if you will come to see
me when I am settled at the Manor," she added, with soft raillery, to
Valmond.  He bowed, expressed his pleasure a little oracularly, and was
about to say something else, but she turned deftly to De la Riviere, with
a sweetness which made up for her previous irony to him, and said:

"You, my kind Seigneur, will come to breakfast with me one day?  My
husband will be here soon.  When you see our flag flying, you will find
the table always laid for four."

Then to the Cure and the avocat: "You shall visit me whenever you will,
and you are to wait for nothing, or I shall come to fetch you.  Voila!
I am so glad to see you.  And now, dear Cure, will you take me to my
carriage?"

Soon there was a surf of dust rising behind the carriage, hiding her; but
four men, left behind in the little garden, stood watching, as if they
expected to see a vision in rose and gold rise from it; and each was
smiling unconsciously.




CHAPTER IV

Since Friday night the good Cure, in his calm, philosophical way, had
brooded much over the talk in the garden upon France, the Revolution, and
Napoleon.  As a rule, his sermons were commonplace almost to a classical
simplicity, but there were times when, moved by some new theme, he talked
to the villagers as if they, like himself, were learned and wise.  He
thought of his old life in France, of two Napoleons that he had seen, and
of the time when, at Neuilly, a famous general burst into his father's
house, and, with streaming tears, cried:

"He is dead--he is dead--at St. Helena--Napoleon!  Oh, Napoleon!"

A chapter from Isaiah came to the Cure's mind.  He brought out his Bible
from the house, and, walking up and down, read aloud certain passages.
They kept singing in his ears all day

     He will surely violently turn and toss thee like a ball into a large
     country: there shalt thou die, and there the chariots of thy glory
     shall be the shame of thy lord's house.  .  .  .

     And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will call my servant
     Eliakim the son of Hilkiah

     And I will clothe him with thy robe, and strengthen him with thy
     girdle, and I will commit thy government into his hand.  .  .  .
     And I will fasten him as a nail in a sure place; and he shall be for
     a glorious throne to his father's house.

     And they shall hang upon him all the glory of his father's house,
     the offspring and the issue.  .  .  .

He looked very benign as he quoted these verses in the pulpit on Sunday
morning, with a half smile, as of pleased meditation.  He was lost to the
people before him, and when he began to speak, it was as in soliloquy.
He was talking to a vague audience, into that space where a man's eyes
look when he is searching his own mind, discovering it to himself.  The
instability of earthly power, the putting down of the great, their exile
and chastening, and their restoration in their own persons, or in the
persons of their descendants--this was his subject.  He brought the
application down to their own rude, simple life, then returned with
it to a higher plane.

At last, as if the memories of France, "beloved and incomparable,"
overcame him, he dwelt upon the bitter glory of the Revolution.  Then,
with a sudden flush, he spoke of Napoleon.  At that name the church
became still, and the dullest habitant listened intently.  Napoleon was
in the air--a curious sequence to the song that was sung on the night of
Valmond's arrival, when a phrase was put in the mouths of the parish,
which gave birth to a personal reality.  "Vive Napoleon!" had been on
every lip this week, and it was an easy step from a phrase to a man.

The Cure spoke with pensive dignity of Napoleon's past career, his work
for France, his too proud ambition, behind which was his great love of
country; and how, for chastening, God turned upon him violently and
tossed him like a ball into the wide land of exile, from which he came
out no more.

"But," continued the calm voice, "his spirit, stripped of the rubbish of
this quarrelsome world, and freed from the spite of foes, comes out from
exile and lives in our France to-day--for she is still ours, though we
find peace and bread to eat, under another flag.  And in these troubled
times, when France needs a man, even as a barren woman a child to be the
token of her womanhood, it may be that one sprung from the loins of the
Great Napoleon may again give life to the principle which some have
sought to make into a legend.  Even as the deliverer came out of obscure
Corsica, so from some outpost of France, where the old watchwords still
are called, may rise another Napoleon, whose mission will be civic glory
and peace alone, the champion of the spirit of France, defending it
against the unjust.  He shall be fastened as a nail in a sure place, as a
glorious throne to his father's house."

He leaned over the pulpit, and, pausing, looked down at his congregation.
Then, all at once, he was aware that he had created a profound
impression.  Just in front of him, his eyes burning with a strange fire,
sat Monsieur Valmond.  Parpon, beside him, hung over the back of a seat,
his long arms stretched out, his hands applauding in a soundless way.
Beneath the sword of Louis the Martyr, the great treasure of the parish,
presented to this church by Marie Antoinette, sat Monsieur Garon, his
thin fingers pressed to his mouth as if to stop a sound.  Presently, out
of pure spontaneity, there ran through the church like a soft chorus:

                   "O, say, where goes your love?
                    O gai, vive le roi!
                    He wears a silver sword,
                    Vive Napoleon!"

The thing was unprecedented.  Who had started it?  Afterwards some said
it was Parpon, the now chosen comrade--or servant--of Valmond, who,
people said, had given himself up to the stranger, body and soul; but no
one could swear to that.  Shocked, and taken out of his dream, the Cure
raised his hand against the song.  "Hush, hush, my children!" he said.
"Hush, I command you!"

It was the sight of the upraised hands, more than the Cure's voice, which
stilled the outburst.  Those same hands had sprinkled the holy water in
the sacrament of baptism, had blessed man and maid at the altar, had
quieted the angry arm lifted to strike, had anointed the brow of the
dying, and laid a crucifix on breasts which had ceased to harbour breath
and care and love, and all things else.

Silence fell.  In another moment the Cure finished his sermon, but not
till his eyes had again met those of Valmond, and there had passed into
his mind a sudden, startling thought.

Unconsciously the Cure had declared himself the patron of all that made
Pontiac for ever a notable spot in the eyes of three nations: and if he
repented of it, no man ever knew.

During mass and the sermon Valmond had sat very still, once or twice
smiling curiously at thought of how, inactive himself, the gate of
destiny was being opened up for him.  Yet he had not been all inactive.
He had paid much attention to his toilet, selecting, with purpose, the
white waistcoat, the long, blue-grey coat cut in a fashion anterior to
this time by thirty years or more, and particularly to the arrangement of
his hair.  He resembled Napoleon--not the later Napoleon, but the
Bonaparte, lean, shy, laconic, who fought at Marengo; and this had
startled the Cure in his pulpit, and the rest of the little coterie.

But Madame Chalice, sitting not far from Elise Malboir, had seen the
resemblance in the Cure's garden on Friday evening; and though she had
laughed at it, for, indeed, the matter seemed ludicrous enough at first,
--the impression had remained.  She was no Catholic, she did not as a
rule care for religious services; but there was interest in the air, she
was restless, the morning was inviting, she was reverent of all true
expression of life and feeling, though a sad mocker in much; and so she
had come to the little church.

Following Elise's intent look, she read with amusement the girl's budding
romance, and was then suddenly arrested by the head of Valmond, now half
turned towards her.  It had, indeed, a look of the First Napoleon.  Was
it the hair?  Yes, it must be; but the head was not so square, so firm
set; and what a world of difference in the grand effect!  The one had
been distant, splendid, brooding (so she glorified him); the other was an
impressionist imitation, with dash, form, poetry, and colour.  But where
was the great strength?  It was lacking.  The close association of Parpon
and Valmond--that was droll; yet, too, it had a sort of fitness, she knew
scarcely why.  However, Monsieur was not a fool, in the vulgar sense, for
he had made a friend of a little creature who could be a wasp or a
humming-bird, as he pleased.  Then, too, this stranger had conquered her
dear avocat; had won the hearts of the mothers and daughters--her own
servants talked of no one else; had captured this pretty Elise Malboir;
had caused the young men to imitate his walk and retail his sayings;
had won from herself an invitation to visit her; and now had made an
unconscious herald and champion of an innocent old Cure, and set a whole
congregation singing "Vive Napoleon" after mass.

Napoleon?  She threw back her pretty head, laughed softly, and fanned
herself.  Napoleon?  Why, of course there could be no real connection;
the man was an impostor, a base impostor, playing upon the credulities
of a secluded village.  Absurd--and interesting!  So interesting, she did
not resent the attention given to Valmond, to the exclusion of herself;
though to speak truly, her vanity desired not admiration more than is
inherent in the race of women.

Yet she was very dainty this morning, good to look at, and refreshing,
with everything in flower-like accord; simple in general effect, yet with
touches of the dramatic here and there--in the little black patch on the
delicate health of her cheek, in the seductive arrangements of her laces.
She loved dress, all the vanities, but she had something above it all--an
imaginative mind, certain of whose faculties had been sharpened to a fine
edge of cleverness and wit.  For she was but twenty-three; with the logic
of a woman of fifty, without its setness and lack of elasticity.  She
went straight for the hearts of things, while yet she glittered upon the
surface.  This was why Valmond interested her--not as a man, a physical
personality, but as a mystery to be probed, discovered.  Sentiment?
Coquetry?  Not with him.  That for less interesting men, she said to
herself.  Why should a point or two of dress and manners affect her
unpleasantly?  She ought to be just, to remember that there was a touch
of the fantastic, of the barbaric, in all genius.

Was he a genius?  For an instant she almost thought he was, when she saw
the people make way for him to pass out of the church, as though he were
a great personage, Parpon trotting behind him.  He carried himself with
true appreciation of the incident, acknowledging more by look than by
sign this courtesy.

"Upon my word," she said, "he has them in his pocket."  Then,
unconsciously plagiarising Parpon: "Prince or barber--a toss-up!"

Outside, many had gathered round Medallion.  The auctioneer, who liked
the unique thing and was not without tact, having the gift of humour,
took on himself the office of inquisitor, even as there rose again little
snatches of "Vive Napoleon" from the crowd.  He approached Valmond, who
was moving on towards the Louis Quinze, with appreciation of a time for
disappearing.

"We know you, sir," said Medallion, "as Monsieur Valmond; but there are
those who think you would let us address you by a name better known--
indeed, the name dear to all Frenchmen.  If it be so, will you not let us
call you Napoleon" (he took off his hat, and Valmond did the same), "and
will you tell us what we may do for you?"

Madame Chalice, a little way off, watched Valmond closely.  He stood a
moment in a quandary, yet he was not outwardly nervous, and he answered
presently, with an air of empressement:

"Monsieur, my friends, I am in the hands of fate.  I am dumb.  Fate
speaks for me.  But we shall know each other better; and I trust you,
who, as Frenchmen, descended from a better day in France, will not betray
me.  Let us be patient till Destiny strikes the hour."  Now for the first
time to-day Valmond saw Madame Chalice.

She could have done no better thing to serve him than to hold out her
hand, and say in her clear tones, which had, too, a fascinating sort of
monotony:

"Monsieur, if you are idle Friday afternoon, perhaps you will bestow on
me a half-hour at the Manor; and I will try to make half mine no bad
one."

He was keen enough to feel the delicacy of the point through the deftness
of the phrase; and what he said and what he did now had no pose, but
sheer gratitude.  With a few gracious words to Medallion, she bowed and
drove away, leaving Valmond in the midst of an admiring crowd.

He was launched on an adventure as whimsical as tragical, if he was an
impostor; and if he was not, as pathetic as droll.  He was scarcely
conscious that Parpon walked beside him, till the dwarf said:

"Hold on, my dauphin, you walk too fast for your poor fool."




CHAPTER V

From this hour Valmond was carried on by a wave of fortune.  Before
vespers on that Sunday night, it was common talk that he was a true son
of the Great Napoleon, born at St. Helena.

Why did he come to Pontiac?  He wished to be in retirement till his
friends, acting for him in France, gave him the signal, and then with a
small army of French-Canadians he would land in France.  Thousands would
gather round his standard, and so marching on to Paris, the Napoleonic
faith would be revived, and he would come into his own.  It is possible
that these stories might have been traced to Parpon, but he had covered
up his trail so well that no one followed him.

On that Sunday night, young men and old flocked into Valmond's chambers
at the Louis Quinze, shook hands with him, addressing him as "Your
Excellency" or "Your Highness."  He maintained towards them a mysterious
yet kindly reserve, singularly effective.  They inspected the martial
furnishing of the room: the drum, the pair of rifles, the pistols, in the
corner, the sabres crossed on the wall, the gold-handled sword that lay
upon the table, and the picture of Napoleon on a white horse against the
wall.  Tobacco and wine were set upon a side table, and every man as he
passed out took a glass of wine and enough tobacco for his pipe, and
said: "Of grace, your health, monseigneur!"

There were those who scoffed, who from natural habit disbelieved, and
nodded knowingly, and whispered in each other's ears; but these were in
the minority; and all the women and children declared for this new "Man
of Destiny."  And when some foolish body asked him for a lock of his
hair, and old Madame Degardy (crazy Joan, as she was called) followed,
offering him a pinch of snuff, and a lad appeared with a bunch of violets
from Madame Chalice, the dissentients were cast in shadow, and had no
longer courage to doubt.

Madame Chalice had been merely whimsical in sending these violets, which
her gardener had brought her that very morning.

"It will help along the pretty farce," she had said to herself; and then
she sat her down to read Napoleon's letters to Josephine, and to wonder
that a woman could have been faithless and vile with such a man.  Her
blood raced indignantly in her veins as she thought of it.  She admired
intellect, supremacy, the gifts of temperament, deeds of war and
adventure beyond all.  As yet her brain was stronger than her feelings;
there had been no breakers of emotion in her life.  A wife, she had no
child; the mother in her was spent upon her husband, whose devotion,
honour, name, and goodness were dear to her.  Yet--yet she had a world of
her own; and reading Napoleon's impassioned letters to his wife, written
with how great homage! in the flow of the tide washing to famous battle-
fields, an exultation of ambition inspired her, and the genius of her
distinguished ancestors set her heart beating hard.  Presently, her face
alive with feeling, a furnace in her eyes, she repeated a paragraph from
Napoleon's letters to Josephine:

     The enemy have lost, my dearest, eighteen thousand men, prisoners,
     killed, and wounded.  Wurmzer has nothing left but to throw himself
     into Mantua.  I hope soon to be in your arms.  I love you to
     distraction.  All is well.  Nothing is wanting to your husband's
     happiness, save the love of Josephine.

She sprang to her feet.  "And she, wife of a hero, was in common intrigue
with Hippolyte Charles at the time!  She had a conqueror, a splendid
adventurer, and coming emperor, for a husband, and she loved him not.
I--I could have knelt to him--worshipped him.  I"--With a little
hysterical, disdainful laugh, as of the soul at itself, she leaned upon
the window, looking into the village below, alternately smiling and
frowning at the thought of this adventurer down at the Louis Quinze.
"Yet, who can tell?  Disraeli was half mountebank at the start," she
said.  "Napoleon dressed infamously, too, before he was successful."
But again she laughed, as at an absurdity.

During the next few days Valmond was everywhere--kind, liberal, quaint,
tireless, at times melancholy; "in the distant perspective of the stage,"
as Monsieur De la Riviere remarked mockingly.  But a passing member of
the legislature met and was conquered by Valmond, and carried on to
neighbouring parishes the wondrous tale.

He carried it through Ville Bambord, fifty miles away; and the story of
how a Napoleon had come to Pontiac reached the ears of old Sergeant
Eustache Lagroin of the Old Guard, who had fought with the Great Emperor
at Waterloo, and in his army on twenty other battle-fields.  He had been
at Fontainebleau when Napoleon bade farewell to the Old Guard, saying:
"For twenty years I have ever found you in the path of honour and glory.
Adieu, my children!  I would I were able to press you all to my heart--
but I will at least press your eagle.  I go to record the great deeds we
have done together."

When the gossip came to Lagroin, as he sat in his doorway, babbling of
Grouchy and Lannes and Davoust, the Little Corporal outflanking them all
in his praise, his dim blue eyes flared out from the distant sky of youth
and memory, his lips pursed in anger, and he got to his feet, his stick
fiercely pounding the ground.

"Tut! tut!" said he.  "A lie! a pretty lie!  I knew all the Napoleons--
Joseph, Lucien, Louis, Jerome, Caroline, Eliza, Pauline--all!  I have
seen them every one.  And their children--pah!  Who can deceive me?  I
will go to Pontiac, I will see to this tomfoolery.  I'll bring the rascal
to the drumhead.  Does he think there is no one?  Pish!  I will spit
him at the first stroke.  Here, here, Manette," he cried to his grand-
daughter; "fetch out my uniform, give it an airing, and see to the
buttons.  I will show this brag how one of the Old Guard looked at
Saint Jean.  Quick, Manette, my sabre polish; I'll clean my musket,
and to-morrow I will go to Pontiac.  I'll put the scamp through his
facings--but yes!  I am eighty, but I have an arm of thirty."  True to
his word, the next morning at daybreak he started to walk to Pontiac,
accompanied for a mile or so by Manette and a few of the villagers.

"See you, my child," he said, "I will stay with my niece, Desire Malboir,
and her daughter Elise, there in Pontiac.  You shall hear how I fetch
that vagabond to his potage!"

Valmond had purchased a tolerable white horse through Medallion.  After a
day's grooming the beast showed off very well; and he was now seen riding
about the parish, dressed after the manner of the First Napoleon, with a
cocked hat and a short sword at his side.  He rode well, and the silver
and pennies he scattered were most fruitful of effect from the martial
elevation.  He happened to be riding into the village at one end as
Sergeant Lagroin entered it at the other, each going towards the Louis
Quinze.  Valmond knew nothing of Sergeant Lagroin, so that what followed
was of the inspiration of the moment.  It sprang from his wit, and from
his knowledge of Napoleon and the Napoleonic history, a knowledge which
had sent Monsieur Garon into tears of joy in his own home, and afterwards
off to the Manor House and also to the Seigneury, full of praise of him.

Catching sight of the sergeant, the significance of the thing flashed to
his brain, and his course was mapped out on the instant.  Sitting very
straight, Valmond rode steadily down towards the old soldier.  The
sergeant had drawn notice as he came up the street, and people came to
their doors, and children followed the grey, dust-covered veteran, in his
last-century uniform.  He came as far as the Louis Quinze, and then,
looking on up the road, he saw the white horse, the cocked hat, the white
waistcoat, and the long grey coat.  He brought his stick down smartly on
the ground, drew himself up, squared his shoulders, and said: "Courage,
Eustache Lagroin.  It is not forty Prussians, but one rogue!  Crush him!
Down with the pretender!"

So, with a defiant light in his eye, he came on, the old uniform sagging
loosely on the shrunken body, which yet was soldier-like from head to
foot.  Years of camp and discipline and battle and endurance were in the
whole bearing of the man.  He was no more of Pontiac and this simple life
than was Valmond himself.

So they neared each other, the challenger and the challenged, the
champion and the invader, and quickly the village emptied itself out to
see.

When Valmond came so close that he could observe every detail of the old
man's uniform, he suddenly reined in his horse, drew him back on his
haunches with his left hand, and with his right saluted--not the old
sergeant, but the coat of the Old Guard, to which his eyes were directed.
Mechanically the hand of the sergeant went to his cap, then, starting
forward with an angry movement, he seemed as though he would attack
Valmond.

Valmond sat very still, his right hand thrust in his bosom, his forehead
bent, his eyes calmly, resolutely, yet distantly, looking at the
sergeant, who grew suddenly still also, while the people watched and
wondered.

As Valmond looked, a soft light passed across his face, relieving its
theatrical firmness, the half-contemptuous curl of his lip.  He knew well
enough that this event would make or unmake him in Pontiac.  He became
also aware that a carriage had driven up among the villagers, and had
stopped; and though he did not look directly, he felt that it was Madame
Chalice.  This soft look on his face was not all assumed; for the ancient
uniform of the sergeant touched something in him, the true comedian, or
the true Napoleon, and it seemed as if he might dismount and take the old
soldier in his arms.

He set his horse on a little, and paused again, with not more than
fifteen feet between them.  The sergeant's brain was going round like a
top.  It was not he that challenged after all.

"Soldier of the Old Guard," cried Valmond, in a clear, ringing voice,
"how far is it to Friedland?"

Like a machine the veteran's hand again went up to his cap, and he
answered:

"To Friedland--the width of a ditch!"

His voice shook as he said it, and the world to him was all a muddle
then; for Napoleon the Great had asked a private this question after that
battle on the Alle, when Berningsen, the Russian, threw away an army to
the master strategist.

The private had answered the question in the words of Sergeant Lagroin.
It was a saying long afterwards among the Old Guard, though it may not be
found in the usual histories of that time, where every battalion, almost
every company, had a watchword, which passed to make room for others, as
victory followed victory.

"Soldier of the Old Guard," said Valmond again, "how came you by those
scars upon your forehead?"

"I was a drummer at Auerstadt, a corporal at Austerlitz, a sergeant at
Waterloo," rolled back the reply, in a high, quavering voice, as memories
of great events blew in upon the ancient fires of his spirit.

"Ah!" answered Valmond, nodding eagerly; "with Davoust at Auerstadt--
thirty against sixty thousand men.  At eight o'clock, all fog and mist,
as you marched up the defile towards the Sonnenberg hills, the brave
Gudin and his division feeling their way to Blucher.  Comrade, how still
you stepped, your bayonet thrust out before you, clearing the mists, your
eyes straining, your teeth set, ready to thrust.  All at once a quick-
moving mass sprang out of the haze, and upon you, with hardly a sound of
warning; and an army of hussars launched themselves at your bayonets!
You bent that wall back like a piece of steel, and broke it.  Comrade,
that was the beginning, in the mist of morning.  Tell me how you fared in
the light of evening, at the end of that bloody day."

The old soldier was trembling.  There was no sign, no movement, from the
crowd.  Across the fields came the sharpening of a scythe, the cry of the
grasshoppers, and the sound of a mill-wheel arose near by.  In the mill
itself, far up in a deep dormer window, sat Parpon with his black cat,
looking down upon the scene with a grim smiling.

The sergeant saw that mist fronting Sonnenberg rise up, and show ten
thousand splendid cavalry and fifty thousand infantry, with a king and a
prince to lead them down upon those malleable but unmoving squares of
French infantry.  He saw himself drumming the Prussians back and his
Frenchmen on.

"Beautiful God!" he cried proudly, "that was a day!  And every man of
the Third Corps that time lift up the lid of hell and drop a Prussian in.
I stand beside Davoust once, and ping! come a bullet, and take off his
chapeau.  It fell upon my drum.  I stoop and pick it up and hand it to
him, but I keep drumming with one hand all the time.  'Comrade,' say I,
'the army thanks you for your courtesy.'  'Brother,' he say, 'twas to
your drum,' and his eye flash out where Gudin carved his way through
those pigs of Prussians.  'I'd take my head off to keep your saddle
filled, comrade,' say I.  Ping!  come a bullet and catch me in the calf.
'You hold your head too high, brother,' the general say, and he smile.
'I'll hold it higher,' answer I, and I snatch at a soldier.  'Up with me
on your shoulder, big comrade,' I say, and he lift me up.  I make my
sticks sing on the leather.  'You shall take off your hat to the Little
Corporal to-morrow, if you've still your head, brother'--speak Davoust
like that, and then he ride away like the devil to Morand's guns.  Ha,
ha, ha!"  The sergeant's face was blazing with a white glare, for he was
very pale, and seemed unconscious of all save the scene in his mind's
eye.  "Ha, ha, ha!" he laughed again.  "Beautiful God, how did Davoust
bring us on up to Sonnenberg!  And next day I saw the Little Corporal.
'Drummer,' say he, 'no head's too high for my Guard.  Come you, comrade,
your general gives you to me.  Come, Corporal Lagroin,' he call; and I
come.  'But, first,' he say, 'up on the shoulder of your big soldier
again, and play.'  'What shall I play, sire?' I ask.  'Play ten thousand
heroes to Walhalla,' he answer.  I play, and I think of my brother
Jacques, who went fighting to heaven the day before.  Beautiful God!
that was a day at Auerstadt."

"Soldier," said Valmond, waving his hand, "step on.  There is a drum at
Louis Quinze.  Let us go together, comrade."

The old sergeant was in a dream.  He wheeled, the crowd made way for him,
and at the neck of the white horse he came on with Valmond.  As they
passed the carriage of Madame Chalice, Valmond made no sign.  They
stopped in front of the hotel, and Valmond, motioning to the garcon, gave
him an order.  The old sergeant stood silent, his eyes full fixed upon
Valmond.  In a moment the boy came out with the drum.  Valmond took it,
and, holding it in his hands, said softly: "Soldier of the Old Guard,
here is a drum of France."  Without a word the old man took the drum, his
fingers trembling as he fastened it to his belt.  When the sticks were in
his hand, all trembling ceased, and his hands became steady.  He was
living in the past entirely.

"Soldier," said Valmond in a loud voice, "remember Austerlitz.  The
Heights of Pratzen are before you.  Play up the feet of the army."

For an instant the old man did not move, and then a sullen sort of look
came over his face.  He was not a drummer at Austerlitz, and for the
instant he did not remember the tune the drummers played.

"Soldier," said Valmond softly, "with 'the Little Sword that Danced' play
up the feet of the army."

A light broke over the old man's face.  The swift look he cast on Valmond
had no distrust now.  Instantly his hand went to his cap.

"My General!" he said, and stepped in front of the white horse.  There
was a moment's pause, and then the sergeant's arms were raised, and down
came the sticks with a rolling rattle on the leather.  They sent a shiver
of feeling through the village, and turned the meek white horse into a
charger of war.  No man laughed at the drama performed in Pontiac that
day, not even the little coterie who were present, not even Monsieur De
la Riviere, whose brow was black with hatred, for he had watched 'the
eyes of Madame Chalice fill with tears at the old sergeant's tale of
Auerstadt, had noticed her admiring glance, "at this damned comedian," as
he now called Valmond.  When he came to her carriage, she said, with
oblique suggestion:

"What do you think of it?"

"Impostor!  fakir!" was his sulky reply.  "Nothing more."

"If fakirs and impostors are so convincing, dear monsieur, why be
yourself longer?  Listen!" she added.  Valmond had spoken down at the
aged drummer, whose arms were young again, as once more he marched on
Pratzen.  Suddenly from the sergeant's lips there broke, in a high,
shaking voice, to the rattle of the drum:

                   "Conscrits, au pas;
                    Ne pleurez pas;
                    Ne pleurez pas;
                    Marchez au pas,
                    Au pas, au pas, au pas, au pas!"

They had not gone twenty yards before fifty men and boys, caught in the
inflammable moment, sprang out from the crowd, fell involuntarily into
rough marching order, and joined in the inspiring refrain:

                   "Marchez au pas,
                    Au pas, au pas, au pas, au pas!"

The old man in front was charged anew.  All at once, at a word from
Valmond, he broke into the Marseillaise, with his voice and with his
drum.  To these Frenchmen of an age before the Revolution, the
Marseillaise had only been a song.  Now in their ignorant breasts there
waked the spirit of France, and from their throats there burst out, with
a half-delirious ecstasy:

                   "Allons, enfants de la patrie,
                    Le jour de gloire est arrive."

As they neared the Louis Quinze, a dozen men, just arrived in the
village, returned from river-driving, carried away by the chant,
tumultuously joined in the procession, and so came on in a fever of vague
patriotism.  A false note in the proceedings, a mismove on the part of
Valmond, would easily have made the thing ridiculous; but even to Madame
Chalice, with her keen artistic sense, it had a pathetic sort of dignity,
by virtue of its rude earnestness, its raw sincerity.  She involuntarily
thought of the great Napoleon and his toy kingdom of Elba, of Garibaldi
and his handful of patriots.  There were depths here, and she knew it.

"Even the pantaloon may have a soul," she said; "or a king may have a
heart."

In front of the Louis Quinze, Valmond waved his hand for a halt, and the
ancient drummer wheeled and faced him, fronting the crowd.  Valmond was
pale, and his eyes burned like restless ghosts.  Surely the Cupid bow of
the thin Napoleonic lips was there, the distant yet piercing look.  He
waved his hand again, and the crowd were silent.

"My children," said he, "we have begun well.  Once more among you the
antique spirit lives.  From you may come the quickening of our beloved
country; for she is yours, though here under the flag of our ancient and
amiable enemy you wait the hour of your return to her.  In you there is
nothing mean or dull; you are true Frenchmen.  My love is with you.  And
you and I, true to each other, may come into our own again--over there!"

He pointed to the East.

"Through you and me may France be born again; and in the villages and
fields and houses of Normandy and Brittany you may, as did your
ancestors, live in peace, and bring your bones to rest in that blessed
and honourable ground.  My children, my heart is full.  Let us move on
together.  Napoleon from St. Helena calls to you, Napoleon in Pontiac
calls to you!  Will you come?"

Reckless cheering followed; many were carried away into foolish tears,
and Valmond sat still and let them kiss his hand, while pitchers of wine
went round.

"Where is our fakir now, dear monsieur?" said Madame Chalice to De la
Riviere once again.

Valmond got silence with a gesture.  He opened his waistcoat, took from
his bosom an order fastened to a little bar of gold, and held it in his
hand.

"Drummer," he said, in a clear, full tone, "call the army to attention."

The old man set their blood tingling with the impish sticks.

"I advance Sergeant Lagroin, of the Old Guard of glorious memory, to the
rank of Captain in my Household Troops, and I command you to obey him as
such."

His look bent upon the crowd, as Napoleon's might have done on the Third
Corps.

"Drummer, call the army to attention," fell the words.

And again like a small whirlwind of hailstones the sticks shook on the
drum.

"I advance Captain Lagroin to the rank of Colonel in my Household Troops,
and I command you to obey him as such."

And once more: "Drummer, call the army to attention."

The sticks swung down, but somehow they faltered, for the drummer was
shaking now.

"I advance Colonel Lagroin to the rank of General in my Household Troops,
and I command you to obey him as such."

Then he beckoned, and the old man drew near.  Stooping, he pinned the
order upon his breast.  When the sergeant saw what it was, he turned
pale, trembled, and the drumsticks fell from his hand.  His eyes shone
like sun on wet glass, then tears sprang from them upon his face.  He
caught Valmond's hand and kissed it, and cried, oblivious of them all:

"Ah, sire, sire!  It is true.  It is true.  I know that ribbon, and I
know you are a Napoleon.  Sire, I love you, and I will die for you!"

For the first time that day a touch of the fantastic came into Valmond's
manner.

"General," he said, "the centuries look down on us as they looked down on
him, your sire--and mine!"

He doffed his hat, and the hats of all likewise came off in a strange
quiet.  A cheer followed, and Valmond motioned for wine to go round
freely.  Then he got off his horse, and, taking the weeping old man by
the arm, himself loosening the drum from his belt, they passed into the
hotel.

"A cheerful bit of foolery and treason," said Monsieur De la Riviere to
Madame Chalice.

"My dear Seigneur, if you only had more humour and less patriotism!" she
answered.  "Treason may have its virtues.  It certainly is interesting,
which, in your present gloomy state, you are not."

"I wonder, madame, that you can countenance this imposture," he broke
out.

"Excellent and superior monsieur, I wonder sometimes that I can
countenance you.  Breakfast with me on Sunday, and perhaps I will tell
you why--at twelve o'clock."

She drove on, but, meeting the Cure, stopped her carriage.

"Why so grave, my dear Cure?" she asked, holding out her hand.

He fingered the gold cross upon his breast--she had given it to him two
years before.

"I am going to counsel him--Monsieur Valmond," he said.  Then, with a
sigh: "He sent me two hundred dollars for the altar to-day, and fifty
dollars to buy new cassocks for myself."

"Come in the morning and tell me what he says," she answered; "and bring
our dear avocat."

As she looked from her window an hour later, she saw bonfires burning,
and up from the village came the old song, that had prefaced a drama in
Pontiac.

But Elise Malboir had a keener interest that night, for Valmond and
Parpon brought her uncle "General Lagroin," in honour to her mother's
cottage; and she sat and listened dreamily, as Valmond and the old man
talked of great things to be done.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Conquest not important enough to satisfy ambition
Face flushed with a sort of pleasurable defiance
Touch of the fantastic, of the barbaric, in all genius
We are only children till we begin to make our dreams our life






WHEN VALMOND CAME TO PONTIAC

The Story of a Lost Napoleon

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.


CHAPTER VI

Prince or plebeian, Valmond played his part with equal aplomb at the
simple home of Elise Malboir and at the Manoir Hilaire, where Madame
Chalice received him.  His dress had nothing of the bizarre on this
occasion.  He was in black-long coat, silk stockings, the collar of his
waistcoat faced with white, his neckerchief white and full, his enamelled
shoes adorned with silver buckles.  His present repose and decorum
contrasted strangely with the fanciful display at his first introduction.
Madame Chalice approved instantly, for though the costume was, in itself,
an affectation, previous to the time by a generation, it was in the
picture, was sedately refined.  She welcomed him in the salon where many
another distinguished man had been entertained--from Frontenac, and
Vaudreuil, down to Sir Guy Carleton.  The Manor had belonged to her
husband's people seventy-five years before, and though, as a banker in
New York, Monsieur Chalice had become an American of the Americans, at
her request he had bought back from a kinsman the old place, unchanged,
furniture and all.  Bringing the antique plate, china, and bric-a-brac,
made in France when Henri Quatre was king, she fared away to Quebec, set
the rude mansion in order, and was happy for a whole summer, as was her
husband, the best of fishermen and sportsmen.  The Manor House stood on a
knoll, behind which, steppe on steppe, climbed the hills, till they ended
in Dalgrothe Mountain.  Beyond the mountain were unexplored regions, hill
and valley floating into hill and valley, lost in a miasmic haze, ruddy,
silent, untenanted, save, mayhap, by the strange people known as the
Little Good Folk of the Scarlet Hills.

The house had been built in the seventeenth century, and the walls were
very thick, to keep out both cold and attack.  Beneath the high-pointed
roof were big dormer windows, and huge chimneys flanked each side of the
house.  The great roof gave a sense of crouching or hovering, for warmth
or in menace.  As Valmond entered the garden, Madame Chalice was leaning
over the lower half of the entrance door, which opened latitudinally, and
was hung on large iron hinges of quaint design, made by some seventeenth-
century forgeron.  Behind her deepened hospitably the spacious hall,
studded and heavy beamed, with its unpainted pine ceiling toned to a good
brown by smoke and time.  Caribou and moose antlers hung along the wall,
with arquebuses, powder-horns, big shot-bags, swords, and even pieces of
armour, such as Cartier brought with him from St. Malo.

Madame Chalice looked out of this ancient avenue, a contrast, yet a
harmony; for, though her dress was modern, her person had a rare touch
of the archaic, and fitted into the picture like a piece of beautiful
porcelain, coloured long before the art of making fadeless colours was
lost.

There was an amused, meditative smiling at her lips, a kind of wonder,
the tender flush of a new experience.  She turned, and, stepping softly
into the salon, seated herself near the immense chimney, in a heavily
carved chair, her feet lost in rich furs on the polished floor.  A quaint
table at her hand was dotted with rare old books and miniatures, and
behind her ticked an ancient clock in a tall mahogany case.

Valmond came forward, hat in hand, and raised to his lips the fingers she
gave him.  He did it with the vagueness of one in a dream, she thought,
and she neither understood nor relished his uncomplimentary abstraction;
so she straightway determined to give him some troublesome moments.

"I have waited to drink my coffee with you," she said, motioning him to a
seat; "and you may smoke a cigarette, if you wish."

Her eyes wandered over his costume with critical satisfaction.

He waved his hand slightly, declining the permission, and looked at her
with an intent seriousness, which took no account of the immediate charm
of her presence.

"I'd like to ask you a question," he said, without preamble.  She
was amused, interested.  Here was an unusual man, who ignored the
conventional preliminary nothings, beating down the grass before
the play, as it were.

"I was never good at catechism," she answered.  "But I will be as
hospitable as I can."

"I've felt," he said, "that you can--can see through things; that you can
balance them, that you get at all sides, and--"

She had been reading Napoleon's letters this very afternoon.

"Full squared?" she interrupted quizzically.

"As the Great Emperor said," he answered.  "A woman sees farther than a
man, and if she has judgment as well, she is the best prophet in the
world."

"It sounds distinctly like a compliment," she answered.  "You are trying
to break that square!"

She was mystified; he was different from any man she had ever
entertained.  She was not half sure she liked it.  Yet, if he were in
very truth a prince--she thought of his debut in flowered waistcoat,
panama hat, and enamelled boots!--she should take this confidence as a
compliment; if he were a barber, she could not resent it; she could not
waste wit or time; she could not even, in extremity, call the servant to
show the barber out; and in any case she was too comfortably interested
to worry herself with speculation.

He was very much in earnest.  "I want to ask you," he said, "what is the
thing most needed to make a great idea succeed."

"I have never had a great idea," she replied.

He looked at her eagerly, with youthful, questioning eyes.

"How simple, and yet how astute he is!" she thought, remembering the
event of yesterday.

"I thought you had--I was sure you had," he said in a troubled sort of
way.  He did not see that she was eluding him.

"I mean, I never had a fixed and definite idea that I proceeded to apply,
as you have done," she explained tentatively.  "But--well, I suppose that
the first requisite for success is absolute belief in the idea; that it
be part of one's life; to suffer for, to fight for, to die for, if need
be--though that sounds like a handbook of moral mottoes, doesn't it?"

"That's it, that's it," he said.  "The thing must be in your bones
--hein?"

"Also in--your blood--hein?" she rejoined slowly and meaningly, looking
over the top of her coffee-cup at him.  Somehow again the plebeian
quality in that hein grated on her, and she could not resist the retort.

"What!" said he confusedly, plunging into another pitfall.  She had
challenged him, and he knew it.  "Nothing what-ever," she answered, with
an urbanity that defied the suggestion of malice.  Yet, now that she
remembered, she had sweetly challenged one of a royal house for the like
lapse into the vulgar tongue.  A man should not be beheaded because of a
what.  So she continued more seriously: "The idea must be himself, all of
him, born with him, the rightful output of his own nature, the thing he
must inevitably do, or waste his life."

She looked him honestly in the eyes.  She had spoken with the soft irony
of truth, the blind tyranny of the just.  She had meant to test him here
and there by throwing little darts of satire, and yet he made her serious
and candid in spite of herself.  He was of kin to her in some part of
his nature.  He did not concern her as a man of personal or social
possibilities--merely as an active originality.  Leaning back languidly,
she was eyeing him closely from under drooping lids, smiling, too, in an
unimportant sort of way, as if what she had said was a trifle.

Consummate liar and comedian, or true man and no pretender, his eyes did
not falter.  They were absorbed, as if in eager study of a theme.

"Yes, yes, that's it; and if he has it, what next?" said he meaningly.

"Well, then, opportunity, joined to coolness, knowledge of men, power of
combination, strategy, and"--she paused, and a purely feminine curiosity
impelled her to add suggestively--"and a woman."

He nodded.  "And a woman," he repeated after her musingly, and not
turning it to account cavalierly, as he might have done.  He was taking
himself with a simple seriousness that appealed to her.

"You may put strategy out of the definition, leaving in the woman," she
continued ironically.

He felt the point, and her demure dart struck home.  But he saw what an
ally she might make.  Tremendous possibilities moved before him.  His
heart beat faster than it did yesterday when the old sergeant faced him.
Here was beauty--he admired that; power--he wished for that.  What might
he not accomplish, no matter how wild his move, with this wonderful
creature as his friend, his ally, his----He paused, for this house
had a master as well as a mistress.

"We will leave in the woman," he said quietly, yet with a sort of trouble
in his face.

"In your idea?" was the negligent question.

"Yes."

"Where is the woman?" insinuated the soft, bewildering voice.

"Here!" he answered emotionally, and he believed it was the truth.  She
stood looking meditatively out of the window, not at him.

"In Pontiac?" she asked presently, turning with a child-like surprise.
"Ah, yes, yes!  I know--one of the people; suitable for Pontiac; but is
it wise?  She is pretty--but is it wise?"

She was adroitly suggesting Elise Malboir, whose little romance she had
discovered.

"She is the prettiest and wisest lady I ever knew, or ever hoped to
know," he said earnestly, laying his hand upon his heart.

"How far will your idea take you?" she asked evasively, her small
fingers tightening a gold hair-pin.  "To Paris--to the Tuileries!"
he answered, rising to his feet.

"And you start--from Pontiac?"

"What difference, Pontiac or Cannes, like the Great Master after Elba,"
he said.  "The principle is the same."

"The money?"

"It will come," he answered.  "I have friends--and hopes."

She almost laughed.  She was suddenly struck by the grotesqueness of the
situation.  But she saw how she had hurt him, and she said instantly:

"Of course, with those one may go far.  Sit down and tell me all your
plans."

He was about to comply, when, glancing out of the window, she saw the
old sergeant, now "General Lagroin," and Parpon hastening up the walk.
Parpon ambled comfortably beside the old man, who seemed ten years
younger than he had done the day before.

"Your army and cabinet, monseigneur!" she said with a pretty, mocking
gesture of salutation.

He glanced at her reprovingly.  "My General and my Minister; as brave a
soldier and as able a counsellor as ever prince had.  Madame," he added,
"they only are farceurs who do not dare, and have not wisdom.  My General
has scars from Auerstadt, Austerlitz, and Waterloo; my Minister is
feared--in Pontiac.  Was he not the trusted friend of the Grand Seigneur,
as he was called here, the father of your Monseiur De la Riviere?  Has he
yet erred in advising me?  Have we yet failed?  Madame," he added, a
little rhetorically, "as we have begun, so will we end, true to our
principles, and--"

"And gentlemen of the king," she said provokingly, urging him on.

"Pardon, gentlemen of the Empire, madame, as time and our lives will
prove.  .  .  .  Madame, I thank you for your violets of Sunday last."

She admired the acumen that had seized the perfect opportunity to thank
her for the violets, the badge of the Great Emperor.

"My hives shall not be empty of bees--or honey," she said, alluding to
the imperial bees, and she touched his arm in a pretty, gracious fashion.

"Madame--ah, madame!" he replied, and his eyes grew moist.

She bade the servant admit Lagroin and Parpon.  They bowed profoundly,
first to Valmond, and afterwards to Madame Chalice.  She saw the point,
and it amused her.  She read in the old man's eye the soldier's contempt
for women, together with his new-born reverence and love for Valmond.
Lagroin was still dressed in the uniform of the Old Guard, and wore on
his breast the sacred ribbon which Valmond had given him the day before.

"Well, General?" said Valmond.

"Sire," said the old man, "they mock us in the streets.  Come to the
window, sire."

The "sire," fell on the ears of Madame Chalice like a mot in a play; but
Valmond, living up to his part, was grave and solicitous.  He walked to
the window, and the old man said:

"Sire, do you not hear a drum?"

A faint rat-tat came up the road.  Valmond bowed.  "Sire," the old man
continued, "I would not act till I had your orders."

"Whence comes the mockery?" Valmond asked quietly.

The other shook his head.  "Sire, I do not know.  But I remember of such
a thing happening to the Emperor.  It was in the garden of the Tuileries,
and twenty-four battalions of the Old Guard filed past our great chief.
Some fool sent out a gamin dressed in regimentals in front of one of the
bands, and then--"

"Enough, General," said Valmond; "I understand.  I will go down into the
village--eh, monsieur?" he added, turning to Parpon with impressive
consideration.

"Sire, there is one behind these mockers," answered the little man in a
low voice.

Valmond turned towards Madame Chalice.  "I know my enemy, madame," he
said.

"Your enemy is not here," she rejoined kindly.

He stooped over her hand, and bowed Lagroin and Parpon to the door.

"Madame," he said, "I thank you.  Will you accept a souvenir of him whom
we both love, martyr and friend of France?"

He drew from his breast a small painting of Napoleon, on ivory, and
handed it to her.

"It was the work of David," he continued.  "You will find it well
authenticated.  Look upon the back of it."

She looked, and her heart beat a little faster.  "This was done when he
was alive?" she said.

"For the King of Rome," he answered.  "Adieu, madame.  Again I thank you,
for our cause as for myself."

He turned away.  She let him get as far as the door.  "Wait, wait!" she
said suddenly, a warm light in her face, for her imagination had been
touched.  "Tell me, tell me the truth.  Who are you?  Are you really a
Napoleon?  I can be a constant ally, but, I charge you, speak the truth
to me.  Are you--"  She stopped abruptly.  "No, no; do not tell me," she
added quickly.  "If you are not, you will be your own executioner.  I
will ask for no further proof than did Sergeant Lagroin.  It is in a
small way yet, but you are playing a terrible game.  Do you realise what
may happen?"

"In the hour that you ask a last proof I will give it," he said almost
fiercely.  "I go now to meet an enemy."

"If I should change that enemy into a friend--" she hinted.

"Then I should have no need of stratagem or force."

"Force?" she asked suggestively.  The drollery of it set her smiling.

"In a week I shall have five hundred men."

"Dreamer!" she thought, and shook her head dubiously; but, glancing
again at the ivory portrait, her mood changed.

"Au revoir," she said.  "Come and tell me about the mockers.  Success go
with you--sire."

Yet she did not know whether she thought him sire or sinner, gentleman
or comedian, as she watched him go down the hill with Lagroin and Parpon.
But she had the portrait.  How did he get it?  No matter, it was hers
now.

Curious to know more of the episode in the village below, she ordered her
carriage, and came driving slowly past the Louis Quinze at an exciting
moment.  A crowd had gathered, and boys, and even women, were laughing
and singing in ridicule snatches of, "Vive Napoleon!"  For, in derision
of yesterday's event, a small boy, tricked out with a paper cocked-hat
and incongruous regimentals, with a hobby-horse between his legs, was
marching up and down, preceded by another lad, who played a toy drum in
derision of Lagroin.  The children had been well rehearsed, for even as
Valmond arrived upon the scene, Lagroin and Parpon on either side of him,
the mock Valmond was bidding the drummer: "Play up the feet of the army!"

The crowd parted on either side, silenced and awed by the look of
potential purpose in the face of this yesterday's hero.  The old
sergeant's glance was full of fury, Parpon's of a devilish sort of glee.

Valmond approached the lads.

"My children," he said kindly, "you have not learned your lesson well
enough.  You shall be taught."  He took the paper caps from their heads.
"I will give you better caps than these."  He took the hobby-horse, the
drum, and the tin swords.  "I will give you better things than these."
He put the caps on the ground, added the toys to the heap, and Parpon,
stooping, lighted the paper.  Scattering money among the crowd, and
giving some silver to the lads, Valmond stood looking at the bonfire for
a moment, and then, pointing to it dramatically, said:

"My friends, my brothers, Frenchmen, we will light larger fires than
these.  Your young Seigneur sought to do me honour this afternoon.
I thank him, and he shall have proof of my affection in due time.
And now our good landlord's wine is free to you, for one goblet each.
My children," he added, turning to the little mockers, "come to me
to-morrow and I will show you how to be soldiers.  My General shall
teach you what to do, and I will teach you what to say."

Almost instantly there arose the old admiring cries of, "Vive Napoleon!"
and he knew that he had regained his ground.  Amid the pleasant tumult
the three entered the hotel together, like people in a play.

As they were going up the stairs, Parpon whispered to the old soldier,
who laid his hand fiercely upon the fine sword at his side, given him
that morning by Valmond; for, looking down, Lagroin saw the young
Seigneur maliciously laughing at them, as if in delight at the mischief
he had caused.

That night, at nine o'clock, the old sergeant went to the Seigneury,
knocked, and was admitted to a room where were seated the young Seigneur,
Medallion, and the avocat.

"Well, General," said De la Riviere, rising with great formality, "what
may I do to serve you?  Will you join our party?"  He motioned to a
chair.

The old man's lips were set and stern, and he vouchsafed no reply to the
hospitable request.

"Monsieur," he said, "to-day you threw dirt at my great master.  He is
of royal blood, and he may not fight you.  But I, monsieur, his General,
demand satisfaction--swords or pistols!"

De la Riviere sat down, leaned back in his chair, and laughed.  Without a
word the old man stepped forward, and struck him across the mouth with
his red cotton handkerchief.

"Then take that, monsieur," said he, "from one who fought for the First
Napoleon, and will fight for this Napoleon against the tongue of slander
and the acts of fools.  I killed two Prussians once for saying that the
Great Emperor's shirt stuck out below his waistcoat.  You'll find me at
the Louis Quinze," he added, before De la Riviere, choking with wrath,
could do more than get to his feet; and, wheeling, he left the room.

The young Seigneur would have followed him, but the avocat laid a
restraining hand upon his arm, and Medallion said: "Dear Seigneur, see,
you can't fight him.  The parish would only laugh."

De la Riviere took the advice, and on Sunday, over the coffee, unburdened
the tale to Madame Chalice.

Contrary to his expectations, she laughed a great deal, then soothed his
wounded feelings and advised him as Medallion had done.  And because
Valmond commanded the old sergeant to silence, the matter ended for the
moment.  But it would have its hour yet, and Valmond knew this as well
as did the young Seigneur.




CHAPTER VII

It was no jest of Valmond's that he would, or could, have five hundred
followers in two weeks.  Lagroin and Parpon were busy, each in his own
way--Lagroin, open, bluff, imperative; Parpon, silent, acute, shrewd.
Two days before the feast of St. John the Baptist, the two made a
special tour through the parish for certain recruits.  If these could be
enlisted, a great many men of this and other parishes would follow.  They
were, by name, Muroc the charcoalman, Duclosse the mealman, Lajeunesse
the blacksmith, and Garotte the limeburner, all men of note, after their
kind, with influence and individuality.

Lagroin chafed that he must play recruiting-sergeant and general also.
But it gave him comfort to remember that the Great Emperor had not at
times disdained to be his own recruiting-sergeant; that, after Friedland,
he himself had been taken into the Old Guard by the Emperor; that Davoust
had called him brother; that Ney had shared his supper and slept with him
under the same blanket.  Parpon would gladly have done this work alone,
but he knew that Lagroin in his regimentals would be useful.

The sought-for comrades were often to be found together about the noon
hour in the shop of Jose Lajeunesse.  They formed the coterie of the
humble, even as the Cure's coterie represented the aristocracy of Pontiac
--with Medallion as a connecting link.

Arches and poles were being put up, to be decorated against the feast-
day, and piles of wood for bonfires were arranged at points on the hills
round the village.  Cheer and goodwill were everywhere, for a fine
harvest was in view, and this feast-day always brought gladness and
simple revelling.  Parish interchanged with parish; but, because it was
so remote, Pontiac was its own goal of pleasure, and few fared forth,
though others came from Ville Bambord and elsewhere to join the fete.
As Lagroin and the dwarf came to the door of the smithy, they heard
the loud laugh of Lajeunesse.

"Good!" said Parpon.  "Hear how he tears his throat!"

"If he has sense, I'll make a captain of him," remarked Lagroin
consequentially.

"You shall beat him into a captain on his own anvil," rejoined the little
man.

They entered the shop.  Lajeunesse was leaning on his bellows, laughing,
and holding an iron in the spitting fire; Muroc was seated on the edge of
the cooling tub; and Duclosse was resting on a bag of his excellent meal.
Garotte was the only missing member of the quartette.

Muroc was a wag, a grim sort of fellow, black from his trade, with big
rollicking eyes.  At times he was not easy to please, but if he took a
liking, he was for joking at once.  He approved of Parpon, and never lost
a chance of sharpening his humour on the dwarf's impish whetstone of a
tongue.

"Lord!  Lord!" he cried, with feigned awe, getting to his feet at sight
of the two.  Then, to his comrades, "Children, children, off with your
hats!  Here is Monsieur Talleyrand, if I'm not mistaken.  On to your
feet, mealman, and dust your stomach.  Lajeunesse, wipe your face with
your leather.  Duck your heads, stupids!"

With mock solemnity the three greeted Parpon and Lagroin.  The old
sergeant's face flushed, and his hand dropped to his sword; but he had
promised Parpon to say nothing till he got his cue, and he would keep his
word.  So he disposed himself in an attitude of martial attention.  The
dwarf bowed to the others with a face of as great gravity as the
charcoalman's, and waving his hand, said:

"Keep your seats, my children, and God be with you.  You are right,
smutty-face; I am Monsieur Talleyrand, Minister of the Crown."

"The devil, you say!" cried the mealman.

"Tut, tut!" said Lajeunesse, chaffing; "haven't you heard the news?
The devil is dead!"

The dwarf's hand went into his pocket.  "My poor orphan," said he,
trotting over and thrusting some silver into the blacksmith's pocket,
"I see he hasn't left you well off.  Accept my humble gift."

"The devil dead?" cried Muroc; "then I'll go marry his daughter."

Parpon climbed up on a pile of untired wheels, and with an elfish grin
began singing.  Instantly the three humorists became silent and listened,
the blacksmith pumping his bellows mechanically the while.

              "O mealman white, give me your daughter,
               Oh, give her to me, your sweet Suzon!
               O mealman dear, you can do no better
               For I have a chateau at Malmaison.

               Black charcoalman, you shall not have her
               She shall not marry you, my Suzon--
               A bag of meal--and a sack of carbon!
               Non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non!

               Go look at your face, my fanfaron,
               For my daughter and you would be night and day,
               Non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non,
               Not for your chateau at Malmaison,
               Non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non,
               You shall not marry her, my Suzon."

A better weapon than his waspish tongue was Parpon's voice, for it,
before all, was persuasive.  A few years before, none of them had ever
heard him sing.  An accident discovered it to them, and afterwards he
sang for them but little, and never when it was expected of him.  He
might be the minister of a dauphin or a fool, but he was now only the
mysterious Parpon who thrilled them.  All the soul cramped in the small
body was showing in his eyes, as on that day when he had sung before the
Louis Quinze.

A face suddenly appeared at a little door just opposite him.  No one but
Parpon saw it.  It belonged to Madelinette, the daughter of Lajeunesse,
who had a voice of merit.  More than once the dwarf had stopped to hear
her singing as he passed the smithy.  She sang only the old chansons and
the songs of the voyageurs, with a far greater sweetness and richness,
however, than any in the parish; and the Cure could detect her among all
others at mass.  She had been taught her notes, but that had only opened
up possibilities, and fretted her till she was unhappy.  What she felt
she could not put into her singing, for the machinery, unknown and
tyrannical, was not hers.  Twice before she had heard Parpon sing--
at mass when the miller's wife was buried, and he, forgetting the world,
had poured forth all his beautiful voice; and on that notable night
before the Louis Quinze.  If he would but teach her those songs of his,
give her that sound of an organ in her throat!  Parpon guessed what she
thought.  Well, he would see what could be done, if the blacksmith joined
Valmond's standard.

He stopped singing.

"That's as good as dear Caron, the vivandiere of the Third Corps.  Blood
o' my body, I believe it's better--almost!" said Lagroin, nodding his
head patronisingly.  "She dragged me from under the mare of a damned
Russian that cut me down, before he got my bayonet in his liver.  Caron!
Caron! ah yes, brave Caron!  my dear Caron!" said the old man, smiling
through the alluring light that the song had made for him, as he looked
behind the curtain of the years.

Parpon's pleasant ridicule was not lost on the charcoalman and the
mealman; but neither was the singing wasted; and their faces were touched
with admiration, while the blacksmith, with a sigh, turned to his fire
and blew the bellows softly.

"Blacksmith," said Parpon, "you have a bird that sings."

"I've no bird that sings like that, though she has pretty notes, my
bird."  He sighed again.  "'Come, blacksmith,' said the Count Lassone,
when he came here a-fishing, 'that's a voice for a palace,' said he.
'Take it out of the woods and teach it,' said he, 'and it will have all
Paris following it.'  That to me, a poor blacksmith, with only my bread
and sour milk, and a hundred dollars a year or so, and a sup of brandy
when I can get it."

The charcoalman spoke up.  "You'll not forget the indulgences folks give
you more than the pay for setting the dropped shoe--true gifts of God,
bought with good butter and eggs at the holy auction, blacksmith.  I gave
you two myself.  You have your blessings, Lajeunesse."

"So; and no one to use the indulgences but you and Madelinette, giant,"
said the fat mealman.

"Ay, thank the Lord, we've done well that way!" said the blacksmith,
drawing himself up--for he loved nothing better than to be called the
giant, though he was known to many as petit enfant, in irony of his size.

Lagroin was now impatient.  He could not see the drift of this, and he
was about to whisper to Parpon, when the little man sent him a look,
commanding silence, and he fretted on dumbly.

"See, my blacksmith," said Parpon, "your bird shall be taught to sing,
and to Paris she shall go by and by."

"Such foolery!" said Duclosse.

"What's in your noddle, Parpon?" cried the charcoalman.

The blacksmith looked at Parpon, his face all puzzled eagerness.  But
another face at the door grew pale with suspense.  Parpon quickly turned
towards it.  "See here, Madelinette," he said, in a low voice.  The girl
stepped inside and came to her father.  Lajeunesse's arm ran round her
shoulder.  There was no corner of his heart into which she had not crept.
"Out with it, Parpon!" called the blacksmith hoarsely, for the
daughter's voice had followed herself into those farthest corners
of his rugged nature.

"I will teach her to sing first; then she shall go to Quebec, and
afterwards to Paris, my friend," he answered.

The girl's eyes were dilating with a great joy.  "Ah, Parpon--good
Parpon!" she whispered.

"But Paris!  Paris!  There's gossip for you, thick as mortar," cried the
charcoalman, and the mealman's fingers beat a tattoo on his stomach.

Parpon waved his hand.  "'Look to the weevil in your meal, Duclosse; and
you, smutty-face, leave true things to your betters.  See, blacksmith,"
he added, "she shall go to Quebec, and after that to Paris."

Here he got off the wheels, and stepped out into the centre of the shop.
"Our master will do that for you.  I swear for him, and who can say that
Parpon was ever a liar?"

The blacksmith's hand tightened on his daughter's shoulder.  He was
trembling with excitement.

"Is it true?  is it true?" he asked, and the sweat stood out on his
forehead.

"He sends this for Madelinette," answered the dwarf, handing over a
little bag of gold to the girl, who drew back.  But Parpon went close to
her, and gently forced it into her hands.

"Open it," he said.  She did so, and the blacksmith's eyes gloated on the
gold.  Muroc and Duclosse drew near, and peered in also.  And so they
stood there for a little while, all looking and exclaiming.

Presently Lajeunesse scratched his head.  "Nobody does nothing for
nothing," said he.  "What horse do I shoe for this?"

"La, la!" said the charcoalman, sticking a thumb in the blacksmith's
side; "you only give him the happy hand--like that!"

Duclosse was more serious.  "It is the will of God that you become a
marshal or a duke," he said wheezingly to the blacksmith.  "You can't say
no; it is the will of God, and you must bear it like a man."

The child saw further; perhaps the artistic strain in her gave her keener
reasoning.

"Father," she said, "Monsieur Valmond wants you for a soldier."

"Wants me?" he roared in astonishment.  "Who's to shoe the horses a week
days, and throw the weight o' Sundays after mass?  Who's to handle a
stick for the Cure when there's fighting among the river-men?

"But there, la, la!  many a time my wife, my good Florienne, said to me,
'Jose--Jose Lajeunesse, with a chest like yours, you ought to be a
corporal at least.'"

Parpon beckoned to Lagroin, and nodded.  "Corporal!  corporal!" cried
Lagroin; "in a week you shall be a lieutenant and a month shall make you
a captain, and maybe better than that!"

"Better than that--bagosh!" cried the charcoalman in surprise, proudly
using the innocuous English oath.  "Better than that--sutler, maybe?"
said the mealman, smacking his lips.

"Better than that," replied Lagroin, swelling with importance.  "Ay, ay,
my dears, great things are for you.  I command the army, and I have free
hand from my master.  Ah, what joy to serve a Napoleon once again!  What
joy!  Lord, how I remember--"

"Better than that-eh?" persisted Duclosse, perspiring, the meal on his
face making a sort of paste.

"A general or a governor, my children," said Lagroin.  "First in, first
served.  Best men, best pickings.  But every man must love his chief, and
serve him with blood and bayonet; and march o' nights if need, and limber
up the guns if need, and shoe a horse if need, and draw a cork if need,
and cook a potato if need; and be a hussar, or a tirailleur, or a
trencher, or a general, if need.  But yes, that's it; no pride but the
love of France and the cause, and--"

"And Monsieur Valmond," said the charcoalman slyly.

"And Monsieur the Emperor!" cried Lagroin almost savagely.

He caught Parpon's eye, and instantly his hand went to his pocket.

"Ah, he is a comrade, that!  Nothing is too good for his friends, for his
soldiers.  See!" he added.

He took from his pocket ten gold pieces.  "'These are bagatelles,' said
His Excellency to me; 'but tell my friends, Monsieur Muroc and Monsieur
Duclosse and Monsieur Garotte, that they are buttons for the coats of my
sergeants, and that my captains' coats have ten times as many buttons.
Tell them,' said he, 'that my friends shall share my fortunes; that
France needs us; that Pontiac shall be called the nest of heroes.  Tell
them that I will come to them at nine o'clock tonight, and we will swear
fidelity.'"

"And a damned good speech too--bagosh!" cried the mealman, his fingers
hungering for the gold pieces.  "We're to be captains pretty soon--eh?"
asked Muroc.

"As quick as I've taught you to handle a company," answered Lagroin, with
importance.

"I was a patriot in '37," said Muroc.  "I went against the English; I
held abridge for two hours.  I have my musket yet."

"I am a patriot now," urged Duclosse.  "Why the devil not the English
first, then go to France, and lick the Orleans!"

"They're a skittish lot, the Orleans; they might take it in their heads
to fight," suggested Muroc, with a little grin.

"What the devil do you expect?" roared the blacksmith, blowing the
bellows hard in his excitement, one arm still round his daughter's
shoulder.  "D'you think we're going to play leap-frog into the Tuileries?
There's blood to let, and we're to let it!"

"Good, my leeches!" said Parpon; "you shall have blood to suck.  But
we'll leave the English be.  France first, then our dogs will take a snap
at the flag on the citadel yonder."  He nodded in the direction of
Quebec.

Lagroin then put five gold pieces each into the hands of Muroc and
Duclosse, and said:

"I take you into the service of Prince Valmond Napoleon, and you do
hereby swear to serve him loyally, even to the shedding of your blood,
for his honour and the honour of France; and you do also vow to require a
like loyalty and obedience of all men under your command.  Swear."

There was a slight pause, for the old man's voice had the ring of a fatal
earnestness.  It was no farce, but a real thing.

"Swear," he said again.  "Raise your right hand."

"Done!" said Muroc.  "To the devil with the charcoal!  I'll go wash my
face."

"There's my hand on it," added Duclosse; "but that rascal Petrie will get
my trade, and I'd rather be strung by the Orleans than that."

"Till I've no more wind in my bellows!" responded Lajeunesse, raising
his hand, "if he keeps faith with my Madelinette."

"On the honour of a soldier," said Lagroin, and he crossed himself.

"God save us all!" said Parpon.  Obeying a motion of the dwarf's hand,
Lagroin drew from his pocket a flask of cognac, with four little tin cups
fitting into each other.  Handing one to each, he poured them brimming
full.  Then, filling his own, he spilled a little in the steely dust of
the smithy floor.  All did the same, though they knew not why.

"What's that for?" asked the mealman.

"To show the Little Corporal, dear Corporal Violet, and my comrades of
the Old Guard, that we don't forget them," cried Lagroin.

He drank slowly, holding his head far back, and as he brought it straight
again, he swung on his heel, for two tears were racing down his cheeks.

The mealman wiped his eyes in sympathy; the charcoalman shook his head at
the blacksmith, as though to say, "Poor devil!" and Parpon straightway
filled their glasses again.  Madelinette took the flask to the old
sergeant.  He looked at her kindly, and patted her shoulder.  Then he
raised his glass.

"Ah, the brave Caron, the dear Lucette Caron!  Ah, the time she dragged
me from under the Russian's mare!"  He smiled into the distance.  "Who
can tell?  Perhaps, perhaps--again!" he added.

Then, all at once, as if conscious of the pitiful humour of his
meditations, he came to his feet, straightened his shoulders, and cried:

"To her we love best!"

The charcoalman drank, and smacked his lips.  "Yes, yes," he said,
looking into the cup admiringly; "like mother's milk that.  White of my
eye, but I do love her!"

The mealman cocked his glance towards the open door.  "Elise!" he said
sentimentally, and drank.  The blacksmith kissed his daughter, and his
hand rested on her head as he lifted the cup, but he said never a word.

Parpon took one sip, then poured his liquor upon the ground, as though
down there was what he loved best; but his eyes were turned to Dalgrothe
Mountain, which he could see through the open door.

"France!" cried the old soldier stoutly, and tossed off the liquor.




CHAPTER VIII

That night Valmond and his three new recruits, to whom Garotte the
limeburner had been added, met in the smithy and swore fealty to the
great cause.  Lajeunesse, by virtue of his position in the parish, and
his former military experience, was made a captain, and the others
sergeants of companies yet unnamed and unformed.  The limeburner was a
dry, thin man of no particular stature, who coughed a little between his
sentences, and had a habit, when not talking, of humming to himself, as
if in apology for his silence.  This humming had no sort of tune or
purpose, and was but a vague musical sputtering.  He almost perilled the
gravity of the oath they all took to Valmond by this idiosyncrasy.  His
occupation gave him a lean, arid look; his hair was crisp and straight,
shooting out at all points, and it flew to meet his cap as if it were
alive.  He was a genius after a fashion, too, and at all the feasts and
on national holidays he invented some new feature in the entertainments.
With an eye for the grotesque, he had formed a company of jovial blades,
called Kalathumpians, after the manner of the mimes of old times in his
beloved Dauphiny.

"All right, all right," he said, when Lagroin, in the half-lighted
blacksmith shop, asked him to swear allegiance and service.  "'Brigadier,
vous avez raison,'" he added, quoting a well-known song.  Then he hummed
a little and coughed.  "We must have a show"--he hummed again--"we must
tickle 'em up a bit--touch 'em where they're silly with a fiddle and
fife-raddy dee dee, ra dee, ra dee, ra dee!"  Then, to Valmond: "We gave
the fools who fought the Little Corporal sour apples in Dauphiny, my
dear!"

He followed this extraordinary speech with a plan for making an ingenious
coup for Valmond, when his Kalathumpians should parade the streets on the
evening of St. John the Baptist's Day.

With hands clasped the new recruits sang:

                   "When from the war we come,
                    Allons gai!
                    Oh, when we ride back home,
                    If we be spared that day,
                    Ma luronne lurette,
                    We'll laugh our scars away,
                    Ma luronne lure,
                    We'll lift the latch and stay,
                    Ma luronne lure."

The huge frame of the blacksmith, his love for his daughter, his simple
faith in this new creed of patriotism, his tenderness of heart, joined to
his irascible disposition, spasmodic humour, and strong arm, roused in
Valmond an immediate liking, as keen, after its kind, as that he had for
the Cure; and the avocat.  With both of these he had had long talks of
late, on everything but purely personal matters.  They would have thought
it a gross breach of etiquette to question him on that which he avoided.
His admiration of them was complete, although he sometimes laughed half
sadly, half whimsically, as he thought of their simple faith in him.

At dusk on the eve of St. John the Baptist's Day, after a long conference
with Lagroin and Parpon, Valmond went through the village, and came to
the smithy to talk with Lajeunesse.  Those who recognised him in passing
took off their bonnets rouges, some saying, "Good-night, your Highness;"
some, "How are you, monseigneur?" some, "God bless your Excellency;" and
a batch of bacchanalian river-men, who had been drinking, called him
"General," and insisted on embracing him, offering him cognac from their
tin flasks.

The appearance among them of old Madame Degardy shifted the good-natured
attack.  For many a year, winter and summer, she had come and gone in the
parish, all rags and tatters, wearing men's kneeboots and cap, her grey
hair hanging down in straggling curls, her lower lip thrust out fiercely,
her quick eyes wandering to and fro, and her sharp tongue, like Parpon's,
clearing a path before her whichever way she turned.  On her arm she
carried a little basket of cakes and confitures, and these she dreamed
she sold, for they were few who bought of Crazy Joan.  The stout stick
she carried was as compelling as her tongue, so that when the river-men
surrounded her in amiable derision, it was used freely and with a heart
all kindness: "For the good of their souls," she said, "since the Cure
was too mild, Mary in heaven bless him high and low!"

She was the Cure's champion everywhere, and he in turn was tender towards
the homeless body, whose history even to him was obscure, save in the few
particulars that he had given to Valmond the last time they had met.

In her youth Madame Degardy was pretty and much admired.  Her lover had
deserted her, and in a fit of mad indignation and despair she had fled
from the village, and vanished no one knew where, though it had been
declared by a wandering hunter that she had been seen in the far-off
hills that march into the south, and that she lived there with a
barbarous mountaineer, who had himself long been an outlaw from his kind.

But this had been mere gossip, and after twenty-five years she came back
to Pontiac, a half-mad creature, and took up the thread of her life
alone; and Parpon and the Cure saw that she suffered nothing in the hard
winters.

Valmond left the river-men to the tyranny of her tongue and stick, and
came on to where the red light of the forge showed through the smithy
window.  As he neared the door, he heard a voice singularly sweet, and
another of commoner calibre was joining in the refrain of a song:

        "'Oh, traveller, see where the red sparks rise,'
          (Fly away, my heart, fly away!)
          But dark is the mist in the traveller's eyes.
          (Fly away, my heart, fly away!)
          'Oh, traveller, see far down the gorge,
          The crimson light from my father's forge.
          (Fly away, my heart, fly away!)

        "'Oh, traveller, hear how the anvils ring.'
          (Fly away, my heart, fly away!)
          But the traveller heard, ah, never a thing.
          (Fly away, my heart, fly away!)
          'Oh, traveller, loud do the bellows roar,
          And my father waits by the smithy door.
          (Fly away, my heart, fly away!)

        "'Oh, traveller, see you thy true love's grace.'
          (Fly away, my heart, fly away!)
          And now there is joy in the traveller's face.
          (Fly away, my heart, fly away!)
          Oh, wild does he ride through the rain and mire,
          To greet his love by the smithy fire.
          (Fly away, my heart, fly away!)"

In accompaniment, some one was beating softly on the anvil, and the
bellows were blowing rhythmically.

He lingered for a moment, loath to interrupt the song, and then softly
opened the upper half of the door, for it was divided horizontally, and
leaned over the lower part.

Beside the bellows, her sleeves rolled up, her glowing face cowled in her
black hair, comely and strong, stood Elise Malboir, pushing a rod of
steel into the sputtering coals.  Over the anvil, with a small bar caught
in a pair of tongs, hovered Madelinette Lajeunesse, beating, almost
tenderly, the red-hot point of the steel.  The sound of the iron hammer
on the malleable metal was like muffled silver, and the sparks flew out
like jocund fireflies.  She was making two hooks for her kitchen wall,
for she was clever at the forge, and could shoe a horse if she were let
to do so.  She was but half-turned to Valmond, but he caught the pure
outlines of her face and neck, her extreme delicacy of expression, which
had a pathetic, subtle refinement, in acute contrast to the quick,
abundant health, the warm energy, the half defiant look of Elise.  It was
a picture of labour and life.

A dozen thoughts ran through Valmond's mind.  He was responsible, to an
extent, for the happiness of these two young creatures.  He had promised
to make a songstress of the one, to send her to Paris; had roused in her
wild, ambitious hopes of fame and fortune--dreams that, in any case,
could be little like the real thing: fanciful visions of conquest and
golden living, where never the breath of her hawthorn and wild violets
entered; only sickly perfumes, as from an odalisque's fan, amid the
enervating splendour of voluptuous boudoirs--for she had read of these
things.

Valmond had, in a vague, graceless sort of way, worked upon the quick
emotions of Elise.  Every little touch of courtesy had been returned to
him in half-shy, half-ardent glances; in flushes, which the kiss he had
given her the first day of their meeting had made the signs of an
intermittent fever; in modest yet alluring waylayings; in restless
nights, in half-tuneful, half-silent days; in a sweet sort of petulance.
She had kept in mind everything he had said to her; the playfully
emotional pressure of her hand, his eloquent talks with her uncle, the
old sergeant's rhapsodies on his greatness; and there was no place in the
room where he had sat or stood, which she had not made sacred--she, the
mad cap, who had lovers by the dozen.  Importuned by the Cure and her
mother to marry, she had threatened, if they worried her further, to wed
fat Duclosse, the mealman, who had courted her in a ponderous way for at
least three years.  The fire that corrodes, when it does not make
glorious without and within, was in her veins, and when Valmond should
call she was ready to come.  She could not, at first, see that if he
were, in truth, a Napoleon, she was not for him.  Seized of that wilful,
daring spirit called Love, her sight was bounded by the little field
where she strayed.

Elise's arm paused upon the lever of the bellows, when she saw Valmond
watching them from the door.  He took off his hat to them, as Madelinette
turned towards him, the hammer pausing in the stroke.

"Ah, monseigneur!" she said impulsively, and then paused, confused.
Elise did not move, but stood looking at him, her eyes all flame, her
cheeks going a little pale, and flushing again.  With a quick motion she
pushed her hair back, and as he stepped inside and closed the door behind
him, she blew the bellows, as if to give a brighter light to the place.
The fire flared up, but there were corners in deep shadow.  Valmond
doffed his hat again and said ceremoniously: "Mademoiselle Madelinette,
Mademoiselle Elise, pray do not stop your work.  Let me sit here and
watch you."

Taking from his pocket a cigarette, he came over to the forge and was
about to light it with the red steel from the fire, when Elise, snatching
up a tiny piece of wood, thrust it in the coals, and, drawing it out,
held it towards the cigarette, saying:

"Ah, no, your Excellency--this!"

As Valmond reached to take it from her, he heard a sound, as of a hoarse
breathing, and turned quickly; but his outstretched hand touched Elise's
fingers, and it involuntarily closed on them, all her impulsive
temperament and warm life thrilling through him.  The shock of feeling
brought his eyes to hers with a sudden burning mastery.  For an instant
their looks fused and were lost in a passionate affiance.  Then, as if
pulling himself out of a dream, he released her fingers with a "Pardon--
my child!"

As he did so, a cry ran through the smithy.  Madelinette was standing,
tense and set with terror, her eyes riveted on something that crouched
beside a pile of cart-wheels a few feet away; something with shaggy head,
flaring eyes, and a devilish face.  The thing raised itself and sprang
towards hers with a devouring cry.  With desperate swiftness leaping
forward, Valmond caught the half man, half beast--it seemed that--by the
throat.  Madelinette fell fainting against the anvil, and, dazed and
trembling, Elise hurried to her.

Valmond was in the grasp of a giant, and, struggle as he might, he could
not withstand the powerful arms of his assailant.  They came to their
knees on the ground, where they clutched and strained for a wild minute,

Valmond desperately fighting to keep the huge bony fingers from his neck.
Suddenly the giant's knee touched the red-hot steel that Madelinette had
dropped, and with a snarl he flung Valmond back against the anvil, his
head striking the iron with a sickening thud.  Then, seizing the steel,
he raised it to plunge the still glowing point into Valmond's eyes.

Centuries of doom seemed crowded into that instant of time.  Valmond
caught the giant's wrist with both hands, and with a mighty effort
wrenched himself aside.  His heart seemed to strain and burst, and just
as he felt the end was come, he heard something crash on the murderer's
skull, and the great creature fell with a gurgling sound, and lay like a
parcel of loose bones across his knees.  Valmond raised himself, a
strange, dull wonder on him, for as the weapon smote this lifeless
creature, he had seen another hurl by and strike the opposite wall.  A
moment afterwards the dead man was pulled away by Parpon.  Trying to rise
he felt blood trickling down his neck, and he turned sick and blind.  As
the world slipped away from him, a soft shoulder caught his head, and out
of a vast distance there came to him the wailing cry: "He is dying! my
love! my love!"

Peril and horror had brought to Elise's breast the one being in the world
for her, the face which was etched like a picture upon her eyes and
heart.

Parpon groaned with a strange horror as he dragged the body from Valmond.
For a moment he knelt gasping beside the shapeless being, his great hands
spasmodically feeling the pulseless breast.

Soon afterwards in the blacksmith's house the two girls nestled in each
other's arms, and Valmond, shaken and weak, returned to the smithy.

In the dull glare of the forge fire knelt Parpon, rocking back and forth
beside the body.  Hearing Valmond, he got to his feet.

"You have killed him," he said, pointing.

"No, no, not I," answered Valmond.  "Some one threw a hammer."

"There were two hammers."

"It was Elise?" asked Valmond, with a shudder.  "No, not Elise; it was
you," said the dwarf, with a strange insistence.

"I tell you no," said Valmond.  "It was you, Parpon."

"By God, it is a lie!" cried the dwarf, with a groan.  Then he came
close to Valmond.  "He was--my brother!  Do you not see?" he demanded
fiercely, his eyes full of misery.  "Do you not see that it was you?
Yes, yes, it was you."

Stooping, Valmond caught the little man in an embrace.  "It was I that
killed him, Parpon.  It was I, comrade.  You saved my life," he added
significantly.  "The girl threw, but missed," said Parpon.  "She does not
know but that she struck him."

"She must be told."

"I will tell her that you killed him.  Leave it to me--all to me, my
grand seigneur."

A half-hour afterwards the avocat, the Cure, and the Little Chemist, had
heard the story as the dwarf told it, and Valmond returned to the Louis
Quinze a hero.  For hours the habitants gathered under his window and
cheered him.

Parpon sat long in gloomy silence by his side, but, raising his voice,
he began to sing softly a lament for the gross-figured body, lying alone
in a shed near the deserted smithy:

              "Children, the house is empty,
               The house behind the tall hill;
               Lonely and still is the empty house.
               There is no face in the doorway,
               There is no fire in the chimney.
               Come and gather beside the gate,
               Little Good Folk of the Scarlet Hills.

              "Where has the wild dog vanished?
               Where has the swift foot gone?
               Where is the hand that found the good fruit,
               That made a garret of wholesome herbs?
               Where is the voice that awoke the morn,
               The tongue that defied the terrible beasts?
               Come and listen beside the door,
               Little Good Folk of the Scarlet Hills."

The pathos of the chant almost made his listener shrink, so immediate and
searching was it.  When the lament ceased, there was a long silence,
broken by Valmond.

"He was your brother, Parpon--how?  Tell me about it."

The dwarf's eyes looked into the distance.

"It was in the far-off country," he said, "in the hills where the Little
Good Folk come.  My mother married an outlaw.  Ah, he was cruel, and an
animal!  My brother Gabriel was born--he was a giant, his brain all
fumbling and wild.  Then I was born, so small, a head as a tub, and long
arms like a gorilla.  We burrowed in the hills, Gabriel and I.  One day
my mother, because my father struck her, went mad, left us and came to--"
He broke off, pausing an instant.  "Then Gabriel struck the man, and he
died, and we buried him, and my brother also left me, and I was alone.
By and by I travelled to Pontiac.  Once Gabriel came down from the hills,
and Lajeunesse burnt him with a hot iron, for cutting his bellows in the
night, to make himself a bed inside them.  To-day he came again to do
some terrible thing to the blacksmith or the girl, and you have seen--ah,
the poor Gabriel, and I killed him!"

"I killed him," said Valmond--"I, Parpon, my friend."

"My poor fool, my wild dog!" wailed the dwarf mournfully.

"Parpon," asked Valmond suddenly, "where is your mother?"

"It is no matter.  She has forgotten--she is safe."

"If she should see him!" said Valmond tentatively, for a sudden thought
had come to him that the mother of these misfits of God was Madame
Degardy.

Parpon sprang to his-feet.  "She shall not see him.  Ah, you know!
You have guessed?" he cried.  "She is all safe with me."

"She shall not see him.  She shall not know," repeated the dwarf, his
eyes huddling back in his head with anguish.

"Does she not remember you?"

"She does not remember the living, but she would remember the dead.  She
shall not know," he said again.

Then, seizing Valmond's hand, he kissed it, and, without a word, trotted
from the room--a ludicrously pathetic figure.




CHAPTER IX

Now and again the moon showed through the cloudy night, and the air was
soft and kind.  Parpon left behind him the village street, and, after a
half mile or more of travel, came to a spot where a crimson light showed
beyond a little hill.  He halted a moment, as if to think and listen,
then crawled up the bank and looked down.  Beside a still smoking lime-
kiln an abandoned fire was burning down into red coals.  The little hut
of the lime-burner was beyond in a hollow, and behind that again was a
lean-to, like a small shed or stable.  Hither stole the dwarf, first
pausing to listen a moment at the door of the hut.

Leaning into the darkness of the shed, he gave a soft, crooning call.
Low growls of dogs came in quick reply.  He stepped inside, and spoke to
them:

"Good dogs!  good dogs!  good Musket, Coffee, Filthy, Jo-Jo--steady,
steady, idiots!" for the huge brutes were nosing him, throwing
themselves against: him, and whining gratefully.  Feeling the wall, he
took down some harness, and, in the dark, put a set on each dog--mere
straps for the shoulders, halters, and traces; called to them sharply to
be quiet, and, keeping hold of their collars, led them out into the
night.  He paused to listen again.  Presently he drove the dogs across
the road, and attached them to a flat vehicle, without wheels or runners,
used by Garotte for the drawing of lime and stones.  It was not so heavy
as many machines of the kind, and at a quick word from the dwarf the
dogs darted away.  Unseen, a mysterious figure hurried on after them,
keeping well in the shadow of the trees fringing the side of the road.

The dwarf drove the dogs down a lonely side lane to the village, and came
to the shed where lay the uncomely thing he had called brother.  He felt
for a spot where there was a loose board, forced it and another with his
strong fingers, and crawled in.  Reappearing with the dead body, he bore
it in his huge arms to the stoneboat: a midget carrying a giant.  He
covered up the face, and, returning to the shed, placed his coat against
the boards to deaden the sound, and hammered them tight again with a
stone, after having straightened the grass about.  Returning, he found
the dogs cowering with fear, for one of them had pushed the cloth off the
dead man's face with his nose, and death exercised its weird dominion
over them.  They crouched together, whining and tugging at the traces.
With a persuasive word he started them away.

The pursuing, watchful figure followed at a distance, on up the road, on
over the little hills, on into the high hills, the dogs carrying along
steadily the grisly load.  And once their driver halted them, and sat in
the grey gloom and dust beside the dead body.

"Where do you go, dwarf?" he said.

"I go to the Ancient House," he made answer to himself.

"What do you get?"

"I do not go to get; I go to give."

"What do you go to give?"

"I go to leave an empty basket at the door, and the lantern that the
Shopkeeper set in the hand of the pedlar."

"Who is the pedlar, hunchback?"

"The pedlar is he that carries the pack on his back."

"What carries he in the pack?"

"He carries what the Shopkeeper gave him--for he had no money and no
choice."

"Who is the Shopkeeper, dwarf?"

"The Shopkeeper--the Shopkeeper is the father of dwarfs and angels and
children--and fools."

"What does he sell, poor man?"

"He sells harness for men and cattle, and you give your lives for the
harness."

"What is this you carry, dwarf?"

"I carry home the harness of a soul."

"Is it worth carrying home?"

"The eyes grow sick at sight of the old harness in the way."

The watching figure, hearing, pitied.

It was Valmond.  Excited by Parpon's last words at the hotel, he had
followed, and was keen to chase this strange journeying to the end,
though suffering from the wound in his head, and shaken by the awful
accident of the evening.  But, as he said to himself; some things were to
be seen but once in the great game, and it was worth while seeing them,
even if life were the shorter for it.

On up the heights filed the strange procession until at last it came to
Dalgrothe Mountain.  On one of the foot-hills stood the Rock of Red
Pigeons.  This was the dwarf's secret resort, where no one ever disturbed
him; for the Little Good Folk of the Scarlet Hills (of whom it was
rumoured, he had come) held revel there, and people did not venture
rashly.  The land about it, and a hut farther down the hill, belonged
to Parpon; a legacy from the father of the young Seigneur.

It was all hills, gorges, rivers, and idle, murmuring pines.  Of a
morning, mist floated into mist as far as eye could see, blue and grey
and amethyst, a glamour of tints and velvety radiance.  The great hills
waved into each other like a vast violet sea, and, in turn, the tiny
earth-waves on each separate hill swelled into the larger harmony.  At
the foot of a steep precipice was the whirlpool from which Parpon, at
great risk, had rescued the father of De la Riviere, and had received
this lonely region as his reward.  To the dwarf it was his other world,
his real home; for here he lived his own life, and it was here he had
brought his ungainly dead, to give it housing.

The dogs drew up the grim cargo to a plateau near the Rock of Red
Pigeons, and, gathering sticks, Parpon lit a sweet-smelling fire of
cedar.  Then he went to the hut, and came back with a spade and a shovel.
At the foot of a great pine he began to dig.  As the work went on, he
broke into a sort of dirge, painfully sweet.  Leaning against a rock not
far away, Valmond watched the tiny man with the long arms throw up the
soft, good-smelling earth, enriched by centuries of dead leaves and
flowers.  The trees waved and bent and murmured, as though they gossiped
with each other over this odd gravedigger.  The light of the fire showed
across the gorge, touching off the far wall of pines with burnished
crimson, and huge flickering shadows looked like elusive spirits,
attendant on the lonely obsequies.  Now and then a bird, aroused by the
flame or the snap of a burning stick, rose from its nest and flew away;
and wild-fowl flitted darkly down the pass, like the souls of heroes
faring to Walhalla.  When an owl hooted, a wolf howled far off, or a loon
cried from the water below; the solemn fantasy took on the aspect of the
unreal.

Valmond watched like one in a dream, and twice or thrice he turned faint,
and drew his cloak about him as if he were cold; for a sickly air,
passing by, seemed to fill his lungs with poison.

At last the grave was dug, and, sprinkling its depth with leaves and soft
branches of spruce, the dwarf drew the body over, and lowered it slowly,
awkwardly, into the grave.  Then he covered all but the huge, unlovely
face, and, kneeling, peered down at it pitifully.

"Gabriel, Gabriel," he cried, "surely thy soul is better without its
harness!  I killed thee, and thou didst kill, and those we love die by
our own hands.  But no, I lie; I did not love thee, thou wert so ugly and
wild and cruel.  Poor boy!  Thou wast a fool, and thou wast a murderer.
Thou wouldst have slain my prince, and so I slew thee--I slew thee."

He rocked to and fro in abject sorrow, and cried again: "Hast thou no one
in all the world to mourn thee, save him who killed thee?  Is there no
one to wish thee speed to the Ancient House?  Art thou tossed away like
an old shoe, and no one to say, The Shoemaker that made thee must see to
it if thou wast ill-shapen, and walked crookedly, and did evil things?
Ah, is there no one to mourn thee, save him that killed thee?"

He leaned back, and cried out into the high hills like a remorseful,
tortured soul.

Valmond, no longer able to watch this grief in silence, stepped quickly
forward.  The dogs, seeing him, barked, and then were still; and the
dwarf looked up as he heard footsteps.

"Another has come to mourn him, Parpon," said Valmond.

A look of bewilderment and joy swam into Parpon's eyes.  Then he gave a
laugh of singular wildness, his face twitched, tears rushed down his
cheeks, and he threw himself at Valmond's feet, and clasped his knees,
crying:

"Ah-ah, my prince, great brother, thou hast come also!  Ah, thou didst
know the way up the long hill Thou hast come to the burial of a fool.
But he had a mother--yes, yes, a mother!  All fools have mothers,
and they should be buried well.  Come, ah, come, and speak softly
the Act of Contrition, and I will cover him up."

He went to throw in the earth, but Valmond pushed him aside gently.

"No, no," he said, "this is for me."  And he began filling the grave.

When they left the place of burial, the fire was burning low, for they
had talked long.  At the foot of the hills they looked back.  Day was
beginning to break over Dalgrothe Mountain.




CHAPTER X

When, next day, in the bright sunlight, the Little Chemist, the Cure,
and others, opened the door of the shed, taking off their hats in the
presence of the Master Workman, they saw that his seat was empty.  The
dead Caliban was gone--who should say how, or where?  The lock was still
on the doors, the walls were intact, there was no window for entrance or
escape.  He had vanished as weirdly as he came.

All day the people sought the place, viewing with awe and superstition
the shed of death, and the spot in the smithy where, it was said,
Valmond had killed the giant.

The day following was the feast of St. John the Baptist.  Mass was said
in the church, all the parish attending; and Valmond was present, with
Lagroin in full regimentals.

Plates of blessed bread were passed round at the close of mass, as was
the custom on this feast-day; and with a curious feeling that came to him
often afterwards, Valmond listened to his General saying solemnly:

                   "Holy bread, I take thee;
                    If I die suddenly,
                    Serve me as a sacrament."

With many eyes watching him curiously, he also ate the bread, repeating
the holy words.

All day there were sports and processions, the habitants gay in rosettes
and ribbons, flowers and maple leaves, as they idled or filed along the
streets, under arches of evergreens, where the Tricolor and Union Jack
mingled and fluttered amiably together.  Anvils, with powder placed
between, were touched off with a bar of red-hot iron, making a vast noise
and drawing applausive crowds to the smithy.  On the hill beside the
Cure's house was a little old cannon brought from the battle-field of
Ticonderoga, and its boisterous salutations were replied to from the
Seigneury, by a still more ancient piece of ordnance.  Sixty of Valmond's
recruits, under Lajeunesse the blacksmith, marched up and down the
streets, firing salutes with a happy, casual intrepidity, and setting
themselves off before the crowds with a good many airs and nods and
simple vanities.

In the early evening the good Cure blessed and lighted the great bonfire
before the church; and immediately, at this signal, an answering fire
sprang up on a hill at the other side of the village.  Then fire on fire
glittered and multiplied, till all the village was in a glow.  This was a
custom set in memory of the old days when fires flashed intelligence,
after a fixed code, across the great rivers and lakes, and from hill to
hill.

Far up against Dalgrothe Mountain appeared a sumptuous star, mystical and
red.  Valmond saw it from his window, and knew it to be Parpon's
watchfire, by the grave of his brother Gabriel.  The chief procession
started with the lighting of the bonfires: Singing softly, choristers and
acolytes in robes preceded the devout Cure, and pious believers and
youths on horseback, with ribbons flying, carried banners and shrines.
Marshals kept the lines steady, and four were in constant attendance on a
gorgeous carriage, all gilt and carving (the heirloom of the parish), in
which reclined the figure of a handsome lad, impersonating John the
Baptist, with long golden hair, dressed in rich robes and skins--
a sceptre in his hand, a snowy lamb at his feet.  The rude symbolism
was softened and toned to an almost poetical refinement, and gave to
the harmless revels a touch of Arcady.

After this semi-religious procession, evening brought the march of
Garotte's Kalathumpians.  They were carried on three long drays, each
drawn by four horses, half of them white, half black.  They were an
outlandish crew of comedians, dressed after no pattern, save the absurd-
clowns, satyrs, kings, soldiers, imps, barbarians.  Many had hideous
false-faces, and a few horribly tall skeletons had heads of pumpkins
containing lighted candles.  The marshals were pierrots and clowns on
long stilts, who towered in a ghostly way above the crowd.  They were
cheerful, fantastic revellers, singing the maddest and silliest of songs,
with singular refrains and repetitions.  The last line of one verse was
the beginning of another:

                   "A Saint Malo, beau port de mer,
                    Trois gros navir' sont arrives.

                    Trois gros navir' sont arrives
                    Charges d'avoin', charges de ble."

For an hour and more their fantastic songs delighted the simple folk.
They stopped at last in front of the Louis Quinze.  The windows of
Valmond's chambers were alight, and to one a staff was fastened.
Suddenly the Kalathumpians quieted where they stood, for the voice of
their leader, a sort of fat King of Yvetot, cried out:

"See there, my noisy children!"  It was the inventive lime-burner who
spoke.  "What come you here for, my rollicking blades?"

"We are a long way from home; we are looking for our brother, your
Majesty," they cried in chorus.

"Ha, ha!  What is your brother like, jolly dogs?"

"He has a face of ivory, and eyes like torches, and he carries a silver
sword."

"But what the devil is his face like ivory for, my fanfarons?"

"So that he shall not blush for us.  He is a grand seigneur," they
shouted back.

"Why are his eyes like torches, my ragamuffins?"

"To show us the way home."

Valmond appeared upon the balcony.

"What is it you wish, my children?" he asked.  "Brother," said the
fantastic leader, "we've lost our way.  Will you lead us home again?"

"It is a long travel," he answered, after the fashion of their own
symbols.  "There are high hills to climb; there may be wild beasts
in the way; and storms come down the mountains."

"We have strong hearts, and you have a silver sword, brother."

"I cannot see your faces, to know if you are true, my children," he
answered.

Instantly the clothes flew off, masks fell, pumpkins came crashing to the
ground, the stilts of the marshals dropped, and thirty men stood upon the
drays in crude military order, with muskets in their hands and cockades
in their caps.  At that moment also, a flag--the Tricolor--fluttered upon
the staff at Valmond's window.  The roll of a drum came out of the street
somewhere, and presently the people fell back before sixty armed men,
marching in columns, under Lagroin, while from the opposite direction
came Lajeunesse with sixty others, silent all, till they reached the
drays and formed round them slowly.

Valmond stood watching intently, and the people were very still, for this
seemed like real life, and no burlesque.  Some of the soldiery had
military clothes, old militia uniforms, or the rebel trappings of '37;
others, less fortunate, wore their trousers in long boots, their coats
buttoned lightly over their chests, and belted in; and the Napoleonic
cockade was in every cap.

"My children," said Valmond at last, "I see that your hearts are strong,
and that you have the bodies of true men.  We have sworn fealty to each
other, and the badge of our love is in your caps.  Let us begin our
journey home.  I will come down among you: I will come down among you,
and I will lead you from Pontiac to the sea, gathering comrades as we go;
then across the sea, to France; then to Paris and the Tuileries, where an
Orleans usurps the place of a Napoleon."

He descended and mounted his waiting horse.  At that moment De la Riviere
appeared on the balcony, and, stepping forward, said:

"My friends, do you know what you are doing?  This is folly.  This man--"

He got no further, for Valmond raised his hand to Lagroin, and the drums
began to beat.  Then he rode down in front of Lajeunesse's men, the
others sprang from the drays and fell into place, and soon the little
army was marching, four deep, through the village.

This was the official beginning of Valmond's fanciful quest for empire.
The people had a phrase, and they had a man; and they saw no further than
the hour.

As they filed past the house of Elise Malboir, the girl stood in the glow
of a bonfire, beside the oven where Valmond had first seen her.  All
around her was the wide awe of night, enriched by the sweet perfume of a
coming harvest.  He doffed his hat to her, then to the Tricolor, which
Lagroin had fastened on a tall staff before the house.  Elise did not
stir, did not courtesy or bow, but stood silent--entranced.  She was in a
dream.  This man, riding at the head of the simple villagers, was part of
her vision; and, at the moment, she did not rouse from the ecstasy of
reverie where her new-born love had led her.

For Valmond the scene had a moving power.  He heard again her voice
crying in the smithy: "He is dying!  Oh, my love!  my love!"

He was now in the heart of a fantastical adventure.  Filled with its
spirit, he would carry it bravely to the end, enjoying every step in it,
comedy or tragedy.  Yet all day, since he had eaten the sacred bread,
there had been ringing in his ears the words:

                        "Holy bread, I take thee;
                         If I die suddenly,
                         Serve me as a sacrament."

It came home to him, at the instant, what a toss-up it all was.  What was
he doing?  No matter: it was a game, in which nothing was sure--nothing
save this girl.  She would, he knew, with the abandon of an absorbing
passion, throw all things away for him.

Such as Madame Chalice--ah, she was a part of this brave fantasy, this
dream of empire, this inspiring play!  But Elise Malboir was life itself,
absolute, true, abiding.  His nature swam gloriously in his daring
exploit; he believed in it, he sank himself in it with a joyous
recklessness; it was his victory or his doom.  But it was a shake of the
dice--had Fate loaded them against him?

He looked up the hill towards the Manor.  Life was there in its essence;
beauty, talent, the genius of the dreamer, like his own.  But it was not
for him; dauphin or fool, it was not for him!  Madame Chalice was
his friendly inquisitor, not his enemy; she endured him for some talent
he had shown, for the apparent sincerity of his love for the cause; but
that was all.  Yet she was ever in this dream of his, and he felt that
she would always be; the unattainable, the undeserved, more splendid than
his cause itself--the cause for which he would give--what would he give?
Time would show.

But Elise Malboir, abundant, true, fine, in the healthy vigour of her
nature, with no dream in her heart but love fulfilled--she was no part of
his adventure, but of that vital spirit which can bring to the humblest
as to the highest the good reality of life.




CHAPTER XI

It was the poignancy of these feelings which, later, drew Valmond to
the ashes of the fire in whose glow Elise had stood.  The village was
quieting down, the excited habitants had scattered to their homes.  But
in one or two houses there was dancing, and, as he passed, Valmond heard
the chansons of the humble games they played--primitive games, primitive
chansons:

              "In my right hand I hold a rose-bush,
               Which will bloom, Manon lon la!
               Which will bloom in the month of May.
               Come into our dance, pretty rose-bush,
               Come and kiss, Manon Ion la!
               Come and kiss whom you love best!"

The ardour, the delight, the careless joy of youth, were in the song and
in the dance.  These simple folk would marry, beget children, labour
hard, obey Mother Church, and yield up the ghost peacefully in the end,
after their kind; but now and then there was born among them one not
after their kind: even such as Madelinette, with the stirring of talent
in her veins, and the visions of the artistic temperament--delight and
curse all at once--lifting her out of the life, lonely, and yet
sorrowfully happy.

Valmond looked around.  How still it was, the home of Elise standing
apart in the quiet fields!  But involuntarily his eyes were drawn to the
hill beyond, where showed a light in a window of the Manor.  To-morrow he
would go there: he had much to say to Madame Chalice.  The moon was lying
off above the edge of hills, looking out on the world complacently, like
an indulgent janitor scanning the sleepy street from his doorway.

He was abruptly drawn from his reverie by the entrance of Lagroin into
the little garden; and he followed the old man through the open doorway.
All was dark, but as they stepped within they heard some one move.
Presently a match was struck, and Elise came forward with a candle raised
level with her dusky head.  Lagroin looked at her in indignant
astonishment.

"Do you not see who is here, girl?" he demanded.  "Your Excellency!"
she said confusedly to Valmond, and, bowing, offered him a chair.

"You must pardon her, sire," said the old sergeant.  "She has never been
taught, and she's a wayward wench."

Valmond waved his hand.  "Nonsense, we are friends.  You are my General;
she is your niece."  His eyes followed Elise as she set out for them some
cider, a small flask of cognac, and some seed-cakes; luxuries which were
served but once a year in this house, as in most homes of Pontiac.

For a long time Valmond and his General talked, devised, planned,
schemed, till the old man grew husky and pale.  The sight of his senile
weariness flashed the irony of the whole wild dream into Valmond's mind.
He rose, and, giving his arm, led Lagroin to his bedroom, and bade him
good-night.  When he returned to the room, it was empty.

He looked around, and, seeing an open door, moved to it quickly.  It led
into a little stairway.

He remembered then that there was a room which had been, apparently,
tacked on, like an after-thought, to the end of the house.  Seeing the
glimmer of a light beyond, he went up a few steps, and came face to face
with Elise, who, candle in hand, was about to descend the stairs again.

For a moment she stood quite still, then placed the candle on the rude
little dressing-table, built of drygoods boxes, and draped with fresh
muslin.  Valmond took in every detail of the chamber at a single glance.
It was very simple and neat, with the small wooden bedstead corded with
rope, the poor hickory rocking-chair, the flaunting chromo of the Holy
Family, the sprig of blessed palm, the shrine of the Virgin, the print
skirts hanging on the wall, the stockings lying across a chair, the bits
of ribbon on the bed.  The quietness, the alluring simplicity, the whole
room filled with the rich presence of the girl, sent a flood of colour to
Valmond's face, and his heart beat hard.  Curiosity only had led him into
the room, something more radical held him there.

Elise seemed to read his thoughts, and, taking up her candle, she came on
to the doorway.  Neither had spoken.  As she was about to pass him, he
suddenly took her arm.  But, glancing towards the window, he noticed that
the blind was not down.  He turned and blew out the candle in her hand.

"Ah, your Excellency!" she cried in tremulous affright.

"We could have been seen from outside," he explained.  She turned and saw
the moonlight streaming in at the window, and lying like a silver
coverlet upon the floor.  As if with a blind, involuntary instinct for
protection, she stepped forward into the moonlight, and stood there
motionless.  The sight thrilled him, and he moved towards her.  The mind
of the girl reasserted itself, and she hastened to the door.  Again, as
she was about to pass him, he put his hand upon her shoulder.

"Elise--Elise!" he said.  The voice was persuasive, eloquent, going to
every far retreat of emotion in her.  There was a sudden riot in his
veins, and he took her passionately in his arms, and kissed her on the
lips, on the eyes, on the hair, on the neck.  At that moment the outer
door opened below, and the murmur of voices came to them.

"Oh, monsieur--oh, your Excellency, let me go!" she whispered fearfully.
"It is my mother and Duclosse the mealman."

Valmond recognised the fat, wheezy tones of Duclosse--Sergeant Duclosse.
He released her, and she caught up the candle.

"What can you do?" she whispered.

"I will wait here.  I must not go down," he replied.  "It would mean
ruin."

Ruin!  ruin!  Was she face to face with ruin already, she who, two
minutes ago, was as safe and happy as a young bird in its nest?  He felt
instantly that he had made a mistake, had been cruel, though he had not
intended it.

"Ruin to me," he said at once.  "Duclosse is a stupid fellow: he would
not understand; he would desert me; and that would be disastrous at this
moment.  Go down," he said.  "I will wait here, Elise."

Her brows knitted painfully.  "Oh, monsieur, I'd rather face death, I
believe, than that you should remain here."

But he pushed her gently towards the door, and a moment afterwards he
heard her talking to Duclosse and her mother.

He sat down on the couch and listened for a moment.  His veins were still
glowing from the wild moment just passed.  Elise would come back--and
then--what?  She would be alone with him again in this room, loving him--
fearing him.  He remembered that once, when a child, he had seen a
peasant strike his wife, felling her to the ground; and how afterwards
she had clasped him round the neck and kissed him, as he bent over her in
merely vulgar fright lest he had killed her.  That scene flashed before
him.

There came an opposing thought.  As Madame Chalice had said, either as
prince or barber, he was playing a terrible game.  Why shouldn't he get
all he could out of it while it lasted--let the world break over him when
it must?  Why should he stand in an orchard of ripe fruit, and refuse to
pick what lay luscious to his hand, what this stupid mealman below would
pick, and eat, and yawn over?  There was the point.  Wouldn't the girl
rather have him, Valmond, at any price, than the priest-blessed love of
Duclosse and his kind?

The thought possessed, devoured him for a moment.  Then suddenly there
again rang in his ears the words which had haunted him all day:

                   "Holy bread, I take thee;
                    If I die suddenly,
                    Serve me as a sacrament."

They passed backwards and forwards in his mind for a little time with no
significance.  Then they gave birth to another thought.  Suppose he
stayed; suppose he took advantage of the love of this girl?  He looked
around the little room, showing so peacefully in the moonlight--the
religious symbols, the purity, the cleanliness, the calm poverty.  He had
known the inside of the boudoirs and the bed-chambers of women of fashion
--he had seen them, at least.  In them the voluptuous, the indulgent,
seemed part of the picture.  But he was not a beast, that he could fail
to see what this tiny bedroom would be, if he followed his wild will.
Some terrible fate might overtake his gay pilgrimage to empire, and leave
him lost, abandoned, in a desert of ruin.

Why not give up the adventure, and come to this quiet, and this good
peace, so shutting out the stir and violence of the world?

All at once Madame Chalice came into his thoughts, swam in his sight,
and he knew that what he felt for this peasant girl was of one side of
his nature only.  All of him worth the having--was any worth the having?
responded to that diffusing charm which brought so many men to the feet
of that lady of the Manor, who had lovers by the score: from such as the
Cure and the avocat, gentle and noble, and requited, to the young
Seigneur, selfish and ulterior, and unrequited.

He got to his feet quietly.  No, he would make a decent exit, in triumph
or defeat, to honour the woman who was standing his friend.  Let them,
the British Government at Quebec, proceed against him; he would have only
one trouble to meet, one to leave behind.  He would not load this girl
with shame as well as sorrow.  Her love itself was affliction enough to
her.  This adventure was serious; a bullet might drop him; the law might
remove him: so he would leave here at once.

He was about to open the window, when he heard a door shut below, and the
thud of heavy steps outside the house.  Drawing back, he waited until he
heard the foot of Elise upon the stair.  She came in without a light, and
at first did not see him.  He heard her gasp.  Stepping forward a little,
he said:

"I am here, Elise.  Come."

She trembled as she came.  "Oh, monsieur--your Excellency!" she
whispered; "oh, you cannot go down, for my mother sits ill by the fire.
You cannot go out that way."

He took both her hands.  "No matter.  Poor child, you are trembling!
Come."

He drew her towards the couch.  She shrank back.  "Oh no, monsieur, oh--
I die of shame!"

"There is no need, Elise," he answered gently, and he sat on the edge of
the couch, and drew her to his side.  "Let us say good-night."

She grew very still, and he felt her move towards him, as she divined his
purpose, and knew that this room of hers would have no shadow in it to-
morrow, and her soul no unpardonable sin.  A warm peace passed through
her veins, and she drew nearer still.  She did not know that this new
ardent confidence came near to wrecking her.  For Valmond had an
instant's madness, and only saved himself from the tumult in his blood by
getting to his feet, with strenuous resolution.  Taking both her hands,
he kissed her on the cheeks, and said:

"Adieu, Elise.  May your sorrow never be more, and my happiness never
less.  I am going now."

He felt her hand grasp his arm, as if with a desire that he should not
leave her.  Then she rose quickly, and came with him to the window.
Raising the sash, she held it, and he looked out.  There seemed to be no
one in the road, no one in the yard.  So, half turning, he swung himself
down by his hands, and dropped to the ground.  From the window above a
sob came to him, and Elise's face, all tears, showed for an instant in
the moonlight.

He did not seek the road directly, but, climbing a fence near by, crossed
a hay-field, going unseen, as he thought, to the village.

But a lady, walking in the road with an old gentleman, had seen and
recognised him.  Her fingers clinched with anger at the sight, and her
spirit filled with disgust.

"What are you looking at?" said her companion, who was short-sighted.

"At the tricks moonlight plays.  Shadows frighten me sometimes, my dear
avocat."  She shuddered.  "My dear madame!" he said in warm sympathy.




CHAPTER XII

The sun was going down behind the hills, like a drowsy boy to his bed,
radiant and weary from his day's sport.  The villagers were up at
Dalgrothe Mountain, soldiering for Valmond.  Every evening, when the
haymakers put up their scythes, the mill-wheel stopped turning, and the
Angelus ceased, the men marched away into the hills, where the ardent
soldier of fortune had pitched his camp.

Tents, muskets, ammunition came out of dark places, as they are ever sure
to come when the war-trumpet sounds.  All seems peace, but suddenly, at
the wild call, the latent barbarian in human nature springs up and is
ready; and the cruder the arms, the fiercer the temper that wields.

Recruits now arrived from other parishes, and besides those who came
every night to drill, there were others who stayed always in camp.  The
lime-burner left his kiln, and sojourned with his dogs at Dalgrothe
Mountain; the mealman neglected his trade; and Lajeunesse was no longer
at his blacksmith shop, save after dark, when the red glow of his forge
could be seen till midnight.  He was captain of a company in the daytime,
forgeron at night.

Valmond, no longer fantastic in dress, speech, or manner, was happy,
busy, buoyed up and cast down by turn, troubled, exhilarated.  He could
not understand these variations of health and mood.  He had not felt
equably well since the night of Gabriel's burial in the miasmic air of
the mountain.  At times he felt a wonderful lightness of head and heart,
with entrancing hopes; again a heaviness and an aching, accompanied by a
feeling of doom.  He fought the depression, and appeared before his men
cheerful and alert always.  He was neither looking back nor looking
forward, but living in his dramatic theme from day to day, and wondering
if, after all, this movement, by some joyful, extravagant chance, might
not carry him on even to the chambers of the Tuileries.

From the first day that he had gathered these peasants about him, had
convinced, almost against their will, the wise men of the village, this
fanciful exploit had been growing a deep reality to him.  He had
convinced himself; he felt that he could, in a larger sphere, gather
thousands about him where he now gathered scores--with a good cause.
Well, was his cause not good, he asked himself?

There were others to whom this growing reality was painful.  The young
Seigneur was serious enough about it, and more than once, irritated and
perturbed, he sought Madame Chalice; but she gave him no encouragement,
remarking coldly that Monsieur Valmond probably knew very well what he
was doing, and was weighing all consequences.

She had become interested in a passing drama, and De la Riviere's
attentions produced no impression on her, and gave her no pleasure.  They
were, however, not obtrusive.  She had seen much of him two years before;
he had been a good friend of her husband.  She was amused at his
attentions then; she had little to occupy her, and she felt herself
superior to any man's emotions: not such as this young Seigneur could win
her away from her passive but certain fealty.  She had played with fire,
from the very spirit of adventure in her, but she had not been burnt.

"You say he is an impostor, dear monsieur," she said languidly: "do pray
exert yourself, and prove him one.  What is your evidence?"

She leaned back in the very chair where she had sat looking at Valmond a
few weeks before, her fingers idly smoothing out the folds of her dress.

"Oh, the thing is impossible," he answered, blowing the smoke of a
cigarette; "we've had no real proof of his birth, and life--and so on."

"But there are relics--and so on!" she said suggestively, and she picked
up the miniature of the Emperor.

"Owning a skeleton doesn't make it your ancestor," he replied.

He laughed, for he was pleased at his own cleverness, and he also wished
to remain good-tempered.

"I am so glad to see you at last take the true attitude towards this,"
she responded brightly.  "If it's a comedy, enjoy it.  If it's a
tragedy"--she drew herself up with a little shudder, for she was thinking
of that figure dropping from Elise's window--"you cannot stop it.
Tragedy is inevitable; but comedy is within the gift and governance of
mortals."

For a moment again she was lost in the thought of Elise, of Valmond's
vulgarity and commonness; and he had dared to speak words of love almost
to her!  She flushed to the hair, as she had done fifty times since she
had seen him that moonlit night.  Ah, she had thought him the dreamer,
the enthusiast--maybe, in kind, credulous moments, the great man he
claimed to be; and he had only been the sensualist after all!  That he
did not love Elise, she knew well enough: he had been coldblooded; in
this, at least, he was Napoleonic.

She had not spoken with him since that night; but she had had two long
letters superscribed: "In Camp, Headquarters, Dalgrothe Mountain," and
these had breathed only patriotism, the love of a cause, the warmth of
a strong, virile temperament, almost a poetical abandon of unnamed
ambitions and achievements.  She had read the letters again and again,
for she had found it hard to reconcile them with her later knowledge of
this man.  He wrote to her as to an ally, frankly, warmly.  She felt the
genuine thing in him somewhere; and, in spite of all, she felt a sort of
kinship for him.  Yet that scene--that scene!  She flushed with anger
again, and, in spite of her smiling lips, the young Seigneur saw the
flush, and wondered.

"The thing must end soon," he said, as he rose to go, for a messenger had
come for him.  "He is injuring the peace, the trade, and the life of the
parishes; he is gathering men and arms, drilling, exploiting military
designs in one country, to proceed against another.  England is at peace
with France!"

"An international matter, this?" she asked sarcastically.

"Yes.  The Government at Quebec is English; we are French and he is
French; and, I repeat, this thing is serious."

She smiled.  "I am an American.  I have no responsibility."

"They might arrest you for aiding and abetting if--"

"If what, dear and cheerful friend?"

"If I did not make it right for you."  He smiled, approving his own
kindness.

She touched his arm, and said with ironical sweetness: "How you relieve
my mind!"  Then with delicate insinuation: "I have a lot of old muskets
here, at least two hundred pounds of powder, and plenty of provisions,
and I will send them to--Valmond Napoleon."

He instantly became grave.  "I warn you--"

She interrupted him.  "Nonsense!  You warn me!"  She laughed mockingly.
"I warn you, dear Seigneur, that you will be more sorry than satisfied,
if you meddle in this matter."

"You are going to send those things to him?" he asked anxiously.

"Certainly--and food every day."  And she kept her word.

De la Riviere, as he went down the hill, thought with irritation of how
ill things were going with him and Madame Chalice--so different from two
years ago, when their friendship had first begun.  He had remembered her
with a singular persistency; he had looked forward to her coming back;
and when she came, his heart had fluttered like a schoolboy's.  But
things had changed.  Clearly she was interested in this impostor.  Was
it the man himself or the adventure?  He did not know.  But the adventure
was the man--and who could tell?  Once he thought he had detected some
warmth for himself in her eye, in the clasp of her hand; there was
nothing of that sort now.  A black, ungentlemanly spirit seized him.

It possessed him most strongly at the moment he was passing the home of
Elise Malboir.  The girl was standing by the gate, looking down towards
the village.  Her brow was a little heavy, so that it gave her eyes at
all times a deep look, but now De la Riviere saw that they were brooding
as well.  There was sadness in the poise of the head.  He did not take
off his hat to her.

                    "'Oh, grand to the war he goes,
                         O gai, rive le roi!'"

he said teasingly.  He thought she might have a lover among the recruits
at Dalgrothe Mountain.

She turned to him, startled, for she thought he meant Valmond.  She did
not speak, but became very still and pale.

"Better tie him up with a garter, Elise, and get the old uncle back to
Ville Bambord.  Trouble's coming.  The game'll soon be up."

"What trouble?" she asked.

"Battle, murder, and sudden death," he answered, and passed on with a
sour laugh.

She slowly repeated his words, looked towards the Manor House, with a
strange expression, then went up to her little bedroom and sat on the
edge of the bed for a long time, where she had sat with Valmond.  Every
word, every incident, of that night came back to her; and her heart
filled up with worship.  It flowed over into her eyes and fell upon her
clasped hands.  If trouble did come to him?--He had given her a new
world, he should have her life and all else.

A half-hour later, De la Riviere came rapping at the Cure's door.
The sun was almost gone, the smell of the hay-fields floated over the
village, and all was quiet in the streets.  Women gossiped in their
doorways, but there was no stir anywhere.  With the young Seigneur was
the member of the Legislature for the county.  His mood was different
from that of his previous visit to Pontiac; for he had been told that
whether the cavalier adventurer was or was not a Napoleon, this campaign
was illegal.  He had made no move.  Being a member of the Legislature,
he naturally shirked responsibility, and he had come to see the young
Seigneur, who was justice of the peace, and practically mayor of the
county.  They found the Cure, the avocat, and Medallion, talking together
amiably.

The three were greatly distressed by the representations of the member
and De la Riviere.  The Cure turned to Monsieur Garon, the avocat,
inquiringly.

"The law--the law of the case is clear," said the avocat helplessly.
"If the peace is disturbed, if there is conspiracy to injure a country
not at war with our own, if arms are borne with menace, if His
Excellency--"

"His Excellency--my faith!--You're an ass, Garon!" cried the young
Seigneur, with an angry sneer.

For once in his life the avocat bridled up.  He got to his feet, and
stood silent an instant, raising himself up and down on his tiptoes, his
lips compressed, his small body suddenly contracting to a firmness, and
grown to a height, his eyelids working quickly.  To the end of his life
the Cure remembered and talked of the moment when the avocat gave battle.
To him it was superb--he never could have done it himself.

"I repeat, His Excellency, Monsieur De la Riviere.  My information is
greater than yours, both by accident and through knowledge.  I accept him
as a Napoleon, and as a Frenchman I have no cause to blush for my homage
or my faith, or for His Excellency.  He is a man of loving disposition,
of great knowledge, of power to win men, of deep ideas, of large courage.
Monsieur, I cannot forget the tragedy he stayed at the smithy, with risk
of his own life.  I cannot forget--"

The Cure, anticipating, nodded at him encouragingly.  Probably the avocat
intended to say something quite different, but the look in the Cure's
eyes prompted him, and he continued:

"I cannot forget that he has given to the poor, and liberally to the
Church, and has promised benefits to the deserving--ah, no, no, my dear
Seigneur!"

He had delivered his speech in a quaint, quick way, as though addressing
a jury, and when he had finished, he sat down again, and nodded his head,
and tapped a foot on the floor; and the Cure did the same, looking
inquiringly at De la Riviere.

This was the first time there had been trouble in the little coterie.
They had never differed painfully before.  Tall Medallion longed to say
something, but he waited for the Cure to speak.

"What is your mind, Monsieur le Cure?" asked De la Riviere testily.

"My dear friend, Monsieur Garon, has answered for us both," replied the
Cure quietly.

"Do you mean to say that you will not act with me to stop this thing," he
urged--"not even for the safety of the people?"

The reply was calm and resolute:

"My people shall have my prayers and my life, when needed, but I do not
feel called upon to act for the State.  I have the honour to be a friend
of His Excellency."

"By Heaven, the State shall act!" cried De la Riviere, fierce with
rancour.  "I shall go to this Valmond to-night, with my friend the member
here.  I shall warn him, and call upon the people to disperse.  If he
doesn't listen, let him beware!  I seem to stand alone in the care of
Pontiac!"

The avocat turned to his desk.  "No, no; I will write you a legal
opinion," he said, with professional honesty.  "You shall have my legal
help; but for the rest, I am at one with my dear Cure."

"Well, Medallion, you too?" asked De la Riviere.  "I'll go with you to
the camp," answered the auctioneer.  "Fair play is all I care for.
Pontiac will come out of this all right.  Come along."

But the avocat kept them till he had written his legal opinion and
had handed it courteously to the young Seigneur.  They were all silent.
There had been a discourtesy, and it lay like a cloud on the coterie.
De la Riviere opened the door to go out, after bowing to the Cure and the
avocat, who stood up with mannered politeness; but presently he turned,
came back, was about to speak, when, catching sight of a miniature of
Valmond on the avocat's desk, before which was set a bunch of violets,
he wheeled and left the room without a word.

The moon had not yet risen, but stars were shining, when the young
Seigneur and the member came to Dalgrothe Mountain.  On one side of the
Rock of Red Pigeons was a precipice and wild water; on the other was a
deep valley like a cup, and in the centre of this was a sort of plateau
or gentle slope.  Dalgrothe Mountain towered above.  Upon this plateau
Valmond had pitched his tents.  There was water, there was good air, and
for purposes of drill--or defence--it was excellent.  The approaches were
patrolled, so that no outside stragglers could reach either the Rock of
Red Pigeons or the valley, or see what was going on below, without
permission.  Lagroin was everywhere, drilling, commanding, browbeating
his recruits one minute, and praising them the next.  Lajeunesse,
Garotte, and Muroc were invaluable, each after his kind.  Duclosse the
mealman was sutler.

The young Seigneur and his companions were not challenged, and they
passed on up to the Rock of Red Pigeons.  Looking down, they had a
perfect view of the encampment.  The tents had come from lumber-camps,
from river-driving gangs, and from private stores; there was some regular
uniform, flags were flying everywhere, many fires were burning, the voice
of Lagroin in command came up the valley loudly, and Valmond watched the
drill and a march past.  The fires lit up the sides of the valley and
glorified the mountains beyond.  In this inspiring air it was impossible
to feel an accent of disaster or to hear the stealthy footfall of ruin.

The three journeyed down into the valley, then up onto the plateau, where
they were challenged, allowed to pass, and came to where Valmond sat upon
his horse.  At sight of them, with a suspicion of the truth, he ordered
Lagroin to march the men down the long plateau.  They made a good figure
filing past the three visitors, as the young Seigneur admitted.

Valmond got from his horse, and waited for them.  He looked weary, and
there were dark circles round his eyes, as though he had had an illness;
but he stood erect and quiet.  His uniform was that of a general of the
Empire.  It was rather dingy, yet it was of rich material, and he wore
the ribbon of the Legion of Honour on his breast.  His paleness was not
of fear, for when his eyes met Monsieur De la Riviere's, there was in
them waiting, inquiry--nothing more.  He greeted them all politely, and
Medallion warmly, shaking his hand twice; for he knew well that the gaunt
auctioneer had only kindness in his heart; and they had exchanged
humorous stories more than once--a friendly bond.

He motioned towards his tent near by, but the young Seigneur declined.
Valmond looked round, and ordered away a listening soldier.

"It is business and imperative," said De la Riviere.  Valmond bowed.
"Isn't it time this burlesque was ended?" continued the challenger,
waving a hand towards the encampment.

"My presence here is my reply," answered Valmond.  "But how does it
concern monsieur?"

"All that concerns Pontiac concerns me."

"And me; I am as good a citizen as you."

"You are troubling our people.  This is illegal--this bearing arms, these
purposes of yours.  It is mere filibustering, and you are an--"

Valmond waved his hand, as if to stop the word.  "I am Valmond Napoleon,
monsieur."

"If you do not promise to forego this, I will arrest you," said De la
Riviere sharply.

"You?" Valmond smiled ironically.

"I am a justice of the peace.  I have the power."

"I have the power to prevent arrest, and I will prevent it, monsieur.
You alone of all this parish, I believe of all this province, turn a
sour face, a sour heart, to me.  I regret it, but I do not fear it."

"I will have you in custody, or there is no law in Quebec," was the acrid
set-out.

Valmond's face was a feverish red now, and he made an impatient gesture.
Both men had bitter hearts, for both knew well that the touchstone of
this malice was Madame Chalice.  Hatred looked out of their eyes.  It
was, each knew, a fight to the dark end.

"There is not law enough to justify you, monsieur," answered Valmond
quickly.

"Be persuaded, monsieur," urged the member to Valmond, with a persuasive,
smirking gesture.

"All this country could not persuade me; only France can do that; and
first I shall persuade France," he answered, speaking to his old cue
stoutly.

"Mummer!" broke out De la Riviere.  "By God, I will arrest you now!"

He stepped forward, putting his hand in his breast, as if to draw a
weapon, though, in truth, it was a summons.

Like lightning the dwarf shot in between, and a sword flashed up at De la
Riviere's breast.

"I saved your father's life, but I will take yours, if you step farther,
dear Seigneur," he said coolly.

Valmond had not stirred, but his face was pale again.

"That will do, Parpon," he said quietly.  "Monsieur had better go,"
he added to De la Riviere, "or even his beloved law may not save him!"

"I will put an end to this," cried the other, bursting with anger.
"Come, gentlemen," he said to his companions, and turned away.

Medallion paused, then came to Valmond and said: "Your Excellency, if
ever you need me, let me know.  I'd do much to prove myself no enemy."

Valmond gave him his hand courteously, bowed, and, beckoning a soldier to
take his horse, walked towards his tent.  He swayed slightly as he went,
then a trembling seized him.  He staggered as he entered the door of the
tent, and Parpon, seeing, ran forward and caught him in his arms.  The
little man laid him down, felt his pulse, his heart, saw a little black
stain on his lips, and cried out in a great fear:

"My God!  The black fever!  Ah, my Napoleon!"

Valmond lay in a burning stupor; and word went abroad that he might die;
but Parpon insisted that he would be well presently, and at first would
let no one but the Little Chemist and the Cure come in or near the tent.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Her sight was bounded by the little field where she strayed
I was never good at catechism
The blind tyranny of the just
Visions of the artistic temperament--delight and curse






WHEN VALMOND CAME TO PONTIAC

The Story of a Lost Napoleon

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.



CHAPTER XIII

The sickness had come like a whirlwind: when it passed, what would be
left?  The fight went on in the quiet hills--a man of no great stature
or strength, against a monster who racked him in a fierce embrace.  A
thousand scenes flashed through Valmond's brain, before his eyes, while
the great wheel of torture went round, and he was broken, broken-mended
and broken again, upon it.  Spinning--he was for ever spinning, like a
tireless moth through a fiery air; and the world went roaring past.  In
vain he cried to the wheelman to stop the wheel: there was no answer.
Would those stars never cease blinking in and out, or the wind stop
whipping the swift clouds past?  So he went on, endless years, driving
through space, some terrible intangible weight dragging at his heart, and
all his body panting as it spun.

Grotesque faces came and went, and bright-eyed women floated by, laughing
at him, beckoning to him; but he could not come, because of this endless
going.  He heard them singing, he felt the divine notes in his battered
soul; he tried to weep for the hopeless joy of it; but the tears came no
higher than his throat.  Why did they mock him so?  At last, all the
figures merged into one, and she had the face--ah, he had seen it
centuries ago!--of Madame Chalice.  Strange that she was so young still,
and that was so long past--when he stood on a mountain, and, clambering
a high wall of rock, looked over into a happy No-man's Land.

Why did the face elude him so, flashing in and out of the vapours?
Why was its look sorrowful and distant?  And yet there was that perfect
smile, that adorable aspect of the brow, that light in the deep eyes.
He tried to stop the eternal spinning, but it went remorselessly on;
and presently the face was gone; but not till it had given him ease of
his pain.

Then came fighting, fighting, nothing but fighting--endless charges of
cavalry, continuous wheelings and advancings and retreatings, and the mad
din of drums; afterwards, in a swift quiet, the deep, even thud of the
horses' hoofs striking the ground.  Flags and banners flaunted gaily by.
How the helmets flashed, and the foam flew from the bits!  But those
flocks of blackbirds flying over the heads of the misty horsemen--they
made him shiver.  Battle, battle, battle, and death, and being born--he
felt it all.

All at once there came a wide peace and clearing, and the everlasting jar
and movement ceased.  Then a great pause, and light streamed round him,
comforting him.

It seemed to him that he was lying helpless and still by falling water in
a valley.  The water soothed him, and he fell asleep.  After a long time
he waked, and dimly knew that a face, good to look at, was bending over
him.  In a vague, far-off way he saw that it was Elise Malboir; but even
as he saw, his eyes closed, the world dropped away, and he sank to sleep
again.

It was no vision or delirium; for Elise had come.  She had knelt beside
his bed, and given him drink, and smoothed his pillow; and once, when
no one was in the tent, she stooped and kissed his hot dark lips, and
whispered words that were not for his ears to hear, nor to be heard by
any one of this world.  The good Cure found her there.  He had not heart
to bid her go home, and he made it clear to the villagers that he
approved of her great kindness.  But he bade her mother also come,
and she stayed in a tent near by.

Lagroin and two hundred men held the encampment, and every night the
recruits arrived from the village, drilled as before, and waited for the
fell disease to pass.  No one knew its exact nature, but now and again,
in long years, some one going to Dalgrothe Mountain was seized by it, and
died, or was left stricken with a great loss of the senses, or the limbs.
Yet once or twice, they said, men had come up from it no worse at all.
There was no known cure, and the Little Chemist could only watch the
swift progress of the fever, and use simple remedies to allay the
suffering.  Parpon knew that the disease had seized upon Valmond the
night of the burial of Gabriel.  He remembered now the sickly, pungent
air that floated past, and how Valmond, weak from the loss of blood in
the fight at the smithy, shuddered, and drew his cloak about him.  A few
days would end it, for good or ill.

Madame Chalice heard the news with consternation, and pity would have
sent her to Valmond's bedside, but that she found Elise was his faithful
nurse and servitor.  This fixed in her mind the belief that if Valmond
died, he would leave both misery and shame behind; if he lived, she
should, in any case, see him no more.  But she sent him wines and
delicacies, and she also despatched a messenger to a city sixty miles
away, for the best physician.  Then she sought the avocat, to discover
whether he had any exact information as to Valmond's friends in Quebec,
or in France.  She had promised not to be his enemy, and she remembered
with a sort of sorrow that she had told him she meant to be his friend;
but, having promised, she would help him in his sore strait.

She had heard of De la Riviere's visit to Valmond, and she intended
sending for him, but delayed it.  The avocat told her nothing: matters
were in abeyance, and she abided the issue; meanwhile getting news of the
sick man twice a day.  More, she used all her influence to keep up the
feeling for him in the country, to prevent flagging of enthusiasm.  This
she did out of a large heart, and a kind of loyalty to her temperament
and to his own ardour for his cause.  Until he was proved the comedian
(in spite of the young Seigneur) she would stand by him, so far as his
public career was concerned.  Misfortune could not make her turn from a
man; it was then she gave him a helping hand.  What was between him and
Elise was for their own souls and consciences.

As she passed the little cottage in the field the third morning of
Valmond's illness, she saw the girl entering.  Elise had come to get some
necessaries for Valmond and for her mother.  She was pale; her face had
gained a spirituality, a refinement, new and touching.  Madame Chalice
was tempted to go and speak to her, and started to do so, but turned
back.

"No, no, not until we know the worst of this illness--then!" she said to
herself.

But ten minutes later De la Riviere was not so kind.  He had guessed a
little at Elise's secret, and as he passed the house on the way to visit
Madame Chalice, seeing the girl, he came to the door and said:

"How goes it with the distinguished gentleman, Elise?  I hear you are his
slave."

The girl turned a little pale.  She was passing a hot iron over some
coarse sheets, and, pausing, she looked steadily at him and replied:

"It is not far to Dalgrothe Mountain, monsieur."

"The journey's too long for me; I haven't your hot young blood," he said
suggestively.

"It was not so long a dozen years ago, monsieur."  De la Riviere flushed
to his hair.  That memory was a hateful chapter in his life--a boyish
folly, which involved the miller's wife.  He had buried it, the village
had forgotten it,--such of it as knew,--and the remembrance of it stung
him.  He had, however, brought it on himself, and he must eat the bitter
fruit.

The girl's eyes were cold and hard.  She knew him to be Valmond's enemy,
and she had no idea of sparing him.  She knew also that he had been
courteous enough to send a man each day to inquire after Valmond, but
that was not to the point; he was torturing her, he had prophesied the
downfall of her "spurious Napoleon."

"It will be too long a journey for you, and for all, presently," he said.

"You mean that His Excellency will die?" she asked, her heart beating so
hard that it hurt her.  Yet the flat-iron moved backwards and forwards
upon the sheets mechanically.

"Or fight a Government," he answered.  "He has had a good time, and good
times can't last for ever, can they, Elise?  Have you ever thought of
that?"

She turned pale and swayed over the table.  In an instant he was beside
her; for though he had been irritable and ungenerous, he had at bottom a
kind heart.  Catching up a glass of water, he ran an arm round her waist
and held the cup to her lips.

"What's the matter, my girl?" he asked.  "There, pull yourself
together."

She drew away from him, though grateful for his new attitude.  She could
not bear everything.  She felt nervous and strangely weak.

"Won't you go, monsieur?" she said, and turned to her ironing again.

He looked at her closely, and not unkindly.  For a moment the thought
possessed him that evil and ill had come to her.  But he put it away from
him, for there was that in her eyes which gave his quick suspicions the
lie.  He guessed now that the girl loved Valmond, and he left her with
that thought.  Going up the hill, deep in thought, he called at the
Manor, to find that Madame Chalice was absent, and would not be back
till evening.

When Elise was left alone, a weakness seized her again, as it had done
when De la Riviere was present.  She had had no sleep in four days, and
it was wearing on her, she said to herself, refusing to believe that a
sickness was coming.  Leaving the kitchen, she went up to her bedroom.
Opening the window, she sat down on the side of the bed and looked round.
She figured Valmond in her mind as he stood in this place and that, his
voice, his words to her, the look in his face, the clasp of his hand.

All at once she sprang up, fell on her knees before the little shrine of
the Virgin, and burst into tears.  Her rich hair, breaking loose, flowed
round her-the picture of a Magdalen; but it was, in truth, a pure girl
with a true heart.  At last she calmed herself and began to pray:

"Ah, dear Mother of God, thou who dost speak for the sorrowful before thy
Son and the Father, be merciful to me and hear me.  I am but a poor girl,
and my life is no matter.  But he is a great man, and he has work to do,
and he is true and kind.  Oh, pray for him, divine Mother, sweet Mary,
that he may be saved from death!  If the cup must be emptied, may it be
given to me to drink!  Oh, see how all the people come to him and love
him!  For the saving of Madelinette, oh, may his own life be given him!
He cannot pray for himself, but I pray for him.  Dear Mother of God, I
love him, and I would lose my life for his sake.  Sweet Mary, comfort thy
child, and out of thy own sorrow be good to my sorrow.  Hear me and pray
for me, divine Mary.  Amen."

Her whole nature had been emptied out, and there came upon her a calm, a
strange clearness of brain, exhausted in body as she was.  For an instant
she stood thinking.

"Madame Degardy!  Madame Degardy!" she cried, with sudden inspiration.
"Ah, I will find her; she may save him with her herbs!"

She hurried out of the house and down through the village to the little
hut by the river, where the old woman lived.

Elise had been to Madame Degardy as good a friend as a half-mad creature,
with no memory, would permit her.  Parpon had lived for years in the same
village, but, though he was her own son, she had never given him a look
of recognition, had used him as she used all others.  In turn, the dwarf
had never told any one but Valmond of the relationship; and so the two
lived their strange lives in their own singular way.  But the Cure knew
who it was that kept the old woman's house supplied with wood and other
necessaries.  Parpon himself had tried to summon her to Valmond's
bedside, for he knew well her skill with herbs, but the little hut was
empty, and he could get no trace of her.  She had disappeared the night
Valmond was seized of the fever, and she came back to her little home in
the very hour that Elise visited her.  The girl found her boiling herbs
before a big fire.  She was stirring the pot diligently, now and then
sprinkling in what looked like a brown dust, and watching the brew
intently.

She nodded, but did not look at Elise, and said crossly:

"Come in, come in, and shut the door, silly."

"Madame," said the girl, "His Excellency has the black fever."

"What of that?" she returned irritably.

"I thought maybe your herbs could cure him.  You've cured others, and
this is an awful sickness.  Ah, won't you save him, if you can?"

"What are you to him, pale-face?" she said, her eyes peering into the
pot.

"Nothing more to him than you are, madame," the girl answered wearily.

"I'll cure because I want, not because you ask me, pretty brat."

Elise's heart gave a leap: these very herbs were for Valmond!  The old
woman had travelled far to get the medicaments immediately she had heard
of Valmond's illness.  Night and day she had trudged, and she was more
brown and weather-beaten than ever.

"The black fever!  the black fever!" cried the old woman.  "I know it
well.  It's most like a plague.  I know it.  But I know the cure-ha, ha!
Come along now, feather-legs, what are you staring there for?  Hold that
jug while I pour the darling liquor in.  Ha, ha!  Crazy Joan hasn't lived
for nothing.  They have to come to her; the great folks have to come to
her!"

So she meandered on, filling the jug.  Later, in the warm dusk, they
travelled up to Dalgrothe Mountain, and came to Valmond's tent.  By the
couch knelt Parpon, watching the laboured breathing of the sick man.
When he saw Madame Degardy, he gave a growl of joy, and made way for her.
She pushed him back with her stick contemptuously, looked Valmond over,
ran her fingers down his cheek, felt his throat, and at last held his
restless hand.  Elise, with the quick intelligence of love, stood ready.
The old woman caught the jug from her, swung it into the hollow of her
arm, poured the cup half full, and motioned the girl to lift up Valmond's
head.  Elise raised it to her bosom, leaning her face down close to his.
Madame Degardy instantly pushed back her head.

"Don't get his breath--that's death, idiot!" she said, and began to pour
the liquid into Valmond's mouth very slowly.  It was a tedious process at
first, but at length he began to swallow naturally, and finished the cup.

There was no change for an hour, and then he became less restless.  After
another cupful, his eyes half opened.  Within an hour a perspiration
came, and he was very quiet, and sleeping easily.  Parpon crouched near
the door, watching it all with deep, piercing eyes.  Madame Degardy never
moved from her place, but stood shaking her head and muttering.  At last
Lagroin came, and whisperingly asked after his chief; then, seeing him in
a healthy and peaceful sleep, he stooped and kissed the hand lying upon
the blanket.

"Beloved sire!  Thank the good God!" he said.  Soon after he had gone,
there was a noise of tramping about the tent, and then a suppressed
cheer, which was fiercely stopped by Parpon, and the soldiers of the
Household Troops scattered to their tents.

"What's that?" asked Valmond, opening his eyes bewilderedly.

"Your soldiers, sire," answered the dwarf.

Valmond smiled languidly.  Then he saw Madame Degardy and Elise.

"I am very sleepy, dear friends," he said, with a courteous, apologetic
gesture, and closed his eyes.  Presently they opened again.  "My snuff-
box--in my pocket," he said to the old woman, waving a hand to where his
uniform hung from the tent-pole; "it is for you, madame."

She understood, smiled grimly, felt in a waistcoat pocket, found the
snuff-box, and, squatting on the ground like a tailor, she took two
pinches, and sat holding the antique silver box in her hand.

"Crazy Joan's no fool, dear lad," she said at last, and took another
pinch, and knowingly nodded her head again and again, while he slept
soundly.




CHAPTER XIV

"Lights Out!"

The bugle-call rang softly down the valley, echoed away tenderly in the
hills, and was lost in the distance.  Roused by the clear call, Elise
rose from watching beside Valmond's couch, and turned towards the door of
the tent.  The spring of a perfect joy at his safety had been followed by
an aching in all her body and a trouble at her heart.  Her feet were like
lead, her spirit quivered and shrank by turn.  The light of the campfires
sent a glow through the open doorway upon the face of the sleeper.

She leaned over him.  The look she gave him seemed to her anxious spirit
like a farewell.  This man had given her a new life, and out of it had
come a new sight.  Valmond had escaped death, but in her poor confused
way she felt another storm gathering about him.  A hundred feelings
possessed her; but one thought was master of them all: when trouble drew
round him, she must be near him, must be strong to help him, protect him,
if need be.  Yet a terrible physical weakness was on her.  Her limbs
trembled, her head ached, her heart throbbed in a sickening way.

He stirred in his sleep; a smile passed over his face.  She wondered
what gave it birth.  She knew well it was not for her, that smile.  It
belonged to his dream of success--when a thousand banners should flaunt
in the gardens of the Tuileries.  Overcome by a sudden rush of emotion,
she fell on her knees at his side, bursting into noiseless sobs, which
shook her from head to foot.

Every nerve in her body responded to the shock of feeling; she was having
her dark hour alone.

At last she staggered to her feet and turned to the open door.  The
tents lay silent in the moonshine, but wayward lights flickered in the
sumptuous dusk, and the quiet of the hills hung like a canopy over the
bivouac of the little army.  No token of misfortune came out of this
peaceful encampment, no omen of disaster crossed the long lane of drowsy
fires and huge amorous shadows.  The sense of doom was in the girl's own
heart, not in this deep cradle of the hills.

Now and again a sentinel crossed the misty line of vision, silent,
and majestically tall, in the soft haze, which came down from Dalgrothe
Mountain and fell like a delicate silver veil before the face of the
valley.

As she looked, lost in a kind of dream, there floated up from the distant
tent the refrain she knew so well:

                    "Oh, say, where goes your love?
                         O gai, vine le roi!"

Her hand caught her bosom as if to stifle a sudden pain.  That song had
been the keynote to her new life, and it seemed now as if it were also to
be the final benediction.  All her spirit gathered itself up for a great
resolution: she would not yield to this invading weakness, this misery of
body and mind.

Some one drew out of the shadows and came towards her.  It was Madame
Degardy.  She had seen the sobbing figure inside the tent, but, with the
occasional wisdom of the foolish of this world, she had not been less
considerate than the children of light.

With brusque, kindly taps of her stick, she drove the girl to her own
tent, and bade her sleep: but sleep was not for Elise that night; and in
the grey dawn, while yet no one was stirring in the camp, she passed
slowly down the valley to her home.

Madame Chalice was greatly troubled also.  Valmond's life was saved.
In three days he was on his feet, eager and ardent again, and preparing
to go to the village; but what would the end of it all be?  She knew of
De la Riviere's intentions, and she foresaw a crisis.  If Valmond were in
very truth a Napoleon, all might be well, though this crusade must close
here.  If he were an impostor, things would go cruelly hard with him.
Impostor?  Strange how, in spite of all evidence against him, she still
felt a vital sureness in him somewhere; a radical reality, a convincing
quality of presence.  At times he seemed like an actor playing his own
character.  She could never quite get rid of that feeling.

In her anxiety--for she was in the affair for good or ill--she went again
to Monsieur Garon.

"You believe in Monsieur Valmond, dear avocat?" she asked.

The little man looked at her admiringly, though his admiration was a
quaint, Arcadian thing; and, perching his head on one side abstractedly,
he answered:

"Ah, yes, ah, yes!  Such candour!  He is the son of Napoleon and a
certain princess, born after Napoleon's fall, not long before his death."

"Then, of course, Monsieur Valmond is really nameless?" she asked.

"Ah, there is the point--the only point; but His Excellency can clear up
all that, and will do so in good time, he says.  He maintains that France
will accept him."

"But the Government here, will they put him down?  proceed against him?
Can they?"

"Ah, yes, I fear they can proceed against him.  He may recruit men,
but he may not drill and conspire, you see.  Yet"--the old man smiled,
as though at some distant and pleasing prospect "the cause is a great
one; it is great.  Ah, madame, dear madame"--he got to his feet and
stepped into the middle of the floor--"he has the true Napoleonic spirit.
He loves it all.  At the very first, it seemed as if he were going to be
a little ridiculous; now it is as if there was but one thing for him--
love of France and loyalty to the cause.  Ah, think of the glories of the
Empire! of France as the light of Europe, of Napoleon making her rich and
proud and dominant!  And think of her now, sinking into the wallow of
bourgeois vulgarity!  If--if, as His Excellency said, the light were to
come from here, even from this far corner of the world, from this old
France, to be the torch of freedom once again--from our little parish
here!"

His face was glowing, his thin hands made a quick gesture of charmed
anticipation.

Madame Chalice looked at him in a sort of wonder and delight.  Dreamers
all!  And this visionary Napoleon had come into the little man's quiet,
cultured, passive life, and had transformed him, filled him with
adventure and patriotism.  There must be something behind Valmond, some
real, even some great thing, or this were not possible.  It was not
surprising that she, with the spirit of dreams and romance deep in her,
should be sympathetic, even carried away for the moment.

"How is the feeling in the country since his illness?" she asked.

"Never so strong as now.  Many new recruits come to him.  Organisation
goes on, and His Excellency has issued a proclamation.  I have advised
him against that--it is not necessary, it is illegal.  He should not
tempt our Government too far.  But he is a gentleman of as great
simplicity as courage, of directness and virtue--a wholesome soldier--"

She thought again of that moonlit night, and Elise's window, and a kind
of hatred of the man came up in her.  No, no, she was wrong; he was not
the true thing.

"Dear avocat," she said suddenly, "you are a good friend.  May I have
always as good!  But have you ever thought that this thing may end in
sore disaster?  Are we doing right?  Is the man worthy our friendship
and our adherence?"

"Ah, dear madame, convictions, principles, truth, they lead to good ends
--somewhere.  I have a letter here from Monsieur Valmond.  It breathes
noble things; it has humour, too--ah, yes, so quaint!  I am to see him
this afternoon--he returns to the Louis Quinze to-day.  The Cure and I--"

She laid her hand on his arm, interrupting him.  "Will you take me this
evening to Monsieur Valmond, dear friend?" she asked.

She saw now how useless it was to attempt anything through these admirers
of Valmond; she must do it herself.  He must be firmly and finally warned
and dissuaded.  The conviction had suddenly come to her with great force,
that the end was near--come to her as it came to Elise.  Her wise mind
had seen the sure end; Elise's heart had felt it.

The avocat readily promised.  She was to call for him at a little before
eight o'clock.  But she decided that she would first seek Elise; before
she accused the man, she would question the woman.  Above and beyond all
anger she felt at this miserable episode, there was pity in her heart for
the lonely girl.  She was capable of fierce tempers, of great caprices,
of even wild injustice, when her emotions had their way with her; but her
heart was large, her nature deep and broad, and her instincts kind.  The
little touch of barbarism in her gave her, too, a sense of primitive
justice.  She was self-analytical, critical of life and conduct, yet her
mind and her heart, when put to the great test, were above mere
anatomising.  Her rich nature, alive with these momentous events, feeling
the prescience of coming crisis, sent a fine glow into her face, into her
eyes.  Excitement gave a fresh elasticity to her step.

In spite of her serious thoughts, she looked very young, almost
irresponsible.  No ordinary observer could guess the mind that lay behind
the eloquent, glowing eyes.  Even the tongue at first deceived, till it
began to probe, to challenge, to drop sharp, incisive truths in little
gold-leaped pellets, which brought conviction when the gold-leaf wore
off.

The sunlight made her part of the brilliant landscape, and she floated
into it, neither too dainty nor too luxurious.  The greatest heat of the
day was past, and she was walking slowly under the maples, on the way to
Elise's home, when she was arrested by a voice near her.  Then a tall
figure leaped the fence, and came to her with outstretched hand and an
unmistakable smile of pleasure.

"I've called at the Manor twice, and found you out; so I took to the
highway," said the voice gaily.

"My dear Seigneur," she answered, with mock gravity, "ancestors' habits
show in time."

"Come, that's severe, isn't it?"

"You have waylaid me in a lonely place, master highwayman!" she said,
with a torturing sweetness.

He had never seen her so radiantly debonnaire; yet her heart was full of
annoying anxiety.

"There's so much I want to say to you," he answered more seriously.

"So very much?"

"Very much indeed."

She looked up the road.  "I can give you ten minutes," she said.
"Suppose we walk up and down under these trees.  It is shady and quiet
here.  Now proceed, monsieur.  Is it my money or my life?"

"You are in a charming mood to-day."

"Which is more than I could say for you the last time we met.  You
threatened, stormed, were childish, impossible to a degree."

His face became grave.  "We were such good friends once!"

"Once--once?" she asked maliciously.  "Once Cain and Abel were a happy
family.  When was that once?"

"Two years ago.  What talks we had then!  I had so looked forward to your
coming again.  It was the alluring thing in my life, your arrival," he
went on; "but something came between."

His tone nettled her.  He talked as if he had some distant claim on her.

"Something came between?" she repeated slowly, mockingly.  "That sounds
melodramatic indeed.  What was it came between--a coach-and-four, or a
grand army?"

"Nothing so stately," he answered, piqued by her tone: "a filibuster and
his ragamuffins."

"Ragamufins would be appreciated by Monsieur Valmond's followers, spoken
at the four corners," she answered.

"Then I'll change it," he said: "a ragamuffin and his filibusters."

"The 'ragamuffin' always speaks of his enemies with courtesy, and the
filibusters love their leader," was her pointed rejoinder.

"At half a dollar a day," he answered sharply.

"They get that much from His Excellency, do they?" she asked in real
surprise.  "That doesn't look like filibustering, does it?"

"'His Excellency!'" he retorted.  "Why won't you look this matter
straight in the face?  Napoleon or no Napoleon, the end of this thing
is ruin."

"Take care that you don't get lost in the debris," she said bitingly.

"I can take care of myself.  I am sorry to have you mixed up in it."

"You are sorry?  How good of you!  How paternal!"

"If your husband were here--"

"If my husband were here, you would probably be his best friend," she
rejoined, with acid sweetness; "and I should still have to take care of
myself."

Had he no sense of what was possible to leave unsaid to a woman?  She was
very angry, though she was also a little sorry for him; for perhaps in
the long run he would be in the right.  But he must pay for his present
stupidity.

"You wrong me," he answered, with a quick burst of feeling.  "You are
most unfair.  You punish me because I do my public duty; and because I
would do anything in the world for you, you punish me the more.  Have you
forgotten two years ago?  Is it so easy to your hand, a true and constant
admiration, a sincere homage, that you throw it aside like--"

"Monsieur De la Riviere," she said, with exasperating deliberation, her
eyes having a dangerous light, "your ten minutes is more than up.  And it
has been quite ten minutes too long."

"If I were a filibuster"--he answered bitterly and suggestively.

She interrupted him, saying, with a purring softness: "If you had only
courage enough--"

He waved his hand angrily.  "If I had, I should hope you would prove a
better friend to me than you are to this man."

"Ah, in what way do I fail towards 'this man'?"

"By encouraging his downfall.  See--I know I am taking my life in my
hands, as it were, but I tell you this thing will do you harm when it
goes abroad."

She felt the honesty of his words, though they angered her.  He seemed to
impute some personal interest in Valmond.  She would not have it from any
man in the world.

"If you will pick up my handkerchief--ah, thank you!  We must travel
different roads in this matter.  You have warned; let me prophesy.  His
Highness Valmond Napoleon will come out of this with more honour than
yourself."

"Thanks to you, then," he said gallantly, for he admired her very
stubbornness.

"Thanks to himself.  I honestly believe that you will be ashamed of your
part in this, one day."

"In any case, I will force the matter to a conclusion," he answered
firmly.  "The fantastic thing must end."

"When?"

"Within a few days."

"When all is over, perhaps you will have the honesty to come and tell me
which was right--you or I.  Goodbye."

Elise was busy at her kitchen fire.  She looked up, startled, as her
visitor entered.  Her heavy brow grew heavier, her eyes gleamed sulkily,
as she dragged herself forward with weariness, and stood silent and
resentful.  Why had this lady of the Manor come to her?  Madame Chalice
scarcely knew how to begin, for, in truth, she wanted to be the girl's
friend, and she feared making her do or say some wild thing.

She looked round the quiet room.  Some fruit was boiling on a stove,
giving out a fragrant savour, and Elise's eye was on it mechanically.  A
bit of sewing lay across a chair, and on the wall hung a military suit of
the old sergeant, beside it a short sabre.  An old Tricolor was draped
from a beam, and one or two maps of France were pinned on the wall.  She
fastened her look on the maps.  They seemed to be her cue.

"Have you any influence with your uncle?" she asked.

Elise remained gloomily silent.

"Because," Madame Chalice went on smoothly, ignoring her silence,
"I think it would be better for him to go back to Ville Bambord--
I am sure of it."

The girl's lip curled angrily.  What right had this great lady to
interfere with her or hers?  What did she mean?

"My uncle is a general and a brave man; he can take care of himself," she
answered defiantly.  Madame Chalice did not smile at the title.  She
admired the girl's courage.  She persisted however.  "He is one man,
and--"

"He has plenty of men, madame, and His Excellency--"

"His Excellency and hundreds of men cannot stand, if the Government send
soldiers against them."

"Why should the Gover'ment do that?  They're only going to France; they
mean no trouble here."

"They have no right to drill and conspire here, my girl."

"Well, my uncle and his men will fight; we'll all fight," Elise retorted,
her hands grasping the arms of the rocking-chair she sat in.

"But why shouldn't we avoid fighting?  What is there to fight for?
You are all very happy here.  You were very happy here before Monsieur
Valmond came.  Are you happy now?"

Madame Chalice's eyes searched the flushed face anxiously.  She was
growing more eager every moment to serve, if she could, this splendid
creature.

"We would die for him!" answered the girl quickly.

"You would die for him," came the reply, slowly, meaningly.

"And what's it to you, if I would?" came the sharp retort.  "Why do you
fine folk meddle yourselves with poor folk's affairs?"

Then, remembering she was a hostess, with the instinctive courtesy of her
race, she said: "Ah, pardon, madame; you meant nothing, I'm sure."

"Why should fine folk make poor folk unhappy?" said Madame Chalice,
quietly and sorrowfully, for she saw that Elise was suffering, and all
the woman in her came to her heart and lips.  She laid her hand on the
girl's arm.  "Indeed yes, why should fine folk make poor folk unhappy?
It is not I alone who makes you unhappy, Elise."

The girl angrily shook off the hand, for she read the true significance
of the words.

"What are you trying to find out?" she asked fiercely.  "What do you
want to do?  Did I ever come in your way?  Why do you come into mine?
What's my life to you?  Nothing, nothing at all.  You're here to-day and
away to-morrow.  You're English; you're not of us.  Can't you see that I
want to be left alone?

"If I were unhappy, I could look after myself.  But I'm not, I'm not--I
tell you I'm not!  I'm happy.  I never knew what happiness was till now.
I'm so happy that I can stand here and not insult you, though you've
insulted me."

"I meant no insult, Elise.  I want to help you; that is all.  I know how
hard it is to confide in one's kinsfolk, and I wish with all my heart I
might be your friend, if you ever need me."

Elise met her sympathetic look clearly and steadily.  "Speak plain to me,
madame," she said.

"Elise, I saw some one climb out of your bedroom window," was the slow
reply.

"Oh, my God!" said the girl; "oh, my God!" and she stared blankly for a
moment at Madame Chalice.  Then, trembling greatly, she reached to the
table for a cup of water.

Madame Chalice was at once by her side.  "You are ill, poor girl," she
said anxiously, and put her arm around her.

Elise drew away.

"I will tell you all, madame, all; and you must believe it, for, as God
is my judge, it is the truth."  Then she told the whole story, exactly
as it happened, save mention of the kisses that Valmond had given her.
Her eyes now and again filled with tears, and she tried, in her poor
untutored way, to set him right.  She spoke for him altogether, not for
herself; and her listener saw that the bond which held the girl to the
man might be proclaimed in the streets, with no dishonour.

"That's the story, and that's the truth," said Elise at last.  "He's a
gentleman, a great man, and I'm a poor girl, and there can be nothing
between us; but I'd die for him."

She no longer resented Madame Chalice's solicitude: she was passive, and
showed that she wished to be alone.

"You think there's going to be great trouble?" she asked, as Madame
Chalice made ready to go.

"I fear so, but we will do all we can to prevent it."  Elise watched her
go on towards the Manor in the declining sunlight, then turned heavily to
her work again.

There came to her ears the sound of a dog-churn in the yard outside, and
the dull roll and beat seemed to keep time to the aching pulses in her
head, in all her body.  One thought kept going through her brain: there
was, as she had felt, trouble coming for Valmond.  She had the
conviction, too, that it was very near.  Her one definite idea was, that
she should be able to go to him when that trouble came; that she should
not fail him at his great need.  Yet these pains in her body, this
alternate exaltation and depression, this pitiful weakness!  She must
conquer it.  She remembered the hours spent at his bedside; the moments
when he was all hers--by virtue of his danger and her own unwavering care
of him.  She recalled the dark moment when Death, intrusive, imminent,
lurked at the tent door, and in its shadow she emptied out her soul in
that one kiss of fealty and farewell.

That kiss--there came to her again, suddenly, Madame Degardy's cry of
warning: "Don't get his breath--it's death, idiot!"

That was it: the black fever was in her veins!  That one kiss had sealed
her own doom.  She knew it now.

He had given her life by giving her love.  Well, he should give her death
too--her lord of fife and death.  She was of the chosen few who could
drink the cup of light and the cup of darkness with equally regnant soul.

But it might lay her low in the very hour of Valmond's trouble.  She must
conquer it--how?  To whom could she turn for succour?  There was but
one,--yet she could not seek Madame Degardy, for the old woman would
drive her to her bed, and keep her there.  There was only this to do:
to possess herself of those wonderful herbs which had been given her
Napoleon in his hour of peril.

Dragging herself wearily to the little but by the river, she knocked, and
waited.  All was still, and, opening the door, she entered.  Striking a
match, she found a candle, lighted it, and then began her search.  Under
an old pan on a shelf she found both herbs and powder.  She snatched up a
handful of the herbs, and kissed them with joyful heart.  Saved--she was
saved!  Ah, thank the Blessed Virgin!  She would thank her for ever!

A horrible sinking sensation seized her.  Turning in dismay, she saw the
face of Parpon at the window.  With a blind instinct for protection, she
staggered towards the door, and fell, her fingers still clasping the
precious herbs.

As Parpon hastily entered, Madame Degardy hobbled out of the shadow of
the trees, and furtively watched the hut.  When a light appeared, she
crept to the door, opened it stealthily upon the intruders of her home,
and stepped inside.

Parpon was kneeling by Elise, lifting up her head, and looking at her in
horrified distress.

With a shrill cry the old woman came forward and dropped on her knees at
the other side of Elise.  Her hand, fumbling anxiously over the girl's
breast, met the hard and warty palm of the dwarf.  She stopped suddenly,
raised the sputtering candle, and peered into his eyes with a vague,
wavering intensity.  For minutes they knelt there, the silence clothing
them about, the body of the unconscious girl between them.  A lost memory
was feeling blindly its way home again.  By and by, out of an infinite
past, something struggled to the old woman's eyes, and Parpon's heart
almost burst in his anxiety.  At length her look steadied.  Memory,
recognition, showed in her face.

With a wild cry her gaunt arms stretched across, and caught the great
head to her breast.

"Where have you been so long, Parpon--my son?" she said.




CHAPTER XV

Valmond's strength came back quickly, but something had given his mind a
new colour.  He felt, by a strange telegraphy of fate, that he had been
spared death by fever to meet an end more in keeping with the strange
exploit which now was coming to a crisis.  The next day he was going back
to Dalgrothe Mountain, the day after that there should be final review,
and the succeeding day the march to the sea would begin.  A move must be
made.  There could be no more delay.  He had so lost himself in the
dream, that it had become real, and he himself was the splendid
adventurer, the maker of empires.  True, he had only a small band of ill-
armed men, but better arms could be got, and by the time they reached the
sea--who could tell!

As he sat alone in the quiet dusk of his room at the Louis Quinze waiting
for Parpon, there came a tap at his door.  It opened, the garcon mumbled
something, and Madame Chalice entered slowly.

Her look had no particular sympathy, but there was a sort of friendliness
in the rich colour of her face, in the brightness of her eyes.

"The avocat was to have accompanied me," she said; "but at the last I
thought it better to come without him, because--"

She paused.  "Yes, madame--because?" he asked, offering her a chair.
He was dressed in simple black, as on that first day when he called at
the Manor, and it set off the ivory paleness of his complexion, making
his face delicate yet strong.

She looked round the room, almost casually, before she went on

"Because what I have to say were better said to you alone--much better."

"I am sure you are right," he answered, as though he trusted her judgment
utterly; and truly there was always something boy-like in his attitude
towards her.  The compliment was unstudied and pleasant, but she steeled
herself for her task.  She knew instinctively that she had influence with
him, and she meant to use it to its utmost limit.

"I am glad, we are all glad, you are better," she said cordially; then
added, "how do your affairs come on?  What are your plans?"

Valmond forgot that she was his inquisitor; he only saw her as his ally,
his friend.  So he spoke to her, as he had done at the Manor, with a sort
of eloquence, of his great theme.  He had changed greatly.  The
rhetorical, the bizarre, had left his speech.  There was no more
grandiloquence than might be expected of a soldier who saw things in the
bright flashes of the battle-field--sharp pinges of colour, the dyes well
soaked in.  He had the gift of telling a story: some peculiar timbre in
the voice, some direct dramatic touch.  She listened quietly, impressed
and curious.  The impossibilities seemed for a moment to vanish in the
big dream, and she herself was a dreamer, a born adventurer among the
wonders of life.  Were she a man, she would have been an explorer or a
soldier.

But good judgment returned, and she gathered herself together for the
unpleasant task that lay before her.

She looked him steadily in the eyes.  "I have come to tell you that you
must give up this dream," she said slowly.  "It can come to nothing but
ill; and in the mishap you may be hurt past repair."

"I shall never give up--this dream," he said, surprised, but firm, almost
dominant.

"Think of these poor folk who surround you, who follow you.  Would you
see harm come to them?"

"As soldiers, they will fight for a cause."

"What is--the cause?" she asked meaningly.

"France," was the quiet reply; and there was a strong ring in the tone.

"Not so--you, monsieur!"

"You called me 'sire' once," he said tentatively.

"I called my maid a fool yesterday, under some fleeting influence;
one has moods," she answered.

"If you would call me puppet to-morrow, we might strike a balance and
find--what should we find?"

"An adventurer, I fear," she remarked.

He was not taken aback.  "An adventurer truly," he said.  "It is a far
travel to France, and there is much to overcome!"

She could scarcely reconcile this acute, self-contained man with the
enthusiast and comedian she had seen in the Cure's garden.

"Monsieur Valmond," she said, "I neither suspect nor accuse; I only feel.
There is something terribly uncertain in this cause of yours, in your
claims.  You have no right to waste lives."

"To waste lives?" he asked mechanically.

"Yes; the Government is to proceed against you."

"Ah, yes," he answered.  "Monsieur De la Riviere has seen to that; but he
must pay for his interference."

"That is beside the point.  If a force comes against you--what then?"

"Then I will act as becomes a Napoleon," he answered, rather grandly.

So there was a touch of the bombastic in his manner even yet!  She
laughed a little ironically.  Then all at once her thoughts reverted to
Elise, and some latent cruelty in her awoke.  Though she believed the
girl, she would accuse the man, the more so, because she suddenly became
aware that his eyes were fixed on herself in ardent admiration.

"You might not have a convenient window," she said, with deliberate,
consuming suggestion.

His glance never wavered, though he understood instantly what she meant.
Well, she had discovered that!  He flushed.

"Madame," he said, "I hope that I am a gentleman at heart."

The whole scene came back on him, and a moisture sprang to his eyes.

"She is innocent," he continued--"upon my sacred honour!  Yes, yes, I
know that the evidence is all against me, but I speak the absolute truth.
You saw--that night, did you?"

She nodded.

"Ah, it is a pity--a pity.  But, madame, as you are a true woman, believe
what I say; for, I repeat, it is the truth."

Then, with admirable reticence, even great delicacy, he told the story
as Elise had told it, and as convincingly.

"I believe you, monsieur," she said frankly, when he had done, and
stretched out her hand to him with a sudden impulse of regard.  "Now,
follow up that unselfishness by another."

He looked inquiringly at her.

"Give up this mad chase," she added eagerly.

"Never!" was his instant reply.  "Never!"

"I beg of you, I appeal to you-my friend," she urged, with that ardour of
the counsel who pleads a bad cause.

"I do not impeach you or your claims, but I ask that you leave this
village as you found it, these happy people undisturbed in their homes.
Ah, go!  Go now, and you will be a name to them, remembered always with
admiration.  You have been courageous, you have been loved, you have been
inspiring--ah, yes, I admit it, even to me!--inspiring!  The spirit of
adventure in you, your hopes, your plans to do great things, roused me.
It was that made me your ally more than aught else.  Truly and frankly, I
do not think that I am convinced of anything save that you are no coward,
and that you love a cause.  Let it go at that--you must, you must.  You
came in the night, privately and mysteriously; go in the night, this
night, mysteriously--an inscrutable, romantic figure.  If you are all you
say, and I should be glad to think so,--go where your talents will have
greater play, your claims larger recognition.  This is a small game here.
Leave us as you found us.  We shall be the better for it; our poor folk
here will be the better.  Proceed with this, and who can tell what may
happen?  I was wrong, wrong--I see that now-to have encouraged you at
all.  I repent of it.  Here, as I talk to you, I feel, with no doubt
whatever, that the end of your bold exploit is near.  Can you not see
that?  Ah yes, you must, you must!  Take my horses to-night, leave here,
and come back no more; and so none of us shall feel sorrow in thinking of
the time when Valmond came to Pontiac."

Variable, accusing, she had suddenly shown him something beyond caprice,
beyond accident of mood or temper.  The true woman had spoken; all outer
modish garments had dropped away from her real nature, and showed its
abundant depth and sincerity.  All that was roused in him this moment was
never known; he never could tell it; there were eternal spaces between
them.  She had been speaking to him just now with no personal sentiment.
She was only the lover of honest things, the friend, the good ally,
obliged to flee a cause for its terrible unsoundness, yet trying to
prevent wreck and ruin.

He arose and turned his head away for an instant, her eloquence had been
so moving.  His glance caught the picture of the Great Napoleon, and his
eyes met hers again with new resolution.

"I must stay," he answered; "I will not turn back, whatever comes.  This
is but child's play, but a speck beside what I mean to do.  True, I came
in the dark, but I will go in the light.  I shall not leave them behind,
these poor folk; they shall come with me.  I have money, France is
waiting, the people are sick of the Orleans, and I--"

"But you must, you must listen to me, monsieur!" she said desperately.

She came close to him, and, out of the frank eagerness of her nature,
laid her hand upon his arm, and looked him in the eyes with an almost
tender appealing.

At that moment the door opened, and Monsieur De la Riviere was announced.

"Ah, madame!" said the young Seigneur in a tone more than a little
carbolic; "secrets of State, no doubt?"

"Statesmen need not commit themselves to newsmongers, monsieur," she
answered, still standing very near Valmond, as though she would continue
a familiar talk when the disagreeable interruption had passed.

She was thoroughly fearless, clear of heart, above all littlenesses.

"I had come to warn Monsieur Valmond once again, but I find him with his
ally, counsellor--and comforter," he retorted, with perilous suggestion.

Time would move on, and Madame Chalice might forget that wild remark, but
she never would forgive it, and she never wished to do so.  The insolent,
petty, provincial Seigneur!

"Monsieur De la Riviere," she returned, with cold dignity, "you cannot
live long enough to atone for that impertinence."

"I beg your pardon, madame," he returned earnestly, awed by the
look in her face; for she was thoroughly aroused.  "I came to stop a
filibustering expedition, to save the credit of the place where I was
born, where my people have lived for generations."

She made a quick, deprecatory gesture.  "You saw me enter here," she
said, "and you thought to discover treason of some kind--Heaven knows
what a mind like yours may imagine!  You find me giving better counsel
to His Highness than you could ever hope to give--out of a better heart
and from a better understanding.  You have been worse than intrusive;
you have been rash and stupid.  You call His Highness filibuster and
impostor.  I assure you it is my fondest hope that Prince Valmond
Napoleon will ever count me among his friends, in spite of all his
enemies."

She turned her shoulder on him, and took Valmond's hand with a pronounced
obeisance, saying, "Adieu, sire" (she was never sorry she had said it),
and passed from the room.  Valmond was about to follow her.

"Thank you, no; I will go to my carrriage alone," she said, and he did
not insist.

When she had gone he stood holding the door open, and looking at De la
Riviere.  He was very pale; there was a menacing fire in his eyes.  The
young Seigneur was ready for battle also.

"I am occupied, monsieur," said Valmond meaningly.

"I have come to warn you--"

"The old song; I am occupied, monsieur."

"Charlatan!" said De la Riviere, and took a step angrily towards him,
for he was losing command of himself.

At that moment Parpon, who had been outside in the hall for a half-hour
or more, stepped into the room, edged between the two, and looked up with
a wicked, mocking leer at the young Seigneur.

"You have twenty-four hours to leave Pontiac," cried De la Riviere,
as he left the room.

"My watch keeps different time, monsieur," said Valmond coolly, and
closed the door.




CHAPTER XVI

From the depths where Elise was cast, it was not for her to see that her
disaster had brought light to others; that out of the pitiful confusion
of her life had come order and joy.  A half-mad woman, without memory,
knew again whence she came and whither she was going; and bewildered and
happy, with a hungering tenderness, moved her hand over the head of her
poor dwarf, as though she would know if he were truly her own son.  A new
spirit also had come into Parpon's eyes, gentler, less weird, less
distant.  With the advent of their joy a great yearning came to save
Elise.  They hung watchful, solicitous, over her bed.

It must go hard with her, and twenty-four hours would see the end or a
fresh beginning.  She had fought back the fever too long, her brain and
emotions had been strung to a fatal pitch, and the disease, like a
hurricane, carried her on for hours, tearing at her being.

Her own mother sat in a corner, stricken and numb.  At last she fell
asleep in her chair, but Parpon and his mother slept not at all.  Now and
again the dwarf went to the door and looked out at the night, so still,
and full of the wonder of growth and rest.

Far up on Dalgrothe Mountain a soft brazen light lay like a shield
against the sky, a strange, hovering thing.  Parpon knew it to be the
reflection of the campfires in the valley, where Lagroin and his men were
sleeping.  There came, too, out of the general stillness, a long, low
murmur, as though nature were crooning: the untiring rustle of the river,
the water that rolled on and never came back again.  Where did they all
go--those thousands of rivers for ever pouring on, lazily or wildly?
What motive?  What purpose?  Just to empty themselves into the greater
waters, there to be lost?  Was it enough to travel on so inevitably to
the end, and be swallowed up?

And these millions of lives hurrying along?  Was it worth while living,
only to grow older and older, and, coming, heavy with sleep, to the
Homestead of the Ages, enter a door that only opened inwards, and be
swallowed up in the twilight?  Why arrest the travelling, however swift
it be?  Sooner or later it must come--with dusk the end of it.

The dwarf heard the moaning of the stricken girl, her cry, "Valmond!
Valmond!" the sobs that followed, the woe of her self-abnegation, even
in delirium.

For one's self it mattered little, maybe, the attitude of the mind,
whether it would arrest or be glad of the terrific travel; but for
another human being, who might judge?  Who might guess what was best for
the other; what was most merciful, most good?  Destiny meant us to prove
our case against it, as well as we might; to establish our right to be
here as long as we could, so discovering the world day by day, and
ourselves to the world, and ourselves to ourselves.  To live it out,
resisting the power that destroys so long as might be--that was the
divine secret.

"Valmond!  Valmond!  O Valmond!"

The voice moaned out the words again and again.  Through the sounds there
came another inner voice, that resolved all the crude, primitive thoughts
here defined; vague, elusive, in Parpon's own brain.

The girl's life should be saved at any cost, even if to save it meant the
awful and certain doom his mother had whispered to him over the bed an
hour before.

He turned and went into the house.  The old woman bent above Elise,
watching intently, her eyes straining, her lips anxiously compressed.

"My son," she said, "she will die in an hour if I don't give her more.
If I do, she may die at once.  If she gets well, she will be--"  She made
a motion to her eyes.

"Blind, mother, blind!" he whispered, and he looked round the room.  How
good was the sight of the eyes!  "Perhaps she'd rather die," said the old
woman.  "She is unhappy."  She was thinking of her own far, bitter past,
remembered now after so many years.  "Misery and blindness too--ah!  What
right have I to make her blind?  It's a great risk, Parpon, my dear son."

"I must, I must, for your sake.  Valmond!  Valmond!  O Valmond!" cried
Elise again out of her delirium.

The stricken girl had answered for Parpon.  She had decided for herself.
Life!  that was all she prayed for: for another's sake, not her own.

Her own mother slept on, in the corner of the room, unconscious of the
terrible verdict hanging in the balance.

Madame Degardy quickly emptied into a cup of liquor the strange brown
powder, mixed it, and held it to the girl's lips, pouring it slowly down.

Once, twice, during the next hour, a low, anguished voice filled the
room; but just as dawn came, Parpon stooped and tenderly wiped a soft
moisture from the face, lying so quiet and peaceful now against the
pillow.

"She breathes easy, poor pretty bird!" said the old woman gently.

"She'll never see again?" asked Parpon mournfully.  "Never a thing while
she lives," was the whispered reply.

"But she has her life," said the dwarf; "she wished it so."

"What's the good!" The old woman had divined why Elise had wanted to
live.

The dwarf did not answer.  His eyes wandered about abstractedly,
and fell again upon Elise's mother sleeping, unconscious of the awful
peril passed, and the painful salvation come to her daughter.

The blue-grey light of morning showed under the edge of the closed
window-blind.  In the room day was mingling incongruously with night,
for the candle looked sickly, and the aged crone's face was of a leaden
colour, lighted by the piercing eyes that brooded hungrily on her son--
her only son: the dwarf had told her of Gabriel's death.

Parpon opened the door and went out.  Day was spreading over the drowsy
landscape.  There was no life as yet in all the horizon, no fires, no
animals stirring, no early workmen, no anxious harvesters.  But the birds
were out, and presently here and there cattle rose up in the fields.

Then, over the foot-hills, he saw a white horse and its rider show up
against the grey dust of the road.  Elise's sorrowful words came to him:
"Valmond!  Valmond!  O Valmond!"

His duty to the girl was done; she was safe; now he must follow that
figure to where the smoke of the campfires came curling up by Dalgrothe
Mountain.  There were rumours of trouble; he must again be minister,
counsellor, friend, to his master.

A half hour later he was climbing the hill where he had seen the white
horse and its rider.  He heard the sound of a drum in the distance.  The
gloom and suspense of the night just passed went from him, and into the
sunshine he sang:

                    "Oh, grand to the war he goes,
                         O gai, vive le roi!"

Not long afterwards he entered the encampment.  Around one fire, cooking
their breakfasts, were Muroc the charcoalman, Duclosse the mealman, and
Garotte the lime-burner.  They all were in good spirits.

"For my part," Muroc was saying, as Parpon nodded at them, and passed by,
"I'm not satisfied."

"Don't you get enough to eat?" asked the mealman, whose idea of
happiness was based upon the appreciation of a good dinner.

"But yes, and enough to drink, thanks to His Excellency, and the buttons
he puts on my coat."  Muroc jingled some gold coins in his pocket.  "It's
this being clean that's the devil!  When I sold charcoal, I was black and
beautiful, and no dirt showed; I polished like a pan.  Now if I touch a
potato, I'm filthy.  Pipe-clay is hell's stuff to show you up as the Lord
made you."  Garotte laughed.  "Wait till you get to fighting.  Powder
sticks better than charcoal.  For my part, I'm always clean as a
whistle."

"But you're like a bit of wool, lime-burner, you never sweat.  Dirt don't
stick to you as to me and the meal man.  Duclosse there used to look like
a pie when the meal and sweat dried on him.  When we reach Paris, and His
Excellency gets his own, I'll take to charcoal again; I'll fill the
palace cellars.  That suits me better than chalk and washing every day."

"Do you think we'll ever get to Paris?" asked the mealman, cocking his
head seriously.

"That's the will of God, and the weather at sea, and what the Orleans
do," answered Muroc grinning.

It was hard to tell how deep this adventure lay in Muroc's mind.  He had
a prodigious sense of humour, the best critic in the world.

"For me," said the lime-burner, "I think there'll be fighting before we
get to the Orleans.  There's talk that the Gover'ment's coming against
us."

"Done!" said the charcoalman.  "We'll see the way our great man puts
their noses out of joint."

"Here's Lajeunesse," broke in the mealman, as the blacksmith came near to
their fire.  He was dressed in complete regimentals, made by the parish
tailor.

"Is that so, monsieur le capitaine?" said Muroc to Lajeunesse.  "Is the
Gover'ment to be fighting us?  Why should it?  We're only for licking the
Orleans, and who cares a sou for them, hein?"

"Not a go-dam," said Duclosse, airing his one English oath.  "The English
hate the Orleans too."  Lajeunesse looked from one to the other, then
burst into a laugh.  "There's two gills of rum for every man at twelve
o'clock to-day, so says His Excellency; and two yellow buttons for the
coat of every sergeant, and five for every captain.  The English up there
in Quebec can't do better than that, can they?  And will they?  No.  Does
a man spend money on a hell's foe, unless he means to give it work to do?
Pish!  Is His Excellency like to hang back because Monsieur De la Riviere
says he'll fetch the Government?  Bah!  The bully soldiers would come
with us as they went with the Great Napoleon at Grenoble.  Ah, that!
His Excellency told me about that just now.  Here stood the soldiers,"--
he mapped out the ground with his sword," here stood the Great Napoleon,
all alone.  He looks straight before him.  What does he see?  Nothing
less than a hundred muskets pointing at him.  What does he do?  He walks
up to the soldiers, opens his coat, and says, 'Soldiers, comrades, is
there one of you will kill your Emperor?'  Damned if there was one!  They
dropped their muskets, and took to kissing his hands.  There, my dears,
that was the Great Emperor's way, our Emperor's father's little way."

"But suppose they fired at us 'stead of at His Excellency?" asked the
mealman.

"Then, mealman, you'd settle your account for lightweights sooner than
you want."

Duclosse twisted his mouth dubiously.  He was not sure how far his
enthusiasm would carry him.  Muroc shook his shaggy head in mirth.

"Well, 'tis true we're getting off to France," said the lime-burner.
"We can drill as we travel, and there's plenty of us for a start."

"Morrow we go," said Lajeunesse.  "The proclamation's to be out in an
hour, and you're all to be ready by ten o'clock in the morning.  His
Excellency is to make a speech to us to-night; then the General--ah,
what a fine soldier, and eighty years old!--he's to give orders, and make
a speech also; and I'm to be colonel,"--he paused dramatically,--"and you
three are for captains; and you're to have five new yellow buttons to
your coats, like these."  He drew out gold coins and jingled them.  Every
man got to his feet, and Muroc let the coffee-tin fall.  "There's to be a
grand review in the village this afternoon.  There's breakfast for you,
my dears!"

Their exclamations were interrupted by Lajeunesse, who added: "And so my
Madelinette is to go to Paris, after all, and Monsieur Parpon is to see
that she starts right."

"Monsieur" Parpon was a new title for the dwarf.  But the great comedy,
so well played, had justified it.  "Oh, His Excellency 'll keep his
oath," said the mealman.  "I'd take Elise Malboir's word about a man for
a million francs, was he prince or ditcher; and she says he's the
greatest man in the world.  She knows."

"That reminds me," said Lajeunesse gloomily, "Elise has the black fever."

The mealman's face seemed to petrify, his eyes stood out, the bread he
had in his teeth dropped, and he stared wildly at Lajeunesse.  All were
occupied in watching the mealman, and they did not see the figure of a
girl approaching.

Muroc, dumfounded, spoke first.  "Elise--the black fever!" he gasped,
thoroughly awed.

"She is better, she will live," said a voice behind Lajeunesse.  It was
Madelinette, who had come to the camp early to cook her father's
breakfast.

Without a word, the mealman turned, pulled his clothes about him with a
jerk, and, pale and bewildered, started away at a run down the plateau.

"He's going to the village," said the charcoalman.  "He hasn't leave.
That's court-martial!"

Lajeunesse shook his head knowingly.  "He's never had but two ideas in
his nut-meal and Elise; let him go."

The mealman was soon lost to view, unheeding the challenge that rang
after him.

Lagroin had seen the fugitive from a distance, and came down, inquiring.
When he was told he swore that Duclosse should suffer divers punishments.

"A pretty kind of officer!" he cried in a fury.  "Damn it, is there
another man in my army would do it?"

No one answered; and because Lagroin was not a wise man, he failed to
see that in time his army might be entirely dissipated by such awkward
incidents.  When Valmond was told, he listened with a better
understanding.

All that Lajeunesse had announced came to pass.  The review and march and
show were goodly, after their kind; and, by dint of money and wine, the
enthusiasm was greater than ever it had been; for it was joined to the
pathos of the expected departure.  The Cure and the avocat kept within
doors; for they had talked together, and now that the day of fate was at
hand, and sons, brothers, fathers, were to go off on this far crusade,
a new spirit suddenly thrust itself in, and made them sad and anxious.
Monsieur De la Riviere was gloomy.  Medallion was the one comfortable,
cool person in the parish.  It had been his conviction that something
would occur to stop the whole business at the critical moment.  He was
a man of impressions, and he lived in the light of them continuously.
Wisdom might have been expected of Parpon, but he had been won by Valmond
from the start; and now, in the great hour, he was deep in another theme
--the restoration of his mother to himself, and to herself.

At seven o'clock in the evening, Valmond and Lagroin were in the streets,
after they had marched their men back to camp.  A crowd had gathered near
the church, for His Excellency was on his way to visit the Cure.

As he passed, they cheered him.  He stopped to speak to them.  Before he
had ended, some one came crying wildly that the soldiers, the red-coats
were come.  The sound of a drum rolled up the street, and presently,
round a corner, came the well-ordered troops of the Government.

Instantly Lagroin wheeled to summon any stray men of his little army, but
Valmond laid a hand on his arm, stopping him.  It would have been the
same in any case, for the people had scattered like sheep, and stood
apart.

They were close by the church steps.  Valmond mechanically saw the
mealman, open-mouthed and dazed, start forward from the crowd; but,
hesitating, he drew back again almost instantly, and was swallowed up in
the safety of distance.  He smiled at the mealman's hesitation, even
while he said to himself: "This ends it--ends it!"

He said it with no great sinking of heart, with no fear.  It was the
solution of all; it was his only way to honour.

The soldiers were halted a little distance from the two; and the
officer commanding, after a dull mechanical preamble, in the name of
the Government, formally called upon Valmond and Lagroin to surrender
themselves, or suffer the perils of resistance.

"Never!" broke out Lagroin, and, drawing his sword, he shouted: "Vive
Napoleon!  The Old Guard never surrenders!"

Then he made as if to rush forward on the troops.  "Fire!" called the
officer.

Twenty rifles blazed out.  Lagroin tottered back, and fell at the feet of
his master.

Raising himself, he clasped Valmond's knee, and, looking up, said
gaspingly:

"Adieu, sire!  I love you; I die for you."  His head fell at his
Emperor's feet, though the hands still clutched the knee.

Valmond stood over his body, one leg on either side, and drew a pistol.

"Surrender, monsieur," said the officer, "or we fire!"

"Never!  A Napoleon knows how to die!" was the reply, and he raised
his pistol at the officer.

"Fire!" came the sharp command.

"Vive Napoleon!" cried the doomed man, and fell, mortally wounded.

At that instant the Cure, with Medallion, came hurrying round the corner
of the church.

"Fools!  Murderers!" he said to the soldiers.  "Ah, these poor
children!"

Stooping, he lifted up Valmond's head, and Medallion felt Lagroin's
pulseless heart.

The officer picked up Valmond's pistol.  A moment afterwards he looked at
the dying man in wonder; for he found that the weapon was not loaded!




CHAPTER XVII

"How long, Chemist?"

"Two hours, perhaps."

"So long?"

After a moment he said dreamily: "It is but a step."

The Little Chemist nodded, though he did not understand.  The Cure
stooped over him.

"A step, my son?" he asked, thinking he spoke of the voyage the soul
takes.

"To the Tuileries," answered Valmond, and he smiled.  The Cure's brow
clouded; he wished to direct the dying man's thoughts elsewhere.  "It
is but a step--anywhere," he continued; and looked towards the Little
Chemist.  "Thank you, dear monsieur, thank you.  There is a silver night-
lamp in my room; I wish it to be yours.  Adieu, my friend."

The Little Chemist tried to speak, but could not.  He stooped and kissed
Valmond's hand, as though he thought him still a prince, and not the
impostor which the British rifles had declared him.  To the end, the
coterie would act according to the light of their own eyes.

"It is now but a step--to anything," repeated Valmond.

The Cure understood him at last.  "The longest journey is short by the
light of the grave," he responded gently.

Presently the door opened, admitting the avocat.  Valmond calmly met
Monsieur Garon's pained look, and courteously whispered his name.

"Your Excellency has been basely treated," said the avocat, his lip
trembling.

"On the contrary, well, dear monsieur," answered the ruined adventurer.
"Destiny plays us all.  Think: I die the death of a soldier, and my
crusade was a soldier's vision of conquest.  I have paid the price.
I have--"

He did not finish the sentence, but lay lost in thought.  At last he
spoke in a low tone to the avocat, who quickly began writing at his
dictation.

The chief clause of the record was a legacy of ten thousand francs to
"my faithful Minister and constant friend, Monsieur Parpon;" another of
ten thousand to Madame Joan Degardy, "whose skill and care of me merits
more than I can requite;" twenty thousand to "the Church of St. Nazaire
of the parish of Pontiac," five thousand to "the beloved Monsieur Fabre,
cure of the same parish, to whose good and charitable heart I come for my
last comforts;" twenty thousand to "Mademoiselle Madelinette Lajeunesse,
that she may learn singing under the best masters in Paris."  To Madame
Chalice he left all his personal effects, ornaments, and relics, save a
certain decoration given the old sergeant, and a ring once worn by the
Emperor Napoleon.  These were for a gift to "dear Monsieur Garon, who has
honoured me with his distinguished friendship; and I pray that our mutual
love for the same cause may give me some title to his remembrance."

Here the avocat stopped him with a quick, protesting gesture.

"Your Excellency!  your Excellency!" he said in a shaking voice, "my
heart has been with the man as with the cause."

Other legacies were given to Medallion, to the family of Lagroin, of whom
he still spoke as "my beloved General who died for me;" and ten francs to
each recruit who had come to his standard.

After a long pause, he said lingeringly: "To Mademoiselle Elise Malboir,
the memory of whose devotion and solicitude gives me joy in my last hour,
I bequeath fifty thousand francs.  In the event of her death, this money
shall revert to the parish of Pontiac, in whose graveyard I wish my body
to lie.  The balance of my estate, whatever it may now be, or may prove
to be hereafter, I leave to Pierre Napoleon, third son of Lucien
Bonaparte, Prince of Canino, of whom I cherish a reverent remembrance."

A few words more ended the will, and the name of a bank in New York was
given as agent.  Then there was silence in the room, and Valmond appeared
to sleep.

Presently the avocat, thinking that he might wish to be alone with the
Cure, stepped quietly to the door and opened it upon Madame Chalice.  She
pressed his hand, her eyes full of tears, passed inside the room, going
softly to a shadowed corner, and sat watching the passive figure on the
bed.

What were the thoughts of this man, now that his adventure was over and
his end near?  If he were in very truth a prince, how pitiable, how
paltry!  What cheap martyrdom!  If an impostor, had the game been worth
the candle?--Death seemed a coin of high value for this short, vanished
comedy.  The man alone could answer, for the truth might not be known,
save by the knowledge that comes with the end of all.

She looked at the Cure, where he knelt praying, and wondered how much of
this tragedy the anxious priest would lay at his own door.

"It is no tragedy, dear Cure" Valmond said suddenly, as if following her
thoughts.

"My son, it is all tragedy until you have shown me your heart, that I may
send you forth in peace."

He had forgotten Madame Chalice's presence, and she sat very still.

"Even for our dear Lagroin," Valmond continued, "it was no tragedy.  He
was fighting for the cause, not for a poor fellow like me.  As a soldier
loves to die, he died--in the dream of his youth, sword in hand."

"You loved the cause, my son?" was the troubled question.  "You were all
honest?"

Valmond made as if he would rise on his elbow, in excitement, but the
Cure put him gently back.  "From a child I loved it, dear Cure," was the
quick reply.  "Listen, and I will tell you all my story."

He composed himself, and his face took on a warm light, giving it a look
of happiness almost.

"The very first thing I remember was sitting on the sands of the sea-
shore, near some woman who put her arms round me and drew me to her
heart.  I seem even to recall her face now, though I never could before
--do we see things clearer when we come to die, I wonder?  I never saw
her again.  I was brought up by my parents, who were humble peasants, on
an estate near Viterbo, in Italy.  I was taught in the schools, and I
made friends among my school-fellows; but that was all the happiness I
had; for my parents were strict and hard with me, and showed me no love.
At twelve years of age I was taken to Rome, and there I entered the house
of Prince Lucien Bonaparte, as page.  I was always near the person of His
Highness."

He paused, at sight of a sudden pain in the Cure's face.  Sighing, he
continued:

"I travelled with him to France, to Austria, to England, where I learned
to speak the language, and read what the English wrote about the Great
Napoleon.  Their hatred angered me, and I began to study what French and
Italian books said of him.  I treasured up every scrap of knowledge I
could get.  I listened to all that was said in the Prince's palace, and I
was glad when His Highness let me read aloud private papers to him.  From
these I learned the secrets of the great family.  The Prince was seldom
gentle with me--sometimes almost brutal, yet he would scarcely let me out
of his sight.  I had little intercourse then with the other servants, and
less still when I was old enough to become a valet; and a valet I was to
the Prince for twelve years."

The Cure's hand clasped the arm of his chair nervously.  His lips moved,
but he said nothing aloud, and he glanced quickly towards Madame Chalice,
who sat moveless, her face flushed, her look fixed on Valmond.  So, he
was the mere impostor after all--a valet!  Fate had won the toss-up; not
faith, or friendship, or any good thing.

"All these years," Valmond continued presently, his voice growing weaker,
"I fed on such food as is not often within the reach of valets.  I knew
as much of the Bonapartes, of Napoleonic history, as the Prince himself,
so much so, that he often asked me of some date or fact of which he was
not sure.  In time, I became almost like a private secretary to him.  I
lived in a dream for years; for I had poetry, novels, paintings, music,
at my hand all the time, and the Prince, at the end, changed greatly, was
affectionate indeed, and said he would do good things for me.  I became
familiar with all the intrigues, the designs of the Bonapartes; and what
I did not know was told me by Prince Pierre, who was near my own age,
and who used me always more like a friend than a servant.

"One day the Prince was visited by Count Bertrand, who was with the
Emperor in his exile, and I heard him speak of a thing unknown to
history: that Napoleon had a son, born at St. Helena, by a countess well
known in Europe.  She had landed, disguised as a sailor, from a merchant-
ship, and had lived in retirement at Longwood for near a year.  After the
Emperor died, the thing was discovered, but the governor of the island
made no report of it to the British Government, for the event would have
reflected on himself; and the returned exiles kept the matter a secret.
It was said that the child died at St. Helena.  The story remained in my
mind, and I brooded on it.

"Two years ago Prince Lucien died in my arms.  When he was gone, I found
that I had been left five hundred thousand francs, a chateau, and several
relics of the Bonapartes, as reward for my services to the Prince, and,
as the will said, in token of the love he had come to bear me.  To these
Prince Pierre added a number of mementoes.  I went to visit my parents,
whom I had not seen for many years.  I found that my mother was dead,
that my father was a drunkard.  I left money for my father with the
mayor, and sailed for England.  From London I came to New York; from New
York to Quebec.  All the time I was restless, unhappy.  I had had to work
all my life, now I had nothing to do.  I had lived close to great
traditions, now there was no habit of life to keep them alive in me.
I spent money freely, but it gave me no pleasure.  I once was a valet to
a great man, now I had the income of a gentleman, and was no gentleman.
Ah, do you not shrink from me, Monsieur le Cure?"

The Cure did not reply, but made a kindly gesture, and Valmond continued:

"Sick of everything, one day I left Quebec hurriedly.  Why I came here I
do not know, save that I had heard it was near the mountains, was quiet,
and I could be at peace.  There was something in me which could not be
content in the foolishness of idle life.  All the time I kept thinking--
thinking.  If I were only a Napoleon, how I would try to do great things!
Ah, my God!  I loved the Great Napoleon.  What had the Bonapartes done?
Nothing--nothing.  Everything had slipped away from them.  Not one of
them was like the Emperor.  His own legitimate son was dead.  None of the
others had the Master's blood, fire, daring in his veins.  The thought
grew on me, and I used to imagine myself his son.  I loved his memory,
all he did, all he was, better than any son could do.  It had been my
whole life, thinking of him and the Empire, while I brushed the Prince's
clothes or combed his hair.  Why should such tastes be given to a valet?
Some one somewhere was to blame, dear Cure.  I really did not conceive or
plan imposture.  I was only playing a comedian's part in front of the
Louis Quinze, till I heard Parpon sing a verse of 'Vive Napoleon!'  Then
it all rushed on me, captured me--and the rest you know."

The Cure could not trust himself to speak yet.

"I had not thought to go so far when I began.  It was mostly a whim.  But
the idea gradually possessed me, and at last it seemed to me that I was a
real Napoleon.  I used to wake from the dream for a moment, and I tried
to stop, but something in my blood drove me on--inevitably.  You were all
good to me; you nearly all believed in me.  Lagroin came--and so it has
gone on till now, till now.  I had a feeling what the end would be.  But
I should have had my dream.  I should have died for the cause as no
Napoleon or Bonaparte ever died.  Like a man, I would pay the penalty
Fate should set.  What more could I do?  If a man gives all he has, is
not that enough?  .  .  .  There is my whole story.  Now, I shall ask
your pardon, dear Cure."

"You must ask pardon of God, my son," said the priest, his looks showing
the anguish he felt.

"The Little Chemist said two hours, but I feel"--his voice got very faint
"I feel that he is mistaken."  He murmured a prayer, and crossed himself
thrice.

The Cure made ready to read the office for the dying.  "My son," he said,
"do you truly and earnestly repent you of your sins?"

Valmond's eyes suddenly grew misty, his breathing heavier.  He scarcely
seemed to comprehend.

"I have paid the price--I have loved you all.  Parpon--where are you?
--Elise!"

A moment of silence, and then his voice rang out with a sort of sob.
"Ah, madame," he cried chokingly, "dear madame, for you I--"

Madame Chalice arose with a little cry, for she knew whom he meant, and
her heart ached for him.  She forgot his imposture--everything.

"Ah, dear, dear monsieur!" she said brokenly.

He knew her voice, he heard her coming; his eyes opened wide, and he
raised himself on the couch with a start.  The effort loosened the
bandage at his neck, and blood gushed out on his bosom.

With a convulsive motion he drew up the coverlet to his chin, to hide the
red stream, and said gaspingly:

"Pardon, madame."

Then a shudder passed through him, and with a last effort to spare her
the sight of his ensanguined body,' he fell face downward, voiceless--for
ever.

The very earth seemed breathing.  Long waves of heat palpitated over the
harvest-fields, and the din of the locust drove lazily through.  The far
cry of the king-fisher, and idly clacking wheels of carts rolling down
from Dalgrothe Mountain, accented the drowsy melody of the afternoon.
The wild mustard glowed so like a golden carpet, that the destroying hand
of the anxious farmer seemed of the blundering tyranny of labour.  Whole
fields were flaunting with poppies, too gay for sorrow to pass that way;
but a blind girl, led by a little child, made a lane through the red
luxuriance, hurrying to the place where vanity and valour, and the
remnant of an unfulfilled manhood, lay beaten to death.

Destiny, which is stronger than human love, or the soul's fidelity, had
overmastered self-sacrifice and the heart of a woman.  This woman had
opened her eyes upon the world again, only to find it all night, all
strange; she was captive of a great darkness.

As she broke through the hedge of lilacs by the Cure's house, the crowd
of awe-stricken people fell back, opening a path for her to the door.
She moved as one unconscious of the troubled life and the vibrating world
about her.

The hand of the child admitted her to the chamber of death; the door
closed, and she stood motionless.

The Cure made as if to rise and go towards her, but Madame Chalice,
sitting sorrowful and dismayed at the foot of the couch, by a motion of
her hand stopped him.

The girl paused a moment, listening.  "Your Excellency," she whispered.
It was as if a soul leaned out of the casement of life, calling into the
dark and the quiet which may not be comprehended by mortal man.
"Monsieur--Valmond !"

Her trembling hands were stretched out before her yearningly.  The Cure
moved.  She turned towards the sound with a pitiful vagueness.

"Valmond, O Valmond!" again she cried beseechingly, her clouded eyes
straining into the silence.

The cloak dropped from her shoulders, and the loose robe enveloping her
fell away from a bosom that throbbed with the passion of a great despair.
Nothing but silence.

She moved to the wall like a little child feeling its way, ran her hand
vaguely along it, and touched a crucifix.  With a moan she pressed her
lips to the nailed feet, and came on gropingly to the couch.  She reached
down towards it, but drew back as if in affright; for a dumb, desolating
fear was upon her.

But with that direful courage which is the last gift to the hopeless,
she stooped down again, and her fingers touched Valmond's cold hands.

They ran up his breast, to his neck, to his face, and fondled it, as only
life can fondle death, out of that pitiful hunger which never can be
satisfied in this world; then they moved with an infinite tenderness to
his eyes, now blind like hers, and lingered there in the kinship of
eternal loss.

A low, anguished cry broke from her: "Valmond--my love!" and she fell
forward upon the breast of her lost Napoleon.

When the people gathered again in the little church upon the hill,
Valmond and his adventure had become almost a legend, so soon are men
and events lost in the distance of death and ruin.

The Cure preached, as he had always done, with a simple, practical
solicitude; but towards the end of his brief sermon he paused, and,
with a serious tenderness of voice, said:

"My children, vanity is the bane of mankind; it destroys as many souls as
self-sacrifice saves.  It is the constant temptation of the human heart.
I have ever warned you against it, as I myself have prayed to be kept
from its devices--alas!  how futilely at times.  Vanity leads to
imposture, and imposture to the wronging of others.  But if a man repent,
and yield all he has, to pay the high price of his bitter mistake, he may
thereby redeem himself even in this world.  If he give his life
repenting, and if the giving stays the evil he might have wrought,
shall we be less merciful than God?

"My children" (he did not mention Valmond's name), "his last act was
manly; his death was pious; his sin was forgiven.  Those rifle bullets
that brought him down let out all the evil in his blood.

"We, my people, have been delivered from a grave error.  Forgetting--
save for our souls' welfare--the misery of this vanity which led us
astray, let us remember with gladness all of him that was commendable in
our eyes: his kindness, eloquence, generous heart, courage, and love of
Mother Church.  He lies in our graveyard; he is ours; and, being ours,
let us protect his memory, as though he had not sought us a stranger,
but was of us: of our homes, as of our love, and of our sorrow.

"And so atoning for our sins, as did he, may we at last come to the
perfect pardon, and to peace everlasting."




EPILOGUE

I

(EXTRACT FROM A LETTER WRITTEN BY MADAME CHALICE TO MONSIEUR PADRE, CURE
OF THE PARISH OF PONTIAC, THREE MONTHS AFTER VALMOND'S DEATH.)

" .  .  .  And here, dear Cure, you shall have my justification for
writing you two letters in one week, though I should make the accident
a habit if I were sure it would more please you than perplex you.

"Prince Pierre, son of Prince Lucien Bonaparte, arrived in New York two
days ago, and yesterday morning he came to the Atlantic Bank, and asked
for my husband.  When he made known his business, Harry sent for me, that
I might speak with him.

"Dear Cure, hearts and instincts were right in Pontiac: our unhappy
friend Valmond was that child of Napoleon, born at St. Helena, of whom he
himself spoke at his death in your home.  His mother was the Countess of
Carnstadt.  At the beginning of an illness which followed Napoleon's
death, the child was taken from her by Prince Lucien Bonaparte, and was
brought up and educated as the son of poor peasants in Italy.  No one
knew of his birth save the companions in exile of the Great Emperor.  All
of them, with the exception of Count Bertrand, believed, as Valmond said,
that the child had died in infancy at St. Helena.

"Prince Lucien had sworn to the mother that he would care personally for
the child, and he fulfilled his promise by making him a page in his
household, and afterwards a valet--base redemption of a vow.

"But even as Valmond drew our hearts to him, so at last he won Prince
Lucien's, as he had from the first won Prince Pierre's.

"It was not until after Valmond's death, when receiving the residue of
our poor friend's estate, that Prince Pierre learned the whole truth from
Count Bertrand.  He immediately set sail for New York, and next week he
will secretly visit you, for love of the dead man, and to thank you and
our dear avocat, together with all others who believed in and befriended
his unfortunate kinsman.

"Ah, dear Cure, think of the irony of it all--that a man be driven,
by the very truth in his blood, to that strangest of all impostures
--to impersonate himself--He did it too well to be the mere comedian;
I felt that all the time.  I shall show his relics now with more pride
than sorrow.  Prince Pierre dines with us to-night.  He looks as if he
had the Napoleonic daring,--or rashness,--but I am sure he has not the
good heart of our Valmond Napoleon.  .  .  ."


II

The haymakers paused and leaned upon their forks, children left the
strawberry vines and climbed upon the fences, as the coach from the
distant city dashed down the street towards the four corners, and the
welcoming hotel, with its big dormer windows and well-carved veranda.
As it whirled by, the driver shouted something at a stalwart forgeron,
standing at the doorway of his smithy, and he passed it on to a loitering
mealman and a lime-burner.

A girl came slowly over the crest of a hill.  Feeling her way with a
stick, she paused now and then to draw in long breaths of sweet air from
the meadows, as if in the joy of Nature she found a balm for the
cruelties of Destiny.

Presently a puff of smoke shot out from the hillside where she stood,
and the sound of an old cannon followed.  From the Seigneury, far over,
came an answering report; and Tricolors ran fluttering up on flagstaffs,
at the four corners, and in the Cure's garden.

The girl stood wondering, her fine, calm face expressing the quick
thoughts which had belonged to eyes once so full of hope and blithe
desire.  The serenity of her life--its charity, its truth, its cheerful
care for others, the confidence of the young which it invited, showed in
all the aspect of her.  She heard the flapping of the flag in the Cure's
garden, and turned her darkened eyes towards it.  A look of pain crossed
her face, and a hand trembled to her bosom, as if to ease a great
throbbing of her heart.  These cannon shots and this shivering pennant
brought back a scene at the four corners, years before.

Footsteps came over the hill: she knew them, and turned.

"Parpon!" she said, with a glad gesture.

Without a word he placed in her hand a bunch of violets that he carried.
She lifted them to her lips.  "What is it all?" she asked, turning again
to the Tricolor.

"Louis Napoleon enters the Tuileries," he answered.  "But ours was the
son of the Great Emperor!" she said.  "Let us be going, Parpon: we will
plats these on his grave."  She pressed the violets to her heart.

"France would have loved him, as we did," said the dwarf, as they moved
on.

"As we do," the blind girl answered softly.

Their figures against the setting sun took on a strange burnished
radiance, so that they seemed as mystical pilgrims journeying into that
golden haze, which veiled them in beyond the hill, as the Angelus sounded
from the tower of the ancient church.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Vanity is the bane of mankind
You cannot live long enough to atone for that impertinence






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "VALMOND TO PONTIAC":

Conquest not important enough to satisfy ambition
Face flushed with a sort of pleasurable defiance
Her sight was bounded by the little field where she strayed
I was never good at catechism
The blind tyranny of the just
Touch of the fantastic, of the barbaric, in all genius
Vanity is the bane of mankind
Visions of the artistic temperament--delight and curse
We are only children till we begin to make our dreams our life
You cannot live long enough to atone for that impertinence






THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD, Complete

By Gilbert Parker



CONTENTS:

EPOCH THE FIRST
I.        AN ENVOY EXTRAORDINARY
II.       THE THREAT OF A RENEGADE
III.      THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
IV.       THE UPLIFTING OF THE SWORDS
V.        THE FRUITS OF THE LAW
VI.       THE KIDNAPPING

EPOCH THE SECOND
VII.      FRIENDS IN COUNCIL
VIII.     AS SEEN THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY
IX.       TO THE PORCH OF THE WORLD
X.        QUI VIVE!
XI.       WITH THE STRANGE PEOPLE
XII.      OUT OF THE NET

EPOCH THE THIRD
XIII.     "AS WATER UNTO WINE"
XIV.      IN WHICH THE HUNTERS ARE OUT
XV.       IN THE MATTER OF BUCKLAW
XVI.      IN THE TREASURE HOUSE
XVII.     THE GIFT OF A CAPTIVE
XVIII.    MAIDEN NO MORE

EPOCH THE FOURTH
XIX.      WHICH TELLS OF A BROTHER'S BLOOD CRYING FROM THE GROUND
XX.       A TRAP IS SET
XXI.      AN UNTOWARD MESSENGER
XXII.     FROM TIGER'S CLAW TO LION'S MOUTH
XXIII.    AT THE GATES OF MISFORTUNE
XXIV.     IN WHICH THE SWORD IS SHEATHED




WHEREIN IS SET FORTH THE HISTORY OF JESSICA LEVERET, AS ALSO THAT OF
PIERRE LE MOYNE OF IBERVILLE, GEORGE GERING, AND OTHER BOLD SPIRITS;
TOGETHER WITH CERTAIN MATTERS OF WAR, AND THE DEEDS OF ONE EDWARD
BUCKLAW, MUTINEER AND PIRATE



DEDICATION

     My Dear Father:

     Once, many years ago, in a kind of despair, you were impelled to say
     that I would "never be anything but a rascally lawyer."  This, it
     may be, sat upon your conscience, for later you turned me gravely
     towards Paley and the Thirty-nine Articles; and yet I know that in
     your deepest soldier's heart, you really pictured me, how
     unavailingly, in scarlet and pipe-clay, and with sabre, like
     yourself in youth and manhood.  In all I disappointed you, for I
     never had a brief or a parish, and it was another son of yours who
     carried on your military hopes.  But as some faint apology--I almost
     dare hope some recompense for what must have seemed wilfulness, I
     send you now this story of a British soldier and his "dear maid,"
     which has for its background the old city of Quebec, whose high
     ramparts you walked first sixty years ago; and for setting, the
     beginning of those valiant fightings, which, as I have heard you
     say, "through God's providence and James Wolfe, gave England her
     best possession."

     You will, I feel sure, quarrel with the fashion of my campaigns, and
     be troubled by my anachronisms; but I beg you to remember that long
     ago you gave my young mind much distress when you told that
     wonderful story, how you, one man, "surrounded" a dozen enemies, and
     drove them prisoners to headquarters.  "Surrounded" may have been
     mere lack of precision, but it serves my turn now, as you see.  You
     once were--and I am precise here--a gallant swordsman: there are
     legends yet of your doings with a crack Dublin bully.  Well, in the
     last chapter of this tale you shall find a duel which will perhaps
     recall those early days of this century, when your blood was hot and
     your hand ready.  You would be distrustful of the details of this
     scene, did I not tell you that, though the voice is Jacob's the hand
     is another's.  Swordsmen are not so many now in the army or out of
     it, that, among them, Mr. Walter Herrim Pollock's name will have
     escaped you: so, if you quarrel, let it be with Esau; though, having
     good reason to be grateful to him, that would cause me sorrow.

     My dear father, you are nearing the time-post of ninety years, with
     great health and cheerfulness; it is my hope you may top the arch of
     your good and honourable life with a century key-stone.

                         Believe me, sir,

                              Your affectionate son,

                                        GILBERT PARKER.

15th September, 1894,
     7 Park Place,
          St. James's S.W.





INTRODUCTION

THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD

This book, like Mrs. Falchion, was published in two volumes in January.
That was in 1894.  It appeared first serially in the Illustrated London
News, for which paper, in effect, it was written, and it also appeared in
a series of newspapers in the United States during the year 1893.  This
was a time when the historical novel was having its vogue.  Mr. Stanley
Weyman, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and a good many others were following
the fashion, and many of the plays at the time were also historical--
so-called.  I did not write The Trail of the Sword because it was in
keeping with the spirit of the moment.  Fashion has never in the least
influenced my writing or my literary purposes.  Whatever may be thought
of my books, they represent nothing except my own bent of mind, my own
wilful expression of myself, and the setting forth of that which seized
my imagination.

I wrote The Trail of the Sword because the early history of the
struggles between the French and English and the North American Continent
interested me deeply and fascinated my imagination.  Also, I had a most
intense desire to write of the Frenchman of the early days of the old
regime; and I have no idea why it was so, because I have no French blood
in my veins nor any trace of French influence in my family.  There is,
however, the Celtic strain, the Irish blood, immediate of the tang, as it
were, and no doubt a sympathy between the Celtic and the Gallic strain is
very near, and has a tendency to become very dear.  It has always been a
difficulty for me to do anything except show the more favourable side of
French character and life.

I am afraid that both in The Trail of the Sword, which was the forerunner
of The Seats of the Mighty, the well sunk, in a sense, out of which the
latter was drawn, I gave my Frenchman the advantage over his English
rival.  In The Trail of the Sword, the gallant French adventurer's
chivalrous but somewhat merciless soul, makes a better picture than does
his more phlegmatic but brave and honourable antagonist, George Gering.
Also in The Seats of the Mighty, Doltaire, the half-villain, overshadows
the good English hero from first to last; and yet, despite the
unconscious partiality for the individual in both books, English
character and the English as a race, as a whole, are dominant in the
narrative.

There is a long letter, as a dedication to this book, addressed to my
father; there is a note also, which explains the spirit in which the book
was written, and I have no desire to enlarge this introduction in the
presence of these prefaces to the first edition.  But I may say that this
book was gravely important to me, because it was to test all my capacity
for writing a novel with an historical background, and, as it were, in
the custom of a bygone time.  It was not really the first attempt at
handling a theme belonging to past generations, because I had written for
Good Words, about the year 1890, a short novel which I called The Chief
Factor, a tale of the Hudson's Bay Company.  It was the first novel or
tale of mine which secured copyright under the new American copyright act
of 1892.

There was a circumstance connected with this publication which is
interesting.  When I arrived in New York, I had only three days in which
to have the book printed in order to secure the copyright before Good
Words published the novel as its Christmas annual in its entirety.  I
tried Messrs. Harper & Brothers, and several other publishers by turn,
but none of them could undertake to print the book in the time.  At last
some kind friend told me to go to the Trow Directory Binding Company,
which I did.  They said they could not print the story in the time.
I begged them to reconsider.  I told them how much was at stake for me.
I said that I would stay in the office and read the proofs as they came
from the press, and would not move until it was finished.  Refusal had
been written on the lips and the face of the manager at the beginning,
but at last I prevailed.  He brought the foreman down there and then.
Each of us, elated by the conditions of the struggle, determined to pull
the thing off.  We printed that book of sixty-five thousand words or so,
in forty-eight hours, and it arrived in Washington three hours before the
time was up.  I saved the copyright, and I need hardly say that my
gratitude to the Trow Directory Binding Company was as great as their
delight in having done a really brilliant piece of work.

The day after the copyright was completed, I happened to mention the
incident to Mr. Archibald Clavering Gunter, author of Mr. Barnes of New
York, who had a publishing house for his own books.  He immediately made
me an offer for The Chief Factor.  I hesitated, because I had been
dealing with great firms like Harpers, and, to my youthful mind, it
seemed rather beneath my dignity to have the imprint of so new a firm as
the Home Publishing Company on the title-page of my book.  I asked the
advice of Mr. Walter H.  Page, then editor of The Forum, now one of the
proprietors of The World's Work and Country Life, and he instantly said:
"What difference does it make who publishes your book?  It is the public
you want."

I did not hesitate any longer.  The Chief Factor went to Mr. Archibald
Clavering Gunter and the Home Publishing Company, and they made a very
large sale of it.  I never cared for the book however; it seemed stilted
and amateurish, though some of its descriptions and some of its dialogues
were, I think, as good as I can do; so, eventually, in the middle
nineties, I asked Mr. Gunter to sell me back the rights in the book and
give me control of it.  This he did.  I thereupon withdrew it from
publication at once, and am not including it in this subscription
edition.  I think it better dead.  But the writing of it taught me better
how to write The Trail of the Sword; though, if I had to do this book
again, I could construct it better.

I think it fresh and very vigorous, and I think it does not lack
distinction, while a real air of romance--of refined romance--pervades
it.  But I know that Mr. W. E. Henley was right when, after most
generously helping me to revise it, with a true literary touch
wonderfully intimate and affectionate, he said to me: "It is just not
quite big, but the next one will get home."

He was right.  The Trail of the Sword is "just not quite," though I think
it has charm; but it remained for The Seats of the Mighty to get home, as
"W. E. H.", the most exacting, yet the most generous, of critics, said.

This book played a most important part in a development of my literary
work, and the warm reception by the public--for in England it has been
through its tenth edition, and in America through proportionate
thousands--was partly made possible by the very beautiful illustrations
which accompanied its publication in The Illustrated London News.  The
artist was A. L. Forestier, and never before or since has my work
received such distinguished pictorial exposition, save, perhaps, in The
Weavers, when Andre Castaigne did such triumphant work.  It is a joy
still to look at the illustrations of The Trail of the Sword, for,
absolutely faithful to the time, they add a note of verisimilitude to the
tale.




A NOTE

The actors in this little drama played their parts on the big stage of a
new continent two hundred years ago.  Despots sat upon the thrones of
France and England, and their representatives on the Hudson and the St.
Lawrence were despots too, with greater opportunity and to better ends.
In Canada, Frontenac quarreled with his Intendant and his Council, set
a stern hand upon the Church when she crossed with his purposes, cajoled,
treated with, and fought the Indians by turn, and cherished a running
quarrel with the English Governor of New York.  They were striving for
the friendship of the Iroquois on the one hand, and for the trade of the
Great West on the other.  The French, under such men as La Salle, had
pushed their trading posts westward to the great lakes and beyond the
Missouri, and north to the shores of Hudson's Bay.  They traded and
fought and revelled, hot with the spirit of adventure, the best of
pioneers and the worst of colonists.  Tardily, upon their trail, came the
English and the Dutch, slow to acquire but strong to hold; not so rash in
adventure, nor so adroit in intrigue, as fond of fighting, but with less
of the gift of the woods, and much more the faculty for government.
There was little interchange of friendliness and trade between the rival
colonists; and Frenchmen were as rare on Manhattan Island as Englishmen
on the heights of Quebec--except as prisoners.

                                                       G. P.




THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD

EPOCH THE FIRST
I.        AN ENVOY EXTRAORDINARY
II.       THE THREAT OF A RENEGADE
III.      THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
IV.       THE UPLIFTING OF THE SWORDS
V.        THE FRUITS OF THE LAW
VI.       THE KIDNAPPING



CHAPTER I

AN ENVOY EXTRAORDINARY

One summer afternoon a tall, good-looking stripling stopped in the midst
of the town of New York, and asked his way to the governor's house.  He
attracted not a little attention, and he created as much astonishment
when he came into the presence of the governor.  He had been announced as
an envoy from Quebec.  "Some new insolence of the County Frontenac!"
cried old Richard Nicholls, bringing his fist down on the table.  For a
few minutes he talked with his chamberfellow; then, "Show the gentleman
in," he added.  In the room without, the envoy from Quebec had stood
flicking the dust from his leggings with a scarf.  He was not more than
eighteen, his face had scarcely an inkling of moustache, but he had an
easy upright carriage, with an air of self-possession, the keenest of
grey eyes, a strong pair of shoulders, a look of daring about his rather
large mouth, which lent him a manliness well warranting his present
service.  He had been left alone, and the first thing he had done was to
turn on his heel and examine the place swiftly.  This he seemed to do
mechanically, not as one forecasting danger, not as a spy.  In the curve
of his lips, in an occasional droop of his eyelids, there was a
suggestion of humour: less often a quality of the young than of the old.
For even in the late seventeenth century, youth took itself seriously at
times.

Presently, as he stood looking at the sunshine through the open door,
a young girl came into the lane of light, waved her hand, with a little
laugh, to some one in the distance, and stepped inside.  At first she did
not see him.  Her glances were still cast back the way she had come.
The young man could not follow her glance, nor was he anything curious.
Young as he was, he could enjoy a fine picture.  There was a pretty
demureness in the girl's manner, a warm piquancy in the turn of the neck,
and a delicacy in her gestures, which to him, fresh from hard hours in
the woods, was part of some delightful Arcady--though Arcady was more in
his veins than of his knowledge.  For the young seigneur of New France
spent far more hours with his gun than with his Latin, and knew his bush-
ranging vassal better than his tutor; and this one was too complete a
type of his order to reverse its record.  He did not look to his scanty
lace, or set himself seemingly; he did but stop flicking the scarf held
loose in his fingers, his foot still on the bench.  A smile played at his
lips, and his eyes had a gleam of raillery.  He heard the girl say in a
soft, quaint voice, just as she turned towards him, "Foolish boy!"  By
this he knew that the pretty picture had for its inspiration one of his
own sex.

She faced him, and gave a little cry of surprise.  Then their eyes met.
Immediately he made the most elaborate bow of all his life, and she swept
a graceful courtesy.  Her face was slightly flushed that this stranger
should have seen, but he carried such an open, cordial look that she
paused, instead of hurrying into the governor's room, as she had seemed
inclined to do.

In the act the string of her hat, slung over her arm, came loose, and the
hat fell to the floor.  Instantly he picked it up and returned it.
Neither had spoken a word.  It seemed another act of the light pantomime
at the door.  As if they had both thought on the instant how droll it
was, they laughed, and she said to him naively: "You have come to visit
the governor?  You are a Frenchman, are you not?"

To this in slow and careful English, "Yes," he replied; "I have come from
Canada to see his excellency.  Will you speak French?"

"If you please, no," she answered, smiling; "your English is better than
my French.  But I must go."  And she turned towards the door of the
governor's room.

"Do not go yet," he said.  "Tell me, are you the governor's daughter?"

She paused, her hand at the door.  "Oh no," she answered; then, in a
sprightly way--"are you a governor's son?"

"I wish I were," he said, "for then there'd be a new intendant, and we'd
put Nick Perrot in the council."

"What is an intendant?" she asked, "and who is Nick Perrot?"

"Bien! an intendant is a man whom King Louis appoints to worry the
governor and the gentlemen of Canada, and to interrupt the trade.
Nicolas Perrot is a fine fellow, and a great coureur du bois, and helps
to get the governor out of troubles to-day, the intendant to-morrow.
He is a splendid fighter.  Perrot is my friend."

He said this, not with an air of boasting, but with a youthful and
enthusiastic pride, which was relieved, by the twinkle in his eyes and
his frank manner.

"Who brought you here?" she asked demurely.  "Are they inside with the
governor?"

He saw the raillery; though, indeed, it was natural to suppose that he
had no business with the governor, but had merely come with some one.
The question was not flattering.  His hand went up to his chin a little
awkwardly.  She noted how large yet how well-shaped it was, or, rather,
she remembered afterwards.  Then it dropped upon the hilt of the rapier
he wore, and he answered with good self-possession, though a little hot
spot showed on his cheek: "The governor must have other guests who are
no men of mine; for he keeps an envoy from Count Frontenac long in his
anteroom."

The girl became very youthful indeed, and a merry light danced in her
eyes and warmed her cheek.  She came a step nearer.  "It is not so?
You do not come from Count Frontenac--all alone, do you?"

"I'll tell you after I have told the governor," he answered, pleased and
amused.

"Oh, I shall hear when the governor hears," she answered, with a soft
quaintness, and then vanished into the governor's chamber.  She had
scarce entered when the door opened again, and the servant, a Scotsman,
came out to say that his excellency would receive him.  He went briskly
forward, but presently paused.  A sudden sense of shyness possessed him.
It was not the first time he had been ushered into vice-regal presence,
but his was an odd position.  He was in a strange land, charged with an
embassy which accident had thrust upon him.  Then, too, the presence of
the girl had withdrawn him for an instant from the imminence of his duty.
His youth came out of him, and in the pause one could fairly see him turn
into man.

He had not the dark complexion of so many of his race, but was rather
Saxon in face, with rich curling brown hair.  Even in that brave time one
might safely have bespoken for him a large career.  And even while the
Scotsman in the doorway eyed him with distant deprecation, as he eyed all
Frenchmen, good and bad, ugly or handsome, he put off his hesitation and
entered the governor's chamber.  Colonel Nicholls came forward to greet
him, and then suddenly stopped, astonished.  Then he wheeled upon the
girl.  "Jessica, you madcap!" he said in a low voice.

She was leaning against a tall chair, both hands grasping the back of it,
her chin just level with the top.  She had told the governor that Count
Frontenac had sent him a lame old man, and that, enemy or none, he ought
not to be kept waiting, with arm in sling and bandaged head.  Seated at
the table near her was a grave member of the governor's council, William
Drayton by name.  He lifted a reproving finger at her now, but with a
smile on his kindly face, and "Fie, fie, young lady!" he said, in a
whisper.

Presently the governor mastered his surprise, and seeing that the young
man was of birth and quality, extended his hand cordially enough, and
said: "I am glad to greet you, sir;" and motioned him to a seat.  "But,
pray, sit down," he added, "and let us hear the message Count Frontenac
has sent.  Meanwhile we would be favoured with your name and rank."

The young man thrust a hand into his doublet and drew forth a packet of
papers.  As he handed it over, he said in English--for till then the
governor had spoken French, having once served with the army of France,
and lived at the French Court: "Your excellency, my name is Pierre le
Moyne of Iberville, son of Charles le Moyne, a seigneur of Canada, of
whom you may have heard."  (The governor nodded.)  "I was not sent by
Count Frontenac to you.  My father was his envoy: to debate with you
our trade in the far West and our dealings with the Iroquois."

"Exactly," said old William Drayton, tapping the table with his
forefinger; "and a very sound move, upon my soul."

"Ay, ay," said the governor, "I know of your father well enough.  A good
fighter and an honest gentleman, as they say.  But proceed, Monsieur le
Moyne of Iberville."

"I am called Iberville," said the young man simply.  Then: "My father and
myself started from Quebec with good Nick Perrot, the coureur du bois--"

"I know him too," the governor interjected--"a scoundrel worth his weight
in gold to your Count Frontenac."

"For whose head Count Frontenac has offered gold in his time," answered
Iberville, with a smile.

"A very pretty wit," said old William Drayton, nodding softly towards the
girl, who was casting bright, quizzical glances at the youth over the
back of the chair.

Iberville went on: "Six days ago we were set upon by a score of your
Indians, and might easily have left our scalps with them; but, as it
chanced, my father was wounded, I came off scot-free, and we had the
joy of ridding your excellency of half a dozen rogues."

The governor lifted his eyebrows and said nothing.  The face of the girl
over against the back of the chair had become grave.

"It was in question whether Perrot or I should bear Count Frontenac's
message.  Perrot knew the way, I did not; Perrot also knew the Indians."

"But Perrot," said the governor blufily, "would have been the letter-
carrier; you are a kind of ambassador.  Upon my soul, yes, a sort of
ambassador!" he added, enjoying the idea; for, look at it how you would,
Iberville was but a boy.

"That was my father's thought and my own," answered Iberville coolly.
"There was my father to care for till his wound was healed and he could
travel back to Quebec, so we thought it better Perrot should stay with
him.  A Le Moyne was to present himself, and a Le Moyne has done so."

The governor was impressed more deeply than he showed.  It was a time of
peace, but the young man's journey among Indian braves and English
outlaws, to whom a French scalp was a thing of price, was hard and
hazardous.  His reply was cordial, then his fingers came to the seal
of the packet; but the girl's hand touched his arm.

"I know his name," she said in the governor's ear, "but he does not know
mine."

The governor patted her hand, and then rejoined: "Now, now, I forgot the
lady; but I cannot always remember that you are full fifteen years old."

Standing up, with all due gravity and courtesy, "Monsieur Iberville," he
said, "let me present you to Mistress Jessica Leveret, the daughter of my
good and honoured and absent friend, the Honourable Hogarth Leveret."

So the governor and his councillor stood shoulder to shoulder at one
window, debating Count Frontenac's message; and shoulder to shoulder at
another stood Iberville and Jessica Leveret.  And what was between these
at that moment--though none could have guessed it--signified as much to
the colonies of France and England, at strife in the New World, as the
deliberations of their elders.




CHAPTER II

THE THREAT OF A RENEGADE

Iberville was used to the society of women.  Even as a young lad, his
father's notable place in the colony, and the freedom and gaiety of life
in Quebec and Montreal, had drawn upon him a notice which was as much a
promise of the future as an accent of the present.  And yet, through all
of it, he was ever better inspired by the grasp of a common soldier, who
had served with Carignan-Salieres, or by the greeting and gossip of such
woodsmen as Du Lhut, Mantet, La Durantaye, and, most of all, his staunch
friend Perrot, chief of the coureurs du bois.  Truth is, in his veins was
the strain of war and adventure first and before all.  Under his tutor,
the good Pere Dollier de Casson, he had never endured his classics, save
for the sake of Hector and Achilles and their kind; and his knowledge of
English, which his father had pressed him to learn,--for he himself had
felt the lack of it in dealings with Dutch and English traders,--only
grew in proportion as he was given Shakespeare and Raleigh to explore.

Soon the girl laughed up at him.  "I have been a great traveller," she
said, "and I have ears.  I have been as far west as Albany and south to
Virginia, with my father, who, perhaps you do not know, is in England
now.  And they told me everywhere that Frenchmen are bold, dark men, with
great black eyes and very fine laces and wigs, and a trick of bowing and
making foolish compliments; and they are not to be trusted, and they will
not fight except in the woods, where there are trees to climb.  But I see
that it is not all true, for you are not dark, your eyes are not big or
black, your laces are not much to see, you do not make compliments--"

"I shall begin now," he interrupted.

"--you must be trusted a little, or Count Frontenac would not send you,
and--and--tell me, would you fight if you had a chance?"

No one of her sex had ever talked so to Iberville.  Her demure raillery,
her fresh, frank impertinence, through which there ran a pretty air of
breeding, her innocent disregard of formality, all joined to impress him,
to interest him.  He was not so much surprised at the elegance and
cleverness of her speech, for in Quebec girls of her age were skilled in
languages and arts, thanks to the great bishop, Laval, and to Marie of
the Incarnation.  In response to her a smile flickered upon his lips.  He
had a quick fierce temper, but it had never been severely tried; and so
well used was he to looking cheerfully upon things, so keen had been his
zest in living, that, where himself was concerned, his vanity was not
easily touched.  So, looking with genial dryness, "You will hardly
believe it, of course," he said, "but wings I have not yet grown, and the
walking is bad 'twixt here and the Chateau St. Louis."

"Iroquois traps," she suggested, with a smile.  "With a trick or two of
English footpads," was his reply.

Meanwhile his eye had loitered between the two men in council at the
farther window and the garden, into which he and the girl were looking.
Presently he gave a little start and a low whistle, and his eyelids
slightly drooped, giving him a handsome sulkiness.  "Is it so?" he said
between his teeth: "Radisson--Radisson, as I live!"

He had seen a man cross a corner of the yard.  This man was short, dark-
bearded, with black, lanky hair, brass earrings, and buckskin leggings,
all the typical equipment of the French coureur du bois.  Iberville had
only got one glance at his face, but the sinister profile could never be
forgotten.  At once the man passed out of view.  The girl had not seen
him, she had been watching her companion.  Presently she said, her
fingers just brushing his sleeve, for he stood eyeing the point where the
man had disappeared: "Wonderful!  You look now as if you would fight.
Oh, fierce, fierce as the governor when he catches a French spy!"

He turned to her and, with a touch of irony, "Pardon!" he retorted.
"Now I shall look as blithe as the governor when a traitor deserts to
him."

Of purpose he spoke loud enough to be heard by the governor and his
friend.  The governor turned sharply on him.  He had caught the ring in
the voice, that rash enthusiasm of eager youth, and, taking a step
towards Iberville, Count Frontenac's letter still poised in his hand:
"Were your words meant for my hearing, monsieur?" he said.  "Were you
speaking of me or of your governor?"

"I was thinking of one Radisson a traitor, and I was speaking of
yourself, your excellency."

The governor had asked his question in French, in French the reply was
given.  Both the girl and Councillor Drayton followed with difficulty.
Jessica looked a message to her comrade in ignorance.  The old man
touched the governor's arm.  "Let it be in English if monsieur is
willing.  He speaks it well."

The governor was at work to hide his anger: he wished good greeting to
Count Frontenac's envoy, and it seemed not fitting to be touched by the
charges of a boy.  "I must tell you frankly, Monsieur Iberville," he
said, "that I do not choose to find a sort of challenge in your words;
and I doubt that your father, had he been here, would have spoke quite so
roundly.  But I am for peace and happy temper when I can.  I may not help
it if your people, tired of the governance of Louis of France, come into
the good ruling of King Charles.  As for this man Radisson: what is it
you would have?"

Iberville was now well settled back upon his native courage.
He swallowed the rebuke with grace, and replied with frankness: "Radisson
is an outlaw.  Once he attempted Count Frontenac's life.  He sold a band
of our traders to the Iroquois.  He led your Hollanders stealthily to cut
off the Indians of the west, who were coming with their year's furs to
our merchants.  There is peace between your colony and ours--is it fair
to harbour such a wretch in your court-yard?  It was said up in Quebec,
your excellency, that such men have eaten at your table."

During this speech the governor seemed choleric, but a change passed
over him, and he fell to admiring the lad's boldness.  "Upon my soul,
monsieur," he said, "you are council, judge, and jury all in one; but I
think I need not weigh the thing with you, for his excellency, from whom
you come, has set forth this same charge,"--he tapped the paper,--"and we
will not spoil good-fellowship by threshing it now."  He laughed a little
ironically.  "And I promise you," he added, "that your Radisson shall
neither drink wine nor eat bread with you at my table.  And now, come,
let us talk awhile together; for, lest any accident befall the packet you
shall bear, I wish you to carry in your memory, with great distinctness,
the terms of my writing to your governor.  I would that it were not to be
written, for I hate the quill, and I've seen the time I would rather
point my sword red than my quill black."

By this the shadows were falling.  In the west the sun was slipping down
behind the hills, leaving the strong day with a rosy and radiant glamour,
that faded away in eloquent tones to the grey, tinsel softness of the
zenith.  Out in the yard a sumach bush was aflame.  Rich tiger-lilies
thrust in at the sill, and lazy flies and king bees boomed in and out of
the window.  Something out of the sunset, out of the glorious freshness
and primal majesty of the new land, diffused through the room where those
four people stood, and made them silent.  Presently the governor drew his
chair to the table, and motioned Councillor Drayton and Iberville to be
seated.

The girl touched his arm.  "And where am I to sit?" she asked demurely.
Colonel Nicholls pursed his lips and seemed to frown severely on her.
"To sit?  Why, in your room, mistress.  Tut, tut, you are too bold.
If I did not know your father was coming soon to bear you off, new orders
should be issued.  Yes, yes, e'en as I say," he added, as he saw the
laughter in her eyes.

She knew that she could wind the big-mannered soldier about her finger.
She had mastered his household; she was the idol of the settlement,
her flexible intelligence, the flush of the first delicate bounty of
womanhood had made him her slave.  In a matter of vexing weight he would
not have let her stay, but such deliberatings as he would have with
Iberville could well bear her scrutiny.  He reached out to pinch her
cheek, but she deftly tipped her head and caught his outstretched
fingers.  "But where am I to sit?" she persisted.  "Anywhere, then, but
at the council-table," was his response, as he wagged a finger at her and
sat down.  Going over she perched herself on a high stool in the window
behind Iberville.  He could not see her, and, if he thought at all about
it, he must have supposed that she could not see him.  Yet she could; for
against the window-frame was a mirror, and it reflected his face and the
doings at the board.  She did not listen to the rumble of voices.  She
fell to studying Iberville.  Once or twice she laughed softly to herself.

As she turned to the window a man passed by and looked in at her.  His
look was singular, and she started.  Something about his face was
familiar.  She found her mind feeling among far memories, for even the
past of the young stretches out interminably.  She shuddered, and a
troubled look came into her eyes.  Yet she could not remember.  She
leaned slightly forward, as if she were peering into that by-gone world
which, maybe, is wider than the future for all of us--the past.  Her eyes
grew deep and melancholy.  The sunset seemed to brighten around her all
at once, and enmesh her in a golden web, burnishing her hair, and it fell
across her brow with a peculiar radiance, leaving the temples in shadow,
softening and yet lighting the carmine of her cheeks and lips, giving a
feeling of life to her dress, which itself was like dusty gold.  Her
hands were caught and clasped at her knees.  There was something
spiritual and exalted in the picture.  It had, too, a touch of tragedy,
for something out of her nebulous past had been reflected in faint
shadows in her eyes, and this again, by strange, delicate processes, was
expressed in every line of her form, in all the aspect of her face.  It
was as if some knowledge were being filtered to her through myriad
atmospheres of premonition; as though the gods in pity foreshadowed a
great trouble, that the first rudeness of misery might be spared.

She did not note that Iberville had risen, and had come round the table
to look over Councillor Drayton's shoulder at a map spread out.  After
standing a moment watching, the councillor's finger his pilot, he started
back to his seat.  As he did so he caught sight of her still in that
poise of wonderment and sadness.  He stopped short, then glanced at
Colonel Nicholls and the councillor.  Both were bent over the map,
talking in eager tones.  He came softly round the table, and was about
to speak over her shoulder, when she drew herself up with a little shiver
and seemed to come back from afar.  Her hands went up to her eyes.  Then
she heard him.  She turned quickly, with the pageant of her dreams still
wavering in her face; smiled at him distantly, looked towards the window
again in a troubled way, then stepped softly and swiftly to the door, and
passed out.  Iberville watched the door close and turned to the window.
Again he saw, and this time nearer to the window, Radisson, and with him
the man who had so suddenly mastered Jessica.

He turned to Colonel Nicholls.  "Your excellency," he said, "will you not
let me tell Count Frontenac that you forbid Radisson your purlieus?  For,
believe me, sir, there is no greater rogue unhanged, as you shall find
some day to the hurt of your colony, if you shelter him."

The governor rose and paced the room thoughtfully.  "He is proclaimed by
Frontenac?" he asked.

"A price is on his head.  As a Frenchman I should shoot him like a wolf
where'er I saw him; and so I would now were I not Count Frontenac's
ambassador and in your excellency's presence."

"You speak manfully, monsieur," said the governor, not ill-pleased; "but
how might you shoot him now?  Is he without there?"  At this he came to
where Iberville stood, and looked out.  "Who is the fellow with him?"
he asked.

"A cut-throat scoundrel, I'll swear, though his face is so smug," said
Iberville.  "What think you sir?" turning to the councillor, who was
peering between their shoulders.

"As artless yet as strange a face as I have ever seen," answered the
merchant.  "What's his business here, and why comes he with the other
rogue?  He would speak with your excellency, I doubt not," he added.

Colonel Nicholls turned to Iberville.  "You shall have your way," he
said.  "Yon renegade was useful when we did not know what sudden game was
playing from Chateau St. Louis; for, as you can guess, he has friends as
faithless as himself.  But to please your governor, I will proclaim him."

He took his stick and tapped the floor.  Waiting a moment, he tapped
again.  There was no sign.  He opened the door; but his Scots body-guard
was not in sight.  "That's unusual," he said.  Then, looking round:
"Where is our other councillor?  Gone?" he laughed.  "Faith, I did not
see her go.  And now we can swear that where the dear witch is will
Morris, my Scotsman, be found.  Well, well!  They have their way with us
whether we will or no.  But, here, I'll have your Radisson in at once."

He was in act to call when Morris entered.  With a little hasty rebuke
he gave his order to the man.  "And look you, my good Morris," he added,
"tell Sherlock and Weir to stand ready.  I may need the show of
firearms."

Turning to Iberville, he said: "I trust you will rest with us some days,
monsieur.  We shall have sports and junketings anon.  We are not yet so
grim as our friends in Massachusetts."

"I think I might venture two days with you, sir, if for nothing else,
to see Radisson proclaimed.  Count Frontenac would gladly cut months from
his calendar to know you ceased to harbour one who can prove no friend,"
was the reply.

The governor smiled.  "You have a rare taste for challenge, monsieur.
To be frank, I will say your gift is more that of the soldier than the
envoy.  But upon my soul, if you will permit me, I think no less of you
for that."

Then the door opened, and Morris brought in Radisson.  The keen, sinister
eyes of the woodsman travelled from face to face, and then rested
savagely on Iberville.  He scented trouble, and traced it to its source.
Iberville drew back to the window and, resting his arm on the high stool
where Jessica had sat, waited the event.  Presently the governor came
over to him.

"You can understand," he said quietly, "that this man has been used by my
people, and that things may be said which--"

Iberville waved his hand respectfully.  "I understand, your excellency,"
he said.  "I will go."  He went to the door.

The woodsman as he passed broke out: "There is the old saying of the
woods, 'It is mad for the young wolf to trail the old bear.'"

"That is so," rejoined Iberville, with excellent coolness, "if the wolf
holds not the spring of the trap."

In the outer room were two soldiers and the Scot.  He nodded, passed into
the yard, and there he paced up and down.  Once he saw Jessica's face at
a window, he was astonished to see how changed.  It wore a grave, an
apprehensive look.  He fell to wondering, but, even as he wondered, his
habit of observation made him take in every feature of the governor's
house and garden, so that he could have reproduced all as it was mirrored
in his eye.  Presently he found himself again associating Radisson's
comrade with the vague terror in Jessica's face.  At last he saw the
fellow come forth between two soldiers, and the woodsman turned his head
from side to side, showing his teeth like a wild beast at sight of
Iberville.  His black brows twitched over his vicious eyes.  "There are
many ways to hell, Monsieur Iberville," he said.  "I will show you one.
Some day when you think you tread on a wisp of straw, it will be a snake
with the deadly tooth.  You have made an outlaw--take care!  When the
outlaw tires of the game, he winds it up quick.  And some one pays for
the candles and the cards."

Iberville walked up to him.  "Radisson," he said in a voice well
controlled, "you have always been an outlaw.  In our native country you
were a traitor; in this, you are the traitor still.  I am not sorry for
you, for you deserve not mercy.  Prove me wrong.  Go back to Quebec;
offer to pay with your neck, then--"

"I will have my hour," said the woodsman, and started on.

"It's a pity," said Iberville to himself--"as fine a woodsman as Perrot,
too!"




CHAPTER III

THE FACE AT THE WINDOW

At the governor's table that night certain ladies and gentlemen assembled
to do the envoy honour.  There came, too, a young gentleman, son of a
distinguished New Englander, his name George Gering, who was now in New
York for the first time.  The truth is, his visit was to Jessica, his old
playmate, the mistress of his boyhood.  Her father was in England, her
mother had been dead many years, and Colonel Nicholls and his sister
being kinsfolk, a whole twelvemonth ago she had been left with them.  Her
father had thought at first to house her with his old friend Edward
Gering, but he loved the Cavalier-like tone of Colonel Nicholls's
household better than the less inspiriting air which Madam Puritan Gering
suffused about her home.  Himself in early youth had felt the austerity
of a Cavalier father turned a Puritan on a sudden, and he wished no such
experience for his daughter.  For all her abundancy of life and feeling,
he knew how plastic and impressionable she was, and he dreaded to see
that exaltation of her fresh spirit touched with gloom.  She was his only
child, she had been little out of his sight, her education had gone on
under his own care, and, in so far as was possible in a new land, he had
surrounded her with gracious influences.  He looked forward to any
definite separation (as marriage) with apprehension.  Perhaps one of the
reasons why he chose Colonel Nicholls's house for her home, was a fear
lest George Gering should so impress her that she might somehow change
ere his return.  And in those times brides of sixteen were common as now
they are rare.

She sat on the governor's left.  All the brightness, the soft piquancy,
which Iberville knew, had returned; and he wondered--fortunate to know
that wonder so young--at her varying moods.  She talked little, and most
with the governor; but her presence seemed pervasive, the aura in her
veins flowed from her eye and made an atmosphere that lighted even the
scarred and rather sulky faces of two officers of His Majesty near.  They
had served with Nicholls in Spain, but not having eaten King Louis's
bread, eyed all Frenchmen askance, and were not needlessly courteous to
Iberville, whose achievements they could scarce appreciate, having done
no Indian fighting.

Iberville sat at the governor's end, Gering at the other.  It was noticed
by Iberville that Gering's eyes were much on Jessica, and in the spirit
of rivalry, the legitimate growth of race and habit, he began to speak to
her with the air of easy but deliberate playfulness which marked their
first meeting.

Presently she spoke across the table to him, after Colonel Nicholls had
pledged him heartily over wine.  The tone was a half whisper as of awe,
in reality a pretty mockery.  "Tell me," she said, "what is the bravest
and greatest thing you ever did?"

"Jessica, Jessica!" said the governor in reproof.  An old Dutch burgher
laughed into his hand, and His Majesty's officers cocked their ears, for
the whisper was more arresting than any loud talk.  Iberville coloured,
but the flush passed quickly and left him unembarrassed.  He was not
hurt, not even piqued, for he felt well used to her dainty raillery.  But
he saw that Gering's eyes were on him, and the lull that fell as by a
common instinct--for all could not have heard the question--gave him a
thrill of timidity.  But, smiling, he said drily across the table, his
voice quiet and clear: "My bravest and greatest thing was to answer an
English lady's wit in English."

A murmur of applause ran round, and Jessica laughed and clapped her
hands.  For the first time in his life Gering had a pang of jealousy and
envy.  Only that afternoon he had spent a happy hour with Jessica in the
governor's garden, and he had then made an advance upon the simple
relations of their life in Boston.  She had met him without self-
consciousness, persisting in her old ways, and showing only when she left
him, and then for a breath, that she saw his new attitude.  Now the eyes
of the two men met, and Gering's dark face flushed and his brow lowered.
Perhaps no one saw but Iberville, but he, seeing, felt a sudden desire to
play upon the other's weakness.  He was too good a sportsman to show
temper in a game; he had suddenly come to the knowledge that love, too,
is a game, and needs playing.  By this time the dinner was drawing to its
close and now a singular thing happened.  As Jessica, with demure
amusement, listened to the talk that followed Iberville's sally, she
chanced to lift her eyes to a window.  She started, changed colour, and
gave a little cry.  The governor's hand covered hers at once as he
followed her look.  It was a summer's night and the curtained windows
were partly open.  Iberville noted that Jessica's face wore the self-same
shadow as in the afternoon when she had seen the stranger with Radisson.

"What was it, my dear?" said the governor.

She did not answer, but pressed his hand nervously.  "A spy, I believe,"
said Iberville, in a low voice.  "Yes, yes," said Jessica in a half
whisper; "a man looked in at the window; a face that I have seen--but
I can't remember when."

The governor went to the window and drew the curtains.  There was nothing
to see.  He ordered Morris, who stood behind his chair, to have the
ground searched and to bring in any straggler.  Already both the officers
were on their way to the door, and at this point it opened and let in a
soldier.  He said that as he and his comrade were returning from their
duty with Radisson they saw a man lurking in the grounds and seized him.
He had made no resistance, and was now under guard in the ante-room.  The
governor apologised to his guests, but the dinner could not be ended
formally now, so the ladies rose and retired.  Jessica, making a mighty
effort to recover herself, succeeded so well that ere she went she was
able to reproach herself for her alarm; the more so because the
governor's sister showed her such consideration as would be given a
frightened child--and she had begun to feel something more.

The ladies gone, the governor drew his guests about him and ordered in
the prisoner.  Morris spoke up, saying that the man had begged an
interview with the governor that afternoon, but, being told that his
excellency was engaged, had said another hour would do.  This man was the
prisoner.  He came in under guard, but he bore himself quietly enough and
made a low bow to the governor.  He was not an ill-favoured fellow.  His
eye was steely cold, but his face was hearty and round, and remarkably
free from viciousness.  He had a cheerful air and an alert freedom of
manner, which suggested good-fellowship and honest enterprise.

Where his left hand had been was an iron hook, but not obtrusively in
view, nor did it give any marked grimness to his appearance.  Indeed, the
effect was almost comical when he lifted it and scratched his head and
then rubbed his chin with it; it made him look part bumpkin and part
sailor.  He bore the scrutiny of the company very well, and presently
bowed again to the governor as one who waited the expression of that
officer's goodwill and pleasure.

"Now, fellow," said the colonel, "think yourself lucky my soldiers here
did not shoot you without shrift.  You chance upon good-natured times.
When a spying stranger comes dangling about these windows, my men are
given to adorning the nearest tree with him.  Out with the truth now.
Who and what are you, and why are you here?"

The fellow bowed.  "I am the captain of a little trading schooner, the
Nell Gwynn, which anchors in the roadstead till I have laid some private
business before your excellency and can get on to the Spanish Indies."

"Business--private business!  Then what in the name of all that's
infernal," quoth Nicholls, "brought your sneaking face to yon window to
fright my lady-guests?"  The memory of Jessica's alarm came hotly to his
mind.  "By Heaven," he said, "I have a will to see you lifted, for means
to better manners."

The man stood very quiet, now and again, however, raising the hook to
stroke his chin.  He showed no fear, but Iberville, with his habit of
observation, caught in his eyes, shining superficially with a sailor's
open honesty, a strange ulterior look.  "My business," so he answered
Nicholls, "is for your excellency's ears."  He bowed again.

"Have done with scraping.  Now, I tell you what, my gentle spy, if your
business hath not concern, I'll stretch you by your fingers there to our
public gallows, and my fellows shall fill you with small shot as full as
a pod of peas."

The governor rose and went into another room, followed by this strange
visitor and the two soldiers.  There he told the guard to wait at the
door, which entered into the ante-room.  Then he unlocked a drawer and
took out of it a pair of pistols.  These he laid on the table (for he
knew the times), noting the while that the seaman watched him with a
pensive, deprecating grin.

"Well, sir," he said sharply (for he was something nettled), "out with
your business, and your name in preface."

"My name is Edward Bucklaw, and I have come to your excellency because
I know there is no braver and more enterprising gentleman in the world."
He paused.  "So much for preamble; now for the discourse."

"By your excellency's leave.  I am a poor man.  I have only my little
craft and a handful of seamen picked up at odd prices.  But there's gold
and silver enough I know of, owned by no man, to make cargo and ballast
for the Nell Gwynn, or another twice her size."

"Gold and silver," said the governor, cocking his ear and eyeing his
visitor up and down.  Colonel Nicholls had an acquisitive instinct; he
was interested.  "Well, well, gold and silver," he continued, "to fill
the Nell Gwynn and another!  And what concern is that of mine?  Let your
words come plain off your tongue; I have no time for foolery."

"'Tis no foolery on my tongue, sir, as you may please to see."

He drew a paper from his pocket and shook it out as he came a little
nearer, speaking all the while.  His voice had gone low, running to a
soft kind of chuckle, and his eyes were snapping with fire, which
Iberville alone had seen was false.  "I have come to make your
excellency's fortune, if you will stand by with a good, stout ship
and a handful of men to see me through."

The governor shrugged his shoulders.  "Babble," he said, "all babble and
bubble.  But go on."

"Babble, your honour!  Every word of it is worth a pint of guineas; and
this is the pith of it.  Far down West Indies way, some twenty-five,
maybe, or thirty years ago, there was a plate ship wrecked upon a reef.
I got it from a Spaniard, who had been sworn upon oath to keep it secret
by priests who knew.  The priests were killed and after a time the
Spaniard died also, but not until he had given me the ways whereby I
should get at what makes a man's heart rap in his weasand."

"Let me see your chart," said the governor.

A half-hour later he rose, went to the door, and sent a soldier for the
two king's officers.  As he did so, Bucklaw eyed the room doors, windows,
fireplaces, with a grim, stealthy smile trailing across his face.  Then
suddenly the good creature was his old good self again--the comfortable
shrewdness, the buoyant devil-may-care, the hook stroking the chin
pensively.  And the king's officers came in, and soon all four were busy
with the map.




CHAPTER IV

THE UPLIFTING OF THE SWORDS

Iberville and Gering sat on with the tobacco and the wine.  The older men
had joined the ladies, the governor having politely asked them to do so
when they chose.  The other occupant of the room was Morris, who still
stood stolidly behind his master's chair.

For a time he heard the talk of the two young men as in a kind of dream.
Their words were not loud, their manner was amicable enough, if the
sharing of a bottle were anything to the point.  But they were sitting
almost the full length of the table from him, and to quarrel courteously
and with an air hath ever been a quality in men of gentle blood.

If Morris's eyesight had been better, he would have seen that Gering
handled his wine nervously, and had put down his long Dutch pipe.  He
would also have seen that Iberville was smoking with deliberation, and
drinking with a kind of mannered coolness.  Gering's face was flushed,
his fine nostrils were swelling viciously, his teeth showed white against
his red lips, and his eyes glinted.  There was a kind of devilry at
Iberville's large and sensuous mouth, but his eyes were steady and
provoking, and while Gering's words went forth pantingly, Iberville's
were slow and concise, and chosen with the certainty of a lapidary.

It is hard to tell which had started the quarrel, but an edge was on
their talk from the beginning.  Gering had been moved by a boyish
jealousy; Iberville, who saw the injustice of his foolish temper, had
played his new-found enemy with a malicious adroitness.  The aboriginal
passions were strong in him.  He had come of a people which had to do
with essentials in the matter of emotions.  To love, to hate, to fight,
to explore, to hunt, to be loyal, to avenge, to bow to Mother Church,
to honour the king, to beget children, to taste outlawry under a more
refined name, and to die without whining: that was its range of duty,
and a very sufficient range it was.

The talk had been running on Bucklaw.  It had then shifted to Radisson.
Gering had crowded home with flagrant emphasis the fact that, while
Radisson was a traitor and a scoundrel,--which Iberville himself had
admitted with an ironical frankness,--he was also a Frenchman.  It was
at this point that Iberville remembered, also with something of irony,
the words that Jessica had used that afternoon when she came out of the
sunshine into the ante-room of the governor's chamber.  She had waved her
hand into the distance and had said: "Foolish boy!"  He knew very well
that that part of the game was turned against him, but with a kind of
cheerful recklessness, as was ever his way with odds against him, and he
guessed that the odds were with Gering in the matter of Jessica,--he bent
across the table and repeated them with an exasperating turn to his
imperfect accent.  "Foolish boy!" he said, and awaited, not for long,
the event.

"A fool's lie," retorted Gering, in a low, angry voice, and spilled his
wine.

At that Iberville's heart thumped in his throat with anger, and the roof
of his mouth became dry; never in his life had he been called a liar.
The first time that insult strikes a youth of spirit he goes a little
mad.

But he was very quiet--an ominous sort of quietness, even in a boy.  He
got to his feet and leaned over the table, speaking in words that dropped
on the silence like metal: "Monsieur, there is but one answer."

At this point Morris, roused from his elaborate musings, caught, not very
clearly, at the meaning of it all.  But he had not time to see more, for
just then he was called by the governor, and passed into the room where
Mammon, for the moment, perched like a leering, little dwarf upon the
shoulders of adventurous gentlemen grown avaricious on a sudden.

"Monsieur, there is but one way.  Well?" repeated Iberville.

"I am ready," replied Gering, also getting to his feet.  The Frenchman
was at once alive to certain difficulties.  He knew that an envoy should
not fight, and that he could ask no one to stand his second; also that it
would not be possible to arrange a formal duel between opposites so young
as Gering and himself.  He sketched this briefly, and the Bostonian
nodded moody assent.  "Come, then," said Iberville, "let us find a place.
My sword is at my hand.  Yours?"

"Mine is not far off," answered Gering sullenly.  Iberville forbore to
point a moral, but walked to the mantel, above which hung two swords of
finest steel, with richly-chased handles.  He had noted them as soon as
he had entered the room.  "By the governor's leave," he said, and took
them down.  "Since we are to ruffle him let him furnish the spurs--eh?
Shall we use these, and so be even as to weapons?  But see," he added,
with a burst of frankness, "I am in a--a trouble."  It was not easy on
the instant to find the English word.  He explained the duties of his
mission.  It was singular to ask his enemy that he should see his papers
handed to Count Frontenac if he were killed, but it was characteristic of
him.

"I will see the papers delivered," said Gering, with equal frankness.

"That is, if by some miraculous chance I should be killed," added
Iberville.  "But I have other ends in view."

"I have only one end in view," retorted Gering.  "But wait," he said, as
they neared the door leading into the main hall; "we may be seen.  There
is another way into the grounds through a little hall here."  He turned
and opened a door almost as small as a panel.  "I was shown this secret
door the other day, and since ours is a secret mission let us use it."

"Very well.  But a minute more," said Iberville.  He went and unhooked a
fine brass lantern, of old Dutch workmanship, swung from the ceiling by a
chain.  "We shall need a light," he remarked.

They passed into the musty little hallway, and Gering with some
difficulty drew back the bolts.  The door creaked open and they stepped
out into the garden,

Iberville leading the way.  He had not conned his surroundings that
afternoon for nothing, and when they had reached a quiet place among
some firs he hung the lantern to the branch of a tree, opening the little
ornamental door so that the light streamed out.  There was not much of
it, but it would serve, and without a word, like two old warriors, they
took off their coats.

Meanwhile Morris had returned to the dining-room to find Jessica standing
agaze there.  She had just come in; for, chancing to be in her bed-
chamber, which was just over the secret hallway, she had heard Gering
shoot the bolts.  Now, the chamber was in a corner, so that the window
faced another way, but the incident seemed strange to her, and she stood
for a moment listening.  Then hearing the door shut, she ran down the
stairs, knocked at the dining-room door and, getting no answer, entered,
meeting Morris as he came from the governor's room.

"Morris, Morris," she said, "where are they all?"

"The governor is in his room, mistress."

"Who are with him?"  He told her.

"Where are the others?" she urged.  "Mr. Gering and Monsieur Iberville
--where are they?"

The man's eyes had flashed to the place where the swords were used to
hang.  "Lord God!" he said under his breath.

Her eyes had followed his.  She ran forward to the wall and threw up her
hands against it.  "Oh Morris," she said distractedly, "they have taken
the swords!"  Then she went past him swiftly through the panel and the
outer door.  She glanced around quickly, running, as she did so, with a
kind of blind instinct towards the clump of firs.  Presently she saw a
little stream of light in the trees.  Always a creature of abundant
energy and sprightliness, she swept through the night, from the comedy
behind to the tragedy in front; the grey starlight falling about her
white dress and making her hair seem like a cloud behind her as she ran.
Suddenly she came in on the two sworders with a scared, transfigured
face.

Iberville had his man at an advantage, and was making the most of it when
she came in at an angle behind the other, and the sight of her stayed his
arm.  It was but for a breath, but it served.  Gering had not seen, and
his sword ran up Iberville's arm, making a little trench in the flesh.

She ran in on them from the gloom, saying in a sharp, aching voice:
"Stop, stop!  Oh, what madness!"  The points dropped and they stepped
back.  She stood between them, looking from one to the other.  At that
moment Morris burst in also.  "In God's name," he said, "is this your
honouring of the king's governor!  Ye that have eat and drunk at his
table the night!  Have ye nae sense o' your manhood, young gentlemen,
that for a mad gossip ower the wine ye wend into the dark to cut each
other's throats?  Think--think shame, baith o' ye, being as ye are of
them that should know better."

Gering moodily put on his coat and held his peace.  Iberville tossed his
sword aside, and presently wrung the blood from his white sleeve.  The
girl saw him, and knew that he was wounded.  She snatched a scarf from
her waist and ran towards him.  "You are wounded," she said.  "Oh, take
this!"

"I am so much sorry, indeed," he answered coolly, winding the scarf about
his arm.  "Mistress Leveret came too soon."

His face wore a peculiar smile, but his eyes burned with anger; his voice
was not excited.  Immediately, however, as he looked at Jessica, his mood
seemed to change.

"Morris," he said, "I am sorry.  Mademoiselle," he added, "pardon!  I
regret whatever gives you pain."  Gering came near to her, and Iberville
could see that a flush stole over Jessica's face as he took her hand and
said: "I am sorry--that you should have known."

"Good!" said Iberville, under his breath.  "Good!  he is worth fighting
again."

A moment afterwards Morris explained to them that if the matter could be
hushed he would not impart it to the governor--at least, not until
Iberville had gone.  Then they all started back towards the house.  It
did not seem incongruous to Iberville and Gering to walk side by side;
theirs was a superior kind of hate.  They paused outside the door, on
Morris's hint, that he might see if the coast was clear, and return the
swords to their place on the wall.

Jessica turned in the doorway.  "I shall never forgive you," she said,
and was swallowed by the darkness.  "Which does she mean?" asked
Iberville, with a touch of irony.  The other was silent.

In a moment Morris came back to tell them that they might come, for the
dining-room was empty still.




CHAPTER V

THE FRUITS OF THE LAW

Bucklaw having convinced the governor and his friends that down in the
Spaniards' country there was treasure for the finding, was told that he
might come again next morning.  He asked if it might not be late
afternoon instead, because he had cargo from the Indies for sale, and in
the morning certain merchants were to visit his vessel.  Truth to tell he
was playing a deep game.  He wanted to learn the governor's plans for the
next afternoon and evening, and thought to do so by proposing this same
change.  He did not reckon foolishly.  The governor gave him to
understand that there would be feasting next day: first, because it
was the birthday of the Duke of York; secondly, because it was the
anniversary of the capture from the Dutch; and, last of all, because
there were Indian chiefs to come from Albany to see New York and himself
for the first time.  The official celebration would begin in the
afternoon and last till sundown, so that all the governor's time must be
fully occupied.  But Bucklaw said, with great candour, that unfortunately
he had to sail for Boston within thirty-six hours, to keep engagements
with divers assignees for whom he had special cargo.  If his excellency,
he said, would come out to his ship the next evening when the shows were
done, he would be proud to have him see his racketing little craft; and
it could then be judged if, with furbishing and armaments, she could by
any means be used for the expedition.  Nicholls consented, and asked the
king's officers if they would accompany him.  This they were exceedingly
glad to do: so that the honest shipman's good nature and politeness were
vastly increased, and he waved his hook in so funny and so boyish a way
it set them all a-laughing.

So it was arranged forthwith that he should be at a quiet point on the
shore at a certain hour to row the governor and his friends to the Nell
Gwynn.  And, this done, he was bade to go to the dining-room and refresh
himself.

He obeyed with cheerfulness, and was taken in charge by Morris, who,
having passed on Iberville and Gering to the drawing-room, was once more
at his post, taciturn as ever.  The governor and his friends had gone
straight to the drawing-room, so that Morris and he were alone.  Wine was
set before the sailor and he took off a glass with gusto, his eye cocked
humorously towards his host.  "No worse fate for a sinner," quoth he;
"none better for a saint."

Morris's temper was not amiable.  He did not like the rascal.  "Ay," said
he, "but many's the sinner has wished yon wish, and footed it from the
stocks to the gallows."

Bucklaw laughed up at him.  It was not a pretty laugh, and his eyes were
insolent and hard.  But that, changed almost on the instant.  "A good
thrust, mighty Scot," he said.  "Now what say you to a pasty, or a strip
of beef cut where the juice runs, and maybe the half of a broiled fowl?"

Morris, imperturbably deliberate, left the room to seek the kitchen.
Bucklaw got instantly to his feet.  His eye took in every window and
door, and ran along the ceiling and the wall.  There was a sudden click
in the wall before him.  It was the door leading to the unused hallway,
which had not been properly closed and had sprung open.  He caught up a
candle, ran over, entered the hallway, and gave a grunt of satisfaction.
He hastily and softly drew the bolts of the outer door, so that any one
might come in from the garden, then stepped back into the dining-room and
closed the panel tight behind him, remarking with delight that it had no
spring-lock, and could be opened from the hallway.  He came back quickly
to the table, put down the candle, took his seat, stroked his chin with
his hook, and chuckled.  When Morris came back, he was holding his wine
with one hand while he hummed a snatch of song and drummed lightly on the
table with the hook.  Immediately after came a servant with a tray, and
the Scotsman was soon astonished, not only at the buxomness of his
appetite, but at the deftness with which he carved and handled things
with what he called his "tiger."  And so he went on talking and eating,
and he sat so long that Jessica, as she passed into the corridor and up
the stairs, wearied by the day, heard his voice uplifted in song.  It so
worked upon her that she put her hands to her ears, hurried to her room,
and threw herself upon the bed in a distress she could set down to no
real cause.

Before the governor and his guests parted for the night, Iberville, as he
made his adieus to Gering, said in a low voice: "The same place and time
to-morrow night, and on the same conditions?"

"I shall be happy," said Gering, and they bowed with great formality.

The governor had chanced to hear a word or two and, thinking it was some
game of which they spoke, said: "Piquet or a game of wits, gentlemen?"

"Neither, your excellency," quoth Gering--"a game called fox and goose."

"Good," said Iberville, under his breath; "my Puritan is waking."

The governor was in ripe humour.  "But it is a game of wits, then, after
all.  Upon my soul, you two should fence like a pair of veterans."

"Only for a pass or two," said Iberville dryly.  "We cannot keep it up."

All this while a boat was rowing swiftly from the shore of the island
towards a craft carrying Nell Gwynn beneath the curious, antique
figurehead.  There were two men in her, and they were talking gloatingly
and low.

"See, bully, how I have the whole thing in my hands.  Ha!  Received by
the governor and his friends!  They are all mad for the doubloons, which
are not for them, my Radisson, but for you and me, and for a greater than
Colonel Richard Nicholls.  Ho, ho!  I know him--the man who shall lead
the hunt and find the gold--the only man in all that cursed Boston whose
heart I would not eat raw, so help me Judas!  And his name--no.  That is
to come.  I will make him great."

Again he chuckled.  "Over in London they shall take him to their bosoms.
Over in London his blessed majesty shall dub him knight--treasure-trove
is a fine reason for the touch of a royal sword--and the king shall say:
'Rise, Sir William'--No, it is not time for the name; but it is not
Richard Nicholls, it is not Hogarth Leveret."  He laughed like a boy.
"I have you, Hogarth Leveret, in my hand, and by God I will squeeze you
until there is a drop of heart's blood at every pore of your skin!"

Now and again Radisson looked sideways at him, a sardonic smile at his
lip.  At last: "Bien," he said, "you are merry.  So--I shall be merry
too, for I have scores to wipe away, and they shall be wiped clean--
clean."

"You are with me, then," the pirate asked; "even as to the girl?"

"Even as to the girl," was the reply, with a brutal oath.

"That is good, dear lad.  Blood of my soul, I have waited twelve years--
twelve years."

"You have not told me," rejoined the Frenchman; "speak now."

"There is not much to tell, but we are to be partners once and for all.
See, my beauty.  He was a kite-livered captain.  There was gold on board.
We mutinied and put him and four others--their livers were like his own--
in a boat with provisions plenty.  Then we sailed for Boston.  We never
thought the crew of skulkers would reach land, but by God they drifted in
again the very hour we found port.  We were taken and condemned.  First,
I was put into the stocks, hands and feet, till I was fit for the
pillory; from the pillory to the wooden horse."  Here he laughed, and the
laugh was soft and womanlike.  "Then the whipping-post, when I was made
pulp from my neck to my loins.  After that I was to hang.  I was the only
one they cooked so; the rest were to hang raw.  I did not hang; I broke
prison and ran.  For years I was a slave among the Spaniards.  Years
more--in all, twelve--and then I came back with the little chart for one
thing, this to do for another.  Who was it gave me that rogues' march
from the stocks to the gallows's foot?  It was Hogarth Leveret, who deals
out law in Massachusetts in the king's name, by the grace of God.  It was
my whim to capture him and take him on a journey--such a journey as he
would go but once.  Blood of my soul, the dear lad was gone.  But there
was his child.  See this: when I stood in the pillory a maid one day
brought the child to the foot of the platform, lifted it up in her arms
and said: 'Your father put that villain there.'  That woman was sister to
one of the dogs we'd set adrift.  The child stared at me hard, and I
looked at her, though my eyes were a little the worse for wear, so that
she cried out in great fright--the sweet innocent!  and then the wench
took her away.  When she saw my face to-night--to-day--it sent her wild,
but she did not remember."  He rubbed his chin in ecstasy and drummed his
knee.  "Ha!  I cannot have the father--so I'll have the goodly child, and
great will be the ransom.  Great will be the ransom, my Frenchman!"  And
once more he tapped Radisson with the tiger.




CHAPTER VI

THE KIDNAPPING

The rejoicing had reached its apogee, and was on the wane.  The Puritan
had stretched his austereness to the point of levity; the Dutchman had
comfortably sweated his obedience and content; the Cavalier had paced it
with a pretty air of patronage and an eye for matron and maid; the
Indian, come from his far hunting-grounds, bivouacked in the governor's
presence as the pipe of peace went round.

About twilight the governor and his party had gone home.  Deep in
ceremonial as he had been, his mind had run upon Bucklaw and the
Spaniards' country.  So, when the dusk was growing into night, the hour
came for his visit to the Nell Gwynn.  With his two soldier friends and
Councillor Drayton, he started by a roundabout for the point where he
looked to find Bucklaw.  Bucklaw was not there: he had other fish to fry,
and the ship's lights were gone.  She had changed her anchorage since
afternoon.

"It's a bold scheme," Bucklaw was saying to his fellow-ruffian in the
governor's garden, "and it may fail, yet 'twill go hard, but we'll save
our skins.  No pluck, no pence.  Once again, here's the trick of it.
I'll go in by the side door I unlocked last night, hide in the hallway,
then enter the house quietly or boldly, as the case may be.  Plan one: a
message from his excellency to Miss Leveret, that he wishes her to join
him on the Nell Gwynn.  Once outside it's all right.  She cannot escape
us.  We have our cloaks and we have the Spanish drug.  Plan two: make her
ours in the house.  Out by this hall door-through the grounds--to the
beach--the boat in waiting--and so, up anchor and away!  Both risky, as
you see, but the bolder the game the sweeter the spoil.  You're sure her
chamber is above the hallway, and that there's a staircase to it from the
main hall?"

"I am very well sure.  I know the house up-stairs and down."

Bucklaw looked to his arms.  He was about starting on his quest when they
heard footsteps, and two figures appeared.  It was Iberville and Gering.
They paused a moment not far from where the rogues were hid.

"I think you will agree," said Iberville, "that we must fight."

"I have no other mind."

"You will also be glad if we are not come upon, as last night; though,
confess, the lady gave you a lease of life?"

"If she comes to-night, I hope it will be when I have done with you,"
answered Gering.

Iberville laughed a little, and the laugh had fire in it--hatred, and the
joy of battle.  "Shall it be here or yonder in the pines, where we were
in train last night?"

"Yonder."

"So."  Then Iberville hummed ironically a song:

              "Oh, bury me where I have fought and fallen,
               Your scarf across my shoulder, lady mine."

They passed on.  "The game is in our hands," said Bucklaw.  "I understand
this thing.  That's a pair of gallant young sprigs, but the choice is
your Frenchman, Radisson."

"I'll pink his breast-bone full of holes if the other doesn't--
curse him."

A sweet laugh trickled from Bucklaw's lips like oil.  "That's neither
here nor there.  I'd like to have him down Acapulco way, dear lad.  .  .
And now, here's my plan all changed.  I'll have my young lady out to stop
the duel, and, God's love, she'll come alone.  Once here she's ours, and
they may cut each other's throats as they will, sweetheart."

He crossed the yard, tried the door,--unlocked, as he had left it,--
pushed it open, and went in, groping his way to the door of the dining-
room.  He listened, and there was no sound.  Then he heard some one go
in.  He listened again.  Whoever it was had sat down.  Very carefully he
felt for the spring and opened the door.  Jessica was seated at the table
with paper and an ink-horn before her.  She was writing.  Presently she
stopped--the pen was bad.  She got up and went away to her room.
Instantly Bucklaw laid his plan.  He entered as she disappeared, went to
the table and looked at the paper on which she had been writing.  It bore
but the words, "Dear Friend."  He caught up the quill and wrote hurriedly
beneath them, this:

"If you'd see two gentlemen fighting, go now where you stopped them last
night.  The wrong one may be killed unless."

With a quick flash of malice he signed, in half a dozen lightning-like
strokes, with a sketch of his hook.  Then he turned, hurried into the
little hall, and so outside, and posted himself beside a lilac bush,
drawing down a bunch of the flowers to drink in their perfume.  Jessica,
returning, went straight to the table.  Before she sat down she looked up
to the mantel, but the swords were there.  She sighed, and a tear
glistened on her eyelashes.  She brushed it away with her dainty
fingertips and, as she sat down, saw the paper.  She turned pale, caught
it up, read it with a little cry, and let it drop with a shudder of fear
and dismay.  She looked round the room.  Everything was as she had left
it.  She was dazed.  She stared at the paper again, then ran and opened
the panel through which Bucklaw had passed, and found the outer door
ajar.  With a soft, gasping moan she passed into the garden, went swiftly
by the lilac bush and on towards the trees.  Bucklaw let her do so; it
was his design that she should be some way from the house.  But, hidden
by the bushes, he was running almost parallel with her.  On the other
side of her was Radisson, also running.  She presently heard them and
swerved, poor child, into the gin of the fowler!  But as the cloak was
thrown over her head she gave a cry.

The firs, where Iberville and Gering had just plucked out their swords,
were not far, and both men heard.  Gering, who best knew the voice, said
hurriedly: "It is Jessica!"

Without a word Iberville leaped to the open, and came into it ahead of
Gering.  They saw the kidnappers and ran.  Iberville was the first to
find what Bucklaw was carrying.  "Mother of God," he called, "they're
taking her off!"

"Help!  help!" cried Gering, and they pushed on.  The two ruffians were
running hard, but it had been an unequal race at the best, and Jessica
lay unconscious in Bucklaw's arms, a dead weight.  Presently they plunged
into the bushes and disappeared.  Iberville and Gering passed through the
bushes also, but could neither see nor hear the quarry.  Gering was wild
with excitement and lost his presence of mind.  Meanwhile Iberville went
beating for a clue.  He guessed that he was dealing with good woodsmen,
and that the kidnappers knew some secret way out of the garden.  It was
so.  The Dutch governor had begun to build an old-fashioned wall with a
narrow gateway, so fitted as to seem part of it.  Through this the two
had vanished.

Iberville was almost in despair.  "Go back," he suddenly said to Gering,
"and rouse the house and the town.  I will get on the trail again if I
can."

Gering started away.  In this strange excitement their own foolish
quarrel was forgotten, and the stranger took on himself to command; he
was, at least, not inexperienced in adventure and the wiles of desperate
men.  All at once he came upon the wall.  He ran along it, and presently
his fingers felt the passage.  An instant and he was outside and making
for the shore, in the sure knowledge that the ruffians would take to the
water.  He thought of Bucklaw, and by some impossible instinct divined
the presence of his hand.  Suddenly he saw something flash on the ground.
He stooped and picked it up.  It was a shoe with a silver buckle.  He
thrilled to the finger-tips as he thrust it in his bosom and pushed on.
He was on the trail now.  In a few moments he came to the waterside.  He
looked to where he had seen the Nell Gwynn in the morning, and there was
never a light in view.  Then a twig snapped, and Bucklaw, the girl in his
arms, came bundling out of the trees upon the bank.  He had sent Radisson
on ahead to warn his boat's crew.

He saw Iberville as soon as Iberville saw him.  He knew that the town
would be roused by this time and the governor on fire for revenge.  But
there was nothing for it but fight.  He did not fear the result.  Time
was life to him, and he swung the girl half behind him with his hook-hand
as Iberville came on, and, whipping out his hanger, caught the
Frenchman's thrust.  Instantly he saw that his opposite was a swordsman,
so he let the girl slip to the ground, and suddenly closing with
Iberville, lunged desperately and expertly at him, straight for a mortal
part.  But the Frenchman was too agile and adroit for him: he took the
thrust in the flesh of his ribs and riposted like lightning.  The pirate
staggered back, but pulled himself together instantly, lunged, and took
his man in the flesh of his upper sword arm.  Iberville was bleeding from
the wound in his side and slightly stiff from the slash of the night
before, but every fibre of his hurt body was on the defensive.  Bucklaw
knew it, and seemed to debate if the game were worth the candle.  The
town was afoot, and he had earned a halter for his pains.  He was by no
means certain that he could kill this champion and carry off the girl.
Moreover, he did not want Iberville's life, for such devils have their
likes and dislikes, and he had fancied the chivalrous youngster from the
first.  But he doubted only for an instant.  What was such a lad's life
compared with his revenge?  It was madness, as he knew, for a shot would
guide the pursuit: none the less, did he draw a pistol from his belt and
fire.  The bullet grazed the lad's temple, carrying away a bit of his
hair.  Iberville staggered forwards, so weak was he from loss of blood,
and, with a deep instinct of protection and preservation, fell at
Jessica's feet.  There was a sound of footsteps and crackling of brush.
Bucklaw stooped to pick up his prey, but a man burst on him from the
trees.  He saw that the game was up and he half raised his knife, but
that was only the mad rage of the instant.  His revenge did not comprise
so unheard-of a crime.  He thought he had killed Iberville: that was
enough.  He sprang away towards the spot where his comrades awaited him.
Escape was his sole ambition now.  The new-comer ran forwards, and saw
the boy and girl lying as they were dead.  A swift glance at Iberville,
and he slung his musket shoulderwards and fired at the retreating figure.
It was a chance shot, for the light was bad and Bucklaw was already
indistinct.

Now the man dropped on his knee and felt Iberville's heart.  "Alive!" he
said.  "Alive, thank the mother of God!  Mon brave!  It is ever the same
--the great father, the great son."

As he withdrew his hand it brushed against the slipper.  He took it out,
glanced at it, and turned to the cloaked figure.  He undid the cloak and
saw Jessica's pale face.  He shook his head.  "Always the same," he said,
"always the same: for a king, for a friend, for a woman!  That is the Le
Moyne."

But he was busy as he spoke.  With the native chivalry of the woodsman,
he cared first for the girl.  Between her lips he thrust his drinking-
horn and held her head against his shoulder.

"My little ma'm'selle-ma'm'selle!" he said.  "Wake up.  It is nothing--
you are safe.  Ah, the sweet lady!  Come, let me see the colour of your
eyes.  Wake up--it is nothing."

Presently the girl did open her eyes.  He put the drinking-horn again to
her lips.  She shuddered and took a sip, and then, invigorated, suddenly
drew away from him.  "There, there," he said; "it is all right.  Now for
my poor Iberville."  He took Iberville's head to his knee and thrust the
drinking-horn between his teeth, as he had done with Jessica, calling him
in much the same fashion.  Iberville came to with a start.  For a moment
he stared blindly at his rescuer, then a glad intelligence flashed into
his eyes.

"Perrot! dear Nick Perrot!" he cried.  "Oh, good--good," he added
softly.  Then with sudden anxiety:

"Where is she?  Where is she?"

"I am safe, monsieur," Jessica said gently; "but you--you are wounded."
She came over and dropped on her knees beside him.

"A little," he said; "only a little.  You cared for her first?" he asked
of Perrot.

Perrot chuckled.  "These Le Moynes!" he said: under his breath.  Then
aloud: "The lady first, monsieur."

"So," answered Iberville.  "And Bucklaw--the devil, Bucklaw?"

"If you mean the rogue who gave you these," said Perrot, touching the
wounds, which he had already begun to bind, "I think he got away--the
light was bad."

Jessica would have torn her frock for a bandage, but Perrot said in his
broken English: "No, pardon.  Not so.  The cloak la-bas."

She ran and brought it to him.  As she did so Perrot glanced down at her
feet, and then, with a touch of humour, said: "Pardon, but you have lost
your slipper, ma'm'selle?"

He foresaw the little comedy, which he could enjoy even in such painful
circumstances.

"It must have dropped off," said Jessica, blushing.  "But it does not
matter."

Iberville blushed too, but a smile also flitted across his lips.  "If you
will but put your hand into my waistcoat here," he said to her, "you will
find it."  Timidly she did as she was bid, drew forth the slipper, and
put it on.

"You see," said Iberville, still faint from loss of blood, "a Frenchman
can fight and hunt too--hunt the slipper."

Suddenly a look of pain crossed her face.

"Mr. Gering, you--you did not kill him?" she asked.  "Oh no,
mademoiselle," said Iberville; "you stopped the game again."

Presently he told her what had happened, and how Gering was rousing the
town.  Then he insisted upon getting on his feet, that they might make
their way to the governor's house.  Stanchly he struggled on, his weight
upon Perrot, till presently he leaned a hand also on Jessica's shoulder-
she had insisted.  On the way, Perrot told how it was he chanced to be
there.  A band of coureurs du bois, bound for Quebec, had come upon old
Le Moyne and himself in the woods.  Le Moyne had gone on with these men,
while Perrot pushed on to New York, arriving at the very moment of the
kidnapping.  He heard the cry and made towards it.  He had met Gering,
and the rest they knew.

Certain things did not happen.  The governor of New York did not at once
engage in an expedition to the Spaniards' country.  A brave pursuit was
made, but Bucklaw went uncaptured.  Iberville and Gering did not make a
third attempt to fight; Perrot prevented that.  Iberville left, however,
with a knowledge of three things: that he was the first Frenchman from
Quebec who had been, or was likely to be, popular in New York; that
Jessica Leveret had shown a tender gratitude towards him--naive, candid--
which set him dreaming gaily of the future; that Gering and he, in spite
of outward courtesy, were still enemies; for Gering could not forget
that, in the rescue of Jessica, Iberville had done the work while he
merely played the crier.

"We shall meet again, monsieur," said Iberville at last; "at least, I
hope so."

"I shall be glad," answered Gering mechanically.  "But 'tis like I shall
come to you before you come to me," added Iberville, with meaning.
Jessica was standing not far away, and Gering did not instantly reply.
In the pause, Iberville said: "Au revoir!  A la bonne heure!" and walked
away.  Presently he turned with a little ironical laugh and waved his
hand at Gering; and laugh and gesture rankled in Gering for many a day.





ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Love, too, is a game, and needs playing
To die without whining






THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD

By Gilbert Parker



EPOCH THE SECOND

VII.      FRIENDS IN COUNCIL
VIII.     AS SEEN THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY
IX.       TO THE PORCH OF THE WORLD
X.        QUI VIVE!
XI.       WITH THE STRANGE PEOPLE
XII.      OUT OF THE NET




CHAPTER VII

FRIENDS IN COUNCIL

Montreal and Quebec, dear to the fortunes of such men as Iberville, were
as cheerful in the still iron winter as any city under any more cordial
sky then or now: men loved, hated, made and broke bargains, lied to
women, kept a foolish honour with each other, and did deeds of valour for
a song, as ever they did from the beginning of the world.  Through the
stern soul of Nature ran the temperament of men who had hearts of summer;
and if, on a certain notable day in Iberville's life, one could have
looked through the window of a low stone house in Notre Dame Street,
Montreal, one could have seen a priest joyously playing a violin; though
even in Europe, Maggini and Stradivarius were but little known, and the
instrument itself was often called an invention of the devil.

The room was not ornamented, save by a crucifix, a pleasant pencil-
drawing of Bishop Laval, a gun, a pair of snow-shoes, a sword, and a
little shrine in one corner, wherein were relics of a saint.  Of
necessaries even there were few.  They were unremarkable, save in the
case of two tall silver candlesticks, which, with their candles at an
angle from the musician, gave his face strange lights and shadows.

The priest was powerfully made; so powerful indeed, so tall was he, that
when, in one of the changes of the music, a kind of exaltation filled
him, and he came to his feet, his head almost touched the ceiling.  His
shoulders were broad and strong, and though his limbs were hid by his
cassock, his arms showed almost huge, and the violin lay tucked under his
chin like a mere toy.  In the eye was a penetrating but abstracted look,
and the countenance had the gravity of a priest lighted by a cheerful
soul within.  It had been said of Dollier de Casson that once, attacked
by two renegade Frenchmen, he had broken the leg of one and the back of
the other, and had then picked them up and carried them for miles to
shelter and nursing.  And it was also declared by the romantic that the
man with the broken back recovered, while he with the shattered leg,
recovering also, found that his foot, pointing backwards, "made a fool of
his nose."

The Abbe de Casson's life had one affection, which had taken the
place of others, now almost lost in the distance of youth, absence, and
indifference.  For France lay far from Montreal, and the priest-musician
was infinitely farther off: the miles which the Church measures between
the priest and his lay boyhood are not easily reckoned.  But such as
Dollier de Casson must have a field for affection to enrich.  You cannot
drive the sap of the tree in upon itself.  It must come out or the tree
must die-burst with the very misery of its richness.

This night he was crowding into the music four years of events: of
memory, hope, pride, patience, and affection.  He was waiting for some
one whom he had not seen for these four years.  Time passed.  More and
more did the broad sonorous notes fill the room.  At length they ceased,
and with a sigh he pressed the violin once, twice, thrice to his lips.

"My good Stradivarius," he said, "my pearless one!"  Once again he kissed
it, and then, drawing his hand across his eyes, he slowly wrapped the
violin in a velvet cloth, put it away in an iron box, and locked it up.
But presently he changed his mind, took it out again, and put it on the
table, shaking his head musingly.

"He will wish to see it, maybe to hear it," he said half aloud.

Then he turned and went into another room.  Here there was a prie-dieu in
a corner, and above it a crucifix.  He knelt and was soon absorbed.

For a time there was silence.  At last there was a crunching of
moccasined feet upon the crisp snow, then a slight tap at the outer door,
and immediately it was opened.  A stalwart young man stepped inside.  He
looked round, pleased, astonished, and glanced at the violin, then
meaningly towards the nearly closed door of the other room.  After which
he pulled off his gloves, threw his cap down, and with a significant toss
of the head, picked up the violin.

He was a strong, handsome man of about twenty-two, with a face at once
open and inscrutable: the mouth with a trick of smiling, the eyes
fearless, convincing, but having at the same time a look behind this--an
alert, profound speculation, which gave his face singular force.  He was
not so tall as the priest in the next room, but still he was very tall,
and every movement had a lithe, supple strength.  His body was so firm
that, as he bent or turned, it seemed as of soft flexible metal.

Despite his fine manliness, he looked very boylike as he picked up the
violin, and with a silent eager laugh put it under his chin, nodding
gaily, as he did so, towards the other room.  He bent his cheek to the
instrument--almost as brown as the wood itself--and made a pass or two in
the air with the bow, as if to recall a former touch and tune.  A
satisfied look shot up in his face, and then with an almost impossible
softness he drew the bow across the strings, getting a distant delicate
note, which seemed to float and tenderly multiply upon itself--a
variation, indeed, of the tune which De Casson had played.  A rapt look
came into his eyes.  And all that look behind the general look of his
face--the look which has to do with a man's past or future--deepened and
spread, till you saw, for once in a way, a strong soldier turned artist,
yet only what was masculine and strong.  The music deepened also, and, as
the priest opened the door, swept against him like a wind so warm that a
moisture came to his eyes.  "Iberville!" he said, in a glad voice.
"Pierre!"

The violin was down on the instant.  "My dear abbe!" he cried.  And then
the two embraced.

"How do you like my entrance?" said the young man.  "But I had to
provide my own music!"  He laughed, and ran his hands affectionately down
the arms of the priest.

"I had been playing the same old chansonette--"

"With your original variations?"

"With my poor variations, just before you came in; and that done--"

"Yes, yes, abbe, I know the rest: prayers for the safe return of the
sailor, who for four years or nearly has been learning war in King
Louis's ships, and forgetting the good old way of fighting by land, at
which he once served his prentice time--with your blessing, my old tutor,
my good fighting abbe!  Do you remember when we stopped those Dutchmen on
the Richelieu, and you--"

The priest interrupted with a laugh.  "But, my dear Iberville--"

"It was 'Pierre' a minute gone; 'twill be 'Monsieur Pierre le Moyne of
Iberville' next," the other said in mock reproach, as he went to the
fire.

"No, no; I merely--"

"I understand.  Pardon the wild youth who plagues his old friend and
teacher, as he did long ago--so much has happened since."

His face became grave and a look of trouble came.  Presently the priest
said: "I never had a pupil whose teasing was so pleasant, poor humourist
that I am.  But now, Pierre, tell me all, while I lay out what the pantry
holds."

The gay look came back into Iberville's face.  "Ahem," he said--"which is
the way to begin a wonderful story: Once upon a time a young man, longing
to fight for his king by land alone, and with special fighting of his own
to do hard by"--(here De Casson looked at him keenly and a singular light
came into his eyes)--"was wheedled away upon the king's ships to France,
and so

              'Left the song of the spinning-wheel,
               The hawk and the lady fair,
               And sailed away--'

But the song is old and so is the story, abbe; so here's the brief note
of it.  After years of play and work,--play in France and stout work in
the Spaniards' country,--he was shipped away to

         'Those battle heights, Quebec heights, our own heights,
          The citadel our golden lily bears,
          And Frontenac--'

But I babble again.  And at Quebec he finds the old song changed.  The
heights and the lilies are there, but Frontenac, the great, brave
Frontenac, is gone: confusion lives where only conquest and honest
quarrelling were--"

"Frontenac will return--there is no other way!" interposed De Casson.

"Perhaps.  And the young man looked round and lo!  old faces and places
had changed.  Children had grown into women, with children at their
breasts; young wives had become matronly; and the middle-aged were
slaving servants and apothecaries to make them young again.  And the
young man turned from the world he used to know, and said: 'There are but
three things in the world worth doing--loving, roaming, and fighting.'
Therefore, after one day, he turned from the poor little Court-game at
Quebec, travelled to Montreal, spent a few hours with his father and his
brothers, Bienville, Longueil, Maricourt, and Sainte-Helene, and then,
having sent word to his dearest friend, came to see him, and found him
--his voice got softer--the same as of old: ready with music and wine
and aves for the prodigal."

He paused.  The priest had placed meat and wine on the table, and now he
came and put his hand on Iberville's shoulder.  "Pierre," he said, "I
welcome you as one brother might another, the elder foolishly fond."
Then he added: "I was glad you remembered our music."

"My dear De Casson, as if I could forget!  I have yet the Maggini you
gave me.  It was of the things for remembering.  If we can't be loyal
to our first loves, why to anything?"

"Even so, Pierre; but few at your age arrive at that.  Most people learn
it when they have bartered away every dream.  It is enough to have a few
honest emotions--very few--and stand by them till all be done."

"Even hating?" Iberville's eyes were eager.

"There is such a thing as a noble hate."

"How every inch of you is man!" answered the other, clasping the
priest's arms.  Then he added: "Abbe, you know what I long to hear.  You
have been to New York twice; you were there within these three months--"

"And was asked to leave within these three months--banished, as it were."

"I know.  You said in your letter that you had news.  You were kind to
go--"

"Perrot went too."

"My faithful Perrot!  I was about to ask of him.  I had a birch-bark
letter from him, and he said he would come--Ah, here he is!"

He listened.  There was a man's voice singing near by.  They could even
hear the words:

             "'O the young seigneur!  O the young seigneur!
               A hundred bucks in a day he slew;
               And the lady gave him a ribbon to wear,
               And a shred of gold from her golden hair
               O the way of a maid was the way he knew;
               O the young seigneur!  O the young seigneur!'"

"Shall we speak freely before him?" said the priest.  "As freely as you
will.  Perrot is true.  He was with me, too, at the beginning."

At that moment there came a knock, and in an instant the coureur du bois
had caught the hands of the young man, and was laughing up in his face.

"By the good Sainte Anne, but you make Nick Perrot a dwarf, dear
monsieur!"

"Well, well, little man, I'll wager neither the great abbe here nor
myself could bring you lower than you stand, for all that.  Comrade, 'tis
kind of you to come so prompt."

"What is there so good as the face of an old friend!" said Perrot, with
a little laugh.  "You will drink with a new, and eat with a coming
friend, and quarrel with either; but 'tis only the old friend that knows
the old trail, and there's nothing to a man like the way he has come in
the world."

"The trail of the good comrade," said the priest softly.

"Ah!" responded Perrot, "I remember, abbe, when we were at the Portneuf
you made some verses of that--eh! eh! but they were good!"

"No fitter time," said Iberville; "come, abbe, the verses!"

"No, no; another day," answered the priest.

It was an interesting scene.  Perrot, short, broad, swarthy, dressed in
rude buckskin gaudily ornamented, bandoleer and belt garnished with
silver,--a recent gift of some grateful merchant, standing between the
powerful black-robed priest and this gallant sailor-soldier, richly
dressed in fine skins and furs, with long waving hair, more like a Viking
than a man of fashion, and carrying a courtly and yet sportive look, as
though he could laugh at the miseries of the sinful world.  Three strange
comrades were these, who knew each other so far as one man can know
another, yet each knowing from a different stand-point.  Perrot knew
certain traits of Iberville of which De Casson was ignorant, and the abbe
knew many depths which Perrot never even vaguely plumbed.  And yet all
could meet and be free in speech, as though each read the other
thoroughly.

"Let us begin," said Iberville.  "I want news of New York."

"Let us eat as we talk," urged the abbe.

They all sat and were soon eating and drinking with great relish.

Presently the abbe began:

"Of my first journey you know by the letter I sent you: how I found that
Mademoiselle Leveret was gone to England with her father.  That was a
year after you left, now about three years gone.  Monsieur Gering entered
the navy of the English king, and went to England also."

Iberville nodded.  "Yes, yes, in the English navy I know very well of
that."

The abbe looked up surprised.  "From my letter?"

"I saw him once in the Spaniards' country," said Iberville, "when we
swore to love each other less and less."

"What was the trouble?" asked the priest.

"Pirates' booty, which he, with a large force, seized as a few of my men
were carrying it to the coast.  With his own hand he cut down my servant,
who had been with me since from the first.  Afterwards in a parley I saw
him, and we exchanged--compliments.  The sordid gentleman thought I was
fretting about the booty.  Good God, what are some thousand pistoles to
the blood of one honest friend!"

"And in your mind another leaven worked," ventured the priest.

"Another leaven, as you say," responded Iberville.  "So, for your story,
abbe."

"Of the first journey there is nothing more to tell, save that the
English governor said you were as brave a gentleman as ever played
ambassador--which was, you remember, much in Count Frontenac's vein."

Iberville nodded and smiled.  "Frontenac railed at my impertinence also."

"But gave you a sword when you told him the news of Radisson,"
interjected Perrot.  "And by and by I've things to say of him."

The abbe continued: "For my second visit, but a few months ago.  We
priests have gone much among the Iroquois, even in the English country,
and, as I promised you, I went to New York.  There I was summoned to the
governor.  He commanded me to go back to Quebec.  I was about to ask him
of Mademoiselle when there came a tap at the door.  The governor looked
at me a little sharply.  'You are,' said he, 'a friend of Monsieur
Iberville.  You shall know one who keeps him in remembrance.'  Then he
let the lady enter.  She had heard that I was there, having seen Perrot
first."

Here Perrot, with a chuckle, broke in: "I chanced that way, and I had a
wish to see what was for seeing; for here was our good abbe alone among
the wolves, and there were Radisson and the immortal Bucklaw, of whom
there was news."

De Casson still continued: "When I was presented she took my hand and
said: 'Monsieur l'Abbe, I am glad to meet a friend--an old friend--of
Monsieur Iberville.  I hear that he has been in France and elsewhere.'"

Here the abbe paused, smiling as if in retrospect, and kept looking into
the fire and turning about in his hand his cassock-cord.

Iberville had sat very still, his face ruled to quietness; only his eyes
showing the great interest he felt.  He waited, and presently said: "Yes,
and then?"

The abbe withdrew his eyes from the fire and turned them upon Iberville.

"And then," he said, "the governor left the room.  When he had gone she
came to me, and, laying her hand upon my arm, said: 'Monsieur, I know you
are to be trusted.  You are the friend of a brave man.'"

The abbe paused, and smiled over at Iberville.  "You see," he said, "her
trust was in your friend, not in my office.  Well, presently she added:
'I know that Monsieur Iberville and Mr. Gering, for a foolish quarrel of
years ago, still are cherished foes.  I wish your help to make them both
happier; for no man can be happy and hate.'  And I gave my word to do
so."  Here Perrot chuckled to himself and interjected softly: "Mon Dieu!
she could make a man say anything at all.  I would have sworn to her that
while I lived I never should fight.  Eh, that's so!"

"Allons!" said Iberville impatiently, yet grasping the arm of the
woodsman kindly.

The abbe once more went on: "When she had ended questioning I said to
her: 'And what message shall I give from you?'  'Tell him,' she answered,
'by the right of lifelong debt I ask for peace.'  'Is that all?' said I.
'Tell him,' she added, 'I hope we may meet again.'  'For whose sake,'
said I, 'do you ask for peace?'  'I am a woman,' she answered, 'I am
selfish--for my own sake.'"

Again the priest paused, and again Iberville urged him.

"I asked if she had no token.  There was a flame in her eye, and she
begged me to excuse her.  When she came back she handed me a little
packet.  'Give it to Monsieur Iberville,' she said, 'for it is his.  He
lent it to me years ago.  No doubt he has forgotten.'"

At that the priest drew from his cassock a tiny packet, and Iberville,
taking, opened it.  It held a silver buckle tied by a velvet ribbon.  A
flush crept slowly up Iberville's face from his chin to his hair, then he
sighed, and presently, out of all reason, laughed.

"Indeed, yes; it is mine," he said.  "I very well remember when I found
it."

Here Perrot spoke.  "I very well remember, monsieur, when she took it
from your doublet; but it was on a slipper then."

Iberville did not answer, but held the buckle, rubbing it on his sleeve
as though to brighten it.  "So much for the lady," he said at last; "what
more?"

"I learned," answered the abbe, "that Monsieur Gering was in Boston, and
that he was to go to Fort Albany at Hudson's Bay, where, on our
territory, the English have set forts."

Here Perrot spoke.  "Do you know, monsieur, who are the poachers?  No?
Eh?  No?  Well, it is that Radisson."

Iberville turned sharply upon Perrot.  "Are you sure of that?" he said.
"Are you sure, Nick?"

"As sure as I've a head.  And I will tell you more: Radisson was with
Bucklaw at the kidnapping.  I had the pleasure to kill a fellow of
Bucklaw, and he told me that before he died.  He also told how Bucklaw
went with Radisson to the Spaniards' country treasure-hunting.  Ah!
there are many fools in the world.  They did not get the treasure.  They
quarreled, and Radisson went to the far north, Bucklaw to the far south.
The treasure is where it was.  Eh bien, such is the way of asses."

Iberville was about to speak.

"But wait," said Perrot, with a slow, tantalising smile; "it is not wise
to hurry.  I have a mind to know; so while I am at New York I go to
Boston.  It makes a man's mind great to travel.  I have been east to
Boston; I have been west beyond the Ottawa and the Michilimackinac, out
to the Mississippi.  Yes.  Well, what did I find in Boston?  Peste!  I
found that they were all like men in purgatory--sober and grave.  Truly.
And so dull!  Never a saint-day, never a feast, never a grand council
when the wine, the rum, flow so free, and you shall eat till you choke.
Nothing.  Everything is stupid; they do not smile.  And so the Indians
make war!  Well, I have found this.  There is a great man from the
Kennebec called William Phips.  He has traded in the Indies.  Once while
he was there he heard of that treasure.  Ha!  ha!  There have been so
many fools on that trail.  The governor of New York was a fool when
Bucklaw played his game; he would have been a greater if he had gone
with Bucklaw."

Here Iberville would have spoken, but Perrot waved his hand.  "De grace,
a minute only.  Monsieur Gering, the brave English lieutenant, is at
Hudson's Bay, and next summer he will go with the great William Phips--
Tonnerre, what a name--William Phips!  Like a pot of herring!  He will go
with him after the same old treasure.  Boston is a big place, but I hear
these things."

Usually a man of few words, Perrot had bursts of eloquence, and this was
one of them.  But having made his speech, he settled back to his tobacco
and into the orator's earned repose.

Iberville looked up from the fire and said: "Perrot, you saw her in New
York.  What speech was there between you?"

Perrot's eyes twinkled.  "There was not much said.

"I put myself in her way.  When she saw me her cheek came like a peach-
blossom.  'A very good morning, ma'm'selle,' said I, in English.  She
smiled and said the same.  'And your master, where is he?' she asked
with a fine smile.  'My friend Monsieur Iberville?' I said; 'ah!  he will
be in Quebec soon.'  Then I told her of the abbe, and she took from a
chain a little medallion and gave it me in memory of the time we saved.
her.  And before I could say Thank you, she had gone--Well, that is all
--except this."

He drew from his breast a chain of silver, from which hung the gold
medallion, and shook his head at it with good-humour.  But presently a
hard look came on his face, and he was changed from the cheerful woodsman
into the chief of bushrangers.  Iberville read the look, and presently
said:

"Perrot, men have fought for less than gold from a woman's chain and a
buckle from her shoe."

"I have fought from Trois Pistoles to Michilimackinac for the toss of a
louis-d'or."

"As you say.  Well, what think you--"

He paused, rose, walked up and down the room, caught his moustache
between his teeth once or twice, and seemed buried in thought.  Once or
twice he was about to speak, but changed his mind.  He was calculating
many things: planning, counting chances, marshalling his resources.
Presently he glanced round the room.  His eyes fell on a map.  That
was it.  It was a mere outline, but enough.  Putting his finger on it,
he sent it up, up, up, till it settled on the shores of Hudson's Bay.
Again he ran the finger from the St. Lawrence up the coast and through
Hudson's Straits, but shook his head in negation.  Then he stood, looked
at the map steadily, and presently, still absorbed, turned to the table.
He saw the violin, picked it up, and handed it to De Casson:

"Something with a smack of war," he said.  "And a woman for me," added
Perrot.

The abbe shook his head musingly at Perrot, took the violin, and gathered
it to his chin.  At first he played as if in wait of something that
eluded him.  But all at once he floated into a powerful melody, as a
stream creeps softly through a weir, and after many wanderings broadens
suddenly into a great stream.  He had found his theme.  Its effect was
striking.  Through Iberville's mind there ran a hundred incidents of his
life, one chasing upon the other without sequence--phantasmagoria out of
the scene--house of memory:

The light upon the arms of De Tracy's soldiers when they marched up
Mountain Street many years before--The frozen figure of a man standing
upright in the plains--A procession of canoes winding down past Two
Mountains, the wild chant of the Indians joining with the romantic songs
of the voyageurs--A girl flashing upon the drawn swords of two lads--King
Louis giving his hand to one of these lads to kiss--A lady of the Court
for whom he might easily have torn his soul to rags, but for a fair-faced
English girl, ever like a delicate medallion in his eye--A fight with the
English in the Spaniards' country--His father blessing him as he went
forth to France--A dark figure taking a hundred shapes, and yet always
meaning the same as when he--Iberville--said over the governor's table in
New York, "Foolish boy!"--A vast stretch of lonely forest, in the white
coverlet of winter, through which sounded now and then the boom-boom of a
bursting tree--A few score men upon a desolate northern track, silent,
desperate, courageous; a forlorn hope on the edge of the Arctic circle,
with the joy of conquest in their bones, and at their thighs the swords
of men.

These are a few of the pictures, but the last of them had not to do with
the past: a dream grown into a fact, shaped by the music, become at once
an emotion and a purpose.

Iberville had now driven home the first tent-peg of a wonderful
adventure.  Under the spell of that music his body seemed to grow larger.
He fingered his sword, and presently caught Perrot by the shoulder and
said "We will do it, Perrot."

Perrot got to his feet.  He understood.  He nodded and seized Iberville's
hand.  "Bravo!  There was nothing else to do," he replied.

De Casson lowered his violin.  "What do you intend?" he asked gravely.

Iberville took his great hand and pressed it.  "To do what you will
commend, abbe: at Hudson's Bay to win back forts the English have taken,
and get those they have built."

"You have another purpose," added De Casson softly.

"Abbe, that is between me and my conscience.  I go for my king and
country against our foes."

"Who will go with you?  You will lead?"

"Not I to lead--that involves me."  Iberville's face darkened.  "I wish
more freedom, but still to lead in fact."

"But who will lead?  And who will go?"

"De Troyes, perhaps, to lead.  To go, my brothers Sainte-Helene and
Maricourt, Perrot and a stout company of his men; and then I fear not
treble as many English."

The priest did not seem satisfied.  Presently Iberville, with a winning
smile, ran an arm over his shoulder and added: "We cannot go without you,
Dollier."

The priest's face cleared, and a moment afterwards the three comrades
shook hands together.




CHAPTER VIII

AS SEEN THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

When King Louis and King James called for peace, they could not know
that it was as little possible to their two colonies as between rival
buccaneers.  New France was full of bold spirits who loved conquest for
conquest's sake.  Besides, in this case there was a force at work,
generally unknown, but as powerful as the convincing influence of an
army.  Behind the worst and the best acts of Charles II was a woman.
Behind the glories and follies of Louis XIV was also a woman.  Behind
some of the most striking incidents in the history of New France, New
England, and New York, was a woman.

We saw her when she was but a child--the centre of singular events.
Years had passed.  Not one of those events had gone for nothing;
each was bearing fruit after its kind.

She is sitting alone in a room of a large unhandsome house, facing on
Boston harbour.  It is evening.  The room itself is of dark wood, and
evening has thrown it into gloom.  Yet somehow the girl's face has a
light of its own.  She is turned fair towards the window, and is looking
out to sea.  A mist is rising from the water, and the shore is growing
grey and heavy as the light in the west recedes and night creeps in from
the ocean.  She watches the waves and the mist till all is mist without;
a scene which she had watched, how often she could not count.  The night
closes in entirely upon her, but she does not move.  At last the door of
the room opens and some one enters and closes it again.  "My daughter!"
says an anxious voice.  "Are you here, Jessica?"

"I am here, father," is the reply.  "Shall we have lights?"

"As you will."

Even as they speak a servant enters, and lighted candles are put upon the
table.  They are alone again.  Both are pale.  The girl stands very
still, and so quiet is her face, one could never guess that she is
passing, through the tragic moment of her life.

"What is your answer, Jessica?" he asks.  "I will marry him when he
comes back."

"Thank God!" is the old man's acknowledgment.  "You have saved our
fortunes."

The girl sighs, and then, with a little touch of that demure irony which
we had seen in her years before, says: "I trust we have not lost our
honour."

"Why, you love him, do you not?  There is no one you care for more than
George Gering?"

"I suppose not," is her reply, but the tone is enigmatical.

While this scene is on, another appears in Cheapside, London.  A man
of bold and vigorous bearing comes from the office of a well-known
solicitor.  That very morning he had had an interview with the King, and
had been reminded with more exactness than kindness that he had cost King
Charles a ship, scores of men, and thousands of pounds, in a fruitless
search for buried treasure in Hispaniola.  When he had urged his case
upon the basis of fresh information, he was drily told that the security
was too scant, even for a king.  He had then pleaded his case to the Duke
of Albemarle and other distinguished gentlemen.  They were seemingly
convinced, but withheld their answer till the following morning.

But William Phips, stubborn adventurer, destined to receive all sorts of
honours in his time, has no intention of quitting London till he has his
way; and this is his thought as he steps into Cheapside, having already
made preparations upon the chance of success.  He has gone so far as to
purchase a ship, called the Bridgwater Merchant from an alderman in
London, though he has not a hundred guineas at his disposal.  As he
stands debating, a hand touches his arm and a voice says in his ear:
"You were within a mile of it with the Atgier Rose, two years ago."

The great adventurer turns.  "The devil I was!  And who are you?"

Satanic humour plays in the stranger's eyes as he answers: "I am Edward
Bucklaw, pirate and keeper of the treasure-house in the La Planta River."

"Blood of Judas," Phips says, "how dare you speak to me?  I'll have you
in yon prison for an unhung rascal!"

"Ah!  you are a great man," is the unmoved reply.  "I knew you'd feel
that way.  But if you'll listen for five minutes, down here at the Bull-
and-Daisy, there shall be peace between us."

An hour later, Phips, following Bucklaw's instructions, is tracing on a
map the true location of the lost galleon's treasure.

"Then," says Bucklaw, "we are comrades?"

"We are adventurers."

Another scene.  In a northern inland sea two men are standing on the deck
of a ship: the one stalwart, clear-eyed, with a touch of strong reserve
in face and manner; the other of middle height, with sinister look.  The
former is looking out silently upon the great locked hummocks of ice
surrounding the vessel.  It is the early morning.  The sun is shining
with that hard brightness only seen in the Arctic world--keen as silver,
cold as steel.  It plays upon the hummocks, and they send out shafts of
light at fantastic angles, and a thin blue line runs between the almost
unbearable general radiance and the sea of ice stretching indefinitely
away.  But to the west is a shore, and on it stands a fort and a few
detached houses.  Upon the walls of the fort are some guns, and the
British flag is flying above.  Beyond these again are the plains of the
north--the home of the elk, musk-ox, silver fox, the white bear and the
lonely races of the Pole.  Here and there, in the south-west, an island
of pines breaks the monotony, but to the north there is only the white
silence, the terrible and yet beautiful trail of the Arctic.

The smaller man stands swinging his arms for warmth; the smack of the
leather in the clear air like the report of a gun.  Presently, stopping
his exercise, he says:

"Well, monsieur, what do you say?"

Slowly the young man withdraws his eyes from the scene and turns.

"Radisson," he says, "this is much the same story as Bucklaw told
Governor Nicholls.  How come you to know of it?"

"You remember, I was proclaimed four years ago?  Well, afterwards I fell
in with Bucklaw.  I sailed with him to the Spaniards' country, and we
might have got the treasure, but we quarreled; there was a fight, and
I--well, we end.  Bucklaw was captured by the French and was carried to
France.  He was a fool to look for the treasure with a poor ship and a
worse crew.  He was for getting William Phips, a man of Boston, to work
with him, for Phips had got something of the secret from an old sailor,
but when he would have got him, Phips was on his way with a ship of King
Charles.  I will tell you something more.'  Mademoiselle Leveret's--"

"What do you know of Mademoiselle Leveret?"

"A little.  Mademoiselle's father lost much money in Phips's expedition."

"How know you that?"

"I have ears.  You have promised to go with Phips.  Isn't that so?"

"What then?"

"I will go with you."

"Booty?"

"No, revenge."

"On whom?"

"The man you hate--Iberville."

Gering's face darkens.  "We are not likely to meet."

"Pardon!  very likely.  Six months ago he was coming back from France.
He will find you.  I know the race."

A sneer is on Gering's face.  "Freebooters, outlaws like yourself!"

"Pardon! gentlemen, monsieur; noble outlaws.  What is it that once or
twice they have quarreled with the governor, and because they would not
yield have been proclaimed?  Nothing.  Proclaimed yesterday, today at
Court.  No, no.  I hate Iberville, but he is a great man."

In the veins of the renegade is still latent the pride of race.  He is a
villain but he knows the height from which he fell.  "He will find you,
monsieur," he repeats.  "When Le Moyne is the hunter he never will kennel
till the end.  Besides, there is the lady!"

"Silence!"

Radisson knows that he has said too much.  His manner changes.  "You will
let me go with you?"  The Englishman remembers that this scoundrel was
with Bucklaw, although he does not know that Radisson was one of the
abductors.

"Never!" he says, and turns upon his heel.

A moment after and the two have disappeared from the lonely pageant of
ice and sun.  Man has disappeared, but his works--houses and ships and
walls and snow-topped cannon--lie there in the hard grasp of the North,
while the White Weaver, at the summit of the world, is shuttling these
lives into the woof of battle, murder, and sudden death.

On the shore of the La Planta River a man lies looking into the sunset.
So sweet, so beautiful is the landscape, the deep foliage, the scent of
flowers, the flutter of bright-winged birds, the fern-grown walls of a
ruined town, the wallowing eloquence of the river, the sonorous din of
the locust, that none could think this a couch of death.  A Spanish
priest is making ready for that last long voyage, when the soul of man
sloughs the dross of earth.  Beside him kneels another priest--a
Frenchman of the same order.

The dying man feebly takes from his breast a packet and hands it to his
friend.

"It is as I have said," he whispers.  "Others may guess, but I know.
I know--and another.  The rest are all dead.  There were six of us, and
all were killed save myself.  We were poisoned by a Spaniard.  He thought
he had killed all, but I lived.  He also was killed.  His murderer's name
was Bucklaw--an English pirate.  He has the secret.  Once he came with a
ship to find, but there was trouble and he did not go on.  An Englishman
also came with the king's ship, but he did not find.  But I know that the
man Bucklaw will come again.  It should not be.  Listen: A year ago, and
something more, I was travelling to the coast.  From there I was to sail
for Spain.  I had lost the chart of the river then.  I was taken ill and
I should have died, but a young French officer stayed his men beside me
and cared for me, and had me carried to the coast, where I recovered.  I
did not go to Spain, and I found the chart of the river again."

There is a pause, in which the deep breathing of the dying man mingles
with the low wash of the river, and presently he speaks again.  "I vowed
then that he should know.  As God is our Father, swear that you will give
this packet to himself only."

The priest, in reply, lifts the crucifix from the dying man's breast and
puts his lips to it.  The world seems not to know, so cheerful is it all,
that, with a sob, that sob of farewell which the soul gives the body,--
the spirit of a man is passing the mile-posts called Life, Time, and
Eternity.

Yet another glance into passing incidents before we follow the straight
trail of our story.  In the city of Montreal fourscore men are kneeling
in a little church, as the mass is slowly chanted at the altar.  All of
them are armed.  By the flare of the torches and the candles--for it is
not daybreak yet--you can see the flash of a scabbard, the glint of a
knife, and the sheen of a bandoleer.

Presently, from among them, one man rises, goes to the steps of the
sanctuary and kneels.  He is the leader of the expedition, the Chevalier
de Troyes, the chosen of the governor.  A moment, and three other men
rise and come and kneel beside him.  These are three brothers, and one we
know--gallant, imperious, cordial, having the superior ease of the
courtier.

The four receive a blessing from a massive, handsome priest, whose face,
as it bends over Iberville, suddenly flushes with feeling.  Presently the
others rise, but Iberville remains an instant longer, as if loth to
leave.  The priest whispers to him: "Be strong, be just, be merciful."

The young man lifts his eyes to the priest's: "I will be just, abbe!"

Then the priest makes the sacred gesture over him.





CHAPTER IX

TO THE PORCH OF THE WORLD

The English colonies never had a race of woodsmen like the coureurs du
bois of New France.  These were a strange mixture: French peasants, half-
breeds, Canadian-born Frenchmen, gentlemen of birth with lives and
fortunes gone askew, and many of the native Canadian noblesse, who, like
the nobles of France, forbidden to become merchants, became adventurers
with the coureurs du bois, who were ever with them in spirit more than
with the merchant.  The peasant prefers the gentleman to the bourgeois as
his companion.  Many a coureur du bois divided his tale of furs with a
distressed noble or seigneur, who dare not work in the fields.

The veteran Charles le Moyne, with his sons, each of whom played a daring
and important part in the history of New France,--Iberville greatest,--
was one of the few merchants in whom was combined the trader and the
noble.  But he was a trader by profession before he became a seigneur.
In his veins was a strain of noble blood; but leaving France and settling
in Canada, he avoided the little Court at Quebec, went to Montreal, and
there began to lay the foundation of his fame and fortune, and to send
forth men who were as the sons of Jacob.  In his heart he was always in
sympathy with the woodsmen, and when they were proclaimed as perilous to
the peace and prosperity of the king's empire, he stood stoutly by them.
Adventurers, they traded as they listed; and when the Intendant Duchesnau
could not bend them to his greedy will, they were to be caught and hanged
wherever found.  King Louis hardly guessed that to carry out that order
would be to reduce greatly the list of his Canadian noblesse.  It struck
a blow at the men who, in one of the letters which the grim Frontenac
sent to Versailles not long before his death, were rightly called "The
King's Traders"--more truly such than any others in New France.

Whether or not the old seigneur knew it at the time, three of his own
sons were among the coureurs du bois--chieftains by courtesy--when they
were proclaimed.  And it was like Iberville, that, then only a lad, he
came in from the woods, went to his father, and astonished him by asking
for his blessing.  Then he started for Quebec, and arriving there with
Perrot and Du Lhut, went to the citadel at night and asked to be admitted
to Count Frontenac.  Perhaps the governor-grand half-barbarian as he was
at heart-guessed the nature of the visit and, before he admitted
Iberville, dismissed those who were with him.  There is in an old letter
still preserved by an ancient family of France, an account of this
interview, told by a cynical young nobleman.  Iberville alone was
admitted.  His excellency greeted his young visitor courteously,
yet with hauteur.

"You bring strange comrades to visit your governor, Monsieur Iberville,"
he said.

"Comrades in peace, your excellency, comrades in war."

"What war?"

"The king makes war against the coureurs du bois.  There is a price on
the heads of Perrot and Du Lhut.  We are all in the same boat."

"You speak in riddles, sir."

"I speak of riddles.  Perrot and Du Lhut are good friends of the king.
They have helped your excellency with the Indians a hundred times.  Their
men have been a little roystering, but that's no sin.  I am one with
them, and I am as good a subject as the king has."

"Why have you come here?"

"To give myself up.  If you shoot Perrot or Du Lhut you will have to
shoot me; and, if you carry on the matter, your excellency will not have
enough gentlemen to play Tartufe."

This last remark referred to a quarrel which Frontenac had had with the
bishop, who inveighed against the governor's intention of producing
Tartufe at the chateau.

Iberville's daring was quite as remarkable as the position in which he
had placed himself.  With a lesser man than Frontenac it might have ended
badly.  But himself, courtier as he was, had ever used heroical methods,
and appreciated the reckless courage of youth.  With grim humour he put
all three under arrest, made them sup with him, and sent them away
secretly before morning--free.  Before Iberville left, the governor had
word with him alone.

"Monsieur," he said, "you have a keen tongue, but our king needs keen
swords, and since you have the advantage of me in this, I shall take care
you pay the bill.  We have had enough of outlawry.  You shall fight by
rule and measure soon."

"In your excellency's bodyguard, I hope," was the instant reply.

"In the king's navy," answered Frontenac, with a smile, for he was
pleased with the frank flattery.

A career different from that of George Gering, who, brought up with
Puritans, had early learned to take life seriously, had little of
Iberville's gay spirit, but was just such a determined, self-conscious
Englishman as any one could trust and admire, and none but an Englishman
love.

And Jessica Leveret?  Wherever she had been during the past four years,
she had stood between these two men, regardful, wondering, waiting; and
at last, as we know, casting the die against the enemy of her country.
But was it cast after all?

Immediately after she made a certain solemn promise, recorded in the last
chapter, she went once again to New York to visit Governor Nicholls.  She
had been there some months before, but it was only for a few weeks, and
then she had met Dollier de Casson and Perrot.  That her mind was
influenced by memory of Iberville we may guess, but in what fashion
who can say?  It is not in mortal man to resolve the fancies of a woman,
or interpret the shadowy inclinations, the timid revulsions, which move
them--they cannot tell why, any more than we.  They would indeed be
thankful to be solved unto themselves.  The great moment for a man with a
woman is when, by some clear guess or some special providence, he shows
her in a flash her own mind.  Her respect, her serious wonder, are all
then making for his glory.  Wise and happy if by a further touch of
genius he seizes the situation: henceforth he is her master.  George
Gering and Jessica had been children together, and he understood her,
perhaps, as, did no one else, save her father; though he never made good
use of his knowledge, nor did he touch that side of her which was purely
feminine--her sweet inconsistency; therefore, he was not her master.

But he had appealed to her, for he had courage, strong, ambition,
thorough kindness, and fine character, only marred by a want of
temperament.  She had avoided as long as she could the question which,
on his return from service in the navy, he asked her, almost without
warning; and with a touch of her old demureness and gaiety she had put
him off, bidding him go win his laurels as commander.  He was then
commissioned for Hudson's Bay, and expected, on his return, to proceed
to the Spaniards' country with William Phips, if that brave gentleman
succeeded with the king or his nobles.  He had gone north with his ship,
and, as we have seen, when Iberville started on that almost impossible
journey, was preparing to return to Boston.  As he waited Iberville came
on.




CHAPTER X

QUI VIVE!

From Land's End to John O' Groat's is a long tramp, but that from
Montreal to Hudson's Bay is far longer, and yet many have made it; more,
however, in the days of which we are writing than now, and with greater
hardships also then.  But weighed against the greater hardships there was
a bolder temper and a more romantic spirit.

How strange and severe a journey it was, only those can tell who have
travelled those wastes, even in these later days, when paths have been
beaten down from Mount Royal to the lodges of the North.  When they
started, the ice had not yet all left the Ottawa River, and they wound
their way through crowding floes, or portaged here and there for miles,
the eager sun of spring above with scarcely a cloud to trail behind him.
At last the river cleared, and for leagues they travelled to the north-
west, and came at last to the Lake of the Winds.  They travelled across
one corner of it, to a point where they would strike an unknown path to
Hudson's Bay.

Iberville had never before seen this lake, and, with all his knowledge of
great proportions, he was not prepared for its splendid vastness.  They
came upon it in the evening, and camped beside it.  They watched the sun
spread out his banners, presently veil his head in them, and sink below
the world.  And between them and that sunset was a vast rock stretching
out from a ponderous shore--a colossal stone lion, resting Sphinxlike,
keeping its faith with the ages.  Alone, the warder of the West, stormy,
menacing, even the vernal sun could give it little cheerfulness.  But to
Iberville and his followers it brought no gloom at night, nor yet in the
morning when all was changed, and a soft silver mist hung over the "great
water," like dissolving dew, through which the sunlight came with a
strange, solemn delicacy.  Upon the shore were bustle, cheerfulness, and
song, until every canoe was launched, and then the band of warriors got
in, and presently were away in the haze.

The long bark canoes, with lofty prows, stained with powerful dyes, slid
along this path swiftly, the paddles noiselessly cleaving the water with
the precision of a pendulum.  One followed the other with a space
between, so that Iberville, in the first, looking back, could see a
diminishing procession, the last seeming large and weird--almost a
shadow--as it were a part of the weird atmosphere.  On either side was
that soft plumbless diffusion, and ahead the secret of untravelled wilds
and the fortunes of war.

As if by common instinct, all gossip ceased soon after they left
the shore, and, cheerful as was the French Canadian, he was--and is--
superstitious.  He saw sermons in stones, books in the running brooks,
and the supernatural in everything.  Simple, hardy, occasionally bloody,
he was ever on the watch for signs and wonders, and a phase of nature
influenced him after the manner of a being with a temperament.  Often, as
some of the woodsmen and river-men had seen this strange effect, they now
made the sacred gesture as they ran on.  The pure moisture lay like a
fine exudation on their brown skins, glistened on their black hair, and
hung from their beards, giving them a mysterious look.  The colours of
their canoes and clothes were softened by the dim air and long use, and
there seemed to accompany each boat and each person an atmosphere within
this other haze, a spiritual kind of exhalation; so that one might have
thought them, with the crucifixes on their breasts, and that unworldly,
distinguished look which comes to those who live much with nature, as
sons of men going upon such mission as did they who went into the far
land with Arthur.

But the silence could not be maintained for long.  The first flush of the
impression gone, these half-barbarians, with the simple hearts of
children, must rise from the almost melancholy, somewhat religious mood,
into which they had been cast.  As Iberville, with Sainte-Helene and
Perrot, sat watching the canoes that followed, with voyageurs erect in
bow and stern, a voice in the next canoe, with a half-chanting
modulation, began a song of the wild-life.  Voice after voice slowly took
it up, until it ran along the whole procession.  A verse was sung, then a
chorus altogether, then a refrain of one verse which was sung by each
boat in succession to the last.  As the refrain of this was sung by the
last boat it seemed to come out of the great haze behind.  Verses of the
old song are still preserved:

                   "Qui vive!
                    Who is it cries in the dawn
                    Cries when the stars go down?
                    Who is it comes through the mist
                    The mist that is fine like lawn,
                    The mist like an angel's gown?
                    Who is it comes in the dawn?
                       Qui vive!  Qui vive!  in the dawn.

                    "Qui rive!
                    Who is it passeth us by,
                    Still in the dawn and the mist?
                    Tall seigneur of the dawn:
                    A two-edged sword at his thigh,
                    A shield of gold at his wrist:
                    Who is it hurrieth by?
                       Qui vive!  Qui vive!  in the dawn."

Under the influence of this beautiful mystery of the dawn, the slow
thrilling song, and the strange, happy loneliness--as though they were in
the wash between two worlds, Iberville got the great inspiration of his
life.  He would be a discoverer, the faithful captain of his king, a
trader in provinces.  .  .  .  And in that he kept his word--years after,
but he kept it.  There came with this, what always comes to a man of
great ideas: the woman who should share his prowess.  Such a man, if
forced to choose between the woman and the idea, will ever decide for
the woman after he has married her, sacrificing what--however much he
hides it--lies behind all.  But he alone knows what he has sacrificed.
For it is in the order of things that the great man shall be first the
maker of kingdoms and homes, and then the husband of his wife and a
begetter of children.  Iberville knew that this woman was not more to him
than the feeling just come to him, but he knew also that while the one
remained the other would also.

He stood up and folded his arms, looking into the silence and mist.  His
hand mechanically dropped to his sword, and he glanced up proudly to the
silver flag with its golden lilies floating softly on the slight breeze
they made as they passed.

"The sword!" he said under his breath.  "The world and a woman by the
sword; there is no other way."

He had the spirit of his time.  The sword was its faith, its magic.
If two men loved a woman, the natural way to make happiness for all was
to let the sword do its eager office.  For they had one of the least-
believed and most unpopular of truths, that a woman's love is more a
matter of mastery and possession than instinct, two men being of
comparatively equal merit and sincerity.

His figure seemed to grow larger in the mist, and the grey haze gave his
hair a frosty coating, so that age and youth seemed strangely mingled in
him.  He stood motionless for a long time as the song went on:

                   "Qui vive!
                    Who saileth into the morn,
                    Out of the wind of the dawn?
                    'Follow, oh, follow me on!'
                    Calleth a distant horn.
                    He is here--he is there--he is gone,
                    Tall seigneur of the dawn!
                    Qui vive!  Qui vive! in the dawn."

Some one touched Iberville's arm.  It was Dollier de Casson.  Iberville
turned to him, but they did not speak at first--the priest knew his
friend well.

"We shall succeed, abbe," Iberville said.

"May our quarrel be a just one, Pierre," was the grave reply.

"The forts are our king's; the man is with my conscience, my dear
friend."

"But if you make sorrow for the woman?"

"You brought me a gift from her!"  His finger touched his doublet.

"She is English, my Pierre."

"She is what God made her."

"She may be sworn to the man."

Iberville started, then shook his head incredulously.  "He is not worthy
of her."

"Are you?"

"I know her value better and prize it more."

"You have not seen her for four years."

"I had not seen you for four years--and yet!"

"You saw her then only for a few days--and she was so young!"

"What are days or years?  Things lie deep in us till some great moment,
and then they spring into life and are ours for ever.  When I kissed King
Louis' hand I knew that I loved my king; when De Montespan's.  I hated,
and shall hate always.  When I first saw this English girl I waked from
youth, I was born again into the world.  I had no doubts, I have none
now."

"And the man?"

"One knows one's enemy even as the other.  There is no way but this,
Dollier.  He is the enemy of my king, and he is greatly in my debt.
Remember the Spaniards' country!"

He laid a hand upon his sword.  The face of the priest was calm and
grave, but in his eyes was a deep fire.  At heart he was a soldier,
a loyalist, a gentleman of France.  Perhaps there came to him then the
dreams of his youth, before a thing happened which made him at last a
servant of the Church after he had been a soldier of the king.

Presently the song of the voyageurs grew less, the refrain softened and
passed down the long line, and, as it were, from out of far mists came
the muffled challenge:

               "Qui vive!  Qui vive! in the dawn."

Then a silence fell once more.  But presently from out of the mists there
came, as it were, the echo of their challenge:

               "Qui vive!  Qui vive! in the dawn."

The paddles stilled in the water and a thrill ran through the line of
voyageurs--even Iberville and his friends were touched by it.

Then there suddenly emerged from the haze on their left, ahead of them, a
long canoe with tall figures in bow and stern, using paddles.  They wore
long cloaks, and feathers waved from their heads.  In the centre of the
canoe was what seemed a body under a pall, at its head and feet small
censers.  The smell of the wood came to them, and a little trail of sweet
smoke was left behind as the canoe swiftly passed into the mist on the
other side and was gone.

It had been seen vaguely.  No one spoke, no one challenged; it had come
and gone like a dream.  What it was, no one, not even Iberville, could
guess, though he thought it a pilgrimage of burial, such as was sometimes
made by distinguished members of Indian tribes.  Or it may have been--
which is likely--a dead priest being carried south by Indian friends.

The impression left upon the party was, however, characteristic.  There
was none but, with the smell of the censers in his nostrils, made the
sacred gesture; and had the Jesuit Silvy or the Abbe de Casson been so
disposed, the event might have been made into the supernatural.

After a time the mist cleared away, and nothing could be seen on the path
they had travelled but the plain of clear water and the distant shore
they had left.

Ahead of them was another shore, and they reached this at last.  Where
the mysterious canoe had vanished, none could tell.

Days upon days, they travelled with incredible labour, now portaging over
a stubborn country, now, placing their lives in hazard as they shot down
untravelled rapids.

One day on the Black Wing River a canoe was torn open and its three
occupants were thrown into the rapids.  Two of them were expert swimmers
and were able to catch the stern of another canoe as it ran by, and
reached safe water, bruised but alive.  The third was a boy, Maurice
Joval, the youngest of the party, whom Iberville had been at first loth
to bring with him.  But he had remembered his own ambitious youth, and
had consented, persuading De Troyes that the lad was worth encouragement.
His canoe was not far behind when the other ran on the rocks.  He saw the
lad struggle bravely and strike out, but a cross current caught him and
carried him towards the steep shore.  There he was thrown against a rock.
His strength seemed to fail, but he grasped the rock.  It was scraggy,
and though it tore and bruised him he clung to it.

Iberville threw off his doublet, and prepared to spring as his boat came
down.  But another had made ready.  It was the abbe, with his cassock
gone, and his huge form showing finely.  He laid his hand upon
Iberville's arm.  "Stay here," he said, "I go; I am the stronger."

But Iberville, as cries of warning and appeal rang out around him, the
drowning lad had not cried out at all,--sprang into the water.  Not
alone.  The abbe looked around him, made the sacred gesture, and then
sprang also into an eddy a distance below, and at an angle made his way
up towards the two.  Priest though he was, he was also an expert river-
man, and his vast strength served him royally.  He saw Iberville tossed
here and there, but with impossible strength and good fortune reach the
lad.  The two grasped each other and then struck out for the high shore.
De Casson seemed to know what would happen.  He altered his course, and,
making for the shore also at a point below, reached it.  He saw with a
kind of despair that it was steep and had no trees; yet his keen eyes
also saw, not far below, the dwarfed bole of a tree jutting out from the
rock.  There lay the chance.  Below this was a great turmoil of rapids.
A prayer mechanically passed the priest's lips, though his thoughts were
those of a warrior then.  He almost enjoyed the danger for himself: his
fear was for Iberville and for the motherless boy.

He had guessed and hoped aright.  Iberville, supporting the now senseless
boy, swung down the mad torrent, his eyes blinded with blood so that he
could not see.  But he heard De Casson's voice, and with a splendid
effort threw himself and the lad towards it.  The priest also fought
upwards to them and caught them as they came, having reserved his great
strength until now.  Throwing his left arm over the lad he relieved
Iberville of his burden, but called to him to hold on.  The blood was
flowing into Iberville's eyes and he could do nothing else.  But now came
the fight between the priest and the mad waters.  Once--twice--thrice
they went beneath, but neither Iberville nor himself let go, and to the
apprehensive cries of their friends there succeeded calls of delight, for
De Casson had seized the jutting bole and held on.  It did not give, and
they were safe for a moment.

A quarter of a mile below there was smoother water, and soon the canoes
were ashore, and Perrot, Sainte-Helene, and others were running to the
rescue.  They arrived just in time.  Ropes were let down, and the lad was
drawn up insensible.  Then came the priest, for Iberville, battered as he
was, would not stir until the abbe had gone up--a stout strain on the
rope.  Fortunately there were clefts and fissures in the wall, which
could be used in the ascent.  De Casson had consented to go first,
chiefly because he wished to gratify the still youthful pride of
Iberville, who thought the soldier should see the priest into safety.
Iberville himself came up slowly, for he was stiff and his limbs were
shaking.  His clothes were in tatters, and his fine face was like that of
a warrior defaced by swords.

But he refused to be carried, and his first care was for the boy, who had
received no mortal injury.

"You have saved the boy, Pierre," said the priest, in a low voice.

"Self-abasing always, dear abbe; you saved us both.  By heaven, but the
king lost a great man in you!"

"Hush!  Mere brawn, Pierre.  .  .  .  By the blessing of God," he added
quickly.




CHAPTER XI

WITH THE STRANGE PEOPLE

After this came varying days of hardship by land and water, and then
another danger.  One day they were, crossing a great northern lake.  The
land was moist with the sweat of quick-springing verdure; flocks of wild
fowl rose at all points, and herds of caribou came drinking and feeding
at the shore.  The cries of herons, loons, and river-hens rose with
strange distinctness, so delicate was the atmosphere, and the blue of the
sky was exquisite.

As they paddled slowly along this lake, keeping time to their songs with
the paddles, there suddenly grew out of the distance a great flotilla of
canoes with tall prows, and behind them a range of islands which they had
not before seen.  The canoes were filled with men--Indians, it would
seem, by the tall feathers lifting from their heads.  A moment before
there had been nothing.  The sudden appearance was even more startling
than the strange canoe that crossed their track on Lake of the Winds.
Iberville knew at once that it was a mirage, and the mystery of it did
not last long even among the superstitious.  But they knew now that
somewhere in the north--presumably not far away--was a large band of
Indians, possibly hostile; their own numbers were about fourscore.  There
was the chance that the Indians were following or intercepting them.
Yet, since they had left the Ottawa River, they had seen no human being,
save in that strange canoe on Lake of the Winds.  To the east were the
dreary wastes of Labrador, to the west were the desolate plains and
hills, stretching to the valley of the Saskatchewan.

Practically in command, Iberville advised watchfulness and preparation
for attack.  Presently the mirage faded away as suddenly as it came.  For
days again they marched and voyaged on, seeing still no human being.  At
last they came to a lake, which they crossed in their canoes; then they
entered the mouth of a small river, travelling northward.  The river
narrowed at a short distance from its mouth, and at a certain point the
stream turned sharply.  As the first canoe rounded the point it came full
upon half a hundred canoes blocking the river, filled by Indians with
bended bows.  They were a northern tribe that had never before seen the
white man.  Tall and stern, they were stout enemies, but they had no
firearms, and, as could be seen, they were astonished at the look of the
little band, which, at the command of De Troyes, who with Iberville was
in the first boat, came steadily on.  Suddenly brought face to face there
was a pause, in which Iberville, who knew several Indian languages,
called to them to make way.

He was not understood, but he had pointed to the white standard of France
flaring with the golden lilies; and perhaps the drawn swords and the
martial manner of the little band--who had donned gay trappings, it being
Iberville's birthday--conveyed in some way his meaning.  The bows of the
strangers stayed drawn, awaiting word from the leader.  Near the chief
stood a man seven feet in height, a kind of bodyguard, who presently said
something in his ear.  He frowned, then seemed to debate, and his face
cleared at last.  Raising a spear, he saluted the French leaders, and
then pointed towards the shore, where there was a space clear of trees,
a kind of plateau.  De Troyes and Iberville, thinking that a truce and
parley were meant, returned the salute with their swords, and presently
the canoes of both parties made over to the shore.  It was a striking
sight: the grave, watchful faces of the Indians, who showed up grandly in
the sun, their skin like fine rippling bronze as they moved; their tall
feathers tossing, rude bracelets on their wrists, while some wore
necklets of brass or copper.  The chief was a stalwart savage with a
cruel eye, but the most striking figure of all--either French or Indian
--was that of the chief's body guard.  He was, indeed, the Goliath of the
tribe, who, after the manner of other champions, was ever ready for
challenge in the name of his master.  He was massively built, with long
sinewy arms; but Iberville noticed that he was not powerful at the waist
in proportion to the rest of his body, and that his neck was thinner than
it should be.  But these were items, for in all he was a fine piece of
humanity, and Iberville said as much to De Casson, involuntarily
stretching up as he did so.  Tall and athletic himself, he never saw a
man of calibre but he felt a wish to measure strength with him, not from
vanity, but through the mere instincts of the warrior.  Priest as he was,
it is possible that De Casson shared the young man's feeling, though
chastening years had overcome impulses of youth.  It was impossible for
the French leaders to guess how this strange parley would end, and when
many more Indians suddenly showed on the banks they saw that they might
have tough work.

"What do you think of it, Iberville?" said De Troyes.  "A juggler's
puzzle--let us ask Perrot," was the reply.

Perrot confessed that he knew nothing of this tribe of Indians.  The
French leaders, who had never heard of Indians who would fight in the
open, were, in spite of great opposing numbers, in warrior mood.
Presently all the canoes were got to land, and without any hostile sign
the Indians filed out on the centre of the plateau, where were pitched a
number of tents.  The tents were in a circle, surrounding a clear space
of ground, and the chief halted in the middle of this.  He and his men
had scarcely noticed the Frenchmen as they followed, seemingly trusting
the honour of the invaders that they would not attack from behind.  It
was these Indians who had been seen in the mirage.  They had followed the
Frenchmen, had gone parallel with them for scores of miles, and had at
last at this strategic point waylaid them.

The conference was short.  The French ranged in column on one side, the
Indians on the other, and then the chief stepped forward.  De Troyes did
the same and not far behind him were Iberville, the other officers, and
Perrot.  Behind the chief was the champion, then, a little distance away,
on either side, the Indian councillors.

The chief waved his hand proudly towards the armed warriors behind him,
as if showing their strength, speaking meanwhile, and then with effective
gesture, remarking the handful of French.  Presently, pointing to his
fighting man, he seemed to ask that the matter be settled by single
combat.

The French leaders understood: Goliath would have his David.  The
champion suddenly began a sing-song challenge, during which Iberville
and his comrades conferred.  The champion's eyes ran up and down the line
and alighted on the large form of De Casson, who calmly watched him.
Iberville saw this look and could not help but laugh, though the matter
was serious.  He pictured the good abbe fighting for the band.  At this
the champion began to beat his breast defiantly.

Iberville threw off his coat, and motioned his friends back.  Immediately
there was protest.  They had not known quite what to do, but Perrot had
offered to fight the champion, and they, supposing it was to be a fight
with weapons, had hastily agreed.  It was clear, however, that it was to
be a wrestle to the death.  Iberville quelled all protests, and they
stepped back.  There was a final call from the champion, and then he
became silent.  From the Indians rose one long cry of satisfaction, and
then they too stilled, the chief fell back, and the two men stood alone
in the centre.  Iberville, whose face had become grave, went to De Casson
and whispered to him.  The abbe gave him his blessing, and then he turned
and went back.  He waved his hand to his brothers and his friends,--a gay
Cavalier-like motion,--then took off all save his small clothes and stood
out.

Never was seen, perhaps, a stranger sight: a gentleman of France ranged
against a savage wrestler, without weapons, stripped to the waist, to
fight like a gladiator.  But this was a new land, and Iberville could
ever do what another of his name or rank could not.  There was only one
other man in Canada who could do the same--old Count Frontenac himself,
who, dressed in all his Court finery, had danced a war-dance in the
torch-light with Iroquois chiefs.

Stripped, Iberville's splendid proportions could be seen at advantage.
He was not massively made, but from crown to heel there was perfect
muscular proportion.  His admirable training and his splendidly nourished
body--cared for, as in those days only was the body cared for--promised
much, though against so huge a champion.  Then, too, Iberville in his
boyhood had wrestled with Indians and had learned their tricks.  Added to
this were methods learned abroad, which might prove useful now.  Yet any
one looking at the two would have begged the younger man to withdraw.
Never was battle shorter.  Iberville, too proud to give his enemy one
moment of athletic trifling, ran in on him.  For a time they were locked,
straining terribly, and then the neck of the champion went with a snap
and he lay dead in the middle of the green.

The Indians and the French were both so dumfounded that for a moment no
one stirred, and Iberville went back and quietly put on his clothes.  But
presently cries of rage and mourning came from the Indians, and weapons
threatened.  But the chief waved aggression down, and came forward to the
dead man.  He looked for a moment, and then as Iberville and De Troyes
came near, he gazed at Iberville in wonder, and all at once reached out
both hands to him.  Iberville took them and shook them heartily.

There was something uncanny in the sudden death of the champion, and
Iberville's achievement had conquered these savages, who, after all,
loved such deeds, though at the hand of an enemy.  And now the whole
scene was changed.  The French courteously but firmly demanded homage,
and got it, as the superior race can get it from the inferior, when
events are, even distantly, in their favour; and here were martial
display, a band of fearless men, weapons which the savages had never seen
before, trumpets, and, most of all, a chief who was his own champion, and
who had snapped the neck of their Goliath as one would break a tree-
branch.

From the moment Iberville and the chief shook hands they were friends,
and after two days, when they parted company, there was no Indian among
all this strange tribe but would have followed him anywhere.  As it was,
he and De Troyes preferred to make the expedition with his handful of
men, and so parted with the Indians, after having made gifts to the chief
and his people.  The most important of these presents was a musket,
handled by the chief at first as though it were some deadly engine.  The
tribe had been greatly astonished at hearing a volley fired by the whole
band at once, and at seeing caribou shot before their eyes; but when the
chief himself, after divers attempts, shot a caribou, they stood in
proper awe.  With mutual friendliness they parted.  Two weeks later,
after great trials, the band emerged on the shores of Hudson's Bay,
almost without baggage, and starving.




CHAPTER XII

OUT OF THE NET

The last two hundred miles of their journey had been made under trying
conditions.  Accidents had befallen the canoes which carried the food,
and the country through which they passed was almost devoid of game.
During the last three days they had little or nothing to eat.  When,
therefore, at night they came suddenly upon the shores of Hudson's Bay,
and Fort Hayes lay silent before them, they were ready for desperate
enterprises.  The high stockade walls with stout bastions and small
cannon looked formidable, yet there was no man of them but was better
pleased that the odds were against him than with him.  Though it was
late spring, the night was cold, and all were wet, hungry, and chilled.

Iberville's first glance at the bay and the fort brought disappointment.
No vessel lay in the harbour, therefore it was probable Gering was not
there.  But there were other forts, and this one must be taken meanwhile.
The plans were quickly made.  Iberville advised a double attack: an
improvised battering-ram at the great gate, and a party to climb the
stockade wall at another quarter.  This climbing-party he would himself
lead, accompanied by his brother Sainte-Helene,

Perrot, and a handful of agile woodsmen.  He had his choice, and his men
were soon gathered round him.  A tree was cut down in the woods some
distance from the shore, shortened, and brought down, ready for its duty
of battering-ram.

The night was beautiful.  There was a bright moon, and the sky by some
strange trick of atmosphere had taken on a green hue, against which
everything stood out with singular distinctness.  The air was placid, and
through the stillness came the low humming wash of the water to the hard
shore.  The fort stood on an upland, looking in its solitariness like
some lonely prison-house where men went, more to have done with the world
than for punishment.  Iberville was in that mood wherein men do stubborn
deeds--when justice is more with them than mercy, and selfishness than
either.

"If you meet the man, Pierre?" De Casson said before the party started.

Iberville laughed softly.  "If we meet, may my mind be his, abbe!  But he
is not here--there is no vessel, you see!  Still, there are more forts on
the bay."  The band knelt down before they started.  It was strange to
hear in that lonely waste, a handful of men, bent on a deadly task,
singing a low chant of penitence--a Kyrie eleison.  Afterwards came the
benediction upon this buccaneering expedition, behind which was one man's
personal enmity, a merchant company's cupidity, and a great nation's lust
of conquest!  Iberville stole across the shore and up the hill with his
handful of men.  There was no sound from the fort; all were asleep.  No
musket-shot welcomed them, no cannon roared on the night; there was no
sentry.  What should people on the outposts of the world need of
sentries, so long as there were walls to keep out wild animals!  In a few
moments Iberville and his companions were over the wall.  Already the
attack on the gate had begun, a passage was quickly made, and by the
time Iberville had forced open the doors of the blockhouse, his followers
making a wild hubbub as of a thousand men, De Troyes and his party were
at his heels.  Before the weak garrison could make resistance they were
in the hands of their enemies, and soon were gathered in the yard--men,
women, and children.

Gering was not there.  Iberville was told that he was at one of the other
forts along the shore: either Fort Rupert on the east, a hundred and
twenty miles away, or at Fort Albany, ninety miles to the north and west.
Iberville determined to go to Fort Rupert, and with a few followers,
embarking in canoes, assembled before it two nights after.  A vessel was
in the harbour, and his delight was keen.  He divided his men, sending
Perrot to take the fort, while himself with a small party moved to the
attack of the vessel.  Gering had delayed a day too long.  He had
intended leaving the day before, but the arrival of the governor of the
company had induced him to remain another day; entertaining his guest at
supper, and toasting him in some excellent wine got in Hispaniola.  So
palatable was it that all drank deeply, and other liquors found their way
to the fo'castle.  Thus in the dead of night there was no open eye on the
Valiant.

The Frenchmen pushed out gently from the shore, paddled noiselessly over
to the ship's side, and clambered up.  Iberville was the first to step on
deck, and he was followed by Perrot and De Casson, who had, against
Iberville's will, insisted on coming.  Five others came after.  Already
they could hear the other party at the gate of the fort, and the cries of
the besiegers, now in the fortyard, came clearly to them.

The watch of the Valiant, waking suddenly, sprang up and ran forward,
making no outcry, dazed but bent on fighting.  He came, however, on the
point of Perrot's sabre and was cut down.  Meanwhile Iberville, hot for
mischief, stamped upon the deck.  Immediately a number of armed men came
bundling up the hatch way.  Among these appeared Gering and the governor,
who thrust themselves forward with drawn swords and pistols.  The first
two men who appeared above the hatchway were promptly despatched, and
Iberville's sword was falling upon Gering, whom he did not recognise,
when De Casson's hand diverted the blow.  It caught the shoulder of a man
at Gering's side.

"'Tis Monsieur Gering!" said the priest.

"Stop! stop!" cried a voice behind these.  "I am the governor.  We
surrender."

There was nothing else to do: in spite of Gering's show of defiance,
though death was above him if he resisted.  He was but half-way up.

"It is no use, Mr. Gering," urged the governor;  "they have us like sheep
in a pen."

"Very well," said Gering suddenly, handing up his, sword and stepping up
himself.  "To whom do I surrender?"

"To an old acquaintance, monsieur," said Iberville, coming near, "who
will cherish you for the king of France."

"Damnation!" cried Gering, and his eyes hungered for his sword again.

"You would not visit me, so I came to look for you; though why, monsieur,
you should hide up here in the porch of the world passeth knowledge."

"Monsieur is witty," answered Gering stoutly; "but if he will grant me
my sword again and an hour alone with him, I shall ask no greater joy
in life."

By this time the governor was on deck, and he interposed.

"I beg, sir," he said to Iberville, "you will see there is no useless
slaughter at yon fort; for I guess that your men have their way with it."

"Shall my messenger, in your name, tell your people to give in?"

"By Heaven, no: I hope that they will fight while remains a chance.  And
be sure, sir, I should not have yielded here, but that I foresaw hopeless
slaughter.  Nor would I ask your favour there, but that I know you are
like to have bloody barbarians with you--and we have women and children!"

"We have no Indians, we are all French," answered Iberville quietly, and
sent the messenger away.

At that moment Perrot touched his arm, and pointed to a man whose
shoulder was being bandaged.  It was Radisson, who had caught Iberville's
sword when the abbe diverted it.

"By the mass," said Iberville; "the gift of the saints!"  He pricked
Radisson with the point of his sword.  "Well, Monsieur Renegade, who holds
the spring of the trap now?  You have some prayers, I hope.  And if there
is no priest among your English, we'll find you one before you swing next
sundown."

Radisson threw up a malignant look, but said nothing; and went on caring
for his wound.

"At sunset, remember.  You will see to it, Perrot," he added.

"Pardon me, monsieur," said the governor.  "This is an officer of our
company, duly surrendered."

"Monsieur will know this man is a traitor, and that I have long-standing
orders to kill him wherever found.  What has monsieur to say for him?"
Iberville added, turning to Gering.

"As an officer of the company," was the reply, "he has the rights of a
prisoner of war."

"Monsieur, we have met at the same table, and I cannot think you should
plead for a traitor.  If you will say that the man--"

But here Radisson broke in.  "I want no one to speak for me.  I hate you
all"--he spat at Iberville--"and I will hang when I must, no sooner."

"Not so badly said," Iberville responded.  "'Tis a pity, Radisson, you
let the devil buy you."

"T'sh!  The devil pays good coin, and I'm not hung yet," he sullenly
returned.

By this time all the prisoners save Gering, the governor, and Radisson,
were secured.  Iberville ordered their disposition, and then, having set
a guard, went down to deal with the governor for all the forts on the
bay.  Because the firing had ceased, he knew that the fort had been
captured; and, indeed, word soon came to this effect.  Iberville then
gave orders that the prisoners from the fort should be brought on board
next morning, to be carried on to Fort Albany, which was yet for attack.
He was ill-content that a hand-to-hand fight with Gering had been
prevented.

He was now all courtesy to the governor and Gering, and, offering them
their own wine, entertained them with the hardships of their travel up.
He gave the governor assurance that the prisoners should be treated well,
and no property destroyed.  Afterwards, with apologies, he saw them
bestowed in a cabin, the door fastened, and a guard set.  Presently he
went on deck, and giving orders that Radisson should be kept safe on the
after-deck, had rations served out.  Then, after eating, he drew his
cloak over him in the cabin and fell asleep.

Near daybreak a man came swimming along the side of the ship to the small
port-hole of a cabin.  He paused before it, took from his pocket a nail,
and threw it within.  There was no response, and he threw another, and
again there was no response.  Hearing the step of some one on the deck
above he drew in close to the side of the ship, diving under the water
and lying still.  A moment after he reappeared and moved-almost floated-
on to another port-hole.  He had only one nail left; he threw it in, and
Gering's face appeared.

"Hush, monsieur!" Radisson called up.  "I have a key which may fit, and
a bar of iron.  If you get clear, make for this side."

He spoke in a whisper.  At that moment he again heard steps above, and
dived as before.  The watch looked over, having heard a slight noise; but
not knowing that Gering's cabin was beneath, thought no harm.  Presently
Radisson came up again.  Gering understood, having heard the footsteps.

"I will make the trial," he said.  "Can you give me no other weapon?"

"I have only the one," responded Radisson, not unselfish enough to give
it up.  His chief idea, after all, was to put Gering under obligation to
him.

"I will do my best," said Gering.

Then he turned to the governor, who did not care to risk his life in the
way of escape.

Gering tried the key, but it would not turn easily and he took it out
again.  Rubbing away the rust, he used tallow from the candle, and tried
the lock again; still it would not turn.  He looked to the fastenings,
but they were solid, and he feared noise; he made one more attempt with
the lock, and suddenly it turned.  He tried the handle, and the door
opened.  Then he bade goodbye to the governor and stepped out, almost
upon the guard, who was sound asleep.  Looking round he saw Iberville's
cloak, which its owner had thrown off in his sleep.  He stealthily picked
it up, and then put Iberville's cap on his head.  Of nearly the same
height, with these disguises he might be able to pass for his captor.

He threw the cloak over his shoulders, stole silently to the hatchway,
and cautiously climbed up.  Thrusting out his head he looked about him,
and he saw two or three figures bundled together at the mainmast--
woodsmen who had celebrated victory too sincerely.  He looked for the
watch, but could not see him.  Then he drew himself carefully up, and on
his hands and knees passed to the starboard side and moved aft.  Doing so
he saw the watch start up from the capstan where he had been resting, and
walk towards him.  He did not quicken his pace.  He trusted to his ruse--
he would impersonate Iberville, possessed as he was of the hat and cloak.
He moved to the bulwarks and leaned against them, looking into the water.
The sentry was deceived; he knew the hat and cloak, and he was only too
glad to have, as he thought, escaped the challenge of having slept at his
post; so he began resolutely to pace the deck.  Gering watched him
closely, and moved deliberately to the stern.  In doing so he suddenly
came upon a body.  He stopped and turned round, leaning against the
bulwarks as before.  This time the watch came within twenty feet of him,
saluted and retired.

Immediately Gering looked again at the body near him, and started back,
for his feet were in a little pool.  He understood: Radisson had escaped
by killing his guard.  It was not possible that the crime and the escape
could go long undetected; the watch might at any moment come the full
length of the ship.  Gering flashed a glance at him again, his back was
to him still,--suddenly doffed the hat and cloak, vaulted lightly upon
the bulwarks, caught the anchor-chain, slid down it into the water, and
struck out softly along the side.  Immediately Radisson was beside him.

"Can you dive?" the Frenchman whispered.  "Can you swim under water?"

"A little."

"Then with me, quick!"

The Frenchman dived and Gering followed him.  The water was bitter cold,
but when a man is saving his life endurance multiplies.

The Fates were with them: no alarm came from the ship, and they reached
the bank in safety.  Here they were upon a now hostile shore without
food, fire, shelter, and weapons; their situation was desperate even yet.
Radisson's ingenuity was not quite enough, so Gering solved the problem:
there were the Frenchmen's canoes; they must be somewhere on the shore.
Because Radisson was a Frenchman, he might be able to impose upon the
watch guarding the canoes.  If not, they still had weapons of a kind-
Radisson a knife, and Gering the bar of iron.  They moved swiftly along
the shore, fearing an alarm meanwhile.  If they could but get weapons and
a canoe they would make their way either to Fort Albany, so warning it,
or attempt the desperate journey to New York.  Again fortune was with
them.  As it chanced, the watch, suffering from the cold night air, had
gone into the bush to bring wood for firing.  The two refugees stole
near, and in the very first canoe found three muskets, and there were
also bags filled with food.  They hastily pushed out a canoe, got in, and
were miles away before their escape was discovered.

Radisson was for going south at once to New York, but Gering would not
hear of it, and at the mouth of a musket Radisson obeyed.  They reached
Fort Albany and warned it.  Having thus done his duty towards the
Hudson's Bay Company, and knowing that surrender must come, and that in
this case his last state would be worse than his first, Gering proceeded
with Radisson--hourly more hateful to him, yet to be endured for what had
happened--southward upon the trail the Frenchmen had taken northward.

A couple of hours after Gering had thrown his hat and cloak into the
blood of the coureur du bois, and slid down the anchor-chain, Iberville
knew that his quarry was flown.  The watch had thought that Iberville had
gone below, and he had again relaxed, but presently a little maggot of
wonder got into his brain.  He then went aft.  Dawn was just breaking;
the grey moist light shone with a naked coldness on land and water; wild-
fowl came fluttering, voiceless, past; night was still drenched in sleep.
Suddenly he saw the dead body, and his boots dabbled in wet!

In all that concerned the honour of the arms of France and the conquest
of the three forts, Hayes, Rupert, and Albany, Iberville might be
content, but he chafed at, the escape of his enemies.

"I will not say it is better so, Pierre," urged De Casson; "but you have
done enough for the king.  Let your own cause come later."

"And it will come, abbe," he answered, with anger.  "His account grows;
we must settle all one day.  And Radisson shall swing or I am no soldier
--so!"



ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Often called an invention of the devil (Violin)






THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD

By Gilbert Parker



EPOCH THE THIRD

XIII.     "AS WATER UNTO WINE"
XIV.      IN WHICH THE HUNTERS ARE OUT
XV.       IN THE MATTER OF BUCKLAW
XVI.      IN THE TREASURE HOUSE
XVII.     THE GIFT OF A CAPTIVE
XVIII.    MAIDEN NO MORE




CHAPTER XIII

"AS WATER UNTO WINE"

Three months afterwards George Gering was joyfully preparing to take
two voyages.  Perhaps, indeed, his keen taste for the one had much to do
with his eagerness for the other--though most men find getting gold as
cheerful as getting married.  He had received a promise of marriage from
Jessica, and he was also soon to start with William Phips for the
Spaniards' country.  His return to New York with the news of the capture
of the Hudson's Bay posts brought consternation.  There was no angrier
man in all America than Colonel Richard Nicholls; there was perhaps no
girl in all the world more agitated than Jessica, then a guest at
Government House.  Her father was there also, cheerfully awaiting her
marriage with Gering, whom, since he had lost most traces of Puritanism,
he liked.  He had long suspected the girl's interest in Iberville; if he
had known that two letters from him--unanswered--had been treasured,
read, and re-read, he would have been anxious.  That his daughter should
marry a Frenchman--a filibustering seigneur, a Catholic, the enemy of the
British colonies, whose fellow-countrymen incited the Indians to harass
and to massacre--was not to be borne.

Besides, the Honourable Hogarth Leveret, whose fame in the colony was now
often in peril because of his Cavalier propensities, and whose losses had
aged him, could not bear that he should sink and carry his daughter with
him.  Jessica was the apple of his eye; for her he would have borne all,
sorts of trials; but he could not bear to see her called on to bear them.
Like most people out of the heyday of their own youth, he imagined the
way a maid's fancy ought to go.

If he had known how much his daughter's promise to marry Gering would
cost her, he would not have had it.  But indeed she did not herself guess
it.  She had, with the dreamy pleasure of a young girl, dwelt upon an
event which might well hold her delighted memory: distance, difference
of race, language, and life, all surrounded Iberville with an engaging
fascination.  Besides, what woman could forget a man who gave her escape
from a fate such as Bucklaw had prepared for her?  But she saw the
hopelessness of the thing, everything was steadily acting in Gering's
favour, and her father's trouble decided her at last.

When Gering arrived at New York and told his story--to his credit with
no dispraise of Iberville, rather as a soldier--she felt a pang greater
than she ever had known.  Like a good British maid, she was angry at the
defeat of the British, she was indignant at her lover's failure and proud
of his brave escape, and she would have herself believe that she was
angry at Iberville.  But it was no use; she was ill-content while her
father and others called him buccaneer and filibuster, and she joyed that
old William Drayton, who had ever spoken well of the young Frenchman,
laughed at their insults, saying that he was as brave, comely, and fine-
tempered a lad as he had ever met, and that the capture of the forts was
genius: "Genius and pith, upon my soul!" he said stoutly; "and if he
comes this way he shall have a right hearty welcome, though he come to
fight."

In the first excitement of Gering's return, sorry for his sufferings and
for his injured ambition, she had suddenly put her hands in his and had
given her word to marry him.

She was young, and a young girl does not always know which it is that
moves her: the melancholy of the impossible, from which she sinks in a
kind of peaceful despair upon the possible, or the flush of a deep
desire; she acts in an atmosphere of the emotions, and cannot therefore
be sure of herself.  But when it was done there came reaction to Jessica.
In the solitude of her own room--the room above the hallway, from which
she had gone to be captured by Bucklaw--she had misgivings.  If she had
been asked whether she loved Iberville, she might have answered no.  But
he was a possible lover; and every woman weighs the possible lover
against the accepted one--often, at first, to fluttering apprehensions.
In this brief reaction many a woman's heart has been caught away.

A few days after Gering's arrival he was obliged to push on to Boston,
there to meet Phips.  He hoped that Mr. Leveret and Jessica would
accompany him, but Governor Nicholls would not hear of it just yet.
Truth is, wherever the girl went she was light and cheerfulness, although
her ways were quiet and her sprightliness was mostly in her looks.  She
was impulsive, but impulse was ruled by a reserve at once delicate and
unembarrassed.  She was as much beloved in the town of New York as in
Boston.

Two days after Gering left she was wandering in the garden, when the
governor joined her.

"Well, well, my pretty councillor," he said--"an hour to cheer an old
man's leisure?"

"As many as you please," she answered daintily, putting her hand within
his arm.  "I am so very cheerful I need to shower the surplus."  There
was a smile at her lips, but her eyes were misty.  Large, brilliant,
gentle, they had now also a bewildered look, which even the rough old
soldier saw.  He did not understand, but he drew the hand further within
his arm and held it, there, and for the instant he knew not what to say.
The girl did not speak; she only kept looking at him with a kind of
inward smiling.  Presently, as if he had suddenly lighted upon a piece of
news for the difficulty, he said: "Radisson has come."

"Radisson!" she cried.

"Yes.  You know 'twas he that helped George to escape?"

"Indeed, no!" she answered.  "Mr. Gering did not tell me."  She was
perplexed, annoyed, yet she knew not why.

Gering had not brought Radisson into New York had indeed forbidden him
to come there, or to Boston, until word was given him; for while he felt
bound to let the scoundrel go with him to the Spaniards' country, it was
not to be forgotten that the fellow had been with Bucklaw.  But Radisson
had no scruples when Gering was gone, though the proscription had never
been withdrawn.

"We will have to give him freedom, councillor, eh?  even though we
proclaimed him, you remember."  He laughed, and added: "You would demand
that, yea or nay.

"Why should I?" she asked.

"Now, give me wisdom all ye saints!  Why--why?

"Faith, he helped your lover from the clutches of the French coxcomb."

"Indeed," she answered, "such a villain helps but for absurd benefits.
Mr. Gering might have stayed with Monsieur Iberville in honour and safety
at least.  And why a coxcomb?  You thought different once; and you cannot
doubt his bravery.  Enemy of our country though he be, I am surely bound
to speak him well--he saved my life."

Anxious to please her, he answered: "Wise as ever, councillor.  What an
old bear am I:  When I called him coxcomb, 'twas as an Englishman hating
a Frenchman, who gave our tongues to gall--a handful of posts gone, a
ship passed to the spoiler, the governor of the company a prisoner, and
our young commander's reputation at some trial!  My temper was
pardonable, eh, mistress?"

The girl smiled, and added: "There was good reason why Mr. Gering brought
not Radisson here, and I should beware that man.  A traitor is ever a
traitor.  He is French, too, and as a good Englishman you should hate all
Frenchmen, should you not?"

"Merciless witch!  Where got you that wit?  If I must, I kneel;" and he
groaned in mock despair.  "And if Monsieur Iberville should come knocking
at our door you would have me welcome him lovingly?"

"Surely; there is peace, is there not?  Has not the king, because of his
love for Louis commanded all goodwill between us and Canada?"

The governor laughed bitterly.  "Much pity that he has! how can we live
at peace with buccaneers?"  Their talk was interrupted here; but a few
days later, in the same garden, Morris came to them.  "A ship enters
harbour," he said, "and its commander sends this letter."

An instant after the governor turned a troubled face on the girl and
said: "Your counsel of the other day is put to rapid test, Jessica.
This comes from monsieur, who would pay his respects to me."

He handed the note to her.  It said that Iberville had brought prisoners
whom he was willing to exchange for French prisoners in the governor's
hands.

Entering New York harbour with a single vessel showed in a strong light
Iberville's bold, almost reckless, courage.  The humour of it was not
lost on Jessica, though she turned pale, and the paper fluttered in her
fingers.

"What will you do?" she said.

"I will treat him as well as he will let me, sweetheart."  Two hours
afterwards, Iberville came up the street with Sainte-Helene, De Casson,
and Perrot,--De Troyes had gone to Quebec,--courteously accompanied by
Morris and an officer of the New York Militia.  There was no enmity shown
the Frenchmen, for many remembered what had once made Iberville popular
in New York.  Indeed, Iberville, whose memory was of the best, now and
again accosted some English or Dutch resident, whose face he recalled.

The governor was not at first cordial; but Iberville's cheerful
soldierliness, his courtier spirit, and his treatment of the English
prisoners, soon placed him on a footing near as friendly as that of years
before.  The governor praised his growing reputation, and at last asked
him to dine, saying that Mistress Leveret would no doubt be glad to meet
her rescuer again.

"Still, I doubt not," said the governor, "there will be embarrassment,
for the lady can scarce forget that you had her lover prisoner.  But
these things are to be endured.  Besides, you and Mr. Gering seem as
easily enemies as other men are friends."

Iberville was amazed.  So, Jessica and Gering were affianced.  And the
buckle she had sent him he wore now in the folds of his lace!  How could
he know what comes from a woman's wavering sympathies, what from her
inborn coquetry, and what from love itself?  He was merely a man with
much to learn.

He accepted dinner and said: "As for Monsieur Gering, your excellency,
we are as easily enemies as he and Radisson are comrades-in-arms."

"Which is harshly put, monsieur.  When a man is breaking prison he
chooses any tool.  You put a slight upon an honest gentleman."

"I fear that neither Mr. Gering nor myself is too generous with each
other, your excellency," answered Iberville lightly.

This frankness was pleasing, and soon the governor took Iberville into
the drawing-room, where Jessica was.  She was standing by the great
fireplace, and she did not move at first, but looked at Iberville in some
thing of her old simple way.  Then she offered him her hand with a quiet
smile.

"I fear you are not glad to see me," he said, with a smile.  "You cannot
have had good reports of me--no?"

"Yes, I am glad," she answered gently.  "You know, monsieur, mine is a
constant debt.  You do not come to me, I take it, as the conqueror of
Englishmen."

"I come to you," he answered, "as Pierre le Moyne of Iberville, who had
once the honour to do you slight service.  I have never tried to forget
that, because by it I hoped I might be remembered--an accident of price
to me."

She bowed and at first did not speak; then Morris came to say that some
one awaited the governor, and the two were left alone.

"I have not forgotten," she began softly, breaking a silence.

"You will think me bold, but I believe you will never forget," was his
meaning reply.

"Yes, you are bold," she replied, with the demure smile which had charmed
him long ago.  Suddenly she looked up at him anxiously, and, "Why did you
go to Hudson's Bay?" she asked.

"I would have gone ten times as far for the same cause," he answered, and
he looked boldly, earnestly, into her eyes.

She turned her head away.  "You have all your old recklessness," she
answered.  Then her eyes softened, and, "All your old courage," she
added.

"I have all my old motive."

"What is-your motive?"

Does a woman ever know how much such speeches cost?  Did Jessica quite
know when she asked the question, what her own motive was; how much it
had of delicate malice--unless there was behind it a simple sincerity?
She was inviting sorrow.  A man like Iberville was not to be counted
lightly; for every word he sowed, he would reap a harvest of some kind.

He came close to her, and looked as though he would read her through and
through.  "Can you ask that question?" he said most seriously.  "If you
ask it because from your soul you wish to know, good!  But if you ask it
as a woman who would read a man's heart, and then--"

"Oh, hush!--hush!" she whispered.  Her face became pale, and her eyes
had a painful brightness.  "You must not answer.  I had no right to ask.
Oh, monsieur!" she added, "I would have you always for my friend if I
could, though you are the enemy of my country and of the man--I am to
marry."

"I am for my king," he replied; "and I am enemy of him who stands between
you and me.  For see: from the hour that I met you I knew that some day,
even as now, I should tell you that--I love you--indeed, Jessica, with
all my heart."

"Oh, have pity!" she pleaded.  "I cannot listen--I cannot."

"You shall listen, for you have remembered me and have understood.
Voila!" he added, hastily catching her silver buckle from his bosom.
"This that you sent me, look where I have kept it--on my heart!"

She drew back from him, her face in her hands.  Then suddenly she put
them out as though to prevent him coming near her, and said:

"Oh, no--no!  You will spare me; I am an affianced wife."  An appealing
smile shone through her tears.  "Oh, will you not go?" she begged.  "Or,
will you not stay and forget what you have said?  We are little more than
strangers; I scarcely know you; I--"

"We are no strangers," he broke in.  "How can that be, when for years I
have thought of you--you of me?  But I am content to wait, for my love
shall win you yet.  You--"

She came to him and put her hands upon his arm.  "You remember," she
said, with a touch of her old gaiety, and with an inimitable grace, "what
good friends we were that first day we met?  Let us be the same now--for
this time at least.  Will you not grant me this for to-day?"

"And to-morrow?" he asked, inwardly determining to stay in the port of
New York and to carry her off as his wife; but, unlike Bucklaw, with her
consent.

At that moment the governor returned, and Iberville's question was never
answered.  Nor did he dine at Government House, for word came secretly
that English ships were coming from Boston to capture him.  He had,
therefore, no other resource but to sail out and push on for Quebec.
He would not peril the lives of his men merely to follow his will with
Jessica.

What might have occurred had he stayed is not easy to say--fortunes
turn on strange trifles.  The girl, under the influence of his masterful
spirit and the rare charm of his manner, might have--as many another has
--broken her troth.  As it was, she wrote Iberville a letter and sent it
by a courier, who never delivered it.  By the same fatality, of the
letters which he wrote her only one was received.  This told her that
when he returned from a certain cruise he would visit her again, for he
was such an enemy to her country that he was keen to win what did it most
honour.  Gering had pressed for a marriage before he sailed for the
Spaniards' country, but she had said no, and when he urged it she had
shown a sudden coldness.  Therefore, bidding her good-bye, he had sailed
away with Phips, accompanied, much against his will, by Radisson.
Bucklaw was not with them.  He had set sail from England in a trading
schooner, and was to join Phips at Port de la Planta.  Gering did not
know that Bucklaw had share in the expedition, nor did Bucklaw guess
the like of Gering.

Within two weeks of the time that Phips in his Bridgwater Merchant,
manned by a full crew, twenty fighting men, and twelve guns, with
Gering in command of the Swallow, a smaller ship, got away to the south,
Iberville also sailed in the same direction.  He had found awaiting him,
on his return to Quebec, a priest bearing messages and a chart from
another priest who had died in the Spaniards' country.




CHAPTER XIV

IN WHICH THE HUNTERS ARE OUT

Iberville had a good ship.  The Maid of Provence carried a handful of
guns and a small but carefully chosen crew, together with Sainte-Helene,
Perrot, and the lad Maurice Joval, who had conceived for Iberville
friendship nigh to adoration.  Those were days when the young were
encouraged to adventure, and Iberville had no compunction in giving the
boy this further taste of daring.

Iberville, thorough sailor as he was, had chosen for his captain one who
had sailed the Spanish Main.  He had commanded on merchant-ships which
had been suddenly turned into men-of-war, and was suited to the present
enterprise: taciturn, harsh of voice, singularly impatient, but a perfect
seaman and as brave as could be.  He had come to Quebec late the previous
autumn with the remnants of a ship which, rotten when she left the port
of Havre, had sprung a leak in mid-ocean, had met a storm, lost her
mainmast, and by the time she reached the St. Lawrence had scarce a stick
standing.  She was still at Quebec, tied up in the bay of St. Charles,
from which she would probably go out no more.  Her captain--Jean Berigord
--had chafed on the bit in the little Hotel Colbert, making himself more
feared than liked, till one day he was taken to Iberville by Perrot.

A bargain was soon struck.  The nature of the expedition was not known in
Quebec, for the sailors were not engaged till the eve of starting, and
Perrot's men were ready at his bidding without why or wherefore.  Indeed,
when the Maid of Provence left the island of Orleans, her nose seawards,
one fine July morning, the only persons in Quebec that knew her
destination were the priest who had brought Iberville the chart of
the river, with its accurate location of the sunken galleon, Iberville's
brothers, and Count Frontenac himself--returned again as governor.

"See, Monsieur Iberville," said the governor, as, with a fine show of
compliment, in full martial dress, with his officers in gold lace,
perukes, powder, swords, and ribbons, he bade Iberville good-bye--"See,
my dear captain, that you find the treasure, or make these greedy English
pay dear for it.  They have a long start, but that is nothing, with a
ship under you that can show its heels to any craft.  I care not so much
about the treasure, but I pray you humble those dull Puritans, who turn
buccaneers in the name of the Lord."

Iberville made a gallant reply, and, with Sainte-Helene, received a
hearty farewell from the old soldier, who, now over seventy years of age,
was as full of spirit as when he distinguished himself at Arras fifty
years before.  In Iberville he saw his own youth renewed, and foretold
the high part he would yet play in the fortunes of New France.  Iberville
had got to the door and was bowing himself out when, with a quick
gesture, Frontenac stopped him, stepped quickly forward, and clasping his
shoulders kissed him on each cheek, and said in a deep, kind voice: "I
know, mon enfant, what lies behind this.  A man pays the price one time
or another: he draws his sword for his mistress and his king; both
forget, but one's country remains--remains."

Iberville said nothing, but with an admiring glance into the aged,
iron face, stooped and kissed Frontenac's hand and withdrew silently.
Frontenac, proud, impatient, tyrannical, was the one man in New France
who had a powerful idea of the future of the country, and who loved her
and his king by the law of a loyal nature.  Like Wolsey, he had found his
king ungrateful, and had stood almost alone in Canada among his enemies,
as at Versailles among his traducers--imperious, unyielding, and yet
forgiving.  Married, too, at an early age, his young wife, caring little
for the duties of maternity and more eager to serve her own ambitions
than his, left him that she might share the fortunes of Mademoiselle de
Montpensier.

Iberville had mastered the chart before he sailed, and when they were
well on their way he disclosed to the captain the object of their voyage.
Berigord listened to all he had to say, and at first did no more than
blow tobacco smoke hard before him.  "Let me see the chart," he said at
last, and, scrutinising it carefully, added: "Yes, yes, 'tis right
enough.  I've been in the port and up the river.  But neither we nor the
Eng lish'll get a handful of gold or silver thereabouts.  'Tis throwing
good money after none at all."

"The money is mine, my captain," said Iberville good-humouredly.  "There
will be sport, and I ask but that you give me every chance you can."

"Look then, monsieur," replied the smileless man, "I'll run your ship for
all she holds from here to hell, if you twist your finger.  She's as good
a craft as ever I spoke, and I'll swear her for any weather.  The
fighting and the gold as you and the devil agree!"

Iberville wished nothing better--a captain concerned only with his own
duties.  Berigord gathered the crew and the divers on deck, and in half a
dozen words told them the object of the expedition, and was followed by
Iberville.  Some of the men had been with him to Hudson's Bay, and they
wished nothing better than fighting the English, and all were keen with
the lust of gold even though it were for another.  As it was, Iberville
promised them all a share of what was got.

On the twentieth day after leaving Quebec they sighted islands, and
simultaneously they saw five ships bearing away towards them.  Iberville
was apprehensive that a fleet of the kind could only be hostile, for
merchant-ships would hardly sail together so, and it was not possible
that they were French.  There remained the probability that they were
Spanish or English ships.  He had no intention of running away, but at
the same time he had no wish to fight before he reached Port de la Planta
and had had his hour with Gering and Phips and the lost treasure.
Besides, five ships was a large undertaking, which only a madman would
willingly engage.  However, he kept steadily on his course.  But there
was one chance of avoiding a battle without running away--the glass had
been falling all night and morning.  Berigord, when questioned, grimly
replied that there was to be trouble, but whether with the fleet or the
elements was not clear, and Iberville did not ask.

He got his reply effectively and duly however.  A wind suddenly sprang up
from the north-west, followed by a breaking cross sea.  It as suddenly
swelled to a hurricane, so that if Berigord had not been fortunate as to
his crew, and had not been so fine a sailor, the Maid of Provence might
have fared badly, for he kept all sail on as long as he dare, and took it
in none too soon.  But so thoroughly did he know the craft and trust his
men that she did what he wanted; and though she was tossed and hammered
by the sea till it seemed that she must, with every next wave, go down,
she rode into safety at last, five hundred miles out of their course.

The storm had saved them from the hostile fleet, which had fared ill.
They were first scattered, then two of them went down, another was so
disabled that she had to be turned back to the port they had left, and
the remaining two were separated, so that their only course was to return
to port also.  As the storm came up they had got within fighting distance
of the Maid of Provence, and had opened ineffectual fire, which she--
occupied with the impact of the storm--did not return.  Escaped the
dangers of the storm, she sheered into her course again, and ran away to
the south-west, until Hispaniola came in sight.




CHAPTER XV

IN THE MATTER OF BUCKLAW

The Bridgwater Merchant and the Swallow made the voyage down with no set-
backs, having fair weather and a sweet wind on their quarter all the way,
to the wild corner of an island, where a great mountain stands sentinel
and a bay washes upon a curving shore and up the.  River de la Planta.
There were no vessels in the harbour and there was only a small
settlement on the shore, and as they came to anchor well away from the
gridiron of reefs known as the Boilers, the prospect was handsome: the
long wash of the waves, the curling, white of the breakers, and the
rainbow-coloured water.  The shore was luxuriant, and the sun shone
intemperately on the sea and the land, covering all with a fine beautiful
haze, like the most exquisite powder sifted through the air.  All on
board the Bridgwater Merchant and the Swallow were in hearty spirits.
There had been some sickness, but the general health of the expedition
was excellent.

It was not till the day they started from Boston that Phips told Gering
he expected to meet some one at the port who had gone to prepare the way,
to warn them by fires in case of danger, and to allay any opposition
among the natives--if there were any.  But he had not told him who the
herald was.

Truth is, Phips was anxious that Gering should have no chance of
objecting to the scoundrel who had, years before, tried to kidnap his now
affianced wife--who had escaped a deserved death on the gallows.  It was
a rude age, and men of Phips's quality, with no particular niceness as to
women, or horror as to mutiny when it was twenty years old, compromised
with their conscience for expediency and gain.  Moreover, in his humorous
way, Bucklaw, during his connection with Phips in England, had made
himself agreeable and resourceful.  Phips himself had sprung from the
lower orders,--the son of a small farmer,--and even in future days when
he rose to a high position in the colonies, gaining knighthood and other
honours, he had the manners and speech of "a man of the people."  Bucklaw
understood men: he knew that his only game was that of bluntness.  This
was why he boarded Phips in Cheapside without subterfuge or disguise.

Nor had Phips told Bucklaw of Gering's coming; so that when the
Bridgwater Merchant and the Swallow entered Port de la Planta, Bucklaw
himself, as he bore out in a small sail-boat, did not guess that he was
likely to meet a desperate enemy.  He had waited patiently, and had
reckoned almost to a day when Phips would arrive.  He was alongside
before Phips had called anchor.  His cheerful countenance came up between
the frowning guns, his hook-hand ran over the rail, and in a moment he
was on deck facing--Radisson.

He was unprepared for the meeting, but he had taken too many chances
in his lifetime to show astonishment.  He and Radisson had fought and
parted; they had been in ugly business together, and they were likely to
be, now that they had met, in ugly business again.

Bucklaw's tiger ran up to stroke his chin with the old grotesque gesture.
"Ha!" he said saucily, "cats and devils have nine lives."

There was the same sparkle in the eye as of old, the same buoyant voice.
For himself, he had no particular quarrel with Radisson; the more so
because he saw a hang-dog sulkiness in Radisson's eye.  It was ever his
cue when others were angered to be cool.  The worst of his crimes had
been performed with an air of humorous cynicism.  He could have great
admiration for an enemy such as Iberville; and he was not a man to fight
needlessly.  He had a firm belief that he had been intended for a high
position--a great admiral, or general, or a notable buccaneer.

Before Radisson had a chance to reply came Phips, who could not help but
show satisfaction at Bucklaw's presence; and in a moment they were on
their way together to the cabin, followed by the eyes of the enraged
Radisson.  Phips disliked Radisson; the sinister Frenchman, with his evil
history, was impossible to the open, bluff captain.  He had been placed
upon Phips's vessel because he knew the entrance to the harbour; but try
as he would for a kind of comradeship, he failed: he had an ugly vanity
and a bad heart.  There was only one decent thing which still clung to
him in rags and tatters--the fact that he was a Frenchman.  He had made
himself hated on the ship--having none of the cunning tact of Bucklaw.
As Phips and Bucklaw went below, a sudden devilry entered into him.  He
was ripe for quarrel, eager for battle.  His two black eyes were like
burning beads, his jaws twitched.  If Bucklaw had but met him without
this rough, bloodless irony, he might have thrown himself with ardour
into the work of the expedition; but he stood alone, and hatred and war
rioted in him.

Below in the cabin Phips and Bucklaw were deep in the chart of the
harbour and the river.  The plan of action was decided upon.  A canoe was
to be built out of a cotton-tree large enough to carry eight or ten oars.
This and the tender, with men and divers, were to go in search of the
wreck under the command of Bucklaw and the captain of the Swallow,
whose name Phips did not mention.  Phips himself was to remain on the
Bridgwater Merchant, the Swallow lying near with a goodly number of men
to meet any possible attack from the sea.  When all was planned, Phips
told Bucklaw who was the commander of the Swallow.  For a moment the
fellow's coolness was shaken; the sparkle died out of his eye and he shot
up a furtive look at Phips, but he caught a grim smile on the face of the
sturdy sailor.  He knew at once there was no treachery meant, and he
guessed that Phips expected no crisis.  It was ever his way to act with
promptness, being never so resourceful as when his position was most
critical: he was in the power of Gering and Phips, and he knew it, but
he knew also that his game must be a bold one.

"By-gones are by-gones, captain," he said; "and what's done can't be
helped, and as it was no harm came anyhow."

"By-gones are by-gones," replied the other, "and let's hope that Mr.
Gering will say so too."

"Haven't you told him, sir?"

"Never a word--but I'll send for him now, and bygones let it be."

Bucklaw nodded, and drummed the table with his tiger.  He guessed why
Phips had not told Gering, and he foresaw trouble.  He trusted, however,
to the time that had passed since the kidnapping, and on Gering's hunger
for treasure.  Phips had compromised, and why not he?  But if Gering was
bent on trouble, why, there was the last resource of the peace-lover.  He
tapped the rapier at his side.  He ever held that he was peaceful, and it
is recorded that at the death of an agitated victim, he begged him to
"sit still and not fidget."

He laid no plans as to what he should do when Gering came.  Like the true
gamester, he waited to see how he should be placed; then he could draw
upon his resources.  He was puzzled about Radisson, but Radisson could
wait; he was so much the superior of the coarser villain that he gave him
little thought.  As he waited he thought more about the treasure at hand
than of either--or all--his enemies.

He did not stir, but kept drumming till he knew that Gering was aboard,
and heard his footsteps, with the captain's, coming.  He showed no
excitement, though he knew a crisis was at hand.  A cool, healthy sweat
stood out on his forehead, cheeks and lips, and his blue eyes sparkled
clearly and coldly.  He rose as the two men appeared.

Phips had not even told his lieutenant.  But Gering knew Bucklaw at the
first glance, and his eyes flashed and a hand went to his sword.

"Captain Phips," he said angrily, "you know who this man is?"

"He is the guide to our treasure-house, Mr. Gering."

"His name is Bucklaw--a mutineer condemned to death, the villain who
tried to kidnap Mistress Leveret."

It was Bucklaw that replied.  "Right--right you are, Mr. Gering.  I'm
Bucklaw, mutineer, or what else you please.  But that's ancient--ancient.
I'm sinner no more.  You and Monsieur Iberville saved the maid I meant no
harm to her; 'twas but for ransom.  I am atoning now--to make your
fortune, give you glory.  Shall by-gones be by-gones, Mr. Gering?  What
say you?"

Bucklaw stood still at the head of the table.  But he was very watchful.
What the end might have been it is hard to tell, but a thing occurred
which took the affair out of Gering's hands.

A shadow darkened the companion-way, and Radisson came quickly down.  His
face was sinister, and his jaws worked like an animal's.  Coming to the
table he stood between Gering and Bucklaw, and looked from one to the
other.  Bucklaw was cool, Gering very quiet, and he misinterpreted.

"You are great friends, eh, all together?" he said viciously.  "All
together you will get the gold.  It is no matter what one English do,
the other absolve for gold.  A buccaneer, a stealer of women--no, it is
no matter!  All English--all together!  But I am French--I am the dirt--
I am for the scuppers.  Bah!  I will have the same as Bucklaw--you see?"

"You will have the irons, fellow!" Phips roared.

A knife flashed in the air, and Bucklaw's pistol was out at the same
instant.  The knife caught Bucklaw in the throat and he staggered against
the table like a stuck pig, the bullet hit Radisson in the chest and he
fell back against the wall, his pistol dropping from his hand.  Bucklaw,
bleeding heavily, lurched forwards, pulled himself together, and,
stooping, emptied his pistol into the moaning Radisson.  Then he sank on
his knees, snatched the other's pistol, and fired again into Radisson's
belly; after which with a last effort he plunged his own dagger into the
throat of the dying man, and, with his fingers still on the handle, fell
with a gurgling laugh across the Frenchman's body.

Radisson recovered for an instant.  He gave a hollow cry, drew the knife
from his own throat and, with a wild, shambling motion, struck at the
motionless Bucklaw, pinning an arm to the ground.  Then he muttered an
oath and fell back dead.

The tournament of blood was over.  So swift had it been there was no
chance to interfere.  Besides, Gering was not inclined to save the life
of either; while Phips, who now knew the chart, as he thought, as well
as Bucklaw, was not concerned, though he liked the mutineer.

For a moment they both looked at the shambles without speaking.  Sailors
for whom Phips had whistled crowded the cabin.

"A damned bad start, Mr. Gering," Phips said, as he moved towards the
bodies.

"For them, yes; but they might have given us a bad ending."

"For the Frenchman, he's got less than was brewing for him, but Bucklaw
was a humorous dog."

As he said this he stooped to Bucklaw and turned him over, calling to the
sailors to clean the red trough and bring the dead men on deck, but
presently he cried: "By the devil's tail, the fellow lives!  Here, a hand
quick, you lubbers, and fetch the surgeon."

Bucklaw was not dead.  He had got two ugly wounds and was bleeding
heavily, but his heart still beat.  Radisson's body was carried on deck,
and within half an hour was dropped into the deep.  The surgeon, however,
would not permit Bucklaw to be removed until he had been cared for, and
so Phips and Gering went on deck and made preparations for the treasure-
hunt.  A canoe was hollowed out by a dozen men in a few hours, the tender
was got ready, the men and divers told off, and Gering took command of
the searching-party, while Phips remained on the ship.

They soon had everything ready for a start in the morning.  Word was
brought that Bucklaw still lived, but was in a high fever, and that the
chances were all against him; and Phips sent cordials and wines from his
own stores, and asked that news be brought to him of any change.

Early in the morning Gering, after having received instructions from
Phips, so far as he knew (for Bucklaw had not told all that was
necessary), departed for the river.  The canoe and tender went up the
stream a distance, and began to work down from the farthest point
indicated in the chart.  Gering continued in the river nearly all day,
and at night camped on the shore.  The second day brought no better luck,
nor yet the third the divers had seen no vestige of a wreck, nor any sign
of treasure--nothing except four skeletons in a heap, tied together with
a chain, where the water was deepest.  These were the dead priests, for
whom Bucklaw could account.  The water was calm, the tide rising and
falling gently, and when they arrived among what was called the Shallows,
they could see plainly to the bottom.  They passed over the Boilers,
a reef of shoals, and here they searched diligently, but to no purpose;
the divers went down frequently, but could find nothing.  The handful of
natives in the port came out and looked on apathetically; one or two
Spaniards also came, but they shrugged their shoulders and pitied the
foolish adventurers.  Gering had the power of inspiring his men, and
Phips was a martinet and was therefore obeyed; but the lifeless days and
unrewarded labour worked on the men, and at last the divers shirked their
task.

Meanwhile, Bucklaw was fighting hard for life.

As time passed, the flush of expectancy waned; the heat was great, the
waiting seemed endless.  Adventure was needed for the spirits of the men,
and of this now there was nothing.  Morning after morning the sun rose in
a moist, heavy atmosphere; day after day went in a quest which became
dreary, and night after night settled upon discontent.  Then came
threats.  But this was chiefly upon the Bridgwater Merchant.  Phips had
picked up his sailors in English ports, and nearly all of them were
brutal adventurers.  They were men used to desperate enterprises,
and they had flocked to him because they smelled excitement and booty.
Of ordinary merchant seamen there were only a few.  When the Duke of
Albemarle had come aboard at Plymouth before they set sail, he had
shrugged his shoulders at the motley crew.  To his hint Phips had only
replied with a laugh: these harum-scarum scamps were more to his mind
than ordinary seamen.  At heart he himself was half-barbarian.  It is
possible he felt there might some time be a tug-of-war on board, but he
did not borrow trouble.  Bucklaw had endorsed every man that he had
chosen; indeed, Phips knew that many of them were old friends of Bucklaw.
Again, of this he had no fear; Bucklaw was a man of desperate deeds, but
he knew that in himself the pirate had a master.  Besides, he would pick
up in Boston a dozen men upon whom he could depend; and cowardice had no
place in him.  Again, the Swallow, commanded by Gering, was fitted out
with New England seamen; and on these dependence could be put.

Therefore, when there came rumblings of mutiny on the Bridgwater
Merchant, there was faithful, if gloomy, obedience, on the Swallow.
Had there been plenty of work to do, had they been at sea instead of
at anchor, the nervousness would have been little; but idleness begot
irritation, and irritation mutiny.  Or had Bucklaw been on deck, instead
of in the surgeon's cabin playing a hard game with death, matters might
not have gone so far as they did; for he would have had immediate
personal influence repressive of revolt.  As it was, Phips had to work
the thing out according to his own lights.  One afternoon, when Gering
was away with the canoes on the long search, the crisis came.  It was a
day when life seemed to stand still; a creamy haze ingrained with
delicate blue had settled on land and sea; the long white rollers slowly
travelled over the Boilers, and the sea rocked like a great cradle.
Indefiniteness of thought, of time, of event, seemed over all; on board
the two ships life swung idly as a hammock; but only so in appearance.

Phips was leaning against the deck-house, watching through his glass the
search-canoes.  Presently he turned and walked aft.  As he did so the
surgeon and the chief mate came running towards him.  They had not time
to explain, for came streaming upon deck a crowd of mutineers.  Phips did
not hesitate an instant; he had no fear--he was swelling with anger.

"Why now, you damned dogs," he blurted out, "what mean you by this?
What's all this show of cutlasses?"

The ringleader stepped forwards.  "We're sick of doing nothing," he
answered.  "We've come on a wild goose chase.  There's no treasure here.
We mean you no harm; we want not the ship out of your hands."

"Then," cried Phips, "in the name of all the devils, what want you?"

"Here's as we think: there's nothing to be got out of this hunt, but
there's treasure on the high seas all the same.  Here's our offer: keep
command of your ship and run up the black flag!"

Phips's arm shot out and dropped the man to the ground.

"That's it, you filthy rogues!" he roared.  "Me to turn pirate, eh?
You'd set to weaving ropes for the necks of every one of us--blood of my
soul!"

He seemed not to know that cutlasses were threatening him, not to be
aware that the man at his feet, clutching his weapon, was mad with rage.

"Now look," he said, in a big loud voice, "I know that treasure is here,
and I know we'll find it; if not now, when we get Bucklaw on his feet."

"Ay! Bucklaw!  Bucklaw!" ran through the throng.

"Well, then, Bucklaw, as you say!  Now here's what I'll do, scoundrels
though you be.  Let me hear no more of this foolery.  Stick to me till
the treasure's found--for God take my soul if I leave this bay till I
have found it!--and you shall have good share of booty."

He had grasped the situation with such courage that the mutineers
hesitated.  He saw his advantage and followed it up, asking for three of
their number to confer with him as to a bond upon his proposal.  After a
time the mutineers consented, the bond was agreed to, and the search went
on.




CHAPTER XVI

IN THE TREASURE HOUSE

The canoes and tender kept husking up and down among the Shallows,
finding nothing.  At last one morning they pushed out from the side of
the Bridgwater Merchant, more limp than ever.  The stroke of the oars was
listless, but a Boston sailor of a merry sort came to a cheery song:

              "I knows a town, an' it's a fine town,
               And many a brig goes sailin' to its quay;
               I knows an inn, an' it's a fine inn,
               An' a lass that's fair to see.
               I knows a town, an' it's a fine town;
               I knows an inn, an' it's a fine inn
               But O my lass! an' O the gay gown,
               Which I have seen my pretty in!

              "I knows a port, an' it's a good port,
               An' many a brig is ridin' easy there;
               I knows a home, an' it's a good home,
               An' a lass that's sweet an' fair.
               I knows a port, an' it's a good port,
               I knows a home, an' it's a good home
               But O the pretty that is my sort,
               That's wearyin' till I come!

              "I knows a day, an' it's a fine day,
               The day a sailor man comes back to town.
               I knows a tide, an' it's a good tide,
               The tide that gets you quick to anchors down.
               I knows a day, an' it's a fine day,
               I knows a tide, an' its' a good tide
               And God help the lubber, I say,
               That's stole the sailor man's bride!"

The song had its way with them and they joined in and lay to their oars
with almost too much goodwill.  Gering, his arms upon the side of the
canoe, was looking into the water idly.  It was clear far down, and
presently he saw what seemed a feather growing out of the side of a rock.
It struck him as strange, and he gave word to back water.  They were just
outside the Boilers in deep water.  Drawing back carefully, he saw the
feather again, and ordered one of the divers to go down.  They could see
the man descend and gather the feather, then he plunged deeper still and
they lost sight of him.  But soon he came up rapidly, and was quickly
inside the boat, to tell Gering that he had seen several great guns.  At
this the crew peered over the boat-side eagerly.  Gering's heart beat
hard.  He knew what it was to rouse wild hope and then to see despair
follow, but he kept an outward calm and told the diver to go down again.
Time seemed to stretch to hours before they saw the man returning with
something in his arm.  He handed up his prize, and behold it was a pig of
silver!

The treasure was found; and there went up a great cheer.  All was
activity, for, apart from the delight of discovery, Phips had promised a
share to every man.  The place was instantly buoyed, and they hastened
back to the port with the grateful tidings to Phips.  With his glass he
saw them coming and by their hard rowing he guessed that they had news.
When they came within hail they cheered, and when they saw the silver the
air rang with shouts.

As Gering stepped on board with the silver Captain Phips ran forwards,
clasped it in both hands, and cried: "We are all made, thanks be to God!"

Then all hands were ordered on board, and because the treasure lay in a
safe anchorage they got the ships away towards it.

Bucklaw, in the surgeon's cabin, was called out of delirium by the noise.
He was worn almost to a skeleton, his eyes were big and staring, his face
had the paleness of death.  The return to consciousness was sudden--
perhaps nothing else could have called him back.  He wriggled out of bed
and, supporting himself against the wall, made his way to the door, and
crawled away, mumbling to himself as he went.

A few minutes afterwards Phips and Gering were talking in the cabin.
Phips was weighing the silver up and down in his hands.

"At least three hundred good guineas here!" he said.  There was a
shuffling behind them, and, as Phips turned, a figure lunged on him,
clutched and hugged the silver.  It was Bucklaw.

"Mine! mine!" he called in a hoarse voice, with great gluttonous eyes.
"All mine!" he cried again.  Then he gasped and came to the ground in a
heap, with the silver hugged in his arms.  All at once he caught at his
throat; the bandage of his wound fell away and there was a rush of blood
over the silver.  With a wild laugh he plunged face forward on the metal
--and the blood of the dead Bucklaw consecrated the first-fruits of the
treasure.

As the vessel rode up the harbour the body was dropped into the deep.

"Worse men--worse men, sir, bide with the king," said Phips to Gering.
"A merry villain, that Bucklaw."  The ship came to anchor at the buoys,
and no time was lost.  Divers were sent down, and by great good luck
found the room where the bullion was stored.  The number of divers was
increased, and the work of raising the bullion went on all that day.
There is nothing like the lust for gold in the hearts of men.  From stem
to stern of the Bridgwater Merchant and the Swallow, this wild will had
its way.  Work went on until the last moment of sun.  That night talk was
long and sleep short, and work was on again at sunrise.  In three days
they took up thirty-two tons of bullion.  In the afternoon of the third
day the store-room was cleared, and then they searched the hold.  Here
they found, cunningly distributed among the ballast, a great many bags of
pieces-of-eight.  These, having lain in the water so long, were crusted
with a strong substance, which they had to break with iron bars.  It was
reserved for Phips himself to make the grand discovery.  He donned a
diving-suit and went below to the sunken galleon.  Silver and gold had
been found, but he was sure there were other treasures.  After much
searching he found, in a secret place of the captain's cabin, a chest
which, on being raised and broken open, was found stocked with pearls,
diamonds, and other precious stones.

And now the work was complete, and on board the Bridgwater Merchant was
treasure to the sum of three hundred thousand pounds, and more.  Joyfully
did Phips raise anchor.  But first he sent to the handful of people in
the port a liberal gift of money and wine and provisions from the ship's
stores.  With a favourable breeze he got away agreeably, and was clear of
the harbour and cleaving northwards before sunset--the Swallow leading
the treasure-ship like a pilot.  All was joy and hilarity; but there
remained one small danger yet: they had raised their treasure unmolested,
but could they bring it to Boston and on to England?  Phips would have
asked that question very seriously indeed had he known that the Maid of
Provence was bowling out of the nor'-east towards the port which he had
just left.

The Maid of Provence had had a perilous travel.  Escaping the English
war-ships, she fell in with a pirate craft.  She closed with it, plugged
it with cannon-shot, and drew off, then took the wind on her beam and
came drifting down on her, boarded her and, after a swift and desperate
fight, killed every pirate-rogue save one--the captain--whom for reasons
they made a prisoner.  Then they sank the rover, and got away to Port de
la Planta as fast as they were able.  But by reason of the storm and the
fighting, and drifting out of their course, they had lost ten days; and
thus it was they reached the harbour a few hours after the Bridgwater
Merchant and the Swallow had left.

They waited till morning and sailed cautiously in to face disappointment.
They quickly learned the truth from the natives.  There was but one thing
to do and Iberville lost no time.  A few hours to get fresh water and
fruit and to make some repairs, for the pirate had not been idle in the
fight--and then Berigord gave the nose of the good little craft to the
sea, and drove her on with an honest wind, like a hound upon the scent.
Iberville was vexed, but not unduly; he had the temper of a warrior who
is both artist and gamester.  As he said to Perrot: "Well, Nick, they've
saved us the trouble of lifting the treasure; we'll see now who shall
beach it."

He guessed that the English ships would sail to Boston for better arming
ere they ventured to the English Channel.  He knew the chances were
against him, but it was his cue to keep heart in his followers.  For days
they sailed without seeing a single ship; then three showed upon the
horizon and faded away.  They kept on, passing Florida and Carolina,
hoping to reach Boston before the treasure-ships, and to rob them at
their own door.  Their chances were fair, for the Maid of Provence had
proved swift, good-tempered, and a sweet sailer in bad waters.

Iberville had reckoned well.  One evening, after a sail northwards as
fine as the voyage down was dirty, they came up gently within forty miles
of Boston, and then, because there was nothing else to do, went idling up
and down all night, keeping watch.  The next morning there was a mist in
the air, which might become fog.  Iberville had dreaded this; but he was
to have his chance, for even when Berigord's face lowered most the look-
out from the shrouds called down that he sighted two ships.  They were
making for the coast.  All sail was put on, they got away to meet the
newcomers, and they were not long in finding these to be their quarry.

Phips did not think that any ship would venture against them so near
Boston, and could not believe the Maid of Provence an enemy.  He thought
her an English ship eager to welcome them, but presently he saw the white
ensign of France at the mizzen, and a round shot rattled through the
rigging of the Bridgwater Merchant.

But he was two to one, and the game seemed with him.  No time was wasted.
Phips's ships came to and stood alongside, and the gunners got to work.
The Bridgwater Merchant was high in the water, and her shot at first did
little damage to the Maid of Provence, which, having the advantage of the
wind, came nearer and nearer.  The Swallow, with her twenty-odd guns, did
better work, and carried away the foremast of the enemy, killing several
men.  But Iberville came on slowly, and, anxious to dispose of the
Swallow first, gave her broadsides between wind and water, so that soon
her decks were spotted with dying men, her bulwarks broken in, and her
mainmast gone.  The cannonade was heard in Boston, from which, a few
hours later, two merchantmen set out for the scene of action, each
carrying good guns.

But the wind suddenly sank, and as the Maid of Provence, eager to close
with the Bridgwater Merchant, edged slowly down, a fog came between, and
the firing ceased on both sides.  Iberville let his ship drift on her
path, intent on a hand-to-hand fight aboard the Bridgwater Merchant; the
grappling-irons were ready, and as they drifted there was silence.

Every eye was strained.  Suddenly a shape sprang out of the grey mist,
and the Maid of Provence struck.  There was a crash of timbers as the
bows of the Swallow--it was she--were stove in, and then a wild cry.
Instantly she began to sink.  The grappling-irons remained motionless on
the Maid of Provence.  Iberville heard a commanding voice, a cheer, and
saw a dozen figures jump from the shattered bow towards the bow of his
own ship intent on fighting, but all fell short save one.  It was a great
leap, but the Englishman made it, catching the chains, and scrambling on
deck.  A cheer greeted him-the Frenchmen could not but admire so brave a
feat.  The Englishman took no notice, but instantly turned to see his own
ship lurch forwards and, without a sound from her decks, sink gently down
to her grave.  He stood looking at the place where she had been, but
there was only mist.  He shook his head and a sob rattled in his throat;
his brave, taciturn crew had gone down without a cry.  He turned and
faced his enemies.  They had crowded forwards--Iberville, Sainte-Helene,
Perrot, Maurice Joval, and the staring sailors.  He choked down his
emotion and faced them all like an animal at bay as Iberville stepped
forwards.  Without a word Gering pointed to the empty scabbard at his
side.

"No, pardon me," said Iberville drily, "not as our prisoner, monsieur.
You have us at advantage; you will remain our guest."

"I want no quarter," said Gering proudly and a little sullenly.

"There can be no question of quarter, monsieur.  You are only one
against us all.  You cannot fight; you saved your life by boarding us.
Hospitality is sacred; you may not be a prisoner of war, for there is no
war between our countries."

"You came upon a private quarrel?" asked Gering.

"Truly; and for the treasure--fair bone of fight between us."

There was a pause, in which Gering stood half turned from them,
listening.  But the Bridgwater Merchant had drifted away in the mist.
Presently he turned again to Iberville with a smile defiant and
triumphant.  Iberville understood, but showed nothing of what he felt,
and he asked Sainte-Helene to show Gering to the cabin.

When the fog cleared away there was no sign of the Bridgwater Merchant
and Iberville, sure that she had made the port of Boston, and knowing
that there must be English vessels searching for him, bore away to Quebec
with Gering on board.

He parted from his rival the day they arrived--Perrot was to escort him a
distance on his way to Boston.  Gering thanked him for his courtesy.

"Indeed, then," said Iberville, "this is a debt--if you choose to call it
so--for which I would have no thanks--no.  For it would please me better
to render accounts all at once some day, and get return in different
form, monsieur."

"Monsieur," said Gering, a little grandly, "you have come to me three
times; next time I will come to you."

"I trust that you will keep your word," answered Iberville, smiling.

That day Iberville, protesting helplessly, was ordered away to France on
a man-of-war, which had rocked in the harbour of Quebec for a month
awaiting his return.  Even Frontenac himself could not help him, for the
order had come from the French minister.




CHAPTER XVII

THE GIFT OF A CAPTIVE

Fortune had not been kind to Iberville, but still he kept a stoical
cheerfulness.  With the pride of a man who feels that he has impressed a
woman, and knowing the strength of his purpose, he believed that Jessica
should yet be his.  Meanwhile matters should not lie still.  In those
days men made love by proxy, and Iberville turned to De Casson and
Perrot.

The night before he started for France they sat together in a little
house flanking the Chateau St. Louis.  Iberville had been speaking.

"I know the strength of your feelings, Iberville," said De Casson, "but
is it wise, and is it right?"  Iberville made an airy motion with his
hand.  "My dear abbe, there is but one thing worth living for, and that
is to follow your convictions.  See: I have known you since you took me
from my mother's last farewell.  I have believed in you, cared for you,
trusted you; we have been good comrades.  Come, now, tell me: what would
you think if my mind drifted!  No, no, no! to stand by one's own heart is
the gift of an honest man--I am a sad rogue, abbe, as you know, but I
swear I would sooner let slip the friendship of King Louis himself than
the hand of a good comrade.  Well, my sword is for my king.  I must obey
him, I must leave my comrades behind, but I shall not forget, and they
must not forget."  At this he got to his feet, came over, laid a hand on
the abbe's shoulder, and his voice softened: "Abbe, the woman shall be
mine."

"If God wills so, Iberville."  "He will, He will."

"Well," said Perrot, with a little laugh; "I think God will be good to a
Frenchman when an Englishman is his foe."

"But the girl is English--and a heretic," urged the abbe helplessly.

Perrot laughed again.  "That will make Him sorry for her."

Meanwhile Iberville had turned to the table, and was now reading a
letter.  A pleased look came on his face, and he nodded in satisfaction.
At last he folded it up with a smile and sealed it.  "Well," he said,
"the English is not good, for I have seen my Shakespeare little this time
back, but it will do--it must do.  In such things rhetoric is nothing.
You will take it, Perrot?" he said, holding up the letter.

Perrot reached out for it.

"And there is something more."  Iberville drew from his finger a costly
ring.  It had come from the hand of a Spanish noble, whose place he had
taken in Spain years before.  He had prevented his men from despoiling
the castle, and had been bidden to take what he would, and had chosen
only this.

"Tell her," he said, "that it was the gift of a captive to me, and that
it is the gift of a captive to her.  For, upon my soul, I am prisoner to
none other in God's world."

Perrot weighed the ring up and down in his hand.  "Bien," he said,
"monsieur, it is a fine speech, but I do not understand.  A prisoner, eh?
I remember when you were a prisoner with me upon the Ottawa.  Only a boy
--only a boy, but, holy Mother, that was different!  I will tell her how
you never gave up; how you went on the hunt after Grey Diver, the
Iroquois.  Through the woods, silent--silent for days and days, Indians
all round us.  Death in the brush, death in the tree-top, death from the
river-bank.  I said to you, Give up; but you kept on.  Then there were
days when there was no sleep--no rest--we were like ghosts.  Sometimes we
come to a settler's cabin and see it all smoking; sometimes to a fort and
find only a heap of bones--and other things!  But you would not give up;
you kept on.  What for?  That Indian chief killed your best friend.
Well, that was for hate; you keep on and on and on for hate--and you had
your way with Grey Diver; I heard your axe crash in his skull.  All for
hate!  And what will you do for love?--I will ask her what will you do
for love.  Ah, you are a great man--but yes!  I will tell her so."

"Tell her what you please, Perrot."

Iberville hummed an air as at some goodly prospect.  Yet when he turned
to the others again there grew a quick mist in his eyes.  It was not so
much the thought of the woman as of the men.  There came to him with
sudden force how these two comrades had been ever ready to sacrifice
themselves for him, and he ready to accept the sacrifice.  He was not
ashamed of the mist, but he wondered that the thing had come to him all
at once.  He grasped the hands of both, shook them heartily, then dashed
his fingers across his eyes, and with the instinct of every imperfect
man,--that touch of the aboriginal in all of us, who must have a sign for
an emotion, he went to a cabinet and out came a bottle of wine.

An hour after, Perrot left him at the ship's side.

They were both cheerful.  "Two years, Perrot; two years!" he said.

"Ah, mon grand capitaine!"

Iberville turned away, then came back again.  "You will start at once?"

"At once; and the abbe shall write."

Upon the lofty bank of the St. Lawrence, at the Sault au Matelot, a tall
figure clad in a cassock stood and watched the river below.  On the high
cliff of Point Levis lights were showing, and fires burning as far off as
the island of Orleans.  And in that sweet curve of shore, from the St.
Charles to Beauport, thousands of stars seemed shining.  Nearer still,
from the heights, there was the same strange scintillation; the great
promontory had a coronet of stars.  In the lower town there was like
illumination, and out upon the river trailed long processions of light.
It was the feast of good Sainte Anne de Beaupre.  All day long had there
been masses and processions on land.  Hundreds of Jesuits, with thousands
of the populace, had filed behind the cross and the host.  And now there
was a candle in every window.  Indians, half-breeds, coureurs du bois,
native Canadians, seigneurs, and noblesse, were joining in the function.
But De Casson's eyes were not for these.  He was watching the lights of
a ship that slowly made its way down the river among the canoes, and his
eyes never left it till it had passed beyond the island of Orleans and
was lost in the night.

"Mon cher!" he said, "mon enfant!  She is not for him; she should not
be.  As a priest it were my duty to see that he should not marry her.
As a man" he sighed--"as a man I would give my life for him."

He lifted his hand and made the sign of the cross towards that spot on
the horizon whither Iberville had gone.

"He will be a great man some day," he added to himself--"a great man.
There will be empires here, and when histories are written Pierre's shall
be a name beside Frontenac's and La Salle's."

All the human affection of the good abbe's life centred upon Iberville.
Giant in stature, so ascetic and refined was his mind, his life, that he
had the intuition of a woman and, what was more, little of the bigotry
of his brethren.  As he turned from the heights, made his way along the
cliff and down Mountain Street, his thoughts were still upon the same
subject.  He suddenly paused.

"He will marry the sword," he said, "and not the woman."

How far he was right we may judge if we enter the house of Governor
Nicholls at New York one month later.




CHAPTER XVIII

MAIDEN NO MORE

It was late mid-summer, and just such an evening as had seen the
attempted capture of Jessica Leveret years before.  She sat at a window,
looking out upon the garden and the river.  The room was at the top of
the house.  It had been to her a kind of play-room when she had visited
Governor Nicholls years before.  To every woman memory is a kind of
religion; and to Jessica as much as to any, perhaps more than to most,
for she had imagination.  She half sat, half knelt, her elbow on her
knee, her soft cheek resting upon her firm, delicate hand.  Her beauty
was as fresh and sweet as on the day we first saw her.  More, something
deep and rich had entered into it.  Her eyes had got that fine
steadfastness which only deep tenderness and pride can give a woman: she
had lived.  She was smiling now, yet she was not merry; her brightness
was the sunshine of a nature touched with an Arcadian simplicity.  Such
an one could not be wholly unhappy.  Being made for others more than for
herself, she had something of the divine gift of self-forgetfulness.

As she sat there, her eyes ever watching the river as though for some one
she expected, there came from the garden beneath the sound of singing.
It was not loud, but deep and strong:

         "As the wave to the shore, as the dew to the leaf,
          As the breeze to the flower,
          As the scent of a rose to the heart of a child, 343
          As the rain to the dusty land--
          My heart goeth out unto Thee--unto Thee!
          The night is far spent and the day is at hand.


         "As the song of a bird to the call of a star,
          As the sun to the eye,
          As the anvil of man to the hammers of God,
          As the snow to the north
          Is my word unto Thy word--to Thy word!
          The night is far spent and the day is at hand."

It was Morris who was singing.  With growth of years had come increase of
piety, and it was his custom once a week to gather about him such of the
servants as would for the reading of Scripture.

To Jessica the song had no religious significance.  By the time it had
passed through the atmosphere of memory and meditation, it carried a
different meaning.  Her forehead dropped forward in her fingers, and
remained so until the song ended.  Then she sighed, smiled wistfully, and
shook her head.

"Poor fellow!  poor--Iberville!" she said, almost beneath her breath.

The next morning she was to be married.  George Gering had returned to
her, for the second time defeated by Iberville.  He had proved himself a
brave man, and, what was much in her father's sight, he was to have his
share of Phips's booty.  And what was still more, Gering had prevailed
upon Phips to allow Mr. Leveret's investment in the first expedition to
receive a dividend from the second.  Therefore she was ready to fulfil
her promise.  Yet had she misgivings?  For, only a few days before, she
had sent for the old pastor at Boston, who had known her since she was a
child.  She wished, she said, to be married by him and no other at
Governor Nicholls's house, rather than at her own home at Boston, where
there was none other of her name.

The old pastor had come that afternoon, and she had asked him to see her
that evening.  Not long after Morris had done with singing there came a
tapping at her door.  She answered and old Pastor Macklin entered, a
white-haired man of kindly yet stern countenance, by nature a gentleman,
by practice a bigot.  He came forward and took both her hands as she
rose.  "My dear young lady!" he said, and smiled kindly at her.  After a
word of greeting she offered him a chair, and came again to the window.

Presently she looked up and said very simply: "I am going to be married.
You have known me ever since I was born: do you think I will make a good
wife?"

"With prayer and chastening of the spirit, my daughter," he said.

"But suppose that at the altar I remembered another man?"

"A sin, my child, for which should be due sorrow."  The girl smiled
sadly.  She felt poignantly how little he could help her.

"And if the man were a Catholic and a Frenchman?" she said.

"A papist and a Frenchman!" he cried, lifting up his hands.
"My daughter, you ever were too playful.  You speak of things impossible.
I pray you listen."  Jessica raised her hand as if to stop him and to
speak herself, but she let him go on.  With the least encouragement she
might have told him all.  She had had her moment of weakness, but now it
was past.  There are times when every woman feels she must have a
confidant, or her heart will burst--have counsel or she will die.
Such a time had come to Jessica.  But she now learned, as we all must
learn, that we live our dark hour alone.

She listened as in a dream to the kindly bigot.  When he had finished,
she knelt and received his blessing.  All the time she wore that strange,
quiet smile.  Soon afterwards he left her.

She went again to the window.  "A papist and a Frenchman--unpardonable
sin!" she said into the distance.  "Jessica, what a sinner art thou!"

Presently there was a tap, the door opened, and George Gering entered.
She turned to receive him, but there was no great lighting of the face.
He came quickly to her, and ran his arm round her waist.  A great
kindness looked out of her eyes.  Somehow she felt herself superior to
him--her love was less and her nature deeper.  He pressed her fingers to
his lips.  "Of what were you thinking, Jessica?" he asked.

"Of what a sinner I am," she answered, with a sad kind of humour.

"What a villain must I be, then!" he responded.  "Well, yes," she said
musingly; "I think you are something of a villain, George."

"Well, well, you shall cure me of all mine iniquities," he said.  "There
will be a lifetime for it.  Come, let us to the garden."

"Wait," she said.  "I told you that I was a sinner, George; I want to
tell you how."

"Tell me nothing; let us both go and repent," he rejoined, laughing, and
he hurried her away.  She had lost her opportunity.

Next morning she was married.  The day was glorious.  The town was
garlanded, and there was not an English merchant or a Dutch burgher but
wore his holiday dress.  The ceremony ended, a traveller came among the
crowd.  He asked a hurried question or two and then edged away.  Soon he
made a stand under the trees, and, viewing the scene, nodded his head and
said: "The abbe was right."

It was Perrot.  A few hours afterwards the crowd had gone and the
governor's garden was empty.  Perrot still kept his watch under the tree,
though why he could hardly say--his errand was useless now.  But he had
the gift of waiting.  At last he saw a figure issue from a door and go
down into the garden.  He remembered the secret gate.  He made a detour,
reached it, and entered.  Jessica was walking up and down in the pines.
In an hour or so she was to leave for England.  Her husband had gone to
the ship to do some needful things, and she had stolen out for a moment's
quiet.  When Perrot faced her, she gave a little cry and started back.
But presently she recovered, smiled at him, and said kindly: "You come
suddenly, monsieur."

"Yet have I travelled hard and long," he answered.

"Yes?"

"And I have a message for you."

"A message?" she said abstractedly, and turned a little pale.

"A message and a gift from Monsieur Iberville."  He drew the letter and
the ring from his pocket and held them out, repeating Iberville's
message.  There was a troubled look in her eyes and she was trembling a
little now, but she spoke clearly.

"Monsieur," she said, "you will tell Monsieur Iberville that I may not;
I am married."

"So, madame," he said.  "But I still must give my message."  When he had
done so he said: "Will you take the letter?"  He held it out.

There was a moment's doubt and then she took it, but she did not speak.

"Shall I carry no message, madame?"

She hesitated.  Then, at last: "Say that I wish him good fortune--with
all my heart."

"Good fortune--ah, madame!" he answered, in a meaning tone.

"Say that I pray God may bless him, and make him a friend of my country,"
she added in a low, almost broken voice, and she held out her hand to
him.

The gallant woodsman pressed it to his lips.  "I am sorry, madame," he
replied, with an admiring look.

She shook her head sadly.  "Adieu, monsieur!" she said steadily and very
kindly.

A moment after he was gone.  She looked at the missive steadfastly for a
moment, then thrust it into the folds of her dress and, very pale, walked
quietly to the house, where, inside her own room, she lighted a candle.
She turned the letter over in her hand once or twice, and her fingers
hung at the seal.  But all at once she raised it to her lips, and then
with a grave, firm look, held it in the flame and saw it pass in smoke.
It was the last effort for victory.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Aboriginal in all of us, who must have a sign for an emotion
Learned, as we all must learn, that we live our dark hour alone






TRAIL OF THE SWORD

By Gilbert Parker



EPOCH THE FOURTH

XIX.      WHICH TELLS OF A BROTHER'S BLOOD CRYING FROM THE GROUND
XX.       A TRAP IS SET
XXI.      AN UNTOWARD MESSENGER
XXII.     FROM TIGER'S CLAW TO LION'S MOUTH
XXIII.    AT THE GATES OF MISFORTUNE
XXIV.     IN WHICH THE SWORD IS SHEATHED




CHAPTER XIX

WHICH TELLS OF A BROTHER'S BLOOD CRYING FROM THE GROUND

Two men stood leaning against a great gun aloft on the heights of Quebec.
The air of an October morning fluttered the lace at their breasts and
lifted the long brown hair of the younger man from his shoulders.  His
companion was tall, alert, bronzed, grey-headed, with an eagle eye and a
glance of authority.  He laid his hand on the shoulder of the younger man
and said: "I am glad you have come, Iberville, for I need you, as I need
all your brave family--I could spare not one."

"You honour me, sir," was the reply; "and, believe me, there is none in
Quebec but thanks God that their governor is here before Phips rounds
Isle Orleans yonder."

"You did nobly while I was away there in Montreal waiting for the New
Yorkers to take it--if they could.  They were a sorry rabble, for they
rushed on La Prairie, that meagre place,--massacred and turned tail."

"That's strange, sir, for they are brave men, stupid though they be.
I have fought them."

"Well, well, as that may be!  We will give them chance for bravery.  Our
forts are strong from the Sault au Matelot round to Champigny's palace,
the trenches and embankments are well ended, and if they give me but two
days more I will hold the place against twice their thirty-four sail and
twenty-five hundred men."

"For how long, your excellency?"

Count Frontenac nodded.  "Spoken like a soldier.  There's the vital
point.  By the mass, just so long as food lasts!  But here we are with
near two thousand men, and all the people from the villages, besides
Callieres's seven or eight hundred, should they arrive in time--and, pray
God they may, for there will be work to do.  If they come at us in front
here and behind from the Saint Charles, shielding their men as they cross
the river, we shall have none too many; but we must hold it."

The governor drew himself up proudly.  He had sniffed the air of battle
for over fifty years with all manner of enemies, and his heart was in the
thing.  Never had there been in Quebec a more moving sight than when he
arrived from Montreal the evening before, and climbed Mountain Street on
his way to the chateau.  Women and children pressed round him, blessing
him; priests, as he passed, lifted hands in benediction; men cheered and
cried for joy; in every house there was thanksgiving that the imperious
old veteran had come in time.

Prevost the town mayor, Champigny the Intendant, Sainte-Helene,
Maricourt, and Longueil, had worked with the skill of soldiers who knew
their duty, and it was incredible what had been done since the alarm had
come to Prevost that Phips had entered the St. Lawrence and was anchored
at Tadousac.

"And how came you to be here, Iberville?" queried the governor
pleasantly.  "We scarce expected you."

"The promptings of the saints and the happy kindness of King Louis, who
will send my ship here after me.  I boarded the first merchantman with
its nose to the sea, and landed here soon after you left for Montreal."

"So?  Good!  See you, see you, Iberville: what of the lady Puritan's
marriage with the fire-eating Englishman?"

The governor smiled as he spoke, not looking at Iberville.  His glance
was upon the batteries in lower town.  He had inquired carelessly, for he
did not think the question serious at this distance of time.  Getting no
answer, he turned smartly upon Iberville, surprised, and he was struck by
the sudden hardness in the sun-browned face and the flashing eyes.  Years
had deepened the power of face and form.

"Your excellency will remember," he answered, in a low, cold tone, "that
I once was counselled to marry the sword."

The governor laid his hand upon Iberville's shoulder.  "Pardon me," he
said.  "I was not wise or kind.  But--I warrant the sword will be your
best wife in the end."

"I have a favour to ask, your excellency."

"You might ask many, my Iberville.  If all gentlemen here, clerics and
laymen, asked as few as you, my life would be peaceful.  Your services
have been great, one way and another.  Ask, and I almost promise
now.

"'Tis this.  Six months ago you had a prisoner here, captured on the New
England border.  After he was exchanged you found that he had sent a plan
of the fortifications to the Government of Massachusetts.  He passed in
the name of George Escott.  Do you remember?"

"Very well indeed."

"Suppose he were taken prisoner again?"

"I should try him."

"And shoot him, if guilty?"

"Or hang him."

"His name was not Escott.  It was Gering--Captain George Gering."

The governor looked hard at Iberville for a moment, and a grim smile
played upon his lips.  "H'm!  How do you guess that?"

"From Perrot, who knows him well."

"Why did Perrot not tell me?"

"Perrot and Sainte-Helene had been up at Sault Sainte Marie.  They did
not arrive until the day he was exchanged, nor did not know till then.
There was no grave reason for speaking, and they said nothing."

"And what imports this?"

"I have no doubt that Mr. Gering is with Sir William Phips below at
Tadousac.  If he is taken let him be at my disposal."

The governor pursed his lips, then flashed a deep, inquiring glance at
his companion.  "The new mistress turned against the old, Iberville!" he
said.  "Gering is her husband, eh?  Well, I will trust you: it shall be
as you wish--a matter for us two alone."

At that moment Sainte-Helene and Maricourt appeared and presently, in the
waning light, they all went down towards the convent of the Ursulines,
and made their way round the rock, past the three gates to the palace of
the Intendant, and so on to the St. Charles River.

Next morning word was brought that Phips was coming steadily up, and
would probably arrive that day.  All was bustle in the town, and prayers
and work went on without ceasing.  Late in the afternoon the watchers
from the rock of Quebec saw the ships of the New England fleet slowly
rounding the point of the Island of Orleans.

To the eyes of Sir William Phips and his men the great fortress, crowned
with walls, towers, and guns, rising three hundred feet above the water,
the white banner flaunting from the chateau and the citadel, the
batteries, the sentinels upon the walls--were suggestive of stern work.
Presently there drew away from Phips's fleet a boat carrying a subaltern
with a flag of truce, who was taken blindfold to the Chateau St. Louis.
Frontenac's final words to the youth were these: "Bid your master do his
best, and I will do mine."

Disguised as a river-man, Iberville himself, with others, rowed the
subaltern back almost to the side of the admiral's ship, for by the freak
of some peasants the boat which had brought him had been set adrift.  As
they rowed from the ship back towards the shore, Iberville, looking up,
saw, standing on the deck, Phips and George Gering.  He had come for
this.  He stood up in his boat and took off his cap.  His long clustering
curls fell loose on his shoulders, and he waved a hand with a nonchalant
courtesy.  Gering sprang forward.  "Iberville!" he cried, and drew his
pistol.

Iberville saw the motion, but did not stir.  He called up, however, in a
clear, distinct voice: "Breaker of parole, keep your truce!"

"He is right," said Gering quietly; "quite right."  Gering was now hot
for instant landing and attack.  Had Phips acted upon his advice the
record of the next few days might have been reversed.  But the disease of
counsel, deliberation, and prayer had entered into the soul of the sailor
and treasure-hunter, now Sir William Phips, governor of Massachusetts.
He delayed too long: the tide turned; there could be no landing that
night.

Just after sundown there was a great noise, and the ringing of bells and
sound of singing came over the water to the idle fleet.

"What does it mean?" asked Phips of a French prisoner captured at
Tadousac.

"Ma foi!  That you lose the game," was the reply.  "Callieres, the
governor of Montreal, with his Canadians, and Nicholas Perrot with his
coureurs du bois have arrived.  You have too much delay, monsieur."

In Quebec, when this contingent arrived, the people went wild.  And
Perrot was never prouder than when, in Mountain Street, Iberville, after
three years' absence, threw his arms round him and kissed him on each
cheek.

It was in the dark hour before daybreak that Iberville and Perrot met for
their first talk after the long separation.  What had occurred on the day
of Jessica's marriage Perrot had, with the Abbe de Casson's help,
written to Iberville.  But they had had no words together.  Now, in a
room of the citadel which looked out on the darkness of the river and the
deeper gloom of the Levis shore, they sat and talked, a single candle
burning, their weapons laid on the table between them.

They said little at first, but sat in the window looking down on the town
and the river.  At last Iberville spoke.  "Tell me it all as you remember
it, Perrot."  Perrot, usually swift of speech when once started, was
very slow now.  He felt the weight of every word, and he had rather have
told of the scalping of a hundred men than of his last meeting with
Jessica.  When he had finished, Iberville said: "She kept the letter, you
say?"

Perrot nodded, and drew the ring from a pouch which he carried.  "I have
kept it safe," he said, and held it out.  Iberville took it and turned it
over in his hand, with an enigmatical smile.  "I will hand it to her
myself," he said, half beneath his breath.

"You do not give her up, monsieur?"

Iberville laughed.  Then he leaned forward, and found Perrot's eyes in
the half darkness.  "Perrot, she kept the letter, she would have kept the
ring if she could.  Listen: Monsieur Gering has held to his word; he has
come to seek me this time.  He knows that while I live the woman is not
his, though she bears his name.  She married him--Why?  It is no matter
--he was there, I was not.  There were her father, her friends!  I was a
Frenchman, a Catholic--a thousand things!  And a woman will yield her
hand while her heart remains in her own keeping.  Well, he has come.
Now, one way or another, he must be mine.  We have great accounts
to settle, and I want it done between him and me.  If he remains in the
ship we must board it.  With our one little craft there in the St.
Charles we will sail out, grapple the admiral's ship, and play a great
game: one against thirty-four.  It has been done before.  Capture the
admiral's ship and we can play the devil with the rest of them.  If not,
we can die.  Or, if Gering lands and fights, he also must be ours.
Sainte-Helene and Maricourt know him, and they with myself, Clermont, and
Saint Denis, are to lead and resist attacks by land--Frontenac has
promised that: so he must be ours one way or another.  He must be
captured, tried as a spy, and then he is mine--is mine!"

"Tried as a spy--ah, I see!  You would disgrace?  Well, but even then he
is not yours."

Iberville got to his feet.  "Don't try to think it out, Perrot.  It will
come to you in good time.  I can trust you--you are with me in all?"

"Have I ever failed you?"

"Never.  You will not hesitate to go against the admiral's ship?  Think,
what an adventure!  Remember Adam Dollard and the Long Sault!"

What man in Canada did not remember that handful of men, going out with
an antique courage to hold back the Iroquois, and save the colony, and
die?  Perrot grasped Iberville's hand, and said: "Where you go, I go.
Where I go, my men will follow."

Their pact was made.  They sat there in silence till the grey light of
morning crept slowly in.  Still they did not lie down to rest; they were
waiting for De Casson.  He came before a ray of sunshine had pierced the
leaden light.  Tall, massive, proudly built, his white hair a rim about
his forehead, his deep eyes watchful and piercing, he looked a soldier in
disguise, as indeed he was to-day as much a soldier as when he fought
under Turenne forty years before.

The three comrades were together again.

Iberville told his plans.  The abbe lifted his fingers in admonition
once or twice, but his eyes flashed as Iberville spoke of an attempt to
capture the admiral on his own ship.  When Iberville had finished, he
said in a low voice:

"Pierre, must it still be so--that the woman shall prompt you to these
things?"

"I have spoken of no woman, abbe."

"Yet you have spoken."  He sighed and raised his hand.  "The man--the
men--down there would destroy our country.  They are our enemies, and we
do well to slay.  But remember, Pierre--'What God hath joined let no man
put asunder!'  To fight him as an enemy of your country--well; to fight
him that you may put asunder is not well."

A look, half-pained, half-amused, crossed Iberville's face.

"And yet heretics--heretics, abbe"

"Marriage is no heresy."

"H'm-they say different at Versailles."

"Since De Montespan went, and De Maintenon rules?"

Iberville laughed.  "Well, well, perhaps not."

They sat silent for a time, but presently Iberville rose, went to a
cupboard, drew forth some wine and meat, and put the coffee on the fire.
Then, with a gesture as of remembrance, he went to a box, drew forth
his own violin, and placed it in the priest's hands.  It seemed strange
that, in the midst of such great events, the loss or keeping of an
empire, these men should thus devote the few hours granted them for
sleep; but they did according to their natures.  The priest took the
instrument and tuned it softly.  Iberville blew out the candle.  There
was only the light of the fire, with the gleam of the slow-coming dawn.
Once again, even as years before in the little house at Montreal, De
Casson played--now with a martial air.  At last he struck the chords of a
song which had been a favourite with the Carignan-Salieres regiment.

Instantly Iberville and Perrot responded, and there rang out from three
strong throats the words:

                   "There was a king of Normandy,
                    And he rode forth to war,
                    Gai faluron falurette!
                    He had five hundred men-no more!
                    Gai faluron donde!

                   "There was a king of Normandy,
                    Came back from war again;
                    He brought a maid, O, fair was she!
                    And twice five hundred men--
                    Gai faluron falurette!
                    Gai faluron donde!"

They were still singing when soldiers came by the window in the first
warm light of sunrise.  These caught it up, singing it as they marched
on.  It was taken up again by other companies, and by the time Iberville
presented himself to Count Frontenac, not long after, there was hardly a
citizen, soldier, or woodsman, but was singing it.

The weather and water were blustering all that day, and Phips did not
move, save for a small attempt--repulsed--by a handful of men to examine
the landing.  The next morning, however, the attack began.  Twelve
hundred men were landed at Beauport, in the mud and low water, under one
Major Walley.  With him was Gering, keen for action--he had persuaded
Phips to allow him to fight on land.

To meet the English, Iberville, Sainte-Helene, and Perrot issued forth
with three hundred sharpshooters and a band of Huron Indians.  In the
skirmish that followed, Iberville and Perrot pressed with a handful of
men forward very close to the ranks of the English.  In the charge which
the New Englander ordered, Iberville and Perrot saw Gering, and they
tried hard to reach him.  But the movement between made it impossible
without running too great risk.  For hours the fierce skirmishing went
on, but in the evening the French withdrew and the New Englanders made
their way towards the St. Charles, where vessels were to meet them, and
protect them as they crossed the river and attacked the town in the rear
--help that never came.  For Phips, impatient, spent his day in a
terrible cannonading, which did no great damage to the town--or the
cliff.  It was a game of thunder, nothing worse, and Walley and Gering
with their men were neglected.

The fight with the ships began again at daybreak.  Iberville, seeing
that Walley would not attack, joined Sainte-Helene and Maricourt at the
battery, and one of Iberville's shots brought down the admiral's
flagstaff, with its cross of St.  George.  It drifted towards the shore,
and Maurice Joval went out in a canoe under a galling fire and brought it
up to Frontenac.

Iberville and Sainte-Helene concentrated themselves on the Six Friends--
the admiral's ship.  In vain Phips's gunners tried to dislodge them and
their guns.  They sent ball after ball into her hull and through her
rigging; they tore away her mainmast, shattered her mizzenmast, and
handled her as viciously as only expert gunners could.  The New Englander
replied bravely, but Quebec was not destined to be taken by bombardment,
and Iberville saw the Six Friends drift, a shattered remnant, out of his
line of fire.

It was the beginning of the end.  One by one the thirty-four craft drew
away, and Walley and Gering were left with their men, unaided in the
siege.  There was one moment when the cannonading was greatest and the
skirmishers seemed withdrawn, that Gering, furious with the delay, almost
prevailed upon the cautious Walley to dash across the river and make a
desperate charge up the hill, and in at the back door of the town.  But
Walley was, after all, a merchant and not a soldier, and would not do it.
Gering fretted on his chain, sure that Iberville was with the guns
against the ships, and would return to harass his New Englanders soon.
That evening it turned bitter cold, and without the ammunition promised
by Phips, with little or no food and useless field-pieces, their lot was
hard.

But Gering had his way the next morning.  Walley set out to the Six
Friends to represent his case to the admiral.  Gering saw how the men
chafed, and he sounded a few of them.  Their wills were with him they had
come to fight, and fight they would, if they could but get the chance.
With a miraculous swiftness the whispered word went through the lines.
Gering could not command them to it, but if the men went forward he must
go with them.  The ships in front were silent.  Quebec was now interested
in these men near the St. Charles River.

As Iberville stood with Frontenac near the palace of the Intendant,
watching, he saw the enemy suddenly hurry forward.  In an instant he was
dashing down to join his brothers, Sainte-Helene, Longueil, and Perrot;
and at the head of a body of men they pushed on to get over the ford and
hold it, while Frontenac, leading three battalions of troops, got away
more slowly.  There were but a few hundred men with Iberville, arrayed
against Gering's many hundreds; but the French were bush-fighters and the
New Englanders were only stout sailors and ploughmen.  Yet Gering had no
reason to be ashamed of his men that day; they charged bravely, but their
enemies were hid to deadly advantage behind trees and thickets, the best
sharpshooters of the province.

Perrot had had his orders from Iberville: Iberville himself was, if
possible, to engage Gering in a hand-to-hand fight; Perrot, on the other
hand, was to cut Gering off from his men and bring him in a prisoner.
More than once both had Gering within range of their muskets, but they
held their hands, nor indeed did Gering himself, who once also had a
chance of bringing Iberville down, act on his opportunity.  Gering's men
were badly exposed, and he sent them hard at the thickets, clearing the
outposts at some heavy loss.  His men were now scattered, and he shifted
his position so as to bring him nearer the spot where Sainte-Helene and
Longueil were pushing forward fresh outposts.  He saw the activity of the
two brothers, but did not recognise them, and sent a handful of men to
dislodge them.  Both Sainte-Helene and Longueil exposed themselves for a
moment, as they made for an advantageous thicket.  Gering saw his
opportunity, took a musket from a soldier, and fired.  Sainte-Helene fell
mortally wounded.  Longueil sprang forward with a cry of rage, but a
spent ball struck him.

Iberville, at a distance, saw the affair.  With a smothered oath he
snatched a musket from Maurice Joval, took steady aim and fired.  The
distance was too great, the wind too strong; he only carried away an
epaulet.  But Perrot, who was not far from the fallen brothers, suddenly
made a dash within easy range of the rifles of the British, and cut
Gering and two of his companions off from the main body.  It was done so
suddenly that Gering found himself between two fires.  His companions
drew close to him, prepared to sell their lives dearly, but Perrot called
to them to surrender.  Gering saw the fruitlessness of resistance and, to
save his companions' lives, yielded.

The siege of Quebec was over.  The British contented themselves with
holding their position till Walley returned bearing the admiral's orders
to embark again for the fleet.  And so in due time they did--in rain,
cold, and gloom.

In a few days Sir William Phips, having patched up his shattered ships,
sailed away, with the knowledge that the capture of Quebec was not so
easy as finding a lost treasure.  He had tried in vain to effect Gering's
release.

When Gering surrendered, Perrot took his sword with a grim coolness and
said: "Come, monsieur, and see what you think your stay with us may be
like."

In a moment he was stopped beside the dead body of Sainte-Helene.  "Your
musket did this," said Perrot, pointing down.  "Do you know him?"

Gering stooped over and looked.  "My God-Sainte-Helene!" he cried.

Perrot crossed himself and mumbled a prayer.  Then he took from his bosom
a scarf and drew it over the face of the dead man.  He turned to
Longueil.

"And here, monsieur, is another brother of Monsieur Iberville," he said.

Longueil was insensible but not dangerously wounded.  Perrot gave a
signal and the two brothers were lifted and carried down towards the
ford, followed by Perrot and Gering.  On their way they met Iberville.

All the brother, the comrade, in Iberville spoke first.  He felt
Longueil's hand and touched his pulse, then turned, as though he had not
seen Gering, to the dead body of Sainte-Helene.  Motioning to the men to
put it down, he stooped and took Perrot's scarf from the dead face.  It
was yet warm, and the handsome features wore a smile.  Iberville looked
for a moment with a strange, cold quietness.  He laid his hand upon the
brow, touched the cheek, gave a great sigh, and made the sacred gesture
over the body; then taking his own handkerchief he spread it over the
face.  Presently he motioned for the bodies to be carried on.

Perrot whispered to him, and now he turned and look at Gering with a
malignant steadiness.

"You have had the great honour, sir," he said, "to kill one of the
bravest gentlemen of France.  More than once to-day myself and my friend
here"--pointing to Perrot "could have killed you.  Why did we not?  Think
you, that you might kill my brother, whose shoe-latchet were too high for
you?  Monsieur, the sum mounts up."  His voice was full of bitterness and
hatred.  "Why did we spare you?" he repeated, and paused.

Gering could understand Iberville's quiet, vicious anger.  He would
rather have lost a hand than have killed Sainte-Helene, who had, on board
the Maid of Provence, treated him with great courtesy.  He only shook his
head now.

"Well, I will tell you," said Iberville.  "We have spared you to try you
for a spy.  And after--after!  His laugh was not pleasant to hear.

"A spy?  It is false!" cried Gering.

"You will remember--monsieur, that once before you gave me the lie!"

Gering made a proud gesture of defiance, but answered nothing.  That
night he was lodged in the citadel.




CHAPTER XX

A TRAP IS SET

Gering was tried before Governor Frontenac and the full council.  It was
certain that he, while a prisoner at Quebec, had sent to Boston plans of
the town, the condition of the defences, the stores, the general armament
and the approaches, for the letter was intercepted.

Gering's defence was straightforward.  He held that he had sent the
letter at a time when he was a prisoner simply, which was justifiable;
not when a prisoner on parole, which was shameless.  The temper of the
court was against him.  Most important was the enmity of the Jesuits,
whose hatred of Puritanism cried out for sacrifice.  They had seen the
work of the saints in every turn of the late siege, and they believed
that the Lord had delivered the man into their hands.  In secret ways
their influence was strong upon many of the council, particularly those
who were not soldiers.  A soldier can appreciate bravery, and Gering had
been courageous.  But he had killed one of the most beloved of Canadian
officers, the gallant Sainte-Helene!  Frontenac, who foresaw an end of
which the council could not know, summed up, not unfairly, against
Gering.

Gering's defence was able, proud, and sometimes passionate.  Once or
twice his words stung his judges like whips across their faces.  He
showed no fear; he asked no mercy.  He held that he was a prisoner of
war, and entitled to be treated as such.  So strong, indeed, was his
pleading, so well did his stout courage stand by him, that had Count
Frontenac balanced in his favour he might have been quit of the charge
of spying.  But before the trial Iberville had had solitary talk with
Frontenac, in which a request was repeated and a promise renewed.

Gering was condemned to die.  It was perhaps the bravest moment of a
brave life.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I have heard your sentence, but, careless of
military honour as you are, you will not dare put me to death.  Do not
think because we have failed this once that we shall not succeed again.
I tell you, that if, instead of raw Boston sailors, ploughmen and
merchant captains, and fishing craft and trading vessels, I had three
English war-ships and one thousand men, I would level your town from the
citadel to the altar of St. Joseph's.  I do not fear to die, nor that I
shall die by your will.  But, if so, 'twill be with English loathing of
injustice."

His speech was little like to mollify his judges, and at his reference to
St. Joseph's a red spot showed upon many cheeks, while to the charge
against their military honour, Frontenac's eyes lighted ominously.  But
the governor merely said: "You have a raw temper, sir.  We will chasten
you with bread and water; and it were well for you, even by your strange
religion, to qualify for passage from this world."

Gering was taken back to prison.  As he travelled the streets he needed
all his fortitude, for his fiery speech had gone abroad, distorted from
its meaning, and the common folk railed at him.  As chastening, it was
good exercise; but when now and again the name of Sainte-Helene rang
towards him, a cloud passed over his face; that touched him in a tender
corner.

He had not met Iberville since his capture, but now, on entering the
prison, he saw his enemy not a dozen paces from the door, pale and stern.
Neither made a sign, but with a bitter sigh Gering entered.  It was
curious how their fortunes had see-sawed, the one against the other,
for twelve years.

Left alone in his cell with his straw and bread and water, he looked
round mechanically.  It was yet after noon.  All at once it came to him
that this was not the cell which he had left that day.  He got up and
began to examine it.  Like every healthy prisoner, he thought upon means
and chances of escape.

It did not seem a regular cell for prisoners, for there was a second
door.  This was in one corner and very narrow, the walls not coming to a
right angle, but having another little strip of wall between.  He tried
to settle its position by tracing in his mind the way he had come through
the prison.  Iberville or Perrot could have done so instinctively, but he
was not woodsman enough.  He thought, however, that the doorway led to a
staircase, like most doors of the kind in old buildings.  There was the
window.  It was small and high up from the floor, and even could he
loosen the bars, it were not possible to squeeze through.  Besides, there
was the yard to cross and the outer wall to scale.  And that achieved,
with the town still full of armed men, he would have a perilous run.  He
tried the door: it was stoutly fastened; the bolts were on the other
side; the key-hole was filled.  Here was sufficient exasperation.  He had
secreted a small knife on his person, and he now sat down, turned it over
in his hand, looked up at the window and the smooth wall below it, at the
mocking door, then smiled at his own poor condition and gave himself to
cheerless meditation.

He was concerned most for his wife.  It was not in him to give up till
the inevitable was on him and he could not yet believe that Count
Frontenac would carry out the sentence.  At the sudden thought of the
rope--so ignominious, so hateful--he shuddered.  But the shame of it was
for his wife, who had dissipated a certain selfish and envious strain in
him.  Jessica had drawn from him the Puritanism which had made him self-
conscious, envious, insular.




CHAPTER XXI

AN UNTOWARD MESSENGER

A few days after this, Jessica, at her home in Boston,--in the room where
she had promised her father to be George Gering's wife,--sat watching the
sea.  Its slow swinging music came up to her through the October air.
Not far from her sat an old man, his hands clasping a chair-arm, a book
in his lap, his chin sunk on his breast.  The figure, drooping
helplessly, had still a distinguished look, an air of honourable pride.
Presently he raised his head, his drowsy eyes lighted as they rested on
her, and he said: "The fleet has not returned, my dear?  Quebec is not
yet taken?"

"No, father," she replied, "not yet."

"Phips is a great man--a great man!" he said, chuckling.  "Ah, the
treasure!"

Jessica did not reply.  Her fingers went up to her eyes; they seemed to
cool the hot lids.

"Ay, ay, it was good," he added, in a quavering voice, "and I gave you
your dowry!"

Now there was a gentle, soft laugh of delight and pride, and he reached
out a hand towards her.  She responded with a little laugh which was not
unlike his, but there was something more: that old sweet sprightliness of
her youth, shot through with a haunting modulation,--almost pensiveness,
but her face was self-possessed.  She drew near, pressed the old man's
hand, and spoke softly.  Presently she saw that he was asleep.

She sat for some time, not stirring.  At last she was about to rise and
take him to his room, but hearing noises in the street she stepped to the
window.  There were men below, and this made her apprehensive.  She
hurried over, kissed the old man, passed from the room, and met her old
servant Hulm in the passage, who stretched out her hand in distress.

"What is it, Hulm?" she asked, a chill at her heart.  "Oh, how can I tell
you!" was the answer.  "Our fleet was beaten, and--and my master is a
prisoner."  The wife saw that this was not all.  "Tell me everything,
Hulm," she said trembling, yet ready for the worst.

"Oh, my dear, dear mistress, I cannot!"

"Hulm, you see that I am calm," she answered.  "You are only paining me."

"They are to try him for his life!"  She caught her mistress by the
waist, but Jessica recovered instantly.  She was very quiet, very pale,
yet the plumbless grief of her eyes brought tears to Hulm's face.  She
stood for a moment in deep thought.

"Is your brother Aaron in Boston, Hulm?" she asked presently.

"He is below, dear mistress."

"Ask him to step to the dining-room.  And that done, please go to my
father.  And, Hulm, dear creature, you can aid me better if you do not
weep."

She then passed down a side staircase and entered the dining-room.  A
moment afterwards Aaron Hulm came in.

"Aaron," she said, as he stood confused before her misery, "know you the
way to Quebec?"

"Indeed, madame, very well.  Madame, I am sorry--"

"Let us not dwell upon it, Aaron.  Can you get a few men together to go
there?"

"Within an hour."

"Very well, I shall be ready."

"You, madame--ready?  You do not think of going?"

"Yes, I am going."

"But, madame, it is not safe.  The Abenaquis and Iroquois are not
friendly, and--"

"Is this friendly?  Is it like a good friend, Aaron Hulm?  Did I not
nurse your mother when--"

He dropped on one knee, took her hand and kissed it.  "Madame," he said
loyally, "I will do anything you ask; I feared only for your safety."

An hour afterwards she came into the room where her father still slept.
Stooping, she kissed his forehead, and fondled his thin grey hair.  Then
she spoke to Hulm.

"Tell him," she said, "that I will come back soon: that my husband needs
me, and that I have gone to him.  Tell him that we will both come back--
both, Hulm, you understand!"

"Dear mistress, I understand."  But the poor soul made a gesture of
despair.

"It is even as I say.  We will both come back," was the quiet reply.
"Something as truthful as God Himself tells me so.  Take care of my dear
father--I know you will; keep from him the bad news, and comfort him."

Then with an affectionate farewell she went to her room, knelt down and
prayed.  When she rose she said to herself: "I am thankful now that I
have no child."

In ten minutes a little company of people, led by Aaron Hulm, started
away from Boston, making for a block-house fifteen miles distant, where
they were to sleep.

The journey was perilous, and more than once it seemed as if they could
not reach Quebec alive, but no member of the party was more cheerful than
Jessica.  Her bravery and spirit never faltered before the others, though
sometimes at night, when lying awake, she had a wild wish to cry out or
to end her troubles in the fast-flowing Richelieu.  But this was only at
night.  In the daytime action eased the strain, and at last she was
rewarded by seeing from the point of Levis, the citadel of Quebec.

They were questioned and kept in check for a time, but at length Aaron
and herself were let cross the river.  It was her first sight of Quebec,
and its massive, impregnable form struck a chill to her heart: it
suggested great sternness behind it.  They were passed on unmolested
towards the Chateau St. Louis.  The anxious wife wished to see Count
Frontenac himself and then to find Iberville.  Enemy of her country
though he was, she would appeal to him.  As she climbed the steep steps
of Mountain Street, worn with hard travel, she turned faint.  But the
eyes of curious folk were on her, and she drew herself up bravely.

She was admitted almost at once to the governor.  He was at dinner when
she came.  When her message was brought to him, his brows twitched with
surprise and perplexity.  He called Maurice Joval, and ordered that she
be shown to his study and tendered every courtesy.  A few moments later
he entered the room.  Wonder and admiration crossed his face.  He had not
thought to see so beautiful a woman.  Himself an old courtier, he knew
women, and he could understand how Iberville had been fascinated.  She
had arranged her toilette at Levis, and there were few traces of the
long, hard journey, save that her hands and face were tanned.  The
eloquence of her eyes, the sorrowful, distant smile which now was natural
to her, worked upon the old soldier before she spoke a word.  And after
she had spoken, had pleaded her husband's cause, and appealed to the
nobleman's chivalry, Frontenac was moved.  But his face was troubled.
He drew out his watch and studied it.

Presently he went to the door and called Maurice Joval.  There was
whispering, and then the young man went away.

"Madame, you have spoken of Monsieur Iberville," said the governor.
"Years ago he spoke to me of you."

Her eyes dropped, and then they raised steadily, clearly.  "I am sure,
sir," she said, "that Monsieur Iberville would tell you that my husband
could never be dishonourable.  They have been enemies, but noble
enemies."

"Yet, Monsieur Iberville might be prejudiced," rejoined the governor.
"A brother's life has weight."

"A brother's life!" she broke in fearfully.  "Madame, your husband
killed Iberville's brother."

She swayed.  The governor's arm was as quick to her waist as a gallant's
of twenty-five: not his to resist the despair of so noble a creature.  He
was sorry for her; but he knew that if all had gone as had been planned
by Iberville, within a half-hour this woman would be a widow.

With some women, perhaps, he would not have hesitated: he would have
argued that the prize was to the victor, and that, Gering gone, Jessica
would amiably drift upon Iberville.  But it came to him that she was not
as many other women.  He looked at his watch again, and she mistook the
action.

"Oh, your excellency," she said, "do not grudge these moments to one
pleading for a life-for justice."

"You mistake, madame," he said; "I was not grudging the time--for
myself."

At that moment Maurice Joval entered and whispered to the governor.
Frontenac rose.

"Madame," he said, "your husband has escaped."  A cry broke from her.
"Escaped!  escaped!"

She saw a strange look in the governor's eyes.

"But you have not told me all," she urged; "there is more.  Oh, your
excellency, speak!"

"Only this, madame: he may be retaken and--"

"And then?  What then?" she cried.

"Upon what happens then," he as drily as regretfully added, "I shall have
no power."

But to the quick searching prayer, the proud eloquence of the woman, the
governor, bound though he was to secresy, could not be adamant.

"There is but one thing I can do for you," he said at last.  "You know
Father Dollier de Casson?"

To her assent, he added: "Then go to him.  Ask no questions.  If anything
can be done, he may do it for you; that he will I do not know."

She could not solve the riddle, but she must work it out.  There was the
one great fact: her husband had escaped.

"You will do all you can do, your excellency?" she said.

"Indeed, madame, I have done all I can," he said.  With impulse she
caught his hand and kissed it.  A minute afterwards she was gone with
Maurice Joval, who had orders to bring her to the abbe's house--that,
and no more.

The governor, left alone, looked at the hand that she had kissed and
said: "Well, well, I am but a fool still.  Yet--a woman in a million!"
He took out his watch.  "Too late," he added.  "Poor lady!"

A few minutes afterwards Jessica met the abbe on his own doorstep.
Maurice Joval disappeared, and the priest and the woman were alone
together.  She told him what had just happened.

"There is some mystery," she said, pain in her voice.  "Tell me, has my
husband been retaken?"

"Madame, he has."

"Is he in danger?"

The priest hesitated, then presently inclined his head in assent.

"Once before I talked with you," she said, "and you spoke good things.
You are a priest of God.  I know that you can help me, or Count Frontenac
would not have sent me to you.  Oh, will you take me to my husband?"

If Count Frontenac had had a struggle, here was a greater.  First, the
man was a priest in the days when the Huguenots were scattering to the
four ends of the earth.  The woman and her husband were heretics, and
what better were they than thousands of others?  Then, Sainte-Helene had
been the soldier-priest's pupil.  Last of all, there was Iberville, over
whom this woman had cast a charm perilous to his soul's salvation.  He
loved Iberville as his own son.  The priest in him decided against the
woman; the soldier in him was with Iberville in this event--for a
soldier's revenge was its mainspring.  But beneath all was a kindly
soul which intolerance could not warp, and this at last responded.

His first words gave her a touch of hope.  "Madame," he said, "I know not
that aught can be done, but come."




CHAPTER XXII

FROM TIGER'S CLAW TO LION'S MOUTH

Every nation has its traitors, and there was an English renegade soldier
at Quebec.  At Iberville's suggestion he was made one of the guards of
the prison.  It was he that, pretending to let Gering win his confidence,
at last aided him to escape through the narrow corner-door of his cell.

Gering got free of the citadel--miraculously, as he thought; and,
striking off from the road, began to make his way by a roundabout to the
St. Charles River, where at some lonely spot he might find a boat.  No
alarm had been given, and as time passed his chances seemed growing, when
suddenly there sprang from the grass round him armed men, who closed in,
and at the points of swords and rapiers seized him.  Scarcely a word was
spoken by his captors, and he did not know who they were, until, after a
long detour, he was brought inside a manor-house, and there, in the light
of flaring candles, faced Perrot and Iberville.  It was Perrot who had
seized him.

"Monsieur," said Perrot, saluting, "be sure this is a closer prison than
that on the heights."  This said, he wheeled and left the room.

The two gentlemen were left alone.  Gering folded his arms and stood
defiant.

"Monsieur," said Iberville, in a low voice, "we are fortunate to meet so
at last."

"I do not understand you," was the reply.

"Then let me speak of that which was unfortunate.  Once you called me a
fool and a liar.  We fought and were interrupted.  We met again, with the
same ending, and I was wounded by the man Bucklaw.  Before the wound was
healed I had to leave for Quebec.  Years passed, you know well how.  We
met in the Spaniards' country, where you killed my servant; and again at
Fort Rupert, you remember.  At the fort you surrendered before we had a
chance to fight.  Again, we were on the hunt for treasure.  You got it;
and almost in your own harbour I found you, and fought you and a greater
ship with you, and ran you down.  As your ship sank you sprang from it to
my own ship--a splendid leap.  Then you were my guest, and we could not
fight; all--all unfortunate."

He paused.  Gering was cool; he saw Iberville's purpose, and he was ready
to respond to it.

"And then?" asked Gering.  "Your charge is long--is it finished?"

A hard light came into Iberville's eyes.

"And then, monsieur, you did me the honour to come to my own country.  We
did not meet in the fighting, and you killed my brother."  Iberville
crossed himself.  "Then"--his voice was hard and bitter--"you were
captured; no longer a prisoner of war, but one who had broken his parole.
You were thrown into prison, were tried and condemned to death.  There
remained two things: that you should be left to hang, or an escape--that
we should meet here and now."

"You chose the better way, monsieur."

"I treat you with consideration, I hope, monsieur."  Gering waved his
hand in acknowledgment, and said: "What weapons do you choose?"

Iberville quietly laid on the table a number of swords.  "If I should
survive this duel, monsieur," questioned Gering, "shall I be free?"

"Monsieur, escape will be unnecessary."

"Before we engage, let me say that I regret your brother's death."

"Monsieur, I hope to deepen that regret," answered Iberville quietly.
Then they took up their swords.




CHAPTER XXIII

AT THE GATES OF MISFORTUNE

Meanwhile the abbe and Jessica were making their way swiftly towards the
manor-house.  They scarcely spoke as they went, but in Jessica's mind was
a vague horror.  Lights sparkled on the crescent shore of Beauport, and
the torches of fishermen flared upon the St. Charles.  She looked back
once towards the heights of Quebec and saw the fires of many homes--they
scorched her eyes.  She asked no questions.  The priest beside her was
silent, not looking at her at all.  At last he turned and said:

"Madame, whatever has happened, whatever may happen, I trust you will be
brave."

"Monsieur l'Abbe" she answered, "I have travelled from Boston here--can
you doubt it?"

The priest sighed.  "May the hope that gave you strength remain, madame!"

A little longer and then they stood within a garden thick with plants and
trees.  As they passed through it, Jessica was vaguely aware of the rich
fragrance of fallen leaves and the sound of waves washing the foot of the
cliffs.

The abbe gave a low call, and almost instantly Perrot stood before them.
Jessica recognised him.  With a little cry she stepped to him quickly and
placed her hand upon his arm.  She did not seem conscious that he was her
husband's enemy: her husband's life was in danger, and it must be saved
at any cost.  "Monsieur," she said, "where is my husband?  You know.
Tell me."

Perrot put her hand from his arm gently, and looked at the priest in
doubt and surprise.

The abbe said not a word, but stood gazing off into the night.

"Will you not tell me of my husband?" she repeated.  "He is within that
house?"  She pointed to the manor-house.  "He is in danger, I will go to
him."

She made as if to go to the door, but he stepped before her.

"Madame," he said, "you cannot enter."

Just then the moon shot from behind a cloud, and all their faces could be
seen.  There was a flame in Jessica's eyes which Perrot could not stand,
and he turned away.  She was too much the woman to plead weakly.

"Tell me," she said, "whose house this is."  "Madame, it is Monsieur
Iberville's."

She could not check a gasp, but both the priest and the woodsman saw how
intrepid was the struggle in her, and they both pitied.

"Now I understand!  Oh, now I understand!" she cried.  "A plot was laid.
He was let escape that he might be cornered here--one single man against
a whole country.  Oh, cowards, cowards!"

"Pardon me, madame," said Perrot, bristling up, "not cowards.  Your
husband has a chance for his life.  You know Monsieur Iberville--he is a
man all honour.  More than once he might have had your husband's life,
but he gave it to him."

Her foot tapped the ground impatiently, her hands clasped before her.
"Go on, oh, go on!" she said.  "What is it?  why is he here?  Have you
no pity, no heart?"  She turned towards the priest.  "You are a man of
God.  You said once that you would help me make peace between my husband
and Monsieur Iberville, but you join here with his enemies."

"Madame, believe me, you are wrong.  I have done all I could: I have
brought you here."

"Yes, yes; forgive me," she replied.  She turned to Perrot again.  "It is
with you, then.  You helped to save my life once--what right have you to
destroy it now?  You and Monsieur Iberville gave me the world when it
were easy to have lost it; now when the world is everything to me because
my husband lives in it, you would take his life and break mine."

Suddenly a thought flashed into her mind.  Her eyes brightened, her hand
trembled towards Perrot, and touched him.  "Once I gave you something,
monsieur, which I had worn on my own bosom.  That little gift--of a
grateful girl, tell me, have you it still?"

Perrot drew from his doublet the medallion she had given him, and
fingered it uncertainly.

"Then you value it," she added.  "You value my gift, and yet when my
husband is a prisoner, to what perilous ends God only knows, you deny me
to him.  I will not plead; I ask as my right; I have come from Count
Frontenac; he sent me to this good priest here.  Were my husband in the
citadel now I should be admitted.  He is here with the man who, you know,
once said he loved me.  My husband is wickedly held a prisoner; I ask for
entrance to him."

Pleading, apprehension, seemed gone from her; she stood superior to her
fear and sorrow.  The priest reached a hand persuasively towards Perrot,
and he was about to speak, but Perrot, coming close to the troubled
wife, said: "The door is locked; they are there alone.  I cannot let you
in, but come with me.  You have a voice--it may be heard.  Come."

Presently all three were admitted into the dim hallway.




CHAPTER XXIV

IN WHICH THE SWORD IS SHEATHED

How had it gone with Iberville and Gering?

The room was large, scantily, though comfortably, furnished.  For a
moment after they took up their swords they eyed each other calmly.
Iberville presently smiled: he was recalling that night, years ago, when
by the light of the old Dutch lantern they had fallen upon each other,
swordsmen, even in those days, of more than usual merit.  They had
practised greatly since.  Iberville was the taller of the two, Gering the
stouter.  Iberville's eye was slow, calculating, penetrating; Gering's
was swift, strangely vigilant.  Iberville's hand was large, compact, and
supple; Gering's small and firm.

They drew and fell on guard.  Each at first played warily.  They were
keen to know how much of skill was likely to enter into this duel, for
each meant that it should be deadly.  In the true swordsman there is
found that curious sixth sense, which is a combination of touch, sight,
apprehension, divination.  They had scarcely made half a dozen passes
before each knew that he was pitted against a master of the art--an art
partly lost in an age which better loves the talk of swords than the
handling of them.  But the advantage was with Iberville, not merely
because of more practice,--Gering made up for that by a fine certainty
of nerve,--but because he had a prescient quality of mind, joined to the
calculation of the perfect gamester.

From the first Iberville played a waiting game.  He knew Gering's
impulsive nature, and he wished to draw him on, to irritate him, as only
one swordsman can irritate another.  Gering suddenly led off with a
disengage from the carte line into tierce, and, as he expected, met the
short parry and riposte.  Gering tried by many means to draw Iberville's
attack, and, failing to do so, played more rapidly than he ought, which
was what Iberville wished.

Presently Iberville's chance came.  In the carelessness of annoyance,
Gering left part of his sword arm uncovered, while he was meditating a
complex attack, and he paid the penalty by getting a sharp prick from
Iberville's sword-point.  The warning came to Gering in time.  When they
crossed swords again, Iberville, whether by chance or by momentary want
of skill, parried Gering's disengage from tierce to carte on to his own
left shoulder.

Both had now got a taste of blood, and there is nothing like that to put
the lust of combat into a man.  For a moment or two the fight went on
with no special feat, but so hearty became the action that Iberville,
seeing Gering flag a little,--due somewhat to loss of blood, suddenly
opened such a rapid attack on the advance that it was all Gering could do
to parry, without thought of riposte, the successive lunges of the swift
blade.  As he retreated, Gering felt, as he broke ground, that he was
nearing the wall, and, even as he parried, incautiously threw a half-
glance over his shoulder to see how near.  Iberville saw his chance, his
finger was shaping a fatal lunge, when there suddenly came from the
hallway a woman's voice.  So weird was it that both swordsmen drew back,
and once more Gering's life was waiting in the hazard.

Strange to say, Iberville recognised the voice first.  He was angered
with himself now that he had paused upon the lunge and saved Gering.
Suddenly there rioted in him the disappointed vengeance of years.  He had
lost her once by sparing this man's life.  Should he lose her again?  His
sword flashed upward.

At that moment Gering recognised his wife's voice, and he turned pale.
"My wife!" he exclaimed.

They closed again.  Gering was now as cold as he had before been ardent,
and he played with malicious strength and persistency.  His nerves seemed
of iron.  But there had come to Iberville the sardonic joy of one who
plays for the final hazard, knowing that he shall win.  There was one
great move he had reserved for the last.  With the woman's voice at the
door beseeching, her fingers trembling upon the panel, they could
not prolong the fight.  Therefore, at the moment when Gering was pressing
Iberville hard, the Frenchman suddenly, with a trick of the Italian
school, threw his left leg en arriere and made a lunge, which ordinarily
would have spitted his enemy, but at the critical moment one word came
ringing clearly through the locked door.  It was his own name, not
Iberville, but--"Pierre!  Pierre!"

He had never heard the voice speak that name.  It put out his judgment,
and instead of his sword passing through Gering's body it only grazed his
ribs.

Perhaps there was in him some ancient touch of superstition, some sense
of fatalism, which now made him rise to his feet and throw his sword upon
the table.

"Monsieur," he said cynically, "again we are unfortunate."

Then he went to the door, unlocked it, and threw it open upon Jessica.
She came in upon them trembling, pale, yet glowing with her anxiety.

Instantly Iberville was all courtesy.  One could not have guessed that he
had just been engaged in a deadly conflict.  As his wife entered, Gering
put his sword aside.  Iberville closed the door, and the three stood
looking at each other for a moment.  Jessica did not throw herself into
her husband's arms.  The position was too painful, too tragic, for even
the great emotion in her heart.  Behind Iberville's courtesy she read the
deadly mischief.  But she had a power born for imminent circumstances,
and her mind was made up as to her course.  It had been made up when, at
the critical moment, she had called out Iberville's Christian name.  She
rightly judged that this had saved her husband's life, for she guessed
that Iberville was the better swordsman.

She placed her hands with slight resistance on the arms of her husband,
who was about to clasp her to his breast, and said: "I am glad to find
you, George."  That was all.

He also had heard that cry, "Pierre," and he felt shamed that his life
was spared because of it--he knew well why the sword had not gone through
his body.  She felt less humiliation, because, as it seemed to her, she
had a right to ask of Iberville what no other woman could ask for her
husband.

A moment after, at Iberville's request, they were all seated.  Iberville
had pretended not to notice the fingers which had fluttered towards him.
As yet nothing had been said about the duel, as if by tacit consent.  So
far as Jessica was concerned it might never have happened.  As for the
men, the swords were there, wet with the blood they had drawn, but they
made no sign.  Iberville put meat and wine and fruit upon the table, and
pressed Jessica to take refreshment.  She responded, for it was in
keeping with her purpose.  Presently Iberville said, as he poured a
glass of wine for her: "Had you been expected, madame, there were
better entertainment."

"Your entertainment, monsieur," she replied, "has two sides,"--she
glanced at the swords,--"and this is the better."

"If it pleases you, madame."

"I dare not say," she returned, "that my coming was either pleasant or
expected."

He raised his glass towards her: "Madame, I am proud to pledge you once
more.  I recall the first time that we met."

Her reply was instant.  "You came, an ambassador of peace to the governor
of New York.  Monsieur, I come an ambassador of peace to you."

"Yes, I remember.  You asked me then what was the greatest, bravest thing
I ever did.  You ever had a buoyant spirit, madame."

"Monsieur," she rejoined, with feeling, "will you let me answer that
question for you now?  The bravest and greatest thing you ever did was
to give a woman back her happiness."

"Have I done so?"

"In your heart, yes, I believe.  A little while ago my husband's life and
freedom were in your hands--you will place them in mine now, will you
not?"

Iberville did not reply directly.  He twisted his wineglass round, sipped
from it pleasantly, and said: "Pardon me, madame, how were you admitted
here?"

She told him.

"Singular, singular!" he replied; "I never knew Perrot fail me before.
But you have eloquence, madame, and he knew, no doubt, that you would
always be welcome to my home."

There was that in his voice which sent the blood stinging through
Gering's veins.  He half came to his feet, but his wife's warning,
pleading glance brought him to his chair again.

"Monsieur, tell me," she said, "will you give my husband his freedom?"

"Madame, his life is the State's."

"But he is in your hands now.  Will you not set him free?  You know that
the charge against him is false--false.  He is no spy.  Oh, monsieur, you
and he have been enemies, but you know that he could not do a
dishonourable thing."

"Madame, my charges against him are true."

"I know what they are," she said earnestly, "but this strife is not
worthy of you, and it is shaming me.  Monsieur, you know I speak truly.

"You called me Pierre a little while ago," he said; "will you not now?"

His voice was deliberate, every word hanging in its utterance.  He had a
courteous smile, an apparent abandon of manner, but there was devilry
behind all, for here, for the first time, he saw this woman, fought for
and lost, in his presence with her husband, begging that husband's life
of him.  Why had she called him Pierre?  Was it because she knew it would
touch a tender corner of his heart?  Should that be so--well, he would
wait.

"Will you listen to me?" she asked, in a low gentle voice.

"I love to hear you speak," was his reply, and he looked into her eyes
as he had boldly looked years before, but his gaze made hers drop.  There
was revealed to her all that was in his mind.

"Then, hear me now," she said slowly.  "There was a motherless young
girl.  She had as fresh and cheerful a heart as any in the world.  She
had not many playmates, but there was one young lad who shared her sports
and pleasant hours, who was her good friend.  Years passed; she was
nearing womanhood, the young man was still her friend, but in his mind
there had come something deeper.  A young stranger also came, handsome,
brave, and brilliant.  He was such a man as any girl could like and any
man admire.  The girl liked him, and she admired him.  The two young men
quarreled; they fought; and the girl parted them.  Again they would have
fought, but this time the girl's 'life was in danger.  The stranger was
wounded in saving her.  She owed him a debt--such a debt as only a woman
can feel; because a woman loves a noble deed more than she loves her
life--a good woman."

She paused, and for an instant something shook in her throat.  Her
husband looked at her with a deep wonder.  And although Iberville's eyes
played with his glass of wine, they were fascinated by her face, and his
ear was strangely charmed by her voice.

"Will you go on?" he said.

"The three parted.  The girl never forgot the stranger.  What might have
happened if he had always been near her, who can tell--who can tell?
Again in later years the two men met, the stranger the aggressor--without
due cause."

"Pardon me, madame, the deepest cause," said Iberville meaningly.

She pretended not to understand, and continued: "The girl, believing that
what she was expected to do would be best for her, promised her hand in
marriage.  At this time the stranger came.  She saw him but for a day,
for an hour, then he passed away.  Time went on again, and the two men
met in battle--men now, not boys; once more the stranger was the victor.
She married the defeated man.  Perhaps she did not love him as much as he
loved her, but she knew that the other love, the love of the stranger,
was impossible--impossible.  She came to care for her husband more and
more--she came to love him.  She might have loved the stranger--who can
tell?  But a woman's heart cannot be seized as a ship or a town.  Believe
me, monsieur, I speak the truth.  Years again passed: her husband's life
was in the stranger's hand.  Through great danger she travelled to plead
for her husband's life.  Monsieur, she does not plead for an unworthy
cause.  She pleads for justice, in the name of honourable warfare, for
the sake of all good manhood.  Will--will you refuse her?"

She paused.  Gering's eyes were glistening.  Her honesty, fine eloquence,
and simple sincerity, showed her to him in a new, strong light.  Upon
Iberville, the greater of the two, it had a greater effect.  He sat still
for a moment, looking at the woman with the profound gaze of one moved to
the soul.  Then he got to his feet slowly, opened the door, and quietly
calling Perrot, whispered to him.  Perrot threw up his hands in surprise,
and hurried away.

Then Iberville shut the door, and came back.  Neither man had made any
show of caring for their wounds.  Still silent, Iberville drew forth
linen and laid it upon the table.  Then he went to the window, and as he
looked through the parted curtains out upon the water--the room hung over
the edge of the cliff-he bound his own shoulder.  Gering had lost blood,
but weak as he was he carried himself well.  For full half an hour
Iberville stood motionless while the wife bound her husband's wounds.

At length the door opened and Perrot entered.  Iberville did not hear him
at first, and Perrot came over to him.  "All is ready, monsieur," he
said.

Iberville, nodding, came to the table where stood the husband and wife,
and Perrot left the room.  He picked up a sword and laid it beside
Gering, then waved his hand towards the door.

"You are free to go, monsieur," he said.  "You will have escort to your
country.  Go now--pray, go quickly."

He feared he might suddenly repent of his action, and going to the door,
he held it open for them to pass.  Gering picked up the sword, found the
belt and sheath, and stepped to the doorway with his wife.  Here he
paused as if he would speak to Iberville: he was ready now for final
peace.  But Iberville's eyes looked resolutely away, and Gering sighed
and passed into the hallway.  Now the wife stood beside Iberville.  She
looked at him steadily, but at first he would not meet her eye.
Presently, however, he did so.

"Good-bye," she said brokenly, "I shall always remember--always."

His reply was bitter.  "Good-bye, madame: I shall forget."

She made a sad little gesture and passed on, but presently turned, as if
she could not bear that kind of parting, and stretched out her hands to
him.

"Monsieur--Pierre!" she cried, in a weak, choking voice.

With hot frank impulse he caught both her hands in his and kissed them.
"I shall--remember," he said, with great gentleness.

Then they passed from the hallway, and he was alone.  He stood looking at
the closed door, but after a moment went to the table, sat down, and
threw his head forward in his arms.

An hour afterwards, when Count Frontenac entered upon him, he was still
in the same position.  Frontenac touched him on the arm, and he rose.
The governor did not speak, but caught him by the shoulders with both
hands, and held him so for a moment, looking kindly at him.  Iberville
picked up his sword from the table and said calmly:

"Once, sir, you made it a choice between the woman and the sword."

Then he raised the sword and solemnly pressed his lips against the
hilt-cross.






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "TRAIL OF THE SWORD":

Aboriginal in all of us, who must have a sign for an emotion
Learned, as we all must learn, that we live our dark hour alone
Love, too, is a game, and needs playing
Often called an invention of the devil (Violin)
To die without whining






THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE, Complete

By Gilbert Parker



CONTENTS
Volume 1.
I.        HIS GREAT MISTAKE
II.       A DIFFICULT SITUATION
III.      OUT OF THE NORTH
IV.       IN THE NAME OF THE FAMILY
V.        AN AWKWARD HALF-HOUR

Volume 2.
VI.       THE PASSING OF THE YEARS
VII.      A COURT-MARTIAL
VIII.     TO EVERY MAN HIS HOUR

Volume 3.
IX.       THE FAITH OF COMRADES
X.        "THOU KNOWEST THE SECRETS OF OUR HEARTS"
XI.       UPON THE HIGHWAY
XII.      "THE CHASE OF THE YELLOW SWAN"
XIII.     A LIVING POEM
XIV.      ON THE EDGE OF A FUTURE
XV.       THE END OF THE TRAIL




INTRODUCTION

The Translation of a Savage was written in the early autumn of 1893, at
Hampstead Heath, where for over twenty years I have gone, now and then,
when I wished to be in an atmosphere conducive to composition.  Hampstead
is one of the parts of London which has as yet been scarcely invaded by
the lodging-house keeper.  It is very difficult to get apartments at
Hampstead; it is essentially a residential place; and, like Chelsea, has
literary and artistic character all its own.  I think I have seen more
people carrying books in their hands at Hampstead than in any other spot
in England; and there it was, perched above London, with eyes looking
towards the Atlantic over the leagues of land and the thousand leagues of
sea, that I wrote 'The Translation of a Savage'.  It was written, as it
were, in one concentrated effort, a ceaseless writing.  It was, in
effect, what the Daily Chronicle said of 'When Valmond Came to Pontiac',
a tour de force.  It belonged to a genre which compelled me to dispose of
a thing in one continuous effort, or the impulse, impetus, and fulness of
movement was gone.  The writing of a book of the kind admitted of no
invasion from extraneous sources, and that was why, while writing 'The
Translation of a Savage' at Hampstead, my letters were only delivered to
me once a week.  I saw no friends, for no one knew where I was; but I
walked the heights, I practised with my golf clubs on the Heath, and I
sat in the early autumn evenings looking out at London in that agony of
energy which its myriad lives represented.  It was a good time.

The story had a basis of fact; the main incident was true.  It happened,
however, in Michigan rather than in Canada; but I placed the incident in
Canada where it was just as true to the life.  I was living in
Hertfordshire at the time of writing the story, and that is why the
English scenes were worked out in Hertfordshire and in London.  When I
had finished the tale, there came over me suddenly a kind of feeling that
the incident was too bold and maybe too crude to be believed, and I was
almost tempted to consign it to the flames; but the editor of 'The
English Illustrated Magazine', Sir C.  Kinloch-Cooke, took a wholly
different view, and eagerly published it.  The judgment of the press was
favourable,--highly so--and I was as much surprised as pleased when Mr.
George Moore, in the Hogarth Club one night, in 1894, said to me: "There
is a really remarkable play in that book of yours, 'The Translation, of a
Savage'."  I had not thought up to that time that my work was of the kind
which would appeal to George Moore, but he was always making discoveries.
Meeting him in Pall Mall one day, he said to me: "My dear fellow, I have
made a great discovery.  I have been reading the Old Testament.  It is
magnificent.  In the mass of its incoherence it has a series of the most
marvellous stories.  Do you remember--" etc.  Then he came home and had
tea with me, revelling, in the meantime, on having discovered the Bible!

I cannot feel that 'The Translation of a Savage' has any significance
beyond the truthfulness with which I believe it describes the
transformation, or rather the evolution, of a primitive character into a
character with an intelligence of perception and a sympathy which is
generally supposed to be the outcome of long processes of civilisation
and culture.  The book has so many friends--this has been sufficiently
established by the very large sale it has had in cheap editions--that I
am still disposed to feel it was an inevitable manifestation in the
progress of my art, such as it is.  People of diverse conditions of life
have found in it something to interest and to stimulate.  One of the most
volcanic of the Labour members in the House of Commons told me that the
violence of his opposition to me in debate on a certain bill was greatly
moderated by the fact that I had written 'The Translation of a Savage';
while a certain rather grave duke remarked to me concerning the character
of Lali that "She would have been all right anywhere."  I am bound to say
that he was a duke who, while a young man, knew the wilds of Canada and
the United States almost as well as I know Westminster.




THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE

CHAPTER I

HIS GREAT MISTAKE

It appeared that Armour had made the great mistake of his life.  When
people came to know, they said that to have done it when sober had shown
him possessed of a kind of maliciousness and cynicism almost pardonable,
but to do it when tipsy proved him merely weak and foolish.  But the fact
is, he was less tipsy at the time than was imagined; and he could have
answered to more malice and cynicism than was credited to him.  To those
who know the world it is not singular that, of the two, Armour was
thought to have made the mistake and had the misfortune, or that people
wasted their pity and their scorn upon him alone.  Apparently they did
not see that the woman was to be pitied.  He had married her; and she was
only an Indian girl from Fort Charles of the Hudson's Bay Company, with a
little honest white blood in her veins.  Nobody, not even her own people,
felt that she had anything at stake, or was in danger of unhappiness, or
was other than a person who had ludicrously come to bear the name of Mrs.
Francis Armour.  If any one had said in justification that she loved the
man, the answer would have been that plenty of Indian women had loved
white men, but had not married them, and yet the population of half-
breeds went on increasing.

Frank Armour had been a popular man in London.  His club might be found
in the vicinity of Pall Mall, his father's name was high and honoured in
the Army List, one of his brothers had served with Wolseley in Africa,
and Frank himself, having no profession, but with a taste for business
and investment, had gone to Canada with some such intention as Lord
Selkirk's in the early part of the century.  He owned large shares in the
Hudson's Bay Company, and when he travelled through the North-West
country, prospecting, he was received most hospitably.  Of an inquiring
and gregarious nature he went as much among the half-breeds--or 'metis',
as they are called--and Indians as among the officers of the Hudson's Bay
Company and the white settlers.  He had ever been credited with having a
philosophical turn of mind; and this was accompanied by a certain strain
of impulsiveness or daring.  He had been accustomed all his life to make
up his mind quickly and, because he was well enough off to bear the
consequences of momentary rashness in commercial investments, he was not
counted among the transgressors.  He had his own fortune; he was not
drawing upon a common purse.  It was a different matter when he
trafficked rashly in the family name so far as to marry the daughter of
Eye-of-the-Moon, the Indian chief.

He was tolerably happy when he went to the Hudson's Bay country; for Miss
Julia Sherwood was his promised wife, and she, if poor, was notably
beautiful and of good family.  His people had not looked quite kindly on
this engagement; they had, indeed, tried in many ways to prevent it;
partly because of Miss Sherwood's poverty, and also because they knew
that Lady Agnes Martling had long cared for him, and was most happily
endowed with wealth and good looks also.  When he left for Canada they
were inwardly glad (they imagined that something might occur to end the
engagement)--all except Richard, the wiseacre of the family, the book-
man, the drone, who preferred living at Greyhope, their Hertfordshire
home, the year through, to spending half the time in Cavendish Square.
Richard was very fond of Frank, admiring him immensely for his buxom
strength and cleverness, and not a little, too, for that very rashness
which had brought him such havoc at last.

Richard was not, as Frank used to say, "perfectly sound on his pins,"
--that is, he was slightly lame, but he was right at heart.  He was an
immense reader, but made little use of what he read.  He had an abundant
humour, and remembered every anecdote he ever heard.  He was kind to the
poor, walked much, talked to himself as he walked, and was known by the
humble sort as "a'centric."  But he had a wise head, and he foresaw
danger to Frank's happiness when he went away.  While others had gossiped
and manoeuvred and were busily idle, he had watched things.  He saw that
Frank was dear to Julia in proportion to the distance between her and
young Lord Haldwell, whose father had done something remarkable in guns
or torpedoes and was rewarded with a lordship and an uncommonly large
fortune.  He also saw that, after Frank left, the distance between Lord
Haldwell and Julia became distinctly less--they were both staying at
Greyhope.  Julia Sherwood was a remarkably clever girl.  Though he felt
it his duty to speak to her for his brother,--a difficult and delicate
matter, he thought it would come better from his mother.

But when he took action it was too late.  Miss Sherwood naively declared
that she had not known her own heart, and that she did not care for Frank
any more.  She wept a little, and was soothed by motherly Mrs. Armour,
who was inwardly glad, though she knew the matter would cause Frank pain;
and even General Armour could not help showing slight satisfaction,
though he was innocent of any deliberate action to separate the two.
Straightway Miss Sherwood despatched a letter to the wilds of Canada, and
for a week was an unengaged young person.  But she was no doubt consoled
by the fact that for some time past she had had complete control of Lord
Haldwell's emotions.  At the end of the week her perceptions were
justified by Lord Haldwell's proposal, which, with admirable tact and
obvious demureness, was accepted.

Now, Frank Armour was wandering much in the wilds, so that his letters
and papers went careering about after him, and some that came first were
last to reach him.  That was how he received a newspaper announcing the
marriage of Lord Haldwell and Julia Sherwood at the same time that her
letter, written in estimable English and with admirable feeling, came,
begging for a release from their engagement, and, towards its close,
assuming, with a charming regret, that all was over, and that the last
word had been said between them.

Armour was sitting in the trader's room at Fort Charles when the carrier
came with the mails.  He had had some successful days hunting buffalo
with Eye-of-the-Moon and a little band of metis, had had a long pow-wow
in Eye-of-the-Moon's lodge, had chatted gaily with Lali the daughter, and
was now prepared to enjoy heartily the arrears of correspondence and news
before him.  He ran his hand through the letters and papers, intending to
classify them immediately, according to such handwriting as he recognised
and the dates on the envelopes.  But, as he did so, he saw a newspaper
from which the wrapper was partly torn.  He also saw a note in the margin
directing him to a certain page.  The note was in Richard's handwriting.
He opened the paper at the page indicated and saw the account of the
marriage!  His teeth clinched on his cigar, his face turned white, the
paper fell from his fingers.  He gasped, his hands spread out nervously,
then caught the table and held it as though to steady himself.

The trader rose.  "You are ill," he said.  "Have you bad news?"  He
glanced towards the paper.  Slowly Armour folded the paper up, and then
rose unsteadily.  "Gordon," he said, "give me a glass of brandy."

He turned towards the cupboard in the room.  The trader opened it, took
out a bottle, and put it on the table beside Armour, together with a
glass and some water.  Armour poured out a stiff draught, added a very
little water, and drank it.  He drew a great sigh, and stood looking at
the paper.

"Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Armour?" urged the trader.

"Nothing, thank you, nothing at all.  Just leave the brandy here, will
you?  I feel knocked about, and I have to go through the rest of these
letters."

He ran his fingers through the pile, turning it over hastily, as if
searching for something.  The trader understood.  He was a cool-headed
Scotsman; he knew that there were some things best not inquired into,
and that men must have their bad hours alone.  He glanced at the brandy
debatingly, but presently turned and left the room in silence.  In his
own mind, however, he wished he might have taken the brandy without being
discourteous.  Armour had discovered Miss Sherwood's letter.  Before he
opened it he took a little more brandy.  Then he sat down and read it
deliberately.  The liquor had steadied him.  The fingers of one hand even
drummed on the table.  But the face was drawn, the eyes were hard, and
the look of him was altogether pinched.  After he had finished this, he
looked for others from the same hand.  He found none.  Then he picked out
those from his mother and father.  He read them grimly.  Once he paused
as he read his mother's letter, and took a gulp of plain brandy.  There
was something very like a sneer on his face when he finished reading.
He read the hollowness of the sympathy extended to him; he understood the
far from adroit references to Lady Agnes Martling.  He was very bitter.
He opened no more letters, but took up the Morning Post again, and read
it slowly through.  The look of his face was not pleasant.  There was a
small looking-glass opposite him.  He caught sight of himself in it.
He drew his hand across his eyes and forehead, as though he was in a
miserable dream.  He looked again; he could not recognise himself.

He then bundled the letters and papers into his despatch-box.  His
attention was drawn to one letter.  He picked it up.  It was from
Richard.  He started to break the seal, but paused.  The strain of the
event was too much; he winced.  He determined not to read it then, to
wait until he had recovered himself.  He laughed now painfully.  It had
been better for him--it had, maybe, averted what people were used to
term his tragedy--had he read his brother's letter at that moment.
For Richard Armour was a sensible man, notwithstanding his peculiarities;
and perhaps the most sensible words he ever wrote were in that letter
thrust unceremoniously into Frank Armour's pocket.  Armour had received a
terrible blow.  He read his life backwards.  He had no future.  The
liquor he had drunk had not fevered him, it had not wildly excited him;
it merely drew him up to a point where he could put a sudden impulse into
practice without flinching.  He was bitter against his people; he
credited them with more interference than was actual.  He felt that
happiness had gone out of his life and left him hopeless.  As we said, he
was a man of quick decisions.  He would have made a dashing but reckless
soldier; he was not without the elements of the gamester.  It is possible
that there was in him also a strain of cruelty, undeveloped but radical.
Life so far had evolved the best in him; he had been cheery and candid.
Now he travelled back into new avenues of his mind and found strange,
aboriginal passions, fully adapted to the present situation.  Vulgar
anger and reproaches were not after his nature.  He suddenly found
sources of refined but desperate retaliation.  He drew upon them.  He
would do something to humiliate his people and the girl who had spoiled
his life.  Some one thing!  It should be absolute and lasting, it should
show how low had fallen his opinion of women, of whom Julia Sherwood had
once been chiefest to him.  In that he would show his scorn of her.  He
would bring down the pride of his family, who, he believed, had helped,
out of mere selfishness, to tumble his happiness into the shambles.

He was older by years than an hour ago.  But he was not without the
faculty of humour; that was why he did not become very excited; it was
also why he determined upon a comedy which should have all the elements
of tragedy.  Perhaps, however, he would have hesitated to carry his
purposes to immediate conclusions, were it not that the very gods seemed
to play his game with him.  For, while he stood there, looking out into
the yard of the fort, a Protestant missionary passed the window.  The
Protestant missionary, as he is found at such places as Fort Charles,
is not a strictly superior person.  A Jesuit might have been of advantage
to Frank Armour at that moment.  The Protestant missionary is not above
comfortable assurances of gold.  So that when Armour summoned this one
in, and told him what was required of him, and slipped a generous gift of
the Queen's coin into his hand, he smiled vaguely and was willing to do
what he was bidden.  Had he been a Jesuit, who is sworn to poverty, and
more often than not a man of birth and education, he might have
influenced Frank Armour and prevented the notable mishap and scandal.
As it was, Armour took more brandy.

Then he went down to Eye-of-the-Moon's lodge.  A few hours afterwards the
missionary met him there.  The next morning Lali, the daughter of Eye-of-
the-Moon, and the chieftainess of a portion of her father's tribe, whose
grandfather had been a white man, was introduced to the Hudson's Bay
country as Mrs. Frank Armour.  But that was not all.  Indeed, as it
stood, it was very little.  He had only made his comedy possible as yet;
now the play itself was to come.  He had carried his scheme through
boldly so far.  He would not flinch in carrying it out to the last
letter.  He brought his wife down to the Great Lakes immediately,
scarcely resting day or night.  There he engaged an ordinary but reliable
woman, to whom he gave instructions, and sent the pair to the coast.  He
instructed his solicitor at Montreal to procure passages for Mrs. Francis
Armour and maid for Liverpool.  Then, by letters, he instructed his
solicitor in London to meet Mrs. Francis Armour and maid at Liverpool and
take them to Greyhope in Hertfordshire--that is, if General Armour and
Mrs. Armour, or some representative of the family, did not meet them when
they landed from the steamship.

Presently he sat down and wrote to his father and mother, and asked them
to meet his wife and her maid when they arrived by the steamer Aphrodite.
He did not explain to them in precise detail his feelings on Miss Julia
Sherwood's marriage, nor did he go into full particulars as to the
personality of Mrs. Frank Armour; but he did say that, because he knew
they were anxious that he should marry "acceptably," he had married into
the aristocracy, the oldest aristocracy of America; and because he also
knew they wished him to marry wealth, he sent them a wife rich in
virtues--native, unspoiled virtues.  He hoped that they would take her to
their hearts and cherish her.  He knew their firm principles of honour,
and that he could trust them to be kind to his wife until he returned to
share the affection which he was sure would be given to her.  It was not
his intention to return to England for some time yet.  He had work to do
in connection with his proposed colony; and a wife--even a native wife--
could not well be a companion in the circumstances.  Besides, Lali--his
wife's name was Lali!--would be better occupied in learning the
peculiarities of the life in which her future would be cast.  It was
possible they would find her an apt pupil.  Of this they could not
complain, that she was untravelled; for she had ridden a horse, bareback,
half across the continent.  They could not cavil at her education, for
she knew several languages--aboriginal languages--of the North.  She had
merely to learn the dialect of English society, and how to carry with
acceptable form the costumes of the race to which she was going.  Her own
costume was picturesque, but it might appear unusual in London society.
Still, they could use their own judgment about that.

Then, when she was gone beyond recall, he chanced one day to put on the
coat he wore when the letters and paper declaring his misfortune came to
him.  He found his brother's letter; he opened it and read it.  It was
the letter of a man who knew how to appreciate at their proper value the
misfortunes, as the fortunes, of life.  While Frank Armour read he came
to feel for the first time that his brother Richard had suffered, maybe,
from some such misery as had come to him through Julia Sherwood.  It was
a dispassionate, manly letter, relieved by gentle wit, and hinting with
careful kindness that a sudden blow was better for a man than a lifelong
thorn in his side.  Of Julia Sherwood he had nothing particularly bitter
to say.  He delicately suggested that she had acted according to her
nature, and that in the see-saw of life Frank had had a sore blow; but
this was to be borne.  The letter did not say too much; it did not
magnify the difficulty, it did not depreciate it.  It did not even
directly counsel; it was wholesomely, tenderly judicial.  Indirectly, it
dwelt upon the steadiness and manliness of Frank's character; directly,
lightly, and without rhetoric, it enlarged upon their own comradeship.
It ran over pleasantly the days of their boyhood, when they were hardly
ever separated.  It made distinct, yet with no obvious purpose, how good
were friendship and confidence--which might be the most unselfish thing
in the world--between two men.  With the letter before him Frank Armour
saw his act in a new light.

As we said, it is possible if he had read it on the day when his trouble
came to him, he had not married Lali, or sent her to England on this--to
her--involuntary mission of revenge.  It is possible, also, that there
came to him the first vague conception of the wrong he had done this
Indian girl, who undoubtedly married him because she cared for him after
her heathen fashion, while he had married her for nothing that was
commendable; not even for passion, which may be pardoned, nor for
vanity, which has its virtues.  He had had his hour with circumstance;
circumstance would have its hour with him in due course.  Yet there was
no extraordinary revulsion.  He was still angry, cynical, and very sore.
He would see the play out with a consistent firmness.  He almost managed
a smile when a letter was handed to him some weeks later, bearing his
solicitor's assurance that Mrs. Frank Armour and her maid had been safely
bestowed on the Aphrodite for England.  This was the first act in his
tragic comedy.




CHAPTER II

A DIFFICULT SITUATION

When Mrs. Frank Armour arrived at Montreal she still wore her Indian
costume of clean, well-broidered buckskin, moccasins, and leggings, all
surmounted by a blanket.  It was not a distinguished costume, but it
seemed suitable to its wearer.  Mr. Armour's agent was in a quandary.
He had received no instructions regarding her dress.  He felt, of course,
that, as Mrs. Frank Armour, she should put off these garments, and dress,
so far as was possible, in accordance with her new position.  But when he
spoke about it to Mackenzie, the elderly maid and companion, he found
that Mr. Armour had said that his wife was to arrive in England dressed
as she was.  He saw something ulterior in the matter, but it was not his
province to interfere.  And so Mrs. Frank Armour was a passenger by the
Aphrodite in her buckskin garments.

What she thought of it all is not quite easy to say.  It is possible that
at first she only considered that she was the wife of a white man,--
a thing to be desired, and that the man she loved was hers for ever--
a matter of indefinable joy to her.  That he was sending her to England
did not fret her, because it was his will, and he knew what was best.
Busy with her contented and yet somewhat dazed thoughts of him,--she
was too happy to be very active mentally, even if it had been the
characteristic of her race,--she was not at first aware how much notice
she excited, and how strange a figure she was in this staring city.
When it did dawn upon her she shrank a little, but still was placid,
preferring to sit with her hands folded in her lap, idly watching things.
She appeared oblivious that she was the wife of a man of family and rank;
she was only thinking that the man was hers--all hers.  He had treated
her kindly enough in the days they were together, but she had not been
a great deal with him, because they travelled fast, and his duties were
many, or he made them so--but the latter possibility did not occur to
her.

When he had hastily bidden her farewell at Port Arthur he had kissed her
and said: "Good-bye, my wife."  She was not yet acute enough in the
inflections of Saxon speech to catch the satire--almost involuntary--in
the last two words.  She remembered the words, however, and the kiss, and
she was quite satisfied.  To what she was going she did not speculate.
He was sending her: that was enough.

The woman given to her as maid had been well chosen.  Armour had done
this carefully.  She was Scotch, was reserved, had a certain amount of
shrewdness, would obey instructions, and do her duty carefully.  What she
thought about the whole matter she kept to herself; even the solicitor at
Montreal could not find out.  She had her instructions clear in her mind;
she was determined to carry them out to the letter--for which she was
already well paid, and was like to be better paid; because Armour had
arranged that she should continue to be with his wife after they got to
England.  She understood well the language of Lali's tribe, and because
Lali's English was limited she would be indispensable in England.

Mackenzie, therefore, had responsibility, and if she was not elated over
it, she still knew the importance of her position, and had enough
practical vanity to make her an efficient servant and companion.  She
already felt that she had got her position in life, from which she was
to go out no more for ever.  She had been brought up in the shadow of
Alnwick Castle, and she knew what was due to her charge--by other people;
herself only should have liberty with her.  She was taking Lali to the
home of General Armour, and that must be kept constantly before her mind.
Therefore, from the day they set foot on the Aphrodite, she kept her
place beside Mrs. Armour, sitting with her,--they walked very little,--
and scarcely ever speaking, either to her or to the curious passengers.
Presently the passengers became more inquisitive, and made many attempts
at being friendly; but these received little encouragement.  It had
become known who the Indian girl was, and many wild tales went about as
to her marriage with Francis Armour.  Now it was maintained she had saved
his life at an outbreak of her tribe; again, that she had found him dying
in the woods and had nursed him back to life and health; yet again, that
she was a chieftainess, a successful claimant against the Hudson's Bay
Company--and so on.

There were several on board who knew the Armours well by name, and two
who knew them personally.  One was Mr. Edward Lambert, a barrister of the
Middle Temple, and the other was Mrs. Townley, a widow, a member of a
well-known Hertfordshire family, who, on a pleasant journey in Scotland,
had met, conquered, and married a wealthy young American, and had been
left alone in the world, by no means portionless, eighteen months before.
Lambert knew Richard Armour well, and when, from Francis Armour's
solicitor, with whom he was acquainted, he heard, just before they
started, who the Indian girl was, he was greatly shocked and sorry.  He
guessed at once the motive, the madness, of this marriage.  But he kept
his information and his opinions mostly to himself, except in so far as
it seemed only due to friendship to contradict the numberless idle
stories going about.  After the first day at sea he came to know Mrs.
Townley, and when he discovered that they had many common friends and
that she knew the Armours, he spoke a little more freely to her regarding
the Indian wife, and told her what he believed was the cause of the
marriage.

Mrs. Townley was a woman--a girl--of uncommon gentleness of disposition,
and, in spite of her troubles, inclined to view life with a sunny eye.
She had known of Frank Armour's engagement with Miss Julia Sherwood, but
she had never heard the sequel.  If this was the sequel--well, it had
to be faced.  But she was almost tremulous with sympathy when she
remembered Mrs. Armour, and Frank's gay, fashionable sister, Marion, and
contemplated the arrival of this Indian girl at Greyhope.  She had always
liked Frank Armour, but this made her angry with him; for, on second
thoughts, she was not more sorry for him and for his people than for
Lali, the wife.  She had the true instinct of womanhood, and she supposed
that a heathen like this could have feelings to be hurt and a life to be
wounded as herself or another.  At least she saw what was possible in the
future when this Indian girl came to understand her position--only to be
accomplished by contact with the new life, so different from her past.
Both she and Lambert decided that she was very fine-looking, not
withstanding her costume.  She was slim and well built, with modest bust
and shapely feet and ankles.  Her eyes were large, meditative, and
intelligent, her features distinguished.  She was a goodly product of her
race, being descended from a line of chiefs and chieftainesses--broken
only in the case of her grandfather, as has been mentioned.  Her hands
(the two kindly inquisitors decided) were almost her best point.  They
were perfectly made, slim, yet plump, the fingers tapering, the wrist
supple.  Mrs. Townley then and there decided that the girl had
possibilities.  But here she was, an Indian, with few signs of
civilisation or of that breeding which seems to white people the
only breeding fit for earth or heaven.

Mrs. Townley did not need Lambert's suggestion that she should try to
approach the girl, make friends with her, and prepare her in some slight
degree for the strange career before her.

Mrs. Townley had an infinite amount of tact.  She knew it was best to
approach the attendant first.  This she did, and, to the surprise of
other lady-passengers, received no rebuff.  Her advance was not, however,
rapid.  Mackenzie had had her instructions.  When she found that Mrs.
Townley knew Francis Armour and his people, she thawed a little more,
and then, very hesitatingly, she introduced her to the Indian wife.
Mrs. Townley smiled her best--and there were many who knew how attractive
she could be at such a moment.  There was a slight pause, in which Lali
looked at her meditatively, earnestly, and then those beautiful wild
fingers glided out, and caught her hand, and held it; but she spoke no
word.  She only looked inquiringly, seriously, at her new-found friend,
and presently dropped the blanket away from her, and sat up firmly, as
though she felt she was not altogether an alien now, and had a right to
hold herself proudly among white people, as she did in her own country
and with her own tribe, who had greatly admired her.  Certainly Mrs.
Townley could find no fault with the woman as an Indian.  She had taste,
carried her clothes well, and was superbly fresh in appearance, though
her hair still bore very slight traces of the grease which even the most
aristocratic Indians use.

But Lali would not talk.  Mrs. Townley was anxious that the girl should
be dressed in European costume, and offered to lend and rearrange dresses
of her own, but she came in collision with Mr. Armour's instructions.
So she had to assume a merely kind and comforting attitude.  The wife had
not the slightest idea where she was going, and even when Mackenzie, at
Mrs. Townley's oft-repeated request, explained very briefly and
unpicturesquely, she only looked incredulous or unconcerned.  Yet the
ship, its curious passengers, the dining saloon, the music, the sea, and
all, had given her suggestions of what was to come.  They had expected
that at table she would be awkward and ignorant to a degree.  But she had
at times eaten at the trader's table at Fort Charles, and had learned how
to use a knife and fork.  She had also been a favourite with the trader's
wife, who had taught her very many civilised things.  Her English, though
far from abundant, was good.  Those, therefore, who were curious and rude
enough to stare at her were probably disappointed to find that she ate
like "any Christom man."

"How do you think the Armours will receive her?" said Lambert to Mrs.
Townley, of whose judgment on short acquaintance he had come to entertain
a high opinion.

Mrs. Townley had a pretty way of putting her head to one side and
speaking very piquantly.  She had had it as a girl; she had not lost it
as a woman, any more than she had lost a soft little spontaneous laugh
which was one of her unusual charms--for few women can laugh audibly with
effect.  She laughed very softly now, and, her sense of humour
supervening for the moment, she said:

"Really, you have asked me a conundrum.  I fancy I see Mrs. Armour's face
when she gets the news,--at the breakfast-table, of course, and gives a
little shriek, and says: 'General!  oh, General!'  But it is all very
shocking, you know," she added, in a lower voice.  "Still I think they
will receive her and do the best they can for her; because, you see,
there she is, married hard and fast.  She bears the Armour name, and is
likely to make them all very unhappy, indeed, if she determines to
retaliate upon them for any neglect."

"Yes.  But how to retaliate, Mrs. Townley?" Lambert had not a suggestive
mind.

"Well, for instance, suppose they sent her away into seclusion,--with
Frank's consent, another serious question,--and she should take the
notion to fly her retirement, and appear inopportunely at some social
function clothed as she is now!  I fancy her blanket would be a wet one
in such a case--if you will pardon the little joke."

Lambert sighed.  "Poor Frank--poor devil!" he said, almost beneath his
breath.

"And wherefore poor Frank?  Do you think he or the Armours of Greyhope
are the only ones at stake in this?  What about this poor girl?  Just
think why he married her, if our suspicions are right,--and then imagine
her feelings when she wakes to the truth over there, as some time she is
sure to do!"

Then Lambert began to see the matter in a different light, and his
sympathy for Francis Armour grew less as his pity for the girl increased.
In fact, the day before they got to Liverpool he swore at Armour more
than once, and was anxious concerning the reception of the heathen wife
by her white relatives.

Had he been present at a certain scene at Greyhope a day or two before,
he would have been still more anxious.  It was the custom, at breakfast,
for Mrs. Armour to open her husband's letters and read them while he was
engaged with his newspaper, and hand to him afterwards those that were
important.  This morning Marion noticed a letter from Frank amongst the
pile, and, without a word, pounced upon it.  She was curious--as any
woman would be--to see how he took Miss Sherwood's action.  Her father
was deep in his paper at the time.  Her mother was reading other letters.
Marion read the first few lines with a feeling of almost painful wonder,
the words were so curious, cynical, and cold.

Richard sat opposite her.  He also was engaged with his paper, but,
chancing to glance up, he saw that she was becoming very pale, and that
the letter trembled in her fingers.  Being a little short-sighted, he
was not near enough to see the handwriting.  He did not speak yet.  He
watched.  Presently, seeing her grow more excited, he touched her foot
under the table.  She looked up, and caught his eye.  She gasped
slightly.  She gave him a warning look, and turned away from her
mother.  Then she went on reading to the bitter end.

Presently a little cry escaped her against her will.  At that her mother
looked up, but she only saw her daughter's back, as she rose hurriedly
from the table, saying that she would return in a moment.  Mrs. Armour,
however, had been startled.  She knew that Marion had been reading a
letter, and, with a mother's instinct, her thoughts were instantly on
Frank.  She spoke quickly, almost sharply:

"Marion, come here."

Richard had risen.  He came round the table, and, as the girl obeyed her
mother, took the letter from her fingers and hastily glanced over it.
Mrs. Armour came forward and took her daughter's arm.  "Marion," she
said, "there is something wrong--with Frank.  What is it?"

General Armour was now looking up at them all, curiously, questioningly,
through his glasses, his paper laid down, his hands resting on the table.

Marion could not answer.  She was sick with regret, vexation, and shame;
at the first flush, death--for Frank--had been preferable to this.  She
had a considerable store of vanity; she was not very philosophical.
Besides, she was not married; and what Captain Vidall, her devoted
admirer and possible husband, would think of this heathenish alliance was
not a cheer ful thought to her.  She choked down a sob, and waved her
hand towards Richard to answer for her.  He was pale too, but cool.  He
understood the case instantly; he made up his mind instantly also as to
what ought to be--must be--done.

"Well, mother," he said, "it is about Frank.  But he is all right; that
is, he is alive and well-in body.  But he has arranged a hateful little
embarrassment for us--he is married."

"Married!" exclaimed his mother faintly.  "Oh, poor Lady Agnes!"

Marion sniffed a little viciously at this.

"Married?  Married?" said his father.  "Well, what about it?  eh?  what
about it?"

The mother wrung her hands.  "Oh, I know it is something dreadful--
dreadful!  He has married some horrible wild person, or something."

Richard, miserable as he was, remained calm.  "Well," said he, "I don't
know about her being horrible.  Frank is silent on that point; but she is
wild enough--a wild Indian, in fact."

"Indian?  Indian?  Good God--a red nigger!" cried General Armour
harshly, starting to his feet.

"An Indian?  a wild Indian?" Mrs. Armour whispered faintly, as she
dropped into a chair.

"And she'll be here in two or three days," fluttered Marion hysterically.

Meanwhile Richard had hastily picked up the Times.  "She is due here the
day after to-morrow," he said deliberately.  "Frank is as decisive as he
is rash.  Well, it's a melancholy tit-for-tat."

"What do you mean by tit-for-tat?" cried his father angrily.

"Oh, I mean that--that we tried to hasten Julia's marriage--with the
other fellow, and he is giving us one in return; and you will all agree
that it's a pretty permanent one."

The old soldier recovered himself, and was beside his wife in an instant.
He took her hand.  "Don't fret about it, wife," he said; "it's an ugly
business, but we must put up with it.  The boy was out of his head.  We
are old, now, my dear, but there was a time when we should have resented
such a thing as much as Frank--though not in the same fashion, perhaps--
not in the same fashion."  The old man pressed his lips hard to keep down
his emotion.

"Oh, how could he--how could he!" said his mother: "we meant everything
for the best."

"It is always dangerous business meddling with lovers' affairs," rejoined
Richard.  "Lovers take themselves very seriously indeed, and--well, here
the thing is!  Now, who will go and fetch her from Liverpool?  I should
say that both my father and my mother ought to go."

Thus Richard took it for granted that they would receive Frank's Indian
wife into their home.  He intended that, so far as he was concerned,
there should be no doubt upon the question from the beginning.

"Never--she shall never come here!" said Marion, with flashing eyes;
"a common squaw, with greasy hair, and blankets, and big mouth, and black
teeth, who eats with her fingers and grunts!  If she does, if she is
brought to Greyhope, I will never show my face in the world again.  Frank
married the animal: why does he ship her home to us?  Why didn't he come
with her?  Why does he not take her to a home of his own?  Why should he
send her here, to turn our house into a menagerie?"

Marion drew her skirt back, as if the common squaw, with her blankets and
grease, was at that moment near her.

"Well, you see," continued Richard, "that is just it.  As I said, Frank
arranged this little complication with a trifling amount of malice.  No
doubt he didn't come with her because he wished to test the family
loyalty and hospitality; but a postscript to this letter says that his
solicitor has instructions to meet his wife at Liverpool, and bring her
on here in case we fail to show her proper courtesy."

General Armour here spoke.  "He has carried the war of retaliation very
far indeed, but men do mad things when their blood is up, as I have seen
often.  That doesn't alter our clear duty in the matter.  If the woman
were bad, or shameful, it would be a different thing; if--"

Marion interrupted: "She has ridden bareback across the continent like a
jockey,--like a common jockey, and she wears a blanket, and she doesn't
know a word of English, and she will sit on the floor!"

"Well," said her father, "all these things are not sins, and she must be
taught better."

"Joseph, how can you?" said Mrs. Armour indignantly.  "She cannot, she
shall not come here.  Think of Marion.  Think of our position."

She hid her troubled, tear-stained face behind her handkerchief.  At the
same time she grasped her husband's hand.  She knew that he was right.
She honoured him in her heart for the position he had taken, but she
could not resist the natural impulse of a woman where her taste and
convention were shocked.

The old man was very pale, but there was no mistaking his determination.
He had been more indignant than any of them, at first, but he had an
unusual sense of justice when he got face to face with it, as Richard had
here helped him to do.  "We do not know that the woman has done any
wrong," he said.  "As for our name and position, they, thank God!  are
where a mad marriage cannot unseat them.  We have had much prosperity in
the world, my wife; we have had neither death nor dishonour; we--"

"If this isn't dishonour, father, what is?" Marion flashed out.

He answered calmly.  "My daughter, it is a great misfortune, it will
probably be a lifelong trial, but it is not necessarily dishonour."

"You never can make a scandal less by trying to hide it," said Richard,
backing up his father.  "It is all pretty awkward, but I daresay we shall
get some amusement out of it in the end."

"Richard," said his mother through her tears, "you are flippant and
unkind!"

"Indeed, mother," was his reply, "I never was more serious in my life.
When I spoke of amusement, I meant comedy merely, not fun--the thing that
looks like tragedy and has a happy ending.  That is what I mean, mother,
nothing more."

"You are always so very deep, Richard," remarked Marion ironically, "and
care so very little how the rest of us feel about things.  You have no
family pride.  If you had married a squaw, we shouldn't have been
surprised.  You could have camped in the grounds with your wild woman,
and never have been missed--by the world," she hastened to add, for she
saw a sudden pain in his face.

He turned from them all a little wearily, and limped over to the window.
He stood looking out into the limes where he and Frank had played when
boys.  He put his finger up, his unhandsome finger, and caught away some
moisture from his eyes.  He did not dare to let them see his face, nor
yet to speak.  Marion had cut deeper than she knew, and he would carry
the wound for many a day before it healed.

But his sister felt instantly how cruel she had been, as she saw him limp
away, and caught sight of the bowed shoulders and the prematurely grey
hair.  Her heart smote her.  She ran over, and impulsively put her hands
on his shoulder.  "Oh, Dick," she said, "forgive me, Dick!  I didn't mean
it.  I was angry and foolish and hateful."

He took one of her hands as it rested on his shoulder, she standing
partly behind him, and raised it to his lips, but he did not turn to her;
he could not.

"It is all right--all right," he said; "it doesn't make any difference.
Let us think of Frank and what we have got to do.  Let us stand together,
Marion; that is best."

But her tears were dropping on his shoulder, as her forehead rested on
her hand.  He knew now that, whatever Frank's wife was, she would not
have an absolute enemy here; for when Marion cried her heart was soft.
She was clay in the hands of the potter whom we call Mercy--more often a
stranger to the hearts of women than of men.  At the other side of the
room also the father and mother, tearless now, watched these two; and the
mother saw her duty better and with less rebelliousness.  She had felt it
from the first, but she could not bring her mind to do it.  They held
each other's hands in silence.  Presently General Armour said: "Richard,
your mother and I will go to Liverpool to meet Frank's wife."

Marion shuddered a little, and her hands closed on Richard's shoulder,
but she said nothing.




CHAPTER III

OUT OF THE NORTH

It was a beautiful day--which was so much in favour of Mrs. Frank Armour
in relation to her husband's people.  General Armour and his wife had
come down from London by the latest train possible, that their suspense
at Liverpool might be short.  They said little to each other, but when
they did speak it was of things very different from the skeleton which
they expected to put into the family cupboard presently.  Each was trying
to spare the other.  It was very touching.  They naturally looked upon
the matter in its most unpromising light, because an Indian was an
Indian, and this unknown savage from Fort Charles was in violent contrast
to such desirable persons as Lady Agnes Martling.  Not that the Armours
were zealous for mere money and title, but the thing itself was
altogether a propos, as Mrs. Armour had more naively than correctly put
it.  The general, whose knowledge of character and the circumstances of
life was considerable, had worked out the thing with much accuracy.  He
had declared to Richard, in their quiet talk upon the subject, that Frank
must have been anything but sober when he did it.  He had previously
called it a policy of retaliation; so that now he was very near the
truth.  When they arrived at the dock at Liverpool, the Aphrodite was
just making into the harbour.

"Egad," said General Armour to himself, "Sebastopol was easier than this;
for fighting I know, and being peppered I know, by Jews, Greeks,
infidels, and heretics; but to take a savage to my arms and do for her
what her godfathers and godmothers never did, is worse than the devil's
dance at Delhi."

What Mrs. Armour, who was not quite so definite as her husband, thought,
it would be hard to tell; but probably grief for, and indignation at, her
son, were uppermost in her mind.  She had quite determined upon her
course.  None could better carry that high, neutral look of social
superiority than she.

Please Heaven, she said to herself, no one should see that her equanimity
was shaken.  They had brought one servant with them, who had been gravely
and yet conventionally informed that his young master's wife, an Indian
chieftainess, was expected.  There are few family troubles but find their
way to servants' hall with an uncomfortable speed; for, whether or not
stone walls have ears, certainly men-servants and maid-servants have eyes
that serve for ears, and ears that do more than their bounden duty.
Boulter, the footman, knew his business.  When informed of the coming of
Mrs. Francis Armour, the Indian chieftainess, his face was absolutely
expressionless; his "Yessir" was as mechanical as usual.  On the dock he
was marble--indifferent.  When the passengers began to land, he showed no
excitement.  He was decorously alert.  When the crucial moment came, he
was imperturbable.  Boulter was an excellent servant.  So said Edward
Lambert to himself after the event; so, likewise, said Mrs. Townley to
herself when the thing was over; so declared General Armour many a time
after, and once very emphatically, just before he raised Boulter's wages.

As the boat neared Liverpool, Lambert and Mrs. Townley grew nervous.  The
truth regarding the Indian wife had become known among the passengers,
and most were very curious--some in a well-bred fashion, some
intrusively, vulgarly.  Mackenzie, Lali's companion, like Boulter, was
expressionless in face.  She had her duty to do, paid for liberally, and
she would do it.  Lali might have had a more presentable and dignified
attendant, but not one more worthy.  It was noticeable that the captain
of the ship and all the officers had been markedly courteous to Mrs.
Armour throughout the voyage, but, to their credit, not ostentatiously
so.  When the vessel was brought to anchor and the passengers were being
put upon the tender, the captain came and made his respectful adieus,
as though Lali were a lady of title in her own right, and not an Indian
girl married to a man acting under the influence of brandy and malice.
General Armour and Mrs. Armour were always grateful to Lambert and Mrs.
Townley for the part they played in this desperate little comedy.  They
stood still and watchful as the passengers came ashore one by one.  They
saw that they were the centre of unusual interest, but General Armour was
used to bearing himself with a grim kind of indifference in public, and
his wife was calm, and so somewhat disappointed those who probably
expected the old officer and his wife to be distressed.  Frank Armour's
solicitor was also there, but, with good taste, he held aloof.  The two
needed all their courage, however, when they saw a figure in buckskin and
blanket step upon the deck, attended by a very ordinary, austere, and
shabbily-dressed Scotswoman.  But immediately behind them were Edward
Lambert and Mrs. Townley, and these, with their simple tact, naturalness,
and freedom from any sort of embarrassment, acted as foils, and relieved
the situation.

General Armour advanced, hat in hand.  "You are my son's wife?" he said
courteously to this being in a blanket.

She looked up and shook her head slightly, for she did not quite
understand; but she recognised his likeness to her husband, and presently
she smiled up musingly.  Mackenzie repeated to her what General Armour
had said.  She nodded now, a flash of pleasure lighting up her face, and
she slid out her beautiful hand to him.  The general took it and pressed
it mechanically, his lips twitching slightly.  He pressed it far harder
than he meant, for his feelings were at tension.  She winced slightly,
and involuntarily thrust out her other hand, as if to relieve his
pressure.  As she did so the blanket fell away from her head and
shoulders.  Lambert, with excellent intuition, caught it, and threw it
across his arm.  Then, quickly, and without embarrassment, he and Mrs.
Townley greeted General Armour, who returned the greetings gravely, but
in a singular, confidential tone, which showed his gratitude.  Then he
raised his hat again to Lali, and said: "Come and let me introduce you
--to your husband's mother."

The falling back of that blanket had saved the situation; for when the
girl stood without it in her buckskin garments there was a dignity in her
bearing which carried off the bizarre event.  There was timidity in her
face, and yet a kind of pride too, though she was only a savage.  The
case, even at this critical moment, did not seem quite hopeless.  When
they came to Mrs. Armour, Lali shrank away timidly from the look in the
mother's eyes, and, shivering slightly, looked round for her blanket.
But Lambert had deftly passed it on to the footman.  Presently Mrs.
Armour took both the girl's hands in hers (perhaps she did it because the
eyes of the public were on her, but that is neither here nor there--she
did it), and kissed her on the cheek.  Then they moved away to a closed
carriage.

And that was the second act in Frank Armour's comedy of errors.




CHAPTER IV

IN THE NAME OF THE FAMILY

The journey from Liverpool to Greyhope was passed in comparative silence.
The Armours had a compartment to themselves, and they made the Indian
girl as comfortable as possible without self-consciousness, without any
artificial politeness.  So far, what they had done was a matter of duty,
not of will; but they had done their duty naturally all their lives, and
it was natural to them now.  They had no personal feelings towards the
girl one way or another, as yet.  It was trying to them that people
stared into the compartment at different stations.  It presently dawned
upon General Armour that it might also be trying to their charge.
Neither he nor his wife had taken into account the possibility of the
girl having feelings to be hurt.  But he had noticed Lali shrink visibly
and flush slightly when some one stared harder than usual, and this
troubled him.  It opened up a possibility.  He began indefinitely to see
that they were not the only factors in the equation.  He was probably a
little vexed that he had not seen it before; for he wished to be a just
man.  He was wont to quote with more or less austerity--chiefly the
result of his professional life--this:

     "For justice, all place a temple, and all season summer."

And, man of war as he was, he had another saying which was much in his
mouth; and he lived up to it with considerable sincerity:

          "Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace,
          To silence envious tongues."

He whispered to his wife.  It would have been hard to tell from her look
what she thought of the matter, but presently she changed seats with her
husband, that he might, by holding his newspaper at a certain angle,
shield the girl from intrusive gazers.

At every station the same scene was enacted.  And inquisitive people must
have been surprised to see how monotonously ordinary was the manner of
the three white people in the compartment.  Suddenly, at a station near
London, General Armour gave a start, and used a strong expression under
his breath.  Glancing at the "Marriage" column, he saw a notice to the
effect that on a certain day of a certain month, Francis Gilbert, the son
of General Joseph Armour, C.B., of Greyhope, Hertfordshire, and Cavendish
Square, was married to Lali, the daughter of Eye-of-the-Moon, chief of
the Bloods, at her father's lodge in the Saskatchewan Valley.  This had
been inserted by Frank Armour's solicitor, according to his instructions,
on the day that the Aphrodite was due at Liverpool.  General Armour did
not at first intend to show this to his wife, but on second thought he
did, because he knew she would eventually come to know of it, and also
because she saw that something had moved him.  She silently reached out
her hand for the paper.  He handed it to her, pointing to the notice.

Mrs. Armour was unhappy, but her self-possession was admirable, and she
said nothing.  She turned her face to the window, and sat for a long time
looking out.  She did not turn to the others, for her eyes were full of
tears, and she did not dare to wipe them away, nor yet to let them be
seen.  She let them dry there.  She was thinking of her son, her
favourite son, for whom she had been so ambitious, and for whom, so far
as she could, and retain her self-respect, she had delicately intrigued,
that he might happily and befittingly marry.  She knew that in the matter
of his engagement she had not done what was best for him, but how could
she have guessed that this would be the result?  She also was sure that
when the first flush of his anger and disappointment had passed, and he
came to view this thing with cooler mind, he would repent deeply--for a
whole lifetime.  She was convinced that he had not married this savage
for anything which could make marriage endurable.  Under the weight of
the thought she was likely to forget that the young alien wife might have
lost terribly in the event also.

The arrival at Euston and the departure from St. Pancras were rather
painful all round, for, though there was no waiting at either place, the
appearance of an Indian girl in native costume was uncommon enough, even
in cosmopolitan London, to draw much attention.  Besides, the placards of
the evening papers were blazoned with such announcements as this:

                         A RED INDIAN GIRL
                            MARRIED INTO
                      AN ENGLISH COUNTY FAMILY.

Some one had telegraphed particulars--distorted particulars--over from
Liverpool, and all the evening sheets had their portion of extravagance
and sensation.  General Armour became a little more erect and austere as
he caught sight of these placards, and Mrs. Armour groaned inwardly; but
their faces were inscrutable, and they quietly conducted their charge,
minus her blanket, to the train which was to take them to St. Albans, and
were soon wheeling homeward.

At Euston they parted with Lambert and Mrs. Townley, who quite simply and
conventionally bade good-bye to them and their Indian daughter-in-law.
Lali had grown to like Mrs. Townley, and when they parted she spoke a few
words quickly in her own tongue, and then immediately was confused,
because she remembered that she could not be understood.  But presently
she said in halting English that the face of her white friend was good,
and she hoped that she would come one time and sit beside her in her
wigwam, for she would be sad till her husband travelled to her.

Mrs. Townley made some polite reply in simple English, pressed the girl's
hand sympathetically, and hurried away.  Before she parted from Mr.
Lambert, however, she said, with a pretty touch of cynicism: "I think I
see Marion Armour listening to her sister-in-law issue invitations to her
wigwam.  I am afraid I should be rather depressed myself if I had to be
sisterly to a wigwam lady."

"But I say, Mrs. Townley," rejoined Lambert seriously, as he loitered at
the steps of her carriage, "I shouldn't be surprised if my Lady Wigwam--
a rather apt and striking title, by the way--turned out better than we
think.  She carried herself rippingly without the blanket, and I never
saw a more beautiful hand in my life--but one," he added, as his fingers
at that moment closed on hers, and held them tightly, in spite of the
indignant little effort at withdrawal.  "She may yet be able to give them
all points in dignity and that kind of thing, and pay Master Frank back
in his own coin.  I do not see, after all, that he is the martyr."

Lambert's voice got softer, for he still held Mrs. Townley's fingers, the
footman not having the matter in his eye,--and then he spoke still more
seriously on sentimental affairs of his own, in which he evidently hoped
she would take some interest.  Indeed, it is hard to tell how far the
case might have been pushed if she had not suddenly looked a little
forbidding and imperious.  For even people of no notable height, with
soft features, dark brown eyes, and a delightful little laugh, may appear
rather regal at times.  Lambert did not quite understand why she should
take this attitude.  If he had been as keen regarding his own affairs of
the affections as in the case of Frank Armour and his Indian bride, he
had known that every woman has in her mind the occasion when she should
and when she should not be wooed, and nothing disappoints her more than a
declaration at a time which is not her time.  If it does not fall out as
she wishes it, retrospect, a dear thing to a woman, is spoiled.  Many a
man has been sent to the right-about because he has ventured his proposal
at the wrong time.  What would have occurred to Lambert it is hard to
tell; but he saw that something was wrong, and stopped in time.

When General Armour and his party reached Greyhope it was late in the
evening.  The girl seemed tired and confused by the events of the day,
and did as she was directed, indifferently, limply.  But when they
entered the gates of Greyhope and travelled up the long avenue of limes,
she looked round her somewhat eagerly, and drew a long sigh, maybe of
relief or pleasure.  She presently stretched out a hand almost
caressingly to the thick trees and the grass, and said aloud: "Oh, the
beautiful trees and the long grass!"  There was a whirr of birds' wings
among the branches, and then, presently, there rose from a distance the
sweet, gurgling whistle of the nightingale.  A smile as of reminiscence
crossed her face.  Then she said, as if to herself: "It is the same.
I shall not die.  I hear the birds' wings, and one is singing.  It is
pleasant to sleep in the long grass when the nights are summer, and to
hang your cradle in the trees."

She had asked for her own blanket, refusing a rug, when they left
St.  Albans, and it had been given to her.  She drew it about her now
with a feeling of comfort, and seemed to lose the horrible sense of
strangeness which had almost convulsed her when she was put into the
carriage at the railway station.  Her reserve had hidden much of what
she really felt; but the drive through the limes had shown General Armour
and his wife that they had to do with a nature having capacities for
sensitive feeling; which, it is sometimes thought, is only the
prerogative of certain well-bred civilisations.

But it was impossible that they should yet, or for many a day, feel any
sense of kinship with this aboriginal girl.  Presently the carriage drew
up to the doorway, which was instantly opened to them.  A broad belt of
light streamed out upon the stone steps.  Far back in the hall stood
Marion, one hand upon the balustrade of the staircase, the other tightly
held at her side, as if to nerve herself for the meeting.  The eyes of
the Indian girl pierced the light, and, as if by a strange instinct,
found those of Marion, even before she left the carriage.  Lali felt
vaguely that here was her possible enemy.  As she stepped out of the
carriage, General Armour's hand under her elbow to assist her, she drew
her blanket something more closely about her, and so proceeded up the
steps.  The composure of the servants was, in the circumstances,
remarkable.  It needed to have been, for the courage displayed by Lali's
two new guardians during the day almost faltered at the threshold of
their own home.  Any sign of surprise or amusement on the part of the
domestics would have given them some painful moments subsequently.  But
all was perfectly decorous.  Marion still stood motionless, almost dazed,
The group advanced into the hall, and there paused, as if waiting for
her.

At that moment Richard came out of the study at her right hand, took her
arm, and said quietly: "Come along, Marion.  Let us be as brave as our
father and mother."

She gave a hard little gasp and seemed to awake as from a dream.  She
quickly glided forwards ahead of him, kissed her mother and father almost
abruptly, then turned to the young wife with a scrutinising eye.
"Marion," said her father, "this is your sister."  Marion stood
hesitating, confused.

"Marion, dear," repeated her mother ceremoniously, "this is your
brother's wife.--Lali, this is your husband's sister, Marion."

Mackenzie translated the words swiftly to the girl, and her eyes flashed
wide.  Then in a low voice she said in English: "Yes, Marion, How!"

It is probable that neither Marion nor any one present knew quite the
meaning of 'How', save Richard, and he could not suppress a smile, it
sounded so absurd and aboriginal.  But at this exclamation Marion once
more came to herself.  She could not possibly go so far as her mother did
at the dock and kiss this savage, but, with a rather sudden grasp of the
hand, she said, a little hysterically, for her brain was going round like
a wheel,--"Wo-won't you let me take your blanket?" and forthwith laid
hold of it with tremulous politeness.

The question sounded, for the instant, so ludicrous to Richard that, in
spite of the distressing situation, he had to choke back a laugh.  Years
afterwards, if he wished for any momentary revenge upon Marion (and he
had a keen sense of wordy retaliation), he simply said: "Wo-won't you let
me take your blanket?"

Of course the Indian girl did not understand, but she submitted to the
removal of this uncommon mantle, and stood forth a less trying sight to
Marion's eyes; for, as we said before, her buckskin costume set off
softly the good outlines of her form.

The Indian girl's eyes wandered from Marion to Richard.  They wandered
from anxiety, doubt, and a bitter kind of reserve, to cordiality,
sympathy, and a grave kind of humour.  Instantly the girl knew that
she had in eccentric Richard Armour a frank friend.  Unlike as he was
to his brother, there was still in their eyes the same friendliness and
humanity.  That is, it was the same look that Frank carried when he first
came to her father's lodge.

Richard held out his hand with a cordial little laugh and said: "Ah, ah,
very glad, very glad!  Just in time for supper.  Come along.  How is
Frank, eh?  how is Frank?  Just so; just so.  Pleasant journey, I
suppose?"  He shook her hand warmly three or four times, and, as he held
it, placed his left hand over it and patted it patriarchally, as was his
custom with all the children and all the old ladies that he knew.

"Richard," said his mother, in a studiously neutral voice, "you might see
about the wine."

Then Richard appeared to recover himself, and did as he was requested,
but not until his brother's wife had said to him in English, as they
courteously drew her towards the staircase: "Oh, my brother Richard,
How!"

But the first strain and suspense were now over for the family, and it
is probable that never had they felt such relief as when they sat down
behind closed doors in their own rooms for a short respite, while the
Indian girl was closeted alone with Mackenzie and a trusted maid, in what
she called her wigwam.




CHAPTER V

AN AWKWARD HALF-HOUR

It is just as well, perhaps, that the matter had become notorious.
Otherwise the Armours had lived in that unpleasant condition of being
constantly "discovered."  It was simply a case of aiming at absolute
secrecy, which had been frustrated by Frank himself, or bold and
unembarrassed acknowledgment and an attempt to carry things off with
a high hand.  The latter course was the only one possible.  It had
originally been Richard's idea, appropriated by General Armour, and
accepted by Mrs. Armour and Marion with what grace was possible.  The
publication of the event prepared their friends, and precluded the
necessity for reserve.  What the friends did not know was whether they
ought or ought not to commiserate the Armours.  It was a difficult
position.  A death, an accident, a lost reputation, would have been easy
to them; concerning these there could be no doubt.  But an Indian
daughter-in-law, a person in moccasins, was scarcely a thing to be
congratulated upon; and yet sympathy and consolation might be much
misplaced; no one could tell how the Armours would take it.  For even
their closest acquaintances knew what kind of delicate hauteur was
possible to them.  Even the "'centric" Richard, who visited the cottages
of the poor, carrying soup and luxuries of many kinds, accompanying them
with the most wholesome advice a single man ever gave to families and the
heads of families, whose laugh was so cheery and spontaneous,--and face
so uncommonly grave and sad at times,--had a faculty for manner.  With
astonishing suddenness he could raise insurmountable barriers; and
people, not of his order, who occasionally presumed on his simplicity of
life and habits, found themselves put distinctly ill at ease by a quiet,
curious look in his eye.  No man was ever more the recluse and at the
same time the man of the world.  He had had his bitter little comedy of
life, but it was different from that of his brother Frank.  It was buried
very deep; not one of his family knew of it: Edward Lambert, and one or
two others who had good reason never to speak of it, were the only
persons possessing his secret.

But all England knew of Frank's mesalliance.  And the question was, What
would people do?  They very properly did nothing at first.  They waited
to see how the Armours would act: they did not congratulate; they did not
console; that was left to those papers which chanced to resent General
Armour's politics, and those others which were emotional and sensational
on every subject--particularly so where women were concerned.

It was the beginning of the season, but the Armours had decided that they
would not go to town.  That is, the general and his wife were not going.
They felt that they ought to be at Greyhope with their daughter-in-law
--which was to their credit.  Regarding Marion they had nothing to say.
Mrs. Armour inclined to her going to town for the season, to visit Mrs.
Townley, who had thoughtfully written to her, saying that she was very
lonely, and begging Mrs. Armour to let her come, if she would.  She said
that of course Marion would see much of her people in town just the same.
Mrs. Townley was a very clever and tactful woman.

She guessed that General Armour and his wife were not likely to come to
town, but that must not appear, and the invitation should be on a
different basis--as it was.

It is probable that Marion saw through the delicate plot, but that did
not make her like Mrs. Townley less.  These little pieces of art make
life possible, these tender fictions!

Marion was, however, not in good humour; she was nervous and a little
petulant.  She had a high-strung temperament, a sensitive perception of
the fitness of things, and a horror of what was gauche; and she would, in
brief, make a rather austere person if the lines of life did not run in
her favour.  She had something of Frank's impulsiveness and temper; it
would have been a great blessing to her if she had had a portion of
Richard's philosophical humour also.  She was at a point of tension--her
mother and Richard could see that.  She was anxious--though for the world
she would not have had it thought so--regarding Captain Vidall.  She had
never cared for anybody but him; it was possible she never would.  But he
did not know this, and she was not absolutely sure that his evident but
as yet informal love would stand this strain--which shows how people very
honourable and perfect-minded in themselves may allow a large margin to
other people who are presumably honourable and perfect-minded also.
There was no engagement between them, and he was not bound in any way,
and could, therefore, without slashing the hem of the code, retire
without any apology; but they had had that unspoken understanding which
most people who love each other show even before a word of declaration
has passed their lips.  If he withdrew because of this scandal there
might be some awkward hours for Frank Armour's wife at Greyhope; but,
more than that, there would be a very hard-hearted young lady to play her
part in the deceitful world; she would be as merciless as she could be.
Naturally, being young, she exaggerated the importance of the event, and
brooded on it.  It was different with her father and mother.  They were
shocked and indignant at first, but when the first scene had been faced
they began to make the best of things all round.  That is, they proceeded
at once to turn the North American Indian into a European--a matter of no
little difficulty.  A governess was discussed; but General Armour did not
like the idea, and Richard opposed it heartily.  She must be taught
English and educated, and made possible in "Christian clothing," as Mrs.
Armour put it.  Of the education they almost despaired--all save Richard;
time, instruction, vanity, and a dressmaker might do much as to the
other.

The evening of her arrival, Lali would not, with any urging, put on
clothes of Marion's which had been sent in to her.  And the next morning
it was still the same.

She came into the breakfast-room dressed still in buckskin and moccasins,
and though the grease had been taken out of her hair it was still combed
flat.  Mrs. Armour had tried to influence her through Mackenzie, but to
no purpose.  She was placidly stubborn.

It had been unwisely told her by Mackenzie that they were Marion's
clothes.  They scarcely took in the fact that the girl had pride, that
she was the daughter of a chief, and a chieftainess herself, and that it
was far from happy to offer her Marion's clothes to wear.

Now, Richard, when he was a lad, had been on a journey to the South Seas,
and had learned some of the peculiarities of the native mind, and he did
not suppose that American Indians differed very much from certain well-
bred Polynesians in little matters of form and good taste.  When his
mother told him what had occurred before Lali entered the breakfast-room,
he went directly to what he believed was the cause, and advised tact with
conciliation.  He also pointed out that Lali was something taller than
Marion, and that she might be possessed of that general trait of
humanity-vanity.  Mrs. Armour had not yet got used to thinking of the
girl in another manner than an intrusive being of a lower order, who was
there to try their patience, but also to do their bidding.  She had yet
to grasp the fact that, being her son's wife, she must have, therefore, a
position in the house, exercising a certain authority over the servants,
who, to Mrs. Armour, at first seemed of superior stuff.  But Richard said
to her: "Mother, I fancy you don't quite grasp the position.  The girl is
the daughter of a chief, and the descendant of a family of chiefs,
perhaps through many generations.  In her own land she has been used to
respect, and has been looked up to pretty generally.  Her garments are,
I fancy, considered very smart in the Hudson's Bay country; and a finely
decorated blanket like hers is expensive up there.  You see, we have to
take the thing by comparison; so please give the girl a chance."

And Mrs. Armour answered wearily, "I suppose you are right, Richard; you
generally are in the end, though why you should be I do not know, for you
never see anything of the world any more, and you moon about among the
cottagers.  I suppose it's your native sense and the books you read."

Richard laughed softly, but there was a queer ring in the laugh, and he
came over stumblingly and put his arm round his mother's shoulder.
"Never mind how I get such sense as I have, mother; I have so much time
to think, it would be a wonder if I hadn't some.  But I think we had
better try to study her, and coax her along, and not fob her off as a
very inferior person, or we shall have our hands full in earnest.  My
opinion is, she has got that which will save her and us too--a very high
spirit, which only needs opportunity to develop into a remarkable thing;
and, take my word for it, mother, if we treat her as a chieftainess, or
princess, or whatever she is, and not simply as a dusky person, we shall
come off better and she will come off better in the long run.  She is not
darker than a Spaniard, anyhow."  At this point Marion entered the room,
and her mother rehearsed briefly to her what their talk had been.  Marion
had had little sleep, and she only lifted her eyebrows at them at first.
She was in little mood for conciliation.  She remembered all at once that
at supper the evening before her sister-in-law had said How! to the
butler, and had eaten the mayonnaise with a dessert spoon.  But
presently, because she saw they waited for her to speak, she said,
with a little flutter of maliciousness: "Wouldn't it be well for Richard-
-he has plenty of time, and we are also likely to have it now
--to put us all through a course of instruction for the training of
chieftainesses?  And when do you think she will be ready for a drawing-
room--Her Majesty Queen Victoria's, or ours?"

"Marion!" said Mrs. Armour severely; but Richard came round to her, and,
with his fresh, child-like humour, put his arm round her waist and added
"Marion, I'd be willing to bet--if I were in the habit of betting--my
shaky old pins here against a lock of your hair that you may present her
at any drawing-room--ours or Queen Victoria's--in two years, if we go at
it right; and it would serve Master Frank very well if we turned her out
something, after all."

To which Mrs. Armour responded almost eagerly: "I wish it were only
possible, Richard.  And what you say is true, I suppose, that she is
of rank in her own country, whatever value that may have."

Richard saw his advantage.  "Well, mother," he said, "a chieftainess is a
chieftainess, and I don't know but to announce her as such, and--"

"And be proud of it, as it were," put in Marion, "and pose her, and make
her a prize--a Pocahontas, wasn't it?--and go on pretending world without
end!"  Marion's voice was still slightly grating, but there was in it too
a faint sound of hope.  "Perhaps," she said to herself, "Richard is
right."

At this point the door opened and Lali entered, shown in by Colvin, her
newly-appointed maid, and followed by Mackenzie, and, as we said, dressed
still in her heathenish garments.  She had a strong sense of dignity, for
she stood still and waited.  Perhaps nothing could have impressed Marion
more.  Had Lali been subservient simply, an entirely passive,
unintelligent creature, she would probably have tyrannised over her in
a soft, persistent fashion, and despised her generally.  But Mrs. Armour
and Marion saw that this stranger might become very troublesome indeed,
if her temper were to have play.  They were aware of capacities for
passion in those dark eyes, so musing yet so active in expression, which
moved swiftly from one object to another and then suddenly became
resolute.

Both mother and daughter came forward, and held out their hands, wishing
her a pleasant good-morning, and were followed by Richard, and
immediately by General Armour, who had entered soon after her.  She had
been keen enough to read (if a little vaguely) behind the scenes, and her
mind was wakening slowly to the peculiarity of the position she occupied.
The place awed her, and had broken her rest by perplexing her mind, and
she sat down to the breakfast-table with a strange hunted look in her
face.  But opposite to her was a window opening to the ground, and beyond
it were the limes and beeches and a wide perfect sward and far away a
little lake, on which swans and wild fowl fluttered.  Presently, as she
sat silent, eating little, her eyes lifted to the window.  They flashed
instantly, her face lighted up with a weird kind of charm, and suddenly
she got to her feet with Indian exclamations on her lips, and, as if
unconscious of them all, went swiftly to the window and out of it, waving
her hands up and down once or twice to the trees and the sunlight.

"What did she say?" said Mrs. Armour, rising with the others.

"She said," replied Mackenzie, as she hurried towards the window, "that
they were her beautiful woods, and there were wild birds flying and
swimming in the water, as in her own country."

By this time all were at the window, Richard arriving last, and the
Indian girl turned on them, her body all quivering with excitement,
laughed a low, bird-like laugh, and then, clapping her hands above her
head, she swung round and ran like a deer towards the lake, shaking her
head back as an animal does when fleeing from his pursuers.  She would
scarcely have been recognised as the same placid, speechless woman in a
blanket who sat with folded hands day after day on the Aphrodite.

The watchers turned and looked at each other in wonder.  Truly, their
task of civilising a savage would not lack in interest.  The old general
was better pleased, however, at this display of activity and excitement
than at yesterday's taciturnity.  He loved spirit, even if it had to be
subdued, and he thought on the instant that he might possibly come to
look upon the fair savage as an actual and not a nominal daughter-in-law.
He had a keen appreciation of courage, and he thought he saw in her face,
as she turned upon them, a look of defiance or daring, and nothing could
have got at his nature quicker.  If the case had not been so near to his
own hearthstone he would have chuckled.  As it was, he said good-
humouredly that Mackenzie and Marion should go and bring her back.
But Mackenzie was already at that duty.  Mrs. Armour had had the presence
of mind to send for Colvin; but presently, when the general spoke, she
thought it better that Marion should go, and counselled returning to
breakfast and not making the matter of too much importance.  This they
did, Richard very reluctantly; while Marion, rather pleased than not at
the spirit shown by the strange girl, ran away over the grass towards the
lake, where Lali had now stopped.  There was a little bridge at one point
where the lake narrowed, and Lali, evidently seeing it all at once, went
towards it, and ran up on it, standing poised above the water about the
middle of it.  For an instant an unpleasant possibility came into
Marion's mind: suppose the excited girl intended suicide!  She shivered
as she thought of it, and yet--!  She put that horribly cruel and selfish
thought away from her with an indignant word at herself.  She had passed
Mackenzie, and came first to the lake.  Here she slackened, and waved her
hand playfully to the girl, so as not to frighten her; and then with a
forced laugh came up panting on the bridge, and was presently by Lali's
side.  Lali eyed her a little furtively, but, seeing that Marion was much
inclined to be pleasant, she nodded to her, said some Indian words
hastily, and spread out her hands towards the water.  As she did so,
Marion noticed again the beauty of those hands and the graceful character
of the gesture, so much so that she forgot the flat hair and the unstayed
body, and the rather broad feet, and the delicate duskiness, which had so
worked upon her in imagination and in fact the evening before.  She put
her hand kindly on that long slim hand stretched out beside her, and,
because she knew not what else to speak, and because the tongue is very
perverse at times,--saying the opposite of what is expected,--she herself
blundered out, "How!  How!  Lali."

Perhaps Lali was as much surprised at the remark as Marion herself, and
certainly very much more delighted.  The sound of those familiar words,
spoken by accident as they were, opened the way to a better
understanding, as nothing else could possibly have done.  Marion was
annoyed with herself, and yet amused too.  If her mind had been perfectly
assured regarding Captain Vidall, it is probable that then and there a
peculiar, a genial, comradeship would have been formed.  As it was,
Marion found this little event more endurable than she expected.  She
also found that Lali, when she laughed in pleasant acknowledgment of that
How!  had remarkably white and regular teeth.  Indeed, Marion Armour
began to discover some estimable points in the appearance of her savage
sister-in-law.  Marion remarked to herself that Lali might be a rather
striking person, if she were dressed, as her mother said, in Christian
garments, could speak the English language well--and was somebody else's
sister-in-law.

At this point Mackenzie came breathlessly to the bridge, and called out a
little sharply to Lali, rebuking her.  In this Mackenzie made a mistake;
for not only did Lali draw herself up with considerable dignity, but
Marion, noticing the masterful nature of the tone, instantly said:
"Mackenzie, you must remember that you are speaking to Mrs. Francis
Armour, and that her position in General Armour's house is the same as
mine.  I hope it is not necessary to say anything more, Mackenzie."

Mackenzie flushed.  She was a sensible woman, she knew that she had done
wrong, and she said very promptly: "I am very sorry, miss.  I was
flustered, and I expect I haven't got used to speaking to--to Mrs. Armour
as I'll be sure to do in the future."

As she spoke, two or three deer came trotting out of the beeches down
to the lake side.  If Lali was pleased and excited before, she was
overwhelmed now.  Her breath came in quick little gasps; she laughed; she
tossed her hands; she seemed to become dizzy with delight; and presently,
as if this new link with, and reminder of, her past, had moved her as one
little expects a savage heart to be moved, two tears gathered in her
eyes, then slid down her cheek unheeded, and dried there in the sunlight,
as she still gazed at the deer.  Marion, at first surprised, was now
touched, as she could not have thought it possible concerning this wild
creature, and her hand went out and caught Lali's gently.  At this
genuine act of sympathy, instinctively felt by Lali, the stranger in a
strange land, husbanded and yet a widow, there came a flood of tears,
and, dropping on her knees, she leaned against the low railing of the
bridge and wept silently.  So passionless was her grief it seemed the
more pathetic, and Marion dropped on her knees beside her, put her arm
round her shoulder, and said: "Poor girl!  Poor girl!"

At that Lali caught her hand, and held it, repeating after her the words:
"Poor girl!  Poor girl!"

She did not quite understand them, but she remembered that once just
before she parted from her husband at the Great Lakes he had said those
very words.  If the fates had apparently given things into Frank Armour's
hands when he sacrificed this girl to his revenge, they were evidently
inclined to play a game which would eventually defeat his purpose, wicked
as it had been in effect if not in absolute motive.  What the end of this
attempt to engraft the Indian girl upon the strictest convention of
English social life would have been had her introduction not been at
Greyhope, where faint likenesses to her past surrounded her, it is hard
to conjecture.  But, from present appearances, it would seem that Richard
Armour was not wholly a false prophet; for the savage had shown herself
that morning to possess, in their crudeness, some striking qualities of
character.  Given character, many things are possible, even to those who
are not of the elect.

This was the beginning of better things.  Lali seemed to the Armours not
quite so impossible now.  Had she been of the very common order of Indian
"pure and simple," the task had resolved itself into making a common
savage into a very common European.  But, whatever Lali was, it was
abundantly evident that she must be reckoned with at all points, and
that she was more likely to become a very startling figure in the Armour
household than a mere encumbrance to be blushed for, whose eternal
absence were preferable to her company.

Years after that first morning Marion caught herself shuddering at the
thought that came to her when she saw Lali hovering on the bridge.
Whatever Marion's faults were, she had a fine dislike of anything that
seemed unfair.  She had not ridden to hounds for nothing.  She had at
heart the sportsman's instinct.  It was upon this basis, indeed, that
Richard appealed to her in the first trying days of Lali's life among
them.  To oppose your will to Marion on the basis of superior knowledge
was only to turn her into a rebel; and a very effective rebel she made;
for she had a pretty gift at the retort courteous, and she could take as
much, and as well, as she gave.  She rebelled at first at assisting in
Lali's education, though by fits and starts she would teach her English
words, and help her to form long sentences, and was, on the whole, quite
patient.  But Lali's real instructors were Mrs. Armour and Richard--,
her best, Richard.

The first few days she made but little progress, for everything was
strange to her, and things made her giddy--the servants, the formal
routine, the handsome furnishings, Marion's music, the great house, the
many precise personal duties set for her, to be got through at stated
times; and Mrs. Armour's rather grand manner.  But there was the relief
to this, else the girl had pined terribly for her native woods and
prairies; this was the park, the deer, the lake, the hares, and birds.
While she sat saying over after Mrs. Armour words and phrases in English,
or was being shown how she must put on and wear the clothes which a
dressmaker from Regent Street had been brought to make, her eyes would
wander dreamily to the trees and the lake and the grass.  They soon
discovered that she would pay no attention and was straightway difficult
to teach if she was not placed where she could look out on the park.
They had no choice, for though her resistance was never active it was
nevertheless effective.

Presently she got on very swiftly with Richard.  For he, with instinct
worthy of a woman, turned their lessons upon her own country and Frank.
This cost him something, but it had its reward.  There was no more
listlessness.  Previously Frank's name had scarcely been spoken to her.
Mrs. Armour would have hours of hesitation and impotent regret before she
brought herself to speak of her son to his Indian wife.  Marion tried to
do it a few times and failed; the general did it with rather a forced
voice and manner, because he saw that his wife was very tender upon the
point.  But Richard, who never knew self-consciousness, spoke freely of
Frank when he spoke at all; and it was seeing Lali's eyes brighten and
her look earnestly fixed on him when he chanced to mention Frank's name,
that determined him on his new method of instruction.  It had its
dangers, but he had calculated them all.  The girl must be educated at
all costs.  The sooner that occurred the sooner would she see her own
position and try to adapt herself to her responsibilities, and face the
real state of her husband's attitude towards her.

He succeeded admirably.  Striving to tell him about her past life, and
ready to talk endlessly about her husband, of his prowess in the hunt,
of his strength and beauty, she also strove to find English words for the
purpose, and Richard supplied them with uncommon willingness.  He
humoured her so far as to learn many Indian words and phrases, but he was
chary of his use of them, and tried hard to make her appreciative of her
new life and surroundings.  He watched her waking slowly to an
understanding of the life, and of all that it involved.  It gave him a
kind of fear, too, because she was sensitive, and there was the possible
danger of her growing disheartened or desperate, and doing some mad thing
in the hour that she wakened to the secret behind her marriage.

His apprehensions were not without cause.  For slowly there came into
Lali's mind the element of comparison.  She became conscious of it one
day when some neighbouring people called at Greyhope.  Mrs. Armour, in
her sense of duty, which she had rigidly set before her, introduced Lali
into the drawing-room.  The visitors veiled their curiosity and said some
pleasant casual things to the young wife, but she saw the half-curious,
half-furtive glances, she caught a sidelong glance and smile, and when
they were gone she took to looking at herself in a mirror, a thing she
could scarcely be persuaded to do before.  She saw the difference between
her carriage and theirs, her manner of wearing her clothes and theirs,
her complexion and theirs.  She exaggerated the difference.  She brooded
on it.  Now she sat downcast and timid, and hunted in face, as on the
first evening she came; now she appeared restless and excited.

If Mrs. Armour was not exactly sympathetic with her, she was quiet and
forbearing, and General Armour, like Richard, tried to draw her out--but
not on the same subjects.  He dwelt upon what she did; the walks she took
in the park, those hours in the afternoon when, with Mackenzie or Colvin,
she vanished into the beeches, making friends with the birds and deer and
swans.  But most of all she loved to go to the stables.  She was,
however, asked not to go unless Richard or General Armour was with her.
She loved horses, and these were a wonder to her.  She had never known
any but the wild, ungroomed Indian pony, on which she had ridden in every
fashion and over every kind of country.  Mrs. Armour sent for a riding-
master, and had riding-costumes made for her.  It was intended that she
should ride every day as soon as she seemed sufficiently presentable.
This did not appear so very far off, for she improved daily in
appearance.  Her hair was growing finer, and was made up in the modest
prevailing fashion; her skin, no longer exposed to an inclement climate,
and subject to the utmost care, was smoother and fairer; her feet,
encased in fine, well-made boots, looked much smaller; her waist was
shaped to fashion, and she was very straight and lissom.  So many things
she did jarred on her relatives, that they were not fully aware of the
great improvement in her appearance.  Even Richard admitted her trying at
times.

Marion went up to town to stay with Mrs. Townley, and there had to face a
good deal of curiosity.  People looked at her sometimes as if it was she
and not Lali that was an Indian.  But she carried things off bravely
enough, and answered those kind inquiries, which one's friends make when
we are in embarrassing situations, with answers so calm and pleasant that
people did not know what to think.

"Yes," she said, in reply to Lady Balwood, "her sister-in-law might be in
town later in the year, perhaps before the season was over: she could not
tell.  She was tired after her long voyage, and she preferred the quiet
of Greyhope; she was fond of riding and country-life; but still she would
come to town for a time."  And so on.

"Ah, dear me, how charming!  And doesn't she resent her husband's
absence--during the honeymoon? or did the honeymoon occur before she came
over to England?"  And Lady Balwood tried to say it all playfully, and
certainly said it something loudly.  She had daughters.

But Marion was perfectly prepared.  Her face did not change expression.
"Yes, they had had their honeymoon on the prairies; Frank was so
fascinated with the life and the people.  He had not come home at once,
because he was making she did not know how great a fortune over there in
investments, and so Mrs. Armour came on before him, and, of course, as
soon as he could get away from his business, he would follow his wife."

And though Marion smiled, her heart was very hot, and she could have
slain Lady Balwood in her tracks.  Lady Balwood then nodded a little
patronisingly, and babbled that "she hoped so much to see Mrs. Francis
Armour.  She must be so very interesting, the papers said so much about
her."

Now, while this conversation was going on, some one stood not far behind
Marion, who seemed much interested in her and what she said.  But Marion
did not see this person.  She was startled presently, however, to hear a
strong voice say softly over her shoulder: "What a charming woman Lady
Balwood is!  And so ingenuous!"

She was grateful, tremulous, proud.  Why had he--Captain Vidall--kept out
of the way all these weeks, just when she needed him most, just when he
should have played the part of a man?  Then she was feeling twinges at
the heart, too.  She had seen Lady Agnes Martling that afternoon, and had
noticed how the news had worn on her.  She felt how much better it had
been had Frank come quietly home and married her, instead of doing the
wild, scandalous thing that was making so many heart-burnings.  A few
minutes ago she had longed for a chance to say something delicately acid
to Lady Haldwell, once Julia Sherwood, who was there.  Now there was a
chance to give her bitter spirit tongue.  She was glad--she dared not
think how glad--to hear that voice again; but she was angry too, and he
should suffer for it--the more so because she recognised in the tone, and
afterwards in his face, that he was still absorbingly interested in her.
There was a little burst of thanksgiving in her heart, and then she
prepared a very notable commination service in her mind.

This meeting had been deftly arranged by Mrs. Townley, with the help of
Edward Lambert, who now held her fingers with a kind of vanity of
possession whenever he bade her good-bye or met her.  Captain Vidall had,
in fact, been out of the country, had only been back a week, and had only
heard of Frank Armour's mesalliance from Lambert at an At Home forty-
eight hours before.  Mrs. Townley guessed what was really at the bottom
of Marion's occasional bitterness, and, piecing together many little
things dropped casually by her friend, had come to the conclusion that
the happiness of two people was at stake.

When Marion shook hands with Captain Vidall she had herself exceedingly
well under control.  She looked at him in slight surprise, and casually
remarked that they had not chanced to meet lately in the run of small-
and-earlies.  She appeared to be unconscious that he had been out of the
country, and also that she had been till very recently indeed at
Greyhope.  He hastened to assure her that he had been away, and to lay
siege to this unexpected barrier.  He knew all about Frank's affair, and,
though it troubled him, he did not see why it should make any difference
in his regard for Frank's sister.  Fastidious as he was in all things, he
was fastidiously deferential.  Not an exquisite, he had all that vanity
as to appearance so usual with the military man; himself of the most
perfect temper and sweetness of manner and conduct, the unusual disturbed
him.  Not possessed of a vivid imagination, he could scarcely conjure up
this Indian bride at Greyhope.

But face to face with Marion Armour he saw what troubled his mind,
and he determined he would not meet her irony with irony, her assumed
indifference with indifference.  He had learned one of the most important
lessons of life--never to quarrel with a woman.  Whoever has so far erred
has been foolish indeed.  It is the worst of policy, to say nothing of
its being the worst of art; and life should never be without art.  It is
absurd to be perfectly natural; anything, anybody can be that.  Well,
Captain Hume Vidall was something of an artist, more, however, in
principle than by temperament.  He refused to recognise the rather
malicious adroitness with which Marion turned his remarks again upon
himself, twisted out of all semblance.  He was very patient.  He inquired
quietly, and as if honestly interested, about Frank, and said--because he
thought it safest as well as most reasonable--that, naturally, they must
have been surprised at his marrying a native; but he himself had seen
some such marriages turn out very well--in Japan, India, the South Sea
Islands, and Canada.  He assumed that Marion's sister-in-law was
beautiful, and then disarmed Marion by saying that he thought of going
down to Greyhope immediately, to call on General Armour and Mrs. Armour,
and wondered if she was going back before the end of the season.

Quick as Marion was, this was said so quietly that she did not quite see
the drift of it.  She had intended staying in London to the end of the
season, not because she enjoyed it, but because she was determined to
face Frank's marriage at every quarter, and have it over, once for all,
so far as herself was concerned.  But now, taken slightly aback, she
said, almost without thinking, that she would probably go back soon--she
was not quite sure; but certainly her father and mother would be glad to
see Captain Vidall at any time.

Then, without any apparent relevancy, he asked her if Mrs. Frank Armour
still wore her Indian costume.  In any one else the question had seemed
impertinent; in him it had a touch of confidence, of the privilege of
close friendship.  Then he said, with a meditative look and a very calm,
retrospective voice, that he was once very much in love with a native
girl in India, and might have become permanently devoted to her, were it
not for the accident of his being ordered back to England summarily.

This was a piece of news which cut two ways.  In the first place it
lessened the extraordinary character of Frank's marriage, and it roused
in her an immediate curiosity--which a woman always feels in the past
"affairs" of her lover, or possible lover.  Vidall did not take pains to
impress her with the fact that the matter occurred when he was almost a
boy; and it was when her earnest inquisition had drawn from him, bit by
bit, the circumstances of the case, and she had forgotten many parts of
her commination service and to preserve an effective neutrality in tone,
that she became aware he was speaking ancient history.  Then it was too
late to draw back.

They had threaded their way through the crowd into the conservatory,
where they were quite alone, and there, with only a little pyramid of
hydrangeas between them, which she could not help but notice chimed well
with the colour of her dress, he dropped his voice a little lower, and
then suddenly said, his eyes hard on her: "I want your permission to go
to Greyhope."

The tone drew her eyes hastily to his, and, seeing, she dropped them
again.  Vidall had a strong will, and, what is of more consequence, a
peculiarly attractive voice.  It had a vibration which made some of his
words organ-like in sound.  She felt the influence of it.  She said a
little faintly, her fingers toying with a hydrangea: "I am afraid I do
not understand.  There is no reason why you should not go to Greyhope
without my permission."

"I cannot go without it," he persisted.  "I am waiting for my commission
from you."

She dropped her hand from the flower with a little impatient motion.  She
was tired, her head ached, she wanted to be alone.  "Why are you
enigmatical?" she said.  Then quickly: "I wish I knew what is in your
mind.  You play with words so."

She scarcely knew what she said.  A woman who loves a man very much is
not quick to take in the absolute declaration of that man's love on the
instant; it is too wonderful for her.  He felt his check flush with hers,
he drew her look again to his.  "Marion!  Marion!" he said.  That was
all.

"Oh, hush, some one is coming!" was her quick, throbbing reply.  When
they parted a half-hour later, he said to her: "Will you give me my
commission to go to Greyhope?"

"Oh no, I cannot," she said very gravely; "but come to Greyhope-when I go
back."

"And when will that be?" he said, smiling, yet a little ruefully too.

"Please ask Mrs. Townley," she replied; "she is coming also."

Marion, knew what that commission to go to Greyhope meant.  But she
determined that he should see Lali first, before anything irrevocable
was done.  She still looked upon Frank's marriage as a scandal.  Well,
Captain Vidall should face it in all its crudeness.  So, in a week or
less, Marion and Mrs. Townley were in Greyhope.

Two months had gone since Lali arrived in England, and yet no letter had
come to her, or to any of them, from Frank.  Frank's solicitor in London
had written him fully of her arrival, and he had had a reply, with
further instructions regarding money to be placed to General Armour's
credit for the benefit of his wife.  Lali, as she became Europeanised,
also awoke to the forms and ceremonies of her new life.  She had
overheard Frank's father and mother wondering, and fretting as they
wondered, why they had not received any word from him.  General Armour
had even called him a scoundrel, which sent Frank's mother into tears.
Then Lali had questioned Mackenzie and Colvin, for she had increasing
shrewdness, and she began to feel her actual position.  She resented
General Armour's imputation, but in her heart she began to pine and
wonder.  At times, too, she was fitful, and was not to be drawn out.  But
she went on improving in personal appearance and manner and in learning
the English language.  Mrs. Townley's appearance marked a change in her.
When they met she suddenly stood still and trembled.  When Mrs. Townley
came to her and took her hand and kissed her, she shivered, and then
caught her about the shoulders lightly, but was silent.  After a little
she said: "Come--come to my wigwam, and talk with me."

She said it with a strange little smile, for now she recognised that the
word wigwam was not to be used in her new life.  But Mrs. Townley
whispered: "Ask Marion to come too."

Lali hesitated, and then said, a little maliciously: "Marion, will you
come to my wigwam?"

Marion ran to her, caught her about the waist, and replied gaily: "Yes,
we will have a pow-wow--is that right--is pow-wow right?"

The Indian girl shook her head with a pretty vagueness, and vanished with
them.  General Armour walked up and down the room briskly, then turned on
his wife and said: "Wife, it was a brutal thing: Frank doesn't deserve to
be--the father of her child."

But Lali had moods--singular moods.  She indulged in one three days after
the arrival of Marion and Mrs. Townley.  She had learned to ride with the
side-saddle, and wore her riding-dress admirably.  Nowhere did she show
to better advantage.  She had taken to riding now with General Armour on
the country roads.  On this day Captain Vidall was expected, he having
written to ask that he might come.  What trouble Lali had with one of the
servants that morning was never thoroughly explained, but certain it is,
she came to have a crude notion of why Frank Armour married her.  The
servant was dismissed duly, but that was after the contre-temps.

It was late afternoon.  Everybody had been busy, because one or two other
guests were expected besides Captain Vidall.  Lali had kept to herself,
sending word through Richard that she would not "be English," as she
vaguely put it, that day.  She had sent Mackenzie on some mission.  She
sat on the floor of her room, as she used to sit on the ground in her
father's lodge.  Her head was bowed in her hands, and her arms rested on
her knees.  Her body swayed to and fro.  Presently all motion ceased.
She became perfectly still.  She looked before her as if studying
something.

Her eyes immediately flashed.  She rose quickly to her feet, went to her
wardrobe, and took out her Indian costume and blanket, with which she
could never be induced to part.  Almost feverishly she took off the
clothes she wore and hastily threw them from her.  Then she put on the
buckskin clothes in which she had journeyed to England, drew down her
hair as she used to wear it, fastened round her waist a long red sash
which had been given her by a governor of the Hudson's Bay Company when
he had visited her father's country, threw her blanket round her
shoulders, and then eyed herself in the great mirror in the room.  What
she saw evidently did not please her perfectly, for she stretched out her
hands and looked at them; she shook her head at herself and put her hand
to her cheeks and pinched them, they were not so brown as they once were,
then she thrust out her foot.  She drew it back quickly in disdain.
Immediately she caught the fashionable slippers from her feet and threw
them among the discarded garments.  She looked at herself again.  Still
she was not satisfied, but she threw up her arms, as with a sense of
pleasure and freedom, and laughed at herself.  She pushed out her
moccasined foot, tapped the floor with it, nodded towards it, and said a
word or two in her own language.  She heard some one in the next room,
possibly Mackenzie.  She stepped to the door leading into the hall,
opened it, went out, travelled its length, ran down a back hallway, out
into the park, towards the stables, her blanket, as her hair, flying
behind her.

She entered the stables, made for a horse that she had ridden much, put a
bridle on him, led him out before any one had seen her, and, catching him
by the mane, suddenly threw herself on him at a bound, and, giving him a
tap with a short whip she had caught up in the stable, headed him for the
main avenue and the open road.  Then a stableman saw her and ran after,
but he might as well have tried to follow the wind.  He forthwith
proceeded to saddle another horse.  Boulter also saw her as she passed
the house, and, running in, told Mrs. Armour and the general.  They both
ran to the window and saw dashing down the avenue--a picture out of
Fenimore Cooper; a saddleless horse with a rider whose fingers merely
touched the bridle, riding as on a journey of life and death.

"My God, it's Lali!  She's mad--she's mad!  She is striking that horse!
It will bolt!  It will kill her!" cried the general.

Then he rushed for a horse to follow her.  Mrs. Armour's hands clasped
painfully.  For an instant she had almost the same thought as had Marion
on the first morning of Lali's coming; but that passed, and left her
gazing helplessly after the horse-woman.  The flying blanket had
frightened the blooded horse, and he made desperate efforts to fulfil the
general's predictions.

Lali soon found that she had miscalculated.  She was not riding an Indian
pony, but a crazed, high-strung horse.  As they flew, she sitting
superbly and tugging at the bridle, the party coming from the railway
station entered the great gate, accompanied by Richard and Marion.  In a
moment they sighted this wild pair bearing down upon them with a terrible
swiftness.

As Marion recognised Lali she turned pale and cried out, rising in her
seat.  Instinctively Captain Vidall knew who it was, though he could not
guess the cause of the singular circumstance.  He saw that the horse had
bolted, but also that the rider seemed entirely fearless.  "Why, in
Heaven's name," he said between his teeth, "doesn't she let go that
blanket!"

At that moment Lali did let it go, and the horse dashed by them, making
hard for the gate.  "Turn the horses round and follow her," said Vidall
to the driver.  While this was doing, Marion caught sight of her father
riding hard down the avenue.  He passed them, and called to them to hurry
on after him.

Lali had not the slightest sense of fear, but she knew that the horse had
gone mad.  When they passed through the gate and swerved into the road, a
less practised rider would have been thrown.  She sat like wax.  The pace
was incredible for a mile, and though General Armour rode well, he was
far behind.

Suddenly a trap appeared in the road in front of them, and the driver,
seeing the runaway, set his horses at right angles to the road.  It
served the purpose only to provide another danger.  Not far from where
the trap was drawn, and between it and the runaway, was a lane, which
ended at a farmyard in a cul-de-sac.  The horse swerved into it, not
slacking its pace, and in the fraction of a minute came to the farmyard.

But now the fever was in Lali's blood.  She did not care whether she
lived or died.  A high hedge formed the cul-de-sac.  When she saw the
horse slacking she cut it savagely across the head twice with a whip, and
drove him at the green wall.  He was of too good make to refuse it, stiff
as it was.  He rose to it magnificently, and cleared it; but almost as he
struck the ground squarely, he staggered and fell--the girl beneath him.
He had burst a blood-vessel.  The ground was soft and wet; the weight of
the horse prevented her from getting free.  She felt its hoof striking in
its death-struggles, and once her shoulder was struck.  Instinctively she
buried her face in the mud, and her arms covered her head.

And then she knew no more.

When she came to, she was in the carriage within the gates of Greyhope,
and Marion was bending over her.  She suddenly tried to lift herself, but
could not.  Presently she saw another face--that of General Armour.  It
was stern, and yet his eyes were swimming as he looked at her.

"How!" she said to him--"How!" and fainted again.





ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Being young, she exaggerated the importance of the event
His duties were many, or he made them so
Men must have their bad hours alone
Most important lessons of life--never to quarrel with a woman
Sympathy and consolation might be much misplaced
These little pieces of art make life possible
Think of our position
Who never knew self-consciousness
You never can make a scandal less by trying to hide it





THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.


VI.       THE PASSING OF THE YEARS
VII.      A COURT-MARTIAL
VIII.     TO EVERY MAN HIS HOUR
IX.       THE FAITH OF COMRADES



CHAPTER VI

THE PASSING OF THE YEARS

Lali's recovery was not rapid.  A change had come upon her.  With that
strange ride had gone the last strong flicker of the desire for savage
life in her.  She knew now the position she held towards her husband:
that he had never loved her; that she was only an instrument for unworthy
retaliation.  So soon as she could speak after her accident, she told
them that they must not write to him and tell him of it.  She also made
them promise that they would give him no news of her at all, save that
she was well.  They could not refuse to promise; they felt she had the
right to demand much more than that.  They had begun to care for her for
herself, and when the months went by, and one day there was a hush about
her room, and anxiety, and then relief, in the faces of all, they came to
care for her still more for the sake of her child.

As the weeks passed, the fair-haired child grew more and more like his
father; but if Lali thought of her husband they never knew it by anything
she said, for she would not speak of him.  She also made them promise
that they would not write to him of the child's birth.  Richard, with his
sense of justice, and knowing how much the woman had been wronged, said
that in all this she had done quite right; that Frank, if he had done his
duty after marrying her, should have come with her.  And because they all
felt that Richard had been her best friend as well as their own, they
called the child after him.  This also was Lali's wish.  Coincident with
her motherhood there came to Lali a new purpose.  She had not lived with
the Armours without absorbing some of their fine social sense and
dignity.  This, added to the native instinct of pride in her, gave her a
new ambition.  As hour by hour her child grew dear to her, so hour by
hour her husband grew away from her.  She schooled herself against him.
--At times she thought she hated him.  She felt she could never forgive
him, but she would prove to him that it was she who had made the mistake
of her life in marrying him; that she had been wronged, not he; and that
his sin would face him with reproach and punishment one day.  Richard's
prophecy was likely to come true: she would defeat very perfectly indeed
Frank's intentions.  After the child was born, so soon as she was able,
she renewed her studies with Richard and Mrs. Armour.  She read every
morning for hours; she rode; she practised all those graceful arts of the
toilet which belong to the social convention; she showed an unexpected
faculty for singing, and practised it faithfully; and she begged Mrs.
Armour and Marion to correct her at every point where correction seemed
necessary.  When the child was two years old, they all went to London,
something against Lali's personal feelings, but quite in accord with what
she felt her duty.

Richard was left behind at Greyhope.  For the first time in eighteen
months he was alone with his old quiet duties and recreations.  During
that time he had not neglected his pensioners,--his poor, sick, halt, and
blind, but a deeper, larger interest had come into his life in the person
of Lali.  During all that time she had seldom been out of his sight,
never out of his influence and tutelage.  His days had been full, his
every hour had been given a keen, responsible interest.  As if by tacit
consent, every incident or development of Lali's life was influenced by
his judgment and decision.  He had been more to her than General Armour,
Mrs. Armour, or Marion.  Schooled as he was in all the ways of the
world, he had at the same time a mind as sensitive as a woman's, an
indescribable gentleness, a persuasive temperament.  Since, years before,
he had withdrawn from the social world and become a recluse, many of his
finer qualities had gone into an indulgent seclusion.  He had once loved
the world and the gay life of London, but some untoward event, coupled
with a radical love of retirement, had sent him into years of isolation
at Greyhope.

His tutelar relations with Lali had reopened many an old spring
of sensation and experience.  Her shy dependency, her innocent
inquisitiveness, had searched out his remotest sympathies.  In teaching
her he had himself been re-taught.  Before she came he had been satisfied
with the quiet usefulness and studious ease of his life.  But in her
presence something of his old youthfulness came back, some reflection of
the ardent hopes of his young manhood.  He did not notice the change in
himself.  He only knew that his life was very full.  He read later at
nights, he rose earlier in the morning.  But unconsciously to himself,
he was undergoing a change.  The more a man's sympathies and emotions
are active, the less is he the philosopher.  It is only when one has
withdrawn from the more personal influence of the emotions that one's
philosophy may be trusted.  One may be interested in mankind and still
be philosophical--may be, as it were, the priest and confessor to all
comers.  But let one be touched in some vital corner in one's nature,
and the high, faultless impartiality is gone.  In proportion as Richard's
interest in Lali had grown, the universal quality of his sympathy had
declined.  Man is only man.  Not that his benefactions as lord-bountiful
in the parish had grown perfunctory, but the calm detail of his interest
was not so definite.  He was the same, yet not the same.

He was not aware of any difference in himself.  He did not know that he
looked younger by ten years.  Such is the effect of mere personal
sympathy upon a man's look and bearing.  When, therefore, one bright May
morning, the family at Greyhope, himself excluded, was ready to start for
London, he had no thought but that he would drop back into his old silent
life, as it was before Lali came, and his brother's child was born.  He
was not conscious that he was very restless that morning; he scarcely was
aware that he had got up two hours earlier than usual.  At the breakfast-
table he was cheerful and alert.  After breakfast he amused himself in
playing with the child till the carriage was brought round.  It was such
a morning as does not come a dozen times a year in England.  The sweet,
moist air blew from the meadows and up through the lime trees with a
warm, insinuating gladness.  The lawn sloped delightfully away to the
flowered embrasures of the park, and a fragrant abundance of flowers met
the eye and cheered the senses.  While Richard loitered on the steps with
the child and its nurse, more excited than he knew, Lali came out and
stood beside him.  At the moment Richard was looking into the distance.
He did not hear her when she came.  She stood near him for a moment, and
did not speak.  Her eyes followed the direction of his look, and idled
tenderly with the prospect before her.  She did not even notice the
child.  The same thought was in the mind of both--with a difference.
Richard was wondering how any one could choose to change the sweet
dignity of that rural life for the flaring, hurried delights of London
and the season.  He had thought this a thousand times, and yet, though he
would have been little willing to acknowledge it, his conviction was not
so impregnable as it had been.

Mrs. Francis Armour was stepping from the known to the unknown.  She was
leaving the precincts of a life in which, socially, she had been born
again.  Its sweetness and benign quietness had all worked upon her nature
and origin to change her.  In that it was an out-door life, full of
freshness and open-air vigour, it was not antagonistic to her past.  Upon
this sympathetic basis had been imposed the conditions of a fine social
decorum.  The conditions must still exist.  But how would it be when she
was withdrawn from this peaceful activity of nature and set down among
"those garish lights" in Cavendish Square and Piccadilly?  She hardly
knew to what she was going as yet.  There had been a few social functions
at Greyhope since she had come, but that could give her, after all, but
little idea of the swing and pressure of London life.

At this moment she was lingering over the scene before her.  She was
wondering with the naive wonder of an awakened mind.  She had intended
many times of late saying to Richard all the native gratitude she felt;
yet somehow she had never been able to say it.  The moment of parting had
come.

"What are you thinking of, Richard?" she said now.  He started and
turned towards her.

"I hardly know," he answered.  "My thoughts were drifting."

"Richard," she said abruptly," I want to thank you."

"Thank me for what, Lali?" he questioned.

"To thank you, Richard, for everything--since I came, over three years
ago."

He broke out into a soft little laugh, then, with his old good-natured
manner, caught her hand as he did the first night she came to Greyhope,
patted it in a fatherly fashion, and said:

"It is the wrong way about, Lali; I ought to be thanking you, not you me.
Why, look what a stupid old fogy I was then, toddling about the place
with too much time on my hands, reading a lot and forgetting everything;
and here you came in, gave me something to do, made the little I know of
any use, and ran a pretty gold wire down the rusty fiddle of life.  If
there are any speeches of gratitude to be made, they are mine, they are
mine."

"Richard," she said very quietly and gravely, "I owe you more than I can
ever say--in English.  You have taught me to speak in your tongue enough
for all the usual things of life, but one can only speak from the depths
of one's heart in one's native tongue.  And see," she added, with a
painful little smile, "how strange it would sound if I were to tell you
all I thought in the language of my people--of my people, whom I shall
never see again.  Richard, can you understand what it must be to have a
father whom one is never likely to see again--whom, if one did see again,
something painful would happen?  We grow away from people against our
will; we feel the same towards them, but they cannot feel the same
towards us; for their world is in another hemisphere.  We want to love
them, and we love, remember, and are glad to meet them again, but they
feel that we are unfamiliar, and, because we have grown different
outwardly, they seem to miss some chord that used to ring.  Richard, I--
I--"  She paused.

"Yes, Lali," he assented--"yes, I understand you so far; but speak out."

"I am not happy," she said.  "I never shall be happy.  I have my child,
and that is all I have.  I cannot go back to the life in which I was
born; I must go on as I am, a stranger among a strange people, pitied,
suffered, cared for a little--and that is all."

The nurse had drawn away a little distance with the child.  The rest of
the family were making their preparations inside the house.  There was no
one near to watch the singular little drama.

"You should not say that," he added; "we all feel you to be one of us."

"But all your world does not feel me to be one of them," she rejoined.

"We shall see about that when you go up to town.  You are a bit morbid,
Lali.  I don't wonder at your feeling a little shy; but then you will
simply carry things before you--now you take my word for it!  For I know
London pretty well."

She held out her ungloved hands.

"Do they compare with the white hands of the ladies you know?" she said.

"They are about the finest hands I have ever seen," he replied.  "You
can't see yourself, sister of mine."

"I do not care very much to see myself," she said.  "If I had not a maid
I expect I should look very shiftless, for I don't care to look in a
mirror.  My only mirror used to be a stream of water in summer," she
added, "and a corner of a looking-glass got from the Hudson's Bay fort in
the winter."

"Well, you are missing a lot of enjoyment," he said, "if you do not use
your mirror much.  The rest of us can appreciate what you would see
there."

She reached out and touched his arm.

"Do you like to look at me?" she questioned, with a strange simple
candour.

For the first time in many a year, Richard Armour blushed like a girl
fresh from school.  The question had come so suddenly, it had gone so
quickly into a sensitive corner of his nature, that he lost command of
himself for the instant, yet had little idea why the command was lost.
He touched the fingers on his arm affectionately.

"Like to look at you--like to look at you?  Why, of course we all like
to look at you.  You are very fine and handsome  and interesting."

"Richard," she said, drawing her hands away, "is that why you like to
look at me?"

He had recovered himself.  He laughed in his old hearty way, and said:

"Yes, yes; why, of course!  Come, let us go and see the boy," he added,
taking her arm and hurrying her down the steps.  "Come and let us see
Richard Joseph, the pride of all the Armours."

She moved beside him in a kind of dream.  She had learned much since she
came to Greyhope, and yet she could not at that moment have told exactly
why she asked Richard the question that had confused him, nor did she
know quite what lay behind the question.  But every problem which has
life works itself out to its appointed end, if fumbling human fingers do
not meddle with it.  Half the miseries of this world are caused by
forcing issues, in every problem of the affections, the emotions, and the
soul.  There is a law working with which there should be no tampering,
lest in foolish interruption come only confusion and disaster.  Against
every such question there should be written the one word, "Wait."

Richard Armour stooped over the child.  "A beauty," he said, "a perfect
little gentleman.  Like Richard Joseph Armour there is none," he added.

"Whom do you think he looks like, Richard?" she asked.  This was a
question she had never asked before since the child was born.  Whom the
child looked like every one knew; but within the past year and a half
Francis Armour's name had seldom been mentioned, and never in connection
with the child.  The child's mother asked the question with a strange
quietness.  Richard answered it without hesitation.

"The child looks like Frank," he said.  "As like him as can be."

"I am glad," she said, "for all your sakes."

"You are very deep this morning, Lali," Richard said, with a kind of
helplessness.  "Frank will be pretty proud of the youngster when he comes
back.  But he won't be prouder of him than I am."

"I know that," she said.  "Won't you be lonely without the boy--and me,
Richard?"

Again the question went home.  "Lonely?  I should think I would," he
said.  "I should think I would.  But then, you see, school is over, and
the master stays behind and makes up the marks.  You will find London a
jollier master than I am, Lali.  There'll be lots of shows, and plenty to
do, and smart frocks, and no end of feeds and frolics; and that is more
amusing than studying three hours a day with a dry old stick like me.  I
tell you what, when Frank comes--"

She interrupted him.  "Do not speak of that," she said.  Then, with a
sudden burst of feeling, though her words were scarcely audible: "I owe
you everything, Richard--everything that is good.  I owe him nothing,
Richard--nothing but what is bitter."

"Hush, hush," he said; "you must not speak that way.  Lali, I want to say
to you--"

At that moment General Armour, Mrs. Armour, and Marion appeared on the
door-step, and the carriage came wheeling up the drive.  What Richard
intended to say was left unsaid.  The chances were it never would be
said.

"Well, well," said General Armour, calling down at them, "escort his
imperial highness to the chariot which awaits him, and then ho!  for
London town.  Come along, my daughter," he said to Lali; "come up here
and take the last whiff of Greyhope that you will have for six months.
Dear, dear, what lunatics we all are, to be sure!  Why, we're as happy as
little birds in their nests out in the decent country, and yet we scamper
off to a smoky old city by the Thames to rush along with the world,
instead of sitting high and far away from it and watching it go by.  God
bless my soul, I'm old enough to know better!  Well, let me help you in,
my dear," he added to his wife; "and in you go, Marion; and in you go,
your imperial highness"--he passed the child awkwardly in to Marion;
"and in you go, my daughter," he added, as he handed Lali in, pressing
her hand with a brusque fatherliness as he did so.  He then got in after
them.

Richard came to the side of the carriage and bade them all good-bye one
by one.  Lali gave him her hand, but did not speak a word.  He called a
cheerful adieu, the horses were whipped up, and in a moment Richard was
left alone on the steps of the house.  He stood for a time looking, then
he turned to go into the house, but changed his mind, sat down, lit a
cigar, and did not move from his seat until he was summoned to his lonely
luncheon.

Nobody thought much of leaving Richard behind at Greyhope.  It seemed the
natural thing to do.  But still he had not been left alone--entirely
alone--for three years or more.

The days and weeks went on.  If Richard had been accounted eccentric
before, there was far greater cause for the term now.  Life dragged.  Too
much had been taken out of his life all at once; for, in the first place,
the family had been drawn together more during the trouble which Lali's
advent had brought; then the child and its mother, his pupil, were gone
also.  He wandered about in a kind of vague unrest.  The hardest thing in
this world to get used to is the absence of a familiar footstep and the
cheerful greeting of a familiar eye.  And the man with no chick or child
feels even the absence of his dog from the hearth-rug when he returns
from a journey or his day's work.  It gives him a sense of strangeness
and loss.  But when it is the voice of a woman and the hand of a child
that is missed, you can back no speculation upon that man's mood or mind
or conduct.  There is no influence like the influence of habit, and that
is how, when the minds of people are at one, physical distances and
differences, no matter how great, are invisible, or at least not obvious.

Richard Armour was a sensible man; but when one morning he suddenly
packed a portmanteau and went up to town to Cavendish Square, the act
might be considered from two sides of the equation.  If he came back to
enter again into the social life which, for so many years, he had
abjured, it was not very sensible, because the world never welcomes its
deserters; it might, if men and women grew younger instead of older.  If
he came to see his family, or because he hungered for his godchild, or
because--but we are hurrying the situation.  It were wiser not to state
the problem yet.  The afternoon that he arrived at Cavendish Square all
his family were out except his brother's wife.  Lali was in the drawing-
room, receiving a visitor who had asked for Mrs. Armour and Mrs. Francis
Armour.  The visitor was received by Mrs. Francis Armour.  The visitor
knew that Mrs. Armour was not at home.  She had by chance seen her and
Marion in Bond Street, and was not seen by them.  She straightway got
into her carriage and drove up to Cavendish Square, hoping to find Mrs.
Francis Armour at home.  There had been house-parties at Greyhope since
Lali had come there to live, but this visitor, though once an intimate
friend of the family, had never been a guest.

The visitor was Lady Haldwell, once Miss Julia Sherwood, who had made
possible what was called Francis Armour's tragedy.  Since Lali had come
to town Lady Haldwell had seen her, but had never met her.  She was not
at heart wicked, but there are few women who can resist an opportunity of
anatomising and reckoning up the merits and demerits of a woman who has
married an old lover.  When that woman is in the position of Lali, the
situation has an unusual piquancy and interest.  Hence Lady Haldwell's
journey of inquisition to Cavendish Square.

As Richard passed the drawing-room door to ascend the stairs, he
recognised the voices.

Once a sort of heathen, as Mrs. Francis Armour had been, she still could
grasp the situation with considerable clearness.  There is nothing keener
than one woman's instinct regarding another woman, where a man is
concerned.  Mrs. Francis Armour received Lady Haldwell with a quiet
stateliness, which, if it did not astonish her, gave her sufficient
warning that matters were not, in this little comedy, to be all her own
way.

Thrown upon the mere resources of wit and language, Mrs. Francis Armour
must have been at a disadvantage.  For Lady Haldwell had a good gift of
speech, a pretty talent for epithet, and no unnecessary tenderness.  She
bore Lali no malice.  She was too decorous and high for that.  In her
mind the wife of the man she had discarded was a mere commonplace
catastrophe, to be viewed without horror, maybe with pity.  She had heard
the alien spoken well of by some people; others had seemed indignant that
the Armours should try to push "a red woman" into English society.  Truth
is, the Armours did not try at all to push her.  For over three years
they had let society talk.  They had not entertained largely in Cavendish
Square since Lali came, and those invited to Greyhope had a chance to
refuse the invitations if they chose.  Most people did not choose to
decline them.  But Lady Haldwell was not of that number.  She had never
been invited.  But now in town, when entertainment must be more general,
she and the Armours were prepared for social interchange.

Behind Lady Haldwell's visit curiosity chiefly ran.  She was in a way
sorry for Frank Armour, for she had been fond of him after a fashion,
always fonder of him than of Lord Haldwell.  She had married with her
fingers holding the scales of advantage; and Lord Haldwell dressed well,
was immensely rich, and the title had a charm.

When Mrs. Francis Armour met her with her strange, impressive dignity,
she was the slightest bit confused, but not outwardly.  She had not
expected it.  At first Lali did not know who her visitor was.  She had
not caught the name distinctly from the servant.

Presently Lady Haldwell said, as Lali gave her hand "I am Lady Haldwell.
As Miss Sherwood I was an old friend of your husband."

A scornful glitter came into Mrs. Armour's eyes--a peculiar touch of
burnished gold, an effect of the light at a certain angle of the lens.
It gave for the instant an uncanny look to the face, almost something
malicious.  She guessed why this woman had come.  She knew the whole
history of the past, and it touched her in a tender spot.  She knew she
was had at an advantage.  Before her was a woman perfectly trained in the
fine social life to which she was born, whose equanimity was as regular
as her features.  Herself was by nature a creature of impulse, of the
woods and streams and open life.  The social convention had been
engrafted.  As yet she was used to thinking and speaking with all
candour.  She was to have her training in the charms of superficiality,
but that was to come; and when it came she would not be an unskilful
apprentice.  Perhaps the latent subtlety of her race came to help her
natural candour at the moment.  For she said at once, in a slow, quiet
tone:

"I never heard my husband speak of you.  Will you sit down?"

"And Mrs. Armour and Marion are not in?  No, I suppose your husband did
not speak much of his old friends."

The attack was studied and cruel.  But Lady Haldwell had been stung by
Mrs. Armour's remark, and it piqued her that this was possible.

"Well, yes, he spoke of some of his friends, but not of you."

"Indeed!  That is strange."

"There was no necessity," said Mrs. Armour quietly.

"Of discussing me?  I suppose not.  But by some chance--"

"It was just as well, perhaps, not to anticipate the pleasure of our
meeting."

Lady Haldwell was surprised.  She had not expected this cleverness.
They talked casually for a little time, the visitor trying in vain to
delicately give the conversation a personal turn.  At last, a little
foolishly, she grew bolder, with a needless selfishness.

"So old a friend of your husband as I am, I am hopeful you and I may be
friends also."

Mrs. Armour saw the move.

"You are very kind," she said conventionally, and offered a cup of tea.

Lady Haldwell now ventured unwisely.  She was nettled at the other's
self-possession.

"But then, in a way, I have been your friend for a long time, Mrs.
Armour."

The point was veiled in a vague tone, but Mrs. Armour understood.  Her
reply was not wanting.  "Any one who has been a friend to my husband has,
naturally, claims upon me."

Lady Haldwell, in spite of herself, chafed.  There was a subtlety in the
woman before her not to be reckoned with lightly.

"And if an enemy?" she said, smiling.

A strange smile also flickered across Mrs. Armour's face as she said:

"If an enemy of my husband called, and was penitent, I should--offer her
tea, no doubt."

"That is, in this country; but in your own country, which, I believe, is
different, what would you do?"  Mrs. Armour looked steadily and coldly
into her visitor's eyes.

"In my country enemies do not compel us to be polite."

"By calling on you?"  Lady Haldwell was growing a little reckless.  "But
then, that is a savage country.  We are different here.  I suppose,
however, your husband told you of these things, so that you were not
surprised.  And when does he come?  His stay is protracted.  Let me see,
how long is it?  Ah yes, near four years."  Here she became altogether
reckless, which she regretted afterwards, for she knew, after all, what
was due herself.  "He will comeback, I suppose?"

Lady Haldwell was no coward, else she had hesitated before speaking in
that way before this woman, in whose blood was the wildness of the
heroical North.  Perhaps she guessed the passion in Lali's breast,
perhaps not.  In any case she would have said what she listed at the
moment.

Wild as were the passions in Lali's breast, she thought on the instant of
her child, of what Richard Armour would say; for he had often talked to
her about not showing her emotions and passions, had told her that
violence of all kinds was not wise or proper.  Her fingers ached to grasp
this beautiful, exasperating woman by the throat.  But after an effort at
calmness she remained still and silent, looking at her visitor with a
scornful dignity.  Lady Haldwell presently rose,--she could not endure
the furnace of that look,--and said good-bye.  She turned towards the
door.  Mrs. Armour remained immovable.  At that instant, however, some
one stepped from behind a large screen just inside the door.  It was
Richard Armour.  He was pale, and on his face was a sternness the like
of which this and perhaps only one other woman had ever seen on him.  He
interrupted her.

"Lady Haldwell has a fine talent for irony," he said, "but she does not
always use it wisely.  In a man it would bear another name, and from a
man it would be differently received."  He came close to her.  "You are a
brave woman," he said, "or you would have been more careful.  Of course
you knew that my mother and sister were not at home?"

She smiled languidly.  "And why 'of course'?"

"I do not know that; only I know that I think so; and I also think that
my brother Frank's worst misfortune did not occur when Miss Julia
Sherwood trafficked without compunction in his happiness."

"Don't be oracular, my dear Richard Armour," she replied.  "You are
trying, really.  This seems almost melodramatic; and melodrama is bad
enough at Drury Lane."

"You are not a good friend even to yourself," he answered.

"What a discoverer you are!  And how much in earnest!  Do come back to
the world, Mr. Armour; you would be a relief, a new sensation."

"I fancy I shall come back, if only to see the 'engineer hoist with his
own'--torpedo."

He paused before the last word to give it point, for her husband's father
had made his money out of torpedoes.  She felt the sting in spite of
herself, and she saw the point.

"And then we will talk it over at the end of the season," he added, "and
compare notes.  Good-afternoon."

"You stake much on your hazard," she said, glancing back at Lali, who
still stood immovable.  "Au revoir!"  She left the room.  Richard heard
the door close after her and the servant retire.  Then he turned to Lali.

As he did so, she ran forward to him with a cry.  "Oh, Richard, Richard!"
she exclaimed, with a sob, threw her arms over his shoulder, and let her
forehead drop on his breast.  Then came a sudden impulse in his blood.
Long after he shuddered when he remembered what he thought at that
instant; what he wished to do; what rich madness possessed him.  He knew
now why he had come to town; he also knew why he must not stay, or, if
staying, what must be his course.

He took her gently by the arm and led her to a chair, speaking cheerily
to her.  Then he sat down beside her, and all at once again, her face wet
and burning, she flung herself forward on her knees beside him, and clung
to him.

"Oh, Richard, I am glad you have come," she said.  "I would have killed
her if I had not thought of you.  I want you to stay; I am always better
when you are with me.  I have missed you, and I know that baby misses you
too."

He had his cue.  He rose, trembling a little.  "Come, come," he said
heartily, "it's all right, it's all right-my sister.  Let us go and see
the youngster.  There, dry your eyes, and forget all about that woman.
She is only envious of you.  Come, for his imperial highness!"

She was in a tumult of feeling.  It was seldom that she had shown emotion
in the past two years, and it was the more ample when it did break forth.
But she dried her eyes, and together they went to the nursery.  She
dismissed the nurse and they were left alone by the sleeping child.  She
knelt at the head of the little cot, and touched the child's forehead
with her lips.  He stooped down also beside it.

"He's a grand little fellow," he said.  "Lali," he continued presently,
"it is time Frank came home.  I am going to write for him.  If he does
not come at once, I shall go and fetch him."

"Never! never!"  Her eyes flashed angrily.  "Promise that you will not.
Let him come when he is ready.

"He does not, care."  She shuddered a little.

"But he will care when he comes, and you--you care for him, Lali?"

Again she shuddered, and a whiteness ran under the hot excitement of her
cheeks.  She said nothing, but looked up at him, then dropped her face in
her hands.

"You do care for him, Lali," he said earnestly, almost solemnly, his lips
twitching slightly.  "You must care for him; it is his right; and he
will--I swear to you I know he will--care for you."

In his own mind there was another thought, a hard, strange thought; and
it had to do with the possibility of his brother not caring for this
wife.

Still she did not speak.

"To a good woman, with a good husband," he continued, "there is no one--
there should be no one--like the father of her child.  And no woman ever
loved her child more than you do yours."  He knew that this was special
pleading.

She trembled, and then dropped her cheek beside the child's.  "I want
Frank to be happy," he went on; "there is no one I care more for than
for Frank."

She lifted her face to him now, in it a strange light.  Then her look ran
to confusion, and she seemed to read all that he meant to convey.  He
knew she did.  He touched her shoulder.

"You must do the best you can every way, for Frank's sake, for all our
sakes.  I will help you--God knows I will--all I can."

"Ah, yes, yes," she whispered, from the child's pillow.

He could see the flame in her cheek.  "I understand."  She put out her
hand to him, but did not look up.  "Leave me alone with my baby,
Richard," she pleaded.

He took her hand and pressed it again and again in his old, unconscious
way.  Then he let it go, and went slowly to the door.  There he turned
and looked back at her.  He mastered the hot thought in him.  "God help
me!" she murmured from the cot.  The next morning Richard went back to
Greyhope.




CHAPTER VII

A COURT-MARTIAL

It was hard to tell, save for a certain deliberateness of speech and a
colour a little more pronounced than that of a Spanish woman, that Mrs.
Frank Armour had not been brought up in England.  She had a kind of grave
sweetness and distant charm which made her notable at any table or in
any ballroom.  Indeed, it soon became apparent that she was to be the
pleasant talk, the interest of the season.  This was tolerably comforting
to the Armours.  Again Richard's prophecy had been fulfilled, and as he
sat alone at Greyhope and read the Morning Post, noticing Lali's name
at distinguished gatherings, or, picking up the World, saw how the lion-
hunters talked extravagantly of her, he took some satisfaction to himself
that he had foreseen her triumph where others looked for her downfall.
Lali herself was not elated; it gratified her, but she had been an angel,
and a very unsatisfactory one, if it had not done so.  As her confidence
grew (though outwardly she had never appeared to lack it greatly), she
did not hesitate to speak of herself as an Indian, her country as a good
country, and her people as a noble if dispossessed race; all the more so
if she thought reference to her nationality and past was being rather
conspicuously avoided.  She had asked General Armour for an interview
with her husband's solicitor.  This was granted.  When she met the
solicitor, she asked him to send no newspaper to her husband containing
any reference to herself, nor yet to mention her in his letters.

She had never directly received a line from him but once, and that was
after she had come to know the truth about his marriage with her.  She
could read in the conventional sentences, made simple as for a child,
the strained politeness, and his absolute silence as to whether or not
a child had been born to them, the utter absence of affection for her.
She had also induced General Armour and his wife to give her husband's
solicitor no information regarding the birth of the child.  There was
thus apparently no more inducement for him to hurry back to England than
there was when he had sent her off on his mission of retaliation, which
had been such an ignominious failure.  For the humiliation of his family
had been short-lived, the affront to Lady Haldwell nothing at all.  The
Armours had not been human if they had failed to enjoy their daughter-in
-law's success.  Although they never, perhaps, would quite recover the
disappointment concerning Lady Agnes Martling, the result was so much
better than they in their cheerfulest moments dared hope for, that they
appeared genuinely content.

To their grandchild they were devotedly attached.  Marion was his
faithful slave and admirer, so much so that Captain Vidall, who now and
then was permitted to see the child, declared himself jealous.  He and
Marion were to be married soon.  The wedding had been delayed owing to
his enforced absence abroad.  Mrs. Edward Lambert, once Mrs. Townley,
shyly regretted in Lali's presence that the child, or one as sweet,
was not hers.  Her husband evidently shared her opinion, from the
extraordinary notice he took of it when his wife was not present.  Not
that Richard Joseph Armour, Jun., was always en evidence, but when asked
for by his faithful friends and admirers he was amiably produced.

Meanwhile, Frank Armour across the sea was engaged with many things.
His business concerns had not prospered prodigiously, chiefly because his
judgment, like his temper, had grown somewhat uncertain.  His popularity
in the Hudson's Bay country had been at some tension since he had shipped
his wife away to England.  Even the ordinary savage mind saw something
unusual and undomestic in it, and the general hospitality declined a
little.  Armour did not immediately guess the cause; but one day, about a
year after his wife had gone, he found occasion to reprove a half-breed,
by name Jacques Pontiac; and Jacques, with more honesty than politeness,
said some hard words, and asked how much he paid for his English hired
devils to kill his wife.  Strange to say, he did not resent this
startling remark.  It set him thinking.  He began to blame himself for
not having written oftener to his people--and to his wife.  He wondered
how far his revenge had succeeded.  He was most ashamed of it now.  He
knew that he had done a dishonourable thing.  The more he thought upon
it the more angry with himself he became.  Yet he dreaded to go back to
England and face it all: the reproach of his people; the amusement of
society; his wife herself.  He never attempted to picture her as a
civilised being.  He scarcely knew her when he married her.  She knew
him much better, for primitive people are quicker in the play of their
passions, and she had come to love him before he had begun to notice
her at all.

Presently he ate his heart out with mortification.  To be yoked for ever
to--a savage!  It was horrible.  And their children?  It was strange he
had not thought of that before.  Children?  He shrugged his shoulders.
There might possibly be a child, but children--never!  But he doubted
even regarding a child, for no word had come to him concerning that
possibility.  He was even most puzzled at the tone and substance of their
letters.  From the beginning there had been no reproaches, no excitement,
no railing, but studied kindness and conventional statements, through
which Mrs. Armour's solicitous affection scarcely ever peeped.  He had
shot his bolt, and got--consideration, almost imperturbability.  They
appeared to treat the matter as though he were a wild youth who would not
yet mend his ways.  He read over their infrequent letters to him; his to
them had been still more infrequent.  In one there was the statement that
"she was progressing favourably with her English"; in another, that "she
was riding a good deal"; again, that "she appeared anxious to adapt
herself to her new life."

At all these he whistled a little to himself, and smiled bitterly.  Then,
all at once, he got up and straightway burned them all.  He again tried
to put the matter behind him for the present, knowing that he must face
it one day, and staving off its reality as long as possible.  He did his
utmost to be philosophical and say his quid refert, but it was easier
tried than done; for Jacques Pontiac's words kept rankling in his mind,
and he found himself carrying round a vague load, which made him
abstracted occasionally, and often a little reckless in action and
speech.  In hunting bear and moose he had proved himself more daring than
the oldest hunter, and proportionately successful.  He paid his servants
well, but was sharp with them.

He made long, hard expeditions, defying the weather as the hardiest of
prairie and mountain men mostly hesitate to defy it; he bought up much
land, then, dissatisfied, sold it again at a loss, but subsequently made
final arrangements for establishing a very large farm.  When he once
became actually interested in this he shook off something of his
moodiness and settled himself to develop the thing.  He had good talent
for initiative and administration, and at last, in the time when his wife
was a feature of the London season, he found his scheme in working order,
and the necessity of going to England was forced upon him.

Actually he wished that the absolute necessity had presented itself
before.  There was always the moral necessity, of course--but then!
Here now was a business need; and he must go.  Yet he did not fix a day
or make definite arrangements.  He could hardly have believed himself
such a coward.  With liberal emphasis he called himself a sneak, and one
day at Fort Charles sat down to write to his solicitor in Montreal to say
that he would come on at once.  Still he hesitated.  As he sat there
thinking, Eye-of-the-Moon, his father-in-law, opened the door quietly and
entered.  He had avoided the chief ever since he had come back to Fort
Charles, and practically had not spoken to him for a year.  Armour
flushed slightly with annoyance.  But presently, with a touch of his old
humour, he rose, held out his hand, and said ironically: "Well, father-
in-law, it's about time we had a big talk, isn't it?  We're not very
intimate for such close relatives."

The old Indian did not fully understand the meaning or the tone of
Armour's speech, but he said "How!" and, reaching out his hand for the
pipe offered him, lighted it, and sat down, smoking in silence.  Armour
waited; but, seeing that the other was not yet moved to talk, he turned
to his letter again.  After a time, Eye-of-the-Moon said gravely, getting
to his feet: "Brother!"

Armour looked up, then rose also.  The Indian bowed to him courteously,
then sat down again.  Armour threw a leg over a corner of the table and
waited.

"Brother," said the Indian presently, "you are of the great race that
conquers us.  You come and take our land and our game, and we at last
have to beg of you for food and shelter.  Then you take our daughters,
and we know not where they go.  They are gone like the down from the
thistle.  We see them not, but you remain.  And men say evil things.
There are bad words abroad.  Brother, what have you done with my
daughter?"

Had the Indian come and stormed, begged money of him, sponged on him,
or abused him, he had taken it very calmly--he would, in fact, have been
superior.  But there was dignity in the chief's manner; there was
solemnity in his speech; his voice conveyed resoluteness and earnestness,
which the stoic calm of his face might not have suggested; and Armour
felt that he had no advantage at all.  Besides, Armour had a conscience,
though he had played some rare tricks with it of late, and it needed more
hardihood than he possessed to face this old man down.  And why face him
down?  Lali was his daughter, blood of his blood, the chieftainess of one
branch of his people, honoured at least among these poor savages, and the
old man had a right to ask, as asked another more famous, "Where is my
daughter?"

His hands in his pockets, Armour sat silent for a minute, eyeing his
boot, as he swung his leg to and fro.  Presently he said: "Eye-of-the-
Moon, I don't think I can talk as poetically as you, even in my own
language, and I shall not try.  But I should like to ask you this:
Do you believe any harm has come to your daughter--to my wife?"

The old Indian forgot to blow the tobacco-smoke from his mouth, and, as
he sat debating, lips slightly apart, it came leaking out in little
trailing clouds and gave a strange appearance to his iron-featured face.
He looked steadily at Armour, and said: "You are of those who rule in
your land,"--here Armour protested, "you have much gold to buy and sell.
I am a chief, "he drew himself up,--"I am poor: we speak with the
straight tongue; it is cowards who lie.  Speak deep as from the heart,
my brother, and tell me where my daughter is."

Armour could not but respect the chief for the way this request was put,
but still it galled him to think that he was under suspicion of having
done any bodily injury to his wife, so he quietly persisted: "Do you
think I have done Lali any harm?"

"The thing is strange," replied the other.  "You are of those who are
great among your people.  You married a daughter of a red man.  Then she
was yours for less than one moon, and you sent her far away, and you
stayed.  Her father was as a dog in your sight.  Do men whose hearts
are clear act so?  They have said strange things of you.  I have not
believed; but it is good I know all, that I may say to the tale-bearers,
'You have crooked tongues.'"

Armour sat for a moment longer, his face turned to the open window.  He
was perfectly still, but he had become grave.  He was about to reply to
the chief, when the trader entered the room hurriedly with a newspaper in
his hand.  He paused abruptly when he saw Eye-of-the-Moon.  Armour felt
that the trader had something important to communicate.  He guessed it
was in the paper.  He mutely held out his hand for it.  The trader handed
it to him hesitatingly, at the same time pointing to a paragraph, and
saying: "It is nearly two years old, as you see.  I chanced upon it by
accident to-day."

It was a copy of a London evening paper, containing a somewhat
sensational account of Lali's accident.  It said that she was in a
critical condition.  This time Armour did not ask for brandy, but the
trader put it out beside him.  He shook his head.  "Gordon," he said
presently, "I shall leave here in the morning.  Please send my men to
me."

The trader whispered to him: "She was all right, of course, long ago, Mr.
Armour, or you would have heard."

Armour looked at the date of the paper.  He had several letters from
England of a later date, and these said nothing of her illness.  It
bewildered him, made him uneasy.  Perhaps the first real sense of his
duty as a husband came home to him there.  For the first time he was
anxious about the woman for her own sake.  The trader had left the room.

"What a scoundrel I've been!" said Armour between his teeth, oblivious,
for the moment, of Eye-of-the-Moon's presence.  Presently, bethinking
himself, he turned to the Indian.  "I've been debating," he said.  "Eye-
of-the-Moon, my wife is in England, at my father's home.  I am going to
her.  Men have lied in thinking I would do her any injury, but--but--
never mind, the harm was of another kind.  It isn't wise for a white man
and an Indian to marry, but when they are married--well, they must live
as man and wife should live, and, as I said, I am going to my wife."

To say all this to a common Indian, whose only property was a dozen
ponies and a couple of tepees, required something very like moral
courage; but then Armour had not been exercising moral courage during
the last year or so, and its exercise was profitable to him.  The next
morning he was on his way to Montreal, and Eye-of-the-Moon was the
richest chief in British North America, at that moment, by five thousand
dollars or so.




CHAPTER VIII

TO EVERY MAN HIS HOUR

It was the close of the season: many people had left town, but
festivities were still on.  To a stranger the season might have seemed
at its height.  The Armours were giving a large party in Cavendish Square
before going back again to Greyhope, where, for the sake of Lali and
her child, they intended to remain during the rest of the summer,
in preference to going on the Continent or to Scotland.  The only
unsatisfactory feature of Lali's season was the absence of her husband.
Naturally there were those who said strange things regarding Frank
Armour's stay in America; but it was pretty generally known that he was
engaged in land speculations, and his club friends, who perhaps took the
pleasantest view of the matter, said that he was very wise indeed, if a
little cowardly, in staying abroad until his wife was educated and ready
to take her position in society.  There was one thing on which they were
all agreed: Mrs. Frank Armour either had a mind superior to the charms
of their sex, or was incapable of that vanity which hath many suitors,
and says: "So far shalt thou go, and--" The fact is, Mrs. Frank Armour's
mind was superior.  She had only one object--to triumph over her husband
grandly, as a woman righteously might.  She had vanity, of course, but it
was not ignoble.  She kept one thing in view; she lived for it.

Her translation had been successful.  There were times when she
remembered her father, the wild days on the prairies, the buffalo-hunt,
tracking the deer, tribal battles, the long silent hours of the winter,
and the warm summer nights when she slept in the prairie grass or camped
with her people in the trough of a great landwave.  Sometimes the hunger
for its freedom, and its idleness, and its sport, came to her greatly;
but she thought of her child, and she put it from her.  She was ambitious
for him; she was keen to prove her worth as a wife against her husband's
unworthiness.  This perhaps saved her.  She might have lost had her life
been without this motive.

The very morning of this notable reception, General Armour had received
a note from Frank Armour's solicitor, saying that his son was likely to
arrive in London from America that day or the next.  Frank had written to
his people no word of his coming; to his wife, as we have said, he had
not written for months; and before he started back he would not write,
because he wished to make what amends he could in person.  He expected to
find her improved, of course, but still he could only think of her as an
Indian, showing her common prairie origin.  His knowledge of her before
their marriage had been particularly brief; she was little more in his
eyes than a thousand other Indian women, save that she was better-
looking, was whiter than most, and had finer features.  He could not very
clearly remember the tones of her voice, because after marriage, and
before he had sent her to England, he had seen little or nothing of her.

When General Armour received the news of Frank's return he told his wife
and Marion, and they consulted together whether it were good to let Lali
know at once.  He might arrive that evening.  If so, the position would
be awkward, because it was impossible to tell how it might affect her.
If they did tell her, and Frank happened not to arrive, it might unnerve
her so as to make her appearance in the evening doubtful.  Richard, the
wiseacre, the inexhaustible Richard, was caring for his cottagers and
cutting the leaves of new books--his chiefest pleasure--at Greyhope.
They felt it was a matter they ought to be able to decide for themselves,
but still it was the last evening of Lali's stay in town, and they did
not care to take any risk.  Strange to say, they had come to take pride
in their son's wife; for even General and Mrs. Armour, high-minded and
of serene social status as they were, seemed not quite insensible to the
pleasure of being an axle on which a system of social notoriety revolved.

At the opportune moment Captain Vidall was announced, and, because he and
Marion were soon to carry but one name between them, he was called into
family consultation.  It is somewhat singular that in this case the women
were quite wrong and the men were quite right.  For General Armour and
Captain Vidall were for silence until Frank came, if he came that day,
or for telling her the following morning, when the function was over.
And the men prevailed.

Marion was much excited all day; she had given orders that Frank's room
should be made ready, but for whom she gave no information.  While Lali
was dressing for the evening, something excited and nervous, she entered
her room.  They were now the best of friends.  The years had seen many
shifting scenes in their companionship; they had been as often at war as
at peace; but they had respected each other, each after her own fashion;
and now they had a real and mutual regard.  Lali's was a slim, lithe
figure, wearing its fashionable robes with an air of possession;
and the face above it, if not entirely beautiful, had a strange, warm
fascination.  The girl had not been a chieftainess for nothing.  A look
of quiet command was there, but also a far-away expression which gave a
faint look of sadness even when a smile was at the lips.  The smile
itself did not come quickly, it grew; but above it all was hair of
perfect brown, most rare,--setting off her face as a plume does a helmet.
She showed no surprise when Marion entered.  She welcomed her with a
smile and outstretched hand, but said nothing.

"Lali," said Marion somewhat abruptly,--she scarcely knew why she said
it,--"are you happy?"

It was strange how the Indian girl had taken on those little manners of
society which convey so much by inflection.  She lifted her eyebrows at
Marion, and said presently, in a soft, deliberate voice, "Come, Marion,
we will go and see little Richard; then I shall be happy."

She linked her arm through Marion's.  Marion drummed her fingers lightly
on the beautiful arm, and then fell to wondering what she should say
next.  They passed into the room where the child lay sleeping; they went
to his little bed, and Lali stretched out her hand gently, touching the
curls of the child.  Running a finger through one delicately, she said,
with a still softer tone than before: "Why should not one be happy?"

Marion looked up slowly into her eyes, let a hand fall on her shoulder
gently, and replied: "Lali, do you never wish Frank to come?"

Lali's fingers came from the child, the colour mounted slowly to her
forehead, and she drew the girl away again into the other room.  Then she
turned and faced Marion, a deep fire in her eyes, and said, in a whisper
almost hoarse in its intensity: "Yes; I wish he would come to-night."

She looked harder yet at Marion; then, with a flash of pride and her
hands clasping before her, she drew herself up, and added: "Am I not
worthy to be his wife now?  Am I not beautiful--for a savage?"

There was no common vanity in the action.  It had a noble kind of
wistfulness, and a serenity that entirely redeemed it.  Marion dated
her own happiness from the time when Lali met her accident, for in the
evening of that disastrous day she issued to Captain Hume Vidall a
commission which he could never--wished never--to resign.  Since then
she had been at her best,--we are all more or less selfish creatures,--
and had grown gentler, curbing the delicate imperiousness of her nature,
and frankly, and without the least pique, taken a secondary position of
interest in the household, occasioned by Lali's popularity.  She looked
Lali up and down with a glance in which many feelings met, and then,
catching her hands warmly, she lifted them, put them on her own
shoulders, and said: "My dear beautiful savage, you are fit and
worthy to be Queen of England; and Frank, when he comes--"

"Hush!" said the other dreamily, and put a finger on Marion's lips.  "I
know what you are going to say, but I do not wish to hear it.  He did not
love me then.  He used me--" She shuddered, put her hands to her eyes
with a pained, trembling motion, then threw her head back with a quick
sigh.  "But I will not speak of it.  Come, we are for the dance, Marion.
It is the last, to-night.  To-morrow--" She paused, looking straight
before her, lost in thought.

"Yes, to-morrow, Lali?"

"I do not know about to-morrow," was the reply.  "Strange things come to
me."

Marion longed to tell her then and there the great news, but she was
afraid to do so, and was, moreover, withheld by the remembrance that it
had been agreed she should not be told.  She said nothing.

At eleven o'clock the rooms were filled.  For the fag end of the season,
people seemed unusually brilliant.  The evening itself was not so hot as
common, and there was an extra array of distinguished guests.  Marion was
nervous all the evening, though she showed little of it, being most
prettily employed in making people pleased with themselves.  Mrs. Armour
also was not free from apprehension.  In reply to inquiries concerning
her son she said, as she had often said during the season, that he might
be back at any time now.  Lali had answered always in the same fashion,
and had shown no sign that his continued absence was singular.  As the
evening wore on, the probability of Frank's appearance seemed less; and
the Armours began to breathe more freely.

Frank had, however, arrived.  He had driven straight from Euston to
Cavendish Square, but, seeing the house lighted up, and guests arriving,
he had a sudden feeling of uncertainty.  He ordered the cabman to take
him to his club.  There he put himself in evening-dress, and drove back
again to the house.  He entered quietly.  At the moment the hall was
almost deserted; people were mostly in the ballroom and supper-room.  He
paused a moment, biting his moustache as if in perplexity.  A strange
timidity came on him.  All his old dash and self-possession seemed to
have forsaken him.  Presently, seeing a number of people entering the
hall, he made for the staircase, and went hastily up.  Mechanically he
went to his own room, and found it lighted.  Flowers were set about, and
everything was made ready as for a guest.  He sat down, not thinking, but
dazed.

Glancing up, he saw his face in a mirror.  It was bronzed, but it looked
rather old and careworn.  He shrugged a shoulder at that.  Then, in the
mirror, he saw also something else.  It startled him so that he sat
perfectly still for a moment looking at it.  It was some one laughing at
him over his shoulder--a child!  He got to his feet and turned round.  On
the table was a very large photograph of a smiling child--with his eyes,
his face.  He caught the chair-arm, and stood looking at it a little
wildly.  Then he laughed a strange laugh, and the tears leaped to his
eyes.  He caught the picture in his hands, and kissed it,--very
foolishly, men not fathers might think,--and read the name beneath,
Richard Joseph Armour; and again, beneath that, the date of birth.
He then put it back on the table and sat looking at it-looking, and
forgetting, and remembering.

Presently, the door opened, and some one entered.  It was Marion.  She
had seen him pass through the hall; she had then gone and told her father
and mother, to prepare them, and had followed him upstairs.  He did not
hear her.  She stepped softly forwards.  "Frank!" she said--"Frank!"
and laid a hand on his shoulder.  He started up and turned his face on
her.

Then he caught her hands and kissed her.  "Marion!" he said, and he
could say no more.  But presently he pointed towards the photograph.

She nodded her head.  "Yes, it is your child, Frank.  Though, of course,
you don't deserve it.  .  .  .  Frank dear," she added, "I am glad--we
shall all be glad-to have you back; but you are a wicked man."  She felt
she must say that.

Now he only nodded, and still looked at the portrait.  "Where is--my
wife?" he added presently.

"She is in the ballroom."  Marion was wondering what was best to do.

He caught his thumb-nail in his teeth.  He winced in spite of himself.
"I will go to her," he said, "and then--the baby."

"I am glad," she replied, "that you have so much sense of justice left,
Frank: the wife first, the baby afterwards.  But do you think you deserve
either?"

He became moody, and made an impatient gesture.  "Lady Agnes Martling is
here, and also Lady Haldwell," she persisted cruelly.  She did not mind,
because she knew he would have enough to compensate him afterwards.

"Marion," he said, "say it all, and let me have it over.  Say what you
like, and I'll not whimper.  I'll face it.  But I want to see my child."

She was sorry for him.  She had really wanted to see how much he was
capable of feeling in the matter.

"Wait here, Frank," she said.  "That will be best; and I will bring your
wife to you."

He said nothing, but assented with a motion of the hand, and she left
him where he was.  He braced himself for the interview.  Assuredly a man
loses something of natural courage and self-confidence when he has done
a thing of which he should be, and is, ashamed.

It seemed a long time (it was in reality but a couple of minutes) before
the door opened again, and Marion said: "Frank, your wife!" and then
retreated.

The door closed, leaving a stately figure standing just inside it.  The
figure did not move forwards, but stood there, full of life and fine
excitement, but very still also.

Frank Armour was confounded.  He came forwards slowly, looking hard.
Was this distinguished, handsome, reproachful woman his wife--Lali, the
Indian girl, whom he had married in a fit of pique and brandy?  He could
hardly believe his eyes; and yet hers looked out at him with something
that he remembered too, together with something which he did not
remember, making him uneasy.  Clearly, his great mistake had turned from
ashes into fruit.  "Lali!" he said, and held out his hand.

She reached out hers courteously, but her fingers gave him no response.

"We have many things to say to each other," she said, "but they cannot be
said now.  I shall be missed from the ballroom."

"Missed from the ballroom!"  He almost laughed to think how strange this
sounded in his ears.  As if interpreting his thought, she added: "You
see, it is our last affair of the season, and we are all anxious to do
our duty perfectly.  Will you go down with me?  We can talk afterwards."

Her continued self-possession utterly confused him.  She had utterly
confused Marion also, when told that her husband was in the house.  She
had had presentiments, and, besides, she had been schooling herself for
this hour for a long time.  She turned towards the door.

"But," he asked, like a supplicant, "our child!  I want to see the boy."

She lifted her eyebrows, then, seeing the photograph of the baby on the
table, understood how he knew.  "Come with me, then," she said, with a
little more feeling.

She led the way along the landing, and paused at her door.  "Remember
that we have to appear amongst the guests directly," she said, as though
to warn him against any demonstration.  Then they entered.  She went over
to the cot and drew back the fleecy curtain from over the sleeping boy's
head.  His fingers hungered to take his child to his arms.  "He is
magnificent--magnificent!" he said, with a great pride.  "Why did you
never let me know of it?"

"How could I tell what you would do?" she calmly replied.  "You married
me--wickedly, and used me wickedly afterwards; and I loved the child."

"You loved the child," he repeated after her.  "Lali," he added, "I don't
deserve it, but forgive me, if you can--for the child's sake."

"We had better go below," she calmly replied.  "We have both duties to
do.  You will of course--appear with me--before them?"

The slight irony in the tone cut him horribly.  He offered his arm in
silence.  They passed on to the staircase.

"It is necessary," she said, "to appear cheerful before one's guests."

She had him at an advantage at every point.  "We will be cheerful, then,"
was his reply, spoken with a grim kind of humour.  "You have learned it
all, haven't you?" he added.

They were just entering the ballroom.  "Yes, with your kind help--and
absence," she replied.

The surprise of the guests was somewhat diminished by the fact that
Marion, telling General Armour and his wife first of Frank's return,
industriously sent the news buzzing about the room.

The two went straight to Frank's father and mother.  Their parts were
all excellently played.  Then Frank mingled among the guests, being very
heartily greeted, and heard congratulations on all sides.  Old club
friends rallied him as a deserter, and new acquaintances flocked about
him; and presently he awakened to the fact that his Indian wife had been
an interest of the season, was not the least admired person present.
It was altogether too good luck for him; but he had an uncomfortable
conviction that he had a long path of penance to walk before he could
hope to enjoy it.

All at once he met Lady Haldwell, who, in spite of all, still accepted
invitations to General Armour's house--the strange scene between Lali and
herself never having been disclosed to the family.  He had nothing but
bitterness in his heart for her, but he spoke a few smooth words, and she
languidly congratulated him on his bronzed appearance.  He asked for a
dance, but she had not one to give him.  As she was leaving, she suddenly
turned as though she had forgotten something, and looking at him, said:
"I forgot to congratulate you on your marriage.  I hope it is not too
late?"

He bowed.  "Your congratulations are so sincere," he said,  "that they
would be a propos late or early."  When he stood with his wife whilst the
guests were leaving, and saw with what manner she carried it all off,--as
though she had been born in the good land of good breeding,--he was moved
alternately with wonder and shame--shame that he had intended this noble
creature as a sacrifice to his ugly temper and spite.

When all the guests were gone and the family stood alone in the drawing-
room, a silence suddenly fell amongst them.  Presently Marion said to her
mother in a half-whisper, "I wish Richard were here."

They all felt the extreme awkwardness of the situation, especially when
Lali bade General Armour, Mrs. Armour, and Marion good-night, and then,
turning to her husband, said, "Good-night"--she did not even speak his
name.  "Perhaps you would care to ride to-morrow morning?  I always go
to the Park at ten, and this will be my last ride of the season."

Had she written out an elaborate proclamation of her intended attitude
towards her husband, it could not have more clearly conveyed her mind
than this little speech, delivered as to a most friendly acquaintance.
General Armour pulled his moustache fiercely, and, it is possible,
enjoyed the situation, despite its peril.  Mrs. Armour turned to the
mantel and seemed tremulously engaged in arranging some bric-a-brac.
Marion, however, with a fine instinct, slid her arm through that of Lali,
and gently said: "Yes, of course Frank will be glad of a ride in the
Park.  He used to ride with me every morning.  But let us go, us three,
and kiss the baby good-night--'good-night till we meet in the morning.'"

She linked her arm now through Frank's, and as she did so he replied to
Lali: "I shall be glad to ride in the morning, but--"

"But we can arrange it at breakfast," said his wife hurriedly.  At the
same time she allowed herself to be drawn away to the hall with her
husband.

He was very angry, but he knew he had no right to be so.  He choked back
his wrath and moved on amiably enough, and suddenly the fashion in which
the tables had been turned on him struck him with its tragic comedy, and
he involuntarily smiled.  His sense of humour saved him from words and
acts which might possibly have made the matter a pure tragedy after all.
He loosed his arm from Marion's.

"I must bid father and mother good-night.  Then I will join you both--
'in the court of the king.'"   And he turned and went back, and said to
his father as he kissed his mother: "I am had at an advantage, General."

"And serves you right, my boy.  You had the odds with you, but she has
captured them like a born soldier."  His mother said to him gently:
"Frank, you blamed us, but remember that we wished only your good.  Take
my advice, dear, and try to love your wife and win her confidence."

"Love her--try to love her!" he said.  "I shall easily do that.  But the
other--?"  He shook his head a little, though what he meant perhaps he
did not know quite himself, and then followed Marion and Lali upstairs.
Marion had tried to escape from Lali, but was told that she must stay;
and the three met at the child's cot.  Marion stooped down and kissed its
forehead.  Frank stooped also and kissed its cheek.  Then the wife kissed
the other cheek.  The child slept peacefully on.  "You can always see the
baby here before breakfast, if you choose," said Lali; and she held out
her hand again in good-night.  At this point Marion stole away, in spite
of Lah's quick little cry of "Wait, Marion!" and the two were left alone
again.

"I am very tired," she said.  "I would rather not talk to-night."  The
dismissal was evident.

He took her hand, held it an instant, and presently said: "I will not
detain you, but I would ask you, Lali, to remember that you are my wife.
Nothing can alter that."

"Still we are only strangers, as you know," she quietly rejoined.

"You forget the days we were together--after we were married," he
cautiously urged.

"I am not the same girl, .  .  .  you killed her.  .  .  We have to start
again.  .  .  .  I know all."

"You know that in my wretched anger and madness I--"

"Oh, please do not speak of it," she said; "it is so bad even in
thought."

"But will you never forgive me, and care for me?  We have to live our
lives together."

"Pray let us not speak of it now," she said, in a weary voice; then,
breathlessly: "It is of much more consequence that you should love me
--and the child."

He drew himself up with a choking sigh, and spread out his arms to her.
"Oh, my wife!" he exclaimed.

"No, no," she cried, "this is unreasonable; we know so little of each
other.  .  .  .  Good-night, again."

He turned at the door, came back, and, stooping, kissed the child on the
lips.  Then he said: "You are right.  I deserve to suffer.  .  .  .
Good-night."

But when he was gone she dropped on her knees, and kissed the child many
times on the lips also.





ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

If fumbling human fingers do not meddle with it
Miseries of this world are caused by forcing issues
Reading a lot and forgetting everything
The world never welcomes its deserters
There is no influence like the influence of habit
There should be written the one word, "Wait."
Training in the charms of superficiality
We grow away from people against our will
We speak with the straight tongue; it is cowards who lie






THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.


IX.       THE FAITH OF COMRADES
X.        "THOU KNOWEST THE SECRETS OF OUR HEARTS"
XI.       UPON THE HIGHWAY
XII.      "THE CHASE OF THE YELLOW SWAN"
XIII.     A LIVING POEM
XIV.      ON THE EDGE OF A FUTURE
XV.       THE END OF THE TRAIL



CHAPTER IX

THE FAITH OF COMRADES

When Francis Armour left his wife's room he did not go to his own, but
quietly descended the stairs, went to the library, and sat down.  The
loneliest thing in the world is to be tete-a-tete with one's conscience.
A man may have a bad hour with an enemy, a sad hour with a friend, a
peaceful hour with himself, but when the little dwarf, conscience,
perches upon every hillock of remembrance and makes slow signs--those
strange symbols of the language of the soul--to him, no slave upon the
tread-mill suffers more.

The butler came in to see if anything was required, but Armour only
greeted him silently and waved him away.  His brain was painfully alert,
his memory singularly awake.  It seemed that the incident of this hour
had so opened up every channel of his intelligence that all his life ran
past him in fantastic panorama, as by that illumination which comes to
the drowning man.  He seemed under some strange spell.  Once or twice he
rose, rubbed his eyes, and looked round the room--the room where as a boy
he had spent idle hours, where as a student he had been in the hands of
his tutor, and as a young man had found recreations such as belong to
ambitious and ardent youth.  Every corner was familiar.  Nothing was
changed.  The books upon the shelves were as they were placed twenty
years ago.  And yet he did not seem a part of it.  It did not seem
natural to him.  He was in an atmosphere of strangeness--that atmosphere
which surrounds a man, as by a cloud, when some crisis comes upon him and
his life seems to stand still, whirling upon its narrow base, while the
world appears at an interminable distance, even as to a deaf man who sees
yet cannot hear.

There came home to him at that moment with a force indescribable the
shamelessness of the act he committed four years ago.  He had thought to
come back to miserable humiliation.  For four years he had refused to do
his duty as a man towards an innocent woman,--a woman, though in part a
savage,--now transformed into a gentle, noble creature of delight and
goodness.  How had he deserved it?  He had sown the storm, it was but
just that he should reap the whirlwind; he had scattered thistles,
could he expect to gather grapes?  He knew that the sympathy of all his
father's house was not with him, but with the woman he had wronged.  He
was glad it was so.  Looking back now, it seemed so poor and paltry a
thing that he, a man, should stoop to revenge himself upon those who had
given him birth, as a kind of insult to the woman who had lightly set him
aside, and should use for that purpose a helpless, confiding girl.  To
revenge one's self for wrong to one's self is but a common passion, which
has little dignity; to avenge some one whom one has loved, man or woman,
--and, before all, woman,--has some touch of nobility, is redeemed by
loyalty.  For his act there was not one word of defence to be made, and
he was not prepared to make it.

The cigars and liquors were beside him, but he did not touch them.  He
seemed very far away from the ordinary details of his life: he knew he
had before him hard travel, and he was not confident of the end.  He
could not tell how long he sat there.  --After, a time the ticking of
the clock seemed painfully loud to him.  Now and again he heard a cab
rattling through the Square, and the foolish song of some drunken
loiterer in the night caused him to start painfully.  Everything jarred
on him.  Once he got up, went to the window, and looked out.  The moon
was shining full on the Square.  He wondered if it would be well for him
to go out and find some quiet to his nerves in walking.  He did so.  Out
in the Square he looked up to his wife's window.  It was lighted.  Long
time he walked up and down, his eyes on the window.  It held him like a
charm.  Once he leaned against the iron railings of the garden and looked
up, not moving for a time.  Presently he saw the curtain of the window
raised, and against the dim light of the room was outlined the figure of
his wife.  He knew it.  She stood for a moment looking out into the
night.  She could not see him, nor could he see her features at all
plainly, but he knew that she, like him, was alone with the catastrophe
which his wickedness had sent upon her.  Soon the curtain was drawn down
again, and then he went once more to the house and took his old seat
beside the table.  He fell to brooding, and at last, exhausted, dropped
to a troubled sleep.  He woke with a start.  Some one was in the room.
He heard a step behind him.  He came to his feet quickly, a wild light in
his eyes.  He faced his brother Richard.

Late in the afternoon Marion had telegraphed to Richard that Frank was
coming.  He had been away visiting some poor and sick people, and when he
came back to Greyhope it was too late to catch the train.  But the horses
were harnessed straightway, and he was driven into town, a three-hours'
drive.  He had left the horses at the stables, and, having a latch-key,
had come in quietly.  He had seen the light in the study, and guessed who
was there.  He entered, and saw his brother asleep.  He watched him for a
moment and studied him.  Then he moved away to take off his hat, and, as
he did so, stumbled slightly.  Then it was Frank waked, and for the first
time in five years they looked each other in the eyes.  They both stood
immovable for a moment, and then Richard caught Frank's hand in both of
his and said: "God bless you, my boy!  I am glad you are back."

"Dick!  Dick!" was the reply, and Frank's other hand clutched Richard's
shoulder in his strong emotion.  They stood silent for a moment longer,
and then Richard recovered himself.  He waved his hand to the chairs.
The strain of the situation was a little painful for them both.  Men are
shy with each other where their emotions are in play.

"Why, my boy," he said, waving a hand to the spirits and liqueurs, "full
bottles and unopened boxes?  Tut, tut!  here's a pretty how-d'ye-do.  Is
this the way you toast the home quarters?  You're a fine soldier for an
old mess!"

So saying, he poured out some whiskey, then opened the box of cigars and
pushed them towards his brother.  He did not care particularly to drink
or smoke himself, but a man--an Englishman--is a strange creature.  He is
most natural and at ease when he is engaged in eating and drinking.  He
relieves every trying situation by some frivolous and selfish occupation,
as of dismembering a partridge, or mixing a punch.

"Well, Frank," said his brother, "now what have you to say for yourself?
Why didn't you come long ago?  You have played the adventurer for five
years, and what have you to show for it?  Have you a fortune?"  Frank
shook his head, and twisted a shoulder.  "What have you done that is
worth the doing, then?"

"Nothing that I intended to do, Dick," was the grave reply.

"Yes, I imagined that.  You have seen them, have you?" he added, in a
softer voice.

Frank blew a great cloud of smoke about his face, and through it he said:
"Yes, I have seen a damned sight more than I deserved to see."

"Oh, of course; I know that, my boy; but, so far as I can see, in another
direction you are getting quite what you deserve: your wife and child are
upstairs--you are here."

He paused, was silent for a moment, then leaned over, caught his
brother's arm, and said, in a low, strenuous voice: "Frank Armour, you
laid a hateful little plot for us.  It wasn't manly, but we forgave it
and did the best we could.  But see here, Frank, take my word for it,
you have had a lot of luck.  There isn't one woman out of ten thousand
that would have stood the test as your wife has stood it; injured at the
start, constant neglect, temptation--" he paused.  "My boy, did you ever
think of that, of the temptation to a woman neglected by her husband?
The temptation to men?  Yes, you have had a lot of luck.  There has been
a special providence for you, my boy; but not for your sake.  God doesn't
love neglectful husbands, but I think He is pretty sorry for neglected
wives."

Frank was very still.  His head drooped, the cigar hung unheeded in his
fingers for a moment, and he said at last: "Dick, old boy, I've thought
it all over to-night since I came back--everything that you've said.
I have not a word of defence to make, but, by heaven!  I'm going to win
my wife's love if I can, and when I do it I'll make up for all my cursed
foolishness--see if I don't."

"That sounds well, Frank," was the quiet reply.  "I like to hear you talk
that way.  You would be very foolish if you did not.  What do you think
of the child?"

"Can you ask me what I think?  He is a splendid little fellow."

"Take care of him, then--take good care of him: you may never have
another," was the grim rejoinder.  Frank winced.  His brother rose, took
his arm, and said: "Let us go to our rooms, Frank.  There will be time
enough to talk later, and I am not so young as I once was."

Truth to say, Richard Armour was not so young as he seemed a few months
before.  His shoulders were a little stooped, he was greyer about the
temples.  The little bit of cynicism which had appeared in that remark
about the care of the child showed also in the lines of his mouth; yet
his eyes had the same old true, honest look.  But a man cannot be hit in
mortal places once or twice in his life without its being etched on his
face or dropped like a pinch of aloe from his tongue.

Still they sat and talked much longer, Frank showing better than when his
brother came, Richard gone grey and tired.  At last Richard rose and
motioned towards the window.  "See, Frank," he said, "it is morning."
Then he went and lifted the blind.  The grey, unpurged air oozed on the
glass.  The light was breaking over the tops of the houses.  A crossing-
sweeper early to his task, or holding the key of the street, went
pottering by, and a policeman glanced up at them as he passed.  Richard
drew down the curtain again.

"Dick," said Frank suddenly, "you look old.  I wonder if I have changed
as much?"

Six months before, Frank Armour would have said hat his brother looked
young.

"Oh, you look young enough, Frank," was the reply.  "But I am a good deal
older than I was five years ago.  .  .  Come, let us go to bed."




CHAPTER X

THOU KNOWEST THE SECRETS OF OUR HEARTS

And Lali?  How had the night gone for her?  When she rose from the
child's cot, where her lips had caught the warmth that her husband had
left on them, she stood for a moment bewildered in the middle of the
room.  She looked at the door out of which he had gone, her bosom beating
hard, her heart throbbing so that it hurt her--that she could have cried
out from mere physical pain.  The wifedom in her was plundering the wild
stores of her generous soul for the man, for--as Richard had said that
day, that memorable day!--the father of her child.  But the woman, the
pure translated woman, who was born anew when this frail life in its pink
and white glory crept out into the dazzling world, shrank back, as any
girl might shrink that had not known marriage.  This child had come--from
what?--She shuddered now--how many times had she done so since she first
waked to the vulgar sacrilege of her marriage?  She knew now that every
good mother, when her first child is born, takes it in her arms, and, all
her agony gone, and the ineffable peace of delivered motherhood come,
speaks the name of its father, and calls it his child.  But--she
remembered it now--when her child was born, this little waif, the fruit
of a man's hot, malicious hour, she wrapped it in her arms, pressed its
delicate flesh to the silken folds of her bosom, and weeping, whispered
only: "My child, my little, little child!"

She had never, as many a wife far from her husband has done, talked to
her child of its father, told it of his beauty and his virtues, arrayed
it day by day in sweet linen and pretty adornments, as if he were just
then knocking at her door; she had never imagined what he would say when
he did come.  What could such a father think of his child, born of a
woman whose very life he had intended as an insult?  No, she had loved
it for father and mother also.  She had tried to be good, a good mother,
living a life unutterably lonely, hard in all that it involved of study,
new duty, translation, and burial of primitive emotions.  And with all
the care and tearful watchfulness that had been needed, she had grown so
proud, so exacting--exacting for her child, proud for herself.

How could she know now that this hasty declaration of affection was
anything more than the mere man in him?  Years ago she had not been able
to judge between love and insult--what guarantee had she here?  Did he
think that she could believe in him?  She was not the woman he had
married, he was not the man she had married.  He had deceived her basely
--she had been a common chattel.  She had been miserable enough--could
she give herself over to his flying emotions again so suddenly?

She paced the room, her face now in her hands, her hands now clasping and
wringing before her.  Her wifely duty?  She straightened to that.  Duty!
She was first and before all a good, unpolluted woman.  No, no, it could
not be.  Love him?  Again she shrank.  Then came flooding on her that
afternoon when she had flung herself on Richard's breast, and all those
hundred days of happiness in Richard's company--Richard the considerate,
the strong, who had stood so by his honour in an hour of peril.

Now as she thought of it a hot wave shivered through all her body, and
tingled to her hair.  Her face again dropped in her hands, and, as on
that other day, she knelt beside the cot, and, bursting into tears,
said through her sobs: "My baby, my own dear baby!  Oh, that we could go
away--away--and never come back again!"

She did not know how intense her sobs were.  They waked the child from
its delicate sleep; its blue eyes opened wide and wise all on the
instant, its round soft arm ran up to its mother's neck, and it said:
"Don't c'y!  I want to s'eep wif you!  I'se so s'eepy!"

She caught the child to her wet face, smiled at it through her tears,
went with it to her own bed, put it away in the deep whiteness, kissed
it, and fondled it away again into the heaven of sleep.  When this was
done she felt calmer.  How she hungered over it!  This--this could not be
denied her.  This, at least, was all hers, without clause or reservation,
an absolute love, and an absolute right.

She disrobed and drew in beside the child, and its little dewy cheek
touching her breast seemed to ease the ache in her soul.

But sleep would not come.  All the past four years trooped by, with their
thousand incidents magnified in the sharp, throbbing light of her mind,
and at last she knew and saw clearly what was before her, what trials,
what duty, and what honour demanded--her honour.

Richard?  Once for all she gently put him away from her into that
infinite distance of fine respect which a good woman can feel, who has
known what she and Richard had known--and set aside.  But he had made for
her so high a standard, that for one to be measured thereby was a severe
challenge.


Could Frank come even to that measure?  She dared not try to answer the
question.  She feared, she shrank, she grew sick at heart.  She did not
reckon with that other thing, that powerful, infinite influence which
ties a woman, she knows not how or why, to the man who led her to the
world of motherhood.  Through all the wrongs which she may suffer by him,
there runs this cable of unhappy attraction, testified to by how many
sorrowful lives!

But Lali was trying to think it out, not only to feel, and she did not
count that subterranean force which must play its part in this new
situation in her drama of life.  Could she love him?  She crept away out
of the haven where her child was, put on her dressing-gown, went to the
window, and looked out upon the night, all unconscious that her husband
was looking at her from the Square below.  Love him?--Love him?--Love
him?  Could she?  Did he love her?  Her eyes wandered over the Square.
Nowhere else was there a light, but a chimney-flue was creaking
somewhere.  It jarred on her so that she shrank.  Then all at once she
smiled to think how she had changed.  Four years ago she could have slept
amid the hammers of a foundry.  The noise ceased.  Her eyes passed from
the cloud of trees in the Square to the sky-all stars, and restful deep
blue.  That--that was the same.  How she knew it!  Orion and Ashtaroth,
and Mars and the Pleiades, and the long trail of the Milky Way.  As a
little child hanging in the trees, or sprawled beside a tepee, she had
made friends with them all, even as she learned and loved all the signs
of the earth beneath--the twist of a blade of grass, the portent in the
cry of a river-hen, the colour of a star, the smell of a wind.  She had
known Nature then, now she knew men.  And knowing them, and having
suffered, and sick at heart as she was, standing by this window in the
dead of night, the cry that shook her softly was not of her new life,
but of the old, primitive, child-like.

'Pasagathe, omarki kethose kolokani vorgantha pestorondikat Oni.'

"A spear hath pierced me, and the smart of the nettle is in my wound.
Maker of the soft night, bind my wounds with sleep, lest I cry out and be
a coward and unworthy."

Again and again, unconsciously, the words passed from her lips

'Vorganthe, pestorondikat Oni.'

At last she let down the blind, came to the bed, and once more gathered
her child in her arms with an infinite hunger.  This love was hers--rich,
untrammelled, and so sacred.  No matter what came, and she did not know
what would come, she had the child.  There was a kind of ecstasy in it,
and she lay and trembled with the feeling, but at last fell into a
troubled sleep.

She waked suddenly to hear footsteps passing her door.  She listened.
One footstep was heavier than the other--heavier and a little stumbling;
she recognised them, Frank and Richard.  In that moment her heart
hardened.  Frank Armour must tread a difficult road.




CHAPTER XI

UPON THE HIGHWAY

Frank visited the child in the morning, and was received with a casual
interest.  Richard Joseph Armour was fastidious, was not to be won at the
grand gallop.  Besides, he had just had a visit from his uncle, and the
good taste of that gay time was yet in his mouth.  He did not resent the
embraces, but he did not respond to them, and he straightened himself
with relief when the assault was over.  Some one was paying homage to
him, that was all he knew; but for his own satisfaction and pleasure he
preferred as yet his old comrades, Edward Lambert, Captain Vidall,
General Armour, and, above all, Richard.  He only showed real interest
at the last, when he asked, as it were in compromise, if his father would
give him a sword.  No one had ever talked to him of his father, and he
had no instinct for him so far as could be seen.  The sword was,
therefore, after the manner of a concession.  Frank rashly promised it,
and was promptly told by Marion that it couldn't be; and she was backed
by Captain Vidall, who said it had already been tabooed, and Frank wasn't
to come in and ask for favours or expect them.

The husband and wife met at breakfast.  He was down first.  When his wife
entered, he came to her, they touched hands, and she presently took a
seat beside him.  More than once he paused suddenly in his eating, when
he thought of his inexplicable case.  He was now face to face with a
reversed situation.  He had once picked up a pebble from the brown dirt
of a prairie, that he might toss it into the pool of this home life; and
he had tossed it, and from the sweet bath there had come out a precious
stone, which he longed to wear, and knew that he could not--not yet.
He could have coerced a lower being, but for his manhood's sake--he had
risen to that now, it is curious how the dignity of fatherhood helps to
make a man--he could not coerce here, and if he did, he knew that the
product would be disaster.

He listened to her talk with Marion and Captain Vidall.  Her voice
was musical, balanced, her language breathed; it had manner, and an
indescribable cadence of intelligence, joined to a deliberation, which
touched her off with distinction.  When she spoke to him--and she seemed
to do that as by studied intention and with tact at certain intervals--
her manner was composed and kind.  She had resolved on her part.  She
asked him about his journey over, about his plans for the day, and if
he had decided to ride with her in the Park,--he could have the general's
mount, she was sure, for the general was not going that day,--and would
he mind doing a little errand for her afterwards in Regent Street, for
the child--she feared she herself would not have time?

Just then General Armour entered, and, passing behind her, kissed her on
the cheek, dropping his hand on Frank's shoulder at the same time with a
hearty greeting.  Of course, Frank could have his mount, he said.  Mrs.
Armour did not come down, but she sent word by Richard, who entered last,
that she would be glad to see Frank for a moment before he left for the
Park.  As of old, Richard took both Lali's hands in his, patted them, and
cheerily said:

"Well, well, Lali, we've got the wild man home again safe and sound,
haven't we--the same old vagabond?  We'll have to turn him into a
Christian again--'For while the lamp holds out to burn'--"

He did not give her time to reply, but their eyes met honestly, kindly,
and from the look they both passed into life and time again with a fresh
courage.  She did not know, nor did he, how near they had been to an
abyss; and neither ever knew.  One furtive glance at the moment, one
hesitating pressure of the hand, one movement of the head from each
other's gaze, and there had been unhappiness for them all.  But they
were safe.

In the Park, Frank and his wife talked little.  They met many who greeted
them cordially, and numbers of Frank's old club friends summoned him to
the sacred fires at his earliest opportunity.  The two talked chiefly of
the people they met, and Frank thrilled with admiration at his wife's
gentle judgment of everybody.

"The true thing, absolutely the true thing," he said; and he was
conscious, too, that her instincts were right and searching, for once or
twice he saw her face chill a little when they met one or two men whose
reputations as chevaliers des dames were pronounced.  These men had had
one or two confusing minutes with Lali in their time.

"How splendidly you ride!" he said, as he came up swiftly to her, after
having chatted for a moment with Edward Lambert.  "You sit like wax, and
so entirely easy."

"Thank you," she said.  "I suppose I really like it too well to ride
badly, and then I began young on horses not so good as Musket here--
bareback, too!" she added, with a little soft irony.

He thought--she did not, however--that she was referring to that first
letter he sent home to his people, when he consigned her, like any other
awkward freight, to their care.  He flushed to his eyes.  It cut him
deep, but her eyes only had a distant, dreamy look which conveyed nothing
of the sting in her words.  Like most men, he had a touch of vanity too,
and he might have resented the words vaguely, had he not remembered his
talk with his mother an hour before.

She had begged him to have patience, she had made him promise that he
would not in any circumstance say an ungentle or bitter thing, that he
would bide the effort of constant devotion, and his love of the child.
Especially must he try to reach her through love of the child.

By which it will be seen that Mrs. Armour had come to some wisdom by
reason of her love for Frank's wife and child.

"My son," she had said, "through the child is the surest way, believe me;
for only a mother can understand what that means, how much and how far it
goes.  You are a father, but until last night you never had the flush of
that love in your veins.  You stand yet only at the door of that life
which has done more to guide, save, instruct, and deepen your wife's life
than anything else, though your brother Richard--to whom you owe a debt
that you can never repay--has done much in deed.  Be wise, my dear, as I
have learned a little to be since first your wife came.  All might easily
have gone wrong.  It has all gone well; and we, my son, have tried to do
our duty lovingly, consistently, to dear Lali and the child."

She made him promise that he would wait, that he would not try to hurry
his wife's affection for him by any spoken or insistent claim.  "For,
Frank dear," she said, "you are only legally married, not morally, not as
God can bless--not yet.  But I pray that what will sanctify all may come
soon, very soon, to the joy of us all.  But again--and I cannot say it
too prayerfully--do not force one little claim that your marriage gave
you, but prove yourself to her, who has cause to distrust you so much.
Will you forgive your mother, my dear, for speaking to you?"

He had told her then that what she had asked he had intended as his own
course, yet what she had said would keep it in his mind always, for he
was sure it was right.  Mrs. Armour had then embraced him, and they
parted.  Dealing with Lali had taught them all much of the human heart
that they had never known before, and the result thereof was wisdom.

They talked casually enough for the rest of the ride, and before they
parted at the door Frank received his commission for Regent Street, and
accepted it with delight, as a schoolboy might a gift.  He was absurdly
grateful for any favours from her, any sign of her companionship.  They
met at luncheon; then, because Lali had to keep an engagement in Eaton
Square, they parted again, and Frank and Richard took a walk, after a
long hour with the child, who still so hungered for his sword that Frank
disobeyed orders, and dragged Richard off to Oxford Street to get one.
He was reduced to a beatific attitude of submission, for he knew that he
had few odds with him now, and that he must live by virtue of new
virtues.  He was no longer proud of himself in any way, and he knew that
no one else was, or rather he felt so, and that was just the same.

He talked of the boy, he talked of his wife, he laid plans, he tore them
down, he built them up again, he asked advice, he did not wait to hear
it, but rambled on, excited, eager.  Truth is, there had suddenly been
lifted from his mind the dread and shadow of four years.  Wherever he had
gone, whatever he had been or done, that dread shadow had followed him,
and now to know that instead of having to endure a hell he had to win a
heaven, and to feel as if his brain had been opened and a mass of vapours
and naughty little mannikins of remorse had been let out, was a trifle
intoxicating even to a man of his usual vigour and early acquaintance
with exciting things.

"Dick, Dick!" he said enthusiastically, "you've been royal.  You always
were better than any chap I ever knew.  You're always doing for others.
Hang it, Dick, where does your fun come in?  Nobody seems ever to do
anything for you."

Richard gave his arm a squeeze.  "Never mind about me, boy.  I've had all
the fun I want, and all I'm likely to get, and so long as you're all
willing to have me around, I'm satisfied.  There's always a lot to do
among the people in the village, one way and another, and I've a heap of
reading on, and what more does a fellow want?"

"You didn't always feel that way, Dick?"

"No.  You see, at different times in life you want different kinds of
pleasures.  I've had a good many kinds, and the present kind is about as
satisfactory as any."

"But, Dick, you ought to get married.  You've got coin, you've got sense,
you're a bit distinguished-looking, and I'll back your heart against a
thousand bishops.  You've never been in danger of making a fool of
yourself as I have.  Why didn't you--why don't you--get married?"

Richard patted his brother's shoulder.

"Married, boy?  Married?  I've got too much on my hands.  I've got to
bring you up yet.  And when that's done I shall have to write a book
called 'How to bring up a Parent.'  Then I've got to help bring your boy
up, as I've done these last three years and more.  I've got to think of
that boy for a long while yet, for I know him better than you do, and I
shall need some of my coin to carry out my plans."

"God bless you, Dick!  Bring me up as you will, only bring her along too;
and as for the boy, you're far more his father than I am.  And mother
says that it's you that's given me the wife I've got now--so what can I
say?--what can I say?"

It was the middle of the Green Park, and Richard turned and clasped Frank
by both shoulders.

"Say?  Say that you'll stand by the thing you swore to one mad day in the
West as well as any man that ever lived--'to have and to hold, to love
and to cherish from this day forth till death us do part, Amen.'"

Richard's voice was low and full of a strange, searching something.

Frank, wondering at this great affection and fondness of his brother,
looked him in the eyes warmly, solemnly, and replied: "For richer or for
poorer, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health--so help me
God, and her kindness and forgiveness!"




CHAPTER XII

"THE CHASE OF THE YELLOW SWAN"

Frank and Lali did not meet until dinner was announced.  The conversation
at dinner was mainly upon the return to Greyhope, which was fixed for the
following morning, and it was deftly kept gay and superficial by Marion
and Richard and Captain Vidall, until General Armour became reminiscent,
and held the interest of the table through a dozen little incidents
of camp and barrack life until the ladies rose.  There had been an
engagement for late in the evening, but it had been given up because
of Frank's home-coming, and there was to be a family gathering merely--
for Captain Vidall was now as much one of the family as Frank or Richard,
by virtue of his approaching marriage with Marion.  The men left alone,
General Armour questioned Frank freely about life in the Hudson's Bay
country, and the conversation ran on idly till it was time to join the
ladies.

When they reached the drawing-room, Marion was seated at the piano,
playing a rhapsody of Raff's, and Mrs. Armour and Lali were seated side
by side.  Frank thrilled at seeing his wife's hand in his mother's.
Marion nodded over the piano at the men, and presently played a snatch
of Carmen, then wandered off into the barbaric strength of Tannhauser,
and as suddenly again into the ballet music of Faust.

"Why so wilful, my girl?" asked her father, who had a keen taste for
music.  "Why this tangle?  Let us have something definite."

Marion sprang up from the piano.  "I can't.  I'm not definite myself
to-night."  Then, turning to Lali: "Lali dear, sing something--do!
Sing my favourite, 'The Chase of the Yellow Swan.'"

This was a song which in the later days at Greyhope, Lali had sung for
Marion, first in her own language, with the few notes of an Indian chant,
and afterwards, by the help of the celebrated musician who had taught her
both music and singing, both of which she had learned but slowly, it was
translated and set to music.  Lali looked Marion steadily in the eyes for
a moment and then rose.  It cost her something to do this thing, for
while she had often talked much and long with Richard about that old
life, it now seemed as if she were to sing it to one who would not quite
understand why she should sing it at all, or what was her real attitude
towards her past--that she looked upon it from the infinite distance of
affectionate pity, knowledge, and indescribable change, and yet loved the
inspiring atmosphere and mystery of that lonely North, which once in the
veins never leaves it--never.  Would he understand that she was feeling,
not the common detail of the lodge and the camp-fire and the Company's
post, but the deep spirit of Nature, filtering through the senses in a
thousand ways--the wild ducks' flight, the sweet smell of the balsam,
the exquisite gallop of the deer, the powder of the frost, the sun and
snow and blue plains of water, the thrilling eternity of plain and the
splendid steps of the hills, which led away by stair and entresol to the
Kimash Hills, the Hills of the Mighty Men?

She did not know what he would think, and again on second thought she
determined to make him, by this song, contrast her as she was when he
married her, and now--how she herself could look upon that past
unabashed, speak of it without blushing, sing of it with pride, having
reached a point where she could look down and say: "This was the way by
which I came."

She rose, and was accompanied to the piano by General Armour, Frank
admiring her soft, springing steps, her figure so girlish and lissom.
She paused for a little before she began.  Her eyes showed for a moment
over the piano, deep, burning, in-looking; then they veiled; her fingers
touched the keys, wandered over them in a few strange, soft chords,
paused, wandered again, more firmly and very intimately, and then she
sang.  Her voice was a good contralto, well balanced, true, of no great
range, but within its compass melodious, and having some inexpressible
charm of temperament.  Frank did not need to strain his ears to hear the
words; every one came clear, searching, delicately valued:

              "In the flash of the singing dawn,
               At the door of the Great One,
               The joy of his lodge knelt down,
               Knelt down, and her hair in the sun
               Shone like showering dust,
               And her eyes were as eyes of the fawn.
               And she cried to her lord,
               'O my lord, O my life,
               From the desert I come;
               From the hills of the Dawn.'
               And he lifted the curtain and said,
               'Hast thou seen It, the Yellow Swan?'

              "And she lifted her head, and her eyes
               Were as lights in the dark,
               And her hands folded slow on her breast,
               And her face was as one who has seen
               The gods and the place where they dwell;
               And she said: 'Is it meet that I kneel,
               That I kneel as I speak to my lord?'
               And he answered her: 'Nay, but to stand,
               And to sit by my side;
               But speak, thou hast followed the trail,
               Hast thou found It, the Yellow Swan?'

              "And she stood as a queen, and her voice
               Was as one who hath seen the Hills,
               The Hills of the Mighty Men,
               And hath heard them cry in the night,
               Hath heard them call in the dawn,
               Hath seen It, the Yellow Swan.
               And she said: 'It is not for my lord;'
               And she murmured, 'I cannot tell,
               But my lord must go as I went,
               And my lord must come as I came,
               And my lord shall be wise.'

              "And he cried in his wrath,
               'What is thine, it is mine,
               And thine eyes are my eyes
               Thou shalt speak of the Yellow Swan!'
               But she answered him: 'Nay, though I die.
               I have lain in the nest of the Swan,
               I have heard, I have known;
               When thine eyes too have seen,
               When thine ears too have heard,
               Thou shalt do with me then as thou wilt!'

              "And he lifted his hand to strike,
               And he straightened his spear to slay,
               But a great light struck on his eyes,
               And he heard the rushing of wings,
               And his long spear fell from his hand,
               And a terrible stillness came.
               And when the spell passed from his eyes,
               He stood in his doorway alone,
               And gone was the queen of his soul,
               And gone was the Yellow Swan."

Frank Armour listened as in a dream.  The song had the wild swing of
savage life, the deep sweetness of a monotone, but it had also the fine
intelligence, the subtle allusiveness of romance.  He could read between
the lines.  The allegory touched him where his nerves were sensitive.
Where she had gone he could not go until his eyes had seen and known
what hers had seen and known; he could not grasp his happiness all in a
moment; she was no longer at his feet, but equal with him, and wiser than
he.  She had not meant the song to be allusive when she began, but to
speak to him through it by singing the heathen song as his own sister
might sing it.  As the song went on, however, she felt the inherent
suggestion in it, so that when she had finished it required all her
strength to get up calmly, come among them again, and listen to their
praises and thanks.  She had no particular wish to be alone with Frank
just yet, but the others soon arranged themselves so that the husband
and wife were left in a cosey corner of the room.

Lali's heart fluttered a little at first, for the day had been trying,
and she was not as strong as she could wish.  Admirably as she had gone
through the season, it had worn on her, and her constitution had become
sensitive and delicate, while yet strong.  The life had almost refined
her too much.  Always on the watch that she should do exactly as Marion
or Mrs. Armour, always so sensitive as to what was required of her,
always preparing for this very time, now that it had come, and her heart
and mind were strong, her body seemed to weaken.  Once or twice during
the day she had felt a little faint, but it had passed off, and she had
scolded herself.  She did not wish a serious talk with her husband
to-night, but she saw now that it was inevitable.

He said to her as he sat down beside her: "You sing very well indeed.
The song is full of meaning, and you bring it all out."

"I am glad you like it," she responded conventionally.  "Of course it's
an unusual song for an English drawing-room."

"As you sing it, it would be beautiful and acceptable anywhere, Lali."

"Thank you again," she answered, closing and unclosing her fan, her eyes
wandering to where Mrs. Armour was.  She wished she could escape, for she
did not feel like talking, and yet though the man was her husband she
could not say that she was too tired to talk; she must be polite.  Then,
with a little dainty malice: "It is more interesting, though, in the
vernacular--and costume!"

"Not unless you sang it so," he answered gallantly, and with a kind of
earnestness.

"You have not forgotten the way of London men," she rejoined.

"Perhaps that is well, for I do not know the way of women," he said, with
a faint bitterness.  "Yet, I don't speak unadvisedly in this,"--here he
meant to be a little bold and bring the talk to the past,--"for I heard
you sing that song once before."

She turned on him half puzzled, a little nervous.  "Where did you hear me
sing it?"

He had made up his mind, wisely enough, to speak with much openness and
some tact also, if possible.  "It was on the Glow Worm River at the Clip
Claw Hills.  I came into your father's camp one evening in the autumn,
hungry and tired and knocked about.  I was given the next tent to yours.
It was night, and just before I turned in I heard your voice singing.  I
couldn't understand much of the language, but I had the sense of it, and
I know it when I hear it again."

"Yes, I remember singing it that night," she said.  "Next day was the
Feast of the Yellow Swan."

Her eyes presently became dreamy, and her face took on a distant, rapt
look.  She sat looking straight before her for a moment.

He did not speak, for he interpreted the look aright, and he was going to
be patient, to wait.

"Tell me of my father," she said.  "You have been kind to him?"

He winced a little.  "When I left Fort Charles he was very well," he
said, "and he asked me to tell you to come some day.  He also has sent
you a half-dozen silver-fox skins, a sash, and moccasins made by his own
hands.  The things are not yet unpacked."

Moccasins?--She remembered when last she had moccasins on her feet--the
day she rode the horse at the quick-set hedge, and nearly lost her life.
How very distant that all was, and yet how near too!  Suddenly she
remembered also why she took that mad ride, and her heart hardened a
little.

"You have been kind to my father since I left?" she asked.

He met her eyes steadily.  "No, not always; not more than I have been
kind to you.  But at the last, yes."  Suddenly his voice became intensely
direct and honest.  "Lali," he continued, "there is much that I want to
say to you."  She waved her hand in a wearied fashion.  "I want to tell
you that I would do the hardest penance if I could wipe out these last
four years."

"Penance?" she said dreamily--"penance?  What guarantee of happiness
would that be?  One would not wish another to do penance if--"

She paused.

"I understand," he said--"if one cared--if one loved.  Yes, I understand.
But that does not alter the force or meaning of the wish.  I swear to you
that I repent with all my heart--the first wrong to you, the long
absence--the neglect--everything."

She turned slowly to him.  "Everything-Everything?" she repeated after
him.  "Do you understand what that means?  Do you know a woman's heart?
No.  Do you know what a shameful neglect is at the most pitiful time in
your life?  No.  How can a man know!  He has a thousand things--the woman
has nothing, nothing at all except the refuge of home, that for which she
gave up everything!"

Presently she broke off, and something sprang up and caught her in the
throat.  Years of indignation were at work in her.  "I have had a home,"
she said, in a low, thrilling voice--"a good home; but what did that cost
you?  Not one honest sentiment of pity, kindness, or solicitude.  You
clothed me, fed me, abandoned me, as--how can one say it?  Do I not know,
if coming back you had found me as you expected to find me, what the
result would have been?  Do I not know?  You would have endured me if I
did not thrust myself upon you, for you have after all a sense of legal
duty, a kind of stubborn honour.  But you would have made my life such
that some day one or both of us would have died suddenly.  For"--she
looked him with a hot clearness in the eyes--"for there is just so much
that a woman can bear.  I wish this talk had not come now, but, since
it has come, it is better to speak plainly.  You see, you misunderstand.
A heathen has a heart as another--has a life to be spoiled or made happy
as another.  Had there been one honest passion in your treatment of me--
in your marrying me--there would be something on which to base mutual
respect, which is more or less necessary when one is expected to love.
But--but I will not speak more of it, for it chokes me, the insult to me,
not as I was, but as I am.  Then it would probably have driven me mad,
if I had known; now it eats into my life like rust."

He made a motion as if to take her hands, but lifting them away quietly
she said: "You forget that there are others present, as well as the fact
that we can talk better without demonstration."

He was about to speak, but she stopped him.  "No, wait," she said;
"for I want to say a little more.  I was only an Indian girl, but you
must remember that I had also in my veins good white blood, Scotch blood.
Perhaps it was that which drew me to you then--for Lali the Indian girl
loved you.  Life had been to me pleasant enough--without care, without
misery, open, strong and free; our people were not as those others which
had learned the white man's vices.  We loved the hunt, the camp-fires,
the sacred feasts, the legends of the Mighty Men; and the earth was a
good friend, whom we knew as the child knows its mother."

She paused.  Something seemed to arrest her attention.  Frank followed
her eyes.  She was watching Captain Vidall and Marion.  He guessed what
she was thinking--how different her own wooing had been from theirs, how
concerning her courtship she had not one sweet memory--the thing that
keeps alive more love and loyalty in this world than anything else.
Presently General Armour joined them, and Frank's opportunity was over
for the present.

Captain Vidall and Marion were engaged in a very earnest conversation,
though it might not appear so to observers.

"Come, now, Marion," he said protestingly, "don't be impossible.  Please
give the day a name.  Don't you think we've waited about long enough?"

"There was a man in the Bible who served seven years."

"I've served over three in India since I met you at the well, and that
counts double.  Why so particular to a day?  It's a bit Jewish.  Anyhow,
that seven years was rough on Rachel."

"How, Hume?  Because she got passee?"

"Well, that counted; but do you suppose that Jew was going to put in
those seven years without interest?  Don't you believe it.  Rachel paid
capital and interest back, or Jacob was no Jew.  Tell me, Marion, when
shall it be?"

"Hume, for a man who has trifled away years in India, you are strangely
impatient."

"Mrs. Lambert says that I have the sweetest disposition."

"My dear sir!"

"Don't look at me like that at this distance, or I shall have to wear
goggles, as the man did who went courting the Sun."

"How supremely ridiculous you are!  And I thought you such a sensible,
serious man."

"Mrs. Lambert put that in your head.  We used to meet at the annual
dinners of the Bible Society."

"Why do you tell me such stuff?"

"It's a fact.  Her father and my aunt were in that swim, and we were
sympathisers."

"Mercenary people!"

"It worked very well in her case; not so well in mine.  But we conceived
a profound respect for each other then.  But tell me, Marion, when is it
to be?  Why put off the inevitable?"

"It isn't inevitable--and I'm only twenty-three."

                    "Only twenty-three,
                    And as good fish in the sea"

he responded, laughing.  "Yes, but you've set the precedent for a
courtship of four years and a bit, and what man could face it?"

"You did."

"Yes, but I wasn't advertised of the fact beforehand.  Suppose I had seen
the notice at the start: 'This mortgage cannot be raised inside of four
years--and a bit!'  There's a limit to human endurance."

"Why shouldn't I hold to the number, but alter the years to days?"

"You wouldn't dare.  A woman must live up to her reputation."

"Indeed?  What an ambition!"

"And a man to his manners."

"An unknown quantity."

"And a lover to his promises."

"A book of jokes."  Marion had developed a taste for satire.

"Which reminds me of Lady Halwood and Mrs. Lambert.  Lady Halwood was
more impertinent than usual the other day at the Sinclairs' show, and had
a little fling at Mrs. Lambert.  The talk turned on gowns.  Lady Halwood
was much interested at once.  She has a weakness that way.  'Why,' said
she, 'I like these fashions this year, but I'm not sure that they suit
me.  They're the same as when the Queen came to the throne.'  'Well,'
said Mrs. Lambert sweetly, 'if they suited you then--' There was an
audible titter, and Mrs. Lambert had an enemy for life."

"I don't see the point of your story in this connection."

"No?  Well, it was merely to suggest that if you had to live up to this
scheme of four-years' probation, other people besides lovers would make
up books of jokes, and--"

"That's like a man--to threaten."

"Yes, I threaten--on my knees."

"Hume, how long do you think Frank will have to wait?"

They were sitting where they had a good view of the husband and wife, and
Vidall, after a moment, said: "I don't know.  She has waited four years,
too; now it looks as if, like Jacob, she was going to gather in her
shekels of interest compounded."

"It isn't going to be a bit pleasant to watch."

"But you won't be here to see."

Marion ignored the suggestion.  "She seems to have hardened since he came
yesterday.  I hardly know her; and yet she looks awfully worn to-night,
don't you think?"

"Yes, as if she had to keep a hand on herself.  But it'll come out all
right in the end, you'll see."

"Yes, of course; but she might be sensible and fall in love with Frank at
once.  That's what she did when--"

"When she didn't know man."

"Yes, but where would you all be if we women acted on what we know of
you?"

"On our knees chiefly, as I am.  Remember this, Marion, that half a
sinner is better than no man."

"You mean that no man is better than half a saint?"

"How you must admire me!"

"Why?"

"As you are about to name the day, I assume that I'm a whole saint in
your eyes."

"St. Augustine!"

"Who was he?"

"A man that reformed."

"Before or after marriage?"

"Before, I suppose."

"I don't think he died happy."

"Why not?"

"I've a faint recollection that he was boiled."

"Don't be horrid.  What has that to do with it?"

"Nothing, perhaps.  But he probably broke out again after marriage, and
sank at last into that caldron.  That's what it means by being-steeped in
crime."

"How utterly nonsensical you are!"

"I feel light-headed.  You've been at sea, on a yacht becalmed, haven't
you?  when along comes a groundswell, and as you rock in the sun there
comes trouble, and your head goes round like a top?  Now, that's my case.
I've been becalmed four years, and while I pray for a little wind to take
me--home, you rock me in the trough of uncertainty.  Suspense is very
gall and wormwood.  You know what the jailer said to the criminal who was
hanging on a reprieve: 'Rope deferred maketh the heart sick.'  Marion,
give me the hour, or give me the rope."

"The rope enough to hang yourself?"

She suddenly reached up and pulled a hair from her head.  She laid it in
his hand-a long brown silken thread.  "Hume," she said airily yet gently,
"there is the rope.  Can you love me for a month of Sundays?"

"Yes, for ever and a day!"

"I will cancel the day, and take your bond for the rest.  I will be
generous.  I will marry you in two months-and a day."

"My dearest girl!"--he drew her hand into both of his--"I can't have you
more generous than myself, I'll throw off the month."  But his eyes were
shining very seriously, though his mouth smiled.

"Two months and a day," she repeated.

"We must all bundle off to Greyhope to-morrow," came General Armour's
voice across the room.  "Down comes the baby, cradle and all."

Lali rose.  "I am very tired," she said; "I think I will say good-night."

"I'll go and see the boy with you," Frank said, rising also.

Lali turned towards Marion.  Marion's face was flushed, and had a sweet,
happy confusion.  With a low, trembling good-night to Captain Vidall, a
hurried kiss on her mother's cheek, and a tip-toed caress on her father's
head, she ran and linked her arm in Lali's, and together they proceeded
to the child's room.  Richard was there when they arrived, mending a
broken toy.  Two hours later, the brothers parted at Frank's door.

"Reaping the whirlwind, Dick?" Frank said, dropping his hand on his
brother's arm.

Richard pointed to the child's room.

"Nonsense!  Do you want all the world at once?  You are reaping the
forgiveness of your sins."  Somehow Richard's voice was a little stern.

"I was thinking of my devilry, Dick.  That's the whirlwind--here!"  His
hand dropped on his breast.

"That's where it ought to be.  Good-night."

"Good-night."




CHAPTER XIII

A LIVING POEM

Part of Frank's most trying interview, next to the meeting with his wife,
was that with Mackenzie, who had been his special commissioner in the
movement of his masquerade.  Mackenzie also had learned a great deal
since she had brought Lali--home.  She, like others, had come to care
truly for the sweet barbarian, and served her with a grim kind of
reverence.  Just in proportion as this had increased, her respect for
Frank had decreased.  No man can keep a front of dignity in the face of
an unbecoming action.  However, Mackenzie had her moment, and when it was
over, the new life began at no general disadvantage to Frank.  To all
save the immediate family Frank and Lali were a companionable husband and
wife.  She rode with him, occasionally walked with him, now and again
sang to him, and they appeared in the streets of St. Albans and at the
Abbey together, and oftener still in the village church near, where the
Armours of many generations were proclaimed of much account in the solid
virtues of tomb and tablet.

The day had gone by when Lali attracted any especial notice among the
villagers, and she enjoyed the quiet beauty and earnestness of the
service.  But she received a shock one Sunday.  She had been nervous all
the week, she could not tell why, and others remarked how her face had
taken on a new sensitiveness, a delicate anxiety, and that her strength
was not what it had been.  As, for instance, after riding she required to
rest, a thing before unknown, and she often lay down for an hour before
dinner.  Then, too, at table once she grew suddenly pale and swayed
against Edward Lambert, who was sitting next to her.  She would not,
however, leave the table, but sat the dinner out, to Frank's
apprehension.  He was devoted, but it was clear to Marion and her mother
at least that his attentions were trying to her.  They seemed to put her
under an obligation which to meet was a trial.  There is nothing more
wearing to a woman than affectionate attentions from a man who has claims
upon her, but whom she does not love.  These same attentions from one who
has no claims give her a thrill of pleasure.  It is useless to ask for
justice in such a matter.  These things are governed by no law; and
rightly so, else the world would be in good time a loveless multitude,
held together only by the hungering ties of parent and child.

But this Sunday wherein Lali received a shock.  She did not know that the
banns for Marion's and Captain Vidall's marriage were to be announced,
and at the time her thoughts were far away.  She was recalled to herself
by the clergyman's voice pronouncing their names, and saying: "If any of
you do know cause or just impediment why these two people should not be
joined together in the bonds of holy matrimony, ye are to declare it."
All at once there came back to her her own marriage when the Protestant
missionary, in his nasal monotone, mumbled these very words, not as if he
expected that any human being would, or could, offer objection.

She almost sprang from her seat now.  Her nerves all at once came to such
a tension that she could have cried out.  Why had there been no one there
at her marriage to say: "I forbid it"?  How shameful it had all been!
And the first kiss her husband had given her had the flavour of brandy!
If she could but turn back the hands upon the clock of Time!  Under the
influence of the music and the excited condition of her nerves, the event
became magnified, distorted; it burned into her brain.  It was not made
less poignant by the sermon from the text: "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin."
When the words were first announced in the original, it sounded like her
own language, save that it was softer, and her heart throbbed fast.  Then
came the interpretation: "Thou art weighed in the balance and found
wanting."

Then suddenly swept over her a new feeling, one she had never felt
before.  Up to this point a determination to justify her child, to
reverse the verdict of the world, to turn her husband's sin upon himself,
had made her defiant, even bitter; in all things eager to live up to her
new life, to the standard that Richard had by manner and suggestion,
rather than by words, laid down for her.  But now there came in upon her
a flood of despair.  At best she was only of this race through one-third
of her parentage, and education and refinement and all things could do no
more than make her possible.  There must always be in the record: "She
was of a strange people.  She was born in a wigwam."  She did not know
that failing health was really the cause of this lapse of self-
confidence, this growing self-depreciation, this languor for which she
could not account.  She found that she could not toss the child and
frolic with it as she had done; she was conscious that within a month
there had stolen upon her the desire to be much alone, to avoid noises
and bustle--it irritated her.  She found herself thinking more and more
of her father, her father to whom she had never written one line since
she had left the North.  She had had good reasons for not writing--
writing could do no good whatever, particularly to a man who could not
read, and who would not have understood her new life if he had read.  Yet
now she seemed not to know why she had not written, and to blame herself
for neglect and forgetfulness.  It weighed on her.  Why had she ever been
taken from the place of tamarack-trees and the sweeping prairie grass?
No, no, she was not, after all, fit for this life.  She had been
mistaken, and Richard had been mistaken--Richard, who was so wise.  The
London season?  Ah!  that was because people had found a novelty, and
herself of better manners than had been expected.

The house was now full of preparations for the wedding.  It stared her in
the face every day, almost every hour.  Dressmakers, milliners, tailors,
and all those other necessary people.  Did the others think what all this
meant to her?  It was impossible that they should.  When Marion came back
from town at night and told of her trials among the dressmakers, when she
asked the general opinion and sometimes individual judgment, she could
not know that it was at the expense of Lali's nerves.

Lali, when she married, had changed her moccasins, combed her hair, and
put on a fine red belt, and that was all.  She was not envious now, not
at all.  But somehow it all was a deadly kind of evidence against herself
and her marriage.  Her reproach was public, the world knew it, and no
woman can forgive a public shame, even was it brought about by a man she
loved, or loves.  Her chiefest property in life is her self-esteem and
her name before the world.  Rob her of these, and her heaven has fallen,
and if a man has shifted the foundations of her peace, there is no
forgiveness for him till her Paradise has been reconquered.  So busy were
all the others that they did not see how her strength was failing.  There
were three weeks between the day the banns were announced and the day of
the wedding, which was to be in the village church, not in town; for, as
Marion said, she had seen too many marriages for one day's triumph and
criticism; she wanted hers where there would be neither triumph nor
criticism, but among people who had known her from her childhood up.
A happy romance had raised Marion's point of view.

Meanwhile Frank was winning the confidence of his own child, who,
however, ranked Richard higher always, and became to a degree his
father's tyrant.  But Frank's nature was undergoing a change.  His point
of view also had enlarged.  The suffering, bitterness, and humiliation of
his life in the North had done him good.  He was being disciplined to
take his position as a husband and father, but he sometimes grew heavy-
hearted when he saw how his attentions oppressed his wife, and had it not
been for Richard he might probably have brought on disaster, for the
position was trying to all concerned.  A few days before the wedding
Edward Lambert and his wife arrived, and he, Captain Vidall, and Frank
Armour took rides and walks together, or set the world right in the
billiard-room.  Richard seldom joined them, though their efforts to
induce him to do so were many.  He had his pensioners, his books, his
pipe, and "the boy," and he had returned in all respects, in so far as
could be seen, to his old life, save for the new and larger interest of
his nephew.

One evening the three men with General Armour were all gathered in the
billiard-room.  Conversation had been general and without particular
force, as it always is when merely civic or political matters are under
view.  But some one gave a social twist to the talk, and presently they
were launched upon that sea where every man provides his own chart, or he
is a very worm and no man.  Each man had been differently trained, each
viewed life from a different stand-point, and yet each had been brought
up in the same social atmosphere, in the same social sets, had imbibed
the same traditions, been moved generally by the same public
considerations.

"But there's little to be said for a man who doesn't, outwardly at least,
live up to the social necessity," said Lambert.

"And keep the Ten Commandments in the vulgar tongue," rejoined Vidall.

"I've lived seventy-odd years, and I've knocked about a good deal in my
time," said the general, "but I've never found that you could make a
breach of social necessity, as you call it, without paying for it one way
or another.  The trouble with us when we're young is that we want to get
more out of life than there really is in it.  There is not much in it,
after all.  You can stand just so much fighting, just so much work, just
so much emotion--and you can stand less emotion than anything else.  I'm
sure more men and women break up from a hydrostatic pressure of emotion
than from anything else.  Upon my soul, that's so."

"You are right, General," said Lambert.  "The steady way is the best way.
The world is a passable place, if a fellow has a decent income by
inheritance, or can earn a big one, but to be really contented to earn
money it must be a big one, otherwise he is far better pleased to take
the small inherited income.  It has a lot of dignity, which the other
can only bring when it is large."

"That's only true in this country; it's not true in America," said Frank,
"for there the man who doesn't earn money is looked upon as a muff, and
is treated as such.  A small inherited income is thought to be a trifle
enervating.  But there is a country of emotions, if you like.  The
American heart is worn upon the American sleeve, and the American mind is
the most active thing in this world.  That's why they grow old so young."

"I met a woman a year or so ago at dinner," said Vidall, "who looked
forty.  She looked it, and she acted it.  She was younger than any woman
present, but she seemed older.  There was a kind of hopeless languor
about her which struck me as pathetic.  Yet she had been beautiful, and
might even have been so when I saw her, if it hadn't been for that look.
It was the look of a person who had no interest in things.  And the
person who has no interest in things is the person who once had a great
deal of interest in things, who had too passionate an interest.  The
revulsion is always terrible.  Too much romance is deadly.  It is as
false a stimulant as opium or alcohol, and leaves a corresponding mark.
Well, I heard her history.  She was married at fifteen--ran away to be
married; and in spite of the fact that a railway accident nearly took her
husband from her on the night of her marriage--one would have thought
that would make a strong bond--she was soon alive to the attentions that
are given a pretty and--considerate woman.  At a ball at Naples, her
husband, having in vain tried to induce her to go home, picked her up
under his arm and carried her out of the ballroom.  Then came a couple of
years of opium-eating, fierce social excitement, divorce, new marriage,
and so on, until her husband agreeably decided to live in Nice, while she
lived somewhere else.  Four days after I had met her at the dinner I saw
her again.  I could scarcely believe my eyes.  The woman had changed
completely.  She was young again-twenty-five, in face and carriage, in
the eye and hand, in step and voice."

"Who was the man?" suggested Frank Armour.  "A man about her own age,
or a little more, but who was an infant beside her in knowledge of the
world."  "She was in love with the fellow?  It was a grande passion?"
asked Lambert.

"In love with him?  No, not at all.  It was a momentary revival of an
old-possibility."

"You mean that such women never really love?"

"Perhaps once, Frank, but only after a fashion.  The rest was mere
imitation of their first impulses."

"And this woman?"

"Well, the end came sooner than I expected.  I tell you I was shocked at
the look in her face when I saw it again.  That light had flickered out;
the sensitive alertness of hand, eye, voice, and carriage had died away;
lines had settled in the face, and the face itself had gone cold, with
that hard, cold passiveness which comes from exhausted emotions and a
closed heart.  The jewels she wore might have been put upon a statue with
equal effect."

"It seems to me that we might pitch into men in these things and not make
women the dreadful examples," said a voice from the corner.  It was the
voice of Richard, who had but just entered.

"My dear Dick," said his father, "men don't make such frightful examples,
because these things mean less to men than they do to women.  Romance is
an incident to a man; he can even come through an affaire with no ideals
gone, with his mental fineness unimpaired; but it is different with a
woman.  She has more emotion than mind, else there were no cradles in the
land.  Her standards are set by the rules of the heart, and when she has
broken these rules she has lost her standard too.  But to come back, it
is true, I think, as I said, that man or woman must not expect too much
out of life, but be satisfied with what they can get within the normal
courses of society and convention and home, and the end thereof is peace
--yes, upon my soul, it's peace."

There was something very fine in the blunt, honest words of the old man,
whose name had ever been sweet with honour.

"And the chief thing is that a man live up to his own standard," said
Lambert.  "Isn't that so, Dick?--you're the wise man."

"Every man should have laws of his own, I should think; commandments of
his own, for every man has a different set of circumstances wherein to
work--or worry."

"The wisest man I ever knew," said Frank, dropping his cigar, "was a
little French-Canadian trapper up in the Saskatchewan country.  A priest
asked him one day what was the best thing in life, and he answered: 'For
a young man's mind to be old, and an old man's heart to be young.'  The
priest asked him how that could be.  And he said: 'Good food, a good
woman to teach him when he is young, and a child to teach him when he is
old.' Then the priest said: 'What about the Church and the love of God?'
The little man thought a little, and then said: 'Well, it is the same--
the love of man and woman came first in the world, then the child, then
God in the garden.'  Afterwards he made a little speech of good-bye to
us, for we were going to the south while he remained in a fork of the Far
Off River.  It was like some ancient blessing: that we should always have
a safe tent and no sorrow as we travelled; that we should always have a
cache for our food, and food for our cache; that we should never find a
tree that would not give sap, nor a field that would not grow grain; that
our bees should not freeze in winter, and that the honey should be thick,
and the comb break like snow in the teeth; that we keep hearts like the
morning, and that we come slow to the Four Corners where man says Good-
night."

Each of the other men present wondered at that instant if Frank Armour
would, or could, have said this with the same feelings two months before.
He seemed almost transformed.

"It reminds me," said the general, "of an inscription from an Egyptian
monument which an officer of the First put into English verse for me
years ago:

         "Fair be the garden where their loves shall dwell,
          Safe be the highway where their feet may go,
          Rich be the fields wherein their hands may toil,
          The fountains many where their good wines flow.
          Full be their harvest-bins with corn and oil,
          To sorrow may their humour be a foil;
          Quick be their hearts all wise delights to know,
          Tardy their footsteps to the gate Farewell."

There was a moment's silence after he had finished, and then there was
noise without, a sound of pattering feet; the door flew open, and in ran
a little figure in white--young Richard in his bed-gown, who had broken
away from his nurse, and had made his way to the billiard-room, where he
knew his uncle had gone.

The child's face was flashing with mischief and adventure.  He ran in
among the group, and stretched out his hands with a little fighting air.
His uncle Richard made a step towards him, but he ran back; his father
made as if to take him in his arms, but he evaded him.  Presently the
door opened, the nurse entered, the child sprang from among the group,
and ran with a laughing defiance to the farthest end of the room, and,
leaning his chin on the billiard-table, flashed a look of defiant humour
at his pursuer.  Presently the door opened again, and the figure of the
mother appeared.  All at once the child's face altered; he stood
perfectly still, and waited for his mother to come to him.  Lali had not
spoken, and she did not speak until, lifting the child, she came the
length of the billiard-table and faced them.

"I beg your pardon," she said, "for intruding; but Richard has led
us a dance, and I suppose the mother may go where her child goes."

"The mother and the child are always welcome wherever they go," said
General Armour quietly.

All the men had risen to their feet, and they made a kind of semicircle
before her.  The white-robed child had clasped its arms about her neck,
and nestled its face against hers, as if, with perfect satisfaction, it
had got to the end of its adventure; but the look of humour was still in
the eyes as they ran from Richard to his father and back again.

Frank Armour stepped forwards and took the child's hand, as it rested on
the mother's shoulder.  Lali's face underwent a slight change as her
husband's fingers touched her neck.

"I must go," she said.  "I hope I have not broken up a serious
conversation--or were you not so serious after all?" she said, glancing
archly at General Armour.  "We were talking of women," said Lambert.

"The subject is wide," replied Lali, "and the speakers many.  One would
think some wisdom might be got in such a case."

"Believe me, we were not trying to understand the subject," said Captain
Vidall; "the most that a mere man can do is to appreciate it."

"There are some things that are hidden from the struggling mind of man,
and are revealed unto babes and the mothers of babes," said General
Armour gravely, as, reaching out his hands, he took the child from the
mother's arms, kissed it full upon the lips, and added: "Men do not
understand women, because men's minds have not been trained in the same
school.  When once a man has mastered the very alphabet of motherhood,
then he shall have mastered the mind of woman; but I, at least, refuse to
say that I do not understand, from the stand-point of modern cynicism."

"Ah, General, General!" said Lambert, "we have lost the chivalric way of
saying things, which belongs to your generation."

By this time the wife had reached the door.  She turned and held out her
arms for the child.  General Armour came and placed the boy where he had
found it, and, with eyes suddenly filling, laid both his hands upon
Lali's and they clasped the child, and said: "It is worth while to have
lived so long and to have seen so much."  Her eyes met his in a wistful,
anxious expression, shifted to those of her husband, dropped to the
cheeks of the child, and with the whispered word, which no one, not even
the general, heard, she passed from the room, the nurse following her.

Perhaps some of the most striking contrasts are achieved in the least
melodramatic way.  The sudden incursion of the child and its mother into
the group, the effect of their presence, and their soft departure,
leaving behind them, as it were, a trail of light, changed the whole
atmosphere of the room, as though some new life had been breathed into
it, charged each mind with new sensations, and gave each figure new
attitude.  Not a man present but had had his full swing with the world,
none worse than most men, none better than most, save that each had
latent in him a good sense of honour concerning all civic and domestic
virtues.  They were not men of sentimentality; they were not accustomed
to exposing their hearts upon their sleeve, but each, as the door closed,
recognised that something for one instant had come in among them, had
made their past conversation to appear meagre, crude, and lacking in both
height and depth.  Somehow, they seemed to feel, although no words
expressed the thought, that for an instant they were in the presence of a
wisdom greater than any wisdom of a man's smoking-room.

"It is wonderful, wonderful," said the general slowly, and no man asked
him why he said it, or what was wonderful.  But Richard, sitting apart,
watched Frank's face acutely, himself wondering when the hour would come
that the wife would forgive her husband, and this situation so fraught
with danger would be relieved.




CHAPTER XIV

ON THE EDGE OF A FUTURE

At last the day of the wedding came, a beautiful September day, which may
be more beautiful in uncertain England than anywhere else.  Lali had been
strangely quiet all the day before, and she had also seemed strangely
delicate.  Perhaps, or perhaps not, she felt the crisis was approaching.
It is probable that when the mind has been strained for a long time, and
the heart and body suffered much, one sees a calamity vaguely, and cannot
define it; appreciates it, and does not know it.  She came to Marion's
room about a half-hour before they were to start for the church.  Marion
was already dressed and ready, save for the few final touches, which,
though they have been given a dozen times, must still again be given
just before the bride starts for the church.  Such is the anxious mind
of women on these occasions.  The two stood and looked at each other a
moment, each wondering what were the thoughts of the other.  Lali was
struck by that high, proud look over which lay a glamour of infinite
satisfaction, of sweetness, which comes to every good woman's face when
she goes to the altar in a marriage which is not contingent on the rise
or fall in stocks, or a satisfactory settlement.  Marion, looking, saw,
as if it had been revealed to her all at once, the intense and miraculous
change which had come over the young wife, even within the past two
months.  Indeed, she had changed as much within that time as within all
the previous four years--that is, she had been brought to a certain point
in her education and experience, where without a newer and deeper
influence she could go no further.  That newer and deeper influence had
come, and the result thereof was a woman standing upon the verge of the
real tragedy to her life, which was not in having married the man, but
in facing that marriage with her new intelligence and a transformed soul.
Men can face that sort of thing with a kind of philosophy, not because
men are better or wiser, but because it really means less to them.  They
have resources of life, they can bury themselves in their ambitions good
or bad, but a woman can only bury herself in her affections, unless her
heart has been closed; and in that case she herself has lost much of what
made her adorable.  And while she may go on with the closed heart and
become a saint, even saintship is hardly sufficient to compensate any man
or woman for a half-lived life.  The only thing worth doing in this world
is to live life according to one's convictions--and one's heart.  He or
she who sells that fine independence for a mess of pottage, no matter if
the mess be spiced, sells, as the Master said, the immortal part of him.

And so Lali, just here on the edge of Marion's future, looking into that
mirror, was catching the reflection of her own life.  When two women come
so near that, like the lovers in the Tempest, they have changed eyes, in
so far as to read each other's hearts, even indifferently, which is much
where two women are concerned, there is only one resource, and that is to
fall into each other's arms, and to weep if it be convenient, or to hold
their tears for a more fitting occasion; and most people will admit that
tears need not add to a bride's beauty.

Marion might, therefore, be pardoned if she had her tears in her throat
and not in her eyes, and Lali, if they arose for a moment no higher than
her heart.  But they did fall into each other's arms despite veils and
orange blossoms, and somehow Marion had the feeling for Lali that she had
on that first day at Greyhope, four years ago, when standing on the
bridge, the girl looked down into the water, tears dropping on her hands,
and Marion said to her: "Poor girl!  poor girl!"  The situations were the
same, because Lali had come to a new phase of her life, and what that
phase would be who could tell-happiness or despair?

The usual person might think that Lali was placing herself and her wifely
affection at a rather high price, but then it is about the only thing
that a woman can place high, even though she be one-third a white woman
and two-thirds an Indian.  Here was a beautiful woman, who had run the
gamut of a London season, who had played a pretty social part, admirably
trained therefor by one of the best and most cultured families of
England.  Besides, why should any woman sell her affections even to her
husband, bargain away her love, the one thing that sanctifies "what God
hath joined let no man put asunder"?  Lali was primitive, she was unlike
so many in a trivial world, but she was right.  She might suffer, she
might die, but, after all, there are many things worse than that.  Man is
born in a day, and he dies in a day, and the thing is easily over; but to
have a sick heart for three-fourths of one's lifetime is simply to have
death renewed every morning; and life at that price is not worth living.
In this sensitive age we are desperately anxious to save life, as if it
was the really great thing in the world; but in the good, strong times of
the earth--and in these times, indeed, when necessity knows its hour--men
held their lives as lightly as a bird upon the housetop which any chance
stone might drop.

It is possible that at this moment the two women understood each other
better than they had ever done, and respected each other more.  Lali,
recovering herself, spoke a few soft words of congratulation, and then
appeared to busy herself in putting little touches to Marion's dress,
that soft persuasion of fingers which does so much to coax mere cloth
into a sort of living harmony with the body.

They had no more words of confidence, but in the porch of the church,
Marion, as she passed Lali, caught the slender fingers in her own and
pressed them tenderly.  Marion was giving comfort, and yet if she had
been asked why she could not have told.  She did not try to define it
further than to say to herself that she herself was having almost too
much happiness.  The village was en fete, and peasants lined the street
leading to the church, ready with their hearty God-bless-you's.  Lali sat
between her husband and Mrs. Armour, apparently impassive until there
came the question: "Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?"
and General Armour's voice came clear and strong: "I do."  Then a soft
little cry broke from her, and she shivered slightly.  Mrs. Armour did
not notice, but Frank and Mrs. Lambert heard and saw, and both were
afterwards watchful and solicitous.  Frank caught Mrs. Lambert's eye,
and it said, to a little motion of the head: "Do not appear to notice."

Lali was as if in a dream.  She never took her eyes from the group at
the altar until the end, and the two, now man and wife, turned to go into
the vestry.  Then she appeared to sink away into herself for a moment,
before she fell into conversation with the others, as they moved towards
the vestry.

"It was beautiful, wasn't it?" ventured Edward Lambert.

"The most beautiful wedding I ever saw," she answered, with a little
shadow of meaning; and Lambert guessed that it was the only one she had
seen since she came to England.

"How well Vidall looked," said Frank, "and as proud as a sultan.  Did you
hear what he said, as Marion came up the aisle?"

"No," responded Lambert.

"He said, 'By Jove, isn't she fine!'  He didn't seem conscious that other
people were present."

"Well, if a man hasn't some inspirations on his wedding-day when is he to
have them?" said Mrs. Lambert.  "For my part, I think that the woman
always does that sort of thing better than a man.  It is her really great
occasion, and she masters it--the comedy is all hers."  They were just
then entering the vestry.

"Or the tragedy, as the case may be," said Lali quietly, smiling at
Marion.  She had, as it were, recovered herself, and her words had come
with that airy, impersonal tone which permits nothing of what is said in
it to be taken seriously.  Something said by the others had recalled her
to herself, and she was now returned very suddenly to the old position of
alertness and social finesse.  Something icy seemed to pass over her, and
she immediately lost all self-consciousness, and began to speak to her
husband with less reserve than she had shown since he had come.  But he
was not deceived.  He saw that at that very instant she was further away
from him than she had ever been.  He sighed, in spite of himself,
as Lali, with well-turned words, said some loving greetings to Marion,
and then talked a moment with Captain Vidall.

"Who can understand a woman?" said Lambert to his wife meaningly.

"Whoever will," she answered.  "How do you mean?"

"Whoever will wait like the saint upon the pillar, will suffer like the
traveller in the desert; serve like a slave, and demand like a king; have
patience greater than Job; love ceaseless as a fountain in the hills; who
sees in the darkness and is not afraid of light; who distrusts not,
neither believes, but stands ready to be taught; who is prepared for a
kiss this hour and a reproach the next; who turneth neither to right nor
left at her words, but hath an unswerving eye--these shall understand a
woman."

"I never knew you so philosophical.  Where did you get this deliverance
on the subject?"

"May not even a woman have a moment of inspiration?"

"I should expect that of my wife."

"And I should expect that of my husband.  It is trite to say that men are
vain; I shall remark that they sit so much in their own light that they
are surprised if another being crosses their disc."

"You always were clever, my dear, and you always were twice too good for
me."

"Well, every woman--worth the knowing--is a missionary."

"Where does Lali come in?"

"Can you ask?  To justify the claims of womanhood in spite of race--and
all."

"To bring one man to a sense of the duty of sex to sex, eh?"

"Truly.  And is she not doing it well?  See her now."  They were now just
leaving the church, and Lali had taken General Armour's arm, while
Richard led his mother to the carriage.

Lali was moving with a little touch of grandeur in her manner and a more
than ordinary deliberation.  She had had a moment of great weakness, and
then there had come the reaction--carried almost too far by the force of
the will.  She was indeed straining herself too far.  Four years of
tension were culminating.

"See her now, Edward," repeated Mrs. Lambert.  "Yes, but if I'm not
mistaken, my dear, she is doing so well that she's going to pieces.
She's overstrung to-day.  If it were you, you'd be in hysterics."

"I believe you are right," was the grave reply.  "There will be an end
to this comedy one way or another very soon."

A moment afterwards they were in a carriage rolling away to Greyhope.




CHAPTER XV

THE END OF THE TRAIL

When Marion was about leaving with her husband for the railway station,
she sought out Lali, and found her standing half hidden by the curtains
of a window, looking out at little Richard, who was parading his pony up
and down before the house.  An unutterable sweetness looked out of
Marion's eyes.  She had found, as it seemed to her, and as so many have
believed until their lives' end, the secret of existence.  Lali saw the
glistening joy, and responded to it, just as it was in her being to
respond to every change of nature--that sensitiveness was in her as
deep as being.

"You are very happy, dear?" she said to Marion.  "You cannot think how
happy, Lali.  And I want to say that I feel sure that you will yet be as
happy, even happier than I.  Oh, it will come--it will come.  And you
have the boy now-so fine, so good."

Lali looked out to where little Richard disported himself; her eyes
shone, and she turned with a responsive but still sad smile to Marion.
"Marion," she said gently, "the other should have come before he came."
"Frank loves you, Lali."

"Who knows?  And then, oh, I cannot tell!  How can one force one's heart?
No, no!  One has to wait, and wait, even if the heart grows harder, and
one gets hopeless."

Marion kissed her on the cheek and smiled.  "Some day soon the heart will
open up, and then such a flood will pour out!  See, Lali.  I am going
now, and our lives won't run together so much again ever, perhaps.  But I
want to tell you now that your coming to us has done me a world of good--
helped me to be a wiser girl; and I ought to be a better woman for it.
Good-bye."

They were calling to her, and with a hurried embrace the two parted, and
in a few moments the bride and bridegroom were on their way to the new
life.  As the carriage disappeared in a turn of the limes, Lali vanished
also to her room.  She was not seen at dinner.  Mackenzie came to say
that she was not very well, and that she would keep to her room.  Frank
sent several times during the evening to inquire after her, and was told
that she was resting comfortably.  He did not try to see her, and in this
was wise.  He had now fallen into a habit of delicate consideration,
which brought its own reward.  He had given up hope of winning her heart
or confidence by storm, and had followed his finer and better instincts--
had come to the point where he made no claims, and even in his own mind
stood upon no rights.  His mother brought him word from Lali before he
retired, to say that she was sorry she could not see him, but giving him
a message and a commission into town the following morning for their son.
Her tact had grown is her strength had declined.  There is something in
failing health--ill-health without disease--which sharpens and refines
the faculties, and makes the temper exquisitely sensitive--that is, with
people of a certain good sort.  The aplomb and spirited manner in which
Lali had borne herself at the wedding and after, was the last flicker of
her old strength, and of the second phase in her married life.  The end
of the first phase came with the ride at the quick-set hedge, this with
a less intent but as active a temper.

The next morning she did not appear at breakfast, but sent a message to
Frank to say that she was better, and adding another commission for town.
All day, save for an hour on the balcony, she kept to her room, and lay
down for the greater part of the afternoon.  In the evening, when Frank
returned, his mother sent for him, and frankly told him that she thought
it would be better for him to go away for a few weeks or so; that Lali
was in a languid, nervous state, and she thought that by the time he got
back--if he would go--she would be better, and that better things would
come for him.

Frank was no longer the vain, selfish fellow who had married Lali--
something of the best in him was at work.  He understood, and suggested
a couple of weeks with Richard at their little place in Scotland.  Also,
he saw his wife for a little while that evening.  She had been lying
down, but she disposed herself in a deep chair before he entered.  He was
a little shocked to see, as it were all at once, how delicate she looked.
He came and sat down near her, and after a few moments of friendly talk,
in which he spoke solicitously of her health, he told her that he thought
of going up to Scotland with Richard for a few weeks, if she saw no
objection.

She did not quite understand why he was going.  She thought that perhaps
he felt the strain of the situation, and that a little absence would be
good for both.  This pleased her.  She did not shrink, as she had so
often done since his return, when he laid his hand on hers for an
instant, as he asked her if she were willing that he should go.
Sometimes in the past few weeks she had almost hated him.  Now she was
a little sorry for him, but she said that of course he must go; that no
doubt it was good that he should go, and so on, in gentle, allusive
phrases.  The next evening she came down to dinner, and was more like
herself as she was before Frank came back, but she ate little, and before
the men came into the drawing-room she had excused herself, and retired;
at which Mrs. Lambert shook her head apprehensively at herself, and made
up her mind to stay at Greyhope longer than she intended.

Which was good for all concerned; for, two nights after Frank and Richard
had gone, Mackenzie hurried down to the drawing-room with the news that
Lali had been found in a faint on her chamber floor.  That was the
beginning of weeks of anxiety, in which Mrs. Lambert was to Mrs. Armour
what Marion would have been, and more; and both to Lali all that mother
and sister could be.

Their patient was unlike any other that they had known.  Feverish,
she had no fever; with a gentle, hacking cough, she had no lung trouble;
nervous, she still was oblivious to very much that went on around her;
hungering often for her child, she would not let him remain long with her
when he came.  Her sleep was broken, and she sometimes talked to herself,
whether consciously or unconsciously they did not know.  The doctor had
no remedies but tonics--he did not understand the case; but he gently
ventured the opinion that it was mostly a matter of race, that she was
pining because civilisation had been infused into her veins--the old
insufficient theory.

"Stuff and nonsense!" said General Armour, when his wife told him.
"The girl bloomed till Frank came back.  God bless my soul! she's falling
in love, and doesn't know what it is."

He was only partly right, perhaps, but he was nearer the truth than the
dealer in quinine and a cheap philosophy of life.  "She'll come around
all right, you'll see.  Decline--decline be hanged!  The girl shall live,
--damn it, she shall!" he blurted out, as his wife's eyes filled with
tears.

Mrs. Lambert was much of the same mind as the general, but went further.
She said to Mrs. Armour that in all her life she had never seen so sweet
a character, so sensitive a mind--a mind whose sorrow was imagination.
And therein the little lady showed herself a person of wisdom.  For none
of them had yet reckoned with that one great element in Lali's character
--that thing which is the birthright of all who own the North for a
mother, the awe of imagination, the awe and the pain, which in its finest
expression comes near, very near, to the supernatural.  Lali's mind was
all pictures; she never thought of things in words, she saw them; and
everything in her life arrayed itself in a scene before her, made vivid
by her sensitive soul, so much more sensitive now with health failing,
the spirit wearing out the body.  There was her malady--the sick heart
and mind.

A new sickness wore upon her.  It had not touched her from the day she
left the North until she sang "The Chase of the Yellow Swan" that first
evening after Frank's return.  Ever since then her father was much in her
mind--the memory of her childhood, and its sweet, inspiring friendship
with Nature.  All the roughness and coarseness of the life was refined
in her memory by the exquisite atmosphere of the North, the good sweet
earth, the strong bracing wind, the camaraderie of trees and streams and
grass and animals.  And in it all stood her father, whom she had left
alone, in that interminable interval between the old life and the new.

Had she done right?  She had cut him off, as if he had never been--her
people, her country also; and for what?  For this--for this sinking
sense, this failing body, this wear and tear of mind and heart, this
constant study to be possible where she had once been declared by the
world to be impossible.

One night she lay sleeping after a rather feverish day, when it was
thought best to keep the child from her.  Suddenly she waked, and sat up.
Looking straight before her, she said:

"I will arise, and will go to my Father, and will say unto Him, Father,
I have sinned against heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to be
called Thy son."

She said nothing more than this, and presently lay back, with eyes wide
open, gazing before her.  Like this she lay all night long, a strange,
aching look in her face.  There had come upon her the sudden impulse to
leave it all, and go back to her father.  But the child--that gave her
pause.  Towards morning she fell asleep, and slept far on into the day,
a thing that had not occurred for a long time.

At noon a letter arrived for her.  It came into General Armour's hands,
and he, seeing that it bore the stamp of the Hudson's Bay Company, with
the legend, From Fort St. Charles, concluded that it was news of Lali's
father.  Then came the question whether the letter should be given to
her.  The general was for doing so, and he prevailed.  If it were bad
news, he said, it might raise her out of her present apathy and by
changing the play of her emotions do her good in the end.

The letter was given to her in the afternoon.  She took it apathetically,
but presently, seeing where it was from, she opened it hurriedly with a
little cry which was very like a moan too.  There were two letters inside
one from the factor at Fort Charles in English, and one from her father
in the Indian language.  She read her father's letter first, the other
fluttered to her feet from her lap.  General Armour, looking down, saw a
sentence in it which, he felt, warranted him in picking it up, reading
it, and retaining it, his face settling into painful lines as he did so.
Days afterwards, Lali read her father's letter to Mrs. Armour.  It ran:


                              My daughter,

                  Lali, the sweet noise of the Spring:

     Thy father speaks.

     I have seen more than half a hundred moons come like the sickle and
     go like the eye of a running buck, swelling with fire, but I hear
     not thy voice at my tent door since the first one came and went.

     Thou art gone.

     Thy face was like the sun on running water; thy hand hung on thy
     wrists like the ear of a young deer; thy foot was as soft on the
     grass as the rain on a child's cheek; thy words were like snow in
     summer, which melts in richness on the hot earth.  Thy bow and arrow
     hang lonely upon the wall, and thy empty cup is beside the pot.

     Thou art gone.

     Thou hast become great with a great race, and that is well.  Our
     race is not great, and shall not be, until the hour when the Mighty
     Men of the Kimash Hills arise from their sleep and possess the land
     again.

     Thou art gone.

     But thou hast seen many worlds, and thou hast learned great things,
     and thou and I shall meet no more; for how shall the wise kneel at
     the feet of the foolish, as thou didst kneel once at thy father's
     feet?

     Thou art gone.

     High on the Clip Claw Hills the trees are green, in the Plain of the
     Rolling Stars the wings of the wild fowl are many, and fine is the
     mist upon Goldfly Lake; and the heart of Eye-of-the-Moon is strong.

     Thou art here.

     The trail is open to the White Valley, and the Scarlet Hunter hath
     saved me, when my feet strayed in the plains and my eyes were
     blinded.

     Thou art here.

     I have friends on the Far Off River who show me the yards where the
     musk-ox gather; I have found the gardens of the young sable, and my
     tents are full of store.

     Thou art here.

     In the morning my spirit is light, and I have harvest where I would
     gather, and the stubble is for my foes.  In the evening my limbs are
     heavy, and I am at rest in my blanket.  The hunt is mine and sleep
     is mine, and my soul is cheerful when I remember thee.

     Thou art here.

     I have built for thee a place where thy spirit comes.  I hear thee
     when thou callest to me, and I kneel outside the door, for thou art
     wise, and thou speakest to me; but thee as thou art in a far land I
     shall see no more.  This is my word to thee, that thou mayst know
     that I am not alone.  Thou shalt not come again, as thou once went;
     it is not meet.  But by these other ways I will speak to thee.

     Thou art here.

     Farewell.  I have spoken.

Lali finished reading, and then slowly folded up the letter.  The writing
was that of the wife of the factor at Fort Charles--she knew it.  She
sat for a minute looking straight before her.  She read her father's
allegory.  Barbarian in so much as her father was, he had beaten this
thing out with the hammer of wisdom.  He missed her, but she must not
come back; she had outgrown the old life--he knew it and she was with
him in spirit, in his memory; she understood his picturesque phrases,
borrowed from the large, affluent world about him.  Something of the
righteousness and magnanimity of this letter passed into her, giving her
for an instant a sort of peace.  She had needed it--needed it to justify
herself, and she had been justified.  To return was impossible--she had
known that all along, though she had not admitted it; the struggle had
been but a kind of remorse, after all.  That her father should come to
her was also impossible--it was neither for her happiness nor his.  She
had been two different persons in her life, and the first was only a
memory to the second.  The father had solved the problem for her.  He too
was now a memory that she could think on with pleasure, as associated
with the girl she once was.  He had been well provided for by her
husband, and General Armour put his hand on hers gently and said:

"Lali, without your permission I have read this other letter."

She did not appear curious.  She was thinking still of her father's
letter to her.  She nodded abstractedly.  "Lali," he continued, "this
says that your father wished that letter to be written to you just as he
said it at the Fort, on the day of the Feast of the Yellow Swan.  He
stood up--the factor writes so here--and said that he had been thinking
much for years, and that the time had come when he must speak to his
daughter over the seas--"

General Armour paused.  Lali inclined her head, smiled wistfully, and
held up the letter for him to see.  The general continued:

"So he spoke as has been written to you, and then they had the Feast of
the Yellow Swan, and that night--"  He paused again, but presently, his
voice a little husky, he went on: "That night he set out on a long
journey,"--he lifted the letter and looked at it, then met the serious
eyes of his daughter-in-law," on a long journey to the Hills of the
Mighty Men; and, my dear, he never came back; for, as he said, there was
peace in the White Valley, and he would rest till the world should come
to its Spring again, and the noise of its coming should be in his ears.
Those, Lali, are his very words."

His hand closed on hers, he reached out and took the other hand, from
which the paper fluttered, and clasped both tight in his own firm grasp.

"My daughter," he said, "you have another father."  With a low cry, like
that of a fawn struck in the throat, she slid forward on her knees beside
him, and buried her face on his arm.  She understood.  Her father was
dead.  Mrs. Armour came forward, and, kneeling also, drew the dark head
to her bosom.  Then that flood came which sweeps away the rust that
gathers in the eyes and breaks through the closed dikes of the heart.

Hours after, when she had fallen into a deep sleep, General Armour and
his wife met outside her bedroom door.

"I shall not leave her," Mrs. Armour said.  "Send for Frank.  His time
has almost come."

But it would not have come so soon had not something else occurred.  The
day that he came back from Scotland he entered his wife's room, prepared
for a change in her, yet he did not find so much to make him happy as he
had hoped.  She received him with a gentleness which touched him, she let
her hand rest in his, she seemed glad to have him with her.  All bars had
been cast down between them, but he knew that she had not given him all,
and she knew it also.  But she hoped he did not know, and she dreaded the
hour when he would speak out of his now full heart.  He did not yet urge
his affection on her, he was simply devoted, and watchful, and tender,
and delightedly hopeful.

But one night she came tapping at his door.  When he opened it, she said:
"Oh come, come!  Richard is ill!  I have sent for the doctor."

Henceforth she was her old self again, with a transformed spirit, her
motherhood spending itself in a thousand ways.  She who was weak bodily
became now much stronger; the light of new vigour came to her eyes; she
and her husband, in the common peril, worked together, thinking little
of themselves, and all of the child.  The last stage of the journey to
happiness was being passed, and if it was not obvious to themselves,
the others, Marion and Captain Vidall included, saw it.

One anxious day, after the family doctor had left the sick child's room,
Marion, turning to the father and mother, said: "Greyhope will be itself
again.  I will go and tell Richard that the danger is over."

As she turned to do so, Richard entered the room.  "I have seen the
doctor," he began, "and the little chap is going to pull along like a
house afire."

Tapping Frank affectionately on the arm, he was about to continue, but
he saw what stopped him.  He saw the last move in Frank Armour's tragic-
comedy.  He and Marion left the room as quickly as was possible to him,
for, as he said himself, he was "slow at a quick march"; and a moment
afterwards the wife heard without demur her husband's tale of love for
her.

Yet, as if to remind him of the wrong he had done, Heaven never granted
Frank Armour another child.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Every man should have laws of his own
Flood came which sweeps away the rust that gathers in the eyes
How can one force one's heart?  No, no!  One has to wait
Man or woman must not expect too much out of life
May be more beautiful in uncertain England than anywhere else
Men are shy with each other where their emotions are in play
Prepared for a kiss this hour and a reproach the next
Romance is an incident to a man
Simply to have death renewed every morning
To sorrow may their humour be a foil
We want to get more out of life than there really is in it
Who can understand a woman?
Worth while to have lived so long and to have seen so much






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE":

Being young, she exaggerated the importance of the event
Every man should have laws of his own
Flood came which sweeps away the rust that gathers in the eyes
His duties were many, or he made them so
How can one force one's heart?  No, no!  One has to wait
If fumbling human fingers do not meddle with it
Man or woman must not expect too much out of life
May be more beautiful in uncertain England than anywhere else
Men must have their bad hours alone
Men are shy with each other where their emotions are in play
Miseries of this world are caused by forcing issues
Most important lessons of life--never to quarrel with a woman
Prepared for a kiss this hour and a reproach the next
Reading a lot and forgetting everything
Romance is an incident to a man
Simply to have death renewed every morning
Sympathy and consolation might be much misplaced
The world never welcomes its deserters
There should be written the one word, "Wait."
There is no influence like the influence of habit
These little pieces of art make life possible
Think of our position
To sorrow may their humour be a foil
Training in the charms of superficiality
We grow away from people against our will
We want to get more out of life than there really is in it
We speak with the straight tongue; it is cowards who lie
Who never knew self-consciousness
Who can understand a woman?
Worth while to have lived so long and to have seen so much
You never can make a scandal less by trying to hide it






THE POMP OF THE LAVILETTES

By Gilbert Parker




INTRODUCTION

I believe that 'The Pomp of the Lavilettes' has elements which justify
consideration.  Its original appearance was, however, not made under
wholly favourable conditions.  It is the only book of mine which I ever
sold outright.  This was in 1896.  Mr. Lamson, of Messrs.  Lamson &
Wolffe, energetic and enterprising young publishers of Boston, came to
see me at Atlantic City (I was on a visit to the United States at the
time), and made a gallant offer for the English, American and colonial
book and serial rights.  I felt that some day I could get the book back
under my control if I so desired, while the chances of the book making an
immediate phenomenal sale were not great.  There is something in the
nature of a story which determines its popularity.  I knew that 'The
Seats of the Mighty' and 'The Right of Way' would have a great sale, and
after they were written I said as much to my publishers.  There was the
element of general appeal in the narratives and the characters.  Without
detracting from the character-drawing, the characters, or the story in
'The Pomp of the Lavilettes', I was convinced that the book would not
make the universal appeal.  Yet I should have written the story, even
if it had been destined only to have a hundred readers.  It had to be
written.  I wanted to write what was in me, and that invasion of a little
secluded French-Canadian society by a ne'er-do-well of the over-sea
aristocracy had a psychological interest, which I could not resist.
I thought it ought to be worked out and recorded, and particularly as
the time chosen--1837--marked a large collision between the British and
the French interests in French Canada, or rather of French political
interests and the narrow administrative prejudices and nepotism of the
British executive in Quebec.

It is a satisfaction to include this book in a definitive edition
of my works, for I think that, so far as it goes, it is truthfully
characteristic of French life in Canada, that its pictures are faithful,
and that the character-drawing represents a closer observation than any
of the previous works, slight as the volume is.  It holds the same
relation to 'The Right of Way' that 'The Trail of the Sword' holds to
'The Seats of the Mighty', that 'A Ladder of Swords' holds to 'The
Battle of the Strong', that 'Donovan Pasha' holds to 'The Weavers'.
Instinctively, and, as I believe, naturally, I gave to each ambitious,
and--so far as conception goes--to each important novel of mine, an avant
coureur.  'The Trail of the Sword, A Ladder of Swords, Donovan Pasha and
The Pomp of the Lavilettes', are all very short novels, not exceeding in
any case sixty thousand words, while the novels dealing in a larger way
with the same material--the same people and environment, with the same
mise-en-scene, were each of them at least one hundred and forty thousand
words in length, or over two and a half times as long.  I do not say that
this is a system which I devised; but it was, from the first, the method
I pursued instinctively; on the basis that dealing with a smaller
subject--with what one might call a genre picture first, I should get
well into my field, and acquire greater familiarity with my material
than I should have if I attempted the larger work at once.

This is not to say that the smaller work was immature.  On the contrary,
I believe that at least these shorter works are quite mature in their
treatment and in their workmanship and design.  Naturally, however, they
made less demand on all one's resources, they were narrower in scope and
less complicated, than the longer works, like 'The Seats of the Mighty',
which made heavier call upon the capacities of one's art.  The only
occasion on which I have not preceded a very long novel of life in a new
field, by a very short one, is in the writing of 'The Judgment House'.
For this book, however, it might be said, that all the last twenty
years was a preparation, since the scenes were scenes in which I had
lived and moved, and in a sense played a part; while the ten South
African chapters of the book placed in the time of the Natal campaign
needed no pioneer narrative to increase familiarity with the material,
the circumstances and the country itself.  I knew it all from study on
the spot.

From The 'Pomp of the Lavilettes', with which might be associated 'The
Lane That Had no Turning', to 'The Right of Way', was a natural
progression; it was the emergence of a big subject which must be treated
in a large bold way, if it was to succeed.  It succeeded to a degree
which could not fail to gratify any one who would rather have a wide
audience than a contracted one, who believes that to be popular is not
necessarily to be contemptible--as the ancient Pistol put it, "base,
common and popular."




THE POMP OF THE LAVILETTES

CHAPTER I

You could not call the place a village, nor yet could it be called a
town.  Viewed from the bluff, on the English side of the river, it was a
long stretch of small farmhouses--some painted red, with green shutters,
some painted white, with red shutters--set upon long strips of land,
green, yellow, and brown, as it chanced to be pasture land, fields of
grain, or "plough-land."

These long strips of property, fenced off one from the other, so narrow
and so precise, looked like pieces of ribbon laid upon a wide quilt of
level country.  Far back from this level land lay the dark, limestone
hills, which had rambled down from Labrador, and, crossing the River St.
Lawrence, stretched away into the English province.  The farmhouses and
the long strips of land were in such regular procession, it might almost
have seemed to the eye of the whimsical spectator that the houses and the
ribbon were of a piece, and had been set down there, sentinel after
sentinel, like so many toy soldiers, along the banks of the great river.
There was one important break in the long line of precise settlement, and
that was where the Parish Church, about the middle of the line, had
gathered round it a score or so of buildings.  But this only added to the
strength of the line rather than broke its uniformity.  Wide stretches of
meadow-land reached back from the Parish Church until they were lost in
the darker verdure of the hills.

On either side of the Parish Church, with its tall, stone tower, were two
stout-built houses, set among trees and shrubbery.  They were low set,
broad and square, with heavy-studded, old-fashioned doors.  The roofs
were steep and high, with dormer windows and a sort of shelf at the
gables.

They were both on the highest ground in the whole settlement, a little
higher than the site of the Parish Church.  The one was the residence of
the old seigneur, Monsieur Duhamel; the other was the Manor Casimbault,
empty now of all the Casimbaults.  For a year it had lain idle, until the
only heir of the old family, which was held in high esteem as far back as
the time of Louis Quinze, returned from his dissipations in Quebec to
settle in the old place or sell it to the highest bidder.

Behind the Manor Casimbault and the Seigneury, thus flanking the church
at reverential distance, another large house completed the acute
triangle, forming the apex of the solid wedge of settlement drawn about
the church.  This was the great farmhouse of the Lavilettes, one of the
most noticeable families in the parish.

Of the little buildings bunched beside the church, not the least
important was the post-office, kept by Papin Baby, who was also keeper
of the bridge which was almost at the door of the office.  This bridge
crossed a stream that ran into the large river, forming a harbour.  It
opened in the middle, permitting boats and vessels to go through.  Baby
worked it by a lever.  A hundred yards or so above the bridge was the
parish mill, and between were the Hotel France, the little house of
Doctor Montmagny, the Regimental Surgeon (as he was called), the cooper
shop, the blacksmith, the tinsmith and the grocery shops.  Just beyond
the mill, upon the banks of the river, was the most notorious, if not the
most celebrated, house in the settlement.  Shangois, the travelling
notary, lived in it--when he was not travelling.  When he was, he left it
unlocked, all save one room; and people came and went through the house
as they pleased, eyeing with curiosity the dusty, tattered books upon the
shelves, the empty bottles in the corner, the patchwork of cheap prints,
notices of sales, summonses, accounts, certificates of baptism,
memoranda, receipted bills--though they were few--tacked or stuck to the
wall.

No grown-up person of the village meddled with anything, no matter how
curious; for this consistent, if unspoken, trust displayed by Shangois
appealed to their better instincts.  Besides, they, like the children,
had a wholesome fear of the disreputable, shrunken, dishevelled little
notary, with the bead-like eyes, yellow stockings, hooked nose and
palsied left hand.  Also the knapsack and black bag he carried under his
arms contained more secrets than most people wished to tempt or challenge
forth.  Few cared to anger the little man, whose father and grandfather
had been notaries here before him.

Like others in the settlement, Shangois was the last of his race.  He
could put his finger upon the secret history and private lives of nearly
every person in a dozen parishes, but most of all in Bonaventure--for
such this long parish was called.  He knew to a hair's breadth the social
value of every human being in the parish.  He was too cunning and acute
to be a gossip, but by direct and indirect ways he made every person feel
that the Cure and the Lord might forgive their pasts, but he could never
forget them, nor wished to do so.  For Monsieur Duhamel, the old
seigneur, for the drunken Philippe Casimbault, for the Cure, and for the
Lavilettes, who owned the great farmhouse at the apex of that wedge of
village life, he had a profound respect.  The parish generally did not
share his respect for the Lavilettes.

Once upon a time, beyond the memories of any in the parish, the
Lavilettes of Bonaventure were a great people.  Disaster came, debt and
difficulty followed, fire consumed the old house in which their dignity
had been cherished, and at last they had no longer their seigneurial
position, but that of ordinary farmers who work and toil in the field
like any of the fifty-acre farmers on the banks of the St. Lawrence
River.

Monsieur Louis Lavilette, the present head of the house, had not
married well.  At the time when the feeling against the English was the
strongest, and when his own fortunes were precarious, he had married a
girl somewhat older than himself, who was half English and half French,
her father having been a Hudson's Bay Company factor on the north coast
of the river.  In proportion as their fortunes and their popularity
declined, and their once notable position as an old family became
scarce a memory even, the pride of the Lavilettes increased.

Madame Lavilette made strong efforts to secure her place; but she was
not of an old French family, and this was an easy and convenient weapon
against her.  Besides, she had no taste, and her manners were much
inferior to those of her husband.  What impression he managed to make by
virtue of a good deal of natural dignity, she soon unmade by her lack of
tact.  She had no innate breeding, though she was not vulgar.  She lacked
sense a little and sensitiveness much.

The Casimbaults and the wife of the old seigneur made no friends of the
Lavilettes, but the old seigneur kept up a formal habit of calling twice
a year at the Lavilettes' big farmhouse, which, in spite of all
misfortune, grew bigger as the years went on.  Probably, in spite of
everything, Monsieur Lavilette and his family would have succeeded better
socially had it not been for one or two unpopular lawsuits brought by the
Lavilettes against two neighbours, small farmers, one of whom was clearly
in the wrong, and the other as clearly in the right.

When, after years had gone by, and the children of the Lavilettes had
grown up, young Monsieur Casimbault came from Quebec to sell his property
(it seemed to the people of Bonaventure like selling his birthright), he
was greatly surprised to find Monsieur Lavilette ready with ten thousand
dollars, to purchase the Manor Casimbault.  Before the parish had time to
take breath Monsieur Casimbault had handed over the deed, pocketed the
money, and leaving the ancient heritage of his family in the hands of the
Lavilettes, (who forthwith prepared to enter upon it, house and land),
had hurried away to Quebec again without any pangs of sentiment.

It was a little before this time that impertinent peasants in the parish
began to sing:

              "O when you hear my little silver drum,
                  And when I blow my little gold trompette-a,
               You must drop your work and come,
               You must leave your pride at home,
                  And duck your heads before the Lavilette-a!"

Gatineau the miller, and Baby the keeper of the bridge, gave their
own reasons for the renewed progress of the Lavilettes.  They met in
conference at the mill on the eve of the marriage of Sophie Lavilette
to Magon Farcinelle, farrier, farmer and member of the provincial
legislature, whose house lay behind the piece of maple wood, a mile
or so to the right of the Lavilettes' farmhouse.  Farcinelle's engagement
to Sophie had come as a surprise to all, for, so far as people knew,
there had been no courting.  Madame Lavilette had encouraged, had even
tempted, the spontaneous and jovial Farcinelle.  Though he had never made
a speech in the House of Assembly, and it was hard to tell why he was
elected, save because everybody liked him, his official position and his
popularity held an important place in Madame Lavilette's long-developed
plans, which at last were to place her in a position equal to that of the
old seigneur, and launch her upon society at the capital.

They had gone more than once to the capital, where their family had been
well-known fifty years before, but few doors had been opened to them.
They were farmers--only farmers--and Madame Lavilette made no remarkable
impression.  Her dress was florid and not in excellent taste, and her
accent was rather crude.  Sophie had gone to school at the convent in the
city, but she had no ambition.  She had inherited the stolid simplicity
of her English grandfather.  When her schooling was finished she let her
school friends drop, and came back to Bonaventure, rather stately, given
to reading, and little inclined to bother her head about anybody.

Christine, the younger sister, had gone to Quebec also, but after a week
of rebellion, bad temper and sharp speaking, had come home again without
ceremony, and refused to return.  Despite certain likenesses to her
mother, she had a deep, if unintelligible, admiration for her father,
and she never tired looking at the picture of her great-grandfather in
the dress of a chevalier of St. Louis--almost the only thing that had
been saved from the old Manor House, destroyed so long before her time.
Perhaps it was the importance she attached to her ancestry which made her
impatient with their present position, and with people in the parish who
would not altogether recognise their claims.  It was that which made her
give a little jerky bow to the miller and the postmaster when she passed
the mill.

"Come, dusty-belly," said Baby, "what's all this pom-pom of the
Lavilettes?"

The miller pursed out his lips, contracted his brows, and arranged his
loose waistcoat carefully on his fat stomach.

"Money," said he, oracularly, as though he had solved the great question
of the universe.

"La! la!  But other folks have money; and they step about Bonaventure no
more louder than a cat."

"Blood," added Gatineau, corrugating his brows still more.

"Bosh!"

"Both together--money and blood," rejoined the miller.  Overcome by his
exertions, he wheezed so tremendously that great billows of excitement
raised his waistcoat, and a perspiration broke out upon his mealy face,
making a paste which the sun, through the open doorway, immediately began
to bake into a crust.

"Pah, the airs they have always had, those Lavilettes!" said Baby.
"They will not do this because it is not polite, they will not do that
because they are too proud.  They say that once there was a baron in
their family.  Who can tell how long ago!  Perhaps when John the Baptist
was alive.  What is that?  Nothing.  There is no baron now.  All at once
somebody die a year ago, and leave them ten thousand dollars; and then--
mais, there is the grand difference!  They have save and save twenty
years to pay their debts and to buy a seigneury, like that baron who live
in the time of John the Baptist.  Now it is to stand on a ladder to speak
to them.  And when all's done, they marry Ma'm'selle Sophie to a farrier,
to that Magon Farcinelle--bah!"

"Magon was at the Laval College in Quebec; he has ten thousand dollars;
he is the best judge of horses in the province, and he's a Member of
Parliament to boot," said the miller, puffing.  "He is a great man
almost."

"He's no better judge of horses than M'sieu' Nic Lavilette--eh, that's a
bully bad scamp, my Gatineau!" responded Baby.  "He's the best in the
family.  He is a grand sport; yes.  It's he that fetched Ma'm'selle
Sophie to the hitching-post.  Voila, he can wind them all round his
finger!"

Baby looked round to see if any one was near; then he drew the miller's
head down by pulling at his collar, and whispered in his ear:

"He's hot foot for the Rebellion; that's one good thing," he said.  "If
he wipes out the English--"

"Hold your tongue," nervously interrupted Gatineau, for just then two or
three loiterers of the parish came shambling around the corner of the
mill.

Baby stopped short, and as they greeted the newcomers their attention was
drawn to the stage-coach from St. Croix coming over the little hill near
by.

"Here's M'sieu' Nic now--and who's with him?" said Baby, stepping about
nervously in his excitement.  "I knew there was something up.  M'sieu'
Nic's been writing long letters from Montreal."

Baby's look suggested that he knew more than his position as postmaster
entitled him to know; but the furtive droop at the corner of his eyes
showed also that his secretiveness was equal to his cowardice.

On the seat, beside the driver of the coach, was Nicolas Lavilette,
black-haired, brown-eyed, athletic, reckless-looking, with a cast in his
left eye, which gave him a look of drollery, in keeping with his buoyant,
daring nature.  Beside him was a figure much more noticeable and unusual.

Lean, dark-featured, with keen-glancing eyes, and a body with a faculty
for finding corners of ease; waving hair, streaked with grey, black
moustache, and a hectic flush on the cheeks, lending to the world-wise
face a wistful look-that, with near six feet of height, was the picture
of his friend.

"Who is it?" asked the miller, with bulging eyes.  "An English
nobleman," answered Baby.  "How do you know?" asked Gatineau.

"How do I know you are a fat, cheating miller?" replied the postmaster,
with cunning care and a touch of malice.  Malice was the only power Baby
knew.




CHAPTER II

In the matter of power, Baby, the inquisitive postmaster and keeper of
the bridge, was unlike the new arrival in Bonaventure.  The abilities of
the Honourable Tom Ferrol lay in a splendid plausibility, a spontaneous
blarney.  He could no more help being spendthrift of his affections and
his morals than of his money, and many a time he had wished that his
money was as inexhaustible as his emotions.

In point of morals, any of the Lavilettes presented a finer average than
their new guest, who had come to give their feasting distinction, and
what more time was to show.  Indeed, the Hon. Mr. Ferrol had no morals to
speak of, and very little honour.  He was the penniless son of an Irish
peer, who was himself well-nigh penniless; and he and his sister, whose
path of life at home was not easy after her marriageable years had
passed, drew from the consols the small sum of money their mother
had left them, and sailed away for New York.

Six months of life there, with varying fortune in which a well-to-do girl
in society gave him a promise of marriage, and then Ferrol found himself
jilted for a baronet, who owned a line of steamships and could give the
ambitious lady a title.  In his sick heart he had spoken profanely of the
future Lady of Title, had bade her good-bye with a smile and an agreeable
piece of wit, and had gone home to his flat and sobbed like a schoolboy;
for, as much as he could love anybody, he loved this girl.  He and the
faithful sister vanished from New York and appeared in Quebec, where they
were made welcome in Government House, at the citadel, and among all who
cared to know the weight of an inherited title.  For a time, the fact
that he had little or no money did not temper their hospitality with
niggardliness or caution.  But their cheery and witty guest began to take
more wine than was good for him or comfortable for others; his bills at
the clubs remained unpaid, his landlord harried him, his tailors pursued
him; and then he borrowed cheerfully and well.

However, there came an end to this, and to the acceptance of his I O U's.
Following the instincts of his Irish ancestors, he then leagued with a
professional smuggler, and began to deal in contraband liquors and
cigars.  But before this occurred, he had sent his sister to a little
secluded town, where she should be well out of earshot of his doings or
possible troubles.  He would have shielded her from harm at the cost of
his life.  His loyalty to her was only limited by the irresponsibility of
his nature and a certain incapacity to see the difference between radical
right and radical wrong.  His honour was a matter of tradition, such as
it was, and in all else he had the inherent invalidity of some of his
distant forebears.  For a time all went well, then discovery came, and
only the kind intriguing of as good friends as any man deserved prevented
his arrest and punishment.  But it all got whispered about; and while
some ladies saw a touch of romance in his doing professionally and
wholesale what they themselves did in an amateurish way with laces,
gloves and so on, men viewed the matter more seriously, and advised
Ferrol to leave Quebec.

Since that time he had lived by his wits--and pleasing, dangerous wits
they were--at Montreal and elsewhere.  But fatal ill-luck pursued him.
Presently a cold settled on his lungs.  In the dead of winter, after
sending what money he had to his sister, he had lived a week or more in
a room, with no fire and little food.  As time went on, the cold got no
better.  After sundry vicissitudes and twists of fortune, he met Nicolas
Lavilette at a horse race, and a friendship was struck up.  He frankly
and gladly accepted an invitation to attend the wedding of Sophie
Lavilette, and to make a visit at the farm, and at the Manor Casimbault
afterwards.  Nicolas spoke lightly of the Manor Casimbault, yet he had
pride in it also; for, scamp as he was, and indifferent to anything like
personal dignity or self-respect, he admired his father and had a
natural, if good-natured, arrogance akin to Christine's self-will.

It meant to Ferrol freedom from poverty, misery and financial subterfuge
for a moment; and he could be quiet--for, as he said, "This confounded
cold takes the iron out of my blood."

Like all people stricken with this disease, he never called it anything
but a cold.  All those illusions which accompany the malady were his.  He
would always be better "to-morrow."  He told the two or three friends who
came from their beds in the early morning to see him safely off from
Montreal to Bonaventure that he would be all right as soon as he got out
into the country; that he sat up too late in the town; and that he had
just got a new prescription which had cured a dozen people "with colds
and hemorrhages."  His was only a cold--just a cold; that was all.  He
was a bit weak sometimes, and what he needed was something to pull up
his strength.  The country would do this-plenty of fresh air, riding,
walking, and that sort of thing.

He had left Montreal behind in gay spirits, and he continued gay for
several hours, holding himself' erect in the seat, noting the landscape,
telling stories; but he stumbled with weakness as they got out of the
coach for luncheon.  He drank three full portions of whiskey at table,
and ate nothing.  The silent landlady who waited on them at last brought
a huge bowl of milk, and set it before him without a word.  A flush
passed swiftly across his face and faded away, as, with quick
sensitiveness, he glanced at Nicolas and another passenger, a fat priest.
They took no notice, and, reassured, he said, with a laugh, that the
landlady knew exactly what he wanted.  Lifting the dish, he drained it at
a gasp, though the milk almost choked him, and, to the apprehension of
his hostess, set the bowl spinning on the table like a top.  Another
illusion of the disease was his: that he succeeded perfectly in deceiving
everybody round him with his pathetic make-believe; and, unlike most
deceivers, he deceived himself as well.  The two actions, inconsistent
as they were, were reconciled in him, as in all the race of consumptives,
by some strange chemistry of the mind and spirit.  He was on the broad,
undiverging highway to death; yet, with every final token about him that
he was in the enemy's country, surrounded, trapped, soon to be passed
unceremoniously inside the citadel at the end of the avenue, he kept
signalling back to old friends that all was well, and he told himself
that to-morrow the king should have his own again--"To-morrow, and to-
morrow, and to-morrow!"

He was not very thin in body; his face was full, and at times his eyes
were singularly and fascinatingly bright.  He had colour--that hectic
flush which, on his cheek, was almost beautiful.  One would have turned
twice to see.  The quantities of spirits that he drank (he ate little)
would have killed a half-dozen healthy men.  To him it was food, taken
up, absorbed by the fever of his disease, giving him a real, not a
fictitious strength; and so it would continue to do till some artery
burst and choked him, or else, by some miracle of air and climate, the
hole in his lung healed up again; which he, in his elation, believed
would be "to-morrow."  Perhaps the air, the food, and life of Bonaventure
were the one medicine he needed!

But, in the moment Nicolas said to him that Bonaventure was just over the
hill, that they would be able to see it now, he had a sudden feeling of
depression.  He felt that he would give anything to turn back.  A
perspiration broke out on his forehead and his cheek.  His eyes had a
wavering, anxious look.  Some of that old sanity of the once healthy man
was making a last effort for supremacy, breaking in upon illusive hopes
and irresponsible deceptions.

It was only for a moment.  Presently, from the top of the hill, they
looked down upon the long line of little homes lying along the banks of
the river like peaceful watchmen in a pleasant land, with corn and wine
and oil at hand.  The tall cross on the spire of the Parish Church was
itself a message of hope.  He did not define it so; but the impression
vaguely, perhaps superstitiously, possessed him.  It was this vague
influence, perhaps (for he was not a Catholic), which made him
involuntarily lift his hat, as did Nicolas, when they passed a calvary;
which induced him likewise to make the sacred gesture when they met a
priest, with an acolyte and swinging censer, hurrying silently on to the
home of some dying parishioner.  The sensations were different from
anything he had known.  He had been used to the Catholic religion in
Ireland; he had seen it in France, Spain, Italy and elsewhere; but here
was something essentially primitive, archaically touching and convincing.

His spirits came back with a rush; he had a splendid feeling of
exaltation.  He was not religious, never could be, but he felt religious;
he was ill, but he felt that he was on the open highway to health; he was
dishonest, but he felt an honest man; he was the son of a peer, but he
felt himself brother to the fat miller by the roadway, to Baby, the
postmaster and keeper of the bridge, to the Regimental Surgeon, who stood
in his doorway, pulling at his moustache and blowing clouds of tobacco
smoke into the air.

Shangois, the notary, met his eye as they dashed on.  A new sensation--
not a change in the elation he felt, but an instant's interruption--
came to him.  He asked who Shangois was, and Nicolas told him.

"A notary, eh?" he remarked gaily.  "Well, why does he disguise himself?
He looks like a ragpicker, and has the eye of Solomon and the devil in
one.  He ought to be in some Star Chamber--Palmerston could make use of
him."

"Oh, he's kept busy enough with secrets here!" was Nicolas's laughing
reply.

"It's only a difference of size in the secrets anyhow," was Ferrol's
response in the same vein; and in a few moments they had passed the
Seigneury, and were drawn up before the great farmhouse.

Its appearance was rather comfortable and commodious than impressive, but
it had the air of home and undepreciating use.  There was one beautiful
clump of hollyhocks and sunflowers in the front garden; a corner of the
main building was covered with morning-glories; a fence to the left was
overgrown with grape-vines, making it look like a hedge; a huge pear tree
occupied a spot opposite to the pretty copse of sunflowers and
hollyhocks; and the rest of the garden was green, save just round a
little "summer-house," in the corner, with its back to the road, near
which Sophie had set a palisade of the golden-rod flower.  Just beside
the front door was a bush of purple lilac; and over the door, in copper,
was the coat-of-arms of the Lavilettes, placed there, at Madame's
insistence, in spite of the dying wish of Lavilette's father, a feeble,
babbling old gentleman in knee-breeches, stock, and swallow-tailed coat,
who, broken down by misfortune, age and loneliness, had gathered himself
together for one last effort for becomingness against his daughter-in-
law's false tastes--and had died the day after.  He was spared the
indignity of the coat-of-arms on the tombstone only by the fierce
opposition of Louis Lavilette, who upon this point had his first quarrel
with his wife.

Ferrol saw no particular details in his first view of the house.
The picture was satisfying to a tired man--comfort, quiet, the bread
of idleness to eat, and welcome, admiring faces round him.  Monsieur
Lavilette stood in the doorway, and behind him, at a carefully disposed
distance, was Madame, rather more emphatically dressed than necessary.
As he shook hands genially with Madame he saw Sophie and Christine in the
doorway of the parlour.  His spirits took another leap.  His
inexhaustible emotions were out upon cheerful parade at once.

The Lavilettes immediately became pensioners of his affections.  The
first hour of his coming he himself did not know which sister his ample
heart was spending itself on most--Sophie, with her English face, and
slow, docile, well-bred manner, or Christine, dark, petite, impertinent,
gay-hearted, wilful, unsparing of her tongue for others--or for herself.
Though Christine's lips and cheeks glowed, and her eyes had wonderful
warm lights, incredulity was constantly signalled from both eyes and
lips.  She was a fine, daring little animal, with as great a talent for
untruth as truth, though, to this point in her life, truth had been more
with her.  Her temptations had been few.




CHAPTER III

Mr. Ferrol seemed honestly to like the old farmhouse, with its low
ceilings, thick walls, big beams and wide chimneys, and he showed himself
perfectly at home.  He begged to be allowed to sit for an hour in the
kitchen, beside the great fireplace.  He enjoyed this part of his first
appearance greatly.  It was like nothing he had tasted since he used, as
a boy, to visit the huntsman's home on his father's estate, and gossip
and smoke in that Galway chimney-corner.  It was only when he had to face
the too impressive adoration of Madame Lavilette that his comfort got a
twist.

He made easy headway into the affections of his hostess; for, besides all
other predilections, she had an adoring awe of the nobility.  It rather
surprised her that Ferrol seemed almost unaware of his title.  He was
quite without self-consciousness, although there was that little touch
of irresponsibility in him which betrayed a readiness to sell his dignity
for a small compensation.  With a certain genial capacity for universal
blarney, he was at first as impressive with Sophie as he was attentive to
Christine.  It was quite natural that presently Madame Lavilette should
see possibilities beyond all her past imaginations.  It would surely
advance her ambitions to have him here for Sophie's wedding; but even as
she thought that, she had twinges of disappointment, because she had
promised Farcinelle to have the wedding as simple and bourgeois as
possible.

Farcinelle did not share the social ambitions of the Lavilettes.
He liked his political popularity, and he was only concerned for that.
He had that touch of shrewdness to save him from fatuity where the
Lavilettes were concerned.  He was determined to associate with the
ceremony all the primitive customs of the country.  He had come of a race
of simple farmers, and he was consistent enough to attempt to live up to
the traditions of his people.  He was entirely too good-natured to take
exception to Ferrol's easy-going admiration of Sophie.

Ferrol spoke excellent French, and soon found points of pleasant contact
with Monsieur Lavilette, who, despite the fact that he had coarsened as
the years went on, had still upon him the touch of family tradition,
which may become either offensive pride or defensive self-respect.  With
the Cure, Ferrol was not quite so successful.  The ascetic, prudent
priest, with that instinctive, long-sighted accuracy which belongs to the
narrow-minded, scented difficulty.  He disliked the English exceedingly;
and all Irishmen were English men to him.  He resisted Ferrol's blarney.
His thin lips tightened, his narrow forehead seemed to grow narrower, and
his very cassock appeared to contract austerely on his figure as he
talked to the refugee of misfortune.

When the most pardonable of gossips, the Regimental Surgeon, asked him on
his way home what he thought of Ferrol, he shrugged his shoulders,
tightened his lips again, and said:

"A polite, designing heretic."

The Regimental Surgeon, though a Frenchman, had once belonged to a
British battery of artillery stationed at Quebec, and there he had
acquired an admiration for the English, which betrayed itself in his
curious attempts to imitate Anglo-Saxon bluffness and blunt spontaneity.
When the Cure had gone, he flung back his shoulders, with a laugh, as he
had seen the major-general do at the officers' mess at the citadel, and
said in English:

"Heretics are damn' funny.  I will go and call.  I have also some Irish
whiskey.  He will like that; and pipes--pipes, plenty of them!"

The pipe he was smoking at the moment had been given to him by the major-
general, and he polished the silver ferrule, with its honourable
inscription, every morning of his life.

On the morning of the second day after Ferrol came, he was carried off to
the Manor Casimbault to see the painful alterations which were being made
there under the direction of Madame Lavilette.  Sophie, who had a good
deal of natural taste, had in the old days fought against her mother's
incongruous ideas, and once, when the rehabilitation of the Manor
Casimbault came up, she had made a protest; but it was unavailing, and it
was her last effort.  The Manor Casimbault was destined to be an example
of ancient dignity and modern bad taste.  Alterations were going on as
Madame Lavilette, Ferrol and Christine entered.

For some time Ferrol watched the proceedings with a casual eye, but
presently he begged his hostess that she would leave the tall, old oak
clock where it was in the big hall, and that the new, platter-faced
office clock, intended for its substitute, be hung up in the kitchen.
He eyed the well-scraped over-mantel askance and saw, with scarcely
concealed astonishment, a fine, old, carved wooden seat carried out of
doors to make room for an American rocking-chair.  He turned his head
away almost in anger when he saw that the beautiful brown wainscoting was
being painted an ultra-marine blue.  His partly disguised astonishment
and dissent were not lost upon the crude but clever Christine.  A new
sense was opened up in her, and she felt somehow that the ultra-marine
blue was not right, that the over-mantel had been spoiled, that the new
walnut table was too noticeable, and that the American rocking-chair
looked very common.  Also she felt that the plush, with which her mother
and the dressmaker at St. Croix had decorated her bodice, was not the
thing.  Presently this made her angry.

"Won't you sit down?" she asked a little maliciously, pointing to the
rocking-chair in the salon.

"I prefer standing--with you," he answered, eyeing the chair with a sly
twinkle.

"No, that isn't it," she rejoined sharply.  "You don't like the chair."
Then suddenly breaking into English--"Ah!  I know, I know.  You can't
fool me.  I see de leetla look in your eye; and you not like the paint,
and you'd pitch that painter, Alcide, out into the snow if it is your
house."

"I wouldn't, really," he answered--he coughed a little--"Alcide is doing
his work very well.  Couldn't you give me a coat of blue paint, too?"

The piquant, intelligent, fiery peasant face interested him.  It had
warmth, natural life and passion.

She flushed and stamped her foot, while he laughed heartily; and she was
about to say something dangerous, when the laugh suddenly stopped and he
began coughing.  The paroxysm increased until he strained and caught at
his breast with his hand.  It seemed as if his chest and throat must
burst.

She instantly changed.  The flush of anger passed from her face, and
something else came into it.  She caught his hand.

"Oh!  what can I do, what can I do to help you?" she asked pitifully.
"I did not know you were so ill.  Tell me, what can I do?"

He made a gentle, protesting motion of his free arm--he could not speak
yet--while she held and clasped his other hand.

"It's the worst I ever had," he said, after a moment "the very worst!"

He sat down, and again he had a fit of coughing, and the sweat started
out violently upon his forehead and cheek.  When his head at last lay
back against the chair, the paroxysm over, a little spot of blood showed
and spread upon his white lips.  With a pained, shuddering little gasp
she caught her handkerchief from her bosom, and, running one hand round
his shoulder, quickly and gently caught away the spot of blood, and
crumpled the handkerchief in her hand to hide it from him.

"Oh! poor fellow, poor fellow!" she said.  "Oh! poor fellow!"

Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked at him with that look which
is not the love of a woman for a man, or of a lover for a lover, but that
latent spirit of care and motherhood which is in every woman who is more
woman than man.  For there are women who are more men than women.

For himself, a new fact struck home in him.  For the first time since
his illness he felt that he was doomed.  That little spot of blood in
the crumpled handkerchief which had flashed past his eye was the fatal
message he had sought to elude for months past.  A hopeless and ironical
misery shot through him.  But he had humour too, and, with the taste of
the warm red drop in his mouth still, his tongue touched his lips
swiftly, and one hand grasping the arm of the chair, and the fingers of
the other dropping on the back of her hand lightly, he said in a quaint,
ironical tone:

"'Dead for a ducat!'"

When he saw the look of horror in her face, his eyes lifted almost gaily
to hers, as he continued:

"A little brandy, if you can get it, mademoiselle."

"Yes, yes.  I'll get some for you--some whiskey!" she said, with
frightened, terribly eager eyes.

"Alcide always has some.  Don't stir.  Sit just where you are."  She ran
out of the room swiftly--a light-footed, warm-spirited, dramatic little
thing, set off so garishly in the bodice with the plush trimming; but she
had a big heart, and the man knew it.  It was the big-heartedness which
was the touch of the man in her that made her companionable to him.

He said to himself when she left him:

"What cursed luck!"  And after a pause, he added: "Good-hearted little
body, how sorry she looked!"  Then he settled back in his chair, his eyes
fixed upon her as she entered the room, eager, pale and solicitous.  A
half-hour later they two were on their way to the farmhouse, the work of
despoiling going on in the Manor behind them.  Ferrol walked with an
easy, half-languid step, even a gay sort of courage in his bearing.  The
liquor he had drunk brought the colour to his lips.  They were now hot
and red, and his eyes had a singular feverish brilliancy, in keeping with
the hectic flush on his cheek.  He had dismissed the subject of his
illness almost immediately, and Christine's adaptable nature had
instantly responded to his mood.

He asked her questions about the country-side, of their neighbours, of
the way they lived, all in an easy, unintrusive way, winning her
confidence and provoking her candour.

Two or three times, however, her face suddenly flushed with the memory
of the scene in the Manor, and her first real awakening to her social
insufficiency; for she of all the family had been least careful to see
herself as others might see her.  She was vain; she was somewhat of a
barbarian; she loved nobody and nobody's opinion as she loved herself and
her own opinion.  Though, if any people really cared for her, and she for
them, they were the Regimental Surgeon and Shangois the notary.

Once, as they walked on, she turned and looked back at the Manor House,
but only for an instant.  He caught the glance, and said:

"You'll like to live there, won't you?"

"I don't know," she answered almost sharply.  "But if the Casimbaults
liked it, I don't see why we shouldn't."

There was a challenge in her voice, defiance in the little toss of her
head.  He liked her spirit in spite of the vanity.  Her vanity did not
concern him greatly; for, after all, what was he doing here?  Merely
filling in dark days, living a sober-coloured game out.  He had one
solitary hundred dollars--no more; and half of that he had borrowed, and
half of it he got from selling his shooting-traps and his hunting-watch.
He might worry along on that till the end of the game; but he had no
money to send his sister in that secluded village two hundred miles away.
She had never known how really poor he was; and she had lived in her
simple way without want and without any unusual anxiety, save for his
health.  More than once he had practically starved himself to send money
to her.  Perhaps also he would have starved others for the same purpose.

"I'll warrant the Casimbaults never enjoyed the Manor as much as I've
done that big kitchen in your house," he said, "and I can't see why you
want to leave it.  Don't you feel sorry you are going to leave the old
place?  Hadn't you got your own little spots there, and made friends with
them?  I feel as if I should like to sit down by the side of your big,
warm chimney-corner, till the wind came along that blows out the candle."

"What do you mean by 'blowing out the candle'?" she asked.

"Well," he answered, "it means, shut up shop, drop the curtain, or
anything you like.  It means X Y Z and the grand finale!"

"Oh!" she said, with a little start, as the thing dawned upon her.
"Don't speak like that; you're not going to die."

"Give me your handkerchief," he answered.  "Give it to me, and I'll tell
you--how soon."

She jammed her hand down in her pocket.  "No, I won't," she answered.
"I won't!"

She never did, and he liked her none the less for that.  Somehow, up to
this time, he had always thought that he would get well, and to-morrow he
would probably think so again; but just for the moment he felt the real
truth.

Presently she said (they spoke in French):

"Why is it you like our old kitchen so much?  It isn't nearly as nice as
the parlour."

"Well, it's a place to live in, anyhow; and I fancy you all feel more at
home there than anywhere else."

"I feel just as much at home in the parlour as there," she retorted.

"Oh, no, I think not.  The room one lives in the most is the room for any
one's money."

She looked at him in a puzzled way.  Too many sensations were being born
in her all at once; but she did recognise that he was not trying to
subtract anything from the pomp of the Lavilettes.

He belonged to a world that she did not know--and yet he was so perfectly
at home with her, so idly easygoing.

"Did you ever live in a castle?" she asked eagerly.  "Yes," he said,
with a dry little laugh.  Then, after a moment, with the half-abstracted
manner of a man who is recalling a long-forgotten scene, he added: "I
lived in the North Tower, looking out on Farcalladen Moor.  When I wasn't
riding to the hounds myself I could see them crossing to or from the
meet.  The River Stavely ran between; and just under the window of the
North Tower is the prettiest copse you ever saw.  That was from one side
of the tower.  From the other side you looked into the court-yard.  As a
boy, I liked the court-yard just as well as the moor; for the pigeons,
the sparrows, the horses and the dogs were all there.  As a man, I liked
the moor better.  Well, I had jolly good times in Castle Stavely--once
upon a time."  "Yet, you like our kitchen!" she again urged, in a maze
of wonderment.

"I like everything here," he answered; "everything--everything, you
understand!" he said, looking meaningly into her eyes.

"Then you'll like the wedding--Sophie's wedding," she answered, in a
little confusion.

A half-hour later, he said much the same sort of thing to Sophie, with
the same look in his eyes, and only the general purpose, in either case,
of being on easy terms with them.




CHAPTER IV

The day of the wedding there was a gay procession through the parish of
the friends and constituents of Magon Farcinelle.  When they came to his
home he joined them, and marched at the head of the procession as had
done many a forefather of his, with ribbons on his hat and others at his
button-hole.  After stopping for exchange of courtesies at several houses
in the parish, the procession came to the homestead of the Lavilettes,
and the crowd were now enough excited to forget the pride which had
repelled and offended them for many years.

Monsieur Lavilette made a polite speech, sending round cider and "white
wine" (as native whiskey was called) when he had finished.  Later,
Nicolas furnished some good brandy, and Farcinelle sent more.  A good
number of people had come out of curiosity to see what manner of man the
Englishman was, well prepared to resent his overbearing snobbishness--
they were inclined to believe every Englishman snobbish.  But Ferrol was
so entirely affable, and he drank so freely with everyone that came to
say "A votre sante, M'sieu' le Baron," and kept such a steady head in
spite of all those quantities of white wine, brandy and cider, that they
were almost ready to carry him on their shoulders; though, with their
racial prejudice, they would probably have repented of that indiscretion
on the morrow.

Presently, dancing began in a paddock just across the road from
the house; and when Madame Lavilette saw that Mr. Ferrol gave such
undisguised countenance to the primitive rejoicings, she encouraged the
revellers and enlarged her hospitality, sending down hampers of eatables.
She preened with pleasure when she saw Ferrol walking up and down in very
confidential conversation with Christine.  If she had been really
observant she would have seen that Ferrol's tendency was towards an
appearance of confidential friendliness with almost everybody.  Great
ideas had entered Madame's head, but they were vaguely defining
themselves in Christine's mind also.  Where might not this friendship
with Ferrol lead her?

Something occurred in the midst of the dancing which gave a new turn to
affairs.  In one of the pauses a song came monotonously lilting down the
street; yet it was not a song, it was only a sort of humming or chanting.
Immediately there was a clapping of hands, a flutter of female voices,
and delighted exclamations of children.

"Oh, it's a dancing bear, it's a dancing bear!" they cried.

"Is it Pito?" asked one.

"Is it Adrienne?" cried another.

"But no; I'll bet it's Victor!" exclaimed a third.  As the man and the
bear came nearer, they saw it was neither of these.  The man's voice was
not unpleasant; it had a rolling, crooning sort of sound, a little weird,
as though he had lived where men see few of their kind and have much to
do with animals.

He was bearded, but young; his hair grew low on his forehead, and,
although it was summer time, a fur cap was set far back, like a fez, upon
his black curly hair.  His forehead was corrugated, like that of a man of
sixty who had lived a hard life; his eyes were small, black and piercing.
He wore a thick, short coat, a red sash about his waist, a blue flannel
shirt, and a loose red scarf, like a handkerchief, at his throat.  His
feet were bare, and his trousers were rolled half way up to his knee.  In
one hand he carried a short pole with a steel pike in it, in the other a
rope fastened to a ring in the bear's nose.

The bear, a huge brown animal, upright on his hind legs, was dancing
sideways along the road, keeping time to the lazy notes of his leader's
voice.

In front of the Hotel France they halted, and the bear danced round and
round in a ring, his eyes rolling savagely, his head shaking from side to
side in a bad-tempered way.

Suddenly some one cried out: "It's Vanne Castine!  It's Vanne!"

People crowded nearer: there was a flurry of exclamations, and then
Christine took a few steps forward where she could see the man's face,
and as swiftly drew back into the crowd, pale and distraite.

The man watched her until she drew away behind a group, which was
composed of Ferrol, her brother and her sister Sophie.  He dropped no
note of his song, and the bear kept jigging on.  Children and elders
threw coppers, which he picked up, with a little nod of his head, a
malicious sort of smile on his lips.  He kept a vigilant eye on the bear,
however, and his pole was pointed constantly towards it.  After about
five minutes of this entertainment he moved along up the road.  He spoke
no word to anybody though there were some cries of greeting, but passed
on, still singing the monotonous song, followed by a crowd of children.
Presently he turned a corner, and was lost to sight.  For a moment longer
the lullaby floated across the garden and the green fields, then the
cornet and the concertina began again, and Ferrol turned towards
Christine.

He had seen her paleness and her look of consternation, had observed the
sulky, penetrating look of the bear-leader's eye, and he knew that he was
stumbling upon a story.  Her eye met his, then swiftly turned away.  When
her look came to his face again it was filled with defiant laughter, and
a hot brilliancy showed where the paleness had been.

"Will you dance with me?" Ferrol asked.

"Dance with you here?" she responded incredulously.

"Yes, just here," he said, with a dry little laugh, as he ran his arm
round her waist and drew her out upon the green.

"And who is Vanne Castine?" he asked as they swung away in time with the
music.

The rest stopped dancing when they saw these two appear in the ring-
through curiosity or through courtesy.

She did not answer immediately.  They danced a little longer, then he
said:

"An old friend, eh?"

After a moment, with a masked defiance still, and a hard laugh, she
answered in English, though his question had been in French:

"De frien' of an ol frien'."

"You seem to be strangers now," he suggested.  She did not answer at all,
but suddenly stopped dancing, saying: "I'm tired."

The dance went on without them.  Sophie and Farcinelle presently withdrew
also.  In five minutes the crowd had scattered, and the Lavilettes and
Mr. Ferrol returned to the house.

Meanwhile, as they passed up the street, the droning, vibrating voice of
the bear-leader came floating along the air and through the voices of the
crowd like the thread of motive in the movement of an opera.




CHAPTER V

That night, while gaiety and feasting went on at the Lavilettes', there
was another sort of feasting under way at the house of Shangois, the
notary.

On one side of a tiny fire in the chimney, over which hung a little black
kettle, sat Shangois and Vanne Castine.  Castine was blowing clouds of
smoke from his pipe, and Shangois was pouring some tea leaves into a
little tin pot, humming to himself snatches of an old song as he did so:

              "What shall we do when the King comes home?
                  What shall we do when he rides along
               With his slaves of Greece and his serfs of Rome?
                  What shall we sing for a song--
                                   When the King comes home?

              "What shall we do when the King comes home?
                  What shall we do when he speaks so fair?
               Shall we give him the house with the silver dome
                  And the maid with the crimson hair
                                   When the King comes home?"

A long, heavy sigh filled the room, but it was not the breath of Vanne
Castine.  The sound came from the corner where the huge brown bear
huddled in savage ease.  When it stirred, as if in response to Shangois's
song, the chains rattled.  He was fastened by two chains to a staple
driven into the foundation timbers of the house.  Castine's bear might
easily be allowed too much liberty!

Once he had killed a man in the open street of the City of Quebec,
and once also he had nearly killed Castine.  They had had a fight and
struggle, out of which the man came with a lacerated chest; but since
that time he had become the master of the bear.  It feared him; yet, as
he travelled with it, he scarcely ever took his eyes off it, and he never
trusted it.  That was why, although Michael was always near him, sleeping
or waking, he kept him chained at night.

As Shangois sang, Castine's brow knotted and twitched and his hand
clinched on his pipe with a sudden ferocity.

"Name of a black cat, what do you sing that song for, notary?" he broke
out peevishly.  "Nose of a little god, are you making fun of me?"

Shangois handed him some tea.  "There's no one to laugh--why should I
make fun of you?" he asked, jeeringly, in English, for his English was
almost as good as his French, save in the turn of certain idioms.
"Come, my little punchinello, tell me, now, why have you come back?"

Castine laughed bitterly.

"Ha, ha, why do I come back?  I'll tell you."  He sucked at his pipe.
"Bon'venture is a good place to come to-yes.  I have been to Quebec,
to St. John, to Fort Garry, to Detroit, up in Maine and down to New York.
I have ride a horse in a circus, I have drive a horse and sleigh in a
shanty, I have play in a brass band, I have drink whiskey every night for
a month--enough whiskey.  I have drink water every night for a year--it
is not enough.  I have learn how to speak English; I have lose all my
money when I go to play a game of cards.  I go back to de circus; de
circus smash; I have no pay.  I take dat damn bear Michael as my share--
yes.  I walk trough de State of New York, all trough de State of Maine to
Quebec, all de leetla village, all de big city--yes.  I learn dat damn
funny song to sing to Michael.  Ha, why do I come to Bon'venture?  What
is there to Bon'venture?  Ha!  you ask that?  I know and you know,
M'sieu' Shangois.  There is nosing like Bon'venture in all de worl'.

"What is it you would have?  Do you want nice warm house in winter,
plenty pork, molass', patat, leetla drop whiskey 'hind de door in de
morning?  Ha!  you come to Bon'venture.  Where else you fin' it?  You
want people say: 'How you do, Vanne Castine--how you are?  Adieu, Vanne
Castine; to see you again ver' happy, Vanne Castine.'  Ha, that is what
you get in Bon'venture.  Who say 'God bless you' in New York!  They say
'Damn you!'--yes, I know.

"Where have you a church so warm, so ver' nice, and everybody say him
mass and God-have-mercy?  Where you fin' it like that leetla place on de
hill in Bon'venture?  Yes.  There is anoser place in Bon'venture, ver'
nice place--yes, ha!  On de side of de hill.  You have small-pox, scarlet
fev', difthere; you get smash your head, you get break your leg, you fall
down, you go to die.  Ha, who is there in all de worl' like M'sieu'
Vallier, the Cure?  Who will say to you like him: 'Vanne Castine, you
have break all de commandments: you have swear, you have steal, you have
kill, you have drink.  Ver' well, now, you will be sorry for dat, and say
your prayer.  Perhaps, after hunder fifty tousen' years of purgator', you
will be forgive and go to Heaven.  But first, when you die, we will put
you way down in de leetla warm house in de ground, on de side of de hill,
in de Parish of Bon'venture, because it is de only place for a gipsy like
Vanne Castine.'

"You ask me-ah!  I see you look at me, M'sieu' le Notaire, you look at me
like a leetla dev'.  You t'ink I come for somet'ing else"--his black eyes
flashed under his brow, he shook his head, and his hands clinched--"You
ask me why I come back?  I come back because there is one thing I care
for mos' in all de worl'.  You t'ink I am happy to go about with a damn
brown bear and dance trough de village?  Moi?--no, no, no!  What a Jack
I look when I sing--ah, that fool's song all down de street!  I come back
for one thing only, M'sieu' Shangois.

"You know that night--ah, four, five years ago?  You remember, M'sieu'
Shangois?  Ah! she was so beautiful, so sweet; her hair it fall down
about her face, her eyes all black, her cheeks like the snow, her lips,
her lips!--You rememb' her father curse me, tell me to go.  Why?  Because
I have kill a man!  Eh bien, what if I kill a man!  He would have kill
me: I do it to save myself.  I say I am not guilty; but her father say I
am a sc'undrel, and turn me out de house.

"De girl, Christine, she love me.  Yes, she love Vanne Castine.  She say
to me, 'I will go with you.  Go anywhere, and I will go!'

"It is night and it is all dark.  I wait at de place, an' she come.  We
start to walk to Montreal.  Ah! dat night, it is like fire in my heart.
Well, a great storm come down, and we have to come back.  We come to your
house here, light a fire, and sit just in de spot where I am, one hour,
two hour, three hour.  Saprie, how I love her!  She is in me like fire,
like de wind and de sea.  Well, I am happy like no other man.  I sit here
and look at her, and t'ink of to-morrow-for ever.  She look at me; oh, de
love of God, she look at me!  So I kneel down on de floor here beside her
and say, 'Who shall take you from me, Christine, my leetla Christine?'

"She look at me and say: 'Who shall take you from me, my big Vanne?'

"All at once the door open, and--"

"And a little black notary take her from you," said Shangois, dryly, and
with a touch of malice also.  "You, yes, you lawyer dev', you take her
from me!  You say to her it is wicked.  You tell her how her father will
weep and her mother's heart will break.  You tell her how she will be
ashame', and a curse will fall on her.  Then she begin to cry, for she is
afraid.  Ah, where is de wrong?  I love her; I would go to marry her--but
no, what is that to you!  She turn on me and say, 'I will go back to my
father.'  And she go back.  After that I try to see her; but she will not
see me.  Then I go away, and I am gone five years; yes."

Shangois came over, and with his thin beautiful hand (for despite the
ill-kept finger nails, it was the one fine feature of his body-long,
shapely, artistic) tapped Castine's knee.

"I did right to save Christine.  She hates you now.  If she had gone with
you that night, do you suppose she would have been happy as your wife?
No, she is not for Vanne Castine."

Suddenly Shangois's manner changed; he laid his hand upon the other's
shoulder.

"My poor, wicked, good-for-nothing Vanne Castine, Christine Lavilette was
not made for you.  You are a poor vaurien, always a poor vaurien.  I knew
your father and your two grandfathers.  They were all vauriens; all as
handsome as you can think, and all died, not in their beds.  Your
grandfather killed a man, your father drank and killed a man.  Your
grandfather drove his wife to her grave, your father broke your mother's
heart.  Why should you break the heart of any girl in the world?  Leave
her alone.  Is it love to a woman when you break all the commandments,
and shame her and bring her down to where you are--a bad vaurien?  When
a man loves a woman with the true love, he will try to do good for her
sake.  Go back to that crazy New York--it is the place for you.
Ma'm'selle Christine is not for you."

"Who is she for, m'sieu' le dev'?"

"Perhaps for the English Irishman," answered Shangois, in a low
suggestive tone, as he dropped a little brandy in his tea with light
fingers.

"Ah, sacre!  we shall see.  There is vaurien in her too," was the half-
triumphant reply.

"There is more woman," retorted Shangois; "much more."

"We'll see about that, m'sieu'!" exclaimed Castine, as he turned towards
the bear, which was clawing at his chain.

An hour later, a scene quite as important occurred at Lavilette's great
farmhouse.




CHAPTER VI

It was about ten o'clock.  Lights were burning in every window.  At a
table in the dining-room sat Monsieur and Madame Lavilette, the father of
Magon Farcinelle, and Shangois, the notary.  The marriage contract was
before them.  They had reached a point of difficulty.  Farcinelle was
stipulating for five acres of river-land as another item in Sophie's dot.

The corners tightened around Madame's mouth.  Lavilette scratched his
head, so that the hair stood up like flying tassels of corn.  The land
in question lay next a portion of Farcinelle's own farm, with a river
frontage.  On it was a little house and shed, and no better garden-stuff
grew in the parish than on this same five acres.

"But I do not own the land," said Lavilette.  "You've got a mortgage on
it," answered Farcinelle.  "Foreclose it."

"Suppose I did foreclose; you couldn't put the land in the marriage
contract until it was mine."

The notary shrugged his shoulder ironically, and dropped his chin in his
hand as he furtively eyed the two men.  Farcinelle was ready for the
emergency.  He turned to Shangois.

"I've got everything ready for the foreclosure," said he.  "Couldn't it
be done to-night, Shangois?"

"Hardly to-night.  You might foreclose, but the property couldn't be
Monsieur Lavilette's until it is duly sold under the mortgage."

"Here, I'll tell you what can be done," said Farcinelle.  "You can put
the mortgage in the contract as her dot, and, name of a little man!  I'll
foreclose it, I can tell you.  Come, now, Lavilette, is it a bargain?"
Shangois sat back in his chair, the fingers of both hands drumming on the
table before him, his head twisted a little to one side.  His little
reflective eyes sparkled with malicious interest, and his little voice
said, as though he were speaking to himself:

"Excuse, but the land belongs to the young Vanne Castine--eh?"

"That's it," exclaimed Farcinelle.

"Well, why not give the poor vaurien a chance to take up the mortgage?"

"Why, he hasn't paid the interest in five years!" said Lavilette.

"But--ah--you have had the use of the land, I think, monsieur.  That
should meet the interest."  Lavilette scowled a little; Farcinelle
grunted and laughed.

"How can I give him a chance to pay the mortgage?" said Lavilette.  "He
never had a penny.  Besides, he hasn't been seen for five years."

A faint smile passed over Shangois's face.  "Yesterday," he said, "he had
not been seen for five years, but to-day he is in Bonaventure."

"The devil!" said Lavilette, dropping a fist on the table, and staring
at the notary; for he was not present in the afternoon when Castine
passed by.

"What difference does that make?" snarled Farcinelle.  "I'll bet he's
got nothing more than what he went away with, and that wasn't a sou
markee!"

A provoking smile flickered at the corners of Shangois's mouth, and he
said, with a dry inflection, as he dipped and redipped his quill pen in
the inkhorn:

"He has a bear, my friends, which dances very well."  Farcinelle
guffawed.  "St. Mary!" said he, slapping his leg, "we'll have the bear
at the wedding, and I'll have that farm of Vanne Castine's.  What does he
want of a farm?  He's got a bear.  Come, is it a bargain?  Am I to have
the mortgage?  If you don't stick it in, I'll not let my boy marry your
girl, Lavilette.  There, now, that's my last word."

"'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, nor his wife, nor his maid,
nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his,"' said the notary,
abstractedly, drawing the picture of a fat Jew on the paper before him.

The irony was lost upon his hearers.  Madame Lavilette had been thinking,
however, and she saw further than her husband.

"It amounts to the same thing," she said.  "You see it doesn't go away
from Sophie; so let him have it, Louis."

"All right," responded monsieur at last, "Sophie gets the acres and the
house in her dot."

"You won't give young Vanne Castine a chance?" asked the notary.  "The
mortgage is for four hundred dollars and the place is worth seven
hundred!"

No one replied.  "Very well, my Israelites," added Shangois, bending over
the contract.

An hour later, Nicolas Lavilette was in the big storeroom of the
farmhouse, which was reached by a covered passage from the hall between
the kitchen and the dining-room.  In his off-hand way he was getting out
some flour, dried fruit and preserves for the cook, who stood near as he
loaded up her arms.  He laughingly thrust a string of green peppers under
her chin, and added a couple of sprigs of summer-savoury, then suddenly
turned round, with a start, for a peculiar low whistle came to him
through the half-open window.  It was followed by heavy stertorous
breathing.

He turned back again to the cook, gaily took her by the shoulders, and
pushed her to the door.  Closing it behind her, he shot the bolt and ran
back to the window.  As he did so, a hand appeared on the windowsill,
and a face followed the hand.

"Ha!  Nicolas Lavilette, is that you?  So, you know my leetla whistle
again!"

Nicolas's brow darkened.  In old days he and this same Vanne Castine had
been in many a scrape together, and Vanne, the elder, had always borne
the responsibility of their adventures.  Nicolas had had enough of those
old days; other ambitions and habits governed him now.  He was not
exactly the man to go back on a friend, but Castine no longer had any
particular claims to friendship.  The last time he had heard Vanne's
whistle was a night five years before, when they both joined a gang of
river-drivers, and made a raid on some sham American speculators and
surveyors and labourers, who were exploiting an oil-well on the property
of the old seigneur.  The two had come out of the melee with bruised
heads, and Vanne with a bullet in his calf.  But soon afterwards came
Christine's elopement with Vanne, of which no one knew save her father,
Nicolas, Shangois and Vanne himself.  That ended their compact, and,
after a bitter quarrel, they had parted and had never met nor seen each
other till this very afternoon.

"Yes, I know your whistle all right," answered Nicolas, with a twist of
the shoulder.

"Aren't you going to shake hands?" asked Castine, with a sort of sneer
on his face.

Nicolas thrust his hands down in his pockets.  "I'm not so glad to see
you as all that," he answered, with a contemptuous laugh.

The black eyes of the bear-leader were alive with anger.

"You're a damn' fool, Nic Lavilette.  You think because I lead a bear--
eh?  Pshaw! you shall see.  I am nothing, eh?  I am to walk on!  Nic
Lavilette, once he steal the Cure's pig and--"

"See you there, Castine, I've had enough of that," was the half-angry,
half-amused interruption.  "What are you after here?"

"What was I after five years ago?" was the meaning reply.

Lavilette's face suddenly flushed with fury.  He gripped the window with
both hands, and made as if he would leap out; but beside Castine's face
there appeared another, with glaring eyes, red tongue, white vicious
teeth, and two huge claws which dropped on the ledge of the window in
much the same way as did Lavilette's.

There was a moment's silence as the man and the beast looked at each
other, and then Castine began laughing in a low, sneering sort of way.

"I'll shoot the beast, and I'll break your neck if ever I see you on this
farm again," said Lavilette, with wild anger.

"Break my neck--that's all right; but shoot this leetla Michael!  When
you do that you will not have to wait for a British bullet to kill you.
I will do it with a knife--just where you can hear it sing under your
ear!"

"British bullet!" said Lavilette, excitedly; "what about a British
bullet--eh--what?"

"Only that the Rebellion's coming quick now," answered Castine, his
manner changing, and a look of cunning crossing his face.  "You've given
your name to the great Papineau, and I am here, as you see."

"You--you--what have you got to do with the Revolution?  with Papineau?"

"Pah! do you think a Lavilette is the only patriot!  Papineau is my
friend, and--"

"Your friend--"

"My friend.  I am carrying his message all through the parishes.
Bon'venture is the last--almost.  The great General Papineau sends you
a word, Nic Lavilette--here."

He drew from his pocket a letter and handed it over.  Lavilette tore it
open.  It was a captain's commission for M. Nicolas Lavilette, with a
call for money and a company of men and horses.

"Maybe there's a leetla noose hanging from the tail of that, but then--
it is the glory--eh?  Captain Lavilette--eh?" There was covert malice in
Castine's voice.  "If the English whip us, they won't shoot us like grand
seigneurs, they will hang us like dogs."

Lavilette scarcely noticed the sneer.  He was seeing visions of a
captain's sword and epaulettes, and planning to get men, money and horses
together--for this matter had been brooding for nearly a year, and he had
been the active leader in Bonaventure.

"We've been near a hundred years, we Frenchmen, eating dirt in the
country we owned from the start; and I'd rather die fighting to get back
the old citadel than live with the English heel on my nose," said
Lavilette, with a play-acting attempt at oratory.

"Yes, an' dey call us Johnny Pea-soups," said Castine, with a furtive
grin.  "An' perhaps that British Colborne will hang us to our barn doors
--eh?"

There was silence for a moment, in which Lavilette read the letter over
again with gloating eyes.  Presently Castine started and looked round.

"What's that?" he said in a whisper.  "I heard nothing."

"I heard the feet of a man--yes."

They both stood moveless, listening.  There was no sound; but, at the
same time, the Hon. Mr. Ferrol had the secret of the Rebellion in his
hands.

A moment later Castine and his bear were out in the road.  Lavilette
leaned out of the window and mused.  Castine's words of a few moments
before came to him:

"That British Colborne will hang us to our barn doors--eh?"

He shuddered, and struck a light.




CHAPTER VII

Mr. Ferrol slept in the large guest-chamber of the house.  Above it was
Christine's bedroom.  Thick as were the timbers and boards of the floor,
Christine could hear one sound, painfully monotonous and frequent, coming
from his room the whole night--the hacking, rending cough which she had
heard so often since he came.  The fear of Vanne Castine, the memories of
the wild, half animal-like love she had had for him in the old days, the
excitement of the new events which had come into her life; these kept her
awake, and she tossed and turned in feverish unrest.  All that had
happened since Ferrol had arrived, every word that he had spoken, every
motion that he had made, every look of his face, she recalled vividly.
All that he was, which was different from the people she had known, she
magnified, so that to her he had a distant, overwhelming sort of
grandeur.  She beat the bedclothes in her restlessness.  Suddenly she sat
up straight in bed.

"Oh, if I hadn't been a Lavilette!  If I'd only been born and brought up
with the sort of people he comes from, I'd not have been ashamed of
myself or him of me."

The plush bodice she had worn that day danced before her eyes.  She knew
how horribly ugly it was.  Her fingers ran over the patchwork quilt on
her bed; and although she could not see it, she loathed it, because she
knew it was a painful mess of colours.  With a little touch of dramatic
extravagance, she leaned over and down, and drew her fingers
contemptuously along the rag-carpet on the floor.  Then she cried a
little hysterically:

"He never saw anything like that before.  How he must laugh as he sits
there in that room!"

As if in reply, the hacking cough came faintly through the time-worn
floor.

"That cough's going to kill him, to kill him," she said.

Then, with a little start and with a sort of cry, which she stopped by
putting both hands over her mouth, she said to herself, brokenly:

"Why shouldn't he--why shouldn't he love me!  I could take care of him;
I could nurse him; I could wait on him; I could be better to him than any
one else in the world.  And it wouldn't make any difference to him at all
in the end.  He's going to die before long--I know it.  Well, what does
it matter what becomes of me afterwards?  I should have had him; I should
have loved him; he should have been mine for a little while anyway.  I'd
be good to him; oh, I'd be good to him!  Who else is there?  He'll get
worse and worse; and what will any of the fine ladies do for him then,
I'd like to know.  Why aren't they here?  Why isn't he with them?  He's
poor--Nic says so--and they're rich.  Why don't they help him?  I would.
I'd give him my last penny and the last drop of blood in my heart.  What
do they know about love?"

Her little teeth clinched, she shook her brown hair back in a sort of
fury.

"What do they know about love?  What would they do for it?  I'd have my
fingers chopped off one by one for it.  I'd break every one of the ten
commandments for it.  I'd lose my soul for it.

"I've got twenty times as much heart as any one of them, I don't care who
they are.  I'd lie for him; I'd steal for him; I'd kill for him.  I'd
watch everything that he says, and I'd say it as he says it.  I'd be
angry when he was angry, miserable when he was miserable, happy when he
was happy.  Vanne Castine--what was he!  What was it that made me care
for him then?  And now--now he travels with a bear, and they toss coppers
to him; a beggar, a tramp--a dirty, lazy tramp!  He hates me, I know--or
else he loves me, and that's worse.  And I'm afraid of him; I know I'm
afraid of him.  Oh, how will it all end?  I know there's going to be
trouble.  I could see it in Vanne's face.  But I don't care, I don't
care, if Mr. Ferrol--"

The cough came droning through the floor.

"If he'd only--ah!  I'd do anything for him, anything; anybody would.
I saw Sophie look at him as she never looked at Magon.  If she did--
if she dared to care for him--"

All at once she shivered as if with shame and fright, drew the bedclothes
about her head, and burst into a fit of weeping.  When it passed, she lay
still and nerveless between the coarse sheets, and sank into a deep sleep
just as the dawn crept through the cracks of the blind.




CHAPTER VIII

The weeks went by.  Sophie had become the wife of the member for the
country, and had instantly settled down to a quiet life.  This was
disconcerting to Madame Lavilette, who had hoped that out of Farcinelle's
official position she might reap some praise and pence of ambition.
Meanwhile, Ferrol became more and more a cherished and important figure
in the Manor Casimbault, where the Lavilettes had made their home soon
after the wedding.  The old farmhouse had also secretly become a
rendezvous for the mysterious Nicolas Lavilette and his rebel comrades.
This was known to Mr. Ferrol.  One evening he stopped Nic as he was
leaving the house, and said:

"See, Nic, my boy, what's up?  I know a thing or so--what's the use of
playing peek-a-boo?"

"What do you know, Ferrol?"

"What's between you and Vanne Castine, for instance.  Come, now, own up
and tell me all about it.  I'm British; but I'm Nic Lavilette's friend
anyhow."

He insinuated into his tone that little touch of brogue which he used
when particularly persuasive.  Nic put out his hand with a burst of good-
natured frankness.

"Meet me in the store-room of the old farmhouse at nine o'clock, and I'll
tell you.  Here's a key."  Handing over the key, he grasped Ferrol's hand
with an effusive confidence, and hurried out.  Nic Lavilette was now
an important person in his own sight and in the sight of others in
Bonaventure.  In him the pomp of his family took an individual form.

Earlier than the appointed time, Ferrol turned the key and stepped inside
the big despoiled hallway of the old farmhouse.  His footsteps sounded
hollow in the empty rooms.  Already dust had gathered, and an air of
desertion and decay filled the place in spite of the solid timbers and
sound floors and window-sills.  He took out his watch; it was ten minutes
to nine.  Passing through the little hallway to the store-room, he opened
the door.  It was dark inside.  Striking a match, he saw a candle on the
window-sill, and, going to it, he lighted it with a flint and steel lying
near.  The window was shut tight.  From curiosity only he tried to open
the shutter, but it was immovable.  Looking round, he saw another candle
on the window-sill opposite.  He lighted it also, and mechanically tried
to force the shutters of the window, but they were tight also.

Going to the door, which opened into the farmyard, he found it securely
fastened.  Although he turned the lock, the door would not open.

Presently his attention was drawn by the glitter of something upon one of
the crosspieces of timber halfway up the wall.  Going over, he examined
it, and found it to be a broken bayonet--left there by a careless rebel.
Placing the steel again upon the ledge, he began walking up and down
thoughtfully.

Presently he was seized with a fit of coughing.  The paroxysm lasted a
minute or more, and he placed his arm upon the window-sill, leaning his
head upon it.  Presently, as the paroxysm lessened, he thought he heard
the click of a lock.  He raised his head, but his eyes were misty, and,
seeing nothing, he leaned his head on his arm again.

Suddenly he felt something near him.  He swung round swiftly, and saw
Vanne Castine's bear not fifteen-feet away from him!  It raised itself on
its hind legs, its red eyes rolling, and started towards him.  He picked
up the candle from the window-sill, threw it in the animal's face, and
dashed towards the door.

It was locked.  He swung round.  The huge beast, with a loud snarl, was
coming down upon him.

Here he was, shut within four solid walls, with a wild beast hungry for
his life.  All his instincts were alive.  He had little hope of saving
himself, but he was determined to do what lay in his power.

His first impulse was to blow out the other candle.  That would leave him
in the dark, and it struck him that his advantage would be greater if
there were no light.  He came straight towards the bear, then suddenly
made a swift movement to the left, trusting to his greater quickness of
movement.  The beast was nearly as quick as he, and as he dashed along
the wall towards the candle, he could hear its breath just behind him.

As he passed the window, he caught the candle in his hands, and was about
to throw it on the floor or in the bear's face, when he remembered that,
in the dark, the bear's sense of smell would be as effective as eyesight,
while he himself would be no better off.

He ran suddenly to the centre of the room, the candle still in his hand,
and turned to meet his foe.  It came savagely at him.  He dodged, ran
past it, turned, doubled on it, and dodged again.  A half-dozen times
this was repeated, the candle still flaring.  It could not last long.
The bear was enraged.  Its movements became swifter, its vicious teeth
and lips were covered with froth, which dripped to the floor, and
sometimes spattered Ferrol's clothes as he ran past.  No matador ever
played with the horns of a mad bull as Ferrol played his deadly game with
Michael, the dancing bear.  His breath was becoming shorter and shorter;
he had a stifling sensation, a terrible tightness across his chest.  He
did not cough, however, but once or twice he tasted warm drops of his
heart's blood in his mouth.  Once he drew the back of his hand across his
lips mechanically, and a red stain showed upon it.

In his boyhood and early manhood he had been a good sportsman; had been
quick of eye, swift of foot, and fearless.  But what could fearlessness
avail him in this strait?  With the best of rifles he would have felt
himself at a disadvantage.  He was certain his time had come; and with
that conviction upon him, the terror of the thing and the horrible
physical shrinking almost passed away from him.  The disease, eating away
his life, had diminished that revolt against death which is in the
healthy flesh of every man.  He was levying upon the vital forces
remaining in him, which, distributed naturally, might cover a year or so,
to give him here and now a few moments of unnatural strength for the
completion of a hopeless struggle.

It was also as if two brains in him were working: one busy with all the
chances and details of his wild contest, the other with the events of his
life.

Pictures flashed before him.  Some having to do with the earliest days of
his childhood; some with fighting on the Danube, before he left the army,
impoverished and ashamed; some with idle hours in the North Tower in
Stavely Castle; and one with the day he and his sister left the old
castle, never to return, and looked back upon it from the top of
Farcalladen Moor, waving a "God bless you" to it.  The thought of his
sister filled him with a desire, a pitiful desire to live.

Just then another picture flashed before his eyes.  It was he himself,
riding the mad stallion, Bolingbroke, the first year he followed the
hounds: how the brute tried to smash his leg against a stone wall; how it
reared until it almost toppled over and backwards; how it jibbed at a
gate, and nearly dashed its own brains out against a tree; and how, after
an hour's hard fighting, he made it take the stiffest fence and water-
course in the county.

This thought gave him courage now.  He suddenly remembered the broken
bayonet upon the ledge against the wall.  If he could reach it there
might be a chance--chance to strike one blow for life.  As his eye
glanced towards the wall he saw the steel flash in the light of the
candle.

The bear was between him and it.  He made a feint towards the left, then
as quickly to the right.  But doing so, he slipped and fell.  The candle
dropped to the floor and went out.  With a lightning-like instinct of
self-preservation he swung over upon his face just as the bear, in its
wild rush, passed over his head.  He remembered afterwards the odour of
the hot, rank body, and the sprawling huge feet and claws.  Scrambling to
his feet swiftly, he ran to the wall.  Fortune was with him.  His hand
almost instantly clutched the broken bayonet.  He whipped out his
handkerchief, tore the scarf from his neck, and wound them around his
hand, that the broken bayonet should not tear the flesh as he fought for
his life; then, seizing it, he stood waiting for the bear to come on.
His body was bent forwards, his eyes straining into the dark, his hot
face dripping, dripping sweat, his breath coming hard and laboured from
his throat.

For a minute there was absolute silence, save for the breathing of the
man and the savage panting of the beast.  Presently he felt exactly where
the bear was, and listened intently.  He knew that it was now but a
question of minutes, perhaps seconds.  Suddenly it occurred to him that
if he could but climb upon the ledge where the bayonet had been, there
might be safety.  Yet again, in getting up, the bear might seize him, and
there would be an end to all immediately.  It was worth trying, however.

Two things happened at that moment to prevent the trial: the sound of
knocking on a door somewhere, and the roaring rush of the bear upon him.
He sprang to one side, striking at the beast as he did so.  The bayonet
went in and out again.  There came voices from the outside; evidently
somebody was trying to get in.

The bear roared again and came on.  It was all a blind man's game.  But
his scent, like the animal's, was keen.  He had taken off his coat, and
he now swung it out before him in a half-circle, and as it struck the
bear it covered his own position.  He swung aside once more and drove his
arm into the dark.  The bayonet struck the nose of the beast.

Now there was a knocking and a hammering at the window, and the wrenching
of the shutters.  He gathered himself together for the next assault.
Suddenly he felt that every particle of strength had gone out of him.  He
pulled himself up with a last effort.  His legs would not support him; he
shivered and swayed.  God, would they never get that window open!

His senses were abnormally acute.  Another sound attracted him: the
opening of the door, and a voice--Vanne Castine's--calling to the bear.

His heart seemed to give a leap, then slowly to roll over with a thud,
and he fell to the floor as the bear lunged forwards upon him.

A minute afterwards Vanne Castine was goading the savage beast through
the door and out to the hallway into the yard as Nic swung through the
open window into the room.

Castine's lantern stood in the middle of the floor, and between it and
the window lay Ferrol, the broken bayonet still clutched in his right
hand.  Lavilette dropped on his knees beside him and felt his heart.  It
was beating, but the shirt and the waistcoat were dripping with blood
where the bear had set its claws and teeth in the shoulder of its victim.

An hour later Nic Lavilette stood outside the door of Ferrol's bedroom in
the Manor Casimbault, talking to the Regimental Surgeon, as Christine,
pale and wildeyed, came running towards them.




CHAPTER IX

"Is he dead? is he dead?" she asked distractedly.  "I've just come from
the village.  Why didn't you send for me?  Tell me, is he dead?  Oh, tell
me at once!"

She caught the Regimental Surgeon's arm.  He looked down at her, over his
glasses, benignly, for she had always been a favourite of his, and
answered:

"Alive, alive, my dear.  Bad rip in the shoulder--worn out--weak--
shattered--but good for a while yet--yes, yes--certainement!"

With a wayward impulse, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him
on the cheek.  The embrace disarranged his glasses and flushed his face
like a schoolgirl's, but his eyes were full of embarrassed delight.

"There, there," he said, "we'll take care of him--!"  Then suddenly he
paused, for the real significance of her action dawned upon him.

"Dear me," he said in disturbed meditation; "dear me!"

She suddenly opened the bedroom door and went in, followed by Nic.  The
Regimental Surgeon dropped his mouth and cheeks in his hand reflectively,
his eyes showing quaintly and quizzically above the glasses and his
fingers.

"Well, well!  Well, well!" he said, as if he had encountered a
difficulty.  "It--it will never be possible.  He would not marry her,"
he added, and then, turning, went abstractedly down the stairs.

Ferrol was in a deep sleep when Christine and her brother entered the
chamber.  Her face turned still more pale when she saw him, flushed, and
became pale again.  There were leaden hollows round his eyes, and his
hair was matted with perspiration.  Yet he was handsome--and helpless.
Her eyes filled with tears.  She turned her head away from her brother
and went softly to the window, but not before she had touched the pale
hand that lay nerveless upon the coverlet.

"It's not feverish," she said to Nic, as if in necessary explanation of
the act.

She stood at the window for a moment, looking out, then said:

"Come here, Nic, and tell me all about it."

He told her all he knew: how he had come to the old house by appointment
with Ferrol; had tried to get into the store-room; had found the doors
bolted; had heard the noise of a wild animal inside; had run out, tried a
window, at last wrenched it open and found Ferrol in a dead faint.  He
went to the table and brought back the broken bayonet.

"That's all he had to fight with," he said.  "Fire of a little hell, but
he had grit--after all!"

"That's all he had to fight with!" she repeated, as she untwisted the
handkerchief from the hilt end.  "Why did you say he had true grit--
'after all'?  What do you mean by that 'after all'?"

"Well, you don't expect much from a man with only one lung--eh?"

"Courage isn't in the lungs," she answered.  Then she added: "Go and
fetch me a bottle of brandy--I'm going to bathe his hands and feet in
brandy and hot water as soon as he's awake."

"Better let mother do that, hadn't you?" he asked rather hesitatingly,
as he moved towards the door.

Her eyes snapped fire.  "Nic--mon Dieu, hear the nice Nic!" she said.
"The dear Nic, who went in swimming with--"

She said no more, for he had no desire to listen to an account of his
misdeeds, which were not a few,--and Christine had a galling tongue.

When the door was shut she went to the bed, sat down on a chair beside
it, and looked at Ferrol earnestly and sadly.

"My dear! my dear, dear, dear!" she said in a whisper, "you look so
handsome and so kind as you lie there--like no man I ever saw in my life.
Who'd have fought as you fought--and nearly dead!  Who'd have had brains
enough to know just what to do!  My darling, that never said 'my darling'
to me, nor heard me call you so.  Suppose you haven't a dollar, not a
cent, in the world, and suppose you'll never earn a dollar or a cent in
the world, what difference does that make to me?  I could earn it; and
I'd give more for a touch of your finger than a thousand dollars; and
more for a month with you than for a lifetime with the richest man in the
world.  You never looked cross at me, or at any one, and you never say an
unkind thing, and you never find fault when you suffer so.  You never
hurt any one, I know.  You never hurt Vanne Castine--"

Her fingers twitched in her lap, and then clasped very tight, as she went
on:

"You never hurt him, and yet he's tried to kill you in the most awful
way.  Perhaps you'll die now--perhaps you'll die to-night--but no, no,
you shall not!" she cried in sudden fright and eagerness, as she got up
and leaned over him.  "You shall not die; you shall live--for a while--
oh! yes, for a while yet," she added, with a pitiful yearning in her
voice; "just for a little while--till you love me, and tell me so!  Oh,
how could that devil try to kill you!"

She suddenly drew herself up.

"I'll kill him and his bear too--now, now, while you lie there sleeping.
And when you wake I'll tell you what I've done, and you'll--you'll love
me then, and tell me so, perhaps.  Yes, yes, I'll--"

She said no more, for her brother entered with the brandy.

"Put it there," she said, pointing to the table.  "You watch him till I
come.  I'll be back in an hour; and then, when he wakes, we'll bathe him
in the hot water and brandy."

"Who told you about hot water and brandy?" he asked her, curiously.

She did not answer him, but passed through the door and down the hall
till she came to Nic's bedroom; she went in, took a pair of pistols from
the wall, examined them, found they were fully loaded, and hurried from
the room.

About a half-hour later she appeared before the house which once had
belonged to Vanne Castine.  The mortgage had been foreclosed, and the
place had passed into the hands of Sophie and Magon Farcinelle;
but Castine had taken up his abode in the house a few days before,
and defied anyone to put him out.

A light was burning in the kitchen of the house.  There were no curtains
to the window, but an old coat had been hung up to serve the purpose, and
light shone between a sleeve of it and the window-sill.  Putting her face
close to the window, the girl could see the bear in the corner, clawing
at its chain and tossing its head from side to side, still panting and
angry from the fight.

Now and again, also, it licked the bayonet-wound between its shoulders,
and rubbed its lacerated nose on its paw.  Castine was mixing some tar
and oil in a pan by the fire, to apply to the still bleeding wounds of
his Michael.  He had an ugly grin on his face.

He was dressed just as in the first day he appeared in the village, even
to the fur cap; and presently, as he turned round, he began to sing the
monotonous measure to which the bear had danced.  It had at once a
soothing effect upon the beast.

After he had gone from the store-room, leaving Ferrol dead, as he
thought, it was this song alone which had saved himself from peril; for
the beast was wild from pain, fury and the taste of blood.  As soon as
they had cleared the farmyard, he had begun this song, and the bear,
cowed at first by the thrusts of its master's pike, quieted to the well-
known ditty.

He approached the bear now, and, stooping, put some of the tar and oil
upon its nose.  It sniffed and rubbed off the salve, but he put more on;
then he rubbed it into the wound of the breast.  Once the animal made a
fierce snap at his shoulder, but he deftly avoided it, gave it a thrust
with a sharp-pointed stick, and began the song again.  Presently he rose
and came towards the fire.

As he did so he heard the door open.  Turning round quickly, he saw
Christine standing just inside.  She had a shawl thrown round her, and
one hand was thrust in the pocket of her dress.  She looked from him to
the bear, then back again to him.

He did not realise why she had come.  For a moment, in his excited state,
he almost thought she had come because she loved him.  He had seen her
twice since his return; but each time she would say nothing to him
further than that she wished not to meet or to speak to him at all.  He
had pleaded with her, had grown angry, and she had left him.  Who could
tell--perhaps she had come to him now as she had come to him in the old
days.  He dropped the pan of tar and oil.  "Chris!" he said, and started
forward to her.

At that moment the bear, as if it knew the girl's mission, sprang
forward, with a growl.  Its huge mouth was open, and all its fierce lust
for killing showed again in its wild lunges.  Castine turned, with an
oath, and thrust the steel-set pike into its leg.  It cowered at the
voice and the punishment for an instant, but came on again.

Castine saw the girl raise a pistol and fire at the beast.  He was so
dumfounded that at first he did not move.  Then he saw her raise another
pistol.  The wounded bear lunged heavily on its chain--once--twice--in a
devilish rage, and as Christine prepared to fire, snapped the staple
loose and sprang forward.

At the same moment Castine threw himself in front of the girl, and caught
the onward rush.  Calling the beast by its name, he grappled with it.
They were man and servant no longer, but two animals fighting for their
lives.  Castine drew out his knife, as the bear, raised on its hind legs,
crushed him in its immense arms, and still calling, half crazily,
"Michael!  Michael!  down, Michael!" he plunged the knife twice in the
beast's side.

The bear's teeth fastened in his shoulder; the horrible pressure of its
arms was turning his face black; he felt death coming, when another
pistol shot rang out close to his own head, and his breath suddenly came
back.  He staggered to the wall, and then came to the floor in a heap as
the bear lurched downwards and fell over on its side, dead.

Christine had come to kill the beast and, perhaps, the man.  The man had
saved her life, and now she had saved his; and together they had killed
the bear which had maltreated Tom Ferrol.

Castine's eyes were fixed on the dead beast.  Everything was gone from
him now--even the way to his meagre livelihood; and the cause of it all,
as he in his blind, unnatural way thought, was this girl before him--this
girl and her people.  Her back was towards the door.  Anger and passion
were both at work in him at once.

"Chris," he said, "Chris, let's call it even-eh?  Let's make it up.
Chris, ma cherie, don't you remember when we used to meet, and was fond
of each other?  Let's make it up and leave here--now--to-night-eh?

"I'm not so poor, after all.  I'll be paid by Papineau, the leader of the
Rebellion--" He made a couple of unsteady steps towards her, for he was
weak yet.  "What's the good--you're bound to come to me in the end!
You've got the same kind of feelings in you; you've--"

She had stood still at first, dazed by his words; but she grew angry
quickly, and was about to speak as she felt, when he went on:

"Stay here now with me.  Don't go back.  Don't you remember Shangois's
house?  Don't you remember that night--that night when--ah!  Chris, stay
here--"

Her face was flaming.  "I'd rather stay in a room full of wild beasts
like that"--she pointed to the bear" than be with you one minute--you
murderer!" she said, with choking anger.

He started towards her, saying:

"By the blood of Joseph!  but you'll stay just the same; and--"

He got no further, for she threw the pistol in his face with all her
might.  It struck between his eyes with a thud, and he staggered back,
blind, bleeding and faint, as she threw open the door and sped away in
the darkness.

Reaching the Manor safely, she ran up to her room, arranged her hair,
washed her hands, and came again to Ferrol's bedroom.  Knocking softly
she was admitted by Nic.  There was an unnatural brightness in her eyes.
"Where've you been?" he asked, for he noticed this.  "What've you been
doing?"

"I've killed the bear that tried to kill him," she answered.

She spoke louder than she meant.  Her voice awakened Ferrol.

"Eh, what?" he said, "killed the bear, mademoiselle,--my dear friend,"
he added, "killed the bear!"  He coughed a little, and a twinge of pain
crossed over his face.

She nodded, and her face was alight with pleasure.  She lifted up his
head and gave him a little drink of brandy.  His fingers closed on hers
that held the glass.  His touch thrilled her.

"That's good, that's easier," he remarked.

"We're going to bathe you in brandy and hot water, now--Nic and I," she
said.

"Bathe me!  Bathe me!" he said, in amused consternation.

"Hands and feet," Nic explained.

A few minutes later as she lifted up his head, her face was very near
him; her breath was in his face.  Her eyes half closed, her fingers
trembled.  He suddenly drew her to him and kissed her.  She looked round
swiftly, but her brother had not noticed.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Illusive hopes and irresponsible deceptions
She lacked sense a little and sensitiveness much
To be popular is not necessarily to be contemptible
Who say 'God bless you' in New York!  They say 'Damn you!'






POMP OF THE LAVILETTES

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.



CHAPTER X

Ferrols's recovery from his injuries was swifter than might have been
expected.  As soon as he was able to move about Christine was his
constant attendant.  She had made herself his nurse, and no one had
seriously interfered, though the Cure had not at all vaguely offered a
protest to Madame Lavilette.  But Madame Lavilette was now in the humour
to defy or evade the Cure, whichever seemed the more convenient or more
necessary.  To be linked by marriage with the nobility would indeed be
the justification of all her long-baffled hopes.  Meanwhile, the parish
gossiped, though little of that gossip was heard at the Manor Casimbault.
By and by the Cure ceased to visit the Manor, but the Regimental Surgeon
came often, and sometimes stayed late.  He, perhaps, could have given
Madame Lavilette the best advice and warning; but, in truth, he enjoyed
what he considered a piquant position.  Once, drawing at his pipe, as
little like an Englishman as possible, he tried to say with an English
accent, "Amusing and awkward situation!" but he said, "Damn funny and
chic!" instead.  He had no idea that any particular harm would be done--
either by love or marriage; and neither seemed certain.

One day as Ferrol, entirely convalescent, was sitting in an arbour of the
Manor garden, half asleep, he was awakened by voices near him.

He did not recognise one of the voices; the other was Nic Lavilette's.

The strange voice was saying: "I have collected five thousand dollars--
all that can be got in the two counties.  It is at the Seigneury.  Here
is an order on the Seigneur Duhamel.  Go there in two days and get the
money.  You will carry it to headquarters.  These are General Papineau's
orders.  You will understand that your men--"

Ferrol heard no more, for the two rebels passed on, their voices becoming
indistinct.  He sat for a few moments moveless, for an idea had occurred
to him even as Papineau's agent spoke.

If that money were only his!

Five thousand dollars--how that would ease the situation!  The money
belonged to whom?  To a lot of rebels: to be used for making war against
the British Government.  After the money left the hands of the men who
gave it--Lavilette and the rest--it wasn't theirs.  It belonged to a
cause.  Well, he was the enemy of that cause.  All was fair in love and
war!

There were two ways of doing it.  He could waylay Nicolas as he came from
the house of the old seigneur, could call to him to throw up his hands in
good highwayman fashion, and, well disguised, could get away with the
money without being discovered.  Or again, he could follow Nic from the
Seigneury to the Manor, discover where he kept the money, and devise a
plan to steal it.

For some time he had given up smoking; but now, as a sort of celebration
of his plan, he opened his cigar case, and finding two cigars left, took
one out and lighted it.

"By Jove," he said to himself, "thieving is a nice come-down, I must say!
But a man has to live, and I'm sick of charity--sick of it.  I've had
enough."

He puffed his cigar briskly, and enjoyed the forbidden and deadly luxury
to the full.

Presently he got up, took his stick, came down-stairs, and passed out
into the garden.  The shoulder which had been lacerated by the bear
drooped forward some what, and seemed smaller than the other.  Although
he held himself as erect as possible, you still could have laid your hand
in the hollow of his left breast, and it would have done no more than
give it a natural fulness.  Perhaps it was a sort of vanity, perhaps a
kind of courage, which made him resolutely straighten himself, in spite
of the deadly weight dragging his shoulder down.  He might be melancholy
in secret, but in public he was gay and hopeful, and talked of everything
except himself.  On that interesting topic he would permit no discussion.
Yet there often came jugs and jars from friendly people, who never spoke
to him of his disease--they were polite and sensitive, these humble folk
--but sent him their home-made medicines, with assurances scrawled on
paper that "it would cure Mr. Ferrol's cold, oh, absolutely."

Before the Lavilettes he smiled, and received the gifts in a debonair
way, sometimes making whimsical remarks.  At the same time the jugs and
jars of cordial (whose contents varied from whiskey, molasses and
boneset, to rum, licorice, gentian and sarsaparilla roots) he carried to
his room; and he religiously tried them all by turn.  Each seemed to do
him good for a few days, then to fail of effect; and he straightway tried
another, with renewed hope on every occasion, and subsequent
disappointment.  He also secretly consulted the Regimental Surgeon, who
was too kindhearted to tell him the truth; and he tried his hand at
various remedies of his own, which did no more than to loosen the cough
which was breaking down his strength.

As now, he often walked down the street swinging his cane, not as though
he needed it for walking, but merely for occupation and companionship.
He did not delude the villagers by these sorrowful deceptions, but they
made believe he did.  There were a few people who did not like him; but
they were of that cantankerous minority who put thorns in the bed of the
elect.

To-day, occupied with his thoughts, he walked down the main road, then
presently diverged on a side road which led past Magon Farcinelle's house
to an old disused mill, owned by Magon's father.  He paused when he came
opposite Magon's house, and glanced up at the open door.  He was tired,
and the coolness of the place looked inviting.  He passed through the
gate, and went lightly up the path.  He could see straight through the
house into the harvest-fields at the back.  Presently a figure crossed
the lane of light, and made a cheerful living foreground to the blue sky
beyond the farther door.  The light and ardour of the scene gave him a
thrill of pleasure, and hurried his footsteps.  The air was palpitating
with sleepy comfort round him, and he felt a new vitality pass into him:
his imagination was feeding his enfeebled body; his active brain was
giving him a fresh counterfeit of health.  The hectic flush on his pale
face deepened.  He came to the wooden steps of the piazza, or stoop, and
then paused a moment, as if for breath; but, suddenly conscious of what
he was doing, he ran briskly up the steps, knocked with his cane upon the
door jamb, and, without waiting, stepped inside.

Between him and the outer door, against the ardent blue background, stood
Sophie Farcinelle--the English faced Sophie--a little heavy, a little
slow, but with the large, long profile which is the type of English
beauty--docile, healthy, cow-like.  Her face, within her sunbonnet,
caught the reflected light, and the pink calico of her dress threw a glow
over her cheeks and forehead, and gave a good gleam to her eyes.  She had
in her hands a dish of strawberries.  It was a charming picture in the
eyes of a man to whom the feelings of robustness and health were mostly a
reminiscence.  Yet, while the first impression was on him, he contrasted
Sophie with the impetuous, fiery-hearted Christine, with her dramatic
Gallic face and blood, to the latter's advantage, in spite of the more
harmonious setting of this picture.

Sophie was in place in this old farmhouse, with its dormer windows, with
the weaver's loom in the large kitchen, the meat-block by the fireplace,
and the big bread-tray by the stove, where the yeast was as industrious
as the reapers beyond in the fields.  She was in keeping with the chromo
of the Madonna and the Child upon the wall, with the sprig of holy palm
at the shrine in the corner, with the old King Louis blunderbuss above
the chimney.

Sophie tried to take off her sunbonnet with one hand, but the knot
tightened, and it tipped back on her head, giving her a piquant air.  She
flushed.

"Oh, m'sieu'!" she said in English, "it's kind of you to call.  I am
quite glad--yes."

Then she turned round to put the strawberries upon a table, but he was
beside her in an instant and took the dish out of her hands.  Placing it
on the table, he took a couple of strawberries in his fingers.

"May I?" he asked in French.

She nodded as she whipped off the sunbonnet, and replied in her own
language:

"Certainly, as many as you want."

He bit into one, but got no further with it.  Her back was turned to him,
and he threw the berry out of the window.  She felt rather than saw what
he had done.  She saw that he was fagged.  She instantly thought of a
cordial she had in the house, the gift of a nun from the Ursuline
Convent in Quebec; a precious little bottle which she had kept for the
anniversary of her wedding day.  If she had been told in the morning that
she would open that bottle now, and for a stranger, she probably would
have resented the idea with scorn.

His disguised weariness still exciting her sympathy, she offered him a
chair.

"You will sit down, m'sieu'?" she asked.  "It is very warm."

She did not say: "You look very tired."  She instinctively felt that it
would suggest the delicate state of his health.

The chair was inviting enough, with its chintz cover and wicker seat, but
he would never admit fatigue.  He threw his leg half jauntily over the
end of the table and said:

"No--no, thanks; I'd rather not sit."

His forehead was dripping with perspiration.  He took out his
handkerchief and dried it.  His eyes were a little heavy, but his
complexion was a delicate and unnatural pink and white-like a piece of
fine porcelain.  It was a face without care, without vice, without fear,
and without morals.  For the absence of vice with the absence of morals
are not incongruous in a human face.  Sophie went into another room for a
moment, and brought back a quaint cut-glass bottle of cordial.

"It is very good," she said, as she took the cork out; "better than peach
brandy or things like that."

He watched her pour it out into a wine-glass, and as soon as he saw the
colour and the flow of it he was certain of its quality.

"That looks like good stuff," he said, as she handed him a glass brimming
over; "but you must have one with me.  I can't drink alone, you know."

"Oh, m'sieu', if you please, no," she answered half timidly, flattered by
the glance of his eye--a look of flattery which was part of his stock-in-
trade.  It had got him into trouble all his life.

"Ah, madame, but I plead yes!" he answered, with a little encouraging
nod towards her.  "Come, let me pour it for you."

He took the odd little bottle and poured her glass as full as his own.

"If Magon were only here--he'd like some, I know," she said, vaguely
struggling with a sense of impropriety, though why, she did not know;
for, on the surface, this was only dutiful hospitality to a distinguished
guest.  The impropriety probably lay in the sensations roused by this
visit and this visitor.  "I intended--"

"Oh, we must try to get along without monsieur," he said, with a little
cough; "he's a busy gentleman."  The rather rude and flippant sentiment
seemed hardly in keeping with the fatal token of his disease.

"Of course, he's far away out there in the field, mowing," she said, as
if in apology for something or other.  "Yes, he's ever so far away," was
his reply, as he turned half lazily to the open doorway.

Neither spoke for a moment.  The eyes of both were on the distant
harvest-fields.  Vaguely, not decisively, the hazy, indolent air of
summer was broken by the lazy droning of the locusts and grasshoppers.
A driver was calling to his oxen down the dusty road, the warning bark
of a dog came across the fields from the gap in the fence which he was
tending, and the blades of tho scythes made three-quarter circles of
light as the mowers travelled down the wheat-fields.

When their eyes met again, the glasses of cordial were at their lips.
He held her look by the intentional warmth and meaning of his own,
drinking very slowly to the last drop; and then, like a bon viveur, drew
a breath of air through his open mouth, and nodded his satisfaction.

"By Jove, but it is good stuff!" he said.  "Here's to the nun that made
it," he added, making a motion to drink from the empty glass.

Sophie had not drunk all her cordial.  At least one third of it was still
in the glass.  She turned her head away, a little dismayed by his toast.

"Come, that's not fair," he said.  "That elixir shouldn't be wasted.
Voila, every drop of it now!" he added, with an insinuating smile and
gesture.

"Oh, m'sieu'!" she said in protest, but drank it off.  He still held the
empty glass in his hand, twisting it round musingly.

"A little more, m'sieu'?" she asked, "just a little?"  Perhaps she was
surprised that he did not hesitate.  He instantly held out his glass.

"It was made by a saint; the result should be health and piety--I need
both," he added, with a little note of irony in his voice.

"So, once again, my giver of good gifts--to you!"  He raised his glass
again, toasting her, but paused.  "No, this won't do; you must join me,"
he added.

"Oh, no, m'sieu', no!  It is not possible.  I feel it now in my head and
in all of me.  Oh, I feel so warm all, through, and my heart it beats so
very fast!  Oh, no, m'sieu', no more!"

Her cheeks were glowing, and her eyes had become softer and more
brilliant under the influence of the potent liqueur.

"Well, well, I'll let you off this time; but next time--next time,
remember."

He raised the glass once more, and let the cordial drain down lazily.

He had said, "next time"--she noticed that.  He seemed very fond of this
strong liqueur.  She placed the bottle on the table, her own glass beside
it.

"For a minute, a little minute," she said suddenly, and went quickly into
the other room.

He coolly picked up the bottle of liqueur, poured his glass full once
more, and began drinking it off in little sips.  Presently he stood up,
and throwing back his shoulder, with a little ostentation of health, he
went over to the chintz-covered chair, and sat down in it.  His mood was
contented and brisk.  He held up the glass of liqueur against the
sunlight.

"Better than any Benedictine I ever tasted," he said.  "A dozen bottles
of that would cure this beastly cold of mine.  By Jove! it would.  It's
as good as the Gardivani I got that blessed day when we chaps of the
Ninetieth breakfasted with the King of Savoy."  He laughed to himself at
the reminiscence.  "What a day that was, what a stunning day that was!"

He was still smiling, his white teeth showing humorously, when Sophie
again entered the room.  He had forgotten her, forgotten all about her.
As she came in he made a quick, courteous movement to rise--too quick;
for a sharp pain shot through his breast, and he grew pale about the
lips.  But he made essay to stand up lightly, nevertheless.

She saw his paleness, came quickly to him, and put out her hand to gently
force him back into his seat, but as instantly decided not to notice his
indisposition, and turned towards the table instead.  Taking the bottle
of cordial, she brought it over, and not looking at him, said:

"Just one more little glass, m'sieu'?"  She had in her other hand a plate
of seed-cakes.  "But yes, you must sit down and eat a cake," she added
adroitly.  "They are very nice, and I made them myself.  We are very fond
of them; and once, when the bishop stayed at our house, he liked them
too."

Before he sat down he drank off the whole of the cordial in the glass.

She took a chair near him, and breaking a seed-cake began eating it.  His
tongue was loosened now, and he told her what he was smiling at when she
came into the room.  She was amused, and there was a little awe to her
interest also.  To think--she was sitting here, talking easily to a man
who had eaten at kings' tables--with the king!  Yet she was at ease too--
since she had drunk the cordial.  It had acted on her like some philtre.
He begged that she would go on with her work; and she got the dish of
strawberries, and began stemming them while he talked.

It was much easier talking or listening to him while she was so occupied.
She had never enjoyed anything so much in her life.  She was not clever,
like Christine, but she had admiration of ability, and was obedient to
the charm of temperament.  Whenever Ferrol had met her he had lavished
little attentions on her, had said things to her that carried weight far
beyond their intention.  She had been pleased at the time, but they had
had no permanent effect.

Now everything he said had a different influence: she felt for the first
time that it was not easy to look into his eyes, and as if she never
could again without betraying--she knew not what.

So they sat there, he talking, she listening and questioning now and
then.  She had placed the bottle of liqueur and the seed-cakes at his
elbow on the windowsill; and as if mechanically, he poured out a
glassful, and after a little time, still another, and at last, apparently
unconsciously, poured her out one also, and handed it to her.  She shook
her head; he still held the glass poised; her eyes met his; she made a
feeble sort of protest, then took the glass and drank off the liqueur in
little sips.

"Gad, that puts fat on the bones, and gives the gay heart!" he said.
"Doesn't it, though?"

She laughed quietly.  Her nature was warm, and she had the animal-like
fondness for physical ease and content.

"It's as if there wasn't another stroke of work to do in the world," she
answered, and sat contentedly back in her chair, the strawberries in her
lap.  Her fingers, stained with red, lay beside the bowl.  All the
strings of conscious duty were loose, and some of them were flying.  The
bumble-bee that flew in at the door and boomed about the room contributed
to the day-dream.

She never quite knew how it happened that a moment later he was bending
over the back of her chair, with her face upturned to his, and his lips--
With that touch thrilling her, she sprang to her feet, and turned away
from him towards the table.  Her face was glowing like a peony, and a
troubled light came into her eyes.  He came over to her, after a moment,
and spoke over her shoulders as he just touched her waist with his
fingers.

"A la bonne heure--Sophie!"

"Oh, it isn't--it isn't right," she said, her body slightly inclining
from him.

"One minute out of a whole life--What does it matter!  Ce ne fait rien!
Good-bye-Sophie."

Now she inclined towards him.  He was about to put his arms round her,
when he heard the distant sound of a horse's hoofs.  He let her go, and
turned towards the front door.  Through it he saw Christine driving up
the road.  She would pass the house.

"Good-bye-Sophie," he said again over her shoulder, softly; and, picking
up his hat and stick, he left the house.

Her eyes followed him dreamily as he went up the road.  She sat down in
a chair, the trance of the passionate moment still on her, and began to
brood.  She vaguely heard the rattle of a buggy--Christine's--as it
passed the house, and her thoughts drifted into a new-discovered
hemisphere where life was all a somnolent sort of joy and bodily love.

She was roused at last by a song which came floating across the fields.
The air she knew, and the voice she knew.  The chanson was, "Le Voleur de
grand Chemin!"  The voice was her husband's.

She knew the words, too; and even before she could hear them, they were
fitting into the air:

              "Qui va la!  There's some one in the orchard,
                  There's a robber in the apple-trees;
               Qui va la!  He is creeping through the doorway.
                  Ah, allez-vous-en! Va-t'-en!"

She hurriedly put away the cordial and the seed-cakes.  She picked up the
bottle.  It was empty.  Ferrol had drunk near half a pint of the liqueur!
She must get another bottle of it somehow.  It would never do for Magon
to know that the precious anniversary cordial was all gone--in this way.

She hurried towards the other room.  The voice of the farrier-farmer was
more distinct now.  She could hear clearly the words of the song.  She
looked out.  The square-shouldered, blue-shirted Magon was skirting the
turnip field, making a short cut home.  His straw hat was pushed back on
his head, his scythe was over his shoulder.  He had cut the last swathe
in the field--now for Sophie.  He was not handsome, and she had known
that always; but he seemed rough and coarse to-day.  She did not notice
how well he fitted in with everything about him; and he was so healthy
that even three glasses of that cordial would have sent him reeling to
bed.

As she passed into the dining-room, the words of the song followed her:

              "Qui va la!  If you please, I own the mansion,
                  And this is my grandfather's gun!
               Qui va la!  Now you're a dead man, robber
                  Ah, allez-vous-en!  Va-t'-en!"




CHAPTER XI

"I saw you coming," Ferrol said, as Christine stopped the buggy.

"You have been to see Magon and Sophie?" she asked.

"Yes, for a minute," he answered.  "Where are you going?"

"Just for a drive," she replied.  "Come, won't you?"  He got in, and she
drove on.

"Where were you going?" she asked.

"Why, to the old mill," was his reply.  "I wanted a little walk, then a
rest."

Ten minutes later they were looking from a window of the mill, out upon
the great wheel which had done all the work the past generations had
given it to do, and was now dropping into decay as it had long dropped
into disuse.  Moss had gathered on the great paddles; many of them were
broken, and the debris had been carried away by the freshets of spring
and the floods of autumn.

They were silent for a time.  Presently she looked up at him.

"You're much better to-day, "she said; "better than you've been since--
since that night!"

"Oh, I'm all right," he answered; "right as can be."  He suddenly turned
on her, put his hand upon her arm, and said:

"Come, now, tell me what there was between you and Vanne Castine--once
upon a time.

"He was in love with me five years ago," she said.

"And five years ago you were in love with him, eh?"  "How dare you say
that to me!" she answered.  "I never was.  I always hated him."

She told her lie with unscrupulous directness.  He did not believe her;
but what did that matter!  It was no reason why he should put her at a
disadvantage, and, strangely enough, he did not feel any contempt for her
because she told the lie, nor because she had once cared for Castine.
Probably in those days she had never known anybody who was very much
superior to Castine.  She was in love with himself now; that was enough,
or nearly enough, and there was no particular reason why he should demand
more from her than she demanded from him.  She was lying to him now
because--well, because she loved him.  Like the majority of men, when
women who love them have lied to them so, they have seen in it a
compliment as strong as the act was weak.  It was more to him now that
this girl should love him than that she should be upright, or moral, or
truthful.  Such is the egotism and vanity of such men.

"Well, he owes me several years of life.  I put in a bad hour that
night."

He knew that "several years of life" was a misstatement; but, then, they
were both sinners.

Her eyes flashed, she stamped her foot, and her fingers clinched.

"I wish I'd killed him when I killed his bear!" she said.

Then excitedly she described the scene exactly as it occurred.  He
admired the dramatic force of it.  He thrilled at the direct simplicity
of the tale.  He saw Vanne Castine in the forearms of the huge beast,
with his eyes bulging from his head, his face becoming black, and he saw
blind justice in that death grip; Christine's pistol at the bear's head,
and the shoulder in the teeth of the beast, and then!

"By the Lord Harry," he said, as she stood panting, with her hands fixed
in the last little dramatic gesture, "what a little spitfire and brick
you are!"

All at once he caught her away from the open window and drew her to him.
Whether what he said that moment, and what he did then, would have been
said and done if it were not for the liqueur he had drunk at Sophie's
house would be hard to tell; but the sum of it was that she was his and
he was hers.  She was to be his until the end of all, no matter what the
end might be.  She looked up at him, her face glowing, her bosom beating
--beating, every pulse in her tingling.

"You mean that you love me, and that--that you want-to marry me?" she
said; and then, with a fervent impulse, she threw her arms round his neck
and kissed him again and again.

The directness of her question dumfounded him for the moment; but what
she suggested (though it might be selfish in him to agree to it) would be
the best thing that could happen to him.  So he lied to her, and said:

"Yes, that's what I meant.  But, then, to tell you the sober truth, I'm
as poor as a church mouse."

He paused.  She looked up at him with a sudden fear in her face.

"You're not married?" she asked, "you're not married?" then, breaking
off suddenly: "I don't care if you are, I don't!  I love you--love you!
Nobody would look after you as I would.  I don't; no, I don't care."

She drew up closer and closer to him.

"No, I don't mean that I was married," he said.  "I meant--what you know
--that my life isn't worth, perhaps, a ten-days' purchase."

Her face became pale again.

"You can have my life," she said; "have it just as long as you live, and
I'll make you live a year--yes, I'll make you live ten years.  Love can
do anything; it can do everything.  We'll be married to-morrow."

"That's rather difficult," he answered.  "You see, you're a Catholic,
and I'm a Protestant, and they wouldn't marry us here, I'm afraid; at
least not at once, perhaps not at all.  You see, I--I've only one lung."

He had never spoken so frankly of his illness before.  "Well, we can go
over the border into the English province--into Upper Canada," she
answered.  "Don't you see?  It's only a few miles' drive to a village.
I can go over one day, get the licence; then, a couple of days after, we
can go over together and be married.  And then, then--"

He smiled.  "Well, then it won't make much difference, will it?  We'll
have to fit in one way or another, eh?"

"We could be married afterwards by the Cure, if everybody made a fuss.
The bishop would give us a dispensation.  It's a great sin to marry a
heretic, but--"

"But love--eh, ma cigale!"  Then he took her eagerly, tenderly into his
arms; and probably he had then the best moment in his life.

Sophie Farcinelle saw them driving back together.  She was sitting at
early supper with Magon, when, raising her head at the sound of wheels,
she saw Christine laughing and Ferrol leaning affectionately towards her.
Ferrol had forgotten herself and the incident of the afternoon.  It meant
nothing to him.  With her, however, it was vital: it marked a change in
her life.  Her face flushed, her hands trembled, and she arose hurriedly
and went to get something from the kitchen, that Magon might not see her
face.




CHAPTER XII

Twenty men had suddenly disappeared from Bonaventure on the day that
Ferrol visited Sophie Farcinelle, and it was only the next morning that
the cause of their disappearance was generally known.

There had been many rumours abroad that a detachment of men from the
parish were to join Papineau.  The Rebellion was to be publicly declared
on a certain date near at hand, but nothing definite was known; and
because the Cure condemned any revolt against British rule, in spite of
the evils the province suffered from bad government, every recruit who
joined Nic Lavilette's standard was sworn to secrecy.  Louis Lavilette
and his wife knew nothing of their son's complicity in the rumoured
revolt--one's own people are generally the last to learn of one's
misdeeds.  Madame would have been sorely frightened and chagrined if
she had known the truth, for she was partly English.  Besides, if the
Rebellion did not succeed, disgrace must come, and then good-bye to the
progress of the Lavilettes, and goodbye, maybe, to her son!

In spite of disappointments and rebuffs in many quarters, she still kept
faith with her ambitions, and, fortunately for herself, she did not see
the abject failure of many of her schemes.  Some of the gentry from the
neighbouring parishes had called, chiefly, she was aware, because of Mr.
Ferrol.  She was building the superstructure of her social ambitions on
that foundation for the present.  She told Louis sometimes, with tears
of joy in her eyes, that a special Providence had sent Mr. Ferrol to
them, and she did not know how to be grateful enough.  He suggested a
gift to the church in token of gratitude, but her thanksgiving did not
take that form.

Nic was entirely French at heart, and ignored his mother's nationality.
He resented the English blood in his veins, and atoned for it by
increased loyalty to his French origin.  This was probably not so much
a principle as a fancy.  He had a kind of importance also in the parish,
and in his own eyes, because he made as much in three months by buying
and selling horses as most people did in a year.  The respect of
Bonaventure for his ability was considerable; and though it had no marked
admiration for his character, it appreciated his drolleries, and was
attracted by his high spirits.  He had always been erratic, so that when
he disappeared for days at a time no one thought anything of it, and when
he came home to the Manor at unearthly hours it created no peculiar
notice.

He had chosen very good men for his recruits; for, though they talked
much among themselves, they drew a cordon of silence round their little
society of revolution.  They vanished in the night, and Nic with them;
but he returned the next afternoon when the fire of excitement was at its
height.  As he rode through the streets, people stopped him and poured
out questions; but he only shrugged his shoulders, and gave no
information, and neither denied nor affirmed anything.

Acting under orders, he had marched his company to make conjunction with
other companies at a point in the mountains twenty miles away, but had
himself returned to get the five thousand dollars gathered by Papineau's
agent.  Now that the Rebellion was known, Nicolas intended to try and win
his father and his father's money and horses over to the cause.

Because Ferrol was an Englishman he made no confidant of him, and because
he was a dying man he saw in him no menace to the cause.  Besides, was
not Ferrol practically dependent upon their hospitality?  If he had
guessed that his friend knew accurately of his movements since the night
he had seen Vanne Castine hand him his commission from Papineau, he would
have felt less secure: for, after all, love--or prejudice--of country is
a principle in the minds of most men deeper than any other.  When all
other morals go, this latent tendency to stand by the blood of his clan
is the last moral in man that bears the test without treason.  If he had
known that Ferrol had written to the Commandant at Quebec, telling him of
the imminence of the Rebellion, and the secret recruiting and drilling
going on in the parishes, his popular comrade might have paid a high
price for his disclosure.

That morning at sunrise, Christine, saying she was going upon a visit to
the next parish, started away upon her mission to the English province.
Ferrol had urged her to let him go, but she had refused.  He had not yet
fully recovered from his adventure with the bear, she said.  Then he said
they might go together; but she insisted that she must make the way
clear, and have everything ready.  They might go and find the minister
away, and then--voila, what a chance for cancan!  So she went alone.

From his window he watched her depart; and as she drove away in the fresh
morning he fell to thinking what it might seem like if he had to look
forward to ten, twenty, or forty years with just such a woman as his
wife.  Now she was at her best (he did not deceive himself), but in
ten years or less the effects of her early life would show in many ways.
She had once loved Vanne Castine!  and now vanity and cowardice, or
unscrupulousness, made her lie about it.  He would have her at her best
--a young, vigorous radiant nature--for his short life, and then, good-
bye, my lover, good-bye!  Selfish?  Of course.  But she would rather--
she had said it--have him for the time he had to live than not at all.
Position?  What was his position?  Cast off by his family, forgotten by
his old friends, in debt, penniless--let position be hanged!  Self-
preservation was the first law.  What was the difference between this
girl and himself?  Morals?  She was better than himself, anyhow.  She had
genuine passions, and her sins would be in behalf of those genuine
passions.  He had kicked over the moral traces many a time from absolute
selfishness.  She had clean blood in her veins, she was good-looking,
she had a quick wit, she was an excellent horse-woman--what then?  If she
wasn't so "well bred," that was a matter of training and opportunity
which had never quite been hers.  What was he himself?  A loafer, "a
deuced unfortunate loafer," but still a loafer.  He had no trade and no
profession.  Confound it!  how much better off, and how much better in
reality, were these people who had trades and occupations.  In the vigour
and lithe activity of that girl's body was the force of generations of
honest workers.  He argued and thought--as every intelligent man in his
position would have done--until he had come into the old life again, and
into the presence of the old advantages and temptations!

Christine pulled up for a moment on a little hill, and waved her whip.
He shook his handkerchief from the window.  That was their prearranged
signal.  He shook it until she had driven away beyond the hill and was
lost to sight, and still stood there at the window looking out.

Presently Madame Lavilette appeared in the garden below, and he was sure,
from the way she glanced up at the window, and from her position in the
shrubbery, that she had seen the signal.  Madame did not look displeased.
On the contrary, though an alliance with Christine now seemed unlikely,
because of the state of Ferrol's health and his religion and nationality,
it pleased her to think that it might have been.

When she had passed into the house, Ferrol sat down on the broad window-
sill, and looked out the way Christine had gone.  He was thinking of the
humiliation of his position, and how it would be more humiliating when he
married Christine, should the Lavilettes turn against them--which was
quite possible.  And from outside: the whole parish--a few excepted--
sympathised with the Rebellion, and once the current of hatred of the
English set in, he would be swept down by it.  There were only three
English people in the place.  Then, if it became known that he had given
information to the authorities, his life would be less uncertain than it
was just now.  Yet, confound the dirty lot of little rebels, it served
them right!  He couldn't sit by and see a revolt against British rule
without raising a hand.  Warn Nic?  To what good?  The result would be
just the same.  But if harm came to this intended brother-in-law-well,
why borrow trouble?  He was not the Lord in Heaven, that he could have
everything as he wanted it!  It was a toss-up, and he would see the sport
out.  "Have to cough your way through, my boy!" he said, as he swayed
back and forth, the hard cough hacking in his throat.

As he had said yesterday, there was only one thing to do: he must have
that five thousand dollars which was to be handed over by the old
seigneur.  This time he did not attempt to find excuses; he called the
thing by its proper name.

"Well, it's stealing, or it's highway robbery, no matter how one looks at
it," he said to himself.  "I wonder what's the matter with me.  I must
have got started wrong somehow.  Money to spend, playing at soldiering,
made to believe I'd have a pot of money and an estate, and then told one
fine day that a son and heir, with health in form and feature, was come,
and Esau must go.  No profession, except soldiering, debt staring me in
the face, and a nasty mess of it all round.  I wonder why it is that I
didn't pull myself together, be honest to a hair, and fight my way
through?  I suppose I hadn't it in me.  I wasn't the right metal at the
start.  There's always been a black sheep in our family, a gentleman or
a lady, born without morals, and I happen to be the gentleman this
generation.  I always knew what was right, and liked it, and I always did
what was wrong, and liked it--nearly always.  But I suppose I was fated.
I was bound to get into a hole, and I'm in it now, with one lung, and a
wife in prospect to support.  I suppose if I were to write down all the
decent things I've thought in my life, and put them beside the indecent
things I've done, nobody would believe the same man was responsible for
them.  I'm one of the men who ought to be put above temptation; be well
bridled, well fed, and the mere cost of comfortable living provided, and
then I'd do big things.  But that isn't the way of the world; and so I
feel that a morning like this, and the love of a girl like that" (he
nodded towards the horizon into which Christine had gone) "ought to make
a man sing a Te Deum.  And yet this evening, or to-morrow evening, or the
next, I'll steal five thousand dollars, if it can be done, and risk my
neck in doing it--to say nothing of family honour, and what not."

He got up from the window, went to his trunk, opened it, and, taking out
a pistol, examined it carefully, cocking and uncorking it, and after
loading it, and again trying the trigger, put it back again.  There came
a tap at the door, and to his call a servant entered with a glass of milk
and whiskey, with which he always began the day.

The taste of the liquid brought back the afternoon of the day before, and
he suddenly stopped drinking, threw back his head, and laughed softly.

"By Jingo, but that liqueur was stunning--and so was-Sophie .  .  .
Sophie!  That sounds compromisingly familiar this morning, and very
improper also!  But Sophie is a very nice person, and I ought to be well
ashamed of myself.  I needed the bit and curb both yesterday.  It'll
never do at all.  If I'm going to marry Christine, we must have no family
complications.  'Must have'!" he exclaimed.  "But what if Sophie
already?--good Lord!"

It was a strange sport altogether, in which some people were bound to get
a bad fall, himself probably among the rest.  He intended to rob the
brother, he had set the government going against the brother's
revolutionary cause, he was going to marry one sister, and the other
--the less thought and said about that matter the better.

The afternoon brought Nic, who seemed perplexed and excited, but was most
friendly.  It seemed to Ferrol as if Nic wished to disclose something;
but he gave him no opportunity.  What he knew he knew, and he could make
use of; but he wanted no further confidences.  Ever since the night of
the fight with the bear there had been nothing said on matters concerning
the Rebellion.  If Nicolas disclosed any secret now, it must surely be
about the money, and that must not be if he could prevent it.  But he
watched his friend, nevertheless.

Night came, and Christine did not return; eight o'clock, nine o'clock.
Lavilette and his wife were a little anxious; but Ferrol and Nicolas made
excuses for her, and, in the wild talk and gossip about the Rebellion,
attention was easily shifted from her.  Besides, Christine was well used
to taking care of herself.

Lavilette flatly refused to give Nic a penny for "the cause," and stormed
at his connection with it; but at last became pacified, and agreed it was
best that Madame Lavilette should know nothing about Nic's complicity
just yet.  At half past nine o'clock Nic left the house and took the road
towards the Seigneury.




CHAPTER XIII

About half-way between the Seigneury and the main street of the village
there was a huge tree, whose limbs stretched across the road and made a
sort of archway.  In the daytime, during the summer, foot travellers,
carts and carriages, with their drivers, loitered in its shade as they
passed, grateful for the rest it gave; but at night, even when it was
moonlight, the wide branches threw a dark and heavy shadow, and the
passage beneath them was gloomy travel.  Many a foot traveller hesitated
to pass into that umbrageous circle, and skirted the fence beyond the
branches on the further side of the road instead.

When Nicolas Lavilette, returning from the Seigneury with the precious
bag of gold for Papineau, came hurriedly along the road towards the
village, he half halted, with sudden premonition of danger, a dozen feet
or so from the great tree.  But like most young people, who are inclined
to trust nothing but their own strong arms and what their eyes can see,
he withstood the temptation to skirt the fence; and with a little half-
scornful laugh at himself, yet a little timidity also (or he would not
have laughed at all), he hurried under the branches.  He had not gone
three steps when the light of a dark lantern flashed suddenly in his
face, and a pistol touched his forehead.  All he could see was a figure
clothed entirely in black, even to hands and face, with only holes for
eyes, nose and mouth.

He stood perfectly still; the shock was so sudden.  There was something
determined and deadly in the pose of the figure before him, in the touch
of the weapon, in the clearness of the light.  His eyes dropped, and
fixed involuntarily upon the lantern.

He had a revolver with him; but it was useless to attempt to defend
himself with it.  Not a word had been spoken.  Presently, with the
fingers that held the lantern, his assailant made a motion of Hands up!
There was no reason why he should risk his life without a chance of
winning, so he put up his hands.  At another motion he drew out the bag
of gold with his left hand, and, obeying the direction of another
gesture, dropped it on the ground.  There was a pause, then another
gesture, which he pretended not to understand.

"Your pistol!" said the voice in a whisper through the mask.

He felt the cold steel at his forehead press a little closer; he also
felt how steady it was.  He was no fool.  He had been in trouble before
in his lifetime; he drew out the pistol, and passed it, handle first, to
three fingers stretched out from the dark lantern.

The figure moved to where the money and the pistol were, and said, in a
whisper still:

"Go!"

He had one moment of wild eagerness to try his luck in a sudden assault,
but that passed as suddenly as it came; and with the pistol still
covering him, he moved out into the open road, with a helpless anger on
him.

A crescent moon was struggling through floes of fleecy clouds, the stars
were shining, and so the road was not entirely dark.  He went about
thirty steps, then turned and looked back.  The figure was still standing
there, with the pistol and the light.  He walked on another twenty or
thirty steps, and once again looked back.  The light and the pistol were
still there.  Again he walked on.  But now he heard the rumble of buggy
wheels behind.  Once more he looked back: the figure and the light had
gone.  The buggy wheels sounded nearer.  With a sudden feeling of
courage, he turned round and ran back swiftly.  The light suddenly
flashed again.

"It's no use," he said to himself, and turned and walked slowly along the
road.

The sound of the buggy wheels came still nearer.  Presently it was
obscured by passing under the huge branches of the tree.  Then the horse,
buggy and driver appeared at the other side, and in a few moments had
overtaken him.  He looked up sharply, scrutinisingly.  Suddenly he burst
out:

"Holy mother, Chris, is that you!  Where've you been?  Are you all
right?"

She had whipped up her horse at first sight of him, thinking he might be
some drunken rough.

"Mais, mon dieu, Nic, is that you?  I thought at first you were a
highwayman!"

"No, you've passed the highwayman!  Come, let me get in."

Five minutes afterwards she knew exactly what had happened to him.

"Who could it be?" she asked.

"I thought at first it was that beast Vanne Castine!" he answered; "he's
the only one that knew about the money, besides the agent and the old
seigneur.  He brought word from Papineau.  But it was too tall for him,
and he wouldn't have been so quiet about it.  Just like a ghost.  It
makes my flesh creep now!"

It did not seem such a terrible thing to her at the moment, for she had
in her pocket the licence to marry the Honourable Tom Ferrol upon the
morrow, and she thought, with joy, of seeing him just as soon as she set
foot in the doorway of the Manor Casimbault.

It was something of a shock to her that she did not see him for quite a
half hour after she arrived home, and that was half past ten o'clock.
But women forget neglect quickly in the delight of a lover's presence;
so her disappointment passed.  Yet she could not help speaking of it.

"Why weren't you at the door to meet me when I came back to-night with
that-that in my pocket?" she asked him, his arm round her.

"I've got a kicking lung, you know," he said, with a half ironical, half
self-pitying smile.

"Oh, forgive me, forgive me, Tom, my love!" she said as she buried her
face on his breast.




CHAPTER XIV

Before he left for the front next morning to join his company and march
to Papineau's headquarters, Nic came to Ferrol, told him, with rage and
disappointment, the story of the highway robbery, and also that he hoped
Ferrol would not worry about the Rebellion, and would remain at the Manor
Casimbault in any case.

"Anyhow," said he, "my mother's half English; so you're not alone.  We're
going to make a big fight for it.  We've stood it as long as we can.  But
we're friends in this, aren't we, Ferrol?"

There was a pause, in which Ferrol sipped his whiskey and milk, and
continued dressing.  He set the glass down, and looked towards the open
window, through which came the smell of the ripe orchard and the
fragrance of the pines.  He turned to.  Lavilette at last and said, as he
fastened his collar:

"Yes, you and I are friends, Nic; but I'm a Britisher, and my people have
been Britishers since Edward the Third's time; and for this same Quebec
two of my great-grand-uncles fought and lost their lives.  If I were
sound of wind and limb I'd fight, like them, to keep what they helped to
get.  You're in for a rare good beating, and, see, my friend--while I
wouldn't do you any harm personally, I'd crawl on my knees from here to
the citadel at Quebec to get a pot-shot at your rag-tag-and-bobtail
'patriots.'  You can count me a first-class enemy to your 'cause,' though
I'm not a first-class fighting man.  And now, Nic, give me a lift with my
coat.  This shoulder jibs a bit since the bear-baiting."

Lavilette was naturally prejudiced in Ferrol's favour; and this
deliberate and straightforward patriotism more pleased than offended him.
His own patriotism was not a deep or lasting thing: vanity and a restless
spirit were its fountains of inspiration.  He knew that Ferrol was
penniless--or he was so yesterday--and this quiet defiance of events in
the very camp of the enemy could not but appeal to his ebullient, Gallic
chivalry.  Ferrol did not say these things because he had five thousand
dollars behind him, for he would have said them if he were starving and
dying--perhaps out of an inherent stubbornness, perhaps because this
hereditary virtue in him would have been as hard to resist as his sins.

"That's all right, Ferrol," answered Lavilette.  "I hope you'll stay here
at the Manor, no matter what comes.  You're welcome.  Will you?"

"Yes, I'll stay, and glad to.  I can't very well do anything else.  I'm
bankrupt.  Haven't got a penny--of my own," he added, with daring irony.
"Besides, it's comfortable here, and I feel like one of the family; and,
anyhow, Life is short and Time is a pacer!"  His wearing cough emphasised
the statement.

"It won't be easy for you in Bonaventure," said Nicolas, walking
restlessly up and down.  "They're nearly all for the cause, all except
the Cure.  But he can't do much now, and he'll keep out of the mess.
By the time he has a chance to preach against it, next Sunday, every man
that wants to 'll be at the front, and fighting.  But you'll be all
right, I think.  They like you here."

"I've a couple of good friends to see me through," was the quiet reply.

"Who are they?"

Ferrol went to his trunk, took out a pair of pistols, and balanced them
lightly in his hands.  "Good to confuse twenty men," he said.  "A brace
of 'em are bound to drop, and they don't know which one."

He raised a pistol lazily, and looked out along its barrel through the
open, sunshiny window.  Something in the pose of the body, in the curve
of the arm, struck Nicolas strangely.  He moved almost in front of
Ferrol.  There came back to him mechanically the remembrance of a piece
of silver on the butt of one of the highwayman's pistols!

The same piece of silver was on the butt of Ferrol's pistol.  It
startled him; but he almost laughed to him self at the absurdity of the
suggestion.  Ferrol was the last man in the world to play a game like
that, and with him.

Still he could not resist a temptation.  He stepped in front of the
pistol, almost touching it with his forehead, looking at Ferrol as he had
looked at the highwayman last night.

"Look out, it's loaded!" said Ferrol, lowering the weapon coolly, and
not showing by sign or muscle that he understood Lavilette's meaning.
"I should think you'd had enough of pistols for one twenty-four hours."

"Do you know, Ferrol, you looked just then so like the robber last night
that, for one moment, I half thought!--And the pistol, too, looks just
the same--that silver piece on the butt!"

"Oh, yes, this piece for the name of the owner!" said Ferrol, in a
laughing brogue, and he coughed a little.  "Well, maybe some one did use
this pistol last night.  It wouldn't be hard to open my trunk.  Let's
see; whom shall we suspect?"

Lavilette was entirely reassured, if indeed he needed reassurance.
Ferrol coughed still more, and was obliged to sit down on the side
of the bed and rest himself against the foot-board.

"There's a new jug of medicine or cordial come this morning from
Shangois, the notary," said Lavilette.  "I just happened to think of it.
What he does counts.  He knows a lot."

Ferrol's eyes showed interest at once.

"I'll try it.  I'll try it.  The stuff Gatineau the miller sent doesn't
do any good now."

"Shangois is here--he's downstairs--if you want to see him."

Ferrol nodded.  He was tired of talking.

"I'm going," said Lavilette, holding out his hand.  "I'll join my company
to-day, and the scrimmage 'll begin as soon as we reach Papineau.  We've
got four hundred men."

Ferrol tried to say something, but he was struggling with the cough in
his throat.  He held out his hand, and Nicolas took it.  At last he was
able to say:

"Good luck to you, Nic, and to the devil with the Rebellion!  You're in
for a bad drubbing."

Nicolas had a sudden feeling of anger.  This superior air of Ferrol's was
assumed by most Englishmen in the country, and it galled him.

"We'll not ask quarter of Englishmen; no-sacre!" he said in a rage.

"Well, Nic, I'm not so sure of that.  Better do that than break your
pretty neck on a taut rope," was the lazy reply.

With an oath, Lavilette went out, banging the door after him.  Ferrol
shrugged his shoulder with a stoic ennui, and put away the pistols in the
trunk.  He was thinking how reckless he had been to take them out; and
yet he was amused, too, at the risk he had run.  A strange indifference
possessed him this morning--indifference to everything.  He was suffering
reaction from the previous day's excitement.  He had got the five
thousand dollars, and now all interest in it seemed to have departed.

Suddenly he said to himself, as he ran a brush around his coat-collar:

"'Pon my soul, I forgot; this is my wedding day!--the great day in a
man's life, the immense event, after which comes steady happiness or the
devil to pay."

He stepped to the window and looked out.  It was only six o'clock as yet.
He could see the harvesters going to their labours in the fields of wheat
and oats, the carters already bringing in little loads of hay.  He could
hear their marche-'t'-en!  to the horses.  Over by a little house on the
river bank stood an old woman sharpening a sickle.  He could see the
flash of the steel as the stone and metal gently clashed.

Presently a song came up to him, through the garden below, from the
house.  The notes seemed to keep time to the hand of the sickle-
sharpener.  He had heard it before, but only in snatches.  Now it seemed
to pierce his senses and to flood his nerves with feeling.

The air was sensuous, insinuating, ardent.  The words were full of summer
and of that dramatic indolence of passion which saved the incident at
Magon Farcinelle's from being as vulgar as it was treacherous.  The voice
was Christine's, on her wedding day.

              "Oh, hark how the wind goes, the wind goes
               (And dark goes the stream by the mill!)
               Oh, see where the storm blows, the storm blows
               (There's a rider comes over the hill!)

              "He went with the sunshine one morning
               (Oh, loud was the bugle and drum!)
               My soldier, he gave me no warning
               (Oh, would that my lover might come!)

              "My kisses, my kisses are waiting
               (Oh, the rider comes over the hill!)
               In summer the birds should be mating
               (Oh, the harvest goes down to the mill!)

              "Oh, the rider, the rider he stayeth
               (Oh, joy that my lover hath come!)
               We will journey together he sayeth
               (No more with the bugle and drum!)"

He caught sight of Christine for a moment as she passed through the
garden towards the stable.  Her gown was of white stuff, with little
spots of red in it, and a narrow red ribbon was shot through the collar.
Her hat was a pretty white straw, with red artificial flowers upon it.
She wore at her throat a medallion brooch: one of the two heirlooms of
the Lavilette family.  It had belonged to the great-grandmother of
Monsieur Louis Lavilette, and was the one security that this ambitious
family did not spring up, like a mushroom, in one night.  It had always
touched Christine's imagination as a child.  Some native instinct in, her
made her prize it beyond everything else.  She used to make up wonderful
stories about it, and tell them to Sophie, who merely wondered, and was
not sure but that Christine was wicked; for were not these little
romances little lies?  Sophie's imagination was limited.  As the years
went on Christine finally got possession of the medallion, and held it
against all opposition.  Somehow, with it on this morning, she felt
diminish the social distance between herself and Ferrol.

Ferrol himself thought nothing of social distance.  Men, as a rule, get
rather above that sort of thing.  The woman: that was all that was in his
mind.  She was good to look at: warm, lovable, fascinating in her little
daring wickednesses; a fiery little animal, full of splendid impulses,
gifted with a perilous temperament: and she loved him.  He had a kind of
exultation at the very fierceness of her love for him, of what she had
done to prove her love: her fury at Vanne Castine, the slaughter of the
bear, and the intention to kill Vanne himself; and he knew that she would
do more than that, if a great test came.  Men feel surer of women than
women feel of men.

He sat down on the broad window-ledge, still sipping his whiskey and
milk, as he looked at her.  She was very good to see.  Presently she had
to cross a little plot of grass.  The dew was still on it.  She gathered
up her skirts and tip-toed quickly across it.  The action was attractive
enough, for she had a lithe smoothness of motion.  Suddenly he uttered an
exclamation of surprise.

"White stockings--humph!" he said.

Somehow those white stockings suggested the ironical comment of the world
upon his proposed mesalliance; then he laughed good-humouredly.

"Taste is all a matter of habit, anyhow," said he to himself.  "My own
sister wouldn't have had any better taste if she hadn't been taught.  And
what am I?

"What am I?  I drink more whiskey in a day than any three men in the
country.  I don't do a stroke of work; I've got debts all over the world;
I've mulcted all my friends; I've made fools of two or three women in my
time; I've broken every commandment except--well, I guess I've broken
every one, if it comes to that, in spirit, anyhow.  I'm a thief, a fire-
eating highwayman, begad, and here I am, with a perforated lung, going to
marry a young girl like that, without one penny in the world except what
I stole!  What beasts men are!  The worst woman may be worse than the
worst man, but all men are worse than most women.  But she wants to marry
me.  She knows exactly what I am in health and prospects; so why
shouldn't I?"

He drew himself up, thinking honestly.  He believed that he would live if
he married Christine; that his "cold" would get better; that the hole in
his lung would heal.  It was only a matter of climate; he was sure of it.
Christine had a few hundred dollars--she had told him so.  Suppose he
took three hundred dollars of the five thousand dollars: that would leave
four thousand seven hundred dollars for his sister.  He could go away
south with Christine, and could live on five or six hundred dollars a
year; then he'd be fit for something.  He could go to work.  He could
join the Militia, if necessary.  Anyhow, he could get something to do
when he got well.

He drank some more whiskey and milk.  "Self-preservation, that's the
thing; that's the first law," he said.  "And more: if the only girl I
ever loved, ever really loved--loved from the crown of her head to the
sole of her feet--were here to-day, and Christine stood beside her,
little plebeian with a big heart, by Heaven, I'd choose Christine.
I can trust her, though she is a little liar.  She loves, and she'll
stick; and she's true where she loves.  Yes; if all the women in the
world stood beside Christine this morning, I'd look them all over, from
duchess to danseuse, and I'd say, 'Christine Lavilette, I'm a scoundrel.
I haven't a penny in the world.  I'm a thief; a thief who believes in
you.  You know what love is; you know what fidelity is.  No matter what I
did, you would stand by me to the end.  To the last day of my life, I'll
give you my heart and my hand; and as you are faithful to me, so I will
be faithful to you, so help me God!'

"I don't believe I ever could have run straight in life.  I couldn't have
been more than four years old when I stole the peaches from my mother's
dressing-table; and I lied just as coolly then as I could now.  I made
love to a girl when I was ten years old."  He laughed to himself at the
remembrance.  "Her father had a foundry.  She used to wear a red dress,
I remember, and her hair was brown.  She sang like a little lark.  I was
half mad about her; and yet I knew that I didn't really love her.  Still,
I told her that I did.  I suppose it was the cursed falseness of my whole
nature.  I know that whenever I have said most, and felt most, something
in me kept saying all the time: 'You're lying, you're lying, you're
lying!'  Was I born a liar?

I wonder if the first words I ever spoke were a lie?  I wonder, when I
kissed my mother first, and knew that I was kissing her, if the same
little devil that sits up in my head now, said then: 'You're lying,
you're lying, you're lying.'  It has said so enough times since.  I loved
to be with my mother; yet I never felt, even when she died--and God knows
I felt bad enough then!

I never felt that my love was all real.  It had some infernal note of
falseness somewhere, some miserable, hollow place where the sound of my
own voice, when I tried to speak the truth, mocked me!  I wonder if the
smiles I gave, before I was able to speak at all, were only blarney?
I wonder, were they only from the wish to stand well with everybody,
if I could?  It must have been that; and how much I meant, and how much
I did not mean, God alone knows!

"What a sympathy I have always had for criminals!  I have always wanted,
or, anyhow, one side of me has always wanted, to do right, and the other
side has always done wrong.  I have sympathised with the just, but I have
always felt that I'd like to help the criminal to escape his punishment.
If I had been more real with that girl in New York, I wonder whether she
wouldn't have stuck to me?  When I was with her I could always convince
her; but, I remember, she told me once that, when I was away from her,
she somehow felt that I didn't really love her.  That's always been the
way.  When I was with people, they liked me; when I was away from them,
I couldn't depend upon them.  No; upon my soul, of all the friends I've
ever had, there's not one that I know of that I could go to now--except
my sister, poor girl!--and feel sure that no matter what I did, they'd
stick to me to the end.  I suppose the fault is mine.  If I'd been worth
the standing by, I'd have been the better stood by.  But this girl, this
little French provincial, with a heart of fire and gold, with a touch of
sin in her, and a thumping artery of truth, she would walk with me to the
gallows, and give her life to save my life--yes, a hundred times.  Well,
then, I'll start over again; for I've found the real thing.  I'll be true
to her just as long as she's true to me.  I'll never lie to her; and I'll
do something else--something else.  I'll tell her--"

He reached out, picked a wild rose from the vine upon the wall, and
fastened it in his button-hole, with a defiant sort of smile, as there
came a tap to his door.  "Come in," he said.

The door opened, and in stepped Shangois, the notary.  He carried a jug
under his arm, which, with a nod, he set down at the foot of the bed.

"M'sieu'," said he, "it is a thing that cured the bishop; and once, when
a prince of France was at Quebec, and had a bad cold, it cured him.  The
whiskey in it I made myself--very good white wine."  Ferrol looked at the
little man curiously.  He had only spoken with him once or twice, but he
had heard the numberless legends about him, and the Cure had told him
many of his sayings, a little weird and sometimes maliciously true to the
facts of life.

Ferrol thanked the little man, and motioned to a chair.  There was,
however, a huge chest against the wall near the window, and Shangois sat
down on this, with his legs hunched up to his chin, looking at Ferrol
with steady, inquisitive eyes.  Ferrol laughed outright.  A grotesque
thought occurred to him.  This little black notary was exactly like the
weird imp which, he had always imagined, sat high up in his brain,
dropping down little ironies and devilries--his personified conscience;
or, perhaps, the truth left out of him at birth and given this form, to
be with him, yet not of him.

Shangois did not stir, nor show by even the wink of an eyelid that he
recognised the laughter, or thought that he was being laughed at.

Presently Ferrol sat down and looked at Shangois without speaking, as
Shangois looked at him.  He smiled more than once, however, as the
thought recurred to him.

"Well?" he said at last.

"What if she finds out about the five thousand dollars--eh, m'sieu'?"

Ferrol was completely dumfounded.  The brief question covered so much
ground--showed a knowledge of the whole case.  Like Conscience itself,
the little black notary had gone straight to the point, struck home.
He was keen enough, however, had sufficient self-command, not to betray
himself, but remained unmoved outwardly, and spoke calmly.

"Is that your business--to go round the parish asking conundrums?" he
said coolly.  "I can't guess the answer to that one, can you?"

Shangois hated cowards, and liked clever people--people who could answer
him after his own fashion.  Nearly everybody was afraid of his tongue and
of him.  He knew too much; which was a crime.

"I can find out," he replied, showing his teeth a little.

"Then you're not quite sure yourself, little devilkin?"

"The girl is a riddle.  I am not the great reader of riddles."

"I didn't call you that.  You're only a common little imp."

Shangois showed his teeth in a malicious smile.

"Why did you set me the riddle, then?" Ferrol continued, his eyes fixed
with apparent carelessness on the other's face.

"I thought she might have told you the answer."

"I never asked her the puzzle.  Have you?"

By instinct, and from the notary's reputation, Ferrol knew that he was in
the presence of an honest man at least, and he waited most anxiously for
an answer, for his fate might hang on it.

"M'sieu', I have not seen her since yesterday morning."

"Well, what would you do if you found out about the five thousand
dollars?"

"I would see what happened to it; and afterwards I would see that a girl
of Bonaventure did not marry a Protestant, and a thief."

Ferrol rose from his chair, coughing a little.  Walking over to Shangois,
he caught him by both ears and shook the shaggy head back and forth.

"You little scrap of hell," he said in a rage, "if you ever come within
fifty feet of me again I'll send you where you came from!"

Though Shangois's eyes bulged from his head, he answered:

"I was only ten feet away from you last night under the elm!"

Suddenly Ferrol's hand slipped down to Shangois's throat.  Ferrol's
fingers tightened, pressed inwards.

"Now, see, I know what you mean.  Some one has robbed Nicolas Lavilette
of five thousand dollars.  You dare to charge me with it, curse you.  Let
me see if there's any more lies on your tongue!"

With the violence of the pressure Shangois's tongue was forced out of his
mouth.

Suddenly a paroxysm of coughing seized Ferrol, and he let go and
staggered back against the window ledge.  Shangois was transformed--an
animal.  No human being had ever seen him as he was at this moment.  The
fingers of his one hand opened and shut convulsively, his arms worked up
and down, his face twitched, his teeth showed like a beast's as he glared
at Ferrol.  He looked as though he were about to spring upon the now
helpless man.  But up from the garden below there came the sound of a
voice--Christine's--singing.

His face quieted, and his body came to its natural pose again, though his
eyes retained an active malice.  He turned to go.

"Remember what I tell you," said Ferrol: "if you publish that lie, you'll
not live to hear it go about.  I mean what I say."  Blood showed upon his
lips, and a tiny little stream flowed down the corner of his mouth.
Whenever he felt that warm fluid on his tongue he was certain of his
doom, and the horror of slowly dying oppressed him, angered him.  It
begot in him a desire to end it all.  He had a hatred of suicide; but
there were other ways.  "I'll have your life, or you'll have mine.  I'm
not to be played with," he added.

The sentences were broken by coughing, and his handkerchief was wet and
red.

"It is no concern of the world," answered Shangois, stretching up his
throat, for he still felt the pressure of Ferrol's fingers--"only of the
girl and her brother.  The girl--I saved her once before from your friend
Vanne Castine, and I will save her from you--but, yes!  It is nothing to
the world, to Bonaventure, that you are a robber; it is everything to
her.  You are all robbers--you English--cochons!"

He opened the door and went out.  Ferrol was about to follow him, but he
had a sudden fit of weakness, and he caught up a pillow, and, throwing it
on the chest where Shangois had sat, stretched himself upon it.  He lay
still for quite a long time, and presently fell into a doze.  In those
days no event made a lasting impression on him.  When it was over it
ended, so far as concerned any disturbing remembrances of it.  He was
awakened (he could not have slept for more than fifteen minutes) by a
tapping at his door, and his name spoken softly.  He went to the door and
opened it.  It was Christine.  He thought she seemed pale, also that she
seemed nervous; but her eyes were full of light and fire, and there was
no mistaking the look in her face: it was all for him.  He set down her
agitation to the adventure they were about to make together.  He stepped
back, as if inviting her to enter, but she shook her head.

"No, not this morning.  I will meet you at the old mill in half an hour.
The parish is all mad about the Rebellion, and no one will notice or talk
of anything else.  I have the best pair of horses in the stable; and we
can drive it in two hours, easy."

She took a paper from her pocket.

"This is--the--license," she added, and she blushed.  Then, with a sudden
impulse, she stepped inside the room, threw her arms about his neck and
kissed him, and he clasped her to his breast.

"My darling Tom!" she said, and then hastened away, with tears in her
eyes.

He saw the tears.  "I wonder what they were for?" he said musingly, as
he opened up the official blue paper.  "For joy?"  He laughed a little
uneasily as he said it.  His eyes ran through the document.

"The Honourable Tom Ferrol, of Stavely Castle, County Galway, Ireland,
bachelor, and Christine Marie Lavilette, of the Township of Bonaventure,
in the Province of Lower Canada, spinster, Are hereby granted," etc.,
etc., etc., "according to the laws of the Province of Upper Canada,"
etc., etc., etc.

He put it in his pocket.

"For better or for worse, then," he said, and descended the stairs.

Presently, as he went through the village, he noticed signs of hostility
to himself.  Cries of Vive la Canada!  Vive la France!  a bas l'Anglais!
came to him out of the murmuring and excitement.  But the Regimental
Surgeon took off his cap to him, very conspicuously advancing to meet
him, and they exchanged a few words.

"By the way, monsieur," the Regimental Surgeon added, as he took his
leave, "I knew of this some days ago, and, being a justice of the peace,
it was my duty to inform the authorities--yes of course!  One must do
one's duty in any case," he said, in imitation of English bluffness, and
took his leave.

Ten minutes later Christine and Ferrol were on their way to the English
province to be married.

That afternoon at three o'clock, as they left the little English-speaking
village man and wife, they heard something which startled them both.  It
was a bear-trainer, singing to his bear the same weird song, without
words, which Vanne Castine sang to Michael.  Over in another street they
could see the bear on his hind feet, dancing, but they could not see the
man.

Christine glanced at Ferrol anxiously, for she was nervous and excited,
though her face had also a look of exultant happiness.

"No, it's not Castine!" he said, as if in reply to her look.

In a vague way, however, she felt it to be ominous.




CHAPTER XV

The village had no thought or care for anything except the Rebellion and
news of it; and for several days Ferrol and Christine lived their new
life unobserved by the people of the village, even by the household of
Manor Casimbault.

It almost seemed that Ferrol's prophecy regarding himself was coming
true, for his cheek took on a heightened colour, his step a greater
elasticity, and he flung his shoulders out with a little of the old
military swagger: cheerful, forgetful of all the world, and buoyant in
what he thought to be his new-found health and permanent happiness.

Vague reports came to the village concerning the Rebellion.  There were
not a dozen people in the village who espoused the British cause; and
these few were silent.  For the moment the Lavilettes were popular.
Nicolas had made for them a sort of grand coup.  He had for the moment
redeemed the snobbishness of two generations.

After his secret marriage, Ferrol was not seen in the village for some
days, and his presence and nationality were almost forgotten by the
people: they only thought of what was actively before their eyes.  On the
fifth day after his marriage, which was Saturday, he walked down to the
village, attracted by shouting and unusual excitement.  When he saw the
cause of the demonstration he had a sudden flush of anger.  A flag-staff
had been erected in the centre of the village, and upon it had been run
up the French tricolour.  He stood and looked at the shouting crowd a
moment, then swung round and went to the office of the Regimental
Surgeon, who met him at the door.  When he came out again he carried a
little bundle under his left arm.  He made straight for the crowd, which
was scattered in groups, and pushed or threaded his way to the flag-
staff.  He was at least a head taller than any man there, and though he
was not so upright as he had been, the lines of his figure were still
those of a commanding personality.  A sort of platform had been erected
around the flag-staff and on it a drunken little habitant was talking
treason.  Without a word, Ferrol stepped upon the platform, and,
loosening the rope, dropped the tricolour half-way down the staff before
his action was quite comprehended by the crowd.  Presently a hoarse shout
proclaimed the anger and consternation of the habitants.

"Leave that flag alone," shouted a dozen voices.  "Leave it where it is!"
others repeated with oaths.

He dropped it the full length of the staff, whipped it off the string,
and put his foot upon it.  Then he unrolled the bundle which he had
carried under his arm.  It was the British flag.  He slipped it upon the
string, and was about to haul it up, when the drunken orator on the
platform caught him by the arm with fiery courage.

"Here, you leave that alone: that's not our flag, and if you string it
up, we'll string you up, bagosh!" he roared.

Ferrol's heavy walking-stick was in his right hand.  "Let go my arm-
quick!" he said quietly.

He was no coward, and these people were, and he knew it.  The habitant
drew back.

"Get off the platform," he said with quiet menace.

He turned quickly to the crowd, for some had sprung towards the platform
to pull him off.  Raising his voice, he said:

"Stand back, and hear what I've got to say.  You're a hundred to one.
You can probably kill me; but before you do that I shall kill three or
four of you.  I've had to do with rioters before.  You little handful of
people here--little more than half a million--imagine that you can defeat
thirty-five millions, with an army of half a million, a hundred battle-
ships, ten thousand cannon and a million rifles.  Come now, don't be
fools.  The Governor alone up there in Montreal has enough men to drive
you all into the hills of Maine in a week.  You think you've got the
start of Colborne?  Why, he has known every movement of Papineau and your
rebels for the last two months.  You can bluster and riot to-day, but
look out for to-morrow.  I am the only Englishman here among you.  Kill
me; but watch what your end will be!  For every hair of my head there
will be one less habitant in this province.  You haul down the British
flag, and string up your tricolour in this British village while there is
one Britisher to say, 'Put up that flag again!'--You fools!"

He suddenly gave the rope a pull, and the flag ran up half-way; but as
he did so a stone was thrown.  It flew past his head, grazing his temple.
A sharp point lacerated the flesh, and the blood flowed down his cheek.
He ran the flag up to its full height, swiftly knotted the cord and put
his back against the pole.  Grasping his stick he prepared himself for an
attack.

"Mind what I say," he cried; "the first man that comes will get what
for!"

There was a commotion in the crowd; consternation and dismay behind
Ferrol, and excitement and anger in front of him.  Three men were pushing
their way through to him.  Two of them were armed.  They reached the
platform and mounted it.  It was the Regimental Surgeon and two British
soldiers.  The Regimental Surgeon held a paper in his hand.

"I have here," he said to the crowd, "a proclamation by Sir John
Colborne.  The rebels have been defeated at three points, and half of
the men from Bonaventure who joined Papineau have been killed.  The
ringleader, Nicolas Lavilette, when found, will be put on trial for his
life.  Now, disperse to your homes, or every man of you will be arrested
and tried by court-martial."

The crowd melted away like snow, and they hurried not the less because
the stone which some one had thrown at Ferrol had struck a lad in the
head, and brought him senseless and bleeding to the ground.

Ferrol picked up the tricolour and handed it to the Regimental Surgeon.

"I could have done it alone, I believe," he said; "and, upon my soul, I'm
sorry for the poor devils.  Suppose we were Englishmen in France, eh?"




CHAPTER XVI

The fight was over.  The childish struggle against misrule had come to a
childish end.  The little toy loyalists had been broken all to pieces.  A
few thousand Frenchmen, with a vague patriotism, had shied some harmless
stones at the British flag-staff on the citadel: that was all.  Obeying
the instincts of blood, religion, race, and language, they had made a
haphazard, sidelong charge upon their ancient conquerors, had spluttered
and kicked a little, and had then turned tail upon disaster and defeat.
An incoherent little army had been shattered into fugitive factors, and
every one of these hurried and scurried for a hole of safety into which
he could hide.  Some were mounted, but most were on foot.

Officers fared little better than men.  It was "Save who can": they were
all on a dead level of misfortune.  Hundreds reached no cover, but were
overtaken and driven back to British headquarters.  In their terror,
twenty brave rebels of two hours ago were to be captured by a single
British officer of infantry speaking bad French.

Two of these hopeless fugitives were still fortunate enough to get a
start of the hounds of retaliation and revenge.  They were both mounted,
and had far to go to reach their destination.  Home was the one word in
the mind of each; and they both came from Bonaventure.

The one was a tall, athletic young man, who had borne a captain's
commission in Papineau's patriot army.  He rode a sorel horse--a great,
wiry raw-bone, with a lunge like a moose, and legs that struck the ground
with the precision of a piston-rod.  As soon as his nose was turned
towards Bonaventure he smelt the wind of home in his nostrils; his
hatchet head jerked till he got the bit straight between his teeth; then,
gripping it as a fretful dog clamps the bone which his master pretends to
wrest from him, he leaned down to his work, and the mud, the new-fallen
snow and the slush flew like dirty sparks, and covered man and horse.

Above, an uncertain, watery moon flew in and out among the shifting
clouds; and now and then a shot came through the mist and the half dusk,
telling of some poor fugitive fighting, overtaken, or killed.

The horse neither turned head nor slackened gait.  He was like a living
machine, obeying neither call nor spur, but travelling with an unchanging
speed along the level road, and up and down hill, mile after mile.

In the rider's heart were a hundred things; among them fear, that
miserable depression which comes with the first defeats of life, the
falling of the mercury from passionate activity to that frozen numbness
which betrays the exhausted nerve and despairing mind.  The horse could
not go fast enough; the panic of flight was on him.  He was conscious of
it, despised himself for it; but he could not help it.  Yet, if he were
overtaken, he would fight; yes, fight to the end, whatever it might be.
Nicolas Lavilette had begun to unwind the coil of fortune and ambition
which his mother had long been engaged in winding.

A mile or two behind was another horse and another rider.  The animal was
clean of limb, straight and shapely of body, with a leg like a lady's,
and heart and wind to travel till she dropped.  This mare the little
black notary, Shangois, had cheerfully stolen from beside the tent of the
English general.  The bridle-rein hung upon the wrist of the notary's
palsied left hand, and in his right hand he carried the long sabre of an
artillery officer, which he had picked up on the battlefield.  He rode
like a monkey clinging to the back of a hound, his shoulder hunched, his
body bent forward even with the mare's neck, his knees gripping the
saddle with a frightened tenacity, his small, black eyes peering into the
darkness before him, and his ears alert to the sound of pursuers.

Twenty men of the British artillery were also off on a chase that pleased
them well.  The hunt was up.  It was not only the joy of killing, but the
joy of gain, that spurred them on; for they would have that little black
thief who stole the general's brown mare, or they would know the reason
why.

As the night wore on, Lavilette could hear hoof-beats behind him; those
of the mare growing clearer and clearer, and those of the artillerymen
remaining about the same, monotonously steady.  He looked back, and saw
the mare lightly leaning to her work, and a little man hanging to her
back.  He did not know who it was; and if he had known he would have
wondered.  Shangois had ridden to camp to fetch him back to Bonaventure
for two purposes: to secure the five thousand dollars from Ferrol, and to
save Nic's sister from marrying a highwayman.  These reasons he would
have given to Nic Lavilette, but other ulterior and malicious ideas were
in his mind.  He had no fear, no real fear.  His body shrank, but that
was because he had been little used to rough riding and to peril.  But he
loved this game too, though there was a troop of foes behind him; and as
long as they rode behind him he would ride on.

He foresaw a moment when he would stop, slide to the ground, and with his
sabre kill one man--or more.  Yes, he would kill one man.  He had a
devilish feeling of delight in thinking how he would do it, and how red
the sabre would look when he had done it.  He wished he had a hundred
hands and a hundred sabres in those hands.  More than once he had been in
danger of his life, and yet he had had no fear.

He had in him the power of hatred; and he hated Ferrol as he had never
hated anything in his life.  He hated him as much as, in a furtive sort
of way, he loved the rebellious, primitive and violent Christine.

As he rode on a hundred fancies passed through his brain, and they all
had to do with killing or torturing.  As a boy dreams of magnificent
deeds of prowess, so he dreamed of deeds of violence and cruelty.  In his
life he had been secret, not vicious; he had enjoyed the power which
comes from holding the secrets of others, and that had given him pleasure
enough.  But now, as if the true passion, the vital principle, asserted
itself at the very last, so with the shadow of death behind him, his real
nature was dominant.  He was entirely sane, entirely natural, only
malicious.

The night wore on, and lifted higher into the sky, and the grey dawn
crept slowly up: first a glimmer, then a neutral glow, then a sort of
darkness again, and presently the candid beginning of day.

As they neared the Parish of Bonaventure, Lavilette looked back again,
and saw the little black notary a few hundred yards behind.  He
recognised him this time, waved a hand, and then called to his own fagged
horse.  Shangois's mare was not fagged; her heart and body were like
steel.

Not a quarter of a mile behind them both were three of the twenty
artillerymen.  Lavilette came to the bridge shouting for Baby, the
keeper.  Baby recognised him, and ran to the lever even as the sorel
galloped up.  For the first time in the ride, Nic stuck spurs harshly
into the sorel's side.  With a grunt of pain the horse sprang madly on.
A half-dozen leaps more and they were across, even as the bridge began to
turn; for Baby had not recognised the little black notary, and supposed
him to be one of Nic's pursuers; the others he saw further back in the
road.  It was only when Shangois was a third of the way across, that he
knew the mare's rider.  There was no time to turn the bridge back, and
there was no time for Shangois to stop the headlong pace of the mare.
She gave a wild whinny of fright, and jumped cornerwise, clear out across
the chasm, towards the moving bridge.  Her front feet struck the timbers,
and then, without a cry, mare and rider dropped headlong down to the
river beneath, swollen by the autumn rains.

Baby looked down and saw the mare's head thrust above the water, once,
twice; then there was a flash of a sabre--and nothing more.

Shangois, with his dreams of malice and fighting, and the secrets of a
half-dozen parishes strapped to his back, had dropped out of Bonaventure,
as a stone crumbles from a bank into a stream, and many waters pass over
it, and no one inquires whither it has gone, and no one mourns for it.




CHAPTER XVII

ON Sunday morning Ferrol lay resting on a sofa in a little room off the
saloon.  He had suffered somewhat from the bruise on his head, and while
the Lavilettes, including Christine, were at mass, he remained behind,
alone in the house, save for two servants in the kitchen.  From where he
lay he could look down into the village.  He was thinking of the tangle
into which things had got.  Feeling was bitter against him, and against
the Lavilettes also, now that the patriots were defeated.  It had gone
about that he had warned the Governor.  The habitants, in their blind
way, blamed him for the consequences of their own misdoing.  They blamed
Nicolas Lavilette.  They blamed the Lavilettes for their friend ship with
Ferrol.  They talked and blustered, yet they did not interfere with the
two soldiers who kept guard at the home of the Regimental Surgeon.  It
was expected that the Cure would speak of the Rebellion from the altar
this morning.  It was also rumoured that he would have something to say
about the Lavilettes; and Christine had insisted upon going.  He laughed
to think of her fury when he suggested that the Cure would probably have
something unpleasant to say about himself.  She would go and see to that
herself, she said.  He was amused, and yet he was not in high spirits,
for he had coughed a great deal since the incident of the day before, and
his strength was much weakened.

Presently he heard a footstep in the room, and turned over so that he
might see.  It was Sophie Farcinelle.

Before he had time to speak or to sit up, she had dropped a hand on his
shoulder.  Her face was aflame.

"You have been badly hurt, and I'm very sorry," she said.  "Why haven't
you been to see me?  I looked for you.  I looked every day, and you
didn't come, and--and I thought you had forgotten.  Have you?  Have you,
Mr. Ferrol?"

He had raised himself on his elbow, and his face was near hers.  It was
not in him to resist the appealing of a pretty woman, and he had scarcely
grasped the fact that he was a married man, his clandestine meetings with
his wife having had, to this point, rather an air of adventure and
irresponsibility.  It is hard to say what he might have done or left
undone; but, as Sophie's face was within an inch of his own, the door of
the room suddenly opened, and Christine appeared.  The indignation that
had sent her back from mass to Ferrol was turned into another indignation
now.

Sophie, frightened, turned round and met her infuriated look.  She did
not move, however.

"Leave this room at once.  What do you want here?" Christine said,
between gasps of anger.

"The room is as much mine as yours," answered Sophie, sullenly.

"The man isn't," retorted Christine, with a vicious snap of her teeth.

"Come, come," said Ferrol, in a soothing tone, rising from the sofa and
advancing.

"What's he to you?" said Sophie, scornfully.

"My husband: that's all!" answered Christine.  "And now, if you please,
will you go to yours?  You'll find him at mass.  He'll have plenty of
praying to do if he prays for you both--voila!"


"Your husband!" said Sophie, in a husky voice, dumfounded and miserable.
"Is that so?" she added to Ferrol.  "Is she-your wife?"

"That's the case," he answered, "and, of course," he added in a
mollifying tone, "being my sister as well as Christine's, there's no
reason why you shouldn't be alone with me in the room a few moments.
Is there now?" he added to Christine.

The acting was clever enough, but not quite convincing, and Christine was
too excited to respond to his blarney.

"He can't be your real husband," said Sophie, hardly above a whisper.
"The Cure didn't marry you, did he?"  She looked at Ferrol doubtfully.

"Well, no," he said; "we were married over in Upper Canada."

"By a Protestant?" asked Sophie.

Christine interrrupted.  "What's that to you?  I hope I'll never see your
face again while I live.  I want to be alone with my husband, and your
husband wants to be alone with his wife: won't you oblige us and him--
Hein?"

Sophie gave Ferrol a look which haunted him while he lived.  One idle
afternoon he had sowed the seeds of a little storm in the heart of a
woman, and a whirlwind was driving through her life to parch and make
desolate the green fields of her youth and womanhood.  He had loitered
and dallied without motive; but the idle and unmeaning sinner is the most
dangerous to others and to himself, and he realised it at that moment,
so far as it was in him to realise anything of the kind.

Sophie's figure as it left the room had that drooping, beaten look which
only comes to the stricken and the incurably humiliated.

"What have you said to her?" asked Christine of Ferrol, "what have you
done to her?"

"I didn't do a thing, upon my soul.  I didn't say a thing.  She'd only
just come in."

"What did she say to you?"

"As near as I can remember, she said: 'You have been hurt, and I'm very
sorry.  Why haven't you been to see me?  I looked for you; but you didn't
come, and I thought you had forgotten me.'"

"What did she mean by that?  How dared she!"

"See here, Christine," he said, laying his hand on her quivering
shoulder, "I didn't say much to her.  I was over there one afternoon, the
afternoon I asked you to marry me.  I drank a lot of liqueur; she looked
very pretty, and before she had a chance to say yes or no about it I
kissed her.  Now that's a fact.  I've never spent five minutes with her
alone since; I haven't even seen her since, until this morning.  Now
that's the honest truth.  I know it was scampish; but I never pretended
to be good.  It is nothing for you to make a fuss about, because,
whatever I am--and it isn't much one way or another--I am all yours,
straight as a die, Christine.  I suppose, if we lived together fifty
years, I'd probably kiss fifty women--once a year isn't a high average;
but those kisses wouldn't mean anything; and you, you, my girl"--he bent
his head down to her "why, you mean everything to me, and I wouldn't give
one kiss of yours for a hundred thousand of any other woman's in the
world!  What you've done for me, and what you'd do for me--"

There was a strange pathos in his voice, an uncommon thing, because his
usual eloquence was, as a rule, more pleasing than touching.  A quick
change of feeling passed over her, and her eyes filled with tears.  He
ran his arm round her shoulder.

"Ah, come, come!" he said, with a touch of insinuating brogue, and
kissed her.  "Come, it's all right.  I didn't mean anything, and she
didn't mean anything; and let's start fresh again."

She looked up at him with quick intelligence.  "That's just what we'll
have to do," she said.  "The Cure this morning at mass scolded the people
about the Rebellion, and said that Nic and you had brought all this
trouble upon Bonaventure; and everybody looked at our pew and snickered.
Oh, how I hate them all!  Then I jumped up--"

"Well?" asked Ferrol, "and what then?"

"I told them that my brother wasn't a coward, and that you were my
husband."

"And then--then what happened?"

"Oh, then there was a great fuss in the church, and the Cure said ugly
things, and I left and came home quick.  And now--"

"Well, and now?" Ferrol interrupted.

"Well, now we'll have to do something."

"You mean, to go away?" he asked, with a little shrug of his shoulder.
She nodded her head.

He was depressed: he had had a hemorrhage that morning, and the road
seemed to close in on him on all sides.

"How are we to live?" he asked, with a pitiful sort of smile.

She looked up at him steadily for a moment, without speaking.  He did not
understand the look in her eyes, until she said:

"You have that five thousand dollars!"

He drew back a step from her, and met her unwavering look a little
fearfully.  She knew that--she--!  "When did you find it out?" he asked.

"The morning we were married," she replied.

"And you--you, Christine, you married me, a thief!"  She nodded again.

"What difference could it make?" she asked.  "I wouldn't have been happy
if I hadn't married you.  And I loved you!"

"Look here, Christine," he said, "that five thousand dollars is not for
you or for me.  You will be safe enough if anything should happen to me;
your people would look after you, and you have some money in your own
right.  But I've a sister, and she's lame.  She never had to do a stroke
of work in her life, and she can't do it now.  I have shared with her
anything I have had since times went wrong with us and our family.  I
needed money badly enough, but I didn't care very much whether I got it
for myself or not--only for her.  I wanted that five thousand dollars for
her, and to her it shall go; not one penny to you, or to me, or to any
other human being.  The Rebellion is over: that money wouldn't have
altered things one way or another.  It's mine, and if anything happens to
me--"

He suddenly stooped down and caught her hands, looking her in the eyes
steadily.

"Christine," he said, "I want you never to ask me to spend a penny of
that money; and I want you to promise me, by the name of the Virgin Mary,
that you'll see my sister gets it, and that you'll never let her or any
one else know where it came from.  Come, Christine, will you do it for
me?  I know it's very little indeed I give you, and you're giving me
everything; but some people are born to be debtors in this world, and
some to be creditors, and some give all and get little, because--"

She interrupted him.

"Because they love as I love you," she said, throwing her arms round his
neck.  "Show me where the money is, and I'll do all you say, if--"

"Yes, if anything happens to me," he said, and dropped his hand
caressingly upon her head.  He loved her in that moment.

She raised her eyes to his.  He stooped and kissed her.  She was still in
his arms as the door opened and Monsieur and Madame Lavilette entered,
pale and angry.




CHAPTER XVIII

That night the British soldiers camped in the village.  All over the
country the rebels had been scattered and beaten, and Bonaventure had
been humbled and injured.  After the blind injustice of the fearful and
the beaten, Nicolas Lavilette and his family were blamed for the miseries
which had come upon the place.  They had emerged from their isolation to
tempt popular favour, had contrived many designs and ambitions, and in
the midst of their largest hopes were humiliated, and were followed by
resentment.  The position was intolerable.  In happy circumstances,
Christine's marriage with Ferrol might have been a completion of their
glory, but in reality it was the last blow to their progress.

In the dusk, Ferrol and Christine sat in his room: she, defiant,
indignant, courageous; he hiding his real feelings, and knowing that all
she now planned and arranged would come to naught.  Three times that day
he had had violent paroxysms of coughing; and at last had thrown himself
on his bed, exhausted, helplessly wishing that something would end it
all.  Illusion had passed for ever.  He no longer had a cold, but a
mortal trouble that was killing him inch by inch.  He remembered how a
brother officer of his, dying of an incurable disease, and abhorring
suicide, had gone into a cafe and slapped an unoffending bully and
duellist in the face, inviting a combat.  The end was sure, easy and
honourable.  For himself--he looked at Christine.  Not all her abounding
vitality, her warm, healthy body, or her overwhelming love, could give
him one extra day of life, not one day.  What a fool he had been to think
that she could do so!  And she must sit and watch him--she, with her
primitive fierceness of love, must watch him sinking, fading helplessly
out of life, sight and being.

A bottle of whiskey was beside him.  During the two hours just gone he
had drunk a whole pint of it.  He poured out another half-glass, filled
it up with milk, and drank it off slowly.  At that moment a knock came
to the door.  Christine opened it, and admitted one of the fugitives of
Nicolas's company of rebels.  He saw Ferrol, and came straight to him.

"A letter for M'sieu' the Honourable," said he "from M'sieu' le Capitaine
Lavilette."

Ferrol opened the paper.  It contained only a few lines.  Nicolas was
hiding in the store-room of the vacant farmhouse, and Ferrol must assist
him to escape to the State of New York.

He had stolen into the village from the north, and, afraid to trust any
one except this faithful member of his company, had taken refuge in a
place where, if the worst came to the worst, he could defend himself,
for a time at least.  Twenty rifles of the rebels had been stored in the
farmhouse, and they were all loaded!  Ferrol, of course, could go where
he liked, being a Britisher, and nobody would notice him.  Would he not
try to get him away?

While Christine questioned the fugitive, Ferrol thought the matter over.
One thing he knew: the solution of the great problem had come; and the
means to the solution ran through his head like lightning.  He rose to
his feet, drank off a few mouthfuls of undiluted whiskey, filled a flask
and put it in his pocket.  Then he found his pistols, and put on his
greatcoat, muffler and cap, before he spoke a word.

Christine stood watching him intently.

"What are you going to do, Tom?" she said quietly.  "I am going to save
your brother, if I can," was his reply, as he handed her Nic's letter.




CHAPTER XIX

Half an hour later, as Ferrol was passing from Louis Lavilette's stables
into the road leading to the Seigneury he met Sophie Farcinelle, face to
face.  In a vague sort of way he was conscious that a look of despair and
misery had suddenly wasted the bloom upon her cheek, and given to the
large, cow-like eyes an expression of child-like hopelessness.  An apathy
had settled upon his nerves.  He saw things as in a dream.  His brain
worked swiftly, but everything that passed before his eyes was, as it
were, in a kaleidoscope, vivid and glowing, but yet intangible.  His
brain told him that here before him was a woman into whose life he had
brought its first ordeal and humiliation.  But his heart only felt a
reflective sort of pity: it was not a personal or immediate realisation,
that is, not at first.

He was scarcely conscious that he stood and looked at her for quite two
minutes, without motion or speech on the part of either; but the dumb,
desolate look in her eyes--a look of appeal, astonishment, horror and
shame combined, presently clarified his senses, and he slowly grew to
look at her as at his punishment, the punishment of his life.  Before
--always before--Sophie had been vague and indistinct: seen to-day,
forgotten tomorrow; and previous to meeting her scores had affected his
senses, affected them not at all deeply.

She was like a date in history to a boy who remembers that it meant
something, but what, is not quite sure.  But the meaning and definiteness
were his own.  Out of the irresponsibility of his nature, out of the
moral ineptitude to which he had been born, moral knowledge came to him
at last.  Love had not done it; neither the love of Christine, as strong
as death, nor the love of his sister, the deepest thing he ever knew--but
the look of a woman wronged.  He had inflicted on her the deepest wrong
that may be done a woman.  A woman can forgive passion and ruin, and
worse, if the man loves her, and she can forgive herself, remembering
that to her who loved much, much was forgiven.  But out of wilful
idleness, the mere flattery of the senses, a vampire feeding upon the
spirits and souls of others, for nothing save emotion for emotion's sake
--that was shameless, it was the last humiliation of a woman.  As it
were, to lose joy, and glow, and fervour of young, sincere and healthy
life, to whip up the dying vitality and morbid brain of a consumptive!

All in a flash he saw it, realised it, and hated himself for it.  He knew
that as long as he lived, an hour or ten years, he never could redeem
himself; never could forgive himself, and never buy back the life that he
had injured.  Many a time in his life he had kissed and ridden away, and
had been unannoyed by conscience.  But in proportion as conscience had
neglected him before, it ground him now between the stones, and he saw
himself as he was.  Come of a gentleman's family, he knew he was no
gentleman.  Having learned the forms and courtesies of life, having
infused his whole career with a spirit of gay bonhomie, he knew that in
truth he was a swaggerer; that bad taste, infamous bad taste, had marked
almost everything that he had done in his life.  He had passed as one of
the nobility, but he knew that all true men, all he had ever met, must
have read him through and through.  He had understood this before to a
certain point, had read himself to a certain mark of gauge, but he had
never been honestly and truly a man until this moment.  His soul was
naked before his eyes.  It had been naked before, but he had laughed.
Born without real remorse, he felt it at last.  The true thing started
within him.  God, the avenger, the revealer and the healer, had held up
this woman as a glass to him that he might see himself.

He saw her as she had been, a docile, soft-eyed girl, untouched by
anything that defames or shames, and all in a moment the man that had
never been in him until now, from the time he laughed first into his
mother's eyes as a babe, spoke out as simply as a child would have
spoken, and told the truth.  There were no ameliorating phrases to soften
it to her ears; there was no tact, there was no blarney, there was no
suave suggestion now, no cheap gaiety, no cynicism of the social vampire
--only the direct statement of a self-reproachful, dying man.

"I didn't fully know what I was doing," he said to her.  "If I had
understood then as I do now, I would never have come near you.  It was
the worst wickedness I ever did."

The new note in his voice, the new fashion of his words, the new look of
his eyes, startled her, confused her.  She could scarcely believe he was
the same man.  The dumb desolation lifted a little, and a look of under
standing seemed to pierce her tragic apathy.  As if a current of thought
had been suddenly sent through her, she drew herself up with a little
shiver, and looked at him as if she were about to speak; but instead of
doing so, a strange, unhappy smile passed across her lips.

He saw that all the goodness of her nature was trying to arouse itself
and assure him of forgiveness.  It did not deceive him in the least.

"I won't be so mean now as to say I was weak," he added.  "I was not
weak; I was bad.  I always felt I was born a liar and a thief.  I've lied
to myself all my life; and I've lied to other people because I never was
a true man."

"A thief!" she said at last, scarcely above a whisper, and looking at him
with a flash of horror in her eyes.  "A thief!"

It was no use; he could not allow her to think he meant a thief in the
vulgar, common sense, though that was what he was: just a common
criminal.

"I have stolen the kind thoughts and love of people to whom I gave
nothing in return," he said steadily.  "There is nothing good in me.
I used to think I was good-natured; but I was not, or I wouldn't have
brought misery to a girl like you."

His truth broke down the barriers of her anger and despair.  Something
welled up in her heart: it may have been love, it may have been inherent
womanliness.

"Why did you marry Christine?" she asked.

All at once he saw that she never could quite understand.  Her stand-
point would still, in the end, be the stand-point of a woman.  He saw
that she would have forgiven him, even had he not loved her, if he had
not married Christine.  For the first time he knew something, the real
something, of a woman's heart.  He had never known it before, because he
had been so false himself.  He might have been evil and had a conscience
too; then he would have been wise.  But he had been evil, and had had no
conscience or moral mentor from the beginning; so he had never known
anything real in his life.  He thought he had known Christine, but now he
saw her in a new light, through the eyes of her sister from whose heart
he had gathered a harvest of passion and affection, and had burnt the
stubble and seared the soil forever.  Sophie could never justify herself
in the eyes of her husband, or in her own eyes, because this man did not
love her.  Even as he stood before her there, declaring himself to her as
wilfully wicked in all that he had said and done, she still longed
passionately for the thing that was denied her: not her lost truth back,
but the love that would have compensated for her suffering, and in some
poor sense have justified her in years to come.  She did not put it into
words, but the thought was bluntly in her mind.  She looked at him, and
her eyes filled with tears, which dropped down her cheek to the ground.

He was about to answer her question, when, all at once, her honest eyes
looked into his mournfully, and she said with an incredible pathos and
simplicity:

"I don't know how I am going to live on with Magon.  I suppose I'll have
to keep pretending till I die!"

The bell in the church was ringing for vespers.  It sounded peaceful and
quiet, as though no war, or rebellion, or misery and shame, were anywhere
within the radius of its travel.

Just where they stood there was a tall calvary.  Behind it was some
shrubbery.  Ferrol was going to answer her, when he saw, coming along the
road, the Cure in his robes, bearing the host.  In front of him trotted
an acolyte, swinging the censer.

Ferrol quickly drew Sophie aside behind the bushes, where they should not
be seen; for he was no longer reckless.  He wished to be careful for the
woman's sake.

The Curb did not turn his head to the right or left, but came along
chanting something slowly.  The smell of the incense floated past them.
When the priest and the lad reached the calvary they turned towards it,
bowed, crossed themselves, and the lad rang a little silver bell.  Then
the two passed on, the lad still ringing.  When they were out of sight
the sound of the bell came softly, softly up the road, while the bell in
the church tower still called to prayer.

The words the priest chanted seemed to ring through the air after he had
gone.

              "God have mercy upon the passing soul!
               God have mercy upon the passing soul!
               Hear the prayer of the sinner, O Lord;
               Listen to the voice of those that mourn;
               Have mercy upon the sinner, O Lord!"

When Ferrol turned to Sophie again, both her hands were clasping the
calvary, and she had dropped her head upon them.

"I must go," he said.  She did not move.

Again he spoke to her; but she did not lift her head.  Presently,
however, as he stood watching her, she moved away from the calvary, and,
with her back still turned to him, stepped out into the road and hurried
on towards her home, never once turning her head.

He stood looking after her for a moment, then turned and, sitting on a
log behind the shrubbery, he tore a few pieces of paper out of a note-
book and began writing.  He wrote swiftly for about twenty minutes or
more, then, arising, he moved on towards the village, where crowds had
gathered--excited, fearful, tumultuous; for the British soldiers had just
entered the place.

Ferrol seemed almost oblivious of the threatening crowd, which once or
twice jostled him more than was accidental.  He came into the post-
office, got an envelope, put his letter inside it, stamped it, addressed
it to Christine, and dropped it into the letter-box.




CHAPTER XX

An hour later he stood among a few companies of British soldiers in front
of the massive stone store-house of the Lavilettes' abandoned farmhouse,
with its thick shuttered windows and its solid oak doors.  It was too
late to attempt the fugitive's escape, save by strategy.  Over half an
hour Nic had kept them at bay.  He had made loopholes in the shutters and
the door, and from these he fired upon his assailants.  Already he had
wounded five and killed two.

Men had been sent for timber to batter down the door and windows.
Meanwhile, the troops stood at a respectful distance, out of the range of
Nic's firing, awaiting developments.

Ferrol consulted with the officers, advising a truce and parley, offering
himself as mediator to induce Nic to surrender.  To this the officers
assented, but warned him that his life might pay the price of his
temerity.  He laughed at this.  He had been talking, with his head and
throat well muffled, and the collar of his greatcoat drawn about his
ears.  Once or twice he coughed, a hacking, wrenching cough, which struck
the ears of more than one of the officers painfully; for they had known
him in his best and gayest days at Quebec.

It was arranged that he should advance, holding out a flag of truce.
Before he went he drew aside one of the younger lieutenants, in whose
home at Quebec his sister had always been a welcome visitor, and told him
briefly the story of his marriage, of his wife and of Nicolas.  He sent
Christine a message, that she should not forget to carry his last token
to his sister!  Then turning, he muffled up his face against the crisp,
harsh air (there was design in this also), and, waving a white
handkerchief, advanced to the door of the store-room.

The soldiers waited anxiously, fearing that Nic would fire, in spite of
all; but presently a spot of white appeared at one of the loopholes; then
the door was slowly opened.  Ferrol entered, and it was closed again.

Nicolas Lavilette grasped his hand.

"I knew you wouldn't go back on me," said he.  "I knew you were my
friend.  What the devil do they want out there?"

"I am more than your friend: I'm your brother," answered Ferrol,
meaningly.  Then, quickly taking off his greatcoat, cap, muffler and
boots: "Quick, on with these!" he said.  "There's no time to lose!"

"What's all this?" asked Nic.

"Never mind; do exactly as I say, and there's a chance for you."

Nic put on the overcoat.  Ferrol placed the cap on his head, and muffled
him up exactly as he himself had been, then made him put on his own top-
boots.

"Now, see," he said, "everything depends upon how you do this thing.
You are about my height.  Pass yourself off for me.  Walk loose and long
as I do, and cough like me as you go."

There was no difficulty in showing him what the cough was like: he
involuntarily offered an illustration as he spoke.

"As soon as I shut the door and you start forward, I'll fire on them.
That'll divert their attention from you.  They'll take you for me, and
think I've failed in persuading you to give yourself up.  Go straight on-
don't hurry--coughing all the time; and if you can make the dark, just
beyond the soldiers, by the garden bench, you'll find two men.  They'll
help you.  Make for the big tree on the Seigneury road--you know: where
you were robbed.  There you'll find the fastest horse from your father's
stables.  Then ride, my boy, ride for your life to the State of New
York!"

"And you--you?" asked Nicolas.  Ferrol laughed.

"You needn't worry about me, Nic.  I'll get out of this all right; as
right as rain!  Are you ready?  Steady now, steady.  Let me hear you
cough."  Nic coughed.

"No, that isn't it.  Listen and watch."  Ferrol coughed.  "Here," he
said, taking something from his pocket, "open your mouth."  He threw some
pepper down the other's throat.  "Now try it."

Nic coughed almost convulsively.

"Yes, that's it, that's it!  Just keep that up.  Come along now.  Quick-
not a moment to lose!  Steady!  You're all right, my boy; you've got
nerve, and that's the thing.  Good-bye, Nic, good luck to you!"

They grasped hands: the door opened swiftly, and Nic stepped outside.  In
an instant Ferrol was at the loophole.  Raising a rifle, he fired, then
again and again.  Through the loophole he could see a half-dozen men lift
a log to advance on the door as Nic passed a couple of officers, coughing
hard, and making spasmodic motions with his hand, as though exhausted and
unable to speak.

He fired again, and a soldier fell.  The lust of fighting was on him now.
It was not a question of country or of race, but only a man crowding the
power of old instincts into the last moments of his life.  The vigour and
valour of a reconquered youth seemed to inspire him; he felt as he did
when a mere boy fighting on the Danube.  His blood rioted in his veins;
his eyes flashed.  He lifted the flask of whiskey and gulped down great
mouthfuls of it, and fired again and again, laughing madly.

"Let them come on, let them come on," he cried.  "By God, I'll settle
them!"  The frenzy of war possessed him.  He heard the timber crash
against the door--once, twice, thrice, and then give away.  He swung
round and saw men's faces glowing in the light of the fire, and then
another face shot in before the others--that of Vanne Castine.

With a cry of fury he ran forward into the doorway.  Castine saw him at
the same moment.  With a similar instinct each sprang for the other's
throat, Castine with a knife in his hand.

A cry of astonishment went up from the officers and the men without.
They had expected to see Nic; but Nic was on his way to the horse beneath
the great elm tree, and from the elm tree to the State of New York--and
safety.

The men and the officers fell back as Castine and Ferrol clinched in a
death struggle.  Ferrol knew that his end had come.  He had expected it,
hoped for it.  But, before the end, he wanted to kill this man, if he
could.  He caught Castine's head in his hands, and, with a last effort,
twisted it back with a sudden jerk.

All at once, with the effort, blood spurted from his mouth into the
other's face.  He shivered, tottered and fell back, as Castine struck
blindly into space.  For a moment Ferrol swayed back and forth, stretched
out his hands convulsively and gasped, trying to speak, the blood welling
from his lips.  His eyes were wild, anxious and yearning, his face deadly
pale and covered with a cold sweat.  Presently he collapsed, like a
loosened bundle, upon the steps.

Castine, blinded with blood, turned round, and the light of the fire upon
his open mouth made him appear to grin painfully--an involuntary grimace
of terror.

At that instant a rifle shot rang out from the shrubbery, and Castine
sprang from the ground and fell at Ferrol's feet.  Then, with a
contortive shudder, he rolled over and over the steps, and lay face
downward upon the ground-dead.

A girl ran forward from the trees, with a cry, pushing her way through to
Ferrol's body.  Lifting up his head, she called to him in an agony of
entreaty.  But he made no answer.

"That's the woman who fired the shot!" said a subaltern officer
excitedly.  "I saw her!"

"Shut up, you fool--it was his wife!" exclaimed the young captain to
whom Ferrol had given his last message for Christine.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

After which comes steady happiness or the devil to pay (wedding)
All men are worse than most women
I always did what was wrong, and liked it--nearly always
Men feel surer of women than women feel of men






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "POMP OF THE LAVILETTES":

After which comes steady happiness or the devil to pay (wedding)
All men are worse than most women
I always did what was wrong, and liked it--nearly always
Illusive hopes and irresponsible deceptions
Men feel surer of women than women feel of men
She lacked sense a little and sensitiveness much
To be popular is not necessarily to be contemptible
Who say 'God bless you', in New York! they say 'Damn you!'






AT THE SIGN OF THE EAGLE

By Gilbert Parker




                   "Life in her creaking shoes
                    Goes, and more formal grows,
                    A round of calls and cues:
                    Love blows as the wind blows.
                    Blows!  .  .  .  "

"Well, what do you think of them, Molly?" said Sir Duke Lawless to his
wife, his eyes resting with some amusement on a big man and a little one
talking to Lord Hampstead.

"The little man is affected, gauche, and servile.  The big one
picturesque and superior in a raw kind of way.  He wishes to be rude to
some one, and is disappointed because, just at the moment, Lord Hampstead
is too polite to give him his cue.  A dangerous person in a drawing-room,
I should think; but interesting.  You are a bold man to bring them here,
Duke.  Is it not awkward for our host?"

"Hampstead did it with his eyes open.  Besides, there is business behind
it--railways, mines, and all that; and Hampstead's nephew is going to the
States fortune-hunting.  Do you see?"

Lady Lawless lifted her eyebrows.  "'To what base uses are we come,
Horatio!' You invite me to dinner and--'I'll fix things up right.'  That
is the proper phrase, for I have heard you use it.  Status for dollars.
Isn't it low?  I know you do not mean what you say, Duke."

Sir Duke's eyes were playing on the men with a puzzled expression, as
though trying to read the subject of their conversation; and he did not
reply immediately.  Soon, however, he turned and looked down at his wife
genially, and said: "Well, that's about it, I suppose.  But really there
is nothing unusual in this, so far as Mr. John Vandewaters is concerned,
for in his own country he travels 'the parlours of the Four Hundred,'
and is considered 'a very elegant gentleman.'  We must respect a man
according to the place he holds in his own community.  Besides, as you
suggest, Mr. Vandewaters is interesting.  I might go further, and say
that he is a very good fellow indeed."

"You will be asking him down to Craigruie next," said Lady Lawless,
inquisition in her look.

"That is exactly what I mean to do, with your permission, my dear.  I
hope to see him laying about among the grouse in due season."

"My dear Duke, you are painfully Bohemian.  I can remember when you were
perfectly precise and exclusive, and--"

"What an awful prig I must have been!"

"Don't interrupt.  That was before you went aroving in savage countries,
and picked up all sorts of acquaintances, making friends with the most
impossible folk.  I should never be surprised to see you drive Shon
McGann--and his wife, of course--and Pretty Pierre--with some other
man's wife--up to the door in a dogcart; their clothes in a saddle-bag,
or something less reputable, to stay a month.  Duke, you have lost your
decorum; you are a gipsy."

"I fear Shon McGann and Pierre wouldn't enjoy being with us as I should
enjoy having them.  You can never understand what a life that is out in
Pierre's country.  If it weren't for you and the bairn, I should be off
there now.  There is something of primeval man in me.  I am never so
healthy and happy, when away from you, as in prowling round the outposts
of civilisation, and living on beans and bear's meat."

He stretched to his feet, and his wife rose with him.  There was a fine
colour on his cheek, and his eye had a pleasant fiery energy.  His wife
tapped him on the arm with her fan.  She understood him very well, though
pretending otherwise.  "Duke, you are incorrigible.  I am in daily dread
of your starting off in the middle of the night, leaving me--"

"Watering your couch with your tears?"

"--and hearing nothing more from you till a cable from Quebec or Winnipeg
tells me that you are on your way to the Arctic Circle with Pierre or
some other heathen.  But, seriously, where did you meet Mr. Vandewaters
--Heavens, what a name!--and that other person?  And what is the other
person's name?"

"The other person carries the contradictory name of Stephen Pride."

"Why does he continually finger his face, and show his emotions so?  He
assents to everything said to him by an appreciative exercise of his
features."

"My dear, you ask a great and solemn question.  Let me introduce the
young man, that you may get your answer at the fountain-head."

"Wait a moment, Duke.  Sit down and tell me when and where you met these
men, and why you have continued the acquaintance."

"Molly," he said, obeying her, "you are a terrible inquisitor, and the
privacy of one's chamber were the kinder place to call one to account.
But I bend to your implacability.  .  .  .  Mr. Vandewaters, like myself,
has a taste for roving, though our aims are not identical.  He has a fine
faculty for uniting business and pleasure.  He is not a thorough
sportsman--there is always a certain amount of enthusiasm, even in the
unrewarded patience of the true hunter; but he sufficeth.  Well, Mr.
Vandewaters had been hunting in the far north, and looking after a
promising mine at the same time.  He was on his way south at one angle,
I at another angle, bound for the same point.  Shon McGann was with me;
Pierre with Vandewaters.  McGann left me, at a certain point, to join his
wife at a Barracks of the Riders of the Plains.  I had about a hundred
miles to travel alone.  Well, I got along the first fifty all right.
Then came trouble.  In a bad place of the hills I fell and broke an ankle
bone.  I had an Eskimo dog of the right sort with me.  I wrote a line on
a bit of birch bark, tied it round his neck, and started him away,
trusting my luck that he would pull up somewhere.  He did.  He ran into
Vandewaters's camp that evening.  Vandewaters and Pierre started away at
once.  They had dogs, and reached me soon.

"It was the first time I had seen Pierre for years.  They fixed me up,
and we started south.  And that's as it was in the beginning with
Mr. John Vandewaters and me."

Lady Lawless had been watching the two strangers during the talk, though
once or twice she turned and looked at her husband admiringly.  When he
had finished she said: "That is very striking.  What a pity it is that
men we want to like spoil all by their lack of form!"

"Don't be so sure about Vandewaters.  Does he look flurried by these
surroundings?"

"No.  He certainly has an air of contentment.  It is, I suppose, the
usual air of self-made Americans."

"Go to London, E.C., and you will find the same, plus smugness.  Now,
Mr. Vandewaters has real power--and taste too, as you will see.  Would
you think Mr. Stephen Pride a self-made man?"

"I cannot think of any one else who would be proud of the patent.  Please
to consider the seals about his waistcoat, and the lady-like droop of his
shoulders."

"Yet he is thought to be a young man of parts.  He has money, made by his
ancestors; he has been round the world; he belongs to societies for
culture and--"

"And he will rave of the Poet's Corner, ask if one likes Pippa Passes,
and expect to be introduced to every woman in the room at a tea-party,
to say nothing of proposing impossible things, such as taking one's girl
friends to the opera alone, sending them boxes of confectionery, and
writing them dreadfully reverential notes at the same time.  Duke, the
creature is impossible, believe me.  Never, never, if you love me, invite
him to Craigruie.  I met one of his tribe at Lady Macintyre's when I was
just out of school; and at the dinner-table, when the wine went round,
he lifted his voice and asked for a cup of tea, saying he never 'drank.'
Actually he did, Duke."

Her husband laughed quietly.  He had a man's enjoyment of a woman's
dislike of bad form.  "A common criminal man, Molly.  Tell me, which is
the greater crime: to rob a bank or use a fish-knife for asparagus?"

Lady Lawless fanned herself.  "Duke, you make me hot.  But if you will
have the truth: the fish-knife business by all means.  Nobody need feel
uncomfortable about the burglary, except the burglar; but see what a
position for the other person's hostess."

"My dear, women have no civic virtues.  Their credo is, 'I believe in
beauty and fine linen, and the thing that is not gauche.'"

His wife was smiling.  "Well, have it your own way.  It is a creed of
comfort, at any rate.  And now, Duke, if I must meet the man of mines and
railways and the spare person making faces at Lord Hampstead, let it be
soon, that it may be done with; and pray don't invite them to Craigruie
till I have a chance to speak with you again.  I will not have impossible
people at a house-party."

"What a difficult fellow your husband is, Molly!"

"Difficult; but perfectly possible.  His one fault is a universal
sympathy which shines alike on the elect--and the others."

"So.  Well, this is our dance.  After it is over, prepare for the
Americanos."

Half-an-hour later Mr. Vandewaters was standing in a conspicuous corner
talking to Lady Lawless.

"It is, then, your first visit to England?" she asked.  He had a dry,
deliberate voice, unlike the smooth, conventional voices round him.
"Yes, Lady Lawless," he replied: "it's the first time I've put my foot in
London town, and--perhaps you won't believe it of an American--I find it
doesn't take up a very conspicuous place."

The humour was slightly accentuated, and Lady Lawless shrank a little,
as if she feared the depths of divertisement to which this speech might
lead; but a quick look at the man assured her of his common-sense, and
she answered: "It is of the joys of London that no one is so important
but finds the space he fills a small one, which may be filled acceptably
by some one else at any moment.  It is easy for kings and princes even--
we have secluded princes here now--to get lost and forgotten in London."
"Well, that leaves little chance for ordinary Americans, who don't bank
on titles."

She looked up, puzzled in spite of herself.  But she presently said, with
frankness and naivete: "What does 'bank on titles' mean?"

He stroked his beard, smiling quaintly, and said: "I don't know how to
put the thing better-it seems to fill the bill.  But, anyway, Americans
are republicans; and don't believe in titles, and--"

"O, pardon me," she interrupted: "of course, I see."

"We've got little ways of talking not the same as yours.  You don't seem
to have the snap to conversation that we have in the States.  But I'll
say here that I think you have got a better style of talking.  It isn't
exhausting."

"Mr. Pride said to me a moment ago that they spoke better English in
Boston than any other place in the world."

"Did he, though, Lady Lawless?  That's good.  Well, I guess he was only
talking through his hat."

She was greatly amused.  Her first impressions were correct.  The man was
interesting.  He had a quaint, practical mind.  He had been thrown upon
his own resources, since infancy almost, in a new country; and he had
seen with his own eyes, nakedly, and without predisposition or
instruction.  From childhood thoroughly adaptable, he could get into
touch with things quickly, and instantly like or dislike them.  He had
been used to approach great concerns with fearlessness and competency.
He respected a thing only for its real value, and its intrinsic value was
as clear to him as the market value.  He had, perhaps, an exaggerated
belief in the greatness of his own country, because he liked eagerness
and energy and daring.  The friction and hurry of American life added to
his enjoyment.  They acted on him like a stimulating air, in which he
was always bold, collected, and steady.  He felt an exhilaration in being
superior to the rustle of forces round him.  It had been his habit to
play the great game of business with decision and adroitness.  He had not
spared his opponent in the fight; he had crushed where his interests were
in peril and the sport played into his hands; comforting himself, if he
thought of the thing, with the knowledge that he himself would have been
crushed if the other man had not.  He had never been wilfully unfair, nor
had he used dishonourable means to secure his ends: his name stood high
in his own country for commercial integrity; men said: he "played
square."  He had, maybe, too keen a contempt for dulness and incompetency
in enterprise, and he loathed red-tape; but this was racial.  His mind
was as open as his manners.  He was utterly approachable.  He was a
millionaire, and yet in his own offices in New York he was as accessible
as a President.  He handled things without gloves, and this was not a
good thing for any that came to him with a weak case.  He had a
penetrating intelligence; and few men attempted, after their first
sophistical statements, to impose upon him: he sent them away unhappy.
He did not like England altogether: first, because it lacked, as he said,
enterprise; and because the formality, decorum and excessive convention
fretted him.  He saw that in many things the old land was backward, and
he thought that precious time was being wasted.  Still, he could see that
there were things, purely social, in which the Londoners were at
advantage; and he acknowledged this when he said, concerning Stephen
Pride's fond boast, that he was "talking through his hat."

Lady Lawless smiled, and after a moment rejoined:

"Does it mean that he was mumming, as it were, like a conjurer?"

"Exactly.  You are pretty smart, Lady Lawless; for I can see that, from
your stand-point, it isn't always easy to catch the meaning of sayings
like that.  But they do hit the case, don't they?"

"They give a good deal of individuality to conversation," was the vague
reply.  "What, do you think, is the chief lack in England?"

"Nerve and enterprise.  But I'm not going to say you ought to have the
same kind of nerve as ours.  We are a different tribe, with different
surroundings, and we don't sit in the same kind of saddle.  We ride for
all we're worth all the time.  You sit back and take it easy.  We are
never satisfied unless we are behind a fast trotter; you are content with
a good cob that steps high, tosses its head, and has an aristocratic
stride."

"Have you been in the country much?" she asked, without any seeming
relevancy.

He was keen enough.  He saw the veiled point of her question.  "No: I've
never been in the country here," he said.  "I suppose you mean that I
don't see or know England till I've lived there."

"Quite so, Mr. Vandewaters."  She smiled to think what an undistinguished
name it was.  It suggested pumpkins in the front garden.  Yet here its
owner was perfectly at his ease, watching the scene before him with good-
natured superiority.  "London is English; but it is very cosmopolitan,
you know," she added; "and I fancy you can see it is not a place for fast
trotters.  The Park would be too crowded for that--even if one wished to
drive a Maud S."

He turned his slow keen eyes on her, and a smile broadened into a low
laugh, out of which he said:

"What do you know of Maud S?  I didn't think you would be up in racing
matters."

"You forget that my husband is a traveller, and an admirer of Americans
and things American."

"That's so," he answered; "and a staving good traveller he is.  You don't
catch him asleep, I can tell you, Lady Lawless.  He has stuff in him."

"The stuff to make a good American?"

"Yes; with something over.  He's the kind of Englishman that can keep
cool when things are ticklish, and look as if he was in a parlour all the
time.  Americans keep cool, but look cheeky.  O, I know that.  We square
our shoulders and turn out our toes, and push our hands into our pockets,
and act as if we owned the world.  Hello--by Jingo!"  Then,
apologetically: "I beg your pardon, Lady Lawless; it slipped."

Lady Lawless followed Mr. Vandewaters's glance, and saw, passing on her
husband's arm, a tall, fascinating girl.  She smiled meaningly to
herself, as she sent a quick quizzical look at the American, and said,
purposely misinterpreting his exclamation: "I am not envious, Mr.
Vandewaters."

"Of course not.  That's a commoner thing with us than with you.  American
girls get more notice and attention from their cradles up, and they want
it all along the line.  You see, we've mostly got the idea that an
Englishman expects from his wife what an American woman expects from her
husband."

"How do Americans get these impressions about us?"

"From our newspapers, I guess; and the newspapers take as the ground-work
of their belief the Bow Street cases where Englishmen are cornered for
beating their wives."

"Suppose we were to judge of American Society by the cases in a Chicago
Divorce Court?"

"There you have me on toast.  That's what comes of having a husband who
takes American papers.  Mind you, I haven't any idea that the American
papers are right.  I've had a lot to do with newspapers, and they are
pretty ignorant, I can tell you--cheap all round.  What's a newspaper,
anyway, but an editor, more or less smart and overworked, with an owner
behind him who has got some game on hand?  I know: I've been there."

"How have you 'been there'?"

"I've owned four big papers all at once, and had fifty others under my
thumb."

Lady Lawless caught her breath; but she believed him.  "You must be very
rich."

"Owning newspapers doesn't mean riches.  It's a lever, though, for
tipping the dollars your way."

"I suppose they have--tipped your way?"

"Yes: pretty well.  But, don't follow this lead any farther, Lady
Lawless, or you may come across something that will give you a start.
I should like to keep on speaking terms with you."

"You mean that a man cannot hold fifty newspapers under his thumb, and
live in the glare of a search-light also?"

"Exactly.  You can't make millions without pulling wires."

She saw him watching the girl on her husband's arm.  She had the instinct
of her sex.  She glanced at the stately girl again; then at Mr.
Vandewaters critically, and rejoined, quizzically: "Did you--make
millions?"

His eyes still watching, he replied abstractedly.  "Yes: a few handfuls,
and lost a few--'that's why I'm here.'"

"To get them back on the London market?"

"That's why I am here."

"You have not come in vain?"

"I could tell you better in a month or so from now.  In any case, I don't
stand to lose.  I've come to take things away from England."

"I hope you will take away a good opinion of it."

"If there'd been any doubt of it half an hour ago, it would be all gone
this minute."

"Which is nice of you; and not in your usual vein, I should think.  But,
Mr. Vandewaters, we want you to come to Craigruie, our country place, to
spend a week.  Then you will have a chance to judge us better, or rather
more broadly and effectively."  She was looking at the girl, and at that
moment she caught Sir Duke's eye.  She telegraphed to him to come.

"Thank you, Lady Lawless, I'm glad you have asked me.  But--" He glanced
to where Mr. Pride was being introduced to the young lady on Sir Duke's
arm, and paused.

"We are hoping," she added, interpreting his thought, and speaking a
little dryly, "that your friend, Mr. Stephen Pride"--the name sounded so
ludicrous--"will join us."

"He'll be proud enough, you may be sure.  It's a singular combination,
Pride and myself, isn't it?  But, you see, he has a fortune which, as
yet, he has never been able to handle for himself; and I do it for him.
We are partners, and, though you mightn't think it, he has got more money
now than when he put his dollars at my disposal to help me make a few
millions at a critical time."

Lady Lawless let her fan touch Mr. Vandewaters's arm.  "I am going
to do you a great favour.  You see that young lady coming to us with my
husband?  Well, I am going to introduce you to her.  It is such as she--
such women--who will convince you--"

"Yes?"

"--that you have yet to make your--what shall I call it?--Ah, I have it:
your 'biggest deal,'--and, in truth, your best."

"Is that so?" rejoined Vandewaters musingly.  "Is that so?  I always
thought I'd make my biggest deal in the States.  Who is she?  She is
handsome."

"She is more than handsome, and she is the Honourable Gracia Raglan."

"I don't understand about 'The Honourable.'"

"I will explain that another time."

A moment later Miss Raglan, in a gentle bewilderment, walked down the
ballroom on the arm of the millionaire, half afraid that something gauche
would happen; but by the time she had got to the other end was reassured,
and became interested.

Sir Duke said to his wife in an aside, before he left her with
Mr. Vandewaters's financial partner: "What is your pretty conspiracy,
Molly?"

"Do talk English, Duke, and do not interfere."

A few hours later, on the way home, Sir Duke said: "You asked Mr. Pride
too?"

"Yes; I grieve to say."

"Why grieve?"

"Because his experiences with us seem to make him dizzy.  He will be
terribly in earnest with every woman in the house, if--"

"If you do not keep him in line yourself?"

"Quite so.  And the creature is not even interesting."

"Cast your eye about.  He has millions; you have cousins."

"You do not mean that, Duke?  I would see them in their graves first.  He
says 'My lady' every other sentence, and wants to send me flowers, and a
box for the opera, and to drive me in the Park."

Her husband laughed.  "I'll stake my life he can't ride.  You will have
him about the place like a tame cat."  Then, seeing that his wife was
annoyed: "Never mind, Molly, I will help you all I can.  I want to be
kind to them."

"I know you do.  But what is your 'pretty conspiracy,' Duke?"

"A well-stocked ranche in Colorado."  He did not mean it.  And she knew
it.

"How can you be so mercenary?" she replied.

Then they both laughed, and said that they were like the rest of the
world.




II

Lady Lawless was an admirable hostess, and she never appeared to better
advantage in the character than during the time when Miss Gracia Raglan,
Mr. John Vandewaters, and Mr. Stephen Pride were guests at Craigruie.
The men accepted Mr. Vandewaters at once as a good fellow and a very
sensible man.  He was a heavy-weight for riding; but it was not the
hunting season, and, when they did ride, a big horse carried him very
well.  At grouse-shooting he showed to advantage.  Mr. Pride never rode.
He went shooting only once, and then, as Mr. Vandewaters told him, he got
"rattled."  He was then advised by his friend to remain at home and
cultivate his finer faculties.  At the same time, Mr. Vandewaters
parenthetically remarked to Sir Duke Lawless that Mr. Pride knew the
poets backwards, and was smart at French.  He insisted on bringing out
the good qualities of his comrade; but he gave him much strong advice
privately.  He would have done it just the same at the risk of losing a
fortune, were it his whim--he would have won the fortune back in due
course.

At the present time Mr. Vandewaters was in the heat of some large
commercial movements.  No one would have supposed it, save for the fact
that telegrams and cablegrams were brought to him day and night.  He had
liberally salaried the telegraph-clerk to work after hours, simply to be
at his service.  The contents of these messages never shook his
equanimity.  He was quiet, urbane, dry-mannered, at all times.  Mr.
Pride, however, was naturally excitable.  He said of himself earnestly
that he had a sensitive nature.  He said it to Mrs. Gregory Thorne, whose
reply was: "Dear me, and when things are irritating and painful to you do
you never think of suicide?"  Then she turned away to speak to some one,
as if she had been interrupted, and intended to take up the subject
again; but she never did.  This remark caused Mr. Pride some nervous
moments.  He was not quite sure how she meant it.  But it did not depress
him as it might otherwise have done, for his thoughts were running much
in another channel with a foolish sort of elation.

As Lady Lawless had predicted, he was assiduously attentive to her, and
it needed all her tact and cheerful frankness to keep him in line.  She
managed it very well: Mr. Pride's devotion was not too noticeable to the
other guests.  She tried to turn his attentions to some pretty girls;
but, although there were one or two who might, in some weak moments, have
compromised with his millions, he did no more than saunter with them on
the terrace and oppress them with his lisping egotism.  Every one hinted
that he seemed an estimable, but trying, young man; and, as Sir Duke said
to his wife, the men would not have him at any price.

As for Mr. Vandewaters and Gracia Raglan, Lady Lawless was not very sure
that her delicate sympathy was certain of reward.  The two were naturally
thrown together a good deal; but Miss Raglan was a girl of singular
individuality and high-mindedness, and she was keen enough to see from
the start what Lady Lawless suspected might happen.  She did not resent
this,--she was a woman; but it roused in her a spirit of criticism, and
she threw up a barrier of fine reserve, which puzzled Mr. Vandewaters.
He did not see that Lady Lawless was making a possible courtship easy for
him.  If he had, it would have made no difference: he would have looked
at it as at most things, broadly.  He was not blind to the fact that his
money might be a "factor", but, as he said to himself, his millions were
a part of him--they represented, like whist-counters, so much pluck and
mother-wit.  He liked the general appreciation of them: he knew very well
that people saw him in them and them in him.  Miss Raglan attracted him
from the moment of meeting.  She was the first woman of her class that
he had ever met closely; and the possibility of having as his own so
adorable a comrade was inspiring.  He sat down sometimes as the days went
on--it was generally when he was shaving--and thought upon his intention
regarding Miss Raglan, in relation to his humble past; for he had fully
made up his mind to marry her, if she would have him.  He wondered what
she would think when he told her of his life; and he laughed at the
humour of the situation.  He had been into Debrett, and he knew that she
could trace her family back to the Crusades.

He determined to make a clean breast of it.  One day he was obliged to
remain at the house in expectation of receiving important telegrams, and
the only people who appeared at lunch were Lady Lawless, Mrs. Gregory
Thorne (who was expecting her husband), Miss Raglan; Pride, and himself.
While at luncheon he made up his mind to have a talk with Miss Raglan.
In the library after luncheon the opportunity was given.  It was a warm,
pleasant day, and delightful in the grounds.

After one or two vain efforts to escape, Mrs. Gregory Thorne and Lady
Lawless resigned themselves to the attentions of Mr. Pride; and for once
Lady Lawless did not check Mrs. Thorne's irony.  It was almost a
satisfaction to see Mr. Pride's bewildered looks, and his inability to
know whether or not he should resent (whether it would be proper to
resent) this softly-showered satire.

Mr. Vandewaters and Gracia Raglan talked more freely than they had ever
done before.

"Do you really like England?" she said to him; then, waving her hand
lightly to the beeches and the clean-cropped grass through the window,
"I mean do you like our 'trim parterres,' our devotion to mere living,
pleasure, sport, squiring, and that sort of thing?"

He raised his head, glanced out, drew in a deep breath, thrust his hands
down in the pockets of his coat, and looking at her with respectful good
humour, said: "Like it?  Yes, right down to the ground.  Why shouldn't I!
It's the kind of place I should like to come to in my old days.  You
needn't die in a hurry here.  See?"

"Are you sure you would not be like the old sailors who must live where
they can scent the brine?  You have been used to an active, adventurous,
hurried life.  Do you think you could endure this humdrum of enjoyment?"

It would be hard to tell quite what was running in Gracia Raglan's mind,
and, for the moment, she herself hardly knew; but she had a sudden,
overmastering wish to make the man talk: to explore and, maybe, find
surprising--even trying--things.  She was astonished that she enjoyed his
society so keenly.  Even now, as she spoke, she remembered a day and a
night since his coming, when he was absent in London; also how the party
seemed to have lost its character and life, and how, when Mr. Pride
condescended, for a few moments, to decline from Lady Lawless upon
herself, she was even pleasant to him, making him talk about Mr.
Vandewaters, and relishing the enthusiastic loyalty of the supine young
man.  She, like Lady Lawless, had learned to see behind the firm bold
exterior, not merely a notable energy, force, self-reliance, and
masterfulness, but a native courtesy, simplicity, and refinement which
surprised her.  Of all the men she knew not a half-dozen had an
appreciation of nature or of art.  They affected art, and some of them
went to the Academy or the private views in Bond Street; but they had
little feeling for the business.  They did it in a well-bred way, with
taste, but not with warmth.

Mr. Vandewaters now startled her by quoting suddenly lines from an
English poet unknown to her.  By chance she was turning over the Academy
pictures of the year, and came at last to one called "A Japanese Beauty
of Old Days"--an exquisite thing.

"Is it not fascinating?" she said.  "So piquant and fresh."

He gave a silent laugh, as was his custom when he enjoyed anything, and
then replied:

"I came across a little book of verses one day in the States.  A friend
of mine, the president of a big railway, gave it to me.  He does some
painting himself when he travels in his Pullman in the Rockies.  Well,
it had some verses on just such a picture as that.  Hits it off right,
Miss Raglan."

"Verses?" she remarked, lifting her eyebrows.  She expected something
out of the "poet's corner" of a country newspaper.  "What are they?"

"Well, one's enough to show the style.  This is it:

             "'Was I a Samurai renowned,
               Two-sworded, fierce, immense of bow?
               A histrion angular and profound?
               A priest?  or porter?  Child, although
               I have forgotten clean, I know
               That in the shade of Fujisan,
               What time the cherry-orchards blow,
               I loved you once in old Japan.'"

The verse on the lips of Mr. Vandewaters struck her strangely.  He was
not like any man she had known.  Most self-made Englishmen, with such a
burly exterior and energy, and engaged in such pursuits, could not, to
save themselves from hanging, have impressed her as Mr. Vandewaters did.
There was a big round sympathy in the tone, a timbre in the voice, which
made the words entirely fitting.  Besides, he said them without any kind
of affectation, and with a certain turn of dry humour, as if he were
inwardly laughing at the idea of the poem.

"The verses are charming," she said, musingly; "and the idea put that way
is charming also.  But do you think there would be much amusement in
living half-a-dozen times, or even twice, unless you were quite sure that
you remembered everything?  This gentleman was peculiarly fortunate to
recall Fujisan, and the orange orchards--and the girl."

"I believe you are right.  One life is about enough for most of us.
Memory is all very fine; but you'd want a life set apart for remembering
the others after awhile."

"Why do you not add, 'And that would bore one?'  Most of the men I know
would say so."

"Well, I never used the word that way in my life.  When I don't like a
thing, that ends it--it has got to go."

"You cannot do that with everything."

"Pretty much, if I set my mind to it.  It is astonishing how things'll
come round your way if you keep on thinking and willing them so."

"Have you always got everything you wanted?"  He had been looking off
into the grounds through the open window.  Now he turned slowly upon her.

"So far I have got everything I set my mind to get.  Little things don't
count.  You lose them sometimes because you want to work at something
else; sometimes because, as in cards, you are throwing a few away to save
the whole game."

He looked at her, as she thought, curiously.  In his mind he was
wondering if she knew that he had made up his mind to marry her.  She was
suddenly made aware of the masterfulness of his spirit, which might, she
knew, be applied to herself.

"Let us go into the grounds," he added, all at once.  Soon after, in the
shade of the trees, she broke in upon the thread of their casual
conversation.  "A few moments ago," she murmured, "you said: 'One life is
about enough for most of us.'  Then you added a disparaging remark about
memory.  Well, that doesn't seem like your usual point of view--more like
that of Mr. Pride; but not so plaintive, of course.  Pray do smoke," she
added, as, throwing back his coat, he exposed some cigars in his
waistcoat pocket.  "I am sure you always smoke after lunch."

He took out a cigar, cut off the end, and put it in his mouth.  But he
did not light it.  Then he glanced up at her with a grave quizzical look
as though wondering what would be the effect of his next words, and a
smile played at his lips.

"What I meant was this.  I think we get enough out of our life to last
us for centuries.  It's all worth doing from the start, no matter what
it is: working, fighting, marching and countermarching, plotting and
counterplotting, backing your friends and hating your foes, playing big
games and giving others a chance to, standing with your hand on the
lynch-pin, or pulling your head safe out of the hot-pot.  But I don't
think it is worth doing twice.  The interest wouldn't be fresh.  For men
and women and life, with a little different dress, are the same as they
always were; and there's only the same number of passions working now, as
at the beginning.  I want to live life up to the hilt; because it is all
new as I go on; but never twice."

"Indeed?"  She looked at him earnestly for a moment, and then added: "I
should think you would have seen lost chances; and doing things a second
time might do them better."

"I never missed chances," he replied, simply: "never except twice, and
then--"

"And then?"

"Then it was to give the other fellow a chance."

"Oh!"  There was a kind of dubiousness in her tone.  He noticed it.
"You can hardly understand, Miss Raglan.  Fact is, it was one of those
deals when you can make a million, in a straight enough game; but it
comes out of another man--one, maybe, that you don't know; who is playing
just the same as you are.  I have had a lot of sport; but I've never
crippled any one man, when my engine has been dead on him.  I have played
more against organisations than single men."

"What was the most remarkable chance you ever had to make a million, and
did not?"

He threw back his head, smiling shrewdly.  "When by accident my enemy got
hold of a telegram meant for me.  I was standing behind a frosted glass
door, and through the narrow bevel of clear glass I watched him read it.
I never saw a struggle like that.  At last he got up, snatched an
envelope, put the telegram inside, wrote my name, and called a messenger.
I knew what was in the message.  I let the messenger go, and watched that
man for ten minutes.  It was a splendid sight.  The telegram had given
him a big chance to make a million or two, as he thought.  But he backed
himself against the temptation, and won.  That day I could have put the
ball into his wicket; but I didn't.  That's a funny case of the kind."

"Did he ever know?"

"He didn't.  We are fighting yet.  He is richer than I am now, and at
this moment he's playing a hard game straight at several interests of
mine.  But I reckon I can stop him."

"You must get a great deal out of life," she said.  "Have you always
enjoyed it so?"  She was thinking it would be strange to live in contact
with such events very closely.  It was so like adventure.

"Always--from the start."

"Tell me something of it all, won't you?"  He did not hesitate.

"I was born in a little place in Maine.  My mother was a good woman,
they said--straight as a die all her life.  I can only remember her in a
kind of dream, when she used to gather us children about the big rocking-
chair, and pray for us, and for my father, who was away most of the time,
working in the timber-shanties in the winter, and at odd things in the
summer.  My father wasn't much of a man.  He was kind-hearted, but
shiftless, but pretty handsome for a man from Maine.

"My mother died when I was six years old.  Things got bad.  I was the
youngest.  The oldest was only ten years old.  She was the head of the
house.  She had the pluck of a woman.  We got along somehow, until one
day, when she and I were scrubbing the floor, she caught cold.  She died
in three days."

Here he paused; and, without glancing at Miss Raglan, who sat very still,
but looking at him, he lighted his cigar.

"Then things got worse.  My father took to drinking hard, and we had
mighty little to eat.  I chored around, doing odd things in the village.
I have often wondered that people didn't see the stuff that was in me,
and give me a chance.  They didn't, though.  As for my relatives: one was
a harness-maker.  He sent me out in the dead of winter to post bills for
miles about, and gave me ten cents for it.  Didn't even give me a meal.
Twenty years after he came to me and wanted to borrow a hundred dollars.
I gave him five hundred on condition that he'd not come near me for the
rest of his natural life.

"The next thing I did was to leave home--'run away,' I suppose, is the
way to put it.  I got to Boston, and went for a cabin-boy on a steamer;
travelled down to Panama, and from there to Brazil.  At Brazil I got on
another ship, and came round to San Francisco.  I got into trouble in San
Francisco with the chief mate of the Flying Polly, because I tried to
teach him his business.  One of the first things I learned in life was
not to interfere with people who had a trade and didn't understand it.
In San Francisco I got out of the situation.  I took to selling
newspapers in the streets.

"There wasn't enough money in it.  I went for a cabin-boy again, and
travelled to Australia.  There, once more, I resigned my position,
chiefly because I wouldn't cheerfully let the Mate bang me about the
quarter-deck.  I expect I was a precocious youth, and wasn't exactly the
kind for Sunday-school prizes.  In Melbourne I began to speculate.  I
found a ticket for the theatre where an American actor--our biggest actor
today--was playing, and I tried to sell it outside the door of the
theatre where they were crowding to see him.  The man who bought it was
the actor himself.  He gave me two dollars more than the regular price.
I expect he knew from my voice I was an American.  Is there anything
peculiar about my voice, Miss Raglan?"

She looked at him quickly, smiled, and said in a low tone: "Yes,
something peculiar.  Please go on."

"Well, anyway, he said to me: 'Look here, where did you come from, my
boy?'  I told him the State of Maine.  'What are you doing here?' he
asked.  'Speculating, said I, and seeing things.'  He looked me up
and down.  'How are you getting on?'  'Well.  I've made four dollars
to-day,' I answered.  'Out of this ticket?'  I expect I grinned.  He
suddenly caught me by the arm and whisked me inside the theatre--the
first time I'd ever been in a theatre in my life.  I shall never forget
it.  He took me around to his dressing-room, stuck me in a corner, and
prodded me with his forefinger.  'Look here,' he said, 'I guess I'll hire
you to speculate for me.'  And that's how I came to get twenty-five
dollars a month and my living from a great American actor.  When I got
back to America--with him--I had two hundred and fifty dollars in cash,
and good clothes.  I started a peanut-stand, and sold papers and books,
and became a speculator.  I heard two men talking one day at my stall
about a railway that was going to run through a certain village, and
how they intended to buy up the whole place.  I had four hundred and
fifty dollars then.  I went down to that village, and bought some lots
myself.  I made four thousand dollars.  Then I sold more books, and went
on speculating."

He paused, blew his cigar-smoke slowly from him a moment; then turned
with a quick look to Miss Raglan, and smiled as at some incongruous
thing.  He was wondering what would be the effect of his next words.

"When I was about twenty-two, and had ten thousand dollars, I fell in
love.  She was a bright-faced, smart girl.  Her mother kept a boarding-
house in New York; not an up-town boarding-house.  She waited on table.
I suppose a man can be clever in making money, and knowing how to handle
men, and not know much about women.  I thought she was worth a good deal
more to me than the ten thousand dollars.  She didn't know I had that
money.  A drummer--that's a commercial traveller--came along, who had a
salary of, maybe, a thousand dollars a year.  She jilted me.  She made a
mistake.  That year I made twenty-five thousand dollars.  I saw her a
couple of years ago.  She was keeping a boarding-house too, and her
daughter was waiting on table.  I'm sorry for that girl: it isn't any fun
being poor.  I didn't take much interest in women after that.  I put my
surplus affections into stocks and shares, and bulling and bearing.  .  .
Well, that is the way the thing has gone till now."

"What became of your father and your brother?" she asked in a neutral
tone.

"I don't know anything about my father.  He disappeared after I left, and
never turned up again.  And Jim--poor Jim!--he was shiftless.  Jim was a
tanner.  It was no good setting him up in business.  Steady income was
the cheapest way.  But Jim died of too much time on his hands.  His son
is in Mexico somewhere.  I sent him there, and I hope he'll stay.  If he
doesn't, his salary stops: he is shiftless too.  That is not the kind of
thing, and they are not the kind of people you know best, Miss Raglan."

He looked at her, eyes full-front, bravely, honestly, ready to face the
worst.  Her head was turned away.

He nodded to himself.  It was as he feared.

At that moment a boy came running along the walk towards them, and handed
Mr. Vandewaters a telegram.  He gave the lad a few pence, then, with an
apology, opened the telegram.  Presently he whistled softly, in a quick
surprised way.  Then he stuffed the paper into his waistcoat pocket,
threw away his cigar, and turned to Gracia Raglan, whose face as yet was
only half towards him.  "I hope your news is good," she said very
quietly.

"Pretty bad, in a way," he answered.  "I have lost a couple of millions--
maybe a little more."

She gasped, and turned an astonished face on him.  He saw her startled
look, and laughed.

"Does it not worry you?" she asked.

"I have got more important things on hand just now," he answered.  "Very
much more important," he added, and there was that in his voice which
made her turn away her head again.

"I suppose," he went on, "that the story you have just heard is not the
kind of an autobiography you would care to have told in your drawing-
room?"

Still she did not reply; but her hands were clasped tightly in front of
her.  "No: I suppose not," he went on--"I--I suppose not.  And yet, do
you know, Miss Raglan, I don't feel a bit ashamed of it, after all: which
may be evidence of my lost condition."

Now she turned to him with a wonderful light in her eyes, her sweet,
strong face rich with feeling.  She put out her hand to his arm, and
touched it quickly, nervously.

"Your story has touched me inexpressibly," she said.  "I did not know
that men could be so strong and frank and courageous as you.  I did not
know that men could be so great; that any man could think more of what a
woman thought of--of his life's story--than of"--she paused, and then
gave a trembling little laugh--"of two millions or more."

He got to his feet, and faced her.  "You--you are a woman, by heaven!"
he said.  "You are finer even than I thought you.  I am not worthy to
ask you what I had in my mind to ask you; but there is no man in God's
universe who would prize you as I do.  I may be a poor man before
sundown.  If that happens, though, I shall remember the place where
I had the biggest moment of my life, and the woman who made that
moment possible."

Now she also rose.  There was a brave high look in her face; but her
voice shook a little as she said: "You have never been a coward, why be a
coward now?"

Smiling, he slowly answered: "I wouldn't if I were sure about my
dollars."

She did not reply, but glanced down, not with coquetry, but because she
could not stand the furnace of his eyes.

"You said a moment ago," she ventured, "that you have had one big moment
in your life.  Oughtn't it to bring you good fortune?"

"It will--it will," he said, reaching his hand towards hers.

"No, no," she rejoined archly.  "I am going.  Please do not follow me."
Then, over her shoulder, as she left him: "If you have luck, I shall want
a subscription for my hospital."

"As many thousands as you like," he answered: then, as she sped away: "I
will have her, and the millions too!" adding reminiscently: "Yes, Lady
Lawless, this is my biggest deal."

He tramped to the stables, asked for and got a horse, and rode away to
the railway station.  It was dinner time when he got back.  He came down
to dinner late, apologising to Lady Lawless as he did so.  Glancing
across the table at Mr. Pride, he saw a peculiar excited look in the
young man's face.

"The baby fool!" he said to himself.  "He's getting into mischief.  I'll
startle him.  If he knows that an army of his dollars is playing at fox-
and-geese, he'll not make eyes at Lady Lawless this way--little ass."

Lady Lawless appeared oblivious of the young man's devotional exercises.
She was engaged on a more congenial theme.  In spite of Miss Raglan's
excellent acting, she saw that something had occurred.  Mr. Vandewaters
was much the same as usual, save that his voice had an added ring.  She
was not sure that all was right; but she was determined to know.  Sir
Duke was amused generally.  He led a pretty by-play with Mrs. Gregory
Thorne, of whom he asked the details of the day, much to the confusion,
not admirably hid, of Mr. Pride; lamenting now and then Mr. Vandewaters's
absence from the shooting.

Mr. Vandewaters was cool enough.  He said that he had been playing at
nine-pins with railways, which was good enough sport for him.  Soon after
dinner, he was handed two telegrams.  He glanced slowly up at Pride, as
if debating whether to tell him something.  He evidently decided against
it, and, excusing himself by saying he was off to take a little walk in
Wall Street, went away to the telegraph office, where he stayed three
hours.

The magnitude of the concerns, the admirable stoicism with which he
received alarming news, his dry humour while they waited between
messages--all were so unlike anything the telegraph-clerk had ever seen,
or imagined, that the thing was like a preposterous dream.  Even when, at
last, a telegram came which the clerk vaguely felt was, somehow, like the
fall of an empire, Mr. Vandewaters remained unmoved.  Then he sent one
more telegram, gave the clerk a pound, asked that the reply be sent to
him as soon as it came, and went away, calmly smoking his cigar.

It was a mild night.  When he got to the house he found some of the
guests walking on the veranda.  He joined them; but Miss Raglan was not
with them; nor were Lady Lawless and Mr. Pride.  He wanted to see all
three, and so he went into the house.  There was no one in the drawing-
room.  He reached the library in time to hear Lady Lawless say to Mr.
Pride, who was disappearing through another door: "You had better ask
advice of Mr. Vandewaters."

The door closed.  Mr. Vandewaters stepped forward.

He understood the situation.  "I guess I know how to advise him, Lady
Lawless," he said.

She turned on him quietly, traces of hauteur in her manner.  Her self-
pride had been hurt.  "You have heard?" she asked.

"Only your last words, Lady Lawless.  They were enough.  I feel guilty in
having brought him here."

"You need not.  I was glad to have your friend.  He is young and
effusive.  Let us say no more about it.

"He is tragically repentant; which is a pity.  There is no reason why he
should not stay, and be sensible.  Why should young men lose their heads,
and be so absurdly earnest?"

"Another poser, Lady Lawless."

"In all your life you never misunderstood things so, I am sure."

"Well, there is no virtue in keeping your head steady.  I have spent most
of my life wooing Madame Fortune; I find that makes a man canny."

"She has been very kind to you."

"Perhaps it would surprise you if I told you that at this moment I am not
worth ten thousand dollars."  She looked greatly astonished.  "I do not
understand," she said.  She was thinking of what this might mean to
Gracia Raglan.

"You see I've been playing games at a disadvantage with some ruffians at
New York.  They have combined and got me into a corner.  I have made my
last move.  If it comes out right I shall be richer than ever; if not I
must begin all over again."

Lady Lawless looked at him curiously.  She had never met a man like him
before.  His power seemed almost Napoleonic; his imperturbability was
absolute.  Yet she noticed something new in him.  On one side a kind of
grim forcefulness; on the other, a quiet sort of human sympathy.  The
one, no doubt, had to do with the momentous circumstances amid which he
was placed; the other, with an event which she had, perhaps prematurely,
anticipated.

"I wonder--I wonder at you," she said.  "How do you keep so cool while
such tremendous things are happening?"

"Because I believe in myself, Lady Lawless.  I have had to take my
measure a good many times in this world.  I never was defeated through
my own stupidity.  It has been the sheer luck of the game."

"You do not look like a gamester," she said.

"I guess it's all pretty much a game in life, if you look at it right.
It is only a case of playing fair or foul."

"I never heard any Englishmen talk as you do."

"Very likely not," he responded.  "I don't want to be unpleasant; but
most Englishmen work things out by the rule their fathers taught them,
and not by native ingenuity.  It is native wit that tells in the end,
I'm thinking."

"Perhaps you are right," she rejoined.  "There must be a kind of genius
in it."  Here her voice dropped a little lower.  "I do not believe there
are many Englishmen, even if they had your dollars--"

"The dollars I had this morning," he interposed.

"--who could have so strongly impressed Gracia Raglan."

He looked thoughtfully on the ground; then raised his eyes to Lady
Lawless, and said in a low, ringing tone:

"Yes, I am going to do more than 'impress': I am going to convince her."

"When?" she asked.

"To-morrow morning, I hope," was the reply.  "I believe I shall have my
millions again."

"If you do," she said slowly, "do you not think that you ought to run no
more risks--for her sake?"

"That is just what I mean to do, Lady Lawless.  I'll settle millions
where they ought to be settled, drop Wall Street, and--go into training."

"Into training?" she asked.

"Yes, for a house on the Hudson, a villa at Cannes, a residence in
Grosvenor Square, and a place in Devonshire--or somewhere else.  Then,"
he added, with a twinkle in his eye, "I shall need a good deal of time to
cultivate accent."

"Don't!" she said.  "You are much more charming as you are."

They passed into the drawing-room.

"Are these things to be told?" she asked, with a little suggestion in
her voice.

"I can trust your discretion."

"Even in such circumstances?" she asked.  She paused, with a motion of
her fan back towards the room they had left.

"You have taught him a lesson, Lady Lawless.  It is rough on him; but he
needs it."

"I hope he will do nothing rash," she said.

"Perhaps he'll write some poetry, and refuse to consider his natural
appetite."

"Will you go and see him now?" she asked.  "Immediately.  Good night,
Lady Lawless."  His big hand swallowed hers in a firm, friendly clasp,
and he shook it once or twice before he parted from her.  He met Sir Duke
Lawless in the doorway.  They greeted cheerfully, and then Lawless came
up to his wife.

"Well, my dear," he said, with an amused look in his face, "well, what
news?"

She lifted her eyebrows at him.

"Something has happened, Molly, I can see it in your face."

She was very brief.  "Gracia Raglan has been conquered; the young man
from Boston has been foolish; and Mr. Vandewaters has lost millions."

"Eh?  That's awkward," said Sir Duke.

"Which?" asked his wife.

Vandewaters found Mr. Pride in his bedroom, a waif of melancholy.  He
drew a chair up, lighted a cigar, eyed the young man from head to foot,
and then said: "Pride, have you got any backbone?  If you have, brace up.
You are ruined.  That's about as mild as I can put it."

"You know all?"--said the young man helplessly, his hands clasped between
his knees in aesthetic agony.

"Yes; I know more than you do, as you will find out.  You're a nice sort
of man, to come into a man's house, in a strange land, and make love to
his wife.  Now, what do you think of yourself?  You're a nice
representative of the American, aren't you?"

"I--I didn't mean any harm--I--couldn't help it," replied the stricken
boy.

"O, for God's sake, drop that bib-and-tucker twaddle!  Couldn't help it!
Every scoundrel, too weak to face the consequences of his sin, says he
couldn't help it.  So help me, Joseph, I'd like to thrash you.  Couldn't
help it!  Now, sit up in your chair, take this cigar, drink this glass of
whiskey I'm pouring for you, and make up your mind that you're going to
be a man and not a nincompoop--sit still!  Don't fly up.  I mean what I
say.  I've got business to talk to you.  And make up your mind that, for
once, you have got to take life seriously."

"What right have you to speak to me like this?" demanded the young man
with an attempt at dignity.  Vandewaters laughed loudly.

"Right?  Great Scott!  The right of a man who thinks a damned sight more
of your reputation than you do yourself, and of your fortune than you
would ever have wits to do.  I am the best friend you've got, and not the
less your friend because I feel like breaking your ribs.  Now, enough of
that.  This is what I have to say, Pride: to-night you and I are beggars.
You understand?  Beggars.  Out in the cold world, out in the street.
Now, what do you think of that?"

The shock to Mr. Pride was great.  Mr. Vandewaters had exaggerated the
disaster; but he had done it with a purpose.  The youth gasped "My God!"
and dropped his glass.  Vandewaters picked it up, and regarded him a
moment in silence.  Then he began to explain their financial position.
He did not explain the one bold stroke which he was playing to redeem
their fortunes: if possible.  When he had finished the story, he said,
"I guess that's a bit more serious than the little affair in the library
half an hour ago?"

He rose to his feet.  "Look here, Pride, be a man.  You've never tried it
yet.  Let me teach you how to face the world without a dollar; how to
make a fortune.  Then, when you've made it, you'll get what you've never
had yet--the pleasure of spending money dug out of your own wits."

He carried conviction into a mind not yet all destroyed by effeminacy and
indulgence of the emotions.  Something of the iron of his own brain got
into the brain of the young man, who came to his feet trembling a little,
and said: "I don't mind it so much, if you only stick to me,
Vandewaters."

A smile flickered about the corners of Vandewaters's mouth.

"Take a little more whiskey," he said; "then get into bed, and go to
sleep.  No nonsense, remember; go to sleep.  To-morrow morning we will
talk.  And see here, my boy,"--he caught him by both arms and fastened
his eyes,--"you have had a lesson: learn it backwards.  Good night."

Next morning Mr. Vandewaters was early in the grounds.  He chatted with
the gardener, and discussed the merits of the horses with the groom,
apparently at peace with the world.  Yet he was watching vigilantly the
carriage-drive from the public-road.  Just before breakfast-time a
telegraph messenger appeared.  Vandewaters was standing with Sir Duke
Lawless when the message was handed to him.  He read it, put it into his
pocket, and went on talking.  Presently he said: "My agent is coming from
town this morning, Sir Duke.  I may have to leave to-night."  Then he
turned, and went to his room.

Lady Lawless had heard his last words.

"What about your ranche in Colorado, Duke?"

"About as sure, I fancy, as your millionaire for Gracia."

Miss Raglan did not appear at breakfast with the rest.  Neither did Mr.
Pride, who slept late that morning.  About ten o'clock Mr. Vandewaters's
agent arrived.  About twelve o'clock Mr. Vandewaters saw Miss Raglan
sitting alone in the library.  He was evidently looking for her.  He came
up to her quietly, and put a piece of paper in her lap.

"What is this?" she asked, a little startled.

"A thousand for your hospital," was the meaning reply.

She flushed, and came to her feet.

"I have won," he said.

And then he reached out and took both her hands.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

But I don't think it is worth doing twice
He wishes to be rude to some one, and is disappointed
I--couldn't help it
Interfere with people who had a trade and didn't understand it
Lose their heads, and be so absurdly earnest
Scoundrel, too weak to face the consequences of his sin






THE TRESPASSER

By Gilbert Parker


CONTENTS:
Volume 1
I.        ONE IN SEARCH OF A KINGDOM
II.       IN WHICH HE CLAIMS HIS OWN
III.      HE TELLS THE STORY OF HIS LIFE
IV.       AN HOUR WITH HIS FATHER'S PAST
V.        WHEREIN HE FINDS HIS ENEMY

Volume 2.
VI.       WHICH TELLS OF STRANGE ENCOUNTERS
VII.      WHEREIN THE SEAL OF HIS HERITAGE IS SET
VIII.     HE ANSWERS AN AWKWARD QUESTION
IX.       HE FINDS NEW SPONSORS
X.        HE COMES TO "THE WAKING OF THE FIRE"
XI.       HE MAKES A GALLANT CONQUEST

Volume 3.
XII.      HE STANDS BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
XIII.     HE JOURNEYS AFAR
XIV.      IN WHICH THE PAST IS REPEATED
XV.       WHEREIN IS SEEN THE OLD ADAM AND THE GARDEN
XVI.      WHEREIN LOVE SNOWS NO LAW SAVE THE MAN'S
XVII.     THE MAN AND THE WOMAN FACE THE INTOLERABLE
XVIII.    "RETURN, O SHULAMITE!"




INTRODUCTION

While I was studying the life of French Canada in the winter of 1892,
in the city of Quebec or in secluded parishes, there was forwarded to me
from my London home a letter from Mr. Arrowsmith, the publisher, asking
me to write a novel of fifty thousand or sixty thousand words for what
was called his Annual.  In this Annual had appeared Hugh Conway's 'Called
Back' and Anthony Hope's 'Prisoner of Zenda', among other celebrated
works of fiction.  I cabled my acceptance of the excellent offer made me,
and the summer of 1893 found me at Audierne, in Brittany, with some
artist friends--more than one of whom has since come to eminence--living
what was really an out-door literary life; for the greater part of 'The
Trespasser' was written in a high-walled garden on a gentle hill, and the
remainder in a little tower-like structure of the villa where I lodged,
which was all windows.  The latter I only used when it rained, and the
garden was my workshop.  There were peaches and figs on the walls,
pleasant shrubs surrounded me, and the place was ideally quiet and
serene.  Coffee or tea and toast was served me at 6.30 o'clock A.M., my
pad was on my knee at 8, and then there was practically uninterrupted
work till 12, when 'dejeuner a la fourchette', with its fresh sardines,
its omelettes, and its roast chicken, was welcome.  The afternoon was
spent on the sea-shore, which is very beautiful at Audierne, and there I
watched my friends painting sea-scapes.  In the late afternoon came
letter-writing and reading, and after a little and simple dinner at 6.30
came bed at 9.45 or thereabouts.  In such conditions for many weeks I
worked on The Trespasser; and I think the book has an outdoor spirit
which such a life would inspire.

It was perhaps natural that, having lived in Canada and Australia,
and having travelled greatly in all the outer portions of the Empire,
I should be interested in and impelled to write regarding the impingement
of the outer life of our far dominions, through individual character,
upon the complicated, traditional, orderly life of England.  That feeling
found expression in The Translation of a Savage, and I think that in
neither case the issue of the plot or the plot--if such it may be called
--nor the main incident, was exaggerated.  Whether the treatment was free
from exaggeration, it is not my province to say.  I only know what I
attempted to do.  The sense produced by the contact of the outer life
with a refined, and perhaps overrefined, and sensitive, not to say
meticulous, civilisation, is always more sensational than the touch of
the representative of "the thousand years" with the wide, loosely
organised free life of what is still somewhat hesitatingly called the
Colonies, though the same remark could be applied to all new lands, such
as the United States.  The representative of the older life makes no
signs, or makes little collision at any rate, when he touches the new
social organisms of the outer circle.  He is not emphatic; he is typical,
but not individual; he seeks seclusion in the mass.  It is not so with
the more dynamic personality of the over-sea citizen.  For a time at
least he remains in the old civilisation an entity, an isolated,
unabsorbed fact which has capacities for explosion.  All this was in my
mind when The Trespasser was written, and its converse was 'The Pomp of
the Lavilettes', which showed the invasion of the life of the outer land
by the representative of the old civilisation.

I do not know whether I had the thought that the treatment of such themes
was interesting or not.  The idea of The Trespasser was there in my mind,
and I had to use it.  At the beginning of one's career, if one were to
calculate too carefully, impulse, momentum, daring, original conception
would be lost.  To be too audacious, even to exaggerate, is no crime in
youth nor in the young artist.  As a farmer once said to me regarding a
frisky mount, it is better to smash through the top bar than to have
spring-halt.

The Trespasser took its place, and, as I think, its natural place, in the
development of my literary life.  I did not stop to think whether it was
a happy theme or not, or whether it had popular elements.  These things
did not concern me.  When it was written I should not have known what was
a popular theme.  It was written under circumstances conducive to its
artistic welfare; if it has not as many friends as 'The Right of Way' or
'The Seats of the Mighty' or 'The Weavers' or 'The Judgment House', that
is not the fault of the public or of the critics.




TO DOUGLAS ROBINSON, Esq.,

AND

FRANK A.  HILTON, Esq.

My dear Douglas and Frank:

I feel sure that this dedication will give you as much pleasure as it
does me.  It will at least be evidence that I do not forget good days in
your company here and there in the world.  I take pleasure in linking
your names; for you, who have never met, meet thus in the porch of a
little house that I have built.

You, my dear Douglas, will find herein scenes, times, and things familiar
to you; and you, my dear Frank, reflections of hours when we camped by an
idle shore, or drew about the fire of winter nights, and told tales worth
more than this, for they were of the future, and it is of the past.

                    Always sincerely yours,
                              GILBERT PARKER.




THE TRESPASSER

CHAPTER I

ONE IN SEARCH OF A KINGDOM

Why Gaston Belward left the wholesome North to journey afar, Jacques
Brillon asked often in the brawling streets of New York, and oftener in
the fog of London as they made ready to ride to Ridley Court.  There was
a railway station two miles from the Court, but Belward had had enough of
railways.  He had brought his own horse Saracen, and Jacques's broncho
also, at foolish expense, across the sea, and at a hotel near Euston
Station master and man mounted and set forth, having seen their worldly
goods bestowed by staring porters, to go on by rail.

In murky London they attracted little notice; but when their hired guide
left them at the outskirts, and they got away upon the highway towards
the Court, cottagers stood gaping.  For, outside the town there was no
fog, and the fresh autumn air drew the people abroad.

"What is it makes 'em stare, Jacques?!" asked Belward, with a humorous
sidelong glance.

Jacques looked seriously at the bright pommel of his master's saddle and
the shining stirrups and spurs, dug a heel into the tender skin of his
broncho, and replied:

"Too much silver all at once."

He tossed his curling black hair, showing up the gold rings in his ears,
and flicked the red-and-gold tassels of his boots.

"You think that's it, eh?!" rejoined Belward, as he tossed a shilling to
a beggar.

"Maybe, too, your great Saracen to this tot of a broncho, and the grand
homme to little Jacques Brillon."  Jacques was tired and testy.

The other laid his whip softly on the half-breed's shoulder.

"See, my peacock: none of that.  You're a spanking good servant, but
you're in a country where it's knuckle down man to master; and what they
do here you've got to do, or quit--go back to your pea-soup and caribou.
That's as true as God's in heaven, little Brillon.  We're not on the
buffalo trail now.  You understand?"

Jacques nodded.

"Hadn't you better say it?"

The warning voice drew up the half-breed's face swiftly, and he replied:

"I am to do what you please."

"Exactly.  You've been with me six years--ever since I turned Bear Eye's
moccasins to the sun; and for that you swore you'd never leave me.  Did
it on a string of holy beads, didn't you, Frenchman?"

"I do it again."

He drew out a rosary, and disregarding Belward's outstretched hand, said:

"By the Mother of God, I will never leave you!"  There was a kind of
wondering triumph in Belward's eyes, though he had at first shrunk from
Jacques's action, and a puzzling smile came.

"Wherever I go, or whatever I do?"

"Whatever you do, or wherever you go."

He put the rosary to his lips, and made the sign of the cross.

His master looked at him curiously, intently.  Here was a vain, naturally
indolent half-breed, whose life had made for selfishness and
independence, giving his neck willingly to a man's heel, serving
with blind reverence, under a voluntary vow.

"Well, it's like this, Jacques," Belward said presently; "I want you, and
I'm not going to say that you'll have a better time than you did in the
North, or on the Slope; but if you'd rather be with me than not, you'll
find that I'll interest you.  There's a bond between us, anyway.  You're
half French, and I'm one-fourth French, and more.  You're half Indian,
and I'm one-fourth Indian--no more.  That's enough.  So far, I haven't
much advantage.  But I'm one-half English--King's English, for there's
been an offshoot of royalty in our family somewhere, and there's the
royal difference.  That's where I get my brains--and manners."

"Where did you get the other?!" asked Jacques, shyly, almost furtively.

"Money?"

"Not money--the other."

Belward spurred, and his horse sprang away viciously.  A laugh came back
on Jacques, who followed as hard as he could, and it gave him a feeling
of awe.  They were apart for a long time, then came together again, and
rode for miles without a word.  At last Belward, glancing at a sign-post
before an inn door, exclaimed at the legend--"The Whisk o' Barley,"--and
drew rein.  He regarded the place curiously for a minute.  The landlord
came out.  Belward had some beer brought.

A half-dozen rustics stood gaping, not far away.  He touched his horse
with a heel.  Saracen sprang towards them, and they fell back alarmed.
Belward now drank his beer quietly, and asked question after question of
the landlord, sometimes waiting for an answer, sometimes not--a kind of
cross-examination.  Presently he dismounted.

As he stood questioning, chiefly about Ridley Court and its people,
a coach showed on the hill, and came dashing down and past.  He lifted
his eyes idly, though never before had he seen such a coach as swings
away from Northumberland Avenue of a morning.  He was not idle, however;
but he had not come to England to show surprise at anything.  As the
coach passed his face lifted above the arm on the neck of the horse,
keen, dark, strange.  A man on the box-seat, attracted at first by the
uncommon horses and their trappings, caught Belward's eyes.  Not he
alone, but Belward started then.  Some vague intelligence moved the minds
of both, and their attention was fixed till the coach rounded a corner
and was gone.

The landlord was at Belward's elbow.

"The gentleman on the box-seat be from Ridley Court.  That's Maister Ian
Belward, sir."

Gaston Belward's eyes half closed, and a sombre look came, giving his
face a handsome malice.  He wound his fingers in his horse's mane, and
put a foot in the stirrup.

"Who is 'Maister Ian'?"

"Maister Ian be Sir William's eldest, sir.  On'y one that's left, sir.
On'y three to start wi': and one be killed i' battle, and one had trouble
wi' his faither and Maister Ian; and he went away and never was heard on
again, sir.  That's the end on him."

"Oh, that's the end on him, eh, landlord?  And how long ago was that?"

"Becky, lass," called the landlord within the door, "wheniver was it
Maister Robert turned his back on the Court--iver so while ago?  Eh, a
fine lad that Maister Robert as iver I see!"

Fat laborious Becky hobbled out, holding an apple and a knife.  She
blinked at her husband, and then at the strangers.

"What be askin' o' the Court?!" she said.  Her husband repeated the
question.

She gathered her apron to her eyes with an unctuous sob:

"Doan't a' know when Maister Robert went!  He comes, i' the house 'ere
and says, 'Becky, gie us a taste o' the red-top-and where's Jock?' He was
always thinkin' a deal o' my son Jock.  'Jock be gone,' I says, 'and I
knows nowt o' his comin' back'--meanin', I was, that day.  'Good for
Jock!' says he, 'and I'm goin' too, Becky, and I knows nowt o' my comin'
back.'  'Where be goin', Maister Robert?' I says.  'To hell, Becky,' says
he, and he laughs.  'From hell to hell.  I'm sick to my teeth o' one,
I'll try t'other'--a way like that speaks he."

Belward was impatient, and to hurry the story he made as if to start on.
Becky, seeing, hastened.  "Dear a' dear!  The red-top were afore him, and
I tryin' to make what become to him.  He throws arm 'round me, smacks me
on the cheek, and says he: 'Tell Jock to keep the mare, Becky.'  Then he
flings away, and never more comes back to the Court.  And that day one
year my Jock smacks me on the cheek, and gets on the mare; and when I
ask: 'Where be goin'?' he says: 'For a hunt i' hell wi' Maister Robert,
mother.'  And from that day come back he never did, nor any word.  There
was trouble wi' the lad-wi' him and Maister Robert at the Court; but I
never knowed nowt o' the truth.  And it's seven-and-twenty years since
Maister Robert went."

Gaston leaned over his horse's neck, and thrust a piece of silver into
the woman's hands.

"Take that, Becky Lawson, and mop your eyes no more."

She gaped.

"How dost know my name is Becky Lawson?  I havena been ca'd so these
three-and-twenty years--not since a' married good man here, and put
Jock's faither in 's grave yander."

"The devil told me," he answered, with a strange laugh, and, spurring,
they were quickly out of sight.  They rode for a couple of miles without
speaking.  Jacques knew his master, and did not break the silence.
Presently they came over a hill, and down upon a little bridge.  Belward
drew rein, and looked up the valley.  About two miles beyond the roofs
and turrets of the Court showed above the trees.  A whimsical smile came
to his lips.

"Brillon," he said, "I'm in sight of home."

The half-breed cocked his head.  It was the first time that Belward had
called him "Brillon"--he had ever been "Jacques."  This was to be a part
of the new life.  They were not now hunting elk, riding to "wipe out" a
camp of Indians or navvies, dining the owner of a rancho or a deputation
from a prairie constituency in search of a member, nor yet with a senator
at Washington, who served tea with canvas-back duck and tooth-picks with
dessert.  Once before had Jacques seen this new manner--when Belward
visited Parliament House at Ottawa, and was presented to some notable
English people, visitors to Canada.  It had come to these notable folk
that Mr. Gaston Belward had relations at Ridley Court, and that of itself
was enough to command courtesy.  But presently, they who would be
gracious for the family's sake, were gracious for the man's.  He had that
which compelled interest--a suggestive, personal, distinguished air.
Jacques knew his master better than any one else knew him; and yet he
knew little, for Belward was of those who seem to give much confidence,
and yet give little--never more than he wished.

"Yes, monsieur, in sight of home," Jacques replied, with a dry cadence.

"Say 'sir,' not 'monsieur,' Brillon; and from the time we enter the Court
yonder, look every day and every hour as you did when the judge asked you
who killed Tom Daly."

Jacques winced, but nodded his head.  Belward continued:

"What you hear me tell is what you can speak of; otherwise you are blind
and dumb.  You understand?"  Jacques's face was sombre, but he said
quickly: "Yes--sir."

He straightened himself on his horse, as if to put himself into
discipline at once--as lead to the back of a racer.

Belward read the look.  He drew his horse close up.  Then he ran an arm
over the other's shoulder.

"See here, Jacques.  This is a game that's got to be played up to the
hilt.  A cat has nine lives, and most men have two.  We have.  Now
listen.  You never knew me mess things, did you?  Well, I play for keeps
in this; no monkeying.  I've had the life of Ur of the Chaldees; now for
Babylon.  I've lodged with the barbarian; here are the roofs of ivory.
I've had my day with my mother's people; voila!  for my father's.  You
heard what Becky Lawson said.  My father was sick of it at twenty-five,
and got out.  We'll see what my father's son will do.  .  .  .  I'm going
to say my say to you, and have done with it.  As like as not there isn't
another man that I'd have brought with me.  You're all right.  But I'm
not going to rub noses.  I stick when I do stick, but I know what's got
to be done here; and I've told you.  You'll not have the fun out of it
that I will, but you won't have the worry.  Now, we start fresh.  I'm to
be obeyed; I'm Napoleon.  I've got a devil, yet it needn't hurt you, and
it won't.  But if I make enemies here--and I'm sure to--let them look
out.  Give me your hand, Jacques; and don't you forget that there are two
Gaston Belwards, and the one you have hunted and lived with is the one
you want to remember when you get raw with the new one.  For you'll hear
no more slang like this from me, and you'll have to get used to lots of
things."

Without waiting reply, Belward urged on his horse, and at last paused on
the top of a hill, and waited for Jacques.  It was now dusk, and the
landscape showed soft, sleepy, and warm.

"It's all of a piece," Belward said to himself, glancing from the trim
hedges, the small, perfectly-tilled fields and the smooth roads, to
Ridley Court itself, where many lights were burning and gates opening and
shutting.  There was some affair on at the Court, and he smiled to think
of his own appearance among the guests.

"It's a pity I haven't clothes with me, Brillon; they have a show going
there."

He had dropped again into the new form of master and man.  His voice was
cadenced, gentlemanly.  Jacques pointed to his own saddle-bag.

"No, no, they are not the things needed.  I want the evening-dress which
cost that cool hundred dollars in New York."

Still Jacques was silent.  He did not know whether, in his new position,
he was expected to suggest.  Belward understood, and it pleased him.

"If we had lost the track of a buck moose, or were nosing a cache of
furs, you'd find a way, Brillon."

"Voila," said Jacques; "then, why not wear the buckskin vest, the red-
silk sash, and the boots like these?"--tapping his own leathers.  "You
look a grand seigneur so."

"But I am here to look an English gentleman, not a grand seigneur, nor a
company's trader on a break.  Never mind, the thing will wait till we
stand in my ancestral halls," he added, with a dry laugh.

They neared the Court.  The village church was close by the Court-wall.
It drew Belward's attention.  One by one lights were springing up in it.
It was a Friday evening, and the choir were come to practise.  They saw
buxom village girls stroll in, followed by the organist, one or two young
men and a handful of boys.  Presently the horsemen were seen, and a
staring group gathered at the church door.  An idea came to Belward.

"Kings used to make pilgrimages before they took their crowns, why
shouldn't I?!" he said half-jestingly.  Most men placed similarly would
have been so engaged with the main event that they had never thought of
this other.  But Belward was not excited.  He was moving deliberately,
prepared for every situation.  He had a great game in hand, and he had no
fear of his ability to play it.  He suddenly stopped his horse, and threw
the bridle to Jacques, saying:

"I'll be back directly, Brillon."

He entered the churchyard, and passed to the door.  As he came the group
under the crumbling arch fell back, and at the call of the organist went
to the chancel.  Belward came slowly up the aisle, and paused about the
middle.  Something in the scene gave him a new sensation.  The church was
old, dilapidated; but the timbered roof, the Norman and Early English
arches incongruously side by side, with patches of ancient distemper and
paintings, and, more than all, the marble figures on the tombs, with
hands folded so foolishly,--yet impressively too, brought him up with a
quick throb of the heart.  It was his first real contact with England;
for he had not seen London, save at Euston Station and in the north-west
district.  But here he was in touch with his heritage.  He rested his
hand upon a tomb beside him, and looked around slowly.

The choir began the psalm for the following Sunday.  At first he did not
listen; but presently the organist was heard alone, and then the choir
afterwards sang:

    "Woe is me, that I am constrained to dwell with Mesech:
     And to have my habitation among the tents of Kedar."

Simple, dusty, ancient church, thick with effigies and tombs; with
inscriptions upon pillars to virgins departed this life; and tablets
telling of gentlemen gone from great parochial virtues: it wakened in
Belward's brain a fresh conception of the life he was about to live--he
did not doubt that he would live it.  He would not think of himself as
inacceptable to old Sir William Belward.  He glanced to the tomb under
his hand.  There was enough daylight yet to see the inscription on the
marble.  Besides, a single candle was burning just over his head.  He
stooped and read:

                         SACRED TO THE MEMORY
                                   OF
                   SIR GASTON ROBERT BELWARD, BART.,
            OF RIDLEY COURT, IN THIS PARISH OF GASTONBURY,
                                 WHO,
                  AT THE AGE OF ONE AND FIFTY YEARS,
          AFTER A LIFE OF DISTINGUISHED SERVICE FOR HIS KING
                             AND COUNTRY,
          AND GRAVE AND CONSTANT CARE OF THOSE EXALTED WORKS
                 WHICH BECAME A GENTLEMAN OF ENGLAND;
            MOST NOTABLE FOR HIS LOVE OF ARTS AND LETTERS;
              SENSIBLE IN ALL GRACES AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS;
             GIFTED WITH SINGULAR VIRTUES AND INTELLECTS;
                                  AND
                DELIGHTING AS MUCH IN THE JOYS OF PEACE
                    AS IN THE HEAVY DUTIES OF WAR:
             WAS SLAIN BY THE SIDE OF HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS,
              THE BELOVED AND ILLUSTRIOUS PRINCE RUPERT,
                       AT THE BATTLE OF NASEBY,
                    IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD MDCXLV.

                 "A Sojourner as all my Fathers were."

"'Gaston Robert Belward'!"

He read the name over and over, his fingers tracing the letters.

His first glance at the recumbent figure had been hasty.  Now, however,
he leaned over and examined it.  It lay, hands folded, in the dress of
Prince Rupert's cavaliers, a sword at side, and great spurs laid beside
the heels.

"'Gaston Robert Belward'!"

As this other Gaston Robert Belward looked at the image of his dead
ancestor, a wild thought came: Had he himself not fought with Prince
Rupert?  Was he not looking at himself in stone?  Was he not here to show
England how a knight of Charles's time would look upon the life of the
Victorian age?  Would not this still cold Gaston be as strange at Ridley
Court as himself fresh from tightening a cinch on the belly of a broncho?
Would he not ride from where he had been sojourning as much a stranger in
his England as himself?

For a moment the idea possessed him.  He was Sir Gaston Robert Belward,
Baronet.  He remembered now how, at Prince Rupert's side, he had sped on
after Ireton's horse, cutting down Roundheads as he passed, on and on,
mad with conquest, yet wondering that Rupert kept so long in pursuit
while Charles was in danger with Cromwell: how, as the word came to wheel
back, a shot tore away the pommel of his saddle; then another, and
another, and with a sharp twinge in his neck he fell from his horse.  He
remembered how he raised himself on his arm and shouted "God save the
King!"  How he loosed his scarf and stanched the blood at his neck, then
fell back into a whirring silence, from which he was roused by feeling
himself in strong arms, and hearing a voice say: "Courage, Gaston."  Then
came the distant, very distant, thud of hoofs, and he fell asleep; and
memory was done.

He stood for a moment oblivious to everything: the evening bird
fluttering among the rafters, the song of the nightingale without, the
sighing wind in the tower entry, the rustics in the doorway, the group in
the choir.  Presently he became conscious of the words sung:

                   "A thousand ages in Thy sight
                    Are like an evening gone;
                    Short as the watch that ends the night
                    Before the rising sun.

                   "Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
                    Bears all its sons away;
                    They fly, forgotten, as a dream
                    Dies at the opening day."

He was himself again in an instant.  He had been in a kind of dream.  It
seemed a long time since he had entered the church--in reality but a few
moments.  He caught his moustache in his fingers, and turned on his heel
with a musing smile.  His spurs clinked as he went down the aisle; and,
involuntarily, he tapped a boot-leg with his riding-whip.  The singing
ceased.  His spurs made the only sound.  The rustics at the door fell
back before him.  He had to go up three steps to reach the threshold.  As
he stood on the top one he paused and turned round.

So, this was home: this church more so even than the Court hard by.
Here his ancestors--for how long he did not know, probably since the time
of Edward III--idled time away in the dust; here Gaston Belward had been
sleeping in effigy since Naseby Field.  A romantic light came into his
face.  Again, why not?  Even in the Hudson's Bay country and in the Rocky
Mountains, he had been called, "Tivi, The Man of the Other."  He had been
counted the greatest of Medicine Men--one of the Race: the people of the
Pole, who lived in a pleasant land, gifted as none others of the race of
men.  Not an hour before Jacques had asked him where he got "the other."
No man can live in the North for any time without getting the strain
of its mystery and romance in him.  Gaston waved his hand to the tomb,
and said half-believingly:

"Gaston Robert Belward, come again to your kingdom."

He turned to go out, and faced the rector of the parish,--a bent, benign-
looking man,--who gazed at him astonished.  He had heard the strange
speech.  His grave eyes rested on the stalwart stranger with courteous
inquiry.  Gaston knew who it was.  Over his left brow there was a scar.
He had heard of that scar before.  When the venerable Archdeacon Varcoe
was tutor to Ian and Robert Belward, Ian, in a fit of anger, had thrown a
stick at his brother.  It had struck the clergyman, leaving a scar.

Gaston now raised his hat.  As he passed, the rector looked after him,
puzzled; the words he had heard addressed to the effigy returning.  His
eyes followed the young man to the gate, and presently, with a quick
lifting of the shoulders, he said:

"Robert Belward!"  Then added: "Impossible!  But he is a Belward."

He saw Gaston mount, then entered and went slowly up the aisle.  He
paused beside the tomb of that other Belward.  His wrinkled hand rested
on it.

"That is it," he said at last.  "He is like the picture of this Sir
Gaston.  Strange."

He sighed, and unconsciously touched the scar on his brow.  His dealings
with the Belwards had not been all joy.  Begun with youthful pride and
affectionate interest, they had gone on into vexation, sorrow, failure,
and shame.  While Gaston was riding into his kingdom, Lionel Henry Varcoe
was thinking how poor his life had been where he had meant it to be
useful.  As he stood musing and listening to the music of the choir,
a girl came softly up the aisle, and touched him on the arm.

"Grandfather, dear," she said, "aren't you going to the Court?  You have
a standing invitation for this night in the week.  You have not been
there for so long."

He fondled the hand on his arm.

"My dearest, they have not asked me for a long time."

"But why not to-night?  I have laid out everything nicely for you--your
new gaiters, and your D. C. L.  coat with the pretty buttons and cord."

"How can I leave you, my dear?  And they do not ask you!"

The voice tried for playfulness, but the eyes had a disturbed look.

"Me?  Oh! they never ask me to dinner-you know that.  Tea and formal
visits are enough for Lady Belward, and almost too much for me.  There is
yet time to dress.  Do say you will go.  I want you to be friendly with
them."

The old man shook his head.

"I do not care to leave you, my dearest."

"Foolish old fatherkins!  Who would carry me off?--'Nobody, no, not I,
nobody cares for me.'"  Suddenly a new look shot up in her face.

"Did you see that singular handsome man who came from the church--like
some one out of an old painting?  Not that his dress was so strange; but
there was something in his face--something that you would expect to find
in--in a Garibaldi.  Silly, am I not?  Did you see him?"

He looked at her gravely.

"My dear," he said at last, "I think I will go after all, though I shall
be a little late."

"A sensible grandfather.  Come quickly, dear."  He paused again.

"But I fear I sent a note to say I could not dine."

"No, you did not.  It has been lying on your table for two days."

"Dear me--dear me!  I am getting very old."

They passed out of the church.  Presently, as they hurried to the rectory
near by, the girl said:

"But you haven't answered.  Did you see the stranger?  Do you know who he
is?"

The rector turned, and pointed to the gate of Ridley Court.  Gaston and
Brillon were just entering.  "Alice," he said, in a vague, half-troubled
way, "the man is a Belward, I think."

"Why, of course!" the girl replied with a flash of excitement.  "But
he's so dark, and foreign-looking!  What Belward is he?"

"I do not know yet, my dear."

"I shall be up when you come back.  But mind, don't leave just after
dinner.  Stay and talk; you must tell me everything that's said and done
--and about the stranger."




CHAPTER II

IN WHICH HE CLAIMS HIS OWN

Meanwhile, without a word, Gaston had mounted, ridden to the castle,
and passed through the open gates into the court-yard.  Inside he paused.
In the main building many lights were burning.  There came a rattle of
wheels behind him, and he shifted to let a carriage pass.  Through the
window of the brougham he could see the shimmer of satin, lace, and soft
white fur, and he had an instant's glance of a pretty face.

The carriage drew up to the steps, and presently three ladies and a
brusque gentleman passed into the hall-way, admitted by powdered footmen.
The incident had a manner, an air, which struck Gaston, he knew not why.
Perhaps it was the easy finesse of ceremonial.  He looked at Brillon.  He
had seen him sit arms folded like that, looking from the top of a bluff
down on an Indian village or a herd of buffaloes.  There was wonder, but
no shyness or agitation, on his face; rather the naive, naked look of a
child.  Belward laughed.

"Come, Brillon; we are at home."

He rode up to the steps, Jacques following.  A foot man appeared and
stared.  Gaston looked down on him neutrally, and dismounted.  Jacques
did the same.  The footman still stared.  Another appeared behind.
Gaston eyed the puzzled servant calmly.

"Why don't you call a groom?!" he presently said.  There was a cold gleam
in his eye.

The footman shrank.

"Yessir, yessir," he said confusedly, and signalled.  The other footman
came down, and made as if to take the bridle.  Gaston waved him back.
None too soon, for the horse lunged at him.

"A rub down, a pint of beer, and water and feed in an hour, and I'll come
to see him myself late to-night."  Jacques had loosened the saddle-bags
and taken them off.  Gaston spoke to the horse, patted his neck, and gave
him to the groom.  Then he went up the steps, followed by Jacques.  He
turned at the door to see the groom leading both horses off, and eyeing
Saracen suspiciously.  He laughed noiselessly.

"Saracen 'll teach him things," he said.  "I might warn him, but it's
best for the horses to make their own impressions."

"What name, sir?!" asked a footman.

"You are--?"

"Falby, Sir."

"Falby, look after my man Brillon here, and take me to Sir William."

"What name, sir?"

Gaston, as if with sudden thought, stepped into the light of the candles,
and said in a low voice: "Falby, don't you know me?"

The footman turned a little pale, as his eyes, in spite of themselves,
clung to Gaston's.  A kind of fright came, and then they steadied.

"Oh yes, sir," he said mechanically.

"Where have you seen me?"

"In the picture on the wall, sir."

"Whose picture, Falby?"

"Sir Gaston Belward, Sir."

A smile lurked at the corners of Gaston's mouth.

"Gaston Belward.  Very well, then you know what to say to Sir William.
Show me into the library."

"Or the justices' room, sir?"

"The justices' room will do."

Gaston wondered what the justices' room was.  A moment after he stood in
it, and the dazed Falby had gone, trying vainly to reconcile the picture
on the wall, which, now that he could think, he knew was very old, with
this strange man who had sent a curious cold shiver through him.  But,
anyhow, he was a Belward, that was certain: voice, face, manner showed
it.  But with something like no Belward he had ever seen.  Left to
himself, Gaston looked round on a large, severe room.  Its use dawned on
him.  This was part of the life: Sir William was a Justice of the Peace.
But why had he been brought here?  Why not to the library as himself had
suggested?  There would be some awkward hours for Falby in the future.
Gaston had as winning a smile, as sweet a manner, as any one in the
world, so long as a straight game was on; but to cross his will with the
other--he had been too long a power in that wild country where his father
had also been a power!  He did not quite know how long he waited, for he
was busy with plans as to his career at Ridley Court.  He was roused at
last by Falby's entrance.  A keen, cold look shot from under his straight
brows.

"Well?!" he asked.

"Will you step into the library, sir?  Sir William will see you there."

Falby tried to avoid his look, but his eyes were compelled, and Gaston
said:

"Falby, you will always hate to enter this room."  Falby was agitated.

"I hope not, sir."

"But you will, Falby, unless--"

"Yessir?"

"Unless you are both the serpent and the dove, Falby."

"Yessir."

As they entered the hall, Brillon with the saddle-bags was being taken in
charge, and Gaston saw what a strange figure he looked beside the other
servants and in these fine surroundings.  He could not think that himself
was so bizarre.  Nor was he.  But he looked unusual; as one of high
civilisation might, through long absence in primitive countries, return
in uncommon clothing, and with a manner of distinguished strangeness: the
barbaric to protect the refined, as one has seen a bush of firs set to
shelter a wheat-field from a seawind, or a wind-mill water cunningly-
begotten flowers.

As he went through the hall other visitors were entering.  They passed
him, making for the staircase.  Ladies with the grand air looked at him
curiously, and two girls glanced shyly from the jingling spurs and
tasselled boots to his rare face.

One of the ladies suddenly gave a little gasping cry, and catching the
arm of her companion, said:

"Reine, how like Robert Belward!  Who--who is he?"

The other coolly put up her pince-nez.  She caught Gaston's profile and
the turn of his shoulder.

"Yes, like, Sophie; but Robert never had such a back, nor anything like
the face."

She spoke with no attempt to modulate her voice, and it carried
distinctly to Gaston.  He turned and glanced at them.

"He's a Belward, certainly, but like what one I don't know; and he's
terribly eccentric, my dear!  Did you see the boots and the sash?  Why,
bless me, if you are not shaking!  Don't be silly--shivering at the
thought of Robert Belward after all these years."

So saying, Mrs. Warren Gasgoyne tapped Lady Dargan on the arm, and then
turned sharply to see if her daughters had been listening.  She saw that
they had; and though herself and not her sister was to blame, she said:

"Sophie, you are very indiscreet!  If you had daughters of your own, you
would probably be more careful--though Heaven only knows, for you were
always difficult!"

With this they vanished up the staircase, Mrs. Gasgoyne's daughters,
Delia and Agatha, smiling at each other and whispering about Gaston.

Meanwhile the seeker after a kingdom was shown into Sir William Belward's
study.  No one was there.  He walked to the mantelpiece, and, leaning his
arm on it, looked round.  Directly in front of him on the wall was the
picture of a lady in middle-life, sitting in an arbour.  A crutch lay
against one arm of her chair, and her left hand leaned on an ebony
silver-topped cane.  There was something painful, haunting, in the face
--a weirdness in the whole picture.  The face was looking into the
sunlight, but the effect was rather of moonlight--distant, mournful.  He
was fascinated; why, he could not tell.  Art to him was an unknown book,
but he had the instinct, and he was quick to feel.  This picture struck
him as being out of harmony with everything else in the room.  Yet it
had, a strange compelling charm.

Presently he started forward with an exclamation.  Now he understood the
vague, eerie influence.  Looking out from behind the foliage was a face,
so dim that one moment it seemed not to be there, and then suddenly to
flash in--as a picture from beyond sails, lightning-like, across the
filmy eyes of the dying.  It was the face of a youth, elf-like, unreal,
yet he saw his father's features in it.

He rubbed his eyes and looked again.  It seemed very dim.  Indeed, so
delicately, vaguely, had the work been done that only eyes like Gaston's,
trained to observe, with the sight of a hawk and a sense of the
mysterious, could have seen so quickly or so distinctly.  He drew slowly
back to the mantel again, and mused.  What did it mean?  He was sure that
the woman was his grandmother.

At that moment the door opened, and an alert, white-haired man stepped in
quickly, and stopped in the centre of the room, looking at his visitor.
His deep, keen eyes gazed out with an intensity that might almost be
fierceness, and the fingers of his fine hands opened and shut nervously.
Though of no great stature, he had singular dignity.  He was in evening-
dress, and as he raised a hand to his chin quickly, as if in surprise or
perplexity, Gaston noticed that he wore a large seal-ring.  It is
singular that while he was engaged with his great event, he was also
thinking what an air of authority the ring gave.

For a moment the two men stood at gaze without speaking, though Gaston
stepped forward respectfully.  A bewildered, almost shrinking look came
into Sir William's eyes, as the other stood full in the light of the
candles.

Presently the old man spoke.  In spite of conventional smoothness, his
voice had the ring of distance, which comes from having lived through and
above painful things.

"My servant announced you as Sir Gaston Belward.  There is some mistake?"

"There is a mistake," was the slow reply.  "I did not give my name as Sir
Gaston Belward.  That was Falby's conclusion, sir.  But I am Gaston
Robert Belward, just the same."

Sir William was dazed, puzzled.  He presently made a quick gesture, as if
driving away some foolish thought, and, motioning to a chair, said:

"Will you be seated?"

They both sat, Sir William by his writing-table.  His look was now steady
and penetrating, but he met one just as firm.

"You are--Gaston Robert Belward?  May I ask for further information?"

There was furtive humour playing at Gaston's mouth.  The old man's manner
had been so unlike anything he had ever met, save, to an extent, in his
father, that it interested him.  He replied, with keen distinctness:
"You mean, why I have come--home?"

Sir William's fingers trembled on a paper-knife.  "Are you-at home?"

"I have come home to ask for my heritage--with interest compounded, sir."

Sir William was now very pale.  He got to his feet, came to the young
man, peered into his face, then drew back to the table and steadied
himself against it.  Gaston rose also: his instinct of courtesy was
acute--absurdly civilised--that is, primitive.  He waited.  "You are
Robert's son?"

"Robert Belward was my father."

"Your father is dead?"

"Twelve years ago."

Sir William sank back in his chair.  His thin fingers ran back and forth
along his lips.  Presently he took out his handkerchief and coughed into
it nervously.  His lips trembled.  With a preoccupied air he arranged a
handful of papers on the table.

"Why did you not come before?!" he asked at last, in a low, mechanical
voice.

"It was better for a man than a boy to come."

"May I ask why?"

"A boy doesn't always see a situation--gives up too soon--throws away his
rights.  My father was a boy."

"He was twenty-five when he went away."

"I am fifty!"

Sir William looked up sharply, perplexed.  "Fifty?"

"He only knew this life: I know the world."

"What world?"

"The great North, the South, the seas at four corners of the earth."

Sir William glanced at the top-boots, the peeping sash, the strong,
bronzed face.

"Who was your mother?!" he asked abruptly.

"A woman of France."

The baronet made a gesture of impatience, and looked searchingly at the
young man.

All at once Gaston shot his bolt, to have it over.  "She had Indian blood
also."

He stretched himself to his full height, easily, broadly, with a touch of
defiance, and leaned an arm against the mantel, awaiting Sir William's
reply.

The old man shrank, then said coldly: "Have you the marriage-
certificate?"

Gaston drew some papers from his pockets.

"Here, sir, with a letter from my father, and one from the Hudson's Bay
Company."

His grandfather took them.  With an effort he steadied himself, then
opened and read them one by one, his son's brief letter last--it was
merely a calm farewell, with a request that justice should be done his
son.

At that moment Falby entered and said:

"Her ladyship's compliments, and all the guests have arrived, sir."

"My compliments to her ladyship, and ask her to give me five minutes yet,
Falby."

Turning to his grandson, there seemed to be a moment's hesitation, then
he reached out his hand.

"You have brought your luggage?  Will you care to dine with us?"

Gaston took the cold outstretched fingers.

"Only my saddle-bag, and I have no evening-dress with me, else I should
be glad."

There was another glance up and down the athletic figure, a half-
apprehensive smile as the baronet thought of his wife, and then he said:

"We must see if anything can be done."

He pulled a bell-cord.  A servant appeared.

"Ask the housekeeper to come for a moment, please."  Neither spoke till
the housekeeper appeared.  "Hovey," he said to the grim woman, "give Mr.
Gaston the room in the north tower.  Then, from the press in the same
room lay out the evening-dress which you will find there....  They were
your father's," he added, turning to the young man.  "It was my wife's
wish to keep them.  Have they been aired lately, Hovey?"

"Some days ago, sir."

"That will do."  The housekeeper left, agitated.  You will probably be in
time for the fish," he added, as he bowed to Robert.

"If the clothes do not fit, sir?"

"Your father was about your height and nearly as large, and fashions have
not changed much."

A few moments afterwards Gaston was in the room which his father had
occupied twenty-seven years before.  The taciturn housekeeper, eyeing him
excitedly the while, put out the clothes.  He did not say anything till
she was about to go.  Then:

"Hovey, were you here in my father's time?"

"I was under-parlourmaid, sir," she said.

"And you are housekeeper now--good!"

The face of the woman crimsoned, hiding her dour wrinkles.  She turned
away her head.

"I'd have given my right hand if he hadn't gone, sir."

Gaston whistled softly, then:

"So would he, I fancy, before he died.  But I shall not go, so you will
not need to risk a finger for me.  I am going to stay, Hovey.  Good-
night.  Look after Brillon, please."

He held out his hand.  Her fingers twitched in his, then grasped them
nervously.

"Yes, sir.  Good-night, Sir.  It's--it's like him comin' back, sir."

Then she suddenly turned and hurried from the room, a blunt figure to
whom emotion was not graceful.  "H'm!" said Gaston, as he shut the door.
"Parlourmaid then, eh?  History at every turn!  'Voici le sabre de mon
pere!'"




CHAPTER III

HE TELLS THE STORY OF HIS LIFE

Gaston Belward was not sentimental: that belongs to the middle-class
Englishman's ideal of civilisation.  But he had a civilisation akin to
the highest; incongruous, therefore, to the general as the sympathy
between the United States and Russia.  The highest civilisation can be
independent.  The English aristocrat is at home in the lodge of a Sioux
chief or the bamboo-hut of a Fijian, and makes brothers of "savages,"
when those other formal folk, who spend their lives in keeping their
dignity, would be lofty and superior.

When Gaston looked at his father's clothes and turned them over,
he had a twinge of honest emotion; but his mind was on the dinner and
his heritage, and he only said, as he frowned at the tightness of the
waistband:

"Never mind, we'll make 'em pay, shot and wadding, for what you lost,
Robert Belward; and wherever you are, I hope you'll see it."

In twelve minutes from the time he entered the bedroom he was ready.
He pulled the bell-cord, and then passed out.  A servant met him on the
stairs, and in another minute he was inside the dining-room.  Sir
William's eyes flashed up.  There was smouldering excitement in his face,
but one could not have guessed at anything unusual.  A seat had been
placed for Gaston beside him.  The situation was singular and trying.
It would have been easier if he had merely come into the drawing-room
after dinner.  This was in Sir William's mind when he asked him to dine;
but it was as it was.  Gaston's alert glance found the empty seat.  He
was about to make towards it, but he caught Sir William's eye and saw it
signal him to the end of the table near him.  His brain was working with
celerity and clearness.  He now saw the woman whose portrait had so
fascinated him in the library.  As his eyes fastened on her here, he
almost fancied he could see the boy's--his father's-face looking over
her shoulder.

He instantly went to her, and said: "I am sorry to be late."

His first impulse had been to offer his hand, as, naturally, he would
have done in "barbaric" lands, but the instinct of this other
civilisation was at work in him.  He might have been a polite casual
guest, and not a grandson, bringing the remembrance, the culmination of
twenty-seven years' tragedy into a home; she might have been a hostess
with whom he wished to be on terms: that was all.

If the situation was trying for him, it was painful for her.  She had had
only a whispered announcement before Sir William led the way to dinner.
Yet she was now all her husband had been, and more.  Repression had been
her practice for unnumbered years, and the only heralds of her feelings
were the restless wells of her dark eyes: the physical and mental misery
she had endured lay hid under the pale composure of her face.  She was
now brought suddenly before the composite image of her past.  Yet she
merely lifted a slender hand with long, fine fingers, which, as they
clasped his, all at once trembled, and then pressed them hotly,
nervously.  To his surprise, it sent a twinge of colour to his cheek.
"It was good of you to come down after such a journey," she said.
Nothing more.

Then he passed on, and sat down to Sir William's courteous gesture.  The
situation had its difficulties for the guests--perfect guests as they
were.  Every one was aware of a dramatic incident, for which there had
been no preparation save Sir William's remark that a grandson had arrived
from the North Pole or thereabouts; and to continue conversation and
appear casual put their resources to some test.  But they stood it well,
though.  their eyes were busy, and the talk was cheerfully mechanical.
So occupied were they with Gaston's entrance, that they did not know
how near Lady Dargan came to fainting.

At the button-hole of the coat worn by Gaston hung a tiny piece of red
ribbon which she had drawn from her sleeve on the terrace twenty-seven
years ago, and tied there with the words:

"Do you think you will wear it till we meet again?"  And the man had
replied:

"You'll not see me without it, pretty girl--pretty girl."

A woman is not so unaccountable after all.  She has more imagination than
a man; she has not many resources to console her for disappointments, and
she prizes to her last hour the swift moments when wonderful things
seemed possible.  That man is foolish who shows himself jealous of a
woman's memories or tokens--those guarantees of her womanliness.

When Lady Dargan saw the ribbon, which Gaston in his hurry had not
disturbed, tied exactly as she had tied it, a weird feeling came to her,
and she felt choking.  But her sister's eyes were on her, and Mrs.
Gasgoyne's voice came across the table clearly:

"Sophie, what were Fred Bideford's colours at Sandown?  You always
remember that kind of thing."  The warning was sufficient.  Lady Dargan
could make no effort of memory, but she replied without hesitation--or
conscience:

"Yellow and brown."

"There," said Mrs. Gasgoyne, "we are both wrong, Captain Maudsley.
Sophie never makes a mistake."  Maudsley assented politely, but, stealing
a look at Lady Dargan, wondered what the little by-play meant.  Gaston
was between Sir William and Mrs. Gasgoyne.  He declined soup and fish,
which had just been served, because he wished for time to get his
bearings.  He glanced at the menu as if idly interested, conscious that
he was under observation.  He felt that he had, some how, the situation
in his hands.  Everything had gone well, and he knew that his part had
been played with some aplomb--natural, instinctive.  Unlike most large
men, he had a mind always alert, not requiring the inspiration of unusual
moments.  What struck him most forcibly now was the tasteful courtesy
which had made his entrance easy.  He instinctively compared it to the
courtesy in the lodge of an Indian chief, or of a Hudson's Bay factor who
has not seen the outer world for half a century.  It was so different,
and yet it was much the same.  He had seen a missionary, a layreader,
come intoxicated into a council of chiefs.  The chiefs did not show that
they knew his condition till he forced them to do so.  Then two of the
young men rose, suddenly pinned him in their arms, carried him out, and
tied him in a lodge.  The next morning they sent him out of their
country.  Gaston was no philosopher, but he could place a thing when he
saw it: which is a kind of genius.

Presently Sir William said quietly:

"Mrs. Gasgoyne, you knew Robert well; his son ought to know you."

Gaston turned to Mrs. Gasgoyne, and said in his father's manner as much
as possible, for now his mind ran back to how his father talked and
acted, forming a standard for him:

"My father once told me a tale of the Keithley Hunt--something 'away up,'
as they say in the West--and a Mrs. Warren Gasgoyne was in it."

He made an instant friend of Mrs. Gasgoyne--made her so purposely.
This was one of the few things from his father's talks upon his past
life.  He remembered the story because it was interesting, the name
because it had a sound.

She flushed with pleasure.  That story of the Hunt was one of her
sweetest recollections.  For her bravery then she had been voted by the
field "a good fellow," and an admiral present declared that she had a
head "as long as the maintop bow-line."  She loved admiration, though she
had no foolish sentiment; she called men silly creatures, and yet would
go on her knees across country to do a deserving man-friend a service.
She was fifty and over, yet she had the springing heart of a girl--mostly
hid behind a brusque manner and a blunt, kindly tongue.

"Your father could always tell a good story," she said.

"He told me one of you: what about telling me one of him?"

Adaptable, he had at once fallen in with her direct speech; the more so
because it was his natural way; any other ways were "games," as he
himself said.

She flashed a glance at her sister, and smiled half-ironically.

"I could tell you plenty," she said softly.  "He was a startling fellow,
and went far sometimes; but you look as if you could go farther."

Gaston helped himself to an entree, wondering whether a knife was used
with sweetbreads.

"How far could he go?!" he asked.

"In the hunting-field with anybody, with women endlessly, with meanness
like a snail, and when his blood was up, to the most nonsensical place
you can think of."

Forks only for sweetbreads!  Gaston picked one up.  "He went there."

"Who told you?"

"I came from there."

"Where is it?"

"A few hundred miles from the Arctic circle."

"Oh, I didn't think it was that climate!"

"It never is till you arrive.  You are always out in the cold there."

"That sounds American."

"Every man is a sinner one way or another."

"You are very clever--cleverer than your father ever was.

"I hope so."

"Why?"

"He went--there.  I've come--from there."

"And you think you will stay--never go back?"

"He was out of it for twenty years, and died.  If I am in it for that
long, I shall have had enough."

Their eyes met.  The woman looked at him steadily.  "You won't be," she
replied, this time seriously, and in a very low voice.

"No?  Why?"

"Because you will tire of it all--though you've started very well."

She then answered a question of Captain Maudsley's and turned again to
Gaston.

"What will make me tire of it?!" he inquired.  She sipped her champagne
musingly.

"Why, what is in you deeper than all this; with the help of some woman
probably."

She looked at him searchingly, then added:

"You seem strangely like and yet unlike your father to-night."

"I am wearing his clothes," he said.

She had plenty of nerve, but this startled her.  She shrank a little: it
seemed uncanny.  Now she remembered that ribbon in the button-hole.

"Poor Sophie!" she thought.  "And this one will make greater mischief
here."  Then, aloud to him: "Your father was a good fellow, but he did
wild things."

"I do not see the connection," he answered.  "I am not a good man, and I
shall do wilder things--is that it?"

"You will do mad things," she replied hardly above a whisper, and talked
once more with Captain Maudsley.  Gaston now turned to his grandfather,
who had heard a sentence here and there, and felt that the young man
carried off the situation well enough.  He then began to talk in a
general way about Gaston's voyage, of the Hudson's Bay Company, and
expeditions to the Arctic, drawing Lady Dargan into the conversation.

Whatever might be said of Sir William Belward he was an excellent host.
He had a cool, unmalicious wit, but that man was unwise who offered
himself to its severity.  To-night he surpassed himself in suggestive
talk, until, all at once, seeing Lady Dargan's eyes fixed on Gaston,
he went silent, sitting back in his chair abstracted.  Soon, however,
a warning glance from his wife brought him back and saved Lady Dargan
from collapse; for it seemed impossible to talk alone to this ghost of
her past.

At this moment Gaston heard a voice near:

"As like as if he'd stepped out of the picture, if it weren't for the
clothes.  A Gaston too!"

The speaker was Lord Dargan.  He was talking to Archdeacon Varcoe.

Gaston followed Lord Dargan's glance to the portrait of that Sir Gaston
Belward whose effigy he had seen.  He found himself in form, feature,
expression; the bold vigilance of eye, the primitive activity of
shoulder, the small firm foot, the nervous power of the hand.  The eyes
seemed looking at him.  He answered to the look.  There was in him the
romantic strain, and something more!  In the remote parts of his being
there was the capacity for the phenomenal, the strange.  Once again, as
in the church, he saw the field of Naseby, King Charles, Ireton's men,
Cromwell and his Ironsides, Prince Rupert and the swarming rush of
cavalry, and the end of it all!  Had it been a tale of his father's at
camp-fire?  Had he read it somewhere?  He felt his blood thump in his
veins.  Another half-hour, wherein he was learning every minute, nothing
escaping him, everything interesting him; his grandfather and Mrs.
Gasgoyne especially, then the ladies retired slowly with their crippled
hostess, who gave Gaston, as she rose, a look almost painfully intense.
It haunted him.

Now Gaston had his chance.  He had no fear of what he could do with men:
he had measured himself a few times with English gentlemen as he
travelled, and he knew where his power lay--not in making himself
agreeable, but in imposing his personality.

The guests were not soon to forget the talk of that hour.  It played into
Gaston's hands.  He pretended to nothing; he confessed ignorance here and
there with great simplicity; but he had the gift of reducing things, as
it were, to their original elements.  He cut away to the core of a
matter, and having simple, fixed ideas, he was able to focus the talk,
which had begun with hunting stories, and ended with the morality of
duelling.  Gaston's hunting stories had made them breathless, his views
upon duelling did not free their lungs.

There were sentimentalists present; others who, because it had become
etiquette not to cross swords, thought it indecent.  Archdeacon Varcoe
would not be drawn into discussion, but sipped his wine, listened, and
watched Gaston.

The young man measured his grandfather's mind, and he drove home his
points mercilessly.

Captain Maudsley said something about "romantic murder."

"That's the trouble," Gaston said.  "I don't know who killed duelling
in England, but behind it must have been a woman or a shopkeeper:
sentimentalism, timidity, dead romance.  What is patriotism but romance?
Ideals is what they call it somewhere.  I've lived in a land full of hard
work and dangers, but also full of romance.  What is the result?  Why, a
people off there whom you pity, and who don't need pity.  Romance?  See:
you only get square justice out of a wise autocrat, not out of your
'twelve true men'; and duelling is the last decent relic of autocracy.
Suppose the wronged man does get killed; that is all right: it wasn't
merely blood he was after, but the right to hit a man in the eye for a
wrong done.  What is all this hullaballoo--about saving human life?
There's as much interest--and duty--in dying as living, if you go the
way your conscience tells you."

A couple of hours later, Gaston, after having seen to his horse, stood
alone in the drawing-room with his grandfather and grandmother.  As yet
Lady Belward had spoken not half a dozen words to him.  Sir William
presently said to him:

"Are you too tired to join us in the library?"

"I'm as fresh as paint, sir," was the reply.

Lady Belward turned without a word, and slowly passed from the room.
Gaston's eyes followed the crippled figure, which yet had a rare dignity.
He had a sudden impulse.  He stepped to her and said with an almost
boyish simplicity:

"You are very tired; let me carry you--grandmother."

He could hear Sir William gasp a little as he laid a quick warm hand on
hers that held the cane.  She looked at him gravely, sadly, and then
said:

"I will take your arm, if you please."

He took the cane, and she put a hand towards him.  He ran his strong arm
around her waist with a little humouring laugh, her hand rested on his
shoulder, and he timed his step to hers.  Sir William was in an eddy of
wonder--a strong head was "mazed."  He had looked for a different
reception of this uncommon kinsman.  How quickly had the new-comer
conquered himself!  And yet he had a slight strangeness of accent--not
American, but something which seemed unusual.  He did not reckon with a
voice which, under cover of easy deliberation, had a convincing quality;
with a manner of old-fashioned courtesy and stateliness.  As Mrs.
Gasgoyne had said to the rector, whose eyes had followed Gaston
everywhere in the drawing-room:

"My dear archdeacon, where did he get it?  Why, he has lived most of his
life with savages!"

"Vandyke might have painted the man," Lord Dargan had added.

"Vandyke did paint him," had put in Delia Gasgoyne from behind her
mother.

"How do you mean, Delia?!" Mrs. Gasgoyne had added, looking curiously at
her.

"His picture hangs in the dining-room."

Then the picture had been discussed, and the girl's eyes had followed
Gaston--followed him until he had caught their glance.  Without an
introduction, he had come and dropped into conversation with her, till
her mother cleverly interrupted.

Inside the library Lady Belward was comfortably placed, and looking up at
Gaston, said:

"You have your father's ways: I hope that you will be wiser."

"If you will teach me!" he answered gently.

There came two little bright spots on her cheeks, and her hands clasped
in her lap.  They all sat down.  Sir William spoke:

"It is much to ask that you should tell us of your life now, but it is
better that we should start with some knowledge of each other."

At that moment Gaston's eyes caught the strange picture on the wall.

"I understand," he answered.  "But I would be starting in the middle of a
story."

"You mean that you wish to hear your father's history?  Did he not tell
you?"

"Trifles--that is all."

"Did he ever speak of me?!" asked Lady Belward with low anxiety.

"Yes, when he was dying."

"What did he say?"

"He said: 'Tell my mother that Truth waits long, but whips hard.  Tell
her that I always loved her.'"  She shrank in her chair as if from a
blow, and then was white and motionless.

"Let us hear your story," Sir William said with a sort of hauteur.
"You know your own, much of your father's lies buried with him."

"Very well, sir."

Sir William drew a chair up beside his wife.  Gaston sat back, and for a
moment did not speak.  He was looking into distance.  Presently the blue
of his eyes went all black, and with strange unwavering concentration he
gazed straight before him.  A light spread over his face, his hands felt
for the chair-arms and held them firmly.  He began:

"I first remember swinging in a blanket from a pine-tree at a buffalo-
hunt while my mother cooked the dinner.  There were scores of tents,
horses, and many Indians and half-breeds, and a few white men.  My father
was in command.  I can see my mother's face as she stood over the fire.
It was not darker than mine; she always seemed more French than Indian,
and she was thought comely."

Lady Belward shuddered a little, but Gaston did not notice.

"I can remember the great buffalo-hunt.  You heard a heavy rumbling
sound; you saw a cloud on the prairie.  It heaved, a steam came from it,
and sometimes you caught the flash of ten thousand eyes as the beasts
tossed their heads and then bent them again to the ground and rolled on,
five hundred men after them, our women shouting and laughing, and arrows
and bullets flying.  .  .  .  I can remember a time also when a great
Indian battle happened just outside the fort, and, with my mother crying
after him, my father went out with a priest to stop it.  My father was
wounded, and then the priest frightened them, and they gathered their
dead together and buried them.  We lived in a fort for a long time, and
my mother died there.  She was a good woman, and she loved my father.
I have seen her on her knees for hours praying when he was away.--I have
her rosary now.  They called her Ste. Heloise.  Afterwards I was always
with my father.  He was a good man, but he was never happy; and only at
the last would he listen to the priest, though they were always great
friends.  He was not a Catholic of course, but he said that didn't
matter."

Sir William interrupted huskily.  "Why did he never come back?"

"I do not know quite, but he said to me once, 'Gaston, you'll tell them
of me some day, and it will be a soft pillow for their heads!  You can
mend a broken life, but the ring of it is gone.'  I think he meant to
come back when I was about fourteen; but things happened, and he stayed."

There was a pause.  Gaston seemed brooding, and Lady Belward said:

"Go on, please."

"There isn't so very much to tell.  The life was the only one I had
known, and it was all right.  But my father had told me of this life.
He taught me himself--he and Father Decluse and a Moravian missionary for
awhile.  I knew some Latin and history, a bit of mathematics, a good deal
of astronomy, some French poets, and Shakespere.  Shakespere is
wonderful.  .  .  .  My father wanted me to come here at once after he
died, but I knew better--I wanted to get sense first.  So I took a place
in the Company.  It wasn't all fun.

"I had to keep my wits sharp.  I was only a youngster, and I had to do
with men as crafty and as silly as old Polonius.  I was sent to Labrador.
That was not a life for a Christian.  Once a year a ship comes to the
port, bringing the year's mail and news from the world.  When you watch
that ship go out again, and you turn round and see the filthy Esquimaux
and Indians, and know that you've got to live for another year with them,
sit in their dirty tepees, eat their raw frozen meat, with an occasional
glut of pemmican, and the thermometer 70 degrees below zero, you get a
lump in your throat.

"Then came one winter.  I had one white man, two half-breeds, and an
Indian with me.  There was darkness day after day, and because the
Esquimaux and Indians hadn't come up to the fort that winter, it was
lonely as a tomb.  One by one the men got melancholy and then went mad,
and I had to tie them up, and care for them and feed them.  The Indian
was all right, but he got afraid, and wanted to start to a mission
station three hundred miles on.  It was a bad look-out for me, but I told
him to go.  I was left alone.  I was only twenty-one, but I was steel to
my toes--good for wear and tear.  Well, I had one solid month all alone
with my madmen.  Their jabbering made me sea-sick some times.  At last
one day I felt I'd go staring mad myself if I didn't do something
exciting to lift me, as it were.  I got a revolver, sat at the opposite
end of the room from the three lunatics, and practised shooting at them.
I had got it into my head that they ought to die, but it was only fair,
I thought, to give them a chance.  I would try hard to shoot all round
them--make a halo of bullets for the head of every one, draw them in
silhouettes of solid lead on the wall.

"I talked to them first, and told them what I was going to do.  They
seemed to understand, and didn't object.  I began with the silhouettes,
of course.  I had a box of bullets beside me.  They never squealed.  I
sent the bullets round them as pretty as the pattern of a milliner.  Then
I began with their heads.  I did two all right.  They sat and never
stirred.  But when I came to the last something happened.  It was Jock
Lawson."

Sir William interposed:

"Jock Lawson--Jock Lawson from here?"

"Yes.  His mother keeps 'The Whisk o' Barley.'"

"So, that is where Jock Lawson went?  He followed your father?"

"Yes.  Jock was mad enough when I began--clean gone.  But, somehow, the
game I was playing cured him.  'Steady, Jock!' I said.  'Steady!' for I
saw him move.  I levelled for the second bead of the halo.  My finger was
on the trigger.  'My God, don't shoot!' he called.  It startled me, my
hand shook, the thing went off, and Jock had a bullet through his brain.

".  .  .  Then I waked up.  Perhaps I had been mad myself--I don't know.
But my brain never seemed clearer than when I was playing that game.  It
was like a magnifying glass: and my eyes were so clear and strong that I
could see the pores on their skin, and the drops of sweat breaking out on
Jock's forehead when he yelled."

A low moan came from Lady Belward.  Her face was drawn and pale, but her
eyes were on Gaston with a deep fascination.  Sir William whispered to
her.

"No," she said, "I will stay."

Gaston saw the impression he had made.

"Well, I had to bury poor Jock all alone.  I don't think I should have
minded it so much, if it hadn't been for the faces of those other two
crazy men.  One of them sat still as death, his eyes following me with
one long stare, and the other kept praying all the time--he'd been a
lay preacher once before he backslided, and it came back on him now
naturally.  Now it would be from Revelation, now out of the Psalms, and
again a swingeing exhortation for the Spirit to come down and convict me
of sin.  There was a lot of sanity in it too, for he kept saying at last:
'O shut not up my soul with the sinners: nor my life with the
bloodthirsty.'  I couldn't stand it, with Jock dead there before me,
so I gave him a heavy dose of paregoric out of the Company's stores.
Before he took it he raised his finger and said to me, with a beastly
stare: 'Thou art the man!'  But the paregoric put him to sleep.  .  .  .

"Then I gave the other something to eat, and dragged Jock out to bury
him.  I remembered then that he couldn't be buried, for the ground was
too hard and the ice too thick; so I got ropes, and, when he stiffened,
slung him up into a big cedar tree, and then went up myself and arranged
the branches about him comfortably.  It seemed to me that Jock was a baby
and I was his father.  You couldn't see any blood, and I fixed his hair
so that it covered the hole in the forehead.  I remember I kissed him on
the cheek, and then said a prayer--one that I'd got out of my father's
prayer-book: 'That it may please Thee to preserve all that travel by land
or by water, all women labouring of child, all sick persons and young
children; and to show Thy pity upon all prisoners and captives.' Somehow
I had got it into my head that Jock was going on a long journey, and that
I was a prisoner and a captive."

Gaston broke off, and added presently:

"Perhaps this is all too awful to hear, but it gives you an idea of what
kind of things went to make me."  Lady Belward answered for both:

"Tell us all--everything."

"It is late," said Sir William, nervously.

"What does it matter?  It is once in a lifetime," she answered sadly.

Gaston took up the thread:

"Now I come to what will shock you even more, perhaps.  So, be prepared.
I don't know how many days went, but at last I had three visitors--in
time I should think: a Moravian missionary, and an Esquimaux and his
daughter.  I didn't tell the missionary about Jock--there was no use,
it could do no good.  They stayed four weeks, and during that time one
of the crazy men died.  The other got better, but had to be watched.  I
could do anything with him, if I got my eye on him.  Somehow, I must tell
you, I've got a lot of power that way.  I don't know where it comes from.
Well, the missionary had to go.  The old Esquimaux thought that he and
his daughter would stay on if I'd let them.  I was only too glad.  But it
wasn't wise for the missionary to take the journey alone--it was a bad
business in any case.  I urged the man that had been crazy to go, for I
thought activity would do him good.  He agreed, and the two left and got
to the Mission Station all right, after wicked trouble.  I was alone with
the Esquimaux and his daughter.  You never know why certain things
happen, and I can't tell why that winter was so weird; why the old
Esquimaux should take sick one morning, and in the evening should call
me and his daughter Lucy--she'd been given a Christian name, of course--
and say that he was going to die, and he wanted me to marry her" (Lady
Belward exclaimed, Sir William's hands fingered the chair-arm nervously)
"there and then, so that he'd know she would be cared for.  He was a
heathen, but he had been primed by the missionaries about his daughter.
She was a fine, clever girl, and well educated--the best product of their
mission.  So he called for a Bible.  There wasn't one in the place, but I
had my mother's Book of the Mass.  I went to get it, but when I set my
eyes on it, I couldn't--no, I couldn't do it, for I hadn't the least idea
but what I should bid my lady good-bye when it suited, and I didn't want
any swearing at all--not a bit.  I didn't do any.  But what happened had
to be with or without any ring or book and 'Forasmuch as.'  There had
been so much funeral and sudden death that a marriage would be a godsend
anyhow.  So the old Esquimaux got our two hands in his, babbled away in
half-English, half-Esquimaux, with the girl's eyes shining like a she-
moose over a dying buck, and about the time we kissed each other, his
head dropped back--and that is all there was about that."

Gaston now kept his eyes on his listeners.  He was aware that his story
must sound to them as brutal as might be, but it was a phase of his life,
and, so far as he could, he wanted to start with a clean sheet; not out
of love of confidence, for he was self-contained, but he would have
enough to do to shepherd his future without shepherding his past.  He saw
that Lady Belward had a sickly fear in her face, while Sir William had
gone stern and hard.

He went on:

"It saved the situation, did that marriage; though it was no marriage you
will say.  Neither was it one way, and I didn't intend at the start to
stand by it an hour longer than I wished.  But she was more than I looked
for, and it seems to me that she saved my life that winter, or my reason
anyhow.  There had been so much tragedy that I used to wonder every day
what would happen before night; and that's not a good thing for the brain
of a chap of twenty-one or two.  The funny part of it is that she wasn't
a pagan--not a bit.  She could read and speak English in a sweet old-
fashioned way, and she used to sing to me--such a funny, sorry little
voice she had--hymns the Moravians had taught her, and one or two English
songs.  I taught her one or two besides, 'Where the Hawthorn Tree is
Blooming,' and 'Allan Water'--the first my father had taught me, the
other an old Scotch trader.  It's different with a woman and a man in a
place like that.  Two men will go mad together, but there's a saving
something in the contact of a man's brain with a woman's.  I got fond of
her, any man would have, for she had something that I never saw in any
heathen, certainly in no Indian; you'll see it in women from Iceland.
I determined to marry her in regular style when spring and a missionary
came.  You can't understand, maybe, how one can settle to a life where
you've got companionship, and let the world go by.  About that time, I
thought that I'd let Ridley Court and the rest of it go as a boy's dreams
go.  I didn't seem to know that I was only satisfied in one set of my
instincts.  Spring came, so did a missionary, and for better or worse it
was."

Sir William came to his feet.  "Great Heaven!" he broke out.

His wife tried to rise, but could not.

"This makes everything impossible," added the baronet shortly.

"No, no, it makes nothing impossible--if you will listen."

Gaston was cool.  He had begun playing for the stakes from one stand-
point, and he would not turn back.

He continued:

"I lived with her happily: I never expect to have happiness like that
again,--never,--and after two years at another post in Labrador, came
word from the Company that I might go to Quebec, there to be given my
choice of posts.  I went.  By this time I had again vague ideas that
sometime I should come here, but how or why I couldn't tell; I was
drifting, and for her sake willing to drift.  I was glad to take her to
Quebec, for I guessed she would get ideas, and it didn't strike me that
she would be out of place.  So we went.  But she was out of place in
many ways.  It did not suit at all.  We were asked to good houses, for I
believe I have always had enough of the Belward in me to keep my end up
anywhere.  The thing went on pretty well, but at last she used to beg me
to go without her to excursions and parties.  There were always one or
two quiet women whom she liked to sit with, and because she seemed
happier for me to go, I did.  I was popular, and got along with women
well; but I tell you honestly I loved my wife all the time; so that when
a Christian busy-body poured into her ears some self-made scandal, it was
a brutal, awful lie--brutal and awful, for she had never known jealousy;
it did not belong to her old social creed.  But it was in the core of her
somewhere, and an aboriginal passion at work naked is a thing to be
remembered.  I had to face it one night.  .  .  .

"I was quiet, and did what I could.  After that I insisted on her going
with me wherever I went, but she had changed, and I saw that, in spite of
herself, the thing grew.  One day we went on an excursion down the St.
Lawrence.  We were merry, and I was telling yarns.  We were just nearing
a landing-stage, when a pretty girl, with more gush than sense, caught me
by the arm and begged some ridiculous thing of me--an autograph, or what
not.  A minute afterwards I saw my wife spring from the bulwarks down on
the landing-stage, and rush up the shore into the woods.  .  .  .  We
were two days finding her.  That settled it.  I was sick enough at heart,
and I determined to go back to Labrador.  We did so.  Every thing had
gone on the rocks.  My wife was not, never would be, the same again.  She
taunted me and worried me, and because I would not quarrel, seemed to
have a greater grievance--jealousy is a kind of madness.  One night she
was most galling, and I sat still and said nothing.  My life seemed gone
of a heap: I was sick--sick to the teeth; hopeless, looking forward to
nothing.  I imagine my hard quietness roused her.  She said something
hateful--something about having married her, and not a woman from Quebec.
I smiled--I couldn't help it; then I laughed, a bit wild, I suppose.
I saw the flash of steel.  .  .  .  I believe I laughed in her face as I
fell.  When I came to she was lying with her head on my breast--dead--
stone dead."

Lady Belward sat with closed eyes, her fingers clasping and unclasping on
the top of her cane; but Sir William wore a look half-satisfied, half-
excited.

He now hurried his story.

"I got well, and after that stayed in the North for a year.  Then I
passed down the continent to Mexico and South America.  There I got a
commission to go to New Zealand and Australia to sell a lot of horses.
I did so, and spent some time in the South Sea Islands.  Again I drifted
back to the Rockies and over into the plains; found Jacques Brillon, my
servant, had a couple of years' work and play, gathered together some
money, as good a horse and outfit as the North could give, and started
with Brillon and his broncho--having got both sense and experience, I
hope--for Ridley Court.  And here I am.  There's a lot of my life that I
haven't told you of, but it doesn't matter, because it's adventure
mostly, and it can be told at any time; but these are essential facts,
and it is better that you should hear them.  And that is all, grandfather
and grandmother."

After a minute Lady Belward rose, leaned on her crutch, and looked at him
wistfully.  Sir William said: "Are you sure that you will suit this life,
or it you?"

"It is the only idea I have at present; and, anyhow, it is my rightful
home, sir."

"I was not thinking of your rights, but of the happiness of us all."

Lady Belward limped to him, and laid a hand on his shoulder.

"You have had one great tragedy, so have we: neither could bear another.
Try to be worthy--of your home."

Then she solemnly kissed him on the cheek.  Soon afterwards they went to
their rooms.




CHAPTER IV

AN HOUR WITH HIS FATHER'S PAST

In his bedroom Gaston made a discovery.  He chanced to place his hand in
the tail-pocket of the coat he had worn.  He drew forth a letter.  The
ink was faded, and the lines were scrawled.  It ran:

     It's no good.  Mr. Ian's been!  It's face the musik now.  If you
     want me, say so.  I'm for kicks or ha'pence--no diffrense.
                                                       Yours, J.

He knew the writing very well--Jock Lawson's.  There had been some
trouble, and Mr. Ian had "been," bringing peril.  What was it?  His
father and Jock had kept the secret from him.

He put his hand in the pocket again.  There was another note--this time
in a woman's handwriting:

     Oh, come to me, if you would save us both!  Do not fail.  God help
     us!  Oh, Robert!

It was signed "Agnes."

Well, here was something of mystery; but he did not trouble himself about
that.  He was not at Ridley Court to solve mysteries, to probe into the
past, to set his father's wrongs right; but to serve himself, to reap for
all those years wherein his father had not reaped.  He enjoyed life, and
he would search this one to the full of his desires.  Before he retired
he studied the room, handling things that lay where his father placed
them so many years before.  He was not without emotions in this, but he
held himself firm.

As he stood ready to get into bed, his eyes chanced upon a portrait of
his uncle Ian.

"There's where the tug comes!" he said, nodding at it.  "Shake hands,
and ten paces, Uncle Ian?"

Then he blew out the candle, and in five minutes was sound asleep.

He was out at six o'clock.  He made for the stables, and found Jacques
pacing the yard.  He smiled at Jacques's dazed look.

"What about the horse, Brillon?!" he said, nodding as he came up.

"Saracen's had a slice of the stable-boy's shoulder--sir."

Amusement loitered in Gaston's eyes.  The "sir" had stuck in Jacques's
throat.

"Saracen has established himself, then?  Good!  And the broncho?"

"Bien, a trifle only.  They laugh much in the kitchen--"

"The hall, Brillon."

"--in the hall last night.  That hired man over there--"

"That groom, Brillon."

"--that groom, he was a fool, and fat.  He was the worst.  This morning
he laugh at my broncho.  He say a horse like that is nothing: no pace, no
travel.  I say the broncho was not so ver' bad, and I tell him try the
paces.  I whisper soft, and the broncho stand like a lamb.  He mount,
and sneer, and grin at the high pommel, and start.  For a minute it was
pretty; and then I give a little soft call, and in a minute there was the
broncho bucking--doubling like a hoop, and dropping same as lead.  Once
that--groom--come down on the pommel, then over on the ground like a
ball, all muck and blood."

The half-breed paused, looking innocently before him.  Gaston's mouth
quirked.

"A solid success, Brillon.  Teach them all the tricks you can.  At ten
o'clock come to my room.  The campaign begins then."

Jacques ran a hand through his long black hair, and fingered his sash.
Gaston understood.

"The hair and ear-rings may remain, Brillon; but the beard and clothes
must go--except for occasions.  Come along."

For the next two hours Gaston explored the stables and the grounds.
Nothing escaped him.  He gathered every incident of the surroundings,
and talked to the servants freely, softly, and easily, yet with a
superiority, which suddenly was imposed in the case of the huntsman at
the kennels--for the Whipshire hounds were here.  Gaston had never ridden
to hounds.  It was not, however, his cue to pretend knowledge.  He was
strong enough to admit ignorance.  He stood leaning against the door of
the kennels, arms folded, eyes half-closed, with the sense of a painter,
before the turning bunch of brown and white, getting the charm of
distance and soft tones.  His blood beat hard, for suddenly he felt as
if he had been behind just such a pack one day, one clear desirable day
of spring.  He saw people gathering at the kennels; saw men drink beer
and eat sandwiches at the door of the huntsman's house,--a long, low
dwelling, with crumbling arched doorways like those of a monastery,
watched them get away from the top of the moor, he among them; heard
the horn, the whips; and saw the fox break cover.

Then came a rare run for five sweet miles--down a long valley--over
quick-set hedges, with stiffish streams--another hill--a great combe--
a lovely valley stretching out--a swerve to the right--over a gate--
and the brush got at a farmhouse door.

Surely, he had seen it all; but what kink of the brain was it that the
men wore flowing wigs and immense boot-legs, and sported lace in the
hunting-field?  And why did he see within that picture another of two
ladies and a gentleman hawking?

He was roused from his dream by hearing the huntsman say in a quizzical
voice:

"How do you like the dogs, sir?"

To his last day Lugley, the huntsman, remembered the slow look of cold
surprise, of masterful malice, scathing him from head to foot.  The words
that followed the look, simple as they were, drove home the naked
reproof:

"What is your name, my man?"

"Lugley, sir."

"Lugley!  Lugley!  H'm!  Well, Lugley, I like the hounds better than
I like you.  Who is Master of the Hounds, Lugley?"

"Captain Maudsley, sir."

"Just so.  You are satisfied with your place, Lugley?"

"Yes, sir," said the man in a humble voice, now cowed.

The news of the arrival of the strangers had come to him late at night,
and, with Whipshire stupidity, he had thought that any one coming from
the wilds of British America must be but a savage after all.

"Very well; I wouldn't throw myself out of a place, if I were you."

"Oh, no, sir!  Beg pardon, sir, I--"

"Attend to your hounds there, Lugley."

So saying, Gaston nodded Jacques away with him, leaving the huntsman sick
with apprehension.

"You see how it is to be done, Brillon?!" said Gaston.  Jacques's brown
eyes twinkled.

"You have the grand trick, sir."

"I enjoy the game; and so shall you, if you will.  You've begun well.
I don't know much of this life yet; but it seems to me that they are all
part of a machine, not the idea behind the machine.  They have no
invention.  Their machine is easy to learn.  Do not pretend; but for
every bit you learn show something better, something to make them dizzy
now and then."

He paused on a knoll and looked down.  The castle, the stables, the
cottages of labourers and villagers lay before them.  In a certain
highly-cultivated field, men were working.  It was cut off in squares and
patches.  It had an air which struck Gaston as unusual; why, he could not
tell.  But he had a strange divining instinct, or whatever it may be
called.  He made for the field and questioned the workmen.

The field was cut up into allotment gardens.  Here, at a nominal rent,
the cottager could grow his vegetables; a little spot of the great acre
of England, which gave the labourer a tiny sense of ownership, of
manhood.  Gaston was interested.  More, he was determined to carry that
experiment further, if he ever got the chance.  There was no socialism
in him.  The true barbarian is like the true aristocrat: more a giver of
gifts than a lover of co-operation; conserving ownership by right of
power and superior independence, hereditary or otherwise.  Gaston was
both barbarian and aristocrat.

"Brillon," he said, as they walked on, "do you think they would be
happier on the prairies with a hundred acres of land, horses, cows,
and a pen of pigs?"

"Can I be happy here all at once, sir?"

"That's just it.  It's too late for them.  They couldn't grasp it unless
they went when they were youngsters.  They'd long for 'Home and Old
England' and this grub-and-grind life.  Gracious heaven, look at them--
crumpled-up creatures!  And I'll stake my life, they were as pretty
children as you'd care to see.  They are out of place in the landscape,
Brillon; for it is all luxury and lush, and they are crumples--crumples!
But yet there isn't any use being sorry for them, for they don't grasp
anything outside the life they are living.  Can't you guess how they
live?  Look at the doors of the houses shut, and the windows sealed;
yet they've been up these three hours!  And they'll suck in bad air,
and bad food; and they'll get cancer, and all that; and they'll die and
be trotted away to the graveyard for 'passun' to hurry them into their
little dark cots, in the blessed hope of everlasting life!  I'm going to
know this thing, Brillon, from tooth to ham-string; and, however it goes,
we'll have lived up and down the whole scale; and that's something."

He suddenly stopped, and then added:

"I'm likely to go pretty far in this.  I can't tell how or why, but it's
so.  Now, once more, as yesterday afternoon, for good or for bad, for
long or for short, for the gods or for the devil, are you with me?
There's time to turn back even yet, and I'll say no word to your going."

"But no, no! a vow is a vow.  When I cannot run I will walk, when I
cannot walk I will crawl after you--comme ca!"

Lady Belward did not appear at breakfast.  Sir William and Gaston
breakfasted alone at half past nine o'clock.  The talk was of the
stables and the estate generally.

The breakfast-room looked out on a soft lawn, stretching away into a
broad park, through which a stream ran; and beyond was a green hillside.
The quiet, the perfect order and discipline, gave a pleasant tingle to
Gaston's veins.  It was all so easy, and yet so admirable--elegance
without weight.  He felt at home.  He was not certain of some trifles
of etiquette; but he and Sir William were alone, and he followed his
instincts.  Once he frankly asked his grandfather of a matter of form,
of which he was uncertain the evening before.  The thing was done so
naturally that the conventional mind of the baronet was not disturbed.
The Belwards were notable for their brains, and Sir William saw that
the young man had an unusual share.  He also felt that this startling
individuality might make a hazardous future; but he liked the fellow, and
he had a debt to pay to the son of his own dead son.  Of course, if their
wills came into conflict, there could be but one thing--the young man
must yield; or, if he played the fool, there must be an end.  Still, he
hoped the best.  When breakfast was finished, he proposed going to the
library.

There Sir William talked of the future, asked what Gaston's ideas were,
and questioned him as to his present affairs.  Gaston frankly said that
he wanted to live as his father would have done, and that he had no
property, and no money beyond a hundred pounds, which would last him
a couple of years on the prairies, but would be fleeting here.

Sir William at once said that he would give him a liberal allowance,
with, of course, the run of his own stables and their house in town:
and when he married acceptably, his allowance would be doubled.

"And I wish to say, Gaston," he added, "that your uncle Ian, though heir
to the title, does not necessarily get the property, which is not
entailed.  Upon that point I need hardly say more.  He has disappointed
us.

"Through him Robert left us.  Of his character I need not speak.  Of his
ability the world speaks variably: he is an artist.  Of his morals I need
only say that they are scarcely those of an English gentleman, though
whether that is because he is an artist, I cannot say--I really cannot
say.  I remember meeting a painter at Lord Dunfolly's,--Dunfolly is a
singular fellow--and he struck me chiefly as harmless, distinctly
harmless.  I could not understand why he was at Dunfolly's, he seemed
of so little use, though Lady Malfire, who writes or something, mooned
with him a good deal.  I believe there was some scandal or something
afterwards.  I really do not know.  But you are not a painter, and I
believe you have character--I fancy so."

"If you mean that I don't play fast and loose, sir, you are right.
What I do, I do as straight as a needle."  The old man sighed carefully.

"You are very like Robert, and yet there is something else.  I don't
know, I really don't know what!"

"I ought to have more in me than the rest of the family, sir."

This was somewhat startling.  Sir William's fingers stroked his beardless
cheek uncertainly.  "Possibly--possibly."

"I've lived a broader life, I've got wider standards, and there are three
races at work in me."

"Quite so, quite so;" and Sir William fumbled among his papers nervously.

"Sir," said Gaston suddenly, "I told you last night the honest story of
my life.  I want to start fair and square.  I want the honest story of my
father's life here; how and why he left, and what these letters mean."

He took from his pocket the notes he had found the night before, and
handed them.  Sir William read them with a disturbed look, and turned
them over and over.  Gaston told where he had found them.

Sir William spoke at last.

"The main story is simple enough.  Robert was extravagant, and Ian was
vicious and extravagant also.  Both got into trouble.  I was younger
then, and severe.  Robert hid nothing, Ian all he could.  One day things
came to a climax.  In his wild way, Robert--with Jock Lawson--determined
to rescue a young man from the officers of justice, and to get him out of
the country.  There were reasons.  He was the son of a gentleman; and, as
we discovered afterwards, Robert had been too intimate with the wife--his
one sin of the kind, I believe.  Ian came to know, and prevented the
rescue.  Meanwhile, Robert was liable to the law for the attempt.  There
was a bitter scene here, and I fear that my wife and I said hard things
to Robert."

Gaston's eyes were on Lady Belward's portrait.  "What did my grandmother
say?"

There was a pause, then:

"That she would never call him son again, I believe; that the shadow of
his life would be hateful to her always.  I tell you this because I see
you look at that portrait.  What I said, I think, was no less.  So,
Robert, after a wild burst of anger, flung away from us out of the house.
His mother, suddenly repenting, ran to follow him, but fell on the stone
steps at the door, and became a cripple for life.  At first she remained
bitter against Robert, and at that time Ian painted that portrait.  It is
clever, as you may see, and weird.  But there came a time when she kept
it as a reproach to herself, not Robert.  She is a good woman--a very
good woman.  I know none better, really no one."

"What became of the arrested man?!" Gaston asked quietly, with the
oblique suggestiveness of a counsel.

"He died of a broken blood-vessel on the night of the intended rescue,
and the matter was hushed up."

"What became of the wife?"

"She died also within a year."

"Were there any children?"

"One--a girl."

"Whose was the child?"

"You mean--?"

"The husband's or the lover's?"  There was a pause.

"I cannot tell you."

"Where is the girl?"

"My son, do not ask that.  It can do no good--really no good."

"Is it not my due?"

"Do not impose your due.  Believe me, I know best.  If ever there is need
to tell you, you shall be told.  Trust me.  Has not the girl her due
also?"

Gaston's eyes held Sir William's a moment.  "You are right, sir," he
said, "quite right.  I shall not try to know.  But if--"  He paused.

Sir William spoke:

"There is but one person in the world who knows the child's father; and I
could not ask him, though I have known him long and well--indeed, no."

"I do not ask to understand more," Gaston replied.  "I almost wish I had
known nothing.  And yet I will ask one thing: is the girl in comfort and
good surroundings?"

"The best--ah, yes, the very best."

There was a pause, in which both sat thinking; then Sir William wrote out
a cheque and offered it, with a hint of emotion.  He was recalling how he
had done the same with this boy's father.

Gaston understood.  He got up, and said: "Honestly, sir, I don't know how
I shall turn out here; for, if I didn't like it, it couldn't hold me, or,
if it did, I should probably make things uncomfortable.  But I think I
shall like it, and I will do my best to make things go well.  Good-
morning, sir."

With courteous attention Sir William let his grandson out of the room.

And thus did a young man begin his career as Gaston Belward, gentleman.




CHAPTER V.

WHEREIN HE FINDS HIS ENEMY

How that career was continued there are many histories: Jock Lawson's
mother tells of it in her way, Mrs. Gasgoyne in hers, Hovey in hers,
Captain Maudsley in his; and so on.  Each looks at it from an individual
stand-point.  But all agree on two matters: that he did things hitherto
unknown in the countryside; and that he was free and affable, but could
pull one up smartly if necessary.

He would sit by the hour and talk with Bimley, the cottager; with Rosher,
the hotel-keeper, who when young had travelled far; with a sailorman,
home for a holiday, who said he could spin a tidy yarn; and with Pogan,
the groom, who had at last won Saracen's heart.  But one day when the
meagre village chemist saw him cracking jokes with Beard, the carpenter,
and sidled in with a silly air of equality, which was merely insolence,
Gaston softly dismissed him, with his ears tingling.  The carpenter
proved his right to be a friend of Gaston's by not changing countenance
and by never speaking of the thing afterwards.

His career was interesting during the eighteen months wherein society
papers chatted of him amiably and romantically.  He had entered into the
joys of hunting with enthusiasm and success, and had made a fast and
admiring friend of Captain Maudsley; while Saracen held his own grandly.
He had dined with country people, and had dined them; had entered upon
the fag-end of the London season with keen, amused enjoyment; and had
engrafted every little use of the convention.  The art was learned, but
the man was always apart from it; using it as a toy, yet not despising
it; for, as he said, it had its points, it was necessary.  There was
yachting in the summer; but he was keener to know the life of England
and his heritage than to roam afar, and most of the year was spent on the
estate and thereabouts: with the steward, with the justices of the peace,
in the fields, in the kennels, among the accounts.

To-day he was in London, haunting Tattersall's, the East End, the docks,
his club, the London Library--he had a taste for English history,
especially for that of the seventeenth century; he saturated himself with
it: to-morrow he would present to his grandfather a scheme for improving
the estate and benefiting the cottagers.  Or he would suddenly enter the
village school, and daze and charm the children by asking them strange
yet simple questions, which sent a shiver of interest to their faces.

One day at the close of his second hunting-season there was to be a ball
at the Court, the first public declaration of acceptance by his people;
for, at his wish, they did not entertain for him in town the previous
season--Lady Belward had not lived in town for years.  But all had gone
so well, if not with absolute smoothness, and with some strangeness,--
that Gaston had become an integral part of their life, and they had
ceased to look for anything sensational.

This ball was to be the seal of their approval.  It had been mentioned in
'Truth' with that freshness and point all its own.  What character than
Gaston's could more appeal to his naive imagination?  It said in a
piquant note that he did not wear a dagger and sombrero.

Everything was ready.  Decorations were up, the cook and the butler had
done their parts.  At eleven in the morning Gaston had time on his hands.
Walking out, he saw two or three children peeping in at the gateway.

He would visit the village school.  He found the junior curate troubling
the youthful mind with what their godfathers and godmothers did for them,
and begging them to do their duty "in that state of life," etc.  He
listened, wondering at the pious opacity, and presently asked the
children to sing.  With inimitable melancholy they sang: "Oh, the Roast
Beef of Old England!"

Gaston sat back and laughed softly till the curate felt uneasy, till the
children, waking to his humour, gurgled a little in the song.  With his
thumbs caught lightly in his waistcoat pockets, he presently began to
talk with the children in an easy, quiet voice.  He asked them little
out-of-the-way questions, he lifted the school-room from their minds, and
then he told them a story, showing them on the map where the place was,
giving them distances, the kind of climate, and a dozen other matters of
information, without the nature of a lesson.  Then he taught them the
chorus--the Board forbade it afterwards--of a negro song, which told how
those who behaved themselves well in this world should ultimately:

"Blow on, blow on, blow on dat silver horn!"

It was on this day that, as he left the school, he saw Ian Belward
driving past.  He had not met his uncle since his arrival,--the artist
had been in Morocco,--nor had he heard of him save through a note in a
newspaper which said that he was giving no powerful work to the world,
nor, indeed, had done so for several years; and that he preferred the
purlieus of Montparnasse to Holland Park.

They recognised each other.  Ian looked his nephew up and down with a
cool kind of insolence as he passed, but did not make any salutation.
Gaston went straight to the castle.  He asked for his uncle, and was told
that he had gone to Lady Belward.  He wandered to the library: it was
empty.  He lit a cigar, took down a copy of Matthew Arnold's poems,
opening at "Sohrab and Rustum," read it with a quick-beating heart, and
then came to "Tristram and Iseult."  He knew little of "that Arthur" and
his knights of the Round Table, and Iseult of Brittany was a new figure
of romance to him.  In Tennyson, he had got no further than "Locksley
Hall," which, he said, had a right tune and wrong words; and "Maud,"
which "was big in pathos."  The story and the metre of "Tristram and
Iseult" beat in his veins.  He got to his feet, and, standing before the
window, repeated a verse aloud:

              "Cheer, cheer thy dogs into the brake,
               O hunter!  and without a fear
               Thy golden-tassell'd bugle blow,
               And through the glades thy pasture take
               For thou wilt rouse no sleepers here!
               For these thou seest are unmoved;
               Cold, cold as those who lived and loved
               A thousand years ago."

He was so engrossed that he did not hear the door open.  He again
repeated the lines with the affectionate modulation of a musician.  He
knew that they were right.  They were hot with life--a life that was no
more a part of this peaceful landscape than a palm-tree would be.  He
felt that he ought to read the poem in a desert, out by the Polar Sea,
down on the Amazon, yonder at Nukualofa; that it would fit in with
bearding the Spaniards two hundred years ago.  Bearding the Spaniards--
what did he mean by that?  He shut his eyes and saw a picture: A Moorish
castle, men firing from the battlements under a blazing sun, a multitude
of troops before a tall splendid-looking man, in armour chased with gold
and silver, and fine ribbons flying.  A woman was lifted upon the
battlements.  He saw the gold of her necklace shake on her flesh like
sunlight on little waves.  He heard a cry:

At that moment some one said behind him: "You have your father's romantic
manner."

He quietly put down the book, and met the other's eyes with a steady
directness.

"Your memory is good, sir."

"Less than thirty years--h'm, not so very long!"

"Looking back--no.  You are my father's brother, Ian Belward?"

"Your uncle Ian."

There was a kind of quizzical loftiness in Ian Belward's manner.

"Well, Uncle Ian, my father asked me to say that he hoped you would get
as much out of life as he had, and that you would leave it as honest."

"Thank you.  That is very like Robert.  He loved making little speeches.
It is a pity we did not pull together; but I was hasty, and he was rash.
He had a foolish career, and you are the result.  My mother has told me
the story--his and yours."

He sat down, ran his fingers through his grey-brown hair, and looking
into a mirror, adjusted the bow of his tie, and flipped the flying ends.
The kind of man was new to Gaston: self-indulgent, intelligent, heavily
nourished, nonchalant, with a coarse kind of handsomeness.  He felt that
here was a man of the world, equipped mentally cap-a-pie, as keen as
cruel.  Reading that in the light of the past, he was ready.

"And yet his rashness will hurt you longer than your haste hurt him."

The artist took the hint bravely.

"That you will have the estate, and I the title, eh?  Well, that looks
likely just now; but I doubt it all the same.  You'll mess the thing one
way or another."

He turned from the contemplation of himself, and eyed Gaston lazily.
Suddenly he started.

"Begad," he said, "where did you get it?"  He rose.

Gaston understood that he saw the resemblance to Sir Gaston Belward.

"Before you were, I am.  I am nearer the real stuff."

The other measured his words insolently:

"But the Pocahontas soils the stream--that's plain."

A moment after Gaston was beside the prostrate body of his uncle,
feeling his heart.

"Good God," he said, "I didn't think I hit so hard!"  He felt the pulse,
looked at the livid face, then caught open the waistcoat and put his ear
to the chest.  He did it all coolly, though swiftly--he was' born for
action and incident.  And during that moment of suspense he thought of a
hundred things, chiefly that, for the sake of the family--the family!
--he must not go to trial.  There were easier ways.

But presently he found that the heart beat.

"Good!  good!" he said, undid the collar, got some water, and rang a
bell.  Falby came.  Gaston ordered some brandy, and asked for Sir
William.  After the brandy had been given, consciousness returned.
Gaston lifted him up.

He presently swallowed more brandy, and while yet his head was at
Gaston's shoulder, said:

"You are a hard hitter.  But you've certainly lost the game now."

Here he made an effort, and with Gaston's assistance got to his feet.
At that moment Falby entered to say that Sir William was not in the
house.  With a wave of the hand Gaston dismissed him.  Deathly pale,
his uncle lifted his eyebrows at the graceful gesture.

"You do it fairly, nephew," he said ironically yet faintly,--"fairly in
such little things; but a gentleman, your uncle, your elder, with fists
--that smacks of low company!"

Gaston made a frank reply as he smothered his pride

"I am sorry for the blow, sir; but was the fault all mine?"

"The fault?  Is that the question?  Faults and manners are not the same.
At bottom you lack in manners; and that will ruin you at last."

"You slighted my mother!"

"Oh, no!  and if I had, you should not have seen it."

"I am not used to swallow insults.  It is your way, sir.  I know your
dealings with my father."

"A little more brandy, please.  But your father had manners, after all.
You are as rash as he; and in essential matters clownish--which he was
not."

Gaston was well in hand now, cooler even than his uncle.

"Perhaps you will sum up your criticism now, sir, to save future
explanation; and then accept my apology."

"To apologise for what no gentleman pardons or does, or acknowledges
openly when done--H'm!  Were it not well to pause in time, and go back
to your wild North?  Why so difficult a saddle--Tartarin after Napoleon?
Think--Tartarin's end!"

Gaston deprecated with a gesture: "Can I do anything for you, sir?"

His uncle now stood up, but swayed a little, and winced from sudden pain.
A wave of malice crossed his face.

"It's a pity we are relatives, with France so near," he said, "for I see
you love fighting."  After an instant he added, with a carelessness as
much assumed as natural: "You may ring the bell, and tell Falby to come
to my room.  And because I am to appear at the flare-up to-night--all in
honour of the prodigal's son--this matter is between us, and we meet as
loving relatives.  You understand my motives, Gaston Robert Belward?"

"Thoroughly."

Gaston rang the bell, and went to open the door for his uncle to pass
out.  Ian Belward buttoned his close-fitting coat, cast a glance in the
mirror, and then eyed Gaston's fine figure and well-cut clothes.  In the
presence of his nephew, there grew the envy of a man who knew that youth
was passing while every hot instinct and passion remained.  For his age
he was impossibly young.  Well past fifty he looked thirty-five, no more.
His luxurious soul loathed the approach of age.  Unlike many men of
indulgent natures, he loved youth for the sake of his art, and he had
sacrificed upon that altar more than most men-sacrificed others.  His
cruelty was not as that of the roughs of Seven Dials or Belleville, but
it was pitiless.  He admitted to those who asked him why and wherefore
when his selfishness became brutality, that everything had to give way
for his work.  His painting of Ariadne represented the misery of two
women's lives.  And of such was his kingdom of Art.

As he now looked at Gaston he was again struck with the resemblance to
the portrait in the dining-room, with his foreign out-of-the-way air:
something that should be seen beneath the flowing wigs of the Stuart
period.  He had long wanted to do a statue of the ill-fated Monmouth,
and another greater than that.  Here was the very man: with a proud,
daring, homeless look, a splendid body, and a kind of cavalier conceit.
It was significant of him, of his attitude towards himself where his work
was concerned, that he suddenly turned and shut the door again, telling
Falby, who appeared, to go to his room; and then said:

"You are my debtor, Cadet--I shall call you that: you shall have a chance
of paying."

"How?"

In a few concise words he explained, scanning the other's face eagerly.

Gaston showed nothing.  He had passed the apogee of irritation.

"A model?!" he questioned drily.

"Well, if you put it that way.  'Portrait' sounds better.  It shall be
Gaston Belward, gentleman; but we will call it in public, 'Monmouth the
Trespasser.'"

Gaston did not wince.  He had taken all the revenge he needed.  The idea
rather pleased him than other wise.  He had instincts about art, and he
liked pictures; statuary, poetry, romance; but he had no standards.  He
was keen also to see the life of the artist, to touch that aristocracy
more distinguished by mind than manners.

"If that gives 'clearance,' yes.  And your debt to me?"

"I owe you nothing.  You find your own meaning in my words.  I was
railing, you were serious.  Do not be serious.  Assume it sometimes,
if you will; be amusing mostly.  So, you will let me paint you--on your
own horse, eh?"

"That is asking much.  Where?"

"Well, a sketch here this afternoon, while the thing is hot--if this
damned headache stops!  Then at my studio in London in the spring, or"
--here he laughed--"in Paris.  I am modest, you see."

"As you will."

Gaston had had a desire for Paris, and this seemed to give a cue for
going.  He had tested London nearly all round.  He had yet to be
presented at St. James's, and elected a member of the Trafalgar Club.
Certainly he had not visited the Tower, Windsor Castle, and the Zoo;
but that would only disqualify him in the eyes of a colonial.

His uncle's face flushed slightly.  He had not expected such good
fortune.  He felt that he could do anything with this romantic figure.
He would do two pictures: Monmouth, and an ancient subject--that legend
of the ancient city of Ys, on the coast of Brittany.  He had had it in
his mind for years.  He came back and sat down, keen, eager.

"I've a big subject brewing," he said; "better than the Monmouth, though
it is good enough as I shall handle it.  It shall be royal, melancholy,
devilish: a splendid bastard with creation against him; the best, most
fascinating subject in English history.  The son dead on against the
father--and the uncle!"

He ceased for a minute, fashioning the picture in his mind; his face
pale, but alive with interest, which his enthusiasm made into dignity.
Then he went on:

"But the other: when the king takes up the woman--his mistress--and rides
into the sea with her on his horse, to save the town!  By Heaven, with
you to sit, it's my chance!  You've got it all there in you--the immense
manner.  You, a nineteenth century gentleman, to do this game of Ridley
Court, and paddle round the Row?  Not you!  You're clever, and you're
crafty, and you've a way with you.  But you'll come a cropper at this as
sure as I shall paint two big pictures--if you'll stand to your word."

"We need not discuss my position here.  I am in my proper place--in my
father's home.  But for the paintings and Paris, as you please."

"That is sensible--Paris is sensible; for you ought to see it right, and
I'll show you what half the world never see, and wouldn't appreciate if
they did.  You've got that old, barbaric taste, romance, and you'll find
your metier in Paris."

Gaston now knew the most interesting side of his uncle's character--which
few people ever saw, and they mostly women who came to wish they had
never felt the force of that occasional enthusiasm.  He had been in the
National Gallery several times, and over and over again he had visited
the picture places in Bond Street as he passed; but he wanted to get
behind art life, to dig out the heart of it.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

He was strong enough to admit ignorance
Not to show surprise at anything
Truth waits long, but whips hard







THE TRESPASSER

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.


VI.       WHICH TELLS OF STRANGE ENCOUNTERS
VII.      WHEREIN THE SEAL OF HIS HERITAGE IS SET
VIII.     HE ANSWERS AN AWKWARD QUESTION
IX.       HE FINDS NEW SPONSORS
X.        HE COMES TO "THE WAKING OF THE FIRE"
XI.       HE MAKES A GALLANT CONQUEST



CHAPTER VI

WHICH TELLS OF STRANGE ENCOUNTERS

A few hours afterwards Gaston sat on his horse, in a quiet corner of the
grounds, while his uncle sketched him.  After a time he said that Saracen
would remain quiet no longer.  His uncle held up the sketch.  Gaston
could scarcely believe that so strong and life-like a thing were possible
in the time.  It had force and imagination.  He left his uncle with a
nod, rode quietly through the park, into the village, and on to the moor.
At the top he turned and looked down.  The perfectness of the landscape
struck him; it was as if the picture had all grown there--not a suburban
villa, not a modern cottage, not one tall chimney of a manufactory, but
just the sweet common life.  The noises of the village were soothing, the
soft smell of the woodland came over.  He watched a cart go by idly,
heavily clacking.

As he looked, it came to him: was his uncle right after all?  Was he out
of place here?  He was not a part of this, though he had adapted himself
and had learned many fine social ways.  He knew that he lived not exactly
as though born here and grown up with it all.  But it was also true that
he had a native sense of courtesy which people called distinguished.
There was ever a kind of mannered deliberation in his bearing--a part of
his dramatic temper, and because his father had taught him dignity where
there were no social functions for its use.  His manner had, therefore,
a carefulness which in him was elegant artifice.

It could not be complained that he did not act after the fashion of
gentle people when with them.  But it was equally true that he did many
things which the friends of his family could not and would not have done.
For instance, none would have pitched a tent in the grounds, slept in it,
read in it, and lived in it--when it did not rain.  Probably no one of
them would have, at individual expense, sent the wife of the village
policeman to a hospital in London, to be cured--or to die--of cancer.
None would have troubled to insist that a certain stagnant pool in the
village be filled up.  Nor would one have suddenly risen in court and
have acted as counsel for a gipsy!  At the same time, all were too well-
bred to think that Gaston did this because the gipsy had a daughter with
him, a girl of strong, wild beauty, with a look of superiority over her
position.

He thought of all the circumstances now.

It was very many months ago.  The man had been accused of stealing and
assault, but the evidence was unconvincing to Gaston.  The feeling in
court was against the gipsy.  Fearing a verdict against him, Gaston rose
and cross-examined the witnesses, and so adroitly bewildered both them
and the justices who sat with his grandfather on the case, that, at last,
he secured the man's freedom.  The girl was French, and knew English
imperfectly.  Gaston had her sworn, and made the most of her evidence.
Then, learning that an assault had been made on the gipsy's van by some
lads who worked at mills in a neighbouring town, he pushed for their
arrest, and himself made up the loss to the gipsy.

It is possible that there was in the mind of the girl what some common
people thought: that the thing was done for her favour; for she viewed it
half-gratefully, half-frowningly, till, on the village green, Gaston
asked her father what he wished to do--push on or remain to act against
the lads.

The gipsy, angry as he was, wished to move on.  Gaston lifted his hat to
the girl and bade her good-bye.  Then she saw that his motives had been
wholly unselfish--even quixotic, as it appeared to her--silly, she would
have called it, if silliness had not seemed unlikely in him.  She had
never met a man like him before.  She ran her fingers through her golden-
brown hair nervously, caught at a flying bit of old ribbon at her waist,
and said in French:

"He is honest altogether, sir.  He did not steal, and he was not there
when it happened."

"I know that, my girl.  That is why I did it."

She looked at him keenly.  Her eyes ran up and down his figure, then met
his curiously.  Their looks swam for a moment.  Something thrilled in
them both.  The girl took a step nearer.

"You are as much a Romany here as I am," she said, touching her bosom
with a quick gesture.  "You do not belong; you are too good for it.  How
do I know?  I do not know; I feel.  I will tell your fortune," she
suddenly added, reaching for his hand.  "I have only known three that I
could do it with honestly and truly, and you are one.  It is no lie.
There is something in it.  My mother had it; but it's all sham mostly."
Then, under a tree on the green, he indifferent to village gossip, she
took his hand and told him--not of his fortune alone.  In half-coherent
fashion she told him of the past--of his life in the North.  She then
spoke of his future.  She told him of a woman, of another, and another
still; of an accident at sea, and of a quarrel; then, with a low, wild
laugh, she stopped, let go his hand, and would say no more.  But her face
was all flushed, and her eyes like burning beads.  Her father stood near,
listening.  Now he took her by the arm.

"Here, Andree, that's enough," he said, with rough kindness; "it's no
good for you or him."

He turned to Gaston, and said in English:

"She's sing'lar, like her mother afore her.  But she's straight."

Gaston lit a cigar.

"Of course."  He looked kindly at the girl.  "You are a weird sort,
Andree, and perhaps you are right that I'm a Romany too; but I don't know
where it begins and where it ends.  You are not English gipsies?!" he
added, to the father.

"I lived in England when I was young.  Her mother was a Breton--not a
Romany.  We're on the way to France now.  She wants to see where her
mother was born.  She's got the Breton lingo, and she knows some English;
but she speaks French mostly."

"Well, well," rejoined Gaston, "take care of yourself, and good luck to
you.  Good-bye--good-bye, Andree."  He put his hand in his pocket to give
her some money, but changed his mind.  Her eye stopped him.  He shook
hands with the man, then turned to her again.  Her eyes were on him--hot,
shining.  He felt his blood throb, but he returned the look with good-
natured nonchalance, shook her hand, raised his hat, and walked away,
thinking what a fine, handsome creature she was.  Presently he said:
"Poor girl, she'll look at some fellow like that one day, with tragedy
the end thereof!"

He then fell to wondering about her almost uncanny divination.  He knew
that all his life he himself had had strange memories, as well as certain
peculiar powers which had put the honest phenomena and the trickery of
the Medicine Men in the shade.  He had influenced people by the sheer
force of presence.  As he walked on, he came to a group of trees in the
middle of the common.  He paused for a moment, and looked back.  The
gipsy's van was moving away, and in the doorway stood the girl, her hand
over her eyes, looking towards him.  He could see the raw colour of her
scarf.  "She'll make wild trouble," he said to himself.

As Gaston thought of this event, he moved his horse slowly towards a
combe, and looked out over a noble expanse--valley, field, stream, and
church-spire.  As he gazed, he saw seated at some distance a girl
reading.  Not far from her were two boys climbing up and down the combe.
He watched them.  Presently he saw one boy creep along a shelf of rock
where the combe broke into a quarry, let himself drop upon another shelf
below, and then perch upon an overhanging ledge.  He presently saw that
the lad was now afraid to return.  He heard the other lad cry out, saw
the girl start up, and run forward, look over the edge of the combe, and
then make as if to go down.  He set his horse to the gallop, and called
out.  The girl saw him, and paused.  In two minutes he was off his horse
and beside her.

It was Alice Wingfield.  She had brought out three boys, who had come
with her from London, where she had spent most of the year nursing their
sick mother, her relative.

"I'll have him up in a minute," he said, as he led Saracen to a sapling
near.  "Don't go near the horse."

He swung himself down from ledge to ledge, and soon was beside the boy.
In another moment he had the youngster on his back, came slowly up, and
the adventurer was safe.

"Silly Walter," the girl said, "to frighten yourself and give Mr. Belward
trouble."

"I didn't think I'd be afraid," protested the lad; "but when I looked
over the ledge my head went round, and I felt sick--like with the
channel."

Gaston had seen Alice Wingfield several times at church and in the
village, and once when, with Lady Belward, he had returned the
archdeacon's call; but she had been away most of the time since his
arrival.  She had impressed him as a gentle, wise, elderly little
creature, who appeared to live for others, and chiefly for her
grandfather.  She was not unusually pretty, nor yet young,--quite
as old as himself,--and yet he wondered what it was that made her so
interesting.  He decided that it was the honesty of her nature, her
beautiful thoroughness; and then he thought little more about her.  But
now he dropped into quiet, natural talk with her, as if they had known
each other for years.  But most women found that they dropped quickly
into easy talk with him.  That was because he had not learned the small
gossip which varies little with a thousand people in the same
circumstances.  But he had a naive fresh sense, everything interested
him, and he said what he thought with taste and tact, sometimes with wit,
and always in that cheerful contemplative mood which influences women.
Some of his sayings were so startling and heretical that they had gone
the rounds, and certain crisp words out of the argot of the North were
used by women who wished to be chic and amusing.

Not quite certain why he stayed, but talking on reflectively, Gaston at
last said:

"You will be coming to us to-night, of course?  We are having a barbecue
of some kind."

"Yes, I hope so; though my grandfather does not much care to have me go."

"I suppose it is dull for him."

"I am not sure it is that."

"No?  What then?"

She shook her head.

"The affair is in your honour, Mr. Belward, isn't it?

"Does that answer my question?!" he asked genially.

She blushed.

"No, no, no!  That is not what I meant."

"I was unfair.  Yes, I believe the matter does take that colour;
though why, I don't know."

She looked at him with simple earnestness.

"You ought to be proud of it; and you ought to be glad of such a high
position where you can do so much good, if you will."

He smiled, and ran his hand down his horse's leg musingly before he
replied:

"I've not thought much of doing good, I tell you frankly.  I wasn't
brought up to think about it; I don't know that I ever did any good in my
life.  I supposed it was only missionaries and women who did that sort of
thing."

"But you wrong yourself.  You have done good in this village.  Why, we
all have talked of it; and though it wasn't done in the usual way--rather
irregularly--still it was doing good."

He looked down at her astonished.

"Well, here's a pretty libel!  Doing good 'irregularly'?  Why, where have
I done good at all?"

She ran over the names of several sick people in the village whose bills
he had paid, the personal help and interest he had given to many, and,
last of all, she mentioned the case of the village postmaster.

Since Gaston had come, postmasters had been changed.  The little pale-
faced man who had first held the position disappeared one night, and in
another twenty-four hours a new one was in his place.  Many stories had
gone about.  It was rumoured that the little man was short in his
accounts, and had been got out of the way by Gaston Belward.
Archdeacon Varcoe knew the truth, and had said that Gaston's sin was not
unpardonable, in spite of a few squires and their dames who declared it
was shocking that a man should have such loose ideas, that no good could
come to the county from it, and that he would put nonsense into the heads
of the common people.  Alice Wingfield was now to hear Gaston's view of
the matter.

"So that's it, eh?  Live and let live is doing good?  In that case it
is easy to be a saint.  What else could a man do?  You say that I am
generous--How?  What have I spent out of my income on these little
things?  My income--how did I get it?  I didn't earn it; neither did my
father.  Not a stroke have I done for it.  I sit high and dry there in
the Court, they sit low there in the village; and you know how they live.
Well, I give away a little money which these people and their fathers
earned for my father and me; and for that you say I am doing good, and
some other people say I am doing harm--'dangerous charity,' and all that!
I say that the little I have done is what is always done where man is
most primitive, by people who never heard 'doing good' preached."

"We must have names for things, you know," she said.

"I suppose so, where morality and humanity have to be taught as Christian
duty, and not as common manhood."

"Tell me," she presently said, "about Sproule, the postmaster."

"Oh, that?  Well, I will.  The first time I entered the post-office I saw
there was something on the man's mind.  A youth of twenty-three oughtn't
to look as he did--married only a year or two also, with a pretty wife
and child.  I used to talk to them a good deal, and one day I said to
him: 'You look seedy; what's the matter?' He flushed, and got nervous.
I made up my mind it was money.  If I had been here longer, I should have
taken him aside and talked to him like a father.  As it was, things slid
along.  I was up in town, and here and there.  One evening as I came back
from town I saw a nasty-looking Jew arrive.  The little postmaster met
him, and they went away together.  He was in the scoundrel's hands;
had been betting, and had borrowed first from the Jew, then from the
Government.  The next evening I was just starting down to have a talk
with him, when an official came to my grandfather to swear out a warrant.
I lost no time; got my horse and trap, went down to the office, gave
the boy three minutes to tell me the truth, and then I sent him away.
I fixed it up with the authorities, and the wife and child follow the
youth to America next week.  That's all."

"He deserved to get free, then?"

"He deserved to be punished, but not as he would have been.  There wasn't
really a vicious spot in the man.  And the wife and child--what was a
little justice to the possible happiness of those three?  Discretion is a
part of justice, and I used it, as it is used every day in business and
judicial life, only we don't see it.  When it gets public, why, some one
gets blamed.  In this case I was the target; but I don't mind in the
least--not in the least.  .  .  .  Do you think me very startling or
lawless?"

"Never lawless; but one could not be quite sure what you would do in any
particular case."  She looked up at him admiringly.

They had not noticed the approach of Archdeacon Varcoe till he was very
near them.  His face was troubled.  He had seen how earnest was their
conversation, and for some reason it made him uneasy.  The girl saw him
first, and ran to meet him.  He saw her bright delighted look, and he
sighed involuntarily.  "Something has worried you," she said caressingly.
Then she told him of the accident, and they all turned and went back
towards the Court, Gaston walking his horse.  Near the church they met
Sir William and Lady Belward.  There were salutations, and presently
Gaston slowly followed his grandfather and grandmother into the
courtyard.

Sir William, looking back, said to his wife: "Do you think that Gaston
should be told?"

"No, no, there is no danger.  Gaston, my dear, shall marry Delia
Gasgoyne."

"Shall marry?  wherefore 'shall'?  Really, I do not see."

"She likes him, she is quite what we would have her, and he is interested
in her.  My dear, I have seen--I have watched for a year."

He put his hand on hers.

"My wife, you are a goodly prophet."

When Archdeacon Varcoe entered his study on returning, he sat down in a
chair, and brooded long.  "She must be told," he said at last, aloud.
"Yes, yes, at once.  God help us both!"




CHAPTER VII

WHEREIN THE SEAL OF HIS HERITAGE IS SET

"Sophie, when you talk with the man, remember that you are near fifty,
and faded.  Don't be sentimental."  So said Mrs. Gasgoyne to Lady Dargan,
as they saw Gaston coming down the ballroom with Captain Maudsley.

"Reine, you try one's patience.  People would say you were not quite
disinterested."

"You mean Delia!  Now, listen.  I haven't any wish but that Gaston
Belward shall see Delia very seldom indeed.  He will inherit the property
no doubt, and Sir William told me that he had settled a decent fortune on
him; but for Delia--no--no--no.  Strange, isn't it, when Lady Harriet
over there aches for him, Indian blood and all?  And why?  Because this
is a good property, and the fellow is distinguished and romantic-looking:
but he is impossible--perfectly impossible.  Every line of his face says
shipwreck."

"You are not usually so prophetic."

"Of course.  But I am prophetic now, for Delia is more than interested,
silly chuck!  Did you ever read the story of the other Gaston--Sir
Gaston--whom this one resembles?  No?  Well, you will find it thinly
disguised in The Knight of Five Joys.  He was killed at Naseby, my dear;
killed, not by the enemy, but by a page in Rupert's cavalry.  The page
was a woman!  It's in this one too.  Indian and French blood is a sad
tincture.  He is not wicked at heart, not at all; but he will do mad
things yet, my dear.  For he'll tire of all this, and then--half-mourning
for some one!"

Gaston enjoyed talking with Mrs. Gasgoyne as to no one else.  Other women
often flattered him, she never did.  Frankly, crisply, she told him
strange truths, and, without mercy, crumbled his wrong opinions.  He had
a sense of humour, and he enjoyed her keen chastening raillery.  Besides,
her talk was always an education in the fine lights and shadows of this
social life.  He came to her now with a smile, greeted her heartily, and
then turned to Lady Dargan.  Captain Maudsley carried off Mrs. Gasgoyne,
and the two were left together--the second time since the evening of
Gaston's arrival, so many months before.  Lady Dargan had been abroad,
and was just returned.

They talked a little on unimportant things, and presently Lady Dargan
said:

"Pardon my asking, but will you tell me why you wore a red ribbon in your
button-hole the first night you came?"

He smiled, and then looked at her a little curiously.  "My luggage had
not come, and I wore an old suit of my father's."

Lady Dargan sighed deeply.

"The last night he was in England he wore that coat at dinner," she
murmured.

"Pardon me, Lady Dargan--you put that ribbon there?"

"Yes."

Her eyes were on him with a candid interest and regard.

"I suppose," he went on, "that his going was abrupt to you?"

"Very--very!" she answered.

She longed to ask if his father ever mentioned her name, but she dared
not.  Besides, as she said to herself, to what good now?  But she asked
him to tell her something about his father.  He did so quietly, picking
out main incidents, and setting them forth, as he had the ability, with
quiet dramatic strength.  He had just finished when Delia Gasgoyne came
up with Lord Dargan.

Presently Lord Dargan asked Gaston if he would bring Lady Dargan to the
other end of the room, where Miss Gasgoyne was to join her mother.  As
they went, Lady Dargan said a little breathlessly:

"Will you do something for me?"

"I would do much for you," was his reply, for he understood!

"If ever you need a friend, if ever you are in trouble, will you let me
know?  I wish to take an interest in you.  Promise me."

"I cannot promise, Lady Dargan," he answered, "for such trouble as I have
had before I have had to bear alone, and the habit is fixed, I fear.
Still, I am grateful to you just the same, and I shall never forget it.
But will you tell me why people regard me from so tragical a stand-
point?"

"Do they?"

"Well, there's yourself, and there's Mrs. Gasgoyne, and there's my uncle
Ian."

"Perhaps we think you may have trouble because of your uncle Ian."

Gaston shook his head enigmatically, and then said ironically:

"As they would put it in the North, Lady Dargan, he'll cut no figure in
that matter.  I remember for two."

"That is right--that is right.  Always think that Ian Belward is bad--bad
at heart.  He is as fascinating as--"

"As the Snake?"

"--as the Snake, and as cruel!  It is the cruelty of wicked selfishness.
Somehow, I forget that I am talking to his nephew.  But we all know Ian
Belward--at least, all women do."

"And at least one man does," he answered gravely.  The next minute Gaston
walked down the room with Delia Gasgoyne on his arm.  The girl delicately
showed her preference, and he was aware of it.  It pleased him--pleased
his unconscious egoism.  The early part of his life had been spent among
Indian women, half-breeds, and a few dull French or English folk, whose
chief charm was their interest in that wild, free life, now so distant.
He had met Delia many times since his coming; and there was that in her
manner--a fine high-bred quality, a sweet speaking reserve--which
interested him.  He saw her as the best product of this convention.

She was no mere sentimental girl, for she had known at least six seasons,
and had refused at least six lovers.  She had a proud mind, not wide,
suited to her position.  Most men had flattered her, had yielded to her;
this man, either with art or instinctively, mastered her, secured her
interest by his personality.  Every woman worth the having, down in her
heart, loves to be mastered: it gives her a sense of security, and she
likes to lean; for, strong as she may be at times, she is often
singularly weak.  She knew that her mother deprecated "that Belward
enigma," but this only sent her on the dangerous way.

To-night she questioned him about his life, and how he should spend the
summer.  Idling in France, he said.  And she?  She was not sure; but she
thought that she also would be idling about France in her father's yacht.
So they might happen to meet.  Meanwhile?  Well, meanwhile, there were
people coming to stay at Peppingham, their home.  August would see that
over.  Then freedom.

Was it freedom, to get away from all this--from England and rule and
measure?  No, she did not mean quite that.  She loved the life with all
its rules; she could not live without it.  She had been brought up to
expect and to do certain things.  She liked her comforts, her luxuries,
many pretty things about her, and days without friction.  To travel?
Yes, with all modern comforts, no long stages, a really good maid, and
some fresh interesting books.

What kind of books?  Well, Walter Pater's essays; "The Light of Asia";
a novel of that wicked man Thomas Hardy; and something light--"The
Innocents Abroad"--with, possibly, a struggle through De Musset,
to keep up her French.

It did not seem exciting to Gaston, but it did sound honest, and it was
in the picture.  He much preferred Meredith, and Swinburne, and Dumas,
and Hugo; but with her he did also like the whimsical Mark Twain.

He thought of suggestions that Lady Belward had often thrown out; of
those many talks with Sir William, excellent friends as they were, in
which the baronet hinted at the security he would feel if there was a
second family of Belwards.  What if he--?  He smiled strangely, and
shrank.

Marriage?  There was the touchstone.

After the dance, when he was taking her to her mother, he saw a pale
intense face looking out to him from a row of others.  He smiled, and the
smile that came in return was unlike any he had ever seen Alice Wingfield
wear.  He was puzzled.  It flashed to him strange pathos, affection, and
entreaty.  He took Delia Gasgoyne to her mother, talked to Lady Belward
a little, and then went quietly back to where he had seen Alice.  She was
gone.  Just then some people from town came to speak to him, and he was
detained.  When he was free he searched, but she was nowhere to be found.
He went to Lady Belward.  Yes, Miss Wingfield had gone.  Lady Belward
looked at Gaston anxiously, and asked him why he was curious.  "Because
she's a lonely-looking little maid," he said, "and I wanted to be kind to
her.  She didn't seem happy a while ago."

Lady Belward was reassured.

"Yes, she is a sweet creature, Gaston," she said, and added: "You are a
good boy to-night, a very good host indeed.  It is worth the doing," she
went on, looking out on the guests proudly.  "I did not think I should
ever come to it again with any heart, but I do it for you gladly.  Now,
away to your duty," she added, tapping his breast affectionately with her
fan, "and when everything is done, come and take me to my room."

Ian Belward passed Gaston as he went.  He had seen the affectionate
passages.

"'For a good boy!' 'God bless our Home!"' he said, ironically.

Gaston saw the mark of his hand on his uncle's chin, and he forbore
ironical reply.

"The home is worth the blessing," he rejoined quietly, and passed on.

Three hours later the guests had all gone, and Lady Belward, leaning on
her grandson's arm, went to her boudoir, while Ian and his father sought
the library.  Ian was going next morning.  The conference was not likely
to be cheerful.

Inside her boudoir, Lady Belward sank into a large chair, and let her
head fall back and her eyes close.  She motioned Gaston to a seat.
Taking one near, he waited.  After a time she opened her eyes and drew
herself up.

"My dear," she said, "I wish to talk with you."

"I shall be very glad; but isn't it late? and aren't you tired,
grandmother?"

"I shall sleep better after," she responded, gently.  She then began
to review the past; her own long unhappiness, Robert's silence, her
uncertainty as to his fate, and the after hopelessness, made greater
by Ian's conduct.  In low, kind words she spoke of his coming and the
renewal of her hopes, coupled with fear also that he might not fit in
with his new life, and--she could say it now--do something unbearable.
Well, he had done nothing unworthy of their name; had acted, on the
whole, sensibly; and she had not been greatly surprised at certain little
oddnesses, such as the tent in the grounds, an impossible deer-hunt, and
some unusual village charities and innovations on the estate.  Nor did
she object to Brillon, though he had sometimes thrown servants'-hall into
disorder, and had caused the stablemen and the footmen to fight.  His
ear-rings and hair were startling, but they were not important.  Gaston
had been admired by the hunting-field--of which they were glad, for it
was a test of popularity.  She saw that most people liked him.  Lord
Dunfolly and Admiral Highburn were enthusiastic.  For her own part, she
was proud and grateful.  She could enjoy every grain of comfort he gave
them; and she was thankful to make up to Robert's son what Robert himself
had lost--poor boy--poor boy!

Her feelings were deep, strong, and sincere.  Her grandson had come,
strong, individual, considerate, and had moved the tender courses of her
nature.  At this moment Gaston had his first deep feeling of
responsibility.

"My dear," she said at last, "people in our position have important
duties.  Here is a large estate.  Am I not clear?  You will never be
quite part of this life till you bring a wife here.  That will give you a
sense of responsibility.  You will wake up to many things then.  Will you
not marry?  There is Delia Gasgoyne.  Your grandfather and I would be so
glad.  She is worthy in every way, and she likes you.  She is a good
girl.  She has never frittered her heart away; and she would make you
proud of her."

She reached out an anxious hand, and touched his shoulder.  His eyes were
playing with the pattern of the carpet; but he slowly raised them to
hers, and looked for a moment without speaking.  Suddenly, in spite of
himself, he laughed--laughed outright, but not loudly.

Marriage?  Yes, here was the touchstone.  Marry a girl whose family had
been notable for hundreds of years?  For the moment he did not remember
his own family.  This was one of the times when he was only conscious
that he had savage blood, together with a strain of New World French,
and that his life had mostly been a range of adventure and common toil.
This new position was his right, but there were times when it seemed to
him that he was an impostor; others, when he felt himself master of it
all, when he even had a sense of superiority--why he could not tell;
but life in this old land of tradition and history had not its due
picturesqueness.  With his grandmother's proposal there shot up in him
the thought that for him this was absurd.  He to pace the world beside
this fine queenly creature--Delia Gasgoyne--carrying on the traditions
of the Belwards!  Was it, was it possible?

"Pardon me," he said at last gently, as he saw Lady Belward shrink and
then look curiously at him, "something struck me, and I couldn't help
it."

"Was what I said at all ludicrous?"

"Of course not; you said what was natural for you to say, and I thought
what was natural for me to think, at first blush."

"There is something wrong," she urged fearfully.  "Is there any reason
why you cannot marry?  Gaston,"--she trembled towards him,--"you have not
deceived us--you are not married?"

"My wife is dead, as I told you," he answered gravely, musingly.

"Tell me: there is no woman who has a claim on you?"

"None that I know of--not one.  My follies have not run that way."

"Thank God!  Then there is no reason why you should not marry.  Oh, when
I look at you I am proud, I am glad that I live!  You bring my youth, my
son back; and I long for a time when I may clasp your child in my arms,
and know that Robert's heritage will go on and on, and that there will be
made up to him, somehow, all that he lost.  Listen: I am an old,
crippled, suffering woman; I shall soon have done with all this coming
and going, and I speak to you out of the wisdom of sorrow.  Had Robert
married, all would have gone well.  He did not: he got into trouble,
then came Ian's hand in it all; and you know the end.  I fear for you,
I do indeed.  You will have sore temptations.  Marry--marry soon,
and make us happy."

He was quiet enough now.  He had seen the grotesque image, now he was
facing the thing behind it.  "Would it please you so very much?!" he
said, resting a hand gently on hers.

"I wish to see a child of yours in my arms, dear."

"And the woman you have chosen is Delia Gasgoyne?"

"The choice is for you; but you seem to like each other, and we care for
her."

He sat thinking for a time, then he got up, and said slowly:

"It shall be so, if Miss Gasgoyne will have me.  And I hope it may turn
out as you wish."

Then he stooped and kissed her on the cheek.  The proud woman, who had
unbent little in her lifetime, whose eyes had looked out so coldly on the
world, who felt for her son Ian an almost impossible aversion, drew down
his head and kissed it.

"Indian and all?!" he asked, with a quaint bitterness.

"Everything, my dear," she answered.  "God bless you! Good-night."

A few moments after, Gaston went to the library.  He heard the voices
of Sir William and his uncle.  He knocked and entered.  Ian, with
exaggerated courtesy, rose.  Gaston, with easy coolness, begged him
to sit, lit a cigar, and himself sat.

"My father has been feeding me with raw truths, Cadet," said his uncle;
"and I've been eating them unseasoned.  We have not been, nor are likely
to be, a happy family, unless in your saturnian reign we learn to say,
pax vobiscum--do you know Latin?  For I'm told the money-bags and the
stately pile are for you.  You are to beget children before the Lord,
and sit in the seat of Justice: 'tis for me to confer honour on you all
by my genius!"

Gaston sat very still, and, when the speech was ended, said tentatively:

"Why rob yourself?"

"In honouring you all?"

"No, sir; in not yourself having 'a saturnian reign'."

"You are generous."

"No: I came here to ask for a home, for what was mine through my father.
I ask, and want, nothing more--not even to beget children before the
Lord!"

"How mellow the tongue!  Well, Cadet, I am not going to quarrel.  Here
we are with my father.  See, I am willing to be friends.  But you mustn't
expect that I will not chasten your proud spirit now and then.  That you
need it, this morning bears witness."

Sir William glanced from one to the other curiously.  He was cold and
calm, and looked worn.  He had had a trying half-hour with his son, and
it had told on him.

Gaston at once said to his grandfather: "Of this morning, sir, I will
tell you.  I--"

Ian interrupted him.

"No, no; that is between us.  Let us not worry my father."

Sir William smiled ironically.

"Your solicitude is refreshing, Ian."

"Late fruit is the sweetest, sir."

Presently Sir William asked Gaston the result of the talk with Lady
Belward.  Gaston frankly said that he was ready to do as they wished.
Sir William then said they had chosen this time because Ian was there,
and it was better to have all open and understood.

Ian laughed.

"Taming the barbarian!  How seriously you all take it.  I am the jester
for the King.  In the days of the flood I'll bring the olive leaf.  You
are all in the wash of sentiment: you'll come to the wicked uncle one day
for common-sense.  But, never mind, Cadet; we are to be friends.  Yes,
really.  I do not fear for my heritage, and you'll need a helping hand
one of these days.  Besides, you are an interesting fellow.  So, if you
will put up with my acid tongue, there's no reason why we shouldn't hit
it off."

To Sir William's great astonishment, Ian held out his hand with a
genial smile, which was tolerably honest, for his indulgent nature was
as capable of great geniality as incapable of high moral conceptions.
Then, he had before his eye, "Monmouth" and "The King of Ys."

Gaston took his hand, and said: "I have no wish to be an enemy."

Sir William rose, looking at them both.  He could not understand Ian's
attitude, and he distrusted.  Yet peace was better than war.  Ian's truce
was also based on a belief that Gaston would make skittles of things.
A little while afterwards Gaston sat in his room, turning over events
in his mind.  Time and again his thoughts returned to the one thing--
marriage.  That marriage with his Esquimaux wife had been in one sense
none at all, for the end was sure from the beginning.  It was in keeping
with his youth, the circumstances, the life, it had no responsibilities.
But this?  To become an integral part of the life--the English country
gentleman; to be reduced, diluted, to the needs of the convention, and no
more?  Let him think of the details:--a justice of the peace: to sit on a
board of directors; to be, perhaps, Master of the Hounds; to unite with
the Bishop in restoring the cathedral; to make an address at the annual
flower show.  His wife to open bazaars, give tennis-parties, and be
patron to the clergy; himself at last, no doubt, to go into Parliament;
to feel the petty, or serious, responsibilities of a husband and a
landlord.  Monotony, extreme decorum, civility to the world; endless
politeness to his wife; with boys at Eton and girls somewhere else; and
the kind of man he must be to do his duty in all and to all!

It seemed impossible.  He rose and paced the floor.  Never till this
moment had the full picture of his new life come close.  He felt stifled.
He put on a cap, and, descending the stairs, went out into the court-yard
and walked about, the cool air refreshing him.  Gradually there settled
upon him a stoic acceptance of the conditions.  But would it last?

He stood still and looked at the pile of buildings before him; then he
turned towards the little church close by, whose spire and roof could be
seen above the wall.  He waved his hand, as when within it on the day of
his coming, and said with irony:

"Now for the marriage-linen, Sir Gaston!"

He heard a low knocking at the gate.  He listened.  Yes, there was no
mistake.  He went to it, and asked quietly:

"Who is there?"

There was no reply.  Still the knocking went on.  He quietly opened the
gate, and threw it back.  A figure in white stepped through and slowly
passed him.  It was Alice Wingfield.  He spoke to her.  She did not
answer.  He went close to her and saw that she was asleep!

She was making for the entrance door.  He took her hand gently, and led
her into a side door, and on into the ballroom.  She moved towards a
window through which the moonlight streamed, and sat on a cushioned bench
beneath it.  It was the spot where he had seen her at the dance.  She
leaned forward, looking into space, as she did at him then.  He moved
and got in her line of vision.

The picture was weird.  She wore a soft white chamber-gown, her hair
hung loose on her shoulders, her pale face cowled it in.  The look was
inexpressibly sad.  Over her fell dim, coloured lights from the stained-
glass windows; and shadowy ancestors looked silently down from the
armour-hung walls.

To Gaston, collected as he was, it gave an ominous feeling.  Why did she
come here even in her sleep?  What did that look mean?  He gazed intently
into her eyes.

All at once her voice came low and broken, and a sob followed the words:

"Gaston, my brother, my brother!"

He stood for a moment stunned, gazing helplessly at her passive figure.

"Gaston, my brother!" he repeated to himself.  Then the painful matter
dawned upon him.  This girl, the granddaughter of the rector of the
parish, was his father's daughter--his own sister.  He had a sudden
spring of new affection--unfelt for those other relations, his by the
rights of the law and the gospel.  The pathos of the thing caught him in
the throat--for her how pitiful, how unhappy!  He was sure that, somehow,
she had only come to know of it since the afternoon.  Then there had been
so different a look in her face!

One thing was clear: he had no right to this secret, and it must be for
now as if it had never been.  He came to her, and took her hand.  She
rose.  He led her from the room, out into the court-yard, and from there
through the gate into the road.

All was still.  They passed over to the rectory.  Just inside the gate,
Gaston saw a figure issue from the house, and come quickly towards them.
It was the rector, excited, anxious.

Gaston motioned silence, and pointed to her.  Then he briefly whispered
how she had come.  The clergyman said that he had felt uneasy about her,
had gone to her room, and was just issuing in search of her.  Gaston
resigned her, softly advised not waking her, and bade the clergyman good-
night.

But presently he turned, touched the arm of the old man, and said
meaningly:

"I know."

The rector's voice shook as he replied: "You have not spoken to her?"

"No."

"You will not speak of it?"

"No."

"Unless I should die, and she should wish it?"

"Always as she wishes."

They parted, and Gaston returned to the Court.




CHAPTER VIII

HE ANSWERS AN AWKWARD QUESTION

The next morning Brillon brought a note from Ian Belward, which said that
he was starting, and asked Gaston to be sure and come to Paris.  The note
was carelessly friendly.  After reading it, he lay thinking.  Presently
he chanced to see Jacques look intently at him.

"Well, Brillon, what is it?!" he asked genially.  Jacques had come on
better than Gaston had hoped for, but the light play of his nature was
gone--he was grave, almost melancholy; and, in his way, as notable as his
master.  Their life in London had changed him much.  A valet in St.
James's Street was not a hunting comrade on the Coppermine River.  Often
when Jacques was left alone he stood at the window looking out on the gay
traffic, scarcely stirring; his eyes slow, brooding.  Occasionally,
standing so, he would make the sacred gesture.  One who heard him swear
now and then, in a calm, deliberate way,--at the cook and the porter,--
would have thought the matters in strange contrast.  But his religion
was a central habit, followed as mechanically as his appetite or the
folding of his master's clothes.  Besides, like most woodsmen, he was
superstitious.  Gaston was kind with him, keeping, however, a firm hand
till his manner had become informed by the new duties.  Jacques's
greatest pleasure was his early morning visits to the stables.  Here were
Saracen and Jim the broncho-sleek, savage, playful.  But he touched the
highest point of his London experience when they rode in the Park.

In this Gaston remained singular.  He rode always with Jacques.  Perhaps
he wished to preserve one possible relic of the old life, perhaps he
liked this touch of drama; or both.  It created notice, criticism, but he
was superior to that.  Time and again people asked him to ride, but he
always pleaded another engagement.  He would then be seen with Jacques
plus Jacques's earrings and the wonderful hair, riding grandly in the
Row.  Jacques's eyes sparkled and a snatch of song came to his lips at
these times.

No figures in the Park were so striking.  There was nothing bizarre, but
Gaston had a distinguished look, and women who had felt his hand at their
waists in the dance the night before, now knew him, somehow, at a grave
distance.  Though Gaston did not say it to himself, these were the hours
when he really was with the old life--lived it again--prairie, savannah,
ice-plain, alkali desert.  When, dismounting, the horses were taken and
they went up the stairs, Gaston would softly lay his whip across
Jacques's shoulders without speaking.  This was their only ritual of
camaraderie, and neglect of it would have fretted the half-breed.  Never
had man such a servant.  No matter at what hour Gaston returned, he found
Jacques waiting; and when he woke he found him ready, as now, on this
morning, after a strange night.

"What is it, Jacques?!" he repeated.

The old name!  Jacques shivered a little with pleasure.  Presently he
broke out with:

"Monsieur, when do we go back?"

"Go back where?"

"To the North, monsieur."

"What's in your noddle now, Brillon?"

The impatient return to "Brillon" cut Jacques like a whip.

"Monsieur," he suddenly said, his face glowing, his hands opening
nervously, "we have eat, we have drunk, we have had the dance and the
great music here: is it enough?  Sometimes as you sleep you call out, and
you toss to the strokes of the tower-clock.  When we lie on the Plains of
Yath from sunset to sunrise, you never stir then.  You remember when we
sleep on the ledge of the Voshti mountain--so narrow that we were tied
together?  Well, we were as babes in blankets.  In the Prairie of the Ten
Stars your fingers were on the trigger firm as a bolt; here I have watch
them shake with the coffee-cup.  Monsieur, you have seen: is it enough?
You have lived here: is it like the old lodge and the long trail?"

Gaston sat up in bed, looked in the mirror opposite, ran his fingers
through his hair, regarded his hands, turning them over, and then, with
sharp impatience, said:

"Go to hell!"

The little man's face flushed to his hair; he sucked in the air with a
gasp.  Without a word, he went to the dressing-table, poured out the
shaving-water, threw a towel over his arm, and turned to come to the bed;
but, all at once, he sidled back, put down the water, and furtively drew
a sleeve across his eyes.

Gaston saw, and something suddenly burned in him.  He dropped his eyes,
slid out of bed, into his dressing-gown, and sat down.

Jacques made ready.  He was not prepared to have Gaston catch him by the
shoulders with a nervous grip, search his eyes, and say:

"You damned little fool, I'm not worth it!"  Jacques's face shone.

"Every great man has his fool--alors!" was the happy reply.

"Jacques," Gaston presently said, "what's on your mind?"

"I saw--last night, monsieur," he said.

"You saw what?"

"I saw you in the court-yard with the lady."  Gaston was now very grave.

"Did you recognise her?"

"No: she moved all as a spirit."

"Jacques, that matter is between you and me.  I'm going to tell you,
though, two things; and--where's your string of beads?"

Jacques drew out his rosary.

"That's all right.  Mum as Manitou!  She was asleep; she is my sister.
And that is all, till there's need for you to know more."

In this new confidence Jacques was content.  The life was a gilded mess,
but he could endure it now.  Three days passed.  During that time Gaston
was up to town twice; lunched at Lady Dargan's, and dined at Lord
Dunfolly's.  For his grandfather, who was indisposed, he was induced to
preside at a political meeting in the interest of a wealthy local brewer,
who confidently expected the seat, and, through gifts to the party,
a knighthood.  Before the meeting, in the gush of--as he put it "kindred
aims," he laid a finger familiarly in Gaston's button-hole.  Jacques, who
was present, smiled, for he knew every change in his master's face, and
he saw a glitter in his eye.  He remembered when they two were in trouble
with a gang of river-drivers, and one did this same thing rudely: how
Gaston looked down, and said, with a devilish softness: "Take it away."
And immediately after the man did so.

Mr. Sylvester Gregory Babbs, in a similar position, heard a voice say
down at him, with a curious obliqueness:

"If you please!"

The keenest edge of it was lost on the flaring brewer, but his fingers
dropped, and he twisted his heavy watchchain uneasily.  The meeting
began.  Gaston in a few formal words, unconventional in idea, introduced
Mr. Babbs as "a gentleman whose name was a household word in the county,
who would carry into Parliament the civic responsibility shown in his
private life, who would render his party a support likely to fulfil its
purpose."

When he sat down, Captain Maudsley said: "That's a trifle vague,
Belward."

"How can one treat him with importance?"

"He's the sort that makes a noise one way or another."

"Yes.  Obituary: 'At his residence in Babbslow Square, yesterday, Sir S.
G. Babbs, M. P., member of the London County Council.  Sir S. G. Babbs,
it will be remembered, gave L100,000 to build a home for the propagation
of Vice, and--'"

"That's droll!"

"Why not Vice?  'Twould be just the same in his mind.  He doesn't give
from a sense of moral duty.  Not he; he's a bungowawen!"

"What is that?"

"That's Indian.  You buy a lot of Indian or halfbreed loafers with
beaver-skins and rum, go to the Mount of the Burning Arrows, and these
fellows dance round you and call you one of the lost race, the Mighty Men
of the Kimash Hills.  And they'll do that while the rum lasts.  Meanwhile
you get to think yourself a devil of a swell--you and the gods!  .  .  .
And now we had better listen to this bungowawen, hadn't we?"

The room was full, and on the platform were gentlemen come to support
Sir William Belward.  They were interested to see how Gaston would
carry it off.

Mr. Babbs's speech was like a thousand others by the same kind of man.
More speeches--some opposing--followed, and at last came the chairman to
close the meeting.  He addressed himself chiefly to a bunch of farmers,
artisans, and labouring-men near.  After some good-natured raillery at
political meetings in general, the bigotry of party, the difficulty in
getting the wheat from the chaff, and some incisive thrusts at those who
promised the moon and gave a green cheese, who spent their time in
berating their opponents, he said:

"There's a game that sailors play on board ship--men-o'-war and sailing-
ships mostly.  I never could quite understand it, nor could any officers
ever tell me--the fo'castle for the men and the quarter-deck for the
officers, and what's English to one is Greek to the other.  Well, this
was all I could see in the game.  They sat about, sometimes talking,
sometimes not.  All at once a chap would rise and say, 'Allow me to
speak, me noble lord,' and follow this by hitting some one of the party
wherever the blow got in easiest--on the head, anywhere!  [Laughter.]
Then he would sit down seriously, and someone else spoke to his noble
lordship.  Nobody got angry at the knocks, and Heaven only knows what it
was all about.  That is much the way with politics, when it is played
fair.  But here is what I want particularly to say: We are not all born
the same, nor can we live the same.  One man is born a brute, and another
a good sort; one a liar, and one an honest man; one has brains, and the
other hasn't.  Now, I've lived where, as they say, one man is as good as
another.  But he isn't, there or here.  A weak man can't run with a
strong.  We have heard to-night a lot of talk for something and against
something.  It is over.  Are you sure you have got what was meant clear
in your mind?  [Laughter, and 'Blowed if we'ave!']  Very well; do not
worry about that.  We have been playing a game of 'Allow me to speak, me
noble lord!'  And who is going to help you to get the most out of your
country and your life isn't easy to know.  But we can get hold of a few
clear ideas, and measure things against them.  I know and have talked
with a good many of you here ['That's so!  That's so!'], and you know my
ideas pretty well--that they are honest at least, and that I have seen
the countries where freedom is 'on the job,' as they say.  Now, don't put
your faith in men and in a party that cry, 'We will make all things new,'
to the tune of, 'We are a band of brothers.'  Trust in one that says,
'You cannot undo the centuries.  Take off the roof, remove a wall, let in
the air, throw out a wing, but leave the old foundations.'  And that is
the real difference between the other party and mine; and these political
games of ours come to that chiefly."

Presently he called for the hands of the meeting.  They were given for
Mr. Babbs.

Suddenly a man's strong, arid voice came from the crowd:

"'Allow me to speak, me noble lord!' [Great laughter.  Then a pause.]
Where's my old chum, Jock Lawson?"

The audience stilled.  Gaston's face went grave.  He replied, in a firm,
clear voice.

"In Heaven, my man.  You'll never see him more."  There was silence for a
moment, a murmur, then a faint burst of applause.  Presently John Cawley,
the landlord of "The Whisk o' Barley," made towards Gaston.  Gaston
greeted him, and inquired after his wife.  He was told that she was very
ill, and had sent her husband to beg Gaston to come.  Gaston had dreaded
this hour, though he knew it would come one day.  A woman on a death-bed
has a right to ask for and get the truth.  He had forborne telling her of
her son; and she, whenever she had seen him, had contented herself with
asking general questions, dreading in her heart that Jock had died a
dreadful or shameful death, or else this gentleman would, voluntarily,
say more.  But, herself on her way out of the world, as she feared,
wished the truth, whatever it might be.

Gaston told Cawley that he would drive over at once, and then asked who
it was had called out at him.  A drunken, poaching fellow, he was told,
who in all the years since Jock had gone, had never passed the inn
without stopping to say: "Where's my old chum, Jock Lawson?"  In the past
he and Jock had been in more than one scrape together.  He had learned
from Mrs. Cawley that Gaston had known Jock in Canada.

When Cawley had gone, Gaston turned to the other gentlemen present.

"An original speech, upon my word, Belward," said Captain Maudsley.

Mr. Warren Gasgoyne came.

"You are expected to lunch or something to-morrow, Belward, you remember?
Devil of a speech that!  But, if you will 'allow me to speak, me noble
lord,' you are the rankest Conservative of us all."

"Don't you know that the easiest constitutional step is from a republic
to an autocracy, and vice versa?"

"I don't know it, and I don't know how you do it."

"Do what?"

"Make them think as you do."

He waved his hand to the departing crowd.

"I don't.  I try to think as they do.  I am always in touch with the
primitive mind."

"You ought to do great things here, Belward," said the other seriously.
"You have the trick; and we need wisdom at Westminster."

"Don't be mistaken; I am only adaptable.  There's frank confession."

At this point Mr. Babbs came up and said good-night in a large, self-
conscious way.  Gaston hoped that his campaign would not be wasted, and
the fluffy gentleman retired.  When he got out of earshot in the shadows,
he turned and shook his fist towards Gaston, saying: "Half-breed
upstart!"  Then he refreshed his spirits by swearing at his coachman.

Gaston and Jacques drove quickly over to "The Whisk o' Barley."  Gaston
was now intent to tell the whole truth.  He wished that he had done it
before; but his motives had been good--it was not to save himself.  Yet
he shrank.  Presently he thought:

"What is the matter with me?  Before I came here, if I had an idea I
stuck to it, and didn't have any nonsense when I knew I was right.  I am
getting sensitive--the thing I find everywhere in this country: fear of
feeling or giving pain; as though the bad tooth out isn't better than the
bad tooth in.  When I really get sentimental I'll fold my Arab tent--so
help me, ye seventy Gods of Yath!"

A little while after he was at Mrs. Cawley's bed, the landlord handing
him a glass of hot grog, Jock's mother eyeing him feverishly from the
quilt.  Gaston quietly felt her wrist, counting the pulse-beats; then
told Cawley to wet a cloth and hand it to him.  He put it gently on the
woman's head.  The eyes of the woman followed him anxiously.  He sat down
again, and in response to her questioning gaze, began the story of Jock's
life as he knew it.

Cawley stood leaning on the foot-board; the woman's face was cowled in
the quilt with hungry eyes; and Gaston's voice went on in a low monotone,
to the ticking of the great clock in the next room.  Gaston watched her
face, and there came to him like an inspiration little things Jock did,
which would mean more to his mother than large adventures.  Her lips
moved now and again, even a smile flickered.  At last Gaston came to his
father's own death and the years that followed; then the events in
Labrador.

He approached this with unusual delicacy: it needed bravery to look into
the mother's eyes, and tell the story.  He did not know how dramatically
he told it--how he etched it without a waste word.  When he came to that
scene in the Fort, the three men sitting, targets for his bullets,--he
softened the details greatly.  He did not tell it as he told it at the
Court, but the simpler, sparser language made it tragically clear.  There
was no sound from the bed, none from the foot-board, but he heard a door
open and shut without, and footsteps somewhere near.

How he put the body in the tree, and prayed over it and left it there,
was all told; and then he paused.  He turned a little sick as he saw the
white face before him.  She drew herself up, her fingers caught away the
night-dress at her throat; she stared hard at him for a moment, and then,
with a wild, moaning voice, cried out:

"You killed my boy!  You killed my boy!  You killed my boy!"

Gaston was about to take her hand, when he heard a shuffle and a rush
behind him.  He rose, turned swiftly, saw a bottle swinging, threw up his
hand .  .  .  and fell backwards against the bed.

The woman caught his bleeding head to her breast and hugged it.

"My Jock, my poor boy!" she cried in delirium now.  Cawley had thrown
his arms about the struggling, drunken assailant--Jock's poaching friend.

The mother now called out to the pinioned man, as she had done to Gaston:

"You have killed my boy!"  She kissed Gaston's bloody face.

A messenger was soon on the way to Ridley Court, and in a little upper
room Jacques was caring for his master.




CHAPTER IX

HE FINDS NEW SPONSORS

Gaston lay for many days at "The Whisk o' Barley."  During that time the
inn was not open to customers.  The woman also for two days hung at the
point of death, and then rallied.  She remembered the events of the
painful night, and often asked after Gaston.  Somehow, her horror of her
son's death at his hands was met by the injury done him now.  She vaguely
felt that there had been justice and punishment.  She knew that in the
room at Labrador Gaston Belward had been scarcely less mad than her son.

Gaston, as soon as he became conscious, said that his assailant must be
got out of the way of the police, and to that end bade Jacques send for
Mr. Warren Gasgoyne.  Mr. Gasgoyne and Sir William arrived at the same
time, but Gaston was unconscious again.  Jacques, however, told them what
his master's wishes were, and they were carried out; Jock's friend
secretly left England forever.  Sir William and Mr. Gasgoyne got the
whole tale from the landlord, whom they asked to say nothing publicly.

Lady Belward drove down each day, and sat beside him for a couple of
hours-silent, solicitous, smoothing his pillow or his wasting hand.  The
brain had been injured, and recovery could not be immediate.  Hovey the
housekeeper had so begged to be installed as nurse, that her wish was
granted, and she was with him night and day.  Now she shook her head at
him sadly, now talked in broken sentences to herself, now bustled about
silently, a tyrant to the other servants sent down from the Court.  Every
day also the headgroom and the huntsman came, and in the village Gaston's
humble friends discussed the mystery, stoutly defending him when some one
said it was "more nor gabble, that theer saying o' the poacher at the
meetin.'"

But the landlord and his wife kept silence, the officers of the law took
no action, and the town and country newspapers could do no more than
speak of "A vicious assault upon the heir of Ridley Court."  It had
become the custom now to leave Ian out of that question.  But the wonder
died as all wonders do, and Gaston made his fight for health.

The day before he was removed to the Court, Mrs. Cawley was helped up-
stairs to see him.  She was gaunt and hollow-eyed.  Lady Belward and Mrs.
Gasgoyne were present.  The woman made her respects, and then stood at
Gaston's bedside.  He looked up with a painful smile.

"Do you forgive me?!" he asked.  "I've almost paid!"

He touched his bandaged head.

"It ain't for mothers to forgi'e the thing," she replied, in a steady
voice, "but I can forgi'e the man.  'Twere done i' madness--there beant
the will workin' i' such.  'Twere a comfort that he'd a prayin' over un."

Gaston took the gnarled fingers in his.  It had never struck him how
dreadful a thing it was--so used had he been to death in many forms--till
he had told the story to this mother.

"Mrs. Cawley," he said, "I can't make up to you what Jock would have
been; but I can do for you in one way as much as Jock.  This house is
yours from to-day."

He drew a deed from the coverlet, and handed it to her.  He had got it
from Sir William that morning.  The poor and the crude in mind can only
understand an objective emotion, and the counters for these are this
world's goods.  Here was a balm in Gilead.  The love of her child was
real, but the consolation was so practical to Mrs. Cawley that the lips
which might have cursed, said:

"Ah, sir, the wind do be fittin' the shore lamb!  I' the last Judgen,
I'll no speak agen 'ee.  I be sore fretted harm come to 'ee."

At this Mrs. Gasgoyne rose, and in her bustling way dismissed the
grateful peasant, who fondled the deed and called eagerly down the stairs
to her husband as she went.

Mrs. Gasgoyne then came back, sat down, and said: "Now you needn't fret
about that any longer--barbarian!" she added, shaking a finger.  "Didn't
I say that you would get into trouble?  that you would set the country
talking?  Here you were, in the dead of night, telling ghost stories,
and raking up your sins, with no cause whatever, instead of in your bed.
You were to have lunched with us the next day--I had asked Lady Harriet
to meet you, too!--and you didn't; and you have wretched patches where
your hair ought to be.  How can you promise that you'll not make a madder
sensation some day?"

Gaston smiled up at her.  Her fresh honesty, under the guise of banter,
was always grateful to him.  He shook his head, smiled, and said nothing.

She went on.

"I want a promise that you will do what your godfather and godmother
will swear for you."

She acted on him like wine.

"Of course, anything.  Who are my godfather and godmother?"

She looked him steadily, warmly in the eyes: "Warren and myself."

Now he understood: his promise to his grandmother and grandfather.
So, they had spoken!  He was sure that Mrs. Gasgoyne had objected.
He knew that behind her playful treatment of the subject there was real
scepticism of himself.  It put him on his mettle, and yet he knew she
read him deeper than any one else, and flattered him least.

He put out his hand, and took hers.

"You take large responsibilities," he said, "but I will try and justify
you--honestly, yes."

In her hearty way, she kissed him on the cheek.  "There," she responded,
"if you and Delia do make up your minds, see that you treat her well.
And you are to come, just as soon as you are able, to stay at Peppingham.
Delia, silly child, is anxious, and can't see why she mustn't call with
me now."

In his room at the Court that night, Gaston inquired of Jacques about
Alice Wingfield, and was told that on the day of the accident she had
left with her grandfather for the Continent.  He was not sorry.  For his
own sake he could have wished an understanding between them.  But now he
was on the way to marriage, and it was as well that there should be no
new situations.  The girl could not wish the thing known.  There would be
left him, in this case, to befriend her should it ever be needed.  He
remembered the spring of pleasure he felt when he first saw other faces
like his father's--his grandfather's, his grandmother's.  But this girl's
was so different to him; having the tragedy of the lawless, that
unconscious suffering stamped by the mother upon the child.  There was,
however, nothing to be done.  He must wait.

Two days later Lady Dargan called to inquire after him.  He was lying in
his study with a book, and Lady Belward sent to ask him if he would care
to see her and Lord Dargan's nephew, Cluny Vosse.  Lady Belward did not
come; Sir William brought them.  Lady Dargan came softly to him, smiled
more with her eyes than her lips, and told him how sorry she had been to
hear of his illness.  Some months before Gaston had met Cluny Vosse, who
at once was his admirer.  Gaston liked the youth.  He was fresh, high-
minded, extravagant, idle; but he had no vices, and no particular vanity
save for his personal appearance.  His face was ever radiant with health,
shining with satisfaction.  People liked him, and did not discount it by
saying that he had nothing in him.  Gaston liked him most because he was
so wholly himself, without guile, beautifully honest.

Now Cluny sat down, tapped the crown of his hat, looked at him cheerily,
and said:

"Got in a cracker, didn't he?"

Gaston nodded, amused.

"The fellows at Brooke's had a talkee-talkee, and they'd twenty different
stories.  Of course it was rot.  We were all cut up though and hoped
you'd pull through.  Of course there couldn't be any doubt of that--
you've been through too many, eh?"

Cluny always assumed that Gaston had had numberless tragical adventures
which, if told, must make Dumas turn in his grave with envy.

Gaston smiled, and laid a hand upon the other's knee.  "I'm not shell-
proof, Vosse, and it was rather a narrow squeak, I'm told.  But I'm kept,
you see, for a worse fate and a sadder."

"I say, Belward, you don't mean that!  Your eyes go so queer sometimes,
that a chap doesn't know what to think.  You ought to live to a hundred.
You'll have to.  You've got it all--"

"Oh no, my boy, I haven't got anything."  He waved his hand pleasantly
towards his grandfather.  "I'm on the knees of the gods merely."

Cluny turned on Sir William.

"It isn't any secret, is it, sir?  He gets the lot, doesn't he?"

Sir William's occasional smile came.

"I fancy there's some condition about the plate, the pictures, and the
title; but I do not suppose that matters meanwhile."

He spoke half-musingly and with a little unconscious irony, and the boy,
vaguely knowing that there was a cross-current somewhere, drifted.

"No, of course not; he can have fun enough without them, can't he?"

Lady Dargan here soothingly broke in, inquiring about Gaston's illness,
and showing a tactful concern.  But the nephew persisted:

"I say, Belward, Aunt Sophie was cut up no end when she heard of it.  She
wouldn't go out to dinner that night at Lord Dunfolly's, and, of course,
I didn't go.  And I wanted to; for Delia Gasgoyne was to be there, and
she's ripping."

Lady Dargan, in spite of herself, blushed, but without confusion, and
Gaston adroitly led the conversation otherwhere.  Presently she said that
they were to be at their villa in France during the late summer, and if
he chanced to be abroad would he come?  He said that he intended to visit
his uncle in Paris, but that afterwards he would be glad to visit them
for a short time.

She looked astonished.  "With your uncle Ian!"

"Yes.  He is to show me art-life, and all that."

She looked troubled.  He saw that she wished to say something.

"Yes, Lady Dargan?!" he asked.

She spoke with fluttering seriousness.

"I asked you once to come to me if you ever needed a friend.  I do not
wait for that.  I ask you not to go to your uncle."

"Why?"

He was thinking that, despite social artifice and worldliness, she was
sentimental.

"Because there will be trouble.  I can see it.  You may trust a woman's
instinct; and I know that man!"  He did not reply at once, but presently
said:

"I fancy I must keep my promise."

"What is the book you are reading?!" she said, changing the subject, for
Sir William was listening.

He opened it, and smiled musingly.

"It is called Affairs of Some Consequence in the Reign of Charles I.
In reading it I seemed to feel that it was incorrect, and my mind kept
wandering away into patches of things--incidents, scenes, bits of talk
--as I fancied they really were, not apocryphal or 'edited' as here."

"I say," said Cluny, "that's rum, isn't it?"

"For instance," Gaston continued, "this tale of King Charles and
Buckingham."  He read it.  "Now here is the scene as I picture it."  In
quick elliptical phrases he gave the tale from a different stand-point.

Sir William stared curiously at Gaston, then felt for some keys in his
pocket.  He got up and rang the bell.  Gaston was still talking.  He gave
the keys to Falby with a whispered word.  In a few moments Falby placed a
small leather box beside Sir William, and retired at a nod.  Sir William
presently said: "Where did you read those things?"

"I do not know that I ever read them."

"Did your father tell you them?"

"I do not remember so, though he may have."

"Did you ever see this box?"

"Never before."

"You do not know what is in it?"

"Not in the least."

"And you have never seen this key?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"It is very strange."  He opened the box.  "Now, here are private papers
of Sir Gaston Belward, more than two hundred years old, found almost
fifty years ago by myself in the office of our family solicitor.
Listen."

He then began to read from the faded manuscript.  A mysterious feeling
pervaded the room.  Once or twice Cluny gave a dry nervous kind of laugh.
Much of what Gaston had said was here in stately old-fashioned language.
At a certain point the MS. ran:

"I drew back and said, 'As your grace will have it, then--"'

Here Gaston came to a sitting posture, and interrupted.

"Wait, wait!"

He rose, caught one of two swords that were crossed on the wall, and
stood out.

"This is how it was.  'As your grace will have it, then, to no waste of
time!'  We fell to.  First he came carefully and made strange feints,
learned at King Louis's Court, to try my temper.  But I had had these
tricks of my cousin Secord, and I returned his sport upon him.  Then he
came swiftly, and forced me back upon the garden wall.  I gave to him
foot by foot, for he was uncommon swift and dexterous.  He pinched me
sorely once under the knee, and I returned him one upon the wrist, which
sent a devilish fire into his eyes.  At that his play became so delicate
and confusing that I felt I should go dizzy if it stayed; so I tried the
one great trick cousin Secord taught me, making to run him through, as a
last effort.  The thing went wrong, but checking off my blunder he
blundered too,--out of sheer wonder, perhaps, at my bungling,--and I
disarmed him.  So droll was it that I laughed outright, and he, as quick
in humour as in temper, stood hand on hip, and presently came to a smile.
With that my cousin Secord cried: 'The king!  the king!'  I got me up
quickly--"

Here Gaston, who had in a kind of dream acted the whole scene, swayed
with faintness, and Cluny caught him, saving him from a fall.  Cluny's
colour was all gone.  Lady Dargan had sat dazed, and Sir William's face
was anxious, puzzled.

A few hours later Sir William was alone with Gaston, who was recovered
and cool.

"Gaston," he said, "I really do not understand this faculty of memory, or
whatever it is.  Have you any idea how you come by it?"

"Have we any idea how life comes and goes, sir?"

"I confess not.  I confess not, really."

"Well, I'm in the dark about it too; but I sometimes fancy that I'm mixed
up with that other Gaston."

"It sounds fantastic."

"It is fantastic.  Now, here is this manuscript, and here is a letter I
wrote this morning.  Put them together."

Sir William did so.

"The handwriting is singularly like."

"Well," continued Gaston, smiling whimsically, "suppose that I am Sir
Gaston Belward, Baronet, who is thought to lie in the church yonder, the
title is mine, isn't it?"

Sir William smiled also.

"The evidence is scarce enough to establish succession."

"But there would be no succession.  A previous holder of the title isn't
dead: ergo, the present holder, has no right."

Gaston had shaded his eyes with his hand, and he was watching Sir
William's face closely, out of curiosity chiefly.  Sir William regarded
the thing with hesitating humour.

"Well, well, suppose so.  The property was in the hands of a younger
branch of the family then.  There was no entail, as now."

"Wasn't there?!" said Gaston enigmatically.

He was thinking of some phrases in a manuscript which he had found in
this box.

"Perhaps where these papers came from there are others," he added.

Sir William lifted his eyebrows ironically.  "I hardly think so."

Gaston laughed, not wishing him to take the thing at all seriously.  He
continued airily:

"It would be amusing if the property went with the title after all,
wouldn't it, sir?"

Sir William got to his feet and said testily: "That should never be while
I lived!"

"Of course not, sir."

Sir William saw the bull, and laughed, heartily for him.

They bade each other good-night.

"I'll have a look in the solicitor's office all the same," said Gaston to
himself.




CHAPTER X

HE COMES TO "THE WAKING OF THE FIRE"

A few days afterwards Gaston joined a small party at Peppingham.  Without
any accent life was made easy for him.  He was alone much, and yet, to
himself, he seemed to have enough of company.

The situation did not impose itself conspicuously.  Delia gave him no
especial reason to be vain.  She had not an exceeding wit, but she had
charm, and her talk was interesting to Gaston, who had come, for the
first time, into somewhat intimate relations with an English girl.  He
was struck with her conventional delicacy and honour on one side, and
the limitation of her ideas on the other.  But with it all she had some
slight touch of temperament which lifted her from the usual level.  And
just now her sprightliness was more marked than it had ever been.

Her great hour seemed come to her.  She knew that there had been talk
among the elders, and what was meant by Gaston's visit.  Still, they were
not much alone together.  Gaston saw her mostly with others.  Even a
woman with a tender strain for a man knows what will serve for her
ascendancy: the graciousness of her disposition, the occasional flash of
her mother's temper, and her sense of being superior to a situation--the
gift of every well-bred English girl.

Cluny Vosse was also at the house, and his devotion was divided between
Delia and Gaston.  Cluny was a great favourite, and Agatha Gasgoyne, who
had a wild sense of humour, egged him on with her sister, which gave
Delia enough to do.  At last Cluny, in a burst of confidence, declared
that he meant to propose to Delia.  Agatha then became serious, and said
that Delia was at least four years older than himself, that he was just
her--Agatha's--age, and that the other match would be very unsuitable.
This put Cluny on Delia's defence, and he praised her youth, and hinted
at his own elderliness.  He had lived, he had seen It (Cluny called the
world and all therein "It"), he was aged; he was in the large eye of
experience; he had outlived the vices and the virtues of his time, which,
told in his own naive staccato phrases, made Agatha hug herself.  She
advised him to go and ask Mr. Belward's advice; begged him not to act
until he had done so.  And Cluny, who was blind as a bat when a woman
mocked him, went to Gaston and said:

"See, old chap,--I know you don't mind my calling you that--I've come for
advice.  Agatha said I'd better.  A fellow comes to a time when he says,
'Here, I want a shop of my own,' doesn't he?  He's seen It, he's had It
all colours, he's ready for family duties, and the rest.  That's so,
isn't it?"

Gaston choked back a laugh, and, purposely putting himself on the wrong
scent, said:

"And does Agatha agree?"

"Agatha?  Come, Belward, that youngster!  Agatha's only in on a sisterly-
brotherly basis.  Now, see I've got a little load of L s. d., and I'm to
get more, especially if Uncle Dick keeps on thinking I am artless.  Well,
why shouldn't I marry?"

"No reason against it, if husband and father in you yearn for bibs and
petticoats."

"I say, Belward, don't laugh!"

"I never was more serious.  Who is the girl?"

"She looks up to you as I do-of course that's natural; and if it comes
off, no one'll have a jollier corner chez nous.  It's Delia."

"Delia?  Delia who?"

"Why, Delia Gasgoyne.  I haven't done the thing quite regular, I know.
I ought to have gone to her people first; but they know all about me,
and so does Delia, and I'm on the spot, and it wouldn't look well to be
taking advantage of that with her father and mother-they'd feel bound to
be hospitable.  So I've just gone on my own tack, and I've come to Agatha
and you.  Agatha said to ask you if I'd better speak to Delia now."

"My dear Cluny, are you very much in love?"

"That sounds religious, doesn't it--a kind of Nonconformist business?
I think she's the very finest.  A fellow'd hold himself up, 'd be a deuce
of a swell--and, hang it all, I hate breakfasting alone!"

"Yes, yes, Cluny; but what about a pew in church, with regular
attendance, and a justice of the peace, and little Cluny Vosses on the
carpet?"

Cluny's face went crimson.

"I say, Belward, I've seen It all, of course; I know It backwards, and
I'm not squeamish, but that sounds--flippant-that, with her."

Gaston reached out and caught the boy's shoulder.  "Don't do it, Cluny.
Spare yourself.  It couldn't come off.  Agatha knows that, I fancy.  She
is a little sportsman.  I might let you go and speak; but I think my
chances are better than yours, Cluny.  Hadn't you better let me try
first?  Then, if I fail, your chances are still the same, eh?"

Cluny gasped.  His warm face went pale, then shot to purple, and finally
settled into a grey ruddiness.  "Belward," he said at last, "I didn't
know; upon my soul, I didn't know, or I'd have cut off my head first."

"My dear Cluny, you shall have your chance; but let me go first, I'm
older."

"Belward, don't take me for a fool.  Why, my trying what you go to do is
like--is like--"

Cluny's similes failed to come.

"Like a fox and a deer on the same trail?"

"I don't understand that.  Like a yeomanry steeplechase to Sandown--is
that it?  Belward, I'm sorry.  Playing it so low on a chap you like!"

"Don't say a word, Cluny; and, believe me, you haven't yet seen all of
It.  There's plenty of time.  When you really have had It, you will learn
to say of a woman, not that she's the very finest, and that you hate
breakfasting alone, but something that'll turn your hair white, or keep
you looking forty when you're sixty."

That evening Gaston dressed with unusual care.  When he entered the
drawing-room, he looked as handsome as a man need in this world.
His illness had refined his features and form, and touched off his
cheerfulness with a fine melancholy.  Delia glowed as she saw the
admiring glances sent his way, but burned with anger when she also saw
that he was to take in Lady Gravesend to dinner; for Lady Gravesend had
spoken slightingly of Gaston--had, indeed, referred to his "nigger
blood!"  And now her mother had sent her in to dinner on his arm, she
affable, too affable by a great deal.  Had she heard the dry and subtle
suggestion of Gaston's talk, she would, however, have justified her
mother.

About half past nine Delia was in the doorway, talking to one of the
guests, who, at the call of some one else, suddenly left her.  She heard
a voice behind her.  "Will you not sing?"

She thrilled, and turned to say: "What shall I sing, Mr. Belward?"

"The song I taught you the other day--'The Waking of the Fire.'"

"But I've never sung it before anybody."

"Do I not count?--But, there, that's unfair!  Believe me, you sing it
very well."

She lifted her eyes to his:

"You do not pay compliments, and I believe you.  Your 'very well' means
much.  If you say so, I will do my best."

"I say so.  You are amenable.  Is that your mood to-night?"  He smiled
brightly.

Her eyes flashed with a sweet malice.

"I am not at all sure.  It depends on how your command to sing is
justified."

"You cannot help but sing well."

"Why?"

"Because I will help you--make you."

This startled her ever so little.  Was there some fibre of cruelty in
him, some evil in this influence he had over her?  She shrank, and yet
again she said that she would rather have his cruelty than another man's
tenderness, so long as she knew that she had his--  She paused, and did
not say the word.  She met his eyes steadily--their concentration dazed
her--then she said almost coldly, her voice sounding far away:

"How, make me?"

"How fine, how proud!" he said to himself, then added:

"I meant 'make' in the helpful sense.  I know the song: I've heard it
sung, I've sung it; I've taught you; my mind will act on yours, and you
will sing it well."

"Won't you sing it yourself?  Do, please."

"No; to-night I wish to hear you."

"Why?"

"I will tell you later.  Can you play the accompaniment?  If not, I--"

"Oh, will you?  I could sing it then, I think.  You played it so
beautifully the other day--with all those strange chords."

He smiled.

"It is one of the few things that I can play.  I always had a taste for
music; and up in one of the forts there was an old melodeon, so I
hammered away for years.  I had to learn difficult things at the start,
or none at all, or else those I improvised; and that's how I can play one
or two of Beethoven's symphonies pretty well, and this song, and a few
others, and go a cropper with a waltz.  Will you come?"

They moved to the piano.  No one at first noticed them.  When he sat
down, he said:

"You remember the words?"

"Yes, I learned them by heart."

"Good!"

He gently struck the chords.  His gentleness had, however, a firmness, a
deep persuasiveness, which drew every face like a call.  A few chords
waving, as it were, over the piano, and then he whispered:

"Now."

"Please go on for a minute longer," she begged.

"My throat feels dry all at once."

"Face away from the rest, towards me," he said gently.

She did so.  His voice took a note softly, and held it.  Presently her
voice as softly joined it, his stopped, and hers went on:

                   "In the lodge of the Mother of Men,
                    In the land of Desire,
                    Are the embers of fire,
                    Are the ashes of those who return,
                    Who return to the world:
                    Who flame at the breath
                    Of the Mockers of Death.
                    O Sweet, we will voyage again
                    To the camp of Love's fire,
                         Nevermore to return!"

"How am I doing?!" she said at the end of this verse.  She really did not
know--her voice seemed an endless distance away.  But she felt the
stillness in the drawing-room.

"Well," he said.  "Now for the other.  Don't be afraid; let your voice,
let yourself, go."

"I can't let myself go."

"Yes, you can: just swim with the music."

She did swim with it.  Never before had Peppingham drawing-room heard a
song like this; never before, never after, did any of Delia Gasgoyne's
friends hear her sing as she did that night.  And Lady Gravesend
whispered for a week afterwards that Delia Gasgoyne sang a wild love song
in the most abandoned way with that colonial Belward.  Really a song of
the most violent sentiment!

There had been witchery in it all.  For Gaston lifted the girl on the
waves of his music, and did what he pleased with her, as she sang:

              "O love, by the light of thine eye
               We will fare oversea,
               We will be
               As the silver-winged herons that rest
               By the shallows,
               The shallows of sapphire stone;
               No more shall we wander alone.
               As the foam to the shore
               Is my spirit to thine;
               And God's serfs as they fly,--
               The Mockers of Death
               They will breathe on the embers of fire:
               We shall live by that breath,--
               Sweet, thy heart to my heart,
               As we journey afar,
               No more, nevermore, to return!"

When the song was ended there was silence, then an eager murmur, and
requests for more; but Gaston, still lengthening the close of the
accompaniment, said quietly:

"No more.  I wanted to hear you sing that song only."

He rose.

"I am so very hot," she said.

"Come into the hall."

They passed into the long corridor, and walked up and down, for a time in
silence.

"You felt that music?!" he asked at last.

"As I never felt music before," she replied.

"Do you know why I asked you to sing it?"

"How should I know?"

"To see how far you could go with it."

"How far did I go?"

"As far as I expected."

"It was satisfactory?"

"Perfectly."

"But why--experiment--on me?"

"That I might see if you were not, after all, as much a barbarian as I."

"Am I?"

"No.  That was myself singing as well as you.  You did not enjoy it
altogether, did you?"

"In a way, yes.  But--shall I be honest?  I felt, too, as if, somehow,
it wasn't quite right; so much--what shall I call it?"

"So much of old Adam and the Garden?  Sit down here for a moment, will
you?"

She trembled a little, and sat.

"I want to speak plainly and honestly to you," he said, looking earnestly
at her.  "You know my history--about my wife who died in Labrador, and
all the rest?"

"Yes, they have told me."

"Well, I have nothing to hide, I think; nothing more that you ought to
know: though I've been a scamp one way and another."

"'That I ought to know'?!" she repeated.

"Yes: for when a man asks a woman to be his wife, he should be prepared
to open the cupboard of skeletons."  She was silent; her heart was
beating so hard that it hurt her.

"I am going to ask you to be my wife, Delia."

She was silent, and sat motionless, her hands clasped in her lap.

He went on

"I don't know that you will be wise to accept me, but if you will take
the risk--"

"Oh, Gaston, Gaston!" she said, and her hands fluttered towards his.

An hour later, he said to her, as they parted for the night:

"I hope, with all my heart, that you will never repent of it, Delia."

"You can make me not repent of it.  It rests with you, Gaston; indeed,
indeed, all with you."

"Poor girl!" he said, unconsciously, as he entered his room.  He could
not have told why he said it.  "Why will you always sit up for me,
Brillon?!" he asked a moment afterwards.

Jacques saw that something had occurred.  "I have nothing else to do,
sir," he replied.  "Brillon," Gaston added presently, "we're in a devil
of a scrape now."

"What shall we do, monsieur?"

"Did we ever turn tail?"

"Yes, from a prairie fire."

"Not always.  I've ridden through."

"Alors, it's one chance in ten thousand!"

"There's a woman to be thought of--Jacques."

"There was that other time."

"Well, then?"

Presently Jacques said: "Who is she, monsieur?"

Gaston did not answer.  He was thinking hard.  Jacques said no more.  The
next morning early the guests knew who the woman was, and by noon Jacques
also.




CHAPTER XI

HE MAKES A GALLANT CONQUEST

Gaston let himself drift.  The game of love and marriage is exciting, the
girl was affectionate and admiring, the world was genial, and all things
came his way.  Towards the end of the hunting season Captain Maudsley had
an accident.  It would prevent him riding to hounds again, and at his
suggestion, backed by Lord Dunfolly and Lord Dargan, Gaston became Master
of the Hounds.  His grandfather and great-grandfather had been Master of
the Hounds before him.  Hunting was a keen enjoyment--one outlet for wild
life in him--and at the last meet of the year he rode in Captain
Maudsley's place.  They had a good run, and the taste of it remained with
Gaston for many a day; he thought of it sometimes as he rode in the Park
now every morning--with Delia and her mother.

Jacques and his broncho came no more, or if they did it was at
unseasonable hours, and then to be often reprimanded (and twice arrested)
for furious riding.  Gaston had a bad moment when he told Jacques that he
need not come with him again.  He did it casually, but, cool as he was,
a cold sweat came on his cheek.  He had to take a little brandy to steady
himself--yet he had looked into menacing rifle-barrels more than once
without a tremor.  It was clear, on the face of it, that Delia and her
mother should be his companions in the Park, and not this grave little
half-breed; but, somehow, it got on his nerves.  He hesitated for days
before he could cast the die against Jacques.  It had been the one open
bond of the old life; yet the man was but a servant, and to be treated as
such, and was, indeed, except on rarest occasions.  If Delia had known
that Gaston balanced the matter between her and Jacques, her indignation
might perhaps have sent matters to a crisis.  But Gaston did the only
possible thing; and the weeks drifted on.

Happy?  It was inexplicable even to himself that at times, when he left
Delia, he said unconsciously: "Well, it's a pity!"

But she was happy in her way.  His dark, mysterious face with its
background of abstraction, his unusual life, distinguished presence,
and the fact that people of great note sought his conversation, all
strengthened the bonds, and deepened her imagination; and imagination is
at the root of much that passes for love.  Gaston was approached at Lord
Dargan's house by the Premier himself.  It was suggested that he should
stand for a constituency in the Conservative interest.  Lord Faramond,
himself picturesque, acute, with a keen knowledge of character and a
taste for originality, saw material for a useful supporter--fearless,
independent, with a gift for saying ironical things, and some primitive
and fundamental principles well digested.

Gaston, smiling, said that he would only be a buffalo fretting on a
chain.

Lord Faramond replied:

"And why the chain?"  He followed this up by saying: "It is but a case of
playing lion-tamer down there.  Have one little gift all your own, know
when to impose it, and you have the pleasure of feeling that your fingers
move a great machine, the greatest in the world--yes the very greatest.
There is Little Grapnel just vacant: the faithful Glynn is gone.  Come:
if you will, I'll send my secretary to-morrow morning-eh?"

"You are not afraid of the buffalo, sir?"

Lord Faramond's fingers touched his arm, drummed it "My greatest need--
one to roar as gently as the sucking-dove."

"But what if I, not knowing the rules of the game, should think myself
on the corner of the veldt or in an Indian's tepee, and hit out?"

"You do not carry derringers?"

He smiled.  "No; but--"

He glanced down at his arms.

"Well, well; that will come one day, perhaps!"  Lord Faramond paused,
abstracted, then added: "But not through you.  Good-bye, then, good-bye.
Little Grapnel in ten days!"

And it was so.  Little Grapnel was Conservative.  It was mostly a matter
of nomination, and in two weeks Gaston, in a kind of dream, went down to
Westminster, lunched with Lord Faramond, and was introduced to the House.
The Ladies Gallery was full, for the matter was in all the papers, and a
pretty sensation had been worked up one way and another.

That night, after dinner, Gaston rose to make his maiden speech on a bill
dealing with an imminent social question.  He was not an amateur.  Time
upon time he had addressed gatherings in the North, and had once stood at
the bar of the Canadian Commons to plead the cause of the half-breeds.
He was pale, but firm, and looked striking.  His eyes went slowly round
the House, and he began in a low, clear, deliberate voice, which got
attention at once.  The first sentence was, however, a surprise to every
one, and not the least to his own party, excepting Lord Faramond.  He
disclaimed detailed and accurate knowledge of the subject.  He said this
with an honesty which took away the breath of the House.  In a quiet,
easy tone he then referred to what had been previously said in the
debate.

The first thing he did was to crumble away with a regretful kind of
superiority the arguments of two Conservative speakers, to the sudden
amusement of the Opposition, who presently cheered him.  He looked up as
though a little surprised, waited patiently, and went on.  The iconoclasm
proceeded.  He had one or two fixed ideas in his mind, simple principles
on social questions of which he had spoken to his leader, and he never
wavered from the sight of them, though he had yet to state them.  The
Premier sat, head cocked, with an ironical smile at the cheering, but he
was wondering whether, after all, his man was sure; whether he could
stand this fire, and reverse his engine quite as he intended.  One of the
previous speakers was furious, came over and appealed to Lord Faramond,
who merely said, "Wait."

Gaston kept on.  The flippant amusement of the Opposition continued.
Something, however, in his grim steadiness began to impress his own party
as the other, while from more than one quarter of the House there came a
murmur of sympathy.  His courage, his stone-cold strength, the disdain
which was coming into his voice, impressed them, apart from his argument
or its bearing on the previous debate.  Lord Faramond heard the
occasional murmurs of approval and smiled.  Then there came a striking
silence, for Gaston paused.  He looked towards the Ladies Gallery.  As if
in a dream--for his brain was working with clear, painful power--he saw,
not Delia nor her mother, nor Lady Dargan, but Alice Wingfield!  He had a
sting, a rush in his blood.  He felt that none had an interest in him
such as she: shamed, sorrowful, denied the compensating comfort which his
brother's love might give her.  Her face, looking through the barriers,
pale, glowing, anxious, almost weird, seemed set to the bars of a cage.

Gaston turned upon the House, and flashed a glance towards Lord Faramond,
who, turned round on the Treasury Bench, was looking up at him.  He began
slowly to pit against his former startling admissions the testimony of
his few principles, and to buttress them on every side with apposite
observations, naive, pungent.  Presently there came a poignant edge to
his trailing tones.  After giving the subject new points of view, showing
him to have studied Whitechapel as well as Kicking Horse Pass, he
contended that no social problem could be solved by a bill so crudely
radical, so impractical.

He was saying: "In the history of the British Parliament--" when some
angry member cried out, "Who coached you?"

Gaston's quick eye found the man.

"Once," he answered instantly, "one honourable gentleman asked that of
another in King Charles's Parliament, and the reply then is mine now--
'You, sir!'"

"How?!" returned the puzzled member.

Gaston smiled:

"The nakedness of the honourable gentleman's mind!"

The game was in his hands.  Lord Faramond twisted a shoulder with
satisfaction, tossed a whimsical look down the line of the Treasury
Bench, and from that Bench came unusual applause.

"Where the devil did he get it?!" queried a Minister.

"Out on the buffalo-trail," replied Lord Faramond.  "Good fellow!"

In the Ladies Gallery, Delia clasped her mother's hand with delight; in
the Strangers Gallery, a man said softly, "Not so bad, Cadet."

Alice Wingfield's face had a light of aching pleasure.  "Gaston, Gaston!"
she said, in a whisper heard only by the woman sitting next to her, who
though a stranger gave a murmur of sympathy.

Gaston made his last effort in a comparison of the state of the English
people now and before she became Cromwell's Commonwealth, and then
incisively traced the social development onwards.  It was the work of a
man with a dramatic nature and a mathematical turn.  He put the time,
the manners, the movements, the men, as in a picture.

Presently he grew scornful.  His words came hotly, like whip-lashes.
He rose to force and power, though his voice was never loud, rather
concentrated, resonant.  It dropped suddenly to a tone of persuasiveness
and conciliation, and declaring that the bill would be merely vicious
where it meant to be virtuous, ended with the question:

"Shall we burn the house to roast the pig?"

"That sounds American," said the member for Burton-Halsey, "but he hasn't
an accent.  Pig is vulgar though--vulgar."

"Make it Lamb--make it Lamb!" urged his neighbour.

Meanwhile both sides applauded.  Maiden speeches like this were not
common.  Lord Faramond turned round to him.  Another member made way
and Gaston leaned towards the Premier, who nodded and smiled.  "Most
excellent buffalo!" he said.

"One day we will chain you--to the Treasury Bench."

Gaston smiled.

"You are thought prudent, sir!"

"Ah!  an enemy hath said this."

Gaston looked towards the Ladies Gallery.  Delia's eyes were on him;
Alice was gone.

A half-hour later he stood in the lobby, waiting for Mrs. Gasgoyne, Lady
Dargan, and Delia to come.  He had had congratulations in the House; he
was having them now.  Presently some one touched him on the arm.

"Not so bad, Cadet."

Gaston turned and saw his uncle.  They shook hands.  "You've a gift that
way," Ian Belward continued, "but to what good?  Bless you, the pot on
the crackling thorns!  Don't you find it all pretty hollow?"

Gaston was feeling reaction from the nervous work.  "It is exciting."

"Yes, but you'll never have it again as to-night.  The place reeks with
smugness, vanity, and drudgery.  It's only the swells--Derby, Gladstone,
and the few--who get any real sport out of it.  I can show you much more
amusing things."

"For instance?"

"'Hast thou forgotten me?' You hungered for Paris and Art and the joyous
life.  Well, I'm ready.  I want you.  Paris, too, is waiting, and a good
cuisine in a cheery menage.  Sup with me at the Garrick, and I'll tell you.
Come along.  Quis separabit?"

"I have to wait for Mrs. Gasgoyne--and Delia."

"Delia!  Delia!  Goddess of proprieties, has it come to that!"

He saw a sudden glitter in Gaston's eyes, and changed his tone.

"Well, an' a man will he will, and he must be wished good-luck.  So,
good-luck to you!  I'm sorry, though, for that cuisine in Paris, and the
grand picnic at Fontainebleau, and Moban and Cerise.  But it can't be
helped."

He eyed Gaston curiously.  Gaston was not in the least deceived.  His
uncle added presently, "But you will have supper with me just the same?"

Gaston consented, and at this point the ladies appeared.  He had a thrill
of pleasure at hearing their praises, but, somehow, of all the fresh
experiences he had had in England, this, the weightiest, left him least
elated.  He had now had it all: the reaction was begun, and he knew it.

"Well, Ian Belward, what mischief are you at now?!" said Mrs. Gasgoyne.

"A picture merely, and to offer homage.  How have you tamed our lion,
and how sweetly does he roar!  I feed him at my Club to-night."

"Ian Belward, you are never so wicked as when you ought most to be
decent.--I wish I knew your place in this picture," she added brusquely.

"Merely a little corner at their fireside."  He nodded towards Delia and
Gaston.

"The man has sense, and Delia is my daughter!"

"Precisely why I wish a place in their affections."

"Why don't you marry one of the women you have--spoiled, and spend the
rest of your time in living yourself down?  You are getting old."

"For their own sakes, I don't.  Put that to my credit.  I'll have but
one mistress only as the sand gets low.  I've been true to her."

"You, true to anything!"

"The world has said so."

"Nonsense!  You couldn't be."

"Visit my new picture in three months--my biggest thing.  You will say
my mistress fares well at my hands."

"Mere talk.  I have seen your mistress, and before every picture I have
thought of those women!  A thing cannot be good at your price: so don't
talk that sentimental stuff to me."

"Be original; you said that to me thirty years ago."

"I remember perfectly: that did not require much sense."

"No; you tossed it off, as it were.  Yet I'd have made you a good
husband.  You are the most interesting woman I've ever met."

"The compliment is not remarkable.  Now, Ian Belward, don't try to say
clever things.  And remember that I will have no mischief-making."

"At thy command--"

"Oh, cease acting, and take Sophie to her carriage."  Two hours later,
Delia Gasgoyne sat in her bedroom wondering at Gaston's abstraction
during the drive home.  Yet she had a proud elation at his success,
and a happy tear came to her eye.

Meanwhile Gaston was supping with his uncle.  Ian was in excellent
spirits: brilliant, caustic, genial, suggestive.  After a little while
Gaston rose to the temper of his host.  Already the scene in the Commons
was fading from him, and when Ian proposed Paris immediately, he did not
demur.  The season was nearly over,

Ian said; very well, why remain?  His attendance at the House?  Well, it
would soon be up for the session.  Besides, the most effective thing he
could do was to disappear for the time.  Be unexpected--that was the key
to notoriety.  Delia Gasgoyne?  Well, as Gaston had said, they were to
meet in the Mediterranean in September; meanwhile a brief separation
would be good for both.  Last of all--he did not wish to press it--but
there was a promise!

Gaston answered quietly, at last: "I will redeem the promise."

"When?"

"Within thirty-six hours."

"That is, you will be at my studio in Paris within thirty-six hours from
now?"

"That is it."

"Good!  I shall start at eight to-morrow morning.  You will bring your
horse, Cadet?"

"Yes, and Brillon."

"He isn't necessary."  Ian's brow clouded slightly.

"Absolutely necessary."

"A fantastic little beggar.  You can get a better valet in France.  Why
have one at all?"

"I shall not decline from Brillon on a Parisian valet.  Besides, he comes
as my camarade."

"Goth!  Goth!  My friend the valet!  Cadet, you're a wonderful fellow,
but you'll never fit in quite."

"I don't wish to fit in; things must fit me."  Ian smiled to himself.

"He has tasted it all--it's not quite satisfying--revolution next!  What
a smash-up there'll be!  The romantic, the barbaric overlaps.  Well, I
shall get my picture out of it, and the estate too."

Gaston toyed with his wine-glass, and was deep in thought.  Strange to
say, he was seeing two pictures.  The tomb of Sir Gaston in the little
church at Ridley: A gipsy's van on the crest of a common, and a girl
standing in the doorway.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Down in her heart, loves to be mastered
I don't wish to fit in; things must fit me
Imagination is at the root of much that passes for love
Live and let live is doing good






THE TRESPASSER

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.



XII.      HE STANDS BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
XIII.     HE JOURNEYS AFAR
XIV.      IN WHICH THE PAST IS REPEATED
XV.       WHEREIN IS SEEN THE OLD ADAM AND THE GARDEN
XVI.      WHEREIN LOVE SNOWS NO LAW SAVE THE MAN'S
XVII.     THE MAN AND THE WOMAN FACE THE INTOLERABLE
XVIII.    "RETURN, O SHULAMITE!"



CHAPTER XII

HE STANDS BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

The next morning he went down to the family solicitor's office.  He had
done so, off and on, for weeks.  He spent the time in looking through old
family papers, fishing out ancient documents, partly out of curiosity,
partly from an unaccountable presentiment.  He had been there about an
hour this morning when a clerk brought him a small box, which, he said,
had been found inside another box belonging to the Belward-Staplings, a
distant branch of the family.  These had asked for certain ancient papers
lately, and a search had been made, with this result.  The little box was
not locked, and the key was in it.  How the accident occurred was not
difficult to imagine.  Generations ago there had probably been a
conference of the two branches of the family, and the clerk had
inadvertently locked the one box within the other.  This particular box
of the Belward-Staplings was not needed again.  Gaston felt that here was
something.  These hours spent among old papers had given him strange
sensations, had, on the one hand, shown him his heritage; but had also
filled him with the spirit of that by-gone time.  He had grown further
away from the present.  He had played his part as in a drama: his real
life was in the distant past and out in the land of the heathen.

Now he took out a bundle of papers with broken seals, and wound with a
faded tape.  He turned the rich important parchments over in his hands.
He saw his own name on the outside of one: "Sir Gaston Robert Belward."
And there was added: "Bart."  He laughed.  Well, why not complete the
reproduction?  He was an M. P.--why not a, Baronet?  He knew how it was
done.  There were a hundred ways.  Throw himself into the arbitration
question between Canada and the United States: spend ten thousand pounds
of--his grandfather's--money on the Party?  His reply to himself was
cynical: the game was not worth the candle.  What had he got out of it
all?  Money?  Yes: and he enjoyed that--the power that it gave--
thoroughly.  The rest?  He knew that it did not strike as deep as it
ought: the family tradition, the social scheme--the girl.

"What a brute I am!" he said.  "I'm never wholly of it.  I either want
to do as they did when George Villiers had his innings, or play the gipsy
as I did so many years."

The gipsy!  As he held the papers in his hand he thought as he had done
last night, of the gipsy-van on Ridley Common, and of--how well he
remembered her name!--of Andree.

He suddenly threw his head back, and laughed.  "Well, well, but it is
droll!  Last night, an English gentleman, an honourable member with the
Treasury Bench in view; this morning an adventurer, a Romany.  I itch for
change.  And why?  Why?  I have it all, yet I could pitch it away this
moment for a wild night on the slope, or a nigger hunt on the Rivas.
Chateau-Leoville, Goulet, and Havanas at a bob?--Jove, I thirst for a
swig of raw Bourbon and the bite of a penny Mexican!  Games, Gaston,
games!  Why the devil did little Joe worry at being made 'move on'?  I've
got 'move on' in every pore: I'm the Wandering Jew.  Oh, a gentleman born
am I!  But the Romany sweats from every inch of you, Gaston Belward!
What was it that sailor on the Cyprian said of the other?  'For every
hair of him was rope-yarn, and every drop of blood Stockholm tar!'"

He opened a paper.  Immediately he was interested.  Another; then,
quickly, two more; and at last, getting to his feet with an exclamation,
he held a document to the light, and read it through carefully.  He was
alone in the room.  He calmly folded it up, put it in his pocket, placed
the rest of the papers back, locked the box, and passing into the next
room, gave it to the clerk.  Then he went out, a curious smile on his
face.  He stopped presently on the pavement.

"But it wouldn't hold good, I fancy, after all these years.  Yet Law is
a queer business.  Anyhow, I've got it."

An hour later he called on Mrs. Gasgoyne and Delia.  Mrs. Gasgoyne was
not at home.  After a little while, Gaston, having listened to some
extracts from the newspapers upon his "brilliant, powerful, caustic
speech, infinite in promise of an important career," quietly told her
that he was starting for Paris, and asked when they expected to go abroad
in their yacht.  Delia turned pale, and could not answer for a moment.
Then she became very still, and as quietly answered that they expected to
get away by the middle of August.  He would join them?  Yes, certainly,
at Marseilles, or perhaps, Gibraltar.  Her manner, so well-controlled,
though her features seemed to shrink all at once, if it did not deceive
him, gave him the wish to say an affectionate thing.  He took her hand
and said it.  She thanked him, then suddenly dropped her fingers on his
shoulder, and murmured with infinite gentleness and pride:

"You will miss me; you ought to!"

He drew the hand down.

"I could not forget you, Delia," he said.

Her eyes came up quickly, and she looked steadily, wonderingly at him.

"Was it necessary to say that?"

She was hurt--inexpressibly,--and she shrank.  He saw that she
misunderstood him; but he also saw that, on the face of it, the phrase
was not complimentary.  His reply was deeply kind, effective.  There was
a pause--and the great moment for them both passed.  Something ought to
have happened.  It did not.  If she had had that touch of abandon shown
when she sang "The Waking of the Fire," Gaston might, even at this
moment, have broken his promise to his uncle; but, somehow, he knew
himself slipping away from her.  With the tenderness he felt, he still
knew that he was acting; imitating, reproducing other, better, moments
with her.  He felt the disrespect to her, but it could not be helped--it
could not be helped.

He said that he would call and say good-bye to her and Mrs. Gasgoyne at
four o'clock.  Then he left.  He went to his chambers, gave Jacques
instructions, did some writing, and returned at four.  Mrs. Gasgoyne had
not come back.  She had telegraphed that she would not be in for lunch.
There was nothing remarkable in Gaston's and Delia's farewell.  She
thought he looked worn, and ought to have change, showing in every word
that she trusted him, and was anxious that he should be, as she put it
gaily, "comfy."  She was composed.  The cleverest men are blind in the
matter of a woman's affections; and Gaston was only a mere man, after
all.  He thought that she had gone about as far in the way of feeling as
she could go.

Nevertheless, in his hansom, he frowned, and said: "I oughtn't to go.
But I'm choking here.  I can't play the game an hour longer without a
change.  I'll come back all right.  I'll meet her in the Mediterranean
after my kick-up, and it'll be all O. K.  Jacques and I will ride down
through Spain to Gibraltar, and meet the Kismet there.  I shall have got
rid of this restlessness then, and I'll be glad enough to settle down,
pose for throne and constitution, cultivate the olive branch, and have
family prayers."

At eight o'clock he appeared at Ridley Court, and bade his grandfather
and grandmother good-bye.  They were full of pride, and showed their
affection in indirect ways--Sir William most by offering his opinion on
the Bill and quoting Gaston frequently; Lady Belward, by saying that next
year she would certainly go up to town--she had not done so for five
years!  They both agreed that a scamper on the Continent would now be
good for him.  At nine o'clock he passed the rectory, on his way, strange
to note, to the church.  There was one light burning, but it was not in
the study nor in Alice's window.  He supposed they had not returned.
He paused and thought.  If anything happened, she should know.  But what
should happen?  He shook his head.  He moved on to the church.  The doors
were unlocked.  He went in, drew out a little pocket-lantern, lit it, and
walked up the aisle.

"A sentimental business this: I don't know why I do it," he thought.

He stopped at the tomb of Sir Gaston Belward, put his hand on it, and
stood looking at it.

"I wonder if there is anything in it?!" he said aloud: "if he does
influence me?  if we've got anything to do with each other?  What he did
I seem to know somehow, more or less.  A little dwarf up in my brain
drops the nuts down now and then.  Well, Sir Gaston Belward, what is
going to be the end of all this?  If we can reach across the centuries,
why, good-night and goodbye to you.  Good-bye."

He turned and went down the aisle.  At the door a voice, a whispering
voice, floated to him: "Good-bye."

He stopped short and listened.  All was still.  He walked up the aisle,
and listened again.-Nothing!  He stood before the tomb, looking at it
curiously.  He was pale, but collected.  He raised the light above his
head, and looked towards the altar.--Nothing!  Then he went to the door
again, and paused.--Nothing!

Outside he said

"I'd stake my life I heard it!"

A few minutes afterwards, a girl rose up from behind the organ in the
chancel, and felt her way outside.  It was Alice Wingfield, who had gone
to the church to pray.  It was her good-bye which had floated down to
Gaston.




CHAPTER XIII

HE JOURNEYS AFAR

Politicians gossiped.  Where was the new member?  His friends could not
tell, further than that he had gone abroad.  Lord Faramond did not know,
but fetched out his lower lip knowingly.

"The fellow has instinct for the game," he said.  Sketches, portraits
were in the daily and weekly journals, and one hardy journalist even
gave an interview--which had never occurred.  But Gaston remained a
picturesque nine-days' figure, and then Parliament rose for the year.

Meanwhile he was in Paris, and every morning early he could be seen with
Jacques riding up the Champs Elysee and out to the Bois de Boulogne.
Every afternoon at three he sat for "Monmouth" or the "King of Ys" with
his horse in his uncle's garden.

Ian Belward might have lived in a fashionable part; he preferred the
Latin Quarter, with incursions into the other at fancy.  Gaston lived for
three days in the Boulevard Haussman, and then took apartments, neither
expensive nor fashionable, in a quiet street.  He was surrounded by
students and artists, a few great men and a host of small men:
Collarossi's school here and Delacluse's there: models flitting in and
out of the studios in his court-yard, who stared at him as he rode, and
sought to gossip with Jacques--accomplished without great difficulty.

Jacques was transformed.  A cheerful hue grew on his face.  He had been
an exile, he was now at home.  His French tongue ran, now with words in
the patois of Normandy, now of Brittany; and all with the accent of
French Canada, an accent undisturbed by the changes and growths of
France.  He gossiped, but no word escaped him which threw any light on
his master's history.

Soon, in the Latin Quarter, they were as notable as they had been at
Ridley Court or in London.  On the Champs Elysee side people stared at
the two: chiefly because of Gaston's splendid mount and Jacques's strange
broncho.  But they felt that they were at home.  Gaston's French was not
perfect, but it was enough for his needs.  He got a taste of that freedom
which he had handed over to the dungeons of convention two years before.
He breathed.  Everything interested him so much that the life he had led
in England seemed very distant.

He wrote to Delia, of course.  His letters were brief, most interesting,
not tenderly intimate, and not daily.  From the first they puzzled her a
little, and continued to do so; but because her mother said, "What an
impossible man!" she said, "Perfectly possible!  Of course he is not
like other men; he is a genius."

And the days went on.

Gaston little loved the purlieus of the Place de l'Opera.  One evening at
a club in the Boulevard Malesherbes bored him.  It was merely Anglo-
American enjoyment, dashed with French drama.  The Bois was more to his
taste, for he could stretch his horse's legs; but every day he could be
found before some simple cafe in Montparnasse, sipping vermouth, and
watching the gay, light life about him.  He sat up with delight to see an
artist and his "Madame" returning from a journey in the country, seated
upon sheaves of corn, quite unregarded by the world; doing as they listed
with unabashed simplicity.  He dined often at the little Hotel St. Malo
near the Gare Montparnasse, where the excellent landlord played the host,
father, critic, patron, comrade--often benefactor--to his bons enfants.
He drank vin ordinaire, smoked caporal cigarettes, made friends, and was
in all as a savage--or a much-travelled English gentleman.

His uncle Ian had introduced him here as at other places of the kind,
and, whatever his ulterior object was, had an artist's pleasure at seeing
a layman enjoy the doings of Paris art life.  Himself lived more
luxuriously.  In an avenue not far from the Luxembourg he had a small
hotel with a fine old-fashioned garden behind it, and here distinguished
artists, musicians, actors, and actresses came at times.

The evening of Gaston's arrival he took him to a cafe and dined him, and
afterwards to the Boullier--there, merely that he might see; but this
place had nothing more than a passing interest for him.  His mind had the
poetry of a free, simple--even wild-life, but he had no instinct for vice
in the name of amusement.  But the later hours spent in the garden under
the stars, the cheerful hum of the boulevards coming to them distantly,
stung his veins like good wine.  They sat and talked, with no word of
England in it at all, Jacques near, listening.

Ian Belward was at his best: genial, entertaining, with the art of the
man of no principles, no convictions, and a keen sense of life's sublime
incongruities.  Even Jacques, whose sense of humour had grown by long
association with Gaston, enjoyed the piquant conversation.  The next
evening the same.  About ten o'clock a few men dropped in: a sculptor,
artists, and Meyerbeer, an American newspaper correspondent--who,
however, was not known as such to Gaston.

This evening Ian determined to make Gaston talk.  To deepen a man's love
for a thing, get him to talk of it to the eager listener--he passes from
the narrator to the advocate unconsciously.  Gaston was not to talk of
England, but of the North, of Canada, of Mexico, the Lotos Isles.  He did
so picturesquely, yet simply too, in imperfect but sufficient French.
But as he told of one striking incident in the Rockies, he heard Jacques
make a quick expression of dissent.  He smiled.  He had made some mistake
in detail.  Now, Jacques had been in his young days in Quebec the village
story-teller; one who, by inheritance or competency, becomes semi-
officially a raconteur for the parish; filling in winter evenings,
nourishing summer afternoons, with tales, weird, childlike, daring.

Now Gaston turned and said to Jacques:

"Well, Brillon, I've forgotten, as you see; tell them how it was."

Two hours later when Jacques retired on some errand, amid ripe applause,
Ian said:

"You've got an artist there, Cadet: that description of the fight with
the loop garoo was as good as a thing from Victor Hugo.  Hugo must have
heard just such yarns, and spun them on the pattern.  Upon my soul, it's
excellent stuff.  You've lived, you two."

Another night Ian Belward gave a dinner, at which were present an
actress, a singer of some repute, the American journalist, and others.
Something that was said sent Gaston's mind to the House of Commons.
Presently he saw himself in a ridiculous picture: a buffalo dragging the
Treasury Bench about the Chamber; as one conjures things in an absurd
dream.  He laughed outright, at a moment when Mademoiselle Cerise was
telling of a remarkable effect she produced one night in "Fedora,"
unpremeditated, inspired; and Mademoiselle Cerise, with smiling lips and
eyes like daggers, called him a bear.  This brought him to him self, and
he swam with the enjoyment.  He did enjoy it, but not as his uncle wished
and hoped.  Gaston did not respond eagerly to the charms of Mademoiselle
Cerise and Madame Juliette.

Was Delia, then, so strong in the barbarian's mind?  He could not think
so, but Gaston had not shown yet, either for model, for daughter of joy,
or for the mademoiselles of the stage any disposition to an amour or a
misalliance; and either would be interesting and sufficient!  Models went
in and out of Ian's studio and the studios of others, and Gaston chatted
with them at times; and once he felt the bare arm and bare breast of a
girl as she sat for a nymph, and said in an interested way that her flesh
was as firm and fine as a Tongan's.  He even disputed with his uncle on
the tints of her skin, on seeing him paint it in, showing a fine eye for
colour.  But there was nothing more; he was impressed, observant,
interested--that was all.  His uncle began to wonder if the Englishman
was, after all, deeper in the grain than the savage.  He contented
himself with the belief that the most vigorous natures are the most
difficult to rouse.  Mademoiselle Cerise sang, with chic and abandon very
fascinating to his own sensuous nature, a song with a charming air and
sentiment.  It was after a night at the opera when they had seen her in
"Lucia," and the contrast, as she sang in his garden, softly lighted,
showed her at the most attractive angles.  She drifted from a sparkling
chanson to the delicate pathos of a song of De Musset's.

Gaston responded to the artist; but to the woman--no.  He had seen a new
life, even in its abandon, polite, fresh.  It amused him, but he could
still turn to the remembrance of Delia without blushing, for he had come
to this in the spirit of the idler, not the libertine.  Mademoiselle
Cerise said to Ian at last:

"Enfin, is the man stone?  As handsome as a leopard, too!  But, it is no
matter."

She made another effort to interest him, however.  It galled her that he
did not fall at her feet as others had done.  Even Ian had come there in
his day, but she knew him too well.  She had said to him at the time:
"You, monsieur?  No, thank you.  A week, a month, and then the brute in
you would out.  You make a woman fond, and then--a mat for your feet, and
your wicked smile, and savage English words to drive her to the vitriol
or the Seine.  Et puis, dear monsieur, accept my good friendship; nothing
more.  I will sing to you, dance to you, even pray for you--we poor
sinners do that sometimes, and go on sinning; but, again, nothing more."

Ian admired her all the more for her refusal of him, and they had been
good friends.  He had told her of his nephew's coming, had hinted at his
fortune, at his primitive soul, at the unconventional strain in him, even
at marriage.  She could not read his purpose, but she knew there was
something, and answering him with a yes, had waited.  Had Gaston have
come to her feet she would probably have got at the truth somehow, and
have worked in his favour--the joy vice takes to side with virtue, at
times--when it is at no personal sacrifice.  But Gaston was superior in a
grand way.  He was simple, courteous, interested only.  This stung her,
and she would bring him to his knees, if she could.  This night she had
rung all the changes, and had done no more than get his frank applause.
She became petulant in an airy, exacting way.  She asked him about his
horse.  This interested him.  She wanted to see it.  To-morrow?  No, no,
now.  Perhaps to-morrow she would not care to; there was no joy in
deliberate pleasure.  Now--now--now!  He laughed.  Well then, now, as she
wished!

Jacques was called.  She said to him:

"Come here, little comrade."  Jacques came.  "Look at me," she added.
She fixed her eyes on him, and smiled.  She was in the soft flare of the
lights.

"Well," she said after a moment, "what do you think of me?"

Jacques was confused.  "Madame is beautiful."

"The eyes?!" she urged.

"I have been to Gaspe, and west to Esquimault, and in England, but I have
never seen such as those," he said.  Race and primitive man spoke there.

She laughed.  "Come closer, little man."

He did so.  She suddenly rose, dropped her hands on his shoulders, and
kissed his cheek.

"Now bring the horse, and I will kiss him too."

Did she think she could rouse Gaston by kissing his servant?  Yet it did
not disgust him.  He knew it was a bit of acting, and it was well done.
Besides, Jacques Brillon was not a mere servant, and he, too, had done
well.  She sat back and laughed lightly when Jacques was gone.  Then she
said: "The honest fellow!" and hummed an air:

                  "'The pretty coquette
                    Well she needs to be wise,
                    Though she strike to the heart
                    By a glance of her eyes.

                    "'For the daintiest bird
                    Is the sport of the storm,
                    And the rose fadeth most
                    When the bosom is warm.'"

In twenty minutes the gate of the garden opened, and Jacques appeared
with Saracen.  The horse's black skin glistened in the lights, and he
tossed his head and champed his bit.  Gaston rose.  Mademoiselle Cerise
sprang to her feet and ran forward.  Jacques put out his hand to stop
her, and Gaston caught her shoulder.  "He's wicked with strangers,"
Gaston said.  "Chat!" she rejoined, stepped quickly to the horse's head
and, laughing, put out her hand to stroke him.  Jacques caught the
beast's nose, and stopped a lunge of the great white teeth.

"Enough, madame, he will kill you!"

"Yet I am beautiful--is it not so?"

"The poor beast is ver' blind."

"A pretty compliment," she rejoined, yet angry at the beast.

Gaston came, took the animal's head in his hands, and whispered.  Saracen
became tranquil.  Gaston beckoned to Mademoiselle Cerise.  She came.  He
took her hand in his and put it at the horse's lips.  The horse whinnied
angrily at first, but permitted a caress from the actress's fingers.

"He does not make friends easily," said Gaston.  "Nor does his master."

Her eyes lifted to his, the lids drooping suggestively.  "But when the
pact is made--!"

"Till death us do part?"

"Death or ruin."

"Death is better."

"That depends!"

"Ah!  I understand," she said.

"On--the woman?"

"Yes."

Then he became silent.  "Mount the horse," she urged.

Gaston sprang at one bound upon the horse's bare back.  Saracen reared
and wheeled.

"Splendid!" she said; then, presently: "Take me up with you."

He looked doubting for a moment, then whispered to the horse.

"Come quickly," he said.

She came to the side of the horse.  He stooped, caught her by the waist,
and lifted her up.  Saracen reared, but Gaston had him down in a moment.

Ian Belward suddenly called out:

"For God's sake, keep that pose for five minutes--only five!"  He caught
up some canvas.  "Hold candles near them," he said to the others.  They
did so.  With great swiftness he sketched in the strange picture.  It
looked weird, almost savage: Gaston's large form, his legs loose at the
horse's side, the woman in her white drapery clinging to him.

In a little time the artist said:

"There; that will do.  Ten such sittings and my 'King of Ys' will have
its day with the world.  I'd give two fortunes for the chance of it."

The woman's heart had beat fast with Gaston's arm around her.  He felt
the thrill of the situation.  Man, woman, and horse were as of a piece.

But Cerise knew, when Gaston let her to the ground again, that she had
not conquered.




CHAPTER XIV

IN WHICH THE PAST IS REPEATED

Next morning Gaston was visited by Meyerbeer the American journalist, of
whose profession he was still ignorant.  He saw him only as a man of raw
vigour of opinion, crude manners, and heavy temperament.  He had not been
friendly to him at night, and he was surprised at the morning visit.  The
hour was such that Gaston must ask him to breakfast.  The two were soon
at the table of the Hotel St. Malo.  Meyerbeer sniffed the air when he
saw the place.  The linen was ordinary, the rooms small; but all--he did
not take this into account--irreproachably clean.  The walls were covered
with pictures; some taken for unpaid debts, gifts from students since
risen to fame or gone into the outer darkness,--to young artists' eyes,
the sordid moneymaking world,--and had there been lost; from a great
artist or two who remembered the days of his youth and the good host who
had seen many little colonies of artists come and go.

They sat down to the table, which was soon filled with students and
artists.  Then Meyerbeer began to see, not only an interesting thing, but
"copy."  He was, in fact, preparing a certain article which, as he said
to himself, would "make 'em sit up" in London and New York.  He had found
out Gaston's history, had read his speech in the Commons, had seen
paragraphs speculating as to where he was; and now he, Salem Meyerbeer,
would tell them what the wild fellow was doing.  The Bullier, the cafes
in the Latin Quarter, apartments in a humble street, dining for one-
franc-fifty, supping with actresses, posing for the King of Ys with that
actress in his arms--all excellent in their way.  But now there was
needed an entanglement, intrigue, amour, and then America should shriek
at his picture of one of the British aristocracy, and a gentleman of the
Commons, "on the loose," as he put it.

He would head it:

               "ARISTOCRAT, POLITICIAN, LIBERTINE!"

Then, under that he would put:

               "CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN, OR THE
                    LEOPARD HIS SPOTS?"  Jer. xi. 23.

The morality of such a thing?  Morality only had to do with ruining a
girl's name, or robbery.  How did it concern this?

So Mr. Meyerbeer kept his ears open.  Presently one of the students said
to Bagshot, a young artist: "How does the dompteuse come on?"

"Well, I think it's chic enough.  She's magnificent.  The colour of her
skin against the lions was splendid to-day: a regular rich gold with a
sweet stain of red like a leaf of maize in September.  There's never been
such a Una.  I've got my chance; and if I don't pull it off,

              'Wrap me up in my tarpaulin jacket,
                And say a poor buffer lies low!'"

"Get the jacket ready," put in a young Frenchman, sneering.

The Englishman's jaw hardened, but he replied coolly

"What do you know about it?"

"I know enough.  The Comte Ploare visits her."

"How the devil does that concern my painting her?"  There was iron in
Bagshot's voice.

"Who says you are painting her?"

The insult was conspicuous.  Gaston quickly interposed.  His clear strong
voice rang down the table: "Will you let me come and see your canvas some
day soon, Mr. Bagshot?  I remember your picture 'A Passion in the
Desert,' at the Academy this year.  A fine thing: the leopard was free
and strong.  As an Englishman, I am proud to meet you."

The young Frenchman stared.  The quarrel had passed to a new and
unexpected quarter.  Gaston's large, solid body, strong face, and
penetrating eyes were not to be sneered out of sight.  The Frenchman,
an envious, disappointed artist, had had in his mind a bloodless duel,
to give a fillip to an unacquired fame.  He had, however, been drinking.
He flung an insolent glance to meet Gaston's steady look, and said:

"The cock crows of his dunghill!"

Gaston looked at the landlord, then got up calmly and walked down the
table.  The Frenchman, expecting he knew not what, sprang to his feet,
snatching up a knife; but Gaston was on him like a hawk, pinioning his
arms and lifting him off the ground, binding his legs too, all so tight
that the Frenchman squealed for breath.

"Monsieur," said Gaston to the landlord, "from the door or the window?"

The landlord was pale.  It was in some respects a quarrel of races.
For, French and English at the tables had got up and were eyeing each
other.  As to the immediate outcome of the quarrel, there could be no
doubt.  The English and Americans could break the others to pieces;
but neither wished that.  The landlord decided the matter:

"Drop him from this window."

He pushed a shutter back, and Gaston dropped the fellow on the hard
pavement--a matter of five feet.  The Frenchman got up raging, and made
for the door; but this time he was met by the landlord, who gave him his
hat, and bade him come no more.  There was applause from both English and
French.  The journalist chuckled--another column!

Gaston had acted with coolness and common-sense; and when he sat down
and began talking of the Englishman's picture again as if nothing had
happened, the others followed, and the meal went on cheerfully.

Presently another young English painter entered, and listened to the
conversation, which Gaston brought back to Una and the lions.  It was his
way to force things to his liking, if possible; and he wanted to hear
about the woman--why, he did not ask himself.  The new arrival, Fancourt
by name, kept looking at him quizzically.  Gaston presently said that he
would visit the menagerie and see this famous dompteuse that afternoon.

"She's a brick," said Bagshot.  "I was in debt, a year behind with my
Pelletier here, and it took all I got for 'A Passion in the Desert' to
square up.  I'd nothing to go on with.  I spent my last sou in visiting
the menagerie.  There I got an idea.  I went to her, told her how I was
fixed, and begged her to give me a chance.  By Jingo!  she brought the
water to my eyes.  Some think she's a bit of a devil; but she can be a
devil of a saint, that's all I've got to say."

"Zoug-Zoug's responsible for the devil," said Fancourt to Bagshot.

"Shut up, Fan," rejoined Bagshot, hurriedly, and then whispered to him
quickly.

Fancourt sent self-conscious glances down the table towards Gaston; and
then a young American, newly come to Paris, said:

"Who's Zoug-Zoug, and what's Zoug-Zoug?"

"It's milk for babes, youngster," answered Bagshot quickly, and changed
the conversation.

Gaston saw something strange in the little incident; but he presently
forgot it for many a day, and then remembered it for many a day, when the
wheel had spun through a wild arc.

When they rose from the table, Meyerbeer went to Bagshot, and said:

"Say, who's Zoug-Zoug, anyway?!" Bagshot coolly replied:

"I'm acting for another paper.  What price?"

"Fifty dollars," in a low voice, eagerly.  Bagshot meditated.

"H'm, fifty dollars!  Two hundred and fifty francs, or thereabouts.
Beggarly!"

"A hundred, then."

Bagshot got to his feet, lighting a cigarette.

"Want to have a pretty story against a woman, and to smutch a man, do
you?  Well, I'm hard up; I don't mind gossip among ourselves; but sell
the stuff to you--I'll see you damned first!"

This was said sufficiently loud; and after that, Meyerbeer could not ask
Fancourt, so he departed with Gaston, who courteously dismissed him, to
his astonishment and regret, for he had determined to visit the menagerie
with his quarry.

Gaston went to his apartments, and cheerily summoned Jacques.

"Now, little man, for a holiday!  The menagerie: lions, leopards, and a
grand dompteuse; and afterwards dinner with me at the Cafe Blanche.  I
want a blow-out of lions and that sort.  I'd like to be a lion-tamer
myself for a month, or as long as might be."

He caught Jacques by the shoulders--he had not done so since that
memorable day at Ridley Court.  "See, Jacques, we'll do this every year.
Six months in England, and three months on the Continent,--in your
France, if you like,--and three months in the out-of-the-wayest place,
where there'll be big game.  Hidalgos for six months, Goths for the
rest."

A half-hour later they were in the menagerie.  They sat near the
doors where the performers entered.  For a long time they watched the
performance with delight, clapping and calling bravo like boys.
Presently the famous dompteuse entered,--Mademoiselle Victorine,--passing
just below Gaston.  He looked down, interested, at the supple, lithe
creature making for the cages of lions in the amphitheatre.  The figure
struck him as familiar.  Presently the girl turned, throwing a glance
round the theatre.  He caught the dash of the dark, piercing eyes, the
luminous look, the face unpainted--in its own natural colour: neither hot
health nor paleness, but a thing to bear the light of day.  "Andree the
gipsy!" he exclaimed in a low tone.

In less than two years this!  Here was fame.  A wanderer, an Ishmael
then, her handful of household goods and her father in the grasp of the
Law: to-day, Mademoiselle Victorine, queen of animal-tamers!  And her
name associated with the Comte Ploare!

With the Comte Ploare?  Had it come to that?  He remembered the look in
her face when he bade her good-bye.  Impossible!  Then, immediately he
laughed.

Why impossible?  And why should he bother his head about it?  People of
this sort: Mademoiselle Cerise, Madame Juliette, Mademoiselle Victorine--
what were they to him, or to themselves?

There flashed through his brain three pictures: when he stood by the
bedside of the old dying Esquimaux in Labrador, and took a girl's hand in
his; when among the flowers at Peppingham he heard Delia say: "Oh,
Gaston!  Gaston!" and Alice's face at midnight in the moonlit window at
Ridley Court.

How strange this figure--spangled, gaudy, standing among her lions--
seemed by these.  To think of her, his veins thumping thus, was an insult
to all three: to Delia, one unpardonable.  And yet he could not take his
eyes off her.  Her performance was splendid.  He was interested,
speculative.  She certainly had flown high; for, again, why should not a
dompteuse be a decent woman?  And here were money, fame of a kind, and an
occupation that sent his blood bounding.  A dompteur!  He had tamed
moose, and young mountain lions, and a catamount, and had had mad hours
with pumas and arctic bears; and he could understand how even he might
easily pass from M.P. to dompteur.  It was not intellectual, but it was
power of a kind; and it was decent, and healthy, and infinitely better
than playing the Jew in business, or keeping a tavern, or "shaving"
notes, and all that.  Truly, the woman was to be admired, for she was
earning an honest living; and no doubt they lied when they named her with
Count Ploare.  He kept coming back to that--Count Ploare!  Why could they
not leave these women alone?  Did they think none of them virtuous?  He
would stake his life that Andree--he would call her that--was as straight
as the sun.

"What do you think of her, Jacques?!" he said suddenly.

"It is grand.  Mon Dieu, she is wonderful--and a face all fire!"

Presently she came out of the cage, followed by two great lions.  She
walked round the ring, a hand on the head of each: one growling, the
other purring against her, with a ponderous kind of affection.  She
talked to them as they went, giving occasionally a deep purring sound
like their own.  Her talk never ceased.  She looked at the audience, but
only as in a dream.  Her mind was all with the animals.  There was
something splendid in it: she, herself, was a noble animal; and she
seemed entirely in place where she was.  The lions were fond of her, and
she of them; but the first part of her performance had shown that they
could be capricious.  A lion's love is but a lion's love after all--and
hers likewise, no doubt!  The three seemed as one in their beauty, the
woman superbly superior.  Meyerbeer, in a far corner, was still on the
trail of his sensation.  He thought that he might get an article out of
it--with the help of Count Ploare and Zoug-Zoug.  Who was Zoug-Zoug?
He exulted in her picturesqueness, and he determined to lie in wait.  He
thought it a pity that Comte Ploare was not an Englishman or an American;
but it couldn't be helped.  Yes, she was, as he said to himself, "a
stunner."  Meanwhile he watched Gaston, noted his intense interest.

Presently the girl stopped beside the cage.  A chariot was brought out,
and the two lions were harnessed to it.  Then she called out another
larger lion, which came unwillingly at first.  She spoke sharply, and
then struck him.  He growled, but came on.  Then she spoke softly to him,
and made that peculiar purr, soft and rich.  Now he responded, walked
round her, coming closer, till his body made a half-circle about her, and
his head was at her knees.  She dropped her hand on it.  Great applause
rang through the building.  This play had been quite accidental.  But
there lay one secret of the girl's success.  She was original; she
depended greatly on the power of the moment for her best effects, and
they came at unexpected times.

It was at this instant that, glancing round the theatre in acknowledgment
of the applause, her eyes rested mechanically on Gaston's box.  There was
generally some one important in that box: from a foreign prince to a
young gentleman whose proudest moment was to take off his hat in the Bois
to the queen of a lawless court.  She had tired of being introduced to
princes.  What could it mean to her?  And for the young bloods, whose
greatest regret was that they could not send forth a daughter of joy into
the Champs Elysee in her carriage, she had ever sent them about their
business.  She had no corner of pardon for them.  She kissed her lions,
she hugged the lion's cub that rode back and forth with her to the
menagerie day by day--her companion in her modest apartments; but sell
one of these kisses to a young gentleman of Paris, whose ambition was to
master all the vices, and then let the vices master him!--she had not
come to that, though, as she said in some bitter moments, she had come
far.

Count Ploare--there was nothing in that.  A blase man of the world, who
had found it all not worth the bothering about, neither code nor people--
he saw in this rich impetuous nature a new range of emotions, a brief
return to the time when he tasted an open strong life in Algiers, in
Tahiti.  And he would laugh at the world by marrying her--yes, actually
marrying her, the dompteuse!  Accident had let him render her a service,
not unimportant, once at Versailles, and he had been so courteous and
considerate afterwards, that she had let him see her occasionally, but
never yet alone.  He soon saw that an amour was impossible.  At last he
spoke of marriage.  She shook her head.  She ought to have been grateful,
but she was not.  Why should she be?  She did not know why he wished to
marry her; but, whatever the reason, he was selfish.  Well, she would be
selfish.  She did not care for him.  If she married him, it would be
because she was selfish: because of position, ease; for protection in
this shameless Paris; and for a home, she who had been a wanderer since
her birth.

It was mere bargaining.  But at last her free, independent nature
revolted.  No: she had had enough of the chain, and the loveless hand of
man, for three months that were burned into her brain--no more!  If ever
she loved--all; but not the right for Count Ploare to demand the
affection she gave her lions freely.

The manager of the menagerie had tried for her affections, had offered a
price for her friendship; and failing, had become as good a friend as
such a man could be.  She even visited his wife occasionally, and gave
gifts to his children; and the mother trusted her and told her her
trials.  And so the thing went on, and the people talked.

As we said, she turned her eyes to Gaston's box.  Instantly they became
riveted, and then a deep flush swept slowly up her face and burned into
her splendid hair.  Meyerbeer was watching through his opera-glasses.
He gave an exclamation of delight:

"By the holy smoke, here's something!" he said aloud.

For an instant Gaston and the girl looked at each other intently.  He
made a slight sign of recognition with his hand, and then she turned
away, gone a little pale now.  She stood looking at her lions, as if
trying to recollect herself.  The lion at her feet helped her.  He had
a change of temper, and, possibly fretting under inaction, growled.  At
once she summoned him to get into the chariot.  He hesitated, but did so.
She put the reins in his paws and took her place behind.  Then a robe of
purple and ermine was thrown over her shoulders by an attendant; she gave
a sharp command, and the lions came round the ring, to wild applause.
Even a Parisian audience had never seen anything like this.  It was
amusing too; for the coachman-lion was evidently disgusted with his task,
and growled in a helpless kind of way.

As they passed Gaston's box, they were very near.  The girl threw one
swift glance; but her face was well controlled now.  She heard, however,
a whispered word come to her:

"Andree!"

A few moments afterwards she retired, and the performance was in other
and less remarkable hands.  Presently the manager himself came, and said
that Mademoiselle Victorine would be glad to see Monsieur Belward if he
so wished.  Gaston left Jacques, and went.

Meyerbeer noticed the move, and determined to see the meeting if
possible.  There was something in it, he was sure.  He would invent an
excuse, and make his way behind.

Gaston and the manager were in the latter's rooms waiting for Victorine.
Presently a messenger came, saying that Monsieur Belward would find
Mademoiselle in her dressing-room.  Thither Gaston went, accompanied by
the manager, who, however, left him at the door, nodding good-naturedly
to Victorine, and inwardly praying that here was no danger to his
business, for Victorine was a source of great profit.  Yet he had failed
himself, and all others had failed in winning her--why should this man
succeed, if that was his purpose?

There was present an elderly, dark-featured Frenchwoman, who was always
with Victorine, vigilant, protective, loving her as her own daughter.

"Monsieur!" said Andree, a warm colour in her cheek.  Gaston shook her
hand cordially, and laughed.  "Mademoiselle--Andree?"

He looked inquiringly.  "Yes, to you," she said.

"You have it all your own way now--isn't it so?"  "With the lions, yes.
Please sit down.  This is my dear keeper," she said, touching the woman's
shoulder.  Then, to the woman: "Annette, you have heard me speak of this
gentleman?"

The woman nodded, and modestly touched Gaston's outstretched hand.

"Monsieur was kind once to my dear Mademoiselle," she said.

Gaston cheerily smiled:

"Nothing, nothing, upon my word!"  Presently he continued:

"Your father, what of him?"  She sighed and shivered a little.

"He died in Auvergne three months after you saw him."

"And you?"  He waved a hand towards the menagerie.

"It is a long story," she answered, not meeting his eyes.  "I hated the
Romany life.  I became an artist's model; sickened of that,"--her voice
went quickly here, "joined a travelling menagerie, and became what I am.
That in brief."

"You have done well," he said admiringly, his face glowing.

"I am a successful dompteuse," she replied.

She then asked him who was his companion in the box.  He told her.
She insisted on sending for Jacques.  Meanwhile they talked of her
profession, of the animals.  She grew eloquent.  Jacques arrived, and
suddenly remembered Andree--stammered, was put at his ease, and dropped
into talk with Annette.  Gaston fell into reminiscences of wild game, and
talked intelligently, acutely of her work.  He must wait, she said, until
the performance closed, and then she would show him the animals as a
happy family.  Thus a half-hour went by.

Meanwhile, Meyerbeer had asked the manager to take him to Mademoiselle;
but was told that Victorine never gave information to journalists, and
would not be interviewed.  Besides, she had a visitor.  Yes, Meyerbeer
knew it--Mr. Gaston Belward; but that did not matter.  The manager
thought it did matter.  Then, with an idea of the future, Meyerbeer asked
to be shown the menagerie thoroughly--he would write it up for England
and America.

And so it happened that there were two sets of people inspecting the
menagerie after the performance.  Andree let a dozen of the animals out--
lions, leopards, a tiger, and a bear,--and they gambolled round her
playfully, sometimes quarrelling with each other, but brought up smartly
by her voice and a little whip, which she always carried--the only sign
of professional life about her, though there was ever a dagger hid in her
dress.  For the rest, she looked a splendid gipsy.

Gaston suddenly asked if he might visit her.  At the moment she was
playing with the young tiger.  She paused, was silent, preoccupied.  The
tiger, feeling neglected, caught her hand with its paw, tearing the skin.
Gaston whipped out his handkerchief, and stanched the blood.  She wrapped
the handkerchief quickly round her hand, and then, recovering herself,
ordered the animals back into their cages.  They trotted away, and the
attendant locked them up.  Meanwhile Jacques had picked up and handed to
Gaston a letter, dropped when he drew out his handkerchief.  It was one
received two days before from Delia Gasgoyne.  He had a pang of
confusion, and hastily put it into his pocket.

Up to this time there had been no confusion in his mind.  He was going
back to do his duty; to marry the girl, union with whom would be an
honour; to take his place in his kingdom.  He had had no minute's doubt
of that.  It was necessary, and it should be done.  The girl?  Did he not
admire her, honour her, care for her?  Why, then, this confusion?

Andree said to him that he might come the next morning for breakfast.
She said it just as the manager and Meyerbeer passed her.  Meyerbeer
heard it, and saw the look in the faces of both: in hers, bewildered,
warm, penetrating; in Gaston's, eager, glowing, bold, with a distant kind
of trouble.

Here was a thickening plot for Paul Pry.  He hugged himself.  But who was
Zoug-Zoug?  If he could but get at that!  He asked the manager, who said
he did not know.  He asked a dozen men that evening, but none knew.  He
would ask Ian Belward.  What a fool not to have thought of him at first.
He knew all the gossip of Paris, and was always communicative--but was
he, after all?  He remembered now that the painter had a way of talking
at discretion: he had never got any really good material from him.  But
he would try him in this.

So, as Gaston and Jacques travelled down the Boulevard Montparnasse,
Meyerbeer was not far behind.  The journalist found Ian Belward at home,
in a cynical indolent mood.

"Wherefore Meyerbeer?!" he said, as he motioned the other to a chair, and
pushed over vermouth and cigarettes.

"To ask a question."

"One question?  Come, that's penance.  Aren't you lying as usual?"

"No; one only.  I've got the rest of it."

"Got the rest of it, eh?  Nasty mess you've got, whatever it is, I'll be
bound.  What a nice mob you press fellows are--wholesale scavengers!"

"That's all right.  This vermouth is good enough.  Well, will you answer
my question?"

"Possibly, if it's not personal.  But Lord knows where your insolence may
run!  You may ask if I'll introduce you to a decent London club!"

Meyerbeer flushed at last.

"You're rubbing it in," he said angrily.

He did wish to be introduced to a good London club.  "The question isn't
personal, I guess.  It's this: Who's Zoug-Zoug?"

Smoke had come trailing out of Belward's nose, his head thrown back, his
eyes on the ceiling.  It stopped, and came out of his mouth on one long,
straight whiff.  Then the painter brought his head to a natural position
slowly, and looking with a furtive nonchalance at Meyerbeer, said:

"Who is what?"

"Who's Zoug-Zoug?"

"That is your one solitary question, is it?"

"That's it."

"Very well.  Now, I'll be scavenger.  What is the story?  Who is the
woman--for you've got a woman in it, that's certain?"

"Will you tell me, then, whether you know Zoug-Zoug?"

"Yes."

"The woman is Mademoiselle Victorine, the dompteuse."

"Ah, I've not seen her yet.  She burst upon Paris while I was away.  Now,
straight: no lies: who are the others?"

Meyerbeer hesitated; for, of course, he did not wish to speak of Gaston
at this stage in the game.  But he said:

"Count Ploare--and Zoug-Zoug."

"Why don't you tell me the truth?"

"I do.  Now, who is Zoug-Zoug?"

"Find out."

"You said you'd tell me."

"No.  I said I'd tell you if I knew Zoug-Zoug.  I do."

"That's all you'll tell me?"

"That's all.  And see, scavenger, take my advice and let Zoug-Zoug alone.
He's a man of influence; and he's possessed of a devil.  He'll make you
sorry, if you meddle with him!"

He rose, and Meyerbeer did the same, saying: "You'd better tell me."

"Now, don't bother me.  Drink your vermouth, take that bundle of
cigarettes, and hunt Zoug-Zoug else where.  If you find him, let me know.
Good-bye."

Meyerbeer went out furious.  The treatment had been too heroic.

"I'll give a sweet savour to your family name," he said with an oath, as
he shook his fist at the closed door.  Ian Belward sat back and looked at
the ceiling reflectively.

"H'm!" he said at last.  "What the devil does this mean?  Not Andree,
surely not Andree!  Yet I wasn't called Zoug-Zoug before that.  It was
Bagshot's insolent inspiration at Auvergne.  Well, well!"

He got up, drew over a portfolio of sketches, took out two or three, put
them in a row against a divan, sat down, and looked at them half
quizzically.

"It was rough on you, Andree; but you were hard to please, and I am
constant to but one.  Yet, begad, you had solid virtues; and I wish, for
your sake, I had been a different kind of fellow.  Well, well, we'll meet
again some time, and then we'll be good friends, no doubt."

He turned away from the sketches and picked up some illustrated
newspapers.  In one was a portrait.  He looked at it, then at the
sketches again and again.

"There's a resemblance," he said.  "But no, it's not possible.  Andree-
Mademoiselle Victorine!  That would be amusing.  I'd go to-morrow and
see, if I weren't off to Fontainebleau.  But there's no hurry: when I
come back will do."




CHAPTER XV

WHEREIN IS SEEN THE OLD ADAM AND THE GARDEN

At Ridley Court and Peppingham all was serene to the eye.  Letters had
come to the Court at least once every two weeks from Gaston, and the
minds of the Baronet and his wife were at ease.  They even went so far as
to hope that he would influence his uncle; for it was clear to them both
that whatever Gaston's faults were, they were agreeably different from
Ian's.  His fame and promise were sweet to their nostrils.  Indeed, the
young man had brought the wife and husband nearer than they had been
since Robert vanished over-sea.  Each had blamed the other in an
indefinite, secret way; but here was Robert's son, on whom they could
lavish--as they did--their affection, long since forfeited by Ian.
Finally, one day, after a little burst of thanksgiving, on getting an
excellent letter from Gaston, telling of his simple, amusing life in
Paris, Sir William sent him one thousand pounds, begging him to buy a
small yacht, or to do what he pleased with it.

"A very remarkable man, my dear," Sir William said, as he enclosed the
cheque.  "Excellent wisdom--excellent!"

"Who could have guessed that he knew so much about the poor and the East
End, and all those social facts and figures?!" Lady Belward answered
complacently.

"An unusual mind, with a singular taste for history, and yet a deep
observation of the present.  I don't know when and how he does it.  I
really do not know."

"It is nice to think that Lord Faramond approves of him."

"Most noticeable.  And we have not been a Parliamentary family since
the first Charles's time.  And then it was a Gaston.  Singular--quite
singular!  Coincidences of looks and character.  Nature plays strange
games.  Reproduction--reproduction!"

"The Pall Mall Gazette says that he may soon reach the Treasury Bench."

Sir William was abstracted.  He was thinking of that afternoon in
Gaston's bedroom, when his grandson had acted, before Lady Dargan and
Cluny Vosse, Sir Gaston's scene with Buckingham.

"Really, most mysterious, most unaccountable.  But it's one of the
virtues of having a descent.  When it is most needed, it counts, it
counts."

"Against the half-breed mother!" Lady Belward added.

"Quite so, against the--was it Cree or Blackfoot?  I've heard him speak
of both, but which is in him I do not remember."

"It is very painful; but, poor fellow, it is not his fault, and we ought
to be content."

"Indeed, it gives him great originality.  Our old families need
refreshing now and then."

"Ah, yes, I said so to Mrs. Gasgoyne the other day, and she replied that
the refreshment might prove intoxicating.  Reine was always rude."

Truth is, Mrs. Gasgoyne was not quite satisfied.  That very day she said
to her husband:

"You men always stand by each other; but I know you, and you know that I
know."

"'Thou knowest the secrets of our hearts'; well, then, you know how we
love you.  So, be merciful."

"Nonsense, Warren!  I tell you he oughtn't to have gone when he did.  He
has the wild man in him, and I am not satisfied."

"What do you want--me to play the spy?"

"Warren, you're a fool!  What do I want?  I want the first of September
to come quickly, that we may have him with us.  With Delia he must go
straight.  She influences him, he admires her--which is better than mere
love.  Away from her just now, who can tell what mad adventure--!  You
see, he has had the curb so long!"

But in a day or two there came a letter-unusually long for Gaston--
to Mrs. Gasgoyne herself.  It was simple, descriptive, with a dash of
epigram.  It acknowledged that he had felt the curb, and wanted a touch
of the unconventional.  It spoke of Ian Belward in a dry phrase, and it
asked for the date of the yacht's arrival at Gibraltar.

"Warren, the man is still sensible," she said.  "This letter is honest.
He is much a heathen at heart, but I believe he hasn't given Delia cause
to blush--and that's a good deal!  Dear me, I am fond of the fellow--
he is so clever.  But clever men are trying."

As for Delia, like every sensible English girl, she enjoyed herself
in the time of youth, drinking in delightedly the interest attaching
to Gaston's betrothed.  His letters had been regular, kind yet not
emotionally affectionate, interesting, uncommon.  He had a knack of
saying as much in one page as most people did in five.  Her imagination
was not great, but he stimulated it.  If he wrote a pungent line on
Daudet or Whistler, on Montaigne or Fielding, she was stimulated to know
them.  One day he sent her Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which he had picked
up in New York on his way to England.  This startled her.  She had
never heard of Whitman.  To her he seemed coarse, incomprehensible,
ungentlemanly.  She could not understand how Gaston could say beautiful
things about Montaigne and about Whitman too.  She had no conception how
he had in him the strain of that first Sir Gaston Belward, and was also
the son of a half-heathen.

He interested her all the more.  Her letters were hardly so fascinating
to him.  She was beautifully correct, but she could not make a sentence
breathe.  He was grateful, but nothing stirred in him.  He could live
without her--that he knew regretfully.  But he did his part with sincere
intention.

That was up to the day when he saw Andree as Mademoiselle Victorine.
Then came a swift change.  Day after day he visited her, always in the
presence of Annette.  Soon they dined often together, still in Annette's
presence, and the severity of that rule was never relaxed.

Count Ploare came no more; he had received his dismissal.  Occasionally
Gaston visited the menagerie, but generally after the performance, when
Victorine had a half-hour's or an hour's romp with her animals.  This was
a pleasant time to Gaston.  The wild life in him responded.

These were hours when the girl was quite naive and natural, when she
spent herself in ripe enjoyment--almost child-like, healthy.  At other
times there was an indefinable something which Gaston had not noticed in
England.  But then he had only seen her once.  She, too, saw something in
him unnoticed before.  It was on his tongue a hundred times to tell her
that that something was Delia Gasgoyne.  He did not.  Perhaps because it
seemed so grotesque, perhaps because it was easier to drift.  Besides, as
he said to himself, he would soon go to join the yacht at Gibraltar, and
all this would be over-over.  All this?  All what?  A gipsy, a dompteuse
--what was she to him?  She interested him, he liked her, and she liked
him, but there had been nothing more between them.  Near as he was to her
now, he very often saw her in his mind's eye as she passed over Ridley
Common, looking towards him, her eyes shaded by her hand.

She, too, had continually said to herself that this man could be nothing
to her--nothing, never!  Yet, why not?  Count Ploare had offered her his
hand.  But she knew what had been in Count Ploare's mind.  Gaston Belward
was different--he had befriended her father.  She had not singular
scruples regarding men, for she despised most of them.  She was not a
Mademoiselle Cerise, nor a Madame Juliette, though they were higher on
the plane of art than she; or so the world put it.  She had not known a
man who had not, one time or another, shown himself common or insulting.
But since the first moment she had seen Gaston, he had treated her as a
lady.

A lady?  She had seen enough to smile at that.  She knew that she hadn't
it in her veins, that she was very much an actress, except in this man's
company, when she was mostly natural--as natural as one can be who
has a painful secret.  They had talked together--for how many hours?
She knew exactly.  And he had never descended to that which--she felt
instinctively--he would not have shown to the ladies of his English
world.  She knew what ladies were.  In her first few weeks in Paris,
her fame mounting, she had lunched with some distinguished people, who
entertained her as they would have done one of her lions, if that were
possible.  She understood.  She had a proud, passionate nature; she
rebelled at this.  Invitations were declined at first on pink note-paper
with gaudy flowers in a corner, afterwards on cream-laid vellum, when she
saw what the great folk did.

And so the days went on, he telling her of his life from his boyhood up
--all but the one thing!  But that one thing she came to know, partly by
instinct, partly by something he accidentally dropped, partly from
something Jacques once said to him.  Well, what did it matter to her?
He would go back; she would remain.  It didn't matter.--Yet, why should
she lie to herself?  It did matter.  And why should she care about that
girl in England?  She was not supposed to know.  The other had everything
in her favour; what had Andree the gipsy girl, or Mademoiselle Victorine,
the dompteuse?

One Sunday evening, after dining together, she asked him to take her to
see Saracen.  It was a long-standing promise.  She had never seen him
riding; for their hours did not coincide until the late afternoon or
evening.  Taking Annette, they went to his new apartments.  He had
furnished a large studio as a sitting-room, not luxuriantly but
pleasantly.  It opened into a pretty little garden, with a few plants
and trees.  They sat there while Jacques went for the horse.  Next door
a number of students were singing a song of the boulevards.  It was
followed by one in a woman's voice, sweet and clear and passionate,
pitifully reckless.  It was, as if in pure contradiction, the opposite
of the other--simple, pathetic.  At first there were laughing
interruptions from the students; but the girl kept on, and soon silence
prevailed, save for the voice:

              "And when the wine is dry upon the lip,
               And when the flower is broken by the hand,
               And when I see the white sails of thy ship
               Fly on, and leave me there upon the sand:
               Think you that I shall weep?  Nay, I shall smile:
               The wine is drunk, the flower it is gone,
               One weeps not when the days no more beguile,
               How shall the tear-drops gather in a stone?"

When it was ended, Andree, who had listened intently, drew herself up
with a little shudder.  She sat long, looking into the garden, the cub
playing at her feet.  Gaston did not disturb her.  He got refreshments
and put them on the table, rolled a cigarette, and regarded the scene.
Her knee was drawn up slightly in her hands, her hat was off, her rich
brown hair fell loosely about her head, framing it, her dark eyes glowed
under her bent brows.  The lion's cub crawled up on the divan, and thrust
its nose under an arm.  Its head clung to her waist.  Who was she?
thought Gaston.  Delilah, Cleopatra--who?  She was lost in thought.  She
remained so until the garden door opened, and Jacques entered with
Saracen.

She looked.  Suddenly she came to her feet with a cry of delight, and ran
out towards the horse.  There was something essentially child-like in
her, something also painfully wild-an animal, and a philosopher, and
twenty-three.

Jacques put out his hand as he had done with Mademoiselle Cerise.

"No, no; he is savage."

"Nonsense!" she rejoined, and came closer.

Gaston watched, interested.  He guessed what she would do.

"A horse!" she added.  "Why, you have seen my lions!  Leave him free:
stand away from him."

Her words were peremptory, and Jacques obeyed.  The horse stood alone,
a hoof pawing the ground.  Presently it sprang away, then half-turned
towards the girl, and stood still.  She kept talking to him and calling
softly, making a coaxing, animal-like sound, as she always did with her
lions.

She stepped forward a little and paused.  The horse suddenly turned
straight towards her, came over slowly, and, with arched neck, dropped
his head on her shoulder.  She felt the folds of his neck and kissed him.
He followed her about the garden like a dog.  She brought him to Gaston,
locked up, and said with a teasing look, "I have conquered him: he is
mine!"

Gaston looked her in her eyes.  "He is yours."

"And you?"

"He is mine."  His look burned into her soul-how deep, how joyful!

She turned away, her face going suddenly pale.  She kept the horse for
some time, but at last gave him up again to Jacques.  Gaston stepped from
the doorway into the garden and met her.  It was now dusk.  Annette was
inside.  They walked together in silence for a time.  Presently she drew
close to him.  He felt his veins bounding.  Her hand slid into his arm,
and, dark as it was, he could see her eyes lifting to his, shining,
profound.  They had reached the end of the garden, and now turned to come
back again.

Suddenly he said, his eyes holding hers: "The horse is yours--and mine."

She stood still; but he could see her bosom heaving hard.  She threw up
her head with a sound half sob, half laugh.  .  .  .

"You are mad!" she said a moment afterwards, as she lifted her head from
his breast.

He laughed softly, catching her cheek to his.  "Why be sane?  It was to
be."

"The gipsy and the gentleman?"

"Gipsies all!"

"And the end of it?"

"Do you not love me, Andree?"  She caught her hands over her eyes.

"I do not know what it is--only that it is madness!  I see, oh, I see a
hundred things."

Her hot eyes were on space.  "What do you see?!" he urged.  She gave a
sudden cry:

"I see you at my feet--dead."

"Better than you at mine, Andree."

"Let us go," she said hurriedly.

"Wait," he whispered.

They talked for a little time.  Then they entered the studio.  Annette
was asleep in her chair.  Andree waked her, and they bade Gaston good-
night.




CHAPTER XVI

WHEREIN LOVE KNOWS NO LAW SAVE THE MAN'S WILL

In another week it was announced that Mademoiselle Victorine would take a
month's holiday; to the sorrow of her chief, and to the delight of Mr.
Meyerbeer, who had not yet discovered his man, though he had a pretty
scandal well-nigh brewed.

Count Ploare was no more, Gaston Belward was.  Zoug-Zoug was in the
country at Fontainebleau, working at his picture.  He had left on the
morning after Gaston discovered Andree.  He had written, asking his
nephew to come for some final sittings.  Possibly, he said, Mademoiselle
Cerise and others would be down for a Sunday.  Gaston had not gone, had
briefly declined.  His uncle shrugged his shoulders, and went on with
other work.  It would end in his having to go to Paris and finish the
picture there, he said.  Perhaps the youth was getting into mischief?
So much the better.  He took no newspapers.--What did an artist need of
them?  He did not even read the notices sent by a press-cutting agency.
He had a model with him.  She amused him for the time, but it was
unsatisfactory working on "The King of Ys" from photographs.  He loathed
it, and gave it up.

One evening Gaston and Andree met at the Gare Montparnasse.  Jacques
was gone on, but Annette was there.  Meyerbeer was there also, at a safe
distance.  He saw Gaston purchase tickets, arrange his baggage, and enter
the train.  He passed the compartment, looking in.  Besides the three,
there was a priest and a young soldier.

Gaston saw him, and guessed what brought him there.  He had an impulse to
get out and shake him as would Andree's cub a puppy.  But the train moved
off.  Meyerbeer found Gaston's porter.  A franc did the business.

"Douarnenez, for Audierne, Brittany," was the legend written in
Meyerbeer's note-book.  And after that: "Journey twenty hours--change at
Rennes, Redon, and Quimpere."

"Too far.  I've enough for now," said Meyerbeer, chuckling, as he walked
away.  "But I'd give five hundred dollars to know who Zoug-Zoug is.  I'll
make another try."

So he held his sensation back for a while yet.  Of the colony at the
Hotel St. Malo, not one of the three who knew would tell him.  Bagshot
had sworn the others to secrecy.

Jacques had gone on with the horses.  He was to rent a house, or get
rooms at a hotel.  He did very well.  The horses were stalled at the
Hotel de France.  He had rented an old chateau perched upon a hill, with
steps approaching, steps flanking; near it strange narrow alleys, leading
where one cared not to search; a garden of pears and figs, and grapes,
and innumerable flowers and an arbour; a pavilion, all windows, over an
entranceway, with a shrine in it--a be-starred shrine below it; bare
floors, simple furniture, primitiveness at every turn.

Gaston and Andree came, of choice, with a courier in a racketing old
diligence from Douarnenez, and they laughed with delight, tired as they
were, at the new quarters.  It must be a gipsy kind of existence at the
most.

There were rooms for Jacques and Annette, who at once set to work with
the help of a little Breton maid.  Jacques had not ordered a dinner at
the hotel, but had got in fresh fish, lobsters, chickens, eggs, and other
necessaries; and all was ready for a meal which could be got in an hour.

Jacques had now his hour of happiness.  He knew not of these morals--
they were beyond him; but after a cheerful dinner in the pavilion, with
an omelette made by Andree herself, Annette went to her room and cried
herself to sleep.  She was civilised, poor soul, and here they were a
stone's throw from the cure and the church!  Gaston and Andree,
refreshed, travelled down the long steps to the village, over the place,
along the quay, to the lighthouse and the beach, through crowds of
sardine fishers and simple hard-tongued Bretons.  Cheerful, buoyant at
dinner, there now came upon the girl an intense quiet and fatigue.  She
stood and looked long at the sea.  Gaston tried to rouse her.

"This is your native Brittany, Andree," he said.  She pointed far over
the sea:

"Near that light at Penmark I was born."

"Can you speak the Breton language?"

"Far worse than you speak Parisian French."

He laughed.  "You are so little like these people!"

She had vanity.  That had been part of her life.  Her beauty had brought
trade when she was a gipsy; she had been the admired of Paris: she was
only twenty three.  Presently she became restless, and shrank from him.
Her eyes had a flitting hunted look.  Once they met his with a wild sort
of pleading or revolt, he could not tell which, and then were continually
turned away.

If either could have known how hard the little dwarf of sense and memory
was trying to tell her something.

This new phase stunned him.  What did it mean?  He touched her hand.
It was hot, and withdrew from his.  He put his arm around her, and she
shivered, cringed.  But then she was a woman, he thought.  He had met
one unlike any he had ever known.  He would wait.  He would be patient.
Would she come--home?  She turned passively and took his arm.  He talked,
but he knew he was talking poorly, and at last he became silent also.
But when they came to the steep steps leading to the chateau, he lifted
her in his arms, carried her to the house, and left her at their chamber-
door.

Then he went to the pavilion to smoke.  He had no wish to think--
at least of anything but the girl.  It was not a time for retrospect,
but to accept a situation.  The die had been cast.  He had followed what
--his nature, his instincts?  The consequence?

He heard Andree's voice.  He went to her.

The next morning they were in the garden walking about.  They had been
speaking, but now both were silent.  At last he turned again to her.

"Andree, who was the other man?!" he asked quietly, but with a strange
troubled look in his eyes.

She shrank away confused, a kind of sickness in her eyes.

"What does it matter?!" she said.

"Of course, of course," he returned in a low, nerveless tone.

They were silent for a long time.  Meanwhile, she seemed to beat up
a feverish cheerfulness.  At last she said:

"Where do we go this afternoon, Gaston?"

"We will see," he replied.

The day passed, another, and another.  The same: she shrank from him, was
impatient, agitated, unhappy, went out alone.  Annette saw, and mourned,
entreated, prayed; Jacques was miserable.  There was no joyous passion
to redeem the situation for which Gaston had risked so much.

They rode, they took excursions in fishing-boats and little sail-boats.
Andree entered into these with zest: talked to the sailors, to Jacques,
caressed children, and was not indifferent to the notice she attracted in
the village; but was obviously distrait.  Gaston was patient--and
unhappy.  So, this was the merchandise for which he had bartered all!
But he had a will, he was determined; he had sowed, he would reap his
harvest to the useless stubble.

"Do you wish to go back to your work?!" he said quietly, once.

"I have no work," she answered apathetically.  He said no more just then.

The days and weeks went by.  The situation was impossible, not to be
understood.  Gaston made his final move.  He hoped that perhaps a forced
crisis might bring about a change.  If it failed--he knew not what!
She was sitting in the garden below--he alone in the window, smoking.
A bundle of letters and papers, brought by the postman that evening, were
beside him.  He would not open them yet.  He felt that there was trouble
in them--he saw phrases, sentences flitting past him.  But he would play
this other bitter game out first.  He let them lie.  He heard the bells
in the church ringing the village commerce done--it was nine o'clock.
The picture of that other garden in Paris came to him: that night when
he had first taken this girl into his arms.  She sat below talking to
Annette and singing a little Breton chanson:

                   "Parvondt varbondt anan oun,
                    Et die don la lire!
                    Parvondt varbondt anan oun,
                    Et die don la, la!"

He called down to her presently.  "Andree!"

"Yes."

"Will you come up for a moment, please?"

"Surely."

She came up, leaving the room door open, and bringing the cub with her.

He called Jacques.

"Take the cub to its quarters, Jacques," he said, quietly.

She seemed about to protest, but sat back and watched him.  He shut the
door--locked it.  Then he came and sat down before her.

"Andree," he said, "this is all impossible."

"What is impossible?"

"You know well.  I am not a mere brute.  The only thing that can redeem
this life is love."

"That is true," she said, coldly.  "What then?"

"You do not redeem it.  We must part."

She laughed fitfully.  "We must--?"

She leaned towards him.

"To-morrow evening you will go back to Paris.  To-night we part, however:
that is, our relations cease."

"I shall go from here when it pleases me, Gaston!"

His voice came low and stern, but courteous:

"You must go when I tell you.  Do you think I am the weaker?"

He could see her colour flying, her fingers lacing and interlacing.

"Aren't you afraid to tell me that?!" she asked.

"Afraid?  Of my life--you mean that?  That you will be as common as that?
No: you will do as I tell you."

He fixed his eyes on hers, and held them.  She sat, looking.  Presently
she tried to take her eyes away.  She could not.  She shuddered and
shrank.

He withdrew his eyes for a moment.  "You will go?!" he asked.

"It makes no difference," she answered; then added sharply: "Who are you,
to look at me like that, to--!"

She paused.

"I am your friend and your master!"

He rose.  "Good-night," he said, at the door, and went out.

He heard the key turn in the lock.  He had forgotten his papers and
letters.  It did not matter.  He would read them when she was gone--if
she did go.  He was far from sure that he had succeeded.  He went to bed
in another room, and was soon asleep.

He was waked in the very early morning by feeling a face against his,
wet, trembling.

"What is it, Andree?!" he asked.  Her arms ran round his neck.

"Oh, mon amour!  Mon adore!  Je t'aime!  Je t'aime!"

In the evening of this day she said she knew not how it was, but on that
first evening in Audierne there suddenly came to her a strange terrible
feeling, which seemed to dry up all the springs of her desire for him.
She could not help it.  She had fought against it, but it was no use; yet
she knew that she could not leave him.  After he had told her to go, she
had had a bitter struggle: now tears, now anger, and a wish to hate.  At
last she fell asleep.  When she awoke she had changed, she was her old
self, as in Paris, when she had first confessed her love.  She felt that
she must die if she did not go to him.  All the first passion returned,
the passion that began on the common at Ridley Court.  "And now--now,"
she said, "I know that I cannot live without you."

It seemed so.  Her nature was emptying itself.  Gaston had got the
merchandise for which he had given a price yet to be known.

"You asked me of the other man," she said.  "I will tell you."

"Not now," he said.  "You loved him?"

"No--ah God, no!" she answered.

An hour after, when she was in her room, he opened the little bundle of
correspondence.--A memorandum with money from his bankers.  A letter from
Delia, and also one from Mrs. Gasgoyne, saying that they expected to meet
him at Gibraltar on a certain day, and asking why he had not written;
Delia with sorrowful reserve, Mrs. Gasgoyne with impatience.  His letters
had missed them--he had written on leaving Paris, saying that his plans
were indefinite, but he would write them definitely soon.  After he came
to Audierne it seemed impossible to write.  How could he?  No, let the
American journalist do it.  Better so.  Better himself in the worst
light, with the full penalty, than his own confession--in itself an
insult.  So it had gone on.  He slowly tore up the letters.  The next
were from his grandfather and grandmother--they did not know yet.  He
could not read them.  A few loving sentences, and then he said:

"What's the good!  Better not."  He tore them up also.  Another--from his
uncle.  It was brief:

     You've made a sweet mess of it, Cadet.  It's in all the papers to-
     day.  Meyerbeer telegraphed it to New York and London.  I'll
     probably come down to see you.  I want to finish my picture on the
     site of the old City of Ys, there at Point du Raz.  Your girl can
     pose with you.  I'll do all I can to clear the thing up.  But a
     British M.P.--that's a tough pill for Clapham!

Gaston's foot tapped the floor angrily.  He scattered the pieces of the
letter at his feet.  Now for the newspapers.  He opened Le Petit Journal,
Coil Blas, Galignani, and the New York Tom-Tom, one by one.  Yes, it was
there, with pictures of himself and Andree.  A screaming sensation.
Extracts, too, from the English papers by telegram.  He read them all
unflinchingly.  There was one paragraph which he did not understand:

There was a previous friend of the lady, unknown to the public, called
Zoug-Zoug.

He remembered that day at the Hotel St. Malo!  Well, the bolt was shot:
the worst was over.  Quid refert?  Justify himself?

Certainly, to all but Delia Gasgoyne.

Thousands of men did the same--did it in cold blood, without one honest
feeling.  He did it, at least under a powerful influence.  He could not
help but smile now at the thought of how he had filled both sides of the
equation.  On his father's side, bringing down the mad record from
Naseby; on his mother's, true to the heathen, by following his impulses
--sacred to primitive man, justified by spear, arrow, and a strong arm.
Why sheet home this as a scandal?  How did they--the libellers--know but
that he had married the girl?  Exactly.  He would see to that.  He would
play his game with open sincerity now.  He could have wished secrecy for
Delia Gasgoyne, and for his grandfather and grandmother,--he was not
wilfully brutal,--but otherwise he had no shame at all; he would stand
openly for his right.  Better one honest passion than a life of deception
and miserable compromise.  A British M.P.?--He had thrown away his
reputation, said the papers.  By this?  The girl was no man's wife, he
was no woman's husband!

Marry her?  Yes, he would marry her; she should be his wife.  His people?
It was a pity.  Poor old people--they would fret and worry.  He had been
selfish, had not thought of them?  Well, who could foresee this outrage
of journalism?  The luck had been dead against him.  Did he not know
plenty of men in London--he was going to say the Commons, but he was
fairer to the Commons than it, as a body, would be to him--who did much
worse?  These had escaped: the hunters had been after him.  What would he
do?  Take the whip?  He got to his feet with an oath.  Take the whip?
Never--never!  He would fight this thing tooth and nail.  Had he come to
England to let them use him for a sensation only--a sequence of
surprises, to end in a tragedy, all for the furtive pleasure of the
British breakfast-table?  No, by the Eternal!  What had the first Gaston
done?  He had fought--fought Villiers and others, and had held up his
head beside his King and Rupert till the hour of Naseby.

When the summer was over he would return to Paris, to London.  The
journalist--punish him?  No; too little--a product of his time.  But
the British people he would fight, and he would not give up Ridley Court.
He could throw the game over when it was all his, but never when it was
going dead against him.

That speech in the Commons?  He remembered gladly that he had contended
for conceptions of social miseries according to surrounding influences of
growth and situation.  He had not played the hypocrite.

No, not even with Delia.  He had acted honestly at the beginning,
and afterwards he had done what he could so long as he could.  It was
inevitable that she must be hurt, even if he had married, not giving her
what he had given this dompteuse.  After all, was it so terrible?  It
could not affect her much in the eyes of the world.  And her heart?  He
did not flatter himself.  Yet he knew that it would be the thing--the
fallen idol--that would grieve her more than thought of the man.  He
wished that he could have spared her in the circumstances.  But it had
all come too suddenly: it was impossible.  He had spared, he could spare,
nobody.  There was the whole situation.  What now to do?--To remain here
while it pleased them, then Paris, then London for his fight.

Three days went round.  There were idle hours by the sea, little
excursions in a sail-boat to Penmark, and at last to Point du Raz.  It
was a beautiful day, with a gentle breeze, and the point was glorified.
The boat ran in lightly between the steep dark shore and the comb of reef
that looked like a host of stealthy pumas crumbling the water.  They
anchored in the Bay des Trepasses.  An hour on shore exploring the caves,
and lunching, and then they went back to the boat, accompanied by a
Breton sailor, who had acted as guide.

Gaston lay reading,--they were in the shade of the cliff,--while Andree
listened to the Breton tell the legends of the coast.  At length Gaston's
attention was attracted.  The old sailor was pointing to the shore, and
speaking in bad French.

"Voila, madame, where the City of Ys stood long before the Bretons came.
It was a foolish ride."

"I do not know the story.  Tell me."

"There are two or three, but mine is the oldest.  A flood came--sent by
the gods, for the woman was impious.  The king must ride with her into
the sea and leave her there, himself to come back, and so save the city."

The sailor paused to scan the sea--something had struck him.  He shook
his head.  Gaston was watching Andree from behind his book.

"Well, well," she said, impatiently, "what then?  What did he do?"

"The king took up the woman, and rode into the water as far as where you
see the great white stone--it has been there ever since.  There he had a
fight--not with the woman, but in his heart.  He turned to the people,
and cried: 'Dry be your streets, and as ashes your eyes for your king!'
And then he rode on with the woman till they saw him no more--never!"
Andree said instantly:

"That was long ago.  Now the king would ride back alone."

She did not look at Gaston, but she knew that his eyes were on her.
He closed the book, got up, came forward to the sailor, who was again
looking out to sea, and said carelessly over his shoulder:

"Men who lived centuries ago would act the same now, if they were here."

Her response seemed quite as careless as his: "How do you know?"

"Perhaps I had an innings then," he answered, smiling whimsically.

She was about to speak again, but the guide suddenly said:

"You must get away.  There'll be a change of wind and a bad cross-current
soon."

In a few minutes the two were bearing out--none too soon, for those pumas
crowded up once or twice within a fathom of their deck, devilish and
devouring.  But they wore away with a capricious current, and down a
tossing sea made for Audierne.




CHAPTER XVII

THE MAN AND THE WOMAN FACE THE INTOLERABLE

In a couple of hours they rounded Point de Leroily, and ran for the
harbour.  By hugging the quay in the channel to the left of the bar, they
were sure of getting in, though the tide was low.  The boat was docile to
the lug-sail and the helm.  As they were beating in they saw a large
yacht running straight across a corner of the bar for the channel.  It
was Warren Gasgoyne's Kismet.

The Kismet had put into Audierne rather than try to pass Point du Raz
at night.  At Gibraltar a telegram had come telling of the painful
sensation, and the yacht was instantly headed for England; Mrs. Gasgoyne
crossing the Continent, Delia preferring to go back with her father--his
sympathy was more tender.  They had seen no newspapers, and they did not
know that Gaston was at Audierne.  Gasgoyne knowing, as all the world
knew, that there was a bar at the mouth of the harbour, allowed himself,
as he thought, sufficient room, but the wind had suddenly drawn ahead,
and he was obliged to keep away.  Presently the yacht took the ground
with great force.

Gasgoyne put the helm hard down, but she would not obey.  He tried at
once to get in his sails, but the surf was running very strong, and
presently a heavy sea broke clean over her.  Then came confusion and
dismay: the flapping of the wet, half-lowered sails, and the whipping of
the slack ropes, making all effort useless.  There was no chance of her-
holding.  Foot by foot she was being driven towards the rocks.  Sailors
stood motionless on the shore.  The lifeboat would be of little use:
besides, it could not arrive for some time.

Gaston had recognised the Kismet.  He turned to Andree.

"There's danger, but perhaps we can do it.  Will you go?"

She flushed.

"Have I ever been a coward, Gaston?  Tell me what to do."

"Keep the helm firm, and act instantly on my orders."

Instead of coming round into the channel, he kept straight on past the
lighthouse towards the yacht, until he was something to seaward of her.
Then, luffing quickly, he dropped sail, let go the anchor, and unshipped
the mast, while Andree got the oars into the rowlocks.  It was his idea
to dip under the yacht's stern, but he found himself drifting alongside,
and in danger of dashing broadside on her.  He got an oar and backed with
all his strength towards the stern, the anchor holding well.  Then he
called to those on board to be ready to jump.  Once in line with the
Kismet's counter, he eased off the painter rapidly, and now dropped
towards the stern of the wreck.

Gaston was quite cool.  He did not now think of the dramatic nature of
this meeting, apart from the physical danger.  Delia also had recognised
him, and guessed who the girl was.  Not to respond to Gaston's call was
her first instinct.  But then, life was sweet.  Besides, she had to think
of others.  Her father, too, was chiefly concerned for her safety and for
his yacht.  He had almost determined to get Delia on Gaston's boat, and
himself take the chances with the Kismet; but his sailors dissuaded him,
declaring that the chances were against succour.

The only greetings were words of warning and direction from Gaston.
Presently there was an opportunity.  Gaston called sharply to Delia,
and she, standing ready, jumped.  He caught her in his arms as she
came.  The boat swayed as the others leaped, and he held her close
meanwhile.  Her eyes closed, she shuddered and went white.  When he put
her down, she covered her face with her hands, trembling.  Then, suddenly
she came huddling in a heap, and burst into tears.

They slipped the painter, a sailor took Andree's place at the helm, the
oars were got out, and they made over to the channel, grazing the bar
once or twice, by reason of the now heavy load.

Warren Gasgoyne and Gaston had not yet spoken in the way of greeting.
The former went to Delia now and said a few cheery words, but, from
behind her handkerchief, she begged him to leave her alone for a moment.

"Nerves, all nerves, Mr. Belward," he said, turning towards Gaston.
"But, then, it was ticklish-ticklish."

They did not shake hands.  Gaston was looking at Delia, and he did not
reply.

Mr. Gasgoyne continued:

"Nasty sea coming on--afraid to try Point du Raz.  Of course we didn't
know you were here."

He looked at Andree curiously.  He was struck by the girl's beauty and
force.  But how different from Delia!

He suddenly turned, and said bluntly, in a low voice: "Belward, what a
fool--what a fool!  You had it all at your feet: the best--the very
best."

Gaston answered quietly:

"It's an awkward time for talking.  The rocks will have your yacht in
half an hour."

Gasgoyne turned towards it.

"Yes, she'll get a raking fore and aft."  Then, he added, suddenly: "Of
course you know how we feel about our rescue.  It was plucky of you."

"Pluckier in the girl," was the reply.  "Brave enough," the honest
rejoinder.

Gaston had an impulse to say, "Shall I thank her for you?" but he was
conscious how little right he had to be ironical with Warren Gasgoyne,
and he held his peace.

While the two were now turned away towards the Kismet, Andree came to
Delia.  She did not quite know how to comfort her, but she was a woman,
and perhaps a supporting arm would do something.

"There, there," she said, passing a hand round her shoulder, "you are all
right now.  Don't cry!"

With a gasp of horror, Delia got to her feet, but swayed, and fell
fainting--into Andree's arms.

She awoke near the landing-place, her father beside her.  Meanwhile
Andree had read the riddle.  As Mr. Gasgoyne bathed Delia's face, and
Gaston her wrists, and gave her brandy, she sat still and intent,
watching.  Tears and fainting!  Would she--Andree-have given way like
that in the same circumstances?  No.  But this girl--Delia--was of a
different order: was that it?  All nerves and sentiment!  At one of those
lunches in the grand world she had seen a lady burst into tears suddenly
at some one's reference to Senegal.  She herself had only cried four
times, that she remembered; when her mother died; when her father was
called a thief; when, one day, she suffered the first great shame of her
life in the mountains of Auvergne; and the night when she waked a second
time to her love for Gaston.  She dared to call it love, though good
Annette had called it a mortal sin.

What was to be done?  The other woman must suffer.

The man was hers--hers for ever.  He had said it: for ever.  Yet her
heart had a wild hunger for that something which this girl had and she
had not.  But the man was hers; she had won him away from this other.

Delia came upon the quay bravely, passing through the crowd of staring
fishermen, who presently gave Gaston a guttural cheer.  Three of them,
indeed, had been drinking his health.  They embraced him and kissed him,
begging him to come with them for absinthe.  He arranged the matter with
a couple of francs.

Then he wondered what now was to be done.  He could not insult the
Gasgoynes by asking them to come to the chateau.  He proposed the Hotel
de France to Mr. Gasgoyne, who assented.  It was difficult to separate
here on the quay: they must all walk together to the hotel.  Gaston
turned to speak to Andree, but she was gone.  She had saved the
situation.

The three spoke little, and then but formally, as they walked to the
hotel.  Mr. Gasgoyne said that they would leave by train for Paris the
next day, going to Douarnenez that evening.  They had saved nothing from
the yacht.

Delia did not speak.  She was pale, composed now.  In the hotel Mr.
Gasgoyne arranged for rooms, while Gaston got some sailors together, and,
in Mr. Gasgoyne's name, offered a price for the recovery of the yacht or
of certain things in her.  Then he went into the hotel to see if he could
do anything further.  The door of the sitting-room was open, and no
answer coming to his knock, he entered.

Delia was standing in the window.  Against her will her father had gone
to find a doctor.  Gaston would have drawn back if she had not turned
round wearily to him.

Perhaps it were well to get it over now.  He came forward.  She made no
motion.

"I hope you feel better?!" he said.  "It was a bad accident."

"I am tired and shaken, of course," she responded.  "It was very brave of
you."

He hesitated, then said:

"We were more fortunate than brave."

He was determined to have Andree included.  She deserved that; the wrong
to Delia was not hers.

But she answered after the manner of a woman: "The girl--ah, yes, please
thank her for us.  What is her name?"

"She is known in Audierne as Madame Belward."  The girl started.  Her
face had a cold, scornful pride.  "The Bretons, then, have a taste for
fiction?"

"No, they speak as they are taught."

"They understand, then, as little as I."

How proud, how ineffaceably superior she was!

"Be ignorant for ever," he answered quietly.

"I do not need the counsel, believe me."

Her hand trembled, though it rested against the window-trembled with
indignation: the insult of his elopement kept beating up her throat in
spite of her.

At that moment a servant knocked, entered, and said that a parcel had
been brought for mademoiselle.  It was laid upon the table.  Delia,
wondering, ordered it to be opened.  A bundle of clothes was disclosed--
Andree's!  Gaston recognised them, and caught his breath with wonder and
confusion.

"Who has sent them?!" Delia said to the servant.  "They come from the
Chateau Ronan, mademoiselle."

Delia dismissed the servant.

"The Chateau Ronan?!" she asked of Gaston.  "Where I am living."

"It is not necessary to speak of this?"  She flushed.

"Not at all.  I will have them sent back.  There is a little shop near by
where you can get what you may need."

Andree had acted according to her lights.  It was not an olive-branch,
but a touch of primitive hospitality.  She was Delia's enemy at sight,
but a woman must have linen.

Mr. Gasgoyne entered.  Gaston prepared to go.  "Is there anything more
that I can do?!" he said, as it were, to both.

The girl replied.  "Nothing at all, thank you."  They did not shake
hands.

Mr. Gasgoyne could not think that all had necessarily ended.  The thing
might be patched up one day yet.  This affair with the dompteuse was mad
sailing, but the man might round-to suddenly and be no worse for the
escapade.

"We are going early in the morning," he said.  "We can get along all
right.  Good-bye.  When do you come to England?"

The reply was prompt.  "In a few weeks."

He looked at both.  The girl, seeing that he was going to speak further,
bowed and left the room.

His eyes followed her.  After a moment, he said firmly

"Mr. Gasgoyne, I am going to face all."

"To live it down, Belward?"

"I am going to fight it down."

"Well, there's a difference.  You have made a mess of things, and shocked
us all.  I needn't say what more.  It's done, and now you know what such
things mean to a good woman--and, I hope also, to the father of a good
woman."

The man's voice broke a little.  He added:

"They used to come to swords or pistols on such points.  We can't settle
it in that way.  Anyhow, you have handicapped us to-day."  Then, with a
burst of reproach, indignation, and trouble: "Great God, as if you hadn't
been the luckiest man on earth!  Delia, the estate, the Commons--all for
a dompteuse!"

"Let us say nothing more," said Gaston, choking down wrath at the
reference to Andree, but sorrowful, and pitying Mr. Gasgoyne.  Besides,
the man had a right to rail.

Soon after they parted courteously.

Gaston went to the chateau.  As he came up the stone steps he met a
procession--it was the feast-day of the Virgin--of priests and people
and little children, filing up from the village and the sea, singing as
they came.  He drew up to the wall, stood upon the stone seat, and took
off his hat while the procession passed.  He had met the cure, first
accidentally on the shore, and afterwards in the cure's house, finding
much in common--he had known many priests in the North, known much good
of them.  The cure glanced up at him now as they passed, and a half-sad
smile crossed his face.  Gaston caught it as it passed.  The cure read
his case truly enough and gently enough too.  In some wise hour he would
plead with Gaston for the woman's soul and his own.

Gaston did not find Andree at the chateau.  She had gone out alone
towards the sea, Annette said, by a route at the rear of the village.
He went also, but did not find her.  As he came again to the quay he saw
the Kismet beating upon the rocks--the sailors had given up any idea of
saving her.  He stood and watched the sea breaking over her, and the
whole scene flashed back on him.  He thought how easily he could be
sentimental over the thing.  But that was not his nature.  He had made
his bed, but he would not lie in it--he would carry it on his back.
They all said that he had gone on the rocks.  He laughed.

"I can turn that tide: I can make things come my way," he said.  "All
they want is sensation, it isn't morals that concerns them.  Well, IT
give them sensation.  They expect me to hide, and drop out of the game.
Never--so help me Heaven!  I'll play it so they'll forget this!"

He rolled and lighted a cigarette, and went again to the chateau.  Dinner
was ready--had been ready for some time.  He sat down, and presently
Andree came.  There was a look in her face that he could not understand.
They ate their dinner quietly, not mentioning the events of the
afternoon.

Presently a telegram was brought to him.  It read: "Come.  My office,
Downing Street, Friday.  Expect you."  It was signed "Faramond."  At the
same time came letters: from his grandfather, from Captain Maudsley.  The
first was stern, imperious, reproachful.--Shame for those that took him
in and made him, a ruined reputation, a spoiled tradition: he had been
but a heathen after all!  There was only left to bid him farewell,
and to enclose a cheque for two thousand pounds.

Captain Maudsley called him a fool, and asked him what he meant to do
--hoped he would give up the woman at once, and come back.  He owed
something to his position as Master of the Hounds--a tradition that
oughtn't to be messed about.

There it all was: not a word about radical morality or immorality; but
the tradition of Family, the Commons, Master of the Hounds!

But there was another letter.  He did not recognise the handwriting, and
the envelope had a black edge.  He turned it over and over, forgetting
that Andree was watching him.  Looking up, he caught her eyes, with their
strange, sad look.  She guessed what was in these letters.  She knew
English well enough to under stand them.  He interpreted her look, and
pushed them over.

"You may read them, if you wish; but I wouldn't, if I were you."

She read the telegram first, and asked who "Faramond" was.  Then she read
Sir William Belward's letter, and afterwards Captain Maudsley's.

"It has all come at once," she said: "the girl and these!  What will you
do?  Give 'the woman' up for the honour of the Master of the Hounds?"

The tone was bitter, exasperating.  Gaston was patient.

"What do you think, Andree?"

"It has only begun," she said.  "Wait, King of Ys.  Read that other
letter."

Her eyes were fascinated by the black border.  He opened it with a
strange slowness.  It began without any form of address, it had the
superscription of a street in Manchester Square:

     If you were not in deep trouble I would not write.  But because I
     know that more hard things than kind will be said by others, I want
     to say what is in my heart, which is quick to feel for you.  I know
     that you have sinned, but I pray for you every day, and I cannot
     believe that God will not answer.  Oh!  think of the wrong that you
     have done: of the wrong to the girl, to her soul's good.  Think of
     that, and right the wrong in so far as you can.  Oh, Gaston, my
     brother, I need not explain why I write thus.  My grandfather,
     before he died, three weeks ago, told me that you know!--and I also
     have known ever since the day you saved the boy.  Ah, think of one
     who would give years of her life to see you good and noble and
     happy.  .  .  .

Then followed a deep, sincere appeal to his manhood, and afterwards a
wish that their real relations should be made known to the world if he
needed her, or if disaster came; that she might share and comfort his
life, whatever it might be.  Then again:

     If you love her, and she loves you, and is sorry for what she has
     done, marry her and save her from everlasting shame.  I am staying
     with my grandfather's cousin, the Dean of Dighbury, the father of
     the boy you saved.  He is very kind, and he knows all.  May God
     guide you aright, and may you believe that no one speaks more
     truthfully to you than your sorrowful and affectionate sister,

                                             ALICE WINGFIELD.

He put the letter down beside him, made a cigarette, and poured out some
coffee for them both.  He was holding himself with a tight hand.  This
letter had touched him as nothing in his life had done since his father's
death.  It had nothing of noblesse oblige, but straight statement of
wrong, as she saw it.  And a sister without an open right to the title:
the mere fidelity of blood!  His father had brought this sorrowful life
into the world and he had made it more sorrowful--poor little thing--poor
girl!

"What are you going to do?!" asked Andree.  "Do you go back--with Delia?"

He winced.  Yet why should he expect of her too great refinement?  She
had not had a chance, she had not the stuff for it in her veins; she had
never been taught.  But behind it all was her passion--her love--for him.

"You know that's altogether impossible!" he answered.

"She would not take you back."

"Probably not.  She has pride."

"Pride-chat!  She'd jump at the chance!"

"That sounds rude, Andree; and it is contradictory."

"Rude!  Well, I'm only a gipsy and a dompteuse!"

"Is that all, my girl?"

"That's all, now."  Then, with a sudden change and a quick sob: "But I
may be--  Oh, I can't say it, Gaston!"  She hid her face for a moment on
his shoulder.  "My God!"

He got to his feet.  He had not thought of that--of another besides
themselves.  He had drifted.  A hundred ideas ran back and forth.  He
went to the window and stood looking out.  Alice's letter was still in
his fingers.

She came and touched his shoulder.

"Are you going to leave me, Gaston?  What does that letter say?"

He looked at her kindly, with a protective tenderness.

"Read the letter, Andree," he said.

She did so, at first slowly, then quickly, then over and over again.
He stood motionless in the window.  She pushed the letter between his
fingers.  He did not turn.  "I cannot understand everything, but what she
says she means.  Oh, Gaston, what a fool, what a fool you've been!"

After a moment, however, she threw her arms about him with animal-like
fierceness.

"But I can't give you up--I can't."  Then, with another of those sudden
changes, she added, with a wild little laugh: "I can't, I can't, O Master
of the Hounds!"

There came a knock at the door.  Annette entered with a letter.  The
postman had not delivered it on his rounds, because the address was not
correct.  It was for madame.  Andree took it, started at the handwriting,
tore open the envelope, and read:

     Zoug-Zoug congratulates you on the conquest of his nephew.  Zoug-
     Zoug's name is not George Maur, as you knew him.  Allah's blessing,
     with Zoug-Zoug's!

     What fame you've got now--dompteuse, and the sweet scandal!

The journalist had found out Zoug-Zoug at last, and Ian Belward had
talked with the manager of the menagerie.

Andree shuddered and put the letter in her pocket.  Now she understood
why she had shrunk from Gaston that first night and those first days in
Audierne: that strange sixth sense, divination--vague, helpless
prescience.  And here, suddenly, she shrank again, but with a different
thought.  She hurriedly left the room and went to her chamber.

In a few moments he came to her.  She was sitting upright in a chair,
looking straight before her.  Her lips were bloodless, her eyes were
burning.  He came and took her hands.

"What is it, Andree?!" he said.  "That letter, what is it?"

She looked at him steadily.  "You'll be sorry if you read it."  But she
gave it to him.  He lighted a candle, put it on a little table, sat down,
and read.  The shock went deep; so deep that it made no violent sign on
the surface.  He spread the letter out before him.  The candle showed his
face gone grey and knotted with misery.  He could bear all the rest:
fight, do all that was right to the coming mother of his child; but this
made him sick and dizzy.  He felt as he did when he waked up in Labrador,
with his wife's dead lips pressed to his neck.  It was strange too that
Andree was as quiet as he: no storm-misery had gone deep with her also.

"Do you care to tell me about it?!" he asked.

She sat back in her chair, her hands over her eyes.  Presently, still
sitting so, she spoke.

Ian Belward had painted them and their van in the hills of Auvergne, and
had persuaded her to sit for a picture.  He had treated her courteously
at first.  Her father was taken ill suddenly, and died.  She was alone
for a few days afterwards.  Ian Belward came to her.  Of that miserable,
heart-rending, cruel time,--the life-sorrow of a defenceless girl,--
Gaston heard with a hard sort of coldness.  The promised marriage was
a matter for the man's mirth a week later.  They came across three young
artists from Paris--Bagshot, Fancourt, and another--who camped one night
beside them.  It was then she fully realised the deep shame of her
position.  The next night she ran away and joined a travelling menagerie.
The rest he knew.  When she had ended there was silence for a time,
broken only by one quick gasping sob from Gaston.  The girl sat still
as death, her eyes on him intently.

"Poor Andree!  Poor girl!" he said at last.  She sighed pitifully.

"What shall we do?!" she asked.  He scarcely spoke above a whisper:

"There must be time to think.  I will go to London."

"You will come back?"

"Yes--in five days, if I live."

"I believe you," she said quietly.  "You never lied to me.  When you
return we will know what to do."  Her manner was strangely quiet.
"A little trading schooner goes from Douarnenez to England to-morrow
morning," she went on.  "There is a notice of it in the market-place.
That would save the journey to Paris.'"

"Yes, that will do very well.  I will start for Douarnenez at once."

"Will Jacques go too?"

"No."

An hour later he passed Delia and her father on the road to Douarnenez.
He did not recognise them, but Delia, seeing him, shrank away in a corner
of the carriage, trembling.

Jacques had wished to go to London with Gaston, but had been denied.  He
was to care for the horses.  When he saw his master ride down over the
place, waving a hand back towards him, he came in and said to Andree:

"Madame, there is trouble--I do not know what.  But I once said I would
never leave him, wherever he go or whatever he did.  Well, I never will
leave him--or you, madame--no."

"That is right, that is right," she said earnestly; "you must never leave
him, Jacques.  He is a good man."

When Jacques had gone she shut herself up in her room.  She was gathering
all her life into the compass of an hour.  She felt but one thing: the
ruin of her happiness and Gaston's.

"He is a good man," she said over and over to herself.  And the other--
Ian Belward?  All the barbarian in her was alive.

The next morning she started for Paris, saying to Jacques and Annette
that she would return in four days.




CHAPTER XVIII

"RETURN, O SHULAMITE!"

Almost the first person that Gaston recognised in London was Cluny Vosse.
He had been to Victoria Station to see a friend off by the train, and as
he was leaving, Gaston and he recognised each other.  The lad's greeting
was a little shy until he saw that Gaston was cool and composed as usual
--in effect, nothing had happened.  Cluny was delighted, and opened his
mind:

"They'd kicked up a deuce of a row in the papers, and there'd been no end
of talk; but he didn't see what all the babble was about, and he'd said
so again and again to Lady Dargan."

"And Lady Dargan, Cluny?!" asked Gaston quietly.  Cluny could not be
dishonest, though he would try hard not to say painful things.

"Well, she was a bit fierce at first--she's a woman, you know; but
afterwards she went like a baby; cried, and wouldn't stay at Cannes any
longer: so we're back in town.  We're going down to the country, though,
to-morrow or next day."

"Do you think I had better call, Cluny?!" Gaston ventured suggestively.

"Yes, yes, of course," Cluny replied, with great eagerness, as if to
justify the matter to himself.  Gaston smiled, said that he might,--
he was only in town for a few days, and dropped Cluny in Pall Mall.
Cluny came running back.

"I say, Belward, things'll come around just as they were before, won't
they?  You're going to cut in, and not let 'em walk on you?"

"Yes, I'm 'going to cut in,' Cluny boy."  Cluny brightened.

"And of course it isn't all over with Delia, is it?"  He blushed.

Gaston reached out and dropped a hand on Cluny's shoulder.

"I'm afraid it is all over, Cluny."  Cluny spoke without thinking.

"I say, it's rough on her, isn't it?"

Then he was confused, hurriedly offered Gaston a cigarette, a hasty good-
bye was said, and they parted.  Gaston went first to Lord Faramond.  He
encountered inquisition, cynical humour, flashes of sympathy, with a
general flavour of reproach.  The tradition of the Commons!  Ah, one way
only: he must come back alone--alone--and live it down.  Fortunately, it
wasn't an intrigue--no matter of divorce--a dompteuse, he believed.  It
must end, of course, and he would see what could be done.  Such a chance
--such a chance as he had had!  Make it up with his grandfather, and
reverse the record--reverse the record: that was the only way.  This
meeting must, of course, be strictly between themselves.  But he was
really interested for him, for his people, and for the tradition of the
Commons.

"I am Master of the Hounds too," said Gaston dryly.  Lord Faramond caught
the meaning, and smiled grimly.

Then came Gaston's decision--he would come back--not to live the thing
down, but to hold his place as long as he could: to fight.

Lord Faramond shrugged a shoulder.  "Without her?"

"I cannot say that."

"With her, I can promise nothing--nothing.  You cannot fight it so.
No one man is stronger than massed opinion.  It is merely a matter of
pressure.  No, no; I can promise nothing in that case."

The Premier's face had gone cold and disdainful.  Why should a clever
man like Belward be so infatuated?  He rose, Gaston thanked him for the
meeting, and was about to go, when the Prime Minister, tapping his
shoulder kindly, said:

"Mr. Belward, you are not playing to the rules of the game."  He waved
his hand towards the Chamber of the House.  "It is the greatest game in
the world.  She must go!  Do not reply.  You will come back without her
--good-bye!"

Then came Ridley Court.  He entered on Sir William and Lady Belward
without announcement.  Sir William came to his feet, austere and pale.
Lady Belward's fingers trembled on the lace she held.  They looked many
years older.  Neither spoke his name, nor did they offer their hands.
Gaston did not wince, he had expected it.  He owed these old people
something.  They lived according to their lights, they had acted
righteously as by their code, they had used him well--well always.

"Will you hear the whole story?!" he said.  He felt that it would be best
to tell them all.  "Can it do any good?!" asked Sir William.  He looked
towards his wife.

"Perhaps it is better to hear it," she murmured.  She was clinging to a
vague hope.

Gaston told the story plainly, briefly, as he had told his earlier
history.  Its concision and simplicity were poignant.  From the day he
first saw Andree in the justice's room till the hour when she opened Ian
Belward's letter, his tale went.  Then he paused.

"I remember very well," Sir William said, with painful meditation: "a
strange girl, with a remarkable face.  You pleaded for her father then.
Ah, yes, an unhappy case!"

"There is more?!" asked Lady Belward, leaning on her cane.  She seemed
very frail.

Then with a terrible brevity Gaston told them of his uncle, of the letter
to Andree: all, except that Andree was his wife.  He had no idea of
sparing Ian Belward now.  A groan escaped Lady Belward.

"And now--now, what will you do?!" asked the baronet.

"I do not know.  I am going back first to Andree."  Sir William's face
was ashy.

"Impossible!"

"I promised, and I will go back."  Lady Belward's voice quivered:

"Stay, ah, stay, and redeem the past!  You can, you can outlive it."

Always the same: live it down!

"It is no use," he answered; "I must return."

Then in a few words he thanked them for all, and bade them good-bye.  He
did not offer his hand, nor did they.  But at the door he heard Lady
Belward say in a pleading voice:

"Gaston!"

He returned.  She held out her hand.

"You must not do as your father did," she said.  "Give the woman up,
and come back to us.  Am I nothing to you--nothing?"

"Is there no other way?!" he asked, gravely, sorrowfully.

She did not reply.  He turned to his grandfather.  "There is no other
way," said the old man, sternly.  Then in a voice almost shrill with pain
and indignation, he cried out as he had never done in his life: "Nothing,
nothing, nothing but disgrace!  My God in heaven!  a lion-tamer--a gipsy!
An honourable name dragged through the mire!  Go back," he said grandly;
"go back to the woman and her lions--savages, savages, savages!"

"Savages after the manner of our forefathers," Gaston answered quietly.
"The first Gaston showed us the way.  His wife was a strolling player's
daughter.  Good-bye, sir."

Lady Belward's face was in her hands.  "Good-bye-grandmother," he said at
the door, and then he was gone.

At the outer door the old housekeeper stepped forward, her gloomy face
most agitated.

"Oh, sir, oh, sir, you will come back again?  Oh, don't go like your
father!"

He suddenly threw an arm about her shoulder, and kissed her on the cheek.

"I'll come back--yes I'll come back here--if I can.  Good-bye, Hovey."

In the library Sir William and Lady Belward sat silent for a time.
Presently Sir William rose, and walked up and down.  He paused at last,
and said, in a strange, hesitating voice, his hands chafing each other:

"I forgot myself, my dear.  I fear I was violent.  I would like to ask
his pardon.  Ah, yes, yes!"

Then he sat down and took her hand, and held it long in the silence.

"It all feels so empty--so empty," she said at last, as the tower-clock
struck hollow on the air.

The old man could not reply, but he drew her close to him, and Hovey,
from the door, saw his tears dropping on her white hair.

Gaston went to Manchester Square.  He half dreaded a meeting with Alice,
and yet he wished it.  He did not find her.  She had gone to Paris with
her uncle, the servant said.  He got their address.  There was little
left to do but to avoid reporters, two of whom almost forced themselves
in upon him.  He was to go back to Douarnenez by the little boat that
brought him, and at seven o'clock in the morning he watched the mists of
England recede.

He chanced to put his hand into a light overcoat which he had got at his
chambers before he started.  He drew out a paper, the one discovered in
the solicitor's office in London.  It was an ancient deed of entail of
the property, drawn by Sir Gaston Belward, which, through being lost,
was never put into force.  He was not sure that it had value.  If it had,
all chance of the estate was gone for him; it would be his uncle's.
Well, what did it matter?  Yes, it did matter: Andree!  For her?  No, not
for her.  He would play straight.  He would take his future as it came:
he would not drop this paper into the water.

He smiled bitterly, got an envelope at a publichouse on the quay, wrote a
few words in pencil on the document, and in a few moments it was on its
way to Sir William Belward, who when he received it said:

"Worthless, quite worthless, but he has an honest mind--an honest mind!"

Meanwhile, Andree was in Paris.  Leaving her bag at the Gare
Montparnasse, she had gone straight to Ian Belward's house.  She had
lived years in the last few hours.  She had had no sleep on the journey,
and her mind had been strained unbearably.  It had, however, a fixed
idea, which shuttled in and out in a hundred shapes, but ever pointing to
one end.  She had determined on a painful thing--the only way.

She reached the house, and was admitted.  In answer to questions, she had
an appointment with monsieur.  He was not within.  Well, she would wait.
She was motioned into the studio.  She was outwardly calm.  The servant
presently recognised her.  He had been to the menagerie, and he had seen
her with Gaston.  His manner changed instantly.  Could he do anything?
No, nothing.  She was left alone.  For a long time she sat motionless,
then a sudden restlessness seized her.  Her brain seemed a burning
atmosphere, in which every thought, every thing showed with an unbearable
intensity.  The terrible clearness of it all--how it made her eyes, her
heart ache!  Her blood was beating hard against every pore.  She felt
that she would go mad if he did not come.  Once she took out the stiletto
she had concealed in the bosom of her cloak, and looked at it.  She had
always carried it when among the beasts at the menagerie, but had never
yet used it.

Time passed.  She felt ill; she became blind with pain.  Presently the
servant entered with a telegram.  His master would not be back until the
next morning.

Very well, she would return in the morning.  She gave him money.  He was
not to say that she had called.  In the Boulevard Montparnasse she took a
cab.  To the menagerie, she said to the driver.  How strange it all
looked: the Invalides, Notre Dame, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la
Concorde!  The innumerable lights were so near and yet so far: it was a
kink of the brain, but she seemed withdrawn from them, not they from her.
A woman passed with a baby in her arms.  The light from a kiosk fell on
it as she passed.  What a pretty, sweet face it had.  Why did it not have
a pretty, delicate Breton cap?  As she went on, that kept beating in her
brain--why did not the child wear a dainty Breton cap--a white Breton
cap?  The face kept peeping from behind the lights--without the dainty
Breton cap.

The menagerie at last.  She dismissed the cab, went to a little door at
the back of the building, and knocked.  She was admitted.  The care-taker
exclaimed with pleasure.  She wished to visit the animals?  He would go
with her; and he picked up a light.  No, she would go alone.  How were
Hector and Balzac, and Antoinette?  She took the keys.  How cool and
pleasant they were to the touch!  The steel of the lantern too--how
exquisitely soothing!  He must lie down again: she would wake him as she
came out.  No, no, she would go alone.

She went to cage after cage.  At last to that of the largest lions.
There was a deep answering purr to her soft call.  As she entered, she
saw a heap moving in one corner--a lion lately bought.  She spoke, and
there was an angry growl.  She wheeled to leave the cage, but her cloak
caught the door, and it snapped shut.

Too late.  A blow brought her to the ground.  She had made no cry, and
now she lay so still!

The watchman had fallen asleep again.  In the early morning he
remembered.  The greyish golden dawn was creeping in, when he found her
with two lions protecting, keeping guard over her, while another crouched
snarling in a corner.  There was no mark on her face.

The point of the stiletto which she had carried in her cloak had pierced
her when she fell.

In a hotel near the Arc de Triomphe Alice Wingfield read the news.
It was she who tenderly prepared the body for burial, who telegraphed to
Gaston at Audierne, getting a reply from Jacques that he was not yet back
from London.  The next day Andree was found a quiet place in the cemetery
at Montmartre.

In the evening Alice and her relative started for Audierne.

                    .........................

On board the Fleur d'Orange Gaston struggled with the problem.  There was
one thought ever coming.  He shut it out at this point, and it crept in
at that.  He remembered when two men, old friends, discovered that one,
unknowingly, had been living with the wife of the other.  There was one
too many--the situation was impossible.  The men played a game of cards
to see which should die.  But they did not reckon with the other factor.
It was the woman who died.

Was not his own situation far worse?  With his uncle living--but no,
no, it was out of the question!  Yet Ian Belward had been shameless,
a sensualist, who had wrecked the girl's happiness and his.  He himself
had done a mad thing in the eyes of the world, but it was more mad than
wicked.  Had this happened in the North with another man, how easily
would the problem have been solved!

Go to his uncle and tell him that he must remove himself for ever from
the situation?  Demand it, force it?  Impossible--this was Europe.

They arrived at Douarnenez.  The diligence had gone.  A fishing-boat was
starting for Audierne.  He decided to go by it.  Breton fishermen are
usually shy of storm to foolishness, and one or two of the crew urged the
drunken skipper not to start, for there were signs of a south-west wind,
too friendly to the Bay des Trepasses.  The skipper was, however,
cheerfully reckless, and growled down objection.

The boat came on with a sweet wind off the land for a time.  Suddenly,
when in the neighbourhood of Point du Raz, the wind drew ahead very
squally, with rain in gusts out of the south-west.  The skipper put the
boat on the starboard tack, close-hauled and close-reefed the sails,
keeping as near the wind as possible, with the hope of weathering the
rocky point at the western extremity of the Bay des Trepasses.  By that
time there was a heavy sea running; night came on, and the weather grew
very thick.  They heard the breakers presently, but they could not make
out the Point.  Old sailor as he was, and knowing as well as any man the
perilous ground, the skipper lost his drunken head this time, and
presently lost his way also in the dark and murk of the storm.

At eight o'clock she struck.  She was thrown on her side, a heavy sea
broke over her, and they were all washed off.  No one raised a cry.  They
were busy fighting Death.

Gaston was a strong swimmer.  It did not occur to him that perhaps this
was the easiest way out of the maze.  He had ever been a fighter.  The
seas tossed him here and there.  He saw faces about him for an instant--
shaggy wild Breton faces--but they dropped away, he knew not where.  The
current kept driving him inshore.  As in a dream, he could hear the
breakers--the pumas on their tread-mill of death.  How long would it
last?  How long before he would be beaten upon that tread-mill--fondled
to death by those mad paws?  Presently dreams came-kind, vague, distant
dreams.  His brain flew like a drunken dove to far points of the world
and back again.  A moment it rested.  Andree!  He had made no provision
for her, none at all.  He must live, he must fight on for her, the
homeless girl, his wife.

He fought on and on.  No longer in the water, as it seemed to him.  He
had travelled very far.  He heard the clash of sabres, the distant roar
of cannon, the beating of horses' hoofs--the thud-thud, tread-tread of an
army.  How reckless and wild it was!  He stretched up his arm to strike-
what was it?  Something hard that bruised: then his whole body was dashed
against the thing.  He was back again, awake.  With a last effort he drew
himself up on a huge rock that stands lonely in the wash of the bay.
Then he cried out, "Andree!" and fell senseless--safe.

The storm went down.  The cold, fast-travelling moon came out, saw the
one living thing in that wild bay, and hurried on into the dark again;
but came and went so till morning, playing hide-and-seek with the man and
his Ararat.

Daylight saw him, wet, haggard, broken, looking out over the waste of
shaken water.  Upon the shore glared the stone of the vanished City of Ys
in the warm sun, and the fierce pumas trod their grumbling way.  Sea-
gulls flew about the quiet set figure, in whose brooding eyes there were
at once despair and salvation.

He was standing between two worlds.  He had had his great crisis, and his
wounded soul rested for a moment ere he ventured out upon the highways
again.  He knew not how it was, but there had passed into him the dignity
of sorrow and the joy of deliverance at the same time.  He saw life's
responsibilities clearer, duties swam grandly before him.  It was a large
dream, in which, for the time, he was not conscious of those troubles
which, yesterday, had clenched his hands and knotted his forehead.  He
had come a step higher in the way of life, and into his spirit had flowed
a new and sobered power.  His heart was sore, but his mind was lifted up.
The fatal wrangle of the pumas there below, the sound of it, would be in
his ears for ever, but he had come above it; the searching vigour of the
sun entered into his bones.

He knew that he was going back to England--to ample work and strong days,
but he did not know that he was going alone.  He did not know that Andree
was gone forever; that she had found her true place: in his undying
memory.

So intent was he, that at first he did not see a boat making into the bay
towards him.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Clever men are trying
He had no instinct for vice in the name of amusement
What a nice mob you press fellows are--wholesale scavengers






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR ENTIRE "THE TRESPASSER":

Clever men are trying
Down in her heart, loves to be mastered
He had no instinct for vice in the name of amusement
He was strong enough to admit ignorance
I don't wish to fit in; things must fit me
Imagination is at the root of much that passes for love
Live and let live is doing good
Not to show surprise at anything
Truth waits long, but whips hard
What a nice mob you press fellows are--wholesale scavengers






THE MARCH OF THE WHITE GUARD

By Gilbert Parker



"Ask Mr. Hume to come here for a moment, Gosse," said Field, the chief
factor, as he turned from the frosty window of his office at Fort
Providence, one of the Hudson's Bay Company's posts.  The servant, or
more properly, Orderly-Sergeant Gosse, late of the Scots Guards, departed
on his errand, glancing curiously at his master's face as he did so.  The
chief factor, as he turned round, unclasped his hands from behind him,
took a few steps forward, then standing still in the centre of the room,
read carefully through a letter which he had held in the fingers of his
right hand for the last ten minutes as he scanned the wastes of snow
stretching away beyond Great Slave Lake to the arctic circle.  He
meditated a moment, went back to the window, looked out again, shook his
head negatively, and with a sigh, walked over to the huge fireplace.  He
stood thoughtfully considering the floor until the door opened and sub-
factor Jaspar Hume entered.

The factor looked up and said: "Hume, I've something here that's been
worrying me a bit.  This letter came in the monthly batch this morning.
It is from a woman.  The company sends another commending the cause of
the woman and urging us to do all that is possible to meet her wishes.
It seems that her husband is a civil engineer of considerable fame.  He
had a commission to explore the Coppermine region and a portion of the
Barren Grounds.  He was to be gone six months.  He has been gone a year.
He left Fort Good Hope, skirted Great Bear Lake, and reached the
Coppermine River.  Then he sent back all of the Indians who accompanied
him but two, they bearing the message that he would make the Great Fish
River and come down by Great Slave Lake to Fort Providence.  That was
nine months ago.  He has not come here, nor to any other of the forts,
so far as is known, nor has any word been received from him.  His wife,
backed by the H.B.C., urges that a relief party be sent to look for him.
They and she forget that this is the arctic region, and that the task is
a well-nigh hopeless one.  He ought to have been here six months ago.
Now how can we do anything?  Our fort is small, and there is always
danger of trouble with the Indians.  We can't force men to join a relief
party like this, and who will volunteer?  Who would lead such a party and
who will make up the party to be led?"

The brown face of Jaspar Hume was not mobile.  It changed in
expression but seldom; it preserved a steady and satisfying character
of intelligence and force.  The eyes, however, were of an inquiring,
debating kind, that moved from one thing to another as if to get a sense
of balance before opinion or judgment was expressed.  The face had
remained impassive, but the eyes had kindled a little as the factor
talked.  To the factor's despairing question there was not an immediate
reply.  The eyes were debating.  But they suddenly steadied and Jaspar
Hume said sententiously: "A relief party should go."

"Yes, yes, but who is to lead them?"

Again the eyes debated.

"Read her letter," said the factor, handing it over.  Jaspar Hume took it
and mechanically scanned it.  The factor had moved towards the table for
his pipe or he would have seen the other start, and his nostrils slightly
quiver, as his eyes grew conscious of what they were seeing.  Turning
quickly, Hume walked towards the window as though for more light, and
with his back to the factor he read the letter.  Then he turned and said:
"I think this thing should be done."

The factor shrugged his shoulders slightly.  "Well, as to that, I think
so too, but thinking and doing are two different things, Hume."

"Will you leave the matter in my hands until the morning?"

"Yes, of course, and glad to do so.  You are the only man who can arrange
the affair, if it is to be done at all.  But I tell you, as you know,
that everything will depend upon a leader, even if you secure the men....
So you had better keep the letter for to-night.  It may help you to get
the men together.  A woman's handwriting will do more than a man's word
any time."

Jaspar Hume's eyes had been looking at the factor, but they were studying
something else.  His face seemed not quite so fresh as it was a few
minutes before.

"I will see you at ten o'clock to-morrow morning, Mr. Field," he said
quietly.  "Will you let Gosse come to me in an hour?"

"Certainly.  Good-night."

Jaspar Hume let himself out.  He walked across a small square to a log
house and opened a door which creaked and shrieked with the frost.
A dog sprang upon him as he did so, and rubbed its head against his
breast.  He touched the head as if it had been that of a child,
and said: "Lie down, Bouche."

It did so, but it watched him as he doffed his dogskin cap and buffalo
coat.  He looked round the room slowly once as though he wished to fix it
clearly and deeply in his mind.  Then he sat down and held near the
firelight the letter the factor had given him.  His features grew stern
and set as he read it.  Once he paused in the reading and looked into the
fire, drawing his breath sharply between his teeth.  Then he read it to
the end without a sign.  A pause, and he said aloud: "So this is how the
lines meet again, Varre Lepage!"  He read the last sentence of the letter
aloud:

     In the hope that you may soon give me good news of my husband,
     I am, with all respect,

                              Faithfully yours,

                                             ROSE LEPAGE.

Again he repeated: "With all respect, faithfully yours, Rose Lepage."

The dog Bouche looked up.  Perhaps it detected something unusual in the
voice.  It rose, came over, and laid its head on its master's knee.
Hume's hand fell gently on the head, and he said to the fire: "Ah, Rose
Lepage, you can write to Factor Field what you dare not write to your
husband if you knew.  You might say to him then, 'With all love,' but not
'With all respect.'"

He folded the letter and put it in his pocket.  Then he took the dog's
head between his hands and said: "Listen, Bouche, and I will tell you a
story."  The dog blinked, and pushed its nose against his arm.

"Ten years ago two young men who had studied and graduated together at
the same college were struggling together in their profession as civil
engineers.  One was Clive Lepage and the other was Jaspar Hume.  The one
was brilliant and persuasive, the other, persistent and studious.  Lepage
could have succeeded in any profession; Hume had only heart and mind for
one.

"Only for one, Bouche, you understand.  He lived in it, he loved it, he
saw great things to be achieved in it.  He had got an idea.  He worked at
it night and day, he thought it out, he developed it, he perfected it,
he was ready to give it to the world.  But he was seized with illness,
became blind, and was ordered to a warm climate for a year.  He left his
idea, his invention, behind him--his complete idea.  While he was gone
his bosom friend stole his perfected idea--yes, stole it, and sold it
for twenty thousand dollars.  He was called a genius, a great inventor.
And then he married her.  You don't know her, Bouche.  You never saw
beautiful Rose Varcoe, who, liking two men, chose the one who was
handsome and brilliant, and whom the world called a genius.  Why didn't
Jaspar Hume expose him, Bouche?  Proof is not always easy, and then he
had to think of her.  One has to think of a woman in such a case, Bouche.
Even a dog can see that."

He was silent for a moment, and then he said: "Come, Bouche.  You will
keep secret what I show you."

He went to a large box in the corner, unlocked it, and took out a model
made of brass and copper and smooth but unpolished wood.

"After ten years of banishment, Bouche, Hume has worked out another idea,
you see.  It should be worth ten times the other, and the world called
the other the work of a genius, dog."

Then he became silent, the animal watching him the while.  It had seen
him working at this model for many a day, but had never heard him talk so
much at a time as he had done this last ten minutes.  He was generally a
silent man--decisive even to severity, careless carriers and shirking
under-officers thought.  Yet none could complain that he was unjust.  He
was simply straight-forward, and he had no sympathy with those who had
not the same quality.  He had carried a drunken Indian on his back for
miles, and from a certain death by frost.  He had, for want of a more
convenient punishment, promptly knocked down Jeff Hyde, the sometime
bully of the fort, for appropriating a bundle of furs belonging to a
French half-breed, Gaspe Toujours.  But he nursed Jeff Hyde through an
attack of pneumonia, insisting at the same time that Gaspe Toujours
should help him.  The result of it all was that Jeff Hyde and Gaspe
Toujours became constant allies.  They both formulated their oaths by
Jaspar Hume.  The Indian, Cloud-in-the-Sky, though by word never thanking
his rescuer, could not be induced to leave the fort, except on some
mission with which Jaspar Hume was connected.  He preferred living an
undignified, un-Indian life, and earning food and shelter by coarsely
labouring with his hands.  He came at least twice a week to Hume's log
house, and, sitting down silent and cross-legged before the fire, watched
the sub-factor working at his drawings and calculations.  Sitting so for
perhaps an hour or more, and smoking all the time, he would rise, and
with a grunt, which was answered by a kindly nod, would pass out as
silently as he came.

And now as Jaspar Hume stood looking at his "Idea," Cloud-in-the-Sky
entered, let his blanket fall by the hearthstone and sat down upon it.
If Hume saw him or heard him, he at least gave no sign at first.  But he
said at last in a low tone to the dog: "It is finished, Bouche; it is
ready for the world."

Then he put it back, locked the box, and turned towards Cloud-in-the-Sky
and the fireplace.  The Indian grunted; the other nodded with the
debating look again dominant in his eyes.  The Indian met the look with
satisfaction.  There was something in Jaspar Hume's habitual reticence
and decisiveness in action which appealed more to Cloud-in-the-Sky than
any freedom of speech could possibly have done.

Hume sat down, handed the Indian a pipe and tobacco, and, with arms
folded, watched the fire.  For half an hour they sat so, white man,
Indian, and dog.  Then Hume rose, went to a cupboard, took out some
sealing wax and matches, and in a moment melted wax was dropping upon the
lock of the box containing his Idea.  He had just finished this as
Sergeant Gosse knocked at the door, and immediately afterwards entered
the room.

"Gosse," said the sub-factor, "find Jeff Hyde, Gaspe Toujours, and Late
Carscallen, and bring them here."  Sergeant Gosse immediately departed
upon this errand.  Hume then turned to the Indian, and said "Cloud-in-
the-Sky, I want you to go a long journey hereaway to the Barren Grounds.
Have twelve dogs ready by nine to-morrow morning."

Cloud-in-the-Sky shook his head thoughtfully, and then after a pause
said: "Strong-back go too?"  Strongback was his name for the sub-factor.
But the other either did not or would not hear.  The Indian, however,
appeared satisfied, for he smoked harder afterwards, and grunted to
himself many times.  A few moments passed, and then Sergeant Gosse
entered, followed by Jeff Hyde, Gaspe Toujours, and Late Carscallen.
Late Carscallen had got his name "Late" from having been called "The Late
Mr. Carscallen" by the chief factor because of his slowness.  Slow as he
was, however, the stout Scotsman had more than once proved himself a man
of rare merit according to Hume's ideas.  He was, of course, the last to
enter.

The men grouped themselves about the fire, Late Carscallen getting the
coldest corner.  Each man drew his tobacco from his pocket, and, cutting
it, waited for Hume to speak.  His eyes were debating as they rested on
the four.  Then he took out Mrs. Lepage's letter, and, with the group
looking at him, he read it aloud.  When it was finished, Cloud-in-the-Sky
gave a guttural assent, and Gaspe Toujours, looking at Jeff Hyde, said:
"It is cold in the Barren Grounds.  We shall need much tabac."  These men
could read without difficulty Hume's reason for summoning them.  To Gaspe
Toujours' remark Jeff Hyde nodded affirmatively, and then all looked at
Late Carscallen.  He opened his heavy jaws once or twice with an animal-
like sound, and then he said, in a general kind of way:

"To the Barren Grounds.  But who leads?"

Hume was writing on a slip of paper, and he did not reply.  The faces of
three of them showed just a shade of anxiety.  They guessed who it would
be, but they were not sure.  Cloud-in-the-Sky, however, grunted at them,
and raised the bowl of his pipe towards the subfactor.  The anxiety then
seemed to disappear.

For ten minutes more they sat so, all silent.  Then Hume rose, handed the
slip of paper to Sergeant Gosse, and said: "Attend to that at once,
Gosse.  Examine the food and blankets closely."

The five were left alone.

Then Hume spoke: "Jeff Hyde, Gaspe Toujours, Late Carscallen, and Cloud-
in-the-Sky, this man, alive or dead, is between here and the Barren
Grounds.  He must be found--for his wife's sake."

He handed Jeff Hyde her letter.  Jeff rubbed his fingers before he
touched the delicate and perfumed missive.  Its delicacy seemed to
bewilder him.  He said: in a rough but kindly way: "Hope to die if I
don't," and passed it on to Gaspe Toujours, who did not find it necessary
to speak.  His comrade had answered for him.  Late Carscallen held it
inquisitively for a moment, and then his jaws opened and shut as if he
were about to speak.  But before he did so Hume said: "It is a long
journey and a hard one.  Those who go may never come back.  But this man
was working for his country, and he has got a wife--a good wife."  He
held up the letter.  "Late Carscallen wants to know who will lead you.
Can't you trust me?  I will give you a leader that you will follow to the
Barren Grounds.  To-morrow you will know who he is.  Are you satisfied?
Will you do it?"

The four rose, and Cloud-in-the-Sky nodded approvingly many times.  Hume
held out his hand.  Each man shook it, Jeff Hyde first.  Then he said:
"Close up ranks for the H.B.C.!"  (H.B.C.  meaning, of course, Hudson's
Bay Company.)

With a good man to lead them, these four would have stormed, alone, the
Heights of Balaklava.

Once more Hume spoke.  "Go to Gosse and get your outfits at nine to-
morrow morning.  Cloud-in-the-Sky, have your sleds at the store at eight
o'clock, to be loaded.  Then all meet me at 10.15 at the office of the
chief factor.  Good night."

As they passed out into the semi-arctic night, Late Carscallen with an
unreal obstinacy said: "Slow march to the Barren Grounds--but who leads?"

Left alone Hume sat down to the pine table at one end of the room and
after a short hesitation began to write.  For hours he sat there, rising
only to put wood on the fire.  The result was three letters: the largest
addressed to a famous society in London, one to a solicitor in Montreal,
and one to Mr. Field, the chief factor.  They were all sealed carefully.
Then he rose, took out his knife, and went over to the box as if to break
the red seal.  He paused, however, sighed, and put the knife back again.
As he did so he felt something touch his leg.  It was the dog.

Hume drew in a sharp breath and said: "It was all ready, Bouche; and in
another six months I should have been in London with it.  But it will go
whether I go or not--whether I go or not, Bouche."

The dog sprang up and put his head against his master's breast.

"Good dog, good dog, it's all right, Bouche; however it goes, it's all
right," said Hume.

Then the dog lay down and watched his master until he drew the blankets
to his chin, and sleep drew oblivion over a fighting soul.




II

At ten o'clock next morning Jaspar Hume presented himself at the chief
factor's office.  He bore with him the letters he had written the night
before.

The factor said: "Well, Hume, I am glad to see you.  That woman's letter
was on my mind all night.  Have you anything to propose?  I suppose not,"
he added despairingly, as he looked closely into the face of the other.
"Yes, Mr. Field, I propose that the expedition start at noon to-day."

"Start-at noon-to-day?"

"In two hours."

"Who are the party?"

"Jeff Hyde, Gaspe Toujours, Late Carscallen, and Cloud-in-the-Sky."

"Who leads them, Hume?  Who leads?"

"With your permission, I do."

"You?  But, man, consider the danger and--your invention!"

"I have considered all.  Here are three letters.  If we do not come back
in three months, you will please send this one, with the box in my room,
to the address on the envelope.  This is for a solicitor in Montreal,
which you will also forward as soon as possible; and this last one is for
yourself; but you will not open it until the three months have passed.
Have I your permission to lead these men?  They would not go without me."

"I know that, I know that, Hume.  I can't say no.  Go, and good luck go
with you."

Here the manly old factor turned away his head.  He knew that Hume had
done right.  He knew the possible sacrifice this man was making of all
his hopes, of his very life; and his sound Scotch heart appreciated the
act to the full.  But he did not know all.  He did not know that Jaspar
Hume was starting to search for the man who had robbed him of youth and
hope and genius and home.

"Here is a letter that the wife has written to her husband on the chance
of his getting it.  You will take it with you, Hume.  And the other she
wrote to me--shall I keep it?"  He held out his hand.

"No, sir, I will keep it, if you will allow me.  It is my commission, you
know."  The shadow of a smile hovered about Hume's lips.

The factor smiled kindly as he replied: "Ah, yes, your commission--
Captain Jaspar Hume of--of what?"  Just then the door opened and there
entered the four men who had sat before the sub-factor's fire the night
before.  They were dressed in white blanket costumes from head to foot,
white woollen capotes covering the grey fur caps they wore.  Jaspar Hume
ran his eye over them and then answered the factor's question: "Of the
White Guard, sir."

"Good," was the reply.  "Men, you are going on a relief expedition.
There will be danger.  You need a good leader.  You have one in Captain
Hume."

Jeff Hyde shook his head at the others with a pleased I-told-you-so
expression; Cloud-in-the-Sky grunted his deep approval; and Late
Carscallen smacked his lips in a satisfied manner and rubbed his leg with
a schoolboy sense of enjoyment.  The factor continued: "In the name of
the Hudson's Bay Company I will say that if you come back, having done
your duty faithfully, you shall be well rewarded.  And I believe you will
come back, if it is in human power to do so."

Here Jeff Hyde said: "It isn't for reward we're doin' it, Mr. Field, but
because Mr. Hume wished it, because we believed he'd lead us; and for the
lost fellow's wife.  We wouldn't have said we'd do it, if it wasn't for
him that's just called us the White Guard."

Under the bronze of the sub-factor's face there spread a glow more red
than brown, and he said simply: "Thank you, men"--for they had all nodded
assent to Jeff Hyde's words--"come with me to the store.  We will start
at noon."

At noon the White Guard stood in front of the store on which the British
flag was hoisted with another beneath it bearing the magic letters,
H.B.C.:  magic, because they opened to the world regions that seemed
destined never to know the touch of civilisation.  The few inhabitants of
the fort were gathered at the store; the dogs and loaded sleds were at
the door.  It wanted but two minutes to twelve when Hume came from his
house, dressed also in the white blanket costume, and followed by his
dog, Bouche.  In a moment more he had placed Bouche at the head of the
first team of dogs.  They were to have their leader too.  Punctually at
noon, Hume shook hands with the factor, said a quick good-bye to the
rest, called out a friendly "How!" to the Indians standing near, and
to the sound of a hearty cheer, heartier perhaps because none had a
confident hope that the five would come back, the march of the White
Guard began.




III

It was eighteen days after.  In the shadow of a little island of pines,
that lies in a shivering waste of ice and snow, the White Guard were
camped.  They were able to do this night what they had not done for days
--dig a great grave of snow, and building a fire of pine wood at each end
of this strange house, get protection and something like comfort.  They
sat silent close to the fires.  Jaspar Hume was writing with numbed
fingers.  The extract that follows is taken from his diary.  It tells
that day's life, and so gives an idea of harder, sterner days that they
had spent and must yet spend, on this weary journey.

     December 25th.--This is Christmas Day and Camp twenty-seven.  We
     have marched only five miles to-day.  We are eighty miles from Great
     Fish River, and the worst yet to do.  We have discovered no signs.
     Jeff Hyde has had a bad two days with his frozen foot.  Gaspe
     Toujours helps him nobly.  One of the dogs died this morning.
     Bouche is a great leader.  This night's shelter is a god-send.
     Cloud-in-the-Sky has a plan whereby some of us will sleep well.  We
     are in latitude 63deg 47' and longitude 112deg 32' 14".  Have worked
     out lunar observations.  Have marked a tree JH/27 and raised cairn
     No. 3.

     We are able to celebrate Christmas Day with a good basin of tea and
     our stand-by of beans cooked in fat.  I was right about them: they
     have great sustaining power.  To-morrow we will start at ten
     o'clock.

The writing done, Jaspar Hume put his book away and turned towards the
rest.  Cloud-in-the-Sky and Late Carscallen were smoking.  Little could
be seen of their faces; they were snuffled to the eyes.  Gaspe Toujours
was drinking a basin of tea, and Jeff Hyde was fitfully dozing by the
fire.  The dogs were above in the tent--all but Bouche, who was permitted
to be near his master.  Presently the sub-factor rose, took from a
knapsack a small tin pail, and put it near the fire.  Then he took five
little cups that fitted snugly into each other, separated them, and put
them also near the fire.  None of the party spoke.  A change seemed to
pass over the faces of all except Cloud-in-the-Sky.  He smoked on
unmoved.  At length Hume spoke cheerily: "Now, men, before we turn in
we'll do something in honour of the day.  Liquor we none of us have
touched since we started; but back there in the fort, and maybe in other
places too, they will be thinking of us; so we'll drink a health to them,
though it's but a spoonful, and to the day when we see them again!"

The cups were passed round.  The sub-factor measured out a very small
portion to each.  They were not men of uncommon sentiment; their lives
were rigid and isolated and severe.  Fireside comforts under fortunate
conditions they saw but seldom, and they were not given to expressing
their feelings demonstratively.  But each man then, save Cloud-in-the-
Sky, had some memory worth a resurrection.

Jaspar Hume raised his cup; the rest followed his example.  "To absent
friends and the day when we see them again!" he said; and they all
drank.  Gaspe Toujours drank solemnly, and, as though no one was near,
made the sign of the cross; for his memory was with a dark-eyed, soft-
cheeked habitant girl of the parish of Saint Gabrielle, whom he had left
behind seven years before, and had never seen since.  Word had come from
the parish priest that she was dying, and though he wrote back in his
homely patois of his grief, and begged that the good father would write
again, no word had ever come.  He thought of her now as one for whom the
candles had been lighted and masses had been said.

But Jeff Hyde's eyes were bright, and suffering as he was, the heart in
him was brave and hopeful.  He was thinking of a glorious Christmas Day
upon the Madawaska River three years agone; of Adam Henry, the blind
fiddler; of bright, warm-hearted Pattie Chown, the belle of the ball, and
the long drive home in the frosty night.

Late Carscallen was thinking of a brother whom he had heard preach his
first sermon in Edinburgh twenty years before.  And Late Carscallen, slow
of speech and thought, had been full of pride and love of that brilliant
brother.  In the natural course of things, they had drifted apart, the
slow and uncouth one to make his home at last in the Far North, and to be
this night on his way to the Barren Grounds.  But as he stood with the
cup to his lips he recalled the words of a newspaper paragraph of a few
months before.  It stated that "the Reverend James Carscallen, D.D.,
preached before Her Majesty on Whitsunday, and had the honour of lunching
with Her Majesty afterwards."  Remembering that, Late Carscallen rubbed
his left hand joyfully against his blanketed leg and drank.

Cloud-in-the-Sky's thoughts were with the present, and his "Ugh!" of
approval was one of the senses purely.  Instead of drinking to absent
friends he looked at the sub-factor and said: "How!"  He drank to the
subfactor.

Jaspar Hume had a memory of childhood; of a house beside a swift-flowing
river, where a gentle widowed mother braced her heart against misfortune
and denied herself and slaved that her son might be educated.  He had
said to her that some day he would be a great man, and she would be paid
back a hundredfold.  And he had worked hard at school, very hard.  But
one cold day of spring a message came to the school, and he sped
homewards to the house beside the dark river down which the ice was
floating,--he would remember that floating ice to his last day, and
entered a quiet room where a white-faced woman was breathing away her
life.  And he fell at her side and kissed her hand and called to her; and
she waked for a moment only and smiled on him, and said: "Be good, my
boy, and God will make you great."  Then she said she was cold, and some
one felt her feet--a kind old soul who shook her head sadly at him; and
a voice, rising out of a strange smiling languor, murmured: "I'll away,
I'll away to the Promised Land--to the Promised Land.  .  .  .  It is
cold--so cold--God keep my boy!"  Then the voice ceased, and the kind
old soul who had looked at him, pityingly folded her arms about him, and
drawing his brown head to her breast, kissed him with flowing eyes and
whispered: "Come away, laddie, come away."

But he came back in the night and sat beside her, and remained there till
the sun grew bright, and then through another day and night, until they
bore her out of the little house by the river to the frozen hill-side.

Sitting here in this winter desolation Jaspar Hume once more beheld these
scenes of twenty years before and followed himself, a poor dispensing
clerk in a doctor's office, working for that dream of achievement in
which his mother believed; for which she hoped.  And following further
the boy that was himself, he saw a friendless first-year man at college,
soon, however, to make a friend of Clive Lepage, and to see always the
best of that friend, being himself so true.  At last the day came when
they both graduated together in science, a bright and happy day,
succeeded by one still brighter, when they both entered a great firm as
junior partners.  Afterwards befell the meeting with Rose Varcoe; and he
thought of how he praised his friend Lepage to her, and brought him to be
introduced to her.  He recalled all those visions that came to him when,
his professional triumphs achieved, he should have a happy home, and
happy faces by his fireside.  And the face was to be that of Rose Varcoe,
and the others, faces of those who should be like her and like himself.
He saw, or rather felt, that face clouded and anxious when he went away
ill and blind for health's sake.  He did not write to her.  The doctors
forbade him that.  He did not ask her to write, for his was so steadfast
a nature that he did not need letters to keep him true; and he thought
she must be the same.  He did not understand a woman's heart, how it
needs remembrances, and needs to give remembrances.

Hume's face in the light of this fire seemed calm and cold, yet behind it
was an agony of memory--the memory of the day when he discovered that
Lepage was married to Rose, and that the trusted friend had grown famous
and well-to-do on the offspring of his brain.  His first thought had been
one of fierce determination to expose this man who had falsified all
trust.  But then came the thought of the girl, and, most of all, there
came the words of his dying mother, "Be good, my boy, and God will make
you great"; and for his mother's sake he had compassion on the girl, and
sought no restitution from her husband.  And now, ten years later, he did
not regret that he had stayed his hand.  The world had ceased to call
Lepage a genius.  He had not fulfilled the hope once held of him.  Hume
knew this from occasional references in scientific journals.

And now he was making this journey to save, if he could, Lepage's life.
Though just on the verge of a new era in his career--to give to the world
the fruit of ten years' thought and labour, he had set all behind him,
that he might be true to the friendship of his youth, that he might be
clear of the strokes of conscience to the last hour of his life.

Looking round him now, the debating look came again into his eyes.  He
placed his hand in his breast, and let it rest there for a moment.  The
look became certain and steady, the hand was drawn out, and in it was a
Book of Common Prayer.  Upon the fly-leaf was written: "Jane Hume, to her
dear son Jaspar, on his twelfth birthday."

These men of the White Guard were not used to religious practices,
whatever their past had been in that regard, and at any other time they
might have been surprised at this action of their leader.  Under some
circumstances it might have lessened their opinion of him; but his
influence over them now was complete.  They knew they were getting nearer
to him than they had ever done; even Cloud-in-the-Sky appreciated that.
Hume spoke no word to them, but looked at them and stood up.  They all
did the same, Jeff Hyde leaning on the shoulders of Gaspe Toujours.  He
read first, four verses of the Thirty-first Psalm, then followed the
prayer of St. Chrysostom, and the beautiful collect which appeals to the
Almighty to mercifully look upon the infirmities of men, and to stretch
forth His hand to keep and defend them in all dangers and necessities.
Late Carscallen, after a long pause, said "Amen," and Jeff said in a
whisper to Gaspe Toujours: "That's to the point.  Infirmities and dangers
and necessities is what troubles us."

Immediately after, at a sign from the sub-factor, Cloud-in-the-Sky began
to transfer the burning wood from one fire to the other until only hot
ashes were left where a great blaze had been.  Over these ashes pine
twigs and branches were spread, and over them again blankets.  The word
was then given to turn in, and Jeff Hyde, Gaspe Toujours, and Late
Carscallen lay down in this comfortable bed.  Each wished to give way to
their captain, but he would not consent.  He and Cloud-in-the-Sky wrapped
themselves in their blankets like mummies, covering the head completely,
and under the arctic sky they slept alone in an austere and tenantless
world.  They never know how loftily sardonic Nature can be who have not
seen that land where the mercury freezes in the tubes, and there is light
but no warmth in the smile of the sun.  Not Sturt in the heart of
Australia with the mercury bursting the fevered tubes, with the finger-
nails breaking like brittle glass, with the ink drying instantly on the
pen, with the hair fading and falling off, would, if he could, have
exchanged his lot for that of the White Guard.  They were in a frozen
endlessness that stretched away to a world where never voice of man or
clip of wing or tread of animal is heard.  It is the threshold to the
undiscovered country, to that untouched north whose fields of white are
only furrowed by the giant forces of the elements; on whose frigid
hearthstone no fire is ever lit; where the electric phantoms of a
nightless land pass and repass, and are never still; where the magic
needle points not towards the north but darkly downward; where the sun
never stretches warm hands to him who dares confront the terrors of
eternal snow.

The White Guard slept.




IV

"No, Captain; leave me here and push on to Manitou Mountain.  You ought
to make it in two days.  I'm just as safe here as on the sleds, and less
trouble.  A blind man's no good.  I'll have a good rest while you're
gone, and then perhaps my eyes will come out right.  My foot's nearly
well now."

Jeff Hyde was snow-blind.  The giant of the party had suffered most.

But Hume said in reply: "I won't leave you alone.  The dogs can carry you
as they've done for the last ten days."

But Jeff replied: "I'm as safe here as marching, and safer.  When the
dogs are not carrying me, nor any one leading me, you can get on faster;
and that means everything to us, now don't it?"

Hume met the eyes of Gaspe Toujours.  He read them.  Then he said to
Jeff: "It shall be as you wish.  Late Carscallen, Cloud-in-the-Sky, and
myself will push on to Manitou Mountain.  You and Gaspe Toujours will
remain here."

Jeff Hyde's blind eyes turned towards Gaspe Toujours, who said: "Yes.
We have plenty tabac."

A tent was set up, provisions were put in it, a spirit-lamp and matches
were added, and the simple menage was complete.  Not quite.  Jaspar Hume
looked round.  There was not a tree in sight.  He stooped and cut away a
pole that was used for strengthening the runners of the sleds, fastened
it firmly in the ground, and tied to it a red woollen scarf, used for
tightening his white blankets round him.  Then he said: "Be sure and keep
that flying."

Jeff's face was turned towards the north.  The blindman's instinct was
coming to him.  Far off white eddying drifts were rising over long
hillocks of snow.  When he turned round again his face was troubled.
It grew more troubled, then it brightened up again, and he said to Hume:
"Captain, would you leave that book with me till you come back--that
about infirmities, dangers, and necessities?  I knew a river-boss who
used to carry an old spelling-book round with him for luck.  It seems to
me as if that book of yours, Captain, would bring luck to this part of
the White Guard, that bein' out at heels like has to stay behind."

Hume had borne the sufferings of his life with courage; he had led this
terrible tramp with no tremor at his heart for himself; he was seeking to
perform a perilous act without any inward shrinking; but Jeff's request
was the greatest trial of this critical period in his life.

Jeff felt, if he could not see, the hesitation of his chief.  His rough
but kind instincts told him something was wrong, and he hastened to add:
"Beg your pardon, Mr. Hume, it ain't no matter.  I oughtn't have asked
you for it.  But it's just like me.  I've been a chain on the leg of the
White Guard this whole tramp."

The moment of hesitation had passed before Jeff had said half-a-dozen
words, and Hume put the book in his hands with the words: "No, Jeff, take
it.  It will bring luck to the White Guard.  Keep it safe until I come
back."

Jeff took the book, but hearing a guttural "Ugh" behind him, he turned
round defiantly.  Cloud-in-the-Sky touched his arm and said: "Good!
Strong-back book--good!"  Jeff was satisfied.

At this point they parted, Jeff and Gaspe Toujours remaining, and Hume
and his two followers going on towards Manitou Mountain.  There seemed
little probability that Clive Lepage would be found.  In their progress
eastward and northward they had covered wide areas of country, dividing
and meeting again after stated hours of travel, but not a sign had been
seen; neither cairn nor staff nor any mark of human presence.

Hume had noticed Jeff Hyde's face when it was turned to the eddying
drifts of the north, and he understood what was in the experienced
huntsman's mind.  He knew that severe weather was before them, and that
the greatest danger of the journey was to be encountered.

That night they saw Manitou Mountain, cold, colossal, harshly calm; and
jointly with that sight there arose a shrieking, biting, fearful north
wind.  It blew upon them in cruel menace of conquest, in piercing
inclemency.  It struck a freezing terror to their hearts, and grew in
violent attack until, as if repenting that it had foregone its power to
save, the sun suddenly grew red and angry, and spread out a shield of
blood along the bastions of the west.  The wind shrank back and grew less
murderous, and ere the last red arrow shot up behind the lonely western
wall of white, the three knew that the worst of the storm had passed and
that death had drawn back for a time.  What Hume thought may be gathered
from his diary; for ere he crawled in among the dogs and stretched
himself out beside Bouche, he wrote these words with aching fingers:

     January 10th: Camp 39.--A bitter day.  We are facing three fears
     now: the fate of those we left behind; Lepage's fate; and the going
     back.  We are twenty miles from Manitou Mountain.  If he is found,
     I should not fear the return journey; success gives hope.  But we
     trust in God.

Another day passed and at night, after a hard march, they camped five
miles from Manitou Mountain.  And not a sign!  But Hume felt there was a
faint chance of Lepage being found at this mountain.  His iron frame had
borne the hardships of this journey well; his strong heart better.  But
this night an unaccountable weakness possessed him.  Mind and body were
on the verge of helplessness.  Bouche seemed to understand this, and when
he was unhitched from the team of dogs, now dwindled to seven, he leaped
upon his master's breast.  It was as if some instinct of sympathy, of
prescience, was passing between the man and the dog.  Hume bent his head
down to Bouche for an instant and rubbed his side kindly; then he said,
with a tired accent: "It's all right, old dog, it's all right."

Hume did not sleep well at first, but at length oblivion came.  He waked
to feel Bouche tugging at his blankets.  It was noon.  Late Carscallen
and Cloud-in-the-Sky were still sleeping--inanimate bundles among the
dogs.  In an hour they were on their way again, and towards sunset they
had reached the foot of Manitou Mountain.  Abruptly from the plain rose
this mighty mound, blue and white upon a black base.  A few straggling
pines grew near its foot, defying latitude, as the mountain itself defied
the calculations of geographers and geologists.  A halt was called.  Late
Carscallen and Cloud-in-the-Sky looked at the chief.  His eyes were
scanning the mountain closely.  Suddenly he motioned.  A hundred feet up
there was a great round hole in the solid rock, and from this hole there
came a feeble cloud of smoke!  The other two saw also.  Cloud-in-the-Sky
gave a wild whoop, and from the mountain there came, a moment after, a
faint replica of the sound.  It was not an echo, for there appeared at
the mouth of the cave an Indian, who made feeble signs for them to come.
In a little while they were at the cave.  As Jaspar Hume entered, Cloud-
in-the-Sky and the stalwart but emaciated Indian who had beckoned to them
spoke to each other in the Chinook language, the jargon common to all
Indians of the West.

Jaspar Hume saw a form reclining on a great bundle of pine branches,
and he knew what Rose Lepage had prayed for was come to pass.  By the
flickering light of a handful of fire he saw Lepage--rather what was left
of him--a shadow of energy, a heap of nerveless bones.  His eyes were
shut, but as Hume, with a quiver of memory and sympathy at his heart,
stood for an instant, and looked at the man whom he had cherished as a
friend and found an enemy, Lepage's lips moved and a weak voice said:
"Who is there?"

"A friend."

"Come-near-me,--friend."

Hume made a motion to Late Carscallen, who was heating some liquor at the
fire, and then he stooped and lifted up the sick man's head, and took his
hand.  "You have come--to save me!" whispered the weak voice again.

"Yes; I've come to save you."  This voice was strong and clear and true.

"I seem--to have--heard--your voice before--somewhere before--I seem to--
have--"

But he had fainted.

Hume poured a little liquor down the sick man's throat, and Late
Carscallen chafed the delicate hand--delicate in health, it was like that
of a little child now.  When breath came again Hume whispered to his
helper "Take Cloud-in-the-Sky and get wood; bring fresh branches.  Then
clear one of the sleds, and we will start back with him in the early
morning."

Late Carscallen, looking at the skeleton-like figure, said: "He will
never get there."

"Yes, he will get there," was Hume's reply.

"But he is dying."

"He goes with me to Fort Providence."

"Ay, to Providence he goes, but not with you," said Late Carscallen,
doggedly.

Anger flashed in Hume's eye, but he said quietly "Get the wood,
Carscallen."

Hume was left alone with the starving Indian, who sat beside the fire
eating voraciously, and with the sufferer, who now was taking
mechanically a little biscuit sopped in brandy.  For a few moments thus,
then his sunken eyes opened, and he looked dazedly at the man bending
above him.  Suddenly there came into them a look of terror.  "You--you
--are Jaspar Hume," his voice said in an awed whisper.

"Yes."  The hands of the sub-factor chafed those of the other.

"But you said you were a friend, and come to save me."

"I have come to save you."

There was a shiver of the sufferer's body.  This discovery would either
make him stronger or kill him.  Hume knew this, and said: "Lepage, the
past is past and dead to me; let it be so to you."

There was a pause.

"How--did you know--about me?"

"I was at Fort Providence.  There came letters from the Hudson's Bay
Company, and from your wife, saying that you were making this journey,
and were six months behind--"

"My wife--Rose!"

"I have a letter for you from her.  She is on her way to Canada.  We are
to take you to her."

"To take me--to her."  Lepage shook his head sadly, but he pressed to his
lips the letter that Hume had given him.

"To take you to her, Lepage."

"No, I shall never see her again."

"I tell you, you shall.  You can live if you will.  You owe that to her
--to me--to God."

"To her--to you--to God.  I have been true to none.  I have been
punished.  I shall die here."

"You shall go to Fort Providence.  Do that in payment of your debt to me,
Lepage.  I demand that."  In this transgressor there was a latent spark
of honour, a sense of justice that might have been developed to great
causes, if some strong nature, seeing his weaknesses, had not condoned
them, but had appealed to the natural chivalry of an impressionable,
vain, and weak character.  He struggled to meet Hume's eyes, and doing
so, he gained confidence and said: "I will try to live.  I will do you
justice--yet."

"Your first duty is to eat and drink.  We start for Fort Providence
to-morrow."

The sick man stretched out his hand.  "Food!  Food!" he said.

In tiny portions food and drink were given to him, and his strength
sensibly increased.  The cave was soon aglow with the fire kindled by
Late Carscallen and Cloud-in-the-Sky.  There was little speaking, for the
sick man soon fell asleep.  Lepage's Indian told Cloud-in-the-Sky the
tale of their march--how the other Indian and the dogs died; how his
master became ill as they were starting towards Fort Providence from
Manitou Mountain in the summer weather; how they turned back and took
refuge in this cave; how month by month they had lived on what would
hardly keep a rabbit alive; and how, at last, his master urged him to
press on with his papers; but he would not, and stayed until this day,
when the last bit of food had been eaten, and they were found.




V

The next morning Lepage was placed upon a sled, and they started back,
Bouche barking joyfully as he led off, with Cloud-in-the-Sky beside him.
There was light in the faces of all, though the light could not be seen
by reason of their being muffled so.  All day they travelled, scarcely
halting, Lepage's Indian marching well.  Often the corpse-like bundle on
the sled was disturbed, and biscuits wet in brandy and bits of preserved
venison were given.

That night Hume said to Late Carscallen: "I am going to start at the
first light of the morning to get to Gaspe Toujours and Jeff Hyde as soon
as possible.  Follow as fast as you can.  He will be safe, if you give
him food and drink often.  I shall get to the place where we left them
about noon; you should reach there at night or early the next morning."

"Hadn't you better take Bouche with you?" said Late Carscallen.

The sub-factor thought a moment, and then said: "No, he is needed most
where he is."

At noon the next day Jaspar Hume looked round upon a billowy plain of sun
and ice, but saw no staff, no signal, no tent, no sign of human life: of
Gaspe Toujours or of Jeff Hyde.  His strong heart quailed.  Had he lost
his way?  He looked at the sun.  He was not sure.  He consulted his
compass, but it quivered hesitatingly.  For awhile that wild bewilderment
which seizes upon the minds of the strongest, when lost, mastered him, in
spite of his struggles against it.  He moved in a maze of half-blindness,
half-delirium.  He was lost in it, swayed by it.  He began to wander
about; and there grew upon his senses strange delights and reeling
agonies.  He heard church bells, he caught at butterflies, he tumbled in
new-mown hay, he wandered in a tropic garden.  But in the hay a wasp
stung him, and the butterfly changed to a curling black snake that struck
at him and glided to a dark-flowing river full of floating ice, and up
from the river a white hand was thrust, and it beckoned him--beckoned
him.  He shut his eyes and moved towards it, but a voice stopped him, and
it said, "Come away, come away," and two arms folded him round, and as he
went back from the shore he stumbled and fell, and .  .  .  What is this?
A yielding mass at his feet--a mass that stirs!  He clutches at it, he
tears away the snow, he calls aloud--and his voice has a faraway
unnatural sound--"Gaspe Toujours!  Gaspe Toujours!"  Then the figure of a
man shakes itself in the snow, and a voice says: "Ay, ay, sir!"  Yes, it
is Gaspe Toujours!  And beside him lies Jeff Hyde, and alive.  "Ay, ay,
sir, alive!"

Jaspar Hume's mind was itself again.  It had but suffered for a moment
the agony of delirium.

Gaspe Toujours and Jeff Hyde had lain down in the tent the night of the
great wind, and had gone to sleep at once.  The staff had been blown
down, the tent had fallen over them, the drift had covered them, and for
three days they had slept beneath the snow, never waking.

Jeff Hyde's sight was come again to him.  "You've come back for the
book," he said.  "You couldn't go on without it.  You ought to have taken
it yesterday."

He drew it from his pocket.  He was dazed.

"No, Jeff, I've not come back for that, and I did not leave you
yesterday: it is three days and more since we parted.  The book has
brought us luck, and the best.  We have found our man; and they'll be
here to-night with him.  I came on ahead to see how you fared."

In that frost-bitten world Jeff Hyde uncovered his head for a moment.
"Gaspe Toujours is a papist," he said, "but he read me some of that book
the day you left, and one thing we went to sleep on: it was that about
'Lightenin' the darkness, and defendin' us from all the perils and
dangers of this night.'"  Here Gaspe Toujours made the sign of the cross.
Jeff Hyde continued half apologetically for his comrade: "That comes
natural to Gaspe Toujours--I guess it always does to papists.  But I
never had any trainin' that way, and I had to turn the thing over and
over, and I fell asleep on it.  And when I wake up three days after,
here's my eyes as fresh as daisies, and you back, sir, and the thing done
that we come to do."

He put the Book into Hume's hands and at that moment Gaspe Toujours said:
"See!"  Far off, against the eastern horizon, appeared a group of moving
figures.

That night the broken segments of the White Guard were reunited, and
Clive Lepage slept by the side of Jaspar Hume.




VI

Napoleon might have marched back from Moscow with undecimated legions
safely enough, if the heart of those legions had not been crushed.  The
White Guard, with their faces turned homeward, and the man they had
sought for in their care, seemed to have acquired new strength.  Through
days of dreadful cold, through nights of appalling fierceness, through
storm upon the plains that made for them paralysing coverlets, they
marched.  And if Lepage did not grow stronger, life at least was kept
in him.

There was little speech among them, but once in a while Gaspe Toujours
sang snatches of the songs of the voyageurs of the great rivers; and the
hearts of all were strong.  Between Bouche and his master there was
occasional demonstration.  On the twentieth day homeward, Hume said with
his hand on the dog's head "It had to be done, Bouche; even a dog could
see that."

And so it was "all right" for the White Guard.  One day when the sun was
warmer than usual over Fort Providence, and just sixty-five days since
that cheer had gone up from apprehensive hearts for brave men going out
into the Barren Grounds, Sergeant Gosse, who, every day, and of late many
times a day, had swept the north-east with a field-glass, rushed into the
chief-factor's office, and with a broken voice cried:  "They've all come!
They've come!"  Then he leaned his arm and head against the wall and
sobbed.  And the old factor rose from his chair tremblingly, and said his
thank-god, and went hurriedly into the square.  He did not go steadily,
however, the joyous news had shaken him, sturdy old pioneer as he was.
A fringe of white had grown about his temples in the last two months.
The people of the fort had said they had never seen him so irascible, yet
so gentle; so uneasy, yet so reserved; so stern about the mouth, yet so
kind about the eyes as he had been since Hume had gone on this desperate
errand.

Already the handful of people at the fort had gathered.  Indians left the
store, and joined the rest; the factor and Sergeant Gosse set out to meet
the little army of relief.  To the factor's "In the name of the Hudson's
Bay Company, Mr. Hume," when they met there came "By the help of God,
sir," and he pointed to the sled whereon Lepage lay.  A feeble hand was
clasped in the burly hand of the factor, and then they all fell into line
again, Cloud-in-the-Sky running ahead of the dogs.  Snow had fallen on
them, and as they entered the stockade, men and dogs were white from head
to foot.

The White Guard had come back.  Jaspar Hume as simply acknowledged his
strident welcome as he had done the God-speed two months and more ago.
With the factor he bore the sick man in, and laid him on his own bed.
Then he came outside again, and when they cheered him once more, he said:
"We have come safe through, and I'm thankful.  But remember that my
comrades in this march deserve your cheers more than I.  Without them
I couldn't have done anything."

"In our infirmities and in all our dangers and necessities," added Jeff
Hyde.  "The luck of the world was in that book!"

In another half-hour the White Guard was at ease, and four of them were
gathered about the great stove in the store, Cloud-in-the-Sky smoking
placidly, and full of guttural emphasis; Late Carscallen moving his
animal-like jaws with a sense of satisfaction; Gaspe Toujours talking in
Chinook to the Indians, in patois to the French clerk, and in broken
English to them all; and Jeff Hyde exclaiming on the wonders of the
march, the finding of Lepage at Manitou Mountain, and of himself and
Gaspe Toujours buried in the snow.




VII

In Hume's house at midnight Lepage lay asleep with his wife's letters--
received through the factor--in his hand.  The firelight played upon a
dark, disappointed face--a doomed, prematurely old face, as it seemed to
the factor.

"You knew him, then," the factor said, after a long silence, with a
gesture towards the bed.

"Yes, well, years ago," replied Hume.

Just then the sick man stirred in his sleep, and he said disjointedly:
"I'll make it all right to you, Hume."  Then came a pause, and a quicker
utterance: "Forgive--forgive me, Rose."  The factor got up, and turned to
go, and Hume, with a sorrowful gesture, went over to the bed.

Again the voice said: "Ten years--I have repented ten years--I dare not
speak--"

The factor touched Hume's arm.  "He has fever.  You and I must nurse him,
Hume.  You can trust me--you understand."

"Yes, I can trust you," was the reply.  "But I can tell you nothing."

"I do not want to know anything.  If you can watch till two o'clock I
will relieve you.  I'll send the medicine chest over.  You know how to
treat him."

The factor passed out, and the other was left alone with the man who had
wronged him.  The feeling most active in his mind was pity, and, as he
prepared a draught from his own stock of medicines, he thought the past
and the present all over.  He knew that however much he had suffered,
this man had suffered more.  In this silent night there was broken down
any barrier that may have stood between Lepage and his complete
compassion.  Having effaced himself from the calculation, justice
became forgiveness.

He moistened the sick man's lips, and bathed his forehead, and roused him
once to take a quieting powder.  Then he sat down and wrote to Rose
Lepage.  But he tore the letter up again and said to the dog: "No,
Bouche, I can't; the factor must do it.  She needn't know yet that it was
I who saved him.  It doesn't make any burden of gratitude, if my name is
kept out of it.  The factor mustn't mention me, Bouche--not yet.  When he
is well we will go to London with It, Bouche, and we needn't meet her.
It will be all right, Bouche, all right!"

The dog seemed to understand; for he went over to the box that held It;
and looked at his master.  Then Jaspar Hume rose, broke the seal,
unlocked the box and opened it; but he heard the sick man moan, and he
closed it again and went over to the bed.  The feeble voice said: "I must
speak--I cannot die so--not so."  Hume moistened the lips once, put a
cold cloth on the fevered head, and then sat down by the fire again.

Lepage slept at last.  The restless hands grew quiet, the breath became
more regular, the tortured mind found a short peace.  With the old
debating look in his eyes, Hume sat there watching until the factor
relieved him.




VIII

February and March and April were past, and May was come.  Lepage had had
a hard struggle for life, but he had survived.  For weeks every night
there was a repetition of that first night after the return: delirious
self-condemnation, entreaty, appeal to his wife, and Hume's name
mentioned in shuddering remorse.  With the help of the Indian who had
shared the sick man's sufferings in the Barren Grounds, the factor and
Hume nursed him back to life.  After the first night no word had passed
between the two watchers regarding the substance of Lepage's delirium.
But one evening the factor was watching alone, and the repentant man from
his feverish sleep cried out: "Hush, hush!  don't let them know--I stole
them both, and Rose did not know.  Rose did not know!"

The factor rose and walked away.  The dog was watching him.  He said to
Bouche: "You have a good master, Bouche."




IX

In an arm-chair made of hickory and birch-bark by Cloud-in-the-Sky,
Lepage sat reading a letter from his wife.  She was at Winnipeg, and was
coming west as far as Regina to meet him on his way down.  He looked a
wreck; but a handsome wreck.  His refined features, his soft black beard
and blue eyes, his graceful hand and gentle manners, seemed not to belong
to an evil-hearted man.  He sat in the sunlight at the door, wrapped
about in moose and beaver skins.  The world of plain and wood was glad.
Not so Lepage.  He sat and thought of what was to come.  He had hoped at
times that he would die, but twice Hume had said: "I demand your life.
You owe it to your wife--to me."  He had pulled his heart up to this
demand and had lived.  But what lay before him?  He saw a stony track,
and he shuddered.

As he sat there facing the future, Hume came to him and said: "If you
feel up to it, Lepage, we will start for Edmonton on Monday.  I think it
will be quite safe, and your wife is anxious.  I shall accompany you as
far as Edmonton; you can then proceed by easy stages, in this pleasant
weather.  Are you ready to go?"

"Quite ready," was the reply.




X

On a beautiful May evening Lepage, Hume, and the White Guard were
welcomed at Fort Edmonton by the officer in command of the Mounted
Police.  They were to enjoy the hospitality of the fort for a couple of
days.  Hume was to go back with Cloud-in-the-Sky and Late Carscallen,
and a number of Indian carriers; for this was a journey of business too.
Gaspe Toujours and Jeff Hyde were to press on with Lepage, who was now
much stronger and better.  One day passed, and on the following morning
Hume gave instructions to Gaspe Toujours and Jeff Hyde, and made
preparations for his going back.  He was standing in the Barracks Square,
when a horseman rode in and made inquiry of a sergeant standing near, if
Lepage had arrived at the fort.  A few words brought out the fact that
Rose Lepage was nearing the fort from the south.  The trooper had been
sent on ahead the day before, but his horse having met with a slight
accident, he had been delayed.  He had seen the party, however, a long
distance back in the early morning.  He must now ride away and meet Mrs.
Lepage, he said.  He was furnished with a fresh horse, and he left,
bearing a message from Lepage.

Hume decided to leave Fort Edmonton at once, and to take all the White
Guard back with him; and gave orders to that effect.  Entering the room
where Lepage sat alone, he said: "Lepage, the time has come for good-bye.
I am starting for Fort Providence."

But the other replied: "You will wait until my wife comes.  You must."
There was trouble in his voice.  "I must not."

Lepage braced himself for a heavy task and said: "Hume, if the time has
come to say good-bye, it has also come when we should speak together for
once openly: to settle, in so far as can be done, a long account.  You
have not let my wife know who saved me.  That appears from her letters.
She asks the name of my rescuer.  I have not yet told her.  But she will
know that to-day when I tell her all."

"When you tell her all?"

"When I tell her all."

"But you shall not do that."

"I will.  It will be the beginning of the confession which I shall
afterwards make to the world."

"By Heaven you shall not do it.  Do you want to wreck her life?"

Jaspar Hume's face was wrathful, and remained so till the other sank back
in the chair with his forehead in his hands; but it softened as he saw
this remorse and shame.  He began to see that Lepage had not clearly
grasped the whole situation.  He said in quieter but still firm tones:
"No, Lepage, that matter is between us two, and us alone.  She must never
know--the world therefore must never know.  You did an unmanly thing; you
are suffering a manly remorse.  Now let it end here--but I swear it
shall," he said in sharp tones, as the other shook his head negatively:
"I would have let you die at Manitou Mountain, if I had thought you would
dare to take away your wife's peace--your children's respect."

"I have no children; our baby died."

Hume softened again.  "Can you not see, Lepage?  The thing cannot be
mended.  I bury it all, and so must you.  You will begin the world again,
and so shall I.  Keep your wife's love.  Henceforth you will deserve it."

Lepage raised moist eyes to the other and said: "But you will take back
the money I got for that?"

There was a pause, then Hume replied: "Yes, upon such terms, times, and
conditions as I shall hereafter fix.  You have no child, Lepage?" he
gently added.

"We have no child; it died with my fame."

Hume looked steadily into the eyes of the man who had wronged him.
"Remember, Lepage, you begin the world again.  I am going now.  By the
memory of old days, good-bye."  He held out his hand.  Lepage took it,
rose tremblingly to his feet, and said, "You are a good man, Hume.  Good-
bye."

The sub-factor turned at the door.  "If it will please you, tell your
wife that I saved you.  Some one will tell her; perhaps I would rather--
at least it would be more natural, if you did it."

He passed out into the sunshine that streamed into the room and fell
across the figure of Lepage, who murmured dreamily: "And begin the world
again."

Time passed.  A shadow fell across the sunlight that streamed upon
Lepage.  He looked up.  There was a startled cry of joy, an answering
exclamation of love, and Rose was clasped in her husband's arms.

A few moments afterwards the sweet-faced woman said: "Who was that man
who rode away to the north as I came up, Clive?  He reminded me of some
one."

"That was the leader of the White Guard, the man who saved me, Rose."
He paused a moment and then solemnly said: "It was Jaspar Hume."

The wife came to her feet with a spring.  "He saved you--Jaspar Hume!
Oh, Clive!"

"He saved me, Rose."

Her eyes were wet: "And he would not stay and let me thank him!  Poor
fellow, poor Jaspar Hume!  Has he been up here all these years?"

Her face was flushed, and pain was struggling with the joy she felt in
seeing her husband again.

"Yes, he has been here all the time."

"Then he has not succeeded in life, Clive!"  Her thoughts went back to
the days when, blind and ill, Hume went away for health's sake, and she
remembered how sorry then she felt for him, and how grieved she was that
when he came back strong and well, he did not come near her or her
husband, and offered no congratulations.  She had not deliberately
wronged him.  She knew he cared for her: but so did Lepage.  A promise
had been given to neither when Jaspar Hume went away; and after that she
grew to love the successful, kind-mannered genius who became her husband.
No real pledge had been broken.  Even in this happiness of hers, sitting
once again at her husband's feet, she thought with tender kindness of the
man who had cared for her eleven years ago; and who had but now saved her
husband.

"He has not succeeded in life," she repeated softly.  Looking down at
her, his brow burning with a white heat, Lepage said: "He is a great man,
Rose."

"I am sure he is a good man," she added.

Perhaps Lepage had borrowed some strength not all his own, for he said
almost sternly: "He is a great man."

His wife looked up half-startled and said: "Very well, dear; he is a
good man--and a great man."

The sunlight still came in through the open door.  The Saskatchewan
flowed swiftly between its verdant banks, an eagle went floating away to
the west, robins made vocal a solitary tree a few yards away, troopers
moved backwards and forwards across the square, and a hen and her
chickens came fluttering to the threshold.  The wife looked at the yellow
brood drawing close to their mother, and her eyes grew wistful.  She
thought of their one baby asleep in an English grave.  But thinking of
the words of the captain of the White Guard, Lepage said firmly: "We will
begin the world again."

She smiled, and rose to kiss him as the hen and chickens hastened away
from the door, and a clear bugle call sounded in the square.




XI

Eleven years have gone since that scene was enacted at Edmonton.

A great gathering is dispersing from a hall in Piccadilly.  It has been
drawn together to do honour to a man who has achieved a triumph in
engineering science.  As he steps from the platform to go, he is greeted
by a fusilade of cheers.  He bows calmly and kindly.  He is a man of
vigorous yet reserved aspect; he has a rare individuality.  He receives
with a quiet cordiality the personal congratulations of his friends.  He
remains for some time in conversation with a royal duke, who takes his
arm, and with him passes into the street.  The duke is a member of this
great man's club, and offers him a seat in his brougham.  Amid the cheers
of the people they drive away together.  Inside the club there are fresh
congratulations, and it is proposed to arrange an impromptu dinner, at
which the duke will preside.  But with modesty and honest thanks the
great man declines.  He pleads an engagement.  He had pleaded this
engagement the day before to a well-known society.  After his health is
proposed, he makes his adieux, and leaving the club, walks away towards a
West-end square.  In one of its streets he pauses, and enters a building
called "Providence Chambers."  His servant hands him a cablegram.  He
passes to his library, and, standing before the fire, opens it.  It
reads: "My wife and I send congratulations to the great man."

Jaspar Hume stands for a moment looking at the fire, and then says
simply: "I wish poor old Bouche were here."  He then sits down and
writes this letter:

     My dear Friends,--Your cablegram has made me glad.  The day is over.
     My latest idea was more successful than I even dared to hope; and
     the world has been kind.  I went down to see your boy, Jaspar, at
     Clifton last week.  It was his birthday, you know--nine years old,
     and a clever, strong-minded little fellow.  He is quite contented.
     As he is my god-child, I again claimed the right of putting a
     thousand dollars to his credit in the bank,--I have to speak of
     dollars to you people living in Canada--which I have done on his
     every birthday.  When he is twenty-one he will have twenty-one
     thousand dollars--quite enough for a start in life.  We get along
     well together, and I think he will develop a fine faculty for
     science.  In the summer, as I said, I will bring him over to you.
     There is nothing more to say to-night except that I am as always,

                    Your faithful and loving friend,
                                                       JASPAR HUME.

A moment after the letter was finished, the servant entered and announced
"Mr. Late Carscallen."  With a smile and hearty greeting the great man
and this member of the White Guard met.  It was to entertain his old
arctic comrade that Jaspar Hume had declined to be entertained by society
or club.  A little while after, seated at the table, the ex-sub-factor
said: "You found your brother well, Carscallen?"

The jaws moved slowly as of old.  "Ay, that, and a grand meenister, sir."

"He wanted you to stay in Scotland, I suppose?"  "Ay, that, but there's
no place for me like Fort Providence."

"Try this pheasant.  And you are sub-factor now, Carscallen?"

"There's two of us sub-factors--Jeff Hyde and myself.  Mr. Field is old,
and can't do much work, and trade's heavy now."

"I know.  I hear from the factor now and then.  And Gaspe Toujours, what
of him?"

"He went away three years ago, and he said he'd come back.  He never did
though.  Jeff Hyde believes he will.  He says to me a hundred times,
'Carscallen, he made the sign of the cross that he'd come back from Saint
Gabrielle; and that's next to the Book with a papist.  If he's alive
he'll come.'"

"Perhaps he will, Carscallen.  And Cloud-in-the-Sky?"

"He's still there, and comes in and smokes with Jeff Hyde and me, as he
used to do with you; but he doesn't obey our orders as he did yours, sir.
He said to me when I left: 'You see Strong-back, tell him Cloud-in-the-
Sky good Injun--he never forget.  How!'"

Jaspar Hume raised his glass with smiling and thoughtful eyes: "To Cloud-
in-the-Sky and all who never forget!" he said.






This eBook was produced by Andrew Sly

THE SEATS OF THE MIGHTY

BEING THE MEMOIRS OF CAPTAIN ROBERT MORAY,
SOMETIME AN OFFICER IN THE VIRGINIA REGIMENT,
AND AFTERWARDS OF AMHERST'S REGIMENT

By Gilbert Parker


To the Memory of Madge Henley.


CONTENTS

Chapter
          Introduction to the Imperial Edition
          Prefatory note to First Edition
      I   An escort to the citadel
     II   The master of the King's magazine
    III   The wager and the sword
     IV   The rat in the trap
      V   The device of the dormouse
     VI   Moray tells the story of his life
    VII   "Quoth little Garaine"
   VIII   As vain as Absalom
     IX   A little concerning the Chevalier de la Darante
      X   An officer of marines
     XI   The coming of Doltaire
    XII   "The point envenomed too!"
   XIII   A little boast
    XIV   Argand Cournal
     XV   In the chamber of torture
    XVI   Be saint or imp
   XVII   Through the bars of the cage
  XVIII   The steep path of conquest
    XIX   A Danseuse and the Bastile
     XX   Upon the ramparts
    XXI   La Jongleuse
   XXII   The lord of Kamaraska
  XXIII   With Wolfe at Montmorenci
   XXIV   The sacred countersign
    XXV   In the cathedral
   XXVI   The secret of the tapestry
  XXVII   A side-wind of revenge
 XXVIII   "To cheat the Devil yet"
   XXIX   "Master Devil" Doltaire
    XXX   "Where all the lovers can hide"
          Appendix--Excerpt from 'The Scot in New France'




INTRODUCTION TO THE IMPERIAL EDITION

It was in the winter of 1892, when on a visit to French Canada, that I
made up my mind I would write the volume which the public knows as 'The
Seats of the Mighty,' but I did not begin the composition until early in
1894. It was finished by the beginning of February, 1895, and began to
appear in 'The Atlantic Monthly' in March of that year. It was not my
first attempt at historical fiction, because I had written 'The Trail of
the Sword' in the year 1893, but it was the first effort on an ambitious
scale, and the writing of it was attended with as much searching of
heart as enthusiasm. I had long been saturated by the early history of
French Canada, as perhaps 'The Trail of the Sword' bore witness, and
particularly of the period of the Conquest, and I longed for a subject
which would, in effect, compel me to write; for I have strong views
upon this business of compulsion in the mind of the writer. Unless a
thing has seized a man, has obsessed him, and he feels that it excludes
all other temptations to his talent or his genius, his book will
not convince. Before all else he must himself be overpowered by the
insistence of his subject, then intoxicated with his idea, and, being
still possessed, become master of his material while remaining the
slave of his subject. I believe that every book which has taken hold of
the public has represented a kind of self-hypnotism on the part of the
writer. I am further convinced that the book which absorbs the author,
which possesses him as he writes it, has the effect of isolating him into
an atmosphere which is not sleep, and which is not absolute wakefulness,
but a place between the two, where the working world is indistinct and
the mind is swept along a flood submerging the self-conscious but not
drowning into unconsciousness.

Such, at any rate, is my own experience. I am convinced that the books
of mine which have had so many friends as this book, 'The Seats of the
Mighty', has had in the English-speaking world were written in just such
conditions of temperamental isolation or absorption. First the subject,
which must of itself have driving power, then the main character, which
becomes a law working out its own destiny; and the subject in my own work
has always been translatable into a phrase. Nearly every one of my books
has always been reducible to its title.

For years I had wished to write an historical novel of the conquest
of Canada or the settlement of the United Empire loyalists and the
subsequent War of 1812, but the central idea and the central character
had not come to me; and without both and the driving power of a big idea
and of a big character, a book did not seem to me possible. The human
thing with the grip of real life was necessary. At last, as pointed out
in the prefatory note of the first edition, published in the spring of
1896 by Messrs. D. Appleton & Co., of New York, and Messrs. Methuen &
Co., of London, I ran across a tiny little volume in the library of Mr.
George M. Fairchild, Jr., of Quebec, called the Memoirs of Major Robert
Stobo. It was published by John S. Davidson, of Market Street,
Pittsburgh, with an introduction by an editor who signed himself
"N. B.C."

The Memoirs proper contained about seventeen thousand words, the
remaining three thousand words being made up of abstracts and appendices
collected by the editor. The narrative was written in a very ornate and
grandiloquent style, but the hero of the memoirs was so evidently a man
of remarkable character, enterprise and adventure, that I saw in the
few scattered bones of the story which he unfolded the skeleton of an
ample historical romance. There was necessary to offset this buoyant and
courageous Scotsman, adventurous and experienced, a character of the race
which captured him and held him in leash till just before the taking of
Quebec. I therefore found in the character of Doltaire--which was the
character of Voltaire spelled with a big D--purely a creature of the
imagination, one who, as the son of a peasant woman and Louis XV, should
be an effective offset to Major Stobo. There was no hint of Doltaire
in the Memoirs. There could not be, nor of the plot on which the story
was based, because it was all imagination. Likewise, there was no
mention of Alixe Duvarney in the Memoirs, nor of Bigot or Madame Cournal
and all the others. They too, when not characters of the imagination,
were lifted out of the history of the time; but the first germ of the
story came from 'The Memoirs of Robert Stobo', and when 'The Seats of
the Mighty' was first published in 'The Atlantic Monthly' the subtitle
contained these words: "Being the Memoirs of Captain Robert Stobo,
sometime an officer in the Virginia Regiment, and afterwards of
Amherst's Regiment."

When the book was published, however, I changed the name of Robert Stobo
to Robert Moray, because I felt I had no right to saddle Robert Stobo's
name with all the incidents and experiences and strange enterprises
which the novel contained. I did not know then that perhaps it might be
considered an honour by Robert Stobo's descendants to have his name
retained. I could not foresee the extraordinary popularity of 'The
Seats of the Mighty', but with what I thought was a sense of honour I
eliminated his name and changed it to Robert Moray. 'The Seats of the
Mighty' goes on, I am happy to say, with an ever-increasing number of
friends. It has a position perhaps not wholly deserved, but it has
crystallised some elements in the life of the continent of America,
the history of France and England, and of the British Empire which may
serve here and there to inspire the love of things done for the sake
of a nation rather than for the welfare of an individual.

I began this introduction by saying that the book was started in the
summer of 1894. That was at a little place called Mablethorpe in
Lincolnshire, on the east coast of England. For several months I worked
in absolute seclusion in that out-of-the-way spot which had not then
become a Mecca for trippers, and on the wonderful sands, stretching for
miles upon miles coastwise and here and there as much as a mile out to
the sea, I tried to live over again the days of Wolfe and Montcalm.
Appropriately enough the book was begun in a hotel at Mablethorpe called
"The Book in Hand." The name was got, I believe, from the fact that, in
a far-off day, a ship was wrecked upon the coast at Mablethorpe, and the
only person saved was the captain, who came ashore with a Bible in his
hands. During the writing now and again a friend would come to me from
London or elsewhere, and there would be a day off, full of literary
tattle, but immediately my friends were gone I was lost again in the
atmosphere of the middle of the eighteenth century.

I stayed at Mablethorpe until the late autumn, and then I went to
Harrogate, exchanging the sea for the moors, and there, still living the
open-air life, I remained for several months until I had finished the
book. The writing of it knew no interruption and was happily set. It
was a thing apart, and not a single untoward invasion of other interests
affected its course.

The title of the book was for long a trouble to me. Months went by
before I could find what I wanted. Scores of titles occurred to me,
but each was rejected. At last, one day when I was being visited by Mr.
Grant Richards, since then a London publisher, but at that time a writer,
who had come to interview me for 'Great Thoughts', I told him of my
difficulties regarding the title. I was saying that I felt the title
should be, as it were, the kernel of a book. I said: "You see, it is a
struggle of one simple girl against principalities and powers; it is the
final conquest of the good over the great. In other words, the book will
be an illustration of the text, 'He has put down the mighty from their
seats, and has exalted the humble and meek.'" Then, like a flash, the
title came 'The Seats of the Mighty'.

Since the phrase has gone into the language and was from the very
first a popular title, it seems strange that the literary director
of the American firm that published the book should take strong
exception to it on the ground that it was grandiloquent. I like to
think that I was firm, and that I declined to change the title.

I need say no more save that the book was dramatised by myself, and
produced, first at Washington by Herbert (now Sir Herbert) Beerbohm
Tree in the winter of 1897 and 1898, and in the spring of 1898 it
opened his new theatre in London.



PREFATORY NOTE TO FIRST EDITION

This tale would never have been written had it not been for the
kindness of my distinguished friend Dr. John George Bourinot,
C.M.G., of Ottawa, whose studies in parliamentary procedure, the
English and Canadian Constitutions, and the history and development
of Canada have been of singular benefit to the Dominion and to the
Empire. Through Dr. Bourinot's good offices I came to know Mr.
James Lemoine, of Quebec, the gifted antiquarian, and President of
the Royal Society of Canada. Mr. Lemoine placed in my hands certain
historical facts suggestive of romance. Subsequently, Mr. George
M. Fairchild, Jr., of Cap Rouge, Quebec, whose library contains a
valuable collection of antique Canadian books, maps, and prints,
gave me generous assistance and counsel, allowing me "the run"
of all his charts, prints, histories, and memoirs. Many of these
prints, and a rare and authentic map of Wolfe's operations against
Quebec are now reproduced in this novel, and may be considered
accurate illustrations of places, people, and events. By the
insertion of these faithful historical elements it is hoped to
give more vividness to the atmosphere of the time, and to
strengthen the verisimilitude of a piece of fiction which is
not, I believe, out of harmony with fact.

Gilbert Parker



PRELUDE


To Sir Edward Seaforth, Bart., of Sangley Hope in Derbyshire, and
Seaforth House in Hanover Square.

Dear Ned: You will have them written, or I shall be pestered to my
grave! Is that the voice of a friend of so long standing? And yet
it seems but yesterday since we had good hours in Virginia together,
or met among the ruins of Quebec. My memoirs--these only will
content you? And to flatter or cajole me, you tell me Mr. Pitt still
urges on the matter. In truth, when he touched first upon this, I
thought it but the courtesy of a great and generous man. But indeed
I am proud that he is curious to know more of my long captivity at
Quebec, of Monsieur Doltaire and all his dealings with me, and the
motions he made to serve La Pompadour on one hand, and, on the
other, to win from me that most perfect of ladies, Mademoiselle
Alixe Duvarney.

Our bright conquest of Quebec is now heroic memory, and honour and
fame and reward have been parcelled out. So I shall but briefly, in
these memoirs (ay, they shall be written, and with a good heart),
travel the trail of history, or discourse upon campaigns and sieges,
diplomacies and treaties. I shall keep close to my own story; for
that, it would seem, yourself and the illustrious minister of the
King most wish to hear. Yet you will find figuring in it great men
like our flaming hero General Wolfe, and also General Montcalm, who,
I shall ever keep on saying, might have held Quebec against us, had
he not been balked by the vain Governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil;
together with such notorious men as the Intendant Bigot, civil
governor of New France, and such noble gentlemen as the Seigneur
Duvarney, father of Alixe.

I shall never view again the citadel on those tall heights where
I was detained so barbarously, nor the gracious Manor House at
Beauport, sacred to me because of her who dwelt therein--how long
ago, how long! Of all the pictures that flash before my mind when
I think on those times, one is most with me: that of the fine
guest-room in the Manor House, where I see moving the benign maid
whose life and deeds alone can make this story worth telling. And
with one scene therein, and it the most momentous in all my days,
I shall begin my tale.

I beg you convey to Mr. Pitt my most obedient compliments,
and say that I take his polite wish as my command.

With every token of my regard, I am, dear Ned, affectionately
your friend,

Robert Moray



I

AN ESCORT TO THE CITADEL


When Monsieur Doltaire entered the salon, and, dropping lazily
into a chair beside Madame Duvarney and her daughter, drawled out,
"England's Braddock--fool and general--has gone to heaven, Captain
Moray, and your papers send you there also," I did not shift a jot,
but looked over at him gravely--for, God knows, I was startled--and
I said,

"The General is dead?"

I did not dare to ask, Is he defeated? though from Doltaire's
look I was sure it was so, and a sickness crept through me, for
at the moment that seemed the end of our cause. But I made as if
I had not heard his words about my papers.

"Dead as a last years courtier, shifted from the scene," he
replied; "and having little now to do, we'll go play with the rat
in our trap."

I would not have dared look towards Alixe, standing beside her
mother then, for the song in my blood was pitched too high, were it
not that a little sound broke from her. At that, I glanced, and saw
that her face was still and quiet, but her eyes were shining, and
her whole body seemed listening. I dared not give my glance meaning,
though I wished to do so. She had served me much, had been a good
friend to me, since I was brought a hostage to Quebec from Fort
Necessity. There, at that little post on the Ohio, France threw
down the gauntlet, and gave us the great Seven Years War. And though
it may be thought I speak rashly, the lever to spring that trouble
had been within my grasp. Had France sat still while Austria and
Prussia quarreled, that long fighting had never been. The game of
war had lain with the Grande Marquise--or La Pompadour, as she was
called--and later it may be seen how I, unwillingly, moved her to
set it going.

Answering Monsieur Doltaire, I said stoutly, "I am sure he made
a good fight; he had gallant men."

"Truly gallant," he returned--"your own Virginians among others"
(I bowed); "but he was a blunderer, as were you also, monsieur, or
you had not sent him plans of our forts and letters of such candour.
They have gone to France, my captain."

Madame Duvarney seemed to stiffen in her chair, for what did
this mean but that I was a spy? and the young lady behind them now
put her handkerchief to her mouth as if to stop a word. To make
light of the charges against myself was the only thing, and yet I
had little heart to do so. There was that between Monsieur Doltaire
and myself--a matter I shall come to by-and-bye--which well might
make me apprehensive.

"My sketch and my gossip with my friends," said I, "can have
little interest in France."

"My faith, the Grande Marquise will find a relish for them," he
said pointedly at me. He, the natural son of King Louis, had played
the part between La Pompadour and myself in the grave matter of
which I spoke. "She loves deciding knotty points of morality," he
added.

"She has had chance and will enough," said I boldly, "but what
point of morality is here?"

"The most vital--to you," he rejoined, flicking his handkerchief a
little, and drawling so that I could have stopped his mouth with my
hand. "Shall a hostage on parole make sketches of a fort and send
them to his friends, who in turn pass them on to a foolish general?"

"When one party to an Article of War brutally breaks his sworn
promise, shall the other be held to his?" I asked quietly.

I was glad that, at this moment, the Seigneur Duvarney entered,
for I could feel the air now growing colder about Madame his wife.
He, at least, was a good friend; but as I glanced at him, I saw his
face was troubled and his manner distant. He looked at Monsieur
Doltaire a moment steadily, stooped to his wife's hand, and then
offered me his own without a word; which done, he went to where
his daughter stood. She kissed him, and, as she did so, whispered
something in his ear, to which he nodded assent. I knew afterwards
that she had asked him to keep me to dinner with them.

Presently turning to Monsieur Doltaire, he said inquiringly,
"You have a squad of men outside my house, Doltaire?"

Doltaire nodded in a languid way, and answered, "An escort--for
Captain Moray--to the citadel."

I knew now, as he had said, that I was in the trap; that he had
begun the long sport which came near to giving me the white
shroud of death, as it turned white the hair upon my head ere
I was thirty-two. Do I not know, the indignities, the miseries
I suffered, I owed mostly to him, and that at the last he
nearly robbed England of her greatest pride, the taking of New
France?--For chance sometimes lets humble men like me balance
the scales of fate; and I was humble enough in rank, if in
spirit always something above my place.

I was standing as he spoke these words, and I turned to him and
said, "Monsieur, I am at your service."

"I have sometimes wished," he said instantly, and with a courteous
if ironical gesture, "that you were in my service--that is, the King's."

I bowed as to a compliment, for I would not see the insolence,
and I retorted, "Would I could offer you a company in my Virginia
regiment!"

"Delightful! delightful!" he rejoined. "I should make as good a
Briton as you a Frenchman, every whit."

I suppose he would have kept leading to such silly play, had I
not turned to Madame Duvarney and said, "I am most sorry that
this mishap falls here; but it is not of my doing, and in colder
comfort, Madame, I shall recall the good hours spent in your
home."

I think I said it with a general courtesy, yet, feeling the eyes
of the young lady on me, perhaps a little extra warmth came into
my voice, and worked upon Madame, or it may be she was glad of my
removal from contact with her daughter; but kindness showed in her
face, and she replied gently, "I am sure it is only for a few days
till we see you again."

Yet I think in her heart she knew my life was perilled: those
were rough and hasty times, when the axe or the rope was the surest
way to deal with troubles. Three years before, at Fort Necessity, I
had handed my sword to my lieutenant, bidding him make healthy use
of it, and, travelling to Quebec on parole, had come in and out of
this house with great freedom. Yet since Alixe had grown towards
womanhood there had been strong change in Madame's manner.

"The days, however few, will be too long until I tax your
courtesy again," I said. "I bid you adieu, Madame."

"Nay, not so," spoke up my host; "not one step: dinner is nearly
served, and you must both dine with us. Nay, but I insist," he
added, as he saw me shake my head. "Monsieur Doltaire will grant
you this courtesy, and me the great kindness. Eh, Doltaire?"

Doltaire rose, glancing from Madame to her daughter. Madame was
smiling, as if begging his consent; for, profligate though he was,
his position, and more than all, his personal distinction, made him
a welcome guest at most homes in Quebec. Alixe met his look without
a yes or no in her eyes--so young, yet having such control and
wisdom, as I have had reason beyond all men to know. Something,
however, in the temper of the scene had filled her with a kind of
glow, which added to her beauty and gave her dignity. The spirit of
her look caught the admiration of this expatriated courtier, and I
knew that a deeper cause than all our past conflicts--and they were
great--would now, or soon, set him fatally against me.

"I shall be happy to wait Captain Moray's pleasure," he said
presently, "and to serve my own by sitting at your table. I was
to have dined with the Intendant this afternoon, but a messenger
shall tell him duty stays me.... If you will excuse me!" he added,
going to the door to find a man of his company. He looked back
for an instant, as if it struck him I might seek escape, for he
believed in no man's truth; but he only said, "I may fetch my men
to your kitchen, Duvarney? 'Tis raw outside."

"Surely. I shall see they have some comfort," was the reply.

Doltaire then left the room, and Duvarney came to me. "This is a
bad business, Moray," he said sadly. "There is some mistake, is
there not?"

I looked him fair in the face. "There is a mistake," I answered.
"I am no spy, and I do not fear that I shall lose my life, my
honour, or my friends by offensive acts of mine."

"I believe you," he responded, "as I have believed since you came,
though there has been gabble of your doings. I do not forget you
bought my life back from those wild Mohawks five years ago. You
have my hand in trouble or out of it."

Upon my soul, I could have fallen on his neck, for the blow to
our cause and the shadow on my own fate oppressed me for the
moment.

At this point the ladies left the room to make some little
toilette before dinner, and as they passed me the sleeve of Alixe's
dress touched my arm. I caught her fingers for an instant, and to
this day I can feel that warm, rich current of life coursing from
finger-tips to heart. She did not look at me at all, but passed on
after her mother. Never till that moment had there been any open
show of heart between us. When I first came to Quebec (I own it to
my shame) I was inclined to use her youthful friendship for private
and patriotic ends; but that soon passed, and then I wished her
companionship for true love of her. Also, I had been held back
because when I first knew her she seemed but a child. Yet how
quickly and how wisely did she grow out of her childhood! She had a
playful wit, and her talents were far beyond her years. It amazed
me often to hear her sum up a thing in some pregnant sentence
which, when you came to think, was the one word to be said. She had
such a deep look out of her blue eyes that you scarcely glanced
from them to see the warm sweet colour of her face, the fair broad
forehead, the brown hair, the delicate richness of her lips, which
ever were full of humour and of seriousness--both running together,
as you may see a laughing brook steal into the quiet of a
river.

Duvarney and I were thus alone for a moment, and he straightway
dropped a hand upon my shoulder. "Let me advise you," he said,
"be friendly with Doltaire. He has great influence at the Court
and elsewhere. He can make your bed hard or soft at the citadel."

I smiled at him, and replied, "I shall sleep no less sound because
of Monsieur Doltaire."

"You are bitter in your trouble," said he.

I made haste to answer, "No, no, my own troubles do not weigh so
heavy--but our General's death!"

"You are a patriot, my friend," he added warmly. "I could well
have been content with our success against your English army
without this deep danger to your person."

I put out my hand to him, but I did not speak, for just then
Doltaire entered. He was smiling at something in his thought.

"The fortunes are with the Intendant always," said he. "When
things are at their worst, and the King's storehouse, the dear
La Friponne, is to be ripped by our rebel peasants like a sawdust
doll, here comes this gay news of our success on the Ohio; and in
that Braddock's death the whining beggars will forget their empty
bellies, and bless where they meant to curse. What fools, to be
sure! They had better loot La Friponne. Lord, how we love fighting,
we French! And 'tis so much easier to dance, or drink, or love."
He stretched out his shapely legs as he sat musing.

Duvarney shrugged a shoulder, smiling. "But you, Doltaire--there's
no man out of France that fights more."

He lifted an eyebrow. "One must be in the fashion; besides, it
does need some skill to fight. The others--to dance, drink, love:
blind men's games!" He smiled cynically into the distance.

I have never known a man who interested me so much--never one so
original, so varied, and so uncommon in his nature. I marvelled at
the pith and depth of his observations; for though I agreed not with
him once in ten times, I loved his great reflective cleverness and
his fine penetration--singular gifts in a man of action. But action
to him was a playtime; he had that irresponsibility of the Court
from which he came, its scornful endurance of defeat or misery,
its flippant look upon the world, its scoundrel view of women. Then
he and Duvarney talked, and I sat thinking. Perhaps the passion
of a cause grows in you as you suffer for it, and I had suffered,
and suffered most by a bitter inaction. Governor Dinwiddie, Mr.
Washington (alas that, as I write the fragment chapters of my life,
among the hills where Montrose my ancestor fought, George leads
the colonists against the realm of England!), and the rest were
suffering, but they were fighting too. Brought to their knees, they
could rise again to battle; and I thought then, How more glorious to
be with my gentlemen in blue from Virginia, holding back death from
the General, and at last falling myself, than to spend good years a
hostage at Quebec, knowing that Canada was for our taking, yet doing
nothing to advance the hour!

In the thick of these thoughts I was not conscious of what the
two were saying, but at last I caught Madame Cournal's name; by
which I guessed Monsieur Doltaire was talking of her amours, of
which the chief and final was with Bigot the Intendant, to whom
the King had given all civil government, all power over commerce
and finance in the country. The rivalry between the Governor and
the Intendant was keen and vital at this time, though it changed
later, as I will show. At her name I looked up and caught Monsieur
Doltaire's eye.

He read my thoughts. "You have had blithe hours here, monsieur,"
he said--"you know the way to probe us; but of all the ladies who
could be most useful to you, you left out the greatest. There you
erred. I say it as a friend, not as an officer, there you erred.
From Madame Cournal to Bigot, from Bigot to Vaudreuil the Governor,
from the Governor to France. But now--"

He paused, for Madame Duvarney and her daughter had come, and we
all rose.

The ladies had heard enough to know Doltaire's meaning. "But
now--Captain Moray dines with us," said Madame Duvarney quietly
and meaningly.

"Yet I dine with Madame Cournal," rejoined Doltaire, smiling.

"One may use more option with enemies and prisoners," she said
keenly, and the shot ought to have struck home. In so small a place
it was not easy to draw lines close and fine, and it was in the
power of the Intendant, backed by his confederates, to ruin almost
any family in the province if he chose; and that he chose at times
I knew well, as did my hostess. Yet she was a woman of courage and
nobility of thought, and I knew well where her daughter got her
good flavor of mind.

I could see something devilish in the smile at Doltaire's lip's,
but his look was wandering between Alixe and me, and he replied
urbanely, "I have ambition yet--to connive at captivity"; and
then he looked full and meaningly at her.

I can see her now, her hand on the high back of a great oak chair,
the lace of her white sleeve falling away, and her soft arm showing,
her eyes on his without wavering. They did not drop, nor turn aside;
they held straight on, calm, strong--and understanding. By that look
I saw she read him; she, who had seen so little of the world, felt
what he was, and met his invading interest firmly, yet sadly; for I
knew long after that a smother was at her heart then, foreshadowings
of dangers that would try her as few women are tried. Thank God that
good women are born with greater souls for trial than men; that,
given once an anchor for their hearts, they hold until the cables
break.

When we were about to enter the dining-room, I saw, to my joy,
Madame incline towards Doltaire, and I knew that Alixe was for
myself--though her mother wished it little, I am sure. As she took
my arm, her finger-tips plunged softly into the velvet of my sleeve,
giving me a thrill of courage. I felt my spirits rise, and I set
myself to carry things off gaily, to have this last hour with her
clear of gloom, for it seemed easy to think that we should meet no
more.

As we passed into the dining-room, I said, as I had said the
first time I went to dinner in her father's house, "Shall we be
flippant, or grave?"

I guessed that it would touch her. She raised her eyes to mine
and answered, "We are grave; let us seem flippant."

In those days I had a store of spirits. I was seldom dismayed,
for life had been such a rough-and-tumble game that I held to
cheerfulness and humour as a hillsman to his broadsword, knowing it
the greatest of weapons with a foe, and the very stone and mortar
of friendship. So we were gay, touching lightly on events around us,
laughing at gossip of the doorways (I in my poor French), casting
small stones at whatever drew our notice, not forgetting a throw or
two at Chateau Bigot, the Intendant's country house at Charlesbourg,
five miles away, where base plots were hatched, reputations soiled,
and all clean things dishonoured. But Alixe, the sweetest soul
France ever gave the world, could not know all I knew; guessing
only at heavy carousals, cards, song, and raillery, with far-off
hints of feet lighter than fit in cavalry boots dancing among the
glasses on the table. I was never before so charmed with her swift
intelligence, for I never had great nimbleness of thought, nor
power to make nice play with the tongue.

"You have been three years with us," suddenly said her father,
passing me the wine. "How time has flown! How much has happened!"

"Madame Cournal's husband has made three million francs," said
Doltaire, with dry irony and truth.

Duvarney shrugged a shoulder, stiffened; for, oblique as the
suggestion was, he did not care to have his daughter hear it.

"And Vaudreuil has sent bees buzzing to Versailles about Bigot
and Company," added the impish satirist.

Madame Duvarney responded with a look of interest, and the
Seigneur's eyes steadied to his plate. All at once by that I saw
the Seigneur had known of the Governor's action, and maybe had
counseled with him, siding against Bigot. If that were so--as it
proved to be--he was in a nest of scorpions; for who among them
would spare him: Marin, Cournal, Rigaud, the Intendant himself?
Such as he were thwarted right and left in this career of knavery
and public evils.

"And our people have turned beggars; poor and starved, they beg at
the door of the King's storehouse--it is well called La Friponne,"
said Madame Duvarney, with some heat; for she was ever liberal to
the poor, and she had seen manor after manor robbed, and peasant
farmers made to sell their corn for a song, to be sold to them again
at famine prices by La Friponne. Even now Quebec was full of pilgrim
poor begging against the hard winter, and execrating their spoilers.

Doltaire was too fond of digging at the heart of things not to
admit she spoke truth.

  "La Pompadour et La Friponne!
  Qu'est que cela, mon petit homme?"
  "Les deux terribles, ma chere mignonne,
        Mais, c'est cela--
  La Pompadour et La Friponne!"

He said this with cool drollery and point, in the patois of the
native, so that he set us all laughing, in spite of our mutual
apprehensions.

Then he continued, "And the King has sent a chorus to the play, with
eyes for the preposterous make-believe, and more, no purse to fill."

We all knew he meant himself, and we knew also that so far as
money went he spoke true; that though hand-in-glove with Bigot, he
was poor, save for what he made at the gaming-table and got from
France. There was the thing that might have clinched me to him, had
matters been other than they were; for all my life I have loathed
the sordid soul, and I would rather, in these my ripe years, eat
with a highwayman who takes his life in his hands than with the
civilian who robs his king and the king's poor, and has no better
trick than false accounts, nor better friend than the pettifogging
knave. Doltaire had no burning love for France, and little faith in
anything; for he was of those Versailles water-flies who recked not
if the world blackened to cinders when their lights went out. As
will be seen by-and-bye, he had come here to seek me, and to serve
the Grande Marquise.

More speech like this followed, and amid it all, with the flower of
the world beside me at this table, I remembered my mother's words
before I bade her good-bye and set sail from Glasgow for Virginia.

"Keep it in mind, Robert," she said, "that an honest love is the
thing to hold you honest with yourself. 'Tis to be lived for, and
fought for, and died for. Ay, be honest in your loves. Be true."

And there I took an oath, my hand clenched beneath the table, that
Alixe should be my wife if better days came; when I was done with
citadel and trial and captivity, if that might be.

The evening was well forward when Doltaire, rising from his seat
in the drawing-room, bowed to me, and said, "If it pleases you,
monsieur?"

I rose also, and prepared to go. There was little talk, yet we
all kept up a play of cheerfulness. When I came to take the
Seigneur's hand, Doltaire was a distance off, talking to Madame.
"Moray," said the Seigneur quickly and quietly, "trials portend
for both of us." He nodded towards Doltaire.

"But we shall come safe through," said I.

"Be of good courage, and adieu," he answered, as Doltaire turned
towards us.

My last words were to Alixe. The great moment of my life was come.
If I could but say one thing to her out of earshot, I would stake
all on the hazard. She was standing beside a cabinet, very still, a
strange glow in her eyes, a new, fine firmness at the lips. I felt
I dared not look as I would; I feared there was no chance now to
speak what I would. But I came slowly up the room with her mother.
As we did so, Doltaire exclaimed and started to the window, and the
Seigneur and Madame followed. A red light was showing on the panes.

I caught Alixe's eye, and held it, coming quickly to her. All backs
were on us. I took her hand and pressed it to my lips suddenly. She
gave a little gasp, and I saw her bosom heave.

"I am going from prison to prison," said I, "and I leave a loved
jailer behind."

She understood. "Your jailer goes also," she answered, with a
sad smile.

"I love you! I love you!" I urged.

She was very pale. "Oh, Robert!" she whispered timidly; and then,
"I will be brave, I will help you, and I will not forget. God
guard you."

That was all, for Doltaire turned to me then and said, "They've
made of La Friponne a torch to light you to the citadel, monsieur."

A moment afterwards we were outside in the keen October air, a
squad of soldiers attending, our faces towards the citadel heights.
I looked back, doffing my cap. The Seigneur and Madame stood at
the door, but my eyes were for a window where stood Alixe. The
reflection of the far-off fire bathed the glass, and her face had
a glow, the eyes shining through, intent and most serious. Yet how
brave she was, for she lifted her handkerchief, shook it a little,
and smiled.

As though the salute were meant for him, Doltaire bowed twice
impressively, and then we stepped forward, the great fire over
against the Heights lighting us and hurrying us on.

We scarcely spoke as we went, though Doltaire hummed now and then
the air La Pompadour et La Friponne. As we came nearer I said,
"Are you sure it is La Friponne, monsieur?"

"It is not," he said, pointing. "See!"

The sky was full of shaking sparks, and a smell of burning grain
came down the wind.

"One of the granaries, then," I added, "not La Friponne itself?"

To this he nodded assent, and we pushed on.



II

THE MASTER OF THE KING'S MAGAZINE


"What fools," said Doltaire presently, "to burn the bread and oven
too! If only they were less honest in a world of rogues, poor moles!"

Coming nearer, we saw that La Friponne itself was safe, but one
warehouse was doomed and another threatened. The streets were full
of people, and thousands of excited peasants, laborers, and sailors
were shouting, "Down with the palace! Down with Bigot!"

We came upon the scene at the most critical moment. None of the
Governors soldiers were in sight, but up the Heights we could hear
the steady tramp of General Montcalm's infantry as they came on.
Where were Bigot's men? There was a handful--one company--drawn up
before La Friponne, idly leaning on their muskets, seeing the great
granary burn, and watching La Friponne threatened by the mad crowd
and the fire. There was not a soldier before the Intendant's
palace, not a light in any window.

"What is this weird trick of Bigot's?" said Doltaire, musing.

The Governor, we knew, had been out of the city that day. But
where was Bigot? At a word from Doltaire we pushed forward towards
the palace, the soldiers keeping me in their midst. We were not
a hundred feet from the great steps when two gates at the right
suddenly swung open, and a carriage rolled out swiftly and dashed
down into the crowd. I recognized the coachman first--Bigot's,
an old one-eyed soldier of surpassing nerve, and devoted to his
master. The crowd parted right and left. Suddenly the carriage
stopped, and Bigot stood up, folding his arms, and glancing round
with a disdainful smile without speaking a word. He carried a paper
in one hand.

Here were at least two thousand armed and unarmed peasants, sick
with misery and oppression, in the presence of their undefended
tyrant. One shot, one blow of a stone, one stroke of a knife--to
the end of a shameless pillage. But no hand was raised to do the
deed. The roar of voices subsided--he waited for it--and silence
was broken only by the crackle of the burning building, the tramp
of Montcalm's soldiers in Mountain Street, and the tolling of the
cathedral bell. I thought it strange that almost as Bigot came out
the wild clanging gave place to a cheerful peal.

After standing for a moment, looking round him, his eye resting on
Doltaire and myself (we were but a little distance from him), Bigot
said in a loud voice: "What do you want with me? Do you think I may
be moved by threats? Do you punish me by burning your own food,
which, when the English are at our doors, is your only hope? Fools!
How easily could I turn my cannon and my men upon you! You think to
frighten me. Who do you think I am?--a Bostonnais or an Englishman?
You--revolutionists! T'sh! You are wild dogs without a leader. You
want one that you can trust; you want no coward, but one who fears
you not at your wildest. Well, I will be your leader. I do not fear
you, and I do not love you, for how have you deserved my love? By
ingratitude and aspersion? Who has the King's favour? Francois Bigot.
Who has the ear of the Grande Marquise? Francois Bigot. Who stands
firm while others tremble lest their power pass to-morrow? Francois
Bigot. Who else dare invite revolution, this danger"--his hand
sweeping to the flames--"who but Francois Bigot?" He paused for a
moment, and looking up to the leader of Montcalm's soldiers on the
Heights, waved him back; then he continued:

"And to-day, when I am ready to give you great news, you play the
mad dog's game; you destroy what I had meant to give you in our hour
of danger, when those English came. I made you suffer a little, that
you might live then. Only to-day, because of our great and glorious
victory--"

He paused again. The peal of bells became louder. Far up on the
Heights we heard the calling of bugles and the beating of drums;
and now I saw the whole large plan, the deep dramatic scheme. He
had withheld the news of the victory that he might announce it when
it would most turn to his own glory. Perhaps he had not counted on
the burning of the warehouse, but this would tell now in his favour.
He was not a large man, but he drew himself up with dignity, and
continued in a contemptuous tone:

"Because of our splendid victory, I designed to tell you all my
plans, and, pitying your trouble, divide among you at the smallest
price, that all might pay, the corn which now goes to feed the
stars."

At that moment some one from the Heights above called out shrilly,
"What lie is in that paper, Francois Bigot?"

I looked up, as did the crowd. A woman stood upon a point of the
great rock, a red robe hanging on her, her hair free over her
shoulders, her finger pointing at the Intendant. Bigot only glanced
up, then smoothed out the paper.

He said to the people in a clear but less steady voice, for I could
see that the woman had disturbed him, "Go pray to be forgiven for
your insolence and folly. His most Christian Majesty is triumphant
upon the Ohio. The English have been killed in thousands, and their
General with them. Do you not hear the joy-bells in the Church of
Our Lady of the Victories? and more--listen!"

There burst from the Heights on the other side a cannon shot, and
then another and another. There was a great commotion, and many ran
to Bigot's carriage, reached in to touch his hand, and called down
blessings on him.

"See that you save the other granaries," he urged, adding, with a
sneer, "and forget not to bless La Friponne in your prayers!"

It was a clever piece of acting. Presently from the Heights
above came the woman's voice again, so piercing that the crowd
turned to her.

"Francois Bigot is a liar and a traitor!" she cried. "Beware of
Francois Bigot! God has cast him out."

A dark look came upon Bigot's face; but presently he turned, and
gave a sign to some one near the palace. The doors of the courtyard
flew open, and out came squad after squad of soldiers. In a moment,
they, with the people, were busy carrying water to pour upon the
side of the endangered warehouse. Fortunately the wind was with
them, else it and the palace also would have been burned that night.

The Intendant still stood in his carriage watching and listening to
the cheers of the people. At last he beckoned to Doltaire and to
me. We both went over.

"Doltaire, we looked for you at dinner," he said. "Was Captain
Moray"--nodding towards me--"lost among the petticoats? He knows
the trick of cup and saucer. Between the sip and click he sucked
in secrets from our garrison--a spy where had been a soldier, as
we thought. You once wore a sword, Captain Moray--eh?"

"If the Governor would grant me leave, I would not only wear,
but use one, your excellency knows well where," said I.

"Large speaking, Captain Moray. They do that in Virginia, I am
told."

"In Gascony there's quiet, your excellency."

Doltaire laughed outright, for it was said that Bigot, in his
coltish days, had a shrewish Gascon wife, whom he took leave to
send to heaven before her time. I saw the Intendant's mouth twitch
angrily.

"Come," he said, "you have a tongue; we'll see if you have a
stomach. You've languished with the girls; you shall have your
chance to drink with Francois Bigot. Now, if you dare, when
we have drunk to the first cockcrow, should you be still on your
feet, you'll fight some one among us, first giving ample cause."

"I hope, your excellency," I replied, with a touch of vanity, "I
have still some stomach and a wrist. I will drink to cockcrow, if
you will. And if my sword prove the stronger, what?"

"There's the point," he said. "Your Englishman loves not fighting
for fighting's sake, Doltaire; he must have bonbons for it. Well,
see: if your sword and stomach prove the stronger, you shall go your
ways to where you will. Voila!"

If I could but have seen a bare portion of the craftiness of this
pair of devils artisans! They both had ends to serve in working ill
to me, and neither was content that I should be shut away in the
citadel, and no more. There was a deeper game playing. I give them
their due: the trap was skillful, and in those times, with great
things at stake, strategy took the place of open fighting here and
there. For Bigot I was to be a weapon against another; for Doltaire,
against myself.

What a gull they must have thought me! I might have known that,
with my lost papers on the way to France, they must hold me tight
here till I had been tried, nor permit me to escape. But I was sick
of doing nothing, thinking with horror on a long winter in the
citadel, and I caught at the least straw of freedom.

"Captain Moray will like to spend a couple of hours at his lodgings
before he joins us at the palace," the Intendant said, and with a
nod to me he turned to his coachman. The horses wheeled, and in a
moment the great doors opened, and he had passed inside to applause,
though here and there among the crowd was heard a hiss, for the
Scarlet Woman had made an impression. The Intendant's men essayed to
trace these noises, but found no one. Looking again to the Heights,
I saw that the woman had gone. Doltaire noted my glance and the
inquiry in my face, and he said:

"Some bad fighting hours with the Intendant at Chateau Bigot, and
then a fever, bringing a kind of madness: so the story creeps about,
as told by Bigot's enemies."

Just at this point I felt a man hustle me as he passed. One of the
soldiers made a thrust at him, and he turned round. I caught his
eye, and it flashed something to me. It was Voban the barber, who
had shaved me every day for months when I first came, while my arm
was stiff from a wound got fighting the French on the Ohio. It was
quite a year since I had met him, and I was struck by the change in
his face. It had grown much older; its roundness was gone. We had
had many a talk together; he helping me with French, I listening
to the tales of his early life in France, and to the later tale
of a humble love, and of the home which he was fitting up for his
Mathilde, a peasant girl of much beauty, I was told, but whom I had
never seen. I remembered at that moment, as he stood in the crowd
looking at me, the piles of linen which he had bought at Ste. Anne
de Beaupre, and the silver pitcher which his grandfather had got
from the Duc de Valois for an act of merit. Many a time we had
discussed the pitcher and the deed, and fingered the linen, now
talking in French, now in English; for in France, years before, he
had been a valet to an English officer at King Louis's court. But my
surprise had been great when I learned that this English gentleman
was no other than the best friend I ever had, next to my parents and
my grandfather. Voban was bound to Sir John Godric by as strong ties
of affection as I. What was more, by a secret letter I had sent to
George Washington, who was then as good a Briton as myself, I had
been able to have my barber's young brother, a prisoner of war,
set free.

I felt that he had something to say to me. But he turned away
and disappeared among the crowd. I might have had some clue if I
had known that he had been crouched behind the Intendant's carriage
while I was being bidden to the supper. I did not guess then that
there was anything between him and the Scarlet Woman who railed at
Bigot.

In a little while I was at my lodgings, soldiers posted at my door
and one in my room. Doltaire gone to his own quarters promising
to call for me within two hours. There was little for me to do but
to put in a bag the fewest necessaries, to roll up my heavy cloak,
to stow safely my pipes and two goodly packets of tobacco, which
were to be my chiefest solace for many a long day, and to write some
letters--one to Governor Dinwiddie, one to George Washington, and
one to my partner in Virginia, telling them my fresh misfortunes,
and begging them to send me money, which, however useless in my
captivity, would be important in my fight for life and freedom.
I did not write intimately of my state, for I was not sure my
letters would ever pass outside Quebec. There were only two men I
could trust to do the thing. One was a fellow-countryman, Clark,
a ship-carpenter, who, to save his neck and to spare his wife and
child, had turned Catholic, but who hated all Frenchmen barbarously
at heart, remembering two of his bairns butchered before his eyes.
The other was Voban. I knew that though Voban might not act, he
would not betray me. But how to reach either of them? It was clear
that I must bide my chances.

One other letter I wrote, brief but vital, in which I begged the
sweetest girl in the world not to have uneasiness because of me;
that I trusted to my star and to my innocence to convince my
judges; and begging her, if she could, to send me a line at the
citadel. I told her I knew well how hard it would be, for her
mother and her father would not now look upon my love with favour.
But I trusted all to time and Providence.

I sealed my letters, put them in my pocket, and sat down to smoke
and think while I waited for Doltaire. To the soldier on duty,
whom I did not notice at first, I now offered a pipe and a glass
of wine, which he accepted rather gruffly, but enjoyed, if I might
judge by his devotion to them.

By-and-bye, without any relevancy at all, he said abruptly, "If a
little sooner she had come--aho!"

For a moment I could not think what he meant; but soon I saw.

"The palace would have been burnt if the girl in scarlet had come
sooner--eh?" I asked. "She would have urged the people on?"

"And Bigot burnt, too, maybe," he answered.

"Fire and death--eh?"

I offered him another pipeful of tobacco. He looked doubtful,
but accepted.

"Aho! And that Voban, he would have had his hand in," he growled.

I began to get more light.

"She was shut up at Chateau Bigot--hand of iron and lock of
steel--who knows the rest! But Voban was for always," he added
presently.

The thing was clear. The Scarlet Woman was Mathilde. So here was the
end of Voban's little romance--of the fine linen from Ste. Anne de
Beaupre and the silver pitcher for the wedding wine. I saw, or felt,
that in Voban I might find now a confederate, if I put my hard case
on Bigot's shoulders.

"I can't see why she stayed with Bigot," I said tentatively.

"Break the dog's leg, it can't go hunting bones--mais, non! Holy,
how stupid are you English!"

"Why doesn't the Intendant lock her up now? She's dangerous to
him. You remember what she said?"

"Tonnerre, you shall see to-morrow," he answered; "now all the sheep
go bleating with the bell. Bigot--Bigot--Bigot--there is nothing
but Bigot! But, pish! Vaudreuil the Governor is the great man, and
Montcalm, aho! son of Mahomet! You shall see. Now they dance to
Bigot's whistling; he will lock her safe enough to-morrow, 'less
some one steps in to help her. Before to-night she never spoke of
him before the world--but a poor daft thing, going about all sad
and wild. She missed her chance to-night--aho!"

"Why are you not with Montcalm's soldiers?" I asked. "You like
him better."

"I was with him, but my time was out, and I left him for Bigot.
Pish! I left him for Bigot, for the militia!" He raised his thumb
to his nose, and spread out his fingers. Again light dawned on me.
He was still with the Governor in all fact, though soldiering for
Bigot--a sort of watch upon the Intendant.

I saw my chance. If I could but induce this fellow to fetch me
Voban! There was yet an hour before I was to go to the intendance.

I called up what looks of candour were possible to me, and told
him bluntly that I wished Voban to bear a letter for me to the
Seigneur Duvarney's. At that he cocked his ear and shook his bushy
head, fiercely stroking his mustaches.

I knew that I should stake something if I said it was a letter for
Mademoiselle Duvarney, but I knew also that if he was still the
Governor's man in Bigot's pay he would understand the Seigneur's
relations with the Governor. And a woman in the case with a
soldier--that would count for something. So I said it was for her.
Besides, I had no other resource but to make a friend among my
enemies, if I could, while yet there was a chance.

It was like a load lifted from me when I saw his mouth and eyes open
wide in a big soundless laugh, which came to an end with a voiceless
aho! I gave him another tumbler of wine. Before he took it, he made
a wide mouth at me again, and slapped his leg. After drinking, he
said, "Poom--what good? They're going to hang you for a spy."

"That rope's not ready yet," I answered. "I'll tie a pretty knot
in another string first, I trust."

"Damned if you haven't spirit!" said he. "That Seigneur Duvarney,
I know him; and I know his son the ensign--whung, what saltpetre
is he! And the ma'm'selle--excellent, excellent; and a face, such
a face, and a seat like leeches in the saddle. And you a British
officer mewed up to kick your heels till gallows day! So droll,
my dear!"

"But will you fetch Voban?" I asked.

"To trim your hair against the supper to-night--eh, like that?"

As he spoke he puffed out his red cheeks with wide boylike eyes,
burst his lips in another soundless laugh, and laid a finger beside
his nose. His marvellous innocence of look and his peasant openness
hid, I saw, great shrewdness and intelligence--an admirable man for
Vaudreuil's purpose, as admirable for mine. I knew well that if I
had tried to bribe him he would have scouted me, or if I had made a
motion for escape he would have shot me off-hand. But a lady--that
appealed to him; and that she was the Seigneur Duvarney's daughter
did the rest.

"Yes, yes," said I, "one must be well appointed in soul and body
when one sups with his Excellency and Monsieur Doltaire."

"Limed inside and chalked outside," he retorted gleefully. "But
M'sieu' Doltaire needs no lime, for he has no soul. No, by Sainte
Helois! The good God didn't make him. The devil laughed, and that
laugh grew into M'sieu' Doltaire. But brave!--no kicking pulse is
in his body."

"You will send for Voban--now?" I asked softly.

He was leaning against the door as he spoke. He reached and put
the tumbler on a shelf, then turned and opened the door, his face
all altered to a grimness.

"Attend here, Labrouk!" he called; and on the soldier coming, he
blurted out in scorn, "Here's this English captain can't go to
supper without Voban's shears to snip him. Go fetch him, for I'd
rather hear a calf in a barn-yard than this whing-whanging for
'M'sieu' Voban!'"

He mocked my accent in the last two words, so that the soldier
grinned, and at once started away. Then he shut the door, and
turned to me again, and said more seriously, "How long have we
before Monsieur comes?"--meaning Doltaire.

"At least an hour," said I.

"Good," he rejoined, and then he smoked while I sat thinking.

It was near an hour before we heard footsteps outside; then came
a knock, and Voban was shown in.

"Quick, m'sieu'," he said. "M'sieu' is almost at our heels."

"This letter," said I, "to Mademoiselle Duvarney," and I handed
four: hers, and those to Governor Dinwiddie, to Mr. Washington,
and to my partner.

He quickly put them in his coat, nodding. The soldier--I have
not yet mentioned his name--Gabord, did not know that more than one
passed into Voban's hands.

"Off with your coat, m'sieu'," said Voban, whipping out his shears,
tossing his cap aside, and rolling down his apron. "M'sieu' is here."

I had off my coat, was in a chair in a twinkling, and he was
clipping softly at me as Doltaire's hand turned the handle of the
door.

"Beware--to-night!" Voban whispered.

"Come to me in the prison," said I. "Remember your brother!"

His lips twitched. "M'sieu', I will if I can." This he said in
my ear as Doltaire entered and came forward.

"Upon my life!" Doltaire broke out. "These English gallants! They go
to prison curled and musked by Voban. VOBAN--a name from the court
of the King, and it garnishes a barber. Who called you, Voban?"

"My mother, with the cure's help, m'sieu'."

Doltaire paused, with a pinch of snuff at his nose, and replied
lazily, "I did not say 'Who called you VOBAN?' Voban, but
who called you here, Voban?"

I spoke up testily then of purpose: "What would you have, monsieur?
The citadel has better butchers than barbers. I sent for him."

He shrugged his shoulders and came over to Voban. "Turn round,
my Voban," he said. "Voban--and such a figure! a knee, a back
like that!"

Then, while my heart stood still, he put forth a finger and
touched the barber on the chest. If he should touch the letters! I
was ready to seize them--but would that save them? Twice, thrice,
the finger prodded Voban's breast, as if to add an emphasis to his
words. "In Quebec you are misplaced, Monsieur le Voban. Once a wasp
got into a honeycomb and died."

I knew he was hinting at the barber's resentment of the poor
Mathilde's fate. Something strange and devilish leapt into the
man's eyes, and he broke out bitterly,

"A honey-bee got into a nest of wasps--and died."

I thought of the Scarlet Woman on the hill.

Voban looked for a moment as if he might do some wild thing. His
spirit, his devilry, pleased Doltaire, and he laughed. "Who would
have thought our Voban had such wit? The trade of barber is
double-edged. Razors should be in fashion at Versailles."

Then he sat down, while Voban made a pretty show of touching off
my person. A few minutes passed so, in which the pealing of bells,
the shouting of the people, the beating of drums, and the calling
of bugles came to us clearly.

A half hour afterwards, on our way to the Intendant's palace, we
heard the Benedictus chanted in the Church of the Recollets as
we passed--hundreds kneeling outside, and responding to the chant
sung within:

"That we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hands
of all that hate us."

At the corner of a building which we passed, a little away from
the crowd, I saw a solitary cloaked figure. The words of the chant,
following us, I could hear distinctly:

"That we, being delivered out of the hands of our enemies,
might serve Him without fear."

And then, from the shadowed corner came in a high, melancholy
voice the words:

"To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow
of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace."

Looking closer, I saw it was Mathilde.

Doltaire smiled as I turned and begged a moment's time to speak
to her.

"To pray with the lost angel and sup with the Intendant, all in
one night--a liberal taste, monsieur; but who shall stay the good
Samaritan!"

They stood a little distance away, and I went over to her and
said, "Mademoiselle--Mathilde, do you not know me?"

Her abstracted eye fired up, as there ran to her brain some
little sprite out of the House of Memory and told her who I
was.

"There were two lovers in the world," she said: "the Mother of
God forgot them, and the devil came. I am the Scarlet Woman," she
went on; "I made this red robe from the curtains of Hell--"

Poor soul! My own trouble seemed then as a speck among the stars
to hers. I took her hand and held it, saying again, "Do you not
know me? Think, Mathilde!"

I was not sure that she had ever seen me, to know me, but I thought
it possible; for, as a hostage, I had been much noticed in Quebec,
and Voban had, no doubt, pointed me out to her. Light leapt from
her black eye, and then she said, putting her finger on her lips,
"Tell all the lovers to hide. I have seen a hundred Francois Bigots."

I looked at her, saying nothing--I knew not what to say. Presently
her eye steadied to mine, and her intellect rallied. "You are a
prisoner, too," she said; "but they will not kill you: they will
keep you till the ring of fire grows in your head, and then you
will make your scarlet robe, and go out, but you will never find
It--never. God hid first, and then It hides.... It hides, that
which you lost--It hides, and you can not find It again. You go
hunting, hunting, but you can not find It."

My heart was pinched with pain. I understood her. She did not
know her lover now at all. If Alixe and her mother at the Manor
could but care for her, I thought. But alas! what could I do?
It were useless to ask her to go to the Manor; she would not
understand.

Perhaps there come to the disordered mind flashes of insight,
illuminations and divinations, greater than are given to the sane,
for she suddenly said in a whisper, touching me with a nervous
finger, "I will go and tell her where to hide. They shall not find
her. I know the woodpath to the Manor. Hush! she shall own all I
have--except the scarlet robe. She showed me where the May-apples
grew. Go,"--she pushed me gently away--"go to your prison, and pray
to God. But you can not kill Francois Bigot, he is a devil." Then she
thrust into my hands a little wooden cross, which she took from many
others at her girdle. "If you wear that, the ring of fire will not
grow," she said. "I will go by the woodpath, and give her one, too.
She shall live with me: I will spread the cedar branches and stir
the fire. She shall be safe. Hush! Go, go softly, for their wicked
eyes are everywhere, the were-wolves!"

She put her fingers on my lips for an instant, and then, turning,
stole softly away towards the St. Charles River.

Doltaire's mockery brought me back to myself.

"So much for the beads of the addled; now for the bowls of sinful
man," said he.



III

THE WAGER AND THE SWORD


As I entered the Intendant's palace with Doltaire I had a singular
feeling of elation. My spirits rose unaccountably, and I felt as
though it were a fete night, and the day's duty over, the hour of
play was come. I must needs have felt ashamed of it then, and now,
were I not sure it was some unbidden operation of the senses. Maybe
a merciful Spirit sees how, left alone, we should have stumbled and
lost ourselves in our own gloom, and so gives us a new temper fitted
to our needs. I remember that at the great door I turned back and
smiled upon the ruined granary, and sniffed the air laden with the
scent of burnt corn--the peoples bread; that I saw old men and women
who could not be moved by news of victory, shaking with cold, even
beside this vast furnace, and peevishly babbling of their hunger,
and I did not say, "Poor souls!" that for a time the power to feel
my own misfortunes seemed gone, and a hard, light indifference came
on me.

For it is true I came into the great dining-hall, and looked upon
the long loaded table, with its hundred candles, its flagons and
pitchers of wine, and on the faces of so many idle, careless
gentlemen bid to a carouse, with a manner, I believe, as reckless
and jaunty as their own. And I kept it up, though I saw it was not
what they had looked for. I did not at once know who was there, but
presently, at a distance from me, I saw the face of Juste Duvarney,
the brother of my sweet Alixe, a man of but twenty or so, who had a
name for wildness, for no badness that I ever heard of, and for a
fiery temper. He was in the service of the Governor, an ensign. He
had been little at home since I had come to Quebec, having been
employed up to the past year in the service of the Governor of
Montreal. We bowed, but he made no motion to come to me, and the
Intendant engaged me almost at once in gossip of the town; suddenly,
however, diverging upon some questions of public tactics and civic
government. He much surprised me, for though I knew him brave and
able, I had never thought of him save as the adroit politician and
servant of the King, the tyrant and the libertine. I might have
known by that very scene a few hours before that he had a wide, deep
knowledge of human nature, and despised it; unlike Doltaire, who had
a keener mind, was more refined even in wickedness, and, knowing the
world, laughed at it more than he despised it, which was the sign of
the greater mind. And indeed, in spite of all the causes I had to
hate Doltaire, it is but just to say he had by nature all the great
gifts--misused and disordered as they were. He was the product of
his age; having no real moral sense, living life wantonly, making
his own law of right or wrong. As a lad, I was taught to think the
evil person carried evil in his face, repelling the healthy mind.
But long ago I found that this was error. I had no reason to admire
Doltaire, and yet to this hour his handsome face, with its shadows
and shifting lights, haunts me, charms me. The thought came to me
as I talked with the Intendant, and I looked round the room. Some
present were of coarse calibre--bushranging sons of seigneurs and
petty nobles, dashing and profane, and something barbarous; but
most had gifts of person and speech, and all seemed capable.

My spirits continued high. I sprang alertly to meet wit and gossip,
my mind ran nimbly here and there, I filled the role of honoured
guest. But when came the table and wine, a change befell me. From
the first drop I drank, my spirits suffered a decline. On one side
the Intendant rallied me, on the other Doltaire. I ate on, drank
on; but while smiling by the force of will, I grew graver little by
little. Yet it was a gravity which had no apparent motive, for I
was not thinking of my troubles, not even of the night's stake and
the possible end of it all; simply a sort of gray colour of the mind,
a stillness in the nerves, a general seriousness of the senses.
I drank, and the wine did not affect me, as voices got loud and
louder, and glasses rang, and spurs rattled on shuffling heels, and
a scabbard clanged on a chair. I seemed to feel and know it all in
some far-off way, but I was not touched by the spirit of it, was
not a part of it. I watched the reddened cheeks and loose scorching
mouths around me with a sort of distant curiosity, and the ribald
jests flung right and left struck me not at all acutely. It was
as if I were reading a Book of Bacchus. I drank on evenly, not
doggedly, and answered jest for jest without a hot breath of
drunkenness. I looked several times at Juste Duvarney, who sat not
far away, on the other side of the table, behind a grand piece
of silver filled with October roses. He was drinking hard, and
Doltaire, sitting beside him, kept him at it. At last the silver
piece was shifted, and he and I could see each other fairly. Now
and then Doltaire spoke across to me, but somehow no word passed
between Duvarney and myself.

Suddenly, as if by magic--I know it was preconcerted--the talk
turned on the events of the evening and on the defeat of the
British. Then, too, as strangely I began to be myself again, amid
a sense of my position grew upon me. I had been withdrawn from
all real feeling and living for hours, but I believe that same
suspension was my salvation. For with every man present deeply gone
in liquor round me--every man save Doltaire--I was sane and steady,
and settling into a state of great alertness, determined on escape,
if that could be, and bent on turning every chance to serve my
purposes.

Now and again I caught my own name mentioned with a sneer, then with
remarks of surprise, then with insolent laughter. I saw it all.
Before dinner some of the revellers had been told of the new charge
against me, and, by instruction, had kept it till the inflammable
moment. Then, when the why and wherefore of my being at this supper
were in the hazard, the stake, as a wicked jest of Bigot's, was
mentioned. I could see the flame grow inch by inch, fed by the
Intendant and Doltaire, whose hateful final move I was yet to see.
For one instant I had a sort of fear, for I was sure they meant I
should not leave the room alive; but anon I felt a river of fiery
anger flow through me, rousing me, making me loathe the faces of
them all. Yet not all, for in one pale face, with dark, brilliant
eyes, I saw the looks of my flower of the world: the colour of her
hair in his, the clearness of the brow, the poise of the head--how
handsome he was!--the light, springing step, like a deer on the sod
of June. I call to mind when I first saw him. He was sitting in a
window of the Manor, just after he had come from Montreal, playing a
violin which had once belonged to De Casson, the famous priest whose
athletic power and sweet spirit endeared him to New France. His
fresh cheek was bent to the brown, delicate wood, and he was playing
to his sister the air of the undying chanson, "Je vais mourir pour
ma belle reine." I loved the look of his face, like that of a young
Apollo, open, sweet, and bold, all his body having the epic strength
of life. I wished that I might have him near me as a comrade, for
out of my hard experience I could teach him much, and out of his
youth he could soften my blunt nature, by comradeship making
flexuous the hard and ungenial.

I went on talking to the Intendant, while some of the guests
rose and scattered about the rooms, at tables, to play picquet,
the jesting on our cause and the scorn of myself abating not at
all. I would not have it thought that anything was openly coarse or
brutal; it was all by innuendo, and brow-lifting, and maddening,
allusive phrases such as it is thought fit for gentlefolk to use
instead of open charge. There was insult in a smile, contempt
in the turn of a shoulder, challenge in the flicking of a
handkerchief. With great pleasure I could have wrung their noses
one by one, and afterwards have met them tossing sword-points in
the same order. I wonder now that I did not tell them so, for I was
ever hasty; but my brain was clear that night, and I held myself
in proper check, letting each move come from my enemies. There was
no reason why I should have been at this wild feast at all, I a
prisoner, accused falsely of being a spy, save because of some
plot by which I was to have fresh suffering and some one else be
benefited--though how that could be I could not guess at first.

But soon I understood everything. Presently I heard a young
gentleman say to Duvarney over my shoulder:

"Eating comfits and holding yarn--that was his doing at your
manor when Doltaire came hunting him."

"He has dined at your table, Lancy," broke out Duvarney hotly.

"But never with our ladies," was the biting answer.

"Should prisoners make conditions?" was the sharp, insolent retort.

The insult was conspicuous, and trouble might have followed, but
that Doltaire came between them, shifting the attack.

"Prisoners, my dear Duvarney," said he, "are most delicate and
exacting; they must be fed on wine and milk. It is an easy life, and
hearts grow soft for them. As thus-- Indeed, it is most sad: so young
and gallant; in speech, too, so confiding! And if we babble all our
doings to him, think you he takes it seriously? No, no--so gay and
thoughtless, there is a thoroughfare from ear to ear, and all's lost
on the other side. Poor simple gentleman, he is a claimant on our
courtesy, a knight without a sword, a guest without the power to
leave us--he shall make conditions, he shall have his caprice. La,
la! my dear Duvarney and my Lancy!"

He spoke in a clear, provoking tone, putting a hand upon the
shoulder of each young gentleman as he talked, his eyes wandering
over me idly, and beyond me. I saw that he was now sharpening the
sickle to his office. His next words made this more plain to me:

"And if a lady gives a farewell sign to one she favours for the
moment, shall not the prisoner take it as his own?" (I knew he was
recalling Alixe's farewell gesture to me at the manor.) "Who shall
gainsay our peacock? Shall the guinea cock? The golden crumb was
thrown to the guinea cock, but that's no matter. The peacock
clatters of the crumb." At that he spoke an instant in Duvarney's
ear. I saw the lad's face flush, and he looked at me angrily.

Then I knew his object: to provoke a quarrel between this young
gentleman and myself, which might lead to evil ends; and the
Intendant's share in the conspiracy was to revenge himself upon
the Seigneur for his close friendship with the Governor. If Juste
Duvarney were killed in the duel which they foresaw, so far as
Doltaire was concerned I was out of the counting in the young lady's
sight. In any case my life was of no account, for I was sure my
death was already determined on. Yet it seemed strange that Doltaire
should wish me dead, for he had reasons for keeping me alive, as
shall be seen.

Juste Duvarney liked me once, I knew, but still he had the
Frenchman's temper, and had always to argue down his bias against my
race, and to cherish a good heart towards me; for he was young, and
most sensitive to the opinions of his comrades. I can not express
what misery possessed me when I saw him leave Doltaire, and, coming
to me where I stood alone, say--

"What secrets found you at our seigneury, monsieur?"

I understood the taunt--as though I were the common interrogation
mark, the abuser of hospitality, the abominable Paul Pry. But I held
my wits together.

"Monsieur," said I, "I found the secret of all good life: a noble
kindness to the unfortunate."

There was a general laugh, led by Doltaire, a concerted influence on
the young gentleman. I cursed myself that I had been snared to this
trap.

"The insolent," responded Duvarney, "not the unfortunate."

"Insolence is no crime, at least," I rejoined quietly, "else this
room were a penitentiary."

There was a moment's pause, and presently, as I kept my eye on
him, he raised his handkerchief and flicked me across the face with
it, saying, "Then this will be a virtue, and you may have more such
virtues as often as you will."

In spite of will, my blood pounded in my veins, and a devilish
anger took hold of me. To be struck across the face by a beardless
Frenchman, scarce past his teens!--it shook me more than now I care
to own. I felt my cheek burn, my teeth clinched, and I know a kind
of snarl came from me; but again, all in a moment, I caught a turn
of his head, a motion of the hand, which brought back Alixe to me.
Anger died away, and I saw only a youth flushed with wine, stung by
suggestions, with that foolish pride the youngster feels--and he was
the youngest of them all--in being as good a man as the best, and
as daring as the worst. I felt how useless it would be to try the
straightening of matters there, though had we two been alone a dozen
words would have been enough. But to try was my duty, and I tried
with all my might; almost, for Alixe's sake, with all my heart.

"Do not trouble to illustrate your meaning," said I patiently.
"Your phrases are clear and to the point."

"You bolt from my words," he retorted, "like a shy mare on the
curb; you take insult like a donkey on a well-wheel. What fly will
the English fish rise to? Now it no more plays to my hook than an
August chub."

I could not help but admire his spirit and the sharpness of his
speech, though it drew me into a deeper quandary. It was clear that
he would not be tempered to friendliness; for, as is often so, when
men have said things fiercely, their eloquence feeds their passion
and convinces them of holiness in their cause. Calmly, but with a
heavy heart, I answered:

"I wish not to find offense in your words, my friend, for in some
good days gone you and I had good acquaintance, and I can not forget
that the last hours of a light imprisonment before I entered on a
dark one were spent in the home of your father--of the brave
Seigneur whose life I once saved."

I am sure I should not have mentioned this in any other
situation--it seemed as if I were throwing myself on his mercy;
but yet I felt it was the only thing to do--that I must bridge
this affair, if at cost of some reputation.

It was not to be. Here Doltaire, seeing that my words had indeed
affected my opponent, said: "A double retreat! He swore to give a
challenge to-night, and he cries off like a sheep from a porcupine;
his courage is so slack, he dares not move a step to his liberty.
It was a bet, a hazard. He was to drink glass for glass with any
and all of us, and fight sword for sword with any of us who gave
him cause. Having drunk his courage to death, he'd now browse at
the feet of those who give him chance to win his stake."

His words came slowly and bitingly, yet with an air of damnable
nonchalance. I looked round me. Every man present was full-sprung
with wine; and a distance away, a gentleman on either side of him,
stood the Intendant, smiling detestably, a keen, houndlike look
shooting out of his small round eyes.

I had had enough; I could bear no more. To be baited like a bear
by these Frenchmen--it was aloes in my teeth! I was not sorry then
that these words of Juste Duvarney's gave me no chance of escape
from fighting; though I would it had been any other man in the room
than he. It was on my tongue to say that if some gentleman would
take up his quarrel I should be glad to drive mine home, though
for reasons I cared not myself to fight Duvarney. But I did not,
for I knew that to carry that point farther might rouse a general
thought of Alixe, and I had no wish to make matters hard for her.
Everything in its own good time, and when I should be free! So,
without more ado, I said to him:

"Monsieur, the quarrel was of your choosing, not mine. There was no
need for strife between us, and you have more to lose than I: more
friends, more years of life, more hopes. I have avoided your bait,
as you call it, for your sake, not mine own. Now I take it, and you,
monsieur, show us what sort of fisherman you are."

All was arranged in a moment. As we turned to pass from the room
to the courtyard, I noted that Bigot was gone. When we came
outside, it was just one, as I could tell by a clock striking in a
chamber near. It was cold, and some of the company shivered as we
stepped upon the white, frosty stones. The late October air bit the
cheek, though now and then a warm, pungent current passed across
the courtyard--the breath from the people's burnt corn. Even yet
upon the sky was the reflection of the fire, and distant sounds of
singing, shouting, and carousal came to us from the Lower Town.

We stepped to a corner of the yard and took off our coats; swords
were handed us--both excellent, for we had had our choice of many.
It was partial moonlight, but there were flitting clouds. That we
should have light, however, pine torches had been brought, and
these were stuck in the wall. My back was to the outer wall of the
courtyard, and I saw the Intendant at a window of the palace looking
down at us. Doltaire stood a little apart from the other gentlemen
in the courtyard, yet where he could see Duvarney and myself at
advantage.

Before we engaged, I looked intently into my opponent's face, and
measured him carefully with my eye, that I might have his height
and figure explicit and exact; for I know how moonlight and fire
distort, how the eye may be deceived. I looked for every button; for
the spot in his lean, healthy body where I could disable him, spit
him, and yet not kill him--for this was the thing furthest from my
wishes, God knows. Now the deadly character of the event seemed to
impress him, for he was pale, and the liquor he had drunk had given
him dark hollows round the eyes, and a gray shining sweat was on his
cheek. But his eyes themselves were fiery and keen and there was
reckless daring in every turn of his body.

I was not long in finding his quality, for he came at me violently
from the start, and I had chance to know his strength and weakness
also. His hand was quick, his sight clear and sure, his knowledge
to a certain point most definite and practical, his mastery of the
sword delightful; but he had little imagination, he did not divine,
he was merely a brilliant performer, he did not conceive. I saw that
if I put him on the defensive I should have him at advantage, for he
had not that art of the true swordsman, the prescient quality which
foretells the opponents action and stands prepared. There I had him
at fatal advantage--could, I felt, give him last reward of insult
at my pleasure. Yet a lust of fighting got into me, and it was
difficult to hold myself in check at all, nor was it easy to meet
his breathless and adroit advances.

Then, too, remarks from the bystanders worked me up to a deep sort
of anger, and I could feel Doltaire looking at me with that still,
cold face of his, an ironical smile at his lips. Now and then, too,
a ribald jest came from some young roisterer near, and the fact
that I stood alone among sneering enemies wound me up to a point
where pride was more active than aught else. I began to press him a
little, and I pricked him once. Then a singular feeling possessed
me. I would bring this to an end when I had counted ten; I would
strike home when I said "ten."

So I began, and I was not aware then that I was counting aloud.
"One--two--three!" It was weird to the onlookers, for the yard grew
still, and you could hear nothing but maybe a shifting foot or a
hard breathing. "Four--five--six!" There was a tenseness in the air,
and Juste Duvarney, as if he felt a menace in the words, seemed to
lose all sense of wariness, and came at me lunging, lunging with
great swiftness and heat. I was incensed now, and he must take what
fortune might send; one can not guide one's sword to do the least
harm fighting as did we.

I had lost blood, and the game could go on no longer. "Eight!" I
pressed him sharply now. "Nine!" I was preparing for the trick
which would end the matter, when I slipped on the frosty stones,
now glazed with our tramping back and forth, and, trying to recover
myself, left my side open to his sword. It came home, though I
partly diverted it. I was forced to my knees, but there, mad,
unpardonable youth, he made another furious lunge at me. I threw
myself back, deftly avoided the lunge, and he came plump on my
upstretched sword, gave a long gasp, and sank down.

At that moment the doors of the courtyard opened, and men stepped
inside, one coming quickly forward before the rest. It was the
Governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil. He spoke, but what he said I
knew not, for the stark upturned face of Juste Duvarney was there
before me, there was a great buzzing in my ears, and I fell back
into darkness.



IV

THE RAT IN THE TRAP


When I waked I was alone. At first nothing was clear to me; my brain
was dancing in my head, my sight was obscured, my body painful, my
senses were blunted. I was in darkness, yet through an open door
there showed a light, which, from the smell and flickering, I knew
to be a torch. This, creeping into my senses, helped me to remember
that the last thing I saw in the Intendant's courtyard was a burning
torch, which suddenly multiplied to dancing hundreds and then went
out. I now stretched forth a hand, and it touched a stone wall; I
moved, and felt straw under me. Then I fixed my eyes steadily on
the open door and the shaking light, and presently it all came to
me: the events of the night, and that I was now in a cell of the
citadel. Stirring, I found that the wound in my body had been bound
and cared for. A loosely tied scarf round my arm showed that some
one had lately left me, and would return to finish the bandaging. I
raised myself with difficulty, and saw a basin of water, a sponge,
bits of cloth, and a pocket-knife. Stupid and dazed though I was,
the instinct of self-preservation lived, and I picked up the knife
and hid it in my coat. I did it, I believe, mechanically, for a
hundred things were going through my mind at the time.

All at once there rushed in on me the thought of Juste Duvarney as
I saw him last--how long ago was it?--his white face turned to the
sky, his arms stretched out, his body dabbled in blood. I groaned
aloud. Fool, fool! to be trapped by these lying French! To be
tricked into playing their shameless games for them, to have a
broken body, to have killed the brother of the mistress of my heart,
and so cut myself off from her and ruined my life for nothing--for
worse than nothing! I had swaggered, boasted, had taken a challenge
for a bout and a quarrel like any hanger-on of a tavern.

Suddenly I heard footsteps and voices outside; then one voice,
louder than the other, saying, "He hasn't stirred a peg--lies like
a log!" It was Gabord.

Doltaire's voice replied, "You will not need a surgeon--no?" His
tone, as it seemed to me, was less careless than usual.

Gabord answered, "I know the trick of it all--what can a surgeon do?
This brandy will fetch him to his intellects. And by-and-bye crack'll
go his spine--aho!"

You have heard a lion growling on a bone. That is how Gabord's voice
sounded to me then--a brutal rawness; but it came to my mind also
that this was the man who had brought Voban to do me service!

"Come, come, Gabord, crack your jaws less, and see you fetch him on
his feet again," said Doltaire. "From the seats of the mighty they
have said that he must live--to die another day; and see to it, or
the mighty folk will say that you must die to live another day--in a
better world, my Gabord."

There was a moment in which the only sound was that of tearing
linen, and I could see the shadows of the two upon the stone wall of
the corridor wavering to the light of the torch; then the shadows
shifted entirely, and their footsteps came on towards my door. I
was lying on my back as when I came to, and, therefore, probably as
Gabord had left me, and I determined to appear still in a faint.
Through nearly closed eyelids however I saw Gabord enter. Doltaire
stood in the doorway watching as the soldier knelt and lifted my arm
to take off the bloody scarf. His manner was imperturbable as ever.
Even then I wondered what his thoughts were, what pungent phrase
he was suiting to the time and to me. I do not know to this day
which more interested him--that very pungency of phrase, or the
critical events which inspired his reflections. He had no sense of
responsibility; his mind loved talent, skill, and cleverness, and
though it was scathing of all usual ethics, for the crude, honest
life of the poor it had sympathy. I remember remarks of his in the
market-place a year before, as he and I watched the peasant in his
sabots and the good-wife in her homespun cloth.

"These are they," said he, "who will save the earth one day, for
they are like it, kin to it. When they are born they lie close to
it, and when they die they fall no height to reach their graves. The
rest--the world--are like ourselves in dreams: we do not walk; we
think we fly, over houses, over trees, over mountains; and then one
blessed instant the spring breaks, or the dream gets twisted, and we
go falling, falling, in a sickening fear, and, waking up, we find we
are and have been on the earth all the while, and yet can make no
claim on it, and have no kin with it, and no right to ask anything
of it--quelle vie--quelle vie!"

Sick as I was, I thought of that as he stood there, looking in at
me; and though I knew I ought to hate him, I admired him in spite
of all.

Presently he said to Gabord, "You'll come to me at noon to-morrow,
and see you bring good news. He breathes?"

Gabord put a hand on my chest and at my neck, and said at once,
"Breath for balloons--aho!"

Doltaire threw his cloak over his shoulder and walked away, his
footsteps sounding loud in the passages. Gabord began humming to
himself as he tied the bandages, and then he reached down for the
knife to cut the flying strings. I could see this out of a little
corner of my eye. When he did not find it, he settled back on his
haunches and looked at me. I could feel his lips puffing out, and
I was ready for the "Poom!" that came from him. Then I could feel
him stooping over me, and his hot strong breath in my face. I was
so near to unconsciousness at that moment by a sudden anxiety that
perhaps my feigning had the look of reality. In any case, he thought
me unconscious and fancied that he had taken the knife away with
him; for he tucked in the strings of the bandage. Then, lifting
my head, he held the flask to my lips; for which I was most
grateful--I was dizzy and miserably faint.

I think I came to with rather more alacrity than was wise, but he
was deceived, and his first words were, "Ho, ho! the devil's
knocking; who's for home, angels?"

It was his way to put all things allusively, using strange figures
and metaphors. Yet, when one was used to him and to them, their
potency seemed greater than polished speech and ordinary phrase.

He offered me more brandy, and then, without preface, I asked him the
one question which sank back on my heart like a load of ice even as I
sent it forth. "Is he alive?" I inquired. "Is Monsieur Juste Duvarney
alive?"

With exasperating coolness he winked an eye, to connect the event
with what he knew of the letter I had sent to Alixe, and, cocking
his head, he blew out his lips with a soundless laugh, and said:

"To whisk the brother off to heaven is to say good-bye to sister
and pack yourself to Father Peter."

"For God's sake, tell me, is the boy dead?" I asked, my voice
cracking in my throat.

"He's not mounted for the journey yet," he answered, with a shrug,
"but the Beast is at the door."

I plied my man with questions, and learned that they had carried
Juste into the palace for dead, but found life in him, and
straightway used all means to save him. A surgeon came, his father
and mother were sent for, and when Doltaire had left there was
hope that he would live.

I learned also that Voban had carried word to the Governor of the
deed to be done that night; had for a long time failed to get
admittance to him, but was at last permitted to tell his story;
and Vaudreuil had gone to Bigot's palace to have me hurried to
the citadel, and had come just too late.

After answering my first few questions, Gabord say nothing more,
and presently he took the torch from the wall and with a gruff
good-night prepared to go. When I asked that a light be left, he
shook his head, said he had no orders. Whereupon he left me, the
heavy door clanging to, the bolts were shot, and I was alone in
darkness with my wounds and misery. My cloak had been put into the
cell beside my couch, and this I now drew over me, and I lay and
thought upon my condition and my prospects, which, as may be seen,
were not cheering. I did not suffer great pain from my wounds--only
a stiffness that troubled me not at all if I lay still. After an
hour or so passed--for it is hard to keep count of time when one's
thoughts are the only timekeeper--I fell asleep.

I know not how long I slept, but I awoke refreshed. I stretched
forth my uninjured arm, moving it about. In spite of will a sort of
hopelessness went through me, for I could feel long blades of corn
grown up about my couch, an unnatural meadow, springing from the
earth floor of my dungeon. I drew the blades between my fingers,
feeling towards them as if they were things of life out of place
like myself. I wondered what colour they were. Surely, said I
to myself, they can not be green, but rather a yellowish white,
bloodless, having only fibre, the heart all pinched to death. Last
night I had not noted them, yet now, looking back, I saw, as in
a picture, Gabord the soldier feeling among them for the knife
that I had taken. So may we see things, and yet not be conscious
of them at the time, waking to their knowledge afterwards. So may
we for years look upon a face without understanding, and then,
suddenly, one day it comes flashing out, and we read its hidden
story like a book.

I put my hand out farther, then brought it back near to my couch,
feeling towards its foot mechanically, and now I touched an earthen
pan. A small board lay across its top, and moving my fingers along
it I found a piece of bread. Then I felt the jar, and knew it was
filled with water. Sitting back, I thought hard for a moment. Of
this I was sure: the pan and bread were not there when I went to
sleep, for this was the spot where my eyes fell naturally while I
lay in bed looking towards Doltaire; and I should have remembered
it now, even if I had not noted it then. My jailer had brought
these while I slept. But it was still dark. I waked again as though
out of sleep, startled: I was in a dungeon that had no window!

Here I was, packed away in a farthest corner of the citadel, in a
deep hole that maybe had not been used for years, to be, no doubt,
denied all contact with the outer world--I was going to say FRIENDS,
but whom could I name among them save that dear soul who, by last
night's madness, should her brother be dead, was forever made dumb
and blind to me? Whom had I but her and Voban!--and Voban was yet to
be proved. The Seigneur Duvarney had paid all debts he may have owed
me, and he now might, because of the injury to his son, leave me to
my fate. On Gabord the soldier I could not count at all.

There I was, as Doltaire had said, like a rat in a trap. But I would
not let panic seize me. So I sat and ate the stale but sweet bread,
took a long drink of the good water from the earthen jar, and then,
stretching myself out, drew my cloak up to my chin, and settled
myself for sleep again. And that I might keep up a kind delusion
that I was not quite alone in the bowels of the earth, I reached out
my hand and affectionately drew the blades of corn between my
fingers.

Presently I drew my chin down to my shoulder, and let myself drift
out of painful consciousness almost as easily as a sort of woman can
call up tears at will. When I waked again, it was without a start
or moving, without confusion, and I was bitterly hungry. Beside my
couch, with his hands on his hips and his feet thrust out, stood
Gabord, looking down at me in a quizzical and unsatisfied way. A
torch was burning near him.

"Wake up, my dickey-bird," said he in his rough, mocking voice, "and
we'll snuggle you into the pot. You've been long hiding; come out of
the bush--aho!"

I drew myself up painfully. "What is the hour?" I asked, and
meanwhile I looked for the earthen jar and the bread.

"Hour since when?" said he.

"Since it was twelve o'clock last night," I answered.

"Fourteen hours since THEN," said he.

The emphasis arrested my attention. "I mean," I added, "since the
fighting in the courtyard."

"Thirty-six hours and more since then, m'sieu' the dormouse," was
his reply.

I had slept a day and a half since the doors of this cell closed on
me. It was Friday then; now it was Sunday afternoon. Gabord had
come to me three times, and seeing how sound asleep I was had not
disturbed me, but had brought bread and water--my prescribed diet.

He stood there, his feet buried in the blanched corn--I could see
the long yellowish-white blades--the torch throwing shadows about
him, his back against the wall. I looked carefully round my dungeon.
There was no a sign of a window; I was to live in darkness. Yet if
I were but allowed candles, or a lantern, or a torch, some books,
paper, pencil, and tobacco, and the knowledge that I had not killed
Juste Duvarney, I could abide the worst with some sort of calmness.
How much might have happened, must have happened, in all these hours
of sleep! My letter to Alixe should have been delivered long ere
this; my trial, no doubt, had been decided on. What had Voban done?
Had he any word for me? Dear Lord! here was a mass of questions
tumbling one upon the other in my head, while my heart thumped
behind my waistcoat like a rubber ball to a prize-fighter's fist.
Misfortunes may be so great and many that one may find grim humour
and grotesqueness in their impossible conjunction and multiplicity.
I remembered at that moment a friend of mine in Virginia, the
most unfortunate man I ever knew. Death, desertion, money losses,
political defeat, flood, came one upon the other all in two years,
and coupled with this was loss of health. One day he said to me:

"Robert, I have a perforated lung, my liver is a swelling sponge,
eating crowds my waistband like a balloon, I have a swimming in
my head and a sinking at my heart, and I can not say litany for
happy release from these for my knees creak with rheumatism. The
devil has done his worst, Robert, for these are his--plague and
pestilence, being final, are the will of God--and, upon my soul,
it is an absurd comedy of ills!" At that he had a fit of coughing,
and I gave him a glass of spirits, which eased him.

"That's better," said I cheerily to him.

"It's robbing Peter to pay Paul," he answered; "for I owed it to my
head to put the quid refert there, and here it's gone to my lungs to
hurry up my breathing. Did you ever think, Robert," he added, "that
this breathing of ours is a labor, and that we have to work every
second to keep ourselves alive? We have to pump air in and out like
a blacksmith's boy." He said it so drolly, though he was deadly ill,
that I laughed for half an hour at the stretch, wiping away my tears
as I did it; for his pale gray face looked so sorry, with its quaint
smile and that odd, dry voice of his.

As I sat there in my dungeon, with Gabord cocking his head and his
eyes rolling, that scene flashed on me, and I laughed freely--so
much so that Gabord sulkily puffed out his lips, and flamed like
bunting on a coast-guard's hut. The more he scowled and spluttered,
the more I laughed, till my wounded side hurt me and my arm had
twinges. But my mood changed suddenly, and I politely begged his
pardon, telling him frankly then and there what had made me laugh,
and how I had come to think of it. The flame passed out of his
cheeks, the revolving fire of his eyes dimmed, his lips broke into
a soundless laugh, and then, in his big voice, he said:

"You've got your knees to pray on yet, and crack my bones, but
you'll have need to con your penitentials if tattle in the town
be true."

"Before you tell of that," said I, "how is young Monsieur Duvarney?
Is--is he alive?" I added, as I saw his face look lower.

"The Beast was at door again last night, wild to be off, and foot of
young Seigneur was in the stirrup, when along comes sister with drug
got from an Indian squaw who nursed her when a child. She gives it
him, and he drinks; they carry him back, sleeping, and Beast must
stand there tugging at the leathers yet."

"His sister--it was his sister," said I, "that brought him back to
life?"

"Like that--aho! They said she must not come, but she will have her
way. Straight she goes to the palace at night, no one knowing
but--guess who? You can't--but no!"

A light broke in on me. "With the Scarlet Woman--with Mathilde,"
I said, hoping in my heart that it was so, for somehow I felt even
then that she, poor vagrant, would play a part in the history of
Alixe's life and mine.

"At the first shot," he said. "'Twas the crimson one, as quiet as
a baby chick, not hanging to ma'm'selle's skirts, but watching and
whispering a little now and then--and she there in Bigot's palace,
and he not knowing it! And maids do not tell him, for they knew the
poor wench in better days--aho!"

I got up with effort and pain, and made to grasp his hand in
gratitude, but he drew back, putting his arms behind him.

"No, no," said he, "I am your jailer. They've put you here to break
your high spirits, and I'm to help the breaking."

"But I thank you just the same," I answered him; "and I promise to
give you as little trouble as may be while you are my jailer--which,
with all my heart, I hope may be as long as I'm a prisoner."

He waved out his hands to the dungeon walls, and lifted his shoulders
as if to say that I might as well be docile, for the prison was safe
enough. "Poom!" said he, as if in genial disdain of my suggestion.

I smiled, and then, after putting my hands on the walls here and
there to see if they were, as they seemed, quite dry, I drew back to
my couch and sat down. Presently I stooped to tip the earthen jar
of water to my lips, for I could not lift it with one hand, but my
humane jailer took it from me and held it to my mouth. When I had
drunk, "Do you know," asked I as calmly as I could, "if our barber
gave the letter to Mademoiselle?"

"M'sieu', you've travelled far to reach that question," said he,
jangling his keys as if he enjoyed it. "And if he had--?"

I caught at his vague suggestion, and my heart leaped.

"A reply," said I, "a message or a letter," though I had not dared
to let myself even think of that.

He whipped a tiny packet from his coat. "'Tis a sparrow's pecking--no
great matter here, eh?"--he weighed it up and down on his fingers--"a
little piping wren's par pitie."

I reached out for it. "I should read it," said he. "There must be
no more of this. But new orders came AFTER I'd got her dainty a
m'sieu'! Yes, I must read it," said he--"but maybe not at first," he
added, "not at first, if you'll give word of honour not to tear it."

"On my sacred honour," said I, reaching out still.

He looked it all over again provokingly, and then lifted it to his
nose, for it had a delicate perfume. Then he gave a little grunt of
wonder and pleasure, and handed it over.

I broke the seal, and my eyes ran swiftly through the lines, traced
in a firm, delicate hand. I could see through it all the fine, sound
nature, by its healthy simplicity mastering anxiety, care, and fear.


"Robert," she wrote, "by God's help my brother will live, to repent
with you, I trust, of Friday night's ill work. He was near gone, yet
we have held him back from that rough-rider, Death.

"You will thank God, will you not, that my brother did not die?
Indeed, I feel you have. I do not blame you; I know--I need not tell
you how--the heart of the affair; and even my mother can see through
the wretched thing. My father says little, and he has not spoken
harshly; for which I gave thanksgiving this morning in the chapel
of the Ursulines. Yet you are in a dungeon, covered with wounds of
my brother's making, both of you victims of others' villainy, and
you are yet to bear worse things, for they are to try you for your
life. But never shall I believe that they will find you guilty of
dishonour. I have watched you these three years; I do not, nor ever
will, doubt you, dear friend of my heart.

"You would not believe it, Robert, and you may think it fanciful,
but as I got up from my prayers at the chapel I looked towards a
window, and it being a little open, for it is a sunny day, there sat
a bird on the sill, a little brown bird that peeped and nodded. I
was so won by it that I came softly over to it. It did not fly away,
but hopped a little here and there. I stretched out my hand gently
on the stone, and putting its head now this side, now that, at last
it tripped into it, and chirped most sweetly. After I had kissed it
I placed it back on the window-sill, that it might fly away again.
Yet no, it would not go, but stayed there, tipping its gold-brown
head at me as though it would invite me to guess why it came. Again
I reached out my hand, and once more it tripped into it. I stood
wondering and holding it to my bosom, when I heard a voice behind me
say, 'The bird would be with thee, my child. God hath many signs.' I
turned and saw the good Mere St. George looking at me, she of whom
I was always afraid, so distant is she. I did not speak, but only
looked at her, and she nodded kindly at me and passed on.

"And, Robert, as I write to you here in the Intendant's palace (what
a great wonderful place it is! I fear I do not hate it and its
luxury as I ought!), the bird is beside me in a cage upon the table,
with a little window open, so that it may come out if it will. My
brother lies in the bed asleep; I can touch him if I but put out my
hand, and I am alone save for one person. You sent two messengers:
can you not guess the one that will be with me? Poor Mathilde, she
sits and gazes at me till I almost fall weeping. But she seldom
speaks, she is so quiet--as if she knew that she must keep a secret.
For, Robert, though I know you did not tell her, she knows--she
knows that you love me, and she has given me a little wooden cross
which she said will make us happy.

"My mother did not drive her away, as I half feared she would, and
at last she said that I might house her with one of our peasants.
Meanwhile she is with me here. She is not so mad but that she has
wisdom too, and she shall have my care and friendship.

"I bid thee to God's care, Robert. I need not tell thee to be not
dismayed. Thou hast two jails, and one wherein I lock thee safe is
warm and full of light. If the hours drag by, think of all thou
wouldst do if thou wert free to go to thine own country--yet alas
that thought!--and of what thou wouldst say if thou couldst speak
to thy ALIXE.

"Postscript.--I trust that they have cared for thy wounds, and that
thou hast light and food and wine. Voban hath promised to discover
this for me. The soldier Gabord, at the citadel, he hath a good
heart. Though thou canst expect no help from him, yet he will not be
rougher than his orders. He did me a good service once, and he likes
me, and I him. And so fare thee well, Robert. I will not languish;
I will act, and not be weary. Dost thou really love me?"



V

THE DEVICE OF THE DORMOUSE


When I had read the letter, I handed it up to Gabord without a
word. A show of trust in him was the only thing, for he had enough
knowledge of our secret to ruin us, if he chose. He took the letter,
turned it over, looking at it curiously, and at last, with a shrug
of the shoulders, passed it back.

"'Tis a long tune on a dot of a fiddle," said he, for indeed
the letter was but a small affair in bulk. "I'd need two
pairs of eyes and telescope! Is it all Heart-o'-my-heart, and
Come-trip-in-dewy-grass--aho? Or is there knave at window to
bear m'sieu' away?"

I took the letter from him. "Listen," said I, "to what the lady says
of you." And then I read him that part of her postscript which had
to do with himself.

He put his head on one side like a great wise magpie, and "H'm--ha!"
said he whimsically, "aho! Gabord the soldier, Gabord, thou hast a
good heart--and the birds fed the beast with plums and froth of
comfits till he died, and on his sugar tombstone they carved the
words, 'Gabord had a good heart.'"

"It was spoken out of a true spirit," said I petulantly, for I could
not bear from a common soldier even a tone of disparagement, though
I saw the exact meaning of his words. So I added, "You shall read
the whole letter, or I will read it to you and you shall judge. On
the honour of a gentleman, I will read all of it!"

"Poom!" said he, "English fire-eater! corn-cracker! Show me the
'good heart' sentence, for I'd see how it is written--how GABORD
looks with a woman's whimsies round it."

I traced the words with my fingers, holding the letter near the
torch. "'Yet he will not be rougher than his orders,'" said he after
me, and "'He did me a good service once.'"

"Comfits," he continued; "well, thou shalt have comfits, too," and
he fished from his pocket a parcel. It was my tobacco and my pipe.

Truly, my state might have been vastly worse. Little more was said
between Gabord and myself, but he refused bluntly to carry message
or letter to anybody, and bade me not to vex him with petitions.
But he left me the torch and a flint and steel, so I had light
for a space, and I had my blessed tobacco and pipe. When the doors
clanged shut and the bolts were shot, I lay back on my couch.

I was not all unhappy. Thank God, they had not put chains on me, as
Governor Dinwiddie had done with a French prisoner at Williamsburg,
for whom I had vainly sought to be exchanged two years before,
though he was my equal in all ways and importance. Doltaire was the
cause of that, as you shall know. Well, there was one more item to
add to his indebtedness. My face flushed and my fingers tingled at
thought of him, and so I resolutely turned my meditations elsewhere,
and again in a little while I seemed to think of nothing, but lay
and bathed in the silence, and indulged my eyes with the good red
light of the torch, inhaling its pitchy scent. I was conscious, yet
for a time I had no thought: I was like something half animal, half
vegetable, which feeds, yet has no mouth, nor sees, nor hears, nor
has sense, but only lives. I seemed hung in space, as one feels when
going from sleep to waking--a long lane of half-numb life, before
the open road of full consciousness is reached.

At last I was aroused by the sudden cracking of a knot in the torch.
I saw that it would last but a few hours more. I determined to put
it out, for I might be allowed no more light, and even a few minutes
of this torch every day would be a great boon. So I took it from its
place, and was about to quench it in the moist earth at the foot of
the wall, when I remembered my tobacco and my pipe. Can you think
how joyfully I packed full the good brown bowl, delicately filling
in every little corner, and at last held it to the flame, and saw
it light? That first long whiff was like the indrawn breath of
the cold, starved hunter, when, stepping into his house, he sees
food, fire, and wife on his hearthstone. Presently I put out the
torchlight, and then went back to my couch and sat down, the bowl
shining like a star before me.

There and then a purpose came to me--something which would keep
my brain from wandering, my nerves from fretting and wearing, for
a time at least. I determined to write to my dear Alixe the true
history of my life, even to the point--and after--of this thing
which now was bringing me to so ill a pass. But I was in darkness, I
had no paper, pens, nor ink. After a deal of thinking I came at last
to the solution. I would compose the story, and learn it by heart,
sentence by sentence, as I so composed it.

So there and then I began to run back over the years of my life,
even to my first remembrances, that I might see it from first to
last in a sort of whole and with a kind of measurement. But when I
began to dwell upon my childhood, one little thing gave birth to
another swiftly, as you may see one flicker in the heaven multiply
and break upon the mystery of the dark, filling the night with
clusters of stars. As I thought, I kept drawing spears of the
dungeon corn between my fingers softly (they had come to be like
comrades to me), and presently there flashed upon me the very first
memory of my life. It had never come to me before, and I knew now
that it was the beginning of conscious knowledge: for we can never
know till we can remember. When a child remembers what it sees or
feels, it has begun life.

I put that recollection into the letter which I wrote Alixe, and it
shall be set down forthwith and in little space, though it took me
so very many days and weeks to think it out, to give each word a
fixed place, so that it should go from my mind no more. Every phrase
of that story as I told it is as fixed as stone in my memory. Yet it
must not be thought I can give it all here. I shall set down only a
few things, but you shall find in them the spirit of the whole. I
will come at once to the body of the letter.



VI

MORAY TELLS THE STORY OF HIS LIFE


"...I would have you know of what I am and whence I came, though I
have given you glimpses in the past. That done, I will make plain
why I am charged with this that puts my life in danger, which would
make you blush that you ever knew me if it were true. And I will
show you first a picture as it runs before me, sitting here, the
corn of my dungeon garden twining in my fingers:--

"A multiplying width of green grass spotted with white flowers, an
upland where sheep browsed on a carpet of purple and gold and green,
a tall rock on a hill where birds perched and fluttered, a blue
sky arching over all. There, sprawling in a garden, a child pulled
at long blades of grass, as he watched the birds flitting about
the rocks, and heard a low voice coming down the wind. Here in my
dungeon I can hear the voice as I have not heard it since that day
in the year 1730--that voice stilled so long ago. The air and the
words come floating down (for the words I knew years afterwards):

  'Did ye see the white cloud in the glint o' the sun?
    That's the brow and the eye o' my bairnie.
  Did ye ken the red bloom at the bend o' the crag?
    That's the rose in the cheek o' my bairnie.
  Did ye hear the gay lilt o' the lark by the burn?
    That's the voice of my bairnie, my dearie.
  Did ye smell the wild scent in the green o' the wood?
    That's the breath o' my ain, o' my bairnie.
  Sae I'll gang awa' hame, to the shine o' the fire,
    To the cot where I lie wi' my bairnie.'

"These words came crooning over the grass of that little garden at
Balmore which was by my mother's home. There I was born one day in
June, though I was reared in the busy streets of Glasgow, where my
father was a prosperous merchant and famous for his parts and
honesty.

"I see myself, a little child of no great strength, for I was,
indeed, the only one of my family who lived past infancy, and
my mother feared she should never bring me up. She, too, is in
that picture, tall, delicate, kind yet firm of face, but with a
strong brow, under which shone grave gray eyes, and a manner so
distinguished that none might dispute her kinship to the renowned
Montrose, who was lifted so high in dying, though his gallows was
but thirty feet, that all the world has seen him there. There was
one other in that picture, standing near my mother, and looking at
me, who often used to speak of our great ancestor--my grandfather,
John Mitchell, the Gentleman of Balmore, as he was called, out of
regard for his ancestry and his rare merits.

"I have him well in mind: his black silk breeches and white
stockings and gold seals, and two eyes that twinkled with great
humour when, as he stooped over me, I ran my head between his calves
and held him tight. I recall how my mother said, 'I doubt that I
shall ever bring him up,' and how he replied (the words seem to
come through great distances to me), 'He'll live to be Montrose the
second, rascal laddie! Four seasons at the breast? Tut, tut! what
o' that? 'Tis but his foolery, his scampishness! Nae, nae! his
epitaph's no for writing till you and I are tucked i' the sod,
my Jeanie. Then, like Montrose's, it will be--

  'Tull Edinburrow they led him thair,
    And on a gallows hong;
  They hong him high abone the rest,
    He was so trim a boy.'

"I can hear his laugh this minute, as he gave an accent to the words
by stirring me with his stick, and I caught the gold head of it and
carried it off, trailing it through the garden, till I heard my
mother calling, and then forced her to give me chase, as I pushed
open a little gate and posted away into that wide world of green,
coming quickly to the river, where I paused and stood at bay. I can
see my mother's anxious face now, as she caught me to her arms; and
yet I know she had a kind of pride, too, when my grandfather said,
on our return, 'The rascal's at it early. Next time he'll ford the
stream and skirl at ye, Jeanie, from yonder bank.'

"This is the first of my life that I remember. It may seem strange
to you that I thus suddenly recall not only it, but the words then
spoken too. It is strange to me, also. But here it comes to me all
on a sudden in this silence, as if another self of me were speaking
from far places. At first all is in patches and confused, and then
it folds out--if not clearly, still so I can understand--and the
words I repeat come as if filtered through many brains to mine. I
do not say that it is true--it may be dreams; and yet, as I say, it
is firmly in my mind.

"The next that I remember was climbing upon a chair to reach for my
grandfather's musket, which hung across the chimney. I got at last
upon the mantelshelf, and my hands were on the weapon, when the
door opened, and my grandfather and my father entered. I was so
busy I did not hear them till I was caught by the legs and swung
to a shoulder, where I sat kicking. 'You see his tastes, William,'
said my grandfather to my father; 'he's white o' face and slim o'
body, but he'll no carry on your hopes.' And more he said to the
point, though what it was I knew not. But I think it to have been
suggestion (I heard him say it later) that I would bring Glasgow up
to London by the sword (good doting soul!) as my father brought it
by manufactures, gaining honour thereby.

"However that may be, I would not rest till my grandfather had put
the musket into my arms. I could scarcely lift it, but from the
first it had a charm for me, and now and then, in spite of my
mother's protests, I was let to handle it, to learn its parts, to
burnish it, and by-and-bye--I could not have been more than six
years old--to rest it on a rock and fire it off. It kicked my
shoulder roughly in firing, but I know I did not wink as I pulled
the trigger. Then I got a wild hunger to fire it at all times; so
much so, indeed, that powder and shot were locked up, and the musket
was put away in my grandfather's chest. But now and again it was
taken out, and I made war upon the unresisting hillside, to the
dismay of our neighbours in Balmore. Feeding the fever in my veins,
my grandfather taught me soldiers' exercises and the handling of
arms: to my dear mother's sorrow, for she ever fancied me as leading
a merchant's quiet life like my father's, hugging the hearthstone,
and finding joy in small civic duties, while she and my dear father
sat peacefully watching me in their decline of years.

"I have told you of that river which flowed near my father's house.
At this time most of my hours were spent by it in good weather, for
at last my mother came to trust me alone there, having found her
alert fears of little use. But she would very often come with me and
watch me as I played there. I loved to fancy myself a miller, and my
little mill-wheel, made by my own hands, did duty here and there on
the stream, and many drives of logs did I, in fancy, saw into piles
of lumber, and loads of flour sent away to the City of Desire. Then,
again, I made bridges, and drove mimic armies across them; and if
they were enemies, craftily let them partly cross, to tumble them in
at the moment when part of the forces were on one side of the stream
and part on the other, and at the mercy of my men.

"My grandfather taught me how to build forts and breastworks, and
I lay in ambush for the beadle, who was my good friend, for my
grandfather, and for half a dozen other village folk, who took no
offense at my sport, but made believe to be bitterly afraid when I
surrounded them and drove them, shackled, to my fort by the river.
Little by little the fort grew, until it was a goodly pile; for
now and then a village youth helped me, or again an old man, whose
heart, maybe, rejoiced to play at being child again with me. Years
after, whenever I went back to Balmore, there stood the fort, for
no one ever meddled with it, nor tore it down.

"And I will tell you one reason why this was, and you will think it
strange that it should have played such a part in the history of
the village, as in my own life. You must know that people living in
secluded places are mostly superstitious. Well, when my fort was
built to such proportions that a small ladder must be used to fix
new mud and mortar in place upon it, something happened.

"Once a year there came to Balmore--and he had done so for a
generation--one of those beings called The Men, who are given to
prayer, fasting, and prophesying, who preach the word of warning
ever, calling even the ministers of the Lord sharply to account.
One day this Man came past my fort, folk with him, looking for
preaching or prophesy from him. Suddenly turning he came inside my
fort, and, standing upon the ladder against the wall, spoke to them
fervently. His last words became a legend in Balmore, and spread
even to Glasgow and beyond.

"'Hear me!' cried he. 'As I stand looking at ye from this wall,
calling on ye in your natural bodies to take refuge in the Fort of
God, the Angel of Death is looking ower the battlements of heaven,
choosing ye out, the sheep frae the goats; calling the one to
burning flames, and the other into peaceable habitations. I hear the
voice now,' cried he, 'and some soul among us goeth forth. Flee ye
to the Fort of Refuge.' I can see him now, his pale face shining,
his eyes burning, his beard blowing in the wind, his grizzled hair
shaking on his forehead. I had stood within the fort watching him.
At last he turned, and, seeing me intent, stooped, caught me by the
arms, and lifted me upon the wall. 'See you,' said he, 'yesterday's
babe a warrior to-day. Have done, have done, ye quarrelsome hearts.
Ye that build forts here shall lie in darksome prisons; there is no
fort but the Fort of God. The call comes frae the white ramparts.
Hush!' he added solemnly, raising a finger. 'One of us goeth hence
this day; are ye ready to walk i' the fearsome valley?'

"I have heard my mother speak these words over often, and they were,
as I said, like an old song in Balmore and Glasgow. He set me down,
and then walked away, waving the frightened people back; and there
was none of them that slept that night.

"Now comes the stranger thing. In the morning The Man was found
dead in my little fort, at the foot of the wall. Henceforth the
spot was sacred, and I am sure it stands there as when last I saw
it twelve years ago, but worn away by rains and winds.

"Again and again my mother said over to me his words, 'Ye that build
forts here shall lie in darksome prisons'; for always she had fear
of the soldier's life, and she was moved by signs and dreams.

"But this is how the thing came to shape my life:

"About a year after The Man died, there came to my grandfather's
house, my mother and I being present, a gentleman, by name Sir
John Godric, and he would have my mother tell the whole story of
The Man. That being done, he said that The Man was his brother, who
had been bad and wild in youth, a soldier; but repenting had gone
as far the other way, giving up place and property, and cutting off
from all his kin.

"This gentleman took much notice of me and said that he should
be glad to see more of me. And so he did, for in the years that
followed he would visit at our home in Glasgow when I was at
school, or at Balmore until my grandfather died.

"My father liked Sir John greatly, and they grew exceedingly
friendly, walking forth in the streets of Glasgow, Sir John's
hand upon my father's arm. One day they came to the school in High
Street, where I learned Latin and other accomplishments, together
with fencing from an excellent master, Sergeant Dowie of the One
Hundredth Foot. They found me with my regiment at drill; for I
had got full thirty of my school-fellows under arms, and spent
all leisure hours in mustering, marching, and drum-beating, and
practising all manner of discipline and evolution which I had been
taught by my grandfather and Sergeant Dowie.

"Those were the days soon after which came Dettingen and Fontenoy
and Charles Edward the Pretender, and the ardour of arms ran high.
Sir John was a follower of the Stuarts, and this was the one point
at which he and my father paused in their good friendship. When
Sir John saw me with my thirty lads marching in fine order, all
fired with the little sport of battle--for to me it was all real,
and our sham fights often saw broken heads and bruised shoulders--he
stamped his cane upon the ground, and said in a big voice, 'Well
done! well done! For that you shall have a hundred pounds next
birthday, and as fine a suit of scarlet as you please, and a sword
from London too.'

"Then he came to me and caught me by both shoulders. 'But alack,
alack! there needs some blood and flesh here, Robert Moray,' said
he. 'You have more heart than muscle.'

"This was true. I had ever been more eager than my strength--thank
God, that day is gone!--and sometimes, after Latin and the drill of
my Lightfoots, as I called them, I could have cried for weakness
and weariness, had I been a girl and not a proud lad. And Sir John
kept his word, liking me better from that day forth, and coming
now and again to see me at the school,--though he was much abroad
in France--giving many a pound to my Lightfoots, who were no worse
soldiers for that. His eye ran us over sharply, and his head nodded,
as we marched past him; and once I heard him say, 'If they had had
but ten years each on their heads, my Prince!'

"About this time my father died--that is, when I was fourteen years
old. Sir John became one of the executors with my mother, and
at my wish, a year afterwards, I was sent to the university, where
at least fifteen of my Lightfoots went also; and there I formed a
new battalion of them, though we were watched at first, and even
held in suspicion, because of the known friendship of Sir John for
me; and he himself had twice been under arrest for his friendship
to the Stuart cause. That he helped Prince Charles was clear: his
estates were mortgaged to the hilt.

"He died suddenly on that day of January when Culloden was fought,
before he knew of the defeat of the Prince. I was with him at the
last. After some most serious business, which I shall come to
by-and-bye, 'Robert,' said he, 'I wish thou hadst been with my
Prince. When thou becomest a soldier, fight where thou hast heart to
fight; but if thou hast conscience for it, let it be with a Stuart.
I thought to leave thee a good moiety of my fortune, Robert, but
little that's free is left for giving. Yet thou hast something
from thy father, and down in Virginia, where my friend Dinwiddie is
Governor, there's a plantation for thee, and a purse of gold, which
was for me in case I should have cause to flee this troubled realm.
But I need it not; I go for refuge to my Father's house. The little
vineyard and the purse of gold are for thee, Robert. If thou
thinkest well of it, leave this sick land for that new one. Build
thyself a name in that great young country, wear thy sword honourably
and bravely, use thy gifts in council and debate--for Dinwiddie will
be thy friend--and think of me as one who would have been a father
to thee if he could. Give thy good mother my loving farewells....
Forget not to wear my sword--it has come from the first King Charles
himself, Robert.'

"After which he raised himself upon his elbow and said, 'Life--life,
is it so hard to untie the knot?' Then a twinge of agony crossed
over his face, and afterwards came a great clearing and peace, and
he was gone.

"King George's soldiers entered with a warrant for him even as he
died, and the same moment dropped their hands upon my shoulder. I
was kept in durance for many days, and was not even at the funeral
of my benefactor; but through the efforts of the provost of the
university and some good friends who could vouch for my loyal
principles, I was released. But my pride had got a setback, and
I listened with patience to my mother's prayers that I would not
join the King's men. With the anger of a youth, I now blamed his
Majesty for the acts of Sir John Godric's enemies. And though I
was a good soldier of the King at heart, I would not serve him
henceforth. We threshed matters back and forth, and presently it
was thought I should sail to Virginia to take over my estate. My
mother urged it, too, for she thought if I were weaned from my old
comrades, military fame would no longer charm. So she urged me,
and go I did, with a commission from some merchants of Glasgow, to
give my visit to the colony more weight.

"It was great pain to leave my mother, but she bore the parting
bravely, and away I set in a good ship. Arrived in Virginia, I was
treated with great courtesy in Williamsburg, and the Governor gave
me welcome to his home for the sake of his old friend; and yet a
little for my own, I think, for we were of one temper, though he
was old and I young. We were both full of impulse and proud, and
given to daring hard things, and my military spirit suited him.

"In Virginia I spent a gay and busy year, and came off very well
with the rough but gentlemanly cavaliers, who rode through the wide,
sandy streets of the capital on excellent horses, or in English
coaches, with a rusty sort of show and splendour, but always with
great gallantry. The freedom of the life charmed me, and with
rumours of war with the French there seemed enough to do, whether
with the sword or in the House of Burgesses, where Governor
Dinwiddie said his say with more force than complaisance. So taken
was I with the life--my first excursion into the wide working
world--that I delayed my going back to Glasgow, the more so that
some matters touching my property called for action by the House
of Burgesses, and I had to drive the affair to the end. Sir John
had done better by me than he thought, and I thanked him over and
over again for his good gifts.

"Presently I got a letter from my father's old partner to say that
my dear mother was ill. I got back to Glasgow only in time--but
how glad I was of that!--to hear her last words. When my mother
was gone I turned towards Virginia with longing, for I could not
so soon go against her wishes and join the King's army on the
Continent, and less desire had I to be a Glasgow merchant. Gentlemen
merchants had better times in Virginia. So there was a winding-up
of the estate, not greatly to my pleasure; for it was found that by
unwise ventures my father's partner had perilled the whole, and lost
part of the property. But as it was, I had a competence and several
houses in Glasgow, and I set forth to Virginia with a goodly sum
of money and a shipload of merchandise, which I should sell to
merchants, if it chanced I should become a planter only. I was
warmly welcomed by old friends and by the Governor and his family,
and I soon set up an establishment of my own in Williamsburg,
joining with a merchant there in business, while my land was worked
by a neighbouring planter.

"Those were hearty days, wherein I made little money, but had
much pleasure in the giving and taking of civilities, in throwing
my doors open to acquaintances, and with my young friend, Mr.
Washington, laying the foundation for a Virginian army, by drill and
yearly duty in camp, with occasional excursions against the Indians.
I saw very well what the end of our troubles with the French would
be, and I waited for the time when I should put to keen use the
sword Sir John Godric had given me. Life beat high then, for I was
in the first flush of manhood, and the spirit of a rich new land
was waking in us all, while in our vanity we held to and cherished
forms and customs that one would have thought to see left behind in
London streets and drawing-rooms. These things, these functions in
a small place, kept us a little vain and proud, but, I also hope it
gave us some sense of civic duty.

"And now I come to that which will, comrade of my heart, bring home
to your understanding what lies behind the charges against me:

"Trouble came between Canada and Virginia. Major Washington, one
Captain Mackaye, and myself marched out to the Great Meadows, where
at Fort Necessity we surrendered, after hard fighting, to a force
three times our number. I, with one Captain Van Braam, became a
hostage. Monsieur Coulon Villiers, the French commander, gave his
bond that we should be delivered up when an officer and two cadets,
who were prisoners with us, should be sent on. It was a choice
between Mr. Mackaye of the Regulars and Mr. Washington, or Mr. Van
Braam and myself. I thought of what would be best for the country;
and besides, Monsieur Coulon Villiers pitched upon my name at
once, and held to it. So I gave up my sword to Charles Bedford, my
lieutenant, with more regret than I can tell, for it was sheathed
in memories, charging him to keep it safe--that he would use it
worthily I knew. And so, sorrowfully bidding my friends good-by,
away we went upon the sorry trail of captivity, arriving in due time
at Fort Du Quesne, at the junction of the Ohio and the Monongahela,
where I was courteously treated. There I bettered my French and made
the acquaintance of some ladies from Quebec city, who took pains to
help me with their language.

"Now, there was one lady to whom I talked with some freedom of my
early life and of Sir John Godric. She was interested in all, but
when I named Sir John she became at once much impressed, and I told
her of his great attachment to Prince Charles. More than once she
returned to the subject, begging me to tell her more; and so I
did, still, however, saying nothing of certain papers Sir John
had placed in my care. A few weeks after the first occasion of my
speaking, there was a new arrival at the fort. It was--can you
guess?--Monsieur Doltaire. The night after he came he visited me
in my quarters, and after courteous passages, of which I need
not speak, he suddenly said, 'You have the papers of Sir John
Godric--those bearing on Prince Charles's invasion of England?'

"I was stunned by the question, for I could not guess his drift or
purpose, though presently it dawned upon me.--Among the papers were
many letters from a great lady in France, a growing rival with La
Pompadour in the counsels and favour of the King. She it was who had
a secret passion for Prince Charles, and these letters to Sir John,
who had been with the Pretender at Versailles, must prove her ruin
if produced. I had promised Sir John most solemnly that no one
should ever have them while I lived, except the great lady herself,
and that I would give them to her some time, or destroy them. It
was Doltaire's mission to get these letters, and he had projected
a visit to Williamsburg to see me, having just arrived in Canada,
after a search for me in Scotland, when word came from the lady
gossip at Fort Du Quesne (with whom he had been on most familiar
terms in Quebec) that I was there.

"When I said I had the papers, he asked me lightly for 'those
compromising letters,' remarking that a good price would be paid,
and adding my liberty as a pleasant gift. I instantly refused, and
told him I would not be the weapon of La Pompadour against her
rival. With cool persistence he begged me to think again, for much
depended on my answer.

"'See, monsieur le capitaine,' said he, 'this little affair at Fort
Necessity, at which you became a hostage, shall or shall not be a
war between England and France as you shall dispose.' When I asked
him how that was, he said, 'First, will you swear that you will not,
to aid yourself, disclose what I tell you? You can see that matters
will be where they were an hour ago in any case.'

"I agreed, for I could act even if I might not speak. So I gave my
word. Then he told me that if those letters were not put into his
hands, La Pompadour would be enraged, and fretful and hesitating
now, would join Austria against England, since in this provincial
war was convenient cue for battle. If I gave the letters up, she
would not stir, and the disputed territory between us should be by
articles conceded by the French.

"I thought much and long, during which he sat smoking and humming,
and seeming to care little how my answer went. At last I turned
on him, and told him I would not give up the letters, and if a war
must hang on a whim of malice, then, by God's help, the rightness of
our cause would be our strong weapon to bring France to her knees.

"'That is your final answer?' asked he, rising, fingering his lace,
and viewing himself in a looking-glass upon the wall.

"'I will not change it now or ever,' answered I.

"'Ever is a long time,' retorted he, as one might speak to a wilful
child. 'You shall have time to think and space for reverie. For
if you do not grant this trifle you shall no more see your dear
Virginia; and when the time is ripe you shall go forth to a better
land, as the Grande Marquise shall give you carriage.'

"'The Articles of Capitulation!' I broke out protestingly.

"He waved his fingers at me. 'Ah, that,' he rejoined--'that is a
matter for conning. You are a hostage. Well, we need not take any
wastrel or nobody the English offer in exchange for you. Indeed,
why should we be content with less than a royal duke? For you are
worth more to us just now than any prince we have; at least so
says the Grande Marquise. Is your mind quite firm to refuse?' he
added, nodding his head in a bored sort of way.

"'Entirely,' said I. 'I will not part with those letters.'

"'But think once again,' he urged; 'the gain of territory to
Virginia, the peace between our countries!'

"'Folly!' returned I. 'I know well you overstate the case. You turn
a small intrigue into a game of nations. Yours is a schoolboy's
tale, Monsieur Doltaire.'

"'You are something of an ass,' he mused, and took a pinch of snuff.

"'And you--you have no name,' retorted I.

"I did not know, when I spoke, how this might strike home in two
ways or I should not have said it. I had not meant, of course, that
he was King Louis's illegitimate son.

"'There is some truth in that,' he replied patiently, though a red
spot flamed high on his cheeks. 'But some men need no christening
for their distinction, and others win their names with proper
weapons. I am not here to quarrel with you. I am acting in a large
affair, not in a small intrigue; a century of fate may hang on this.
Come with me,' he added. 'You doubt my power, maybe.'

"He opened the door of the cell, and I followed him out, past the
storehouse and the officers' apartments, to the drawbridge. Standing
in the shadow by the gate, he took keys from his pocket. 'Here,'
said he, 'are what will set you free. This fort is all mine: I act
for France. Will you care to free yourself? You shall have escort
to your own people. You see I am most serious,' he added, laughing
lightly. 'It is not my way to sweat or worry. You and I hold war and
peace in our hands. Which shall it be? In this trouble France or
England will be mangled. It tires one to think of it when life can
be so easy. Now, for the last time,' he urged, holding out the keys.
'Your word of honour that the letters shall be mine--eh?'

"'Never,' I concluded. 'England and France are in greater hands than
yours or mine. The God of battles still stands beside the balances.'

"He shrugged a shoulder. 'Oh well,' said he, 'that ends it. It will
be interesting to watch the way of the God of battles. Meanwhile you
travel to Quebec. Remember that however free you may appear you will
have watchers, that when you seem safe you will be in most danger,
that in the end we will have those letters or your life; that
meanwhile the war will go on, that you shall have no share in it,
and that the whole power of England will not be enough to set her
hostage free. That is all there is to say, I think.... Will you have
a glass of wine with me?' he added courteously, waving a hand
towards the commander's quarters.

"I assented, for why, thought I, should there be a personal quarrel
between us? We talked on many things for an hour or more, and his
I found the keenest mind that ever I have met. There was in him a
dispassionateness, a breadth, which seemed most strange in a trifler
of the Court, in an exquisite--for such he was. I sometimes think
that his elegance and flippancy were deliberate, lest he should be
taking himself or life too seriously. His intelligence charmed me,
held me, and, later, as we travelled up to Quebec, I found my journey
one long feast of interest. He was never dull, and his cynicism had
an admirable grace and cordiality. A born intriguer, he still was
above intrigue, justifying it on the basis that life was all sport.
In logic a leveller, praising the moles, as he called them, the
champion of the peasant, the apologist for the bourgeois--who
always, he said, had civic virtues--he nevertheless held that what
was was best, that it could not be altered, and that it was all
interesting. 'I never repent,' he said to me one day. 'I have done
after my nature, in the sway and impulse of our time, and as the
King has said, After us the deluge. What a pity it is we shall see
neither the flood nor the ark! And so, when all is done, we shall
miss the most interesting thing of all: ourselves dead and the gap
and ruin we leave behind us. By that, from my standpoint,' he would
add, 'life is a failure as a spectacle.'

"Talking in this fashion and in a hundred other ways, we came to
Quebec. And you know in general what happened. I met your honoured
father, whose life I had saved on the Ohio some years before, and
he worked for my comfort in my bondage. You know how exchange after
exchange was refused, and that for near three years I have been
here, fretting my soul out, eager to be fighting in our cause,
yet tied hand and foot, wasting time and losing heart, idle in an
enemy's country. As Doltaire said, war was declared, but not till he
had made here in Quebec last efforts to get those letters. I do not
complain so bitterly of these lost years, since they have brought me
the best gift of my life, your love and friendship; but my enemies
here, commanded from France, have bided their time, till an accident
has given them a cue to dispose of me without openly breaking the
accepted law of nations. They could not decently hang a hostage, for
whom they had signed articles; but they have got their chance, as
they think, to try me for a spy.

"Here is the case. When I found that they were determined and had
ever determined to violate their articles, that they never intended
to set me free, I felt absolved from my duty as an officer on
parole, and I therefore secretly sent to Mr. Washington in Virginia
a plan of Fort Du Quesne and one of Quebec. I knew that I was
risking my life by so doing, but that did not deter me. By my
promise to Doltaire, I could not tell of the matter between us, and
whatever he has done in other ways, he has preserved my life; for it
would have been easy to have me dropped off by a stray bullet, or
to have accidentally drowned me in the St. Lawrence. I believe this
matter of the letters to be between myself and him and Bigot--and
perhaps not even Bigot, though he must know that La Pompadour has
some peculiar reason for interesting herself in a poor captain of
provincials. You now can see another motive for the duel which was
brought about between your brother and myself.

"My plans and letters were given by Mr. Washington to General
Braddock, and the sequel you know: they have fallen into the hands
of my enemies, copies have gone to France, and I am to be tried for
my life. Preserving faith with my enemy Doltaire, I can not plead
the real cause of my long detention; I can only urge that they had
not kept to their articles, and that I, therefore, was free from the
obligations of parole. I am sure they have no intention of giving
me the benefit of any doubt. My real hope lies in escape and the
intervention of England, though my country, alas! has not concerned
herself about me, as if indeed she resented the non-delivery of
those letters to Doltaire, since they were addressed to one she
looked on as a traitor, and held by one whom she had unjustly put
under suspicion.

"So, dear Alixe, from that little fort on the banks of the river
Kelvin have come these strange twistings of my life, and I can date
this dismal fortune of a dungeon from that day The Man made his
prophecy from the wall of my mud fort.

"Whatever comes now, if you have this record, you will know the
private history of my life.... I have told all, with unpractised
tongue, but with a wish to be understood, and to set forth a story
of which the letter should be as true as the spirit. Friend beyond
all price to me, some day this tale will reach your hands, and I ask
you to house it in your heart, and, whatever comes, let it be for my
remembrance. God be with you, and farewell!"



VII

"QUOTH LITTLE GARAINE"


I have given the whole story here as though it had been thought
out and written that Sunday afternoon which brought me good news of
Juste Duvarney. But it was not so. I did not choose to break the
run of the tale to tell of other things and of the passing of time.
The making took me many, many weeks, and in all that time I had
seen no face but Gabord's, and heard no voice but his, when he
came twice a day to bring me bread and water. He would answer no
questions concerning Juste Duvarney, or Voban, or Monsieur Doltaire,
nor tell me anything of what was forward in the town. He had had
his orders precise enough, he said. At the end of my hints and
turnings and approaches, stretching himself up, and turning the
corn about with his foot (but not crushing it, for he saw that I
prized the poor little comrades), he would say:

"Snug, snug, quiet and warm! The cosiest nest in the world--aho!"

There was no coaxing him, and at last I desisted. I had no
light. With resolution I set my mind to see in spite of the dark,
and at the end of a month I was able to note the outlines of my
dungeon; nay, more, I was able to see my field of corn; and at last
what joy I had when, hearing a little rustle near me, I looked
closely and beheld a mouse running across the floor! I straightway
began to scatter crumbs of bread, that it might, perhaps, come near
me--as at last it did.

I have not spoken at all of my wounds, though they gave me many
painful hours, and I had no attendance but my own and Gabord's. The
wound in my side was long healing, for it was more easily disturbed
as I turned in my sleep, while I could ease my arm at all times,
and it came on slowly. My sufferings drew on my flesh, my blood,
and my spirits, and to this was added that disease inaction, the
corrosion of solitude, and the fever of suspense and uncertainty as
to Alixe and Juste Duvarney. Every hour, every moment that I had
ever passed in Alixe's presence, with many little incidents and
scenes in which we shared, passed before me--vivid and cherished
pictures of the mind. One of those incidents I will set down here.

A year or so before, soon after Juste Duvarney came from Montreal,
he brought in one day from hunting a young live hawk, and put it
in a cage. When I came the next morning, Alixe met me, and asked
me to see what he had brought. There, beside the kitchen door,
overhung with morning-glories and flanked by hollyhocks, was a
large green cage, and in it the gray-brown hawk. "Poor thing,
poor prisoned thing!" she said. "Look how strange and hunted it
seems! See how its feathers stir! And those flashing, watchful
eyes, they seem to read through you, and to say, 'Who are you? What
do you want with me? Your world is not my world; your air is not my
air; your homes are holes, and mine hangs high up between you and
God. Who are you? Why do you pen me? You have shut me in that I may
not travel, not even die out in the open world. All the world is
mine; yours is only a stolen field. Who are you? What do you want
with me? There is a fire within my head, it eats to my eyes, and I
burn away. What do you want with me?'"

She did not speak these words all at once as I have written them
here, but little by little, as we stood there beside the cage. Yet,
as she talked with me, her mind was on the bird, her fingers running
up and down the cage bars soothingly, her voice now and again
interjecting soft reflections and exclamations.

"Shall I set it free?" I asked her.

She turned upon me and replied, "Ah, monsieur, I hoped you
would--without my asking. You are a prisoner too," she added; "one
captive should feel for another."

"And the freeman for both," I answered meaningly, as I softly
opened the cage.

She did not drop her eyes, but raised them shining honestly and
frankly to mine, and said, "I wished you to think that."

Opening the cage door wide, I called the little captive to
freedom. But while we stood close by it would not stir, and the
look in its eyes became wilder. I moved away, and Alixe followed
me. Standing beside an old well we waited and watched. Presently
the hawk dropped from the perch, hopped to the door, then with a
wild spring was gone, up, up, up, and was away over the maple woods
beyond, lost in the sun and the good air.

I know not quite why I dwell on this scene, save that it throws
some little light upon her nature, and shows how simple and yet
deep she was in soul, and what was the fashion of our friendship.
But I can perhaps give a deeper insight of her character if I here
set down the substance of a letter written about that time, which
came into my possession long afterwards. It was her custom to
write her letters first in a book, and afterwards to copy them
for posting. This she did that they might be an impulse to her
friendships and a record of her feelings.


ALIXE DUVARNEY TO LUCIE LOTBINIERE.

QUEBEC CITY, the 10th of May, 1756.

MY DEAR LUCIE: I wish I knew how to tell you all I have been
thinking since we parted at the door of the Ursulines a year ago.
Then we were going to meet again in a few weeks, and now twelve
months have gone! How have I spent them? Not wickedly, I hope,
and yet sometimes I wonder if Mere St. George would quite approve
of me; for I have such wild spirits now and then, and I shout and
sing in the woods and along the river as if I were a mad youngster
home from school. But indeed, that is the way I feel at times,
though again I am so quiet that I am frightened of myself. I am a
hawk to-day and a mouse to-morrow, and fond of pleasure all the
time. Ah, what good days I have had with Juste! You remember him
before he went to Montreal? He is gay, full of fancies, as brave
as can be, and plays and sings well, but he is very hot-headed,
and likes to play the tyrant. We have some bad encounters now and
then. But we love each other better for it; he respects me, and
he does not become spoiled, as you will see when you come to us.

I have had no society yet. My mother thinks seventeen years too
few to warrant my going into the gay world. I wonder will my wings
be any stronger, will there be less danger of scorching them at
twenty-six? Years do not make us wise; one may be as wise at twenty
as at fifty. And they do not save us from the scorching. I know
more than they guess how cruel the world may be to the innocent as
to--the other. One can not live within sight of the Intendant's
palace and the Chateau St. Louis without learning many things; and,
for myself, though I hunger for all the joys of life, I do not
fret because my mother holds me back from the gay doings in the
town. I have my long walks, my fishing and rowing, and sometimes
hunting, with Juste and my sweet sister Georgette, my drawing,
painting, music, and needlework, and my housework.

Yet I am not entirely happy, I do not know quite why. Do you
ever feel as if there were some sorrow far back in you, which now
and then rushed in and flooded your spirits, and then drew back,
and you could not give it a name? Well, that is the way with me.
Yesterday, as I stood in the kitchen beside our old cook Jovin,
she said a kind word to me, and my eyes filled, and I ran up to
my room, and burst into tears as I lay upon my bed. I could not
help it. I thought at first it was because of the poor hawk that
Captain Moray and I set free yesterday morning; but it could not
have been that, for it was FREE when I cried, you see. You know,
of course, that he saved my father's life, some years ago? That is
one reason why he has been used so well in Quebec, for otherwise
no one would have lessened the rigours of his captivity. But there
are tales that he is too curious about our government and state,
and so he may be kept close jailed, though he only came here as a
hostage. He is much at our home, and sometimes walks with Juste
and me and Georgette, and accompanies my mother in the streets.
This is not to the liking of the Intendant, who loves not my
father because he is such a friend of our cousin the Governor.
If their lives and characters be anything to the point the
Governor must be in the right.

In truth, things are in a sad way here, for there is robbery on
every hand, and who can tell what the end may be? Perhaps that we
go to the English after all. Monsieur Doltaire--you do not know
him, I think--says, "If the English eat us, as they swear they
will, they'll die of megrims, our affairs are so indigestible." At
another time he said, "Better to be English than to be damned." And
when some one asked him what he meant, he said, "Is it not read
from the altar, 'Cursed is he that putteth his trust in man'? The
English trust nobody, and we trust the English." That was aimed at
Captain Moray, who was present, and I felt it a cruel thing for him
to say; but Captain Moray, smiling at the ladies, said, "Better
to be French and damned than not to be French at all." And this
pleased Monsieur Doltaire, who does not love him. I know not
why, but there are vague whispers that he is acting against the
Englishman for causes best known at Versailles, which have nothing
to do with our affairs here. I do believe that Monsieur Doltaire
would rather hear a clever thing than get ten thousand francs. At
such times his face lights up, he is at once on his mettle, his
eyes look almost fiendishly beautiful. He is a handsome man, but
he is wicked, and I do not think he has one little sense of morals.
I do not suppose he would stab a man in the back, or remove his
neighbour's landmark in the night, though he'd rob him of it in
open daylight, and call it "enterprise"--a usual word with him.

He is a favourite with Madame Cournal, who influences Bigot most,
and one day we may see the boon companions at each other's throats;
and if either falls, I hope it maybe Bigot, for Monsieur Doltaire
is, at least, no robber. Indeed, he is kind to the poor in a
disdainful sort of way. He gives to them and scoffs at them at the
same moment; a bad man, with just enough natural kindness to make
him dangerous. I have not seen much of the world, but some things
we know by instinct; we feel them; and I often wonder if that is
not the way we know everything in the end. Sometimes when I take my
long walks, or go and sit beside the Falls of Montmorenci, looking
out to the great city on the Heights, to dear Isle Orleans,
where we have our pretty villa (we are to go there next week for
three months--happy summer months), up at the blue sky and into
the deep woods, I have strange feelings, which afterwards become
thoughts; and sometimes they fly away like butterflies, but oftener
they stay with me, and I give them a little garden to roam in--you
can guess where. Now and then I call them out of the garden and
make them speak, and then I set down what they say in my journal;
but I think they like their garden best. You remember the song we
used to sing at school?

  "'Where do the stars grow, little Garaine?
    The garden of moons, is it far away?
  The orchard of suns, my little Garaine,
    Will you take us there some day?'

  "'If you shut your eyes,' quoth little Garaine,
    'I will show you the way to go
  To the orchard of suns, and the garden of moons,
    And the field where the stars do grow.

  "'But you must speak soft,' quoth little Garaine,
    'And still must your footsteps be,
  For a great bear prowls in the field of the stars,
    And the moons they have men to see.

  "'And the suns have the Children of Signs to guard,
    And they have no pity at all--
  You must not stumble, you must not speak,
    When you come to the orchard wall.

  "'The gates are locked,' quoth little Garaine,
    'But the way I am going to tell?
  The key of your heart it will open them all:
    And there's where the darlings dwell!'"

You may not care to read these lines again, but it helps to show
what I mean: that everything is in the heart, and that nothing
is at all if we do not feel it. Sometimes I have spoken of these
things to my mother, but she does not see as I do. I dare not tell
my father all I think, and Juste is so much a creature of moods
that I am never sure whether he will be sensible and kind, or
scoff. One can not bear to be laughed at. And as for my sister, she
never thinks; she only lives; and she looks it--looks beautiful.
But there, dear Lucie, I must not tire you with my childish
philosophy, though I feel no longer a child. You would not know
your friend. I can not tell what has come over me. Voila!

To-morrow we go to visit General Montcalm, who has just arrived
in the colony. Bigot and his gay set are not likely to be there.
My mother insists that I shall never darken the doors of the
Intendant's palace.

Do you still hold to your former purpose of keeping a daily
journal? If so, I beg you to copy into it this epistle and your
answer; and when I go up to your dear manor house at Beauce next
summer, we will read over our letters and other things set down,
and gossip of the changes come since we met last. Do sketch the
old place for me (as will I our new villa on dear Isle Orleans),
and make interest with the good cure to bring it to me with your
letter, since there are no posts, no postmen, yet between here
and Beauce. The cure most kindly bears this to you, and says he
will gladly be our messenger. Yesterday he said to me, shaking
his head in a whimsical way, "But no treason, mademoiselle, and
no heresy or schism." I am not quite sure what he meant. I dare
hardly think he had Captain Moray in his mind. I would not for
the world so lessen my good opinion of him as to think him
suspicious of me when no other dare; and so I put his words
down to chance hitting, to a humorous fancy.

Be sure, dear Lucie, I shall not love you less for giving me a
prompt answer. Tell me of what you are thinking and what doing. If
Juste can be spared from the Governor's establishment, may I bring
him with me next summer? He is a difficult, sparkling sort of
fellow, but you are so steady-tempered, so full of tact, getting
your own way so quietly and cleverly, that I am sure I should find
plenty of straw for the bricks of my house of hope, my castle in
Spain!

Do not give too much of my share of thy heart elsewhere, and
continue to think me, my dear Lucie, thy friend, loyal and
loving,

ALIXE DUVARNEY.

P.S.--Since the above was written we have visited the General.
Both Monsieur Doltaire and Captain Moray were there, but neither
took much note of me--Monsieur Doltaire not at all. Those two
either hate each other lovingly, or love hatefully, I know not
which, they are so biting, yet so friendly to each other's
cleverness, though their style of word-play is so different:
Monsieur Doltaire's like a bodkin-point, Captain Moray's like a
musket-stock a-clubbing. Be not surprised to see the British at
our gates any day. Though we shall beat them back, I shall feel no
less easy because I have a friend in the enemy's camp. You may
guess who. Do not smile. He is old enough to be my father. He said
so himself six months ago.

ALIXE.



VIII

AS VAIN AS ABSALOM


Gabord, coming in to me one day after I had lain down to sleep,
said, "See, m'sieu' the dormouse, 'tis holiday-eve; the King's
sport comes to-morrow."

I sat up in bed with a start, for I knew not but that my death
had been decided on without trial; and yet on second thought I was
sure this could not be, for every rule of military conduct was
against it.

"Whose holiday?" asked I after a moment; "and what is King's
sport?"

"You're to play bear in the streets to-morrow--which is sport for
the King," he retorted; "we lead you by a rope, and you dance
the quickstep to please our ladies all the way to the Chateau,
where they bring the bear to drum-head."

"Who sits behind the drum?" I questioned.

"The Marquis de Vaudreuil," he replied, "the Intendant, Master
Devil Doltaire, and the little men." By these last he meant
officers of the colonial soldiery.

So then, at last I was to be tried, to be dealt with definitely
on the abominable charge. I should at least again see light and
breathe fresh air, and feel about me the stir of the world. For a
long year I had heard no voice but my own and Gabord's, had had no
friends but my pale blades of corn and a timid mouse, day after day
no light at all; and now winter was at hand again, and without fire
and with poor food my body was chilled and starved. I had had no
news of the world, nor of her who was dear to me, nor of Juste
Duvarney save that he lived, nor of our cause. But succeeding the
thrill of delight I had at thought of seeing the open world again
there came a feeling of lassitude, of indifference; I shrank from
the jar of activity. But presently I got upon my feet, and with a
little air of drollery straightened out my clothes and flicked a
handkerchief across my gaiters. Then I twisted my head over my
shoulder as if I were noting the shape of my back and the set of
my clothes in a mirror, and thrust a leg out in the manner of an
exquisite. I had need to do some mocking thing at the moment, or I
should have given way to tears like a woman, so suddenly weak had
I become.

Gabord burst out laughing.

An idea came to me. "I must be fine to-morrow," said I. "I must
not shame my jailer." I rubbed my beard--I had none when I came
into this dungeon first.

"Aho!" said he, his eyes wheeling.

I knew he understood me. I did not speak, but went on running my
fingers through my beard.

"As vain as Absalom," he added. "Do you think they'll hang you
by the hair?"

"I'd have it off," said I, "to be clean for the sacrifice."

"You had Voban before," he rejoined; "we know what happened--a
dainty bit of a letter all rose-lily scented, and comfits for
the soldier. The pretty wren perches now in the Governor's
house--a-cousining, a-cousining. Think you it is that she may get
a glimpse of m'sieu' the dormouse as he comes to trial? But 'tis
no business o' mine; and if I bring my prisoner up when called
for, there's duty done!"

I saw the friendly spirit in the words.

"Voban," urged I, "Voban may come to me?"

"The Intendant said no, but the Governor yes," was the reply;
"and that M'sieu' Doltaire is not yet come back from Montreal,
so he had no voice. They look for him here to-morrow."

"Voban may come?" I asked again.

"At daybreak Voban--aho!" he continued. "There's milk and honey
to-morrow," he added, and then, without a word, he drew forth from
his coat, and hurriedly thrust into my hands, a piece of meat and a
small flask of wine, and, swinging round like a schoolboy afraid of
being caught in a misdemeanor, he passed through the door and the
bolts clanged after him. He left the torch behind him, stuck in the
cleft of the wall.

I sat down on my couch, and for a moment gazed almost vacantly
at the meat and wine in my hands. I had not touched either for a
year, and now I could see that my fingers, as they closed on the
food nervously, were thin and bloodless, and I realized that my
clothes hung loose upon my person. Here were light, meat, and wine,
and there was a piece of bread on the board covering my water-jar.
Luxury was spread before me, but although I had eaten little all
day I was not hungry. Presently, however, I took the knife which I
had hidden a year before, and cut pieces of the meat and laid them
by the bread. Then I drew the cork from the bottle of wine, and,
lifting it towards that face which was always visible to my soul,
I drank--drank--drank!

The rich liquor swam through my veins like glorious fire. It
wakened my brain and nerved my body. The old spring of life
came back. This wine had come from the hands of Alixe--from the
Governor's store, maybe; for never could Gabord have got such
stuff. I ate heartily of the rich beef and bread with a new-made
appetite, and drank the rest of the wine. When I had eaten and
drunk the last, I sat and looked at the glowing torch, and felt
a sort of comfort creep through me. Then there came a delightful
thought. Months ago I had put away one last pipeful of tobacco, to
save it till some day when I should need it most. I got it, and
no man can guess how lovingly I held it to a flying flame of the
torch, saw it light, and blew out the first whiff of smoke into the
sombre air; for November was again piercing this underground house
of mine, another winter was at hand. I sat and smoked, and--can you
not guess my thoughts? For have you all not the same hearts, being
British born and bred? When I had taken the last whiff, I wrapped
myself in my cloak and went to sleep. But twice or thrice during
the night I waked to see the torch still shining, and caught the
fragrance of consuming pine, and minded not at all the smoke the
burning made.



IX

A LITTLE CONCERNING THE CHEVALIER DE LA DARANTE


I was wakened completely by the shooting of bolts. With the opening
of the door I saw the figures of Gabord and Voban. My little friend
the mouse saw them also, and scampered from the bread it had been
eating, away among the corn, through which my footsteps had now made
two rectangular paths, not disregarded by Gabord, who solicitously
pulled Voban into the narrow track, that he should not trespass on
my harvest.

I rose, showed no particular delight at seeing Voban, but greeted
him easily--though my heart was bursting to ask him of Alixe--and
arranged my clothes. Presently Gabord said, "Stools for barber,"
and, wheeling, he left the dungeon. He was gone only an instant,
but long enough for Voban to thrust a letter into my hand, which
I ran into the lining of my waistcoat as I whispered, "Her
brother--he is well?"

"Well, and he have go to France," he answered. "She make me say,
look to the round window in the Chateau front."

We spoke in English--which, as I have said, Voban understood
imperfectly. There was nothing more said, and if Gabord, when he
returned, suspected, he showed no sign, but put down two stools,
seating himself on one, as I seated myself on the other for Voban's
handiwork. Presently a soldier appeared with a bowl of coffee.
Gabord rose, took it from him, waved him away, and handed it to me.
Never did coffee taste so sweet, and I sipped and sipped till Voban
had ended his work with me. Then I drained the last drop and stood
up. He handed me a mirror, and Gabord, fetching a fine white
handkerchief from his pocket, said, "Here's for your tears, when
they drum you to heaven, dickey-bird."

But when I saw my face in the mirror, I confess I was startled.
My hair, which had been black, was plentifully sprinkled with
white, my face was intensely pale and thin, and the eyes were sunk
in dark hollows. I should not have recognized myself. But I laughed
as I handed back the glass, and said, "All flesh is grass, but a
dungeon's no good meadow."

"'Tis for the dry chaff," Gabord answered, "not for young
grass--aho!"

He rose and made ready to leave, Voban with him. "The commissariat
camps here in an hour or so," he said, with a ripe chuckle.

It was clear the new state of affairs was more to his mind than
the long year's rigour and silence. It seemed to me strange then,
and it has seemed so ever since, that during all that time I never
was visited by Doltaire but once, and of that event I am going to
write briefly here.

It was about two months before this particular morning that he
came, greeting me courteously enough.

"Close quarters here," said he, looking round as if the place
were new to him and smiling to himself.

"Not so close as we all come to one day," said I.

"Dismal comparison!" he rejoined; "you've lost your
spirits."

"Not so," I retorted; "nothing but my liberty."

"You know the way to find it quickly," he suggested.

"The letters for La Pompadour?" I asked.

"A dead man's waste papers," responded he; "of no use to him or
you, or any one save the Grande Marquise."

"Valuable to me," said I.

"None but the Grande Marquise and the writer would give you a
penny for them!"

"Why should I not be my own merchant?"

"You can--to me. If not to me, to no one. You had your chance long
ago, and you refused it. You must admit I dealt fairly with you.
I did not move till you had set your own trap and fallen into it.
Now, if you do not give me the letters--well, you will give them to
none else in this world. It has been a fair game, and I am winning
now. I've only used means which one gentleman might use with
another. Had you been a lesser man I should have had you spitted
long ago. You understand?"

"Perfectly. But since we have played so long, do you think I'll
give you the stakes now--before the end?"

"It would be wiser," he answered thoughtfully.

"I have a nation behind me," urged I.

"It has left you in a hole here to rot."

"It will take over your citadel and dig me out some day," I
retorted hotly.

"What good that? Your life is more to you than Quebec to England."

"No, no," said I quickly; "I would give my life a hundred times
to see your flag hauled down!"

"A freakish ambition," he replied; "mere infatuation!"

"You do not understand it, Monsieur Doltaire," I remarked
ironically.

"I love not endless puzzles. There is no sport in following a maze
that leads to nowhere save the grave." He yawned. "This air is
heavy," he added; "you must find it trying."

"Never as trying as at this moment," I retorted.

"Come, am I so malarious?"

"You are a trickster," I answered coldly.

"Ah, you mean that night at Bigot's?" He smiled. "No, no, you
were to blame--so green. You might have known we were for having
you between the stones."

"But it did not come out as you wished?" hinted I.

"It served my turn," he responded; and he gave me such a smiling,
malicious look that I knew sought to convey he had his way with
Alixe; and though I felt that she was true to me, his cool
presumption so stirred me I could have struck him in the face.
I got angrily to my feet, but as I did so I shrank a little, for
at times the wound in my side, not yet entirely healed, hurt me.

"You are not well," he said, with instant show of curiosity;
"your wounds still trouble you? They should be healed. Gabord was
ordered to see you cared for."

"Gabord has done well enough," answered I. "I have had wounds
before, monsieur."

He leaned against the wall and laughed. "What braggarts you
English are!" he said. "A race of swashbucklers--even on bread and
water!"

He had me at advantage, and I knew it, for he had kept his
temper. I made an effort. "Both excellent," rejoined I, "and
English too."

He laughed again. "Come, that is better. That's in your old
vein. I love to see you so. But how knew you our baker was
English?--which he is, a prisoner like yourself."

"As easily as I could tell the water was not made by Frenchmen."

"Now I have hope of you," he broke out gaily; "you will yet
redeem your nation."

At that moment Gabord came with a message from the Governor to
Doltaire, and he prepared to go.

"You are set on sacrifice?" he asked. "Think--dangling from Cape
Diamond!"

"I will meditate on your fate instead," I replied.

"Think!" he said again, waving off my answer with his hand.
"The letters I shall no more ask for; and you will not escape
death?"

"Never by that way," rejoined I.

"So. Very good. Au plaisir, my captain. I go to dine at
the Seigneur Duvarney's."

With that last thrust he was gone, and left me wondering if the
Seigneur had ever made an effort to see me, if he had forgiven the
duel with his son.

That was the incident.

 *   *   *   *   *

When Gabord and Voban were gone, leaving the light behind, I
went over to where the torch stuck in the wall, and drew Alixe's
letter from my pocket with eager fingers. It told the whole story
of her heart.

CHATEAU ST. LOUIS, 27th November, 1757.

Though I write you these few words, dear Robert, I do not know
that they will reach you, for as yet it is not certain they will
let Voban visit you. A year, dear friend, and not a word from you!
I should have broken my heart if I had not heard of you one way and
another. They say you are much worn in body, though you have always
a cheerful air. There are stories of a visit Monsieur Doltaire paid
you, and how you jested. He hates you, and yet he admires you too.

And now listen, Robert, and I beg you not to be angry--oh, do not
be angry, for I am all yours; but I want to tell you that I have
not repulsed Monsieur Doltaire when he has spoken flatteries to me.
I have not believed them, and I have kept my spirits strong against
the evil in him. I want to get you free of prison, and to that end
I have to work through him with the Intendant, that he will not set
the Governor more against you. With the Intendant himself I will
not deal at all. So I use the lesser villain, and in truth the more
powerful, for he stands higher at Versailles than any here. With
the Governor I have influence, for he is, as you know, a kinsman of
my mother's, and of late he has shown a fondness for me. Yet you
can see that I must act most warily, that I must not seem to care
for you, for that would be your complete undoing. I rather seem
to scoff. (Oh, how it hurts me! how my cheeks tingle when I think
of it alone! and how I clench my hands, hating them all for
oppressing you!)

I do not believe their slanders--that you are a spy. It is I,
Robert, who have at last induced the Governor to bring you to
trial. They would have put it off till next year, but I feared you
would die in that awful dungeon, and I was sure that if your trial
came on there would be a change, as there is to be for a time, at
least. You are to be lodged in the common jail during the sitting
of the court; and so that is one step gained. Yet I had to use all
manner of device with the Governor.

He is sometimes so playful with me that I can pretend to
sulkiness; and so one day I said that he showed no regard for our
family or for me in not bringing you, who had nearly killed my
brother, to justice. So he consented, and being of a stubborn
nature, too, when Monsieur Doltaire and the Intendant opposed
the trial, he said it should come off at once. But one thing
grieves me: they are to have you marched through the streets of
the town like any common criminal, and I dare show no distress
nor plead, nor can my father, though he wishes to move for you in
this; and I dare not urge him, for then it would seem strange the
daughter asked your punishment, and the father sought to lessen it.

When you are in the common jail it will be much easier to help
you. I have seen Gabord, but he is not to be bent to any purpose,
though he is kind to me. I shall try once more to have him take
some wine and meat to you to-night. If I fail, then I shall only
pray that you may be given strength in body for your time of
trouble equal to your courage.

It may be I can fix upon a point where you may look to see me as
you pass to-morrow to the Chateau. There must be a sign. If you
will put your hand to your forehead-- But no, they may bind you,
and your hands may not be free. When you see me, pause in your
step for an instant, and I shall know. I will tell Voban where
you shall send your glance, if he is to be let in to you, and I
hope that what I plan may not fail.

And so, Robert, adieu. Time can not change me, and your misfortunes
draw me closer to you. Only the dishonourable thing could make me
close the doors of my heart, and I will not think you, whate'er
they say, unworthy of my constant faith. Some day, maybe, we shall
smile at, and even cherish, these sad times. In this gay house I
must be flippant, for I am now of the foolish world! But under all
the trivial sparkle a serious heart beats. It belongs to thee, if
thou wilt have it, Robert, the heart of thy

ALIXE.

An hour after getting this good letter Gabord came again, and
with him breakfast--a word which I had almost dropped from my
language. True, it was only in a dungeon, on a pair of stools, by
the light of a torch, but how I relished it!--a bottle of good
wine, a piece of broiled fish, the half of a fowl, and some tender
vegetables.

When Gabord came for me with two soldiers, an hour later--I say
an hour, but I only guess so, for I had no way of noting time--I
was ready for new cares, and to see the world again. Before the
others Gabord was the rough, almost brutal soldier, and soon I
knew that I was to be driven out upon the St. Foye Road and on
into the town. My arms were well fastened down, and I was tied
about till I must have looked like a bale of living goods of no
great value. Indeed, my clothes were by no means handsome, and
save for my well-shaven face and clean handkerchief I was an
ill-favoured spectacle; but I tried to bear my shoulders up as
we marched through dark reeking corridors, and presently came
suddenly into well-lighted passages.

I had to pause, for the light blinded my eyes, and they hurt me
horribly, so delicate were the nerves. For some minutes I stood
there, my guards stolidly waiting, Gabord muttering a little and
stamping upon the floor as if in anger, though I knew he was
merely playing a small part to deceive his comrades. The pain in
my eyes grew less, and, though they kept filling with moisture
from the violence of the light, I soon could see without distress.

I was led into the yard of the citadel, where was drawn up a
company of soldiers. Gabord bade me stand still, and advanced
towards the officers' quarters. I asked him if I might not walk to
the ramparts and view the scene. He gruffly assented, bidding the
men watch me closely, and I walked over to a point where, standing
three hundred feet above the noble river, I could look out upon its
sweet expanse, across to the Levis shore, with its serried legions
of trees behind, and its bold settlement in front upon the Heights.
There, eastward lay the well-wooded Island of Orleans, and over all
the clear sun and sky, enlivened by a crisp and cheering air. Snow
had fallen, but none now lay upon the ground, and I saw a rare and
winning earth. I stood absorbed. I was recalling that first day
that I remember in my life, when at Balmore my grandfather made
prophecies upon me, and for the first time I was conscious of the
world.

As I stood lost to everything about me, I heard Doltaire's voice
behind, and presently he said over my shoulder, "To wish Captain
Moray a good-morning were superfluous!"

I smiled at him: the pleasure of that scene had given me an
impulse towards good nature even with my enemies.

"The best I ever had," I answered quietly.

"Contrasts are life's delights," he said. "You should thank us.
You have your best day because of our worst dungeon."

"But my thanks shall not be in words; you shall have the same
courtesy at our hands one day."

"I had the Bastile for a year," he rejoined, calling up a squad
of men with his finger as he spoke. "I have had my best day. Two
would be monotony. You think your English will take this some
time?" he asked, waving a finger towards the citadel. "It will need
good play to pluck that ribbon from its place." He glanced up, as
he spoke, at the white flag with its golden lilies.

"So much the better sport," I answered. "We will have the ribbon
and its heritage."

"You yourself shall furnish evidence to-day. Gabord here will
see you temptingly disposed--the wild bull led peaceably by the
nose!"

"But one day I will twist your nose, Monsieur Doltaire."

"That is fair enough, if rude," he responded. "When your turn
comes, you twist and I endure. You shall be nourished well like me,
and I shall look a battered hulk like you. But I shall never be the
fool that you are. If I had a way to slip the leash, I'd slip it.
You are a dolt." He was touching upon the letters again.

"I weigh it all," said I. "I am no fool--anything else you will."

"You'll be nothing soon, I fear--which is a pity."

What more he might have said I do not know, but there now
appeared in the yard a tall, reverend old gentleman, in the costume
of the coureur de bois, though his belt was richly chased, and he
wore an order on his breast. There was something more refined than
powerful in his appearance, but he had a keen, kindly eye, and a
manner unmistakably superior. His dress was a little barbarous,
unlike Doltaire's splendid white uniform, set off with violet and
gold, the lace of a fine handkerchief sticking from his belt, and
a gold-handled sword at his side; but the manner of both was
distinguished.

Seeing Doltaire, he came forward and they embraced. Then he turned
towards me, and as they walked off a little distance I could see
that he was curious concerning me. Presently he raised his hand,
and, as if something had excited him, said, "No, no, no; hang him
and have done with it, but I'll have nothing to do with it--not a
thing. 'Tis enough for me to rule at--"

I could hear no further, but I was now sure that he was some one
of note who had retired from any share in state affairs. He and
Doltaire then moved on to the doors of the citadel, and, pausing
there, Doltaire turned round and made a motion of his hand to
Gabord. I was at once surrounded by the squad of men, and the
order to march was given. A drum in front of me began to play a
well-known derisive air of the French army, The Fox and the Wolf.

We came out on the St. Foye Road and down towards the Chateau St.
Louis, between crowds of shouting people who beat drums, kettles,
pans, and made all manner of mocking noises. It was meant not only
against myself, but against the British people. The women were not
behind the men in violence; from them at first came handfuls of
gravel and dust which struck me in the face; but Gabord put a
stop to that.

It was a shameful ordeal, which might have vexed me sorely if I
had not had greater trials and expected worse. Now and again
appeared a face I knew--some lady who turned her head away, or
some gentleman who watched me curiously, but made no sign.

When we came to the Chateau, I looked up as if casually, and there
in the little round window I saw Alixe's face--for an instant only.
I stopped in my tracks, was prodded by a soldier from behind, and
I then stepped on. Entering, we were taken to the rear of the
building, where, in an open courtyard, were a company of soldiers,
some seats, and a table. On my right was the St. Lawrence swelling
on its course, hundreds of feet beneath, little boats passing
hither and thither on its flood.

We were waiting about half an hour, the noises of the clamoring
crowd coming to us, as they carried me aloft in effigy, and,
burning me at the cliff edge, fired guns and threw stones at me,
till, rags, ashes, and flame, I was tumbled into the river far
below. At last, from the Chateau came the Marquis de Vaudreuil,
Bigot, and a number of officers. The Governor looked gravely at
me, but did not bow; Bigot gave me a sneering smile, eying me
curiously the while, and (I could feel) remarking on my poor
appearance to Cournal beside him--Cournal, who winked at his
wife's dishonour for the favour of her lover, who gave him means
for public robbery.

Presently the Governor was seated, and he said, looking round,
"Monsieur Doltaire--he is not here?"

Bigot shook his head, and answered, "No doubt he is detained at
the citadel."

"And the Seigneur Duvarney?" the Governor added.

At that moment the Governor's secretary handed him a letter. The
Governor opened it. "Listen," said he. He read to the effect that
the Seigneur Duvarney felt he was hardly fitted to be a just judge
in this case, remembering the conflict between his son and the
notorious Captain Moray. And from another standpoint, though the
prisoner merited any fate reserved for him, if guilty of spying,
he could not forget that his life had been saved by this British
captain--an obligation which, unfortunately, he could neither repay
nor wipe out. After much thought, he must disobey the Governor's
summons, and he prayed that his Excellency would grant his
consideration thereupon.

I saw the Governor frown, but he made no remark, while Bigot
said something in his ear which did not improve his humour, for
he replied curtly, and turned to his secretary. "We must have
two gentlemen more," he said.

At that moment Doltaire entered with the old gentleman of whom
I have written. The Governor instantly brightened, and gave the
stranger a warm greeting, calling him his "dear Chevalier;" and,
after a deal of urging, the Chevalier de la Darante was seated as
one of my judges: which did not at all displease me, for I liked
his face.

I do not need to dwell upon the trial here. I have set down the
facts before. I had no counsel and no witnesses. There seemed no
reason why the trial should have dragged on all day, for I soon saw
it was intended to find me guilty. Yet I was surprised to see how
Doltaire brought up a point here and a question there in my favour,
which served to lengthen out the trial; and all the time he sat
near the Chevalier de la Darante, now and again talking with him.

It was late evening before the trial came to a close. The one
point to be established was that the letters taken from General
Braddock were mine, and that I had made the plans while a hostage.
I acknowledged nothing, and would not do so unless I was allowed
to speak freely. This was not permitted until just before I was
sentenced.

Then Doltaire's look was fixed on me, and I knew he waited to
see if I would divulge the matter private between us. However, I
stood by my compact with him. Besides, it could not serve me to
speak of it here, or use it as an argument, and it would only
hasten an end which I felt he could prevent if he chose.

So when I was asked if I had aught to say, I pleaded only that
they had not kept the Articles of War signed at Fort Necessity,
which provided I should be free within two months and a half--that
is, when prisoners in our hands should be delivered up to them,
as they were. They had broken their bond, though we had fulfilled
ours, and I held myself justified in doing what I had done for
our cause and for my own life.

I was not heard patiently, though I could see that the Governor
and the Chevalier were impressed; but Bigot instantly urged the
case hotly against me, and the end came very soon. It was now dark;
a single light had been brought and placed beside the Governor,
while a soldier held a torch at a distance. Suddenly there was a
silence; then, in response to a signal, the sharp ringing of a
hundred bayonets as they were drawn and fastened to the muskets,
and I could see them gleaming in the feeble torchlight. Presently,
out of the stillness, the Governor's voice was heard condemning me
to death by hanging, thirty days hence, at sunrise. Silence fell
again instantly, and then a thing occurred which sent a thrill
through us all. From the dark balcony above us came a voice, weird,
high, and wailing:

"Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! He is guilty, and shall die! Francois
Bigot shall die!"

The voice was Mathilde's, and I saw Doltaire shrug a shoulder
and look with malicious amusement at the Intendant. Bigot himself
sat pale and furious. "Discover the intruder," he said to Gabord,
who was standing near, "and have--him--jailed."

But the Governor interfered. "It is some drunken creature," he
urged quietly. "Take no account of it."



X

AN OFFICER OF MARINES


What was my dismay to know that I was to be taken back again to
my dungeon, and not lodged in the common jail, as I had hoped and
Alixe had hinted! When I saw whither my footsteps were directed I
said nothing, nor did Gabord speak at all. We marched back through
a railing crowd as we had come, all silent and gloomy. I felt a
chill at my heart when the citadel loomed up again out of the
November shadow, and I half paused as I entered the gates.
"Forward!" said Gabord mechanically, and I moved on into the yard,
into the prison, through the dull corridors, the soldiers' heels
clanking and resounding behind, down into the bowels of the earth,
where the air was moist and warm, and then into my dungeon home! I
stepped inside, and Gabord ordered the ropes off my person somewhat
roughly, watched the soldiers till they were well away, and then
leaned against the wall, waiting for me to speak. I had no impulse
to smile, but I knew how I could most touch him, and so I said
lightly, "You've got dickey-bird home again."

He answered nothing and turned towards the door, leaving the torch
stuck in the wall. But he suddenly stopped short, and suddenly
thrust out to me a tiny piece of paper.

"A hand touched mine as I went through the Chateau," said he, "and
when out I came, look you, this here! I can't see to read. What does
it say?" he added, with a shrewd attempt at innocence.

I opened the little paper, held it towards the torch, and read:

"Because of the storm there is no sleeping. Is there not the
watcher aloft? Shall the sparrow fall unheeded? The wicked
shall be confounded."

It was Alixe's writing. She had hazarded this in the hands of my
jailer as her only hope, and, knowing that he might not serve her,
had put her message in vague sentences which I readily interpreted.
I read the words aloud to him, and he laughed, and remarked, "'Tis
a foolish thing that--The Scarlet Woman, mast like."

"Most like," I answered quietly; "yet what should she be doing
there at the Chateau?"

"The mad go everywhere," he answered, "even to the intendance!"

With that he left me, going, as he said, "to fetch crumbs and
wine." Exhausted with the day's business, I threw myself upon
my couch, drew my cloak over me, composed myself, and in a few
minutes was sound asleep. I waked to find Gabord in the dungeon,
setting out food upon a board supported by two stools.

"'Tis custom to feed your dickey-bird ere you fetch him to the
pot." he said, and drew the cork from a bottle of wine.

He watched me as I ate and talked, but he spoke little. When I
had finished, he fetched a packet of tobacco from his pocket. I
offered him money, but he refused it, and I did not press him, for
he said the food and wine were not of his buying. Presently he
left, and came back with pens, ink, paper, and candles, which be
laid out on my couch without words.

After a little he came again, and laid a book on the improvised
table before me. It was an English Bible. Opening it, I found
inscribed on the fly-leaf, Charles Wainfleet, Chaplain to the
British Army. Gabord explained that this chaplain had been in
the citadel for some weeks; that he had often inquired about me;
that he had been brought from the Ohio; and had known of me, having
tended the lieutenant of my Virginian infantry in his last hours.
Gabord thought I should now begin to make my peace with Heaven,
and so had asked for the chaplain's Bible, which was freely given.
I bade him thank the chaplain for me, and opening the book, I found
a leaf turned down at the words,

"In the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these
calamities be overpast."

When I was left alone, I sat down to write diligently that history
of myself which I had composed and fixed in my memory during the
year of my housing in this dungeon. The words came from my pen
freely, and hour after hour through many days, while no single word
reached me from the outside world, I wrote on; carefully revising,
but changing little from that which I had taken so long to record
in my mind. I would not even yet think that they would hang me; and
if they did, what good could brooding do? When the last word of the
memoirs (I may call them so), addressed to Alixe, had been written,
I turned my thoughts to other friends.

The day preceding that fixed for my execution came, yet there
was no sign from friend or enemy without. At ten o'clock of that
day Chaplain Wainfleet was admitted to me in the presence of Gabord
and a soldier. I found great pleasure in his company, brief as his
visit was; and after I had given him messages to bear for me to old
friends, if we never met again and he were set free, he left me,
benignly commending me to Heaven. There was the question of my
other letters. I had but one desire--Voban again, unless at my
request the Seigneur Duvarney would come, and they would let him
come. If it were certain that I was to go to the scaffold, then I
should not hesitate to tell him my relations with his daughter,
that he might comfort her when, being gone from the world myself,
my love could do her no harm. I could not think that he would hold
against me the duel with his son, and I felt sure he would come to
me if he could.

But why should I not try for both Voban and the Seigneur? So I
spoke to Gabord.

"Voban! Voban!" said he. "Does dickey-bird play at peacock still?
Well, thou shalt see Voban. Thou shalt go trimmed to heaven--aho!"

Presently I asked him if he would bear a message to the Governor,
asking permission for the Seigneur Duvarney to visit me, if he were
so inclined. At his request I wrote my petition out, and he carried
it away with him, saying that I should have Voban that evening.

I waited hour after hour, but no one came. As near as I could
judge it was now evening. It seemed strange to think that, twenty
feet above me, the world was all white with snow; the sound of
sleigh-bells and church-bells, and the cries of snowshoers ringing
on the clear, sharp air. I pictured the streets of Quebec alive
with people: the young seigneur set off with furs and silken sash
and sword or pistols; the long-haired, black-eyed woodsman in his
embroidered moccasins and leggings with flying thrums; the peasant
farmer slapping his hands cheerfully in the lighted market-place;
the petty noble, with his demoiselle, hovering in the precincts of
the Chateau St. Louis and the intendance. Up there were light,
freedom, and the inspiriting frost; down here in my dungeon, the
blades of corn, which, dying, yet never died, told the story of a
choking air, wherein the body and soul of a man droop and take long
to die. This was the night before Christmas Eve, when in England
and Virginia they would be preparing for feasting and thanksgiving.

The memories of past years crowded on me. I thought of feastings
and spendthrift rejoicings in Glasgow and Virginia. All at once
the carnal man in me rose up and damned these lying foes of mine.
Resignation went whistling down the wind. Hang me! Hang me! No, by
the God that gave me breath! I sat back and laughed--laughed at
my own insipid virtue, by which, to keep faith with the fanatical
follower of Prince Charlie, I had refused my liberty; cut myself off
from the useful services of my King; wasted good years of my life,
trusting to pressure and help to come from England, which never
came; twisted the rope for my own neck to keep honour with the
dishonourable Doltaire, who himself had set the noose swinging; and,
inexpressible misery! involved in my shame and peril a young blithe
spirit, breathing a miasma upon the health of a tender life. Every
rebellious atom in my blood sprang to indignant action. I swore
that if they fetched me to the gallows to celebrate their Noel,
other lives than mine should go to keep me company on the dark trail.
To die like a rat in a trap, oiled for the burning, and lighted by
the torch of hatred! No, I would die fighting, if I must die.

I drew from its hiding-place the knife I had secreted the day I
was brought into that dungeon--a little weapon, but it would serve
for the first blow. At whom? Gabord? It all flashed through my mind
how I might do it when he came in again: bury this blade in his neck
or heart--it was long enough for the work; then, when he was dead,
change my clothes for his, take his weapons, and run my chances to
get free of the citadel. Free? Where should I go in the dead of
winter? Who would hide me, shelter me? I could not make my way to
an English settlement. Ill clad, exposed to the merciless climate,
and the end death. But that was freedom--freedom! I could feel my
body dilating with the thought, as I paced my dungeon like an
ill-tempered beast. But kill Gabord, who had put himself in danger
to serve me, who himself had kept the chains from off my ankles and
body, whose own life depended upon my security--"Come, come, Robert
Moray," said I, "what relish have you for that? That's an ill game
for a gentleman. Alixe Duvarney would rather see you dead than get
your freedom over the body of this man."

That was an hour of storm. I am glad that I conquered the baser
part of me; for, almost before I had grown calm again, the bolts of
the dungeon doors shot back, and presently Gabord stepped inside,
followed by a muffled figure.

"Voban the barber," said Gabord in a strange voice, and stepping
again outside, he closed the door, but did not shoot the bolts.

I stood as one in a dream. Voban the barber? In spite of cap and
great fur coat, I saw the outline of a figure that no barber ever
had in this world. I saw two eyes shining like lights set in a rosy
sky. A moment of doubt, of impossible speculation, of delicious
suspense, and then the coat of Voban the barber opened, dropped
away from the lithe, graceful figure of a young officer of marines,
the cap flew off, and in an instant the dear head, the blushing,
shining face of Alixe was on my breast.

In that moment, stolen from the calendar of hate, I ran into the
haven where true hearts cast anchor and bless God that they have
seen upon the heights, to guide them, the lights of home. The
moment flashed by and was gone, but the light it made went not
with it.

When I drew her blushing face up, and stood her off from me that
I might look at her again, the colour flew back and forth on her
cheek, as you may see the fire flutter in an uncut ruby when you
turn it in the sun. Modestly drawing the cloak she wore more
closely about her, she hastened to tell me how it was she came in
such a guise; but I made her pause for a moment while I gave her a
seat and sat down beside her. Then by the light of the flickering
torch and flaring candles I watched her feelings play upon her
face as the warm light of autumn shifts upon the glories of ripe
fruits. Her happiness was tempered by the sadness of our position,
and my heart smote me that I had made her suffer, had brought care
to her young life. I could see that in the year she had grown
older, yet her beauty seemed enhanced by that and by the trouble
she had endured. I shall let her tell her story here unbroken by
my questions and those interruptions which Gabord made, bidding
her to make haste. She spoke without faltering, save here and
there; but even then I could see her brave spirit quelling the riot
of her emotions, shutting down the sluice-gate of tears.

"I knew," she said, her hand clasped in mine, "that Gabord was
the only person like to be admitted to you, and so for days, living
in fear lest the worst should happen, I have prepared for this
chance. I have grown so in height that I knew an old uniform of my
brothers would fit me, and I had it ready--small sword and all,"
she added, with a sad sort of humour, touching the weapon at her
side. "You must know that we have for the winter a house here upon
the ramparts near the Chateau. It was my mother's doings, that my
sister Georgette and I might have no great journeyings in the cold
to the festivities hereabouts. So I, being a favourite with the
Governor, ran in and out of the Chateau at my will; of which my
mother was proud, and she allowed me much liberty, for to be a
favourite of the Governor is an honour. I knew how things were
going, and what the chances were of the sentence being carried out
on you. Sometimes I thought my heart would burst with the anxiety of
it all, but I would not let that show to the world. If you could but
have seen me smile at the Governor and Monsieur Doltaire--nay, do
not press my hand so, Robert; you know well you have no need to
fear monsieur--while I learned secrets of state, among them news of
you. Three nights ago Monsieur Doltaire was talking with me at a
ball--ah, those feastings while you were lying in a dungeon, and I
shutting up my love and your danger close in my heart, even from
those who loved me best! Well, suddenly he said, 'I think I will
not have our English captain shifted to a better world.'

"My heart stood still; I felt an ache across my breast so that I
could hardly breathe. 'Why will you not?' said I; 'was not the
sentence just?' He paused a minute, and then replied, 'All
sentences are just when an enemy is dangerous.' Then said I as in
surprise, 'Why, was he no spy, after all?' He sat back, and laughed
a little. 'A spy according to the letter of the law, but you have
heard of secret history--eh?' I tried to seem puzzled, for I had a
thought there was something private between you and him which has
to do with your fate. So I said, as if bewildered, 'You mean there
is evidence which was not shown at the trial?' He answered slowly,
'Evidence that would bear upon the morals, not the law of the
case.' Then said I, 'Has it to do with you, monsieur?' 'It has to
do with France,' he replied. 'And so you will not have his death?'
I asked. 'Bigot wishes it,' he replied, 'for no other reason than
that Madame Cournal has spoken nice words for the good-looking
captain, and because that unsuccessful duel gave Vaudreuil an
advantage over himself. Vaudreuil wishes it because he thinks it
will sound well in France, and also because he really believes the
man a spy. The Council do not care much; they follow the Governor
and Bigot, and both being agreed, their verdict is unanimous.'
He paused, then added, 'And the Seigneur Duvarney--and his
daughter--wish it because of a notable injury to one of their
name.' At that I cautiously replied, 'No, my father does not wish
it, for my brother gave the offense, and Captain Moray saved his
life, as you know. I do not wish it, Monsieur Doltaire, because
hanging is a shameful death, and he is a gentle man, not a ruffian.
Let him be shot like a gentleman. How will it sound at the Court of
France that, on insufficient evidence, as you admit, an English
gentleman was hanged for a spy? Would not the King say (for he is a
gentleman), Why was not this shown me before the man's death? Is it
not a matter upon which a country would feel as gentlemen feel?'

"I knew it the right thing to say at the moment, and it seemed
the only way to aid you, though I intended, if the worst came to
the worst, to go myself to the Governor at the last and plead for
your life, at least for a reprieve. But it had suddenly flashed
upon me that a reference to France was the thing, since the
Articles of War which you are accused of dishonouring were signed
by officers from France and England.

"Presently he turned to me with a look of curiosity, and another
sort of look also that made me tremble, and said, 'Now, there you
have put your finger on the point--my point, the choice weapon I
had reserved to prick the little bubble of Bigot's hate and the
Governor's conceit, if I so chose, even at the last. And here is a
girl, a young girl just freed from pinafores, who teaches them the
law of nations! If it pleased me I should not speak, for Vaudreuil's
and Bigot's affairs are none of mine; but, in truth, why should you
kill your enemy? It is the sport to keep him living; you can get no
change for your money from a dead man. He has had one cheerful year;
why not another, and another, and another? And so watch him fretting
to the slow-coming end, while now and again you give him a taste of
hope, to drop him back again into the pit which has no sides for
climbing.' He paused a minute, and then added, 'A year ago I thought
he had touched you, this Britisher, with his raw humour and manners;
but, my faith, how swiftly does a woman's fancy veer!' At that I
said calmly to him, 'You must remember that then he was not thought
so base.' 'Yes, yes,' he replied; 'and a woman loves to pity the
captive, whatever his fault, if he be presentable and of some notice
or talent. And Moray has gifts,' he went on. I appeared all at once
to be offended. 'Veering, indeed! a woman's fancy! I think you might
judge women better. You come from high places, Monsieur Doltaire,
and they say this and that of your great talents and of your power
at Versailles, but what proof have we had of it? You set a girl
down with a fine patronage, and you hint at weapons to cut off my
cousin the Governor and the Intendant from their purposes; but how
do we know you can use them, that you have power with either the
unnoticeable woman or the great men?' I knew very well it was a bold
move. He suddenly turned to me, in his cruel eyes a glittering kind
of light, and said, 'I suggest no more than I can do with those
"great men"; and as for the woman, the slave can not be patron--I am
the slave. I thought not of power before; but now that I do, I will
live up to my thinking. I seem idle, I am not; purposeless, I am
not; a gamester, I am none. I am a sportsman, and I will not leave
the field till all the hunt be over. I seem a trifler, yet I have
persistency. I am no romanticist, I have no great admiration for
myself, and yet when I set out to hunt a woman honestly, be sure
I shall never back to kennel till she is mine or I am done for
utterly. Not by worth nor by deserving, but by unending patience and
diligence--that shall be my motto. I shall devote to the chase every
art that I have learned or known by nature. So there you have me,
mademoiselle. Since you have brought me to the point, I will unfurl
my flag.... I am--your--hunter,' he went on, speaking with slow,
painful emphasis, 'and I shall make you mine. You fight against me,
but it is no use.' I got to my feet, and said with coolness, though
I was sick at heart and trembling, 'You are frank. You have made two
resolves. I shall give weight to one as you fulfill the other'; and,
smiling at him, I moved away towards my mother.

"Masterful as he is, I felt that this would touch his vanity.
There lay my great chance with him. If he had guessed the truth
of what's between us, be sure, Robert, your life were not worth
one hour beyond to-morrow's sunrise. You must know how I loathe
deceitfulness, but when one weak girl is matched against powerful
and evil men, what can she do? My conscience does not chide me, for
I know my cause is just. Robert, look me in the eyes.... There,
like that.... Now tell me. You are innocent of the dishonourable
thing, are you not? I believe with all my soul, but that I may say
from your own lips that you are no spy, tell me so."

When I had said as she had wished, assuring her she should know
all, carrying proofs away with her, and that hidden evidence of
which Doltaire had spoken, she went on:

"'You put me to the test,' said monsieur. 'Doing one, it will be
proof that I shall do the other.' He fixed his eyes upon me with
such a look that my whole nature shrank from him, as if the next
instant his hateful hands were to be placed on me. Oh, Robert, I
know how perilous was the part I played, but I dared it for your
sake. For a whole year I have dissembled to every one save to that
poor mad soul Mathilde, who reads my heart in her wild way, to
Voban, and to the rough soldier outside your dungeon. But they will
not betray me. God has given us these rough but honest friends.

"Well, monsieur left me that night, and I have not seen him since,
nor can I tell where he is, for no one knows, and I dare not ask
too much. I did believe he would achieve his boast as to saving
your life, and so, all yesterday and to-day, I have waited with most
anxious heart; but not one word! Yet there was that in all he said
which made me sure he meant to save you, and I believe he will. Yet
think: if anything happened to him! You know what wild doings go on
at Bigot's chateau out at Charlesbourg; or, again, in the storm of
yesterday he may have been lost. You see, there are the hundred
chances; so I determined not to trust wholly to him. There was
one other way--to seek the Governor myself, open my heart to him,
and beg for a reprieve. To-night at nine o'clock--it is now six,
Robert--we go to the Chateau St. Louis, my mother and my father and
I, to sup with the Governor. Oh, think what I must endure, to face
them with this awful shadow on me! If no word come of the reprieve
before that hour, I shall make my own appeal to the Governor. It may
ruin me, but it may save you; and that done, what should I care for
the rest? Your life is more to me than all the world beside." Here
she put both hands upon my shoulders and looked me in the eyes.

I did not answer yet, but took her hands in mine, and she
continued: "An hour past, I told my mother I should go to see
my dear friend Lucie Lotbiniere. Then I stole up to my room,
put on my brother's uniform, and came down to meet Voban near the
citadel, as we had arranged. I knew he was to have an order from
the Governor to visit you. He was waiting, and to my great joy he
put the order in my hands. I took his coat and wig and cap, a poor
disguise, and came straight to the citadel, handing the order to
the soldiers at the gate. They gave it back without a word, and
passed me on. I thought this strange, and looked at the paper by
the light of the torches. What was my surprise to see that Voban's
name had been left out! It but gave permission to the bearer. That
would serve with the common soldier, but I knew well it would not
with Gabord or with the commandant of the citadel. All at once I saw
the great risk I was running, the danger to us both. Still I would
not turn back. But how good fortune serves us when we least look for
it! At the commandant's very door was Gabord. I did not think to
deceive him. It was my purpose from the first to throw myself upon
his mercy. So there, that moment, I thrust the order into his hand.
He read it, looked a moment, half fiercely and half kindly, at me,
then turned and took the order to the commandant. Presently he came
out, and said to me, 'Come, m'sieu', and see you clip the gentleman
dainty fine for his sunrise travel. He'll get no care 'twixt
posting-house and end of journey, m'sieu'.' This he said before two
soldiers, speaking with harshness and a brutal humour. But inside
the citadel he changed at once, and, taking from my head this cap
and wig, he said quite gently, yet I could see he was angry, too,
'This is a mad doing, young lady.' He said no more, and led me
straight to you. If I had told him I was coming, I know he would
have stayed me. But at the dangerous moment he had not heart to
drive me back.... And that is all my story, Robert."

As I have said, this tale was broken often by little questionings
and exclamations, and was not told in one long narrative as I have
written it here. When she had done I sat silent and overcome for a
moment. There was one thing now troubling me sorely, even in the
painful joy of having her here close by me. She had risked all to
save my life--reputation, friends, even myself, the one solace in
her possible misery. Was it not my duty to agree to Doltaire's
terms, for her sake, if there was yet a chance to do so? I had made
a solemn promise to Sir John Godric that those letters, if they ever
left my hands, should go to the lady who had written them; and to
save my own life I would not have broken faith with my benefactor.
But had I the right to add to the misery of this sweet, brave
spirit? Suppose it was but for a year or two: had I the right to
give her sorrow for that time, if I could prevent it, even at the
cost of honour with the dead? Was it not my duty to act, and at
once? Time was short.

While in a swift moment I was debating, Gabord opened the door,
and said, "Come, end it, end it. Gabord has a head to save!" I
begged him for one minute more, and then giving Alixe the packet
which held my story, I told her hastily the matter between Doltaire
and myself, and said that now, rather than give her sorrow, I was
prepared to break my word with Sir John Godric. She heard me through
with flashing eyes, and I could see her bosom heave. When I had
done, she looked me straight in the eyes.

"Is all that here?" she said, holding up the packet.

"All," I answered.

"And you would not break your word to save your own life?"

I shook my head in negation.

"Now I know that you are truly honourable," she answered, "and
you shall not break your promise for me. No, no, you shall not; you
shall not stir. Tell me that you will not send word to Monsieur
Doltaire--tell me!"

When, after some struggle, I had consented, she said, "But I may
act. I am not bound to secrecy. I have given no word or bond. I
will go to the Governor with my love, and I do not fear the end.
They will put me in a convent, and I shall see you no more, but I
shall have saved you."

In vain I begged her not to do so; her purpose was strong, and I
could only get her promise that she would not act till midnight.
This was hardly achieved when Gabord entered quickly, saying,
"The Seigneur Duvarney! On with your coat, wig, and cap! Quick,
mademoiselle!"

Swiftly the disguise was put on, and I clasped her to my breast with
a joyful agony, while Gabord hastily put out the candles and torch,
and drew Alixe behind the dungeon door. Then standing himself in
the doorway, he loudly commended me to sleep sound and be ready
for travel in the morning. Taking the hint, I threw myself upon
my couch, and composed myself. An instant afterwards the Seigneur
appeared with a soldier, and Gabord met him cheerfully, looked at
the order from the Governor, and motioned the Seigneur in and the
soldier away. As Duvarney stepped inside, Gabord followed, holding
up a torch. I rose to meet my visitor, and as I took his hand I saw
Gabord catch Alixe by the sleeve and hurry her out with a whispered
word, swinging the door behind her as she passed. Then he stuck the
torch in the wall, went out, shut and bolted the dungeon door, and
left us two alone.

I was glad that Alixe's safety had been assured, and my greeting
of her father was cordial. But he was more reserved than I had
ever known him. The duel with his son, which had sent the youth to
France and left him with a wound which would trouble him for many a
day, weighed heavily against me. Again, I think that he guessed my
love for Alixe, and resented it with all his might. What Frenchman
would care to have his daughter lose her heart to one accused of a
wretched crime, condemned to death, an enemy of his country, and a
Protestant? I was sure that should he guess at the exact relations
between us, Alixe would be sent behind the tall doors of a convent,
where I should knock in vain.

"You must not think, Moray," said he, "that I have been indifferent
to your fate, but you can not guess how strong the feeling is
against you, how obdurate is the Governor, who, if he should appear
lax in dealing with you, would give a weapon into Bigot's hands
which might ruin him in France one day. I have but this moment come
from the Governor, and there seems no way to move him."

I saw that he was troubled greatly, and I felt his helplessness.
He went on: "There is but one man who could bend the Governor, but
he, alas! is no friend of yours. And what way there is to move him
I know not; he has no wish, I fancy, but that you shall go to your
fate."

"You mean Monsieur Doltaire?" said I quietly.

"Doltaire," he answered. "I have tried to find him, for he is
the secret agent of La Pompadour, and if I had one plausible reason
to weigh with him--- But I have none, unless you can give it. There
are vague hints of things between you and him, and I have come to
ask if you can put any fact, any argument, in my hands that would
aid me with him. I would go far to serve you."

"Think not, I pray you," returned I, "that there is any debt
unsatisfied between us."

He waved his hand in a melancholy way. "Indeed, I wish to serve
you for the sake of past friendship between us, not only for that
debt's sake."

"In spite of my quarrel with your son?" asked I.

"In spite of that, indeed," he said slowly, "though a great
wedge was driven between us there."

"I am truly sorry for it," said I, with some pride. "The blame
was in no sense mine. I was struck across the face; I humbled
myself, remembering you, but he would have me out yes or no."

"Upon a wager!" he urged, somewhat coldly.

"With the Intendant, monsieur," I replied, "not with your son."

"I can not understand the matter," was his gloomy answer.

"I beg you not to try," I rejoined; "it is too late for
explanations, and I have nothing to tell you of myself and Monsieur
Doltaire. Only, whatever comes, remember I have begged nothing of
you, have desired nothing but justice--that only. I shall make no
further move; the axe shall fall if it must. I have nothing now to
do but set my house in order, and live the hours between this and
sunrise with what quiet I may. I am ready for either freedom or
death. Life is not so incomparable a thing that I can not give it
up without pother."

He looked at me a moment steadily. "You and I are standing far
off from each other," he remarked. "I will say one last thing to
you, though you seem to wish me gone and your own grave closing
in. I was asked by the Governor to tell you that if you would put
him in the way of knowing the affairs of your provinces from the
letters you have received, together with estimate of forces and
plans of your forts, as you have known them, he will spare you.
I only tell you this because you close all other ways to me."

"I carry," said I, with a sharp burst of anger, "the scars of
wounds an insolent youth gave me. I wish now that I had killed
the son of the man who dares bring me such a message."

For a moment I had forgotten Alixe, everything, in the wildness
of my anger. I choked with rage; I could have struck him.

"I mean nothing against you," he urged, with great ruefulness. "I
suggest nothing. I bring the Governor's message, that is all. And
let me say," he added, "that I have not thought you a spy, nor
ever shall think so."

I was trembling with anger still, and I was glad that at the
moment Gabord opened the door, and stood waiting.

"You will not part with me in peace, then?" asked the Seigneur
slowly.

"I will remember the gentleman who gave a captive hospitality,"
I answered. "I am too near death to let a late injury outweigh an
old friendship. I am ashamed, but not only for myself. Let us part
in peace--ay, let us part in peace," I added with feeling, for the
thought of Alixe came rushing over me, and this was her father!

"Good-by, Moray," he responded gravely. "You are a soldier, and
brave; if the worst comes, I know how you will meet it. Let us
waive all bitter thoughts between us. Good-by."

We shook hands then, without a word, and in a moment the dungeon
door closed behind him, and I was alone; and for a moment my heart
was heavy beyond telling, and a terrible darkness settled on my
spirit. I sat on my couch and buried my head in my hands.



XI

THE COMING OF DOLTAIRE


At last I was roused by Gabord's voice.

He sat down, and drew the leaves of faded corn between his
fingers. "'Tis a poor life, this in a cage, after all--eh,
dickey-bird? If a soldier can't stand in the field fighting, if
a man can't rub shoulders with man, and pitch a tent of his own
somewhere, why not go travelling with the Beast--aho? To have all
the life sucked out like these--eh? To see the flesh melt and the
hair go white, the eye to be one hour bright like a fire in a kiln,
and the next like mother on working vinegar--that's not living at
all--no."

The speech had evidently cost him much thinking, and when he ended,
his cheeks puffed out and a soundless laugh seemed to gather,
but it burst in a sort of sigh. I would have taken his hand that
moment, if I had not remembered when once he drew back from such
demonstrations. I did not speak, but nodded assent, and took to
drawing the leaves of corn between my fingers as he was doing.

After a moment, cocking his head at me as might a surly
schoolmaster in a pause of leniency, he added, "As quiet, as quiet,
and never did he fly at door of cage, nor peck at jailer--aho!"

I looked at him a minute seriously, and then, feeling in my
coat, handed to him the knife which I had secreted, with the words,
"Enough for pecking with, eh?"

He looked at me so strangely, as he weighed the knife up and
down in his hand, that I could not at first guess his thought;
but presently I understood it, and I almost could have told what
he would say. He opened the knife, felt the blade, measured it
along his fingers, and then said, with a little bursting of the
lips, "Poom! But what would ma'm'selle have thought if Gabord
was found dead with a hole in his neck--behind? Eh?"

He had struck the very note that had sung in me when the temptation
came; but he was gay at once again, and I said to him, "What is the
hour fixed?"

"Seven o'clock," he answered, "and I will bring your breakfast
first."

"Good-night, then," said I. "Coffee and a little tobacco will be
enough."

When he was gone, I lay down on my bag of straw, which, never
having been renewed, was now only full of worn chaff, and,
gathering myself in my cloak, was soon in a dreamless sleep.

I waked to the opening of the dungeon door, to see Gabord entering
with a torch and a tray that held my frugal breakfast. He had added
some brandy, also, of which I was glad, for it was bitter cold
outside, as I discovered later. He was quiet, seeming often to
wish to speak, but pausing before the act, never getting beyond a
stumbling aho! I greeted him cheerfully enough. After making a
little toilette, I drank my coffee with relish. At last I asked
Gabord if no word had come to the citadel for me; and he said, none
at all, nothing save a message from the Governor, before midnight,
ordering certain matters. No more was said, until, turning to the
door, he told me he would return to fetch me forth in a few minutes.
But when halfway out he suddenly wheeled, came back, and blurted
out, "If you and I could only fight it out, m'sieu'! 'Tis ill for a
gentleman and a soldier to die without thrust or parry."

"Gabord," said I, smiling at him, "you preach good sermons always,
and I never saw a man I'd rather fight and be killed by than you!"
Then, with an attempt at rough humour, I added, "But as I told you
once, the knot is'nt at my throat, and I'll tie another one yet
elsewhere, if God loves honest men."

I had no hope at all, yet I felt I must say it. He nodded, but
said nothing, and presently I was alone.

I sat down on my straw couch and composed myself to think; not
upon my end, for my mind was made up as to that, but upon the girl
who was so dear to me, whose life had crept into mine and filled
it, making it of value in the world. It must not be thought that I
no longer had care for our cause, for I would willingly have spent
my life a hundred times for my country, as my best friends will
bear witness; but there comes a time when a man has a right to set
all else aside but his own personal love and welfare, and to me the
world was now bounded by just so much space as my dear Alixe might
move in. I fastened my thought upon her face as I had last seen it.
My eyes seemed to search for it also, and to find it in the torch
which stuck out, softly sputtering, from the wall. I do not
pretend, even at this distance of time, after having thought much
over the thing, to give any good reason for so sudden a change as
took place in me there. All at once a voice appeared to say to me,
"When you are gone, she will be Doltaire's. Remember what she said.
She fears him. He has a power over her."

Now, some will set it down to a low, unmanly jealousy and suspicion;
it is hard to name it, but I know that I was seized with a misery so
deep that all my past sufferings and disappointments, and even this
present horror were shadowy beside it. I pictured to myself Alixe in
Doltaire's arms, after I had gone beyond human call. It is strange
how an idea will seize us and master us, and an inconspicuous
possibility suddenly stand out with huge distinctness. All at once I
felt in my head "the ring of fire" of which Mathilde had warned me,
a maddening heat filled my veins, and that hateful picture grew more
vivid. Things Alixe had said the night before flashed to my mind,
and I fancied that, unknown to herself even, he already had a
substantial power over her.

He had deep determination, the gracious subtlety which charms
a woman, and she, hemmed in by his devices, overcome by his
pleadings, attracted by his enviable personality, would come at
last to his will. The evening before I had seen strong signs of the
dramatic qualities of her nature. She had the gift of imagination,
the epic spirit. Even three years previous I felt how she had seen
every little incident of her daily life in a way which gave it
vividness and distinction. All things touched her with delicate
emphasis--were etched upon her brain--or did not touch her at all.
She would love the picturesque in life, though her own tastes were
so simple and fine. Imagination would beset her path with dangers;
it would be to her, with her beauty, a fatal gift, a danger to
herself and others. She would have power, and feeling it, womanlike,
would use it, dissipating her emotions, paying out the sweetness
of her soul, till one day a dramatic move, a strong picturesque
personality like Doltaire's, would catch her from the moorings of
her truth, and the end must be tragedy to her. Doltaire! Doltaire!
The name burnt into my brain. Some prescient quality in me awaked,
and I saw her the sacrifice of her imagination, of the dramatic
beauty of her nature, my enemy her tyrant and destroyer. He would
leave nothing undone to achieve his end, and do nothing that would
not in the end poison her soul and turn her very glories into
miseries. How could she withstand the charm of his keen knowledge
of the world, the fascination of his temperament, the alluring
eloquence of his frank wickedness? And I should rather a million
times see her in her grave than passed through the atmosphere of
his life.

This may seem madness, selfish and small; but after-events went
far to justify my fears and imaginings, for behind there was a
love, an aching, absorbing solicitude. I can not think that my
anxiety was all vulgar smallness then.

I called him by coarse names, as I tramped up and down my
dungeon; I cursed him; impotent contempt was poured out on him;
in imagination I held him there before me, and choked him till
his eyes burst out and his body grew limp in my arms. The ring of
fire in my head scorched and narrowed till I could have shrieked
in agony. My breath came short and labored, and my heart felt as
though it were in a vise and being clamped to nothing. For an
instant, also, I broke out in wild bitterness against Alixe. She
had said she would save me, and yet in an hour or less I should
be dead. She had come to me last night ah--true; but that was in
keeping with her dramatic temperament; it was the drama of it that
had appealed to her; and to-morrow she would forget me, and sink
her fresh spirit in the malarial shadows of Doltaire's.

In my passion I thrust my hand into my waistcoat and unconsciously
drew out something. At first my only feeling was that my hand could
clench it, but slowly a knowledge of it travelled to my brain, as
if through clouds and vapours. Now I am no Catholic, I do not know
that I am superstitious, yet when I became conscious that the thing
I held was the wooden cross that Mathilde had given me, a weird
feeling passed through me, and there was an arrest of the passions
of mind and body; a coolness passed over all my nerves, and my brain
got clear again, the ring of fire loosing, melting away. It was a
happy, diverting influence, which gave the mind rest for a moment,
till the better spirit, the wiser feeling, had a chance to reassert
itself; but then it seemed to me almost supernatural.

One can laugh when misery and danger are over, and it would be
easy to turn this matter into ridicule, but from that hour to this
the wooden cross which turned the flood of my feelings then into a
saving channel has never left me. I keep it, not indeed for what it
was, but for what it did.

As I stood musing, there came to my mind suddenly the words of a
song which I had heard some voyageurs sing on the St. Lawrence,
as I sat on the cliff a hundred feet above them and watched them
drift down in the twilight:

  "Brothers, we go to the Scarlet Hills:
    (Little gold sun, come out of the dawn!)
  There we will meet in the cedar groves;
    (Shining white dew, come down!)
  There is a bed where you sleep so sound,
  The little good folk of the hills will guard,
  Till the morning wakes and your love comes home.
    (Fly away, heart, to the Scarlet Hills!)"

Something in the half-mystical, half-Arcadian spirit of the
words soothed me, lightened my thoughts, so that when, presently,
Gabord opened the door, and entered with four soldiers, I was calm
enough for the great shift. Gabord did not speak, but set about
pinioning me himself. I asked him if he could not let me go
unpinioned, for it was ignoble to go to ones death tied like a
beast. At first he shook his head, but as if with a sudden impulse
lie cast the ropes aside, and, helping me on with my cloak, threw
again over it a heavier cloak he had brought, gave me a fur cap to
wear, and at last himself put on me a pair of woollen leggings,
which, if they were no ornament, and to be of but transitory use
(it seemed strange to me then that one should be caring for a body
so soon to be cut off from all feeling), were most comforting when
we came into the bitter, steely air. Gabord might easily have given
these last tasks to the soldiers, but he was solicitous to perform
them himself. Yet with surly brow and a rough accent he gave the
word to go forward, and in a moment we were marching through the
passages, up frosty steps, in the stone corridors, and on out of
the citadel into the yard.

I remember that as we passed into the open air I heard the voice
of a soldier singing a gay air of love and war. Presently he came
in sight. He saw me, stood still for a moment looking curiously,
and then, taking up the song again at the very line where he had
broken off, passed round an angle of the building and was gone. To
him I was no more than a moth fluttering in the candle, to drop
dead a moment later.

It was just on the verge of sunrise. There was the grayish-blue
light in the west, the top of a long range of forest was sharply
outlined against it, and a timorous darkness was hurrying out of
the zenith. In the east a sad golden radiance was stealing up and
driving back the mystery of the night, and that weird loneliness of
an arctic world. The city was hardly waking as yet, but straight
silver columns of smoke rolled up out of many chimneys, and the
golden cross on the cathedral caught the first rays of the sun. I
was not interested in the city; I had now, as I thought, done with
men. Besides the four soldiers who had brought me out, another squad
surrounded me, commanded by a young officer whom I recognized as
Captain Lancy, the rough roysterer who had insulted me at Bigot's
palace over a year ago. I looked with a spirit absorbed upon the
world about me, and a hundred thoughts which had to do with man's
life passed through my mind. But the young officer, speaking sharply
to me, ordered me on, and changed the current of my thoughts. The
coarseness of the man and his insulting words were hard to bear,
so that I was constrained to ask him if it were not customary to
protect a condemned man from insult rather than to expose him to it.
I said that I should be glad of my last moments in peace. At that he
asked Gabord why I was unbound, and my jailer answered that binding
was for criminals who were to be HANGED!

I could scarcely believe my ears. I was to be shot, not hanged.
I had a thrill of gratitude which I can not describe. It may seem
a nice distinction, but to me there were whole seas between the
two modes of death. I need not blush in advance for being shot--my
friends could bear that without humiliation; but hanging would have
always tainted their memory of me, try as they would against it.

"The gallows is ready, and my orders were to see him hanged,"
Mr. Lancy said.

"An order came at midnight that he should be shot," was Gabord's
reply, producing the order, and handing it over.

The officer contemptuously tossed it back, and now, a little
more courteous, ordered me against the wall, and I let my cloak
fall to the ground. I was placed where, looking east, I could see
the Island of Orleans, on which was the summer-house of the Seigneur
Duvarney. Gabord came to me and said, "M'sieu', you are a brave
man"--then, all at once breaking off, he added in a low, hurried
voice, "'Tis not a long flight to heaven, m'sieu'!" I could see his
face twitching as he stood looking at me. He hardly dared to turn
round to his comrades, lest his emotion should be seen. But the
officer roughly ordered him back. Gabord coolly drew out his watch,
and made a motion to me not to take off my cloak yet.

"'Tis not the time by six minutes," he said. "The gentleman is
to be shot to the stroke--aho!" His voice and manner were dogged.
The officer stepped forward threateningly; but Gabord said
something angrily in an undertone, and the other turned on his
heel and began walking up and down. This continued for a moment,
in which we all were very still and bitter cold--the air cut like
steel--and then my heart gave a great leap, for suddenly there
stepped into the yard Doltaire. Action seemed suspended in me, but
I know I listened with singular curiosity to the shrill creaking of
his boots on the frosty earth, and I noticed that the fur collar
of the coat he wore was all white with the frozen moisture of his
breath, also that tiny icicles hung from his eyelashes. He came
down the yard slowly, and presently paused and looked at Gabord
and the young officer, his head laid a little to one side in a
quizzical fashion, his eyelids drooping.

"What time was monsieur to be shot?" he asked of Captain Lancy.

"At seven o'clock, monsieur," was the reply.

Doltaire took out his watch. "It wants three minutes of seven,"
said he. "What the devil means this business before the stroke o'
the hour?" waving a hand towards me.

"We were waiting for the minute, monsieur," was the officer's
reply.

A cynical, cutting smile crossed Doltaire's face. "A charitable
trick, upon my soul, to fetch a gentleman from a warm dungeon and
stand him against an icy wall on a deadly morning to cool his heels
as he waits for his hour to die! You'd skin your lion and shoot him
afterwards--voila!" All this time he held the watch in his hand.

"You, Gabord," he went on, "you are a man to obey orders--eh?"

Gabord hesitated a moment as if waiting for Lancy to speak, and
then said, "I was not in command. When I was called upon I brought
him forth."

"Excuses! excuses! You sweated to be rid of your charge."

Gabord's face lowered. "M'sieu' would have been in heaven by
this if I had'nt stopped it," he broke out angrily.

Doltaire turned sharply on Lancy. "I thought as much," said he,
"and you would have let Gabord share your misdemeanor. Yet your
father was a gentleman! If you had shot monsieur before seven, you
would have taken the dungeon he left. You must learn, my young
provincial, that you are not to supersede France and the King. It
is now seven o'clock; you will march your men back into quarters."

Then turning to me, he raised his cap. "You will find your cloak
more comfortable, Captain Moray," said he, and he motioned Gabord
to hand it to me, as he came forward. "May I breakfast with you?"
he added courteously. He yawned a little. "I have not risen so
early in years, and I am chilled to the bone. Gabord insists that
it is warm in your dungeon; I have a fancy to breakfast there. It
will recall my year in the Bastile."

He smiled in a quaint, elusive sort of fashion, and as I drew
the cloak about me, I said through chattering teeth, for I had
suffered with the brutal cold, "I am glad to have the chance to
offer breakfast."

"To me or any one?" he dryly suggested. "Think! by now, had I
not come, you might have been in a warmer world than this--indeed,
much warmer," he suddenly said, as he stooped, picked up some snow
in his bare hand, and clapped it to my cheek, rubbing it with force
and swiftness. The cold had nipped it, and this was the way to
draw out the frost. His solicitude at the moment was so natural
and earnest that it was hard to think he was my enemy.

When he had rubbed awhile, he gave me his own handkerchief to
dry my face; and so perfect was his courtesy, it was impossible to
do otherwise than meet him as he meant and showed for the moment.
He had stepped between me and death, and even an enemy who does
that, no matter what the motive, deserves something at your hands.

"Gabord," he said, as we stepped inside the citadel, "we will
breakfast at eight o'clock. Meanwhile, I have some duties with our
officers here. Till we meet in your dining-hall, then, monsieur,"
he added to me, and raised his cap.

"You must put up with frugal fare," I answered, bowing.

"If you but furnish locusts," he said gaily, "I will bring the
wild honey.... What wonderful hives of bees they have at the
Seigneur Duvarney's!" he continued musingly, as if with second
thought; "a beautiful manor--a place for pretty birds and
honey-bees!"

His eyelids drooped languidly, as was their way when he had said
something a little carbolic, as this was to me, because of its
hateful suggestion. His words drew nothing from me, not even a look
of understanding, and, again bowing, we went our ways.

At the door of the dungeon Gabord held the torch up to my face. His
own had a look which came as near to being gentle as was possible
to him. Yet he was so ugly that it looked almost ludicrous in him.
"Poom!" said he. "A friend at court. More comfits."

"You think Monsieur Doltaire gets comfits, too?" asked I.

He rubbed his cheek with a key. "Aho!" mused he--"aho! M'sieu'
Doltaire rises not early for naught."



XII

"THE POINT ENVENOMED TOO!"


I was roused by the opening of the door. Doltaire entered. He
advanced towards me with the manner of an admired comrade, and,
with no trace of what would mark him as my foe, said, as he
sniffed the air:

"Monsieur, I have been selfish. I asked myself to breakfast with
you, yet, while I love the new experience, I will deny myself in
this. You shall breakfast with me, as you pass to your new lodgings.
You must not say no," he added, as though we were in some salon. "I
have a sleigh here at the door, and a fellow has already gone to fan
my kitchen fires and forage for the table. Come," he went on, "let
me help you with your cloak."

He threw my cloak around me, and turned towards the door. I had not
spoken a word, for what with weakness, the announcement that I was
to have new lodgings, and the sudden change in my affairs, I was
like a child walking in its sleep. I could do no more than bow to
him and force a smile, which must have told more than aught else of
my state, for he stepped to my side and offered me his arm. I drew
back from that with thanks, for I felt a quick hatred of myself that
I should take favours of the man who had moved for my destruction,
and to steal from me my promised wife. Yet it was my duty to live if
I could, to escape if that were possible, to use every means to foil
my enemies. It was all a game; why should I not accept advances at
my enemy's hands, and match dissimulation with dissimulation?

When I refused his arm, he smiled comically, and raised his
shoulders in deprecation.

"You forget your dignity, monsieur," I said presently as we
walked on, Gabord meeting us and lighting us through the passages;
"you voted me a villain, a spy, at my trial!"

"Technically and publicly, you are a spy, a vulgar criminal," he
replied; "privately, you are a foolish, blundering gentleman."

"A soldier, also, you will admit, who keeps his compact with his
enemy."

"Otherwise we should not breakfast together this morning," he
answered. "What difference would it make to this government if our
private matter had been dragged in? Technically, you still would
have been the spy. But I will say this, monsieur, to me you are a
man better worth torture than death."

"Do you ever stop to think of how this may end for you?" I asked
quietly.

He seemed pleased with the question. "I have thought it might be
interesting," he answered; "else, as I said, you should long ago
have left this naughty world. Is it in your mind that we shall
cross swords one day?"

"I feel it in my bones," said I, "that I shall kill you."

At that moment we stood at the entrance to the citadel, where a
good pair of horses and a sleigh awaited us. We got in, the robes
were piled around us, and the horses started off at a long trot. I
was muffled to the ears, but I could see how white and beautiful was
the world, how the frost glistened in the trees, how the balsams
were weighted down with snow, and how snug the chateaux looked with
the smoke curling up from their hunched chimneys.

Presently Doltaire replied to my last remark. "Conviction is the
executioner of the stupid," said he. "When a man is not great
enough to let change and chance guide him, he gets convictions,
and dies a fool."

"Conviction has made men and nations strong," I rejoined.

"Has made men and nations asses," he retorted. "The Mohammmedan
has conviction, so has the Christian: they die fighting each other,
and the philosopher sits by and laughs. Expediency, monsieur,
expediency is the real wisdom, the true master of this world.
Expediency saved your life to-day; conviction would have sent you
to a starry home."

As he spoke a thought came in on me. Here we were in the open
world, travelling together, without a guard of any kind. Was it not
possible to make a dash for freedom? The idea was put away from me,
and yet it was a fresh accent of Doltaire's character that he
tempted me in this way. As if he divined what I thought, he said
to me--for I made no attempt to answer his question:

"Men of sense never confuse issues or choose the wrong time for
their purposes. Foes may have unwritten truces."

There was the matter in a nutshell. He had done nothing carelessly;
he was touching off our conflict with flashes of genius. He was the
man who had roused in me last night the fiercest passions of my
life, and yet this morning he had saved me from death, and, though
he was still my sworn enemy, I was about to breakfast with him.

Already the streets of the town were filling; for it was the day
before Christmas, and it would be the great market-day of the year.
Few noticed us as we sped along down Palace Street and I could not
conceive whither we were going, until, passing the Hotel Dieu, I
saw in front the Intendance. I remembered the last time I was there,
and what had happened then, and a thought flashed through me that
perhaps this was another trap. But I put it from me, and soon
afterwards Doltaire said:

"I have now a slice of the Intendance for my own, and we shall
breakfast like squirrels in a loft."

As we drove into the open space before the palace, a company of
soldiers standing before the great door began marching up to the
road by which we came. With them was a prisoner. I saw at once that
he was a British officer, but I did not recognize his face. I asked
his name of Doltaire, and found it was one Lieutenant Stevens, of
Rogers' Rangers, those brave New Englanders. After an interview
with Bigot he was being taken to the common jail. To my request
that I might speak with him Doltaire assented, and at a sign from
my companion the soldiers stopped. Stevens's eyes were fixed on me
with a puzzled, disturbed expression. He was well built, of intrepid
bearing, with a fine openness of manner joined to handsome features.
But there was a recklessness in his eye which seemed to me to come
nearer the swashbuckling character of a young French seigneur than
the wariness of a British soldier.

I spoke his name and introduced myself. His surprise and pleasure
were pronounced, for he had thought (as he said) that by this time
I would be dead. There was an instant's flash of his eye, as if a
suspicion of my loyalty had crossed his mind; but it was gone on
the instant, and immediately Doltaire, who also had interpreted the
look, smiled, and said he had carried me off to breakfast while the
furniture of my former prison was being shifted to my new one. After
a word or two more, with Stevens's assurance that the British had
recovered from Braddock's defeat and would soon be knocking at the
portals of the Chateau St. Louis, we parted, and soon Doltaire and
I got out at the high stone steps of the palace.

Standing there a moment, I looked round. In this space
surrounding the Intendance was gathered the history of New France.
This palace, large enough for the king of a European country with
a population of a million, was the official residence of the
commercial ruler of a province. It was the house of the miller, and
across the way was the King's storehouse, La Friponne, where poor
folk were ground between the stones. The great square was already
filling with people who had come to trade. Here were barrels of
malt being unloaded; there, great sacks of grain, bags of dried
fruits, bales of home-made cloth, and loads of fine-sawn boards and
timber. Moving about among the peasants were the regular soldiers
in their white uniforms faced with blue, red, yellow, or violet,
with black three-cornered hats, and black gaiters from foot to
knee, and the militia in coats of white with black facings. Behind
a great collar of dogskin a pair of jet-black eyes flashed out from
under a pretty forehead; and presently one saw these same eyes
grown sorrowful or dull under heavy knotted brows, which told of a
life too vexed by care and labour to keep alive a spark of youth's
romance. Now the bell in the tower above us rang a short peal, the
signal for the opening of La Friponne, and the bustling crowd moved
towards its doors. As I stood there on the great steps, I chanced
to look along the plain, bare front of the palace to an annex at
the end, and standing in a doorway opening on a pair of steps was
Voban. I was amazed that he should be there--the man whose life
had been spoiled by Bigot. At the same moment Doltaire motioned to
him to return inside; which he did.

Doltaire laughed at my surprise, and as he showed me inside
the palace said: "There is no barber in the world like Voban.
Interesting interesting! I love to watch his eye when he draws the
razor down my throat. It would be so easy to fetch it across; but
Voban, as you see, is not a man of absolute conviction. It will be
sport, some day, to put Bigot's valet to bed with a broken leg or
a fit of spleen, and send Voban to shave him."

"Where is Mathilde?" I asked, as though I knew naught of her
whereabouts.

"Mathilde is where none may touch her, monsieur; under the
protection of the daintiest lady of New France. It is her whim; and
when a lady is charming, an Intendant, even, must not trouble her
caprice."

He did not need to speak more plainly. It was he who had prevented
Bigot from taking Mathilde away from Alixe, and locking her up, or
worse. I said nothing, however, and soon we were in a large room,
sumptuously furnished, looking out on the great square. The morning
sun stared in, some snowbirds twittered on the window-sill, and
inside, a canary, in an alcove hung with plants and flowers, sang as
if it were the heart of summer. All was warm and comfortable, and it
was like a dream that I had just come from the dismal chance of a
miserable death. My cloak and cap and leggings had been taken from
me when I entered, as courteously as though I had been King Louis
himself, and a great chair was drawn solicitously to the fire. All
this was done by the servant, after one quick look from Doltaire.
The man seemed to understand his master perfectly, to read one look
as though it were a volume--

  "The constant service of the antique world."

Such was Doltaire's influence. The closer you came to him, the
more compelling was he--a devilish attraction, notably selfish, yet
capable of benevolence. Two years before this time I saw him lift
a load from the back of a peasant woman and carry it home for her,
putting into her hand a gold piece on leaving. At another time, an
old man had died of a foul disease in a miserable upper room of a
warehouse. Doltaire was passing at the moment when the body should
be carried to burial. The stricken widow of the dead man stood
below, waiting, but no one would fetch the body down. Doltaire
stopped and questioned her kindly, and in another minute he was
driving the carter and another upstairs at the point of his sword.
Together they brought the body down, and Doltaire followed it to
the burying-ground; keeping the gravedigger at his task when he
would have run away, and saying the responses to the priest in the
short service read above the grave.

I said to him then, "You rail at the world and scoff at men and
many decencies, and yet you do these things!"

To this he replied--he was in my own lodgings at the time--"The
brain may call all men liars and fools, but the senses feel the
shock of misery which we do not ourselves inflict. Inflicting,
we are prone to cruelty, as you have seen a schoolmaster begin
punishment with tears, grow angry at the shrinking back under his
cane, and give way to a sudden lust of torture. I have little pity
for those who can help themselves--let them fight or eat the leek;
but the child and the helpless and the sick it is a pleasure to
aid. I love the poor as much as I love anything. I could live their
life, if I were put to it. As a gentleman, I hate squalor and the
puddles of wretchedness but I could have worked at the plough or
the anvil; I could have dug in the earth till my knuckles grew big
and my shoulders hardened to a roundness, have eaten my beans and
pork and pea-soup, and have been a healthy ox, munching the bread
of industry and trailing the puissant pike, a diligent serf. I have
no ethics, and yet I am on the side of the just when they do not
put thorns in my bed to keep me awake at night!"

Upon the walls hung suits of armour, swords of beautiful make,
spears, belts of wonderful workmanship, a tattered banner, sashes
knit by ladies' fingers, pouches, bandoleers, and many strong
sketches of scenes that I knew well. Now and then a woman's head in
oils or pencil peeped out from the abundant ornaments. I recalled
then another thing he said at that time of which I write:

"I have never juggled with my conscience--never 'made believe'
with it. My will was always stronger than my wish for anything,
always stronger than temptation. I have chosen this way or that
deliberately. I am ever ready to face consequences, and never to
cry out. It is the ass who does not deserve either reward or
punishment who says that something carried him away, and, being
weak, he fell. That is a poor man who is no stronger than his
passions. I can understand the devil fighting God, and taking the
long punishment without repentance, like a powerful prince as he
was. I could understand a peasant, killing King Louis in the
palace, and being ready, if he had a hundred lives, to give them
all, having done the deed he set out to do. If a man must have
convictions of that sort, he can escape everlasting laughter--the
final hell--only by facing the rebound of his wild deeds."

These were strange sentiments in the mouth of a man who was ever
the mannered courtier, and as I sat there alone, while he was gone
elsewhere for some minutes, many such things he had said came back
to me, suggested, no doubt, by this new, inexplicable attitude
towards myself. I could trace some of his sentiments, perhaps
vaguely, to the fact that--as I had come to know through the
Seigneur Duvarney--his mother was of peasant blood, the beautiful
daughter of a farmer of Poictiers, who had died soon after giving
birth to Doltaire. His peculiar nature had shown itself in his
refusal to accept a title. It was his whim to be the plain
"Monsieur"; behind which was, perhaps, some native arrogancy which
made him prefer that to being a noble whose origin, well known,
must ever interfere with his ambitions. Then, too, maybe, the
peasant in him--never in his face or form, which were patrician
altogether--spoke for more truth and manliness than he was capable
of, and so he chose to be the cynical, irresponsible courtier, while
many of his instincts had urged him to the peasant's integrity. He
had undisturbed, however, one instinct of the peasant--a directness,
which was evident chiefly in the clearness of his thoughts.

As these things hurried through my mind, my body sunk in a kind
of restfulness before the great fire, Doltaire came back.

"I will not keep you from breakfast," said he. "Voban must wait,
if you will pass by untidiness."

A thought flashed through my mind. Maybe Voban had some word for
me from Alixe! So I said instantly, "I am not hungry. Perhaps you
will let me wait yonder while Voban tends you. As you said, it
should be interesting."

"You will not mind the disorder of my dressing-room? Well, then,
this way, and we can talk while Voban plays with temptation."

So saying, he courteously led the way into another chamber,
where Voban stood waiting. I spoke to him, and he bowed, but did
not speak; and then Doltaire said:

"You see, Voban, your labour on Monsieur was wasted so far as
concerns the world to come. You trimmed him for the glorious company
of the apostles, and see, he breakfasts with Monsieur Doltaire--in
the Intendance, too, my Voban, which, as you know, is wicked--a very
nest of wasps!"

I never saw more hate than shot out of Voban's eyes at that
moment; but the lids drooped over them at once, and he made ready
for his work, as Doltaire, putting aside his coat, seated himself,
laughing. There was no little daring, as there was cruelty, in thus
torturing a man whose life had been broken by Doltaire's associate.
I wondered now and then if Doltaire were not really putting acid on
the barber's bare nerves for some other purpose than mere general
cruelty. Even as he would have understood the peasant's murder of
King Louis, so he would have seen a logical end to a terrible game
in Bigot's death at the hand of Voban. Possibly he wondered that
Voban did not strike, and he himself took a delight in showing him
his own wrongs occasionally. Then, again, Doltaire might wish for
Bigot's death, to succeed him in his place! But this I put by as
improbable, for the Intendant's post was not his ambition, or,
favourite of La Pompadour as he was, he would, desiring, have
long ago achieved that end. Moreover, every evidence showed that
he would gladly return to France, for his clear brain foresaw the
final ruin of the colony and the triumph of the British. He had
once said in my hearing:

"Those swaggering Englishmen will keep coming on. They are too
stupid to turn back. The eternal sameness of it all will so
distress us we shall awake one morning, find them at our bedsides,
give a kick, and die from sheer ennui. They'll use our banners to
boil their fat puddings in, they'll roast oxen in the highways,
and after our girls have married them they'll turn them into
kitchen wenches with frowsy skirts and ankles like beeves!"

But, indeed, beneath his dangerous irony there was a strain of
impishness, and he would, if need be, laugh at his own troubles,
and torture himself as he had tortured others. This morning he
was full of a carbolic humour. As the razor came to his neck he
said:

"Voban, a barber must have patience. It is a sad thing to
mistake friend for enemy. What is a friend? Is it one who says
sweet words?"

There was a pause, in which the shaving went on, and then he
continued:

"Is it he who says, I have eaten Voban's bread, and Voban shall
therefore go to prison, or be hurried to Walhalla? Or is it he who
stays the iron hand, who puts nettles in Voban's cold, cold bed,
that he may rise early and go forth among the heroes?"

I do not think Voban understood that, through some freak of purpose,
Doltaire was telling him thus obliquely he had saved him from
Bigot's cruelty, from prison or death. Once or twice he glanced at
me, but not meaningly, for Doltaire was seated opposite a mirror,
and could see each motion made by either of us. Presently Doltaire
said to me idly:

"I dine to-day at the Seigneur Duvarney's. You will be glad to
hear that mademoiselle bids fair to rival the charming Madame
Cournal. Her followers are as many, so they say, and all in one
short year she has suddenly thrown out a thousand new faculties and
charms. Doubtless you remember she was gifted, but who would have
thought she could have blossomed so! She was all light and softness
and air; she is now all fire and skill as well. Matchless!
matchless! Every day sees her with some new capacity, some fresh
and delicate aplomb. She has set the town admiring, and jealous
mothers prophesy trist ending for her. Her swift mastery of the
social arts is weird, they say. La! la! The social arts! A good
brain, a gift of penetration, a manner--which is a grand necessity,
and it must be with birth--no heart to speak of, and the rest is
easy. No heart--there is the thing; with a good brain and senses all
warm with life--to feel, but never to have the arrow strike home.
You must never think to love and be loved, and be wise too. The
emotions blind the judgment. Be heartless, be perfect with heavenly
artifice, and, if you are a woman, have no vitriol on your
tongue--and you may rule at Versailles or Quebec. But with this
difference: in Quebec you may be virtuous; at Versailles you must
not. It is a pity that you may not meet Mademoiselle Duvarney. She
would astound you. She was a simple ballad a year ago; to-morrow she
may be an epic."

He nodded at me reflectively, and went on:

"'Mademoiselle,' said the Chevalier de la Darante to her at
dinner, some weeks ago, 'if I were young, I should adore you.'
'Monsieur,' she answered, 'you use that "if" to shirk the
responsibility.' That put him on his mettle. 'Then, by the gods,
I adore you now,' he answered. 'If I were young, I should blush
to hear you say so,' was her reply. 'I empty out my heart, and
away trips the disdainful nymph with a laugh,' he rejoined gaily,
the rusty old courtier; 'there's nothing left but to fall upon
my sword!' 'Disdainful nymphs are the better scabbards for
distinguished swords,' she said, with charming courtesy. Then,
laughing softly, 'There is an Egyptian proverb which runs thus:
"If thou, Dol, son of Hoshti, hast emptied out thy heart, and
it bring no fruit in exchange, curse not thy gods and die, but
build a pyramid in the vineyard where thy love was spent, and
write upon it, Pride hath no conqueror."' It is a mind for a
palace, is it not?"

I could see in the mirror facing him the provoking devilry of
his eyes. I knew that he was trying how much he could stir me. He
guessed my love for her, but I could see he was sure that she no
longer--if she ever had--thought of me. Besides, with a lover's
understanding, I saw also that he liked to talk of her. His eyes, in
the mirror, did not meet mine, but were fixed, as on some distant
and pleasing prospect, though there was, as always, a slight disdain
at his mouth. But the eyes were clear, resolute, and strong, never
wavering--and I never saw them waver--yet in them something distant
and inscrutable. It was a candid eye, and he was candid in his evil;
he made no pretense; and though the means to his ends were wicked,
they were never low. Presently, glancing round the room, I saw an
easel on which was a canvas. He caught my glance.

"Silly work for a soldier and a gentleman," he said, "but silliness
is a great privilege. It needs as much skill to carry folly as to be
an ambassador. Now, you are often much too serious, Captain Moray."

At that he rose, and, after putting on his coat, came over to
the easel and threw up the cloth, exposing a portrait of Alixe! It
had been painted in by a few bold strokes, full of force and life,
yet giving her face more of that look which comes to women bitterly
wise in the ways of this world than I cared to see. The treatment
was daring, and it cut me like a knife that the whole painting had
a red glow: the dress was red, the light falling on the hair was
red, the shine of the eyes was red also. It was fascinating, but
weird, and, to me, distressful. There flashed through my mind the
remembrance of Mathilde in her scarlet robe as she stood on the
Heights that momentous night of my arrest. I looked at the picture
in silence. He kept gazing at it with a curious, half-quizzical
smile, as if he were unconscious of my presence. At last he said,
with a slight knitting of his brows:

"It is strange--strange. I sketched that in two nights ago, by
the light of the fire, after I had come from the Chateau St.
Louis--from memory, as you see. It never struck me where the effect
was taken from, that singular glow over all the face and figure.
But now I see it; it returns: it is the impression of colour in the
senses, left from the night that lady-bug Mathilde flashed out on
the Heights! A fine--a fine effect! H'm! for another such one might
give another such Mathilde!"

At that moment we were both startled by a sound behind us, and,
wheeling, we saw Voban, a mad look in his face, in the act of
throwing at Doltaire a short spear which he had caught up from a
corner. The spear flew from his hand even as Doltaire sprang aside,
drawing his sword with great swiftness. I thought he must have been
killed, but the rapidity of his action saved him, for the spear
passed his shoulder so close that it tore away a shred of his coat,
and stuck in the wall behind him. In another instant Doltaire had
his sword-point at Voban's throat. The man did not cringe, did not
speak a word, but his hands clinched, and the muscles of his face
worked painfully. There was at first a fury in Doltaire's face and
a metallic hardness in his eyes, and I was sure he meant to pass
his sword through the other's body; but after standing for a moment,
death hanging on his sword-point, he quietly lowered his weapon,
and, sitting on a chair-arm, looked curiously at Voban, as one
might sit and watch a mad animal within a cage. Voban did not stir,
but stood rooted to the spot, his eyes, however, never moving
from Doltaire. It was clear that he had looked for death, and now
expected punishment and prison. Doltaire took out his handkerchief
and wiped a sweat from his cheeks. He turned to me soon, and said,
in a singularly impersonal way, as though he were speaking of some
animal:

"He had great provocation. The Duchess de Valois had a young panther
once which she had brought up from the milk. She was inquisitive,
and used to try its temper. It was good sport, but one day she
took away its food, gave it to the cat, and pointed her finger at
monsieur the panther. The Duchess de Valois never bared her breast
thereafter to an admiring world--a panther's claws leave scars." He
paused, and presently continued: "You remember it, Voban; you were
the Duke's valet then--you see I recall you! Well, the panther lost
his head, both figuratively and in fact. The panther did not mean to
kill, maybe, but to kill the lady's beauty was death to her....
Voban, yonder spear was poisoned!"

He wiped his face, and said to me, "I think you saw that at the
dangerous moment I had no fear; yet now when the game is in my own
hands, my cheek runs with cold sweat. How easy to be charged with
cowardice! Like evaporation, the hot breath of peril passing
suddenly into the cold air of safety leaves this!"--he wiped his
cheek again.

He rose, moved slowly to Voban, and, pricking him with his
sword, said, "You are a bungler, barber. Now listen. I never
wronged you; I have only been your blister. I prick your sores at
home. Tut! tut! they prick them openly in the market-place. I gave
you life a minute ago; I give you freedom now. Some day I may ask
that life for a day's use, and then, Voban, then will you give it?"

There was a moment's pause, and the barber answered, "M'sieu',
I owe you nothing. I would have killed you then; you may kill me,
if you will."

Doltaire nodded musingly. Something was passing through his
mind. I judged he was thinking that here was a man who as a servant
would be invaluable.

"Well, well, we can discuss the thing at leisure, Voban," he
said at last. "Meanwhile you may wait here till Captain Moray has
breakfasted, and then you shall be at his service; and I would
have a word with you, also."

Turning with a polite gesture to me, he led the way into the
breakfast-room, and at once, half famished, I was seated at the
table, drinking a glass of good wine, and busy with a broiled
whitefish of delicate quality. We were silent for a time, and the
bird in the alcove kept singing as though it were in Eden, while
chiming in between the rhythms there came the silvery sound of
sleigh-bells from the world without. I was in a sort of dream,
and I felt there must be a rude awakening soon. After a while,
Doltaire, who seemed thinking keenly, ordered the servant to take
in a glass of wine to Voban.

He looked up at me after a little, as if he had come back from a
long distance, and said, "It is my fate to have as foes the men I
would have as friends, and as friends the men I would have as foes.
The cause of my friends is often bad; the cause of my enemies is
sometimes good. It is droll. I love directness, yet I have ever
been the slave of complication. I delight in following my reason,
yet I have been of the motes that stumble in the sunlight. I have
enough cruelty in me, enough selfishness and will, to be a ruler,
and yet I have never held an office in my life. I love true
diplomacy, yet I have been comrade to the official liar, and am
the captain of intrigue--la! la!"

"You have never had an enthusiasm, a purpose?" said I.

He laughed, a dry, ironical laugh. "I have both an enthusiasm
and a purpose," he answered, "or you would by now be snug in bed
forever."

I knew what he meant, though he could not guess I understood.
He was referring to Alixe and the challenge she had given him.
I did not feel that I had anything to get by playing a part of
friendliness, and besides, he was a man to whom the boldest
speaking was always palatable, even when most against himself.

"I am sure neither would bear daylight," said I.

"Why, I almost blush to say that they are both honest--would at
this moment endure a moral microscope. The experience, I confess,
is new, and has the glamour of originality."

"It will not stay honest," I retorted. "Honesty is a new toy
with you. You will break it on the first rock that shows."

"I wonder," he answered, "I wonder, ... and yet I suppose you are
right. Some devilish incident will twist things out of gear, and
then the old Adam must improvise for safety and success. Yes, I
suppose my one beautiful virtue will get a twist."

What he had said showed me his mind as in a mirror. He had no
idea that I had the key to his enigmas. I felt as had Voban in
the other room. I could see that he had set his mind on Alixe,
and that she had roused in him what was perhaps the first honest
passion of his life.

What further talk we might have had I can not tell, but while we
were smoking and drinking coffee the door opened suddenly, and the
servant said, "His Excellency the Marquis de Vaudreuil!"

Doltaire got to his feet, a look of annoyance crossing his face;
but he courteously met the Governor, and placed a chair for him.
The Governor, however, said frostily, "Monsieur Doltaire, it must
seem difficult for Captain Moray to know who is Governor in Canada,
since he has so many masters. I am not sure who needs assurance
most upon the point, you or he. This is the second time he has
been feasted at the Intendance when he should have been in prison.
I came too late that other time; now it seems I am opportune."

Doltaire's reply was smooth: "Your Excellency will pardon the
liberty. The Intendance was a sort of halfway house between
the citadel and the jail."

"There is news from France," the Governor said, "brought from
Gaspe. We meet in council at the Chateau in an hour. A guard
is without to take Captain Moray to the common jail."

In a moment more, after a courteous good-by from Doltaire, and a
remark from the Governor to the effect that I had spoiled his
night's sleep to no purpose, I was soon on my way to the common
jail, where arriving, what was my pleased surprise to see Gabord!
He had been told off to be my especial guard, his services at the
citadel having been deemed so efficient. He was outwardly surly--as
rough as he was ever before the world, and without speaking a word
to me, he had a soldier lock me in a cell.



XIII

"A LITTLE BOAST"


My new abode was more cheerful than the one I had quitted in the
citadel. It was not large, but it had a window, well barred,
through which came the good strong light of the northern sky. A
wooden bench for my bed stood in one corner, and, what cheered me
much, there was a small iron stove. Apart from warmth, its fire
would be companionable, and to tend it a means of passing the time.
Almost the first thing I did was to examine it. It was round, and
shaped like a small bulging keg on end. It had a lid on top, and in
the side a small door with bars for draught, suggesting to me in
little the delight of a fireplace. A small pipe from the side
carried away the smoke into a chimney in the wall. It seemed to
me luxurious, and my spirits came back apace.

There was no fire yet, and it was bitter cold, so that I took to
walking up and down to keep warmth in me. I was ill nourished, and
I felt the cold intensely. But I trotted up and down, plans of
escape already running through my head. I was as far off as you can
imagine from that event of the early morning, when I stood waiting,
half frozen, to be shot by Lancy's men.

After I had been walking swiftly up and down for an hour or
more, slapping my hands against my sides to keep them warm--for it
was so cold I ached and felt a nausea--I was glad to see Gabord
enter with a soldier carrying wood and shavings. I do not think I
could much longer have borne the chilling air--a dampness, too, had
risen from the floor, which had been washed that morning--for my
clothes were very light in texture and much worn. I had had but the
one suit since I entered the dungeon, for my other suit, which
was by no means smart, had been taken from me when I was first
imprisoned the year before. As if many good things had been
destined to come at once, soon afterwards another soldier entered
with a knapsack, which he laid down on the bench. My delight was
great when I saw it held my other poor suit of clothes, together
with a rough set of woollens, a few handkerchiefs, two pairs of
stockings, and a wool cap for night wear.

Gabord did not speak to me at all, but roughly hurried the
soldier at his task of fire-lighting, and ordered the other to
fetch a pair of stools and a jar of water. Meanwhile I stood near,
watching, and stretched out my skinny hands to the grateful heat as
soon as the fire was lighted. I had a boy's delight in noting how
the draught pumped the fire into violence, shaking the stove till
it puffed and roared. I was so filled, that moment, with the
domestic spirit that I thought a steaming kettle on the little
stove would give me a tabby-like comfort.

"Why not a kettle on the hob?" said I gaily to Gabord.

"Why not a cat before the fire, a bit of bacon on the coals, a
pot of mulled wine at the elbow, and a wench's chin to chuck,
baby-bumbo!" said Gabord in a mocking voice, which made the
soldiers laugh at my expense. "And a spinet, too, for ducky dear,
Scarrat; a piece of cake and cherry wine, and a soul to go to
heaven! Tonnerre!" he added, with an oath, "these English prisoners
want the world for a sou, and they'd owe that till judgment
day."

I saw at once the meaning of his words, for he turned his back
on me and went to the window and tried the stanchions, seeming much
concerned about them, and muttering to himself. I drew out from my
pocket two gold pieces, and gave them to the soldier Scarrat; and
the other soldier coming in just then, I did the same with him; and
I could see that their respect for me mightily increased. Gabord,
still muttering, turned to us again, and began to berate the
soldiers for their laziness. As the two men turned to go, Scarrat,
evidently feeling that something was due for the gold I had given,
said to Gabord, "Shall m'sieu' have the kettle?"

Gabord took a step forward as if to strike the soldier, but stopped
short, blew out his cheeks, and laughed in a loud, mocking way.

"Ay, ay, fetch m'sieu' the kettle, and fetch him flax to spin, and
a pinch of snuff, and hot flannels for his stomach, and every night
at sundown you shall feed him with pretty biscuits soaked in milk.
Ah, go to the devil and fetch the kettle, fool!" he added roughly
again, and quickly the place was empty save for him and myself.

"Those two fellows are to sit outside your cage door, dickey-bird,
and two are to march beneath your window yonder, so you shall not
lack care if you seek to go abroad. Those are the new orders."

"And you, Gabord," said I, "are you not to be my jailer?" I said
it sorrowfully, for I had a genuine feeling for him, and I could
not keep that from my voice.

When I had spoken so feelingly, he stood for a moment, flushing
and puffing, as if confused by the compliment in the tone, and then
he answered, "I'm to keep you safe till word comes from the King
what's to be done with you."

Then he suddenly became surly again, standing with legs apart
and keys dangling; for Scarrat entered with the kettle, and put it
on the stove. "You will bring blankets for m'sieu'," he added, "and
there's an order on my table for tobacco, which you will send your
comrade for."

In a moment we were left alone.

"You'll live like a stuffed pig here," he said, "though 'twill
be cold o' nights."

After another pass or two of words he left me, and I hastened to
make a better toilet than I had done for a year. My old rusty suit
which I exchanged for the one I had worn seemed almost sumptuous,
and the woollen wear comforted my weakened body. Within an hour my
cell looked snug, and I sat cosily by the fire, feeding it lazily.

It must have been about four o'clock when there was a turning of
keys and a shooting of bolts, the door opened, and who should
step inside but Gabord, followed by Alixe! I saw Alixe's lips
frame my name thrice, though no word came forth, and my heart was
bursting to cry out and clasp her to my breast. But still with a
sweet, serious look cast on me, she put out her hand and stayed me.

Gabord, looking not at us at all, went straight to the window,
and, standing on a stool, busied himself with the stanchions and
to whistle. I took Alixe's hands and held them, and spoke her name
softly, and she smiled up at me with so perfect a grace that I
thought there never was aught like it in the world.

She was the first to break the good spell. I placed a seat for
her, and sat down by her. She held out her fingers to the fire, and
then, after a moment, she told me the story of last night's affair.
First she made me tell her briefly of the events of the morning, of
which she knew, but not fully. This done, she began. I will set
down her story as a whole, and you must understand as you read that
it was told as women tell a story, with all little graces and
diversions, and those small details with which even momentous
things are enveloped in their eyes. I loved her all the more
because of these, and I saw, as Doltaire had said, how admirably
poised was her intellect, how acute her wit, how delicate and
astute a diplomatist she was becoming; and yet, through all,
preserving a simplicity of character almost impossible of belief.
Such qualities, in her directed to good ends, in lesser women have
made them infamous. Once that day Alixe said to me, breaking off as
her story went on, "Oh, Robert, when I see what power I have to
dissimulate--for it is that, call it by what name you will--when I
see how I enjoy accomplishing against all difficulty, how I can
blind even so skilled a diplomatist as Monsieur Doltaire, I almost
tremble. I see how, if God had not given me something here"--she
placed her hand upon her heart--"that saves me, I might be like
Madame Cournal, and far worse, far worse than she. For I love
power--I do love it; I can see that!"

She did not realize that it was her strict honesty with herself
that was her true safeguard.

But here is the story she told me:

"When I left you, last night, I went at once to my home, and was
glad to get in without being seen. At nine o'clock we were to be
at the Chateau, and while my sister Georgette was helping me with
my toilette--oh, how I wished she would go and leave me quite
alone!--my head was in a whirl, and now and then I could feel
my heart draw and shake like a half-choked pump, and there was
a strange pain behind my eyes. Georgette is of such a warm
disposition, so kind always to me, whom she would yield to in
everything, so simple in her affections, that I seemed standing
there by her like an intrigante, as one who had got wisdom at the
price of a good something lost. But do not think, Robert, that for
one instant I was sorry I played a part, and have done so for a long
year and more. I would do it and more again, if it were for you.

"Georgette could not understand why it was I stopped all at once
and caught her head to my breast, as she sat by me where I stood
arranging my gown. I do not know quite why I did it, but perhaps
it was from my yearning that never should she have a lover in such
sorrow and danger as mine, and that never should she have to learn
to mask her heart as I have done. Ah, sometimes I fear, Robert,
that when all is over, and you are free, and you see what the world
and all this playing at hide-and-seek have made me, you will feel
that such as Georgette, who have never looked inside the hearts of
wicked people, and read the tales therein for knowledge to defeat
wickedness--that such as she were better fitted for your life and
love. No, no, please do not take my hand--not till you have heard
all I am going to tell."

She continued quietly; yet her eye flashed out now and then, and
now and then, also, something in her thoughts as to how she, a
weak, powerless girl, had got her ends against astute evil men,
sent a little laugh to her lips; for she had by nature as merry a
heart as serious.

"At nine o'clock we came to the Chateau St. Louis from Ste. Anne
Street, where our winter home is--yet how much do I prefer the Manor
House! There were not many guests to supper, and Monsieur Doltaire
was not among them. I affected a genial surprise, and asked the
Governor if one of the two vacant chairs at the table was for
monsieur; and looking a little as though he would reprove me--for
he does not like to think of me as interested in monsieur--he said
it was, but that monsieur was somewhere out of town, and there was
no surety that he would come. The other chair was for the Chevalier
de la Darante, one of the oldest and best of our nobility, who
pretends great roughness and barbarism, but is a kind and honourable
gentleman, though odd. He was one of your judges, Robert; and though
he condemned you, he said that you had some reason on your side. And
I will show you how he stood for you last night.

"I need not tell you how the supper passed, while I was
planning--planning to reach the Governor if monsieur did not come;
and if he did come, how to play my part so he should suspect
nothing but a vain girl's caprice, and maybe heartlessness. Moment
after moment went by, and he came not. I almost despaired. Presently
the Chevalier de la Darante entered, and he took the vacant chair
beside me. I was glad of this. I had gone in upon the arm of a
rusty gentleman of the Court, who is over here to get his health
again, and does it by gaming and drinking at the Chateau Bigot. The
Chevalier began at once to talk to me, and he spoke of you, saying
that he had heard of your duel with my brother, and that formerly
you had been much a guest at our house. I answered him with what
carefulness I could, and brought round the question of your death,
by hint and allusion getting him to speak of the mode of execution.

"Upon this point he spoke his mind strongly, saying that it was
a case where the penalty should be the musket, not the rope. It was
no subject for the supper table, and the Governor felt this, and I
feared he would show displeasure; but other gentlemen took up the
matter, and he could not easily change the talk at the moment. The
feeling was strong against you. My father stayed silent, but I could
see he watched the effect upon the Governor. I knew that he himself
had tried to get the mode of execution changed, but the Governor had
been immovable. The Chevalier spoke most strongly, for he is afraid
of no one, and he gave the other gentlemen raps upon the knuckles.

"'I swear,' he said at last, 'I am sorry now I gave in to his
death at all, for it seems to me that there is much cruelty and
hatred behind the case against him. He seemed to me a gentleman of
force and fearlessness, and what he said had weight. Why was the
gentleman not exchanged long ago? He was here three years before he
was tried on this charge. Ay, there's the point. Other prisoners
were exchanged--why not he? If the gentleman is not given a decent
death, after these years of captivity, I swear I will not leave
Kamaraska again to set foot in Quebec.'

"At that the Governor gravely said, 'These are matters for our
Council, dear Chevalier.' To this the Chevalier replied, 'I meant
no reflection on your Excellency, but you are good enough to let
the opinions of gentlemen not so wise as you weigh with you in your
efforts to be just; and I have ever held that one wise autocrat was
worth a score of juries.' There was an instant's pause, and then my
father said quietly, 'If his Excellency had always councillors and
colleagues like the Chevalier de la Darante, his path would be
easier, and Canada happier and richer.' This settled the matter,
for the Governor, looking at them both for a moment, suddenly said,
'Gentlemen, you shall have your way, and I thank you for your
confidence.--If the ladies will pardon a sort of council of state
here!' he added. The Governor called a servant, and ordered pen,
ink, and paper; and there before us all he wrote an order to Gabord,
your jailer, to be delivered before midnight.

"He had begun to read it aloud to us, when the curtains of the
entrance-door parted, and Monsieur Doltaire stepped inside. The
Governor did not hear him, and monsieur stood for a moment
listening. When the reading was finished, he gave a dry little
laugh, and came down to the Governor, apologizing for his lateness,
and bowing to the rest of us. He did not look at me at all, but
once he glanced keenly at my father, and I felt sure that he had
heard my father's words to the Governor.

"'Have the ladies been made councillors?' he asked lightly, and
took his seat, which was opposite to mine. 'Have they all conspired
to give a criminal one less episode in his life for which to
blush? ... May I not join the conspiracy?' he added, glancing round,
and lifting a glass of wine. Not even yet had he looked at me. Then
he waved his glass the circuit of the table, and said, 'I drink to
the councillors and applaud the conspirators,' and as he raised his
glass to his lips his eyes came abruptly to mine and stayed, and
he bowed profoundly and with an air of suggestion. He drank, still
looking, and then turned again to the Governor. I felt my heart
stand still. Did he suspect my love for you, Robert? Had he
discovered something? Was Gabord a traitor to us? Had I been
watched, detected? I could have shrieked at the suspense. I was
like one suddenly faced with a dreadful accusation, with which was
a great fear. But I held myself still--oh, so still, so still--and
as in a dream I heard the Governor say pleasantly, 'I would I had
such conspirators always by me. I am sure you would wish them to
take more responsibility than you will now assume in Canada.'
Doltaire bowed and smiled, and the Governor went on: 'I am sure
you will approve of Captain Moray being shot instead of hanged. But
indeed it has been my good friend the Chevalier here who has given
me the best council I have held in many a day.'

"To this Monsieur Doltaire replied: 'A council unknown to
statute, but approved of those who stand for etiquette with ones
foe's at any cost. For myself, it is so unpleasant to think of the
rope'" (here Alixe hid her face in her hands for a moment) "'that I
should eat no breakfast to-morrow, if the gentleman from Virginia
were to hang.' It was impossible to tell from his tone what was in
his mind, and I dared not think of his failure to interfere as he
had promised me. As yet he had done nothing, I could see, and in
eight or nine hours more you were to die. He did not look at me
again for some time, but talked to my mother and my father and the
Chevalier, commenting on affairs in France and the war between our
countries, but saying nothing of where he had been during the past
week. He seemed paler and thinner than when I last saw him, and I
felt that something had happened to him. You shall hear soon what
it was.

"At last he turned from the Chevalier to me, and, said, 'When
did you hear from your brother, mademoiselle?' I told him; and he
added, 'I have had a letter since, and after supper, if you will
permit me, I will tell you of it.' Turning to my father and my
mother, he assured them of Juste's well-being, and afterwards
engaged in talk with the Governor, to whom he seemed to defer.
When we all rose to go to the salon, he offered my mother his
arm, and I went in upon the arm of the good Chevalier. A few
moments afterwards he came to me, and remarked cheerfully, 'In this
farther corner where the spinet sounds most we can talk best'; and
we went near to the spinet, where Madame Lotbiniere was playing.
'It is true,' he began, 'that I have had a letter from your brother.
He begs me to use influence for his advancement. You see he writes
to me instead of to the Governor. You can guess how I stand in
France. Well, we shall see what I may do.... Have you not wondered
concerning me this week?' he asked. I said to him, 'I scarce
expected you till after to-morrow, when you would plead some
accident as cause for not fulfilling your pretty little boast.' He
looked at me sharply for a minute, and then said: 'A pretty LITTLE
boast, is it? H'm! you touch great things with light fingers.' I
nodded. 'Yes,' said I, 'when I have no great faith.' 'You have
marvellous coldness for a girl that promised warmth in her youth,'
he answered. 'Even I, who am old in these matters, can not think of
this Moray's death without a twinge, for it is not like an affair
of battle; but you seem to think of it in its relation to my
"little boast," as you call it. Is it not so?'

"'No, no,' said I, with apparent indignation, 'you must not make
me out so cruel. I am not so hard-hearted as you think. My brother
is well--I have no feeling against Captain Moray on his account;
and as for spying--well, it is only a painful epithet for what is
done here and everywhere all the time.' 'Dear me, dear me,' he
remarked lightly, 'what a mind you have for argument!--a born
casuist; and yet, like all women, you would let your sympathy rule
you in matters of state. But come,' he added, 'where do you think
I have been?' It was hard to answer him gaily, and yet it must be
done, and so I said, 'You have probably put yourself in prison,
that you should not keep your tiny boast.' 'I have been in prison,'
he answered, 'and I was on the wrong side, with no key--even locked
in a chest-room of the Intendance,' he explained, 'but as yet I do
not know by whom, nor am I sure why. After two days without food or
drink, I managed to get out through the barred window. I spent three
days in my room, ill, and here I am. You must not speak of this--you
will not?' he asked me. 'To no one,' I answered gaily, 'but my other
self.' 'Where is your other self?' he asked. 'In here,' said I,
touching my bosom. I did not mean to turn my head away when I said
it, but indeed I felt I could not look him in the eyes at the
moment, for I was thinking of you.

"He mistook me; he thought I was coquetting with him, and he leaned
forward to speak in my ear, so that I could feel his breath on my
cheek. I turned faint, for I saw how terrible was this game I was
playing; but oh, Robert, Robert,"--her hands fluttered towards me,
then drew back--"it was for your sake, for your sake, that I let his
hand rest on mine an instant, as he said: 'I shall go hunting THERE
to find your other self. Shall I know the face if I see it?' I drew
my hand away, for it was torture to me, and I hated him, but I only
said a little scornfully, 'You do not stand by your words. You
said'--here I laughed a little disdainfully--'that you would meet
the first test to prove your right to follow the second boast.'

"He got to his feet, and said in a low, firm voice: 'Your memory
is excellent, your aplomb perfect. You are young to know it all so
well. But you bring your own punishment,' he added, with a wicked
smile, 'and you shall pay hereafter. I am going to the Governor.
Bigot has arrived, and is with Madame Cournal yonder. You shall
have proof in half an hour.'

"Then he left me. An idea occurred to me. If he succeeded in
staying your execution, you would in all likelihood be placed in
the common jail. I would try to get an order from the Governor to
visit the jail to distribute gifts to the prisoners, as my mother
and I had done before on the day before Christmas. So, while
Monsieur Doltaire was passing with Bigot and the Chevalier de la
Darante into another room, I asked the Governor; and that very
moment, at my wish, he had his secretary write the order, which he
countersigned and handed me, with a gift of gold for the prisoners.
As he left my mother and myself, Monsieur Doltaire came back with
Bigot, and, approaching the Governor, they led him away, engaging
at once in serious talk. One thing I noticed: as monsieur and Bigot
came up, I could see monsieur eying the Intendant askance, as though
he would read treachery; for I feel sure that it was Bigot who
contrived to have monsieur shut up in the chest-room. I can not
quite guess the reason, unless it be true what gossips say, that
Bigot is jealous of the notice Madame Cournal has given Doltaire,
who visits much at her house.

"Well, they asked me to sing, and so I did; and can you guess
what it was? Even the voyageurs' song,--

  'Brothers, we go to the Scarlet Hills,
  (Little gold sun, come out of the dawn!)'

I know not how I sang it, for my heart, my thoughts, were far
away in a whirl of clouds and mist, as you may see a flock of wild
ducks in the haze upon a river, flying they know not whither, save
that they follow the sound of the stream. I was just ending the
song when Monsieur Doltaire leaned over me, and said in my ear,
'To-morrow I shall invite Captain Moray from the scaffold to my
breakfast-table--or, better still, invite myself to his own.' His
hand caught mine, as I gave a little cry; for when I felt sure of
your reprieve, I could not, Robert, I could not keep it back. He
thought I was startled at his hand-pressure, and did not guess the
real cause.

"'I have met one challenge, and I shall meet the other,' he said
quickly. 'It is not so much a matter of power, either; it is that
engine opportunity. You and I should go far in this wicked world,'
he added. 'We think together, we see through ladders. I admire you,
mademoiselle. Some men will say they love you; and they should, or
they have no taste; and the more they love you, the better pleased
am I--if you are best pleased with me. But it is possible for men to
love and not to admire. It is a foolish thing to say that reverence
must go with love. I know men who have lost their heads and their
souls for women whom they knew infamous. But when one admires where
one loves, then in the ebb and flow of passion the heart is safe,
for admiration holds when the sense is cold.'

"You know well, Robert, how clever he is; how, listening to him,
you must admit his talent and his power. But oh, believe that,
though I am full of wonder at his cleverness, I can not bear him
very near me."

She paused. I looked most gravely at her, as well one might who
saw so sweet a maid employing her heart thus, and the danger that
faced her. She misread my look a little, maybe, for she said at
once:

"I must be honest with you, and so I tell you all--all, else the
part I play were not possible to me. To you I can speak plainly,
pour out my soul. Do not fear for me. I see a battle coming between
that man and me, but I shall fight it stoutly, worthily, so that in
this, at least, I shall never have to blush for you that you loved
me. Be patient, Robert, and never doubt me; for that would make me
close the doors of my heart, though I should never cease to aid
you, never weary in labor for your well-being. If these things, and
fighting all these wicked men, to make Doltaire help me to save
you, have schooled to action some worse parts of me, there is yet
in me that which shall never be brought low, never be dragged to
the level of Versailles or the Chateau Bigot--never!"

She looked at me with such dignity and pride that my eyes filled
with tears, and, not to be stayed, I reached out and took her
hands, and would have clasped her to my breast, but she held back
from me.

"You believe in me, Robert?" she said most earnestly. "You will
never doubt me? You know that I am true and loyal."

"I believe in God, and you," I answered reverently, and I took
her in my arms and kissed her. I did not care at all whether or no
Gabord saw; but indeed he did not, as Alixe told me afterwards,
for, womanlike, even in this sweet crisis she had an eye for such
details.

"What more did he say?" I asked, my heart beating hard in the
joy of that embrace.

"No more, or little more, for my mother came that instant and
brought me to talk with the Chevalier de la Darante, who wished to
ask me for next summer to Kamaraska or Isle aux Coudres, where he
has manorhouses. Before I left Monsieur Doltaire, he said, 'I never
made a promise but I wished to break it. This one shall balance all
I've broken, for I'll never unwish it.'

"My mother heard this, and so I summoned all my will, and said
gaily, 'Poor broken crockery! You stand a tower among the ruins.'
This pleased him, and he answered, 'On the tower base is written,
This crockery outserves all others.' My mother looked sharply at
me, but said nothing, for she has come to think that I am heartless
and cold to men and to the world, selfish in many things."

At this moment Gabord turned round, saying, "'Tis time to be
done. Madame comes."

"It is my mother," said Alixe, standing up, and hastily placing
her hands in mine. "I must be gone. Good-bye, good-bye."

There was no chance for further adieu, and I saw her pass out with
Gabord; but she turned at the last, and said in English, for she
spoke it fairly now, "Believe, and remember."



XIV

ARGAND COURNAL


The most meagre intelligence came to me from the outer world. I
no longer saw Gabord; he had suddenly been with drawn and a new
jailer substituted, and the sentinels outside my door and beneath
the window of my cell refused all information. For months I had no
news whatever of Alixe or of those affairs nearest my heart. I
heard nothing of Doltaire, little of Bigot, and there was no sign
of Voban.

Sometimes I could see my new jailer studying me, if my plans were
a puzzle to his brain. At first he used regularly to try the bars
of the window, and search the wall as though he thought my devices
might be found there.

Scarrat and Flavelle, the guards at my door, set too high a
price on their favours, and they talked seldom, and then with
brutal jests and ribaldry, of matters in the town which were not
vital to me. Yet once or twice, from things they said, I came to
know that all was not well between Bigot and Doltaire on one hand,
and Doltaire and the Governor on the other. Doltaire had set the
Governor and the Intendant scheming against him because of his
adherence to the cause of neither, and his power to render the
plans of either of no avail when he chose, as in my case.
Vaudreuil's vanity was injured, and besides, he counted Doltaire
too strong a friend of Bigot. Bigot, I doubted not, found in Madame
Cournal's liking for Doltaire all sorts of things of which he never
would have dreamed; for there is no such potent devilry in this
world as the jealousy of such a sort of man over a woman whose
vanity and cupidity are the springs of her affections. Doltaire's
imprisonment in a room of the Intendance was not so mysterious as
suggestive. I foresaw a strife, a complication of intrigues, and
internal enmities which would be (as they were) the ruin of New
France. I saw, in imagination, the English army at the gates of
Quebec, and those who sat in the seats of the mighty, sworn to
personal enmities--Vaudreuil through vanity, Bigot through cupidity,
Doltaire by the innate malice of his nature--sacrificing the
country; the scarlet body of British power moving down upon a
dishonoured city, never to take its foot from that sword of France
which fell there on the soil of the New World.

But there was another factor in the situation which I have not
dwelt on before. Over a year earlier, when war was being carried
into Prussia by Austria and France, and against England, the ally
of Prussia, the French Minister of War, D'Argenson, had, by the
grace of La Pompadour, sent General the Marquis de Montcalm to
Canada, to protect the colony with a small army. From the first,
Montcalm, fiery, impetuous, and honourable, was at variance with
Vaudreuil, who, though honest himself, had never dared to make open
stand against Bigot. When Montcalm came, practically taking the
military command out of the hands of the Governor, Vaudreuil
developed a singular jealous spirit against the General. It began
to express itself about the time I was thrown into the citadel
dungeon, and I knew from what Alixe had told me, and from the
gossip of the soldiers, that there was a more open show of
disagreement now.

The Governor, seeing how ill it was to be at variance with both
Montcalm and Bigot, presently began to covet a reconciliation with
the latter. To this Bigot was by no means averse, for his own
position had danger. His followers and confederates, Cournal,
Marin, Cadet, and Rigaud, were robbing the King with a daring and
effrontery which must ultimately bring disaster. This he knew, but
it was his plan to hold on for a time longer, and then to retire
before the axe fell, with an immense fortune. Therefore, about the
time set for my execution, he began to close with the overtures of
the Governor, and presently the two formed a confederacy against the
Marquis de Montcalm. Into it they tried to draw Doltaire, and were
surprised to find that he stood them off as to anything more than
outward show of friendliness.

Truth was, Doltaire, who had no sordid feeling in him, loathed
alike the cupidity of Bigot and the incompetency of the Governor,
and respected Montcalm for his honour, and reproached him for his
rashness. From first to last, he was, without show of it, the best
friend Montcalm had in the province; and though he held aloof from
bringing punishment to Bigot, he despised him and his friends,
and was not slow to make that plain. D'Argenson made inquiry of
Doltaire when Montcalm's honest criticisms were sent to France in
cipher, and Doltaire returned the reply that Bigot was the only
man who could serve Canada efficiently in this crisis; that he had
abounding fertility of resource, a clear head, a strong will, and
great administrative faculty. This was all he would say, save that
when the war was over other matters might be conned. Meanwhile
France must pay liberally for the Intendant's services.

Through a friend in France, Bigot came to know that his affairs
were moving to a crisis, and saw that it would be wise to retire;
but he loved the very air of crisis, and Madame Cournal, anxious to
keep him in Canada, encouraged him in his natural feeling to stand
or fall with the colony. He never showed aught but a hold and
confident face to the public, and was in all regards the most
conspicuous figure in New France. When, two years before, Montcalm
took Oswego from the English, Bigot threw open his palace to the
populace for two days' feasting, and every night during the war he
entertained lavishly, though the people went hungry, and their own
corn, bought for the King, was sold back to them at famine prices.

As the Governor amid the Intendant grew together in friendship,
Vaudreuil sinking past disapproval in present selfish necessity,
they quietly combined against Doltaire as against Montcalm. Yet at
this very time Doltaire was living in the Intendance, and, as he
had told Alixe, not without some personal danger. He had before
been offered rooms at the Chateau St. Louis; but these he would
not take, for he could not bear to be within touch of the Governor's
vanity and timidity. He would of preference have stayed in the
Intendance had he known that pitfalls and traps were at every
footstep. Danger gave a piquancy to his existence. I think he did
not greatly value Madame Cournal's admiration of himself; but when
it drove Bigot to retaliation, his imagination got an impulse, and
he entered upon a conflict which ran parallel with the war, and
with that delicate antagonism which Alixe waged against him, long
undiscovered by himself.

At my wits' end for news, at last I begged my jailer to convey a
message for me to the Governor, asking that the barber be let
come to me. The next day an answer arrived in the person of Voban
himself, accompanied by the jailer. For a time there was little
speech between us, but as he tended me we talked. We could do
so with safety, for Voban knew English; and though he spoke it
brokenly, he had freedom in it, and the jailer knew no word of it.
At first the fellow blustered, but I waved him off. He was a man
of better education than Gabord, but of inferior judgment and
shrewdness. He made no trial thereafter to interrupt our talk, but
sat and drummed upon a stool with his keys, or loitered at the
window, or now and again thrust his hand into my pockets, as if
to see if weapons were concealed in them.

"Voban," said I, "what has happened since I saw you at the
Intendance? Tell me first of mademoiselle. You have nothing from
her for me?"

"Nothing," he answered. "There is no time. A soldier come an
hour ago with an order from the Governor, and I must go all at
once. So I come as you see. But as for the ma'm'selle, she is well.
Voila, there is no one like her in New France. I do not know
all, as you can guess, but they say she can do what she will at
the Chateau. It is a wonder to see her drive. A month ago, a
droll thing come to pass. She is driving on the ice with ma'm'selle
Lotbiniere and her brother Charles. M'sieu' Charles, he has
the reins. Soon, ver' quick, the horses start with all their might.
M'sieu' saw and pull, but they go the faster. Like that for a mile
or so; then ma'm'selle remember there is a great crack in the ice a
mile farther on, and beyond the ice is weak and rotten, for there
the curren' is ver' strongest. She see that M'sieu' Charles, he can
do nothing, so she reach and take the reins. The horses go on; it
make no diff'rence at first. But she begin to talk to them so sof',
and to pull ver' steady, and at last she get them shaping to the
shore. She have the reins wound on her hands, and people on the
shore, they watch. Little on little the horses pull up, and stop at
last not a hunder' feet from the great crack and the rotten ice.
Then she turn them round and drive them home.

"You should hear the people cheer as she drive up Mountain
Street. The bishop stand at the window of his palace and smile at
her as she pass, and m'sieu'"--he looked at the jailer and
paused--"m'sieu' the gentleman we do not love, he stand in the
street with his cap off for two minutes as she come, and after she
go by, and say a grand compliment to her, so that her face go pale.
He get froze ears for his pains--that was a cold day. Well, at night
there was a grand dinner at the Intendance, and afterwards a ball in
the splendid room which that man" (he meant Bigot: I shall use names
when quoting him further, that he may be better understood) "built
for the poor people of the land for to dance down their sorrows. So
you can guess I would be there--happy. Ah yes, so happy! I go and
stand in the great gallery above the hall of dance, with crowd of
people, and look down at the grand folk.

"One man come to me and say, 'Ah, Voban, is it you here? Who would
think it!'--like that. Another, he come and say, 'Voban, he can not
keep away from the Intendance. Who does he come to look for? But no,
SHE is not here--no.' And again, another, 'Why should not Voban be
here? One man has not enough bread to eat, and Bigot steals his
corn. Another hungers for a wife to sit by his fire, and Bigot takes
the maid, and Voban stuffs his mouth with humble pie like the rest.
Chut! shall not Bigot have his fill?' And yet another, and voila,
she was a woman, she say, 'Look at the Intendant down there with
madame. And M'sieu' Cournal, he also is there. What does M'sieu'
Cournal care? No, not at all. The rich man, what he care, if he has
gold? Virtue! ha, ha! what is that in your wife if you have gold for
it? Nothing. See his hand at the Intendant's arm. See how M'sieu'
Doltaire look at them, and then up here at us. What is it in his
mind, you think? Eh? You think he say to himself, A wife all to
himself is the poor man's one luxury? Eh? Ah, M'sieu' Doltaire, you
are right, you are right. You catch up my child from its basket in
the market-place one day, and you shake it ver' soft, an' you say,
"Madame, I will stake the last year of my life that I can put my
finger on the father of this child." And when I laugh in his face,
he say again, "And if he thought he wasn't its father, he would cut
out the liver of the other--eh?" And I laugh, and say, "My Jacques
would follow him to hell to do it." Then he say, Voban, he say to
me, "That is the difference between you and us. We only kill men who
meddle with our mistresses!" Ah, that M'sieu' Doltaire, he put a
louis in the hand of my babe, and he not even kiss me on the cheek.
Pshaw! Jacques would sell him fifty kisses for fifty louis. But sell
me, or a child of me? Well, Voban, you can guess! Pah, barber, if
you do not care what he did to the poor Mathilde, there are other
maids in St. Roch.'"

Voban paused a moment then added quietly, "How do you think I bear
it all? With a smile? No, I hear with my ears open and my heart
close tight. Do they think they can teach me? Do they guess I sit
down and hear all without a cry from my throat or a will in my body?
Ah, m'sieu' le Capitaine, it is you who know. You saw what I would
have go to do with M'sieu' Doltaire before the day of the Great
Birth. You saw if I am coward--if I not take the sword when it was
at my throat without a whine. No, m'sieu', I can wait. Then is a
time for everything. At first I am all in a muddle, I not how what
to do; but by-and-bye it all come to me, and you shall one day what
I wait for. Yes, you shall see. I look down on that people dancing
there, quiet and still, and I hear some laugh at me, and now and
then some one say a good word to me that make me shut my hands
tight, so the tears not come to my eyes. But I felt alone--so much
alone. The world does not want a sad man. In my shop I try to laugh
as of old, and I am not sour or heavy, but I can see men do not say
droll things to me as once back time. No, I am not as I was. What am
I to do? There is but one way. What is great to one man is not to
another. What kills the one does not kill the other. Take away from
some people one thing, and they will not care; from others that
same, and there is nothing to live for, except just to live, and
because a man does not like death."

He paused. "You are right, Voban," said I. "Go on."

He was silent again for a time, and then he moved his hand in a
helpless sort of way across his forehead. It had become deeply
lined and wrinkled all in a couple of years. His temples were
sunken, his cheeks hollow, and his face was full of those shadows
which lend a sort of tragedy to even the humblest and least
distinguished countenance. His eyes had a restlessness, anon an
intense steadiness almost uncanny, and his thin, long fingers had a
stealthiness of motion, a soft swiftness, which struck me strangly.
I never saw a man so changed. He was like a vessel wrested from its
moorings; like some craft, filled with explosives, set loose along
a shore lined with fishing-smacks, which might come foul of one,
and blow the company of men and boats into the air. As he stood
there, his face half turned to me for a moment, this came to my
mind, and I said to him, "Voban, you look like some wicked gun
which would blow us all to pieces."

He wheeled, and came to me so swiftly that I shrank back in my
chair with alarm, his action was so sudden, and, peering into my
face, he said, glancing, as I thought, anxiously at the jailer,
"Blow--blow--how blow us all to pieces, m'sieu'?" He eyed me with
suspicion, and I could see that he felt like some hurt animal among
its captors, ready to fight, yet not knowing from what point danger
would come. Something pregnant in what I said had struck home, yet
I could not guess then what it was, though afterwards it came to me
with great force and vividness.

"I meant nothing, Voban," answered I, "save that you look dangerous."

I half put out my hand to touch his arm in a friendly way, but I
saw that the jailer was watching, and I did not. Voban felt what I
was about to do, and his face instantly softened, and his blood-shot
eyes gave me a look of gratitude. Then he said:

"I will tell you what happen next I know the palace very well,
and when I see the Intendant and M'sieu' Doltaire and others leave
the ballroom I knew that they go to the chamber which they call 'la
Chambre de la Joie,' to play at cards. So I steal away out of the
crowd into a passage which, as it seem, go nowhere, and come quick,
all at once, to a bare wall. But I know the way. In one corner of
the passage I press a spring, and a little panel open. I crawl
through and close it behin'. Then I feel my way along the dark
corner till I come to another panel. This I open, and I see light.
You ask how I can do this? Well, I tell you. There is the valet of
Bigot, he is my friend. You not guess who it is? No? It is a man
whose crime in France I know. He was afraid when he saw me here,
but I say to him, 'No, I will not speak--never'; and he is all
my friend just when I most need. Eh, voila, I see light, as I said,
and I push aside heavy curtains ver' little, and there is the
Chamber of the Joy below. There they all are, the Intendant and the
rest, sitting down to the tables. There was Capitaine Lancy, M'sieu'
Cadet, M'sieu' Cournal, M'sieu' le Chevalier de Levis, and M'sieu'
le Generale, le Marquis de Montcalm. I am astonish to see him there,
the great General, in his grand coat of blue and gold and red, and
laces tres beau at his throat, with a fine jewel. Ah, he is not ver'
high on his feet, but he has an eye all fire, and a laugh come quick
to his lips, and he speak ver' galant, but he never let them,
Messieurs Cadet, Marin, Lancy, and the rest, be thick friends with
him. They do not clap their hands on his shoulder comme le bon
camarade--non!

"Well, they sit down to play, and soon there is much noise and
laughing, and then sometimes a silence, and then again the noise,
and you can see one snuff a candle with the points of two rapiers,
or hear a sword jangle at a chair, or listen to some one sing ver'
soft a song as he hold a good hand of cards, or the ring of louis
on the table, or the sound of glass as it break on the floor. And
once a young gentleman--alas! he is so young--he get up from his
chair, and cry out, 'All is lost! I go to die!' He raise a pistol
to his head; but M'sieu' Doltaire catch his hand, and say quite
soft and gentle, 'No, no, mon enfant, enough of making fun
of us. Here is the hunder' louis I borrow of you yesterday. Take
your revenge.' The lad sit down slow, looking ver' strange at
M'sieu' Doltaire. And it is true: he took his revenge out of
M'sieu' Cadet, for he win--I saw it--three hunder' louis. Then
M'sieu' Doltaire lean over to him and say, 'M'sieu', you will
carry for me a message to the citadel for M'sieu' Ramesay, the
commandant.' Ah, it was a sight to see M'sieu' Cadet's face, going
this way and that. But it was no use: the young gentleman pocket
his louis, and go away with a letter from M'sieu' Doltaire. But
M'sieu' Doltaire, he laugh in the face of M'sieu' Cadet, and say
ver' pleasant, 'That is a servant of the King, m'sieu', who live by
his sword alone. Why should civilians be so greedy? Come, play,
M'sieu' Cadet. If M'sieu' the General will play with me, we two
will what we can do with you and his Excellency the Intendant.'

"They sit just beneath me, and I hear all what is said, I see all
the looks of them, every card that is played. M'sieu' the General
have not play yet, but watch M'sieu' Doltaire and the Intendant at
the cards. With a smile he now sit down. Then M'sieu' Doltaire, he
say, 'M'sieu' Cadet, let us have no mistake--let us be commercial.'
He take out his watch. 'I have two hours to spare; are you dispose
to play for that time only? To the moment we will rise, and there
shall be no question of satisfaction, no discontent anywhere--eh,
shall it be so, if m'sieu' the General can spare the time also?' It
is agree that the General play for one hour and go, and that M'sieu'
Doltaire and the Intendant play for the rest of the time.

"They begin, and I hide there and watch. The time go ver' fast,
and my breath catch in my throat to see how great the stakes they
play for. I hear M'sieu' Doltaire say at last, with a smile, taking
out his watch, 'M'sieu' the General, your time is up, and you take
with you twenty thousan' francs.'

"The General, he smile and wave his hand, as if sorry to take so
much from M'sieu' Cadet and the Intendant. M'sieu' Cadet sit dark,
and speak nothing at first, but at last he get up and turn on his
heel and walk away, leaving what he lose on the table. M'sieu' the
General bow also, and go from the room. Then M'sieu' Doltaire and
the Intendant play. One by one the other players stop, and come and
watch these. Something get into the two gentlemen, for both are
pale, and the face of the Intendant all of spots, and his little
round eyes like specks of red fire; but M'sieu' Doltaire's face,
it is still, and his brows bend over, and now and then he make a
little laughing out of his lips. All at once I hear him say, 'Double
the stakes, your Excellency!' The Intendant look up sharp and say,
'What! Two hunder' thousan' francs!'--as if M'sieu' Doltaire could
not pay such a like that. M'sieu' Doltaire smile ver' wicked, and
answer, 'Make it three hunder' thousan' francs, your Excellency.' It
is so still in the Chamber of the Joy that all you hear for a minute
was the fat Monsieur Varin breathe like a hog, and the rattle of a
spur as some one slide a foot on the floor.

"The Intendant look blank; then he nod his head for answer, and
each write on a piece of paper. As they begin, M'sieu' Doltaire
take out his watch and lay it on the table, and the Intendant
do the same, and they both look at the time. The watch of the
Intendant is all jewels. 'Will you not add the watches to the
stake?' say M'sieu' Doltaire. The Intendant look, and shrug a
shoulder, and shake his head for no, and M'sieu' Doltaire smile in
a sly way, so that the Intendant's teeth show at his lips and his
eyes almost close, he is so angry.

"Just this minute I hear a low noise behind me, and then some
one give a little cry. I turn quick and Madame Cournal. She stretch
her hand, and touch my lips, and motion me not to stir. I look down
again, and I see that M'sieu' Doltaire look up to the where I am,
for he hear that sound, I think--I not know sure. But he say once
more, 'The watch, the watch, your Excellency! I have a fancy for
yours!' I feel madame breathe hard beside me, but I not like to
look at her. I am not afraid of men, but a woman that way--ah, it
make me shiver! She will betray me, I think. All at once I feel her
hand at my belt, then at my pocket, to see if I have a weapon; for
the thought come to her that I am there to kill Bigot. But I raise
my hands and say, 'No,' ver' quiet, and she nod her head all right.

"The Intendant wave his hand at M'sieu' Doltaire to say he would
not stake the watch, for I know it is one madame give him; and then
they begin to play. No one stir. The cards go out flip, flip, on the
table, and with a little soft scrape in the hands, and I hear
Bigot's hound much a bone. All at once M'sieu' Doltaire throw down
his cards, and say, 'Mine, Bigot! Three hunder' thousan' francs,
and the time is up!' The other get from his chair, and say, 'How
would you have pay if you had lost, Doltaire?' And m'sieu' answer,
'From the coffers of the King, like you, Bigot' His tone is odd.
I feel madame's breath go hard. Bigot turn round and say to the
others, 'Will you take your way to the great hall, messieurs,
and M'sieu' Doltaire and I will follow. We have some private
conf'rence.' They all turn away, all but M'sieu' Cournal, and leave
the room, whispering. 'I will join you soon, Cournal,' say his
Excellency. M'sieu' Cournal not go, for he have been drinking, and
something stubborn got into him. But the Intendant order him rough,
and he go. I can hear madame gnash her teeth sof' beside me.

"When the door close, the Intendant turn to M'sieu' Doltaire and
say, 'What is the end for which you play?' M'sieu' Doltaire make a
light motion of his hand, and answer, 'For three hunder' thousan'
francs.' 'And to pay, m'sieu', how to pay if you have lost?'
M'sieu' Doltaire lay his hand on his sword sof'. 'From the King's
coffers, as I say; he owes me more than he has paid. But not like
you, Bigot. I have earned, this way and that, all that I might ever
get from the King's coffers--even this three hunder' thousan'
francs, ten times told. But you, Bigot--tush! why should we make
bubbles of words?' The Intendant get white in the face, but there
are spots on it like on a late apple of an old tree. 'You go too
far, Doltaire,' he say. 'You have hint before my officers and my
friends that I make free with the King's coffers.' M'sieu' answer,
'You should see no such hints, if your palms were not musty.' 'How
know you,' ask the Intendant, 'that my hands are musty from the
King's coffers?' M'sieu' arrange his laces, and say light, 'As
easy from the must as I tell how time passes in your nights by the
ticking of this trinket here.' He raise his sword and touch the
Intendant's watch on the table.

"I never hear such silence as there is for a minute, and then the
Intendant say, 'You have gone one step too far. The must on my
hands, seen through your eyes, is no matter, but when you must the
name of a lady there is but one end. You understan', m'sieu', there
is but one end.' M'sieu' laugh. 'The sword, you mean? Eh? No, no,
I will not fight with you. I am not here to rid the King of so
excellent an officer, however large fee he force for his services.'
'And I tell you,' say the Intendant, 'that I will not have you cast
a slight upon a lady.' Madame beside me start up, and whisper to
me, 'If you betray me, you shall die. If you be still, I too will
say nothing.' But then a thing happen. Another voice sound from
below, and there, coming from behind a great screen of oak wood, is
M'sieu' Cournal, his face all red with wine, his hand on his sword.
'Bah!' he say, coming forward--'bah! I will speak for madame. I
will speak. I have been silent long enough.' He come between the
two, and, raising his sword, he strike the time-piece and smash it.
'Ha! ha!' he say, wild with drink, 'I have you both here alone.' He
snap his fingers under the Intendant's nose. 'It is time I protect
my wife's name from you, and by God, I will do it!' At that M'sieu'
Doltaire laugh, and Cournal turn to him, and say, 'Batard!' The
Intendant have out his sword, and he roar in a hoarse voice, 'Dog,
you shall die!' But M'sieu' Doltaire strike up his sword, and face
the drunken man. 'No, leave that to me. The King's cause goes
shipwreck; we can't change helmsman now. Think--scandal and your
disgrace!' Then he make a pass at m'sieu' Cournal, who parry quick.
Another, and he prick his shoulder. Another, and then madame beside
me, as I spring back, throw aside the curtains, and cry out, 'No,
m'sieu'! no! For shame!'

"I kneel in a corner behind the curtains, and wait and listen.
There is not a sound for a moment; then I hear a laugh from M'sieu'
Cournal, such a laugh make me sick--loud, and full of what you call
not care and the devil. Madame speak down at them. 'Ah,' she say,
'it is so fine a sport to drag a woman's name in the mire!' Her
voice is full of spirit. and she look beautiful--beautiful. I never
guess how a woman like that look; so full of pride, and to speak
like you could think knives sing as they strike steel--sharp and
cold. 'I came to see how gentlemen look at play, and they end in
brawling over a lady!'

"M'sieu' Doltaire speak to her, and they all put up their swords,
and M'sieu' Cournal sit down at a table, and he stare and stare
up at the balcony, and make a motion now and then with his
hand. M'sieu' Doltaire say to her, 'Madame, you must excuse
our entertainment; we did not know we had an audience so
distinguished.' She reply, 'As scene-shifter and prompter, M'sieu'
Doltaire, you have a gift. Your Excellency,' she say to the
Intendant, 'I will wait for you at the top of the great staircase,
if you will be so good as to take me to the ballroom.' The
Intendant and M'sieu' Doltaire bow, and turn to the door, and
M'sieu' Cournal scowl, and make as if to follow; but madame speak
down at him, 'M'sieu'--Argand'--like that! and he turn back, and sit
down. I think she forget me, I keep so still. The others bow and
scrape, and leave the room, and the two are alone--alone, for what
am I? What if a dog hear great people speak? No, it is no matter!

"There is all still for a little while, and I watch her face as
she lean over the rail and look down at him; it is like stone, like
stone that aches, and her eyes stare and stare at him. He look up
at her and scowl; then he laugh, with a toss of the finger, and sit
down. All at once he put his hand on his sword, and gnash his teeth.

"Then she speak down to him, her voice ver' quiet. 'Argand,' she
say, 'you are more a man drunk than sober. Argand,' she go on,
'years ago, they said you were a brave man; you fight well, you
do good work for the King, your name goes with a sweet sound to
Versailles. You had only your sword and my poor fortune and me
then--that is all; but you were a man. You had ambition, so had I.
What can a woman do? You had your sword, your country, the King's
service. I had beauty; I wanted power--ah yes, power, that was the
thing! But I was young and a fool; you were older. You talked fine
things then, but you had a base heart, so much baser than mine....
I might have been a good woman. I was a fool, and weak, and vain,
but you were base--so base--coward and betrayer, you!'

"At that m'sieu' start up and snatch at his sword, and speak out
between his teeth, 'By God, I will kill you to-night!' She smile
cold and hard, and say, 'No, no, you will not; it is too late for
killing; that should have been done before. You sold your right to
kill long ago, Argand Cournal. You have been close friends with the
man who gave me power, and you gold.' Then she get fierce. 'Who
gave you gold before he gave me power, traitor?' Like that she
speak. 'Do you never think of what you have lost?' Then she break
out in a laugh. 'Pah! Listen: if there must be killing, why not be
the great Roman--drunk!'

"Then she laugh so hard a laugh, and turn away, and go quick by
me and not see me. She step into the dark, and he sit down in the
chair, and look straight in front of him. I do not stir, and after
a minute she come back sof', and peep down, her face all differen'.
'Argand! Argand!' she say ver' tender and low, 'if--if--if'--like
that. But just then he see the broken watch on the floor, and he
stoop, with a laugh, and pick up the pieces; then he get a candle
and look on the floor everywhere for the jewels, and he pick them
up, and put them away one by one in his purse like a miser. He keep
on looking, and once the fire of the candle burn his beard, and he
swear, and she stare and stare at him. He sit down at the table,
and look at the jewels and laugh to himself. Then she draw herself
up, and shake, and put her hands to her eyes, and 'C'est fini!
c'est fini!' she whisper, and that is all.

"When she is gone, after a little time he change--ah, he change
much, he go to a table and pour out a great bowl of wine, and then
another, and he drink them both, and he begin to walk up and down
the floor. He sway now and then, but he keep on for a long time.
Once a servant come, but he wave him away, and he scowl and talk to
himself, and shut the doors and lock them. Then he walk on and on.
At last he sit down, and he face me. In front of him are candles,
and he stare between them, and stare and stare. I sit and watch,
and I feel a pity. I hear him say, 'Antoinette! Antoinette! My dear
Antoinette! We are lost forever, my Antoinette!' Then he take the
purse from his pocket, and throw it up to the balcony where I am.
'Pretty sins,' he say, 'follow the sinner!' It lie there, and it
have sprung open, and I can see the jewels shine, but I not touch
it--no. Well, he sit there long--long, and his face get gray and
his cheeks all hollow.

"I hear the clock strike one! two! three! four! Once some
one come and try the door, but go away again, and he never stir;
he is like a dead man. At last I fall asleep. When I wake up, he
still sit there, but his head lie in his arms. I look round. Ah,
it is not a fine sight--no. The candles burn so low, and there is
a smell of wick, and the grease runs here and there down the great
candlesticks. Upon the floor, this place and that, is a card, and
pieces of paper, and a scarf, and a broken glass, and something
that shine by a small table. This is a picture in a little gold
frame. On all the tables stand glasses, some full, and some empty of
wine. And just as the dawn come in through the tall windows, a cat
crawl out from somewhere, all ver' thin and shy, and walk across the
floor; it make the room look so much alone. At last it come and move
against m'sieu's legs, and he lift his head and look down at it, and
nod, and say something which I not hear. After that he get up, and
pull himself together with a shake, and walk down the room. Then
he see the little gold picture on the floor which some drunk young
officer drop, and he pick it up and look at it, and walk again.
'Poor fool!' he say, and look at the picture again. 'Poor fool! Will
he curse her some day--a child with a face like that? Ah!' And he
throw the picture down. Then he walk away to the doors, unlock them,
and go out. Soon I steal away through the panels, and out of the
palace ver' quiet, and go home. But I can see that room in my mind."

Again the jailer hurried Voban; There was no excuse for him to
remain longer; so I gave him a message to Alixe, and slipped into
his hand a transcript from my journal. Then he left me, and I sat
and thought upon the strange events of the evening which he had
described to me. That he was bent on mischief I felt sure, but
how it would come, what were his plans, I could not guess. Then
suddenly there flashed into my mind my words to him, "blow us all
to pieces," and his consternation and strange eagerness. It came
to me suddenly: he meant to blow up the Intendance. When? And how?
It seemed absurd to think of it. Yet--yet-- The grim humour of the
thing possessed me, and I sat back and laughed heartily.

In the midst of my mirth the cell door opened and let in Doltaire.



XV

IN THE CHAMBER OF TORTURE


I started from my seat; we bowed, and, stretching out a hand to
the fire, Doltaire said, "Ah, my Captain, we meet too seldom. Let
me see: five months--ah yes, nearly five months. Believe me, I have
not breakfasted so heartily since. You are looking older--older.
Solitude to the active mind is not to be endured alone--no."

"Monsieur Doltaire is the surgeon to my solitude," said I.

"H'm!" he answered, "a jail surgeon merely. And that brings me
to a point, monsieur. I have had letters from France. The Grande
Marquise--I may as well be frank with you--womanlike, yearns
violently for those silly letters which you hold. She would sell
our France for them. There is a chance for you who would serve your
country so. Serve it, and yourself--and me. We have no news yet as
to your doom, but be sure it is certain. La Pompadour knows all,
and if you are stubborn, twenty deaths were too few. I can save you
little longer, even were it my will so to do. For myself, the great
lady girds at me for being so poor an agent. You, monsieur"--he
smiled whimsically--"will agree that I have been persistent--and
intelligent."

"So much so," rejoined I, "as to be intrusive."

He smiled again. "If La Pompadour could hear you, she would
understand why I prefer the live amusing lion to the dead dog. When
you are gone, I shall be inconsolable. I am a born inquisitor."

"You were born for better things than this," I answered.

He took a seat and mused for a moment. "For larger things, you
mean," was his reply. "Perhaps--perhaps. I have one gift of the
strong man--I am inexorable when I make for my end. As a general,
I would pour men into the maw of death as corn into the hopper,
if that would build a bridge to my end. You call to mind how those
Spaniards conquered the Mexique city which was all canals like
Venice? They filled the waterways with shattered houses and the
bodies of their enemies, as they fought their way to Montezuma's
palace. So I would know not pity if I had a great cause. In anything
vital I would have success at all cost, and to get, destroy as I
went--if I were a great man."

I thought for a moment with horror of his pursuit of my dear
Alixe. "I am your hunter," had been his words to her, and I knew
not what had happened in all these months.

"If you were a great man, you should have the best prerogative
of greatness," I remarked quietly.

"And what is that? Some excellent moral, I doubt not," was the
rejoinder.

"Mercy," I replied.

"Tush!" he retorted, "mercy is for the fireside, not for the
throne. In great causes, what is a screw of tyranny here, a bolt of
oppression there, or a few thousand lives!" He suddenly got to his
feet, and, looking into the distance, made a swift motion of his
hand, his eyes half closed, his brows brooding and firm. "I should
look beyond the moment, the year, or the generation. Why fret
because the hour of death comes sooner than we looked for? In the
movement of the ponderous car, some honest folk must be crushed
by the wicked wheels. No, no, in large affairs there must be no
thought of the detail of misery, else what should be done in the
world! He who is the strongest shall survive, and he alone. It is
all conflict--all. For when conflict ceases, and those who could
and should be great spend their time chasing butterflies among the
fountains, there comes miasma and their doom. Mercy? Mercy? No, no:
for none but the poor and sick and overridden, in time of peace; in
time of war, mercy for none, pity nowhere, till the joybells ring
the great man home."

"But mercy to women always," said I, "in war or peace."

He withdrew his eyes as if from a distant prospect, and they
dropped to the stove, where I had corn parching. He nodded, as if
amused, but did not answer at once, and taking from my hand the
feather with which I stirred the corn, softly whisked some off for
himself, and smiled at the remaining kernels as they danced upon
the hot iron. After a little while he said, "Women? Women should
have all that men can give them. Beautiful things should adorn
them; no man should set his hand in cruelty on a woman--after she
is his. Before--before? Woman is wilful, and sometimes we wring
her heart that we may afterwards comfort it."

"Your views have somewhat changed," I answered. "I mind when you
talked less sweetly."

He shrugged a shoulder. "That man is lost who keeps one mind
concerning woman. I will trust the chastity of no woman, yet I will
trust her virtue--if I have her heart. They a foolish tribe, and
all are vulnerable in their vanity. They of consequence to man, of
no consequence in state matters. When they meddle there, we have La
Pompadour and war with England, and Captain Moray in the Bastile of
New France."

"You come from a court, monsieur, which believes in nothing, not
even in itself."

"I come from a court," he rejoined, "which has made a gospel of
artifice, of frivolity a creed; buying the toys for folly with the
savings of the poor. His most Christian Majesty has set the fashion
of continual silliness and universal love. He begets children in
the peasant's oven and in the chamber of Charlemagne alike. And we
are all good subjects of the King. We are brilliant, exquisite,
brave, and naughty; and for us there is no to-morrow."

"Nor for France," I suggested.

He laughed, as he rolled a kernel of parched corn on his tongue.
"Tut, tut! that is another thing. We the fashion of an hour, but
France is a fact as stubborn as the natures of you English; for
beyond stubbornness and your Shakespeare you have little. Down
among the moles, in the peasants' huts, the spirit of France never
changes--it is always the same; it is for all time. You English,
nor all others, you can not blow out that candle which is the spirit
of France. I remember of the Abbe Bobon preaching once upon the
words, 'The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord'; well, the
spirit of France is the candle of Europe, and you English will be
its screen against the blowing out, though in spasms of stupidity
you flaunt the extinguisher. You--you have no imagination, no
passion, no temperament, no poetry. Yet I am wrong. The one thing
you have--"

He broke off, nodding his head in amusement. "Yes, you have, but
it is a secret. You English are the true lovers, we French the true
poets; and I will tell you why. You are a race of comrades, the
French of gentlemen; you cleave to a thing, we to an idea; you love
a woman best when she is near, we when she is away; you make a
romance of marriage, we of intrigue; you feed upon yourselves, we
upon the world; you have fever in your blood, we in our brains; you
believe the world was made in seven days, we have no God; you would
fight for the seven days, we would fight for the danseuse on a
bonbon box. The world will say 'fie!' at us and love us; it will
respect you and hate you. That is the law and the gospel," he
added, smiling.

"Perfect respect casteth out love" said I ironically.

He waved his fingers in approval. "By the Lord, but you are pungent
now and then!" he answered; "cabined here you are less material. By
the time you are chastened unto heaven you will be too companionable
to lose."

"When is that hour of completed chastening?" I asked.

"Never," he said, "if you will oblige me with those
letters."

"For a man of genius you discern but slowly," retorted I.

"Discern your amazing stubbornness?" he asked. "Why should you
play at martyr, when your talent is commercial? You have no gifts
for martyrdom but wooden tenacity. Pshaw! the leech has that.
You mistake your calling."

"And you yours," I answered. "This is a poor game you play, and
losing it you lose all. La Pompadour will pay according to the
goods you bring."

He answered with an amusing candour: "Why, yes, you are partly in
the right. But when La Pompadour and I come to our final reckoning,
when it is a question who can topple ruins round the King quickest,
his mistress or his 'cousin,' there will be tales to tell."

He got up, and walked to and fro in the cell, musing, and his
face grew dark and darker. "Your Monmouth was a fool," he said.
"He struck from the boundaries; the blow should fall in the very
chambers of the King." He put a finger musingly upon his lip. "I
see--I see how it could be done. Full of danger, but brilliant,
brilliant and bold! Yes, yes...yes!" Then all at once he seemed to
come out of a dream, and laughed ironically. "There it is," he
said; "there is my case. I have the idea, but I will not strike; it
is not worth the doing unless I am driven to it. We are brave
enough, we idlers," he went on; "we die with an air--all artifice,
artifice! ... Yet of late I have had dreams. Now that is not well.
It is foolish to dream, and I had long since ceased to do so. But
somehow all the mad fancies of my youth come back. This dream will
go, it will not last; it is--my fate, my doom," he added lightly,
"or what you will!"

I knew, alas, too well where his thoughts were hanging, and I
loathed him anew; for, as he hinted, his was a passion, not a deep
abiding love. His will was not stronger than the general turpitude
of his nature. As if he had divined my thought, he said, "My
will is stronger than any passion that I have; I can never plead
weakness in the day of my judgment. I am deliberate. When I choose
evil it is because I love it. I could be an anchorite; I am, as I
said--what you will."

"You are a conscienceless villain, monsieur."

"Who salves not his soul," he added, with a dry smile, "who will
play his game out as he began; who repents nor ever will repent of
anything; who for him and you some interesting moments yet. Let me
make one now," and he drew from his pocket a packet. He smiled
hatefully as he handed it to me, and said, "Some books which
monsieur once lent Mademoiselle Duvarney--poems, I believe.
Mademoiselle found them yesterday, and desired me to fetch them
to you; and I obliged her. I had the pleasure of glancing through
the books before she rolled them up. She bade me say that monsieur
might find them useful in his captivity. She has a tender
heart--even to the worst of criminals."

I felt a strange churning in my throat, but with composure I
took the books, and said, "Mademoiselle Duvarney chooses
distinguished messengers."

"It is a distinction to aid her in her charities," he replied.

I could not at all conceive what was meant. The packet hung in
my hands like lead. There was a mystery I could not solve. I would
not for an instant think what he meant to convey by a look--that
her choice of him to carry back my gift to her was a final repulse
of past advances I had made to her, a corrective to my romantic
memories. I would not believe that, not for one fleeting second.
Perhaps, I said to myself, it was a ruse of this scoundrel. But
again, I put that from me, for I did not think he would stoop to
little meannesses, no matter how vile he was in great things. I
assumed indifference to the matter, laying the packet down upon my
couch, and saying to him, "You will convey my thanks to Mademoiselle
Duvarney for these books, whose chief value lies in the honourable
housing they have had."

He smiled provokingly; no doubt he was thinking that my studied
compliment smelt of the oil of solitude. "And add--shall I--your
compliments that they should have their airing at the hands of
Monsieur Doltaire?"

"I shall pay those compliments to Monsieur Doltaire himself one
day," I replied.

He waved his fingers. "The sentiments of one of the poems were
commendable, fanciful. I remember it"--he put a finger to his
lip--"let me see." He stepped towards the packet, but I made a sign
of interference--how grateful was I of this afterwards!--and he drew
back courteously. "Ah well," he said, "I have a fair memory; I can,
I think, recall the morsel. It impressed me. I could not think the
author an Englishman. It runs thus," and with admirable grace he
recited the words:

  "O flower of all the world, O flower of all!
    The garden where thou dwellest is so fair,
  Thou art so goodly and so queenly tall,
    Thy sweetness scatters sweetness everywhere,
        O flower of all!

  "O flower of all the years, O flower of all!
    A day beside thee is a day of days;
  Thy voice is softer than the throstle's call,
    There is not song enough to sing thy praise,
        O flower of all!

  "O flower of all the years, O flower of all!
    I seek thee in thy garden, and I dare
  To love thee; and though my deserts be small,
    Thou art the only flower I would wear,
        O flower of all!"

"Now that," he said, "is the romantic, almost the Arcadian
spirit. We have lost it, but it lingers like some rare scent in the
folds of lace. It is also but artifice, yet so is the lingering
perfume. When it hung in the flower it was lost after a day's life,
but when gathered and distilled into an essence it becomes, through
artifice, an abiding sweetness. So with your song there. It is the
spirit of devotion, gathered, it may be, from a thousand flowers,
and made into an essence, which is offered to one only. It is not
the worship of this one, but the worship of a thousand distilled at
last to one delicate liturgy. So much for sentiment," he continued.
"Upon my soul, Captain Moray, you are a boon. I love to have you
caged. I shall watch your distressed career to its close with deep
scrutiny. You and I are wholly different, but you are interesting.
You never could be great. Pardon the egotism, but it is truth. Your
brain works heavily, you are too tenacious of your conscience, you
are a blunderer. You will always sow, and others will reap."

I waved my hand in deprecation, for I was in no mood for further
talk, and I made no answer. He smiled at me, and said, "Well, since
you doubt my theories, let us come, as your Shakespeare says, to
Hecuba.... If you will come with me," he added, as he opened my
cell door, and motioned me courteously to go outside. I drew back,
and he said, "There is no need to hesitate; I go to show you merely
what will interest you."

We passed in silence through the corridors, two sentinels
attending, and at last came into a large square room, wherein stood
three men with hands tied over their heads against the wall, their
faces twitching with pain. I drew back in astonishment, for there,
standing before them, were Gabord and another soldier. Doltaire
ordered from the room the soldier with Gabord, and my two sentinels,
and motioned me to one of two chairs set in the middle of the floor.

Presently his face became hard and cruel, and he said to the
tortured prisoners, "You will need to speak the truth, and
promptly. I have an order to do with you what I will, and I will
do it without pause. Hear me. Three nights ago, as Mademoiselle
Duvarney was returning from the house of a friend living near the
Intendance, she was set upon by you. A cloak was thrown over her
head, she was carried to a carriage, where two of you got inside
with her. Some gentlemen and myself were coming that way. We heard
the lady's cries, and two gave chase to the carriage, while one
followed the others. By the help of soldier Gabord here you all
were captured. You have hung where you are for two days, and now
I shall have you whipped. When that is done, you shall tell your
story. If you do not speak truth, you shall be whipped again, and
then hung. Ladies shall have safety from rogues like you."

Alixe's danger told in these concise words made me, I am sure,
turn pale; but Doltaire did not see it, he was engaged with the
prisoners. As I thought and wondered, four soldiers were brought
in, and the men were made ready for the lash. In vain they pleaded
they would tell their story at once. Doltaire would not listen; the
whipping first, and their story after. Soon their backs were bared,
their faces were turned to the wall, and, as Gabord with harsh
voice counted, the lashes were mercilessly laid on. There was a
horrible fascination in watching the skin corrugate under the
lashes, rippling away in red and purple blotches, the grooves in
the flesh crossing and recrossing, the raw misery spreading from
the hips to the shoulders. Now and again Doltaire drew out a box
and took a pinch of snuff, and once, coolly and curiously, he
walked up to the most stalwart prisoner and felt his pulse, then
to the weakest, whose limbs and body had stiffened as though dead.
"Ninety-seven! Ninety-eight! Ninety-nine!" growled Gabord, and
then came Doltaire's voice:

"Stop! Now fetch some brandy."

The prisoners were loosened, and Doltaire spoke sharply to a
soldier who was roughly pulling one man's shirt over the excoriated
back. Brandy was given by Gabord, and the prisoners stood, a most
pitiful sight, the weakest livid.

"Now tell your story," said Doltaire to this last.

The man, with broken voice and breath catching, said that they
had erred. They had been hired to kidnap Madame Cournal, not
Mademoiselle Duvarney.

Doltaire's eyes flashed. "I see, I see," he said aside to me.
"The wretch speaks truth."

"Who was your master?" he asked of the sturdiest of the
villains; and he was told that Monsieur Cournal had engaged them.
To the question what was to be done with Madame Cournal, another
answered that she was to be waylaid as she was coming from the
Intendance, kidnapped, and hurried to a nunnery to be imprisoned
for life.

Doltaire sat for a moment, looking at the men in silence. "You
are not to hang," he said at last; "but ten days hence, when you
have had one hundred lashes more, you shall go free. Fifty for
you," he continued to the weakest who had first told the story.

"Not fifty nor one!" was the shrill reply, and, being unbound,
the prisoner snatched something from a bench near; there was a
flash of steel, and he came huddling in a heap on the floor,
muttering a malediction on the world.

"There was some bravery in that," said Doltaire, looking at the
dead man. "If he has friends, hand over the body to them. This
matter must not be spoken of--at your peril," he added sternly.
"Give them food and brandy."

Then he accompanied me to my cell, and opened the door. I passed
in, and he was about going without a word, when on a sudden his old
nonchalance came back, and he said:

"I promised you a matter of interest. You have had it. Gather
philosophy from this: you may with impunity buy anything from a
knave and fool except his nuptial bed. He throws the money in your
face some day."

So saying he plunged in thought again, and left me.



XVI

BE SAINT OR IMP


Immediately I opened the packet. As Doltaire had said, the two books
of poems I had lent Alixe were there, and between the pages of one
lay a letter addressed to me. It was, indeed, a daring thing to make
Doltaire her messenger. But she trusted to his habits of courtesy;
he had no small meannesses--he was no spy or thief.

DEAR ROBERT (the letter ran): I know not if this will ever reach
you, for I am about to try a perilous thing, even to make Monsieur
Doltaire my letter-carrier. Bold as it is, I hope to bring it
through safely.

You must know that my mother now makes Monsieur Doltaire welcome to
our home, for his great talents and persuasion have so worked upon
her that she believes him not so black as he is painted. My father,
too, is not unmoved by his amazing address and complaisance. I do
not think he often cares to use his arts--he is too indolent; but
with my father, my mother, and my sister he has set in motion all
his resources.

Robert, all Versailles is here. This Monsieur Doltaire speaks for
it. I know not if all courts in the world are the same, but if so,
I am at heart no courtier; though I love the sparkle, the sharp
play of wit and word, the very touch-and-go of weapons. I am in
love with life, and I wish to live to be old, very old, that I will
have known it all, from helplessness to helplessness again, missing
nothing, even though much be sad to feel and bear. Robert, I should
have gone on many years, seeing little, knowing little, I think, if
it had not been for you and for your troubles, which are mine, and
for this love of ours, builded in the midst of sorrows. Georgette
is now as old as when I first came to love you, and you were thrown
into the citadel, and yet in feeling and experience, I am ten years
older than she; and necessity has made me wiser. Ah, if necessity
would but make me happy too, by giving you your liberty, that on
these many miseries endured we might set up a sure home. I wonder
if you think--if you think of that: a little home away from all
these wars, aloof from vexing things.

But there! all too plainly I am showing you my heart. Yet it is
so great a comfort to speak on paper to you, in this silence here.
Can you guess where is that HERE, Robert? It is not the Chateau
St. Louis--no. It is not the Manor. It is the chateau, dear Chateau
Alixe--my father has called it that--on the Island of Orleans.
Three days ago I was sick at heart, tired of all the junketings
and feastings, and I begged my mother to fetch me here, though it
is yet but early spring, and snow is on the ground.

First, you must know that this new chateau is built upon, and is
joined to, the ruins of an old one, owned long years ago by the
Baron of Beaugard, whose strange history you must learn some day,
out of the papers we have found here. I begged my father not to
tear the old portions of the manor down, but, using the first
foundations, put up a house half castle and half manor. Pictures
of the old manor were found, and so we have a place that is no
patchwork, but a renewal. I made my father give me the old
surviving part of the building for my own, and so it is.

It is all set on high ground abutting on the water almost at the
point where I am, and I have the river in my sight all day. Now,
think yourself in the new building. You come out of a dining-hall,
hung all about with horns and weapons and shields and such bravery,
go through a dark, narrow passage, and then down a step or two.
You open a door, bright light breaks on your eyes, then two steps
lower, and you are here with me. You might have gone outside the
dining-hall upon a stone terrace, and so have come along to the
deep window where I sit so often. You may think of me hiding in the
curtains, watching you, though you knew it not till you touched the
window and I came out quietly, startling you, so that your heart
would beat beyond counting.

As I look up towards the window, the thing first in sight is the
cage, with the little bird which came to me in the cathedral the
morning my brother got lease of life again: you DO remember--is it
not so? It never goes from my room, and though I have come here
but for a week I muffled the cage well and brought it over; and
there the bird swings and sings the long day through. I have heaped
the window-seats with soft furs, and one of these I prize most
rarely. It was a gift--and whose, think you? Even a poor soldier's.
You see I have not all friends among the great folk. I often lie
upon that soft robe of sable--ay, sable, Master Robert--and think
of him who gave it to me. Now I know you are jealous, and I can see
your eyes flash up. But you shall at once be soothed. It is no other
than Gabord's gift. He is now of the Governor's body-guard, and
I think is by no means happy, and would prefer service with the
Marquis de Montcalm, who goes not comfortably with the Intendant
and the Governor.

One day Gabord came to our house on the ramparts, and, asking
for me, blundered out, "Aho, what shall a soldier do with sables?
They are for gentles and for wrens to snuggle in. Here comes a
Russian count oversea, and goes mad in tavern. Here comes Gabord,
and saves count from ruddy crest for kissing the wrong wench. Then
count falls on Gabord's neck, and kisses both his ears, and gives
him sables, and crosses oversea again; and so good-bye to count and
his foolery. And sables shall be ma'm'selle's, if she will have
them." He might have sold the thing for many louis, and yet he
brought it to me; and he would not go till he had seen me sitting
on it, muffling my hands and face in the soft fur.

Just now, as I am writing, I glance at the table where I sit--a
small brown table of oak, carved with the name of Felise,
Baroness of Beaugard. She sat here; and some day, when you hear
her story, you will know why I begged Madame Lotbiniere to give
it to me in exchange for another, once the King's. Carved, too,
beneath her name, are the words, "Oh, tarry thou the Lord's
leisure."

And now you shall laugh with me at a droll thing Georgette has
given me to wipe my pen upon. There are three little circles of
deerskin and one of ruby velvet, stitched together in the centre.
Then, standing on the velvet is a yellow wooden chick, with little
eyes of beads, and a little wooden bill stuck in most quaintly,
and a head that twists like a weathercock. It has such a piquant
silliness of look that I laugh at it most heartily, and I have an
almost elfish fun in smearing its downy feathers. I am sure you
did not think I could be amused so easily. You shall see this silly
chick one day, humorously ugly and all daubed with ink.

There is a low couch in one corner of the room, and just above
hangs a picture of my mother. In another corner is a little shelf
of books, among them two which I have studied constantly since you
were put in prison--your great Shakespeare, and the writings of one
Mr. Addison. I had few means of studying at first, so difficult
it seemed, and all the words sounded hard; but there is your
countryman, one Lieutenant Stevens of Rogers' Rangers, a prisoner,
and he has helped me, and is ready to help you when the time comes
for stirring. I teach him French; and though I do not talk of you,
he tells me in what esteem you are held in Virginia and in England,
and is not slow to praise you on his own account, which makes me
more forgiving when he would come to sentiment!

In another corner is my spinning-wheel, and there stands a
harpsichord, just where the soft sun sends in a ribbon of light;
and I will presently play for you a pretty song. I wonder if you
can hear it? Where I shall sit at the harpsichord the belt of
sunlight will fall across my shoulder, and, looking through the
window, I shall see your prison there on the Heights; the silver
flag with its gold lilies on the Chateau St. Louis; the great
guns of the citadel; and far off at Beauport the Manor House and
garden which you and I know so well, and the Falls of Montmorenci,
falling like white flowing hair from the tall cliff.

You will care to know of how these months have been spent, and
what news of note there is of the fighting between our countries.
No matters of great consequence have come to our ears, save that
it is thought your navy may descend on Louisburg; that Ticonderoga
is also to be set upon, and Quebec to be besieged in the coming
summer. From France the news is various. Now, Frederick of Prussia
and England defeat the allies, France, Russia, and Austria; now,
they, as Monsieur Doltaire says, "send the great Prussian to
verses and the megrims." For my own part, I am ever glad to hear
that our cause is victorious, and letters that my brother writes
me rouse all my ardour for my country. Juste has grown in place
and favour, and in his latest letter he says that Monsieur
Doltaire's voice has got him much advancement. He also remarks
that Monsieur Doltaire has reputation for being one of the most
reckless, clever, and cynical men in France. Things that he has
said are quoted at ball and rout. Yet the King is angry with him,
and La Pompadour's caprice may send him again to the Bastile.
These things Juste heard from D'Argenson, Minister of War, through
his secretary, with whom he is friendly.

I will now do what I never thought to do: I will send you here
some extracts from my journal, which will disclose to you the
secrets of a girl's troubled heart. Some folk might say that I am
unmaidenly in this. But I care not, I fear not.


December 24. I was with Robert to-day. I let him see what trials I
had had with Monsieur Doltaire, and what were like to come. It hurt
me to tell him, yet it would have hurt me more to withhold them. I
am hurt whichever way it goes. Monsieur Doltaire rouses the worst
parts of me. On the one hand I detest him for his hatred of Robert
and for his evil life, yet on the other I must needs admire him for
his many graces--why are not the graces of the wicked horrible?--for
his singular abilities, and because, gamester though he may be, he
is no public robber. Then, too, the melancholy of his birth and
history claims some sympathy. Sometimes when I listen to him speak,
hear the almost piquant sadness of his words, watch the spirit of
isolation which, by design or otherwise, shows in him, for the
moment I am conscious of a pity or an interest which I flout in
wiser hours. This is his art, the potent danger of his personality.

To-night he came, and with many fine phrases wished us a happy
day to-morrow, and most deftly worked upon my mother and Georgette
by looking round and speaking with a quaint sort of raillery--half
pensive, it was--of the peace of this home-life of ours; and indeed,
he did it so inimitably that I was not sure how much was false
and how much true. I tried to avoid him to-day, but my mother as
constantly made private speech between us easy. At last he had
his way, and then I was not sorry; for Georgette was listening to
him with more colour than she is wont to wear. I would rather see
her in her grave than with her hand in his, her sweet life in his
power. She is unschooled in the ways of the world, and she never
will know it as I now do. How am I sounding all the depths! Can a
woman walk the dance with evil, and be no worse for it by-and-bye?
Yet for a cause, for a cause! What can I do? I can not say,
"Monsieur Doltaire, you must not speak with me, or talk with me;
you are a plague-spot." No, I must even follow this path, so it
but lead at last to Robert and his safety.

Monsieur, having me alone at last, said to me, "I have kept my
word as to the little boast: this Captain Moray still lives."

"You are not greater than I thought," said I.

He professed to see but one meaning in my words, and answered,
"It was then mere whim to see me do this thing, a lady's curious
mind, eh? My faith, I think your sex are the true scientists:
you try experiment for no other reason than to see effect."

"You forget my deep interest in Captain Moray," said I, with airy
boldness.

He laughed. He was disarmed. How could he think I meant it! "My
imagination halts," he rejoined. "Millennium comes when you are
interested. And yet," he continued, "it is my one ambition to
interest you, and I will do it, or I will say my prayers no more."

  "But how can that be done no more,
  Which ne'er was done before?"

I retorted, railing at him, for I feared to take him seriously.

"There you wrong me," he said. "I am devout; I am a lover of the
Scriptures--their beauty haunts me; I go to mass--its dignity
affects me; and I have prayed, as in my youth I wrote verses. It
is not a matter of morality, but of temperament. A man may be
religious and yet be evil. Satan fell, but he believed and he
admired, as the English Milton wisely shows it."

I was most glad that my father came between us at that moment;
but before Monsieur left, he said to me, "You have challenged
me. Beware: I have begun this chase. Yet I would rather be your
follower, rather have your arrow in me, than be your hunter." He
said it with a sort of warmth, which I knew was a glow in his
senses merely; he was heated with his own eloquence.

"Wait," returned I. "You have heard the story of King Artus?"

He thought a moment. "No, no. I never was a child as other
children. I was always comrade to the imps."

"King Artus," said I, "was most fond of hunting." (It is but a
legend with its moral, as you know.) "It was forbidden by the
priests to hunt while mass was being said. One day, at the lifting
of the host, the King, hearing a hound bay, rushed out, and
gathered his pack together; but as they went, a whirlwind caught
them up into the air, where they continue to this day, following
a lonely trail, never resting, and all the game they get is one
fly every seventh year. And now, when all on a sudden at night you
hear the trees and leaves and the sleepy birds and crickets stir,
it is the old King hunting--for the fox he never gets."

Monsieur looked at me with curious intentness. "You have a great
gift," he said; "you make your point by allusion. I follow you.
But see: when I am blown into the air I shall not ride alone.
Happiness is the fox we ride to cover, you and I, though we find
but a firefly in the end."

"A poor reply," I remarked easily; "not worthy of you."

"As worthy as I am of you," he rejoined; then he kissed my hand.
"I will see you at mass to-morrow."

Unconsciously, I rubbed the hand he kissed with my handkerchief.

"I am not to be provoked," he said. "It is much to have you treat
my kiss with consequence."


March 25. No news of Robert all this month. Gabord has been away
in Montreal. I see Voban only now and then, and he is strange in
manner, and can do nothing. Mathilde is better--so still and
desolate, yet not wild; but her memory is all gone, all save for
that "Francois Bigot is a devil." My father has taken anew a
strong dislike to Monsieur Doltaire, because of talk that is
abroad concerning him and Madame Cournal. I once thought she was
much sinned against, but now I am sure she is not to be defended.
She is most defiant, though people dare not shut their doors
against her. A change seemed to come over her all at once,
and over her husband also. He is now gloomy and taciturn, now
foolishly gay, yet he is little seen with the Intendant, as
before. However it be, Monsieur Doltaire and Bigot are no longer
intimate. What should I care for that, if Monsieur Doltaire had no
power, if he were not the door between Robert and me? What care I,
indeed, how vile he is, so he but serve my purpose? Let him try my
heart and soul and senses as he will; I will one day purify myself
of his presence and all this soiling, and find my peace in Robert's
arms--or in the quiet of a nunnery.

This morning I got up at sunrise, it being the Annunciation of
the Virgin, and prepared to go to mass in the chapel of the
Ursulines. How peaceful was the world! So still, so still. The
smoke came curling up here and there through the sweet air of
spring, a snowbird tripped along the white coverlet of the earth,
and before a Calvary, I saw a peasant kneel and say an Ave as he
went to market. There was springtime in the sun, in the smell of
the air; springtime everywhere but in my heart, which was all
winter. I seemed alone--alone--alone. I felt the tears start. But
that was for a moment only, I am glad to say, for I got my courage
again, as I did the night before when Monsieur Doltaire placed his
arm at my waist, and poured into my ears a torrent of protestations.

I did not move at first. But I could feel my cheeks go to stone,
and something clamp my heart. Yet had ever man such hateful
eloquence! There is that in him--oh, shame! oh, shame!--which goes
far with a woman. He has the music of passion, and though it is
lower than love, it is the poetry of the senses. I spoke to him
calmly, I think, begging him place his merits where they would have
better entertainment; but I said hard, cold things at last, when
other means availed not; which presently made him turn upon me in
another fashion.

His words dropped slowly, with a consummate carefulness, his
manner was pointedly courteous, yet there was an underpressure of
force, of will, which made me see the danger of my position. He
said that I was quite right; that he would wish no privilege of a
woman which was not given with a frank eagerness; that to him no
woman was worth the having who did not throw her whole nature into
the giving. Constancy--that was another matter. But a perfect gift
while there was giving at all--that was the way.

"There is something behind all this," he said. "I am not so
vain as to think any merits of mine would influence you. But my
devotion, my admiration of you, the very force of my passion,
should move you. Be you ever so set against me--and I do not
think you are--you should not be so strong to resist the shock of
feeling. I do not know the cause, but I will find it out; and when
I do, I shall remove it or be myself removed." He touched my arm
with his fingers. "When I touch you like that," he said, "summer
riots in my veins. I will not think that this which rouses me so
is but power upon one side, and effect upon the other. Something
in you called me to you, something in me will wake you yet. Mon
Dieu, I could wait a score of years for my touch to thrill you
as yours does me! And I will--I will."

"You think it suits your honour to force my affections?" I asked;
for I dared not say all I wished.

"What is there in this reflecting on my honour?" he answered.
"At Versailles, believe me, they would say I strive here for a
canonizing. No, no; think me so gallant that I follow you to serve
you, to convince you that the way I go is the way your hopes will
lie. Honour? To fetch you to the point where you and I should
start together on the Appian Way, I would traffic with that, even,
and say I did so, and would do so a thousand times, if in the end
it put your hand in mine. Who, who can give you what I offer, can
offer? See: I have given myself to a hundred women in my time--but
what of me? That which was a candle in a wind, and the light went
out. There was no depth, no life, in that; only the shadow of a
man was there those hundred times. But here, now, the whole man
plunges into this sea, and he will reach the lighthouse on the
shore, or be broken on the reefs. Look in my eyes, and see the
furnace there, and tell me if you think that fire is for cool
corners in the gardens at Neuilly or for the Hills of--" He suddenly
broke off, and a singular smile followed. "There, there," he said,
"I have said enough. It came to me all at once how droll my speech
would sound to our people at Versailles. It is an elaborate irony
that the occasional virtues of certain men turn and mock them. That
is the penalty of being inconsistent. Be saint or imp; it is the
only way. But this imp that mocks me relieves you of reply. Yet I
have spoken truth, and again and again I will tell it you, till
you believe according to my gospel."

How glad I was that he himself lightened the situation! I had been
driven to despair, but this strange twist in his mood made all
smooth for me. "That 'again and again' sounds dreary," said I. "It
might almost appear I must sometime accept your gospel, to cure you
of preaching it, and save me from eternal drowsiness."

We were then most fortunately interrupted. He made his adieus,
and I went to my room, brooded till my head ached, then fell
a-weeping, and wished myself out of the world, I was so sick and
weary. Now and again a hot shudder of shame and misery ran through
me, as I thought of monsieur's words to me. Put them how he would,
they sound an insult now, though as he spoke I felt the power of
his passion. "If you had lived a thousand years ago, you would
have loved a thousand times," he said to me one day. Sometimes I
think he spoke truly; I have a nature that responds to all
eloquence in life.


Robert, I have bared my heart to thee. I have hidden nothing. In
a few days I shall go back to the city with my mother, and when I
can I will send news; and do thou send me news also, if thou canst
devise a safe way. Meanwhile, I have written my brother Juste to
be magnanimous, and to try for thy freedom. He will not betray me,
and he may help us. I have begged him to write to thee a letter
of reconcilement.

And now, comrade of my heart, do thou have courage. I also shall
be strong as I am ardent. Having written thee, I am cheerful once
more; and when again I may, I will open the doors of my heart that
thou mayst come in. That heart is thine, Robert. Thy

ALIXE,

who loves thee all her days.

P.S.--I have found the names and places of the men who keep the
guard beneath thy window. If there is chance for freedom that way,
fix the day some time ahead, and I will see what may be done.
Voban fears nothing; he will act secretly for me.

The next day I arranged for my escape, which had been long in
planning.



XVII

THROUGH THE BARS OF THE CAGE


I should have tried escape earlier but that it was little use to
venture forth in the harsh winter in a hostile country. But now
April had come, and I was keen to make a trial of my fortune. I
had been saving food for a long time, little by little, and hiding
it in the old knapsack which had held my second suit of clothes. I
had used the little stove for parching my food--Indian corn, for
which I had professed a fondness to my jailer, and liberally paid
for out of funds which had been sent me by Mr. George Washington
in answer to my letter, and other moneys to a goodly amount in a
letter from Governor Dinwiddie. These letters had been carefully
written, and the Marquis de Vaudreuil, into whose hands they had
first come, was gallant enough not to withhold them--though he
read them first.

Besides Indian corn, the parching of which amused me, I had dried
ham and tongue, and bread and cheese, enough, by frugal use, to
last me a month at least. I knew it would be a journey of six weeks
or more to the nearest English settlement, but if I could get that
month's start I should forage for the rest, or take my fate as I
found it: I was used to all the turns of fortune now. My knapsack
gradually filled, and meanwhile I slowly worked my passage into the
open world. There was the chance that my jailer would explore the
knapsack; but after a time I lost that fear, for it lay untouched
with a blanket in a corner, and I cared for my cell with my own
hands.

The true point of danger was the window. There lay my way. It
was stoutly barred with iron up and down, and the bars were set in
the solid limestone. Soon after I entered this prison, I saw that
I must cut a groove in the stone from stanchion to stanchion, and
then, by drawing one to the other, make an opening large enough to
let my body through. For tools I had only a miserable knife with
which I cut my victuals, and the smaller but stouter one which
Gabord had not taken from me. There could be no pounding, no
chiselling, but only rubbing of the hard stone. So hour after
hour I rubbed away, in constant danger of discovery however. My
jailer had a trick of sudden entrance, which would have been
grotesque if it had not been so serious to me. To provide against
the flurried inquisition of his eye, I kept near me bread well
chewed, with which I filled the hole, covering it with the sand
I had rubbed or the ashes of my pipe. I lived in dread of these
entrances, but at last I found that they chanced only within
certain hours, and I arranged my times of work accordingly. Once
or twice, however, being impatient, I scratched the stone with
some asperity and noise, and was rewarded by hearing my fellow
stumbling in the hall; for he had as uncertain limbs as ever I
saw. He stumbled upon nothing, as you have seen a child trip
itself up by tangling of its feet.

The first time that he came, roused by the grating noise as he
sat below, he stumbled in the very centre of the cell, and fell
upon his knees. I would have laughed if I had dared, but I yawned
over the book I had hastily snatched up, and puffed great whiffs
from my pipe. I dreaded lest he should go to the window. He started
for it, but suddenly made for my couch, and dragged it away, as if
looking to find a hole dug beneath it. Still I did not laugh at him,
but gravely watched him; and presently he went away. At another
time I was foolishly harsh with my tools; but I knew now the time
required by him to come upstairs, and I swiftly filled the groove
with bread, strewed ashes and sand over it, rubbed all smooth, and
was plunged in my copy of Montaigne when he entered. This time he
went straight to the window, looked at it, tried the stanchions,
and then, with an amused attempt at being cunning and hiding his
own vigilance, he asked me, with laborious hypocrisy, if I had seen
Captain Lancy pass the window. And so for weeks and weeks we played
hide-and-seek with each other.

At last I had nothing to do but sit and wait, for the groove was
cut, the bar had room to play. I could not bend it, for it was fast
at the top; but when my hour of adventure was come, I would tie a
handkerchief round the two bars and twist it with the piece of
hickory used for stirring the fire. Here was my engine of escape,
and I waited till April should wind to its close, when I should,
in the softer weather, try my fortune outside these walls.

So time went on until one eventful day, even the 30th of April
of that year 1758. It was raining and blowing when I waked, and
it ceased not all the day, coming to a hailstorm towards night. I
felt sure that my guards without would, on such a day, relax their
vigilance. In the evening I listened, and heard no voices nor any
sound of feet, only the pelting rain and the whistling wind. Yet I
did not stir till midnight. Then I slung the knapsack in front of
me, so that I could force it through the window first, and tying
my handkerchief round the iron bars, I screwed it up with my stick.
Presently the bars came together, and my way was open. I got my
body through by dint of squeezing, and let myself go plump into
the mire below. Then I stood still a minute, and listened again.

A light was shining not far away. Drawing near, I saw that it
came from a small hut or lean-to. Looking through the cracks, I
observed my two gentlemen drowsing in the corner. I was eager for
their weapons, but I dared not make the attempt to get them, for
they were laid between their legs, the barrels resting against
their shoulders. I drew back, and for a moment paused to get my
bearings. Then I made for a corner of the yard where the wall was
lowest, and, taking a run at it, caught the top, with difficulty
scrambled up, and speedily was over and floundering in the mud. I
knew well where I was, and at once started off in a northwesterly
direction, toward the St. Charles River, making for a certain
farmhouse above the town. Yet I took care, though it was dangerous,
to travel a street in which was Voban's house. There was no light
in the street nor in his house, nor had I seen any one abroad as
I came, not even a sentinel.

I knew where was the window of the barber's bedroom, and I tapped
upon it softly. Instantly I heard a stir; then there came the
sound of flint and steel, then a light, and presently a hand at
the window, and a voice asking who was there.

I gave a quick reply; the light was put out, the window opened,
and there was Voban staring at me.

"This letter," said I, "to Mademoiselle Duvarney," and I slipped
ten louis into his hand, also.

This he quickly handed back. "M'sieu'," said he, "if I take it I
would seem to myself a traitor--no, no. But I will give the letter
to ma'm'selle."

Then he asked me in; but I would not, yet begged him, if he could,
to have a canoe at my disposal at a point below the Falls of
Montmorenci two nights hence.

"M'sieu'," said he, "I will do so if I can, but I am watched.
I would not pay a sou for my life--no. Yet I will serve you, if
there is a way."

Then I told him what I meant to do, and bade him repeat it
exactly to Alixe. This he swore to do, and I cordially grasped the
good wretch's shoulder, and thanked him with all my heart. I got
from him a weapon, also, and again I put gold louis into his hand,
and bade him keep it, for I might need his kind offices to spend it
for me. To this he consented, and I plunged into the dark again. I
had not gone far when I heard footsteps coming, and I drew aside
into the corner of a porch. A moment, then the light flashed full
upon me. I had my hand upon the hanger I had got from Voban, and I
was ready to strike if there were need, when Gabord's voice broke
on my ear, and his hand caught at the short sword by his side.

"'Tis dickey-bird, aho!" cried he. There was exultation in his eye
and voice. Here was a chance for him to prove himself against me;
he had proved himself for me more than once.

"Here was I," added he, "making for M'sieu' Voban, that he might
come and bleed a sick soldier, when who should come running but our
English captain! Come forth, aho!"

"No, Gabord," said I, "I'm bound for freedom." I stepped forth. His
sword was poised against me. I was intent to make a desperate fight.

"March on," returned he gruffly, and I could feel the iron in
his voice.

"But not with you, Gabord. My way lies towards Virginia."

I did not care to strike the first blow, and I made to go past
him. His lantern came down, and he made a catch at my shoulder.
I swung back, threw off my cloak and up my weapon.

Then we fought. My knapsack troubled me, for it was loose, and
kept shifting. Gabord made stroke after stroke, watchful, heavy,
offensive, muttering to himself as he struck and parried. There was
no hatred in his eyes, but he had the lust of fighting on him, and
he was breathing easily, and could have kept this up for hours. As
we fought I could hear a clock strike one in a house near. Then
a cock crowed. I had received two slight wounds, and I had not
touched my enemy. But I was swifter, and I came at him suddenly
with a rush, and struck for his left shoulder when I saw my chance.
I felt the steel strike the bone. As I did so, he caught my wrist
and lunged most fiercely at me, dragging me to him. The blow struck
straight at my side, but it went through the knapsack, which had
swung loose, and so saved my life; for another instant and I had
tripped him down, and he lay bleeding badly.

"Aho! 'twas a fair fight," said he. "Now get you gone. I call
for help."

"I can not leave you so, Gabord," said I. I stooped and lifted up
his head.

"Then you shall go to citadel," said he, feeling for his small
trumpet.

"No, no," I answered; "I'll go fetch Voban."

"To bleed me more!" quoth he whimsically; and I knew well he was
pleased that I did not leave him. "Nay, kick against yon door. It
is Captain Lancy's."

At that moment a window opened, and Lancy's voice was heard.
Without a word I seized the soldier's lantern and my cloak, and
made away as hard as I could go.

"I'll have a wing of you for lantern there!" roared Gabord,
swearing roundly as I ran off with it.

With all my might I hurried, and was soon outside the town, and
coming fast to the farmhouse about two miles beyond. Nearing it, I
hid the lantern beneath my cloak and made for an outhouse. The door
was not locked, and I passed in. There was a loft nearly full of
hay, and I crawled up, and dug a hole far down against the side of
the building, and climbed in, bringing with me for drink a nest of
hen's eggs which I found in a corner. The warmth of the dry hay was
comforting, and after caring for my wounds, which I found were but
scratches, I had somewhat to eat from my knapsack, drank up two
eggs, and then coiled myself for sleep. It was my purpose, if not
discovered, to stay where I was two days, and then to make for the
point below the Falls of Montmorenci where I hoped to find a canoe
of Voban's placing.

When I waked it must have been near noon, so I lay still for a
time, listening to the cheerful noise of fowls and cattle in the
yard without, and to the clacking of a hen above me. The air smelt
very sweet. I also heard my unknowing host, at whose table I had
once sat, two years before, talking with his son, who had just
come over from Quebec, bringing news of my escape, together with a
wonderful story of the fight between Gabord and myself. It had, by
his calendar, lasted some three hours, and both of us, in the end,
fought as we lay upon the ground. "But presently along comes a
cloaked figure, with horses, and he lifts m'sieu' the Englishman
upon one, and away they ride like the devil towards St. Charles
River and Beauport. Gabord was taken to the hospital, and he swore
that Englishman would not have got away if stranger had not fetched
him a crack with a pistol-butt which sent him dumb and dizzy. And
there M'sieu' Lancy sleep snug through all until the horses ride
away!"

The farmer and his son laughed heartily, with many a "By Gar!"
their sole English oath. Then came the news that six thousand
livres were offered for me, dead or living, the drums beating
far and near to tell the people so.

The farmer gave a long whistle, and in a great bustle set to
calling all his family to arm themselves and join with him in this
treasure-hunting. I am sure at least a dozen were at the task,
searching all about; nor did they neglect the loft where I lay.
But I had dug far down, drawing the hay over me as I went, so that
they must needs have been keen to smell me out. After about three
hours' poking about over all the farm, they met again outside this
building, and I could hear their gabble plainly. The smallest among
them, the piping chore-boy, he was for spitting me without mercy;
and the milking-lass would toast me with a hay-fork, that she would,
and six thousand livres should set her up forever.

In the midst of their rattling came two soldiers, who ordered them
about, and with much blustering began searching here and there,
and chucking the maids under the chins, as I could tell by their
little bursts of laughter, and the "La M'sieu's!" which trickled
through the hay.

I am sure that one such little episode saved me. For I heard a
soldier just above me poking and tossing hay with uncomfortable
vigour. But presently the amorous hunter turned his thoughts
elsewhere, and I was left to myself, and to a late breakfast of
parched beans and bread and raw eggs, after which I lay and
thought; and the sum of the thinking was that I would stay where
I was till the first wave of the hunt had passed.

Near midnight of the second day I came out secretly from my
lurking-place, and faced straight for the St. Charles River.
Finding it at high water, I plunged in, with my knapsack and cloak
on my head, and made my way across, reaching the opposite shore
safely. After going two miles or so, I discovered friendly covert
in the woods, where, in spite of my cloak and dry cedar boughs
wrapped round, I shivered as I lay until the morning. When the sun
came up, I drew out, that it might dry me; after which I crawled
back into my nest and fell into a broken sleep. Many times during
the day I heard the horns of my hunters, and more than once voices
near me. But I had crawled into the hollow of a half-uprooted stump,
and the cedar branches, which had been cut off a day or two before,
were a screen. I could see soldiers here and there, armed and
swaggering, and faces of peasants and shopkeepers whom I knew.

A function was being made of my escape; it was a hunting-feast,
in which women were as eager as their husbands and their brothers.
There was something devilish in it, when I came to think of it: a
whole town roused and abroad to hunt down one poor fugitive, whose
only sin was, in themselves, a virtue--loyalty to his country. I
saw women armed with sickles and iron forks, and lads bearing axes
and hickory poles cut to a point like a spear, while blunderbusses
were in plenty. Now and again a weapon was fired, and, to watch
their motions and peepings, it might have been thought I was a
dragon, or that they all were hunting La Jongleuse, their fabled
witch, whose villainies, are they not told at every fireside?

Often I shivered violently, and anon I was burning hot; my
adventure had given me a chill and fever. Late in the evening of
this day, my hunters having drawn off with as little sense as they
had hunted me, I edged cautiously down past Beauport and on to
the Montmorenci Falls. I came along in safety, and reached a spot
near the point where Voban was to hide the boat. The highway ran
between. I looked out cautiously. I could hear and see nothing,
and so ran out and crossed the road, and pushed for the woods on
the banks of the river. I had scarcely got across when I heard
a shout, and looking round I saw three horsemen, who instantly
spurred towards me. I sprang through the underbrush and came
down roughly into a sort of quarry, spraining my ankle on a pile
of stones. I got up quickly; but my ankle hurt me sorely, and I
turned sick and dizzy. Limping a little way, I set my back against
a tree, and drew my hanger. As I did so, the three gentlemen
burst in upon me. They were General Montcalm, a gentleman of the
Governor's household, and Doltaire!

"It is no use, dear Captain," said Doltaire. "Yield up your weapon."

General Montcalm eyed me curiously, as the other gentleman
talked in low, excited tones; and presently he made a gesture
of courtesy, for he saw that I was hurt. Doltaire's face wore a
malicious smile; but when he noted how sick I was, he came and
offered me his arm, and was constant in courtesy till I was set
upon a horse; and with him and the General riding beside me I
came to my new imprisonment. They both forbore to torture me with
words, for I was suffering greatly; but they fetched me to the
Chateau St. Louis, followed by a crowd, who hooted at me. Doltaire
turned on them at last, and stopped them.

The Governor, whose petty vanity was roused, showed a foolish
fury at seeing me, and straightway ordered me to the citadel
again.

"It's useless kicking 'gainst the pricks," said Doltaire to me
cynically, as I passed out limping between two soldiers; but I did
not reply. In another half hour of most bitter journeying I found
myself in my dungeon. I sank upon the old couch of straw, untouched
since I had left it; and when the door shut upon me, desponding,
aching in all my body, now feverish and now shivering, my ankle in
great pain, I could bear up no longer, and I bowed my head and fell
a-weeping like a woman.



XVIII

THE STEEP PATH OF CONQUEST


Now I am come to a period on which I shall not dwell, nor repeat
a tale of suffering greater than that I had yet endured. All the
first night of this new imprisonment I tossed on my wretched bed
in pain and misery. A strange and surly soldier came and went,
bringing bread and water; but when I asked that a physician be sent
me, he replied, with a vile oath, that the devil should be my only
surgeon. Soon he came again, accompanied by another soldier, and
put irons on me. With what quietness I could I asked him by whose
orders this was done; but he vouchsafed no reply save that I was
to "go bound to fires of hell."

"There is no journeying there," I answered; "here is the place
itself."

Then a chain was roughly put round my injured ankle, and it gave me
such agony that I turned sick, but I kept back groaning, for I would
not have these varlets catch me quaking.

"I'll have you grilled for this one day," said I. "You are no men,
but butchers. Can you not see my ankle has been sorely hurt?"

"You are for killing," was the gruff reply, "and here's a taste
of it."

With that he drew the chain with a jerk round the hurt member,
so that it drove me to madness. I caught him by the throat and
hurled him back against the wall, and snatching a pistol from his
comrade's belt aimed it at his head. I was beside myself with pain,
and if he had been further violent I should have shot him. His
fellow dared not stir in his defence, for the pistol was trained
on him too surely; and so at last the wretch, promising better
treatment, crawled to his feet, and made motion for the pistol to
be given him. But I would not yield it, telling him it should be
a guarantee of truce. Presently the door closed behind them, and I
sank back upon the half-fettered chains.

I must have sat for more than an hour, when there was a noise
without, and there entered the Commandant, the Marquis de Montcalm,
and the Seigneur Duvarney. The pistol was in my hand, and I did not
put it down, but struggled to my feet, and waited for them to speak.

For a moment there was silence, and then the Commandant said,
"Your guards have brought me word, Monsieur le Capitaine, that you
are violent. You have resisted them, and have threatened them with
their own pistols."

"With one pistol, monsieur le commandant," answered I. Then, in
bitter words, I told them of my treatment by those rascals, and
I showed them how my ankle had been tortured. "I have no fear of
death," said I, "but I will not lie and let dogs bite me with
'I thank you.' Death can come but once, it is a damned brutality
to make one die a hundred and yet live--the work of Turks, not
Christians. If you want my life, why, take it and have done."

The Marquis de Montcalm whispered to the Commandant. The Seigneur
Duvarney, to whom I had not yet spoken, nor he to me, stood
leaning against the wall, gazing at me seriously and kindly.

Presently Ramesay, the Commandant, spoke, not unkindly: "It was
ordered you should wear chains, but not that you should be
maltreated. A surgeon shall be sent to you, and this chain shall
be taken from your ankle. Meanwhile, your guards shall be changed."

I held out the pistol, and he took it. "I can not hope for justice
here," said I, "but men are men, and not dogs, and I ask for human
usage till my hour comes and my country is your jailer."

The Marquis smiled, and his gay eyes sparkled. "Some find comfort
in daily bread, and some in prophecy," he rejoined. "One should
envy your spirit, Captain Moray."

"Permit me, your Excellency," replied I; "all Englishmen must envy
the spirit of the Marquis de Montcalm, though none is envious of
his cause."

He bowed gravely. "Causes are good or bad as they are ours or
our neighbours'. The lion has a good cause when it goes hunting for
its young; the deer has a good cause when it resists the lion's
leap upon its fawn."

I did not reply, for I felt a faintness coming; and at that
moment the Seigneur Duvarney came to me, and put his arm through
mine. A dizziness seized me, my head sank upon his shoulder, and
I felt myself floating away into darkness, while from a great
distance came a voice:

"It had been kinder to have ended it last year."

"He nearly killed your son, Duvarney." This was the voice of the
Marquis in a tone of surprise.

"He saved my life, Marquis," was the sorrowful reply. "I have not
paid back those forty pistoles, nor ever can, in spite of all."

"Ah, pardon me, seigneur," was the courteous rejoinder of the
General.

That was all I heard, for I had entered the land of complete
darkness. When I came to, I found that my foot had been bandaged,
there was a torch in the wall, and by my side something in a jug,
of which I drank, according to directions in a surgeon's hand on
a paper beside it.

I was easier in all my body, yet miserably sick still, and I
remained so, now shivering and now burning, a racking pain in my
chest. My couch was filled with fresh straw, but in no other wise
was my condition altered from the first time I had entered this
place. My new jailer was a man of no feeling that I could see,
yet of no violence or cruelty; one whose life was like a wheel,
doing the eternal round. He did no more nor less than his orders,
and I made no complaint nor asked any favour. No one came to me,
no message found its way.

Full three months went by in this fashion, and then, one day,
who should step into my dungeon, torch in hand, but Gabord! He
raised the light above his head, and looked down at me most
quizzically.

"Upon my soul--Gabord!" said I. "I did not kill you, then?"

"Upon your soul and upon your body, you killed not Gabord."

"And what now, quarrelsome Gabord?" I questioned cheerfully.

He shook some keys. "Back again to dickey-bird's cage. 'Look you,'
quoth Governor, 'who will guard and bait this prisoner like the man
he mauled?' 'No one,' quoth a lady who stands by Governor's chair.
And she it was who had Governor send me here--even Ma'm'selle
Duvarney. And she it was who made the Governor loose off these
chains."

He began to free me from the chains. I was in a vile condition.
The irons had made sores upon my wrists and legs, my limbs now
trembled so beneath me that I could scarcely walk, and my head was
very light and dizzy at times. Presently Gabord ordered a new bed
of straw brought in; and from that hour we returned to our old
relations, as if there had not been between us a fight to the
death. Of what was going on abroad he would not tell me, and soon
I found myself in as ill a state as before. No Voban came to me,
no Doltaire, no one at all. I sank into a deep silence, dropped
out of a busy world, a morsel of earth slowly coming to Mother
Earth again.

A strange apathy began to settle on me. All those resources of
my first year's imprisonment had gone, and I was alone: my mouse
was dead; there was no history of my life to write, no incident to
break the pitiful monotony. There seemed only one hope: that our
army under Amherst would invest Quebec and take it. I had no news
of any movement, winter again was here, and it must be five or
six months before any action could successfully be taken; for the
St. Lawrence was frozen over in winter, and if the city was to be
seized it must be from the water, with simultaneous action by land.

I knew the way, the only way, to take the city. At Sillery, west
of the town, there was a hollow in the cliffs, up which men,
secretly conveyed above the town by water, could climb. At the top
was a plateau, smooth and fine as a parade-ground, where battle
could be given, or move be made upon the city and citadel, which
lay on ground no higher. Then, with the guns playing on the town
from the fleet, and from the Levis shore with forces on the
Beauport side, attacking the lower town where was the Intendant's
palace, the great fortress might be taken, and Canada be ours.

This passage up the cliff side at Sillery I had discovered three
years before.

When winter set well in Gabord brought me a blanket, and though
last year I had not needed it, now it was most grateful. I had been
fed for months on bread and water, as in my first imprisonment, but
at last--whether by orders or not, I never knew--he brought me a
little meat every day, and some wine also. Yet I did not care for
them, and often left them untasted. A hacking cough had never left
me since my attempt at escape, and I was miserably thin, and so
weak that I could hardly drag myself about my dungeon. So, many
weeks of the winter went on, and at last I was not able to rise
from my bed of straw, and could do little more than lift a cup of
water to my lips and nibble at some bread. I felt that my hours
were numbered.

At last, one day, I heard commotion at my dungeon door; it
opened, and Gabord entered and closed it after him. He came and
stood over me, as with difficulty I lifted myself upon my elbow.

"Come, try your wings," said he.

"It is the end, Gabord?" asked I.

"Not paradise yet!" said he.

"Then I am free?" I asked.

"Free from this dungeon," he answered cheerily.

I raised myself and tried to stand upon my feet, but fell back.
He helped me to rise, and I rested an arm on his shoulder.

I tried to walk, but faintness came over me, and I sank back.
Then Gabord laid me down, went to the door, and called in two
soldiers with a mattress. I was wrapped in my cloak and blankets,
laid thereon, and so was borne forth, all covered even to my weak
eyes. I was placed in a sleigh, and as the horses sprang away,
the clear sleigh-bells rang out, and a gun from the ramparts was
fired to give the noon hour, I sank into unconsciousness.



XIX

A DANSEUSE AND THE BASTILE


Recovering, I found myself lying on a couch, in a large,
well-lighted room hung about with pictures and adorned with
trophies of the hunt. A wide window faced the foot of the bed
where I lay, and through it I could see--though the light hurt my
eyes greatly--the Levis shore, on the opposite side of the St.
Lawrence. I lay and thought, trying to discover where I was. It
came to me at last that I was in a room of the Chateau St. Louis.
Presently I heard breathing near me, and, looking over, I saw a
soldier sitting just inside the door.

Then from another corner of the room came a surgeon with some
cordial in a tumbler, and, handing it to me, he bade me drink.
He felt my pulse; then stopped and put his ear to my chest, and
listened long.

"Is there great danger?" asked I.

"The trouble would pass," said he, "if you were stronger. Your
life is worth fighting for, but it will be a struggle. That dungeon
was slow poison. You must have a barber," added he; "you are a
ghost like this."

I put my hand up, and I found my hair and beard were very long
and almost white. Held against the light, my hands seemed
transparent. "What means my coming here?" asked I.

He shook his head. "I am but a surgeon," he answered shortly,
meanwhile writing with a flourish on a piece of paper. When he had
finished, he handed the paper to the soldier, with an order. Then
he turned to go, politely bowing to me, but turned again and said,
"I would not, were I you, trouble to plan escape these months yet.
This is a comfortable prison, but it is easier coming in than going
out. Your mind and body need quiet. You have, we know, a taste for
adventure"--he smiled--"but is it wise to fight a burning powder
magazine?"

"Thank you, monsieur," said I, "I am myself laying the fuse to
that magazine. It fights for me by-and-bye."

He shrugged a shoulder. "Drink," said he, with a professional air
which almost set me laughing, "good milk and brandy, and think of
nothing but that you are a lucky man to have this sort of prison."

He bustled out in an important way, shaking his head and talking
to himself. Tapping the chest of a bulky soldier who stood outside,
he said brusquely, "Too fat, too fat; you'll come to apoplexy. Go
fight the English, lazy ruffian!"

The soldier gave a grunt, made a mocking gesture, and the door
closed on me and my attendant. This fellow would not speak at all,
and I did not urge him, but lay and watched the day decline and
night come down. I was taken to a small alcove which adjoined the
room, where I slept soundly.

Early the next morning I waked, and there was Voban sitting just
outside the alcove, looking at me. I sat up in bed and spoke to
him, and he greeted me in an absent sort of way. He was changed as
much as I; he moved as one in a dream; yet there was the ceaseless
activity of the eye, the swift, stealthy motion of the hand. He
began to attend me, and I questioned him; but he said he had orders
from mademoiselle that he was to tell nothing--that she, as soon as
she could, would visit me.

I felt at once a new spring of life. I gave him the letter I had
written, and bade him deliver it, which he promised to do; for
though there was much in it not vital now, it was a record of my
thoughts and feelings, and she would be glad of it, I knew. I
pressed Voban's hand in leaving, and he looked at me as if he
would say something; but immediately he was abstracted, and left
me like one forgetful of the world.

About three hours after this, as I lay upon the couch in the large
room, clean and well shaven, the door opened, and some one entered,
saying to my guard, "You will remain outside. I have the Governor's
order."

I knew the voice; an instant, and I saw the face shining with
expectancy, the eyes eager, yet timid, a small white hand pressed
to a pulsing breast--my one true friend, the jailer of my heart.

For a moment she was all trembling and excited, her hand softly
clutching at my shoulder, tears dripping from her eyes and falling
on my cheek, as hers lay pressed to mine; but presently she grew
calm, and her face was lifted with a smile, and, brushing back some
flying locks of hair, she said in a tone most quaint and touching
too, "Poor gentleman! poor English prisoner! poor hidden lover!
I ought not, I ought not," she added, "show my feelings thus, nor
excite you so." My hand was trembling on hers, for in truth I
was very weak. "It was my purpose," she continued, "to come most
quietly to you; but there are times when one must cry out, or the
heart will burst."

I spoke then as a man may who has been delivered from bondage
into the arms of love. She became very quiet, looking at me in her
grave, sweet way, her deep eyes shining with a sincerity.

"Honest, honest eyes," said I--"eyes that never deceive, and
never were deceived."

"All this in spite of what you do not know," she answered. For
an instant a look elfish and childlike came into her eyes, and she
drew back from me, stood in the middle of the floor, and caught
her skirts in her fingers.

"See," she said, "is there no deceit here?"

Then she began to dance softly, her feet seeming hardly to touch the
ground, her body swaying like a tall flower in the wind, her face
all light and fire. I was charmed, fascinated. I felt my sleepy
blood stirring to the delicate rise and fall of her bosom, the light
of her eyes flashing a dozen colours. There was scarce a sound her
steps could not be heard across the room.

All at once she broke off from this, and stood still.

"Did my eyes seem all honest then?" she asked, with a strange,
wistful expression. Then she came to the couch where I was.

"Robert," said she, "can you, do you trust me, even when you see
me at such witchery?"

"I trust you always," answered I. "Such witcheries are no evils
that I can see."

She put her finger upon my lips, with a kind of bashfulness.
"Hush, till I tell you where and when I danced like that, and then,
and then--"

She settled down in a low chair. "I have at least an hour," she
continued. "The Governor is busy with my father and General
Montcalm, and they will not be free for a long time. For your
soldiers, I have been bribing them to my service these weeks past,
and they are safe enough for to-day. Now I will tell you of that
dancing.

"One night last autumn there was a grand dinner at the Intendance.
Such gentlemen as my father were not asked; only the roisterers and
hard drinkers, and gambling friends of the Intendant. You would know
the sort of upspring it would be. Well, I was sitting in my window,
looking down into the garden; for the moon was shining. Presently
I saw a man appear below, glance up towards me, and beckon. It was
Voban. I hurried down to him, and he told me that there had been a
wild carousing at the palace, and that ten gentlemen had determined,
for a wicked sport, to mask themselves, go to the citadel at
midnight, fetch you forth, and make you run the gauntlet in the yard
of the Intendance, and afterwards set you fighting for your life
with another prisoner, a common criminal. To this, Bigot, heated
with wine, made no objection. Monsieur Doltaire was not present; he
had, it was said, taken a secret journey into the English country.
The Governor was in Montreal, where he had gone to discuss matters
of war with the Council.

"There was but one thing to do--get word to General Montcalm. He
was staying at the moment with the Seigneur Pipon at his manor by
the Montmorenci Falls. He must needs be sought there: he would
never allow this shameless thing. So I bade Voban go thither at
once, getting a horse from any quarter, and to ride as if for his
life. He promised, and left me, and I returned to my room to think.
Voban had told me that his news came from Bigot's valet, who is his
close friend. This I knew, and I knew the valet too, for I had seen
something of him when my brother lay wounded at the palace. Under
the best circumstances General Montcalm could not arrive within two
hours. Meanwhile, these miserable men might go on their dreadful
expedition. Something must be done to gain time. I racked my brain
for minutes, till the blood pounded at my temples. Presently a plan
came to me.

"There is in Quebec one Madame Jamond, a great Parisian dancer,
who, for reasons which none knows save perhaps Monsieur Doltaire,
has been banished from France. Since she came to Canada, some nine
months ago, she has lived most quietly and religiously, though many
trials have been made to bring her talents into service; and the
Intendant has made many efforts have her dance in the palace for
his guests. But she would not.

"Madame Lotbiniere had come to know Jamond, and she arranged, after
much persuasion, for lessons in dancing to be given to Lucy, myself,
and Georgette. To me the dancing was a keen delight, a passion. As I
danced I saw and felt a thousand things, I can not tell you how. Now
my feet appeared light as air, like thistledown, my body to float.
I was as a lost soul flying home, flocks of birds singing me to come
with them into a pleasant land.

"Then all that changed, and I was passing through a bitter land,
with harsh shadows and tall cold mountains. From clefts and hollows
figures flew out and caught at me with filmy hands. These melancholy
things pursued me as I flew, till my wings drooped, and I felt that
I must drop into the dull marsh far beneath, round which travelled
a lonely mist.

"But this too passed, and I came through a land all fire, so that,
as I flew swiftly, my wings were scorched, and I was blinded often,
and often missed my way, and must change my course of flight. It was
all scarlet, all that land--scarlet sky and scarlet sun, and scarlet
flowers, and the rivers running red, and men and women in long red
robes, with eyes of flame, and voices that kept crying, 'The world
is mad, and all life is a fever!'"

She paused for a moment, seeming to come out of a dream, and then
she laughed a little. "Will you not go on?" I asked gently.

"Sometimes, too," she continued, "I fancied I was before a king
and his court, dancing for my life or for another's. Oh, how I
scanned the faces of my judges, as they sat there watching me; some
meanwhile throwing crumbs to fluttering birds that whirled round
me, some stroking the ears of hounds that gaped at me, while the
king's fool at first made mock at me, and the face of a man behind
the king's chair smiled like Satan--or Monsieur Doltaire! Ah,
Robert, I know you think me fanciful and foolish, as indeed I am;
but you must bear with me.

"I danced constantly, practising hour upon hour with Jamond,
who came to be my good friend; and you shall hear from me some day
her history--a sad one indeed; a woman sinned against, not sinning.
But these special lessons went on secretly, for I was sure, if
people knew how warmly I followed this recreation, they would set
it down to wilful desire to be singular--or worse. It gave me new
interest in lonely days. So the weeks went on.

"Well, that wicked night I sent Voban to General Montcalm, and,
as I said, a thought came to me: I would find Jamond, beg her to
mask herself, go to the Intendance, and dance before the gentlemen
there, keeping them amused till the General came, as I was sure he
would at my suggestion, for he is a just man and a generous. All
my people, even Georgette, were abroad at a soiree, and would not
be home till late. So I sought Mathilde, and she hurried with me,
my poor daft protector, to Jamond's, whose house is very near the
bishop's palace.

"We were at once admitted to Jamond, who was lying upon a couch.
I hurriedly told her what I wished her to do, what was at stake,
everything but that I loved you; laying my interest upon humanity
and to your having saved my father's life. She looked troubled at
once, then took my face in her hands. 'Dear child,' she said, 'I
understand. You have sorrow too young--too young.' 'But you will do
this for me?' I cried. She shook her head sadly. 'I can not. I am
lame these two days,' she answered. 'I have had a sprain.' I sank
on the floor beside her, sick and dazed. She put her hand pitifully
on my head, then lifted up my chin. Looking into her eyes, I read a
thought there, and I got to my feet with a spring. 'I myself will
go,' said I; 'I will dance there till the General comes.' She put
out her hand in protest. 'You must not,' she urged. 'Think: you may
be discovered, and then the ruin that must come!'

"'I shall put my trust in God,' said I. 'I have no fear. I will do
this thing.' She caught me to her breast. 'Then God be with you,
child,' was her answer; 'you shall do it.' In ten minutes I was
dressed in a gown of hers, which last had been worn when she danced
before King Louis. It fitted me well, and with a wig the colour of
her hair, brought quickly from her boxes, and use of paints which
actors use, I was transformed. Indeed, I could scarce recognize
myself without the mask, and with it on my mother would not have
known me. 'I will go with you,' she said to me, and she hurriedly
put on an old woman's wig and a long cloak, quickly lined her face,
and we were ready. She walked lame, and must use a stick, and we
issued forth towards the Intendance, Mathilde remaining behind.

"When we got to the palace, and were admitted, I asked for the
Intendant's valet, and we stood waiting in the cold hall until he
was brought. 'We come from Voban, the barber,' I whispered to him,
for there were servants near; and he led us at once to his private
room. He did not recognize me, but looked at us with sidelong
curiosity. 'I am,' said I, throwing back my cloak, 'a dancer, and
I have come to dance before the Intendant and his guests.' 'His
Excellency does not expect you?' be asked. 'His Excellency has
many times asked Madame Jamond to dance before him,' I replied. He
was at once all complaisance, but his face was troubled. 'You come
from Monsieur Voban?' he inquired. 'From Monsieur Voban,' answered
I. 'He has gone to General Montcalm.' His face fell, and a kind of
fear passed over it. 'There is no peril to any one save the English
gentleman,' I urged. A light dawned on him. 'You dance until the
General comes?' he asked, pleased at his own penetration. 'You will
take me at once to the dining-hall,' said I, nodding. 'They are
in the Chambre de la Joie,' he rejoined. 'Then the Chambre de la
Joie,' said I; and he led the way. When we came near the chamber,
I said to him, 'You will tell the Intendant that a lady of some
gifts in dancing would entertain his guests; but she must come
and go without exchange of individual courtesies, at her will.

"He opened the door of the chamber, and we followed him; for
there was just inside a large oak screen, and from its shadow we
could see the room and all therein. At the first glance I shrank
back, for, apart from the noise and the clattering of tongues,
such a riot of carousal I have never seen. I was shocked to note
gentlemen whom I had met in society, with the show of decorum
about them, loosed now from all restraint, and swaggering like
woodsmen at a fair. I felt a sudden fear, and drew back sick;
but that was for an instant, for even as the valet came to the
Intendant's chair a dozen or more men, who were sitting near
together in noisy yet half-secret conference, rose to their feet,
each with a mask in his hand, and started towards the door. I felt
my blood fly back and forth in my heart with great violence, and
I leaned against the oak screen for support. 'Courage,' said the
voice of Jamond in my ear, and I ruled myself to quietness.

"Just then the Intendant's voice stopped the men in their
movement towards the great entrance door, and drew the attention
of the whole company. 'Messieurs,' said he, 'a lady has come to
dance for us. She makes conditions which must be respected. She
must be let come and go without individual courtesies. Messieurs,'
he added, 'I grant her request in your name and my own.'

"There was a murmur of 'Jamond! Jamond!' and every man stood looking
towards the great entrance door. The Intendant, however, was gazing
towards the door where I was, and I saw he was about to come, as
if to welcome me. Welcome from Francois Bigot to a dancing-woman!
I slipped off the cloak, looked at Jamond, who murmured once again,
'Courage,' and then I stepped out swiftly, and made for a low,
large dais at one side of the room. I was so nervous that I knew not
how I went. The faces and forms of the company were blurred before
me, and the lights shook and multiplied distractedly. The room
shone brilliantly, yet just under the great canopy, over the dais;
there were shadows, and they seemed to me, as I stepped under the
red velvet, a relief, a sort of hiding-place from innumerable
candles and hot unnatural eyes.

"Once there I was changed. I did not think of the applause that
greeted me, the murmurs of surprise, approbation, questioning,
rising round me. Suddenly, as I paused and faced them all,
nervousness passed out of me, and I saw nothing--nothing but a sort
of far-off picture. My mind was caught away into that world which I
had created for myself when I danced, and these rude gentlemen were
but visions. All sense of indignity passed from me. I was only a
woman fighting for a life and for her own and her another's
happiness.

"As I danced I did not know how time passed--only that I must
keep those men where they were till General Montcalm came. After a
while, when the first dazed feeling had passed, I could see their
faces plainly through my mask, and I knew that I could hold them;
for they ceased to lift their glasses, and stood watching me,
sometimes so silent that I could hear their breathing only,
sometimes making a great applause, which passed into silence again
quickly. Once, as I wheeled, I caught the eyes of Jamond watching
me closely. The Intendant never stirred from his seat, and scarcely
moved, but kept his eyes fixed on me. Nor did he applaud. There was
something painful in his immovability.

"I saw it all as in a dream, yet I did see it, and I was resolute to
triumph over the wicked designs of base and abandoned men. I feared
that my knowledge and power to hold them might stop before help
came. Once, in a slight pause, when a great noise of their hands
and a rattling of scabbards on the table gave me a short respite,
some one--Captain Lancy, I think--snatched up a glass, and called
on all to drink my health.

"'Jamond! Jamond!' was the cry, and they drank; the Intendant
himself standing up, and touching the glass to his lips, then
sitting down again, silent and immovable as before. One gentleman,
a nephew of the Chevalier de la Darante, came swaying towards
me with a glass of wine, begging me in a flippant courtesy to
drink; but I waved him back, and the Intendant said most curtly,
'Monsieur de la Darante will remember my injunction.'

"Again I danced, and I can not tell you with what anxiety and
desperation--for there must be an end to it before long, and your
peril, Robert, come again, unless these rough fellows changed their
minds. Moment after moment went, and though I had danced beyond
reasonable limits, I still seemed to get new strength, as I have
heard men say, in fighting, they 'come to their second wind.' At
last, at the end of the most famous step that Jamond had taught me,
I stood still for a moment to renewed applause; and I must have
wound these men up to excitement beyond all sense, for they would
not be dissuaded, but swarmed towards the dais where I was, and
some called for me to remove my mask.

"Then the Intendant came down among them, bidding them stand
back, and himself stepped towards me. I felt affrighted, for I
liked not the look in his eyes, and so, without a word, I stepped
down from the dais--I did not dare to speak, lest they should
recognize my voice--and made for the door with as much dignity as
I might. But the Intendant came to me with a mannered courtesy,
and said in my ear, 'Madame, you have won all our hearts; I would
you might accept some hospitality--a glass of wine, a wing of
partridge, in a room where none shall disturb you?' I shuddered,
and passed on. 'Nay, nay, madame, not even myself with you, unless
you would have it otherwise,' he added.

"Still I did not speak, but put out my hand in protest, and
moved on towards the screen, we two alone, for the others had
fallen back with whisperings and side-speeches. Oh, how I longed to
take the mask from my face and spurn them! The hand that I put out
in protest the Intendant caught within his own, and would have held
it, but that I drew it back with indignation, and kept on towards
the screen. Then I realized that a new-corner had seen the matter,
and I stopped short, dumfounded--for it was Monsieur Doltaire! He
was standing beside the screen, just within the room, and he sent
at the Intendant and myself a keen, piercing glance.

"Now he came forward quickly, for the Intendant also half
stopped at sight of him, and a malignant look shot from his eyes;
hatred showed in the profane word that was chopped off at his
teeth. When Monsieur Doltaire reached us, he said, his eyes resting
on me with intense scrutiny, 'His Excellency will present me to his
distinguished entertainer?' He seemed to read behind my mask. I knew
he had discovered me, and my heart stood still. But I raised my eyes
and met his gaze steadily. The worst had come. Well, I would face
it now. I could endure defeat with courage. He paused an instant,
a strange look passed over his face, his eyes got hard and very
brilliant, and he continued (oh, what suspense that was!): 'Ah yes,
I see--Jamond, the perfect and wonderful Jamond, who set us all
a-kneeling at Versailles. If Madame will permit me?' He made to take
my hand. Here the Intendant interposed, putting out his hand also.
'I have promised to protect Madame from individual courtesy while
here,' he said. Monsieur Doltaire looked at him keenly. 'Then your
Excellency must build stone walls about yourself,' he rejoined,
with cold emphasis. 'Sometimes great men are foolish. To-night your
Excellency would have let'--here he raised his voice so that all
could hear--'your Excellency would have let a dozen cowardly
gentlemen drag a dying prisoner from his prison, forcing back his
Majesty's officers at the dungeon doors, and, after baiting, have
matched him against a common criminal. That was unseemly in a great
man and a King's chief officer, the trick of a low law-breaker. Your
Excellency promised a lady to protect her from individual courtesy,
if she gave pleasure--a pleasure beyond price--to you and your
guests, and you would have broken your word without remorse. General
Montcalm has sent a company of men to set your Excellency right in
one direction, and I am come to set you right in the other.'

"The Intendant was white with rage. He muttered something between
his teeth, then said aloud, 'Presently we will talk more of this,
monsieur. You measure strength with Francois Bigot: we will see
which proves the stronger in the end.' 'In the end the unjust
steward kneels for mercy to his master,' was Monsieur Doltaire's
quiet answer; and then he made a courteous gesture towards the door,
and I went to it with him slowly, wondering what the end would be.
Once at the other side of the screen, he peered into Jamond's face
for an instant, then he gave a low whistle. 'You have an apt pupil,
Jamond, one who might be your rival one day,' said he. Still there
was a puzzled look on his face, which did not leave it till he saw
Jamond walking. 'Ah yes,' he added, 'I see now. You are lame. This
was a desperate yet successful expedient.'

"He did not speak to me, but led the way to where, at the great
door, was the Intendant's valet standing with my cloak. Taking it
from him, he put it round my shoulders. 'The sleigh by which I came
is at the door,' he said, 'and I will take you home.' I knew not
what to do, for I feared some desperate act on his part to possess
me. I determined that I would not leave Jamond, in any case, and
I felt for a weapon which I had hidden in my dress. We had not,
however, gone a half dozen paces in the entrance hall when there
were quick steps behind, and four soldiers came towards us, with an
officer at their head--an officer whom I had seen in the chamber,
but did not recognize.

"'Monsieur Doltaire,' the officer said; and monsieur stopped.
Then he cried in surprise, 'Legrand, you here!' To this the officer
replied by handing monsieur a paper. Monsieur's hand dropped to his
sword, but in a moment he gave a short, sharp laugh, and opened up
the packet. 'H'm,' he said, 'the Bastile! The Grande Marquise is
fretful--eh, Legrand? You will permit me some moments with these
ladies?' he added. 'A moment only,' answered the officer. 'In
another room?' monsieur again asked. 'A moment where you are,
monsieur,' was the reply. Making a polite gesture for me to step
aside, Monsieur Doltaire said, in a voice which was perfectly
controlled and courteous, though I could hear behind all a deadly
emphasis, 'I know everything now. You have foiled me, blindfolded
me and all others, these three years past. You have intrigued
against the captains of intrigue, you have matched yourself against
practised astuteness. On one side, I resent being made a fool and
tool of; on the other, I am lost in admiration of your talent. But
henceforth there is no such thing as quarter between us. Your lover
shall die, and I will come again. This whim of the Grande Marquise
will last but till I see her; then I will return to you--forever.
Your lover shall die, your love's labour for him shall be lost. I
shall reap where I did not sow--his harvest and my own. I am as ice
to you, mademoiselle, at this moment; I have murder in my heart. Yet
warmth will come again. I admire you so much that I will have you
for my own, or die. You are the high priestess of diplomacy; your
brain is a statesman's, your heart is a vagrant; it goes covertly
from the sweet meadows of France to the marshes of England, a taste
unworthy of you. You shall be redeemed from that by Tinoir Doltaire.
Now thank me for all I have done for you, and let me say adieu.'
He stooped and kissed my hand. 'I can not thank you for what I
myself achieved,' I said. 'We are, as in the past, to be at war,
you threaten, and I have no gratitude.' 'Well, well, adieu and au
revoir, sweetheart,' he answered. 'If I should go to the Bastile,
I shall have food for thought; and I am your hunter to the end. In
this good orchard I pick sweet fruit one day.' His look fell on me
in such a way that shame and anger were at equal height in me. Then
he bowed again to me and to Jamond, and, with a sedate gesture,
walked away with the soldiers and the officer.

"You can guess what were my feelings. You were safe for the
moment--that was the great thing. The terror I had felt when I saw
Monsieur Doltaire in the Chambre de la Joie had passed, for I felt
he would not betray me. He is your foe, and he would kill you; but
I was sure he would not put me in danger while he was absent in
France--if he expected to return--by making public my love for you
and my adventure at the palace. There is something of the noble
fighter in him, after all, though he is so evil a man. A prisoner
himself now, he would have no immediate means to hasten your death.
But I can never forget his searching, cruel look when he recognized
me! Of Jamond I was sure. Her own past had been full of sorrow, and
her life was now so secluded and religious that I could not doubt
her. Indeed, we have been blessed with good, true friends, Robert,
though they are not of those who are powerful, save in their
loyalty."

Alixe then told me that the officer Legrand had arrived from
France but two days before the eventful night of which I have just
written, armed with an order from the Grande Marquise for Doltaire's
arrest and transportation. He had landed at Gaspe, and had come on
to Quebec overland. Arriving at the Intendance, he had awaited
Doltaire's coming. Doltaire had stopped to visit General Montcalm at
Montmorenci Falls, on his way back from an expedition to the English
country, and had thus himself brought my protection and hurried to
his own undoing. I was thankful for his downfall, though I believed
it was but for a moment.

I was curious to know how it chanced I was set free of my
dungeon, and I had the story from Alixe's lips; but not till after
I had urged her, for she was sure her tale had wearied me, and she
was eager to do little offices of comfort about me; telling me
gaily, while she shaded the light, freshened my pillow, and gave
me a cordial to drink, that she would secretly convey me wines and
preserves and jellies and such kickshaws, that I should better get
my strength.

"For you must know," she said, "that though this gray hair and
transparency of flesh become you, making your eyes look like two
jets of flame and your face to have shadows most theatrical, a
ruddy cheek and a stout hand are more suited to a soldier. When
you are young again in body, these gray hairs shall render you
distinguished."

Then she sat down beside me, and clasped my hand, now looking
out into the clear light of afternoon to the farther shores of
Levis, showing green here and there from a sudden March rain, the
boundless forests beyond, and near us the ample St. Lawrence still
covered with its vast bridge of ice; anon into my face, while I
gazed into those deeps of her blue eyes that I had drowned my heart
in. I loved to watch her, for with me she was ever her own absolute
self, free from all artifice, lost in her perfect naturalness: a
healthy, perfect soundness, a primitive simplicity beneath the
artifice of usual life. She had a beautiful hand, long, warm, and
firm, and the fingers, when they clasped, seemed to possess and
inclose your own--the tenderness of the maidenly, the protectiveness
of the maternal. She carried with her a wholesome fragrance and
beauty as of an orchard, and while she sat there I thought of the
engaging words:

"Thou art to me like a basket of summer fruit, and I seek
thee in thy cottage by the vineyard, fenced about with good
commendable trees."

Of my release she spoke thus: "Monsieur Doltaire is to be
conveyed overland to the coast en route for France, and he sent
me by his valet a small arrow studded with emeralds and pearls,
and a skull all polished, with a message that the arrow was for
myself, and the skull for another--remembrances of the past, and
earnests of the future--truly an insolent and wicked man. When he
was gone I went to the Governor, and, with great show of interest
in many things pertaining to the government (for he has ever been
flattered by my attentions--me, poor little bee in the buzzing
hive!), came to the question of the English prisoner. I told him
it was I that prevented the disgrace to his good government by
sending to General Montcalm to ask for your protection.

"He was deeply impressed, and he opened out his vain heart in
divers ways. But I may not tell you of these--only what concerns
yourself; the rest belongs to his honour. When he was in his most
pliable mood, I grew deeply serious, and told him there was a danger
which perhaps he did not see. Here was this English prisoner, who,
they said abroad in the town, was dying. There was no doubt that
the King would approve the sentence of death, and if it were duly
and with some display enforced, it would but add to the Governor's
reputation in France. But should the prisoner die in captivity, or
should he go an invalid to the scaffold, there would only be pity
excited in the world for him. For his own honour, it were better the
Governor should hang a robust prisoner, who in full blood should
expiate his sins upon the scaffold. The advice went down like wine;
and when he knew not what to do, I urged your being brought here,
put under guard, and fed and nourished for your end. And so it was.

"The Governor's counsellor in the matter will remain a secret,
for by now he will be sure that he himself had the sparkling
inspiration. There, dear Robert, is the present climax to many
months of suspense and persecution, the like of which I hope I may
never see again. Some time I will tell you all: those meetings with
Monsieur Doltaire, his designs and approaches, his pleadings and
veiled threats, his numberless small seductions of words, manners,
and deeds, his singular changes of mood, when I was uncertain
what would happen next; the part I had to play to know all that
was going on in the Chateau St. Louis, in the Intendance, and
with General Montcalm; the difficulties with my own people; the
despair of my poor father, who does not know that it is I who have
kept him from trouble by my influence with the Governor. For since
the Governor and the Intendant are reconciled, he takes sides with
General Montcalm, the one sound gentleman in office in this poor
country--alas!"

Soon afterwards we parted. As she passed out she told me I might
at any hour expect a visit from the Governor.



XX

UPON THE RAMPARTS


The Governor visited me. His attitude was marked by nothing so
much as a supercilious courtesy, a manner which said, You must
see I am not to be trifled with; and though I have you here in
my chateau, it is that I may make a fine scorching of you in the
end. He would make of me an example to amaze and instruct the
nations--when I was robust enough to die.

I might easily have flattered myself on being an object of
interest to the eyes of nations. I almost pitied him; for he
appeared so lost in self-admiration and the importance of his
office that he would never see disaster when it came.

"There is but one master here in Canada," he said, "and I am he.
If things go wrong it is because my orders are not obeyed. Your
people have taken Louisburg; had I been there, it should never have
been given up. Drucour was hasty--he listened to the women. I should
allow no woman to move me. I should be inflexible. They might send
two Amhersts and two Wolfes against me, I would hold my fortress."

"They will never send two, your Excellency," said I.

He did not see the irony, and he prattled on: "That Wolfe, they
tell me, is bandy-legged; is no better than a girl at sea, and
never well ashore. I am always in raw health--the strong mind in
the potent body. Had I been at Louisburg, I should have held it,
as I held Ticonderoga last July, and drove the English back with
monstrous slaughter."

Here was news. I had had no information in many months, and all
at once two great facts were brought to me.

"Your Excellency, then, was at Ticonderoga?" said I.

"I sent Montcalm to defend it," he replied pompously. "I told
him how he must act; I was explicit, and it came out as I had said:
we were victorious. Yet he would have done better had he obeyed me
in everything. If I had been at Louisburg--"

I could not at first bring myself to flatter the vice-regal peacock;
for it had been my mind to fight these Frenchmen always; to yield in
nothing; to defeat them like a soldier, not like a juggler. But I
brought myself to say half ironically, "If all great men had capable
instruments, they would seldom fail."

"You have touched the heart of the matter," he said credulously.
"It is a pity," he added, with complacent severity, "that you
have been so misguided and criminal; you have, in some things,
more sense than folly."

I bowed as to a compliment from a great man. Then, all at once,
I spoke to him with an air of apparent frankness, and said that if
I must die, I cared to do so like a gentleman, with some sort of
health, and not like an invalid. He must admit that at least I was
no coward. He might fence me about with what guards he chose, but
I prayed him to let me walk upon the ramparts, when I was strong
enough to be abroad, under all due espionage. I had already
suffered many deaths, I said, and I would go to the final one
looking like a man, and not like an outcast of humanity.

"Ah, I have heard this before," said he. "Monsieur Doltaire, who
is in prison here, and is to fare on to the Bastile, was insolent
enough to send me message yesterday that I should keep you close in
your dungeon. But I had had enough of Monsieur Doltaire; and indeed
it was through me that the Grande Marquise had him called to
durance. He was a muddler here. They must not interfere with me; I
am not to be cajoled or crossed in my plans. We shall see, we shall
see about the ramparts," he continued. "Meanwhile prepare to die."
This he said with such importance that I almost laughed in his face.
But I bowed with a sort of awed submission, and he turned and left
the room.

I grew stronger slowly day by day, but it was quite a month
before Alixe came again. Sometimes I saw her walking on the banks
of the river, and I was sure she was there that I might see her,
though she made no sign towards me, nor ever seemed to look towards
my window.

Spring was now fully come. The snow had gone from the ground,
the tender grass was springing, the air was so soft and kind. One
fine day, at the beginning of May, I heard the booming of cannons
and a great shouting, and, looking out, I could see crowds of
people upon the banks, and many boats in the river, where yet the
ice had not entirely broken up. By stretching from my window,
through the bars of which I could get my head, but not my body, I
noted a squadron sailing round the point of the Island of Orleans.
I took it to be a fleet from France bearing re-enforcements
and supplies--as indeed afterwards I found was so; but the
re-enforcements were so small and the supplies so limited that
it is said Montcalm, when he knew, cried out, "Now is all lost!
Nothing remains but to fight and die. I shall see my beloved
Candiac no more."

For the first time all the English colonies had combined against
Canada. Vaudreuil and Montcalm were at variance, and Vaudreuil
had, through his personal hatred and envy of Montcalm, signed the
death-warrant of the colony by writing to the colonial minister
that Montcalm's agents, going for succour, were not to be trusted.
Yet at that moment I did not know these things, and the sight made
me grave, though it made me sure also that this year would find the
British battering this same Chateau.

Presently there came word from the Governor that I might walk
upon the ramparts, and I was taken forth for several hours each
day; always, however, under strict surveillance, my guards, well
armed, attending, while the ramparts were, as usual, patrolled by
soldiers. I could see that ample preparations were being made
against a siege, and every day the excitement increased. I got to
know more definitely of what was going on, when, under vigilance,
I was allowed to speak to Lieutenant Stevens, who also was
permitted some such freedom as I had enjoyed when I first came to
Quebec. He had private information that General Wolfe or General
Amherst was likely to proceed against Quebec from Louisburg, and
he was determined to join the expedition.

For months he had been maturing plans for escape. There was one
Clark, a ship-carpenter (of whom I have before written), and two
other bold spirits, who were sick of captivity, and it was intended
to fare forth one night and make a run for freedom. Clark had had a
notable plan. A wreck of several transports had occurred at Belle
Isle, and it was thought to send him down the river with a sloop to
bring back the crew, and break up the wreck. It was his purpose to
arm his sloop with Lieutenant Stevens and some English prisoners
the night before she was to sail, and steal away with her down
the river. But whether or not the authorities suspected him, the
command was given to another.

It was proposed, however, on a dark night, to get away to some
point on the river, where a boat should be stationed--though that
was a difficult matter, for the river was well patrolled and boats
were scarce--and drift quietly down the stream, till a good distance
below the city. Mr. Stevens said he had delayed the attempt on the
faint hope of fetching me along. Money, he said, was needed, for
Clark and all were very poor, and common necessaries were now at
exorbitant prices in the country. Tyranny and robbery had made corn
and clothing luxuries. All the old tricks of Bigot and his La
Friponne, which, after the outbreak the night of my arrest at the
Seigneur Duvarney's, had been somewhat repressed, were in full swing
again, and robbery in the name of providing for defense was the only
habit.

I managed to convey to Mr. Stevens a good sum of money, and
begged him to meet me every day upon the ramparts, until I also
should see my way to making a dart for freedom. I advised him in
many ways, for he was more bold than shrewd, and I made him promise
that he would not tell Clark or the others that I was to make trial
to go with them. I feared the accident of disclosure, and any new
failure on my part to get away would, I knew, mean my instant
death, consent of King or no consent.

One evening, a soldier entered my room, whom in the half-darkness
I did not recognize, till a voice said, "There's orders new! Not
dungeon now, but this room Governor bespeaks for gentlemen from
France."

"And where am I to go, Gabord?"

"Where you will have fighting," he answered.

"With whom?"

"Yourself, aho!" A queer smile crossed his lips, and was followed
by a sort of sternness. There was something graver in his manner
than I had ever seen. I could not guess his meaning. At last he
added, pulling roughly at his mustache, "And when that's done, if
not well done, to answer to Gabord the soldier; for, God take my
soul without bed-going, but I will call you to account! That
Seigneur's home is no place for you."

"You speak in riddles," said I. Then all at once the matter burst
upon me. "The Governor quarters me at the Seigneur Duvarney's?"
I asked.

"No other," answered he. "In three days to go."

I understood him now. He had had a struggle, knowing of the
relations between Alixe and myself, to avoid telling the Governor
all. And now, if I involved her, used her to effect my escape from
her father's house! Even his peasant brain saw my difficulty, the
danger to my honour--and hers. In spite of the joy I felt at being
near her, seeing her, I shrank from the situation. If I escaped
from the Seigneur Duvarney's, it would throw suspicion upon him,
upon Alixe, and that made me stand abashed. Inside the Seigneur
Duvarney's house I should now feel unhappy, bound to certain calls
of honour concerning his daughter and himself. I stood long,
thinking, Gabord watching me.

Finally, "Gabord," said I, "I give you my word of honour that I
will not put Mademoiselle or Monsieur Duvarney in peril."

"You will not try to escape?"

"Not to use them for escape. To elude my guards, to fight my way
to liberty--yes--yes--yes!"

"But that mends not. Who's to know the lady did not help you?"

"You. You are to be my jailer again there?"

He nodded, and fell to pulling his mustache. "'Tis not enough,"
he said decisively.

"Come, then," said I, "I will strike a bargain with you. If you
will grant me one thing, I will give my word of honour not to escape
from the seigneur's house."

"Say on."

"You tell me I am not to go to the seigneur's for three days yet.
Arrange that mademoiselle may come to me to-morrow at dusk--at six
o'clock, when all the world dines--and I will give my word. No more
do I ask you--only that."

"Done," said he. "It shall be so."

"You will fetch her yourself?" I asked.

"On the stroke of six. Guard changes then."

Here our talk ended. He went, and I plunged deep into my great plan;
for all at once, as we had talked, came a thing to me which I shall
make clear ere long. I set my wits to work. Once since my coming to
the chateau I had been visited by the English chaplain who had been
a prisoner at the citadel the year before. He was now on parole, and
had freedom to come and go in the town. The Governor had said he
might visit me on a certain day every week, at a fixed hour, and
the next day at five o'clock was the time appointed for his second
visit. Gabord had promised to bring Alixe to me at six.

The following morning I met Mr. Stevens on the ramparts. I told
him it was my purpose to escape the next night, if possible. If
not, I must go to the Seigneur Duvarney's, where I should be on
parole--to Gabord. I bade him fulfill my wishes to the letter, for
on his boldness and my own, and the courage of his men, I depended
for escape. He declared himself ready to risk all, and die in the
attempt, if need be, for he was sick of idleness. He could, he
said, mature his plans that day, if he had more money. I gave him
secretly a small bag of gold, and then I made explicit note of
what I required of him: that he should tie up in a loose but safe
bundle a sheet, a woman's skirt, some river grasses and reeds,
some phosphorus, a pistol and a knife, and some saltpetre and
other chemicals. That evening, about nine o'clock, which was the
hour the guard changed, he was to tie this bundle to a string
which I let down from my window, and I would draw it up. Then, the
night following, the others must steal away to that place near
Sillery--the west side of the town was always ill guarded--and wait
there with a boat. He should see me at a certain point on the
ramparts, and, well armed, we also would make our way to Sillery,
and from the spot called the Anse du Foulon drift down the river
in the dead of night.

He promised to do all as I wished.

The rest of the day I spent in my room fashioning strange toys
out of willow rods. I had got these rods from my guards, to make
whistles for their children, and they had carried away many of
them. But now, with pieces of a silk handkerchief tied to the
whistle and filled with air, I made a toy which, when squeezed,
sent out a weird lament. Once when my guard came in, I pressed one
of these things in my pocket, and it gave forth a sort of smothered
cry, like a sick child. At this he started, and looked round the
room in trepidation; for, of all peoples, these Canadian Frenchmen
are the most superstitious, and may be worked on without limit.
The cry had seemed to come from a distance. I looked around, also,
and appeared serious, and he asked me if I had heard the thing
before.

"Once or twice," said I.

"Then you are a dead man," said he; "'tis a warning, that!"

"Maybe it is not I, but one of you," I answered. Then, with a
sort of hush, "Is't like the cry of La Jongleuse?" I added. (La
Jongleuse is their fabled witch, or spirit, of disaster.)

He nodded his head, crossed himself, mumbled a prayer, and turned
to go, but came back. "I'll fetch a crucifix," he said. "You are
a heathen, and you bring her here. She is the devil's dam."

He left with a scared face, and I laughed to myself quietly, for
I saw success ahead of me. True to his word, he brought a crucifix
and put it up--not where he wished, but, at my request, opposite
the door, upon the wall. He crossed himself before it, and was
most devout.

It looked singular to see this big, rough soldier, who was in
most things a swaggerer, so childlike in all that touched his
religion. With this you could fetch him to his knees; with it
I would cow him that I might myself escape.

At half past five the chaplain came, having been delayed by the
guard to have his order indorsed by Captain Lancy of the Governor's
household. To him I told my plans so far as I thought he should
know them, and then I explained what I wished him to do. He was
grave and thoughtful for some minutes, but at last consented. He
was a pious man, and of as honest a heart as I have known, albeit
narrow and confined, which sprang perhaps from his provincial
practice and his theological cutting and trimming. We were in the
midst of a serious talk, wherein I urged him upon matters which
shall presently be set forth, when there came a noise outside. I
begged him to retire to the alcove where my bed was, and draw the
curtain for a few moments, nor come forth until I called. He did
so, yet I thought it hurt his sense of dignity to be shifted to a
bedroom.

As he disappeared the door opened, and Gabord and Alixe entered.
"One half hour," said Gabord, and went out again.

Presently Alixe told me her story.

"I have not been idle, Robert, but I could not act, for my father
and mother suspect my love for you. I have come but little to the
chateau without them, and I was closely watched. I knew not how the
thing would end, but I kept up my workings with the Governor, which
is easier now Monsieur Doltaire is gone, and I got you the freedom
to walk upon the ramparts. Well, once before my father suspected me,
I said that if his Excellency disliked your being in the Chateau,
you could be as well guarded in my father's house, with sentinels
always there, until you could, in better health, be taken to the
common jail again. What was my surprise when yesterday came word to
my father that he should make ready to receive you as a prisoner;
being sure that he, his Excellency's cousin, the father of the man
you had injured, and the most loyal of Frenchmen, would guard you
diligently; he now needed all extra room in the Chateau for the
entertainment of gentlemen and officers lately come from France.

"When my father got the news, he was thrown into dismay. He knew
not what to do. On what ground could he refuse the Governor? Yet
when he thought of me he felt it his duty to do so. Again, on what
ground could he refuse this boon to you, to whom we all owe the
blessing of his life? On my brother's account? But my brother has
written to my father justifying you, and magnanimously praising you
as a man, while hating you as an English soldier. On my account?
But he could not give this reason to the Governor. As for me, I
was silent, I waited--and I wait; I know not what will be the end.
Meanwhile preparations go on to receive you."

I could see that Alixe's mood was more tranquil since Doltaire
was gone. A certain restlessness had vanished. Her manner had much
dignity, and every movement a peculiar grace and elegance. She was
dressed in a soft cloth of a gray tone, touched off with red and
slashed with gold, and a cloak of gray, trimmed with fur, with
bright silver buckles, hung loosely on her, thrown off at one
shoulder. There was a sweet disorder in the hair, which indeed
was prettiest when freest.

When she had finished speaking, she looked at me, as I thought,
with a little anxiety.

"Alixe," I said, "we have come to the cross-roads, and the way
we choose now is for all time."

She looked up, startled, yet governing herself, and her hand
sought mine and nestled there. "I feel that, too," she replied.
"What is it, Robert?"

"I can not in honour escape from your father's house. I can not
steal his daughter and his safety too--"

"You must escape," she interrupted firmly.

"From here, from the citadel, from anywhere but your house; and
so I will not go to it."

"You will not go to it?" she repeated slowly and strangely. "How
may you not? You are a prisoner. If they make my father your
jailer--" She laughed.

"I owe that jailer and that jailer's daughter--"

"You owe them your safety and your freedom. Oh, Robert, I know,
I know what you mean. But what care I what the world may think
by-and-bye, or to-morrow, or to-day? My conscience is clear."

"Your father--" I persisted.

She nodded. "Yes, yes, you speak truth, alas! And yet you must
be freed. And"--here she got to her feet, and with flashing eyes
spoke out--"and you shall be set free. Let come what will, I owe
my first duty to you, though all the world chatter; and I will
not stir from that. As soon as I can make it possible, you
shall escape."

"You shall have the right to set me free," said I, "if I must go
to your father's house. And if I do not go there, but out to my
own good country, you shall still have the right before all the
world to follow, or to wait till I come to fetch you."

"I do not understand you, Robert," said she. "I do not--" Here
she broke off, looking, looking at me, and trembling a little.

Then I stooped and whispered softly in her ear. She gave a little
cry, and drew back from me; yet instantly her hand came out and
caught my arm.

"Robert, Robert! I can not, I dare not!" she cried softly. "No,
no, it may not be," she added in a whisper of fear.

I went to the alcove, drew back the curtain, and asked Mr.
Wainfleet to step forth.

"Sir," said I, picking up my Prayer Book and putting it in his
hands, "I beg you to marry this lady and myself."

He paused, dazed. "Marry you--here--now?" he asked shakingly.

"Before ten minutes go round, this lady must be my wife," said I.

"Mademoiselle Duvarney, you--" he began.

"Be pleased, dear sir, to open the book at 'Wilt thou have,'" said
I. "The lady is a Catholic; she has not the consent of her people;
but when she is my wife, made so by you, whose consent need we ask?
Can you not tie us fast enough, a man and woman of sense sufficient,
but you must pause here? Is the knot you tie safe against picking
and stealing?"

I had touched his vanity and his ecclesiasticism. "Married by me,"
he replied, "once chaplain to the Bishop of London, you have a
knot that no sword can cut. I am in full orders. My parish is in
Boston itself."

"You will hand a certificate to my wife to-morrow, and you will
uphold this marriage against all gossip?" asked I.

"Against all France and all England," he answered, roused now.

"Then come," I urged.

"But I must have a witness," he interposed, opening the book.

"You shall have one in due time," said I. "Go on. When the
marriage is performed, and at the point where you shall proclaim
us man and wife, I will have a witness."

I turned to Alixe, and found her pale and troubled. "Oh, Robert,
Robert!" she cried, "it can not be. Now, now I am afraid, for the
first time in my life, clear, the first time!"

"Dearest lass in the world," I said, "it must be. I shall not go
to your father's. To-morrow night, I make my great stroke for
freedom, and when I am free I shall return to fetch my wife."

"You will try to escape from here to-morrow?" she asked, her
face flushing finely.

"I will escape or die," I answered; "but I shall not think of
death. Come--come and say with me that we shall part no more--in
spirit no more; that, whatever comes, you and I have fulfilled our
great hope, though under the shadow of the sword."

At that she put her hand in mine with pride and sweetness, and
said, "I am ready, Robert. I give my heart, my life, and my honour
to you--forever."

Then, with great sweetness and solemnity she turned to the
clergyman: "Sir, my honour is also in your hands. If you have
mother or sister, or any care of souls upon you, I pray you, in
the future act as becomes good men."

"Mademoiselle," he said earnestly, "I am risking my freedom,
maybe my life, in this; do you think--"

Here she took his hand and pressed it. "Ah, I ask your pardon. I
am of a different faith from you, and I have known how men forget
when they should remember." She smiled at him so perfectly that
he drew himself up with pride.

"Make haste, sir," said I. "Jailers are curious folk."

The room was not yet lighted, the evening shadows were creeping
in, and up out of the town came the ringing of the vesper bell from
the church of the Recollets. For a moment there was stillness in the
room and all around us, and then the chaplain began in a low voice:
"I require and charge you both--" and so on. In a few moments I had
made the great vow, and had put on Alixe's finger a ring which the
clergyman drew from his own hand. Then we knelt down, and I know
we both prayed most fervently with the good man that we might "ever
remain in perfect love and perfect peace together."

Rising, he paused, and I went to the door and knocked upon it.
It was opened by Gabord. "Come in, Gabord," said I. "There is a
thing that you must hear."

He stepped back and got a light, and then entered, holding it up,
and shutting the door. A strange look came upon his face when he saw
the chaplain, and a stranger when, stepping beside Alixe, I took her
hand, and Mr. Wainfleet declared us man and wife. He stood like one
dumfounded, and he did not stir as Alixe, turning to me, let me
kiss her on the lips, and then went to the crucifix on the wall and
embraced the feet of it, and stood for a moment, praying. Nor did
he move or make a sign till she came back and stood beside me.

"A pretty scene!" he burst forth then with anger. "But, by God!
no marriage is it!"

Alixe's hand tightened on my arm, and she drew close to me.

"A marriage that will stand at Judgment Day, Gabord," said I.

"But not in France or here. 'Tis mating wild, with end of doom."

"It is a marriage our great Archbishop at Lambeth Palace will
uphold against a hundred popes and kings," said the chaplain with
importance.

"You are no priest, but holy peddler!" cried Gabord roughly.
"This is not mating as Christians, and fires of hell shall
burn--aho! I will see you all go down, and hand of mine shall
not be lifted for you!"

He puffed out his cheeks, and his great eyes rolled so like
fire-wheels.

"You are a witness to this ceremony," said the chaplain. "And
you shall answer to your God, but you must speak the truth for this
man and wife."

"Man and wife?" laughed Gabord wildly. "May I die and be damned
to--"

Like a flash Alixe was beside him, and put to his lips most
swiftly the little wooden cross that Mathilde had given her.

"Gabord, Gabord," she said in a sweet, sad voice, "when you may
come to die, a girl's prayers will be waiting at God's feet for
you."

He stopped, and stared at her. Her hand lay on his arm, and she
continued: "No night gives me sleep, Gabord, but I pray for the
jailer who has been kind to an ill-treated gentleman."

"A juggling gentleman, that cheats Gabord before his eyes, and
smuggles in a mongrel priest!" he blustered.

I waved my hand at the chaplain, or I think he would have put
his Prayer Book to rougher use than was its wont, and I was about
to answer, but Alixe spoke instead, and to greater purpose than I
could have done. Her whole mood changed, her face grew still and
proud, her eyes flashed bravely.

"Gabord," she said, "vanity speaks in you there, not honesty. No
gentleman here is a juggler. No kindness you may have done warrants
insolence. You have the power to bring great misery on us, and you
may have the will, but, by God's help, both my husband and myself
shall be delivered from cruel hands. At any moment I may stand alone
in the world, friends, people, the Church, and all the land against
me: if you desire to haste that time, to bring me to disaster,
because you would injure my husband,"--how sweet the name sounded on
her lips!--"then act, but do not insult us. But no, no," she broke
off softly, "you spoke in temper, you meant it not, you were but
vexed with us for the moment. Dear Gabord," she added, "did we not
know that if we had asked you first, you would have refused us? You
care so much for me, you would have feared my linking my life and
fate with one--"

"With one the death-man has in hand, to pay price for wicked
deed," he interrupted.

"With one innocent of all dishonour, a gentleman wronged every
way. Gabord, you know it so, for you have guarded him and fought
with him, and you are an honourable gentleman," she added gently.

"No gentleman I," he burst forth, "but jailer base, and soldier
born upon a truss of hay. But honour is an apple any man may eat
since Adam walked in garden.... 'Tis honest foe, here," he
continued magnanimously, and nodded towards me.

"We would have told you all," she said, "but how dare we involve
you, or how dare we tempt you, or how dare we risk your refusal? It
was love and truth drove us to this; and God will bless this mating
as the birds mate, even as He gives honour to Gabord who was born
upon a truss of hay."

"Poom!" said Gabord, puffing out his cheeks, and smiling on her
with a look half sour, and yet with a doglike fondness, "Gabord's
mouth is shut till 's head is off, and then to tell the tale to
Twelve Apostles!"

Through his wayward, illusive speech we found his meaning. He
would keep faith with us, and be best proof of this marriage, at
risk of his head even.

As we spoke, the chaplain was writing in the blank fore-pages of
the Prayer Book. Presently he said to me, handing me the pen, which
he had picked from a table, "Inscribe your names here. It is a
rough record of the ceremony, but it will suffice before all men,
when to-morrow I have given Mistress Moray another record."

We wrote our names, and then the pen was handed to Gabord. He took
it, and at last, with many flourishes and ahos, and by dint of
puffings and rolling eyes, he wrote his name so large that it filled
as much space as the other names and all the writing, and was indeed
like a huge indorsement across the record.

When this was done, Alixe held out her hand to him. "Will you kiss
me, Gabord?" she said.

The great soldier was all taken back. He flushed like a schoolboy,
yet a big humour and pride looked out of his eyes.

"I owe you for the sables, too," she said. "But kiss me--not on my
ears, as the Russian count kissed Gabord, but on both cheek."

This won him to our cause utterly, and I never think of Gabord,
as I saw him last in the sway and carnage of battle, fighting with
wild uproar and covered with wounds, but the memory of that moment,
when he kissed my young wife, comes back to me.

At that he turned to leave. "I'll hold the door for ten minutes,"
he added; and bowed to the chaplain, who blessed us then with tears
in his eyes, and smiled a little to my thanks and praises and purse
of gold, and to Alixe's sweet gratitude. With lifting chin--good
honest gentleman, who afterwards proved his fidelity and truth--he
said that he would die to uphold this sacred ceremony. And so he
made a little speech, as if he had a pulpit round him, and he wound
up with a benediction which sent my dear girl to tears and soft
trembling:

"The Lord bless you and keep you: the Lord make his face to shine
upon you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you
peace now and for evermore."

A moment afterwards the door closed, and for ten minutes I looked
into my wife's face, and told her my plans for escape. When
Gabord opened the door upon us, we had passed through years of
understanding and resolve. Our parting was brave--a bravery on
her side that I do not think any other woman could match. She
was quivering with the new life come upon her, yet she was
self-controlled; she moved as in a dream, yet I knew her mind was
alert, vigilant, and strong; she was aching with thought of this
separation, with the peril that faced us both, yet she carried a
quiet joy in her face, a tranquil gravity of bearing.

"Whom God hath joined--" said I gravely at the last.

"Let no man put asunder," she answered softly and solemnly.

"Aho!" said Gabord, and turned his head away.

Then the door shut upon me, and though I am no Catholic, I have
no shame in saying that I kissed the feet on the crucifix which
her lips had blessed.



XXI

LA JONGLEUSE


At nine o'clock I was waiting by the window, and even as a bugle
sounded "lights out" in the barracks and change of guard, I let the
string down. Mr. Stevens shot round the corner of the chateau, just
as the departing sentinel disappeared, and attached a bundle to the
string, and I drew it up.

"Is all well?" I called softly down.

"All well," said Mr. Stevens, and, hugging the wall of the chateau,
he sped away. In another moment a new sentinel began pacing up and
down, and I shut the window and untied my bundle. All that I had
asked for was there. I hid the things away in the alcove and went to
bed at once, for I knew that I should have no sleep on the following
night.

I did not leave my bed till the morning was well advanced. Once
or twice during the day I brought my guards in with fear on their
faces, the large fat man more distorted than his fellow, by the
lamentable sounds I made with my willow toys. They crossed
themselves again and again, and I myself appeared devout and
troubled. When we walked abroad during the afternoon, I chose to
saunter by the river rather than walk, for I wished to conserve my
strength, which was now vastly increased, though, to mislead my
watchers and the authorities, I assumed the delicacy of an invalid,
and appeared unfit for any enterprise--no hard task, for I was
still very thin and worn.

So I sat upon a favourite seat on the cliff, set against a solitary
tree, fixed in the rocks. I gazed long on the river, and my guards,
stoutly armed, stood near, watching me, and talking in low tones.
Eager to hear their gossip, I appeared to sleep. They came nearer,
and, facing me, sat upon a large stone, and gossiped freely
concerning the strange sounds heard in my room at the chateau.

"See you, my Bamboir," said the lean to the fat soldier, "the
British captain, he is to be carried off in burning flames by that
La Jongleuse. We shall come in one morning and find a smell of
sulphur only, and a circle of red on the floor where the imps
danced before La Jongleuse said to them, 'Up with him, darlings,
and away!'"

At this Bamboir shook his head, and answered, "To-morrow I'll to the
Governor, and tell him what's coming. My wife, she falls upon my
neck this morning. 'Argose,' she says, ''twill need the bishop and
his college to drive La Jongleuse out of the grand chateau.'"

"No less," replied the other. "A deacon and sacred palm and
sprinkle of holy water would do for a cottage, or even for a little
manor house, with twelve candles burning, and a hymn to the Virgin.
But in a king's house--"

"It's not the King's house."

"But yes, it is the King's house, though his Most Christian
Majesty lives in France. The Marquis de Vaudreuil stands for the
King, and we are sentinels in the King's house. But, my faith, I'd
rather be fighting against Frederick, the Prussian boar, than
watching this mad Englishman."

"But see you, my brother, that Englishman's a devil. Else how has he
not been hanged long ago? He has vile arts to blind all, or he would
not be sitting there. It is well known that M'sieu' Doltaire, even
the King's son--his mother worked in the fields like your Nanette,
Bamboir--"

"Or your Lablanche, my friend. She has hard hands, with warts,
and red knuckles therefrom--"

"Or your Nanette, Bamboir, with nose that blisters in the summer,
as she goes swingeing flax, and swelling feet that sweat in sabots,
and chin thrust out from carrying pails upon her head--"

"Ay, like Nanette and like Lablanche, this peasant mother of M'sieu'
Doltaire, and maybe no such firm breasts like Nanette--"

"Nor such an eye as has Lablanche. Well, M'sieu' Doltaire, who
could override them all, he could not kill this barbarian. And
Gabord--you know well how they fought, and the black horse and
his rider came and carried him away. Why, the young M'sieu'
Duvarney had him on his knees, the blade at his throat,
and a sword flashed out from the dark--they say it was the
devil's--and took him in the ribs and well-nigh killed him."

"But what say you to Ma'm'selle Duvarney coming to him that day,
and again yesterday with Gabord?"

"Well, well, who knows, Bamboir? This morning I said to Nanette,
'Why is't, all in one moment, you send me to the devil, and pray to
meet me in Abraham's bosom too?' What think you she answered me?
Why, this, my Bamboir: 'Why is't Adam loved his wife and swore
her down before the Lord also, all in one moment?' Why Ma'm'selle
Duvarney does this or that is not for muddy brains like ours. It
is some whimsy. They say that women are more curious about the
devil than about St. Jean Baptiste. Perhaps she got of him a
magic book."

"No, no! If he had the magic Petit Albert, he would have turned
us into dogs long ago. But I do not like him. He is but thirty
years, they say, and yet his hair is white as a pigeon's wing. It
is not natural. Nor did he ever, says Gabord, do aught but laugh at
everything they did to him. The chains they put would not stay,
and when he was set against the wall to be shot, the watches
stopped--the minute of his shooting passed. Then M'sieu' Doltaire
came, and said a man that could do a trick like that should live
to do another. And he did it, for M'sieu' Doltaire is gone to
the Bastile. Voyez, this Englishman is a damned heretic, and has
the wicked arts."

"But see, Bamboir, do you think he can cast spells?"

"What mean those sounds from his room?"

"So, so. But if he be a friend of the devil, La Jongleuse would
not come for him, but--"

Startled and excited, they grasped each other's arms. "But for
us--for us!"

"It would be a work of God to send him to the devil," said Bamboir
in a loud whisper. "He has given us trouble enough. Who can tell
what comes next? Those damned noises in his room, eh--eh?"

Then they whispered together, and presently I caught a fragment,
by which I understood that, as we walked near the edge of the
cliff, I should be pushed over, and they would make it appear
that I had drowned myself.

They talked in low tones again, but soon got louder, and presently
I knew that they were speaking of La Jongleuse; and Bamboir--the
fat Bamboir, who the surgeon had said would some day die of
apoplexy--was rash enough to say that he had seen her. He
described her accurately, with the spirit of the born raconteur:

"Hair so black as the feather in the Governor's hat, and green
eyes that flash fire, and a brown face with skin all scales. Oh,
my saints of Heaven, when she pass I hide my head, and I go cold
like stone. She is all covered with long reeds and lilies about her
head and shoulders, and blue-red sparks fly up at every step. Flames
go round her, and she burns not her robe--not at all. And as she go,
I hear cries that make me sick, for it is, I said, some poor man
in torture, and I think, perhaps it is Jacques Villon, perhaps Jean
Rivas, perhaps Angele Damgoche. But no, it is a young priest of St.
Clair, for he is never seen again--never!"

In my mind I commended this fat Bamboir as an excellent
story-teller, and thanked him for his true picture of La Jongleuse,
whom, to my regret, I had never seen. I would not forget his
stirring description, as he should see. I gave point to the tale by
squeezing an inflated toy in my pocket, with my arm, while my hands
remained folded in front of me; and it was as good as a play to see
the faces of these soldiers, as they sprang to their feet, staring
round in dismay. I myself seemed to wake with a start, and, rising
to my feet, I asked what meant the noise and their amazement. We
were in a spot where we could not easily be seen from any distance,
and no one was in sight, nor were we to be remarked from the fort.
They exchanged looks, as I started back towards the chateau,
walking very near the edge of the cliff. A spirit of bravado came
on me, and I said musingly to them as we walked:

"It would be easy to throw you both over the cliff, but I love you
too well. I have proved that by making toys for your children."

It was as cordial to me to watch their faces. They both drew
away from the cliff, and grasped their firearms apprehensively.

"My God," said Bamboir, "those toys shall be burned to-night.
Alphonse has the smallpox and Susanne the croup--damned devil!" he
added furiously, stepping forward to me with gun raised, "I'll--"

I believe he would have shot me, but that I said quickly, "If you
did harm to me you'd come to the rope. The Governor would rather
lose a hand than my life."

I pushed his musket down. "Why should you fret? I am leaving the
chateau to-morrow for another prison. You fools, d'ye think I'd
harm the children? I know as little of the devil or La Jongleuse
as do you. We'll solve the witcheries of these sounds, you and I,
to-night. If they come, we'll say the Lord's Prayer, and make the
sacred gesture, and if it goes not, we will have one of your good
priests to drive out this whining spirit."

This quieted them much, and I was glad of it, for they had looked
bloodthirsty enough, and though I had a weapon on me, there was
little use in seeking fighting or flight till the auspicious moment.
They were not satisfied, however, and they watched me diligently as
we came on to the chateau.

I could not bear that they should be frightened about their
children, so I said:

"Make for me a sacred oath, and I will swear by it that those
toys will do your children no harm."

I drew out the little wooden cross that Mathilde had given me,
and held it up. They looked at me astonished. What should I, a
heretic and a Protestant, do with this sacred emblem? "This
never leaves me," said I; "it was a pious gift."

I raised the cross to my lips, and kissed it.

"That's well," said Bamboir to his comrade. "If otherwise, he
should have been struck down by the Avenging Angel."

We got back to the chateau without more talk, and I was locked
in, while my guards retired. As soon as they had gone I got to
work, for my great enterprise was at hand.

At ten o'clock I was ready for the venture. When the critical
moment came, I was so arrayed that my dearest friend would not have
known me. My object was to come out upon my guards as La Jongleuse,
and, in the fright and confusion which should follow, make my
escape through the corridors and to the entrance doors, past the
sentinels, and so on out. It may be seen now why I got the woman's
garb, the sheet, the horsehair, the phosphorus, the reeds, and such
things; why I secured the knife and pistol may be guessed likewise.
Upon the lid of a small stove in the room I placed my saltpetre,
and I rubbed the horsehair on my head with phosphorus, also on my
hands, and face, and feet, and on many objects in the room. The
knife and pistol were at my hand, and when the clock struck ten,
I set my toys to wailing.

Then I knocked upon the door with solemn taps, hurried back to
the stove, and waited for the door to open before I applied the
match. I heard a fumbling at the lock, then the door was thrown wide
open. All was darkness in the hall without, save for a spluttering
candle which Bamboir held over his head, as he and his fellow,
deadly pale, stood peering forward. Suddenly they gave a cry, for
I threw the sheet from my face and shoulders, and to their excited
imagination La Jongleuse stood before them, all in flames. As I
started down on them, the coloured fire flew up, making the room all
blue and scarlet for a moment, in which I must have looked devilish
indeed, with staring eyes, and outstretched chalky hands, and
wailing cries coming from my robe.

I moved swiftly, and Bamboir, without a cry, dropped like a log
(poor fellow, he never rose again! the apoplexy which the surgeon
promised had come), his comrade gave a cry, and sank in a heap in
a corner, mumbling a prayer, and making the sign of the cross, his
face stark with terror.

I passed him, came along the corridor and down one staircase,
without seeing any one; then two soldiers appeared in the
half-lighted hallway. Presently also a door opened behind me, and
some one came out. By now the phosphorus light diminished a little,
but still I was a villainous picture, for in one hand I held a
small cup from which suddenly sprang red and blue fires. The men
fell back, and I sailed past them, but I had not gone far down the
lower staircase when a shot rang after me, and a bullet passed by
my head. Now I came rapidly to the outer door, where two more
sentinels stood. They shrank back, and suddenly one threw down his
musket and ran; the other, terrified, stood stock-still. I passed
him, opened the door, and came out upon the Intendant, who was
just alighting from his carriage.

The horses sprang away, frightened at sight of me, and nearly threw
Bigot to the ground. I tossed the tin cup with its chemical fires
full in his face, as he made a dash for me. He called out, and drew
his sword. I wished not to fight, and I sprang aside; but he made a
pass at me, and I drew my pistol and was about to fire, when another
shot came from the hallway and struck him. He fell, almost at my
feet, and I dashed away into the darkness. Fifty feet ahead I cast
one glance hack, and saw Monsieur Cournal standing in the doorway.
I was sure that his second shot had not been meant for me, but for
the Intendant--a wild attempt at a revenge, long delayed, for the
worst of wrongs.

I ran on, and presently came full upon five soldiers, two of
whom drew their pistols, fired, and missed. Their comrades ran away
howling. They barred my path, and now I fired, too, and brought one
down; then came a shot from behind them, and another fell. The last
one took to his heels, and a moment later I had my hand in that of
Mr. Stevens. It was he who had fired the opportune shot that rid me
of one foe. We came quickly along the river brink, and, skirting
the citadel, got clear of it without discovery, though we could see
soldiers hurrying past, roused by the firing at the chateau.

In about half an hour of steady running, with a few bad stumbles
and falls, we reached the old windmill above the Anse du Foulon at
Sillery, and came plump upon our waiting comrades. I had stripped
myself of my disguise, and rubbed the phosphorus from my person as
we came along, but enough remained to make me an uncanny figure.
It had been kept secret from these people that I was to go with
them, and they sullenly kept their muskets raised and cocked; but
when Mr. Stevens told them who I was, they were agreeably surprised.
I at once took command of the enterprise, saying firmly at the
same time that I would shoot the first man who disobeyed my
orders. I was sure that I could bring them to safety, but my will
must be law. They took my terms like men, and swore to stand by me.



XXII

THE LORD OF KAMARSKA


We were five altogether--Mr. Stevens, Clark, the two Boston
soldiers, and myself; and presently we came down the steep passage
in the cliff to where our craft lay, secured by my dear wife--a
birch canoe, well laden with necessaries. Our craft was none too
large for our party, but she must do; and safely in, we pushed out
upon the current, which was in our favour, for the tide was going
out. My object was to cross the river softly, skirt the Levis
shore, pass the Isle of Orleans, and so steal down the river.
There was excitement in the town, as we could tell from the lights
flashing along the shore, and boats soon began to patrol the banks,
going swiftly up and down, and extending a line round to the St.
Charles River towards Beauport.

It was well for us the night was dark, else we had run that
gantlet. But we were lucky enough, by hard paddling, to get past
the town on the Levis side. Never were better boatmen. The paddles
dropped with agreeable precision, and no boatswain's rattan was
needed to keep my fellows to their task. I, whose sight was long
trained to darkness, could see a great distance round us, and so
could prevent a trap, though once or twice we let our canoe drift
with the tide, lest our paddles should be heard. I could not paddle
long, I had so little strength. After the Isle of Orleans was
passed, I drew a breath of relief, and played the part of captain
and boatswain merely.

Yet when I looked back at the town on those strong heights, and saw
the bonfires burn to warn the settlers of our escape, saw the lights
sparkling in many homes, and even fancied I could make out the
light shining in my dear wife's window, I had a strange feeling of
loneliness. There in the shadow of my prison walls, was the dearest
thing on earth to me. Ought she not to be with me? She had begged to
come, to share with me these dangers and hardships; but that I could
not, would not grant. She would be safer with her people. As for us
desperate men bent on escape, we must face hourly peril.

Thank God, there was work to do. Hour after hour the swing and
dip of the paddles went on. No one showed weariness, and when the
dawn broke slow and soft over the eastern hills, I motioned my good
boatmen towards the shore, and landed safely. We lifted our frigate
up, and carried her into a thicket, there to rest with us till
night, when we would sally forth again into the friendly darkness.
We were in no distress all that day, for the weather was fine, and
we had enough to eat; and in such case were we for ten days and
nights, though indeed some of the nights were dreary and very cold,
for it was yet but the beginning of May.

It might thus seem that we were leaving danger well behind,
after having travelled so many heavy leagues, but it was yet
several hundred miles to Louisburg, our destination; and we had
escaped only immediate danger. We passed Isle aux Coudres and the
Isles of Kamaraska, and now we ventured by day to ramble the woods
in search of game, which was most plentiful. In this good outdoor
life my health came slowly back, and I should soon be able to bear
equal tasks with any of my faithful comrades. Never man led better
friends, though I have seen adventurous service near and far since
that time. Even the genial ruffian Clark was amenable, and took
sharp reprimand without revolt.

On the eleventh night after our escape, our first real trial
came. We were keeping the middle of the great river, as safest from
detection, and when the tide was with us we could thus move more
rapidly. We had had a constant favouring wind, but now suddenly,
though we were running with the tide, the wind turned easterly, and
blew up the river against the ebb. Soon it became a gale, to which
was added snow and sleet, and a rough, choppy sea followed.

I saw it would be no easy task to fetch our craft to the land.
The waves broke in upon us, and presently, while half of us were
paddling with laboured and desperate stroke, the other half were
bailing. Lifted on a crest, our canoe, heavily laden, dropped at
both ends; and again, sinking into the hollows between the short,
brutal waves, her gunwales yielded outward, and her waist gaped
in a dismal way. We looked to see her with a broken back at any
moment. To add to our ill fortune, a violent current set in from
the shore, and it was vain to attempt a landing. Spirits and bodies
flagged, and it needed all my cheerfulness to keep my good fellows
to their tasks.

At last, the ebb of tide being almost spent, the waves began to
fall, the wind shifted a little to the northward, and a piercing
cold instantly froze our drenched clothes on our backs. But with
the current changed there was a good chance of reaching the shore.
As daylight came we passed into a little sheltered cove, and sank
with exhaustion on the shore. Our frozen clothes rattled like tin,
and we could scarce lift a leg. But we gathered a fine heap of
wood, flint and steel were ready, and the tinder was sought; which,
when found, was soaking. Not a dry stitch or stick could we find
anywhere, till at last, within a leather belt, Mr. Stevens found a
handkerchief, which was, indeed, as he told me afterwards, the gift
and pledge of a lady to him; and his returning to her with out it
nearly lost him another and better gift and pledge, for this went
to light our fire. We had had enough danger and work in one night
to give us relish for some days of rest, and we piously took them.

The evening of the second day we set off again, and had a good
night's run, and in the dawn, spying a snug little bay, we stood
in, and went ashore. I sent my two Provincials foraging with their
guns, and we who remained set about to fix our camp for the day and
prepare breakfast. A few minutes only passed, and the two hunters
came running back with rueful faces to say they had seen two
Indians near, armed with muskets and knives. My plans were made at
once. We needed their muskets, and the Indians must pay the price
of their presence here, for our safety should be had at any cost.

I urged my men to utter no word at all, for none but Clark could
speak French, and he but poorly. For myself, my accent would pass
after these six years of practice. We came to a little river,
beyond which we could observe the Indians standing on guard. We
could only cross by wading, which we did; but one of my Provincials
came down, wetting his musket and himself thoroughly. Reaching the
shore, we marched together, I singing the refrain of an old French
song as we went,

  En roulant, ma boule roulant,
  En roulant, ma boule

so attracting the attention of the Indians. The better to deceive,
we all were now dressed in the costume of the French peasant--I had
taken pains to have Mr. Stevens secure these for us before starting;
a pair of homespun trousers, a coarse brown jacket, with thrums like
waving tassels, a silk handkerchief about the neck, and a strong
thick worsted wig on the head; no smart toupet, nor buckle; nor
combed, nor powdered; and all crowned by a dull black cap. I myself
was, as became my purpose, most like a small captain of militia,
doing wood service, and in the braver costume of the coureur de bois.

I signalled to the Indians, and, coming near, addressed them in
French. They were deceived, and presently, abreast of them, in the
midst of apparent ceremony, their firelocks were seized, and Mr.
Stevens and Clark had them safe. I said we must be satisfied as
to who they were, for English prisoners escaped from Quebec were
abroad, and no man could go unchallenged. They must at once lead me
to their camp. So they did, and at their bark wigwam they said they
had seen no Englishman. They were guardians of the fire; that is,
it was their duty to light a fire on the shore when a hostile fleet
should appear; and from another point farther up, other guardians,
seeing, would do the same, until beacons would be shining even to
Quebec, three hundred leagues away.

While I was questioning them, Clark rifled the wigwam; and
presently, the excitable fellow, finding some excellent stores of
skins, tea, maple sugar, coffee, and other things, broke out into
English expletives. Instantly the Indians saw they had been
trapped, and he whom Mr. Stevens held made a great spring from him,
caught up a gun, and gave a wild yell which echoed far and near.
Mr. Stevens, with great rapidity, leveled his pistol and shot him
in the heart, while I, in a close struggle with my captive, was
glad--for I was not yet strong--that Clark finished my assailant:
and so both lay there dead, two foes less of our good King.

Not far from where we stood was a pool of water, black and deep,
and we sank the bodies there; but I did not know till long
afterwards that Clark, with a barbarous and disgusting spirit,
carried away their scalps to sell them in New York, where they
would bring, as he confided to one of the Provincials, twelve
pounds each. Before we left, we shot a poor howling dog that
mourned for his masters, and sank him also in the dark pool.

We had but got back to our camp, when, looking out, we saw a
well-manned four-oared boat making for the shore. My men were in
dismay until I told them that, having begun the game of war, I
would carry it on to the ripe end. This boat and all therein should
be mine. Safely hidden, we watched the rowers draw in to shore,
with brisk strokes, singing a quaint farewell song of the
voyageurs, called La Pauvre Mere, of which the refrain is:

  "And his mother says, 'My dear,
  For your absence I shall grieve;
  Come you home within the year.'"

They had evidently been upon a long voyage, and by their toiling
we could see their boat was deep loaded; but they drove on, like a
horse that, at the close of day, sees ahead the inn where he is to
bait and refresh, and, rousing to the spur, comes cheerily home.
The figure of a reverend old man was in the stern, and he sent
them in to shore with brisk words. Bump came the big shallop on
the beach, and at that moment I ordered my men to fire, but to
aim wide, for I had another end in view than killing.

We were exactly matched as to numbers, so that a fight would be
fair enough, but I hoped for peaceful conquest. As we fired I
stepped out of the thicket, and behind me could be seen the shining
barrels of our threatening muskets. The old gentleman stood up
while his men cried for quarter. He waved them down with an
impatient gesture, and stepped out on the beach. Then I recognized
him. It was the Chevalier de la Darante. I stepped towards him, my
sword drawn.

"Monsieur the Chevalier de la Darante, you are my prisoner," said I.

He started, then recognized me. "Now, by the blood of man! now,
by the blood of man!" he said, and paused, dumfounded.

"You forget me, monsieur?" asked I.

"Forget you, monsieur?" said he. "As soon forget the devil at
mass! But I thought you dead by now, and--"

"If you are disappointed," said I, "there is a way"; and I waved
towards his men, then to Mr. Stevens and my own ambushed fellows.

He smiled an acid smile, and took a pinch of snuff. "It is not
so fiery-edged as that," he answered; "I can endure it."

"You shall have time too for reverie," answered I.

He looked puzzled. "What is't you wish?" he asked.

"Your surrender first," said I, "and then your company at
breakfast."

"The latter has meaning and compliment," he responded, "the former
is beyond me. What would you do with me?"

"Detain you and your shallop for the services of my master, the
King of England, soon to be the master of your master, if the signs
are right."

"All signs fail with the blind, monsieur."

"I will give you good reading of those
signs in due course," retorted I.

"Monsieur," he added, with great, almost too great dignity, "I am
of the family of the Duc de Mirepoix. The whole Kamaraska Isles are
mine, and the best gentlemen in this province do me vassalage. I
make war on none, I have stepped aside from all affairs of state, I
am a simple gentleman. I have been a great way down this river, at
large expense and toil, to purchase wheat, for all the corn of
these counties goes to Quebec to store the King's magazine, the
adored La Friponne. I know not your purposes, but I trust you will
not push your advantage"--he waved towards our muskets--"against a
private gentleman."

"You forget, Chevalier," said I, "that you gave verdict for my
death."

"Upon the evidence," he replied. "And I have no doubt you
deserve hanging a thousand times."

I almost loved him for his boldness. I remembered also that he
had no wish to be one of my judges, and that he spoke for me in
the presence of the Governor. But he was not the man to make a
point of that.

"Chevalier," said I, "I have been foully used in yonder town; by
the fortune of war you shall help me to compensation. We have come
a long, hard journey; we are all much overworked; we need rest, a
better boat, and good sailors. You and your men, Chevalier, shall
row us to Louisburg. When we are attacked, you shall be in the
van; when we are at peace, you shall industriously serve under
King George's flag. Now will you give up your men, and join me
at breakfast?"

For a moment the excellent gentleman was mute, and my heart
almost fell before his venerable white hair and his proud bearing;
but something a little overdone in his pride, a little ludicrous
in the situation, set me smiling; there came back on me the
remembrance of all I had suffered, and I let no sentiment stand
between me and my purposes.

"I am the Chevalier de la--" he began.

"If you were King Louis himself, and every man there in your
boat a peer of his realm, you should row a British subject now,"
said I; "or, if you choose, you shall have fighting instead."
I meant there should be nothing uncertain in my words.

"I surrender," said he; "and if you are bent on shaming me, let
us have it over soon."

"You shall have better treatment than I had in Quebec," answered I.

A moment afterwards, his men were duly surrendered, disarmed,
and guarded, and the Chevalier breakfasted with me, now and again
asking me news of Quebec. He was much amazed to hear that Bigot
had been shot, and distressed that I could not say whether fatally
or not.

I fixed on a new plan. We would now proceed by day as well as by
night, for the shallop could not leave the river, and, besides,
I did not care to trust my prisoners on shore. I threw from the
shallop into the stream enough wheat to lighten her, and now, well
stored and trimmed, we pushed away upon our course, the Chevalier
and his men rowing, while my men rested and tended the sail, which
was now set. I was much loath to cut our good canoe adrift, but she
stopped the shallop's way, and she was left behind.

After a time, our prisoners were in part relieved, and I made the
Chevalier rest also, for he had taken his task in good part, and
had ordered his men to submit cheerfully. In the late afternoon,
after an excellent journey, we saw a high and shaggy point of land,
far ahead, which shut off our view. I was anxious to see beyond it,
for ships of war might appear at any moment. A good breeze brought
up this land, and when we were abreast of it a lofty frigate was
disclosed to view--a convoy (so the Chevalier said) to a fleet of
transports which that morning had gone up the river. I resolved
instantly, since fight was useless, to make a run for it. Seating
myself at the tiller, I declared solemnly that I would shoot the
first man who dared to stop the shallop's way, to make sign, or
speak a word. So, as the frigate stood across the river, I had all
sail set, roused the men at the oars, and we came running by her
stern. Our prisoners were keen enough to get by in safety, for
they were between two fires, and the excellent Chevalier was as
alert and laborious as the rest. They signalled us from the frigate
by a shot to bring to, but we came on gallantly. Another shot
whizzed by at a distance, but we did not change our course, and
then balls came flying over our heads, dropping round us, cooling
their hot protests in the river. But none struck us, and presently
all fell short.

We durst not slacken pace that night, and by morning, much
exhausted, we deemed ourselves safe, and rested for a while, making
a hearty breakfast, though a sombre shadow had settled on the face
of the good Chevalier. Once more he ventured to protest, but I
told him my resolution was fixed, and that I would at all costs
secure escape from my six years' misery. He must abide the fortune
of this war.

For several days we fared on, without more mishap. At last, one
morning, we hugged the shore, I saw a large boat lying on the
beach. On landing we found the boat of excellent size, and made
for swift going, and presently Clark discovered the oars. Then I
turned to the Chevalier, who was watching me curiously, yet hiding
anxiety, for he had upheld his dignity with some accent since he
had come into my service:

"Chevalier," said I, "you shall find me more humane than my
persecutors at Quebec. I will not hinder your going, if you will
engage on your honour--as would, for instance, the Duc de
Mirepoix!"--he bowed to my veiled irony--"that you will not divulge
what brought you back thus far, till you shall reach your Kamaraska
Isles; and you must undertake the same for your fellows here."

He consented, and I admired the fine, vain old man, and lamented
that I had had to use him so.

"Then," said I, "you may depart with your shallop. Your mast and
sail, however, must be ours; and for these I will pay. I will also
pay for the wheat which was thrown into the river, and you shall
have a share of our provisions, got from the Indians."

"Monsieur," said he, "I shall remember with pride that I have
dealt with so fair a foe. I can not regret the pleasure of your
acquaintance, even at the price. And see, monsieur, I do not
think you the criminal they have made you out, and so I will
tell a lady--"

I raised my hand at him, for I saw that he knew something, and
Mr. Stevens was near us at the time.

"Chevalier," said I, drawing him aside, "if, as you say, you
think I have used you honourably, then, if trouble falls upon my
wife before I see her again, I beg you to stand her friend. In the
sad fortunes of war and hate of me, she may need a friend--even
against her own people, on her own hearthstone."

I never saw a man so amazed; and to his rapid questionings I
gave the one reply, that Alixe was my wife. His lip trembled.

"Poor child! poor child!" he said; "they will put her in a
nunnery. You did wrong, monsieur."

"Chevalier," said I, "did you ever love a woman?"

He made a motion of the hand, as if I had touched upon a tender
point, and said, "So young, so young!"

"But you will stand by her," I urged, "by the memory of some
good woman you have known!"

He put out his hand again with a chafing sort of motion. "There,
there," said he, "the poor child shall never want a friend. If I
can help it, she shall not be made a victim of the Church or of
the State, nor yet of family pride--good God, no!"

Presently we parted, and soon we lost our grateful foes in the
distance. All night we jogged along with easy sail, but just at
dawn, in a sudden opening of the land, we saw a sloop at anchor
near a wooded point, her pennant flying. We pushed along, unheeding
its fiery signal to bring to; and declining, she let fly a swivel
loaded with grape, and again another, riddling our sail; but we
were travelling with wind and tide, and we soon left the indignant
patrol behind. Towards evening came a freshening wind and a cobbling
sea, and I thought it best to make for shore. So, easing the sail,
we brought our shallop before the wind. It was very dark, and there
was a heavy surf running; but we had to take our fortune as it came,
and we let drive for the unknown shore, for it was all alike to us.
Presently, as we ran close in, our boat came hard upon a rock, which
bulged her bows open. Taking what provisions we could, we left our
poor craft upon the rocks, and fought our way to safety.

We had little joy that night in thinking of our shallop breaking
on the reefs, and we discussed the chances of crossing overland
to Louisburg; but we soon gave up that wild dream: this river
was the only way. When daylight came, we found our boat, though
badly wrecked, still held together. Now Clark rose to the great
necessity, and said that he would patch her up to carry us on, or
never lift a hammer more. With labour past reckoning we dragged her
to shore, and got her on the stocks, and then set about to find
materials to mend her. Tools were all too few--a hammer, a saw, and
an adze were all we had. A piece of board or a nail were treasures
then, and when the timbers of the craft were covered, for oakum we
had resort to tree-gum. For caulking, one spared a handkerchief,
another a stocking, and another a piece of shirt, till she was
stuffed in all her fissures. In this labour we passed eight days,
and then were ready for the launch again.

On the very afternoon fixed for starting, we saw two sails
standing down the river, and edging towards our shore. One of them
let anchor go right off the place where our patched boat lay. We
had prudently carried on our work behind rocks and trees, so that
we could not be seen, unless our foes came ashore. Our case seemed
desperate enough, but all at once I determined on a daring
enterprise.

The two vessels--convoys, I felt sure--had anchored some distance
from each other, and from their mean appearance I did not think that
they would have a large freight of men and arms; for they seemed not
ships from France, but vessels of the country. If I could divide the
force of either vessel, and quietly, under cover of night, steal on
her by surprise, then I would trust our desperate courage, and open
the war which soon General Wolfe and Admiral Saunders were to wage
up and down this river.

I had brave fellows with me, and if we got our will it would be
a thing worth remembrance. So I disclosed my plan to Mr. Stevens
and the others, and, as I looked for, they had a fine relish for
the enterprise. I agreed upon a signal with them, bade them to
lie close along the ground, picked out the nearer (which was
the smaller) ship for my purpose, and at sunset, tying a white
handkerchief to a stick, came marching out of the woods, upon the
shore, firing a gun at the same time. Presently a boat was put out
from the sloop, and two men and a boy came rowing towards me.
Standing off a little distance from the shore, they asked what
was wanted.

"The King's errand," was my reply in French, and I must be
carried down the river by them, for which I would pay generously.
Then, with idle gesture, I said that if they wished some drink,
there was a bottle of rum near my fire, above me, to which they
were welcome; also some game, which they might take as a gift to
their captain and his crew.

This drew them like a magnet, and, as I lit my pipe, their boat
scraped the sand, and, getting out, they hauled her up and came
towards me. I met them, and, pointing towards my fire, as it might
appear, led them up behind the rocks, when, at a sign, my men
sprang up, the fellows were seized, and were forbidden to cry out
on peril of their lives. I compelled them to tell what hands and
what arms were left on board. The sloop from which they came, and
the schooner, its consort, were bound for Gaspe, to bring provisions
for several hundred Indians assembled at Miramichi and Aristiguish,
who were to go by these same vessels to re-enforce the garrison of
Quebec.

The sloop, they said, had six guns and a crew of twenty men; but
the schooner, which was much larger, had no arms save muskets,
and a crew and guard of thirty men.

In this country there is no twilight, and with sunset came instantly
the dusk. Already silence and dark inclosed the sloop. I had the men
bound to a tree, and gagged also, engaging to return and bring them
away safe and unhurt when our task was over. I chose for pilot the
boy, and presently, with great care, launching our patched shallop
from the stocks--for the ship-boat was too small to carry six
safely--we got quietly away. Rowing with silent stroke, we came
alongside the sloop. No light burned save that in the binnacle, and
all hands, except the watch, were below at supper and at cards.

I could see the watch forward as we dropped silently alongside
the stern. My object was to catch this fellow as he came by. This
I would trust to no one but myself; for now, grown stronger, I
had the old spring in my blood, and I had also a good wish that
my plans should not go wrong through the bungling of others. I
motioned my men to sit silent, and then, when the fellow's back was
toward me, coming softly up the side, I slid over quietly, and drew
into the shadow of a boat that hung near.

He came on lazily, and when just past me I suddenly threw my
arms about him, clapping my hand upon his mouth. He was stoutly
built, and he began at once to struggle. He was no coward, and
feeling for his knife, he drew it, and would have had it in me but
that I was quicker, and, with a desperate wrench, my hand still
over his mouth, half swung him round, and drove my dagger home.

He sank in my arms with a heaving sigh, and I laid him down,
still and dead, upon the deck. Then I whispered up my comrades, the
boy leading. As the last man came over, his pistol, stuck in his
belt, caught the ratlings of the shrouds, and it dropped upon the
deck. This gave the alarm, but I was at the companion-door on the
instant, as the first master came bounding up, sword showing, and
calling to his men, who swarmed after him. I fired; the bullet
travelled his spine, and he fell back stunned.

A dozen others came on. Some reached the deck and grappled with
my men. I never shall forget with what fiendish joy Clark fought
that night--those five terrible minutes. He was like some mad
devil, and by his imprecations I knew that he was avenging the
brutal death of his infant daughter some years before. He was armed
with a long knife, and I saw four men fall beneath it, while he
himself got but one bad cut. Of the Provincials, one fell wounded,
and the other brought down his man. Mr. Stevens and myself held the
companion-way, driving the crew back, not without hurt, for my
wrist was slashed by a cutlass, and Mr. Stevens had a bullet in his
thigh. But presently we had the joy of having those below cry
quarter.

We were masters of the sloop. Quickly battening down the prisoners,
I had the sails spread, the windlass going, and the anchor apeak
quickly, and we soon were moving down upon the schooner, which was
now all confusion, commands ringing out on the quiet air. But when,
laying alongside, we gave her a dose, and then another, from all
our swivels at once, sweeping her decks, the timid fellows cried
quarter, and we boarded her. With my men's muskets cocked, I ordered
her crew and soldiers below, till they were all, save two lusty
youths, stowed away. Then I had everything of value brought from
the sloop, together with the swivels, which we fastened to the
schooner's side; and when all was done, we set fire to the sloop,
and I stood and watched her burn with a proud--too proud--spirit.

Having brought our prisoners from the shore, we placed them with
the rest below. At dawn I called a council with Mr. Stevens and
the others--our one wounded Provincial was not omitted--and we all
agreed that some of the prisoners should be sent off in the long
boat, and a portion of the rest be used to work the ship. So we had
half the fellows up, and giving them fishing-lines, rum, and
provisions, with a couple of muskets and ammunition, we sent them
off to shift for themselves, and, raising anchor, got on our way
down the broad river, in perfect weather.

The days that followed are like a good dream to me, for we came
on all the way without challenge and with no adventure, even round
Gaspe, to Louisburg, thirty-eight days after my escape from
the fortress.



XXIII

WITH WOLFE AT MONTMORENCI


At Louisburg we found that Admiral Saunders and General Wolfe
were gone to Quebec. They had passed us as we came down, for we had
sailed inside some islands of the coast, getting shelter and better
passage, and the fleet had, no doubt, passed outside. This was a
blow to me, for I had hoped to be in time to join General Wolfe and
proceed with him to Quebec, where my knowledge of the place should
be of service to him. It was, however, no time for lament, and I
set about to find my way back again. Our prisoners I handed over
to the authorities. The two Provincials decided to remain and take
service under General Amherst; Mr. Stevens would join his own
Rangers at once, but Clark would go back with me to have his hour
with his hated foes.

I paid Mr. Stevens and the two Provincials for their shares in
the schooner, and Clark and I manned her afresh, and prepared
to return instantly to Quebec. From General Amherst I received
correspondence to carry to General Wolfe and Admiral Saunders.
Before I started back, I sent letters to Governor Dinwiddie and to
Mr. (now Colonel) George Washington, but I had no sooner done so
than I received others from them through General Amherst. They had
been sent to him to convey to General Wolfe at Quebec, who was, in
turn, to hand them to me, when, as was hoped, I should be released
from captivity, if not already beyond the power of men to free me.

The letters from these friends almost atoned for my past sufferings,
and I was ashamed that ever I had thought my countrymen forgot me in
my worst misery; for this was the first matter I saw when I opened
the Governor's letter:

  By the House of Burgesses.

Resolved, That the sum of three hundred pounds be paid to Captain
Robert Moray, in consideration of his services to the country,
and his singular sufferings in his confinement, as a hostage, in
Quebec.

This, I learned, was one of three such resolutions.

But there were other matters in his letter which much amazed me.
An attempt, he said, had been made one dark night upon his
strong-room, which would have succeeded but for the great bravery
and loyalty of an old retainer. Two men were engaged in the
attempt, one of whom was a Frenchman. Both men were masked,
and, when set upon, fought with consummate bravery, and escaped.
It was found the next day that the safe of my partner had also
been rifled and all my papers stolen. There was no doubt in my mind
what this meant. Doltaire, with some renegade Virginian who knew
Williamsburg and myself, had made essay to get my papers. But they
had failed in their designs, for all my valuable documents--and
those desired by Doltaire among them--remained safe in the
Governor's strong-room.

I got away again for Quebec five days after reaching Louisburg.
We came along with good winds, having no check, though twice we
sighted French sloops, which, however, seemed most concerned to
leave us to ourselves. At last, with colours flying, we sighted
Kamaraska Isles, which I saluted, remembering the Chevalier de la
Darante; then Isle aux Coudres, below which we poor fugitives came
so near disaster. Here we all felt new fervour, for the British
flag flew from a staff on a lofty point, tents were pitched thereon
in a pretty cluster, and, rounding a point, we came plump upon
Admiral Durell's little fleet, which was here to bar advance of
French ships and to waylay stragglers.

On a blithe summer day we sighted, far off, the Island of
Orleans and the tall masts of two patrol ships of war, which in
due time we passed, saluting, and ran abreast of the island in the
North Channel. Coming up this passage, I could see on an eminence,
far distant, the tower of the Chateau Alixe.

Presently there opened on our sight the great bluff at the Falls
of Montmorenci, and, crowning it, tents and batteries, the camp of
General Wolfe himself, with the good ship Centurion standing off
like a sentinel at a point where the Basin, the River Montmorenci,
and the North Channel seem to meet. To our left, across the shoals,
was Major Hardy's post, on the extreme eastern point of the Isle
Orleans; and again beyond that, in a straight line, Point Levis on
the south shore, where Brigadier-General Monckton's camp was
pitched; and farther on his batteries, from which shell and shot
were poured into the town. How all had changed in the two months
since I left there! Around the Seigneur Duvarney's manor, in the
sweet village of Beauport, was encamped the French army, and
redoubts and batteries were ranged where Alixe and I and her brother
Juste had many a time walked in a sylvan quiet. Here, as it were,
round the bent and broken sides of a bowl, war raged, and the centre
was like some caldron out of which imps of ships sprang and sailed
to hand up fires of hell to the battalions on the ledges. Here swung
Admiral Saunders's and Admiral Holmes's divisions, out of reach of
the French batteries, yet able to menace and destroy, and to feed
the British camps with men and munitions. There was no French ship
in sight--only two old hulks with guns in the mouth of the St.
Charles River, to protect the road to the palace gate--that is,
at the Intendance.

It was all there before me, the investment of Quebec, for which
I had prayed and waited seven long years.

All at once, on a lull in the fighting which had lasted
twenty-four hours, the heavy batteries from the Levis shore opened
upon the town, emptying therein the fatal fuel. Mixed feelings
possessed me. I had at first listened to Clark's delighted
imprecations and devilish praises with a feeling of brag almost
akin to his own--that was the soldier and the Briton in me. But all
at once the man, the lover, and the husband spoke: my wife was in
that beleaguered town under that monstrous shower! She had said
that she would never leave it till I came to fetch her. For I knew
well that our marriage must become known after I had escaped; that
she would not, for her own good pride and womanhood, keep it secret
then; that it would be proclaimed while yet Gabord and the
excellent chaplain were alive to attest all.

Summoned by the Centurion, we were passed on beyond the eastern
point of the Isle of Orleans to the admiral's ship, which lay in
the channel off the point, with battleships in front and rear, and
a line of frigates curving towards the rocky peninsula of Quebec.
Then came a line of buoys beyond these, with manned boats moored
alongside to protect the fleet from fire rafts, which once already
the enemy had unavailingly sent down to ruin and burn our fleet.

Admiral Saunders received me with great cordiality, thanked me
for the dispatches, heard with applause of my adventures with the
convoy, and at once, with dry humour, said he would be glad, if
General Wolfe consented, to make my captured schooner one of his
fleet. Later, when her history and doings became known in the
fleet, she was at once called the Terror of France; for she did a
wild thing or two before Quebec fell, though from first to last
she had but her six swivel guns, which I had taken from the burnt
sloop. Clark had command of her.

From Admiral Saunders I learned that Bigot had recovered from
his hurt, which had not been severe, and of the death of Monsieur
Cournal, who had ridden his horse over the cliff in the dark.
From the Admiral I came to General Wolfe at Montmorenci.

I shall never forget my first look at my hero, my General, that
flaming, exhaustless spirit, in a body so gauche and so unshapely.
When I was brought to him, he was standing on a knoll alone,
looking through a glass towards the batteries of Levis. The
first thing that struck me, as he lowered the glass and leaned
against a gun, was the melancholy in the lines of his figure. I
never forget that, for it seemed to me even then that, whatever
glory there was for British arms ahead, there was tragedy for
him. Yet, as he turned at the sound of our footsteps, I almost
laughed; for his straight red hair, his face defying all
regularity, with the nose thrust out like a wedge and the chin
falling back from an affectionate sort of mouth, his tall
straggling frame and far from athletic shoulders, challenged
contrast with the compact, handsome, graciously shaped Montcalm.
In Montcalm was all manner of things to charm--all save that
which presently filled me with awe, and showed me wherein this
sallow-featured, pain-racked Briton was greater than his rival
beyond measure: in that searching, burning eye, which carried
all the distinction and greatness denied him elsewhere. There
resolution, courage, endurance, deep design, clear vision, dogged
will, and heroism, lived: a bright furnace of daring resolves and
hopes, which gave England her sound desire.

An officer of his staff presented me. He looked at me with
piercing intelligence, and then, presently, his long hand made
a swift motion of knowledge and greeting, and he said:

"Yes, yes, and you are welcome, Captain Moray. I have heard of
you, of much to your credit. You were for years in durance
there."

He pointed towards the town, where we could see the dome of the
cathedral shine, and the leaping smoke and flame of the roaring
batteries.

"Six years, your Excellency," said I.

"Papers of yours fell into General Braddock's hands, and they
tried you for a spy--a curious case--a curious case! Wherein were
they wrong and you justified, and why was all exchange refused?"

I told him the main, the bare facts, and how, to force certain
papers from me, I had been hounded to the edge of the grave. He
nodded, and seemed lost in study of the mud-flats at the Beauport
shore, and presently took to beating his foot upon the ground.
After a minute, as if he had come back from a distance, he said:
"Yes, yes, broken articles. Few women have a sense of national
honour, such as La Pompadour none! An interesting matter."

Then, after a moment: "You shall talk with our chief engineer;
you know the town you should be useful to me, Captain Moray. What
do you suggest concerning this siege of ours?"

"Has any attack been made from above the town, your Excellency?"

He lifted his eyebrows. "Is it vulnerable from there? From Cap
Rouge, you mean?"

"They have you at advantage everywhere, sir," I said. "A thousand
men could keep the town, so long as this river, those mud-flats,
and those high cliffs are there."

"But above the town--"

"Above the citadel there is a way--the only way: a feint from
the basin here, a sham menace and attack, and the real action at
the other door of the town."

"They will, of course, throw fresh strength and vigilance above,
if our fleet run their batteries and attack there; the river at Cap
Rouge is like this Montmorenci for defense." He shook his head.
"There is no way, I fear."

"General," said I, "if you will take me into your service, and
then give me leave to handle my little schooner in this basin and
in the river above, I will prove that you may take your army into
Quebec by entering it myself, and returning with something as
precious to me as the taking of Quebec to you."

He looked at me piercingly for a minute, then a sour sort of smile
played at his lips. "A woman!" he said. "Well, it were not the first
time the love of a wench opened the gates to a nation's victory."

"Love of a wife, sir, should carry a man farther."

He turned on me a commanding look. "Speak plainly," said he. "If
we are to use you, let us know you in all."

He waved farther back the officers with him.

"I have no other wish, your Excellency," I answered him. Then I told
him briefly of the Seigneur Duvarney, Alixe, and of Doltaire.

"Duvarney! Duvarney!" he said, and a light came into his look.
Then he called an officer. "Was it not one Seigneur Duvarney who
this morning prayed protection for his chateau on the Isle of
Orleans?" he asked.

"Even so, your Excellency," was the reply; "and he said that if
Captain Moray was with us, he would surely speak for the humanity
and kindness he and his household had shown to British prisoners."

"You speak, then, for this gentleman?" he asked, with a dry sort
of smile.

"With all my heart," I answered. "But why asks he protection at
this late day?"

"New orders are issued to lay waste the country; hitherto all
property was safe," was the General's reply. "See that the Seigneur
Duvarney's suit is granted," he added to his officer, "and say it
is by Captain Moray's intervention.--There is another matter of
this kind to be arranged this noon," he continued: "an exchange
of prisoners, among whom are some ladies of birth and breeding,
captured but two days ago. A gentleman comes from General Montcalm
directly upon the point. You might be useful herein," he added,
"if you will come to my tent in an hour." He turned to go.

"And my ship, and permission to enter the town, your Excellency?"
I asked.

"What do you call your--ship?" he asked a little grimly.

I told him how the sailors had already christened her. He
smiled. "Then let her prove her title to Terror of France," he
said, "by being pilot to the rest of our fleet, up the river, and
you, Captain Moray, be guide to a footing on those heights"--he
pointed to the town. "Then this army and its General, and all
England, please God, will thank you. Your craft shall have
commission as a rover--but if she gets into trouble?"

"She will do as her owner has done these six years, your
Excellency: she will fight her way out alone."

He gazed long at the town and at the Levis shore. "From above,
then, there is a way?"

"For proof, if I come back alive--"

"For proof that you have been--" he answered meaningly, with an
amused flash of his eyes, though at the very moment a spasm of pain
crossed his face, for he was suffering from incurable disease, and
went about his great task in daily misery, yet cheerful and
inspiring.

"For proof, my wife, sir," said I.

He nodded, but his thoughts were diverted instantly, and he went
from me at once abstracted. But again he came back. "If you
return," said he, "you shall serve upon my staff. You will care to
view our operations," he added, motioning towards the intrenchments
at the river. Then he stepped quickly away, and I was taken by an
officer to the river, and though my heart warmed within me to hear
that an attack was presently to be made from the shore not far
distant from the falls, I felt that the attempt could not succeed:
the French were too well intrenched.

At the close of an hour I returned to the General's tent. It was
luncheon-time, and they were about to sit as I was announced. The
General motioned me to a seat, and then again, as if on second
thought, made as though to introduce me to some one who stood
beside him. My amazement was unbounded when I saw, smiling
cynically at me, Monsieur Doltaire.

He was the envoy from Quebec. I looked him in the eyes steadily
for a moment, into malicious, unswerving eyes, as maliciously and
unswervingly myself, and then we both bowed.

"Captain Moray and I have sat at meat together before," he said,
with mannered coolness. "We have played host and guest also: but
that was ere he won our hearts by bold, romantic feats. Still, I
dared scarcely hope to meet him at this table."

"Which is sacred to good manners," said I meaningly and coolly,
for my anger and surprise were too deep for excitement.

I saw the General look at both of us keenly, then his marvellous
eyes flashed intelligence, and a grim smile played at his lips a
moment. After a little general conversation Doltaire addressed
me:

"We are not yet so overwhelmed with war but your being here
again will give a fillip to our gossip. It must seem sad to
you--you were so long with us--you have broken bread with so many
of us--to see us pelted so. Sometimes a dinner-table is disordered
by a riotous shell."

He bent on torturing me. And it was not hard to do that, for
how knew I what had happened? How came he back so soon from the
Bastile? It was incredible. Perhaps he had never gone, in spite
of all. After luncheon, the matter of exchange of prisoners was
gone into, and one by one the names of the French prisoners in
our hands--ladies and gentlemen apprehended at the chateau were
ticked off, and I knew them all save two. The General deferred to
me several times as to the persons and positions of the captives,
and asked my suggestions. Immediately I proposed Mr. Wainfleet,
the chaplain, in exchange for a prisoner, though his name was not
on the list, but Doltaire shook his head in a blank sort of way.

"Mr. Wainfleet! Mr. Wainfleet! There was no such prisoner in the
town," he said.

I insisted, but he stared at me inscrutably, and said that he
had no record of the man. Then I spoke most forcibly to the
General, and said that Mr. Wainfleet should be produced, or an
account of him be given by the French Governor. Doltaire then
said:

"I am only responsible for these names recorded. Our General
trusts to your honour, and you to ours, Monsieur le General."

There was nothing more to say, and presently the exchanges were
arranged, and, after compliments, Doltaire took his leave. I left
the Governor also, and followed Doltaire. He turned to meet me.

"Captain Moray and I," he remarked to the officers near, "are
old--enemies; and there is a sad sweetness in meetings like these.
May I--"

The officers drew away at a little distance at once before the
suggestion was made, and we were left alone. I was in a white heat,
but yet in fair control.

"You are surprised to see me here," he said. "Did you think the
Bastile was for me? Tut! I had not got out of the country when we a
packet came, bearing fresh commands. La Pompadour forgave me, and
in the King's name bade me return to New France, and in her own she
bade me get your papers, or hang you straight. And--you will think
it singular--if need be, I was to relieve the Governor and Bigot
also, and work to save New France with the excellent Marquis de
Montcalm." He laughed. "You can see how absurd that is. I have held
my peace, and I keep my commission in my pocket."

I looked at him amazed that he should tell me this. He read my
look, and said:

"Yes, you are my confidant in this. I do not fear you. Your
enemy is bound in honour, your friend may seek to serve himself."
Again he laughed. "As if I, Tinoir Doltaire--note the agreeable
combination of peasant and gentleman in my name--who held his hand
from ambition for large things in France, should stake a lifetime
on this foolish hazard! When I play, Captain Moray, it is for
things large and vital. Else I remain the idler, the courtier--the
son of the King."

"Yet you lend your vast talent, the genius of those unknown
possibilities, to this, monsieur--this little business of exchange
of prisoners," I retorted ironically.

"That is my whim--a social courtesy."

"You said you knew nothing of the chaplain," I broke out.

"Not so. I said he was on no record given me. Officially I know
nothing of him."

"Come," said I, "you know well how I am concerned for him. You
quibble; you lied to our General."

A wicked light shone in his eyes. "I choose to pass that by, for the
moment," said he. "I am sorry you forget yourself; it were better
for you and me to be courteous till our hour of reckoning, Shall
we not meet some day?" he said, with a sweet hatred in his tone.

"With all my heart."

"But where?"

"In yonder town," said I, pointing.

He laughed provokingly. "You are melodramatic," he rejoined. "I
could hold that town with one thousand men against all your army
and five times your fleet."

"You have ever talked and nothing done," said I. "Will you tell
me the truth of the chaplain?"

"Yes, in private the truth you shall hear," he said. "The man is
dead."

"If you speak true, he was murdered," I broke out. "You know
well why."

"No, no," he answered. "He was put in prison, escaped, made for
the river, was pursued, fought, and was killed. So much for serving
you."

"Will you answer me one question?" said I. "Is my wife well? Is
she safe? She is there set among villainies."

"Your wife?" he answered, sneering. "If you mean Mademoiselle
Duvarney, she is not there." Then he added solemnly and slowly:
"She is in no fear of your batteries now--she is beyond them. When
she was there, she was not child enough to think that foolish game
with the vanished chaplain was a marriage. Did you think to gull a
lady so beyond the minute's wildness? She is not there," he added
again in a low voice.

"She is dead?" I gasped. "My wife is dead?"

"Enough of that," he answered with cold fierceness. "The lady
saw the folly of it all, before she had done with the world.
You--you, monsieur! It was but the pity of her gentle heart, of
a romantic nature. You--you blundering alien, spy, and seducer!"

With a gasp of anger I struck him in the face, and whipped out
my sword. But the officers near came instantly between us, and I
could see that they thought me gross, ill-mannered, and wild, to
do this thing before the General's tent, and to an envoy.

Doltaire stood still a moment. Then presently wiped a little
blood from his mouth, and said:

"Messieurs, Captain Moray's anger was justified; and for the
blow he will justify that in some happier time--for me. He said
that I had lied, and I proved him wrong. I called him a spy and a
seducer--he sought to shame, he covered with sorrow, one of the
noblest families of New France--and he has yet to prove me wrong.
As envoy I may not fight him now, but I may tell you that I have
every cue to send him to hell one day. He will do me the credit
to say that it is not cowardice that stays me."

"If no coward in the way of fighting, coward in all other
things," I retorted instantly.

"Well, well, as you may think." He turned to go. "We will meet
there, then?" he said, pointing to the town. "And when?"

"To-morrow," said I.

He shrugged his shoulder as to a boyish petulance, for he thought
it an idle boast. "To-morrow? Then come and pray with me in the
cathedral, and after that we will cast up accounts--to-morrow,"
he said, with a poignant and exultant malice. A moment afterwards
he was gone, and I was left alone.

Presently I saw a boat shoot out from the shore below, and he
was in it. Seeing me, he waved a hand in an ironical way. I paced
up and down, sick and distracted, for half an hour or more. I knew
not whether he lied concerning Alixe, but my heart was wrung with
misery, for indeed he spoke with an air of truth.

Dead! dead! dead! "In no fear of your batteries now," he had
said. "Done with the world!" he had said. What else could it mean?
Yet the more I thought, there came a feeling that somehow I had
been tricked. "Done with the world!" Ay, a nunnery--was that it?
But then, "In no fear of your batteries now"--that, what did that
mean but death?

At this distressful moment a message came from the General, and
I went to his tent, trying to calm myself, but overcome with
apprehension. I was kept another half hour waiting, and then,
coming in to him, he questioned me closely for a little about
Doltaire, and I told him the whole story briefly. Presently
his secretary brought me the commission for my appointment to
special service on the General's own staff.

"Your first duty," said his Excellency, "will be to--reconnoitre;
and if you come back safe, we will talk further."

While he was speaking I kept looking at the list of prisoners
which still lay upon his table. It ran thus:

  Monsieur and Madame Joubert.
  Monsieur and Madame Carcanal.
  Madame Rousillon.
  Madame Champigny.
  Monsieur Pipon.
  Mademoiselle La Rose.
  L'Abbe Durand.
  Monsieur Halboir.
  La Soeur Angelique.
  La Soeur Seraphine.

I know not why it was, but the last three names held my eyes.
Each of the other names I knew, and their owners also. When I
looked close, I saw that where "La Soeur Angelique" now was
another name had been written and then erased. I saw also that
the writing was recent. Again, where "Halboir" was written there
had been another name, and the same process of erasure and
substitution had been made. It was not so with "La Soeur Seraphine."
I said to the General at once, "Your excellency, it is possible
you have been tricked." Then I pointed out what I had discovered.
He nodded.

"Will you let me go, sir?" said I. "Will you let me see this
exchange?"

"I fear you will be too late," he answered. "It is not a vital
matter, I fancy."

"Perhaps to me most vital," said I, and I explained my fears.

"Then go, go," he said kindly. He quickly gave directions to
have me carried to Admiral Saunders's ship, where the exchange
was to be effected, and at the same time a general passport.

In a few moments we were hard on our way. Now the batteries were
silent. By the General's orders, the bombardment ceased while the
exchange was being effected, and the French batteries also were
still. A sudden quietness seemed to settle on land and sea, and
there was only heard, now and then, the note of a bugle from a ship
of war. The water in the basin was moveless, and the air was calm
and quiet. This heraldry of war was all unnatural in the golden
weather and sweet-smelling land.

I urged the rowers to their task, and we flew on. We passed
another boat loaded with men, singing boisterously a disorderly
sort of song, called "Hot Stuff," set to the air "Lilies of
France." It was out of touch with the general quiet:

  "When the gay Forty-Seventh is dashing ashore,
  While bullets are whistling and cannons do roar,
  Says Montcalm, 'Those are Shirleys--I know the lapels.'
  'You lie,' says Ned Botwood, 'we swipe for Lascelles!
  Though our clothing is changed, and we scout powder-puff,
  Here's at you, ye swabs--here's give you Hot Stuff!'"

While yet we were about two miles away, I saw a boat put out
from the admiral's ship, then, at the same moment, one from the
Lower Town, and they drew towards each other. I urged my men to
their task, and as we were passing some of Admiral Saunders's ships,
their sailors cheered us. Then came a silence, and it seemed to me
that all our army and fleet, and that at Beauport, and the garrison
of Quebec, were watching us; for the ramparts and shore were
crowded. We drove on at an angle, to intercept the boat that left
the admiral's ship before it reached the town.

War leaned upon its arms and watched a strange duel. There was
no authority in any one's hands save my own to stop the boat,
and the two armies must avoid firing, for the people of
both nations were here in this space between--ladies and gentlemen
in the French boat going to the town, Englishmen and a poor woman
or two coming to our own fleet.

My men strained every muscle, but the pace was impossible--it
could not last; and the rowers in the French boat hung over their
oars also with enthusiasm. With the glass of the officer near
me--Kingdon of Anstruther's Regiment--I could now see Doltaire
standing erect in the boat, urging the boatmen on.

All round that basin, on shore and cliff and mountains,
thousands of veteran fighters--Fraser's, Otway's, Townsend's,
Murray's; and on the other side the splendid soldiers of La Sarre,
Languedoc, Bearn, and Guienne--watched in silence. Well they
might, for in this entr'acte was the little weapon forged which
opened the door of New France to England's glory. So may the little
talent or opportunity make possible the genius of the great.

The pain of this suspense grew so, that I longed for some sound
to break the stillness; but there was nothing for minute after
minute. Then, at last, on the halcyon air of that summer day
floated the Angelus from the cathedral tower. Only a moment, in
which one could feel, and see also, the French army praying, then
came from the ramparts the sharp inspiring roll of a drum, and
presently all was still again. Nearer and nearer the boat of
prisoners approached the stone steps of the landing, and we were
several hundred yards behind.

I motioned to Doltaire to stop, but he made no sign. I saw the
cloaked figures of the nuns near him, and I strained my eyes, but I
could not note their faces. My men worked on ardently, and presently
we gained. But I saw that it was impossible to reach them before
they set foot on shore. Now their boat came to the steps, and one by
one they hastily got out. Then I called twice to Doltaire to stop.
The air was still, and my voice carried distinctly. Suddenly one of
the cloaked figures sprang towards the steps with arms outstretched,
calling aloud, "Robert! Robert!" After a moment, "Robert, my
husband!" rang out again, and then a young officer and the other
nun took her by the arm to force her away. At the sharp instigation
of Doltaire, instantly some companies of marines filed in upon the
place where they had stood, leveled their muskets on us, and hid my
beloved wife from my view. I recognized the young officer who had
put a hand upon Alixe. It was her brother Juste.

"Alixe! Alixe!" I called, as my boat still came on.

"Save me, Robert!" came the anguished reply, a faint but
searching sound, and then no more.

Misery and mystery were in my heart all at once. Doltaire had
tricked me. "Those batteries can not harm her now!" Yes, yes, they
could not while she was a prisoner in our camp. "Done with the
world!" Truly, when wearing the garb of the Sister Angelique. But
why that garb? I swore that I would be within that town by the
morrow, that I would fetch my wife into safety, out from the
damnable arts and devices of Master Devil Doltaire, as Gabord had
called him.

The captain of the marines called to us that another boat's length
would fetch upon us the fire of his men. There was nothing to do,
but to turn back, while from the shore I was reviled by soldiers
and by the rabble. My marriage with Alixe had been made a national
matter--of race and religion. So, as my men rowed back towards our
fleet, I faced my enemies, and looked towards them without moving.
I was grim enough that moment, God knows; I felt turned to stone.
I did not stir when--ineffaceable brutality--the batteries on the
heights began to play upon us, the shot falling round us, and
passing over our heads, and musket-firing followed.

"Damned villains! Faithless brutes!" cried Kingdon beside me. I
did not speak a word, but stood there defiant, as when we first
had turned back. Now, sharply, angrily, from all our batteries,
there came reply to the French; and as we came on with only one
man wounded and one oar broken, the whole fleet cheered us. I
steered straight for the Terror of France, and there Clark and I,
he swearing violently, laid plans.



XXIV

THE SACRED COUNTERSIGN


That night, at nine o'clock, the Terror of France, catching the
flow of the tide, with one sail set and a gentle wind, left the
fleet, and came slowly up the river, under the batteries of the
town. In the gloom we passed lazily on with the flow of the tide,
unquestioned, soon leaving the citadel behind, and ere long came
softly to that point called Anse du Foulon, above which Sillery
stood. The shore could not be seen distinctly, but I knew by a
perfect instinct the cleft in the hillside where was the path
leading up the mountain. I bade Clark come up the river again two
nights hence to watch for my signal, which was there agreed upon.
If I did not come, then, with General Wolfe's consent, he must
show the General this path up the mountain. He swore that all
should be as I wished; and indeed you would have thought that he
and his Terror of France were to level Quebec to the water's edge.

I stole softly to the shore in a boat, which I drew up among the
bushes, hiding it as well as I could in the dark, and then, feeling
for my pistols and my knife, I crept upwards, coming presently to
the passage in the mountain. I toiled on to the summit without a
sound of alarm from above. Pushing forward, a light flashed from
the windmill, and a man, and then two men, appeared in the open
door. One of them was Captain Lancy, whom I had very good reason
to remember. The last time I saw him was that famous morning when
he would have had me shot five minutes before the appointed hour,
rather than endure the cold and be kept from his breakfast. I
itched to call him to account then and there, but that would have
been foolish play. I was outside of the belt of light falling from
the door, and stealing round I came near to the windmill on the
town side. I was not surprised to see such poor watch kept. Above
the town, up to this time, the guard was of a perfunctory sort, for
the great cliffs were thought impregnable; and even if surmounted,
there was still the walled town to take, surrounded by the St.
Lawrence, the St. Charles, and these massive bulwarks.

Presently Lancy stepped out into the light, and said, with a
hoarse laugh, "Blood of Peter, it was a sight to-day! She has a
constant fancy for the English filibuster. 'Robert! my husband!'
she bleated like a pretty lamb, and Doltaire grinned at her."

"But Doltaire will have her yet."

"He has her pinched like a mouse in a weasel's teeth."

"My faith, mademoiselle has no sweet road to travel since her
mother died," was the careless reply.

I almost cried out. Here was a blow which staggered me. Her
mother dead!

Presently the scoffer continued: "The Duvarneys would remain in
the city, and on that very night, as they sit at dinner, a shell
disturbs them, a splinter strikes Madame, and two days after she
is carried to her grave."

They linked arms and walked on.

It was a dangerous business I was set on, for I was sure that I
would be hung without shrift if captured. As it proved afterwards,
I had been proclaimed, and it was enjoined on all Frenchmen and
true Catholics to kill me if the chance showed.

Only two things could I depend on: Voban and my disguise, which
was very good. From the Terror of France I had got a peasant's
dress, and by rubbing my hands and face with the stain of
butternut, cutting again my new-grown beard, and wearing a wig,
I was well guarded against discovery.

How to get into the city was the question. By the St. Charles
River and the Palace Gate, and by the St. Louis Gate, not far from
the citadel, were the only ways, and both were difficult. I had,
however, two or three plans, and these I chewed as I went across
Maitre Abraham's fields, and came to the main road from
Sillery to the town.

Soon I heard the noise of clattering hoofs, and jointly with
this I saw a figure rise up not far ahead of me, as if waiting for
the coming horseman. I drew back. The horseman passed me, and,
as he came on slowly, I saw the figure spring suddenly from the
roadside and make a stroke at the horseman. In a moment they were
a rolling mass upon the ground, while the horse trotted down the
road a little, and stood still. I never knew the cause of that
encounter--robbery, or private hate, or paid assault; but there
was scarcely a sound as the two men struggled. Presently, there
was groaning, and both lay still. I hurried to them, and found one
dead, and the other dying, and dagger wounds in both, for the
assault had been at such close quarters that the horseman had had
no chance to use a pistol.

My plans were changed on the instant. I drew the military coat,
boots, and cap off the horseman, and put them on myself; and
thrusting my hand into his waistcoat--for he looked like a
courier--I found a packet. This I put into my pocket, and then,
making for the horse which stood quiet in the road, I mounted it
and rode on towards the town. Striking a light, I found that the
packet was addressed to the Governor. A serious thought disturbed
me: I could not get into the town through the gates without the
countersign. I rode on, anxious and perplexed.

Presently a thought pulled me up. The courier was insensible
when I left him, and he was the only one who could help me in this.
I greatly reproached myself for leaving him while he was still
alive. "Poor devil," thought I to myself, "there is some one whom
his death will hurt. He must not die alone. He was no enemy of
mine." I went back, and, getting from the horse, stooped to him,
lifted up his head, and found that he was not dead. I spoke in his
ear. He moaned, and his eyes opened.

"What is your name?" said I.

"Jean--Labrouk," he whispered.

Now I remembered him. He was the soldier whom Gabord had sent as
messenger to Voban the night I was first taken to the citadel.

"Shall I carry word for you to any one?" asked I.

There was a slight pause; then he said, "Tell my--Babette--Jacques
Dobrotte owes me ten francs--and--a leg--of mutton. Tell--my
Babette--to give my coat of beaver fur to Gabord the soldier.
Tell"...he sank back, but raised himself, and continued: "Tell my
Babette I weep with her.... Ah, mon grand homme de Calvaire--bon
soir!" He sank back again, but I roused him with one question more,
vital to me. I must have the countersign.

"Labrouk! Labrouk!" said I sharply.

He opened his dull, glazed eyes.

"Qui va la?" said I, and I waited anxiously.

Thought seemed to rally in him, and, staring--alas! how helpless
and how sad: that look of a man brought back for an instant from
the Shadows!--his lips moved.

"France," was the whispered reply.

"Advance and give the countersign!" I urged.

"Jesu--" he murmured faintly. I drew from my breast the cross that
Mathilde had given me, and pressed it to his lips. He sighed softly,
lifted his hand to it, and then fell back, never to speak again.

After covering his face and decently laying the body out, I mounted
the horse again. Glancing up, I saw that this bad business had
befallen not twenty feet from a high Calvary at the roadside.

I was in a painful quandary. Did Labrouk mean that the countersign
was "Jesu," or was that word the broken prayer of his soul as it
hurried forth? So strange a countersign I had never heard, and yet
it might be used in this Catholic country. This day might be some
great feast of the Church--possibly that of the naming of Christ
(which was the case, as I afterwards knew). I rode on, tossed
about in my mind. So much hung on this. If I could not give the
countersign, I should have to fight my way back again the road I
came. But I must try my luck. So I went on, beating up my heart to
confidence; and now I came to the St. Louis Gate. A tiny fire was
burning near, and two sentinels stepped forward as I rode boldly on
the entrance.

"Qui va la?" was the sharp call.

"France," was my reply, in a voice as like the peasant's as
possible.

"Advance and give the countersign," came the demand.

Another voice called from the darkness of the wall: "Come and
drink, comrade; I've a brother with Bougainville."

"Jesu," said I to the sentinel, answering his demand for the
countersign, and I spurred on my horse idly, though my heart was
thumping hard, for there were several sturdy fellows lying beyond
the dull handful of fire.

Instantly the sentinel's hand came to my bridle-rein. "Halt!"
roared he.

Surely some good spirit was with me then to prompt me, for,
with a careless laugh, as though I had not before finished the
countersign, "Christ," I added--"Jesu Christ!"

With an oath the soldier let go the bridle-rein, the other
opened the gates, and I passed through. I heard the first fellow
swearing roundly to the others that he would "send yon courier to
fires of hell, if he played with him again so."

The gates closed behind me, and I was in the town which had seen
the worst days and best moments of my life. I rode along at a trot,
and once again beyond the citadel was summoned by a sentinel.
Safely passed on, I came down towards the Chateau St. Louis. I rode
boldly up to the great entrance door, and handed the packet to the
sentinel.

"From whom?" he asked.

"Look in the corner," said I. "And what business is't of yours?"

"There is no word in the corner," answered he doggedly. "Is't
from Monsieur le General at Cap Rouge?"

"Bah! Did you think it was from an English wolf?" I asked.

His dull face broke a little. "Is Jean Labrouk with Bougainville
yet?"

"He's done with Bougainville; he's dead," I answered.

"Dead! dead!" said he, a sort of grin playing on his face.

I made a shot at a venture. "But you're to pay his wife Babette
the ten francs and the leg of mutton in twenty-four hours, or his
ghost will follow you. Swallow that, pudding-head! And see you pay
it, or every man in our company swears to break a score of shingles
on your bare back."

"I'll pay, I'll pay," he said, and he took to trembling.

"Where shall I find Babette?" asked I. "I come from Isle aux
Coudres; I know not this rambling town."

"A little house hugging the cathedral rear," he explained. "Babette
sweeps out the vestry, and fetches water for the priests."

"Good," said I. "Take that to the Governor at once, and send the
corporal of the guard to have this horse fed and cared for, and
he's to carry back the Governor's messenger. I've further business
for the General in the town. And tell your captain of the guard to
send and pick up two dead men in the highway, just against the
first Calvary beyond the town."

He did my bidding, and I dismounted, and was about to get away,
when I saw the Chevalier de la Darante and the Intendant appear at
the door. They paused upon the steps. The Chevalier was speaking
most earnestly:

"To a nunnery--a piteous shame! it should not be, your Excellency."

"To decline upon Monsieur Doltaire, then?" asked Bigot, with a
sneer.

"Your Excellency believes in no woman," responded the Chevalier
stiffly.

"Ah yes, in one!" was the cynical reply.

"Is it possible? And she remains a friend of your Excellency?"
came back in irony.

"The very best; she finds me unendurable."

"Philosophy shirks the solving of that problem, your
Excellency," was the cold reply.

"No, it is easy. The woman to be trusted is she who never trusts."

"The paragon--or prodigy--who is she?"

"Even Madame Jamond."

"She danced for you once, your Excellency, they tell me."

"She was a devil that night; she drove us mad."

So Doltaire had not given up the secret of that affair! There
was silence for a moment, and then the Chevalier said, "Her father
will not let her go to a nunnery--no, no. Why should he yield to
the Church in this?"

Bigot shrugged a shoulder. "Not even to hide--shame?"

"Liar--ruffian!" said I through my teeth. The Chevalier answered
for me:

"I would stake my life on her truth and purity."

"You forget the mock marriage, dear Chevalier."

"It was after the manner of his creed and people."

"It was after a manner we all have used at times."

"Speak for yourself, your Excellency," was the austere reply.
Nevertheless, I could see that the Chevalier was much troubled.

"She forgot race, religion, people--all, to spend still hours with
a foreign spy in prison," urged Bigot, with damnable point and
suggestion.

"Hush, sir!" said the Chevalier. "She is a girl once much beloved
and ever admired among us. Let not your rancour against the man be
spent upon the maid. Nay, more, why should you hate the man so? It
is said, your Excellency, that this Moray did not fire the shot
that wounded you, but one who has less reason to love you."

Bigot smiled wickedly, but said nothing.

The Chevalier laid a hand on Bigot's arm. "Will you not oppose
the Governor and the bishop? Her fate is sad enough."

"I will not lift a finger. There are weightier matters. Let
Doltaire, the idler, the Don Amato, the hunter of that fawn, save
her from the holy ambush. Tut, tut, Chevalier. Let her go. Your
nephew is to marry her sister; let her be swallowed up--a shame
behind the veil, the sweet litany of the cloister."

The Chevalier's voice set hard as he said in quick reply, "My
family honour, Francois Bigot, needs no screen. And if you
doubt that, I will give you argument at your pleasure;" so saying,
he turned and went back into the chateau.

Thus the honest Chevalier kept his word, given to me when I
released him from serving me on the St. Lawrence.

Bigot came down the steps, smiling detestably, and passed me
with no more than a quick look. I made my way cautiously through
the streets towards the cathedral, for I owed a duty to the poor
soldier who had died in my arms, through whose death I had been
able to enter the town.

Disarray and ruin met my sight at every hand. Shot and shell had
made wicked havoc. Houses where, as a hostage, I had dined, were
battered and broken; public buildings were shapeless masses,
and dogs and thieves prowled among the ruins. Drunken soldiers
staggered past me; hags begged for sous or bread at corners; and
devoted priests and long-robed Recollet monks, cowled and alert,
hurried past, silent, and worn with labours, watchings, and
prayers. A number of officers in white uniforms rode by, going
towards the chateau, and a company of coureurs de bois came up
from Mountain Street, singing:

  "Giron, giran! le canon grand--
  Commencez-vous, commencez-vous!"

Here and there were fires lighted in the streets, though it was
not cold, and beside them peasants and soldiers drank and quarreled
over food--for starvation was abroad in the land.

By one of these fires, in a secluded street--for I had come a
roundabout way--were a number of soldiers of Languedoc's regiment
(I knew them by their trick of headgear and their stoutness), and
with them reckless girls, who, in their abandonment, seemed to me
like those revellers in Herculaneum, who danced their way into the
Cimmerian darkness. I had no thought of staying there to moralize
upon the theme; but, as I looked, a figure came out of the dusk
ahead, and moved swiftly towards me.

It was Mathilde. She seemed bent on some errand, but the
revellers at the fire caught her attention, and she suddenly
swerved towards them, and came into the dull glow, her great black
eyes shining with bewildered brilliancy and vague keenness, her
long fingers reaching out with a sort of chafing motion. She did
not speak till she was among them. I drew into the shade of a
broken wall, and watched. She looked all round the circle, and
then, without a word, took an iron crucifix which hung upon her
breast, and silently lifted it above their heads for a moment. I
myself felt a kind of thrill go through me, for her wild beauty
was almost tragical. Her madness was not grotesque, but solemn
and dramatic. There was something terribly deliberate in her
strangeness; it was full of awe to the beholder, more searching
and painfully pitiful than melancholy.

Coarse hands fell away from wanton waists; ribaldry hesitated;
hot faces drew apart; and all at once a girl with a crackling
laugh threw a tin cup of liquor into the fire. Even as she did it,
a wretched dwarf sprang into the circle without a word, and,
snatching the cup out of the flames, jumped back again into the
darkness, peering into it with a hollow laugh. As he did so a
soldier raised a heavy stick to throw at him; but the girl caught
him by the arms, and said, with a hoarse pathos, "My God, no,
Alphonse! It is my brother!"

Here Mathilde, still holding out the cross, said in a loud
whisper, "'Sh, 'sh! My children, go not to the palace, for there
is Francois Bigot, and he has a devil. But if you have no cottage,
I will give you a home. I know the way to it up in the hills.
Poor children, see, I will make you happy."

She took a dozen little wooden crosses from her girdle, and,
stepping round the circle, gave each person one. No man refused,
save a young militiaman; and when, with a sneering laugh, he threw
his into the fire, she stooped over him and said, "Poor boy! poor
boy!"

She put her fingers on her lips, and whispered, "Beati
immaculati--miserere mei, Deus," stray phrases gathered from
the liturgy, pregnant to her brain, order and truth flashing out of
wandering and fantasy. No one of the girls refused, but sat there,
some laughing nervously, some silent; for this mad maid had come
to be surrounded with a superstitious reverence in the eyes of the
common people. It was said she had a home in the hills somewhere,
to which she disappeared for days and weeks, and came back hung
about the girdle with crosses; and it was also said that her red
robe never became frayed, shabby, or disordered.

Suddenly she turned and left them. I let her pass, unchecked,
and went on towards the cathedral, humming an old French chanson.
I did this because now and then I met soldiers and patrols, and my
free and careless manner disarmed notice. Once or twice drunken
soldiers stopped me and threw their arms about me, saluting me on
the cheeks a la mode, asking themselves to drink with me. Getting
free of them, I came on my way, and was glad to reach the cathedral
unchallenged. Here and there a broken buttress or a splintered wall
told where our guns had played upon it, but inside I could hear an
organ playing and a Miserere being chanted. I went round to its
rear, and there I saw the little house described by the sentinel
at the chateau. Coming to the door, I knocked, and it was opened
at once by a warm-faced, woman of thirty or so, who instantly
brightened on seeing me. "Ah, you come from Cap Rouge, m'sieu',"
she said, looking at my clothes--her own husband's, though she
knew it not.

"I come from Jean," said I, and stepped inside.

She shut the door, and then I saw, sitting in a corner, by a
lighted table, an old man, bowed and shrunken, white hair and white
beard falling all about him, and nothing of his features to be seen
save high cheek-bones and two hawklike eyes which peered up at me.

"So, so, from Jean," he said in a high, piping voice. "Jean's a
pretty boy--ay, ay, Jean's like his father, but neither with a foot
like mine--a foot for the Court, said Frotenac to me--yes, yes, I
knew the great Frotenac--"

The wife interrupted his gossip. "What news from Jean?" said she.
"He hoped to come one day this week."

"He says," responded I gently, "that Jacques Dobrotte owes you
ten francs and a leg of mutton, and that you are to give his great
beaver coat to Gabord the soldier."

"Ay, ay, Gabord the soldier, he that the English spy near sent
to heaven." quavered the old man.

The bitter truth was slowly dawning upon the wife. She was
repeating my words in a whisper, as if to grasp their full
meaning.

"He said also," I continued, "'Tell Babette I weep with her.'"

She was very still and dazed; her fingers went to her white lips,
and stayed there for a moment. I never saw such a numb misery in
any face.

"And last of all, he said, 'Ah, mon grand homme de Calvaire--bon
soir!'"

She turned round, and went and sat down beside the old man,
looked into his face for a minute silently, and then said,
"Grandfather, Jean is dead; our Jean is dead."

The old man peered at her for a moment, then broke into a
strange laugh, which had in it the reflection of a distant misery,
and said, "Our little Jean, our little Jean Labrouk! Ha! ha! There
was Villon, Marmon, Gabriel, and Gouloir, and all their sons;
and they all said the same at the last, 'Mon grand homme--de
Calvaire--bon soir!' Then there was little Jean, the pretty
little Jean. He could not row a boat, but he could ride a horse,
and he had an eye like me. Ha, ha! I have seen them all say
good-night. Good-morning, my children, I will say one day, and I
will give them all the news, and I will tell them all I have
done these hundred years. Ha, ha, ha--"

The wife put her fingers on his lips, and, turning to me, said
with a peculiar sorrow, "Will they fetch him to me?"

I assured her that they would.

The old man fixed his eyes on me most strangely, and then,
stretching out his finger and leaning forward, he said, with a
voice of senile wildness, "Ah, ah, the coat of our little Jean!"

I stood there like any criminal caught in his shameful act.
Though I had not forgotten that I wore the dead man's clothes, I
could not think that they would be recognized, for they seemed like
others of the French army--white, with violet facings. I can not
tell to this day what it was that enabled them to detect the coat;
but there I stood condemned before them.

The wife sprang to her feet, came to me with a set face, and
stared stonily at the coat for an instant. Then, with a cry of
alarm, she made for the door; but I stepped quickly before her, and
bade her wait till she heard what I had to say. Like lightning it
all went through my brain. I was ruined if she gave an alarm: all
Quebec would be at my heels, and my purposes would be defeated.
There was but one thing to do--tell her the whole truth, and trust
her; for I had at least done fairly by her and by the dead man.

So I told them how Jean Labrouk had met his death; told them who
I was, and why I was in Quebec--how Jean died in my arms; and,
taking from my breast the cross that Mathilde had given me, I swore
by it that every word which I said was true. The wife scarcely
stirred while I spoke, but with wide dry eyes and hands clasping
and unclasping heard me through. I told her how I might have left
Jean to die without a sign or message to them, how I had put the
cross to his lips as he went forth, and how by coming here at all I
placed my safety in her hands, and now, by telling my story, my
life itself.

It was a daring and a difficult task. When I had finished, both
sat silent for a moment, and then the old man said, "Ay, ay, Jean's
father and his uncle Marmon were killed a-horseback, and by the
knife. Ay, ay, it is our way. Jean was good company--none better,
mass over, on a Sunday. Come, we will light candles for Jean, and
comb his hair back sweet, and masses shall be said, and--"

Again the woman interrupted, quieting him. Then she turned to
me, and I awaited her words with a desperate sort of courage.

"I believe you," she said. "I remember you now. My sister was
the wife of your keeper at the common jail. You shall be safe.
Alas! my Jean might have died without a word to me all alone in
the night. Merci mille fois, monsieur!" Then she rocked a little
to and fro, and the old man looked at her like a curious child. At
last, "I must go to him," she said. "My poor Jean must be brought
home."

I told her I had already left word concerning the body at
headquarters. She thanked me again. Overcome as she was, she went
and brought me a peasant's hat and coat. Such trust and kindness
touched me. Trembling, she took from me the coat and hat I had
worn, and she put her hands before her eyes when she saw a little
spot of blood upon the flap of a pocket. The old man reached out
his hands, and, taking them, he held them on his knees, whispering
to himself.

"You will be safe here," the wife said to me. "The loft above is
small, but it will hide you, if you have no better place."

I was thankful that I had told her all the truth. I should be snug
here, awaiting the affair in the cathedral on the morrow. There
was Voban, but I knew not of him, or whether he was open to aid or
shelter me. His own safety had been long in peril; he might be dead,
for all I knew. I thanked the poor woman warmly, and then asked her
if the old man might not betray me to strangers. She bade me leave
all that to her--that I should be safe for a while, at least.

Soon afterwards I went abroad, and made my way by a devious
route to Voban's house. As I did so, I could see the lights of our
fleet in the Basin, and the camp-fires of our army on the Levis
shore, on Isle Orleans, and even at Montmorenci, and the myriad
lights in the French encampment at Beauport. How impossible it all
looked--to unseat from this high rock the Empire of France! Ay,
and how hard it would be to get out of this same city with Alixe!

Voban's house stood amid a mass of ruins, itself broken a little,
but still sound enough to live in. There was no light. I clambered
over debris, made my way to his bedroom window, and tapped on the
shutter. There was no response. I tried to open it, but it would not
stir. So I thrust beneath it, on the chance of his finding it if he
opened the casement in the morning, a little piece of paper, with
one word upon it--the name of his brother. He knew my handwriting,
and he would guess where to-morrow would find me, for I had also
hastily drawn upon the paper the entrance of the cathedral.

I went back to the little house by the cathedral, and was
admitted by the stricken wife. The old man was abed. I climbed up
to the small loft, and lay there wide-awake for hours. At last came
the sounds that I had waited for, and presently I knew by the tramp
beneath, and by low laments floating up, that a wife was mourning
over the dead body of her husband. I lay long and listened to the
varying sounds, but at last all became still, and I fell asleep.



XXV

IN THE CATHEDRAL


I awoke with the dawn, and, dressing, looked out of the window,
seeing the brindled light spread over the battered roofs and ruins
of the Lower Town. A bell was calling to prayers in the Jesuit
College not far away, and bugle-calls told of the stirring
garrison. Soldiers and stragglers passed down the street near by,
and a few starved peasants crept about the cathedral with downcast
eyes, eager for crumbs that a well-fed soldier might cast aside.
Yet I knew that in the Intendant's Palace and among the officers
of the army there was abundance, with revelry and dissipation.

Presently I drew to the trap-door of my loft, and, raising it
gently, came down the ladder to the little hallway, and softly
opened the door of the room where Labrouk's body lay. Candles
were burning at his head and his feet, and two peasants sat dozing
in chairs near by. I could see Labrouk's face plainly in the
flickering light: a rough, wholesome face it was, refined by death,
yet unshaven and unkempt, too. Here was work for Voban's shears and
razor. Presently there was a footstep behind me, and, turning, I
saw in the half-light the widowed wife.

"Madame," said I in a whisper, "I too weep with you. I pray for
as true an end for myself."

"He was of the true faith, thank the good God," she said
sincerely. She passed into the room, and the two watchers, after
taking refreshment, left the house. Suddenly she hastened to the
door, called one back, and, pointing to the body, whispered
something. The peasant nodded and turned away. She came back into
the room, stood looking at the face of the dead man for a moment,
and bent over and kissed the crucifix clasped in the cold hands.
Then she stepped about the room, moving a chair and sweeping up a
speck of dust in a mechanical way. Presently, as if she again
remembered me, she asked me to enter the room. Then she bolted the
outer door of the house. I stood looking at the body of her husband,
and said, "Were it not well to have Voban the barber?"

"I have sent for him and for Gabord," she replied. "Gabord was
Jean's good friend. He is with General Montcalm. The Governor put
him in prison because of the marriage of Mademoiselle Duvarney, but
Monsieur Doltaire set him free, and now he serves General Montcalm.

"I have work in the cathedral," continued the poor woman, "and I
shall go to it this morning as I have always gone. There is a
little unused closet in a gallery where you may hide, and still see
all that happens. It is your last look at the lady, and I will give
it to you, as you gave me to know of my Jean."

"My last look?" I asked eagerly.

"She goes into the nunnery to-morrow, they say," was the reply.
"Her marriage is to be set aside by the bishop to-day--in the
cathedral. This is her last night to live as such as I--but no,
she will be happier so."

"Madame," said I, "I am a heretic, but I listened when your
husband said, 'Mon grand homme de Calvaire, bon soir!' Was the
cross less a cross because a heretic put it to his lips? Is a
marriage less a marriage because a heretic is the husband? Madame,
you loved your Jean; if he were living now, what would you do to
keep him. Think, madame, is not love more than all?"

She turned to the dead body. "Mon petit Jean!" she
murmured, but made no reply to me, and for many minutes the room
was silent. At last she turned, and said, "You must come at once,
for soon the priests will be at the church. A little later I will
bring you some breakfast, and you must not stir from there till I
come to fetch you--no."

"I wish to see Voban," said I.

She thought a moment. "I will try to fetch him to you by-and-bye,"
she said. She did not speak further, but finished the sentence by
pointing to the body.

Presently, hearing footsteps, she drew me into another little
room. "It is the grandfather," she said. "He has forgotten you
already, and he must not see you again."

We saw the old man hobble into the room we had left, carrying in
one arm Jean's coat and hat. He stood still, and nodded at the body
and mumbled to himself; then he went over and touched the hands and
forehead, nodding wisely; after which he came to his armchair, and,
sitting down, spread the coat over his knees, put the cap on it,
and gossiped with himself:

  "In eild our idle fancies all return,
  The mind's eye cradled by the open grave."

A moment later, the woman passed from the rear of the house to
the vestry door of the cathedral. After a minute, seeing no one
near, I followed, came to the front door, entered, and passed up a
side aisle towards the choir. There was no one to be seen, but soon
the woman came out of the vestry and beckoned to me nervously. I
followed her quick movements, and was soon in a narrow stairway,
coming, after fifty steps or so, to a sort of cloister, from which
we went into a little cubiculum, or cell, with a wooden lattice
door which opened on a small gallery. Through the lattices the
nave amid choir could be viewed distinctly.

Without a word the woman turned and left me, and I sat down on a
little stone bench and waited. I saw the acolytes come and go,
and priests move back and forth before the altar; I smelt the
grateful incense as it rose when mass was said; I watched the people
gather in little clusters at the different shrines, or seek the
confessional, or kneel to receive the blessed sacrament. Many who
came were familiar--among them Mademoiselle Lucie Lotbiniere. Lucie
prayed long before a shrine of the Virgin, and when she rose at last
her face bore signs of weeping. Also I noticed her suddenly start as
she moved down the aisle, for a figure came forward from seclusion
and touched her arm. As he half turned I saw that it was Juste
Duvarney. The girl drew back from him, raising her hand as if in
protest, and it struck me that her grief and her repulse of him had
to do with putting Alixe away into a nunnery.

I sat hungry and thirsty for quite three hours, and then the
church became empty, and only an old verger kept a seat by the
door, half asleep, though the artillery of both armies was at work,
and the air was laden with the smell of powder. (Until this time
our batteries had avoided firing on the churches.) At last I heard
footsteps near me in the dark stairway, and I felt for my pistols,
for the feet were not those of Labrouk's wife. I waited anxiously,
and was overjoyed to see Voban enter my hiding-place, bearing some
food. I greeted him warmly, but he made little demonstration. He
was like one who, occupied with some great matter, passed through
the usual affairs of life with a distant eye. Immediately he
handed me a letter, saying:

"M'sieu', I give my word to hand you this--in a day or a year,
as I am able. I get your message to me this morning, and then I
come to care for Jean Labrouk, and so I find you here, and I
give the letter. It come to me last night."

The letter was from Alixe. I opened it with haste, and, in the
dim light, read:

MY BELOVED HUSBAND: Oh, was there no power in earth or heaven to
bring me to your arms to-day?

To-morow they come to see my marriage annulled by the Church.
And every one will say it is annulled--every one but me. I, in
God's name, will say no, though it break my heart to oppose
myself to them all.

Why did my brother come back? He has been hard--O, Robert, he
has been hard upon me, and yet I was ever kind to him! My father,
too, he listens to the Church, and, though he likes not Monsieur
Doltaire, he works for him in a hundred ways without seeing it.
I, alas! see it too well, and my brother is as wax in monsieur's
hands. Juste loves Lucie Lotbiniere--that should make him kind.
She, sweet friend, does not desert me, but is kept from me. She
says she will not yield to Juste's suit until he yields to me.
If--oh, if Madame Jamond had not gone to Montreal!

...As I was writing the foregoing sentence, my father asked to
see me, and we have had a talk--ah, a most bitter talk!

"Alixe," said he, "this is our last evening together, and I
would have it peaceful."

"My father," said I, "it is not my will that this evening be our
last; and for peace, I long for it with all my heart."

He frowned, and answered, "You have brought me trouble and
sorrow. Mother of God! was it not possible for you to be as
your sister Georgette? I gave her less love, yet she honours
me more."

"She honours you, my father, by a sweet, good life, and by marriage
into an honourable family, and at your word she gives her hand to
Monsieur Auguste de la Darante. She marries to your pleasure,
therefore she has peace and your love. I marry a man of my own
choosing, a bitterly wronged gentleman, and you treat me as some
wicked thing. Is that like a father who loves his child?"

"The wronged gentleman, as you call him, invaded that which is
the pride of every honest gentleman," he said.

"And what is that?" asked I quietly, though I felt the blood
beating at my temples.

"My family honour, the good name and virtue of my daughter."

I got to my feet, and looked my father in the eyes with an anger
and a coldness that hurts me now when I think of it, and I said, "I
will not let you speak so to me. Friendless though I be, you shall
not. You have the power to oppress me, but you shall not slander me
to my face. Can not you leave insults to my enemies?"

"I will never leave you to the insults of this mock marriage,"
answered he, angrily also. "Two days hence I take command of five
thousand burghers, and your brother Juste serves with General
Montcalm. There is to be last fighting soon between us and the
English. I do not doubt of the result, but I may fall, and your
brother also, and, should the English win, I will not leave you to
him you call your husband. Therefore you shall be kept safe where
no alien hands may reach you. The Church will hold you close."

I calmed myself again while listening to him, and I asked, "Is
there no other way?"

He shook his head.

"Is there no Monsieur Doltaire?" said I. "He has a king's blood
in his veins!"

He looked sharply at me. "You are mocking," he replied. "No, no,
that is no way, either. Monsieur Doltaire must never mate with
daughter of mine. I will take care of that; the Church is a perfect
if gentle jailer."

I could bear it no longer. I knelt to him. I begged him to have
pity on me. I pleaded with him; I recalled the days when, as a
child, I sat upon his knee and listened to the wonderful tales he
told; I begged him, by the memory of all the years when he and I
were such true friends to be kind to me now, to be merciful--even
though he thought I had done wrong--to be merciful. I asked him to
remember that I was a motherless girl, and that if I had missed the
way to happiness he ought not to make my path bitter to the end. I
begged him to give me back his love and confidence, and, if I must
for evermore be parted from you, to let me be with him, not to put
me away into a convent.

Oh, how my heart leaped when I saw his face soften! "Well,
well," he said, "if I live, you shall be taken from the convent;
but for the present, till this fighting is over, it is the only
safe place. There, too, you shall be safe from Monsieur
Doltaire."

It was poor comfort. "But should you be killed, and the English
take Quebec?" said I.

"When I am dead," he answered, "when I am dead, then there is
your brother."

"And if he speaks for Monsieur Doltaire?" asked I.

"There is the Church and God always," he answered.

"And my own husband, the man who saved your life, my father," I
urged gently; and when he would have spoken I threw myself into his
arms--the first time in such long, long weeks!--and, stopping his
lips with my fingers, burst into tears on his breast. I think much
of his anger against me passed, yet before he left he said he could
not now prevent the annulment of the marriage, even if he would,
for other powers were at work; which powers I supposed to be the
Governor, for certain reasons of enmity to my father and me--alas!
how changed is he, the vain old man!--and Monsieur Doltaire, whose
ends I knew so well. So they will unwed us to-morrow, Robert; but
be sure that I shall never be unwed in my own eyes, and that I will
wait till I die, hoping you will come and take me--oh, Robert, my
husband--take me home.

If I had one hundred men, I would fight my way out of this city,
and to you; but, dear, I have none, not even Gabord, who is not let
come near me. There is but Voban. Yet he will bear you this, if it
be possible, for he comes to-night to adorn my fashionable brother.
The poor Mathilde I have not seen of late. She has vanished. When
they began to keep me close, and carried me off at last into the
country, where we were captured by the English, I could not see
her, and my heart aches for her.

God bless you, Robert, and farewell. How we shall smile, when
all this misery is done! Oh, say we shall, say we shall smile, and
all this misery cease. Will you not take me home? Do you still
love thy wife, thy

ALIXE?

I bade Voban come to me at the little house behind the church
that night at ten o'clock, and by then I should have arranged some
plan of action. I knew not whether to trust Gabord or no. I was
sorry now that I had not tried to bring Clark with me. He was
fearless, and he knew the town well; but he lacked discretion,
and that was vital.

Two hours of waiting, then came a scene which is burned into my
brain. I looked down upon a mass of people, soldiers, couriers of
the woods, beggars, priests, camp followers, and anxious gentlefolk,
come from seclusion, or hiding, or vigils of war, to see a host of
powers torture a young girl who by suffering had been made a woman
long before her time. Out in the streets was the tramping of armed
men, together with the call of bugles and the sharp rattle of drums.
Presently I heard the hoofs of many horses, and soon afterwards
there entered the door, and way was made for him up the nave,
the Marquis de Vaudreuil and his suite, with the Chevalier de la
Darante, the Intendant, and--to my indignation--Juste Duvarney.

They had no sooner taken their places than, from a little side
door near the vestry, there entered the Seigneur Duvarney and
Alixe, who, coming down slowly, took places very near the chancel
steps. The Seigneur was pale and stern, and carried himself with
great dignity. His glance never shifted from the choir, where the
priests slowly entered and took their places, the aged and feeble
bishop going falteringly to his throne. Alixe's face was pale and
sorrowful, and yet it had a dignity and self-reliance that gave
it a kind of grandeur. A buzz passed through the building, yet I
noted, too, with gladness that there were tears on many faces.

A figure stole in beside Alixe. It was Mademoiselle Lotbiniere, who
immediately was followed by her mother. I leaned forward, perfectly
hidden, and listened to the singsong voices of the priests, the
musical note of the responses, heard the Kyrie Eleison, the
clanging of the belfry bell as the host was raised by the trembling
bishop. The silence which followed the mournful voluntary played by
the organ was most painful to me.

At that moment a figure stepped from behind a pillar, and gave
Alixe a deep, scrutinizing look. It was Doltaire. He was graver
than I had ever seen him, and was dressed scrupulously in black,
with a little white lace showing at the wrists and neck. A
handsomer figure it would be hard to see; and I hated him for it,
and wondered what new devilry was in his mind. He seemed to sweep
the church with a glance. Nothing could have escaped that swift,
searching look. His eyes were even raised to where I was, so that
I involuntarily drew back, though I knew he could not see me.

I was arrested suddenly by a curious disdainful, even sneering
smile which played upon his face as he looked at Vaudreuil and
Bigot. There was in it more scorn than malice, more triumph than
active hatred. All at once I remembered what he had said to me
the day before: that he had commission from the King through La
Pompadour to take over the reins of government from the two
confederates, and send them to France to answer the charges made
against them.

At last the bishop came forward, and read from a paper as follows:

"Forasmuch as a well-beloved child of our Holy Church, Mademoiselle
Alixe Duvarney, of the parish of Beauport and of this cathedral
parish, in this province of New France, forgetting her manifest duty
and our sacred teaching, did illegally and in sinful error make
feigned contract of marriage with one Robert Moray, captain in a
Virginian regiment, a heretic, a spy, and an enemy to our country;
and forasmuch as this was done in violence of all nice habit and
commendable obedience to Mother Church and our national uses, we
do hereby declare and make void this alliance until such time as
the Holy Father at Rome shall finally approve our action and
proclaiming. And it is enjoined upon Mademoiselle Alixe Duvarney,
on peril of her soul's salvation, to obey us in this matter, and
neither by word or deed or thought have commerce more with this
notorious and evil heretic and foe of our Church and of our country.
It is also the plain duty of the faithful children of our Holy
Church to regard this Captain Moray with a pious hatred, and to
destroy him without pity; and any good cunning or enticement which
should lure him to the punishment he so much deserves shall be
approved. Furthermore, Mademoiselle Alixe Duvarney shall, until
such times as there shall be peace in this land, and the molesting
English are driven back with slaughter--and for all time, if the
heart of our sister incline to penitence and love of Christ--be
confined within the Convent of the Ursulines, and cared for with
great tenderness."

He left off reading, and began to address himself to Alixe
directly; but she rose in her place, and while surprise and awe
seized the congregation, she said:

"Monseigneur, I must needs, at my father's bidding, hear the
annulment of my marriage, but I will not hear this public
exhortation. I am but a poor girl, unlearned in the law, and I must
needs submit to your power, for I have no one here to speak for me.
But my soul and my conscience I carry to my Saviour, and I have no
fear to answer Him. I am sorry that I have offended against my
people and my country and Holy Church, but I repent not that I love
and hold to my husband. You must do with me as you will, but in
this I shall never willingly yield."

She turned to her father, and all the people breathed hard; for
it passed their understanding, and seemed most scandalous that a
girl could thus defy the Church, and answer the bishop in his own
cathedral. Her father rose, and then I saw her sway with faintness.
I know not what might have occurred, for the bishop stood with hand
upraised and a great indignation in his face, about to speak, when
out of the desultory firing from our batteries there came a shell,
which burst even at the cathedral entrance, tore away a portion of
the wall, and killed and wounded a number of people.

Then followed a panic which the priests in vain tried to quell.
The people swarmed into the choir and through the vestry. I saw
Doltaire with Juste Duvarney spring swiftly to the side of Alixe,
and, with her father, put her and Mademoiselle Lotbiniere into
the pulpit, forming a ring round it, and preventing the crowd
from trampling on them, as, suddenly gone mad, they swarmed past.
The Governor, the Intendant, and the Chevalier de la Darante did
as much also for Madame Lotbiniere; and as soon as the crush had
in a little subsided, a number of soldiers cleared the way, and
I saw my wife led from the church. I longed to leap down there
among them and claim her, but that thought was madness, for I
should have been food for worms in a trice, so I kept my place.



XXVI

THE SECRET OF THE TAPESTRY


That evening, at eight o'clock, Jean Labrouk was buried. A
shell had burst not a dozen paces from his own door, within the
consecrated ground of the cathedral, and in a hole it had made he
was laid, the only mourners his wife and his grandfather, and two
soldiers of his company sent by General Bougainville to bury him.
I watched the ceremony from my loft, which had one small dormer
window. It was dark, but burning buildings in the Lower Town made
all light about the place. I could hear the grandfather mumbling
and talking to the body as it was lowered into the ground. While
yet the priest was hastily reading prayers, a dusty horseman came
riding to the grave, and dismounted.

"Jean," he said, looking at the grave, "Jean Labrouk, a man dies
well that dies with his gaiters on, aho! ... What have you said
for Jean Labrouk, m'sieu'?" he added to the priest.

The priest stared at him, as though he had presumed.

"Well?" said Gabord. "Well?"

The priest answered nothing, but prepared to go, whispering a
word of comfort to the poor wife. Gabord looked at the soldiers,
looked at the wife, at the priest, then spread out his legs and
stuck his hands down into his pockets, while his horse rubbed its
nose against his shoulder. He fixed his eyes on the grave, and
nodded once or twice musingly.

"Well," he said at last, as if he had found a perfect virtue,
and the one or only thing that could be said, "well, he never
eat his words, that Jean."

A moment afterwards he came into the house with Babette, leaving
one of the soldiers holding his horse. After the old man had gone,
I heard him say, "Were you at mass to-day? And did you see all?"

And when she had answered yes, he continued: "It was a mating as
birds mate, but mating was it, and holy fathers and Master Devil
Doltaire can't change it till cock-pheasant Moray come rocketing to
's grave. They would have hanged me for my part in it, but I repent
not, for they have wickedly hunted this little lady."

"I weep with her," said Jean's wife.

"Ay, ay, weep on, Babette," he answered.

"Has she asked help of you?" said the wife.

"Truly; but I know not what says she, for I read not, but I know
her pecking. Here it is. But you must be secret."

Looking through a crack in the floor, I could plainly see them.
She took the letter from him and read aloud:

"If Gabord the soldier have a good heart still, as ever
he had in the past, he will again help a poor
friendless woman. She needs him, for all are against her. Will he
leave her alone among her enemies? Will he not aid her to fly? At
eight o'clock to-morrow night she will be taken to the Convent of
the Ursulines, to be there shut in. Will he not come to her
before that time?"

For a moment after the reading there was silence, and I could see
the woman looking at him curiously. "What will you do?" she asked.

"My faith, there's nut to crack, for I have little time. This
letter but reached me with the news of Jean, two hours ago, and I
know not what to do, but, scratching my head, here comes word from
General Montcalm that I must ride to Master Devil Doltaire with a
letter, and I must find him wherever he may be, and give it
straight. So forth I come; and I must be at my post again by morn,
said the General."

"It is now nine o'clock, and she will be in the convent," said
the woman tentatively.

"Aho!" he answered, "and none can enter there but Governor, if
holy Mother say no. So now goes Master Devil there? 'Gabord,' quoth
he, 'you shall come with me to the convent at ten o'clock, bringing
three stout soldiers of the garrison. Here's an order on Monsieur
Ramesay, the Commandant. Choose you the men, and fail me not, or
you shall swing aloft, dear Gabord.' Sweet lovers of hell, but
Master Devil shall have swinging too one day." He put his thumb to
his nose, and spread his fingers out.

Presently he seemed to note something in the woman's eyes, for
he spoke almost sharply to her: "Jean Labrouk was honest man, and
kept faith with comrades."

"And I keep faith too, comrade," was the answer.

"Gabord's a brute to doubt you," he rejoined quickly, and he
drew from his pocket a piece of gold, and made her take it,
though she much resisted.

Meanwhile my mind was made up. I saw, I thought, through "Master
Devil's" plan, and I felt, too, that Gabord would not betray me. In
any case, Gabord and I could fight it out. If he opposed me, it was
his life or mine, for too much was at stake, and all my plans were
now changed by his astounding news. At that moment Voban entered
the room without knocking. Here was my cue, and so, to prevent
explanations, I crept quickly down, opened the door, came in on
them.

They wheeled at my footsteps; the woman gave a little cry, and
Gabord's hand went to his pistol. There was a wild sort of look in
his face, as though he could not trust his eyes. I took no notice of
the menacing pistol, but went straight to him and held out my hand.

"Gabord," said I, "you are not my jailer now."

"I'll be your guard to citadel," said he, after a moment's dumb
surprise, refusing my outstretched hand.

"Neither guard nor jailer any more, Gabord," said I seriously.
"We've had enough of that, my friend."

The soldier and the jailer had been working in him, and his
fingers trifled with the trigger. In all things he was the foeman
first. But now something else was working in him. I saw this, and
added pointedly, "No more cage, Gabord, not even for reward of
twenty thousand livres and at command of Holy Church."

He smiled grimly, too grimly, I thought, and turned inquiringly
to Babette. In a few words she told him all, tears dropping from
her eyes.

"If you take him, you betray me," she said; "and what would Jean
say, if he knew?"

"Gabord," said I, "I come not as a spy; I come to seek my wife,
and she counts you as her friend. Do harm to me, and you do harm to
her. Serve me, and you serve her. Gabord, you said to her once that
I was an honourable man."

He put up his pistol. "Aho, you've put your head in the trap.
Stir, and click goes the spring."

"I must have my wife," I continued. "Shall the nest you helped
to make go empty?"

I worked upon him to such purpose that, all bristling with war
at first, he was shortly won over to my scheme, which I disclosed
to him while the wife made us a cup of coffee. Through all our talk
Voban had sat eying us with a covert interest, yet showing no
excitement. He had been unable to reach Alixe. She had been taken
to the convent, and immediately afterwards her father and brother
had gone their ways--Juste to General Montcalm, and the Seigneur
to the French camp. Thus Alixe did not know that I was in Quebec.

An hour after this I was marching, with two other men and Gabord,
to the Convent of the Ursulines, dressed in the ordinary costume
of a French soldier, got from the wife of Jean Labrouk. In manner
and speech though I was somewhat dull, my fellows thought, I was
enough like a peasant soldier to deceive them, and my French was
more fluent than their own. I was playing a desperate game; yet
I liked it, for it had a fine spice of adventure apart from the
great matter at stake. If I could but carry it off, I should have
sufficient compensation for all my miseries, in spite of their
twenty thousand livres and Holy Church.

In a few minutes we came to the convent, and halted outside,
waiting for Doltaire. Presently he came, and, looking sharply at us
all, he ordered two to wait outside, and Gabord and myself to come
with him. Then he stood looking at the building curiously for a
moment. A shell had broken one wing of it, and this portion had
been abandoned; but the faithful Sisters clung still to their home,
though urged constantly by the Governor to retire to the Hotel Dieu,
which was outside the reach of shot and shell. This it was their
intention soon to do, for within the past day or so our batteries
had not sought to spare the convent. As Doltaire looked he laughed
to himself, and then said, "Too quiet for gay spirits, this hearse.
Come, Gabord, and fetch this slouching fellow," nodding towards me.

Then he knocked loudly. No one came, and he knocked again and
again. At last the door was opened by the Mother Superior, who was
attended by two others. She started at seeing Doltaire.

"What do you wish, monsieur?" she asked.

"I come on business of the King, good Mother," he replied
seriously, and stepped inside.

"It is a strange hour for business," she said severely.

"The King may come at all hours," he answered soothingly: "is it
not so? By the law he may enter when he wills."

"You are not the King, monsieur," she objected, with her head
held up sedately.

"Or the Governor may come, good Mother?"

"You are not the Governor, Monsieur Doltaire," she said, more
sharply still.

"But a Governor may demand admittance to this convent, and by
the order of his Most Christian Majesty he may not be refused:
is it not so?"

"Must I answer the catechism of Monsieur Doltaire?"

"But is it not so?" he asked again urbanely.

"It is so, yet how does that concern you, monsieur?"

"In every way," and he smiled.

"This is unseemly, monsieur. What is your business?"

"The Governor's business, good Mother."

"Then let the Governor's messenger give his message and depart
in peace," she answered, her hand upon the door.

"Not the Governor's messenger, but the Governor himself," he
rejoined gravely.

He turned and was about to shut the door, but she stopped him.
"This is no house for jesting, monsieur," she said. "I will arouse
the town if you persist.--Sister," she added to one standing near,
"the bell!"

"You fill your office with great dignity and merit, Mere St.
George," he said, as he put out his hand and stayed the Sister.
"I commend you for your discretion. Read this," he continued,
handing her a paper.

A Sister held a light, and the Mother read it. As she did so
Doltaire made a motion to Gabord, and he shut the door quickly
on us. Mere St. George looked up from the paper, startled and
frightened too.

"Your Excellency!" she exclaimed.

"You are the first to call me so," he replied. "I thought to
leave untouched this good gift of the King, and to let the Marquis
de Vaudreuil and the admirable Bigot untwist the coil they have
made. But no. After some too generous misgivings, I now claim my
own. I could not enter here, to speak with a certain lady, save
as the Governor, but as the Governor I now ask speech with
Mademoiselle Duvarney. Do you hesitate?" he added. "Do you doubt
that signature of his Majesty? Then see this. Here is a line from
the Marquis de Vaudreuil, the late Governor. It is not dignified,
one might say it is craven, but it is genuine."

Again the distressed lady read, and again she said, "Your
Excellency!" Then, "You wish to see her in my presence,
your Excellency?"

"Alone, good Mother," he softly answered.

"Your Excellency, will you, the first officer in the land, defy
our holy rules, and rob us of our privilege to protect and comfort
and save?"

"I defy nothing," he replied. "The lady is here against her will,
a prisoner. She desires not your governance and care. In any case,
I must speak with her; and be assured, I honour you the more for
your solicitude, and will ask your counsel when I have finished
talk with her."

Was ever man so crafty? After a moment's thought she turned,
dismissed the others, and led the way, and Gabord and I followed.
We were bidden to wait outside a room, well lighted but bare, as I
could see through the open door. Doltaire entered, smiling, and
then bowed the nun on her way to summon Alixe. Gabord and I stood
there, not speaking, for both were thinking of the dangerous game
now playing. In a few minutes the Mother returned, bringing Alixe.
The light from the open door shone upon her face. My heart leaped,
for there was in her look such a deep sorrow. She was calm, save
for those shining yet steady eyes; they were like furnaces, burning
up the colour of her cheeks. She wore a soft black gown, with no
sign of ornament, and her gold-brown hair was bound with a piece of
black velvet ribbon. Her beauty was deeper than I had ever seen it;
a peculiar gravity seemed to have added years to her life. As she
passed me her sleeve brushed my arm, as it did that day I was
arrested in her father's house. She started, as though I had
touched her fingers, but only half turned toward me, for her mind
was wholly occupied with the room where Doltaire was.

At that moment Gabord coughed slightly, and she turned quickly
to him. Her eyes flashed intelligence, and presently, as she passed
in, a sort of hope seemed to have come on her face to lighten its
painful pensiveness. The Mother Superior entered with her, the door
closed, and then, after a little, the Mother came out again. As
she did so I saw a look of immediate purpose in her face, and her
hurrying step persuaded me she was bent on some project of espial.
So I made a sign to Gabord and followed her. As she turned the
corner of the hallway just beyond, I stepped forward silently and
watched her enter a room that would, I knew, be next to this we
guarded.

Listening at the door for a moment, I suddenly and softly turned
the handle and entered, to see the good Mother with a panel drawn
in the wall before her, and her face set to it. She stepped back as
I shut the door and turned the key in the lock. I put my finger to
my lips, for she seemed about to cry out.

"Hush!" said I. "I watch for those who love her. I am here to
serve her--and you."

"You are a servant of the Seigneur's?" she said, the alarm
passing out of her face.

"I served the Seigneur, good Mother," I answered, "and I would
lay down my life for ma'm'selle."

"You would hear?" she asked, pointing to the panel.

I nodded.

"You speak French not like a Breton or Norman," she added. "What
is your province?"

"I am an Auvergnian."

She said no more, but motioned to me, enjoining silence also by
a sign, and I stood with her beside the panel. Before it was a
piece of tapestry which was mere gauze in one place, and I could
see through and hear perfectly. The room we were in was at least
four feet higher than the other, and we looked down on its
occupants.

"Presently, holy Mother," said I, "all shall be told true to
you, if you wish it. It is not your will to watch and hear; it
is because you love the lady. But I love her, too, and I am to
be trusted. It is not business for such as you."

She saw my implied rebuke, and said, as I thought a little abashed,
"You will tell me all? And if he would take her forth, give me alarm
in the room opposite yonder door, and stay them, and--"

"Stay them, holy Mother, at the price of my life. I have the
honour of her family in my hands."

She looked at me gravely, and I assumed a peasant openness of
look and honesty. She was deceived completely, and, without further
speech, she stepped to the door like a ghost and was gone. I never
saw a human being so noiseless, so uncanny. Our talk had been
carried on silently, and I had closed the panel quietly, so that we
could not be heard by Alixe or Doltaire. Now I was alone, to see
and hear my wife in speech with my enemy, the man who had made a
strong, and was yet to make a stronger fight to unseat me in her
affections.

There was a moment's compunction, in which I hesitated to see
this meeting; but there was Alixe's safety to be thought on, and
what might he not here disclose of his intentions!--knowing which,
I should act with judgment, and not in the dark. I trusted Alixe,
though I knew well that this hour would see the great struggle in
her between this scoundrel and myself. I knew that he had ever had
a sort of power over her, even while she loathed his character;
that he had a hundred graces I had not, place which I had not, an
intellect that ever delighted me, and a will like iron when it was
called into action. I thought for one moment longer ere I moved
the panel. My lips closed tight, and I felt a pang at my heart.

Suppose, in this conflict, this singular man, acting on a nature
already tried beyond reason, should bend it to his will, to which
it was, in some radical ways, inclined? Well, if that should be,
then I would go forth and never see her more. She must make her
choice out of her own heart and spirit, and fight this fight alone,
and having fought, and lost or won, the result should be final,
should stand, though she was my wife, and I was bound in honour to
protect her from all that might invade her loyalty, to cherish her
through all temptation and distress. But our case was a strange one,
and it must be dealt with according to its strangeness--our only
guides our consciences. There were no precedents to meet our needs;
our way had to be hewn out of a noisome, pathless wood. I made up my
mind: I would hear and see all. So I slid the panel softly, and put
my eyes to the tapestry. How many times did I see, in the next hour,
my wife's eyes upraised to this very tapestry, as if appealing to
the Madonna upon it! How many times did her eyes look into mine
without knowing it! And more than once Doltaire followed her
glance, and a faint smile passed over his face, as if he saw and
was interested in the struggle in her, apart from his own passion
and desires.

When first I looked in, she was standing near a tall high-backed
chair, in almost the same position as on the day when Doltaire told
me of Braddock's death, accused me of being a spy, and arrested me.
It gave me, too, a thrill to see her raise her handkerchief to her
mouth as if to stop a cry, as she had done then, the black sleeve
falling away from her perfect rounded arm, now looking almost like
marble against the lace. She held her handkerchief to her lips for
quite a minute; and indeed it covered more than a little of her
face, so that the features most showing were her eyes, gazing at
Doltaire with a look hard to interpret, for there seemed in it
trouble, entreaty, wonder, resistance, and a great sorrow--no fear,
trepidation, or indirectness.

His disturbing words were these: "To-night I am the Governor of
this country. You once doubted my power--that was when you would
save your lover from death. I proved it in that small thing--I saved
him. Well, when you saw me carried off to the Bastile--it looked
like that--my power seemed to vanish: is it not so? We have talked
of this before, but now is a time to review all things again. And
once more I say I am the Governor of New France. I have had the
commission in my hands ever since I came back. But I have spoken of
it to no one--except your lover."

"My husband!" she said steadily, crushing the handkerchief in
her hand, which now rested upon the chair-arm.

"Well, well, your husband--after a fashion. I did not care to
use this as an argument. I chose to win you by personal means
alone, to have you give yourself to Tinoir Doltaire because you
set him before any other man. I am vain, you see; but then vanity
is no sin when one has fine aspirations, and I aspire to you!"

She made a motion with her hand. "Oh, can you not spare me this
to-day of all days in my life--your Excellency?"

"Let it be plain 'monsieur,'" he answered. "I can not spare you,
for this day decides all. As I said, I desired you. At first my
wish was to possess you at any cost: I was your hunter only. I am
still your hunter, but in a different way. I would rather have you
in my arms than save New France; and with Montcalm I could save it.
Vaudreuil is a blunderer and a fool; he has sold the country. But
what ambition is that? New France may come and go, and be forgotten,
and you and I be none the worse. There are other provinces to
conquer. But for me there is only one province, and I will lift my
standard there, and build a grand chateau of my happiness there.
That is my hope, and that is why I come to conquer it, and not the
English. Let the English go--all save one, and he must die. Already
he is dead; he died to-day at the altar of the cathedral--"

"No, no, no!" broke in Alixe, her voice low and firm.

"But yes," he said; "but yes, he is dead to you forever. The
Church has said so; the state says so; your people say so; race and
all manner of good custom say so; and I, who love you better--yes,
a hundred times better than he--say so."

She made a hasty, deprecating gesture with her hand. "Oh, carry
this old song elsewhere," she said, "for I am sick of it." There
were now both scorn and weariness in her tone.

He had a singular patience, and he resented nothing. "I understand,"
he went on, "what it was sent your heart his way. He came to you
when you were yet a child, before you had learnt the first secret
of life. He was a captive, a prisoner, he had a wound got in fair
fighting, and I will do him the credit to say he was an honest man;
he was no spy."

She looked up at him with a slight flush, almost of gratitude.
"I know that well," she returned. "I knew there was other cause
than spying at the base of all ill treatment of him. I know that
you, you alone, kept him prisoner here five long years."

"Not I; the Grande Marquise--for weighty reasons. You should not
fret at those five years, since it gave you what you have cherished
so much, a husband--after a fashion. But yet we will do him
justice: he is an honourable fighter, he has parts and graces of a
rude order. But he will never go far in life; he has no instincts
and habits common with you; it has been, so far, a compromise,
founded upon the old-fashioned romance of ill-used captive and
soft-hearted maid; the compassion, too, of the superior for the
low, the free for the caged."

"Compassion such as your Excellency feels for me, no doubt," she
said, with a slow pride.

"You are caged, but you may be free," he rejoined meaningly.

"Yes, in the same market open to him, and at the same price of
honour," she replied, with dignity.

"Will you not sit down?" he now said, motioning her to a chair
politely, and taking one himself, thus pausing before he answered
her.

I was prepared to see him keep a decorous distance from her. I
felt he was acting upon deliberation; that he was trusting to the
power of his insinuating address, his sophistry, to break down
barriers. It was as if he felt himself at greater advantage, making
no emotional demonstrations, so allaying her fears, giving her time
to think; for it was clear he hoped to master her intelligence, so
strong a part of her.

She sat down in the high-backed chair, and I noted that our
batteries began to play upon the town--an unusual thing at night.
It gave me a strange feeling--the perfect stillness of the holy
place, the quiet movement of this tragedy before me, on which
broke, with no modifying noises or turmoil, the shouting cannonade.
Nature, too, it would have seemed, had forged a mood in keeping
with the time, for there was no air stirring when we came in, and a
strange stillness had come upon the landscape. In the pause, too, I
heard a long, soft shuffling of feet in the corridor--the evening
procession from the chapel--and a slow chant:

"I am set down in a wilderness, O Lord, I am alone. If a strange
voice call, O teach me what to say; if I languish, O give me
Thy cup to drink; O strengthen Thou my soul. Lord, I am like a
sparrow far from home; O bring me to Thine honourable house.
Preserve my heart, encourage me, according to Thy truth."

The words came to us distinctly yet distantly, swelled softly,
and died away, leaving Alixe and Doltaire seated and looking at
each other. Alixe's hands were clasped in her lap.

"Your honour is above all price," he said at last in reply to
her. "But what is honour in this case of yours, in which I throw
the whole interest of my life, stake all? For I am convinced that,
losing, the book of fate will close for me. Winning, I shall begin
again, and play a part in France which men shall speak of when I
am done with all. I never had ambition for myself; for you, Alixe
Duvarney, a new spirit lives in me.... I will be honest with you.
At first I swore to cool my hot face in your bosom; and I would
have done that at any price, and yet I would have stood by that
same dishonour honourably to the end. Never in my whole life did I
put my whole heart in any--episode--of admiration: I own it, for
you to think what you will. There never was a woman whom, loving
to-day,"--he smiled--"I could not leave to-morrow with no more than
a pleasing kind of regret. Names that I ought to have recalled I
forgot; incidents were cloudy, like childish remembrances. I was
not proud of it; the peasant in me spoke against it sometimes. I
even have wished that I, half peasant, had been--"

"If only you had been all peasant, this war, this misery of
mine, had never been," she interrupted.

He nodded with an almost boyish candour. "Yes, yes, but I was half
prince also; I had been brought up, one foot in a cottage and
another in a palace. But for your misery: is it, then, misery? Need
it be so? But lift your finger and all will be well. Do you wish to
save your country? Would that be compensation? Then I will show you
the way. We have three times as many soldiers as the English, though
of poorer stuff. We could hold this place, could defeat them, if we
were united and had but two thousand men. We have fifteen thousand.
As it is now, Vaudreuil balks Montcalm, and that will ruin us in the
end unless you make it otherwise. You would be a patriot? Then shut
out forever this English captain from your heart, and open its doors
to me. To-morrow I will take Vaudreuil's place, put your father
in Bigot's, your brother in Ramesay's--they are both perfect and
capable; I will strengthen the excellent Montcalm's hands in every
way, will inspire the people, and cause the English to raise this
siege. You and I will do this: the Church will bless us, the State
will thank us; your home and country will be safe and happy, your
father and brother honoured. This, and far, far greater things I
will do for your sake."

He paused. He had spoken with a deep power, such as I knew he
could use, and I did not wonder that she paled a little, even
trembled before it.

"Will you not do it for France?" she said.

"I will not do it for France," he answered. "I will do it for
you alone. Will you not be your country's friend? It is no virtue
in me to plead patriotism--it is a mere argument, a weapon that I
use; but my heart is behind it, and it is a means to that which
you will thank me for one day. I would not force you to anything,
but I would persuade your reason, question your foolish loyalty
to a girl's mistake. Can you think that you are right? You have no
friend that commends your cause; the whole country has upbraided
you, the Church has cut you off from the man. All is against
reunion with him, and most of all your own honour. Come with me,
and be commended and blessed here, while over in France homage
shall be done you. For you I would take from his Majesty a dukedom
which he has offered me more than once."

Suddenly, with a passionate tone, he continued: "Your own heart is
speaking for me. Have I not seen you tremble when I come near you?"

He rose and came forward a step or two. "You thought it was fear
of me. It was fear, but fear of that in you which was pleading for
me, while you had sworn yourself away to him who knows not and can
never know how to love you, who has nothing kin with you in mind or
heart--an alien of poor fortune, and poorer birth and prospects."

He fixed his eyes upon her, and went on, speaking with forceful
quietness: "Had there been cut away that mistaken sense of duty to
him, which I admire unspeakably--yes, though it is misplaced--you
and I would have come to each other's arms long ago. Here in your
atmosphere I feel myself possessed, endowed. I come close to you,
and something new in me cries out simply, 'I love you, Alixe, I
love you!' See, all the damnable part of me is burned up by the
clear fire of your eyes; I stand upon the ashes, and swear that
I can not live without you. Come--come--"

He stepped nearer still, and she rose like one who moves under
some fascination, and I almost cried out, for in that moment she
was his, his--I felt it; he possessed her like some spirit; and I
understood it, for the devilish golden beauty of his voice was
like music, and he had spoken with great skill.

"Come," he said, "and know where all along your love has lain.
That other way is only darkness--the convent, which will keep you
buried, while you will never have heart for the piteous seclusion,
till your life is broken all to pieces; till you have no hope, no
desire, no love, and at last, under a cowl, you look out upon the
world, and, with a dead heart, see it as in a pale dream, and die
at last: you, born to be a wife, without a husband; endowed to be
the perfect mother, without a child; to be the admired of princes,
a moving, powerful figure to influence great men, with no salon but
the little bare cell where you pray. With me all that you should be
you will be. You have had a bad, dark dream; wake, and come into the
sun with me. Once I wished for you as the lover only; now, by every
hope I ever might have had, I want you for my wife."

He held out his arms to her and smiled, and spoke one or two low
words which I could not hear. I had stood waiting death against
the citadel wall, with the chance of a reprieve hanging between
uplifted muskets and my breast; but that suspense was less than
this, for I saw him, not moving, but standing there waiting for
her, the warmth of his devilish eloquence about him, and she
moving toward him.

"My darling," I heard him say, "come, till death...us do part,
and let no man put asunder."

She paused, and, waking from the dream, drew herself together,
as though something at her breast hurt her, and she repeated his
words like one dazed--"Let no man put asunder!"

With a look that told of her great struggle, she moved to a shrine
of the Virgin in the corner, and, clasping her hands before her
breast for a moment, said something I could not hear, before she
turned to Doltaire, who had now taken another step towards her.
By his look I knew that he felt his spell was broken; that his
auspicious moment had passed; that now, if he won her, it must
be by harsh means.

For she said: "Monsieur Doltaire, you have defeated yourself.
'Let no man put asunder' was my response to my husband's 'Whom God
hath joined,' when last I met him face to face. Nothing can alter
that while he lives, nor yet when he dies, for I have had such a
sorrowful happiness in him that if I were sure he were dead I would
never leave this holy place--never. But he lives, and I will keep my
vow. Holy Church has parted us, but yet we are not parted. You say
that to think of him now is wrong, reflects upon me. I tell you,
monsieur, that if it were a wrong a thousand times greater I would
do it. To me there can be no shame in following till I die the man
who took me honourably for his wife."

He made an impatient gesture and smiled ironically.

"Oh, I care not what you say or think," she went on. "I know not
of things canonical and legal; the way that I was married to him
is valid in his country and for his people. Bad Catholic you call
me, alas! But I am a true wife, who, if she sinned, sinned not
knowingly, and deserves not this tyranny and shame."

"You are possessed with a sad infatuation," he replied
persuasively. "You are not the first who has suffered so. It will
pass, and leave you sane--leave you to me. For you are mine; what
you felt a moment ago you will feel again, when this romantic
martyrdom of yours has wearied you."

"Monsieur Doltaire," she said, with a successful effort at
calmness, though I could see her trembling too, "it is you who are
mistaken, and I will show you how. But first: You have said often
that I have unusual intelligence. You have flattered me in that, I
doubt not, but still here is a chance to prove yourself sincere. I
shall pass by every wicked means that you took first to ruin me, to
divert me to a dishonest love (though I knew not what you meant at
the time), and, failing, to make me your wife. I shall not refer to
this base means to reach me in this sacred place, using the King's
commission for such a purpose."

"I would use it again and do more, for the same ends," he rejoined,
with shameless candour.

She waved her hand impatiently. "I pass all that by. You shall
listen to me as I have listened to you, remembering that what I say
is honest, if it has not your grace and eloquence. You say that I
will yet come to you, that I care for you and have cared for you
always, and that--that this other--is a sad infatuation. Monsieur,
in part you are right."

He came another step forward, for he thought he saw a foothold
again; but she drew back to the chair, and said, lifting her hand
against him, "No, no, wait till I have done. I say that you are
right in part. I will not deny that, against my will, you have
always influenced me; that, try as I would, your presence moved me,
and I could never put you out of my mind, out of my life. At first
I did not understand it, for I knew how bad you were. I was sure
you did evil because you loved it; that to gratify yourself you
would spare no one: a man without pity--"

"On the contrary," he interrupted, with a sour sort of smile,
"pity is almost a foible with me."

"Not real pity," she answered. "Monsieur, I have lived long enough
to know what pity moves you. It is the moment's careless whim; a
pensive pleasure, a dramatic tenderness. Wholesome pity would make
you hesitate to harm others. You have no principles--"

"Pardon me, many," he urged politely, as he eyed her with
admiration.

"Ah no, monsieur; habits, not principles. Your life has been one
long irresponsibility. In the very maturity of your powers, you use
them to win to yourself, to your empty heart, a girl who has tried
to live according to the teachings of her soul and conscience. Were
there not women elsewhere to whom it didn't matter--your abandoned
purposes? Why did you throw your shadow on my path? You are not,
never were, worthy of a good woman's love."

He laughed with a sort of bitterness. "Your sinner stands between
two fires--" he said. She looked at him inquiringly, and he added,
"the punishment he deserves and the punishment he does not deserve.
But it is interesting to be thus picked out upon the stone, however
harsh the picture. You said I influenced you--well?"

"Monsieur," she went on, "there were times when, listening to
you, I needed all my strength to resist. I have felt myself weak
and shaking when you came into the room. There was something in you
that appealed to me, I know not what; but I do know that it was not
the best of me, that it was emotional, some strange power of your
personality--ah yes, I can acknowledge all now. You had great
cleverness, gifts that startled and delighted; but yet I felt
always, and that feeling grew and grew, that there was nothing in
you wholly honest, that by artifice you had frittered away what
once may have been good in you. Now all goodness in you was an
accident of sense and caprice, not true morality."

"What has true morality to do with love of you?" he said.

"You ask me hard questions," she replied. "This it has to do
with it: We go from morality to higher things, not from higher
things to morality. Pure love is a high thing; yours was not high.
To have put my life in your hands--ah no, no! And so I fought you.
There was no question of yourself and Robert Moray--none. Him I
knew to possess fewer gifts, but I knew him also to be what you
could never be. I never measured him against you. What was his was
all of me worth the having, and was given always; there was no
change. What was yours was given only when in your presence, and
then with hatred of myself and you--given to some baleful
fascination in you. For a time, the more I struggled against it
the more it grew, for there was nothing that could influence
a woman which you did not do. Monsieur, if you had had Robert
Moray's character and your own gifts, I could--monsieur, I could
have worshiped you!"

Doltaire was in a kind of dream. He was sitting now in the
high-backed chair, his mouth and chin in his hand, his elbow resting
on the chair-arm. His left hand grasped the other arm, and he leaned
forward with brows bent and his eyes fixed on her intently. It was a
figure singularly absorbed, lost in study of some deep theme. Once
his sword clanged against the chair as it slipped a little from its
position, and he started almost violently, though the dull booming
of a cannon in no wise seemed to break the quietness of the scene.
He was dressed, as in the morning, in plain black, but now the star
of Louis shone on his breast. His face was pale, but his eyes, with
their swift-shifting lights, lived upon Alixe, devoured her.

She paused for an instant.

"Thou shalt not commit--idolatry," he remarked in a low, cynical
tone, which the repressed feeling in his face and the terrible new
earnestness of his look belied.

She flushed a little, and continued: "Yet all the time I was
true to him, and what I felt concerning you he knew--I told him
enough."

Suddenly there came into Doltaire's looks and manner an astounding
change. Both hands caught the chair-arm, his lips parted with a sort
of snarl, and his white teeth showed maliciously. It seemed as if,
all at once, the courtier, the flaneur, the man of breeding, had
gone, and you had before you the peasant, in a moment's palsy from
the intensity of his fury.

"A thousand hells for him!" he burst out in the rough patois of
Poictiers, and got to his feet. "You told him all, you confessed
your fluttering fears and desires to him, while you let me play upon
those ardent strings of feelings, that you might save him! You used
me, Tinoir Doltaire, son of a king, to further your amour with a
bourgeois Englishman! And he laughed in his sleeve, and soothed away
those dangerous influences of the magician. By the God of heaven,
Robert Moray and I have work to do! And you--you, with all the gifts
of the perfect courtesan--"

"Oh, shame! shame!" she said, breaking in.

"But I speak the truth. You berate me, but you used incomparable
gifts to hold me near you, and the same gifts to let me have no
more of you than would keep me. I thought you the most honest, the
most heavenly of women, and now--"

"Alas!" she interrupted, "what else could I have done? To draw
the line between your constant attention and my own necessity!
Ah, I was but a young girl; I had no friend to help me; he was
condemned to die; I loved him; I did not believe in you, not in
ever so little. If I had said, 'You must not speak to me again,'
you would have guessed my secret, and all my purposes would have
been defeated. So I had to go on; nor did I think that it ever
would cause you aught but a shock to your vanity."

He laughed hatefully. "My faith, but it has, shocked my vanity,"
he answered. "And now take this for thinking on: Up to this point I
have pleaded with you, used persuasion, courted you with a humility
astonishing to myself. Now I will have you in spite of all. I will
break you, and soothe your hurt afterwards. I will, by the face of
the Madonna, I will feed where this Moray would pasture, I will
gather this ripe fruit!"

With a devilish swiftness he caught her about the waist, and
kissed her again and again upon the mouth.

The blood was pounding in my veins, and I would have rushed in
then and there, have ended the long strife, and have dug revenge
for this outrage from his heart, but that I saw Alixe did not move,
nor make the least resistance. This struck me with horror, till,
all at once, he let her go, and I saw her face. It was very white
and still, smooth and cold as marble. She seemed five years older
in the minute.

"Have you quite done, monsieur?" she said, with infinite quiet
scorn. "Do you, the son of a king, find joy in kissing lips that
answer nothing, a cheek from which the blood flows in affright and
shame? Is it an achievement to feed as cattle feed? Listen to me,
Monsieur Doltaire. No, do not try to speak till I have done, if
your morality--of manners--is not all dead. Through this cowardly
act of yours, the last vestige of your power over me is gone. I
sometimes think that, with you, in the past, I have remained true
and virtuous at the expense of the best of me; but now all that is
over, and there is no temptation--I feel beyond it: by this hour
here, this hour of sore peril, you have freed me. I was
tempted--Heaven knows, a few minutes ago I was tempted, for
everything was with you; but God has been with me, and you and I
are no nearer than the poles."

"You doubt that I love you?" he said in an altered voice.

"I doubt that any man will so shame the woman he loves," she
answered.

"What is insult to-day may be a pride to-morrow," was his quick
reply. "I do not repent of it, I never will, for you and I shall
go to-night from here, and you shall be my wife; and one day, when
this man is dead, when you have forgotten your bad dream, you will
love me as you can not love him. I have that in me to make you love
me. To you I can be loyal, never drifting, never wavering. I tell
you, I will not let you go. First my wife you shall be, and after
that I will win your love; in spite of all, mine now, though it is
shifted for the moment. Come, come, Alixe"--he made as if to take
her hand--"you and I will learn the splendid secret--"

She drew back to the shrine of the Virgin.

"Mother of God! Mother of God!" I heard her whisper, and then she
raised her hand against him. "No, no, no," she said, with sharp
anguish, "do not try to force me to your wishes--do not; for I, at
least, will never live to see it. I have suffered more than I can
bear I will end this shame, I will--"

I had heard enough. I stepped back quickly, closed the panel,
and went softly to the door and into the hall, determined to bring
her out against Doltaire, trusting to Gabord not to oppose me.



XXVII

A SIDE-WIND OF REVENGE


I knew it was Doltaire's life or mine, and I shrank from desecrating
this holy place; but our bitter case would warrant this, and more.
As I came quickly through the hall, and round the corner where stood
Gabord, I saw a soldier talking with the Mother Superior.

"He is not dead?" I heard her say.

"No, holy Mother," was the answer, "but sorely wounded. He was
testing the fire-organs for the rafts, and one exploded too soon."

At that moment the Mother turned to me, and seemed startled by
my look. "What is it?" she whispered.

"He would carry her off," I replied.

"He shall never do so," was her quick answer. "Her father, the
good Seigneur, has been wounded, and she must go to him."

"I will take her," said I at once, and I moved to open the door.
At that moment I caught Gabord's eye. There I read what caused me
to pause. If I declared myself now, Gabord's life would pay for his
friendship to me--even if I killed Doltaire; for the matter would
be open to all then just the same. That I could not do, for the man
had done me kindnesses dangerous to himself. Besides, he was a true
soldier, and disgrace itself would be to him as bad as the drum-head
court-martial. I made up my mind to another course even as the
perturbed "aho" which followed our glance fell from his puffing lips.

"But no, holy Mother," said I, and I whispered in her ear. She
opened the door and went in, leaving it ajar. I could hear only
a confused murmur of voices, through which ran twice, "No, no,
monsieur," in Alixe's soft, clear voice. I could scarcely restrain
myself, and I am sure I should have gone in, in spite of all, had
it not been for Gabord, who withstood me.

He was right, and as I turned away I heard Alixe cry, "My father,
my poor father!"

Then came Doltaire's voice, cold and angry: "Good Mother, this
is a trick."

"Your Excellency should be a better judge of trickery," she
replied quietly. "Will not your Excellency leave an unhappy lady
to her trouble and the Church's care?"

"If the Seigneur is hurt, I will take mademoiselle to him," was
his instant reply.

"It may not be, your Excellency," she said. "I will furnish her
with other escort."

"And I, as Governor of this province, as commander-in-chief of
the army, say that only with my escort shall the lady reach her
father."

At this Alixe spoke: "Dear Mere St. George, do not fear
for me; God will protect me--"

"And I also, mademoiselle, with my life," interposed
Doltaire.

"God will protect me," Alixe repeated; "I have no fear."

"I will send two of our Sisters with mademoiselle to nurse the
poor Seigneur," said Mere St. George.

I am sure Doltaire saw the move. "A great kindness, holy Mother,"
he said politely, "and I will see they are well cared for. We will
set forth at once. The Seigneur shall be brought to the Intendance,
and he and his daughter shall have quarters there."

He stepped towards the door where we were. I fell back into
position as he came. "Gabord," said he, "send your trusted fellow
here to the General's camp, and have him fetch to the Intendance
the Seigneur Duvarney, who has been wounded. Alive or dead, he must
be brought," he added in a lower voice.

Then he turned back into the room. As he did so, Gabord looked
at me inquiringly.

"If you go, you put your neck into the gin," said he; "some one
in camp will know you."

"I will not leave my wife," I answered in a whisper. Thus were
all plans altered on the instant. Gabord went to the outer door and
called another soldier, to whom he gave this commission.

A few moments afterwards, Alixe, Doltaire, and the Sisters of
Mercy were at the door ready to start. Doltaire turned and bowed
with a well-assumed reverence to the Mother Superior. "To-night's
affairs here are sacred to ourselves, Mere St. George," he said.

She bowed, but made no reply. Alixe turned and kissed her hand.
But as we stepped forth, the Mother said suddenly, pointing to me,
"Let the soldier come back in an hour, and mademoiselle's luggage
shall go to her, your Excellency."

Doltaire nodded, glancing at me. "Surely he shall attend you, Mere
St. George," he said, and then stepped on with Alixe, Gabord and
the other soldier ahead, the two Sisters behind, and myself beside
these. Going quietly through the disordered Upper Town, we came down
Palace Street to the Intendance. Here Doltaire had kept his quarters
despite his growing quarrel with Bigot. As we entered he inquired of
the servant where Bigot was, and was told he was gone to the Chateau
St. Louis. Doltaire shrugged a shoulder and smiled--he knew that
Bigot had had news of his deposition through the Governor. He
gave orders for rooms to be prepared for the Seigneur and for the
Sisters; mademoiselle meanwhile to be taken to hers, which had, it
appeared, been made ready. Then I heard him ask in an undertone if
the bishop had come, and he was answered that Monseigneur was at
Charlesbourg, and could not be expected till the morning. I was
in a most dangerous position, for, though I had escaped notice,
any moment might betray me; Doltaire himself might see through
my disguise.

We all accompanied Alixe to the door of her apartments, and there
Doltaire with courtesy took leave of her, saying that he would
return in a little time to see if she was comfortable, and to
bring her any fresh news of her father. The Sisters were given
apartments next her own, and they entered her room with her, at
her own request.

When the door closed, Doltaire turned to Gabord, and said, "You
shall come with me to bear letters to General Montcalm, and you
shall send one of these fellows also for me to General Bougainville
at Cap Rouge." Then he spoke directly to me, and said, "You shall
guard this passage till morning. No one but myself may pass into
this room or out of it, save the Sisters of Mercy, on pain of
death."

I saluted, but spoke no word.

"You understand me?" he repeated.

"Absolutely, monsieur," I answered in a rough peasantlike voice.

He turned and walked in a leisurely way through the passage, and
disappeared, telling Gabord to join him in a moment. As he left,
Gabord said to me in a low voice, "Get back to General Wolfe, or
wife and life will both be lost."

I caught his hand and pressed it, and a minute afterwards I was
alone before Alixe's door.

An hour later, knowing Alixe to be alone, I tapped on her door
and entered. As I did so she rose from a priedieu where she had
been kneeling. Two candles were burning on the mantel, but the room
was much in shadow.

"What is't you wish?" she asked, approaching.

I had off my hat; I looked her direct in the eyes and put my fingers
on my lips. She stared painfully for a moment.

"Alixe," said I.

She gave a gasp, and stood transfixed, as though she had seen a
ghost, and then in an instant she was in my arms, sobs shaking her.
"Oh, Robert! oh my dear, dear husband!" she cried again and again.
I calmed her, and presently she broke into a whirl of questions.
I told her of all I had seen at the cathedral and at the convent,
what my plans had been, and then I waited for her answer. A new
feeling took possession of her. She knew that there was one
question at my lips which I dared not utter. She became very quiet,
and a sweet, settled firmness came into her face.

"Robert," she said, "you must go back to your army without me. I
can not leave my father now. Save yourself alone, and if--and if
you take the city, and I am alive, then we shall be reunited. If
you do not take the city, then, whether father lives or dies, I
will come to you. Of this be sure, that I shall never live to be
the wife of any other man--wife or aught else. You know me. You
know all, you trust me, and, my dear husband, my own love, we
must part once more. Go, go, and save yourself, keep your life
safe for my sake, and may God in heaven, may God--"

Here she broke off and started back from my embrace, staring hard
a moment over my shoulder; then her face became deadly pale, and
she fell back unconscious. Supporting her, I turned round, and
there, inside the door, with his back to it, was Doltaire. There
was a devilish smile on his face, as wicked a look as I ever saw on
any man. I laid Alixe down on a sofa without a word, and faced him
again.

"As many coats as Joseph's coat had colours," he said. "And for
once disguised as an honest man--well, well!"

"Beast" I hissed, and I whipped out my short sword.

"Not here," he said, with a malicious laugh. "You forget your
manners: familiarity"--he glanced towards the couch--"has bred--"

"Coward!" I cried. "I will kill you at her feet."

"Come, then," he answered, and stepped away from the door,
drawing his sword, "since you will have it here. But if I kill you,
as I intend--"

He smiled detestably, and motioned towards the couch, then
turned to the door again as if to lock it. I stepped between, my
sword at guard. At that the door opened. A woman came in quickly,
and closed it behind her. She passed me, and faced Doltaire.

It was Madame Cournal. She was most pale, and there was a peculiar
wildness in her eyes.

"You have deposed Francois Bigot," she said.

"Stand back, madame; I have business with this fellow," said
Doltaire, waving his hand.

"My business comes first," she replied. "You--you dare to depose
Francois Bigot!"

"It needs no daring," he said nonchalantly.

"You shall put him back in his place."

"Come to me to-morrow morning, dear madame."

"I tell you he must be put back, Monsieur Doltaire."

"Once you called me Tinoir," he said meaningly.

Without a word she caught from her cloak a dagger and struck him
in the breast, though he threw up his hand and partly diverted the
blow. Without a cry he half swung round, and sank, face forward,
against the couch where Alixe lay.

Raising himself feebly, blindly, he caught her hand and kissed
it; then he fell back.

Stooping beside him, I felt his heart. He was alive. Madame
Cournal now knelt beside him, staring at him as in a kind of dream.
I left the room quickly, and met the Sisters of Mercy in the hall.
They had heard the noise, and were coming to Alixe. I bade them
care for her. Passing rapidly through the corridors, I told a
servant of the household what had occurred, bade him send for
Bigot, and then made for my own safety. Alixe was safe for a time,
at least--perhaps forever, thank God!--from the approaches of
Monsieur Doltaire. As I sped through the streets, I could not help
but think of how he had kissed her hand as he fell, and I knew by
this act, at such a time, that in very truth he loved her after his
fashion.

I came soon to the St. John's Gate, for I had the countersign
from Gabord, and, dressed as I was, I had no difficulty in passing.
Outside I saw a small cavalcade arriving from Beauport way. I drew
back and let it pass me, and then I saw that it was soldiers
bearing the Seigneur Duvarney to the Intendance.

An hour afterwards, having passed the sentries, I stood on a
lonely point of the shore of Lower Town, and, seeing no one near,
I slid into the water. As I did so I heard a challenge behind me,
and when I made no answer there came a shot, another, and another;
for it was thought, I doubt not, that I was a deserter. I was
wounded in the shoulder, and had to swim with one arm; but though
boats were put out, I managed to evade them and to get within hail
of our fleet. Challenged there, I answered with my name. A boat shot
out from among the ships, and soon I was hauled into it by Clark
himself; and that night I rested safe upon the Terror of France.



XXVIII

"TO CHEAT THE DEVIL YET."


My hurt proved more serious than I had looked for, and the day
after my escape I was in a high fever. General Wolfe himself,
having heard of my return, sent to inquire after me. He also was
ill, and our forces were depressed in consequence; for he had a
power to inspire them not given to any other of our accomplished
and admirable generals. He forbore to question me concerning the
state of the town and what I had seen; for which I was glad. My
adventure had been of a private nature, and such I wished it to
remain. The general desired me to come to him as soon as I was
able, that I might proceed with him above the town to reconnoitre.
But for many a day this was impossible, for my wound gave me much
pain and I was confined to my bed.

Yet we on the Terror of France served our good general, too; for
one dark night, when the wind was fair, we piloted the remaining
ships of Admiral Holmes's division above the town. This move was
made on my constant assertion that there was a way by which Quebec
might be taken from above; and when General Wolfe made known my
representations to his general officers, they accepted it as a
last resort; for otherwise what hope had they? At Montmorenci our
troops had been repulsed, the mud flats of the Beauport shore and
the St. Charles River were as good as an army against us; the
Upper Town and citadel were practically impregnable; and for
eight miles west of the town to the cove and river at Cap Rouge
there was one long precipice, broken in but one spot; but just
there, I was sure, men could come up with stiff climbing as I
had done. Bougainville came to Cap Rouge now with three thousand
men, for he thought that this was to be our point of attack.
Along the shore from Cap Rouge to Cape Diamond small batteries
were posted, such as that of Lancy's at Anse du Foulon; but they
were careless, for no conjectures might seem so wild as that of
bringing an army up where I had climbed.

"Tut, tut," said General Murray, when he came to me on the
Terror of France, after having, at my suggestion, gone to the
south shore opposite Anse du Foulon, and scanned the faint line
that marked the narrow cleft on the cliff side--"tut, tut, man,"
said he, "'tis the dream of a cat or a damned mathematician."

Once, after all was done, he said to me that cats and
mathematicians were the only generals.

With a belligerent pride Clark showed the way up the river one
evening, the batteries of the town giving us plunging shots as we
went, and ours at Point Levis answering gallantly. To me it was a
good if most anxious time: good, in that I was having some sort of
compensation for my own sufferings in the town; anxious, because no
single word came to me of Alixe or her father, and all the time we
were pouring death into the place.

But this we knew from deserters, that Vaudreuil was Governor
and Bigot Intendant still; by which it would seem that, on the
momentous night when Doltaire was wounded by Madame Cournal, he
gave back the governorship to Vaudreuil and reinstated Bigot.
Presently, from an officer who had been captured as he was setting
free a fire-raft upon the river to run among the boats of our
fleet, I heard that Doltaire had been confined in the Intendance
from a wound given by a stupid sentry. Thus the true story had been
kept from the public. From him, too, I learned that nothing was
known of the Seigneur Duvarney and his daughter; that they had
suddenly disappeared from the Intendance, as if the earth had
swallowed them; and that even Juste Duvarney knew nothing of them,
and was, in consequence, much distressed.

This officer also said that now, when it might seem as if both
the Seigneur and his daughter were dead, opinion had turned in
Alixe's favour, and the feeling had crept about, first among the
common folk and afterwards among the people of the garrison, that
she had been used harshly. This was due largely, he thought, to the
constant advocacy of the Chevalier de la Darante, whose nephew had
married Mademoiselle Georgette Duvarney. This piece of news, in
spite of the uncertainty of Alixe's fate, touched me, for the
Chevalier had indeed kept his word to me.

At last all of Admiral Holmes's division was got above the town,
with very little damage, and I never saw a man so elated, so
profoundly elated as Clark over his share in the business. He was
a daredevil, too; for the day that the last of the division was
taken up the river, without my permission or the permission of the
admiral or any one else, he took the Terror of France almost up to
Bougainville's earthworks in the cove at Cap Rouge and insolently
emptied his six swivels into them, and then came out and stood
down the river. When I asked what he was doing--for I was now well
enough to come on deck--he said he was going to see how monkeys
could throw nuts; when I pressed him, he said he had a will to
hear the cats in the eaves; and when I became severe, he added
that he would bring the Terror of France up past the batteries of
the town in broad daylight, swearing that they could no more hit
him than a woman could a bird on a flagstaff. I did not relish this
foolish bravado, and I forbade it; but presently I consented, on
condition that he take me to General Wolfe's camp at Montmorenci
first; for now I felt strong enough to be again on active service.

Clark took the Terror of France up the river in midday, running
perilously close to the batteries; and though they pounded at him
petulantly, foolishly angry at his contemptuous defiance, he ran
the gauntlet safely, and coming to the flagship, the Sutherland,
saluted with his six swivels, to the laughter of the whole fleet
and his own profane joy.

"Mr. Moray," said General Wolfe, when I saw him, racked with
pain, studying a chart of the river and town which his chief
engineer had just brought him, "show me here this passage in the
hillside."

I did so, tracing the plains of Maitre Abraham, which I
assured him would be good ground for a pitched battle. He nodded;
then rose, and walked up and down for a time, thinking. Suddenly
he stopped, and fixed his eyes upon me.

"Mr. Moray," said he, "it would seem that you, angering La
Pompadour, brought down this war upon us." He paused, smiling in a
dry way, as if the thought amused him, as if indeed he doubted it;
but for that I cared not, it was an honour I could easily live
without.

I bowed to his words, and said, "Mine was the last straw, sir."

Again he nodded, and replied, "Well, well, you got us into trouble;
you must show us the way out," and he looked at the passage I had
traced upon the chart. "You will remain with me until we meet our
enemy on these heights." He pointed to the plains of Maitre Abraham.
Then he turned away, and began walking up and down again. "It is
the last chance!" he said to himself in a tone despairing and yet
heroic. "Please God, please God!" he added.

"You will speak nothing of these plans," he said to me at last,
half mechanically. "We must make feints of landing at Cap
Rouge--feints of landing everywhere save at the one possible place;
confuse both Bougainville and Montcalm; tire out their armies with
watchings and want of sleep; and then, on the auspicious night,
make the great trial."

I had remained respectfully standing at a little distance from
him. Now he suddenly came to me, and, pressing my hand, said
quickly, "You have trouble, Mr. Moray. I am sorry for you. But
maybe it is for better things to come."

I thanked him stumblingly, and a moment later left him, to serve
him on the morrow, and so on through many days, till, in divers
perils, the camp at Montmorenci was abandoned, the troops were got
aboard the ships, and the general took up his quarters on the
Sutherland; from which, one notable day, I sallied forth with him
to a point at the south shore opposite the Anse du Foulon, where he
saw the thin crack in the cliff side. From that moment instant and
final attack was his purpose.

The great night came, starlit and serene. The camp-fires of two
armies spotted the shores of the wide river, and the ships lay like
wild fowl in convoys above the town from where the arrow of fate
should be sped. Darkness upon the river, and fireflies upon the
shore. At Beauport, an untiring general, who for a hundred days had
snatched sleep, booted and spurred, and in the ebb of a losing game,
longed for his adored Candiac, grieved for a beloved daughter's
death, sent cheerful messages to his aged mother and to his wife,
and by the deeper protests of his love foreshadowed his own doom.
At Cap Rouge, a dying commander, unperturbed and valiant, reached
out a finger to trace the last movements in a desperate campaign of
life that opened in Flanders at sixteen; of which the end began
when he took from his bosom the portrait of his affianced wife,
and said to his old schoolfellow, "Give this to her, Jervis, for
we shall meet no more."

Then, passing to the deck, silent and steady, no signs of pain
upon his face, so had the calm come to him, as to Nature and this
beleaguered city, before the whirlwind, he looked out upon the
clustered groups of boats filled with the flower of his army,
settled in a menacing tranquillity. There lay the Light Infantry,
Bragg's, Kennedy's, Lascelles's, Anstruther's Regiment, Fraser's
Highlanders, and the much-loved, much-blamed, and impetuous
Louisburg Grenadiers. Steady, indomitable, silent as cats, precise
as mathematicians, he could trust them, as they loved his awkward
pain-twisted body and ugly red hair. "Damme, Jack, didst thee ever
take hell in tow before?" said a sailor from the Terror of France
to his fellow once, as the marines grappled with a flotilla of
French fire-ships, and dragged them, spitting destruction, clear
of the fleet, to the shore. "Nay, but I've been in tow of Jimmy
Wolfe's red head; that's hell-fire, lad!" was the reply.

From boat to boat the General's eye passed, then shifted to the
ships--the Squirrel, the Leostaff, the Seahorse, and the rest--and
lastly to where the army of Bougainville lay. Then there came
towards him an officer, who said quietly, "The tide has turned,
sir." For reply the general made a swift motion towards the
maintop shrouds, and almost instantly lanterns showed in them. In
response the crowded boats began to cast away, and, immediately
descending, the General passed into his own boat, drew to the
front, and drifted in the current ahead of his gallant men, the
ships following after.

It was two by the clock when the boats began to move, and slowly
we ranged down the stream, silently steered, carried by the
current. No paddle, no creaking oarlock, broke the stillness. I was
in the next boat to the General's, for, with Clark and twenty-two
other volunteers to the forlorn hope, I was to show the way up the
heights, and we were near to his person for over two hours that
night. No moon was shining, but I could see the General plainly;
and once, when our boats almost touched, he saw me, and said
graciously, "If they get up, Mr. Moray, you are free to serve
yourself."

My heart was full of love of country then, and I answered, "I
hope, sir, to serve you till your flag is hoisted in the citadel."

He turned to a young midshipman beside him, and said, "How old
are you, sir?"

"Seventeen, sir," was the reply.

"It is the most lasting passion," he said, musing.

It seemed to me then, and I still think it, that the passion he
meant was love of country. A moment afterwards I heard him recite
to the officers about him, in a low clear tone, some verses by Mr.
Gray, the poet, which I had never then read, though I have prized
them since. Under those frowning heights, and the smell from our
roaring thirty-two-pounders in the air, I heard him say:

  "The curfew tolls, the knell of parting day;
    The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea;
  The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
    And leaves the world to darkness and to me."

I have heard finer voices than his--it was as tin beside
Doltaire's--but something in it pierced me that night, and I
felt the man, the perfect hero, when he said:

  "The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
    And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
  Await alike the inevitable hour--
    The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

Soon afterwards we neared the end of our quest, the tide carrying
us in to shore; and down from the dark heights there came a
challenge, satisfied by an officer who said in French that we were
provision-boats for Montcalm: these, we knew, had been expected!
Then came the batteries of Samos. Again we passed with the same
excuse, and we rounded a headland, and the great work was begun.

The boats of the Light Infantry swung in to shore. No sentry
challenged, but I knew that at the top Lancy's tents were set. When
the Light Infantry had landed, we twenty-four volunteers stood
still for a moment, and I pointed out the way. Before we started,
we stooped beside a brook that leaped lightly down the ravine, and
drank a little rum and water. Then I led the way, Clark at one side
of me, and a soldier of the Light Infantry at the other. It was
hard climbing, but, following in our careful steps as silently as
they might, the good fellows came eagerly after. Once a rock broke
loose and came tumbling down, but plunged into a thicket, where it
stayed; else it might have done for us entirely. I breathed freely
when it stopped. Once, too, a branch cracked loudly, and we lay
still; but hearing nothing above, we pushed on, and, sweating
greatly, came close to the top.

Here I drew back with Clark, for such honour as there might be
in gaining the heights first I wished to go to these soldiers who
had trusted their lives to my guidance. I let six go by and reach
the heights, and then I drew myself up. We did not stir till all
twenty-four were safe; then we made a dash for the tents of Lancy,
which now showed in the first gray light of morning. We made a dash
for them, were discovered, and shots greeted us; but we were on
them instantly, and in a moment I had the pleasure of putting a
bullet in Lancy's heel, and brought him down. Our cheers told the
general the news, and soon hundreds of soldiers were climbing the
hard way that we had come.

And now while an army climbed to the heights of Maitre Abraham,
Admiral Saunders in the gray dawn was bombarding Montcalm's
encampment, and boats filled with marines and soldiers drew to the
Beauport flats, as if to land there; while shots, bombs, shells,
and carcasses were hurled from Levis upon the town, deceiving
Montcalm. At last, however, suspecting, he rode towards the town
at six o'clock, and saw our scarlet ranks spread across the plains
between him and Bougainville, and on the crest, nearer to him,
eying us in amazement, the white-coated battalion of Guienne,
which should the day before have occupied the very ground held by
Lancy. A slight rain falling added to their gloom, but cheered us.
It gave us a better light to fight by, for in the clear September
air, the bright sun shining in our faces, they would have had us
at advantage.

In another hour the gates of St. John and St. Louis emptied out
upon this battlefield a warring flood of our foes. It was a
handsome sight: the white uniforms of the brave regiments,
Roussillon, La Sarre, Guienne, Languedoc, Bearn, mixed with
the dark, excitable militia, the sturdy burghers of the town, a
band of coureurs de bois in their rough hunter's costume, and
whooping Indians, painted and furious, ready to eat us. At last
here was to be a test of fighting in open field, though the
French had in their whole army twice the number of our men, a
walled and provisioned city behind them, and field-pieces in
great number to bring against us.

But there was bungling with them. Vaudreuil hung back or came
tardily from Beauport; Bougainville had not yet arrived; and when
they might have pitted twice our number against us, they had not
many more than we. With Bougainville behind us and Montcalm in
front, we might have been checked, though there was no man in all
our army but believed that we should win the day. I could plainly
see Montcalm, mounted on a dark horse, riding along the lines as
they formed against us, waving his sword, a truly gallant figure.
He was answered by a roar of applause and greeting. On the left
their Indians and burghers overlapped our second line, where
Townsend with Amherst's and the Light Infantry, and Colonel Burton
with the Royal Americans and Light Infantry, guarded our flank,
prepared to meet Bougainville. In vain our foes tried to get
between our right flank and the river; Otway's Regiment, thrown
out, defeated that.

It was my hope that Doltaire was with Montcalm, and that we
might meet and end our quarrel. I came to know afterwards that it
was he who had induced Montcalm to send the battalion of Guienne
to the heights above the Anse du Foulon. The battalion had not
been moved till twenty-four hours after the order was given, or
we should never have gained those heights; stones rolled from the
cliff would have destroyed an army.

We waited, Clark and I, with the Louisburg Grenadiers while
they formed. We made no noise, but stood steady and still, the
bagpipes of the Highlanders shrilly challenging. At eight o'clock
sharpshooters began firing on us from the left, and skirmishers
were thrown out to hold them in check, or dislodge them and drive
them from the houses where they sheltered and galled Townsend's
men. Their field-pieces opened on us, too, and yet we did nothing,
but at nine o'clock, being ordered, lay down and waited still.
There was no restlessness, no anxiety, no show of doubt, for
these men of ours were old fighters, and they trusted their
leaders. From bushes, trees, coverts, and fields of grain there
came that constant hail of fire, and there fell upon our ranks a
doggedness, a quiet anger, which grew into a grisly patience. The
only pleasure we had in two long hours was in watching our two
brass six-pounders play upon the irregular ranks of our foes,
making confusion, and Townsend drive back a detachment of cavalry
from Cap Rouge, which sought to break our left flank and reach
Montcalm.

We had seen the stars go down, the cold, mottled light of dawn
break over the battered city and the heights of Charlesbourg;
we had watched the sun come up, and then steal away behind
slow-travelling clouds and hanging mist; we had looked across over
unreaped cornfields and the dull, slovenly St. Charles, knowing
that endless leagues of country, north and south, east and west,
lay in the balance for the last time. I believed that this day
would see the last of the strife between England and France for
dominion here; of La Pompadour's spite which I had roused to action
against my country; of the struggle between Doltaire and myself.

The public stake was worthy of our army--worthy of the dauntless
soldier, who had begged his physicians to patch him up long enough
to fight this fight, whereon he staked reputation, life, all that a
man loves in the world; the private stake was more than worthy of
my long sufferings. I thought that Montcalm would have waited for
Vaudreuil, but no. At ten o'clock his three columns moved down upon
us briskly, making a wild rattle; two columns moving upon our right
and one upon our left, firing obliquely and constantly as they
marched. Then came the command to rise, and we stood up and waited,
our muskets loaded with an extra ball. I could feel the stern
malice in our ranks, as we stood there and took, without returning
a shot, that damnable fire. Minute after minute passed; then came
the sharp command to advance. We did so, and again halted, and yet
no shot came from us. We stood there, a long palisade of red.

At last I saw our general raise his sword, a command rang down
the long line of battle, and, like one terrible cannon-shot, our
muskets sang together with as perfect a precision as on a private
field of exercise. Then, waiting for the smoke to clear a little,
another volley came with almost the same precision; after which the
firing came in choppy waves of sound, and again in a persistent
clattering. Then a light breeze lifted the smoke and mist well
away, and a wayward sunlight showed us our foe, like a long white
wave retreating from a rocky shore, bending, crumpling, breaking,
and, in a hundred little billows, fleeing seaward.

Thus checked, confounded, the French army trembled and fell back.
Then I heard the order to charge, and from near four thousand
throats there came for the first time our exultant British cheer,
and high over all rang the slogan of Fraser's Highlanders. To my
left I saw the flashing broadswords of the clansmen, ahead of all
the rest. Those sickles of death clove through and broke the
battalions of La Sarre, and Lascelles scattered the good soldiers
of Languedoc into flying columns. We on the right, led by Wolfe,
charged the desperate and valiant men of Roussillon and Guienne
and the impetuous sharpshooters of the militia. As we came on, I
observed the general sway and push forward again, and then I lost
sight of him, for I saw what gave the battle a new interest to me:
Doltaire, cool and deliberate, animating and encouraging the
French troops.

I moved in a shaking hedge of bayonets, keeping my eye on him;
and presently there was a hand-to-hand melee, out of which I fought
to reach him. I was making for him, where he now sought to rally
the retreating columns, when I noticed, not far away, Gabord,
mounted, and attacked by three grenadiers. Looking back now, I see
him, with his sabre cutting right and left, as he drove his horse
at one grenadier, who slipped and fell on the slippery ground,
while the horse rode on him, battering him. Obliquely down swept
the sabre, and drove through the cheek and chin of one foe;
another sweep, and the bayonet of the other was struck aside;
and another, which was turned aside as Gabord's horse came down,
bayoneted by the fallen grenadier. But Gabord was on his feet
again, roaring like a bull, with a wild grin on his face, as
he partly struck aside the bayonet of the last grenadier. It caught
him in the flesh of the left side. He grasped the musket-barrel,
and swung his sabre with fierce precision. The man's head dropped
back like the lid of a pot, and he tumbled into a heap of the faded
golden-rod flower which spattered the field.

It was at this moment I saw Juste Duvarney making towards me,
hatred and deadly purpose in his eyes. I had will enough to meet
him, and to kill him too, yet I could not help but think of Alixe.
Gabord saw him, also, and, being nearer, made for me as well.
For that act I cherish his memory. The thought was worthy of a
gentleman of breeding; he had the true thing in his heart. He
would save us--two brothers--from fighting, by fighting me himself.

He reached me first, and with an "Au diable!" made a stroke at
me. It was a matter of sword and sabre now. Clark met Juste
Duvarney's rush; and there we were, at as fine a game of
cross-purposes as you can think: Clark hungering for Gabord's life
(Gabord had once been his jailer, too), and Juste Duvarney for
mine; the battle faring on ahead of us. Soon the two were clean
cut off from the French army, and must fight to the death or
surrender.

Juste Duvarney spoke only once, and then it was but the
rancorous word "Renegade!" nor did I speak at all; but Clark
was blasphemous, and Gabord, bleeding, fought with a sputtering
relish.

"Fair fight and fowl for spitting," he cried. "Go home to heaven,
dickey-bird."

Between phrases of this kind we cut and thrust for life, an odd
sort of fighting. I fought with a desperate alertness, and
presently my sword passed through his body, drew out, and he
shivered--fell--where he stood, collapsing suddenly like a bag. I
knelt beside him, and lifted up his head. His eyes were glazing
fast.

"Gabord! Gabord!" I called, grief-stricken, for that work was
the worst I ever did in this world.

He started, stared, and fumbled at his waistcoat. I quickly put
my hand in, and drew out--one of Mathilde's wooden crosses.

"To cheat--the devil--yet--aho!" he whispered, kissed the cross,
and so was done with life.

When I turned from him, Clark stood beside me. Dazed as I was, I
did not at first grasp the significance of that fact. I looked
towards the town, and saw the French army hustling into the St.
Louis Gate; saw the Highlanders charging the bushes at the
Cote Ste. Genevieve, where the brave Canadians made their last
stand; saw, not fifty feet away, the noblest soldier of our time,
even General Wolfe, dead in the arms of Mr. Henderson, a volunteer
in the Twenty-Second; and then, almost at my feet, stretched out
as I had seen him lie in the Palace courtyard two years before,
Juste Duvarney.

But now he was beyond all friendship or
reconciliation--forever.



XXIX

"MASTER DEVIL" DOLTAIRE


The bells of some shattered church were calling to vespers, the
sun was sinking behind the flaming autumn woods, as once more I
entered the St. Louis Gate, with the grenadiers and a detachment of
artillery, the British colours hoisted on a gun-carriage. Till this
hour I had ever entered and left this town a captive, a price set
on my head, and in the very street where now I walked I had gone
with a rope round my neck, abused and maltreated. I saw our flag
replace the golden lilies of France on the citadel where Doltaire
had baited me, and at the top of Mountain Street, near to the
bishop's palace, our colours also flew.

Every step I took was familiar, yet unfamiliar too. It was a
disfigured town, where a hungry, distracted people huddled among
ruins, and begged for mercy and for food, nor found time in the
general overwhelming to think of the gallant Montcalm, lying in his
shell-made grave at the chapel of the Ursulines, not fifty steps
from where I had looked through the tapestry on Alixe and Doltaire.
The convent was almost deserted now, and as I passed it, on my way
to the cathedral, I took off my hat; for how knew I but that she
I loved best lay there, too, as truly a heroine as the admirable
Montcalm was hero! A solitary bell was clanging on the chapel as
I went by, and I saw three nuns steal past me with bowed heads.
I longed to stop them and ask them of Alixe, for I felt sure that
the Church knew where she was, living or dead, though none of all
I asked knew aught of her, not even the Chevalier de la Darante,
who had come to our camp the night before, accompanied by Monsieur
Joannes, the town major, with terms of surrender.

I came to the church of the Recollets as I wandered; for now,
for a little time, I seemed bewildered and incapable, lost in a
maze of dreadful imaginings. I entered the door of the church,
and stumbled upon a body. Hearing footsteps ahead in the dusk,
I passed up the aisle, and came upon a pile of debris. Looking
up, I could see the stars shining through a hole in the roof,
Hearing a noise beyond, I went on, and there, seated on the high
altar, was the dwarf who had snatched the cup of rum out of
the fire the night that Mathilde had given the crosses to the
revellers. He gave a low, wild laugh, and hugged a bottle to his
breast. Almost at his feet, half naked, with her face on the lowest
step of the altar, her feet touching the altar itself, was the
girl--his sister--who had kept her drunken lover from assaulting
him. The girl was dead--there was a knife-wound in her breast. Sick
at the sight I left the place, and went on, almost mechanically,
to Voban's house. It was level with the ground, a crumpled heap of
ruins. I passed Lancy's house, in front of which I had fought with
Gabord; it too was broken to pieces.

As I turned away I heard a loud noise, as of an explosion, and I
supposed it to be some magazine. I thought of it no more at the
time. Voban must be found; that was more important. I must know
of Alixe first, and I felt sure that if any one guessed her
whereabouts it would be he: she would have told him where she was
going, if she had fled; if she were dead, who so likely to know,
this secret, elusive, vengeful watcher? Of Doltaire I had heard
nothing; I would seek him out when I knew of Alixe. He could not
escape me in this walled town. I passed on for a time without
direction, for I seemed not to know where I might find the barber.
Our sentries already patrolled the streets, and our bugles were
calling on the heights, with answering calls from the fleet in
the basin. Night came down quickly, the stars shone out in the
perfect blue, and, as I walked along, broken walls, shattered
houses, solitary pillars, looked mystically strange. It was
painfully quiet, as if a beaten people had crawled away into the
holes our shot and shell had made, to hide their misery. Now and
again a gaunt face looked out from a hiding-place, and drew back
again in fear at sight of me. Once a drunken woman spat at me and
cursed me; once I was fired at; and many times from dark corners
I heard voices crying, "Sauvez-moi--ah, sauvez-moi, bon Dieu!"
Once I stood for many minutes and watched our soldiers giving
biscuits and their own share of rum to homeless French peasants
hovering round the smouldering ruins of a house which carcasses had
destroyed.

And now my wits came back to me, my purposes, the power to act,
which for a couple of hours had seemed to be in abeyance. I
hurried through narrow streets to the cathedral. There it stood,
a shattered mass, its sides all broken, its roof gone, its tall
octagonal tower alone substantial and unchanged. Coming to its
rear, I found Babette's little house, with open door, and I went
in. The old grandfather sat in his corner, with a lighted candle
on the table near him, across his knees Jean's coat that I had
worn. He only babbled nonsense to my questioning, and, after
calling aloud to Babette and getting no reply, I started for
the Intendance.

I had scarcely left the house when I saw some French peasants
coming towards me with a litter. A woman, walking behind the
litter, carried a lantern, and one of our soldiers of artillery
attended and directed. I ran forward, and discovered Voban,
mortally hurt. The woman gave a cry, and spoke my name in a kind
of surprise and relief; and the soldier, recognizing me, saluted.
I sent him for a surgeon, and came on with the hurt man to the
little house. Soon I was alone with him save for Babette, and her
I sent for a priest. As soon as I had seen Voban I guessed what
had happened: he had tried for his revenge at last. After a little
time he knew me, but at first he could not speak.

"What has happened--the Palace?" said I.

He nodded.

"You blew it up--with Bigot?" I asked.

His reply was a whisper, and his face twitched with pain:
"Not--with Bigot."

I gave him some cordial, which he was inclined to refuse. It
revived him, but I saw he could live only a few hours. Presently
he made an effort. "I will tell you," he whispered.

"Tell me first of my wife," said I. "Is she alive?--is she alive?"

If a smile could have been upon his lips then, I saw one
there--good Voban! I put my ear down, and my heart almost stopped
beating, until I heard him say, "Find Mathilde."

"Where?" asked I.

"In the Valdoche Hills," he answered, "where the Gray Monk
lives--by the Tall Calvary."

He gasped with pain. I let him rest awhile, and eased the
bandages on him, and at last he told his story:


"I am to be gone soon. For two years I have wait for the good
time to kill him--Bigot--to send him and his palace to hell. I can
not tell you how I work to do it. It is no matter--no. From an old
cellar I mine, and at last I get the powder lay beneath him--his
palace. So. But he does not come to the Palace much this many
months, and Madame Cournal is always with him, and it is hard to
do the thing in other ways. But I laugh when the English come in
the town, and when I see Bigot fly to his palace alone to get his
treasure-chest I think it is my time. So I ask the valet, and he
say he is in the private room that lead to the treasure-place.
Then I come back quick to the secret spot and fire my mine. In ten
minutes all will be done. I go at once to his room again, alone. I
pass through the one room, and come to the other. It is a room with
one small barred window. If he is there, I will say a word to him
that I have wait long to say, then shut the door on us both--for I
am sick of life--and watch him and laugh at him till the end comes.
If he is in the other room, then I have another way as sure--"

He paused, exhausted, and I waited till he could again go on. At
last he made a great effort, and continued: "I go back to the first
room, and he is not there. I pass soft, to the treasure-room, and I
see him kneel beside a chest, looking in. His back is to me. I hear
him laugh to himself. I shut the door, turn the key, go to the
window and throw it out, and look at him again. But now he stand
and turn to me, and then I see--I see it is not Bigot, but M'sieu'
Doltaire!

"I am sick when I see that, and at first I can not speak, my
tongue stick in my mouth so dry. 'Has Voban turn robber?' m'sieu'
say. I put out my hand and try to speak again--but no. 'What did
you throw from the window?' he ask. 'And what's the matter, my
Voban?' 'My God,' I say at him now, 'I thought you are Bigot!'
I point to the floor. 'Powder!' I whisper.

"His eyes go like fire so terrible; he look to the window, take
a quick angry step to me, but stand still. Then he point to the
window. 'The key, Voban?' he say; and I answer, 'Yes.' He get
pale; then he go and try the door, look close at the walls, try
them--quick, quick, stop, feel for a panel, then try again, stand
still, and lean against the table. It is no use to call; no one
can hear, for it is all roar outside, and these walls are solid
and very thick.

"'How long?' he say, and take out his watch. 'Five minutes--maybe,'
I answer. He put his watch on the table, and sit down on a bench by
it, and for a little minute he do not speak, but look at me close,
and not angry, as you would think. 'Voban,' he say in a low voice,
'Bigot was a thief.' He point to the chest. 'He stole from the
King--my father. He stole your Mathilde from you! He should have
died. We have both been blunderers, Voban, blunderers,' he say;
'things have gone wrong with us. We have lost all.' There is little
time. 'Tell me one thing,' he go on: 'Is Mademoiselle Duvarney
safe--do you know?' I tell him yes, and he smile, and take from
his pocket something, and lay it against his lips, and then put
it back in his breast.

"'You are not afraid to die, Voban?' he ask. I answer no. 'Shake
hands with me, my friend,' he speak, and I do so that. 'Ah, pardon,
pardon, m'sieu',' I say. 'No, no, Voban; it was to be,' he answer.
'We shall meet again, comrade--eh, if we can?' he speak on, and he
turn away from me and look to the sky through the window. Then he
look at his watch, and get to his feet, and stand there still. I
kiss my crucifix. He reach out and touch it, and bring his fingers
to his lips. 'Who can tell--perhaps--perhaps!' he say. For a little
minute--ah, it seem like a year, and it is so still, so still he
stand there, and then he put his hand over the watch, lift it up,
and shut his eyes, as if time is all done. While you can count ten
it is so, and then the great crash come."

For a long time Voban lay silent again. I gave him more cordial,
and he revived and ended his tale. "I am a blunderer, as m'sieu'
say," he went on, "for he is killed, not Bigot and me, and only a
little part of the palace go to pieces. And so they fetch me here,
and I wish--my God in Heaven, I wish I go with M'sieu' Doltaire."
But he followed him a little later.

Two hours afterwards I went to the Intendance, and there I found
that the body of my enemy had been placed in the room where I had
last seen him with Alixe. He lay on the same couch where she had
lain. The flag of France covered his broken body, but his face was
untouched--as it had been in life, haunting, fascinating, though
the shifting lights were gone, the fine eyes closed. A noble peace
hid all that was sardonic; not even Gabord would now have called
him "Master Devil." I covered up his face and left him there--
peasant and prince--candles burning at his head and feet, and the
star of Louis on his shattered breast; and I saw him no more.

All that night I walked the ramparts, thinking, remembering,
hoping, waiting for the morning; and when I saw the light break
over those far eastern parishes, wasted by fire and sword, I set
out on a journey to the Valdoche Hills.



XXX

"WHERE ALL THE LOVERS CAN HIDE"


It was in the saffron light of early morning that I saw it, the
Tall Calvary of the Valdoche Hills.

The night before I had come up through a long valley, overhung
with pines on one side and crimsoning maples on the other, and,
travelling till nearly midnight, had lain down in the hollow of a
bank, and listened to a little river leap over cascades, and, far
below, go prattling on to the greater river in the south. My eyes
closed, but for long I did not sleep. I heard a night-hawk go by on
a lonely mission, a beaver slide from a log into the water, and the
delicate humming of the pine needles was a drowsy music, through
which broke by-and-bye the strange crying of a loon from the water
below. I was neither asleep nor awake, but steeped in this wide
awe of night, the sweet smell of earth and running water in my
nostrils. Once, too, in a slight breeze, the scent of some wild
animal's nest near by came past, and I found it good. I lifted up
a handful of loose earth and powdered leaves, and held it to my
nose--a good, brave smell--all in a sort of drowsing.

While I mused, Doltaire's face passed before me as it was in
life, and I heard him say again of the peasants, "These shall save
the earth some day, for they are of it, and live close to it, and
are kin to it."

Suddenly there rushed before me that scene in the convent, when
all the devil in him broke loose upon the woman I loved. But,
turning on my homely bed, I looked up and saw the deep quiet of the
skies, the stable peace of the stars, and I was a son of the good
Earth again, a sojourner in the tents of Home. I did not doubt that
Alixe was alive or that I should find her. There was assurance in
this benignant night. In that thought, dreaming that her cheek lay
close to mine, her arm around my neck, I fell asleep. I waked to
bear the squirrels stirring in the trees, the whir of the partridge,
and the first unvarying note of the oriole. Turning on my dry,
leafy bed, I looked down, and saw in the dark haze of dawn the
beavers at their house-building.

I was at the beginning of a deep gorge or valley, on one side of
which was a steep sloping hill of grass and trees, and on the other
a huge escarpment of mossed and jagged rocks. Then, farther up, the
valley seemed to end in a huge promontory. On this great wedge grim
shapes loomed in the mist, uncouth and shadowy and unnatural--a
lonely, mysterious Brocken, impossible to human tenantry. Yet as
I watched the mist slowly rise, there grew in me the feeling that
there lay the end of my quest. I came down to the brook, bathed
my face and hands, ate my frugal breakfast of bread, with berries
picked from the hillside, and, as the yellow light of the rising
sun broke over the promontory, I saw the Tall Calvary upon a knoll,
strange comrade to the huge rocks and monoliths--as it were vast
playthings of the Mighty Men, the fabled ancestors of the Indian
races of the land.

I started up the valley, and presently all the earth grew
blithe, and the birds filled the woods and valleys with jocund
noise.

It was near noon before I knew that my pilgrimage was over.

Coming round a point of rock, I saw the Gray Monk, of whom
strange legends had lately travelled to the city. I took off my hat
to him reverently; but all at once he threw back his cowl, and I
saw--no monk, but, much altered, the good chaplain who had married
me to Alixe in the Chateau St. Louis. He had been hurt when he was
fired upon in the water; had escaped, however, got to shore, and
made his way into the woods. There he had met Mathilde, who led
him to her lonely home in this hill. Seeing the Tall Calvary, he
had conceived the idea of this disguise, and Mathilde had brought
him the robe for the purpose.

In a secluded cave I found Alixe with her father, caring for
him, for he was not yet wholly recovered from his injuries.
There was no waiting now. The ban of Church did not hold my
dear girl back, nor did her father do aught but smile when she
came laughing and weeping into my arms.

"Robert, O Robert, Robert!" she cried, and at first that was all
she could say.

The good Seigneur put out his hand to me beseechingly. I took
it, clasped it.

"The city?" he asked.

"Is ours," I answered.

"And my son--my son?"

I told him how, the night that the city was taken, the Chevalier
de la Darante and I had gone a sad journey in a boat to the Isle
of Orleans, and there, in the chapel yard, near to his father's
chateau, we had laid a brave and honest gentleman who died
fighting for his country.

By-and-bye, when their grief had a little abated, I took them
out into the sunshine. A pleasant green valley lay to the north,
and to the south, far off, was the wall of rosy hills that hid
the captured town. Peace was upon it all, and upon us.

As we stood there, a scarlet figure came winding in and out among
the giant stones, crosses hanging at her girdle. She approached
us, and, seeing me, she said: "Hush! I know a place where all the
lovers can hide."

And she put a little wooden cross into my hands.




APPENDIX


The following is an excerpt from 'The Scot in New France' (1880)
by J.M. Lemoine. It is an account of Robert Stobo, the man whose
life this text is loosely based upon.


Five years previous to the battle of the Plains of Abraham, one
comes across three genuine Scots in the streets of Quebec--all
however prisoners of war, taken in the border raids--as such
under close surveillance. One, a youthful and handsome officer of
Virginia riflemen, aged 27 years, a friend of Governor Dinwiddie,
had been allowed the range of the fortress, on parole. His good
looks, education, smartness (we use the word advisedly) and
misfortunes seem to have created much sympathy for the captive,
but canny Scot. He has a warm welcome in many houses--the French
ladies even plead his cause; le beau capitaine is asked out; no
entertainment at last is considered complete, without Captain--later
on Major Robert Stobo. The other two are: Lieutenant Stevenson of
Rogers' Rangers, another Virginia corps, and a Leith carpenter of
the name of Clarke. Stobo, after more attempts than one, eluded the
French sentries, and still more dangerous foes to the peace of mind
of a handsome bachelor--the ladies of Quebec. He will re-appear on
the scene, the advisor of General Wolfe, as to the best landing
place round Quebec. Doubtless you wish to hear more about the
adventurous Scot.

A plan of escape between him, Stevenson and Clarke, was carried out
on 1st May, 1759. Major Stobo met the fugitives under a wind-mill,
probably the old wind-mill on the grounds of the General Hospital
Convent. Having stolen a birch canoe, the party paddled it all
night, and, after incredible fatigue and danger, they passed
Isle-aux-Coudres, Kamouraska, and landed below this spot, shooting
two Indians in self-defence, whom Clarke buried after having scalped
them, saying to the Major: "Good sir, by your permission, these same
two scalps, when I come to New York, will sell for twenty-four good
pounds: with this I'll be right merry, and my wife right beau." They
then murdered the Indians' faithful dog, because he howled, and
buried him with his masters. It was shortly after this that they met
the laird of the Kamouraska Isles, le Chevalier de la Durantaye,
who said that the best Canadian blood ran in his veins, and that he
was of kin with the mighty Duc de Mirapoix. Had the mighty Duke,
however, at that moment seen his Canadian cousin steering the
four-oared boat, loaded with wheat, he might have felt but a very
qualified admiration for the majesty of his stately demeanor and
his nautical savoir faire. Stobo took possession of the Chevalier's
pinnace, and made the haughty laird, nolens volens, row him with the
rest of the crew, telling him to row away, and that, had the Great
Louis himself been in the boat at that moment, it would be his fate
to row a British subject thus. "At these last mighty words," says
the Memoirs, "a stern resolution sat upon his countenance, which the
Canadian beheld and with reluctance temporized." After a series of
adventures, and dangers of every kind, the fugitives succeeded in
capturing a French boat. Next, they surprised a French sloop, and,
after a most hazardous voyage, they finally, in their prize, landed
at Louisbourg, to the general amazement. Stobo missed the English
fleet; but took passage two days after in a vessel leaving for
Quebec, where he safely arrived to tender his services to the
immortal Wolfe, who gladly availed himself of them. According to the
Memoirs, Stobo used daily to set out to reconnoitre with Wolfe on
the deck of a frigate, opposite the Falls of Montmorency, some French
shots were nigh carrying away his "decorated" and gartered legs.

We next find the Major, on the 21st July, 1759, piloting the
expedition sent to Deschambault to seize, as prisoners, the Quebec
ladies who had taken refuge there during the bombardment--"Mesdames
Duchesnay and Decharnay; Mlle. Couillard; the Joly, Malhiot and
Magnan families." "Next day, in the afternoon, les belles captives,
who had been treated with every species of respect, were put on
shore and released at Diamond Harbour. The English admiral, full of
gallantry, ordered the bombardment of the city to be suspended, in
order to afford the Quebec ladies time to seek places of safety."
The incident is thus referred to in a letter communicated to the
Literary and Historical Society by Capt. Colin McKenzie.

Stobo next points out the spot, at Sillery, where Wolfe landed,
and soon after was sent with despatches, via the St. Lawrence, to
General Amherst; but, during the trip, the vessel was overhauled and
taken by a French privateer, the despatches having been previously
consigned to the deep. Stobo might have swung at the yard-arm in
this new predicament, had his French valet divulged his identity
with the spy of Fort du Quesne; but fortune again stepped in to
preserve the adventurous Scot. There were already too many prisoners
on board of the French privateer. A day's provision is allowed the
English vessel, which soon landed Stobo at Halifax, from whence
he joined General Amherst, "many a league across the country." He
served under Amherst on his Lake Champlain expedition, and there he
finished the campaign; which ended, he begs to go to Williamsburg,
the then capital of Virginia.

It seems singular that no command of any importance appears to have
been given to the brave Scot; but, possibly, the part played by
the Major when under parole at Fort du Quesne, was weighed by the
Imperial authorities. There certainly seems to be a dash of the
Benedict Arnold in this transaction. However, Stobo was publicly
thanked by a committee of the Assembly of Virginia, and was allowed
his arrears of pay for the time of his captivity. On the 30th April,
1756, he had also been presented by the Assembly of Virginia with
300 pounds, in consideration of his services to the country and his
sufferings in his confinement as a hostage in Quebec. On the 19th
November, 1759, he was presented with 1,000 pounds as "a reward for
his zeal to his country and the recompense for the great hardships
he has suffered during his confinement in the enemy's country."
On the 18th February, 1760, Major Stobo embarked from New York for
England, on board the packet with Colonel West and several other
gentlemen. One would imagine that he had exhausted the vicissitudes
of fortune. But no. A French privateer boards them in the midst of
the English channel. The Major again consigns to the deep all his
letters, all except one which he forgot, in the pocket of his coat,
under the arm pit. This escaped the general catastrophe; and will
again restore him to notoriety; it is from General A. Monckton to
Mr. Pitt. The passengers of the packet were assessed 2,500 pounds to
be allowed their liberty, and Stobo had to pay 125 pounds towards
the relief fund. The despatch forgotten in his coat on delivery to
the great Pitt brought back a letter from Pitt to Amherst. With this
testimonial, Stobo sailed for New York, 24th April, 1760, to rejoin
the army engaged in the invasion of Canada; here end the Memoirs.

Though Stobo's conduct at Fort du Quesne and at Quebec can never be
defended or palliated, all will agree that he exhibited, during his
eventful career, most indomitable fortitude, a boundless ingenuity,
and great devotion to his country--the whole crowned with final
success.






THE BATTLE OF THE STRONG, Complete

[A ROMANCE OF TWO KINGDOMS]

By Gilbert Parker




CONTENTS:

THE INVASION

ELEVEN YEARS AFTER

IN FRANCE--NEAR FIVE MONTHS AFTER

IN JERSEY FIVE YEARS LATER

DURING ONE YEAR LATER

IN JERSEY--A YEAR LATER




INTRODUCTION

This book is a protest and a deliverance.  For seven years I had written
continuously of Canada, though some short stories of South Sea life, and
the novel Mrs. Falchion, had, during that time, issued from my pen.  It
looked as though I should be writing of the Far North all my life.
Editors had begun to take that view; but from the start it had never been
my view.  Even when writing Pierre and His People I was determined that I
should not be cabined, cribbed, and confined in one field; that I should
not, as some other men have done, wind in upon myself, until at last each
succeeding book would be but a variation of some previous book, and I
should end by imitating myself, become the sacrifice to the god of the
pin-hole.

I was warned not to break away from Canada; but all my life I had been
warned, and all my life I had followed my own convictions.  I would
rather not have written another word than be corralled, bitted, saddled,
and ridden by that heartless broncho-buster, the public, which wants a
man who has once pleased it, to do the same thing under the fret of whip
and spur for ever.  When I went to the Island of Jersey, in 1897, it was
to shake myself free of what might become a mere obsession.  I determined
that, as wide as my experiences had been in life, so would my writing be,
whether it pleased the public or not.  I was determined to fulfil myself;
and in doing so to take no instructions except those of my own
conscience, impulse, and conviction.  Even then I saw fields of work
which would occupy my mind, and such skill as I had, for many a year to
come.  I saw the Channel Islands, Egypt, South Africa, and India.  In all
these fields save India, I have given my Pegasus its bridle-rein, and, so
far, I have no reason to feel that my convictions were false.  I write of
Canada still, but I have written of the Channel Islands, I have written
of Egypt, I have written of England and South Africa, and my public--that
is, those who read my books--have accepted me in all these fields without
demur.  I believe I have justified myself in not accepting imprisonment
in the field where I first essayed to turn my observation of life to
account.

I went to Jersey, therefore, with my teeth set, in a way; yet happily and
confidently.  I had been dealing with French Canada for some years, and a
step from Quebec, which was French, to Jersey, which was Norman French,
was but short.  It was a question of atmosphere solely.  Whatever may be
thought of The 'Battle of the Strong' I have not yet met a Jerseyman who
denies to it the atmosphere of the place.  It could hardly have lacked
it, for there were twenty people, deeply intelligent, immensely
interested in my design, and they were of Jersey families which had been
there for centuries.  They helped me, they fed me with dialect, with
local details, with memories, with old letters, with diaries of their
forebears, until, if I had gone wrong, it would have been through lack of
skill in handling my material.  I do not think I went wrong, though I
believe that I could construct the book more effectively if I had to do
it again.  Yet there is something in looseness of construction which
gives an air of naturalness; and it may be that this very looseness which
I notice in 'The Battle of the Strong' has had something to do with
giving it such a great circle of readers; though this may appear
paradoxical.  When it first appeared, it did not make the appeal which
'The Right of Way' or 'The Seats of the Mighty' made, but it justified
itself, it forced its way, it assured me that I had done right in shaking
myself free from the control of my own best work.  The book has gone on
increasing its readers year by year, and when it appeared in Nelson's
delightful cheap edition in England it had an immediate success, and has
sold by the hundred thousand in the last four years.

One of the first and most eager friends of 'The Battle of the Strong' was
Mrs. Langtry, now Lady de Bathe, who, born in Jersey, and come of an old
Jersey family, was well able to judge of the fidelity of the life and
scene which it depicted.  She greatly desired the novel to be turned into
a play, and so it was.  The adaptation, however, was lacking in much, and
though Miss Marie Burroughs and Maurice Barrymore played in it, success
did not attend its dramatic life.

'The Battle of the Strong' was called an historical novel by many
critics, but the disclaimer which I made in the first edition I make
again.  'The Seats of the Mighty' came nearer to what might properly be
called an historical novel than any other book which I have written save,
perhaps, 'A Ladder of Swords'.  'The Battle of the Strong' is not without
faithful historical elements, but the book is essentially a romance, in
which character was not meant to be submerged by incident; and I do not
think that in this particular the book falls short of the design of its
author.  There was this enormous difference between life in the Island of
Jersey and life in French Canada, that in Jersey, tradition is heaped
upon tradition, custom upon custom, precept upon precept, until every
citizen of the place is bound by innumerable cords of a code from which
he cannot free himself.  It is a little island, and that it is an island
is evidence of a contracted life, though, in this case, a life which has
real power and force.  The life in French Canada was also traditional,
and custom was also somewhat tyrannous, but it was part of a great
continent in which the expansion of the man and of a people was
inevitable.  Tradition gets somewhat battered in a new land, and
even where, as in French Canada, the priest and the Church have such
supervision, and can bring such pressure to bear that every man must
feel its influence; yet there is a happiness, a blitheness, and an
exhilaration even in the most obscure quarter of French Canada which
cannot be observed in the Island of Jersey.  In Jersey the custom of five
hundred years ago still reaches out and binds; and so small is the place
that every square foot of it almost--even where the potato sprouts, and
the potato is Jersey's greatest friend--is identified with some odd
incident, some naive circumstance, some big, vivid, and striking
historical fact.  Behind its rugged coasts a little people proudly hold
by their own and to their own, and even a Jersey criminal has more
friends in his own environment than probably any other criminal anywhere
save in Corsica; while friendship is a passion even with the pettiness
by which it is perforated.

Reading this book again now after all these years, I feel convinced that
the book is truly Jersiais, and I am grateful to it for having brought me
out from the tyranny of the field in which I first sought for a hearing.




NOTE

A list of Jersey words and phrases used herein, with their English or
French equivalents, will be found at the end of the book.  The Norman and
patois words are printed as though they were English, some of them being
quite Anglicised in Jersey.  For the sake of brevity I have spoken of the
Lieutenant-Bailly throughout as Bailly; and, in truth, he performed all
the duties of Bailly in those days when this chief of the Jurats of the
Island usually lived in England.




PROEM

There is no man living to-day who could tell you how the morning broke
and the sun rose on the first day of January 1800; who walked in the
Mall, who sauntered in the Park with the Prince: none lives who heard and
remembers the gossip of the moment, or can give you the exact flavour of
the speech and accent of the time.  Down the long aisle of years echoes
the air but not the tone; the trick of form comes to us but never the
inflection.  The lilt of the sensations, the idiosyncrasy of voice,
emotion, and mind of the first hour of our century must now pass from the
printed page to us, imperfectly realised; we may not know them through
actual retrospection.  The more distant the scene, the more uncertain the
reflection; and so it must needs be with this tale, which will take you
back to even twenty years before the century began.

Then, as now, England was a great power outside these small islands.
She had her foot firmly planted in Australia, in Asia, and in America--
though, in bitterness, the American colonies had broken free, and only
Canada was left to her in that northern hemisphere.  She has had, in her
day, to strike hard blows even for Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.  But
among her possessions is one which, from the hour its charter was granted
it by King John, has been loyal, unwavering, and unpurchasable.  Until
the beginning of the century the language of this province was not our
language, nor is English its official language to-day; and with a pretty
pride oblivious of contrasts, and a simplicity unconscious of mirth, its
people say: "We are the conquering race; we conquered England, England
did not conquer us."

A little island lying in the wash of St. Michael's Basin off the coast of
France, Norman in its foundations and in its racial growth, it has been
as the keeper of the gate to England; though so near to France is it,
that from its shores on a fine day may be seen the spires of Coutances,
from which its spiritual welfare was ruled long after England lost
Normandy.  A province of British people, speaking still the Norman-French
that the Conqueror spoke; such is the island of Jersey, which, with
Guernsey, Alderney, Sark, Herm, and Jethou, form what we call the Channel
Isles, and the French call the Iles de la Manche.




Volume 1.


CHAPTER I

In all the world there is no coast like the coast of Jersey; so
treacherous, so snarling; serrated with rocks seen and unseen, tortured
by currents maliciously whimsical, encircled by tides that sweep up from
the Antarctic world with the devouring force of a monstrous serpent
projecting itself towards its prey.  The captain of these tides,
travelling up through the Atlantic at a thousand miles an hour, enters
the English Channel, and drives on to the Thames.  Presently retreating,
it meets another pursuing Antarctic wave, which, thus opposed in its
straightforward course, recoils into St. Michael's Bay, then plunges, as
it were, upon a terrible foe.  They twine and strive in mystic conflict,
and, in rage of equal power, neither vanquished nor conquering, circle,
mad and desperate, round the Channel Isles.  Impeded, impounded as they
riot through the flumes of sea, they turn furiously, and smite the cliffs
and rocks and walls of their prison-house.  With the frenzied winds
helping them, the island coasts and Norman shores are battered by their
hopeless onset: and in that channel between Alderney and Cap de la Hague
man or ship must well beware, for the Race of Alderney is one of the
death-shoots of the tides.  Before they find their way to the main again,
these harridans of nature bring forth a brood of currents which
ceaselessly fret the boundaries of the isles.

Always, always the white foam beats the rocks, and always must man go
warily along these coasts.  The swimmer plunges into a quiet pool, the
snowy froth that masks the reefs seeming only the pretty fringe of
sentient life to a sleeping sea; but presently an invisible hand reaches
up and grasps him, an unseen power drags him exultingly out to the main--
and he returns no more.  Many a Jersey boatman, many a fisherman who has
lived his whole life in sight of the Paternosters on the north, the
Ecrehos on the east, the Dog's Nest on the south, or the Corbiere on the
west, has in some helpless moment been caught by the unsleeping currents
which harry his peaceful borders, or the rocks that have eluded the
hunters of the sea, and has yielded up his life within sight of his own
doorway, an involuntary sacrifice to the navigator's knowledge and to the
calm perfection of an admiralty chart.

Yet within the circle of danger bounding this green isle the love of home
and country is stubbornly, almost pathetically, strong.  Isolation, pride
of lineage, independence of government, antiquity of law and custom, and
jealousy of imperial influence or action have combined to make a race
self-reliant even to perverseness, proud and maybe vain, sincere almost
to commonplaceness, unimaginative and reserved, with the melancholy born
of monotony--for the life of the little country has coiled in upon
itself, and the people have drooped to see but just their own selves
reflected in all the dwellers of the land, whichever way they turn.
A hundred years ago, however, there was a greater and more general
lightness of heart and vivacity of spirit than now.  Then the song of the
harvester and the fisherman, the boat-builder and the stocking-knitter,
was heard on a summer afternoon, or from the veille of a winter night
when the dim crasset hung from the roof and the seaweed burned in the
chimney.  Then the gathering of the vraic was a fete, and the lads and
lasses footed it on the green or on the hard sand, to the chance
flageolets of sportive seamen home from the war.  This simple gaiety was
heartiest at Christmastide, when the yearly reunion of families took
place; and because nearly everybody in Jersey was "couzain" to his
neighbour these gatherings were as patriarchal as they were festive.

                    ..........................

The new year of seventeen hundred and eighty-one had been ushered in by
the last impulse of such festivities.  The English cruisers lately in
port had vanished up the Channel; and at Elizabeth Castle, Mont Orgueil,
the Blue Barracks and the Hospital, three British regiments had taken up
the dull round of duty again; so that by the fourth day a general
lethargy, akin to content, had settled on the whole island.

On the morning of the fifth day a little snow was lying upon the ground,
but the sun rose strong and unclouded, the whiteness vanished, and there
remained only a pleasant dampness which made sod and sand firm yet
springy to the foot.  As the day wore on, the air became more amiable
still, and a delicate haze settled over the water and over the land,
making softer to the eye house and hill and rock and sea.

There was little life in the town of St. Heliers, there were few people
upon the beach; though now and then some one who had been praying beside
a grave in the parish churchyard came to the railings and looked out upon
the calm sea almost washing its foundations, and over the dark range of
rocks, which, when the tide was out, showed like a vast gridiron
blackened by fires.  Near by, some loitering sailors watched the yawl-
rigged fishing craft from Holland, and the codfish-smelling cul-de-poule
schooners of the great fishing company which exploited the far-off fields
of Gaspe in Canada.

St. Heliers lay in St. Aubin's Bay, which, shaped like a horseshoe, had
Noirmont Point for one end of the segment and the lofty Town Hill for
another.  At the foot of this hill, hugging it close, straggled the town.
From the bare green promontory above might be seen two-thirds of the
south coast of the island--to the right St. Aubin's Bay, to the left
Greve d'Azette, with its fields of volcanic-looking rocks, and St.
Clement's Bay beyond.  Than this no better place for a watchtower could
be found; a perfect spot for the reflective idler and for the sailorman
who, on land, must still be within smell and sound of the sea, and loves
that place best which gives him widest prospect.

This day a solitary figure was pacing backwards and forwards upon the
cliff edge, stopping now to turn a telescope upon the water and now upon
the town.  It was a lad of not more than sixteen years, erect, well-
poised, having an air of self-reliance, even of command.  Yet it was a
boyish figure too, and the face was very young, save for the eyes; these
were frank but still sophisticated.

The first time he looked towards the town he laughed outright, freely,
spontaneously; threw his head back with merriment, and then glued his eye
to the glass again.  What he had seen was a girl of about five years of
age with a man, in La Rue d'Egypte, near the old prison, even then called
the Vier Prison.  Stooping, the man had kissed the child, and she,
indignant, snatching the cap from his head, had thrown it into the stream
running through the street.  Small wonder that the lad on the hill
grinned, for the man who ran to rescue his hat from the stream was none
other than the Bailly of the island, next in importance to the
Lieutenant-Governor.

The lad could almost see the face of the child, its humorous anger, its
wilful triumph, and also the enraged look of the Bailly as he raked the
stream with his long stick, tied with a sort of tassel of office.
Presently he saw the child turn at the call of a woman in the Place du
Vier Prison, who appeared to apologise to the Bailly, busy now drying his
recovered hat by whipping it through the air.  The lad on the hill
recognised the woman as the child's mother.

This little episode over, he turned once more towards the sea, watching
the sun of late afternoon fall upon the towers of Elizabeth Castle and
the great rock out of which St. Helier the hermit once chiselled his
lofty home.  He breathed deep and strong, and the carriage of his body
was light, for he had a healthy enjoyment of all physical sensations and
all the obvious drolleries of life.  A broad sort of humour was written
upon every feature; in the full, quizzical eye, in the width of cheek-
bone, in the broad mouth, and in the depth of the laugh, which, however,
often ended in a sort of chuckle not entirely pleasant.  It suggested a
selfish enjoyment of the odd or the melodramatic side of other people's
difficulties.

At last the youth encased his telescope, and turned to descend the hill
to the town.  As he did so, a bell began to ring.  From where he was he
could look down into the Vier Marchi, or market-place, where stood the
Cohue Royale and house of legislature.  In the belfry of this court-
house, the bell was ringing to call the Jurats together for a meeting of
the States.  A monstrous tin pan would have yielded as much assonance.
Walking down towards the Vier Marchi the lad gleefully recalled the
humour of a wag who, some days before, had imitated the sound of the bell
with the words:

"Chicane--chicane!  Chicane--chicane!"

The native had, as he thought, suffered somewhat at the hands of the
twelve Jurats of the Royal Court, whom his vote had helped to elect, and
this was his revenge--so successful that, for generations, when the bell
called the States or the Royal Court together, it said in the ears of the
Jersey people--thus insistent is apt metaphor:

"Chicane--chicane!  Chicane--chicane!"

As the lad came down to the town, trades-people whom he met touched their
hats to him, and sailors and soldiers saluted respectfully.  In this
regard the Bailly himself could not have fared better.  It was not due to
the fact that the youth came of an old Jersey family, nor by reason that
he was genial and handsome, but because he was a midshipman of the King's
navy home on leave; and these were the days when England's sailors were
more popular than her soldiers.

He came out of the Vier Marchi into La Grande Rue, along the stream
called the Fauxbie flowing through it, till he passed under the archway
of the Vier Prison, making towards the place where the child had snatched
the hat from the head of the Bailly.

Presently the door of a cottage opened, and the child came out, followed
by her mother.

The young gentleman touched his cap politely, for though the woman was
not fashionably dressed, she was distinguished in appearance, with an air
of remoteness which gave her a kind of agreeable mystery.

"Madame Landresse--" said the young gentleman with deference.

"Monsieur d'Avranche--" responded the lady softly, pausing.

"Did the Bailly make a stir?  I saw the affair from the hill, through my
telescope," said young d'Avranche, smiling.

"My little daughter must have better manners," responded the lady,
looking down at her child reprovingly yet lovingly.

"Or the Bailly must--eh, Madame?" replied d'Avranche, and, stooping, he
offered his hand to the child.  Glancing up inquiringly at her mother,
she took it.  He held hers in a clasp of good nature.  The child was so
demure, one could scarcely think her capable of tossing the Bailly's hat
into the stream; yet looking closely, there might be seen in her eyes a
slumberous sort of fire, a touch of mystery.  They were neither blue nor
grey, but a mingling of both, growing to the most tender, greyish sort of
violet.  Down through generations of Huguenot refugees had passed sorrow
and fighting and piety and love and occasional joy, until in the eyes of
this child they all met, delicately vague, and with the wistfulness of
the early morning of life.

"What is your name, little lady?" asked d'Avranche of the child.

"Guida, sir," she answered simply.

"Mine is Philip.  Won't you call me Philip?"

She flashed a look at her mother, regarded him again, and then answered:

"Yes, Philip--sir."

D'Avranche wanted to laugh, but the face of the child was sensitive and
serious, and he only smiled.  "Say 'Yes, Philip', won't you?" he asked.

"Yes, Philip," came the reply obediently.

After a moment of speech with Madame Landresse, Philip stooped to say
good-bye to the child.  "Good-bye, Guida."

A queer, mischievous little smile flitted over her face--a second, and it
was gone.

"Good-bye, sir--Philip," she said, and they parted.  Her last words kept
ringing in his ears as he made his way homeward.  "Good-bye, sir--Philip"
--the child's arrangement of words was odd and amusing, and at the same
time suggested something more.  "Good-bye, Sir Philip," had a different
meaning, though the words were the same.

"Sir Philip--eh?" he said to himself, with a jerk of the head--"I'll be
more than that some day."




CHAPTER II

The night came down with leisurely gloom.  A dim starlight pervaded
rather than shone in the sky; Nature seemed somnolent and gravely
meditative.  It brooded as broods a man who is seeking his way through a
labyrinth of ideas to a conclusion still evading him.  This sense of
cogitation enveloped land and sea, and was as tangible to feeling as
human presence.

At last the night seemed to wake from reverie.  A movement, a thrill, ran
through the spangled vault of dusk and sleep, and seemed to pass over the
world, rousing the sea and the earth.  There was no wind, apparently no
breath of air, yet the leaves of the trees moved, the weather-vanes
turned slightly, the animals in the byres roused themselves, and
slumbering folk opening their eyes, turned over in their beds, and
dropped into a troubled doze again.

Presently there came a long moaning sound from the tide, not loud but
rather mysterious and distant--a plaint, a threatening, a warning, a
prelude?

A dull labourer, returning from late toil, felt it, and raised his head
in a perturbed way, as though some one had brought him news of a far-off
disaster.  A midwife, hurrying to a lowly birth-chamber, shivered and
gathered her mantle more closely about her.  She looked up at the sky,
she looked out over the sea, then she bent her head and said to herself
that this would not be a good night, that ill-luck was in the air.  "The
mother or the child will die," she said to herself.  A 'longshoreman,
reeling home from deep potations, was conscious of it, and, turning round
to the sea, snarled at it and said yah! in swaggering defiance.  A young
lad, wandering along the deserted street, heard it, began to tremble, and
sat down on a block of stone beside the doorway of a baker's shop.  He
dropped his head on his arms and his chin on his knees, shutting out the
sound and sobbing quietly.

Yesterday his mother had been buried; to-night his father's door had been
closed in his face.  He scarcely knew whether his being locked out was an
accident or whether it was intended.  He thought of the time when his
father had ill-treated his mother and himself.  That, however, had
stopped at last, for the woman had threatened the Royal Court, and the
man, having no wish to face its summary convictions, thereafter conducted
himself towards them both with a morose indifference.

The boy was called Ranulph, a name which had passed to him through
several generations of Jersey forebears--Ranulph Delagarde.  He was being
taught the trade of ship-building in St. Aubin's Bay.  He was not beyond
fourteen years of age, though he looked more, so tall and straight and
self-possessed was he.

His tears having ceased soon, he began to think of what he was to do
in the future.  He would never go back to his father's house, or be
dependent on him for aught.  Many plans came to his mind.  He would
learn his trade of ship-building, he would become a master-builder, then
a shipowner, with fishing-vessels like the great company sending fleets
to Gaspe.

At the moment when these ambitious plans had reached the highest point of
imagination, the upper half of the door beside him opened suddenly, and
he heard men's voices.  He was about to rise and disappear, but the words
of the men arrested him, and he cowered down beside the stone.  One of
the men was leaning on the half-door, speaking in French.

"I tell you it can't go wrong.  The pilot knows every crack in the coast.
I left Granville at three; Rulle cour left Chaussey at nine.  If he lands
safe, and the English troops ain't roused, he'll take the town and hold
the island easy enough."

"But the pilot, is he certain safe?" asked another voice.  Ranulph
recognised it as that of the baker Carcaud, who owned the shop.  "Olivier
Delagarde isn't so sure of him."

Olivier Delagarde!  The lad started.  That was his father's name.  He
shrank as from a blow--his father was betraying Jersey to the French!

"Of course, the pilot, he's all right," the Frenchman answered the baker.
"He was to have been hung here for murder.  He got away, and now he's
having his turn by fetching Rullecour's wolves to eat up your green-
bellies.  By to-morrow at seven Jersey 'll belong to King Louis."

"I've done my promise," rejoined Carcaud the baker; "I've been to three
of the guard-houses on St. Clement's and Grouville.  In two the men are
drunk as donkeys; in another they sleep like squids.  Rullecour he can
march straight to the town and seize it--if he land safe.  But will he
stand by 's word to we?  You know the saying: 'Cadet Roussel has two
sons; one's a thief, t'other's a rogue.'  There's two Rullecours--
Rullecour before the catch and Rullecour after!"

"He'll be honest to us, man, or he'll be dead inside a week, that's all."

"I'm to be Connetable of St. Heliers, and you're to be harbour-master--
eh?"

"Naught else: you don't catch flies with vinegar.  Give us your hand--
why, man, it's doggish cold."

"Cold hand, healthy heart.  How many men will Rullecour bring?"

"Two thousand; mostly conscripts and devil's beauties from Granville and
St. Malo gaols."

"Any signals yet?"

"Two--from Chaussey at five o'clock.  Rullecour 'll try to land at Gorey.
Come, let's be off.  Delagarde's there now."

The boy stiffened with horror--his father was a traitor!  The thought
pierced his brain like a hot iron.  He must prevent this crime, and warn
the Governor.  He prepared to steal away.  Fortunately the back of the
man's head was towards him.

Carcaud laughed a low, malicious laugh as he replied to the Frenchman.

"Trust the quiet Delagarde!  There's nothing worse nor still waters.
He'll do his trick, and he'll have his share if the rest suck their
thumbs.  He doesn't wait for roasted larks to drop into his mouth--what's
that!"  It was Ranulph stealing away.

In an instant the two men were on him, and a hand was clapped to his
mouth.  In another minute he was bound, thrown onto the stone floor of
the bakehouse, his head striking, and he lost consciousness.

When he came to himself, there was absolute silence round him-deathly,
oppressive silence.  At first he was dazed, but at length all that had
happened came back to him.

Where was he now?  His feet were free; he began to move them about.  He
remembered that he had been flung on the stone floor of the bakeroom.
This place sounded hollow underneath--it certainly was not the bakeroom.
He rolled over and over.  Presently he touched a wall--it was stone.  He
drew himself up to a sitting posture, but his head struck a curved stone
ceiling.  Then he swung round and moved his foot along the wall--it
touched iron.  He felt farther with his foot-something clicked.  Now he
understood; he was in the oven of the bakehouse, with his hands bound.
He began to think of means of escape.  The iron door had no inside latch.
There was a small damper covering a barred hole, through which perhaps he
might be able to get a hand, if only it were free.  He turned round so
that his fingers might feel the grated opening.  The edge of the little
bars was sharp.  He placed the strap binding his wrists against these
sharp edges, and drew his arms up and down, a difficult and painful
business.  The iron cut his hands and wrists at first, so awkward was the
movement.  But, steeling himself, he kept on steadily.

At last the straps fell apart, and his hands were free.  With difficulty
he thrust one through the bars.  His fingers could just lift the latch.
Now the door creaked on its hinges, and in a moment he was out on the
stone flags of the bakeroom.  Hurrying through an unlocked passage into
the shop, he felt his way to the street door, but it was securely
fastened.  The windows?  He tried them both, one on either side, but
while he could free the stout wooden shutters on the inside, a heavy iron
bar secured them without, and it was impossible to open them.

Feverish with anxiety, he sat down on the low counter, with his hands
between his knees, and tried to think what to do.  In the numb
hopelessness of the moment he became very quiet.  His mind was confused,
but his senses were alert; he was in a kind of dream, yet he was acutely
conscious of the smell of new-made bread.  It pervaded the air of the
place; it somehow crept into his brain and his being, so that, as long as
he might live, the smell of new-made bread would fetch back upon him the
nervous shiver and numbness of this hour of danger.

As he waited, he heard a noise outside, a clac-clac!  clac-clac!  which
seemed to be echoed back from the wood and stone of the houses in the
street, and then to be lifted up and carried away over the roofs and out
to sea---clac-clac!  clac-clac!  It was not the tap of a blind man's
staff--at first he thought it might be; it was not a donkey's foot on the
cobbles; it was not the broom-sticks of the witches of St. Clement's Bay,
for the rattle was below in the street, and the broom-stick rattle is
heard only on the roofs as the witches fly across country from Rocbert to
Bonne Nuit Bay.

This clac-clac came from the sabots of some nightfarer.  Should he make a
noise and attract the attention of the passer-by?  No, that would not do.
It might be some one who would wish to know whys and wherefores.  He
must, of course, do his duty to his country, but he must save his father
too.  Bad as the man was, he must save him, though, no matter what
happened, he must give the alarm.  His reflections tortured him.  Why had
he not stopped the nightfarer?

Even as these thoughts passed through the lad's mind, the clac-clac had
faded away into the murmur of the stream flowing by the Rue d'Egypte to
the sea, and almost beneath his feet.  There flashed on him at that
instant what little Guida Landresse had said a few days before as she lay
down beside this very stream, and watched the water wimpling by.
Trailing her fingers through it dreamily, the child had said to him:

"Ro, won't it never come back?"  She always called him "Ro," because when
beginning to talk she could not say Ranulph.

Ro, won't it never come back?  But while yet he recalled the words,
another sound mingled again with the stream-clac-clac!  clac-clac!
Suddenly it came to him who was the wearer of the sabots making this
peculiar clatter in the night.  It was Dormy Jamais, the man who never
slept.  For two years the clac-clac of Dormy Jamais's sabots had not been
heard in the streets of St. Heliers--he had been wandering in France,
a daft pilgrim.  Ranulph remembered how these sabots used to pass and
repass the doorway of his own home.  It was said that while Dormy Jamais
paced the streets there was no need of guard or watchman.  Many a time
had Ranulph shared his supper with the poor beganne whose origin no one
knew, whose real name had long since dropped into oblivion.

The rattle of the sabots came nearer, the footsteps were now in front of
the window.  Even as Ranulph was about to knock and call the poor
vagrant's name, the clac-clac stopped, and then there came a sniffing at
the shutters as a dog sniffs at the door of a larder.  Following the
sniffing came a guttural noise of emptiness and desire.  Now there was no
mistake; it was the half-witted fellow beyond all doubt, and he could
help him--Dormy Jamais should help him: he should go and warn the
Governor and the soldiers at the Hospital, while he himself would speed
to Gorey in search of his father.  He would alarm the regiment there at
the same time.

He knocked and shouted.  Dormy Jamais, frightened, jumped back into the
street.  Ranulph called again, and yet again, and now at last Dormy
recognised the voice.

With a growl of mingled reassurance and hunger, he lifted down the iron
bar from the shutters.  In a moment Ranulph was outside with two loaves
of bread, which he put into Dormy Jamais's arms.  The daft one whinnied
with delight.

"What's o'clock, bread-man?" he asked with a chuckle.

Ranulph gripped his shoulders.  "See, Dormy Jamais, I want you to go to
the Governor's house at La Motte, and tell them that the French are
coming, that they're landing at Gorey now.  Then to the Hospital and tell
the sentry there.  Go, Dormy--allez kedainne!"

Dormy Jamais tore at a loaf with his teeth, and crammed a huge crust into
his mouth.

"Come, tell me, will you go, Dormy?" the lad asked impatiently.

Dormy Jamais nodded his head, grunted, and, turning on his heel with
Ranulph, clattered up the street.  The lad sprang ahead of him, and ran
swiftly up the Rue d'Egypte, into the Vier Marchi, and on over the Town
Hill along the road to Grouville.




CHAPTER III

Since the days of Henry III of England the hawk of war that broods in
France has hovered along that narrow strip of sea dividing the island of
Jersey from the duchy of Normandy.  Eight times has it descended, and
eight times has it hurried back with broken pinion.  Among these
truculent invasions two stand out boldly: the spirited and gallant attack
by Bertrand du Guesclin, Constable of France; and the freebooting
adventure of Rullecour, with his motley following of gentlemen and
criminals.  Rullecour it was, soldier of fortune, gambler, ruffian, and
embezzler, to whom the King of France had secretly given the mission to
conquer the unconquerable little island.

From the Chaussey Isles the filibuster saw the signal light which the
traitor Olivier Delagarde had set upon the heights of Le Couperon, where,
ages ago, Caesar built fires to summon from Gaul his devouring legions.

All was propitious for the attack.  There was no moon--only a meagre
starlight when they set forth from Chaussey.  The journey was made in
little more than an hour, and Rullecour himself was among the first to
see the shores of Jersey loom darkly in front.  Beside him stood the
murderous pilot who was leading in the expedition, the colleague of
Olivier Delagarde.

Presently the pilot gave an exclamation of surprise and anxiety--the
tides and currents were bearing them away from the intended landing-
place.  It was now almost low water, and instead of an immediate shore,
there lay before them a vast field of scarred rocks, dimly seen.  He gave
the signal to lay-to, and himself took the bearings.  The tide was going
out rapidly, disclosing reefs on either hand.  He drew in carefully to
the right of the rock known as L'Echiquelez, up through a passage scarce
wide enough for canoes, and to Roque Platte, the south-eastern projection
of the island.

You may range the seas from the Yugon Strait to the Erebus volcano, and
you will find no such landing-place for imps or men as that field of
rocks on the southeast corner of Jersey called, with a malicious irony,
the Bane des Violets.  The great rocks La Coniere, La Longy, Le Gros
Etac, Le Teton, and the Petite Sambiere, rise up like volcanic monuments
from a floor of lava and trailing vraic, which at half-tide makes the sea
a tender mauve and violet.  The passages of safety between these ranges
of reef are but narrow at high tide; at half-tide, when the currents are
changing most, the violet field becomes the floor of a vast mortuary
chapel for unknowing mariners.

A battery of four guns defended the post on the landward side of this
bank of the heavenly name.  Its guards were asleep or in their cups.
They yielded, without resistance, to the foremost of the invaders.  But
here Rullecour and his pilot, looking back upon the way they had come,
saw the currents driving the transport boats hither and thither in
confusion.  Jersey was not to be conquered without opposition--no army
of defence was abroad, but the elements roused themselves and furiously
attacked the fleet.  Battalions unable to land drifted back with the
tides to Granville, whence they had come.  Boats containing the heavy
ammunition and a regiment of conscripts were battered upon the rocks, and
hundreds of the invaders found an unquiet grave upon the Banc des
Violets.

Presently the traitor Delagarde arrived and was welcomed warmly by
Rullecour.  The night wore on, and at last the remaining legions were
landed.  A force was left behind to guard La Roque Platte, and then the
journey across country to the sleeping town began.

With silent, drowsing batteries in front and on either side of them, the
French troops advanced, the marshes of Samares and the sea on their left,
churches and manor houses on their right, all silent.  Not yet had a blow
been struck for the honour of this land and of the Kingdom.

But a blind injustice was, in its own way, doing the work of justice.
On the march, Delagarde, suspecting treachery to himself, not without
reason, required of Rullecour guarantee for the fulfilment of his pledge
to make him Vicomte of the Island when victory should be theirs.
Rullecour, however, had also promised the post to a reckless young
officer, the Comte de Tournay, of the House of Vaufontaine, who, under
the assumed name of Yves Savary dit Detricand, marched with him.
Rullecour answered Delagarde churlishly, and would say nothing till the
town was taken--the ecrivain must wait.  But Delagarde had been drinking,
he was in a mood to be reckless; he would not wait, he demanded an
immediate pledge.

"By and by, my doubting Thomas," said Rullecour.  "No, now, by the blood
of Peter!" answered Delagarde, laying a hand upon his sword.

The French leader called a sergeant to arrest him.  Delagarde instantly
drew his sword and attacked Rullecour, but was cut down from behind by
the scimitar of a swaggering Turk, who had joined the expedition as aide-
de-camp to the filibustering general, tempted thereto by promises of a
harem of the choicest Jersey ladies, well worthy of this cousin of the
Emperor of Morocco.

The invaders left Delagarde lying where he fell.  What followed this
oblique retribution could satisfy no ordinary logic, nor did it meet the
demands of poetic justice.  For, as a company of soldiers from Grouville,
alarmed out of sleep by a distracted youth, hurried towards St. Heliers,
they found Delagarde lying by the roadside, and they misunderstood what
had happened.  Stooping over him an officer said pityingly:

"See--he got this wound fighting the French!"  With the soldiers was the
youth who had warned them.  He ran forward with a cry, and knelt beside
the wounded man.  He had no tears, he had no sorrow.  He was only sick
and dumb, and he trembled with misery as he lifted up his father's head.
The eyes of Olivier Delagarde opened.

"Ranulph--they've killed--me," gasped the stricken man feebly, and his
head fell back.

An officer touched the youth's arm.  "He is gone," said he.  "Don't fret,
lad, he died fighting for his country."

The lad made no reply, and the soldiers hurried on towards the town.

He died fighting for his country!  So that was to be the legend, Ranulph
meditated: his father was to have a glorious memory, while he himself
knew how vile the man was.  One thing however: he was glad that Olivier
Delagarde was dead.  How strangely had things happened!  He had come to
stay a traitor in his crime, and here he found a martyr.  But was not he
himself likewise a traitor?  Ought not he to have alarmed the town first
before he tried to find his father?  Had Dormy Jamais warned the
Governor?  Clearly not, or the town bells would be ringing and the
islanders giving battle.  What would the world think of him!

Well, what was the use of fretting here?  He would go on to the town,
help to fight the French, and die that would be the best thing.  He
knelt, and unclasped his father's fingers from the handle of the sword.
The steel was cold, it made him shiver.  He had no farewell to make.  He
looked out to sea.  The tide would come and carry his father's body out,
perhaps-far out, and sink it in the deepest depths.  If not that, then
the people would bury Olivier Delagarde as a patriot.  He determined that
he himself would not live to see such mockery.

As he sped along towards the town he asked himself why nobody suspected
the traitor.  One reason for it occurred to him: his father, as the whole
island knew, had a fishing-hut at Gorey.  They would imagine him on the
way to it when he met the French, for he often spent the night there.  He
himself had told his tale to the soldiers: how he had heard the baker and
the Frenchman talking at the shop in the Rue d'Egypte.  Yes, but suppose
the French were driven out, and the baker taken prisoner and should
reveal his father's complicity!  And suppose people asked why he himself
did not go at once to the Hospital Barracks in the town and to the
Governor, and afterwards to Gorey?

These were direful imaginings.  He felt that it was no use; that the lie
could not go on concerning his father.  The world would know; the one
thing left for him was to die.  He was only a boy, but he could fight.
Had not young Philip d'Avranche; the midshipman, been in deadly action
many times?  He was nearly as old as Philip d'Avranche--yes, he would
fight, and, fighting, he would die.  To live as the son of such a father
was too pitiless a shame.

He ran forward, but a weakness was on him; he was very hungry and
thirsty-and the sword was heavy.  Presently, as he went, he saw a stone
well near a cottage by the roadside.  On a ledge of the well stood a
bucket of water.  He tilted the bucket and drank.  He would have liked to
ask for bread at the cottage-door, but he said to himself, Why should he
eat, for was he not going to die?  Yet why should he not eat, even if he
were going to die?  He turned his head wistfully, he was so faint with
hunger.  The force driving him on, however, was greater than hunger--he
ran harder.  .  .  .  But undoubtedly the sword was heavy!




CHAPTER IV

In the Vier Marchi the French flag was flying, French troops occupied it,
French sentries guarded the five streets entering into it.  Rullecour,
the French adventurer, held the Lieutenant-Governor of the isle captive
in the Cohue Royale; and by threats of fire and pillage thought to force
capitulation.  For his final argument he took the Governor to the
doorway, and showed him two hundred soldiers with lighted torches ready
to fire the town.

When the French soldiers first entered the Vier Marchi there was Dormy
Jamais on the roof of the Cohue Royale, calmly munching his bread.  When
he saw Rullecour and the Governor appear, he chuckled to himself, and
said, in Jersey patois: "I vaut mux alouonyi l'bras que l'co," which is
to say: It is better to stretch the arm than the neck.  The Governor
would have done more wisely, he thought, to believe the poor beganne, and
to have risen earlier.  Dormy Jamais had a poor opinion of a governor who
slept.  He himself was not a governor, yet was he not always awake?  He
had gone before dawn to the Governor's house, had knocked, had given
Ranulph Delagarde's message, had been called a dirty buzard, and been
sent away by the crusty, incredulous servant.  Then he had gone to the
Hospital Barracks, was there iniquitously called a lousy toad, and had
been driven off with his quartern loaf, muttering through the dough the
island proverb "While the mariner swigs the tide rises."

Had the Governor remained as cool as the poor vagrant, he would not have
shrunk at the sight of the incendiaries, yielded to threats, and signed
the capitulation of the island.  But that capitulation being signed, and
notice of it sent to the British troops, with orders to surrender and
bring their arms to the Cohue Royale, it was not cordially received by
the officers in command.

"Je ne comprends pas le francais," said Captain Mulcaster, at Elizabeth
Castle, as he put the letter into his pocket unread.

"The English Governor will be hanged, and the French will burn the town,"
responded the envoy.  "Let them begin to hang and burn and be damned, for
I'll not surrender the castle or the British flag so long as I've a man
to defend it, to please anybody!" answered Mulcaster.

"We shall return in numbers," said the Frenchman, threateningly.

"I shall be delighted:  we shall have the more to kill," Mulcaster
replied.

Then the captive Lieutenant-Governor was sent to Major Peirson at the
head of his troops on the Mont es Pendus, with counsel to surrender.

"Sir," said he, "this has been a very sudden surprise, for I was made
prisoner before I was out of my bed this morning."

"Sir," replied Peirson, the young hero of twenty-four, who achieved death
and glory between a sunrise and a noontide, "give me leave to tell you
that the 78th Regiment has not yet been the least surprised."

From Elizabeth Castle came defiance and cannonade, driving back Rullecour
and his filibusters to the Cohue Royale: from Mont Orgueil, from the
Hospital, from St. Peter's came the English regiments; from the other
parishes swarmed the militia, all eager to recover their beloved Vier
Marchi.  Two companies of light infantry, leaving the Mont es Pendus,
stole round the town and placed themselves behind the invaders on the
Town Hill; the rest marched direct upon the enemy.  Part went by the
Grande Rue, and part by the Rue d'Driere, converging to the point of
attack; and as the light infantry came down from the hill by the Rue des
Tres Pigeons, Peirson entered the Vier Marchi by the Route es Couochons.
On one side of the square, where the Cohue Royale made a wall to fight
against, were the French.  Radiating from this were five streets and
passages like the spokes of a wheel, and from these now poured the
defenders of the isle.

A volley came from the Cohue Royale, then another, and another.  The
place was small: friend and foe were crowded upon each other.  The
fighting became at once a hand-to-hand encounter.  Cannon were useless,
gun-carriages overturned.  Here a drummer fell wounded, but continued
beating his drum to the last; there a Glasgow soldier struggled with a
French officer for the flag of the invaders; yonder a handful of Malouins
doggedly held the foot of La Pyramide, until every one was cut down by
overpowering numbers of British and Jersiais.  The British leader was
conspicuous upon his horse.  Shot after shot was fired at him.  Suddenly
he gave a cry, reeled in his saddle, and sank, mortally wounded, into the
arms of a brother officer.

For a moment his men fell back.

In the midst of the deadly turmoil a youth ran forward from a group of
combatants, caught the bridle of the horse from which Peirson had fallen,
mounted, and, brandishing a short sword, called upon his dismayed and
wavering followers to advance; which they instantly did with fury and
courage.  It was Midshipman Philip d'Avranche.  Twenty muskets were
discharged at him.  One bullet cut the coat on his shoulder, another
grazed the back of his hand, a third scarred the pommel of the saddle,
and still another wounded his horse.  Again and again the English called
upon him to dismount, for he was made a target, but he refused, until
at last the horse was shot under him.  Then once more he joined in the
hand-to-hand encounter.

Windows near the ground, such as were not shattered, were broken by
bullets.  Cannon-balls embedded themselves in the masonry and the heavy
doorways.  The upper windows were safe, however: the shots did not range
so high.  At one of these, over a watchmaker's shop, a little girl was to
be seen, looking down with eager interest.  Presently an old man came in
view and led her away.  A few minutes of fierce struggle passed, and then
at another window on the floor below the child appeared again.  She saw a
youth with a sword hurrying towards the Cohue Royale from a tangled mass
of combatants.  As he ran, a British soldier fell in front of him.  The
youth dropped the sword and grasped the dead man's musket.

The child clapped her hands on the window.

"It's Ro--it's Ro!" she cried, and disappeared again.

"Ro," with white face, hatless, coatless, pushed on through the melee.
Rullecour, the now disheartened French general, stood on the steps of the
Cohue Royale.  With a vulgar cruelty and cowardice he was holding the
Governor by the arm, hoping thereby to protect his own person from the
British fire.

Here was what the lad had been trying for--the sight of this man
Rullecour.  There was one small clear space between the English and the
French, where stood a gun-carriage.  He ran to it, leaned the musket on
the gun, and, regardless of the shots fired at him, took aim steadily.
A French bullet struck the wooden wheel of the carriage, and a splinter
gashed his cheek.  He did not move, but took sight again, and fired.
Rullecour fell, shot through the jaw.  A cry of fury and dismay went up
from the French at the loss of their leader, a shout of triumph from the
British.

The Frenchmen had had enough.  They broke and ran.  Some rushed for
doorways and threw themselves within, many scurried into the Rue des Tres
Pigeons, others madly fought their way into Morier Lane.

At this moment the door of the watchmaker's shop opened and the little
girl who had been seen at the window ran into the square, calling out:
"Ro!  Ro!" It was Guida Landresse.

Among the French flying for refuge was the garish Turk, Rullecour's ally.
Suddenly the now frightened, crying child got into his path and tripped
him up.  Wild with rage he made a stroke at her, but at that instant his
scimitar was struck aside by a youth covered with the smoke and grime of
battle.  He caught up the child to his arms, and hurried with her through
the melee to the watchmaker's doorway.  There stood a terror-stricken
woman--Madame Landresse, who had just made her way into the square.
Placing the child, in her arms, Philip d'Avranche staggered inside the
house, faint and bleeding from a wound in the shoulder.  The battle of
Jersey was over.

"Ah bah!" said Dormy Jamais from the roof of the Cohue Royale; "now I'll
toll the bell for that achocre of a Frenchman.  Then I'll finish my
supper."

Poising a half-loaf of bread on the ledge of the roof, he began to slowly
toll the cracked bell at his hand for Rullecour the filibuster.

The bell clanged out: Chicane-chicane!  Chicane-chicane!

Another bell answered from the church by the square, a deep, mournful
note.  It was tolling for Peirson and his dead comrades.

Against the statue in the Vier Marchi leaned Ranulph Delagarde.  An
officer came up and held out a hand to him.  "Your shot ended the
business," said he.  "You're a brave fellow.  What is your name?"

"Ranulph Delagarde, sir."

"Delagarde--eh?  Then well done, Delagardes!  They say your father was
the first man killed.  We won't forget that, my lad."

Sinking down upon the base of the statue, Ranulph did not stir or reply,
and the officer, thinking he was grieving for his father, left him alone.




ELEVEN YEARS AFTER

CHAPTER V

The King of France was no longer sending adventurers to capture the
outposts of England.  He was rather, in despair, beginning to wind in
again the coil of disaster which had spun out through the helpless
fingers of Neckar, Calonne, Brienne and the rest, and was in the end to
bind his own hands for the guillotine.

The Isle of Jersey, like a scout upon the borders of a foeman's country,
looked out over St. Michael's Basin to those provinces where the war of
the Vendee was soon to strike France from within, while England, and
presently all Europe, should strike her from without.

War, or the apprehension of war, was in the air.  The people of the
little isle, living always within the influence of natural wonder and the
power of the elements, were deeply superstitious; and as news of dark
deeds done in Paris crept across from Carteret or St. Malo, as men-of-war
anchored in the tide-way, and English troops, against the hour of
trouble, came, transport after transport, into the harbour of St.
Heliers, they began to see visions and dream dreams.  One peasant heard
the witches singing a chorus of carnage at Rocbert; another saw, towards
the Minquiers, a great army like a mirage upon the sea; others declared
that certain French refugees in the island had the evil eye and bewitched
their cattle; and a woman, wild with grief because her child had died
of a sudden sickness, meeting a little Frenchman, the Chevalier du
Champsavoys, in the Rue des Tres Pigeons, thrust at his face with her
knitting-needle, and then, Protestant though she was, made the sacred
sign, as though to defeat the evil eye.

This superstition and fanaticism so strong in the populace now and then
burst forth in untamable fury and riot.  So that when, on the sixteenth
of December 1792, the gay morning was suddenly overcast, and a black
curtain was drawn over the bright sun, the people of Jersey, working in
the fields, vraicking among the rocks, or knitting in their doorways,
stood aghast, and knew not what was upon them.

Some began to say the Lord's Prayer, some in superstitious terror ran to
the secret hole in the wall, to the chimney, or to the bedstead, or dug
up the earthen floor, to find the stocking full of notes and gold, which
might, perchance, come with them safe through any cataclysm, or start
them again in business in another world.  Some began fearfully to sing
hymns, and a few to swear freely.  These latter were chiefly carters,
whose salutations to each other were mainly oaths, because of the extreme
narrowness of the island roads, and sailors to whom profanity was as
daily bread.

In St. Heliers, after the first stupefaction, people poured into the
streets.  They gathered most where met the Rue d'Driere and the Rue
d'Egypte.  Here stood the old prison, and the spot was called the Place
du Vier Prison.

Men and women with breakfast still in their mouths mumbled their terror
to each other.  A lobster-woman shrieking that the Day of Judgment was
come, instinctively straightened her cap, smoothed out her dress of
molleton, and put on her sabots.  A carpenter, hearing her terrified
exclamations, put on his sabots also, stooped whimpering to the stream
running from the Rue d'Egypte, and began to wash his face.  A dozen of
his neighbours did the same.  Some of the women, however, went on
knitting hard, as they gabbled prayers and looked at the fast-blackening
sun.  Knitting was to Jersey women, like breathing or tale-bearing, life
itself.  With their eyes closing upon earth they would have gone on
knitting and dropped no stitches.

A dusk came down like that over Pompeii and Herculaneum.  The tragedy of
fear went hand in hand with burlesque commonplace.  The grey stone walls
of the houses grew darker and darker, and seemed to close in on the
dumfounded, hysterical crowd.  Here some one was shouting command to
imaginary militia; there an aged crone was offering, without price,
simnels and black butter, as a sort of propitiation for an imperfect
past; and from a window a notorious evil-liver was frenziedly crying that
she had heard the devil and his Rocbert witches revelling in the prison
dungeons the night before.  Thereupon a long-haired fanatic, once a
barber, with a gift for mad preaching, sprang upon the Pompe des
Brigands, and declaring that the Last Day was come, shrieked:

     "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me!  He hath sent me to proclaim
     liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that
     are bound!"

Some one thrust into his hand a torch.  He waved it to and fro in his
wild harangue; he threw up his arms towards the ominous gloom, and with
blatant fury ordered open the prison doors.  Other torches and candles
appeared, and the mob trembled to and fro in delirium.

"The prison!  Open the Vier Prison!  Break down the doors!  Gatd'en'ale--
drive out the devils!  Free the prisoners--the poor vauriens!" the crowd
shouted, rushing forward with sticks and weapons.

The prison arched the street as Temple Bar once spanned the Strand.  They
crowded under the archway, overpowered the terror-stricken jailer, and,
battering open the door in frenzy, called the inmates forth.

They looked to see issue some sailor seized for whistling of a Sabbath,
some profane peasant who had presumed to wear pattens in church, some
profaner peasant who had not doffed his hat to the Connetable, or some
slip-shod militiaman who had gone to parade in his sabots, thereby
offending the red-robed dignity of the Royal Court.

Instead, there appeared a little Frenchman of the most refined and
unusual appearance.  The blue cloth of his coat set off the extreme
paleness of a small but serene face and high round forehead.  The hair,
a beautiful silver grey which time only had powdered, was tied in a queue
behind.  The little gentleman's hand was as thin and fine as a lady's,
his shoulders were narrow and slightly stooped, his eye was eloquent and
benign.  His dress was amazingly neat, but showed constant brushing and
signs of the friendly repairing needle.

The whole impression was that of a man whom a whiff of wind would blow
away; with the body of an ascetic and the simplicity of a child.  The
face had some particular sort of wisdom, difficult to define and
impossible to imitate.  He held in his hand a tiny cane of the sort
carried at the court of Louis Quinze.  Louis Capet himself had given it
to him; and you might have had the life of the little gentleman, but not
this cane with the tiny golden bust of his unhappy monarch.

He stood on the steps of the prison and looked serenely on the muttering,
excited crowd.

"I fear there is a mistake," said he, coughing a little into his fingers.
"You do not seek me.  I--I have no claim upon your kindness; I am only
the Chevalier Orvilliers du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir."

For a moment the mob had been stayed in amazement by this small, rare
creature stepping from the doorway, like a porcelain coloured figure from
some dusky wood in a painting by Claude.  In the instant's pause the
Chevalier Orvilliers du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir took from his pocket a
timepiece and glanced at it, then looked over the heads of the crowd
towards the hooded sun, which now, a little, was showing its face again.

"It was due at eight, less seven minutes," said he; "clear sun again was
set for ten minutes past.  It is now upon the stroke of the hour."

He seemed in no way concerned with the swaying crowd before him--
undoubtedly they wanted naught of him, and therefore he did not take
their presence seriously; but, of an inquiring mind, he was absorbed in
the eclipse.

"He's a French sorcerer!  He has the evil eye!  Away with him to the
sea!" shouted the fanatical preacher from the Pompe des Brigands.

"It's a witch turned into a man!" cried a drunken woman from her window.
"Give him the wheel of fire at the blacksmith's forge."

"That's it!  Gad'rabotin--the wheel of fire'll turn him back to a hag
again!"

The little gentleman protested, but they seized him and dragged him from
the steps.  Tossed like a ball, so light was he, he grasped the gold-
headed cane as one might cling to life, and declared that he was no
witch, but a poor French exile, arrested the night before for being
abroad after nine o'clock, against the orders of the Royal Court.

Many of the crowd knew him well enough by sight, but they were too
delirious to act with intelligence now.  The dark cloud was lifting a
little from the sun, and dread of the Judgment Day was declining; but as
the pendulum swung back towards normal life again, it carried with it the
one virulent and common prejudice of the country--radical hatred of the
French--which often slumbered but never died.

The wife of an oyster-fisher from Rozel Bay, who lived in hourly enmity
with the oyster-fishers of Carteret, gashed his cheek with the shell of
an ormer.  A potato-digger from Grouville parish struck at his head with
a hoe, for the Granvillais had crossed the strait to the island the year
before, to work in the harvest fields for a lesser wage than the
Jersiais, and this little French gentleman must be held responsible for
that.  The weapon missed the Chevalier, but laid low a centenier, who,
though a municipal officer, had in the excitement lost his head like his
neighbours.  This but increased the rage against the foreigner, and was
another crime to lay to his charge.  A smuggler thereupon kicked him in
the side.

At that moment there came a cry of indignation from a girl at an upper
window of the Place.  The Chevalier evidently knew her, for even in his
hard case he smiled; and then he heard another voice ring out over the
heads of the crowd, strong, angry, determined.

From the Rue d'Driere a tall athletic man was hurrying.  He had on his
shoulders a workman's han basket, from which peeped a ship-builder's
tools.  Seeing the Chevalier's danger, he dropped his tool-basket through
the open window of a house and forced his way through the crowd, roughly
knocking from under them the feet of two or three ruffians who opposed
him.  He reproached the crowd, he berated them, he handled them fiercely.
By a dexterous strength he caught the little gentleman up in his arms,
and, driving straight on to the open door of the smithy, placed him
inside, then blocked the passage with his own body.

It was a strange picture: the preacher in an ecstasy haranguing the
foolish rabble, who now realised, with an unbecoming joy, that the Last
Day was yet to face; the gaping, empty prison; the open windows crowded
with excited faces; the church bell from the Vier Marchi ringing an
alarm; Norman lethargy roused to froth and fury: one strong man holding
two hundred back!

Above them all, at a hus in the gable of a thatched cottage, stood the
girl whom the Chevalier had recognised, anxiously watching the affray.
She was leaning across the lower closed half of the door, her hands in
apprehensive excitement clasping her cheeks.  The eyes were bewildered,
and, though alive with pain, watched the scene below with unwavering
intensity.

Like all mobs this one had no reason, no sense.  They were baulked in
their malign intentions, and this man, Maitre Ranulph Delagarde, was the
cause of it--that was all they knew.  A stone was thrown at Delagarde as
he stood in the doorway, but it missed him.

"Oh-oh-oh!" the girl exclaimed, shrinking.  "O shame!  O you cowards!"
she added, her hands now indignantly beating on the hus.  Three or four
men rushed forward on Ranulph.  He hurled them back.  Others came on with
weapons.  The girl fled for an instant, then reappeared with a musket, as
the people were crowding in on Delagarde with threats and execrations.

"Stop!  stop!" cried the girl from above, as Ranulph seized a black-
smith's hammer to meet the onset.  "Stop, or I'll fire!" she called
again, and she aimed her musket at the foremost assailants.

Every face turned in her direction, for her voice had rung out clear as
music.  For an instant there was silence--the levelled musket had a
deadly look, and the girl seemed determined.  Her fingers, her whole
body, trembled; but there was no mistaking the strong will, the indignant
purpose.

All at once in the pause another sound was heard.  It was a quick tramp,
tramp, tramp!  and suddenly under the prison archway came running an
officer of the King's navy with a company of sailors.  The officer, with
drawn sword, his men following with cutlasses, drove a way through the
mob, who scattered before them like sheep.

Delagarde threw aside his hammer, and saluted the officer.  The little
Chevalier made a formal bow, and hastened to say that he was not at all
hurt.  With a droll composure he offered snuff to the officer, who
declined politely.  Turning to the window where the girl stood, the new-
comer saluted with confident gallantry.

"Why, it's little Guida Landresse!" he said under his breath--"I'd know
her anywhere.  Death and Beauty, what a face!"  Then he turned to Ranulph
in recognition.

"Ranulph Delagarde, eh?" said he good-humouredly.  "You've forgotten me,
I see.  I'm Philip d'Avranche, of the Narcissus."

Ranulph had forgotten.  The slight lad Philip had grown bronzed, and
stouter of frame.  In the eleven years since they had been together at
the Battle of Jersey, events, travel, and responsibility had altered him
vastly.  Ranulph had changed only in growing very tall and athletic and
strong; the look of him was still that of the Norman lad of the isle,
though the power and intelligence of his face were unusual.

The girl in the cottage doorway had not forgotten at all.  The words that
d'Avranche had said to her years before, when she was a child, came to
her mind: "My name is Philip; call me Philip."

The recollection of that day when she snatched off the Bailly's hat
brought a smile to her lips now, so quickly were her feelings moved one
way or another.  Then she grew suddenly serious, for the memory of the
hour when he saved her from the scimitar of the Turk came to her, and her
heart throbbed hotly.  But she smiled again, though more gently and a
little wistfully now.

Philip d'Avranche looked up towards her once more, and returned her
smile.  Then he addressed the awed crowd.  He did not spare his language;
he unconsciously used an oath or two.  He ordered them off to their
homes.  When they hesitated (for they were slow to acknowledge any
authority save their own sacred Royal Court) the sailors advanced on them
with drawn cutlasses, and a moment later the Place du Vier Prison was
clear.  Leaving a half-dozen sailors on guard till the town corps should
arrive, d'Avranche prepared to march, and turned to Delagarde.

"You've done me a good turn, Monsieur d'Avranche," said Ranulph.

"There was a time you called me Philip," said d'Avranche, smiling.  "We
were lads together."

"It's different now," answered Delagarde.

"Nothing is different at all, of course," returned d'Avranche carelessly,
yet with the slightest touch of condescension, as he held out his hand.
Turning to the Chevalier, he said: "Monsieur, I congratulate you on
having such a champion"--with a motion towards Ranulph.  "And you,
monsieur, on your brave protector"--he again saluted the girl at the
window above.

"I am the obliged and humble servant of monsieur, and monsieur,"
responded the little gentleman, turning from one to the other with a
courtly bow, the three-cornered hat under his arm, the right foot
forward, the thin fingers making a graceful salutation.  "But I--I think
--I really think I must go back to prison.  I was not formally set free.
I was out last night beyond the hour set by the Court.  I lost my way,
and--"

"Not a bit of it," d'Avranche interrupted.  "The centeniers are too free
with their jailing here.  I'll be guarantee for you, monsieur."  He
turned to go.

The little man shook his head dubiously.  "But, as a point of honour, I
really think--"

D'Avranche laughed.  "As a point of honour, I think you ought to
breakfast.  A la bonne heure, monsieur le chevalier!"

He turned again to the cottage window.  The girl was still there.  The
darkness over the sun was withdrawn, and now the clear light began to
spread itself abroad.  It was like a second dawn after a painful night.
It tinged the face of the girl; it burnished the wonderful red-brown hair
falling loosely and lightly over her forehead; it gave her beauty a touch
of luxuriance.  D'Avranche thrilled at the sight of her.

"It's a beautiful face," he said to himself as their eyes met and he
saluted once more.

Ranulph had seen the glances passing between the two, and he winced.
He remembered how, eleven years ago, Philip d'Avranche had saved the girl
from death.  It galled him that then and now this young gallant
should step in and take the game out of his hands--he was sure that
himself alone could have mastered this crowd.

"Monsieur--monsieur le chevalier!" the girl called down from the window,
"grandpethe says you must breakfast with us.  Oh, but come you must, or
we shall be offended!" she added, as Champsavoys shook his head in
hesitation and glanced towards the prison.

"As a point of honour--" the little man still persisted, lightly touching
his breast with the Louis Quinze cane, and taking a step towards the
sombre prison archway.  But Ranulph interfered, drew him gently inside
the cottage, and, standing in the doorway, said to some one within:

"May I come in also, Sieur de Mauprat?"

Above the pleasant welcome of a quavering voice came another, soft and
clear, in pure French:

"Thou art always welcome, without asking, as thou knowest, Ro."

"Then I'll go and fetch my tool-basket first," Ranulph said cheerily, his
heart beating more quickly, and, turning, he walked across the Place.




CHAPTER VI

The cottage in which Guida lived at the Place du Vier Prison was in
jocund contrast to the dungeon from which the Chevalier Orvilliers du
Champsavoys de Beaumanoir had complacently issued.  Even in the hot
summer the prison walls dripped moisture, for the mortar had been made of
wet sea-sand, which never dried, and beneath the gloomy tenement of crime
a dark stream flowed to the sea.  But the walls of the cottage were dry,
for, many years before, Guida's mother had herself seen it built from
cellar-rock to the linked initials over the doorway, stone by stone, and
every corner of it was as free from damp as the mielles stretching in
sandy desolation behind to the Mont es Pendus, where the law had its way
with the necks of criminals.

In early childhood Madame Landresse had come with her father into exile
from the sunniest valley in the hills of Chambery, where flowers and
trees and sunshine had been her life.  Here, in the midst of blank and
grim stone houses, her heart travelled back to the chateau where she
lived before the storm of persecution drove her forth; and she spent her
heart and her days in making this cottage, upon the western border of St.
Heliers, a delight to the quiet eye.

The people of the island had been good to her and her dead husband during
the two short years of their married life, and had caused her to love the
land which necessity made her home.  Her child was brought up after the
fashion of the better class of Jersey children, wore what they wore, ate
what they ate, lived as they lived.  She spoke the country patois in the
daily life, teaching it to Guida at the same time that she taught her
pure French and good English, which she herself had learned as a child,
and cultivated later here.  She had done all in her power to make Guida
Jersiaise in instinct and habit, and to beget in her a contented
disposition.  There could be no future for her daughter outside this
little green oasis of exile, she thought.  Not that she lacked ambition,
but in the circumstances she felt that ambition could yield but one
harvest to her child, which was marriage.  She herself had married a poor
man, a master builder of ships, like Maitre Ranulph Delagarde, but she
had been very happy while he lived.  Her husband had come of an ancient
Jersey family, who were in Normandy before the Conqueror was born; a man
of genius almost in his craft, but scarcely a gentleman according to the
standard of her father, the distinguished exile and now retired
watchmaker.  If Guida should chance to be as fortunate as herself, she
could ask no more.

She had watched the child anxiously, for the impulses of Guida's
temperament now and then broke forth in indignation as wild as her tears
and in tears as wild as her laughter.  As the girl grew in health and
stature, she tried, tenderly, strenuously, to discipline the sensitive
nature, bursting her heart with grief at times because she knew that
these high feelings and delicate powers came through a long line of
ancestral tendencies, as indestructible as perilous and joyous.

Four things were always apparent in the girl's character: sympathy with
suffering, kindness without partiality, a love of nature, and an intense
candour.

Not a stray cat wandering into the Place du Vier Prison but found an
asylum in the garden behind the cottage.  Not a dog hungry for a bone,
stopping at Guida's door, but was sure of one from a hiding-place in the
hawthorn hedge of the garden.  Every morning you might have seen the
birds in fluttering, chirping groups upon the may-tree or the lilac-
bushes, waiting for the tiny snow-storm of bread to fall from her hand.
Was he good or bad, ragged or neat, honest or a thief, not a deserting
sailor or a homeless lad, halting at the cottage, but was fed from the
girl's private larder behind the straw beehives among the sweet lavender
and the gooseberry-bushes.  No matter how rough the vagrant, the
sincerity and pure impulse of the child seemed to throw round him a
sunshine of decency and respect.

The garden behind the house was the girl's Eden.  She had planted upon
the hawthorn hedge the crimson monthly rose, the fuchsia, and the
jonquil, until at last the cottage was hemmed in by a wall of flowers;
and here she was ever as busy as the bees which hung humming on the sweet
scabious.

In this corner was a little hut for rabbits; in that, there was a hole
dug in the bank for a hedgehog; in the middle a little flower-grown
enclosure for cats in various stages of health or convalescence, and a
small pond for frogs; and in the midst of all wandered her faithful dog,
Biribi by name, as master of the ceremonies.

Madame Landresse's one ambition had been to live long enough to see her
child's character formed.  She knew that her own years were numbered, for
month by month she felt her strength going.  And yet a beautiful tenacity
kept her where she would be until Guida was fifteen years of age.  Her
great desire had been to live till the girl was eighteen.  Then--well,
then might she not perhaps leave her to the care of a husband?  At best,
M. de Mauprat could not live long.  He had at last been forced to give up
the little watchmaker's shop in the Vier Marchi, where for so many years,
in simple independence, he had wrought, always putting by, from work done
after hours, Jersey bank-notes and gold, to give Guida a dot, if not
worthy of her, at least a guarantee against reproach when some great man
should come seeking her in marriage.  But at last his hands trembled
among the tiny wheels, and his eyes failed.  He had his dark hour by
himself, then he sold the shop to a native, who thenceforward sat in the
ancient exile's place; and the two brown eyes of the stooped, brown old
man looked out no more from the window in the Vier Marchi: and then they
all made their new home in the Place du Vier Prison.

Until she was fifteen Guida's life was unclouded.  Once or twice her
mother tried to tell her of a place that must soon be empty, but her
heart failed her.  So at last the end came like a sudden wind out of the
north; and it was left to Guida Landresse de Landresse to fight the fight
and finish the journey of womanhood alone.

This time was the turning-point in Guida's life.  What her mother had
been to the Sieur de Mauprat, she soon became.  They had enough to live
on simply.  Every week her grandfather gave her a fixed sum for the
household.  Upon this she managed, that the tiny income left by her
mother might not be touched.  She shrank from using it yet, and besides,
dark times might come when it would be needed.  Death had once surprised
her, but it should bring no more amazement.  She knew that M. de
Mauprat's days were numbered, and when he was gone she would be left
without one near relative in the world.  She realised how unprotected her
position would be when death came knocking at the door again.  What she
would do she knew not.  She thought long and hard.  Fifty things occurred
to her, and fifty were set aside.  Her mother's immediate relatives in
France were scattered or dead.  There was no longer any interest at
Chambery in the watchmaking exile, who had dropped like a cherry-stone
from the beak of the blackbird of persecution upon one of the Iles de la
Manche.

There remained the alternative more than once hinted by the Sieur de
Mauprat as the months grew into years after the mother died--marriage;
a husband, a notable and wealthy husband.  That was the magic destiny de
Mauprat figured for her.  It did not elate her, it did not disturb her;
she scarcely realised it.  She loved animals, and she saw no reason to
despise a stalwart youth.  It had been her fortune to know two or three
in the casual, unconventional manner of villages, and there were few in
the land, great or humble, who did not turn twice to look at her as she
passed through the Vier Marchi, so noble was her carriage, so graceful
and buoyant her walk, so lacking in self-consciousness her beauty.  More
than one young gentleman of family had been known to ride through the
Place du Vier Prison, hoping to get sight of her, and to offer the view
of a suggestively empty pillion behind him.

She had, however, never listened to flatterers, and only one youth of
Jersey had footing in the cottage.  This was Ranulph Delagarde, who had
gone in and out at his will, but that was casually and not too often,
and he was discreet and spoke no word of love.  Sometimes she talked to
him of things concerning the daily life with which she did not care to
trouble Sieur de Mauprat.  In ways quite unknown to her he had made her
life easier for her.  She knew that her mother had thought of Ranulph for
her husband, although she blushed whenever--but it was not often--the
idea came to her.  She remembered how her mother had said that Ranulph
would be a great man in the island some day; that he had a mind above all
the youths in St. Heliers; that she would rather see Ranulph a master
ship-builder than a babbling ecrivain in the Rue des Tres Pigeons, a
smirking leech, or a penniless seigneur with neither trade nor talent.
Guida was attracted to Ranulph through his occupation, for she loved
strength, she loved all clean and wholesome trades; that of the mason,
of the carpenter, of the blacksmith, and most of the ship-builder.  Her
father, whom she did not remember, had been a ship-builder, and she knew
that he had been a notable man; every one had told her that.

                    .........................

"She has met her destiny," say the village gossips, when some man in the
dusty procession of life sees a woman's face in the pleasant shadow of a
home, and drops out of the ranks to enter at her doorway.

Was Ranulph to be Guida's destiny?

Handsome and stalwart though he looked as he entered the cottage in the
Place du Vier Prison, on that September morning after the rescue of the
chevalier, his tool-basket on his shoulder, and his brown face enlivened
by one simple sentiment, she was far from sure that he was--far from
sure.




CHAPTER VII

The little hall-way into which Ranulph stepped from the street led
through to the kitchen.  Guida stood holding back the door for him to
enter this real living-room of the house, which opened directly upon the
garden behind.  It was so cheerful and secluded, looking out from the
garden over the wide space beyond to the changeful sea, that since Madame
Landresse's death the Sieur de Mauprat had made it reception-room,
dining-room, and kitchen all in one.  He would willingly have slept there
too, but noblesse oblige and the thought of what the Chevalier Orvilliers
du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir might think prevented him.  Moreover, there
was something patriarchal in a kitchen as a reception-room; and both he
and the chevalier loved to watch Guida busy with her household duties: at
one moment her arms in the dough of the kneading trough; at another
picking cherries for a jelly, or casting up her weekly accounts with a
little smiling and a little sighing.

If, by chance, it had been proposed by the sieur to adjourn to the small
sitting-room which looked out upon the Place du Vier Prison, a gloom
would instantly have settled upon them both; though in this little front
room there was an ancient arm-chair, over which hung the sword that the
Comte Guilbert Mauprat de Chambery had used at Fontenoy against the
English.

So it was that this spacious kitchen, with its huge chimney, and paved
with square flagstones and sanded, became like one of those ancient
corners of camaraderie in some exclusive inn where gentlemen of quality
were wont to meet.  At the left of the chimney was the great settle, or
veille, covered with baize, "flourished" with satinettes, and spread with
ferns and rushes, and above it a little shelf of old china worth the
ransom of a prince at least.  Opposite the doorway were two great
armchairs, one for the sieur and the other for the Chevalier, who made
his home in the house of one Elie Mattingley, a fisherman by trade and by
practice a practical smuggler, with a daughter Carterette whom he loved
passing well.

These, with a few constant visitors, formed a coterie: the huge, grizzly-
bearded boatman, Jean Touzel, who wore spectacles, befriended smugglers,
was approved of all men, and secretly worshipped by his wife; Amice
Ingouville, the fat avocat with a stomach of gigantic proportions, the
biggest heart and the tiniest brain in the world; Maitre Ranulph
Delagarde, and lastly M. Yves Savary dit Detricand, that officer of
Rullecour's who, being released from the prison hospital, when the hour
came for him to leave the country was too drunk to find the shore.  By
some whim of negligence the Royal Court was afterwards too lethargic to
remove him, and he stayed on, vainly making efforts to leave between one
carousal and another.  In sober hours, none too frequent, he was rather
sorrowfully welcomed by the sieur and the chevalier.

When Ranulph entered the kitchen his greeting to the sieur and the
chevalier was in French, but to Guida he said, rather stupidly in the
patois--for late events had embarrassed him--"Ah bah! es-tu gentiment?"

"Gentiment," she answered, with a queer little smile.  "You'll have
breakfast?" she said in English.

"Et ben!" Ranulph repeated, still embarrassed, "a mouthful, that's all."

He laid aside his tool-basket, shook hands with the sieur, and seated
himself at the table.  Looking at du Champsavoys, he said:

"I've just met the connetable.  He regrets the riot, chevalier, and says
the Royal Court extends its mercy to you."

"I prefer to accept no favours," answered the chevalier.  "As a point of
honour, I had thought that, after breakfast, I should return to prison,
and--"

"The connetable said it was cheaper to let the chevalier go free than to
feed him in the Vier Prison," dryly explained Ranulph, helping himself to
roasted conger eel and eyeing hungrily the freshly-made black butter
Guida was taking from a wooden trencher.  "The Royal Court is stingy," he
added.  "'It's nearer than Jean Noe, who got married in his red
queminzolle,' as we say on Jersey--"

But he got no further at the moment, for shots rang out suddenly before
the house.  They all started to their feet, and Ranulph, running to the
front door, threw it open.  As he did so a young man, with blood flowing
from a cut on the temple, stepped inside.




CHAPTER VIII

It was M. Savary dit Detricand.

"Whew--what fools there are in the world!  Pish, you silly apes!" the
young man said, glancing through the open doorway again to where the
connetable's men were dragging two vile-looking ruffians into the Vier
Prison.

"What's happened, monsieur?" said Ranulph, closing the door and bolting
it.

"What was it, monsieur?" asked Guida anxiously, for painful events had
crowded too fast that morning.  Detricand was stanching the blood at his
temple with the scarf from his neck.

"Get him some cordial, Guida--he's wounded!" said de Mauprat.

Detricand waved a hand almost impatiently, and dropped upon the veille,
swinging a leg backwards and forwards.

"It's nothing, I protest--nothing whatever, and I'll have no cordial, not
a drop.  A drink of water--a mouthful of that, if I must drink."

Guida caught up a hanap of water from the dresser, and passed it to him.
Her fingers trembled a little.  His were steady enough as he took the
hanap and drank off the water at a gulp.  Again she filled it and again
he drank.  The blood was running in a tiny little stream down his cheek.
She caught her handkerchief from her girdle impulsively, and gently wiped
it away.

"Let me bandage the wound," she said eagerly.  Her eyes were alight with
compassion, certainly not because it was the dissipated French invader,
M. Savary dit Detricand,--no one knew that he was the young Comte de
Tournay of the House of Vaufontaine, but because he was a wounded fellow-
creature.  She would have done the same for the poor beganne, Dormy
Jamais, who still prowled the purlieus of St. Heliers.

It was clear, however, that Detricand felt differently.  The moment she
touched him he became suddenly still.  He permitted her to wash the blood
from his temple and forehead, to stanch it first with brandied jeru-
leaves, then with cobwebs, and afterwards to bind it with her own
kerchief.

Detricand thrilled at the touch of the warm, tremulous fingers.  He had
never been quite so near her before.  His face was not far from hers.
Now her breath fanned him.  As he bent his head for the bandaging, he
could see the soft pulsing of her bosom, and hear the beating of her
heart.  Her neck was so full and round and soft, and her voice--surely
he had never heard a voice so sweet and strong, a tone so well poised,
so resonantly pleasant.

When she had finished, he had an impulse to catch the hand as it dropped
away from his forehead, and kiss it; not as he had kissed many a hand,
hotly one hour and coldly the next, but with an unpurchasable kind of
gratitude characteristic of this especial sort of sinner.  He was just
young enough, and there was still enough natural health in him, to know
the healing touch of a perfect decency, a pure truth of spirit.  Yet he
had been drunk the night before, drunk with three noncommissioned
officers--and he a gentleman, in spite of all, as could be plainly seen.

He turned his head away from the girl quickly, and looked straight into
the eyes of her grandfather.

"I'll tell you how it was, Sieur de Mauprat," said he.  "I was crossing
the Place du Vier Prison when a rascal threw a cleaver at me from a
window.  If it had struck me on the head--well, the Royal Court would
have buried me, and without a slab to my grave like Rullecour.  I burst
open the door of the house, ran up the stairs, gripped the ruffian, and
threw him through the window into the street.  As I did so a door opened
behind, and another cut-throat came at me with a pistol.  He fired--fired
wide.  I ran in on him, and before he had time to think he was out of the
window too.  Then the other brute below fired up at me.  The bullet
gashed my temple, as you see.  After that, it was an affair of the
connetable and his men.  I had had enough fighting before breakfast.
I saw your open door, and here I am--monsieur, monsieur, monsieur,
mademoiselle!"  He bowed to each of them and glanced towards the table
hungrily.

Ranulph placed a seat for him.  He viewed the conger eel and limpets with
an avid eye, but waited for the chevalier and de Mauprat to sit.  He had
no sooner taken a mouthful, however, and thrown a piece of bread to
Biribi the dog, than, starting again to his feet, he said:

"Your pardon, monsieur le chevalier, that brute in the Place has knocked
all sense from my head!  I've a letter for you, brought from Rouen by one
of the refugees who came yesterday."  He drew from his breast a packet
and handed it over.  "I went out to their ship last night."

The chevalier looked with surprise and satisfaction at the seal on the
letter, and, breaking it, spread open the paper, fumbled for the eye-
glass which he always carried in his waistcoat, and began reading
diligently.

Meanwhile Ranulph turned to Guida.  "To-morrow Jean Touzel and his wife
and I go to the Ecrehos Rocks in Jean's boat," said he.  "A vessel was
driven ashore there three days ago, and my carpenters are at work on her.
If you can go and the wind holds fair, you shall be brought back safe by
sundown--Jean says so too."

Of all boatmen and fishermen on the coast, Jean Touzel was most to be
trusted.  No man had saved so many shipwrecked folk, none risked his life
so often; and he had never had a serious accident.  To go to sea with
Jean Touzel, folk said, was safer than living on land.  Guida loved the
sea; and she could sail a boat, and knew the tides and currents of the
south coast as well as most fishermen.

M. de Mauprat met her inquiring glance and nodded assent.  She then said
gaily to Ranulph: "I shall sail her, shall I not?"

"Every foot of the way," he answered.

She laughed and clapped her hands.  Suddenly the little chevalier broke
in.  "By the head of John the Baptist!" said he.

Detricand put down his knife and fork in amazement, and Guida coloured,
for the words sounded almost profane upon the chevalier's lips.

Du Champsavoys held up his eye-glass, and, turning from one to the other,
looked at each of them imperatively yet abstractedly too.  Then, pursing
up his lower lip, and with a growing amazement which carried him to
distant heights of reckless language, he said again:

"By the head of John the Baptist on a charger!"  He looked at Detricand
with a fierceness which was merely the tension of his thought.  If he had
looked at a wall it would have been the same.  But Detricand, who had an
almost whimsical sense of humour, felt his neck in affected concern as
though to be quite sure of it.  "Chevalier," said he, "you shock us--you
shock us, dear chevalier."

"The most painful things, and the most wonderful too," said the
chevalier, tapping the letter with his eye-glass; "the most terrible and
yet the most romantic things are here.  A drop of cider, if you please,
mademoiselle, before I begin to read it to you, if I may--if I may--eh?"

They all nodded eagerly.  Guida handed him a mogue of cider.  The little
grey thrush of a man sipped it, and in a voice no bigger than a bird's
began:

     "From Lucillien du Champsavoys, Comte de Chanier, by the hand of a
     faithful friend, who goeth hence from among divers dangers, unto my
     cousin, the Chevalier du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir, late Gentleman
     of the Bedchamber to the best of monarchs, Louis XV, this writing:

     "MY DEAR AND HONOURED Cousin"--The chevalier paused, frowned a
     trifle, and tapped his lips with his finger in a little lyrical
     emotion--"My dear and honoured cousin, all is lost.  The France we
     loved is no more.  The twentieth of June saw the last vestige of
     Louis's power pass for ever.  That day ten thousand of the sans-
     culottes forced their way into the palace to kill him.  A faithful
     few surrounded him.  In the mad turmoil, we were fearful, he was
     serene.  'Feel,' said Louis, placing his hand on his bosom, 'feel
     whether this is the beating of a heart shaken by fear.'  Ah, my
     friend, your heart would have clamped in misery to hear the Queen
     cry: 'What have I to fear?  Death?  it is as well to-day as to-
     morrow; they can do no more!'  Their lives were saved, the day
     passed, but worse came after.

     "The tenth of August came.  With it too, the end-the dark and bloody
     end-of the Swiss Guard.  The Jacobins had their way at last.  The
     Swiss Guard died in the Court of the Carrousel as they marched to
     the Assembly to save the King.  Thus the last circle of defence
     round the throne was broken.  The palace was given over to flame and
     the sword.  Of twenty nobles of the court I alone escaped.  France
     is become a slaughter-house.  The people cried out for more liberty,
     and their liberators gave them the freedom of death.  A fortnight
     ago, Danton, the incomparable fiend, let loose his assassins upon
     the priests of God.  Now Paris is made a theatre where the people
     whom Louis and his nobles would have died to save have turned every
     street into a stable of carnage, every prison and hospital into a
     vast charnel-house.  One last revolting thing alone remains to be
     done--the murder of the King; then this France that we have loved
     will have no name and no place in our generation.  She will rise
     again, but we shall not see her, for our eyes have been blinded with
     blood, for ever darkened by disaster.  Like a mistress upon whom we
     have lavished the days of our youth and the strength of our days,
     she has deceived us; she has stricken us while we slept.  Behold a
     Caliban now for her paramour!

     "Weep with me, for France despoils me.  One by one my friends have
     fallen beneath the axe.  Of my four sons but one remains.  Henri was
     stabbed by Danton's ruffians at the Hotel de Ville; Gaston fought
     and died with the Swiss Guard, whose hacked and severed limbs were
     broiled and eaten in the streets by these monsters who mutilate the
     land.  Isidore, the youngest, defied a hundred of Robespierre's
     cowards on the steps of the Assembly, and was torn to pieces by the
     mob.  Etienne alone is left.  But for him and for the honour of my
     house I too would find a place beside the King and die with him.
     Etienne is with de la Rochejaquelein in Brittany.  I am here at
     Rouen.

     "Brittany and Normandy still stand for the King.  In these two
     provinces begins the regeneration of France: we call it the War of
     the Vendee.  On that Isle of Jersey there you should almost hear the
     voice of de la Rochejaquelein and the marching cries of our loyal
     legions.  If there be justice in God we shall conquer.  But there
     will be joy no more for such as you or me, nor hope, nor any peace.
     We live only for those who come after.  Our duty remains, all else
     is dead.  You did well to go, and I do well to stay.

     "By all these piteous relations you shall know the importance of the
     request I now set forth.

     "My cousin by marriage of the House of Vaufontaine has lost all his
     sons.  With the death of the Prince of Vaufontaine, there is in
     France no direct heir to the house, nor can it, by the law, revert
     to my house or my heirs.  Now of late the Prince hath urged me to
     write to you--for he is here in seclusion with me--and to unfold to
     you what has hitherto been secret.  Eleven years ago the only nephew
     of the Prince, after some naughty escapades, fled from the Court
     with Rullecour the adventurer, who invaded the Isle of Jersey.  From
     that hour he has been lost to France.  Some of his companions in
     arms returned after a number of years.  All with one exception
     declared that he was killed in the battle at St. Heliers.  One,
     however, maintains that he was still living and in the prison
     hospital when his comrades were set free.

     "It is of him I write to you.  He is--as you will perchance
     remember--the Comte de Tournay.  He was then not more than seventeen
     years of age, slight of build, with brownish hair, dark grey eyes,
     and had over the right shoulder a scar from a sword thrust.  It
     seemeth little possible that, if living, he should still remain in
     that Isle of Jersey.  He may rather have returned to obscurity in
     France or have gone to England to be lost to name and remembrance
     --or even indeed beyond the seas.

     "That you may perchance give me word of him is the object of my
     letter, written in no more hope than I live; and you can well guess
     how faint that is.  One young nobleman preserved to France may yet
     be the great unit that will save her.

     "Greet my poor countrymen yonder in the name of one who still waits
     at a desecrated altar; and for myself you must take me as I am, with
     the remembrance of what I was, even

                    "Your faithful friend and loving kinsman,

                                        "CHANIER."

     "All this, though in the chances of war you read it not till
     wintertide, was told you at Rouen this first day of September 1792."


During the reading, broken by feeling and reflective pauses on the
chevalier's part, the listeners showed emotion after the nature of each.
The Sieur de Mauprat's fingers clasped and unclasped on the top of his
cane, little explosions of breath came from his compressed lips, his
eyebrows beetled over till the eyes themselves seemed like two glints of
flame.  Delagarde dropped a fist heavily upon the table, and held it
there clinched, while his heel beat a tattoo of excitement upon the
floor.  Guida's breath came quick and fast--as Ranulph said afterwards,
she was "blanc comme un linge."  She shuddered painfully when the
slaughter and burning of the Swiss Guards was read.  Her brain was so
swimming with the horrors of anarchy that the latter part of the letter
dealing with the vanished Count of Tournay passed by almost unheeded.

But this particular matter greatly interested Ranulph and de Mauprat.
They leaned forward eagerly, seizing every word, and both instinctively
turned towards Detricand when the description of de Tournay was read.

As for Detricand himself, he listened to the first part of the letter
like a man suddenly roused out of a dream.  For the first time since the
Revolution had begun, the horror of it and the meaning of it were brought
home to him.  He had been so long expatriated, had loitered so long in
the primrose path of daily sleep and nightly revel, had fallen so far,
that he little realised how the fiery wheels of Death were spinning in
France, or how black was the torment of her people.  His face turned
scarlet as the thing came home to him now.  He dropped his head in his
hand as if to listen more attentively, but it was in truth to hide his
emotion.  When the names of Vaufontaine and de Tournay were mentioned, he
gave a little start, then suddenly ruled himself to a strange stillness.
His face seemed presently to clear; he even smiled a little.  Conscious
that de Mauprat and Delagarde were watching him, he appeared to listen
with a keen but impersonal interest, not without its effect upon his
scrutinisers.  He nodded his head as though he understood the situation.
He acted very well; he bewildered the onlookers.  They might think he
tallied with the description of the Comte de Tournay, yet he gave the
impression that the matter was not vital to himself.  But when the little
Chevalier stopped and turned his eye-glass upon him with sudden startled
inquiry, he found it harder to keep composure.

"Singular--singular!" said the old man, and returned to the reading of
the letter.

When he ended there was absolute silence for a moment.  Then the
chevalier lifted his eye-glass again and looked at Detricand intently.

"Pardon me, monsieur," he said, "but you were with Rullecour--as I was
saying."

Detricand nodded with a droll sort of helplessness, and answered: "In
Jersey I never have chance to forget it, Chevalier."

Du Champsavoys, with a naive and obvious attempt at playing counsel,
fixed him again with the glass, pursed his lips, and with the importance
of a greffier at the ancient Cour d'Heritage, came one step nearer to his
goal.

"Have you knowledge of the Comte de Tournay, monsieur?"

"I knew him--as you were saying, Chevalier," answered Detricand lightly.

Then the Chevalier struck home.  He dropped his fingers upon the table,
stood up, and, looking straight into Detricand's eyes, said:

"Monsieur, you are the Comte de Tournay!"

The Chevalier involuntarily held the silence for an instant.  Nobody
stirred.  De Mauprat dropped his chin upon his hands, and his eyebrows
drew down in excitement.  Guida gave a little cry of astonishment.  But
Detricand answered the Chevalier with a look of blank surprise and a
shrug of the shoulder, which had the effect desired.

"Thank you, Chevalier," said he with quizzical humour.  "Now I know who I
am, and if it isn't too soon to levy upon the kinship, I shall dine with
you today, chevalier.  I paid my debts yesterday, and sous are scarce,
but since we are distant cousins I may claim grist at the family mill,
eh?"

The Chevalier sat, or rather dropped into his chair again.

"Then you are not the Comte de Tournay, monsieur," said he hopelessly.

"Then I shall not dine with you to-day," retorted Detricand gaily.

You fit the tale," said de Mauprat dubiously, touching the letter with
his finger.

"Let me see," rejoined Detricand.  "I've been a donkey farmer, a
shipmaster's assistant, a tobacco pedlar, a quarryman, a wood merchant,
an interpreter, a fisherman--that's very like the Comte de Tournay!  On
Monday night I supped with a smuggler; on Tuesday I breakfasted on soupe
a la graisse with Manon Moignard the witch; on Wednesday I dined with
Dormy Jamais and an avocat disbarred for writing lewd songs for a
chocolate-house; on Thursday I went oyster-fishing with a native who
has three wives, and a butcher who has been banished four times for not
keeping holy the Sabbath Day; and I drank from eleven o'clock till
sunrise this morning with three Scotch sergeants of the line--which is
very like the Comte de Tournay, as you were saying, Chevalier!  I am five
feet eleven, and the Comte de Tournay was five feet ten--which is no
lie," he added under his breath.  "I have a scar, but it's over my left
shoulder and not over my right--which is also no lie," he added under his
breath.  "De Tournay's hair was brown, and mine, you see, is almost a
dead black--fever did that," he added under his breath.  "De Tournay
escaped the day after the Battle of Jersey from the prison hospital, I
was left, and here I've been ever since--Yves Savary dit Detricand at
your service, chevalier."

A pained expression crossed over the Chevalier's face.  "I am most sorry;
I am most sorry," he said hesitatingly.  "I had no wish to wound your
feelings."

"Ah, it is de Tournay to whom you must apologise," said Detricand
musingly, with a droll look.

"It is a pity," continued the Chevalier, "for somehow all at once I
recalled a resemblance.  I saw de Tournay when he was fourteen--yes,
I think it was fourteen--and when I looked at you, monsieur, his face
came back to me.  It would have made my cousin so happy if you had been
the Comte de Tournay and I had found you here."  The old man's voice
trembled a little.  "We are growing fewer every day, we Frenchmen of the
ancient families.  And it would have made my cousin so happy, as I was
saying, monsieur."

Detricand's manner changed; he became serious.  The devil-may-care,
irresponsible shamelessness of his face dropped away like a mask.
Something had touched him.  His voice changed too.

"De Tournay was a much better fellow than I am, chevalier," said he--"
and that's no lie," he added under his breath.  "De Tournay was a fiery,
ambitious, youngster with bad companions.  De Tournay told me he repented
of coming with Rullecour, and he felt he had spoilt his life--that he
could never return to France again or to his people."

The old Chevalier shook his head sadly.  "Is he dead?" he asked.

There was a slight pause, and then Detricand answered: "No, still
living."

"Where is he?"

"I promised de Tournay that I would never reveal that."

"Might I not write to him?" asked the old man.  "Assuredly, Chevalier."

"Could you--will you--despatch a letter to him from me, monsieur?"

"Upon my honour, yes."

"I thank you--I thank you, monsieur; I will write it to-day."

"As you will, Chevalier.  I will ask you for the letter to-night,"
rejoined Detricand.  "It may take time to reach de Tournay; but he shall
receive it into his own hands."

De Mauprat trembled to his feet to put the question he knew the Chevalier
dreaded to ask:

"Do you think that monsieur le comte will return to France?"

"I think he will," answered Detricand slowly.

"It will make my cousin so happy--so happy," quavered the little
Chevalier.  "Will you take snuff with me, monsieur?" He offered his
silver snuff-box to his vagrant countryman.  This was a mark of favour
he showed to few.

Detricand bowed, accepted, and took a pinch.  "I must be going," he said.




CHAPTER IX

At eight o'clock the next morning, Guida and her fellow-voyagers, bound
for the Ecrehos Rocks, had caught the first ebb of the tide, and with a
fair wind from the sou'-west had skirted the coast, ridden lightly over
the Banc des Violets, and shaped their course nor'-east.  Guida kept the
helm all the way, as she had been promised by Ranulph.  It was still more
than half tide when they approached the rocks, and with a fair wind there
should be ease in landing.

No more desolate spot might be imagined.  To the left, as you faced
towards Jersey, was a long sand-bank.  Between the rocks and the sand-
bank shot up a tall, lonely shaft of granite with an evil history.  It
had been chosen as the last refuge of safety for the women and children
of a shipwrecked vessel, in the belief that high tide would not reach
them.  But the wave rose up maliciously, foot by foot, till it drowned
their cries for ever in the storm.  The sand-bank was called "Ecriviere,"
and the rock was afterwards known as the "Pierre des Femmes."

Other rocks less prominent, but no less treacherous, flanked it--the Noir
Sabloniere and the Grande Galere.  To the right of the main island were a
group of others, all reef and shingle, intersected by treacherous
channels; in calm lapped by water with the colours of a prism of crystal,
in storm by a leaden surf and flying foam.  These were known as the
Colombiere, the Grosse Tete, Tas de Pois, and the Marmotiers; each with
its retinue of sunken reefs and needles of granitic gneiss lying low in
menace.  Happy the sailor caught in a storm and making for the shelter
the little curves in the island afford, who escapes a twist of the
current, a sweep of the tide, and the impaling fingers of the submarine
palisades.

Beyond these rocks lay Maitre Ile, all gneiss and shingle, a desert in
the sea.  The holy men of the early Church, beholding it from the shore
of Normandy, had marked it for a refuge from the storms of war and the
follies of the world.  So it came to pass, for the honour of God and the
Virgin Mary, the Abbe of Val Richer builded a priory there: and there now
lie in peace the bones of the monks of Val Richer beside the skeletons of
unfortunate gentlemen of the sea of later centuries--pirates from France,
buccaneers from England, and smugglers from Jersey, who kept their trysts
in the precincts of the ancient chapel.

The brisk air of early autumn made the blood tingle in Guida's cheeks.
Her eyes were big with light and enjoyment.  Her hair was caught close by
a gay cap of her own knitting, but a little of it escaped, making a
pretty setting to her face.

The boat rode under all her courses, until, as Jean said, they had put
the last lace on her bonnet.  Guida's hands were on the tiller firmly,
doing Jean's bidding promptly.  In all they were five.  Besides Guida and
Ranulph, Jean and Jean's wife, there was a young English clergyman of the
parish of St. Michael's, who had come from England to fill the place of
the rector for a few months.  Word had been brought to him that a man was
dying on the Ecrehos.  He had heard that the boat was going, he had found
Jean Touzel, and here he was with a biscuit in his hand and a black-jack
of French wine within easy reach.  Not always in secret the Reverend
Lorenzo Dow loved the good things of this world.

The most notable characteristic of the young clergyman's appearance was
his outer guilelessness and the oddness of his face.  His head was rather
big for his body; he had a large mouth which laughed easily, a noble
forehead, and big, short-sighted eyes.  He knew French well, but could
speak almost no Jersey patois, so, in compliment to him, Jean Touzel,
Ranulph, and Guida spoke in English.  This ability to speak English--his
own English--was the pride of Jean's life.  He babbled it all the way,
and chiefly about a mythical Uncle Elias, who was the text for many a
sermon.

"Times past," said he, as they neared Maitre Ile, "mon onc' 'Lias he
knows these Ecrehoses better as all the peoples of the world--respe d'la
compagnie.  Mon onc' 'Lias he was a fine man.  Once when there is a fight
between de Henglish and de hopping Johnnies," he pointed towards France,
"dere is seven French ship, dere is two Henglish ship--gentlemen-of-war
dey are call.  Eh ben, one of de Henglish ships he is not a gentleman-of-
war, he is what you call go-on-your-own-hook--privator.  But it is all de
same--tres-ba, all right!  What you t'ink coum to pass?  De big Henglish
ship she is hit ver' bad, she is all break-up.  Efin, dat leetle privator
he stan' round on de fighting side of de gentleman-of-war and take de
fire by her loneliness.  Say, then, wherever dere is troub' mon onc'
'Lias he is there, he stan' outside de troub' an' look on--dat is his
hobby.  You call it hombog?  Oh, nannin-gia!  Suppose two peoples goes to
fight, ah bah, somebody must pick up de pieces--dat is mon onc' 'Lias!
He have his boat full of hoysters; so he sit dere all alone and watch dat
great fight, an' heat de hoyster an' drink de cider vine.

"Ah, bah!  mon onc' 'Lias he is standin' hin de door dat day.  Dat is what
we say on Jersey--when a man have some ver' great luck we say he stan'
hin de door.  I t'ink it is from de Bible or from de helmanac--sacre moi,
I not know....  If I talk too much you give me dat black-jack."

They gave him the black-jack.  After he had drunk and wiped his mouth on
his sleeve, he went on:

"O my good-ma'm'selle, a leetle more to de wind.  Ah, dat is right--
trejous!  .  .  .  Dat fight it go like two bulls on a vergee--respe d'la
compagnie.  Mon onc' 'Lias he have been to Hengland, he have sing 'God
save our greshus King'; so he t'ink a leetle--Ef he go to de French,
likely dey will hang him.  Mon onc' 'Lias, he is what you call
patreeteesm.  He say, 'Hengland, she is mine--trejous.' Efin, he sail
straight for de Henglish ships.  Dat is de greates' man, mon onc' 'Lias
--respe d'la compagnie!  he coum on de side which is not fighting.  Ah
bah, he tell dem dat he go to save de gentleman-of-war.  He see a
hofficier all bloodiness and he call hup: 'Es-tu gentiment?' he say.
'Gentiment,' say de hofficier; 'han' you?'  'Naicely, yank you!' mon onc'
'Lias he say.  'I will save you,' say mon onc' 'Lias--'I will save de
ship of God save our greshus King.' De hofficier wipe de tears out of his
face.  'De King will reward you, man alive,' he say.  Mon onc' 'Lias he
touch his breast and speak out.  'Mon hofficier, my reward is here--
trejous.  I will take you into de Ecrehoses.'  'Coum up and save de
King's ships,' says de hofficier.  'I will take no reward,' say mon onc'
'Lias, 'but, for a leetle pourboire, you will give me de privator
--eh?'  'Milles sacres'--say de hofficier, 'mines saeres--de privator!'
he say, ver' surprise'.  'Man doux d'la vie--I am damned!' 'You are
damned trulee, if you do not get into de Ecrehoses,' say mon onc' 'Lias
--'A bi'tot, good-bye!' he say.  De hofficier call down to him: 'Is dere
nosing else you will take?' 'Nannin, do not tempt me,' say mon onc'
'Lias.  'I am not a gourman'.  I will take de privator--dat is my hobby.'
All de time de cannons grand--dey brow-brou! boum-boum!--what you call
discomfortable.  Time is de great t'ing, so de hofficier wipe de tears
out of his face again.  'Coum up,' he say; 'de privator is yours.'

"Away dey go.  You see dat spot where we coum to land, Ma'm'selle
Landresse--where de shingle look white, de leetle green grass above?  Dat
is where mon onc' 'Lias he bring in de King's ship and de privator.
Gatd'en'ale--it is a journee awful!  He twist to de right, he shape to de
left trough de teeth of de rocks--all safe--vera happee--to dis nice
leetle bay of de Maitre Ile dey coum.  De Frenchies dey grind dere teeth
and spit de fire.  But de Henglish laugh at demdey are safe.  'Frien' of
my heart,' say de hofficier to mon onc' 'Lias, 'pilot of pilots,' he say,
'in de name of our greshus King I t'ank you--A bi'tot, good-bye!' he say.
'Tres-ba,' mon onc' 'Lias he say den, 'I will go to my privator.' 'You
will go to de shore,' say de hofficier.  'You will wait on de shore till
de captain and his men of de privator coum to you.  When dey coum, de
ship is yours--de privator is for you.' Mon onc' 'Lias he is like a
child--he believe.  He 'bout ship and go shore.  Misery me, he sit on dat
rocking-stone you see tipping on de wind.  But if he wait until de men of
de privator coum to him, he will wait till we see him sitting there now.
Gache-a-penn, you say patriote?  Mon onc' 'Lias he has de patreeteesm,
and what happen?  He save de ship of de greshus King God save--and dey
eat up his hoysters!  He get nosing.  Gad'rabotin--respe d'la compagnie--
if dere is a ship of de King coum to de Ecrehoses, and de hofficier say
to me"--he tapped his breast--"'Jean Touzel, tak de ships of de King
trough de rocks,'--ah bah, I would rememb' mon onc' 'Lias.  I would say,
'A bi'tot-good-bye.' .  .  .  Slowlee--slowlee!  We are at de place.
Bear wif de land, ma'm'selle!  Steadee!  As you go!  V'la!  hitch now,
Maitre Ranulph."

The keel of the boat grated on the shingle.

The air of the morning, the sport of using the elements for one's
pleasure, had given Guida an elfish sprightliness of spirits.  Twenty
times during Jean's recital she had laughed gaily, and never sat a laugh
better on any one's countenance than on hers.  Her teeth were strong,
white, and regular; in themselves they gave off a sort of shining mirth.

At first the lugubrious wife of the happy Jean was inclined to resent
Guida's gaiety as unseemly, for Jean's story sounded to her as serious
statement of fact; which incapacity for humour probably accounted for
Jean's occasional lapses from domestic grace.  If Jean had said that he
had met a periwinkle dancing a hornpipe with an oyster she would have
muttered heavily "Think of that!"  The most she could say to any one was:
"I believe you, ma couzaine."  Some time in her life her voice had
dropped into that great well she called her body, and it came up only now
and then like an echo.  There never was anything quite so fat as she.
She was found weeping one day on the veille because she was no longer
able to get her shoulders out of the window to use the clothes-lines
stretching to her neighbour's over the way.  If she sat down in your
presence, it was impossible to do aught but speculate as to whether she
could get up alone.  Yet she went abroad on the water a great deal with
Jean.  At first the neighbours gave out sinister suspicions as to Jean's
intentions, for sea-going with your own wife was uncommon among the
sailors of the coast.  But at last these dark suggestions settled down
into a belief that Jean took her chiefly for ballast; and thereafter she
was familiarly called "Femme de Ballast."

Talking was no virtue in her eyes.  What was going on in her mind no one
ever knew.  She was more phlegmatic than an Indian; but the tails of the
sheep on the Town Hill did not better show the quarter of the wind than
the changing colour of Aimable's face indicated Jean's coming or going.
For Mattresse Aimable had one eternal secret, an unwavering passion for
Jean Touzel.  If he patted her on the back on a day when the fishing was
extra fine, her heart pumped so hard she had to sit down; if, passing her
lonely bed of a morning, he shook her great toe to wake her, she blushed,
and turned her face to the wall in placid happiness.  She was so
credulous and matter-of-fact that if Jean had told her she must die on
the spot, she would have said "Think of that!" or "Je te crais," and
died.  If in the vague dusk of her brain the thought glimmered that she
was ballast for Jean on sea and anchor on land, she still was content.
For twenty years the massive, straight-limbed Jean had stood to her for
all things since the heavens and the earth were created.  Once, when she
had burnt her hand in cooking supper for him, his arm made a trial of her
girth, and he kissed her.  The kiss was nearer her ear than her lips, but
to her mind it was the most solemn proof of her connubial happiness and
of Jean's devotion.  She was a Catholic, unlike Jean and most people of
her class in Jersey, and ever since that night he kissed her she had told
an extra bead on her rosary and said another prayer.

These were the reasons why at first she was inclined to resent Guida's
laughter.  But when she saw that Maitre Ranulph and the curate and Jean
himself laughed, she settled down to a grave content until they landed.

They had scarce reached the deserted chapel where their dinner was to be
cooked by Maitresse Aimable, when Ranulph called them to note a vessel
bearing in their direction.

"She's not a coasting craft," said Jean.

"She doesn't look like a merchant vessel," said Ranulph, eyeing her
through his telescope.  "Why, she's a warship!" he added.

Jean thought she was not, but Maitre Ranulph said "Pardi, I ought to
know, Jean.  Ship-building is my trade, to say nothing of guns--I wasn't
two years in the artillery for nothing.  See the low bowsprit and the
high poop.  She's bearing this way.  She'll be Narcissus!" he said
slowly.

That was Philip d'Avranche's ship.

Guida's face lighted, her heart beat faster.  Ranulph turned on his heel.

"Where are you going, Ro?" Guida said, taking a step after him.

"On the other side, to my men and the wreck," he said, pointing.

Guida glanced once more towards the man-o'-war: and then, with mischief
in her eye, turned towards Jean.  "Suppose," she said to him archly,
"suppose the ship should want to come in, of course you'd remember your
onc' 'Lias, and say, 'A bi'tot, good-bye!"'

An evasive "Ah bah!" was the only reply Jean vouchsafed.

Ranulph joined his men at the wreck, and the Reverend Lorenzo Dow went
about the Lord's business in the little lean-to of sail-cloth and ship's
lumber which had been set up near to the toil of the carpenters.  When
the curate entered the but the sick man was in a doze.  He turned his
head from side to side restlessly and mumbled to himself.  The curate,
sitting on the ground beside the man, took from his pocket a book, and
began writing in a strange, cramped hand.  This book was his journal.
When a youth he had been a stutterer, and had taken refuge from talk in
writing, and the habit stayed even as his affliction grew less.  The
important events of the day or the week, the weather, the wind, the
tides, were recorded, together with sundry meditations of the Reverend
Lorenzo Dow.  The pages were not large, and brevity was Mr. Dow's
journalistic virtue.  Beyond the diligent keeping of this record, he had
no habits, certainly no precision, no remembrance, no system: the
business of his life ended there.  He had quietly vacated two curacies
because there had been bitter complaints that the records of certain
baptisms, marriages, and burials might only be found in the chequered
journal of his life, sandwiched between fantastic reflections and remarks
upon the rubric.  The records had been exact enough, but the system was
not canonical, and it rested too largely upon the personal ubiquity of
the itinerary priest, and the safety of his journal--and of his life.

Guida, after the instincts of her nature, had at once sought the highest
point on the rocky islet, and there she drank in the joy of sight and
sound and feeling.  She could see--so perfect was the day--the line
marking the Minquiers far on the southern horizon, the dark and perfect
green of the Jersey slopes, and the white flags of foam which beat
against the Dirouilles and the far-off Paternosters, dissolving as they
flew, their place taken by others, succeeding and succeeding, as a
soldier steps into a gap in the line of battle.  Something in these
rocks, something in the Paternosters--perhaps their distance, perhaps
their remoteness from all other rocks--fascinated her.  As she looked at
them, she suddenly felt a chill, a premonition, a half-spiritual, half-
material telegraphy of the inanimate to the animate: not from off cold
stone to sentient life; but from that atmosphere about the inanimate
thing, where the life of man has spent itself and been dissolved,
leaving--who can tell what?  Something which speaks but yet has no sound.

The feeling which possessed Guida as she looked at the Paternosters was
almost like blank fear.  Yet physical fear she had never felt, not since
that day when the battle raged in the Vier Marchi, and Philip d'Avranche
had saved her from the destroying scimitar of the Turk.  Now that scene
all came back to her in a flash, as it were; and she saw again the dark
snarling face of the Mussulman, the blue-and-white silk of his turban,
the black and white of his waistcoat, the red of the long robe, and the
glint of his uplifted sword.  Then in contrast, the warmth, brightness,
and bravery on the face of the lad in blue and gold who struck aside the
descending blade and caught her up in his arms; and she had nestled
there--in those arms of Philip d'Avranche.  She remembered how he had
kissed her, and how she had kissed him--he a lad and she a little child
--as he left her with her mother in the watchmaker's shop in the Vier
Marchi that day.  .  .  .  And she had never seen him again until
yesterday.

She looked from the rocks to the approaching frigate.  Was it the
Narcissus coming--coming to this very island?  She recalled Philip--how
gallant he was yesterday, how cool, with what an air of command!  How
light he had made of the riot!  Ranulph's strength and courage she
accepted as a matter of course, and was glad that he was brave, generous,
and good; but the glamour of distance and mystery were around d'Avranche.
Remembrance, like a comet, went circling through the firmament of eleven
years, from the Vier Marchi to the Place du Vier Prison.

She watched the ship slowly bearing with the land.  The Jack was flying
from the mizzen.  They were now taking in her topsails.  She was so near
that Guida could see the anchor a-cockbell, and the poop lanthorns.  She
could count the guns like long black horns shooting out from a rhinoceros
hide: she could discern the figurehead lion snarling into the spritsail.
Presently the ship came up to the wind and lay to.  Then she signalled
for a pilot, and Guida ran towards the ruined chapel, calling for Jean
Touzel.

In spite of Jean's late protests as to piloting a "gentleman-of-war,"
this was one of the joyful moments of his life.  He could not loosen his
rowboat quick enough; he was away almost before you could have spoken his
name.  Excited as Guida was, she could not resist calling after him:

"'God save our greshus King!  A bi'tot--goodbye!'"




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

A sort of chuckle not entirely pleasant
Sacrifice to the god of the pin-hole
What fools there are in the world






THE BATTLE OF THE STRONG

[A ROMANCE OF TWO KINGDOMS]

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.



CHAPTER X

As Ranulph had surmised, the ship was the Narcissus, and its first
lieutenant was Philip d'Avranche.  The night before, orders had reached
the vessel from the Admiralty that soundings were to be taken at the
Ecrehos.  The captain had at once made inquiries for a pilot, and Jean
Touzel was commended to him.  A messenger sent to Jean found that he had
already gone to the Ecrehos.  The captain had then set sail, and now,
under Jean's skilful pilotage, the Narcissus twisted and crept through
the teeth of the rocks at the entrance, and slowly into the cove, reefs
on either side gaping and girding at her, her keel all but scraping the
serrated granite beneath.  She anchored, and boats put off to take
soundings and explore the shores.  Philip was rowed in by Jean Touzel.

Stepping out upon the beach of Mattre 'Ile, Philip slowly made his way
over the shingle to the ruined chapel, in no good humour with himself or
with the world, for exploring these barren rocks seemed a useless whim of
the Admiralty, and he could not conceive of any incident rising from the
monotony of duty to lighten the darkness of this very brilliant day.
His was not the nature to enjoy the stony detail of his profession.
Excitement and adventure were as the breath of life to him, and since he
had played his little part at the Jersey battle in a bandbox eleven years
before, he had touched hands with accidents of flood and field in many
countries.

He had been wrecked on the island of Trinidad in a tornado, losing his
captain and his ship; had seen active service in America and in India;
won distinction off the coast of Arabia in an engagement with Spanish
cruisers; and was now waiting for his papers as commander of a ship of
his own, and fretted because the road of fame and promotion was so
toilsome.  Rumours of war with France had set his blood dancing a little,
but for him most things were robbed of half their pleasure because they
did not come at once.

This was a moody day with him, for he had looked to spend it differently.
As he walked up the shingle his thoughts were hanging about a cottage in
the Place du Vier Prison.  He had hoped to loiter in a doorway there, and
to empty his sailor's heart in well-practised admiration before the altar
of village beauty.  The sight of Guida's face the day before had given a
poignant pulse to his emotions, unlike the broken rhythm of past comedies
of sentiment and melodramas of passion.  According to all logic of
custom, the acuteness of yesterday's impression should have been followed
up by today's attack; yet here he was, like another Robinson Crusoe,
"kicking up the shingle of a cursed Patmos"--so he grumbled aloud.
Patmos was not so wild a shot after all, for no sooner had he spoken the
word than, looking up, he saw in the doorway of the ruined chapel the
gracious figure of a girl: and a book of revelations was opened and
begun.

At first he did not recognise Guida.  There was only a picture before him
which, by some fantastic transmission, merged into his reveries.  What he
saw was an ancient building--just such a humble pile of stone and rough
mortar as one might see on some lone cliff of the AEgean or on abandoned
isles of the equatorial sea.  The gloom of a windowless vault was behind
the girl, but the filtered sunshine of late September fell on her head.
It brightened the white kerchief, and the bodice and skirt of a faint
pink, throwing the face into a pleasing shadow where the hand curved over
the forehead.  She stood like some Diana of a ruined temple looking out
into the staring day.

At once his pulses beat faster, for to him a woman was ever the fountain
of adventure, and an unmanageable heart sent him headlong to the oasis
where he might loiter at the spring of feminine vanity, or truth, or
impenitent gaiety, as the case might be.  In proportion as his spirits
had sunk into sour reflection, they now shot up rocket-high at the sight
of a girl's joyous pose of body and the colour and form of the picture
she made.  In him the shrewdness of a strong intelligence was mingled
with wild impulse.  In most, rashness would be the outcome of such a
marriage of characteristics; but clear-sightedness, decision, and a
little unscrupulousness had carried into success many daring actions of
his life.  This very quality of resolute daring saved him from disaster.

Impulse quickened his footsteps now.  It quickened them to a run when the
hand was dropped from the girl's forehead, and he saw again the face
whose image and influence had banished sleep from his eyes the night
before.

"Guida!" broke from his lips.

The man was transfigured.  Brightness leaped into his look, and the
greyness of his moody eye became as blue as the sea.  The professional
straightness of his figure relaxed into the elastic grace of an athlete.
He was a pipe to be played on: an actor with the ambitious brain of a
diplomatist; as weak as water, and as strong as steel; soft-hearted to
foolishness or unyielding at will.

Now, if the devil had sent a wise imp to have watch and ward of this man
and this maid, and report to him upon the meeting of their ways, the
moment Philip took Guida's hand, and her eyes met his, monsieur the
reporter of Hades might have clapped-to his book and gone back to his
dark master with the message and the record: "The hour of Destiny is
struck."

When the tide of life beats high in two mortals, and they meet in the
moment of its apogee, when all the nature is sweeping on without command,
guilelessly, yet thoughtlessly, the mere lilt of existence lulling to
sleep wisdom and tried experience--speculation points all one way.  Many
indeed have been caught away by such a conjunction of tides, and they
mostly pay the price.

But paying is part of the game of life: it is the joy of buying that we
crave.  Go down into the dark markets of the town.  See the long, narrow,
sordid streets lined with the cheap commodities of the poor.  Mark how
there is a sort of spangled gaiety, a reckless swing, a grinning
exultation in the grimy, sordid caravanserai.  The cheap colours of the
shoddy open-air clothing-house, the blank faded green of the coster's
cart; the dark bluish-red of the butcher's stall--they all take on a
value not their own in the garish lights flaring down the markets of the
dusk.  Pause to the shrill music of the street musician, hear the
tuneless voice of the grimy troubadour of the alley-ways; and then hark
to the one note that commands them all--the call which lightens up faces
sodden with base vices, eyes bleared with long looking into the dark
caverns of crime:

"Buy--buy--buy--buy--buy!"

That is the tune the piper pipes.  We would buy, and behold, we must pay.
Then the lights go out, the voices stop, and only the dark tumultuous
streets surround us, and the grime of life is ours again.  Whereupon we
go heavily to hard beds of despair, having eaten the cake we bought, and
now must pay for unto Penalty, the dark inordinate creditor.  And anon
the morning comes, and then, at last, the evening when the triste bazaars
open again, and the strong of heart and nerve move not from their
doorways, but sit still in the dusk to watch the grim world go by.  But
mostly they hurry out to the bazaars once more, answering to the fevered
call:

"Buy--buy--buy--buy--buy!"

And again they pay the price: and so on to the last foreclosure and the
immitigable end.

One of the two standing in the door of the ruined chapel on the Ecrehos
had the nature of those who buy but once and pay the price but once; the
other was of those who keep open accounts in the markets of life.  The
one was the woman and the other was the man.

There was nothing conventional in their greeting.  "You remembered me!"
he said eagerly, in English, thinking of yesterday.

"I shouldn't deserve to be here if I had forgotten," she answered
meaningly.  "Perhaps you forget the sword of the Turk?" she added.

He laughed a little, his cheek flushed with pleasure.  "I shouldn't
deserve to be here if I remembered--in the way you mean," he answered.

Her face was full of pleasure.  "The worst of it is," she said, "I never
can pay my debt.  I have owed it for eleven years, and if I should live
to be ninety I should still owe it."

His heart was beating hard and he became daring.  "So, thou shalt save my
life," he said, speaking in French. "We shall be quits then, thou and I."

The familiar French thou startled her.  To hide the instant's confusion
she turned her head away, using a hand to gather in her hair, which the
wind was lifting lightly.

"That wouldn't quite make us quits," she rejoined; "your life is
important, mine isn't.  You"--she nodded towards the Narcissus--"you
command men."

"So dost thou," he answered, persisting in the endearing pronoun.

He meant it to be endearing.  As he had sailed up and down the world,
a hundred ports had offered him a hundred adventures, all light in the
scales of purpose, but not all bad.  He had gossiped and idled and
coquetted with beauty before; but this was different, because the nature
of the girl was different from all others he had met.  It had mostly been
lightly come and lightly go with himself, as with the women it had been
easily won and easily loosed.  Conscience had not smitten him hard,
because beauty, as he had known it, though often fair and of good report,
had bloomed for others before he came.  But here was a nature fresh and
unspoiled from the hand of the potter Life.

As her head slightly turned from him again, he involuntarily noticed the
pulse beating in her neck, the rise and fall of her bosom.  Life--here
was life unpoisoned by one drop of ill thought or light experience.

"Thou dost command men too," he repeated.

She stepped forward a little from the doorway and beyond him, answering
back at him:

"Oh, no, I only knit, and keep a garden, and command a little home,
that's all.  .  .  .  Won't you let me show you the island?" she added
quickly, pointing to a hillock beyond, and moving towards it.  He
followed, speaking over her shoulder:

"That's what you seem to do," he answered, "not what you do."  Then he
added rhetorically: "I've seen a man polishing the buckle of his shoe,
and he was planning to take a city or manoeuvre a fleet."

She noticed that he had dropped the thou, and, much as its use had
embarrassed her, the gap left when the boldness was withdrawn became
filled with regret, for, though no one had dared to say it to her before,
somehow it seemed not rude on Philip's lips.  Philip?  Yes, Philip she
had called him in her childhood, and the name had been carried on into
her girlhood--he had always been Philip to her.

"No, girls don't think like that, and they don't do big things," she
replied.  "When I polish the pans"--she laughed--"and when I scour my
buckles, I just think of pans and buckles."  She tossed up her fingers
lightly, with a perfect charm of archness.

He was very close to her now.  "But girls have dreams, they have
memories."

"If women hadn't memory," she answered, "they wouldn't have much, would
they?  We can't take cities and manoeuvre fleets."  She laughed a little
ironically.  "I wonder that we think at all or have anything to think
about, except the kitchen and the garden, and baking and scouring and
spinning"--she paused slightly, her voice lowered a little--"and the sea,
and the work that men do round us.  .  .  .  Do you ever go into a
market?" she added suddenly.

Somehow she could talk easily and naturally to him.  There had been no
leading up to confidence.  She felt a sudden impulse to tell him all her
thoughts.  To know things, to understand, was a passion with her.  It
seemed to obliterate in her all that was conventional, it removed her far
from sensitive egotism.  Already she had begun "to take notice" in the
world, and that is like being born again.  As it grows, life ceases to be
cliche; and when the taking notice is supreme we call it genius; and
genius is simple and believing: it has no pride, it is naive, it is
childlike.

Philip seemed to wear no mark of convention, and Guida spoke her thoughts
freely to him.  "To go into a market seems to me so wonderful," she
continued.  "There are the cattle, the fruits, the vegetables, the
flowers, the fish, the wood; the linen from the loom, the clothes that
women's fingers have knitted.  But it isn't just those things that you
see, it's all that's behind them--the houses, the fields, and the boats
at sea, and the men and women working and working, and sleeping and
eating, and breaking their hearts with misery, and wondering what is to
be the end of it all; yet praying a little, it may be, and dreaming a
little--perhaps a very little."  She sighed, and continued: "That's as
far as I get with thinking.  What else can one do in this little island?
Why, on the globe Maitre Damian has at St. Aubin's, Jersey is no bigger
than the head of a pin.  And what should one think of here?"

Her eyes were on the sea.  Its mystery was in them, the distance, the ebb
and flow, the light of wonder and of adventure too.  "You--you've been
everywhere," she went on.  "Do you remember you sent me once from Malta a
tiny silver cross?  That was years ago, soon after the Battle of Jersey,
when I was a little bit of a girl.  Well, after I got big enough I used
to find Malta and other places on Maitre Damian's globe.  I've lived
always there, on that spot"--she pointed towards Jersey--"on that spot
one could walk round in a day.  What do I know!  You've been everywhere
--everywhere.  When you look back you've got a thousand pictures in your
mind.  You've seen great cities, temples, palaces, great armies, fleets;
you've done things: you've fought and you've commanded, though you're so
young, and you've learned about men and about many countries.  Look at
what you know, and then, if you only think, you'll laugh at what I know."

For a moment he was puzzled what to answer.  The revelation of the girl's
nature had come so quickly upon him.  He had looked for freshness,
sweetness, intelligence, and warmth of temperament, but it seemed to him
that here were flashes of power.  Yet she was only seventeen.  She had
been taught to see things with her own eyes and not another's, and she
spoke of them as she saw them; that was all.  Yet never but to her mother
had Guida said so much to any human being as within these past few
moments to Philip d'Avranche.

The conditions were almost maliciously favourable, and d'Avranche was
simple and easy as a boy, with his sailor's bonhomie and his naturally
facile spirit.  A fateful adaptability was his greatest weapon in life,
and his greatest danger.  He saw that Guida herself was unconscious of
the revelation she was making, and he showed no surprise, but he caught
the note of her simplicity, and responded in kind.  He flattered her
deftly--not that she was pressed unduly, he was too wise for that.  He
took her seriously; and this was not all dissimulation, for her every
word had glamour, and he now exalted her intellect unduly.  He had never
met girl or woman who talked just as she did; and straightway, with the
wild eloquence of his nature, he thought he had discovered a new heaven
and a new earth.  A spell was upon him.  He knew what he wanted when he
saw it.  He had always made up his mind suddenly, always acted on the
intelligent impulse of the moment.  He felt things, he did not study
them--it was almost a woman's instinct.  He came by a leap to the goal of
purpose, not by the toilsome steps of reason.  On the instant his
headlong spirit declared his purpose: this was the one being for him in
all the world: at this altar he would light a lamp of devotion, and keep
it burning forever.

"This is my day," he said to himself.  "I always knew that love would
come down on me like a storm."  Then, aloud, he said to her: "I wish I
knew what you know; but I can't, because my mind is different, my life
has been different.  When you go into the world and see a great deal, and
loosen a little the strings of your principles, and watch how sins and
virtues contradict themselves, you see things after a while in a kind of
mist.  But you, Guida, you see them clearly because your heart is clear.
You never make a mistake, you are always right because your mind is
right."

She interrupted him, a little troubled and a good deal amazed: "Oh, you
mustn't, mustn't speak like that.  It's not so.  How can one see and
learn unless one sees and knows the world?  Surely one can't think wisely
if one doesn't see widely?"

He changed his tactics instantly.  The world--that was the thing?  Well,
then, she should see the world, through him, with him.

"Yes, yes, you're right," he answered.  "You can't know things unless you
see widely.  You must see the world.  This island, what is it?  I was
born here, don't I know!  It's a foothold in the world, but it's no more;
it's not afield to walk in, why, it's not even a garden.  No, it's the
little patch of green we play in in front of a house, behind the
railings, before we go out into the world and learn how to live."

They had now reached the highest point on the island, where a flagstaff
stood.  Guida was looking far beyond Jersey to the horizon line.  There
was little haze, the sky was inviolably blue.  Far off against the
horizon lay the low black rocks of the Minquiers.  They seemed to her, on
the instant, like stepping-stones.  Beyond would be other stepping-
stones, and others and others still again, and they would all mark the
way and lead to what Philip called the world.  The world!  She felt a
sudden little twist of regret at her heart.  Here she was like a cow
grazing within the circle of its tether--like a lax caterpillar on its
blade of grass.  Yet it had all seemed so good to her in the past; broken
only by little bursts of wonder and wish concerning that outside world.

"Do we ever learn how to live?" she asked.  "Don't we just go on from
one thing to another, picking our way, but never knowing quite what to
do, because we don't know what's ahead?  I believe we never do learn how
to live," she added, half-smiling, yet a little pensive too; "but I am so
very ignorant, and--"

She stopped, for suddenly it flashed upon her: here she was baring her
childish heart--he would think it childish, she was sure he would--
everything she thought, to a man she had never known till to-day.  No,
no, she was wrong; she had known him, but it was only as Philip, the boy
who had saved her life.  And the Philip of her memory was only a picture,
not a being; something to think about,  not something to speak with, to
whom she might show her heart.  She flushed hotly and turned her shoulder
on him.  Her eyes followed a lizard creeping up the stones.  As long
as she lived she remembered that lizard, its colour changing in the sun.
She remembered the hot stones, and how warm the flag-staff was when she
stretched out her hand to it mechanically.  But the swift, noiseless
lizard running in and out of the stones, it was ever afterwards like a
coat-of-arms upon the shield of her life.

Philip came close to her.  At first he spoke over her shoulder, then he
faced her.  His words forced her eyes up to his, and he held them.

"Yes, yes, we learn how to live," he said.  "It's only when we travel
alone that we don't see before us.  I will teach you how to live--we will
learn the way together!  Guida!  Guida!"--he reached out his hands to
wards her--"don't start so!  Listen to me.  I feel for you what I have
felt for no other being in all my life.  It came upon me yesterday when
I saw you in the window at the Vier Prison.  I didn't understand it.  All
night I walked the deck thinking of you.  To-day as soon as I saw your
face, as soon as I touched your hand, I knew what it was, and--"

He attempted to take her hand now.  "Oh, no, no!" she exclaimed, and
drew back as if terrified.

"You need not fear me," he burst out.  "For now I know that I have but
two things to live for: for my work"--he pointed to the Narcissus--"and
for you.  You are frightened of me?  Why, I want to have the right to
protect you, to drive away all fear from your life.  You shall be the
garden and I shall be the wall; you the nest and I the rock; you the
breath of life and I the body that breathes it.  Guida, my Guida, I love
you!"

She drew back, leaning against the stones, her eyes riveted upon his, and
she spoke scarcely above a whisper.

"It is not true--it is not true.  You've known me only for one day--only
for one hour.  How can you say it!"  There was a tumult in her breast;
her eyes shone and glistened; wonder, embarrassed yet happy wonder,
looked at him from her face, which was touched with an appealing,
as of the heart that dares not believe and yet must believe or suffer.

"It is madness," she added.  "It is not true--how can it be true!"

Yet it all had the look of reality--the voice had the right ring, the
face had truth, the bearing was gallant; the force and power of the man
overwhelmed her.

She reached out her hand tremblingly as though to push him back.  "It
cannot be true," she said.  "To think--in one day!"

"It is true," he answered, "true as that I stand here.  One day--it is
not one day.  I knew you years ago.  The seed was sown then, the flower
springs up to-day, that is all.  You think I can't know that it is love I
feel for you?  It is admiration; it is faith; it is desire too; but it is
love.  When you see a flower in a garden, do you not know at once if you
like it or no?  Don't you know the moment you look on a landscape, on a
splendid building, whether it is beautiful to you?  If, then, with these
things one knows--these that haven't any speech, no life like yours or
mine--how much more when it is a girl with a face like yours, when it is
a mind noble like yours, when it is a touch that thrills, and a voice
that drowns the heart in music!  Guida, believe that I speak the truth.
I know, I swear, that you are the one passion, the one love of my life.
All others would be as nothing, so long as you live, and I live to look
upon you, to be beside you."

"Beside me!" she broke in, with an incredulous irony fain to be
contradicted, "a girl in a village, poor, knowing nothing, seeing no
farther"--she looked out towards Jersey--"seeing no farther than the
little cottage in the little country where I was born."

"But you shall see more," he said, "you shall see all, feel all, if you
will but listen to me.  Don't deny me what is life and breathing and hope
to me.  I'll show you the world; I'll take you where you may see and
know.  We will learn it all together.  I shall succeed in life.  I shall
go far.  I've needed one thing to make me do my best for some one's sake
beside my own; you will make me do it for your sake.  Your ancestors were
great people in France; and you know that mine, centuries ago, were great
also--that the d'Avranches were a noble family in France.  You and I will
win our place as high as the best of them.  In this war that's coming
between England and France is my chance.  Nelson said to me the other
day--you have heard of him, of young Captain Nelson, the man they're
pointing to in the fleet as the one man of them all?--he said to me: 'We
shall have our chance now, d'Avranche.'  And we shall.  I have wanted it
till to-day for my own selfish ambition--now I want it for you.  When I
landed on this islet a half-hour ago, I hated it, I hated my ship, I
hated my duty, I hated everything, because I wanted to go where you were,
to be with you.  It was Destiny that brought us both to this place at one
moment.  You can't escape Destiny.  It was to be that I should love you,
Guida."

He reached out to take her hands, but she put them behind her against the
stones, and drew back.  The lizard suddenly shot out from a hole and
crossed over her fingers.  She started, shivered at the cold touch, and
caught the hand away.  A sense of foreboding awaked in her, and her eyes
followed the lizard's swift travel with a strange fascination.  But she
lifted them to Philip's, and the fear and premonition passed.

"Oh, my brain is in a whirl!" she said.  "I do not understand.  I know
so little.  No one has ever spoken to me as you have done.  You would not
dare"--she leaned forward a little, looking into his face with that
unwavering gaze which was the best sign of her straight-forward mind--
"you would not dare to deceive--you would not dare.  I have--no mother,"
she added with simple pathos.

The moisture came into his eyes.  He must have been stone not to be
touched by the appealing, by the tender inquisition, of that look.

"Guida," he said impetuously, "if I deceive you, may every fruit of life
turn to dust and ashes in my mouth!  If ever I deceive you, may I die a
black, dishonourable death, abandoned and alone!  I should deserve that
if I deceived you, Guida."

For the first time since he had spoken she smiled, yet her eyes filled
with tears too.

"You will let me tell you that I love you, Guida--it is all I ask now:
that you will listen to me?"

She sighed, but did not answer.  She kept looking at him, looking as
though she would read his inmost soul.  Her face was very young, though
the eyes were so wise in their simplicity.

"You will give me my chance--you will listen to me, Guida, and try to
understand--and be glad?" he asked, leaning closer to her and holding
out his hands.

She drew herself up slightly as with an air of relief and resolve.  She
put a hand in his.

"I will try to understand--and be glad," she answered.

"Won't you call me Philip?" he said.

The same slight, mischievous smile crossed her lips now as eleven years
ago in the Rue d'Egypte, and recalling that moment, she replied:

"Yes, sir--Philip!"

At that instant the figure of a man appeared on the shingle beneath,
looking up towards them.  They did not see him.  Guida's hand was still
in Philip's.

The man looked at them for a moment, then started and turned away.  It
was Ranulph Delagarde.

They heard his feet upon the shingle now.  They turned and looked; and
Guida withdrew her hand.




CHAPTER XI

There are moments when a kind of curtain seems dropped over the brain,
covering it, smothering it, while yet the body and its nerves are
tingling with sensation.  It is like the fire-curtain of a theatre let
down between the stage and the audience, a merciful intervention between
the mind and the disaster which would consume it.

As the years had gone on Maitre Ranulph's nature had grown more powerful,
and his outdoor occupation had enlarged and steadied his physical forces.
His trouble now was in proportion to the force of his character.  The
sight of Guida and Philip hand in hand, the tender attitude, the light in
their faces, was overwhelming and unaccountable.  Yesterday these two
were strangers--to-day it was plain to be seen they were lovers, and
lovers who had reached a point of confidence and revelation.  Nothing in
the situation tallied with Ranulph's ideas of Guida and his knowledge of
life.  He had, as one might say, been eye to eye with this girl for
fifteen years: he had told his love for her in a thousand little ways,
as the ant builds its heap to a pyramid that becomes a thousand times
greater than itself.  He had followed her footsteps, he had fetched and
carried, he had served afar off, he had ministered within the gates.  He
had, unknown to her, watched like the keeper of the house over all who
came and went, neither envious nor over-zealous, neither intrusive nor
neglectful; leaving here a word and there an act to prove himself, above
all, the friend whom she could trust, and, in all, the lover whom she
might wake to know and reward.  He had waited with patience, hoping
stubbornly that she might come to put her hand in his one day.

Long ago he would have left the island to widen his knowledge, earn
experience in his craft, or follow a career in the army--he had been an
expert gunner when he served in the artillery four years ago--and hammer
out fame upon the anvils of fortune in England or in France; but he had
stayed here that he might be near her.  His love had been simple, it had
been direct, and wise in its consistent reserve.  He had been self-
obliterating.  His love desired only to make her happy: most lovers
desire that they themselves shall be made happy.  Because of the crime
his father committed years ago--because of the shame of that hidden
crime--he had tried the more to make himself a good citizen, and had
formed the modest ambition of making one human being happy.  Always
keeping this near him in past years, a supreme cheerfulness of heart had
welled up out of his early sufferings and his innate honesty.  Hope had
beckoned him on from year to year, until it seemed at last that the time
had almost come when he might speak, might tell her all--his father's
crime and the manner of his father's death; of his own devoted purpose in
trying to expiate that crime by his own uprightness; and of his love for
her.

Now, all in a minute, his horizon was blackened.  This adventurous
gallant, this squire of dames, had done in a day what he had worked, step
by step, to do through all these years.  This skipping seafarer, with his
powder and lace, his cocked hat and gold-handled sword, had whistled at
the gates which he had guarded and by which he had prayed, and all in a
minute every defence had been thrown down, and Guida--his own Guida--had
welcomed the invader with shameless eagerness.

He crossed the islet slowly.  It seemed to him--and for a moment it was
the only thing of which he was conscious--that the heels of his boots
shrieked in the shingle, and with every step he was raising an immense
weight.  He paused behind the chapel.  After a little the smother lifted
slowly from his brain.

"I'll believe in her still," he said aloud.  "It's all his cursed tongue.
As a boy he could make every other boy do what he wanted because his
tongue knows how to twist words.  She's been used to honest people; he's
talked a new language to her--tricks caught in his travels.  But she
shall know the truth.  She shall find out what sort of a man he is.
I'll make her see under his pretty foolings."

He turned, and leaned against the wall of the chapel.  "Guida, Guida," he
said, speaking as if she were there before him, "you won't--you won't go
to him, and spoil your life, and mine too.  Guida, ma couzaine, you'll
stay here, in the land of your birth.  You'll make your home here--here
with me, ma chere couzaine.  Ah, but then you shall be my wife in spite
of him, in spite of a thousand Philip d'Avranches!"

He drew himself up firmly, for a great resolve was made.  His path was
clear.  It was a fair fight, he thought; the odds were not so much
against him after all, for his birth was as good as Philip d'Avranche's,
his energy was greater, and he was as capable and as clever in his own
way.

He walked quickly down the shingle towards the wreck on the other side of
the islet.  As he passed the hut where the sick man lay, he heard a
querulous voice.  It was not that of the Reverend Lorenzo Dow.

Where had he heard that voice before?  A shiver of fear ran through him.
Every sense and emotion in him was arrested.  His life seemed to reel
backward.  Curtain after curtain of the past unfolded.

He hurried to the door of the hut and looked in.

A man with long white hair and straggling grey beard turned to him a
haggard face, on which were written suffering, outlawry, and evil.

"Great God--my father!" Ranulph said.

He drew back slowly like a man who gazes upon some horrible fascinating
thing, and then turned heavily towards the sea, his face set, his senses
paralysed.

"My father not dead!  My father--the traitor!" he groaned.




CHAPTER XII

Philip d'Avranche sauntered slowly through the Vier Marchi, nodding right
and left to people who greeted him.  It was Saturday and market day in
Jersey.  The square was crowded with people.  All was a cheerful babel;
there was movement, colour everywhere.  Here were the high and the
humble, hardi vlon and hardi biaou--the ugly and the beautiful, the
dwarfed and the tall, the dandy and the dowdy, the miser and the
spendthrift; young ladies gay in silks, laces, and scarfs from Spain, and
gentlemen with powdered wigs from Paris; sailors with red tunics from the
Mediterranean, and fishermen with blue and purple blouses from Brazil;
man-o'-war's-men with Greek petticoats, Turkish fezzes, and Portuguese
espadras.  Jersey housewives, in bedgones and white caps, with molleton
dresses rolled up to the knees, pushed their way through the crowd, jars
of black butter, or jugs of cinnamon brandy on their heads.  From La
Pyramide--the hospitable base of the statue of King George II--fishwives
called the merits of their conger-eels and ormers; and the clatter of a
thousand sabots made the Vier Marchi sound like a ship-builder's yard.

In this square Philip had loitered and played as a child.  Down there,
leaning against a pillar of the Corn Market piazza was Elie Mattingley,
the grizzly-haired seller of foreign silks and droll odds and ends, who
had given him a silver flageolet when he was a little lad.  There were
the same swaggering manners, the big gold rings in his ears; there was
the same red sash about the waist, the loose unbuttoned shirt, the
truculent knifebelt; there were the same keen brown eyes looking you
through and through, and the mouth with a middle tooth in both jaws gone.
Elie Mattingley, pirate, smuggler, and sometime master of a privateer,
had had dealings with people high and low in the island, and they had not
always, nor often, been conducted in the open Vier Marchi.

Fifteen years ago he used to have his little daughter Carterette always
beside him when he sold his wares.  Philip wondered what had become of
her.  He glanced round.  .  .  .  Ah, there she was, not far from her
father, over in front of the guard-house, selling, at a little counter
with a canopy of yellow silk (brought by her father from that distant
land called Piracy), mogues of hot soupe a la graisse, simnels, curds,
coffee, and Jersey wonders, which last she made on the spot by dipping
the little rings of dough in a bashin of lard on a charcoal fire at her
side.

Carterette was short and spare, with soft yet snapping eyes as black as
night--or her hair; with a warm, dusky skin, a tongue which clattered
pleasantly, and very often wisely.  She had a hand as small and plump as
a baby's, and a pretty foot which, to the disgust of some mothers and
maidens of greater degree, was encased in a red French slipper, instead
of the wooden sabot stuffed with straw, while her ankles were nicely
dressed in soft black stockings, in place of the woolen native hose, as
became her station.

Philip watched Carterette now for a moment, a dozen laughing memories
coming back to him; for he had teased her and played with her when she
was a child, had even called her his little sweetheart.  Looking at her
he wondered what her fate would be: To marry one of these fishermen or
carters?  No, she would look beyond that.  Perhaps it would be one of
those adventurers in bearskin cap and buckskin vest, home from Gaspe,
where they had toiled in the great fisheries, some as common fishermen,
some as mates and maybe one or two as masters.  No, she would look beyond
that.  Perhaps she would be carried off by one of those well-to-do,
black-bearded young farmers in the red knitted queminzolle, blue
breeches, and black cocked hat, with his kegs of cider and bunches of
parsley.

That was more likely, for among the people there was every prejudice in
her favour.  She was Jersey born, her father was reputed to have laid by
a goodly sum of money--not all got in this Vier Marchi; and that he was
a smuggler and pirate roused a sentiment in their bosoms nearer to envy
than aught else.  Go away naked and come back clothed, empty and come
back filled, simple and come back with a wink of knowledge, penniless and
come back with the price of numerous vergees of land, and you might
answer the island catechism without fear.  Be lambs in Jersey, but harry
the rest of the world with a lion's tooth, was the eleventh commandment
in the Vier Marchi.

Yes, thought Philip idly now, as he left the square, the girl would
probably marry a rich farmer, and when he came again he should find her
stout of body, and maybe shrewish of face, crying up the virtues of her
black butter and her knitted stockings, having made the yellow silk
canopy above her there into a gorgeous quilt for the nuptial bed.

Yet the young farmers who hovered near her now, buying a glass of cider
or a mogue of soup, received but scant notice.  She laughed with them,
treated them lightly, and went about her business again with a toss
of the head.  Not once did she show a moment's real interest, not until a
fine upstanding fellow came round the corner from the Rue des Vignes, and
passed her booth.

She was dipping a doughnut into the boiling lard, but she paused with it
suspended.  The little dark face took on a warm glow, the eyes glistened.

"Maitre Ranulph!" called the girl softly.  Then as the tall fellow
turned to her and lifted his cap she added briskly: "Where away so fast
with face hard as hatchet?"

"Garcon Cart'rette!" he said abstractedly--he had always called her
that.

He was about to move on.  She frowned in vexation, yet she saw that he
was pale and heavy-eyed, and she beckoned him to come to her.

"What's gone wrong, big wood-worm?" she said, eyeing him closely, and
striving anxiously to read his face.  He looked at her sharply, but the
softness in her black eyes somehow reassured him, and he said quite
kindly:

"Nannin, 'tite garcon, nothing's matter."

"I thought you'd be blithe as a sparrow with your father back from the
grave!"  Then as Ranulph's face seemed to darken, she added: "He's not
worse--he's not worse?"

"No, no, he's well enough now," he said, forcing a smile.

She was not satisfied, but she went on talking, intent to find the cause
of his abstraction.  "Only to think," she said--"only to think that he
wasn't killed at all at the Battle of Jersey, and was a prisoner in
France, and comes back here--and we all thought him dead, didn't we?"

"I left him for dead that morning on the Grouville road," he answered.
Then, as if with a great effort, and after the manner of one who has
learned a part, he went on: "As the French ran away mad, paw of one on
tail of other, they found him trying to drag himself along.  They nabbed
him, and carried him aboard their boats to pilot them out from the Rocque
Platte, and over to France.  Then because they hadn't gobbled us up here,
what did the French Gover'ment do?  They clapped a lot of 'em in irons
and sent 'em away to South America, and my father with 'em.  That's why
we heard neither click nor clack of him all this time.  He broke free a
year ago.  Then he fell sick.  When he got well he set sail for Jersey,
was wrecked off the Ecrehos, and everybody knows the rest.  Diantre, he's
had a hard time!"

The girl had listened intently.  She had heard all these things in flying
rumours, and she had believed the rumours; but now that Maitre Ranulph
told her--Ranulph, whose word she would have taken quicker than the oath
of a Jurat--she doubted.  With the doubt her face flushed as though she
herself had been caught in a lie, had done a mean thing.  Somehow her
heart was aching for him, she knew not why.

All this time she had held the doughnut poised; she seemed to have
forgotten her work.  Suddenly the wooden fork holding the cake was taken
from her fingers by the daft Dormy Jamais who had crept near.

"Des monz a fou," said he, "to spoil good eating so!  What says fishing-
man: When sails flap, owner may whistle for cargo.  Tut, tut, goose
Carterette!"

Carterette took no note, but said to Ranulph:

"Of course he had to pilot the Frenchmen back, or they'd have killed him,
and it'd done no good to refuse.  He was the first man that fought the
French on the day of the battle, wasn't he?  I've always heard that."
Unconsciously she was building up a defence for Olivier Delagarde.  She
was, as it were, anticipating insinuation from other quarters.  She was
playing Ranulph's game, because she instinctively felt that behind this
story there was gloom in his mind and mystery in the tale itself.  She
noticed too that he shrank from her words.  She was not very quick of
intellect, so she had to feel her way fumblingly.  She must have time
to think, but she said tentatively:

"I suppose it's no secret?  I can tell any one at all what happened to
your father?" she asked.

"Oh so--sure so!" he said rather eagerly.  "Tell every one about it.  He
doesn't mind."

Maitre Ranulph deceived but badly.  Bold and convincing in all honest
things, he was, as yet, unconvincing in this grave deception.  All these
years he had kept silence, enduring what he thought a buried shame; but
that shame had risen from the dead, a living agony.  His father had
betrayed the island to the French: if the truth were known to-day they
would hang him for a traitor on the Mont es Pendus.  No mercy and scant
shrift would be shown him.

Whatever came, he must drink this bitter cup to the dregs.  He could
never betray his own father.  He must consume with inward disgust while
Olivier Delagarde shamelessly babbled his monstrous lies to all who would
listen.  And he must tell these lies too, conceal, deceive, and live in
hourly fear of discovery.  He must sit opposite his father day by day at
table, talk with him, care for him, shrinking inwardly at every knock at
the door lest it should be an officer come to carry the pitiful traitor
off to prison.

And, more than all, he must give up for ever the thought of Guida.  Here
was the acid that ate home, the black hopelessness, the machine of fate
clamping his heart.  Never again could he rise in the morning with a song
on his lips; never again his happy meditations go lilting with the
clanging blows of the adze and the singing of the saws.

All these things had vanished when he looked into a tent-door on the
Ecrehos.  Now, in spite of himself, whenever he thought upon Guida's
face, this other fateful figure, this Medusan head of a traitor,
shot in between.

Since his return his father had not been strong enough to go abroad; but
to-day he meant to walk to the Vier Marchi.  At first Ranulph had decided
to go as usual to his ship-yard at St. Aubin's, but at last in anxious
fear he too had come to the Vier Marchi.  There was a horrible
fascination in being where his father was, in listening to his
falsehoods, in watching the turns and twists of his gross hypocrisies.

But yet at times he was moved by a strange pity, for Olivier Delagarde
was, in truth, far older than his years: a thin, shuffling, pallid
invalid, with a face of mingled sanctity and viciousness.  If the old man
lied, and had not been in prison all these years, he must have had misery
far worse, for neither vice nor poverty alone could so shatter a human
being.  The son's pity seemed to look down from a great height upon the
contemptible figure with the beautiful white hair and the abominable
mouth.  This compassion kept him from becoming hard, but it would also
preserve him to hourly sacrifice--Prometheus chained to his rock.  In the
short fortnight that had gone since the day upon the Ecrehos, he had
changed as much as do most people in ten years.  Since then he had seen
neither Philip nor Guida.

To Carterette he seemed not the man she had known.  With her woman's
instinct she knew that he loved Guida, but she also knew that nothing
which might have happened between them could have brought this look of
shame and shrinking into his face.  As these thoughts flashed through her
mind her heart grew warmer.  Suppose Ranulph was in some trouble--well,
now might be her great chance.  She might show him that he could not live
without her friendship, and then perhaps, by-and-bye, that he could not
live without her love.

Ranulph was about to move on.  She stopped him.  "When you need me,
Maitre Ranulph, you know where to find me," she said scarce above a
whisper.  He looked at her sharply, almost fiercely, but again the
tenderness of her eyes, the directness of her gaze, convinced him.  She
might be, as she was, variable with other people; with himself she was
invincibly straightforward.

"P'raps you don't trust me?" she added, for she read his changing
expression.

"I'd trust you quick enough," he said.

"Then do it now--you're having some bad trouble," she rejoined.

He leaned over her stall and said to her steadily and with a little
moroseness:

"See you, ma garche, if I was in trouble I'd bear it by myself.  I'd ask
no one to help me.  I'm a man, and I can stand alone.  Don't go telling
folks I look as if I was in trouble.  I'm going to launch to-morrow the
biggest ship ever sent from a Jersey building yard--that doesn't look
like trouble, does it?  Turn about is fair play, garcon Cart'rette: so
when you're in trouble come to me.  You're not a man, and it's a man's
place to help a woman, all the more when she's a fine and good little
stand-by like you."

He forced a smile, turned upon his heel, and threaded his way through the
square, keeping a look-out for his father.  This he could do easily, for
he was the tallest man in the Vier Marchi by at least three inches.

Carterette, oblivious of all else, stood gazing after him.  She was only
recalled to herself by Dormy Jamais.  He was diligently cooking her
Jersey wonders, now and then turning his eyes up at her--eyes which were
like spots of greyish, yellowish light in a face of putty and flour;
without eyelashes, without eyebrows, a little like a fish's, something
like a monkey's.  They were never still.  They were set in the face like
little round glow worms in a mould of clay.  They burned on night and
day--no man had ever seen Dormy Jamais asleep.

Carterette did not resent his officiousness.  He had a kind of kennel in
her father's boat-house, and he was devoted to her.  More than all else,
Dormy Jamaas was clean.  His clothes were mostly rags, but they were
comely, compact rags.  When he washed them no one seemed to know, but no
languid young gentleman lounging where the sun was warmest in the Vier
Marchi was better laundered.

As Carterette turned round to him he was twirling a cake on the wooden
fork, and trolling:

                   "Caderoussel he has a coat,
                    All lined with paper brown;
                    And only when it freezes hard
                    He wears it in the town.
                    What do you think of Caderoussel?
                    Ah, then, but list to me:
                    Caderoussel is a bon e'fant--"

"Come, come, dirty-fingers," she said.  "Leave my work alone, and stop
your chatter."

The daft one held up his fingers, but to do so had to thrust a cake into
his mouth.

"They're as clean as a ha'pendy," he said, mumbling through the cake.
Then he emptied his mouth of it, and was about to place it with the
others.

"Black beganne," she cried; "how dare you!  V'la--into your pocket with
it!"

He did as he was bid, humming to himself again:

                   "M'sieu' de la Palisse is dead,
                    Dead of a maladie;
                    Quart' of an hour before his death
                    He could breathe like you and mel
                    Ah bah, the poor M'sieu'
                    De la Palisse is dead!"

"Shut up!  Man doux d'la vie, you chatter like a monkey!"

"That poor Maitre Ranulph," said Dormy, "once he was lively as a basket
of mice; but now--"

"Well, now, achocre?" she said irritably, stamping her foot.

"Now the cat's out of the bag--oui-gia!"

"You're as cunning as a Norman--you've got things in your noddee!" she
cried with angry impatience.

He nodded, grinning.  "As thick as haws," he answered.

She heard behind her a laugh of foolish good-nature, which made her angry
too, for it seemed to be making fun of her.  She wheeled to see M. Savary
dit Detricand leaning with both elbows on the little counter, his chin in
his hand, grinning provokingly,

"Oh, it's you!" she said snappishly; "I hope you're pleased."

"Don't be cross," he answered, his head swinging unsteadily.  "I wasn't
laughing at you, heaven-born Jersienne.  I wasn't, 'pon honour!  I was
laughing at a thing I saw five minutes ago."  He nodded in gurgling
enjoyment now.  "You mustn't mind me, seraphine," he added, "I'd a hot
night, and I'm warm as a thrush now.  But I saw a thing five minutes
ago!"--he rolled on the stall.  "'Sh!" he added in a loud mock whisper,
"here he comes now.  Milles diables, but here's a tongue for you, and
here's a royal gentleman speaking truth like a travelling dentist!"

Carterette followed his gesture and saw coming out of the Route es
Couochons, where the brave Peirson issued to his death eleven years
before, Maitre Ranulph's father.

He walked with the air of a man courting observation.  He imagined
himself a hero; he had told his lie so many times now that he almost
believed it himself.

He was soon surrounded.  Disliked when he lived in Jersey before the
invasion years ago, that seemed forgotten now; for word had gone abroad
that he was a patriot raised from the dead, an honour to his country.
Many pressed forward to shake hands with him.

"Help of heaven, is that you, m'sieu'?" asked one.  "You owed me five
chelins, but I wiped it out, O my good!" cried another generously.

"Shaken," cried a tall tarter holding out his hand.  He had lived in
England, and now easily made English verbs into French.

One after another called on him to tell his story; some tried to hurry
him to La Pyramide, but others placed a cider-keg near, and almost lifted
him on to it.

"Go on, go on, tell us the story," they cried.  To the devil with the
Frenchies!"

"Here--here's a dish of Adam's ale," cried an old woman, handing him a
bowl of water.

They cheered him lustily.  The pallor of his face changed to a warmth.
He had the fatuousness of those who deceive with impunity.  With
confidence he unreeled the dark line out to the end.  When he had told
his story, still hungry for applause, he repeated the account of how the
tatterdemalion brigade of Frenchmen came down upon him out of the night,
and how he should have killed Rullecour himself had it not been for an
officer who struck him down from behind.

During the recital Ranulph had drawn near.  He watched the enthusiasm
with which the crowd received every little detail of the egregious
history.  Everybody believed the old man, who was safe, no matter what
happened to himself, Ranulph Delagarde, ex-artilleryman, ship-builder--
and son of a criminal.  At any rate the worst was over now, the first
public statement of the lifelong lie.  He drew a sigh of relief and
misery in one.  At that instant he caught sight of the flushed face of
Detricand, who broke into a laugh of tipsy mirth when Olivier Delagarde
told how the French officer had stricken him down as he was about
finishing off Rullecour.

All at once the whole thing rushed upon Ranulph.  What a fool he had
been!  He had met this officer of Rullecour's these ten years past, and
never once had the Frenchman, by so much as a hint, suggested that he
knew the truth about his father.  Here and now the contemptuous mirth
upon the Frenchman's face told the whole story.  The danger and horror of
the situation descended on him.  Instantly he started towards Detricand.

At that moment his father caught sight of Detricand also, saw the laugh,
the sneer, and recognised him.  Halting short in his speech he turned
pale and trembled, staring as at a ghost.  He had never counted on this.
His breath almost stopped as he saw Ranulph approach Detricand.

Now the end was come.  His fabric of lies would be torn down; he would be
tried and hanged on the Mont es Pendus, or even be torn to pieces by this
crowd.  Yet he could not have moved a foot from where he was if he had
been given a million pounds.

The sight of Ranulph's face revealed to Detricand the true meaning of
this farce and how easily it might become a tragedy.  He read the story
of the son's torture, of his sacrifice; and his decision was instantly
made: he would befriend him.  Looking straight into his eyes, his own
said he had resolved to know nothing whatever about this criminal on
the cider-cask.  The two men telegraphed to each other a perfect
understanding, and then Detricand turned on his heel, and walked
away into the crowd.

The sudden change in the old man's appearance had not been lost on the
spectators, but they set it down to weakness or a sudden sickness.  One
ran for a glass of brandy, another for cider, and an old woman handed up
to him a mogue of cinnamon drops.

The old man tremblingly drank the brandy.  When he looked again Detricand
had disappeared.  A dark, sinister expression crossed his face, an evil
thought pulled down the corners of his mouth as he stepped from the cask.
His son went to him and taking his arm, said: "Come, you've done enough
for to-day."

The old man made no reply, but submissively walked away into the Coin &
Anes.  Once however he turned and looked the way Detricand had gone,
muttering.

The peasants cheered him as he passed.  Presently, free of the crowd and
entering the Rue d'Egypte, he said to Ranulph:

"I'm going alone; I don't need you."

"Where are you going?" asked Ranulph.

"Home," answered the old man gloomily.

Ranulph stopped.  "All right; better not come out again to-day."

"You're not going to let that Frenchman hurt me?" suddenly asked
Delagarde with morose anxiety.  "You're going to stop that?  They'd put
me in prison."

Ranulph stooped over his father, his eyes alive with anger, his face
blurred with disgust.

"Go home," said he, "and never mention this again while you live, or I'll
take you to prison myself."  Ranulph watched his father disappear down
the Rue d'Egypte, then he retraced his steps to the Vier Marchi.  With a
new-formed determination he quickened his walk, ruling his face to a sort
of forced gaiety, lest any one should think his moodiness strange.  One
person after another accosted him.  He listened eagerly, to see if
anything were said which might show suspicion of his father.  But the
gossip was all in old Delagarde's favour.  From group to group he went,
answering greetings cheerily and steeling himself to the whole disgusting
business.

Presently he saw the Chevalier du Champsavoys with the Sieur de Mauprat.
This was the first public appearance of the chevalier since the sad
business at the Vier Prison a fortnight before.  The simple folk had
forgotten their insane treatment of him then, and they saluted him now
with a chirping: "Es-tu biaou, chevalier?" and "Es-tu gentiment,
m'sieu'?" to which he responded with amiable forgiveness.  To his idea
they were only naughty children, their minds reasoning no more clearly
than they saw the streets through the tiny little squares of bottle-glass
in the windows of their homes.

All at once they came face to face with Detricand.  The chevalier stopped
short with pleased yet wistful surprise.  His brow knitted when he saw
that his compatriot had been drinking again, and his eyes had a pained
look as he said eagerly:

"Have you heard from the Comte de Tournay, monsieur?  I have not seen you
these days past.  You said you would not disappoint me."

Detricand drew from his pocket a letter and handed it over, saying: "This
comes from the comte."

The old gentleman took the letter, nervously opened it, and read it
slowly, saying each sentence over twice as though to get the full
meaning.

"Ah," he exclaimed, "he is going back to France to fight for the King!"

Then he looked at Detricand sadly, benevolently.  "Mon cher," said he,
"if I could but persuade you to abjure the wine-cup and follow his
example!"

Detricand drew himself up with a jerk.  "You can persuade me, chevalier,"
said he.  "This is my last bout.  I had sworn to have it with--with a
soldier I knew, and I've kept my word.  But it's the last, the very last
in my life, on the honour of--the Detricands.  And I am going with the
Comte de Tournay to fight for the King."

The little chevalier's lips trembled, and taking the young man by the
collar of his coat, he stood tiptoed, and kissed him on both cheeks.

"Will you accept something from me?" asked M. de Mauprat, joining in his
friend's enthusiasm.  He took from his pocket a timepiece he had worn for
fifty years.  "It is a little gift to my France, which I shall see no
more," he added.  "May no time be ill spent that it records for you,
monsieur."

Detricand laughed in his careless way, but the face, seamed with
dissipation, took on a new and better look, as with a hand-grasp of
gratitude he put the timepiece in his pocket.

"I'll do my best," he said simply.  "I'll be with de la Rochejaquelein
and the army of the Vendee to-morrow night."

Then he shook hands with both little gentlemen and moved away towards the
Rue des Tres Pigeons.  Presently some one touched his arm.  He looked
round.  It was Ranulph.

"I stood near," said Ranulph; "I chanced to hear what you said to them.
You've been a friend to me today--and these eleven years past.  You knew
about my father, all the time."

Before replying Detricand glanced round to see that no one was listening.

"Look you, monsieur, a man must keep some decencies in his life, or cut
his own throat.  What a ruffian I'd be to do you or your father harm!
I'm silent, of course.  Let your mind rest about me.  But there's the
baker Carcaud--"

"The baker?" asked Ranulph dumfounded.  "I thought he was tied to a rock
and left to drown, by Rullecour's orders."

"I had him set free after Rullecour had gone on to the town.  He got away
to France."

Ranulph's anxiety deepened.  "He might come back, and then if anything
happened to him--"

"He'd try and make things happen to others, eh? But there's little danger
of his coming back.  They know he's a traitor, and he knows he'd be hung.
If he's alive he'll stay where he is.  Cheer up!  Take my word, Olivier
Delagarde has only himself to fear."  He put out his hand.  "Good-bye.
If ever I can do anything for you, if you ever want to find me, come or
send to--no, I'll write it," he suddenly added, and scribbling something
on a piece of paper he handed it over.

They parted with another handshake, Detricand making his way into the Rue
d'Egypte, and towards the Place du Vier Prison.

Ranulph stood looking dazedly at the crowd before him, misery, revolt,
and bitterness in his heart.  This French adventurer, Detricand, after
years of riotous living, could pick up the threads of life again with a
laugh and no shame, while he felt himself going down, down, down, with no
hope of ever rising again.

As he stood buried in his reflections the town crier entered the Vier
Marchi, and, going to La Pyramide, took his place upon the steps, and in
a loud voice began reading a proclamation.

It was to the effect that the great Fishing Company trading to Gaspe
needed twenty Jersiais to go out and replace a number of the company's
officers and men who had been drowned in a gale off the rock called
Perch.  To these twenty, if they went at once, good pay would be given.
But they must be men of intelligence and vigour, of well-known character.

The critical moment in Maitre Ranulph's life came now.  Here he was
penned up in a little island, chained to a criminal having the fame of a
martyr.  It was not to be borne.  Why not leave it all behind?  Why not
let his father shift for himself, abide his own fate?  Why not leave him
the home, what money he had laid by, and go-go-go where he could forget,
go where he could breathe.  Surely self-preservation, that was the first
law; surely no known code of human practice called upon him to share the
daily crimes of any living soul--it was a daily repetition of his crime
for this traitor to carry on the atrocious lie of patriotism.

He would go.  It was his right.

Taking a few steps towards the officer of the company standing by the
crier, he was about to speak.  Some one touched him.

He turned and saw Carterette.  She had divined his intention, and though
she was in the dark as to the motive, she saw that he meant to go to
Gaspe.  Her heart seemed to contract till the pain of it hurt her; then,
as a new thought flashed into her mind, it was freed again and began
pounding hard against her breast.  She must prevent him from leaving
Jersey, from leaving her.  What she might feel personally would have no
effect upon him; she would appeal to him from a different stand-point.

"You must not go," she said.  "You must not leave your father alone,
Maitre Ranulph."

For a minute he did not reply.  Through his dark wretchedness one thought
pierced its way: this girl was his good friend.

"Then I'll take him with me," he said.

"He would die in the awful cold," she answered.  "Nannin-gia, you must
stay."

"Eh ben, I will think!" he said presently, with an air of heavy
resignation, and, turning, walked away.  Her eyes followed him.  As she
went back to her booth she smiled: he had come one step her way.  He
would not go.




CHAPTER XIII

When Detricand left the Vier Marchi he made his way along the Rue
d'Egypte to the house of M. de Mauprat.  The front door was open, and a
nice savour of boiling fruit came from within.  He knocked, and instantly
Guida appeared, her sleeves rolled back to her elbows, her fingers
stained with the rich red of the blackberries on the fire.

A curious shade of disappointment came into her face when she saw who it
was.  It was clear to Detricand that she expected some one else; it was
also clear that his coming gave no especial pleasure to her, though she
looked at him with interest.  She had thought of him more than once since
that day when the famous letter from France to the chevalier was read.
She had instinctively compared him, this roystering, notorious fellow,
with Philip d'Avranche, Philip the brave, the ambitious, the conquering.
She was sure that Philip had never over-drunk himself in his life; and
now, looking into the face of Detricand, she could tell that he had been
drinking again.  One thing was apparent, however: he was better dressed
than she ever remembered seeing him, better pulled together, and bearing
himself with an air of purpose.

"I've fetched back your handkerchief--you tied up my head with it, you
know," he said, taking it from his pocket.  "I'm going away, and I wanted
to thank you."

"Will you not come in, monsieur?" she said.

He readily entered the kitchen, still holding the handkerchief in his
hand, but he did not give it to her.  "Where will you sit?" she said,
looking round.  "I'm very busy.  You mustn't mind my working," she added,
going to the brass bashin at the fire.  "This preserve will spoil if I
don't watch it."

He seated himself on the veille, and nodded his head.  "I like this," he
said.  "I'm fond of kitchens.  I always was.  When I was fifteen I was
sent away from home because I liked the stables and the kitchen too well.
Also I fell in love with the cook."

Guida flushed, frowned, her lips tightened, then presently a look of
amusement broke over her face, and she burst out laughing.

"Why do you tell me these things?" she said.  "Excuse me, monsieur, but
why do you always tell unpleasant things about yourself?  People think
ill of you, and otherwise they might think--better."

"I don't want them to think better till I am better," he answered.  "The
only way I can prevent myself becoming a sneak is by blabbing my faults.
Now, I was drunk last night--very, very drunk."

A look of disgust came into her face.

"Why do you relate this sort of thing to me, monsieur?  Do--do I remind
you of the cook at home, or of an oyster-girl in Jersey?"

She was flushing, but her voice was clear and vibrant, the look of the
eyes direct and fearless.  How dared he hold her handkerchief like that!

"I tell you them," he answered slowly, looking at the handkerchief in his
hand, then raising his eyes to hers with whimsical gravity, "because I
want you to ask me never to drink again."

She looked at him scarce comprehending, yet feeling a deep compliment
somewhere, for this man was a gentleman by birth, and his manner was
respectful, and had always been respectful to her.

"Why do you want me to ask you that?" she said.  "Because I'm going to
France to join the war of the Vendee, and--"

"With the Comte de Tournay?" she interrupted.  He nodded his head.  "And
if I thought I was keeping a promise to--to you, I'd not break it.  Will
you ask me to promise?" he persisted, watching her intently.

"Why, of course," she answered kindly, almost gently; the compliment was
so real, he could not be all bad.

"Then say my name, and ask me," he said.

"Monsieur--"

"Leave out the monsieur," he interrupted.

"Yves Savary dit Detricand, will you promise me, Guida Landresse--"

"De Landresse," he interposed courteously.

"--Guida Landresse de Landresse, that you will never again drink wine to
excess, and that you will never do anything that"--she paused confused.
"That you would not wish me to do," he said in a low voice.

"That I should not wish you to do," she repeated in a half-embarrassed
way.

"On my honour I promise," he said slowly.

A strange feeling came over her.  She had suddenly, in some indirect,
allusive way, become interested in a man's life.  Yet she had done
nothing, and in truth she cared nothing.  They stood looking at each
other, she slightly embarrassed, he hopeful and eager, when suddenly a
step sounded without, a voice called "Guida!" and as Guida coloured and
Detricand turned towards the door, Philip d'Avranche entered impetuously.

He stopped short on seeing Detricand.  They knew each other slightly, and
they bowed.  Philip frowned.  He saw that something had occurred between
the two.  Detricand on his part realised the significance of that
familiar "Guida!" called from outside.  He took up his cap.

"It is greeting and good-bye, I am just off for France," he said.

Philip eyed him coldly, and not a little maliciously, for he knew
Detricand's reputation well, the signs of a hard life were thick on him,
and he did not like to think of Guida being alone with him.

"France should offer a wide field for your talents just now," he answered
drily; "they seem wasted here."  Detricand's eye flashed, but he answered
coolly: "It wasn't talent that brought me here, but a boy's folly; it's
not talent that's kept me from starving here, I'm afraid, but the
ingenuity of the desperate."

"Why stay here?  The world was wide, and France but a step away.  You
would not have needed talents there.  You would no doubt have been
rewarded by the Court which sent you and Rullecour to ravage Jersey--"

"The proper order is Rullecour and me, monsieur."  Detricand seemed
suddenly to have got back a manner to which he had been long a stranger.
His temper became imperturbable, and this was not lost on Philip; his
manner had a balanced serenity, while Philip himself had no such perfect
control; which made him the more impatient.  Presently Detricand added in
a composed and nonchalant tone:

"I've no doubt there were those at Court who'd have clothed me in purple
and fine linen, and given me wine and milk, but it was my whim to work in
the galleys here, as it were."

"Then I trust you've enjoyed your Botany Bay," answered Philip mockingly.
"You've been your own jailer, you could lay the strokes on heavy or
light."  He moved to the veille, and sat down.  Guida busied herself at
the fireplace, but listened intently.

"I've certainly been my own enemy, whether the strokes were heavy or
light," replied Detricand, lifting a shoulder ironically.

"And a friend to Jersey at the same time, eh?" was the sneering reply.

Detricand was in the humour to tell the truth even to this man who hated
him.  He was giving himself the luxury of auricular confession.  But
Philip did not see that when once such a man has stood in his own
pillory, sat in his own stocks, voluntarily paid the piper, he will take
no after insult.

Detricand still would not be tempted out of his composure.  "No," he
answered, "I've been an enemy to Jersey too, both by act and example; but
people here have been kind enough to forget the act, and the example I
set is not unique."

"You've never thought that you've outstayed your welcome, eh?"

"As to that, every country is free to whoever wills, if one cares to pay
the entrance fee and can endure the entertainment.  One hasn't to
apologise for living in a country.  You probably get no better treatment
than you deserve, and no worse.  One thing balances another."

The man's cool impeachment and defence of himself irritated Philip, the
more so because Guida was present, and this gentlemanly vagrant had him
at advantage.

"You paid no entrance fee here; you stole in through a hole in the wall.
You should have been hanged."

"Monsieur d'Avranche!" said Guida reproachfully, turning round from the
fire.

Detricand's answer came biting and dry.  "You are an officer of your
King, as was I.  You should know that hanging the invaders of Jersey
would have been butchery.  We were soldiers of France; we had the
distinction of being prisoners of war, monsieur."

This shot went home.  Philip had been touched in that nerve called
military honour.  He got to his feet.  "You are right," he answered with
reluctant frankness.  "Our grudge is not individual, it is against
France, and we'll pay it soon with good interest, monsieur."

"The individual grudge will not be lost sight of in the general, I hope?"
rejoined Detricand with cool suggestion, his clear, persistent grey eye
looking straight into Philip's.

"I shall do you that honour," said Philip with mistaken disdain.

Detricand bowed low.  "You will always find me in the suite of the Prince
of Vaufontaine, monsieur, and ready to be so distinguished by you."
Turning to Guida, he added: "Mademoiselle will perhaps do me the honour
to notice me again one day?" then, with a mocking nod to Philip, he left
the house.

Guida and Philip stood looking after him in silence for a minute.
Suddenly Guida said to herself: "My handkerchief--why did he take my
handkerchief?  He put it in his pocket again."

Philip turned on her impatiently.

"What was that adventurer saying to you, Guida?  In the suite of the
Prince of Vaufontaine, my faith!  What did he come here for?"

Guida looked at him in surprise.  She scarcely grasped the significance
of the question.  Before she had time to consider, he pressed it again,
and without hesitation she told him all that had happened--it was so very
little, of course--between Detricand and herself.  She omitted nothing
save that Detricand had carried off the handkerchief, and she could not
have told, if she had been asked, why she did not speak of it.

Philip raged inwardly.  He saw the meaning of the whole situation from
Detricand's stand-point, but he was wise enough from his own stand-point
to keep it to himself; and so both of them reserved something, she from
no motive that she knew, he from an ulterior one.  He was angry too:
angry at Detricand, angry at Guida for her very innocence, and because
she had caught and held even the slight line of association Detricand
had thrown.

In any case, Detricand was going to-morrow, and to-day-to-day should
decide all between Guida and himself.  Used to bold moves, in this affair
of love he was living up to his custom; and the encounter with Detricand
here added the last touch to his resolution, nerved him to follow his
strong impulse to set all upon one hazard.  A month ago he had told Guida
that he loved her; to-day there should be a still more daring venture.
A thing not captured by a forlorn hope seemed not worth having.  The girl
had seized his emotions from the first moment, and had held them.  To him
she was the most original creature he had ever met, the most natural, the
most humorous of temper, the most sincere.  She had no duplicity, no
guile, no arts.

He said to himself that he knew his own mind always.  He believed in
inspirations, and he would back his knowledge, his inspiration, by an
irretrievable move.  Yesterday had come an important message from his
commander.  That had decided him.  To-day Guida should hear a message
beyond all others in importance.

"Won't you come into the garden?" he said presently.

"A moment--a moment," she answered him lightly, for the frown had passed
from his face, and he was his old buoyant self again.  "I'm to make an
end to this bashin of berries first," she added.  So saying, she waved
him away with a little air of tyranny; and he perched himself boyishly on
the big chair in the corner, and with idle impatience began playing with
the flax on the spinning-wheel near by.  Then he took to humming a ditty
the Jersey housewife used to sing as she spun, while Guida disposed of
the sweet-smelling fruit.  Suddenly she stopped and stamped her foot.

"No, no, that's not right, stupid sailor-man," she said, and she sang a
verse at him over the last details of her work:

              "Spin, spin, belle Mergaton!
                 The moon wheels full, and the tide flows high,
               And your wedding-gown you must put it on
                 Ere the night hath no moon in the sky--
                        Gigoton Mergaton, spin!"

She paused.  He was entranced.  He had never heard her sing, and the
full, beautiful notes of her contralto voice thrilled him like organ
music.  His look devoured her, her song captured him.

"Please go on," he said, "I never heard it that way."  She was
embarrassed yet delighted by his praise, and she threw into the next
verse a deep weirdness:

              "Spin, spin, belle Mergaton!
                 Your gown shall be stitched ere the old moon fade:
               The age of a moon shall your hands spin on,
                 Or a wife in her shroud shall be laid--
                           Gigoton Mergaton, spin!"

"Yes, yes, that's it!" he exclaimed with gay ardour.  "That's it.  Sing
on.  There are two more verses."

"I'll only sing one," she answered, with a little air of wilfulness.

              "Spin, spin, belle Mergaton!
                 The Little Good Folk the spell they have cast;
               By your work well done while the moon hath shone,
                 Ye shall cleave unto joy at last--
                        Gigoton Mergaton, spin!"

As she sang the last verse she seemed in a dream, and her rich voice,
rising with the spirit of the concluding lines, poured out the notes like
a bird drunk with the air of spring.

"Guida," he cried, springing to his feet, "when you sing like that it
seems to me I live in a world that has nothing to do with the sordid
business of life, with my dull trade--with getting the weather-gauge or
sailing in triple line.  You're a planet all by yourself, Mistress Guida!
Are you ready to come into the garden?"

"Yes, yes, in a minute," she answered.  "You go out to the big apple-
tree, and I'll come in a minute."  The apple-tree was in the farthest
corner of the large garden.  Near it was the summer-house where Guida
and her mother used to sit and read, Guida on the three-legged stool,
her mother on the low, wide seat covered with ferns.  This spot Guida
used to "flourish" with flowers.  The vines, too, crept through the
rough latticework, and all together made the place a bower, secluded and
serene.  The water of the little stream outside the hedge made music too.

Philip placed himself on the bench beneath the appletree.  What a change
was all this, he thought to himself, from the staring hot stones of
Malta, the squalor of Constantinople, the frigid cliffs of Spitzbergen,
the noisome tropical forests of the Indies!  This was Arcady.  It was
peace, it was content.  His life was sure to be varied and perhaps
stormy--here would be the true change, the spirit of all this.  Of course
he would have two sides to his life like most men: that lived before the
world, and that of the home.  He would have the fight for fame.  He would
have to use, not duplicity, but diplomacy, to play a kind of game; but
this other side to his life, the side of love and home, should be simple,
direct--all genuine and strong and true.  In this way he would have a
wonderful career.

He heard Guida's footstep now, and standing up he parted the apple boughs
for her entrance.  She was dressed all in white, without a touch of
colour save in the wild rose at her throat and the pretty red shoes with
the broad buckles which the Chevalier had given her.  Her face, too, had
colour--the soft, warm tint of the peach-blossom--and her auburn hair was
like an aureole.

Philip's eyes gleamed.  He stretched out both his hands in greeting and
tenderness.  "Guida--sweetheart!" he said.

She laughed up at him mischievously, and put her hands behind her back.

"Ma fe, you are so very forward," she said, seating herself on the bench.
"And you must not call me Guida, and you've no right to call me
sweetheart."

"I know I've no right to call you anything, but to myself I always call
you Guida, and sweetheart too, and I've liked to think that you would
care to know my thoughts," he answered.

"Yes, I wish I knew your thoughts," she responded, looking up at him
intently; "I should like to know every thought in your mind.  .  .  .
Do you know--you don't mind my saying just what I think?--I find myself
feeling that there's something in you that I never touch; I mean, that a
friend ought to touch, if it's a real friendship.  You appear to be so
frank, and I know you are frank and good and true, and yet I seem always
to be hunting for something in your mind, and it slips away from me
always--always.  I suppose it's because we're two different beings,
and no two beings can ever know each other in this world, not altogether.
We're what the Chevalier calls 'separate entities.'  I seem to understand
his odd, wise talk better lately.  He said the other day: 'Lonely we come
into the world, and lonely we go out of it.'  That's what I mean.  It
makes me shudder sometimes, that part of us which lives alone for ever.
We go running on as happy as can be, like Biribi there in the garden, and
all at once we stop short at a hedge, just as he does there--a hedge just
too tall to look over and with no foothold for climbing.  That's what I
want so much; I want to look over the Hedge."

When she spoke like this to Philip, as she sometimes did, she seemed
quite unconscious that he was a listener, it was rather as if he were
part of her and thinking the same thoughts.  To Philip she seemed
wonderful.  He had never bothered his head in that way about abstract
things when he was her age, and he could not understand it in her.  What
was more, he could not have thought as she did if he had tried.  She had
that sort of mind which accepts no stereotyped reflection or idea; she
worked things out for herself.  Her words were her own, and not
another's.  She was not imitative, nor yet was she bizarre; she was
individual, simple, inquiring.

"That's the thing that hurts most in life," she added presently; "that
trying to find and not being able to--voila, what a child I am to babble
so!" she broke off with a little laugh, which had, however, a plaintive
note.  There was a touch of undeveloped pathos in her character, for she
had been left alone too young, been given responsibility too soon.

He felt he must say something, and in a sympathetic tone he replied:

"Yes, Guida, but after a while we stop trying to follow and see and find,
and we walk in the old paths and take things as they are."

"Have you stopped?" she said to him wistfully.  "Oh, no, not
altogether," he replied, dropping his tones to tenderness, "for I've been
trying to peep over a hedge this afternoon, and I haven't done it yet."
"Have you?" she rejoined, then paused, for the look in his eyes
embarrassed her.  .  .  .  "Why do you look at me like that?" she added
tremulously.

"Guida," he said earnestly, leaning towards her, "a month ago I asked you
if you would listen to me when I told you of my love, and you said you
would.  Well, sometimes when we have met since, I have told you the same
story, and you've kept your promise and listened.  Guida, I want to go on
telling you the same story for a long time--even till you or I die."

"Do you--ah, then, do you?" she asked simply.  "Do you really wish
that?"

"It is the greatest wish of my life, and always will be," he added,
taking her unresisting hands.

"I like to hear you say it," she answered simply, "and it cannot be
wrong, can it?  Is there any wrong in my listening to you?  Yet why
do I feel that it is not quite right?--sometimes I do feel that."

"One thing will make all right," he said eagerly; "one thing.  I love
you, Guida, love you devotedly.  Do you--tell me if you love me?  Do not
fear to tell me, dearest, for then will come the thing that makes all
right."

"I do not know," she responded, her heart beating fast, her eyes drooping
before him; "but when you go from me, I am not happy till I see you
again.  When you are gone, I want to be alone that I may remember all you
have said, and say it over to myself again.  When I hear you speak I want
to shut my eyes, I am so happy; and every word of mine seems clumsy when
you talk to me; and I feel of how little account I am beside you.  Is
that love, Philip--Philip, do you think that is love?"

They were standing now.  The fruit that hung above Guida's head was not
fairer and sweeter than she.  Philip drew her to him, and her eyes lifted
to his.

"Is that love, Philip?" she repeated.  "Tell me, for I do not know--it
has all come so soon.  You are wiser; do not deceive me; you understand,
and I do not.  Philip, do not let me deceive myself."

"As the Judgment of Life is before us, I believe you love me, Guida--
though I don't deserve it," he answered with tender seriousness.

"And it is right that you should love me; that we should love each other,
Philip?"

"It will be right soon," he said, "right for ever.  Guida mine, I want
you to marry me."

His arm tightened round her waist, as though he half feared she would fly
from him.  He was right; she made a motion backward, but he held her
firmly, tenderly.  "Marry--marry you, Philip!" she exclaimed in
trembling dismay.

"Marry--yes, marry me, Guida.  That will make all right; that will bind
us together for ever.  Have you never thought of that?"

"Oh, never, never!" she answered.  It was true, she had never thought of
that; there had not been time.  Too much had come all at once.  "Why
should I?  I cannot--cannot.  Oh, it could not be--not at least for a
long, long time, not for years and years, Philip."

"Guida," he answered gravely and persistently, "I want you to marry me--
to-morrow."

She was overwhelmed.  She could scarcely speak.  "To-morrow--to-morrow,
Philip?  You are laughing at me.  I could not--how could I marry you
to-morrow?"

"Guida, dearest,"--he took her hands more tightly now--"you must indeed.
The day after to-morrow my ship is going to Portsmouth for two months.
Then we return again here, but I will not go now unless I go as your
husband!"

"Oh, no, I could not--it is impossible, Philip!  It is madness--it is
wrong.  My grandfather--"

"Your grandfather need not know, sweetheart."

"How can you say such wicked things, Philip?"

"My dearest, it is not necessary for him to know.  I don't want any one
to know until I come back from Portsmouth.  Then I shall have a ship of
my own--commander of the Araminta I shall be then.  I have word from the
Admiralty to that effect.  But I dare not let them know that I am married
until I get commissioned to my ship.  The Admiralty has set its face
against lieutenants marrying."

"Then do not marry, Philip.  You ought not, you see."

Her pleading was like the beating of helpless wings against the bars of a
golden cage.

"But I must marry you, Guida.  A sailor's life is uncertain, and what I
want I want now.  When I come back from Portsmouth every one shall know,
but if you love me--and I know you do--you must marry me to-morrow.
Until I come back no one shall know about it except the clergyman, Mr.
Dow of St. Michael's--I have seen him--and Shoreham, a brother officer of
mine.  Ah, you must, Guida, you must!  Whatever is worth doing is better
worth doing in the time one's own heart says.  I want it more, a thousand
times more, than I ever wanted anything in my life."

She looked at him in a troubled sort of way.  Somehow she felt wiser than
he at that moment, wiser and stronger, though she scarcely defined the
feeling to herself, though she knew that in the end her brain would yield
to her heart in this.

"Would it make you so much happier, Philip?" she said more kindly than
joyfully, more in grave acquiescence than delighted belief.

"Yes, on my honour--supremely happy."

"You are afraid that otherwise, by some chance, you might lose me?" she
said it tenderly, yet with a little pain.

"Yes, yes, that is it, Guida dearest," he replied.  "I suppose women are
different altogether from men," she answered.  "I could have waited ever
so long, believing that you would come again, and that I should never
lose you.  But men are different; I see, yes, I see that, Philip."

"We are more impetuous.  We know, we sailors, that now-to-day-is our
time; that to-morrow may be Fate's, and Fate is a fickle jade: she
beckons you up with one hand to-day, and waves you down with the other
to-morrow."

"Philip," she said, scarcely above a whisper, and putting her hands
on his arms, as her head sank towards him, "I must be honest with you--
I must be that or nothing at all.  I do not feel as you do about it; I
can't.  I would much--much--rather everybody knew.  And I feel it almost
wrong that they do not."  She paused a minute, her brow clouded slightly,
then cleared again, and she went on bravely: "Philip, if--if I should,
you must promise me that you will leave me as soon as ever we are
married, and that you will not try to see me until you come again from
Portsmouth.  I am sure that is right, for the deception will not be so
great.  I should be better able then to tell the poor grandpethe.  Will
you promise me, Philip-dear?  It--it is so hard for me.  Ah, can't you
understand?"

This hopeless everlasting cry of a woman's soul!

He clasped her close.  "Yes, Guida, my beloved, I understand, and I
promise you--I do promise you."  Her head dropped on his breast, her arms
ran round his neck.  He raised her face; her eyes were closed; they were
dropping tears.  He tenderly kissed the tears away.




CHAPTER XIV

              "Oh, give to me my gui-l'annee,
                 I pray you, Monseigneur;
               The king's princess doth ride to-day,
                 And I ride forth with her.
               Oh!  I will ride the maid beside
                 Till we come to the sea,
               Till my good ship receive my bride,
                 And she sail far with me.
                 Oh, donnez-moi ma gui-l'annee,
                   Monseigneur, je vous prie!"

The singer was perched on a huge broad stone, which, lying athwart other
tall perpendicular stones, made a kind of hut, approached by a pathway of
upright narrow pillars, irregular and crude.  Vast must have been the
labour of man's hands to lift the massive table of rock upon the
supporting shafts--relics of an age when they were the only architecture,
the only national monuments; when savage ancestors in lion skins, with
stone weapons, led by white-robed Druid priests, came solemnly here and
left the mistletoe wreath upon these Houses of Death for their adored
warriors.

Even the words sung by Shoreham on the rock carried on the ancient story,
the sacred legend that he who wore in his breast this mistletoe got from
the Druids' altar, bearing his bride forth by sea or land, should suffer
no mischance; and for the bride herself, the morgen-gifn should fail not,
but should attest richly the perfect bliss of the nuptial hours.

The light was almost gone from the day, though the last crimson petals
had scarce dropped from the rose of sunset.  Upon the sea beneath there
was not a ripple; it was a lake of molten silver, shading into a leaden
silence far away.  The tide was high, and the ragged rocks of the Banc
des Violets in the south and the Corbiore in the west were all but
hidden.

Below the mound where the tuneful youth loitered was a path, leading down
through the fields and into the highway.  In this path walked lingeringly
a man and a maid.  Despite the peaceful, almost dormant life about them,
the great event of their lives had just occurred, that which is at once a
vast adventure and a simple testament of nature: they had been joined in
marriage privately in the parish church of St. Michael's near by.  As
Shoreham's voice came down the cotil, the two looked up, then passed on
out of view.

But still the voice followed them, and the man looked down at the maid,
repeating the refrain of the song:

                   "Oh, give to me my gui-l'annee,
                    Monseigneur, je vous prie!"

The maid looked up at the man tenderly, almost devoutly.

"I have no Druid's mistletoe from the Chapel of St. George, but I will
give you--stoop down, Philip," she added softly, "I will give you the
first kiss I have ever given to any man."

He stooped.  She kissed him on the forehead, then upon the lips.

"Guida, my wife," Philip said, and drew her to his breast.

"My Philip," she answered softly.  "Won't you say, 'Philip, my husband'?"

She shyly did as he asked in a voice no louder than a bee's.  She was
only seventeen.

Presently she looked up at him with a look a little abashed, a little
anxious, yet tender withal.

"Philip," she said, "I wonder what we will think of this day a year from
now--no, don't frown, Philip," she added.  "You look at things so
differently from me.  To-day is everything to you; to-morrow is very much
to me.  It isn't that I am afraid, it is that thoughts of possibilities
will come whether or no.  If I couldn't tell you everything I feel I
should be most unhappy.  You see, I want to be able to do that, to tell
you everything."

"Of course, of course," he said, not quite comprehending her, for his
thoughts were always more material.  He was revelling in the beauty of
the girl before him, in her perfect outward self, in her unique
personality.  The more subtle, the deeper part of her, the searching soul
never to be content with superficial reasons and the obvious cause, these
he did not know--was he ever to know?  It was the law of her nature that
she was never to deceive herself, to pretend anything, nor to forgive
pretence.  To see things, to look beyond the Hedge, that was to be a
passion with her; already it was nearly that.

"Of course," Philip continued, "you must tell me everything, and I'll
understand.  And as for what we'll think of this in another year, why,
doesn't it hold to reason that we'll think it the best day of our lives--
as it is, Guida?"  He smiled at her, and touched her shining hair.  "Evil
can't come out of good, can it?  And this is good, as good as anything in
the world can be.  .  .  .  There, look into my eyes that way--just that
way."

"Are you happy--very, very happy, Philip?" she asked, lingering on the
words.

"Perfectly happy, Guida," he answered; and in truth he seemed so, his
eyes were so bright, his face so eloquent, his bearing so buoyant.

"And you think we have done quite right, Philip?" she urged.

"Of course, of course we have.  We are honourably disposing of our own
fates.  We love each other, we are married as surely as others are
married.  Where is the wrong?  We have told no one, simply because for a
couple of months it is best not to do so.  The parson wouldn't have
married us if there'd been anything wrong."

"Oh, it isn't what the clergyman might think that I mean; it's what we
ourselves think down, down deep in our hearts.  If you, Philip--if you
say it is all right, I will believe that it is right, for you would never
want your wife to have one single wrong thing like a dark spot on her
life with you--would you?  If it is all right to you, it must be all
right for me, don't you see?"

He did see that, and it made him grave for an instant, it made him not
quite so sure.

"If your mother were alive," he answered, "of course she should have
known; but it isn't necessary for your grandfather to know.  He talks; he
couldn't keep it to himself even for a month.  But we have been regularly
married, we have a witness--Shoreham over there "he pointed towards the
Druid's cromlech where the young man was perched--" and it only concerns
us now--only you and me."

"Yet if anything happened to you during the next two months, Philip, and
you did not come back!"

"My dearest, dearest Guida," he answered, taking her hands in his,
and laughing boyishly, "in that case you will announce the marriage.
Shoreham and the clergyman are witnesses; besides, there's the
certificate which Mr. Dow will give you to-morrow; and, above all,
there's the formal record on the parish register.  There, sweetest
interrogation mark in the world, there is the law and the gospel!
Come, come, let us be gay, let this be the happiest hour we've yet
had in all our lives."

"How can I be altogether gay, Philip, when we part now, and I shall not
see you for two whole long months?"

"Mayn't I come to you for just a minute to-morrow morning, before I go?"

"No, no, no, you must not, indeed you must not.  Remember your promise,
remember that you are not to see me again until you come back from
Portsmouth.  Even this is not quite what we agreed, for you are still
with me, and we've been married nearly half an hour!"

"Perhaps we were married a thousand years ago--I don't know," he
answered, drawing her to him.  "It's all a magnificent dream so far."

"You must go, you must keep your word.  Don't break the first promise
you ever made me, Philip."

She did not say it very reproachfully, for his look was ardent and
worshipful, and she could not be even a little austere in her new joy.

"I am going," he answered.  "We will go back to the town, I by the road,
you by the shore, so no one will see us, and--"

"Philip," said Guida suddenly, "is it quite the same being married
without banns?"

His laugh had again a youthful ring of delight.  "Of course, just the
same, my doubting fay," said he.  "Don't be frightened about anything.
Now promise me that--will you promise me?"

She looked at him a moment steadily, her eyes lingering on his face with
great tenderness, and then she said:

"Yes, Philip, I will not trouble or question any longer.  I will only
believe that everything is all right.  Say good-bye to me, Philip.
I am happy now, but if--if you stay any longer--ah, please, please go,
Philip!"

A moment afterwards Philip and Shoreham were entering the high road,
waving their handkerchiefs to her as they went.

She had gone back to the Druid's cromlech where Philip's friend had sat,
and with smiling lips and swimming eyes she watched the young men until
they were lost to view.

Her eyes wandered over the sea.  How immense it was, how mysterious, how
it begot in one feelings both of love and of awe!  At this moment she was
not in sympathy with its wonderful calm.  There had been times when she
seemed of it, part of it, absorbed by it, till it flowed over her soul
and wrapped her in a deep content.  Now all was different.  Mystery and
the million happenings of life lay hidden in that far silver haze.  On
the brink of such a sea her mind seemed to be hovering now.  Nothing was
defined, nothing was clear.  She was too agitated to think; life, being,
was one wide, vague sensation, partly delight, partly trepidation.
Everything had a bright tremulousness.  This mystery was no dark cloud,
it was a shaking, glittering mist, and yet there rose from it an air
which made her pulse beat hard, her breath come with joyous lightness.
She was growing to a new consciousness; a new glass, through which to
see life, was quickly being adjusted to her inner sight.

Many a time, with her mother, she had sat upon the shore at St. Aubin's
Bay, and looked out where white sails fluttered like the wings of
restless doves.  Nearer, maybe just beneath her, there had risen the keen
singing of the saw, and she could see the white flash of the adze as it
shaped the beams; the skeleton of a noble ship being covered with its
flesh of wood, and veined with iron; the tall masts quivering to their
places as the workmen hauled at the pulleys, singing snatches of patois
rhymes.  She had seen more than one ship launched, and a strange shiver
of pleasure and of pain had gone through her; for as the water caught the
graceful figure of the vessel, and the wind bellied out the sails, it
seemed to her as if some ship of her own hopes were going out between the
reefs to the open sea.  What would her ship bring back again to her?  Or
would anything ever come back?

The books of adventure, poetry, history, and mythology she had read with
her mother had quickened her mind, sharpened her intuition, had made her
temperament still more sensitive--and her heart less peaceful.  In her
was almost every note of human feeling: home and duty, song and gaiety,
daring and neighbourly kindness, love of sky and sea and air and
orchards, of the good-smelling earth and wholesome animal life, and all
the incidents, tragic, comic, or commonplace, of human existence.

How wonderful love was, she thought!  How wonderful that so many millions
who had loved had come and gone, and yet of all they felt they had spoken
no word that laid bare the exact feeling to her or to any other.  The
barbarians who raised these very stones she sat on, they had loved and
hated, and everything they had dared or suffered was recorded--but where?
And who could know exactly what they felt?

She realised the almost keenest pain of life, that universal agony, the
trying to speak, to reveal; and the proof, the hourly proof even the
wisest and most gifted have, that what they feel they can never quite
express, by sound, or by colour, or by the graven stone, or by the spoken
word.  .  .  .  But life was good, ah yes!  and all that might be
revealed to her she would pray for; and Philip--her Philip--would help
her to the revelation.

Her Philip!  Her heart gave a great throb, for the knowledge that she was
a wife came home to her with a pleasant shock.  Her name was no longer
Guida Landresse de Landresse, but Guida d'Avranche.  She had gone from
one tribe to another, she had been adopted, changed.  A new life was
begun.

She rose, slowly made her way down to the sea, and proceeded along the
sands and shore-paths to the town.  Presently a large vessel, with new
sails, beautiful white hull, and gracious form, came slowly round a
point.  She shaded her eyes to look at it.

"Why, it's the boat Maitre Ranulph was to launch to-day," she said.  Then
she stopped suddenly.  "Poor Ranulph--poor Ro!" she added gently.  She
knew that he cared for her--loved her.  Where had he been these weeks
past?  She had not seen him once since that great day when they had
visited the Ecrehos.




CHAPTER XV

The house of Elie Mattingley the smuggler stood in the Rue d'Egypte, not
far east of the Vier Prison.  It had belonged to a jurat of repute, who
parted with it to Mattingley not long before he died.  There was no doubt
as to the validity of the transfer, for the deed was duly registered au
greffe, and it said: "In consideration of one livre turnois," etc.
Possibly it was a libel against the departed jurat that he and Mattingley
had had dealings unrecognised by customs law, crystallising at last into
this legacy to the famous pirate-smuggler.

Unlike any other in the street, this house had a high stone wall in
front, enclosing a small square paved with flat stones.  In one corner
was an ivy-covered well, with an antique iron gate, and the bucket,
hanging on a hook inside the fern-grown hood, was an old wine-keg--
appropriate emblem for a smuggler's house.  In one corner, girdled by
about five square feet of green earth, grew a pear tree, bearing large
juicy pears, reserved for the use of a distinguished lodger, the
Chevalier du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir.

In the summer the Chevalier always had his breakfast under this tree.
Occasionally one other person breakfasted with him, even Savary dit
Detricand, whom however he met less frequently than many people of the
town, though they lived in the same house.  Detricand was but a fitful
lodger, absent at times for a month or so, and running up bills for food
and wine, of which payment was never summarily demanded by Mattingley,
for some day or other he always paid.  When he did, he never questioned
the bill, and, what was most important, whether he was sober or "warm as
a thrush," he always treated Carterette with respect, though she was not
unsparing with her tongue under slight temptation.

Despite their differences and the girl's tempers, when the day came for
Detricand to leave for France, Carterette was unhappy.  Several things
had come at once: his going,--on whom should she lavish her good advice
and biting candour now?--yesterday's business in the Vier Marchi with
Olivier Delagarde, and the bitter change in Ranulph.  Sorrowful
reflections and as sorrowful curiosity devoured her.

All day she tortured herself.  The late afternoon came, and she could
bear it no longer--she would visit Guida.  She was about to start, when
the door in the garden wall opened and Olivier Delagarde entered.  As he
doffed his hat to her she thought she had never seen anything more
beautiful than the smooth forehead, white hair, and long beard of the
returned patriot.  That was the first impression; but a closer scrutiny
detected the furtive, watery eye, the unwholesome, drooping mouth, the
vicious teeth, blackened and irregular.  There was, too, something
sinister in the yellow stockings, luridly contrasting with the black
knickerbockers and rusty blue coat.

At first Carterette was inclined to run towards the prophet-like figure
--it was Ranulph's father; next she drew back with dislike--his smile was
leering malice under the guise of amiable mirth.  But he was old, and he
looked feeble, so her mind instantly changed again, and she offered him a
seat on a bench beside the arched doorway with the superscription:

              "Nor Poverty nor Riches, but Daily Bread
               Under Mine Own Fig Tree."

After the custom of the country, Carterette at once offered him
refreshment, and brought him brandy--good old brandy was always to be got
at the house of Elie Mattingley!  As he drank she noticed a peculiar,
uncanny twitching of the fingers and eyelids.  The old man's eyes were
continually shifting from place to place.  He asked Carterette many
questions.  He had known the house years before--did the deep stream
still run beneath it?  Was the round hole still in the floor of the back
room, from which water used to be drawn in old days?  Carterette replied
that it was M. Detricand's bedroom now, and you could plainly hear the
stream running beneath the house.  Did not the noise of the water worry
poor M. Detricand then?  And so it still went straight on to the sea--
and, of course, much swifter after such a heavy rain as they had had the
day before.

Carterette took him into every room in the house save her own and the
Chevalier's.  In the kitchen and in Detricand's bedroom Olivier
Delagarde's eyes were very busy.  He saw that the kitchen opened on the
garden, which had a gate in the rear wall.  He also saw that the lozenge-
paned windows swung like doors, and were not securely fastened; and he
tried the trap-door in Detricand's bedroom to see the water flowing
beneath, just as it did when he was young--Yes, there it was running
swiftly away to the sea!  Then he babbled all the way to the door that
led into the street; for now he would stay no longer.

When he had gone, Carterette sat wondering why it was that Ranulph's
father should inspire her with such dislike.  She knew that at this
moment no man in Jersey was so popular as Olivier Delagarde.  The longer
she thought the more puzzled she became.  No sooner had she got one
theory than another forced her to move on.  In the language of her
people, she did not know on which foot to dance.

As she sat and thought, Detricand entered, loaded with parcels and
bundles.  These were mostly gifts for her father and herself; and for
du Champsavoys there was a fine delft shaving-dish, shaped like a
quartermoon to fit the neck.  They were distributed, and by the time
supper was over, it was quite dark.  Then Detricand said his farewells,
for it was ten o'clock, and he must be away at three, when his boat was
to steal across to Brittany, and land him near to the outposts of the
Royalist army under de la Rochejaquelein.  There were letters to write
and packing yet to do.  He set to work gaily.

At last everything was done, and he was stooping over a bag to fasten it.
The candle was in the window.  Suddenly a hand--a long, skinny hand--
reached softly out from behind a large press, and swallowed and crushed
out the flame.  Detricand raised his head quickly, astonished.  There was
no wind blowing--the candle had not even flickered when burning.  But
then, again, he had not heard a sound; perhaps that was because his foot
was scraping the floor at the moment the light went out.  He looked out
of the window, but there was only starlight, and he could not see
distinctly.  Turning round he went to the door of the outer hall-way,
opened it, and stepped into the garden.  As he did so, a figure slipped
from behind the press in the bedroom, swiftly raised the trap-door in the
flooring, then, shadowed by the door leading into the hall-way, waited
for him.

Presently his footstep was heard.  He entered the hall, stood in the
doorway of the bedroom for a moment, while he searched in his pockets for
a light, then stepped inside.

Suddenly his attention was arrested.  There was the sound of flowing
water beneath his feet.  This could always be heard in his room, but now
how loud it was!  Realising that the trap-door must be open, he listened
for a second and was instantly conscious of some one in the room.  He
made a step towards the door, but it suddenly closed softly.  He moved
swiftly to the window, for the presence was near the door.

What did it mean?  Who was it?  Was there one, or more?  Was murder
intended?  The silence, the weirdness, stopped his tongue--besides, what
was the good of crying out?  Whatever was to happen would happen at once.
He struck a light, and held it up.  As he did so some one or something
rushed at him.  What a fool he had been--the light had revealed his
position!  But at the same moment came the instinct to throw himself to
one side; which he did as the rush came.  In that one flash he had seen
--a man's white beard.

Next instant there was a sharp sting in his right shoulder.  The knife
had missed his breast--the sudden swerving had saved him.  Even as it
struck, he threw himself on his assailant.  Then came a struggle.  The
long fingers of the man with the white beard clove to the knife like a
dead soldier's to the handle of a sword.  Twice Detricand's hand was
gashed slightly, and then he pinioned the wrist of his enemy, and tripped
him up.  The miscreant fell half across the opening in the floor.  One
foot, hanging down, almost touched the running water.

Detricand had his foe at his mercy.  There was the first inclination to
drop him into the stream, but that was put away as quickly as it came.
He gave the wretch a sudden twist, pulling him clear of the hole, and
wrenched the knife from his fingers at the same moment.

"Now, monsieur," said he, feeling for a light, "now we'll have a look at
you."

The figure lay quiet beneath him.  The nervous strength was gone, the
body was limp, the breathing was laboured.  The light flared.  Detricand
held it down, and there was revealed the haggard, malicious face of
Olivier Delagarde.

"So, monsieur the traitor," said Detricand--" so you'd be a murderer too
--eh?"

The old man mumbled an oath.

"Hand of the devil," continued Detricand, "was there ever a greater beast
than you!  I held my tongue about you these eleven years past, I held it
yesterday and saved your paltry life, and you'd repay me by stabbing me
in the dark--in a fine old-fashioned way too, with your trap-doors, and
blown-out candle, and Italian tricks--"

He held the candle down near the white beard as though he would singe it.

"Come, sit up against the wall there and let me look at you."

Cringing, the old man drew himself over to the wall.  Detricand, seating
himself in a chair, held the candle up before him.

After a moment he said: "What I want to know is, how could a low-flying
cormorant like you beget a gull of the cliffs like Maitre Ranulph?"

The old man did not answer, but sat blinking with malignant yet fearful
eyes at Detricand, who continued: "What did you come back for?  Why
didn't you stay dead?  Ranulph had a name as clean as a piece of paper
from the mill, and he can't write it now without turning sick, because
it's the same name as yours.  You're the choice blackamoor of creation,
aren't you?  Now what have you got to say?"

"Let me go," whined the old man with the white beard.  "Let me go,
monsieur.  Don't send me to prison."

Detricand stirred him with his foot, as one might a pile of dirt.

"Listen," said he.  "In the Vier Marchi they're cutting off the ear of a
man and nailing it to a post, because he ill-used a cow.  What do you
suppose they'd do to you, if I took you down there and told them it was
through you Rullecour landed, and that you'd have seen them all murdered
--eh, maitre cormorant?"

The old man crawled towards Detricand on his knees.  "Let me go, let me
go," he whined.  "I was mad; I didn't know what I was doing; I've not
been right in the head since I was in the Guiana prison."

At that moment it struck Detricand that the old man must have had some
awful experience in prison, for now his eyes had the most painful terror,
the most abject fear.  He had never seen so craven a sight.

"What were you in prison for in Guiana, and what did they do to you
there?" asked Detricand sternly.  Again the old man shivered horribly,
and tears streamed down his cheeks, as he whined piteously: "Oh no, no,
no--for the mercy of Christ, no!"  He threw up his hands as if to ward
off a blow.

Detricand saw that this was not acting, that it was a supreme terror, an
awful momentary aberration; for the traitor's eyes were wildly staring,
the mouth was drawn in agony, the hands were now rigidly clutching an
imaginary something, the body stiffened where it crouched.

Detricand understood now.  The old man had been tied to a triangle and
whipped--how horribly who might know?  His mood towards the miserable
creature changed: he spoke to him in a firm, quiet tone.

"There, there, you're not going to be hurt.  Be quiet now, and you shall
not be touched."

Then he stooped over, and quickly undoing the old man's waistcoat, he
pulled down the coat and shirt and looked at his back.  As far as he
could see it was scarred as though by a red-hot iron, and the healed
welts were like whipcords on the shrivelled skin.  The old man whimpered
yet, but he was growing quieter.  Detricand lifted him up, and buttoning
the shirt and straightening the coat again, he said:

"Now, you're to go home and sleep the sleep of the unjust, and you're to
keep the sixth commandment, and you're to tell no more lies.  You've made
a shameful mess of your son's life, and you're to die now as soon as you
can without attracting notice.  You're to pray for an accident to take
you out of the world: a wind to blow you over a cliff, a roof to fall on
you, a boat to go down with you, a hole in the ground to swallow you up,
a fever or a plague to end you in a day."

He opened the door to let him go; but suddenly catching his arms held him
in a close grip.  "Hark!" he said in a mysterious whisper.

There was only the weird sound of the running water through the open
trap-door of the floor.  He knew how superstitious was every Jerseyman,
from highest to lowest, and he would work upon that weakness now.

"You hear that water running to the sea?" he said solemnly.  "You tried
to kill and drown me to-night.  You've heard how when one man has drowned
another an invisible stream follows the murderer wherever he goes, and he
hears it, hour after hour, month after month, year after year, until
suddenly one day it comes on him in a huge flood, and he is found,
whether in the road, or in his bed, or at the table, or in the field,
drowned, and dead?"

The old man shivered violently.

"You know Manon Moignard the witch?  Well, if you don't do what I say--
and I shall find out, mind you--she shall bewitch the flood on you.  Be
still .  .  .  listen!  That's the sound you'll hear every day of your
life, if you break the promise you've got to make to me now."

He spoke the promise with ghostly deliberation, and the old man, all the
desperado gone out of him, repeated it in a husky voice.  Whereupon
Detricand led him into the garden, saw him safe out on the road and
watched him disappear.  Then rubbing his fingers, as though to rid them
of pollution, with an exclamation of disgust he went back to the house.

By another evening--that is, at the hour when Guida arrived home after
her secret marriage with Philip d'Avranche--he saw the lights of the army
of de la Rochejaquelein in the valley of the Vendee.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Adaptability was his greatest weapon in life
He felt things, he did not study them
If women hadn't memory, she answered, they wouldn't have much
Lilt of existence lulling to sleep wisdom and tried experience
Lonely we come into the world, and lonely we go out of it
Never to be content with superficial reasons and the obvious






THE BATTLE OF THE STRONG

[A ROMANCE OF TWO KINGDOMS]

By Gilbert Parker


Volume 3.


CHAPTER XVI

The night and morning after Guida's marriage came and went.  The day drew
on to the hour fixed for the going of the Narcissus.  Guida had worked
all forenoon with a feverish unrest, not trusting herself, though the
temptation was sore, to go where she might see Philip's vessel lying in
the tide-way.  She had resolved that only at the moment fixed for sailing
would she go to the shore; yet from her kitchen door she could see a wide
acreage of blue water and a perfect sky; and out there was Noirmont
Point, round which her husband's ship would go, and be lost to her vision
thereafter.

The day wore on.  She got her grandfather's dinner, saw him bestowed in
the great arm-chair for his afternoon sleep, and, when her household work
was done, settled herself at the spinning wheel.

The old man loved to have her spin and sing as he drowsed.  To-day his
eyes had followed her everywhere.  He could not have told why it was, but
somehow all at once he seemed to deeply realise her--her beauty, the joy
of this innocent living intelligence moving through his home.  She had
always been necessary to him, but he had taken her presence as a matter
of course.  She had always been to him the most wonderful child ever
given to comfort an old man's life, but now as he abstractedly took a
pinch of snuff from the silver box and then forgot to put it to his nose,
he seemed suddenly to get that clearness of sight, that perspective, from
which he could see her as she really was.  He took another pinch of
snuff, and again forgot to put it to his nose, but brushed imaginary dust
from his coat, as was his wont, and whispered to himself:

"Why now, why now, I had not thought she was so much a woman.  Flowers
of the sea, but what eyes, what carriage, and what an air!  I had not
thought--h'm--blind old bat that I am--I had not thought she was grown
such a lady.  It was only yesterday, surely but yesterday, since I rocked
her to sleep.  Francois de Mauprat"--he shook his head at himself--"you
are growing old.  Let me see--why, yes, she was born the day I sold the
blue enamelled timepiece to his Highness the Duc de Mauban.  The Duc was
but putting the watch to his ear when a message comes to say the child
there is born.  'Good,' says the Duc de Mauban, when he hears, 'give me
the honour, de Mauprat,' says he, 'for the sake of old days in France, to
offer a name to the brave innocent--for the sake of old associations,'
says de Mauban.  'You knew my wife, de Mauprat,' says he; 'you knew the
Duchesse Guida-Guidabaldine.  She's been gone these ten years, alas!  You
were with me when we were married, de Mauprat,' says the Duc; 'I should
care to return the compliment if you will allow me to offer a name, eh?'
'Duc,' said I, 'there is no honour I more desire for my grandchild.'
'Then let the name of Guidabaldine be somewhere among others she will
carry, and--and I'll not forget her, de Mauprat, I'll not forget her.'...
Eh, eh, I wonder--I wonder if he has forgotten the little Guidabaldine
there?  He sent her a golden cup for the christening, but I wonder--
I wonder--if he has forgotten her since?  So quick of tongue, so bright
of eye, so light of foot, so sweet a face--if one could but be always
young!  When her grandmother, my wife, my Julie, when she was young--ah,
she was fair, fairer than Guida, but not so tall--not quite so tall.
Ah! .  .  . "

He was slipping away into sleep when he realised that Guida was singing

              "Spin, spin, belle Mergaton!
                 The moon wheels full, and the tide flows high,
               And your wedding-gown you must put it on
                 Ere the night hath no moon in the sky--
                         Gigoton Mergaton, spin!"

"I had never thought she was so much a woman," he said drowsily; "I--
I wonder why--I never noticed it."

He roused himself again, brushed imaginary snuff from his coat, keeping
time with his foot to the wheel as it went round.  "I--I suppose she will
wed soon.  .  .  .  I had forgotten.  But she must marry well, she must
marry well--she is the godchild of the Duc de Mauban.  How the wheel goes
round!  I used to hear--her mother--sing that song, 'Gigoton, Mergaton
spin-spin-spin.'" He was asleep.

Guida put by the wheel, and left the house.  Passing through the Rue des
Sablons, she came to the shore.  It was high tide.  This was the time
that Philip's ship was to go.  She had dressed herself with as much care
as to what might please his eye as though she were going to meet him in
person.  Not without reason, for, though she could not see him from the
land, she knew he could see her plainly through his telescope, if he
chose.

She reached the shore.  The time had come for him to go, but there was
his ship at anchor in the tide-way still.  Perhaps the Narcissus was not
going; perhaps, after all, Philip was to remain!  She laughed with
pleasure at the thought of that.  Her eyes wandered lovingly over the
ship which was her husband's home upon the sea.  Just such another vessel
Philip would command.  At a word from him those guns, like long, black,
threatening arms thrust out, would strike for England with thunder and
fire.

A bugle call came across the still water, clear, vibrant, and compelling.
It represented power.  Power--that was what Philip, with his ship, would
stand for in the name of England.  Danger--oh yes, there would be danger,
but Heaven would be good to her; Philip should go safe through storm and
war, and some day great honours would be done him.  He should be an
admiral, and more perhaps; he had said so.  He was going to do it as much
for her as for himself, and when he had done it, to be proud of it more
for her than for himself; he had said so: she believed in him utterly.
Since that day upon the Ecrehos it had never occurred to her not to
believe him.  Where she gave her faith she gave it wholly; where she
withdrew it--

The bugle call sounded again.  Perhaps that was the signal to set sail.
No, a boat was putting out from the Narcissus.  It was coming landward.
As she watched its approach she heard a chorus of boisterous voices
behind her.  She turned and saw nearing the shore from the Rue d'Egypte a
half-dozen sailors, singing cheerily:

              "Get you on, get you on, get you on,
               Get you on to your fo'c'stle'ome;
               Leave your lassies, leave your beer,
               For the bugle what you 'ear
               Pipes you on to your fo'c'stle 'ome--
               'Ome--'ome--'ome,
               Pipes you on to your fo'c'stle 'ome."

Guida drew near.

"The Narcissus is not leaving to-day?" she asked of the foremost sailor.

The man touched his cap.  "Not to-day, lady."

"When does she leave?"

"Well, that's more nor I can say, lady, but the cap'n of the main-top,
yander, 'e knows."

She approached the captain of the main-top.  "When does the Narcissus
leave?" she asked.

He looked her up and down, at first glance with something like boldness,
but instantly he touched his hat.

"To-morrow, mistress--she leaves at 'igh tide tomorrow."

With an eye for a fee or a bribe, he drew a little away from the others,
and said to her in a low tone: "Is there anything what I could do for
you, mistress?  P'r'aps you wanted some word carried aboard, lady?"

She hesitated an instant, then said: "No-no, thank you."

He still waited, however, rubbing his hand on his hip with mock
bashfulness.  There was an instant's pause, then she divined his meaning.

She took from her pocket a shilling.  She had never given away so much
money in her life before, but she seemed to feel instinctively that now
she must give freely--now that she was the wife of an officer of the
navy.  Strange how these sailors to-day seemed so different to her from
ever before--she felt as if they all belonged to her.  She offered the
shilling to the captain of the main-top.  His eyes gloated, but he said
with an affected surprise:

"No, I couldn't think of it, yer leddyship."

"Ah, but you will take it!" she said.  "I--I have a r-relative"--she
hesitated at the word--" in the navy."

"'Ave you now, yer leddyship?" he said.  "Well, then, I'm proud to 'ave
the shilling to drink 'is 'ealth, yer leddyship."

He touched his hat, and was about to turn away.  "Stay a little," she
said with bashful boldness.  The joy of giving was rapidly growing to a
vice.  "Here's something for them," she added, nodding towards his
fellows, and a second shilling came from her pocket.  "Just as you say,
yer leddyship," he said with owlish gravity; "but for my part I think
they've 'ad enough.  I don't 'old with temptin' the weak passions of
man."

A moment afterwards the sailors were in the boat, rowing towards the
Narcissus.  Their song came back across the water:

              ".  .  .  O you A.B.  sailor-man,
               Wet your whistle while you can,
                  For the piping of the bugle calls you 'ome!
               'Ome--'ome--'ome,
                  Calls you on to your fo'c'stle 'ome!"

The evening came down, and Guida sat in the kitchen doorway looking out
over the sea, and wondering why Philip had sent her no message.  Of
course he would not come himself, he must not: he had promised her.  But
how much she would have liked to see him for just one minute, to feel his
arms about her, to hear him say good-bye once more.  Yet she loved him
the better for not coming.

By and by she became very restless.  She would have been almost happier
if he had gone that day: he was within call of her, still they were not
to see each other.

She walked up and down the garden, Biribi the dog by her side.  Sitting
down on the bench beneath the appletree, she recalled every word that
Philip had said to her two days before.  Every tone of his voice, every
look he had given her, she went over in her thoughts.  There is no
reporting in the world so exact, so perfect, as that in a woman's mind,
of the words, looks, and acts of her lover in the first days of mutual
confession and understanding.

It can come but once, this dream, fantasy, illusion--call it what you
will: it belongs to the birth hour of a new and powerful feeling; it is
the first sunrise of the heart.  What comes after may be the calmer joy
of a more truthful, a less ideal emotion, but the transitory glory of the
love and passion of youth shoots higher than all other glories into the
sky of time.  The splendour of youth is its madness, and the splendour of
that madness is its unconquerable belief.  And great is the strength of
it, because violence alone can destroy it.  It does not yield to time nor
to decay, to the long wash of experience that wears away the stone, nor
to disintegration.  It is always broken into pieces at a blow.  In the
morning all is well, and ere the evening come the radiant temple is in
ruins.

At night when Guida went to bed she could not sleep at first.  Then came
a drowsing, a floating between waking and sleeping, in which a hundred
swift images of her short past flashed through her mind:

A butterfly darting in the white haze of a dusty road, and the cap of the
careless lad that struck it down....  Berry-picking along the hedges
beyond the quarries of Mont Mado, and washing her hands in the strange
green pools at the bottom of the quarries.  .  .  .  Stooping to a stream
and saying of it to a lad: "Ro, won't it never come back?" .  .  .  From
the front doorway watching a poor criminal shrink beneath the lash with
which he was being flogged from the Vier Marchi to the Vier Prison.  .  .
Seeing a procession of bride and bridegroom with young men and women gay
in ribbons and pretty cottons, calling from house to house to receive the
good wishes of their friends, and drinking cinnamon wine and mulled
cider--the frolic, the gaiety of it all.  Now, in a room full of people,
she was standing on a veille flourished with posies of broom and
wildflowers, and Philip was there beside her, and he was holding her
hand, and they were waiting and waiting for some one who never came.
Nobody took any notice of her and Philip, she thought; they stood there
waiting and waiting--why, there was M. Savary dit Detricand in the
doorway, waving a handkerchief at her, and saying: "I've found it--I've
found it!"--and she awoke with a start.

Her heart was beating hard, and for a moment she was dazed; but presently
she went to sleep again, and dreamed once more.

This time she was on a great warship, in a storm which was driving
towards a rocky shore.  The sea was washing over the deck.  She
recognised the shore: it was the cliff at Plemont in the north of Jersey,
and behind the ship lay the awful Paternosters.  They were drifting,
drifting on the wall of rock.  High above on the land there was a
solitary stone hut.  The ship came nearer and nearer.  The storm
increased in strength.  In the midst of the violence she looked up and
saw a man standing in the doorway of the hut.  He turned his face towards
her: it was Ranulph Delagarde, and he had a rope in his hand.  He saw her
and called to her, making ready to throw the rope, but suddenly some one
drew her back.  She cried aloud, and then all grew black.  .  .  .

And then, again, she knew she was in a small, dark cabin of the ship.
She could hear the storm breaking over the deck.  Now the ship struck.
She could feel her grinding upon the rocks.  She seemed to be sinking,
sinking--There was a knocking, knocking at the door of the cabin, and a
voice calling to her--how far away it seemed!  .  .  .  Was she dying,
was she drowning?  The words of a nursery rhyme rang in her ears
distinctly, keeping time to the knocking.  She wondered who should be
singing a nursery rhyme on a sinking ship:

                        "La main morte,
                         La main morte,
                         Tapp' a la porte,
                         Tapp' a la porte."

She shuddered.  Why should the dead hand tap at her door?  Yet there it
was tapping louder, louder.  .  .  .  She struggled, she tried to cry
out, then suddenly she grew quiet, and the tapping got fainter and
fainter--her eyes opened: she was awake.

For an instant she did not know where she was.  Was it a dream still?
For there was a tapping, tapping at her door--no, it was at the window.
A shiver ran through her from head to foot.  Her heart almost stopped
beating.  Some one was calling to her.

"Guida!  Guida!"

It was Philip's voice.  Her cheek had been cold the moment before; now
she felt the blood tingling in her face.  She slid to the floor, threw a
shawl round her, and went to the casement.

The tapping began again.  For a moment she could not open the window.
She was trembling from head to foot.  Philip's voice reassured her a
little.

"Guida, Guida, open the window a moment."

She hesitated.  She could not--no--she could not do it.  He tapped still
louder.

"Guida, don't you hear me?" he asked.

She undid the catch, but she had hardly the courage even yet.  He heard
her now, and pressed the window a little.  Then she opened it slowly, and
her white face showed.

"O Philip," she said breathlessly, "why have you frightened me so?"

He caught her hand in his own.  "Come out into the garden, sweetheart,"
he said, and he kissed the hand.  "Put on a dress and your slippers and
come," he urged again.

"Philip," she said, "O Philip, I cannot!  It is too late.  It is
midnight.  Do not ask me.  Why, why did you come?"

"Because I wanted to speak with you for one minute.  I have only a little
while.  Please come outside and say good-bye to me again.  We are sailing
to-morrow--there's no doubt about it this time."

"O Philip," she answered, her voice quivering, "how can I?  Say good-bye
to me here, now."

"No, no, Guida, you must come.  I can't kiss you good-bye where you are."

"Must I come to you?" she said helplessly.  "Well, then, Philip," she
added, "go to the bench by the apple-tree, and I shall be there in a
moment."

"Beloved!" he exclaimed ardently.  She shut the window slowly.

For a moment he looked about him; then went lightly through the garden,
and sat down on the bench under the apple-tree, near to the summer-house.
At last he heard her footstep.  He rose quickly to meet her, and as she
came timidly to him, clasped her in his arms.

"Philip," she said, "this isn't right.  You ought not to have come; you
have broken your promise."

"Are you not glad to see me?"

"Oh, you know, you know that I'm glad to see you, but you shouldn't have
come--hark!  what's that?"  They both held their breath, for there was a
sound outside the garden wall.  Clac-clac! clac-clac!--a strange, uncanny
footstep.  It seemed to be hurrying away--clac-clac! clac-clac!

"Ah, I know," whispered Guida: "it is Dormy Jamais.  How foolish of me to
be afraid!"

"Of course, of course," said Philip--"Dormy Jamais, the man who never
sleeps."

"Philip--if he saw us!"

"Foolish child, the garden wall is too high for that.  Besides--"

"Yes, Philip?"

"Besides, you are my wife, Guida!"

"No, no, Philip, no; not really so until all the world is told."

"My beloved Guida, what difference can that make?"  She sighed and shook
her head.  "To me, Philip, it is only that which makes it right--that the
whole world knows.  Philip, I am so afraid of--of secrecy, and cheating."

"Nonsense-nonsense!" he answered.  "Poor little wood-bird, you're
frightened at nothing at all.  Come and sit by me."  He drew her close to
him.

Her trembling presently grew less.  Hundreds of glow-worms were
shimmering in the hedge.  The grass-hoppers were whirring in the mielles
beyond; a flutter of wings went by overhead.  The leaves were rustling
gently; a fresh wind was coming up from the sea upon the soft, fragrant
dusk.

They talked a little while in whispers, her hands in his, his voice
soothing her, his low, hurried words giving her no time to think.
But presently she shivered again, though her heart was throbbing hotly.

"Come into the summer-house, Guida; you are cold, you are shivering."
He rose, with his arm round her waist, raising her gently at the same
time.

"Oh no, Philip dear," she said, "I'm not really cold--I don't know what
it is--"

"But indeed you are cold," he answered.  "There's a stiff south-easter
rising, and your hands are like ice.  Come into the arbour for a minute.
It's warm there, and then--then we'll say good-bye, sweetheart."

His arm round her, he drew her with him to the summer-house, talking to
her tenderly all the time.  There was reassurance, comfort, loving care
in his very tones.

How brightly the stars shone, how clearly the music of the stream came
over the hedge!  With what lazy restfulness the distant All's well
floated across the mielles from a ship at anchor in the tide-way, how
like a slumber-song the wash of the sea rolled drowsily along the wind!
How gracious the smell of the earth, drinking up the dew of the affluent
air, which the sun, on the morrow, should turn into life-blood for the
grass and trees and flowers!




CHAPTER XVII

Philip was gone.  Before breakfast was set upon the table, Guida saw the
Narcissus sail round Noirmont Point and disappear.

Her face had taken on a new expression since yesterday.  An old touch of
dreaminess, of vague anticipation was gone--that look which belongs to
youth, which feels the confident charm of the unknown future.  Life was
revealed; but, together with joy, wonder and pain informed the
revelation.

A marvel was upon her.  Her life was linked to another's, she was a wife.
She was no longer sole captain of herself.  Philip would signal, and she
must come until either he or she should die.  He had taken her hand, and
she must never let it go; the breath of his being must henceforth give
her new and healthy life, or inbreed a fever which should corrode the
heart and burn away the spirit.  Young though she was, she realised it--
but without defining it.  The new-found knowledge was diffused in her
character, expressed in her face.

Seldom had a day of Guida's life been so busy.  It seemed to her that
people came and went far more than usual.  She talked, she laughed a
little, she answered back the pleasantries of the seafaring folk who
passed her doorway or her garden.  She was attentive to her grandfather;
exact with her household duties.  But all the time she was thinking--
thinking--thinking.  Now and again she smiled, but at times too tears
sprang to her eyes, to be quickly dried.  More than once she drew in her
breath with a quick, sibilant sound, as though some thought wounded her;
and she flushed suddenly, then turned pale, then came to her natural
colour again.

Among those who chanced to visit the cottage was Maitresse Aimable.  She
came to ask Guida to go with her and Jean to the island of Sark, twelve
miles away, where Guida had never been.  They would only be gone one
night, and, as Maitresse Aimable said, the Sieur de Mauprat could very
well make shift for once.

The invitation came to Guida like water to thirsty ground.  She longed to
get away from the town, to be where she could breathe; for all this day
the earth seemed too small for breath: she gasped for the sea, to be
alone there.  To sail with Jean Touzel was practically to be alone,
for Maitresse Aimable never talked; and Jean knew Guida's ways, knew when
she wished to be quiet.  In Jersey phrase, he saw beyond his spectacles--
great brass-rimmed things, giving a droll, childlike kind of wisdom to
his red rotund face.

Having issued her invitation, Maitresse Aimable smiled placidly and
seemed about to leave, when, all at once, without any warning, she
lowered herself like a vast crate upon the veille, and sat there looking
at Guida.

At first the grave inquiry of her look startled Guida.  She was beginning
to know that sensitive fear assailing those tortured by a secret.  How
she loathed this secrecy!  How guilty she now felt, where, indeed, no
guilt was!  She longed to call aloud her name, her new name, from the
housetops.

The voice of Maitresse Aimable roused her.  Her ponderous visitor had
made a discovery which had yet been made by no other human being.  Her
own absurd romance, her ancient illusion, had taught her to know when
love lay behind another woman's face.  And after her fashion, Maitresse
Aimable loved Jean Touzel as it is given to few to love.

"I was sixteen when I fell in love; you're seventeen--you," she said.
"Ah bah, so it goes!"

Guida's face crimsoned.  What--how much did Maitresse Aimable know?  By
what necromancy had this fat, silent fisher-wife learned the secret which
was the heart of her life, the soul of her being--which was Philip?  She
was frightened, but danger made her cautious.

"Can you guess who it is?" she asked, without replying directly to the
oblique charge.

"It is not Maitre Ranulph," answered her friendly inquisitor; "it is not
that M'sieu' Detricand, the vaurien."  Guida flushed with annoyance.  "It
is not that farmer Blampied, with fifty vergees, all potatoes; it is not
M'sieu' Janvrin, that bat'd'lagoule of an ecrivain.  Ah bah, so it goes!"

"Who is it, then?" persisted Guida.  "Eh ben, that is the thing!"

"How can you tell that one is in love, Maitresse Aimable?  "persisted
Guida.

The other smiled with a torturing placidity, then opened her mouth;
but nothing came of it.  She watched Guida moving about the kitchen
abstractedly.  Her eye wandered to the racllyi, with its flitches of
bacon, to the dreschiaux and the sanded floor, to the great Elizabethan
oak chair, and at last back to Guida, as though through her the lost
voice might be charmed up again.

The eyes of the two met now, fairly, firmly; and Guida was conscious of a
look in the other's face which she had never seen before.  Had then a new
sight been given to herself?  She saw and understood the look in
Maitresse Aimable's face, and instantly knew it to be the same that was
in her own.

With a sudden impulse she dropped the bashin she was polishing, and,
going over quickly, she silently laid her cheek against her old friend's.
She could feel the huge breast heave, she felt the vast face turn hot,
she was conscious of a voice struggling back to life, and she heard it
say at last:

"Gatd'en'ale, rosemary tea cures a cough, but nothing cures the love--ah
bah, so it goes!"

"Do you love Jean?" whispered Guida, not showing her face, but longing
to hear the experience of another who suffered that joy called love.

Maitresse Aimable's face grew hotter; she did not speak, but patted
Guida's back with her heavy hand and nodded complacently.

"Have you always loved him?" asked Guida again, with an eager
inquisition, akin to that of a wayside sinner turned chapel-going saint,
hungry to hear what chanced to others when treading the primrose path.

Maitresse Aimable again nodded, and her arm drew closer about Guida.
There was a slight pause, then came an unsophisticated question:

"Has Jean always loved you?"

A short silence, and then the voice said with the deliberate prudence of
an unwilling witness:

"It is not the man who wears the wedding-ring."  Then, as if she had been
disloyal in even suggesting that Jean might hold her lightly, she added,
almost eagerly--an enthusiasm tempered by the pathos of a half-truth:

"But my Jean always sleeps at home."

This larger excursion into speech gave her courage, and she said more;
and even as Guida listened hungrily--so soon had come upon her the
apprehensions and wavering moods of loving woman!--she was wondering to
hear this creature, considered so dull by all, speak as though out of a
watchful and capable mind.  What further Maitresse Aimable said was proof
that if she knew little and spake little, she knew that little well; and
if she had gathered meagrely from life, she had at least winnowed out
some small handfuls of grain from the straw and chaff.  At last her
sagacity impelled her to say:

"If a man's eyes won't see, elder-water can't make him; if he will--ah
bah, glad and good!"  Both arms went round Guida, and hugged her
awkwardly.

Her voice came up but once more that morning.  As she left Guida in the
doorway, she said with a last effort:

"I will have one bead to pray for you, trejous."  She showed her rosary,
and, Huguenot though she was, Guida touched the bead reverently.  "And if
there is war, I will have two beads, trejous.  A bi'tot--good-bye!"

Guida stood watching her from the doorway, and the last words of the
fisher-wife kept repeating themselves through her brain: "And if there is
war, I will have two beads, trejous."

So, Maitresse Aimable knew she loved Philip!  How strange it was that one
should read so truly without words spoken, or through seeing acts which
reveal.  She herself seemed to read Maitresse Aimable all at once--read
her by virtue, and in the light, of true love, the primitive and
consuming feeling in the breast of each for a man.  Were not words
necessary for speech after all?  But here she stopped short suddenly;
for if love might find and read love, why was it she needed speech of
Philip?  Why was it her spirit kept beating up against the hedge beyond
which his inner self was, and, unable to see that beyond, needed
reassurance by words, by promises and protestations?

All at once she was angry with herself for thinking thus concerning
Philip.  Of course Philip loved her deeply.  Had she not seen the light
of true love in his eyes, and felt the arms of love about her?  Suddenly
she shuddered and grew bitter, and a strange rebellion broke loose in
her.  Why had Philip failed to keep his promise not to see her again
after the marriage, till he should return from Portsmouth?  It was
selfish, painfully, terribly selfish of him.  Why, even though she had
been foolish in her request--why had he not done as she wished?  Was that
love--was it love to break the first promise he had ever made to his
wife?

Yet she excused him to herself.  Men were different from women, and men
did not understand what troubled a woman's heart and spirit; they were
not shaken by the same gusts of emotion; they--they were not so fine;
they did not think so deeply on what a woman, when she loves, thinks
always, and acts upon according to her thought.  If Philip were only here
to resolve these fears, these perplexities, to quiet the storm in her!
And yet, could he--could he?  For now she felt that this storm was
rooting up something very deep and radical in her.  It frightened her,
but for the moment she fought it passionately.

She went into her garden; and here among her animals and her flowers it
seemed easier to be gay of heart; and she laughed a little, and was most
tender and pretty with her grandfather when he came home from spending
the afternoon with the Chevalier.

In this manner the first day of her marriage passed--in happy
reminiscence and in vague foreboding; in affection yet in reproach
as the secret wife; and still as the loving, distracted girl, frightened
at her own bitterness, but knowing it to be justified.

The late evening was spent in gaiety with her grandfather and the
Chevalier; but at night when she went to bed she could not sleep.  She
tossed from side to side; a hundred thoughts came and went.  She grew
feverish, her breath choked her, and she got up and opened the window.
It was clear, bright moonlight, and from where she was she could see the
mielles and the ocean and the star-sown sky above and beyond.  There she
sat and thought and thought till morning.




CHAPTER XVIII

At precisely the same moment in the morning two boats set sail from the
south coast of Jersey: one from Grouville Bay, and one from the harbour
of St. Heliers.  Both were bound for the same point; but the first was to
sail round the east coast of the island, and the second round the west
coast.

The boat leaving Grouville Bay would have on her right the Ecrehos and
the coast of France, with the Dirouilles in her course; the other would
have the wide Atlantic on her left, and the Paternosters in her course.
The two converging lines should meet at the island of Sark.

The boat leaving Grouville Bay was a yacht carrying twelve swivel-guns,
bringing Admiralty despatches to the Channel Islands.  The boat leaving
St. Heliers harbour was a new yawl-rigged craft owned by Jean Touzel.  It
was the fruit of ten years' labour, and he called her the Hardi Biaou,
which, in plain English, means "very beautiful."  This was the third time
she had sailed under Jean's hand.  She carried two carronades, for war
with France was in the air, and it was Jean's whim to make a show of
preparation, for, as he said: "If the war-dogs come, my pups can bark
too.  If they don't, why, glad and good, the Hardi Biaou is big enough to
hold the cough-drops."

The business of the yacht Dorset was important that was why so small a
boat was sent on the Admiralty's affairs.  Had she been a sloop she might
have attracted the attention of a French frigate or privateer wandering
the seas in the interests of Vive la Nation!  The business of the yawl
was quite unimportant.  Jean Touzel was going to Sark with kegs of wine
and tobacco for the seigneur, and to bring over whatever small cargo
might be waiting for Jersey.  The yacht Dorset had aboard her the
Reverend Lorenzo Dow, an old friend of her commander.  He was to be
dropped at Sark, and was to come back with Jean Touzel in the Hardi
Biaou, the matter having been arranged the evening before in the Vier
Marchi.  The saucy yawl had aboard Maitresse Aimable, Guida, and a lad to
assist Jean in working the sails.  Guida counted as one of the crew, for
there was little in the handling of a boat she did not know.

As the Hardi Biaou was leaving the harbour of St. Heliers, Jean told
Guida that Mr. Dow was to join them on the return journey.  She had a
thrill of excitement, for this man was privy to her secret, he was
connected with her life history.  But before the little boat passed St.
Brelade's Bay she was lost in other thoughts: in picturing Philip on the
Narcissus, in inwardly conning the ambitious designs of his career.  What
he might yet be, who could tell?  She had read more than a little of the
doings of great naval commanders, both French and British.  She knew how
simple midshipmen had sometimes become admirals, and afterwards peers of
the realm.

Suddenly a new thought came to her.  Suppose that Philip should rise to
high places, would she be able to follow?  What had she seen--what did
she know--what social opportunities had been hers?  How would she fit
with an exalted station?

Yet Philip had said that she could take her place anywhere with grace and
dignity; and surely Philip knew.  If she were gauche or crude in manners,
he would not have cared for her; if she were not intelligent, he would
scarcely have loved her.  Of course she had read French and English to
some purpose; she could speak Spanish--her grandfather had taught her
that; she understood Italian fairly--she had read it aloud on Sunday
evenings with the Chevalier.  Then there were Corneille, Shakespeare,
Petrarch, Cervantes--she had read them all; and even Wace, the old Norman
trouvere, whose Roman de Rou she knew almost by heart.  Was she so very
ignorant?

There was only one thing to do: she must interest herself in what
interested Philip; she must read what he read; she must study naval
history; she must learn every little thing about a ship of war.  Then
Philip would be able to talk with her of all he did at sea, and she would
understand.

When, a few days ago, she had said to him that she did not know how she
was going to be all that his wife ought to be, he had answered her: "All
I ask is that you be your own sweet self, for it is just you that I want,
you with your own thoughts and imaginings, and not a Guida who has
dropped her own way of looking at things to take on some one else's--even
mine.  It's the people who try to be clever who never are; the people who
are clever never think of trying to be."

Was Philip right?  Was she really, in some way, a little bit clever?  She
would like to believe so, for then she would be a better companion for
him.  After all, how little she knew of Philip--now, why did that thought
always come up!  It made her shudder.  They two would really have to
begin with the A B C of understanding.  To understand was a passion, it
was breathing and life to her.  She would never, could never, be
satisfied with skimming the surface of life as the gulls out there
skimmed the water.  .  .  .  Ah, how beautiful the morning was, and how
the bracing air soothed her feverishness!  All this sky, and light, and
uplifting sea were hers, they fed her with their strength--they were all
so companionable.

Since Philip had gone--and that was but four days ago--she had sat down
a dozen times to write to him, but each time found she could not.  She,
drew back from it because she wanted to empty out her heart, and yet,
somehow, she dared not.  She wanted to tell Philip all the feelings that
possessed her; but how dared she write just what she felt: love and
bitterness, joy and indignation, exaltation and disappointment, all in
one?  How was it these could all exist in a woman's heart at once?  Was
it because Love was greater than all, deeper than all, overcame all,
forgave all?  and was that what women felt and did always?  Was that
their lot, their destiny?  Must they begin in blind faith, then be
plunged into the darkness of disillusion, shaken by the storm of emotion,
taste the sting in the fruit of the tree of knowledge--and go on again
the same, yet not the same?

More or less incoherently these thoughts flitted through Guida's mind.
As yet her experiences were too new for her to fasten securely upon their
meaning.  In a day or two she would write to Philip freely and warmly of
her love and of her hopes; for, maybe, by that time nothing but happiness
would be left in the caldron of feeling.  There was a packet going to
England in three days--yes, she would wait for that.  And Philip--alas!
a letter from him could not reach her for at least a fortnight yet; and
then in another month after that he would be with her, and she would be
able to tell the whole world that she was the wife of Captain Philip
d'Avranche, of the good ship Araminta--for that he was to be when he came
again.

She was not sad now, indeed she was almost happy, for her thoughts had
brought her so close to Philip that she could feel his blue eyes looking
at her, the strong clasp of his hand.  She could almost touch the brown
hair waving back carelessly from the forehead, untouched by powder, in
the fashion of the time; and she could hear his cheery laugh quite
plainly, so complete was the illusion.

St. Ouen's Bay, l'Etacq, Plemont, dropped behind them as they sailed.
They drew on to where the rocks of the Paternosters foamed to the unquiet
sea.  Far over between the Nez du Guet and the sprawling granite pack of
the Dirouilles, was the Admiralty yacht winging to the nor'-west.  Beyond
it again lay the coast of France, the tall white cliffs, the dark blue
smoky curve ending in Cap de la Hague.

To-day there was something new in this picture of the coast of France.
Against the far-off sands were some little black spots, seemingly no
bigger than a man's hand.  Again and again Jean Touzel had eyed these
moving specks with serious interest; and Maitresse Aimable eyed Jean,
for Jean never looked so often at anything without good reason.  If,
perchance, he looked three times at her consecutively, she gaped with
expectation, hoping that he would tell her that her face was not so red
to-day as usual--a mark of rare affection.

At last Guida noticed Jean's look.  "What is it that you see, Maitre
Jean?" she said.

"Little black wasps, I think, ma'm'selle-little black wasps that sting."

Guida did not understand.

Jean gave a curious cackle, and continued: "Ah, those wasps--they have a
sting so nasty!"  He paused an instant, then he added in a lower voice,
and not quite so gaily: "Yon is the way that war begins."

Guida's fingers suddenly clinched rigidly upon the tiller.  "War?  Do--do
you think that's a French fleet, Maitre Jean?"

"Steadee--steadee-keep her head up, ma'm'selle," he answered, for Guida
had steered unsteadily for the instant.  "Steadee--shale ben!  that's
right--I remember twenty years ago the black wasps they fly on the coast
of France like that.  Who can tell now?"  He shrugged his shoulders.
"P'rhaps they are coum out to play, but see you, when there is trouble in
the nest it is my notion that wasps come out to sting.  Look at France
now, they all fight each other there, ma fuifre!  When folks begin to
slap faces at home, look out when they get into the street.  That is when
the devil have a grand fete."

Guida's face grew paler as he spoke.  The eyes of Maitresse Aimable were
fixed on her now, and unconsciously the ponderous good-wife felt in that
warehouse she called her pocket for her rosary.  An extra bead was there
for Guida, and one for another than Guida.  But Maltresse Aimable did
more: she dived into the well of silence for her voice; and for the first
time in her life she showed anger with Jean.  As her voice came forth she
coloured, her cheeks expanded, and the words sallied out in puffs:

"Nannin, Jean, you smell shark when it is but herring.  You cry wasp when
the critchett sing.  I will believe war when I see the splinters fly--
me!"

Jean looked at his wife in astonishment.  That was the longest speech
he had ever heard her make.  It was also the first time that her rasp of
criticism had ever been applied to him, and with such asperity too.  He
could not make it out.  He looked from his wife to Guida; then, suddenly
arrested by the look in her face, he scratched his shaggy head in
despair, and moved about in his seat.

"Sit you still, Jean," said his wife sharply; "you're like peas on a hot
griddle."

This confused Jean beyond recovery, for never in his life had Aimable
spoken to him like that.  He saw there was something wrong, and he did
not know whether to speak or hold his tongue; or, as he said to himself,
he "didn't know which eye to wink."  He adjusted his spectacles, and,
pulling himself together, muttered: "Smoke of thunder, what's all this?"

Guida wasn't a wisp of quality to shiver with terror at the mere mention
of war with France; but ba su, thought Jean, there was now in her face a
sharp, fixed look of pain, in her eyes a bewildered anxiety.

Jean scratched his head still more.  Nothing particular came of that.
There was no good trying to work the thing out suddenly, he wasn't clever
enough.  Then out of an habitual good-nature he tried to bring better
weather fore and aft.

"Eh ben," said he, "in the dark you can't tell a wasp from a honey-bee
till he lights on you; and that's too far off there"--he jerked a finger
towards the French shore--"to be certain sure.  But if the wasp nip, you
make him pay for it, the head and the tail--yes, I think -me.  .  .  .
There's the Eperquerie," he added quickly, nodding in front of him.

The island of Sark lifted a green bosom above her perpendicular cliffs,
with the pride of an affluent mother among her brood.  Dowered by sun and
softened by a delicate haze like an exquisite veil of modesty, this
youngest daughter of the isles clustered with her kinsfolk in the emerald
archipelago between the great seas.

The outlines of the coast grew plainer as the Hardi Biaou drew nearer and
nearer.  From end to end there was no harbour upon this southern side.
There was no roadway, as it seemed no pathway at all up the overhanging
cliffs-ridges of granite and grey and green rock, belted with mist,
crowned by sun, and fretted by the milky, upcasting surf.  Little
islands, like outworks before it, crouched slumberously to the sea, as a
dog lays its head in its paws and hugs the ground close, with vague,
soft-blinking eyes.

By the shore the air was white with sea-gulls flying and circling, rising
and descending, shooting up straight into the air; their bodies smooth
and long like the body of a babe in white samite, their feathering tails
spread like a fan, their wings expanding on the ambient air.  In the tall
cliffs were the nests of dried seaweed, fastened to the edge of a rocky
bracket on lofty ledges, the little ones within piping to the little ones
without.  Every point of rock had its sentinel gull, looking-looking out
to sea like some watchful defender of a mystic city.  Piercing might be
the cries of pain or of joy from the earth, more piercing were their
cries; dark and dreadful might be the woe of those who went down to the
sea in ships, but they shrilled on unheeding, their yellow beaks still
yellowing in the sun, keeping their everlasting watch and ward.

Now and again other birds, dark, quick-winged, low-flying, shot in among
the white companies of sea-gulls, stretching their long necks, and
turning their swift, cowardly eyes here and there, the cruel beak
extended, the body gorged with carrion.  Black marauders among blithe
birds of peace and joy, they watched like sable spirits near the nests,
or on some near sea rocks, sombre and alone, blinked evilly at the tall
bright cliffs and the lightsome legions nestling there.

These swart loiterers by the happy nests of the young were like spirits
of fate who might not destroy, who had no power to harm the living, yet
who could not be driven forth: the ever-present death-heads at the feast,
the impressive acolytes by the altars of destiny.

As the Hardi Biaou drew near the lofty, inviolate cliffs, there opened up
sombre clefts and caverns, honeycombing the island at all points of the
compass.  She slipped past rugged pinnacles, like buttresses to the
island, here trailed with vines, valanced with shrubs of unnameable
beauty, and yonder shrivelled and bare like the skin of an elephant.

Some rocks, indeed, were like vast animals round which molten granite had
been poured, preserving them eternally.  The heads of great dogs, like
the dogs of Ossian, sprang out in profile from the repulsing mainland;
stupendous gargoyles grinned at them from dark points of excoriated
cliff.  Farther off, the face of a battered sphinx stared with unheeding
look into the vast sea and sky beyond.  From the dark depths of mystic
crypts came groanings, like the roaring of lions penned beside the caves
of martyrs.

Jean had startled Guida with his suggestions of war between England and
France.  Though she longed to have Philip win glory in some great battle,
yet her first natural thought was of danger to the man she loved--and the
chance too of his not coming back to her from Portsmouth.  But now as she
looked at this scene before her, there came again to her face the old
charm of blitheness.  The tides of temperament in her were fast to flow
and quick to ebb.  The reaction from pain was in proportion to her
splendid natural health.

Her lips smiled.  For what can long depress the youthful and the loving
when they dream that they are entirely beloved?  Lands and thrones may
perish, plague and devastation walk abroad with death, misery and beggary
crawl naked to the doorway, and crime cower in the hedges; but to the
egregious egotism of young love there are only two identities bulking
in the crowded universe.  To these immensities all other beings are
audacious who dream of being even comfortable and obscure--happiness
would be a presumption; as though Fate intended each living human being
at some one moment to have the whole world to himself.  And who shall cry
out against that egotism with which all are diseased?

So busy was Guida with her own thoughts that she scarcely noticed they
had changed their course, and were skirting the coast westerly, whereby
to reach Havre Gosselin on the other side of the island.  There on the
shore above lay the seigneurie, the destination of the Hardi Biaou.

As they passed the western point of the island, and made their course
easterly by a channel between rocky bulwarks opening Havre Gosselin, they
suddenly saw a brig rounding the Eperquerie.  She was making to the
south-east under full sail.  Her main and mizzen masts were not visible,
and her colours could not be seen, but Jean's quick eye had lighted on
something which made him cast apprehensive glances at his wife and Guida.
There was a gun in the stern port-hole of the vanishing brig; and he also
noted that it was run out for action.

His swift glance at his wife and Guida assured him that they had not
noticed the gun.

Jean's brain began working with unusual celerity.  He was certain that
the brig was a French sloop or a privateer.  In other circumstances, that
in itself might not have given him much trouble of mind, for more than
once French frigates had sailed round the Channel Isles in insulting
strength and mockery; but at this moment every man knew that France and
England were only waiting to see who should throw the ball first and set
the red game going.  Twenty French frigates could do little harm to the
island of Sark; a hundred men could keep off an army and navy there; but
Jean knew that the Admiralty yacht Dorset was sailing at this moment
within half a league of the Eperquerie.  He would stake his life that the
brig was French and hostile and knew it also.  At all costs he must
follow and learn the fate of the yacht.

If he landed at Havre Gosselin and crossed the island on foot, whatever
was to happen would be over and done, and that did not suit the book of
Jean Touzel.  More than once he had seen a little fighting, and more than
once shared in it.  If there was to be a fight--he looked affectionately
at his carronades--then he wanted to be within seeing or striking
distance.

Instead of running into Havre Gosselin, he set for the Bec du Nez, the
eastern point of the island.  His object was to land upon the rocks of
the Eperquerie, where the women would be safe whatever befell.  The tide
was running strong round the point, and the surf was heavy, so that once
or twice the boat was almost overturned; but Jean had measured well the
currents and the wind.

This was one of the most exciting moments in his life, for, as they
rounded the Bec du Nez, there was the Dorset going about to make for
Guernsey, and the brig, under full sail, bearing down upon her.  Even as
they rounded the point, up ran the tricolour to the brig's mizzen-mast,
and the militant shouts of the French sailors came over the water.

Too late had the little yacht with her handful of guns seen the danger
and gone about.  The wind was fair for her; but it was as fair for the
brig, able to outsail her twice over.  As the Hardi Biaou neared the
landing-place of the Eperquerie, a gun was fired from the privateer
across the bows of the Dorset, and Guida realised what was happening.

As they landed another shot was fired, then came a broadside.  Guida put
her hands before her eyes, and when she looked again the main-mast of the
yacht was gone.  And now from the heights of Sark above there rang out a
cry from the lips of the affrighted islanders: "War--war--war--war!"

Guida sank down upon the rock, and her face dropped into her hands.  She
trembled violently.  Somehow all at once, and for the first time in her
life, there was borne in upon her a feeling of awful desolation and
loneliness.  She was alone--she was alone--she was alone that was the
refrain of her thoughts.

The cry of war rang along the cliff tops; and war would take Philip from
her.  Perhaps she would never see him again.  The horror of it, the pity
of it, the peril of it.

Shot after shot the twelve-pounders of the Frenchman drove like dun hail
at the white timbers of the yacht, and her masts and spars were flying.
The privateer now came drawing down to where she lay lurching.

A hand touched Guida upon the shoulder.  "Cheer thee, my dee-ar," said
Maitresse Aimable's voice.  Below, Jean Touzel had eyes only for this
sea-fight before him, for, despite the enormous difference, the
Englishmen were now fighting their little craft for all that she was
capable.  But the odds were terribly against her, though she had the
windward side, and the firing of the privateer was bad.  The carronades
on her flush decks were replying valiantly to the twelve-pounders of the
brig.  At last a chance shot carried away her mizzenmast, and another
dismounted her single great gun, killing a number of men.  The
carronades, good for only a few discharges, soon left her to the fury of
her assailant, and presently the Dorset was no better than a battered
raisin-box.  Her commander had destroyed his despatches, and nothing
remained now but to be sunk or surrender.

In not more than twenty minutes from the time the first shot was fired,
the commander and his brave little crew yielded to the foe, and the
Dorset's flag was hauled down.

When her officers and men were transferred to the Frenchman, her one
passenger and guest, the Rev. Lorenzo Dow, passed calmly from the gallant
little wreck to the deck of the privateer, with a finger between the
leaves of his book of meditations.  With as much equanimity as he would
have breakfasted with a bishop, made breaches of the rubric, or drunk
from a sailor's black-jack, he went calmly into captivity in France,
giving no thought to what he left behind; quite heedless that his going
would affect for good or ill the destiny of the young wife of Philip
d'Avranche.

Guida watched the yacht go down, and the brig bear away towards France
where those black wasps of war were as motes against the white sands.
Then she remembered that there had gone with it one of the three people
in the world who knew her secret, the man who had married her to Philip.
She shivered a little, she scarcely knew why, for it did not then seem of
consequence to her whether Mr. Dow went or stayed, though he had never
given her the marriage certificate.  Indeed, was it not better he should
go?  Thereby one less would know her secret.  But still an undefined fear
possessed her.

"Cheer thee, cheer thee, my dee-ar, my sweet dormitte," said Maitresse
Aimable, patting her shoulder.  "It cannot harm thee, ba su!  'Tis but a
flash in the pan."

Guida's first impulse was to throw herself into the arms of the slow-
tongued, great-hearted woman who hung above her like a cloud of mercy,
and tell her whole story.  But no, she would keep her word to Philip,
till Philip came again.  Her love--the love of the young, lonely wife,
must be buried deep in her own heart until he appeared and gave her the
right to speak.

Jean was calling to them.  They rose to go.  Guida looked about her.  Was
it all a dream-all that had happened to her, and around her?  The world
was sweet to look upon, and yet was it true that here before her eyes
there had been war, and that out of war peril must come to her.

A week ago she was free as air, happy as healthy body, truthful mind,
simple nature, and tender love can make a human being.  She was then only
a young, young girl.  To-day-she sighed.

Long after they put out to sea again she could still hear the affrighted
cry of the peasants from the cliff-or was it only the plaintive echo of
her own thoughts?

"War--war--war--war!"




IN FRANCE--NEAR FIVE MONTHS AFTER

CHAPTER XIX

"A moment, monsieur le duc."

The Duke turned at the door, and looked with listless inquiry into the
face of the Minister of Marine, who, picking up an official paper from
his table, ran an eye down it, marked a point with the sharp corner of
his snuff-box, and handed it over to his visitor, saying:

"Our roster of English prisoners taken in the action off Brest."

The Duke, puzzled, lifted his glass and scanned the roll mechanically.

"No, no, Duke, just where I have marked," interposed the Minister.

"My dear Monsieur Dalbarade," remarked the Duke a little querulously,
"I do not see what interest--"

He stopped short, however, looked closer at the document, and then
lowering it in a sort of amazement, seemed about to speak; but, instead,
raised the paper again and fixed his eyes intently on the spot indicated
by the Minister.

"Most curious," he said after a moment, making little nods of his head
towards Dalbarade; "my own name--and an English prisoner, you say?"

"Precisely so; and he gave our fellows some hard knocks before his
frigate went on the reefs."

"Strange that the name should be my own.  I never heard of an English
branch of our family."

A quizzical smile passed over the face of the Minister, adding to his
visitor's mystification.  "But suppose he were English, yet French too?"
he rejoined.

"I fail to understand the entanglement," answered the Duke stiffly.

"He is an Englishman whose name and native language are French--he speaks
as good French as your own."

The Duke peevishly tapped a chair with his stick.  "I am no reader
of riddles, monsieur," he said acidly, although eager to know more
concerning this Englishman of the same name as himself, ruler of the
sovereign duchy of Bercy.

"Shall I bid him enter, Prince?" asked the Minister.  The Duke's face
relaxed a little, for the truth was, at this moment of his long life he
was deeply concerned with his own name and all who bore it.

"Is he here then?" he asked, nodding assent.

"In the next room," answered the Minister, turning to a bell and ringing.
"I have him here for examination, and was but beginning when I was
honoured by your Highness's presence."  He bowed politely, yet there was,
too, a little mockery in the bow, which did not escape the Duke.  These
were days when princes received but little respect in France.

A subaltern entered, received an order, and disappeared.  The Duke
withdrew to the embrasure of a window, and immediately the prisoner was
gruffly announced.

The young Englishman stood quietly waiting, his quick eyes going from
Dalbarade to the wizened figure by the window, and back again to the
Minister.  His look carried both calmness and defiance, but the defiance
came only from a sense of injury and unmerited disgrace.

"Monsieur," said the Minister with austerity, "in your further
examination we shall need to repeat some questions."

The prisoner nodded indifferently, and for a brief space there was
silence.  The Duke stood by the window, the Minister by his table, the
prisoner near the door.  Suddenly the prisoner, with an abrupt motion of
the hand towards two chairs, said with an assumption of ordinary
politeness:

"Will you not be seated?"

The remark was so odd in its coolness and effrontery, that the Duke
chuckled audibly.  The Minister was completely taken aback.  He glanced
stupidly at the two chairs--the only ones in the room--and at the
prisoner.  Then the insolence of the thing began to work upon him, and he
was about to burst forth, when the Duke came forward, and politely moving
a chair near to the young commander, said:

"My distinguished compliments, monsieur le capitaine.  I pray you accept
this chair."

With quiet self-possession and a matter-of-course air the prisoner bowed
politely, and seated himself, then with a motion of the hand backward
towards the door, said to the Duke: "I've been standing five hours with
some of those moutons in the ante-room.  My profound thanks to
monseigneur."

Touching the angry Minister on the arm, the Duke said quietly:

"Dear monsieur, will you permit me a few questions to the prisoner?"

At that instant there came a tap at the door, and an orderly entered with
a letter to the Minister, who glanced at it hurriedly, then turned to the
prisoner and the Duke, as though in doubt what to do.

"I will be responsible for the prisoner, if you must leave us," said the
Duke at once.

"For a little, for a little--a matter of moment with the Minister of
War," answered Dalbarade, nodding, and with an air of abstraction left
the room.

The Duke withdrew to the window again, and seated himself in the
embrasure, at some little distance from the Englishman, who at once got
up and brought his chair closer.  The warm sunlight of spring, streaming
through the window, was now upon his pale face, and strengthened it,
giving it fulness and the eye fire.

"How long have you been a prisoner, monsieur?" asked the Duke, at the
same time acknowledging the other's politeness with a bow.

"Since March, monseigneur."

"Monseigneur again--a man of judgment," said the Duke to himself, pleased
to have his exalted station recognised.  "H'm, and it is now June--four
months, monsieur.  You have been well used, monsieur?"

"Vilely, monseigneur," answered the other; "a shipwrecked enemy should
never be made prisoner, or at least he should be enlarged on parole; but
I have been confined like a pirate in a sink of a jail."

"Of what country are you?"

Raising his eyebrows in amazement the young man answered:

"I am an Englishman, monseigneur."

"Monsieur is of England, then?"

"Monseigneur, I am an English officer."

"You speak French well, monsieur."

"Which serves me well in France, as you see, monseigneur."

The Duke was a trifle nettled.  "Where were you born, monsieur?"

There was a short pause, and then the prisoner, who had enjoyed the
other's perplexity, said:

"On the Isle of Jersey, monseigneur."

The petulant look passed immediately from the face of the Duke; the
horizon was clear at once.

"Ah, then, you are French, monsieur!"

"My flag is the English flag; I was born a British subject, and I shall
die one," answered the other steadily.

"The sentiment sounds estimable," answered the Duke; "but as for life and
death, and what we are or what we may be, we are the sport of Fate."  His
brow clouded.  "I myself was born under a monarchy; I shall probably die
under a Republic.  I was born a Frenchman; I may die--"

His tone had become low and cynical, and he broke off suddenly, as though
he had said more than he meant.  "Then you are a Norman, monsieur," he
added in a louder tone.

"Once all Jerseymen were Normans, and so were many Englishmen,
monseigneur."

"I come of Norman stock too, monsieur," remarked the Duke graciously, yet
eyeing the young man keenly.

"Monseigneur has not the kindred advantage of being English?" added the
prisoner dryly.

The Duke protested with a deprecatory wave of the fingers and a flash of
the sharp eyes, and then, after a slight pause, said: "What is your name,
monsieur?"

"Philip d'Avranche," was the brief reply; then with droll impudence: "And
monseigneur's, by monseigneur's leave?"

The Duke smiled, and that smile relieved the sourness, the fret of a face
which had care and discontent written upon every line of it.  It was a
face that had never known happiness.  It had known diversion, however,
and unusual diversion it knew at this moment.

"My name," he answered with a penetrating quizzical look, "--my name is
Philip d'Avranche."

The young man's quick, watchful eyes fixed themselves like needles on the
Duke's face.  Through his brain there ran a succession of queries and
speculations, and dominating them all one clear question-was he to gain
anything by this strange conversation?  Who was this great man with a
name the same as his own, this crabbed nobleman with skin as yellow as an
orange, and body like an orange squeezed dry?  He surely meant him no
harm, however, for flashes of kindliness had lighted the shrivelled face
as he talked.  His look was bent in piercing comment upon Philip, who,
trying hard to solve the mystery, now made a tentative rejoinder to his
strange statement.  Rising from his chair and bowing, he said, with
shrewd foreknowledge of the effect of his words:

"I had not before thought my own name of such consequence."

The old man grunted amiably.  "My faith, the very name begets a towering
conceit wherever it goes," he answered, and he brought his stick down on
the floor with such vehemence that the emerald and ruby rings rattled on
his shrunken fingers.

"Be seated--cousin," he said with dry compliment, for Philip had remained
standing, as if with the unfeigned respect of a cadet in the august
presence of the head of his house.  It was a sudden and bold suggestion,
and it was not lost on the Duke.  The aged nobleman was too keen an
observer not to see the designed flattery, but he was in a mood when
flattery was palatable, seeing that many of his own class were arrayed
against him for not having joined the army of the Vendee; and that the
Revolutionists, with whom he had compromised, for the safety of his lands
of d'Avranche and his duchy of Bercy, regarded him with suspicion.
Between the two, the old man--at heart most profoundly a Royalist--bided
his time, in some peril but with no fear.  The spirit of this young
Englishman of his own name pleased him; the flattery, patent as it was,
gratified him, for in revolutionary France few treated him with deference
now.  Even the Minister of Marine, with whom he was on good terms, called
him "citizen" at times.

All at once it flashed on the younger man that this must be the Prince
d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy, of that family of d'Avranche from which his own
came in long descent--even from the days of Rollo, Duke of Normandy.  He
recalled on the instant the token of fealty of the ancient House of
d'Avranche--the offering of a sword.

"Your Serene Highness," he said with great deference and as great tact,
"I must first offer my homage to the Prince d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy--"
Then with a sudden pause, and a whimsical look, he added: "But, indeed,
I had forgotten, they have taken away my sword!"

"We shall see," answered the Prince, well pleased, "we shall see about
that sword.  Be seated."  Then, after a short pause: "Tell me now,
monsieur, of your family, of your ancestry."

His eyes were bent on Philip with great intentness, and his thin lips
tightened in some unaccountable agitation.

Philip instantly responded.  He explained how in the early part of the
thirteenth century, after the great crusade against the Albigenses, a
cadet of the house of d'Avranche had emigrated to England, and had come
to place and honour under Henry III, who gave to the son of this
d'Avranche certain tracts of land in Jersey, where he settled.  Philip
was descended in a direct line from this same receiver of king's favours,
and was now the only representative of his family.

While Philip spoke the Duke never took eyes from his face--that face so
facile in the display of feeling or emotion.  The voice also had a lilt
of health and vitality which rang on the ears of age pleasantly.  As he
listened he thought of his eldest son, partly imbecile, all but a lusus
naturae, separated from his wife immediately after marriage, through whom
there could never be succession--he thought of him, and for the millionth
time in his life winced in impotent disdain.  He thought too of his
beloved second son, lying in a soldier's grave in Macedonia; of the
buoyant resonance of that by-gone voice, of the soldierly good spirits
like to the good spirits of the prisoner before him, and "his heart
yearned towards the young man exceedingly."  If that second son had but
lived there would be now no compromising with this Republican Government
of France; he would be fighting for the white flag with the golden lilies
over in the Vendee.

"Your ancestors were mine, then," remarked the Duke gravely, after a
pause, "though I had not heard of that emigration to England.  However
--however!  Come, tell me of the engagement in which you lost your ship,"
he added hurriedly in a low tone.  He was now so intent that he did not
stir in his seat, but sat rigidly still, regarding Philip kindly.
Something in the last few moments' experience had loosened the puckered
skin, softened the crabbed look in the face, and Philip had no longer
doubt of his friendly intentions.

"I had the frigate Araminta, twenty-four guns, a fortnight out from
Portsmouth," responded Philip at once.  "We fell in with a French
frigate, thirty guns.  She was well to leeward of us, and the Araminta
bore up under all sail, keen for action.  The Frenchman was as ready as
ourselves for a brush, and tried to get the weather of us, but, failing,
she shortened sail and gallantly waited for us.  The Araminta overhauled
her on the weather quarter, and hailed.  She responded with cheers and
defiance--as sturdy a foe as man could wish.  We lost no time in getting
to work, and, both running before the wind, we fired broadsides as we
cracked on.  It was tit-for-tat for a while with splinters flying and
neither of us in the eye of advantage, but at last the Araminta shot away
the main-mast and wheel of the Niobe, and she wallowed like a tub in the
trough of the sea.  We bore down on her, and our carronades raked her
like a comb.  Then we fell thwart her hawse, and tore her up through her
bowline-ports with a couple of thirty-two-pounders.  But before we could
board her she veered, lurched, and fell upon us, carrying away our
foremast.  We cut clear of the tangle, and were making once more to board
her, when I saw to windward two French frigates bearing down on us under
full sail.  And then--"

The Prince exclaimed in surprise: "I had not heard of this," he said.
"They did not tell the world of those odds against you."

"Odds and to spare, monsieur le due!  We had had all we could manage in
the Niobe, though she was now disabled, and we could hurt her no more.
If the others came up on our weather we should be chewed like a bone in a
mastiff's jaws.  If she must fight again, the Araminta would be little
fit for action till we cleared away the wreckage; so I sheered off to
make all sail.  We ran under courses with what canvas we had, and got
away with a fair breeze and a good squall whitening to windward, while
our decks were cleared for action again.  The guns on the main-deck had
done good service and kept their places.  On the quarter-deck and
fo'castle there was more amiss, but as I watched the frigates overhauling
us I took heart of grace still.  There was the creaking and screaming of
the carronade-slides, the rattling of the carriages of the long twelve-
pounders amidships as they were shotted and run out again, the thud of
the carpenters' hammers as the shot-holes were plugged--good sounds in
the ears of a fighter--"

"Of a d'Avranche--of a d'Avranche!" interposed the Prince.

"We were in no bad way, and my men were ready for another brush with our
enemies, everything being done that could be done, everything in its
place," continued Philip.  "When the frigates were a fair gunshot off, I
saw that the squall was overhauling us faster than they.  This meant good
fortune if we wished escape, bad luck if we would rather fight.  But I
had no time to think of that, for up comes Shoreham, my lieutenant, with
a face all white.  'For God's sake, sir,' says he, 'shoal water-shoal
water!  We're ashore.'  So much, monsieur le prince, for Admiralty charts
and soundings!  It's a hateful thing to see--the light green water, the
deadly sissing of the straight narrow ripple like the grooves of a wash-
board: and a ship's length ahead the water breaking over the reefs, two
frigates behind ready to eat us.

"Up we came to the wind, the sheets were let run, and away flew the
halyards.  All to no purpose, for a minute later we came broadside on the
reef, and were gored on a pinnacle of rock.  The end wasn't long in
coming.  The Araminta lurched off the reef on the swell.  We watched our
chance as she rolled, and hove overboard our broadside of long twelve-
pounders.  But it was no use.  The swishing of the water as it spouted
from the scuppers was a deal louder than the clang of the chain-pumps.
It didn't last long.  The gale spilled itself upon us, and the Araminta,
sick and spent, slowly settled down.  The last I saw of her"--Philip
raised his voice as though he would hide what he felt behind an
unsentimental loudness--"was the white pennant at the main-top gallant
masthead.  A little while, and then I didn't see it, and--and so good-bye
to my first command!  Then"--he smiled ironically--"then I was made
prisoner by the French frigates, and have been closely confined ever
since, against every decent principle of warfare.  And now here I am,
monsieur le duc."

The Duke had listened with an immovable attention, the grey eyebrows
twitching now and then, the arid face betraying a grim enjoyment.  When
Philip had finished, he still sat looking at him with steady slow-
blinking eyes, as though unwilling to break the spell the tale had thrown
round him.  But an inquisition in the look, a slight cocking of the head
as though weighing important things, the ringed fingers softly drumming
on the stick before him--all these told Philip that something was at
stake concerning himself.

The Duke seemed about to speak, when the door of the room opened and
the Minister of Marine entered.  The Duke, rising and courteously laying
a hand on his arm, drew him over to the window, and engaged him in
whispered conversation, of which the subject seemed unwelcome to the
Minister, for now and then he interrupted sharply.

As the two stood fretfully debating, the door of the room again opened.
There appeared an athletic, adventurous-looking officer in brilliant
uniform who was smiling at something called after him from the
antechamber.  His blue coat was spick and span and very gay with double
embroidery at the collar, coat-tails, and pockets.  His white waistcoat
and trousers were spotless; his netted sash of blue with its stars on the
silver tassels had a look of studied elegance.  The black three-cornered
hat, broidered with gold, and adorned with three ostrich tips of red and
a white and blue aigrette, was, however, the glory of his bravery.  He
seemed young to be a General of Division, for such his double
embroideries and aigrette proclaimed him.

He glanced at Philip, and replied to his salute with a half-quizzical
smile on his proud and forceful face.  "Dalbarade, Dalbarade," said he
to the Minister, "I have but an hour--ah, monsieur le prince!" he added
suddenly, as the latter came hurriedly towards him, and, grasping his
hand warmly, drew him over to Dalbarade at the window.  Philip now knew
beyond doubt that he was the subject of debate, for all the time that the
Duke in a low tone, half cordial, half querulous, spoke to the new-comer,
the latter let his eyes wander curiously towards Philip.  That he was an
officer of great importance was to be seen from the deference paid him by
Dalbarade.

All at once he made a polite gesture towards the Duke, and, facing the
Minister, said in a cavalier-like tone, and with a touch of patronage:
"Yes, yes, Dalbarade; it is of no consequence, and I myself will be
surety for both."  Then turning to the nobleman, he added: "We are
beginning to square accounts, Duke.  Last time we met I had a large
favour of you, and to-day you have a small favour of me.  Pray introduce
your kinsman here, before you take him with you," and he turned squarely
towards Philip.

Philip could scarcely believe his ears.  The Duke's kinsman!  Had the
Duke then got his release on the ground that they were of kin--a kinship
which, even to be authentic, must go back seven centuries for proof?

Yet here he was being introduced to the revolutionary general as "my
kinsman of the isles of Normandy."  Here, too, was the same General
Grandjon-Larisse applauding him on his rare fortune to be thus released
on parole through the Duc de Bercy, and quoting with a laugh, half sneer
and half raillery, the old Norman proverb: "A Norman dead a thousand
years cries Haro! Haro! if you tread on his grave."

So saying, he saluted the Duke with a liberal flourish of the hand and a
friendly bow, and turned away to Dalbarade.

A half-hour later Philip was outside with the Duke, walking slowly
through the court-yard to an open gateway, where waited a carriage with
unliveried coachman and outriders.  No word was spoken till they entered
the carriage and were driven swiftly away.

"Whither now, your Highness?" asked Philip.

"To the duchy," answered the other shortly, and relapsed into sombre
meditation.




CHAPTER XX

The castle of the Prince d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy, was set upon a vast
rock, and the town of Bercy huddled round the foot of it and on great
granite ledges some distance up.  With fifty defenders the castle, on its
lofty pedestal, might have resisted as many thousands; and, indeed, it
had done so more times than there were rubies in the rings of the present
Duke, who had rescued Captain Philip d'Avranche from the clutches of the
Red Government.

Upon the castle, with the flag of the duchy, waved the republican
tricolour, where for a thousand years had floated a royal banner.  When
France's great trouble came to her, and the nobles fled, or went to fight
for the King in the Vendee, the old Duke, with a dreamy indifference to
the opinion of Europe, had proclaimed alliance with the new Government.
He felt himself privileged in being thus selfish; and he had made the
alliance that he might pursue, unchecked, the one remaining object of his
life.

This object had now grown from a habit into a passion.  It was now his
one ambition to arrange a new succession excluding the Vaufontaines, a
detested branch of the Bercy family.  There had been an ancient feud
between his family and the Vaufontaines, whose rights to the succession,
after his eldest son, were to this time paramount.  For three years past
he had had a whole monastery of Benedictine monks at work to find some
collateral branch from which he might take a successor to Leopold John,
his imbecile heir--but to no purpose.

In more than a little the Duke was superstitious, and on the day when he
met Philip d'Avranche in the chamber of M. Dalbarade he had twice turned
back after starting to make the visit, so great was his dislike to pay
homage to the revolutionary Minister.  He had nerved himself to the
distasteful duty, however, and had gone.  When he saw the name of the
young English prisoner--his own name--staring him in the face, he had
had such a thrill as a miracle might have sent through the veins of a
doubting Christian.

Since that minute he, like Philip, had been in a kind of dream; on his
part, to find in the young man, if possible, an heir and successor; on
Philip's to make real exalted possibilities.  There had slipped past two
months, wherein Philip had seen a new and brilliant avenue of life
opening out before him.  Most like a dream indeed it seemed.  He had been
shut out from the world, cut off from all connection with England and his
past, for M. Dalbarade made it a condition of release that he should send
no message or correspond with any one outside Castle Bercy.  He had not
therefore written to Guida.  She seemed an interminable distance away.
He was as completely in a new world as though he had been transplanted;
he was as wholly in the air of fresh ambitions as though he were
beginning the world again--ambitions as gorgeous as bewildering.

For, almost from the first, the old nobleman treated him like a son.
He spoke freely to him of the most private family matters, of the most
important State affairs.  He consulted with him, he seemed to lean upon
him.  He alluded often, in oblique phrase, to adoption and succession.
In the castle Philip was treated as though he were in truth a high
kinsman of the Duke.  Royal ceremony and state were on every hand.  He
who had never had a servant of his own, now had a score at his disposal.
He had spent his early days in a small Jersey manor-house; here he was
walking the halls of a palace with the step of assurance, the most
honoured figure in a principality next to the sovereign himself.
"Adoption and succession" were words that rang in his ears day and night.
The wild dream had laid feverish hands upon him.  Jersey, England, the
Navy, seemed very far away.

Ambition was the deepest passion in him, even as defeating the hopes of
the Vaufontaines was more than a religion with the Duke.  By no trickery,
but by a persistent good-nature, alertness of speech, avoidance of
dangerous topics, and aptness in anecdote, he had hourly made his
position stronger, himself more honoured at the Castle Bercy.  He had
also tactfully declined an offer of money from the Prince--none the less
decidedly because he was nearly penniless.  The Duke's hospitality he was
ready to accept, but not his purse--not yet.

Yet he was not in all acting a part.  He was sincere in his liking for
the soured, bereaved sovereign, forced to endure alliance with a
Government he loathed.  He even admired the Duke for his vexing
idiosyncrasies, for they came of a strong individuality which, in happier
case, should have made him a contented and beloved monarch.  As it was,
the people of his duchy were loyal to him beyond telling, doing his
bidding without cavil: standing for the King of France at his will,
declaring for the Republic at his command; for, whatever the Duke was
to the world outside, within his duchy he was just and benevolent, if
imperious.

All these things Philip had come to know in his short sojourn.  He had,
with the Duke, mingled freely, yet with great natural dignity, among the
people of the duchy, and was introduced everywhere, and at all times, as
the sovereign's kinsman--"in a direct line from an ancient branch," as
his Highness declared.  He had been received gladly, and had made himself
an agreeable figure in the duchy, to the delight of the Duke, who watched
his every motion, every word, and their effect.  He came to know the
gossip gone abroad that the Duke had already chosen him for heir.  A
fantastic rumour, maybe, yet who could tell?

One day the Duke arranged a conference of the civil and military officers
of his duchy.  He chuckled to see how reluctant they all were at first to
concede their homage to his favourite, and how soon they fell under that
favourite's influence--all save one man, the Intendant of the duchy.
Philip himself was quick to see that this man, Count Carignan Damour,
apprehensive for his own selfish ends, was bitterly opposed to him.
But Damour was one among many, and the Duke was entirely satisfied,
for the common people received Philip with applause.

On this very day was laid before the Duke the result of the long
researches of the monks into the genealogy of the d'Avranches, and there,
clearly enough, was confirmation of all Philip had said about his
ancestors and their relation to the ancient house of d'Avranche.  The
Duke was overjoyed, and thereupon secretly made ready for Philip's formal
adoption and succession.  It never occurred to him that Philip might
refuse.

On the same afternoon he sent for Philip to come to him in the highest
room of the great tower.  It was in this room that, many years ago, the
Duke's young and noble wife, from the province of Aquitaine, had given
birth to the second son of the house of Bercy, and had died a year later,
happy that she should at last leave behind a healthy, beautiful child, to
do her honour in her lord's eyes.

In this same room the Duke and the brave second son had spent unnumbered
hours; and here it had come home to him that the young wife was faultless
as to the elder, else she had not borne him this perfect younger son.
Thus her memory came to be adored; and thus, when the noble second son,
the glory of his house and of his heart, was killed in Macedonia,
the Duke still came to the little upper room for his communion of
remembrance.  Hour after hour he would sit looking from the great window
out over the wide green valley, mourning bitterly, and feeling his heart
shrivel up within him, his body grow crabbed and cold, and his face sour
and scornful.

When Philip now entered this sanctuary, the Duke nodded and motioned him
to a chair.  In silence he accepted, and in silence they sat for a time.
Philip knew the history of this little room--he had learned it first from
Frange Pergot, the porter at the castle gates with whom he had made
friends.  The silence gave him opportunity to recall the whole story.

At length the motionless brown figure huddled in the great chair, not
looking at Philip but out over the wide green valley, began to speak in
a low, measured tone, as a dreamer might tell his dream, or a priest his
vision:

"A breath of life has come again to me through you.  Centuries ago our
ancestors were brothers--far back in the direct line, brothers--the monks
have proved it.

"Now I shall have my spite of the Vaufoutaines, and now shall I have
another son--strong, and with good blood in him to beget good blood."

A strange, lean sort of smile passed over his lips, his eyebrows
twitched, his hands clinched the arm of the chair wherein he sat,
and he made a motion of his jaws as though enjoying a toothsome morsel.

"H'm, Henri Vaufontaine shall see--and all his tribe!  They shall not
feed upon these lands of the d'Avranches, they shall not carouse at my
table when I am gone and the fool I begot has returned to his Maker.  The
fault of him was never mine, but God's--does the Almighty think we can
forget that?  I was ever sound and strong.  When I was twenty I killed
two men with my own sword at a blow; when I was thirty, to serve the King
I rode a hundred and forty miles in one day--from Paris to Dracourt it
was.  We d'Avranches have been men of power always.  We fought for
Christ's sepulchre in the Holy Land, and three bishops and two
archbishops have gone from us to speak God's cause to the world.  And my
wife, she came of the purest stock of Aquitaine, and she was constant, in
her prayers.  What discourtesy was it then, for God, who hath been served
well by us, to serve me in return with such mockery: to send me a
bloodless zany, whom his wife left ere the wedding meats were cold."

His foot tapped the floor in anger, his eyes wandered restlessly out over
the green expanse.  Suddenly a dove perched upon the window-sill before
him.  His quick, shifting gaze settled on it and stayed, softening and
quieting.

After a slight pause, he turned to Philip and spoke in a still lower
tone.  "Last night in the chapel I spake to God and I said: 'Lord God,
let there be fair speech between us.  Wherefore hast Thou nailed me like
a malefactor to the tree?  Why didst Thou send me a fool to lead our
house, and afterwards a lad as fine and strong as Absalom, and then lay
him low like a wisp of corn in the wind, leaving me wifeless--with a
prince to follow me, the by-word of men, the scorn of women--and of the
Vaufontaines?"'

He paused again, and his eyes seemed to pierce Philip's, as though he
would read if each word was burning its way into his brain.

"As I stood there alone, a voice spoke to me as plainly as now I speak to
you, and it said: 'Have done with railing.  That which was the elder's
shall be given to the younger.  The tree hath grown crabbed and old, it
beareth no longer.  Behold the young sapling by thy door--I have planted
it there.  The seed is the seed of the old tree.  Cherish it, lest
a grafted tree flourish in thy house.'" .  .  .  . His words rose
triumphantly.  "Yes, yes, I heard it with my own ears, the Voice.  The
crabbed tree, that is the main line, dying in me; the grafted tree is the
Vaufontaine, the interloper and the mongrel; and the sapling from the
same seed as the crabbed old tree"--he reached out as though to clutch
Philip's arm, but drew back, sat erect in his chair, and said with
ringing decision: "the sapling is Philip d'Avranche, of the Jersey Isle."

For a moment there was silence between the two.  A strong wind came
rushing up the valley through the clear sunlight, the great trees beneath
the castle swayed, and the flapping of the tricolour could be heard
within.  From the window-sill the dove, caught up on the wave of wind,
sailed away down the widening glade.

Philip's first motion was to stand up and say: "I dare not think your
Highness means in very truth to make me your kinsman in the succession."

"And why not, why not?" testily answered the Duke, who liked not to
be imperfectly apprehended.  Then he added more kindly: "Why not--come,
tell me that, cousin?  Is it then distasteful?"

Philip's heart gave a leap and his face flushed.  "I have no other
kinsman," he answered in a low tone of feeling.  "I knew I had your
august friendship--else all the tokens of your goodness to me were
mockery; but I had scarce let myself count on the higher, more intimate
honour--I, a poor captain in the English navy."

He said the last words slowly, for, whatever else he was, he was a loyal
English sailor, and he wished the Duc de Bercy to know it, the more
convincingly the better for the part he was going to play in this duchy,
if all things favoured.

"Tut, tut, what has that to do with it?" answered the Duke.  "What has
poverty to do with blood?  Younger sons are always poor, younger cousins
poorer.  As for the captaincy of an English warship, that's of no
consequence where greater games are playing--eh?"

He eyed Philip keenly, yet too there was an unasked question in his look.
He was a critic of human nature, he understood the code of honour, none
better; his was a mind that might be wilfully but never crassly blind.
He was selfish where this young gentleman was concerned, yet he knew well
how the same gentleman ought to think, speak, and act.

The moment of the great test was come.

Philip could not read behind the strange, shrivelled face.  Instinct
could help him much, but it could not interpret that parchment.  He did
not know whether his intended reply would alienate the Duke or not, but
if it did, then he must bear it.  He had come, as he thought, to the crux
of this adventure.  All in a moment he was recalled again to his real
position.  The practical facts of his life possessed him.  He was
standing between a garish dream and commonplace realities.  Old feelings
came back--the old life.  The ingrain loyalty of all his years was his
again.  Whatever he might be, he was still an English officer, and he was
not the man to break the code of professional honour lightly.  If the
Duke's favour and adoption must depend on the answer he must now give,
well, let it be; his last state could not be worse than his first.

So, still standing, he answered the Duke boldly, yet quietly, his new
kinsman watching him with a grim curiosity.

"Monsieur le prince," said Philip, "I am used to poverty, that matters
little; but whatever you intend towards me--and I am persuaded it is to
my great honour and happiness--I am, and must still remain, an officer of
the English navy."

The Duke's brow contracted, and his answer came cold and incisive: "The
navy--that is a bagatelle; I had hoped to offer you heritage.  Pooh,
pooh, commanding a frigate is a trade--a mere trade!"

Philip's face did not stir a muscle.  He was in spirit the born
adventurer, the gamester who could play for life's largest stakes,
lose all, draw a long breath--and begin the world again.

"It's a busy time in my trade now, as Monsieur Dalbarade would tell you,
Duke."

The Duke's lips compressed as though in anger.  "You mean to say,
monsieur, that you would let this wretched war between France and England
stand before our own kinship and alliance?  What are you and I in this
great shuffle of events?  Have less egotism, less vanity, monsieur.  You
are no more than a million others--and I--I am nothing.  Come, come,
there is more than one duty in the life of every man, and sometime he
must choose between one and the other.  England does not need you"--his
voice and manner softened, he leaned towards Philip, the eyes almost
closing as he peered into his face--"but you are needed by the House of
Bercy."

"I was commissioned to a warship in time of war," answered Philip
quietly, "and I lost that warship.  When I can, it is my duty to go back
to the powers that sent me forth.  I am still an officer in full
commission.  Your Highness knows well what honour claims of me."

"There are hundreds of officers to take your place; in the duchy of Bercy
there is none to stand for you.  You must choose between your trade and
the claims of name and blood, older than the English navy, older than
Norman England."

Philip's colour was as good, his manner as easy as if nothing were at
stake; but in his heart he felt that the game was lost--he saw a storm
gathering in the Duke's eyes, the disappointment presently to break out
into wrath, the injured vanity to burst into snarling disdain.  But he
spoke boldly nevertheless, for he was resolved that, even if he had to
return from this duchy to prison, he would go with colours flying.

"The proudest moment of my life was when the Duc de Bercy called me
kinsman," he responded; "the best" (had he then so utterly forgotten the
little church of St. Michael's?) "was when he showed me friendship.  Yet,
if my trade may not be reconciled with what he may intend for me, I must
ask to be sent back to Monsieur Dalbarade."  He smiled hopelessly, yet
with stoical disregard of consequences, and went on: "For my trade is
in full swing these days, and I stand my chance of being exchanged and
earning my daily bread again.  At the Admiralty I am a master workman on
full pay, but I'm not earning my salt here.  With Monsieur Dalbarade my
conscience would be easier."

He had played his last card.  Now he was prepared for the fury of a
jaundiced, self-willed old man, who could ill brook being thwarted.  He
had quickly imagined it all, and not without reason, for surely a furious
disdain was at the grey lips, lines of anger were corrugating the
forehead, the rugose parchment face was fiery with distemper.

But what Philip expected did not come to pass.  Rising quickly to his
feet, the Duke took him by the shoulders, kissed him on both cheeks, and
said:

"My mind is made up--is made up.  Nothing can change it.  You have no
father, cousin--well, I will be your father.  You shall retain your post
in the English navy-officer and patriot you shall be if you choose.  A
brave man makes a better ruler.  But now there is much to do.  There is
the concurrence of the English King to secure; that shall be--has already
been--my business.  There is the assent of Leopold John to achieve; that
I shall command.  There are the grave formalities of adoption to arrange;
these I shall expedite.  You shall see, Master Insolence--you, who'd
throw me and my duchy over for your trade; you shall see how the
Vaufontaines will gnash their teeth!"

In his heart Philip was exultant, though outwardly he was calm.  He was,
however, unprepared for what followed.  Suddenly the Duke, putting a hand
on his shoulder, said:

"One thing, cousin, one thing: you must marry in our order, and at once.
There shall be no delay.  Succession must be made sure.  I know the very
woman--the Comtesse Chantavoine--young, rich, amiable.  You shall meet
her to-morrow-to-morrow."




CHAPTER XXI

"The Comtesse Chantavoine, young, rich, amiable.  You shall meet her
to-morrow " .  .  .  !--Long after Philip left the Duke to go to his own
chamber, these words rang in his ears.  He suddenly felt the cords of
fate tightening round him.  So real was the momentary illusion that, as
he passed through the great hall where hung the portraits of the Duke's
ancestors, he made a sudden outward motion of his arms as though to free
himself from a physical restraint.  Strange to say, he had never foreseen
or reckoned with this matter of marriage in the designs of the Duke.  He
had forgotten that sovereign dukes must make sure their succession even
unto the third and fourth generation.  His first impulse had been to tell
the Duke that to introduce him to the Countess would be futile, for he
was already married.  But the instant warning of the mind that his
Highness could never and would never accept the daughter of a Jersey
ship-builder restrained him.  He had no idea that Guida's descent from
the noble de Mauprats of Chambery would weigh with the Duke, who would
only see in her some apple-cheeked peasant stumbling over her court
train.

It was curious that the Duke had never even hinted at the chance of his
being already married--yet not so curious either, since complete silence
concerning a wife was in itself declaration enough that he was unmarried.
He felt in his heart that a finer sense would have offered Guida no such
humiliation, for he knew the lie of silence to be as evil as the lie of
speech.

He had not spoken, partly because he had not yet become used to the fact
that he really was married.  It had never been brought home to him by
the ever-present conviction of habit.  One day of married life, or, in
reality, a few hours of married life, with Guida had given the sensation
more of a noble adventure than of a lasting condition.  With distance
from that noble adventure, something of the glow of a lover's relations
had gone, and the subsequent tender enthusiasm of mind and memory was not
vivid enough to make him daring or--as he would have said--reckless for
its sake.  Yet this same tender enthusiasm was sincere enough to make him
accept the fact of his marriage without discontent, even in the glamour
of new and alluring ambitions.

If it had been a question of giving up Guida or giving up the duchy of
Bercy--if that had been put before him as the sole alternative, he would
have decided as quickly in Guida's favour as he did when he thought it
was a question between the duchy and the navy.  The straightforward
issue of Guida or the duchy he had not been called upon to face.  But,
unfortunately for those who are tempted, issues are never put quite so
plainly by the heralds of destiny and penalty.  They are disguised as
delectable chances: the toss-up is always the temptation of life.  The
man who uses trust-money for three days, to acquire in those three days
a fortune, certain as magnificent, would pull up short beforehand if the
issue of theft or honesty were put squarely before him.  Morally he means
no theft; he uses his neighbour's saw until his own is mended: but he
breaks his neighbour's saw, his own is lost on its homeward way; and
having no money to buy another, he is tried and convicted on a charge of
theft.  Thus the custom of society establishes the charge of immorality
upon the technical defect.  But not on that alone; upon the principle
that what is committed in trust shall be held inviolate, with an exact
obedience to the spirit as to the letter of the law.

The issue did not come squarely to Philip.  He had not openly lied about
Guida: so far he had had no intention of doing so.  He even figured to
himself with what surprise Guida would greet his announcement that she
was henceforth Princesse Guida d'Avranche, and in due time would be her
serene highness the Duchesse de Bercy.  Certainly there was nothing
immoral in his ambitions.  If the reigning Prince chose to establish
him as heir, who had a right to complain?

Then, as to an officer of the English navy accepting succession in a
sovereign duchy in suzerainty to the present Government of France, while
England was at war with her, the Duke had more than once, in almost so
many words, defined the situation.  Because the Duke himself, with no
successor assured, was powerless to side with the Royalists against the
Red Government, he was at the moment obliged, for the very existence of
his duchy, to hoist the tricolour upon the castle with his own flag.
Once the succession was secure beyond the imbecile Leopold John, then he
would certainly declare against the present fiendish Government and for
the overthrown dynasty.

Now England was fighting France, not only because she was revolutionary
France, but because of the murder of Louis XVI and for the restoration of
the overthrown dynasty.  Also she was in close sympathy with the war of
the Vendee, to which she would lend all possible assistance.  Philip
argued that if it was his duty, as a captain in the English navy, to
fight against the revolutionaries from without, he would be beyond
criticism if, as the Duc de Bercy, he also fought against them from
within.

Indeed, it was with this plain statement of the facts that the second
military officer of the duchy had some days before been sent to the Court
of St. James to secure its intervention for Philip's freedom by exchange
of prisoners.  This officer was also charged with securing the consent of
the English King for Philip's acceptance of succession in the duchy,
while retaining his position in the English navy.  The envoy had been
instructed by the Duke to offer his sympathy with England in the war and
his secret adherence to the Royalist cause, to become open so soon as the
succession through Philip was secured.

To Philip's mind all that side of the case was in his favour, and sorted
well with his principles of professional honour.  His mind was not so
acutely occupied with his private honour.  To tell the Duke now of his
marriage would be to load the dice against himself: he felt that the
opportunity for speaking of it had passed.

He seated himself at a table and took from his pocket a letter of Guida's
written many weeks before, in which she had said firmly that she had not
announced the marriage, and would not; that he must do it, and he alone;
that the letter written to her grandfather had not been received by him,
and that no one in Jersey knew their secret.

In reading this letter again a wave of feeling rushed over him.  He
realised the force and strength of her nature: every word had a clear,
sharp straightforwardness and the ring of truth.

A crisis was near, and he must prepare to meet it.

The Duke had said that he must marry; a woman had already been chosen for
him, and he was to meet her to-morrow.  But, as he said to himself, that
meant nothing.  To meet a woman was not of necessity to marry her.

Marry--he could feel his flesh creeping!  It gave him an ugly, startled
sensation.  It was like some imp of Satan to drop into his ear the
suggestion that princes, ere this, had been known to have two wives--
one of them unofficial.  He could have struck himself in the face for the
iniquity of the suggestion; he flushed from the indecency of it; but so
have sinners ever flushed as they set forth on the garish road to
Avernus.  Yet--yet somehow he must carry on the farce of being single
until the adoption and the succession had been formally arranged.

Vexed with these unbidden and unwelcome thoughts, he got up and walked
about his chamber restlessly.  "Guida--poor Guida!" he said to himself
many times.  He was angry, disgusted that those shameful, irresponsible
thoughts should have come to him.  He would atone for all that--and more
--when he was Prince and she Princess d'Avranche.  But, nevertheless,
he was ill at ease with himself.  Guida was off there alone in Jersey--
alone.  Now, all at once, another possibility flashed into his mind.
Suppose, why, suppose--thoughtless scoundrel that he had been--suppose
that there might come another than himself and Guida to bear his name!
And she there alone, her marriage still kept secret--the danger of it to
her good name.  But she had said nothing in her letters, hinted nothing.
No, in none had there been the most distant suggestion.  Then and there
he got them, one and all, and read every word, every line, all through to
the end.  No; there was not one hint.  Of course it could not be so; she
would have--but no, she might not have!  Guida was unlike anybody else.

He read on and on again.  And now, somehow, he thought he caught in one
of the letters a new ring, a pensive gravity, a deeper tension, which
were like ciphers or signals to tell him of some change in her.  For a
moment he was shaken.  Manhood, human sympathy, surged up in him.  The
flush of a new sensation ran through his veins like fire.  The first
instinct of fatherhood came to him, a thrilling, uplifting feeling.  But
as suddenly there shot through his mind a thought which brought him to
his feet with a spring.

But suppose--suppose that it was so--suppose that through Guida the
further succession might presently be made sure, and suppose he went to
the Prince and told him all; that might win his favour for her; and the
rest would be easy.  That was it, as clear as day.  Meanwhile he would
hold his peace, and abide the propitious hour.

For, above all else--and this was the thing that clinched the purpose in
his mind--above all else, the Duke had, at best, but a brief time to
live.  Only a week ago the Court physician had told him that any violence
or mental shock might snap the thread of existence.  Clearly, the thing
was to go on as before, keep his marriage secret, meet the Countess,
apparently accede to all the Duke proposed, and wait--and wait.

With this clear purpose in his mind colouring all that he might say,
yet crippling the freedom of his thought, he sat down to write to Guida.
He had not yet written to her, according to his parole: this issue was
clear; he could not send a letter to Guida until he was freed from that
condition.  It had been a bitter pill to swallow; and many times he had
had to struggle with himself since his arrival at the castle.  For
whatever the new ambitions and undertakings, there was still a woman
in the lonely distance for whose welfare he was responsible, for whose
happiness he had yet done nothing, unless to give her his name under
sombre conditions was happiness for her.  All that he had done to remind
him of the wedded life he had so hurriedly, so daringly, so eloquently
entered upon, was to send his young wife fifty pounds.  Somehow, as this
fact flashed to his remembrance now, it made him shrink; it had a certain
cold, commercial look which struck him unpleasantly.  Perhaps, indeed,
the singular and painful shyness--chill almost--with which Guida had
received the fifty pounds now communicated itself to him by the
intangible telegraphy of the mind and spirit.

All at once that bare, glacial fact of having sent her fifty pounds acted
as an ironical illumination of his real position.  He felt conscious that
Guida would have preferred some simple gift, some little thing that women
love, in token and remembrance, rather than this contribution to the
common needs of existence.  Now that he came to think of it, since he had
left her in Jersey, he had never sent her ever so small a gift.  He had
never given her any gifts at all save the Maltese cross in her childhood
--and her wedding-ring.  As for the ring, it had never occurred to him
that she could not wear it save in the stillness of the night, unseen by
any eye save her own.  He could not know that she had been wont to go to
sleep with the hand clasped to her breast, pressing close to her the one
outward token she had of a new life, begun with a sweetness which was
very bitter and a bitterness only a little sweet.

Philip was in no fitting mood to write a letter.  Too many emotions were
in conflict in him at once.  They were having their way with him; and,
perhaps, in this very complexity of his feelings he came nearer to being
really and acutely himself than he had ever been in his life.  Indeed,
there was a moment when he was almost ready to consign the Duke and all
that appertained to the devil or the deep sea, and to take his fate as it
came.  But one of the other selves of him calling down from the little
attic where dark things brood, told him that to throw up his present
chances would bring him no nearer and no sooner to Guida, and must
return him to the prison whence he came.

Yet he would write to Guida now, and send the letter when he was released
from parole.  His courage grew as the sentences spread out before him; he
became eloquent.  He told her how heavily the days and months went on
apart from her.  He emptied out the sensations of absence, loneliness,
desire, and affection.  All at once he stopped short.  It flashed upon
him now that always his letters had been entirely of his own doings; he
had pictured himself always: his own loneliness, his own grief at
separation.  He had never yet spoken of the details of her life,
questioned her of this and of that, of all the little things which fill
the life of a woman--not because she loves them, but because she is a
woman, and the knowledge and governance of little things is the habit of
her life.  His past egotism was borne in upon him now.  He would try to
atone for it.  Now he asked her many questions in his letter.  But one
he did not ask.  He knew not how to speak to her of it.  The fact that he
could not was a powerful indictment of his relations towards her, of his
treatment of her, of his headlong courtship and marriage.

So portions of this letter of his had not the perfect ring of truth, not
the conviction which unselfish love alone can beget.  It was only at the
last, only when he came to a close, that the words went from him with the
sharp photography of his own heart.  It came, perhaps, from a remorse
which, for the instant, foreshadowed danger ahead; from an acute pity for
her; or perchance from a longing to forego the attempt upon an exalted
place, and get back to the straightforward hours, such as those upon the
Ecrehos, when he knew that he loved her.  But the sharpness of his
feelings rendered more intense now the declaration of his love.  The
phrases were wrung from him.  "Good-bye--no, a la bonne heure, my
dearest," he wrote.  "Good days are coming--brave, great days, when I
shall be free to strike another blow for England, both from within and
from without France; when I shall be, if all go well, the Prince
d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy, and you my perfect Princess.  Good-bye!  Thy
Philip, qui t'aime toujours."

He had hardly written the last words when there came a knocking at his
door, and a servant entered.  "His Highness offers his compliments to
monsieur, and will monsieur descend to meet the Marquis Grandjon-Larisse
and the Comtesse Chantavoine, who have just arrived."

For an instant Philip could scarce compose himself, but he sent a message
of obedience to the Duke's command, and prepared to go down.

So it was come--not to-morrow, but to-day.  Already the deep game was on.
With a sigh which was half bitter and mocking laughter, he seized the
pouncebox, dried his letter to Guida, and put it in his pocket.  As he
descended the staircase, the last words of it kept assailing his mind,
singing in his brain: "Thy Philip, qui t'aime toujours!"




CHAPTER XXII

Not many evenings after Philip's first interview with the Comtesse
Chantavoine, a visitor arrived at the castle.  From his roundabout
approach up the steep cliff in the dusk it was clear he wished to avoid
notice.  Of gallant bearing, he was attired in a fashion unlike the
citizens of Bercy, or the Republican military often to be seen in the
streets of the town.  The whole relief of the costume was white: white
sash, white cuffs turned back, white collar, white rosette and band,
white and red bandeau, and the faint glitter of a white shirt.  In
contrast were the black hat and plume, black top boots with huge spurs,
and yellow breeches.  He carried a gun and a sword, and a pistol was
stuck in the white sash.  But one thing caught the eye more than all
else: a white square on the breast of the long brown coat, strangely
ornamented with a red heart and a cross.  He was evidently a soldier of
high rank, but not of the army of the Republic.

The face was that of a devotee, not of peace but of war--of some forlorn
crusade.  It had deep enthusiasm, which yet to the trained observer would
seem rather the tireless faith of a convert than the disposition of the
natural man.  It was somewhat heavily lined for one so young, and the
marks of a hard life were on him, but distinction and energy were in his
look and in every turn of his body.

Arriving at the castle, he knocked at the postern.  At first sight of him
the porter suspiciously blocked the entrance with his person, but seeing
the badge upon his breast, stood at gaze, and a look of keen curiosity
crossed over his face.  On the visitor announcing himself as a
Vaufontaine, this curiosity gave place to as keen surprise; he was
admitted with every mark of respect, and the gates closed behind him.

"Has his Highness any visitors?" he asked as he dismounted.

The porter nodded assent.

"Who are they?"  He slipped a coin into the porter's hand.

"One of the family--for so his Serene Highness calls him."

"H'm, indeed!  A Vaufontaine, friend?"

"No, monsieur, a d'Avranche."

"What d'Avranche?  Not Prince Leopold John?"

"No, monsieur, the name is the same as his Highness's."

"Philip d'Avranche?  Ah, from whence?"

"From Paris, monsieur, with his Highness."

The visitor, whistling softly to himself, stood thinking a moment.

Presently he said:

"How old is he?"

"About the same age as monsieur."

"How does he occupy himself?"

"He walks, rides, talks with his Highness, asks questions of the people,
reads in the library, and sometimes shoots and fishes."

"Is he a soldier?"

"He carries no sword, and he takes long aim with a gun."

A sly smile was lurking about the porter's mouth.  The visitor drew from
his pocket a second gold piece, and, slipping it into the other's hand,
said:

"Tell it all at once.  Who is the gentleman, and what is his business
here?  Is he, perhaps, on the side of the Revolution, or does he--keep
better company?"

He looked keenly into the eyes of the porter, who screwed up his own,
returning the gaze unflinchingly.  Handing back the gold piece, the man
answered firmly:

"I have told monsieur what every one in the duchy knows; there's no
charge for that.  For what more his Highness and--and those in his
Highness's confidence know," he drew himself up with brusque importance,
"there's no price, monsieur."

"Body o' me, here's pride and vainglory!" answered the other.  "But I
know you, my fine Pergot, I knew you almost too well years ago; and then
you were not so sensitive; then you were a good Royalist like me,
Pergot."

This time he fastened the man's look with his own and held it until
Pergot dropped his head before it.

"I don't remember monsieur," he answered, perturbed.

"Of course not.  The fine Pergot has a bad memory, like a good
Republican, who by law cannot worship his God, or make the sign of the
Cross, or, ask the priest to visit him when he's dying.  A red
Revolutionist is our Pergot now!"

"I'm as good a Royalist as monsieur," retorted the man with some
asperity.  "So are most of us.  Only--only his Highness says to us--"

"Don't gossip of what his Highness says, but do his bidding, Pergot.
What a fool are you to babble thus!  How d'ye know but I'm one of
Fouche's or Barere's men?  How d'ye know but there are five hundred men
beyond waiting for my whistle?"

The man changed instantly.  His hand was at his side like lightning.
"They'd never hear that whistle, monsieur, though you be Vaufontaine or
no Vaufontaine!"

The other, smiling, reached out and touched him on the shoulder kindly.

"My dear Frange Pergot," said he, "that's the man I knew once, and the
sort of man that's been fighting with me for the Church and for the King
these months past in the Vendee.  Come, come, don't you know me, Pergot?
Don't you remember the scapegrace with whom, for a jape, you waylaid my
uncle the Cardinal and robbed him, then sold him back his jewelled watch
for a year's indulgences?"

"But no, no," answered the man, crossing himself quickly, and by the dim
lanthorn light peering into the visitor's face, "it is not possible,
monsieur.  The Comte Detricand de Tournay--God rest him!--died in the
Jersey Isle, with him they called Rullecour."

"Well, well, you might at least remember this," rejoined the other, and
with a smile he showed an old scar in the palm of his hand.

A little later was ushered into the library of the castle the Comte
Detricand de Tournay, who, under the name of Savary dit Detricand, had
lived in the Isle of Jersey for many years.  There he had been a
dissipated idler, a keeper of worthless company, an alien coolly
accepting the hospitality of a country he had ruthlessly invaded as a
boy.  Now, returned from vagabondage, he was the valiant and honoured
heir of the House of Vaufontaine, and heir-presumptive of the House of
Bercy.

True to his intention, Detricand had joined de la Rochejaquelein, the
intrepid, inspired leader of the Vendee, whose sentiments became his own
--"If I advance, follow me; if I retreat, kill me; if I fall, avenge me."

He had proven himself daring, courageous, resourceful.  His unvarying
gaiety of spirits infected the simple peasants with a rebounding energy;
his fearlessness inspired their confidence; his kindness to the wounded,
friend or foe, his mercy to prisoners, the respect he showed devoted
priests who shared with the peasants the perils of war, made him beloved.

From the first all the leaders trusted him, and he sprang in a day, as
had done the peasants Cathelineau, d'Elbee, and Stofflet, or gentlemen
like Lescure and Bonchamp, and noble fighters like d'Antichamp and the
Prince of Talmont, to an outstanding position in the Royalist army.
Again and again he had been engaged in perilous sorties and leading
forlorn hopes.  He had now come from the splendid victory at Saumur to
urge his kinsman, the Duc de Bercy, to join the Royalists.

He had powerful arguments to lay before a nobleman the whole traditions
of whose house were of constant alliance with the Crown of France, whose
very duchy had been the gift of a French monarch.  Detricand had not seen
the Duke since he was a lad at Versailles, and there would be much in his
favour, for of all the Vaufontaines the Duke had reason to dislike him
least, and some winning power in him had of late grown deep and
penetrating.

When the Duke entered upon him in the library, he was under the immediate
influence of a stimulating talk with Philip d'Avranche and the chief
officers of the duchy.  With the memory of past feuds and hatreds in his
mind, and predisposed against any Vaufontaine, his greeting was
courteously disdainful, his manner preoccupied.

Remarking that he had but lately heard of monsieur le comte's return to
France, he hoped he had enjoyed his career in--was it then England or
America?  But yes, he remembered, it began with an expedition to take the
Channel Isles from England, an insolent, a criminal business in time of
peace, fit only for boys or buccaneers.  Had monsieur le comte then spent
all these years in the Channel Isles--a prisoner perhaps?  No?  Fastening
his eyes cynically on the symbol of the Royalist cause on Detricand's
breast, he asked to what he was indebted for the honour of this present
visit.  Perhaps, he added drily, it was to inquire after his own health,
which, he was glad to assure monsieur le comte and all his cousins of
Vaufontaine, was never better.

The face was like a leather mask, telling nothing of the arid sarcasm in
the voice.  The shoulders were shrunken, the temples fallen in, the neck
behind was pinched, and the eyes looked out like brown beads alive with
fire, and touched with the excitement of monomania.  His last word had a
delicate savagery of irony, though, too, there could be heard in the tone
a defiance, arguing apprehension, not lost upon his visitor.

Detricand had inwardly smiled during the old man's monologue, broken only
by courteous, half-articulate interjections on his own part.  He knew too
well the old feud between their houses, the ambition that had possessed
many a Vaufontaine to inherit the dukedom of Bercy, and the Duke's futile
revolt against that possibility.  But for himself, now heir to the
principality of Vaufontaine, and therefrom, by reversion, to that of
Bercy, it had no importance.

He had but one passion now, and it burned clear and strong, it dominated,
it possessed him.  He would have given up any worldly honour to see it
succeed.  He had idled and misspent too many years, been vaurien and
ne'er-do-well too long to be sordid now.  Even as the grievous sinner,
come from dark ways, turns with furious and tireless strength to piety
and good works, so this vagabond of noble family, wheeling suddenly in
his tracks, had thrown himself into a cause which was all sacrifice,
courage, and unselfish patriotism--a holy warfare.  The last bitter
thrust of the Duke had touched no raw flesh, his withers were unwrung.
Gifted to thrust in return, and with warrant to do so, he put aside the
temptation, and answered his kinsman with daylight clearness.

"Monsieur le duc," said he, "I am glad your health is good--it better
suits the purpose of this interview.  I am come on business, and on that
alone.  I am from Saumur, where I left de la Rochejaquelein, Stofflet,
Cathelineau, and Lescure masters of the city and victors over Coustard's
army.  We have taken eleven thousand prisoners, and--"

"I have heard a rumour--" interjected the Duke impatiently.

"I will give you fact," continued Detricand, and he told of the series of
successes lately come to the army of the Vendee.  It was the heyday of
the cause.

"And how does all this concern me?" asked the Duke.

"I am come to beg you to join us, to declare for our cause, for the
Church and for the King.  Yours is of the noblest names in France.  Will
you not stand openly for what you cannot waver from in your heart?  If
the Duc de Bercy declares for us, others will come out of exile, and from
submission to the rebel government, to our aid.  My mission is to beg you
to put aside whatever reasons you may have had for alliance with this
savage government, and proclaim for the King."

The Duke never took his eyes from Detricand's.

What was going on behind that parchment face, who might say?

"Are you aware," he answered Detricand at last, "that I could send you
straight from here to the guillotine?"

"So could the porter at your gates, but he loves France almost as well
as does the Duc de Bercy."

"You take refuge in the fact that you are my kinsman," returned the Duke
acidly.

"The honour is stimulating, but I should not seek salvation by it.  I
have the greater safety of being your guest," answered Detricand with
dignity.

"Too premature a sanctuary for a Vaufontaine!" retorted the Duke,
fighting down growing admiration for a kinsman whose family he would
gladly root out, if it lay in his power.

Detricand made a gesture of impatience, for he felt that his appeal had
availed nothing, and he had no heart for a battle of words.  His wit had
been tempered in many fires, his nature was non-incandescent to praise or
gibe.  He had had his share of pastime; now had come his share of toil,
and the mood for give and take of words was not on him.

He went straight to the point now.  Hopelessly he spoke the plain truth.

"I want nothing of the Prince d'Avranche but his weight and power in a
cause for which the best gentlemen of France are giving their lives.  I
fasten my eyes on France alone: I fight for the throne of Louis, not for
the duchy of Bercy.  The duchy of Bercy may sink or swim for all of me,
if so be it does not stand with us in our holy war."

The Duke interjected a disdainful laugh.  Suddenly there shot into
Detricand's mind a suggestion, which, wild as it was, might after all
belong to the grotesque realities of life.  So he added with
deliberation:

"If alliance must still be kept with this evil government of France,
then be sure there is no Vaufontaine who would care to inherit a duchy so
discredited.  To meet that peril the Duc de Bercy will do well to consult
his new kinsman--Philip d'Avranche."

For a moment there was absolute silence in the room.  The old nobleman's
look was like a flash of flame in a mask of dead flesh.  The short upper
lip was arrested in a sort of snarl, the fingers, half-closed, were
hooked like talons, and the whole man was a picture of surprise, fury,
and injured pride.  The Duc de Bercy to be harangued to his duty,
scathed, measured, disapproved, and counselled, by a stripling
Vaufontaine--it was monstrous.

It had the bitterness of aloes also, for in his own heart he knew that
Detricand spoke truth.  The fearless appeal had roused him, for a moment
at least, to the beauty and righteousness of a sombre, all but hopeless,
cause, while the impeachment had pierced every sore in his heart.  He
felt now the smarting anger, the outraged vanity of the wrong-doer who,
having argued down his own conscience, and believing he has blinded
others as himself, suddenly finds that himself and his motives are naked
before the world.

Detricand had known regretfully, even as he spoke, that the Duke, no
matter what the reason, would not now ally himself with the Royalists;
though, had his life been in danger, he still would have spoken the
truth.  So he had been human enough to try and force open the door of
mystery by a biting suggestion; for he had a feeling that in the presence
of the mysterious kinsman, Philip d'Avranche, lay the cause of the Duke's
resistance to his prayer.  Who was this Philip d'Avranche?  At the moment
it seemed absurd to him that his mind should travel back to the Isle of
Jersey.

The fury of the Duke was about to break forth, when the door of the
chamber opened and Philip stepped inside.  The silence holding two men
now held three, and a curious, cold astonishment possessed the two
younger.  The Duke was too blind with anger to see the start of
recognition his visitors gave at sight of each other, and by a
concurrence of feeling neither Detricand nor Philip gave sign of
acquaintance.  Wariness was Philip's cue, wondering caution Detricand's
attitude.

The Duke spoke first.  Turning from Philip, he said to Detricand with
malicious triumph:

"It will disconcert your pious mind to know I have yet one kinsman who
counts it no shame to inherit Bercy.  Monsieur le comte, I give you here
the honour to know Captain Philip d'Avranche."

Something of Detricand's old buoyant self came back to him.  His face
flushed with sudden desire to laugh, then it paled in dumb astonishment.
So this man, Philip d'Avranche, was to be set against him even in the
heritage of his family, as for one hour in a Jersey kitchen they had been
bitter opposites.  For the heritage of the Houses of Vaufontaine and
Bercy he cared little--he had deeper ambitions; but this adventuring
sailor roused in him again the private grudge he had once begged him to
remember.  Recovering himself, he answered meaningly, bowing low:

"The honour is memorable--and monstrous."  Philip set his teeth, but
replied: "I am overwhelmed to meet one whose reputation is known--in
every taproom."

Neither had chance to say more, for the Duke, though not conceiving the
cause or meaning of the biting words, felt the contemptuous suggestion in
Detricand's voice, and burst out in anger:

"Go tell the prince of Vaufontaine that the succession is assured to my
house.  Monsieur my cousin, Captain Philip d'Avranche, is now my adopted
son; a wife is chosen for him, and soon, monsieur le comte, there will be
still another successor to the title."

"The Duc de Bercy should add inspired domestic prophecy to the family
record in the 'Almanach de Gotha,"' answered Detricand.

"God's death!" cried the old nobleman, trembling with rage, and
stretching towards the bell-rope, "you shall go to Paris and the Temple.
Fouche will take care of you."

"Stop, monsieur le duc!"  Detricand's voice rang through the room.  "You
shall not betray even the humblest of your kinsmen, like that monster
d'Orleans who betrayed the highest of his.  Be wise: there are hundreds
of your people who still will pass a Royalist on to safety."

The Duke's hand dropped from the bell-rope.  He knew that Detricand's
words were true.  Ruling himself to quiet, he said with cold hatred:

"Like all your breed, crafty and insolent.  But I will make you pay for
it one day."

Glancing towards Philip as though to see if he could move him, Detricand
answered: "Make no haste on my behalf; years are not of such moment to me
as to your Highness."

Philip saw Detricand's look, and felt his moment and his chance had come.
"Monsieur le comte!" he exclaimed threateningly.

The Duke glanced proudly at Philip.  "You will collect the debt, cousin,"
said he, and the smile on his face was wicked as he again turned towards
Detricand.

"With interest well compounded," answered Philip firmly.

Detricand smiled.  "I have drawn the Norman-Jersey cousin, then?" said
he.  "Now we can proceed to compliments."  Then with a change of manner
he added quietly: "Your Highness, may the House of Bercy have no worse
enemy than I!  I came only to plead the cause which, if it give death,
gives honour too.  And I know well that at least you are not against us
in heart.  Monsieur d'Avranche"--he turned to Philip, and his words were
slow and deliberate--"I hope we may yet meet in the Place du Vier Prison
--but when and where you will; and you shall find me in the Vendee when
you please."  So saying, he bowed, and, turning, left the room.

"What meant the fellow by his Place du Vier Prison?" asked the Duke.

"Who knows, monsieur le duc?" answered Philip.  "A fanatic like all the
Vaufontaines--a roysterer yesterday, a sainted chevalier to-morrow," said
the Duke irritably.  "But they still have strength and beauty--always!"
he added reluctantly.  Then he looked at the strong and comely frame
before him, and was reassured.  He laid a hand on Philip's broad
shoulder, and said admiringly:

"You will of course have your hour with him, cousin: but not--not till
you are a d'Avranche of Bercy."

"Not till I am a d'Avranche of Bercy," responded Philip in a low voice.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Egotism with which all are diseased
Egregious egotism of young love there are only two identities
Follow me; if I retreat, kill me; if I fall, avenge me
It's the people who try to be clever who never are
Knew the lie of silence to be as evil as the lie of speech
People who are clever never think of trying to be






THE BATTLE OF THE STRONG

[A ROMANCE OF TWO KINGDOMS]

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 4.



CHAPTER XXIII

With what seemed an unnecessary boldness Detricand slept that night at
the inn, "The Golden Crown," in the town of Bercy: a Royalist of the
Vendee exposing himself to deadly peril in a town sworn to alliance with
the Revolutionary Government.  He knew that the town, even the inn, might
be full of spies; but one other thing he also knew: the innkeeper of "The
Golden Crown" would not betray him, unless he had greatly changed since
fifteen years ago.  Then they had been friends, for his uncle of
Vaufontaine had had a small estate in Bercy itself, in ironical
proximity to the castle.

He walked boldly into the inn parlour.  There were but four men in the
room--the landlord, two stout burghers, and Frange Pergot, the porter of
the castle, who had lost no time carrying his news: not to betray his old
comrade in escapade, but to tell a chosen few, Royalists under the rose,
that he had seen one of those servants of God, an officer of the Vendee.

At sight of the white badge with the red cross on Detricand's coat, the
four stood up and answered his greeting with devout respect; and he had
speedy assurance that in this inn he was safe from betrayal.  Presently
he learned that three days hence a meeting of the States of Bercy was to
be held for setting the seal upon the Duke's formal adoption of Philip,
and to execute a deed of succession.  It was deemed certain that, ere
this, the officer sent to England would have returned with Philip's
freedom and King George's licence to accept the succession in the duchy.
From interest in these matters alone Detricand would not have remained at
Bercy, but he thought to use the time for secretly meeting officers of
the duchy likely to favour the cause of the Royalists.

During these three days of waiting he heard with grave concern a
rumour that the great meeting of the States would be marked by Philip's
betrothal with the Comtesse Chantavoine.  He cared naught for the
succession, but there was ever with him the remembrance of Guida
Landresse de Landresse, and what touched Philip d'Avranche he had come
to associate with her.  Of the true relations between Guida and Philip
he knew nothing, but from that last day in Jersey he did know that Philip
had roused in her emotions, perhaps less vital than love but certainly
less equable than friendship.

Now in his fear that Guida might suffer, the more he thought of the
Comtesse Chantavoine as the chosen wife of Philip the more it troubled
him.  He could not shake off oppressive thoughts concerning Guida and
this betrothal.  They interwove themselves through all his secret
business with the Royalists of Bercy.  For his own part, he would
have gone far and done much to shield her from injury.  He had seen and
known in her something higher than Philip might understand--a simple
womanliness, a profound depth of character.  His pledge to her had been
the key-note of his new life.  Some day, if he lived and his cause
prospered, he would go back to Jersey--too late perhaps to tell her what
was in his heart, but not too late to tell her the promise had been kept.

It was a relief when the morning of the third day came, bright and
joyous, and he knew that before the sun went down he should be on his way
back to Saumur.

His friend the innkeeper urged him not to attend the meeting of the
States of Bercy, lest he should be recognised by spies of government.
He was, however, firm in his will to go, but he exchanged his coat with
the red cross for one less conspicuous.

With this eventful morn came the news that the envoy to England had
returned with Philip's freedom by exchange of prisoners, and with the
needful licence from King George.  But other news too was carrying
through the town: the French Government, having learned of the Duke's
intentions towards Philip, had despatched envoys from Paris to forbid the
adoption and deed of succession.

Though the Duke would have defied them, it behoved him to end the matter,
if possible, before these envoys' arrival.  The States therefore was
hurriedly convened two hours before the time appointed, and the race
began between the Duke and the emissaries of the French Government.

It was a perfect day, and as the brilliant procession wound down the
great rock from the castle, in ever-increasing, glittering line, the
effect was mediaeval in its glowing splendour.  All had been ready for
two days, and the general enthusiasm had seized upon the occasion with an
adventurous picturesqueness, in keeping with this strange elevation of a
simple British captain to royal estate.  This buoyant, clear-faced,
stalwart figure had sprung suddenly out of the dark into the garish light
of sovereign place, and the imagination of the people had been touched.
He was so genial too, so easy-mannered, this d'Avranche of Jersey, whose
genealogy had been posted on a hundred walls and carried by a thousand
mouths through the principality.  As Philip rode past on the left of the
exulting Duke, the crowds cheered him wildly.  Only on the faces of Comte
Carignan Damour and his friends was discontent, and they must perforce be
still.  Philip himself was outwardly calm, with that desperate quiet
which belongs to the most perilous, most adventurous achieving.  Words he
had used many years ago in Jersey kept ringing in his ears--"'Good-bye,
Sir Philip'--I'll be more than that some day."

The Assembly being opened, in a breathless silence the Governor-General
of the duchy read aloud the licence of the King of England for Philip
d'Avranche, an officer in his navy, to assume the honours to be conferred
upon him by the Duke and the States of Bercy.  Then, by command of the
Duke, the President of the States read aloud the new order of succession:

"1.  To the Hereditary Prince Leopold John and his heirs male; in default
of which to

"2.  The Prince successor, Philip d'Avranche and his heirs male; in
default of which to

"3.  The heir male of the House of Vaufontaine."  Afterwards came reading
of the deed of gift by which the Duke made over to Prince Philip certain
possessions in the province of d'Avranche.  To all this the assent of
Prince Leopold John had been formally secured.  After the Assembly and
the chief officers of the duchy should have ratified these documents and
the Duke signed them, they were to be enclosed in a box with three locks
and deposited with the Sovereign Court at Bercy.  Duplicates were also to
be sent to London and registered in the records of the College of Arms.
Amid great enthusiasm, the States, by unanimous vote, at once ratified
the documents.  The one notable dissentient was the Intendant, Count
Carignan Damour, the devout ally of the French Government.  It was he who
had sent Fouche word concerning Philip's adoption; it was also he who had
at last, through his spies, discovered Detricand's presence in the town,
and had taken action thereupon.  In the States, however, he had no vote,
and wisdom kept him silent, though he was watchful for any chance to
delay events against the arrival of the French envoys.

They should soon be here, and, during the proceedings in the States, he
watched the doors anxiously.  Every minute that passed made him more
restless, less hopeful.  He had a double motive in preventing this new
succession.  With Philip as adopted son and heir there would be fewer
spoils of office; with Philip as duke there would be none at all, for the
instinct of distrust and antipathy was mutual.  Besides, as a Republican,
he looked for his reward from Fouche in good time.

Presently it was announced by the President that the signatures to the
acts of the States would be set in private.  Thereupon, with all the
concourse standing, the Duke, surrounded by the law, military, and civil
officers of the duchy, girded upon Philip the jewelled sword which had
been handed down in the House of d'Avranche from generation to
generation.  The open function being thus ended, the people were enjoined
to proceed at once to the cathedral, where a Te Deum would be sung.

The public then retired, leaving the Duke and a few of the highest
officials of the duchy to formally sign and seal the deeds.  When the
outer doors were closed, one unofficial person remained--Comte Detricand
de Tournay, of the House of Vaufontaine.  Leaning against a pillar, he
stood looking calmly at the group surrounding the Duke at the great
council-table.

Suddenly the Duke turned to a door at the right of the President's chair,
and, opening it, bowed courteously to some one beyond.  An instant
afterwards there entered the Comtesse Chantavoine, with her uncle the
Marquis Grandjon-Larisse, an aged and feeble but distinguished figure.
They advanced towards the table, the lady on the Duke's arm, and Philip,
saluting them gravely, offered the Marquis a chair.  At first the Marquis
declined it, but the Duke pressed him, and in the subsequent proceedings
he of all the number was seated.

Detricand apprehended the meaning of the scene.  This was the lady whom
the Duke had chosen as wife for the new Prince.  The Duke had invited the
Comtesse to witness the final act which was to make Philip d'Avranche his
heir in legal fact as by verbal proclamation; not doubting that the
romantic nature of the incident would impress her.  He had even hoped
that the function might be followed by a formal betrothal in the presence
of the officials; and the situation might still have been critical for
Philip had it not been for the pronounced reserve of the Comtesse
herself.

Tall, of gracious and stately carriage, the curious quietness of the face
of the Comtesse would have been almost an unbecoming gravity were it not
that the eyes, clear, dark, and strong, lightened it.  The mouth had a
somewhat set sweetness, even as the face was somewhat fixed in its calm.
In her bearing, in all her motions, there was a regal quality; yet, too,
something of isolation, of withdrawal, in her self-possession and
unruffled observation.  She seemed, to Detricand, a figure apart, a woman
whose friendship would be everlasting, but whose love would be more an
affectionate habit than a passion; and in whom devotion would be strong
because devotion was the key-note of her nature.  The dress of a nun
would have turned her into a saint; of a peasant would have made her a
Madonna; of a Quaker, would have made her a dreamer and a devote; of a
queen, would have made her benign yet unapproachable.  It struck him all
at once as he looked, that this woman had one quality in absolute kinship
with Guida Landresse--honesty of mind and nature; only with this young
aristocrat the honesty would be without passion.  She had straight-
forwardness, a firm if limited intellect, a clear-mindedness belonging
somewhat to narrowness of outlook, but a genuine capacity for
understanding the right and the wrong of things.  Guida, so Detricand
thought, might break her heart and live on; this woman would break her
heart and die: the one would grow larger through suffering, the other
shrink to a numb coldness.

So he entertained himself by these flashes of discernment, presently
merged in wonderment as to what was in Philip's mind as he stood there,
destiny hanging in that drop of ink at the point of the pen in the Duke's
fingers!

Philip was thinking of the destiny, but more than all else just now he
was thinking of the woman before him and the issue to be faced by him
regarding her.  His thoughts were not so clear nor so discerning as
Detricand's.  No more than he understood Guida did he understand
this clear-eyed, still, self-possessed woman.  He thought her cold,
unsympathetic, barren of that glow which should set the pulses of a man
like himself bounding.  It never occurred to him that these still waters
ran deep, that to awaken this seemingly glacial nature, to kindle a fire
on this altar, would be to secure unto his life's end a steady, enduring
flame of devotion.  He revolted from her; not alone because he had a
wife, but because the Comtesse chilled him, because with her, in any
case, he should never be able to play the passionate lover as he had done
with Guida; and with Philip not to be the passionate lover was to be no
lover at all.  One thing only appealed to him: she was the Comtesse
Chantavoine, a fitting consort in the eyes of the world for a sovereign
duke.  He was more than a little carried off his feet by the marvel of
the situation.  He could think of nothing quite clearly; everything was
confused and shifting in his mind.

The first words of the Duke were merely an informal greeting to his
council and the high officers present.  He was about to speak further
when some one drew his attention to Detricand's presence.  An order was
given to challenge the stranger, but Detricand, without waiting for the
approach of the officer, advanced towards the table, and, addressing the
Duke, said:

"The Duc de Bercy will not forbid the presence of his cousin, Detricand
de Tournay, at this impressive ceremony?"

The Duke, dumfounded, though he preserved an outward calm, could not
answer for an instant.  Then with a triumphant, vindictive smile which
puckered his yellow cheeks like a wild apple, he said:

"The Comte de Tournay is welcome to behold an end of the ambitions of
the Vaufontaines."  He looked towards Philip with an exulting pride.
"Monsieur le Comte is quite right," he added, turning to his council--
"he may always claim the privileges of a relative of the Bercys; but the
hospitality goes not beyond my house and my presence, and monsieur le
comte will understand my meaning."

At that moment Detricand caught the eye of Damour the Intendant, and he
understood perfectly.  This man, the innkeeper had told him, was known to
be a Revolutionary, and he felt he was in imminent danger.

He came nearer, however, bowing to all present, and, making no reply to
the Duke save a simple, "I thank your Highness," took a place near the
council-table.

The short ceremony of signing the deeds immediately followed.  A few
formal questions were asked of Philip, to which he briefly replied, and
afterwards he made the oath of allegiance to the Duke, with his hand upon
the ancient sword of the d'Avranches.  These preliminaries ended, the
Duke was just stooping to put his pen to the paper for signature, when
the Intendant, as much to annoy Philip as still to stay the proceedings
against the coming of Fouche's men, said:

"It would appear that one question has been omitted in the formalities of
this Court."  He paused dramatically.  He was only aiming a random shot;
he would make the most of it.

The Duke looked up perturbed, and said sharply: "What is that--what is
that, monsieur?"

"A form, monsieur le duc, a mere form.  Monsieur"--he bowed towards
Philip politely--"monsieur is not already married?  There is no--"  He
paused again.

For an instant there was absolute stillness.  Philip had felt his heart
give one great thump of terror: Did the Intendant know anything?  Did
Detricand know anything.

Standing rigid for a moment, his pen poised, the Duke looked sharply at
the Intendant and then still more sharply at Philip.  The progress of
that look had granted Philip an instant's time to recover his composure.
He was conscious that the Comtesse Chantavoine had given a little start,
and then had become quite still and calm.  Now her eyes were intently
fixed upon him.

He had, however, been too often in physical danger to lose his nerve at
this moment.  The instant was big with peril; it was the turning point of
his life, and he felt it.  His eyes dropped towards the spot of ink at
the point of the pen the Duke held.  It fascinated him, it was destiny.

He took a step nearer to the table, and, drawing himself up, looked his
princely interlocutor steadily in the eyes.

"Of course there is no marriage--no woman?" asked the Duke a little
hoarsely, his eyes fastened on Philip's.  With steady voice Philip
replied: "Of course, monsieur le duc."

There was another stillness.  Some one sighed heavily.  It was the
Comtesse Chantavoine.

The next instant the Duke stooped, and wrote his signature three times
hurriedly upon the deeds.

A moment afterwards, Detricand was in the street, making towards "The
Golden Crown."  As he hurried on he heard the galloping of horses ahead
of him.  Suddenly some one plucked him by the arm from a doorway.

"Quick--within!" said a voice.  It was that of the Duke's porter, Frange
Pergot.  Without hesitation or a word, Detricand did as he was bid, and
the door clanged to behind him.

"Fouche's men are coming down the street; spies have betrayed you,"
whispered Pergot.  "Follow me.  I will hide you till night, and then you
must away."

Pergot had spoken the truth.  But Detricand was safely hidden, and
Fouche's men came too late to capture the Vendean chief or to forbid
those formal acts which made Philip d'Avranche a prince.

Once again at Saumur, a week later, Detricand wrote a long letter to
Carterette Mattingley, in Jersey, in which he set forth these strange
events at Bercy, and asked certain questions concerning Guida.




CHAPTER XXIV

Since the day of his secret marriage with Guida, Philip had been carried
along in the gale of naval preparation and incidents of war as a leaf is
borne onward by a storm--no looking back, to-morrow always the goal.  But
as a wounded traveller nursing carefully his hurt seeks shelter from the
scorching sun and the dank air, and travels by little stages lest he
never come at all to friendly hostel, so Guida made her way slowly
through the months of winter and of spring.

In the past, it had been February to Guida because the yellow Lenten
lilies grew on all the sheltered cotils; March because the periwinkle and
the lords-and-ladies came; May when the cliffs were a blaze of golden
gorse and the perfume thereof made all the land sweet as a honeycomb.

Then came the other months, with hawthorn trees and hedges all in blow;
the honeysuckle gladdening the doorways, the lilac in bloomy thickets;
the ox-eyed daisy of Whitsuntide; the yellow rose of St. Brelade that
lies down in the sand and stands up in the hedges; the "mergots" which,
like good soldiers, are first in the field and last out of it; the
unscented dog-violets, orchises and celandines; the osier beds, the ivy
on every barn; the purple thrift in masses on the cliff; the sea-thistle
in its glaucous green--"the laughter of the fields whose laugh was gold."
And all was summer.

Came a time thereafter, when the children of the poor gathered
blackberries for preserves and home made wine; when the wild stock
flowered in St. Ouen's Bay; when the bracken fern was gathered from every
cotil, and dried for apple-storing, for bedding for the cherished cow,
for back-rests for the veilles, and seats round the winter fire; when
peaches, apricots, and nectarines made the walls sumptuous red and gold;
when the wild plum and crab-apple flourished in secluded roadways, and
the tamarisk dropped its brown pods upon the earth.  And all this was
autumn.

At last, when the birds of passage swept aloft, snipe and teal and
barnacle geese, and the rains began; when the green lizard with its
turquoise-blue throat vanished; when the Jersey crapaud was heard
croaking no longer in the valleys and the ponds; and the cows were well
blanketed--then winter had come again.

Such was the association of seasons in Guida's mind until one day of a
certain year, when for a few hours a man had called her his wife, and
then had sailed away.  There was no log that might thereafter record the
days and weeks unwinding the coils of an endless chain into that sea
whither Philip had gone.

Letters she had had, two letters, one in January, one in March.  How many
times, when a Channel-packet came in, did she go to the doorway and watch
for old Mere Rossignol, making the rounds with her han basket, chanting
the names of those for whom she had letters; and how many times did she
go back to the kitchen, choking down a sob!

The first letter from Philip was at once a blessing and a blow; it was a
reassurance and it was a misery.  It spoke of bread, as it were, yet
offered a stone.  It eloquently, passionately told of his love; but it
also told, with a torturing ease, that the Araminta was commissioned with
sealed orders, and he did not know when he should see her nor when he
should be able to write again.  War had been declared against France,
and they might not touch a port nor have chance to send a letter by a
homeward vessel for weeks, and maybe months.  This was painful, of
course, but it was fate, it was his profession, and it could not be
helped.  Of course--she must understand--he would write constantly,
telling her, as through a kind of diary, what he was doing every day,
and then when the chance came the big budget should go to her.

A pain came to Guida's heart as she read the flowing tale of his buoyant
love.  Had she been the man and he the woman, she could never have
written so smoothly of "fate," and "profession," nor told of this
separation with so complaisant a sorrow.  With her the words would have
been wrenched forth from her heart, scarred into the paper with the
bitterness of a spirit tried beyond enduring.

With what enthusiasm did Philip, immediately after his heart-breaking
news, write of what the war might do for him; what avenues of advancement
it might open up, what splendid chances it would offer for success in his
career!  Did he mean that to comfort her, she asked herself.  Did he mean
it to divert her from the pain of the separation, to give her something
to hope for?  She read the letter over and over again--yet no, she could
not, though her heart was so willing, find that meaning in it.  It was
all Philip, Philip full of hope, purpose, prowess, ambition.  Did he
think--did he think that that could ease the pain, could lighten the dark
day settling down on her?  Could he imagine that anything might
compensate for his absence in the coming months, in this year of all
years in her life?  His lengthened absence might be inevitable, it might
be fate, but could he not see the bitter cruelty of it?  He had said that
he would be back with her again in two months; and now--ah, did he not
know!

As the weeks came and went again she felt that indeed he did not know--
or care, maybe.

Some natures cling to beliefs long after conviction has been shattered.
These are they of the limited imagination, the loyal, the pertinacious,
and the affectionate, the single-hearted children of habit; blind where
they do not wish to see, stubborn where their inclinations lie,
unamenable to reason, wholly held by legitimate obligations.

But Guida was not of these.  Her brain and imagination were as strong as
her affections.  Her incurable honesty was the deepest thing in her; she
did not know even how to deceive herself.  As her experience deepened
under the influence of a sorrow which still was joy, and a joy that still
was sorrow, her vision became acute and piercing.  Her mind was like some
kaleidoscope.  Pictures of things, little and big, which had happened to
her in her life, flashed by her inner vision in furious procession.  It
was as if, in the photographic machinery of the brain, some shutter had
slipped from its place, and a hundred orderless and ungoverned pictures,
loosed from natural restraint, rushed by.

Five months had gone since Philip had left her: two months since
she had received his second letter, months of complexity of feeling;
of tremulousness of discovery; of hungry eagerness for news of the war;
of sudden little outbursts of temper in her household life--a new thing
in her experience; of passionate touches of tenderness towards her
grandfather; of occasional biting comments in the conversations between
the Sieur and the Chevalier, causing both gentlemen to look at each other
in silent amaze; of as marked lapses into listless disregard of any talk
going on around her.

She had been used often to sit still, doing nothing, in a sort of
physical content, as the Sieur and his visitors talked; now her hands
were always busy, knitting, sewing, or spinning, the steady gaze upon the
work showing that her thoughts were far away.  Though the Chevalier and
her grandfather vaguely noted these changes, they as vaguely set them
down to her growing womanhood.  In any case, they held it was not for
them to comment upon a woman or upon a woman's ways.  And a girl like
Guida was an incomprehensible being, with an orbit and a system all her
own; whose sayings and doings were as little to be reduced to their
understandings as the vagaries of any star in the Milky Way or the
currents in St. Michael's Basin.

One evening she sat before the fire thinking of Philip.  Her grandfather
had retired earlier than usual.  Biribi lay asleep on the veille.  There
was no sound save the ticking of the clock on the mantel above her head,
the dog's slow breathing, the snapping of the log on the fire, and a soft
rush of heat up the chimney.  The words of Philip's letters, from which
she had extracted every atom of tenderness they held, were always in her
ears.  At last one phrase kept repeating itself to her like some
plaintive refrain, torturing in its mournful suggestion.  It was this:
"But you see, beloved, though I am absent from you I shall have such
splendid chances to get on.  There's no limit to what this war may do for
me."

Suddenly Guida realised how different was her love from Philip's, how
different her place in his life from his place in her life.  She reasoned
with herself, because she knew that a man's life was work in the world,
and that work and ambition were in his bones and in his blood, had been
carried down to him through centuries of industrious, ambitious
generations of men: that men were one race and women were another.  A man
was bound by the conditions governing the profession by which he earned
his bread and butter and played his part in the world, while striving to
reach the seats of honour in high places.  He must either live by the
law, fulfil to the letter his daily duties in the business of life, or
drop out of the race; while a woman, in the presence of man's immoderate
ambition, with bitterness and tears, must learn to pray, "O Lord, have
mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law."

Suddenly the whole thing resolved itself in Guida's mind, and her
thinking came to a full stop.  She understood now what was the right and
what the wrong; and, child as she was in years, woman in thought and
experience, yielding to the impulse of the moment, she buried her face in
her hands and burst into tears.

"O Philip, Philip, Philip," she sobbed aloud, "it was not right of you
to marry me; it was wicked of you to leave me!"  Then in her mind she
carried on the impeachment and reproach.  If he had married her openly
and left her at once, it would have been hard to bear, but in the
circumstances it might have been right.  If he had married her secretly
and left her at the altar, so keeping the vow he had made her when she
promised to become his wife, that might have been pardonable.  But to
marry her as he did, and then, breaking his solemn pledge, leave her--it
was not right in her eyes; and if not right in the eyes of her who loved
him, in whose would it be right?

To these definitions she had come at last.

It is an eventful moment, a crucial ordeal for a woman, when she forces
herself to see the naked truth concerning the man she has loved, yet the
man who has wronged her.  She is born anew in that moment: it may be to
love on, to blind herself, and condone and defend, so lowering her own
moral tone; or to congeal in heart, become keener in intellect, scornful
and bitter with her own sex and merciless towards the other, indifferent
to blame and careless of praise, intolerant, judging all the world by her
own experience, incredulous of any true thing.  Or again she may become
stronger, sadder, wiser; condoning nothing, minimising nothing, deceiving
herself in nothing, and still never forgiving at least one thing--the
destruction of an innocent faith and a noble credulity; seeing clearly
the whole wrong; with a strong intelligence measuring perfectly the
iniquity; but out of a largeness of nature and by virtue of a high sense
of duty, devoting her days to the salvation of a man's honour, to the
betterment of one weak or wicked nature.

Of these last would have been Guida.

"O Philip, Philip, you have been wicked to me!" she sobbed.

Her tears fell upon the stone hearth, and the fire dried them.  Every
teardrop was one girlish feeling and emotion gone, one bright fancy, one
tender hope vanished.  She was no longer a girl.  There were troubles and
dangers ahead of her, but she must now face them dry-eyed and alone.

In his second letter Philip had told her to announce the marriage, and
said that he would write to her grandfather explaining all, and also to
the Rev. Lorenzo Dow.  She had waited and watched for that letter to her
grandfather, but it had not come.  As for Mr. Dow, he was a prisoner with
the French; and he had never given her the marriage certificate.

There was yet another factor in the affair.  While the island was agog
over Mr. Dow's misfortune, there had been a bold robbery at St. Michael's
Rectory of the strong-box containing the communion plate, the parish
taxes for the year, and--what was of great moment to at least one person
--the parish register of deaths, baptisms, and marriages.  Thus it was
that now no human being in Jersey could vouch that Guida had been
married.

Yet these things troubled her little.  How easily could Philip set all
right!  If he would but come back--that at first was her only thought;
for what matter a ring, or any proof or proclamation without Philip!

It did not occur to her at first that all these things were needed to
save her from shame in the eyes of the world.  If she had thought of them
apprehensively, she would have said to herself, how easy to set all right
by simply announcing the marriage!  And indeed she would have done so
when war was declared and Philip received his new command, but that she
had wished the announcement to come from him.  Well, that would come in
any case when his letter to her grandfather arrived.  No doubt it had
missed the packet by which hers came, she thought.

But another packet and yet another arrived; and still there was no letter
from Philip for the Sieur de Mauprat.  Winter had come, and spring had
gone, and now summer was at hand.  Haymaking was beginning, the wild
strawberries were reddening among the clover, and in her garden, apples
had followed the buds on the trees beneath which Philip had told his
fateful tale of love.

At last a third letter arrived, but it brought little joy to her heart.
It was extravagant in terms of affection, but somehow it fell short of
the true thing, for its ardour was that of a mind preoccupied, and
underneath all ran a current of inherent selfishness.  It delighted in
the activity of his life, it was full of hope, of promise of happiness
for them both in the future, but it had no solicitude for Guida in the
present.  It chilled her heart--so warm but a short season ago--that
Philip to whom she had once ascribed strength, tenderness, profound
thoughtfulness, should concern himself so little in the details of her
life.  For the most part, his letters seemed those of an ardent lover who
knew his duty and did it gladly, but with a self-conscious and flowing
eloquence, costing but small strain of feeling.

In this letter he was curious to know what the people in Jersey said
about their marriage.  He had written to Lorenzo Dow and her grandfather,
he said, but had heard afterwards that the vessel carrying the letters
had been taken by a French privateer; and so they had not arrived in
Jersey.  But of course she had told her grandfather and all the island of
the ceremony performed at St. Michael's.  He was sending her fifty
pounds, his first contribution to their home; and, the war over, a pretty
new home she certainly should have.  He would write to her grandfather
again, though this day there was no time to do so.

Guida realised now that she must announce the marriage at once.  But what
proofs of it had she?  There was the ring Philip had given her, inscribed
with their names; but she was sophisticated enough to know that this
would not be adequate evidence in the eyes of her Jersey neighbours.  The
marriage register of St. Michael's, with its record, was stolen, and that
proof was gone.  Lastly, there were Philip's letters; but no--a thousand
times no!--she would not show Philip's letters to any human being; even
the thought of it hurt her delicacy, her self-respect.  Her heart burned
with fresh bitterness to think that there had been a secret marriage.
How hard it was at this distance of time to tell the world the tale, and
to be forced to prove it by Philip's letters.  No, no, in spite of all,
she could not do it--not yet.  She would still wait the arrival of his
letter to her grandfather.  If it did not come soon, then she must be
brave and tell her story.

She went to the Vier Marchi less now.  Also fewer folk stood gossiping
with her grandfather in the Place du Vier Prison, or by the well at the
front door--so far he had not wondered why.  To be sure, Maitresse
Aimable came oftener; but, since that notable day at Sark, Guida had
resolutely avoided reference, however oblique, to Philip and herself.
In her dark days the one tenderly watchful eye upon her was that of the
egregiously fat old woman called the "Femme de Ballast," whose thick
tongue clave to the roof of her mouth, whose outer attractions were so
meagre that even her husband's chief sign of affection was to pull her
great toe, passing her bed of a morning to light the fire.

Carterette Mattingley also came, but another friend who had watched over
Guida for years before Philip appeared in the Place du Vier Prison never
entered her doorway now.  Only once or twice since that day on the
Ecrehos, so fateful to them both, had Guida seen Ranulph.  He had
withdrawn to St. Aubin's Bay, where his trade of ship-building was
carried on, and having fitted up a small cottage, lived a secluded life
with his father there.  Neither of them appeared often in St. Heliers,
and they were seldom or never seen in the Vier Marchi.

Carterette saw Ranulph little oftener than did Guida, but she knew what
he was doing, being anxious to know, and every one's business being every
one else's business in Jersey.  In the same way Ranulph knew of Guida.
What Carterette was doing Ranulph was not concerned to know, and so knew
little; and Guida knew and thought little of how Ranulph fared: which was
part of the selfishness of love.

But one day Carterette received a letter from France which excited her
greatly, and sent her off hot-foot to Guida.  In the same hour Ranulph
heard a piece of hateful gossip which made him fell to the ground the man
who told him, and sent him with white face, and sick, yet indignant
heart, to the cottage in the Place du Vier Prison.




CHAPTER XXV

Guida was sitting on the veille reading an old London paper she had
bought of the mate of the packet from Southampton.  One page contained an
account of the execution of Louis XVI; another reported the fight between
the English thirty-six gun frigate Araminta and the French Niobe.  The
engagement had been desperate, the valiant Araminta having been fought,
not alone against odds as to her enemy, but against the irresistible
perils of a coast upon which the Admiralty charts gave cruelly imperfect
information.  To the Admiralty we owed the fact, the journal urged, that
the Araminta was now at the bottom of the sea, and its young commander
confined in a French fortress, his brave and distinguished services lost
to the country.  Nor had the government yet sought to lessen the injury
by arranging a cartel for the release of the unfortunate commander.

The Araminta!  To Guida the letters of the word seemed to stand out from
the paper like shining hieroglyphs on a misty grey curtain.  The rest of
the page was resolved into a filmy floating substance, no more tangible
than the ashy skeleton on which writing still lives when the paper itself
has been eaten by flame, and the flame swallowed by the air.

Araminta--this was all her eyes saw, that familiar name in the flaring
handwriting of the Genius of Life, who had scrawled her destiny in that
one word.

Slowly the monstrous ciphers faded from the grey hemisphere of space, and
she saw again the newspaper in her trembling fingers, the kitchen into
which the sunlight streamed from the open window, the dog Biribi basking
in the doorway.  That living quiet which descends upon a house when the
midday meal and work are done came suddenly home to her, in contrast to
the turmoil in her mind and being.

So that was why Philip had not written to her!  While her heart was daily
growing more bitter against him, he had been fighting his vessel against
great odds, and at last had been shipwrecked and carried off a prisoner.
A strange new understanding took possession of her.  Her life suddenly
widened.  She realised all at once how the eyes of the whole world might
be fixed upon a single ship, a few cannon, and some scores of men.  The
general of a great army leading tens of thousands into the clash of
battle--that had been always within her comprehension; but this was
almost miraculous, this sudden projection of one ship and her commander
upon the canvas of fame.  Philip had left her, unknown save to a few.
With the nations turned to see, he had made a gallant and splendid fight,
and now he was a prisoner in a French fortress.

This then was why her grandfather had received no letter from him
concerning the marriage.  Well, now she must speak for herself; she must
announce it.  Must she show Philip's letters?--No, no, she could not....
Suddenly a new suggestion came to her: there was one remaining proof.
Since no banns had been published, Philip must have obtained a license
from the Dean of the island, and he would have a record of it.  All she
had to do now was to get a copy of this record--but no, a license to
marry was no proof of marriage; it was but evidence of intention.

Still, she would go to the Dean this very moment.

It was not right that she should wait longer: indeed, in waiting so long
she had already done great wrong to herself--and to Philip perhaps.

She rose from the veille with a sense of relief.  No more of this
secrecy, making her innocence seem guilt; no more painful dreams of
punishment for some intangible crime; no starting if she heard a sudden
footstep; no more hurried walk through the streets, looking neither to
right nor to left; no more inward struggles wearing away her life.

To-morrow--to-morrow--no, this very night, her grandfather and one other,
even Maitresse Aimable, should know all; and she should sleep quietly--
oh, so quietly to-night!

Looking into a mirror on the wall--it had been a gift from her
grandfather--she smiled at herself.  Why, how foolish of her it had been
to feel so much and to imagine terrible things!  Her eyes were shining
now, and her hair, catching the sunshine from the window, glistened like
burnished copper.  She turned to see how it shone on the temple and the
side of her head.  Philip had praised her hair.  Her look lingered for a
moment placidly on herself-then she started suddenly.  A wave of feeling,
a shiver, passed through her, her brow gathered, she flushed deeply.

Turning away from the mirror, she went and sat down again on the edge of
the veille.  Her mind had changed.  She would go to the Dean's--but not
till it was dark.  She suddenly thought it strange that the Dean had
never said anything about the license.  Why, again, perhaps he had.  How
should she know what gossip was going on in the town!  But no, she was
quick to feel, and if there had been gossip she would have felt it in the
manner of her neighbours.  Besides, gossip as to a license to marry was
all on the right side.  She sighed--she had sighed so often of late--to
think what a tangle it all was, of how it would be smoothed out tomorrow,
of what--

There was a click of the garden-gate, a footstep on the walk, a half-
growl from Biribi, and the face of Carterette Mattingley appeared in the
kitchen doorway.  Seeing Guida seated on the veille, she came in quickly,
her dancing dark eyes heralding great news.

"Don't get up, ma couzaine," she said, "please no.  Sit just there, and
I'll sit beside you.  Ah, but I have the most wonderfuls!"

Carterette was out of breath.  She had hurried here from her home.  As
she said herself, her two feet weren't in one shoe on the way, and that
with her news made her quiver with excitement.

At first, bursting with mystery, she could do no more than sit and look
in Guida's face.  Carterette was quick of instinct in her way, but yet
she had not seen any marked change in her friend during the past few
months.  She had been so busy thinking of her own particular secret that
she was not observant of others.  At times she met Ranulph, and then she
was uplifted, to be at once cast down again; for she saw that his old
cheerfulness was gone, that a sombreness had settled on him.  She
flattered herself, however, that she could lighten his gravity if she had
the right and the good opportunity; the more so that he no longer visited
the cottage in the Place du Vier Prison.

This drew her closer to Guida also, for, in truth, Carterette had no
loftiness of nature.  Like most people, she was selfish enough to hold a
person a little dearer for not standing in her own especial light.  Long
ago she had shrewdly guessed that Guida's interest lay elsewhere than
with Ranulph, and a few months back she had fastened upon Philip as the
object of her favour.  That seemed no weighty matter, for many sailors
had made love to Carterette in her time, and knowing it was here to-day
and away to-morrow with them, her heart had remained untouched.  Why then
should she think Guida would take the officer seriously where she herself
held the sailor lightly?  But at the same time she felt sure that what
concerned Philip must interest Guida, she herself always cared to hear
the fate of an old admirer, and this was what had brought her to the
cottage to-day.

"Guess who's wrote me a letter?" she asked of Guida, who had taken up
some sewing, and was now industriously regarding the stitches.

At Carterette's question, Guida looked up and said with a smile, "Some
one you like, I see."

Carterette laughed gaily.  "Ba su, I should think I did--in a way.  But
what's his name?  Come, guess, Ma'm'selle Dignity."

"Eh ben, the fairy godmother," answered Guida, trying not to show an
interest she felt all too keenly; for nowadays it seemed to her that all
news should be about Philip.  Besides, she was gaining time and preparing
herself for--she knew not what.

"O my grief!" responded the brown-eyed elf, kicking off a red slipper,
and thrusting her foot into it again, "never a fairy godmother had I,
unless it's old Manon Moignard the witch:

             "'Sas, son, bileton,
               My grand'methe a-fishing has gone:
               She'll gather the fins to scrape my jowl,
               And ride back home on a barnyard fowl!'

"Nannin, ma'm'selle, 'tis plain to be seen you can't guess what a
cornfield grows besides red poppies."  Laughing in sheer delight at the
mystery she was making, she broke off again into a whimsical nursery
rhyme:

                  "'Coquelicot, j'ai mal au de
                    Coquelicot, qu'est qui l'a fait?
                    Coquelicot, ch'tai mon valet.'"

She kicked off the red slipper again.  Flying half-way across the room,
it alighted on the table, and a little mud from the heel dropped on the
clean scoured surface.  With a little moue of mockery, she got slowly up
and tiptoed across the floor, like a child afraid of being scolded.
Gathering the dust carefully, and looking demurely askance at Guida the
while, she tiptoed over again to the fireplace and threw it into the
chimney.

"Naughty Carterette," she said at herself with admiring reproach, as she
looked in Guida's mirror, and added, glancing with farcical approval
round the room, "and it all shines like peacock's feather, too!"

Guida longed to snatch the letter from Carterette's hand and read it, but
she only said calmly, though the words fluttered in her throat:

"You're as gay as a chaffinch, Garcon Carterette."  Garcon Carterette!
Instantly Carterette sobered down.  No one save Ranulph ever called her
Garcon Carterette.  Guida used Ranulph's name for Carterette, knowing
that it would change the madcap's mood.  Carterette, to hide a sudden
flush, stooped and slowly put on her slipper.  Then she came back to the
veille, and sat down again beside Guida, saying as she did so:

"Yes, I'm gay as a chaffinch--me."

She unfolded the letter slowly, and Guida stopped sewing, but
mechanically began to prick the linen lying on her knee with the point
of the needle.

"Well," said Carterette deliberately, "this letter's from a pend'loque
of a fellow--at least, we used to call him that--though if you come to
think, he was always polite as mended porringer.  Often he hadn't two
sous to rub against each other.  And--and not enough buttons for his
clothes."

Guida smiled.  She guessed whom Carterette meant.  "Has Monsieur
Detricand more buttons now?" she asked with a little whimsical lift
of the eyebrows.

"Ah bidemme, yes, and gold too, all over him--like that!"  She made a
quick sweeping gesture which would seem to make Detricand a very spangle
of buttons.  "Come, what do you think--he's a general now.

"A general!"  Instantly Guida thought of Philip and a kind of envy shot
into her heart that this idler Detricand should mount so high in a few
months--a man whose past had held nothing to warrant such success.  "A
general--where?" she asked.

"In the Vendee army, fighting for the new King of France--you know the
rebels cut off the last King's head."

At another time Guida's heart would have throbbed with elation,
for the romance of that Vendee union of aristocrat and peasant fired her
imagination; but she only said in the tongue of the people: "Ma fuifre,
yes, I know!"

Carterette was delighted to thus dole out her news, and get due reward of
astonishment.  "And he's another name," she added.  "At least it's not
another, he always had it, but he didn't call himself by it.  Pardi, he's
more than the Chevalier; he's the Comte Detricand de Tournay--ah, then,
believe me if you choose, there it is!"

She pointed to the signature of the letter, and with a gush of eloquence
explained how it all was about Detricand the vaurien and Detricand the
Comte de Tournay.

"Good riddance to Monsieur Savary dit Detricand, and good welcome to the
Comte de Tournay," answered Guida, trying hard to humour Carterette, that
she should sooner hear the news yet withheld.  "And what follows after?"

Carterette was half sorry that her great moment had come.  She wished she
could have linked out the suspense longer.  But she let herself be
comforted by the anticipated effect of her "wonderfuls."

"I'll tell you what comes after--ah, but see then what a news I have for
you!  You know that Monsieur d'Avranche--well, what do you think has come
to him?"

Guida felt as if a monstrous hand had her heart in its grasp, crushing
it.  Presentiment seized her.  Carterette was busy running over the pages
of the letter, and did not notice her colourless face.  She had no
thought that Guida had any vital interest in Philip, and ruthlessly,
though unconsciously, she began to torture the young wife as few are
tortured in this world.

She read aloud Detricand's description of his visit to the Castle of
Bercy, and of the meeting with Philip.  "'See what comes of a name!'"
wrote Detricand.  "'Here was a poor prisoner whose ancestor, hundreds of
years ago, may or mayn't have been a relative of the d'Avranches of
Clermont, when a disappointed duke, with an eye open for heirs, takes a
fancy to the good-looking face of the poor prisoner, and voila!  you have
him whisked off to a palace, fed on milk and honey, and adopted into the
family.  Then a pedigree is nicely grown on a summer day, and this fine
young Jersey adventurer is found to be a green branch from the old root;
and there's a great blare of trumpets, and the States of the duchy are
called together to make this English officer a prince--and that's the
Thousand and One Nights in Arabia, Ma'm'selle Carterette.'"

Guida was sitting rigid and still.  In the slight pause Carterette made,
a hundred confused torturing thoughts swam through her mind and presently
floated into the succeeding sentences of the letter:

"'As for me, I'm like Rabot's mare, I haven't time to laugh at my own
foolishness.  I'm either up to my knees in grass or clay fighting
Revolutionists, or I'm riding hard day and night till I'm round-backed
like a wood-louse, to make up for all the good time I so badly lost in
your little island.  You wouldn't have expected that, my friend with the
tongue that stings, would you?  But then, Ma'm'selle of the red slippers,
one is never butted save by a dishorned cow--as your father used to
say."'

Carterette paused again, saying in an aside: "That is M'sieu' all over,
all so gay.  But who knows?  For he says, too, that the other day a-
fighting Fontenay, five thousand of his men come across a cavalry as they
run to take the guns that eat them up like cabbages, and they drop on
their knees, and he drops with them, and they all pray to God to help
them, while the cannon balls whiz-whiz over their heads.  And God did
hear them, for they fell down flat when the guns was fired and the cannon
balls never touched 'em."

During this interlude, Guida, sick with anxiety, could scarcely sit
still.  She began sewing again, though her fingers trembled so she could
hardly make a stitch.  But Carterette, the little egoist, did not notice
her agitation; her own flurry dimmed her sight.

She began reading again.  The first few words had little or no
significance for Guida, but presently she was held as by the fascination
of a serpent.

"'And Ma'm'selle Carterette, what do you think this young captain, now
Prince Philip d'Avranche, heir to the title of Bercy--what do you think
he is next to do?  Even to marry a countess of great family the old Duke
has chosen for him; so that the name of d'Avranche may not die out in the
land.  And that is the way that love begins.  .  .  .  Wherefore, I want
you to write and tell me--'"

What he wanted Carterette to tell him Guida never heard, though it
concerned herself, for she gave a moan like a dumb animal in agony, and
sat rigid and blanched, the needle she had been using embedded in her
finger to the bone, but not a motion, not a sign of animation in face or
figure.

All at once, some conception of the truth burst upon the affrighted
Carterette.  The real truth she imagined as little as had Detricand.

But now when she saw the blanched face, the filmy eyes and stark look,
the finger pierced by the needle, she knew that a human heart had been
pierced too, with a pain worse than death--truly it was worse, for she
had seen death, and she had never seen anything like this in its dire
misery and horror.  She caught the needle quickly from the finger,
wrapped her kerchief round the wound, threw away the sewing from Guida's
lap, and running an arm about her waist, made as if to lay a hot cheek
against the cold brow of her friend.  Suddenly, however, with a new and
painful knowledge piercing her intelligence, and a face as white and
scared as Guida's own, she ran to the dresser, caught up a hanap, and
brought some water.  Guida still sat as though life had fled, and the
body, arrested in its activity, would presently collapse.

Carterette, with all her seeming lightsomeness, had sense and self-
possession.  She tenderly put the water to Guida's lips, with comforting
words, though her own brain was in a whirl, and dark forebodings flashed
through her mind.

"Ah, man gui, man pethe!" she said in the homely patois.  "There, drink,
drink, dear, dear couzaine."  Guida's lips opened, and she drank slowly,
putting her hand to her heart with a gesture of pain.  Carterette put
down the hanap and caught her hands.  "Come, come, these cold hands--
pergui, but we must stop that!  They are so cold."  She rubbed them hard.
"The poor child of heaven--what has come over you?  Speak to me .  .  .
ah, but see, everything will come all right by and by!  God is good.
Nothing's as bad as what it seems.  There was never a grey wind but
there's a greyer.  Nanningia, take it not so to heart, my couzaine; thou
shalt have love enough in the world....  Ah, grand doux d'la vie, but I
could kill him!" she added under her breath, and she rubbed Guida's hands
still, and looked frankly, generously into her eyes.

Yet, try as she would in that supreme moment, Carterette could not feel
all she once felt concerning Guida.  There is something humiliating in
even an undeserved injury, something which, to the human eye, lessens the
worthiness of its victim.  To this hour Carterette had looked upon her
friend as a being far above her own companionship.  All in a moment, in
this new office of comforter the relative status was altered.  The plane
on which Guida had moved was lowered.  Pity, while it deepened
Carterette's tenderness, lessened the gap between them.

Perhaps something of this passed through Guida's mind, and the deep pride
and courage of her nature came to her assistance.  She withdrew her hands
and mechanically smoothed back her hair, then, as Carterette sat watching
her, folded up the sewing and put it in the work-basket hanging on the
wall.

There was something unnatural in her governance of herself now.  She
seemed as if doing things in a dream, but she did them accurately and
with apparent purpose.  She looked at the clock, then went to the fire
to light it, for it was almost time to get her grandfather's tea.  She
did not seem conscious of the presence of Carterette, who still sat on
the veille, not knowing quite what to do.  At last, as the flame flashed
up in the chimney, she came over to her friend, and said:

"Carterette, I am going to the Dean's.  Will you run and ask Maitresse
Aimable to come here to me soon?"  Her voice had the steadiness of
despair--that steadiness coming to those upon whose nerves has fallen a
great numbness, upon whose sensibilities has settled a cloud that stills
them as the thick mist stills the ripples on the waters of a fen.

All the glamour of Guida's youth had dropped away.  She had deemed life
good, and behold, it was not good; she had thought her dayspring was on
high, and happiness had burnt into darkness like quick-consuming flax.
But all was strangely quiet in her heart and mind.  Nothing more that she
feared could happen to her; the worst had fallen, and now there came down
on her the impermeable calm of the doomed.

Carterette was awed by her face, and saying that she would go at once to
Maitresse Aimable, she started towards the door, but as quickly stopped
and came back to Guida.  With none of the impulse that usually marked her
actions, she put her arms round Guida's neck and kissed her, saying with
a subdued intensity:

"I'd go through fire and water for you.  I want to help you every way I
can--me."

Guida did not say a word, but she kissed the hot cheek of the smuggler-
pirate's daughter, as in dying one might kiss the face of a friend seen
with filmy eyes.

When she had gone Guida drew herself up with a shiver.  She was conscious
that new senses and instincts were born in her, or were now first
awakened to life.  They were not yet under control, but she felt them,
and in so far as she had power to think, she used them.

Leaving the house and stepping into the Place du Vier Prison, she walked
quietly and steadily up the Rue d'Driere.  She did not notice that people
she met glanced at her curiously, and turned to look after her as she
hurried on.




CHAPTER XXVI

It had been a hot, oppressive day, but when, a half-hour later, Guida
hastened back from a fruitless visit to the house of the Dean, who was
absent in England, a vast black cloud had drawn up from the south-east,
dropping a curtain of darkness upon the town.  As she neared the doorway
of the cottage, a few heavy drops began to fall, and, in spite of her
bitter trouble, she quickened her footsteps, fearing that her grandfather
had come back, to find the house empty and no light or supper ready.

M. de Mauprat had preceded her by not more than five minutes.  His
footsteps across the Place du Vier Prison had been unsteady, his head
bowed, though more than once he raised it with a sort of effort, as it
were in indignation or defiance.  He muttered to himself as he opened the
door, and he paused in the hall-way as though hesitating to go forward.
After a moment he made a piteous gesture of his hand towards the kitchen,
and whispered to himself in a kind of reassurance.  Then he entered the
room and stood still.  All was dark save for the glimmer of the fire.

"Guida!  Guida!" he said in a shaking, muffled voice.  There was no
answer.  He put by his hat and stick in the corner, and felt his way to
the great chair-he seemed to have lost his sight.  Finding the familiar,
worn arm of the chair, he seated himself with a heavy sigh.  His lips
moved, and he shook his head now and then, as though in protest against
some unspoken thought.

Presently he brought his clinched hand down heavily on the table, and
said aloud:

"They lie--they lie!  The Connetable lies!  Their tongues shall be cut
out.  .  .  .  Ah, my little, little child!  .  .  .  The Connetable
dared--he dared--to tell me this evil gossip--of the little one--of my
Guida!"

He laughed contemptuously, but it was a crackling, dry laugh, painful in
its cheerlessness.  He drew his snuff-box from his pocket, opened it, and
slowly taking a pinch, raised it towards his nose, but the hand paused
half-way, as though a new thought arrested it.

In the pause there came the sound of the front door opening, and then
footsteps in the hall.

The pinch of snuff fell from the fingers of the old man on to the white
stuff of his short-clothes, but as Guida entered the room and stood still
a moment, he did not stir in his seat.  The thundercloud had come still
lower and the room was dark, the coals in the fireplace being now covered
with grey ashes.

"Grandpethe!  Grandpethe!" Guida said.

He did not answer.  His heart was fluttering, his tongue clove to the
roof of his mouth, dry and thick.  Now he should know the truth, now
he should be sure that they had lied about his little Guida, those
slanderers of the Vier Marchi.  Yet, too, he had a strange, depressing
fear, at variance with his loving faith and belief that in Guida there
was no wrong: such belief as has the strong swimmer that he can reach the
shore through wave and tide; yet also with strange foreboding, prelude to
the cramp that makes powerless, defying youth, strength, and skill.  He
could not have spoken if it had been to save his own life--or hers.

Getting no answer to her words, Guida went first to the hearth and
stirred the fire, the old man sitting rigid in his chair and regarding
her with fixed, watchful eyes.  Then she found two candles and lighted
them, placing them on the mantel, and turning to the crasset hanging by
its osier rings from a beam, slowly lighted it.  Turning round, she was
full in the light of the candles and the shooting flames of the fire.

De Mauprat's eyes had followed her every motion, unconscious of his
presence as she was.  This--this was not the Guida he had known!  This
was not his grandchild, this woman with the pale, cold face, and dark,
unhappy eyes; this was not the laughing girl who but yesterday was a babe
at his knee.  This was not--

The truth, which had yet been before his blinded eyes how long!  burst
upon him.  The shock of it snapped the filmy thread of being.  As the
escaping soul found its wings, spread them, and rose from that dun morass
called Life, the Sieur de Mauprat, giving a long, deep sigh, fell back in
his great arm-chair dead, and the silver snuff-box rattled to the floor.

Guida turned round with a sharp cry.  Running to him, she lifted up the
head that lay over on his shoulder.  She felt his pulse, she called to
him.  Opening his waistcoat, she put her ear to his heart; but it was
still--still.

A mist, a blackness, came over her own eyes, and without a cry or a word,
she slid to the floor unconscious, as the black thunderstorm broke upon
the Place du Vier Prison.

The rain was like a curtain let down between the prying, clattering world
without and the strange peace within: the old man in his perfect sleep;
the young, misused wife in that passing oblivion borrowed from death and
as tender and compassionate while it lasts.

As though with merciful indulgence, Fate permitted no one to enter upon
the dark scene save a woman in whom was a deep motherhood which had never
nourished a child, and to whom this silence and this sorrow gave no
terrors.  Silence was her constant companion, and for sorrow she had been
granted the touch that assuages the sharpness of pain and the love called
neighbourly kindness.  Maitresse Aimable came.

Unto her it was given to minister here.  As the night went by, and the
offices had been done for the dead, she took her place by the bedside of
the young wife, who lay staring into space, tearless and still, the life
consuming away within her.

In the front room of the cottage, his head buried in his hands, Ranulph
Delagarde sat watching beside the body of the Sieur de Mauprat.




CHAPTER XXVII

In the Rue d'Driere, the undertaker and his head apprentice were right
merry.  But why should they not be?  People had to die, quoth the
undertaker, and when dead they must be buried.  Burying was a trade,
and wherefore should not one--discreetly--be cheerful at one's trade?
In undertaking there were many miles to trudge with coffins in a week,
and the fixed, sad, sympathetic look long custom had stereotyped was
wearisome to the face as a cast of plaster-of-paris.  Moreover, the
undertaker was master of ceremonies at the house of bereavement as well.
He not only arranged the funeral, he sent out the invitations to the
"friends of deceased, who are requested to return to the house of the
mourners after the obsequies for refreshment."  All the preparations for
this feast were made by the undertaker--Master of Burials he chose to be
called.

Once, after a busy six months, in which a fever had carried off many a
Jersiais, the Master of Burials had given a picnic to his apprentices,
workmen, and their families.  At this buoyant function he had raised his
glass and with playful plaintiveness proposed: "The day we celebrate!"

He was in a no less blithesome mood this day.  The head apprentice was
reading aloud the accounts for the burials of the month, while the master
checked off the items, nodding approval, commenting, correcting or
condemning with strange expletives.

"Don't gabble, gabble  next one slowlee!" said the Master of Burials, as
the second account was laid aside, duly approved.  "Eh ben, now let's
hear the next--who is it?"

"That Josue Anquetil," answered the apprentice.  The Master of Burials
rubbed his hands together with a creepy sort of glee.  "Ah, that was a
clever piece of work!  Too little of a length and a width for the box,
but let us be thankful--it might have been too short, and it wasn't."

"No danger of that, pardingue!" broke in the apprentice.  "The first it
belonged to was a foot longer than Josue--he."

"But I made the most of Josue," continued the Master.  "The mouth was
crooked, but he was clean, clean--I shaved him just in time.  And he had
good hair for combing to a peaceful look, and he was light to carry--O my
good!  Go on, what has Josue the centenier to say for himself?"

With a drawling dull indifference, the lank, hatchet-faced servitor of
the master servitor of the grave read off the items:

     The Relict of Josue Anquetil, Centenier, in account with
     Etienne Mahye, Master of Burials.

Item:                                     Livres.  Sols.  Farth.
Paid to Gentlemen of Vingtaine, who
carried him to his grave .................. 4       4       0
Ditto to me, Etienne Mahye, for proper
gloves of silk and cotton ................. 1       0       0
Ditto to me, E. M., for laying of him
out and all that appertains ............... 0       7       0
Ditto to me, E. M., for coffin ............ 4       0       0
Ditto to me, E. M., for divers ............ 0       4       0


The Master of Burials interrupted.  "Bat'dlagoule, you've forgot blacking
for coffin!"

The apprentice made the correction without deigning reply, and then went
on

                                          Livres.  Sols.  Farth.

Ditto to me, E. M., for black for blacking
coffin .................................... 0       3      0
Ditto to me, E. M., paid out for supper
after obs'quies ........................... 3       2      0
Ditto to me, E. M., paid out for wine
(3 pots and 1 pt. at a shilling) for
ditto ..................................... 2       5      6
Ditto to me, E. M., paid out for oil and
candle .................................... 0       7      0
Ditto to me, E.  M., given to the poor, as
fitting station of deceased ............... 4       0      0


The apprentice stopped.  "That's all," he said.

There was a furious leer on the face of the Master of Burials.  So, after
all his care, apprentices would never learn to make mistakes on his side.
"O my grief, always on the side of the corpse, that can thank nobody for
naught!" was his snarling comment.

"What about those turnips from Denise Gareau, numskull?" he grunted, in
a voice between a sneer and a snort.

The apprentice was unmoved.  He sniffed, rubbed his nose with a
forefinger, laboriously wrote for a moment, and then added:

Ditto to Madame Denise Gareau for turnips
for supper after obs'quies ...................... 10 sols

"Saperlote, leave out the Madame, calf-lugs--, you!"

The apprentice did not move a finger.  Obstinacy sat enthroned on him.
In a rage, the Master made a snatch at a metal flower-wreath to throw at
him.  "Shan't!  She's my aunt.  I knows my duties to my aunt--me," said
the apprentice stolidly.

The Master burst out in a laugh of scorn.  "Gaderabotin, here's family
pride for you!  I'll go stick dandelines in my old sow's ear--respe d'la
compagnie."

The apprentice was still calm.  "If you want to flourish yourself, don't
mind me," said he, and picking up the next account, he began reading:

     Mademoiselle Landresse, in the matter of the Burial of
     the Sieur de Mauprat, to Etienne Mahye, &c.  Item--

The first words read by the apprentice had stilled the breaking storm of
the Master's anger.  It dissolved in a fragrant dew of proud
reminiscence, profit, and scandal.

He himself had no open prejudices.  He was an official of the public--or
so he counted himself--and he very shrewdly knew his duty in that walk of
life to which it had pleased Heaven to call him.  The greater the
notoriety of the death, the more in evidence was the Master and all his
belongings.  Death with honour was an advantage to him; death with
disaster a boon; death with scandal was a godsend.  It brought tears of
gratitude to his eyes when the death and the scandal were in high places.
These were the only real tears he ever shed.  His heart was in his head,
and the head thought solely of Etienne Mahye.  Though he wore an air of
sorrow and sympathy in public, he had no more feeling than a hangman.
His sympathy seemed to say to the living, "I wonder how soon you'll come
into my hands," and to the dead, "What a pity you can only die once--and
second-hand coffins so hard to get!"

     Item: paid to me, Etienne Mahye,

droned the voice of the apprentice,

     for rosewood coffin--

"O my good," interrupted the Master of Burials with a barren chuckle, and
rubbing his hands with glee, "O my good, that was a day in a lifetime!
I've done fine work in my time, but upon that day--not a cloud above,
no dust beneath, a flowing tide, and a calm sea.  The Royal Court, too,
caught on a sudden marching in their robes, turns to and joins the
cortegee, and the little birds a-tweeting-tweeting, and two parsons at
the grave.  Pardingue, the Lord was--with me that day, and--"

The apprentice laughed--a dry, mirthless laugh of disbelief and ridicule.
"Ba su, master, the Lord was watching you.  There was two silver bits
inside that coffin, on Sieur's eyes."

"Bigre!"  The Master was pale with rage.  His lips drew back, disclosing
long dark teeth and sickly gums, in a grimace of fury.  He reached out to
seize a hammer lying at his hand, but the apprentice said quickly:

"Sapri--that's the cholera hammer!"

The Master of Burials dropped the hammer as though it were at white heat,
and eyed it with scared scrutiny.  This hammer had been used in nailing
down the coffins of six cholera patients who had died in one house at
Rozel Bay a year before.  The Master would not himself go near the place,
so this apprentice had gone, on a promise from the Royal Court that he
should have for himself--this he demanded as reward--free lodging in two
small upper rooms of the Cohue Royale, just under the bell which said to
the world, "Chicane--chicane!  Chicane--chicane!"

This he asked, and this he got, and he alone of all Jersey went out
to bury three people who had died of cholera; and then to watch three
others die, to bury them scarce cold, and come back, with a leer of
satisfaction, to claim his price.  At first people were inclined to make
a hero of him, but that only made him grin the more, and at last the
island reluctantly decided that he had done the work solely for fee and
reward.

The hammer used in nailing the coffins, he had carried through the town
like an emblem of terror and death, and henceforth he only, in the shop
of the Master, touched it.

"It won't hurt you if you leave it alone," said the apprentice grimly to
the Master of Burials.  "But, if you go bothering, I'll put it in your
bed, and it'll do after to nail down your coffin."

Then he went on reading with a malicious calmness, as though the matter
were the dullest trifle:

Item: one dozen pairs of gloves for mourners.

"Par made, that's one way of putting it!" commented the apprentice, "for
what mourners was there but Ma'm'selle herself, and she quiet as a mice,
and not a teardrop, and all the island necks end to end for look at her,
and you, master, whispering to her: 'The Lord is the Giver and Taker,'
and the Femme de Ballast t'other side, saying 'My dee-ar, my dee-ar, bear
thee up, bear thee up--thee.'"

"And she looking so steady in front of her, as if never was shame about
her--and her there soon to be; and no ring of gold upon her hand, and all
the world staring!" broke in the Master, who, having edged away from the
cholera hammer, was launched upon a theme that stirred his very soul.
"All the world staring, and good reason," he added.

"And she scarce winking, eh?" said the apprentice.  "True that--her eyes
didn't feel the cold," said the Master of Burials with a leer, for to his
sight as to that of others, only as boldness had been Guida's bitter
courage, the blank, despairing gaze, coming from eyes that turn their
agony inward.

The apprentice took up the account again, and prepared to read it.  The
Master, however, had been roused to a genial theme.  "Poor fallen child
of Nature!" said he.  "For what is birth or what is looks of virtue like
a summer flower!  It is to be brought down by hand of man."  He was
warmed to his text.  Habit had long made him so much hypocrite, that he
was sentimentalist and hard materialist in one.  "Some pend'loque has
brought her beauty to this pass, but she must suffer--and also his time
will come, the sulphur, the torment, the worm that dieth not--and no
Abraham for parched tongue--misery me!  They that meet in sin here shall
meet hereafter in burning fiery furnace."

The cackle of the apprentice rose above the whining voice.  "Murder, too
--don't forget the murder, master.  The Connetable told the old Sieur de
Mauprat what people were blabbing, and in half-hour dead he is--he."

"Et ben, the Sieur's blood it is upon their heads," continued the Master
of Burials; "it will rise up from the ground--"

The apprentice interrupted.  "A good thing if the Sieur himself doesn't
rise, for you'd get naught for coffin or obs'quies.  It was you tells the
Connetable what folks babbled, and the Connetable tells the Sieur, and
the Sieur it kills him dead.  So if he rised, he'd not pay you for
murdering him--no, bidemme!  And 'tis a gobbly mouthful--this," he added,
holding up the bill.

The undertaker's lips smacked softly, as though in truth he were waiting
for the mouthful.  Rubbing his hands, and drawing his lean leg up till it
touched his nose, he looked over it with avid eyes, and said: "How much--
don't read the items, but come to total debit--how much she pays me?"

Ma'm'selle Landresse, debtor in all for one hundred and twenty livres,
eleven sols and two farthings.

Shan't you make it one hundred and twenty-one livres?" added the
apprentice.

"God forbid, the odd sols and farthings are mine--no more!" returned the
Master of Burials.  "Also they look exact; but the courage it needs to be
honest!  O my grief, if--"

"'Sh!" said the apprentice, pointing, and the Master of Burials, turning,
saw Guida pass the window.  With a hungry instinct for the morbid they
stole to the doorway and looked down the Rue d'Driere after her.  The
Master was sympathetic, for had he not in his fingers at that moment a
bill for a hundred and twenty livres odd?  The way the apprentice craned
his neck, and tightened the forehead over his large, protuberant eyes,
showed his intense curiosity, but the face was implacable.  It was like
that of some strong fate, superior to all influences of sorrow, shame, or
death.  Presently he laughed--a crackling cackle like new-lighted
kindling wood; nothing could have been more inhuman in sound.  What in
particular aroused this arid mirth probably he himself did not know.
Maybe it was a native cruelty which had a sort of sardonic pleasure in
the miseries of the world.  Or was it only the perception, sometimes
given to the dullest mind, of the futility of goodness, the futility of
all?  This perhaps, since the apprentice shared with Dormy Jamais his
rooms at the top of the Cohue Royale; and there must have been some
natural bond of kindness between the blank, sardonic undertaker's
apprentice and the poor beganne, who now officially rang the bell for the
meetings of the Royal Court.

The dry cackle of the apprentice as he looked after Guida roused a
mockery of indignation in the Master.  "Sacre matin, a back-hander on the
jaw'd do you good, slubberdegullion--you!  Ah, get go scrub the coffin
blacking from your jowl!" he rasped out with furious contempt.

The apprentice seemed not to hear, but kept on looking after Guida, a
pitiless leer on his face.  "Dame, lucky for her the Sieur died before he
had chance to change his will.  She'd have got ni fiche ni bran from
him."

"Support d'en haut, if you don't stop that I'll give you a coffin before
your time, keg of nails--you.  Sorrow and prayer at the throne of grace
that she may have a contrite heart"--he clutched the funeral bill tighter
in his fingers--"is what we must feel for her.  The day the Sieur died
and it all came out, I wept.  Bedtime come I had to sop my eyes with
elder-water.  The day o' the burial mine eyes were so sore a-draining I
had to put a rotten sweet apple on 'em over-night--me."

"Ah bah, she doesn't need rosemary wash for her hair!" said the
apprentice admiringly, looking down the street after Guida as she turned
into the Rue d'Egypte.

Perhaps it was a momentary sympathy for beauty in distress which made the
Master say, as he backed from the doorway with stealthy step:

"Gatd'en'ale, 'tis well she has enough to live on, and to provide for
what's to come!"

But if it was a note of humanity in the voice it passed quickly, for
presently, as he examined the bill for the funeral of the Sieur de
Mauprat, he said shrilly:

"Achocre, you've left out the extra satin for his pillow--you."

"There wasn't any extra satin," drawled the apprentice.

With a snarl the Master of Burials seized a pen and wrote in the account:

Item: To extra satin for pillow, three livres.




CHAPTER XXVIII

Guida's once blithe, rose-coloured face was pale as ivory, the mouth had
a look of deep sadness, and the step was slow; but the eye was clear and
steady, and her hair, brushed under the black crape of the bonnet as
smoothly as its nature would admit, gave to the broad brow a setting of
rare attraction and sombre nobility.  It was not a face that knew inward
shame, but it carried a look that showed knowledge of life's cruelties
and a bitter sensitiveness to pain.  Above all else it was fearless, and
it had no touch of the consciousness or the consequences of sin; it was
purity itself.

It alone should have proclaimed abroad her innocence, though she said no
word in testimony.  To most people, however, her dauntless sincerity only
added to her crime and to the scandalous mystery.  Yet her manner awed
some, while her silence held most back.  The few who came to offer
sympathy, with curiousness in their eyes and as much inhumanity as pity
in their hearts, were turned back gently but firmly, more than once with
proud resentment.

So it chanced that soon only Maitresse Aimable came--she who asked no
questions, desired no secrets--and Dormy Jamais.

Dormy had of late haunted the precincts of the Place du Vier Prison,
and was the only person besides Maitresse Aimable whom Guida welcomed.
His tireless feet went clac-clac past her doorway, or halted by it,
or entered in when it pleased him.  He was more a watch-dog than Biribi;
he fetched and carried; he was silent and sleepless--always sleepless.
It was as if some past misfortune had opened his eyes to the awful
bitterness of life, and they had never closed again.

The Chevalier had not been with her, for on the afternoon of the very day
her grandfather died, he had gone a secret voyage to St. Malo, to meet
the old solicitor of his family.  He knew nothing of his friend's death
or of Guida's trouble.  As for Carterette, Guida would not let her come
--for her own sake.

Nor did Maitre Ranulph visit her after the funeral of the Sieur de
Mauprat.  The horror of the thing had struck him dumb, and his mind
was one confused mass of conflicting thoughts.  There--there were the
terrifying facts before him; yet, with an obstinacy peculiar to him,
he still went on believing in her goodness and in her truth.  Of the man
who had injured her he had no doubt, and his course was clear, in the
hour when he and Philip d'Avranche should meet.  Meanwhile, from a spirit
of delicacy, avoiding the Place du Vier Prison, he visited Maitresse
Aimable, and from day to day learned all that happened to Guida.  As of
old, without her knowledge, he did many things for her through the same
Maitresse Aimable.  And it quickly came to be known in the island that
any one who spoke ill of Guida in his presence did so at no little risk.
At first there had been those who marked him as the wrongdoer, but
somehow that did not suit with the case, for it was clear he loved Guida
now as he had always done; and this the world knew, as it had known that
he would have married her all too gladly.  Presently Detricand and Philip
were the only names mentioned, but at last, as by common consent, Philip
was settled upon, for such evidence as there was pointed that way.  The
gossips set about to recall all that had happened when Philip was in
Jersey last.  Here one came forward with a tittle of truth, and there
another with tattle of falsehood, and at last as wild a story was
fabricated as might be heard in a long day.

But in bitterness Guida kept her own counsel.

This day when she passed the undertaker's shop she had gone to visit the
grave of her grandfather.  He had died without knowing the truth, and her
heart was hardened against him who had brought misery upon her.  Reaching
the cottage in the Place du Vier Prison now, she took from a drawer the
letter Philip had written her on the day he first met the Comtesse
Chantavoine.  She had received it a week ago.  She read it through
slowly, shuddering a little once or twice.  When she had finished,
she drew paper to her and began a reply.

The first crisis of her life was passed.  She had met the shock of utter
disillusion; her own perfect honesty now fathomed the black dishonesty of
the man she had loved.  Death had come with sorrow and unmerited shame.
But an innate greatness, a deep courage supported her.  Out of her wrongs
and miseries now she made a path for her future, and in that path
Philip's foot should never be set.  She had thought and thought, and had
come to her decision.  In one month she had grown years older in mind.
Sorrow gave her knowledge, it threw her back on her native strength and
goodness.  Rising above mere personal wrongs she grew to a larger sense
of womanhood, to a true understanding of her position and its needs.  She
loved no longer, but Philip was her husband by the law, and even as she
had told him her whole mind and heart in the days of their courtship and
marriage, she would tell him her whole mind and heart now.  Once more, to
satisfy the bond, to give full reasons for what she was about to do, she
would open her soul to her husband, and then no more!  In all she wrote
she kept but two things back, her grandfather's death--and one other.
These matters belonged to herself alone.

     No, Philip d'Avranche, [she wrote], your message came too late.  All
     that you might have said and done should have been said and done
     long ago, in that past which I believe in no more.  I will not ask
     you why you acted as you did towards me.  Words can alter nothing
     now.  Once I thought you true, and this letter you send would have
     me still believe so.  Do you then think so ill of my intelligence?
     In the light of the past it may be you have reason, for you know
     that I once believed in you!  Think of it--believed in you!

     How bad a man are you!  In spite of all your promises; in spite of
     the surrender of honest heart and life to you; in spite of truth and
     every call of honour, you denied me--dared to deny me, at the very
     time you wrote this letter.

     For the hopes and honours of this world, you set aside, first by
     secrecy, and then by falsehood, the helpless girl to whom you once
     swore undying love.  You, who knew the open book of her heart, you
     threw it in the dust.  "Of course there is no wife?" the Duc de
     Bercy said to you before the States of Bercy.  "Of course," you
     answered.  You told your lie without pity.

     Were you blind that you did not see the consequences?  Or did you
     not feel the horror of your falsehood?--to play shuttlecock with a
     woman's life, with the soul of your wife; for that is what your
     conduct means.  Did you not realise it, or were you so wicked that
     you did not care?  For I know that before you wrote me this letter,
     and afterwards when you had been made prince, and heir to the duchy,
     the Comtesse Chantavoine was openly named by the Duc de Bercy for
     your wife.

     Now read the truth.  I understand all now.  I am no longer the
     thoughtless, believing girl whom you drew from her simple life to
     give her so cruel a fate.  Yesterday I was a child, to-day----Oh,
     above all else, do you think I can ever forgive you for having
     killed the faith, the joy of life that was in me!  You have spoiled
     for me for ever my rightful share of the joyous and the good.  My
     heart is sixty though my body is not twenty.  How dared you rob me
     of all that was my birthright, of all that was my life, and give me
     nothing--nothing in return!

     Do you remember how I begged you not to make me marry you; but you
     urged me, and because I loved you and trusted you, I did?  how I
     entreated you not to make me marry you secretly, but you insisted,
     and loving you, I did?  how you promised you would leave me at the
     altar and not see me till you came again to claim me openly for your
     wife, and you broke that sacred promise?  Do you remember--my
     husband!

     Do you remember that night in the garden when the wind came moaning
     up from the sea?  Do you remember how you took me in your arms, and
     even while I listened to your tender and assuring words, in that
     moment--ah, the hurt and the wrong and the shame of it!  Afterwards
     in the strange confusion, in my blind helplessness I tried to say,
     "But he loved me," and I tried to forgive you.  Perhaps in time I
     might have made myself believe I did; for then I did not know you as
     you are--and were; but understanding all now I feel that in that
     hour I really ceased to love you; and when at last I knew you had
     denied me, love was buried for ever.

     Your worst torment is to come, mine has already been with me.  When
     my miseries first fell upon me, I thought that I must die.  Why
     should I live on--why should I not die?  The sea was near, and it
     buries deep.  I thought of all the people that live on the great
     earth, and I said to myself that the soul of one poor girl could not
     count, that it could concern no one but myself.  It was clear to me
     --I must die and end all.

     But there came to me a voice in the night which said: "Is thy life
     thine own to give or to destroy?"  It was clearer than my own
     thinking.  It told my heart that death by one's own hand meant
     shame; and I saw then that to find rest I must drag unwilling feet
     over the good name and memory of my dead loved ones.  Then I
     remembered my mother.  If you had remembered her perhaps you would
     have guarded the gift of my love and not have trampled it under your
     feet--I remembered my mother, and so I live still.

     I must go on alone, with naught of what makes life bearable; you
     will keep climbing higher by your vanity, your strength, and your
     deceit.  But yet I know however high you climb you will never find
     peace.  You will remember me, and your spirit will seek in vain for
     rest.  You will not exist for me, you will not be even a memory; but
     even against your will I shall always be part of you: of your brain,
     of your heart, of your soul--the thought of me your torment in your
     greatest hour.  Your passion and your cowardice have lost me all;
     and God will punish you, be sure of that.

     There is little more to say.  If it lies in my power I shall never
     see you again while I live.  And you will not wish it.  Yes, in
     spite of your eloquent letter lying here beside me, you do not wish
     it, and it shall not be.  I am not your wife save by the law; and
     little have you cared for law!  Little, too, would the law help you
     in this now; for which you will rejoice.  For the ease of your mind
     I hasten to tell you why.

     First let me inform you that none in this land knows me to be your
     wife.  Your letter to my grandfather never reached him, and to this
     hour I have held my peace.  The clergyman who married us is a
     prisoner among the French, and the strong-box which held the
     register of St. Michael's Church was stolen.  The one other witness,
     Mr. Shoreham, your lieutenant--as you tell me--went down with the
     Araminta.  So you are safe in your denial of me.  For me, I would
     endure all the tortures of the world rather than call you husband
     ever again.  I am firmly set to live my own life, in my own way,
     with what strength God gives.  At last I see beyond the Hedge.

     Your course is clear.  You cannot turn back now.  You have gone too
     far.  Your new honours and titles were got at the last by a
     falsehood.  To acknowledge it would be ruin, for all the world knows
     that Captain Philip d'Avranche of the King's navy is now the adopted
     son of the Duc de Bercy.  Surely the house of Bercy has cause for
     joy, with an imbecile for the first in succession and a traitor for
     the second!

     I return the fifty pounds you sent me--you will not question why
     ....And so all ends.  This is a last farewell between us.

     Do you remember what you said to me on the Ecrehos? "If ever I
     deceive you, may I die a black, dishonourable death, abandoned and
     alone.  I should deserve that if ever I deceived you, Guida."

     Will you ever think of that, in your vain glory hereafter?

                                   GUIDA LANDRESSE DE LANDRESSE.





IN JERSEY FIVE YEARS LATER

CHAPTER XXIX

On a map the Isle of Jersey has the shape and form of a tiger on the
prowl.

The fore-claws of this tiger are the lacerating pinnacles of the Corbiere
and the impaling rocks of Portelet Bay and Noirmont; the hind-claws are
the devastating diorite reefs of La Motte and the Banc des Violets.  The
head and neck, terrible and beautiful, are stretched out towards the
west, as it were to scan the wild waste and jungle of the Atlantic seas.
The nose is L'Etacq, the forehead Grosnez, the ear Plemont, the mouth the
dark cavern by L'Etacq, and the teeth are the serried ledges of the Foret
de la Brequette.  At a discreet distance from the head and the tail hover
the jackals of La Manche: the Paternosters, the Dirouilles, and the
Ecrehos, themselves destroying where they may, or filching the remains of
the tiger's feast of shipwreck and ruin.  In truth, the sleek beast, with
its feet planted in fearsome rocks and tides, and its ravening head set
to defy the onslaught of the main, might, but for its ensnaring beauty,
seem some monstrous foot-pad of the deep.

To this day the tiger's head is the lonely part of Jersey; a hundred
years ago it was as distant from the Vier Marchi as is Penzance from
Covent Garden.  It would almost seem as if the people of Jersey, like the
hangers-on of the king of the jungle, care not to approach too near the
devourer's head.  Even now there is but a dwelling here and there upon
the lofty plateau, and none at all near the dark and menacing headland.
But as if the ancient Royal Court was determined to prove its sovereignty
even over the tiger's head, it stretched out its arms from the Vier
Marchi to the bare neck of the beast, putting upon it a belt of defensive
war; at the nape, a martello tower and barracks; underneath, two other
martello towers like the teeth of a buckle.

The rest of the island was bristling with armament.  Tall platforms were
erected at almost speaking distance from each other, where sentinels kept
watch for French frigates or privateers.  Redoubts and towers were within
musket-shot of each other, with watch-houses between, and at intervals
every able-bodied man in the country was obliged to leave his trade to
act as sentinel, or go into camp or barracks with the militia for months
at a time.  British cruisers sailed the Channel: now a squadron under
Barrington, again under Bridport, hovered upon the coast, hoping that a
French fleet might venture near.

But little of this was to be seen in the western limits of the parish of
St. Ouen's.  Plemont, Grosnez, L'Etacq, all that giant headland could
well take care of itself--the precipitous cliffs were their own defence.
A watch-house here and there sufficed.  No one lived at L'Etacq, no one
at Grosnez; they were too bleak, too distant and solitary.  There were no
houses, no huts.

If you had approached Plemont from Vinchelez-le-Haut, making for the sea,
you would have said that it also had no habitation.  But when at last you
came to a hillock near Plemont point, looking to find nothing but sky and
sea and distant islands, suddenly at your very feet you saw a small stone
dwelling.  Its door faced the west, looking towards the Isles of Guernsey
and Sark.  Fronting the north was a window like an eye, ever watching the
tireless Paternosters.  To the east was another tiny window like a deep
loop-hole or embrasure set towards the Dirouilles and the Ecrehos.

The hut had but one room, of moderate size, with a vast chimney.  Between
the chimney and the western wall was a veille, which was both lounge and
bed.  The eastern side was given over to a few well-polished kitchen
utensils, a churn, and a bread-trough.  The floor was of mother earth
alone, but a strip of handmade carpet was laid down before the fireplace,
and there was another at the opposite end.  There were also a table, a
spinning-wheel, and a shelf of books.

It was not the hut of a fisherman, though upon the wall opposite the
books there hung fishing-tackle, nets, and cords, while outside, on
staples driven in the jutting chimney, were some lobster-pots.  Upon two
shelves were arranged a carpenter's and a cooper's tools, polished and in
good order.  And yet you would have said that neither a cooper nor a
carpenter kept them in use.  Everywhere there were signs of man's
handicraft as well as of woman's work, but upon all was the touch of a
woman.  Moreover, apart from the tools there was no sign of a man's
presence in the hut.  There was no coat hanging behind the door, no
sabots for the fields or oilskins for the sands, no pipe laid upon a
ledge, no fisherman's needle holding a calendar to the wall.  Whatever
was the trade of the occupant, the tastes were above those of the
ordinary dweller in the land.  That was to be seen in a print of
Raphael's "Madonna and Child" taking the place of the usual sampler upon
the walls of Jersey homes; in the old clock nicely bestowed between a
narrow cupboard and the tool shelves; in a few pieces of rare old china
and a gold-handled sword hanging above a huge, well-carved oak chair.
The chair relieved the room of anything like commonness, and somehow was
in sympathy with the simple surroundings, making for dignity and sweet
quiet.  It was clear that only a woman could have arranged so perfectly
this room and all therein.  It was also clear that no man lived here.

Looking in at the doorway of this hut on a certain autumn day of the year
1797, the first thing to strike your attention was a dog lying asleep on
the hearth.  Then a suit of child's clothes on a chair before the fire of
vraic would have caught the eye.  The only thing to distinguish this
particular child's dress from that of a thousand others in the island was
the fineness of the material.  Every thread of it had been delicately and
firmly knitted, till it was like perfect soft blue cloth, relieved by a
little red silk ribbon at the collar.

The hut contained as well a child's chair, just so high that when placed
by the windows commanding the Paternosters its occupant might see the
waves, like panthers, beating white paws against the ragged granite
pinnacles; the currents writhing below at the foot of the cliffs, or at
half-tide rushing up to cover the sands of the Greve aux Langons, and
like animals in pain, howling through the caverns in the cliffs; the
great nor'wester of November come battering the rocks, shrieking to the
witches who boiled their caldrons by the ruins of Grosnez Castle that the
hunt of the seas was up.

Just high enough was the little chair that of a certain day in the year
its owner might look out and see mystic fires burning round the
Paternosters, and lighting up the sea with awful radiance.  Scarce a rock
to be seen from the hut but had some legend like this: the burning
Russian ship at the Paternosters, the fleet of boats with tall prows and
long oars drifting upon the Dirouilles and going down to the cry of the
Crusaders' Dahindahin!  the Roche des Femmes at the Ecrehos, where still
you may hear the cries of women in terror of the engulfing sea.

On this particular day, if you had entered the hut, no one would have
welcomed you; but had you tired of waiting, and followed the indentations
of the coast for a mile or more by a deep bay under tall cliffs, you
would have seen a woman and a child coming quickly up the sands.  Slung
upon the woman's shoulders was a small fisherman's basket.  The child ran
before, eager to climb the hill and take the homeward path.

A man above was watching them.  He had ridden along the cliff, had seen
the woman in her boat making for the shore, had tethered his horse in the
quarries near by, and now awaited her.  He chuckled as she came on, for
he had ready a surprise for her.  To make it more complete he hid himself
behind some boulders, and as she reached the top sprang out with an ugly
grinning.

The woman looked at him calmly and waited for him to speak.  There was no
fear on her face, not even surprise; nothing but steady inquiry and quiet
self-possession.  With an air of bluster the man said:

"Aha, my lady, I'm nearer than you thought--me!"  The child drew in to
its mother's side and clasped her hand.  There was no fear in the little
fellow's look, however; he had something of the same self-possession as
the woman, and his eyes were like hers, clear, unwavering, and with a
frankness that consumed you.  They were wells of sincerity; open-eyed,
you would have called the child, wanting a more subtle description.

"I'm not to be fooled-me!  Come now, let's have the count," said the man,
as he whipped a greasy leather-covered book from his pocket.  "Sapristi,
I'm waiting.  Stay yourself!" he added roughly as she moved on, and his
greyish-yellow face had an evil joy at thought of the brutal work in
hand.

"Who are you?" she asked, but taking her time to speak.

"Dame!  you know who I am."

"I know what you are," she answered quietly.

He did not quite grasp her meaning, but the tone sounded contemptuous,
and that sorted little with his self-importance.

"I'm the Seigneur's bailiff--that's who I am.  Gad'rabotin, don't you put
on airs with me!  I'm for the tribute, so off with the bag and let's see
your catch."

"I have never yet paid tribute to the seigneur of the manor."

"Well, you'll begin now.  I'm the new bailiff, and if you don't pay your
tale, up you come to the court of the fief to-morrow."

She looked him clearly in the eyes.  "If I were a man, I should not pay
the tribute, and I should go to the court of the fief to-morrow, but
being a woman--"

She clasped the hand of the child tightly to her for an instant, then
with a sigh she took the basket from her shoulders and, opening it,
added:

"But being a woman, the fish I caught in the sea that belongs to God and
to all men I must divide with the Seigneur whose bailiff spies on poor
fisher-folk."

The man growled an oath and made a motion as though he would catch her by
the shoulder in anger, but the look in her eyes stopped him.  Counting
out the fish, and giving him three out of the eight she had caught, she
said:

"It matters not so much to me, but there are others poorer than I, they
suffer."

With a leer the fellow stooped, and, taking up the fish, put them in the
pockets of his queminzolle, all slimy from the sea as they were.

"Ba su, you haven't got much to take care of, have you?  It don't take
much to feed two mouths--not so much as it does three, Ma'm'selle."

Before he had ended, the woman, without reply to the insult, took the
child by the hand and moved along her homeward path towards Plemont.

"A bi'tot, good-bye!" the bailiff laughed brutally.  Standing with his
legs apart and his hands fastened on the fish in the pockets of his long
queminzolle, he called after her in sneering comment: "Ma fistre, your
pride didn't fall--ba su!"  Then he turned on his heel.

"Eh ben, here's mackerel for supper," he added as he mounted his horse.

The woman was Guida Landresse, the child was her child, and they lived in
the little house upon the cliff at Plemont.  They were hastening thither
now.




CHAPTER XXX

A visitor was awaiting Guida and the child: a man who, first knocking at
the door, then looking in and seeing the room empty, save for the dog
lying asleep by the fire, had turned slowly away, and going to the cliff
edge, looked out over the sea.  His movements were deliberate, his body
moved slowly; the whole appearance was of great strength and nervous
power.  The face was preoccupied, the eyes were watchful, dark,
penetrating.  They seemed not only to watch but to weigh, to meditate,
even to listen--as it were, to do the duty of all the senses at once.
In them worked the whole forces of his nature; they were crucibles
wherein every thought and emotion were fused.  The jaw was set and
strong, yet it was not hard.  The face contradicted itself.  While not
gloomy it had lines like scars telling of past wounds.  It was not
despairing, it was not morbid, and it was not resentful; it had the look
of one both credulous and indomitable.  Belief was stamped upon it; not
expectation or ambition, but faith and fidelity.  You would have said he
was a man of one set idea, though the head had a breadth sorting little
with narrowness of purpose.  The body was too healthy to belong to a
fanatic, too powerful to be that of a dreamer alone, too firm for other
than a man of action.

Several times he turned to look towards the house and up the pathway
leading from the hillock to the doorway.  Though he waited long he did
not seem impatient; patience was part of him, and not the least part.
At last he sat down on a boulder between the house and the shore, and
scarcely moved, as minute after minute passed, and then an hour and more,
and no one came.  Presently there was a soft footstep beside him, and he
turned.  A dog's nose thrust itself into his hand.

"Biribi, Biribi!" he said, patting its head with his big hand.
"Watching and waiting, eh, old Biribi?"  The dog looked into his eyes as
if he knew what was said, and would speak--or, indeed, was speaking in
his own language.  "That's the way of life, Biribi--watching and waiting,
and watching--always watching."

Suddenly the dog caught its head away from his hand, gave a short joyful
bark, and ran slowly up the hillock.

"Guida and the child," the man said aloud, moving towards the house--
"Guida and the child!"

He saw her and the little one before they saw him.  Presently the child
said: "See, maman," and pointed.  Guida started.  A swift flush passed
over her face, then she smiled and made a step forward to meet her
visitor.

"Maitre Ranulph--Ranulph!" she said, holding out her hand.  "It's a long
time since we met."

"A year," he answered simply, "just a year."  He looked down at the
child, then stooped, caught him up in his arms and said: "He's grown.
Es-tu gentiment?" he added to the child--"es-tu gentiment, m'sieu'?"

The child did not quite understand.  "Please?" it said in true Jersey
fashion--at which the mother was troubled.

"O Guilbert, is that what you should say?" she asked.  The child looked
up quaintly at her, and with the same whimsical smile which Guida had
given to another so many years ago, he looked at Ranulph and said:
"Pardon, monsieur."

"Coum est qu'on etes, m'sieu'?" said Ranulph in another patois greeting.

Guida shook her head reprovingly.  The child glanced swiftly at his
mother as though asking permission to reply as he wished, then back at
Ranulph, and was about to speak, when Guida said: "I have not taught him
the Jersey patois, Ranulph; only English and French."

Her eyes met his clearly, meaningly.  Her look said to him as plainly as
words, The child's destiny is not here in Jersey.  But as if he knew that
in this she was blinding herself, and that no one can escape the
influences of surroundings, he held the child back from him, and said
with a smile: "Coum est qu'on vos portest?"

Now the child with elfish sense of the situation replied in Jersey
English: "Naicely, thenk you."

"You see," said Ranulph to Guida, "there are things in us stronger than
we are.  The wind, the sea, and people we live with, they make us sing
their song one way or another.  It's in our bones."

A look of pain passed over Guida's face, and she did not reply to his
remark, but turned almost abruptly to the doorway, saying, with just the
slightest hesitation: "You will come in?"

There was no hesitation on his part.  "Oui-gia!" he said, and stepped
inside.

She hastily hung up the child's cap and her own, and as she gathered in
the soft, waving hair, Ranulph noticed how the years had only burnished
it more deeply and strengthened the beauty of the head.  She had made the
gesture unconsciously, but catching the look in his eye a sudden thrill
of anxiety ran through her.  Recovering herself, however, and with an air
of bright friendliness, she laid a hand upon the great arm-chair, above
which hung the ancient sword of her ancestor, the Comte Guilbert Mauprat
de Chambery, and said: "Sit here, Ranulph."

Seating himself he gave a heavy sigh--one of those passing breaths of
content which come to the hardest lives now and then: as though the
Spirit of Life itself, in ironical apology for human existence, gives
moments of respite from which hope is born again.  Not for over four long
years had Ranulph sat thus quietly in the presence of Guida.  At first,
when Maitresse Aimable had told him that Guida was leaving the Place du
Vier Prison to live in this lonely place with her newborn child, he had
gone to entreat her to remain; but Maitresse Aimable had been present
then, and all that he could say--all that he might speak out of his
friendship, out of the old love, now deep pity and sorrow--was of no
avail.  It had been borne in upon him then that she was not morbid, but
that her mind had a sane, fixed purpose which she was intent to fulfil.
It was as though she had made some strange covenant with a little
helpless life, with a little face that was all her face; and that
covenant she would keep.

So he had left her, and so to do her service had been granted elsewhere.
The Chevalier, with perfect wisdom and nobility, insisted on being to
Guida what he had always been, accepting what was as though it had always
been, and speaking as naturally of her and the child as though there had
always been a Guida and the child.  Thus it was that he counted himself
her protector, though he sat far away in the upper room of Elie
Mattingley's house in the Rue d'Egypte, thinking his own thoughts, biding
the time when she should come back to the world, and mystery be over, and
happiness come once more; hoping only that he might live to see it.

Under his directions, Jean Touzel had removed the few things that Guida
took with her to Plemont; and instructed by him, Elie Mattingley sold her
furniture.  Thus Guida had settled at Plemont, and there over four years
of her life were passed.

"Your father--how is he?" she asked presently.  "Feeble," replied
Ranulph; "he goes abroad but little now."

"It was said the Royal Court was to make him a gift, in remembrance of
the Battle of Jersey."  Ranulph turned his head away from her to the
child, and beckoned him over.  The child came instantly.

As Ranulph lifted him on his knee he answered Guida: "My father did not
take it."

"Then they said you were to be connetable--the grand monsieur.  "She
smiled at him in a friendly way.

"They said wrong," replied Ranulph.

"Most people would be glad of it," rejoined Guida.  "My mother used to
say you would be Bailly one day."

"Who knows--perhaps I might have been!"

She looked at him half sadly, half curiously.  "You--you haven't any
ambitions now, Maitre Ranulph?"  It suddenly struck her that perhaps she
was responsible for the maiming of this man's life--for clearly it was
maimed.  More than once she had thought of it, but it came home to her
to-day with force.  Years ago Ranulph Delagarde had been spoken of as one
who might do great things, even to becoming Bailly.  In the eyes of a
Jerseyman to be Bailly was to be great, with jurats sitting in a row on
either side of him and more important than any judge in the Kingdom.
Looking back now Guida realised that Ranulph had never been the same
since that day on the Ecrehos when his father had returned and Philip had
told his wild tale of love.

A great bitterness suddenly welled up in her.  Without intention, without
blame, she had brought suffering upon others.  The untoward happenings of
her life had killed her grandfather, had bowed and aged the old
Chevalier, had forced her to reject the friendship of Carterette
Mattingley, for the girl's own sake; had made the heart of one fat old
woman heavy within her; and, it would seem, had taken hope and ambition
from the life of this man before her.  Love in itself is but a bitter
pleasure; when it is given to the unworthy it becomes a torture--and so
far as Ranulph and the world knew she was wholly unworthy.  Of late she
had sometimes wondered if, after all, she had had the right to do as she
had done in accepting the public shame, and in not proclaiming the truth:
if to act for one's own heart, feelings, and life alone, no matter how
perfect the honesty, is not a sort of noble cruelty, or cruel nobility;
an egotism which obeys but its own commandments, finding its own straight
and narrow path by first disbarring the feelings and lives of others.
Had she done what was best for the child?  Misgiving upon this point made
her heart ache bitterly.  Was life then but a series of trist condonings
at the best, of humiliating compromises at the worst?

She repeated her question to Ranulph now.  "You haven't ambition any
longer?"

"I'm busy building ships," he answered evasively.  "I build good ships,
they tell me, and I am strong and healthy.  As for being connetable,
I'd rather help prisoners free than hale them before the Royal Court.
For somehow when you get at the bottom of most crimes--the small ones
leastways--you find they weren't quite meant.  I expect--I expect," he
added gravely, "that half the crimes oughtn't to be punished at all; for
it's queer that things which hurt most can't be punished by law."

"Perhaps it evens up in the long end," answered Guida, turning away from
him to the fire, and feeling her heart beat faster as she saw how the
child nestled in Ranulph's arms--her child which had no father.  "You
see," she added, "if some are punished who oughtn't to be, there are
others who ought to be that aren't, and the worst of it is, we care so
little for real justice that we often wouldn't punish if we could.  I
have come to feel that.  Sometimes if you do exactly what's right, you
hurt some one you don't wish to hurt, and if you don't do exactly what's
right, perhaps that some one else hurts you.  So, often, we would rather
be hurt than hurt."

With the last words she turned from the fire and involuntarily faced him.
Their eyes met.  In hers were only the pity of life, the sadness, the
cruelty of misfortune, and friendliness for him.  In his eyes was purpose
definite, strong.

He went over and put the child in its high chair.  Then coming a little
nearer to Guida, he said:

"There's only one thing in life that really hurts--playing false."

Her heart suddenly stopped beating.  What was Ranulph going to say?
After all these years was he going to speak of Philip?  But she did not
reply according to her thought.

"Have people played false in your life--ever?" she asked.

"If you'll listen to me I'll tell you how," he answered.  "Wait, wait,"
she said in trepidation.  "It--it has nothing to do with me?"

He shook his head.  "It has only to do with my father and myself.  When
I've told you, then you must say whether you will have anything to do
with it, or with me....  You remember," he continued, without waiting for
her to speak, "you remember that day upon the Ecrehos--five years ago?
Well, that day I had made up my mind to tell you in so many words what I
hoped you had always known, Guida.  I didn't--why?  Not because of
another man--no, no, I don't mean to hurt you, but I must tell you the
truth now--not because of another man, for I should have bided my chance
with him."

"Ranulph, Ranulph," she broke in, "you must not speak of this now!  Do
you not see it hurts me?  It is not like you.  It is not right of you--"

A sudden emotion seized him, and his voice shook.  "Not right!  You
should know that I'd never say one word to hurt you, or do one thing to
wrong you.  But I must speak to-day-I must tell you everything.  I've
thought of it for four long years, and I know now that what I mean to do
is right."

She sat down in the great arm-chair.  A sudden weakness came upon her:
she was being brought face to face with days of which she had never
allowed herself to think, for she lived always in the future now.

"Go on," she said helplessly.  "What have you to say, Ranulph?"

"I will tell you why I didn't speak of my love to you that day we went to
the Ecrehos.  My father came back that day."

"Yes, yes," she said; "of course you had to think of him."

"Yes, I had to think of him, but not in the way you mean.  Be patient a
little while," he added.

Then in a few words he told her the whole story of his father's treachery
and crime, from the night before the Battle of Jersey up to their meeting
again upon the Ecrehos.

Guida was amazed and moved.  Her heart filled with pity.  "Ranulph--poor
Ranulph!" she said, half rising in her seat.

"No, no--wait," he rejoined.  "Sit where you are till I tell you all.
Guida, you don't know what a life it has been for me these four years.
I used to be able to look every man in the face without caring whether he
liked me or hated me, for then I had never lied, I had never done a mean
thing to any man; I had never deceived--nannin-gia, never!  But when my
father came back, then I had to play a false game.  He had lied, and to
save him I either had to hold my peace or tell his story.  Speaking was
lying or being silent was lying.  Mind you, I'm not complaining, I'm not
saying it because I want any pity.  No, I'm saying it because it's the
truth, and I want you to know the truth.  You understand what it means to
feel right in your own mind--if you feel that way, the rest of life is
easy.  Eh ben, what a thing it is to get up in the morning, build your
fire, make your breakfast, and sit down facing a man whose whole life's a
lie, and that man your own father!  Some morning perhaps you forget, and
you go out into the sun, and it all seems good; and you take your tools
and go to work, and the sea comes washing up the shingle, and you think
that the shir-r-r-r of the water on the pebbles and the singing of the
saw and the clang of the hammer are the best music in the world.  But all
at once you remember--and then you work harder, not because you love work
now for its own sake, but because it uses up your misery and makes you
tired; and being tired you can sleep, and in sleep you can forget.  Yet
nearly all the time you're awake it fairly kills you, for you feel some
one always at your elbow whispering, 'you'll never be happy again, you'll
never be happy again!'  And when you tell the truth about anything, that
some one at your elbow laughs and says: 'Nobody believes--your whole
life's a lie!'  And if the worst man you know passes you by, that some
one at your elbow says: 'You can wear a mask, but you're no better than
he, no better, no--"'

While Ranulph spoke Guida's face showed a pity and a kindness as deep as
the sorrow which had deepened her nature.  She shook her head once or
twice as though to say, Surely, what suffering!  and now this seemed to
strike Ranulph, to convict him of selfishness, for he suddenly stopped.
His face cleared, and, smiling with a little of his old-time
cheerfulness, he said:

"Yet one gets used to it and works on because one knows it will all come
right sometime.  I'm of the kind that waits."

She looked up at him with her old wide-eyed steadfastness and replied:
"You are a good man, Ranulph."  He stood gazing at her a moment without
remark, then he said:

"No, ba su, no!  but it's like you to say I am."  Then he added suddenly:
"I've told you the whole truth about myself and about my father.  He did
a bad thing, and I've stood by him.  At first, I nursed my troubles and
my shame.  I used to think I couldn't live it out, that I had no right
to any happiness.  But I've changed my mind about that-oui-gia!  As I
hammered away at my ships month in month out, year in year out, the truth
came home to me at last.  What right had I to sit down and brood over my
miseries?  I didn't love my father, but I've done wrong for him, and I've
stuck to him.  Well, I did love--and I do love--some one else, and I
should only be doing right to tell her, and to ask her to let me stand
with her against the world."

He was looking down at her with all his story in his face.  She put out
her hand quickly as if in protest and said:

"Ranulph--ah no, Ranulph--"

"But yes, Guida," he replied with stubborn tenderness, "it is you I mean
--it is you I've always meant.  You have always been a hundred times more
to me than my father, but I let you fight your fight alone.  I've waked
up now to my mistake.  But I tell you true that though I love you better
than anything in the world, if things had gone well with you I'd never
have come to you.  I never came, because of my father, and I'd never have
come because you are too far above me always--too fine, too noble for me.
I only come now because we're both apart from the world and lonely beyond
telling; because we need each other.  I have just one thing to say: that
we two should stand together.  There's none ever can be so near as those
that have had hard troubles, that have had bitter wrongs.  And when
there's love too, what can break the bond!  You and I are apart from the
world, a black loneliness no one understands.  Let us be lonely no
longer.  Let us live our lives together.  What shall we care for the rest
of the world if we know we mean to do good and no wrong?  So I've come to
ask you to let me care for you and the child, to ask you to make my home
your home.  My father hasn't long to live, and when he is gone we could
leave this island for ever.  Will you come, Guida?"

She had never taken her eyes from his face, and as his story grew her
face lighted with emotion, the glow of a moment's content, of a fleeting
joy.  In spite of all, this man loved her, he wanted to marry her--in
spite of all.  Glad to know that such men lived--and with how dark
memories contrasting with this bright experience-she said to him once
again: "You are a good man, Ranulph."

Coming near to her, he said in a voice husky with feeling: "Will you be
my wife, Guida?"

She stood up, one hand resting on the arm of the great chair, the other
half held out in pitying deprecation.

"No, Ranulph, no; I can never, never be your wife--never in this world."

For an instant he looked at her dumfounded, then turned away to the
fireplace slowly and heavily.  "I suppose it was too much to hope for,"
he said bitterly.  He realised now how much she was above him, even in
her sorrow and shame.

"You forget," she answered quietly, and her hand went out suddenly to the
soft curls of the child, "you forget what the world says about me."

There was a kind of fierceness in his look as he turned to her again.

"Me--I have always forgotten--everything," he answered.  "Have you
thought that for all these years I've believed one word?  Secours d'la
vie, of what use is faith, what use to trust, if you thought I believed!
I do not know the truth, for you have not told me; but I do know, as I
know I have a heart in me--I do know that there never was any wrong in
you.  It is you who forget," he added quickly--"it is you who forget.
I tried to tell you all this before; three years ago I tried to tell you.
You stopped me, you would not listen.  Perhaps you've thought I did not
know what has happened to you every week, almost every day of your life?
A hundred times I have walked here and you haven't seen me--when you were
asleep, when you were fishing, when you were working like a man in the
fields and the garden; you who ought to be cared for by a man, working
like a slave at man's work.  But, no, no, you have not thought well of
me, or you would have known that every day I cared, every day I watched,
and waited, and hoped--and believed!"

She came to him slowly where he stood, his great frame trembling with his
passion and the hurt she had given him, and laying her hand upon his arm,
she said:

"Your faith was a blind one, Ro.  I was either a girl who--who deserved
nothing of the world, or I was a wife.  I had no husband, had I?  Then I
must have been a girl who deserved nothing of the world, or of you.  Your
faith was blind, Ranulph, you see it was blind."

"What I know is this," he repeated with dogged persistence--"what I know
is this: that whatever was wrong, there was no wrong in you.  My life a
hundred times on that!"

She smiled at him, the brightest smile that had been on her face these
years past, and she answered softly: "'I did not think there was so great
faith--no, not in Israel!'"  Then the happiness passed from her lips to
her eyes.  "Your faith has made me happy, Ro--I am selfish, you see.
Your love in itself could not make me happy, for I have no right to
listen, because--"

She paused.  It seemed too hard to say: the door of her heart enclosing
her secret opened so slowly, so slowly.  A struggle was going on in her.
Every feeling, every force of her nature was alive.  Once, twice, thrice
she tried to speak and could not.  At last with bursting heart and eyes
swimming with tears she said solemnly:

"I can never marry you, Ranulph, and I have no right to listen to your
words of love, because--because I am a wife."

Then she gave a great sigh of relief; like some penitent who has for
a lifetime hidden a sin or a sorrow and suddenly finds the joy of a
confessional which relieves the sick heart, takes away the hand of
loneliness that clamps it, and gives it freedom again; lifting the poor
slave from the rack of secrecy, the cruelest inquisition of life and
time.  She repeated the words once more, a little louder, a little
clearer.  She had vindicated herself to God, now she vindicated herself
to man--though to but one.

"I can never marry you; because I am a wife," she said again.  There was
a slight pause, and then the final word was said: "I am the wife of
Philip d'Avranche."

Ranulph did not speak.  He stood still and rigid, looking with eyes that
scarcely saw.

"I had not intended telling any one until the time should come"--once
more her hand reached out and tremblingly stroked the head of the child
--"but your faith has forced it from me.  I couldn't let you go from me
now, ignorant of the truth, you whose trust is beyond telling.  Ranulph,
I want you to know that I am at least no worse than you thought me."

The look in his face was one of triumph, mingled with despair, hatred,
and purpose--hatred of Philip d'Avranche, and purpose concerning him.
He gloried now in knowing that Guida might take her place among the
honest women of this world,--as the world terms honesty,--but he had
received the death-blow to his every hope.  He had lost her altogether,
he who had watched and waited; who had served and followed, in season and
out of season; who had been the faithful friend, keeping his eye fixed
only upon her happiness; who had given all; who had poured out his heart
like water, and his life like wine before her.

At first he only grasped the fact that Philip d'Avranche was the husband
of the woman he loved, and that she had been abandoned.  Then sudden
remembrance stunned him: Philip d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy, had another
wife.  He remembered--it had been burned into his brain the day he saw
it first in the Gazette de Jersey--that he had married the Comtesse
Chantavoine, niece of the Marquis Grandjon-Larisse, upon the very day,
and but an hour before, the old Duc de Bercy suddenly died.  It flashed
across his mind now what he had felt then.  He had always believed that
Philip had wronged Guida; and long ago he would have gone in search of
him--gone to try the strength of his arm against this cowardly marauder,
as he held him--but his father's ill-health had kept him where he was,
and Philip was at sea upon the nation's business.  So the years had gone
on until now.

His brain soon cleared.  All that he had ever thought upon the matter now
crystallised itself into the very truth of the affair.  Philip had
married Guida secretly; but his new future had opened up to him all at
once, and he had married again--a crime, but a crime which in high places
sometimes goes unpunished.  How monstrous it was that such vile
wickedness should be delivered against this woman before him, in whom
beauty, goodness, power were commingled!  She was the real Princess
Philip d'Avranche, and this child of hers--now he understood why she
allowed Guilbert to speak no patois.

They scarcely knew how long they stood silent, she with her hand stroking
the child's golden hair, he white and dazed, looking, looking at her and
the child, as the thing resolved itself to him.  At last, in a voice
which neither he nor she could quite recognise as his own, he said:

"Of course you live now only for Guilbert."

How she thanked him in her heart for the things he had left unsaid, those
things which clear-eyed and great-minded folk, high or humble, always
understand.  There was no selfish lamenting, no reproaches, none of the
futile banalities of the lover who fails to see that it is no crime for a
woman not to love him.  The thing he had said was the thing she most
cared to hear.

"Only for that, Ranulph," she answered.

"When will you claim the child's rights?"

She shook her head sadly.  "I do not know," she answered with hesitation.
"I will tell you all about it."

Then she told him of the lost register of St. Michael's, and about the
Reverend Lorenzo Dow, but she said nothing as to why she had kept
silence.  She felt that, man though he was, he might divine something of
the truth.  In any case he knew that Philip had deserted her.

After a moment he said: "I'll find Mr. Dow if he is alive, and the
register too.  Then the boy shall have his rights."

"No, Ranulph," she answered firmly, "it shall be in my own time.  I must
keep the child with me.  I know not when I shall speak; I am biding my
day.  Once I thought I never should speak, but then I did not see all,
did not wholly see my duty towards Guilbert.  It is so hard to find what
is wise and just."

"When the proofs are found your child shall have his rights," he said
with grim insistence.

"I would never let him go from me," she answered, and, leaning over, she
impulsively clasped the little Guilbert in her arms.

"There'll be no need for Guilbert to go from you," he rejoined, "for when
your rights come to you, Philip d'Avranche will not be living."

"Will not be living!" she said in amazement.  She did not understand.

"I mean to kill him," he answered sternly.

She started, and the light of anger leaped into her eyes.  "You mean to
kill Philip d'Avranche--you, Maitre Ranulph Delagarde!" she exclaimed.
"Whom has he wronged?  Myself and my child only--his wife and his child.
Men have been killed for lesser wrongs, but the right to kill does not
belong to you.  You speak of killing Philip d'Avranche, and yet you dare
to say you are my friend!"

In that moment Ranulph learned more than he had ever guessed of life's
subtle distinctions and the workings of a woman's mind; and he knew that
she was right.  Her father, her grandfather, might have killed Philip
d'Avranche--any one but himself, he the man who had but now declared his
love for her.  Clearly his selfishness had blinded him.  Right was on his
side, but not the formal codes by which men live.  He could not avenge
Guida's wrongs upon her husband, for all men knew that he himself had
loved her for years.

"Forgive me," he said in a low tone.  Then a new thought came to him.
"Do you think your not speaking all these years was best for the child?"
he asked.

Her lips trembled.  "Oh, that thought," she said, "that thought has made
me unhappy so often!  It comes to me at night as I lie sleepless, and I
wonder if my child will grow up and turn against me one day.  Yet I did
what I thought was right, Ranulph, I did the only thing I could do.  I
would rather have died than--"

She stopped short.  No, not even to this man who knew all could she speak
her whole mind; but sometimes the thought came to her with horrifying
acuteness: was it possible that she ought to have sunk her own
disillusions, misery, and contempt of Philip d'Avranche, for the child's
sake?  She shuddered even now as the reflection of that possibility came
to her--to live with Philip d'Avranche!

Of late she had felt that a crisis was near.  She had had premonitions
that her fate, good or bad, was closing in upon her; that these days in
this lonely spot with her child, with her love for it and its love for
her, were numbered; that dreams must soon give way for action, and this
devoted peace would be broken, she knew not how.

Stooping, she kissed the little fellow upon the forehead and the eyes,
and his two hands came up and clasped both her cheeks.

"Tu m'aimes, maman?" the child asked.  She had taught him the pretty
question.

"Comme la vie, comme la vie!" she answered with a half sob, and caught
up the little one to her bosom.  Now she looked towards the window.
Ranulph followed her look, and saw that the shades of night were falling.

"I have far to walk," he said; "I must be going."  As he held out his
hand to Guida the child leaned over and touched him on the shoulder.
"What is your name, man?" he asked.

He smiled, and, taking the warm little hand in his own, he said: "My name
is Ranulph, little gentleman.  Ranulph's my name, but you shall call me
Ro."

"Good-night, Ro, man," the child answered with a mischievous smile.

The scene brought up another such scene in Guida's life so many years
ago.  Instinctively she drew back with the child, a look of pain crossing
her face.  But Ranulph did not see; he was going.  At the doorway he
turned and said:

"You know you can trust me.  Good-bye."




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Being tired you can sleep, and in sleep you can forget
Cling to beliefs long after conviction has been shattered
Futility of goodness, the futility of all
Her voice had the steadiness of despair
Joy of a confessional which relieves the sick heart
Often, we would rather be hurt than hurt
Queer that things which hurt most can't be punished by law
Rack of secrecy, the cruelest inquisition of life
Sardonic pleasure in the miseries of the world
Sympathy, with curiousness in their eyes and as much inhumanity
Thanked him in her heart for the things he had left unsaid
There is something humiliating in even an undeserved injury
There was never a grey wind but there's a greyer
Uses up your misery and makes you tired (Work)
We care so little for real justice






THE BATTLE OF THE STRONG

[A ROMANCE OF TWO KINGDOMS]

By Gilbert Parker


Volume 5.



CHAPTER XXXI

When Ranulph returned to his little house at St. Aubin's Bay night had
fallen.  Approaching he saw there was no light in the windows.  The
blinds were not drawn, and no glimmer of fire came from the chimney.  He
hesitated at the door, for he instinctively felt that something must have
happened to his father.  He was just about to enter, however, when some
one came hurriedly round the corner of the house.

"Whist, boy," said a voice; "I've news for you."  Ranulph recognised the
voice as that of Dormy Jamais.  Dormy plucked at his sleeve.  "Come with
me, boy," said he.

"Come inside if you want to tell me something," answered Ranulph.

"Ah bah, not for me!  Stone walls have ears.  I'll tell only you and the
wind that hears and runs away."

"I must speak to my father first," answered Ranulph.

"Come with me, I've got him safe," Dormy chuckled to himself.

Ranulph's heavy hand dropped on his shoulder.  "What's that you're
saying--my father with you!  What's the matter?"

As though oblivious of Ranulph's hand Dormy went on chuckling.

"Whoever burns me for a fool 'll lose their ashes.  Des monz a fous--I
have a head!  Come with me."  Ranulph saw that he must humour the shrewd
natural, so he said:

"Et ben, put your four shirts in five bundles and come along."  He was a
true Jerseyman at heart, and speaking to such as Dormy Jamais he used the
homely patois phrases.  He knew there was no use hurrying the little man,
he would take his own time.

"There's been the devil to pay," said Dormy as he ran towards the shore,
his sabots going clac--clac, clac--clac.  "There's been the devil to pay
in St. Heliers, boy."  He spoke scarcely above a whisper.

"Tcheche--what's that?" said Ranulph.  But Dormy was not to uncover his
pot of roses till his own time.  "That connetable's got no more wit than
a square bladed knife," he rattled on.  "But gache-a-penn, I'm hungry!"
And as he ran he began munching a lump of bread he took from his pocket.

For the next five minutes they went on in silence.  It was quite dark,
and as they passed up Market Hill--called Ghost Lane because of the Good
Little People who made it their highway--Dormy caught hold of Ranulph's
coat and trotted along beside him.  As they went, tokens of the life
within came out to them through doorway and window.  Now it was the voice
of a laughing young mother:

                        "Si tu as faim
                         Manges ta main
                         Et gardes l'autre pour demain;
                         Et ta tete
                         Pour le jour de fete;
                         Et ton gros ortee
                         Pour le Jour Saint Norbe"

And again:

                   "Let us pluck the bill of the lark,
                    The lark from head to tail--"

He knew the voice.  It was that of a young wife of the parish of St.
Saviour: married happily, living simply, given a frugal board, after the
manner of her kind, and a comradeship for life.  For the moment he felt
little but sorrow for himself.  The world seemed to be conspiring against
him: the chorus of Fate was singing behind the scenes, singing of the
happiness of others in sardonic comment on his own final unhappiness.
Yet despite the pain of finality there was on him something of the apathy
of despair.

From another doorway came fragments of a song sung at a veille.  The door
was open, and he could see within the happy gathering of lads and lassies
in the light of the crasset.  There was the spacious kitchen, its beams
and rafters dark with age, adorned with flitches of bacon, huge loaves
resting in the racllyi beneath the centre beam, the broad open hearth,
the flaming fire of logs, and the great brass pan shining like fresh-
coined gold, on its iron tripod over the logs.  Lassies in their short
woollen petticoats, and bedgones of blue and lilac, with boisterous lads,
were stirring the contents of the vast bashin--many cabots of apples,
together with sugar, lemon-peel, and cider; the old ladies in mob-caps
tied under the chin, measuring out the nutmeg and cinnamon to complete
the making of the black butter: a jocund recreation for all, and at all
times.

In one corner was a fiddler, and on the veille, flourished for the
occasion with satinettes and fern, sat two centeniers and the prevot,
singing an old song in the patois of three parishes.

Ranulph looked at the scene lingeringly.  Here he was, with mystery and
peril to hasten his steps, loitering at the spot where the light of home
streamed out upon the roadway.  But though he lingered, somehow he seemed
withdrawn from all these things; they were to him now as pictures of a
distant past.

Dormy plucked at his coat.  "Come, come, lift your feet, lift your feet,"
said he; "it's no time to walk in slippers.  The old man will be getting
scared, oui-gia!"  Ranulph roused himself.  Yes, yes, he must hurry on.
He had not forgotten his father, but something held him here; as though
Fate were whispering in his ear.  What does it matter now?  While yet you
may, feed on the sight of happiness.  So the prisoner going to execution
seizes one of the few moments left to him for prayer, to look lingeringly
upon what he leaves, as though to carry into the dark a clear remembrance
of it all.

Moving on quietly in a kind of dream, Ranulph was roused again by Dormy's
voice: "On Sunday I saw three magpies, and there was a wedding that day.
Tuesday I saw two--that's for joy--and fifty Jersey prisoners of the
French comes back on Jersey that day.  This morning one I saw.  One
magpie is for trouble, and trouble's here.  One doesn't have eyes for
naught--no, bidemme!"

Ranulph's patience was exhausted.

"Bachouar," he exclaimed roughly, "you make elephants out of fleas!
You've got no more news than a conch-shell has music.  A minute and
you'll have a back-hander that'll put you to sleep, Maitre Dormy."

If he had been asked his news politely Dormy would have been still more
cunningly reticent.  To abuse him in his own argot was to make him loose
his bag of mice in a flash.

"Bachouar yourself, Maitre Ranulph!  You'll find out soon.  No news--no
trouble--eh!  Par made, Mattingley's gone to the Vier Prison--he!  The
baker's come back, and the Connetable's after Olivier Delagarde.  No
trouble, pardingue, if no trouble, Dormy Jamais's a batd'lagoule and no
need for father of you to hide in a place that only Dormy knows--my
good!"

So at last the blow had fallen; after all these years of silence,
sacrifice, and misery.  The futility of all that he had done and suffered
for his father's sake came home to Ranulph.  Yet his brain was instantly
alive.  He questioned Dormy rapidly and adroitly, and got the story from
him in patches.

The baker Carcaud, who, with Olivier Delagarde, betrayed the country into
the hands of Rullecour years ago, had, with a French confederate of
Mattingley's, been captured in attempting to steal Jean Touzel's boat,
the Hardi Biaou.  At the capture the confederate had been shot.  Before
dying he implicated Mattingley in several robberies, and a notorious case
of piracy of three months before, committed within gunshot of the men-of-
war lying in the tide-way.  Carcaud, seriously wounded, to save his life
turned King's evidence, and disclosed to the Royal Court in private his
own guilt and Olivier Delagarde's treason.

Hidden behind the great chair of the Bailly himself, Dormy Jamais had
heard the whole business.  This had brought him hot-foot to St. Aubin's
Bay, whence he had hurried Olivier Delagarde to a hiding-place in the
hills above the bay of St. Brelade.  The fool had travelled more swiftly
than Jersey justice, whose feet are heavy.  Elie Mattingley was now in
the Vier Prison.  There was the whole story.

The mask had fallen, the game was up.  Well, at least there would be no
more lying, no more brutalising inward shame.  All at once it appeared to
Ranulph madness that he had not taken his father away from Jersey long
ago.  Yet too he knew that as things had been with Guida he could never
have stayed away.

Nothing was left but action.  He must get his father clear of the island
and that soon.  But how?  and where should they go?  He had a boat in St.
Aubin's Bay: getting there under cover of darkness he might embark with
his father and set sail--whither?  To Sark--there was no safety there.
To Guernsey--that was no better.  To France--yes, that was it, to the war
of the Vendee, to join Detricand.  No need to find the scrap of paper
once given him in the Vier Marchi.  Wherever Detricand might be, his fame
was the highway to him.  All France knew of the companion of de la
Rochejaquelein, the fearless Comte de Tournay.  Ranulph made his
decision.  Shamed and dishonoured in Jersey, in that holy war of the
Vendee he would find something to kill memory, to take him out of life
without disgrace.  His father must go with him to France, and bide his
fate there also.

By the time his mind was thus made up, they had reached the lonely
headland dividing Portelet Bay from St. Brelade's.  Dark things were said
of this spot, and the country folk of the island were wont to avoid it.
Beneath the cliffs in the sea was a rocky islet called Janvrin's Tomb.
One Janvrin, ill of a fell disease, and with his fellows forbidden by the
Royal Court to land, had taken refuge here, and died wholly neglected and
without burial.  Afterwards his body lay exposed till the ravens and
vultures devoured it, and at last a great storm swept his bones off into
the sea.  Strange lights were to be seen about this rock, and though wise
men guessed them mortal glimmerings, easily explained, they sufficed to
give the headland immunity from invasion.

To a cave at this point Dormy Jamais had brought the trembling Olivier
Delagarde, unrepenting and peevish, but with a craven fear of the Royal
Court and a furious populace quickening his footsteps.  This hiding-place
was entered at low tide by a passage from a larger cave.  It was like a
little vaulted chapel floored with sand and shingle.  A crevice through
rock and earth to the world above let in the light and out the smoke.

Here Olivier Delagarde sat crouched over a tiny fire, with some bread and
a jar of water at his hand, gesticulating and talking to himself.  The
long white hair and beard, with the benevolent forehead, gave him the
look of some latter-day St. Helier, grieving for the sins and praying for
the sorrows of mankind; but from the hateful mouth came profanity fit
only for the dreadful communion of a Witches' Sabbath.

Hearing the footsteps of Ranulph and Dormy, he crouched and shivered in
terror, but Ranulph, who knew too well his revolting cowardice, called to
him reassuringly.  On their approach he stretched out his talon-like
fingers in a gesture of entreaty.

"You'll not let them hang me, Ranulph--you'll save me," he whimpered.

"Don't be afraid, they shall not hang you," Ranulph replied quietly, and
began warming his hands at the fire.  "You'll swear it, Ranulph--on the
Bible?"

"I've told you they shall not hang you.  You ought to know by now whether
I mean what I say," his son answered more sharply.

Assuredly Ranulph meant that his father should not be hanged.  Whatever
the law was, whatever wrong the old man had done, it had been atoned for;
the price had been paid by both.  He himself had drunk the cup of shame
to the dregs, but now he would not swallow the dregs.  An iron
determination entered into him.  He had endured all that he would endure
from man.  He had set out to defend Olivier Delagarde from the worst that
might happen, and he was ready to do so to the bitter end.  His scheme of
justice might not be that of the Royal Court, but he would defend it with
his life.  He had suddenly grown hard--and dangerous.




CHAPTER XXXII

The Royal Court was sitting late.  Candles had been brought to light
the long desk or dais where sat the Bailly in his great chair, and the
twelve scarlet-robed jurats.  The Attorney-General stood at his desk,
mechanically scanning the indictment read against prisoners charged with
capital crimes.  His work was over, and according to his lights he had
done it well.  Not even the Undertaker's Apprentice could have been less
sensitive to the struggles of humanity under the heel of fate and death.
A plaintive complacency, a little righteous austerity, and an agreeable
expression of hunger made the Attorney-General a figure in godly contrast
to the prisoner awaiting his doom in the iron cage opposite.

There was a singular stillness in this sombre Royal Court, where only a
tallow candle or two and a dim lanthorn near the door filled the room
with flickering shadows-great heads upon the wall drawing close together,
and vast lips murmuring awful secrets.  Low whisperings came through the
dusk like mournful nightwinds carrying tales of awe through a heavy
forest.  Once in the long silence a figure rose up silently, and stealing
across the room to a door near the jury box, tapped upon it with a
pencil.  A moment's pause, the door opened slightly, and another shadowy
figure appeared, whispered, and vanished.  Then the first figure closed
the door again silently, and came and spoke softly up to the Bailly, who
yawned in his hand, sat back in his chair, and drummed his fingers upon
the arm.  Thereupon the other--the greffier of the court--settled down at
his desk beneath the jurats, and peered into an open book before him, his
eyes close to the page, reading silently by the meagre light of a candle
from the great desk behind him.

Now a fat and ponderous avocat rose up and was about to speak, but the
Bailly, with a peevish gesture, waved him down, and he settled heavily
into place again.

At last the door at which the greffier had tapped opened, and a gaunt
figure in a red robe came out.  Standing in the middle of the room he
motioned towards the great pew opposite the Attorney-General.  Slowly the
twenty-four men of the grand jury following him filed into place and sat
themselves down in the shadows.  Then the gaunt figure--the Vicomte or
high sheriff--bowing to the Bailly and the jurats, went over and took his
seat beside the Attorney-General.  Whereupon the Bailly leaned forward
and droned a question to the Grand Enquete in the shadow.  One rose up
from among the twenty-four, and out of the dusk there came in reply to
the Judge a squeaking voice:

"We find the Prisoner at the Bar more Guilty than Innocent."

A shudder ran through the court.  But some one not in the room shuddered
still more violently.  From the gable window of a house in the Rue des
Tres Pigeons, a girl had sat the livelong day, looking, looking into the
court-room.  She had watched the day decline, the evening come, and the
lighting of the crassets and the candles, and had waited to hear the
words that meant more to her than her own life.  At last the great moment
came, and she could hear the foreman's voice whining the fateful words,
"More Guilty than Innocent."

It was Carterette Mattingley, and the prisoner at the bar was her father.




CHAPTER XXXIII

Mattingley's dungeon was infested with rats and other vermin, he had only
straw for his bed, and his food and drink were bread and water.  The
walls were damp with moisture from the Fauxbie running beneath, and a
mere glimmer of light came through a small barred window.  Superstition
had surrounded the Vier Prison with horrors.  As carts passed under the
great archway, its depth multiplied the sounds so powerfully, the echoes
were so fantastic, that folk believed them the roarings of fiendish
spirits.  If a mounted guard hurried through, the reverberation of the
drum-beats and the clatter of hoofs were so uncouth that children stopped
their ears and fled in terror.  To the ignorant populace the Vier Prison
was the home of noisome serpents and the rendezvous of the devil and his
witches of Rocbert.

When therefore the seafaring merchant of the Vier Marchi, whose massive,
brass-studded bahue had been as a gay bazaar where the gentry of Jersey
refreshed their wardrobes, with one eye closed--when he was transferred
to the Vier Prison, little wonder he should become a dreadful being round
whom played the lightnings of dark fancy.  Elie Mattingley the popular
sinner, with insolent gold rings in his ears, unchallenged as to how he
came by his merchandise, was one person; Elie Mattingley, a torch for the
burning, and housed amid the terrors of the Vier Prison, was another.

Few people in Jersey slept the night before his execution.  Here and
there kind-hearted women or unimportant men lay awake through pity, and a
few through a vague sense of loss; for, henceforth, the Vier Marchi would
lack a familiar interest; but mostly the people of Mattingley's world
were wakeful through curiosity.  Morbid expectation of the hanging had
for them a gruesome diversion.  The thing itself would break the daily
monotony of life and provide hushed gossip for vraic gatherings and
veilles for a long time to come.  Thus Elie Mattingley would not die in
vain!

Here was one sensation, but there was still another.  Olivier Delagarde
had been unmasked, and the whole island had gone tracking him down.  No
aged toothless tiger was ever sported through the jungle by an army of
shikarris with hungrier malice than was this broken traitor by the people
he had betrayed.  Ensued, therefore, a commingling of patriotism with
lust of man-hunting and eager expectation of to-morrow's sacrifice.

Nothing of this excitement disturbed Mattingley.  He did not sleep, but
that was because he was still watching for a means of escape.  He felt
his chances diminish, however, when about midnight an extra guard was put
round the prison.  Something had gone amiss in the matter of his rescue.

Three things had been planned.

Firstly, he was to try escape by the small window of the dungeon.

Secondly, Carterette was to bring Sebastian Alixandre to the prison
disguised as a sorrowing aunt of the condemned.  Alixandre was suddenly
to overpower the jailer, Mattingley was to make a rush for freedom, and a
few bold spirits without would second his efforts and smuggle him to the
sea.  The directing mind and hand in the business were Ranulph
Delagarde's.  He was to have his boat waiting to respond to a signal from
the shore, and to make sail for France, where he and his father were to
be landed.  There he was to give Mattingley, Alixandre, and Carterette
his craft to fare across the seas to the great fishing-ground of Gaspe in
Canada.

Lastly, if these plans failed, the executioner was to be drugged with
liquor, his besetting weakness, on the eve of the hanging.

The first plan had been found impossible, the window being too small for
even Mattingley's head to get through.  The second had failed because the
righteous Royal Court forbade Carterette the prison, intent that she
should no longer be contaminated by so vile a wretch as her father.  For
years this same Christian solicitude had looked down from the windows of
the Cohue Royale upon this same criminal in the Vier Marchi, with one
blind eye for himself the sinner and an open one for his merchandise.

Mattingley could hear the hollow sound of the sentinels' steps under the
archway of the Vier Prison.  He was quite stoical.  If he had to die,
then he had to die.  Death could only be a little minute of agony; and
for what came after--well, he had not thought fearfully of that, and he
had no wish to think of it at all.  The visiting chaplain had talked, and
he had not listened.  He had his own ideas about life, and death, and the
beyond, and they were not ungenerous.  The chaplain had found him patient
but impossible, kindly but unresponsive, sometimes even curious, but
without remorse.

"You should repent with sorrow and a contrite heart," said the clergyman.
"You have done many evil things in your life, Mattingley."

Mattingley had replied: "Ma fuifre, I can't remember them!  I know I
never done them, for I never done anything but good all my life--so much
for so much."  He had argued it out with himself and he believed he was a
good man.  He had been open-handed, had stood by his friends, and, up to
a few days ago, was counted a good citizen; for many had come to profit
through him.  His trade--a little smuggling, a little piracy?  Was not
the former hallowed by distinguished patronage, and had it not existed
from immemorial time?  It was fair fight for gain, an eye for an eye and
a tooth for a tooth.  If he hadn't robbed others on the high seas, they
would probably have robbed him--and sometimes they did.  His spirit was
that of the Elizabethan admirals; he belonged to a century not his own.
As for the crime for which he was to suffer, it had been the work of
another hand, and very bad work it was, to try and steal Jean Touzel's
Hardi Biaou, and then bungle it.  He had had nothing to do with it, for
he and Jean Touzel were the best of friends, as was proved by the fact
that while he lay in his dungeon, Jean wandered the shore sorrowing for
his fate.

Thinking now of the whole business and of his past life, Mattingley
suddenly had a pang.  Yes, remorse smote him at last.  There was one
thing on his conscience--only one.  He had respect for the feelings of
others, and where the Church was concerned this was mingled with a droll
sort of pity, as of the greater for the lesser, the wise for the
helpless.  For clergymen he had a half-affectionate contempt.
He remembered now that when, five years ago, his confederate who had
turned out so badly--he had trusted him, too! had robbed the church of
St. Michael's, carrying off the great chest of communion plate,
offertories, and rents, he had piously left behind in Mattingley's house
the vestry-books and parish-register; a nice definition in rogues'
ethics.  Awaiting his end now, it smote Mattingley's soul that these
stolen records had not been returned to St. Michael's.  Next morning he
must send word to Carterette to restore the books.  Then his conscience
would be clear once more.  With this resolve quieting his mind, he turned
over on his straw and went peacefully to sleep.

Hours afterwards he waked with a yawn.  There was no start, no terror,
but the appearance of the jailer with the chaplain roused in him disgust
for the coming function at the Mont es Pendus.  Disgust was his chief
feeling.  This was no way for a man to die!  With a choice of evils he
should have preferred walking the plank, or even dying quietly in his
bed, to being stifled by a rope.  To dangle from a cross-tree like a
half-filled bag offended all instincts of picturesqueness, and first and
last he had been picturesque.

He asked at once for pencil and paper.  His wishes were obeyed with
deference.  On the whole he realised by the attentions paid him--the
brandy and the food offered by the jailer, the fluttering kindness of
the chaplain--that in the life of a criminal there is one moment when
he commands the situation.  He refused the brandy, for he was strongly
against spirits in the early morning, but asked for coffee.  Eating
seemed superfluous--and a man might die more gaily on an empty stomach.
He assured the chaplain that he had come to terms with his conscience and
was now about to perform the last act of a well-intentioned life.

There and then he wrote to Carterette, telling her about the vestry-books
of St. Michael's, and begging that she should restore them secretly.
There were no affecting messages; they understood each other.  He knew
that when it was possible she would never fail to come to the mark where
he was concerned, and she had equal faith in him.  So the letter was
sealed, addressed with flourishes, he was proud of his handwriting, and
handed to the chaplain for Carterette.

He had scarcely drunk his coffee when there was a roll of drums outside.
Mattingley knew that his hour was come, and yet to his own surprise he
had no violent sensations.  He had a shock presently, however, for on the
jailer announcing the executioner, who should be there before him but the
Undertaker's Apprentice!  In politeness to the chaplain Mattingley
forbore profanity.  This was the one Jerseyman for whom he had a profound
hatred, this youth with the slow, cold, watery blue eye, a face that
never wrinkled either with mirth or misery, the square-set teeth always
showing a little--an involuntary grimace of cruelty.  Here was insult.

"Devil below us, so you're going to do it--you!" broke out Mattingley.

"The other man was drunk," said the Undertaker's Apprentice.  "He's been
full as a jug three days.  He got drunk too soon."  The grimace seemed to
widen.  "O my good!" said Mattingley, and he would say no more.  To him
words were like nails--of no use unless they were to be driven home by
acts.

To Mattingley the procession of death was stupidly slow.  As it issued
from the archway of the Vier Prison between mounted guards, and passed
through a long lane of moving spectators, he looked round coolly.  One
or two bold spirits cried out: "Head up to the wind, Maitre Elie!"

"Oui-gia," he replied; "devil a top-sail in!" and turned a look of
contempt on those who hooted him.  He realised now that there was no
chance of rescue.  The militia and the town guard were in ominous force,
and although his respect for the island military was not devout, a bullet
from the musket of a fool might be as effective as one from Bonapend's--
as Napoleon Bonaparte was disdainfully called in Jersey.  Yet he could
not but wonder why all the plans of Alixandre, Carterette, and Ranulph
had gone for nothing; even the hangman had been got drunk too soon!  He
had a high opinion of Ranulph, and that he should fail him was a blow to
his judgment of humanity.

He was thoroughly disgusted.  Also they had compelled him to put on a
white shirt, he who had never worn linen in his life.  He was ill at ease
in it.  It made him conspicuous; it looked as though he were aping the
gentleman at the last.  He tried to resign himself, but resignation was
hard to learn so late in life.  Somehow he could not feel that this was
really the day of his death.  Yet how could it be otherwise?  There was
the Vicomte in his red robe, there was the sinister Undertaker's
Apprentice, ready to do his hangman's duty.  There, as they crossed the
mielles, while the sea droned its sing-song on his left, was the parson
droning his sing-song on the right "In the midst of life we are in
death," etc.  There were the grumbling drums, and the crowd morbidly
enjoying their Roman holiday; and there, looming up before him, were the
four stone pillars on the Mont es Pendus from which he was to swing.  His
disgust deepened.  He was not dying like a seafarer who had fairly earned
his reputation.

His feelings found vent even as he came to the foot of the platform where
he was to make his last stand, and the guards formed a square about the
great pillars, glooming like Druidic altars.  He burst forth in one
phrase expressive of his feelings.

"Sacre matin--so damned paltry!" he said, in equal tribute to two races.

The Undertaker's Apprentice, thinking this a reflection upon his
arrangements, said, with a wave of the hand to the rope:

"Nannin, ch'est tres ship-shape, Maitre!"

The Undertaker's Apprentice was wrong.  He had made everything ship-
shape, as he thought, but a gin had been set for him.  The rope to be
used at the hanging had been measured and approved by the Vicomte, and
the Undertaker's Apprentice had carried it to his room at the top of the
Cohue Royale.  In the dead of night, however, Dormy Jamais drew it from
under the mattress whereon the deathman slept, and substituted one a foot
longer.  This had been Ranulph's idea as a last resort, for he had a grim
wish to foil the law even at the twelfth hour.

The great moment had come.  The shouts and hootings ceased.  Out of the
silence there arose only the champing of a horse's bit or the hysterical
giggle of a woman.  The high painful drone of the chaplain's voice was
heard.

Then came the fatal "Maintenant!" from the Vicomte, the platform fell,
and Elie Mattingley dropped the length of the rope.

What was the consternation of the Vicomte and the hangman, and the horror
of the crowd, to see that Mattingley's toes just touched the ground!  The
body shook and twisted.  The man was being slowly strangled, not hanged.

The Undertaker's Apprentice was the only person who kept a cool head.
The solution of the problem of the rope for afterwards, but he had been
sent there to hang a man, and a man he would hang somehow.  Without more
ado he jumped upon Mattingley's shoulders and began to drag him down.

That instant Ranulph Delagarde burst through the mounted guard and the
militia.  Rushing to the Vicomte, he exclaimed:

"Shame!  The man was to be hung, not strangled.  This is murder.  Stop
it, or I'll cut the rope."  He looked round on the crowd.  "Cowards--
cowards," he cried, "will you see him murdered?"

He started forward to drag away the deathmann, but the Vicomte,
thoroughly terrified at Ranulph's onset, himself seized the Undertaker's
Apprentice, who, drawing off with unruffled malice, watched what followed
with steely eyes.

Dragged down by the weight of the Apprentice, Mattingley's feet were now
firmly on the ground.  While the excited crowd tried to break through the
cordon of mounted guards, Mattingley, by a twist and a jerk, freed his
corded hands.  Loosing the rope at his neck he opened his eyes and looked
around him, dazed and dumb.

The Apprentice came forward.  "I'll shorten the rope oui-gia!  Then you
shall see him swing," he grumbled viciously to the Vicomte.

The gaunt Vicomte was trembling with excitement.  He looked helplessly
around him.

The Apprentice caught hold of the rope to tie knots in it and so shorten
it, but Ranulph again appealed to the Vicomte.

"You've hung the man," said he; "you've strangled him and you didn't kill
him.  You've got no right to put that rope round his neck again."

Two jurats who had waited on the outskirts of the crowd, furtively
watching the effect of their sentence, burst in, as distracted as the
Vicomte.

"Hang the man again and the whole world will laugh at you," Ranulph said.
"If you're not worse than fools or Turks you'll let him go.  He has had
death already.  Take him back to the prison then, if you're afraid to
free him."  He turned on the crowd fiercely.  "Have you nothing to say to
this butchery?" he cried.  "For the love of God, haven't you anything to
say?"

Half the crowd shouted "Let him go free!" and the other half,
disappointed in the working out of the gruesome melodrama, groaned and
hooted.

Meanwhile Mattingley stood as still as ever he had stood by his bahue in
the Vier Marchi, watching--waiting.

The Vicomte conferred nervously with the jurats for a moment, and then
turned to the guard.

"Take the prisoner to the Vier Prison," he said.  Mattingley had been
slowly solving the problem of his salvation.  His eye, like a gimlet, had
screwed its way through Ranulph's words into what lay behind, and at last
he understood the whole beautiful scheme.  It pleased him: Carterette had
been worthy of herself, and of him.  Ranulph had played his game well
too.  He only failed to do justice to the poor beganne, Dormy Jamais.
But then the virtue of fools is its own reward.  As the procession
started back with the Undertaker's Apprentice now following after
Mattingley, not going before, Mattingley turned to him, and with a smile
of malice said:

"Ch'est tres ship-shape, Maitre-eh!" and he jerked his head back towards
the inadequate rope.

He was not greatly troubled about the rest of this grisly farce.  He was
now ready for breakfast, and his appetite grew as he heard how the crowd
hooted and snarled yah! at the Undertaker's Apprentice.  He was quite
easy about the future.  What had been so well done thus far could not
fail in the end.




CHAPTER XXXIV

Events proved Mattingley right.  Three days after, it was announced that
he had broken prison.  It is probable that the fury of the Royal Court at
the news was not quite sincere, for it was notable that the night of his
evasion, suave and uncrestfallen, they dined in state at the Tres
Pigeons.  The escape gave them happy issue from a quandary.

The Vicomte officially explained that Mattingley had got out by the
dungeon window.  People came to see the window, and there, ba su, the
bars were gone!  But that did not prove the case, and the mystery was
deepened by the fact that Jean Touzel, whose head was too small for
Elie's hat, could not get that same head through the dungeon window.
Having proved so much, Jean left the mystery there, and returned to his
Hardi Biaou.

This happened on the morning after the dark night when Mattingley,
Carterette, and Alixandre hurried from the Vier Prison, through the Rue
des Sablons to the sea, and there boarded Ranulph's boat, wherein was
Olivier Delagarde the traitor.

Accompanying Carterette to the shore was a little figure that moved along
beside them like a shadow, a little grey figure that carried a gold-
headed cane.  At the shore this same little grey figure bade Mattingley
good-bye with a quavering voice.  Whereupon Carterette, her face all wet
with tears, kissed him upon both cheeks, and sobbed so that she could
scarcely speak.  For now when it was all done--all the horrible ordeal
over--the woman in her broke down before the little old gentleman, who
had been like a benediction in the house where the ten commandments were
imperfectly upheld.  But she choked down her sobs, and thinking of
another more than of herself, she said:

"Dear Chevalier, do not forget the book--that register--I gave you
to-night.  Read it--read the last writing in it, and then you will know--
ah, bidemme--but you will know that her we love--ah, but you must read it
and tell nobody till--till the right time comes!  She hasn't held her
tongue for naught, and it's only fair to do as she's done all along, and
hold ours.  Pardingue, but my heart hurts me!" she added suddenly, and
catching the hand that held the little gold cane she kissed it with
impulsive ardour.  "You have been so good to me--oui-gia!" she said with
a gulp, and then she dropped the hand and turned and fled to the boat
rocking in the surf.

The little Chevalier watched the boat glide out into the gloom of night,
and waited till he knew that they must all be aboard Ranulph's schooner
and making for the sea.  Then he turned and went back to the empty house
in the Rue d'Egypte.

Opening the book Carterette had placed in his hands before they left the
house, he turned up and scanned closely the last written page.  A moment
after, he started violently, his eyes dilating, first with wonder, then
with a bewildered joy; and then, Protestant though he was, with the
instinct of long-gone forefathers, he made the sacred gesture, and said:

"Now I have not lived and loved in vain, thanks be to God!"

Even as joy opened wide the eyes of the Chevalier, who had been sorely
smitten through the friends of his heart, out at sea Night and Death were
closing the eyes of another wan old man who had been a traitor to his
country.

For the boat of the fugitives had scarcely cleared reefs and rocks, and
reached the open Channel, when Olivier Delagarde, uttering the same cry
as when Ranulph and the soldiers had found him wounded in the Grouville
road sixteen years before, suddenly started up from where he had lain
mumbling, and whispering incoherently, "Ranulph--they've killed me!"
fell back dead.

True to the instinct which had kept him faithful to one idea for sixteen
years, and in spite of the protests of Mattingley and Carterette--of the
despairing Carterette who felt the last thread of her hopes snap with his
going--Ranulph made ready to leave them.  Bidding them good-bye, he
placed his father's body in the rowboat, and pulling back to the shore of
St. Aubin's Bay with his pale freight, carried it on his shoulders up to
the little house where he had lived so many years.  There he kept the
death-watch alone.




CHAPTER XXXV

Guida knew nothing of the arrest and trial of Mattingley until he had
been condemned to death.  Nor until then did she know anything of what
had happened to Olivier Delagarde; for soon after her interview with
Ranulph she had gone a-marketing to the Island of Sark, with the results
of half a year's knitting.  Her return had been delayed by ugly gales
from the south east.  Several times a year she made this journey, landing
at the Eperquerie Rocks as she had done one day long ago, and selling her
beautiful wool caps and jackets to the farmers and fisher-folk, getting
in kind for what she gave.

When she made these excursions to Sark, Dormy Jamais had always remained
at the little house, milking her cow, feeding her fowls, and keeping all
in order--as perfect a sentinel as old Biribi, and as faithful.  For the
first time in his life, however, Dormy Jamais was unfaithful.  On the day
that Carcaud the baker and Mattingley were arrested, he deserted the hut
at Plemont to exploit, with Ranulph, the adventure which was at last to
save Olivier Delagarde and Mattingley from death.  But he had been
unfaithful only in the letter of his bond.  He had gone to the house of
Jean Touzel, through whose Hardi Biaou the disaster had come, and had
told Mattresse Aimable that she must go to Plemont in his stead--for a
fool must keep his faith whate'er the worldly wise may do.  So the fat
Femme de Ballast, puffing with every step, trudged across the island to
Plemont, and installed herself as keeper of the house.

One day Mattresse Aimable's quiet was invaded by two signalmen who kept
watch, not far from Guida's home, for all sail, friend or foe, bearing in
sight.  They were now awaiting the new Admiral of the Jersey station and
his fleet.  With churlish insolence they entered Guida's hut before
Maitresse Aimable could prevent it.  Looking round, they laughed
meaningly, and then told her that the commander coming presently to lie
with his fleet in Grouville Bay was none other than the sometime Jersey
midshipman, now Admiral Prince Philip d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy.
Understanding then the meaning of their laughter, and the implied insult
to Guida, Maitresse Aimable's voice came ravaging out of the silence
where it lay hid so often and so long, and the signalmen went their ways
shamefacedly.

She could not make head or tail of her thoughts now, nor see an inch
before her nose; all she could feel was an aching heart for Guida.  She
had heard strange tales of how Philip had become Prince Philip
d'Avranche, and husband of the Comtesse Chantavoine, and afterwards Duc
de Bercy.  Also she had heard how Philip, just before he became the Duc
de Bercy, had fought his ship against a French vessel off Ushant, and,
though she had heavier armament than his own, had destroyed her.  For
this he had been made an admiral.  Only the other day her Jean had
brought the Gazette de Jersey in which all these things were related,
and had spelled them out for her.  And now this same Philip d'Avranche
with his new name and fame was on his way to defend the Isle of Jersey.

Mattresse Aimable's muddled mind could not get hold of this new Philip.
For years she had thought him a monster, and here he was, a great and
valiant gentleman to the world.  He had done a thing that Jean would
rather have cut off his hand--both hands--than do, and yet here he was,
an admiral, a prince, and a sovereign duke, and men like Jean were as
dust beneath his feet.  The real Philip she knew: he was the man who had
spoiled the life of a woman; this other Philip--she could read about him,
she could think about him, just as she could think about William and his
horse' in Boulay Bay, or the Little Bad Folk of Rocbert; but she could
not realise him as a thing of flesh and blood and actual being.  The more
she tried to realise him the more mixed she became.

As in her mental maze she sat panting her way to enlightenment, she saw
Guida's boat entering the little harbour.  Now the truth must be told--
but how?

After her first exclamation of welcome to mother and child, Maitresse
Aimable struggled painfully for her voice.  She tried to find words in
which to tell Guida the truth, but, stopping in despair, she suddenly
began rocking the child back and forth, saying only: "Prince Admiral he
--and now to come!  O my good--O my good!"  Guida's sharp intuition found
the truth.

"Philip d'Avranche!" she said to herself.  Then aloud, in a shaking
voice--"Philip d'Avranche!"

She could not think clearly for a moment.  It was as if her brain had
received a blow, and in her head was a singing numbness, obscuring
eyesight, hearing, speech.

When she had recovered a little she took the child from Maitresse
Aimable, and pressing him to her bosom placed him in the Sieur de
Mauprat's great arm-chair.  This action, ordinary as it seemed, was
significant of what was in her mind.  The child himself realised
something unusual, and he sat perfectly still, two small hands spread
out on the big arms.

"You always believed in me, 'tresse Aimable," Guida said at last in a low
voice.

"Oui-gia, what else?" was the instant reply.  The quick responsiveness
of her own voice seemed to confound the Femme de Ballast, and her face
suffused.

Guida stooped quickly and kissed her on the cheek.  "You'll never regret
that.  And you will have to go on believing still, but you'll not be
sorry in the end, 'tresse Aimable," she said, and turned away to the
fireplace.  An hour afterwards Mattresse Aimable was upon her way to St.
Heliers, but now she carried her weight more easily and panted less.
Twice within the last month Jean had given her ear a friendly pinch, and
now Guida had kissed her--surely she had reason to carry her weight more
lightly.

That afternoon and evening Guida struggled with herself: the woman in her
shrinking from the ordeal at hand.  But the mother in her pleaded,
commanded, ruled confused emotions to quiet.  Finality of purpose once
determined, a kind of peace came over her sick spirit, for with finality
there is quiescence if not peace.

When she looked at the little Guilbert, refined and strong, curiously
observant, and sensitive in temperament like herself, her courage
suddenly leaped to a higher point than it had ever known.  This innocent
had suffered enough.  What belonged to him he had not had.  He had been
wronged in much by his father, and maybe--and this was the cruel part of
it--had been unwittingly wronged, alas! how unwilling, by her!  If she
gave her own life many times, it still could be no more than was the
child's due.

A sudden impulse seized her, and with a quick explosion of feeling she
dropped on her knees, and looking into his eyes, as though hungering for
the words she so often yearned to hear, she said:

"You love your mother, Guilbert?  You love her, little son?"

With a pretty smile and eyes brimming with affectionate fun, but without
a word, the child put out a tiny hand and drew the fingers softly down
his mother's face.

"Speak, little son, tell your mother that you love her."  The tiny hand
pressed itself over her eyes, and a gay little laugh came from the
sensitive lips, then both arms ran round her neck.  The child drew her
head to him impulsively, and kissing her, a little upon the hair and a
little upon the forehead, so indefinite was the embrace, he said:

"Si, maman, I loves you best of all," then added: "Maman, can't I have
the sword now?"

"You shall have the sword too some day," she answered, her eyes flashing.

"But, maman, can't I touch it now?"

Without a word she took down the sheathed goldhandled sword and laid it
across the chair-arms.

"I can't take the sword out, can I, maman?" he asked.

She could not help smiling.  "Not yet, my son, not yet."

"I has to be growed up so the blade doesn't hurt me, hasn't I, maman?"

She nodded and smiled again, and went about her work.

He nodded sagely.  "Maman--" he said.  She turned to him; the little
figure was erect with a sweet importance.  "Maman, what am I now--with
the sword?" he asked, with wide-open, amazed eyes.

A strange look passed across her face.  Stooping, she kissed his curly
hair.

"You are my prince," she said.

A little later the two were standing on that point of land called
Grosnez--the brow of the Jersey tiger.  Not far from them was a signal-
staff which telegraphed to another signal-staff inland.  Upon the staff
now was hoisted a red flag.  Guida knew the signals well.  The red flag
meant warships in sight.  Then bags were hoisted that told of the number
of vessels: one, two, three, four, five, six, then one next the upright,
meaning seven.  Last of all came the signal that a flag-ship was among
them.

This was a fleet in command of an admiral.  There, not far out, between
Guernsey and Jersey, was the squadron itself.  Guida watched it for a
long while, her heart hardening; but seeing that the men by the signal-
staff were watching her, she took the child and went to a spot where they
were shielded from any eyes.  Here she watched the fleet draw nearer and
nearer.

The vessels passed almost within a stone's throw of her.  She could see
the St. George's Cross flying at the fore of the largest ship.  That was
the admiral's flag--that was the flag of Admiral Prince Philip
d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy.

She felt her heart stand still suddenly, and with a tremor, as of fear,
she gathered her child close to her.  "What is all those ships, maman?"
asked the child.  "They are ships to defend Jersey," she said, watching
the Imperturbable and its flotilla range on.

"Will they affend us, maman?"

"Perhaps-at the last," she said.




CHAPTER XXXVI

Off Grouville Bay lay the squadron of the Jersey station.  The St.
George's Cross was flying at the fore of the Imperturbable, and on every
ship of the fleet the white ensign flapped in the morning wind.  The
wooden-walled three-decked flag-ship, with her 32-pounders, and six
hundred men, was not less picturesque and was more important than the
Castle of Mont Orgueil near by, standing over two hundred feet above the
level of the sea: the home of Philip d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy, and the
Comtesse Chantavoine, now known to the world as the Duchesse de Bercy.

The Comtesse had arrived in the island almost simultaneously with Philip,
although he had urged her to remain at the ducal palace of Bercy.  But
the duchy of Bercy was in hard case.  When the imbecile Duke Leopold John
died and Philip succeeded, the neutrality of Bercy had been proclaimed,
but this neutrality had since been violated, and there was danger at once
from the incursions of the Austrians and the ravages of the French
troops.  In Philip's absence the valiant governor-general of the duchy,
aided by the influence and courage of the Comtesse Chantavoine, had thus
far saved it from dismemberment, in spite of attempted betrayals by
Damour the Intendant, who still remained Philip's enemy.

But when the Marquis Grandjon-Larisse, the uncle of the Comtesse, died,
her cousin, General Grandjon-Larisse of the Republican army--whose word
with Dalbarade had secured Philip's release years before for her own
safety, first urged and then commanded her temporary absence from the
duchy.  So far he had been able to protect it from the fury of the
Republicans and the secret treachery of the Jacobins.  But a time of
great peril was now at hand.  Under these anxieties and the lack of other
inspiration than duty, her health had failed, and at last she obeyed her
cousin, joining Philip at the Castle of Mont Orgueil.

More than a year had passed since she had seen him, but there was no
emotion, no ardour in their present greeting.  From the first there had
been nothing to link them together.  She had married, hoping that she
might love thereafter; he in choler and bitterness, and in the stress of
a desperate ambition.  He had avoided the marriage so long as he might,
in hope of preventing it until the Duke should die, but with the irony of
fate the expected death had come two hours after the ceremony.  Then,
shortly afterwards, came the death of the imbecile Leopold John; and
Philip found himself the Duc de Bercy, and within a year, by reason of a
splendid victory for the Imperturbable, an admiral.

Truth to tell, in this battle he had fought for victory for his ship and
a fall for himself: for the fruit he had plucked was turning to dust and
ashes.  He was haunted by the memory of a wronged woman, as she herself
had foretold.  Death, with the burial of private dishonour under the
roses of public victory--that had come to be his desire.  But he had
found that Death is wilful and chooseth her own time; that she may be
lured, but she will not come with shouting.  So he had stoically accepted
his fate, and could even smile with a bitter cynicism when ordered to
proceed to the coast of Jersey, where collision with a French squadron
was deemed certain.

Now, he was again brought face to face with his past; with the imminent
memory of Guida Landresse de Landresse.  Where was Guida now?  What had
happened to her?  He dared not ask, and none told him.  Whichever way he
turned--night or day--her face haunted him.  Looking out from the windows
of Mont Orgueil Castle, or from the deck of the Imperturbable, he could
see--and he could scarce choose but see--the lonely Ecrehos.  There, with
a wild eloquence, he had made a girl believe he loved her, and had taken
the first step in the path which should have led to true happiness and
honour.  From this good path he had violently swerved--and now?

From all that could be seen, however, the world went very well with him.
He was the centre of authority.  Almost any morning one might have seen a
boat shoot out from below the Castle wall, carrying a flag with the blue
ball of a Vice-Admiral of the White in the canton, and as the Admiral
himself stepped upon the deck of the Imperturbable between saluting
guards, across the water came a gay march played in his honour.

Jersey herself was elate, eager to welcome one of her own sons risen to
such high estate.  When, the very day after his arrival, he passed
through the Vier Marchi on his way to visit the Lieutenant-Governor, the
redrobed jurats impulsively turned out to greet him.  They were ready to
prove that memory is a matter of will and cultivation.  There is no
curtain so opaque as that which drops between the mind of man and the
thing it is advantageous to forget.  But how closely does the ear of
self-service listen for the footfall of a most distant memory, when to do
so is to share even a reflected glory!

A week had gone since Philip had landed on the island.  Memories pursued
him.  If he came by the shore of St. Clement's Bay, he saw the spot where
he had stood with her the evening he married her, and she said to him:
"Philip, I wonder what we will think of this day a year from now!......
To-day is everything to you, but to-morrow is very much to me."  He
remembered Shoreham sitting upon the cromlech above singing the legend of
the gui-l'annee--and Shoreham was lying now a hundred fathoms deep.

As he walked through the Vier Marchi with his officers, there flashed
before his eyes the scene of sixteen years ago, when, through the grime
and havoc of battle, he had run to save Guida from the scimitar of the
garish Turk.  Walking through the Place du Vier Prison, he recalled the
morning when he had rescued Ranulph from the hands of the mob.  Where was
Ranulph now?

If he had but known it, that very morning as he passed Mattingley's house
Ranulph had looked down at him with infinite scorn and loathing--but with
triumph too, for the Chevalier had just shown him a certain page in a
certain parish-register long lost, left with him by Carterette
Mattingley.  Philip knew naught of Ranulph save the story babbled by
the islanders.  He cared to hear of no one but Guida, and who was now to
mention her name to him?  It was long--so long since he had seen her
face.  How many years ago was it?  Only five, and yet it seemed twenty.

He was a boy then; now his hair was streaked with grey.  He was light-
hearted then, and he was still buoyant with his fellows, still alert and
vigorous, quick of speech and keen of humour--but only before the world.
In his own home he was fitful of mood, impatient of the grave, meditative
look of his wife, of her resolute tenacity of thought and purpose, of her
unvarying evenness of mood, through which no warmth played.  It seemed
to him that if she had defied him--given him petulance for petulance,
impatience for impatience, it would have been easier to bear.  If--if he
could only read behind those passionless eyes, that clear, unwrinkled
forehead!  But he knew her no better now than he did the day he married
her.  Unwittingly she chilled him, and he felt he had no right to
complain, for he had done her the greatest wrong which can be done a
woman.  Whatever chanced, Guida was still his wife; and there was in him
yet the strain of Calvinistic morality of the island race that bred him.
He had shrunk from coming here, but it had been far worse than he had
looked for.

One day, in a nervous, bitter moment, after an impatient hour with the
Comtesse, he had said: "Can you--can you not speak?  Can you not tell me
what you think?"  She had answered quietly:

"It would do no good.  You would not understand.  I know you in some ways
better than you know yourself.  I cannot tell what it is, but there is
something wrong in your nature, something that poisons your life.  And
not myself only has felt that.  I never told you--but you remember the
day the old Duke died, the day we were married?  You had gone from the
room a moment.  The Duke beckoned me to him, and whispered 'Don't be
afraid--don't be afraid--' and then he died.  That meant that he was
afraid, that death had cleared his sight as to you in some way.  He was
afraid--of what?  And I have been afraid--of what?  I do not know.
Things have not gone well somehow.  You are strong, you are brave,
and I come of a family that have been strong and brave.  We ought to be
near: yet, yet we are lonely and far apart, and we shall never be nearer
or less lonely.  That I know."

To this he had made no reply and this anger vanished.  Something in her
words had ruled him to her own calmness, and at that moment he had the
first flash of understanding of her nature and its true relation to his
own.

Passing through the Rue d'Egypte this day he met Dormy Jamais.  Forgetful
of everything save that this quaint foolish figure had interested him
when a boy, he called him by name; but Dormy Jamais swerved away, eyeing
him askance.

At that instant he saw Jean Touzel standing in the doorway of his house.
A wave of remorseful feeling rushed over him.  He could wait no longer:
he would ask Jean Touzel and his wife about Guida.  He instantly
bethought him of an excuse for the visit.  His squadron needed another
pilot; he would approach Jean in the matter.

Bidding his flag-lieutenant go on to Elizabeth Castle whither they were
bound, and await him there, he crossed over to Jean.  By the time he
reached the doorway, however, Jean had retreated to the veille by the
chimney behind Maitresse Aimable, who sat in a great stave-chair mending
a net.

Philip knocked and stepped inside.  When Mattresse Aimable saw who it was
she was so startled that she dropped her work, and made vague clutches to
recover it.  Stooping, however, was a great effort for her.  Philip
instantly stepped forward and picked up the net.  Politely handing it to
her, he said:

"Ah, Maitresse Aimable, it is as if you had never stirred all these
years!"  Then turning to her husband "I have come looking for a good
pilot, Jean."  Mattresse Aimable had at first flushed to a purple, had
afterwards gone pale, then recovered herself, and now returned Philip's
look with a downright steadiness.  Like Jean, she knew well enough he
had not come for a pilot--that was not the business of a Prince Admiral.

She did not even rise.  Philip might be whatever the world chose to call
him, but her house was her own, and he had come uninvited, and he was
unwelcome.

She kept her seat, but her fat head inclined once in greeting, and she
waited for him to speak again.  She knew why he had come; and somehow the
steady look in these slow, brown eyes, and the blinking glance behind
Jean's brass-rimmed spectacles, disconcerted Philip.  Here were people
who knew the truth about him, knew the sort of man he really was.  These
poor folk who had had nothing of the world but what they earned, they
would never hang on any prince's favours.

He read the situation rightly.  The penalties of his life were teaching
him a discernment which could never have come to him through good fortune
alone.  Having at last discovered his real self a little, he was in the
way of knowing others.

"May I shut the door?" he asked quietly.  Jean nodded.  Closing it he
turned to them again.  "Since my return I have heard naught concerning
Mademoiselle Landresse," he said.  "I want to ask you about her now.
Does she still live in the Place du Vier Prison?"

Both Jean and Aimable shook their heads.  They had spoken no word since
his entrance.

"She--she is not dead?" he asked.  They shook their heads again.

"Her grandfather"--he paused--"is he living?"  Once more they shook their
heads in negation.  "Where is mademoiselle?"  he asked, sick at heart.

Jean looked at his wife; neither moved nor answered.  "Where does she
live?" urged Philip.  Still there was no motion, no reply.  "You might
as well tell me."  His tone was half pleading, half angry--little like a
sovereign duke, very like a man in trouble.  "You must know I shall find
out from some one else, then," he continued.  "But it is better for you
to tell me.  I mean her no harm, and I would rather know about her from
her friends."

He took off his hat now.  Something in the dignity of these two honest
folk rebuked the pride of place and spirit in him.  As plainly as though
heralds had proclaimed it, he understood that these two knew the
abatements on the shield of his honour-argent, a plain point tenne, due
to him "that tells lyes to his Prince or General," and argent, a gore
sinister tenne, due for flying from his colours.

Maitresse Aimable turned and looked towards Jean, but Jean turned away
his head.  Then she did not hesitate.  The voice so oft eluding her will
responded readily now.  Anger--plain primitive rage-possessed her.  She
had had no child, but as the years had passed all the love that might
have been given to her own was bestowed upon Guida, and in that mind she
spoke.

"O my grief, to think you have come here-you!" she burst forth.  "You
steal the best heart in the world--there is none like her, nannin-gia.
You promise her, you break her life, you spoil her, and then you fly away
--ah coward you!  Man pethe benin, was there ever such a man like you!
If my Jean there had done a thing as that I would sink him in the sea--
he would sink himself, je me crais!  But you come back here, O my Mother
of God, you come back here with your sword, with your crown-ugh, it is
like a black cat in heaven--you!"

She got to her feet more nimbly than she had ever done in her life, and
the floor seemed to heave as she came towards Philip.  "You speak to me
with soft words," she said harshly--"but you shall have the good hard
truth from me.  You want to know now where she is--I ask where you have
been these five years?  Your voice it tremble when you speak of her now.
Oh ho! it has been nice and quiet these five years.  The grand pethe of
her drop dead in his chair when he know.  The world turn against her,
make light of her, when they know.  All alone--she is all alone, but for
one fat old fool like me.  She bear all the shame, all the pain, for
the crime of you.  All alone she take her child and go on to the rock of
Plemont to live these five years.  But you, you go and get a crown and be
Amiral and marry a grande comtesse--marry, oh, je crais ben!  This is no
world for such men like you.  You come to my house, to the house of Jean
Touzel, to ask this and that--well, you have the truth of God, ba su!
No good will come to you in the end, nannin-gia!  When you go to die,
you will think and think and think of that beautiful Guida Landresse;
you will think and think of the heart you kill, and you will call,
and she will not come.  You will call till your throat rattle, but she
will not come, and the child of sorrow you give her will not come--no,
bidemme!  E'fin, the door you shut you can open now, and you can go from
the house of Jean Touzel.  It belong to the wife of an honest man--
maint'nant!"

In the moment's silence that ensued, Jean took a step forward.
"Ma femme, ma bonne femme!" he said with a shaking voice.  Then he
pointed to the door.  Humiliated, overwhelmed by the words of the woman,
Philip turned mechanically towards the door without a word, and his
fingers fumbled for the latch, for a mist was before his eyes.  With a
great effort he recovered himself, and passed slowly out into the Rue
d'Egypte.

"A child--a child!" he said brokenly.  "Guida's child--my God!  And I
--have never--known.  Plemont--Plemont, she is at Plemont!"  He
shuddered.  "Guida's child--and mine," he kept saying to himself, as in a
painful dream he passed on to the shore.

In the little fisherman's cottage he had left, a fat old woman sat
sobbing in the great chair made of barrel-staves, and a man, stooping,
kissed her twice on the cheek--the first time in fifteen years.
And then she both laughed and cried.




CHAPTER XXXVII

Guida sat by the fire sewing, Biribi the dog at her feet.  A little
distance away, to the right of the chimney, lay Guilbert asleep.  Twice
she lowered the work to her lap to look at the child, the reflected light
of the fire playing on his face.  Stretching out her hand, she touched
him, and then she smiled.  Hers was an all-devouring love; the child was
her whole life; her own present or future was as nothing; she was but
fuel for the fire of his existence.

A storm was raging outside.  The sea roared in upon Plemont and Grosnez,
battering the rocks in futile agony.  A hoarse nor'-easter ranged across
the tiger's head in helpless fury: a night of awe to inland folk, and of
danger to seafarers.  To Guida, who was both of the sea and of the land,
fearless as to either, it was neither terrible nor desolate to be alone
with the storm.  Storm was but power unshackled, and power she loved and
understood.  She had lived so long in close commerce with storm and sea
that something of their keen force had entered into her, and she was kin
with them.  Each wind to her was intimate as a friend, each rock and cave
familiar as her hearthstone; and the ungoverned ocean spoke in terms
intelligible.  So heavy was the surf that now and then the spray of some
foiled wave broke on the roof, but she only nodded at that, as though the
sea were calling her to come forth, tapping on her rooftree in joyous
greeting.

But suddenly she started and bent her head.  It seemed as if her whole
body were hearkening.  Now she rose quickly to her feet, dropped her work
upon the table near by, and rested herself against it, still listening.
She was sure she heard a horse's hoofs.  Turning swiftly, she drew the
curtain of the bed before her sleeping child, and then stood quiet
waiting--waiting.  Her hand went to her heart once as though its fierce
throbbing hurt her.  Plainly as though she could look through these stone
walls into clear sunlight, she saw some one dismount, and she heard a
voice.

The door of the but was unlocked and unbarred.  If she feared, it was
easy to shoot the bolt and lock the door, to drop the bar across the
little window, and be safe and secure.  But no bodily fear possessed her-
-only that terror of the spirit when its great trial comes suddenly and
it shrinks back, though the mind be of faultless courage.

She waited.  There came a knocking at the door.  She did not move from
where she stood.

"Come in," she said.  She was composed and resolute now.

The latch clicked, the door opened, and a cloaked figure entered, the
shriek of the storm behind.  The door closed again.  The intruder took a
step forward, his hat came off, the cloak was loosed and dropped upon the
floor.  Guida's premonition had been right: It was Philip.

She did not speak.  A stone could have been no colder as she stood in the
light of the fire, her face still and strong, the eyes darkling,
luminous.  There was on her the dignity of the fearless, the pure in
heart.

"Guida!" Philip said, and took a step nearer, and paused.

He was haggard, he had the look of one who had come upon a desperate
errand.  When she did not answer he said pleadingly:

"Guida, won't you speak to me?"

"The Duc de Bercy chooses a strange hour for his visit," she said
quietly.

"But see," he answered hurriedly; "what I have to say to you--"
he paused, as though to choose the thing he should say first.

"You can say nothing I need hear," she answered, looking him steadily in
the eyes.

"Ah, Guida," he cried, disconcerted by her cold composure, "for God's
sake listen to me!  To-night we have to face our fate.  To-night you have
to say--"

"Fate was faced long ago.  I have nothing to say."

"Guida, I have repented of all.  I have come now only to speak honestly
of the wrong I did you.  I have come to--"

Scorn sharpened her words, though she spoke calmly: "You have forced
yourself upon a woman's presence--and at this hour!"

"I chose the only hour possible," he answered quickly.  "Guida, the past
cannot be changed, but we have the present and the future still.  I have
not come to justify myself, but to find a way to atone."

"No atonement is possible."

"You cannot deny me the right to confess to you that--"

"To you denial should not seem hard usage," she answered slowly, "and
confession should have witnesses--"

She paused suggestively.  The imputation that he of all men had the least
right to resent denial; that, dishonest still, he was willing to justify
her privately though not publicly; that repentance should have been open
to the world--it all stung him.

He threw out his hands in a gesture of protest.  "As many witnesses as
you will, but not now, not this hour, after all these years.  Will you
not at least listen to me, and then judge and act?  Will you not hear me,
Guida?"

She had not yet even stirred.  Now that it had come, this scene was all
so different from what she might have imagined.  But she spoke out of a
merciless understanding, an unchangeable honesty.  Her words came clear
and pitiless:

"If you will speak to the point and without a useless emotion, I will try
to listen.  Common kindness should have prevented this intrusion--
by you!"

Every word she said was like a whip-lash across his face.  A devilish
light leapt into his eye, but it faded as quickly as it came.

"After to-night, to the public what you will," he repeated with dogged
persistence, "but it was right we should speak alone to each other at
least this once before the open end.  I did you wrong, yet I did not mean
to ruin your life, and you should know that.  I ought not to have married
you secretly; I acknowledge that.  But I loved you--"

She shook her head, and with a smile of pitying disdain--he could so
little see the real truth, his real misdemeanour--she said: "Oh no,
never--never!  You were not capable of love; you never knew what it
means.  From the first you were too untrue ever to love a woman.  There
was a great fire of emotion, you saw shadows on the wall, and you fell in
love with them.  That was all."

"I tell you that I loved you," he answered with passionate energy.  "But
as you will.  Let it be that it was not real love: at least it was all
there was in me to give.  I never meant to desert you.  I never meant to
disavow our marriage.  I denied you, you will say.  I did.  In the light
of what came after, it was dishonourable--I grant that; but I did it at a
crisis and for the fulfilment of a great ambition--and as much for you as
for me."

"That was the least of your evil work.  But how little you know what true
people think or feel!" she answered with a kind of pain in her voice,
for she felt that such a nature could never even realise its own
enormities.  Well, since it had gone so far she would speak openly,
though it hurt her sense of self-respect.

"For that matter, do you think that I or any good woman would have had
place or power, been princess or duchess, at the price?  What sort of
mind have you?"  She looked him straight in the eyes.  "Put it in the
clear light of right and wrong, it was knavery.  You--you talk of not
meaning to do me harm.  You were never capable of doing me good.  It was
not in you.  From first to last you are untrue.  Were it otherwise, were
you not from first to last unworthy, would you have--but no, your worst
crime need not be judged here.  Yet had you one spark of worthiness would
you have made a mock marriage--it is no more--with the Comtesse
Chantavoine?  No matter what I said or what I did in anger, or contempt
of you, had you been an honest man you would not have so ruined another
life.  Marriage, alas!  You have wronged the Comtesse worse than you have
wronged me.  One day I shall be righted, but what can you say or do to
right her wrongs?"

Her voice had now a piercing indignation and force.  "Yes, Philip
d'Avranche, it is as I say, justice will come to me.  The world turned
against me because of you; I have been shamed and disgraced.  For years
I have suffered in silence.  But I have waited without fear for the end.
God is with me.  He is stronger than fortune or fate.  He has brought you
to Jersey once more, to right my wrongs, mine and my child's."

She saw his eyes flash to the little curtained bed.  They both stood
silent and still.  He could hear the child breathing.  His blood
quickened.  An impulse seized him.  He took a step towards the bed, as
though to draw the curtain, but she quickly moved between.

"Never," she said in a low stern tone; "no touch of yours for my
Guilbert--for my son!  Every minute of his life has been mine.  He is
mine--all mine--and so he shall remain.  You who gambled with the name,
the fame, the very soul of your wife, you shall not have one breath of
her child's life."

It was as if the outward action of life was suspended in them for a
moment, and then came the battle of two strong spirits: the struggle of
fretful and indulged egotism, the impulse of a vigorous temperament,
against a deep moral force, a high purity of mind and conscience, and the
invincible love of the mother for the child.  Time, bitterness, and power
had hardened Philip's mind, and his long-restrained emotions, breaking
loose now, made him a passionate and wilful figure.  His force lay in the
very unruliness of his spirit, hers in the perfect command of her moods
and emotions.  Well equipped by the thoughts and sufferings of five long
years, her spirit was trained to meet this onset with fiery wisdom.  They
were like two armies watching each other across a narrow stream, between
one conflict and another.

For a minute they stood at gaze.  The only sounds in the room were the
whirring of the fire in the chimney and the child's breathing.  At last
Philip's intemperate self-will gave way.  There was no withstanding that
cold, still face, that unwavering eye.  Only brutality could go further.
The nobility of her nature, her inflexible straight-forwardness came upon
him with overwhelming force.  Dressed in molleton, with no adornment save
the glow of a perfect health, she seemed at this moment, as on the
Ecrehos, the one being on earth worth living and caring for.  What had he
got for all the wrong he had done her?  Nothing.  Come what might, there
was one thing that he could yet do, and even as the thought possessed him
he spoke.

"Guida," he said with rushing emotion, "it is not too late.  Forgive the
past-the wrong of it, the shame of it.  You are my wife; nothing can undo
that.  The other woman--she is nothing to me.  If we part and never meet
again she will suffer no more than she suffers to go on with me.  She has
never loved me, nor I her.  Ambition did it all, and of ambition God
knows I have had enough!  Let me proclaim our marriage, let me come back
to you.  Then, happen what will, for the rest of our lives I will try to
atone for the wrong I did you.  I want you, I want our child.  I want to
win your love again.  I can't wipe out what I have done, but I can put
you right before the world, I can prove to you that I set you above place
and ambition.  If you shrink from doing it for me, do it"--he glanced
towards the bed--"do it for our child.  To-morrow--to-morrow it shall be,
if you will forgive.  To-morrow let us start again--Guida--Guida!"

She did not answer at once; but at last she said "Giving up place and
ambition would prove nothing now.  It is easy to repent when our
pleasures have palled.  I told you in a letter four years ago that your
protests came too late.  They are always too late.  With a nature like
yours nothing is sure or lasting.  Everything changes with the mood.
It is different with me: I speak only what I truly mean.  Believe me,
for I tell you the truth, you are a man that a woman could forget but
could never forgive.  As a prince you are much better than as a plain
man, for princes may do what other men may not.  It is their way to take
all and give nothing.  You should have been born a prince, then all your
actions would have seemed natural.  Yet now you must remain a prince, for
what you got at such a price to others you must pay for.  You say you
would come down from your high place, you would give up your worldly
honours, for me.  What madness!  You are not the kind of man with whom a
woman could trust herself in the troubles and changes of life.  Laying
all else aside, if I would have had naught of your honours and your duchy
long ago, do you think I would now share a disgrace from which you could
never rise?  For in my heart I feel that this remorse is but caprice.
It is to-day; it may not--will not--be tomorrow."

"You are wrong, you are wrong.  I am honest with you now," he broke in.

"No," she answered coldly, "it is not in you to be honest.  Your words
have no ring of truth in my ears, for the note is the same as I heard
once upon the Ecrehos.  I was a young girl then and I believed; I am a
woman now, and I should still disbelieve though all the world were on
your side to declare me wrong.  I tell you"--her voice rose again, it
seemed to catch the note of freedom and strength of the storm without--
"I tell you, I will still live as my heart and conscience prompt me.
The course I have set for myself I will follow; the life I entered upon
when my child was born I will not leave.  No word you have said has made
my heart beat faster.  You and I can never have anything to say to each
other in this life, beyond"--her voice changed, she paused--"beyond one
thing--"

Going to the bed where the child lay, she drew the curtain softly, and
pointing, she said:

"There is my child.  I have set my life to the one task, to keep him to
myself, and yet to win for him the heritage of the dukedom of Bercy.
You shall yet pay to him the price of your wrong-doing."

She drew back slightly so that he could see the child lying with its rosy
face half buried in its pillow, the little hand lying like a flower upon
the coverlet.

Once more with a passionate exclamation he moved nearer to the child.

"No farther!" she said, stepping before him.

When she saw the wild impulse in his face to thrust her aside, she added:
"It is only the shameless coward that strikes the dead.  You had a wife--
Guida d'Avranche, but Guida d'Avranche is dead.  There only lives the
mother of this child, Guida Landresse de Landresse."

She looked at him with scorn, almost with hatred.  Had he touched her--
but she would rather pity than loathe!

Her words roused all the devilry in him.  The face of the child had sent
him mad.

"By Heaven, I will have the child--I will have the child!" he broke out
harshly.  "You shall not treat me like a dog.  You know well I would have
kept you as my wife, but your narrow pride, your unjust anger threw me
over.  You have wronged me.  I tell you you have wronged me, for you held
the secret of the child from me all these years."

"The whole world knew!" she exclaimed indignantly.  "I will break your
pride," he said, incensed and unable to command himself.  "Mark you, I
will break your pride.  And I will have my child too!"

"Establish to the world your right to him," she answered keenly.  "You
have the right to acknowledge him, but the possession shall be mine."

He was the picture of impotent anger and despair.  It was the irony of
penalty that the one person in the world who could really sting him was
this unacknowledged, almost unknown woman.  She was the only human being
that had power to shatter his egotism and resolve him into the common
elements of a base manhood.  Of little avail his eloquence now!  He had
cajoled a sovereign dukedom out of an aged and fatuous prince; he had
cajoled a wife, who yet was no wife, from among the highest of a royal
court; he had cajoled success from Fate by a valour informed with vanity
and ambition; years ago, with eloquent arts he had cajoled a young girl
into a secret marriage--but he could no longer cajole the woman who was
his one true wife.  She knew him through and through.

He was so wild with rage he could almost have killed her as she stood
there, one hand stretched out to protect the child, the other pointing to
the door.

He seized his hat and cloak and laid his hand upon the latch, then
suddenly turned to her.  A dark project came to him.  He himself could
not prevail with her; but he would reach her yet, through the child.  If
the child were in his hands, she would come to him.

"Remember, I will have the child," he said, his face black with evil
purpose.

She did not deign reply, but stood fearless and still, as, throwing open
the door, he rushed out into the night.  She listened until she heard his
horse's hoofs upon the rocky upland.  Then she went to the door, locked
it, and barred it.  Turning, she ran with a cry as of hungry love to the
little bed.  Crushing the child to her bosom, she buried her face in his
brown curls.

"My son, my own, own son!" she said.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

If at times it would seem that Nature's disposition of the events of a
life or a series of lives is illogical, at others she would seem to play
them with an irresistible logic--loosing them, as it were, in a trackless
forest of experience, and in some dramatic hour, by an inevitable
attraction, drawing them back again to a destiny fulfilled.  In this
latter way did she seem to lay her hand upon the lives of Philip
d'Avranche and Guida Landresse.

At the time that Elie Mattingley, in Jersey, was awaiting hanging on
the Mont es Pendus, and writing his letter to Carterette concerning the
stolen book of church records, in a town of Brittany the Reverend Lorenzo
Dow lay dying.  The army of the Vendee, under Detricand Comte de Tournay,
had made a last dash at a small town held by a section of the Republican
army, and captured it.  On the prisons being opened, Detricand had
discovered in a vile dungeon the sometime curate of St. Michael's Church
in Jersey.  When they entered on him, wasted and ragged he lay asleep on
his bed of rotten straw, his fingers between the leaves of a book of
meditations.  Captured five years before and forgotten alike by the
English and French Governments, he had apathetically pined and starved to
these last days of his life.

Recognising him, Detricand carried him in his strong arms to his own
tent.  For many hours the helpless man lay insensible, but at last the
flickering spirit struggled back to light for a little space.  When first
conscious of his surroundings, the poor captive felt tremblingly in the
pocket of his tattered vest.  Not finding what he searched for, he half
started up.  Detricand hastened forward with a black leather-covered book
in his hand.  Mr. Dow's thin trembling fingers clutched eagerly--it was
his only passion--at this journal of his life.  As his grasp closed on
it, he recognised Detricand, and at the same time he saw the cross and
heart of the Vendee on his coat.

A victorious little laugh struggled in his throat.  "The Lord hath
triumphed gloriously--I could drink some wine, monsieur," he added in the
same quaint clerical monotone.

Having drunk the wine he lay back murmuring thanks and satisfaction, his
eyes closed.  Presently they opened.  He nodded at Detricand.

"I have not tasted wine these five years," he said; then added, "You--you
took too much wine in Jersey, did you not, monsieur?  I used to say an
office for you every Litany day, which was of a Friday."

His eyes again caught the cross and heart on Detricand's coat, and they
lighted up a little.  "The Lord hath triumphed gloriously," he repeated,
and added irrelevantly, "I suppose you are almost a captain now?"

"A general--almost," said Detricand with gentle humour.

At that moment an orderly appeared at the tent-door, bearing a letter for
Detricand.

"From General Grandjon-Larisse of the Republican army, your highness,"
said the orderly, handing the letter.  "The messenger awaits an answer."

As Detricand hastily read, a look of astonishment crossed over his face,
and his brows gathered in perplexity.  After a minute's silence he said
to the orderly:

"I will send a reply to-morrow."

"Yes, your highness."  The orderly saluted and retired.

Mr. Dow half raised himself on his couch, and the fevered eyes swallowed
Detricand.

"You--you are a prince, monsieur?" he said.  Detricand glanced up from
the letter he was reading again, a grave and troubled look on his face.

"Prince of Vaufontaine they call me, but, as you know, I am only a
vagabond turned soldier," he said.  The dying man smiled to himself,--
a smile of the sweetest vanity this side of death,--for it seemed to him
that the Lord had granted him this brand from the burning, and in supreme
satisfaction, he whispered: "I used to say an office for you every
Litany--which was a Friday, and twice, I remember, on two Saints' days."

Suddenly another thought came to him, and his lips moved--he was
murmuring to himself.  He would leave a goodly legacy to the captive of
his prayers.

Taking the leather-covered journal of his life in both hands, he held it
out.

"Highness, highness--" said he.  Death was breaking the voice in his
throat.

Detricand stooped and ran an arm round his shoulder, but raising himself
up Mr. Dow gently pushed him back.  The strength of his supreme hour was
on him.

"Highness," said he, "I give you the book of five years of my life--not
of its every day, but of its moments, its great days.  Read it," he
added, "read it wisely.  Your own name is in it--with the first time I
said an office for you."  His breath failed him, he fell back, and lay
quiet for several minutes.

"You used to take too much wine," he said half wildly, starting up again.
"Permit me your hand, highness."

Detricand dropped on his knee and took the wasted hand.  Mr. Dow's eyes
were glazing fast.  With a last effort he spoke--his voice like a
squeaking wind in a pipe:

"The Lord hath triumphed gloriously--" and he leaned forward to kiss
Detricand's hand.

But Death intervened, and his lips fell instead upon the red cross on
Detricand's breast, as he sank forward lifeless.

That night, after Lorenzo Dow was laid in his grave, Detricand read the
little black leather-covered journal bequeathed to him.  Of the years of
his captivity the records were few; the book was chiefly concerned with
his career in Jersey.  Detricand read page after page, more often with a
smile than not; yet it was the smile of one who knew life and would
scarce misunderstand the eccentric and honest soul of the Reverend
Lorenzo Dow.

Suddenly, however, he started, for he came upon these lines:

     I have, in great privacy and with halting of spirit, married, this
     twenty-third of January, Mr. Philip d'Avranche of His Majesty's ship
     "Narcissus," and Mistress Guida Landresse de Landresse, both of this
     Island of Jersey; by special license of the Bishop of Winchester.

To this was added in comment:

     Unchurchmanlike, and most irregular.  But the young gentleman's
     tongue is gifted, and he pressed his cause heartily.  Also Mr.
     Shoreham of the Narcissus--"Mad Shoreham of Galway" his father was
     called--I knew him--added his voice to the request also.  Troubled
     in conscience thereby, yet I did marry the twain gladly, for I think
     a worthier maid never lived than this same Mistress Guida Landresse
     de Landresse, of the ancient family of the de Mauprats.  Yet I like
     not secrecy, though it be but for a month or two months--on my vow,
     I like it not for one hour.

     Note: At leisure read of the family history of the de Mauprats and
     the d'Avranches.

     N.: No more secret marriages nor special licenses--most uncanonical
     privileges!

     N.: For ease of conscience write to His Grace at Lambeth upon the
     point.

Detricand sprang to his feet.  So this was the truth about Philip
d'Avranche, about Guida, alas!

He paced the tent, his brain in a whirl.  Stopping at last, he took from
his pocket the letter received that afternoon from General Grandjon-
Larisse, and read it through again hurriedly.  It proposed a truce, and a
meeting with himself at a village near, for conference upon the surrender
of Detricand's small army.

"A bitter end to all our fighting," said Detricand aloud at last.  "But
he is right.  It is now a mere waste of life.  I know my course.  .  .  .
Even to-night," he added, "it shall be to-night."

Two hours later Detricand, Prince of Vaufontaine, was closeted with
General Grandjon-Larisse at a village half-way between the Republican
army and the broken bands of the Vendee.

As lads Detricand and Grandjon-Larisse had known each other well.  But
since the war began Grandjon-Larisse had gone one way, and he had gone
the other, bitter enemies in principle but friendly enough at heart.

They had not seen each other since the year before Rullecour's invasion
of Jersey.

"I had hoped to see you by sunset, monseigneur," said Grandjon-Larisse
after they had exchanged greetings.

"It is through a melancholy chance you see me at all," replied Detricand
heavily.

"To what piteous accident am I indebted?"  Grandjon-Larisse replied in an
acid tone, for war had given his temper an edge.  "Were not my reasons
for surrender sound?  I eschewed eloquence--I gave you facts."

Detricand shook his head, but did not reply at once.  His brow was
clouded.

"Let me speak fully and bluntly now," Grandjon-Larisse went on.  "You
will not shrink from plain truths, I know.  We were friends ere you went
adventuring with Rullecour.  We are soldiers too; and you will understand
I meant no bragging in my letter."

He raised his brows inquiringly, and Detricand inclined his head in
assent.

Without more ado, Grandjon-Larisse laid a map on the table.  "This will
help us," he said briefly, then added: "Look you, Prince, when war began
the game was all with you.  At Thouars here"--his words followed his
finger--"at Fontenay, at Saumur, at Torfou, at Coron, at Chateau-
Gonthier, at Pontorson, at Dol, at Antrain, you had us by the heels.
Victory was ours once to your thrice.  Your blood was up.  You had great
men--great men," he repeated politely.

Detricand bowed.  "But see how all is changed," continued the other.
"See: by this forest of Vesins de la Rochejaquelein fell.  At Chollet"--
his finger touched another point--"Bonchamp died, and here d'Elbee and
Lescure were mortally wounded.  At Angers Stofflet was sent to his
account, and Charette paid the price at Nantes."  He held up his fingers.
"One--two--three--four--five--six great men gone!"

He paused, took a step away from the table, and came back again.

Once more he dropped his finger on the map.  "Tinteniac is gone, and at
Quiberon Peninsula your friend Sombreuil was slain.  And look you here,"
he added in a lower voice, "at Laval my old friend the Prince of Talmont
was executed at his own chateau, where I had spent many an hour with
him."

Detricand's eyes flashed fire.  "Why then permit the murder, monsieur le
general?"

Grandjon-Larisse started, his voice became hard at once.  "It is not a
question of Talmont, or of you, or of me, monseigneur.  It is not a
question of friendship, not even of father, or brother, or son--but of
France."

"And of God and the King," said Detricand quickly.

Grandjon-Larisse shrugged his shoulders.  "We see with different eyes.
We think with different minds," and he stooped over the map again.

"We feel with different hearts," said Detricand.  "There is the
difference between us--between your cause and mine.  You are all for
logic and perfection in government, and to get it you go mad, and France
is made a shambles--"

"War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle," interrupted Grandjon-
Larisse.  He turned to the map once more.  "And see, monseigneur, here at
La Vie your uncle the Prince of Vaufontaine died, leaving you his
name and a burden of hopeless war.  Now count them all over--de la
Rochejaquelein, Bonchamp, d'Elbee, Lescure, Stofflet, Charette, Talmont,
Tinteniac, Sombreuil, Vaufontaine--they are all gone, your great men.
And who of chieftains and armies are left?  Detricand of Vaufontaine and
a few brave men--no more.  Believe me, monseigneur, your game is
hopeless--by your grace, one moment still," he added, as Detricand made
an impatient gesture.  "Hoche destroyed your army and subdued the country
two years ago.  You broke out again, and Hoche and I have beaten you
again.  Fight on, with your doomed followers--brave men I admit--and
Hoche will have no mercy.  I can save your peasants if you will yield
now.

"We have had enough of blood.  Let us have peace.  To proceed is certain
death to all, and your cause worse lost.  On my honour, monseigneur, I do
this at some risk, in memory of old days.  I have lost too many friends,"
he added in a lower voice.

Detricand was moved.  "I thank you for this honest courtesy.  I had
almost misread your letter," he answered.  "Now I will speak freely.
I had hoped to leave my bones in Brittany.  It was my will to fight to
the last, with my doomed followers as you call them--comrades and lovers
of France I say.  And it was their wish to die with me.  Till this
afternoon I had no other purpose.  Willing deaths ours, for I am
persuaded, for every one of us that dies, a hundred men will rise up
again and take revenge upon this red debauch of government!"

"Have a care," said Grandjon-Larisse with sudden anger, his hand dropping
upon the handle of his sword.

"I ask leave for plain beliefs as you asked leave for plain words.  I
must speak my mind, and I will say now that it has changed in this matter
of fighting and surrender.  I will tell you what has changed it," and
Detricand drew from his pocket Lorenzo Dow's journal.  "It concerns both
you and me."

Grandjon-Larisse flashed a look of inquiry at him.  "It concerns your
cousin the Comtesse Chantavoine and Philip d'Avranche, who calls himself
her husband and Duc de Bercy."

He opened the journal, and handed it to Grandjon-Larisse.  "Read," he
said.

As Grandjon-Larisse read, an oath broke from him.  "Is this authentic,
monseigneur?" he said in blank astonishment "and the woman still lives?"

Detricand told him all he knew, and added:

"A plain duty awaits us both, monsieur le general.  You are concerned for
the Comtesse Chantavoine; I am concerned for the Duchy of Bercy and for
this poor lady--this poor lady in Jersey," he added.

Grandjon-Larisse was white with rage.  "The upstart!  The English
brigand!" he said between his teeth.

"You see now," said Detricand, "that though it was my will to die
fighting your army in the last trench--"

"Alone, I fear," interjected Grandjon-Larisse with curt admiration.

"My duty and my purpose go elsewhere," continued Detricand.  "They take
me to Jersey.  And yours, monsieur?"

Grandjon-Larisse beat his foot impatiently on the floor.  "For the moment
I cannot stir in this, though I would give my life to do so," he answered
bitterly.  "I am but now recalled to Paris by the Directory."

He stopped short in his restless pacing and held out his hand.

"We are at one," he said--"friends in this at least.  Command me when and
how you will.  Whatever I can I will do, even at risk and peril.  The
English brigand!" he added bitterly.  "But for this insult to my blood,
to the noble Chantavoine, he shall pay the price to me--yes, by the heel
of God!"

"I hope to be in Jersey three days hence," said Detricand.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

It is easy to repent when our pleasures have palled
Kissed her twice on the cheek--the first time in fifteen years
No news--no trouble
War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle






THE BATTLE OF THE STRONG

[A ROMANCE OF TWO KINGDOMS]

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 6.


CHAPTER XXXIX

The bell on the top of the Cohue Royale clattered like the tongue of a
scolding fishwife.  For it was the fourth of October, and the opening of
the Assise d'Heritage.

This particular session of the Court was to proceed with unusual spirit
and importance, for after the reading of the King's Proclamation, the
Royal Court and the States were to present the formal welcome of the
island to Admiral Prince Philip d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy; likewise to
offer a bounty to all Jerseymen enlisting under him.

The island was en fete.  There had not been such a year of sensations
since the Battle of Jersey.  Long before chicane--chicane ceased clanging
over the Vier Marchi the body of the Court was filled.  The Governor, the
Bailly, the jurats, the seigneurs and the dames des fiefs, the avocats
with their knowledge of the ancient custom of Normandy and the devious
inroads made upon it by the customs of Jersey, the military, all were in
their places; the officers of the navy had arrived, all save one and he
was to be the chief figure of this function.  With each arrival the
people cheered and the trumpets blared.  The islanders in the Vier Marchi
turned to the booths for refreshments, or to the printing-machine set up
near La Pyramide, and bought halfpenny chapsheets telling of recent
defeats of the French; though mostly they told in ebullient words of the
sea-fight which had made Philip d'Avranche an admiral, and of his
elevation to a sovereign dukedom.  The crowds restlessly awaited his
coming now.

Inside the Court there was more restlessness still.  It was now many
minutes beyond the hour fixed.  The Bailly whispered to the Governor, the
Governor to his aide, and the aide sought the naval officers present; but
these could give no explanation of the delay.  The Comtesse Chantavoine
was in her place of honour beside the Attorney-General--but Prince Philip
and his flag-lieutenant came not.

The Comtesse Chantavoine was the one person outwardly unmoved.  What she
thought, who could tell?  Hundreds of eyes scanned her face, yet she
seemed unconscious of them, indifferent to them.  What would not the
Bailly have given for her calmness!  What would not the Greffier have
given for her importance!  She drew every eye by virtue of something
which was more than the name of Duchesse de Bercy.  The face, the
bearing, had an unconscious dignity, a living command and composure: the
heritage, perhaps, of a race ever more fighters than courtiers, rather
desiring good sleep after good warfare than luxurious peace.

The silence, the tension grew painful.  A whole half hour had the Court
waited beyond its time.  At last, however, cheers arose outside, and all
knew that the Prince was coming.  Presently the doors were thrown open,
two halberdiers stepped inside, and an officer of the Court announced
Admiral his Serene Highness Prince Philip d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy.

"Oui-gia, think of that!" said a voice from somewhere in the hall.

Philip heard it, and he frowned, for he recognised Dormy Jamais's voice.
Where it came from he knew not, nor did any one; for the daft one was
snugly bestowed above a middle doorway in what was half balcony, half
cornice.

When Philip had taken his place beside the Comtesse Chantavoine, came the
formal opening of the Cour d'Heritage.

The Comtesse's eyes fixed themselves upon Philip.  There was that in his
manner which puzzled and evaded her clear intuition.  Some strange
circumstance must have delayed him, for she saw that his flag-lieutenant
was disturbed, and this she felt sure was not due to delay alone.  She
was barely conscious that the Bailly had been addressing Philip, until he
had stopped and Philip had risen to reply.

He had scarcely begun speaking when the doors were suddenly thrown open
again, and a woman came forward quickly.  The instant she entered Philip
saw her, and stopped speaking.  Every one turned.

It was Guida.  In the silence, looking neither to right nor left, she
advanced almost to where the Greffier sat, and dropping on her knee and
looking up to the Bailly and the jurats, stretched out her hands and
cried:

"Haro, haro!  A l'aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort!"

If one rose from the dead suddenly to command them to an awed obedience,
Jerseymen could not be more at the mercy of the apparition than at the
call of one who cries in their midst, "Haro! Haro!"--that ancient relic
of the custom of Normandy and Rollo the Dane.  To this hour the Jerseyman
maketh his cry unto Rollo, and the Royal Court--whose right to respond to
this cry was confirmed by King John and afterwards by Charles--must
listen, and every one must heed.  That cry of Haro makes the workman drop
his tools, the woman her knitting, the militiaman his musket, the
fisherman his net, the schoolmaster his birch, and the ecrivain his
babble, to await the judgment of the Royal Court.

Every jurat fixed his eye upon Guida as though she had come to claim his
life.  The Bailly's lips opened twice as though to speak, but no words
came.  The Governor sat with hands clinched upon his chairarm.  The crowd
breathed in gasps of excitement.  The Comtesse Chantavoine looked at
Philip, looked at Guida, and knew that here was the opening of the scroll
she had not been able to unfold.  Now she should understand that
something which had made the old Duc de Bercy with his last breath say,
Don't be afraid!

Philip stood moveless, his eyes steady, his face bitter, determined.  Yet
there was in his look, fixed upon Guida, some strange mingling of pity
and purpose.  It was as though two spirits were fighting in his face for
mastery.  The Countess touched him upon the arm, but he took no notice.
Drawing back in her seat she looked at him and at Guida, as one might
watch the balances of justice weighing life and death.  She could not
read this story, but one glance at the faces of the crowd round her made
her aware that here was a tale of the past which all knew in little or in
much.

"Haro!  haro!  A l'aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort!"  What did she
mean, this woman with the exquisite face, alive with power and feeling,
indignation and appeal?  To what prince did she cry?--for what aid?
who trespassed upon her?

The Bailly now stood up, a frown upon his face.  He knew what scandal had
said concerning Guida and Philip.  He had never liked Guida, for in the
first days of his importance she had, for a rudeness upon his part meant
as a compliment, thrown his hat--the Lieutenant-Bailly's hat--into the
Fauxbie by the Vier Prison.  He thought her intrusive thus to stay these
august proceedings of the Royal Court, by an appeal for he knew not what.

"What is the trespass, and who the trespasser?" asked the Bailly
sternly.

Guida rose to her feet.

"Philip d'Avranche has trespassed," she said.  "What Philip d'Avranche,
mademoiselle?" asked the Bailly in a rough, ungenerous tone.

"Admiral Philip d'Avranche, known as his Serene Highness the Duc de
Bercy, has trespassed on me," she answered.

She did not look at Philip, her eyes were fixed upon the Bailly and the
jurats.

The Bailly whispered to one or two jurats.  "Wherein is the trespass?"
asked the Bailly sharply.  "Tell your story."

After an instant's painful pause, Guida told her tale.

"Last night at Plemont," she said in a voice trembling a little at first
but growing stronger as she went on, "I left my child, my Guilbert, in
his bed, with Dormy Jamais to watch beside him, while I went to my boat
which lies far from my hut.  I left Dormy Jamais with the child because I
was afraid--because I had been afraid, these three days past, that Philip
d'Avranche would steal him from me.  I was gone but half an hour; it was
dark when I returned.  I found the door open, I found Dormy Jamais lying
unconscious on the floor, and my child's bed empty.  My child was gone.
He was stolen from me by Philip d'Avranche, Duc de Bercy."

"What proof have you that it was the Duc de Bercy?" asked the Bailly.

"I have told your honour that Dormy Jamais was there.  He struck Dormy
Jamais to the ground, and rode off with my child."

The Bailly sniffed.

"Dormy Jamais is a simpleton--an idiot."

"Then let the Prince speak," she answered quickly.  She turned and looked
Philip in the eyes.  He did not answer a word.  He had not moved since
she entered the court-room.  He kept his eyes fixed on her, save for one
or two swift glances towards the jurats.  The crisis of his life had
come.  He was ready to meet it now: anything would be better than all he
had gone through during the past ten days.  In mad impulse he had stolen
the child, with the wild belief that through it he could reach Guida,
could bring her to him.  For now this woman who despised him, hated him,
he desired more than all else in the world.  Ambition has her own means
of punishing.  For her gifts of place or fortune she puts some impossible
hunger in the soul of the victim which leads him at last to his own
destruction.  With all the world conquered there is still some mystic
island of which she whispers, and to gain this her votary risks all--and
loses all.

The Bailly saw by Philip's face that Guida had spoken truth.  But he
whispered with the jurats eagerly, and presently he said with brusque
decision:

"Our law of Haro may only apply to trespass upon property.  Its intent is
merely civil."

Which having said he opened and shut his mouth with gusto, and sat back
as though expecting Guida to retire.

"Your law of Haro, monsieur le Bailly!" Guida answered with flashing
eyes, her voice ringing out fearlessly.  "Your law of Haro!  The law of
Haro comes from the custom of Normandy, which is the law of Jersey.  You
make its intent this, you make it that, but nothing can alter the law,
and what has been done in its name for generations.  Is it so, that if
Philip d'Avranche trespass on my land, or my hearth, I may cry Haro,
haro!  and you will take heed?  But when it is blood of my blood, bone of
my bone, flesh of my flesh that he has wickedly seized; when it is the
head I have pillowed on my breast for four years--the child that has
known no father, his mother's only companion in her unearned shame, the
shame of an outcast--then is it so that your law of Haro may not apply?
Messieurs, it is the justice of Haro that I ask, not your lax usage of
it.  From this Prince Philip I appeal to the spirit of Prince Rollo who
made this law.  I appeal to the law of Jersey which is the Custom of
Normandy.  There are precedents enough, as you well know, messieurs.  I
demand--I demand--my child."

The Bailly and the jurats were in a hopeless quandary.  They glanced
furtively at Philip.  They were half afraid that she was right, and yet
were timorous of deciding against the Prince.

She saw their hesitation.  "I call on you to fulfil the law.  I have
cried Haro, haro!  and what I have cried men will hear outside this
Court, outside this Isle of Jersey; for I appeal against a sovereign
duke of Europe."

The Bailly and the jurats were overwhelmed by the situation.  Guida's
brain was a hundred times clearer than theirs.  Danger, peril to her
child, had aroused in her every force of intelligence; she had the
daring, the desperation of the lioness fighting for her own.

Philip himself solved the problem.  Turning to the bench of jurats, he
said quietly:

"She is quite right; the law of Haro is with her.  It must apply."

The Court was in a greater maze than ever.  Was he then about to restore
to Guida her child?  After an instant's pause Philip continued:

"But in this case there was no trespass, for the child--is my own."

Every eye in the Cohue Royale fixed itself upon him, then upon Guida,
then upon her who was known as the Duchesse de Bercy.  The face of the
Comtesse Chantavoine was like snow, white and cold.  As the words were
spoken a sigh broke from her, and there came to Philip's mind that
distant day in the council chamber at Bercy when for one moment he was
upon his trial; but he did not turn and look at her now.  It was all
pitiable, horrible; but this open avowal, insult as it was to the
Comtesse Chantavoine, could be no worse than the rumours which would
surely have reached her one day.  So let the game fare on.  He had thrown
down the glove now, and he could not see the end; he was playing for one
thing only--for the woman he had lost, for his own child.  If everything
went by the board, why, it must go by the board.  It all flashed through
his brain: to-morrow he must send in his resignation to the Admiralty--
so much at once.  Then Bercy--come what might, there was work for him to
do at Bercy.  He was a sovereign duke of Europe, as Guida had said.  He
would fight for the duchy for his son's sake.  Standing there he could
feel again the warm cheek of the child upon his own, as last night he
felt it riding across the island from Plemont to the village near Mont
Orgueil.  That very morning he had hurried down to a little cottage in
the village and seen it lying asleep, well cared for by a peasant woman.
He knew that to-morrow the scandal of the thing would belong to the
world, but he was not dismayed.  He had tossed his fame as an admiral
into the gutter, but Bercy still was left.  All the native force, the
stubborn vigour, the obdurate spirit of the soil of Jersey of which he
was, its arrogant self-will, drove him straight into this last issue.
What he had got at so much cost he would keep against all the world.
He would--

But he stopped short in his thoughts, for there now at the court-room
door stood Detricand, the Chouan chieftain.

He drew his hand quickly across his eyes.  It seemed so wild, so
fantastic, that of all men, Detricand should be there.  His gaze was so
fixed that every one turned to see--every one save Guida.

Guida was not conscious of this new figure in the scene.  In her heart
was fierce tumult.  Her hour had come at last, the hour in which she must
declare that she was the wife of this man.  She had no proofs.  No doubt
he would deny it now, for he knew how she loathed him.  But she must tell
her tale.

She was about to address the Bailly, but, as though a pang of pity shot,
through her heart, she turned instead and looked at the Comtesse
Chantavoine.  She could find it in her to pause in compassion for this
poor lady, more wronged than herself had been.  Their eyes met.  One
instant's flash of intelligence between the souls of two women, and Guida
knew that the look of the Comtesse Chantavoine had said: "Speak for your
child."

Thereupon she spoke.

"Messieurs, Prince Philip d'Avranche is my husband."

Every one in the court-room stirred with excitement.  Some weak-nerved
woman with a child at her breast began to cry, and the little one joined
its feeble wail to hers.

"Five years ago," Guida continued, "I was married to Philip d'Avranche by
the Reverend Lorenzo Dow in the church of St. Michael's--"

The Bailly interrupted with a grunt.  "H'm--Lorenzo Dow is well out of
the way-have done."

"May I not then be heard in my own defence?" Guida cried in indignation.
"For years I have suffered silently slander and shame.  Now I speak for
myself at last, and you will not hear me!  I come to this court of
justice, and my word is doubted ere I can prove the truth.  Is it for
judges to assail one so?  Five years ago I was married secretly, in St.
Michael's Church--secretly, because Philip d'Avranche urged it, pleaded
for it.  An open marriage, he said, would hinder his promotion.  We were
wedded, and he left me.  War broke out.  I remained silent according to
my promise to him.  Then came the time when in the States of Bercy he
denied that he had a wife.  From the hour I knew he had done so I denied
him.  My child was born in shame and sorrow, I myself was outcast in this
island.  But my conscience was clear before Heaven.  I took myself and my
child out from among you and went to Plemont.  I waited, believing that
God's justice was surer than man's.  At last Philip d'Avranche--my
husband--returned here.  He invaded my home, and begged me to come with
my child to him as his wife--he who had so evilly wronged me, and wronged
another more than me.  I refused.  Then he stole my child from me.  You
ask for proofs of my marriage.  Messieurs, I have no proofs.

"I know not where Lorenzo Dow may be found.  The register of St. Michael's
Church, as you all know, was stolen.  Mr. Shoreham, who witnessed the
marriage, is dead.  But you must believe me.  There is one witness left,
if he will but speak--even the man who married me, the man that for one
day called me his wife.  I ask him now to tell the truth."

She turned towards Philip, her clear eyes piercing him through and
through.

What was going on in his mind neither she nor any in that Court might
ever know, for in the pause, the Comtesse Chantavoine rose up, and
passing steadily by Philip, came to Guida.  Looking her in the eyes with
an incredible sorrow, she took her hand, and turned towards Philip with
infinite scorn.

A strange, thrilling silence fell upon all the Court.  The jurats shifted
in their seats with excitement.  The Bailly, in a hoarse, dry voice,
said:

"We must have proof.  There must be record as well as witness."

From near the great doorway came a voice saying: "The record is here,"
and Detricand stepped forward, in his uniform of the army of the Vendee.

A hushed murmur ran round the room.  The jurats whispered to each other.

"Who are you, monsieur?" said the Bailly.

"I am Detricand, Prince of Vaufontaine," he replied, "for whom the
Comtesse Chantavoine will vouch," he added in a pained voice, and bowed
low to her and to Guida.  "I am but this hour landed.  I came to Jersey
on this very matter."

He did not wait for the Bailly to reply, but began to tell of the death
of Lorenzo Dow, and, taking from his pocket the little black journal,
opened it and read aloud the record written therein by the dead
clergyman.  Having read it, he passed it on to the Greffier, who handed
it up to the Bailly.  Another moment's pause ensued.  To the most
ignorant and casual of the onlookers the strain was great; to those
chiefly concerned it was supreme.  The Bailly and the jurats whispered
together.  Now at last a spirit of justice was roused in them.  But the
law's technicalities were still to rule.

The Bailly closed the book, and handed it back to the Greffier with the
words: "This is not proof though it is evidence."

Guida felt her heart sink within her.  The Comtesse Chantavoine, who
still held her hand, pressed it, though herself cold as ice with sickness
of spirit.

At that instant, and from Heaven knows where--as a bird comes from a
bush--a little grey man came quickly among them all, carrying spread open
before him a book almost as big as himself.  Handing it up to the Bailly,
he said:

"Here is the proof, Monsieur le Bailly--here is the whole proof."

The Bailly leaned over and drew up the book.  The jurats crowded near and
a dozen heads gathered about the open volume.

At last the Bailly looked up and addressed the Court solemnly.

"It is the lost register of St. Michael's," he said.  "It contains the
record of the marriage of Lieutenant Philip d'Avranche and Guida
Landresse de Landresse, both of the Isle of Jersey, by special license of
the Bishop of Winchester."

"Precisely so, precisely so," said the little grey figure--the Chevalier
Orvillier du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir.  Tears ran down his cheeks as he
turned towards Guida, but he was smiling too.

Guida's eyes were upon the Bailly.  "And the child?" she cried with a
broken voice--"the child?"

"The child goes with its mother," answered the Bailly firmly.




DURING ONE YEAR LATER

CHAPTER XL

The day that saw Guida's restitution in the Cohue Royale brought but
further trouble to Ranulph Delagarde.  The Chevalier had shown him the
lost register of St. Michael's, and with a heart less heavy, he left the
island once more.  Intending to join Detricand in the Vendee, he had
scarcely landed at St. Malo when he was seized by a press-gang and
carried aboard a French frigate commissioned to ravage the coasts of
British America.  He had stubbornly resisted the press, but had been
knocked on the head, and there was an end on it.

In vain he protested that he was an Englishman.  They laughed at him.
His French was perfect, his accent Norman, his was a Norman face--
evidence enough.  If he was not a citizen of France he should be, and he
must be.  Ranulph decided that it was needless to throw away his life.
It was better to make a show of submission.  So long as he had not to
fight British ships, he could afford to wait.  Time enough then for him
to take action.  When the chance came he would escape this bondage;
meanwhile remembering his four years' service with the artillery at
Elizabeth Castle, he asked to be made a gunner, and his request was
granted.

The Victoire sailed the seas battle-hungry, and presently appeased her
appetite among Dutch and Danish privateers.  Such excellent work did
Ranulph against the Dutchmen, that Richambeau, the captain, gave him a
gun for himself, and after they had fought the Danes made him a master-
gunner.  Of the largest gun on the Victoire Ranulph grew so fond that at
last he called her ma couzaine.

Days and weeks passed, until one morning came the cry of "Land!  Land!"
and once again Ranulph saw British soil--the tall cliffs of the peninsula
of Gaspe.  Gaspe--that was the ultima Thule to which Mattingley and
Carterette had gone.

Presently, as the Victoire came nearer to the coast, he could see a bay
and a great rock in the distance, and, as they bore in now, the rock
seemed to stretch out like a vast wall into the gulf.  As he stood
watching and leaning on ma couzaine, a sailor near him said that the bay
and the rock were called Perce.

Perce Bay--that was the exact point for which Elie Mattingley and
Carterette had sailed with Sebastian Alixandre.  How strange it was!  He
had bidden Carterette good-bye for ever, yet fate had now brought him to
the very spot whither she had gone.

The Rock of Perce was a wall, three hundred feet high, and the wall was
an island that had once been a long promontory like a battlement, jutting
out hundreds of yards into the gulf.  At one point it was pierced by an
archway.  It was almost sheer; its top was flat and level.  Upon the
sides there was no verdure; upon the top centuries had made a green
field.  The wild geese as they flew northward, myriad flocks of gulls,
gannets, cormorants, and all manner of fowl of the sea, had builded upon
the summit until it was rich with grass and shrubs.  The nations of the
air sent their legions here to bivouac, and the discord of a hundred
languages might be heard far out to sea, far in upon the land.  Millions
of the races of the air swarmed there; at times the air above was
darkened by clouds of them.  No fog-bell on a rock-bound coast might warn
mariners more ominously than these battalions of adventurers on the Perce
Rock.

No human being had ever mounted to this eyrie.  Generations of fishermen
had looked upon the yellowish-red limestone of the Perce Rock with a
valorous eye, but it would seem that not even the tiny clinging hoof of a
chamois or wild goat might find a foothold upon the straight sides of it.

Ranulph was roused out of the spell Perce cast over him by seeing the
British flag upon a building by the shore of the bay they were now
entering.  His heart gave a great bound.  Yes, it was the English flag
defiantly flying.  And more--there were two old 12 pounders being trained
on the French squadron.  For the first time in years a low laugh burst
from his lips.

"O mai grand doux," he said in the Jersey patois, "only one man in the
world would do that.  Only Elie Mattingley!"

At that moment, Mattingley now issued from a wooden fishing-shed with
Sebastian Alixandre and three others armed with muskets, and passed to
the little fort on which flew the British and Jersey flags.  Ranulph
heard a guffaw behind.  Richambeau, the captain, confronted him.

"That's a big splutter in a little pot, gunner," said he.  He put his
telescope to his eye.  "The Lord protect us," he cried, "they're going to
fight my ship!"  He laughed again till the tears came.  "Son of Peter,
but it is droll that--a farce au diable!  They have humour, these fisher-
folk, eh, gunner?"

"Mattingley will fight you just the same," answered Ranulph coolly.

"Oh ho, you know these people, my gunner?" asked Richambeau.

"All my life," answered Ranulph, "and, by your leave, I will tell you
how."

Not waiting for permission, after the manner of his country, he told
Richambeau of his Jersey birth and bringing up, and how he was the victim
of the pressgang.

"Very good," said Richambeau.  "You Jersey folk were once Frenchmen, and
now that you're French again, you shall do something for the flag.  You
see that 12-pounder yonder to the right?  Very well, dismount it.  Then
we'll send in a flag of truce, and parley with this Mattingley, for his
jests are worth attention and politeness.  There's a fellow at the gun--
no, he has gone.  Dismount the right-hand gun at one shot.  Ready now.
Get a good range."

The whole matter went through Ranulph's mind as the captain spoke.  If he
refused to fire, he would be strung up to the yardarm; if he fired and
missed, perhaps other gunners would fire, and once started they might
raze the fishing-post.  If he dismounted the gun, the matter would
probably remain only a jest, for such as yet Richambeau regarded it.

Ranulph ordered the tackle and breechings cast away, had off the apron,
pricked a cartridge, primed, bruised the priming, and covered the vent.
Then he took his range steadily, quietly.  There was a brisk wind blowing
from the south--he must allow for that; but the wind was stopped somewhat
in its course by the Perch Rock--he must allow for that.

All was ready.  Suddenly a girl came running round the corner of the
building.

It was Carterette.  She was making for the right-hand gun.  Ranulph
started, the hand that held the match trembled.

"Fire, you fool, or you'll kill the girl!" cried Richambeau.

Ranulph laid a hand on himself as it were.  Every nerve in his body
tingled, his legs trembled, but his eye was steady.  He took the sight
once more coolly, then blew on the match.  Now the girl was within thirty
feet of the gun.

He quickly blew on the match again, and fired.  When the smoke cleared
away he saw that the gun was dismounted, and not ten feet from it stood
Carterette looking at it dazedly.

He heard a laugh behind him.  There was Richambeau walking away,
telescope under arm, even as the other 12-pounder on shore replied
impudently to the gun he had fired.

"A good aim," he heard Richambeau say, jerking a finger backward towards
him.

Was it then?  said Ranulph to himself; was it indeed?  Ba su, it was the
last shot he would ever fire against aught English, here or elsewhere.

Presently he saw a boat drawing away with the flag of truce in the hands
of a sous-lieutenant.  His mind was made up; he would escape to-night.
His place was there beside his fellow-countrymen.  He motioned away the
men of the gun.  He would load ma couzaine himself for the last time.

As he sponged the gun he made his plans.  Swish-swash the sponge-staff
ran in and out--he would try to steal away at dog-watch.  He struck the
sponge smartly on ma couzaine's muzzle, cleansing it--he would have to
slide into the water like a rat and swim very softly to the shore.  He
reached for a fresh cartridge, and thrust it into the throat of the gun,
and as the seam was laid downwards he said to himself that he could swim
under water, if discovered as he left the Victoire.  As he unstopped the
touch-hole and tried with the priming-wire whether the cartridge was
home, he was stunned by a fresh thought.

Richambeau would send a squad of men to search for him, and if he was not
found they would probably raze the Post, or take its people prisoners.
As he put the apron carefully on ma couzaine, he determined that he could
not take refuge with the Mattingleys.  Neither would it do to make for
the woods of the interior, for still Richambeau might revenge himself on
the fishing-post.  What was to be done?  He turned his eyes helplessly on
Perce Rock.

As he looked, a new idea came to him.  If only he could get to the top of
that massive wall, not a hundred fleets could dislodge him.  One musket
could defeat the forlorn hope of any army.  Besides, if he took refuge on
the rock, there could be no grudge against Perce village or the
Mattingleys, and Richambeau would not injure them.

He eyed the wall closely.  The blazing sunshine showed it up in a hard
light, and he studied every square yard of it with a telescope.  At one
point the wall was not quite perpendicular.  There were also narrow
ledges, lumps of stone, natural steps and little pinnacles which the
fingers could grip and where man might rest.  Yes, he would try it.

It was the last quarter of the moon, and the neaptide was running low
when he let himself softly down into the water from the Victoire.  The
blanket tied on his head held food kept from his rations, with stone and
flint and other things.  He was not seen, and he dropped away quietly
astern, getting clear of the Victoire while the moon was partially
obscured.

Now it was a question when his desertion would be discovered.  All he
asked was two clear hours.  By that time the deed would be done, if he
could climb Perce Rock at all.

He touched bottom.  He was on Perce sands.  The blanket on his head was
scarcely wetted.  He wrung the water out of his clothes, and ran softly
up the shore.  Suddenly he was met by a cry of Qui va la!  and he stopped
short at the point of Elie Mattingley's bayonet.  "Hush!" said Ranulph,
and gave his name.

Mattingley nearly dropped his musket in surprise.  He soon knew the tale
of Ranulph's misfortunes, but he had not yet been told of his present
plans when there came a quick footstep, and Carterette was at her
father's side.  Unlike Mattingley, she did drop her musket at the sight
of Ranulph.  Her lips opened, but at first she could not speak--this was
more than she had ever dared hope for, since those dark days
in Jersey.  Ranulph here!  She pressed her hands to her heart to stop its
throbbing.

Presently she was trembling with excitement at the story of how Ranulph
had been pressed at St. Malo, and, all that came after until this very
day.

"Go along with Carterette," said Mattingley.  "Alixandre is at the house;
he'll help you away into the woods."

As Ranulph hurried away with Carterette, he told her his design.
Suddenly she stopped short, "Ranulph Delagarde," she said vehemently,
"you can't climb Perch Rock.  No one has ever done it, and you must not
try.  Oh, I know you are a great man, but you mustn't think you can do
this.  You will be safe where we shall hide you.  You shall not climb the
rock-ah no, ba su!"

He pointed towards the Post.  "They wouldn't leave a stick standing there
if you hid me.  No, I'm going to the top of the rock."

"Man doux terrible!" she said in sheer bewilderment, and then was
suddenly inspired.  At last her time had come.

"Pardingue," she said, clutching his arm, "if you go to the top of Perch
Rock, so will I!"

In spite of his anxiety he almost laughed.

"But see--but see," he said, and his voice dropped; "you couldn't stay up
there with me all alone, garcon Carterette.  And Richambeau would be
firing on you too!"

She was very angry, but she made no reply, and he continued quickly:

"I'll go straight to the rock now.  When they miss me there'll be a pot
boiling, you may believe.  If I get up," he added, "I'll let a string
down for a rope you must get for me.  Once on top they can't hurt me....
Eh ben, A bi'tot, gargon Carterette!"

"O my good!  O my good!" said the girl with a sudden change of mood.
"To think you have come like this, and perhaps--" But she dashed the
tears from her eyes, and bade him go on.

The tide was well out, the moon shining brightly.  Ranulph reached the
point where, if the rock was to be scaled at all, the ascent must be
made.  For a distance there was shelving where foothold might be had by a
fearless man with a steady head and sure balance.  After that came about
a hundred feet where he would have to draw himself up by juttings and
crevices hand over hand, where was no natural pathway.  Woe be to him if
head grew dizzy, foot slipped, or strength gave out; he would be broken
to pieces on the hard sand below.  That second stage once passed, the
ascent thence to the top would be easier; for though nearly as steep, it
had more ledges, and offered fair vantage to a man with a foot like a
mountain goat.  Ranulph had been aloft all weathers in his time, and his
toes were as strong as another man's foot, and surer.

He started.  The toes caught in crevices, held on to ledges, glued
themselves on to smooth surfaces; the knees clung like a rough-rider's to
a saddle; the big hands, when once they got a purchase, fastened like an
air-cup.

Slowly, slowly up, foot by foot, yard by yard, until one-third of the
distance was climbed.  The suspense and strain were immeasurable.  But he
struggled on and on, and at last reached a sort of flying pinnacle of
rock, like a hook for the shields of the gods.

Here he ventured to look below, expecting to see Carterette, but there
was only the white sand, and no sound save the long wash of the gulf.  He
drew a horn of arrack from his pocket and drank.  He had two hundred feet
more to climb, and the next hundred would be the great ordeal.

He started again.  This was travail indeed.  His rough fingers, his toes,
hard as horn almost, began bleeding.  Once or twice he swung quite clear
of the wall, hanging by his fingers to catch a surer foothold to right or
left, and just getting it sometimes by an inch or less.  The tension was
terrible.  His head seemed to swell and fill with blood: on the top it
throbbed till it was ready to burst.  His neck was aching horribly with
constant looking up, the skin of his knees was gone, his ankles bruised.
But he must keep on till he got to the top, or until he fell.

He was fighting on now in a kind of dream, quite apart from all usual
feelings of this world.  The earth itself seemed far away, and he was
toiling among vastnesses, himself a giant with colossal frame and huge,
sprawling limbs.  It was like a gruesome vision of the night, when the
body is an elusive, stupendous mass that falls into space after a
confused struggle with immensities.  It was all mechanical, vague, almost
numb, this effort to overcome a mountain.  Yet it was precise and hugely
expert too; for though there was a strange mist on the brain, the body
felt its way with a singular certainty, as might some molluscan dweller
of the sea, sensitive like a plant, intuitive like an animal.  Yet at
times it seemed that this vast body overcoming the mountain must let go
its hold and slide away into the darkness of the depths.

Now there was a strange convulsive shiver in every nerve--God have mercy,
the time was come!  .  .  .  No, not yet.  At the very instant when it
seemed the panting flesh and blood would be shaken off by the granite
force repelling it, the fingers, like long antennae, touched horns of
rock jutting out from ledges on the third escarpment of the wall.  Here
was the last point of the worst stage of the journey.  Slowly, heavily,
the body drew up to the shelf of limestone, and crouched in an inert
bundle.  There it lay for a long time.

While the long minutes went by, a voice kept calling up from below;
calling, calling, at first eagerly, then anxiously, then with terror.
By and by the bundle of life stirred, took shape, raised itself, and was
changed into a man again, a thinking, conscious being, who now understood
the meaning of this sound coming up from the earth below--or was it the
sea?  A human voice had at last pierced the awful exhaustion of the
deadly labour, the peril and strife, which had numbed the brain while the
body, in its instinct for existence, still clung to the rocky ledges.  It
had called the man back to earth--he was no longer a great animal, and
the rock a monster with skin and scales of stone.

"Ranulph!  Maitre Ranulph!  Ah, Ranulph!" called the voice.

Now he knew, and he answered down: "All right, all right, garche
Carterette!"

"Are you at the top?"

"No, but the rest is easy."

"Hurry, hurry, Ranulph.  If they should come before you reach the top!"

"I'll soon be there."

"Are you hurt, Ranulph?"

"No, but my fingers are in rags.  I am going now.  A bi'tot, Carterette!"

"Ranulph!"

"'Sh, 'sh, do not speak.  I am starting."

There was silence for what seemed hours to the girl below.  Foot by foot
the man climbed on, no less cautious because the ascent was easier, for
he was now weaker.  But he was on the monster's neck now, and soon he
should set his heel on it: he was not to be shaken off.

At last the victorious moment came.  Over a jutting ledge he drew himself
up by sheer strength and the rubber-like grip of his lacerated fingers,
and now he lay flat and breathless upon the ground.

How soft and cool it was!  This was long sweet grass touching his face,
making a couch like down for the battered, wearied body.  Surely such
travail had been more than mortal.  And what was this vast fluttering
over his head, this million-voiced discord round him, like the buffetings
and cries of spirits welcoming another to their torment?  He raised his
head and laughed in triumph.  These were the cormorants, gulls, and
gannets on the Perch Rock.

Legions of birds circled over him with cries so shrill that at first he
did not hear Carterette's voice calling up to him.  At last, however,
remembering, he leaned over the cliff and saw her standing in the
moonlight far below.

Her voice came up to him indistinctly because of the clatter of the
birds.  "Maitre Ranulph!  Ranulph!"  She could not see him, for this part
of the rock was in shadow.

"Ah bah, all right!" he said, and taking hold of one end of the twine he
had brought, he let the roll fall.  It dropped almost at Carterette's
feet.  She tied to the end of it three loose ropes she had brought from
the Post.  He drew them up quickly, tied them together firmly, and let
the great coil down.  Ranulph's bundle, a tent and many things Carterette
had brought were drawn up.

"Ranulph!  Ranulph!" came Carterette's voice again.

"Garcon Carterette!"

"You must help Sebastian Alixandre up," she said.

"Sebastian Alixandre--is he there?  Why does he want to come?"

"That is no matter," she called softly.  "He is coming.  He has the rope
round his waist.  Pull away!"  It was better, Ranulph thought to himself,
that he should be on Perch Rock alone, but the terrible strain had
bewildered him, and he could make no protest now.

"Don't start yet," he called down; "I'll pull when all's ready."

He fell back from the edge to a place in the grass where, tying the rope
round his body, and seating himself, he could brace his feet against a
ledge of rock.  Then he pulled on the rope.  It was round Carterette's
waist!

Carterette had told her falsehood without shame, for she was of those to
whom the end is more than the means.  She began climbing, and Ranulph
pulled steadily.  Twice he felt the rope suddenly jerk when she lost her
footing, but it came in evenly still, and he used a nose of rock as a
sort of winch.

The climber was nearly two-thirds of the way up when a cannon-shot boomed
out over the water, frightening again the vast covey of birds which
shrieked and honked till the air was a maelstrom of cries.  Then came
another cannon-shot.

Ranulph's desertion was discovered.  The fight was begun between a single
Jersey shipwright and a French war-ship.

His strength, however, could not last much longer.  Every muscle of his
body had been strained and tortured, and even this lighter task tried him
beyond endurance.  His legs stiffened against the ledge of rock, the
tension numbed his arms.  He wondered how near Alixandre was to the top.
Suddenly there was a pause, then a heavy jerk.  Love of God--the rope
was shooting through his fingers, his legs were giving way!  He gathered
himself together, and then with teeth, hands, and body rigid with
enormous effort, he pulled and pulled.  Now he could not see.  A mist
swam before his eyes.  Everything grew black, but he pulled on and on.

He never knew how the climber reached the top.  But when the mist cleared
away from his eyes, Carterette was bending over him, putting rum to his
lips.

"Carterette-garcon Carterette!" he murmured, amazed.  Then as the truth
burst upon him he shook his head in a troubled sort of way.

"What a cat I was!" said Carterette.  "What a wild cat I was to make you
haul me up!  It was bad for me with the rope round me, it must have been
awful for you, my poor esmanus--poor scarecrow Ranulph."

Scarecrow indeed he looked.  His clothes were nearly gone, his hair was
tossed and matted, his eyes bloodshot, his big hands like pieces of raw
meat, his feet covered with blood.

"My poor scarecrow!" she repeated, and she tenderly wiped the blood from
his face where his hands had touched it.  Meanwhile bugle-calls and cries
of command came up to them, and in the first light of morning they could
see French officers and sailors, Mattingley, Alixandre, and others,
hurrying to and fro.

When day came clear and bright, it was known that Carterette as well as
Ranulph had vanished.  Mattingley shook his head stoically, but
Richambeau on the Victoire was as keen to hunt down one Jersey-Englishman
as he had ever been to attack an English fleet.  More so, perhaps.

Meanwhile the birds kept up a wild turmoil and shrieking.  Never before
had any one heard them so clamorous.  More than once Mattingley had
looked at Perch Rock curiously, but whenever the thought of it as a
refuge came to him, he put it away.  No, it was impossible.

Yet, what was that?  Mattingley's heart thumped.  There were two people
on the lofty island wall--a man and a woman.  He caught' the arm of a
French officer near him.  "Look, look!" he said.  The officer raised his
glass.

"It's the gunner," he cried and handed the glass to the old man.

"It's Carterette," said Mattingley in a hoarse voice.  "But it's not
possible.  It's not possible," he added helplessly.  "Nobody was ever
there.  My God, look at it--look at it!"

It was a picture indeed.  A man and a woman were outlined against the
clear air, putting up a tent as calmly as though on a lawn, thousands of
birds wheeling over their heads, with querulous cries.

A few moments later, Elie Mattingley was being rowed swiftly to the
Victoire, where Richambeau was swearing viciously as he looked through
his telescope.  He also had recognised the gunner.

He was prepared to wipe out the fishing-post if Mattingley did not
produce Ranulph--well, "here was Ranulph duly produced and insultingly
setting up a tent on this sheer rock, with some snippet of the devil,"
said Richambeau, and defying a great French war-ship.  He would set his
gunners to work.  If he only had as good a marksman as Ranulph himself,
the deserter should drop at the first shot "death and the devil take his
impudent face!"

He was just about to give the order when Mattingley was brought to him.
The old man's story amazed him beyond measure.

"It is no man, then!" said Richambeau, when Mattingley had done.  "He
must be a damned fly to do it.  And the girl--sacre moi!  he drew her up
after him.  I'll have him down out of that though, or throw up my flag,"
he added, and turning fiercely, gave his orders.

For hours the Victoire bombarded the lonely rock from the north.  The
white tent was carried away, but the cannon-balls flew over or merely
battered the solid rock, the shells were thrown beyond, and no harm was
done.  But now and again the figure of Ranulph appeared, and a half-dozen
times he took aim with his musket at the French soldiers on the shore.
Twice his shots took effect; one man was wounded, and one killed.  Then
whole companies of marines returned a musketry fire at him, to no
purpose.  At his ease he hid himself in the long grass at the edge of the
cliff, and picked off two more men.

Here was a ridiculous thing: one man and a slip of a girl fighting and
defying a battle-ship.  The smoke of battle covered miles of the great
gulf.  Even the seabirds shrieked in ridicule.

This went on for three days at intervals.  With a fine chagrin Richambeau
and his men saw a bright camp-fire lighted on the rock, and knew that
Ranulph and the girl were cooking their meals in peace.  A flag-staff too
was set up, and a red cloth waved defiantly in the breeze.  At last
Richambeau, who had watched the whole business from the deck of the
Victoire, burst out laughing, and sent for Elie Mattingley.  "Come, I've
had enough," said Richambeau.

"There never was a wilder jest, and I'll not spoil the joke.  He has us
on his toasting-fork.  He shall have the honour of a flag of truce."

And so it was that the French battle-ship sent a flag of truce to the
foot of Perch Rock, and a French officer, calling up, gave his captain's
word of honour that Ranulph should suffer nothing at the hands of a
court-martial, and that he should be treated as an English prisoner of
war, not as a French deserter.

There was no court-martial.  After Ranulph, at Richambeau's command, had
told the tale of the ascent, the Frenchman said:

"No one but an Englishman could be fool enough to try such a thing, and
none but a fool could have had the luck to succeed.  But even a fool can
get a woman to follow him, and so this flyaway followed you, and--"

Carterette made for Richambeau as though to scratch his eyes out, but
Ranulph held her back.  "--And you are condemned, gunner," continued
Richambeau dryly, "to marry the said maid before sundown, or be carried
out to sea a prisoner of war."  So saying, he laughed, and bade them
begone to the wedding.

Ranulph left Richambeau's ship bewildered and perturbed.  For hours he
paced the shore, and at last his thoughts began to clear.  The new life
he had led during the last few months had brought many revelations.  He
had come to realise that there are several sorts of happiness, but that
all may be divided into two kinds: the happiness of doing good to
ourselves, and that of doing good to others.  It opened out clearly to
him now as he thought of Carterette in the light of Richambeau's coarse
jest.

For years he had known in a sort of way that Carterette preferred him to
any other man.  He knew now that she had remained single because of him.
For him her impatience had been patience, her fiery heart had spilled
itself in tenderness for his misfortunes.  She who had lightly tossed
lovers aside, her coquetry appeased, had to himself shown sincerity
without coquetry, loyalty without selfishness.  He knew well that she had
been his champion in dark days, that he had received far more from her
than he had ever given--even of friendship.  In his own absorbing love
for Guida Landresse, during long years he had been unconsciously blind to
a devotion which had lived on without hope, without repining, with
untiring cheerfulness.

In those three days spent on the top of the Perch Rock how blithe garcon
Carterette had been!  Danger had seemed nothing to her.  She had the
temper of a man in her real enjoyment of the desperate chances of life.
He had never seen her so buoyant; her animal spirits had never leapt so
high.  And yet, despite the boldness which had sent her to the top of
Perch Rock with him, there had been in her whole demeanour a frank
modesty free from self-consciousness.  She could think for herself, she
was sure of herself, and she would go to the ends of the earth for him.
Surely he had not earned such friendship, such affection.

He recalled how, the night before, as he sat by their little camp-fire,
she had come and touched him on the shoulder, and, looking down at him,
said:

"I feel as if I was beginning my life all over again, don't you, Maitre
Ranulph?"

Her black eyes had been fixed on his, and the fire in them was as bright
and full of health and truth as the fire at his feet.

And he had answered her: "I think I feel that too, garcon Carterette."

To which she had replied: "It isn't hard to forget here--not so very
hard, is it?"

She did not mean Guida, nor what he had felt for Guida, but rather the
misery of the past.  He had nodded his head in reply, but had not spoken;
and she, with a quick: "A bi'tot," had taken her blanket and gone to that
portion of the rock set apart for her own.  Then he had sat by the fire
thinking through the long hours of night until the sun rose.  That day
Richambeau had sent his flag of truce, and the end of their stay on Perch
Rock was come.

Yes, he would marry Carterette.  Yet he was not disloyal, even in memory.
What had belonged to Guida belonged to her for ever, belonged to a past
life with which henceforth he should have naught to do.  What had sprung
up in his heart for Carterette belonged to the new life.  In this new
land there was work to do--what might he not accomplish here?  He
realised that within one life a man may still live several lives, each
loyal and honest after its kind.  A fate stronger than himself had
brought him here; and here he would stay with fate.  It had brought him
to Carterette, and who could tell what good and contentment might not yet
come to him, and how much to her!

That evening he went to Carterette and asked her to be his wife.  She
turned pale, and, looking up into his eyes with a kind of fear, she said
brokenly:

"It's not because you feel you must?  It's not because you know I love
you, Ranulph--is it?  It's not for that alone?"

"It is because I want you, garcon Carterette," he answered tenderly,
"because life will be nothing without you."

"I am so happy--par made, I am so happy!" she answered, and she hid her
face on his breast.




CHAPTER XLI

Detricand, Prince of Vaufontaine, was no longer in the Vendee.  The whole
of Brittany was in the hands of the victorious Hoche, the peasants were
disbanded, and his work for a time at least was done.

On the same day of that momentous scene in the Cohue Royale when Guida
was vindicated, Detricand had carried to Granville the Comtesse
Chantavoine, who presently was passed over to the loving care of her
kinsman General Grandjon-Larisse.  This done, he proceeded to England.

From London he communicated with Grandjon-Larisse, who applied himself
to secure from the Directory leave for the Chouan chieftain to return to
France, with amnesty for his past "rebellion."  This was got at last
through the influence of young Bonaparte himself.  Detricand was free now
to proceed against Philip.

He straightway devoted himself to a thing conceived on the day that Guida
was restored to her rightful status as a wife.  His purpose now was to
wrest from Philip the duchy of Bercy.  Philip was heir by adoption only,
and the inheritance had been secured at the last by help of a lie--surely
his was a righteous cause!

His motives had not their origin in hatred of Philip alone, nor in desire
for honours and estates for himself, nor in racial antagonism, for had he
not been allied with England in this war against the Government?  He
hated Philip the man, but he hated still more Philip the usurper who had
brought shame to the escutcheon of Bercy.  There was also at work another
and deeper design to be shown in good time.  Philip had retired from the
English navy, and gone back to his duchy of Bercy.  Here he threw himself
into the struggle with the Austrians against the French.  Received with
enthusiasm by the people, who as yet knew little or nothing of the doings
in the Cohue Royale, he now took over command of the army and proved
himself almost as able in the field as he had been at sea.  Of these
things Detricand knew, and knew also that the lines were closing in round
the duchy; that one day soon Bonaparte would send a force which should
strangle the little army and its Austrian allies.  The game then would be
another step nearer the end.  Free to move at will, he visited the Courts
of Prussia, Russia, Spain, Italy, and Austria, and laid before them his
claims to the duchy, urging an insistence on its neutrality, and a trial
of his cause against Philip.  Ceaselessly, adroitly, with persistence and
power, he toiled towards his end, the way made easier by tales told of
his prowess in the Vendee.  He had offers without number to take service
in foreign armies, but he was not to be tempted.  Gossip of the Courts
said that there was some strange romance behind this tireless pursuit of
an inheritance, but he paid no heed.  If at last there crept over Europe
wonderful tales of Detricand's past life in Jersey, of the real Duchesse
de Bercy, and of the new Prince of Vaufontaine, Detricand did not, or
feigned not to, hear them; and the Comtesse Chantavoine had disappeared
from public knowledge.  The few who guessed his romance were puzzled to
understand his cause: for if he dispossessed Philip, Guida must also be
dispossessed.  This, certainly, was not lover-like or friendly.

But Detricand was not at all puzzled; his mind and purpose were clear.
Guida should come to no injury through him--Guida who, as they left the
Cohue Royale that day of days, had turned on him a look of heavenly trust
and gratitude; who, in the midst of her own great happenings, found time
to tell him by a word how well she knew he had kept his promise to her,
even beyond belief.  Justice for her was now the supreme and immediate
object of his life.  There were others ready also to care for France, to
fight for her, to die for her, to struggle towards the hour when the King
should come to his own; but there was only one man in the world who could
achieve Guida's full justification, and that was himself, Detricand of
Vaufontaine.

He was glad to turn to the Chevalier's letters from Jersey.  It was from
the Chevalier's lips he had learned the whole course of Guida's life
during the four years of his absence from the island.  It was the
Chevalier who drew for him pictures of Guida in her new home, none
other than the house of Elie Mattingley, which the Royal Court having
confiscated now handed over to her as an act of homage.  The little world
of Jersey no longer pointed the finger of scorn at Guida Landresse de
Landresse, but bent the knee to Princess Guida d'Avranche.

Detricand wrote many letters to the Chevalier, and they with their
cheerful and humorous allusions were read aloud to Guida--all save one
concerning Philip.  Writing of himself to the Chevalier on one occasion,
he laid bare with a merciless honesty his nature and his career.
Concerning neither had he any illusions.

     I do not mistake myself, Chevalier [he wrote], nor these late doings
     of mine.  What credit shall I take to myself for coming to place and
     some little fame?  Everything has been with me: the chance of
     inheritance, the glory of a cause as hopeless as splendid, and more
     splendid because hopeless; and the luck of him who loads the dice--
     for all my old comrades, the better men, are dead, and I, the least
     of them all, remain, having even outlived the cause.  What praise
     shall I take for this?  None--from all decent fellows of the earth,
     none at all.  It is merely laughable that I should be left, the
     monument of a sacred loyalty greater than the world has ever known.

     I have no claims--But let me draw the picture, dear Chevalier.  Here
     was a discredited, dissolute fellow whose life was worth a pin to
     nobody.  Tired of the husks and the swine, and all his follies grown
     stale by over-use, he takes the advice of a good gentleman, and
     joins the standard of work and sacrifice.  What greater luxury shall
     man ask?  If this be not running the full scale of life's enjoyment,
     pray you what is?  The world loves contrasts.  The deep-dyed sinner
     raising the standard of piety is picturesque.  If, charmed by his
     own new virtues, he is constant in his enthusiasm, behold a St.
     Augustine!  Everything is with the returned prodigal--the more so if
     he be of the notorious Vaufontaines, who were ever saints turned
     sinners, or sinners turned saints.

     Tell me, my good friend, where is room for pride in me?  I am
     getting far more out of life than I deserve; it is not well that you
     and others should think better of me than I do of myself.  I do not
     pretend that I dislike it, it is as balm to me.  But it would seem
     that the world is monstrously unjust.  One day when I'm grown old--I
     cannot imagine what else Fate has spared me for--I shall write the
     Diary of a Sinner, the whole truth.  I shall tell how when my
     peasant fighters were kneeling round me praying for success, even
     thanking God for me, I was smiling in my glove--in scorn of myself,
     not of them, Chevalier, no,--no, not of them!  The peasant's is the
     true greatness.  Everything is with the aristocrat; he has to kick
     the great chances from his path; but the peasant must go hunting
     them in peril.  Hardly snatching sustenance from Fate, the peasant
     fights into greatness; the aristocrat may only win to it by
     rejecting Fate's luxuries.  The peasant never escapes the austere
     teaching of hard experience, the aristocrat the languor of good
     fortune.  There is the peasant and there am I.  Voila! enough of
     Detricand of Vaufontaine.  .  .  .  The Princess Guida and the
     child, are they--

So the letter ran, and the Chevalier read it aloud to Guida up to the
point where her name was writ.  Afterwards Guida would sit and think of
what Detricand had said, and of the honesty of nature that never allowed
him to deceive himself.  It pleased her also to think she had in some
small way helped a man to the rehabilitation of his life.  He had said
that she had helped him, and she believed him; he had proved the
soundness of his aims and ambitions; his career was in the world's mouth.

The one letter the Chevalier did not read to Guida referred to Philip.
In it Detricand begged the Chevalier to hold himself in readiness to
proceed at a day's notice to Paris.

So it was that when, after months of waiting, the Chevalier suddenly
left St. Heliers to join Detricand, Guida did not know the object of his
journey.  All she knew was that he had leave from the Directory to visit
Paris.  Imagining this to mean some good fortune for him, with a light
heart she sent him off in charge of Jean Touzel, who took him to St. Malo
in the Hardi Biaou, and saw him safely into the hands of an escort from
Detricand.




CHAPTER XLII

Three days later there was opened in one of the chambers of the Emperor's
palace at Vienna a Congress of four nations--Prussia, Russia, Austria,
and Sardinia.  Detricand's labours had achieved this result at last.
Grandjon-Larisse, his old enemy in battle, now his personal friend and
colleague in this business, had influenced Napoleon, and the Directory
through him, to respect the neutrality of the duchy of Bercy, for which
the four nations of this Congress declared.  Philip himself little knew
whose hand had secured the neutrality until summoned to appear at the
Congress, to defend his rights to the title and the duchy against those
of Detricand Prince of Vaufontaine.  Had he known that Detricand was
behind it all he would have fought on to the last gasp of power and died
on the battle-field.  He realised now that such a fate was not for him--
that he must fight, not on the field of battle like a prince, but in a
Court of Nations like a doubtful claimant of sovereign honours.

His whole story had become known in the duchy, and though it begot no
feeling against him in war-time, now that Bercy was in a neutral zone of
peace there was much talk of the wrongs of Guida and the Countess
Chantavoine.  He became moody and saturnine, and saw few of his subjects
save the old Governor-General and his whilom enemy, now his friend, Count
Carignan Damour.  That at last he should choose to accompany him to
Vienna the man who had been his foe during the lifetime of the old Duke,
seemed incomprehensible.  Yet, to all appearance, Damour was now Philip's
zealous adherent.  He came frankly repenting his old enmity, and though
Philip did not quite believe him, some perverse temper, some obliquity of
vision which overtakes the ablest minds at times, made him almost eagerly
accept his new partisan.  One thing Philip knew: Damour had no love for
Detricand, who indeed had lately sent him word that for his work in
sending Fouche's men to attempt his capture in Bercy, he would have him
shot, if the Court of Nations upheld his rights to the duchy.  Damour was
able, even if Damour was not honest.  Damour, the able, the implacable
and malignant, should accompany him to Vienna.

The opening ceremony of the Congress was simple, but it was made notable
by the presence of the Emperor of Austria, who addressed a few words of
welcome to the envoys, to Philip, and, very pointedly, to the
representative of the French Nation, the aged Duc de Mauban, who, while
taking no active part in the Congress, was present by request of the
Directory.  The Duke's long residence in Vienna and freedom from share in
the civil war in France had been factors in the choice of him when the
name was submitted to the Directory by General Grandjon-Larisse, upon
whom in turn it had been urged by Detricand.

The Duc de Mauban was the most marked figure of the Court, the Emperor
not excepted.  Clean shaven, with snowy linen and lace, his own natural
hair, silver white, tied in a queue behind, he had large eloquent
wondering eyes that seemed always looking, looking beyond the thing he
saw.  At first sight of him at his court, the Emperor had said: "The
stars have frightened him."  No fanciful supposition, for the Duc de
Mauban was as well known an astronomer as student of history and
philanthropist.

When the Emperor mentioned de Mauban's name Philip wondered where he had
heard it before.  Something in the sound of it was associated with his
past, he knew not how.  He had a curious feeling too that those
deliberate, searching dark eyes saw the end of this fight, this battle of
the strong.  The face fascinated him, though it awed him.  He admired it,
even as he detested the ardent strength of Detricand's face, where the
wrinkles of dissipation had given way to the bronzed carven look of the
war-beaten soldier.

It was fair battle between these two, and there was enough hatred in the
heart of each to make the fight deadly.  He knew--and he had known since
that day, years ago, in the Place du Vier Prison--that Detricand loved
the girl whom he himself had married and dishonoured.  He felt also that
Detricand was making this claim to the duchy more out of vengeance than
from desire to secure the title for himself.  He read the whole deep
scheme: how Detricand had laid his mine at every Court in Europe to bring
him to this pass.

For hours Philip's witnesses were examined, among them the officers of
his duchy and Count Carignan Damour.  The physician of the old Duke of
Bercy was examined, and the evidence was with Philip.  The testimony of
Dalbarade, the French ex-Minister of Marine, was read and considered.
Philip's story up to the point of the formal signature by the old Duke
was straightforward and clear.  So far the Court was in his favour.

Detricand, as natural heir of the duchy, combated each step in the
proceedings from the stand-point of legality, of the Duke's fatuity
concerning Philip, and his personal hatred of the House of Vaufontaine.
On the third day, when the Congress would give its decision, Detricand
brought the Chevalier to the palace.  At the opening of the sitting he
requested that Damour be examined again.  The Count was asked what
question had been put to Philip immediately before the deeds of
inheritance were signed.  It was useless for Damour to evade the point,
for there were other officers of the duchy present who could have told
the truth.  Yet this truth, of itself, need not ruin Philip.  It was no
phenomenon for a prince to have one wife unknown, and, coming to the
throne, to take to himself another more exalted.

Detricand was hoping that the nice legal sense of mine and thine should
be suddenly weighted in his favour by a prepared tour de force.  The
sympathies of the Congress were largely with himself, for he was of the
order of the nobility, and Philip's descent must be traced through
centuries of yeoman blood; yet there was the deliberate adoption by the
Duke to face, with the formal assent of the States of Bercy, but little
lessened in value by the fact that the French Government had sent its
emissaries to Bercy to protest against it.  The Court had come to a point
where decision upon the exact legal merits of the case was difficult.

After Damour had testified to the question the Duke asked Philip when
signing the deeds at Bercy, Detricand begged leave to introduce another
witness, and brought in the Chevalier.  Now he made his great appeal.
Simply, powerfully, he told the story of Philip's secret marriage with
Guida, and of all that came after, up to the scene in the Cohue Royale
when the marriage was proved and the child given back to Guida; when the
Countess Chantavoine, turning from Philip, acknowledged to Guida the
justice of her claim.  He drove home the truth with bare unvarnished
power--the wrong to Guida, the wrong to the Countess, the wrong to the
Dukedom of Bercy, to that honour which should belong to those in high
estate.  Then at the last he told them who Guida was: no peasant girl,
but the granddaughter of the Sieur Larchant de Mauprat of de Mauprats of
Chambery: the granddaughter of an exile indeed, but of the noblest blood
of France.

The old Duc de Mauban fixed his look on him intently, and as the story
proceeded his hand grasped the table before him in strong emotion.  When
at last Detricand turned to the Chevalier and asked him to bear witness
to the truth of what he had said, the Duke, in agitation, whispered to
the President.

All that Detricand had said moved the Court powerfully, but when the
withered little flower of a man, the Chevalier, told in quaint brief
sentences the story of the Sieur de Mauprat, his sufferings, his exile,
and the nobility of his family, which had indeed, far back, come of royal
stock, and then at last of Guida and the child, more than one member of
the Court turned his head away with misty eyes.

It remained for the Duc de Mauban to speak the word which hastened and
compelled the end.  Rising in his place, he addressed to the Court a few
words of apology, inasmuch as he was without real power there, and then
he turned to the Chevalier.

"Monsieur le chevalier," said he, "I had the honour to know you in
somewhat better days for both of us.  You will allow me to greet you here
with my profound respect.  The Sieur Larchant de Mauprat"--he turned to
the President, his voice became louder--"the Sieur de Mauprat was my
friend.  He was with me upon the day I married the Duchess Guidabaldine.
Trouble, exile came to him.  Years passed, and at last in Jersey I saw
him again.  It was the very day his grandchild was born.  The name given
to her was Guidabaldine--the name of the Duchese de Mauban.  She was
Guidabaldine Landresse de Landresse, she is my godchild.  There is no
better blood in France than that of the de Mauprats of Chambery, and the
grandchild of my friend, her father being also of good Norman blood, was
worthy to be the wife of any prince in Europe.  I speak in the name of
our order, I speak for Frenchmen, I speak for France.  If Detricand,
Prince of Vaufontaine, be not secured in his right of succession to the
dukedom of Bercy, France will not cease to protest till protest hath done
its work.  From France the duchy of Bercy came.  It was the gift of a
French king to a Frenchman, and she hath some claims upon the courtesy of
the nations."

For a moment after he took his seat there was absolute silence.  Then the
President wrote upon a paper before him, and it was passed to each member
of the Court sitting with him.  For a moment longer there was nothing
heard save the scratching of a quill.  Philip recalled that day at Bercy
when the Duke stooped and signed his name upon the deed of adoption and
succession three times-three fateful times.

At last the President, rising in his place, read the pronouncement of the
Court: that Detricand, Prince of Vaufontaine, be declared true inheritor
of the duchy of Bercy, the nations represented here confirming him in his
title.

The President having spoken, Philip rose, and, bowing to the Congress
with dignity and composure, left the chamber with Count Carignan Damour.

As he passed from the portico into the grounds of the palace, a figure
came suddenly from behind a pillar and touched him on the arm.  He turned
quickly, and received upon the face a blow from a glove.

The owner of the glove was General Grandjon-Larisse.




CHAPTER XLIII

"You understand, monsieur?" said Grandjon-Larisse.

"Perfectly--and without the glove, monsieur le general," answered Philip
quietly.  "Where shall my seconds wait upon you?"  As he spoke he turned
with a slight gesture towards Damour.

"In Paris, monsieur, if it please you."

"I should have preferred it here, monsieur le general--but Paris, if it
is your choice."

"At 22, Rue de Mazarin, monsieur."  Then he made an elaborate bow to
Philip.  "I bid you good-day, monsieur."

"Monseigneur, not monsieur," Philip corrected.  "They may deprive me of my
duchy, but I am still Prince Philip d'Avranche.  I may not be robbed of
my adoption."

There was something so steady, so infrangible in Philip's composure now,
that Grandjon-Larisse, who had come to challenge a great adventurer, a
marauder of honour, found his furious contempt checked by some integral
power resisting disdain.  He intended to kill Philip--he was one of the
most expert swordsmen in France--yet he was constrained to respect a
composure not sangfroid and a firmness in misfortune not bravado.  Philip
was still the man who had valiantly commanded men; who had held of the
high places of the earth.  In whatever adventurous blood his purposes had
been conceived, or his doubtful plans accomplished, he was still,
stripped of power, a man to be reckoned with: resolute in his course once
set upon, and impulsive towards good as towards evil.  He was never so
much worth respect as when, a dispossessed sovereign with an empty title,
discountenanced by his order, disbarred his profession, he held himself
ready to take whatever penalty now came.

In the presence of General Grandjon-Larisse, with whom was the might of
righteous vengeance, he was the more distinguished figure.  To Philip now
there came the cold quiet of the sinner, great enough to rise above
physical fear, proud enough to say to the world: "Come, I pay the debt I
owe.  We are quits.  You have no favours to give, and I none to take.
You have no pardon to grant, and I none to ask."

At parting Grandjon-Larisse bowed to Philip with great politeness, and
said: "In Paris then, monsieur le prince."

Philip bowed his head in assent.

When they met again, it was at the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne near
the Maillot gate.

It was a damp grey morning immediately before sunrise, and at first there
was scarce light enough for the combatants to see each other perfectly,
but both were eager and would not delay.

As they came on guard the sun rose.  Philip, where he stood, was full in
its light.  He took no heed, and they engaged at once.  After a few
passes Grandjon-Larisse said: "You are in the light, monseigneur; the sun
shines full upon you," and he pointed to the shade of a wall near by.
"It is darker there."

"One of us must certainly be in the dark-soon," answered Philip grimly,
but he removed to the wall.  From the first Philip took the offensive.
He was more active, and he was quicker and lighter of fence than his
antagonist.  But Grandjon-Larisse had the surer eye, and was invincibly
certain of hand and strong of wrist.  At length Philip wounded his
opponent slightly in the left breast, and the seconds came forward to
declare that honour was satisfied.  But neither would listen or heed;
their purpose was fixed to fight to the death.  They engaged again, and
almost at once the Frenchman was slightly wounded in the wrist.  Suddenly
taking the offensive and lunging freely, Grandjon-Larisse drove Philip,
now heated and less wary, backwards upon the wall.  At last, by a
dexterous feint, he beat aside Philip's guard and drove the sword through
his right breast at one fierce lunge.

With a moan Philip swayed and fell forward into the arms of Damour, still
grasping his weapon.  Grandjon-Larisse stooped to the injured man.
Unloosing his fingers from the sword, Philip stretched up a hand to his
enemy.

"I am hurt to death," he said.  "Permit my compliments to the best
swordsman I have ever known."  Then with a touch of sorry humour he
added: "You cannot doubt their sincerity."

Grandjon-Larisse was turning away when Philip called him back.  "Will you
carry my profound regret to the Countess Chantavoine?" he whispered.
"Say that it lies with her whether Heaven pardon me."

Grandjon-Larisse hesitated an instant, then answered:

"Those who are in heaven, monseigneur, know best what Heaven may do."

Philip's pale face took on a look of agony.  "She is dead--she is dead!"
he gasped.

Grandjon-Larisse inclined his head, then after a moment, gravely said:

"What did you think was left for a woman--for a Chantavoine?  It is not
the broken heart that kills, but broken pride, monseigneur."

So saying, he bowed again to Philip and turned upon his heel.




CHAPTER XLIV

Philip lay on a bed in the unostentatious lodging in the Rue de Vaugirard
where Damour had brought him.  The surgeon had pronounced the wound
mortal, giving him but a few hours to live.  For long after he was gone
Philip was silent, but at length he said "You heard what Grandjon-Larisse
said--It is broken pride that kills, Damour."  Then he asked for pen,
ink, and paper.  They were brought to him.  He tried the pen upon the
paper, but faintness suddenly seized him, and he fell back unconscious.

When he came to himself he was alone in the room.  It was cold and
cheerless--no fire on the hearth, no light save that flaring from a lamp
in the street outside his window.  He rang the bell at his hand.  No one
answered.  He called aloud: "Damour!  Damour!"

Damour was far beyond earshot.  He had bethought him that now his place
was in Bercy, where he might gather up what fragments of good fortune
remained, what of Philip's valuables might be secured.  Ere he had fallen
back insensible, Philip, in trying the pen, had written his own name on a
piece of paper.  Above this Damour wrote for himself an order upon the
chamberlain of Bercy to enter upon Philip's private apartments in the
castle; and thither he was fleeing as Philip lay dying in the dark room
of the house in the Rue de Vaugirard.

The woman of the house, to whose care Philip was passed over by Damour,
had tired of watching, and had gone to spend one of his gold pieces for
supper with her friends.

Meanwhile in the dark comfortless room, the light from without flickering
upon his blanched face, Philip was alone with himself, with memory, and
with death.  As he lay gasping, a voice seemed to ring through the silent
room, repeating the same words again and again--and the voice was his own
voice.  It was himself--some other outside self of him--saying, in
tireless repetition: "May I die a black, dishonourable death, abandoned
and alone, if ever I deceive you.  I should deserve that if I deceived
you, Guida!...."  "A black, dishonourable death, abandoned and alone": it
was like some horrible dirge chanting in his ear.

Pictures flashed before his eyes, strange imaginings.  Now he was passing
through dark corridors, and the stone floor beneath was cold--so cold!
He was going to some gruesome death, and monks with voices like his own
voice were intoning: "Abandoned and alone.  Alone--alone--abandoned and
alone."  .  .  .  And now he was fighting, fighting on board the
Araminta.  There was the roar of the great guns, the screaming of the
carronade slides, the rattle of musketry, the groans of the dying, the
shouts of his victorious sailors, the crash of the main-mast as it fell
upon the bulwarks.  Then the swift sissing ripple of water, the thud of
the Araminta as she struck, and the cold chill of the seas as she went
down.  How cold was the sea--ah, how it chilled every nerve and tissue of
his body!

He roused to consciousness again.  Here was still the blank cheerless
room, the empty house, the lamplight flaring through the window upon his
stricken face, upon the dark walls, upon the white paper lying on the
table beside him.

Paper--that was it--he must write, he must write while he had strength.
With the last courageous effort of life, his strenuous will forcing the
declining powers into obedience for a final combat, he drew the paper
near, and began to write.  The light flickered, wavered, he could just
see the letters that he formed--no more.

     Guida [he began], on the Ecrehos I said to you: "If I deceive you
     may I die a black, dishonourable death, abandoned and alone!"  It
     has all come true.  You were right, always right, and I was always
     wrong.  I never started fair with myself or with the world.  I was
     always in too great a hurry; I was too ambitious, Guida.  Ambition
     has killed me, and it has killed her--the Comtesse.  She is gone.
     What was it he said--if I could but remember what Grandjon-Larisse
     said--ah yes, yes!--after he had given me my death-wound, he said:
     "It is not the broken heart that kills, but broken pride."  There is
     the truth.  She is in her grave, and I am going out into the dark.

He lay back exhausted for a moment, in desperate estate.  The body was
fighting hard that the spirit might confess itself before the vital spark
died down for ever.  Seizing a glass of cordial near, he drank of it.
The broken figure in its mortal defeat roused itself again, leaned over
the paper, and a shaking hand traced on the brief piteous record of a
life.

     I climbed too fast.  Things dazzled me.  I thought too much of
     myself--myself, myself was everything always; and myself has killed
     me.  In wanton haste I came to be admiral and sovereign duke, and it
     has all come to nothing--nothing.  I wronged you, I denied you,
     there was the cause of all.  There is no one to watch with me now to
     the one moment of life that counts.  In this hour the clock of time
     fills all the space between earth and heaven.  It will strike soon--
     the awful clock.  It will soon strike twelve: and then it will be
     twelve of the clock for me always--always.

     I know you never wanted revenge on me, Guida, but still you have it
     here.  My life is no more now than vraic upon a rock.  I cling, I
     cling, but that is all, and the waves break over me.  I am no longer
     an admiral, I am no more a duke--I am nothing.  It is all done.  Of
     no account with men I am going to my judgment with God.  But you
     remain, and you are Princess Philip d'Avranche, and your son--your
     son--will be Prince Guilbert d'Avranche.  But I can leave him
     naught, neither estates nor power.  There is little honour in the
     title now.  So it may be you will not use it.  But you will have a
     new life: with my death happiness may begin again for you.  That
     thought makes death easier.  I was never worthy of you, never.  I
     understand myself now, and I know that you have read me all these
     years, read me through and through.  The letter you wrote me, never
     a day or night has passed but, one way or another, it has come home
     to me.

There was a footfall outside his window.  A roysterer went by in the
light of the flaring lamp.  He was singing a ribald song.  A dog ran
barking at his heels.  The reveller turned, drew his sword, and ran the
dog through, then staggered on with his song.  Philip shuddered, and with
a supreme effort bent to the table again, and wrote on.

     You were right: you were my star, and I was so blind with
     selfishness and vanity I could not see.  I am speaking the truth to
     you now, Guida.  I believe I might have been a great man if I had
     thought less of myself and more of others, more of you.  Greatness,
     I was mad for that, and my madness has brought me to this desolate
     end--alone.  Go tell Maitresse Aimable that she too was a good
     prophet.  Tell her that, as she foresaw, I called your name in
     death, and you did not come.  One thing before all: teach your boy
     never to try to be great, but always to live well and to be just.
     Teach him too that the world means better by him than he thinks, and
     that he must never treat it as his foe; he must not try to force its
     benefits and rewards.  He must not approach it like the highwayman.
     Tell him never to flatter.  That is the worst fault in a gentleman,
     for flattery makes false friends and the flatterer himself false.
     Tell him that good address is for ease and courtesy of life, but it
     must not be used to one's secret advantage  as I have used mine to
     mortal undoing.  If ever Guilbert be in great temptation, tell him
     his father's story, and read him these words to you, written, as you
     see, with the cramped fingers of death.

He could scarcely hold the pen now, and his eyes were growing dim.

     .  .  .  I am come to the end of my strength.  I thought I loved
     you, Guida, but I know now that it was not love--not real love.  Yet
     it was all a twisted manhood had to give.  There are some things of
     mine that you will keep for your son, if you forgive me dead whom
     you despised living.  Detricand Duke of Bercy will deal honourably
     by you.  All that is mine at the Castle of Bercy he will secure to
     you.  Tell him I have written it so; though he will do it of
     himself, I know.  He is a great man.  As I have gone downwards he
     has come upwards.  There has been a star in his sky too.  I know it,
     I know it, Guida, and he--he is not blind.  The light is going, I
     cannot see.  I can only--

He struggled fiercely for breath, but suddenly collapsed upon the table,
and his head fell forward upon the paper; one cheek lying in the wet ink
of his last written words, the other, cold and stark, turned to the
window.  The light from the lamp without flickered on it in gruesome
sportiveness.  The eyes stared and stared from the little dark room out
into the world.  But they did not see.

The night wore on.  At last came a knocking, knocking at the door-tap!
tap!  tap!  But he did not hear.  A moment of silence, and again came a
knocking--knocking--knocking .  .  .  !




CHAPTER XLV

The white and red flag of Jersey was flying half-mast from the Cohue
Royale, and the bell of the parish church was tolling.  It was Saturday,
but little business was being done in the Vier Marchi.  Chattering people
were gathered at familiar points, and at the foot of La Pyramide a large
group surrounded two sailor-men just come from Gaspe, bringing news of
adventuring Jersiais--Elie Mattingley, Carterette and Ranulph Delagarde.
This audience quickly grew, for word was being passed on from one little
group to another.  So keen was interest in the story told by the home-
coming sailors, that the great event which had brought them to the Vier
Marchi was, for the moment, almost neglected.

Presently, however, a cannon-shot, then another, and another, roused the
people to remembrance.  The funeral cortege of Admiral Prince Philip
d'Avranche was about to leave the Cohue Royale, and every eye was turned
to the marines and sailors lining the road from the court-house to the
church.

The Isle of Jersey, ever stubbornly loyal to its own--even those whom the
outside world contemned or cast aside--jealous of its dignity even with
the dead, had come to bury Philip d'Avranche with all good ceremony.
There had been abatements to his honour, but he had been a strong man and
he had done strong things, and he was a Jerseyman born, a Norman of the
Normans.  The Royal Court had judged between him and Guida, doing tardy
justice to her, but of him they had ever been proud; and where conscience
condemned here, vanity commended there.  In any event they reserved the
right, independent of all non-Jersiais, to do what they chose with their
dead.

For what Philip had been as an admiral they would do his body reverence
now; for what he had done as a man, that belonged to another tribunal.
It had been proposed by the Admiral of the station to bury him from his
old ship, the Imperturbable, but the Royal Court made its claim, and so
his body had lain in state in the Cohue Royale.  The Admiral joined hands
with the island authorities.  In both cases it was a dogged loyalty.  The
sailors of England knew Philip d'Avranche as a fighter, even as the Royal
Court knew him as a famous and dominant Jerseyman.  A battle-ship is a
world of its own, and Jersey is a world of its own.  They neither knew
nor cared for the comment of the world without; or, knowing, refused to
consider it.

When the body of Philip was carried from the Cohue Royale signals were
made to the Imperturbable in the tide-way.  From all her ships in company
forty guns were fired funeral-wise and the flags were struck halfmast.

Slowly the cortege uncoiled itself to one long unbroken line from the
steps of the Cohue Royale to the porch of the church.  The Jurats in
their red robes, the officers, sailors, and marines, added colour to the
pageant.  The coffin was covered by the flag of Jersey with the arms of
William the Conqueror in the canton.  Of the crowd some were curious,
some stoical; some wept, some essayed philosophy.

"Et ben," said one, "he was a brave admiral!"

"Bravery was his trade," answered another: "act like a sheep and you'll
be eaten by the wolf."

"It was a bad business about her that was Guida Landresse," remarked a
third.

"Every man knows himself, God knows all men," snuffled the fanatical
barber who had once delivered a sermon from the Pompe des Brigands.

"He made things lively while he lived, ba su!" droned the jailer of the
Vier Prison.  "But he has folded sails now."

"Ma fe, yes, he sleeps like a porpoise now, and white as a wax he looked
up there in the Cohue Royale," put in a centenier standing by.

A voice came shrilly over the head of the centenier.  "As white as you'll
look yellow one day, bat'd'lagoule!  Yellow and green, oui-gia--yellow
like a bad apple, and cowardly green as a leek."  This was Manon Moignard
the witch.

"Man doux d'la vie, where's the Master of Burials?" babbled the jailer.
"The apprentice does the obs'quies to-day."

"The Master's sick of a squinzy," grunted the centenier.  "So hatchet-
face and bundle-o'-nails there brings dust to dust, amen."

All turned now to the Undertaker's Apprentice, a grim, saturnine figure
with his grey face, protuberant eyes, and obsequious solemnity, in which
lurked a callous smile.  The burial of the great, the execution of the
wicked, were alike to him.  In him Fate seemed to personify life's
revenges, its futilities, its calculating ironies.  The flag-draped
coffin was just about to pass, and the fanatical barber harked back to
Philip.  "They say it was all empty honours with him afore he died
abroad."

"A full belly's a full belly if it's only full of straw," snapped Manon
Moignard.

"Who was it brought him home?" asked the jailer.  "None that was born on
Jersey, but two that lived here," remarked Maitre Damian, the
schoolmaster from St. Aubins.

"That Chevalier of Champsavoys and the other Duc de Bercy," interposed
the centenier.

Maitre Damian tapped his stick upon the ground, and said oracularly: "It
is not for me to say, but which is the rightful Duke and which is not,
there is the political question!"

"Pardi, that's it," answered the centenier.  "Why did Detricand Duke turn
Philip Duke out of duchy, see him killed, then fetch him home to Jersey
like a brother?  Ah, man pethe benin, that's beyond me!

"Those great folks does things their own ways; oui-gia," remarked the
jailer.

"Why did Detricand Duke go back to France?" asked Maitre Damian, cocking
his head wisely; "why did he not stay for obsequies--he?"

"That's what I say," answered the jailer, "those great folks does things
their own ways."

"Ma fistre, I believe you," ejaculated the centenier.  "But for the
Chevalier there, for a Frenchman, that is a man after God's own heart--
and mine."

"Ah then, look at that," said Manon Moignard, with a sneer, "when one
pleases you and God it is a ticket to heaven, diantre!"

But in truth what Detricand and the Chevalier had done was but of human
pity.  The day after the duel, Detricand had arrived in Paris to proceed
thence to Bercy.  There he heard of Philip's death and of Damour's
desertion.  Sending officers to Bercy to frustrate any possible designs
of Damour, he, with the Chevalier, took Philip's body back to Jersey,
delivering it to those who would do it honour.

Detricand did not see Guida.  For all that might be said to her now the
Chevalier should be his mouthpiece.  In truth there could be no better
mouthpiece for him.  It was Detricand--Detricand--Detricand, like a
child, in admiration and in affection.  If Guida did not understand all
now, there should come a time when she would understand.  Detricand would
wait.  She should find that he was just, that her honour and the honour
of her child were safe with him.

As for Guida, it was not grief she felt in the presence of this tragedy.
No spark of love sprang up, even when remembrance was now brought to its
last vital moment.  But a fathomless pity stirred her heart, that
Philip's life had been so futile and that all he had done was come to
naught.  His letter, blotched and blotted by his own dead cheek, she read
quietly.  Yet her heart ached bitterly--so bitterly that her face became
pinched with pain; for here in this letter was despair, here was the
final agony of a broken life, here were the last words of the father of
her child to herself.  She saw with a sudden pang that in writing of
Guilbert he only said your child, not ours.  What a measureless distance
there was between them in the hour of his death, and how clearly the
letter showed that he understood at last!

The evening before the burial she went with the Chevalier to the Cohue
Royale.  As she looked at Philip's dead face bitterness and aching
compassion were quieted within her.  The face was peaceful--strong.
There was on it no record of fret or despair.  Its impassive dignity
seemed to say that all accounts had been settled, and in this finality
there was quiet; as though he had paid the price, as though the long
account against him in the markets of life was closed and cancelled,
and the debtor freed from obligation for ever.  Poignant impulses in her
stilled, pity lost its wounding acuteness.  She shed no tears, but at
last she stretched out her hand and let it rest upon his forehead for a
moment.

"Poor Philip!" she said.

Then she turned and slowly left the room, followed by the Chevalier, and
by the noiseless Dormy Jamais, who had crept in behind them.  As Dormy
Jamais closed the door, he looked back to where the coffin lay, and in
the compassion of fools he repeated Guida's words:

"Poor Philip!" he said.

Now, during Philip's burial, Dormy Jamais sat upon the roof of the Cohue
Royale, as he had done on the day of the Battle of Jersey, looking down
on the funeral cortege and the crowd.  He watched it all until the ruffle
of drums at the grave told that the body was being lowered--four ruffles
for an admiral.

As the people began to disperse and the church bell ceased tolling, Dormy
turned to another bell at his elbow, and set it ringing to call the Royal
Court together.  Sharp, mirthless, and acrid it rang:

Chicane--chicane!  Chicane--chicane!  Chicane--chicane!




IN JERSEY-A YEAR LATER

CHAPTER XLVI

"What is that for?" asked the child, pointing.  Detricand put the watch
to the child's ear.  "It's to keep time.  Listen.  Do you hear it-tic-
tic, tic-tic?"'

The child nodded his head gleefully, and his big eyes blinked with
understanding.  "Doesn't it ever stop?" he asked.

"This watch never stops," replied Detricand.  "But there are plenty of
watches that do."

"I like watches," said the child sententiously.

"Would you like this one?" asked Detricand.

The child drew in a gurgling breath of pleasure.  "I like it.  Why
doesn't mother have a watch?"

The man did not answer the last question.  "You like it?" he said again,
and he nodded his head towards the little fellow.  "H'm, it keeps good
time, excellent time it keeps," and he rose to meet the child's mother,
who having just entered the room, stood looking at them.  It was Guida.
She had heard the last words, and she glanced towards the watch
curiously.  Detricand smiled in greeting, and said to her: "Do you
remember it?"  He held up the watch.

She came forward eagerly.  "Is it--is it that indeed, the watch that the
dear grandpethe--?"

He nodded and smiled.  "Yes, it has never once stopped since the moment
he gave it me in the Vier-Marchi seven years ago.  It has had a charmed
existence amid many rough doings and accidents.  I was always afraid of
losing it, always afraid of an accident to it.  It has seemed to me that
if I could keep it things would go right with me, and things come out
right in the end.  Superstition, of course, but I lived a long time in
Jersey.  I feel more a Jerseyman than a Frenchman sometimes."

Although his look seemed to rest but casually on her face, it was evident
he was anxious to feel the effect of every word upon her, and he added:
"When the Sieur de Mauprat gave me the watch he said, 'May no time be ill
spent that it records for you.'"

"Perhaps he knows his wish was fulfilled," answered Guida.

"You think, then, that I've kept my promise?"

"I am sure he would say so," she replied warmly.

"It isn't the promise I made to him that I mean, but the promise I made
to you."

She smiled brightly.  "You know what I think of that.  I told you long
ago."  She turned her head away, for a bright colour had come to her
cheek.  "You have done great things, Prince," she added in a low tone.

He flashed a look of inquiry at her.  To his ear there was in her voice a
little touch--not of bitterness, but of something, as it were, muffled or
reserved.  Was she thinking how he had robbed her child of the chance of
heritage at Bercy?  He did not reply, but, stooping, put the watch again
to the child's ear.  "There you are, monseigneur!"

"Why do you call him monseigneur?" she asked.  "Guilbert has no title
to your compliment."

A look half-amused, half-perplexed, crossed over Detricand's face.  "Do
you think so?" he said musingly.  Stooping once more, he said to the
child: "Would you like the watch?" and added quickly, "you shall have it
when you're grown up."

"Do you really mean it?" asked Guida, delighted; "do you really mean to
give him the grandpethe's watch one day?"

"Oh yes, at least that--one day.  But I have something more," he added
quickly--" something more for you;" and he drew from his pocket a
miniature set in rubies and diamonds.  "I have brought you this from the
Duc de Mauban--and this," he went on, taking a letter from his pocket,
and handing it with the gift.  "The Duke thought you might care to have
it.  It is the face of your godmother, the Duchess Guidabaldine."

Guida looked at the miniature earnestly, and then said a little
wistfully: "How beautiful a face--but the jewels are much too fine for
me!  What should one do here with rubies and diamonds?  How can I thank
the Duke!"

"Not so.  He will thank you for accepting it.  He begged me to say--as
you will find by his letter to you--that if you will but go to him upon a
visit with this great man here"--pointing to the child with a smile--
"he will count it one of the greatest pleasures of his life.  He is too
old to come to you, but he begs you to go to him--the Chevalier, and you,
and Guilbert here.  He is much alone now, and he longs for a little of
that friendship which can be given by but few in this world.  He counts
upon your coming, for I said I thought you would."

"It would seem so strange," she answered, "to go from this cottage of my
childhood, to which I have come back in peace at last--from this kitchen,
to the chateau of the Duc de Mauban."

"But it was sure to come," he answered.  "This kitchen to which I come
also to redeem my pledge after seven years, it belongs to one part of
your life.  But there is another part to fulfil,"--he stooped and passed
his hands over the curls of the child," and for your child here you
should do it."

"I do not find your meaning," she said after a moment's deliberation.
"I do not know what you would have me understand."

"In some ways you and I would be happier in simple surroundings," he
replied gravely, "but it would seem that to play duly our part in the
world, we must needs move in wider circles.  To my mind this kitchen is
the most delightful spot in the world.  Here I took a fresh commission of
life.  I went out, a sort of battered remnant, to a forlorn hope; and now
I come back to headquarters once again--not to be praised," he added in
an ironical tone, and with a quick gesture of almost boyish shyness--
"not to be praised; only to show that from a grain of decency left in a
man may grow up some sheaves of honest work and plain duty."

"No, it is much more than that, it is much, much more than that," she
broke in.

"No, I am afraid it is not," he answered; "but that is not what I wished
to say.  I wished to say that for monseigneur here--"

A little flash of anger came into her eyes.  He is no monseigneur, he is
Guilbert d'Avranche," she said bitterly.  "It is not like you to mock my
child, Prince.  Oh, I know you mean it playfully," she hurriedly added,
"but--but it does not sound right to me."

"For the sake of monseigneur the heir to the duchy of Bercy," he added,
laying his hand upon the child's head, "these things your devout friends
suggest, you should do, Princess."

Her clear unwavering eye looked steadfastly at him, but her face turned
pale.

"Why do you call him monseigneur the heir to the duchy of Bercy?" she
said almost coldly, and with a little fear in her look too.

"Because I have come here to tell you the truth, and to place in your
hands the record of an act of justice."

Drawing from his pocket a parchment gorgeous with seals, he stooped, and
taking the hands of the child, he placed it in them.  "Hold it tight,
hold it tight, my little friend, for it is your very own," he said to the
child with cheerful kindliness.  Then stepping back a little, and looking
earnestly at Guida, he added with a motion of the hand towards the child:

"You must learn the truth from him."

"Oh, what can you mean--what can you mean?" she exclaimed.  Dropping
upon her knees, and running an arm round the child, she opened the
parchment and read.

"What--what right has he to this?" she cried in a voice of dismay.
"A year ago you dispossessed his father from the duchy.  Ah, I do not
understand it!  You--only you are the Duc de Bercy."

Her eyes were shining with a happy excitement and tenderness.  No such
look had been in them for many a day.  Something that had long slept was
waking in her, something long voiceless was speaking.  This man brought
back to her heart a glow she had never thought to feel again, the glow of
the wonder of life and of a girlish faith.

"I am only Detricand of Vaufontaine," he answered.  "What, did you--could
you think that I would dispossess your child?  His father was the adopted
son of the Duc de Bercy.  Nothing could wipe that out, neither law nor
nations.  You are always Princess Guida, and your child is always Prince
Guilbert d'Avranche--and more than that."

His voice became lower, his war-beaten face lighted with that fire and
force which had made him during years past a figure in the war records of
Europe.

"I unseated Philip d'Avranche," he continued, "because he acquired the
duchy through--a misapprehension; because the claims of the House of
Vaufontaine were greater.  We belonged; he was an alien.  He had a right
to his adoption, he had no right to his duchy--no real right in the
equity of nations.  But all the time I never forgot that the wife of
Philip d'Avranche and her child had rights infinitely beyond his own.
All that he achieved was theirs by every principle of justice.  My plain
duty was to win for your child that succession belonging to him by all
moral right.  When Philip d'Avranche was killed, I set to work to do for
your child what had been done by another for Philip d'Avranche.  I have
made him my heir.  When he is of age I shall abdicate from the duchy in
his favour.  This deed, countersigned by the Powers that dispossessed his
father, secures to him the duchy when he is old enough to govern."

Guida had listened like one in a dream.  A hundred feelings possessed
her, and one more than all.  She suddenly saw all Detricand's goodness to
her stretch out in a long line of devoted friendship, from this day to
that far-off hour seven years before, when he had made a vow to her--
kept how nobly!  Devoted friendship--was it devoted friendship alone,
even with herself?  In a tumult of emotions she answered him hurriedly.
"No, no, no, no!  I cannot accept it.  This is not justice, this is a
gift for which there is no example in the world's history."

"I thought it best," he went on quietly, "to govern Bercy myself during
these troubled years.  So far its neutrality has been honoured, but who
can tell what may come!  As a Vaufontaine it is my duty to see that
Bercy's interests are duly protected amidst the troubles of Europe."

Guida got to her feet now and stood looking dazedly at the parchment in
her hand.  The child, feeling himself neglected, ran out into the garden.

There was moisture in Guida's eyes as she presently said: "I had not
thought that any man could be so noble--no, not even you."

"You should not doubt yourself so," he answered meaningly.  "I am the
work of your hands.  If I have fought my way back to reputable life
again--"

He paused, and took from his pocket a handkerchief.  "This was the gage,"
he said, holding it up.  "Do you remember the day I came to return it to
you, and carried it off again?"

"It was foolish of you to keep it," she answered softly, "as foolish of
you as to think that I shall accept for my child these great honours."

"But suppose the child in after years should blame you?" he answered
slowly and with emphasis.  "Suppose that Guilbert should say, What right
had you, my mother, to refuse what was my due?"

This was the question she had asked herself long, long ago.  It smote her
heart now.  What right had she to reject this gift of Fate to her child?

Scarcely above a whisper she replied: "Of course he might say that, but
how, oh, how should we simple folk, he and I, be fitted for these high
places--yet?  Now that what I desired all these years for him has come,
I have not the courage."

"You have friends to help you in all you do," he answered meaningly.

"But friends cannot always be with one," she answered.

"That depends upon the friends.  There is one friend of yours who has
known you for eighteen years.  Eighteen years' growth should make a
strong friendship--there was always friendship on his part at least.  He
can be a still stronger and better friend.  He comes now to offer you the
remainder of a life for which your own goodness is the guarantee.  He
comes to offer you a love of which your own soul must be the only judge,
for you have eyes that see and a spirit that knows.  The Chevalier needs
you, and the Duc de Mauban needs you, but Detricand of Vaufontaine needs
you a thousand times more."

"Oh, hush--but no, you must not!" she broke in, her face all crimson,
her lips trembling.

"But yes, I must," he answered quickly.  "You find peace here, but it is
the peace of inaction.  It dulls the brain, and life winds in upon itself
wearily at the last.  But out there is light and fire and action and the
quick-beating pulse, and the joy of power wisely used, even to the end.
You come of a great people, you were born to great things; your child has
rights accorded now by every Court of Europe.  You must act for him.  For
your child's sake, for my sake come out into the great field of life with
me--as my wife, Guida."

She turned to him frankly, she looked at him steadfastly, the colour in
her face came and went, but her eyes glowed with feeling.

"After all that has happened?" she asked in a low tone.

"It could only be because of all that has happened," he answered.

"No, no, you do not understand," she said quickly, a great pain in her
voice.  "I have suffered so, these many, many years!  I shall never be
light-hearted again.  And I am not fitted for such high estate.  Do you
not see what you ask of me--to go from this cottage to a palace?"

"I love you too well to ask you to do what you could not.  You must trust
me," he answered, "you must give your life its chance, you must--"

"But listen to me," she interjected with breaking tones; "I know as
surely as I know--as I know the face of my child, that the youth in me is
dead.  My summer came--and went--long ago.  No, no, you do not
understand--I would not make you unhappy.  I must live only to make my
child happy.  That love has not been marred."

"And I must be judge of what is for my own happiness.  And for yours--if
I thought my love would make you unhappy for even one day, I should not
offer it.  I am your lover, but I am also your friend.  Had it not been
for you I might have slept in a drunkard's grave in Jersey.  Were it not
for you, my bones would now be lying in the Vendee.  I left my peasants,
I denied myself death with them to serve you.  The old cause is gone.
You and your child are now my only cause--"

"You make it so hard for me," she broke in.  "Think of the shadows from
the past always in my eyes, always in my heart--you cannot wear the
convict's chain without the lagging footstep afterwards."

"Shadows--friend of my soul, how should I dare come to you if there had
never been shadows in your life!  It is because you--you have suffered,
because you know, that I come.  Out of your miseries, the convict's
lagging step, you say?  Think what I was.  There was never any wrong in
you, but I was sunk in evil depths of folly--"

"I will not have you say so," she interrupted; "you never in your life
did a dishonourable thing."

"Then again I say, trust me.  For, on the honour of a Vaufontaine,
I believe that happiness will be yours as my wife.  The boy, you see how
he and I--"

"Ah, you are so good to him!"

"You must give me chance and right to serve him.  What else have you or I
to look forward to?  The honours of this world concern us little.  The
brightest joys are not for us.  We have work before us, no rainbow
ambitions.  But the boy--think for him---" he paused.

After a little, she held out her hand towards him.  "Good-bye," she said
softly.

"Good-bye--you say good-bye to me!" he exclaimed in dismay.

"Till--till to-morrow," she answered, and she smiled.  The smile had a
little touch of the old archness which was hers as a child, yet, too, a
little of the sadness belonging to the woman.  But her hand-clasp was
firm and strong; and her touch thrilled him.  Power was there, power with
infinite gentleness.  And he understood her; which was more than all.

He turned at the door.  She was standing very still, the parchment with
the great seals yet in her hand.  Without speaking, she held it out to
him, as though uncertain what to do with it.

As he passed through the doorway he smiled, and said:

"To-morrow--to-morrow!"




EPILOGUE

St. John's Eve had passed.  In the fields at Bonne-Nuit Bay the "Brow-
brow!  ben-ben!" of the Song of the Cauldron had affrighted the night;
riotous horns, shaming the blare of a Witches' Sabbath, had been blown
by those who, as old Jean Touzel said, carried little lead under their
noses.  The meadows had been full of the childlike islanders welcoming in
the longest day of the year.  Mid-summer Day had also come and gone, but
with less noise and clamour, for St. John's Fair had been carried on with
an orderly gaiety--as the same Jean Touzel said, like a sheet of music.
Even the French singers and dancers from St. Malo had been approved in
Norman phrases by the Bailly and the Jurats, for now there was no longer
war between England and France, Napoleon was at St. Helena, and the
Bourbons were come again to their own.

It had been a great day, and the roads were cloudy with the dust of Mid-
summer revellers going to their homes.  But though some went many stayed,
camping among the booths, since the Fair was for tomorrow and for other
to-morrows after.  And now, the day's sport being over, the superstitious
were making the circle of the rock called William's Horse in Boulay Bay,
singing the song of William, who, with the fabled sprig of sacred
mistletoe, turned into a rock the kelpie horse carrying him to death.

There was one boat, however, which putting out into the Bay did not bear
towards William's Horse, but, catching the easterly breeze, bore away
westward towards the point of Plemont.  Upon the stern of the boat was
painted in bright colours, Hardi Biaou.  "We'll be there soon after
sunset," said the grizzled helmsman, Jean Touzel, as he glanced from the
full sail to the setting sun.

Neither of his fellow-voyagers made reply, and for a time there was
silence, save for the swish of the gunwale through the water.  But at
last Jean said:

"Su' m'n ame, but it is good this, after that!" and he jerked his head
back towards the Fair-ground on the hill.  "Even you will sleep to-night,
Dormy Jamais, and you, my wife of all."

Maitresse Aimable shook her great head slowly on the vast shoulders, and
shut her heavy eyelids.  "Dame, but I think you are sleeping now--you,"
Jean went on.

Maitresse Aimable's eyes opened wide, and again she shook her head.

Jean looked a laugh at her through his great brass-rimmed spectacles and
added:

"Ba su, then I know.  It is because we go to sleep in my hut at Plemont
where She live so long.  I know, you never sleep there."

Maitresse Aimable shook her head once more, and drew from her pocket a
letter.

At sight of it Dormy Jamais crawled quickly over to where the Femme de
Ballast sat, and, 'reaching out, he touched it with both hands.

"Princess of all the world--bidemme," he said, and he threw out his arms
and laughed.

Two great tears were rolling down Maitresse Aimable's cheeks.

"How to remember she, ma fuifre!" said Jean Touzel.  "But go on to the
news of her."

Maitresse Aimable spread the letter out and looked at it lovingly.  Her
voice rose slowly up like a bubble from the bottom of a well, and she
spoke.

"Ah man pethe benin, when it come, you are not here, my Jean.  I take it
to the Greffier to read for me.  It is great news, but the way he read so
sour I do not like, ba su!  I see Maitre Damian the schoolmaster pass my
door.  I beckon, and he come.  I take my letter here, I hold it close to
his eyes.  'Read on that for me, Maitre Damian--you,' I say.  O my good,
when he read it, it sing sweet like a song, pergui!  Once, two, three
times I make him read it out--he has the voice so soft and round, Maitre
Damian there."

"Glad and good!" interrupted Jean.  "What is the news, my wife?  What is
the news of highnesss--he?"

Maitresse Aimable smiled, then she tried to speak, but her voice broke.

"The son--the son--at last he is the Duke of Bercy.  E'fin, it is all
here.  The new King of France, he is there at the palace when the child
which it have sleep on my breast, which its mother I have love all the
years, kiss her son as the Duke of Bercy."

"Ch'est ben," said Jean, "you can trust the good God in the end."

Dormy Jamais did not speak.  His eyes were fastened upon the north, where
lay the Paternoster Rocks.  The sun had gone down, the dusk was creeping
on, and against the dark of the north there was a shimmer of fire--a fire
that leapt and quivered about the Paternoster Rocks.

Dormy pointed with his finger.  Ghostly lights or miracle of Nature,
these fitful flames had come and gone at times these many years, and now
again the wonder of the unearthly radiance held their eyes.

"Gatd'en'ale, I don't understand you--you!" said Jean, speaking to the
fantastic fires as though they were human.

"There's plenty things we see we can't understand, and there's plenty we
understand we can't never see.  Ah bah, so it goes!" said Maitresse
Aimable, and she put Guida's letter in her bosom.

                    .......................

Upon the hill of Plemont above them, a stone taken from the chimney of
the hut where Guida used to live, stood upright beside a little grave.
Upon it was carved:

                                BIRIBI,
                              Fidele ami
                            De quels jours!

In the words of Maitresse Aimable, "Ah bah, so it goes."

FINIS



NOTE:
IT is possible that students of English naval history may find in the
life of Philip d'Avranche, as set forth in this book, certain
resemblances to the singular and long forgotten career of the young
Jerseyman, Philip d'Auvergne of the "Arethusa," who in good time became
Vice-Admiral of the White and His Serene Highness the Duke of Bouillon.

Because all the relatives and direct descendants of Admiral Prince Philip
d'Auvergne are dead, I am the more anxious to state that, apart from one
main incident, the story here-before written is not taken from the life
of that remarkable man.  Yet I will say also that I have drawn upon the
eloquence, courage, and ability of Philip d'Auvergne to make the better
part of Philip d'Avranche, whose great natural fault, an overleaping
ambition, was the same fault that brought the famous Prince Admiral to a
piteous death in the end.

In any case, this tale has no claim to be called a historical novel.





JERSEY WORDS AND PHRASES

WITH THEIR EQUIVALENTS IN ENGLISH OR FRENCH

A bi'tot = a bientot.
Achocre = dolt, ass.
Ah bah!  (Difficult to render in English, but meaning much the same as
"Well!  well!")
Ah be! = eh bien.
Alles kedainne = to go quickly, to skedaddle.
Bachouar = a fool.
Ba su! = bien sur.
Bashin = large copper-lined stew-pan.
Batd'lagoule = chatterbox.
Bedgone = shortgown or deep bodice of print.
Beganne = daft fellow.
Biaou = beau.
Bidemme! = exclamation of astonishment.
Bouchi = mouthful.
Bilzard = idiot.
Chelin = shilling.
Ch'est ben = c'est bien.
Cotil = slope of a dale.
Coum est qu'on etes?         }
Coum est qu'ou vos portest?  } Comment vous portez-vous!
Couzain or couzaine = cousin.
Crasset = metal oil-lamp of classic shape.
Critchett = cricket.
Diantre = diable.
Dreschiaux = dresser.
E'fant = enfant.
E'fin = enfin.
Eh ben = eh bien.
Esmanus = scarecrow.
Es-tu gentiment? = are you well?
Et ben = and now.
Gache-a-penn! = misery me!
Gaderabotin! = deuce take it!
Garche = lass.
Gatd'en'ale! = God be with us!
Grandpethe = grandpere.
Han = kind of grass for the making of ropes, baskets, etc.
Hanap = drinking-cup.
Hardi = very.
Hus = lower half of a door.  (Doors of many old Jersey houses were
divided horizontally, for protection against cattle, to let out the
smoke, etc.)
Je me crais; je to crais; je crais ben! = I believe it; true for you; I
                                        well believe it!
Ma fe!     }
Ma fistre! }= ma foi!
Ma fuifre! }
Mai grand doux! = but goodness gracious!
Man doux! = my good, oh dear!  (Originally man Dieu!)
Man doux d'la vie! = upon my life!
Man gui, mon pethe! = mon Dieu, mon pere!
Man pethe benin! = my good father!
Marchi = marche.
Mogue = drinking-cup.
Nannin; nannin-gia! = no; no indeed!
Ni bouf ni baf   } Expression of absolute negation, untranslatable.
Ni fiche ni bran }
Oui-gia! = yes indeed!
Par made = par mon Dieu.
Pardi!     }
Pardingue! }= old forms of par Dieul
Pergui!    }
Pend'loque = ragamuffin.
Queminzolle = overcoat.
Racllyi = hanging rack from the rafters of a kitchen.
Respe d'la compagnie! = with all respect for present company.
Shale ben = very well.
Simnel = a sort of biscuit, cup-shaped, supposed to represent unleavened
        bread, specially eaten at Easter.
Soupe a la graisse = very thin soup, chiefly made of water, with a few
                  vegetables and some dripping.
Su' m'n ame = sur mon ame!
Tcheche? = what's that you say?
Trejous = toujours.
Tres-ba = tres bien.
Veille = a wide low settle.  (Probably from lit de fouaille.)  Also
   applied to evening gatherings, when, sitting cross-legged on the
   veille, the neighbours sang, talked, and told stories.
Verges = the land measure of Jersey, equal to forty perches.  Two and a
       quarter vergees are equivalent to the English acre.
Vier = vieux.
Vraic = a kind of sea-weed.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

It is not the broken heart that kills, but broken pride






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "BATTLE OF THE STRONG":

A sort of chuckle not entirely pleasant
Adaptability was his greatest weapon in life
Being tired you can sleep, and in sleep you can forget
Cling to beliefs long after conviction has been shattered
Egotism with which all are diseased
Egregious egotism of young love there are only two identities
Follow me; if I retreat, kill me; if I fall, avenge me
Futility of goodness, the futility of all
He felt things, he did not study them
Her voice had the steadiness of despair
If women hadn't memory, she answered, they wouldn't have much
It is not the broken heart that kills, but broken pride
It is easy to repent when our pleasures have palled
It's the people who try to be clever who never are
Joy of a confessional which relieves the sick heart
Kissed her twice on the cheek--the first time in fifteen years
Knew the lie of silence to be as evil as the lie of speech
Lilt of existence lulling to sleep wisdom and tried experience
Lonely we come into the world, and lonely we go out of it
Never to be content with superficial reasons and the obvious
No news--no trouble
Often, we would rather be hurt than hurt
People who are clever never think of trying to be
Queer that things which hurt most can't be punished by law
Rack of secrecy, the cruelest inquisition of life
Sacrifice to the god of the pin-hole
Sardonic pleasure in the miseries of the world
Sympathy, with curiousness in their eyes and as much inhumanity
Thanked him in her heart for the things he had left unsaid
There was never a grey wind but there's a greyer
There is something humiliating in even an undeserved injury
Uses up your misery and makes you tired (Work)
War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle
We care so little for real justice
What fools there are in the world






THE LANE THAT HAD NO TURNING

By Gilbert Parker



CONTENTS

Volume 1.
THE LANE THAT HAD NO TURNING

Volume 2.
THE ABSURD ROMANCE OF P'TITE LOUISON
THE LITTLE BELL OF HONOUR
A SON OF THE WILDERNESS
A WORKER IN STONE

Volume 3.
THE TRAGIC COMEDY OF ANNETTE
THE MARRIAGE OF THE MILLER
MATHURIN
THE STORY OF THE LIME-BURNER
THE WOODSMAN'S STORY OF THE GREAT WHITE CHIEF
UNCLE JIM
THE HOUSE WITH THE TALL PORCH
PARPON THE DWARF

Volume 4.
TIMES WERE HARD IN PONTIAC
MEDALLION'S WHIM
THE PRISONER
AN UPSET PRICE
A FRAGMENT OF LIVES
THE MAN THAT DIED AT ALMA
THE BARON OF BEAUGARD
THE TUNE McGILVERAY PLAYED




The Right Hon. Sir Wilfrid Laurier G.C.M.G.

Dear Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Since I first began to write these tales in
1892, I have had it in my mind to dedicate to you the "bundle of life"
when it should be complete.  It seemed to me--and it seems so still--that
to put your name upon the covering of my parcel, as one should say, "In
care of," when it went forth, was to secure its safe and considerate
delivery to that public of the Empire which is so much in your debt.

But with other feelings also do I dedicate this volume to yourself.  For
many years your name has stood for a high and noble compromise between
the temperaments and the intellectual and social habits of two races; and
I am not singular in thinking that you have done more than most other men
to make the English and French of the Dominion understand each other
better.  There are somewhat awkward limits to true understanding as yet,
but that sympathetic service which you render to both peoples, with a
conscientious striving for impartiality, tempers even the wind of party
warfare to the shorn lamb of political opposition.

In a sincere sympathy with French life and character, as exhibited in the
democratic yet monarchical province of Quebec, or Lower Canada (as,
historically, I still love to think of it), moved by friendly
observation, and seeking to be truthful and impartial, I have made this
book and others dealing with the life of the proud province, which a
century and a half of English governance has not Anglicised.  This series
of more or less connected stories, however, has been the most cherished
of all my labours, covering, as it has done, so many years, and being the
accepted of my anxious judgment out of a much larger gathering, so many
numbers of which are retired to the seclusion of copyright, while
reserved from publication.  In passing, I need hardly say that the
"Pontiac" of this book is an imaginary place, and has no association with
the real Pontiac of the Province.

I had meant to call the volume, "Born with a Golden Spoon," a title
stolen from the old phrase, "Born with a golden spoon in the mouth"; but
at the last moment I have given the book the name of the tale which is,
chronologically, the climax of the series, and the end of my narratives
of French Canadian life and character.  I had chosen the former title
because of an inherent meaning in it relation to my subject.  A man born
in the purple--in comfort wealth, and secure estate--is said to have the
golden spoon in his mouth.  In the eyes of the world, however, the phrase
has a some what ironical suggestiveness, and to have luxury, wealth, and
place as a birthright is not thought to be the most fortunate incident of
mortality.  My application of the phrase is, therefore, different.

I have, as you know, travelled far and wide during the past seventeen
years, and though I have seen people as frugal and industrious as the
French Canadians, I have never seen frugality and industry associated
with so much domestic virtue, so much education and intelligence, and so
deep and simple a religious life; nor have I ever seen a priesthood at
once so devoted and high-minded in all the concerns the home life of
their people, as in French Canada.  A land without poverty and yet
without riches, French Canada stands alone, too well educated to have a
peasantry, too poor to have an aristocracy; as though in her the ancient
prayer had been answered "Give me neither poverty nor riches, but feed me
with food convenient for me."  And it is of the habitant of Quebec,
before a men else, I should say, "Born with the golden spoon in his
mouth."

To you I come with this book, which contains the first thing I ever wrote
out of the life of the Province so dear to you, and the last things also
that I shall ever write about it.  I beg you to receive it as the loving
recreation of one who sympathises with the people of who you come, and
honours their virtues, and who has no fear for the unity, and no doubt as
to the splendid future, of the nation, whose fibre is got of the two
great civilising races of Europe.

Lastly, you will know with what admiration and regard I place your name
on the fore page of my book, and greet in you the statesman, the
litterateur, and the personal friend.

               Believe me,
                    Dear Sir Wilfrid Laurier,
                         Yours very sincerely,
                              GILBERT PARKER.

20 CARLTON HOUSE TERRACE,
     LONDON, S.  W.,
          14th August, 1900.




INTRODUCTION

The story with which this book opens, 'The Lane That Had No Turning',
gives the title to a collection which has a large share in whatever
importance my work may possess.  Cotemporaneous with the Pierre series,
which deal with the Far West and the Far North, I began in the
'Illustrated London News', at the request of the then editor, Mr. Clement
K. Shorter, a series of French Canadian sketches of which the first was
'The Tragic Comedy of Annette'.  It was followed by 'The Marriage of the
Miller, The House with the Tall Porch, The Absurd Romance of P'tite
Louison, and The Woodsman's Story of the Great White Chief'.  They were
begun and finished in the autumn of 1892 in lodgings which I had taken on
Hampstead Heath.  Each--for they were all very short--was written at a
sitting, and all had their origin in true stories which had been told me
in the heart of Quebec itself.  They were all beautifully illustrated in
the Illustrated London News, and in their almost monosyllabic narrative,
and their almost domestic simplicity, they were in marked contrast to the
more strenuous episodes of the Pierre series.  They were indeed in
keeping with the happily simple and uncomplicated life of French Canada
as I knew it then; and I had perhaps greater joy in writing them and the
purely French Canadian stories that followed them, such as 'Parpon the
Dwarf, A Worker in Stone, The Little Bell of Honour, and The Prisoner',
than in almost anything else I have written, except perhaps 'The Right of
Way and Valmond', so far as Canada is concerned.

I think the book has harmony, although the first story in it covers
eighty-two pages, while some of the others, like 'The Marriage of the
Miller', are less than four pages in length.  At the end also there are
nine fantasies or stories which I called 'Parables of Provinces'.  All of
these, I think, possessed the spirit of French Canada, though all are
more or less mystical in nature.  They have nothing of the simple realism
of 'The Tragic Comedy of Annette', and the earlier series.  These nine
stories could not be called popular, and they were the only stories I
have ever written which did not have an immediate welcome from the
editors to whom they were sent.  In the United States I offered them to
'Harper's Magazine', but the editor, Henry M. Alden, while, as I know,
caring for them personally, still hesitated to publish them.  He thought
them too symbolic for the every-day reader.  He had been offered four of
them at once because I declined to dispose of them separately, though the
editor of another magazine was willing to publish two of them.  Messrs.
Stone & Kimball, however, who had plenty of fearlessness where literature
was concerned, immediately bought the series for The Chap Book, long
since dead, and they were published in that wonderful little short-lived
magazine, which contained some things of permanent value to literature.
They published four of the series, namely: 'The Golden Pipes, The
Guardian of the Fire, By that Place Called Peradventure, The Singing of
the Bees, and The Tent of the Purple Mat'.  In England, because I would
not separate the first five, and publish them individually, two or three
of the editors who were taking the Pierre series and other stories
appearing in this volume would not publish them.  They, also, were
frightened by the mystery and allusiveness of the tales, and had an
apprehension that they would not be popular.

Perhaps they were right.  They were all fantasies, but I do not wish them
other than they are.  One has to write according to the impulse that
seizes one and after the fashion of one's own mind.  This at least can be
said of all my books, that not a page of them has ever been written to
order, and there is not a story published in all the pages bearing my
name which does not represent one or two other stories rejected by
myself.  The art of rejection is the hardest art which an author has to
learn; but I have never had a doubt as to my being justified in
publishing these little symbolic things.

Eventually the whole series was published in England.  W. E. Henley gave
'There Was a Little City' a home in 'The New Review', and expressed
himself as happy in having it.  'The Forge in the Valley' was published
by Sir Wemyss Reid in the weekly paper called 'The Speaker', now known as
'The Nation', in which 'Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch' made his name and
helped the fame of others.  'There Was a Little City' was published in
'The Chap Book' in the United States, but 'The Forge in the Valley' had
(I think) no American public until it appeared within the pages of 'The
Lane That Had No Turning'.  The rest of the series were published in the
'English Illustrated Magazine', which was such a good friend to my work
at the start.  As was perhaps natural, there was some criticism, but very
little, in French Canada itself, upon the stories in this volume.  It
soon died away, however, and almost as I write these words there has come
to me an appreciation which I value as much as anything that has befallen
me in my career, and that is, the degree of Doctor of Letters from the
French Catholic University of Laval at Quebec.  It is the seal of French
Canada upon the work which I have tried to do for her and for the whole
Dominion.







THE LANE THAT HAD NO TURNING

CHAPTER I

THE RETURN OF MADELINETTE

His Excellency the Governor--the English Governor of French Canada--was
come to Pontiac, accompanied by a goodly retinue; by private secretary,
military secretary, aide-de-camp, cabinet minister, and all that.  He was
making a tour of the Province, but it was obvious that he had gone out of
his way to visit Pontiac, for there were disquieting rumours in the air
concerning the loyalty of the district.  Indeed, the Governor had arrived
but twenty-four hours after a meeting had been held under the presidency
of the Seigneur, at which resolutions easily translatable into sedition
were presented.  The Cure and the Avocat, arriving in the nick of time,
had both spoken against these resolutions; with the result that the new-
born ardour in the minds of the simple habitants had died down, and the
Seigneur had parted from the Cure and the Avocat in anger.

Pontiac had been involved in an illegal demonstration once before.
Valmond, the bizarre but popular Napoleonic pretender, had raised his
standard there; the stones before the parish church had been stained with
his blood; and he lay in the churchyard of St. Saviour's forgiven and
unforgotten.  How was it possible for Pontiac to forget him?  Had he not
left his little fortune to the parish? and had he not also left twenty
thousand francs for the musical education of Madelinette Lajeunesse, the
daughter of the village forgeron, to learn singing of the best masters in
Paris?  Pontiac's wrong-doings had brought it more profit than penalty,
more praise than punishment: for, after five years in France in the care
of the Little Chemist's widow, Madelinette Lajeunesse had become the
greatest singer of her day.  But what had put the severest strain upon
the modesty of Pontiac was the fact that, on the morrow of Madelinette's
first triumph in Paris, she had married M. Louis Racine, the new Seigneur
of Pontiac.

What more could Pontiac wish?  It had been rewarded for its mistakes; it
had not even been chastened, save that it was marked Suspicious as to its
loyalty, at the headquarters of the English Government in Quebec.  It
should have worn a crown of thorns, but it flaunted a crown of roses.  A
most unreasonable good fortune seemed to pursue it.  It had been led to
expect that its new Seigneur would be an Englishman, one George Fournel,
to whom, as the late Seigneur had more than once declared, the property
was devised by will; but at his death no will had been found, and Louis
Racine, the direct heir in blood, had succeeded to the property and the
title.

Brilliant, enthusiastic, fanatically French, the new Seigneur had set
himself to revive certain old traditions, customs, and privileges of
the Seigneurial position.  He was reactionary, seductive, generous,
and at first he captivated the hearts of Pontiac.  He did more than that.
He captivated Madelinette Lajeunesse.  In spite of her years in Paris--
severe, studious years, which shut out the social world and the
temptations of Bohemian life--Madelinette retained a strange simplicity
of heart and mind, a desperate love for her old home which would not be
gainsaid, a passionate loyalty to her past, which was an illusory attempt
to arrest the inevitable changes that come with growth; and, with a
sudden impulse, she had sealed herself to her past at the very outset of
her great career by marriage with Louis Racine.

On the very day of their marriage Louis Racine had made a painful
discovery.  A heritage of his fathers, which had skipped two generations,
suddenly appeared in himself: he was becoming a hunchback.

Terror, despair, gloom, anxiety had settled upon him.  Three months later
Madelinette had gone to Paris alone.  The Seigneur had invented excuses
for not accompanying her, so she went instead in the care of the Little
Chemist's widow, as of old Louis had promised to follow within another
three months, but had not done so.  The surgical operation performed upon
him was unsuccessful; the strange growth increased.  Sensitive, fearful,
and morose, he would not go to Europe to be known as the hunchback
husband of Lajeunesse, the great singer.  He dreaded the hour when
Madelinette and he should meet again.  A thousand times he pictured her
as turning from him in loathing and contempt.  He had married her because
he loved her, but he knew well enough that ten thousand other men could
love her just as well, and be something more than a deformed Seigneur of
an obscure manor in Quebec.

As his gloomy imagination pictured the future, when Madelinette should
return and see him as he was and cease to love him--to build up his
Seigneurial honour to an undue importance, to give his position a
fictitious splendour, became a mania with him.  No ruler of a
Grand Duchy ever cherished his honour dearer or exacted homage more
persistently than did Louis Racine in the Seigneury of Pontiac.
Coincident with the increase of these futile extravagances was the
increase of his fanatical patriotism, which at last found vent in
seditious writings, agitations, the purchase of rifles, incitement to
rebellion, and the formation of an armed, liveried troop of dependants at
the Manor.  On the very eve of the Governor's coming, despite the Cure's
and the Avocat's warnings, he had held a patriotic meeting intended to
foster a stubborn, if silent, disregard of the Governor's presence
amongst them.

The speech of the Cure, who had given guarantee for the good behaviour of
his people to the Government, had been so tinged with sorrowful appeal,
had recalled to them so acutely the foolish demonstration which had ended
in the death of Valmond; that the people had turned from the exasperated
Seigneur with the fire of monomania in his eyes, and had left him alone
in the hall, passionately protesting that the souls of Frenchmen were not
in them.

Next day, upon the church, upon the Louis Quinze Hotel, and elsewhere,
the Union Jack flew--the British colours flaunted it in Pontiac with
welcome to the Governor.  But upon the Seigneury was another flag--it of
the golden-lilies.  Within the Manor House M. Louis Racine sat in the
great Seigneurial chair, returned from the gates of death.  As he had
come home from the futile public meeting, galloping through the streets
and out upon the Seigneury road in the dusk, his horse had shied upon a
bridge, where mischievous lads waylaid travellers with ghostly heads made
of lighted candles in hollowed pumpkins, and horse and man had been
plunged into the stream beneath.  His faithful servant Havel had seen the
accident and dragged his insensible master from the water.

Now the Seigneur sat in the great arm-chair glowering out upon the
cheerful day.  As he brooded, shaken and weak and bitter--all his
thoughts were bitter now--a flash of scarlet, a glint of white plumes
crossed his line of vision, disappeared, then again came into view, and
horses' hoofs rang out on the hard road below.  He started to his feet,
but fell back again, so feeble was he, then rang the bell at his side
with nervous insistence.  A door opened quickly behind him, and his voice
said imperiously:

"Quick, Havel--to the door.  The Governor and his suite have come.  Call
Tardif, and have wine and cake brought at once.  When the Governor
enters, let Tardif stand at the door, and you beside my chair.  Have the
men-at-arms get into livery, and make a guard of honour for the Governor
when he leaves.  Their new rifles too--and let old Fashode wear his
medal!  See that Lucre is not filthy--ha! ha!  very good.  I must let the
Governor hear that.  Quick--quick, Havel.  They are entering the grounds.
Let the Manor bell be rung, and every one mustered.  He shall see that to
be a Seigneur is not an empty honour.  I am something in the state,
something by my own right."  His lips moved restlessly; he frowned; his
hands nervously clasped the arms of the chair.  "Madelinette too shall
see that I am to be reckoned with, that I am not a nobody.  By God, then,
but she shall see it!" he added, bringing his clasped hand down hard
upon the wood.

There was a stir outside, a clanking of chains, a champing of bits, and
the murmurs of the crowd who were gathering fast in the grounds.
Presently the door was thrown open and Havel announced the Governor.
Louis Racine got to his feet, but the Governor hastened forward, and,
taking both his hands, forced him gently back into the chair.

"No, no, my dear Seigneur.  You must not rise.  This is no state visit,
but a friendly call to offer congratulations on your happy escape, and
to inquire how you are."

The Governor said his sentences easily, but he suddenly flushed and was
embarrassed, for Louis Racine's deformity, of which he had not known--
Pontiac kept its troubles to itself--stared him in the face; and he felt
the Seigneur's eyes fastened on him with strange intensity.

"I have to thank your Excellency," the Seigneur said in a hasty nervous
voice.  "I fell on my shoulders--that saved me.  If I had fallen on my
head I should have been killed, no doubt.  My shoulders saved me!" he
added, with a petulant insistence in his voice, a morbid anxiety in his
face.

"Most providential," responded the Governor.  "It grieves me that it
should have happened on the occasion of my visit.  I missed the
Seigneur's loyal public welcome.  But I am happy," he continued, with
smooth deliberation, "to have it here in this old Manor House, where
other loyal French subjects of England have done honour to their
Sovereign's representative."

"This place is sacred to hospitality and patriotism, your Excellency,"
said Louis Racine, nervousness passing from his voice and a curious hard
look coming into his face.

The Governor was determined not to see the double meaning.  "It is a
privilege to hear you say so.  I shall recall the fact to her Majesty's
Government in the report I shall make upon my tour of the province.
I have a feeling that the Queen's pleasure in the devotion of her
distinguished French subjects may take some concrete form."

The Governor's suite looked at each other significantly, for never before
in his journeys had his Excellency hinted so strongly that an honour
might be conferred.  Veiled as it was, it was still patent as the sun.
Spots of colour shot into the Seigneur's cheeks.  An honour from the
young English Queen--that would mate with Madelinette's fame.  After all,
it was only his due.  He suddenly found it hard to be consistent.  His
mind was in a whirl.  The Governor continued:

"It must have given you great pleasure to know that at Windsor her
Majesty has given tokens of honour to the famous singer, the wife of a
notable French subject, who, while passionately eager to keep alive
French sentiment, has, as we believe, a deep loyalty to England."

The Governor had said too much.  He had thought to give the Seigneur an
opportunity to recede from his seditious position there and then, and to
win his future loyalty.  M. Racine's situation had peril, and the
Governor had here shown him the way of escape.  But he had said one thing
that drove Louis Racine mad.  He had given him unknown information about
his own wife.  Louis did not know that Madelinette had been received by
the Queen, or that she had received "tokens of honour."  Wild with
resentment, he saw in the Governor's words a consideration for himself
based only on the fact that he was the husband of the great singer.  He
trembled to his feet.

At that moment there was a cheering outside--great cheering--but
he did not heed it; he was scarcely aware of it.  If it touched his
understanding at all, it only meant to him a demonstration in honour of
the Governor.

"Loyalty to the flag of England, your Excellency!" he said, in a hoarse
acrid voice--"you speak of loyalty to us whose lives for two centuries--"
He paused, for he heard a voice calling his name.

"Louis!  Louis!  Louis!"

The fierce words he had been about to utter died on his lips, his eyes
stared at the open window, bewildered and even frightened.

"Louis!  Louis!"

Now the voice was inside the house.  He stood trembling, both hands
grasping the arms of the chair.  Every eye in the room was now turned
towards the door.  As it opened, the Seigneur sank back in the chair, a
look of helpless misery, touched by a fierce pride, covering his face.

"Louis!"

It was Madelinette, who, disregarding the assembled company, ran forward
to him and caught both his hands in hers.

"O Louis, I have heard of your accident, and--" she stopped suddenly
short.  The Governor turned away his head.  Every person in the room did
the same.  For as she bent over him--she saw.  She saw for the first
time; for the first time knew!

A look of horrified amazement, of shrinking anguish, crossed over her
face.  He felt the lightning-like silence, he knew that she had seen;
he struggled to his feet, staring fiercely at her.

That one torturing instant had taken all the colour from her face, but
there was a strange brightness in her eyes, a new power in her bearing.
She gently forced him into the seat again.

"You are not strong enough, Louis.  You must be tranquil."

She turned now to the Governor.  He made a sign to his suite, who,
bowing, slowly left the room.  "Permit me to welcome you to your native
land again, Madame," he said.  "You have won for it a distinction it
could never have earned, and the world gives you many honours."

She was smiling and still, and with one hand clasping her husband's, she
said:

"The honour I value most my native land has given me: I am lady of the
Manor here, and wife of the Seigneur Racine."

Agitated triumph came upon Louis Racine's face; a weird painful vanity
entered into him.  He stood up beside his wife, as she turned and looked
at him, showing not a sign that what she saw disturbed her.

"It is no mushroom honour to be Seigneur of Pontiac, your Excellency," he
said, in a tone that jarred.  "The barony is two hundred years old.  By
rights granted from the crown of France, I am Baron of Pontiac."

"I think England has not yet recognised the title," said the Governor
suggestively, for he was here to make peace, and in the presence of this
man, whose mental torture was extreme, he would not allow himself to be
irritated.

"Our baronies have never been recognised," said the Seigneur harshly.
"And yet we are asked to love the flag of England and--"

"And to show that we are too proud to ask for a right that none can take
away," interposed Madelinette graciously and eagerly, as though to
prevent Louis from saying what he intended.  All at once she had had to
order her life anew, to replace old thoughts by new ones.  "We honour and
obey the rulers of our land, and fly the English flag, and welcome the
English Governor gladly when he comes to us--will your Excellency have
some refreshment?" she added quickly, for she saw the cloud on the
Seigneur's brow.  "Louis," she added quickly, "will you--"

"I have ordered refreshment," said the Seigneur excitedly, the storm
passing from his face, however.  "Havel, Tardif--where are you, fellows!"
He stamped his foot imperiously.

Havel entered with a tray of wine and glasses, followed by Tardif loaded
with cakes and comfits, and set them on the table.

Ten minutes later the Governor took his leave.  At the front door he
stopped surprised, for a guard of honour of twenty men were drawn up.
He turned to the Seigneur.

"What soldiers are these?" he asked.

"The Seigneury company, your Excellency," replied Louis.

"What uniform is it they wear?" he asked in an even tone, but with a
black look in his eye, which did not escape Madelinette.

"The livery of the Barony of Pontiac," answered the Seigneur.

The Governor looked at them a moment without speaking.  "It is French
uniform of the time of Louis Quinze," he said.  "Picturesque, but
informal," he added.

He went over, and taking a carbine from one of the men, examined it.
"Your carbines are not so unconventional and antique," he said meaningly,
and with a frosty smile.  "The compromise of the centuries--hein?" he
added to the Cure, who, with the Avocat, was now looking on with some
trepidation.  "I am wondering if it is quite legal.  It is charming to
have such a guard of honour, but I am wondering--wondering--eh, monsieur
l'avocat, is it legal?"

The Avocat made no reply, but the Cure's face was greatly troubled.  The
Seigneur's momentary placidity passed.

"I answer for their legality, your Excellency," he said, in a high,
assertive voice.

"Of course, of course, you will answer for it," said the Governor,
smiling enigmatically.  He came forward and held out his hand to
Madelinette.

"Madame, I shall remember your kindness, and I appreciate the simple
honours done me here.  Your arrival at the moment of my visit is a happy
circumstance."

There was a meaning in his eye--not in his voice--which went straight to
Madelinette's understanding.  She murmured something in reply, and a
moment afterwards the Governor, his suite, and the crowd were gone; and
the men-at-arms-the fantastic body of men in their antique livery-armed
with the latest modern weapons, had gone back to civic life again.

Inside the house once more, Madelinette laid her hand upon Louis' arm
with a smile that wholly deceived him for a moment.  He thought now that
she must have known of his deformity before she came--the world was so
full of tale-bearers--and no doubt had long since reconciled herself to
the painful fact.  She had shown no surprise, no shrinking.  There had
been only the one lightning instant in which he had felt a kind of
suspension of her breath and being, but when he had looked her in the
face, she was composed and smiling.  After all his frightened
anticipation the great moment had come and gone without tragedy.  With
satisfaction he looked in the mirror in the hall as they passed inside
the house.  He saw no reason to quarrel with his face.  Was it possible
that the deformity did not matter after all?

He felt Madelinette's hand on his arm.  He turned and clasped her to his
breast.

He did not notice that she kept her hands under her chin as he drew her
to him, that she did not, as had been her wont, put them on his
shoulders.  He did not feel her shrink, and no one, seeing, could have
said that she shrank from him in ever so little.

"How beautiful you are!" he said, as he looked into her face.

"How glad I am to be here again, and how tired I am, Louis!" she said.
"I've driven thirty miles since daylight."  She disengaged herself.  "I
am going to sleep now," she added.  "I am going to turn the key in my
door till evening.  Please tell Madame Marie so, Louis."

Inside her room alone she flung herself on her bed in agony and despair.

"Louis--Oh, my God!" she cried, and sobbed and sobbed her strength away.




CHAPTER II

WHEN THE RED-COATS CAME

A month later there was a sale of the household effects, the horses and
general possessions of Medallion the auctioneer, who, though a Protestant
and an Englishman, had, by his wits and goodness of heart, endeared
himself to the parish.  Therefore the notables among the habitants had
gathered in his empty house for a last drink of good-fellowship--Muroc
the charcoalman, Duclosse the mealman, Benoit the ne'er-do-weel, Gingras
the one-eyed shoemaker, and a few others.  They had drunk the health of
Medallion, they had drunk the health of the Cure, and now Duclosse the
mealman raised his glass.  "Here's to--"

"Wait a minute, porridge-pot," cried Muroc.  "The best man here should
raise the glass first and say the votre sante.  'Tis M'sieu' Medallion
should speak and sip now."

Medallion was half-sitting on the window-sill, abstractedly listening.
He had been thinking that his ships were burned behind him, and that in
middle-age he was starting out to make another camp for himself in the
world, all because of the new Seigneur of Pontiac.  Time was when he had
been successful here, but Louis Racine had changed all that.  His hand
was against the English, and he had brought a French auctioneer to
Pontiac.  Medallion might have divided the parish as to patronage, but he
had other views.

So he was going.  Madelinette had urged him to stay, but he had replied
that it was too late.  The harm was not to be undone.

As Muroc spoke, every one turned towards Medallion.  He came over and
filled a glass at the table, and raised it.

"I drink to Madelinette, daughter of that fine old puffing forgeron
Lajeunesse," he added, as the big blacksmith now entered the room.
Lajeunesse grinned and ducked his head.  "I knew Madelinette, as did you
all, when I could take her on my knee and tell her English stories, and
listen to her sing French chansons--the best in the world.  She has gone
on; we stay where we were.  But she proves her love to us, by taking her
husband from Pontiac and coming back to us.  May she never find a spot so
good to come to and so hard to leave as Pontiac!"

He drank, and they all did the same.  Draining his glass, Medallion let
it fall on the stone floor.  It broke into a score of pieces.

He came and shook hands with Lajeunesse.  "Give her my love," he said.
"Tell her the highest bidder on earth could not buy one of the kisses
she gave me when she was five and I was twenty."

Then he shook hands with them all and went into the next room.

"Why did he drop his glass?" asked Gingras the shoemaker.

"That's the way of the aristocrats when it's the damnedest toast that
ever was," said Duclosse the mealman.  "Eh, Lajeunesse, that's so, isn't
it?"

"What the devil do I know about aristocrats!" said Lajeunesse.

"You're among the best of the land, now that Madelinette's married to the
Seigneur.  You ought to wear a collar every day."

"Bah!" answered the blacksmith.  "I'm only old Lajeunesse the
blacksmith, though she's my girl, dear lads.  I was Joe Lajeunesse
yesterday, and I'll be Joe Lajeunesse to-morrow, and I'll die Joe
Lajeunesse the forgeron--bagosh!  So you take me as you find me.  M'sieu'
Racine doesn't marry me.  And Madelinette doesn't take me to Paris and
lead me round the stage and say, 'This is M'sieu' Lajeunesse, my father.'
No.  I'm myself, and a damn good blacksmith and nothing else am I"

"Tut, tut, old leather-belly," said Gingras the shoemaker, whose liquor
had mounted high, "you'll not need to work now.  Madelinette's got double
fortune.  She gets thousands for a song, and she's lady of the Manor
here.  What's too good for you, tell me that, my forgeron?"

"Not working between meals--that's too good for me, Gingras.  I'm here to
earn my bread with the hands I was born with, and to eat what they earn,
and live by it.  Let a man live according to his gifts--bagosh!  Till I'm
sent for, that's what I'll do; and when time's up I'll take my hand off
the bellows, and my leather apron can go to you, Gingras, for boots for a
bigger fool than me."

"There's only one," said Benolt, the ne'er-do-weel, who had been to
college as a boy.

"Who's that?" said Muroc.

"You wouldn't know his name.  He's trying to find eggs in last year's
nest," answered Benolt with a leer.

"He means the Seigneur," said Muroc.  "Look to your son-in-law,
Lajeunesse.  He's kicking up a dust that'll choke Pontiac yet.
It's as if there was an imp in him driving him on."

"We've had enough of the devil's dust here," said Lajeunesse.  "Has he
been talking to you, Muroc?"

Muroc nodded.  "Treason, or thereabouts.  Once, with him that's dead in
the graveyard yonder, it was France we were to save and bring back the
Napoleons--I have my sword yet.  Now it's save Quebec.  It's stand alone
and have our own flag, and shout, and fight, maybe, to be free of
England.  Independence--that's it!  One by one the English have had
to go from Pontiac.  Now it's M'sieu' Medallion."

"There's Shandon the Irishman gone too.  M'sieu' sold him up and shipped
him off," said Gingras the shoemaker.

"Tiens! the Seigneur gave him fifty dollars when he left, to help him
along.  He smacks and then kisses, does M'sieu' Racine."

"We've to pay tribute to the Seigneur every year, as they did in the days
of Vaudreuil and Louis the Saint," said Duclosse.  "I've got my notice--a
bag of meal under the big tree at the Manor door."

"I've to bring a pullet and a bag of charcoal," said Muroc.  "'Tis the
rights of the Seigneur as of old."

"Tiens!  it is my mind," said Benoit, "that a man that nature twists in
back, or leg, or body anywhere, gets a twist in's brain too.  There's
Parpon the dwarf--God knows, Parpon is a nut to crack!"

"But Parpon isn't married to the greatest singer in the world, though
she's only the daughter of old leather-belly there," said Gingras.

"Something doesn't come of nothing, snub-nose," said Lajeunesse.  "Mark
you, I was born a man of fame, walking bloody paths to glory; but, by the
grace of Heaven and my baptism, I became a forgeron.  Let others ride to
glory, I'll shoe their horses for the gallop."

"You'll be in Parliament yet, Lajeunesse," said Duclosse the mealman, who
had been dozing on a pile of untired cart-wheels.

"I'll be hanged first, comrade."

"One in the family at a time," said Muroc.  "There's the Seigneur.  He's
going into Parliament."

"He's a magistrate--that's enough," said Duclosse.  "He's started the
court under the big tree, as the Seigneurs did two hundred years ago.
He'll want a gibbet and a gallows next."

"I should think he'd stay at home and not take more on his shoulders!"
said the one-eyed shoemaker.  Without a word, Lajeunesse threw a dish of
water in Gingras's face.  This reference to the Seigneur's deformity was
unpalatable.

Gingras had not recovered from his discomfiture when all were startled by
the distant blare of a bugle.  They rushed to the door, and were met by
Parpon the dwarf, who announced that a regiment of soldiers was marching
on the village.

"'Tis what I expected after that meeting, and the Governor's visit, and
the lily-flag of France on the Manor, and the body-guard and the
carbines," said Muroc nervously.

"We're all in trouble again-sure," said Benoit, and drained his glass to
the last drop.  "Some of us will go to gaol."

The coming of the militia had been wholly unexpected by the people of
Pontiac, but the cause was not far to seek.  Ever since the Governor's
visit there had been sinister rumours abroad concerning Louis Racine,
which the Cure and the Avocat and others had taken pains to contradict.
It was known that the Seigneur had been requested to disband his
so-called company of soldiers with their ancient livery and their modern
arms, and to give them up.  He had disbanded the corps, but he had not
given up the arms, and, for reasons unknown, the Government had not
pressed the point, so far as the world knew.  But it had decided to hold
a district drill in this far-off portion of the Province; and this summer
morning two thousand men marched 'upon the town and through it, horse,
foot, and commissariat, and Pontiac was roused out of the last-century
romance the Seigneur had sought to continue, to face the actual presence
of modern force and the machinery of war.  Twice before had British
soldiers marched into the town, the last time but a few years agone, when
blood had been shed on the stones in front of the parish church.  But
here were large numbers of well-armed men from the Eastern parishes,
English and French, with four hundred regulars to leaven the mass.
Lajeunesse knew only too well what this demonstration meant.

Before the last soldier had passed through the street, he was on his way
to the Seigneury.

He found Madelinette alone in the great dining-room, mending a rent in
the British flag, which she was preparing for a flag-staff.  When she saw
him, she dropped the flag, as if startled, came quickly to him, took both
his hands in hers, and kissed his cheek.

"Wonder of wonders!" she said.

"It's these soldiers," he replied shortly.  "What of them?" she asked
brightly.

"Do you mean to say you don't know what their coming here means?" he
asked.

"They must drill somewhere, and they are honouring Pontiac," she replied
gaily, but her face flushed as she bent over the flag again.

He came and stood in front of her.  "I don't know what's in your mind;
I don't know what you mean to do; but I do know that M'sieu' Racine is
making trouble here, and out of it you'll come more hurt than anybody."

"What has Louis done?"

"What has he done!  He's been stirring up feeling against the British.
What has he done!--Look at the silly customs he's got out of old coffins,
to make us believe they're alive.  Why did he ever try to marry you?  Why
did you ever marry him?  You are the great singer of the world.  He's a
mad hunchback habitant seigneur!"

She stamped her foot indignantly, but presently she ruled herself to
composure, and said quietly: "He is my husband.  He is a brave man, with
foolish dreams."  Then with a sudden burst of tender feeling, she said:
"Oh, father, father, can't you see, I loved him--that is why I married
him.  You ask me what I am going to do?  I am going to give the rest of
my life to him.  I am going to stay with him, and be to him all that he
may never have in this world, never--never.  I am going to be to him what
my mother was to you, a slave to the end--a slave who loved you, and who
gave you a daughter who will do the same for her husband--"

"No matter what he does or is--eh?"

"No matter what he is."

Lajeunesse gasped.  "You will give up singing!  Not sing again before
kings and courts, and not earn ten thousand dollars a month--more than
I've earned in twenty years?  You don't mean that, Madelinette."

He was hoarse with feeling, and he held out his hand pleadingly.  To him
it seemed that his daughter was mad; that she was throwing her life away.

"I mean that, father," she answered quietly.  "There are things worth
more than money."

"You don't mean to say that you can love him as he is.  It isn't natural.
But no, it isn't."

"What would you have said, if any one had asked you if you loved my
mother that last year of her life, when she was a cripple, and we wheeled
her about in a chair you made for her?"

"Don't say any more," he said slowly, and took up his hat, and kept
turning it round in his hand.  "But you'll prevent him getting into
trouble with the Gover'ment?" he urged at last.

"I have done what I could," she answered.  Then with a little gasp: "They
came to arrest him a fortnight ago, but I said they should not enter the
house.  Havel and I prevented them--refused to let them enter.  The men
did not know what to do, and so they went back.  And now this--!" she
pointed to where the soldiers were pitching their tents in the valley
below.  "Since then Louis has done nothing to give trouble.  He only
writes and dreams.  If he would but dream and no more--!" she added,
half under her breath.

"We've dreamt too much in Pontiac already," said Lajeunesse, shaking his
head.

Madelinette reached up her hand and laid it on his shaggy black hair.
"You are a good little father, big smithy-man," she said lovingly.  "You
make me think of the strong men in the Niebelungen legends.  It must be a
big horse that will take you to Walhalla with the heroes," she added.

"Such notions--there in your head," he laughed.  "Try to frighten me with
your big names-hein?"  There was a new look in the face of father and of
daughter.  No mist or cloud was between them.  The things they had long
wished to say were uttered at last.  A new faith was established between
them.  Since her return they had laughed and talked as of old when they
had met, though her own heart was aching, and he was bitter against the
Seigneur.  She had kept him and the whole parish in good humour by her
unconventional ways, as though people were not beginning to make
pilgrimages to Pontiac to see her--people who stared at the name over
the blacksmith's door, and eyed her curiously, or lay in wait about the
Seigneury, that they might get a glimpse of Madame and her deformed
husband.  Out in the world where she was now so important, the newspapers
told strange romantic tales of the great singer, wove wild and wonderful
legends of her life.  To her it did not matter.  If she knew, she did not
heed.  If she heeded it--even in her heart--she showed nothing of it
before the world.  She knew that soon there would be wilder tales still
when it was announced that she was bidding farewell to the great working
world, and would live on in retirement.  She had made up her mind quite
how the announcement should read, and, once it was given out, nothing
would induce her to change her mind.  Her life was now the life of the
Seigneur.

A struggle in her heart went on, but she fought it down.  The lure of a
great temptation from that far-off outside world was before her, but she
had resolved her heart against it.  In his rough but tender way her
father now understood, and that was a comfort to her.  He felt what he
could not reason upon or put into adequate words.  But the confidence
made him happy, and his eyes said so to her now.

"See, big smithy-man," she said gaily, "soon will be the fete of St. Jean
Baptiste, and we shall all be happy then.  Louis has promised me to make
a speech that will not be against the English, but only words which will
tell how dear the old land is to us."

"Ten to one against it!" said Lajeunesse anxiously.  Then he brightened
as he saw a shadow cross her face.  "But you can make him do anything--as
you always made me," he added, shaking his tousled head and taking with a
droll eagerness the glass of wine she offered him.




CHAPTER III

"MAN TO MAN AND STEEL TO STEEL"

One evening a fortnight later Louis Racine and George Fournel, the
Englishman, stood face to face in the library of the Manor House.  There
was antagonism and animosity in the attitude of both.  Apart from the
fact that Louis had succeeded to the Seigneury promised to Fournel, and
sealed to him by a reputed will which had never been found, there was
cause for hatred on the Englishman's part.  Fournel had been an
incredibly successful man.  Things had come his way--wealth, and the
power that wealth brings.  He had but two set-backs, and the man before
him in the Manor House of Pontiac was the cause of both.  The last rebuff
had been the succession to the Seigneury, which, curious as it might
seem, had been the cherished dream of the rich man's retirement.  It had
been his fancy to play the Seigneur, the lord magnificent and bountiful,
and he had determined to use wealth and all manner of influence to have
the title of Baron of Pontiac revived--it had been obsolete for a hundred
years.  He leaned towards the grace of an hereditary dignity, as other
retired millionaires cultivate art and letters, vainly imagining that
they can wheedle civilisation and the humanities into giving them what
they do not possess by nature, and fool the world at the same time.

The loss of the Seigneury had therefore cut deep, but there had been a
more hateful affront still.  Four years before, Louis Racine, when
spasmodically practising law in Quebec, had been approached by two poor
Frenchmen, who laid claim to thousands of acres of land which a Land
Company, whereof George Fournel was president, was publicly exploiting
for the woods and valuable minerals discovered on it.  The Land Company
had been composed of Englishmen only.  Louis Racine, reactionary and
imaginative, brilliant and free from sordidness, and openly hating the
English, had taken up the case, and for two years fought it tooth and
nail without pay or reward.  The matter had become a cause celebre, the
Land Company engaging the greatest lawyers in both the English and French
province.  In the Supreme Court the case was lost to Louis' clients.
Louis took it over to the Privy Council in London, and carried it
through triumphantly and alone, proving his clients' title.  His two poor
Frenchmen regained their land.  In payment he would accept nothing save
the ordinary fees, as though it were some petty case in a county court.
He had, however, made a reputation, which he had seemed not to value,
save as a means of showing hostility to the governing race, and the
Seigneury of Pontiac, when it fell to him, had more charms for him than
any celebrity to be won at the bar.  His love of the history of his
country was a mania with him, and he looked forward, on arriving at
Pontiac, to being the apostle of French independence on the continent.
Madelinette had crossed his path in his most enthusiastic moment, when
his brilliant tongue and great dreams surrounded him with a kind of
glamour.  He had caught her to himself out of the girl's first triumph,
when her nature, tried by the strain of her first challenge to the
judgment of the world, cried out for rest, for Pontiac and home,
and all that was of the old life among her people.

Fournel's antipathy had only been increased by the fact that Louis Racine
had married the now famous Madelinette, and his animosity extended to
her.

It was not in him to understand the nature of the Frenchman, volatile,
moody, chivalrous, unreasonable, the slave of ideas, the victim of
sentiment.  Not understanding, when he began to see that he could not
attain the object of his visit, which was to secure some relics of the
late Seigneur's household, he chose to be disdainful.

"You are bound to give me these things I ask for, as a matter of justice
--if you know what justice means," he said at last.

"You should be aware of that," answered the Seigneur, with a kindling
look.  He felt every glance of Fournel's eye a contemptuous comment upon
his deformity, now so egregious and humiliating.  "I taught you justice
once."

Fournel was not to be moved from his phlegm.  He knew he could torture
the man before him, and he was determined to do so, if he did not get his
way upon the matter of his visit.

"You can teach me justice twice and be thanked once," he answered.
"These things I ask for were much prized by my friend, the late Seigneur.
I was led to expect that this Seigneury and all in it and on it should be
mine.  I know it was intended so.  The law gives it you instead.  Your
technical claim has overridden my rights--you have a gift for making
successful technical claims.  But these old personal relics, of no
monetary value--you should waive your avaricious and indelicate claim to
them."  He added the last words with a malicious smile, for the hardening
look in Racine's face told him his request was hopeless, and he could not
resist the temptation to put the matter with cutting force.  Racine rose
to the bait with a jump.

"Not one single thing--not one single solitary thing--!"

"The sentiment is strong if the grammar is bad," interrupted Fournel,
meaning to wound wherever he found an opportunity, for the Seigneur's
deformity excited in him no pity; it rather incensed him against the man,
as an affront to decency and to his own just claims to the honours the
Frenchman enjoyed.  It was a petty resentment, but George Fournel had set
his heart upon playing the grand-seigneur over the Frenchmen of Pontiac,
and of ultimately leaving his fortune to the parish, if they all fell
down and worshipped him and his "golden calf."

"The grammar is suitable to the case," retorted the Seigneur, his voice
rising.  "Everything is mine by law, and everything I will keep.  If you
think different, produce a will--produce a will!"

Truth was, Louis Racine would rather have parted with the Seigneury
itself than with these relics asked for.  They were reminiscent of the
time when France and her golden-lilies brooded over his land, of the
days when Louis Quatorze was king.  He cherished everything that had
association with the days of the old regime, as a miner hugs his gold,
or a woman her jewels.  The request to give them up to this unsympathetic
Englishman, who valued them because they had belonged to his friend the
late Seigneur, only exasperated him.

"I am ready to pay the highest possible price for them, as I have said,"
urged the Englishman, realising as he spoke that it was futile to urge
the sale upon that basis.

"Money cannot buy the things that Frenchmen love.  We are not a race of
hucksters," retorted the Seigneur.

"That accounts for your envious dispositions then.  You can't buy what
you want--you love such curious things, I assume.  So you play the dog in
the manger, and won't let other decent folk buy what they want."  He
wilfully distorted the other's meaning, and was delighted to see the
Seigneur's fingers twitch with fury.  "But since you can't buy the things
you love--and you seem to think you should--how do you get them?  Do you
come by them honestly?  or do you work miracles?  When a spider makes
love to his lady he dances before her to infatuate her, and then in a
moment of her delighted aberration snatches at her affections.  Is it the
way of the spider then?"

With a snarl as of a wild beast, Louis Racine sprang forward and struck
Fournel in the face with his clinched fist.  Then, as Fournel, blinded,
staggered back upon the book-shelves, he snatched two antique swords from
the wall.  Throwing one on the floor in front of the Englishman, he ran
to the door and locked it, and turned round, the sword grasped firmly in
his hand, and white with rage.

"Spider!  Spider!  By Heaven, you shall have the spider dance before
you!" he said hoarsely.  He had mistaken Fournel's meaning.  He had put
the most horrible construction upon it.  He thought that Fournel referred
to his deformity, and had ruthlessly dragged in Madelinette as well.

He was like a being distraught.  His long brown hair was tossed over his
blanched forehead and piercing black eyes.  His head was thrown forward
even more than his deformity compelled, his white teeth showed in a
grimace of hatred; he was half-crouched, like an animal ready to spring.

"Take up the sword, or I'll run you through the heart where you stand,"
he continued, in a hoarse whisper.  "I will give you till I can count
three.  Then by the God in Heaven--!"

Fournel felt that he had to deal with a man demented.  The blow he had
received had laid open the flesh on his cheek-bone, and blood was flowing
from the wound.  Never in his life before had he been so humiliated.  And
by a Frenchman--it roused every instinct of race-hatred in him.  Yet he
wanted not to go at him with a sword, but with his two honest hands,
and beat him into a whining submission.  But the man was deformed,
he had none of his own robust strength--he was not to be struck,
but to be tossed out of the way like an offending child.

He staunched the blood from his face and made a step forward without a
word, determined not to fight, but to take the weapon from the other's
hands.  "Coward!" said the Seigneur.  "You dare not fight with the
sword.  With the sword we are even.  I am as strong as you there--
stronger, and I will have your blood.  Coward!  Coward!  Coward!  I will
give you till I count three.  One!  .  .  .  Two!  .  .  ."

Fournel did not stir.  He could not make up his mind what to do.  Cry
out?  No one could come in time to prevent the onslaught--and onslaught
there would be, he knew.  There was a merciless hatred in the Seigneur's
face, a deadly purpose in his eyes; the wild determination of a man who
did not care whether he lived or died, ready to throw himself upon a
hundred in his hungry rage.  It seemed so mad, so monstrous, that the
beautiful summer day through which came the sharp whetting of the scythe,
the song of the birds, and the smell of ripening fruit and grain, should
be invaded by this tragic absurdity, this human fury which must spend
itself in blood.

Fournel's mind was conscious of this feeling, this sense of futile,
foolish waste and disfigurement, even as the Seigneur said "Three!"
and, rushing forward, thrust.

As Fournel saw the blade spring at him, he dropped on one knee, caught it
with his left hand as it came, and wrenched it aside.  The blade
lacerated his fingers and his palm, but he did not let go till he had
seized the sword at his feet with his right hand.  Then, springing up
with it, he stepped back quickly and grasped his weapon fiercely enough
now.

Yet, enraged as he was, he had no wish to fight; to involve himself in a
fracas which might end in tragedy and the courts of the land.  It was a
high price to pay for any satisfaction he might have in this affair.  If
the Seigneur were killed in the encounter--he must defend himself now--
what a miserable notoriety and possible legal penalty and public
punishment!  For who could vouch for the truth of his story?  Even if
he wounded Racine only, what a wretched story to go abroad: that he had
fought with a hunchback--a hunchback who knew the use of the sword,
which he did not, but still a hunchback!

"Stop this nonsense," he said, as Louis Racine prepared to attack again.
"Don't be a fool.  The game isn't worth the candle."

"One of us does not leave this room alive," said the Seigneur.  "You care
for life.  You love it, and you can't buy what you love from me.  I don't
care for life, and I would gladly die, to see your blood flow.  Look,
it's flowing down your face; it's dripping from your hand, and there
shall be more dripping soon.  On guard!"

He suddenly attacked with a fierce energy, forcing Fournel back upon the
wall.  He was not a first-class swordsman, but he had far more knowledge
of the weapon than his opponent, and he had no scruple about using his
knowledge.  Fournel fought with desperate alertness, yet awkwardly, and
he could not attack; it was all that he could do, all that he knew how
to do, to defend himself.  Twice again did the Seigneur's weapon draw
blood, once from the shoulder and once from the leg of his opponent, and
the blood was flowing from each wound.  After the second injury they
stood panting for a moment.  Now the outside world was shut out from
Fournel's senses as it was from Louis Racine's.  The only world they knew
was this cool room, whose oak floors were browned by the slow searching
stains of Time, and darkened by the footsteps of six generations that had
come and gone through the old house.  The books along the walls seemed to
cry out against the unseemly and unholy strife.  But now both men were in
that atmosphere of supreme egoism where only their two selves moved, and
where the only thing that mattered on earth was the issue of this strife.
Fournel could only think of how to save his life, and to do that he must
become the aggressor, for his wounds were bleeding hard, and he must have
more wounds, if the fight went on without harm to the Seigneur.

"You know now what it is to insult a Frenchman--On guard!" again cried
the Seigneur, in a shriller voice, for everything in him was pitched to
the highest note.

He again attacked, and the sound of the large swords meeting clashed on
the soft air.  As they struggled, a voice came ringing through the
passages, singing a bar from an opera:

         "Oh eager golden day, Oh happy evening hour,
          Behold my lover cometh from fields of wrath and hate!
          Sheathed is his sword; he cometh to my bower;
          In war he findeth honour, and love within the gate."

The voice came nearer and nearer.  It pierced the tragic separateness of
the scene of blood.  It reached the ears of the Seigneur, and a look of
pain shot across his face.  Fournel was only dimly aware of the voice,
for he was hard pressed, and it seemed to come from infinite distances.
Presently the voice stopped, and some one tried the door of the room.

It was Madelinette.  Astonished at finding it locked, she stood still a
moment uncertain what to do.  Then the sounds of the struggle within came
to her ears.  She shook the door, leaned her shoulders against it, and
called, "Louis!  Louis!"  Suddenly she darted away, found Havel the
faithful servant in the passage, and brought him swiftly to the door.
The man sprang upon it, striking with his shoulder.  The lock gave, the
door flew open, and Madelinette stepped swiftly into the room, in time to
see George Fournel sway and fall, his sword rattling on the hard oak
floor.

"Oh, what have you done, Louis!" she cried, then added hurriedly to
Havel: "Draw the blind there, shut the door, and tell Madame Marie to
bring some water quickly."

The silent servant vanished, and she dropped on her knees beside the
bleeding and insensible man, and lifted his head.

"He insulted you and me, and I've killed him, Madelinette," said Louis
hoarsely.

A horrified look came to her face, and she hurriedly and tremblingly
opened Fournel's waistcoat and shirt, and felt his heart.

She was freshly startled by a struggle behind her, and, turning quickly,
she saw Madame Marie holding the Seigneur's arm to prevent him from
ending his own life.

She sprang up and laid her hand upon her husband's arm.  "He is not dead-
-you need not do it, Louis," she said quietly.  There was no alarm, no
undue excitement in her face now.  She was acting with good presence of
mind.  A new sense was working in her.  Something had gone from her
suddenly where her husband was concerned, and something else had taken
its place.  An infinite pity, a bitter sorrow, and a gentle command were
in her eyes all at once--new vistas of life opened before her, all in
an instant.

"He is not dead, and there is no need to kill yourself, Louis," she
repeated, and her voice had a command in it that was not to be gainsaid.
"Since you have vindicated your honour, you will now help me to set this
business right."

Madame Marie was on her knees beside the insensible man.  "No, he is not
dead, thank God!" she murmured, and while Havel stripped the arm and
leg, she poured some water between Fournel's lips.  Her long experience
as the Little Chemist's wife served her well now.

Now that the excitement was over, Louis collapsed.  He swayed and would
have fallen, but Madelinette caught him, helped him to the sofa, and,
forcing him gently down on his side, adjusted a pillow for him, and
turned to the wounded man again.

An hour went busily by in the closely-curtained room, and at last George
Fournel, conscious, and with wounds well bandaged, sat in a big arm-
chair, glowering round him.  At his first coming-to, Louis Racine, at his
wife's insistence, had come and offered his hand, and made apology for
assaulting him in his own house.

Fournel's reply had been that he wanted to hear no more fool's talk and
to have no more fool's doings, and that one day he hoped to take his pay
for the day's business in a satisfactory way.

Madelinette made no apology, said nothing, save that she hoped he would
remain for a few days till he was recovered enough to be moved.  He
replied that he would leave as soon as his horses were ready, and refused
to take food or drink from their hands.  His servant was brought from
the Louis Quinze Hotel, and through him he got what was needed for
refreshment, and requested that no one of the household should come near
him.  At night, in the darkness, he took his departure, no servant of the
household in attendance.  But as he got into the carriage, Madelinette
came quickly to him, and said:

"I would give ten years of my life to undo to-day's work."

"I have no quarrel with you, Madame," he said gloomily, raised his hat,
and was driven away.




CHAPTER IV

MADELINETTE MAKES A DISCOVERY

The national fete of the summer was over.  The day had been successful,
more successful indeed than any within the memory of the inhabitants;
for the English and French soldiers joined in the festivities without
any intrusion of racial spirit, but in the very essence and soul of good-
fellowship.  The General had called at the Manor, and paid his respects
to the Seigneur, who received him abstractedly if not coolly, but
Madelinette had captured his imagination and his sympathies.  He was fond
of music for an Englishman, and with a ravishing charm she sang for him a
bergerette of the eighteenth century and then a ballad of Shakespeare's
set to her own music.  She was so anxious that the great holiday should
pass off without one untoward incident, that she would have resorted to
any fair device to attain the desired end.  The General could help her
by his influence and instructions, and if the soldiers--regulars and
militia--joined in the celebrations harmoniously, and with goodwill,
a long step would be made towards undoing the harm that Louis had done,
and maybe influencing him towards a saner, wiser view of things.  He had
changed much since the fateful day when he had forced George Fournel to
fight him; had grown more silent, and had turned grey.  His eyes had
become by turns watchful and suspicious, gloomy and abstracted; and his
speech knew the same variations; now bitter and cynical, now sad and
distant, and all the time his eyes seemed to grow darker and his face
paler.  But however moody and variable and irascible he might be with
others, however unappeasable, with Madelinette he struggled to be gentle,
and his petulance gave way under the intangible persuasiveness of her
words and will, which had the effect of command.  Under this influence
he had prepared the words which he was to deliver at the Fete.  They were
full of veneration for past traditions, but were not at variance with a
proper loyalty to the flag under which they lived, and if the English
soldiery met the speech with genial appreciation the day might end in a
blessing--and surely blessings were overdue in Madelinette's life in
Pontiac.

It had been as she worked for and desired, thanks to herself and the
English General's sympathetic help.  Perhaps his love of music made him
better understand what she wanted, made him even forgiving of the
Seigneur's strained manner; but certain it is that the day, begun with
uneasiness on the part of the people of Pontiac, who felt themselves
under surveillance, ended in great good-feeling and harmless revelry;
and it was also certain that the Seigneur's speech gained him an applause
that surprised him and momentarily appeased his vanity.  The General gave
him a guard of honour of the French Militia in keeping with his position
as Seigneur; and this, with Madelinette's presence at his elbow,
restrained him in his speech when he would have broken from the limits
of propriety in the intoxication of his eager eloquence.  But he spoke
with moderation, standing under the British Flag on the platform, and at
the last he said:

"A flag not our own floats over us now; guarantees us against the
malice of the world and assures us in our laws and religion; but there is
another flag which in our tearful memories is as dear to us now as it was
at Carillon and Levis.  It is the flag of memory--of language and of
race, the emblem of our past upon our hearthstones; and the great country
that rules us does not deny us reverence to it.  Seeing it, we see the
history of our race from Charlemagne to this day, and we have a pride in
that history which England does not rebuke, a pride which is just and
right.  It is fitting that we should have a day of commemoration.  Far
off in France burns the light our fathers saw and were glad.  And we in
Pontiac have a link that binds us to the old home.  We have ever given
her proud remembrance--we now give her art and song."

With these words, and turning to his wife, he ended, and cries of "Madame
Madelinette!  Madame Madelinette!" were heard everywhere.  Even the
English soldiers cheered, and Madelinette sang a la Claire Fontaine,
three verses in French and one in English, and the whole valley rang
with the refrain sung at the topmost pitch by five thousand voices:

"I'ya longtemps que je t'aime,
Jamais je ne t'oublierai."

The day of pleasure done and dusk settled on Pontiac and on the
encampment of soldiers in the valley, a light still burned in the library
at the Manor House long after midnight.  Madelinette had gone to bed,
but, excited by the events of the day, she could not sleep, and she went
down to the library to read.  But her mind wandered still, and she sat
mechanically looking before her at a picture of the father of the late
Seigneur, which was let into the moulding of the oak wall.  As she looked
abstractedly and yet with the intensity of the preoccupied mind, her eye
became aware of a little piece of wood let into the moulding of the
frame.  The light of the hanging lamp was full on it.

This irregularity began to perplex her eye.  Presently it intruded on her
reverie.  Still busy with her thoughts, she knelt upon the table beneath
the picture and pressed the irregular piece of wood.  A spring gave, the
picture came slowly away from the frame, and disclosed a small cupboard
behind.  In this cupboard were a few books, an old silver-handled pistol,
and a packet.  Madelinette's reverie was broken now.  She was face to
face with discovery and mystery.  Her heart stood still with fear.  After
an instant of suspense, she took out the packet and held it to the light.
She gave a smothered cry.

It was the will of the late Seigneur.




CHAPTER V

WHAT WILL SHE DO WITH IT?

George Fournel was the heir to the Seigneury of Pontiac, not Louis
Racine.  There it was in the will of Monsieur de la Riviere, duly signed
and attested.

Madelinette's heart stood still.  Louis was no longer--indeed, never had
been--Seigneur of Pontiac, and they had no right there, had never had any
right there.  They must leave this place which was to Louis the fetich of
his soul, the small compensation fate had made him for the trouble nature
had cynically laid upon him.  He had clung to it as a drowning man clings
to a spar.  To him it was the charter from which he could appeal to the
world as the husband of Madelinette Lajeunesse.  To him it was the name,
the dignity, and the fortune he brought her.  It was the one thing that
saved him from a dire humiliation; it was the vantage-ground from which
he appealed to her respect, the flaming testimony of his own self-esteem.
Every hour since his trouble had come upon him, since Madelinette's great
fame had come to her, he had protested to himself that it was honour for
honour; and every day he had laboured, sometimes how fantastically, how
futilely! to dignify his position, to enhance his importance in her eyes.
She had understood it all, had read him to the last letter in the
alphabet of his mind and heart.  She had realised the consternation of
the people, and she knew that, for her sake, and because the Cure had
commanded, all the obsolete claims he had made were responded to by the
people.  Certainly he had affected them by his eloquence and his fiery
kindness, but at the same time they had shrewdly smelt the treason
underneath his ardour.  There was a definite limit to their loyalty to
him; and, deprived of the Seigneury, he would count for nothing.

A hundred thoughts like these went through her mind as she stood by the
table under the hanging lamp, her face white as the loose robe she wore,
her eyes hot and staring, her figure rigid as stone.

To-morrow--how could she face to-morrow, and Louis!  How could she tell
him this!  How could she say to him, "Louis, you are no longer Seigneur.
The man you hate, he who is your inveterate enemy, who has every reason
to exact from you the last tribute of humiliation, is Seigneur here!"
How could she face the despair of the man whose life was one inward
fever, one long illusion, which was yet only half an illusion, since
he was forever tortured by suspicion; whose body was wearing itself out,
and spirit was destroying itself in the struggle of a vexed imagination!

She knew that Louis' years were numbered.  She knew that this blow would
break him body and soul.  He could never survive the humiliation.  His
sensitiveness was a disease, his pride was the only thing that kept him
going; his love of her, strong as it was, would be drowned in an imagined
shame!

It was midnight.  She was alone with this secret.  She held the paper in
her hand, which was at once Louis' sentence or his charter of liberty.
A candle was at her hand, the doors were shut, the blinds drawn, the
house a frozen silence--how cold she was, though it was the deep of
summer!  She shivered from head to foot, and yet all day the harvest sun
had drenched the room in its heat.

Yet her blood might run warm again, her cold cheeks might regain their
colour, her heart beat quietly, if this paper were no more!  The thought
made her shrink away from herself, as it were, yet she caught up the
candle and lighted it.

For Louis.  For Louis, though she would rather have died than do it for
herself.  To save to Louis what was, to his imagination, the one claim
he had upon her respect and the world's.  After all, how little was it in
value or in dignity!  How little she cared for it!  One year of her voice
could earn two such Seigneuries as this.  And the honour--save that it
was Pontiac-it was naught to her.  In all her life she had never done or
said a dishonourable thing.  She had never lied, she had never deceived,
she had never done aught that might not have been written down and
published to all the world.  Yet here, all at once, she was faced with
a vast temptation, to do a deed, the penalty of which was an indelible
shame.

What injury would it do to George Fournel!  He was used now to his
disappointment; he was rich; he had no claims upon Pontiac; there was no
one but himself to whom it mattered, this little Seigneury.  What he did
not know did not exist, so far as himself was concerned.  How easily
could it all be made right some day!  She felt as though she were
suffocating, and she opened the window a little very softly.  Then she
lit the candle tremblingly, watched the flame gather strength, and opened
out the will.  As she did so, however, the smell of a clover field, which
is as honey, came stealing through the room, and all at once a strange
association of ideas flashed into her brain.

She recalled one summer day long ago, when, in the church of St.
Saviour's, the smell of the clover fields came through the open doors
and windows, and her mind had kept repeating mechanically, till she fell
asleep, the text of the Curb's sermon--"As ye sow, so also shall ye
reap."

That placid hour which had no problems, no cares, no fears, no penalties
in view, which was filled with the richness of a blessed harvest and the
plenitude of innocent youth, came back on her now in the moment of her
fierce temptation.

She folded up the paper slowly, a sob came in her throat, she blew out
the candle, and put the will back in the cupboard.  The faint click of
the spring as she closed the panel seemed terribly loud to her.  She
started and looked timorously round.  The blood came back to her face--
she flushed crimson with guilt.  Then she turned out the lighted lamp
and crept away up the stairs to her room.

She paused beside Louis' bed.  He was moving restlessly in his sleep;
he was murmuring her name.  With a breaking sigh she crept into bed
slowly and lay like one who had been beaten, bruised, and shamed.

At last, before the dawn, she fell asleep.  She dreamed that she was
in prison and that George Fournel was her jailor.

She waked to find Louis at her bedside.

"I am holding my seigneurial court to-day," he said.




CHAPTER VI

THE ONE WHO SAW

All day and every day Madelinette's mind kept fastening itself upon one
theme, kept turning to one spot.  In her dreams she saw the hanging lamp,
the moving panel, the little cupboard, the fatal paper.  Waking and
restlessly busy, she sometimes forgot it for a moment, but remembrance
would come back with painful force, and her will must govern her hurt
spirit into quiet resolution.  She had such a sense of humiliation as
though some one dear to her had committed a crime against herself.  Two
persons were in her--Madelinette Lajeunesse, the daughter of the village
blacksmith, brought up in the peaceful discipline of her religion,
shunning falsehood and dishonour with a simple proud self-respect; and
Madame Racine, the great singer, who had touched at last the heart of
things; and, with the knowledge, had thrown aside past principles and
convictions to save her stricken husband from misery and humiliation--
to save his health, his mind, his life maybe.

The struggle of conscience and expediency, of principle and womanliness
wore upon her, taking away the colour from her cheeks, but spiritualising
her face, giving the large black eyes an expression of rare intensity, so
that the Avocat in his admiration called her Madonna, and the Cure came
oftener to the Manor House with a fear in his heart that all was not
well.  Yet he was met by her cheerful smile, by her quiet sense of
humour, by the touching yet not demonstrative devotion of the wife
to the husband, and a varying and impulsive adoration of the wife by
the husband.  One day when the Cure was with the Seigneur, Madelinette
entered upon them.  Her face was pale though composed, yet her eyes had a
look of abstraction or detachment.  The Cure's face brightened at her
approach.  She wore a simple white gown with a bunch of roses at the
belt, and a broad hat lined with red that shaded her face and gave it a
warmth it did not possess.

"Dear Madame!" said the Cure, rising to his feet and coming towards her.

"I have told you before that I will have nothing but 'Madelinette,' dear
Cure," she replied, with a smile, and gave him her hand.  She turned to
Louis, who had risen also, and putting a hand on his arm pressed him
gently into his chair, then, with a swift, almost casual, caress of his
hair, placed on the table the basket of flowers she was carrying, and
began to arrange them.

"Dear Louis," she said presently, and as though en passant, "I have
dismissed Tardif to-day--I hope you won't mind these dull domestic
details, Cure," she added.

The Cure nodded and turned his head towards the window musingly.  He was
thinking that she had done a wise thing in dismissing Tardif, for the man
had evil qualities, and he was hoping that he would leave the parish now.

The Seigneur nodded.  "Then he will go.  I have dismissed him--I have
a temper--many times, but he never went.  It is foolish to dismiss a man
in a temper.  He thinks you do not mean it.  But our Madelinette there"--
he turned towards the Cure now--"she is never in a temper, and every one
always knows she means what she says; and she says it as even as a
clock."  Then the egoist in him added: "I have power and imagination
and the faculty for great things; but Madelinette has serene judgment
--a tribute to you, Cure, who taught her in the old days."

"In any case, Tardif is going," she repeated quietly.  "What did he do?"
said the Seigneur.  "What was your grievance, beautiful Madame?"

He was looking at her with unfeigned admiration--with just such a look
as was in his face the first day they met in the Avocat's house on his
arrival in Pontiac.  She turned and saw it, and remembered.  The scene
flashed before her mind.  The thought of herself then, with the flush of
a sunrise love suddenly rising in her heart, roused a torrent of feeling
now, and it required every bit of strength she had to prevent her
bursting into a passion of tears.  In imagination she saw him there,
a straight, slim, handsome figure, with the very vanity of proud health
upon him, and ambition and passionate purpose in every line of his
figure, every glance of his eyes.  Now--there he was, bent, frail, and
thin, with restless eyes and deep discontent in voice and manner; the
curved shoulder and the head grown suddenly old; the only thing, speaking
of the past, the graceful hand, filled with the illusory courage of a
declining vitality.  But for the nervous force in him, the latent
vitality which renewed with stubborn persistence the failing forces, he
was dead.  The brain kept commanding the body back to life and manhood
daily.

"What did Tardif do?" the Seigneur again questioned, holding out a hand
to her.

She did not dare to take his hand lest her feelings should overcome her;
so with an assumed gaiety she put in it a rose from her basket and said:

"He has been pilfering.  Also he was insolent.  I suppose he could not
help remembering that I lived at the smithy once--the dear smithy," she
added softly.

"I will go at once and pay the scoundrel his wages," said the Seigneur,
rising, and with a nod to the Cure and his wife opened the door.

"Do not see him yourself, Louis," said Madelinette.  "Not I.  Havel shall
pay him and he shall take himself off to-morrow morning."

The door closed, and Madelinette was left alone with the Cure.  She came
to him and said with a quivering in her voice:

"He mocked Louis."

"It is well that he should go.  He is a bad man and a bad servant.  I
know him too well."

"You see, he keeps saying"--she spoke very slowly--"that he witnessed
a will the Seigneur made in favour of Monsieur Fournel.  He thinks us
interlopers, I suppose."

The Cure put a hand on hers gently.  "There was a time when I felt that
Monsieur Fournel was the legal heir to the Seigneury, for Monsieur de la
Riviere had told me there was such a will; but since then I have changed
my mind.  Your husband is the natural heir, and it is only just that the
Seigneury should go on in the direct line.  It is best."

"Even with all Louis' mistakes?"

"Even with them.  You have set them right, and you will keep him within
the bounds of wisdom and prudence.  You are his guardian angel,
Madelinette."

She looked up at him with a pensive smile and a glance of gratitude.

"But suppose that will--if there is one--exists, see how false our
position!"

"Do you think it is mere accident that the will has never been found--if
it was not destroyed by the Seigneur himself before he died?  No, there
is purpose behind it, with which neither you or I or Louis have anything
to do.  Ah, it is good to have you here in this Seigneury, my child!
What you give us will return to you a thousandfold.  Do not regret the
world and your work there.  You will go back all too soon."

She was about to reply when the Seigneur again entered the room.

"I made up my mind that he should go at once, and so I've sent him word
--the rat!"

"I will leave you two to be drowned in the depths of your own
intelligence," said Madelinette; and taking her empty basket left the
room.

A strange compelling feeling drove her to the library where the fateful
panel was.  With a strange sense that her wrong-doing was modified by the
fact, she had left the will where she had found it.  She had a
superstition that fate would deal less harshly with her if
she did.  It was not her way to temporise.  She had concealed the
discovery of the will with an unswerving determination.  It was for
Louis, it was for his peace, for the ease of his fading life, and she had
no repentance.  Yet there it was, that curious, useless concession to old
prejudices, the little touch of hypocrisy--she left the will where she
had found it.  She had never looked at it since, no matter how great the
temptation, and sometimes this was overpowering.

To-day it overpowered her.  The house was very still and the blinds were
drawn to shut out the heat, but the soft din of the locusts came through
the windows.  Her household were all engaged elsewhere.  She shut the
doors of the little room, and kneeling on the table touched the spring.
The panel came back and disclosed the cupboard.  There lay the will.  She
took it up and opened it.  Her eyes went dim on the instant, and she
leaned her forehead against the wall sick at heart.

As she did so a sudden gust of wind drove in the blind of the window.
She started, but saw what it was, and hastily putting the will back,
closed the panel, and with a fast-beating heart, left the room.

Late that evening she found a letter on her table addressed to herself.
It ran:

     You've shipped me off like dirt.  You'll be shipped off, Madame,
     double quick.  I've got what'll bring the right owner here.  You'll
     soon hear from
                                        Tardif.

In terror she hastened to the library and sprung the panel.  The will was
gone.

Tardif was on his way with it to George Fournel.




CHAPTER VII

THE PURSUIT

There was but one thing to do.  She must go straight to George Fournel at
Quebec.  She knew only too well that Tardif was speeding thither as fast
as horses could carry him.  He had had several hours' start, but there
was still a chance of overtaking him.  And suppose she overtook him?
She could not decide definitely what she should do, but she would do
anything, sacrifice anything, to secure again that fatal document which,
in George Fournel's hands, must bring a collapse worse than death.  A
dozen plans flashed before her, and now that her mind was set upon the
thing, compunction would not stay her.  She had gone so far, she was
prepared to go further to save this Seigneury to Louis.  She put in her
pocket the silver-handled pistol from the fatal cupboard.

In an hour from the time she found the note, the horses and coach were at
the door, and the faithful Havel, cloaked and armed, was ready for the
journey.  A note to Louis, with the excuse of a sudden and important call
to Quebec, which he was to construe into business concerning her
profession; hurried yet careful arrangements for his comfort during her
absence; a letter to the Cure begging of him a daily visit to the Manor
House; and then, with the flurried Madame Marie, she entered the coach
with Havel on the box, and they were off.

The coach rattled through the village and stopped for a moment at the
smithy.  A few words of cheerful good-bye to her father--she carried the
spring in her face and the summer of gaiety in her face however sore her
heart was--and they were once more upon the road.

Their first stage was twenty-five miles, and it led through the ravine
where Parpon and his comrades had once sought to frighten George Fournel.
As they passed the place Madelinette shuddered, and she remembered
Fournel's cynical face as he left the house three months ago.  She felt
that it would not easily soften to mercy or look upon her trouble with a
human eye, if once the will were in his hands.  It was a silent journey,
but Madame Marie asked no questions, and there was comfort in her
unspoken sympathy.

Five hours, and at midnight they arrived at the end of the first stage
of their journey, at the village tavern of St. Stanislaus.  Here Madame
Marie urged Madelinette to stay and sleep, but this she refused to do,
if horses could be got to go forward.  The sight of two gold pieces made
the thing possible in the landlord's eyes, and Madame Marie urged no
more, but found some refreshment, of which she gently insisted that
Madelinette should partake.  In another hour from their arrival they were
on the road again, with the knowledge that Tardif had changed horses and
gone forward four hours before, boasting as he went that when the
bombshell he was carrying should burst, the country would stay awake
o' nights for a year.

Madelinette herself had made the inquiries of the landlord, whose easily-
bought obsequiousness now knew no bounds, and he gave a letter to Havel
to hand to his cousin the landlord at the next change, which, he said,
would be sure to secure them the best of accommodation and good horses.

As the night grew to morning, Madelinette drooped a little, and Madame
Marie, who had, to her own anger and disgust, slept three hours or more,
quietly drew Madelinette towards her.  With a little sob the girl--for
what was she but a girl--let her head drop on the old woman's shoulder,
and she fell into a troubled sleep, which lasted till, in the flush of
sunrise, they drew up at the solitary inn on the outskirts of the village
of Beaugard.  They had come fifty miles since the evening before.

Here Madelinette took Havel into her confidence, in so far as to tell him
that Tardif had stolen a valuable paper from her, the loss of which might
bring most serious consequences.

Whatever Havel had suspected he was the last man in the world to show or
tell.  But before leaving the Manor House of Pontiac he had armed himself
with pistols, in the grim hope that he might be required to use them.
Havel had been used hard in the world, Madelinette had been kind to him,
and he was ready to show his gratitude--and he little recked what form it
might take.  When he found that they were following Tardif, and for what
purpose, an ugly joy filled his heart, and he determined on revenge--
so long delayed--on the scoundrel who had once tried to turn the parish
against him by evil means.  He saw that his pistols were duly primed, he
learned that Tardif had passed but two hours before, boasting again that
Europe would have gossip for a year, once he reached Quebec.  Tardif too
had paid liberally for his refreshment and his horses, for here he had
taken a carriage, and had swaggered like a trooper in a conquered
country.

Havel had every hope of overtaking Tardif, and so he told Madelinette,
adding that he would secure the paper for her at any cost.  She did not
quite know what Havel meant, but she read purpose in his eye, and when
Havel said: "I won't say 'Stop thief' many times," she turned away
without speaking--she was choked with anxiety.  Yet in her own pocket was
a little silver-handled pistol.

It was true that Tardif was a thief, but she knew that his theft would be
counted a virtue before the world.  This she could not tell Havel, but
when the critical moment came--if it did come--she would then act upon
the moment's inspiration.  If Tardif was a thief, what was she!--But this
she could not tell Havel or the world.  Even as she thought it for this
thousandth time, her face flushed deeply, and a mist came before her
eyes.  But she hardened her heart and gave orders to proceed as soon as
the horses were ready.  After a hasty breakfast they were again on their
way, and reached the third stage of their journey by eleven o'clock.
Tardif had passed two hours before.

So, for two days they travelled, with no sleep save what they could catch
as the coach rolled on.  They were delayed three hours at one inn because
of the trouble in getting horses, since it appeared that Tardif had taken
the only available pair in the place; but a few gold pieces brought
another pair galloping from a farm two miles away, and they were again on
the road.  Fifty miles to go, and Tardif with three hours' start of them!
Unless he had an accident there was faint chance of overtaking him, for
at this stage he had taken to the saddle again.  As time had gone on, and
the distance between them and Quebec had decreased, Madelinette had grown
paler and stiller.  Yet she was considerate of Madame Marie, and more
than once insisted on Havel lying down for a couple of hours, and herself
made him a strengthening bowl of soup at the kitchen fire of the inn.
Meanwhile she inquired whether it might be possible to get four horses at
the next change, and she offered five gold pieces to a man who would ride
on ahead of them and secure the team.

Some magic seemed to bring her the accomplishment of the impossible, for
even as she made the offer, and the downcast looks of the landlord were
assuring her that her request was futile, there was the rattle of hoofs
without, and a petty Government official rode up.  He had come a journey
of three miles only, and his horse was fresh.  Agitated, yet ruling
herself to composure, Madelinette approached him and made her proposal
to him.  He was suspicious, as became a petty Government official, and
replied sullenly.  She offered him money--before the landlord, unhappily
--and his refusal was now unnecessarily bitter.  She turned away sadly,
but Madame Marie had been roused by the official's churlishness, and for
once the placid little body spoke in that vulgar tongue which needs no
interpretation.  She asked the fellow if he knew to whom he had been
impolite, to whom he had refused a kindly act.

"You--you, a habitant road-watcher, a pound-keeper, a village tax-
collector, or something less!" she said.  "You to refuse the great
singer Madelinette Lajeunesse, the wife of the Seigneur of Pontiac, the
greatest patriot in the land; to refuse her whom princes are glad to
serve--" She stopped and gasped her indignation.

A hundred speeches and a hundred pounds could not have done so much.  The
habitant official stared in blank amazement, the landlord took a glass of
brandy to steady himself.

"The Lajeunesse--the Lajeunesse, the singer of all the world--ah, why did
she not say so then!" said the churl.  "What would I not do for her!
Money--no, it is nothing, but the Lajeunesse, I myself would give my
horse to hear her sing."

"Tell her she can have M'sieu's horse," said the landlord, excitedly
interposing.

"Tiens, who the devil--the horse is mine!  If Madame--if she will but let
me offer it to her myself!" said the agitated official.  "I sing myself
--I know what singing is.  I have sung in an opera--a sentinel in armour
I was.  Ah, but bring me to her, and you shall see what I will do, by
grace of heaven!  I will marry you if you haven't a husband," he added
with ardour to the dumfounded Madame Marie, who hurried to the adjoining
room.

An instant afterwards the official was making an oration in tangled
sentences which brought him a grateful smile and a hand-clasp from
Madelinette.  She could not prevent him from kissing her hand, she could
not refrain from laughing when, outside the room, he tried to kiss Madame
Marie.  She was astounded, however, an hour later, to see him still at
the inn door, marching up and down, a whip in his hand.  She looked at
him reproachfully, indignantly.

"Why are you not on the way?" she asked.

"Your man, that M'sieu' Havel, has rode on; I am to drive," he said.
"Yes, Madame, it is my everlasting honour that I am to drive you.  Havel
has a good horse, the horse has a good rider, you have a good servant in
me.  I, Madame, have a good mistress in you--I am content.  I am
overjoyed--I am proud--I am ready, I, Pierre Lapierre."

The churlish official had gone back to the natural state of an excitable
habitant, ready to give away his heart or lose his head at an instant's
notice, the temptation being sufficient.  Madelinette was frightened.
She knew well why Havel had ridden on ahead without her permission, and
shaking hands with the landlord and getting into the coach, she said
hastily to her new coachman: "Lose not an instant.  Drive hard."

They reached the next change by noon, and here they found four horses
awaiting them.  Tardif, and Havel also, had come and gone.  An hour's
rest, and they were away again upon the last stage of the journey.  They
should reach Quebec soon after dusk, all being well.  At first, Lapierre
the official had been inclined to babble, but at last he relieved his
mind by interjections only.  He kept shaking his head wisely, as though
debating on great problems, and he drove his horses with a master-hand--
he had once been a coach driver on that long river-road, which in summer
makes a narrow ribbon of white, mile for mile with the St. Lawrence from
east to west.  This was the proudest moment of his life.  He knew great
things were at stake, and they had to do with the famous singer,
Lajeunesse; and what tales for his grandchildren in years to come!

The flushed and comfortable Madame Marie sat upright in the coach,
holding the hand of her mistress, and Madelinette grew paler as the miles
diminished between her and Quebec.  Yet she was quiet and unmoving, now
and then saying an encouraging word to Lapierre, who smacked his lips for
miles afterwards, and took out of his horses their strength and paces by
masterly degrees.  So that when, at last, on the hill they saw far off
the spires of Quebec, the team was swinging as steadily on as though they
had not come twenty-five miles already.  This was a moment of pride for
Lapierre, but of apprehension for Madelinette.  At the last two inns on
the road she had got news of both Tardif and Havel.  Tardif had had the
final start of half-an-hour.  A half-hour's start, and fifteen miles to
go!  But one thing was sure, Havel, the wiry Havel, was the better man,
with sounder nerve and a fostered strength.

Yet, as they descended the hill and plunged into the wild wooded valley,
untenanted and uncivilised, where the road wound and curved among giant
boulders and twisted through ravines and gorges, her heart fell within
her.  Evening was at hand, and in the thick forest the shadows were
heavy, and night was settling upon them before its time.

They had not gone a mile, however, when, as they swung creaking round a
great boulder, Lapierre pulled up his horses with a loud exclamation, for
almost under his horses' feet lay a man apparently dead, his horse dead
beside him.

It was Havel.  In an instant Madelinette and Ma dame Marie were bending
over him.  The widow of the Little Chemist had skill and presence of
mind.

"He is not dead, dear mine," said she in a low voice, feeling Havel's
heart.

"Thank God," was all that Madelinette could say.  "Let us lift him into
the coach."

Now Lapierre was standing beside them, the reins in his hand.  "Leave
that to me," he said, and passed the reins into Madame Marie's hands,
then with muttered imprecations on persons unmentioned he lifted up the
slight form of Havel, and carried him to the coach.  Meanwhile
Madelinette had stooped to a little stream at the side of the road, and
filled her silver drinking-cup with water.

As she bent over Havel and sprinkled his face, Lapierre examined the
insensible man.

"He is but stunned," he said.  "He will come to in a moment."

Then he went to the spot where Havel had lain, and found a pistol lying
at the side of the road.  Examining it, he found it had been discharged-
both barrels.  Rustling with importance he brought it to Madelinette,
nodding and looking wise, yet half timorous too in sharing in so
remarkable a business.  Madelinette glanced at the pistol, her lips
tightened, and she shuddered.  Havel had evidently failed, and she must
face the worst.  Yet now that it had come, she was none the less
determined to fight on.

Havel opened his eyes and looked round in a startled way.  He saw
Madelinette.

"Ah, Madame, Madame, pardon!  He got away.  I fired twice and winged him,
but he shot my horse and I fell on my head.  He has got away.  What time
is it, Madame?" he suddenly asked.  She told him.  "Ah, it is too late,"
he added.  "It happened over half-an-hour ago.  Unless he is badly hurt
and has fallen by the way, he is now in the city.  Madame, I have failed
you--pardon, Madame!"

She helped him to sit up, and made a cushion of her cloak for his head,
in a corner of the coach.  "There is nothing to ask pardon for, Havel,"
she said; "you did your best.  It was to be--that's all.  Drink the
brandy now."

A moment afterwards Lapierre was on the box, Madame Marie was inside, and
Madelinette said to the coachman:

"Drive hard--the White Calvary by the church of St. Mary Magdalene."

In another hour the coach drew up by the White Calvary, where a soft
light burned in memory of some departed soul.

The three alighted.  Madelinette whispered to Havel, he got up on the box
beside Lapierre, and the coach rattled away to a tavern, as the two women
disappeared swiftly into the darkness.




CHAPTER VIII

FACE TO FACE

As the two approached the mansion where George Fournel lived, they saw
the door open and a man come hurriedly out into the street.  He wore his
wrist in a sling.

Madelinette caught Madame Marie's arm.  She did not speak, but her heart
sank within her.  The man was Tardif.

He saw them and shuffled over.

"Ha, Madame," he said, "he has the will, and I've not done with you yet
--you'll see."  Then, shaking a fist in Madelinette's face, he clattered
off into the darkness.

They crossed the street, and Madame Marie knocked at Fournel's door.  It
was at once opened, and Madelinette announced herself.  The servant
stared stonily at first, then, as she mentioned her name and he saw her
face, he suddenly became servile, and asked them into a small waiting-
room.  Monsieur Fournel was at home, and should be informed at once of
Madame's arrival.

A few moments later the servant, somewhat graver, but as courteous still,
came to say that Monsieur would receive her in his library.  Madelinette
turned towards Madame Marie.  The servant understood.

"I shall see that the lady has refreshment," he said.  "Will Madame
perhaps care for refreshment--and a mirror, before Monsieur has the
honour?--Madame has travelled far."

In spite of the anxiety of the moment and the great matters at stake,
Madelinette could not but smile.  "Thank you," she said, "I hope I'm not
so unpresentable."

"A little dust here and there perhaps, Madame," he said, with humble
courtesy.

Madelinette was not so heroical as to undervalue the suggestion.  Lives
perhaps were in the balance, but she was a woman, and who could tell what
slight influences might turn the scale!

The servant saw her hesitation.  "If Madame will but remain here, I will
bring what is necessary," he said, and was gone.  In a moment he appeared
again with a silver basin, a mirror, and a few necessaries of the toilet.

"I suppose, Madame," said the servant, with fluttered anxiety, to show
that he knew who she was, "I suppose you have had sometimes to make rough
shifts, even in palaces."

She gave him a gold piece.  It cheered her in the moment to think that in
this forbidding house, on a forbidding mission, to a forbidding man, she
had one friend.  She made a hasty toilet, and but for the great paleness
of her cheeks, no traces remained of the three days' travel with their
hardship and anxiety.  Presently, as the servant ushered her into the
presence of George Fournel, even the paleness was warmed a little by the
excitement of the moment.

Fournel was standing with his back to the door, looking out into the
moonlit night.  As she entered he quickly drew the curtains of the
windows and turned towards his visitor, a curious, hard, disdainful look
in his face.  In his hands he held a paper which she knew only too well.

"Madame," he said, and bowed.  Then he motioned her to a chair.  He took
one himself and sat down beside the great oak writing-desk and waited for
her to speak--waited with a look which sent the blood from her heart to
colour her cheeks and forehead.

She did not speak, however, but looked at him fearlessly.  It was
impossible for her to humble herself before the latent insolence of his
look.  It seemed to degrade her out of all consideration.  He felt the
courage of her defiance, and it moved him.  Yet he could but speak in
cynical suggestion.

"You had a long, hard, and adventurous journey," he said.  He rose
suddenly and drew a tray towards him.  "Will you not have some
refreshment?" he added, in an even voice.  "I fear you have not had time
to seek it at an inn.  Your messenger has but just gone."

It was impossible for him to do justice to himself, or to let his
hospitality rest upon its basis of natural courtesy.  It was clear that
he was moved with accumulated malice, and he could not hide it.

"Your servant has been hospitable," she said, her voice trembling a
little.  She plunged at once into the business of her visit.

"Monsieur, that paper you hold--" she stopped for an instant, able to go
no further.

"Ah, this--this document you have sent me," he said, opening it with an
assumed carelessness.  "Your servant had an accident--I suppose we may
call it that privately--as he came.  He was fired at--was wounded.  You
will share with me the hope that the highwayman who stopped him may be
brought to justice, though, indeed, your man Tardif left him behind in
the dust.  Perhaps you came upon him, Madame--hein?"

She steeled herself.  Too much was at stake; she could not resent his
hateful implications now.

"Tardif was not my messenger, Monsieur, as you know.  Tardif was the
thief of that document in your hands."

"Yes, this--will!" he said musingly, an evil glitter in his eyes.  "Its
delivery has been long delayed.  Posts and messengers are slow from
Pontiac."

"Monsieur will hear what I have to say?  You have the will, your rights
are in your hands.  Is not that enough?"

"It is not enough," he answered, in a grating voice.  "Let us be plain
then, Madame, and as simple as you please.  You concealed this will.
Not Tardif but yourself is open to the law."

She shrank under the brutality of his manner, but she ruled herself to
outward composure.  She was about to reply when he added, with a sneer:
"Avarice is a debasing vice--Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house!
Thou shalt not steal!"

"Monsieur," she said calmly, "it would have been easy to destroy the
will.  Have you not thought of that?"

For a moment he was taken aback, but he said harshly: "If crime were
always intelligent, it would have fewer penalties."

She shrank again under the roughness of his words.  But she was fighting
for an end that was dear to her soul, and she answered:

"It was not lack of intelligence, but a sense of honour--yes, a sense of
honour," she insisted, as he threw back his head and laughed.  "What do
you think might be my reason for concealing the will--if I did conceal
it?"

"The answer seems obvious.  Why does the wild ass forage with a strange
herd, or the pig put his feet in the trough?  Not for his neighbour's
gain, Madame, not in a thousand years."

"Monsieur, I have never been spoken to so coarsely.  I am a blacksmith's
daughter, and I have heard rough men talk in my day, but I have never
heard a man--of my own race at least--so rude to a woman.  But I am here
not for my own sake; I will not go till I have said and done all I have
come to say and do.  Will you listen to me, Monsieur?"

"I have made my charges--answer them.  Disprove this theft"--he held up
the will--"of concealment, and enjoyment of property not your own, and
then ask of me that politeness which makes so beautiful stable and forge
at Pontiac."

"Monsieur, you cannot think that the will was concealed for profit, for
the value of the Seigneury of Pontiac.  I can earn two such seigneuries
in one year, Monsieur."

"Nevertheless you do not."

"For the same reason that I did not bring or send that will to you when I
found it, Monsieur.  And for that same reason I have come to ask you not
to take advantage of that will."

He was about to interpose angrily, but she continued: "Whatever the
rental may be that you in justice feel should be put upon the Seigneury,
I will pay--from the hour my husband entered on the property, its heir as
he believed.  Put such rental on the property, do not disturb Monsieur
Racine in his position as it is, and I will double that rental."

"Do not think, Madame, that I am as avaricious as you."

"Is it avaricious to offer double the worth of the rental?"

"There is the title and distinction.  You married a mad nobody; you wish
to retain an honour that belongs to me."

"I am asking it for my husband's sake, not my own, believe me, Monsieur."

"And what do you expect me to do for his sake, Madame?"

"What humanity would suggest.  Ah, I know what you would say: he tried to
kill you; he made you fight him.  But, Monsieur, he has repented of that.
He is ill, he is--crippled, he cherishes the Seigneury beyond its worth a
thousand times."

"He cherishes it at my expense.  So, you must not disturb the man who
robs you of house and land, and tries to murder you, lest he should be
disturbed and not sleep o' nights.  Come, Madame, that is too thin."

"He might kill you, but he would not rob you, Monsieur.  Do you think
that if he knew that will existed, he would be now at the Seigneury,
or I here?  I know you hate Louis Racine."

"With ample reason."

"You hate him more because he defeated you than because he once tried to
kill you.  Oh, I do not know the rights or wrongs of that great case at
law; I only know that Louis Racine was not the judge or jury, but the
avocat only, whose duty it was to do as he did.  That he did it the more
gladly because he was a Frenchman and you an Englishman, is not his fault
or yours either.  Louis Racine's people came here two hundred years ago,
yours not sixty years ago.  You, the great business man, have had
practical power which gave you riches.  You have sacrificed all for
power.  Louis Racine has only genius, and no practical power."

"A dangerous fanatic and dreamer," he interjected.  "A dreamer, if you
will, with no practical power, for he never thought of himself, and
'practical power' is usually all self.  He dreamed--he gave his heart and
soul up for ideas.  Englishmen do not understand that.  Do you not know--
you do know--that, had he chosen, he might have been rich too, for his
brains would have been of great use to men of practical power like
yourself."

She paused; Fournel did not answer, but sat as though reading the will
intently.

"Was it strange that he should dream of a French sovereign state here,
where his people came and first possessed the land?  Can you wonder that
this dreamer, when the Seigneury of Pontiac came to him, felt as if a new
life were opened up to him, and saw a way to some of his ambitions.  They
were sad, mistaken ambitions, doomed to failure, but they were also his
very heart, which he would empty out gladly for an idea.  The Seigneury
of Pontiac came to him, and I married him."

"Evidently bent upon wrecking the chances of a great career," interrupted
Fournel over the paper.

"But no; I also cared more for ideas than for the sordid things of life.
It is in our blood, you see"  she was talking with less restraint now,
for she saw he was listening, despite assumed indifference--"and Pontiac
was dearer to me than all else in the world.  Louis Racine belonged
there.  You--what sort of place would you, an Englishman, have occupied
at the Seigneury of Pontiac!  What kind--"

He got suddenly to his feet.  He was a man of strange whims and vanities,
and his resentment at his exclusion from the Seigneury of Pontiac had
become a fixed idea.  He had hugged the thought of its possession before
M. de la Riviere died, as a man humbly born prides himself on the
distinguished lineage of his wife.  His great schemes were completed, he
was a rich man, and he had pictured himself retiring to this Seigneury,
a peaceful and practical figure, living out his days in a refined repose
which his earlier life had never known.  She had touched the raw nerves
of his secret vanity.

"What kind of Seigneur would I make, eh?  What sort of figure would I
cut in Pontiac!"  He laughed loudly.  "By heaven, Madame, you shall see!
I did not move against his outrage and assault, but I will move to
purpose now.  For you and he shall leave there in disgrace before another
week goes round.  I have you both in my 'practical power,' and I will
squeeze satisfaction out of you.  He is a ruffianly interloper, and you,
Madame, the law would call by another name."

She got quickly to her feet and came a step nearer to him.  Leaning a
hand on the table, she bent towards him slightly.  Something seemed to
possess her that transfigured her face, and gave it a sense of power and
confidence.  Her eyes fixed themselves steadily on him.

"Monsieur," she said, "you may call me what you will, and I will bear it,
for you have been sorely injured.  You are angry because I seemed to
think an Englishman was not fitted to be Seigneur of Pontiac.  We French
are a people of sentiments and ideas; we make idols of trifles, and we
die for fancies.  We dream, we have shrines for memories.  These things
you despise.  You would give us justice and make us rich by what you call
progress.  Monsieur, that is not enough.  We are not born to appreciate
you.  Our hearts are higher than our heads, and, under a flag that
conquered us, they cling together.  Was it strange that I should think
Louis Racine better suited to be Seigneur at Pontiac?"

She paused as though expecting him to answer, but he only looked
inquiringly at her, and she continued "My husband used you ill, but he
is no interloper.  He took what the law gave him, what has been in his
family for over two hundred years.  Monsieur, it has meant more to him
than a hundred times greater honour could to you.  When his trouble came,
when--" she paused, as though it was difficult to speak--"when the other
--legacy--of his family descended on him, that Seigneury became to him
the one compensation of his life.  By right of it only could he look the
world in the face--or me."

She stopped suddenly, for her voice choked her.  "Will you please
continue?" said Fournel, opening and shutting the will in his hand,
and looking at her with a curious new consideration.

"Fame came to me as his trouble came to him.  It was hard for him to go
among men, but, ah, can you think how he dreaded the day when I should
return to Pontiac !  .  .  .  I will tell you the whole truth, Monsieur."
She drew herself up proudly.  "I loved--Louis.  He came into my heart
with its first great dream, and before life--the business of life--really
began.  He was one with the best part of me, the girlhood in me which is
dead."

Fournel rose and in a low voice said: "Will you not sit down?"  He
motioned to a chair.

She shook her head.  "Ah no, please!  Let me say all quickly and while
I have the courage.  I loved him, and he loved and loves me.  I love
that love in which I married him, and I love his love for me.  It is
indestructible, because it is in the fibre of my life.  It has nothing
to do with ugliness or beauty, or fortune or misfortune, or shame or
happiness, or sin or holiness.  When it becomes part of us, it must go on
in one form or another, but it cannot die.  It lives in breath and song
and thought and work and words.  That is the wonder of it, the pity of
it, and the joy of it.  Because it is so, because love would shield the
beloved from itself if need be, and from all the terrors of the world at
any cost, I have done what I have done.  I did it at cost of my honour,
but it was for his sake; at the price of my peace, but to spare him.  Ah,
Monsieur, the days of life are not many for him: his shame and his futile
aims are killing him.  The clouds will soon close over, and his vexed
brain and body will be still.  To spare him the last turn of the wheel of
torture, to give him the one bare honour left him yet a little while, I
have given up my work of life to comfort him.  I concealed, I stole, if
you will, the document you hold.  And, God help me!  I would do it again
and yet again, if I lost my soul for ever, Monsieur.  Monsieur, I know
that in his madness he would have killed you, but it was his suffering,
not a bad heart, that made him do it.  Do a sorrowful woman a great
kindness and spare him, Monsieur."

She had held the man motionless and staring.  When she ended, he got to
his feet and came near to her.  There was a curious look in his face,
half struggle, half mysterious purpose.  "The way is easy to a hundred
times as much," he said, in a low meaning voice, and his eyes boldly held
hers.  "You are doing a chivalrous sort of thing that only a woman would
do--for duty; do something for another reason: for what a woman would do
--for the blood of youth that is in her."  He reached out a hand to lay
it on her arm.  "Ask of me what you will, if you but put your hand in
mine and--"

"Monsieur," she said, pale and gasping, "do you think so ill of me then?
Do I seem to you like--!"  She turned away, her eyes dry and burning, her
body trembling with shame.

"You are here alone with me at night," he persisted.  "It would not be
easy to--"

"Death would be easy, Monsieur," she said calmly and coldly.  "My husband
tried to kill you.  You would do--ah, but let me pass!" she said, with a
sudden fury.  "You--if you were a million times richer, if you could ruin
me for ever, do you think--"

"Hush, Madame," he said, with a sudden change of voice and a manner all
reverence.  "I do not think.  I spoke only to hear you speak in reply:
only to know to the uttermost what you were.  Madame," he added, in a
shaking voice, "I did not know that such a woman lived.  Madame, I could
have sworn there was none in the world."  Then in a quicker, huskier note
he added: "Eighteen years ago a woman nearly spoiled my life.  She was
as beautiful as you, but her heart was tainted.  Since then I have never
believed in any woman--never till now.  I have said that all were
purchasable--at a price.  I unsay that now.  I have not believed
in any one--"

"Oh, Monsieur!" she said, with a quick impulsive gesture towards him,
and her face lighting with sympathy.

"I was struck too hard--"

She touched his arm and said gently: "Some are hurt in one way and some
in another; all are hurt some time, but--"

"You shall have your way," he interrupted, and moved apart.

"Ah, Monsieur, Monsieur, it is a noble act!--" she hurriedly rejoined,
then with a sudden cry rushed towards him, for he was lighting the will
at the flame of a candle near him.

"But no, no, no, you shall not do it," she cried.  "I only asked it for
while he lives--ah!"

She collapsed with a cry of despair, for he had held the flaming paper
above her reach, and its ashes were now scattering on the floor.

"You will let me give you some wine?" he said quietly, and poured out a
glassful.




CHAPTER IX

THE BITER BITTEN

Madelinette was faint, and, sitting down, she drank the wine feebly, then
leaned her head against the back of the chair, her face turned from
Fournel.

"Forgive me, if you can," he said.  "You have this to comfort you, that
if friendship is a boon in this world you have an honest friend in George
Fournel."

She made a gesture of assent with her hand, but she did not speak.  Tears
were stealing quietly down her cold face.  For a moment so, in silence,
and then she rose to her feet, and pulled down over her face the veil she
wore.  She was about to hold out her hand to him to say good-bye, when
there was a noise without, a knocking at the door, then it was flung
open, and Tardif, intoxicated, entered followed by two constables, with
Fournel's servant vainly protesting.

"Here she is," Tardif said to the officers of the law, pointing to
Madelinette.  "It was her set the fellow on to shoot me.  I had the will
she stole from him," he added, pointing to Fournel.

Distressed as Madelinette was, she was composed and ready.

"The man was dismissed my employ--" she began, but Fournel interposed.

"What is this I hear about shooting and a will?" he said sternly.

"What will!" cried Tardif.  "The will I brought you from Pontiac, and
Madame there followed, and her servant shot me.  The will I brought you,
M'sieu'.  The will leaving the Manor of Pontiac to you!"

Fournel turned as though with sudden anger to the officers.  "You come
here--you enter my house to interfere with a guest of mine, on the charge
of a drunken scoundrel like this!  What is this talk of wills!  The
vapourings of his drunken brain.  The Seigneury of Pontiac belongs to
Monsieur Racine, and but three days since Madame here dismissed this
fellow for pilfering and other misdemeanours.  As for shooting--the man
is a liar, and--"

"Ah, do you deny that I came to you?--" began Tardif.

"Constables," said Fournel, "I give this fellow in charge.  Take him to
gaol, and I will appear at court against him when called upon."

Tardif's rage choked him.  He tried to speak once or twice, then began to
shriek an imprecation at Fournel; but the constables clapped hands on his
mouth, and dragged him out of the room and out of the house.

Fournel saw him safely out, then returned to Madelinette.  "Do not fear
for the fellow.  A little gaol will do him good.  I will see to it that
he gives no trouble, Madame," he said.  "You may trust me."

"I do trust you, Monsieur," Madelinette answered quietly.  "I pray that
you may be right, and that--" "It will all come out right," he firmly
insisted.  "Will you ask for Madame Marie?" she said.  Then with a
smile: "We will go happier than we came."

As she and Madame Marie passed from the house, Fournel shook
Madelinette's hand warmly, and said: "'All's well that ends well.'"

"That ends well," answered Madelinette, with a sorrowful questioning in
her voice.

"We will make it so," he rejoined, and then they parted.




CHAPTER X

THE DOOR THAT WOULD NOT OPEN

The old Manor House of Pontiac was alive with light and merriment.  It
was the early autumn; not cool enough for the doors and windows to be
shut, but cool enough to make dancing a pleasure, and to give spirit to
the gaiety that filled the old house.  The occasion was a notable one for
Pontiac.  An address of congratulation and appreciation and a splendid
gift of silver had been brought to the Manor from the capital by certain
high officials of the Government and the Army, representing the people of
the Province.  At first Madelinette had shrunk from the honour to be done
her, and had so written to certain quarters whence the movement had
proceeded; but a letter had come to her which had changed her mind.  This
letter was signed George Fournel.  Fournel had a right to ask a favour of
her; and one that was to do her honour seemed the least that she might
grant.  He had suffered much at Louis' hands; he had forborne much; and
by an act of noble forgiveness and generosity, had left Louis undisturbed
in an honour which was not his, and the enjoyment of an estate to which
he had no claim.  He had given much, suffered much, and had had nothing
in return save her measureless and voiceless gratitude.  Friendship she
could give him; but it was a silent friendship, an incompanionable
friendship, founded upon a secret and chivalrous act.  He was in Quebec
and she in Pontiac; and since that day when he had burned the will before
her eyes she had not seen him.  She had heard from him but twice; once to
tell her that she need have no fear of Tardif, and again, when he urged
her to accept the testimonial and the gift to be offered by her grateful
fellow-citizens.

The deputation, distinguished and important, had been received by the
people of Pontiac with the flaunting of flags, playing of bands, and
every demonstration of delight.  The honour done to Madelinette was an
honour done to Pontiac, and Pontiac had never felt itself so important.
It realised that this kind of demonstration was less expensive, and less
dangerous, than sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion.  The vanity of
the habitants could be better exercised in applauding Madelinette and in
show of welcome to the great men of the land, than in cultivating a
dangerous patriotism under the leadership of Louis Racine.  Temptations
to conspiracy had been few since the day George Fournel, wounded and
morose, left the Manor House secretly one night, and carried back to
Quebec his resentment and his injuries.  Treasonable gossip filtered no
longer from doorway to doorway; carbines were not to be had for a song;
no more nightly drills and weekly meetings gave a spice of great
expectations to their life.  Their Seigneur, silent, and pale, and
stooped, lived a life apart.  If he walked through the town, it was with
bitter, abstracted eyes that took little heed of their presence.  If he
drove, his horses travelled like the wind.  At Mass, he looked at no one,
saw no one, and, as it would seem, heard no one.

But Madelinette--she was the Madelinette of old, simple, gracious, kind,
with a smile here and a kind word there: a little child to be caressed or
an old woman to be comforted; the sick to be fed and doctored; the poor
to be helped; the idle to be rebuked with a persuasive smile; the angry
to be coaxed by a humorous word; the evil to be reproved by a fearless
friendliness; the spiteful to be hushed by a still, commanding presence.
She never seemed to remember that she was the daughter of old Joe
Lajeunesse the blacksmith, yet she never seemed to forget it.  She was
the wife of the Seigneur, and she was the daughter of the smithy-man too.
She sat in the smithy-man's doorway with her hand in his; and she sat at
the Manor table with its silver glitter, and its antique garnishings,
with as real an unconsciousness.

Her influence seemed to pierce far and wide.  The Cure and the Avocat
adored her; and the proudest, happiest moment of their lives was when
they sat at the Manor table, or, in the sombre drawing-room, watched her
give it light and grace and charm, and fill their hearts with the
piercing delight of her song.  So her life had gone on; to the outward
world serene and happy, full of simplicity, charity, and good works.
What it was in reality no one could know, not even herself.  Since the
day when Louis had tried to kill George Fournel, life had been a
different thing for them both.  On her part she had been deeply hurt;
wounded beyond repair.  He had failed her from every vital stand-point,
he had not fulfilled one hope she had ever had of him.  But she laid the
blame not at his door; she rather shrank with inner bitterness from the
cynical cruelty of nature, which, in deforming the body, with a merciless
cruelty had deformed a noble mind.  These things were between her and her
inmost soul.

To Louis she was ever the same, affectionate, gentle, and unselfish;
but her stronger soul ruled him without his knowledge, commanded his
perturbed spirit into the abstracted quiet and bitter silence wherein he
lived, and which she sought to cheer by a thousand happy devices.  She
did not let him think that she was giving up anything for him; no word or
act of hers could have suggested to him the sacrifices she had made.  He
knew them, still he did not know them in their fulness; he was grateful,
but his gratitude did not compass the splendid self-effacing devotion
with which she denied herself the glorious career that had lain before
her.  Morbid and self-centred, he could not understand.  Since her return
from Quebec she had sought to give a little touch of gaiety to their
life, and she had not the heart to interfere with his constant insistence
on the little dignities of the position of Seigneur, ironical as they all
were in her eyes.  She had sacrificed everything; and since another also
had sacrificed himself to give her husband the honours and estate he
possessed, the game should be delicately played to the unseen end.

So it had gone on until the coming of the deputation with the testimonial
and the gift.  She had proposed the gaieties of the occasion to Louis
with so simple a cheerfulness, that he had no idea of the torture it
meant to her; no realisation of how she would be brought face to face
with the life that she had given up for his sake.  But neither he nor she
was aware of one thing, that the beautiful embossed address contained an
appeal to her to return to the world of song which she had renounced,
to go forth once more and contribute to the happiness of humanity.

When, therefore, in the drawing-room of the Manor, the address was read
to her, and this appeal rang upon her ears, she felt herself turn dizzy
and faint: her whole life seemed to reel backwards to all she had lost,
and the tyranny of the present bore down upon her with a cruel weight.
It needed all her courage and all her innate strength to rule herself to
composure.  For an instant the people in the room were a confused mass,
floating away into a blind distance.  She heard, however, the quick
breathing of the Seigneur beside her, and it called her back to an active
and necessary confidence.

With a smile she received the address, and, turning, handed it to Louis,
smiling at him too with a winning duplicity, for which she might never
have to ask forgiveness in this world or the next.  Then she turned and
spoke.  Eloquently, simply, she gave out her thanks for the gift of
silver and the greater gift of kind words; and said that in her quiet
life, apart from that active world of the stage, where sorrow and sordid
experience went hand in hand with song, where the delights of home were
sacrificed to the applause of the world, she would cherish their gift as
a reward that she might have earned, had she chosen the public instead
of the private way of life.  They had told her of the paths of glory,
but she was walking the homeward way.

Thus deftly, and without strain, and with an air of happiness even, did
she set aside the words and the appeal which had created a storm in her
soul.  A few moments afterwards, as the old house rang to the laughter of
old and young, with dancing well begun, no one would have thought that
the Manor of Pontiac was not the home of peace and joy.  Even Louis
himself, who had had his moments of torture and suspicion when the appeal
was read, was now in a kind of happy reaction.  He moved about among the
guests with less abstraction and more cheerfulness than he had shown for
months.  He carried in his hand the address which Madelinette had handed
him.  Again and again he showed it to eager guests.

Suddenly, as he was about to fold it up for the last time and carry it to
the library, he saw the name of George Fournel among the signatures.
Stunned, dumfounded, he left the room.  George Fournel, whom he had tried
to kill, had signed this address of congratulation to his wife!  Was it
Fournel's intention thus to show that he had forgiven and forgotten?  It
was not like the man to either forgive or forget.  What did it mean?  He
left the house buried in morbid speculation, and involuntarily made his
way to a little hut of two rooms which he had built in the Seigneury
grounds.  Here it was he read and wrote, here he had spent moody hours
alone, day after day, for months past.  He was not aware that some one
left the crowd about the house and followed him.  Arrived at the hut, he
entered and shut the door; lighted candles, and spread the embossed
parchment out before him upon the table.  As he stood looking at it, he
heard the door open behind him.  Tardif stood before him.

The face of Tardif had an evil hunted look.  Before the astonished and
suspicious Seigneur had chance to challenge him, he said in a low
insolent tone:

"Good evening, M'sieu'!  Fine doings at the Manor--eh?

"What are you doing at the Manor, and what are you doing here?" asked
the Seigneur, scanning the face of the man closely; for there was a look
in it he did not understand.

"I have as much right to be here as you, M'sieu'."

"You have no right at all to be here.  You were dismissed your place by
the mistress of this Manor."

"There is no mistress of this Manor."

"Madame Racine dismissed you."

"And I dismissed Madame Racine," answered the man with a sneer.

"You are training for the horsewhip.  You forget that, as Seigneur,
I have power to give you summary punishment."

"You haven't power to do anything at all, M'sieu'!" The Seigneur
started.  He thought the remark had reference to his physical disability.
His fingers itched to take the creature by the throat, and choke the
tongue from his mouth.  Before he could speak, the man continued with a
half-drunken grimace:

"You, with your tributes, and your courts, and your body-guards!  Bah!
You'd have a gibbet if you could, wouldn't you?  You with your rebellion
and your tinpot honours!  A puling baby could conspire as well as you.
And all the world laughing at you--v'la!"

"Get out of this room and take your feet from my Manor, Tardif," said the
Seigneur with a deadly quietness, "or it will be the worse for you."

"Your Manor--pish!"  The man laughed a hateful laugh.  "Your Manor?  You
haven't any Manor.  You haven't anything but what you carry on your
back."

A flush passed swiftly over the Seigneur's face, then left it cold and
white, and the eyes shone fiery in his head.  He felt some shameful
meaning in the man's words, beyond this gross reference to his deformity.

"I am Seigneur of this Manor, and you have taken wages from me, and eaten
my bread, slept under my roof, and--"

"I've no more eaten your bread and slept under your roof than you have.
Pish!  You were living then on another man's fortune, now you're living
on what your wife earns."

The Seigneur did not understand yet.  But there was a strange light of
suspicion in his eyes, a nervous rage knotting his forehead.

"My land and my earnings are my own, and I have never lived on another
man's fortune.  If you mean that the late Seigneur made a will--that
canard--"

"It was no canard."  Tardif laughed hatefully.  "There was a will right
enough."

"Where is it?  I've heard that fool's gossip before."

"Where is it?  Ask your wife; she knows.  Ask your loving Tardif, he
knows."

"Where is the will, Tardif?" asked the Seigneur in a voice that, in his
own ears, seemed to come from an infinite distance; to Tardif's ears it
was merely tuneless and harsh.

"In M'sieu' Fournel's pocket, or Madame's.  What's the difference?  The
price is the same, and you keep your eyes shut and play the Seigneur, and
eat and drink what they give you just the same."

Now the Seigneur understood.  His eyes went blind for a moment, and his
hands twitched convulsively on the embossed address he had been rolling
and unrolling.  A terror, a shame, a dreadful cruelty entered into him,
but he was still and numb, and his tongue was thick.  He spoke heavily.

"Tell me all," he said.  "You shall be well paid."

"I don't want your money.  I want to see you squirm.  I want to see her
put where she deserves.  Bah!  Do you think Fournel forgave you for
putting his feet in his shoes, and for that case at law, for nothing?
Why should he?  He hated you, and you hated him.  His name's on that
paper in your hand among all the rest.  Do you think he eats humble pie
and crawls to Madame and lets you stay here for nothing?"

The Seigneur was painfully quiet and intent, yet his brain was like some
great lens, refracting and magnifying things to monstrous proportions.

"A will was found?" he asked.

"By Madame in the library.  She left it where she found it--behind the
picture over the Louis Seize table.  The day you dismissed me, I saw her
at the cupboard.  I found the will and started with it to M'sieu'
Fournel.  She followed.  You remember when she went--eh?  On business--
and such business!  she and Havel and the old slut Marie.  You remember,
eh; Louis?" he added with unnamable insolence.  The Seigneur inclined
his head.  "V'la!  they followed me, overtook me, and Havel shot me in
the wrist.  See there!"--he held out his wrist.  The Seigneur nodded.
"But I got to Fournel's first.  I put the will into his hands.

"I told him Madame Madelinette was following.  Then I went to bring the
constables to his house to arrest her when he had finished with her."
He laughed a brutal laugh, which deepened the strange glittering look in
Louis' eyes.  "When I came an hour later, she was there.  But--now you
shall see what stuff they are both made of!  He laughed at me, said I had
lied; that there was no will; that I was a thief; and had me locked up in
gaol.  For a month I was in gaol without trial.  Then one day I was let
out without trial.  His servant met me and brought me to his house.  He
gave me money and told me to leave the country.  If I didn't, I would be
arrested again for trying to shoot Havel, and for blackmail.  They could
all swear me off my feet and into prison--what was I to do!  I took the
money and went.  But I came back to have my revenge.  I could cut their
hearts out and eat them."

"You are drunk," said the Seigneur quietly.  "You don't know what you're
saying."

"I'm not drunk.  I'm always trying to get drunk now.  I couldn't have
come here if I hadn't been drinking.  I couldn't have told you the truth,
if I hadn't been drinking.  But I'm sober enough to know that I've done
for him and for her!  And I'm even with you too--bah!  Did you think she
cared a fig for you?  She's only waiting till you die.  Then she'll go to
her lover.  He's a man of life and limb.  Youpish!  a hunchback, that all
the world laughs at, a worm--" he turned towards the door laughing
hideously, his evil face gloating.  "You've not got a stick or stone.
She"--jerking a finger towards the house--"she earns what you eat, she--"

It was the last word he ever spoke, for, with a low terrible cry, the
Seigneur snatched up a knife from the table and sprang upon him, catching
him by the throat.  Once, twice, thrice, the knife went home, and the
ruffian collapsed under it with one loud cry.  Not letting go his grasp
of the dying man's collar, the Seigneur dragged him across the floor,
and, opening the door of the small inner room, pulled him inside.  For a
moment he stood beside the body, panting, then he went to the other room
and, bringing a candle, looked at the dead thing in silence.  Presently
he stooped, held the candle to the wide-staring eyes, then felt the
heart.  "He is gone," he said in an even voice.  Stooping for the knife
he had dropped on the floor, he laid it on the body.  He looked at his
hands.  There was one spot of blood on his fingers.  He wiped it off with
his handkerchief, then blowing out the light, he calmly opened the door
of the hut, locked it, went out, and moved on slowly towards the house.

As he left the hut he was conscious that some one was moving under the
trees by the window, but his mind was not concerned with things outside
himself and the one other thing left for him to do.

He entered the house and went in search of Madelinette.  When he reached
the drawing-room, surrounded by eager listeners, she was beginning to
sing.  Her bearing was eager and almost tremulous, for, with this crowd
round her and in the flush of this gaiety and excitement, there was
something of that exhilarating air that greets the singer upon the stage.
Her eyes were shining with a look, half-sorrowful, half-triumphant.
Within the past half-hour she had overcome herself; she had fought down
the blind, wild rebellion that, for one moment as it were, had surged up
in her heart.  She was proud and glad, and piteous and triumphant and
deeply womanly all at once.

Going to the piano she had looked round for Louis, but he was not
visible.  She smiled to herself, however, for she knew that her singing
would bring him--he worshipped it.  Her heart was warm towards him,
because of that moment when she rebelled and was hard at soul.  She
played her own accompaniment, and he was hidden from her by the piano
as she sang--sang more touchingly and more humanly, if not more
artistically, than she had ever done in her life.  The old art was not so
perfect, perhaps, but there was in the voice all that she had learned and
loved and suffered and hoped.  When she rose from the piano to a storm of
applause, and saw the shining faces and tearful eyes round her, her own
eyes filled with tears.  These people--most of them--had known and loved
her since she was a child, and loved her still without envy or any taint.
Her father was standing near, and with smiling face she caught from his
hand the handkerchief with which he was mopping his eyes, and kissed him,
saying:

"I learned that from the tunes you played on your anvil, dear smithy-
man."

Then she turned again to look for Louis.  Near the door she saw him, and
with so strange a face, so wild a look, that, unheeding eager requests to
sing again, she responded to the gesture he made, made her way through
the crowd to the hall-way, and followed him up the stairs, and to the
little boudoir beside her bedroom.  As she entered and shut the door,
a low sound like a moan broke from him.  She went quickly to lay a hand
upon his arm, but he waved her back.  "What is it, Louis?" she asked, in
a bewildered voice.  "Where is the will?" he said.

"Where is the will, Louis," she repeated after him mechanically, staring
at his face, ghostly in the moonlight.

"The will you found behind the picture in the library."

"O Louis!" she cried, and made a gesture of despair.  "O Louis!"

"You found it, and Tardif stole it and took it to Quebec."

"Yes, Louis, but Louis--ah, what is the matter, dear!  I cannot bear that
look in your face.  What is the matter, Louis?"

"Tardif took it to Fournel, and you followed.  And I have been living in
another man's house, on another's bread--"

"O Louis, no--no--no!  Our money has paid for all."

"Your money, Madelinette!"  His voice rose.

"Ah, don't speak like that!  See, Louis.  It can make no difference.  How
you have found out I do not know, but it can make no difference.  I did
not want you to know--you loved the Seigneury so.  I concealed the will;
Tardif found it, as you say.  But, Louis, dear, it is all right.
Monsieur Fournel would not take the place, and--and I have bought it."

She told her falsehood fearlessly.  This man's trouble, this man's peace,
if she might but win it, was the purpose of her life.

"Tardif said that--he said that you--that you and Fournel--"

She read his meaning in his tone, and shrank back in terror, then with a
flush, straightened herself, and took a step towards him.

"It was natural that you should not care for a hunchback like me," he
continued, "but--"

"Louis!" she cried, in a voice of anguish and reproach.

"But I did not doubt you.  I believed in you when he said it, as I
believe in you now when you stand there like that.  I know what you have
done for me--"

"I pleaded with Monsieur Fournel, knowing how you loved the Seigneury--
pleaded and offered to pay three times the price--"

"Yourself would have been a hundred million times the price.  Ah, I know
you, Madelinette--I know you now!  I have been selfish, but I see all
now.  Now when all is over--" he seemed listening to noises with out--
"I see what you have done for me.  I know how you have sacrificed all for
me--all but honour--all but honour," he added, a wild fire in his eyes,
a trembling seizing him.  "Your honour is yours forever.  I say so.
I say so, and I have proved it.  Kiss me, Madelinette--kiss me once," he
added, in a quick whisper.

"My poor, poor Louis!" she said, laid a soothing hand upon his arm, and
leaned towards him.  He snatched her to his breast, and kissed her twice
in a very agony of joy, then let her go.  He listened for an instant to
the growing noise without, then said in a hoarse voice:

"Now, I will tell you, Madelinette.  They are coming for me--don't you
hear them?  They are coming to take me; but they shall not have me.  They
shall not have me--" he glanced to a little door that led into a bath-
room at his right.

"Louis-Louis!" she said in a sudden fright, for though his words seemed
mad, a strange quiet sanity was in all he did.  "What have you done?  Who
are coming?" she asked in agony, and caught him by the arm.

"I killed Tardif.  He is there in the hut in the garden--dead!  I was
seen, and they are coming to take me."

With a cry she ran to the door that led into the hall, and locked it.
She listened, then turned her face to Louis.

"You killed him!" she gasped.  "Louis!  Louis!"  Her face was like
ashes.

"I stabbed him to death.  It was all I could do, and I did it.  He
slandered you.  I went mad, and did it.  Now--"

There was a knocking at the door, and a voice calling--a peremptory
voice.

"There is only one way," he said.  "They shall not take me.  I will not
be dragged to gaol for crowds to jeer at.  I will not be sent to the
scaffold, to your shame."

He ran to the door of the bath-room and flung it open.  "If my life is to
pay the price, then--!"

She came blindly towards him, stretching out her hands.

"Louis!  Louis!" was all that she could say.

He caught her hands and kissed them, then stepped swiftly back into the
little bath-room, and locked the door, as the door of the room she was in
was burst open, and two constables and a half-dozen men crowded into the
room.

She stood with her back to the bath-room door, panting, and white, and
anguished, and her ears strained to the terrible thing inside the place
behind her.

The men understood, and came towards her.  "Stand back," she said.  "You
shall not have him.  You shall not have him.  Ah, don't you hear?  He is
dying--O God, O God!" she cried, with tearless eyes and upturned face--
"Ah, let it be soon!  Ah, let him die soon!"

The men stood abashed before her agony.  Behind the little door where
she stood there was a muffled groaning.  She trembled, but her arms were
spread out before the door as though on a cross, and her lips kept
murmuring: "O God, let him die!  Let him die!  Oh spare him agony!"

Suddenly she stood still and listened-listened, with staring eyes that
saw nothing.  In the room men shrank back, for they knew that death was
behind the little door, and that they were in the presence of a sorrow
greater than death.

Suddenly she turned upon them with a gesture of piteous triumph and said:

"You cannot have him now."

Then she swayed and fell forward to the floor as the Cure and George
Fournel entered the room.  The Cure hastened to her side and lifted up
her head.

George Fournel pushed the men back who would have entered the bath-room,
and himself, bursting the door open, entered.  Louis lay dead upon the
floor.  He turned to the constables.

"As she said, you cannot have him now.  You have no right here.  Go.
I had a warning from the man he killed.  I knew there would be trouble.
But I have come too late," he added bitterly.

An hour later the house was as still as the grave. Madame Marie sat with
the doctor beside the bed of her dear mistress, and in another room,
George Fournel, with the Avocat, kept watch beside the body of the
Seigneur of Pontiac.  The face of the dead man was as peaceful as that of
a little child.

                    .........................

At ninety years of age, the present Seigneur of Pontiac, one Baron
Fournel, lives in the Manor House left him by Madelinette Lajeunesse the
great singer, when she died a quarter of a century ago.  For thirty years
he followed her from capital to capital of Europe and America to hear her
sing; and to this day he talks of her in language more French than
English in its ardour.  Perhaps that is because his heart beats in
sympathy with the Frenchmen he once disdained.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Ah, let it be soon!  Ah, let him die soon!
All are hurt some time
Did not let him think that she was giving up anything for him
Duplicity, for which she might never have to ask forgiveness
Frenchman,  slave of ideas, the victim of sentiment
Frenchman, volatile, moody, chivalrous, unreasonable
Her stronger soul ruled him without his knowledge
I love that love in which I married him
Let others ride to glory, I'll shoe their horses for the gallop
Lighted candles in hollowed pumpkins
Love has nothing  to do with ugliness or beauty, or fortune
Nature twists in back, or  anywhere, gets a twist in's brain too
Rewarded for its mistakes
Some are hurt in one way and some in another
Struggle of conscience and expediency






THE LANE THAT HAD NO TURNING

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.



THE ABSURD ROMANCE OF P'TITE LOUISON
THE LITTLE BELL OF HONOUR
A SON OF THE WILDERNESS
A WORKER IN STONE



THE ABSURD ROMANCE OF P'TITE LOUISON

The five brothers lived with Louison, three miles from Pontiac, and
Medallion came to know them first through having sold them, at an
auction, a slice of an adjoining farm.  He had been invited to their
home, intimacy had grown, and afterwards, stricken with a severe illness,
he had been taken into the household and kept there till he was well
again.  The night of his arrival, Louison, the sister, stood with a
brother on either hand--Octave and Florian--and received him with a
courtesy more stately than usual, an expression of the reserve and
modesty of her single state.  This maidenly dignity was at all times
shielded by the five brothers, who treated her with a constant and
reverential courtesy.  There was something signally suggestive in their
homage, and Medallion concluded at last that it was paid not only to the
sister, but to something that gave her great importance in their eyes.

He puzzled long, and finally decided that Louison had a romance.  There
was something which suggested it in the way they said "P'tite Louison";
in the manner they avoided all gossip regarding marriages and marriage-
feasting; in the way they deferred to her on questions of etiquette (as,
for instance, Should the eldest child be given the family name of the
wife or a Christian name from her husband's family?).  And P'tite
Louison's opinion was accepted instantly as final, with satisfied
nods on the part of all the brothers, and whispers of "How clever!
how adorable!"

P'tite Louison affected never to hear these remarks, but looked
complacently straight before her, stirring the spoon in her cup, or
benignly passing the bread and butter.  She was quite aware of the homage
paid to her, and she gracefully accepted the fact that she was an object
of interest.

Medallion had not the heart to laugh at the adoration of the brothers,
or at the outlandish sister, for, though she was angular, and sallow, and
thin, and her hands were large and red, there was a something deep in her
eyes, a curious quality in her carriage commanding respect.  She had
ruled these brothers, had been worshipped by them, for near half a
century, and the romance they had kept alive had produced a grotesque
sort of truth and beauty in the admiring "P'tite Louison"--an
affectionate name for her greatness, like "The Little Corporal" for
Napoleon.  She was not little, either, but above the middle height,
and her hair was well streaked with grey.

Her manner towards Medallion was not marked by any affectation.  She was
friendly in a kind, impersonal way, much as a nurse cares for a patient,
and she never relaxed a sort of old-fashioned courtesy, which might have
been trying in such close quarters, were it not for the real simplicity
of the life and the spirit and lightness of their race.  One night
Florian--there were Florian and Octave and Felix and Isidore and Emile
--the eldest, drew Medallion aside from the others, and they walked
together by the river.  Florian's air suggested confidence and mystery,
and soon, with a voice of hushed suggestion, he told Medallion the
romance of P'tite Louison.  And each of the brothers at different times
during the next fortnight did the same, differing scarcely at all in
details, or choice of phrase or meaning, and not at all in general facts
and essentials.  But each, as he ended, made a different exclamation.

"Voila, so sad, so wonderful!  She keeps the ring--dear P'tite Louison!"
said Florian, the eldest.

"Alors, she gives him a legacy in her will!  Sweet P'tite Louison," said
Octave.

"Mais, the governor and the archbishop admire her--P'tite Louison:" said
Felix, nodding confidently at Medallion.

"Bien, you should see the linen and the petticoats!" said Isidore, the
humorous one of the family.  "He was great--she was an angel, P'tite
Louison!"

"Attends!  what love--what history--what passion!--the perfect P'tite
Louison!" cried Emile, the youngest, the most sentimental.  "Ah,
Moliere!" he added, as if calling on the master to rise and sing the
glories of this daughter of romance.

Isidore's tale was after this fashion:

"I ver' well remember the first of it; and the last of it--who can tell?
He was an actor--oh, so droll, that!  Tall, ver' smart, and he play in
theatre at Montreal.  It is in the winter.  P'tite Louison visit
Montreal.  She walk past the theatre and, as she go by, she slip on the
snow and fall.  Out from a door with a jomp come M'sieu' Hadrian, and
pick her up.  And when he see the purty face of P'tite Louison, his eyes
go all fire, and he clasp her hand to his breast.

"'Ma'm'selle, Ma'm'selle,' he say, 'we must meet again!'

"She thank him and hurry away queeck.  Next day we are on the river, and
P'tite Louison try to do the Dance of the Blue Fox on the ice.  While she
do it, some one come up swift, and catch her hand and say: 'Ma'm'selle,
let's do it together'--like that!  It take her breath away.  It is
M'sieu' Hadrian.  He not seem like the other men she know; but he have a
sharp look, he is smooth in the face, and he smile kind like a woman.
P'tite Louison, she give him her hand, and they run away, and every one
stop to look.  It is a gran' sight.  M'sieu' Hadrian laugh, and his teeth
shine, and the ladies say things of him, and he tell P'tite Louison that
she look ver' fine, and walk like a queen.  I am there that day, and I
see all, and I think it dam good.  I say: 'That P'tite Louison, she beat
them all'--I am only twelve year old then.  When M'sieu' Hadrian leave,
he give her two seats for the theatre, and we go.  Bagosh!  that is grand
thing that play, and M'sieu' Hadrian, he is a prince; and when he say to
his minister, 'But no, my lord, I will marry out of my star, and where my
heart go, not as the State wills,' he look down at P'tite Louison, and
she go all red, and some of the women look at her, and there is a whisper
all roun'.

"Nex' day he come to the house where we stay, but the Cure come also
pretty soon and tell her she must go home--he say an actor is not good
company.  Never mind.  And so we come out home.  Well, what you think?
Nex' day M'sieu' Hadrian come, too, and we have dam good time--Florian,
Octave, Felix, Emile, they all sit and say bully-good to him all the
time.  Holy, what fine stories he tell!  And he talk about P'tite
Louison, and his eyes get wet, and Emile he say his prayers to him--
bagosh!  yes, I think.  Well, at last, what you guess?  M'sieu' he come
and come, and at last one day, he say that he leave Montreal and go to
New York, where he get a good place in a big theatre--his time in
Montreal is finish.  So he speak to Florian and say he want marry P'tite
Louison, and he say, of course, that he is not marry and he have money.
But he is a Protestan', and the Cure at first ver' mad, bagosh!

"But at las' when he give a hunder' dollars to the Church, the Cure say
yes.  All happy that way for while.  P'tite Louison, she get ready quick-
sapre, what fine things had she--and it is all to be done in a week,
while the theatre in New York wait for M'sieu'.  He sit there with us,
and play on the fiddle, and sing songs, and act plays, and help Florian
in the barn, and Octave to mend the fence, and the Cure to fix the grape-
vines on his wall.  He show me and Emile how to play sword-sticks; and he
pick flowers and fetch them to P'tite Louison, and teach her how to make
an omelette and a salad like the chef of the Louis Quinze Hotel, so he
say.  Bagosh, what a good time we have!  But first one, then another, he
get a choke-throat when he think that P'tite Louison go to leave us, and
the more we try, the more we are bagosh fools.  And that P'tite Louison,
she kiss us hevery one, and say to M'sieu' Hadrian, 'Charles, I love you,
but I cannot go.'  He laugh at her, and say, 'Voila!  we will take them
all with us:' and P'tite Louison she laugh.  That night a thing happen.
The Cure come, and he look ver' mad, and he frown and he say to M'sieu'
Hadrian before us all, 'M'sieu', you are married.'

"Sapre! that P'tite Louison get pale like snow, and we all stan' roun'
her close and say to her quick, 'Courage, P'tite Louison!'  M'sieu'
Hadrian then look at the priest and say: 'No, M'sieu', I was married ten
years ago; my wife drink and go wrong, and I get divorce.  I am free like
the wind.'

"'You are not free,' the Cure say quick.  'Once married, married till
death.  The Church cannot marry you again, and I command Louison to give
you up.'

"P'tite Louison stan' like stone.  M'sieu' turn to her.  'What shall it
be, Louison?' he say.  'You will come with me?'

"'Kiss me, Charles,' she say, 'and tell me good-bye till--till you are
free.'

"He look like a madman.  'Kiss me once, Charles,' she say, 'and let me
go.'

"And he come to her and kiss her on the lips once, and he say, 'Louison,
come with me.  I will never give you up.'

"She draw back to Florian.  'Good-bye, Charles,' she say.  'I will wait
as long as you will.  Mother of God, how hard it is to do right!' she
say, and then she turn and leave the room.

"M'sieu' Hadrian, he give a long sigh.  'It was my one chance,' he say.
'Now the devil take it all!'  Then he nod and say to the Cure: 'We'll
thrash this out at Judgment Day, M'sieu'.  I'll meet you there--you and
the woman that spoiled me.'

"He turn to Florian and the rest of us, and shake hands, and say: 'Take
care of Louison.  Thank you.  Good-bye.' Then he start towards the door,
but stumble, for he look sick.  'Give me a drink,' he say, and begin to
cough a little--a queer sort of rattle.  Florian give him big drink, and
he toss it off-whiff!  'Thank you,' he say, and start again, and we see
him walk away over the hill ver' slow--an' he never come back.  But every
year there come from New York a box of flowers, and every year P'tite
Louison send him a 'Merci, Charles, mille fois.  Dieu to garde.'  It is
so every year for twenty-five year."

"Where is he now?" asked Medallion.

Isidore shook his head, then lifted his eyes religiously.  "Waiting for
Judgment Day and P'tite Louison," he answered.

"Dead!" said Medallion.

"How long?"

"Twenty year."

"But the flowers--the flowers?"

"He left word for them to be sent just the same, and the money for it."

Medallion turned and took off his hat reverently, as if a soul were
passing from the world; but it was only P'tite Louison going out into the
garden.

"She thinks him living?" he asked gently as he watched Louison.

"Yes; we have no heart to tell her.  And then he wish it so.  And the
flowers kep' coming."

"Why did he wish it so?" Isidore mused a while.

"Who can tell?  Perhaps a whim.  He was a great actor--ah, yes, sublime!"
he said.

Medallion did not reply, but walked slowly down to where P'tite Louison
was picking berries.  His hat was still off.

"Let me help you, Mademoiselle," he said softly.  And henceforth he was
as foolish as her brothers.






THE LITTLE BELL OF HONOUR

"Sacre bapteme!"

"What did he say?" asked the Little Chemist, stepping from his doorway.

"He cursed his baptism," answered tall Medallion, the English auctioneer,
pushing his way farther into the crowd.

"Ah, the pitiful vaurien!" said the Little Chemist's wife, shudderingly;
for that was an oath not to be endured by any one who called the Church
mother.

The crowd that had gathered at the Four Corners were greatly disturbed,
for they also felt the repulsion that possessed the Little Chemist's
wife.  They babbled, shook their heads, and waved their hands excitedly,
and swayed and craned their necks to see the offender.

All at once his voice, mad with rage, was heard above the rest, shouting
frenziedly a curse which was a horribly grotesque blasphemy upon the name
of God.  Men who had used that oath in their insane anger had been known
to commit suicide out of remorse afterwards.

For a moment there was a painful hush.  The crowd drew back involuntarily
and left a clear space, in which stood the blasphemer--a middle-sized,
athletic fellow, with black beard, thick, waving hair, and flashing brown
eyes.  His white teeth were showing now in a snarl like a dog's, his cap
was on the ground, his hair was tumbled, his hands were twitching with
passion, his foot was stamping with fury, and every time it struck the
ground a little silver bell rang at his knee--a pretty sylvan sound, in
no keeping with the scene.  It heightened the distress of the fellow's
blasphemy and ungovernable anger.  For a man to curse his baptism was a
wicked thing; but the other oath was not fit for human ears, and horror
held the crowd moveless for a moment.

Then, as suddenly as the stillness came, a low, threatening mumble of
voices rose, and a movement to close in on the man was made; but a figure
pushed through the crowd, and, standing in front of the man, waved the
people back.  It was the Cure, the beloved M. Fabre, whose life had been
spent among them, whom they obeyed as well as they could, for they were
but frail humanity, after all--crude, simple folk, touched with
imagination.

"Luc Pomfrette, why have you done this?  What provocation had you?"

The Cure's voice was stern and cold, his usually gentle face had become
severe, his soft eyes were piercing and determined.

The foot of the man still beat the ground angrily, and the little bell
kept tinkling.  He was gasping with passion, and he did not answer yet.

"Luc Pomfrette, what have you to say?" asked the Cure again.  He
motioned back Lacasse, the constable of the parish, who had suddenly
appeared with a rusty gun and a more rusty pair of handcuffs.

Still the voyageur did not answer.

The Cure glanced at Lajeunesse the blacksmith, who stood near.

"There was no cause--no," sagely shaking his head said Lajeunesse, "Here
stand we at the door of the Louis Quinze in very good humour.  Up come
the voyageurs, all laughing, and ahead of them is Luc Pomfrette, with the
little bell at his knee.  Luc, he laugh the same as the rest, and they
stand in the door, and the garcon bring out the brandy--just a little,
but just enough too.  I am talking to Henri Beauvin.  I am telling him
Junie Gauloir have run away with Dicey the Protestant, when all very
quick Luc push between me and Henri, jump into the street, and speak like
that!"

Lajeunesse looked around, as if for corroboration; Henri and others
nodded, and some one said:

"That's true; that's true.  There was no cause."

"Maybe it was the drink," said a little hunchbacked man, pushing his way
in beside the Cure.  "It must have been the drink; there was nothing
else--no."

The speaker was Parpon the dwarf, the oddest, in some ways the most
foolish, in others the wisest man in Pontiac.

"That is no excuse," said the Cure.

"It is the only one he has, eh?" answered Parpon.  His eyes were fixed
meaningly on those of Pomfrette.

"It is no excuse," repeated the Cure sternly.  "The blasphemy is
horrible, a shame and stigma upon Pontiac for ever."  He looked Pomfrette
in the face.  "Foul-mouthed and wicked man, it is two years since you
took the Blessed Sacrament.  Last Easter day you were in a drunken sleep
while Mass was being said; after the funeral of your own father you were
drunk again.  When you went away to the woods you never left a penny for
candles, nor for Masses to be said for your father's soul; yet you sold
his horse and his little house, and spent the money in drink.  Not a cent
for a candle, but--"

"It's a lie," cried Pomfrette, shaking with rage from head to foot.

A long horror-stricken "Ah!" broke from the crowd.  The Cure's face
became graver and colder.

"You have a bad heart," he answered, "and you give Pontiac an evil name.
I command you to come to Mass next Sunday, to repent and to hear your
penance given from the altar.  For until--"

"I'll go to no Mass till I'm carried to it," was the sullen, malevolent
interruption.

The Cure turned upon the people.

"This is a blasphemer, an evil-hearted, shameless man," he said.  "Until
he repents humbly, and bows his vicious spirit to holy Church, and his
heart to the mercy of God, I command you to avoid him as you would a
plague.  I command that no door be opened to him; that no one offer him
comfort or friendship; that not even a bon jour or a bon soir pass
between you.  He has blasphemed against our Father in heaven; to the
Church he is a leper."  He turned to Pomfrette.  "I pray God that you
have no peace in mind or body till your evil life is changed, and your
black heart is broken by sorrow and repentance."

Then to the people he said again: "I have commanded you for your souls'
sake; see that you obey.  Go to your homes.  Let us leave the leper--
alone."  He waved the awed crowd back.

"Shall we take off the little bell?" asked Lajeunesse of the Cure.

Pomfrette heard, and he drew himself together, his jaws shutting with
ferocity, and his hand flying to the belt where his voyageur's case-knife
hung.  The Cure did not see this.  Without turning his head towards
Pomfrette, he said:

"I have commanded you, my children.  Leave the leper alone."

Again he waved the crowd to be gone, and they scattered, whispering to
each other; for nothing like this had ever occurred in Pontiac before,
nor had they ever seen the Cure with this granite look in his face, or
heard his voice so bitterly hard.

He did not move until he had seen them all started homewards from the
Four Corners.  One person remained beside him--Parpon the dwarf.

"I will not obey you, M'sieu' le Cure," said he.  "I'll forgive him
before he repents."

"You will share his sin," answered the Cure sternly.  "No; his
punishment, M'sieu'," said the dwarf; and turning on his heel, he trotted
to where Pomfrette stood alone in the middle of the road, a dark, morose
figure, hatred and a wild trouble in his face.

Already banishment, isolation, seemed to possess Pomfrette, to surround
him with loneliness.  The very effort he made to be defiant of his fate
appeared to make him still more solitary.  All at once he thrust a hand
inside his red shirt, and, giving a jerk which broke a string tied round
his neck, he drew forth a little pad--a flat bag of silk, called an Agnus
Dei, worn as a protection and a blessing by the pious, and threw it on
the ground.  Another little parcel he drew from his belt, and ground it
into the dirt with his heel.  It contained a woman's hair.  Then,
muttering, his hands still twitching with savage feeling, he picked up
his cap, covered with dirt, put it on, and passed away down the road
towards the river, the little bell tinkling as he went.  Those who heard
it had a strange feeling, for already to them the man was as if he had
some baleful disease, and this little bell told of the passing of a
leper.

Yet some one man had worn just such a bell every year in Pontiac.  It was
the mark of honour conferred upon a voyageur by his fellows, the token of
his prowess and his skill.  This year Luc Pomfrette had won it, and that
very day it had been buckled round his leg with songs and toasts.

For hours Pomfrette walked incessantly up and down the river-bank,
muttering and gesticulating, but at last came quietly to the cottage
which he shared with Henri Beauvin.  Henri had removed himself and his
belongings: already the ostracising had begun.  He went to the bedroom of
old Mme.  Burgoyne, his cousin; she also was gone.  He went to a little
outhouse and called.

For reply there was a scratching at the door.  He opened it, and a dog
leaped out and upon him.  With a fierce fondness he snatched at the dog's
collar, and drew the shaggy head to his knee; then as suddenly shoved him
away with a smothered oath, and going into the house, shut the door.  He
sat down in a chair in the middle of the room, and scarcely stirred for
half an-hour.  At last, with a passionate jerk of the head, he got to his
feet, looking about the room in a half-distracted way.  Outside, the dog
kept running round and round the house, silent, watchful, waiting for the
door to open.

As time went by, Luc became quieter, but the look of his face was more
desolate.  At last he almost ran to the door, threw it open, and called.
The dog sprang into the room, went straight to the fireplace, lay down,
and with tongue lolling and body panting looked at Pomfrette with
blinking, uncomprehending eyes.

Pomfrette went to a cupboard, brought back a bone well covered with meat,
and gave it to the dog, which snatched it and began gnawing it, now and
again stopping to look up at his master, as one might look at a mountain
moving, be aware of something singular, yet not grasp the significance of
the phenomenon.  At last, worn out, Pomfrette threw himself on his bed,
and fell into a sound sleep.  When he awoke, it was far into the morning.
He lighted a fire in the kitchen, got a "spider," fried himself a piece
of pork, and made some tea.  There was no milk in the cupboard; so he
took a pitcher and walked down the road a few rods to the next house,
where lived the village milkman.  He knocked, and the door was opened by
the milkman's wife.  A frightened look came upon her when she saw who it
was.

"Non, non!" she said, and shut the door in his face.  He stared blankly
at the door for a moment, then turned round and stood looking down into
the road, with the pitcher in his hand.  The milkman's little boy,
Maxime, came running round the corner of the house.  "Maxime," he said
involuntarily and half-eagerly, for he and the lad had been great
friends.

Maxime's face brightened, then became clouded; he stood still an instant,
and presently, turning round and looking at Pomfrette askance, ran away
behind the house, saying: "Non, non!"

Pomfrette drew his rough knuckles across his forehead in a dazed way;
then, as the significance of the thing came home to him, he broke out
with a fierce oath, and strode away down the yard and into the road.  On
the way to his house he met Duclosse the mealman and Garotte the lime-
burner.  He wondered what they would do.  He could see the fat, wheezy
Duclosse hesitate, but the arid, alert Garotte had determination in every
motion and look.  They came nearer; they were about to pass; there was no
sign.

Pomfrette stopped short.  "Good-day, lime-burner; good-day, Duclosse," he
said, looking straight at them.

Garotte made no reply, but walked straight on.  Pomfrette stepped swiftly
in front of the mealman.  There was fury in his face-fury and danger; his
hair was disordered, his eyes afire.

"Good-day, mealman," he said, and waited.  "Duclosse," called Garotte
warningly, "remember!"  Duclosse's knees shook, and his face became
mottled like a piece of soap; he pushed his fingers into his shirt and
touched the Agnus Dei that he carried there.  That and Garotte's words
gave him courage.  He scarcely knew what he said, but it had meaning.
"Good-bye-leper," he answered.

Pomfrette's arm flew out to throw the pitcher at the mealman's head, but
Duclosse, with a grunt of terror, flung up in front of his face the small
bag of meal that he carried, the contents pouring over his waistcoat from
a loose corner.  The picture was so ludicrous that Pomfrette laughed with
a devilish humour, and flinging the pitcher at the bag, he walked away
towards his own house.  Duclosse, pale and frightened, stepped from among
the fragments of crockery, and with backward glances towards Pomfrette
joined his comrade.

"Lime-burner," he said, sitting down on the bag of meal, and mechanically
twisting tight the loose, leaking corner, "the devil's in that leper."

"He was a good enough fellow once," answered Garotte, watching Pomfrette.

"I drank with him at five o'clock yesterday," said Duclosse
philosophically.  "He was fit for any company then; now he's fit for
none."

Garotte looked wise.  "Mealman," said he, "it takes years to make folks
love you; you can make them hate you in an hour.  La!  La!  it's easier
to hate than to love.  Come along, m'sieu' dusty-belly."

Pomfrette's life in Pontiac went on as it began that day.  Not once a
day, and sometimes not once in twenty days, did any human being speak to
him.  The village baker would not sell him bread; his groceries he had to
buy from the neighbouring parishes, for the grocer's flighty wife called
for the constable when he entered the bake-shop of Pontiac.  He had to
bake his own bread, and do his own cooking, washing, cleaning, and
gardening.  His hair grew long and his clothes became shabbier.  At last,
when he needed a new suit--so torn had his others become at woodchopping
and many kinds of work--he went to the village tailor, and was promptly
told that nothing but Luc Pomfrette's grave-clothes would be cut and made
in that house.

When he walked down to the Four Corners the street emptied at once, and
the lonely man with the tinkling bell of honour at his knee felt the
whole world falling away from sight and touch and sound of him.  Once
when he went into the Louis Quinze every man present stole away in
silence, and the landlord himself, without a word, turned and left the
bar.  At that, with a hoarse laugh, Pomfrette poured out a glass of
brandy, drank it off, and left a shilling on the counter.  The next
morning he found the shilling, wrapped in a piece of paper, just inside
his door; it had been pushed underneath.  On the paper was written: "It
is cursed."  Presently his dog died, and the day afterwards he suddenly
disappeared from Pontiac, and wandered on to Ste.  Gabrielle, Ribeaux,
and Ville Bambord.  But his shame had gone before him, and people shunned
him everywhere, even the roughest.  No one who knew him would shelter
him.  He slept in barns and in the woods until the winter came and snow
lay thick upon the ground.  Thin and haggard, and with nothing left of
his old self but his deep brown eyes and curling hair, and his unhappy
name and fame, he turned back again to Pontiac.  His spirit was sullen
and hard, his heart closed against repentance.  Had not the Church and
Pontiac and the world punished him beyond his deserts for a moment's
madness brought on by a great shock!




II

One bright, sunshiny day of early winter, he trudged through the snow-
banked street of Pontiac back to his home.  Men he once knew well, and
had worked with, passed him in a sled on their way to the great shanty in
the backwoods.  They halted in their singing for a moment when they saw
him; then, turning their heads from him, dashed off, carolling lustily:

                        "Ah, ah, Babette,
                           We go away;
                         But we will come
                           Again, Babette,
                         Again back home,
                           On Easter Day,
                         Back home to play
                           On Easter Day,
                         Babette! Babette!"

"Babette!  Babette!"  The words followed him, ringing in his ears long
after the men had become a mere fading point in the white horizon behind
him.


This was not the same world that he had known, not the same Pontiac.
Suddenly he stopped short in the road.

"Curse them!  Curse them!  Curse them all!" he cried in a cracked,
strange voice.  A woman hurrying across the street heard him, and went
the faster, shutting her ears.  A little boy stood still and looked at
him in wonder.  Everything he saw maddened him.  He turned sharp round
and hurried to the Louis Quinze.  Throwing open the door, he stepped
inside.  Half-a-dozen men were there with the landlord.  When they saw
him, they started, confused and dismayed.  He stood still for a moment,
looking at them with glowering brows.

"Good-day," he said.  "How goes it?"

No one answered.  A little apart from the others sat Medallion the
auctioneer.  He was a Protestant, and the curse on his baptism uttered by
Pomfrette was not so heinous in his sight.  For the other oath, it was
another matter.  Still, he was sorry for the man.  In any case, it was
not his cue to interfere; and Luc was being punished according to his
bringing up and to the standards familiar to him.  Medallion had never
refused to speak to him, but he had done nothing more.  There was no
reason why he should provoke the enmity of the parish unnecessarily; and
up to this-point Pomfrette had shifted for himself after a fashion, if a
hard fashion.

With a bitter laugh, Pomfrette turned to the little bar.

"Brandy," he said; "brandy, my Bourienne."

The landlord shrugged his shoulder, and looked the other way.

"Brandy," he repeated.  Still there was no sign.

There was a wicked look in his face, from which the landlord shrank back-
shrank so far that he carried himself among the others, and stood there,
half frightened, half dumfounded.

Pomfrette pulled out a greasy dollar-bill from his pocket--the last he
owned in the world--and threw it on the counter.  Then he reached over,
caught up a brandy-bottle from the shelf, knocked off the neck with a
knife, and, pouring a tumblerful, drank it off at a gasp.

His head came up, his shoulders straightened out, his eyes snapped fire.
He laughed aloud, a sardonic, wild, coarse laugh, and he shivered once or
twice violently, in spite of the brandy he had drunk.

"You won't speak to me, eh?  Won't you?  Curse you!  Pass me on the other
side--so!  Look at me.  I am the worst man in the world, eh?  Judas is
nothing--no!  Ack, what are you, to turn your back on me?  Listen to me!
You, there, Muroc, with your charcoal face, who was it walk thirty miles
in the dead of winter to bring a doctor to your wife, eh?  She die, but
that is no matter--who was it?  It was Luc Pomfrette.  You, Alphonse
Durien, who was it drag you out of the bog at the Cote Chaudiere?  It was
Luc Pomfrette.  You, Jacques Baby, who was it that lied for you to the
Protestant girl at Faribeau?  Just Luc Pomfrette.  You two, Jean and
Nicolas Mariban, who was it lent you a hunderd dollars when you lose all
your money at cards?  Ha, ha, ha!  Only that beast Luc Pomfrette!  Mother
of Heaven, such a beast is he--eh, Limon Rouge?--such a beast that used
to give your Victorine little silver things, and feed her with bread and
sugar and buttermilk pop.  Ah, my dear Limon Rouge, how is it all
different now!"

He raised the bottle and drank long from the ragged neck.  When he took
it away from his mouth not much more than half remained in the quart
bottle.  Blood was dripping upon his beard from a cut on his lip, and
from there to the ground.

"And you, M'sieu' Bourienne," he cried hoarsely, "do I not remember that
dear M'sieu' Bourienne, when he beg me to leave Pontiac for a little
while that I not give evidence in court against him?  Eh bien!  you all
walk by me now, as if I was the father of smallpox, and not Luc
Pomfrette--only Luc Pomfrette, who spits at every one of you for a pack
of cowards and hypocrites."

He thrust the bottle inside his coat, went to the door, flung it open
with a bang, and strode out into the street, muttering as he went.  As
the landlord came to close the door Medallion said:

"The leper has a memory, my friends."  Then he also walked out, and went
to his office depressed, for the face of the man haunted him.

Pomfrette reached his deserted, cheerless house.  There was not a stick
of fire-wood in the shed, not a thing to eat or drink in cellar or
cupboard.  The door of the shed at the back was open, and the dog-chains
lay covered with frost and half embedded in mud.  With a shiver of misery
Pomfrette raised the brandy to his mouth, drank every drop, and threw the
bottle on the floor.  Then he went to the front door, opened it, and
stepped outside.  His foot slipped, and he tumbled head forward into the
snow.  Once or twice he half raised himself, but fell back again, and
presently lay still.  The frost caught his ears and iced them; it began
to creep over his cheeks; it made his fingers white, like a leper's.

He would soon have stiffened for ever had not Parpon the dwarf, passing
along the road, seen the open door and the sprawling body, and come and
drawn Pomfrette inside the house.  He rubbed the face and hands and ears
of the unconscious man with snow till the whiteness disappeared, and,
taking off the boots, did the same with the toes; after which he drew the
body to a piece of rag carpet beside the stove, threw some blankets over
it, and, hurrying out, cut up some fence rails, and soon had a fire going
in the stove.

Then he trotted out of the house and away to the Little Chemist, who came
passively with him.  All that day, and for many days, they fought to save
Pomfrette's life.  The Cure came also; but Pomfrette was in fever and
delirium.  Yet the good M. Fabre's presence, as it ever did, gave an air
of calm and comfort to the place.  Parpon's hands alone cared for the
house; he did all that was to be done; no woman had entered the place
since Pomfrette's cousin, old Mme. Burgoyne, left it on the day of his
shame.

When at last Pomfrette opened his eyes, and saw the Cure standing beside
him, he turned his face to the wall, and to the exhortation addressed to
him he answered nothing.  At last the Cure left him, and came no more;
and he bade Parpon do the same as soon as Pomfrette was able to leave his
bed.

But Parpon did as he willed.  He had been in Pontiac only a few days
since the painful business in front of the Louis Quinze.  Where he had
been and what doing no one asked, for he was mysterious in his movements,
and always uncommunicative, and people did not care to tempt his
inhospitable tongue.  When Pomfrette was so far recovered that he might
be left alone, Parpon said to him one evening:

"Pomfrette, you must go to Mass next Sunday."

"I said I wouldn't go till I was carried there, and I mean it--that's
so," was the morose reply.

"What made you curse like that--so damnable?" asked Parpon furtively.

"That's my own business.  It doesn't matter to anybody but me."

"And you said the Cure lied--the good M'sieu' Fabre--him like a saint."

"I said he lied, and I'd say it again, and tell the truth."

"But if you went to Mass, and took your penance, and--"

"Yes, I know; they'd forgive me, and I'd get absolution, and they'd all
speak to me again, and it would be, 'Good-day, Luc,' and 'Very good,
Luc,' and 'What a gay heart has Luc, the good fellow!'  Ah, I know.  They
curse in the heart when the whole world go wrong for them; no one hears.
I curse out loud.  I'm not a hypocrite, and no one thinks me fit to live.
Ack, what is the good!"

Parpon did not respond at once.  At last, dropping his chin in his hand
and his elbow on his knee, as he squatted on the table, he said:

"But if the girl got sorry--"

For a time there was no sound save the whirring of the fire in the stove
and the hard breathing of the sick man.  His eyes were staring hard at
Parpon.  At last he said, slowly and fiercely:

"What do you know?"

"What others might know if they had eyes and sense; but they haven't.
What would you do if that Junie come back?"

"I would kill her."  His look was murderous.

"Bah, you would kiss her first, just the same!"

"What of that?  I would kiss her because--because there is no face like
hers in the world; and I'd kill her for her bad heart."

"What did she do?"  Pomfrette's hands clinched.

"What's in my own noddle, and not for any one else," he answered sulkily.

"Tiens, tiens, what a close mouth!  What did she do?  Who knows?  What
you think she do, it's this.  You think she pretends to love you, and you
leave all your money with her.  She is to buy masses for your father's
soul; she is to pay money to the Cure for the good of the Church; she is
to buy a little here, a little there, for the house you and she are going
to live in, the wedding and the dancing over.  Very well.  Ah, my
Pomfrette, what is the end you think?  She run away with Dicey the
Protestant, and take your money with her.  Eh, is that so?"

For answer there came a sob, and then a terrible burst of weeping and
anger and passionate denunciations--against Junie Gauloir, against
Pontiac, against the world.

Parpon held his peace.

The days, weeks, and months went by; and the months stretched to three
years.

In all that time Pomfrette came and went through Pontiac, shunned and
unrepentant.  His silent, gloomy endurance was almost an affront to
Pontiac; and if the wiser ones, the Cure, the Avocat, the Little Chemist,
and Medallion, were more sorry than offended, they stood aloof till the
man should in some manner redeem himself, and repent of his horrid
blasphemy.  But one person persistently defied Church and people, Cure
and voyageur.  Parpon openly and boldly walked with Pomfrette, talked
with him, and occasionally visited his house.

Luc made hard shifts to live.  He grew everything that he ate, vegetables
and grains.  Parpon showed him how to make his own flour in primitive
fashion, for no miller in any parish near would sell him flour, and he
had no money to buy it, nor would any one who knew him give him work.
And after his return to Pontiac he never asked for it.  His mood was
defiant, morbid, stern.  His wood he chopped from the common known as
No-Man's Land.  His clothes he made himself out of the skins of deer that
he shot; when his powder and shot gave out, he killed the deer with bow
and arrow.




III

The end came at last.  Luc was taken ill.  For four days, all alone, he
lay burning with fever and inflammation, and when Parpon found him he was
almost dead.  Then began a fight for life again, in which Parpon was the
only physician; for Pomfrette would not allow the Little Chemist or a
doctor near him.  Parpon at last gave up hope; but one night, when he
came back from the village, he saw, to his joy, old Mme. Degardy ("Crazy
Joan" she was called) sitting by Pomfrette's bedside.  He did not disturb
her, for she had no love for him, and he waited till she had gone.  When
he came into the room again he found Pomfrette in a sweet sleep, and a
jug of tincture, with a little tin cup, placed by the bed.  Time and
again he had sent for Mme. Degardy, but she would not come.  She had
answered that the dear Luc could go to the devil for all of her; he'd
find better company down below than in Pontiac.

But for a whim, perhaps, she had come at last without asking, and as a
consequence Luc returned to the world, a mere bundle of bones.

It was still while he was only a bundle of bones that one Sunday morning,
Parpon, without a word, lifted him up in his arms and carried him out of
the house.  Pomfrette did not speak at first: it seemed scarcely worth
while; he was so weak he did not care.

"Where are you going?" he said at last, as they came well into the
village.  The bell in St. Saviour's had stopped ringing for Mass, and the
streets were almost empty.

"I'm taking you to Mass," said Parpon, puffing under his load, for
Pomfrette made an ungainly burden.  "Hand of a little devil, no!" cried
Pomfrette, startled.  "I said I'd never go to Mass again, and I never
will.

"You said you'd never go to Mass till you were carried; so it's all
right."

Once or twice Pomfrette struggled, but Parpon held him tight, saying:

"It's no use; you must come; we've had enough.  Besides--"

"Besides what?" asked Pomfrette faintly.  "Never mind," answered Parpon.

At a word from Parpon the shrivelled old sexton cleared a way through the
aisle, making a stir, through which the silver bell at Pomfrette's knee
tinkled, in answer, as it were, to the tinkling of the acolyte's bell in
the sanctuary.  People turned at the sound, women stopped telling their
beads, some of the choir forgot their chanting.  A strange feeling passed
through the church, and reached and startled the Cure as he recited the
Mass.  He turned round and saw Parpon laying Pomfrette down at the
chancel steps.  His voice shook a little as he intoned the ritual, and as
he raised the sacred elements tears rolled down his cheeks.

From a distant corner of the gallery a deeply veiled woman also looked
down at Pomfrette, and her hand trembled on the desk before her.

At last the Cure came forward to the chancel steps.  "What is it,
Parpon?" he asked gravely.

"It is Luc Pomfrette, M'sieu' le Cure."  Pomfrette's eyes were closed.

"He swore that he would never come to Mass again," answered the good
priest.

"Till he was carried, M'sieu' le Cure--and I've carried him."

"Did you come of your own free will, and with a repentant heart, Luc
Pomfrette?" asked the Cure.

"I did not know I was coming--no."  Pomfrette's brown eyes met the
priest's unflinchingly.

"You have defied God, and yet He has spared your life."

"I'd rather have died," answered the sick man simply.

"Died, and been cast to perdition!"

"I'm used to that; I've had a bad time here in Pontiac."

His thin hands moved restlessly.  His leg moved, and the little bell
tinkled--the bell that had been like the bell of a leper these years
past.

"But you live, and you have years yet before you, in the providence of
God.  Luc Pomfrette, you blasphemed against your baptism, and horribly
against God himself.  Luc"--his voice got softer--"I knew your mother,
and she was almost too weak to hold you when you were baptised, for you
made a great to-do about coming into the world.  She had a face like a
saint--so sweet, so patient.  You were her only child, and your baptism
was more to her than her marriage even, or any other thing in this world.
The day after your baptism she died.  What do you think were her last
words?"

There was a hectic flush on Pomfrette's face, and his eyes were intense
and burning as they looked up fixedly at the Cure.

"I can't think any more," answered Pomfrette slowly.  "I've no head."

"What she said is for your heart, not for your head, Luc," rejoined the
Cure gently.  "She wandered in her mind, and at the last she raised
herself up in her bed, and lifting her finger like this"--he made the
gesture of benediction--" she said, 'Luc Michele, I baptise you in the
name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.'  Then
she whispered softly: 'God bless my dear Luc Michee!  Holy Mother pray
for him!'  These were her last words, and I took you from her arms.  What
have you to say, Luc Michee?"

The woman in the gallery was weeping silently behind her thick veil, and
her worn hand clutched the desk in front of her convulsively.  Presently
she arose and made her way down the stair, almost unnoticed.  Two or
three times Luc tried to speak, but could not.  "Lift me up," he said
brokenly, at last.

Parpon and the Little Chemist raised him to his feet, and held him, his
shaking hands resting on their shoulders, his lank body tottering above
and between them.

Looking at the congregation, he said slowly: "I'll suffer till I die for
cursing my baptism, and God will twist my neck in purgatory for--"

"Luc," the Cure interrupted, "say that you repent."

"I'm sorry, and I ask you all to forgive me, and I'll confess to the
Cure, and take my penance, and--" he paused, for breathing hurt him.

At that moment the woman in black who had been in the gallery came
quickly forward.  Parpon saw her, frowned, and waved her back; but she
came on.  At the chancel steps she raised her veil, and a murmur of
recognition and wonder ran through the church.  Pomfrette's face was
pitiful to see--drawn, staring.

"Junie!" he said hoarsely.

Her eyes were red with weeping, her face was very pale.  "M'sieu' le
Cure" she said, "you must listen to me"--the Cure's face had become
forbidding--"sinner though I am.  You want to be just, don't you?  Ah,
listen!  I was to be married to Luc Pomfrette, but I did not love him--
then.  He had loved me for years, and his father and my father wished it
--as you know, M'sieu' le Cure.  So after a while I said I would; but I
begged him that he wouldn't say anything about it till he come back from
his next journey on the river.  I did not love him enough--then.  He left
all his money with me: some to pay for Masses for his father's soul, some
to buy things for--for our home; and the rest to keep till he came back."

"Yes, yes," said Pomfrette, his eyes fixed painfully on her face--"yes,
yes."

"The day after Luc went away John Dicey the Protestant come to me.
I'd always liked him; he could talk as Luc couldn't, and it sounded nice.
I listened and listened.  He knew about Luc and about the money and all.
Then he talked to me.  I was all wild in the head, and things went round
and round, and oh, how I hated to marry Luc--then!  So after he had
talked a long while I said yes, I would go with him and marry him--
a Protestant--for I loved him.  I don't know why or how."

Pomfrette trembled so that Parpon and the Little Chemist made him sit
down, and he leaned against their shoulders, while Junie went on:

"I gave him Luc's money to go and give to Parpon here, for I was too
ashamed to go myself.  And I wrote a little note to Luc, and sent it with
the money.  I believed in John Dicey, of course.  He came back, and said
that he had seen Parpon and had done it all right; then we went away to
Montreal and got married.  The very first day at Montreal, I found out
that he had Luc's money.  It was awful.  I went mad, and he got angry and
left me alone, and didn't come back.  A week afterwards he was killed,
and I didn't know it for a long time.  But I began to work, for I wanted
to pay back Luc's money.  It was very slow, and I worked hard.  Will it
never be finished, I say.  At last Parpon find me, and I tell him all--
all except that John Dicey was dead; and I did not know that.  I made him
promise to tell nobody; but he knows all about my life since then.  Then
I find out one day that John Dicey is dead, and I get from the gover'ment
a hundred dollars of the money he stole.  It was found on him when he was
killed.  I work for six months longer, and now I come back--with Luc's
money."

She drew from her pocket a packet of notes, and put it in Luc's hands.
He took it dazedly, then dropped it, and the Little Chemist picked it up;
he had no prescription like that in his pharmacopoeia.

"That's how I've lived," she said, and she handed a letter to the Cure.

It was from a priest in Montreal, setting forth the history of her career
in that city, her repentance for her elopement and the sin of marrying a
Protestant, and her good life.  She had wished to do her penance in
Pontiac, and it remained to M'sieu' le Cure; to set it.

The Cure's face relaxed, and a rare gentleness came into it.

He read the letter aloud.  Luc once more struggled to his feet, eagerly
listening.

"You did not love Luc?" the Cure asked Junie, meaningly.

"I did not love Luc--then," she answered, a flush going over her face.

"You loved Junie?" the Cure said to Pomfrette.  "I could have killed
her, but I've always loved her," answered Luc.  Then he raised his voice
excitedly:  "I love her, love her, love her--but what's the good!  She'd
never 've been happy with me.  Look what my love drove her to!  What's
the good, at all!"

"She said she did not love you then, Luc Michee," said Parpon,
interrupting.  "Luc Michee, you're a fool as well as a sinner.
Speak up, Junie."

"I used to tell him that I didn't love him; I only liked him.  I was
honest.  Well, I am honest still.  I love him now."

A sound of joy broke from Luc's lips, and he stretched out his arms to
her, but the Cure; stopped that.  "Not here," he said.  "Your sins must
first be considered.  For penance--" He paused, looking at the two sad
yet happy beings before him.  The deep knowledge of life that was in him
impelled him to continue gently:

"For penance you shall bear the remembrance of each other's sins.  And
now to God the Father--" He turned towards the altar, and raised his
hands in the ascription.

As he knelt to pray before he entered the pulpit, he heard the tinkling
of the little bell of honour at the knee of Luc, as Junie and Parpon
helped him from the church.




A SON OF THE WILDERNESS

Rachette told the story to Medallion and the Little Chemist's wife on
Sunday after Mass, and because he was vain of his English he forsook his
own tongue and paid tribute to the Anglo-Saxon.

"Ah, she was so purty, that Norinne, when she drive through the parishes
all twelve days, after the wedding, a dance every night, and her eyes and
cheeks on fire all the time.  And Bargon, bagosh! that Bargon, he have a
pair of shoulders like a wall, and five hunder' dollars and a horse and
wagon.  Bagosh, I say that time: 'Bargon he have put a belt round the
world and buckle it tight to him--all right, ver' good.' I say to him:
'Bargon, what you do when you get ver' rich out on the Souris River in
the prairie west?' He laugh and throw up his hands, for he have not many
words any kind.  And the dam little dwarf Parpon, he say: 'He will have
flowers on the table and ice on the butter, and a wheel in his head.'

"And Bargon laugh and say: 'I will have plenty for my friends to eat and
drink and a ver' fine time.' "'Good,' we all say-'Bagosh!'  So they make
the trip through twelve parish, and the fiddles go all the time, and I am
what you say 'best man' with Bargon.  I go all the time, and Lucette
Dargois, she go with me and her brother--holy, what an eye had she in her
head, that Lucette!  As we go we sing a song all right, and there is no
one sing so better as Norinne:

                       "'C'est la belle Francoise,
                         Allons gai!
                         C'est la belle Francoise,
                         Qui veut se marier,
                         Ma luron lurette!
                         Qui veut se marier,
                         Ma luron lure!'

"Ver' good, bagosh!  Norinne and Bargon they go out to the Souris, and
Bargon have a hunder' acre, and he put up a house and a shed not ver'
big, and he carry his head high and his shoulders like a wall; yes, yes.
First year it is pretty good time, and Norinne's cheeks--ah, like an
apple they.  Bimeby a baby laugh up at Bargon from Norinne's lap.  I am
on the Souris at a saw-mill then, and on Sunday sometime I go up to see
Bargon and Norinne.  I t'ink that baby is so dam funny; I laugh and pinch
his nose.  His name is Marie, and I say I marry him pretty quick some
day.  We have plenty hot cake, and beans and pork, and a little how-you-
are from a jar behin' the door.

"Next year it is not so good.  There is a bad crop and hard time, and
Bargon he owe two hunder' dollar, and he pay int'rest.  Norinne, she do
all the work, and that little Marie, there is dam funny in him, and
Norinne, she keep go, go, all the time, early and late, and she get ver'
thin and quiet.  So I go up from the mill more times, and I bring fol-
lols for that Marie, for you know I said I go to marry him some day.  And
when I see how Bargon shoulders stoop and his eye get dull, and there is
nothing in the jar behin' the door, I fetch a horn with me, and my
fiddle, and, bagosh!  there is happy sit-you-down.  I make Bargon sing
'La Belle Francoise,' and then just before I go I make them laugh, for I
stand by the cradle and I sing to that Marie:

                  "'Adieu, belle Frangoise;
                    Allons gai!
                    Adieu, belle Francoise!
                    Moi, je to marierai,
                    Ma luron lurette! Moi,
                    je to marierai,
                    Ma luron lure!'

"So; and another year it go along, and Bargon he know that if there come
bad crop it is good-bye-my lover with himselves.  He owe two hunder' and
fifty dollar.  It is the spring at Easter, and I go up to him and
Norinne, for there is no Mass, and Pontiac is too far away off.  We stan'
at the door and look out, and all the prairie is green, and the sun stan'
up high like a light on a pole, and the birds fly by ver' busy looking
for the summer and the prairie-flower.

"'Bargon,' I say--and I give him a horn of old rye--'here's to le bon
Dieu!'

"'Le bon Dieu, and a good harvest!' he say.

"I hear some one give a long breath behin', and I look round; but, no, it
is Norinne with a smile--for she never grumble--bagosh!  What purty eyes
she have in her head!  She have that Marie in her arms, and I say to
Bargon it is like the Madonne in the Notre Dame at Montreal.  He nod his
head. 'C'est le bon Dieu--it is the good God,' he say.

"Before I go I take a piece of palm--it come from the Notre Dame; it is
all bless by the Pope--and I nail it to the door of the house. 'For
luck,' I say.  Then I laugh, and I speak out to the prairie: 'Come along,
good summer; come along, good crop; come two hunder' and fifty dollars
for Gal Bargon.'  Ver' quiet I give Norinne twenty dollar, but she will
not take him.  'For Marie,' then I say: 'I go to marry him, bimeby.'
But she say: 'Keep it and give it to Marie yourself some day.'

"She smile at me, then she have a little tear in her eye, and she nod
to where Bargon stare' houtside, and she say: 'If this summer go wrong,
it will kill him.  He work and work and fret and worry for me and Marie,
and sometimes he just sit and look at me and say not a word.'

"I say to her that there will be good crop, and next year we will be
ver' happy.  So, the time go on, and I send up a leetla snack of pork
and molass' and tabac, and sugar and tea, and I get a letter from Bargon
bimeby, and he say that heverything go right, he t'ink, this summer.  He
say I must come up.  It is not dam easy to go in the summer, when the
mill run night and day; but I say I will go.

"When I get up to Bargon's I laugh, for all the hunder' acre is ver'
fine, and Bargon stan' hin the door, and stretch out his hand, and say:
'Rachette, there is six hunder' dollar for me.' I nod my head, and fetch
out a horn, and he have one, his eyes all bright like a lime-kiln.  He is
thin and square, and his beard grow ver' thick and rough and long, and
his hands are like planks.  Norinne, she is ver' happy, too, and Marie
bite on my finger, and I give him sugar-stick to suck.

"Bimeby Norinne say to me, ver' soft: 'If a hailstorm or a hot wind come,
that is the end of it all, and of my poor Gal.'

"What I do? I laugh and ketch Marie under the arms, and I sit down, and I
put him on my foot, and I sing that dam funny English song--'Here We Go
to Banbury Cross.'  An' I say: 'It will be all as happy as Marie pretty
quick.  Bargon he will have six hunder' dollar, and you a new dress and a
hired girl to help you.'

"But all the time that day I think about a hail-storm or a hot wind
whenever I look out on that hunder' acre farm.  It is so beautiful, as
you can guess--the wheat, the barley, the corn, the potatoes, the turnip,
all green like sea-water, and pigeons and wild ducks flying up and down,
and the horse and the ox standing in a field ver' comfer'ble.

"We have good time that day, and go to bed all happy that night.  I get
up at five o'clock, an' I go hout.  Bargon stan' there looking hout on
his field with the horse-bridle in his hand.  'The air not feel right,'
he say to me.  I t'ink the same, but I say to him: 'Your head not feel
right--him too sof'.'  He shake his head and go down to the field for his
horse and ox, and hitch them up together, and go to work making a road.

"It is about ten o'clock when the dam thing come.  Piff! go a hot splash
of air in my face, and then I know that it is all up with Gal Bargon.
A month after it is no matter, for the grain is ripe then, but now, when
it is green, it is sure death to it all.  I turn sick in my stomich, and
I turn round and see Norinne stan' hin the door, all white, and she make
her hand go as that, like she push back that hot wind.

"'Where is Gal?' she say.  'I must go to him.'  'No,' I say, 'I will
fetch him.  You stay with Marie.'  Then I go ver' quick for Gal, and I
find him, his hands all shut like that! and he shake them at the sky, and
he say not a word, but his face, it go wild, and his eyes spin round in
his head.  I put my hand on his arm and say: 'Come home, Gal.  Come home,
and speak kind to Norinne and Marie.'

"I can see that hot wind lean down and twist the grain about--a dam devil
thing from the Arzone desert down South.  I take Gal back home, and we
sit there all day, and all the nex' day, and a leetla more, and when we
have look enough, there is no grain on that hunder' acre farm--only a
dry-up prairie, all grey and limp.  My skin is bake and rough, but when
I look at Gal Bargon I know that his heart is dry like a bone, and, as
Parpon say that back time, he have a wheel in his head.  Norinne she is
quiet, and she sit with her hand on his shoulder, and give him Marie to
hold.

"But it is no good; it is all over.  So I say: 'Let us go back to
Pontiac.  What is the good for to be rich?  Let us be poor and happy once
more.'

"And Norinne she look glad, and get up and say: 'Yes, let us go back.'
But all at once she sit down with Marie in her arms, and cry--bagosh, I
never see a woman cry like that!

"So we start back for Pontiac with the horse and the ox and some pork and
bread and molass'.  But Gal Bargon never hold up his head, but go silent,
silent, and he not sleep at night.  One night he walk away on the
prairie, and when he come back he have a great pain.  So he lie down, and
we sit by him, an' he die.  But once he whisper to me, and Norinne not
hear: 'You say you will marry him, Rachette?' and I say, 'I will.'

"'C'est le bon Dieu!' he say at the last, but he say it with a little
laugh.  I think he have a wheel in his head.  But bimeby, yiste'day,
Norinne and Marie and I come to Pontiac."

The Little Chemist's wife dried her eyes, and Medallion said in French:
"Poor Norinne!  Poor Norinne!  And so, Rachette, you are going to marry
Marie, by-and-bye?"  There was a quizzical look in Medallion's eyes.

Rachette threw up his chin a little.  "I'm going to marry Norinne on New
Year's Day," he said.  "Bagosh, poor Norinne!" said Medallion, in a
queer sort of tone.  "It is the way of the world," he added.  "I'll wait
for Marie myself."

It looks as if he meant to, for she has no better friend.  He talks to
her much of Gal Bargon; of which her mother is glad.






A WORKER IN STONE

At the beginning he was only a tombstone-cutter.  His name was Francois
Lagarre.  He was but twenty years old when he stepped into the shop where
the old tombstone-cutter had worked for forty years.  Picking up the
hammer and chisel which the old man had dropped when he fell dead at the
end of a long hot day's labour, he finished the half-carved tombstone,
and gave the price of it to the widow.  Then, going to the Seigneur and
Cure, he asked them to buy the shop and tools for him, and let him pay
rent until he could take the place off their hands.

They did as he asked, and in two years he had bought and paid for the
place, and had a few dollars to the good.  During one of the two years
a small-pox epidemic passed over Pontiac, and he was busy night and day.
It was during this time that some good Catholics came to him with an
heretical Protestant suggestion to carve a couplet or verse of poetry on
the tombstones they ordered.  They themselves, in most cases, knew none,
and they asked Francois to supply them--as though he kept them in stock
like marble and sand-paper.  He had no collection of suitable epitaphs,
and, besides, he did not know whether it was right to use them.  Like all
his race in New France he was jealous of any inroads of Protestantism,
or what the Little Chemist called "Englishness."  The good M. Fabre,
the Cure, saw no harm in it, but said he could not speak for any one's
grief.  What the bereaved folk felt they themselves must put in words
upon the stone.  But still Francois might bring all the epitaphs to him
before they were carved, and he would approve or disapprove, correct or
reject, as the case might be.

At first he rejected many, for they were mostly conventional couplets,
taken unknowingly from Protestant sources by mourning Catholics.  But
presently all that was changed, and the Cure one day had laid before him
three epitaphs, each of which left his hand unrevised and untouched; and
when he passed them back to Francois his eyes were moist, for he was a
man truly after God's own heart, and full of humanity.

"Will you read them to me, Francois?" he said, as the worker in stone
was about to put the paper back in his pocket.  "Give the names of the
dead at the same time."

So Francois read:

"Gustave Narrois, aged seventy-two years-"

"Yes, yes," interrupted the Cure, "the unhappy yet happy Gustave, hung by
the English, and cut down just in time to save him--an innocent man.  For
thirty years my sexton.  God rest his soul!  Well now, the epitaph."

Francois read it:

                   "Poor as a sparrow was I,
                    Yet I was saved like a king;
                    I heard the death-bells ring,
                    Yet I saw a light in the sky:
                    And now to my Father I wing."

The Cure nodded his head.  "Go on; the next," he said.

"Annette John, aged twenty years--"

"So.  The daughter of Chief John.  When Queen Anne of England was on the
throne she sent Chief John's grandfather a gold cup and a hundred pounds.
The girl loved, but would not marry, that she might keep Chief John from
drinking.  A saint, Francois!  What have they said of her?"

Francois smoothed out the paper and read:

                   "A little while I saw the world go by
                    A little doorway that I called my own,
                    A loaf, a cup of water, and a bed had I,
                    A shrine of Jesus, where I knelt alone:
                    And now alone I bid the world good-bye."

The Cure turned his head away.  "Go on," he said sadly.  "Chief John has
lost his right hand.  Go on."

"Henri Rouget"

"Aged thirty years," again interrupted the Cure.  "Henri Rouget, idiot;
as young as the morning.  For man grows old only by what he suffers, and
what he forgives, and what he sins.  What have you to say for Henri
Rouget, my Francois?"

And Francois read:

              "I was a fool; nothing had I to know
               Of men, and naught to men had I to give.
               God gave me nothing; now to God I go,
               Now ask for pain, for bread,
               Life for my brain: dead,
               By God's love I shall then begin to live."

The priest rose to his feet and put a hand on the young man's shoulder.

"Do you know, Francois," he said, half sadly, "do you know, you have the
true thing in you.  Come often to me, my son, and bring all these things
--all you write."

While the Cure troubled himself about his future, Francois began to work
upon a monument for the grave of a dozen soldiers of Pontiac who were
killed in the War of the Patriots.  They had died for a mistaken cause,
and had been buried on the field of battle.  Long ago something would
have been done to commemorate them but that three of them were
Protestants, and difficulties had been raised by the bigoted.  But
Francois thought only of the young men in their common grave at St.
Eustache.  He remembered when they went away one bright morning, full of
the joy of an erring patriotism, of the ardour of a weak but fascinating
cause: race against race, the conquered against the conquerors, the
usurped against the usurpers.

In the space before the parish church it stands--a broken shaft, with an
unwound wreath straying down its sides; a monument of fine proportions,
a white figure of beaten valour and erring ardour of youth and beautiful
bad ambition.  One Saturday night it was not there, and when next morning
the people came to Mass it was there.  All night had Francois and his men
worked, and the first rays of the morning sun fell on the tall shivered
shaft set firmly in its place.  Francois was a happy man.  All else that
he had done had been wholly after a crude, staring convention, after rule
and measure--an artisan's, a tombstone-cutter's labour.  This was the
work of a man with the heart and mind of an artist.  When the people came
to Mass they gazed and gazed, and now and then the weeping of a woman was
heard, for among them were those whose sons and brothers were made
memorable by this stone.

That day at the close of his sermon the Cure spoke of it, and said at the
last: "That white shaft, dear brethren, is for us a sign of remembrance
and a warning to our souls.  In the name of race and for their love they
sinned.  But yet they sinned; and this monument, the gift and work of one
young like them, ardent and desiring like them, is for ever in our eyes
the crucifixion of our wrong ambitions and our selfish aims.

"Nay, let us be wise and let us be good.  They who rule us speak with
foreign tongue, but their hearts desire our peace and a mutual regard.
Pray that this be.  And pray for the young and the daring and the
foolish.  And pray also that he who has given us here a good gift may
find his thanks in our better-ordered lives, and that he may consecrate
his parts and talents to the redeeming actions of this world."

And so began the awakening of Francois Lagarre; and so began his ambition
and his peril.

For, as he passed from the church, the Seigneur touched him on the
shoulder and introduced him to his English grandniece, come on a visit
for the summer, the daughter of a London baronet.  She had but just
arrived, and she was feeling that first homesickness which succeeds
transplanting.  The face of the young worker in stone interested her; the
idea of it all was romantic; the possibilities of the young man's life
opened out before her.  Why should not she give him his real start, win
his gratitude, help him to his fame, and then, when it was won, be
pointed out as a discoverer and a patron?

All these things flashed through her mind as they were introduced.  The
young man did not read the look in her eyes, but there was one other
person in the crowd about the church steps who did read it, whose heart
beat furiously, whose foot tapped the ground angrily--a black-haired,
brown-eyed farmer's daughter, who instantly hated the yellow hair and
rosy and golden face of the blue-eyed London lady; who could, that
instant, have torn the silk gown from her graceful figure.

She was not disturbed without reason.  And for the moment, even when she
heard impertinent and incredulous fellows pooh-poohing the monument, and
sharpening their rather dull wits upon its corners, she did not open her
lips, when otherwise she would have spoken her mind with a vengeance; for
Jeanne Marchand had a reputation for spirit and temper, and she spared no
one when her blood was up.  She had a touch of the vixen--an impetuous,
loving, forceful mademoiselle, in marked contrast to the rather ascetic
Francois, whose ways were more refined than his origin might seem to
warrant.

"Sapre!" said Duclosse the mealman of the monument; "it's like a timber
of cheese stuck up.  What's that to make a fuss about?"

"Fig of Eden," muttered Jules Marmotte, with one eye on Jeanne, "any fool
could saw a better-looking thing out of ice!"

"Fish," said fat Caroche the butcher, "that Francois has a rattle in his
capote.  He'd spend his time better chipping bones on my meat-block."

But Jeanne could not bear this--the greasy whopping butcher-man!

"What, what, the messy stupid Caroche, who can't write his name," she
said in a fury; "the sausage-potted Caroche, who doesn't remember that
Francois Lagarre made his brother's tombstone, and charged him nothing
for the verses he wrote for it, nor for the Agnus Dei he carved on it!
No, Caroche does not remember his brother Ba'tiste the fighter, as brave
as Caroche is a coward!  He doesn't remember the verse on Ba'tiste's
tombstone, does he?"

Francois heard this speech, and his eyes lighted tenderly as he looked at
Jeanne: he loved this fury of defence and championship.  Some one in the
crowd turned to him and asked him to say the verses.  At first he would
not; but when Caroche said that it was only his fun, that he meant
nothing against Francois, the young man recited the words slowly--an
epitaph on one who was little better than a prize-fighter, a splendid
bully.

Leaning a hand against the white shaft of the Patriot's Memory, he said:

              "Blows I have struck, and blows a-many taken,
               Wrestling I've fallen, and I've rose up again;
                    Mostly I've stood--
                    I've had good bone and blood;
               Others went down, though fighting might and main.
                    Now death steps in--
                    Death the price of sin.
               The fall it will be his; and though I strive and strain,
               One blow will close my eyes, and I shall never waken."

"Good enough for Ba'tiste," said Duclosse the mealman.

The wave of feeling was now altogether with Francois, and presently he
walked away with Jeanne Marchand and her mother, and the crowd dispersed.
Jeanne was very happy for a few hours, but in the evening she was
unhappy, for she saw Francois going towards the house of the Seigneur;
and during many weeks she was still more unhappy, for every three or four
days she saw the same thing.

Meanwhile Francois worked as he had never before worked in his life.
Night and day he was shut in his shop, and for two months he came with
no epitaphs for the Cure, and no new tombstones were set up in the
graveyard.  The influence of the lady at the Seigneury was upon him, and
he himself believed it was for his salvation.  She had told him of great
pieces of sculpture she had seen, had sent and got from Quebec City,
where he had never been, pictures of some of the world's masterpieces in
sculpture, and he had lost himself in the study of them and in the depths
of the girl's eyes.  She meant no harm; the man interested her beyond
what was reasonable in one of his station in life.  That was all, and all
there ever was.

Presently people began to gossip, and a story crept round that, in a new
shed which he had built behind his shop, Francois was chiselling out of
stone the nude figure of a woman.  There were one or two who professed
they had seen it.  The wildest gossip said that the figure was that of
the young lady at the Seigneury.  Francois saw no more of Jeanne
Marchand; he thought of her sometimes, but that was all.  A fever of work
was on him.  Twice she came to the shed where he laboured, and knocked at
the door.  The first time, he asked who was there.  When she told him he
opened the door just a little way, smiled at her, caught her hand and
pressed it, and, when she would have entered, said: "No, no, another day,
Jeanne," and shut the door in her face.

She almost hated him because he had looked so happy.  Still another day
she came knocking.  She called to him, and this time he opened the door
and admitted her.  That very hour she had heard again the story of the
nude stone woman in the shed, and her heart was full of jealousy, fury,
and suspicion.  He was very quiet, he seemed tired.  She did not notice
that.  Her heart had throbbed wildly as she stepped inside the shed.
She looked round, all delirious eagerness for the nude figure.

There it was, covered up with a great canvas!  Yes, there were the
outlines of the figure.  How shapely it seemed, even inside the canvas!

She stepped forward without a word, and snatched at the covering.  He
swiftly interposed and stopped her hand.

"I will see it," she said.

"Not to-day," he answered.

"I tell you I will."  She wrenched her hand free and caught at the
canvas.  A naked foot and ankle showed.  He pinioned her wrists with one
hand and drew her towards the door, determination and anger in his face.

"You beast, you liar!" she said.

"You beast!  beast!  beast!"

Then, with a burst of angry laughter, she opened the door herself.  "You
ain't fit to know," she said; "they told the truth about you.  Now you
can take the canvas off her.  Good-bye!"  With that she was gone.  The
following day was Sunday.  Francois did not attend Mass, and such strange
scandalous reports had reached the Cure that he was both disturbed and
indignant.  That afternoon, after vespers (which Francois did not
attend), the Cure made his way to the sculptor's workshop, followed
by a number of parishioners.

The crowd increased, and when the Cure knocked at the door it seemed as
if half the village was there.  The chief witness against Francois had
been Jeanne Marchand.  That very afternoon she had told the Cure, with
indignation and bitterness, that there was no doubt about it; all that
had been said was true.

Francois, with wonder and some confusion, admitted the Cure.  When M.
Fabre demanded that he be taken to the new workshop, Francois led the
way.  The crowd pushed after, and presently the place was full.  A
hundred eyes were fastened upon the canvas-covered statue, which had been
the means of the young man's undoing.

Terrible things had been said--terrible things of Francois, and of the
girl at the Seigneury.  They knew the girl for a Protestant and an
Englishwoman, and that in itself was a sort of sin.  And now every ear
was alert to hear what the Cure should say, what denunciation should come
from his lips when the covering was removed.  For that it should be
removed was the determination of every man present.  Virtue was at its
supreme height in Pontiac that day.  Lajeunesse the blacksmith, Muroc the
charcoal-man, and twenty others were as intent upon preserving a high
standard of morality, by force of arms, as if another Tarquin were
harbouring shame and crime in this cedar shed.

The whole thing came home to Francois with a choking, smothering force.
Art, now in its very birth in his heart and life, was to be garroted.  He
had been unconscious of all the wicked things said about him: now he knew
all!

"Remove the canvas from the figure," said the Cure sternly.  Stubbornness
and resentment filled Francois's breast.  He did not stir.

"Do you oppose the command of the Church?" said the Cure, still more
severely.  "Remove the canvas."

"It is my work--my own: my idea, my stone, and the labour of my hands,"
said Francois doggedly.

The Cure turned to Lajeunesse and made a motion towards the statue.
Lajeunesse, with a burning righteous joy, snatched off the canvas.
There was one instant of confusion in the faces of all-of absolute
silence.

Then the crowd gasped.  The Cure's hat came off, and every other hat
followed.  The Cure made the sign of the cross upon his breast and
forehead, and every other man, woman, and child present did the same.
Then all knelt, save Francois and the Cure himself.

What they saw was a statue of Christ, a beautiful benign figure;
barefooted, with a girdle about his waist: the very truth and semblance
of a man.  The type was strong and yet delicate; vigorous and yet
refined; crude and yet noble; a leader of men--the God-man, not the
man-God.

After a moment's silence the Cure spoke.  "Francois, my son," said he,
"we have erred.  'All we like sheep have gone astray; we have followed
each after his own way, but God hath laid on Him'--he looked towards the
statue--'the iniquity of us all.'"

Francois stood still a moment gazing at the Cure, doggedly, bitterly;
then he turned and looked scornfully at the crowd, now risen to their
feet again.  Among them was a girl crying as if her heart would break.
It was Jeanne Marchand.  He regarded her coldly.

"You were so ready to suspect," he said.

Then he turned once more to the Cure.  "I meant it as my gift to the
Church, monsieur le Cure--to Pontiac, where I was born again.  I waked
up here to what I might do in sculpture, and you--you all were so ready
to suspect!  Take it, it is my last gift."

He went to the statue, touched the hands of it lovingly, and stooped and
kissed the feet.  Then, without more words, he turned and left the shed
and the house.

Pouring out into the street the people watched him cross the bridge that
led into another parish--and into another world: for from that hour
Francois Lagarre was never seen in Pontiac.

The statue that he made stands upon a little hill above the valley where
the beaters of flax come in the autumn, through which the woodsmen pass
in winter and in spring.  But Francois Lagarre, under another name, works
in another land.

While the Cure lived he heard of him and of his fame now and then, and to
the day of his death he always prayed for him.  He was wont to say to the
little Avocat whenever Francois's name was mentioned:

"The spirit of a man will support him, but a wounded spirit who can
bear?"




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

But a wounded spirit who can bear
Man grows old only by what he suffers, and what he forgives
You--you all were so ready to suspect






THE LANE THAT HAD NO TURNING

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.


THE TRAGIC COMEDY OF ANNETTE
THE MARRIAGE OF THE MILLER
MATHURIN
THE STORY OF THE LIME-BURNER
THE WOODSMAN'S STORY OF THE GREAT WHITE CHIEF
UNCLE JIM
THE HOUSE WITH THE TALL PORCH
PARPON THE DWARF



THE TRAGIC COMEDY OF ANNETTE

The chest of drawers, the bed, the bedding, the pieces of linen, and the
pile of yarn had been ready for many months.  Annette had made inventory
of them every day since the dot was complete--at first with a great deal
of pride, after a time more shyly and wistfully: Benoit did not come.  He
had said he would be down with the first drive of logs in the summer, and
at the little church of St. Saviour's they would settle everything and
get the Cure's blessing.  Almost anybody would have believed in Benoit.
He had the brightest scarf, the merriest laugh, the quickest eyes, and
the blackest head in Pontiac; and no one among the river drivers could
sing like him.  That was, he said gaily, because his earrings were gold,
and not brass like those of his comrades.  Thus Benoit was a little vain,
and something more; but old ladies such as the Little Chemist's wife said
he was galant.  Probably only Medallion the auctioneer and the Cure did
not lose themselves in the general admiration; they thought he was to
Annette like a farthing dip to a holy candle.

Annette was the youngest of twelve, and one of a family of thirty-for
some of her married brothers and sisters and their children lived in her
father's long white house' by the river.  When Benoit failed to come in
the spring, they showed their pity for her by abusing him; and when she
pleaded for him they said things which had an edge.  They ended by
offering to marry her to Farette, the old miller, to whom they owed money
for flour.  They brought Farette to the house at last, and she was
patient while he ogled her, and smoked his strong tabac, and tried to
sing.  She was kind to him, and said nothing until, one day, urged by her
brother Solime, he mumbled the childish chanson Benoit sang the day he
left, as he passed their house going up the river:

              "High in a nest of the tam'rac tree,
               Swing under, so free, and swing over;
               Swing under the sun and swing over the world,
               My snow-bird, my gay little lover
               My gay little lover, don, don!  .  .  .  don, don!

              "When the winter is done I will come back home,
               To the nest swinging under and over,
               Swinging under and over and waiting for me,
               Your rover, my snow-bird, your rover--
               Your lover and rover, don, don!  .  .  .  don, don!"

It was all very well in the mouth of the sprightly, sentimental Benoit;
it was hateful foolishness in Farette.  Annette now came to her feet
suddenly, her pale face showing defiance, and her big brown eyes flicking
anger.  She walked up to the miller and said: "You are old and ugly and a
fool.  But I do not hate you; I hate Solime, my brother, for bringing you
here.  There is the bill for the flour?  Well, I will pay it myself--and
you can go as soon as you like."

Then she put on her coat and capote and mittens, and went to the door.
"Where are you going, Ma'm'selle?" cried Solime, in high rage.

"I am going to M'sieu' Medallion," she said.

Hard profane words followed her, but she ran, and never stopped till she
came to Medallion's house.  He was not there.  She found him at the
Little Chemist's.  That night a pony and cart took away from the house
of Annette's father the chest of drawers, the bed, the bedding, the
pieces of linen, and the pile of yarn which had been made ready so long
against Benoit's coming.  Medallion had said he could sell them at once,
and he gave her the money that night; but this was after he had had a
talk with the Cure, to whom Annette had told all.  Medallion said he had
been able to sell the things at once; but he did not tell her that they
were stored in a loft of the Little Chemist's house, and that the Little
Chemist's wife had wept over them and carried the case to the shrine of
the Blessed Virgin.

It did not matter that the father and brothers stormed.  Annette was
firm; the dot was hers, and she would do as she wished.  She carried the
money to the miller.  He took it grimly and gave her a receipt, grossly
mis-spelled, and, as she was about to go, brought his fist heavily down
on his leg and said: "Mon Dieu, it is brave--it is grand--it is an
angel."  Then he chuckled: "So, so!  It was true.  I am old, ugly, and a
fool.  Eh, well, I have my money!"  Then he took to counting it over in
his hand, forgetting her, and she left him growling gleefully over it.

She had not a happy life, but her people left her alone, for the Cure had
said stern things to them.  All during the winter she went out fishing
every day at a great hole in the ice--bitter cold work, and fit only for
a man; but she caught many fish, and little by little laid aside pennies
to buy things to replace what she had sold.  It had been a hard trial to
her to sell them.  But for the kind-hearted Cure she would have repined.
The worst thing happened, however, when the ring Benoit had given her
dropped from her thin finger into the water where she was fishing.  Then
a shadow descended on her, and she grew almost unearthly in the anxious
patience of her face.  The Little Chemist's wife declared that the look
was death.  Perhaps it would have been if Medallion had not sent a lad
down to the bottom of the river and got the ring.  He gave it to the
Cure, who put it on her finger one day after confession.  Then she
brightened, and waited on and on patiently.

She waited for seven years.  Then the deceitful Benoit came pensively
back to her, a cripple from a timber accident.  She believed what he told
her; and that was where her comedy ended and her tragedy began.






THE MARRIAGE OF THE MILLER

Medallion put it into his head on the day that Benoit and Annette were
married.  "See," said Medallion, "Annette wouldn't have you--and quite
right--and she took what was left of that Benoit, who'll laugh at you
over his mush-and-milk."

"Benoit will want flour some day, with no money."  The old man chuckled
and rubbed his hands.  "That's nothing; he has the girl--an angel!"
"Good enough, that is what I said of her--an angel!"

"Get married yourself, Farette."

For reply Farette thrust a bag of native tabac into Medallion's hands.
Then they went over the names of the girls in the village.  Medallion
objected to those for whom he wished a better future, but they decided at
last on Julie Lachance, who, Medallion thought, would in time profoundly
increase Farette's respect for the memory of his first wife; for Julie
was not an angel.  Then the details were ponderously thought out by the
miller, and ponderously acted upon, with the dry approval of Medallion,
who dared not tell the Cure of his complicity, though he was without
compunction.  He had a sense of humour, and knew there could be no
tragedy in the thing--for Julie.  But the miller was a careful man and
original in his methods.  He still possessed the wardrobe of the first
wife, thoughtfully preserved by his sister, even to the wonderful grey
watered-poplin which had been her wedding-dress.  These he had taken out,
shaken free of cayenne, camphor, and lavender, and sent upon the back of
Parpon, the dwarf, to the house where Julie lodged (she was an orphan),
following himself with a statement on brown paper, showing the extent of
his wealth, and a parcel of very fine flour from the new stones in his
mill.  All was spread out, and then he made a speech, describing his
virtues, and condoning his one offence of age by assuring her that every
tooth in his head was sound.  This was merely the concession of
politeness, for he thought his offer handsome.

Julie slyly eyed the wardrobe and as slyly smiled, and then, imitating
Farette's manner--though Farette could not see it, and Parpon spluttered
with laughter--said:

"M'sieu', you are a great man.  The grey poplin is noble, also the flour,
and the writing on the brown paper.  M'sieu', you go to Mass, and all
your teeth are sound; you have a dog-churn, also three feather-beds, and
five rag carpets; you have sat on the grand jury.

"M'sieu', I have a dot; I accept you.  M'sieu', I will keep the brown
paper, and the grey poplin, and the flour."  Then with a grave elaborate
bow, "M'sieu'!"

That was the beginning and end of the courtship.  For though Farette came
every Sunday evening and smoked by the fire, and looked at Julie as she
arranged the details of her dowry, he only chuckled, and now and again
struck his thigh and said:

"Mon Dieu, the ankle, the eye, the good child, Julie, there!"

Then he would fall to thinking and chuckling again.  One day he asked her
to make him some potato-cakes of the flour he had given her.  Her answer
was a catastrophe.  She could not cook; she was even ignorant of
buttermilk-pudding.  He went away overwhelmed, but came back some days
afterwards and made another speech.  He had laid his plans before
Medallion, who approved of them.  He prefaced the speech by placing the
blank marriage certificate on the table.  Then he said that his first
wife was such a cook, that when she died he paid for an extra Mass and
twelve very fine candles.  He called upon Parpon to endorse his words,
and Parpon nodded to all he said, but, catching Julie's eye, went off
into gurgles of laughter, which he pretended were tears, by smothering
his face in his capote.  "Ma'm'selle," said the miller, "I have thought.
Some men go to the Avocat or the Cure with great things; but I have been
a pilgrimage, I have sat on the grand jury.  There, Ma'm'selle!"  His
chest swelled, he blew out his cheeks, he pulled Parpon's ear as Napoleon
pulled Murat's.  "Ma'm'selle, allons!  Babette, the sister of my first
wife-ah! she is a great cook also--well, she was pouring into my plate
the soup--there is nothing like pea-soup with a fine lump of pork, and
thick molasses for the buckwheat cakes.  Ma'm'selle, allons!  Just then
I thought.  It is very good; you shall see; you shall learn how to cook.
Babette will teach you.  Babette said many things.  I got mad and spilt
the soup.  Ma'm'selle--eh, holy, what a turn has your waist!"

At length he made it clear to her what his plans were, and to each and
all she consented; but when he had gone she sat and laughed till she
cried, and for the hundredth time took out the brown paper and studied
the list of Farette's worldly possessions.

The wedding-day came.  Julie performed her last real act of renunciation
when, in spite of the protests of her friends, she wore the grey watered-
poplin, made modern by her own hands.  The wedding-day was the
anniversary of Farette's first marriage, and the Cure faltered in the
exhortation when he saw that Farette was dressed in complete mourning,
even to the crape hat-streamers, as he said, out of respect for the
memory of his first wife, and as a kind of tribute to his second.  At the
wedding-breakfast, where Medallion and Parpon were in high glee, Farette
announced that he would take the honeymoon himself, and leave his wife to
learn cooking from old Babette.

So he went away alone cheerfully, with hymeneal rice falling in showers
on his mourning garments; and his new wife was as cheerful as he, and
threw rice also.

She learned how to cook, and in time Farette learned that he had his one
true inspiration when he wore mourning at his second marriage.






MATHURIN

The tale was told to me in the little valley beneath Dalgrothe Mountain
one September morning.  Far and near one could see the swinging of the
flail, and the laughter of a ripe summer was upon the land.  There was a
little Calvary down by the riverside, where the flax-beaters used to say
their prayers in the intervals of their work; and it was just at the foot
of this that Angele Rouvier, having finished her prayer, put her rosary
in her pocket, wiped her eyes with the hem of her petticoat, and said to
me:

"Ah, dat poor Mathurin, I wipe my tears for him!"

"Tell me all about him, won't you, Madame Angele?  I want to hear you
tell it," I added hastily, for I saw that she would despise me if I
showed ignorance of Mathurin's story.  Her sympathy with Mathurin's
memory was real, but her pleasure at the compliment I paid her was also
real.

"Ah!  It was ver' longtime ago--yes.  My gran'mudder she remember dat
Mathurin ver' well.  He is not ver' big man.  He has a face-oh, not ver'
handsome, not so more handsome as yours--non.  His clothes, dey hang on
him all loose; his hair, it is all some grey, and it blow about him head.
He is clean to de face, no beard--no, nosing like dat.  But his eye--la,
M'sieu', his eye!  It is like a coal which you blow in your hand, whew!
--all bright.  My gran'mudder, she say, 'Voila, you can light your pipe
with de eyes of dat Mathurin!'  She know.  She say dat M'sieu' Mathurin's
eyes dey shine in de dark.  My gran'fadder he say he not need any lights
on his cariole when Mathurin ride with him in de night.

"Ah, sure!  it is ver' true what I tell you all de time.  If you cut off
Mathurin at de chin, all de way up, you will say de top of him it is a
priest.  All de way down from his neck, oh, he is just no better as
yoursel' or my Jean--non.  He is a ver' good man.  Only one bad ting he
do.  Dat is why I pray for him; dat is why everybody pray for him--only
one bad ting.  Sapristi!--if I have only one ting to say God-have-mercy
for, I tink dat ver' good; I do my penance happy.  Well, dat Mathurin him
use to teach de school.  De Cure he ver' fond of him.  All de leetla
children, boys and girls, dey all say: 'C'est bon Mathurin!'  He is not
ver' cross--non.  He have no wife, no child; jes live by himself all
alone.  But he is ver' good friends with everybody in Pontiac.  When he
go 'long de street, everybody say, 'Ah, dere go de good Mathurin!'  He
laugh, he tell story, he smoke leetla tabac, he take leetla white wine
behin' de door; dat is nosing--non.

"He have in de parish five, ten, twenty children all call Mathurin; he is
godfadder with dem--yes.  So he go about with plenty of sugar and sticks
of candy in his pocket.  He never forget once de age of every leetla
child dat call him godfadder.  He have a brain dat work like a clock.  My
gran'fadder he say dat Mathurin have a machine in his head.  It make de
words, make de thoughts, make de fine speech like de Cure, make de gran'
poetry--oh, yes!

"When de King of Englan' go to sit on de throne, Mathurin write ver' nice
verse to him.  And by-and-by dere come to Mathurin a letter--voila, dat
is a letter!  It have one, two, three, twenty seals; and de King he say
to Mathurin: 'Merci mille fois, m'sieu'; you are ver' polite.  I tank
you.  I will keep your verses to tell me dat my French subjects are all
loyal like M. Mathurin.'  Dat is ver' nice, but Mathurin is not proud--
non.  He write six verses for my granmudder--hein?  Dat is something.
He write two verses for de King of Englan' and he write six verses for
my granmudder--you see!  He go on so, dis week, dat week, dis year, dat
year, all de time.

"Well, by-and-by dere is trouble on Pontiac.  It is ver' great trouble.
You see dere is a fight 'gainst de King of Englan', and dat is too bad.
It is not his fault; he is ver' nice man; it is de bad men who make de
laws for de King in Quebec.  Well, one day all over de country everybody
take him gun, and de leetla bullets, and say, I will fight de soldier of
de King of Englan'--like dat.  Ver' well, dere was twenty men in Pontiac,
ver' nice men--you will find de names cut in a stone on de church; and
den, three times as big, you will find Mathurin's name.  Ah, dat is de
ting!  You see, dat rebellion you English call it, we call it de War of
de Patriot--de first War of de Patriot, not de second-well, call it what
you like, quelle difference?  The King of Englan' smash him Patriot War
all to pieces.  Den dere is ten men of de twenty come back to Pontiac
ver' sorry.  Dey are not happy, nobody are happy.  All de wives, dey cry;
all de children, dey are afraid.  Some people say, What fools you are;
others say, You are no good; but everybody in him heart is ver' sorry all
de time.

"Ver' well, by-and-by dere come to Pontiac what you call a colonel with a
dozen men--what for, you tink?  To try de patriots.  He will stan' dem
against de wall and shoot dem to death--kill dem dead.  When dey come, de
Cure he is not in Pontiac--non, not dat day; he is gone to anudder
village.  De English soldier he has de ten men drew up before de church.
All de children and all de wives dey cry and cry, and dey feel so bad.
Certainlee, it is a pity.  But de English soldier he say he will march
dem off to Quebec, and everybody know dat is de end of de patriots.

"All at once de colonel's horse it grow ver' wild, it rise up high, and
dance on him hind feet, and--voila!  he topple him over backwards, and de
horse fall on de colonel and smaish him--smaish him till he go to die.
Ver' well; de colonel, what does he do?  Dey lay him on de steps of de
church.  Den he say: 'Bring me a priest, quick, for I go to die.'  Nobody
answer.  De colonel he say: 'I have a hunder sins all on my mind; dey are
on my heart like a hill.  Bring to me de priest,'--he groan like dat.
Nobody speak at first; den somebody say de priest is not here.  'Find me
a priest,' say de colonel; 'find me a priest.'  For he tink de priest
will not come, becos' he go to kill de patriots.  'Bring me a priest,'
he say again, 'and all de ten shall go free.'  He say it over and over.
He is smaish to pieces, but his head is all right.  All at once de doors
of de church open behin' him--what you tink!  Everybody's heart it stan'
still, for dere is Mathurin dress as de priest, with a leetla boy to
swing de censer.  Everybody say to himself, What is dis?  Mathurin is
dress as de priest-ah! dat is a sin.  It is what you call blaspheme.

"The English soldier he look up at Mathurin and say: 'Ah, a priest at
last--ah, M'sieu' le Cure, comfort me!' "Mathurin look down on him and
say: 'M'sieu', it is for you to confess your sins, and to have de office
of de Church.  But first, as you have promise just now, you must give up
dese poor men, who have fight for what dey tink is right.  You will let
dem go free dis women'?'"  'Yes, yes,' say de English colonel; 'dey shall
go free.  Only give me de help of de Church at my last.' "Mathurin turn
to de other soldiers and say: 'Unloose de men.'

"De colonel nod his head and say: 'Unloose de men.' Den de men are
unloose, and dey all go away, for Mathurin tell dem to go quick.

"Everybody is ver' 'fraid becos' of what Mathurin do.  Mathurin he say to
de soldiers: 'Lift him up and bring him in de church.'  Dey bring him up
to de steps of de altar.  Mathurin look at de man for a while, and it
seem as if he cannot speak to him; but de colonel say: 'I have give you
my word.  Give me comfort of de Church before I die.'  He is in ver'
great pain, so Mathurin he turn roun' to everybody dat stan' by, and tell
dem to say de prayers for de sick.  Everybody get him down on his knees
and say de prayer.  Everybody say: 'Lord have mercy.  Spare him, O Lord;
deliver him, O Lord, from Thy wrath!'  And Mathurin he pray all de same
as a priest, ver' soft and gentle.  He pray on and on, and de face of de
English soldier it get ver; quiet and still, and de tear drop down his
cheek.  And just as Mathurin say at de last his sins dey are forgive, he
die.  Den Mathurin, as he go away to take off his robes, he say to
himself: 'Miserere mei Deus! miserere mei Deus!'

"So dat is de ting dat Mathurin do to save de patriots from de bullets.
Ver' well, de men dey go free, and when de Governor at Quebec he hear de
truth, he say it is all right.  Also de English soldier die in peace and
happy, becos' he tink his sins are forgive.  But den--dere is Mathurin
and his sin to pretend he is a priest!  The Cure he come back, and dere
is a great trouble.

"Mathurin he is ver' quiet and still.  Nobody come near him in him house;
nobody go near to de school.  But he sit alone all day in de school, and
he work on de blackboar' and he write on de slate; but dere is no child
come, becos' de Cure has forbid any one to speak to Mathurin.  Not till
de next Sunday, den de Cure send for Mathurin to come to de church.
Mathurin come to de steps of de altar; den de Cure say to him:

"'Mathurin, you have sin a great sin.  If it was two hunderd years ago
you would be put to death for dat.'

"Mathurin he say ver' soft: 'Dat is no matter.  I am ready to die now.
I did it to save de fadders of de children and de husbands of de wives.
I do it to make a poor sinner happy as he go from de world.  De sin is
mine.'

"Den de Cure he say: 'De men are free, dat is good; de wives have dere
husbands and de children dere fadders.  Also de man who confess his sins
--de English soldier--to whom you say de words of a priest of God, he is
forgive.  De Spirit of God it was upon him when he die, becos' you speak
in de name of de Church.  But for you, blasphemer, who take upon you de
holy ting, you shall suffer!  For penance, all your life you shall teach
a chile no more.'

"Voila, M'sieu' le Cure he know dat is de greatest penance for de poor
Mathurin!  Den he set him other tings to do; and every month for a whole
year Mathurin come on his knees all de way to de church, but de Cure say:
'Not yet are you forgive.'  At de end of de year Mathurin he look so
thin, so white, you can blow through him.  Every day he go to him school
and write on de blackboar', and mark on de slate, and call de roll of de
school.  But dere is no answer, for dere is no children.  But all de time
de wives of de men dat he have save, and de children, dey pray for him.
And by-and-by all de village pray for him, so sorry.

"It is so for two years; and den dey say dat Mathurin he go to die.  He
cannot come on his knees to de church; and de men whose life he save, dey
come to de Cure and ask him to take de penance from Mathurin.  De Cure
say: 'Wait till nex' Sunday.'  So nex' Sunday Mathurin is carry to de
church--he is too weak to walk on his knees.  De Cure he stan' at de
altar, and he read a letter from de Pope, which say dat Mathurin his
penance is over, and he is forgive; dat de Pope himself pray for
Mathurin, to save his soul.  So "Mathurin, all at once he stan' up, and
his face it smile and smile, and he stretch out his arms as if dey are on
a cross, and he say, 'Lord, I am ready to go,' and he fall down.  But de
Cure catch him as he fall, and Mathurin say: 'De children--let dem come
to me dat I teach dem before I die.'  And all de children in de church
dey come close to him, and he sit up and smile at dem, and he say:

"'It is de class in 'rithmetic.  How much is three times four?' And dem
all answer: 'T'ree times four is twelve.' And he say: 'May de Twelve
Apostles pray for me!'  Den he ask: 'Class in geography--how far is it
roun' de world?'  And dey answer: 'Twenty-four t'ousand miles.'  He say:
'Good; it is not so far to God!  De school is over all de time,' he say.
And dat is only everything of poor Mathurin.  He is dead.

"When de Cure lay him down, after he make de Sign upon him, he kiss his
face and say: 'Mathurin, now you are a priest unto God.'"

That was Angele Rouvier's story of Mathurin, the Master of the School,
for whom the women and the children pray in the parish of Pontiac, though
the school has been dismissed these hundred years and more.






THE STORY OF THE LIME-BURNER

For a man in whose life there had been tragedy he was cheerful.  He had a
habit of humming vague notes in the silence of conversation, as if to put
you at your ease.  His body and face were lean and arid, his eyes oblique
and small, his hair straight and dry and straw-coloured; and it flew out
crackling with electricity, to meet his cap as he put it on.  He lived
alone in a little but near his lime-kiln by the river, with no near
neighbours, and few companions save his four dogs; and these he fed
sometimes at expense of his own stomach.  He had just enough crude poetry
in his nature to enjoy his surroundings.  For he was well placed.  Behind
the lime-kiln rose knoll on knoll, and beyond these the verdant hills,
all converging to Dalgrothe Mountain.  In front of it was the river, with
its banks dropping forty feet, and below, the rapids, always troubled and
sportive.  On the farther side of the river lay peaceful areas of meadow
and corn land, and low-roofed, hovering farm-houses, with one larger than
the rest, having a wind-mill and a flag-staff.  This building was almost
large enough for a manor, and indeed it was said that it had been built
for one just before the conquest in 1759, but the war had destroyed the
ambitious owner, and it had become a farm-house.  Paradis always knew the
time of the day by the way the light fell on the wind-mill.  He had owned
this farm once, he and his brother Fabian, and he had loved it as he
loved Fabian, and he loved it now as he loved Fabian's memory.  In spite
of all, they were cheerful memories, both of brother and house.

At twenty-three they had become orphans, with two hundred acres of land,
some cash, horses and cattle, and plenty of credit in the parish, or in
the county, for that matter.  Both were of hearty dispositions, but
Fabian had a taste for liquor, and Henri for pretty faces and shapely
ankles.  Yet no one thought the worse of them for that, especially at
first.  An old servant kept house for them and cared for them in her
honest way, both physically and morally.  She lectured them when at first
there was little to lecture about.  It is no wonder that when there came
a vast deal to reprove, the bonne desisted altogether, overwhelmed by the
weight of it.

Henri got a shock the day before their father died when he saw Fabian
lift the brandy used to mix with the milk of the dying man, and pouring
out the third of a tumbler, drink it off, smacking his lips as he did so,
as though it were a cordial.  That gave him a cue to his future and to
Fabian's.  After their father died Fabian gave way to the vice.  He drank
in the taverns, he was at once the despair and the joy of the parish;
for, wild as he was, he had a gay temper, a humorous mind, a strong arm,
and was the universal lover.  The Cure, who did not, of course, know one-
fourth of his wildness, had a warm spot for him in his heart.  But there
was a vicious strain in him somewhere, and it came out one day in a
perilous fashion.

There was in the hotel of the Louis Quinze an English servant from the
west, called Nell Barraway.  She had been in a hotel in Montreal, and it
was there Fabian had seen her as she waited at table.  She was a
splendid-looking creature--all life and energy, tall, fair-haired, and
with a charm above her kind.  She was also an excellent servant, could do
as much as any two women in any house, and was capable of more airy
diablerie than any ten of her sex in Pontiac.  When Fabian had said to
her in Montreal that he would come to see her again, he told her where he
lived.  She came to see him instead, for she wrote to the landlord of the
Louis Quinze, enclosed fine testimonials, and was at once engaged.
Fabian was stunned when he entered the Louis Quinze and saw her waiting
at table, alert, busy, good to behold.  She nodded at him with a quick
smile as he stood bewildered just inside the door, then said in English:
"This way, m'sieu'."

As he sat down he said in English also, with a laugh and with snapping
eyes: "Good Lord, what brings you here, lady-bird?"

As she pushed a chair under him she whispered through his hair: "You!"
and then was gone away to fetch pea-soup for six hungry men.

The Louis Quinze did more business now in three months than it had done
before in six.  But it became known among a few in Pontiac that Nell was
notorious.  How it had crept up from Montreal no one guessed, and, when
it did come, her name was very intimately associated with Fabian's.  No
one could say that she was not the most perfect of servants, and also no
one could say that her life in Pontiac had not been exemplary.  Yet wise
people had made up their minds that she was determined to marry Fabian,
and the wisest declared that she would do so in spite of everything--
religion (she was a Protestant), character, race.  She was clever, as the
young Seigneur found, as the little Avocat was forced to admit, as the
Cure allowed with a sigh, and she had no airs of badness at all and very
little of usual coquetry.  Fabian was enamoured, and it was clear that he
intended to bring the woman to the Manor one way or another.

Henri admitted the fascination of the woman, felt it, despaired, went to
Montreal, got proof of her career, came back, and made his final and only
effort to turn his brother from the girl.

He had waited an hour outside the hotel for his brother, and when Fabian
got in, he drove on without a word.  After a while, Fabian, who was in
high spirits, said:

"Open your mouth, Henri.  Come along, sleepyhead."

Straightway he began to sing a rollicking song, and Henri joined in with
him heartily, for the spirit of Fabian's humour was contagious:

                        "There was a little man,
                         The foolish Guilleri
                         Carabi.
                         He went unto the chase,
                         Of partridges the chase.
                         Carabi.
                         Titi Carabi,
                         Toto Carabo,
                         You're going to break your neck,
                         My lovely Guilleri!"

He was about to begin another verse when Henri stopped him, saying:

"You're going to break your neck, Fabian."

"What's up, Henri?" was the reply.

"You're drinking hard, and you don't keep good company."

Fabian laughed.  "Can't get the company I want, so what I can get I have,
Henri, my lad."

"Don't drink."  Henri laid his freehand on Fabian's knee.

"Whiskey-wine is meat and drink to me--I was born on New Year's Day, old
coffin-face.  Whiskey-wine day, they ought to call it.  Holy! the empty
jars that day."  Henri sighed.  "That's the drink, Fabian," he said
patiently.  "Give up the company.  I'll be better company for you than
that girl, Fabian."

"Girl?  What the devil do you mean!"

"She, Nell Barraway, was the company I meant, Fabian."

"Nell Barraway--you mean her?  Bosh!  I'm going to marry her, Henri."

"You mustn't, Fabian," said Henri, eagerly clutching Fabian's sleeve.

"But I must, my Henri.  She's the best-looking, wittiest girl I ever saw
--splendid.  Never lonely with her."

"Looks and brains isn't everything, Fabian."

"Isn't it, though?  Isn't it?  Tiens, you try it!"

"Not without goodness."  Henri's voice weakened.

"That's bosh.  Of course it is, Henri, my dear.  If you love a woman, if
she gets hold of you, gets into your blood, loves you so that the touch
of her fingers sets your pulses going pom-pom, you don't care a sou
whether she is good or not."

"You mean whether she was good or not?"

"No, I don't.  I mean is good or not.  For if she loves you she'll travel
straight for your sake.  Pshaw, you don't know anything about it!"

"I know all about it."

"Know all about it!  You're in love--you?"

"Yes."

Fabian sat open-mouthed for a minute.  "Godam!" he said.  It was his one
English oath.

"Is she good company?" he asked after a minute.

"She's the same as you keep--voila, the same."

"You mean Nell--Nell?" asked Fabian, in a dry, choking voice.

"Yes, Nell.  From the first time I saw her.  But I'd cut my hand off
first.  I'd think of you; of our people that have been here for two
hundred years; of the rooms in the old house where mother used to be."

Fabian laughed nervously.  "Holy heaven, and you've got her in your
blood, too!"

"Yes, but I'd never marry her.  Fabian, at Montreal I found out all about
her.  She was as bad--"

"That's nothing to me, Henri," said Fabian, "but something else is.  Here
you are now.  I'll make a bargain."  His face showed pale in the
moonlight.  "If you'll drink with me, do as I do, go where I go, play the
devil when I play it, and never squeal, never hang back, I'll give her
up.  But I've got to have you--got to have you all the time, everywhere,
hunting, drinking, or letting alone.  You'll see me out, for you're
stronger, had less of it.  I'm soon for the little low house in the
grass.  Stop the horses."

Henri stopped them and they got out.  They were just opposite the lime-
kiln, and they had to go a few hundred yards before they came to the
bridge to cross the river to their home.  The light of the fire shone in
their faces as Fabian handed the flask to Henri, and said: "Let's drink
to it, Henri.  You half, and me half."  He was deadly pale.

Henri drank to the finger-mark set, and then Fabian lifted the flask to
his lips.

"Good-bye, Nell!" he said.  "Here's to the good times we've had!"  He
emptied the flask, and threw it over the bank into the burning lime, and
Garotte, the old lime-burner, being half asleep, did not see or hear.

The next day the two went on a long hunting expedition, and the following
month Nell Barraway left for Montreal.

Henri kept to his compact, drink for drink, sport for sport.  One year
the crops were sold before they were reaped, horses and cattle went
little by little, then came mortgage, and still Henri never wavered,
never weakened, in spite of the Cure and all others.  The brothers were
always together, and never from first to last did Henri lose his temper,
or openly lament that ruin was coming surely on them.  What money Fabian
wanted he got.  The Cure's admonitions availed nothing, for Fabian would
go his gait.  The end came on the very spot where the compact had been
made; for, passing the lime-kiln one dark night, as the two rode home
together, Fabian's horse shied, the bank of the river gave way, and with
a startled "Ah, Henri!" the profligate and his horse were gone into the
river below.

Next month the farm and all were sold, Henri Paradis succeeded the old
lime-burner at his post, drank no more ever, and lived his life in sight
of the old home.






THE WOODSMAN'S STORY OF THE GREAT WHITE CHIEF

The old woodsman shifted the knife with which he was mending his fishing-
rod from one hand to the other, and looked at it musingly, before he
replied to Medallion.  "Yes, m'sieu', I knew the White Chief, as they
called him: this was his"--holding up the knife; "and this"--taking a
watch from his pocket.  "He gave them to me; I was with him in the Circle
on the great journey."

"Tell us about him, then," Medallion urged; "for there are many tales,
and who knows which is the right one?"

"The right one is mine.  Holy, he was to me like a father then!  I know
more of the truth than any one."  He paused a moment, looking out on the
river where the hot sun was playing with all its might, then took off his
cap with deliberation, laid it beside him, and speaking as it were into
the distance, began:

"He once was a trader of the Hudson's Bay Company.  Of his birth some
said one thing, some another; I know he was beaucoup gentil, and his
heart, it was a lion's!  Once, when there was trouble with the
Chipp'ways, he went alone to their camp, and say he will fight their
strongest man, to stop the trouble.  He twist the neck of the great
fighting man of the tribe, so that it go with a snap, and that ends it,
and he was made a chief, for, you see, in their hearts they all hated
their strong man.  Well, one winter there come down to Fort o' God two
Esquimaux, and they say that three white men are wintering by the
Coppermine River; they had travel down from the frozen seas when their
ship was lock in the ice, but can get no farther.  They were sick with
the evil skin, and starving.  The White Chief say to me: 'Galloir, will
you go to rescue them?'  I would have gone with him to the ends of the
world--and this was near one end."

The old man laughed to himself, tossed his jet-black hair from his
wrinkled face, and after a moment, went on: "There never was such a
winter as that.  The air was so still by times that you can hear the
rustle of the stars and the shifting of the northern lights; but the cold
at night caught you by the heart and clamp it--Mon Dieu, how it clamp!
We crawl under the snow and lay in our bags of fur and wool, and the dogs
hug close to us.  We were sorry for the dogs; and one died, and then
another, and there is nothing so dreadful as to hear the dogs howl in the
long night--it is like ghosts crying in an empty world.  The circle of
the sun get smaller and smaller, till he only tramp along the high edge
of the north-west.  We got to the river at last and found the camp.
There is one man dead--only one; but there were bones--ah, m'sieu', you
not guess what a thing it is to look upon the bones of men, and know
that--!"

Medallion put his hand on the old man's arm.  "Wait a minute," he said.
Then he poured out coffee for both, and they drank before the rest was
told.

"It's a creepy story," said Medallion, "but go on."

"Well, the White Chief look at the dead man as he sit there in the snow,
with a book and a piece of paper beside him, and the pencil in the book.
The face is bent forward to the knees.  The White Chief pick up the book
and pencil, and then kneel down and gaze up in the dead man's face, all
hard like stone and crusted with frost.  I thought he would never stir
again, he look so long.  I think he was puzzle.  Then he turn and say to
me: 'So quiet, so awful, Galloir!' and got up.  Well, but it was cold
then, and my head seemed big and running about like a ball of air.  But
I light a spirit-lamp, and make some coffee, and he open the dead man's
book--it is what they call a diary--and begin to read.  All at once I
hear a cry, and I see him drop the book on the ground, and go to the dead
man, and jerk his fist as if to strike him in the face.  But he did not
strike."

Galloir stopped, and lighted his pipe, and was so long silent that
Medallion had to jog him into speaking.  He puffed the smoke so that his
face was in the cloud, and he said through it: "No, he did not strike.
He get to his feet and spoke: 'God forgive her!' like that, and come and
take up the book again, and read.  He eat and drunk, and read the book
again, and I know by his face that something more than cold was clamp his
heart.

"'Shall we bury him in the snow?' I say.  'No,' he spoke, 'let him sit
there till the Judgmen'.  This is a wonderful book, Galloir,' he went on.
'He was a brave man, but the rest--the rest!'--then under his breath
almost: 'She was so young--but a child.' I not understand that.  We start
away soon, leaving the thing there.  For four days, and then I see that
the White Chief will never get back to Fort Pentecost; but he read the
dead man's book much.  .  .  ."

"I cannot forget that one day.  He lies down looking at the world--
nothing but the waves of snow, shining blue and white, on and on.  The
sun lift an eye of blood in the north, winking like a devil as I try to
drive Death away by calling in his ear.  He wake all at once; but his
eyes seem asleep.  He tell me to take the book to a great man in
Montreal--he give me the name.  Then he take out his watch--it is stop--
and this knife, and put them into my hands, and then he pat my shoulder.
He motion to have the bag drawn over his head.  I do it.  .  .  .  Of
course that was the end!"

"But what about the book?" Medallion asked.

"That book?  It is strange.  I took it to the man in Montreal--tonnerre,
what a fine house and good wine had he!--and told him all.  He whip out a
scarf, and blow his nose loud, and say very angry: 'So, she's lost both
now!  What a scoundrel he was!  .  .  .'  Which one did he mean?  I not
understan' ever since."






UNCLE JIM

He was no uncle of mine, but it pleased me that he let me call him Uncle
Jim.

It seems only yesterday that, for the first time, on a farm "over the
border," from the French province, I saw him standing by a log outside
the wood-house door, splitting maple knots.  He was all bent by years and
hard work, with muscles of iron, hands gnarled and lumpy, but clinching
like a vise; grey head thrust forward on shoulders which had carried
forkfuls of hay and grain, and leaned to the cradle and the scythe, and
been heaped with cordwood till they were like hide and metal; white
straggling beard and red watery eyes, which, to me, were always hung with
an intangible veil of mystery--though that, maybe, was my boyish fancy.
Added to all this he was so very deaf that you had to speak clear and
loud into his ear; and many people he could not hear at all, if their
words were not sharp-cut, no matter how loud.  A silent, withdrawn man
he was, living close to Mother Earth, twin-brother of Labour, to whom
Morning and Daytime were sounding-boards for his axe, scythe, saw, flail,
and milking-pail, and Night a round hollow of darkness into which he
crept, shutting the doors called Silence behind him, till the impish page
of Toil came tapping again, and he stepped awkwardly into the working
world once more.  Winter and summer saw him putting the kettle on the
fire a few minutes after four o'clock, in winter issuing with lantern
from the kitchen door to the stable and barn to feed the stock; in summer
sniffing the grey dawn and looking out on his fields of rye and barley,
before he went to gather the cows for milking and take the horses to
water.

For forty years he and his worn-faced wife bowed themselves beneath the
yoke, first to pay for the hundred-acre farm, and then to bring up and
educate their seven children.  Something noble in them gave them
ambitions for their boys and girls which they had never had for
themselves; but when had gone the forty years, in which the little farm
had twice been mortgaged to put the eldest son through college as a
doctor, they faced the bitter fact that the farm had passed from them to
Rodney, the second son, who had come at last to keep a hotel in a town
fifty miles away.  Generous-hearted people would think that these grown-
up sons and daughters should have returned the old people's long toil and
care by buying up the farm and handing it back to them, their rightful
refuge in the decline of life.  But it was not so.  They were tenants
where they had been owners, dependants where they had been givers, slaves
where once they were, masters.  The old mother toiled without a servant,
the old man without a helper, save in harvest time.

But the great blow came when Rodney married the designing milliner who
flaunted her wares opposite his bar-room; and, somehow, from the date
of that marriage, Rodney's good fortune and the hotel declined.  When he
and his wife first visited the little farm after their marriage the old
mother shrank away from the young woman's painted face, and ever
afterwards an added sadness showed in her bearing and in her patient
smile.  But she took Rodney's wife through the house, showing her all
there was to show, though that was not much.  There was the little
parlour with its hair-cloth chairs, rag carpet, centre table, and iron
stove with black pipes, all gaily varnished.  There was the parlour
bedroom off it, with the one feather-bed of the house bountifully piled
up with coarse home-made blankets, topped by a silk patchwork quilt, the
artistic labour of the old wife's evening hours while Uncle Jim peeled
apples and strung them to dry from the rafters.  There was a room,
dining-room in summer, and kitchen dining-room in winter, as clean as
aged hands could scrub and dust it, hung about with stray pictures from
illustrated papers, and a good old clock in the corner "ticking" life,
and youth, and hope away.  There was the buttery off that, with its
meagre china and crockery, its window looking out on the field of rye,
the little orchard of winter apples, and the hedge of cranberry bushes.
Upstairs were rooms with no ceilings, where, lying on a corn-husk bed,
you reached up and touched the sloping roof, with windows at the end
only, facing the buckwheat field, and looking down two miles towards the
main road--for the farm was on a concession or side-road, dusty in
summer, and in winter sometimes impassable for weeks together.  It was
not much of a home, as any one with the mind's eye can see, but four
stalwart men and three fine women had been born, raised, and quartered
there, until, with good clothes, and speaking decent English and
tolerable French, and with money in their pockets, hardly got by the old
people, one by one they issued forth into the world.

The old mother showed Rodney's wife what there was for eyes to see, not
forgetting the three hives of bees on the south side, beneath the parlour
window.  She showed it with a kind of pride, for it all seemed good to
her, and every dish, and every chair, and every corner in the little
house had to her a glory of its own, because of those who had come and
gone--the firstlings of her flock, the roses of her little garden of
love, blooming now in a rougher air than ranged over the little house on
the hill.  She had looked out upon the pine woods to the east and the
meadow-land to the north, the sweet valley between the rye-field and the
orchard, and the good honest air that had blown there for forty years,
bracing her heart and body for the battle of love and life, and she had
said through all, Behold it is very good.

But the pert milliner saw nothing of all this; she did not stand abashed
in the sacred precincts of a home where seven times the Angel of Death
had hovered over a birth-bed.  She looked into the face which Time's
finger had anointed, and motherhood had etched with trouble, and said:

"'Tisn't much, is it?  Only a clap-board house, and no ceilings upstairs,
and rag carpets-pshaw!"

And when she came to wash her hands for dinner, she threw aside the
unscented, common bar-soap, and, shrugging her narrow shoulders at the
coarse towel, wiped her fingers on her cambric handkerchief.  Any other
kind of a woman, when she saw the old mother going about with her twisted
wrist--a doctor's bad work with a fracture--would have tucked up her
dress, and tied on an apron to help.  But no, she sat and preened herself
with the tissue-paper sort of pride of a vain milliner, or nervously
shifted about, lifting up this and that, curiously supercilious, her
tongue rattling on to her husband and to his mother in a shallow, foolish
way.  She couldn't say, however, that any thing was out of order or ill-
kept about the place.  The old woman's rheumatic fingers made corners
clean, and wood as white as snow, the stove was polished, the tins were
bright, and her own dress, no matter what her work, neat as a girl's,
although the old graceful poise of the body had twisted out of drawing.

But the real crisis came when Rodney, having stood at the wood-house door
and blown the dinner-horn as he used to do when a boy, the sound floating
and crying away across the rye-field, the old man came--for, strange to
say, that was the one sound he could hear easily, though, as he said to
himself, it seemed as small as a pin, coming from ever so far away.  He
came heavily up from the barn-yard, mopping his red face and forehead,
and now and again raising his hand to shade his eyes, concerned to see
the unknown visitors, whose horse and buggy were in the stable-yard.  He
and Rodney greeted outside warmly enough, but there was some trepidation
too in Uncle Jim's face--he felt trouble brewing; and there is no trouble
like that which comes between parent and child.  Silent as he was,
however, he had a large and cheerful heart, and nodding his head he
laughed the deep, quaint laugh which Rodney himself of all his sons had--
and he was fonder of Rodney than any.  He washed his hands in the little
basin outside the wood-house door, combed out his white beard, rubbed his
red, watery eyes, tied a clean handkerchief round his neck, put on a
rusty but clean old coat, and a minute afterwards was shaking hands for
the first time with Rodney's wife.  He had lived much apart from his
kind, but he had a mind that fastened upon a thought and worked it down
until it was an axiom.  He felt how shallow was this thin, flaunting
woman of flounces and cheap rouge; he saw her sniff at the brown sugar-
she had always had white at the hotel; and he noted that she let Rodney's
mother clear away and wash the dinner things herself.  He felt the little
crack of doom before it came.

It came about three o'clock.  He did not return to the rye-field after
dinner, but stayed and waited to hear what Rodney had to say.  Rodney did
not tell his little story well, for he foresaw trouble in the old home;
but he had to face this and all coming dilemmas as best he might.  With a
kind of shamefacedness, yet with an attempt to carry the thing off
lightly, he told Uncle Jim, while, inside, his wife told the old mother,
that the business of the hotel had gone to pot (he did not say who was
the cause of that), and they were selling out to his partner and coming
to live on the farm.

"I'm tired anyway of the hotel job," said Rodney.  "Farming's a better
life.  Don't you think so, dad?"

"It's better for me, Rod," answered Uncle Jim, "it's better for me."

Rodney was a little uneasy.  "But won't it be better for me?" he asked.

"Mebbe," was the slow answer, "mebbe, mebbe so."

"And then there's mother, she's getting too old for the work, ain't she?"

"She's done it straight along," answered the old man, "straight along
till now."

"But Millie can help her, and we'll have a hired girl, eh?"

"I dunno, I dunno," was the brooding answer; "the place ain't going to
stand it."

"We'll get more out of it," answered Rodney.  "I'll stock it up, I'll put
more under barley.  All the thing wants is working, dad.  Put more in,
get more out.  Now ain't that right?"

The other was looking off towards the rye-field, where, for forty years,
up and down the hillside, he had travelled with the cradle and the
scythe, putting all there was in him into it, and he answered, blinking
along the avenue of the past:

"Mebbe, mebbe!"

Rodney fretted under the old man's vague replies, and said: "But darn it
all, can't you tell us what you think?"

His father did not take his eyes off the rye-field.  "I'm thinking," he
answered, in the same old-fashioned way, "that I've been working here
since you were born, Rod.  I've blundered along, somehow, just boggling
my way through.  I ain't got anything more to say.  The farm ain't mine
any more, but I'll keep my scythe sharp and my axe ground just as I
always did, and I'm for workin' as I've always worked as long as I'm let
to stay."

"Good Lord, dad, don't talk that way!  Things ain't going to be any
different for you and mother than they are now.  Only, of course--"
He paused.

The old man pieced out the sentence: "Only, of course, there can't be two
women rulin' one house, Rod, and you know it as well as I do."

Exactly how Rodney's wife told the old mother of the great change Rodney
never'knew; but when he went back to the house the grey look in his
mother's face told him more than her words ever told.  Before they left
that night the pink milliner had already planned the changes which were
to celebrate her coming and her ruling.

So Rodney and his wife came, all the old man prophesied in a few brief
sentences to his wife proving true.  There was no great struggle on the
mother's part; she stepped aside from governing, and became as like a
servant as could be.  An insolent servant-girl came, and she and Rodney's
wife started a little drama of incompetency, which should end as the
hotel-keeping ended.  Wastefulness, cheap luxury, tawdry living, took the
place of the old, frugal, simple life.  But the mother went about with
that unchanging sweetness of face, and a body withering about a fretted
soul.  She had no bitterness, only a miserable distress.  But every
slight that was put upon her, every change, every new-fangled idea, from
the white sugar to the scented soap and the yellow buggy, rankled in the
old man's heart.  He had resentment both for the old wife and himself,
and he hated the pink milliner for the humiliation that she heaped upon
them both.  Rodney did not see one-fifth of it, and what he did see lost
its force, because, strangely enough, he loved the gaudy wife who wore
gloves on her bloodless hands as she did the house-work and spent
numberless afternoons in trimming her own bonnets.  Her peevishness grew
apace as the newness of the experience wore off.  Uncle Jim seldom spoke
to her, as he seldom spoke to anybody, but she had an inkling of the
rancour in his heart, and many a time she put blame upon his shoulders to
her husband, when some unavoidable friction came.

A year, two years, passed, which were as ten upon the shoulders of the
old people, and then, in the dead of winter, an important thing happened.
About the month of March Rodney's first child was expected.  At the end
of January Rodney had to go away, expecting to return in less than a
month.  But, in the middle of February, the woman's sacred trouble came
before its time.  And on that day there fell such a storm as had not been
seen for many a year.  The concession road was blocked before day had
well set in; no horse could go ten yards in it.  The nearest doctor was
miles away at Pontiac, and for any man to face the journey was to connive
with death.  The old mother came to Uncle Jim, and, as she looked out of
a little unfrosted spot on the window at the blinding storm, told him
that the pink milliner would die.  There seemed to be no other end to it,
for the chances were a hundred to one against the strongest man making a
journey for the doctor, and another hundred to one against the doctor's
coming.

No one knows whether Uncle Jim could hear the cries from the torture-
chamber, but, after standing for a time mumbling to himself, he wrapped
himself in a heavy coat, tied a muffler about his face, and went out.
If they missed him they must have thought him gone to the barn, or in the
drive-shed sharpening his axe.  But the day went on and the old mother
forgot all the wrongs that she had suffered, and yearned over the trivial
woman who was hurrying out into the Great Space.  Her hours seemed
numbered at noon, her moments measured as it came towards sundown, but
with the passing of the sun the storm stopped, and a beautiful white
peace fell on the world of snow, and suddenly out of that peace came six
men; and the first that opened the door was the doctor.  After him came
Uncle Jim, supported between two others.

Uncle Jim had made the terrible journey, falling at last in the streets
of the county town with frozen hands and feet, not a dozen rods from the
doctor's door.  They brought him to, he told his story, and, with the
abating of the storm, the doctor and the villagers drove down to the
concession road, and then made their way slowly up across the fields,
carrying the old man with them, for he would not be left behind.

An hour after the doctor entered the parlour bedroom the old mother came
out to where the old man sat, bundled up beside the fire with bandaged
hands and feet.

"She's safe, Jim, and the child too," she said softly.  The old man
twisted in his chair, and blinked into the fire.  "Dang my soul!" he
said.

The old woman stooped and kissed his grey tangled hair.  She did not
speak, and she did not ask him what he meant; but there and then they
took up their lives again and lived them out.






THE HOUSE WITH THE TALL PORCH

No one ever visited the House except the Little Chemist, the Avocat,
and Medallion; and Medallion, though merely an auctioneer, was the only
person on terms of intimacy with its owner, the old Seigneur, who for
many years had never stirred beyond the limits of his little garden.  At
rare intervals he might be seen sitting in the large stone porch which
gave overweighted dignity to the house, itself not very large.

An air of mystery surrounded the place: in summer the grass was rank,
the trees seemed huddled together in gloom about the houses, the vines
appeared to ooze on the walls, and at one end, where the window-shutters
were always closed and barred, a great willow drooped and shivered; in
winter the stone walls showed naked and grim among the gaunt trees and
furtive shrubs.

None who ever saw the Seigneur could forget him--a tall figure with
stooping shoulders; a pale, deeply lined, clean-shaven face, and a
forehead painfully white, with blue veins showing; the eyes handsome,
penetrative, brooding, and made indescribably sorrowful by the dark skin
around them.  There were those in Pontiac, such as the Cure, who
remembered when the Seigneur was constantly to be seen in the village;
and then another person was with him always, a tall, handsome youth, his
son.  They were fond and proud of each other, and were religious and good
citizens in a highbred, punctilious way.

At that time the Seigneur was all health and stalwart strength.  But one
day a rumour went abroad that he had quarrelled with his son because of
the wife of Farette the miller.  No one outside knew if the thing was
true, but Julie, the miller's wife, seemed rather to plume herself that
she had made a stir in her little world.  Yet the curious habitants came
to know that the young man had gone, and after a few years his having
once lived there had become a mere memory.  But whenever the Little
Chemist set foot inside the tall porch he remembered; the Avocat was kept
in mind by papers which he was called upon to read and alter from time to
time; the Cure never forgot, because when the young man went he lost not
one of his flock but two; and Medallion, knowing something of the story,
had wormed a deal of truth out of the miller's wife.  Medallion knew that
the closed, barred rooms were the young man's; and he knew also that the
old man was waiting, waiting, in a hope which he never even named to
himself.

One day the silent old housekeeper came rapping at Medallion's door, and
simply said to him: "Come--the Seigneur!"

Medallion went, and for hours sat beside the Seigneur's chair, while the
Little Chemist watched and sighed softly in a corner, now and again
rising to feel the sick man's pulse or to prepare a cordial.  The
housekeeper hovered behind the high-backed chair, and when the Seigneur
dropped his handkerchief--now, as always, of the exquisite fashion of a
past century--she put it gently in his hand.

Once when the Little Chemist touched his wrist, his dark eyes rested on
him with inquiry, and he said: "Soon?"

It was useless trying to shirk the persistency of that look.  "Eight
hours, perhaps, sir," the Little Chemist answered, with painful shyness.

The Seigneur seemed to draw himself up a little, and his hand grasped his
handkerchief tightly for an instant; then he said: "Soon.  Thank you."

After a little, his eyes turned to Medallion and he seemed about to
speak, but still kept silent.  His chin dropped on his breast, and for a
time he was motionless and shrunken; but still there was a strange little
curl of pride--or disdain--on his lips.  At last he drew up his head, his
shoulders came erect, heavily, to the carved back of the chair, where,
strange to say, the Stations of the Cross were figured, and he said, in a
cold, ironical voice: "The Angel of Patience has lied!"

The evening wore on, and there was no sound, save the ticking of the
clock, the beat of rain upon the windows, and the deep breathing of the
Seigneur.  Presently he started, his eyes opened wide, and his whole body
seemed to listen.

"I heard a voice," he said.

"No one spoke, my master," said the housekeeper.

"It was a voice without," he said.

"Monsieur," said the Little Chemist, "it was the wind in the eaves."

His face was almost painfully eager and sensitively alert.

"Hush!" he said; "I hear a voice in the tall porch."

"Sir," said Medallion, laying a hand respectfully on his arm, "it is
nothing."

With a light on his face and a proud, trembling energy, he got to his
feet.  "It is the voice of my son," he said.  "Go--go, and bring him in."

No one moved.  But he was not to be disobeyed.

His ears had been growing keener as he neared the subtle atmosphere of
that Brink where man strips himself to the soul for a lonely voyaging,
and he waved the woman to the door.

"Wait," he said, as her hand fluttered at the handle.  "Take him to
another room.  Prepare a supper such as we used to have.  When it is
ready I will come.  But, listen, and obey.  Tell him not that I have
but four hours of life.  Go, good woman, and bring him in."

It was as he said.  They found the son weak and fainting, fallen within
the porch--a worn, bearded man, returned from failure and suffering and
the husks of evil.  They clothed him and cared for him, and strengthened
him with wine, while the woman wept over him and at last set him at the
loaded, well-lighted table.  Then the Seigneur came in, leaning his arm
very lightly on that of Medallion with a kind of kingly air; and,
greeting his son before them all, as if they had parted yesterday, sat
down.  For an hour they sat there, and the Seigneur talked gaily with a
colour to his face, and his great eyes glowing.  At last he rose, lifted
his glass, and said: "The Angel of Patience is wise.  I drink to my son!"

He was about to say something more, but a sudden whiteness passed over
his face.  He drank off the wine, and as he put the glass down, shivered,
and fell back in his chair.

"Two hours short, Chemist!" he said, and smiled, and was Still.






PARPON THE DWARF

Parpon perched in a room at the top of the mill.  He could see every
house in the village, and he knew people a long distance off.  He was a
droll dwarf, and, in his way, had good times in the world.  He turned the
misery of the world into a game, and grinned at it from his high little
eyrie with the dormer window.  He had lived with Farette the miller for
some years, serving him with a kind of humble insolence.

It was not a joyful day for Farette when he married Julie.  She led him a
pretty travel.  He had started as her master; he ended by being her slave
and victim.

She was a wilful wife.  She had made the Seigneur de la Riviere, of the
House with the Tall Porch, to quarrel with his son Armand, so that Armand
disappeared from Pontiac for years.

When that happened she had already stopped confessing to the good Cure;
so it may be guessed there were things she did not care to tell, and for
which she had no repentance.  But Parpon knew, and Medallion the
auctioneer guessed; and the Little Chemist's wife hoped that it was not
so.  When Julie looked at Parpon, as he perched on a chest of drawers,
with his head cocked and his eyes blinking, she knew that he read the
truth.  But she did not know all that was in his head; so she said sharp
things to him, as she did to everybody, for she had a very poor opinion
of the world, and thought all as flippant as herself.  She took nothing
seriously; she was too vain.  Except that she was sorry Armand was gone,
she rather plumed herself on having separated the Seigneur and his son--
it was something to have been the pivot in a tragedy.  There came others
to the village, as, for instance, a series of clerks to the Avocat; but
she would not decline from Armand upon them.  She merely made them
miserable.

But she did not grow prettier as time went on.  Even Annette, the sad
wife of the drunken Benoit, kept her fine looks; but then, Annette's life
was a thing for a book, and she had a beautiful child.  You cannot keep
this from the face of a woman.  Nor can you keep the other: when the
heart rusts the rust shows.

After a good many years, Armand de la Riviere came back in time to see
his father die.  Then Julie picked out her smartest ribbons, capered at
the mirror, and dusted her face with oatmeal, because she thought that he
would ask her to meet him at the Bois Noir, as he had done long ago.  The
days passed, and he did not come.  When she saw Armand at the funeral--
a tall man with a dark beard and a grave face, not like the Armand she
had known, he seemed a great distance from her, though she could almost
have touched him once as he turned from the grave.  She would have liked
to throw herself into his arms, and cry before them all: "Mon Armand!"
and go away with him to the House with the Tall Porch.  She did not care
about Farette, the mumbling old man who hungered for money, having ceased
to hunger for anything else--even for Julie, who laughed and shut her
door in his face, and cowed him.

After the funeral Julie had a strange feeling.  She had not much brains,
but she had some shrewdness, and she felt her romance askew.  She stood
before the mirror, rubbing her face with oatmeal and frowning hard.
Presently a voice behind her said: "Madame Julie, shall I bring another
bag of meal?"

She turned quickly, and saw Parpon on a table in the corner, his legs
drawn up to his chin, his black eyes twinkling.

"Idiot!" she cried, and threw the meal at him.  He had a very long,
quick arm.  He caught the basin as it came, but the meal covered him.  He
blew it from his beard, laughing softly, and twirled the basin on a
finger-point.

"Like that, there will need two bags!" he said.

"Imbecile!" she cried, standing angry in the centre of the room.

"Ho, ho, what a big word!  See what it is to have the tongue of fashion!"

She looked helplessly round the room.  "I will kill you!"

"Let us die together," answered Parpon; "we are both sad."

She snatched the poker from the fire, and ran at him.  He caught her
wrists with his great hands, big enough for tall Medallion, and held her.

"I said 'together,"' he chuckled; "not one before the other.  We might
jump into the flume at the mill, or go over the dam at the Bois Noir; or,
there is Farette's musket which he is cleaning--gracious, but it will
kick when it fires, it is so old!"

She sank to the floor.  "Why does he clean the musket?" she asked; fear,
and something wicked too, in her eye.  Her fingers ran forgetfully
through the hair on her forehead, pushing it back, and the marks of
small-pox showed.  The contrast with her smooth cheeks gave her a weird
look.  Parpon got quickly on the table again and sat like a Turk, with a
furtive eye on her.  "Who can tell!" he said at last.  "That musket has
not been fired for years.  It would not kill a bird; the shot would
scatter: but it might kill a man--a man is bigger."

"Kill a man!"  She showed her white teeth with a savage little smile.

"Of course it is all guess.  I asked Farette what he would shoot, and he
said, 'Nothing good to eat.'  I said I would eat what he killed.  Then he
got pretty mad, and said I couldn't eat my own head.  Holy!  that was
funny for Farette.  Then I told him there was no good going to the Bois
Noir, for there would be nothing to shoot.  Well, did I speak true,
Madame Julie?"

She was conscious of something new in Parpon.  She could not define it.
Presently she got to her feet and said: "I don't believe you--you're a
monkey."

"A monkey can climb a tree quick; a man has to take the shot as it
comes."  He stretched up his powerful arms, with a swift motion as of
climbing, laughed, and added: "Madame Julie, Farette has poor eyes; he
could not see a hole in a ladder.  But he has a kink in his head about
the Bois Noir.  People have talked--"

"Pshaw!" Julie said, crumpling her apron and throwing it out; "he is a
child and a coward.  He should not play with a gun; it might go off and
hit him."

Parpon hopped down and trotted to the door.  Then he turned and said,
with a sly gurgle: "Farette keeps at that gun.  What is the good!  There
will be nobody at the Bois Noir any more.  I will go and tell him."

She rushed at him with fury, but seeing Annette Benoit in the road, she
stood still and beat her foot angrily on the doorstep.  She was ripe for
a quarrel, and she would say something hateful to Annette; for she never
forgot that Farette had asked Annette to be his wife before herself was
considered.  She smoothed out her wrinkled apron and waited.

"Good day, Annette," she said loftily.

"Good day, Julie," was the quiet reply.

"Will you come in?"

"I am going to the mill for flax-seed.  Benoit has rheumatism."

"Poor Benoit!" said Julie, with a meaning toss of her head.

"Poor Benoit," responded Annette gently.  Her voice was always sweet.
One would never have known that Benoit was a drunken idler.

"Come in.  I will give you the meal from my own.  Then it will cost you
nothing," said Julie, with an air.

"Thank you, Julie, but I would rather pay."

"I do not sell my meal," answered Julie.  "What's a few pounds of meal to
the wife of Farette?  I will get it for you.  Come in, Annette."

She turned towards the door, then stopped all at once.  There was the
oatmeal which she had thrown at Parpon, the basin, and the poker.  She
wished she had not asked Annette in.  But in some things she had a quick
wit, and she hurried to say: "It was that yellow cat of Parpon's.  It
spilt the meal, and I went at it with the poker."

Perhaps Annette believed her.  She did not think about it one way or the
other; her mind was with the sick Benoit.  She nodded and said nothing,
hoping that the flax-seed would be got at once.  But when she saw that
Julie expected an answer, she said: "Cecilia, my little girl, has a black
cat-so handsome.  It came from the house of the poor Seigneur de la
Riviere a year ago.  We took it back, but it would not stay."

Annette spoke simply and frankly, but her words cut like a knife.

Julie responded, with a click of malice: "Look out that the black cat
doesn't kill the dear Cecilia."  Annette started, but she did not believe
that cats sucked the life from children's lungs, and she replied calmly:
"I am not afraid; the good God keeps my child."  She then got up and came
to Julie, and said: "It is a pity, Julie, that you have not a child.  A
child makes all right."

Julie was wild to say a fierce thing, for it seemed that Annette was
setting off Benoit against Farette; but the next moment she grew hot,
her eyes smarted, and there was a hint of trouble at her throat.
She had lived very fast in the last few hours, and it was telling on her.
She could not rule herself--she could not play a part so well as she
wished.  She had not before felt the thing that gave a new pulse to her
body and a joyful pain at her breasts.  Her eyes got thickly blurred so
that she could not see Annette, and, without a word, she hurried to get
the meal.  She was silent when she came back.  She put the meal into
Annette's hands.  She felt that she would like to talk of Armand.  She
knew now there was no evil thought in Annette.  She did not like her more
for that, but she felt she must talk, and Annette was safe.  So she took
her arm.  "Sit down, Annette," she said.  "You come so seldom."

"But there is Benoit, and the child--"

"The child has the black cat from the House!"  There was again a sly ring
to Julie's voice, and she almost pressed Annette into a chair.

"Well, it must only be a minute."

"Were you at the funeral to-day?" Julie began.

"No; I was nursing Benoit.  But the poor Seigneur!  They say he died
without confession.  No one was there except M'sieu' Medallion, the
Little Chemist, Old Sylvie, and M'sieu' Armand.  But, of course, you
have heard everything."

"Is that all you know?" queried Julie.

"Not much more.  I go out little, and no one comes to me except the
Little Chemist's wife--she is a good woman."

"What did she say?"

"Only something of the night the Seigneur died.  He was sitting in his
chair, not afraid, but very sad, we can guess.  By-and-by he raised his
head quickly.  'I hear a voice in the Tall Porch,' he said.  They thought
he was dreaming.  But he said other things, and cried again that he heard
his son's voice in the Porch.  They went and found M'sieu' Armand.  Then
a great supper was got ready, and he sat very grand at the head of the
table, but died quickly, when making a grand speech.  It was strange he
was so happy, for he did not confess-he hadn't absolution."

This was more than Julie had heard.  She showed excitement.

"The Seigneur and M'sieu' Armand were good friends when he died?" she
asked.

"Quite."

All at once Annette remembered the old talk about Armand and Julie.  She
was confused.  She wished she could get up and run away; but haste would
look strange.

"You were at the funeral?" she added, after a minute.

"Everybody was there."

"I suppose M'sieu' Armand looks very fine and strange after his long
travel," said Annette shyly, rising to go.

"He was always the grandest gentleman in the province," answered Julie,
in her old vain manner.  "You should have seen the women look at him
to-day!  But they are nothing to him--he is not easy to please."

"Good day," said Annette, shocked and sad, moving from the door.
Suddenly she turned, and laid a hand on Julie's arm.  "Come and see my
sweet Cecilia," she said.  "She is gay; she will amuse you."

She was thinking again what a pity it was that Julie had no child.

"To see Cecilia and the black cat?  Very well--some day."

You could not have told what she meant.  But, as Annette turned away
again, she glanced at the mill; and there, high up in the dormer window,
sat Parpon, his yellow cat on his shoulder, grinning down at her.  She
wheeled and went into the house.




II

Parpon sat in the dormer window for a long time, the cat purring against
his head, and not seeming the least afraid of falling, though its master
was well out on the window-ledge.  He kept mumbling to himself:

"Ho, ho, Farette is below there with the gun, rubbing and rubbing at the
rust!  Holy mother, how it will kick!  But he will only meddle.  If she
set her eye at him and come up bold and said: 'Farette, go and have your
whiskey-wine, and then to bed,' he would sneak away.  But he has heard
something.  Some fool, perhaps that Benoit--no, he is sick--perhaps the
herb-woman has been talking, and he thinks he will make a fuss.  But it
will be nothing.  And M'sieu' Armand, will he look at her?" He chuckled
at the cat, which set its head back and hissed in reply.  Then he sang
something to himself.

Parpon was a poor little dwarf with a big head, but he had one thing
which made up for all, though no one knew it--or, at least, he thought
so.  The Cure himself did not know.  He had a beautiful voice.  Even in
speaking it was pleasant to hear, though he roughened it in a way.  It
pleased him that he had something of which the finest man or woman would
be glad.  He had said to himself many times that even Armand de la
Riviere would envy him.

Sometimes Parpon went off away into the Bois Noir, and, perched there in
a tree, sang away--a man, shaped something like an animal, with a voice
like a muffled silver bell.

Some of his songs he had made himself: wild things, broken thoughts, not
altogether human; the language of a world between man and the spirits.
But it was all pleasant to hear, even when, at times, there ran a weird,
dark thread through the woof.  No one in the valley had ever heard the
thing he sang softly as he sat looking down at Julie:

         "The little white smoke blows there, blows here,
            The little blue wolf comes down--
                    C'est la!
          And the hill-dwarf laughs in the young wife's ear,
            When the devil comes back to town--
                    C'est la!"

It was crooned quietly, but it was distinct and melodious, and the cat
purred an accompaniment, its head thrust into his thick black hair.  From
where Parpon sat he could see the House with the Tall Porch, and, as he
sang, his eyes ran from the miller's doorway to it.

Off in the grounds of the dead Seigneur's manor he could see a man push
the pebbles with his foot, or twist the branch of a shrub thoughtfully as
he walked.  At last another man entered the garden.  The two greeted
warmly, and passed up and down together.



III

"My good friend," said the Cure, "it is too late to mourn for those lost
years.  Nothing can give them back.  As Parpon the dwarf said--you
remember him, a wise little man, that Parpon--as he said one day, 'For
everything you lose you get something, if only how to laugh at
yourself."'

Armand nodded thoughtfully and answered: "You are right--you and Parpon.
But I cannot forgive myself; he was so fine a man: tall, with a grand
look, and a tongue like a book.  Yes, yes, I can laugh at myself--for a
fool."

He thrust his hands into his pockets, and tapped the ground nervously
with his foot, shrugging his shoulders a little.  The priest took off his
hat and made the sacred gesture, his lips moving.  Armand caught off his
hat also, and said: "You pray--for him?"

"For the peace of a good man's soul."

"He did not confess; he had no rites of the Church; he had refused you
many years."

"My son, he had a confessor."

Armand raised his eyebrows.  "They told me of no one."

"It was the Angel of Patience."

They walked on again for a time without a word.  At last the Cure said:
"You will remain here?"

"I cannot tell.  This 'here' is a small world, and the little life may
fret me.  Nor do I know what I have of this,"--he waved his hands towards
the house,--"or of my father's property.  I may need to be a wanderer
again."

"God forbid!  Have you not seen the will?"

"I have got no farther than his grave," was the sombre reply.

The priest sighed.  They paced the walk again in silence.  At last the
Cure said: "You will make the place cheerful, as it once was."

"You are persistent," replied the young man, smiling.  "Whoever lives
here should make it less gloomy."

"We shall soon know who is to live here.  See, there is Monsieur Garon,
and Monsieur Medallion also."

"The Avocat to tell secrets, the auctioneer to sell them--eh?"  Armand
went forward to the gate.  Like most people, he found Medallion
interesting, and the Avocat and he were old friends.

"You did not send for me, monsieur," said the Avocat timidly, "but I
thought it well to come, that you might know how things are; and Monsieur
Medallion came because he is a witness to the will, and, in a case--"here
the little man coughed nervously--"joint executor with Monsieur le Cure."

They entered the house.  In a business-like way Armand motioned them to
chairs, opened the curtains, and rang the bell.  The old housekeeper
appeared, a sorrowful joy in her face, and Armand said: "Give us a bottle
of the white-top, Sylvie, if there is any left."

"There is plenty, monsieur," she said; "none has been drunk these twelve
years."

The Avocat coughed, and said hesitatingly to Armand: "I asked Parpon the
dwarf to come, monsieur.  There is a reason."

Armand raised his eyebrows in surprise.  "Very good," he said.  "When
will he be here?"

"He is waiting at the Louis Quinze hotel."

"I will send for him," said Armand, and gave the message to Sylvie, who
was entering the room.

After they had drunk the wine placed before them, there was silence for a
moment, for all were wondering why Parpon should be remembered in the
Seigneur's Will.

"Well," said Medallion at last, "a strange little dog is Parpon.  I could
surprise you about him--and there isn't any reason why I should keep the
thing to myself.  One day I was up among the rocks, looking for a strayed
horse.  I got tired, and lay down in the shade of the Rock of Red
Pigeons--you know it.  I fell asleep.  Something waked me.  I got up and
heard the finest singing you can guess: not like any I ever heard; a
wild, beautiful, shivery sort of thing.  I listened for a long time.  At
last it stopped.  Then something slid down the rock.  I peeped out, and
saw Parpon toddling away."

The Cure stared incredulously, the Avocat took off his glasses and tapped
his lips musingly, Armand whistled softly.

"So," said Armand at last, "we have the jewel in the toad's head.  The
clever imp hid it all these years--even from you, Monsieur le Cure."

"Even from me," said the Cure, smiling.  Then, gravely: "It is strange,
the angel in the stunted body."  "Are you sure it's an angel?" said
Armand.

"Who ever knew Parpon do any harm?" queried the Cure.

"He has always been kind to the poor," put in the Avocat.

"With the miller's flour," laughed Medallion: "a pardonable sin."  He
sent a quizzical look at the Cure.  "Do you remember the words of
Parpon's song?" asked Armand.

"Only a few lines; and those not easy to understand, unless one had an
inkling."

"Had you the inkling?"

"Perhaps, monsieur," replied Medallion seriously.  They eyed each other.

"We will have Parpon in after the will is read," said Armand suddenly,
looking at the Avocat.  The Avocat drew the deed from his pocket.  He
looked up hesitatingly, and then said to Armand: "You insist on it being
read now?"

Armand nodded coolly, after a quick glance at Medallion.  Then the Avocat
began, and read to that point where the Seigneur bequeathed all his
property to his son, should he return--on a condition.  When the Avocat
came to the condition Armand stopped him.

"I do not know in the least what it may be," he said, "but there is only
one by which I could feel bound.  I will tell you.  My father and I
quarrelled"--here he paused for a moment, clinching his hands before him
on the table--"about a woman; and years of misery came.  I was to blame
in not obeying him.  I ought not to have given any cause for gossip.
Whatever the condition as to that matter may be, I will fulfil it.  My
father is more to me than any woman in the world; his love of me was
greater than that of any woman.  I know the world--and women."

There was a silence.  He waved his hand to the Avocat to go on, and as he
did so the Cure caught his arm with a quick, affectionate gesture.  Then
Monsieur Garon read the conditions: "That Farette the miller should have
a deed of the land on which his mill was built, with the dam of the mill
--provided that Armand should never so much as by a word again address
Julie, the miller's wife.  If he agreed to the condition, with solemn
oath before the Cure, his blessing would rest upon his dear son, whom he
still hoped to see before he died."

When the reading ceased there was silence for a moment, then Armand stood
up, and took the will from the Avocat; but instantly, without looking at
it, handed it back.  "The reading is not finished," he said.  "And if I
do not accept the condition, what then?"

Again Monsieur Garon read, his voice trembling a little.  The words of
the will ran: "But if this condition be not satisfied, I bequeath to my
son Armand the house known as the House with the Tall Porch, and the
land, according to the deed thereof; and the residue of my property--with
the exception of two thousand dollars, which I leave to the Cure of the
parish, the good Monsieur Fabre--I bequeath to Parpon the dwarf."

Then followed a clause providing that, in any case, Parpon should have in
fee simple the land known as the Bois Noir, and the hut thereon.

Armand sprang to his feet in surprise, blurting out something, then sat
down, quietly took the will, and read it through carefully.  When he had
finished he looked inquiringly, first at Monsieur Garon, then at the
Cure.  "Why Parpon?" he said searchingly.

The Cure, amazed, spread out his hands in a helpless way.  At that moment
Sylvie announced Parpon.  Armand asked that he should be sent in.  "We'll
talk of the will afterwards," he added.

Parpon trotted in, the door closed, and he stood blinking at them.
Armand put a stool on the table.  "Sit here, Parpon," he said.  Medallion
caught the dwarf under the arms and lifted him on the table.

Parpon looked at Armand furtively.  "The wild hawk comes back to its
nest," he said.  "Well, well, what is it you want with the poor Parpon?"

He sat down and dropped his chin in his hands, looking round keenly.
Armand nodded to Medallion, and Medallion to the priest, but the priest
nodded back again.  Then Medallion said: "You and I know the Rock of Red
Pigeons, Parpon.  It is a good place to perch.  One's voice is all to
one's self there, as you know.  Well, sing us the song of the little
brown diver."

Parpon's hands twitched in his beard.  He looked fixedly at Medallion.
Presently he turned towards the Cure, and shrank so that he looked
smaller still.

"It's all right, little son," said the Cure kindly.  Turning sharply on
Medallion, Parpon said: "When was it you heard?"

Medallion told him.  He nodded, then sat very still.  They said nothing,
but watched him.  They saw his eyes grow distant and absorbed, and his
face took on a shining look, so that its ugliness was almost beautiful.
All at once he slid from the stool and crouched on his knees.  Then he
sent out a low long note, like the toll of the bell-bird.  From that time
no one stirred as he sang, but sat and watched him.  They did not even
hear Sylvie steal in gently and stand in the curtains at the door.

The song was weird, with a strange thrilling charm; it had the slow
dignity of a chant, the roll of an epic, the delight of wild beauty.  It
told of the little good Folk of the Scarlet Hills, in vague allusive
phrases: their noiseless wanderings; their sojourning with the eagle, the
wolf, and the deer; their triumph over the winds, the whirlpools, and the
spirits of evil fame.  It filled the room with the cry of the west wind;
it called out of the frozen seas ghosts of forgotten worlds; it coaxed
the soft breezes out of the South; it made them all to be at the whistle
of the Scarlet Hunter who ruled the North.

Then, passing through veil after veil of mystery, it told of a grand
Seigneur whose boat was overturned in a whirlpool, and was saved by a
little brown diver.  And the end of it all, and the heart of it all, was
in the last few lines, clear of allegory:

"And the wheel goes round in the village mill, And the little brown diver
he tells the grain.  .  .  And the grand Seigneur he has gone to meet The
little good Folk of the Scarlet Hills!"

At first, all were so impressed by the strange power of Parpon's voice,
that they were hardly conscious of the story he was telling.  But when he
sang of the Seigneur they began to read his parable.  Their hearts
throbbed painfully.

As the last notes died away Armand got up, and standing by the table,
said: "Parpon, you saved my father's life once?"

Parpon did not answer.

"Will you not tell him, my son?" said the Cure, rising.  Still Parpon
was silent.

"The son of your grand Seigneur asks you a question, Parpon," said
Medallion soothingly.

"Oh, my grand Seigneur!" said Parpon, throwing up his hands.  "Once he
said to me, 'Come, my brown diver, and live with me.'  But I said, 'No,
I am not fit.  I will never go to you at the House with the Tall Porch.'
And I made him promise that he would never tell of it.  And so I have
lived sometimes with old Farette."  Then he laughed strangely again, and
sent a furtive look at Armand.

"Parpon," said Armand gently, "our grand Seigneur has left you the Bois
Noir for your own.  So the hills and the Rock of Red Pigeons are for you
--and the little good people, if you like."

Parpon, with fiery eyes, gathered himself up with a quick movement, then
broke out: "Oh, my grand Seigneur--my grand Seigneur!" and fell forward,
his head in his arms, laughing and sobbing together.

Armand touched his shoulder.  "Parpon!"  But Parpon shrank away.

Armand turned to the rest.  "I do not understand it, gentlemen.  Parpon
does not like the young Seigneur as he liked the old."

Medallion, sitting in the shadow, smiled.  He understood.  Armand
continued: "As for this 'testament, gentlemen, I will fulfil its
conditions; though I swear, were I otherwise minded regarding the woman"
--here Parpon raised his head swiftly--"I would not hang my hat for an
hour in the Tall Porch."

They rose and shook hands, then the wine was poured out, and they drank
it off in silence.  Parpon, however, sat with his head in his hands.

"Come, little comrade, drink," said Medallion, offering him a glass.

Parpon made no reply, but caught up the will, kissed it, put it into
Armand's hand, and then, jumping down from the table, ran to the door and
disappeared through it.




IV

The next afternoon the Avocat visited old Farette.  Farette was polishing
a gun, mumbling the while.  Sitting on some bags of meal was Parpon, with
a fierce twinkle in his eye.  Monsieur Garon told Farette briefly what
the Seigneur had left him.  With a quick, greedy chuckle Farette threw
the gun away.

"Man alive!" said he; "tell me all about it.  Ah, the good news!"

"There is nothing to tell: he left it; that is all."

"Oh, the good Seigneur," cried Farette, "the grand Seigneur!"

Some one laughed scornfully in the doorway.  It was Julie.

"Look there," she cried; "he gets the land, and throws away the gun!
Brag and coward, miller!  It is for me to say 'the grand Seigneur!'"

She tossed her head: she thought the old Seigneur had relented towards
her.  She turned away to the house with a flaunting air, and got her hat.
At first she thought she would go to the House with the Tall Porch, but
she changed her mind, and went to the Bois Noir instead.  Parpon followed
her a distance off.  Behind, in the mill, Farette was chuckling and
rubbing his hands.

Meanwhile, Armand was making his way towards the Bois Noir.  All at once,
in the shade of a great pine, he stopped.  He looked about him
astonished.

"This is the old place.  What a fool I was, then!" he said.

At that moment Julie came quickly, and lifted her hands towards him.
"Armand--beloved Armand!" she said.

Armand looked at her sternly, from her feet to her pitted forehead, then
wheeled, and left her without a word.

She sank in a heap on the ground.  There was a sudden burst of tears, and
then she clinched her hands with fury.

Some one laughed in the trees above her--a shrill, wild laugh.  She
looked up frightened.  Parpon presently dropped down beside her.

"It was as I said," whispered the dwarf, and he touched her shoulder.
This was the full cup of shame.  She was silent.

"There are others," he whispered again.  She could not see his strange
smile; but she noticed that his voice was not as usual.  "Listen," he
urged, and he sang softly over her shoulder for quite a minute.  She was
amazed.

"Sing again," she said.

"I have wanted to sing to you like that for many years," he replied; and
he sang a little more.  "He cannot sing like that," he wheedled, and he
stretched his arm around her shoulder.

She hung her head, then flung it back again as she thought of Armand.

"I hate him!" she cried; "I hate him!"

"You will not throw meal on me any more, or call me idiot?" he pleaded.

"No, Parpon," she said.

He kissed her on the cheek.  She did not resent it.  But now he drew
away, smiled wickedly at her, and said: "See, we are even now, poor
Julie!"  Then he laughed, holding his little sides with huge hands.
"Imbecile!" he added, and, turning, trotted away towards the Rock of Red
Pigeons.

She threw herself, face forward, in the dusty needles of the pines.

When she rose from her humiliation, her face was as one who has seen the
rags of harlequinade stripped from that mummer Life, leaving only naked
being.  She had touched the limits of the endurable; her sordid little
hopes had split into fragments.  But when a human soul faces upon its
past, and sees a gargoyle at every milestone where an angel should be,
and in one flash of illumination--the touch of genius to the smallest
mind--understands the pitiless comedy, there comes the still stoic
outlook.

Julie was transformed.  All the possible years of her life were gathered
into the force of one dreadful moment--dreadful and wonderful.  Her mean
vanity was lost behind the pale sincerity of her face--she was sincere at
last.  The trivial commonness was gone from her coquetting shoulders and
drooping eyelids; and from her body had passed its flexuous softness.
She was a woman; suffering, human, paying the price.

She walked slowly the way that Parpon had gone.  Looking neither to right
nor left, she climbed the long hillside, and at last reached the summit,
where, bundled in a steep corner, was the Rock of Red Pigeons.  As she
emerged from the pines, she stood for a moment, and leaned with
outstretched hand against a tree, looking into the sunlight.  Slowly her
eyes shifted from the Rock to the great ravine, to whose farther side the
sun was giving bastions of gold.  She was quiet.  Presently she stepped
into the light and came softly to the Rock.  She walked slowly round it
as though looking for some one.  At the lowest side of the Rock, rude
narrow hollows were cut for the feet.  With a singular ease she climbed
to the top of it.  It had a kind of hollow, in which was a rude seat,
carved out of the stone.  Seeing this, a set look came to her face: she
was thinking of Parpon, the master of this place.  Her business was with
him.

She got down slowly, and came over to the edge of the precipice.
Steadying herself against a sapling, she looked over.  Down below was a
whirlpool, rising and falling-a hungry funnel of death.  She drew back.
Presently she peered again, and once more withdrew.  She gazed round, and
then made another tour of the hill, searching.  She returned to the
precipice.  As she did so she heard a voice.  She looked and saw Parpon
seated upon a ledge of rock not far below.  A mocking laugh floated up to
her.  But there was trouble in the laugh too--a bitter sickness.  She did
not notice that.  She looked about her.  Not far away was a stone, too
heavy to carry but perhaps not too heavy to roll!

Foot by foot she rolled it over.  She looked.  He was still there.  She
stepped back.  As she did so a few pebbles crumbled away from her feet
and fell where Parpon perched.  She did not see or hear them fall.  He
looked up, and saw the stone creeping upon the edge.  Like a flash he was
on his feet, and, springing into the air to the right, caught a tree
steadfast in the rock.  The stone fell upon the ledge, and bounded off
again.  The look of the woman did not follow the stone.  She ran to the
spot above the whirlpool, and sprang out and down.

From Parpon there came a wail such as the hills of the north never heard
before.  Dropping upon a ledge beneath, and from that to a jutting tree,
which gave way, he shot down into the whirlpool.  He caught Julie's body
as it was churned from life to death: and then he fought.  There was a
demon in the whirlpool, but God and demon were working in the man.
Nothing on earth could have unloosed that long, brown arm from Julie's
drenched body.  The sun lifted an eyelid over the yellow bastions of
rock, and saw the fight.  Once, twice, the shaggy head was caught beneath
the surface--but at last the man conquered.

Inch by inch, foot by foot, Parpon, with the lifeless Julie clamped in
one arm, climbed the rough wall, on, on, up to the Rock of Red Pigeons.
He bore her to the top of it.  Then he laid her down, and pillowed her
head on his wet coat.

The huge hands came slowly down Julie's soaked hair, along her blanched
cheek and shoulders, caught her arms and held them.  He peered into her
face.  The eyes had the film which veils Here from Hereafter.  On the
lips was a mocking smile.  He stooped as if to kiss her.  The smile
stopped him.  He drew back for a time, then he leaned forward, shut his
eyes, and her cold lips were his.

Twilight-dusk-night came upon Parpon and his dead--the woman whom an
impish fate had put into his heart with mockery and futile pain.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Can't get the company I want, so what I can get I have
Capered at the mirror, and dusted her face with oatmeal
For everything you lose you get something
No trouble like that which comes between parent and child
Old clock in the corner "ticking" life, and youth, and hope away
She had not much brains, but she had some shrewdness
Take the honeymoon himself, and leave his wife to learn cooking
The laughter of a ripe summer was upon the land
Thought all as flippant as herself
Turned the misery of the world into a game, and grinned at it
When the heart rusts the rust shows






THE LANE THAT HAD NO TURNING

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 4.



TIMES WERE HARD IN PONTIAC
MEDALLION'S WHIM
THE PRISONER
AN UPSET PRICE
A FRAGMENT OF LIVES
THE MAN THAT DIED AT ALMA
THE BARON OF BEAUGARD
THE TUNE McGILVERAY PLAYED




TIMES WERE HARD IN PONTIAC

It was soon after the Rebellion, and there was little food to be had
and less money, and winter was at hand.  Pontiac, ever most loyal to old
France, though obedient to the English, had herself sent few recruits to
be shot down by Colborne; but she had emptied her pockets in sending to
the front the fulness of her barns and the best cattle of her fields.
She gave her all; she was frank in giving, hid nothing; and when her own
trouble came there was no voice calling on her behalf.  And Pontiac would
rather starve than beg.  So, as the winter went on, she starved in
silence, and no one had more than sour milk and bread and a potato now
and then.  The Cure, the Avocat, and the Little Chemist fared no better
than the habitants; for they gave all they had right and left, and
themselves often went hungry to bed.  And the truth is that few outside
Pontiac knew of her suffering; she kept the secret of it close.

It seemed at last, however, to the Cure that he must, after all, write
to the world outside for help.  That was when he saw the faces of the
children get pale and drawn.  There never was a time when there were so
few fish in the river and so little game in the woods.  At last, from the
altar steps one Sunday, the Cure, with a calm, sad voice, told the people
that, for "the dear children's sake," they must sink their pride and ask
help from without.  He would write first to the Bishop of Quebec; "for,"
said he, "Mother Church will help us; she will give us food, and money to
buy seed in the spring; and, please God, we will pay all back in a year
or two!"  He paused a minute, then continued: "Some one must go, to speak
plainly and wisely of our trouble, that there be no mistake--we are not
beggars, we are only borrowers.  Who will go?  I may not myself, for who
would give the Blessed Sacrament, and speak to the sick, or say Mass and
comfort you?"

There was silence in the church for a moment, and many faces meanwhile
turned instinctively to M. Garon the Avocat, and some to the Little
Chemist.

"Who will go?" asked the Cure again.  "It is a bitter journey, but our
pride must not be our shame in the end.  Who will go?"

Every one expected that the Avocat or the Little Chemist would rise; but
while they looked at each other, waiting and sorrowful, and the Avocat's
fingers fluttered to the seat in front of him, to draw himself up, a
voice came from the corner opposite, saying: "M'sieu' le Cure, I will
go."

A strange, painful silence fell on the people for a moment, and then went
round an almost incredulous whisper: "Parpon the dwarf!"

Parpon's deep eyes were fixed on the Cure, his hunched body leaning on
the railing in front of him, his long, strong arms stretched out as if he
were begging for some good thing.  The murmur among the people increased,
but the Cure raised his hand to command silence, and his eyes gazed
steadily at the dwarf.  It might seem that he was noting the huge head,
the shaggy hair, the overhanging brows, the weird face of this distortion
of a thing made in God's own image.  But he was thinking instead of how
the angel and the devil may live side by side in a man, and neither be
entirely driven out--and the angel conquer in great times and seasons.

He beckoned to Parpon to come over, and the dwarf trotted with a sidelong
motion to the chancel steps.  Every face in the congregation was eager,
and some were mystified, even anxious.  They all knew the singular power
of the little man--his knowledge, his deep wit, his judgment, his
occasional fierceness, his infrequent malice; but he was kind to children
and the sick, and the Cure and the Avocat and their little coterie
respected him.  Once everybody had worshipped him: that was when he had
sung in the Mass, the day of the funeral of the wife of Farette the
miller, for whom he worked.  It had been rumoured that in his hut by the
Rock of Red Pigeons, up at Dalgrothe Mountain, a voice of most wonderful
power and sweetness had been heard singing; but this was only rumour.
Yet when the body of the miller's wife lay in the church, he had sung so
that men and women wept and held each other's hands for joy.  He had
never sung since, however; his voice of silver was locked away in the
cabinet of secret purposes which every man has somewhere in his own soul.

"What will you say to the Bishop, Parpon?" asked the Cure.

The congregation stirred in their seats, for they saw that the Cure
intended Parpon to go.

Parpon went up two steps of the chancel quietly and caught the arm of the
Cure, drawing him down to whisper in his ear.

A flush and then a peculiar soft light passed over the Cure's face, and
he raised his hand over Parpon's head in benediction and said: "Go, my
son, and the blessing of God and of His dear Son be with you."

Then suddenly he turned to the altar, and, raising his hands, he tried to
speak, but only said: "O Lord, Thou knowest our pride and our vanity,
hear us, and--"

Soon afterwards, with tearful eyes, he preached from the text:

"And the Light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it
not."

                    .......................

Five days later a little, uncouth man took off his hat in the chief
street of Quebec, and began to sing a song of Picardy to an air which no
man in French Canada had ever heard.  Little farmers on their way to the
market by the Place de Cathedral stopped, listening, though every
moment's delay lessened their chances of getting a stand in the market-
place.  Butchers and milkmen loitered, regardless of waiting customers;
a little company of soldiers caught up the chorus, and, to avoid
involuntary revolt, their sergeant halted them, that they might listen.
Gentlemen strolling by--doctor, lawyer, officer, idler--paused and forgot
the raw climate, for this marvellous voice in the unshapely body warmed
them, and they pushed in among the fast-gathering crowd.  Ladies hurrying
by in their sleighs lost their hearts to the thrilling notes of:

                   "Little grey fisherman,
                    Where is your daughter?
                    Where is your daughter so sweet?
                    Little grey man who comes Over the water,
                    I have knelt down at her feet,
                    Knelt at your Gabrielle's feet---ci ci!"

Presently the wife of the governor stepped out from her sleigh, and,
coming over, quickly took Parpon's cap from his hand and went round among
the crowd with it, gathering money.

"He is hungry, he is poor," she said, with tears in her eyes.  She had
known the song in her childhood, and he who used to sing it to her was in
her sight no more.  In vain the gentlemen would have taken the cap from
her; she gathered the money herself, and others followed, and Parpon sang
on.

A night later a crowd gathered in the great hall of the city, filling it
to the doors, to hear the dwarf sing.  He came on the platform dressed as
he had entered the city, with heavy, home-made coat and trousers, and
moccasins, and a red woollen comforter about his neck--but this comforter
he took off when he began to sing.  Old France and New France, and the
loves and hates and joys and sorrows of all lands, met that night in the
soul of this dwarf with the divine voice, who did not give them his name,
so that they called him, for want of a better title, the Provencal.  And
again two nights afterwards it was the same, and yet again a third night
and a fourth, and the simple folk, and wise folk also, went mad after
Parpon the dwarf.

Then, suddenly, he disappeared from Quebec City, and the next Sunday
morning, while the Cure was saying the last words of the Mass, he entered
the Church of St. Saviour's at Pontiac.  Going up to the chancel steps he
waited.  The murmuring of the people drew the Cure's attention, and then,
seeing Parpon, he came forward.

Parpon drew from his breast a bag, and put it in his hands, and beckoning
down the Cure's head, he whispered.

The Cure turned to the altar and raised the bag towards it in ascription
and thanksgiving, then he turned to Parpon again, but the dwarf was
trotting away down the aisle and from the church.

"Dear children," said the Cure, "we are saved, and we are not shamed."
He held up the bag.  "Parpon has brought us two thousand dollars: we
shall have food to eat, and there shall be more money against seed-time.
The giver of this good gift demands that his name be not known.  Such is
all true charity.  Let us pray."

So hard times passed from Pontiac as the months went on; but none save
the Cure and the Avocat knew who had helped her in her hour of need.






MEDALLION'S WHIM

When the Avocat began to lose his health and spirits, and there crept
through his shrewd gravity and kindliness a petulance and dejection,
Medallion was the only person who had an inspiriting effect upon him.
The Little Chemist had decided that the change in him was due to bad
circulation and failing powers: which was only partially true.

Medallion made a deeper guess.  "Want to know what's the matter with
him?" he said.  "Ha, I'll tell you!  Woman."

"Woman--God bless me!" said the Little Chemist, in a frightened way.

"Woman, little man; I mean the want of a woman," said Medallion.

The Cure, who was present, shrugged his shoulders.  "He has an excellent
cook, and his bed and jackets are well aired; I see them constantly at
the windows."

A laugh gurgled in Medallion's throat.  He loved these innocent folk; but
himself went twice a year to Quebec City and had more expanded views.

"Woman, Padre"--nodding to the priest, and rubbing his chin so that it
rasped like sand-paper--"Woman, my druggist"--throwing a sly look at the
Chemist----"woman, neither as cook nor bottle-washer, is what he needs.
Every man-out of holy orders"--this in deference to his good friend the
Cure--"arrives at the time when his youth must be renewed or he becomes
as dry bones--like an empty house--furniture sold off.  Can only be
renewed one way--Woman. Well, here's our Avocat, and there's his remedy.
He's got the cooking and the clean fresh linen; he must have a wife, the
very best."

"Ah, my friend, you are droll," said the Cure, arching his long fingers
at his lips and blowing gently through them, but not smiling in the
least; rather serious, almost reproving.

"It is such a whim, such a whim!" said the Little Chemist, shaking his
head and looking through his glasses sideways like a wise bird.

"Ha--you shall see!  The man must be saved; our Cure shall have his fees;
our druggist shall provide the finest essences for the feast--no more
pills.  And we shall dine with our Avocat once a week--with asparagus in
season for the Cure, and a little good wine for all.  Ha!"

His Ha! was never a laugh; it was unctuous, abrupt, an ejaculation of
satisfaction, knowledge, solid enjoyment, final solution.

The Cure shook his head doubtfully; he did not see the need; he did not
believe in Medallion's whim; still he knew that the man's judgment was
shrewd in most things, and he would be silent and wait.  But he shrank
from any new phase of life likely to alter the conditions of that old
companionship, which included themselves, the Avocat, and the young
Doctor, who, like the Little Chemist, was married.

The Chemist sharply said: "Well, well, perhaps.  I hope.  There is a
poetry (his English was not perfect, and at times he mixed it with French
in an amusing manner), a little chanson, which runs:

             "'Sorrowful is the little house,
               The little house by the winding stream;
               All the laughter has died away
                    Out of the little house.
               But down there come from the lofty hills
               Footsteps and eyes agleam,
               Bringing the laughter of yesterday
                    Into the little house,
               By the winding stream and the hills.
               Di ron, di ron, di ron, di ron-don!'"

The Little Chemist blushed faintly at the silence that followed his
timid, quaint recital.  The Cure looked calm and kind, and drawn away as
if in thought; but Medallion presently got up, stooped, and laid his long
fingers on the shoulder of the apothecary.

"Exactly, little man," he said; "we've both got the same idea in our
heads.  I've put it hard fact, you've put it soft sentiment; and it's
God's truth either way."

Presently the Cure asked, as if from a great distance, so meditative was
his voice: "Who will be the woman, Medallion?"

"I've got one in my eye--the very right one for our Avocat; not here, not
out of Pontiac, but from St. Jean in the hills--fulfilling your verses,
gentle apothecary.  She must bring what is fresh--he must feel that the
hills have come to him, she that the valley is hers for the first time.
A new world for them both.  Ha!"

"Regardez Ca!  you are a great man," said the Little Chemist.

There was a strange, inscrutable look in the kind priest's eyes.  The
Avocat had confessed to him in his time.

Medallion took up his hat.

"Where are you going?" said the Little Chemist.  "To our Avocat, and
then to St. Jean."

He opened the door and vanished.  The two that were left shook their
heads and wondered.

Chuckling softly to himself, Medallion strode away through the lane of
white-board houses and the smoke of strong tabac from these houses, now
and then pulling suddenly up to avoid stumbling over a child, where
children are numbered by the dozen to every house.  He came at last to a
house unlike the others, in that it was of stone and larger.  He leaned
for a moment over the gate, and looked through a window into a room where
the Avocat sat propped up with cushions in a great chair, staring
gloomily at two candles burning on the table before him.  Medallion
watched him for a long time.  The Avocat never changed his position; he
only stared at the candle, and once or twice his lips moved.  A woman
came in and put a steaming bowl before him, and laid a pipe and matches
beside the bowl.  She was a very little, thin old woman, quick and quiet
and watchful--his housekeeper.  The Avocat took no notice of her.  She
looked at him several times anxiously, and passed backwards and forwards
behind him as a hen moves upon the flank of her brood.  All at once she
stopped.  Her small, white fingers, with their large rheumatic knuckles,
lay flat on her lips as she stood for an instant musing; then she trotted
lightly to a bureau, got pen and paper and ink, reached down a bunch of
keys from the mantel, and came and put them all beside the bowl and the
pipe.  Still the Avocat did not stir, or show that he recognised her.
She went to the door, turned, and looked back, her fingers again at her
lips, then slowly sidled out of the room.  It was long before the Avocat
moved.  His eyes had not wavered from the space between the candles.  At
last, however, he glanced down.  His eye caught the bowl, then the pipe.
He reached out a slow hand for the pipe, and was taking it up, when his
glance fell on the keys and the writing material.  He put the pipe down,
looked up at the door through which the little old woman had gone, gazed
round the room, took up the keys, but soon put them down again with a
sigh, and settled back in his chair.  Now his gaze alternated between
that long lane, sloping into shadow between the candles, and the keys.

Medallion threw a leg over the fence and came in a few steps to the door.
He opened it quietly and entered.  In the dark he felt his way along the
wall to the door of the Avocat's room, opened it, and thrust in his
ungainly, whimsical face.

"Ha!" he laughed with quick-winking eyes.  "Evening, Garon.  Live the
Code Napoleon!  Pipes for two."  A change came slowly over the Avocat.
His eyes drew away from that vista between the candles, and the strange
distant look faded out of them.

"Great is the Code Napoleon!" he said mechanically.  Then, presently:
"Ah, my friend, Medallion!"

His first words were the answer to a formula which always passed between
them on meeting.  As soon as Garon had said them, Medallion's lanky body
followed his face, and in a moment he had the Avocat's hand in his,
swallowing it, of purpose crushing it, so that Monsieur Garon waked up
smartly and gave his visitor a pensive smile.  Medallion's cheerful
nervous vitality seldom failed to inspire whom he chose to inspire with
Something of his own life and cheerfulness.  In a few moments both the
Avocat and himself were smoking, and the contents of the steaming bowl
were divided between them.  Medallion talked on many things.  The little
old housekeeper came in, chirped a soft good-evening, flashed a small
thankful smile at Medallion, and, after renewing the bowl and lighting
two more tall candles, disappeared.  Medallion began with the parish,
passed to the law, from the law to Napoleon, from Napoleon to France,
and from France to the world, drawing out from the Avocat something of
his old vivacity and fire.  At last Medallion, seeing that the time was
ripe, turned his glass round musingly in his fingers before him and said:

"Benoit, Annette's husband, died to-day, Garon.  You knew him.
He went singing--gone in the head, but singing as he used to do before he
married--or got drunk!  Perhaps his youth came back to him when he was
going to die, just for a minute."

The Avocat's eye gazed at Medallion earnestly now, and Medallion went on:

"As good singing as you want to hear.  You've heard the words of the
song--the river drivers sing it:

             "'What is there like to the cry of the bird
                 That sings in its nest in the lilac tree?
               A voice the sweetest you ever have heard;
                 It is there, it is here, ci ci!
               It is there, it is here, it must roam and roam,
                 And wander from shore to shore,
               Till I go forth and bring it home,
                 And enter and close my door
               Row along, row along home, ci ci!'"

When Medallion had finished saying the first verse he waited, but the
Avocat said nothing; his eyes were now fastened again on that avenue
between the candles leading out into the immortal part of him--his past;
he was busy with a life that had once been spent in the fields of
Fontainebleau and in the shadow of the Pantheon.

Medallion went on:

             "'What is there like to the laughing star,
               Far up from the lilac tree?
               A face that's brighter and finer far;
               It laughs and it shines, ci, ci!
               It laughs and it shines, it must roam and roam,
               And travel from shore to shore,
               Till I go forth and bring it home,
               And house it within my door
               Row along, row along home, ci, ci!'"

When Medallion had finished he raised his glass and said: "Garon, I drink
to home and woman!"

He waited.  The Avocat's eyes drew away from the candles again, and he
came to his feet suddenly, swaying slightly as he did so.  He caught up
a glass and, lifting it, said: "I drink to home and--" a little cold
burst of laughter came from him, he threw his head back with something
like disdain--"and the Code Napoleon!" he added abruptly.

Then he put the glass down without drinking, wheeled back, and dropped
into his chair.  Presently he got up, took his keys, went over, opened
the bureau, and brought back a well-worn note-book which looked like a
diary.  He seemed to have forgotten Medallion's presence, but it was not
so; he had reached the moment of disclosure which comes to every man, no
matter how secretive, when he must tell what is on his mind or die.  He
opened the book with trembling fingers, took a pen and wrote, at first
slowly, while Medallion smoked:

"September 13th.--It is five-and-twenty years ago to-day--Mon Dieu, how
we danced that night on the flags before the Sorbonne!  How gay we were
in the Maison Bleu!  We were gay and happy--Lulie and I--two rooms and a
few francs ahead every week.  That night we danced and poured out the
light wine, because we were to be married to-morrow.  Perhaps there would
be a child, if the priest blessed us, she whispered to me as we watched
the soft-travelling moon in the gardens of the Luxembourg.  Well, we
danced.  There was an artist with us.  I saw him catch Lulie about the
waist, and kiss her on the neck.  She was angry, but I did not think of
that; I was mad with wine.  I quarrelled with her, and said to her a
shameful thing.  Then I rushed away.  We were not married the next day;
I could not find her.  One night, soon after, there was a revolution of
students at Mont Parnasse.  I was hurt.  I remember that she came to me
then and nursed me, but when I got well she was gone.  Then came the
secret word from the Government that I must leave the country or go to
prison.  I came here.  Alas! it is long since we danced before the
Sorbonne, and supped at the Maison Bleu.  I shall never see again the
gardens of the Luxembourg.  Well, that was a mad night five-and-twenty
years ago!"

His pen went faster and faster.  His eyes lighted up, he seemed quite
forgetful of Medallion's presence.  When he finished, a fresh change came
over him.  He gathered his thin fingers in a bunch at his lips, and made
an airy salute to the warm space between the candles.  He drew himself
together with a youthful air, and held his grey head gallantly.  Youth
and age in him seemed almost grotesquely mingled.  Sprightly notes from
the song of a cafe chantant hovered on his thin, dry lips.  Medallion,
amused, yet with a hushed kind of feeling through all his nerves, pushed
the Avocat's tumbler till it touched his fingers.  The thin fingers
twined round it, and once more he came to his feet.  He raised the glass.
"To--" for a minute he got no further--"To the wedding-eve!" he said,
and sipped the hot wine.  Presently he pushed the little well-worn book
over to Medallion.  "I have known you fifteen years--read!" he said.  He
gave Medallion a meaning look out of his now flashing eyes.  Medallion's
bony face responded cordially.  "Of course," he answered, picked up the
book, and read what the Avocat had written.  It was on the last page.
When he had finished reading, he held the book musingly.  His whim had
suddenly taken on a new colour.  The Avocat, who had been walking up and
down the room, with the quick step of a young man, stopped before him,
took the book from him, turned to the first page, and handed it back
silently.  Medallion read:

Quebec, September 13th, 18-.  It is one year since.  I shall learn to
laugh some day.

Medallion looked up at him.  The old man threw back his head, spread out
the last page in the book which he had just written, and said defiantly,
as though expecting contradiction to his self-deception--"I have
learned."

Then he laughed, but the laugh was dry and hollow and painful.  It
suddenly passed from his wrinkled lips, and he sat down again; but now
with an air as of shy ness and shame.  "Let us talk," he said, "of--
of the Code Napoleon."

The next morning Medallion visited St. Jean in the hills.  Five years
before he had sold to a new-comer at St. Jean-Madame Lecyr--the furniture
of a little house, and there had sprung up between them a quiet
friendship, not the less admiring on Medallion's part because Madame
Lecyr was a good friend to the poor and sick.  She never tired, when they
met, of hearing him talk of the Cure, the Little Chemist, and the Avocat;
and in the Avocat she seemed to take the most interest, making countless
inquiries--countless when spread over many conversations--upon his life
during the time Medallion had known him.  He knew also that she came to
Pontiac, occasionally, but only in the evening; and once of a moonlight
night he had seen her standing before the window of the Avocat's house.
Once also he had seen her veiled in the little crowded court-room of
Pontiac when an interesting case was being tried, and noticed how she
watched Monsieur Garon, standing so very still that she seemed lifeless;
and how she stole out as soon as he had done speaking.

Medallion had acute instincts, and was supremely a man of self-counsel.
What he thought he kept to him self until there seemed necessity to
speak.  A few days before the momentous one herebefore described he had
called at Madame Lecyr's house, and, in course of conversation, told her
that the Avocat's health was breaking; that the day before he had got
completely fogged in court over the simplest business, and was quite
unlike his old, shrewd, kindly self.  By this time he was almost prepared
to see her turn pale and her fingers flutter at the knitting-needles she
held.  She made an excuse to leave the room for a moment.  He saw a
little book lying near the chair from which she had risen.  Perhaps it
had dropped from her pocket.  He picked it up.  It was a book of French
songs--Beranger's and others less notable.  On the fly-leaf was written:
"From Victor to Lulie, September 13th, 18-."  Presently she came back to
him quite recovered and calm, inquired how the Avocat was cared for, and
hoped he would have every comfort and care.  Medallion grew on the
instant bold.  He was now certain that Victor was the Avocat, and Lulie
was Madame Lecyr.  He said abruptly to her: "Why not come and cheer him
up--such old friends as you are?"

At that she rose with a little cry, and stared anxiously at him.  He
pointed to the book of songs.  "Don't be angry--I looked," he said.

She breathed quick and hard, and said nothing, but her fingers laced and
interlaced nervously in her lap.  "If you were friends why don't you go
to him?" he said.

She shook her head mournfully.  "We were more than friends, and that is
different."

"You were his wife?" said Medallion gently.

"It was different," she replied, flushing.  "France is not the same as
here.  We were to be married, but on the eve of our wedding-day there was
an end to it all.  Only five years ago I found out he was here."

Then she became silent, and would, or could, speak no more; only, she
said at last before he went: "You will not tell him, or any one?"

She need not have asked Medallion.  He knew many secrets and kept them;
which is not the usual way of good-humoured people.

But now, with the story told by the Avocat himself in his mind, he saw
the end of the long romance.  He came once more to the house of Madame
Lecyr, and being admitted, said to her: "You must come at once with me."

She trembled towards him.  "He is worse--he is dying!"

He smiled.  "Not dying at all.  He needs you; come along.  I'll tell you
as we go."

But she hung back.  Then he told her all he had seen and heard the
evening before.  Without a word further she prepared to go.  On the way
he turned to her and said: "You are Madame Lecyr?"

"I am as he left me," she replied timidly, but with a kind of pride, too.

"Don't mistake me," he said.  "I thought perhaps you had been married
since."

The Avocat sat in his little office, feebly fumbling among his papers,
as Medallion entered on him and called to him cheerily: "We are coming to
see you to-night, Garon--the Cure, our Little Chemist, and the Seigneur;
coming to supper."

The Avocat put out his hand courteously; but he said in a shrinking,
pained voice: "No, no, not to-night, Medallion.  I would wish no visitors
this night--of all."

Medallion stooped over him, and caught him by both arms gently.  "We
shall see," he said.  "It is the anniversary," he whispered.

"Ah, pardon!" said the Avocat, with a reproving pride, and shrank back
as if all his nerves had been laid bare.  But Medallion turned, opened
the door, went out, and let in a woman, who came forward and timidly
raised her veil.

"Victor!" Medallion heard, then "Lulie!" and then he shut the door,
and, with supper in his mind, went into the kitchen to see the
housekeeper, who, in this new joy, had her own tragedy--humming to
himself:

              "But down there come from the lofty hills
               Footsteps and eyes agleam,
               Bringing the laughter of yesterday
               Into the little house."






THE PRISONER

His chief occupation in the daytime was to stand on the bench by the
small barred window and watch the pigeons on the roof and in the eaves of
the house opposite.  For five years he had done this.  In the summer a
great fire seemed to burn beneath the tin of the roof, for a quivering
hot air rose from them, and the pigeons never alighted on them, save in
the early morning or in the evening.  Just over the peak could be seen
the topmost branch of a maple, too slight to bear the weight of the
pigeons, but the eaves were dark and cool, and there his eyes rested when
he tired of the hard blue sky and the glare of the slates.

In winter the roof was covered for weeks and months by a blanket of snow
which looked like a shawl of impacted wool, white and restful, and the
windows of the house were spread with frost.  But the pigeons were always
gay, walking on the ledges or crowding on the shelves of the lead pipes.
He studied them much, but he loved them more.  His prison was less a
prison because of them, and during those long five years he found himself
more in touch with them than with the wardens of the prison or with any
of his fellow-prisoners.  To the former he was respectful, and he gave
them no trouble at all; with the latter he had nothing in common, for
they were criminals, and he--so wild and mad with drink and anger was he
at the time, that he had no remembrance, absolutely none, of how Jean
Gamache lost his life.

He remembered that they had played cards far into the night; that they
had quarrelled, then made their peace; that the others had left; that
they had begun gaming and drinking and quarrelling again--and then
everything was blurred, save for a vague recollection that he had won
all Gamache's money and had pocketed it.  Afterwards came a blank.

He waked to find two officers of the law beside him, and the body of Jean
Gamache, stark and dreadful, a few feet away.

When the officers put their hands upon him he shook them off; when they
did it again he would have fought them to the death, had it not been for
his friend, tall Medallion the auctioneer, who laid a strong hand on his
arm and said, "Steady, Turgeon, steady!" and he had yielded to the firm
friendly pressure.

Medallion had left no stone unturned to clear him at the trial, had
himself played detective unceasingly.  But the hard facts remained, and
on a chain of circumstantial evidence Blaze Turgeon was convicted of
manslaughter and sent to prison for ten years.  Blaze himself had said
that he did not remember, but he could not believe that he had committed
the crime.  Robbery?  He shrugged his shoulders at that, he insisted that
his lawyer should not reply to the foolish and insulting suggestion.  But
the evidence went to show that Gamache had all the winnings when the
other members of the party retired, and this very money had been found in
Blaze's pocket.  There was only Blaze's word that they had played cards
again.  Anger?  Possibly.  Blaze could not recall, though he knew they
had quarrelled.  The judge himself, charging the jury, said that he never
before had seen a prisoner so frank, so outwardly honest, but he warned
them that they must not lose sight of the crime itself, the taking of a
human life, whereby a woman was made a widow and a child fatherless.  The
jury found him guilty.

With few remarks the judge delivered his sentence, and then himself,
shaken and pale, left the court-room hurriedly, for Blaze Turgeon's
father had been his friend from boyhood.

Blaze took his sentence calmly, looking the jury squarely in the eyes,
and when the judge stopped, he bowed to him, and then turned to the jury
and said:

"Gentlemen, you have ruined my life.  You don't know, and I don't know,
who killed the man.  You have guessed, and I take the penalty.  Suppose
I'm innocent--how will you feel when the truth comes out?  You've known
me more or less these twenty years, and you've said, with evidently no
more knowledge than I've got, that I did this horrible thing.  I don't
know but that one of you did it.  But you are safe, and I take my ten
years!"

He turned from them, and, as he did so, he saw a woman looking at him
from a corner of the court-room, with a strange, wild expression.  At the
moment he saw no more than an excited, bewildered face, but afterwards
this face came and went before him, flashing in and out of dark places in
a kind of mockery.

As he went from the court-room another woman made her way to him in spite
of the guards.  It was the Little Chemist's wife, who, years before, had
been his father's housekeeper, who knew him when his eyes first opened on
the world.

"My poor Blaze! my poor Blaze!" she said, clasping his manacled hands.

In prison he refused to see all visitors, even Medallion, the Little
Chemist's wife, and the good Father Fabre.  Letters, too, he refused to
accept and read.  He had no contact, wished no contact with the outer
world, but lived his hard, lonely life by himself, silent, studious--
for now books were a pleasure to him.  He had entered his prison a wild,
excitable, dissipated youth, and he had become a mature brooding man.
Five years had done the work of twenty.

The face of the woman who looked at him so strangely in the court-room
haunted him so that at last it became a part of his real life, lived
largely at the window where he looked out at the pigeons on the roof of
the hospital.

"She was sorry for me," he said many a time to himself.  He was shaken
with misery often, so that he rocked to and fro as he sat on his bed,
and a warder heard him cry out even in the last days of his imprisonment:

"O God, canst Thou do everything but speak!"  And again: "That hour--the
memory of that hour, in exchange for my ruined life!"

One day the gaoler came to him and said: "Monsieur Turgeon, you are free.
The Governor has cut off five years from your sentence."

Then he was told that people were waiting without--Medallion, the Little
Chemist and his wife, and others more important.  But he would not go to
meet them, and he stepped into the open world alone at dawn the next
morning, and looked out upon a still sleeping village.  Suddenly there
stood before him a woman, who had watched by the prison gates all night;
and she put out her hand in entreaty, and said with a breaking voice:
"You are free at last!"

He remembered her--the woman who had looked at him so anxiously and
sorrowfully in the court-room.  "Why did you come to meet me?" he asked.

"I was sorry for you."

"But that is no reason."

"I once committed a crime," she whispered, with shrinking bitterness.

"That's bad," he said.  "Were you punished?"  He looked at her keenly,
almost fiercely, for a curious suspicion shot into his mind.

She shook her head and answered no.

"That's worse!"

"I let some one else take my crime upon him and be punished for it," she
said, an agony in her eyes.  "Why was that?"

"I had a little child," was her reply.

"And the man who was punished instead?"

"He was alone in the world," she said.

A bitter smile crept to his lips, and his face was afire.  He shut his
eyes, and when they opened again discovery was in them.

"I remember you now," he said.  "I remember now.

"I waked and saw you looking at me that night!  Who was the father of your
child?"

"Jean Gamache," she replied.  "He ruined me and left me to starve."

"I am innocent of his death!" he said quietly and gladly.

She nodded.  He was silent for a moment.  "The child still lives?" he
asked.  She nodded again.  "Well, let it be so," he said.  "But you owe
me five years--and a good name."

"I wish to God I could give them back!" she cried, tears streaming down
her cheeks.  "It was for my child; he was so young."

"It can't be helped now," he said sighing, and he turned away from her.

"Won't you forgive me?" she asked bitterly.

"Won't you give me back those five years?"

"If the child did not need me I would give my life," she answered.  "I
owe it to you."

Her haggard, hunted face made him sorry; he, too, had suffered.

"It's all right," he answered gently.  "Take care of your child."

Again he moved away from her, and went down the little hill, with a cloud
gone from his face that had rested there five years.  Once he turned to
look back.  The woman was gone, but over the prison a flock of pigeons
were flying.  He took off his hat to them.

Then he went through the town, looking neither to right nor left, and
came to his own house, where the summer morning was already entering the
open windows, though he had thought to find the place closed and dark.

The Little Chemist's wife met him in the doorway.  She could not speak,
nor could he, but he kissed her as he had done when he went condemned to
prison.  Then he passed on to his own room, and entering, sat down before
the open window, and peacefully drank in the glory of a new world.  But
more than once he choked down a sob rising in his throat.






AN UPSET PRICE

Once Secord was as fine a man to look at as you would care to see: with a
large intelligent eye, a clear, healthy skin, and a full, brown beard.
He walked with a spring, had a gift of conversation, and took life as he
found it, never too seriously, yet never carelessly.  That was before he
left the village of Pontiac in Quebec to offer himself as a surgeon to
the American Army.  When he came back there was a change in him.  He was
still handsome, but something of the spring had gone from his walk, the
quick light of his eyes had given place to a dark, dreamy expression, his
skin became a little dulled, and his talk slower, though not less musical
or pleasant.  Indeed, his conversation had distinctly improved.
Previously there was an undercurrent of self-consciousness; it was all
gone now.  He talked as one knowing his audience.  His office became
again, as it had been before, a rendezvous for the few interesting men
of the place, including the Avocat, the Cure, the Little Chemist, and
Medallion.  They played chess and ecarte for certain hours of certain
evenings in the week at Secord's house.  Medallion was the first to
notice that the wife--whom Secord had married soon after he came back
from the war--occasionally put down her work and looked with a curious
inquiring expression at her husband as he talked.  It struck Medallion
that she was puzzled by some change in Secord.

Secord was a brilliant surgeon and physician.  With the knife or beside a
sick-bed, he was admirable.  His intuitive perception, so necessary in
his work, was very fine: he appeared to get at the core of a patient's
trouble, and to decide upon necessary action with instant and absolute
confidence.  Some delicate operation performed by him was recorded and
praised in the Lancet; and he was offered a responsible post in a medical
college, and, at the same time, the good-will of a valuable practice.  He
declined both, to the lasting astonishment, yet personal joy, of the Cure
and the Avocat; but, as time went on, not so much to the surprise of the
Little Chemist and Medallion.  After three years, the sleepy Little
Chemist waked up suddenly in his chair one day, and said: "Parbleu, God
bless me!" (he loved to mix his native language with English) got up and
went over to Secord's office, adjusted his glasses, looked at Secord
closely, caught his hand with both of his own, shook it with shy
abruptness, came back to his shop, sat down, and said: "God bless my
soul!  Regardez ca!"

Medallion made his discovery sooner.  Watching closely he had seen a
pronounced deliberation infused through all Secord's indolence of manner,
and noticed that often, before doing anything, the big eyes debated
steadfastly, and the long, slender fingers ran down the beard softly.
At times there was a deep meditativeness in the eye, again a dusky fire.
But there was a certain charm through it all--a languid precision,
a slumbering look in the face, a vague undercurrent in the voice,
a fantastical flavour to the thought.  The change had come so gradually
that only Medallion and the wife had a real conception of how great it
was.  Medallion had studied Secord from every stand-point.  At the very
first he wondered if there was a woman in it.  Much thinking on a woman,
whose influence on his life was evil or disturbing, might account
somewhat for the change in Secord.  But, seeing how fond the man was of
his wife, Medallion gave up that idea.  It was not liquor, for Secord
never touched it.  One day, however, when Medallion was selling the
furniture of a house, he put up a feather bed, and, as was his custom--
for he was a whimsical fellow--let his humour have play.  He used many
metaphors as to the virtue of the bed, crowning them with the statement
that you slept in it dreaming as delicious dreams as though you had eaten
poppy, or mandragora, or--He stopped short, said, "By jingo, that's it!"
knocked the bed down instantly, and was an utter failure for the rest of
the day.

The wife was longer in discovering the truth, but a certain morning, as
her husband lay sleeping after an all-night sitting with a patient, she
saw lying beside him--it had dropped from his waistcoat pocket--a little
bottle full of a dark liquid.  She knew that he always carried his
medicine-phials in a pocket-case.  She got the case, and saw that none
was missing.  She noticed that the cork of the phial was well worn.  She
took it out and smelled the liquid.  Then she understood.  She waited and
watched.  She saw him after he waked look watchfully round, quietly take
a wine-glass, and let the liquid come drop by drop into it from the point
of his forefinger.  Henceforth she read with understanding the changes in
his manner, and saw behind the mingled abstraction and fanciful
meditation of his talk.

She had not yet made up her mind what to do.  She saw that he hid it from
her assiduously.  He did so more because he wished not to pain her than
from furtiveness.  By nature he was open and brave, and had always had a
reputation for plainness and sincerity.  She was in no sense his equal in
intelligence or judgment, nor even in instinct.  She was a woman of more
impulse and constitutional good-nature than depth.  It is probable that
he knew that, and refrained from letting her into the knowledge of this
vice, contracted in the war when, seriously ill, he was able to drag
himself about from patient to patient only by the help of opium.  He was
alive to his position and its consequences, and faced it.  He had no
children, and he was glad of this for one reason.  He could do nothing
now without the drug; it was as necessary as light to him.  The little
bottle had been his friend so long, that, with his finger on its smooth-
edged cork, it was as though he held the tap of life.

The Little Chemist and Medallion kept the thing to themselves, but they
understood each other in the matter, and wondered what they could do to
cure him.  The Little Chemist only shrank back, and said, "No, no,
pardon, my friend!" when Medallion suggested that he should speak to
Secord.  But the Little Chemist was greatly concerned--for had not Secord
saved his beloved wife by a clever operation? and was it not her custom
to devote a certain hour every week to the welfare of Secord's soul and
body, before the shrine of the Virgin?  Her husband told her now that
Secord was in trouble, and though he was far from being devout himself,
he had a shy faith in the great sincerity of his wife.  She did her best,
and increased her offerings of flowers to the shrine; also, in her
simplicity, she sent Secord's wife little jars of jam to comfort him.

One evening the little coterie met by arrangement at the doctor's house.
After waiting an hour or two for Secord, who had been called away to a
critical case, the Avocat and the Cure went home, leaving polite old-
fashioned messages for their absent host; but the Little Chemist and
Medallion remained.  For a time Mrs. Secord remained with them, then
retired, begging them to await her husband, who, she knew, would be
grateful if they stayed.  The Little Chemist, with timid courtesy, showed
her out of the room, then came back and sat down.  They were very silent.
The Little Chemist took off his glasses a half-dozen times, wiped them,
and put them back.  Then suddenly turned on Medallion.  "You mean to
speak to-night?"

"Yes, that's it."

"Regardez ca--well, well!"

Medallion never smoked harder than he did then.  The Little Chemist
looked at him nervously again and again, listened towards the door,
fingered with his tumbler, and at last hearing the sound of sleigh-bells,
suddenly came to his feet, and said: "Voila, I will go to my wife."  And
catching up his cap, and forgetting his overcoat, he trotted away home in
a fright.

What Medallion did or said to Secord that night neither ever told.
But it must have been a singular scene, for when the humourist pleads or
prays there is no pathos like it; and certainly Medallion's eyes were red
when he rapped up the Little Chemist at dawn, caught him by the
shoulders, turned him round several times, thumped him on the back, and
called him a bully old boy; and then, seeing the old wife in her quaint
padded night-gown, suddenly hugged her, threw himself into a chair, and
almost shouted for a cup of coffee.

At the same time Mrs. Secord was alternately crying and laughing in her
husband's arms, and he was saying to her: "I'll make a fight for it,
Lesley, a big fight; but you must be patient, for I expect I'll be a
devil sometimes without it.  Why, I've eaten a drachm a day of the stuff,
or drunk its equivalent in the tincture.  No, never mind praying; be a
brick and fight with me that's the game, my girl."

He did make a fight for it, such an one as few men have made and come
out safely.  For those who dwell in the Pit never suffer as do they who
struggle with this appetite.  He was too wise to give it up all at once.
He diminished the dose gradually, but still very perceptibly.  As it was,
it made a marked change in him.  The necessary effort of the will gave a
kind of hard coldness to his face, and he used to walk his garden for
hours at night in conflict with his enemy.  His nerves were uncertain,
but, strange to say, when (it was not often) any serious case of illness
came under his hands, he was somehow able to pull himself together and do
his task gallantly enough.  But he had had no important surgical case
since he began his cure.  In his heart he lived in fear of one; for he
was not quite sure of himself.  In spite of effort to the contrary he
became irritable, and his old pleasant fantasies changed to gloomy and
bizarre imaginings.

The wife never knew what it cost her husband thus, day by day, to take a
foe by the throat and hold him in check.  She did not guess that he knew
if he dropped back even once he could not regain himself: this was his
idiosyncrasy.  He did not find her a great help to him in his trouble.
She was affectionate, but she had not much penetration even where he was
concerned, and she did not grasp how much was at stake.  She thought
indeed that he should be able to give it up all at once.  He was tender
with her, but he wished often that she could understand him without
explanation on his part.  Many a time he took out the little bottle with
a reckless hand, but conquered himself.  He got most help, perhaps, from
the honest, cheerful eye of Medallion and the stumbling timorous
affection of the Little Chemist.  They were perfectly disinterested
friends--his wife at times made him aware that he had done her a wrong,
for he had married her with thus appetite on him.  He did not defend
himself, but he wished she would--even if she had to act it--make him
believe in himself more.  One morning against his will he was irritable
with her, and she said something that burnt like caustic.  He smiled
ironically, and pushed his newspaper over to her, pointing to a
paragraph.  It was the announcement that an old admirer of hers whom she
had passed by for her husband, had come into a fortune.  "Perhaps you've
made a mistake," he said.

She answered nothing, but the look she gave was unfortunate for both.
He muffled his mouth in his long silken beard as if to smother what he
felt impelled to say, then suddenly rose and left the table.

At this time he had reduced his dose of the drug to eight drops twice a
day.  With a grim courage he resolved to make it five all at once.  He
did so, and held to it.  Medallion was much with him in these days.  One
morning in the spring he got up, went out in his garden, drew in the
fresh, sweet air with a great gulp, picked some lovely crab-apple
blossoms, and, with a strange glowing look in his eyes, came in to his
wife, put them into her hands, and kissed her.  It was the anniversary of
their wedding-day.  Then, without a word, he took from his pocket the
little phial that he had carried so long, rolled it for an instant in his
palm, felt its worn, discoloured cork musingly, and threw it out of the
window.

"Now, my dear," he whispered, "we will be happy again."

He held to his determination with a stern anxiety.  He took a month's
vacation, and came back better.  He was not so happy as he hoped to be;
yet he would not whisper to himself the reason why.  He felt that
something had failed him somewhere.

One day a man came riding swiftly up to his door to say that his wife's
father had met with a bad accident in his great mill.  Secord told his
wife.  A peculiar troubled look came into his face as he glanced
carefully over his instruments and through his medicine case.  "God, I
must do it alone!" he said.

The old man's injury was a dangerous one: a skilful operation was
necessary.  As Secord stood beside the sufferer, he felt his nerves
suddenly go--just as they did in the war before he first took the drug.
His wife was in the next room--he could hear her; he wished she would
make no sound at all.  Unless this operation was performed successfully
the sufferer would die--he might die anyhow.  Secord tried to gather
himself up to his task, but he felt it was of no use.  A month later when
he was more recovered physically he would be able to perform the
operation, but the old man was dying now, while he stood helplessly
stroking his big brown beard.  He took up his pocket medicine-case, and
went out where his wife was.

Excited and tearful, she started up to meet him, painfully inquiring.
"Can you save him?" she said.  "Oh, James, what is the matter?  You are
trembling."

"It's just this way, Lesley: my nerve is broken; I can't perform the
operation as I am, and he will die in an hour if I don't."

She caught him by the arm.  "Can you not be strong?  You have a will.
Will you not try to save my father, James?  Is there no way?"

"Yes, there is one way," he said.  He opened the pocket-case and took out
a phial of laudanum.  "This is the way.  I can pull myself together with
it.  It will save his life."  There was a dogged look in his face.

"Well? well?" she said.  "Oh, my dear father, will you not keep him
here?"

A peculiar cold smile hovered about his lips.  "But there is danger to me
in this .  .  .  and remember, he is very old!"

"Oh," she cried, "how can you be so shocking, so cruel!"  She rocked
herself to and fro.  "If it will save him--and you need not take it
again, ever!"

"But, I tell you--"

"Do you not hear him--he is dying!"  She was mad with grief; she hardly
knew what she said.

Without a word he dropped the tincture swiftly in a wine-glass of water,
drank it off, shivered, drew himself up with a start, gave a sigh as if
some huge struggle was over, and went in to where the old man was.  Three
hours after he told his wife that her father was safe.

When, after a hasty kiss, she left him and went into the room of
sickness, and the door closed after her, standing where she had left him
he laughed a hard crackling laugh, and said between his teeth:

"An upset price!"

Then he poured out another portion of the dark tincture--the largest he
had ever taken--and tossed it off.  That night he might have been seen
feeling about the grass in a moon-lit garden.  At last he put something
in his pocket with a quick, harsh chuckle of satisfaction.  It was a
little black bottle with a well-worn cork.






A FRAGMENT OF LIVES

They met at last, Dubarre, and Villiard, the man who had stolen from him
the woman he loved.  Both had wronged the woman, but Villiard most, for
he had let her die because of jealousy.

They were now in a room alone in the forest of St. Sebastian.  Both were
quiet, and both knew that the end of their feud was near.

Going to a cupboard Dubarre brought out four glasses and put them on the
table.  Then from two bottles he poured out what looked like red wine,
two glasses from each bottle.  Putting the bottles back he returned to
the table.

"Do you dare to drink with me?" Dubarre asked, nodding towards the
glasses.  "Two of the glasses have poison in them, two have good red wine
only.  We will move them about and then drink.  Both may die, or only one
of us."

Villiard looked at the other with contracting, questioning eyes.

"You would play that game with me?" he asked, in a mechanical voice.

"It would give me great pleasure."  The voice had a strange, ironical
tone.  "It is a grand sport--as one would take a run at a crevasse and
clear it, or fall.  If we both fall, we are in good company; if you fall,
I have the greater joy of escape; if I fall, you have the same joy."

"I am ready," was the answer.  "But let us eat first."

A great fire burned in the chimney, for the night was cool.  It filled
the room with a gracious heat and with huge, comfortable shadows.  Here
and there on the wall a tin cup flashed back the radiance of the fire,
the barrel of a gun glistened soberly along a rafter, and the long, wiry
hair of an otter-skin in the corner sent out little needles of light.
Upon the fire a pot was simmering, and a good savour came from it.  A
wind went lilting by outside the but in tune with the singing of the
kettle.  The ticking of a huge, old-fashioned repeating-watch on the wall
was in unison with these.

Dubarre rose from the table, threw himself upon the little pile of otter-
skins, and lay watching Villiard and mechanically studying the little
room.

Villiard took the four glasses filled with the wine and laid them on a
shelf against the wall, then began to put the table in order for their
supper, and to take the pot from the fire.

Dubarre noticed that just above where the glasses stood on the shelf a
crucifix was hanging, and that red crystal sparkled in the hands and feet
where the nails should be driven in.  There was a painful humour in the
association.  He smiled, then turned his head away, for old memories
flashed through his brain--he had been an acolyte once; he had served at
the altar.

Suddenly Dubarre rose, took the glasses from the shelf and placed them in
the middle of the table--the death's head for the feast.

As they sat down to eat, the eyes of both men unconsciously wandered to
the crucifix, attracted by the red sparkle of the rubies.  They drank
water with the well-cooked meat of the wapiti, though red wine faced them
on the table.  Each ate heartily; as though a long day were before them
and not the shadow of the Long Night.  There was no speech save that of
the usual courtesies of the table.  The fire, and the wind, and the watch
seemed the only living things besides themselves, perched there between
heaven and earth.

At length the meal was finished, and the two turned in their chairs
towards the fire.  There was no other light in the room, and on the faces
of the two, still and cold, the flame played idly.

"When?" said Dubarre at last.  "Not yet," was the quiet reply.

"I was thinking of my first theft--an apple from my brother's plate,"
said Dubarre, with a dry smile.  "You?"

"I, of my first lie."

"That apple was the sweetest fruit I ever tasted."

"And I took the penalty of the lie, but I had no sorrow."

Again there was silence.

"Now?" asked Villiard, after an hour had passed.  "I am ready."

They came to the table.

"Shall we bind our eyes?" asked Dubarre.  "I do not know the glasses
that hold the poison."

"Nor I the bottle that held it.  I will turn my back, and do you change
about the glasses."

Villiard turned his face towards the timepiece on the wall.  As he did so
it began to strike--a clear, silvery chime: "One! two! three--!"

Before it had finished striking both men were facing the glasses again.

"Take one," said Dubarre.

Villiard took the one nearest himself.  Dubarre took one also.  Without a
word they lifted the glasses and drank.

"Again," said Dubarre.

"You choose," responded Villiard.

Dubarre lifted the one nearest himself, and Villiard picked up the other.
Raising their glasses again, they bowed to each other and drank.

The watch struck twelve, and stopped its silvery chiming.

They both sat down, looking at each other, the light of an enormous
chance in their eyes, the tragedy of a great stake in their clinched
hands; but the deeper, intenser power was in the face of Dubarre, the
explorer.

There was more than power; malice drew down the brows and curled the
sensitive upper lip.  Each man watched the other for knowledge of his own
fate.  The glasses lay straggling along the table, emptied of death and
life.

All at once a horrible pallor spread over the face of Villiard, and his
head jerked forward.  He grasped the table with both hands, twitching and
trembling.  His eyes stared wildly at Dubarre, to whose face the flush of
wine had come, whose look was now maliciously triumphant.

Villiard had drunk both glasses of the poison!

"I win!"  Dubarre stood up.  Then, leaning over the table towards the
dying man, he added: "You let her die-well!  Would you know the truth?
She loved you--always."

Villiard gasped, and his look wandered vaguely along the opposite wall.

Dubarre went on.  "I played the game with you honestly, because--because
it was the greatest man could play.  And I, too, sinned against her.  Now
die!  She loved you--murderer!"

The man's look still wandered distractedly along the wall.  The sweat of
death was on his face; his lips were moving spasmodically.

Suddenly his look became fixed; he found voice.  "Pardon--Jesu!" he
said, and stiffened where he sat.  His eyes were fixed on the jewelled
crucifix.  Dubarre snatched it from the wall, and hastening to him held
it to his lips: but the warm sparkle of the rubies fell on eyes that were
cold as frosted glass.  Dubarre saw that he was dead.

"Because the woman loved him!" he said, gazing curiously at the dead
man.

He turned, went to the door and opened it, for his breath choked him.

All was still on the wooded heights and in the wide valley.

"Because the woman loved him he repented," said Dubarre again with a
half-cynical gentleness as he placed the crucifix on the dead man's
breast.






THE MAN THAT DIED AT ALMA

The man who died at Alma had a Kilkenny brogue that you could not cut
with a knife, but he was called Kilquhanity, a name as Scotch as
McGregor.  Kilquhanity was a retired soldier, on pension, and Pontiac was
a place of peace and poverty.  The only gentry were the Cure, the Avocat,
and the young Seigneur, but of the three the only one with a private
income was the young Seigneur.

What should such a common man as Kilquhanity do with a private income!
It seemed almost suspicious, instead of creditable, to the minds of the
simple folk at Pontiac; for they were French, and poor, and laborious,
and Kilquhanity drew his pension from the headquarters of the English
Government, which they only knew by legends wafted to them over great
tracts of country from the city of Quebec.

When Kilquhanity first came with his wife, it was without introductions
from anywhere--unlike everybody else in Pontiac, whose family history
could be instantly reduced to an exact record by the Cure.  He had a
smattering of French, which he turned off with oily brusqueness; he was
not close-mouthed, he talked freely of events in his past life; and he
told some really wonderful tales of his experiences in the British army.
He was no braggart, however, and his one great story which gave him the
nickname by which he was called at Pontiac, was told far more in a spirit
of laughter at himself than in praise of his own part in the incident.

The first time he told the story was in the house of Medallion the
auctioneer.

"Aw the night it was," said Kilquhanity, after a pause, blowing a cloud
of tobacco smoke into the air, "the night it was, me darlin's!  Bitther
cowld in that Roosian counthry, though but late summer, and nothin' to
ate but a lump of bread, no bigger than a dickybird's skull; nothin' to
drink but wather.  Turrible, turrible, and for clothes to wear--Mother of
Moses! that was a bad day for clothes!  We got betune no barrick quilts
that night.  No stockin' had I insoide me boots, no shirt had I but a
harse's quilt sewed an to me; no heart I had insoide me body; nothin' at
all but duty an' shtandin' to orders, me b'ys!

"Says Sergeant-Major Kilpatrick to me, 'Kilquhanity,' says he, 'there's
betther places than River Alma to live by,' says he.  'Faith, an' by the
Liffey I wish I was this moment'--Liffey's in ould Ireland, Frenchies!
'But, Kilquhanity,' says he, 'faith, an' it's the Liffey we'll never see
again, an' put that in yer pipe an' smoke it!' And thrue for him.

"But that night, aw that night!  Ivery bone in me body was achin', and
shure me heart was achin' too, for the poor b'ys that were fightin' hard
an' gettin' little for it.  Bitther cowld it was, aw, bitther cowld, and
the b'ys droppin' down, droppin', droppin', droppin', wid the Roosian
bullets in thim!

"'Kilquhanity,' says Sergeant-Major Kilpatrick to me, 'it's this
shtandin' still, while we do be droppin', droppin', that girds the soul
av yer.' Aw, the sight it was, the sight it was!  The b'ys of the
rigimint shtandin' shoulder to shoulder, an' the faces av 'm blue wid
powder, an' red wid blood, an' the bits o' b'ys droppin' round me loike
twigs of an' ould tree in a shtorm.  Just a cry an' a bit av a gurgle tru
the teeth, an' divil the wan o' thim would see the Liffey side anny more.
"'The Roosians are chargin'!' shouts Sergeant-Major Kilpatrick.  'The
Roosians are chargin'--here they come!'  Shtandin' besoide me was a bit
of a lump of a b'y, as foine a lad as ever shtood in the boots of me
rigimint--aw! the look of his face was the look o' the dead.  'The
Roosians are comin'--they're chargin'!' says Sergeant-Major Kilpatrick,
and the bit av a b'y, that had nothin' to eat all day, throws down his
gun and turns round to run.  Eighteen years old he was, only eighteen--
just a straight slip of a lad from Malahide.  'Hould on!  Teddie,' says
I, 'hould on!  How'll yer face yer mother if yer turn yer back on the
inimy of yer counthry?'  The b'y looks me in the eyes long enough to wink
three times, picks up his gun, an' shtood loike a rock, he did, till the
Roosians charged us, roared on us, an' I saw me slip of a b'y go down
under the sabre of a damned Cossack.  'Mother!' I heard him say,
'Mother!' an' that's all I heard him say--and the mother waitin' away aff
there by the Liffey soide.  Aw, wurra, wurra, the b'ys go down to battle
and the mothers wait at home!  Some of the b'ys come back, but the most
of thim shtay where the battle laves 'em.  Wurra, wurra, many's the b'y
wint down that day by Alma River, an' niver come back!  "There I was
shtandin', when hell broke loose on the b'ys of me rigimint, and divil
the wan o' me knows if I killed a Roosian that day or not.  But Sergeant-
Major Kilpatrick--a bit of a liar was the Sergeant-Major--says he: 'It
was tin ye killed, Kilquhanity.' He says that to me the noight that I
left the rigimint for ever, and all the b'ys shtandin' round and liftin'
lasses an' saying, 'Kilquhanity!  Kilquhanity!  Kilquhanity!'
as if it was sugar and honey in their mouths.  Aw, the sound of it!
'Kilquhanity,' says he, 'it was tin ye killed;' but aw, b'ys, the
Sergeant-Major was an awful liar.  If he could be doin' annybody anny
good by lyin', shure he would be lyin' all the time.

"But it's little I know how many I killed, for I was killed meself that
day.  A Roosian sabre claved the shoulder and neck of me, an' down I
wint, and over me trampled a squadron of Roosian harses, an' I stopped
thinkin'.  Aw, so aisy, so aisy, I slipped away out av the fight!  The
shriekin' and roarin' kept dwindlin' and dwindlin', and I dropped all
into a foine shlape, so quiet, so aisy.  An' I thought that slip av a lad
from the Liffey soide was houlding me hand, and sayin' 'Mother!  Mother!'
and we both wint ashlape; an' the b'ys of the rigimint when Alma was
over, they said to each other, the b'ys they said: 'Kilquhanity's dead.'
An' the trinches was dug, an' all we foine dead b'ys was laid in long
rows loike candles in the trinches.  An' I was laid in among thim, and
Sergeant-Major Kilpatrick shtandin' there an' looking at me an' sayin':
'Poor b'y--poor b'y!'

"But when they threw another man on tap of me, I waked up out o' that
beautiful shlape, and give him a kick.  'Yer not polite,' says I to
mesilf.  Shure, I couldn't shpake--there was no strength in me.  An' they
threw another man on, an' I kicked again, and the Sergeant-Major he sees
it, an' shouts out.  'Kilquhan ity's leg is kickin'!' says he.  An' they
pulled aff the two poor divils that had been thrown o' tap o' me, and the
Sergeant-Major lifts me head, an' he says 'Yer not killed, Kilquhanity?'
says he.

"Divil a word could I shpake, but I winked at him, and Captain Masham
shtandin' by whips out a flask.

"'Put that betune his teeth,' says he.  Whin I got it there, trust me fur
not lettin' it go.  An' the Sergeant-Major says to me: 'I have hopes of
you, Kilquhanity, when you do be drinkin' loike that.'

"'A foine healthy corpse I am; an' a foine thirsty, healthy corpse I am,'
says I."

A dozen hands stretched out to give Kilquhanity a drink, for even the
best story-teller of Pontiac could not have told his tale so well.

Yet the success achieved by Kilquhanity at such moments was discounted
through long months of mingled suspicion and doubtful tolerance.
Although both he and his wife were Catholics (so they said, and so it
seemed), Kilquhanity never went to Confession or took the Blessed
Sacrament.  The Cure spoke to Kilquhanity's wife about it, and she said
she could do nothing with her husband.  Her tongue once loosed, she spoke
freely, and what she said was little to the credit of Kilquhanity.  Not
that she could urge any horrible things against him; but she railed at
minor faults till the Cure dismissed her with some good advice upon wives
rehearsing their husband's faults, even to the parish priest.

Mrs. Kilquhanity could not get the Cure to listen to her, but she was
more successful elsewhere.  One day she came to get Kilquhanity's
pension, which was sent every three months through M. Garon, the Avocat.
After she had handed over the receipt prepared beforehand by Kilquhanity,
she replied to M. Garon's inquiry concerning her husband in these words:
"Misther Garon, sir, such a man it is--enough to break the heart of anny
woman.  And the timper of him--Misther Garon, the timper of him's that
awful, awful!  No conshideration, and that ugly-hearted, got whin a
soldier b'y!  The things he does--my, my, the things be does!"  She threw
up her hands with an air of distraction.

"Well, and what does he do, Madame?" asked the Avocat simply.

"An' what he says, too--the awful of it!  Ah, the bad sour heart in him!
What's he lyin' in his bed for now--an' the New Year comin' on, whin we
ought to be praisin' God an' enjoyin' each other's company in this
blessed wurruld?  What's he lying betune the quilts now fur, but by token
of the bad heart in him!  It's a wicked could he has, an' how did he come
by it?  I'll tell ye, Misther Garon.  So wild was he, yesterday it was a
week, so black mad wid somethin' I'd said to him and somethin' that
shlipped from me hand at his head, that he turns his back on me, throws
opin the dure, shteps out into the shnow, and shtandin' there alone, he
curses the wide wurruld--oh, dear Misther Garon, he cursed the wide
wurruld, shtandin' there in the snow!  God forgive the black heart of
him, shtandin' out there cursin' the wide wurruld!"

The Avocat looked at the Sergeant's wife musingly, the fingers of his
hands tapping together, but he did not speak: he was becoming wiser all
in a moment as to the ways of women.

"An' now he's in bed, the shtrappin' blasphemer, fur the could he got
shtandin' there in the snow cursin' the wide wurruld.  Ah, Misther Garon,
pity a poor woman that has to live wid the loikes o' that!"

The Avocat still did not speak.  He turned his face away and looked out
of the window, where his eyes could see the little house on the hill,
which to-day had the Union Jack flying in honour of some battle or
victory, dear to Kilquhanity's heart.  It looked peaceful enough, the
little house lying there in the waste of snow, banked up with earth, and
sheltered on the northwest by a little grove of pines.  At last M. Garon
rose, and lifting himself up and down on his toes as if about to deliver
a legal opinion, he coughed slightly, and then said in a dry little
voice:

"Madame, I shall have pleasure in calling on your husband.  You have not
seen the matter in the true light.  Madame, I bid you good-day."

That night the Avocat, true to his promise, called on Sergeant
Kilquhanity.  Kilquhanity was alone in the house.  His wife had gone to
the village for the Little Chemist.  She had been roused at last to the
serious nature of Kilquhanity's illness.

M. Garon knocked.  There was no answer.  He knocked again more loudly,
and still no answer.  He opened the door and entered into a clean, warm
living-room, so hot that the heat came to him in waves, buffeting his
face.  Dining, sitting, and drawing-room, it was also a sort of winter
kitchen; and side by side with relics of Kilquhanity's soldier-life were
clean, bright tins, black saucepans, strings of dried fruit, and well-
cured hams.  Certainly the place had the air of home; it spoke for the
absent termagant.

M. Garon looked round and saw a half-opened door, through which presently
came a voice speaking in a laboured whisper.  The Avocat knocked gently
at the door.  "May I come in, Sergeant?" he asked, and entered.  There
was no light in the room, but the fire in the kitchen stove threw a glow
over the bed where the sick man lay.  The big hands of the soldier moved
restlessly on the quilt.

"Aw, it's the koind av ye!" said Kilquhanity, with difficulty, out of
the half shadows.

The Avocat took one burning hand in both of his, held it for a moment,
and pressed it two or three times.  He did not know what to say.

"We must have a light," said he at last, and taking a candle from the
shelf he lighted it at the stove and came into the bedroom again.  This
time he was startled.  Even in this short illness, Kilquhanity's flesh
had dropped away from him, leaving him but a bundle of bones, on which
the skin quivered with fever.  Every word the sick man tried to speak cut
his chest like a knife, and his eyes half started from his head with the
agony of it.  The Avocat's heart sank within him, for he saw that a life
was hanging in the balance.  Not knowing what to do, he tucked in the
bedclothes gently.

"I do be thinkin'," said the strained, whispering voice--"I do be
thinkin' I could shmoke."

The Avocat looked round the room, saw the pipe on the window, and cutting
some tobacco from a "plug," he tenderly filled the old black corn-cob.
Then he put the stem in Kilquhanity's mouth and held the candle to the
bowl.  Kilquhanity smiled, drew a long breath, and blew out a cloud of
thick smoke.  For a moment he puffed vigorously, then, all at once, the
pleasure of it seemed to die away, and presently the bowl dropped down on
his chin.  M. Garon lifted it away.  Kilquhanity did not speak, but kept
saying something over and over again to himself, looking beyond M. Garon
abstractedly.

At that moment the front door of the house opened, and presently a shrill
voice came through the door: "Shmokin', shmokin', are ye, Kilquhanity?
As soon as me back's turned, it's playin' the fool--" She stopped short,
seeing the Avocat.

"Beggin' yer pardon, Misther Garon," she said, "I thought it was only
Kilquhanity here, an' he wid no more sense than a babby."

Kilquhanity's eyes closed, and he buried one side of his head in the
pillow, that her shrill voice should not pierce his ears.

"The Little Chemist 'll be comin' in a minit, dear Misther Garon," said
the wife presently, and she began to fuss with the bedclothes and to be
nervously and uselessly busy.

"Aw, lave thim alone, darlin'," whispered Kilquhanity, tossing.  Her
officiousness seemed to hurt him more than the pain in his chest.

M. Garon did not wait for the Little Chemist to arrive, but after
pressing the Sergeant's hand he left the house and went straight to the
house of the Cure, and told him in what condition was the black sheep of
his flock.

When M. Garon returned to his own home he found a visitor in his library.
It was a woman, between forty and fifty years of age, who rose slowly to
her feet as the Avocat entered, and, without preliminary, put into his
hands a document.

"That is who I am," she said.  "Mary Muddock that was, Mary Kilquhanity
that is."

The Avocat held in his hands the marriage lines of Matthew Kilquhanity of
the parish of Malahide and Mary Muddock of the parish of St. Giles,
London.  The Avocat was completely taken aback.  He blew nervously
through his pale fingers, raised himself up and down on his toes, and
grew pale through suppressed excitement.  He examined the certificate
carefully, though from the first he had no doubt of its accuracy and
correctness.

"Well?" said the woman, with a hard look in her face and a hard note in
her voice.  "Well?"

The Avocat looked at her musingly for a moment.  All at once there had
been unfolded to him Kilquhanity's story.  In his younger days
Kilquhanity had married this woman with a face of tin and a heart of
leather.  It needed no confession from Kilquhanity's own lips to explain
by what hard paths he had come to the reckless hour when, at Blackpool,
he had left her for ever, as he thought.  In the flush of his criminal
freedom he had married again--with the woman who shared his home on the
little hillside, behind the Parish Church, she believing him a widower.
Mary Muddock, with the stupidity of her class, had never gone to the
right quarters to discover his whereabouts until a year before this day
when she stood in the Avocat's library.  At last, through the War Office,
she had found the whereabouts of her missing Matthew.  She had gathered
her little savings together, and, after due preparation, had sailed away
to Canada to find the soldier boy whom she had never given anything but
bad hours in all the days of his life with her.

"Well," said the woman, "you're a lawyer--have you nothing to say?  You
pay his pension--next time you'll pay it to me.  I'll teach him to leave
me and my kid and go off with an Irish cook!"

The Avocat looked her steadily in the eyes, and then delivered the
strongest blow that was possible from the opposite side of the case.
"Madame," said he, "Madame, I regret to inform you that Matthew
Kilquhanity is dying."

"Dying, is he?" said the woman, with a sudden change of voice and
manner, but her whine did not ring true.  "The poor darlin', and only
that Irish hag to care for him!  Has he made a will?" she added eagerly.

Kilquhanity had made no will, and the little house on the hillside,
and all that he had, belonged to this woman who had spoiled the first
part of his life, and had come now to spoil the last part.

An hour later the Avocat, the Cure, and the two women stood in the chief
room of the little house on the hillside.  The door was shut between the
two rooms, and the Little Chemist was with Kilquhanity.  The Cure's hand
was on the arm of the first wife and the Avocat's upon the arm of the
second.  The two women were glaring eye to eye, having just finished as
fine a torrent of abuse of each other and of Kilquhanity as can be
imagined.  Kilquhanity himself, with the sorrow of death upon him, though
he knew it not, had listened to the brawl, his chickens come home to
roost at last.  The first Mrs. Kilquhanity had sworn, with an oath that
took no account of the Cure's presence, that not a stick nor a stone nor
a rag nor a penny should that Irish slattern have of Matthew
Kilquhanity's!

The Cure and the Avocat had quieted them at last, and the Cure spoke
sternly now to both women.

"In the presence of death," said he, "have done with your sinful clatter.
Stop quarrelling over a dying man.  Let him go in peace--let him go in
peace!  If I hear one word more," he added sternly, "I will turn you both
out of the house into the night.  I will have the man die in peace."

Opening the door of the bedroom, the Cure went in and shut the door,
bolting it quietly behind him.  The Little Chemist sat by the bedside,
and Kilquhanity lay as still as a babe upon the bed.  His eyes were half
closed, for the Little Chemist had given him an opiate to quiet the
terrible pain.

The Cure saw that the end was near.  He touched Kilquhanity's arm: "My
son," said he, "look up.  You have sinned; you must confess your sins,
and repent."

Kilquhanity looked up at him with dazed but half smiling eyes.  "Are they
gone?  Are the women gone?"  The Cure nodded his head.  Kilquhanity's
eyes closed and opened again.  "They're gone, thin!  Oh, the foine of it,
the foine of it!" he whispered.  "So quiet, so aisy, so quiet!  Faith,
I'll just be shlaping!  I'll be shlaping now."

His eyes closed, but the Cure touched his arm again.  "My son," said he,
"look up.  Do you thoroughly and earnestly repent you of your sins?"

His eyes opened again.  "Yis, father, oh yis!  There's been a dale o'
noise--there's been a dale o' noise in the wurruld, father," said he.
"Oh, so quiet, so quiet now!  I do be shlaping."

A smile came upon his face.  "Oh, the foine of it!  I do be shlaping-
shlaping."

And he fell into a noiseless Sleep.






THE BARON OF BEAUGARD

"The Manor House at Beaugard, monsieur?  Ah, certainlee, I mind it very
well.  It was the first in Quebec, and there are many tales.  It had a
chapel and a gallows.  Its baron, he had the power of life and death, and
the right of the seigneur--you understand?--which he used only once; and
then what trouble it made for him and the woman, and the barony, and the
parish, and all the country!"

"What is the whole story, Larue?" said Medallion, who had spent months
in the seigneur's company, stalking game, and tales, and legends of the
St. Lawrence.

Larue spoke English very well--his mother was English.

"Mais, I do not know for sure; but the Abbe Frontone, he and I were
snowed up together in that same house which now belongs to the Church,
and in the big fireplace, where we sat on a bench, toasting our knees and
our bacon, he told me the tale as he knew it.  He was a great scholar--
there is none greater.  He had found papers in the wall of the house, and
from the Gover'ment chest he got more.  Then there were the tales handed
down, and the records of the Church--for she knows the true story of
every man that has come to New France from first to last.  So, because I
have a taste for tales, and gave him some, he told me of the Baron of
Beaugard, and that time he took the right of the seigneur, and the end of
it all.

"Of course it was a hundred and fifty years ago, when Bigot was
Intendant-ah, what a rascal was that Bigot, robber and deceiver!  He
never stood by a friend, and never fought fair a foe--so the Abbe said.
Well, Beaugard was no longer young.  He had built the Manor House, he had
put up his gallows, he had his vassals, he had been made a lord.  He had
quarrelled with Bigot, and had conquered, but at great cost; for Bigot
had such power, and the Governor had trouble enough to care for himself
against Bigot, though he was Beaugard's friend.

"Well, there was a good lump of a fellow who had been a soldier, and he
picked out a girl in the Seigneury of Beaugard to make his wife.  It is
said the girl herself was not set for the man, for she was of finer stuff
than the peasants about her, and showed it.  But her father and mother
had a dozen other children, and what was this girl, this Falise, to do?
She said yes to the man, the time was fixed for the marriage, and it came
along.

"So.  At the very hour of the wedding Beaugard came by, for, the church
was in mending, and he had given leave it should be in his own chapel.
Well, he rode by just as the bride was coming out with the man--Garoche.
When Beaugard saw Falise, he gave a whistle, then spoke in his throat,
reined up his horse, and got down.  He fastened his eyes on the girl's.
A strange look passed between them--he had never seen her before, but she
had seen him often, and when he was gone had helped the housekeeper with
his rooms.  She had carried away with her a stray glove of his.  Of
course it sounds droll, and they said of her when all came out that it
was wicked; but evil is according to a man's own heart, and the girl had
hid this glove as she hid whatever was in her soul--hid it even from the
priest.

"Well, the Baron looked and she looked, and he took off his hat, stepped
forward, and kissed her on the cheek.  She turned pale as a ghost, and
her eyes took the colour that her cheeks lost.  When he stepped back he
looked close at the husband.  'What is your name?' he said.  'Garoche,
M'sieu' le Baron,' was the reply.  'Garoche, Garoche,' he said, eyeing
him up and down.  'You have been a soldier?'  'Yes, M'sieu' le Baron.'
'You have served with me?'  'Against you, M'sieu' le Baron .  .  .  when
Bigot came fighting.' 'Better against me than for me,' said the Baron,
speaking to himself, though he had so strong a voice that what he said
could be heard by those near him-that is, those who were tall, for he was
six and a half feet, with legs and shoulders like a bull.

"He stooped and stroked the head of his hound for a moment, and all the
people stood and watched him, wondering what next.  At last he said: 'And
what part played you in that siege, Garoche?' Garoche looked troubled,
but answered: 'It was in the way of duty, M'sieu' le Baron--I with five
others captured the relief-party sent from your cousin the Seigneur of
Vadrome.'  'Oh,' said the Baron, looking sharp, 'you were in that, were
you?  Then you know what happened to the young Marmette?' Garoche
trembled a little, but drew himself up and said: 'M'sieu' le Baron, he
tried to kill the Intendant--there was no other way.' 'What part played
you in that, Garoche?'  Some trembled, for they knew the truth, and they
feared the mad will of the Baron.  'I ordered the firing-party, M'sieu'
le Baron,' he answered.

"The Baron's eyes got fierce and his face hardened, but he stooped and
drew the ears of the hound through his hand softly.  'Marmette was my
cousin's son, and had lived with me,' he said.  'A brave lad, and he had
a nice hatred of vileness--else he had not died.' A strange smile played
on his lips for a moment, then he looked at Falise steadily.  Who can
tell what was working in his mind!  'War is war,' he went on, 'and Bigot
was your master, Garoche; but the man pays for his master's sins this way
or that.  Yet I would not have it different, no, not a jot.'  Then he
turned round to the crowd, raised his hat to the Cure, who stood on the
chapel steps, once more looked steadily at Falise, and said: 'You shall
all come to the Manor House, and have your feastings there, and we will
drink to the home-coming of the fairest woman in my barony.'  With that
he turned round, bowed to Falise, put on his hat, caught the bridle
through his arm, and led his horse to the Manor House.

"This was in the afternoon.  Of course, whether they wished or not,
Garoche and Falise could not refuse, and the people were glad enough, for
they would have a free hand at meat and wine, the Baron being liberal of
table.  And it was as they guessed, for though the time was so short, the
people at Beaugard soon had the tables heavy with food and drink.  It was
just at the time of candle-lighting the Baron came in and gave a toast.
'To the dwellers in Eden to-night,' he said--'Eden against the time of
the Angel and the Sword.'  I do not think that any except the Cure and
the woman understood, and she, maybe, only because a woman feels the
truth about a thing, even when her brain does not.  After they had done
shouting to his toast, he said a good-night to all, and they began to
leave, the Cure among the first to go, with a troubled look in his face.

"As the people left, the Baron said to Garoche and Falise: 'A moment with
me before you go.' The woman started, for she thought of one thing, and
Garoche started, for he thought of another--the siege of Beaugard and the
killing of young Marmette.  But they followed the Baron to his chamber.
Coming in, he shut the door on them.  Then he turned to Garoche.  'You
will accept the roof and bed of Beaugard to-night, my man,' he said, 'and
come to me here at nine tomorrow morning.'  Garoche stared hard for an
instant.  'Stay here!' said Garoche, 'Falise and me stay here in the
Manor, M'sieu' le Baron!'  'Here, even here, Garoche; so good-night to
you,' said the Baron.  Garoche turned towards the girl.  'Then come,
Falise,' he said, and reached out his hand.  'Your room, Garoche, shall
be shown you at once,' the Baron added softly, 'the lady's at her
pleasure.'

"Then a cry burst from Garoche, and he sprang forward, but the Baron
waved him back.  'Stand off,' he said, 'and let the lady choose between
us.'  'She is my wife,' said Garoche.  'I am your Seigneur,' said the
other.  'And there is more than that,' he went on; 'for, damn me, she
is too fine stuff for you, and the Church shall untie what she has tied
to-day!'  At that Falise fainted, and the Baron caught her as she fell.
He laid her on a couch, keeping an eye on Garoche the while.  'Loose her
gown,' he said, 'while I get brandy.' Then he turned to a cupboard,
poured liquor, and came over.  Garoche had her dress open at the neck and
bosom, and was staring at something on her breast.  The Baron saw also,
stooped with a strange sound in his throat, and picked it up.  'My
glove!' he said.  'And on her wedding-day!' He pointed.  'There on the
table is its mate, fished this morning from my hunting-coat--a pair the
Governor gave me.  You see, man, you see her choice!'

"At that he stooped and put some brandy to her lips.  Garoche drew back
sick and numb, and did nothing, only stared.  Falise came to herself
soon, and when she felt her dress open, gave a cry.  Garoche could have
killed her then, when he saw her shudder from him, as if afraid, over
towards the Baron, who held the glove in his hand, and said: 'See,
Garoche, you had better go.  In the next room they will tell you where to
sleep.  To-morrow, as I said, you will meet me here.  We shall have
things to say, you and I.'  Ah, that Baron, he had a queer mind, but in
truth he loved the woman, as you shall see!

"Garoche got up without a word, went to the door and opened it, the look
of the Baron and the woman following him, for there was a devil in his
eye.  In the other room there were men waiting, and he was taken to a
chamber and locked in.  You can guess what that night must have been to
him!"

"What was it to the Baron and Falise?" asked Medallion.

"M'sieu', what do you think?  Beaugard had never had an eye for women;
loving his hounds, fighting, quarrelling, doing wild, strong things.  So,
all at once, he was face to face with a woman who has the look of love in
her face, who was young, and fine of body--so the Abbe said--and was
walking to marriage at her father's will and against her own, carrying
the Baron's glove in her bosom.  What should Beaugard do?  But no, ah no,
m'sieu', not as you think, not quite!  Wild, with the bit in his teeth,
yes; but at heart-well, here was the one woman for him.  He knew it all
in a minute, and he would have her once and for all, and till death
should come their way.  And so he said to her, as he raised her, she
drawing back afraid, her heart hungering for him, yet fear in her eyes,
and her fingers trembling as she softly pushed him from her.  You see,
she did not know quite what was in his heart.  She was the daughter of a
tenant vassal, who had lived in the family of a grand seigneur in her
youth, the friend of his child--that was all, and that was where she got
her manners and her mind.

"She got on her feet and said: 'M'sieu' le Baron, you will let me go--
to my husband.  I cannot stay here.  Oh, you are great, you are noble,
you would not make me sorry, make me to hate myself--and you!  I have
only one thing in the world of any price--you would not steal my
happiness?'  He looked at her steadily in the eyes, and said: 'Will it
make you happy to go to Garoche?'  She raised her hands and wrung them.
'God knows, God knows, I am his wife,' she said helplessly, 'and he loves
me.'  'And God knows, God knows,' said the Baron, 'it is all a question
of whether one shall feed and two go hungry, or two gather and one have
the stubble!  Shall not he stand in the stubble?  What has he done to
merit you?

"What would he do?  You are for the master, not the man; for love, not the
feeding on; for the Manor House and the hunt, not the cottage and the
loom.'

"She broke into tears, her heart thumping in her throat.  'I am for what
the Church did for me this day,' she said.  'O sir, I pray you, forgive
me and let me go.  Do not punish me, but forgive me--and let me go.
I was wicked to wear your glove-wicked, wicked.'  'But no,' was his
reply, 'I shall not forgive you so good a deed, and you shall not go.
And what the Church did for you this day she shall undo--by all the
saints, she shall!  You came sailing into my heart this hour past on a
strong wind, and you shall not slide out on an ebb-tide.  I have you
here, as your Seigneur, but I have you here as a man who will--'

"He sat down by her at that point, and whispered softly in her ear; at
which she gave a cry which had both gladness and pain.  'Surely, even
that,' he said, catching her to his breast.  'And the Baron of Beaugard
never broke his word.'  What should be her reply?  Does not a woman when
she truly loves always believe?  That is the great sign.  She slid to her
knees and dropped her head into the hollow of his arm.  'I do not
understand these things,' she said, 'but I know that the other was death,
and this is life.  And yet I know, too, for my heart says so, that the
end--the end, will be death.'

"'Tut, tut, my flower, my wild-rose!' he said.  'Of course the end of all
is death, but we will go a-Maying first, come October, and let the world
break over us when it must.  We are for Maying now, my rose of all the
world!'  It was as if he meant more than he said, as if he saw what would
come in that October which all New France never forgot, when, as he said,
the world broke over them.

"The next morning the Baron called Garoche to him.  The man was like some
mad buck harried by the hounds, and he gnashed his teeth behind his shut
lips.  The Baron eyed him curiously, yet kindly, too, as well he might,
for when was ever man to hear such a speech as came to Garoche the
morning after his marriage?  'Garoche,' the Baron said, having waved his
men away, 'as you see, the lady made her choice--and for ever.  You and
she have said your last farewell in this world--for the wife of the Baron
of Beaugard can have nothing to say to Garoche the soldier.'  At that
Garoche snarled out, 'The wife of the Baron of Beaugard, that is a lie to
shame all hell.'  The Baron wound the lash of a riding-whip round and
round his fingers quietly and said: 'It is no lie, my man, but the
truth.'  Garoche eyed him savagely, and growled: 'The Church made her my
wife yesterday; and you--you--you--ah, you who had all--you with your
money and place, which could get all easy, you take the one thing I have!
You, the grand seigneur, are only a common robber!  Ah, Jesu--if you
would but fight me!'

"The Baron, very calm, said: 'First, Garoche, the lady was only your wife
by a form which the Church shall set aside--it could never have been a
true marriage.  Second, it is no stealing to take from you what you did
not have.  I took what was mine--remember the glove!  For the rest--to
fight you?  No, my churl, you know that's impossible.  You may shoot me
from behind a tree or a rock, but swording with you--come, come, a pretty
gossip for the Court!  Then, why wish a fight?  Where would you be, as
you stood before me--you!'  The Baron stretched himself up, and smiled
down at Garoche.  'You have your life, man; take it and go--to the
farthest corner of New France, and show not your face here again.  If I
find you ever again in Beaugard I will have you whipped from parish to
parish.  Here is money for you--good gold coins.  Take them, and go.'

"Garoche got still and cold as stone.  He said in a low, harsh voice:
'M'sieu' le Baron, you are a common thief, a wolf, a snake.  Such men as
you come lower than Judas.  As God has an eye to see, you shall pay all
one day.  I do not fear you nor your men nor your gallows.  You are a
jackal, and the woman has a filthy heart--a ditch of shame.'

"The Baron drew up his arm like lightning, and the lash of his whip came
singing across Garoche's pale face.  Where it passed, a red welt rose,
but the man never stirred.  The arm came up again, but a voice' behind
the Baron said: 'Ah no, no, not again!'  There stood Falise.  Both men
looked at her.  'I have heard Garoche,' she said.  'He does not judge me
right.  My heart is no filthy ditch of shame; but it was breaking when I
came from the altar with him yesterday.  Yet I would have been a true
wife to him after all.  A ditch of shame--ah, Garoche--Garoche!  And you
said you loved me, and that nothing could change you!'

"The Baron said to her: 'Why have you come, Falise?  I forbade you.' 'Oh,
my lord,' she answered, 'I feared--for you both!  When men go mad because
of women a devil enters into them.'  The Baron, taking her by the hand,
said: 'Permit me,' and he led her to the door for her to pass out.  She
looked back sadly at Garoche, standing for a minute very still.  Then
Garoche said: 'I command you, come with me; you are my wife.'  She did
not reply, but shook her head at him.  Then he spoke out high and fierce:
'May no child be born to you.  May a curse fall on you.  May your fields
be barren, and your horses and cattle die.  May you never see nor hear
good things.  May the waters leave their courses to drown you, and the
hills their bases to bury you, and no hand lay you in decent graves!'

"The woman put her hands to her ears and gave a little cry, and the Baron
pushed her gently on, and closed the door after her.  Then he turned on
Garoche.  'Have you said all you wish?' he asked.  'For, if not, say on,
and then go; and go so far you cannot see the sky that covers Beaugard.
We are even now--we can cry quits.  But that I have a little injured you,
you should be done for instantly.  But hear me: if I ever see you again,
my gallows shall end you straight.  Your tongue has been gross before the
mistress of this Manor; I will have it torn out if it so much as
syllables her name to me or to the world again.  She is dead to you.  Go,
and go for ever!'

"He put a bag of money on the table, but Garoche turned away from it, and
without a word left the room, and the house, and the parish, and said
nothing to any man of the evil that had come to him.

"But what talk was there, and what dreadful things were said at first-
that Garoche had sold his wife to the Baron; that he had been killed and
his wife taken; that the Baron kept him a prisoner in a cellar under the
Manor House!  And all the time there was Falise with the Baron--very
quiet and sweet and fine to see, and going to Chapel every day, and to
Mass on Sundays--which no one could understand, any more than they could
see why she should be called the Baroness of Beaugard; for had they all
not seen her married to Garoche?  And there were many people who thought
her vile.  Yet truly, at heart, she was not so--not at all.  Then it was
said that there was to be a new marriage; that the Church would let it be
so, doing and undoing, and doing again.  But the weeks and the months
went by, and it was never done.  For, powerful as the Baron was, Bigot
the Intendant was powerful also, and fought the thing with all his might.
The Baron went to Quebec to see the Bishop and the Governor, and though
promises were made, nothing was done.  It must go to the King and then to
the Pope, and from the Pope to the King again, and so on.  And the months
and the years went by as they waited, and with them came no child to the
Manor House of Beaugard.  That was the only sad thing--that and the
waiting, so far as man could see.  For never were man and woman truer to
each other than these, and never was a lady of the Manor kinder to the
poor, or a lord freer of hand to his vassals.  He would bluster
sometimes, and string a peasant up by the heels, but his gallows was
never used; and, what was much in the minds of the people, the Cure did
not refuse the woman the sacrament.

"At last the Baron, fierce because he knew that Bigot was the cause of
the great delay, so that he might not call Falise his wife, seized a
transport on the river, which had been sent to brutally levy upon a poor
gentleman, and when Bigot's men resisted, shot them down.  Then Bigot
sent against Beaugard a company of artillery and some soldiers of the
line.  The guns were placed on a hill looking down on the Manor House
across the little river.  In the evening the cannons arrived, and in the
morning the fight was to begin.  The guns were loaded and everything was
ready.  At the Manor all was making ready also, and the Baron had no
fear.

"But Falise's heart was heavy, she knew not why.  'Eugene,' she said, 'if
anything should happen!'  'Nonsense, my Falise,' he answered; 'what
should happen?'  'If--if you were taken--were killed!' she said.
'Nonsense, my rose,' he said again, 'I shall not be killed.  But if I
were, you should be at peace here.'  'Ah, no, no!' said she.  'Never.
Life to me is only possible with you.  I have had nothing but you--none
of those things which give peace to other women--none.  But I have been
happy-yes, very happy.  And, God forgive me, Eugene, I cannot regret, and
I never have!  But it has been always and always my prayer that, when you
die, I may die with you--at the same moment.  For I cannot live without
you, and, besides, I would like to go to the good God with you to speak
for us both; for oh, I loved you, I loved you, and I love you still, my
husband, my adored!'

"He stooped--he was so big, and she but of middle height--kissed her, and
said: 'See, my Falise, I am of the same mind.  We have been happy in
life, and we could well be happy in death together.'  So they sat long,
long into the night and talked to each other--of the days they had passed
together, of cheerful things, she trying to comfort herself, and he
trying to bring smiles to her lips.  At last they said good-night, and he
lay down in his clothes; and after a few moments she was sleeping like a
child.  But he could not sleep, for he lay thinking of her and of her
life--how she had come from humble things and fitted in with the highest.
At last, at break of day, he arose and went outside.  He looked up at the
hill where Bigot's two guns were.  Men were already stirring there.  One
man was standing beside the gun, and another not far behind.  Of course
the Baron could not know that the man behind the gunner said: 'Yes, you
may open the dance with an early salute;' and he smiled up boldly at the
hill and went into the house, and stole to the bed of his wife to kiss
her before he began the day's fighting.  He looked at her a moment,
standing over her, and then stooped and softly put his lips to hers.

"At that moment the gunner up on the hill used the match, and an awful
thing happened.  With the loud roar the whole hillside of rock and gravel
and sand split down, not ten feet in front of the gun, moved with
horrible swiftness upon the river, filled its bed, turned it from its
course, and, sweeping on, swallowed the Manor House of Beaugard.  There
had been a crack in the hill, the water of the river had sapped its
foundations, and it needed only this shock to send it down.

"And so, as the woman wished: the same hour for herself and the man!  And
when at last their prison was opened by the hands of Bigot's men, they
were found cheek by cheek, bound in the sacred marriage of Death.

"But another had gone the same road, for, at the awful moment, beside the
bursted gun, the dying gunner, Garoche, lifted up his head, saw the loose
travelling hill, and said with his last breath: 'The waters drown them,
and the hills bury them, and--'

"He had his way with them, and after that perhaps the great God had His
way with him perhaps."






THE TUNE McGILVERAY PLAYED

McGilveray has been dead for over a hundred years, but there is a parish
in Quebec where his tawny-haired descendants still live.  They have the
same sort of freckles on their faces as had their ancestor, the
bandmaster of Anstruther's regiment, and some of them have his taste for
music, yet none of them speak his language or with his brogue, and the
name of McGilveray has been gallicised to Magille.

In Pontiac, one of the Magilles, the fiddler of the parish, made the
following verse in English as a tribute of admiration for an heroic deed
of his ancestor, of which the Cure of the parish, the good M. Santonge,
had told him:

              "Piff! poem! ka-zoon, ka-zoon!
               That is the way of the organ tune--
               And the ships are safe that day!
               Piff!  poum!  kazoon, kazoon!
               And the Admiral light his pipe and say:
               'Bully for us, we are not kill!
               Who is to make the organ play
               Make it say zoon-kazoon?
               You with the corunet come this way--
               You are the man, Magillel
               Piff! poum! kazoon, kazoon!'"

Now, this is the story of McGilveray the bandmaster of Anstruther's
regiment:

It was at the time of the taking of Quebec, the summer of 1759.  The
English army had lain at Montmorenci, at the Island of Orleans, and at
Point Levis; the English fleet in the basin opposite the town, since June
of that great year, attacking and retreating, bombarding and besieging,
to no great purpose.  For within the walls of the city, and on the shore
of Beauport, protected by its mud flats--a splendid moat--the French more
than held their own.

In all the hot months of that summer, when parishes were ravaged with
fire and sword, and the heat was an excuse for almost any lapse of
virtue, McGilveray had not been drunk once--not once.  It was almost
unnatural.  Previous to that, McGilveray's career had been chequered.
No man had received so many punishments in the whole army, none had risen
so superior to them as had he, none had ever been shielded from wrath
present and to come as had this bandmaster of Anstruther's regiment.  He
had no rivals for promotion in the regiment--perhaps that was one reason;
he had a good temper and an overwhelming spirit of fun--perhaps that was
another.

He was not remarkable to the vision--scarcely more than five feet four;
with an eye like a gimlet, red hair tied in a queue, a big mouth, and a
chest thrown out like the breast of a partridge--as fine a figure of a
man in miniature as you should see.  When intoxicated, his tongue rapped
out fun and fury like a triphammer.  Alert-minded drunk or sober, drunk,
he was lightning-tongued, and he could play as well drunk as sober, too;
but more than once a sympathetic officer altered the tactics that
McGilveray might not be compelled to march, and so expose his condition.
Standing still he was quite fit for duty.  He never got really drunk "at
the top."  His brain was always clear, no matter how useless were his
legs.

But the wonderful thing was that for six months McGilveray's legs were as
steady as his head was right.  At first the regiment was unbelieving, and
his resolution to drink no more was scoffed at in the non-com mess.  He
stuck to it, however, and then the cause was searched for--and not found.
He had not turned religious, he was not fanatical, he was of sound mind--
what was it?  When the sergeant-major suggested a woman, they howled him
down, for they said McGilveray had not made love to women since the day
of his weaning, and had drunk consistently all the time.

Yet it was a woman.

A fortnight or so after Wolfe's army and Saunders's fleet had sat down
before Quebec, McGilveray, having been told by a sentry at Montmorenci
where Anstruther's regiment was camped, that a French girl on the other
side of the stream had kissed her hand to him and sung across in laughing
insolence:

               "Malbrouk s'en va t'en guerre,"

he had forthwith set out to hail this daughter of Gaul, if perchance she
might be seen again.

At more than ordinary peril he crossed the river on a couple of logs,
lashed together, some distance above the spot where the picket had seen
Mademoiselle.  It was a moonlight night, and he might easily have been
picked off by a bullet, if a wary sentry had been alert and malicious.
But the truth was that many of these pickets on both sides were in no
wise unfriendly to each other, and more than once exchanged tobacco and
liquor across the stream.  As it chanced, however, no sentry saw
McGilveray, and presently, safely landed, he made his way down the
stream.  Even at the distance he was from the falls, the rumble of them
came up the long walls of firs and maples with a strange, half-moaning
sound--all else was still.  He came down until he was opposite the spot
where his English picket was posted, and then he halted and surveyed his
ground.

Nothing human in sight, no sound of life, no sign of habitation.  At this
moment, however, his stupidity in thus rushing into danger, the
foolishness of pursuing a woman whom he had never seen, and a French
woman at that, the punishment that would be meted out to him if his
adventure was discovered--all these came to him.

They stunned him for a moment, and then presently, as if in defiance of
his own thoughts, he began to sing softly:

"Malbrouk s'en va t'en guerre."

Suddenly, in one confused moment, he was seized, and a hand was clapped
over his mouth.  Three French soldiers had him in their grip-stalwart
fellows they were, of the Regiment of Bearn.  He had no strength to cope
with them, he at once saw the futility of crying out, so he played the
eel, and tried to slip from the grasp of his captors.  But though he gave
the trio an awkward five minutes he was at last entirely overcome, and
was carried away in triumph through the woods.  More than once they
passed a sentry, and more than once campfires round which soldiers slept
or dozed.  Now and again one would raise his head, and with a laugh, or a
"Sapristi!" or a "Sacre bleu!" drop back into comfort again.

After about ten minutes' walk he was brought to a small wooden house, the
door was thrown open, he was tossed inside, and the soldiers entered
after.  The room was empty save for a bench, some shelves, a table, on
which a lantern burned, and a rude crucifix on the wall.  McGilveray sat
down on the bench, and in five minutes his feet were shackled, while a
chain fastened to a staple in the wall held him in secure captivity.

"How you like yourself now?" asked a huge French corporal who had
learned English from an English girl at St. Malo years before.

"If you'd tie a bit o' pink ribbon round me neck, I'd die wid pride,"
said McGilveray, spitting on the ground in defiance at the same time.

The big soldier laughed, and told his comrades what the bandmaster had
said.  One of them grinned, but the other frowned sullenly, and said:

"Avez vous tabac?"

"Havey you to-ba-co?" said the big soldier instantly--interpreting.

"Not for a Johnny Crapaud like you, and put that in your pipe and shmoke
it!" said McGilveray, winking at the big fellow, and spitting on the
ground before the surly one, who made a motion as if he would bayonet
McGilveray where he sat.

"He shall die--the cursed English soldier," said Johnny Crapaud.

"Some other day will do," said McGilveray.  "What does he say?" asked
Johnny Crapaud.

"He says he'll give each of us three pounds of tobacco, if we let him
go," answered the corporal.  McGilveray knew by the corporal's voice that
he was lying, and he also knew that, somehow, he had made a friend.

"Y'are lyin', me darlin', me bloody beauty!" interposed McGilveray.

"If we don't take him to headquarters now he'll send across and get the
tobacco," interpreted the corporal to Johnny Crapaud.

"If he doesn't get the tobacco he'll be hung for a spy," said Johnny
Crapaud, turning on his heel.  "Do we all agree?" said the corporal.

The others nodded their heads, and, as they went out, McGilveray said
after them:

"I'll dance a jig on yer sepulchrees, ye swobs!" he roared, and he spat
on the ground again in defiance.  Johnny Crapaud turned to the corporal.

"I'll kill him very dead," said he, "if that tobacco doesn't come.  You
tell him so," he added, jerking a thumb towards McGilveray.  "You tell
him so."

The corporal stayed when the others went out, and, in broken English,
told McGilveray so.

"I'll play a hornpipe, an' his gory shroud is round him," said
McGilveray.

The corporal grinned from ear to ear.  "You like a chew tabac?" said he,
pulling out a dirty knob of a black plug.

McGilveray had found a man after his own heart.  "Sing a song
a-sixpence," said he, "what sort's that for a gintleman an' a corporal,
too?  Feel in me trousies pocket," said he, "which is fur me frinds for
iver."  McGilveray had now hopes of getting free, but if he had not taken
a fancy to "me baby corporal," as he called the Frenchman, he would have
made escape or release impossible, by insulting him and every one of them
as quick as winking.

After the corporal had emptied one pocket, "Now the other, man-o-wee-
wee!" said McGilveray, and presently the two were drinking what the
flask from the "trousies pocket" contained.  So well did McGilveray work
upon the Frenchman's bonhomie that the corporal promised he should
escape.  He explained how McGilveray should be freed--that at midnight
some one would come and release him, while he, the corporal, was with his
companions, so avoiding suspicion as to his own complicity.  McGilveray
and the corporal were to meet again and exchange courtesies after the
manner of brothers--if the fortunes of war permitted.

McGilveray was left alone.  To while away the time he began to whistle to
himself, and what with whistling, and what with winking and talking to
the lantern on the table, and calling himself painful names, he endured
his captivity well enough.

It was near midnight when the lock turned in the door and presently
stepped inside--a girl.

"Malbrouk s'en va t'en guerre," said she, and nodded her head to him
humorously.

By this McGilveray knew that this was the maid that had got him into all
this trouble.  At first he was inclined to say so, but she came nearer,
and one look of her black eyes changed all that.

"You've a way wid you, me darlin'," said McGilveray, not thinking that
she might understand.

"A leetla way of my own," she answered in broken English.

McGilveray started.  "Where did you learn it?" he asked, for he had had
two surprises that night.

"Of my mother--at St. Malo," she replied.  "She was half English--of
Jersey.  You are a naughty boy," she added, with a little gurgle of
laughter in her throat.  "You are not a good soldier to go a-chase of the
French girls 'cross of the river."

"Shure I am not a good soldier thin.  Music's me game.  An' the band of
Anstruther's rigimint's mine."

"You can play tunes on a drum?" she asked, mischievously.

"There's wan I'd play to the voice av you," he said, in his softest
brogue.  "You'll be unloosin' me, darlin'?" he added.

She stooped to undo the shackles on his ankles.  As she did so he leaned
over as if to kiss her.  She threw back her head in disgust.

"You have been drink," she said, and she stopped her work of freeing him.

"What'd wet your eye--no more," he answered.  She stood up.  "I will
not," she said, pointing to the shackles, "if you drink some more--nevare
some more--nevare!"

"Divil a drop thin, darlin', till we fly our flag yander," pointing
towards where he supposed the town to be.

"Not till then?" she asked, with a merry little sneer.  "Ver' well, it
is comme ca!"  She held out her hand.  Then she burst into a soft laugh,
for his hands were tied.  "Let me kiss it," he said, bending forward.

"No, no, no," she said.  "We will shake our hands after," and she
stooped, took off the shackles, and freed his arms.

"Now if you like," she said, and they shook hands as McGilveray stood up
and threw out his chest.  But, try as he would to look important, she was
still an inch taller than he.

A few moments later they were hurrying quietly through the woods, to the
river.  There was no speaking.  There was only the escaping prisoner and
the gay-hearted girl speeding along in the night, the mumbling of the
quiet cascade in their ears, the shifting moon playing hide-and-seek with
the clouds.  They came out on the bank a distance above where McGilveray
had landed, and the girl paused and spoke in a whisper.  "It is more hard
now," she said.  "Here is a boat, and I must paddle--you would go to
splash.  Sit still and be good."

She loosed the boat into the current gently, and, holding it, motioned to
him to enter.

"You're goin' to row me over?" he asked, incredulously.

"'Sh!  get in," she said.

"Shtrike me crazy, no!" said McGilveray.  "Divil a step will I go.  Let
me that sowed the storm take the whirlwind."  He threw out his chest.

"What is it you came here for?" she asked, with meaning.

"Yourself an' the mockin' bird in yer voice," he answered.

"Then that is enough," she said.  "You come for me, I go for you.  Get
in."

A moment afterwards, taking advantage of the obscured moon, they were
carried out on the current diagonally down the stream, and came quickly
to that point on the shore where an English picket was placed.  They had
scarcely touched the shore when the click of a musket was heard, and a
"Qui-va-la?" came from the thicket.

McGilveray gave the pass-word, and presently he was on the bank saluting
the sentry he had left three hours before.

"Malbrouk s'en va t'en guerre!" said the girl again with a gay
insolence, and pushed the boat out into the stream.

"A minnit, a minnit, me darlin'," said McGilveray.

"Keep your promise," came back, softly.

"Ah, come back wan minnit!"

"A flirt!" said the sentry.

"You will pay for that," said the girl to the sentry, with quick anger.

"Do you love me, Irishman?" she added, to McGilveray.

"I do--aw, wurra, wurra, I do!" said McGilveray.  "Then you come and get
me by ze front door of ze city," said she, and a couple of quick strokes
sent her canoe out into the dusky middle of the stream; and she was soon
lost to view.

"Aw, the loike o' that!  Aw, the foine av her-the tip-top lass o' the
wide world!" said he.

"You're a fool, an' there'll be trouble from this," said the sentry.

There was trouble, for two hours later the sentry was found dead; picked
off by a bullet from the other shore when he showed himself in the
moonlight; and from that hour all friendliness between the pickets of the
English and the French ceased on the Montmorenci.

But the one witness to McGilveray's adventure was dead, and that was why
no man knew wherefore it was that McGilveray took an oath to drink no
more till they captured Quebec.

From May to September McGilveray kept to his resolution.  But for all
that time he never saw "the tip-top lass o' the wide world."  A time
came, however, when McGilveray's last state was worse than his first, and
that was the evening before the day Quebec was taken.  A dozen prisoners
had been captured in a sortie from the Isle of Orleans to the mouth of
the St. Charles River.  Among these prisoners was the grinning corporal
who had captured McGilveray and then released him.

Two strange things happened.  The big, grinning corporal escaped from
captivity the same night, and McGilveray, as a non-com said, "Got
shameful drunk."  This is one explanation of the two things.  McGilveray
had assisted the grinning corporal to escape.  The other explanation
belongs to the end of the story.  In any case, McGilveray "got shameful
drunk," and "was going large" through the camp.  The end of it was his
arrest for assisting a prisoner to escape and for being drunk and
disorderly.  The band of Anstruther's regiment boarded H.M.S. Leostaf
without him, to proceed up the river stealthily with the rest of the
fleet to Cap Rouge, from whence the last great effort of the heroic Wolfe
to effect a landing was to be made.  McGilveray, still intoxicated but
intelligent, watched them go in silence.

As General Wolfe was about to enter the boat which was to convey him to
the flag-ship, he saw McGilveray, who was waiting under guard to be taken
to Major Hardy's post at Point Levis.  The General knew him well, and
looked at him half sadly, half sternly.

"I knew you were free with drink, McGilveray," he said, "but I did not
think you were a traitor to your country too."

McGilveray saluted, and did not answer.

"You might have waited till after to-morrow, man," said the General, his
eyes flashing.  "My soldiers should have good music to-morrow."

McGilveray saluted again, but made no answer.

As if with a sudden thought the General waved off the officers and men
near him, and betkcned McGilveray to him.

"I can understand the drink in a bad soldier," he said, "but you helped a
prisoner to escape.  Come, man, we may both be dead to-morrow, and I'd
like to feel that no soldier in my army is wilfully a foe of his
country."

"He did the same for me, whin I was taken prisoner, yer Excillincy, an'
--an', yer Excillincy, 'twas a matter of a woman, too."

The General's face relaxed a little.  "Tell me the whole truth," said he;
and McGilveray told him all.  "Ah, yer Excillincy," he burst out, at
last, "I was no traitor at heart, but a fool I always was!  Yer
Excillincy, court-martial and death's no matter to me; but I'd like to
play wan toon agin, to lead the byes tomorrow.  Wan toon, Gineral, an'
I'll be dacintly shot before the day's over-ah, yer Excillincy, wan toon
more, and to be wid the byes followin' the Gineral!"

The General's face relaxed still more.

"I take you at your word," said he.  He gave orders that McGilveray
should proceed at once aboard the flag-ship, from whence he should join
Anstruther's regiment at Cap Rouge.

The General entered the boat, and McGilveray followed with some non-com.
officers in another.  It was now quite dark, and their motions, or the
motions of the vessels of war, could not be seen from the French
encampment or the citadel.  They neared the flag-ship, and the General,
followed by his officers, climbed up.  Then the men in McGilveray's boat
climbed up also, until only himself and another were left.

At that moment the General, looking down from the side of the ship, said
sharply to an officer beside him: "What's that?"

He pointed to a dark object floating near the ship, from which presently
came a small light with a hissing sound.

"It's a fire-organ, sir," was the reply.

A fire-organ was a raft, carrying long tubes like the pipes of an organ,
and filled with explosives.  They were used by the French to send among
the vessels of the British fleet to disorganise and destroy them.  The
little light which the General saw was the burning fuse.  The raft had
been brought out into the current by French sailors, the fuse had been
lighted, and it was headed to drift towards the British ships.  The fleet
was now in motion, and apart from the havoc which the bursting fire-organ
might make, the light from the explosion would reveal the fact that the
English men-o'-war were now moving towards Cap Rouge.  This knowledge
would enable Montcalm to detect Wolfe's purpose, and he would at once
move his army in that direction.  The west side of the town had meagre
military defenses, the great cliffs being thought impregnable.  But at
this point Wolfe had discovered a narrow path up a steep cliff.

McGilveray had seen the fire-organ at the same moment as the General.
"Get up the side," he said to the remaining soldier in his boat.  The
soldier began climbing, and McGilveray caught the oars and was instantly
away towards the raft.  The General, looking over the ship's side,
understood his daring purpose.  In the shadow, they saw him near it, they
saw him throw a boat-hook and catch it, and then attach a rope; they saw
him sit down, and, taking the oars, laboriously row up-stream toward the
opposite shore, the fuse burning softly, somewhere among the great pipes
of explosives.  McGilveray knew that it might be impossible to reach the
fuse--there was no time to spare, and he had set about to row the
devilish machine out of range of the vessels which were carrying Wolfe's
army to a forlorn hope.

For minutes those on board the man-o'-war watched and listened.
Presently nothing could be seen, not even the small glimmer from the
burning fuse.

Then, all at once, there was a terrible report, and the organ pipes
belched their hellish music upon the sea.  Within the circle of light
that the explosion made, there was no sign of any ship; but, strangely
tall in the red glare, stood McGilveray in his boat.  An instant he stood
so, then he fell, and presently darkness covered the scene.  The furious
music of death and war was over.  There was silence on the ship for a
time as all watched and waited.  Presently an officer said to the
General: "I'm afraid he's gone, sir."

"Send a boat to search," was the reply.  "If he is dead"--the General
took off his hat "we will, please God, bury him within the French citadel
to-morrow."

But McGilveray was alive, and in half-an-hour he was brought aboard the
flag-ship, safe and sober.  The General praised him for his courage, and
told him that the charge against him should be withdrawn.

"You've wiped all out, McGilveray," said Wolfe.  "We see you are no
traitor."

"Only a fool of a bandmaster who wanted wan toon more, yer Excillincy,"
said McGilveray.

"Beware drink, beware women," answered the General.

But advice of that sort is thrown away on such as McGilveray.  The next
evening after Quebec was taken, and McGilveray went in at the head of his
men playing "The Men of Harlech," he met in the streets the woman that
had nearly been the cause of his undoing.  Indignation threw out his
chest.

"It's you, thin," he said, and he tried to look scornfully at her.

"Have you keep your promise?" she said, hardly above her breath.

"What's that to you?" he asked, his eyes firing up.  "I got drunk last
night--afther I set your husband free--afther he tould me you was his
wife.  We're aven now, decaver!  I saved him, and the divil give you joy
of that salvation--and that husband, say I."

"Hoosban'--" she exclaimed, "who was my hoosban'?"

"The big grinning corporal," he answered.

"He is shot this morning," she said, her face darkening, "and, besides,
he was--nevare--my hoosban'."

"He said he was," replied McGilveray, eagerly.

"He was awway a liar," she answered.

"He decaved you too, thin?" asked McGilveray, his face growing red.

She did not answer, but all at once a change came over her, the half-
mocking smile left her lips, tears suddenly ran down her cheeks, and
without a word she turned and hurried into a little alley, and was lost
to view, leaving McGilveray amazed and confounded.

It was days before he found her again, and three things only that they
said are of any moment here.  "We'll lave the past behind us," he said-
"an' the pit below for me, if I'm not a good husband t' ye!"

"You will not drink no more?" she asked, putting a hand on his shoulder.

"Not till the Frenchies take Quebec again," he answered.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

We'll lave the past behind us
The furious music of death and war was over






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "LANE HAD NO TURNING":

Ah, let it be soon!  Ah, let him die soon!
All are hurt some time
But a wounded spirit who can bear
Did not let him think that she was giving up anything for him
Duplicity, for which she might never have to ask forgiveness
Frenchman,  slave of ideas, the victim of sentiment
Frenchman, volatile, moody, chivalrous, unreasonable
Her stronger soul ruled him without his knowledge
I love that love in which I married him
Let others ride to glory, I'll shoe their horses for the gallop
Lighted candles in hollowed pumpkins
Love has nothing  to do with ugliness or beauty, or fortune
Man grows old only by what he suffers, and what he forgives
Nature twists in back, or  anywhere, gets a twist in's brain too
Rewarded for its mistakes
Some are hurt in one way and some in another
Struggle of conscience and expediency
The furious music of death and war was over
We'll lave the past behind us
You--you all were so ready to suspect






PARABLES OF A PROVINCE

By Gilbert Parker



THE GOLDEN PIPES
THE GUARDIAN OF THE FIRE
BY THAT PLACE CALLED PERADVENTURE
THE SINGING OF THE BEES
THE WHITE OMEN
THE SOJOURNERS
THE TENT OF THE PURPLE MAT
THERE WAS A LITTLE CITY
THE FORGE IN THE VALLEY



THE GOLDEN PIPES

They hung all bronzed and shining, on the side of Margath Mountain--the
tall and perfect pipes of the organ which was played by some son of God
when the world was young.  At least Hepnon the cripple said this was so,
when he was but a child, and when he got older he said that even now a
golden music came from the pipes at sunrise and sunset.  And no one
laughed at Hepnon, for you could not look into the dark warm eyes,
dilating with his fancies, or see the transparent temper of his face, the
look of the dreamer over all, without believing him, and reproving your
own judgment.  You felt that he had travelled ways you could never
travel, that he had had dreams beyond you, that his fanciful spirit had
had adventures you would give years of your dull life to know.

And yet he was not made only as women are made, fragile and trembling in
his nerves.  For he was strong of arm, and there was no place in the
hills to be climbed by venturesome man, which he could not climb with
crutch and shrivelled leg.  Also, he was a gallant horseman, riding with
his knees and one foot in stirrup, his crutch slung behind him.  It may
be that was why rough men listened to his fancies about the Golden Pipes.
Indeed they would go out at sunrise and look across to where the pipes
hung, taking the rosy glory of the morning, and steal away alone at
sunset, and in some lonely spot lean out towards the flaming instrument
to hear if any music rose from them.  The legend that one of the Mighty
Men of the Kimash Hills came here to play, with invisible hands, the
music of the first years of the world, became a truth, though a truth
that none could prove.  And by-and-by, no man ever travelled the valley
without taking off his hat as he passed the Golden Pipes--so had a
cripple with his whimsies worked upon the land.

Then, too, perhaps his music had to do with it.  As a child he had only
a poor concertina, but by it he drew the traveller and the mountaineer
and the worker in the valley to him like a magnet.  Some touch of the
mysterious, some sweet fantastical melody in all he played, charmed them,
even when he gave them old familiar airs.  From the concertina he passed
to the violin, and his skill and mastery over his followers grew; and
then there came a notable day when up over a thousand miles of country a
melodeon was brought him.  Then a wanderer, a minstrel outcast from a far
country, taking refuge in those hills, taught him, and there was one long
year of loving labour together, and merry whisperings between the two,
and secret drawings, and worship of the Golden Pipes; and then the
minstrel died, and left Hepnon alone.

And now they said that Hepnon tried to coax out of the old melodeon the
music of the Golden Pipes.  But a look of sorrow grew upon his face, and
stayed for many months.  Then there came a change, and he went into the
woods, and began working there in the perfect summer weather; and the
tale went abroad that he was building an organ, so that he might play for
all who came, the music he heard on the Golden Pipes--for they had
ravished his ear since childhood, and now he must know the wonderful
melodies all by heart, they said.

With consummate patience Hepnon dried the wood and fashioned it into long
tuneful tubes, beating out soft metal got from the forge in the valley to
case the lips of them, tanning the leather for the bellows, stretching
it, and exposing all his work to the sun of early morning, which gave
every fibre and valve a rich sweetness, like a sound fruit of autumn.
People also said that he set all the pieces out at sunrise and sunset
that the tone of the Golden Pipes might pass into them, so that when the
organ was built, each part should be saturated with such melody as it had
drawn in, according to its temper and its fibre.

So the building of the organ went on, and a year passed, and then
another, and it was summer again; and soon Hepnon began to build also--
while yet it was sweet weather--a home for his organ, a tall nest of
cedar added to his father's house.  And in it every piece of wood, and
every board had been made ready by his own hands, and set in the sun and
dried slowly to a healthy soundness; and he used no nails of metal, but
wooden pins of the iron-wood or hickory tree, and it was all polished,
and there was no paint or varnish anywhere; and when you spoke in this
nest your voice sounded pure and strong.

At last the time came when, piece by piece, the organ was set up in its
home; and as the days and weeks went by, and autumn drew to winter, and
the music of the Golden Pipes stole down the flumes of snow to their
ardent lover, and spring came with its sap, and small purple blossoms,
and yellow apples of mandrake, and summer stole on luxurious and dry; the
face of Hepnon became thinner and thinner, a strange deep light shone in
his eyes, and all his person seemed to exhale a kind of glow.  He ceased
to ride, to climb, to lift weights with his strong arms, as he had--poor
cripple--been once so proud to do.  A delicacy came upon him, and more
and more he withdrew himself to his organ, and to those lofty and lonely
places where he could see--and hear--the Golden Pipes boom softly over
the valley.

At last it all was done, even to the fine-carved stool of cedar whereon
he should sit when he played his organ.  Never yet had he done more than
sound each note as he made it, trying it, softening it by tender devices
with the wood; but now the hour was come when he should gather down the
soul of the Golden Pipes to his fingers, and give to the ears of the
world the song of the morning stars, the music of Jubal and his comrades,
the affluent melody to which the sons of men, in the first days, paced
the world in time with the thoughts of God.  For days he lived alone in
the cedar-house--and who may know what he was doing dreaming, listening,
or praying?  Then the word went through the valley and the hills, that
one evening he would play for all who came; and that day was "Toussaint,"
or the Feast of All Souls.

So they came both old and young, and they did not enter the house, but
waited outside, upon the mossy rocks, or sat among the trees, and watched
the heavy sun roll down and the Golden Pipes flame in the light of
evening.  Far beneath in the valley the water ran lightly on, but there
came no sound from it, none from anywhere; only a general pervasive
murmur quieting to the heart.

Now they heard a note come from the organ--a soft low sound that seemed
to rise out of the good earth and mingle with the vibrant air, the song
of birds, the whisper of trees, and the murmuring water.  Then came
another, and another note, then chords, and chords upon these, and by-
and-by, rolling tides of melody, until, as it seemed to the listeners,
the air ached with the incomparable song; and men and women wept, and
children hid their heads in the laps of their mothers, and young men and
maidens dreamed dreams never to be forgotten.  For one short hour the
music went on, then twilight came.  Presently the sounds grew fainter,
and exquisitely painful, and now a low sob seemed to pass through all the
heart of the organ, and then silence fell, and in the sacred pause,
Hepnon came out among them all, pale and desolate.  He looked at them a
minute most sadly, and then lifting up his arms towards the Golden Pipes,
now hidden in the dusk, he cried low and brokenly:

"O my God, give me back my dream!"

Then his crutch seemed to give way beneath him, and he sank upon the
ground, faint and gasping.

They raised him up, and women and men whispered in his ear

"Ah, the beautiful, beautiful music, Hepnon!"  But he only said: "O my
God, O my God, give me back my dream!"  When he had said it thrice, he
turned his face to where his organ was in the cedar-house, and then his
eyes closed, and he fell asleep: and they could not wake him.  But at
sunrise the next morning a shiver passed through him, and then a cold
quiet stole over him, and Hepnon and the music of the Golden Pipes
departed from the Voshti Hills, and came again no more.






THE GUARDIAN OF THE FIRE

"Height unto height answereth knowledge."

His was the first watch, the farthest fire, for Shaknon Hill towered
above the great gulf, and looked back also over thirty leagues of country
towards the great city.  There came a time again when all the land was
threatened.  From sovereign lands far off, two fleets were sailing hard
to reach the wide basin before the walled city, the one to save, the
other to destroy.  If Tinoir, the Guardian of the Fire, should sight the
destroying fleet, he must light two fires on Shaknon Hill, and then, at
the edge of the wide basin, in a treacherous channel, the people would
send out fire-rafts to burn the ships of the foe.  Five times in the past
had Tinoir been the Guardian of the Fire, and five times had the people
praised him; but praise and his scanty wage were all he got.

The hut in which he lived with his wife on another hill, ten miles from
Shaknon, had but two rooms, and their little farm and the garden gave
them only enough to live--no more.  Elsewhere there was good land in
abundance, but it had been said years ago to Tinoir by the great men,
that he should live not far from Shaknon, so that in times of peril he
might guard the fire and be sentinel for all the people.  Perhaps Tinoir
was too dull to see that he was giving all and getting naught; that while
he waited and watched he was always poor, and also was getting old.
There was no house or home within fifty miles of them, and only now and
then some wandering Indians lifted the latch, and drew in beside their
hearth, or a good priest with a soul of love for others, came and said
Mass in the room where a little Calvary had been put up.  Two children
had come and gone, and Tinoir and Dalice had dug their graves and put
them in a warm nest of maple leaves, and afterwards lived upon the
memories of them.  But after these two, children came no more; and Tinoir
and Dalice grew closer and closer to each other, coming to look alike in
face, as they had long been alike in mind and feeling.  None ever lived
nearer to nature than they, and wild things grew to be their friends; so
that you might see Dalice at her door tossing crumbs with one hand to
birds, and with the other bits of meat to foxes, martens, and wild dogs,
which came and went unharmed by them.  Tinoir shot no wild animals for
profit--only for food and for skins and furs to wear.  Because of this he
was laughed at by all who knew, save the priest of St. Sulpice, who, on
Easter Day, when the little man came yearly to Mass over two hundred
miles of country, praised him to his people, and made much of him, though
Tinoir was not vain enough to see it.

When word came down the river, and up over the hills to Tinoir, that war
was come and that he must go to watch for the hostile fleet and for the
friendly fleet as well, he made no murmur, though it was the time of
harvest, and Dalice had had a sickness from which she was not yet
recovered.

"Go, my Tinoir," said Dalice, with a little smile, "and I will reap the
grain.  If your eyes are sharp you shall see my bright sickle moving in
the sun."

"There is the churning of the milk too, Dalice," answered Tinoir; "you
are not strong, and sometimes the butter comes slow; and there's the
milking also."

"Strength is coming to me fast, Tinoir," she said, and drew herself up;
but her dress lay almost flat on her bosom.  Tinoir took her arm and felt
it above the elbow.

"It is like the muscle of a little child," he said.

"But I will drink those bottles of red wine the Governor sent the last
time you watched the fire on Shaknon," she said, brightening up, and
trying to cheer him.  He nodded, for he saw what she was trying to do,
and said: "Also a little of the gentian and orange root three times a
day-eh, Dalice?"

After arranging for certain signs, by little fires, which they were to
light upon the hills and so speak with each other, they said, "Good day,
Dalice," and "Good day, Tinoir," drank a glass of the red wine, and
added: "Thank the good God;" then Tinoir wiped his mouth with his sleeve,
and went away, leaving Dalice with a broken glass at her feet, and a look
in her eyes which it was well that Tinoir did not see.

But as he went he was thinking how, the night before, Dalice had lain
with her arm round his neck hour after hour as she slept, as she did
before they ever had a child; and that even in her sleep, she kissed him
as she used to kiss him before he brought her away from the parish of
Ste. Genevieve to be his wife.  And the more he thought about it the
happier he became, and more than once he stopped and shook his head in
pleased retrospection.  And Dalice thought of it too as she hung over the
churn, her face drawn and tired and shining with sweat; and she shook her
head, and tears came into her eyes, for she saw further into things
than Tinoir.  And once as she passed his coat on the wall, she rubbed it
softly with her hand, as she might his curly head when he lay beside her.

From Shaknon Tinoir watched; but of course he could never see her bright
sickle shining, and he could not know whether her dress still hung loose
upon her breast, or whether the flesh of her arms was still like a
child's.  If all was well with Dalice a little fire should be lighted at
the house door just at the going down of the sun, and it should be at
once put out.  If she was ill, a fire should be lit and then put out two
hours after sundown.  If she should be ill beyond any help, this fire
should burn on till it went out.

Day after day Tinoir, as he watched for the coming fleet, saw the fire
lit at sundown, and then put out.  But one night the fire did not come
till two hours after sundown, and it was put out at once.  He fretted
much, and he prayed that Dalice might be better, and he kept to his post,
looking for the fleet of the foe.  Evening after evening was this other
fire lighted and then put out at once; and a great longing came to him to
leave this guarding of the fire, and go to her--"For half a day," he
said--"just for half a day!"  But in that half day the fleet might pass,
and then it would be said that Tinoir had betrayed his country.  At last
sleep left him, and he fought a demon night and day; and always he
remembered Dalice's arm about his neck, and her kisses that last night
they were together.  Twice he started away from his post to go to her,
but before he had gone a hundred paces he came back.

At last one afternoon he saw ships, not far off, rounding the great cape
in the gulf, and after a time, at sunset, he knew by their shape it was
the fleet of the foe; and so he lighted his great fires, and they were
answered leagues away towards the city by another beacon.

Two hours after sunset of this day the fire in front of Tinoir's home was
lighted, and was not put out, and Tinoir sat and watched it till it died
away.  So he lay in the light of his own great war-fire till morning, for
he could not travel at night, and then, his duty over, he went back to
his home.  He found Dalice lying beside the ashes of her fire, past
hearing all he said in her ear, unheeding the kiss he set upon her lips.

Two nights afterwards, coming back from laying her beside her children,
he saw a great light in the sky towards the city, as of a huge fire.
When the courier came to him bearing the Governor's message and the
praise of the people, and told of the enemy's fleet destroyed by the
fire-rafts, he stared at the man, then turned his head to a place where a
pine cross showed against the green grass, and said:

"Dalice--my wife--is dead."

"You have saved your country, Tinoir," answered the courier kindly.

"I have lost Dalice!" he said, and fondled the rosary Dalice used to
carry when she lived; and he would speak to the man no more.






BY THAT PLACE CALLED PERADVENTURE

By that place called Peradventure in the Voshti Hills dwelt Golgothar the
strong man, who, it was said, could break an iron pot with a blow, or
pull a tall sapling from the ground.

"If I had a hundred men so strong," said Golgothar, "I would go and
conquer Nooni, the city of our foes."

Because he had not the hundred men he did not go; and Nooni still sent
insults to the country of Golgothar, and none could travel safe between
the capitals.  And Golgothar was sorry.

"If I had a hundred men so strong," said Golgothar, "I would build a dyke
to keep the floods back from the people crowded on the lowlands."

Because he had not the hundred men, now and again the floods came down,
and swept the poor folk out to sea, or laid low their habitations.  And
Golgothar pitied them.

"If I had a hundred men so strong," said Golgothar, "I would clear the
wild boar from the forests, that the children should not fear to play
among the trees."

Because he had not the hundred men the graves of children multiplied, and
countless mothers sat by empty beds and mourned.  And Golgothar put his
head between his knees in trouble for them.

"If I had a hundred men so strong," said Golgothar, "I would with great
stones mend the broken pier, and the bridge between the islands should
not fall."  Because he had not the hundred men, at last the bridge gave
way, and a legion of the king's army were carried to the whirlpool, where
they fought in vain.  And Golgothar made a feast of remembrance to them,
and tears dripped on his beard when he said: "Hail and Farewell!"

"If I had a hundred men so strong," said Golgothar, "I would go against
the walls of chains our rebels built, and break them one by one."

Because he had not the hundred men, the chain walls blocked the only pass
between the hills, and so cut in two the kingdom: and they who pined for
corn went wanting, and they who yearned for fish stayed hungry.  And
Golgothar, brooding, said his heart bled for his country.

"If I had a hundred men so strong," said Golgothar, "I would go among the
thousand brigands of Mirnan, and bring again the beloved daughter of our
city."

Because he had not the hundred men the beloved lady languished in her
prison, for the brigands asked as ransom the city of Talgone which they
hated.  And Golgothar carried in his breast a stone image she had given
him, and for very grief let no man speak her name before him.

"If I had a hundred men so strong--" said Golgothar, one day, standing on
a great point of land and looking down the valley.

As he said it, he heard a laugh, and looking down he saw Sapphire, or
Laugh of the Hills, as she was called.  A long staff of iron-wood was in
her hands, with which she jumped the dykes and streams and rocky
fissures; in her breast were yellow roses, and there was a tuft of pretty
feathers in her hair.  She reached up and touched him on the breast with
her staff, then she laughed again, and sang a snatch of song in mockery:

                        "I am a king,
                         I have no crown,
                         I have no throne to sit in--"

"Pull me up, boy," she said.  She wound a leg about the staff, and,
taking hold, he drew her up as if she had been a feather.

"If I had a hundred mouths I would kiss you for that," she said, still
mocking; "but having only one, I'll give it to the cat, and weep for
Golgothar."

"Silly jade," he said, and turned towards his tent.

As they passed a slippery and dangerous place, where was one strong
solitary tree, she suddenly threw a noose over him, drew it fast and
sprang far out over the precipice into the air.  Even as she did so, he
jumped behind the tree, and clasped it, else on the slippery place he
would have gone over with her.  The rope came taut, and presently he drew
her up again to safety, and while she laughed at him and mocked him, he
held her tight under his arm, and carried her to his lodge, where he let
her go.

"Why did you do it, devil's madcap?" he asked.

"Why didn't you wait for the hundred men so strong?" she laughed.

"Why did you jump behind the tree?

             "'If I had a hundred men, heigho,
               I would buy my corn for a penny a gill.
               If I had a hundred men or so,
               I would dig a grave for the maid of the hill, heigho!'"

He did not answer her, but stirred the soup in the pot and tasted it, and
hung a great piece of meat over the fire.  Then he sat down, and only
once did he show anger as she mocked him, and that was when she thrust
her hand into his breast, took out the little stone image, and said:

              "If a little stone god had a hundred hearts,
               Would a little stone goddess trust in one?"

Then she made as if she would throw it into the fire, but he caught her
hand and crushed it, so that she cried out for pain and anger, and said:

"Brute of iron, go break the posts in the brigands' prison-house, but
leave a poor girl's wrist alone.  If I had a hundred men--" she added,
mocking wildly again, and then, springing at him, put her two thumbs at
the corners of his eyes, and cried: "Stir a hand, and out they will come
--your eyes for my bones!"

He did not stir till her fury was gone.  Then he made her sit down and
eat with him, and afterwards she said softly to him, and without a laugh:
"Why should the people say, 'Golgothar is our shame, for he has great
strength, and yet he does nothing but throw great stones for sport into
the sea'?"

He had the simple mind of a child, and he listened to her patiently, and
at last got up and began preparing for a journey, cleaning all his
weapons, and gathering them together.  She understood him, and she said,
with a little laugh like music: "One strong man is better than a hundred
--a little key will open a great door easier than a hundred hammers.
What is the strength of a hundred bullocks without this?" she added,
tapping him on the forehead.

Then they sat down and talked together quietly for a long time; and at
sunset she saw him start away upon great errands.

Before two years had gone, Nooni, the city of their foes, was taken; the
chain wall of the rebels opened to the fish and corn of the poor; the
children wandered in the forest without fear of wild boars; the dyke was
built to save the people in the lowlands; and Golgothar carried to the
castle the King had given him the daughter of the city, freed from
Mirnan.

"If Golgothar had a hundred wives--" said a voice to the strong man as he
entered the castle gates.  Looking up he saw Sapphire.  He stretched out
his hand to her in joy and friendship.

"--I would not be one of them," she added, with a mocking laugh, as she
dropped from the wall, leaped the moat by the help of her staff, and
danced away laughing.  There are those who say, however that tears fell
down her cheeks as she laughed.






THE SINGING OF THE BEES

"Mother, didst thou not say thy prayers last night?"

"Twice, my child."

"Once before the little shrine, and once beside my bed--is it not so?"

"It is so, my Fanchon.  What hast thou in thy mind?"

"Thou didst pray that the storm die in the hills, and the flood cease,
and that my father come before it was again the hour of prayer.  It is
now the hour.  Canst thou not hear the storm and the wash of the flood?
And my father does not come!"

"Dear Fanchon, God is good."

"When thou wast asleep I rose from my bed, and in the dark I kissed the
feet of--Him--on the little Calvary; and I did not speak, but in my heart
I called."

"What didst thou call, my child?"

"I called to my father: 'Come back-come back!'"

"Thou shouldst have called to God, my Fanchon."

"I loved my father, and I called to him."

"Thou shouldst love God."

"I knew my father first.  If God loved thee, He would answer thy prayer.
Dost thou not hear the cracking of the cedar trees and the cry of the
wolves--they are afraid.  All day and all night the rain and wind come
down, and the birds and wild fowl have no peace.  I kissed--His feet, and
my throat was full of tears; but I called in my heart.  Yet the storm and
the dark stay, and my father does not come."

"Let us be patient, my Fanchon."

"He went to guide the priest across the hills.  Why does not God guide
him back?"

"My Fanchon, let us be patient."

"The priest was young, and my father has grey hair."

"Wilt thou not be patient, my child?"

"He filled the knapsack of the priest with food better than his own, and
--thou didst not see it--put money in his hand."

"My own, the storm may pass."

"He told the priest to think upon our home as a little nest God set up
here for such as he."

"There are places of shelter in the hills for thy father, my Fanchon."

"And when the priest prayed, 'That Thou mayst bring us safely to this
place where we would go,' my father said so softly, 'We beseech Thee to
hear us, good Lord!'"

"My Fanchon, thy father hath gone this trail many times."

"The prayer was for the out-trail, not the in-trail, my mother."

"Nay, I do not understand thee."

"A swarm of bees came singing through the room last night, my mother.
It was dark and I could not see, but there was a sweet smell, and I heard
the voices."

"My child, thou art tired with watching, and thy mind is full of fancies.
Thou must sleep."

"I am tired of watching.  Through the singing of the bees as they passed
over my bed, I heard my father's voice.  I could not hear the words, they
seemed so far away, like the voices of the bees; and I did not cry out,
for the tears were in my throat.  After a moment the room was so still
that it made my heart ache."

"Oh, my Fanchon, my child, thou dost break my heart!  Dost thou not know
the holy words?"

"'And their souls do pass like singing bees, where no man may follow.
These are they whom God gathereth out of the whirlwind and the desert,
and bringeth home in a goodly swarm.'"

Night drew close to the earth, and as suddenly as a sluice-gate drops and
holds back a flood the storm ceased.  Along the crest of the hills there
slowly grew a line of light, and then the serene moon came up and on,
persistent to give the earth love where it had had punishment.  Divers
flocks of clouds, camp-followers of the storm, could not abash her.  But
once she drew shrinking back behind a slow troop of them; for down at the
bottom of a gorge lay a mountaineer, face upward and unmoving, as he had
lain since a rock loosened beneath him, and the depths swallowed him.  If
he had had ears to hear, he would have answered the soft, bitter cries
which rose from a but on the Voshti Hills above him:

"Michel, Michel, art thou gone?"

"Come back, oh, my father, come back!"

But perhaps it did avail that there were lighted candles before a little
shrine, and that a mother, in her darkness, kissed the feet of One on a
Calvary.






THE WHITE OMEN

"Ah, Monsieur, Monsieur, come quick!"

"My son, wilt thou not be patient?"

"But she--my Fanchon--and the child!"

"I knew thy Fanchon, and her father, when thou wast yet a child."

"But they may die before we come, Monsieur."

"These things are in God's hands, Gustave."

"You are not a father; you have never known what makes the world seem
nothing."

"I knew thy Fanchon's father."

"Is that the same?"

"There are those who save and those who die for others.  Of thy love thou
wouldst save--the woman hath lain in thine arms, the child is of this.
But to thy Fanchon's father I was merely a priest--we had not hunted
together nor met often about the fire, and drew fast the curtains for the
tales which bring men close.  He took me safely on the out-trail, but on
the home-trail he was cast away.  Dost thou not think the love of him
that stays as great as the love of him that goes?"

"Ah, thou wouldst go far to serve my wife and child!"

"Love knows not distance; it hath no continent; its eyes are for the
stars, its feet for the swords; it continueth, though an army lay waste
the pasture; it comforteth when there are no medicines; it hath the
relish of manna; and by it do men live in the desert."

"But if it pass from a man, that which he loves, and he is left alone,
Monsieur?"

"That which is loved may pass, but love hath no end."

"Thou didst love my Fanchon's father?"

"I prayed him not to go, for a storm was on, but there was the thought of
wife and child on him--the good Michel--and he said: 'It is the home-
trail, and I must get to my nest.'  Poor soul, poor soul!  I who carry my
life as a leaf in autumn for the west wind was saved, and he--!"

"We are on the same trail now, Monsieur?"

"See: how soft a night, and how goodly is the moon!"

"It is the same trail now as then, Monsieur?"

"And how like velvet are the shadows in the gorge there below--like
velvet-velvet."

"Like a pall.  He travelled this trail, Monsieur?"

"I remember thy Fanchon that night--so small a child was she, with deep
brown eyes, a cloud of hair that waved about her head, and a face that
shone like spring.  I have seen her but once since then, and yet thou
sayest thy Fanchon has now her great hour, that she brings forth?"

"Yes.  In the morning she cried out to me twice, for I am not easy of
waking--shame to me--and said: 'Gustave, thou shalt go for the priest
over the hills, for my time is at hand, and I have seen the White Omen
on the wall.'  The White Omen--you know, Monsieur?"

"What does such as she with the legend of the White Omen, Gustave?"

"Who can tell what is in the heart of a mother?  Their eyes are not the
eyes of such as we."

"Neither the eyes of man nor priest--thou sayest well.  How did she see
it?"

"She was lying in a soft sleep, when something like a pain struck through
her eyes, and she waked.  There upon the wall over the shrine was the
white arrow with the tuft of fire.  It came and went three times, and
then she called me."

"What tale told the arrow to thy Fanchon, Gustave?"

"That for the child which cometh into the world a life must go from the
world."

"The world is wide and souls are many, Gustave."

"Most true; but her heart was heavy, and it came upon her that the child
might be spared and herself taken."

"Is not that the light of thy home--yonder against the bunch of firs?"

"Yes, yes, good father, they have put a light in the window.  See, see,
there are two lights.  Ah, merci, merci, they both live!  She hath had
her hour!  That was the sign our mother promised me."

"Michel's wife--ah, yes, Michel's wife!  Blessed be God.  A moment,
Gustave; let us kneel here .  .  ."

.  .  .  "Monsieur, did you not see a white arrow shoot down the sky as
the prayer ended?"

"My son, it was a falling star."

"It seemed to have a tuft of fire."

"Hast thou also the mind of a woman, Gustave?"

"I cannot tell.  If it was not a human soul it was a world, and death is
death."

"Thou shalt think of life, Gustave.  In thy nest there are two birds
where was but one.  Keep in thy heart the joy of life and the truth of
love, and the White Omen shall be naught to thee."

"May I say 'thou' as I speak?"

"Thou shalt speak as I speak to thee."

"Thy face is pale-art thou ill, mon pere?"

"I have no beard, and the moon shines in my face."

"Thy look is as that of one without sight."

"Nay, nay, I can see the two lights in thy window, my son."

"Joy--joy, a little while, and I shall clasp my Fanchon in my arms!"

"Thy Fanchon, and the child--and the child."

The fire sent a trembling glow through the room of a hut on a Voshti
hill, and the smell of burning fir and camphire wood filtered through the
air with a sleepy sweetness.  So delicate and faint between the quilts
lay the young mother, the little Fanchon, a shining wonder still in her
face, and the exquisite touch of birth on her--for when a child is born
the mother also is born again.  So still she lay until one who gave her
into the world stooped, and drawing open the linen at her breast, nestled
a little life there, which presently gave a tiny cry, the first since it
came forth.  Then Fanchon's arms drew up, and, with eyes all tenderly
burning, she clasped the babe to her breast, and as silk breast touched
silk cheek, there sprang up in her the delight and knowledge that the
doom of the White Omen was not for herself.  Then she called the child by
its father's name, and said into the distance: "Gustave, Gustave, come
back!"

And the mother of Fanchon, remembering one night so many years before,
said, under her breath: "Michel, Michel, thou art gone so long!"

With their speaking, Gustave and the priest entered on them; and Fanchon
crying out for joy, said:

"Kiss thy child--thy little Gustave, my husband."  Then, to the priest:

"Last night I saw the White Omen, mon pere; and one could not die, nor
let the child die, without a blessing.  But we shall both live now."

The priest blessed all, and long time he talked with the wife of the lost
Michel.  When he rose to go to bed she said to him: "The journey has been
too long, mon pere.  Your face is pale and you tremble.  Youth has no
patience.  Gustave hurried you."

"Gustave yearned for thy Fanchon and the child.  The White Omen made him
afraid."

"But the journey was too much.  It is a hard, a bitter trail."

"I have come gladly as I went once with thy Michel.  But, as thou sayest,
I am tired--at my heart.  I will get to my rest."

Near dawn Gustave started from the bed where he sat watching, for he saw
the White Omen over against the shrine, and then a voice said, as it were
out of a great distance:

"Even me also, O my father!"

With awed footsteps, going to see, he found that a man had passed out
upon that trail by which no hunter from life can set a mark to guide a
comrade; leaving behind the bones and flesh which God set up, too heavy
to carry on so long a journey.






THE SOJOURNERS

"My father, shall we soon be there?"

The man stopped, and shading his eyes with his hand, looked long before
him into the silver haze.  They were on the southern bank of a wide
valley, flanked by deep hills looking wise as grey-headed youth, a legion
of close comrades, showing no gap in their ranks.  They seemed to
breathe; to sit, looking down into the valley, with heads dropped on
their breasts, and deep overshadowed eyes, that never changed, in mist or
snow, or sun, or any kind of weather: dark brooding lights that knew
the secrets of the world, watchful yet kind.  Races, ardent with longing,
had come and gone through the valley, had passed the shining porches in
the North on the way to the quiet country; and they had never come again,
though shadows flitted back and forth when the mists came down: visiting
spirits, hungering on the old trail for some that had dropped by the way.
As the ages passed, fewer and fewer travelled through the valley-no
longer a people or a race, but twos and threes, and sometimes a small
company, like soldiers of a battered guard, and oftener still solitary
pilgrims, broken with much travel and bowed with loneliness.  But they
always cried out with joy when they beheld far off in the North, at the
end of the long trail, this range of grey and violet hills break into
golden gaps with scarlet walls, and rivers of water ride through them
pleasantly.  Then they hurried on to the opal haze that hung at the end
of the valley--and who heard ever of any that wished to leave the Scarlet
Hills and the quiet country beyond!

The boy repeated his question: "My father, shall we soon be there?"

The man withdrew his hand from over his eyes, and a strange smile came to
his lips.

"My son," he answered, "canst thou not see?  Yonder, through the gentle
mist, are the Scarlet Hills.  Our journey is near done."

The boy lifted his head and looked.  "I can see nothing but the mist, my
father--not the Scarlet Hills.  I am tired, I would sleep."

"Thou shalt sleep soon.  The wise men told us of the Delightful Chateau
at the gateway of the hills.  Courage, my son!  If I gave thee the golden
balls to toss, would it cheer thee?"

"My father, I care not for the golden balls; but if I had horse and sword
and a thousand men, I would take a city."

The man laid his hand upon the boy's shoulder.

"If I, my son," he said, "had a horse and sword and a thousand men, I
would build a city."

"Why dost thou not fly thy falcon, or write thy thoughts upon the sand,
as thou didst yesterday, my father?"

The man loosed the falcon from his wrist, and watched it fly away.

"My son, I care not for the falcon, nor any more for writing on the
sands."

"My father, if thou didst build a city, I would not tear it down, but I
would keep it with my thousand men.

"Thou hast well said, my son."  And the man stooped and kissed the lad on
the forehead.

And so they travelled on in silence for a long time, and slowly they came
to the opal haze, which smelled sweet as floating flowers, and gave their
hearts a halcyon restfulness.  And glancing down at him many times, the
father saw the lad's face look serenely wise, without becoming old, and
his brown hair clustered on his forehead with all the life of youth in
it.  Yet in his eyes the lad seemed as old as himself.

"My father," said the lad again, "wouldst thou then build a city?"

And the father answered: "Nay, my son, I would sow seed, and gather it
into harvest--enough for my needs, no more; and sit quiet in my doorway
when my work was done, and be grateful to the gods."

The lad waited a moment, then answered: "When thou wast a governor in our
own country, thou hadst serfs and retainers without number, and fifty men
to beat upon the shields of brass to tell of thy coming through the gates
of the King's house; now thou wouldst sow a field and sit quiet in thy
doorway, like the blind seller of seed-cakes 'gainst the temple."

"Even so, my son."  Then he stooped down, knelt upon his knees, and
kissed the earth solemnly, and when he rose there was a smile upon his
face.

Then the lad said: "When I was the son of a governor I loved to play with
the golden balls, to shoot at the target for pearls, and to ride the
flamingo down; now I would grind the corn which thou didst reap, and with
oil make seed-cakes for our supper, and sit quiet with thee in thy
doorway."  Then he too stooped down and kissed the earth, and rose up
again with a smile upon his face.

And as they went the earth seemed suddenly to blossom anew, the glory of
the Scarlet Hills burst upon them, and they could hear bugles calling far
off and see giant figures trooping along the hills, all scarlet too,
with streaming hair.  And presently, near to a lake, there was a great
gateway, and perched upon a rock near it a chateau of divine proportions,
on which was written above the perfect doorway:

"The Keeper of the House awaits thee.  Enter into Quiet."

And they entered, and were possessed of an incomparable peace.  And then
came to them an old man of noble countenance, with eye neither dimmed nor
sunken, and cheek dewy as a child's, and his voice was like an organ when
it plays the soft thanksgiving of a mother.

"Why did ye kiss the earth as ye travelled?" he asked.  Then they told
him, each with his own tongue, and he smiled upon them and questioned
them of all their speech by the way; and they answered him all honestly
and with gladness, for the searching of their hearts was a joy and
relief.  But he looked most lovingly upon the lad.

"Wouldst thou, then, indeed enter the quiet country?" he asked.

And the lad answered: "I have lived so long in the noise!"

"Thou hast learned all, thou hast lived all," he answered the boy.
"Beyond the Hills of Scarlet there is quiet, and thou shalt dwell there,
thou and he.  Ye have the perfect desire--Go in peace, and know that
though ye are of different years, as men count time, God's clock strikes
the same for both; for both are of equal knowledge, and have the same
desire at last."

Then, lifting up his hands, he said: "O children of men!  O noisy world!
when will ye learn the delectable way?"

Slowly they all three came from the Chateau, and through the great
gateway, and passed to the margin of a shining lake.  There the two
stepped into a boat that waited for them, of which the rowers were nobly
fashioned, like the Keeper of the House, and as they bowed their heads to
a melodious blessing, the boat drew away.  Soon, in the sweet haze, they
looked transfigured and enlarged, majestic figures moving through the
Scarlet Hills to the quiet country.  Now the valley through which they
had passed was the Valley of Death, where the young become old, and the
old young, and all become wise.






THE TENT OF THE PURPLE MAT

The Tent stands on the Mount of Lost Winters, in that bit of hospitable
land called the Fair Valley, which is like no other in the North.  Whence
comes the soft wind that comforts it, who can tell?  It swims through the
great gap in the mountains, and passing down the valley, sinks upon the
prairie of the Ten Stars, where it is lost.  What man first placed the
Tent on the Mount none knows, though legends are many.  It has a clear
outlook to the north, whence comes the gracious wind, and it is sheltered
at the south by a stout wall of commendable trees; yet these are at some
small distance, so that the Tent has a space all about it, and the figure
of the general land is as that of an amphitheatre.

It is made of deerskin, dyed by a strange process which turned it white,
and doctored by some cunning medicine.  It is like a perfect parchment,
and shows no decay.  It has a centre-pole of excellent fir, and from its
peak flies a strip of snake-skin, dyed a red which never fades.  For the
greater part of the year the plateau whereon the Tent stands is covered
with a sweet grass, and when the grass dies there comes a fine white
frost, ungoverned by the sun, in which the footstep sinks, as into an
unfilled honeycomb.

The land has few clouds, and no storms, save of the lightest-rain which
is as mist, and snow which is as frosty haze.  The sun cherishes the
place continually, and the moon rises on it with a large rejoicing.

Yet no man dwells in the valley.  It is many scores of leagues from any
habitation, from the lodges of the Indians or the posts of the Company's
people.  There are few tribes that know of it, and these go not to it as
tribes, but as one man or one woman has need.  Men say that beyond it, in
another amphitheatre of the hills, is the White Valley, the Place of
Peace, where the sleepers are, and the Scarlet Hunter is sentinel.  Yet
who knows--since any that have been there are constrained to be silent,
or forget what they have seen?

But this valley where the Tent stands is for those who have broken the
commandment, "Thou shalt not sell thy soul."  Hither they come and wait
and desire continually; and this delightful land is their punishment, for
they have no relish for goodly things, the power to enjoy going from them
when they bargained their souls away.  The great peace, the noble
pasturage, the equal joy of day and night wherein is neither heat nor
cold, where life is like the haze on a harvest-field, are for
chastisement, till that by great patience and striving, some one, having
the gift of sacrifice, shall give his life to buy back that soul.  For it
is in the minds of this people of the North that for every life that
comes into the world one passes out, and for every soul which is bartered
away another must be set free ere it can be redeemed.

Men and women whom life and their own sins had battered came seeking the
Tent; but they were few and they were chiefly old, for conscience cometh
mostly when man can work and wanton no more.  Yet one day, when the sight
of the valley was most fair to their eyes, there came out of the
southmost corner a girl, who, as soon as she set foot in the valley, laid
aside her knapsack in the hollow of a tree, also her moccasins and a
little cap of fur, and came on with bare head and feet towards the Mount
of the Lost Winters.

She was of good stature, ripely made, not beautiful of face, but with a
look which would make any man turn twice to see, a very glory of fine
hair, and a hand which spoke oftener than the lips.  She had come a
month's travel, scarcely halting from sunrise to sunset, and she was as
worn in body as in spirit.  Now, as she passed up the valley she stood
still several times, and looked round in a kind of dream, as well one
might who had come out of an inclement south country to this sweet
nourishment.  Yet she stood not still for joy and content, but for pain.
Once or twice she lifted up her hands above her head as though appealing,
but these pauses were only for brief moments, for she kept moving on
towards the mountain with a swift step.  When she had climbed the plateau
where the delicate grass yielded with a tender spring to the feet, she
paused long and gazed round, as though to take a last glance at all;
then, turning to the Tent, looked steadfastly at it, awe and wonder, and
something more difficult of interpretation, in her face.  At last she
slowly came to the curtain of the Tent, and lifting it, without a pause
stepped inside, the curtain falling behind her.

The Tent was empty save for the centre-pole, a wooden trough of dried
fruit, a jar of water, and a mat of the most gentle purple colour, which
was laid between the centre-pole and the tent-curtain.  The mat was of
exquisite make, as it seemed from the chosen fibres of some perfect wood,
and the hue was as that of a Tyrian dye.  A soft light pervaded the
place, perhaps filtered through the parchment-like white skin of the
Tent, for it seemed to have no other fountain.  Upon the farther side a
token was drawn in purple on the tentskin, and the girl, seeing it,
turned quickly to the curtain through which she had passed.  Upon the
curtain were other signs.  She read them slowly, and repeated them out
loud in a low uncertain voice, like a bird's note blundering in a flute:

"Four hours shalt thou look northward, kneeling on the Mat of Purple, and
thinking of the Camp of the Delightful Fires, around which is the Joyous
City; four hours shalt thou lie prone, thy face upon the soothing earth,
desiring sleep; and four hours shalt thou look within thine own breast,
thinking of thy sin; four hours also shalt thou go through the valley,
calling out that thou art lost, and praying the Scarlet Hunter to bring
thee home.  Afterwards thou shalt sleep, and thou shalt comfort thyself
with food when thou wilt.  If the Scarlet Hunter comes not, and thy life
faileth for misery, and none comprehending thy state offereth his life,
that thy soul may be free once more--then thou shalt gladly die, and,
yielding thine own body, shall purchase back thy soul; but this is not
possible until thou hast dwelt here a year and a day."

Having read, the girl threw herself face forward on the ground, her body
shaking with grief, and she cried out a man's name many times with great
bitterness "Ambroise!  Ambroise!  Ambroise!"

A long time she lay prone, crying so; but at last arose and, folding back
the curtain with hot hands, began her vigil for the redemption of a soul.

And while her sorrow grew, a father mourned for his daughter and called
his God to witness that he was guiltless of her loss, though he had said
hard words to her by reason of a man called Ambroise.  Then, too, the
preacher had exhorted her late and early till her mind was in a maze--it
is enough to have the pangs of youth and love, to be awakened by the pain
of mere growth and knowledge, without the counsel of the overwise to go
jolting through the soul.

The girl was only eighteen.  She had never known her mother, she had
lived as the flowers do, and when her hour of trial came she felt herself
cast like a wandering bird out of the nest.  In her childhood she had
known no preachers, no teaching, save the wholesome catechism of a
father's love and the sacred intimacy of Nature.  Living so, learning by
signs the language of law and wisdom, she had indrawn the significance of
legend, the power of the awful natural.  She had made her own
commandments.

When Ambroise the courier came, she had looked into his eyes and seen her
own--indeed, it was most wonderful, for those two pairs of eyes were as
those of one person.  And each, as each looked, smiled--that smile which
is the coming laughter of a heart at itself.  Yet they were different--he
a man, she a woman; he versed in evil, she taught in good; he a vagrant
of the snows, the fruit of whose life was like the contemptible stones of
the desert; she the keeper of a goodly lodge, past which flowed a water
that went softly, making rich the land, the fountain of her perfect
deeds.  He, looking into her eyes, saw himself when he had no sin on his
soul; and she into his--as it seemed, her own always--saw herself as it
were in a cobweb of evils which she could not understand.  As his heart
grew lighter, hers grew sick, even when she knew that these were the only
eyes in which she could ever see happiness.

It grew upon her that Ambroise's sins were hers and not his; that she,
not he, had bartered a soul for the wages of sin.  When they said at the
Fort that her eyes and Ambroise's, and her face and his, were as of one
piece, the pain of the thought deepened, and other pains came likewise,
for her father and the preacher urged that a man who had sold himself to
the devil was no comrade for her in little or much.  Yet she loved him as
only they can who love for the first time, and with the deep primitive
emotions which are out of the core of nature.  But her heart had been
cloven as by a wedge, and she would not, and could not, lie in his arms,
nor rest her cheek to his, nor seek that haven where true love is
fastened like a nail on the wall of that inn called home.  He was
herself, he must be brought back; and so, one night, while yet the winter
was on, she stole away out of the Fort, pausing at his door a moment
only, laying her hand upon it as one might tenderly lay it on the brow of
a sick sleeper.  Then she stepped away out on the plains, pointing her
course by the moon, for the Mount of Lost Winters and the Tent of the
Purple Mat.

When the people of the Fort waked, and it was found that she was gone,
search parties sallied out, but returned as they went after many days.
And at last, because Ambroise suffered as one ground between rolling
stones, even the preacher and the father of the girl relented towards
him.  After some weeks there came word through a wandering tribe that the
body of a girl had been found on the Child o' Sin River, and black pelts
were hung as mourning on the lodges and houses and walls of the Fort, and
the father shut himself in his room, admitting no one.  Still, they
mourned without great cause.

But, if the girl had taken the sins of Ambroise with her, she had left
him beside that soft flowing river of her goodness; and the savour of the
herbs on its banks was to him like the sun on a patch of pennyroyal,
bringing medicine to the sick body through the nostrils.  So one morning,
after many months, having crept from the covert of remorse, he took a
guide to start him in the right trail, and began his journey to the
Valley, whither she had gone before him, though he knew it not.  From the
moment that his guide left him dangers beset him, and those spirits
called the Mockers, which are the evil deeds of a man crying to Heaven,
came crying about him from the dead white trees, breathing through the
powdery air, whistling down the moonlight; so that to cheer him he called
out again and again, like any heathen:

              "Keeper, O Keeper of the Kimash Hills!
               I am as a dog in the North Sea,
               I am as a bat in a cave,
               As a lizard am I on a prison wall,
               As a tent with no pole,
               As a bird with one wing;
               I am as a seal in the desert,
               I am as a wild horse alone.
               O Scarlet Hunter of the Kimash Hills!
               Thou hast an arm like a shooting star,
               Thou hast an eye like the North Sky fires,
               Thou hast a pouch for the hungry,
               Thou hast a tent for the lost:
               Hear me, O Keeper of the Kimash Hills!"

And whether or not this availed him, who can tell?  There be many names
of the One Thing, and the human soul hath the same north and south, if
there be any north and south and east and west, save in the words of men.
But something availed; and one day a footworn traveller, entering the
Valley at the southmost corner, laid his cap and bag, moccasins, bow and
arrow, and an iron weapon away in a hollow log, seeing not that there
were also another bag and cap, and a pair of moccasins there.  Then,
barefooted and bareheaded, he marched slowly up the Valley, and all its
loveliness smote him as a red iron is buffeted at the forge; and an
exquisite agony coursed through his veins, so that he cried out, hiding
his face.  And yet he needs must look and look, all his sight aching with
this perfection, never overpowering him, but keeping him ever in the
relish of his torture.

At last he came to the door of the Tent in the late evening, and, intent
not only to buy back the soul he had marketed--for the sake of the memory
of the woman, and believing that none would die for him and that he must
die for himself--he lifted the curtain and entered.  Then he gave a great
cry, for there she lay asleep, face downward, her forehead on the Purple
Mat.

"Sherah!  Sherah!" he cried, dropping on his knees beside her and
lifting up her head.

"Ambroise!" she called out faintly, her pale face drawing away from his
breast.

"Sherah, why didst thou come here?" he said.  "Thou!  thou!"

"To buy back my soul, Ambroise.  And this is the last day of the year
that I have spent here.  Oh, why, why didst thou come?  To-morrow all
should have been well!"

"To buy back thy soul--thou didst no wrong!"  But at that moment their
eyes drew close, and changed, and he understood.

"For me--for me!" he whispered.

"Nay, for me!" she replied.

Then they noticed that the Purple Mat on which they knelt was red under
their knees, and a goodly light shone through the Tent, not of the day or
night.  And as they looked amazed, the curtain of the Tent drew open, and
one entered, clothed in red from head to foot; and they knew him to be
the Scarlet Hunter, the lover of the lost, the Keeper of the Kimash
Hills.

Looking at them steadfastly he said to Sherah: "Thou has prevailed.
To-night, at the setting of the sun, an old man died in Syria who uttered
thy name as in a dream when he passed.  The soul of Ambroise hath been
bought back by thee."

Then he spoke to Ambroise.  "Because thy spirit was willing, and for the
woman's sake thou shalt have peace; but this year which she has spent for
thee shall be taken from thy life, and added to hers.  Come, and I will
start ye on the swift trail to your own country, and ye shall come here
no more."

As they rose, obeying him, they saw that the red of the Mat had gone a
perfect white, and they knew not what to think, for they had acted after
the manner of the heathen; but that night, as they travelled with joy
towards that Inn called Home, down at the Fort, a preacher with rude
noise cried to those who would hear him: "Though your sins be as scarlet
they shall become whiter than snow."






THERE WAS A LITTLE CITY

It lay between the mountains and the sea, and a river ran down past it,
carrying its good and ill news to a pacific shore, and out upon soft
winds, travelling lazily to the scarlet east.  All white and a tempered
red, it nestled in a valley with other valleys on lower steppes, which
seemed as if built by the gods, that they might travel easily from the
white-topped mountains, Margath, Shaknon, and the rest, to wash their
feet in the sea.  In the summer a hot but gracious mistiness softened the
green of the valleys, the varying colours of the hills, the blue of the
river, the sharp outlines of the cliffs.  Along the high shelf of the
mountain, muletrains travelled like a procession seen in dreams--slow,
hazy, graven yet moving, a part of the ancient hills themselves; upon the
river great rafts, manned by scarlet-vested crews, swerved and swam,
guided by the gigantic oars which needed five men to lift and
swayargonauts they from the sweet-smelling forests to the salt-smelling
main.  In winter the little city lay still under a coverlet of pure
white, with the mists from the river and the great falls above frozen
upon the trees, clothing them as graciously as with white samite; so that
far as eye could see there was a heavenly purity upon all, covering every
mean and distorted thing.  There were days when no wind stirred anywhere,
and the gorgeous sun made the little city and all the land round about a
pretty silver kingdom, where Oberon and his courtiers might have danced
and been glad.  Often, too, you could hear a distant wood-cutter's axe
make a pleasant song in the air, and the wood-cutter himself, as the
hickory and steel swung in a shining half-circle to the bole of balsam,
was clad in the bright livery of frost, his breath issuing in grey smoke
like life itself, mystic and peculiar, man, axe, tree, and breath one
common being.  And when, by-and-by, the woodcutter added a song of his
own to the song his axe made, the illusion was not lost, but rather
heightened; for it, too, was part of the unassuming pride of nature,
childlike in its simplicity, primeval in its suggestion and
expression.  The song had a soft monotony, swinging backwards and
forwards to the waving axe like the pendulum of a clock.  It began with a
low humming, as one could think man made before he heard the Voice which
taught him how to speak.  And then came the words:

              "None shall stand in the way of the lord,
               The lord of the Earth--of the rivers and trees,
               Of the cattle and fields and vines!
               Hew!
               Here shall I build me my cedar home,
               A city with gates, a road to the sea
               For I am the lord of the Earth!
               Hew!  Hew!
               Hew and hew, and the sap of the tree
               Shall be yours, and your bones shall be strong,
               Shall be yours, and your heart shall rejoice,
               Shall be yours, and the city be yours,
               And the key of its gates be the key
               Of the home where your little ones dwell.
               Hew and be strong!  Hew and rejoice!
               For man is the lord of the Earth,
               And God is the Lord over all!"

And so long as the little city stands will this same wood-cutter's name
and history stand also.  He had camped where it stood now, when nothing
was there save the wild duck in the reeds, the antelopes upon the hills,
and all manner of furred and feathered things; and it all was his.  He
had seen the yellow flashes of gold in the stream called Pipi, and he had
not gathered it, for his life was simple, and he was young enough to
cherish in his heart the love of the open world, beyond the desire of
cities and the stir of the market-place.  In those days there was not a
line in his face, not an angle in his body--all smoothly rounded and
lithe and alert, like him that was called "the young lion of Dedan."  Day
by day he drank in the wisdom of the hills and the valleys, and he wrote
upon the dried barks of trees the thoughts that came as he lay upon the
bearskin in his tent, or cooled his hands and feet, of a hot summer day,
in the moist sandy earth, and watched the master of the deer lead his
cohorts down the passes of the hills.

But by-and-by mule-trains began to crawl along the ledges of Margath
Mountain, and over Shaknon came adventurers, and after them, wandering
men seeking a new home, women and children coming also.  But when these
came he had passed the spring-time of his years, and had grown fixed in
the love of the valley, where his sole visitors had been passing tribes
of Indians, who knew his moods and trespassed not at all on his domain.
The adventurers hungered for the gold in the rivers, and they made it one
long washing-trough, where the disease that afflicted them passed on from
man to man like poison down a sewer.  Then the little city grew, and with
the search for gold came other seekings and findings and toilings, and
men who came as one stops at an inn to feed, stayed to make their home,
and women made the valley cheerful, and children were born, and the pride
of the place was as great as that of some village of the crimson East,
where every man has ancestors to Mahomet and beyond.

And he, Felion, who had been lord and master of the valley, worked with
them, but did not seek for riches, and more often drew away into the
hills to find some newer place unspoiled by man.  But again and again he
returned; for no fire is like the old fire, and no trail like the old
trail.  And at last it seemed as if he had driven his tent-peg in the
Long Valley for ever; for, from among the women who came, he chose one
comely and wise and kind, and for five years the world grew older, and
Felion did not know it.  When he danced his little daughter on his knee,
he felt that he had found a new world.

But? a day came when trouble fell upon the little city, for of a sudden
the reef of gold was lost, and the great crushing-mills stood idle, and
the sound of the hammers was stayed.  And they came to Felion, because in
his youth he had been of the best of the schoolmen; and he got up from
his misery--only the day before his wife had taken a great and lonely
journey to that Country which welcomes, but never yields again--and
leaving his little child behind, he went down to the mines.  And in three
days they found the reef once more; for it had curved like the hook of a
sickle, and the first arc of the yellow circle had dropped down into the
bowels of the earth.

And so he saved the little city from disaster, and the people blessed him
at the moment; and the years went on.

Then there came a time when the little city was threatened with a woeful
flood, because of a breaking flume; but by a simple and wise device
Felion stayed the danger.

And again the people blessed him; and the years went on.

By-and-by an awful peril came, for two-score children had set a great
raft loose upon the river, and they drifted down towards the rapids in
the sight of the people; and mothers and helpless fathers wrung their
hands, for on the swift tide no boat could reach them, and none could
intercept the raft.  But Felion, seeing, ran out upon the girders of a
bridge that was being builded, and there, before them all, as the raft
passed under, he let himself fall, breaking his leg as he dropped among
the timbers of the fore-part of the raft; for the children were all
gathered at the back, where the great oars lay motionless, one dragging
in the water behind.  Felion drew himself over to the huge oar, and with
the strength of five men, while the people watched and prayed, he kept
the raft straight for the great slide, else it had gone over the dam and
been lost, and all that were thereon.  A mile below, the raft was brought
to shore, and again the people said that Felion had saved the little city
from disaster.

And they blessed him for the moment; and the years went on.

Felion's daughter grew towards womanhood, and her beauty was great, and
she was welcome everywhere in the valley, the people speaking well of her
for her own sake.  But at last a time came when of the men of the valley
one called, and Felion's daughter came quickly to him, and with tears for
her father and smiles for her husband, she left the valley and journeyed
into the east, having sworn to love and cherish him while she lived.  And
her father, left solitary, mourned for her, and drew away into a hill
above the valley in a cedar house that he built; and having little else
to love, loved the earth, and sky, and animals, and the children from the
little city when they came his way.  But his heart was sore; for by-and-
by no letters came from his daughter, and the little city, having
prospered, concerned it self no more with him.  When he came into its
streets there were those who laughed, for he was very tall and rude, and
his grey hair hung loose on his shoulders, and his dress was still a
hunter's.  They had not long remembered the time when a grievous disease,
like a plague, fell upon the place, and people died by scores, as sheep
fall in a murrain.  And again they had turned to him, and he, because he
knew of a miraculous medicine got from Indian sachems, whose people had
suffered of this sickness, came into the little city, and by his
medicines and fearless love and kindness stayed the plague.

And thus once more he saved the little city from disaster, and they
blessed him for the moment; and the years went on.

In time they ceased to think of Felion at all, and he was left alone;
even the children came no more to visit him; and he had pleasure only in
hunting and shooting and in felling trees, with which he built a high
stockade and a fine cedar house within it.  And all the work of this he
did with his own hands, even to the polishing of the floors and the
carved work of the large fireplaces.  Yet he never lived in the house,
nor in any room of it, and the stockade gate was always shut; and when
any people passed that way they stared and shrugged their shoulders, and
thought Felion mad or a fool.  But he was wise in his own way, which was
not the way of those who had reason to bless him for ever, and who forgot
him, though he had served them through so many years.  Against the little
city he had an exceeding bitterness; and this grew, and had it not been
that his heart was kept young by the love of the earth, and the beasts
about him in the hills, he must needs have cursed the place and died.
But the sight of a bird in the nest with her young, and the smell of a
lair, and the light of the dawn that came out of the east, and the winds
that came up from the sea, and the hope that would not die kept him from
being of those who love not life for life's sake, be it in ease or in
sorrow.  He was of those who find all worth the doing, even all worth the
suffering; and so, though he frowned and his lips drew tight with anger
when he looked down at the little city, he felt that elsewhere in the
world there was that which made it worth the saving.

If his daughter had been with him he would have laughed at that which his
own hands had founded, protected, and saved.  But no word came from her,
and laughter was never on his lips--only an occasional smile when,
perhaps, he saw two sparrows fighting, or watched the fish chase each
other in the river, or a toad, too lazy to jump, walk stupidly like a
convict, dragging his long, green legs behind him.  And when Felion
looked up towards Shaknon and Margath, a light came in his eyes, for they
were wise and quiet, and watched the world, and something of their
grandeur drew about him like a cloak.  As age cut deep lines in his face
and gave angles to his figure, a strange, settled dignity grew upon him,
whether he swung his axe by the balsams or dressed the skins of the
animals he had killed, piling up the pelts in a long shed in the
stockade, a goodly heritage for his daughter, if she ever came back.
Every day at sunrise he walked to the door of his house and looked
eastward steadily, and sometimes there broke from his lips the words:
"My daughter-Carille!"  Again, he would sit and brood with his chin in
his hand, and smile, as though remembering pleasant things.

One day at last, in the full tide of summer, a man, haggard and troubled,
came to Felion's house, and knocked, and, getting no reply, waited; and
whenever he looked down at the little city he wrung his hands, and more
than once he put them up to his face and shuddered, and again looked for
Felion.  Just when the dusk was rolling down, Felion came back, and,
seeing the man, would have passed him without a word, but that the man
stopped with an eager, sorrowful gesture and said: "The plague has come
upon us again, and the people, remembering how you healed them long ago,
beg you to come."

At that Felion leaned his fishing-rod against the door and answered:

"What people?"

The other then replied: "The people of the little city below, Felion."

"I do not know your name," was the reply; "I know naught of you or of
your city."

"Are you mad?" cried the man.  "Do you forget the little city down
there?  Have you no heart?"

A strange smile passed over Felion's face, and he answered: "When one
forgets, why should the other remember?"

He turned and went into the house and shut the door, and though the man
knocked, the door was no opened, and he went back angry and miserable;
and the people could not believe that Felion would no come to help them,
as he had done all his life.  A dawn three others came, and they found
Felion looking out towards the east, his lips moving as though he prayed.
Yet it was no prayer, only a call, that was on his lips.  They felt a
sort of awe in his presence, for now he seemed as if he had lived more
than a century, so wise and old was the look of his face, so white his
hair, so set and distant his dignity.  They begged him to come, and,
bringing his medicines, save the people, for death was galloping through
the town, knocking at many doors.

"One came to heal you," he answered--"the young man of the schools, who
wrote mystic letters after his name; it swings on a brass by his door-
where is he?"

"He is dead of the plague," they replied, "and the other also that came
with him, who fled before the sickness, fell dead of it on the roadside,
going to the sea."

"Why should I go?" he replied, and he turned threateningly to his
weapon, as if in menace of their presence.

"You have no one to leave behind," they answered eagerly, "and you are
old."

"Liars," he rejoined, "let the little city save itself!" and he wheeled
and went into his house, and they saw that they had erred in not
remembering his daughter, whose presence they had once prized.  They saw
that they had angered him beyond soothing; and they went back in grief,
for two of them had lost dear relatives by the fell sickness.  When they
told what had happened, the people said: "We will send the women; he will
listen to them--he had a daughter."

That afternoon, when all the hills lay still and dead, and nowhere did
bird or breeze stir, the women came, and they found him seated with his
back turned to the town.  He was looking into the deep woods, into the
hot shadows of the trees.

"We have come to bring you to the little city," they said to him; "the
sick grow in numbers every hour."

"It is safe in the hills," he answered, not looking at them.  "Why do the
people stay in the valley?"

"Every man has a friend, or a wife, or a child, ill or dying, and every
woman has a husband, or a child, or a friend, or a brother.  Cowards have
fled, and many of them have fallen by the way."

"Last summer I lay sick here many weeks and none came near me--why should
I go to the little city?" he demanded austerely.  "Four times I saved
it, and of all that I saved none came to give me water to drink, or food
to eat, and I lay burning with fever, and thirsty and hungry--God of
heaven, how thirsty!"

"We did not know," they answered humbly; "you came to us so seldom, we
had forgotten; we were fools."

"I came and went fifty years," he answered bitterly, "and I have
forgotten how to rid the little city of the plague!"

At that one of the women, mad with anger, made as if to catch him by his
beard, but she forbore, and said: "Liar--the men shall hang you to your
own rooftree!"

His eyes had a wild light, but he waved his hand quietly, and answered:
"Begone, and learn how great a sin is ingratitude."

He turned away from them gloomily, and would have entered his home, but
one of the women, who was young, plucked his sleeve, and said
sorrowfully: "I loved Carille, your daughter."

"And forgot her and her father.  I am three-score and ten years, and she
has been gone fifteen, and for the first time I see your face," was his
scornful reply.

She was tempted to say: "I was ever bearing children and nursing them,
and the hills were hard to climb, and my husband would not go;" but she
saw how dark his look was, and she hid her face in her hands and turned
away to follow after the others.  She had five little children, and her
heart was anxious for them and her eyes full of tears.

Anger and remorse seized on the little city, and there were those who
would have killed Felion, but others saw that the old man had been sorely
wronged in the past, and these said: "Wait until the morrow and we will
devise something."

That night a mule-train crept slowly down the mountain side and entered
the little city, for no one who came with them knew of the plague.  The
caravan had come from the east across the great plains, and not from the
west, which was the travelled highway to the sea.  Among them was a woman
who already was ill of a fever, and knew naught of what passed round her.
She had with her a beautiful child; and one of the women of the place
devised a thing.  "This woman," she said, "does not belong to the little
city, and he can have nothing against her; she is a stranger.  Let one of
us take this beautiful lad to him, and he shall ask Felion to come and
save his mother."

Every one approved the woman's wisdom, and in the early morning she
herself, with another, took the child and went up the long hillside in
the heavy heat; and when they came near Felion's house the women stayed
behind, and the child went forward, having been taught what to say to the
old man.

Felion sat just within his doorway, looking out into the sunlight which
fell upon the red and white walls of the little city, flanked by young
orchards, with great, oozy meadows beyond these, where cattle ate, knee-
deep in the lush grass and cool reed-beds.  Along the riverside, far up
on the high banks, were the tall couches of dead Indians, set on poles,
their useless weapons laid along the deerskin pall.  Down the hurrying
river there passed a raft, bearing a black flag on a pole, and on it were
women and children who were being taken down to the sea from the doomed
city.  These were they who had lost fathers and brothers; and now were
going out alone with the shadow of the plague over them, for there was
none to say them nay.  The tall oarsmen bent to their task, and Felion
felt his blood beat faster when he saw the huge oars swing high, then
drop and bend in the water, as the raft swung straight in its course and
passed on safe through the narrow slide into the white rapids below,
which licked the long timbers as with white tongues, and tossed spray
upon the sad voyagers.  Felion remembered the day when he left his own
child behind and sprang from the bridge to the raft whereon were the
children of the little city, and saved them.

And when he tried to be angry now, the thought of the children as they
watched him, with his broken leg striving against their peril, softened
his heart.  He shook his head, for suddenly there came to him the memory
of a time, three-score years before, when he and the foundryman's
daughter had gone hunting flag-flowers by the little trout stream; of the
songs they sang together at the festivals, she in her sweet Quaker garb
and demure Quaker beauty, he lithe, alert, and full of the joy of life
and loving.  As he sat so, thinking, he wondered where she was, and why
he should be thinking of her now, facing the dreary sorrow of this
pestilence and his own anger and vengeance.  He nodded softly to the
waving trees far down in the valley, for his thoughts had drifted on to
his wife as he first saw her.  She was standing bare-armed among the
grape-vines by a wall of rock, the dew of rich life on her lip and
forehead, her grey eyes swimming with a soft light; and looking at her he
had loved her at once, as he had loved, on the instant, the little child
that came to him later; as he had loved the girl into which the child
grew, till she left him and came back no more.  Why had he never gone in
search of her?

He got to his feet involuntarily and stepped towards the door, looking
down into the valley.  As his eyes rested on the little city his face
grew dark, but his eyes were troubled and presently grew bewildered, for
out of a green covert near there stepped a pretty boy, who came to him
with frank, unabashed face and a half-shy smile.

Felion did not speak at first, but stood looking, and presently the child
said: "I have come to fetch you."

"To fetch me where, little man?" asked Felion, a light coming into his
face, his heart beating faster.

"To my mother.  She is sick."

"Where is your mother?"

"She's in the village down there," answered the boy, pointing.

In spite of himself, Felion smiled in a sour sort of way, for the boy had
called the place a village, and he relished the unconscious irony.

"What is the matter with her?" asked Felion, beckoning the lad inside.

The lad came and stood in the doorway, gazing round curiously, while the
old man sat down and looked at him, moved, he knew not why.

The bright steel of Felion's axe, standing in the corner, caught the
lad's eye and held it.  Felion saw, and said: "What are you thinking of?"

The lad answered: "Of the axe.  When I'm bigger I will cut down trees and
build a house, a bridge, and a city.  Aren't you coming quick to help my
mother?  She will die if you don't come."

Felion did not answer, and from the trees without two women watched him
anxiously.

"Why should I come?" asked Felion curiously.  "Because she's sick, and
she's my mother."

"Why should I do it because she's your mother?"

"I don't know," the lad answered, and his brow knitted in the attempt to
think it out, "but I like you."  He came and stood beside the old man and
looked into his face with a pleasant confidence.  "If your mother was
sick, and I could heal her, I would--I know I would--I wouldn't be afraid
to go down into the village."

Here were rebuke, love, and impeachment, all in one, and the old man half
started from his seat.

"Did you think I was afraid?" he asked of the boy, as simply as might a
child of a child, so near are children and wise men in their thoughts.

"I knew if you didn't it'd be because you were angry or were afraid, and
you didn't look angry."

"How does one look when one is angry?"

"Like my father."

"And how does your father look?"

"My father's dead."

"Did he die of the plague?" asked Felion, laying his hand on the lad's
shoulder.

"No," said the lad quickly, and shut his lips tight.

"Won't you tell me?" asked Felion, with a strange inquisitiveness.

"No.  Mother'll tell you, but I won't."  The lad's eyes filled with
tears.

"Poor boy--poor boy!" said Felion, and his hand tightened on the small
shoulder.

"Don't be sorry for me; be sorry for mother, please," said the boy, and
he laid a hand on the old man's knee, and that touch went to a heart long
closed against the little city below; and Felion rose and said: "I will
go with you to your mother."

Then he went into another room, and the boy came near the axe and ran his
fingers along the bright steel, and fondled the handle, as does a hunter
the tried weapon which has been his through many seasons.  When the old
man came back he said to the boy: "Why do you look at the axe?"

"I don't know," was the answer; "maybe because my mother used to sing a
song about the wood-cutters."  Without a word, and thinking much, he
stepped out into the path leading to the little city, the lad holding one
hand.  Years afterwards men spoke with a sort of awe or reverence of
seeing the beautiful stranger lad leading old Felion into the plague-
stricken place, and how, as they passed, women threw themselves at
Felion's feet, begging him to save their loved ones.  And a drunkard cast
his arm round the old man's shoulder and sputtered foolish pleadings in
his ear; but Felion only waved them back gently, and said: "By-and-by,
by-and-by--God help us all!"

Now a fevered hand snatched at him from a doorway, moanings came from
everywhere, and more than once he almost stumbled over a dead body;
others he saw being carried away to the graveyard for hasty burial.  Few
were the mourners that followed, and the faces of those who watched the
processions go by were set and drawn.  The sunlight and the green trees
seemed an insult to the dead.

They passed into the house where the sick woman lay, and some met him at
the door with faces of joy and meaning; for now they knew the woman and
would have spoken to him of her; but he waved them off, and put his
fingers upon his lips and went where a fire burned in a kitchen, and
brewed his medicines.  And the child entered the room where his mother
lay, and presently he came to the kitchen and said: "She is asleep--my
mother."

The old man looked down on him a moment steadily, and a look of
bewilderment came into his face.  But he turned away again to the
simmering pots.  The boy went to the window and, leaning upon the sill,
began to hum softly a sort of chant, while he watched a lizard
running hither and thither in the sun.  As he hummed, the old man
listened, and presently, with his medicines in his hands and a half-
startled look, he came over to the lad.

"What are you humming?" he asked.

The lad answered: "A song of the wood-cutters."

"Sing it again," said Felion.

The lad began to sing:

              "Here shall I build me my cedar house,
               A city with gates, a road to the sea--
               For I am the lord of the Earth!  Hew!  Hew!"

The old man stopped him.  "What is your name?"  "My name is Felion,"
answered the lad; and he put his face close to the jug that held the
steaming tinctures: but the old man caught the little chin in his huge
hand and bent back the head, looking long into the lad's eyes.  At last
he caught little Felion's hand and hurried into the other room, where the
woman lay in a stupor.  The old man came quickly to her and looked into
her face.  Seeing, he gave a broken cry and said:

"Carille, my daughter!  Carille!"

He drew her to his breast, and as he did so he groaned aloud, for he knew
that inevitable Death was waiting for her at the door.  He straightened
himself up, clasped the child to his breast, and said: "I, too, am
Felion, my little son."

And then he set about to defeat that dark, hovering Figure at the door.

For three long hours he sat beside her, giving her little by little his
potent medicines; and now and again he stopped his mouth with his hand,
lest he should cry out; and his eyes never wavered from her face, not
even to the boy, who lay asleep in the corner.

At last his look relaxed its vigilance, for a dewy look passed over the
woman's face, and she opened her eyes and saw him, and gave a little cry
of "Father!" and was straightway lost in his arms.

"I have come home to die," she said.

"No, no, to live!" he answered firmly.  "Why did you not send me word
all these long years?"

"My husband was in shame, in prison, and I in sorrow," she answered
sadly.  "I could not."

"He did evil?  He is--" he paused.

"He is dead," she said.  "It is better so."  Her eyes wandered round the
room restlessly, and then fixed upon the sleeping child, and a smile
passed over her face.  She pointed to the lad.

The old man nodded.  "He brought me here," he said gently.  Then he got
to his feet.  "You must sleep now," he added, and he gave her a cordial.
"I must go forth and save the sick."

"Is it a plague?" she asked.

He nodded.  "They said you would not come to save them," she continued
reproachfully.  "You came to me because I was your Carille, only for
that?"

"No, no," he answered; "I knew not who you were.  I came to save a mother
to her child."

"Thank God!" she said.

With a happy smile she hid her face in the pillow.  At last, leaving her
and the child asleep, old Felion went forth into the little city, and the
people flocked to him, and for many days he came and went ceaselessly.

And once more he saved the city, and the people blessed him: and the
years go on.






THE FORGE IN THE VALLEY

He lay where he could see her working at the forge.  As she worked she
sang:

              "When God was making the world,
                 (Swift is the wind and white is the fire)
               The feet of his people danced the stars;
               There was laughter and swinging bells,

               And clanging iron and breaking breath,
               The hammers of heaven making the hills,
               The vales on the anvil of God.
                 (Wild is the fire and low is the wind.)"

His eyes were shining, and his face had a pale radiance from the
reflected light, though he lay in the shadow where he could watch her,
while she could not see him.  Now her hand was upon the bellows, and the
low, white fire seethed hungrily up, and set its teeth upon the iron she
held; now it turned the iron about upon the anvil, and the sparks
showered about her very softly and strangely.  There was a cheerful
gravity in her motions, a high, fine look in her face.

They two lived alone in the solitudes of Megalon Valley.

It was night now, and the pleasant gloom of the valley was not broken by
any sound save the hum of the stream near by, and the song, and the
ringing anvil.  But into the workshop came the moist, fragrant smell of
the acacia and the maple, and a long brown lizard stretched its neck
sleepily across the threshold of the door opening into the valley.

The song went on:

              "When God had finished the world
                 (Bright was the fire and sweet was the wind)
               Up from the valleys came song,
               To answer the morning stars,
               And the hand of man on the anvil rang;
               His breath was big in his breast, his life
               Beat strong on the walls of the world.
                 (Glad is the wind and tall is the fire.)"

He put his hands to his eyes, and took them away again, as though to make
sure that the song was not a dream.  Wonder grew upon his thin, bearded
face, he ran his fingers through his thick hair in a dazed way.  Then he
lay and looked, and a rich warm flush crept over his cheek, and stayed
there.

There was a great gap in his memory.

The evening wore on.  Once or twice the woman turned towards the room
where the man lay, and listened--she could not see his face from where
she stood.  At such times he lay still, though his heart beat quickly,
like that of an expectant child.  His lips opened to speak, but still
they remained silent.  As yet he was like a returned traveller who does
not quickly recognise old familiar things, and who is struggling with
vague suggestions and forgotten events.  As time went on, the woman
turned towards the doorway oftener, and shifted her position so that she
faced it, and the sparks, flying up, lighted her face with a wonderful
irregular brightness.

"Samantha," he said at last, and his voice sounded so strange to him that
the word quivered timidly towards her.

She paused upon a stroke, and some new note in his voice sent so sudden a
thrill to her heart that she caught her breath with a painful kind of
joy.  The hammer dropped upon the anvil, and, in a moment, she stood in
the doorway of his room.

"Francis, Francis," she responded in a low whisper.  He started up from
his couch of skins.  "Samantha, my wife!" he cried, in a strong proud
voice.

She dropped beside him and caught his head, like a mother, to her
shoulder, and set her warm lips on his forehead and hair with a kind of
hunger; and then he drew her face down and kissed her on the lips.  Tears
hung at her eyes, and presently dropped on her cheeks, a sob shook her,
and then she was still, her hands grasping his shoulders.

"Have I been ill?" he asked.

"You have been very ill, Francis."

"Has it been long?"

Her fingers passed tenderly through his grizzled hair.  "Too long, too
long, my husband," she replied.

"Is it summer now?"

"Yes, Francis, it is summer."

"Was it in the spring, Samantha?--Yes, I think it was in the spring," he
added, musing.

"It was in a spring."

"There was snow still on the mountain-top, the river was running high,
and wild fowl were gathered on the island in the lake--yes, I remember,
I think."

"And the men were working at the mine," she whispered, her voice shaking
a little, and her eyes eagerly questioning his face.

"Ah, the mine--it was the mine, Samantha!" he said abruptly, his eyes
flashing up.  "I was working at the forge to make a great bolt for the
machinery, and some one forgot and set the engine in motion.  I ran out;
but it was too late .  .  .  and then .  .  ."

"And then you tried to save them, Francis, and you were hurt."

"What month is this, my wife?"

"It is December."

"And that was in October?"

"Yes, in October."

"I have been ill since?  What happened?"

"Many were killed, Francis, and you and I came away."

"Where are we now?  I do not know the place."

"This is Megalon Valley.  You and I live alone here."

"Why did you bring me here?"

"I did not bring you, Francis; you wished me to come.  One day you said
to me: 'There is a place in Megalon Valley where, long ago, an old man
lived, who had become a stranger among men--a place where the blackbird
stays, and the wolf-dog troops and hides, and the damson grows as thick
as blossoms on the acacia.  We will go there.'  And I came with you."

"I do not remember.  What of the mine?  Was I a coward and left the mine?
There was no one understood the ways of the wheel, and rod, and steam,
save me.

"The mine is closed, Francis," she answered gently.  "You were no coward,
but--but you had strange fancies.

"When did the mine close?" he said, with a kind of sorrow; "I put hard
work and good years into it."  At that moment, when her face drew close
to his, the vision of her as she stood at the anvil came to him with a
new impression, and he said again in a half-frightened way: "When did it
close, Samantha?"

"The mine was closed--twelve years ago, my own dear husband."

He got to his feet and clasped her to his breast.  A strength came to him
which had eluded him twelve years, and she, womanlike, delighted in that
strength, and, with a great gladness, changed eyes and hands with him;
keeping her soul still her own, brooding and lofty, as is the soul of
every true woman, though, like this one, she labours at a forge, and in a
far, untenanted country is faithful friend, ceaseless apothecary to a
comrade with a disordered mind; living on savage meats, clothing herself
and the other in skins, and, with a divine persistence, keeping a
cheerful heart, certain that the intelligence which was frightened from
its home would come back one day.  It should be hers to watch for the
great moment, and give the wanderer loving welcome, lest it should hurry
madly away again into the desert, never to return.

She had her reward, yet she wept.  She had carried herself before him
with the bright ways of an unvexed girl these twelve years past; she had
earned the salt of her tears.  He was dazed still, but, the doublet of
his mind no longer unbraced, he understood what she had been to him, and
how she had tended him in absolute loneliness, her companions the wild
things of the valley--these and God.

He drew her into the workshop, and put his hand upon the bellows and
churned them, so that the fire roared joyously up, and the place was red
with the light.  In this light he turned her to him and looked at her.
The look was as that of one who had come back from the dead--that naked,
profound, unconditional gaze which is as deep and honest as the primeval
sense.  His eyes fell upon her rich, firm, stately body; it lingered for
a moment on the brown fulness of her hair; then her look was gathered to
his, and they fell into each other's arms.

For long they sat in the solemn silence of their joy, and so awed were
they by the thing which had come to them that they felt no surprise when
a wolf-dog crawled over the lizard on the threshold, and stole along the
wall with shining, bloody eyes to an inner room, and stayed there
munching meat to surfeit and drowsiness, and at last crept out and lay
beside the forge in a thick sleep.  These two had lived so much with the
untamed things of nature, the bellows and the fire had been so long
there, and the clang of the anvil was so familiar, that there was a
kinship among them, man and beast, with the woman as ruler.

"Tell me, Samantha," he said at last, "what has happened during these
twelve years, all from the first.  Keep nothing back.  I am strong now."
He looked around the workshop, then, suddenly, at her, with a strange
pain, and they both turned their heads away for an instant, for the same
thought was on them.  Then, presently, she spoke, and answered his shy,
sorrowful thought before all else.  "The child is gone," she softly said.

He sat still, but a sob was in his throat.  He looked at her with a kind
of fear.  He wondered if his madness had cost the life of the child.  She
understood.  "Did I ever see the child?" he asked.

"Oh yes, I sometimes thought that through the babe you would be yourself
again.  When you were near her you never ceased to look at her and fondle
her, as I thought very timidly; and you would start sometimes and gaze at
me with the old wise look hovering at your eyes.  But the look did not
stay.  The child was fond of you, but she faded and pined, and one day as
you nursed her you came to me and said: 'See, beloved, the little one
will not wake.  She pulled at my beard and said, "Daddy," and fell
asleep.'  And I took her from your arms.  .  .  .  There is a chestnut
tree near the door of our cottage at the mine.  One night you and I
buried her there; but you do not remember her, do you?"

"My child, my child!" he said, looking out into the night; and he lifted
up his arms and looked at them.  "I held her here, and still I never held
her; I fondled her, and yet I never fondled her; I buried her, yet--
to me--she never was born."

"You have been far away, Francis; you have come back home.  I waited, and
prayed, and worked with you, and was patient.  .  .  .  It is very
strange," she continued.  "In all these twelve years you cannot remember
our past, though you remembered about this place--the one thing, as if
God had made it so--and now you cannot remember those twelve years."

"Tell me now of the twelve years," he urged.

"It was the same from day to day.  When we came from the mountain, we
brought with us the implements of the forge upon a horse.  Now and again
as we travelled we cut our way through the heavy woods.  You were changed
for the better then; a dreadful trouble seemed to have gone from your
face.  There was a strong kind of peace in the valley, and there were so
many birds and animals, and the smell of the trees was so fine, that we
were not lonely, neither you nor I."

She paused, thinking, her eyes looking out to where the Evening Star was
sailing slowly out of the wooded horizon, his look on her.  In the pause
the wolf-dog raised its big, sleepy eyes at them, then plunged its head
into its paws, its wildness undisturbed by their presence.

Presently the wife continued: "At last we reached here, and here we have
lived, where no human being, save one, has ever been.  We put up the
forge, and in a little hill not far away we found coal for it.  The days
went on.  It was always summer, though there came at times a sharp frost,
and covered the ground with a coverlet of white.  But the birds were
always with us, and the beasts were our friends.  I learned to love even
the shrill cry of the reed hens, and the soft tap-tap of the wood-pecker
is the sweetest music to my ear after the song of the anvil.  How often
have you and I stood here at the anvil, the fire heating the iron, and
our hammers falling constantly!  Oh, Francis, I knew that only here with
God and His dumb creatures, and His wonderful healing world, all sun, and
wind, and flowers, and blossoming trees, working as you used to work, as
the first of men worked, would the sane wandering soul return to you.
The thought was in you, too, for you led me here, and have been patient
also in the awful exile of your mind."

"I have been as a child, and not as a man," he said gravely.  "Shall I
ever again be a man, as I once was, Samantha?"

"You cannot see yourself," she said.  "A week ago you fell ill, and since
then you have been pale and worn; but your body has been, and is, that of
a great strong man.  In the morning I will take you to a spring in the
hills, and you shall see yourself, beloved."

He stood up, stretched himself, went to the door, and looked out into the
valley flooded with moonlight.  He drew in a great draught of air, and
said: "The world--the great, wonderful world, where men live, and love
work, and do strong things!"--he paused, and turned with a trouble in his
face.  "My wife," he said, "you have lived with a dead man twelve years,
and I have lost twelve years in the world.  I had a great thought once--
an invention--but now--" he hung his head bitterly.  She came to him, and
her hands slid up along his breast to his shoulders, and rested there;
and she said, with a glad smile: "Francis, you have lost nothing.  The
thing--the invention--was all but finished when you fell ill a week ago.
We have worked at it for these twelve years; through it, I think, you
have been brought back to me.  Come, there is a little work yet to, do
upon it;" and she drew him to where a machine of iron lay in the corner.
With a great cry he fell upon his knees beside it, and fondled it.

Then, presently, he rose, and caught his wife to his breast.

Together, a moment later, they stood beside the anvil.  The wolf-dog fled
out into the night from the shower of sparks, as, in the red light, the
two sang to the clanging of the hammers:

              "When God was making the world
                 (Swift is the wind and white is the fire)"




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Counsel of the overwise to go jolting through the soul
Love knows not distance; it hath no continent
When a child is born the mother also is born again






THE RIGHT OF WAY

By Gilbert Parker



CONTENTS

Volume 1.
I.        THE WAY TO THE VERDICT
II.       WHAT CAME OF THE TRIAL
III.      AFTER FIVE YEARS
IV.       CHARLEY MAKES A DISCOVERY
V.        THE WOMAN IN HELIOTROPE
VI.       THE WIND AND THE SHORN LAMB
VII.      "PEACE, PEACE, AND THERE IS NO PEACE!"
VIII.     THE COST OF THE ORNAMENT

Volume 2.
IX.       OLD DEBTS FOR NEW
X.        THE WAY IN AND THE WAY OUT
XI.       THE RAISING OF THE CURTAIN
XII.      THE COMING OF ROSALIE
XIII.     HOW CHARLEY WENT ADVENTURING, AND WHAT HE FOUND
XIV.      ROSALIE, CHARLEY, AND THE MAN THE WIDOW PLOMONDON JILTED
XV.       THE MARK IN THE PAPER
XVI.      MADAME DAUPHIN HAS A MISSION
XVII.     THE TAILOR MAKES A MIDNIGHT FORAY
XVIII.    THE STEALING OF THE CROSS

Volume 3.
XIX.      THE SIGN FROM HEAVEN
XX.       THE RETURN OF THE TAILOR
XXI.      THE CURE HAS AN INSPIRATION
XXII.     THE WOMAN WHO SAW
XXIII.    THE WOMAN WHO DID NOT TELL
XXIV.     THE SEIGNEUR TAKES A HAND IN THE GAME
XXV.      THE COLONEL TELLS HIS STORY
XXVI.     A SONG, A BOTTLE, AND A GHOST
XXVII.    OUT ON THE OLD TRAIL
XXVIII.   THE SEIGNEUR GIVES A WARNING

Volume 4.
XXIX.     THE WILD RIDE
XXX.      ROSALIE WARNS CHARLEY
XXXI.     CHARLEY STANDS AT BAY
XXXII.    JO PORTUGAIS TELLS A STORY
XXXIII.   THE EDGE OF LIFE
XXXIV.    IN AMBUSH
XXXV.     THE COMING OF MAXIMILIAN COUR AND ANOTHER
XXXVI.    BARRIERS SWEPT AWAY
XXXVII.   THE CHALLENGE OF PAULETTE DUBOIS
XXXVIII.  THE CURE AND THE SEIGNEUR VISIT THE TAILOR
XXXIX.    THE SCARLET WOMAN
XL.       AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING

Volume 5.
XLI.      IT WAS MICHAELMAS DAY
XLII.     A TRIAL AND A VERDICT
XLIII.    JO PORTUGAIS TELLS A STORY
XLIV.     "WHO WAS KATHLEEN?"
XLV.      SIX MONTHS GO BY
XLVI.     THE FORGOTTEN MAN
XLVII.    ONE WAS TAKEN AND THE OTHER LEFT
XLVIII.   "WHERE THE TREE OF LIFE IS BLOOMING--"
XLIX.     THE OPEN GATE

Volume 6.
L.        THE PASSION PLAY AT CHAUDIERE
LI.       FACE TO FACE
LII.      THE COMING OF BILLY
LIII.     THE SEIGNEUR AND THE CURE HAVE A SUSPICION
LIV.      M. ROSSIGNOL SLIPS THE LEASH
LV.       ROSALIE PLAYS A PART
LVI.      MRS. FLYNN SPEAKS
LVII.     A BURNING FIERY FURNACE
LVIII.    WITH HIS BACK TO THE WALL
LIX.      IN WHICH CHARLEY MEETS A STRANGER
LX.       THE HAND AT THE DOOR
LXI.      THE CURE SPEAKS

EPILOGUE




INTRODUCTION

In a book called 'The House of Harper', published in this year, 1912,
there are two letters of mine, concerning 'The Right of Way', written to
Henry M. Alden, editor of Harper's Magazine.  To my mind those letters
should never have been published.  They were purely personal.  They were
intended for one man's eyes only, and he was not merely an editor but a
beloved and admired personal friend.  Only to him and to W. E. Henley, as
editors, could I ever have emptied out my heart and brain; and, as may be
seen by these two letters, one written from London and the other from a
place near Southampton, I uncovered all my feelings, my hopes and my
ambitions concerning The Right of Way.  Had I been asked permission to
publish them I should not have granted it.  I may wear my heart upon my
sleeve for my friend, but not for the universe.

The most scathing thing ever said in literature was said by Robert
Buchanan on Dante Gabriel Rossetti's verses--"He has wheeled his nuptial
bed into the street."  Looking at these letters I have a great shrinking,
for they were meant only for the eyes of an aged man for whom I cared
enough to let him see behind the curtain.  But since they have been
printed, and without a "by your leave," I will use one or two passages
in them to show in what mood, under what pressure of impulse, under what
mental and, maybe, spiritual hypnotism it was written.  I first planned
it as a story of twenty-five thousand words, even as 'Valmond' was
planned as a story of five thousand words, and 'A Ladder of Swords' as a
story of twenty thousand words; but I had not written three chapters
before I saw what the destiny of the tale was to be.  I had gone to
Quebec to start the thing in the atmosphere where Charley Steele
belonged, and there it was borne in upon me that it must be a three-
decker novel, not a novelette.  I telegraphed to Harper & Brothers to ask
them whether it would suit them just as well if I made it into a long
novel.  They telegraphed their assent at once; so I went on.  At that
time Mr. F. N. Doubleday was a sort of director of Harper's firm.  To him
I had told the tale in a railway train, and he had carried me off at once
to Henry M. Alden, to whom I also told it, with the result that Harper's
Magazine was wide open to it, and there in Quebec, soon after my
interview with Mr. Alden and Mr. Doubleday, the book was begun.

The first of the letters published in The House of Harper, however, was
apparently written immediately after my return to London when the novel
was well on its way.  Evidently the first paragraph of the letter was an
apology for having suddenly announced the development of the book from a
long short story to a long novel; for I used these words:

"Yet if you really take an interest in the working of the human mind in
its relation to the vicissitudes of life, you will appreciate what I am
going to tell you, and will recognise that there is only stability in
evolution which the vulgar call chance.  .  .  .  Now, sir, perpend.
Charley Steele is going to be a novel of one hundred thousand words or
one hundred and twenty thousand--a real bang-up heartful of a novel."

Then there follows the confidence of a friend to a friend.  As I look
at the words I am not sorry that I wrote them.  They were a part of me.
They were the inveterate truth, but I would not willingly have uncovered
my inner self to any except the man to whom the words were written.  But
here is what I wrote:

"I am a bit of a fool over this book.  It catches me at every tender
corner of my nature.  It has aroused all the old ardent dreams of youth
and springtime puissance.  I cannot lay it down, and I cannot shorten it,
for story, character, soul and reflection, imagination, observation are
dragging me along after them.  .  .  .  This novel will make me or break
me--prove me human and an artist, or an affected literary bore.  If you
want it you must take the risk.  But, my dear Alden, you will be
investing in a man's heart--which may be a fortune or a folly.  Why,
I ought to have seen--and far back in my brain I did see--that the
character of Charley Steele was a type, an idiosyncrasy of modern life, a
resultant of forces all round us, and that he would demand space in which
to live and tell his story to the world.  .  .  .  And behold with what
joy I follow him, not only lovingly but sternly and severely, noting him
down as he really is, condoning naught, forgiving naught, but above all
else, understanding him--his wilful mystification of the world, his
shameless disdain of it, but the old law of interrogation, of sad yet
eager inquiry and wonder and 'non possumus' with him to the end."

This letter was evidently written in December, 1899, and the other went
to Mr. Alden on the 7th August, 1900; therefore, eight or nine months
later.  The work had gone well.  Week after week, month after month it
had unfolded itself with an almost unpardonable ease.  Evidently, the
very ease with which the book was written troubled me, because I find
that in this letter of the 7th August, 1900, to Mr. Alden, I used these
words:

"A kind of terror has seized me, and instead of sending a dozen more
chapters to you as I proposed to do, I am setting to to break this love
story anew under the stones of my most exacting criticism and troubled
regard.  I go to bury myself at a solitary little seaside place" (it was
Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire), "there to live alone with Rosalie and
Charley, and if I do not know them hereafter, never ask me to write for
'Harper's' again.  .  .  .  This book has been written out of something
vital in me--I do not mean the religious part of it, I mean the humanity
that becomes one's own and part of one's self, by observation,
experience, and understanding got from dead years."

Anyhow that shows the spirit in which the book was written, and there
must have been something in it that rang true, because not only did it
have an enormous sale and therefore a multitude of readers, but I
received hundreds of letters from people who in one way or another were
deeply interested in the story.

The majority of them were inquisitive letters.  A great many of them said
that the writer had shared in controversy as to what the relations of
Charley and Rosalie were, and asked me to set for ever queries and
controversies at rest by declaring either that the relations of these two
were what, in the way of life's stern conventions, they ought not to be,
or that Rosalie passed unscathed through the fire.  I had foreseen all
this, though I could not have foreseen the passionately intense interest
which my readers would take in the life-story of these unhappy yet happy
people.  I had, however, only one reply.  It was that all I had meant to
say concerning Charley and Rosalie had been said in the book, to the last
word.  All I had meant not to say would not be said after the book was
written.  I asked them to take exactly the same view of Charley and
Rosalie as they would in real life regarding two human beings with whom
they were acquainted, and concerning whom, to their minds, there was
sufficient evidence, or not sufficient evidence, to come to a conclusion
as to what their relations were.  I added that, as in real life we used
our judgment upon such things with a reasonable amount of accuracy,
I asked them to apply that judgment to Charley Steele and Rosalie
Evanturel.  They and their story were there for eyes to see and read,
and when I had ended my manuscript in the year 1900 I had said the last
word I ever meant to say as to their history.  The controversy therefore
continues, for the book still makes its appeal to an ever increasing
congregation of new readers.

But another kind of letter came to me--the letter of some man who had
just such a struggle as Charley Steele, or whose father or brother or
friend had had such a struggle.  Letters came from clergymen who had
preached concerning the book; from men who told me in brief their own
life problems and tragedies.  These letters I prize; most of them had
the real thing in them, the human truth.

That the book drew wide attention to the Dominion of Canada, particularly
to French Canada, and crystallised something of the life of that dear
Province, was a deep pleasure to me; and I was glad that I had been able
to culminate my efforts to portray the life of the French-Canadian as I
saw it, by a book which arrested the attention of so comprehensive a
public.

I have seen many statements as to the original of Charley Steele, but I
have never seen a story which was true.  Many people have told me that
they had seen the original of Charley Steele in an American lawyer.
They knew he was the original, because he himself had said so.  The
gentleman was mistaken; I have never seen him.  As with the purple cow,
I never hope to see him.  Whoever he is or whatever he is, the original
Charley was an abler and a more striking man.  I knew him as a boy, and
he died while I was yet a boy, taking with him, save in the memory of a
few, a rare and wonderful, if not wholly lovable personality.  For over
twenty years I had carried him in my mind, wondering whether, and when,
I should-make use of him.  Again and again I was tempted, but was never
convinced that his time had come; yet through all the years he was
gaining strength, securing possession of my mind, and gathering to him,
magnet-like, the thousand observations which my experience sent in his
direction.  In my mind his life-story ended with his death at the Cote
Dorion.  For years and years I saw his ending there.  Yet it all seemed
to me so futile, despite the wonder of his personality, that I could make
nothing of him, and though always fascinated by his character I was held
back from exploiting it, because of the hopelessness of it all.  It led
nowhere.  It was the 'quid refert' of the philosopher, and I could not
bring myself to get any further than an interrogation mark at the end of
a life which was all scepticism, mind and matter, and nothing more.

There came a day, however, when that all ended, when the doors were flung
wide to a new conception of the man, and of what he might have become.
I was going to America, and I paid an angry and reluctant visit to my
London tailor thirty-six hours before I was to start.  A suit of clothes
had been sent home which, after an effective trying-on, was a
monstrosity.  I went straight to my tailor, put on the clothes and bade
him look at them.  He was a great tailor-he saw exactly what I saw, and
what I saw was bad; and when a tailor will do that, you may be quite sure
he is a good and a great man.  He said the clothes were as bad as they
could be, but he added: "You shall have them before you sail, and they
shall be exactly as you want them.  I'll have the foreman down."  He rang
a bell.  Presently the door swung open and in stepped a man with an
eyeglass in his eye.  There, with a look at once reflective and
penetrating, with a figure at once slovenly and alert, was a caricature
of Charley Steele as I had known him, and of all his characteristics.
There was such a resemblance as an ugly child in a family may have to his
handsome brother.  It was Charley Steele with a twist--gone to seed.
Looking at him in blank amazement, I burst out: "Good heavens, so you
didn't die, Charley Steele!  You became a tailor!"

All at once the whole new landscape of my story as it eventually became,
spread out before me.  I was justified in waiting all the years.  My
discontent with the futile end of the tale as I originally knew it and
saw it was justified.  Charley Steele, brilliant, enigmatic and
epigrammatic, did not die at the Cote Dorion, but lived in that far
valley by Dalgrothe Mountain, and became a tailor!  So far as I am
concerned he became much more.  He was the beginning of a new epoch in
my literary life.  I had got into subtler methods, reached more intimate
understandings, had come to a place where analysis of character had
shaken itself free--but certainly not quite free--from a natural yet
rather dangerous eloquence.

As a play The Right of Way, skilfully and sympathetically dramatised by
Mr. Eugene Presbery, has had a career extending over several years, and
still continues to make its appearance.




NOTE

It should not be assumed that the "Chaudiere" of this story is the real
Chaudiere of Quebec province.  The name is characteristic, and for this
reason alone I have used it.

I must also apologise to my readers for appearing to disregard a
statement made in 'The Lane that Had no Turning', that that tale was the
last I should write about French Canada.  In explanation I would say that
'The Lane that Had no Turning' was written after the present book was
finished.

G. F.







THE RIGHT OF WAY

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 1.


I.        THE WAY TO THE VERDICT
II.       WHAT CAME OF THE TRIAL
III.      AFTER FIVE YEARS
IV.       CHARLEY MAKES A DISCOVERY
V.        THE WOMAN IN HELIOTROPE
VI.       THE WIND AND THE SHORN LAMB
VII.      "PEACE, PEACE, AND THERE IS NO PEACE!"
VIII.     THE COST OF THE ORNAMENT



     "They had lived and loved, and walked and worked in their own way,
     and the world went by them.  Between them and it a great gulf was
     fixed: and they met its every catastrophe with the Quid Refert? of
     the philosophers."

              "I want to talk with some old lover's ghost,
               Who lived before the god of love was born."

     "There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and
     none of them is without signification."




CHAPTER I

THE WAY TO THE VERDICT

"Not guilty, your Honour!"

A hundred atmospheres had seemed pressing down on the fretted people in
the crowded court-room.  As the discordant treble of the huge foreman of
the jury squeaked over the mass of gaping humanity, which had twitched at
skirts, drawn purposeless hands across prickling faces, and kept nervous
legs at a gallop, the smothering weights of elastic air lifted suddenly,
a great suspiration of relief swept through the place like a breeze, and
in a far corner of the gallery a woman laughed outright.

The judge looked up reprovingly at the gallery; the clerk of the court
angrily called "Silence!" towards the offending corner, and seven or
eight hundred eyes raced between three centres of interest--the judge,
the prisoner, and the prisoner's counsel.  Perhaps more people looked at
the prisoner's counsel than at the prisoner, certainly far more than
looked at the judge.

Never was a verdict more unexpected.  If a poll had been taken of the
judgment of the population twenty-four hours before, a great majority
would have been found believing that there was no escape for the
prisoner, who was accused of murdering a wealthy timber merchant.  The
minority would have based their belief that the prisoner had a chance of
escape, not on his possible innocence, not on insufficient evidence, but
on a curious faith in the prisoner's lawyer.  This minority would not
have been composed of the friends of the lawyer alone, but of outside
spectators, who, because Charley Steele had never lost a criminal case,
attached to him a certain incapacity for bad luck; and of very young men,
who looked upon him as the perfect pattern of the person good to see and
hard to understand.

During the first two days of the trial the case had gone wholly against
the prisoner, who had given his name as Joseph Nadeau.  Witnesses had
heard him quarrelling with the murdered man, and the next day the body of
the victim had been found by the roadside.  The prisoner was a stranger
in the lumber-camp where the deed was done, and while there had been
morose and lived apart; no one knew him; and he refused to tell even his
lawyer whence he came, or what his origin, or to bring witnesses from his
home to speak for his character.

One by one the points had been made against him--with no perceptible
effect upon Charley Steele, who seemed the one cool, undisturbed person
in the courtroom.

Indifferent as he seemed, seldom speaking to the prisoner, often looking
out of the windows to the cool green trees far over on the hill, absorbed
and unbusinesslike, yet judge and jury came to see, before the second day
was done, that he had let no essential thing pass, that the questions
he asked had either a pregnant aptness, opened up new avenues of
deliberation, or were touched with mystery--seemed to have a longer
reach than the moment or the hour.

Before the end of this second day, however, more attention was upon him
than upon the prisoner, and nine-tenths of the people in the court-room
could have told how many fine linen handkerchiefs he used during the
afternoon, how many times he adjusted his monocle to look at the judge
meditatively.  Probably no man, for eight hours a day, ever exasperated
and tried a judge, jury, and public, as did this man of twenty-nine years
of age, who had been known at college as Beauty Steele, and who was still
so spoken of familiarly; or was called as familiarly, Charley Steele, by
people who never had attempted to be familiar with him.

The second day of the trial had ended gloomily for the prisoner.  The
coil of evidence had drawn so close that extrication seemed impossible.
That the evidence was circumstantial, that no sign of the crime was upon
the prisoner, that he was found sleeping quietly in his bed when he was
arrested, that he had not been seen to commit the deed, did not weigh in
the minds of the general public.  The man's guilt was freely believed;
not even the few who clung to the opinion that Charley Steele would yet
get him off thought that he was innocent.  There seemed no flaw in the
evidence, once granted its circumstantiality.

During the last two hours of the sitting the prisoner had looked at his
counsel in despair, for he seemed perfunctorily conducting the case: was
occupied in sketching upon the blotting-pad before him, looking out of
the window, or turning his head occasionally towards a corner where sat a
half-dozen well-dressed ladies, and more particularly towards one lady
who watched him in a puzzled way--more than once with a look of
disappointment.  Only at the very close of the sitting did he appear to
rouse himself.  Then, for a brief ten minutes, he cross-examined a friend
of the murdered merchant in a fashion which startled the court-room, for
he suddenly brought out the fact that the dead man had once struck a
woman in the face in the open street.  This fact, sharply stated by the
prisoner's counsel, with no explanation and no comment, seemed uselessly
intrusive and malicious.  His ironical smile merely irritated all
concerned.  The thin, clean-shaven face of the prisoner grew more pinched
and downcast, and he turned almost pleadingly towards the judge.  The
judge pulled his long side-whiskers nervously, and looked over his
glasses in severe annoyance, then hastily adjourned the sitting and left
the bench, while the prisoner saw with dismay his lawyer leave the court-
room with not even a glance towards him.

On the morning of the third day Charley Steele's face, for the first
time, wore an expression which, by a stretch of imagination, might be
called anxious.  He also took out his monocle frequently, rubbed it with
his handkerchief, and screwed it in again, staring straight before him
much of the time.  But twice he spoke to the prisoner in a low voice, and
was hurriedly answered in French as crude as his own was perfect.  When
he spoke, which was at rare intervals, his voice was without feeling,
concise, insistent, unappealing.  It was as though the business before
him was wholly alien to him, as though he were held there against his
will, but would go on with his task bitterly to the bitter end.

The court adjourned for an hour at noon.  During this time Charley
refused to see any one, but sat alone in his office with a few biscuits
and an ominous bottle before him, till the time came for him to go back
to the court-house.  Arrived there he entered by a side door, and was not
seen until the court opened once more.

For two hours and a half the crown attorney mercilessly made out his case
against the prisoner.  When he sat down, people glanced meaningly at each
other, as though the last word had been said, then looked at the
prisoner, as at one already condemned.

Yet Charley Steele was to reply.  He was not now the same man that had
conducted the case during the past two days and a half.  Some great
change had passed over him.  There was no longer abstraction,
indifference, or apparent boredom, or disdain, or distant stare.
He was human, intimate and eager, yet concentrated and impelling:
he was quietly, unnoticeably drunk.

He assured the prisoner with a glance of the eye, with a word scarce
above a whisper, as he slowly rose to make his speech for the defence.

His first words caused a new feeling in the courtroom.  He was a new
presence; the personality had a changed significance.  At first the
public, the jury, and the judge were curiously attracted, surprised into
a fresh interest.  The voice had an insinuating quality, but it also had
a measured force, a subterranean insistence, a winning tactfulness.
Withal, a logical simplicity governed his argument.  The flaneur, the
poseur--if such he was--no longer appeared.  He came close to the
jurymen, leaned his hands upon the back of a chair--as it were, shut out
the public, even the judge, from his circle of interest--and talked in a
conversational tone.  An air of confidence passed from him to the amazed
yet easily captivated jury; the distance between them, so gaping during
the last two days, closed suddenly up.  The tension of the past
estrangement, relaxing all at once, surprised the jury into an almost
eager friendliness, as on a long voyage a sensitive traveller finds in
some exciting accident a natural introduction to an exclusive fellow-
passenger, whom he discovers as human as he had thought him offensively
distant.

Charley began by congratulating the crown attorney on his statement of
the case.  He called it masterly; he said that in its presentations it
was irrefutable; as a precis of evidence purely circumstantial it was--
useful and interesting.  But, speech-making aside, and ability--and
rhetoric--aside, and even personal conviction aside, the case should
stand or fall by its total, not its comparative, soundness.  Since the
evidence was purely circumstantial, there must be no flaw in its cable of
assumption, it must be logically inviolate within itself.  Starting with
assumption only, there must be no straying possibilities, no loose ends
of certainty, no invading alternatives.  Was this so in the case of the
man before them?  They were faced by a curious situation.  So far as the
trial was concerned, the prisoner himself was the only person who could
tell them who he was, what was his past, and, if he committed the crime,
what was--the motive of it: out of what spirit--of revenge, or hatred--
the dead man had been sent to his account.  Probably in the whole history
of crime there never was a more peculiar case.  Even himself the
prisoner's counsel was dealing with one whose life was hid from him
previous to the day the murdered man was discovered by the roadside.
The prisoner had not sought to prove an alibi; he had done no more than
formally plead not guilty.  There was no material for defence save that
offered by the prosecution.  He had undertaken the defence of the
prisoner because it was his duty as a lawyer to see that the law
justified itself; that it satisfied every demand of proof to the last
atom of certainty; that it met the final possibility of doubt with
evidence perfect and inviolate if circumstantial, and uncontradictory if
eye-witness, if tell-tale incident, were to furnish basis of proof.

Judge, jury, and public riveted their eyes upon Charley Steele.
He had now drawn a little farther away from the jury-box; his eye took
in the judge as well; once or twice he turned, as if appealingly and
confidently, to the people in the room.  It was terribly hot, the air
was sickeningly close, every one seemed oppressed--every one save a lady
sitting not a score of feet from where the counsel for the prisoner
stood.  This lady's face was not one that could flush easily; it belonged
to a temperament as even as her person was symmetrically beautiful.  As
Charley talked, her eyes were fixed steadily, wonderingly upon him.
There was a question in her gaze, which never in the course of the speech
was quite absorbed by the admiration--the intense admiration--she was
feeling for him.  Once as he turned with a concentrated earnestness in
her direction his eyes met hers.  The message he flashed her was sub-
conscious, for his mind never wavered an instant from the cause in hand,
but it said to her:

"When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you."  For another quarter
of an hour he exposed the fallacy of purely circumstantial evidence; he
raised in the minds of his hearers the painful responsibility of the law,
the awful tyranny of miscarriage of justice; he condemned prejudice
against a prisoner because that prisoner demanded that the law should
prove him guilty instead of his proving himself innocent.  If a man chose
to stand to that, to sternly assume this perilous position, the law had
no right to take advantage of it.  He turned towards the prisoner and
traced his possible history: as the sensitive, intelligent son of godly
Catholic parents from some remote parish in French Canada.  He drew an
imaginary picture of the home from which he might have come, and of the
parents and brothers and sisters who would have lived weeks of torture
knowing that their son and brother was being tried for his life.  It
might at first glance seem quixotic, eccentric, but was it unnatural that
the prisoner should choose silence as to his origin and home, rather than
have his family and friends face the undoubted peril lying before him?
Besides, though his past life might have been wholly blameless, it would
not be evidence in his favour.  It might, indeed, if it had not been
blameless, provide some element of unjust suspicion against him, furnish
some fancied motive.  The prisoner had chosen his path, and events had so
far justified him.  It must be clear to the minds of judge and jury that
there were fatally weak places in the circumstantial evidence offered for
the conviction of this man.

There was the fact that no sign of the crime, no drop of blood, no
weapon, was found about him or near him, and that he was peacefully
sleeping at the moment the constable arrested him.

There was also the fact that no motive for the crime had been shown.
It was not enough that he and the dead man had been heard quarrelling.
Was there any certainty that it was a quarrel, since no word or sentence
of the conversation had been brought into court?  Men with quick tempers
might quarrel over trivial things, but exasperation did not always end in
bodily injury and the taking of life; imprecations were not so uncommon
that they could be taken as evidence of wilful murder.  The prisoner
refused to say what that troubled conversation was about, but who could
question his right to take the risk of his silence being misunderstood?

The judge was alternately taking notes and looking fixedly at the
prisoner; the jury were in various attitudes of strained attention; the
public sat open mouthed; and up in the gallery a woman with white face
and clinched hands listened moveless and staring.  Charley Steele was
holding captive the emotions and the judgments of his hearers.  All
antipathy had gone; there was a strange eager intimacy between the
jurymen and himself.  People no longer looked with distant dislike at the
prisoner, but began to see innocence in his grim silence, disdain only in
his surly defiance.

But Charley Steele had preserved his great stroke for the psychological
moment.  He suddenly launched upon them the fact, brought out in
evidence, that the dead man had struck a woman in the face a year ago;
also that he had kept a factory girl in affluence for two years.  Here
was motive for murder--if motive were to govern them--far greater than
might be suggested by excited conversation which listeners who could not
hear a word construed into a quarrel--listeners who bore the prisoner at
the bar ill-will because he shunned them while in the lumber-camp.  If
the prisoner was to be hanged for motive untraceable, why should not
these two women be hanged for motive traceable!

Here was his chance.  He appeared to impeach subtly every intelligence in
the room for having had any preconviction about the prisoner's guilt.  He
compelled the jury to feel that they, with him, had made the discovery of
the unsound character of the evidence.  The man might be guilty, but
their personal guilt, the guilt of the law, would be far greater if they
condemned the man on violable evidence.  With a last simple appeal, his
hands resting on the railing before the seat where the jury sat, his
voice low and conversational again, his eyes running down the line of
faces of the men who had his client's life in their hands, he said:

"It is not a life only that is at stake, it is not revenge for a life
snatched from the busy world by a brutal hand that we should heed to-day,
but the awful responsibility of that thing we call the State, which,
having the power of life and death without gainsay or hindrance, should
prove to the last inch of necessity its right to take a human life.  And
the right and the reason should bring conviction to every honest human
mind.  That is all I have to say."

The crown attorney made a perfunctory reply.  The judge's charge was
brief, and, if anything, a little in favour of the prisoner--very little,
a casuist's little; and the jury filed out of the room.  They were gone
but ten minutes.  When they returned, the verdict was given: "Not guilty,
your Honour!"

Then it was that a woman laughed in the gallery.  Then a whispering voice
said across the railing which separated the public from the lawyers:
"Charley!  Charley!"

Though Charley turned and looked at the lady who spoke, he made no
response.

A few minutes later, outside the court, as he walked quickly away, again
inscrutable and debonair, the prisoner, Joseph Nadeau, touched him on the
arm and said:

"M'sieu', M'sieu', you have saved my life--I thank you, M'sieu'!"

Charley Steele drew his arm away with disgust.  "Get out of my sight!
You're as guilty as hell!" he said.




CHAPTER II

WHAT CAME OF THE TRIAL

"When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you."  So Charley Steele's
eyes had said to a lady in the court room on that last day of the great
trial.  The lady had left the court-room dazed and exalted.  She, with
hundreds of others, had had a revelation of Charley Steele; had had also
the great emotional experience of seeing a crowd make the 'volte face'
with their convictions; looking at a prisoner one moment with eyes of
loathing and anticipating his gruesome end, the next moment seeing him
as the possible martyr to the machinery of the law.  She whose heart was
used to beat so evenly had felt it leap and swell with excitement,
awaiting the moment when the jury filed back into the court-room.  Then
it stood still, as a wave might hang for an instant at its crest ere it
swept down to beat upon the shore.

With her as with most present, the deepest feeling in the agitated
suspense was not so much that the prisoner should go free, as that the
prisoner's counsel should win his case.  It was as if Charley Steele were
on trial instead of the prisoner.  He was the imminent figure; it was his
fate that was in the balance--such was the antic irony of suggestion.
And the truth was, that the fates of both prisoner and counsel had been
weighed in the balance that sweltering August day.

The prisoner was forgotten almost as soon as he had left the court-room
a free man, but wherever men and women met in Montreal that day, one name
was on the lips of all-Charley Steele!  In his speech he had done two
things: he had thrown down every barrier of reserve--or so it seemed--
and had become human and intimate.  "I could not have believed it of
him," was the remark on every lip.  Of his ability there never had been
a moment's doubt, but it had ever been an uncomfortable ability, it had
tortured foes and made friends anxious.  No one had ever seen him show
feeling.  If it was a mask, he had worn it with a curious consistency: it
had been with him as a child, at school, at college, and he had brought
it back again to the town where he was born.  It had effectually
prevented his being popular, but it had made him--with his foppishness
and his originality--an object of perpetual interest.  Few men had
ventured to cross swords with him.  He left his fellow-citizens very much
alone.  He was uniformly if distantly courteous, and he was respected in
his own profession for his uncommon powers and for an utter indifference
as to whether he had cases in court or not.

Coming from the judge's chambers after the trial he went to his office,
receiving as he passed congratulations more effusively offered than, as
people presently found, his manner warranted.

For he was again the formal, masked Charley Steele, looking calmly
through the interrogative eye-glass.  By the time he reached his office,
greetings became more subdued.  His prestige had increased immensely in
a few short hours, but he had no more friends than before.  Old relations
were soon re-established.  The town was proud of his ability as it had
always been, irritated by his manner as it had always been, more
prophetic of his future than it had ever been, and unconsciously grateful
for the fact that he had given them a sensation which would outlast the
summer.

All these things concerned him little.  Once the business of the court-
room was over, a thought which had quietly lain in waiting behind the
strenuous occupations of his brain leaped forward to exclude all others.

As he entered his office he was thinking of that girl's face in the
court-room, with its flush of added beauty which he and his speech had
brought there.  "What a perfect loveliness!" he said to himself as he
bathed his face and hands, and prepared to go into the street again.
"She needed just such a flush to make her supreme Kathleen!"  He stood,
looking out into the square, out into the green of the trees where the
birds twittered.  "Faultless--faultless in form and feature.  She was so
as a child, she is so as a woman."  He lighted a cigarette, and blew away
little clouds of smoke.  "I will do it.  I will marry her.  She will have
me: I saw it in her eye.  Fairing doesn't matter.  Her uncle will never
consent to that, and she doesn't care enough for him.  She cares, but she
doesn't care enough.  .  .  .  I will do it."

He turned towards a cupboard into which he had put a certain bottle
before he went to the court-room two hours before.  He put the key in the
lock, then stopped.  "No, I think not!" he said.  "What I say to her
shall not be said forensically.  What a discovery I've made!  I was dull,
blank, all iron and ice; the judge, the jury, the public, even Kathleen,
against me; and then that bottle in there--and I saw things like crystal!
I had a glow in my brain, I had a tingle in my fingers; and I had
success, and"--his face clouded--"He was as guilty as hell!" he added,
almost bitterly, as he put the key of the cupboard into his pocket again.

There was a knock at the door, and a youth of about nineteen entered.

"Hello!" he said.  "I say, sir, but that speech of yours struck us all
where we couldn't say no.  Even Kathleen got in a glow over it.  Perhaps
Captain Fairing didn't, for he's just left her in a huff, and she's
looking--you remember those lines in the school-book:

                  "'A red spot burned upon her cheek,
                    Streamed her rich tresses down--'"

He laughed gaily.  "I've come to ask you up to tea," he added.  "The
Unclekins is there.  When I told him that Kathleen had sent Fairing away
with a flea in his ear, he nearly fell off his chair.  He lent me twenty
dollars on the spot.  Are you coming our way?" he continued, suddenly
trying to imitate Charley's manner.  Charley nodded, and they left the
office together and moved away under a long avenue of maples to where, in
the shade of a high hill, was the house of the uncle of Kathleen Wantage,
with whom she and her brother Billy lived.  They walked in silence for
some time, and at last Billy said, 'a propos' of nothing:

"Fairing hasn't a red cent."

"You have a perambulating mind, Billy," said Charley, and bowed to a
young clergyman approaching them from the opposite direction.

"What does that mean?" remarked Billy, and said "Hello!" to the young
clergyman, and did not wait for Charley's answer.

The Rev. John Brown was by no means a conventional parson.  He was
smoking a cigarette, and two dogs followed at his heels.  He was
certainly not a fogy.  He had more than a little admiration for Charley
Steele, but he found it difficult to preach when Charley was in the
congregation.  He was always aware of a subterranean and half-pitying
criticism going on in the barrister's mind.  John Brown knew that he
could never match his intelligence against Charley's, in spite of the
theological course at Durham, so he undertook to scotch the snake by
kindness.  He thought that he might be able to do this, because Charley,
who was known to be frankly agnostical, came to his church more or less
regularly.

The Rev. John Brown was not indifferent to what men thought of him.  He
had a reputation for being "independent," but his chief independence
consisted in dressing a little like a layman, posing as the athletic
parson of the new school, consorting with ministers of the dissenting
denominations when it was sufficiently effective, and being a "good
fellow" with men easily bored by church and churchmen.  He preached
theatrical sermons to societies and benevolent associations.  He wanted
to be thought well of on all hands, and he was shrewd enough to know that
if he trimmed between ritualism on one hand and evangelicism on the
other, he was on a safe road.  He might perforate old dogmatical
prejudices with a good deal of freedom so long as he did not begin
bringing "millinery" into the service of the church.  He invested his own
personal habits with the millinery.  He looked a picturesque figure with
his blond moustache, a little silk-lined brown cloak thrown carelessly
over his shoulder, a gold-headed cane, and a brisk jacket half
ecclesiastical, half military.

He had interested Charley Steele, also he had amused him, and
sometimes he had surprised him into a sort of admiration; for Brown had
a temperament capable of little inspirations--such a literary inspiration
as might come to a second-rate actor--and Charley never belittled any
man's ability, but seized upon every sign of knowledge with the
appreciation of the epicure.

John Brown raised his hat to Charley, then held out a hand.  "Masterly-
masterly!" he said.  "Permit my congratulations.  It was the one thing
to do.  You couldn't have saved him by making him an object of pity, by
appealing to our sympathies."

"What do you take to be the secret, then?" asked Charley, with a look
half abstracted, half quizzical.  "Terror--sheer terror.  You startled
the conscience.  You made defects in the circumstantial evidence, the
imminent problems of our own salvation.  You put us all on trial.  We
were under the lash of fear.  If we parsons could only do that from the
pulpit!"

"We will discuss that on our shooting-trip next week.  Duck-shooting
gives plenty of time for theological asides.  You are coming, eh?"

John Brown scarcely noticed the sarcasm, he was so delighted at the
suggestion that he was to be included in the annual duck-shoot of the
Seven, as the little yearly party of Charley and his friends to Lake
Aubergine was called.  He had angled for this invitation for two years.

"I must not keep you," Charley said, and dismissed him with a bow.  "The
sheep will stray, and the shepherd must use his crook."

Brown smiled at the badinage, and went on his way rejoicing in the fact
that he was to share the amusements of the Seven at Lake Aubergine--the
Lake of the Mad Apple.  To get hold of these seven men of repute and
position, to be admitted into this good presence!--He had a pious
exaltation, but whether it was because he might gather into the fold
erratic and agnostical sheep like Charley Steele, or because it pleased
his social ambitions, he had occasion to answer in the future.  He gaily
prepared to go to the Lake of the Mad Apple, where he was fated to eat
of the tree of knowledge.

Charley Steele and Billy Wantage walked on slowly to the house under the
hill.

"He's the right sort," said Billy.  "He's a sport.  I can stand that
kind.  Did you ever hear him sing?  No?  Well, he can sing a comic song
fit to make you die.  I can sing a bit myself, but to hear him sing 'The
Man Who Couldn't Get Warm' is a show in itself.  He can play the banjo
too, and the guitar--but he's best on the banjo.  It's worth a dollar to
listen to his Epha-haam--that's Ephraim, you know--Ephahaam Come Home,'
and 'I Found Y' in de Honeysuckle Paitch.'"

"He preaches, too!" said Charley drily.

They had reached the door of the house under the hill, and Billy had no
time for further remark.  He ran into the drawing-room, announcing
Charley with the words: "I say, Kathleen, I've brought the man that made
the judge sit up."

Billy suddenly stopped, however, for there sat the judge who had tried
the case, calmly munching a piece of toast.  The judge did not allow
himself the luxury of embarrassment, but bowed to Charley with a smile,
which he presently turned on Kathleen, who came as near being
disconcerted as she had ever been in her life.

Kathleen had passed through a good deal to look so unflurried.  She had
been on trial in the court-room as well as the prisoner.  Important
things had been at stake with her.  She and Charley Steele had known each
other since they were children.  To her, even in childhood, he had been
a dominant figure.  He had judicially and admiringly told her she was
beautiful--when he was twelve and she five.  But he had said it without
any of those glances which usually accompanied the same sentiments in the
mouths of other lads.  He had never made boy-love to her, and she had
thrilled at the praise of less splendid people than Charley Steele.  He
had always piqued her, he was so superior to the ordinary enchantments
of youth, beauty, and fine linen.

As he came and went, growing older and more characteristic, more and more
"Beauty Steele," accompanied by legends of wild deeds and days at
college, by tales of his fopperies and the fashions he had set, she
herself had grown, as he had termed it, more "decorative."  He had told
her so, not in the least patronisingly, but as a simple fact in which no
sentiment lurked.  He thought her the most beautiful thing he had ever
seen, but he had never regarded her save as a creation for the perfect
pleasure of the eye; he thought her the concrete glory of sensuous
purity, no more capable of sentiment than himself.  He had said again and
again, as he grew older and left college and began the business of life
after two years in Europe, that sentiment would spoil her, would scatter
the charm of her perfect beauty; it would vitalise her too much, and her
nature would lose its proportion; she would be decentralised!  She had
been piqued at his indifference to sentiment; she could not easily be
content without worship, though she felt none.  This pique had grown
until Captain Tom Fairing crossed her path.

Fairing was the antithesis of Charley Steele.  Handsome, poor,
enthusiastic, and none too able, he was simple and straightforward, and
might be depended on till the end of the chapter.  And the end of it was,
that in so far as she had ever felt real sentiment for anybody, she felt
it for Tom Fairing of the Royal Fusileers.  It was not love she felt in
the old, in the big, in the noble sense, but it had behind it selection
and instinct and natural gravitation.

Fairing declared his love.  She would give him no answer.  For as soon
as she was presented with the issue, the destiny, she began to look round
her anxiously.  The first person to fill the perspective was Charley
Steele.  As her mind dwelt on him, her uncle gave forth his judgment,
that she should never have a penny if she married Tom Fairing.  This only
irritated her, it did not influence her.  But there was Charley.  He was
a figure, was already noted in his profession because of a few masterly
successes in criminal cases, and if he was not popular, he was
distinguished, and the world would talk about him to the end.  He was
handsome, and he was well-to-do-he had a big unoccupied house on the hill
among the maples.  How many people had said, What a couple they would
make-Charley Steele and Kathleen Wantage!

So, as Fairing presented an issue to her, she concentrated her thoughts
as she had never done before on the man whom the world set apart for her,
in a way the world has.

As she looked and looked, Charley began to look also.  He had not been
enamoured of the sordid things of the world; he had been merely curious.
He thought vice was ugly; he had imagination and a sense of form.
Kathleen was beautiful.  Sentiment had, so he thought, never seriously
disturbed her; he did not think it ever would.  It had not affected him.
He did not understand it.  He had been born non-intime.  He had had
acquaintances, but never friendships, and never loves or love.  But he
had a fine sense of the fitting and the proportionate, and he worshipped
beauty in so far as he could worship anything.  The homage was cerebral,
intellectual, temperamental, not of the heart.  As he looked out upon the
world half pityingly, half ironically, he was struck with wonder at the
disproportion which was engendered by "having heart," as it was called.
He did not find it necessary.

Now that he had begun to think of marriage, who so suitable as Kathleen?
He knew of Fairing's adoration, but he took it as a matter of course that
she had nothing to give of the same sort in return.  Her beauty was still
serene and unimpaired.  He would not spoil it by the tortures of emotion.
He would try to make Kathleen's heart beat in harmony with his own; it
should not thunder out of time.  He had made up his mind that he would
marry her.

For Kathleen, with the great trial, the beginning of the end had come.
Charley's power over her was subtle, finely sensuous, and, in deciding,
there were no mere heart-impulses working for Charley.  Instinct and
impulse were working in another direction.  She had not committed her
mind to either man, though her heart, to a point, was committed to
Fairing.

On the day of the trial, however, she fell wholly under that influence
which had swayed judge, jury, and public.  To her the verdict of the jury
was not in favour of the prisoner at the bar--she did not think of him.
It was in favour of Charley Steele.

And so, indifferent as to who heard, over the heads of the people in
front of her, to the accused's counsel inside the railings, she had
called, softly: "Charley!  Charley!"

Now, in the house under the hill, they were face to face, and the end was
at hand: the end of something and the beginning of something.

There was a few moments of casual conversation, in which Billy talked as
much as anybody, and then Kathleen said:

"What do you suppose was the man's motive for committing the murder?"

Charley looked at Kathleen steadily, curiously, through his monocle.
It was a singular compliment she paid him.  Her remark took no heed of
the verdict of the jury.  He turned inquiringly towards the judge, who,
though slightly shocked by the question, recovered himself quickly.

"What do you think it was, sir?" Charley asked quietly.

"A woman--and revenge, perhaps," answered the judge, with a matter-of-
course air.

A few moments afterwards the judge was carried off by Kathleen's uncle
to see some rare old books; Billy, his work being done, vanished; and
Kathleen and Charley were left alone.

"You did not answer me in the court-room," Kathleen said.  "I called to
you."

"I wanted to hear you say them here," he rejoined.  "Say what?" she
asked, a little puzzled by the tone of his voice.

"Your congratulations," he answered.

She held out a hand to him.  "I offer them now.  It was wonderful.  You
were inspired.  I did not think you could ever let yourself go."

He held her hand firmly.  "I promise not to do it again," he said
whimsically.

"Why not?"

"Have I not your congratulations?"  His hand drew her slightly towards
him; she rose to her feet.

"That is no reason," she answered, confused, yet feeling that there was a
double meaning in his words.

"I could not allow you to be so vain," he said.  "We must be
companionable.  Henceforth I shall congratulate myself--Kathleen."

There was no mistaking now.  "Oh, what is it you are going to say to me?"
she asked, yet not disengaging her hand.

"I said it all in the court-room," he rejoined; "and you heard."

"You want me to marry you--Charley?" she asked frankly.

"If you think there is no just impediment," he answered, with a smile.

She drew her hand away, and for a moment there was a struggle in her
mind--or heart.  He knew of what she was thinking, and he did not
consider it of serious consequence.  Romance was a trivial thing, and
women were prone to become absorbed in trivialities.  When the woman had
no brains, she might break her life upon a trifle.  But Kathleen had an
even mind, a serene temperament.  Her nerves were daily cooled in a bath
of nature's perfect health.  She had never had an hour's illness in her
life.

"There is no just or unjust impediment, Kathleen," he added presently,
and took her hand again.

She looked him in the eyes clearly.  "You really think so?" she asked.

"I know so," he answered.  "We shall be two perfect panels in one picture
of life."




CHAPTER III

AFTER FIVE YEARS

"You have forgotten me?"

Charley Steele's glance was serenely non-committal as he answered drily:

"I cannot remember doing so."

The other man's eyelids drew down with a look of anger, then the humour
of the impertinence worked upon him, and he gave a nervous little laugh
and said: "I am John Brown."

"Then I'm sure my memory is not at fault," remarked Charley, with an
outstretched hand.  "My dear Brown!  Still preaching little sermons?"

"Do I look it?"  There was a curious glitter in John Brown's eyes.  "I'm
not preaching little sermons, and you know it well enough."  He laughed,
but it was a hard sort of mirth.  "Perhaps you forgot to remember that,
though," he sneeringly added.  "It was the work of your hands."

"That's why I should remember to forget it--I am the child of modesty."
Charley touched the corners of his mouth with his tongue, as though his
lips were dry, and his eyes wandered to a saloon a little farther down
the street.

"Modesty is your curse," rejoined Brown mockingly.

"Once when you preached at me you said that beauty was my curse."
Charley laughed a curt, distant little laugh which was no more the
spontaneous humour lying for ever behind his thoughts than his eye-glass
was the real sight of his eyes, though since childhood this laugh and his
eye-glass were as natural to all expression of himself as John Brown's
outward and showy frankness did not come from the real John Brown.

John Brown looked him up and down quickly, then fastened his eyes on the
ruddy cheeks of his old friend.  "Do they call you Beauty now as they
used to?" he asked, rather insolently.

"No.  They only say, 'There goes Charley Steele!'"  The tongue again
touched the corners of the mouth, and the eyes wandered to the doorway
down the street, over which was written in French: "Jean Jolicoeur,
Licensed to sell wine, beer, and other spirituous and fermented liquors."

Just then an archdeacon of the cathedral passed them, bowed gravely to
Charley, glanced at John Brown, turned colour slightly, and then with a
cold stare passed on too quickly for dignity.

"I'm thinking of Bunyan," said the aforetime friend of Charley Steele.
"I'll paraphrase him and say: 'There, but for beauty and a monocle, walks
John Brown.'"

Under the bitter sarcasm of the man, who, five years ago, had gone down
at last beneath his agnostic raillery, Charley's blue eye did not waver,
not a nerve stirred in his face, as he replied: "Who knows!"

"That was what you always said--who knows!  That did for John Brown."

Charley seemed not to hear the remark.  "What are you doing now?" he
asked, looking steadily at the face whence had gone all the warmth of
manhood, all that courage of life which keeps men young.  The lean
parchment visage had the hunted look of the incorrigible failure,
had written on it self-indulgence, cunning, and uncertainty.

"Nothing much," John Brown replied.

"What last?"

"Floated an arsenic-mine on Lake Superior."

"Failed?"

"More or less.  There are hopes yet.  I've kept the wolf from the door."

"What are you going to do?"

"Don't know--nothing, perhaps; I've not the courage I had."

"I'd have thought you might find arsenic a good thing," said Charley,
holding out a silver cigarette-case, his eyes turning slowly from the
startled, gloomy face of the man before him, to the cool darkness beyond
the open doorway of that saloon on the other side of the street.

John Brown shivered--there was something so cold-blooded in the
suggestion that he might have found arsenic a good thing.  The metallic
glare of Charley's eye-glass seemed to give an added cruelty to the
words.  Charley's monocle was the token of what was behind his blue eye-
one ceaseless interrogation.  It was that everlasting questioning, the
ceaseless who knows! which had in the end unsettled John Brown's mind,
and driven him at last from the church and the possible gaiters of a dean
into the rough business of life, where he had been a failure.  Yet as
Brown looked at Charley the old fascination came on him with a rush.
His hand suddenly caught Charley's as he took a cigarette, and he said:
"Perhaps I'll find arsenic a good thing yet."

For reply Charley laid a hand on his arm-turned him towards the shade of
the houses opposite.  Without a word they crossed the street, entered the
saloon, and passed to a little back room, Charley giving an unsympathetic
stare to some men at the bar who seemed inclined to speak to him.

As the two passed into the small back room with the frosted door, one of
the strangers said to the other: "What does he come here for, if he's too
proud to speak!  What's a saloon for!  I'd like to smash that eye-glass
for him!"

"He's going down-hill fast," said the other.  "He drinks steady--steady."

"Tiens--tiens!" interposed Jean Jolicoeur, the landlord.  "It is not
harm to him.  He drink all day, an' he walk a crack like a bee-line."

"He's got the handsomest wife in this city.  If I was him, I'd think more
of myself," answered the Englishman.

"How you think more--hein?  You not come down more to my saloon?"

"No, I wouldn't come to your saloon, and I wouldn't go to Theophile
Charlemagne's shebang at the Cote Dorion."

"You not like Charlemagne's hotel?" said a huge black-bearded pilot,
standing beside the landlord.  "Oh, I like Charlemagne's hotel, and I
like to talk to Suzon Charlemagne, but I'm not married, Rouge Gosselin--"

"If he go to Charlemagne's hotel, and talk some more too mooch to dat
Suzon Charlemagne, he will lose dat glass out of his eye," interrupted
Rouge Gosselin.

"Who say he been at dat place?" said Jean Jolicoeur.  "He bin dere four
times las' month, and dat Suzon Charlemagne talk'bout him ever since.
When dat Narcisse Bovin and Jacques Gravel come down de river, he better
keep away from dat Cote Dorion," sputtered Rouge Gosselin.  "Dat's a long
story short, all de same for you--bagosh!"

Rouge Gosselin flung off his glass of white whiskey, and threw after it a
glass of cold water.

"Tiens!  you know not M'sieu' Charley Steele," said Jean Jolicoeur, and
turned on his heel, nodding his head sagely.




CHAPTER IV

CHARLEY MAKES A DISCOVERY

A hot day a month later Charley Steele sat in his office staring before
him into space, and negligently smoking a cigarette.  Outside there was a
slow clacking of wheels, and a newsboy was crying "La Patrie!  La Patrie!
All about the War in France!  All about the massacree!"  Bells--wedding-
bells--were ringing also, and the jubilant sounds, like the call of the
newsboy, were out of accord with the slumberous feeling of the afternoon.
Charley Steele turned his head slowly towards the window.  The branches
of a maple-tree half crossed it, and the leaves moved softly in the
shadow they made.  His eye went past the tree and swam into the tremulous
white heat of the square, and beyond to where in the church-tower the
bells were ringing-to the church doors, from which gaily dressed folk
were issuing to the carriages, or thronged the pavement, waiting for the
bride and groom to come forth into a new-created world--for them.

Charley looked through his monocle at the crowd reflectively, his head
held a little to one side in a questioning sort of way, on his lips the
ghost of a smile--not a reassuring smile.  Presently he leaned forward
slightly and the monocle dropped from his eye.  He fumbled for it, raised
it, blew on it, rubbed it with his handkerchief, and screwed it carefully
into his eye again, his rather bushy brow gathering over it strongly, his
look sharpened to more active thought.  He stared straight across the
square at a figure in heliotrope, whose face was turned to a man in
scarlet uniform taller than herself two glowing figures towards whom many
other eyes than his own were directed, some curiously, some disdain
fully, some sadly.  But Charley did not see the faces of those who looked
on; he only saw two people--one in heliotrope, one in scarlet.

Presently his white firm hand went up and ran through his hair nervously,
his comely figure settled down in the chair, his tongue touched the
corners of his red lips, and his eyes withdrew from the woman in
heliotrope and the man in scarlet, and loitered among the leaves of the
tree at the window.  The softness of the green, the cool health of the
foliage, changed the look of his eye from something cold and curious to
something companionable, and scarcely above a whisper two words came from
his lips:

"Kathleen!  Kathleen!"

By the mere sound of the voice it would have been hard to tell what the
words meant, for it had an inquiring cadence and yet a kind of distant
doubt, a vague anxiety.  The face conveyed nothing--it was smooth, fresh,
and immobile.  The only point where the mind and meaning of the man
worked according to the law of his life was at the eye, where the monocle
was caught now as in a vise.  Behind this glass there was a troubled
depth which belied the self-indulgent mouth, the egotism speaking loudly
in the red tie, the jewelled finger, the ostentatiously simple yet
sumptuous clothes.

At last he drew in a sharp, sibilant breath, clicked his tongue--a sound
of devil-may-care and hopelessness at once--and turned to a little
cupboard behind him.  The chair squeaked on the floor as he turned, and
he frowned, shivered a little, and kicked it irritably with his heel.

From the cupboard he took a bottle of liqueur, and, pouring out a small
glassful, drank it off eagerly.  As he put the bottle away, he said
again, in an abstracted fashion, "Kathleen!"

Then, seating himself at the table, as if with an effort towards energy,
he rang a bell.  A clerk entered.  "Ask Mr. Wantage to come for a
moment," he said.  "Mr. Wantage has gone to the church--to the wedding,"
was the reply.

"Oh, very well.  He will be in again this afternoon?"

"Sure to, sir."

"Just so.  That will do."

The clerk retired, and Charley, rising, unlocked a drawer, and taking out
some books and papers, laid them on the table.  Intently, carefully, he
began to examine them, referring at the same time to a letter which had
lain open at his hand while he had been sitting there.  For a quarter of
an hour he studied the books and papers, then, all at once, his fingers
fastened on a point and stayed.  Again he read the letter lying beside
him.  A flush crimsoned his face to his hair--a singular flush of shame,
of embarrassment, of guilt--a guilt not his own.  His breath caught in
his throat.

"Billy!" he gasped.  "Billy, by God!"




CHAPTER V

THE WOMAN IN HELIOTROPE

The flush was still on Charley's face when the door opened slowly, and a
lady dressed in heliotrope silk entered, and came forward.  Without a
word Charley rose, and, taking a step towards her, offered a chair; at
the same time noticing her heightened colour, and a certain rigid
carriage not in keeping with her lithe and graceful figure.  There was no
mistaking the quiver of her upper lip--a short lip which did not hide a
wonderfully pretty set of teeth.

With a wave of the hand she declined the seat.  Glancing at the books and
papers lying on the table, she flashed an inquiry at his flushed face,
and, misreading the cause, with slow, quiet point, in which bitterness or
contempt showed, she said meaningly:

"What a slave you are!"

"Behold the white man work!" he said good-naturedly, the flush passing
slowly from his face.  With apparent negligence he pushed the letter and
the books and papers a little to one side, but really to place them
beyond the range of her angry eyes.  She shrugged her shoulders at his
action.

"For 'the fatherless children and widows, and all that are desolate and
oppressed?'" she said, not concealing her malice, for at the wedding she
had just left all her married life had rushed before her in a swift
panorama, and the man in scarlet had fixed the shooting pictures in her
mind.

Again a flush swept up Charley's face and seemed to blur his sight.  His
monocle dropped the length of its silken tether, and he caught it and
slowly adjusted it again as he replied evenly:

"You always hit the nail on the head, Kathleen."  There was a kind of
appeal in his voice, a sort of deprecation in his eye, as though he would
be friends with her, as though, indeed, there was in his mind some secret
pity for her.

Her look at his face was critical and cold.  It was plain that she was
not prepared for any extra friendliness on his part--there seemed no
reason why he should add to his usual courtesy a note of sympathy to the
sound of her name on his lips.  He had not fastened the door of the
cupboard from which he had taken the liqueur, and it had swung open a
little, disclosing the bottle and the glass.  She saw.  Her face took on
a look of quiet hardness.

"Why did you not come to the wedding?  She was your cousin.  People asked
where you were.  You knew I was going."

"Did you need me?" he asked quietly, and his eyes involuntarily swept
to the place where he had seen the heliotrope and scarlet make a glow of
colour on the other side of the square.  "You were not alone."

She misunderstood him.  Her mind had been overwrought, and she caught
insinuation in his voice.  "You mean Tom Fairing!"  Her eyes blazed.
"You are quite right--I did not need you.  Tom Fairing is a man that
all the world trusts save you."

"Kathleen!"  The words were almost a cry.  "For God's sake!  I have never
thought of 'trusting' men where you are concerned.  I believe in no man"
--his voice had a sharp bitterness, though his face was smooth and
unemotional--"but I trust you, and believe in you.  Yes, upon my soul and
honour, Kathleen."

As he spoke she turned quickly and stepped towards the window, an
involuntary movement of agitation.  He had touched a chord.  But even as
she reached the window and glanced down to the hot, dusty street, she
heard a loud voice below, a reckless, ribald sort of voice, calling to
some one to, "Come and have a drink."

"Billy!" she said involuntarily, and looked down, then shrank back
quickly.  She turned swiftly on her husband.  "Your soul and honour,
Charley!" she said slowly.  "Look at what you've made of Billy!  Look at
the company he keeps--John Brown, who hasn't even decency enough to keep
away from the place he disgraced.  Billy is always with him.  You ruined
John Brown, with your dissipation and your sneers at religion and your-
'I-wonder-nows!'  Of what use have you been, Charley?  Of what use to
anyone in the world?  You think of nothing but eating, and drinking, and
playing the fop."

He glanced down involuntarily, and carefully flicked some cigarette-ash
from his waistcoat.  The action arrested her speech for a moment, and
then, with a little shudder, she continued: "The best they can say of you
is, 'There goes Charley Steele!'"

"And the worst?" he asked.  He was almost smiling now, for he admired
her anger, her scorn.  He knew it was deserved, and he had no idea of
making any defence.  He had said all in that instant's cry, "Kathleen!"
--that one awakening feeling of his life so far.  She had congealed the
word on his lips by her scorn, and now he was his old debonair,
dissipated self, with the impertinent monocle in his eye and a jest upon
his tongue.

"Do you want to know the worst they say?" she asked, growing pale to the
lips.  "Go and stand behind the door of Jolicoeur's saloon.  Go to any
street corner, and listen.  Do you think I don't know what they say?  Do
you think the world doesn't talk about the company you keep?  Haven't I
seen you going into Jolicoeur's saloon when I was walking on the other
side of the street?  Do you think that all the world, and I among the
rest, are blind?  Oh, you fop, you fool, you have ruined my brother, you
have ruined my life, and I hate and despise you for a cold-blooded,
selfish coward!"

He made a deprecating gesture and stared--a look of most curious inquiry.
They had been married for five years, and during that time they had never
been anything but persistently courteous to each other.  He had never on
any occasion seen her face change colour, or her manner show chagrin or
emotion.  Stately and cold and polite, she had fairly met his ceaseless
foppery and preciseness of manner.  But people had said of her, "Poor
Kathleen Steele!" for her spotless name stood sharply off from his
negligence and dissipation.  They called her "Poor Kathleen Steele!" in
sympathy, though they knew that she had not resisted marriage with the
well-to-do Charley Steele, while loving a poor captain in the Royal
Fusileers.  She preserved social sympathy by a perfect outward decorum,
though the man of the scarlet coat remained in the town and haunted the
places where she appeared, and though the eyes of the censorious world
were watching expectantly.  No voice was raised against her.  Her cold
beauty held the admiration of all women, for she was not eager for men's
company, and she kept her poise even with the man in scarlet near her,
glacially complacent, beautifully still, disconcertingly emotionless.
They did not know that the poise with her was to an extent as much a pose
as Charley's manner was to him.

"I hate you and despise you for a cold-blooded, selfish coward!"  So that
was the way Kathleen felt!  Charley's tongue touched his lips quickly,
for they were arid, and he slowly said:

"I assure you I have not tried to influence Billy.  I have no remembrance
of his imitating me in anything.  Won't you sit down?  It is very
fatiguing, this heat."

Charley was entirely himself again.  His words concerning Billy Wantage
might have been either an impeachment of Billy's character and, by
deduction, praise of his own, or it may have been the insufferable egoism
of the fop, well used to imitators.  The veil between the two, which for
one sacred moment had seemed about to lift, was fallen now, leaded and
weighted at the bottom.

"I suppose you would say the same about John Brown!  It is disconcerting
at least to think that we used to sit and listen to Mr. Brown as he waved
his arms gracefully in his surplice and preached sentimental sermons.
I suppose you will say, what we have heard you say before, that you only
asked questions.  Was that how you ruined the Rev. John Brown--
and Billy?"

Charley was very thirsty, and because of that perhaps, his voice had an
unusually dry tone as he replied: "I asked questions of John Brown; I
answer them to Billy.  It is I that am ruined!"

There was that in his voice she did not understand, for though long used
to his paradoxical phrases and his everlasting pose--as it seemed to her
and all the world--there now rang through his words a note she had never
heard before.  For a fleeting instant she was inclined to catch at some
hidden meaning, but her grasp of things was uncertain.  She had been
thrown off her balance, or poise, as Charley had, for an unwonted second,
been thrown off his pose, and her thought could not pierce beneath the
surface.

"I suppose you will be flippant at Judgment Day," she said with a bitter
laugh, for it seemed to her a monstrous thing that they should be such an
infinite distance apart.

"Why should one be serious then?  There will be no question of an alibi,
or evidence for the defence--no cross-examination.  A cut-and-dried
verdict!"

She ignored his words.  "Shall you be at home to dinner?" she rejoined
coldly, and her eyes wandered out of the window again to that spot across
the square where heliotrope and scarlet had met.

"I fancy not," he answered, his eyes turned away also--towards the
cupboard containing the liqueur.  "Better ask Billy; and keep him in,
and talk to him--I really would like you to talk to him.  He admires you
so much.  I wish--in fact I hope you will ask Billy to come and live with
us," he added half abstractedly.  He was trying to see his way through a
sudden confusion of ideas.  Confusion was rare to him, and his senses,
feeling the fog, embarrassed by a sudden air of mystery and a cloud of
futurity, were creeping to a mind-path of understanding.

"Don't be absurd," she said coldly.  "You know I won't ask him, and you
don't want him."

"I have always said that decision is the greatest of all qualities--even
when the decision is bad.  It saves so much worry, and tends to health."
Suddenly he turned to the desk and opened a tin box.  "Here is further
practice for your admirable gift."  He opened a paper.  "I want you to
sign off for this building--leaving it to my absolute disposal."  He
spread the paper out before her.

She turned pale and her lips tightened.  She looked at him squarely in
the eyes.  "My wedding-gift!" she said.  Then she shrugged her
shoulders.  A moment she hesitated, and in that moment seemed to congeal.
"You need it?" she asked distantly.

He inclined his head, his eye never leaving hers.  With a swift angry
motion she caught the glove from her left hand, and, doubling it back,
dragged it off.  A smooth round ring came off with it and rolled upon the
floor.

Stooping, he picked up the ring, and handed it back to her, saying:
"Permit me."  It was her wedding-ring.  She took it with a curious
contracted look and put it on the finger again, then pulled off the other
glove quietly.  "Of course one uses the pen with the right hand," she
said calmly.

"Involuntary act of memory," he rejoined slowly, as she took the pen in
her hand.  "You had spoken of a wedding, this was a wedding-gift, and--
that's right, sign there!"

There was a brief pause, in which she appeared to hesitate, and then she
wrote her name in a large firm hand, and, throwing down the pen, caught
up her gloves, and began to pull them on viciously.

"Thanks.  It is very kind of you," he said.  He put the document in the
tin box, and took out another, as without a word, but with a grave face
in which scorn and trouble were mingled, she now turned towards the door.

"Can you spare a minute longer?" he said, and advanced towards her,
holding the new document in his hand.  "Fair exchange is no robbery.
Please take this.  No, not with the right hand; the left is better luck
--the better the hand, the better the deed," he added with a whimsical
squint and a low laugh, and he placed the paper in her left hand.  "Item
No. 2 to take the place of item No. 1."

She scrutinised the paper.  Wonder filled her face.  "Why, this is a deed
of the homestead property--worth three times as much!" she said.
"Why--why do you do this?"

"Remember that questions ruin people sometimes," he answered, and stepped
to the door and turned the handle, as though to show her out.  She was
agitated and embarrassed now.  She felt she had been unjust, and yet she
felt that she could not say what ought to be said, if all the rules were
right.

"Thank you," she said simply.  "Did you think of this when--when you
handed me back the ring?"

"I never had an inspiration in my life.  I was born with a plan of
campaign."

"I suppose I ought to--kiss you!" she said in some little confusion.

"It might be too expensive," he answered, with a curious laugh.  Then he
added lightly: "This was a fair exchange"--he touched the papers--"but I
should like you to bear witness, madam, that I am no robber!"  He opened
the door.  Again there was that curious penetrating note in his voice,
and that veiled look.  She half hesitated, but in the pause there was a
loud voice below and a quick foot on the stairs.

"It's Billy!" she said sharply, and passed out.




CHAPTER VI

THE WIND AND THE SHORN LAMB

A half-hour later Charley Steele sat in his office alone with Billy
Wantage, his brother-in-law, a tall, shapely fellow of twenty-four.
Billy had been drinking, his face was flushed, and his whole manner was
indolently careless and irresponsible.  In spite of this, however, his
grey eyes were nervously fixed on Charley, and his voice was shaky as he
said, in reply to a question as to his finances: "That's my own business,
Charley."

Charley took a long swallow from the tumbler of whiskey and soda beside
him, and, as he drew some papers towards him, answered quietly: "I must
make it mine, Billy, without a doubt."

The tall youth shifted in his chair and essayed to laugh.

"You've never been particular about your own business.  Pshaw, what's the
use of preaching to me!"

Charley pushed his chair back, and his look had just a touch of surprise,
a hint of embarrassment.  This youth, then, thought him something of a
fool: read him by virtue of his ornamentations, his outer idiosyncrasy!
This boy, whose iniquity was under his finger on that table, despised him
for his follies, and believed in him less than his wife--two people who
had lived closer to him than any others in the world.  Before he answered
he lifted the glass beside him and drank to the last drop, then slowly
set it down and said, with a dangerous smile:

"I have always been particular about other people's finances, and the
statement that you haven't isn't preaching, it's an indictment--so it is,
Billy."

"An indictment!"  Billy bit his finger-nails now, and his voice shook.

"That's what the jury would say, and the judge would do the preaching.
You have stolen twenty-five thousand dollars of trust-moneys!"

For a moment there was absolute silence in the room.  From outside in the
square came the Marche-t'en! of a driver, and the loud cackling laugh of
some loafer at the corner.  Charley's look imprisoned his brother-in-law,
and Billy's eyes were fixed in a helpless stare on Charley's finger,
which held like a nail the record of his infamy.

Billy drew himself back with a jerk of recovery, and said with bravado,
but with fear in look and motion: "Don't stare like that.  The thing's
done, and you can't undo it, and that's all there is about it."  Charley
had been staring at the youth-staring and not seeing him really, but
seeing his wife and watching her lips say again: "You are ruining Billy!"
He was not sober, but his mind was alert, his eccentric soul was getting
kaleidoscopic glances at strange facts of life as they rushed past his
mind into a painful red obscurity.

"Oh yes, it can be undone, and it's not all there is about it!" he
answered quietly.

He got up suddenly, went to the door, locked it, put the key in his
pocket, and, coming back, sat down again beside the table.

Billy watched him with shrewd, hunted eyes.  What did Charley mean to do?
To give him in charge?  To send him to jail?  To shut him out from the
world where he had enjoyed himself so much for years and years?  Never to
go forth free among his fellows!  Never to play the gallant with all the
pretty girls he knew!  Never to have any sports, or games, or tobacco, or
good meals, or canoeing in summer, or tobogganing in winter, or moose-
hunting, or any sort of philandering!

The thoughts that filled his mind now were not those of regret for his
crime, but the fears of the materialist and sentimentalist, who revolted
at punishment and all the shame and deprivation it would involve.

"What did you do with the money?" said Charley, after a minute's
silence, in which two minds had travelled far.

"I put it into mines."

"What mines?"

"Out on Lake Superior."

"What sort of mines?"

"Arsenic."

Charley's eye-glass dropped, and rattled against the gold button of his
white waistcoat.

"In arsenic-mines!"  He put the monocle to his eye again.  "On whose
advice?"

"John Brown's."

"John Brown's!"  Charley Steele's ideas were suddenly shaken and
scattered by a man's name, as a bolting horse will crumple into confusion
a crowd of people.  So this was the way his John Brown had come home to
roost.  He lifted the empty whiskey-glass to his lips and drained air.
He was terribly thirsty; he needed something to pull himself together.
Five years of dissipation had not robbed him of his splendid native
ability, but it had, as it were, broken the continuity of his will and
the sequence of his intellect.

"It was not investment?" he asked, his tongue thick and hot in his
mouth.

"No.  What would have been the good?"

"Of course.  Speculation--you bought heavily to sell on an expected
rise?"

"Yes."

There was something so even in Charley's manner and tone that Billy
misinterpreted it.  It seemed hopeful that Charley was going to make the
best of a bad job.

"You see," Billy said eagerly, "it seemed dead certain.  He showed me the
way the thing was being done, the way the company was being floated, how
the market in New York was catching hold.  It looked splendid.  I thought
I could use the money for a week or so, then put it back, and have a nice
little scoop, at no one's cost.  I thought it was a dead-sure thing--and
I was hard up, and Kathleen wouldn't lend me any more.  If Kathleen had
only done the decent thing--"

A sudden flush of anger swept over Charley's face--never before in his
life had that face been so sensitive, never even as a child.  Something
had waked in the odd soul of Beauty Steele.

"Don't be a sweep--leave Kathleen out of it!" he said, in a sharp,
querulous voice--a voice unnatural to himself, suggestive of little use,
as though he were learning to speak, using strange words stumblingly
through a melee of the emotions.  It was not the voice of Charley Steele
the fop, the poseur, the idlest man in the world.

"What part of the twenty-five thousand went into the arsenic?" he said,
after a pause.  There was no feeling in the voice now; it was again even
and inquiring.

"Nearly all."

"Don't lie.  You've been living freely.  Tell the truth, or--or I'll know
the reason why, Billy."

"About two-thirds-that's the truth.  I had debts, and I paid them."

"And you bet on the races?"

"Yes."

"And lost?"

"Yes.  See here, Charley; it was the most awful luck--"

"Yes, for the fatherless children and widows, and all that are
oppressed!"

Charley's look again went through and beyond the culprit, and he recalled
his wife's words and his own reply.  A quick contempt and a sort of
meditative sarcasm were in the tone.  It was curious, too, that he could
smile, but the smile did not encourage Billy Wantage now.

"It's all gone, I suppose?" he added.

"All but about a hundred dollars."

"Well, you have had your game; now you must pay for it."

Billy had imagination, and he was melodramatic.  He felt danger ahead.

"I'll go and shoot myself!" he said, banging the table with his fist so
that the whiskey-tumbler shook.

He was hardly prepared for what followed.  Charley's nerves had been
irritated; his teeth were on edge.  This threat, made in such a cheap,
insincere way, was the last thing in the world he could bear to hear.
He knew that Billy lied; that if there was one thing Billy would not do,
shooting himself was that one thing.  His own life was very sweet to
Billy Wantage.  Charley hated him the more at that moment because he
was Kathleen's brother.  For if there was one thing he knew of Kathleen,
it was that she could not do a mean thing.  Cold, unsympathetic she might
be, cruel at a pinch perhaps, but dishonourable--never!  This weak,
cowardly youth was her brother!  No one had ever seen such a look on
Charley Steele's face as came upon it now--malicious, vindictive.  He
stooped over Billy in a fury.

"You think I'm a fool and an ass--you ignorant, brainless, lying cub!
You make me a thief before all the world by forging my name, and stealing
the money for which I am responsible, and then you rate me so low that
you think you'll bamboozle me by threats of suicide.  You haven't the
courage to shoot yourself--drunk or sober.  And what do you think would
be gained by it?  Eh, what do you think would be gained?  You can't see
that you'd insult your sister as well as--as rob me."

Billy Wantage cowered.  This was not the Charley Steele he had known,
not like the man he had seen since a child.  There was something almost
uncouth in this harsh high voice, these gauche words, this raw accent;
but it was powerful and vengeful, and it was full of purpose.  Billy
quivered, yet his adroit senses caught at a straw in the words, "as rob
me!" Charley was counting it a robbery of himself, not of the widows and
orphans!  That gave him a ray of hope.  In a paroxysm of fear, joined to
emotional excitement, he fell upon his knees, and pleaded for mercy--for
the sake of one chance in life, for the family name, for Kathleen's sake,
for the sake of everything he had ruthlessly dishonoured.  Tears came
readily to his eyes, real tears--of excitement; but he could measure,
too, the strength of his appeal.

"If you'll stand by me in this, I'll pay you back every cent, Charley,"
he cried.  "I will, upon my soul and honour!  You shan't lose a penny,
if you'll only see me through.  I'll work my fingers off to pay it back
till the last hour of my life.  I'll be straight till the day I die--so
help me God!"

Charley's eyes wandered to the cupboard where the liqueurs were.  If he
could only decently take a drink!  But how could he with this boy
kneeling before him?  His breath scorched his throat.

"Get up!" he said shortly.  "I'll see what I can do--to-morrow.  Go away
home.  Don't go out again to-night.  And come here at ten o'clock in the
morning."

Billy took up his hat, straightened his tie, carefully brushed the dust
from his knees, and, seizing Charley's hand, said: "You're the best
fellow in the world, Charley."  He went towards the door, dusting his
face of emotion as he had dusted his knees.  The old selfish, shrewd look
was again in his eyes.  Charley's gaze followed him gloomily.  Billy
turned the handle of the door.  It was locked.

Charley came forward and unlocked it.  As Billy passed through, Charley,
looking sharply in his face, said hoarsely: "By Heaven, I believe you're
not worth it!"  Then he shut the door again and locked it.

He almost ran back and opened the cupboard.  Taking out the bottle of
liqueur, he filled a glass and drank it off.  Three times he did this,
then seated himself at the table with a sigh of relief and no emotion in
his face.




CHAPTER VII

"PEACE, PEACE, AND THERE IS NO PEACE"'

The sun was setting by the time Charley was ready to leave his office.
Never in his life had he stayed so late in "the halls of industry," as
he flippantly called his place of business.  The few cases he had won so
brilliantly since the beginning of his career, he had studied at night in
his luxurious bedroom in the white brick house among the maples on the
hill.  In every case, as at the trial of Joseph Nadeau, the man who
murdered the timber-merchant, the first prejudice of judge and jury had
given way slowly before the deep-seeing mind, which had as rare a power
of analysis as for generalisation, and reduced masses of evidence to
phrases; and verdicts had been given against all personal prejudice--to
be followed outside the court by the old prejudice, the old look askance
at the man called Beauty Steele.

To him it had made no difference at any time.  He cared for neither
praise nor blame.  In his actions a materialist, in his mind he was a
watcher of life, a baffled inquirer whose refuge was irony, and whose
singular habits had in five years become a personal insult to the
standards polite society and Puritan morality had set up.  Perhaps the
insult had been intended, for irregularities were committed with an
insolent disdain for appearances.  He did nothing secretly; his page of
life was for him who cared to read.  He played cards, he talked
agnosticism, he went on shooting expeditions which became orgies, he
drank openly in saloons, he whose forefathers had been gentlemen of King
George, and who sacrificed all in the great American revolution for
honour and loyalty--statesmen, writers, politicians, from whom he had
direct inheritance, through stirring, strengthening forces, in the
building up of laws and civilisation in a new land.  Why he chose to be
what he was--if he did choose--he alone could answer.  His personality
had impressed itself upon his world, first by its idiosyncrasies and
afterwards by its enigmatical excesses.

What was he thinking of as he laid the papers away in the tin box in a
drawer, locked it, and put the key in his pocket?  He had found to the
smallest detail Billy's iniquity, and he was now ready to shoulder the
responsibility, to save the man, who, he knew, was scarce worth the
saving.  But Kathleen--there was what gave him pause.  As he turned to
the window and looked out over the square he shuddered.  He thought of
the exchange of documents he had made with her that day, and he had a
sense of satisfaction.  This defalcation of Billy's would cripple him,
for money had flown these last few years.  He had had heavy losses, and
he had dug deep into his capital.  Down past the square ran a cool avenue
of beeches to the water, and he could see his yacht at anchor.  On the
other side of the water, far down the shore, was a house which had been
begun as a summer cottage, and had ended in being a mansion.  A few
Moorish pillars, brought from Algiers for the decoration of the entrance,
had necessitated the raising of the roof, and then all had to be in
proportion, and the cottage became like an appanage to a palace.
So it had gone, and he had cared so little about it all, and for the
consequences.  He had this day secured Kathleen from absolute poverty, no
matter what happened, and that had its comfort.  His eyes wandered among
the trees.  He could see the yellow feathers of the oriole and catch the
note of the whippoorwill, and from the great church near the voices of
the choir came over.  He could hear the words "Lord, now lettest thou thy
servant depart in peace, according to thy word."

Depart in peace--how much peace was there in the world?  Who had it?  The
remembrance of what Kathleen said to him at the door--"I suppose I ought
to kiss you"--came to him, was like a refrain in his ears.

"Peace is the penalty of silence and inaction," he said to himself
meditatively.  "Where there is action there is no peace.  If the brain
and body fatten, then there is peace.  Kathleen and I have lived at
peace, I suppose.  I never said a word to her that mightn't be put down
in large type and pasted on my tombstone, and she never said a word to
me--till to-day--that wasn't like a water-colour picture.  Not till
to-day, in a moment's strife and trouble, did I ever get near her.  And
we've lived in peace.  Peace?  Where is the right kind of peace?  Over
there is old Sainton.  He married a rich woman, he has had the platter of
plenty before him always, he wears ribbons and such like baubles given by
the Queen, but his son had to flee the country.  There's Herring.  He
doesn't sleep because his daughter is going to marry an Italian count.
There's Latouche.  His place in the cabinet is begotten in corruption,
in the hotbed of faction war.  There's Kenealy.  His wife has led him a
dance of deep damnation.  There's the lot of them--every one, not an
ounce of peace among them, except with old Casson, who weighs eighteen
stone, lives like a pig, grows stuffier in mind and body every day, and
drinks half a bottle of whiskey every night.  There's no one else--yes,
there is!"

He was looking at a small black-robed figure with clean-shaven face,
white hair, and shovel-hat, who passed slowly along the wooden walk
beneath, with meditative content in his face.

"There's peace," he said with a laugh.  "I've known Father Hallon for
twenty-five years, and no man ever worked so hard, ever saw more trouble,
ever shared other people's bad luck mere than he; ever took the bit in
his teeth, when it was a matter of duty, stronger than he; and yet
there's peace; he has it; a peace that passes all understanding--mine
anyhow.  I've never had a minute's real peace.  The World, or Nature, or
God, or It, whatever the name is, owes me peace.  And how is It to give
it?  Why, by answering my questions.  Now it's a curious thing that the
only person I ever met who could answer any questions of mine--answer
them in the way that satisfies--is Suzon.  She works things down to
phrases.  She has wisdom in the raw, and a real grip on life, and yet all
the men she has known have been river-drivers and farmers, and a few men
from town who mistook the sort of Suzon she is.  Virtuous and straight,
she's a born child of Aphrodite too--by nature.  She was made for love.
A thousand years ago she would have had a thousand loves!  And she thinks
the world is a magnificent place, and she loves it, and wallows--fairly
wallows--in content.  Now which is right: Suzon or Father Hallon--
Aphrodite or the Nazarene?  Which is peace--as the bird and the beast
of the field get it--the fallow futile content, or--"

He suddenly stopped, hiccoughed, then hurriedly drawing paper before him,
he sat down.  For an hour he wrote.  It grew darker.  He pushed the table
nearer the window, and the singing of the choir in the church came in
upon him as his pen seemed to etch words into the paper, firm, eccentric,
meaning.  What he wrote that evening has been preserved, and the yellow
sheets lie loosely in a black despatch-box which contains the few records
Charley Steele left behind him.  What he wrote that night was the note of
his mind, the key to all those strange events through which he began to
move two hours after the lines were written:

               Over thy face is a veil of white sea-mist,
               Only thine eyes shine like stars; bless or blight me,
               I will hold close to the leash at thy wrist,
               O Aphrodite!

               Thou in the East and I here in the West,
               Under our newer skies purple and pleasant:
               Who shall decide which is better--attest,
               Saga or peasant?

               Thou with Serapis, Osiris, and Isis,
               I with Jehovah, in vapours and shadows;
               Thou with the gods' joy-enhancing devices,
               Sweet-smelling meadows!

               What is there given us?--Food and some raiment,
               Toiling to reach to some Patmian haven,
               Giving up all for uncertain repayment,
               Feeding the raven!

               Striving to peer through the infinite azure,
               Alternate turning to earthward and falling,
               Measuring life with Damastian measure,
               Finite, appalling.

               What does it matter!  They passed who with Homer
               Poured out the wine at the feet of their idols:
               Passing, what found they?  To-come a misnomer,
               It and their idols?

               Sacristan, acolyte, player, or preacher,
               Each to his office, but who holds the key?
               Death, only Death--thou, the ultimate teacher
               Wilt show it to me.

               And when the forts and the barriers fall,
               Shall we then find One the true, the almighty,
               Wisely to speak with the worst of us all--
               Ah, Aphrodite!

               Waiting, I turn from the futile, the human,
               Gone is the life of me, laughing with youth
               Steals to learn all in the face of a woman,
               Mendicant Truth!

Rising with a bitter laugh, and murmuring the last lines, he thrust the
papers into a drawer, locked it, and going quickly from the room, he went
down-stairs.  His horse and cart were waiting for him, and he got in.

The groom looked at him inquiringly.  "The Cote Dorion!" he said, and
they sped away through the night.




CHAPTER VIII

THE COST OF THE ORNAMENT

One, two, three, four, five, six miles.  The sharp click of the iron
hoofs on the road; the strong rush of the river; the sweet smell of the
maple and the pungent balsam; the dank rich odour of the cedar swamp; the
cry of the loon from the water; the flaming crane in the fishing-boat;
the fisherman, spear in hand, staring into the dark waters tinged with
sombre red; the voice of a lonely settler keeping time to the ping of the
axe as, lengthening out his day to nightly weariness, he felled a tree;
river-drivers' camps spotted along the shore; huge cribs or rafts which
had swung down the great stream for scores of miles, the immense oars
motionless, the little houses on the timbers blinking with light; and
from cheerful raftsmen coming the old familiar song of the rivers:

                   "En roulant, ma boule roulant,
                    En roulant ma boule!"

Not once had Charley Steele turned his head as the horse sped on.  His
face was kept straight along the line of the road; he seemed not to see
or to hear, to be unresponsive to sound or scene.  The monocle at his eye
was like a veil to hide the soul, a defence against inquiry, itself the
unceasing question, a sort of battery thrown forward, a kind of field-
casemate for a lonely besieged spirit.

It was full of suggestion.  It might have been the glass behind which
showed some mediaeval relic, the body of some ancient Egyptian king whose
life had been spent in doing wonders and making signs--the primitive,
anthropomorphic being.  He might have been a stone man, for any motion
that he made.  Yet looking at him closely you would have seen discontent
in the eye, a kind of glaze of the sardonic over the whole face.

What is the good!  the face asked.  What is there worth doing?  it said.
What a limitless futility!  it urged, fain to be contradicted too, as the
grim melancholy of the figure suggested.

"To be an animal and soak in the world," he thought to himself--" that is
natural; and the unnatural is civilisation, and the cheap adventure of
the mind into fields of baffling speculation, lighted by the flickering
intelligences of dead speculators, whose seats we have bought in the
stock-exchange of mortality, and exhaust our lives in paying for.  To
eat, to drink, to lie fallow, indifferent to what comes after, to roam
like the deer, and to fight like the tiger--"

He came to a dead stop in his thinking.  "To fight like the tiger!"  He
turned his head quickly now to where upon a raft some river-drivers were
singing:

              "And when a man in the fight goes down,
               Why, we will carry him home!"

"To fight like the tiger!"  Ravage--the struggle to possess from all the
world what one wished for one's self, and to do it without mercy and
without fear-that was the clear plan in the primitive world, where action
was more than speech and dominance than knowledge.  Was not civilisation
a mistake, and religion the insinuating delusion designed to cover it up;
or, if not designed, accepted by the original few who saw that humanity
could not turn back, and must even go forward with illusions, lest in
mere despair all men died and the world died with them?

His eyes wandered to the raft where the men were singing, and he
remembered the threat made: that if he came again to the Cote Dorion he
"would get what for!"  He remembered the warning of Rouge Gosselin
conveyed by Jolicoeur, and a sinister smile crossed over his face.  The
contradictions of his own thoughts came home to him suddenly, for was it
not the case that his physical strength alone, no matter what his skill,
would be of small service to him in a dark corner of contest?  Primitive
ideas could only hold in a primitive world.  His real weapon was his
brain, that which civilisation had given him in lieu of primitive prowess
and the giant's strength.

They had come to a long piece of corduroy-road, and the horse's hoofs
struck rumbling hollow sounds from the floor of cedar logs.  There was a
swamp on one side where fire-flies were flickering, and there flashed
into Charley Steele's mind some verses he had once learned at school:

              "They made her a grave too cold and damp
               For a soul so warm and true--"

It kept repeating itself in his brain in a strange dreary monotone.

"Stop the horse.  I'll walk the rest of the way," he said presently to
the groom.  "You needn't come for me, Finn; I'll walk back as far as the
Marochal Tavern.  At twelve sharp I'll be there.  Give yourself a drink
and some supper"--he put a dollar into the man's hand--"and no white
whiskey, mind: a bottle of beer and a leg of mutton, that's the thing."
He nodded his head, and by the light of the moon walked away smartly down
the corduroy-road through the shadows of the swamp.  Finn the groom
looked after him.

"Well, if he ain't a queer dick!  A reg'lar 'centric--but a reg'lar
brick, cutting a wide swathe as he goes.  He's a tip-topper; and he's a
sort of tough too--a sort of a kind of a tough.  Well, it's none of my
business.  Get up!" he added to the horse, and turning round in the road
with difficulty, he drove back a mile to the Tavern Marochal for his beer
and mutton--and white whiskey.

Charley stepped on briskly, his shining leather shoes, straw hat, and
light cane in no good keeping with his surroundings.  He was thinking
that he had never been in such a mood for talk with Suzon Charlemagne.
Charlemagne's tavern of the Cote Dorion was known over half a province,
and its patrons carried news of it half across a continent.  Suzon
Charlemagne--a girl of the people, a tavern-girl, a friend of sulking,
coarse river-drivers!  But she had an alert precision of brain, an
instinct that clove through wastes of mental underbrush to the tree of
knowledge.  Her mental sight was as keen and accurate as that which runs
along the rifle-barrel of the great hunter with the red deer in view.
Suzon Charlemagne no company for Charley Steele?  What did it matter!  He
had entered into other people's lives to-day, had played their games with
them and for them, and now he would play his own game, live his own life
in his own way through the rest of this day.  He thirsted for some sort
of combat, for the sharp contrasts of life, for the common and the base;
he thirsted even for the white whiskey against which he had warned
his groom.  He was reckless--not blindly, but wilfully, wildly reckless,
caring not at all what fate or penalty might come his way.

"What do I care!" he said to himself.  "I shall never squeal at any
penalty.  I shall never say in the great round-up that I was weak and
I fell.  I'll take my gruel expecting it, not fearing it--if there is
to be any gruel anywhere, or any round-up anywhere!"

A figure suddenly appeared coming round the bend of the road before him.
It was Rouge Gosselin.  Rouge Gosselin was inclined to speak.  Some
satanic whim or malicious foppery made Charley stare him blankly in the
face.  The monocle and the stare stopped the bon soir and the friendly
warning on Rouge Gosselin's tongue, and the pilot passed on with a
muttered oath.

Gosselin had not gone far, however, before he suddenly stopped and
laughed outright, for at the bottom he had great good-nature, in keeping
with his "six-foot" height, and his temper was friendly if quick.  It
seemed so absurd, so audacious, that a man could act like Charley Steele,
that he at once became interested in the phenomenon, and followed slowly
after Charley, saying as he went: "Tiens, there will be things to watch
to-night!"

Before Charley was within five hundred yards of the tavern he could hear
the laughter and song coming from the old seigneury which Theophile
Charlemagne called now the Cote Dorion Hotel, after the name given to the
point on which the house stood.  Low and wide-roofed, with dormer windows
and a wide stoop in front, and walls three feet thick, behind, on the
river side, it hung over the water, its narrow veranda supported by
piles, with steps down to the water-side.  Seldom was there an hour when
boats were not tied to these steps.  Summer and winter the tavern was a
place of resort.  Inside, the low ceiling, the broad rafters, the great
fireplace, the well-worn floor, the deep windows, the wooden cross let
into the wall, and the varied and picturesque humanity frequenting this
great room, gave it an air of romance.  Yet there were people who called
the tavern a "shebang"--slander as it was against Suzon Charlemagne,
which every river-driver and woodsman and habitant who frequented the
place would have resented with violence.  It was because they thought
Charley Steele slandered the girl and the place in his mind, that the
river-drivers had sworn they would make it hot for him if he came again.
Charley was the last man in the world to undeceive them by words.

When he coolly walked into the great room, where a half-dozen of them
were already assembled, drinking white "whiskey-wine," he had no
intention of setting himself right.  He raised his hat cavalierly to
Suzon and shook hands with her.

He took no notice of the men around him.  "Brandy, please!" he said.
"Why do I drink, do you say?" he added, as Suzon placed the bottle and
glass before him.

She was silent for an instant, then she said gravely: "Perhaps because
you like it; perhaps because something was left out of you when you were
made, and--"

She paused and went no further, for a red-shirted river-driver with brass
rings in his ears came close to them, and called gruffly for whiskey.  He
glowered at Charley, who looked at him indolently, then raised his glass
towards Suzon and drank the brandy.

"Pish!" said Red Shirt, and, turning round, joined his comrades.  It was
clear he wanted a pretext to quarrel.

"Perhaps because you like it; perhaps because something was left out of
you when you were made--" Charley smiled pleasantly as Suzon came over to
him again.  "You've answered the question," he said, "and struck the
thing at the centre.  Which is it?  The difficulty to decide which has
divided the world.  If it's only a physical craving, it means that we are
materialists naturally, and that the soil from which the grape came is
the soil that's in us; that it is the body feeding on itself all the
time; that like returns to like, and we live a little together, and then
mould together for ever and ever, amen.  If it isn't a natural craving--
like to like--it's a proof of immortality, for it represents the wild
wish to forget the world, to be in another medium.

"I am only myself when I am drunk.  Liquor makes me human.  At other times
I'm merely Charley Steele!  Now isn't it funny, this sort of talk here?"

"I don't know about that," she answered, "if, as you say, it's natural.
This tavern's the only place I have to think in, and what seems to you
funny is a sort of ordinary fact to me."

"Right again, ma belle Suzon.  Nothing's incongruous.  I've never felt so
much like singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs as when I've been
drinking.  I remember the last time I was squiffy I sang all the way home
that old nursery hymn:

                  "'On the other side of Jordan,
                    In the sweet fields of Eden,
                    Where the tree of life is blooming,
                         There is rest for you.
                    There is rest for the weary,
                    There is rest for the weary,
                    There is rest for the weary,
                         There is rest for you!'"

"I should have liked to hear you sing it--sure!" said Suzon, laughing.

Charley tossed off a quarter-tumbler of brandy, which, instead of
flushing the face, seemed only to deepen the whiteness of the skin,
showing up more brightly the spots of colour in the cheeks, that white
and red which had made him known as Beauty Steele.  With a whimsical
humour, behind which was the natural disposition of the man to do what he
listed without thinking of the consequences, he suddenly began singing,
in a voice shaken a little now by drink, but full of a curious magnetism:

                    "On the other side of Jordan--"

"Oh, don't; please don't!" said the girl, in fear, for she saw two
river-drivers entering the door, one of whom had sworn he would do for
Charley Steele if ever he crossed his path.

"Oh, don't--M'sieu' Charley!" she again urged.  The "Charley" caught his
ear, and the daring in his eye brightened still more.  He was ready for
any change or chance to-night, was standing on the verge of any
adventure, the most reckless soul in Christendom.

                   "On the other side of Jordan,
                    In the sweet fields of Eden,
                    Where the tree of life is blooming,
                         There is rest for you!"

What more incongruous thing than this flaneur in patent leathers and red
tie, this "hell-of-a-fellow with a pane of glass in his eye," as Jake
Hough, the horse-doctor, afterwards said, surrounded by red and blue-
shirted river-men, woodsmen, loafers, and toughs, singing a sacred song
with all the unction of a choir-boy; with a magnetism, too, that did its
work in spite of all prejudice?  It was as if he were counsel in one of
those cases when, the minds and sympathies of judge and jury at first
arrayed against him, he had irresistibly cloven his way to their
judgment--not stealing away their hearts, but governing, dominating their
intelligences.  Whenever he had done this he had been drinking hard, was
in a mental world created by drink, serene, clear-eyed, in which his
brain worked like an invincible machine, perfect and powerful.  Was it
the case that, as he himself suggested, he was never so natural as when
under this influence?  That then and only then the real man spoke, that
then and only then the primitive soul awakened, that it supplied the
thing left out of him at birth?

                   "There is rest for the weary,
                    There is rest for the weary,
                    There is rest for the weary,
                         There is rest for you!"

One, two verses he sang as the men, at first snorting and scornful,
shuffled angrily; then Jake Hough, the English horse-doctor, roared in
the refrain:

                   "There is rest for the weary,
                         There is rest for you!"

Upon which, carried away, every one of them roared, gurgled, or shouted

                   "There is rest for the weary,
                         There is rest for you!"

Rouge Gosselin, who had entered during the singing, now spoke up quickly
in French:

"A sermon now, M'sieu'!"

Charley took his monocle out of his eye and put it back again.  Now each
man present seemed singled out for an attack by this little battery of
glass.  He did not reply directly to Rouge Gosselin, but standing
perfectly still, with one hand resting on the counter at which Suzon
stood, he prepared to speak.

Suzon did not attempt to stop him now, but gazed at him in a sort of awe.
These men present were Catholics, and held religion in superstitious
respect, however far from practising its precepts.  Many of them had been
profane and blasphemous in their time; may have sworn "sacre bapteme!"
one of the worst oaths of their race; but it had been done in the
wildness of anger, and they were little likely to endure from Charley
Steele any word that sounded like blasphemy.  Besides, the world said
that he was an infidel, and that was enough for bitter prejudice.

In the pause--very short--before Charley began speaking, Suzon's
fingers stole to his on the counter and pressed them quickly.  He made no
response; he was scarcely aware of it.  He was in a kind of dream.  In an
even, conversational tone, in French at once idiomatic and very simple,
he began:

"My dear friends, this is a world where men get tired.  If they work they
get tired, and if they play they get tired.  If they look straight ahead
of them they walk straight, but then they get blind by-and-by; if they
look round them and get open-eyed, their feet stumble and they fall.  It
is a world of contradictions.  If a man drinks much he loses his head,
and if he doesn't drink at all he loses heart.  If he asks questions he
gets into trouble, and if he doesn't ask them he gets old before his
time.  Take the hymn we have just sung:

                   "'On the other side of Jordan,
                    In the sweet fields of Eden,
                    Where the tree of life is blooming,
                         There is rest for you!'

"We all like that, because we get tired, and it isn't always summer, and
nothing blooms all the year round.  We get up early and we work late, and
we sleep hard, and when the weather is good and wages good, and there's
plenty in the house, we stay sober and we sadly sing, 'On the other side
of Jordan'; but when the weather's heavy and funds scarce, and the pork
and molasses and bread come hard, we get drunk, and we sing the comic
chanson 'Brigadier, vows avez raison!'  We've been singing a sad song
to-night when we're feeling happy.  We didn't think whether it was sad or
not, we only knew it pleased our ears, and we wanted those sweet fields
of Eden, and the blooming tree of life, and the rest under the tree.  But
ask a question or two.  Where is the other side of Jordan?  Do you go up
to it, or down to it?  And how do you go?  And those sweet fields of
Eden, what do they look like, and how many will they hold?  Isn't it
clear that the things that make us happiest in this world are the things
we go for blind?"

He paused.  Now a dozen men came a step or two nearer, and crowded close
together, looking over each others' shoulders at him with sharp,
wondering eyes.

"Isn't that so?" he continued.  "Do you realise that no man knows where
that Jordan and those fields are, and what the flower of the tree of life
looks like?  Let us ask a question again.  Why is it that the one being
in all the world who could tell us anything about it, the one being who
had ever seen Jordan or Eden or that tree of life-in fact, the one of all
creation who could describe heaven, never told?  Isn't it queer?  Here he
was--that one man-standing just as I am among you, and round him were the
men who followed him, all ordinary men, with ordinary curiosity.  And he
said he had come down from heaven, and for years they were with him, and
yet they never asked him what that heaven was like: what it looked like,
what it felt like, what sort of life they lived there, what manner of
folk were the angels, what was the appearance of God.  Why didn't they
ask, and why didn't he answer?  People must have kept asking that
question afterwards, for a man called John answered it.  He described,
as only an oriental Jew would or could, a place all precious stones and
gold and jewels and candles, in oriental language very splendid and
auriferous.  But why didn't those twelve men ask the One Man who knew,
and why didn't the One answer?  And why didn't the One tell without being
asked?"

He paused again, and now there came a shuffling and a murmuring, a
curious rumble, a hard breathing, for Charley had touched with steely
finger the tender places in the natures of these Catholics, who, whatever
their lives, held fast to the immemorial form, the sacredness of Mother
Church.  They were ever ready to step into the galley which should bear
them all home, with the invisible rowers of God at the oars, down the
wild rapids, to the haven of St.  Peter.  There was savagery in their
faces now.

He saw, and he could not refrain from smiling as he stretched out his
hand to them again with a little quieting gesture, and continued
soothingly:

"But why should we ask?  There's a thing called electricity.  Well, you
know that if you take a slice out of anything, less remains behind.  We
can take the air out of this room, and scarcely leave any in it.

"We take a drink out of a bottle, and certainly there isn't as much left
in it!  But the queer thing is that with this electricity you take it
away and just as much remains.  It goes out from your toe, rushes away to
Timbuctoo, and is back in your toe before you can wink.  Why?  No one
knows.  What's the good of asking?  You can't see it: you can only see
what it does.  What good would it do us if we knew all about it?  There
it is, and it's going to revolutionise the world.  It's no good asking--
no one knows what it is and where it comes from, or what it looks like.
It's better to go it blind, because you feel the power, though you can't
see where it comes from.  You can't tell where the fields of Eden are,
but you believe they're somewhere, and that you'll get to them some day.
So say your prayers, believe all you can, don't ask questions, and don't
try to answer 'em; and remember that Charley Steele preached to you the
fear of the Lord at the Cote Dorion, and wound up the service with the
fine old hymn:

          "'I'll away, I'll away, to the promised land--'"

A whole verse of this camp-meeting hymn he sang in an ominous silence
now, for it had crept into their minds that the hymn they had previously
sung so loudly was a Protestant hymn, and that this was another
Protestant hymn of the rankest sort.  When he stopped singing and pushed
over his glass for Suzon to fill it, the crowd were noiseless and silent
for a moment, for the spell was still on them.  They did not recover
themselves until they saw him lift his glass to Suzon, his back on them,
again insolently oblivious of them all.  They could not see his face, but
they could see the face of Suzon Charlemagne, and they misunderstood the
light in her eye, the flush on her cheek.  They set it down to a personal
interest in Charley Steele.

Charley had, however, thrown a spell over her in another fashion.  In her
eye, in her face, was admiration, the sympathy of a strong intelligence,
the wonder of a mind in the presence of its master, but they thought they
saw passion, love, desire, in her face--in the face of their Suzon, the
pride of the river, the flower of the Cote Dorion.  Not alone because
Charley had blasphemed against religion did they hate him at this moment,
but because every heart was scorched with envy and jealousy--the black
unreasoning jealousy which the unlettered, the dull, the crude, feels for
the lettered, the able and the outwardly refined.

Charley was back again in the unfriendly climate of his natural life.
Suzon felt the troubled air round them, saw the dark looks on the faces
of the men, and was at once afraid and elated.  She loved the glow of
excitement, she had a keen sense of danger, but she also felt that in any
possible trouble to-night the chances of escape would be small for the
man before her.

He pushed out his glass again.  She mechanically poured brandy into it.

"You've had more than enough," she said, in a low voice.

"Every man knows his own capacity, Suzon.  Love me little, love me long,"
he added, again raising his glass to her, as the men behind suddenly
moved forward upon the bar.

"Don't--for God's sake!" she whispered hastily.  "Do go--or there'll be
trouble!"

The black face of Theophile Charlemagne was also turned anxiously in
Charley's direction as he pushed out glasses for those who called for
liquor.

"Oh, do, do go--like a good soul!" Suzon urged.  Charley laughed
disdainfully.  "Like a good soul!"  Had it come to this, that Suzon
pleaded with him as if he were a foolish, obstreperous child!

"Faithless and unbelieving!" he said to Suzon in English.  "Didn't I
play my game well a minute ago--eh--eh--eh, Suzon?"

"Oh, yes, yes, M'sieu'," she replied in English; "but now you are
differen' and so are they.  You must goah, so, you must!"

He laughed again, a queer sardonic sort of laugh, yet he put out his hand
and touched the girl's arm lightly with a forefinger.  "I am a Quaker
born; I never stir till the spirit moves me," he said.

He scented conflict, and his spirits rose at the thought.  Some reckless
demon of adventure possessed him; some fatalistic courage was upon him.
So far as the eye could see, the liquor he had drunk had done no more
than darken the blue of his eye, for his hand was steady, his body was
well poised, his look was direct; there seemed some strange electric
force in leash behind his face, a watchful yet nonchalant energy of
spirit, joined to an indolent pose of body.  As the girl looked at him
something of his unreckoning courage passed into her.  Somehow she
believed in him, felt that by some wild chance he might again conquer
this truculent element now almost surrounding him.  She spoke quickly to
her step-father.  "He won't go.  What can we do?"

"You go, and he'll follow," said Theophile, who didn't want a row--
a dangerous row-in his house.

"No, he won't," she said; "and I don't believe they'd let him follow me."

There was no time to say more.  The crowd were insistent and restless
now.  They seemed to have a plan of campaign, and they began to carry it
out.  First one, then another, brushed roughly against Charley.  Cool and
collected, he refused to accept the insults.

"Pardon," he said, in each case; "I am very awkward."

He smiled all the time; he seemed waiting.  The pushing and crowding
became worse.  "Don't mention it," he said.  "You should learn how to
carry your liquor in your legs."

Suddenly he changed from apology to attack.  He talked at them with a
cheerful scorn, a deprecating impertinence, as though they were children;
he chided them with patient imprecations.  This confused them for a
moment and cleared a small space around him.  There was no defiance in
his aspect, no aggressiveness of manner; he was as quiet as though it
were a drawing-room and he a master of monologues.  He hurled original
epithets at them in well-cadenced French, he called them what he listed,
but in language which half-veiled the insults--the more infuriating to
his hearers because they did not perfectly understand.

Suddenly a low-set fellow, with brass rings in his ears, pulled off his
coat and threw it on the floor.  "I'll eat your heart," he said, and
rolled up blue sleeves along a hairy arm.

"My child," said Charley, "be careful what you eat.  Take up your coat
again, and learn that it is only dogs that delight to bark and bite.  Our
little hands were never made to tear each other's eyes."

The low-set fellow made a rush forward, but Rouge Gosselin held him back.
"No, no, Jougon," he said.  "I have the oldest grudge."

Jougon struggled with Rouge Gosselin.  "Be good, Jougon," said Charley.

As he spoke a heavy tumbler flew from the other side of the room.
Charley saw the missile thrown and dodged.  It missed his temple, but
caught the rim of his straw hat, carrying it off his head, and crashed
into a lantern hanging against the wall, putting out the light.  The room
was only lighted now by another lantern on the other side of the room.
Charley stooped, picked up his hat, and put it on his head again coolly.

"Stop that, or I'll clear the bar!" cried Theophile Charlemagne, taking
the pistol Suzon slipped into his hand.  The sight of the pistol drove
the men wild, and more than one snatched at the knife in his belt.

At that instant there pushed forward into the clear space beside Charley
Steele the great figure of Jake Hough, the horse-doctor, the strongest
man, and the most popular Englishman on the river.  He took his stand by
Charley, raised his great hand, smote him in the small of his back, and
said:

"By the Lord, you have sand, and I'll stand by you!"  Under the friendly
but heavy stroke the monocle shot from Charley's eye the length of the
string.  Charley lifted it again, put it up, and staring hard at Jake,
coolly said:

"I beg your pardon--but have I ever--been introduced to you?"

What unbelievable indifference to danger, what disdain to friendliness,
made Charley act as he did is a matter for speculation.  It was throwing
away his one chance; it was foppery on the scaffold--an incorrigible
affectation or a relentless purpose.

Jake Hough strode forward into the crowd, rage in his eye.  "Go to the
devil, then, and take care of yourself!" he said roughly.

"Please," said Charley.

They were the last words he uttered that night, for suddenly the other
lantern went out, there was a rush and a struggle, a muffled groan, a
shrill woman's voice, a scramble and hurrying feet, a noise of a
something splashing heavily in the water outside.  When the lights were
up again the room was empty, save for Theophile Charlemagne, Jake Hough,
and Suzon, who lay in a faint on the floor with a nasty bruise on her
forehead.

A score of river-drivers were scattering into the country-side, and
somewhere in the black river, alive or dead, was Charley Steele.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

He had had acquaintances, but never friendships, and never loves
He has wheeled his nuptial bed into the street
He left his fellow-citizens very much alone
I am only myself when I am drunk
I should remember to forget it
Liquor makes me human
Nervous legs at a gallop
So say your prayers, believe all you can, don't ask questions
Was not civilisation a mistake
Who knows!






THE RIGHT OF WAY

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.


IX.       OLD DEBTS FOR NEW
X.        THE WAY IN AND THE WAY OUT
XI.       THE RAISING OF THE CURTAIN
XII.      THE COMING OF ROSALIE
XIII.     HOW CHARLEY WENT ADVENTURING, AND WHAT HE FOUND
XIV.      ROSALIE, CHARLEY, AND THE MAN THE WIDOW PLOMONDON JILTED
XV.       THE MARK IN THE PAPER
XVI.      MADAME DAUPHIN HAS A MISSION
XVII.     THE TAILOR MAKES A MIDNIGHT FORAY
XVIII.    THE STEALING OF THE CROSS




CHAPTER IX

OLD DEBTS FOR NEW

Jo Portugtais was breaking the law of the river--he was running a little
raft down the stream at night, instead of tying up at sundown and camping
on the shore, or sitting snugly over cooking-pot by the little wooden
caboose on his raft.  But defiance of custom and tradition was a habit
with Jo Portugais.  He had lived in his own way many a year, and he was
likely to do so till the end, though he was a young man yet.  He had many
professions, or rather many gifts, which he practised as it pleased him.
He was river-driver, woodsman, hunter, carpenter, guide, as whim or
opportunity came to him.  On the evening when Charley Steele met with his
mishap he was a river-driver--or so it seemed.  He had been up nor'west a
hundred and fifty miles, and he had come down-stream alone with his raft-
which in the usual course should take two men to guide it--through
slides, over rapids, and in strong currents.  Defying the code of the
river, with only one small light at the rear of his raft, he voyaged the
swift current towards his home, which, when he arrived opposite the Cote
Dorion, was still a hundred miles below.  He had watched the lights in
the river-drivers' camps, had seen the men beside the fires, and had
drifted on, with no temptation to join in the songs floating out over the
dark water, to share the contents of the jugs raised to boisterous lips,
or to thrust his hand into the greasy cooking-pot for a succulent bone.

He drifted on until he came opposite Charlemagne's tavern.  Here the
current carried him inshore.  He saw the dim light, he saw dark figures
in the bar-room, he even got a glimpse of Suzon Charlemagne.  He dropped
the house behind quickly, but looked back, leaning on the oar and
thinking how swift was the rush of the current past the tavern.  His eyes
were on the tavern door and the light shining through it.  Suddenly the
light disappeared, and the door vanished into darkness.  He heard a
scuffle, and then a heavy splash.

"There's trouble there," said Jo Portugais, straining his eyes through
the night, for a kind of low roar, dwindling to a loud whispering, and
then a noise of hurrying feet, came down the stream, and he could dimly
see dark figures running away into the night by different paths.

"Some dirty work, very sure," said Jo Portugais, and his eyes travelled
back over the dark water like a lynx's, for the splash was in his ear,
and a sort of prescience possessed him.  He could not stop his raft.  It
must go on down the current, or be swerved to the shore, to be fastened.

"God knows, it had an ugly sound," said Jo Portugais, and again strained
his eyes and ears.  He shifted his position and took another oar, where
the raft-lantern might not throw a reflection upon the water.  He saw a
light shine again through the tavern doorway, then a dark object block
the light, and a head thrust forward towards the river as though
listening.

At this moment he fancied he saw something in the water nearing him.  He
stretched his neck.  Yes, there was something.

"It's a man.  God save us--was it murder?" said Jo Portugais, and
shuddered.  "Was it murder?"

The body moved more swiftly than the raft.  There was a hand thrust up--
two hands.

"He's alive!" said Jo Portugais, and, hurriedly pulling round his waist
a rope tied to a timber, jumped into the water.

Three minutes later, on the raft, he was examining a wound in the head of
an insensible man.

As his hand wandered over the body towards the heart, it touched
something that rattled against a button.  He picked it up mechanically
and held it to the light.  It was an eye-glass.

"My God!" said Jo Portugais, and peered into the man's face.  "It's
him."  Then he remembered the last words the man had spoken to him--
"Get out of my sight.  You're as guilty as hell!"  But his heart yearned
towards the man nevertheless.




CHAPTER X

THE WAY IN AND THE WAY OUT

In his own world of the parish of Chaudiere Jo Portugais was counted a
widely travelled man.  He had adventured freely on the great rivers and
in the forests, and had journeyed up towards Hudson's Bay farther than
any man in seven parishes.

Jo's father and mother had both died in one year--when he was twenty-
five.  That year had turned him from a clean-shaven cheerful boy into a
morose bearded man who looked forty, for it had been marked by his
disappearance from Chaudiere and his return at the end of it, to find his
mother dead and his father dying broken-hearted.  What had driven Jo from
home only his father knew; what had happened to him during that year only
Jo himself knew, and he told no one, not even his dying father.

A mystery surrounded him, and no one pierced it.  He was a figure apart
in Chaudiere parish.  A dreadful memory that haunted him, carried him out
of the village, which clustered round the parish church, into Vadrome
Mountain, three miles away, where he lived apart from all his kind.  It
was here he brought the man with the eye-glass one early dawn, after two
nights and two days on the river, pulling him up the long hill in a low
cart with his strong faithful dogs, hitching himself with them and
toiling upwards through the dark.  In his three-roomed hut he laid his
charge down upon a pile of bear-skins, and tended him with a strange
gentleness, bathing the wound in the head and binding it again and again.

The next morning the sick man opened his eyes heavily.  He then began
fumbling mechanically on his breast.  At last his fingers found his
monocle.  He feebly put it to his eye, and looked at Jo in a strange,
questioning, uncomprehending way.

"I beg--your pardon," he said haltingly, "have I ever--been intro--"
Suddenly his eyes closed, a frown gathered on his forehead.  After a
minute his eyes opened again, and he gazed with painful, pathetic
seriousness at Jo.  This grew to a kind of childish terror; then slowly,
as a shadow passes, the perplexity, anxiety and terror cleared away, and
left his forehead calm, his eyes unvexed and peaceful.  The monocle
dropped, and he did not heed it.  At length he said wearily, and with an
incredibly simple dependence:

"I am thirsty now."

Jo lifted a wooden bowl to his lips, and he drank, drank, drank to
repletion.  When he had finished he patted Jo's shoulder.

"I am always thirsty," he said.  "I shall be hungry too.  I always am."

Jo brought him some milk and bread in a bowl.  When the sick man had
eaten and drunk the bowlful to the last drop and crumb, he lay back with
a sigh of content, but trembling from weakness and the strain, though
Jo's hand had been under his head, and he had been fed like a little
child.

All day he lay and watched Jo as he worked, as he came and went.
Sometimes he put his hand to his head and said to Jo: "It hurts."
Then Jo would cool the wound with fresh water from the mountain spring,
and he would drag down the bowl to drink from it greedily.

It was as though he could never get enough water to drink.  So the first
day in the hut at Vadrome Mountain passed without questioning on the part
of either Charley Steele or his host.

With good reason.  Jo Portugais saw that memory was gone; that the past
was blotted out.  He had watched that first terrible struggle of memory
to reassert itself, as the eyes mechanically looked out upon new and
strange surroundings, but it was only the automatic habit of the sight,
the fumbling of the blind soul in its cell-fumbling for the latch which
it could not find, for the door which would not open.  The first day on
the raft, as Charley had opened his eyes upon the world again after that
awful night at the Cote Dorion, Jo.  had seen that same blank
uncomprehending look--as it were, the first look of a mind upon the
world.  This time he saw, and understood what he saw, and spoke as men
speak, but with no knowledge or memory behind it--only the involuntary
action of muscle and mind repeated from the vanished past.

Charley Steele was as a little child, and having no past, and
comprehending in the present only its limited physical needs and motions,
he had no hope, no future, no understanding.  In three days he was upon
his feet, and in four he walked out of doors and followed Jo into the
woods, and watched him fell a tree and do a woodsman's work.  Indoors he
regarded all Jo did with eager interest and a pleased, complacent look,
and readily did as he was told.  He seldom spoke--not above three or four
times a day, and then simply and directly, and only concerning his wants.
From first to last he never asked a question, and there was never any
inquiry by look or word.  A hundred and twenty miles lay between him and
his old home, between him and Kathleen and Billy and Jean Jolicoeur's
saloon, but between him and his past life the unending miles of eternity
intervened.  He was removed from it as completely as though he were dead
and buried.

A month went by.  Sometimes Jo went down to the village below, and then,
at first, he locked the door of the house behind him upon Charley.
Against this Charley made no motion and said no word, but patiently
awaited Jo's return.  So it was that, at last, Jo made no attempt to lock
the door, but with a nod or a good-bye left him alone.  When Charley saw
him returning he would go to meet him, and shake hands with him, and say
"Good-day," and then would come in with him and help him get supper or do
the work of the house.

Since Charley came no one had visited the house, for there were no paths
beyond it, and no one came to the Vadrome Mountain, save by chance.  But
after two months had gone the Cure came.  Twice a year the Cure made it a
point to visit Jo in the interests of his soul, though the visits came to
little, for Jo never went to confession, and seldom to mass.  On this
occasion the Cure arrived when Jo was out in the woods.  He discovered
Charley.  Charley made no answer to his astonished and friendly greeting,
but watched him with a wide-eyed anxiety till the Cure seated himself at
the door to await Jo's coming.  Presently, as he sat there, Charley, who
had studied his face as a child studies the unfamiliar face of a
stranger, brought him a bowl of bread and milk and put it in his hands.
The Cure smiled and thanked him, and Charley smiled in return and said:
"It is very good."

As the Cure ate, Charley watched him with satisfaction, and nodded at him
kindly.

When Jo came he lied to the Cure.  He said he had found Charley wandering
in the woods, with a wound in his head, and had brought him home with him
and cared for him.  Forty miles away he had found him.

The Cure was perplexed.  What was there to do?  He believed what Jo said.
So far as he knew, Jo had never lied to him before, and he thought he
understood Jo's interest in this man with the look of a child and no
memory: Jo's life was terribly lonely; he had no one to care for, and no
one cared for him; here was what might comfort him!  Through this
helpless man might come a way to Jo's own good.  So he argued with
himself.

What to do?  Tell the story to the world by writing to the newspaper at
Quebec?  Jo pooh-poohed this.  Wait till the man's memory came back?
Would it come back--what chance was there of its ever coming back?  Jo
said that they ought to wait and see--wait awhile, and then, if his
memory did not return, they would try to find his friends, by publishing
his story abroad.

Chaudiere was far from anywhere: it knew little of the world, and the
world knew naught of it, and this was a large problem for the Cure.
Perhaps Jo was right, he thought.  The man was being well cared for, and
what more could be wished at the moment?  The Cure was a simple man, and
when Jo urged that if the sick man could get well anywhere in the world
it would be at Vadrome Mountain in Chaudiere, the Cure's parochial pride
was roused, and he was ready to believe all Jo said.  He also saw reason
in Jo's request that the village should not be told of the sick man's
presence.  Before he left, the Cure knelt down and prayed, "for the good
of this poor mortal's soul and body."

As he prayed, Charley knelt down also, and kept his eyes-calm unwondering
eyes-full fixed on the good M. Loisel, whose grey hair, thin peaceful
face, and dark brown eyes made a noble picture of patience and devotion.

When the Cure shook him by the hand, murmuring in good-bye, "God be
gracious to thee, my son," Charley nodded in a friendly way.  He watched
the departing figure till it disappeared over the crest of the hill.

This day marked an epoch in the solitude of the hut on Vadrome Mountain.
Jo had an inspiration.  He got a second set of carpenter's tools, and
straightway began to build a new room to the house.  He gave the extra
set of tools to Charley with an encouraging word.  For the first time
since he had been brought here, Charley's face took on a look of
interest.  In half-an-hour he was at work, smiling and perspiring, and
quickly learning the craft.  He seldom spoke, but he sometimes laughed a
mirthful, natural boy's laugh of good spirits and contentment.  From that
day his interest in things increased, and before two months went round,
while yet it was late autumn, he looked in perfect health.  He ate
moderately, drank a great deal of water, and slept half the circle of the
clock each day.  His skin was like silk; the colour of his face was as
that of an apple; he was more than ever Beauty Steele.  The Cure came
two or three times, and Charley spoke to him but never held conversation,
and no word concerning the past ever passed his tongue, nor did he have
memory of what was said to him from one day to the next.  A hundred ways
Jo had tried to rouse his memory.  But the words Cote Dorion had no
meaning to him, and he listened blankly to all names and phrases once so
familiar.  Yet he spoke French and English in a slow, passive,
involuntary way.  All was automatic, mechanical.

The weeks again wore on, and autumn became winter, and then at last one
day the Cure came, bringing his brother, a great Parisian surgeon lately
arrived from France on a short visit.  The Cure had told his brother the
story, and had been met by a keen, astonished interest in the unknown man
on Vadrome Mountain.  A slight pressure on the brain from accident had
before now produced loss of memory--the great man's professional
curiosity was aroused: he saw a nice piece of surgical work ready
to his hand; he asked to be taken to Vadrome Mountain.

Now the Cure had lived long out of the world, and was not in touch with
the swift-minded action and adventuring intellects of such men as his
brother, Marcel Loisel.  Was it not tempting Providence, a surgical
operation?  He was so used to people getting ill and getting well without
a doctor--the nearest was twenty miles distant--or getting ill and dying
in what seemed a natural and preordained way, that to cut open a man's
head and look into his brain, and do this or that to his skull, seemed
almost sinful.  Was it not better to wait and see if the poor man would
not recover in God's appointed time?

In answer to his sensitively eager and diverse questions, Marcel Loisel
replied that his dear Cure was merely mediaeval, and that he had
sacrificed his mental powers on the altar of a simple faith, which might
remove mountains but was of no value in a case like this, where, clearly,
surgery was the only providence.

At this the Cure got to his feet, came over, laid his hand on his
brother's shoulder, and said, with tears in his eyes:

"Marcel, you shock me.  Indeed you shock me!"

Then he twisted a knot in his cassock cords, and added "Come then,
Marcel.  We will go to him.  And may God guide us aright!"

That afternoon the two grey-haired men visited Vadrome Mountain, and
there they found Charley at work in the little room that the two men had
built.  Charley nodded pleasantly when the Cure introduced his brother,
but showed no further interest at first.  He went on working at the
cupboard under his hand.  His cap was off and his hair was a little
rumpled where the wound had been, for he had a habit of rubbing the place
now and then--an abstracted, sensitive motion--although he seemed to
suffer no pain.  The surgeon's eyes fastened on the place, and as Charley
worked and his brother talked, he studied the man, the scar, the contour
of the head.  At last he came up to Charley and softly placed his fingers
on the scar, feeling the skull.  Charley turned quickly.

There was something in the long, piercing look of the surgeon which
seemed to come through limitless space to the sleeping and imprisoned
memory of Charley's sick mind.  A confused, anxious, half-fearful look
crept into the wide blue eyes.  It was like a troubled ghost, flitting
along the boundaries of sight and sense, and leaving a chill and a
horrified wonder behind.  The surgeon gazed on, and the trouble in
Charley's eye passed to his face, stayed an instant.  Then he turned away
to Jo Portugais.  "I am thirsty now," he said, and he touched his lips in
the way he was wont to do in those countless ages ago, when, millions
upon millions of miles away, people said: "There goes Charley Steele!"

"I am thirsty now," and that touch of the lip with the tongue, were a
revelation to the surgeon.

A half-hour later he was walking homeward with the Cure.  Jo accompanied
them for a distance.  As they emerged into the wider road-paths that
began half-way down the mountain, the Cure, who had watched his brother's
face for a long time in silence, said:

"What is in your mind, Marcel?"  The surgeon turned with a half-smile.

"He is happy now.  No memory, no conscience, no pain, no responsibility,
no trouble--nothing behind or before.  Is it good to bring him back?"

The Cure had thought it all over, and he had wholly changed his mind
since that first talk with his brother.  "To save a mind, Marcel!" he
said.

"Then to save a soul?" suggested the surgeon.  "Would he thank me?"

"It is our duty to save him."

"Body and mind and soul, eh?  And if I look after the body and the mind?"

"His soul is in God's hands, Marcel."

"But will he thank me?  How can you tell what sorrows, what troubles, he
has had?  What struggles, temptations, sins?  He has none now, of any
sort; not a stain, physical or moral."

"That is not life, Marcel."

"Well, well, you have changed.  This morning it was I who would, and you
hesitated."

"I see differently now, Marcel."

The surgeon put a hand playfully on his brother's shoulder.

"Did you think, my dear Prosper, that I should hesitate?  Am I a
sentimentalist?  But what will he say?

"We need not think of that, Marcel."

"But yet suppose that with memory come again sin and shame--even crime?"

"We will pray for him."  "But if he isn't a Catholic?"

"One must pray for sinners," said the Curb, after a silence.

This time the surgeon laid a hand on the shoulder of his brother
affectionately.  "Upon my soul, dear Prosper, you almost persuade me to
be reactionary and mediaeval."

The Curb turned half uneasily towards Jo, who was following at a little
distance.  This seemed hardly the sort of thing for him to hear.

"You had better return now, Jo," he said.

"As you wish, M'sieu'," Jo answered, then looked inquiringly at the
surgeon.

"In about five days, Portugais.  Have you a steady hand and a quick eye?"

Jo spread out his hands in deprecation, and turned to the Curb, as though
for him to answer.

"Jo is something of a physician and surgeon too, Marcel.  He has a gift.
He has cured many in the parish with his herbs and tinctures, and he has
set legs and arms successfully."

The surgeon eyed Jo humorously, but kindly.  "He is probably as good a
doctor as some of us.  Medicine is a gift, surgery is a gift and an art.
You shall hear from me, Portugais."  He looked again keenly at Jo.  "You
have not given him 'herbs and tinctures'?"

"Nothing, M'sieu'."

"Very sensible.  Good-day, Portugais."

"Good-day, my son," said the priest, and raised his fingers in
benediction, as Jo turned and quickly retraced his steps.

"Why did you ask him if he had given the poor man any herbs or tinctures,
Marcel?" said the priest.

"Because those quack tinctures have whiskey in them."

"What do you mean?"

"Whiskey in any form would be bad for him," the surgeon answered
evasively.

But to himself he kept saying: "The man was a drunkard--he was a
drunkard."




CHAPTER XI

THE RAISING OF THE CURTAIN

M. Marcel Loisel did his work with a masterly precision, with the aid of
his brother and Portugais.  The man under the instruments, not wholly
insensible, groaned once or twice.  Once or twice, too, his eyes opened
with a dumb hunted look, then closed as with an irresistible weariness.
When the work was over, and every stain or sign of surgery removed, sleep
came down on the bed--a deep and saturating sleep, which seemed to fill
the room with peace.  For hours the surgeon sat beside the couch, now and
again feeling the pulse, wetting the hot lips, touching the forehead with
his palm.  At last, with a look of satisfaction, he came forward to where
Jo and the Cure sat beside the fire.

"It is all right," he said.  "Let him sleep as long as he will."  He
turned again to the bed.  "I wish I could stay to see the end of it.
Is there no chance, Prosper?" he added to the priest.

"Impossible, Marcel.  You must have sleep.  You have a seventy-mile drive
before you to-morrow, and sixty the next day.  You can only reach the
port now by starting at daylight to-morrow."

So it was that Marcel Loisel, the great surgeon, was compelled to leave
Chaudiere before he knew that the memory of the man who had been under
his knife had actually returned to him.  He had, however, no doubt in
his own mind, and he was confident that there could be no physical harm
from the operation.  Sleep was the all-important thing.  In it lay the
strength for the shock of the awakening--if awakening of memory there
was to be.

Before he left he stooped over Charley and said musingly: "I wonder what
you will wake up to, my friend?"  Then he touched the wound with a light
caressing finger.  "It was well done, well done," he murmured proudly.

A moment afterwards he was hurrying down the hill to the open road, where
a cariole awaited the Cure and himself.

For a day and a half Charley slept, and Jo watched him with an
affectionate solicitude.  Once or twice, becoming anxious, because of the
heavy breathing and the motionless sleep, he had forced open the teeth,
and poured a little broth between.

Just before dawn on the second morning, worn out and heavy with slumber,
Jo lay down by the piled-up fire and dropped into a sleep that wrapped
him like a blanket, folding him away into a drenching darkness.

For a time there was a deep silence, troubled only by Jo's deep
breathing, which seemed itself like the pulse of the silence.  Charley
appeared not to be breathing at all.  He was lying on his back, seemingly
lifeless.  Suddenly on the snug silence there was a sharp sound.  A tree
outside snapped with the frost.

Charley awoke.  The body seemed not to awake, for it did not stir, but
the eyes opened wide and full, looking straight before them--straight up
to the brown smoke-stained rafters, along which were ranged guns and
fishing-tackle, axes and bear-traps.  Full clear blue eyes, healthy and
untired as a child's fresh from an all-night's drowse, they looked and
looked.  Yet, at first, the body did not stir; only the mind seemed to be
awakening, the soul creeping out from slumber into the day.  Presently,
however, as the eyes gazed, there stole into them a wonder, a trouble, an
anxiety.  For a moment they strained at the rafters and the crude weapons
and implements there, then the body moved, quickly, eagerly, and turned
to see the flickering shadows made by the fire and the simple order of
the room.

A minute more, and Charley was sitting on the side of his couch, dazed
and staring.  This hut, this fire, the figure by the hearth in a sound
sleep-his hand went to his head: it felt the bandage there!

He remembered now!  Last night at the Cote Dorion!  Last night he had
talked with Suzon Charlemagne at the Cote Dorion; last night he had drunk
harder than he had ever drunk in his life, he had defied, chaffed,
insulted the river-drivers.  The whole scene came back: the faces of
Suzon and her father; Suzon's fingers on his for an instant; the glass of
brandy beside him; the lanterns on the walls; the hymn he sang; the
sermon he preached--he shuddered a little; the rumble of angry noises
round him; the tumbler thrown; the crash of the lantern, and only one
light left in the place!  Then Jake Hough and his heavy hand, the flying
monocle, and his disdainful, insulting reply; the sight of the pistol in
the hand of Suzon's father; then a rush, a darkness, and his own fierce
plunge towards the door, beyond which were the stars and the cool night
and the dark river.  Curses, hands that battered and tore at him, the
doorway reached, and then a blow on the head and--falling, falling,
falling, and distant noises growing more distant, and suddenly and
sweetly--absolute silence.

Again he shuddered.  Why?  He remembered that scene in his office
yesterday with Kathleen, and the one later with Billy.  A sensitive chill
swept all over him, making his flesh creep, and a flush sped over his
face from chin to brow.  To-day he must pick up all these threads again,
must make things right for Billy, must replace the money he had stolen,
must face Kathleen again he shuddered.  Was he at the Cote Dorion still?
He looked round him.  No, this was not the sort of house to be found at
the Cote Dorion.  Clearly this was the hut of a hunter.  Probably he had
been fished out of the river by this woodsman and brought here.  He felt
his head.  The wound was fresh and very sore.  He had played for death,
with an insulting disdain, yet here he was alive.

Certainly he was not intended to be drowned or knifed--he remembered the
knives he saw unsheathed--or kicked or pummelled into the hereafter.  It
was about ten o'clock when he had had his "accident"--he affected a
smile, yet somehow he did not smile easily--it must be now about five,
for here was the morning creeping in behind the deer-skin blind at the
window.

Strange that he felt none the worse for his mishap, and his tongue was as
clean and fresh as if he had been drinking milk last night, and not very
doubtful brandy at the Cote Dorion.  No fever in his hands, no headache,
only the sore skull, so well and tightly bandaged but a wonderful thirst,
and an intolerable hunger.  He smiled.  When had he ever been hungry for
breakfast before?  Here he was with a fine appetite: it was like coals of
fire heaped on his head by Nature for last night's business at the Cote
Dorion.  How true it was that penalties did not always come with--
indiscretions.  Yet, all at once, he flushed again to the forehead, for a
curious sense of shame flashed through his whole being, and one Charley
Steele--the Charley Steele of this morning, an unknown, unadventuring,
onlooking Charley Steele--was viewing with abashed eyes the Charley
Steele who had ended a doubtful career in the coarse and desperate
proceedings of last night.  With a nervous confusion he sought refuge in
his eye-glass.  His fingers fumbled over his waistcoat, but did not find
it.  The weapon of defence and attack, the symbol of interrogation and
incomprehensibility, was gone.  Beauty Steele was under the eyes of
another self, and neither disdain, nor contempt, nor the passive stare,
were available.  He got suddenly to his feet, and started forward, as
though to find refuge from himself.

The abrupt action sent the blood to his head, and feeling a blindness
come over him, he put both hands up to his temples, and sank back on the
couch, dizzy and faint.

His motions waked Jo Portugais, who scrambled from the floor, and came
towards him.

"M'sieu'," he said, "you must not.  You are faint."  He dropped his hands
supportingly to Charley's shoulders.

Charley nodded, but did not yet look up.  His head throbbed sorely.
"Water--please!" he said.

In an instant Jo was beside him again, with a bowl of fresh water at his
lips.  He drank, drank, drank, until the great bowl was drained to the
last drop.

"Whew!  That was good!" he said, and looked up at Jo with a smile.
"Thank you, my friend; I haven't the honour of your acquaintance, but--"

He stopped suddenly and stared at Jo.  Inquiry, mystification, were in
his look.

"Have I ever seen you before?" he said.  "Who knows, M'sieu'!"

Since Jo had stood before Charley in the dock near six years ago he had
greatly changed.  The marks of smallpox, a heavy beard, grey hair, and
solitary life had altered him beyond Charley's recognition.

Jo could hardly speak.  His legs were trembling under him, for now he
knew that Charley Steele was himself again.  He was no longer the simple,
quiet man-child of three days ago, and of these months past, but the man
who had saved him from hanging, to whom he owed a debt he dare not
acknowledge.  Jo's brain was in a muddle.  Now that the great crisis was
over, now that the expected thing had come, and face to face with the
cure, he had neither tongue, nor strength, nor wit.  His words stuck in
his throat where his heart was, and for a minute his eyes had a kind of
mist before them.

Meanwhile Charley's eyes were upon him, curious, fixed, abstracted.

"Is this your house?"

"It is, M'sieu'."

"You fished me out of the river by the Cote Dorion?"  He still held his
head with his hands, for it throbbed so, but his eyes were intent on his
companion.

"Yes, M'sieu'."

Charley's hand mechanically fumbled for his monocle.  Jo turned quickly
to the wall, and taking it by its cord from the nail where it had been
for these long months, handed it over.  Charley took it and mechanically
put it in his eye.  "Thank you, my friend," he said.  "Have I been
conscious at all since you rescued me last night?" he asked.

"In a way, M'sieu'."

"Ah, well, I can't remember, but it was very kind of you--I do thank you
very much.  Do you think you could find me something to eat?  I beg your
pardon--it isn't breakfast-time, of course, but I was never so hungry in
my life!"

"In a minute, M'sieu'--in one minute.  But lie down, you must lie down a
little.  You got up too quick, and it makes your head throb.  You have
had nothing to eat."

"Nothing, since yesterday noon, and very little then.  I didn't eat
anything at the Cote Dorion, I remember."  He lay back on the couch and
closed his eyes.  The throbbing in his head presently stopped, and he
felt that if he ate something he could go to sleep again, it was so
restful in this place--a whole day's sleep and rest, how good it would be
after last night's racketing!  Here was primitive and material comfort,
the secret of content, if you liked!  Here was this poor hunter-fellow,
with enough to eat and to drink, earning it every day by every day's
labour, and, like Robinson Crusoe no doubt, living in a serene self-
sufficiency and an elysian retirement.  Probably he had no
responsibilities in the world, with no one to say him nay, himself only
to consider in all the universe: a divine conception of adequate life.
Yet himself, Charley Steele, an idler, a waster, with no purpose in life,
with scarcely the necessity to earn his bread-never, at any rate, until
lately--was the slave of the civilisation to which he belonged.  Was
civilisation worth the game?

His hand involuntarily went to his head.  It changed the course of his
thoughts.  He must go back to-day to put Billy's crime right, to replace
the trust-moneys Billy had taken by forging his brother-in-law's name.
Not a moment must be lost.  No doubt he was within driving distance of
his office, and, bandaged head or no bandaged head, last night's
disgraceful doings notwithstanding, it was his duty to face the wondering
eyes--what did he care for wondering eyes?  hadn't he been making eyes
wonder all his life?--face the wondering eyes in the little city, and set
a crooked business straight.  Fool and scoundrel certainly Billy was, but
there was Kathleen!

His lips tightened; he had a strange anxious flutter of the heart.  When
had his heart fluttered like this?  When had he ever before considered
Kathleen's feelings as to his personal conduct so delicately?  Well,
since yesterday he did feel it, and a sudden sense of pity sprang up in
him--vague, shamefaced pity, which belied the sudden egotistical flourish
with which he put his monocle to his eye and tried futilely to smile in
the old way.

He had lain with his eyes closed.  They opened now, and he saw his host
spreading a newspaper as a kind of cloth on a small rough table, and
putting some food upon it-bread, meat, and a bowl of soup.  It was
thoughtful of this man to make his soup overnight-he saw Jo lift it from
beside the fire where it had been kept hot.  A good fellow-an excellent
fellow, this woodsman.

His head did not throb now, and he drew himself up slowly on his elbow-
then, after a moment, lifted himself to a sitting posture.

"What is your name, my friend?" he said.

"Jo Portugais, M'sieu'," Jo answered, and brought a candle and put it on
the table, then lifted the tin-plate from over the bowl of savoury soup.

Never before had Charley Steele sat down to such a breakfast.  A roll and
a cup of coffee had been enough, and often too much, for him.  Yet now he
could not wait to eat the soup with a spoon, but lifted the bowl and took
a long draught of it, and set it down with a sigh of content.  Then he
broke bread into the soup--large pieces of black oat bread--until the
bowl was a mass of luscious pulp.  This he ate almost ravenously, his eye
wandering avidly the while to the small piece of meat beside the bowl.
What meat was it?  It looked like venison, yet summer was not the time
for venison.  What did it matter!  Jo sat on a bench beside the fire, his
face turned towards his guest, dreading the moment when the man he had
nursed and cared for, with whom he had eaten and drunk for so long,
should know the truth about himself.  He could not tell him all there was
to tell, he was taking another means of letting him know.

Charley did not speak.  Hunger was a new sensation, a delicious thing,
too good to be broken by talking.  He ate till he had cleared away the
last crumbs of bread and meat and drunk the last drop of soup.  He looked
at the woodsman as though wondering if he would bring more.  Jo evidently
thought he had had enough, for he did not move.  Charley's glance
withdrew from Jo, and busied itself with the few crumbs remaining upon
the table.  He saw a little piece of bread on the floor.  He picked it up
and ate it with relish, laughing to himself.

"How long will it take us to get to town?  Can we do it this morning?"

"Not this morning, M'sieu'," said Jo, in a sort of hoarse whisper.

"How many hours would it take?"

He was gathering the last crumbs of his feast with his hand, and looking
casually down at the newspaper spread as a table-cloth.

All at once his hand stopped, his eyes became fixed on a spot in the
paper.  He gave a hoarse, guttural cry, like an animal in agony.  His
lips became dry, his hand wiped a blinding mist from his eyes.

Jo watched him with an intense alarm and a horrified curiosity.  He felt
a base coward for not having told Charley what this paper contained.
Never had he seen such a look as this.  He felt his beads, and told them
over and over again, as Charley Steele, in a dry, croaking sort of
whisper, read, in letters that seemed monstrous symbols of fire, a record
of himself:

"To-day, by special license from the civil and ecclesiastical courts [the
paragraph in the paper began], was married, at St. Theobald's Church,
Mrs. Charles Steele, daughter of the late Hon.  Julien Wantage, and niece
of the late Eustace Wantage, Esq., to Captain Thomas Fairing, of the
Royal Fusileers--"

Charley snatched at the top of the paper and read the date "Tenth of
February, 18-!" It was August when he was at the Cote Dorion, the 5th
August, 18-, and this paper was February 10th, 18-.  He read on, in the
month-old paper, with every nerve in his body throbbing now: a fierce
beating that seemed as if it must burst the heart and the veins:

"--Captain Thomas Fairing, of the Royal Fusileers, whose career in our
midst has been marked by an honourable sense of public and private duty.
Our fellow-citizens will unite with us in congratulating the bride, whose
previous misfortunes have only increased the respect in which she is
held.  If all remember the obscure death of her first husband (though the
body was not found, there has never been a doubt of his death), and the
subsequent discovery that he had embezzled trust-moneys to the extent of
twenty-five thousand dollars, thereby setting the final seal of shame
upon a misspent life, destined for brilliant and powerful uses, all
have conspired to forget the association of our beautiful and admired
townswoman with his career.  It is painful to refer to these
circumstances, but it is only within the past few days that the estate of
the misguided man has been wound up, and the money he embezzled restored
to its rightful owners; and it is better to make these remarks now than
repeat them in the future, only to arouse painful memories in quarters
where we should least desire to wound.

"In her new life, blessed by a romantic devotion known and admired by
all, Mrs. Fairing and her husband will be followed by the affectionate
good wishes of the whole community."

The man on the hearth-stone shrank back at the sight of the still, white
face, in which the eyes were like sparks of fire.  His impulse had been
to go over and offer the hand of sympathy to the stricken man, but his
simple mind grasped the fact that no one might, with impunity, invade
this awful quiet.  Charley was frozen in body, but his brain was awake
with the heat of "a burning fiery furnace."

Seven months of unconscious life-seven months of silence--no sight, no
seeing, no knowing; seven months of oblivion, in which the world had
buried him out of ken in an unknown grave of infamy!  Seven months--and
Kathleen was married again to the man she had always loved.  To the world
he himself was a rogue and thief.  Billy had remained silent--Billy, whom
he had so befriended, had let decent men heap scorn and reproaches on his
memory.  Here was what the world thought of him--he read the lines over
again, his eyes scorching, but his finger steady, as it traced the lines
slowly: "the obscure death .  .  .  .  ."  "embezzled trustmoneys .  .  .
.  ."  "the final seal of shame upon a misspent life!"

These were the epitaphs on the tombstone of Charley Steele; dead and
buried, out of sight, out of repute, soon to be out of mind and out of
memory, save as a warning to others--an old example raked out of the
dust-bin of time by the scavengers of morality, to toss at all who trod
the paths of dalliance.

What was there to do?  Go back?  Go back and knock at Kathleen's door,
another Enoch Arden, and say: "I have come to my own again?"  Return and
tell Tom Fairing to go his way and show his face no more?  Break up this
union, this marriage of love in which these two rejoiced?  Summon
Kathleen out of her illegal intercourse with the man who had been true to
her all these years?

To what end?  What had he ever done for her that he might destroy her
now?  What sort of Spartan tragedy was this, that the woman who had been
the victim of circumstances, who had been the slave to a tie he never
felt, yet which had been as iron-bound to her, should now be brought out
to be mangled body and soul for no fault of her own?  What had she done?
What had she ever done to give him right to touch so much as a hair of
her head?

Go back, and bring Billy to justice, and clear his own name?  Go back,
and send Kathleen's brother, the forger, to jail?  What an achievement
in justice!  Would not the world have a right to say that the only decent
thing he could do was to eliminate himself from the equation?  What
profit for him in the great summing-up, that he was technically innocent
of this one thing, and that to establish his innocence he broke a woman's
heart and destroyed a boy's life?  To what end!  It was the murderer
coming back as a ghost to avenge himself for being hanged.  Suppose he
went back--the death's-head at the feast--what would there be for himself
afterwards; for any one for whom he was responsible?  Living at that
price?

To die and end it all, to disappear from this petty life where he had
done so little, and that little ill?  To die?

No.  There was in him some deep, if obscure, fatalism after all.  If he
had been meant to die now, why had he not gone to the bottom of the river
that yesterday at the Cote Dorion?  Why had he been saved by this yokel
at the fire, and brought here to lie in oblivion in this mountain hut,
wrapped in silence and lost to the world?  Why had his brain and senses
lain fallow all these months, a vacuous vegetation, an empty
consciousness?  Was it fate?  Did it not seem probable that the Great
Machine had, in its automatic movement, tossed him up again on the shores
of Time because he had not fallen on the trap-door predestined for his
eternal exit?

It was clear to him that death by his own hand was futile, and that if
there were trap-doors set for him alone, it were well to wait until he
trod upon them and fell through in his appointed hour in the movement of
the Great Machine.

What to do--where to live--how to live?

He got slowly to his feet and took a step forward half blindly.  The man
on the bench stirred.  Crossing the room he dropped a hand on the man's
shoulder.  "Open the blind, my friend."

Jo Portugais got to his feet quickly, eyes averted--he did not dare look
into Charley's face--and went over and drew back the deer-skin blind.
The clear, crisp sunlight of a frosty morning broke gladly into the room.
Charley turned and blew out the candle on the table where he had eaten,
then walked feebly to the window.  Standing on the crest of the mountain
the hut looked down through a clearing, flanked by forest trees.

It was a goodly scene.  The green and frosted foliage of the pines and
cedars; the flowery tracery of frost hanging like cobwebs everywhere; the
poudre sparkle in the air; the hills of silver and emerald sloping down
to the valley miles away, where the village clustered about the great old
parish church; the smoke from a hundred chimneys, in purple spirals,
rising straight up in the windless air; over all peace and a perfect
silence.

Charley mechanically fixed his eye-glass and stood with hands resting on
the window-sill, looking, looking out upon a new world.

At length he turned.

"Is there anything I can do for you, M'sieu'?" said Jo huskily.

Charley held out his hand and clasped Jo's.  "Tell me about all these
months," he said.




CHAPTER XII

THE COMING OF ROSALIE

Charley Steele saw himself as he had been through the eyes of another.
He saw the work that he had done in the carpentering shed, and had no
memory of it.  The real Charley Steele had been enveloped in oblivion for
seven months.  During that time a mild phantom of himself had wandered,
as it were in a somnambulistic dream, through the purlieus of life.
Open-eyed, but with the soul asleep, all idiosyncrasy laid aside, all
acquired impressions and influences vanished, he had been walking in the
world with no more complexity of mind than a new-born child, nothing
intervening between the sight of the eyes and the original sense.

Now, when the real Charley Steele emerged again, the folds of mind and
soul unrolling to the million-voiced creation and touched by the antenna
of a various civilisation, the phantom Charley was gone once more into
obscurity.  The real Charley could remember naught of the other, could
feel naught, save, as in the stirring industrious day, one remembers that
he has dreamed a strange dream the night before, and cannot recall it,
though the overpowering sense of it remains.

He saw the work of his hands, the things he had made with adze and plane,
with chisel and hammer, but nothing seemed familiar save the smell of the
glue pot, which brought back in a cloudy impression curious unfamiliar
feelings.  Sights, sounds, motions, passed in a confused way through his
mind as the smell of the glue crept through his nostrils; and he
struggled hard to remember.  But no--seven months of his life were gone
for ever.  Yet he knew and felt that a vast change had gone over him, had
passed through him.  While the soul had lain fallow, while the body had
been growing back to childlike health again, and Nature had been pouring
into his sick senses her healing balm; while the medicaments of peace and
sleep and quiet labour had been having their way with him, he had been
reorganised, renewed, flushed of the turgid silt of dissipation.  For his
sins and weaknesses there had been no gall and vinegar to drink.

As Charley stood looking round the workshop, Jo entered, shaking the snow
from his moccasined feet.  "The Cure, M'sieu' Loisel, has come," he said.
Charley turned, and, without a word, followed Jo into the house.  There,
standing at the window and looking down at the village beneath, was the
Cure.  As Charley entered, M. Loisel carne forward with outstretched
hand.

"I am glad to see you well again, Monsieur," he said, and his cool thin
hand held Charley's for a moment, as he looked him benignly in the eye.

With a kind of instinct as to the course he must henceforth pursue,
Charley replied simply, dropping his eye-glass as he met that clear
soluble look of the priest--such a well of simplicity he had never before
seen.  Only naked eye could meet that naked eye, imperfect though his own
sight was.

"It is good of you to feel so, and to come and tell me so," he answered
quietly.  "I have been a great trouble, I know."

There was none of the old pose in his manner, none of the old cryptic
quality in his words.

"We were anxious for your sake--and for the sake of your friends,
Monsieur."

Charley evaded the suggestion.  "I cannot easily repay your kindness and
that of Jo Portugais, my good friend here," he rejoined.

"M'sieu'," replied Jo, his face turned away, and his foot pushing a log
on the fire, "you have repaid it."

Charley shook his head.  "I am in a conspiracy of kindness," he said.
"It is all a mystery to me.  For why should one expect such treatment
from strangers, when, besides all, one can never make any real return,
not even to pay for board and lodging!"

"'I was a stranger and ye took me in,"' said the Cure, smiling by no
means sentimentally.  "So said the Friend of the World."

Charley looked the Curb steadily in the eyes.  He was thinking how simply
this man had said these things; as if, indeed, they were part of his
life; as though it were usual speech with him, a something that belonged,
not an acquired language.  There was the old impulse to ask a question,
and he put the monocle to his eye, but his lips did not open, and the
eye-glass fell again.  He had seen familiarity with sacred names and
things in the uneducated, in excited revivalists, worked up to a state
clairvoyant and conversational with the Creator; but he had never heard
an educated man speak as this man did.

At last Charley said: "Your brother--Portugais tells me that your
brother, the surgeon, has gone away.  I should have liked to thank him
--if no more."

"I have written him of your good recovery.  He will be glad, I know.  But
my brother, from one stand-point--a human stand-point--had scruples.
These I did not share, but they were strong in him, Monsieur.  Marcel
asked himself--"  He stopped suddenly and looked towards Jo.

Charley saw the look, and said quickly: "Speak plainly.  Portugais is my
friend."

Jo turned slowly towards him, and a light seemed to come to his eyes--a
shining something that resolved itself into a dog-like fondness, an utter
obedience, a strange intense gratitude.

"Marcel asked himself," the Cure continued, "whether you would thank him
for bringing you back to--to life and memory.  I fear he was trying to
see what I should say--I fear so.  Marcel said, 'Suppose that he should
curse me for it?  Who knows what he would be brought back to--to what
suffering and pain, perhaps?'  Marcel said that."

"And you replied, Monsieur le Cure?"

"I replied that Nature required you to answer that question for yourself,
and whether bitterly or gladly, it was your duty to take up your life and
live it out.  Besides, it was not you alone that had to be considered.
One does not live alone or die alone in this world.  There were your
friends to consider."

"And because I had no friends here, you were compelled to think for me!"
answered Charley calmly.  "Truth is, it was not a question of my friends,
for what I was during those seven months, or what I am now, can make no
difference to them."

He looked the Cure in the eyes steadily, and as though he would convey
his intentions without words.  The Curb understood.  The habit of
listening to the revelations of the human heart had given him something
of that clairvoyance which can only be pursued by the primitive mind,
unvexed by complexity.

"It is, then, as though you had not come to life again?  It is as though
you had no past, Monsieur?"

"It is that, Monsieur."

Jo suddenly turned and left the room, for he heard a step on the frosty
snow without.

"You will remain here, Monsieur?" said the Cure.  "I cannot tell."

The Cure had the bravery of simple souls with a duty to perform.  He
fastened his eyes on Charley.  "Monsieur, is there any reason why you
should not stay here?  I ask it now, man to man--not as a priest of my
people, but as man to man."

Charley did not answer for a moment.  He was wondering how he should put
his reply.  But his look did not waver, and the Cure saw the honesty of
the gaze.  At length he replied: "If you mean, have I committed any crime
which the law may punish?--I answer no, Monsieur.  If you mean, have I
robbed or killed, or forged--or wronged a woman as men wrong women?  No.
These, I take it, are the things that matter first.  For the rest, you
can think of me as badly as you will, or as well, for what I do
henceforth is the only thing that really concerns the world, Monsieur le
Cure."

The Cure came forward and put out his hand with a kindly gesture.
"Monsieur, you have suffered," he said.

"Never, never at all, Monsieur.  Never for a moment, until I was dropped
down here like a stone from a sling.  I had life by the throat; now it
has me there--that is all."

"You are not a Catholic, Monsieur?" asked the priest, almost pleadingly,
and as though the question had been much on his mind.

"No, Monsieur."

The Cure made no rejoinder.  If he was not a Catholic, what matter
what he was?  If he was not a Catholic, were he Buddhist, pagan, or
Protestant, the position for them personally was the same.  "I am very
sorry," he said gently.  "I might have helped you had you been a
Catholic."

The eye-glass came like lightning to the eye, and a caustic, questioning
phrase was on the tongue, but Charley stopped himself in time.  For,
apart from all else, this priest had been his friend in calamity, had
acted with a charming sensibility.  The eye-glass troubled the Cure, and
the look on Charley's face troubled him still more, but it passed as
Charley said, in a voice as simple as the Cure's own:

"You may still help me as you have already done.  I give you my word,
too"--strange that he touched his lips with his tongue as he did in the
old days when his mind turned to Jean Jolicoeur's saloon--"that I will do
nothing to cause regret for your humanity and--and Christian kindness."
Again the tongue touched the lips--a wave of the old life had swept over
him, the old thirst had rushed upon him.  Perhaps it was the force of
this feeling which made him add, with a curious energy, "I give you my
word, Monsieur le Cure."  At that moment the door opened and Jo entered.

"M'sieu'," he said to Charley, "a registered parcel has come for you.
It has been brought by the postmaster's daughter.  She will give it to no
one but yourself."

Charley's face paled, and the Cure's was scarcely less pale.  In
Charley's mind was the question, Who had discovered his presence here?
Was he not, then, to escape?  Who should send him parcels through the
post?

The Cure was perturbed.  Was he, then, to know who this man was--his name
and history?  Was the story of his life now to be told?

Charley broke the silence.  "Tell the girl to come in."  Instantly
afterwards the postmaster's daughter entered.  The look of the girl's
face, at once delicate and rosy with health, almost put the question of
the letter out of his mind for an instant.  Her dark eyes met his as he
came forward with outstretched hand.

"This is addressed, as you will see, 'To the Sick Man at the House of Jo
Portugais, at Vadrome Mountain.'  Are you that person, Monsieur?" she
asked.

As she handed the parcel, Charley's eyes scanned her face quickly.  How
did this habitant girl come by this perfect French accent, this refined
manner?  He did not know the handwriting on the parcel; he hastily tore
it open.  Inside were a few dozen small packets.  Here also was a sheet
of paper.  He opened and read it quickly.  It said:

     Monsieur, I am not sure that you have recovered your memory and your
     health, and I am also not sure that in such case you will thank me
     for my work.  If you think I have done you an injury, pray accept my
     profound apologies.  Monsieur, you have been a drunkard.  If you
     would reverse the record now, these powders, taken at opportune
     moments, will aid you.  Monsieur, with every expression of my good-
     will, and the hope that you will convey to me without reserve your
     feelings on this delicate matter, I append my address in Paris, and
     I have the honour to subscribe myself, with high consideration,
     Monsieur, yours faithfully,
                                        MARCEL LOISEL.

The others looked at him with varied feelings as he read.  Curiosity,
inquiry, expectation, were common to them all, but with each was a
different personal feeling.  The Cure's has been described.  Jo
Portugais' mind was asking if this meant that the man who had come
into his life must now go out of it; and the girl was asking who was
this mysterious man, like none she had ever seen or known.

Without hesitation Charley handed over the letter to the Cure, who took
it with surprise, read it with amazement, and handed it back with a flush
on his face.

"Thank you," said Charley to the girl.  "It is good of you to bring it
all this way.  May I ask--"

"She is Mademoiselle Rosalie Evanturel," said the Cure smiling.

"I am Charles Mallard," said Charley slowly.  "Thank you.  I will go now,
Monsieur Mallard," the girl said, lifting her eyes to his face.  He
bowed.  As she turned and went towards the door her eyes met his.  She
blushed.

"Wait, Mademoiselle; I will go back with you," said the Cure kindly.  He
turned to Charley and held out his hand.  "God be with you, Monsieur--
Charles," he said.  "Come and see me soon."  Remembering that his brother
had written that the man was a drunkard, his eyes had a look of pity.
This was the man's own secret and his.  It was a way to the man's heart;
he would use it.

As the two went out of the door, the girl looked back.  Charley was
putting the surgeon's letter into the fire, and did not see her; yet she
blushed again.




CHAPTER XIII

HOW CHARLEY WENT ADVENTURING AND WHAT HE FOUND

A week passed.  Charley's life was running in a tiny circle, but his mind
was compassing large revolutions.  The events of the last few days had
cut deep.  His life had been turned upside down.  All his predispositions
had been suddenly brought to check, his habits turned upon the flank and
routed, his mental postures flung into confusion.  He had to start life
again; but it could not be in the way of any previous travel of mind or
body.  The line of cleavage was sharp and wide, and the only connection
with the past was in the long-reaching influence of evil habits, which
crept from their coverts, now and again, to mock him as his old self had
mocked life--to mock him and to tempt him.  Through seven months of
healthy life for his body, while brain and will were sleeping, the whole
man had made long strides towards recreation.  But with the renewal of
will and mind the old weaknesses, roused by memory, began to emerge
intermittently, as water rises from a spring.  There was something
terrible in this repetition of sensation--the law of habit answering
to the machine-like throbbing of memory, as, a kaleidoscope turning,
turning, its pictures pass a certain point at fixed intervals--an
automatic recurrence.  He found himself at times touching his lips with
his tongue, and with this act came the dry throat, the hot eye, the
restless hand feeling for a glass that eluded his fingers.

Twice in one week did this fever surge up in him, and it caught him in
those moments when, exhausted by the struggle of his mind to adapt itself
to the new conditions, his senses were delicately susceptible.  Visions
of Jolicoeur's saloon came to his mind's eye.  With a singular
separateness, a new-developed dual sense, he saw himself standing in the
summer heat, looking over to the cool dark doorway of the saloon, and he
caught again the smell of the fresh-drawn beer.  He was conscious of
watching himself do this and that, of seeing himself move here and there.
He began to look upon Charley Steele as a man he had known--he, Charles
Mallard, had known--while he had to suffer for what Charley Steele had
done.  Then, all at once, as he was thinking and dreaming and seeing,
there would seize upon him the old appetite, coincident with the seizure
of his brain by the old sense of cynicism at its worst--such a worst as
had made him insult Jake Hough when the rough countryman was ready to
take his part that wild night at the Cote Dorion.

At such moments life became a conflict--almost a terror--for as yet he
had not swung into line with the new order of things.  In truth, there
was no order of things; for one life was behind him and the new one was
not yet decided upon, save that here he would stay--here out of the
world, out of the game, far from old associations, cut off, and to be for
ever cut off, from all that he had ever known or seen or felt or loved!
.  .  .  Loved!  When did he ever love?  If love was synonymous with
unselfishness, with the desire to give greater than the desire to get,
then he had never known love.  He realised now that he had given Kathleen
only what might be given across a dinner-table--the sensuous tribute of
a temperament, passionate without true passion or faith or friendship.
Kathleen had known that he gave her nothing worth the having; for in some
meagre sense she knew what love was, and had given it meagrely, after her
nature, to another man, preserving meanwhile the letter of the law,
respecting that bond which he had shamed by his excesses.

Kathleen was now sitting at another man's table--no, probably at his own
table--his, Charley Steele's own table in his own house--the house he had
given her by deed of gift the day he died.  Tom Fairing was sitting where
he used to sit, talking across the table--not as he used to talk--looking
into Kathleen's face as he had never looked.  He was no more to them than
a dark memory.  "Well, why should I be more?" he asked himself.  "I am
dead, if not buried.  They think me down among the fishes.  My game is
done; and when she gets older and understands life better, Kathleen will
say, 'Poor Charley--he might have been anything!'  She'll be sure to say
that some day, for habit and memory go round in a circle and pass the
same point again and again.  For me--they take me by the throat--"  He
put his hand up as if to free his throat from a grip, his tongue touched
his lips, his hands grew restless.

"It comes back on me like a fit of ague, this miserable thirst.  If I
were within sight of Jolicoeur's saloon, I should be drinking hard this
minute.  But I'm here, and--"  His hand felt his pocket, and he took out
the powders the great surgeon had sent him.

"He knew--how did he know that I was a drunkard?  Does a man carry in his
face the tale he would not tell?  Jo says I didn't talk of the past, that
I never had delirium, that I never said a word to suggest who I was, or
where I came from.  Then how did the doctor--man know?  I suppose every
particular habit carries its own signal, and the expert knows the
ciphers."  He opened the paper containing the powders, and looked round
for water, then paused, folded the paper up, and put it in his pocket
again.  He went over to the window and looked out.  His shoulders set
square.  "No, no, no, not a speck on my tongue!" he said.  "What I can't
do of my own will is not worth doing.  It's too foolish, to yield to the
shadow of an old appetite.  I play this game alone--here in Chaudiere."

He looked out and down.  The sweet sun of early spring was shining
hard, and the snow was beginning to pack, to hang like a blanket on the
branches, to lie like a soft coverlet over all the forest and the fields.
Far away on the frozen river were saplings stuck up to show where the ice
was safe--a long line of poles from shore to shore--and carioles were
hurrying across to the village.  Being market-day, the place was alive
with the cheerful commerce of the habitant.  The bell of the parish
church was ringing.  The sound of it came up distantly and peacefully.
Charley drew a long breath, turned away to a pail of water, filled a
dipper half full, and drank it off gaspingly.  Then he returned to the
window with a look of relief.

"That does it," he said.  "The horrible thing is gone again--out of my
brain and out of my throat."

As he stood there, Jo came up the hill with a bundle in his arms.
Charley watched him for a moment, half whimsically, half curiously.  Yet
he sighed once too as Portugais opened the door and came into the room.
"Well done, Jo!" said he.  "You have 'em?"

"Yes, M'sieu'.  A good suit, and I believe they'll fit.  Old Trudel says
it's the best suit he's made in a year.  I'm afraid he'll not make many
more suits, old Trudel.

"He's very bad.  When he goes there'll be no tailor--ah, old Trudel will
be missed for sure, M'sieu'!"

Jo spread the clothes out on the table--a coat, waistcoat, and trousers
of fulled cloth, grey and bulky, and smelling of the loom and the
tailor's iron.  Charley looked at them interestedly, then glanced at the
clothes he had on, the suit that had belonged to him last year--grave-
clothes.

He drew himself up as though rousing from a dream.  "Come, Jo, clear out,
and you shall have your new habitant in a minute," he said.  Portugais
left the room, and when he came back, Charley was dressed in the suit of
grey fulled cloth.  It was loose, but comfortable, and save for the
refined face--on which a beard was growing now--and the eye-glass, he
might easily have passed for a farmer.  When he put on the dog-skin fur
cap and a small muffler round his neck, it was the costume of the
habitant complete.

Yet it was no disguise, for it was part of the life that Charles Mallard,
once Charley Steele, should lead henceforth.

He turned to the door and opened it.  "Good-bye, Portugais," he said.

Jo was startled.  "Where are you going, M'sieu'?"

"To the village."

"What to do, M'sieu'?"

"Who knows?"

"You will come back?" Jo asked anxiously.

"Before sundown, Jo.  Good-bye!"

This was the first long walk he had taken since he had become himself
again.  The sweet, cold air, with a bracing wind in his face, gave peace
to the nerves but now strained and fevered in the fight with appetite.
His mind cleared, and he drank in the sunny air and the pungent smell of
the balsams.  His feet light with moccasins, he even ran a distance,
enjoying the glow from a fast-beating pulse.

As he came into the high-road, people passed him in carioles and sleighs.
Some eyed him curiously.  What did he mean to do?  What object had he in
coming to the village?  What did he expect?  As he entered the village
his pace slackened.  He had no destination, no object.  He was simply
aware that his new life was beginning.

He passed a little house on which was a sign, "Narcisse Dauphin, Notary."
It gave him a curious feeling.  It was the old life before him.  "Charles
Mallard, Notary?"--No, that was not for him.  Everything that reminded
him of the past, that brought him in touch with it, must be set aside.
He moved on.  Should he go to the Cure?  No; one thing at a time, and
today he wanted his thoughts for himself.  More people passed him, and
spoke of him to each other, though there was no coarse curiosity--the
habitant has manners.

Presently he passed a low shop with a divided door.  The lower half was
closed, the upper open, and the winter sun was shining full into the
room, where a bright fire burned.

Charley looked up.  Over the door was painted, in straggling letters:
"Louis Trudel, Tailor."  He looked inside.  There, on a low table, bent
over his work, with a needle in his hand, sat Louis Trudel the tailor.
Hearing footsteps, feeling a shadow, he looked up.  Charley started at
the look of the shrunken, yellow face; for if ever death had set his
seal, it was on that haggard parchment.  The tailor's yellow eyes ran
from Charley's face to his clothes.

"I knew they'd fit," he said, with a snarl.  "Drove me hard, too!"

Charley had an inspiration.  He opened the halfdoor, and entered.

"Do you want help?" he said, fixing his eyes on the tailor's, steady and
persistent.

"What's the good of wanting--I can't get it," was the irritable reply, as
he uncrossed his legs.

Charley took the iron out of his hand.  "I'll press, if you'll show me
how," he said.

"I don't want a fiddling ten-minutes' help like that."

"It isn't fiddling.  I'm going to stay, if you think I'll do."

"You are going to stop-every day?"  The old man's voice quavered a
little.

"Precisely that."  Charley wetted a seam with water as he had often seen
tailors do.  He dropped the hot iron on the seam, and sniffed with
satisfaction.

"Who are you?" said the tailor.

"A man who wants work.  The Cure knows.  It's all right.  Shall I stay?"

The tailor nodded, and sat down with a colour in his face.




CHAPTER XIV

ROSALIE, CHARLEY, AND THE MAN THE WIDOW PLOMONDON JILTED

From the moment there came to the post-office the letter addressed to
"The Sick Man at the House of Jo Portugais at Vadrome Mountain," Rosalie
Evanturel dreamed dreams.  Mystery, so fascinating a thing in all the
experiences of life, took hold of her.  The strange man in the lonely
hut on the hill, the bandaged head, the keen, piercing blue eyes, the
monocle, like a masked battery of the mind, levelled at her--all appealed
to that life she lived apart from the people with whom she had daily
commerce.  Her world was a world of books and dreams, and simple,
practical duties of life.  Most books were romance to her, for most were
of a life to which she had not been educated.  Even one or two purely
Protestant books of missionary enterprise, found in a box in her dead
mother's room, had had all the charms of poetry and adventure.  It was
all new, therefore all delightful, even when the Protestant sentiments
shocked her as being not merely untrue, but hurting that aesthetic sense
never remote from the mind of the devout Catholic.

She had blushed when monsieur had first looked at her, in the hut on
Vadrome Mountain, not because there was any soft sentiment about him in
her heart--how could there be for a man she had but just seen!--but
because her feelings, her imagination, were all at high temperature;
because the man compelled attention.  The feeling sprang from a deep
sensibility, a natural sense, not yet made incredulous by the ironies of
life.  These had never presented themselves to her in a country, in a
parish, where people said of fortune and misfortune, happiness and
sorrow, "C'est le bon Dieu!"--always "C'est le bon Dieu!"

In some sense it was a pity that she had brains above the ordinary, that
she had had a good education and nice tastes.  It was the cultivation of
the primitive and idealistic mind, which could not rationalise a sense of
romance, of the altruistic, by knowledge of life.  As she sat behind the
post-office counter she read all sorts of books that came her way.  When
she learned English so as to read it almost as easily as she read French,
her greatest joy was to pore over Shakespeare, with a heart full of
wonder, and, very often, eyes full of tears--so near to the eyes of her
race.  Her imagination inhabited Chaudiere with a different folk, living
in homes very unlike these wide, sweeping-roofed structures, with double
windows and clean-scrubbed steps, tall doors, and wide, uncovered stoops.
Her people--people of bright dreaming--were not quarrelsome, or childish,
or merely traditional, like the habitants.  They were picturesque and
able and simple, doing good things in disguise, succouring distress,
yielding their lives without thought for a cause, or a woman, and loving
with an undying love.

Charley was of these people--from the first instant she saw him.  The
Cure, the Avocat, and the Seigneur were also of them, but placidly,
unimportantly.  "The Sick Man at Jo Portugais' House" came out of a
mysterious distance.  Something in his eyes said, "I have seen, I have
known," told her that when he spoke she would answer freely, that they
were kinsfolk in some hidden way.  Her nature was open and frank; she
lived upon the house-tops, as it were, going in and out of the lives of
the people of Chaudiere with neighbourly sympathy and understanding.  Yet
she knew that she was not of them, and they knew that, poor as she was,
in her veins flowed the blood of the old nobility of France.  For this
the Cure could vouch.  Her official position made her the servant of the
public, and she did her duty with naturalness.

She had been a figure in the parish ever since the day she returned from
the convent at Quebec, and took her dead mother's place in the home and
the parish.  She had a quick temper, but there was not a cheerless note
in her nature, and there was scarce a dog or a horse in the parish but
knew her touch, and responded to it.  Squirrels ate out of her hand, she
had even tamed two partridges, and she kept in her little garden a bear
she had brought up from a cub.  Her devotion to her crippled father was
in keeping with her quick response to every incident of sorrow or joy in
the parish--only modified by wilful prejudices scarcely in keeping with
her unselfishness.

As Mrs. Flynn, the Seigneur's Irish cook, said of her: "Shure, she's not
made all av wan piece, the darlin'!  She'll wear like silk, but she's not
linen for everybody's washin'."  And Mrs. Flynn knew a thing or two, as
was conceded by all in Chaudiere.  No gossip was Mrs. Flynn, but she knew
well what was going on in the parish, and she had strong views upon all
subjects, and a special interest in the welfare of two people in
Chaudiere.  One of these was the Seigneur, who, when her husband died,
leaving behind him a name for wit and neighbourliness, and nothing else,
proposed that she should come to be his cook.  In spite of her protest
that what was "fit for Teddy was not fit for a gintleman of quality," the
Seigneur had had his way, never repenting of his choice.  Mrs. Flynn's
cooking was not her only good point.  She had the rarest sense and an
unfailing spring of good-nature--life bubbled round her.  It was she that
had suggested the crippled M. Evanturel to the Seigneur when the office
of postmaster became vacant, and the Seigneur had acted on her
suggestion, henceforth taking greater interest in Rosalie.

It was Mrs. Flynn who gave Rosalie information concerning Charley's
arrival at the shop of Louis Trudel the tailor.  The morning after
Charley came, Mrs. Flynn had called for a waistcoat of the Seigneur, who
was expected home from a visit to Quebec.  She found Charley standing at
a table pressing seams, and her quick eye took him in with knowledge and
instinct.  She was the one person, save Rosalie, who could always divert
old Louis, and this morning she puckered his sour face with amusement by
the story of the courtship of the widow Plomondon and Germain Boily the
horse-trainer, whose greatest gift was animal-training, and greatest
weakness a fondness for widows, temporary and otherwise.  Before she left
the shop, with the stranger's smile answering to her nod, she had made up
her mind that Charley was a tailor by courtesy only.  So she told Rosalie
a few moments afterwards.

"'Tis a man, darlin', that's seen the wide wurruld.  'Tis himisperes he
knows, not parrishes.  Fwhat's he doin' here, I dun'no'.  Fwhere's he
come from, I dun'no'.  French or English, I dun'no'.  But a gintleman
born, I know.  'Tis no tailor, darlin', but tailorin' he'll do as aisy as
he'll do a hunderd other things anny day.  But how he shlipped in here,
an' when he shlipped in here, an' what's he come for, an' how long he's
stayin', an' meanin' well, or doin' ill, I dun'no', darlin', I dun'
no'."

"I don't think he'll do ill, Mrs. Flynn," said Rosalie, in English.

"An' if ye haven't seen him, how d'ye know?" asked Mrs. Flynn, taking a
pinch of snuff.

"I have seen him--but not in the tailor-shop.  I saw him at Jo Portugais'
a fortnight ago."

"Aisy, aisy, darlin'.  At Jo Portugais'--that's a quare place for a
stranger.  'Tis not wid Jo's introducshun I'd be comin' to Chaudiere."

"He comes with the Cure's introduction."

"An' how d'ye know that, darlin'?"

"The Curb was at Jo Portugais' with monsieur when I went there."

"You wint there!"

"To take him a letter--the stranger."  "What's his name, darlin'?"

"The letter I took him was addressed, 'To the Sick Man at Jo Portugais'
House at Vadrome Mountain.'"

"Ah, thin, the Cure knows.  'Tis some rich man come to get well, and
plays at bein' tailor.  But why didn't the letther come to his name,
I wander now?  That's what I wander."

Rosalie shook her head, and looked reflectively through the window
towards the tailor-shop.

"How manny times have ye seen him?"

"Only once;" answered Rosalie truthfully.  She did not, however, tell
Mrs. Flynn that she had thrice walked nearly to Vadrome Mountain in the
hope of seeing him again; and that she had gone to her favourite resort,
the Rest of the Flax-Beaters, lying in the way of the riverpath from
Vadrome Mountain, on the chance of his passing.  She did not tell Mrs.
Flynn that there had scarcely been a waking hour when she had not thought
of him.

"What Portugais knows, he'll not be tellin'," said Mrs. Flynn, after a
moment.  "An' 'tis no business of ours, is it, darlin'?  Shure, there's
Jo comin' out of the tailor-shop now!"

They both looked out of the window, and saw Jo encounter Filion Lacasse
the saddler, and Maximilian Cour the baker.  The three stood in the
middle of the street for a minute, Jo talking freely.  He was usually
morose and taciturn, but now he spoke as though eager to unburden his
mind--Charley and he had agreed upon what should be said to the people of
Chaudiere.

The sight of the confidences among the three was too much for Mrs. Flynn.
She opened the door of the post office and called to Jo.  "Like three
crows shtandin' there!" she said.  "Come in--ma'm'selle says come in,
and tell your tales here, if they're fit to hear, Jo Portugais.  Who are
you to say no when ma'm'selle bids!" she added.

Very soon afterwards Jo was inside the post-office, telling his tale with
the deliberation of a lesson learned by heart.

"It's all right, as ma'm'selle knows," he said.  "The Cure was there when
ma'm'selle brought a letter to M'sieu' Mallard.  The Cure knows all.
M'sieu' come to my house sick-and he stayed there.  There is nothing like
the pine-trees and the junipers to cure some things.  He was with me very
quiet some time.  The Cure come and come.  He knows.  When m'sieu' got
well, he say, 'I will not go from Chaudiere; I will stay.  I am poor, and
I will earn my bread here.' At first, when he is getting well, he is
carpent'ring.  He makes cupboards and picture-frames.  The Cure has one
of the cupboards in the sacristy; the frames he puts on the Stations of
the Cross in the church."

"That's good enough for me!" said Maximilian Cour.  "Did he make them
for nothing?" asked Filion Lacasse solemnly.

"Not one cent did he ask.  What's more, he's working for Louis Trudel for
nothing.  He come through the village yesterday; he see Louis old and
sick on his bench, and he set down and go to work."

"That's good enough for me," said the saddler.  "If a man work for the
Church for nothing, he is a Christian.  If he work for Louis Trudel for
nothing, he is a fool--first-class--or a saint.  I wouldn't work for
Louis Trudel if he give me five dollars a day."

"Tiens!  the man that work for Louis Trudel work for the Church, for all
old Louis makes goes to the Church in the end--that is his will.  The
Notary knows," said Maximilian Cour.

"See there, now," interposed Mrs. Flynn, pointing across the street to
the tailor-shop.  "Look at that grocer-man stickin' in his head; and
there's Magloire Cadoret and that pig of a barber, Moise Moisan, starin'
through the dure, an'--"

As she spoke, the barber and his companion suddenly turned their faces to
the street, and started forward with startled exclamations, the grocer
following.  They all ran out from the post-office.  Not far up the street
a crowd was gathering.  Rosalie locked the office-door and followed the
others quickly.

In front of the Hotel Trois Couronnes a painful thing was happening.
Germain Boily, the horse-trainer, fresh from his disappointment with the
widow Plomondon, had driven his tamed moose up to the Trois Couronnes,
and had drunk enough whiskey to make him ill-tempered.  He had then begun
to "show off" the animal, but the savage instincts of the moose being
roused, he had attacked his master, charging with wide-branching horns,
and striking with his feet.  Boily was too drunk to fight intelligently.
He went down under the hoofs of the enraged animal, as his huge boar-
hound, always with him, fastened on the moose's throat, dragged him to
the ground, and tore gaping wounds in his neck.

It was all the work of a moment.  People ran from the doorways and
sidewalks, but stayed at a comfortable distance until the moose was
dragged down; then they made to approach the insensible man.  Before any
one could reach him, however, the great hound, with dripping fangs,
rushed to his master's body, and, standing over it, showed his teeth
savagely.  The hotel-keeper approached, but the bristles of the hound
stood up, he prepared to attack, and the landlord drew back in haste.
Then M. Dauphin, the Notary, who had joined the crowd, held out a hand
coaxingly, and with insinuating rhetoric drew a little nearer than the
landlord had done; but he retreated precipitously as the hound crouched
back for a spring.  Some one called for a gun, and Filion Lacasse ran
into his shop.  The animal had now settled down on his master's body, his
bloodshot eyes watching in menace.  The one chance seemed to be to shoot
him, and there must be no bungling, lest his prostrate master suffer at
the same time.  The crowd had melted away into the houses, and were now
standing at doorways and windows, ready for instant retreat.

Filion Lacasse's gun was now at disposal, but who would fire it?  Jo
Portugais was an expert shot, and he reached out a hand for the weapon.

As he did so, Rosalie Evanturel cried: "Wait, oh, wait!"  Before any one
could interfere she moved along the open space to the mad beast, speaking
soothingly, and calling his name.

The crowd held their breath.  A woman fainted.  Some wrung their hands,
and Jo Portugais, with blanched face, stood with gun half raised.  With
assured kindness of voice and manner, Rosalie walked deliberately over to
the hound.  At first the animal's bristles came up, and he prepared to
spring, but murmuring to him, she held out her hand, and presently laid
it on his huge head.  With a growl of subjection, the dog drew from the
body of his master, and licked Rosalie's fingers as she knelt beside
Boily and felt his heart.  She put her arm round the dog's neck, and said
to the crowd, "Some one come--only one--ah, yes, you, Monsieur!" she
added, as Charley, who had just arrived on the scene, came forward.
"Only you, if you can lift him.  Take him to my house."

Her arm still round the dog, she talked to him, as Charley came forward,
and, lifting up the body of the little horse-trainer, drew him across his
shoulder.  The hound at first resented the act, but under Rosalie's touch
became quiet, and followed at their heels towards the post-office,
licking the wounded man's hands as they hung down.  Inside M. Evanturel's
house the injured man was laid upon a couch.  Charley examined his
wounds, and, finding them severe, advised that the Cure be sent for,
while he and Jo Portugais set about restoring him to consciousness.
Jo had skill of a sort, and his crude medicaments were efficacious.

When the Cure came, the injured man was handed over to his care, and he
arranged that in the evening Boily should be removed to his house, to
await the arrival of the doctor from the next parish.

This was Charley's public introduction to the people of Chaudiere, and it
was his second meeting with Rosalie Evanturel.

The incident brought him into immediate prominence.  Before he left the
post-office, Filion Lacasse, Maximilian Cour, and Mrs. Flynn had given
forth his history, as related by Jo Portugais.  The village was agog with
excitement.

But attention was not centred on himself, for Rosalie's courage had set
the parish talking.  When the Notary stood on the steps of the saddler's
shop, and with fine rhetoric proposed a vote of admiration for the girl,
the cheering could be heard inside the post-office, and it brought Mrs.
Flynn outside.

"'Tis for her, the darlin'--for Ma'm'selle Rosalie--they're splittin'
their throats!" she said to Charley as he was making his way from the
sick man's room to the street door.  "Did ye iver see such an eye an'
hand?  That avil baste that's killed two Injins already--an' all the men
o' the place sneakin' behind dures, an' she walkin' up cool as leaf in
mornin' dew, an' quietin' the divil's own!  Did ye iver see annything
like it, sir--you that's seen so much?"

"Madame, it is not touch of hand alone, or voice alone," answered
Charley.

"Shure, 'tis somethin' kin in baste an' maid, you're manin' thin?"

"Quite so, Madame."

"Simple like, an' understandin' what Noah understood in that ark av his
--for talk to the bastes he must have, explainin' what was for thim to
do."

"Like that, Madame."

"Thrue for you, sir, 'tis as you say.  There's language more than tongue
of man can shpake.  But listen, thin, to me"--her voice got lower--
"for 'tis not the furst time, a thing like that, the lady she is--
granddaughter of a Seigneur, and descinded from nobility in France!  'Tis
not the furst time to be doin' brave things.  Just a shlip of a girl she
was, three years ago, afther her mother died, an' she was back from
convint.  A woman come to the parish an' was took sick in the house of
her brother--from France she was.  Small-pox they said at furst.  'Twas
no small-pox, but plague, got upon the seas.  Alone she was in the house
--her brother left her alone, the black-hearted coward.  The people
wouldn't go near the place.  The Cure was away.  Alone the woman was--
poor soul!  Who wint--who wint and cared for her?  Who do ye think, sir?"

"Mademoiselle?"

"None other.  'Go tell Mrs. Flynn,' says she, 'to care for my father till
I come back,' an' away she wint to the house of plague.  A week she
stayed, an' no one wint near her.  Alone she was with the woman and the
plague.  'Lave her be,' said the Cure when he come back; "tis for the
love of God.  God is with her--lave her be, and pray for her,' says he.
An' he wint himself, but she would not let him in.  ''Tis my work,' says
she.  ''Tis God's work for me to do,' says she.  'An' the woman will live
if 'tis God's will,' says she.  'There's an agnus dei on her breast,'
says she.  'Go an' pray,' says she.  Pray the Cure did, an' pray did we
all, but the woman died of the plague.  All alone did Rosalie draw her to
the grave on a stone-boat down the lane, an' over the hill, an' into the
churchyard.  An' buried her with her own hands at night, no one knowin'
till the mornin', she did.  So it was.  An' the burial over, she wint
back an' burned the house to the ground--sarve the villain right that
lave the sick woman alone!  An' her own clothes she burned, an' put on
the clothes I brought her wid me own hand.  An' for that thing she did,
the love o' God in her heart, is it for Widdy Flynn or Cure or anny other
to forgit?  Shure the Cure was for iver broken-hearted, for that he was
sick abed for days an' could not go to the house when the woman died, an'
say to Rosalie, 'Let me in for her last hour.'  But the word of Rosalie
--shure 'twas as good as the words of a praste, savin' the Cure prisince
wheriver he may be!"

This was the story of Rosalie which Mrs. Flynn told Charley, as he stood
at the street door of the post-office.  When she had finished, Charley
went back into the room where Rosalie sat beside the sick man's couch,
the hound at her feet.  She came forward, surprised, for he had bade her
good-bye but a few minutes before.

"May I sit and watch for an hour longer, Mademoiselle?" he said.  "You
will have your duties in the post-office."

"Monsieur--it is good of you," she answered.

For two hours Charley watched her going in and out, whispering directions
to Mrs. Flynn, doing household duty, bringing warmth in with her, and
leaving light behind her.

It was afternoon when he returned to his bench in the tailor-shop, and
was received by old Louis Trudel in peevish silence.  For an hour they
worked in silence, and then the tailor said:

"A brave girl--that.  We will work till nine to-night!"




CHAPTER XV

THE MARK IN THE PAPER

Chaudiere was nearing the last of its nine-days' wonder.  It had filed
past the doorway of the tailor-shop; it had loitered on the other side of
the street; it had been measured for more clothes than in three months
past--that it might see Charley at work in the shop, cross-legged on a
bench, or wielding the goose, his eye glass in his eye.  Here was
sensation indeed, for though old M. Rossignol, the Seigneur, had an eye-
glass, it was held to his eye--a large bone-bound thing with a little
gold handle; but no one in Chaudiere had ever worn a glass in his eye
like that.  Also, no one in Chaudiere had ever looked quite like
"M'sieu'"--for so it was that, after the first few days (a real tribute
to his importance and sign of the interest he created) Charley came to be
called "M'sieu'," and the Mallard was at last entirely dropped.

Presently people came and stood at the tailor's door and talked, or
listened to Louis Trudel and M'sieu' talking.  And it came to be noised
abroad that the stranger talked as well as the Cure and better than the
Notary.  By-and-by they associated his eye-glass with his talent, so that
it seemed, as it were, to be the cause of it.  Yet their talk was ever of
simple subjects, of everyday life about them, now and then of politics,
occasionally of the events of the world filtered to them through vast
tracts of country.  There was one subject which, however, was barred;
perhaps because there was knowledge abroad that M'sieu' was not a
Catholic, perhaps because Charley himself adroitly changed the
conversation when it veered that way.

Though the parish had not quite made up its mind about him, there were a
number of things in his favour.  In the first place, the Cure seemed
satisfied; secondly, he minded his own business.  Also, he was working
for Louis Trudel for nothing.  These things Jo Portugais diligently
impressed on the minds of all who would listen.

From above the frosted part of the windows of the post-office, in the
corner where she sorted letters, Rosalie could look over at the tailor's
shop at an angle; could sometimes even see M'sieu' standing at the long
table with a piece of chalk, a pair of shears, or a measure.  She watched
the tailor-shop herself, but it annoyed her when she saw any one else do
so.  She resented--she was a woman and loved monopoly--all inquiry
regarding M'sieu', so frequently addressed to her.

One afternoon, as Charley came out, on his way to the house on Vadrome
Mountain, she happened to be outside.  He saw her, paused, lifted his fur
cap, and crossed the street to her.

"Have you, perhaps, paper, pens, and ink for sale, Mademoiselle?"

"Yes, oh yes; come in, Monsieur Mallard."

"Ah, it is nice of you to remember me," he answered.  "I see you every
day--often," she answered.

"Of course, we are neighbours," he responded.  "The man--the horse-
trainer--is quite well again?"

"He has gone home almost well," she answered.  She placed pens, paper,
and ink before him.  "Will these do?"

"Perfectly," he answered mechanically, and laid a few pens and a bottle
of ink beside the paper.

"You were very brave that day," he said--they had not talked together
since, though seeing each other so often.

"Oh, no; I knew he would make friends with me--the hound."

"Of course," he rejoined.

"We should show animals that we trust them," she said, in some confusion,
for being near him made her heart throb painfully.

He did not answer.  Presently his eye glanced at the paper again, and was
arrested.  He ran his fingers over it, and a curious look flashed across
his face.  He held the paper up to the light quickly, and looked through
it.  It was thin, half-foreign paper, without lines, and there was a
water-mark in it-large, shadowy, filmy--Kathleen.

It was paper made in the mills which had belonged to Kathleen's uncle.
This water-mark was made to celebrate their marriage-day.  Only for one
year had this paper been made, and then the trade in it was stopped.  It
had gone its ways down the channels of commerce, and here it was in his
hand, a reminder, not only of the old life, but, as it were, the
parchment for the new.  There it was, a piece of plain good paper, ready
for pen and ink and his letter to the Cure's brother in Paris--the only
letter he would ever write, ever again until he died, so he told himself;
but hold it up to the light and there was the name over which his letter
must be written--Kathleen, invisible but permanent, obscured, but brought
to life by the raising of a hand.

The girl caught the flash of feeling in his face, saw him holding the
paper up to the light, and then, with an abstracted air, calmly lay it
down.

"That will do, thank you," he said.  "Give me the whole packet."  She
wrapped it up for him without a word, and he laid down a two-dollar note,
the last he had in the world.

"How much of this paper have you?" he asked.  The girl looked under the
counter.  "Six packets," she said.  "Six, and a few sheets over."

"I will take it all.  But keep it for me, for a week, or perhaps a
fortnight, will you?"  He did not need all this paper to write letters
upon, yet he meant to buy all the paper of this sort that the shop
contained.  But he must get money from Louis Trudel--he would speak about
it to-morrow.

"Monsieur does not want me to sell even the loose sheets?"

"No.  I like the paper, and I will take it all."

"Very good, Monsieur."

Her heart was beating hard.  All this man did had peculiar significance
to her.  His look seemed to say: "Do not fear.  I will tell you things."

She gave him the parcel and the change, and he turned to go.  "You read
much?" he asked, almost casually, yet deeply interested in the charm and
intelligence of her face.

"Why, yes, Monsieur," she answered quickly.  "I am always reading."

He did not speak at once.  He was wondering whether, in this primitive
place, such a mind and nature would be the wiser for reading; whether it
were not better to be without a mental aspiration, which might set up
false standards.

"What are you reading now?" he asked, with his hand on the door.

"Antony and Cleopatra, also Enoch Arden," she answered, in good English,
and without accent.

His head turned quickly towards her, but he did not speak.

"Enoch Arden is terrible," she added eagerly.  "Don't you think so,
Monsieur?"

"It is very painful," he answered.  "Good-night."  He opened the door and
went out.

She ran to the door and watched him go down the street.  For a little she
stood thinking, then, turning to the counter, and snatching up a sheet of
the paper he had bought, held it up to the light.  She gave a cry of
amazement.

"Kathleen!" she exclaimed.

She thought of the start he gave when he looked at the water-mark; she
thought of the look on his face when he said he would buy all this paper
she had.

"Who was Kathleen?" she whispered, as though she was afraid some one
would hear.  "Who was Kathleen!" she said again resentfully.




CHAPTER XVI

MADAME DAUPHIN HAS A MISSION

One day Charley began to know the gossip of the village about him from a
source less friendly than Jo Portugais.  The Notary's wife, bringing her
boy to be measured for a suit of broadcloth, asked Charley if the things
Jo had told about him were true, and if it was also true that he was a
Protestant, and perhaps an Englishman.  As yet, Charley had been asked
no direct questions, for the people of Chaudiere had the consideration
of their temperament; but the Notary's wife was half English, and being
a figure in the place, she took to herself more privileges than did old
Madame Dugal, the Cure's sister.

To her ill-disguised impertinence in English, as bad as her French and as
fluent, Charley listened with quiet interest.  When she had finished her
voluble statement she said, with a simper and a sneer-for, after all, a
Notary's wife must keep her position--"And now, what is the truth about
it?  And are you a Protestant?"

There was a sinister look in old Trudel's eyes as, cross-legged on his
table, he listened to Madame Dauphin.  He remembered the time, twenty-
five years ago, when he had proposed to this babbling woman, and had been
rejected with scorn--to his subsequent satisfaction; for there was no
visible reason why any one should envy the Notary, in his house or out of
it.  Already Trudel had a respect for the tongue of M'sieu'.  He had not
talked much the few days he had been in the shop, but, as the old man had
said to Filion Lacasse the saddler, his brain was like a pair of shears--
it went clip, clip, clip right through everything.  He now hoped that his
new apprentice, with the hand of a master-workman, would go clip, clip
through madame's inquisitiveness.  He was not disappointed, for he heard
Charley say:

"One person in the witness-box at a time, Madame.  Till Jo Portugais is
cross-examined and steps down, I don't see what I can do!"

"But you are a Protestant!" said the woman snappishly.  This man was
only a tailor, dressed in fulled cloth, and no doubt his past life would
not bear inspection; and she was the Notary's wife, and had said to
people in the village that she would find out the man's history from
himself.

"That is one good reason why I should not go to confession," he replied
casually, and turned to a table where he had been cutting a waistcoat--
for the first time in his life.

"Do you think I'm going to stand your impertinence?  Do you know who I
am?"

Charley calmly put up his monocle.  He looked at the foolish little woman
with so cruel a flash of the eye that she shrank back.

"I should know you anywhere," he said.

"Come, Stephan," she said nervously to her boy, and pulled him towards
the door.

On the instant Charley's feeling changed.  Was he then going to carry the
old life into the new, and rebuke a silly garish woman whose faults were
generic more than personal?  He hurried forward to the door and
courteously opened it for her.

"Permit me, Madame," he said.

She saw that there was nothing ironical in this politeness.  She had a
sudden apprehension of an unusual quality called "the genteel," for no
storekeeper in Chaudiere ever opened or shut a shop-door for anybody.
She smiled a vacuous smile; she played "the lady" terribly, as, with a
curious conception of dignity, she held her body stiff as a ramrod, and
with a prim merci sailed into the street.

This gorgeous exit changed her opinion of the man she had been unable to
catechise.  Undoubtedly he had snubbed her--that was the word she used in
her mind--but his last act had enabled her, in the sight of several
habitants and even of Madame Dugal, "to put on airs," as the charming
Madame Dugal said afterwards.

Thinking it better to give the impression that she had had a successful
interview, she shook her head mysteriously when asked about M'sieu', and
murmured, "He is quite the gentleman!" which she thought a socially
distinguished remark.

When she had gone, Charley turned to old Louis.

"I don't want to turn your customers away," he said quietly, "but there
it is!  I don't need to answer questions as a part of the business, do
I?"

There was a sour grin on the face of old Trudel.  He grunted some
inaudible answer, then, after a pause, added: "I'd have been hung for
murder, if she'd answered the question I asked her once as I wanted her
to."

He opened and shut his shears with a sardonic gesture.

Charley smiled, and went to the window.  For a minute he stood watching
Madame Dauphin and Rosalie at the post-office door.  The memory of his
talk with Rosalie was vivid to him at the moment.  He was thinking also
that he had not a penny in the world to pay for the rest of the paper he
had bought.  He turned round and put on his coat slowly.

"What are you doing that for?" asked the old man, with a kind of snarl,
yet with trepidation.

"I don't think I'll work any more to-day."

"Not work!  Smoke of the devil, isn't Sunday enough to play in?  You're
not put out by that fool wife of Dauphin's?"

"Oh no--not that!  I want an understanding about wages."

To Louis the dread crisis had come.  He turned a little green, for he was
very miserly-for the love of God.

He had scarcely realised what was happening when Charley first sat down
on the bench beside him.  He had been taken by surprise.  Apart from the
excitement of the new experience, he had profited by the curiosity of the
public, for he had orders enough to keep him busy until summer, and he
had had to give out work to two extra women in the parish, though he had
never before had more than one working for him.  But his ruling passion
was strong in him.  He always remembered with satisfaction that once when
the Cure was absent and he was supposed to be dying, a priest from
another parish came, and, the ministrations over, he had made an offering
of a gold piece.  When the young priest hesitated, his fingers had crept
back to the gold piece, closed on it, and drawn it back beneath the
coverlet again.  He had then peacefully fallen asleep.  It was a gracious
memory.

"I don't need much, I don't want a great deal," continued Charley when
the tailor did not answer, "but I have to pay for my bed and board, and I
can't do it on nothing."

"How have you done it so far?" peevishly replied the tailor.

"By working after hours at carpentering up there"--he made a gesture
towards Vadrome Mountain.  "But I can't go on doing that all the time,
or I'll be like you too soon."

"Be like me!"  The voice of the tailor rose shrilly.

"Be like me!  What's the matter with me?"

"Only that you're in a bad way before your time, and that you mayn't get
out of this hole without stepping into another.  You work too hard,
Monsieur Trudel."

"What do you want--wages?"

Charley inclined his head.  "If you think I'm worth them."

The tailor viciously snipped a piece of cloth.  "How can I pay you wages,
if you stand there doing nothing?"  "This is my day for doing nothing,"
Charley answered pleasantly, for the tailor-man amused him, and the
whimsical mental attitude of his past life was being brought to the
surface by this odd figure, with big spectacles pushed up on a yellow
forehead, and shrunken hands viciously clutching the shears.

"You don't mean to say you're not going to work to-day, and this suit of
clothes promised for to-morrow night--for the Manor House too!"

With a piece of chalk Charley idly made heads on brown paper.  "After
all, why should clothes be the first thing in one's mind--when they are
some one else's!  It's a beautiful day outside.  I've never felt the sun
so warm and the air so crisp and sweet--never in all my life."

"Then where have you lived?" snapped out the tailor with a sneer.
"You must be a Yankee--they have only what we leave over down there!"
--he jerked his head southward.  "We don't stop to look at weather here.
I suppose you did where you come from?"

Charley smiled in a distant sort of way.  "Where I came from, when we
weren't paid for our work we always stopped to consider our health--and
the weather.  I don't want a great deal.  I put it to you honestly.  Do
you want me?  If you do, will you give me enough to live on--enough to
buy a suit of clothes a year, to pay for food and a room?  If I work for
you for nothing, I have to live on others for nothing, or kill myself as
you're doing."

There was no answer at once, and Charley went on: "I came to you because
I saw you wanted help badly.  I saw that you were hard-pushed and sick--"

"I wasn't sick," interrupted the tailor with a snarl.

"Well, overworked, which is the same thing in the end.  I did the best I
could: I gave you my hands--awkward enough they were at first, I know,
but--"

"It's a lie.  They weren't awkward," churlishly cut in the tailor.

"Well, perhaps they weren't so awkward, but they didn't know quite what
to do--"

"You knew as well as if you'd been taught," came back in a growl.

"Well, then, I wasn't awkward, and I had a knack for the work.  What was
more, I wanted work.  I wanted to work at the first thing that appealed
to me.  I had no particular fancy for tailoring--you get bowlegged in
time!"--the old spirit was fighting with the new--"but here you were at
work, and there I was idle, and I had been ill, and some one who wasn't
responsible for me--a stranger-worked for me and cared for me.  Wasn't it
natural, when you were playing the devil with yourself, that I should
step in and give you a hand?  You've been better since--isn't that so?"
The tailor did not answer.

"But I can't go on as we are, though I want only enough to keep me
going," Charley continued.

"And if I don't give you what you want, you'll leave?"

"No.  I'm never going to leave you.  I'm going to stay here, for you'll
never get another man so cheap; and it suits me to stay--you need some
one to look after you."

A curious soft look suddenly flashed into the tailor's eyes.

"Will you take on the business after I'm gone?" he asked at last.
"It's along time to look ahead, I know," he added quickly, for not in
words would he acknowledge the possibility of the end.

"I should think so," Charley answered, his eyes on the bright sun and the
soft snow on the trees beyond the window.

The tailor snatched up a pattern and figured on it for a moment.
Then he handed it to Charley.  "Will that do?" he asked with anxious,
acquisitive look, his yellow eyes blinking hard.

Charley looked at it musingly, then said "Yes, if you give me a room
here."

"I meant board and lodging too," said Louis Trudel with an outburst of
eager generosity, for, as it was, he had offered about one-half of what
Charley was worth to him.

Charley nodded.  "Very well, that will do," he said, and took off his
coat and went to work.  For a long time they worked silently.  The tailor
was in great good-humour; for the terrible trial was over, and he now had
an assistant who would be a better tailor than himself.  There would be
more profit, more silver nails for the church door, and more masses for
his soul.

"The Cure says you are all right.  .  .  .  When will you come here?" he
said at last.

"To-morrow night I shall sleep here," answered Charley.

So it was arranged that Charley should come to live in the tailor's
house, to sleep in the room which the tailor had provided for a wife
twenty-five years before--even for her that was now known as Madame
Dauphin.

All morning the tailor chuckled to himself.  When they sat down at noon
to a piece of venison which Charley had prepared himself--taking the
frying-pan out of the hands of Margot Patry, the old servant, and cooking
it to a turn--Louis Trudel saw his years lengthen to an indefinite
period.  He even allowed himself to nervously stand up, bow, shake
Charley's hand jerkingly, and say:

"M'sieu', I care not what you are or where you come from, or even if
you're a Protestant, perhaps an Englishman.  You're a gentleman and a
tailor, and old Louis Trudel will not forget you.  It shall be as you
said this morning--it is no day for work.  We will play, and the clothes
for the Manor can go to the devil.  Smoke of hell-fire, I will go and
have a pipe with that, poor wretch the Notary!"

So, a wonderful thing happened.  Louis Trudel, on a week-day and a
market-day, went to smoke a pipe with Narcisse Dauphin, and to tell him
that M. Mallard was going to stay with him for ever, at fine wages.  He
also announced that he had paid this whole week's wages in advance; but
he did not tell what he did not know--that half the money had already
been given to old Margot, whose son lay ill at home with a broken leg,
and whose children were living on bread and water.  Charley had slowly
drawn from the woman the story of her life as he sat by the kitchen fire
and talked to her, while her master was talking to the Notary.




CHAPTER XVII

THE TAILOR MAKES A MIDNIGHT FORAY

Since the day Charley had brought home the paper bought at the post-
office, and water-marked Kathleen, he had, at odd times, written down
his thoughts, and promptly torn the paper up again or put it in the fire.
In the repression of the new life, in which he must live wholly alone, so
far as all past habits of mind were concerned, it was a relief to record
his passing reflections, as he had been wont to do when the necessity for
it was less.  Writing them here was like the bursting of an imprisoned
stream; it was relaxing the ceaseless eye of vigilance; freeing an
imprisoned personality.  This personality was not yet merged into that
which must take its place, must express itself in the involuntary acts
which tell of a habit of mind and body--no longer the imitative and the
histrionic, but the inherent and the real.

On the afternoon of the day that old Louis agreed to give him wages, and
went to smoke a pipe with the Notary, Charley scribbled down his thoughts
on this matter of personality and habit.

"Who knows," he wrote, "which is the real self?  A child comes into the
world gin-begotten, with the instinct for liquor in his brain, like the
scent of the fox in the nostrils of the hound.  And that seems the real.
But the same child caught up on the hands of chance is carried into
another atmosphere, is cared for by ginhating minds and hearts: habit
fastens on him--fair, decent, and temperate habit--and he grows up like
the Cure yonder, a brother of Aaron.  Which is the real?  Is the instinct
for the gin killed, or covered?  Is the habit of good living mere habit
and mere acting, in which the real man never lives his real life, or is
it the real life?

"Who knows!  Here am I, born with a question in my mouth, with the ever-
present 'non possumus' in me.  Here am I, to whom life was one poor
futility; to whom brain was but animal intelligence abnormally developed;
to whom speechless sensibility and intelligence was the only reality; to
whom nothing from beyond ever sent a flash of conviction, an intimation,
into my soul--not one.  To me God always seemed a being of dreams, the
creation of a personal need and helplessness, the despairing cry of the
victims of futility--And here am I flung like a stone from a sling into
this field where men believe in God as a present and tangible being; who
reply to all life's agonies and joys and exultations with the words
'C'est le bon Dieu.' And what shall I become?  Will habit do its work,
and shall I cease to be me?  Shall I, in the permanency of habit, become
like unto this tailor here, whose life narrows into one sole cause; whose
only wish is to have the Church draw the coverlet of forgiveness and
safety over him; who has solved all questions in a blind belief or an
inherited predisposition--which?  This stingy, hard, unhappy man--how
should he know what I am denied!  Or does he know?  Is it all illusion?
If there is a God who receives such devotion, to the exclusion of natural
demand and spiritual anxieties, why does not this tailor 'let his light
so shine before men that they may see his good works, and glorify his
Father which is in heaven?' That is it.  Therefore, wherefore, tailor-
man?  Therefore, wherefore, God?  Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-
man!"

Seated on his bench in the shop, with his eyes ever and anon raised
towards the little post-office opposite, he wrote these words.
Afterwards he sat and thought till the shadows deepened, and the tailor
came in to supper.  Then he took up the pieces of paper, and, going to
the fire, which was still lighted of an evening, thrust them inside.

Louis Trudel saw the paper burning, and, glancing down, he noticed that
one piece--the last--had slipped to the floor and was lying under the
table.  He saw the pencil still in Charley's hand.  Forthwith his natural
suspicion leaped up, and the cunning of the monomaniac was upon him.
With all his belief in le bon Dieu and the Church, Louis Trudel trusted
no one.  One eye was ever open to distrust man, while the other was ever
closed with blind belief in Heaven.

As Charley stooped to put wood in the fire, the tailor thrust a foot
forward and pushed the piece of paper further under the table.

That night the tailor crept down into the shop, felt for the paper in the
dark, found it, and carried it away to his room.  All kinds of thoughts
had raged through his diseased mind.  It was a letter, perhaps, and if a
letter, then he would gain some facts about the man's life.  But if it
was a letter, why did he burn it?  It was said that he never received a
letter and never sent one, therefore it was little likely to be a letter.
if not a letter, then what could it be?  Perhaps the man was English and
a spy of the English government, for was there not disaffection in some
of the parishes?  Perhaps it was a plan of robbery.  To such a state of
hallucination did his weakened mind come, that he forgot the kindly
feeling he had had for this stranger who had worked for him without pay.
Suspicion, the bane of sick old age, was hot on him.  He remembered that
M'sieu' had put an arm through his when they went upstairs, and that now
increased suspicion.  Why should the man have been so friendly?  To lull
him into confidence, perhaps, and then to rob and murder him in his
sleep.  Thank God, his ready money was well hid, and the rest was safe in
the bank far away!  He crept back to his room with the paper in his hand.
It was the last sheet of what Charley had written, and had been
accidentally brushed off on the floor.  It was in French, and, holding
the candle close, he slowly deciphered the crabbed, characteristic
handwriting.

His eyes dilated, his yellow cheeks took on spots of unhealthy red, his
hand trembled.  Anger seized him, and he mumbled the words over and over
again to himself.  Twice or thrice, as the paper lay in one hand, he
struck it with the clinched fist of the other, muttering and distraught.

"This tailor here.  .  .  .  This stingy, hard, unhappy man.  .  .  .  If
there is a God!  .  .  .  Therefore, wherefore, tailor-man?  .  .  .
Therefore, wherefore, God?  .  .  .  Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-
man!"

Hatred of himself, blasphemy, the profane and hellish humour of--of the
infidel!  A Protestant heretic--he was already damned; a robber--you
could put him in jail; a spy--you could shoot him or tar and feather him;
a murderer--you could hang him.  But an infide--this was a deadly poison,
a black danger, a being capable of all crimes.  An infidel--"Therefore,
wherefore, tailor-man?  .  .  .  Therefore, wherefore, God?  .  .  .
Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-man!"

The devil laughing--the devil incarnate come to mock a poor tailor, to
sow plague through a parish where all were at peace in the bosom of the
Church.  The tailor had three ruling passions--cupidity, vanity, and
religion.  Charley had now touched the three, and the whole man was
alive.  His cupidity had been flattered by the unpaid service of a
capable assistant, but now he saw that he was paying the devil a wage.
His vanity was overwhelmed by a satanic ridicule.  His religion and his
God had been assaulted in so shameful a way that no punishment could be
great enough for the man of hell.  In religion he was a fanatic; he was a
demented fanatic now.

He thrust the paper into his pocket, then crept out into the hall and to
the door of Charley's bedroom.  He put his ear to the door.  After a
moment he softly raised the latch, and opened the door and listened
again.  'M'sieu' was in a deep sleep.

Louis Trudel scarcely knew why he had listened, why he had opened the
door and stood looking at the figure in the bed, barely definable in the
semi-darkness of the room.  If he had meant harm to the helpless man, he
had brought no weapon; if he had been curious, there the man was
peacefully sleeping!

His sick, morbid imagination was so alive, that he scarcely knew what he
did.  As he stood there listening, hatred and horror in his heart, a
voice said to him: "Thou shalt do no murder."  The words kept ringing in
his ears.  Yet he had not thought of murder.  The fancied command itself
was his first temptation towards such a deed.  He had thought of raising
the parish, of condign punishment of many sorts, but not this.  As he
closed the door softly, killing entered his mind and stayed there.  "Thou
shalt not" had been the first instigation to "Thou shalt."

It haunted him as he returned to his room, undressed himself, and went
to bed.  He could not sleep.  "Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-man!"
The challenge had been to himself.  He must respond to it.  The duty lay
with him; he must answer this black infidel for the Church, for faith,
for God.

The more he thought of it, the more Charley's face came before him, with
the monocle shining and hard in the eye.  The monocle haunted him.  That
was the infidel's sign.  "Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-man!"  What
sign should he show?

Presently he sat up straight in bed.  In another minute he was out and
dressing.  Five minutes later he was on his way to the parish church.
When he reached it he took a tool from his pocket and unscrewed a small
iron cross from the front door.  It was a cross which had been blessed by
the Pope, and had been brought to Chaudiere by the beloved mother of the
Cure, now dead.

"When I have done with it I will put it back," he said, as he thrust it
inside his shirt, and hurried stealthily back to his house.  As he got
into bed he gave a noiseless, mirthless laugh.  All night he lay with his
yellow eyes wide open, gazing at the ceiling.  He was up at dawn,
hovering about the fire in the shop.




CHAPTER XVIII

THE STEALING OF THE CROSS

If Charley had been less engaged with his own thoughts, he would have
noticed the curious baleful look in the eyes of the tailor; but he was
deeply absorbed in a struggle that had nothing to do with Louis Trudel.

The old fever of thirst and desire was upon him.  All morning the door of
Jolicoeur's saloon was opening and shutting before his mind's eye, and
there was a smell of liquor everywhere.  It was in his nostrils when the
hot steam rose from the clothes he was pressing, in the thick odour of
the fulled cloth, in the melting snow outside the door.

Time and again he felt that he must run out of the shop and away to the
little tavern where white whiskey was sold to unwise habitants.  But he
fought on.  Here was the heritage of his past, the lengthening chain of
slavery to his old self--was it his real self?  Here was what would
prevent him from forgetting all that he had been and not been, all the
happiness he might have had, all that he had lost--the ceaseless
reminder.  He was still the victim to a poison which gave not only a
struggle of body, but a struggle of soul--if he had a soul.

"If he had a soul!"  The phrase kept repeating itself to him even as he
fought the fever in his throat, resisting the temptation to take that
medicine which the Curb's brother had sent him.

"If he had a soul!"  The thinking served as an antidote, for by the
ceaseless iteration his mind was lulled into a kind of drowse.  Again and
again he went to the pail of water that stood on the window-sill, and
lifting it to his lips, drank deep and full, to quench the wearing
thirst.

"If he had a soul!"  He looked at Louis Trudel, silent and morose, the
clammy yellow of a great sickness in his face and hands, but his mind
only intent on making a waistcoat--and the end of all things very near!
The words he had written the night before came to him: "Therefore,
wherefore, tailor-man?  Therefore, wherefore, God?  .  .  .  Show me a
sign from Heaven, tailor-man!"  As if in reply to his thoughts there came
the sound of singing, and of bells ringing in the parish church.

A procession with banners was coming near.  It was a holy day, and
Chaudiere was mindful of its duties.  The wanderers of the parish had
come home for Easter.  All who belonged to Chaudiere and worked in the
woods or shanties, or lived in big cities far away, were returned--those
who could return--to take the holy communion in the parish church.
Yesterday the parish had been alive with a pious hilarity.  The great
church had been crowded beyond the doors, the streets had been full of
cheerily dressed habitants.  There had, however, come a sudden chill to
the seemly rejoicings--the little iron cross blessed by the Pope had been
stolen from the door of the church!

The fact had been told to the Cure as he said the Mass, and from the
altar steps, before going to the pulpit, he referred to the robbery with
poignant feeling; for the relic had belonged to a martyr of the Church,
who, two centuries before, had laid down his life for the Master on the
coast of Africa.

Louis Trudel had heard the Cure's words, and in his place at the rear of
the church he smiled sourly to himself.  In due time the little cross
should be returned, but it had work to do first.  He did not take the
holy communion this Easter day, or go to confession as was his wont.
Not, however, until a certain day later did the Cure realise this, though
for thirty years the tailor had never omitted his Easter-time duties.

The people guessed and guessed, but they knew not on whom to cast
suspicion at first.  No sane Catholic of Chaudiere could possibly have
taken the holy thing.  Presently a murmur crept about that M'sieu' might
have been the thief.  He was not a Catholic, and--who could tell?  Who
knew where he came from?  Who knew what he had been?  Perhaps a jail-
bird-robber-murderer!  Charley, however, stitched on, intent upon his own
struggle.

The procession passed the doorway: men bearing banners with sacred texts,
acolytes swinging censers, a figure of the Saviour carved in wood borne
aloft, the Cure under a silk canopy, and a long line of habitants
following with sacred song.  People fell upon their knees in the street
as the procession passed, and the Cure's face was bent here and there,
his hand raised in blessing.

Old Louis got up from his bench, and, putting on a coat over his wool
jacket, hastened to the doorway, knelt down, made the sign of the cross,
and said a prayer.  Then he turned quickly towards Charley, who, looking
at the procession, then at the tailor, then back again at the procession,
smiled.

Charley was hardly conscious of what he did.  His mind had ranged far
beyond this scene to the large issues which these symbols represented.
Was it one universal self-deception?  Was this "religion" the pathetic,
the soul-breaking make-believe of mortality?  So he smiled--at himself,
at his own soul, which seemed alone in this play, the skeleton in armour,
the thing that did not belong.  His own words written that fateful day
before he died at the Cote Dorion came to him:

"Sacristan, acolyte, player, or preacher, Each to his office, but who
holds the key?  Death, only Death, thou, the ultimate teacher, Wilt show
it to me!"

He was suddenly startled from his reverie, through which the procession
was moving--a cloud of witnesses.  It was the voice of Louis Trudel,
sharp and piercing:

"Don't you believe in God and the Son of God?"

"God knows!" answered Charley slowly in reply--an involuntary
exclamation of helplessness, an automatic phrase deflected from its first
significance to meet a casual need of the mind.  Yet it seemed like
satire, like a sardonic, even vulgar, humour.  So it struck Louis Trudel,
who snatched up a hot iron from the fire and rushed forward with a snarl.
So astounded was Charley that he did not stir.  He was not prepared for
the sudden onslaught.  He did not put up his hand even, but stared at the
tailor, who, within a foot of him, stopped short with the iron poised.

Louis Trudel repented in time.  With the cunning of the monomaniac he
realised that an attack now might frustrate his great stroke.  It would
bring the village to his shop door, precipitate the crisis upon the wrong
incident.

As it chanced, only one person in Chaudiere saw the act.  That was
Rosalie Evanturel across the way.  She saw the iron raised, and looked
for M'sieu' to knock the tailor down; but, instead, she beheld the tailor
go back and put the iron on the fire again.  She saw also that M'sieu'
was speaking, though she could hear no words.

Charley's words were simple enough.  "I beg your pardon, Monsieur," he
said across the room to old Louis; "I meant no offence at all.  I was
trying to think it out in a human sort of way.  I suppose I wanted a sign
from Heaven--wanted too much, no doubt."

The tailor's lips twitched, and his hand convulsively clutched the shears
at his side.

"It is no matter now," he answered shortly.  "I have had signs from
Heaven; perhaps you will have one too!"

"It would be worth while," rejoined Charley musingly.  Charley wondered
bitterly if he had made an irreparable error in saying those ill-chosen
words.  This might mean a breach between them, and so make his position
in the parish untenable.  He had no wish to go elsewhere--where could he
go?  It mattered little what he was, tinker or tailor.  He had now only
to work his way back to the mind of the peasant; to be an animal with
intelligence; to get close to mother earth, and move down the declivity
of life with what natural wisdom were possible.  It was his duty to adapt
himself to the mind of such as this tailor; to acquire what the tailor
and his like had found--an intolerant belief and an inexpensive security,
to be got through yielding his nature to the great religious dream.  And
what perfect tranquillity, what smooth travelling found therein.

Gazing across the street towards the little post-office, he saw Rosalie
Evanturel at the window.  He fell to thinking about her.  Rosalie, on her
part, kept wondering what old Louis' violence meant.

Presently she saw a half-dozen men come quickly down the street, and,
before they reached the tailorshop, stand in a group talking excitedly.
Afterwards one came forward from the others quickly--Filion Lacasse the
saddler.  He stopped short at the tailor's door.  Looking at Charley, he
exclaimed roughly:

"If you don't hand out the cross you stole from the church door, we'll
tar and feather you, M'sieu'."  Charley looked up, surprised.  It had
never occurred to him that they could associate him with the theft.
"I know nothing of the cross," he said quietly.  "You're the only heretic
in the place.  You've done it.  Who are you?  What are you doing here in
Chaudiere?"

"Working at my trade," was Charley's quiet answer.  He looked towards
Louis Trudel, as though to see how he took this ugly charge.

Old Louis responded at once.  "Get away with you, Filion Lacasse," he
croaked.  "Don't come here with your twaddle.  M'sieu' hasn't stole the
cross.  What does he want with a cross?  He's not a Catholic."

"If he didn't steal the cross, why, he didn't," answered the saddler;
"but if he did, what'll you say for yourself, Louis?  You call yourself a
good Catholic--bah!--when you've got a heretic living with you."

"What's that to you?" growled the tailor, and reached out a nervous hand
towards the iron.  "I served at the altar before you were born.  Sacre!
I'll make your grave-clothes yet, and be a good Catholic when you're in
the churchyard.  Be off with you.  Ach," he sharply added, when Filion
did not move, "I'll cut your hair for you!"  He scrambled off the bench
with his shears.

Filion Lacasse disappeared with his friends, and the old man settled back
on his bench.

Charley, looking up quietly from his work, said "Thank you, Monsieur."

He did not notice what an evil look was in Louis Trudel's face as it
turned towards him, but Rosalie Evanturel, standing outside, saw it; and
she stole back to the post-office ill at ease and wondering.

All that day she watched the tailor's shop, and even when the door was
shut in the evening, her eyes were fastened on the windows.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Is the habit of good living mere habit and mere acting
Suspicion, the bane of sick old age






THE RIGHT OF WAY

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.



XIX.      THE SIGN FROM HEAVEN
XX.       THE RETURN OF THE TAILOR
XXI.      THE CURE HAS AN INSPIRATION
XXII.     THE WOMAN WHO SAW
XXIII.    THE WOMAN WHO DID NOT TELL
XXIV.     THE SEIGNEUR TAKES A HAND IN THE GAME
XXV.      THE COLONEL TELLS HIS STORY
XXVI.     A SONG, A BOTTLE, AND A GHOST
XXVII.    OUT ON THE OLD TRAIL
XXVIII.   THE SEIGNEUR GIVES A WARNING



CHAPTER XIX

THE SIGN FROM HEAVEN

The agitation and curiosity possessing Rosalie all day held her in the
evening when the wooden shutters of the tailor's shop were closed and
only a flickering light showed through the cracks.  She was restless and
uneasy during supper, and gave more than one unmeaning response to the
remarks of her crippled father, who, drawn up for supper in his wheel-
chair, was more than usually inclined to gossip.

Damase Evanturel's mind was stirred concerning the loss of the iron
cross; the threat made by Filion Lacasse and his companions troubled him.
The one person beside the Cure, Jo Portugais, and Louis Trudel, to whom
M'sieu' talked much, was the postmaster, who sometimes met him of an
evening as he was taking the air.  More than once he had walked behind
the wheel-chair and pushed it some distance, making the little crippled
man gossip of village matters.

As the two sat at supper the postmaster was inclined to take a serious
view of M'sieu's position.  He railed at Filion Lacasse; he called the
suspicious habitants clodhoppers, who didn't know any better--which was
a tribute to his own superior birth; and at last, carried away by a
feverish curiosity, he suggested that Rosalie should go and look through
the cracks in the shutters of the tailor-shop and find out what was going
on within.  This was indignantly rejected by Rosalie, but the more she
thought, the more uneasy she became.  She ceased to reply to her father's
remarks, and he at last relapsed into gloom, and said that he was tired
and would go to bed.  Thereupon she wheeled him inside his bedroom, bade
him good-night, and left him to his moodiness, which, however, was soon
absorbed in a deep sleep, for the mind of the little grey postmaster
could no more hold trouble or thought than a sieve.

Left alone, Rosalie began to be tortured.  What were they doing in the
house opposite?

Go and look through the windows?  But she had never spied on people in
her life!  Yet would it be spying?  Would it not be pardonable?  In the
interest of the man who had been attacked in the morning by the tailor,
who had been threatened by the saddler, and concerning whom she had seen
a signal pass between old Louis and Filion Lacasse, would it not be a
humane thing to do?  It might be foolish and feminine to be anxious, but
did she not mean well, and was it not, therefore, honourable?

The mystery inflamed her imagination.  Charley's passiveness when he was
assaulted by old Louis and afterwards threatened by the saddler seemed to
her indifference to any sort of danger--the courage of the hopeless life,
maybe.  Instantly her heart overflowed with sympathy.  Monsieur was not a
Catholic perhaps?  Well, so much the more he should be befriended, for he
was so much the more alone and helpless.  If a man was born a Protestant
--or English--he could not help it, and should not be punished in this
world for it, since he was sure to be punished in the next.

Her mind became more and more excited.  The postoffice had been long
since closed, and her father was asleep--she could hear him snoring.  It
was ten o'clock, and there was still a light in the tailor's shop.
Usually the light went out before nine o'clock.  She went to the post-
office door and looked out.  The streets were empty; there was not a
light burning anywhere, save in the house of the Notary.  Down towards
the river a sleigh was making its way over the thin snow of spring, and
screeching on the stones.  Some late revellers, moving homewards from the
Trois Couronnes, were roaring at the top of their voices the habitant
chanson, 'Le Petit Roger Bontemps':

                   "For I am Roger Bontemps,
                         Gai, gai, gai!
                    With drink I am full and with joy content,
                         Gai, gaiment!"

The chanson died away as she stood there, and still the light was burning
in the shop opposite.  A thought suddenly came to her.  She would go over
and see if the old housekeeper, Margot Patry, had gone to bed.  Here was
the solution to the problem, the satisfaction of modesty and propriety.

She crossed the street quickly, hurried round the corner of the house,
and was passing the side-window of the shop, when a crack in the shutters
caught her eye.  She heard something fall on the floor within.  Could it
be that the tailor and M'sieu' were working at so late an hour?  She had
an irresistible impulse, and glued her eye to the crack.

But presently she started back with a smothered cry.  There by the great
fireplace stood Louis Trudel picking up a red-hot cross with a pair of
pincers.  Grasping the iron firmly just below the arms of the cross, the
tailor held it up again.  He looked at it with a wild triumph, yet with a
malignancy little in keeping with the object he held--the holy relic he
had stolen from the door of the parish church.  The girl gave a low cry
of dismay.

She saw old Louis advance stealthily towards the door of the shop leading
into the house.  In bewilderment, she stood still an instant, then, with
a sudden impulse, she ran to the kitchen-door and tried it softly.  It
was not locked.  She opened it, entered quickly, and found old Margot
standing in the middle of the room in her night-dress.

"Oh, Rosalie, Rosalie!" cried the old woman, "something's going to
happen.  M'sieu' Trudel has been queer all evening.  I peeped in the key-
hole of the shop just now, and--"

"Yes, yes, I've seen too.  Come!" said Rosalie, and going quickly to the
door, opened it, and passed through to another room.  Here she opened
another door, leading into the hall between the shop and the house.
Entering the hall, she saw a glimmer of light above.  It was the reddish
glow of the iron cross held by old Louis.  She crept softly up the stone
steps.  She heard a door open very quietly.  She hurried now, and came to
the landing.  She saw the door of Charley's room open--all the village
knew what room he slept in--and the moonlight was streaming in at the
window.

She saw the sleeping man on the bed, and the tailor standing over him.
Charley was lying with one arm thrown above his head; the other lay over
the side of the bed.

As she rushed forward, divining old Louis' purpose, the fiery cross
descended, and a voice cried: "'Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-man!'"

This voice was drowned by that of another, which, gasping with agony out
of a deep sleep, as the body sprang upright, cried: "God-oh God!"
Rosalie's hand grasped old Louis' arm too late.  The tailor sprang back
with a horrible laugh, striking her aside, and rushed out to the landing.

"Oh, Monsieur, Monsieur!" cried Rosalie, and, snatching a scarf from her
bosom, thrust it in upon the excoriated breast, as Charley, hardly
realising what had happened, choked back moans of pain.

"What did he do?" he gasped.

"The iron cross from the church door!" she answered.  "A minute, one
minute, Monsieur!"

She rushed out upon the landing in time to see the tailor stumble on the
stairs and fall head forwards to the bottom, at the feet of Margot Patry.

Rosalie paid no heed to the fallen man.  "Oil!  flour!  Quick!" she
cried.  "Quick!  Quick!"  She stepped over the body of the tailor,
snatched at Margot's arm, and dragged her into the kitchen.  "Quick-oil
and flour!"

The old woman showed her where they were, moaning and whining.

"He tried to kill Monsieur," cried Rosalie,  "burned him on the breast
with the holy cross!"

With oil and flour she hurried back, over the body of the tailor, up the
stairs, and into Charley's room.  Charley was now out of bed and half
dressed, though choking with pain, and preserving consciousness only by a
great effort.

"Good Mademoiselle!" he said.

She took the scarf off gently, soaked it in oil and splashed it with
flour, and laid it quickly back on the burnt flesh.

Margot came staggering into the room.

"I cannot rouse him.  I cannot rouse him.  He is dead!  He is dead!" she
whimpered.

"He--"

Charley swayed forward towards the woman, recovered himself, and said:

"Now not a word of what he did to me, remember.  Not one word, or you
will go to jail with him.  If you keep quiet, I'll say nothing.  He
didn't know what he was doing."  He turned to Rosalie.  "Not a word of
this, please," he moaned.  "Hide the cross."

He moved towards the door.  Rosalie saw his purpose, and ran out ahead of
him and down the stairs to where the tailor lay prone on his face, one
hand still holding the pincers.  The little iron cross lay in a dark
corner.  Stooping, she lifted up the tailor's head, then felt his heart.

"He is not dead," she cried.  "Quick, Margot, some water," she added, to
the whimpering woman.  Margot tottered away, and came again presently
with the water.

"I will go for some one to help," Rosalie said, rising to her feet, as
she saw Charley come slowly down the staircase, his face white with
misery.  She ran and took his arm to help him down.

"No, no, dear Mademoiselle," he said; "I shall be all right presently.
You must get help to carry him up stairs.  Bring the Notary; he and I can
carry him up."

"You, Monsieur!  You--it would kill you!  You are terribly hurt."

"I must help to carry him, else people will be asking questions," he
answered painfully.  "He is going to die.  It must not be known--you
understand!"  His eyes searched the floor until they found the cross.
Rosalie picked it up with the pincers.  "It must not be known what he did
to me," Charley said to the muttering and weeping old woman.  He caught
her shoulder with his hand, for she seemed scarcely to heed.

She nodded.  "Yes, yes, M'sieu', I will never speak."  Rosalie was
standing in the door.  "Go quickly, Mademoiselle," he said.  She
disappeared with the iron cross, and flying across the street, thrust it
inside the post-office, then ran to the house of the Notary.




CHAPTER XX

THE RETURN OF THE TAILOR

Twenty minutes later the tailor was lying in his bed, breathing, but
still unconscious, the Notary, M'sieu', and the doctor of the next
parish, who by chance was in Chaudiere, beside him.  Charley's face was
drawn and haggard with pain, for he had helped to carry old Louis to bed,
though every motion of his arms gave him untold agony.  In the doorway
stood Rosalie and Margot Patry.

"Will he live?" asked the Notary.

The doctor shook his head.  "A few hours, perhaps.  He fell downstairs?"

Charley nodded.  There was silence for some time, as the doctor went on
with his ministrations, and the Notary sat drumming his fingers on the
little table beside the bed.  The two women stole away to the kitchen,
where Rosalie again pressed secrecy on Margot.  In the interest of the
cause she had even threatened Margot with a charge of complicity.  She
had heard the phrase "accessory before the fact," and she used it now
with good effect.

Then she took some fresh flour and oil, and thrust them inside the
bedroom door where Charley now sat clinching his hands and fighting down
the pain.  Careful as ever of his personal appearance, however, he had
brushed every speck of flour from his clothes, and buttoned his coat up
to the neck.

Nearly an hour passed, and then the Cure appeared.  When he entered the
sick man's room, Charley followed, and again Rosalie and old Margot came
and stood within the doorway.

"Peace be to this house!" said the Cure.  He had a few minutes of
whispered conversation with the doctor, and then turned to Charley.

"He fell down-stairs, Monsieur?  You saw him fall?"

"I was in my room--I heard him fall, Cure."

"Had he been ill during the day?"

"He appeared to be feeble, and he seemed moody."

"More than usual, Monsieur?"  The Cure had heard of the incident of the
morning when Filion Lacasse accused Charley of stealing the cross.

"Rather more than usual, Monsieur."

The Cure turned towards the door.  "You, Mademoiselle Rosalie, how came
you to know?"

"I was in the kitchen with Margot, who was not well."

The Cure looked at Margot, who tearfully nodded.  "I was ill," she said,
"and Rosalie was here with me.  She helped M'sieu' and me.  Rosalie is a
good girl, and kind to me," she whimpered.

The Cure seemed satisfied, and after looking at the sick man for a
moment, he came close to Charley.  "I am deeply pained at what happened
to-day," he said courteously.  "I know you have had nothing to do with
the beloved little cross."

The Notary tried to draw near and listen, but the Cure's look held him
back.  The doctor was busy with his patient.

"You are only just, Monsieur," said Charley in response, wishing that
these kind eyes were fixed anywhere than on his face.

All at once the Cure laid a hand upon his arm.  "You are ill," he said
anxiously.  "You look very ill indeed.  See, Vaudrey," he added to the
doctor, "you have another patient here!"

The friendly, oleaginous doctor came over and peered into Charley's face.
"Ill-sure enough!" he said.  "Look at this sweat!" he pointed to the
drops of perspiration on Charley's forehead.  "Where do you suffer?"

"Severe pains all through my body," Charley answered simply, for it
seemed easier to tell the truth, as near as might be.

"I must look to you," said the doctor.  "Go and lie down, and I will come
to you."

Charley bowed, but did not move.  Just then two things drew the attention
of all: the tailor showed returning consciousness, and there was noise of
many voices outside the house and the tramping of feet below-stairs.

"Go and tell them no one must come up," said the doctor to the Notary,
and the Cure made ready to say the last offices for the dying.

Presently the noise below-stairs diminished, and the priest's voice rose
in the office, vibrating and touching.  The two women sank to their
knees, the doctor followed, his eyes still fixed on the dying man.
Presently, however, Charley did the same; for something penetrating and
reasonable in the devotion touched him.

All at once Louis Trudel opened his eyes.  Staring round with acute
excitement, his eyes fell on the Cure, then upon Charley.

"Stop--stop, M'sieu' le Cure!" he cried.  "There's other work to do."
He gasped and was convulsed, but the pallor of his face was alive with
fire from the distempered eyes.  He snatched from his breast the paper
Charley had neglected to burn.  He thrust it into the Curb's hand.

"See--see!" he croaked.  "He is an infidel--black infidel--from hell!"
His voice rose in a kind of shriek, piercing to every corner of the
house.  He pointed at Charley with shaking finger.

"He wrote it there--on that paper.  He doesn't--believe in God."

His strength failed him, his hand clutched tremblingly at the air.  He
laughed, a dry, crackling laugh, and his mouth opened twice or thrice to
speak, but gasping breaths only came forth.  With a last effort, however-
-as the priest, shocked, stretched out his hand and said: "Have done,
have done, Trudel!"--he cried, in a voice that quavered shrilly:

"He asked--tailor-man--sign--from--Heaven.  Look-look!"  He pointed
wildly at Charley.  "I--gave him--sign of--"

But that was the end.  With a shudder the body collapsed in a formless
heap, and the tailor-man was gone to tell of the work he had done for his
faith on earth.




CHAPTER XXI

THE CURE HAS AN INSPIRATION

White and malicious faces peered through the doorway.  There was an ugly
murmur coming up the staircase.  Many habitants had heard Louis Trudel's
last words, and had passed them on with vehement exaggeration.

Chaudiere had been touched in its most superstitious corner.
Protestantism was a sin, but atheism was a crime against humanity.
The Protestant might be the victim of a mistake, but the atheist was the
deliberate son of darkness, the source of fearful dangers.  An atheist in
their midst was like a scorpion in a flower-bed--no one could tell when
and where he would sting.  Rough misdemeanours among them had been many,
there had once been a murder in the parish, but the undefined horrors of
infidelity were more shameful than crimes the eye could see.

To the minds of these excited people the tailor-man's death was due to
the infidel before them.  They were ready to do all that might become a
Catholic intent to avenge the profaned honour of the Church and the
faith.  Bodily harm was the natural form for their passion to take.

"Bring him out--let us have him!" they cried with fierce gestures, to
which Rosalie Evanturel turned a pained, indignant face.

As the Curb stood with the paper in his hand, his face set and bitter,
Rosalie made a step forward.  She meant to tell the truth about Louis
Trudel, and show how good this man was, who stood charged with an
imaginary crime.  But she met the warning eye of the man himself, calm
and resolute, she saw the suffering in the face, endured with what
composure! and she felt instantly that she must obey him, and that--who
could tell?--his plan might be the best in the end.  She looked at the
Cure anxiously.  What would he say and do?  In the Cure's heart and
mind a great struggle was going on.  All his inherent prejudice, the
hereditary predisposition of centuries, the ingrain hatred of atheism,
were alive in him, hardening his mind against the man before him.  His
first impulse was to let Charley take his fate at the hands of the people
of Chaudiere, whatever it might be.  But as he looked at the man, as he
recalled their first meeting, and remembered the simple, quiet life he
had lived among them--charitable, and unselfish--the barriers of creed
and habit fell down, and tears unbidden rushed into his eyes.

The Cure had, all at once, the one great inspiration of his life--its one
beautiful and supreme imagining.  For thus he reasoned swiftly:

Here he was, a priest who had shepherded a flock of the faithful passed
on to him by another priest before him, who again had received them from
a guardian of the fold--a family of faithful Catholics whose thoughts
never strayed into forbidden realms.  He had done no more than keep them
faithful and prevent them from wandering--counselling, admonishing,
baptising, and burying, giving in marriage and blessing, sending them on
their last great journey with the cachet of Holy Church upon them.  But
never once, never in all his life, had he brought a lost soul into the
fold.  If he died to-night, he could not say to St. Peter, when he
arrived at Heaven's gate: "See, I have saved a soul!"  Before
the Throne he could not say to Him who cried: "Go ye into all the world
and preach the gospel to every creature"--he could not say: "Lord,
by Thy grace I found this soul in the wilderness, in the dark and the
loneliness, having no God to worship, denial and rebellion in his heart;
and behold, I took him to my breast, and taught him in Thy name, and led
him home to Thy haven, the Church!"

Thus it was that the Cure dreamed a dream.  He would set his life to
saving this lost soul.  He would rescue him from the outer darkness.

His face suffused, he handed the paper in his hand back to the man who
had written the words upon it.  Then he lifted his hand against the
people at the door and the loud murmuring behind them.

"Peace--peace!" he said, as though from the altar.  "Leave this room of
death, I command you.  Go at once to your homes.  This man"--he pointed
to Charley--"is my friend.  Who seeks to harm him, would harm me.  Go
hence and pray.  Pray for yourselves, pray for him, and for me; and pray
for the troubled soul of Louis Trudel.  Go in peace."

Soon afterwards the house was empty, save for the Cure, Charley, old
Margot, and the Notary.

That night Charley sat in the tailor's bedroom, rigid and calm, though
racked with pain, and watched the candles flickering beside the dead
body.  He was thinking of the Cure's last words to the people.

"I wonder--I wonder," he said, and through his eyeglass he stared at the
crucifix that threw a shadow on the dead man's face.  Morning found him
there.  As dawn crept in he rose to his feet.  "Whither now?" he said,
like one in a dream.




CHAPTER XXII

THE WOMAN WHO SAW

Up to the moment of her meeting with Charley, Rosalie Evanturel's life
had been governed by habit, which was lightly coloured by temperament.
Since the eventful hour on Vadrome Mountain it had become a life of
temperament, in which habit was involuntary and mechanical.  She did her
daily duties with a good heart, but also with a sense superior to the
practical action.  This grew from day to day, until, in the tragical days
wherein she had secretly played a great part, she moved as in a dream,
but a dream so formal that no one saw any change taking place in her,
or associated her with the events happening across the way.

She had been compelled to answer many questions, for it was known she was
in the tailor's house when Louis Trudel fell down-stairs, but what more
was there to tell than that she had run for the Notary, and sent word to
the Cure, and that she was present when the tailor died, charging M'sieu'
with being an infidel?  At first she was ill disposed to answer any
questions, but she soon felt that attitude would only do harm.  For the
first time in her life she was face to face with moral problems--the
beginning of sorrow, of knowledge, and of life.

In all secrets there is a kind of guilt, however beautiful or joyful they
may be, or for what good end they may be set to serve.  Secrecy means
evasion, and evasion means a problem to the moral mind.  To the primitive
mind, with its direct yes and no, there is danger of it becoming a
tragical problem ere it is realised that truth is various and diverse.
Perhaps even with that Mary who hid the matter in her heart--the
exquisite tragedy and glory of Christendom--there was a delicate feeling
of guilt, the guilt of the hidden though lofty and beautiful thing.

If secrecy was guilt, then Charley and Rosalie were bound together by a
bond as strong as death: Rosalie held the key to a series of fateful days
and doings.

In ordinary course, they might have known each other for five years and
not have come to this sensitive and delicate association.  With one great
plunge she had sprung into the river of understanding.  In the moment
that she had thrust her scarf into his scorched breast, in that little
upper room, the work of years had been done.

As long as he lived, that mark must remain on M'sieu's breast--the red,
smooth scar of a cross!  She had seen the sort of shining scar a bad burn
makes, and at thought of it she flushed, trembled, and turned her head
away, as though some one were watching her.  Even in the night she
flushed and buried her face in the pillow when the thought flashed
through her mind; though when she had soaked the scarf in oil and flour
and laid it on the angry wound she had not flushed at all, was
determined, quiet, and resourceful.

That incident had made her from a girl into a woman, from a child of the
convent into a child of the world.  She no longer thought and felt as she
had done before.  What she did think or feel could not easily have been
set down, for her mind was one tremulous confusion of unusual thoughts,
her heart was beset by new feelings, her imagination, suddenly finding
itself, was trying its wings helplessly.  The past was full of wonder and
event, the present full of surprises.

There was M'sieu' established already in Louis Trudel's place, having
been granted a lease of the house and shop by the Curte, on the part of
the parish, to which the property had been left; receiving also a gift of
the furniture and of old Margot, who remained where she had been so many
years.  She could easily see Charley at work--pale and suffering still
--for the door was generally open in the sweet April weather, with the
birds singing, and the trees bursting into blossom.  Her wilful
imagination traced the cross upon his breast--it almost seemed as if it
were outside upon his clothes, exposed to every eye, a shining thing all
fire, not a wound inside, for which old Margot prepared oiled linen now.

The parish was as perturbed as her own mind, for the mystery of the
stolen cross had never been cleared up, and a few still believed that
M'sieu' had taken it.  They were of those who kept hinting at dark things
which would yet be worked upon the infidel in the tailor's shop.  These
were they to whom the Curb's beautiful ambition did not appeal.  He had
said that if the man were an infidel, then they must pray that he be
brought into the fold; but a few were still suspicious, and they said in
Rosalie's presence: "Where is the little cross?  M'sieu' knows."

He did know.  That was the worst of it.  The cross was in her possession.
Was it not necessary, then, to quiet suspicion for his sake?  She had
locked the relic away in a cupboard in her bedroom, and she carried the
key of it always in her pocket.  Every day she went and looked at it, as
at some ghostly token.  To her it was a symbol, not of supernatural
things, but of life in its new reality to her.  It was M'sieu', it was
herself, it was their secret--she chafed inwardly that Margot should
share a part of that secret.  If it were only between their two selves--
between M'sieu' and herself!  If Margot--she paused suddenly, for she was
going to say, If Margot would only die!  She was not wicked enough to
wish that; yet in the past few weeks she had found herself capable of
thinking things beyond the bounds of any past experience.

She found a solution at last.  She would go to-night secretly and nail
the cross again on the church door, and so stop the chatter of evil
tongues.  The moon set very early now, and as every one in Chaudiere was
supposed to be in bed by ten o'clock, the chances of not being seen were
in her favour.  She received the final impetus to her resolution by a
quarrelsome and threatening remark of Jo Portugais to some sharp-tongued
gossip in the post-office.  She was glad that Jo should defend M'sieu',
but she was jealous of his friendship for the tailor.  Besides, did there
not appear to be a secret between Jo and M'sieu'?  Was it not possible
that Jo knew where M'sieu' came from, and all about him?  Of late Jo had
come in and gone out of the shop oftener than in the past, had even
brought her bunches of mosses for her flower-pots, the first budding
lilacs, and some maple-sugar made from the trees on Vadrome Mountain.
She remembered that when she was a girl at school, years ago--ten years
ago--Jo Portugais, then scarcely out of his teens, a cheerful, pleasant,
quick-tempered lad, had brought her bunches of the mountain-ash berry;
that once he had mended the broken runner of her sled; and yet another
time had sent her a birch-bark valentine at the convent, where it was
confiscated by the Mother Superior.  Since those days he had become a
dark morose figure, living apart from men, never going to confession,
seldom going to Mass, unloving and unlovable.

There was only one other person in the parish more unloved.  That was the
woman called Paulette Dubois, who lived in the little house at the outer
gate of the Manor.  Paulette Dubois had a bad name in the parish--so bad
that all women shunned her, and few men noticed her.  Yet no one could
say that at the present time she did not live a careful life, justifying,
so far as eye could see, the protection of the Seigneur, M. Rossignol,
a man of queer habits and queerer dress, a dabbler in physical science,
a devout Catholic, and a constant friend of the Cure.  He it was who,
when an effort was made to drive Paulette out of the parish, had said
that she should not go unless she wished; that, having been born in
Chaudiere, she had a right to live there and die there; and if she had
sinned there, the parish was in some sense to blame.  Though he had no
lodge-gates, and though the seigneury was but a great wide low-roofed
farmhouse, with an observatory, and a chimney-piece dating from the time
of Louis the Fourteenth, the Seigneur gave Paulette Dubois a little hut
at his outer gate, which had been there since the great Count Frontenac
visited Chaudiere.  Probably Rosalie spoke to Paulette Dubois more often
than did any one else in the parish, but that was because the woman came
for little things at the shop, and asked for letters, and every week sent
one--to a man living in Montreal.  She sent these letters, but not more
than once in six months did she get a reply, and she had not had one in
a whole year.  Yet every week she asked, and Rosalie found it hard to
answer her politely, and sometimes showed it.

So it was that the two disliked each other without good cause, save that
they were separated by a chasm as wide as a sea.  The one disliked the
other because she must recognise her; the other chafed because she could
be recognised by Rosalie officially only.

The late afternoon of the day in which Rosalie decided to nail the cross
on the church door again, Paulette arrived to ask for letters at the
moment that the office wicket was closed, and Rosalie had answered that
it was after office hours, and had almost closed the door in her face.
As she turned away Jo Portugais came out of the tailor-shop opposite.  He
saw Paulette, and stood still an instant.  She did the same.  A strange
look passed across the face of each, then they turned and went in
opposite directions.

Never in her life had time gone so slowly with Rosalie.  She watched the
clock.  A dozen times she went to the front door and looked out.  She
tried to read--it was no use; she tried to spin-her fingers trembled; she
sorted the letters in the office again, and rearranged every letter and
parcel and paper in its little pigeonhole--then did it all over again.
She took out again the letter Paulette had dropped in the letter-box; it
was addressed in the name of the man at Montreal.  She looked at it in a
kind of awe, as she had ever done the letters of this woman who was
without the pale.  They had a sense of mystery, an air of forbidden
imagination.

She put the letter back, went to the door again, and looked out.  It was
now time to go.  Drawing a hood over her head, she stepped out into the
night.  There was a little frost, though spring was well forward, and the
smell of the rich earth and the budding trees was sweet to the sense.
The moon had just set, but the stars were shining, and here and there
patches of snow on the hillside and in the fields added to the light.
Yet it was not bright enough to see far, and as Rosalie moved down the
street she did not notice a figure at a little distance behind, walking
on the new-springing grass by the roadside.  All was quiet at the tavern;
there was no light in the Notary's house--as a rule, he sat up late,
reading; and even the fiddle of Maximilian Cour, the baker, was silent.
The Cure's windows were dark, and the church with its white tin spire
stood up sentinel-like above the village.

Rosalie had the fateful cross in her hand as she softly opened the gate
of the churchyard and approached the great oak doors.  Taking a screw-
driver and some screws from her pocket, she felt with a finger for the
old screw-holes in the door.  Then she began her work, looking fearfully
round once or twice at first.  Presently, however, because the screws
were larger than the old ones, it became much harder; the task called
forth more strength, and drove all thought of being seen out of her mind
for a space.  At last, however, she gave the final turn to the handle,
and every screw was in its place, its top level and smooth with the iron
of the cross.  She stopped and looked round again with an uneasy feeling.
She could see no one, hear no one, but she began to tremble, and,
overcome, she fell on her knees before the door, and, with her fingers on
the foot of the little cross, prayed passionately; for herself, for
Monsieur.

Suddenly she heard footsteps inside the church.  They were coming towards
the doorway, nearer and nearer.  At first she was so struck with terror
that she could not move.  Then with a little cry she sprang to her feet,
rushed to the gate, threw it open, ran out into the road, ind wildly on
towards home.  She did not stop for at least three hundred yards.
Turning and looking back she saw at the church door a pale round light.
With another cry she sped on, and did not pause till she reached the
house.  Then, bursting in and locking the door, she hurried to her room,
undressed quickly, got into bed without saying her prayers, and buried
her face in the pillow, shivering and overwrought.

The footsteps she had heard were those of the Cure and Jo Portugais.  The
Cure had sent for Jo to do some last work upon a little altar, to be used
the next day for the first time.  The carpenter and the carver in wood
who were responsible for the work had fallen victims to white whiskey on
the very last day of their task, and had been driven from the church by
the Cure, who then sent for Jo.  Rosalie had not seen the light at the
shrine, as it was on the side of the church farthest from the village.

Their labour finished, the two came towards the front door, the Cure's
lantern in his hand.  Opening the door, Jo heard the sound of footsteps
and saw a figure flying down the road.  As the Cure came out
abstractedly, he glanced sorrowfully towards the place where the little
cross was used to be.  He gave a wondering cry, and almost dropped the
lantern.

"See, see, Portugais," he said, "our little cross again!"  Jo nodded.
"So it seems, Monsieur," he said.

At that instant he saw a hood lying on the ground, and as the Cure held
up the lantern, peering at the little cross, he hastily picked it up and
thrust it inside his coat.

"Strange--very strange!" said the Cure.  "It must have been done while
we were inside.  It was not there when we entered."

"We entered by the vestry door," said Jo.

"Ah, true-true," responded the Cure.

"It comes as it went," said Jo.  "You can't account for some things."

The Cure turned and looked at Jo curiously.  "Are you then so
superstitious, Jo?  Nonsense; it is the work of human hands--very human
hands," he added sadly.

"There is nothing to show," said the Cure, seeing Jo's glance round.

"As you see, M'sieu' le Cure."

"Well, it is a mystery which time no doubt will clear up.  Meanwhile, let
us be thankful to God," said the Cure.

They parted, the Cure going through a side-gate into his own garden,
Jo passing out of the churchyard-gate through which Rosalie had gone.
He looked down the road towards the village.

"Well!" said a voice in his ear.  Paulette Dubois stood before him.

"It was you, then," he said, with a glowering look.  "What did you want
with it?"

"What do you want with the hood in your coat there?"  She threw her head
back with a spiteful laugh.  "Whose do you think it is?" he said
quietly.

"You and the schoolmaster made verses about her once."

"It was Rosalie Evanturel?" he asked, with aggravating composure.

"You have the hood-look at it!  You saw her running down the road; I saw
her come, watched her, and saw her go.  She is a thief--pretty Rosalie--
thief and postmistress!  No doubt she takes letters too."

"The ones you wait for, and that never come--eh?"  Her face darkened with
rage and hatred.  "I will tell the world she's a thief," she sneered.

"Who will believe you?"

"You will."  She was hard and fierce, and looked him in the eyes
squarely.  "You'll give evidence quick enough, if I ask you."

"I wouldn't do anything you asked me to-nothing, if it was to save my
life."

"I'll prove her a thief without you.  She can't deny it."

"If you try it, I'll--"  He stopped, husky and shaking.

"You'll kill me, eh?  You killed him, and you didn't hang.  Oh no, you
wouldn't kill me, Jo," she added quickly, in a changed voice.  "You've
had enough of that kind of thing.  If I'd been you, I'd rather have hung
--ah, sure!"  She suddenly came close to him.  "Do you hate me so bad,
Jo?" she said anxiously.  "It's eight years--do you hate me so bad as
then?"

"You keep your tongue off Rosalie Evanturel," he said, and turned on his
heel.

She caught his arm.  "We're both bad, Jo.  Can't we be friends?" she
said eagerly, her voice shaking.

He did not reply.

"Don't drive a woman too hard," she said between her teeth.

"Threats!  Pah!" he rejoined.  "What do you think I'm made of?"

"I'll find that out," she said, and, turning on her heel, ran down the
road towards the Manor House.  "What had Rosalie to do with the cross?"
Jo said to himself.  "This is her hood."  He took it out and looked at
it.  "It's her hood--but what did she want with the cross?"

He hurried on, and as he neared the post-office he saw the figure of a
woman in the road.  At first he thought it might be Rosalie, but as he
came nearer he saw it was not.  The woman was muttering and crying.  She
wandered to and fro bewilderedly.  He came up, caught her by the arm, and
looked into her face.

It was old Margot Patry.




CHAPTER XXIII

THE WOMAN WHO DID NOT TELL

"Oh, M'sieu', I am afraid."

"Afraid of what, Margot?"

"Of the last moment, M'sieu' le Cure."

"There will be no last moment to your mind--you will not know it when it
comes, Margot."

The woman trembled.  "I am not sorry to die.  But I am afraid; it is so
lonely, M'sieu' le Cure."

"God is with us, Margot."

"When we are born we do not know.  It is on the shoulders of others.
When we die we know, and we have to answer."

"Is the answering so hard, Margot?"

The woman shook her head feebly and sadly, but did not speak.

"You have been a good mother, Margot."  She made no sign.

"You have been a good neighbour; you have done unto others as you would
be done by."

She scarcely seemed to hear.

"You have been a good servant--doing your duty in season and out of
season; honest and just and faithful."

The woman's fingers twitched on the coverlet, and she moved her head
restlessly.

The Curb almost smiled, for it seemed as if Margot were finding herself
wanting.  Yet none in Chaudiere but knew that she had lived a blameless
life--faithful, friendly, a loving and devoted mother, whose health had
been broken by sleepless attendance at sick-beds by night, while doing
her daily work at the house of the late Louis Trudel.

"I will answer for the way you have done your duty, Margot," said the
Cure.  "You have been a good daughter of the Church."

He paused a minute, and in the pause some one rose from a chair by the
window and looked out on the sunset sky.  It was Charley.  The woman
heard, and turned her eyes towards him.  "Do you wish him to go?" asked
the Cure.

"No, no--oh no, M'sieu'!" she said eagerly.  She had asked all day that
either Rosalie or M'sieu' should be in the room with her.  It would seem
as though she were afraid she had not courage enough to keep the secret
of the cross without their presence.  Charley had yielded to her request,
while he shrank from granting it.  Yet, as he said to himself, the woman
was keeping his secret--his and Rosalie's--and she had some right to make
demand.

When the Cure asked the question of old Margot, he turned expectantly,
and with a sense of relief.  He thought it strange that the Cure should
wish him to remain.  The Cure, on his part, was well pleased to have him
in the influence of a Christian death-bed.  A time must come when the
last confidences of the dying woman could be given to no ears but his
own, but meanwhile it was good that M'sieu' should be there.

"M'sieu' le Cure," said the dying woman, "must I tell all?"

"All what, Margot?"

"All that is sin?"

"There is no must, Margot."

"If you should ask me, M'sieu'--"

She paused, and the man at the window turned and looked curiously at her.
He saw the problem in the woman's mind: had she the right to die with the
secret of another's crime upon her mind?

"The priest does not ask, Margot: it is you who confess your sins.  That
is between you and God."

The Cure spoke firmly, for he wanted the man at the window to clearly
understand.

"But if there are the sins of others, and you know, and they trouble your
soul, M'sieu'?"

"You have nothing to do with the sins of others; it is enough to repent
of your own sins.  The priest has nothing to do with any sins but those
confessed by the sinner to himself.  Your own sins are your sole concern
to-night, Margot."

The woman's face seemed to clear a little, and her eyes wandered to the
man at the window with less anxiety.  Charley was wondering whether,
after all, she would have the courage to keep her word, whether spiritual
terror would surmount the moral attitude of honour.  He was also
wondering how much right he had to put the strain upon the woman in her
desperate hour.  "How long did the doctor say I could live?" the woman
asked presently.

"Till morning, perhaps, Margot."

"I should like to live till sunrise," she answered, "till after
breakfast.  Rosalie makes good tea," she added musingly.

The Cure almost smiled.  "There is the Living Bread, my daughter."

She nodded.  "But I should like to see the sunrise and have Rosalie bring
me tea," she persisted.

"Very well, Margot.  We will ask God for that."

Her mind flew back again to the old question.

"Is it wrong to keep a secret?" she asked, her face turned away from the
man at the window.

"If it is the secret of a sin, and the sin is your own--yes, Margot."

"And if the sin is not your own?"

"If you share the sin, and if the secret means injury to others, and a
wrong is being done, and the law can right that wrong, then you must go
to the law, not to your priest."

The Cure's look was grave, even anxious, for he saw that the old woman's
mind was greatly disturbed.  But her face cleared now, and stayed so.
"It has all been a mix and a muddle," she answered; "and it hurt my poor
head, M'sieu' le Cure, but now I think I under stand.  I am not afraid;
I will confess."

The Cure had made it clear to her that she could carry to her grave the
secret of the little cross and the work it had done, and so keep her word
and still not injure her chances of salvation.  She was content.  She no
longer needed the helpful presence of M'sieu' or Rosalie.  Charley
instinctively felt what was in her mind, and came towards the bed.

"I will tell Mademoiselle Rosalie about the tea," he said to her.

She looked up at him, almost smiling.  "Thank you, good M'sieu'," she
said.

"I will confess now, M'sieu' le Cure" she continued.  Charley left the
room.

Towards morning Margot waked out of a brief sleep, and found the Cure and
his sister and others about her bed.

"Is it near sunrise?" she whispered.

"It is just sunrise.  See; God has been good," answered the Cure, drawing
open the blind and letting in the first golden rays.

Rosalie entered the room with a cup of tea, and came towards the bed.

Old Margot looked at the girl, at the tea, and then at the Cure.

"Drink the tea for me, Rosalie," she whispered.  Rosalie did as she was
asked.

She looked round feebly; her eyes were growing filmy.  "I never gave--so
much--trouble--before," she managed to say.  "I never had--so much--
attention....  I can keep--a secret too," she said, setting her lips
feebly with pride.  "But I--never--had--so much--attention--before; have
I--Rosalie?"

Rosalie did not need to answer, for the woman was gone.  The crowning
interest of her life had come all at the last moment, as it were, and she
had gone away almost gladly and with a kind of pride.

Rosalie also had a hidden pride: the secret was now her very own--hers
and M'sieu's.




CHAPTER XXIV

THE SEIGNEUR TAKES A HAND IN THE GAME

It was St. Jean Baptiste's day, and French Canada was en fete.  Every
seigneur, every cure, every doctor, every notary--the chief figures in a
parish--and every habitant was bent for a happy holiday, dressed in his
best clothes, moved in his best spirits, in the sweet summer weather.

Bells were ringing, flags were flying, every road and lane was filled
with caleches and wagons, and every dog that could draw a cart pulled big
and little people, the old and the blind and the mendicant, the happy and
the sour, to the village, where there were to be sports and speeches,
races upon the river, and a review of the militia, arranged by the member
of the Legislature for the Chaudiere-half of the county.  French soldiers
in English red coats and carrying British flags were straggling along the
roads to join the battalion at the volunteers' camp three miles from the
town, and singing:

                   "Brigadier, respondez Pandore--
                    Brigadier, vous avez raison."

It was not less incongruous and curious when one group presently broke
out into 'God save the Queen', and another into the 'Marseillaise', and
another still into 'Malbrouck s'en va t'en guerre'.  At last songs and
soldiers were absorbed in the battalion at the rendezvous, and 1the long
dusty march to the village gave a disciplined note to the gaiety of the
militant habitant.

At high noon Chaudiere was filled to overflowing.  There were booths and
tents everywhere--all sorts of cheap-jacks vaunted their wares, merry-go-
rounds and swings and shooting-galleries filled the usual spaces in the
perspective.  The Cure, M. Rossignol the Seigneur, and the Notary stood
on the church steps viewing the scene and awaiting the approach of the
soldier-citizens.  The Seigneur and the Cure had ceased listening to the
babble of M. Dauphin, who seemed not to know that his audience closed its
ears and found refuge in a "Well, well!" or "Think of that!" or an
abstracted "You surprise me!"

The Notary talked on with eager gesture and wreathing smile, shaking back
his oiled ringlets as though they trespassed on his smooth, somewhat
jaundiced cheeks, until it began to dawn upon him that there was no coin
of real applause to be got at this mint.  Fortune favoured him at the
critical juncture, for the tailor walked slowly past them, looking
neither to right nor to left, his eyes cast upon the ground, apparently
oblivious to all round him.  Almost opposite the church door, however,
Charley was suddenly stopped by Filion Lacasse, who ran out from a group
before the tavern, and, standing in front of him with outstretched hand,
said loudly:

"M'sieu', it's all right.  What you said done it, sure!  I'm a thousand
dollars richer to-day.  You may be an infidel, but you have a head, and
you save me money, and you give away your own, and that's good enough for
me,"--he wrung Charley's hand,--"and I don't care who knows it--sacre!"

Charley did not answer him, but calmly withdrew his hand, smiled, raised
his hat at the lonely cheer the saddler raised, and passed on, scarce
conscious of what had happened.  Indeed he was indifferent to it, for he
had a matter on his mind this day which bitterly absorbed him.

But the Notary was not indifferent.  "Look there, what do you think of
that?" he asked querulously.  "I am glad to see that Lacasse treats
Monsieur well," said the Cure.

"What do you think of that, Monsieur?" repeated the Notary excitedly to
the Seigneur.

The Seigneur put his large gold-handled glass to his eye and looked
interestedly after Charley for a moment, then answered: "Well, Dauphin,
what?"

"He's been giving Filion Lacasse advice about the old legacy business,
and Filion's taken it; and he's got a thousand dollars; and now there's
all that fuss.  And four months ago Filion wanted to tar and feather him
for being just what he is to-day--an infidel--an infidel!"

He was going to say something else, but he did not like the look the Cure
turned on him, and he broke off short.

"Do you regret that he gave Lacasse good advice?" asked the Cure.

"It's taking bread out of other men's mouths."

"It put bread into Filion's mouth.  Did you ever give Lacasse advice?
The truth now, Dauphin!" said the Seigneur drily.

"Yes, Monsieur, and sound advice too, within the law-precedent and code
and every legal fact behind."  The Seigneur was a man of laconic speech.
"Tut, tut, Dauphin; precedent and code and legal fact are only good when
there's brain behind 'em.  The tailor yonder has brains."

"Ah, but what does he know about the law?" answered Dauphin, with
acrimonious voice but insinuating manner, for he loved to stand well with
the Seigneur.

"Enough for the saddler evidently," sharply rejoined the Seigneur.

Dauphin was fighting for his life, as it were.  His back was to the wall.
If this man was to be allowed to advise the habitants of Chaudiere on
their disputes and "going to law," where would his own prestige be?
His vanity had been deeply wounded.

"It's guesswork with him.  Let him stick to his trade as I stick to mine.
That sort of thing only does harm."

"He puts a thousand dollars into the saddler's pocket: that's a positive
good.  He may or may not take thereby ten dollars out of your pocket:
that's a negative injury.  In this case there was no injury, for you had
already cost Lacasse--how much had you cost him, Dauphin?" continued the
Seigneur, with a half-malicious smile.  "I've been out of Chaudiere for
near a year; I don't know the record--how much, eh, Dauphin?"

The Notary was too offended to answer.  He shook his ringlets back
angrily, and a scarlet spot showed on each straw-coloured cheek.

"Twenty dollars is what Lacasse paid our dear Dauphin," said the Cure
benignly, "and a very proper charge.  Lacasse probably gave Monsieur
there quite as much, and Monsieur will give it to the first poor man he
meets, or send it to the first sick person of whom he hears."

"My own opinion is, he's playing some game here," said the Notary.

"We all play games," said the Seigneur.  "His seems to give him hard work
and little luxury.  Will you bring him to see me at the Manor, my dear
Cure?" he added.  "He will not go.  I have asked him."

"Then I shall visit him at his tailor-shop," said the Seigneur.  "I need
a new suit."

"But you always had your clothes made in Quebec, Monsieur," said the
Notary, still carping.

"We never had such a tailor," answered the Seigneur.

"We'll hear more of him before we're done with him," obstinately urged
the Notary.

"It would give Dauphin the greatest pleasure if our tailor proved to be a
murderer or a robber.  I suppose you believe that he stole our little
cross here," the Cure added, turning to the church door, where his eye
lingered lovingly on the relic, hanging on a pillar just inside, whither
he had had it removed.

"I'm not sure yet he hadn't something to do with it," was the stubborn
response.

"If he did, may it bring him peace at last!" said the Cure piously.
"I have set my heart on nailing him to our blessed faith as that cross
is fixed to the pillar yonder--'I will fasten him like a nail in a sure
place,' says the Book.  I take it hard that my friend Dauphin will not
help me on the way.  Suppose the man were evil, then the Church should
try to snatch him like a brand from the burning.  But suppose that in his
past there was no wrong necessary to be hidden in the present--and this
I believe with all my heart; suppose that he was wronged, not wronging:
then how much more should the Church strive to win him to the light!
Why, man, have you no pride in Holy Church?  I am ashamed of you,
Dauphin, with your great intelligence, your wide reading.  With our
knowledge of the world we should be broader."

The Seigneur's eyes were turned away, for there was in them at once
humour and a suspicious moisture.  Of all men in the world he most
admired the Cure, for his utter truth and nobility; but he could not
help smiling at his enthusiasm--his dear Cure turned evangelist like any
"Methody"!--and at the appeal of the Notary on the ground of knowledge
of the world.  He was wise enough to count himself an old fogy, a
provincial, and "a simon-pure habitant," but of the three he only had any
knowledge of life.  As men of the world the Cure and the Notary were sad
failures, though they stood for much in Chaudiere.  Yet this detracted
nothing from the fine gentlemanliness of the Cure or the melodramatic
courtesy of the Notary.

Amused and touched as the Seigneur had been at the Cure's words, he
turned now and said: "Always on the weaker side, Cure; always hoping the
best from the worst of us."

"I am only following an example at my door--you taught us all charity and
justice," answered M. Loisel, looking meaningly at the Seigneur.  There
was silence a little while, for all three were thinking of the woman of
the hut, at the gate of the Seigneur's manor.

On this topic M. Dauphin was not voluble.  His original kindness to the
woman had given him many troubled hours at home, for Madame Dauphin had
construed his human sympathy into the dark and carnal desires of the
heart, and his truthful eloquence had made his case the worse.  A
miserable sentimentalist, the Notary was likely to be misunderstood for
ever, and one or two indiscretions of his extreme youth had been a weapon
against him through the long years of a blameless married life.

He heaved a sigh of sympathy with the Cure now.  "She has not come back
yet?" he said to the Seigneur.  "No sign of her.  She locked up and
stepped out, so my housekeeper says, about the time--"

"The day of old Margot's funeral," interposed the Notary.  "She'd had a
letter that day, a letter she'd been waiting for, and abroad she went--
alas! the flyaway--from bad to worse, I fear--ah me!"

The Seigneur turned sharply on him.  "Who told you she had a letter that
day, for which she had been waiting?" he said.

"Monsieur Evanturel."

The Seigneur's face became sterner still.  "What business had he to know
that she received a letter that day?"

"He is postmaster," innocently replied the Notary.  "He is the devil!"
said the Seigneur tartly.  "I beg your pardon, Cure; but it is
Evanturel's business not to know what letters go to and fro in that
office.  He should be blind and dumb, so far as we all are concerned."

"Remember that Evanturel is a cripple," the Cure answered gently.  "I am
glad, very glad it was not Rosalie."

"Rosalie has more than usual sense for her sex," gruffly but kindly
answered the Seigneur, a look of friendliness in his eyes.  "I shall talk
to her about her father; I can't trust myself to speak to the man."

"Rosalie is down there with Madame Dauphin," said the Notary, pointing.
"Shall I ask her to come?"

The Seigneur nodded.  He was magistrate and magnate, and he was the
guarantor of the post-office, and of Rosalie and her father.  His eyes
fixed in reverie on Rosalie; he and the Cure passively waited her
approach.

She came over, pale and a little anxious, but with a courageous look.
She had a vague sense of trouble, and she feared it might be the little
cross, that haunting thing of all these months.

When she came near, the Cure greeted her courteously, and then, taking
the Notary by the arm, led him away.

The Seigneur and Rosalie being left alone, the girl said: "You wish to
speak with me, Monsieur?"

The Seigneur scrutinised her sharply.  Though her colour came and went,
her look was frank and fearless.  She had had many dark hours since that
fateful month of April.  At night, trying to sleep, she had heard the
ghostly footsteps in the church, which had sent her flying homeward.
Then, there was the hood.  She had waited on and on, fearing word would
come that it had been found in the churchyard, and that she had been seen
putting the cross back upon the church door.  As day after day passed she
had come at length to realise that, whatever had happened to the hood,
she was not suspected.  Yet the whole train of circumstances had a
supernatural air, for the Cure and Jo Portugais had not made public their
experience on the eventful night; she had been educated in a land of
legend and superstition, and a deep impression had been made upon her
mind, giving to her other new emotions a touch of pathos, of imagination,
and adding character to her face.  The old Seigneur stroked his chin as
he looked at her.  He realised that a change had come upon her, that she
had developed in some surprising way.

"What has happened--who has happened, Mademoiselle Rosalie?" he asked.
He had suddenly made up his mind about that look in her face--he thought
it the woman in her which answers to the call of man, not perhaps any
particular man, but man the attractive influence, the complement.

Her eyes dropped, then raised frankly to his.  "I don't know,"--adding,
with a quick humour, for he had been very friendly with her, and joked
with her in his dry way all her life; "do you, Monsieur?"

He pulled his nose with a quick gesture habitual to him, and answered
slowly and meaningly: "The government's a good husband and pays regular
wages, Mademoiselle.  I'd stick to government."

"I am not asking for a divorce, Monsieur."

He pulled his nose again delightedly--so many people were pathetically
in earnest in Chaudiere--even the Cure's humour was too mediaeval and
obvious.  He had never before thought Rosalie so separate from them all.
All at once he had a new interest in her.  His cheek flushed a little,
his eye kindled, humour relaxed his lips.

"No other husband would intrude so little," he rejoined.

"True, there's little love lost between us, Monsieur."  She felt
exhilaration in talking with him, a kind of joy in measuring word against
word; yet a year ago she would have done no more than smile respectfully
and give a demure reply if the Seigneur had spoken to her like this.

The Seigneur noted the mixed emotions in her face and the delicate
alertness of expression.  As a man of the world, he was inclined to
believe that only one kind of experience can bring such looks to a
woman's face.  He saw in her the awakening of the deeper interests of
life, the tremulous apprehension of nascent emotions and passions which,
at some time or other, give beauty and importance to the nature of every
human being.  It did not occur to him that the tailor--the mysterious
figure in the parish--might be responsible.  He was observant, but not
imaginative; he was moved by what he saw, in a quiet, unexplainable
manner.

"The government is the best sort of husband.  From the other sort you
would get more kisses and less ha'pence," he continued.

"That might be a satisfactory balance-sheet, Monsieur."

"Take care, Mademoiselle Rosalie," he rejoined, half seriously, "that you
don't miss the ha'pence before you get the kisses."

She turned pale in very fear.  What was he going to say?  Was the post-
office to be taken from them?  She came straight to the point.

"What have I done wrong, Monsieur?  I've never kept the mail-stage
waiting; I've never left the mailbag unlocked; I've never been late in
opening the wicket; I've never been careless, and no one's ever
complained of a lost letter."

The Seigneur saw her agitation, and was sorry for her.  He came to the
point as she had done:

"We will have you made postmistress--you alone, Rosalie Evanturel.  I've
made up my mind to that.  But you'll promise not to get married--eh?
Anyhow, there's no one in the parish for you to marry.  You're too well-
born and you've been too well educated for a habitant's wife--and the
Cure or I can't marry you."

He was not taken back to see her flush deeply, and it pleased him to see
this much life rising to his own touch, this much revelation to give his
mind a new interest.  He had come to that age when the mind is surprised
to find that the things that once charmed charm less, and the things once
hated are less acutely repulsive.  He saw her embarrassment.  He did not
know that this was the first time that she had ever thought of marriage
since it ceased to be a dream of girlhood, and, by reason of thinking
much on a man, had become a possibility, which, however, she had never
confessed to herself.  Here she was faced by it now in the broad open
day: a plain, hard statement, unrelieved by aught save the humour of the
shrewd eyes bent upon her.

She did not answer him at once.  "Do you promise not to marry so useless
a thing as man, and to remain true to the government?" he continued.

"If I wished to marry a man, I should not let the government stand in my
way," she said, in brave confusion.

"But do you wish to marry any man?" he asked abruptly, even petulantly.

"I have not asked myself that question, Monsieur, and--should you ask it,
unless--" she said, and paused with as pretty and whimsical a glance of
merriment as could well be.

He burst out laughing at the swift turn she had given her reply, and at
the double suggestion.  Then he suddenly changed.  A curious expression
filled his eyes.  A smile, almost beautiful, came to his lips.

"'Pon my honour," he said, in a low tone, "you have me caught!  And I beg
to say--I beg to say," he added, with a flush mounting in his own face, a
sudden inspiration in his look, "that if you do not think me too old and
crabbed and ugly, and can endure me, I shall be profoundly happy if you
will marry me, Rosalie."

He stood upright, holding himself very hard, for this idea had shot into
his mind all in an instant, though, unknown to himself, it had been
growing for years, cherished by many a kind act to her father and by a
simple gratitude on her part.  He had spoken without feeling the
absurdity of the proposal.  He had never married, and he was unprepared
to make any statement on such a theme; but now, having made it somehow,
he would stand by it, in spite of any and all criticism.  He had known
Rosalie since her birth, her education was as good as a convent could
secure, she was the granddaughter of a notable seigneur, and here she
was, as fine a type of health, beauty and character as man could wish--
and he was only fifty!  Life was getting lonelier for him every day,
and, after all, why should he leave distant relations and the Church his
worldly goods?  All this flashed through his mind as he waited for her
answer.  Now it seemed to him that he had meant to say this thing for
many years.  He had seen an awakening in her--he had suddenly been
awakened himself.

"Monsieur, Monsieur," she said in a bewildered way, "do not amuse
yourself at my expense."

"Would it be that, then?" he said, with a smile, behind which there was
determination and self-will.  "I want you to marry me; I do with all my
heart.  You shall have those ha'pence, and the kisses too, if so be you
will take them--or not, as you will, Rosalie."

"Monsieur," she gasped, for something caught her in the throat, and the
tears started to her eyes, "ask me to forget that you have ever said
those words.  Oh, Monsieur, it is not possible, it never could be
possible!  I am only the postmaster's daughter."

"You are my wife, if you will but say the word," he answered, "and I as
proud a husband as the land holds!"

"You were always kind to me, Monsieur," she rejoined, her lips trembling;
"won't you be so still?"

"I am too old?" he asked.

"Oh no, it is not that," she replied.

"You have as good manners as my mother had.  You need not fear comparison
with any lady in the land.  Have I not known you all your life?  I know
the way you have come, and your birth is as good as mine."

"Ah, it is not that, Monsieur!"

"I give you my word that I do not come to you because no one else would
have me," he said with a curious simplicity.  "I never asked a woman to
marry me--never!  You are the first.  There was talk once--but it was all
false.  I never meant to ask any one to marry me.  But I have the wish
now which I never had in my youth.  I thought best of myself always; now,
I think--I think better of you than--"

"Oh, Monsieur, I beg of you, no more!  I cannot; oh, I cannot--"

"You--but no; I will not ask you, Mademoiselle.  If you have some one
else in your heart, or want some one else there, that is your affair, not
mine--undoubtedly.  I would have tried to make you happy; you would have
had peace and comfort all your life; you could have trusted me--but there
it is.  .  .  ."  He felt all at once that he was unfair to her, that he
had thrust upon her too hard a problem in too troubled an hour.

"I could trust you with my life, Monsieur Rossignol," she replied.  "And
I love you in a way that a man may be loved to no one's harm or sorrow:
it is true that!" She raised her eyes to his simply, trustingly.

He looked at her steadily for a moment.  "If you change your mind--"

She shook her head sadly.

"Good, then," he went on, for he thought it wise not to press her now,
though he had no intention of taking her no as final.  "I'll keep an eye
on you.  You'll need me some day soon; I can do things that the Cure
can't, perhaps."  His manner changed still more.  "Now to business," he
continued.  "Your father has been talking about letters received and sent
from the post-office.  That is punishable.  I am responsible for you
both, and if it is reported, if the woman were to report it--you know
the letter I mean--there would be trouble.  You do not talk.  Now I am
going to ask the government to make you sole postmistress, with full
responsibility.  Then you must govern your father--he hasn't as much
sense as you."

"Monsieur, we owe you so much!  I am deeply grateful, and, whatever you
do for us, you may rely on me to do my duty."

They could scarcely hear each other speak now, for the soldiers were
coming nearer, and the fife-and-drum bands were screeching, 'Louis the
King was a Soldier'.

"Then you will keep the government as your husband?" he asked, with
forced humour, as he saw the Cure and the Notary approaching.

"It is less trouble, Seigneur," she answered, with a smile of relief.

M. Rossignol turned to the Cure and the Notary.  "I have just offered
Mademoiselle a husband she might rule in place of a government that rules
her, and she has refused," he said in the Cure's ear, with a dry laugh.

"She's a sensible girl, is Rosalie," said the Cure, not apprehending.

The soldiers were now opposite the church, and riding at their head was
the battalion Colonel, also member of the Legislature.

They all moved down, and Rosalie disappeared in the crowd.  As the
Seigneur and the Cure greeted the Colonel, the latter said:

"At luncheon I'll tell you one of the bravest things ever seen.  Happened
half-hour ago at the Red Ravine.  Man who did it wore an eye-glass--said
he was a tailor."




CHAPTER XXV

THE COLONEL TELLS HIS STORY

The Colonel had lunched very well indeed.  He had done justice to every
dish set before him; he had made a little speech, congratulating himself
on having such a well-trained body of men to command, and felicitating
Chaudiere from many points of view.  He was in great good-humour with
himself, and when the Notary asked him--it was at the Manor, with the
soldiers resting on the grass without--about the tale of bravery he had
promised them, he brought his fist down on the table with great intensity
but little noise, and said:

"Chaudiere may well be proud of it.  I shall refer to it in the
Legislature on the question of roads and bridges--there ought to be a
stone fence on that dangerous road by the Red Ravine--Have I your
attention?"

He stood up, for he was an excitable and voluble Colonel, and he loved
oration as a cat does milk.  With a knife he drew a picture of the locale
on the table cloth.  "Here I was riding on my sorrel, all my noble
fellows behind, the fife and drums going as at Louisburg--that day!
Martial ardour united to manliness and local pride--follow me?  Here we
were, Red Ravine left, stump fences and waving fields of grain right.
From military point of view, bad position--ravine, stump fence, brave
soldiers in the middle, food for powder--catch it?--see?"

He emptied his glass, drew a long breath, and again began, the carving-
knife cutting a rhetorical path before him.  "I was engaged upon the
military problem--demonstration in force, no scouts ahead, no rearguard,
ravine on the right, stump fence on the left, red coats, fife-and-drum
band, concealed enemy--follow me?  Observant mind always sees problems
everywhere--unresting military genius accustoms intelligence to all
possible contingencies--'stand what I mean?"

The Seigneur took a pinch of snuff, and the Cure, whose mind was
benevolent, listened with the gravest interest.

"At the juncture when, in my mind's eye, I saw my gallant fellows
enfiladed with a terrible fire, caught in a trap, and I, despairing,
spurring on to die at their headhave I your attention?--just at that
moment there appeared between the ravine and the road ahead a man.  He
wore an eye-glass; he seemed an unconcerned spectator of our movements
--so does the untrained, unthinking eye look out upon destiny!  Not far
away was a wagon, in it a man.  Wagon bisecting our course from a cross-
road--"

He drew a line on the table-cloth with the carvingknife, and the Notary
said: "Yes, yes, the concession road."

"So, Messieurs.  There were we, a battalion and a fife-and-drum band;
there was the man with the eyeglass, the indifferent spectator, yet the
engine of fate; there was the wagon, a mottled horse, and a man driving--
catch it?  The mottled horse took fright at our band, which at that
instant strikes up 'The Chevalier Drew his Sabre'.  He shies from the
road with a leap, the man falls backwards into the wagon, and the reins
drop.  The horse dashes from the road into the open, and rushes on to the
ravine.  What good now to stop the fifes and drums-follow me?  What can
we, an armed force, bandoleered, knapsacked, sworded, rifled, impetuous,
brave, what can we do before this tragedy?  The man in the wagon
senseless, the flying horse, the ravine, death!  How futile the power of
man--'stand what I mean?"

"Why didn't your battalion shoot the horse?" said the Seigneur drily,
taking a pinch of snuff.  "Monsieur," said the Colonel, "see the irony,
the implacable irony of fate--we had only blank cartridge!  But see you,
here was this one despised man with an eye-glass, a tailor--takes nine
tailors to make a man!--between the ravine and the galloping tragedy.
His spirit arrayed itself like an army with banners, prepared to wrestle
with death as Jacob wrestled with his shadow all the night 'sieur le
Cure!"

The Cure bowed; the Notary shook back his oiled locks in excitement.

"Awoke a whole man--nine-ninths, as in Adam--in the obscure soul of the
tailor, and, rushing forward, he seized the mottled horse by the bridle
as he galloped upon the chasm:  The horse dragged him on--dragged him on
--on--on.  We, an army, so to speak, stood and watched the Tailor and the
Tragedy!  All seemed lost, but, by the decree of fate--"

"The will of God," said the Cure softly.

"By the great decree, the man was able to stop the horse, not a half-
dozen feet from the ravine.  The horse and the insensible driver were
spared death--death.  So, Messieurs, does bravery come from unexpected
places--see?"

The Seigneur, the Cure, and even the Notary clapped their hands, and
murmured praises of the tailor-man.  But the Colonel did not yet take his
seat.

"But now, mark the sequel," he said.  "As I galloped over, I saw the
tailor look into the wagon, and turn away quickly.  He waited by the
horse till I came near, and then walked off without a word.  I rode up,
and tapped him with my sword upon the shoulder.  'A noble deed, my good
man,' said I.  'I approve of your conduct, and I will remember it in the
Legislature when I address the committee of the whole house on roads and
bridges.'  What do you think was his reply to my affable words?  When I
tapped him approvingly on the shoulder a second time, he screwed his eye-
glass in his eye, and, with no emotion, though my own eyes were full of
tears, he said, in a tone of affront, 'Look after the man there,
constable,' and pointed to the wagon.  Constable--mon Dieu!  Gross
manners even for a tailor!"

"I had not thought his manners bad," said the Cure, as the Colonel sat
down, gulped a glass of brandy-andwater, and mopped his forehead.

"A most remarkable tailor," said the Seigneur, peering into his snuff-
box.

"And the driver of the mottled horse?" asked the Notary.

"Knocked senseless.  One of my captains soon restored him.  He followed
us into the village.  He is a quack-doctor.  I suppose he is now selling
tinctures, pulling teeth, and driving away rheumatics.  He gave me his
card.  I told him he should leave one on the tailor."

With a flourish he threw a professional card upon the table, before the
Cure.

The Cure picked it up and read:

                         JOHN BROWN, B.A., M.D.,

          Healer of Ailments that Defy the Ordinary Skill of Ordinary
          Medical Men.  Rheumatism, Sciatica, Headache, Toothache,
          Asthma, Ague, Pleurisy, Gout, and all Chronic Diseases Yield
          Instantly to the Power of his Medicines.

     Dr. Brown will publicly treat the most stubborn cases, laying
     himself open to the derision of mankind if he does not instantly
     give relief and benefit.  His whole career has been a blessing to
     his fellows, and his journey now through this country, fresh from
     his studies in the Orient, is to introduce his remedies to a
     suffering world, for the conquest of malady, not for personal
     profit.

                         JOHN BROWN, B.A., M.D.,

          Specialist in Chronic Diseases and General Practitioner.




CHAPTER XXVI

A SONG, A BOTTLE, AND A GHOST

All day John Brown, ex-clergyman and quack-doctor, harangued the people
of Chaudiere from his gaily-painted wagon.  He had the perfect gift of
the charlatan, and he had discovered his metier.  Inclined to the
picturesque by nature, melodramatic and empirical, his earlier career had
been the due fruit of habit and education.  As a dabbler in mines he had
been out of his element.  He lacked the necessary reticence, and arsenic
had not availed him, though it had tempted Billy Wantage to forgery; and
because Billy hid himself behind the dismal opportunity of silence, had
ruined the name of a dead man called Charley Steele.  Since Charley's
death John Brown had never seen Billy: he had left the town one woful
day an hour after Billy had told him of the discovery Charley had made.
From a far corner of the country he had read the story of Charley's
death; of the futile trial of the river-drivers afterwards, ending in
acquittal, and the subsequent discovery of the theft of the widows' and
orphans' trust-moneys.

On this St. Jean Baptiste's day he was thinking of anything and
everything else but Charley Steele.  Nothing could have been a better
advertisement for him than the perilous incident at the Red Ravine.
Falling backwards when the horse suddenly bolted, his head had struck the
medicine-chest, and he had lain insensible till brought back to
consciousness by the good offices of the voluble Colonel.  He had not,
therefore, seen Charley.  It was like him that his sense of gratitude
to the unknown tailor should be presently lost in exploiting the interest
he created in the parish.  His piebald horse, his white "plug" hat, his
gaily painted wagon, his flamboyant manner, and, above all, the
marvellous tale of his escape from death, were more exciting to the
people of Chaudiere than the militia, the dancing-bears, the shooting-
galleries, or the boat-races.  He could sing extremely well--had he not
trained his own choir when he was a parson? had not Billy approved his
comic songs?--and these comic songs, now sandwiched between his cures
and his sales, created much laughter.  He cured headaches, toothaches,
rheumatism, and all sorts of local ailments "with despatch."
He miraculously juggled away pains by what he called his Pain Paint,
and he stopped a cough by a laugh and a dose of his Golden Pectoral.
In the exuberance of trade, which steadily increased till sundown,
he gave no thought to the tailor, to whom, however, he had sent by a
messenger a two-dollar bill and two bottles of Pain Paint, with the
lordly announcement that he would call in the evening and "present his
compliments and his thanks."  The messenger left the Pain Paint on the
door-step of the tailor-shop, and the two dollars he promptly spent at
the Trois Couronnes.

Rosalie Evanturel rescued the bottles from the doorstep and awaited
Charley's return to his shop, that she might take them over to him, and
so have an excuse to speak with him; for to-day her heart and mind were
full of him.  He had done a brave thing for the medicine-man, and had
then fled from public gaze as a brave man should.  There was no one to
compare with him.  Not even the Cure was his superior in ability, and
certainly he was a greater man--though seemingly only a tailor--than M.
Rossignol.  M. Rossignol--she flushed.  Who could have believed that the
Seigneur would say those words to her this morning--to her, Rosalie
Evanturel, who hadn't five hundred dollars to her name?  That she should
be asked to be Madame Rossignol!  Confusion mingled with her simple
pride, and she ran out into the street, to where her father sat listening
to the medicine-man singing, in doubtful French:

                   "I am a waterman bold,
                    Oh, I'm a waterman bold:
                    But for my lass I have great fear,
                    Yes, in the isles I have great fear,
                    For she is young, and I am old,
                    And she is bien gentille!"

It was night now.  The militia had departed, their Colonel roaring
commands at them out of a little red drill-book; the older people had
gone to their homes, but festive youth hovered round the booths and
sideshows, the majority enjoying themselves at some expense in the
medicine-man's encampment.

As Rosalie ran towards the crowd she turned a wistful glance to the
tailor-shop.  Not a sign of life there!  She imagined M'sieu' to be at
Vadrome Mountain, until, glancing round the crowd at the quack-doctor's
wagon, she saw Jo Portugais gloomily watching the travelling tinker of
human bodies.  Evidently M'sieu' was not at Vadrome Mountain.

He was not far from her.  At the side of the road, under a huge maple-
tree with wide-spreading branches, Charley stood and watched John Brown
performing behind the flaring oil-lights stuck on poles round his wagon,
his hat now on, now off; now singing a comic song in English---'I found
Y' in de Honeysuckle Paitch;' now a French chanson--'En Revenant de St.
Alban;' now treating a stiff neck or a bent back, or giving momentary
help to the palsy of an old man, or again making a speech.

Charley was in touch again with the old life, but in a kind of fantasy
only--a staring, high-coloured dream.  This man--John Brown--had gone
down before his old ironical questioning, had been, indirectly, the means
of disgracing his name.  A step forward to that wagon, a word uttered,
a look, and he would have to face again the life he had put by for ever,
would have to meet a hard problem and settle it--to what misery and
tragedy, who might say?  Under this tree he was M. Mallard, the infidel
tailor, whose life was slowly entering into the life of this place called
Chaudiere, slowly being acted upon by habit, which, automatically
repeated, at length becomes character.  Out in that red light, before
that garish wagon, he would be Charley Steele, barrister, 'flaneur', and
fop, who, according to the world, had misused a wife, misled her brother,
robbed widows and orphans, squandered a fortune, become drunkard and
wastrel, and at last had lost his life in a disorderly tavern at the Cote
Dorion.  This man before him had contributed to his disgrace; but once he
had contributed to John Brown's disgrace; and to-day he had saved John
Brown's life.  They were even.

All the night before, all this morning, he had fought a fierce battle
with his past--with a raging thirst.  The old appetite had swept over him
fiercely.  All day he had moved in a fevered conflict, which had lifted
him away from the small movements of everyday life into a region where
only were himself and one strong foe, who tirelessly strove with him.
In his old life he had never had a struggle of any sort.  His emotions
had been cloaked, his soul masked, there had been a film before his eyes,
he had worn an armour of selfishness on a life which had no deep
problems, because it had no deep feelings--a life never rising to the
intellectual prowess for which it was fitted, save when under the
stimulus of liquor.

From the moment he had waked from a long seven months' sleep in the hut
on Vadrome Mountain, new deep feelings had come to him as he faced
problems of life.  Fighting had begun from that hour--a fighting which
was putting his nature through bitter mortal exercises, yet, too, giving
him a sense of being he had never known.  He had now the sweetness of
earning daily bread by the work of his hands; of giving to the poor, the
needy, and the afflicted; of knowing for the first time in his life that
he was not alone in the world.  Out of the grey dawn of life a woman's
voice had called to him; the look of her face had said to him: "Viens
ici!  Viens ici!"--"Come to me!  Come to me!"

But with that call there was the answer of his soul, the desolating cry
of the dispossessed Lear-" Never--never--never--never--never!"

He had not questioned himself concerning Rosalie--had dared not to do so.
But now, as he stood under the great tree, within hand-touch of the old
life, in imminent danger of being thrust back into it, the question of
Rosalie came upon him with all the force of months of feeling behind it.
Thus did he argue with himself:

"Do I love her?  And if I love her, what is to be done?  Marry her, with
a wife living?  Marry her while charged with a wretched crime?  Would
that be love?  But suppose I never were discovered, and we might live
here for ever, I as 'Monsieur Mallard,' in peace and quiet all the days
of our life?  Would that be love?  .  .  .  Could there be love with a
vital secret, like, a cloud between, out of which, at any hour, might
spring discovery?  Could I build our life upon a silence which must be a
lie?  Would I not have to face the question, Does any one know cause or
just impediment why this woman should not be married to this man?  Tell
Rosalie all, and let the law separate myself and Kathleen?  That would
mean Billy's ruin and imprisonment, and Kathleen's shame, and it might
not bring Rosalir.  She is a Catholic, and her Church would not listen to
it.  Would I have the right to bring trouble into her life?  To wrong one
woman should seem enough for one lifetime!"

At that instant Rosalie, who had been on the outskirts of the crowd,
moved into his line of vision.  The glare from the lights fell on her
face as she stood by her father's chair, looking curiously at the quack-
doctor who, having sold many bottles of his medicines, noy picked up a
guitar and began singing an old dialect chanson of Saintonge:

                   "Voici, the day has come
                    When Rosette leaves her home!
                    With fear she walks in the sun,
                    For Raoul is ninety year,
                    And she not twenty-one.
                    La petit' Rosette,
                    She is not twenty-one.

                   "He takes her by the hand,
                    And to the church they go;
                    By parents 'twas well meant,
                    But is Rosette content?
                    'Tis gold and ninety year
                    She walks in the sun with fear,
                    La petit' Rosette,
                    Not twenty-one as yet!"

Charley's eyes, which had watched her these months past, noted the
deepening colour of the face, the glow in the eyes, the glances of keen
but agitated interest towards the singer.  He could not translate her
looks; and she, on her part, had she been compelled to do so, could only
have set down a confusion of sensations.

In Rosette she saw herself, Rosalie Evanturel; in the man "de quatre-
vingt-dix ans," who was to marry this Rosette of Saintonge, she saw M.
Rossignol.  Disconcerting pictures of a possible life with the Seigneur
flitted before her mind.  She beheld herself, young, fresh-cheeked, with
life beating high and all the impulses of youth panting to use, sitting
at the head of the seigneury table.  She saw herself in the great pew at
Mass, stiff with dignity, old in the way of manorial pride--all laughter
dead in her, all spring-time joy overshadowed by the grave decorum of the
Manor, all the imagination of her dreaming spirit chilled by the presence
of age, however kindly and quaint and cheerful.

She shuddered, and dropped her eyes upon the ground, as, to the laughter
and giggling of old and young gathered round the wagon, the medicine-man
sang:

                   "He takes her by the hand,
                    And to her chamber fair--"

Then, suddenly turning, she vanished into the night, followed by the
feeble inquiry of her father's eyes, the anxious look in Charley's.

Charley could not read her tale.  He had, however, a hot impulse to
follow and ask her if she would vanish from the scene if the medicine-man
should sing of Rosette and a man of thirty, not ninety, years.  The fight
he had had all day with his craving for drink had made him feverish, and
all his emotions--unregulated, under the command of his will only--were
in high temperature.  A reckless feeling seized him.  He would go to
Rosalie, look into her eyes, and tell her that he loved her, no matter
what the penalty of fate.  He had never loved a human being, and the
sudden impulse to cry out in the new language was driving him to follow
the girl whose spirit for ever called to him.

He made a step forward to follow her, but stopped short, recalled to
caution and his danger by the voice of the medicine-man:

"I had a friend once--good fellow, bad fellow, cleverest chap I ever
knew.  Tremendous fop--ladies loved him--cheeks like roses--tongue like
sulphuric acid.  Beautiful to look at.  Clothes like a fashion-plate--got
any fashion-plates in Chaudiere? 'who's your tailor?'" he added, in the
slang of the hour, with a loud laugh, then stopped suddenly and took off
his hat.  "I forgot," he added, with upturned eyes and a dramatic
seriousness, "your tailor saved my life to-day-henceforth I am the friend
of all tailors.  Well, to continue.  My friend that was--I call him my
friend, though he ruined me and ruined others,--didn't mean to, but he
did just the same,--he came to a bad end.  But he was a great man while
he lived.  And what I'm coming to is this, the song he used to sing when,
in youthful exuberance, we went on the war-path like our young friend
over there"--he pointed to a young habitant farmer, who was trying hard
to preserve equilibrium--"Brown's Golden Pectoral will cure that cough,
my friend!" he added, as the young man, gloomily ashamed of the laughter
of the crowd, hiccoughed and turned away to the tree under which Charley
Steele stood.  "Well," he went on, "I was going to say that my friend's
name was Charley, and the song he used to sing when the roosters waked
the morn was called 'Champagne Charlie.'  He was called 'Champagne
Charlie'--till he came to a bad end."

He twanged his guitar, cleared his throat, winked at Maximilian Cour the
baker, and began:

         "The way I gained my title's by a hobby which I've got
          Of never letting others pay, however long the shot;
          Whoever drinks at my expense is treated all the same;
          Whoever calls himself my friend, I make him drink champagne.
          Some epicures like Burgundy, Hock, Claret, and Moselle,
          But Moet's vintage only satisfies this champagne swell.
          What matter if I go to bed and head is muddled thick,
          A bottle in the morning sets me right then very quick.
          Champagne Charlie is my name;
          Champagne Charlie is my name.
          Who's the man with the heart so young,
          Who's the man with the ginger tongue?
          Champagne Charlie is his name!"

Under the tree, Charley Steele listened to this jaunty epitaph on his old
self.  At the first words of the coarse song there rushed on him the
dreaded thirst.  He felt his veins beating with desire, with anger,
disgust, and shame; for there was John Brown, to the applause of the
crowd, imitating his old manner, his voice, his very look.  He started
forward, but the drunken young habitant lurched sideways under the tree
and collapsed upon the ground, a bottle of whiskey falling out of his
pocket and rolling almost to his own feet.

                    "Champagne Charlie is my name,"

sang the medicine-man.  All Charley's old life surged up in him as dyked
water suddenly bursts bounds and spreads destruction.  He had an
uncontrollable impulse.  As a starving animal snatches at the first food
offered it, he stooped, with a rattle in his throat, seized the bottle,
uncorked it, put it to his lips, and drank--drank--drank.

Then he turned and plunged away into the trees.  The sound of the song
followed him.  It came to him, the last refrain, sung loudly to the
laughter of the crowd, in imitation of his own voice as it used to be
--it had been a different voice during this past year.  He turned with
headlong intention, and, as the last notes of the song and the applause
that followed it, died away, threw back his head and sang out of the
darkness:

                    "Champagne Charlie is my name--"

With a shrill laugh, like the half-mad cry of an outcast soul, he flung
away farther into the trees.

There was a sudden silence.  The crowd turned with half-apprehensive
laughter to the trees.  Upon John Brown the effect was startling.  His
face blanched, his eyes grew large with terror, his mouth opened in
helpless agitation.  Charley Steele was lying under the waters of the
great river, his bones rotting there for a year, yet here was his voice
coming out of the night, in response to his own grotesque imitation of
the dead man.  Seeing his agitation, women turned pale, men felt their
flesh creep, imagination gave a thrilling coldness to the air.  For a
moment the silence was unbroken.  Then John Brown stretched out his hand
and said, in a hoarse whisper:

"It was his voice--Charley's voice, and he's been dead a year!"

Within half-an-hour, in utter collapse and fright, he was being driven to
the next parish by two young habitants whom he paid to accompany him.




CHAPTER XXVII

OUT ON THE OLD TRAIL

There was one person in the crowd surrounding the medicine-man's wagon
who had none of that superstitious thrill which had scattered the
habitants into little awe-stricken groups, and then by twos and threes to
their homes; none of that fear which had reduced the quack-doctor to such
nervous collapse that he would not spend the night in the village.  Jo
Portugais had recognised the voice--that of Charley Steele the lawyer who
had saved him from hanging years ago.  It was little like the voice of
M'sieu'!  There was that in it which frightened him.  He waited until he
had seen the quackdoctor start for the next parish, then he went slowly
down the street.  There were people still about, so he walked on towards
the river.  When he returned, the street was empty.  Keeping in the
shadow of the trees, he went to Charley's house.  There was a light in a
window.  He went to the back door and tried it.  It was not locked, and,
without knocking, he stepped inside the kitchen.  Here was no light, and
he passed into the hallway and on to a little room opening from the
tailorshop.  He knocked; then, not waiting for response, opened the door
and entered.

Charley was standing before a mirror, holding a pair of scissors.  He
turned abruptly, and said forbiddingly: "I am at my toilet!"

Then, turning again to the mirror, with a shrug of the shoulders, he
raised the shears to his beard.  Before he could use them, Jo's hand was
on his arm.

"Stop that, M'sieu'!" he said huskily.

Charley had drunk nearly a whole bottle of cheap whiskey within an hour.
He was intoxicated, but, as had ever been the case with him, his brain
was working clearly, his hand was steady; he was in that wide dream of
clear-seeing and clear-knowing which, in old days, had given him glimpses
of the real life from which, in the egotism of the non-intime, he had
been shut out.  Looking at Jo now, he was possessed by a composed
intoxication like that in which he had moved during that last night at
the Cote Dorion.

But now, with the baleful crust of egotism gone, with every nerve of
life exposed, with conscience struggling to its feet from the torpor of
thirty-odd vacant years, he was as two men in one, with different lives
and different souls, yet as inseparable in their misery as those poor
victims of Gallic tyranny, chained back to back and thrown into the
Seine.

Jo's words, insistent and eager, suddenly roused in him some old memory,
which stayed his hand.

"Why should I stop?" he asked quietly, and smiling that smile which had
infuriated the river-drivers at the Cote Dorion.

"Are you going back, M'sieu?"

"Back where?"  Charley's eyes were fixed on Jo with a penetrating
intensity, heightened to a strange abstraction, as though he saw not Jo
alone, but something great distances beyond.

Jo did not answer this question directly.  "Some one came to-day--he is
gone; some one may come to-morrow--and stay," he said meaningly.

Charley went over to the fire and sat down on a bench, opening and
shutting the scissors mechanically.  Jo was in the light, and Charley's
eyes again studied him hard.

His memory was industriously feeling its way into the baffling distance.

"What if some one did come-and stay?" he urged quietly.

"You might be recognised without the beard."

"What difference would it make?"  Charley's memory was creeping close to
the hidden door.  It was feeling-feeling for the latch.

"You know best, M'sieu'."

"But what do you know?"  Charley's face now had a strained look, and he
touched his lips with his tongue.  "What John Brown knows, M'sieu'."

There flashed across Charley's mind the fatal newspaper he had read on
the day he awakened to memory again in the but on Vadrome Mountain.  He
remembered that he had put it in the fire.  But Jo might have read it
before it was spread upon the bench-put it there of purpose for him to
read.  Yet what reason could Jo have for being silent, for hiding his
secret?

There was silence for a space, in which Charley's eyes were like unmoving
sparks of steel.  He did not see Jo's face--it was in a mist--he was
searching, searching, searching.  All at once he felt the latch of the
hidden door under his finger; he saw a court-room, a judge and jury, and
hundreds of excited faces, himself standing in the midst.  He saw twelve
men file slowly into the room and take their seats-all save one, who
stood still in his place and said: "Not guilty, your Honour!"  He saw the
prisoner leave the box and step down a free man.  He saw himself coming
out into the staring summer day.  He watched the prisoner come to him and
touch his arm, and say: "Thank you, M'sieu'.  You have saved my life."
He saw himself turn to this man:

He roused from his trance, he staggered to his feet, the shears rattled
to the floor.  Lurching forward, he caught Jo Portugais by the throat,
and said, as he had said outside the court-room years ago:

"Get out of my sight.  You're as guilty as hell!"

His grip tightened--tightened on Jo's throat.  Jo did not move, though
his face grew black.  Then, suddenly, the hands relaxed, a bluish
paleness swept over the face, and Charley fell sidewise to the floor
before Jo could catch him.

All night, alone, the murderer struggled with death over the body of the
lawyer who had saved his life.




CHAPTER XXVIII

THE SEIGNEUR GIVES A WARNING

Rosalie had watched a shut door for five days--a door from which, for
months past, had come all the light and glow of her life.  It framed a
figure which had come to represent to her all that meant hope and soul
and conscience-and love.  The morning after St. Jean Baptiste's day she
had awaited the opening door, but it had remained closed.  Ensued
watchful hours, and then from Jo Portugais she had learned that M'sieu'
had been ill and near to death.  She had been told the weird story of the
medicine-man and the ghostly voice, and, without reason, she took the
incident as a warning, and associated it with the man across the way.
She was come of a superstitious race, and she herself had heard and seen
things of which she never had been able to speak--the footsteps in the
church the night she had screwed the little cross to the door again; the
tiny round white light by the door of the church; the hood which had
vanished into the unknown.  One mystery fed another.  It seemed to her as
if some dreadful event were forward; and all day she kept her eyes fixed
on the tailor's door.

Dead--if M'sieu' should die!  If M'sieu' should die--it needed all her
will to prevent herself from going over and taking things in her own
hands, being his nurse, his handmaid, his slave.  Duty--to the
government, to her father?  Her heart cried out that her duty lay where
all her life was eddying to one centre.  What would the world say?  She
was not concerned for that, save for him.  What, then, would M'sieu' say?
That gave her pause.  The Seigneur's words the day before had driven her
back upon a tide of emotions which carried her far out upon that sea
where reason and life's conventions are derelicts, where Love sails with
reckless courage down the shoreless main.

"If I could only be near him!" she kept saying to herself.  "It is my
right.  I would give my life, my soul for his.  I was with him before
when his life was in danger.  It was my hand that saved him.  It was my
love that tended him.  It was my soul that kept his secret.  It was my
faith that spoke for him.  It was my heart that ached for him.  It is my
heart that aches for him now as none other in all the world can.  No one
on earth could care as I care.  Who could there be?"  Something whispered
in her ear, "Kathleen!"  The name haunted her, as the little cross had
done.  Misery and anger possessed her, and she fought on with herself
through dark hours.

Thus five days had gone, until at last a wagon was brought to the door of
the tailor-shop, and M'sieu' came out, leaning on the arm of Jo
Portugais.  There were several people in the street at the time, and they
kept whispering that M'sieu' had been at death's door.  He was pale and
haggard, with dark hollows under the eyes.  Just as he got into the wagon
the Cure came up.  They shook hands.  The Cure looked him earnestly in
the face, his lips moved, but no one could have told what he said.  As
the wagon started, Charley looked across to the post-office.  Rosalie was
standing a little back from the door, but she stepped forward now.  Their
eyes met.  Her heart beat faster, for there was a look in his eyes she
had never seen before--a look of human helplessness, of deep anxiety.  It
was meant for her--for herself alone.  She could not trust herself to go
and speak to him.  She felt that she must burst into tears.  So, with a
look of pity and pain, she watched the wagon go down the street.

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!--the Seigneur's gold-headed cane rattled on the
front door of the tailor-shop.  It was plain to be seen his business was
urgent.

Madame Dauphin came hurrying from the postoffice, followed by Maximilian
Cour and Filion Lacasse.  "Ah, M'sieu', the tailor will not answer.
There's no use knocking--not a bit, M'sieu' Rossignol," said Madame.

The Seigneur turned querulously upon the Notary's wife, yet with a glint
of hard humour in his eye.  He had no love for Madame Dauphin.  He
thought she took unfair advantages of M. Dauphin, whom also he did not
love, but whose temperament did him credit.

"How should Madame know whether or no the gentleman will answer?  Does
Madame share the gentleman's confidence, perhaps?" he remarked.

Madame did not reply at once.  She turned on the saddler and the baker.
"I hope you'll learn a lesson," she cried triumphantly.  "I've always
said the tailor was quite the gentleman; and now you see how your betters
call him.  No, M'sieu', the gentleman will not answer," she added to the
Seigneur.

"He is in bed yet, Madame?"

"His bed is empty there, M'sieu'," she said, impressively, and pointing.

"I suppose I should trust you in this matter; I suppose you should know.
But, Dauphin--what does Dauphin say?"

The saddler laughed outright.  Maximilian Cour suddenly blushed in
sympathy with Madame Dauphin, who now saw the drift of the Seigneur's
remarks, and was sensibly agitated, as the Seigneur had meant her to be.
Had she not turned Dauphin's human sympathies into a crime?  Had not the
Notary supported the Seigneur in his friendly offices to Paulette Dubois;
and had not Madame troubled her husband's life because of it?  Madame
bridled up now--with discretion, for it was not her cue to offend the
Seigneur.

"All the village knows his bed's empty there, M'sieu'," she said, with
tightening lips.

"I am subtracted from the total, then?" he asked drily.

"You have been away for the last five days--"

"Come, now, how did you know that?"

"Everybody knows it.  You went away with the Colonel and the soldiers on
St.  Jean Baptiste's day.  Since then M'sieu' the tailor has been ill.  I
should think Mrs. Flynn would have told you that, M'sieu'."

"H'm!  Would you?  Well, Mrs. Flynn has been away too--and you didn't
know that!  What is the matter with Monsieur Mallard?"

"Some kind of fever.  On St. Jean Baptiste's day he was taken ill, and
that animal Portugais took care of him all night--I wonder how M'sieu'
can have the creature about!  That St. Jean Baptiste's night was an awful
night.  Have you heard of what happened, M'sieu'?  Ghost or no ghost--"

"Come, come, I want to know about the tailor, not of ghosts," impatiently
interrupted the Seigneur.  "Tiens!  M'sieu', the tailor was ill for three
days here, and he would let no one except the Cure and Jo Portugais near
him.  I went myself to clean up and make some broth, but that toad of a
Portugais shut the door in my face.  The Cure told us to go home and
leave M'sieu' with Portugais.  He must be very sick to have that black
sheep about him--and no doctor either."

The saddler spoke up now.  "I took him a bottle of good brandy and some
buttermilk-pop and seed cake--I would give him a saddle if he had a
horse--he got my thousand dollars for me!  Well, he took them, but what
do you think?  He sent them right off to the shantyman, Gugon, who has a
broken leg.  Infidel or no, I'm on his side for sure.  And God blesses a
cheerful giver, I'm told."

It was the baker's chance, and he took it.  "I played 'The Heart Bowed
Down'-it is English-under his window, two nights ago, and he sent word
for me to come and play it again in the kitchen.  Ah, that is a good
song, 'The Heart Bowed Down.'"

"You'd be a better baker if you fiddled less," said Madame Dauphin,
annoyed at being dropped out of the conversation.

"The soul must be fed, Madame," rejoined the baker, with asperity.

"Where is the tailor now?" said the Seigneur shortly.  "At Portugais's
on Vadrome Mountain.  They say he looked like a ghost when he went.
Rosalie Evanturel saw him, but she has no tongue in her head this
morning," added Madame.

The Seigneur moved away.  "Good-bye to you--I am obliged to you, Madame.
Good-bye, Lacasse.  Come and fiddle to me some night, Cour."

He bowed to the obsequious three, and then bent his steps towards the
post-office.  They seemed about to follow him, but he stopped them with a
look.  The men raised their bonnets-rouges, the woman bowed low, and the
Seigneur entered the post-office door.

From the shadows of the office Rosalie had watched the little group
before the door of the tailor-shop.  She saw the Seigneur coming across
the street.  Suddenly she flushed deeply, for there came to her mind the
song the quack-doctor sang:

                        "Voila, the day has come
                         When Rosette leaves her home!
                         With fear she walks in the sun,
                         For Raoul is ninety year,
                         And she not twenty-one."

As M. Rossignol's figure darkened the doorway, she pretended to be busy
behind the wicket, and not to see him.  He was not sure, but he thought
it quite possible that she had seen him coming, and he put her
embarrassment down to shyness.  Naturally the poor child was not given
the chance every day to receive an offer of marriage from a seigneur.
He had made up his mind that she would be sure to accept him if he asked
her a second time.

"Ah, Ma'm'selle Rosalie," he said gaily, "what have you to say that you
should not come before a magistrate at once?"

"Nothing, if Monsieur Rossignol is to be the magistrate," she replied,
with forced lightness.

"Good!"  He looked at her quizzically through his gold-handled glass.
"I can't frighten you, I see.  Well, you must wait a little; you shall be
sworn in postmistress in three days."  His voice lowered, became more
serious.  "Tell me," he said, "do you know what is the matter with the
gentleman across the way?"  Turning, he looked across to the tailor-shop,
as though he expected "the gentleman" to appear, and he did not see her
turn pale.  When his look fell on her again, she was self-controlled.

"I do not know, Monsieur."

"You have been opposite him here these months past--did you ever see
anything not--not as it should be?"

"With him, Monsieur?  Never."

"It is as though the infidel behaved like a good Catholic and a
Christian?"

"There are good Catholics in Chaudiere who do not behave like
Christians."

"What would you say, for instance, about his past?"

"What should I say about his past, Monsieur?  What should I know?"

"You should know more than any one else in Chaudiere.  The secrets of his
breast might well be bared to you."

She started and crimsoned.  Before her eyes there came a mist obscuring
the Seigneur, and for an instant shutting out the world.  The secrets of
his breast--what did he mean?  Did he know that on Monsieur's breast was
the red scar which .  .  .

M. Rossignol's voice seemed coming from an infinite distance, and as it
came, the mist slowly passed from her eyes.

"You will know, Mademoiselle Rosalie," he was saying, "that while I
suggested that the secrets of his breast might well be bared to you, I
meant that as an honest lady and faithful postmistress they were not.  It
was my awkward joke--a stupid gambolling by an old man who ought to know
better."

She did not answer, and he continued:

"You know that you are trusted.  Pray accept my apologies."

She was herself again.  "Monsieur," she said quietly; "I know nothing of
his past.  I want to know nothing.  It does not seem to me that it is my
business.  The world is free for a man to come and go in, if he keeps the
law and does no ill--is it not?  But, in any case, I know nothing.  Since
you have said so much, I shall say this, and betray no 'secrets of his
breast'--that he has received no letter through this office since the day
he first came from Vadrome Mountain."

The Seigneur smiled.  "A wonderful tailor!  How does he carry on business
without writing letters?"

"There was a large stock of everything left by Louis Trudel, and not long
ago a commercial traveller was here with everything."

"You think he has nothing to hide, then?"

"Have not we all something to hide--with or without shame?" she asked
simply.

"You have more sense than any woman in Chaudiere, Mademoiselle."

She shook her head, yet she raised her eyes gratefully to him.

"I put faith in what you say," he continued.  "Now listen.  My brother,
the Abbe, chaplain to the Archbishop, is coming here.  He has heard of
'the infidel' of our parish.  He is narrow and intolerant--the Abbe.  He
is going to stir up trouble against the tailor.  We are a peaceful people
here, and like to be left alone.  We are going on very well as we are.
So I wanted to talk to Monsieur to-day.  I must make up my own mind how
to act.  The tailor-shop is the property of the Church.  An infidel
occupies it, so it is said; the Abbe does not like that.  I believe there
are other curious suspicions about Monsieur: that he is a robber, or
incendiary, or something of the sort.  The Abbe may take a stand, and the
Cure's position will be difficult.  What is more, my brother has friends
here, fanatics like himself.  He has been writing to them.  They are men
capable of doing unpleasant things--the Abbe certainly is.  It is fair to
warn the tailor.  Shall I leave it to you?  Do not frighten him.  But
there is no doubt he should be warned--fair play, fair play!  I hear
nothing but good of him from those whose opinions I value.  But, you see,
every man's history in this parish and in every parish of the province is
known.  This man, for us, has no history.  The Cure even admits there are
some grounds for calling him an infidel, but, as you know, he would keep
the man here, not drive him out from among us.  I have not told the Cure
about the Abbe yet.  I wished first to talk with you.  The Abbe may come
at any moment.  I have been away, and only find his letters to-day."

"You wish me to tell Monsieur?" interrupted Rosalie, unable to hold
silence any longer.  More than once during the Seigneur's disclosure she
had felt that she must cry out and fiercely repel the base insinuations
against the man she loved.

"You would do it with discretion.  You are friendly with him, are you
not?--you talk with him now and then?"

She inclined her head.  "Very well, Monsieur.  I will go to Vadrome
Mountain to-morrow," she said quietly.  Anger, apprehension, indignation,
possessed her, but she held herself firmly.  The Seigneur was doing a
friendly thing; and, in any case, she could have no quarrel with him.
There was danger to the man she loved, however, and every faculty was
alive.

"That's right.  He shall have his chance to evade the Abbe if he wishes,"
answered M. Rossignol.

There was silence for a moment, in which she was scarcely conscious of
his presence; then he leaned over the counter towards her, and spoke in a
low voice.

"What I said the other day I meant.  I do not change my mind--I am too
old for that.  Yet I'm young enough to know that you may change yours."

"I cannot change, Monsieur," she said tremblingly.

"But you will change.  I knew your mother well, I know how anxious she
was for your future.  I told her once that I should keep an eye on you
always.  Her father was my father's good friend.  I knew you when you
were in the cradle--a little brown-haired babe.  I watched you till you
went to the convent.  I saw you come back to take up the duties which
your mother laid down, alas!--"

"Monsieur--!" she said choking, and with a troubled little gesture.

"You must let me speak, Rosalie.  We got your father this post-office.
It is a poor living, but it keeps a roof over your head.  You have never
failed us you have always fulfilled our hopes.  But the best years of
your life are going, and your education and your nature have not their
chance.  Oh, I've not watched you all these years for nothing.  I never
meant to ask you to marry me.  It came to me, though, all at once, and
I know that it has been in my mind all these years--far back in my mind.
I don't ask you for my own sake alone.  Your father may grow very ill--
who can tell what may happen!"

"I should be postmistress still," she said sadly.

"As a young girl you could not have the responsibility here alone.  And
you should not waste your life it is a fine, full spirit; let the lean,
the poor-spirited, go singly.  You should be mated.  You can't marry any
of the young farmers of Chaudiere.  'Tis impossible.  I can give you
enough for any woman's needs--the world may be yours to see and use to
your heart's content.  I can give, too"--he drew himself up proudly--"
the unused emotions of a lifetime."  This struck him as a very fine and
important thing to say.

"Ah, Monsieur, that is not enough," she responded.  "What more can you
want?"

She looked up with a tearful smile.  "I will tell you one day, Monsieur."

"What day?"

"I have not picked it out in the calendar."

"Fix the day, and I will wait till then.  I will not open my mouth again
till then."

"Michaelmas day, then, Monsieur," she answered mechanically and at
haphazard, but with an urged gaiety, for a great depression was on her.

"Good.  Till Michaelmas day, then!"  He pulled his long nose, laughing
silently.  .  .  .  "I leave the tailor in your hands.  Give every man
his chance, I say.  The Abbe is a hard man, but our hearts are soft--eh,
eh, very soft!"  He raised his hat and turned to the door.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Always hoping the best from the worst of us
Have not we all something to hide--with or without shame?
In all secrets there is a kind of guilt
Pathetically  in earnest
Things that once charmed charm less






THE RIGHT OF WAY

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 4.



XXIX.     THE WILD RIDE
XXX.      ROSALIE WARNS CHARLEY
XXXI.     CHARLEY STANDS AT BAY
XXXII.    JO PORTUGAIS TELLS A STORY
XXXIII.   THE EDGE OF LIFE
XXXIV.    IN AMBUSH
XXXV.     THE COMING OF MAXIMILIAN COUR AND ANOTHER
XXXVI.    BARRIERS SWEPT AWAY
XXXVII.   THE CHALLENGE OF PAULETTE DUBOIS
XXXVIII.  THE CURE AND THE SEIGNEUR VISIT THE TAILOR
XXXIX.    THE SCARLET WOMAN
XL.       AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING



CHAPTER XXIX

THE WILD RIDE

There had been a fierce thunder-storm in the valley of the Chaudiere.  It
had come suddenly from the east, had shrieked over the village, levelling
fences, carrying away small bridges, and ending in a pelting hail, which
whitened the ground with pebbles of ice.  It had swept up to Vadrome
Mountain, and had marched furiously through the forest, carrying down
hundreds of trees, drowning the roars of wild animals and the crying and
fluttering of birds.  One hour of ravage and rage, and then, spent and
bodiless, the storm crept down the other side of the mountain and into
the next parish, whither the affrighted quack-doctor had betaken himself.
After, a perfect calm, a shining sun, and a sweet smell over all the
land, which had thirstily drunk the battering showers.

In the house on Vadrome Mountain the tailor of Chaudiere had watched the
storm with sympathetic interest.  It was in accord with his own feelings.
He had had a hard fight for months past, and had gone down in the storm
of his emotions one night when a song called Champagne Charlie had had a
weird and thrilling antiphonal.  There had been a subsequent debacle for
himself, and then a revelation concerning Jo Portugais.  Ensued hours and
days, wherein he had fought a desperate fight with the present--with
himself and the reaction from his dangerous debauch.

The battle for his life had been fought for him by this gloomy woodsman
who henceforth represented his past, was bound to him by a measureless
gratitude, almost a sacrament--of the damned.  Of himself he had played
no conscious part in it till the worst was over.  On the one side was the
Cure, patient, gentle, friendly, never pushing forward the Faith which
the good man dreamed should give him refuge and peace; on the other side
was the murderer, who typified unrest, secretiveness, an awful isolation,
and a remorse which had never been put into words or acts of restitution.
For six days the tailor-shop and the life at Chaudiere had been things
almost apart from his consciousness.  Ever-recurring memories of Rosalie
Evanturel were driven from his mind with a painful persistence.  In the
shadows where his nature dwelt now he would not allow her good innocence
and truth to enter.  His self-reproach was the more poignant because it
was silent.

Watching the tempest-swept valley, the tortured forest, where wild life
was in panic, there came upon him the old impulse to put his thoughts
into words, "and so be rid of them," as he was wont to say in other days.
Taking from his pocket some slips of paper, he laid them on the table
before him.  Three or four times he leaned over the paper to write, but
the noise of the storm again and again drew his look to the window.  The
tempest ceased almost as suddenly as it had come, and, as the first
sunlight broke through the flying clouds, he mechanically lifted a sheet
of the paper and held it up to the light.  It brought to his eyes the
large water-mark, Kathleen!

A sombre look passed over his face, he shifted in his chair, then bent
over the paper and began to write.  Words flowed from his pen.  The lines
of his face relaxed, his eyes lightened; he was lost in a dream.  He
thought of the present, and he wrote:

                   "Wave walls to seaward,
                    Storm-clouds to leeward,
                    Beaten and blown by the winds of the West;
                    Sail we encumbered
                    Past isles unnumbered,
                    But never to greet the green island of Rest."

He thought of Father Loisel.  He had seen the good man's lips tremble at
some materialistic words he had once used in their many talks, and he
wrote:

                        "Lips that now tremble,
                         Do you dissemble
                    When you deny that the human is best?--
                         Love, the evangel,
                         Finds the Archangel?
                    Is that a truth when this may be a jest?

                        "Star-drifts that glimmer
                         Dimmer and dimmer,
                    What do ye know of my weal or my woe?
                         Was I born under
                         The sun or the thunder?
                    What do I come from?  and where do I go?

                        "Rest, shall it ever
                         Come?  Is endeavour
                    But a vain twining and twisting of cords?
                         Is faith but treason;
                         Reason, unreason,
                    But a mechanical weaving of words?"

He thought of Louis Trudel, in his grave, and his own questioning: "Show
me a sign from Heaven, tailorman!" and he wrote:

                        "What is the token,
                         Ever unbroken,
                    Swept down the spaces of querulous years,
                         Weeping or singing
                         That the Beginning
                    Of all things is with us, and sees us, and hears?"

He made an involuntary motion of his hand to his breast, where old Louis
Trudel had set a sign.  So long as he lived, it must be there to read:
a shining smooth scar of excoriation, a sacred sign of the faith he had
never been able to accept; of which he had never, indeed, been able to
think, so distant had been his soul, until, against his will, his heart
had answered to the revealing call in a woman's eyes.  He felt her
fingers touch his breast as they did that night the iron seared him; and
out of this first intimacy of his soul he wrote:

                        "What is the token?
                         Bruised and broken,
                    Bend I my life to a blossoming rod?
                         Shall then the worst things
                         Come to the first things,
                    Finding the best of all, last of all, God?"

Like the cry of his "Aphrodite," written that last afternoon of the old
life, this plaint ended with the same restless, unceasing question.  But
there was a difference.  There was no longer the material, distant note
of a pagan mind; there was the intimate, spiritual note of a mind finding
a foothold on the submerged causeway of life and time.

As he folded up the paper to put it into his pocket, Jo Portugais entered
the room.  He threw in a corner the wet bag which had protected his
shoulders from the rain, hung his hat on a peg of the chimney-piece,
nodded to Charley, and put a kettle on the little fire.

"A big storm, M'sieu'," Jo said presently as he put some tea into a pot.

"I have never seen a great storm in a forest before," answered Charley,
and came nearer to the window through which the bright sun streamed.

"It always does me good," said Jo.  "Every bird and beast is awake and
afraid and trying to hide, and the trees fall, and the roar of it like
the roar of the chasse-galerie on the Kimash River."

"The Kimash River--where is it?"

Jo shrugged his shoulders.  "Who knows!"

"Is it a legend, then?"

"It is a river."

"And the chasse-galerie?"

"That is true, M'sieu', no matter what any one thinks.  I know; I have
seen--I have seen with my own eyes."  Jo was excited now.

"I am listening."  He took a cup of tea from Portugais and drank eagerly.

"The Kimash River, M'sieu', that is the river in the air.  On it is the
chasse-galerie.  You sell your soul to the devil; you ask him to help
you; you deny God.  You get into a canoe and call on the devil.  You are
lifted up, canoe and all, and you rush on down rapids, over falls, on the
Kimash River in the air.  The devil stands behind you and shouts, and you
sing, 'V'la! l'bon vent!  V'la l'joli vent!' On and on you go, faster and
faster, and you forget the world, and you forget yourself, and the devil
is with you in the air--in the chasse-galerie on the Kimash River."

"Jo," said Charley Steele, "do you honestly think there's a river like
that?"

'M'sieu', I know it.  I saw Ignace Latoile, who robbed a priest and got
drunk on the communion wine--I saw him with the devil in the Black Canoe
at the Saguenay.  I could see Ignace; I could see the devil; I could see
the Kimash River.  I shall ride myself some day.

"Ride where?"

"What does it matter where?"

"Why should you ride?"

"Because you ride fast with the devil."

"What is the good of riding fast?"

"In the rush a man forget."

"What does he forget, my friend?"

There was a pause, in which a man with a load of crime upon his soul
dwelt upon the words my friend, coming from the lips of one who knew the
fulness of his iniquity.  Then he answered:

"In the noise he forget that a voice is calling in his ear, 'You did It!'
He forget what he see in his dreams.  He forget the hand that touch him
on the arm when he walk in the woods alone, or lie down to sleep at
night, no one near.  He forget that some one wait--wait--wait, till he
has suffer long enough, or till, one day, he think he is happy again, and
the Thing he did is far off like a dream--to drag him out to the death he
did not die.  He forget that he is alone--all alone in the world, for
ever and ever and ever."

He suddenly sank upon the floor beside Charley, and a groan burst from
his lips.  "To have no friend--ah, it is so awful!" he said.  "Never to
see a face that look into yours, and know how bad are you, and doesn't
mind.  For five years I have live like that.  I cannot let any one be my
friend because I was that!  They seem to know--everything, everybody--
what I am.  The little children when I pass them run away to hide.  I
have wake in the night and cry out in fear, it is so lonely.  I have hear
voices round me in the woods, and I run and run and run from them, and
not leave them behind.  Three times I go to the jails in Quebec to see
the prisoners behind the bars, and watch the pains on their faces, to
understand what I escape.  Five times have I go to the courts to listen
to murderers tried, and watch them when the Jury say Guilty!  and the
Judge send them to death--that I might know.  Twice have I go to see
murderers hung.  Once I was helper to the hangman, that I might hear and
know what the man said, what he felt.  When the arms were bound, I felt
the straps on my own; when the cap come down, I gasp for breath; when the
bolt is shot, I feel the wrench and the choke, and shudder go through
myself--feel the world jerk out in the dark.  When the body is bundled in
the pit, I see myself lie still under the quick-lime with the red mark
round my throat."

Charley touched him on the shoulder.  "Jo--poor Jo, my friend!" he said.
Jo raised his eyes, red with an unnatural fire, deep with gratitude.

"As I sit at my dinner, with the sun shining and the woods green and
glad, and all the world gay, I have see what happened all over again.
I have see his strong hands; his bad face laugh at my words; I have see
him raise his riding-whip and cut me across the head.  I have see him
stagger and fall from the blows I give him with the knife--the knife
which never was found--why, I not know, for I throw it on the ground
beside him!  There, as I sit in the open day, a thousand times I have see
him shiver and fall, staring, staring at me as if he see a dreadful
thing.  Then I stand up again and strike at him--at his ghost!--as I did
that day in the woods.  Again I see him lie in his blood, straight and
white--so large, so handsome, so still!  I have shed tears--but what are
tears!  Blind with tears I have call out for the devils of hell to take
me with them.  I have call on God to give me death.  I have prayed, and I
have cursed.  Twice I have travelled to the grave where he lies.  I have
knelt there and have beg him to tell the truth to God, and say that he
torture me till I kill him.  I have beg him to forgive me and to haunt me
no more with his bad face.  But never--never--never--have I one quiet
hour until you come, M'sieu'; nor any joy in my heart till I tell you the
black truth--M'sieu'!  M'sieu!"

He buried his face between Charley's feet, and held them with his hands.

Charley laid a hand on the shaggy head as though it were that of a child.
"Be still--be still, Jo," he said gently.

Since that night of St. Jean Baptiste's festival, no word of the past,
of the time when Charley turned aside the revanche of justice from a man
called Joseph Nadeau, had been spoken between them.  Out of the delirium
of his drunken trance had come Charley's recognition of the man he knew
now as Jo Portugais.  But the recognition had been sent again into the
obscurity whence it came, and had not been mentioned since.  To outward
seeming they had gone on as before.  As Charley saw the knotted brows,
the staring eyes, the clinched hands, the figure of the woodsman rigid in
its agony of remorse, he said to himself: "What right had I to save this
man's life?  To have paid for his crime would have been easier for him.
I knew he was guilty.  Perhaps it was my duty to see that every
condition, to the last shade of the law, was satisfied, but was it
justice to the poor devil himself?  There he sits with a load on him that
weighs him down every hour of his life.  I called him back; I gave him
life; but I gave him memory and remorse, and the ghosts that haunt him:
the voice in his ear, the touch on his arm, the some one that is
'waiting--waiting--waiting!'  That is what I did, and that is what the
brother of the Cure did for me.  He drew me back.  He knew I was a
drunkard, but he drew me back.  I might have been a murderer like
Portugais.  The world says I was a thief, and a thief I am until I prove
to the world I am innocent--and wreck three lives!  How much of Jo's
guilt is guilt?  How much remorse should a man suffer to pay the debt of
a life?  If the law is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, how
much hourly remorse and torture, such as Jo's, should balance the eye or
the tooth or the life?  I wonder, now!"

He leaned over, and, helping Jo to his feet, gently forced him down upon
a bench near.  "All right, Jo, my friend," he said.  "I understand.
We'll drink the gall together."

They sat and looked at each other in silence.

At length Charley leaned over and touched Jo on the shoulder.

"Why did you want to save yourself?" he said.

At that instant there was a knock at the door, and a voice said:
"Monsieur!--Monsieur!"

Jo sprang to his feet with a sharp exclamation, then went heavily to the
door and threw it open.




CHAPTER XXX

ROSALIE WARNS CHARLEY

Charley's eyes met Rosalie's with a look the girl had never seen in them
before.  It gave a glow to his haggard face.

Rosalie turned to Jo and greeted him with a friendlier manner than was
her wont towards him.  The nearer she was to Charley, the farther away
from him, to her mind, was Portugais, and she became magnanimous.

Jo nodded' awkwardly and left the room.  Looking after the departing
figure, Rosalie said: "I know he has been good to you, but--but do you
trust him, Monsieur?"

"Does not everybody in Chaudiere trust him?"

"There is one who does not, though perhaps that's of no consequence."

"Why do you not trust him?"

"I don't know.  I never knew him do a bad thing; I never heard of a bad
thing he has done; and--he has been good to you."

She paused, flushing as she felt the significance of her words, and
continued: "Yet there is--I cannot tell what.  I feel something.  It is
not reasonable to go upon one's feelings; but there it is, and so I do
not trust him."

"It is the way he lives, here in these lonely woods--the mystery around
him."

A change passed over her.  With the first glow of meeting the object of
her visit had receded, though since her last interview with the Seigneur
she had not rested a moment, in her anxiety to warn him of his danger.
"Oh, no," she said, lifting her eyes frankly to his: "oh, no, Monsieur!
It is not that.  There is mystery about you!"  She felt her heart beating
hard.  It almost choked her, but she kept on bravely.  "People say
strange and bad things about you.  No one knows"--she trembled under the
painful inquiry of his eyes.  Then she gained courage and went on, for
she must make it clear she trusted him, that she took him at his word,
before she told him of the peril before him--"No one knows where you came
from .  .  .  and it is nobody's business.  Some people do not believe in
you.  But I believe in you--I should believe in you if every one doubted;
for there is no feeling in me that says, 'He has done some wicked thing
that stands-between us.'  It isn't the same as with Portugais, you see--
naturally, it could not be the same."

She seemed not to realise that she was telling more of her own heart than
she had ever told.  It was a revelation, having its origin in an honesty
which impelled a pure outspokenness to himself.  Reserve, of course,
there had been elsewhere, for did not she hold a secret with him?  Had
she not hidden things, equivocated else where?  Yet it had been at his
wish, to protect the name of a dead man, for the repose of whose soul
masses were now said, with expensive candles burning.  For this she had
no repentance; she was without logic where this man's good was at stake.

Charley had before him a problem, which he now knew he never could evade
in the future.  He could solve it by none of the old intellectual means,
but by the use of new faculties, slowly emerging from the unexplored
fastnesses of his nature.

"Why should you believe in me?" he asked, forcing himself to smile, yet
acutely alive to the fact that a crisis was impending.  "You, like all
down there in Chaudiere, know nothing of my past, are not sure that I
haven't been a hundred times worse than you think poor Jo there.  I may
have been anything.  You may be harbouring a man the law is tracking
down."

In all that befell Rosalie Evanturel thereafter, never could come such
another great resolute moment.  There was nothing to support her in the
crisis but her own faith.  It needed high courage to tell this man who
had first given her dreams, then imagination, hope, and the beauty of
doing for another's well-being rather than for her own--to tell this man
that he was a suspected criminal.  Would he hate her?  Would his kindness
turn to anger?  Would he despise her for even having dared to name the
suspicion which was bringing hither an austere Abbe and officers of the
law?

"We are harbouring a man the law is tracking down," she said with an
infinite appeal in her eyes.

He did not quite understand.  He thought that perhaps she meant Jo, and
he glanced towards the door; but she kept her eyes on him, and they told
him that she meant himself.  He chilled, as though ether were being
poured through his veins.

Did the world know, then, that Charley Steele was alive?  Was the law
sending its officers to seize the embezzler, the ruffian who had robbed
widow and orphan?

If it were so.  .  .  .  To go back to the world whence he came, with the
injury he must do to others, and the punishment also that he must suffer,
if he did not tell the truth about Billy!  And Chaudiere, which, in spite
of all, was beginning to have a real belief in him--where was his
contempt for the world now!  .  .  .  And Rosalie, who trusted him--
this new element rapidly grew dominant in his thoughts-to be the common
criminal in her eyes!

His paleness gave way to a flush as like her own as could be.

"You mean me?" he asked quietly.

She had thought that his flush meant anger, and she was surprised at the
quiet tone.  She nodded assent.  "For what crime?" he asked.

"For stealing."

His heart seemed to stand still.  Then, it had come in spite of all it
had come.  Here was his resurrection, and the old life to face.

"What did I steal?" he asked with dull apathy.  "The gold vessels from
the Catholic Cathedral of Quebec, after--after trying to blow up
Government House with gunpowder."

His despair passed.  His face suddenly lighted.  He smiled.  It was so
absurd.  "Really!" he said.  "When was the place blown up?"

"Two days before you came here last year--it was not blown up; an attempt
was made."

"Ah, I did not know.  Why was the attempt made to blow it up?"

"Some Frenchman's hatred of the English, they say."

"But I am not French."

"They do not know.  You speak French as perfectly as English--ah,
Monsieur, Monsieur, I believe you are whatever you say."  Pain and appeal
rang from her lips.

"I am only an honest tailor," he answered gently.  He ruled his face to
calmness, for he read the agony in the girl's face, and troubled as he
was, he wished to show her that he had no fear.

"It is for what you were they will arrest you," she said helplessly, and
as though he needed to have all made clear to him.  "Oh, Monsieur," she
continued, in a broken voice, "it would shame me so to have you made a
prisoner in Chaudiere--before all these silly people, who turn with the
wind.  I should not lift my head--but yes, I should lift my head!" she
added hurriedly.  "I should tell them all they lied--every one--the
idiots!  The Seigneur--"

"Well, what of the Seigneur-Rosalie?"

Her own name on his lips--the sound of it dimmed her eyes.

"Monsieur Rossignol does not know you.  He neither believes nor
disbelieves.  He said to me that if you wanted consideration, to command
him, for in Chaudiere he had heard nothing but good of you.  If you
stayed, he would see that you had justice--not persecution.  I saw him
two hours ago."

She said the last words shyly, for she was thinking why the Seigneur had
spoken as he did--that he had taken her opinion of Monsieur as his guide,
and she had not scrupled to impress him with her views.  The Seigneur was
in danger of becoming prejudiced by his sentiments.

A wave of feeling passed over Charley, a rushing wave of sympathy for
this simple girl, who, out of a blind confidence, risked so much for him.
Risk there certainly was, if she--if she cared for him.  It was cruelty
not to reassure her.

Touching his breast, he said gravely: "By this sign here, I am not guilty
of the crime for which they come to seek me, Rosalie.  Nor of any other
crime for which the law might punish me--dear, noble friend."

He did so little to get such rich return.  Her eyes leaped up to brighter
degrees of light, her face shone with a joy it had never reflected
before, her blood rushed to her finger-tips.  She abruptly sat down in
a chair and buried her face in her hands, trembling.  Then, lifting her
head slowly, after a moment she spoke in a tone that told him her faith,
her gratitude--not for reassurance, but for confidence, which is as water
in a thirsty land to a woman.

"Oh, Monsieur, I thank you, I thank you from the depth of my heart; and
my heart is deep indeed, very, very deep--I cannot find what lies lowest
in it!  I thank you, because you trust me, because you make it so easy
to--to be your friend; to say 'I know' when any one might doubt you.
One has no right to speak for another till--till the other has given
confidence, has said you may.  Ah, Monsieur, I am so happy!"

In very abandonment of heart she clasped her hands and came a step nearer
to him, but abruptly stopped still; for, realising her action, timidity
and embarrassment rushed upon her.

Charley understood, and again his impulse was to say what was in his
heart and dare all; but resolution possessed him, and he said quickly:

"Once, Rosalie, you saved me--from death perhaps.  Once your hands helped
my pain--here."  He touched his breast.  "Your words now, and what you
do, they still help me--here .  .  .  but in a different way.  The
trouble is in my heart, Rosalie.  You are glad of my confidence?  Well,
I will give you more.  .  .  .  I cannot go back to my old life.  To do
so would injure others--some who have never injured me and some who have.
That is why.  That is why I do not wish to be taken to Quebec now on a
false charge.  That is all I can say.  Is it enough?"

She was about to answer, but Jo Portugais entered, exclaiming.
"M'sieu'," he cried, "men are coming with the Seigneur and Cure."

Charley nodded at Jo, then turned to Rosalie.  "You need not be seen if
you go out by the back way, Mademoiselle."  He held aside the bear-skin
curtain of the door that led into the next room.

There was a frightened look in her face.  "Do not fear for me," he
continued.  "It will come right--somehow.  You have done more for me than
any one has ever done or ever will do.  I will remember till the last
moment of my life.  Good-bye."

He laid a hand on her shoulder and gently pushed her from the room.

"God protect you!  The Blessed Virgin speak for you!  I will pray for
you," she whispered.




CHAPTER XXXI

CHARLEY STANDS AT BAY

Charley turned quickly to the woodsman.  "Listen," he said, and he told
Jo how things stood.

"You will not hide, M'sieu'?  There is time," Jo asked.

"I will not hide, Jo."

"What will you do?"

"I'll decide when they come."

There was silence for a moment, then the sound of voices on the hill-
side.

Charley's soul rose up in revolt against the danger that faced him--not
against personal peril, but the danger of being dragged back again into
the life he had come from, with all that it involved--the futility of
this charge against him!  To be the victim of an error--to go to the bar
of justice with the hand of injustice on his arm!

All at once the love of this new life welled up in him, as a spring of
water overflows its bounds.  A voice kept ringing in his ears, "I will
pray for you."  Subconsciously his mind kept saying, "Rosalie--Rosalie--
Rosalie!"  There was nothing now that he would not do to avert his being
taken away upon this ridiculous charge.  Mistaken identity?  To prove
that, he must at once prove himself--who he was, whence he came.  Tell
the Cure, and make it a point of honour for his secret to be kept?  But
once told, the new life would no longer stand by itself as the new life,
cut off from all contact with the past.  Its success, its possibility,
must lie in its absolute separateness, with obscurity behind--as though
he had come out of nothing into this very room, on that winter morning
when memory returned.

It was clear that he must, somehow, evade the issue.  He glanced at Jo,
whose eyes, strained and painful, were fixed upon the door.  Here was a
man who suffered for his sake.  .  .  .  He took a step forward, as
though with sudden resolve, but there came a knocking, and, pausing,
he motioned Jo to open the door.  Then, turning to a shelf, he took
something from it hastily, and kept it in his hand.

Jo roused himself with an effort, and opened to the knocking.

Three people entered: the Seigneur, the Cure, and the Abbe Rossignol, an
ascetic, severe man, with a face of intolerance and inflexibility.  Two
constables in plain clothes followed; one stolid, one alert, one English
and one French, both with grim satisfaction in their faces--the
successful exercise of his trade is pleasant to every craftsman.  When
they entered, Charley was standing with his back to the fireplace, his
eye-glass adjusted, one hand stroking his beard, the other held behind
his back.

The Cure came forward and shook hands in an eager friendly way.

"My dear Monsieur," said he, "I hope that you are better."

"I am quite well, thank you, Monsieur le Cure," answered Charley.
"I shall get back to work on Monday, I hope."

"Yes, yes, that is good," responded the Cure, and seemed confused.
He turned uneasily to the Seigneur.  "You have come to see my friend
Portugais," Charley remarked slowly, almost apologetically.  "I will take
my leave."  He made a step forward.  The two constables did the same, and
would have laid their hands upon his shoulder but that the Seigneur said
tartly:

"Stand off, Jack-in-boxes!"

The two stood aside, and looked covertly at the Seigneur, whose temper
seemed unusually irascible.  Charley's face showed no surprise, but he
looked inquiringly at the Cure.

"If they wish to be measured for uniforms--or manners--I will see them at
my shop," he said.

The Seigneur chuckled.  Charley stepped again towards the door.  The two
constables stood before it.  Again he turned inquiringly, this time
towards the Cure.  The Cure did not speak.

"It is you we wish to see, tailor," said the Abbe Rossignol.

Soft-tongued irony leaped to Charley's lips: "Have I, then, the honour
of including Monsieur among my customers?  I cannot recall Monsieur's
figure.  I think I should not have forgotten it."

It was now the old Charley Steele, with the new body, the new spirit, but
with the old skilful mind, aggravatingly polite, non-intime--the
intolerant face of this father of souls irritated him.

"I never forget a figure which has idiosyncrasy," he added, with a bland
eye wandering over the priest's gaunt form.  It was his old way to strike
first and heal after--"a kick and a lick," as old Paddy Wier, whom he
once saved from prison, said of him.  It was like bygone years of another
life to appear in defence when the law was tightening round a victim.
The secret spring had been touched, the ancient machinery of his mind
was working almost automatically.

The illusion was considerable, for the Seigneur had taken the only arm-
chair in the room, a little apart, as it were, filling the place of
judge.  The priest-brother, cold and inveterate, was like the attorney
for the crown.  The Cure was the clerk of the court, who could only
echo the decisions of the Judge.  The constables were the machinery of
the Law, and Jo Portugais was the unwilling witness, whose evidence would
be the crux of the case.  The prisoner--he himself was prisoner and
prisoner's counsel.

A good struggle was forward.

He had enraged the Abbe as much as he had delighted the Abbe's brother;
for nothing gave the Seigneur such pleasure as the discomfiture of the
Abbe Rossignol, chaplain and ordinary to the Archbishop of Quebec.  The
genial, sympathetic nature of the Seigneur could not even be patient with
the excessive piety of the churchman, who, in rigid righteousness, had
thrashed him cruelly as a boy.  At Charley's words upon the Abbe's
figure, gaunt and precise as a swaddled ramrod, he pulled his nose with a
grunt of satisfaction.

The Cure, the peace-maker, intervened.  The tailor's meaning was
sufficiently clear: if they had come to see him personally, then it was
natural for him to wish to know the names and stations of his guests,
and their business.  The Seigneur was aware that the tailor did know,
and he enjoyed the 'sang-froid' with which he was meeting the situation.

"Monsieur," said the Cure, in a mollifying voice, "I have ventured to
bring the Seigneur of Chaudiere"--the Seigneur stood up and bowed
gravely--"and his brother, the Abbe Rossignol, who would speak with you
on private business"--he ignored the presence of the constables.

Charley bowed to the Seigneur and the Abbe, then turned inquiringly
towards the two constables.  "Friends of my brother the Abbe," said the
Seigneur maliciously.

"Their names, Monsieur?" asked Charley.

"They have numbers," answered the Seigneur whimsically--to the Cure's
pain, for levity seemed improper at such a time.

"Numbers of names are legally suspicious, numbers for names are
suspiciously legal," rejoined Charley.  "You have pierced the disguise of
discourtesy," said the Seigneur, and, on the instant, he made up his mind
that whatever the tailor might have been, he was deserving of respect.

"You have private business with me, Monsieur?" asked Charley of the
Abbe.

The Abbe shook his head.  "The business is not private, in one sense.
These men have come to charge you with having broken into the cathedral
at Quebec and stolen the gold vessels of the altar; also with having
tried to blow up the Governor's residence."

One of the constables handed Charley the warrant.  He looked at it with a
curious smile.  It was so natural, yet so unnatural, to be thus in touch
with the habits of far-off times.

"On what information is this warrant issued?" he asked.

"That is for the law to show in due course," said the priest.

"Pardon me; it is for the law to show now.  I have a right to know."

The constables shifted from one foot to the other, looked at each other
meaningly, and instinctively felt their weapons.

"I believe," said the Seigneur evenly, "that--" The Abbe interrupted.
"He can have information at his trial."

"Excuse me, but the warrant has my endorsement," said the Seigneur, "and,
as the justice most concerned, I shall give proper information to the
gentleman under suspicion."  He waved a hand at the Abbe, as at a
fractious child, and turned courteously to Charley.

"Monsieur," he said, "on the tenth of August last the cathedral at Quebec
was broken into, and the gold altar-vessels were stolen.  You are
suspected.  The same day an attempt was made to blow up the Governor's
residence.  You are suspected."

"On what ground, Monsieur?"

"You appeared in this vicinity three days afterwards with an injury to
the head.  Now, the incendiary received a severe blow on the head from a
servant of the Governor.  You see the connection, Monsieur?"

"Where is the servant of the Governor, Monsieur?"

"Dead, unfortunately.  He told the story so often, to so much
hospitality, that he lost his footing on Mountain Street steps--you
remember Mountain Street steps possibly, Monsieur?--and cracked his head
on the last stone."

There was silence for a moment.  If the thing had not been so serious,
Charley must have laughed outright.  If he but disclosed his identity,
how easy to dispose of this silly charge!  He did not reply at once, but
looked calmly at the Abbe.  In the pause, the Seigneur added "I forgot to
add that the man had a brown beard.  You have a brown beard, Monsieur."

"I had not when I arrived here."

Jo Portugais spoke.  "That is true, M'sieu'; and what is more, I know a
newly shaved face when I see it, and M'sieu's was tanned with the sun.
It is foolish, that!"

"This is not the place for evidence," said the Abbe sharply.

"Excuse me, Abbe," said his brother; "if Monsieur wishes to have a
preliminary trial here, he may.  He is in my seigneury; he is a tenant of
the Church here--"

"It is a grave offence that an infidel, dropping down here from, who
knows where--that an acknowledged infidel should be a tenant of the
Church!"

"The devil is a tenant of the Almighty, if creation is the Almighty's,"
said Charley.

"Satan is a prisoner," snapped the Abbe.

"With large domains for exercise," retorted Charley, "and in successful
opposition to the Church.  If it is true that the man you charge is an
infidel, how does that warrant suspicion?"

"Other thefts," answered the Abbe.  "A sacred iron cross was stolen from
the door of the church of Chaudiere.  I have no doubt that the thief of
the gold vessels of the cathedral was the thief of the iron cross."

"It is not true," sullenly broke in Jo Portugais.

"What proof have you?" said the Seigneur.  Charley waved a deprecating
hand towards Jo.

"I shall not call Portugais as evidence," he said.

"You are conducting your own case?" asked the Seigneur, with a grim
smile.

"It is dangerous, I believe."

"I will take my chances," answered Charley.  "Will you tell me what
object the criminal could have in stealing the gold vessels from the
cathedral?" he added, turning to the Abbe.

"They were gold!"

"And for taking the cross from the door of the church in Chaudiere?"

"It was sacred, and he was an infidel, and hated it."

"I do not see the logic of the argument.  He stole the vessels because
they were valuable, and the iron cross because he was an infidel!  Now
how do you know that the suspected criminal was an infidel, Monsieur?"

"It is well known."

"Has he ever said so?"

"He does not deny it."

"If you were charged with being an opium-eater, does it follow that you
are one because you do not deny it?  There was a Man who was said to
blaspheme, to have all 'the crafts and assaults of the devil'--was it His
duty to deny it?  Suppose you were accused of being a highwayman, would
you be less a highwayman if you denied it?  Or would you be less guilty
if you denied it?"

"That is beside the case," said the priest with acerbity.

"Faith, I think it is the case itself," said the Seigneur with a
satisfied pull of his nose.

"But do you seriously suggest that only infidels rob churches?" Charley
persisted.

"I am not here to be cross-examined," answered the Abbe harshly.
"You are charged with robbing the cathedral and trying to blow up the
Governor's residence.  Arrest him!" he added, turning to the constables.

"Stand where you are, men," sharply threatened the Seigneur.  "There are
no lettres de cachet nowadays, Francois," he added tartly to his brother.

"If it is the exclusive temptation of an infidel to rob a church, has
infidelity also an inherent penchant for arson?  Is it a patent?  Why did
the infidel blow up the Governor's residence?" continued Charley.

"He did not blow it up, he only tried," interposed the Cure softly.

"I was not aware," said Charley.  "Well, did the man who stole the patens
from the altar--"

"They were chalices," again interrupted the Cure, with a faint smile.

"Ah, I was not aware!" again rejoined Charley.  "I repeat, what reason
had the person who stole the chalices to try to blow up the Governor's
residence?  Is it a sign of infidelity, or--"

"You can answer for that yourself," angrily interposed the Abbe.  The
strain was telling on his nerves.

"It is fair to give reasons for the suspicion," urged the Seigneur
acidly.

"As I said before, Francois, this is not the fifteenth century."

"He hated the English government," said the Abbe.  "I do not understand,"
responded Charley.  "Am I then to suppose that the alleged criminal was a
Frenchman as well as an infidel?"

There was silence, and Charley continued.  "It is an unusual thing for a
French Abbe to be so concerned for the safety of an English Protestant's
life and housing .  .  .  the Governor is a Protestant--eh?  That is,
indeed, a zeal almost Christian--or millennial."

The Abby turned to the Seigneur.  "Are you going to interfere longer with
the process of the law?"

"I think Monsieur has not quite finished his argument," said the
Seigneur, with a twist of the mouth.

"If the man was a Frenchman, why do you suspect the tailor of Chaudiere?"
asked Charley softly.  "Of course I understand the reason behind all: you
have heard that the tailor is an infidel; you have protested to the good
Cure here, and the Cure is a man who has a sense of justice, and will not
drive a poor man from his parish by Christian persecution--without cause.
Since certain dates coincide and impulses urge, you suspect the tailor.
Again, according to your mind, a man who steals holy vessels must needs
be an infidel; therefore a tailor in Chaudiere, suspected of being an
infidel, stole the holy chalices.  It might seem a fair case for a grand
jury of clericals.  But it breaks down in certain places.  Your criminal
is a Frenchman; the tailor of Chaudiere is an Englishman."

The Abbe's face was contracted with stubborn annoyance, though he held
his tongue from violence.  "Do you deny that you are French?" he asked
tartly.

"I could almost endure the suspicion because of the compliment to my
command of your charming language."

"Prove that you are an Englishman.  No one knows where you came from;
no one knows what you are.  You are a fair subject for suspicion, apart
from the evidence shown," said the Abbe, trying now to be as polite as
the tailor.

"This is a free country.  So long as the law is obeyed, one can go where
one wills without question, I take it."

"There is a law of vagrancy."

"I am a householder, a tenant of the Church, not a vagrant."

"Monsieur, you can have your choice of proving these things here or in
Quebec," said the Abbe, with angry impatience again.

"I may not be compelled to prove anything.  It is the privilege of the
law to prove the crime against me."

"You are a very remarkable tailor," said the Abbe sarcastically.

"I have not had the honour of making you even a cassock, I think.
Monsieur le Cure, I believe, approves of those I make for him.
He has a good figure, however."

"You refuse to identify yourself?" asked the Abbe, with asperity.

"I am not aware that you possess any right to ask me to do so."

The Abbe's thin lips clipped-to like shears.  He turned again towards the
officers.

"It would relieve the situation," interposed the Seigneur, "if Monsieur
could find it possible to grant the Abbe's demand."

Charley bowed to the Seigneur.  "I do not know why I should be taken for
a Frenchman or an infidel.  I speak French well, I presume, but I spoke
it from the cradle.  I speak English with equally good accent," he added,
with the glimmer of a smile; for there was a kind of exhilaration in the
little contest, even with so much at stake.  This miserable, silly charge
had that behind it which might open up a grave, make its dead to walk,
fright folk from their senses, and destroy their peace for ever.  Yet he
was cool and thinking clearly.  He measured up the Abbe in his mind,
analysed him, found the vulnerable spot in his nature, the avenue to the
one place lighted by a lamp of humanity.  He leaned a hand upon the ledge
of the chimney where he stood, and said, in a low voice:

"Monsieur l'Abbe, it is sometimes the misfortune of just men to be
terribly unjust.  'For conscience sake' is another name for prejudice--
for those antipathies which, natural to us, are, at the same time, trap-
doors, for our just intentions.  You, Monsieur, have a radical antipathy
to those men who are unable to see or to feel what you were privileged to
see and feel from the time of your birth.  You know that you are right.
Do you think that those who do not see as you do are wicked because they
were not given what you were given?  If you are right, may they, poor
folk! not be the victims of their blindness of heart--of the darkness
born with them, or of the evils that overtake them?  For conscience sake,
you would crush out evil.  To you an infidel--so called--is an evil-doer,
a peril to the peace of God.  You drive him out from among the faithful.
You heard that a tailor of Chaudiere was an infidel.  You did not prove
him one, but you, for conscience sake, are trying to remove him, by
fixing on him a crime of which he may, with slight show of reason,
be suspected.  But I ask you, would you have taken the same deep interest
in setting the law upon this suspected man did you not believe him to be
an infidel?"

He paused.  The Abbe made no reply.  The Cure was bending forward
eagerly; the Seigneur sat with his hands over the top of his cane, his
chin on his hands, never taking his eyes from him, save to glance once or
twice at his brother.  Jo Portugais was crouched on the bench, watching.

"I do not know what makes an infidel," Charley went on.  "Is it an honest
mind, a decent life, an austerity of living as great as that of any
priest, a neighbourliness that gives and takes in fairness--"

"No, no, no," interposed the Cure eagerly.  "So you have lived here,
Monsieur; I can vouch for that.  Charity and a good heart have gone with
you always."

"Do you mean that a man is an infidel because he cannot say, as Louis
Trudel said to me, 'Do you believe in God?' and replies, as I replied,
'God knows!'  Is that infidelity?  If God is God, He alone knows when the
mind or the tongue can answer in the terms of that faith which you
profess.  He knows the secret desires of our hearts, and what we believe,
and what we do not believe; He knows better than we ourselves know--if
there is a God.  Does a man conjure God, if he does not believe in God?
'God knows!' is not a statement of infidelity.  With me it was a phrase
--no more.  You ask me to bare my inmost soul.  I have not learned how
to confess.  You ask me to lay bare my past, to prove my identity.  For
conscience sake you ask that, and I for conscience sake say I will not,
Monsieur.  You, when you enter your priestly life, put all your past
behind you.  It is dead for ever: all its deeds and thoughts and desires,
all its errors--sins.  I have entered on a life here which is to me as
much a new life as your priesthood is to you.  Shall I not have the right
to say, that may not be disinterred?  Have I not the right to say, Hands
off?  For the past I am responsible, and for the past I will speak from
the past; but for the deeds of the present I will speak only from the
present.  I am not a Frenchman; I did not steal the little cross from the
church door here, nor the golden chalices in Quebec; nor did I seek to
injure the Governor's residence.  I have not been in Quebec for three
years."

He ceased speaking, and fixed his eyes on the Abbe, who now met his look
fairly.

"In the way of justice, there is nothing hidden that shall not be
revealed, nor secret that shall not be made known," answered the Abbe.
"Prove that you were not in Quebec on the day the robbery was committed."
There was silence.  The Abbe's pertinacity was too difficult.  The
Seigneur saw the grim look in Charley's face, and touched the Abbe on the
arm.  "Let us walk a little outside.  Come, Cure" he added.  "It is right
that Monsieur should have a few minutes alone.  It is a serious charge
against him, and reflection will be good for us all."

He motioned the constables from the room.  The Abby passed through the
door into the open air, and the Cure and the Seigneur went arm in arm
together, talking earnestly.  The Cure turned in the doorway.

"Courage, Monsieur!" he said to Charley, and bowed himself out.  Jo
Portugais followed.

One officer took his place at the front door and the other at the back
door, outside.

The Abby, by himself, took to walking backward and forward under the
trees, buried in gloomy reflection.  Jo Portugais caught his sleeve.

"Come with me for a moment, M'sieu'," he said.  "It is important."

The Abby followed him.




CHAPTER XXXII

JO PORTUGAIS TELLS A STORY

Jo Portugais had fastened down a secret with clasps heavier than iron,
and had long stood guard over it.  But life is a wheel, and natures move
in circles, passing the same points again and again, the points being
distant or near to the sense as the courses of life have influenced the
nature.  Confession was an old principle, a light in the way, a rest-
house for Jo and all his race, by inheritance, by disposition, and by
practice.  Again and again Jo had come round to the rest-house since one
direful day, but had not, found his way therein.  There were passwords to
give at the door, there was the tale of the journey to tell to the door-
keeper.  And this tale he had not been ready to tell.  But the man who
knew of the terrible thing he had done, who had saved him from the
consequences of that terrible thing, was in sore trouble, and this broke
down the gloomy guard he had kept over his dread secret.  He fought the
matter out with himself, and, the battle ended, he touched the door-
keeper on the arm, beckoned him to a lonely place in the trees, and knelt
down before him.

"What is it you seek?" asked the door-keeper, whose face was set and
forbidding.

"To find peace," answered the man; yet he was thinking more of another's
peril than of his own soul.  "What have I to do with the peace of your
soul?  Yonder is your shepherd and keeper," said the doorkeeper, pointing
to where two men walked arm in arm under the trees.

"Shall the sinner not choose the keeper of his sins?" said the man
huskily.

"Who has been the keeper all these years?  Who has given you peace?"

"I have had no keeper; I have had no peace these many years."

"How many years?" The Abbe's voice was low and even, and showed no
feeling, but his eyes were keenly inquiring and intent.

"Seven years."

"Is the sin that held you back from the comfort of the Church a great
one?"

"The greatest, save one."

"What would be the greatest?"

"To curse God."

"The next?"

"To murder."

The other's whole manner changed on the instant.  He was no longer the
stern Churchman, the inveterate friend of Justice, the prejudiced priest,
rigid in a pious convention, who could neither bend nor break.  The sin
of an infidel breaker of the law, that was one thing; the crime of a son
of the Church, which a human soul came to relate in its agony, that was
another.  He had a crass sense of justice, but there was in him a deeper
thing still: the revelation of the human soul, the responsibility of
speaking to the heart which has dropped the folds of secrecy, exposing
the skeleton of truth, grim and staring, to the eye of a secret earthly
mentor.

"If it has been hidden all these years, why do you tell it now, my son?"

"It is the only way."

"Why was it hidden?"

"I have come to confess," answered the man bitterly.  The priest looked
at him anxiously.  "You have spoken rightly, my son.  I am not here to
ask, but to receive."

"Forgive me, but it is my crime I would speak of now.  I choose this
moment that another should not suffer for what he did not do."

The priest thought of the man they had left in the little house, and the
crime with which he was charged, and wondered what the sinner before him
was going to say.

"Tell your story, my son, and God give your tongue the very spirit of
truth, that nothing be forgotten and nothing excused."

There was a fleeting pause, in which the colour left the priest's face,
and, as he opened the door of his mind--of the Church, secret and
inviolate--he had a pain at his heart; for beneath his arrogant
churchmanship there was a fanatical spirituality of a mediaeval kind.
His sense of responsibility was painful and intense.  The same pain
possessed him always, were the sin that of a child or a Borgia.

As he listened to the broken tale, the forest around was vocal, the
chipmunks scampered from tree to tree, the woodpecker's tap-tap, tap-tap,
went on over their heads, the leaves rustled and gave forth their divine
sweetness, as though man and nature were at peace, and there were no
storms in sky above or soul beneath, or in the waters of life that are
deeper than "the waters under the earth."

It was only a short time, but to the door-keeper and the wayfarer it
seemed hours, for the human soul travels far and hard and long in moments
of pain and revelation.  The priest in his anxiety suffered as much as
the man who did the wicked thing.  When the man had finished, the priest
said:

"Is this all?"

"It is the great sin of my life."  He shuddered, and continued: "I have
no love of life; I have no fear of death; but there is the man who saved
me years ago, who got me freedom.  He has had great sorrow and trouble,
and I would live for his sake--because he has no friend."

"Who is the man?"

The other pointed to where the little house was hidden among the trees.
The priest almost gasped his amazement, but waited.

Thereupon the woodsman told the whole truth concerning the tailor of
Chaudiere.

"To save him, I have confessed my own sin.  To you I might tell all in
confession, and the truth about him would be buried for ever.  I might
not confess at all unless I confessed my own sin.  You will save him,
father?" he asked anxiously.

"I will save him," was the reply of the priest.

"I want to give myself to justice; but he has been ill, and he may be ill
again, and he needs me."  He told of the tailor's besetting weakness, of
his struggles against it, of his fall a few days before, and the cause of
it .  .  .  told all to the man of silence.

"You wish to give yourself to justice?"

"I shall have no peace unless."

There was something martyr-like in the man's attitude.  It appealed to
some stern, martyr-like quality in the priest.  If the man would win
eternal peace so, then so be it.  His grim piety approved.  He spoke now
with the authority of divine justice.

"For one year longer go on as you are, then give yourself to justice--one
year from to-day, my son.  Is it enough?"

"It is enough."

"Absolvo te!" said the priest.




CHAPTER XXXIII

THE EDGE OF LIFE

Meantime Charley was alone with his problem.  The net of circumstances
seemed to have coiled inextricably round him.  Once, at a trial in court
in other days, he had said in his ironical way: "One hasn't to fear the
penalties of one's sins, but the damnable accident of discovery."

To try to escape now, or, with the assistance of Jo Portugais,
when en route to Quebec in charge of the constables, and find refuge and
seclusion elsewhere?  There was nothing he might ask of Portugais which
he would not do.  To escape--and so acknowledge a guilt not his own!
Well, what did it matter!  Who mattered?  He knew only too well.  The
Cure mattered--that good man who had never intruded his piety on him; who
had been from the first a discreet friend, a gentleman,--a Christian
gentleman, if there was such a sort of gentleman apart from all others.
Who mattered?  The Seigneur, whom he had never seen before, yet who had
showed that day a brusque sympathy, a gruff belief in him?  Who mattered?

Above all, Rosalie mattered.  To escape, to go from Rosalie's presence by
a dark way, as it were, like a thief in the night--was that possible?
His escape would work upon her mind.  She would first wonder, then doubt,
and then believe at last that he was a common criminal.  She was the one
who mattered in that thought of escape escape to some other parish, to
some other province, to some other country--to some other world!

To some other world?  He looked at a little bottle he held in the palm of
his hand.

A hand held aside the curtain of the door entering on the next room, and
a girl's troubled face looked in, but he did not see.

Escape to some other world?  And why not, after all?  On the day his
memory came back he had resisted the idea in this very room.  As the
fatalist he had resisted it then.  Now how poor seemed the reasons for
not having ended it all that day!  If his appointed time had been come,
the river would have ended him then--that had been his argument.  Was
that argument not belief in Somebody or Something which governed his
going or staying?  Was it not preordination?  Was not fatalism, then,
the cheapest sort of belief in an unchangeable Somebody or Something,
representing purpose and law and will?  Attribute to anything power,
and there was God, whatever His qualities, personality, or being.

The little phial of laudanum was in his hand to loosen life into
knowledge.  Was it not his duty to eliminate himself, rather than be an
unsolvable quantity in the problem of many lives?  It was neither vulgar
nor cowardly to pass quietly from forces making for ruin, and so avert
ruin and secure happiness.  To go while yet there was time, and smooth
for ever the way for others by an eternal silence--that seemed well.
Punishment thereafter, the Cure would say.  But was it not worth while
being punished, even should the Cure's fond belief in the noble fable be
true, if one saved others here?  Who--God or man--had the right to take
from him the right to destroy himself, not for fear, not through despair,
but for others' sake?  Had he not the right to make restitution to
Kathleen for having given her nothing but himself, whom she had learned
to despise?  If he were God, he would say, Do justice and fear not.  And
this was justice.  Suppose he were in a battle, with all these things
behind him, and put himself, with daring and great results, in some
forlorn hope--to die; and he died, ostensibly a hero for his country,
but, in his heart of hearts, to throw his life away to save some one he
loved, not his country, which profited by his sacrifice--suppose that
were the case, what would the world say?

"He saved others, himself he could not save"--flashed through his mind,
possessed him.  He could save others; but it was clear he could not save
himself.  It was so simple, so kind, and so decent.  And he would be
buried here in quiet, unconsecrated ground, a mystery, a tailor who,
finding he could not mend the garment of life, cast it away, and took on
himself the mantle of eternal obscurity.  No reproaches would follow him;
and he would not reproach himself, for Kathleen and Billy and another
would be safe and free to live their lives.

Far, far better for Rosalie!  She too would be saved--free from the peril
of his presence.  For where could happiness come to her from him?  He
might not love her; he might not marry her; and it were well to go now,
while yet love was not a habit, but an awakening, a realisation of life.
His death would settle this sad question for ever.  To her he would be a
softening memory as time went on.

The girl who had watched by the curtain stepped softly inside the room
.  .  .  .  she divined his purpose.  He was so intent he did not hear.

"I will do it," he said to himself.  "It is better to go than to stay.
I have never done a good thing for love of any human being.  I will do
one now."

He turned towards the window through which the sunlight streamed.
Stepping forward into the sun, he uncorked the bottle.

There was a quick step behind him, and the girl's voice said clearly:

"If you go, I go also."

He turned swiftly, cold with amazement, the blood emptied from his heart.

Rosalie stood a little distance from him, her face pale, her hands held
hard to her side.

"I understand all.  I could not go outside, I stayed there"--she pointed
to the other room--"and I know why you would die.  You would die to save
others."

"Rosalie!" he protested in a hoarse voice, and could say nothing more.

"You think that I will stay, if you go!  No, no, no--I will not.  You
taught me how to live, and I will follow you now."

He saw the strange determination of her look.  It startled him; he knew
not what to say.  "Your father, Rosalie--"

"My father will be cared for.  But who will care for you in the place
where you are going?  You will have no friends there.  You shall not go
alone.  You will need me--in the dark."

"It is good that I go," he said.  "It would be wicked, it would be
dreadful, for you to go."

"I go if you go," she urged.  "I will lose my soul to be with you; you
will want me--there!"

There was no mistaking her intention.  Footsteps sounded outside.  The
others were coming back.  To die here before her face?  To bring her to
death with him?  He was sick with despair.

"Go into the next room quickly," he said.  "No matter what comes, I will
not--on my honour!"

She threw him a look of gratitude, and, as the bearskin curtain dropped
behind her, he put the phial of laudanum in his pocket.

The door opened, and the Abbe Rossignol entered, followed by the
Seigneur, the Cure, and Jo Portugais.  Charley faced them calmly, and
waited.

The Abbe's face was still cold and severe, but his voice was human as he
said quickly: "Monsieur, I have decided to take you at your word.  I am
assured you are not the man who committed the crime.  You probably have
reasons for not establishing your identity."

Had Charley been a prisoner in the dock, he could not have had a moment
of deeper amazement--even if after the jury had said Guilty, a piece of
evidence had been handed in, proving innocence, averting the death
sentence.  A wave of excitement passed over him, leaving him cold and
still.  In the other room a girl put her hand to her mouth to stifle a
cry of joy.

Charley bowed.  "You made a mistake, Monsieur--pray do not apologise," he
said.




CHAPTER XXXIV

IN AMBUSH

Weeks went by.  Summer was done, autumn was upon the land.  Harvest-home
had gone, and the "fall" ploughing was forward.  The smell of the burning
stubble, of decaying plant and fibre, was mingling with the odours of the
orchards and the balsams of the forest.  The leafy hill-sides, far and
near, were resplendent in scarlet and saffron and tawny red.  Over the
decline of the year flickered the ruined fires of energy.

It had been a prosperous summer in the valley.  Harvests had been reaped
such as the country had not known for years--and for years there had been
great harvests.  There had not been a death in the parish all summer, and
births had occurred out of all usual proportion.

When Filion Lacasse commented thereon, and mentioned the fact that even
the Notary's wife had had the gift of twins as the crowning fulness of
the year, Maximilian Cour, who was essentially superstitious, tapped on
the table three times, to prevent a turn in the luck.

The baker was too late, however, for the very next day the Notary was
brought home with a nasty gunshot wound in his leg.  He had been lured
into duck-hunting on a lake twenty miles away, in the hills, and had been
accidentally shot on an Indian reservation, called Four Mountains, where
the Church sometimes held a mission and presented a primitive sort of
passion-play.  From there he had been brought home by his comrades, and
the doctor from the next parish summoned.  The Cure assisted the doctor
at first, but the task was difficult to him.  At the instant when the
case was most critical the tailor of Chaudiere set his foot inside the
Notary's door.  A moment later he relieved the Cure and helped to probe
for shot, and care for an ugly wound.

Charley had no knowledge of surgery, but his fingers were skilful, his
eye was true, and he had intuition.  The long operation over, the rural
physician and surgeon washed his hands and then studied Charley with
curious admiration.

"Thank you, Monsieur," he said, as he dried his hands on a towel.
"I couldn't have done it without you.  It's a pretty good job; and you
share the credit."

Charley bowed.  "It's a good thing not to halloo till you're out of the
woods," he said.  "Our friend there has a bad time before him--hein?"

"I take you.  It is so."  The man of knives and tinctures pulled his
side-whiskers with smug satisfaction as he looked into a small mirror on
the wall.  "Do you chance to know if madame has any cordials or spirits?"
he added, straightening his waistcoat and adjusting his cravat.

"It is likely," answered Charley, and moved away to the window looking
upon the street.

The doctor turned in surprise.  He was used to being waited on, and he
had expected the tailor to follow the tradition.

"We might--eh?" he said suggestively.  "It is usually the custom to
provide refreshment, but the poor woman, madame, has been greatly
occupied with her husband, and--"

"And the twins," Charley put in drily--" and a house full of work, and
only one old crone in the kitchen to help.  Still, I have no doubt she
has thought of the cordials too.  Women are the slaves of custom--ah,
here they are, as I said, and--"

He stopped short, for in the doorway, with a tray, stood Rosalie
Evanturel.  The surgeon was so intent upon at once fortifying himself
that he did not see the look which passed between Rosalie and the tailor.

Rosalie had been absent for two months.  Her father had been taken
seriously ill the day after the critical episode in the but at Vadrome
Mountain, and she had gone with him to the hospital at Quebec, for an
operation.  The Abbe Rossignol had undertaken to see them safely to the
hospital, and Jo Portugais, at his own request, was permitted to go in
attendance upon M. Evanturel.

There had been a hasty leave-taking between Charley and Rosalie, but it
was in the presence of others, and they had never spoken a word privately
together since the day she had said to him that where he went she would
go, in life or out of it.

"You have been gone two months," Charley said now, after their touch of
hands and voiceless greeting.  "Two months yesterday," she answered.

"At sundown," he replied, in an even voice.

"The Angelus was ringing," she answered calmly, though her heart was
leaping and her hands were trembling.  The doctor, instantly busy with
the cordial, had not noticed what they said.

"Won't you join me?" he asked, offering a glass to Charley.

"Spirits do not suit me," answered Charley.  "Matter of constitution,"
rejoined the doctor, and buttoned up his coat, preparing to depart.  He
came close to Charley.  "Now, I don't want to put upon you, Monsieur," he
said, "but this sick man is valuable in the parish--you take me?  Well,
it's a difficult, delicate case, and I'd be glad if I could rely on you
for a few days.  The Cure would do, but you are young, you have a sense
of things--take me?  Half the fees are yours if you'll keep a sharp eye
on him--three times a day, and be with him at night a while.  Fever is
the thing I'm afraid of--temperature--this way, please!"  He went to the
window, and for a minute engaged Charley in whispered conversation.  "You
take me?" he said cheerily at last, as he turned again towards Rosalie.

"Quite, Monsieur," answered Charley, and drew away, for he caught the
odour of the doctor's breath, and a cold perspiration broke out over him.
He felt the old desire for drink sweeping through him.  "I will do what I
can," he said.

"Come, my dear," the doctor said to Rosalie.  "We will go and see your
father."

Charley's eyes had fastened on the bottles avidly.  As Rosalie turned to
bid him good-bye, he said to her, almost hoarsely: "Take the tray back to
Madame Dauphin--please."

She flashed a glance of inquiry at him.  She was puzzled by the fire in
his eyes.  With her soul in her face as she lifted the tray, out of the
warm-beating life in her, she said in a low tone:

"It is good to live, isn't it?"

He nodded and smiled, and the trouble slowly passed from his eyes.  The
woman in her had conquered his enemy.




CHAPTER XXXV

THE COMING OF MAXIMILIAN COUR AND ANOTHER

"It is good to live, isn't it?"  In the autumn weather when the air drank
like wine, it seemed so indeed, even to Charley, who worked all day in
his shop, his door wide open to the sunlight, and sat up half the night
with Narcisse Dauphin, sometimes even taking a turn at the cradle of the
twins, while madame sat beside her husband's bed.

To Charley the answer to Rosalie's question lay in the fact that his eyes
had never been so keen, his face so alive, or his step so buoyant as in
this week of double duty.  His mind was more hopeful than it had ever
been since the day he awoke with memory restored in the silence of a
mountain hut.

He had found the antidote to his great temptation, to the lurking,
relentless habit which had almost killed him the night John Brown had
sung Champagne Charlie from behind the flaring lights.  From a
determination to fight his own fight with no material aids, he had never
once used the antidote sent him by the Cure's brother.

On St. Jean Baptiste's day his proud will had failed him; intellectual
force, native power of mind, had broken like reeds under the weight of a
cruel temptation.  But now a new force had entered into him.  As his
fingers were about to reach for the spirit-bottle in the house of the
Notary, and he had, for the first time in his life, made an appeal for
help, a woman's voice had said, "It is good to live, isn't it?" and his
hand was stayed.  A woman's look had stilled the strife.  Never before in
his life had he relied on a moral or a spiritual impulse in him.  What
of these existed in him were in unseen quantities--for which there was
neither multiple nor measure--had been primitive and hereditary, flowing
in him like a feeble tincture diluted to inefficacy.

Rosalie had resolved him back to the original elements.  The quiet days
he had spent in Chaudiere, the self-sacrifice he had been compelled to
make, the human sins, such as those of Jo Portugais and Louis Trudel,
with which he had had to do, the simplicity of the life around him--the
uncomplicated lie and the unvarnished truth, the obvious sorrow and the
patent joy, the childish faith, and the rude wickedness so pardonable
because so frankly brutal--had worked upon him.  The elemental spirit of
it all had so invaded his nature, breaking through the crust of old habit
to the new man, that, when he fell before his temptation, and his body
became saturated with liquor, the healthy natural being and the growing
natural mind were overpowered by the coarse onslaught, and death had
nearly followed.

It was his first appeal to a force outside himself, to an active
principle unfamiliar to the voluntary working of his nature, and the
answer had been immediate and adequate.  Yet what was it?  He did not
ask; he had not got beyond the mere experience, and the old questioning
habit was in abeyance.  Each new and great emotion has its dominating
moment, its supreme occasion, before taking its place in the modulated
moral mechanism.  He was touched with helplessness.

As he sat beside Narcisse Dauphin's bedside, one evening, the sick man on
his way to recovery, there came to him the text of a sermon he had once
heard John Brown preach: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friend."  He had been thinking of Rosalie and
that day at Vadrome Mountain.  She would not only have died with him, but
she would have died for him, if need had been.  What might he give in
return for what she gave?

The Notary interrupted his thoughts.  He had lain watching Charley for a
long time, his brow drawn down with thought.  At last he said:

"Monsieur, you have been good to me."  Charley laid a hand on the sick
man's arm.

"I don't see that.  But if you won't talk, I'll believe you think so."

The Notary shook his head.  "I've not been talking for an hour, I've no
fever, and I want to say some things.  When I've said them, I'll feel
better--voila!  I want to make the amende honorable.  I once thought
you were this and that--I won't say what I thought you.  I said you
interfered--giving advice to people, as you did to Filion Lacasse,
and taking the bread out of my mouth.  I said that!"

He paused, raised himself on his elbow, smoothed back his grizzled hair
behind his ears, looked at himself in the mirror opposite with
satisfaction, and added oracularly: "But how prone is the mind of man to
judge amiss!  You have put bread into my mouth--no, no, Monsieur, you
shall hear me!  As well as doing your own work, you have done my business
since my accident as well as a lawyer could do it; and you've given every
penny to my wife."

"As for the work I've done," answered Charley, "it was nothing--you
notaries have easy times.  You may take your turn with my shears and
needle one day."

With a dash of patronage true to his nature, "You are wonderful for a
tailor," the Notary rejoined.  Charley laughed--seldom, if ever, had he
laughed since coming to Chaudiere.  It was, however, a curious fact that
he took a real pleasure in the work he did with his hands.  In making
clothes for habitant farmers, and their sons and their sons' sons, and
jackets for their wives and daughters, he had had the keenest pleasure
of his life.

He had taken his earnings with pride, if not with exultation.  He knew
the Notary did not mean that he was wonderful as a tailor, but he
answered to the suggestion.

"You liked that last coat I made for you, then," he said drily;
"I believe you wore it when you were shot.  It was the thing for your
figure, man."

The Notary looked in the large mirror opposite with sad content.  "Ah, it
was a good figure, the first time I went to that hut at Four Mountains!"

"We can't always be young.  You have a waist yet, and your chest-barrel
gives form to a waistcoat.  Tut, tut!  Think of the twins in the way of
vainglory and hypocrisy."

"'Twins' and 'hypocrisy'; there you have struck the nail on the head,
tailor.  There is the thing I'm going to tell you about."

After a cautious glance at the door and the window, Dauphin continued in
quick, broken sentences: "It wasn't an accident at Four Mountains--not
quite.  It was Paulette Dubois--you know the woman that lives at the
Seigneur's gate?  Twelve years ago she was a handsome girl.  I fell in
love with her, but she left here.  There were two other men.  There was a
timber-merchant,--and there was a lawyer after.  The timber-merchant was
married; the lawyer wasn't.  She lived at first with the timber-merchant.
He was killed--murdered in the woods."

"What was the timber-merchant's name?" interrupted Charley in an even
voice.

"Turley--but that doesn't matter!" continued the Notary.  "He was
murdered, and then the lawyer came on the scene.  He lived with her for a
year.  She had a child by him.  One day he sent the child away to a safe
place and told her he was going to turn over a new leaf--he was going to
stand for Parliament, and she must go.  She wouldn't go without the
child.  At last he said the child was dead; and showed her the
certificate of death.  Then she came back here, and for a while, alas!
she disgraced the parish.  But all at once she changed--she got a message
that her child was alive.  To her it was like being born again.  It was
at this time they were going to drive her from the parish.  But the
Seigneur and then the Cure spoke for her, and so did I--at last."

He paused and plaintively admired himself in the mirror.  He was grateful
that he had been clean-shaved that morning, and he was content to catch
the citrine odour of the bergamot upon his hair.

New phases of the most interesting case Charley had ever defended spread
out before him--the case which had given him his friend Jo Portugais,
which had turned his own destiny.  Yet he could not quite trace in it the
vital association of this vain Notary now in the confessional mood.

"You behaved very well," said Charley tentatively.

"Ah, you say that, knowing so little!  What will you say when you know
all--ah!  That I should take a stand also was important.  Neither the
Seigneur nor the Cure was married; I was.  I have been long-suffering for
a cause.  My marital felicity has been bruised--bruised--but not broken."

"There are the twins," said Charley, with a half-closed eye.

"Could woman ask greater proof?" urged the Notary seriously, for the
other's voice had been so well masked that he did not catch its satire.
"But see my peril, and mark the ground of my interest in this poor
wanton!  Yet a woman--a woman-frail creatures, as we know, and to be
pitied, not made more pitiable by the stronger sex.  .  .  .  But, see
now!  Why should I have perilled mine own conjugal peace, given ground
for suspicion even--for I am unfortunate, unfortunate in the exterior
with which Dame Nature has honoured me!"  Again he looked in the mirror
with sad complacency.

On these words his listener offered no comment, and he continued:

"For this reason I lifted my voice for the poor wanton.  It was I who
wrote the letter to her that her child was alive.  I did it with high
purpose--I foresaw that she would change her ways if she thought her
child was living.  Was I mistaken?  No.  I am an observer of human
nature.  Intellect conquered.  'Io triumphe'.  The poor fly-away changed,
led a new life.  Ever since then she has tried to get the man--the
lawyer--to tell her where her child is.  He has not done so.  He has said
the child is dead--always.  When she seemed to give up belief, then would
come another letter to her, telling her the child was living--but not
where.  So she would keep on writing to the man, and sometimes she would
go away searching--searching.  To what end?  Nothing!  She had a letter
some months ago, for she had got restless, and a young kinsman of the
Seigneur had come to visit at the seigneury for a week, and took much
notice of her.  There was danger.  Voila, another letter."

"From you?"

"Monsieur, of course!  Will you keep a secret--on your sacred honour?"

"I can keep a secret without sacred honour."

"Ah, yes, of course!  You have a secret of your own--pardon me, I am
only saying what every one says.  Well, this is the secret of the woman
Paulette Dubois.  My cousin, Robespierre Dauphin, a notary in Quebec, is
the agent of the lawyer, the father of the child.  He pities the poor
woman.  But he is bound in professional honour to the lawyer fellow, not
to betray.  When visiting Robespierre once I found out the truth-by
accident.

"I told him what I intended.  He gave permission to tell the woman her
child was alive; and, if need be for her good, to affirm it over and over
again--no more."

"And this?" said Charley, pointing to the injured leg, for he now
associated the accident with the secret just disclosed.

"Ah, you apprehend!  You have an avocat's mind--almost.  It was at Four
Mountains.  Paulette is superstitious; so not long ago she went to live
there alone with an old half-breed woman who has second-sight.  Monsieur,
it is a gift unmistakably.  For as soon as the hag clapped eyes on me in
the hut, she said: 'There is the man that wrote you the letters.'  Well--
what!  Paulette Dubois came down on me like an avalanche--Monsieur, like
an avalanche!  She believed the old witch; and there was I lying with an
unconvincing manner"--he sighed--"lying requires practice, alas!  She saw
I was lying, and in a rage snatched up my gun.  It went off by accident,
and brought me down.  Did she relent?  Not so.  She helped to bind me up,
and the last words she said to me were: 'You will suffer; you will have
time to think.  I am glad.  You have kept me on the rack.  I shall only
be sorry if you die, for then I shall not be able to torture you till you
tell me where my child is!'  Monsieur, I lied to the last, lest she
should come here and make a noise; but I'm not sure it wouldn't have been
better to break faith with Robespierre, and tell the poor wanton where
her child is.  What would you do, Monsieur?  I cannot ask the Cure or the
Seigneur--I have reasons.  But you have the head of a lawyer--almost--and
you have no local feelings, no personal interest--eh?"

"I should tell the truth."

"Your reasons, Monsieur?"

"Because the lawyer is a scoundrel.  Your betrayal of his secret is not a
thousandth part so bad as one lie told to this woman, whose very life is
her child.  Is it a boy or a girl?"

"A boy."

"Good!  What harm can be done?  A left-handed boy is all right in the
world.  Your wife has twins--then think of the woman, the one ewe lamb of
'the poor wanton.'  If you do not tell her, you will have her here making
a noise, as you say.  I wonder she has not been here on your door-step."

"I had a letter from her to-day.  She is coming-ah, mon dieu!"

"When?"

There was a tap at the window.  The Notary started.  "Ah, Heaven, here
she is!" he gasped, and drew over to the wall.

A voice came from outside.  "Shall I play for you, Dauphin?  It is as
good as medicine."

The Notary recovered himself at once.  His volatile nature sprang back to
its pose.  He could forget Paulette Dubois for the moment.

"It is Maximilian Cour in the garden," he said happily.  Then he raised
his voice.  "Play on, baker; but something for convalescence--the return
of spring, the sweet assonance of memory."

"A September air, and a gush of spring," said the baker, trying to crane
his long neck through the window.  "Ah, there you are, Dauphin!  I shall
give you a sleep to-night like a balmy eve."  He nodded to the tailor.
"M'sieu', you shall judge if sentiment be dead.

"I have racked my heart to play this time.  I have called it, 'The Baffled
Quest of Love'.  I have taken the music of the song of Alsace, 'Le Jardin
d'Amour', and I have made variations on it, keeping the last verse of the
song in my mind.  You know the song, M'sieu':

             "'Quand je vais au jardin, Jardin d'amour,
               Je crois entendu des pas,
               Je veux fuir, et n'ose pas.
               Voici la fin du jour .  .  .
               Je crains et j'hesite,
               Mon coeur bat plus vite
               En ce sejour .  .  .
               Quand je vais an jardin, jardin d'amour.'"

The baker sat down on a stool he had brought, and began to tune his
fiddle.  From inside came the voice of the Notary.

"Play 'The Woods are Green' first," he said.  "Then the other."

The Notary possessed the one high-walled garden in the village, and
though folk gathered outside and said that the baker was playing for
the sick man, there was no one in the garden save the fiddler himself.
Once or twice a lad appeared on the top of the wall, looking over, but
vanished at once when he saw Charley's face at the window.  Long ere the
baker had finished, the song was caught up from outside, and before the
last notes of the violin had died away, twenty voices were singing it in
the street, and forty feet marched away with it into the dusk.

Darkness comes quickly in this land of brief twilight.  Presently
out of the soft shadowed stillness, broken by the note of a vagrant
whippoorwill, crept out from Maximilian Cour's old violin the music
of 'The Baffled Quest of Love'.

The baker was not a great musician, but he had a talent, a rare gift of
pathos, and an imagination untrammelled by rigorous rules of harmony and
construction.  Whatever there was in his sentimental bosom he poured into
this one achievement of his life.  It brought tears to the eyes of
Narcisse Dauphin.  It opened a gate of the garden wall, and drew inside a
girl's face, shining with feeling.

Maximilian Cour spoke for more than himself that night.  His philandering
spirit had, at middle age, begotten a desire to house itself in a quiet
place, where the blinds could be drawn close, and the room of life made
ready with all the furniture of love.  So he had spoken to his violin,
and it had answered as it had never done before.  The soul of the lean
baker touched the heart of a man whose life had been but a baffled quest,
and the spirit of a girl whose love was her sun by day, her moon by
night, and the starlight of her dreams.

From the shade of the window the man the girl loved watched her as she
sank upon the ground and clasped her hands before her in abandonment to
the music.  He watched her when the baker, at last, overcome by his own
feelings--and ashamed of them--got up and stole swiftly out of the
garden.  He watched her till he saw her drop her face in her hands;
then, opening the door and stealing out, he came and laid a hand upon
her shoulder, and she heard him say:

"Rosalie!"




CHAPTER XXXVI

BARRIERS SWEPT AWAY

Rosalie came to her feet, gasping with pleasure.  She had been unhappy
ever since she had returned from Quebec, for though she had sometimes
been brought in contact with Charley in the Notary's house since the day
of the operation, nothing had passed between them save the necessary
commonplaces of a sick-room, given a little extra colour, perhaps, by the
sense of responsibility which fell upon them both, and by that importance
which hidden sentiment gives to every motion.  The twins had been
troublesome and ill, and Madame Dauphin had begged Rosalie to come in
for a couple of hours every evening.  Thus the tailor and the girl who,
by every rule of wisdom, should have been kept as far apart as the poles,
were played into each other's hands by human kindness and damnable
propinquity.  The man, manlike, felt no real danger, because nothing was
said--after everything had been said for all time at the hut on Vadrome
Mountain.  He had not realised the true situation, because of late her
voice, like his, had been even and her hand cool and steady.  He had not
noticed that her eyes were like hungry fires, eating up her face--eating
away its roundness, and leaving a pathetic beauty behind.

It seemed to him that because there was silence--neither the written word
nor the speaking look--that all was well.  He was hugging the chain of
denial to his bosom, as though to say, "This way is safety"; he was
hiding his face from the beacon-lights of her eyes, which said: "This way
is home."

Home?  Pictures of home, of a home such as Maximilian Cour painted in his
music, had passed before him now and then since that great day on Vadrome
Mountain.  A simple fireside, with frugal but comfortable fare; a few
books; the study of the fields and woods; the daily humble task over
which he could meditate as his hands worked mechanically; the happy face
of a happy woman near--he had thought of home; and he had put it from
him.  No matter what the temptation, his must be, perhaps for ever, the
bed and board unshared.  He had had his chance in the old days, and he
had thrown it away with insolent indifference, and an unpardonable
contempt for the opinion of the world.

Now, with a blind fatuousness which had nothing to do with his old
intellectual power, but was evidence of a primitive life of feeling, had
vaguely imagined that because there were no clinging hands, or stolen
looks, or any vow or promise, that all might go on as at present--upon
the surface.  With a curious absence of his old accuracy of observation
he was treating the immediate past--his and Rosalie's past--as if it did
not actually exist; as if only the other and farther past was a tragedy,
and this nearer one a dream.

But the film fell from his eyes as Maximilian Cour played his 'Baffled
Quest', with its quaint, searching pathos; and as he saw the figure of
the girl alone in the shade of the great rose-bushes, past and present
became one, and the whole man was lost in that one word "Rosalie!" which
called her to her feet with outstretched hands.

The tears sprang to her eyes; her face upturned to his was a mute appeal,
a speechless 'Viens ici'.

Past, present, future, duty, apprehension, consequences, suddenly fell
away from Charley's mind like a garment slipping from the shoulders, and
the new man, swept off his feet by the onrush of unused and ungoverned
emotions, caught the girl to his arms with a desperate joy.

"Oh, do you care, then--for me?" wept the girl, and hid her face in his
breast.

A voice came from inside the house: "Monsieur, Monsieur--ah, come, if you
please, tailor!"

The girl drew back quickly, looked up at him for one instant with a
triumphant happy daring, then, suddenly covered with confusion, turned,
ran to the gate, opened it, passed swiftly out, and was swallowed up in
the dusk.




CHAPTER XXXVII

THE CHALLENGE OF PAULETTE DUBOIS

"Monsieur, Monsieur!" came the voice from inside the house, querulously
and anxiously.  Charley entered the Notary's bedroom.

"Monsieur," said the Notary excitedly, "she is here--Paulette is here.
My wife is asleep, thank God!  but old Sophie has just told me that the
woman asks to see me.  Ah, Heaven above, what shall I do?"

"Will you leave it to me?"

"Yes, yes, Monsieur."

"You will do exactly as I say?"

"Ah, most sure."

"Very well.  Keep still.  I will see her first.  Trust to me."  He turned
and left the room.

Charley found the woman in the Notary's office, which, while partly
detached from the house, did duty as sitting-room and library.  When
Charley entered, the room was only lighted by two candles, and Paulette's
face was hidden by a veil, but Charley observed the tremulousness of the
figure and the nervous decision of manner.  He had seen her before
several times, and he had always noticed the air, half bravado, half
shrinking, marking her walk and movements, as though two emotions were
fighting in her.  She was now dressed in black, save for one bright red
ribbon round her throat, incongruous and garish.

When she saw Charley she started, for she had expected the servant with a
message from the Notary--her own message had been peremptory.

"I wish to see the Notary," she said defiantly.

"He is not able to come to you."

"What of that?"

"Did you expect to go to his bedroom?"

"Why not?"  She was abrupt to discourtesy.

"You are neither physician, nor relative."

"I have important business."

"I transact his business for him, Madame."

"You are a tailor."

"I learned that; I am learning to be a notary."

"My business is private."

"I transact his private business too--that which his wife cannot do.
Would you prefer his wife to me?  It must be either the one or the
other."

The woman started towards the door in a rage.  He stepped between.  "You
cannot see the Notary."

"I'll see his wife, then--"

"That would only put the fat in the fire.  His wife would not listen to
you.  She is quick-tempered, and she fancies she has reasons for not
liking you."

"She's a fool.  I haven't been always particular, but as for Narcisse
Dauphin--"

"He has been a good friend to you at some expense, the world says."

The woman struggled with herself.  "The world lies!" she said at last.

"But he doesn't.  The village was against you once.  That was when the
Notary, with the Seigneur, was for you--it has cost him something ever
since, I'm told.  You've never thanked him."

"He has tortured me for years, the oily, smirking, lying--"

"He has been your best friend," he interrupted.  "Please sit down, and
listen to me for a moment."

She hesitated, then did as he asked.

"He tells me that years ago he was in love with you.  Hasn't he behaved
better than some who said they loved you?"

The woman half started up, her eyes flashing, but met a deprecating
motion of his hand and sat down again.

"He thought that if you knew your child lived, you would think better of
life--and of yourself.  He has his good points, the Notary."

"Why doesn't he tell me where my child is?"

"The Notary is in bed--you shot him!  Don't you think it is doing you a
good turn not to have you arrested?"

"It was an accident."

"Oh no, it wasn't!  You couldn't make a jury believe that.  And if you
were in prison, how could you find your child?  You see, you have treated
the Notary very badly."

She was silent, and he added, slowly: "He had good reasons for not
telling you.  It wasn't his own secret, and he hadn't come by it in a
strictly professional way.  Your child was being well cared for, and he
told you simply that it was alive--for your own sake.  But he has changed
his mind at last, and--"

The woman sprang from her seat.  "He will tell me--he will tell me?"

"I will tell you."

"Monsieur-Monsieur--ah, my God, but you are kind!  How should you know--
what do you know?"

"I give you my word that by to-morrow evening you shall know where your
child is."

For a moment she was bewildered and overcome, then a look of gratitude,
of luminous hope, covered her face, softening the hardness of its
contour, and she fell on her knees beside the table, dropped her head
in her arms, and sobbed as if her heart would break.

"My little lamb, my little, little lamb-my own dearest!" she sobbed.
"I shall have you again.  I shall have you again--all my own!"

He stood and watched her meditatively.  He was wondering why it was that
grief like this had never touched him so before.  His eyes were moist.
Though he had been many things in his life, he had never been abashed;
but a curious timidity possessed him now.

He leaned over and touched her shoulder with a kindly abruptness, a
friendly awkwardness.  "Cheer up," he said.  "You shall have your child,
if Dauphin can help you to it."

"If he ever tries to take him from me"--she sprang to her feet, her face
in a fury--"I will--"

For an instant her overpowering passion possessed her, and she stood
violent and wilful; then, under his fixed, exacting gaze, her rage
ceased; she became still and grey and quiet.

"I shall know to-morrow evening, Monsieur?  Where?"  Her voice was weak
and distant.

He thought for a time.  "At my house-at nine o'clock," he answered at
last.

"Monsieur," she said, in a choking voice, "if I get my child again, I
will bless you to my dying day."

"No, no; it will be Dauphin you must bless," he said, and opened the door
for her.  As she disappeared into the dusk and silence he adjusted his
eye-glass, and stared musingly after her, though there was nothing to see
save the summer darkness, nothing to hear save the croak of the frogs in
the village pond.  He was thinking of the trial of Joseph Nadeau, and of
a woman in the gallery, who laughed.

"Monsieur, Monsieur," called the voice of the Notary from the bedroom.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE CURE AND THE SEIGNEUR VISIT THE TAILOR

It had been a perfect September day.  The tailor of Chaudiere had been
busier than usual, for winter was within hail, and careful habitants
were renewing their simple wardrobes.  The Seigneur and the Cure arrived
together, each to order the making of a greatcoat of the Irish frieze
which the Seigneur kept in quantity at the Manor.  The Seigneur was in
rare spirits.  And not without reason; for this was Michaelmas eve, and
tomorrow would be Michaelmas day, and there was a promise to be redeemed
on Michaelmas day!  He had high hopes of its redemption according to his
own wishes; for he was a vain Seigneur, and he had had his way in all
things all his life, as everybody knew.  Importunity with discretion was
his motto, and he often vowed to the Cure that there was no other motto
for the modern world.

The Cure's visit to the tailor's shop on this particular day had unusual
interest, for it concerned his dear ambition, the fondest aspiration of
his life: to bring the infidel tailor (they could not but call a man an
infidel whose soul was negative--the word agnostic had not then become
usual) from the chains of captivity into the freedom of the Church.
The Cure had ever clung to his fond hope; and it was due to his patient
confidence that there were several parishioners who now carried Charley's
name before the shrine of the blessed Virgin, and to the little calvaries
by the road-side.  The wife of Filion Lacasse never failed to pray for
him every day.  The thousand dollars gained by the saddler on the
tailor's advice had made her life happier ever since, for Filion had
become saving and prudent, and had even got her a "hired girl."  There
were at least a half-dozen other women, including Madame Dauphin, who did
the same.

That he might listen again to the good priest on his holy hobby, inflamed
with this passion of missionary zeal, the Seigneur, this morning, had
thrown doubt upon the ultimate success of the Cure's efforts.

"My dear Cure" said the Seigneur, "it is true, I think, what the tailor
suggested to my brother--on my soul, I wonder the Abbe gave in, for
a more obstinate fellow I never knew!--that a man is born with the
disbelieving maggot in his brain, or the butterfly of belief, or
whatever it may be called.  It's constitutional--may be criminal, but
constitutional.  It seems to me you would stand more chance with the Jew,
Greek, or heretic, than our infidel.  He thinks too much--for a tailor,
or for nine tailors, or for one man."

He pulled his nose, as if he had said a very good thing indeed.  They
were walking slowly towards the village during this conversation, and the
Cure, stopping short, brought his stick emphatically down in his palm
several times, as he said:

"Ah, you will not see!  You will not understand.  With God all things are
possible.  Were it the devil himself in human form, I should work and
pray and hope, as my duty is, though he should still remain the devil to
the end.  What am I?  Nothing.  But what the Church has done, the Church
may do.  Think of Paul and Augustine, and Constantine!"

"They were classic barbarians to whom religion was but an emotion.  This
man has a brain which must be satisfied."

"I must count him as a soul to be saved through that very intelligence,
as well as through the goodness of his daily life, which, in its charity,
shames us all.  He gives all he earns to the sick and needy.  He lives on
fare as poor as the poorest of our people eat; he gives up his hours of
sleep to nurse the sick.  Dauphin might not have lived but for him.  His
heart is good, else these things were impossible.  He could not act
them."

"But that's just it, Cure.  Doesn't he act them?  Isn't it a whim?  What
more likely than that, tired of the flesh-pots of Egypt, he comes here to
live in the desert--for a sensation?  We don't know."

"We do know.  The man has had sorrow and the man has had sin.  Yes,
believe me, there is none of us that suffers as this man has suffered.
I have had many, many talks with him.  Believe me, Maurice, I speak the
truth.  My heart bleeds for him.  I think I know the thing that drove him
here amongst us.  It is a great temptation, which pursues him here--even
here, where his life is so commendable.  I have seen him fighting it.
I have seen his torture, the piteous, ignoble yielding, and the struggle,
with more than mortal energy, to be master of himself."

"It is--" the Seigneur said, then paused.

"No, no; do not ask me.  He has not confessed to me, Maurice-naturally,
nothing like that.  But I know.  I know and pity--ah, Maurice, I almost
love.  You argue, and reason, but I know this, my friend, that something
was left out of this man when he was made, and it is that thing that we
must find, or he will die among us a ruined soul, and his gravestone will
be the monument of our shame.  If he can once trust the Church, if he can
once say, 'Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit,' then his temptation
will vanish, and I shall bring him in--I shall lead him home."

For an instant the Seigneur looked at him in amazement, for this was a
Cure he had never known.

"Dear Cure, you are not your old self," he said gently.

"I am not myself--yes, that is it, Maurice.  I am not the old humdrum
Cure you knew.  The whole world is my field now.  I have sorrowed for
sin, within the bounds of this little Chaudiere.  Now I sorrow for
unbelief.  Through this man, through much thinking on him, I have come to
feel the woe of all the world.  I have come to hear the footsteps of the
Master near.  My friend, it is not a legend, not a belief now, it is a
presence.  I owe him much, Maurice.  In bringing him home, I shall
understand what it all means--the faith that we profess.  I shall in
truth feel that it is all real.  You see how much I may yet owe to him--
to this infidel tailor.  I only hope I have not betrayed him," he added
anxiously.  "I would keep faith with him--ah, yes, indeed!"

"I only remember that you have said the man suffers.  That is no
betrayal."

They entered the village in silence.  Presently, however, the sound of
Maximilian Cour's violin, as they passed the bakery, set the Seigneur's
tongue wagging again, and it wagged on till they came to the tailor's
shop.

"Good-day to you, Monsieur," he said, as they entered.

"Have you a hot goose for me?"

"I have, but I will not press it on you," replied Charley.

"Should you so take my question--eh?"

"Should you so take my 'anser'?"

The pun was new to the Seigneur, and he turned to the Cure chuckling.
"Think of that, Cure!  He knows the classics."  He laughed till the tears
came into his eyes.

The next few moments Charley was busy measuring the two potentates for
greatcoats.  As it was his first work for them, it was necessary for the
Cure to write down the Seigneur's measurements, as the tailor called them
off, while the Seigneur did the same when the Cure was being measured.
So intent were the three it might have been a conference of war.  The
Seigneur ventured a distant but self-conscious smile when the measurement
of his waist was called, for he had by two inches the advantage of the
Cure, though they were the same age, while he was one inch better in the
chest.  The Seigneur was proud of his figure, and, unheeding the passing
of fashions, held to the knee-breeches and silk stockings long after they
had disappeared from the province.  To the Cure he had often said that
the only time he ever felt heretical was when in the presence of the
gaitered calves of a Protestant dean.  He wore his sleeves tight and his
stock high, as in the days when William the Sailor was king in England,
and his long gold-topped Prince Regent cane was the very acme of dignity.

The measurement done, the three studied the fashion plates--mostly five
years old--as Von Moltke and Bismarck might have studied the field of
Gravelotte.  The Seigneur's remarks were highly critical, till, with a
few hasty strokes on brown paper, Charley sketched in his figure with a
long overcoat in style much the same as his undercoat, stately and
flowing and confined at the waist.

"Admirable, most admirable!" said the Seigneur.  "The likeness is
astonishing"--he admired the carriage of his own head in Charley's swift
lines--"the garment in perfect taste.  Form--there is nothing like form
and proportion in life.  It is almost a religion."

"My dear friend!" said the Cure, in amazement.

"I know when I am in the presence of an artist and his work.  Louis
Trudel had rule and measure, shears and a needle.  Our friend here has
eye and head, sense of form and creative gift.  Ah, Cure, Cure, if I were
twenty-five, with the assistance of Monsieur, I would show the bucks in
Fabrique Street how to dress.  What style is this called, Monsieur?" he
suddenly asked, pointing to the drawing.

"Style a la Rossignol, Seigneur," said the tailor.

The Seigneur was flattered out of all reason.  He looked across at the
post-office, where he could see Rosalie dimly moving in the shade of the
shop.

"Ah, if I had but ordered this coat sooner!" he said regretfully.
He was thinking that to-morrow was Michaelmas day, when he was to ask
Rosalie for her answer again, and he fancied himself appearing before
her in the gentle cool of the evening, in this coat, lightly thrown back,
disclosing his embroidered waistcoat, seals, and snowy linen.  "Monsieur,
I am highly complimented, believe me," he said.  "Observe, Cure, that
this coat is invented for me on the spot."

The Cure nodded appreciatively.  "Wonderful!  Wonderful!  But do you
not think," he added, a little wistfully--for, was he not a Frenchman,
susceptible like all his race to the appearance of things?--"do you not
think it might be too fashionable for me?"

"Not a whit--not a whit," replied the Seigneur generously.  "Should not a
Cure look distinguished--be dignified?  Consider the length, the line,
the eloquence of design!  Ah, Monsieur, once again, you are an artist!
The Cure shall wear it--indeed but he shall!  Then I shall look like him,
and perhaps get credit for some of his perfections."

"And the Cure?" said Charley.

"The Cure?--the Cure?  Tiens, a little of my worldliness will do him
good.  There are no contrasts in him.  He must wear the coat."  He waved
his walking-stick complacently, for he was thinking that the Cure's less
perfect figure would set off his own well as they walked together.  "May
I have the honour to keep this as a souvenir?" he added, picking up the
sketch.

"With pleasure," answered Charley.  "You do not need it?"

"Not at all."

The Cure looked a little disappointed, and Charley, seeing, immediately
sketched on brown paper the priestly figure in the new-created coat,
a la Rossignol.  On this drawing he was a little longer engaged, with the
result that the Cure was reproduced with a singular fidelity--in face,
figure, and expression a personality gentle yet important.

"On my soul, you shall not have it!" said the Seigneur.  "But you shall
have me, and I shall have you, lest we both grow vain by looking at
ourselves."  He thrust the sketch of himself into the Cure's hands,
and carefully rolled up that of his friend.

The Cure was amazed at this gift of the tailor, and delighted with the
picture of himself--his vanity was as that of a child, without guile or
worldliness.  He was better pleased, however, to have the drawing of his
friend by him, that vanity might not be too companionable.  He thanked
Charley with a beaming face, and then the two friends bowed and moved
towards the door.  Suddenly the Cure stopped.

"My dear Maurice," said he, "we have forgotten the important thing."

"Think of that--we two old babblers!" said the Seigneur.  He nodded for
the Cure to begin.  "Monsieur," said the Cure to Charley, "you maybe able
to help us in a little difficulty.  For a long time we have intended
holding a great mission with a kind of religious drama like that
performed at Ober-Ammergau, and called The Passion Play.  You know of it,
Monsieur?"

"Very well through reading, Monsieur."

"Next Easter we propose having a Passion Play in pious imitation of
the famous drama.  We will hold it at the Indian reservation of Four
Mountains, thus quickening our own souls and giving a good object-lesson
of the great History to the Indians."

The Cure paused rather anxiously, but Charley did not speak.  His eyes
were fixed inquiringly on the Cure, and he had a sudden suspicion that
some devious means were forward to influence him.  He dismissed the
thought, however, for this Cure was simple as man ever was made,
straightforward as the most heretical layman might demand.

The Cure, taking heart, again continued: "Now I possess an authentic
description of the Ober-Ammergau drama, giving details of its
presentation at different periods, and also a book of the play.  But
there is no one in the parish who reads German, and it occurred to the
Seigneur and myself that, understanding French so well, by chance you may
understand German also, and would, perhaps, translate the work for us."

"I read German easily and speak it fairly," Charley answered, relieved;
"and you are welcome to my services."

The Cure's pale face flushed with pleasure.  He took the little German
book from his pocket, and handed it over.

"It is not so very long," he said; "and we shall all be grateful."  Then
an inspiration came to him; his eyes lighted.

"Monsieur," he said, "you will notice that there are no illustrations in
the book.  It is possible that you might be able to make us a few
drawings--if we do not ask too much?  It would aid greatly in the matter
of costume, and you might use my library--I have a fair number of
histories."  The Cure was almost breathless, his heart thumped as he made
the request.  After a slight pause he added, hastily: "You are always
doing for others.  It is hardly kind to ask you; but we have some months
to spare; there need be no haste."  Charley hastened to relieve the
Cure's anxiety.  "Do not apologise," he said.  "I will do what I can
when I can.  But as for drawing, Monsieur, it will be but amateurish."

"Monsieur," interposed the Seigneur promptly, "if you're not an artist,
I'm damned!"

"Maurice!" murmured the Cure reproachfully.  "Can't help it, Cure.  I've
held it in for an hour.  It had to come; so there it is exploded.  I see
no damage either, save to my own reputation.  Monsieur," he added to
Charley, "if I had gifts like yours, nothing would hold me.  I should put
on more airs than Beauty Steele."

It was fortunate that, at that instant, Charley's face was turned away,
or the Seigneur would have seen it go white and startled.  Charley did
not dare turn his head for the moment.  He could not speak.  What did
the Seigneur know of Beauty Steele?

To hide his momentary confusion, he went over to the drawer of a cupboard
in the wall, and placed the book inside.  It gave him time to recover
himself.  When he turned round again his face was calm, his manner
composed.

"And who, may I ask, is Beauty Steele?" he said.  "Faith I do not know,"
answered the Seigneur, taking a pinch of snuff.  "It's years since I
first read the phrase in a letter a scamp of a relative of mine wrote me
from the West.  He had met a man of the name, who had a reputation as a
clever fop, a very handsome fellow.  So I thought it a good phrase, and
I've used it ever since on occasions.  'More airs than Beauty Steele.'
--It has a sound; it's effective, I fancy, Monsieur?"

"Decidedly effective," answered Charley quietly.  He picked up his
shears.  "You will excuse me," he said grimly, "but I must earn my
living.  I cannot live on my reputation."

The Seigneur and the Cure lifted their hats--to the tailor.

"Au revoir, Monsieur," they both said, and Charley bowed them out.

The two friends turned to each other a little way up the street.
"Something will come of this, Cure," said the Seigneur.  The Cure,
whose face had a look of happiness, pressed his arm in reply.

Inside the tailor-shop, a voice kept saying, "More airs than Beauty
Steele!"





CHAPTER XXXIX

THE SCARLET WOMAN

Since the evening in the garden when she had been drawn into Charley's
arms, and then fled from them in joyful confusion, Rosalie had been in a
dream.  She had not closed her eyes all night, or, if she closed them,
they still saw beautiful things flashing by, to be succeeded by other
beautiful things.  It was a roseate world.  To her simple nature it was
not so important to be loved as to love.  Selfishness was as yet the
minor part of her.  She had been giving all her life--to her mother, as a
child; to sisters at the convent who had been kind to her; to the poor
and the sick of the parish; to her father, who was helpless without her;
to the tailor across the way.  In each case she had given more than she
had got.  A nature overflowing with impulsive affection, it must spend
itself upon others.  The maternal instinct was at the very core of her
nature, and care for others was as much a habit as an instinct with her.
She had love to give, and it must be given.  It had been poured like the
rain from heaven on the just and the unjust; on animals as on human
beings, and in so far as her nature, in the first spring--the very April
--of its powers, could do.

Till Charley had come to Chaudiere, it had all been the undisciplined
ardour of a girl's nature.  A change had begun in the moment when she had
tearfully thrust the oil and flour in upon his excoriated breast.  Later
came real awakening, and a riotous outpouring of herself in sympathy, in
observation, in a reckless kindness which must have done her harm but
that her clear intelligence balanced her actions, and because secrecy in
one thing helped to restrain her in all.  Yet with all the fresh overflow
of her spirit, which, assisted by her new position as postmistress, made
her a conspicuous and popular figure in the parish, where officialdom had
rare honour and little labour, she had prejudices almost unworthy of her,
due though they were to radical antipathy.  These prejudices, one against
Jo Portugais and the other against Paulette Dubois, she had never been
able entirely to overcome, though she had honestly tried.  On the way
to the hospital at Quebec, however, Jo had been so careful of her father,
so respectful when speaking of M'sieu', so regardful of her own comfort,
that her antagonism to him was lulled.  But the strong prejudice against
Paulette Dubois remained, casting a shadow on her bright spirit.

All this day she had moved about in a mellow dream, very busy, scarcely
thinking.  New feelings dominated her, and she was too primitive to
analyse them and too occupied with them to realise acutely the life about
her.  Work was an abstraction, resting rather than tiring her.

Many times she had looked across at the tailor-shop, only seeing Charley
once.  She did not wish to speak with him now, nor to be near him yet;
she wanted this day for herself only.

So it was that, soon after the Cure and the Seigneur had bade good-bye to
Charley, she left the post-office and went quickly through the village
to a spot by the river, where was a place called the Rest of the
Flaxbeaters.  It was an overhanging rock which made a kind of canopy over
a sweet spring, where, in the days when their labours sounded through the
valley, the flaxbeaters from the level below came to eat their meals and
to rest.

This had always been a resort for her in the months when the flax-beaters
did not use it.  Since a child she had made the place her own.  To this
day it is called Rosalie's Dell; for are not her sorrows and joys still
told by those who knew and loved her?  and is not the parish still
fragrant with her name?  Has not her history become a living legend a
thousand times told?

Leaving the village behind her, Rosalie passed down the high-road till
she came to a path that led off through a grove of scattered pines.
There would be yet a half-hour's sun and then a short twilight, and the
river and the woods and the Rest of the Flax-beaters would be her own;
and she could think of the wonderful thing come upon her.  She had
brought with her a book of English poems, and as she went through the
grove she opened it, and in her pretty English repeated over and over to
herself:

         "My heart is thine, and soul and body render
          Faith to thy faith; I give nor hold in thrall:
          Take all, dear love!  thou art my life's defender;
          Speak to my soul!  Take life and love; take all!"

She was lifted up by the abandonment of the verse, by the fulness of her
own feelings, which had only needed a touch of beauty to give it
exaltation.  The touch had come.

She went on abstractedly to the place where she had trysted with her
thoughts only, these many years, and, sitting down, watched the sun sink
beyond the trees, the shades of evening fall.  All that had happened
since Charley came to the parish she went over in her mind.  She
remembered the day he had said this, the day he had said that; she
brought back the night--it was etched upon her mind!--when he had said
to her, "You have saved my life, Mademoiselle!"  She recalled the time
she put the little cross back on the church-door, the ghostly footsteps
in the church, the light, the lost hood.  A shudder ran through her now,
for the mystery of that hood had never been cleared up.  But the words on
the page caught her eye again:

         "My heart is thine, and soul and body render
          Faith to thy faith .  .  ."

It swallowed up the moment's agitation.  Never till this day, never till
last night, had she dared to say to herself, He loves me.  He seemed so
far above her--she never had thought of him as a tailor!--that she had
given and never dared hope to receive, had lived without anticipation
lest there should come despair.  Even that day at Vadrome Mountain she
had not thought he meant love, when he had said to her that he would
remember to the last.  When he had said that he would die for love's
sake, he had not meant her, but others--some one else whom he would save
by his death.  Kathleen, that name which had haunted her--ah, whoever
Kathleen was, or whatever Kathleen had to do with him or his life, she
had no reason to fear Kathleen now.  She had no reason to fear any one;
for had she not heard his words of love as he clasped her in his arms
last night?  Had she not fled from that enfolding, because her heart was
so full in the hour of her triumph that she could not bear more, could
not look longer into the eyes to which she had told her love before his
was spoken?

In the midst of her thoughts she heard footsteps.  She started up.
Paulette Dubois suddenly appeared in the path below.  She had taken
the river-path down from Vadrome Mountain, where she had gone to see Jo
Portugais, who had not yet returned from Quebec.  Paulette's face was
agitated, her manner nervous.  For nights she had not slept, and her
approaching meeting with the tailor had made her tremble all day.
Excited as she was, there was a wild sort of beauty in her face, and her
figure was lithe and supple.  She dressed always a little garishly, but
now there was only that band of colour round the throat, worn last night
in the talk with Charley.

To both women this meeting was as a personal misfortune, a mutual
affront.  Each had a natural antipathy.  To Rosalie the invasion of her
beloved retreat was as hateful as though the woman had purposely
intruded.

For a moment they confronted each other without speaking, then Rosalie's
natural courtesy, her instinctive good-heartedness, overcame her
irritation, and she said quietly:

"Good-evening, Madame."

"I am not Madame, and you know it," answered the woman harshly.

"I am sorry.  Good-evening, Mademoiselle," rejoined Rosalie evenly.

"You wanted to insult me.  You knew I wasn't Madame."

Rosalie shook her head.  "How should I know?  You have not always lived
in Chaudiere, you have lived in Montreal, and people often call you
Madame."

"You know better.  You know that letters come to me from Montreal
addressed Mademoiselle."

Rosalie turned as if to go.  "I do not recall what letters pass through
the post-office.  I have a good memory for forgetting.  Good-evening,"
she added, with an excess of courtesy.  Paulette read the placid scorn in
the girl's face; she did not see and would not understand that Rosalie
did not scorn her for what she had ever done, but for something that she
was.

"You think I am the dirt under your feet," she said, now white, now red,
and mad with anger.  "I'm not fit to speak with you--I'm a rag for the
dust pile!"

"I have never thought so," answered Rosalie.  "I have not liked you, but
I am sorry for you, and I never thought those things."

"You lie!" was the rejoinder; and Rosalie, turning away quickly with
trouble in her face, put her hands to her ears, and, hastening down the
hillside, did not hear the words the woman called after her.

"To-morrow every one shall know you are a thief.  Run, run, run!  You can
hear what I say, white-face!  They shall know about the little cross
to-morrow."

She followed Rosalie at a distance, her eyes blazing.  As fate would have
it, she met on the highroad the least scrupulous man in the parish, an
inveterate gossip, the keeper of the general store, whose only opposition
in business was the post-office shop.  He was the centre of the village
tittle-tattle, and worse.  With malicious speed Paulette told him how she
had seen Rosalie Evanturel nailing the little cross on the church door of
a certain night.  If he wanted proof of what she said, let him ask Jo
Portugais.

Having spat out her revenge, she went on to the village, and through it
to her house, where she prepared to visit the shop of the tailor.  Her
sense of retaliation satisfied, Rosalie passed from her mind; her child
only occupied it.  In another hour she would know where her child was--
the tailor had promised that she should.  Then perhaps she would be sorry
for the accident to the Notary; for it was an accident, in spite of
appearances.

It was dark when Paulette entered the door of the tailor's house.  When
she came out, a half-hour later, with elation in her carriage, and tears
of joy running down her face, she did not look about her; she did not
care whether or not any one saw her: she was possessed with only one
thought--her child!  She passed like a swift wind down the street, making
for home and for her departure to the hiding-place of her child.

She had not seen a figure in the shadow of a tree near by as she came
from the tailor's door.  She had not heard a smothered cry behind her.
She was not aware that in unspeakable agony another woman knocked softly
at the door of the tailor's house, and, not waiting for an answer, opened
it and entered.  It was Rosalie Evanturel.




CHAPTER XL

AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING

The kitchen was empty, but light fell through the door of the shop
opening upon the little hall between.  Rosalie crossed the hall and stood
in the doorway of the shop, a figure of concentrated indignation,
despair, and shame.  Leaning on his elbow Charley was bending over a book
in the light of a candle on the bench be side him.  He was reading aloud,
translating into English the German text of the narrative the Cure had
given him:

     "And because of this divine interposition, consequent upon their
     faithful prayers and their oblations, they did perform these holy
     scenes from season to season, with solemn proof of piety and godly
     living, so that it seemed the life of the Lord our Shepherd was ever
     present with them, as though, indeed, Ober-Ammergau were Nazareth or
     Jerusalem.  And the hearts of all in the land did answer daily to
     that sweet and lively faith, insomuch that even in times of war the
     zeal of the people became an holy zeal, and their warfare noble; so
     that they did accept both victory and defeat with equal humbleness.
     Because there was no war in their hearts, but peace, and they did
     fight to defend and not to acquire, they buried their foe with tears
     and their own with singleness of heart and quiet joy, for that they
     did rest from their labours.  In this manner was the great tragedy
     and glory of the world made to the people a present thing,
     transforming them to the body of the Life that hath neither spot nor
     blemish nor .  .  ."

Charley had not heard Rosalie enter, nor her footsteps in the hall.  But
now there ran through his reading a thread of something not of himself or
of it.  He had thrilled to the archaic but clear-hearted style of the old
German chronicler, and the warmth he felt had passed into his voice, so
that it became louder.

As Rosalie listened to his reading, a hundred thoughts rushed through
her mind.  Paulette Dubois, the wanton woman, had just left his doorway
secretly, yet there he was, instantly after, calmly reading a pious book!
Her mind was in tumult.  She could not reason, she could not rule her
judgment.  She only knew that the woman had come from this house, and
hurried guiltily away into the dark.  She only knew that the man the
woman had left here was the man she loved--loved more than her life, for
he embodied all her past; all her present--she knew that she could not
live without him; all her future--for where he went she would go,
whatever the fate.

Her judgment had been swept from its moorings.  She had been carried on
the wave of her heart's fever into this room, not daring to think this
or that, not planning this or that, not accusing, not reproaching, not
shaming herself and him by black suspicion, but blindly, madly demanding
to see him, to look into his eyes, to hear his voice, to know him,
whatever he was--man, lover, or devil.  She was a child-woman--a child in
her primitive feelings that threw aside all convention, because there was
no wrong in her heart; a woman, because she was possessed by a jealousy
which shamed and angered her, because its very existence put him on
trial, condemned him.  Her soul was the sport of emotions and passions
stronger than herself, because the heritage, the instinct, of all the
race of women, the eternal predisposition.  At the moment her will
was not sufficient to rule them to obedience.  She was in the first
subservience to that power which feeds the streams of human history.

As she now listened to Charley reading, a sudden revulsion of feeling
came over her.  Some note in his voice reassured her heart--if it needed
reassuring.  The quiet force of his presence stilled the tumult in her,
so that her eyes could see without mist, her heart beat without agony;
but every pulse in her was throbbing, every instinct was alive.
Presently there rushed upon her the words that had rung in her ears and
chimed in her heart at the Rest of the Flax-beaters:

         "Take all, dear love!  thou art my life's defender;
          Speak to my soul!  Take life and love; take all."

Feelings lying beneath the mad conflict of emotion which had sent her
into this room in such unmaidenly fashion--feelings that were her deepest
self-welled up.  Her breath came hard and broken.

As Charley read on, a breathing seemed to answer his own.  It became
quicker than his own, it pierced the stillness, it filled the room with
feeling, it came calling to him out of the silence.  He swung round, and
saw the girl in the doorway.

"Rosalie!" he cried, and sprang to his feet.

With a piteously pathetic cry, she flung herself on her knees beside the
tailor's bench where he worked every day, and, burying her face in her
arms as they rested on the bench, wept bitterly.

"Rosalie!" he said anxiously, leaning over her.  "What is the matter?
What has happened?"

She wept more bitterly still; she made a despairing gesture.  His hand
touched her hair; he dropped on a knee beside her.

"Oh, I am so ashamed, ashamed!  I have been so wicked," she murmured.

"Rosalie, what has happened?" he urged gently.  His own heart was
beating hard, his own eyes were responding to hers.  The new feelings
alive in him, the forces his love had awakened, which, last night, had
kept him sleepless, and had been upon him like a dream all day--they
were at height in him now.  He knew not how to command them.

"Rosalie, dearest, tell me all!" he persisted.

"I shall never--I have been--oh--you will never forgive me!" she said
brokenly.  "I knew it wasn't true, but I couldn't help it.  I saw her--
the woman--come from your house, and--"

"Hush!  For God's sake, hush!" he broke in almost harshly.  Then a
better understanding came upon him, and it made him gentle with her.

"Ah, Rosalie, you did not think!  But--but it was natural you should wish
to see me.  .  .  ."

"But, as soon as I saw you, I knew that--that--" She broke down again and
wept.

"I will tell you about her, Rosalie--" His fingers stroked her hair, and,
bending over her, his face was near her hands.

"No, no, tell me nothing--oh, if you tell me!--"

"She came to hear from me what she ought to have heard from the Notary.
She has had great trouble--the man--her child--and I have helped her,
told her--" His face was so near now that his breath was on her hair.
She suddenly raised her head and clasped his face in her hands.

"I knew--oh, I knew, I knew .  .  .  !" she wept, and her eyes drank
his.

"Rosalie, my life!" he cried, clasping her in his arms.

The love that was in him, new-born and but half understood, poured itself
out in broken words like her own.  For him there was no outside world; no
past, no Kathleen, no Billy; no suspicion, or infidelity, or unfaith; no
fear of disaster; no terrors of the future.  Life was Now to him and to
her: nothing brooded behind, nothing lay before.  The candle spluttered
and burnt low in the socket.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

A left-handed boy is all right in the world
Damnable propinquity
Hugging the chain of denial to his bosom
I have a good memory for forgetting
Importunity with discretion was his motto
It is good to live, isn't it?
Know how bad are you, and doesn't mind
Strike first and heal after--"a kick and a lick"






THE RIGHT OF WAY

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 5.



XLI.      IT WAS MICHAELMAS DAY
XLII.     A TRIAL AND A VERDICT
XLIII.    JO PORTUGAIS TELLS A STORY
XLIV.     "WHO WAS KATHLEEN?"
XLV.      SIX MONTHS GO BY
XLVI.     THE FORGOTTEN MAN
XLVII.    ONE WAS TAKEN AND THE OTHER LEFT
XLVIII.   "WHERE THE TREE OF LIFE IS BLOOMING--"
XLIX.     THE OPEN GATE




CHAPTER XLI

IT WAS MICHAELMAS DAY

Not a cloud in the sky, and, ruling all, a sweet sun, liberal in
warmth and eager in brightness as its distance from the northern world
decreased.  As Mrs. Flynn entered the door of the post-office she sang
out to Maximilian Cour, with a buoyant lilt: "Oh, isn't it the fun o' the
world to be alive!"

The tailor over the way heard it, and lifted his head with a smile;
Rosalie Evanturel, behind the postal wicket, heard it, and her face swam
with colour.  Rosalie busied herself with the letters and papers for a
moment before she answered Mrs. Flynn's greeting, for there were ringing
in her ears the words she herself had said a few days before: "It is good
to live, isn't it?"

To-day it was so good to live that life seemed an endless being and
a tireless happy doing--a gift of labour, an inspiring daytime, and
a rejoicing sleep.  Exaltation, a painful joy, and a wide embarrassing
wonderment possessed her.  She met Mrs. Flynn's face at the wicket with
shining eyes and a timid smile.

"Ah, there y'are, darlin'!" said Mrs. Flynn.  "And how's the dear father
to-day?"

"He seems about the same, thank you."

"Ah, that's foine.  Shure, if we could always be 'about the same,' we'd
do.  True for you, darlin', 'tis as you say.  If ould Mary Flynn could
be always "bout the same,' the clods o' the valley would never cover her
bones.  But there 'tis--we're here to-day, and away tomorrow.  Shure,
though, I am not complainin'.  Not I--not Mary Flynn.  Teddy Flynn used
to say to me, says he: 'Niver born to know distress!  Happy as worms in a
garden av cucumbers.  Seventeen years in this country, Mary,' says he,
'an' nivir in the pinitintiary yet.'  There y'are.  Ah, the birds do be
singin' to-day!  'Tis good!  'Tis good, darlin'!  You'll not mind Mary
Flynn callin' you darlin', though y'are postmistress, an' 'll be more
than that--more than that wan day--or Mary Flynn's a fool.  Aye, more
than that y'll be, darlin', and y're eyes like purty brown topazzes and
y're cheeks like roses-shure, is there anny lether for Mary Flynn,
darlin'?" she hastily added as she saw the Seigneur standing in the
doorway.  He had evidently been listening.

"Ye didn't hear what y're ould fool of a cook was sayin'," she added to
the Seigneur, as Rosalie shook her head and answered: "No letters,
Madame--dear."  Rosalie timidly added the dear, for there was something
so great-hearted in Mrs. Flynn that she longed to clasp her round the
neck, longed as she had never done in her life to lay her head upon some
motherly breast and pour out her heart.  But it was not to be now.
Secrecy was her duty still.

"Can't ye speak to y're ould fool of a cook, sir?" Mrs. Flynn said
again, as the Seigneur made way for her to leave the shop.

"How did you guess?" he said to her in a low voice, his sharp eyes
peering into hers.

"By the looks in y're face these past weeks, and the look in hers," she
whispered, and went on her way rejoicing.

"I'll wind thim both round me finger like a wisp o' straw," she said,
going up the road with a light step, despite her weight, till she was
stopped by the malicious grocer-man of the village, whose tongue had been
wagging for hours upon an unwholesome theme.

Meanwhile, in the post-office, the Seigneur and Rosalie were face to
face.

"It is Michaelmas day," he said.  "May I speak with you, Mademoiselle?"

She looked at the clock.  It was on the stroke of noon.  The shop always
closed from twelve till half-past twelve.

"Will you step into the parlour, Monsieur?" she said, and coming round
the counter, locked the shop-door.  She was trembling and confused, and
entered the little parlour shyly.  Yet her eyes met the Seigneur's
bravely.  "Your father, how is he?" he said, offering her a chair.  The
sunlight streaming in the window made a sort of pathway of light between
them, while they were in the shade.

"He seems no worse, and to-day he is wheeling himself about."

"He is stronger, then--that's good.  Is there any fear that he must go to
the hospital again?"

She inclined her head.  "The doctor says he may have to go any moment.
It may be his one chance.  The Cure is very kind, and says that, with
your permission, his sister will keep the office here, if--if needed."

The Seigneur nodded briskly.  "Of course, of course.  But have you not
thought that we might secure another postmistress?"

Her face clouded a little; her heart beat hard.  She knew what was
coming.  She dreaded it, but it was better to have it over now.

"We could not live without it," she said helplessly.

"What we have saved is not enough.  The little my mother had must pay for
the visits to the hospital.  I have kept it for that.  You see, I need
the place here."

"But you have thought, just the same.  Do you not know the day?" he
asked meaningly.

She was silent.

"I have come to ask you to marry me--this is Michaelmas day, Rosalie."

She did not speak.  He had hopes from her silence.  "If anything happened
to your father, you could not live here alone--but a young girl!  Your
father may be in the hospital for a long time.  You cannot afford that.
If I were to offer you money, you would refuse.  If you marry me, all
that I have is yours to dispose of at your will: to make others happy,
to take you now and then from this narrow place, to see what's going on
in the world."

"I am happy here," she said falteringly.

"Chaudiere is the finest place in the world," he replied proudly, and as
a matter of fact.  "But, for the sake of knowledge, you should see what
the rest of the world is.  It helps you to understand Chaudiere better.
I ask you to be my wife, Rosalie."

She shook her head sorrowfully.

"You said before, it was not because I am old, not because I am rich, not
because I am Seigneur, not because I am I, that you refused me."

She smiled at him now.  "That is true," she said.

"Then what reason can you have?  None, none.  'Pon honour, I believe you
are afraid of marriage because it's marriage.  By my life, there's naught
to dread.  A little giving here and taking there, and it's easy.  And
when a woman is all that's good, to a man, it can be done without fear or
trembling.  Even the Cure would tell you that."

"Ah, I know, I know," she said, in a voice half painful, half joyous.
"I know that it is so.  But, oh, dear Monsieur, I cannot marry you--
never--never."

He hung on bravely.  "I want to make life easy and happy for you.  I want
the right to do so.  When trouble comes upon you--"

"When it does I will turn to you--ah, yes, I would turn to you without
fear, dear Monsieur," she said, and her heart ached within her, for a
premonition of sorrow came upon her and filled her eyes, and made her
heart like lead within her breast.  "I know how true a gentleman you
are," she added.  "I could give you everything but that which is life
to me, which is being, and soul, and the beginning and the end."

The weight of the revealing hour of her life, its wonder, its agony, its
irrevocability, was upon her.  It was giving new meanings to existence-
primitive woman, child of nature as she was.  All morning she had longed
to go out into the woods and bury herself among the ferns and bracken,
and laugh and weep for very excess of feeling, downright joy and vague
woe possessing her at once.  She looked the Seigneur in the eyes with
consuming earnestness.

"Oh, it is not because I am young," she said, in a low voice, "for I am
old--indeed, I am very old.  It is because I cannot love you, and never
can love you in the one great way; and I will not marry without love.  My
heart is fixed on that.  When I marry, it will be when I love a man so
much that I cannot live without him.  If he is so poor that each meal is
a miracle, it will make no difference.  Oh, can't you see, can't you
feel, what I mean, Monsieur--you who are so wise and learned, and know
the world so well?"

"Wise and learned!" he said, a little roughly, for his voice was husky
with emotion.  "'Pon honour, I think I am a fool!  A bewildered fool,
that knows no more of woman than my cook knows Sanscrit.  Faith, a
hundred times less!  For Mary Flynn's got an eye to see, and, without
telling, she knew I had a mind set on you.  But Mary Flynn thought more
than that, for she has an idea that you've a mind set on some one,
Rosalie.  She thought it might be me."

"A woman is not so easily read as a man," she replied, half smiling, but
with her eyes turned to the street.  A few people were gathering in front
of the house--she wondered why.

"There is some one else--that is it, Rosalie.  There is some one else.
You shall tell me who it is.  You shall--"

He stopped short, for there was a loud knocking at the shop-door, and the
voice of M. Evanturel calling: "Rosalie!  Rosalie!  Rosalie!  Ah, come
quickly--ah, my Rosalie!"

Without a look at the Seigneur, Rosalie rushed into the shop and opened
the front door.  Her father was deathly pale, and was trembling
violently.

"Rosalie, my bird," he cried indignantly, "they're saying you stole the
cross from the church door."

He was now wheeled inside the shop, and people gathered round, looking
at him and Rosalie, some covertly, some as friends, some in a half-
frightened way, as though strange things were about to happen.

"Shure, 'tis a lie, or me name's not Mary Flynn--the darlin'!" said the
Seigneur's cook, with blazing face.  "Who makes this charge?" roared an
angry voice.  No one had seen the Seigneur enter from the little room
beside the shop, and at the sound of the sharp voice the people fell
back, for he was as free with his stick as his tongue.

"I do," said the grocer, to whom Paulette Dubois had told her story.

"Ye shall be tarred and feathered before y'are a day older," said Mary
Flynn.

Rosalie was very pale.

The Seigneur was struck by this and by the strangeness of her look.

"Clear the room," he said to Filion Lacasse, who was now a constable of
the parish.

"Not yet!" said a voice at the doorway.  "What is the trouble?"  It was
the Cure, who had already heard rumours of the scandal, and had come at
once to Rosalie.  M. Evanturel tried to speak, and could not.  But Mary
Flynn did, with a face like a piece of scarlet bunting.  Having finished
with a flourish, she could scarce keep her hands off the cowardly grocer.

The Cure turned to Rosalie.  "It is absurd," he said.  "Forgive me," he
added to the Seigneur.  "It is better that Rosalie should answer this
charge.  If she gives her word of honour, I will deny communion to
whoever slanders her hereafter."

"She did it," said the grocer stubbornly.  "She can't deny it."

"Answer, Rosalie," said the Cure firmly.

"Excuse me; I will answer," said a voice at the door.  The tailor of
Chaudiere made his way into the shop, through the fast-gathering crowd.




CHAPTER XLII

A TRIAL AND A VERDICT

"What right have you to answer for mademoiselle?" said the Seigneur,
with a sudden rush of jealousy.  Was not he alone the protector of
Rosalie Evanturel?  Yet here was mystery, and it was clear the tailor had
something important to say.  M. Rossignol offered the Cure a chair,
seated himself on a small bench, and gently drew Rosalie down beside him.

"I will make this a court," said he.  "Advance, grocer."

The grocer came forward smugly.

"On what information do you make this charge against mademoiselle?"

The grocer volubly related all that Paulette Dubois had said.  As he
told his tale the Cure's face was a study, for the night the cross was
restored came back to him, and the events, so far as he knew them, were
in keeping with the grocer's narrative.  He looked at Rosalie anxiously.
Monsieur Evanturel moaned, for he remembered he had heard Rosalie come in
very late that night.  Yet he fixed his eyes on her in dog-like faith.

"Mademoiselle will admit that this is true, I presume," said Charley.

Rosalie looked at him intently, as though to read his very heart.  It was
clear that he wished her to say yes; and what he wished was law.

"It is quite true," answered Rosalie calmly, and all fear passed from
her.

"But she did not steal the cross," continued Charley, in a louder voice,
that all might hear, for people were gathering fast.

"If she didn't steal it, why was she putting it back on the church door
in the dark?" said the grocer.  "Ah, hould y'r head, ould sand-in-the-
sugar!" said Mrs. Flynn, her fingers aching to get into his hair.
"Silence!" said the Seigneur severely, and looked inquiringly at
Rosalie.  Rosalie looked at Charley.

"It is not a question of why mademoiselle put the cross back," he said.
"It is a question of who took the cross away, is it not?  Suppose it was
not a theft.  Suppose that the person who took the relic thought to do a
pious act--for your Church, Monsieur?"

"I do not see," the Cure answered helplessly.  "It was a secret act,
therefore suspicious at least."

"'Let your good gifts be in secret, and your Heavenly Father who seeth in
secret will reward you openly,"' answered Charley.  "That, I believe, is
a principle you teach, Monsieur."

"At one time Monsieur the tailor was thought to have taken the cross,"
said the Seigneur suggestively.  "Perhaps Monsieur was secretly doing
good with it?" he added.  It vexed him that there should be a secret
between Rosalie and this man.

"It had to do with me, not I with it," he answered evenly.  He must
travel wide at first to convince their narrow brains.  "Mademoiselle did
a kind act when she nailed that cross on the church door again--to make
a dead man rest easier in his grave."

A hush fell upon the crowd.

Rosalie looked at Charley in surprise; but she saw his meaning presently
--that what she did for him must seem to have been done for the dead
tailor only.  Her heart beat hot with indignation, for she would, if
she but might, cry her love gladly from the hill-tops of the world.

Alight began to break upon the Cure's mind.  "Will Monsieur speak
plainly?" he said.

"I did not see Louis Trudel take the cross, but I know that he did."

"Louis Trudel!  Louis Trudel!" interposed the Seigneur anxiously.  "What
does this mean?"

"Monsieur speaks the truth," interposed Rosalie.  The Cure recalled the
death-bed of Louis Trudel, and the dying man's strange agitation.  He
also recalled old Margot's death, and her wish to confess some one else's
wrong-doing.  He was convinced that Charley was speaking the truth.

"It is true," added Charley slowly; "but you may think none the worse of
him when you know all.  He took the cross for temporary use, and before
he could replace it he died."

"How do you know what he meant, or did not mean?" said the Seigneur in
perplexity.  "Did he take you into his confidence?"

"The very closest," answered Charley grimly.

"Yet he looked upon you as an infidel, and said hard things of you on his
death-bed," urged the Cure anxiously.  He could not see the end of the
tale, and he was troubled for both the dead man and the living.

"That was why he took me into his confidence.  I will explain.  I have
not the honour to have the fulness of your Christian faith, Monsieur le
Cure.  I had asked him to show me a sign from heaven, and he showed it by
the little iron cross."

"I can't make anything of that," said the Seigneur peevishly.

Rosalie sprang to her feet.  "He will not tell the whole truth,
Messieurs, but I will.  With that little cross Louis Trudel would have
killed Monsieur, had it not been for me."

A gasp of excitement went out from those who stood by.

"But for you, Rosalie?" asked the Cure.

"But for me.  I saw Louis Trudel raise an iron against Monsieur that day
in the shop.  It made me nervous--I thought he was mad.  So I watched.
That night I saw a light in the tailor-shop late.  I thought it strange.
I went over and peeped through the cracks of the shutters.  I saw old
Louis at the fire with the little cross, red-hot.  I knew he meant
trouble.  I ran into the house.  Old Margot was beside herself with fear
--she had seen also.  I ran through the hall and saw old Louis upstairs
with the burning cross.  I followed.  He went into Monsieur's room.  When
I got to the door"--she paused, trembling, for she saw Charley's
reproving eyes upon her--"I saw him with the cross--with the cross raised
over Monsieur."

"He meant to threaten me," interposed Charley quickly.

"We will have the truth!" said the Seigneur, in a husky voice.

"The cross came down on Monsieur's bare breast."  The grocer laughed
vindictively.

"Silence!" growled the Seigneur.

"Silence!" said Filion Lacasse, and dropped his hand on the grocer's
shoulder.  "I'll baste you with a stirrup-strap."

"The rest is well known," quickly interposed Charley.  "The poor man was
mad.  He thought it a pious act to mark an infidel with the cross."

Every eye was fixed upon him.  The Cure remembered Louis Trudel's last
words: "Look--look--I gave--him--the sign--of .  .  .  !"  Old Margot's
words also kept ringing in his ears.  He turned to the Seigneur.
"Monsieur," said he, "we have heard the truth.  That act of Louis Trudel
was cruel and murderous.  May God forgive him!  I will not say that
mademoiselle did well in keeping silent--"

"God bless the darlin'!" cried Mrs. Flynn.

"--but I will say that she meant to do a kind act for a man's mortal
memory--perhaps at the expense of his soul."

"For Monsieur to take his injury in silence, to keep it secret, was
kind," said the Seigneur.  "It is what our Cure here might call bearing
his cross manfully."

"Seigneur," said the Cure reproachfully, "Seigneur, it is no subject for
jest."

"Cure, our tailor here has treated it as a jest."

"Let him show his breast, if it's true," said the grocer, who, beneath
his smirking, was a malignant soul.

The Cure turned on him sharply.  Seldom had any one seen the Cure roused.

"Who are you, Ba'tiste Maxime, that your base curiosity should be
satisfied--you, whose shameless tongue clattered, whose foolish soul
rejoiced over the scandal?  Must we all wear the facts of our lives--our
joys, our sorrows, and our sins--for such eyes as yours to read?  Bethink
you of the evil things that you would hide--aye, every one here!" he
added loudly.  "Know, all of you, what goodness of heart towards a wicked
man lay behind the secret these two have kept, that old Margot carried to
her grave.  When you go to your homes, pray for as much human kindness in
you as a man of no Church or faith can show.  For this child"--he turned
to Rosalie-"honour her!  Go now--go in peace!"

"One moment," said the Seigneur.  "I fine Ba'tiste Maxime twenty dollars
for defamation of character.  The money to go for the poor."

"You hear that, ould sand-in-the-sugar!" said Mrs. Flynn.  "Will you let
me kiss ye, darlin'?" she added to Rosalie, and, waddling over, reached
out her hands.

Rosalie's eyes were wet as she warmly kissed the old Irishwoman, and
thereupon they entered into a friendship which was without end.

The Seigneur drove the crowd from the shop, and shut the door.

The Cure came to Charley.  "Monsieur," said he, "I have no words.
When I remember what agonies you suffered in those hours, how bravely you
endured them--ah, Monsieur!" he added, with moist eyes, "I shall always
feel that--that you are not far from the kingdom of God."

A silence fell upon them, for the Cure, the Seigneur, and Rosalie, as
they looked at Charley, thought of the scar like a red cross on his
breast.

It touched Charley with a kind of awe.  He smiled painfully.  "Shall I
give you proof?" he said, making a motion to undo his waistcoat.

"Monsieur!" said the Seigneur reprovingly, and holding out his hand.
"Monsieur!  We are all gentlemen!"




CHAPTER XLIII

JO PORTUGAIS TELLS A STORY

Walking slowly, head bent, eyes unseeing, Charley was on his way to
Vadrome Mountain, with the knowledge that Jo Portugais had returned.

The hunger for companionship was on him: to touch some mind that could
understand the deep loneliness which had settled on him since that scene
in the postoffice.  It was the loneliness of a new and great separation.
He had wakened to it to-day.

Once before, in the hut on Vadrome Mountain, he had wakened from a grave,
had been born again.  Last night had come still another birth, had come,
as with Rosalie herself, knowledge, revelation, understanding.  To
Rosalie the new vision had come with a vague pain of heart, without
shame, and with a wonderful happiness.  Pain, shame, knowledge, and a
happiness that passed suddenly into a despairing sorrow, had come to him.

In finding love he had found conscience, and in finding conscience he was
on his way to another great discovery.

Looking to where Jo Portugais' house was set among the pines, Charley
remembered the day--he saw the scene in his mind's eye--when Rosalie
entered with the letter addressed "To the sick man at the house of Jo
Portugais, at Vadrome Mountain," and he saw again her clear, unsoiled
soul in the deep inquiring eyes.

"If you but knew"--he turned and looked down at the village below--
"if you but knew!" he said, as though to all the world.  "I have the
sign from heaven--I know it now.  To-day I wake to know what life means,
and I see--Rosalie!  I know now--but how?  In taking all she had to give.
What does she get in return?  Nothing--nothing.  Because I love her,
because the whole world is nothing beside her, nor life, nor twenty
lives, if I had them to give, I must say to her now: 'Rosalie, it was
love that brought you to my arms, it is love that says, Thus far and no
farther.  Never again--never--never--never!' Yesterday I could have left
her--died or vanished, without real hurt to her.  She would have mourned
and broken her heart and mended it again; and I should have been only a
memory--of mystery, of tenderness.  Then, one day she would have married,
and no sting from my going would have remained.  She would have had
happiness, and I neither shame nor despair.  .  .  .  To-day it is all
too late.  We have drunk too deep-alas! too deep.  She cannot marry
another man, for ghosts will not lie for asking, and what is mine may not
be another's.  She cannot marry me, for what once was mine is mine still
by ring and by book, and I should always be haunted by a torturing
shadow.  Kathleen has the right of way, not Rosalie.  Ah, Rosalie,
I dare not wrong you further.  Yet to marry you, even as things are,
if that might be!  To live on here unrecognised?  I am little like my
old self, and year after year I should grow less and less like Charley
Steele.  .  .  .  But, no, it is not possible!"

He stopped short in his thoughts, and his lips tightened in bitterness.

"God in heaven, what an impasse!" he said aloud.

There was a sudden crackling of twigs as a man rose up from a log by the
wayside ahead of him.  It was Jo Portugais, who had seen him coming, and
had waited for him.  He had heard Charley's words.

"Do you call me an impasse, M'sieu'?"  Charley grasped Portugais' hand.

"What has happened, M'sieu'?" Jo asked anxiously.  There was a brief
silence, and then Charley told him of the events of the morning.

"You know of the mark-here?" he asked, touching his breast.

Jo nodded.  "I saw, when you were ill."

"Yet you never asked!"

"I studied it out--I knew old Louis Trudel.  Also, I saw ma'm'selle nail
the cross to the church door.  Two and two together in my mind did it.
I didn't think Paulette Dubois would tell.  I warned her."

"She quarrelled with mademoiselle.  It was revenge.

"She might have been less vindictive.  She had had good luck herself
lately."

"What good luck had she, M'sieu'?"

Charley told Jo the story of the Notary, the woman, and the child.

Jo made no comment.  They relapsed into silence.  Arriving at the house,
they entered.  Jo lighted his pipe, and smoked steadily for a time
without speaking.  Buried in thought, Charley stood in the doorway
looking down at the village.  At last he turned.

"Where have you been these weeks past, Jo?"

"To Quebec first, M'sieu'."

Charley looked curiously at Jo, for there was meaning in his tone.  "And
where last?"

"To Montreal."

Charley's face became paler, his hands suddenly clinched, for he read the
look in Jo's eyes.  He knew that Jo had been looking at people and places
once so familiar; that he had seen--Kathleen.

"Go on.  Tell me all," he said heavily.

Portugais spoke in English.  The foreign language seemed to make the
truth less naked and staring to himself.  He had a hard story to tell.

"It is not to say why I go to Montreal," he began.  "But I go.  I have my
ears open; my eyes, she is not close.  No one knows me--I am no account
of.  Every one is forgot the man, Joseph Nadeau, who was try for his
life.  Perhaps it is every one is forget the lawyer who save his neck--
perhaps?  So I stand by the streetside.  I say to a man as I look up at
sign-boards,' 'Where is that writing "M'sieu' Charles Steele," and all
the res'?' 'He is dead long ago,' say the man to me.  'A good thing too,
for he was the very devil.'  'I not understan',' I say.  'I tink that
M'sieu' Steele is a dam smart man back time.'  'He was the smartes' man
in the country, that Beauty Steele,' the man say. 'He bamboozle the jury
hevery time.  He cut up bad though.'"

Charley raised his hand with a nervous gesture of misery and impatience.

"'Where have you been,' that man say--'where have you been all these
times not to know 'bout Charley Steele, hein?'  'In the backwoods,'
I say.  'What bring you here now?' he ask.  'I have a case,' I say.
'What is it?' he ask.  'It is a case of a man who is punish for another
man,' I say.  'That's the thing for Charley Steele,' he laugh.  'He was
great man to root things out.  Can't fool Charley Steele, we use to say
here.  But he die a bad death.'  'What was the matter with him?' I say.
'He drink too much, he spend too much, he run after a girl at Cote
Dorion, and the river-drivers do for him one night.  They say it was
acciden', but is there any green on my eye?  But he die trump--jus' like
him.  He have no fear of devil or man,' so the man say.  'But fear of
God?' I ask.  'He was hinfidel,' he say.  'That was behin' all.  He was
crooked all roun'. He rob the widow and horphan?'  'I think he too smart
for that,' I speak quick.  'I suppose it was the drink,' he say.  'He
loose his grip.' 'He was a smart man, an' he would make you all sit up,
if he come back,' I hanswer.  'If he come back!' The man laugh queer at
that.  'If he comeback, there would be hell.'  'How is that?' I say.
'Look across the street,' he whisper.  'That was his wife.'"

Charley choked back a cry in his throat.  Jo had no intention of cutting
his story short.  He had an end in view.

"I look across the street.  There she is--' Ah, that is a fine woman
to see!  I have never seen but one more finer to look at--here in
Chaudiere.' The man say: 'She marry first for money, and break her heart;
now she marry for love.  If Beauty Steele come back-eh! sacra!  that
would be a mess.  But he is at the bottom of the St  Lawrence--the courts
say so, and the Church say so--and ghosts don't walk here.' 'But if that
Beauty Steele come back alive, what would happen it?' I speak.  'His wife
is marry, blockhead!' he say.

"'But the woman is his,' I hanswer.  'Do you think she would go back to a
thief she never love from the man she love?' he speak back.  'She is not
marry to the other man,' I say, 'if Beauty Steele is .  .  .'  'He is
dead as a door,' he swear.  'You see that?' he go on, nodding down the
street.  'Well, that is Billy.'  'Who is Billy?' I ask.  'The brother of
her,' he say.  'Charley, he spoil Billy.  Billy, he has not been the same
since Charley's death-he is so ashame of Charley.  When he get drunk he
talk of nothing else.  We all remember that Charley spoil him, and that
make us sorry for him.'  'Excuse me,' I say.  'I think that Billy is a
dam smart man.  He is smart as Charley Steele.'  'Charley was the
smartes' man in the country,' he say again.  'I've got his practice now,
but this town will never be the same without him.  Thief or no thief,
I wish he is alive here.  By the Lord, I'd get drunk with him!'  He was
all right, that man," Jo added finally.

Charley's agitation was hidden.  His eyes were fixed on Jo intently.
"That was Larry Rockwell.  Go on," he said, in a hard metallic voice.

"I see--her, the next night again.  It is in the white stone house on the
hill.  All the windows are open, an' I can hear her to sing.  I not know
that song.  It begin, 'Oft in the stilly night'--like that."

Charley stiffened.  It was the song Kathleen sang for him the night they
became engaged.

"It is a good voice-that.  I see her face, for there is a candle on the
piano.  I come close and closter to the house.  There is big maple-trees
--I am well hid.  A man is beside her.  He lean hover her an' put his
hand on her shoulder.  'Sing it again, Kat'leen,' he say.  'I cannot to
get enough.'"

"Stop!" said Charley, in a strained, harsh voice.  "Not yet, M'sieu',"
said Portugais.  "It is good for you to hear what I say."

"'Come, Kat'leen!' the man say, an' he blow hout the candle.  I hear them
walk away, an' the door shut behin' them.  Then I hear anudder voice--ah,
that is a baby--very young baby!"

Charley quickly got to his feet.  "Not another word!" he said.

"Yes, yes, but there is one word more, M'sieu'," said Jo, standing up and
facing him firmly.  "You must go back.  You are not a thief.  The woman
is yours.  You throw your life away.  What is the man to you--or the
man's brat of a child?  It is all waiting for you.  You mus' go back.
You not steal the money, but that Billy--it is that Billy, I know.  You
can forgive your wife, and take her back, or you can say to both, Go!
You can put heverything right and begin again."

Anger, wild words, seemed about to break from Charley's lips, but he
conquered himself.

The old life had been brought back to him with painful acuteness and
vividness.  The streets of the town, the people in the street, Billy, the
mean scoundrel, who could not leave him alone in the grave of obscurity,
Kathleen--Fairing.  The voice of the child--with her voice--was in his
ears.  A child!  If he had had a child, perhaps----He stopped short in
his thinking, his face all at once flooding with colour.  For a moment he
stood looking out of the window down towards the village.  He could see
the post-office like a toy house among toy houses.  At last he turned to
Jo.

"Never again while I live, speak of this to me: of the past, of going
back, or of--of anything else," he said.  "I cannot go back.  I am dead
and shamed.  Let the dust of forgetfulness come and cover the past.  I've
begun life again here, and here I stay, and see it out.  I shall work out
the problem here."  He dropped a hand on the other's shoulder.  "Jo,"
said he, "we are both shipwrecks.  Let us see how long we can float."

"M'sieu', is it worth it?" said Portugais, remembering his confession to
the Abbe, and seeing the end of it all to himself.

"I don't know, Jo.  Let us wait and see how Fate will play us."

"Or God, M'sieu'?"

"God or Fate--who knows"




CHAPTER XLIV

"WHO WAS KATHLEEN?"

The painful incidents of the morning weighed heavily upon Rosalie, and
she was glad when Madame Dugal came to talk with her father, who was
ailing and irritable, and when Mrs. Flynn drove her away with a kiss on
either cheek, saying: "Don't come back, darlin', till there's roses in
both cheeks, for y'r eyes are 'atin' up yer face!"

She had seen Charley take the path to Vadrome Mountain, and to the
Rest of the Flax-beaters she betook herself, in the blind hope that,
returning, he might pass that way.  Under the influence of the fresh air
and the quiet of the woods her spirits rose, her pulse beat faster,
though a sense of foreboding and sorrow hovered round her.  The two-miles
walk to her beloved retreat seemed a matter of minutes only, so busy were
her thoughts.

Her mind was one luxurious confusion, through which travelled a ghostly
little sprite, who kept tumbling her thoughts about, sneering, smirking,
whispering--"You dare not go to confession--dare not go to confession.
You will never be the same again--never feel the same again--never think
the same again; your dreams are done!  You can only love.  And what will
this love do for you?  What do you expect to happen--you dare not go to
confession!"

Her reply had been the one iteration: "I love him--I love him--I love
him.  We shall be together all our lives, till we are old and grey.
I shall watch him at his work, and listen to his voice.  I shall read
with him and walk with him, and I shall grow to think like him a little
--in everything except religion.  In everything except that.  One day he
will come to think like me--to believe in God."

In the dreamy happiness of these thoughts the colour came to her cheeks,
the roses of light gathered in her eyes.  In her tremulous ardour she
scarcely realised how time passed, and her reverie deepened as the
afternoon shadows grew and the sun made to its covert behind the hills.
She was roused by a man's voice singing, just under the bluff where she
sat.  To her this voice represented the battle-call, the home-call, the
life call of the universe.  The song it sang was known to her.  It was as
old as Rizzio.  It had come from old France with Mary, had been merged
into English words and English music, and had voyaged to New France.
There it had been sung by lovers in fair vales, on wide rivers, and in
deep forests:

                   "What is not mine I may not hold,
                       (Ah, hark the hunter's horn!),
                    And what is thine may not be sold,
                       (My love comes through the corn!);
                          And none shall buy
                          And none shall sell
                          What Love works well?"

In the walk back from Vadrome Mountain, a change--a fleeting change--
had passed over Charley's mind and mood.  The quiet of the woodland,
the song of the birds, the tumbling brook, the smell of the rich earth,
replenishing its strength from the gorgeous falling leaves, had soothed
him.  Thoughts of Rosalie took a new form.  Her image possessed him,
excluding the future, the perils that surrounded them.  He had gone
through so much within the past twenty-four hours that the capacity for
suffering had almost exhausted itself, and in the reaction endearing
thoughts of Rosalie had dominion over him.  It was the reassertion of
primitive man, the demands of the first element.  The great problem was
still in the background.  The picture of Kathleen and the other man was
pushed into the distance; thoughts of Billy and his infamy were thrust
under foot--how futile to think of them!  There was Rosalie to be thought
of, the to-day and to-morrow of the new life.

Rosalie was of to-day.  How strong and womanly she had been this
morning, the girl whose life had been bounded by this Chaudiere, with a
metropolitan convent and hospital as her only glimpses of the busy world.
She would fit in anywhere--in the highest places, with her grace, and her
nobleness of mind, arcadian, passionate and beautiful.  There came upon
him again the feeling of the evening before, when he saw her standing in
his doorway, the night about them, jealous affection, undying love, in
her eyes.  It quickened his steps imperceptibly.  He passed a stream, and
glanced down into a dark pool involuntarily.  It reflected himself
clearly.  He stopped short.  "Is this you, Beauty Steele?" he said, and
he caught his brown beard in his hand.  "Beauty Steele had brains and no
heart.  You have heart, and your wits have gone wool-gathering.  No
matter!

                    What is not mine I may not hold,
                    (Ah, hark the hunter's horn!)'"

he sang, and came quickly along the stream where the flax-beaters worked
in harvest-time, then up the hill, then--Rosalie.

She started to her feet.  "I knew you would come--I knew you would!" she
said.

"You have been waiting here for me?" he asked breathless, taking her
hand.

"I felt you would come.  I made you," she added smiling, and, eagerly
answering the look in his eyes, threw her arms round his neck.  In that
moment's joy a fresh realisation of their fate came upon him with dire
force, and a bitter protest went up from his heart, that he and she
should be sacrificed.

Yet the impasse was there, and what could remove it--what clear the way?

He looked down at the girl whose head was buried in happy peace on his
shoulder.  She clung to him, as though in him was everlasting protection
from the sprite that kept whispering: "You dare not go to confession--
your dreams are done--you can only love."  But she had no fear now.

As he looked down at her a swift change passed over him, and, almost for
the first time since he was a little child, his eyes filled with tears.
He hastily brushed them away, and drew her down on the seat beside him.
He was wondering how he should tell her that they must not meet like
this, that they must be apart.  No matter what had happened, no matter
what love there was, it was better that they should die--that he should
die--than that they should meet like this.  There was only one end to
secret meetings, and discovery was inevitable.  Then, with discovery,
shame to her.  For he must either marry her--how could he marry her?
--or die.  For him to die would but increase her misery.

The time had passed when it could be of any use.  It passed that day in
the hut on Vadrome Mountain when she said that if he died, she would die
with him--"Where you are going you will be alone.  There will be no one
to care for you, no one but me."  Last night it passed for ever.  She had
put her life into his hands; henceforth, there could never be a question
of giving or taking, of withdrawing or advancing, for all was
irrevocable, sealed with the great seal.  Yet she must be saved.
But how?

She suddenly looked up at him.  "I can ask you anything I want now, can't
I?" she said.

"Anything, Rosalie."

"You know that when I ask, it is because I want to know what you know, so
that I may feel as you feel.  You know that, don't you?

"I know it when you tell me, wonderful Rosalie."  What a revelation it
was, this transmuting power, which could change mortal dross into the
coin of immortal wealth!

"I want to ask you," she said, "who was Kathleen?"  His blood seemed to
go cold in his veins, and he sat without answering, shocked and dismayed.
What could she know of Kathleen?

"Can't you tell me?" she asked anxiously yet fearfully.  He looked so
strange that she thought she had offended him.  "Please don't mind
telling me.  I should understand everything--everything.  Was it some one
you loved--once?"  It was hard for her to say it, but she said it
bravely.

"No.  I never loved any one in all the world, Rosalie--not till I loved
you."

She gave a happy sigh.  "Oh, it is wonderful!" she said.  "It is
wonderful and good!  Did you--did you love me from the very first?"

"I think I did, though I didn't know it from the very first," he answered
slowly.  His heart beat hard, for he could not guess how she should know
of Kathleen.  It was absurdly impossible that she should know.  "But many
have loved you!" she said proudly.  "They have not shown it," he
answered grimly; then added quickly, and with aching anxiety: "When did
you hear of--of Kathleen?"

"Oh, you are such a blind huntsman!" she laughed.  "Don't you know where
my little fox was hiding?  Why, in the shop, when you held the note-paper
up to the light, and looked startled, and bought all the paper we had
that was water-marked Kathleen.  Do you think that was clever of me?  I
don't."

"I think it was very clever," he said.

"Then she-Kathleen--doesn't really matter?" she asked eagerly.  "Of
course she can't, if you don't love her.  But does she love you?  Did she
ever love you?"  "Never in her life."

"So of course it doesn't matter," she rejoined.  "Hush!" she added
rapidly.  "I see some one coming in the trees yonder.  It may be some one
for me.  Father knows I come here sometimes.  Go quickly and hide behind
the rocks, please.  I'll stay and see who it is.  Please go--dearest."

He kissed her, and, keeping out of sight, got to a place of safety a few
hundred feet away.

He saw the new-comer run to Rosalie, speak to her, saw Rosalie half turn
in his own direction, then go hastily down the hillside with the
messenger.

"It is her father!" he exclaimed, and followed at a distance.  At the
village he learned that M. Evanturel had had another seizure.




CHAPTER XLV

SIX MONTHS GO BY

Spring again--budding trees and flowing sap; the earth banks removed from
the houses, and outside windows discarded; the ice tumbling and crunching
in the river; the dormant farmer raising his head to the energy and
delight of April.

The winter had been long and hard.  Never had there been severer frost or
deeper snow, and seldom had big game been so plentiful.  In the snug warm
stables the cattle munched and chewed the cud; the idle, long-haired
horses grew as spirited in the keen air as in summer they were sluggish
with hard work; and the farm-hands were abroad in the dark of the early
mornings with lanterns, to feed the stock and take them out to water,
singing cheerfully.  All morning spread the clamour of the flail and the
fanning-mill, the swish of the knife through the turnips and the beets,
and the sound of the saw and the axe, as the youngest man of the family,
muffled to the nose, sawed the wood into lengths or split the knots.

Night brought the cutting and stringing of apples, the shelling of the
Indian corn, the making of rag carpets.  On Saturday came the going to
market with grain, or pork, or beef, or fowls frozen like stones; the
gossip in the market-place.  Then again sounded jingling sleigh-bells as,
on the return road, the habitant made for home, a glass of white whiskey
inside him, and black-eyed children in the doorway, swarming like bees at
the mouth of a hive.

This particular winter in Chaudiere had been full of excitement and
expectation.  At Easter-time there was to be the great Passion Play,
after the manner of that known as The Passion Play of Ober-Ammergau.  Not
one in a hundred habitants had ever heard of Ober-Ammergau, but they had
all shared in picturesque processions of the Stations of the Cross to
some calvaire; and many had taken part in dramatic scenes arranged from
the life of Christ.  Drama of a crude kind was deep in them; it showed in
gesture, speech, and temperament.

In all the preparations Maximilian Cour was a conspicuous and useful
official.  Gifted with the dramatic temperament to a degree rare in so
humble a man, he it was who really educated the people of Chaudiere in
the details of the Passion Play to be produced by the good Catholics of
the parish and the Indians of the reservation.  He had gone to the Cure
every day, and the Cure had talked with him, and then had sent him to the
tailor, who had, during the past six months, withdrawn more and more from
the life about him, practically living with shut door.  No one ventured
in unless on business, or were in need, or wished advice.  These he never
turned empty away.

Besides Portugais, Maximilian Cour was the one man received constantly
by the tailor.  With patience and insight Charley taught the baker, by
drawings and careful explanations, the outlines of the representation,
and the baker grew proud of the association, though Charley's face used
to haunt him in his sleep.  Excitable, eager, there was an elemental
adaptability in the baker, as easily leading to Avernus as to Elysium.
This appealed to Charley, realising, as he did, that Maximilian Cour was
a reputable citizen by mere accident.  The baker's life had run in a
sentimental groove of religious duty; that same sentimentality would,
in other circumstances, have forced him with equal ardour into the broad
primrose path.

In the evening hours and on Sunday Charley had worked at his drawings for
the scenery and costumes of the Play, and completed his translation of
the German text, but there had been days when he could not put pen to
paper.  Life to him now was one aching emptiness--since that day at the
Rest of the Flax-beaters Rosalie had been absent.  On the very morning
after their meeting by the river she had gone away with her father to the
great hospital at Montreal--not Quebec this time, on the advice of the
Seigneur--as the one chance of prolonging his life.  There had come but
one letter from her since that hour when he saw her in the Seigneur's
coach with her father, moving away in the still autumn air, a piteous
appeal in her eyes.  The good-bye look she gave him then was with him day
and night.

She had written him one letter, and he had written one in reply, and no
more.  Though he was wholly reckless for himself, for her he was prudent
now--there was nothing else to do.  To save her--if he could but save her
from himself!  If he might only put back the clock!

In his letter to her he had simply said that it were wiser not to write,
since the acting postmistress, the Cure's sister, would note the exchange
of letters, and this would arouse suspicion.  He could not see what was
best to do, what was right to do.  To wait seemed the only thing, and his
one letter ended with the words: Rosalie, my life is lived only in the
thought of you.  There is no hour but I think of you, no moment but you
are with me.  The greatest proof of love that man can give, I will give
to you, in the hour fate wills--for us.  But now, we must wait--we must
wait, Rosalie.  Do not write to me, but know that if I could go to you I
would go; if I could say to you, Come, I would say it.  If the giving of
my life would save you any pain or sorrow, I would give it.

Sitting on his bench at work, it seemed to Charley that sometimes she was
near him, and more than once he turned quickly round as though she were,
in very truth, standing beside him.  He thought of her continually, and
often with an unbearable pain.  He figured her in his mind as pale and
distressed, and always her eyes had the piteous terror of that last look
as she went away over the hills.

But the weeks had worn on, then the Seigneur, who had been to Montreal,
came back with the news that Rosalie was looking as beautiful as a
picture.  "Grown a woman in beauty and in stature; comely--comely as a
lady in a Watteau picture, my dear messieurs!" he had said to the Cure,
standing in the tailor's shop.

Replying, the Cure had said: "She is in good hands, with good people,
recommended to me by an abbe there; yet I am not wholly happy about her.
When her trouble comes to her"--Charley's needle slipped and pierced his
finger to the bone--"when her father goes, as he must, I fear, there will
be no familiar face; she will hear no familiar voice."

"Faith, there you are wrong, my dear Cure" answered the Seigneur;
"there'll be a face yonder she likes very well indeed, and a voice she's
fond of too."

Charley's back was on them at that moment, of which he was glad, for his
face was haggard with anxiety, and it seemed hours before the Cure said:
"Whom do you mean, Maurice?" and hours before the Seigneur replied:
"Mrs. Flynn, of course.  I'm sending her tomorrow."

Mrs. Flynn had gone, and Charley had, in one sense, been made no happier
by that, for it seemed to him that Rosalie would rather that strangers'
eyes were on her than the inquisitively friendly eye of Mary Flynn.

Weeks had grown into months, and no news came--none save that which the
Cure let fall, or was brought by the irresponsible Notary, who heard all
gossip.  Only the Cure's scant news were authentic, however, and Charley
never saw the good priest but he had a secret hope of hearing him say
that Rosalie was coming back.  Yet when she came back, what would, or
could, he do?  There was always the crime for which he or Billy must be
punished.  Concerning this crime his heart was growing harder--for
Rosalie's sake.  But there was Kathleen--and Rosalie was now in the
city where she lived, and they might meet!  There was one solution--
if Kathleen should die!  It sickened him that he could think of that with
a sense of relief, almost of hope.  If Kathleen should die, then he would
be free to marry Rosalie--into what?  He still could only marry her into
the peril and menace of the law?  Again, even if Kathleen did not stand
in the way, neither the Cure nor any other priest would marry him to her
without his antecedents being certified.  A Protestant minister would,
perhaps, but would Rosalie give up her faith?  Following him without the
blessing of the Church, she would trample under foot every dear tradition
of her life, win the scorn of all of her religion, and destroy her own
peace; for the faith of her fathers was as the breath of her nostrils.
What cruelty to her!

But was it, after all, even true that he had but to call and she would
come?  In truth it well might be that she had learned to despise him;
to feel how dastardly he had been to take her love, given in blind
simplicity, bestowed like the song of the bird upon the listening fields
--to take the plenteous fulness of her life, and give nothing in return
save the empty hand, the hopeless hour, the secret sorrow.

Nothing could quench his misery.  The physical part of him craved without
ceasing for something to allay his distress.  Again and again he fought
his old enemy with desperate resolve.  To fall again, to touch liquor
once more, was to end all for ever.  He fought on tenaciously and
gloomily, with little of the pride of life, with nothing of the old
stubborn self-will, but with a new-awakened sense.  He had found
conscience at last--and more.

The months went by and still M. Evanturel lingered on, and Rosalie did
not come.  The strain became too great at last.  In the week preceding
Easter, when all the parish was busy at Four Mountains, making costumes,
rehearsing, building, putting up seats, cutting down trees, and erecting
crosses and calvaries, Charley disclosed to Jo a new intention.

In the earlier part of the winter Jo and he had met two or three times
a week, but now Jo had come to help him with his work in the shop--two
silent, devoted companions.  They understood each other, and in that
understanding were life and death.  For never did Jo forget that a year
from the day he had confessed his sins he meant to give himself up to
justice.  This caused him no sleepless nights.  He thought more of
Charley than of himself, and every month now he went to confession, and
every day he said his prayers.  He was at his prayers when Charley went
to tell him of his purpose.  Charley had often seen Jo on his knees of
late, and he had wondered, but not with the old pagan mind.  "Jo," he
said, "I am going away--to Montreal."

"To Montreal!" exclaimed Jo huskily.  "You are going back--to stay?"

"Not that.  I am going--to see--Rosalie Evanturel."  Jo was troubled but
not dumfounded.  It had slowly crept into his mind that Charley loved the
girl, though he had no real ground for suspicion.  His will, however, had
been so long the slave of the other man's that he had far-off reflections
of his thoughts.  He made no reply in words, but nodded his head.

"I want you to stay here, Jo.  If I don't come back, and--and she does,
stand by her, Jo.  I can trust you."  "You will come back, M'sieu'--but
you will come back, then?" Jo asked heavily.

"If I can, Jo--if I can," he answered.

Long after he had gone, Jo wandered up and down among the trees on the
river-road, up which Charley had disappeared with Jo's dogs and sled.
He kept shaking his head mournfully.




CHAPTER XLVI

THE FORGOTTEN MAN

It was Easter morning, and the good sunrise of a perfect spring made
radiant the high hill above the town.  Rosy-fingered morn touched with
magic colour the masts and scattered sails of the ships upon the great
river, and spires and towers quivered with rainbow light.  The city was
waking cheerfully, though the only active life was in the pealing bells
and on the deep flowing rivers.  The streets were empty yet, save for an
assiduous priest or the cart of a milkman.  Here and there a window
opened and a drowsy head was thrust into the eager air.  These saw a
bearded countryman with his team of six dogs and his little cart going
slowly up the street.  It was plain the man had come a long distance--
from the mountains in the east or south, no doubt, where horses were few,
and dogs, canoes, and oxen the means of transportation.

As the man moved slowly through the streets, his dogs still gallantly
full of life after their hard journey, he did not stare about him after
the manner of countrymen.  His movements had intelligence and freedom.
He was an unusual figure for a woodsman or river-man--he did not wear
ear-rings or a waist-sash as did the river-men, and he did not turn in
his toes like a woodsman.  Yet he was plainly a man from the far
mountains.

The man with the dogs did not heed the few curious looks turned his way,
but held his head down as though walking in familiar places.  Now and
then he spoke to his dogs, and once he stopped before a newspaper office,
which had a placard bearing these lines:

The Coming Passion Play In the Chaudiere Valley.

He looked at it mechanically, for, though he was concerned in the Passion
Play and the Chaudiere Valley, it was an abstraction to him at this
moment.  His mind was absorbed by other things.

Though he looked neither to right nor to left, he was deeply affected by
all round him.

At last he came to a certain street, where he and his dogs travelled
more quickly.  It opened into a square, where bells were booming in
the steeple of a church.  Shops and offices in the street were shut,
but a saloon-door was open, and over the doorway was the legend: Jean
Jolicoeur, Licensed to sell Wine, Beer, and other Spirituous and
Fermented Liquors.

Nearly opposite was a lawyer's office, with a new-painted sign.  It had
once read, in plain black letters, Charles Steele, Barrister, etc.; now
it read, in gold letters and many flourishes of the sign-painter's art,
Rockwell and Tremblay, Barristers, Attorneys, etc.

Here the man looked up with trouble in his eyes.  He could see dimly the
desk and the window beside which he had sat for so many years, and on the
wall a map of the city glowed with the incoming sun.

He moved on, passing the saloon with the open door.  The landlord, in his
shirt-sleeves, was standing in the doorway.  He nodded, then came out to
the edge of the board-walk.

"Come a long way, M'sieu'?" he asked.

"Four days' journey," answered the man gruffly through his beard, looking
the landlord in the eyes.  If this landlord, who in the past had seen him
so often and so closely, did not recognise him, surely no one else would.
It was, however, a curious recurrence of habit that, as he looked at the
landlord, he instinctively felt for his eye-glass, which he had discarded
when he left Chaudiere.  For an instant there was an involuntary arrest
of Jean Jolicoeur's look, as though memory had been roused, but this
swiftly passed, and he said:

"Fine dogs, them!  We never get that kind hereabouts now, M'sieu'.  Ever
been to the city before?"

"I've never been far from home before," answered the Forgotten Man.

"You'd better keep your eyes open, my friend, though you've got a sharp
pair in your head--sharp as Beauty Steele's almost.  There's rascals in
the river-side drinking-places that don't let the left hand know what the
right does."

"My dogs and I never trust anybody," said the Forgotten Man, as one of
the dogs snarled at the landlord's touch.  "So I can take care of myself,
even if I haven't eyes as sharp as Beauty Steele's, whoever he is."

The landlord laughed.  "Beauty's only skin-deep, they say.  Charley
Steele was a lawyer; his office was over there"--he pointed across the
street.  "He went wrong.  He come here too often--that wasn't my fault.
He had an eye like a hawk, and you couldn't read it.  Now I can read your
eye like a book.  There's a bit of spring in 'em, M'sieu'.  His eyes were
hard winter-ice five feet deep and no fishing under--froze to the bed.
He had a tongue like a cross-cut saw.  He's at the bottom of the St.
Lawrence, leaving a bad job behind him.

"Have a drink--hein?"  He jerked a finger backwards to the saloon door.
"It's Sunday, but stolen waters are sweet, sure!"

The Forgotten Man shook his head.  "I don't drink, thank you."

"It'd do you good.  You're dead beat.  You've been travelling hard--eh?"

"I've come a long way, and travelled all night."

"Going on?"

"I am going back to-morrow."

"On business?"

Charley nodded--he glanced involuntarily at the sign across the street.

Jean Jolicoeur saw the look.  "Lawyer's business, p'r'aps?"

"A lawyer's business--yes."

"Ah, if Charley Steele was here!"

"I have as good a lawyer as--"

The landlord laughed scornfully.  "They're not made.  He'd legislate the
devil out of the Pit.  Where are you going to stay, M'sieu'?"

"Somewhere cheap--along the river," answered the Forgotten Man.

Jolicoeur's good-natured face became serious.  "I'll tell you a place--
it's honest.  It's the next street, a few hundred yards down, on the
left.  There's a wooden fish over the door.  It's called The Black Bass
--that hotel.  Say I sent you.  Good luck to you, countryman!  Ah, la;
la, there's the second bell--I must be getting to Mass!"  With a nod he
turned and went into the house.

The Forgotten Man passed slowly up the street, into the side street,
and followed it till he came to The Black Bass, and turned into the small
stable-yard.  A stable-man was stirring.  He at once put his dogs into
a little pen set apart for them, saw them fed from the kitchen, and,
betaking himself to a little room behind the bar of the hotel, ordered
breakfast.  The place was empty, save for the servant--the household were
at Mass.  He looked round the room abstractedly.  He was thinking of a
crippled man in a hospital, of a girl from a village in the Chaudiere
Valley.  He thought with a shiver of a white house on the hill.  He
thought of himself as he had never done before in his life.  Passing
along the street, he had realised that he had no moral claim upon
anything or anybody within these precincts of his past life.  The place
was a tomb to him.

As he sat in the little back parlour of The Black Bass, eating his frugal
breakfast of eggs and bread and milk, the meaning of it all slowly dawned
upon him.  Through his intellect he had known something of humanity, but
he had never known men.  He had thought of men in the mass, and despised
them because of their multitudinous duplication, and their typical
weaknesses; but he had never known one man or one woman from the subtler,
surer divination of the heart.  His intellect had made servants and lures
of his emotions and his heart, for even his every case in court had been
won by easy and selfish command of all those feelings in mankind which
make possible personal understanding.

In this little back parlour it came to him with sudden force how, long
ago, he had cut himself off from any claim upon his fellows--not only by
his conduct, but by his merciless inhuman intelligence working upon the
merciful human life about him.  He never remembered to have had any real
feeling till on that day with Kathleen--the day he died.  The bitter
complaint of a woman he had wronged cruelly, by having married her, had
wrung from him his own first wail of life, in the one cry "Kathleen!"

As he sat eating his simple meal his pulses were beating painfully.
Every nerve in his body seemed to pluck at the angry flesh.  There
flashed across his mind in sympathetic sensation a picture.  It was the
axe-factory on the river, before which he used to stand as a boy, and
watch the men naked to the waist, with huge hairy arms and streaming
faces, toiling in the red glare, the trip-hammers endlessly pounding upon
the glowing metal.  In old days it had suggested pictures of gods and
demi-gods toiling in the workshops of the primeval world.  So the whole
machinery of being seemed to be toiling in the light of an awakened
conscience, to the making of a man.  It seemed to him that all his life
was being crowded into these hours.  His past was here--its posing, its
folly, its pitiful uselessness, and its shame.  Kathleen and Billy were
here, with all the problems that involved them.  Rosalie was here, with
the great, the last problem.

"Nothing matters but that--but Rosalie," he said to himself as he turned
to look out of the window at the wrangling dogs gnawing bones.  "Here she
is in the midst of all I once knew, and I know that I am no more a part
of it than she is.  She and Kathleen may have met face to face in these
streets--who can tell!  The world is large, but there's a sort of
whipper-in of Fate, who drives the people wearing the same livery into
one corner in the end.  If they met"--he rose and walked hastily up and
down--"what then?  I have a feeling that Rosalie would recognise her as
plainly as though the word Kathleen were stitched on her breast."

There was a clock on the wall.  He looked at it.  "It will not be safe to
go out until evening.  Then I can go to the hospital, and watch her
coming out."  He realised with satisfaction that many people coming from
Mass must pass the inn.  There was a chance of his seeing Rosalie, if she
had gone to early Mass.  This street lay in her way from the hospital.
"One look--ah, one look!"  For this one look he had come.  For this, and
to secure that which would save Rosalie from want always, if anything
should happen to him.  This too had been greatly on his mind.  There was
a way to give her what was his very own, which would rob no one and serve
her well indeed.

Looking at his face in the mirror over the mantel, he said to himself

"I might have had ten thousand friends, yet I have a thousand enemies,
who grin at the memory of the drunken fop down among the eels and the
cat-fish.  Every chance was with me then.  I come back here, and--and
Jolicoeur tells me the brutal truth.  But if I had had ambition"--a wave
of the feeling of the old life passed over him--"if I had had ambition as
I was then, I should have been a monster.  It was all so paltry that, in
sheer disgust, I should have kicked every ladder down that helped me up.
I should have sacrificed everything to myself."

He stopped short and stared, for, in the mirror, he saw a girl passing
through the stable-yard towards the quarrelling dogs in the kennel.  He
clapped his hand to his mouth to stop a cry.  It was Rosalie.

He did not turn round but looked at her in the mirror, as though it were
the last look he might give on earth.

He could hear her voice speaking to the dogs: "Ah, my friends, ah, my
dears!  I know you every one.  Jo Portugais is here.  I know your bark,
you, Harpy, and you, Lazybones, and you, Cloud and London!  I know you
every one.  I heard you as I came from Mass, beauty dears.  Ah, you know
me, sweethearts?  Ah, God bless you for coming!  You have come to bring
us home; you have come to fetch us home--father and me."  The paws of one
of the dogs was on her shoulder, and his nose was in her hair.

Charley heard her words, for the window was open, and he listened and
watched now with an infinite relief in his look.  Her face was half
turned towards him.  It was pale-very pale and sad.  It was Rosalie as of
old--thank God, as of old!--but more beautiful in the touching sadness,
the far-off longing, of her look.

"I must go and see your master," she said to the dogs.  "Down--down,
Lazybones!"

There was no time to lose--he must not meet her ere.  He went into the
outer hall hastily.  The servant was passing through.  "If any one asks
for Jo Portugais," he said, "say that I'll be back to-morrow morning--I'm
going across the river to-day."

"Certainly, M'sieu'," said the girl, and smiled because of the piece of
silver he put in her hand.

As he heard the side door open he stepped through the front doorway into
the street, and disappeared round a corner.




CHAPTER XLVII

ONE WAS TAKEN AND THE OTHER LEFT

Rosalie carried to the hospital that afternoon a lighter heart than she
had known for many a day.  The sight of Jo Portugais' dogs had roused her
out of the apathy which had been growing on her in this patient but
hopeless watching beside her father.  She had always a smile and a
cheerful word for the poor man.  A settled sorrow hung upon her face,
however, taking away its colour, but giving it a sweet gravity which made
her slave more than one young doctor of the hospital, for whom, however,
she showed no more than a friendly frankness, free from self-
consciousness.  For hours she would sit in reverie beside her sleeping
father, her heart "over the water to Charley."  As in a trance, she could
see him sitting at his bench, bent over his work, now and again lifting
up his head to look across to the post-office, where another hand than
hers sorted letters now.

Day by day her father weakened and faded away.  All that was possible to
medical skill had been done.  As the money left by her mother dwindled,
she had no anxiety, for she knew that the life she so tenderly cherished
would not outlast the gold which lengthened out the tenuous chain of
being.  This last illness of her father's had been the salvation of her
mind, the saving of her health.  Maybe it had been the saving of her
soul; for at times a curious contempt of life came upon her--she who had
loved it so eagerly and fully.  There descended on her then the bitter
conviction that never again would she see the man she loved.  Then not
even Mrs. Flynn could call back "the fun o' the world" to her step and
her tongue and her eye.  At first there had been a timid shrinking, but
soon her father and herself were brighter and better for the old
Irishwoman's presence, and she began to take comfort in Mrs. Flynn.

Mrs. Flynn gave hopefulness to whatever life she touched, and Rosalie,
buoyant and hopeful enough by nature, responded to the living warmth and
the religion of life in the Irishwoman's heart.

"'Tis worth the doin', ivery bit of it, darlin', the bither an' the
swate, the hard an' the aisy, the rough an' the smooth, the good an' the
bad," said Mrs. Flynn to her this very Easter morning.  "Even the avil is
worth doin', if so be 'twas not mint, an' the good is in yer heart in the
ind, an' ye do be turnip' to the Almoighty, repentin' an' glad to be
aloive: provin' to Him 'twas worth while makin' the world an' you, to
want, an' worry, an' work, an' play, an' pick the flowers, an' bleed o'
the thorns, an' dhrink the sun, an' ate the dust, an' be lovin' all the
way!  Ah, that's it, darlin'," persisted Mrs. Flynn, "'tis lovin' all the
way makes it aisier.  There's manny kinds o' love.  There's lad an' lass,
there's maid an' man.  An' that last is spring, an' all the birds
singin', an' shtorms now an' thin, an' siparations, an' misthrust, an'
God in hivin bein' that aisy wid ye for bein' fools an' children, an'
bringin' ye thegither in the ind, if so be ye do be lovin' as man an'
maid should love, wid all yer heart.  Thin there's the love o' man an'
wife.  Shure, that's the love that lasts, if it shtarts right.  Shure,
it doesn't always shtart wid the sun shinin.'  'Will ye marry me?' says
Teddy Flynn to me.  'I will,' says I.  'Then I'll come back from Canaday
to futch ye,' says he, wid a tear in his eye.

"'For what's a man in ould Ireland that has a head for annything but
puttaties!  There's land free in Canaday, an' I'm goin' to make a home
for ye, Mary,' says he, wavin' a piece of paper in the air.  'Are ye,
thin?' says I.  He goes away that night, an' the next mornin' I have a
lether from him, sayin' he's shtartin' that day for Canaday.  He hadn't
the heart to tell me to me face.  Fwaht do I do thin?  I begs, borrers,
an' stales, an' I reached that ship wan minnit before she sailed.  There
was no praste aboord, but we was married six weeks afther at Quebec.  And
thegither we lived wid ups an' downs--but no ups an' downs to the love of
us for twenty years, blessed be God for all His mercies!"

Rosalie had listened with eyes that hungrily watched every expression,
ears that weighed eagerly every inflection; for she was hearing the story
of another's love, and it did not seem strange to her that a woman, old,
red-faced, and fat, should be telling it.

Yet there were times when she wept till she was exhausted; when all her
girlhood was drowned in the overflow of her eyes; when there was a sense
of irrevocable loss upon her.  Then it was, in her fear of soul and
pitiful loneliness, that her lover--the man she would have died for--
seemed to have deserted her.  Then it was that a sudden hatred against
him rose up in her--to be swept away as swiftly as it came by the memory
of his broken tale of love, his passionate words: "I have never loved any
one but you in all my life, Rosalie."  And also, there was that letter
from Chaudiere, which said that in the hour when the greatest proof of
his love must be given he would give it.  Reading the letter again,
hatred, doubt, even sorrow, passed from her, and her imagination pictured
the hour when, disguise and secrecy ended, he would step forward before
all the world and say: "I take Rosalie Evanturel to be my wife."  Despite
the gusts of emotion that swayed her at times, in the deepest part of her
being she trusted him completely.

When she reached the hospital this Sunday afternoon her step was quick,
her smile bright--though she had not been to confession as was her duty
on Easter day.  The impulse towards it had been great, but her secret was
not her own, and the passionate desire to give relief to her full heart
was overborne by thought of the man.  Her soul was her own, but this
secret of their love was his as well as hers.  She knew that she was the
only just judge between.

Soon after she entered the ward, the chief surgeon said that all that
could be done for her father had now been done, and that as M. Evanturel
constantly asked to be taken back to Chaudiere (he never said to die,
though they knew what was in his mind), he might now make the journey,
partly by river, partly by land.  It seemed to the delighted and excited
Rosalie that Jo Portugais had been sent to her as a surprise, and that
his team of dogs was to take her father back.

She sat by her father's bed this beautiful, wonderful Sunday afternoon,
and talked cheerfully, and laughed a little, and told M. Evanturel of the
dogs, and together they looked out of the window to the far-off hills, in
their golden purple, beyond which, in the valley of the Chaudiere, was
their little home.  With her father's hand in hers the girl dreamed
dreams again, and it seemed to her that she was the very Rosalie
Evanturel of old, whose thoughts were bounded by a river and a hill,
a post-office and a church, a catechism and a few score of books.  Here
in the crowded city she had come to be a woman who, bitterly shaken in
soul, knew life's sufferings; who had, during the past few months, read
with avidity history, poetry, romance, fiction, and the drama, English
and French; for in every one she found something that said: "You have
felt that."  In these long months she had learned more than she had known
or learned in all her previous life.

As she sat looking out into the eastern sky she became conscious of
voices, and of a group of people who came slowly down the ward, sometimes
speaking to the sick and crippled.  It was not a general visitors' day,
but one reserved for the few to come and say a kindly word to the
suffering, to bring some flowers and distribute books.  Rosalie had
always been absent at this hour before, for she shrank from strangers;
but to-day she had stayed on unthinking.  It mattered nothing to her who
came and went.  Her heart was over the hills, and the only tie she had
here was with this poor cripple whose hand she held.  If she did not
resent the visit of these kindly strangers, she resolutely held herself
apart from the object of their visit with a sense of distance and cold
dignity.  If she had given Charley something of herself, she had in turn
taken something from him, something unlike her old self, delicately non-
intime.  Knowledge of life had rationalised her emotions to a definite
degree, had given her the pride of self-repression.  She had had need of
it in these surroundings, where her beauty drew not a little dangerous
attention, which she had held at arm's-length--her great love for one man
made her invulnerable.

Now, as the visitors came near, she did not turn towards them, but still
sat, her chin on her hand, looking out across the hills, in resolute
abstraction.  She felt her father's fingers press hers, as if to draw her
attention, for he, weak man, was ever ready to open his hand and heart to
any friendly soul.  She took no notice, but held his hand firmly, as
though to say that she had no wish to see.

She was conscious now that they were beside her father's bed.  She hoped
that they would pass.  But no, the feet stopped, there was whispering,
and then she heard a voice say, "Rather rude!" then another, "Not
wanted, that's plain!"--the first a woman's, the second a man's.  Then
another voice, clear and cold, and well modulated, said to her father:
"They tell me you have been here a long time, and have had much pain.
You will be glad to go, I am sure."

Something in the voice startled her.  Some familiar sound or inflection
struck upon her ear with a far-off note, some lost tone she knew.  Of
what, of whom, did this voice remind her?  She turned round quickly and
caught two cold blue eyes looking at her.  The face was older than her
own, handsome and still, and happy in a placid sort of way.  Few gusts of
passion or of pain had passed across that face.  The figure was shapely
to the newest fashion, the bonnet was perfect, the hand which held two
books was prettily gloved.  Polite charity was written in her manner and
consecrated every motion.  On the instant, Rosalie resented this fine
epitome of convention, this dutiful charity-monger, herself the centre of
an admiring quartet.  She saw the whispering, she noted the well-bred
disguise of interest, and she met the visitor's gaze with cold courtesy.
The other read the look in her face, and a slightly pacifying smile
gathered at her lips.

"We are glad to hear that your father is better.  He has been ill a long
time?"

Rosalie started again, for the voice perplexed her--rather, not the
voice, but the inflection, the deliberation.

She bowed, and set her lips, but, chancing to glance at her father, she
saw that he was troubled by her manner.  Flashing a look of love at him,
she adjusted the pillow under his head, and said to her questioner in a
low voice: "He is better now, thank you."

Encouraged, the other rejoined: "May I leave one or two books for him to
read--or for you to read to him?"  Then added hastily, for she saw a
curious look in Rosalie's eyes: "We can have mutual friends in books,
though we cannot be friends with each other.  Books are the go-betweens
of humanity."

Rosalie's heart leapt, she flushed, then grew slightly pale, for
it was not tone or inflection alone that disturbed her now, but words
themselves.  A voice from over the hills seemed to say these things to
her.  A haunting voice from over the hills had said them to her--these
very words.

"Friends need no go-betweens," she said quietly, "and enemies should not
use them."

She heard a voice say, "By Jove!" in a tone of surprise, as though it
were wonderful the girl from Chaudiere should have her wits about her.
So Rosalie interpreted it.

"Have you many friends here?" asked the cold voice, meant to be kindly
and pacific.  It was schooled to composure, because it gave advantage in
life's intercourse, not from any inner urbanity.

"Some need many friends, some but a few.  I come from a country where one
only needs a few."

"Where is your country, I wonder?" said the cold echo of another voice.

Charley had passed out of Kathleen's life--he was dead to her, his memory
scorned and buried.  She loved the man to whom she supposed she was
married; she was only too glad to let the dust of death and time cover
every trace of Charley from her gaze; she would have rooted out every
particle of association: yet his influence on her had been so great that
she had unconsciously absorbed some of his idiosyncrasies--in the tone of
his voice, in his manner of speaking.  To-day she had even repeated
phrases he had used.

"Beyond the hills," said Rosalie, turning away.

"Is it not strange?" said the voice.  "That is the title of one of the
books I have just brought--'Beyond the Hills'.  It is by an English
writer.  This other book is French.  May I leave them?"

Rosalie inclined her head.  It would.  make her own position less
dignified if she refused them.  "Books are always welcome to my father,"
she said.

There was an instant's pause, as though the fashionable lady would offer
her hand; but their eyes met, and they only bowed.  The lady moved on
with a smile, leaving a perfume of heliotrope behind her.

"Where is your country, I wonder?"--the voice of the lady rang in
Rosalie's ears.  As she sat at the window again, long after the visitors
had disappeared, the words, "I wonder--I wonder--I wonder!" kept beating
in her brain.  It was absurd that this woman should remind her of the
tailor of Chaudiere.

Suddenly she was roused by her father's voice.  "This is beautiful--ah,
but beautiful, Rosalie!"

She turned towards him.  He was reading the book in his hand--'Beyond the
Hills'.  "Listen," he said, and he read, in English: "'Compensation is
the other name for God.  How often is it that those whom disease or
accident has robbed of active life find greater inner rejoicing and a
larger spiritual itinerary!  It would seem that withdrawal from the ruder
activities gives a clearer seeing.  Also for these, so often, is granted
a greater love, which comes of the consecration of other lives to theirs.
And these too have their reward, for they are less encompassed by the
vanities of the world, having the joy of self-sacrifice.'"  He looked at
Rosalie with an unnatural brightness in his eyes, and she smiled at him
now and stroked his hand.

"It has been all compensation to me," he said, after a moment.  "You have
been a good daughter to me, Rosalie."

She shook her head and smiled.  "Good fathers think they have good
daughters," she answered, choking back a sob.

He closed the book and let it lie upon the coverlet.  "I will sleep now,"
he said, and turned on his side.  She arranged his pillow, and adjusted
the bedclothes to his comfort.

"Good-night," he said, as, with a faint hand, he drew her head down and
kissed her.  "Good girl!  Goodnight!"

She patted his hand.  "It is not night yet, father."

He was already half asleep.  "Good-night!" he said again, and fell into
a deep sleep.

She sat down by the window, in her hand the book he had laid down.  A
hundred thoughts were busy in her brain--of her father; of the woman who
had just left; of her lover over the hills.  The woman's voice came to
her again--a far-off mockery.  She opened the book mechanically and
turned over the pages.  Presently her eyes were riveted to a page.
On it was written the word Kathleen.

For a moment she sat transfixed.  The word Kathleen and the haunting
voice became one, and her mind ran back to the day when she had said to
Charley: "Who is Kathleen?"

She sprang to her feet.  What should she do?  Follow the woman?  Find out
who and what she was?  Go to the young surgeon who had accompanied them,
ask him who she was, and so learn the clue to the mystery concerning her
lover?

In the midst of her confusion she became sharply conscious of two things:
the approach of Mrs. Flynn, and her father's heavy breathing.  Dropping
the book, she leaned over her father's bed and looked closely at him.
Then she turned to the frightened and anxious Mrs. Flynn.

"Go for the priest," she said.  "He is dying."

"I'll send some one.  I'm stayin' here by you, darlin'," said the old
woman, and hurried to the room of the young surgeon for a messenger.

As the sun went down, the cripple went out upon a long journey alone.




CHAPTER XLVIII

"WHERE THE TREE OF LIFE IS BLOOMING--"

As Charley walked the bank of the great river by the city where his old
life lay dead, he struggled with the new life which--long or short--must
henceforth belong to the village of the woman he loved.  .  .  .  But as
he fought with himself in the long night-watch it was borne in upon him
that though he had been shown the Promised Land, he might never find
there a habitation and a home.  The hymn he had mockingly sung the night
he had been done to death at the Cote Dorion sang in his senses now, an
ever-present mockery:

               "On the other side of Jordan,
               In the sweet fields of Eden,
               Where the tree of life is blooming,
                    There is rest for you.
               There is rest for the weary,
               There is rest for the weary,
               There is rest for the weary,
                    There is rest for you."

In the uttermost corner of his intelligence he felt with sure prescience
that, however befalling, the end of all was not far off.  In the exercise
of new faculties, which had more to do with the soul than with reason, he
now believed what he could not see, and recognised what was not proved.
Labour of the hand, trouble, sorrow, and perplexity, charity and
humanity, had cleared and simplified his life, had sweetened his
intelligence, and taken the place of ambition.  He saw life now through
the lens of personal duty, which required that the thing nearest to one's
hand should be done first.

But as foreboding pressed upon him there came the thought of what should
come after--to Rosalie.  His thoughts took a practical form--her good was
uppermost in his mind.  All Rosalie had to live on was her salary as
postmistress, for it was in every one's knowledge that the little else
she had was being sacrificed to her father's illness.  Suppose, then,
that through illness or accident she lost her position, what could she
do?  He might leave her what he had--but what had he?  Enough to keep her
for a year or two--no more.  All his earnings had gone to the poor and
the suffering of Chaudiere.

There was one way.  It had suggested itself to him so often in Chaudiere,
and had been one of the two reasons for bringing him here.  There were
his dead mother's pearls and one thousand dollars in notes behind a
secret panel in the white house on the hill, in this very city where he
was.  The pearls were worth over ten thousand dollars--in all, there
would be eleven thousand, enough to secure Rosalie from poverty.  What
should Kathleen do with his mother's pearls, even if they were found by
her?  What should she do with his money did she not loathe his memory?
Had not all his debts been paid?  These pearls and this money were all
his own.

But to get them.  To go now to the white house on the hill; to face that
old life even for an hour, a knocking at the door of a haunted house--he
shrank from the thought.  He would have to enter the place like a thief
in the night.

Yet for Rosalie he must take the risk--he must go.




CHAPTER XLIX

THE OPEN GATE

It was a still night, and the moon, delicately bright, gave forth that
radiance which makes spiritual to the eye the coarsest thing.  Inside the
white house on the hill all was dark.  Sleep had settled on it long
before midnight, for, on the morrow, its master and mistress hoped to
make a journey to the valley of the Chaudiere, where the Passion Play was
being performed by habitants and Indians.  The desire to see the play had
become an infatuation in the minds of the two, eager for some interest to
relieve the monotony of a happy life.

But as all slept, a figure in the dress of a habitant moved through the
passages of the house stealthily, yet with an assurance unusual in the
thief or housebreaker.  In the darkest passages his step was sure, and
his hand fastened on latch or door-knob with perfect precision.  He came
at last into a large hallway flooded by the moon, pale, watchful, his
beard frosted by the light.  In the stillness of his tread and the
composed sorrow of his face he seemed like one long dead who "revisits
the glimpses of the moon."

At last he entered a room the door of which stood wide open.  In this
room had been begotten, or had had exercise, whatever of him was worth
approving in the days before he died.  It was a place of books and
statues and tapestry, and the dark oak was nobly smutched of Time.  This
sombre oaken wall had been handed down through four generations from the
man's great-grandfather: the breath of generations had steeped it in
human association.

Entering, he turned for an instant with clinched hands to look at another
door across the hall.  Behind that door were two people who despised his
memory, who conspired to forget his very name.  This house was the
woman's, for he had given it to her the day he died.  But that she could
live there with all the old associations, with memories that, however
bitter, however shaming, had a sort of sacredness, struck into his soul
with a harrowing pain.  There she was whom he had spared--himself; whose
happiness had lain in his hands, and he had given it to her.  Yet her
very existence robbed himself of happiness, and made sorrowful a life
dearer than his own.

Kathleen lay asleep in that room--he fancied he could hear her breathing;
and, by the hospital on the hill, up beyond the point of pines, in a
little cottage which he could see from the great window, lay Rosalie with
sleepless eyes and wan cheeks, longing for morning and the stir of life
to help her to forget.

For Rosalie he had come to this house once more.  For her sake he was
revisiting this torture-chamber, from which he knew he must go again,
blanched and shaken, as a man goes from a tomb where his dead lie
unforgiving.

He shut his teeth, went swiftly across the room, and beside a great
carved oak table touched a hidden spring in the side of it.  The spring
snapped; the panel creaked a little and drew back.  It seemed to him that
the noise he made must be heard in every part of the house, so sensitive
was his ear, so deep was the silence on which the sounds had broken.  He
turned round to the doorway to listen before he put his hand within the
secret place.

There was no sound.  He turned his attention to the table.  Drawing forth
two packets with a gasp of relief, he put them in his pocket, and, with
extreme care, proceeded to close the panel.  By rubbing the edges of the
wood with grease from a candle on the table, he was able to readjust the
panel in silence.  But, as the spring came home, he became suddenly
conscious of a presence in the room.  A shiver passed through him.  He
turned round-softly, quickly.  He was in the shadow and near great
window-curtains, and his fingers instinctively clutched them as he saw a
figure in white at the door of the room.  Slowly, strangely deliberate,
the figure moved further into the room.

Charley's breath stopped.  He felt his face flush, and a strange weakness
came on him.  There before him stood Kathleen.

She was in her night-gown, and she stood still, as though listening; yet,
as Charley looked closer, he realised that it was an unconscious, passive
listening, and that she did not know he was there.

Her mind only was listening.  She was asleep.  Was it possible that his
very presence in the house had touched some old note of memory, which,
automatically responding, had carried her from her bed in this
somnambulistic trance?  That subtle telegraphy between our subconscious
selves which we cannot reduce to a law, yet alarming us at times,
announced to Kathleen's mind, independent of the waking senses, the
presence once familiar to this house for so many years.  In her sleep
she had involuntarily responded to the call of Charley's approach.

Once, in the past, the night her uncle died, she had walked in her sleep,
and the memory of this flashed upon Charley now.  Silently he came closer
to her.  The moonlight shone on her face.  He could see plainly she was
asleep.  His position was painful and perilous.  If she waked, the shock
to herself would be great; if she waked and saw him, what disaster might
not occur!

Yet he had no agitation now, only clearness of mind and a curious sense
of confusion that he should see her en dishabille--the old fastidious
sense mingling with the feeling that she was now a stranger to him, and
that, waking, she would fly embarrassed from his presence, as he was
ready to fly from hers.  He was about to steal to the door and escape
before she waked, but she turned round, moved through the doorway, and
glided down the hall.  He followed silently.

She moved to the staircase, then slowly down it, and through a passage to
a morning-room, where, opening a pair of French windows, she passed out
onto the lawn.  He followed, not more than a dozen paces behind her.
His safety lay in getting outside, where he could easily hide among the
bushes, should someone else appear and an alarm be raised.

She crossed the lawn swiftly, a white, ghostlike figure.  In the middle
of the lawn she stopped short once as if in doubt what to do--as a
thought-reader pauses in his search for the mental scent again, ere he
rushes upon the object of his search with the certainty of instinct.

Presently she moved on, going directly towards a gate that opened out on
the cliff above the river.  In Charley's day this gate had been often
used, for it gave upon four steep wooden steps leading to a narrow shelf
of rock below.  From the edge of this cliff a rope-ladder dropped fifty
feet to the river.  For years he had used this rope-ladder to get down to
his boat, and often, when they were first married, Kathleen used to come
and watch him descend, and sometimes, just at the very first, would
descend also.  As he stole into the grounds this evening he had noticed,
however, that the rope-ladder was gone, and that new steps were being
built.  He had also mechanically observed that the gate was open.

For an instant he watched her slowly moving towards the gate.  At first
he did not realise the situation.  Suddenly her danger flashed upon him.
Passing through the gateway, she must fall over the cliff.

Her life was in his hands.

He could rush forward swiftly and close the gate, then, raising an alarm,
get away before he was seen; or--he could escape now.

What had he to do with her?  A weird, painful suggestion crept into his
brain: he was not responsible for her, and he was responsible for a woman
up there by the hospital, whose home was the valley of the Chaudiere!

If Kathleen were gone, what barrier would there be between him and
Rosalie?  What had he to do with this strange disposition of events?
Kathleen was never absent from her church twice on Sundays; she was
devoted to work of all sorts for the church on week-days--where was her
intervening personal Providence?  If Providence permitted her to die?--
well, she had had two years of happiness with the man she loved, at some
expense to himself--was it not fair that Rosalie should have her share?
Had he the right to call upon Rosalie for constant self-sacrifice, when,
by shutting his eyes now, by being dead to Kathleen and her need, as he
was dead to the world he once knew, the way would be clear to marry
Rosalie?

Dead--he was dead to the world and to Kathleen!  Should his ghost
interpose between her and the death now within two-score feet of her?
Who could know?  It was grim, it was awful, but was it not a wild kind of
justice?  Who could blame?  It was the old Charley Steele, the Charley
Steele of the court-room, who argued back humanity and the inherent
rightness of things.

But it was only a moment's pause.  The thoughts flashed by like the
lightning impressions of a dream, and a voice said in his ear, the voice
of the new Charley with a conscience:

"Save her--save her!"

Even as he was conscious of another presence on the lawn, he rushed
forward noiselessly.  Stealing between Kathleen and the gate-she was
within five feet of it he closed and locked it.  Then, with a quick
glance at her sleeping face-it was engraven on his memory ever after like
a dead face in a coffin--he ran along the fence among the shrubbery.  A
man not fifty feet away called to him.

"Hush--she is asleep!" Charley whispered, and disappeared.

It was Fairing himself who saw this deed which saved Kathleen's life.
Awaking, and not finding her, he had glanced towards the window, and had
seen her on the lawn.  He had rushed down to her, in time to see her
saved by a strange bearded man in habitant dress.  His one glance at the
man's face, as it turned towards him, produced an extraordinary effect
upon his mind, not soon to be dispelled--a haunting, ghostlike
apparition, which kept reminding him of something or somebody, he could
not tell what or whom.  The whispering voice and the breathless words,
"Hush--she is asleep!" repeated themselves over and over again in his
brain, as, taking Kathleen's hand, he led her, unresisting, and still
sleeping, back to her room.  In agitated thankfulness he resolved not to
speak of the event to Kathleen, or to any one else, lest it should come
to her ears and frighten her.

He would, however, keep a sharp lookout for the man who had saved her
life, and would reward him duly.  The face of the bearded habitant came
between him and his sleep.

Meanwhile this disturber of a woman's dreams and a man's sleep was
hurrying to an inn in the town by the waterside, where he met another
habitant with a team of dogs--Jo Portugais.  Jo had not been able to bear
the misery of suspense and anxiety, and had come seeking him.  There was
little speech between them.

"You have not been found out, M'sieu'?" was Jo's anxious question.

"No, no, but I have had a bad night, Jo.  Get the dogs together."

A little later, as Charley made ready to go back to Chaudiere, Jo said:

"You look as if you'd had a black dream, M'sieu'."  With the river
rustling by, and the trees stirring in the first breath of dawn, Charley
told Jo what had happened.

For a moment the murderer did not speak or stir, for a struggle was going
on in his breast also; then he stooped quickly, caught his companion's
hand, and kissed it.

"I could not have done it, M'sieu'," he said hoarsely.  They parted, Jo
to remain behind as they had agreed, to be near Rosalie if needed;
Charley to return to the valley of the Chaudiere.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Good fathers think they have good daughters
Shure, if we could always be 'about the same,' we'd do






THE RIGHT OF WAY

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 6.



L.        THE PASSION PLAY AT CHAUDIERE
LI.       FACE TO FACE
LII.      THE COMING OF BILLY
LIII.     THE SEIGNEUR AND THE CURE HAVE A SUSPICION
LIV.      M. ROSSIGNOL SLIPS THE LEASH
LV.       ROSALIE PLAYS A PART
LVI.      MRS. FLYNN SPEAKS
LVII.     A BURNING FIERY FURNACE
LVIII.    WITH HIS BACK TO THE WALL
LIX.      IN WHICH CHARLEY MEETS A STRANGER
LX.       THE HAND AT THE DOOR
LXI.      THE CURE SPEAKS
EPILOGUE



CHAPTER L

THE PASSION PLAY AT CHAUDIERE

For the first time in its history Chaudiere was becoming notable in the
eyes of the outside world.

"We'll have more girth after this," said Filion Lacasse the saddler to
the wife of the Notary, as, in front of the post-office, they stood
watching a little cavalcade of habitants going up the road towards Four
Mountains to rehearse the Passion Play.

"If Dauphin's advice had been taken long ago, we'd have had a hotel at
Four Mountains, and the city folk would be coming here for the summer,"
said Madame Dauphin, with a superior air.

"Pish!" said a voice behind them.  It was the Seigneur's groom, with a
straw in his mouth.  He had a gloomy mind.

"There isn't a house but has two or three boarders.  I've got three,"
said Filion Lacasse.  "They come tomorrow."

"We'll have ten at the Manor.  But no good will come of it," said the
groom.

"No good!  Look at the infidel tailor!" said Madame Dauphin.  "He
translated all the writing.  He drew all the dresses, and made a hundred
pictures--there they are at the Cure's house."

"He should have played Judas," said the groom malevolently.  "That'd be
right for him."

"Perhaps you don't like the Passion Play," said Madame Dauphin
disdainfully.

"We ain't through with it yet," said the death's-head groom.

"It is a pious and holy mission," said Madame Dauphin.  "Even that Jo
Portugais worked night and day till he went away to Montreal, and he
always goes to Mass now.  He's to take Pontius Pilate when he comes back.
Then look at Virginie Morrissette, that put her brother's eyes out
quarrelling--she's to play Mary Magdalene."

"I could fit the parts better," said the groom.

"Of course.  You'd have played St. John," said the saddler--" or, maybe,
Christus himself!"

"I'd have Paulette Dubois play Mary the sinner."

"Magdalene repented, and knelt at the foot of the cross.  She was sorry
and sinned no more," said the Notary's wife in querulous reprimand.

"Well, Paulette does all that," said the stolid, dark-visaged groom.

Filion Lacasse's ears pricked up.  "How do you know--she hasn't come
back?"

"Hasn't she, though!  And with her child too--last night."

"Her child!"  Madame Dauphin was scandalised and amazed.

The groom nodded.  "And doesn't care who knows it.  Seven years old, and
as fine a child as ever was!"

"Narcisse--Narcisse!" called Madame Dauphin to her husband, who was
coming up the street.  She hastily repeated the groom's news to him.

The Notary stuck his hand between the buttons of his waistcoat.  "Well,
well, my dear Madame," he said consequentially, "it is quite true."

"What do you know about it--whose child is it?" she asked, with curdling
scorn.

"'Sh-'sh!" said the Notary.  Then, with an oratorical wave of his free
hand: "The Church opens her arms to all--even to her who sinned much
because she loved much, who, through woful years, searched the world for
her child and found it not--hidden away, as it was, by the duplicity of
sinful man"--and so on through tangled sentences, setting forth in broken
terms Paulette Dubois's life.

"How do you know all about it?" asked the saddler.  "I've known it for
years," said the Notary grandly--stoutly too, for he would freely risk
his wife's anger that the vain-glory of the moment might be enlarged.

"And you keep it even from madame!" said the saddler, with a smile too
broad to be sarcastic.  "Tiens!  if I did that, my wife'd pick my eyes
out with a bradawl."

"It was a professional secret," said the Notary, with a desperate resolve
to hold his position.

"I'm going home, Dauphin--are you coming?" questioned his wife, with an
air.

"You will remain, and hear what I've got to say.  This Paulette Dubois--
she should play Mary Magdalene, for--"

"Look--look, what's that?" said the saddler.  He pointed to a wagon
coming slowly up the road.  In front of it a team of dogs drew a cart.
It carried some thing covered with black.  "It's a funeral!  There's the
coffin.  It's on Jo Portugais' little cart," added Filion Lacasse.

"Ah, God be merciful, it's Rosalie Evanturel and Mrs. Flynn!  And M'sieu'
Evanturel in the coffin!" said Madame Dauphin, running to the door of
the postoffice to call the Cure's sister.

"There'll be use enough for the baker's Dead March now," remarked M.
Dauphin sadly, buttoning up his coat, taking off his hat, and going
forward to greet Rosalie.  As he did so, Charley appeared in the doorway
of his shop.

"Look, Monsieur," said the Notary.  "This is the way Rosalie Evanturel
comes home with her father."

"I will go for the Cure" Charley answered, turning white.  He leaned
against the doorway for a moment to steady himself, then hurried up the
street.  He did not dare meet Rosalie, or go near her yet.  For her sake
it was better not.

"That tailor infidel has a heart.  His eyes were leaking," said the
Notary to Filion Lacasse, and went on to meet the mournful cavalcade.




CHAPTER LI

FACE TO FACE

"If I could only understand!"--this was Rosalie's constant cry in these
weeks wherein she lay ill and prostrate after her father's burial.  Once
and once only had she met Charley alone, though she knew that he was
keeping watch over her.  She had first seen him the day her father was
buried, standing apart from the people, his face sorrowful, his eyes
heavy, his figure bowed.

The occasion of their meeting alone was the first night of her return,
when the Notary and Charley had kept watch beside her father's body.

She had gone into the little hallway, and had looked into the room of
death.  The Notary was sound asleep in his arm-chair, but Charley sat
silent and moveless, his eyes gazing straight before him.  She murmured
his name, and though it was only to herself, not even a whisper, he got
up quickly and came to the hall, where she stood grief-stricken, yet with
a smile of welcome, of forgiveness, of confidence.  As she put out her
hand to him, and his swallowed it, she could not but say to him--so
contrary is the heart of woman, so does she demand a Yes by asserting a
No, and hunger for the eternal assurance--she could not but say:

"You do not love me--now."

It was but a whisper, so faint and breathless that only the heart of love
could hear it.  There was no answer in words, for some one was stirring
beyond Rosalie in the dark, and a great figure heaved through the kitchen
doorway, but his hand crushed hers in his own; his heart said to her, "My
love is an undying light; it will not change for time or tears"--the
words they had read together in a little snuff-coloured book on the
counter in the shop one summer day a year ago.  The words flashed into
his mind, and they were carried to hers.  Her fingers pressed his, and
then Charley said, over her shoulder, to the approaching Mrs. Flynn: "Do
not let her come again, Madame.  She should get some sleep," and he put
her hand in Mrs. Flynn's.  "Be good to her, as you know how, Mrs. Flynn,"
he added gently.

He had won the heart of Mrs. Flynn that moment, and it may be she had a
conviction or an inspiration, for she said, in a softer voice than she
was wont to use to any one save Rosalie:

"I'll do by her as you'd do by your own, sir," and tenderly drew Rosalie
to her own room.

Such had been their first meeting after her return.  Afterwards she was
taken ill, and the torture of his heart drove him out into the night, to
walk the road and creep round her house like a sentinel, Mrs. Flynn's
words ringing in his ears to reproach him--"I'll do by her as you would
do by your own, sir."  Night after night it was the same, and Rosalie
heard his footsteps and listened and was less sorrowful, because she knew
that she was ever in his thoughts.  But one day Mrs. Flynn came to him in
his shop.

"She's wantin' a word with ye on business," she said, and gestured
towards the little house across the way.  "'Tis few words ye do be
shpakin' to annybody, but if y' have kind words to shpake and good things
to say, y' naidn't be bitin' yer tongue," she added in response to his
nod, and left him.

Charley looked after her with a troubled face.  On the instant it seemed
to him that Mrs. Flynn knew all.  But his second thought told him that it
was only an instinct on her part that there was something between them--
the beginning of love, maybe.

In another half-hour he was beside Rosalie's chair.  "Perhaps you are
angry," she said, as he came towards her where she sat in the great arm-
chair.  She did not give him time to answer, but hurried on.  "I wanted
to tell you that I have heard you every night outside, and that I have
been glad, and sorry too--so sorry for us both."

"Rosalie!  Rosalie" he said hoarsely, and dropped on a knee beside her
chair, and took her hand and kissed it.  He did not dare do more.

"I wanted to say to you," she said, dropping a hand on his shoulder,
"that I do not blame you for anything--not for anything.  Yet I want you
to be sorry too.  I want you to feel as sorry for me as I feel sorry for
you."

"I am the worst man and you the best woman in the world."

She leaned over him with tears in her eyes.  "Hush!" she said.  "I want
to help you--Charles.  You are wise.  You know ten thousand things more
than I; but I know one thing you do not understand."

"You know and do whatever is good," he said brokenly.

"Oh, no, no, no!  But I know one thing, because I have been taught, and
because it was born with me.  Perhaps much was habit with me in the past,
but now I know that one thing is true.  It is God."

She paused.  "I have learned so much since--since then."

He looked up with a groan, and put a finger on her lips.  "You are
feeling bitterly sorry for me," she said.  "But you must let me speak--
that is all I ask.  It is all love asks.  I cannot bear that you should
not share my thoughts.  That is the thing that has hurt--hurt so all
these months, these long hard months, when I could not see you, and did
not know why I could not.  Don't shake so, please!  Hear me to the end,
and we shall both be the better after.  I felt it all so cruelly, because
I did not--and I do not--understand.  I rebelled, but not against you.
I rebelled against myself, against what you called Fate.  Fate is one's
self, what one brings on one's self.  But I had faith in you--always--
always, even when I thought I hated you."

"Ah, hate me!  Hate me!  It is your loving that cuts me to the quick," he
said.  "You have the magnanimity of God."

Her eyes leapt up.  "'Of God'--you believe in God!" she said eagerly.
"God is God to you?  He is the one thing that has come out of all this to
me."  She reached out her hand and took her Bible from a table.  "Read
that to yourself," she said, and, opening the Book, pointed to a passage.
He read it:

     And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in
     the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the
     presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.

     And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art
     thou?

     And he said, I heard Thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid,
     because I was naked; and I hid myself.

     And He said, Who told thee that thou wart naked?  Hast thou eaten of
     the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?

Closing the Book, Charley said: "I understand--I see."

"Will you say a prayer with me?" she urged.  "It is all I ask.  It is
the only--the only thing I want to hurt you, because it may make you
happier in the end.  What keeps us apart, I do not know.  But if you will
say one prayer with me, I will keep on trusting, I will never complain,
and I will wait--wait."

He kissed both her hands, but the look in his eyes was that of a man
being broken on the wheel.  She slipped to the floor, her rosary in her
fingers.  "Let us pray," she said simply, and in a voice as clear as a
child's, but with the anguish of a woman's struggling heart behind.

He did not move.  She looked at him, caught his hands in both of hers,
and cried: "But you will not deny me this!  Haven't I the right to ask
it?  Haven't I a right to ask of you a thousand times as much?"

"You have the right to ask all that is mine to give life, honour, my body
in pieces inch by inch, the last that I can call my own.  But, Rosalie,
this is not mine to give!  How can I pray, unless I believe!"

"You do--oh, you do believe in God," she cried passionately.

"Rosalie--my life," he urged, hoarse misery in his voice, "the only thing
I have to give you is the bare soul of a truthful man--I am that now at
least.  You have made me so.  If I deceived the whole world, if I was as
the thief upon the cross, I should still be truthful to you.  You open
your heart to me--let me open mine to you, to see it as it is.  Once
my soul was like a watch, cased and carried in the pocket of life,
uncertain, untrue, because it was a soul made, not born.  I must look at
the hands to know the time, and because it varied, because the working
did not answer to the absolute, I said: 'The soul is a lie.'  You--you
have changed all that, Rosalie.  My soul now is like a dial to the sun.
But the clouds are there above, and I do not know what time it is in
life.  When the clouds break--if they ever break--and the sun shines, the
dial will speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth--"

He paused, confused, for he had repeated the words of a witness taking
the oath in court.

"'So help me God!"' she finished the oath for him.  Then, with a sudden
change of manner, she came to her feet with a spring.  She did not quite
understand.  She was, however, dimly conscious of the power she had over
his chivalrous mind: the power of the weak over the strong--the tyranny
of the defended over the defender.  She was a woman tortured beyond
bearing; and she was fighting for her very life, mad with anguish as she
struggled.

"I do not understand you," she cried, with flashing eyes.  "One minute
you say you do not believe in anything, and the next you say, 'So help me
God!'"

"Ah, no, you said that, Rosalie," he interposed gently.

"You said I was as magnanimous as God.  You were laughing at me then,
mocking me, whose only fault is that I loved and trusted you.  In the
wickedness of your heart you robbed me of happiness, you--"

"Don't--don't!  Rosalie!  Rosalie!" he exclaimed in shrinking protest.

That she had spoken to him as her deepest heart abhorred only increased
her agitated denunciation.  "Yes, yes, in your mad selfishness, you did
not care for the poor girl who forgot all, lost all, and now--" She
stopped short at the sight of his white, awe stricken face.  His eye-
glass seemed like a frost of death over an eye that looked upon some
shocking scene of woe.  Yet he appeared not to see, for his fingers
fumbled on his waistcoat for the monocle--fumbled--vaguely, helplessly.
It was the realisation of a soul cast into the outer darkness.  Her
abrupt silence came upon him like the last engulfing wave to a drowning
man--the final assurance of the end, in which there is quiet and the
deadly smother.

"Now--I know-the truth!" he said, in a curious even tone, different from
any she had ever heard from him.  It was the old Charley Steele who
spoke, the Charley Steele in whom the intellect was supreme once more.
The judicial spirit, the inveterate intelligence which put justice before
all, was alive in him, almost rejoicing in its regained governance.  The
new Charley was as dead as the old had been of late, and this clarifying
moment left the grim impression behind that the old law was not obsolete.
He felt that in the abandonment of her indignation she had mercilessly
told the truth; and the irreducible quality of mind in him which in the
old days made for justice, approved.  There was a new element now,
however--that conscience which never possessed him fully until the day he
saw Rosalie go travelling over the hills with her crippled father.  That
picture of the girl against the twilight, her figure silhouetted in the
clear air, had come to him in sleeping and waking dreams, the type and
sign of an everlasting melancholy.  As he looked at her blindly now, he
saw, not herself, but that melancholy figure.  Out of the distance his
own voice said again:

"Now--I know-the truth!"

She had struck with a violence she did not intend, which, she knew, must
rend her own heart in the future, which put in the dice-box the last
hopes she had.  But she could not have helped it--she could not have
stayed the words, though a suspended sword were to fall with the saying.
It was the cry of tradition and religion, and every home-bred, convent-
nurtured habit, the instinct of heredity, the wail of woman, for whom
destiny, or man, or nature, has arranged the disproportionate share of
life's penalties.  It was the impotent rebellion against the first curse,
that man in his punishment should earn his bread by the sweat of his
brow--which he might do with joy--while the woman must work out her
ordained sentence "in sorrow all the days of her life."

In her bitter words was the inherent revolt of the race of woman.  But
now she suddenly felt that she had flung him an infinite distance from
her; that she had struck at the thing she most cherished--his belief that
she loved him; that even if she had told the truth--and she felt she had
not--it was not the truth she wished him most to feel.

For an instant she stood looking at him, shocked and confounded, then her
changeless love rushed back on her, the maternal and protective spirit
welled up, and with a passionate cry she threw herself in the chair again
in very weakness, with outstretched hands, saying:

"Forgive me--oh, forgive me!  I did not mean it--oh, forgive your
Rosalie!"

Stooping over her, he answered:

"It is good for me to know the whole truth.  What hurts you may give me
will pass--for life must end, and my life cannot be long enough to pay
the price of the hurts I have given you.  I could bear a thousand--one
for every hour--if they could bring back the light to your eye, the joy
to your heart.  Could prayer, do you think, make me sorrier than I am?
I have hurt what I would have spared from hurt at the cost of my life--
and all the lives in all the world!" he added fiercely.

"Forgive me--oh, forgive your Rosalie!" she pleaded.  "I did not know
what I was saying--I was mad."

"It was all so sane and true," he said, like one who, on the brink of
death, finds a satisfaction in speaking the perfect truth.  "I am glad to
hear the truth--I have been such a liar."

She looked up startled, her tears blinding her.  "You have not deceived
me?" she asked bitterly.  "Oh, you have not deceived me--you have loved
me, have you not?"  It was that which mattered, that only.  Moveless and
eager, she looked--looked at him, waiting, as it were, for sentence.

"I never lied to you, Rosalie--never!" he answered, and he touched her
hand.

She gave a moan of relief at his words.  "Oh, then, oh, then .  .  .  "
she said, in a low voice, and the tears in her eyes dried away.

"I meant that until I knew you, I kept deceiving myself and others all my
life--"

"But without knowing it?" she said eagerly.

"Perhaps, without quite knowing it."

"Until you knew me?" she asked, in quick, quivering tones.

"Till I knew you," he answered.

"Then I have done you good--not ill?" she asked, with painful
breathlessness.

"The only good there may be in me is you, and you only," he said, and he
choked something rising in his throat, seeing the greatness of her heart,
her dear desire to have entered into his life to his own good.  He would
have said that there was no good in him at all, but that he wished to
comfort her.

A little cry of joy broke from her lips.  "Oh, that--that!" she cried,
with happy tears.  "Won't you kiss me now?" she added softly.

He clasped her in his arms, and though his eyes were dry, his heart wept
tears of blood.




CHAPTER LII

THE COMING OF BILLY

Chaudiere had made--and lost--a reputation.  The Passion Play in the
valley had become known to a whole country--to the Cure's and the
Seigneur's unavailing regret.  They had meant to revive the great story
for their own people and the Indians--a homely, beautiful object-lesson,
in an Eden--like innocence and quiet and repose; but behold the world had
invaded them!  The vanity of the Notary had undone them.  He had written
to the great papers of the province, telling of the advent of the play,
and pilgrimages had been organised, and excursions had been made to the
spot, where a simple people had achieved a crude but noble picture of the
life and death of the Hero of Christendom.  The Cure viewed with
consternation the invasion of their quiet.  It was no longer his own
Chaudiere; and when, on a Sunday, his dear people were jostled from the
church to make room for strangers, his gentle eloquence seemed to forsake
him, he spoke haltingly, and his intoning of the Mass lacked the old
soothing simplicity.

"Ah, my dear Seigneur!" he said, on the Sunday before the playing was to
end, "we have overshot the mark."

The Seigneur nodded and turned his head away.  "There is an English play
which says, 'I have shot mine arrow o'er the house and hurt my brother.'
That's it--that's it!  We began with religion, and we end with greed,
and pride, and notoriety."

"What do we want of fame!  The price is too high, Maurice.  Fame is not
good for the hearts and minds of simple folk."

"It will soon be over."

"I dread a sordid reaction."

The Seigneur stood thinking for a moment.  "I have an idea," he said at
last.  "Let us have these last days to ourselves.  The mission ends next
Saturday at five o'clock.  We will announce that all strangers must leave
the valley by Wednesday night.  Then, during those last three days, while
yet the influence of the play is on them, you can lead your own people
back to the old quiet feelings."

"My dear Maurice--it is worthy of you!  It is the way.  We will announce
it to-day.  And see now.  .  .  .  For those three days we will change
the principals; lest those who have taken the parts so long have lost the
pious awe which should be upon them.  We will put new people in their
places.  I will announce it at vespers presently.  I have in my mind who
should play the Christ, and St. John, and St. Peter--the men are not hard
to find; but for Mary the Mother and Mary Magdalene--"

The eyes of the two men suddenly met, a look of understanding passed
between them.

"Will she do it?" said the Seigneur.

The Cure nodded.  "Paulette Dubois has heard the word, 'Go and sin no
more'; she will obey."

Walking through the village as they talked, the Cure shrank back
painfully several times, for voices of strangers, singing festive songs,
rolled out upon the road.  "Who can they be?" he said distressfully.

Without a word the Seigneur went to the door of the inn whence the sounds
proceeded, and, without knocking, entered.  A moment afterwards the
voices stopped, but broke out again, quieted, then once more broke out,
and presently the Seigneur issued from the door, white with anger, three
strangers behind him.  All were intoxicated.

One was violent.  It was Billy Wantage, whom the years had not improved.
He had arrived that day with two companions--an excursion of curiosity
as an excuse for a "spree."

"What's the matter with you, old stick-in-the-mud?" he shouted.  "Mass
is over, isn't it?  Can't we have a little guzzle between prayers?"

By this time a crowd had gathered, among them Filion Lacasse.  At a
motion from the Seigneur, and a whisper that went round quickly, a dozen
habitants swiftly sprang on the three men, pinioned their arms, and
carrying them bodily to the pump by the tavern, held them under it, one
by one, till each was soaked and sober.  Then their horses and wagon were
brought, and they were given five minutes to leave the village.

With a devilish look in his eye, and drenched and furious, Billy was
disposed to resist the command, but the faces around him were determined,
and, muttering curses, the three drove away towards the next parish.




CHAPTER LIII

THE SEIGNEUR AND THE CURE HAVE A SUSPICION

Presently the Seigneur and the Cure stood before the door of the tailor-
shop.  The Cure was about to knock, when the Seigneur laid a hand upon
his arm.

"There is no use; he has been gone several days," he said.

"Gone--gone!" said the Cure.

"I came to see him yesterday, and not finding him, I asked at the post-
office."  M. Rossignol's voice lowered.  "He told Mrs. Flynn he was going
into the hills, so Rosalie says."

The Cure's face fell.  "He went away also just before the play began.
I almost fear that--that we get no nearer.  His mind prompts him to do
good and not evil, and yet--and yet.  .  .  .  I have dreamed a good
dream, Maurice, but I sometimes fear I have dreamed in vain."

"Wait-wait!"

M. Loisel looked towards the post-office musingly.  "I have thought
sometimes that what man's prayers may not accomplish a woman's love might
do.  If--but, alas, what do we know of his past!  Nothing.  What do we
know of his future?  Nothing.  What do we know of the human heart?
Nothing--nothing!"

The Seigneur was astounded.  The Cure's meaning was plain.  "What do you
mean?" he asked, almost gruffly.

"She--Rosalie--has changed--changed."  In his heart he dwelt sorrowfully
upon the fact that she had not been to confession to him for many, many
months.

"Since her father's death--since her illness?"

"Since she went to Montreal seven months ago.  Even while she was so ill
these past weeks, she never asked for me; and when I came .  .  .  Ah, if
it is that her heart has gone out to the man, and his does not respond!"

"A good thing, too!" said the other gloomily.  "We don't know where he
came from, and we do know that he is a pagan."

"Yet there she sits now, hour after hour, day after day--so changed."

"She has lost her father," urged M. Rossignol anxiously.

"I know the grief of children--this is not such a grief.  There is
something more.  But I cannot ask. If she were a sinner--but she is
without fault.  Have we not watched her grow up here, mirthful, brave,
pure-souled--"

"Fitted for any station," interposed the Seigneur huskily.  Presently he
laid a hand upon the Cure's arm.  "Shall I ask her again?" he said,
breathing hard.  "Do you think she has found out her mistake?"

The Cure was so taken aback that at first he could not speak.  When he
realised, however, he could scarce suppress a smile at the other's simple
vanity.  But he mastered himself, and said: "It is not that, Maurice.  It
is not you."

"How did you know I had asked her?" asked his friend querulously.

"You have just told me."

M. Rossignol felt a kind of reproval in the Cure's tone.  It made him a
little nervous.  "I'm an old fool, but she needed some one," he
protested.  "At least I am a gentleman, and she would not be thrown
away."

"Dear Maurice!" said the Cure, and linked his arm in the other's.  "In
all respects save one, it would have been to her advantage.  But youth is
the only comrade for youth.  All else is evasion of life's laws."

The Seigneur pressed his arm.  "I thought you less worldly-wise than
myself; I find you more," he said.

"Not worldly-wise.  Life is deeper than the world or worldly wisdom.
Come, we will both go and see Rosalie."

M. Rossignol suddenly stopped at the post-office door, and half turned
towards the tailor-shop.  "He is young.  Suppose that he drew her love
his way, but gave her nothing in return, and--"

"If it were so"--the Cure paused, and his face darkened--"if it were so,
he should leave her forever; and so my dream would end."

"And Rosalie?"

"Rosalie would forget.  To remember, youth must see and touch and be
near, else it wears itself out in excess of feeling.  Youth feels more
deeply than age, but it must bear daily witness."

"Upon my honour, Cure, you shall write your little philosophies for the
world," said M. Rossignol, and then knocked at the door.

"I will go in alone, Maurice," the Cure urged.  "Good-you are right,"
answered the other.  "I will go write the proclamation denying strangers
the valley after Wednesday.  I will enforce it, too," he added, with
vigour, and, turning, walked up the street, as Mrs. Flynn admitted the
Cure to the post-office.

A half-hour later M. Loisel again appeared at the post-office door, a
pale, beautiful face at his shoulder.

He had not been brave enough to say what was on his mind.  But as he bade
her good-bye, he plucked up needful courage.

"Forgive me, Rosalie," he said, "but I have sometimes thought that you
have more griefs than one.  I have thought"--he paused, then went on
bravely--"that there might be--there might be unwelcomed love, or love
deceived."

A mist came before her eyes, but she quietly and firmly answered: "I have
never been deceived in love, Monsieur Loisel."

"There, there!" he hurriedly and gently rejoined.  "Do not be hurt, my
child.  I only want to help you."  A moment afterwards he was gone.

As the door closed behind him, she drew herself proudly up.

"I have never been deceived," she said aloud.  "I love him--love him--love
him."




CHAPTER LIV

M. ROSSIGNOL SLIPS THE LEASH

It was the last day of the Passion Play, and the great dramatic mission
was drawing to a close.  The confidence of the Cure and the Seigneur was
restored.  The prohibition against strangers had had its effect, and for
three whole days the valley had been at rest again.  Apparently there was
not a stranger within its borders, save the Seigneur's brother, the Abbe
Rossignol, who had come to see the moving spectacle.

The Abbe, on his arrival, had made inquiries concerning the tailor of
Chaudiere and Jo Portugais, as persistently about the one as the other.
Their secrets had been kept inviolate by him.

It was disconcerting to hear the tales people told of the tailor's
charity and wisdom.  It was all dangerous, for what was, accidentally,
no evil in this particular instance, might be the greatest disaster in
another case.  Principle was at stake.  He heard in stern silence the
Cure's happy statement that Jo Portugais had returned to the bosom of the
Church, and attended Mass regularly.

"So it may be, my dear Abbe," said M. Loisel, "that the friendship
between him and our 'infidel' has been the means of helping Portugais.
I hope their friendship will go on unbroken for years and years."

"I have no idea that it will," said the Abbe grimly.  "That rope of
friendship may snap untimely."

"Upon my soul, you croak like a raven!" testily broke in M. Rossignol,
who was present.  "I didn't know there was so much in common between you
and my surly-jowled groom.  He gets his pleasure out of croaking.  'Wait,
wait, you'll see--you'll see!  Death, death, death--every man must die!
The devil has you by the hair--death--death--death!'  Bah!  I'm heartily
sick of croakers.  I suppose, like my grunting groom, you'll say about
the Passion Play, 'No good will come of it--wait--wait--wait!'  Bah!"

"It may not be an unmixed good," answered the ascetic.

"Well, and is there any such thing on earth as an unmixed good?  The play
yesterday was worth a thousand sermons.  It was meant to serve Holy
Church, and it will serve it.  Was there ever anything more real--and
touching--than Paulette Dubois as Mary Magdalene yesterday?"

"I do not approve of such reality.  For that woman to play the part is to
destroy the impersonality of the scene."

"You would demand that the Christus should be a good man, and the St.
John blameless--why shouldn't the Magdalene be a repentant woman?"

"It might impress the people more, if the best woman in your parish were
to play the part.  The fall of virtue, the ruin of innocence, would be
vividly brought home.  It does good to make the innocent feel the terror
and shame of sin.  That is the price the good pay for the fall of man--
sorrow and shame for those who sin."  The Seigneur, rising quickly from
the table, and kicking his chair back, said angrily: "Damn your
theories!"  Then, seeing the frozen look on his brother's face,
continued, more excitedly: "Yes, damn, damn, damn your theories!  You
always took the crass view.  I beg your pardon, Cure--I beg your pardon."

He then went to the window, threw it open, and called to his groom.

"Hi, there, coffin-face," he said, "bring round the horses--the quietest
one in the stable for my brother--you hear?  He can't ride," he added
maliciously.

This was his fiercest stroke, for the Abbe's secret vanity was the belief
that he looked well on a horse, and rode handsomely.




CHAPTER LV

ROSALIE PLAYS A PART

From a tree upon a little hill rang out a bell--a deep-toned bell, bought
by the parish years before for the missions held at this very spot.
Every day it rang for an instant at the beginning of each of the five
acts.  It also tolled slowly when the curtain rose upon the scene of the
Crucifixion.  In this act no one spoke save the abased Magdalene, who
knelt at the foot of the cross, and on whose hair red drops fell when the
Roman soldier pierced the side of the figure on the cross.  This had been
the Cure's idea.  The Magdalene should speak for mankind, for the
continuing world.  She should speak for the broken and contrite heart in
all ages, should be the first-fruits of the sacrifice, a flower of the
desert earth, bedewed by the blood of the Prince of Peace.

So, in the long nights of the late winter and early spring, the Cure had
thought and thought upon what the woman should say from the foot of the
cross.  At last he put into her mouth that which told the whole story of
redemption and deliverance, so far as his heart could conceive it--the
prayer for all sorts and conditions of men and the general thanksgiving
of humanity.

During the last three days Paulette Dubois had taken the part of Mary
Magdalene.  As Jo Portugais had confessed to the Abbe that notable day in
the woods at Vadrome Mountain, so she had confessed to the Cure after so
many years of agony--and the one confession fitted into the other: Jo had
once loved her, she had treated him vilely, then a man had wronged her,
and Jo had avenged her--this was the tale in brief.  She it was who
laughed in the gallery of the court-room the day that Joseph Nadeau was
acquitted.

It had pained and shocked the Cure more than any he had ever heard, but
he urged for her no penalty as Portugais had set for himself with the
austere approval of the Abbe.  Paulette's presence as the Magdalene had
had a deep effect upon the people, so that she shared with Mary the
Mother the painfully real interest of the vast audience.

Five times had the bell rung out in the perfect spring air, upon which
the balm of the forest and the refreshment of the ardent sun were poured.
The quick anger of M. Rossignol had passed away long before the Cure, the
Abbe, and himself had reached the lake and the great plateau.  Between
the acts the two brothers walked up and down together, at peace once
more, and there was a suspicious moisture in the Seigneur's eyes.  The
demeanour of the people had been so humble and rapt that the place and
the plateau and the valley seemed alone in creation with the lofty drama
of the ages.

The Cure's eyes shone when he saw on a little knoll in the trees, apart
from the worshippers and spectators, Charley and Jo Portugais.  His cup
of content was now full.  He had felt convinced that if the tailor had
but been within these bounds during the past three days, a work were
begun which should end only at the altar of their parish church.  To-day
the play became to him the engine of God for the saving of a man's soul.
Not long before the last great tableau was to appear he went to his own
little tent near the hut where the actors prepared to go upon the stage.
As he entered, some one came quickly forward from the shadow of the trees
and touched him on the arm.

"Rosalie!" he cried in amazement, for she wore the costume of Mary
Magdalene.

"It is I, not Paulette, who will appear," she said, a deep light in her
eyes.

"You, Rosalie?" he asked dumfounded.  "You are distrait.  Trouble and
sorrow have put this in your mind.  You must not do it."

"Yes, I am going there," she said, pointing towards the great stage.
"Paulette has given me these to wear"--she touched the robe--"and I only
ask your blessing now.  Oh, believe, believe me, I can speak for those
who are innocent and those who are guilty; for those who pray and those
who cannot pray; for those who confess and those who dare not!  I can
speak the words out of my heart with gladness and agony, Monsieur," she
urged, in a voice vibrating with feeling.

A luminous look came into the Cure's face.  A thought leapt up in his
heart.  Who could tell!--this pure girl, speaking for the whole sinful,
unbelieving, and believing world, might be the one last conquering
argument to the man.

He could not read the agony of spirit which had driven Rosalie to this
--to confess through the words of Mary Magdalene her own woe, to say it
out to all the world, and to receive, as did Paulette Dubois, every day
after the curtain came down, absolution and blessing.  She longed for the
old remembered peace.

The Cure could not read the struggle between her love for a man and the
ineradicable habit of her soul; but he raised his hand, made the sacred
gesture over leer, and said: "Go, my child, and God be with you."

He could not see her for tears as she hurried away to where Paulette
Dubois awaited her--the two at peace now.  At the hands of the lately
despised and injurious woman Rosalie was made ready to play the part in
the last act, none knowing save the few who appeared in the final
tableau, and they at the last moment only.

The bell began to toll.

A thousand people fell upon their knees, and with fascinated yet abashed
and awe-struck eyes saw the great tableau of Christendom: the three
crosses against the evening sky, the Figure in the centre, the Roman
populace, the trembling Jews, the pathetic groups of disciples.  A cloud
passed across the sky, the illusion grew, and hearts quivered in piteous
sympathy.  There was no music now--not a sound save the sob of some
overwrought woman.  The woe of an oppressed world absorbed them.  Even
the stolid Indians, as Roman soldiers, shrank awe-stricken from the
sacred tragedy.  Now the eyes of all were upon the central Figure, then
they shifted for a moment to John the Beloved, standing with the Mother.

"Pauvre Mere!  Pauvre Christ!" said a weeping woman aloud.

A Roman soldier raised a spear and pierced the side of the Hero of the
World.  Blood flowed, and hundreds gasped.  Then there was silence--a
strange hush as of a prelude to some great event.

"It is finished.  Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit," said the
Figure.

The hush was broken by such a sound as one hears in a forest when a wind
quivers over the earth, flutters the leaves, and then sinks away--neither
having come nor gone, but only lived and died.

Again there was silence, and then all eyes were fixed upon the figure at
the foot of the cross-Mary the Magdalene.

Day after day they had seen this figure rise, come forward a step, and
speak the epilogue to this moving miracle-drama.  For the last three days
Paulette Dubois had turned a sorrowful face upon them, and with one hand
upraised had spoken the prayer, the prophecy, the thanksgiving, the
appeal of humanity and the ages.  They looked to see the same figure now,
and waited.  But as the Magdalene turned, there was a great stir in the
multitude, for the face bent upon them was that of Rosalie Evanturel.
Awe and wonder moved the people.

Apart from the crowd, under a clump of trees, knelt a woodsman from
Vadrome Mountain, and the tailor of Chaudiere stood beside him.

When Charley, touched by the heavy scene, saw the figure of the Magdalene
rise, he felt a curious thrill of fascination.  When she turned, and he
saw the face of Rosalie, the blood rushed to his face; then his heart
seemed to stand still.  Pain and shame travelled to the farthest recesses
of his nature.  Jo Portugais rose to his feet with a startled
exclamation.

Rosalie began to speak.  "This is the day of which the hours shall never
cease--in it there shall be no night.  He whom ye have crucified hath
saved you from the wrath to come.  He hath saved others, Himself He would
not save.  Even for such as I, who have secretly opened, who have
secretly entered, the doors of sin--"

With a gasp of horror and a mad desire to take her away from the sight of
this gaping, fascinated crowd, Charley made to rush forward, but Jo
Portugais held him back.

"Be still.  You will ruin her, M'sieu'!" said Jo.

"--even for such as I am," the beautiful voice went on, "hath He died.
And in the ages to come, women such as I, and all women who sorrow, and
all men who err and are deceived, and all the helpless world, will know
that this was the Friend of the human soul."  Not a gesture, not a
movement, only that slight, pathetic figure, with pale, agonised face,
and eyes that looked--looked--looked beyond them, over their heads to the
darkening east, the clouded light of evening behind her.  Her voice rang
out now valiant and clear, now searching and piteous, yet reaching to
where the farthermost person knelt, and was lost upon the lake and in the
spreading trees.

"What ye have done may never be undone; what He hath said shall never be
unsaid.  His is the Word which shall unite all languages, when ye that
are Romans shall be no more Romans, and ye that are Jews shall still be
Jews, reproached and alone.  No longer shall men faint in the glare--the
shadow of the Cross shall screen them.  No more shall woman bear her
black sorrows, alone; the Light of the World shall cheer her."

As she spoke, the cloud drew back from the sunset, and the saffron glow
behind lighted the cross, and shone upon her hair, casting her face in a
gracious shadow.  Her voice rose higher.  "I, the Magdalene, am the
first-fruits of this sacrifice: from the foot of the cross I come.
I have sinned more than all.  I have shamed all women.  But I have
confessed my sin, and He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and
to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

Her voice now became lower, but clear and even, pathetically exulting:

"O world, forgive, as He hath forgiven you!  Fall, dark curtain, and hide
this pain, and rise again upon forgiven sin and a redeemed people!"

She stood still, with her eyes upraised, and the curtain came slowly
down.

For a long time no one in all the gathered multitude stirred.  Far over
under the trees a man sat upon the ground, his head upon his arms, and
his arms upon his knees, in a misery unmeasurable.  Beside him stood a
woodsman, who knew of no word to say that might comfort him.

A girl, in the garb of the Magdalene, entered the tent of the Cure, and,
speaking no word, knelt and received absolution of her sins.




CHAPTER LVI

MRS. FLYNN SPEAKS

CHARLEY left Jo Portugais behind, and went home alone.  He watched at a
window till he saw Rosalie return.  As she passed quickly down the street
with Mrs. Flynn to her own door, he observed that her face was happier
than he had seen it for many a day.  Her step was lighter, there was a
freedom in her air, a sense of confidence in her carriage.

She bore herself as one who had done a thing which relaxed a painful
tension.  There was a curious glow in her eyes and face, and this became
deeper as, showing himself at the door, she saw him, smiled, and stood
still.  He came across the street and took her hand.

"You have been away," she said softly.  "For a few days," he answered.

"Far?"

"At Vadrome Mountain."

"You have missed these last days of the Passion Play," she said, a shadow
in her eyes.

"I was present to-day," he answered.

She turned away her head quickly, for the look in his eyes told her more
than any words could have done, and Mrs. Flynn said:

"'Tis a day for everlastin' mimory, sir.  For the part she played this
day, the darlin', only such as she could play!  'Tis the innocent takin'
the shame o' the guilty, and the tears do be comin' to me eyes.  'Tis not
ould Widdy Flynn's eyes alone that's wet this day, but hearts do be
weepin' for the love o' God."

Rosalie suddenly opened the door, and, without another look at Charley,
entered the house.

"'Tis one in a million!" said Mrs. Flynn, in a confidential tone, for
she had a fixed idea that Rosalie loved Charley and that he loved her,
and that the only thing that stood in the way of their marriage was
religion.  From the first Charley had conquered Mrs. Flynn.  That he was
a tailor was a pity and a shame, but love was love, and the man had a
head on him and a heart in him; and love was love!  So Mrs. Flynn said:

"'Tis one that a man that's a man should do annything for, was it havin'
the heart cut out uv him, or givin' the last drop uv his blood.  Shure,
for such as her, murder, or false witness, or givin' up the last wish or
thought a man hugged to his boosom, would be as aisy as aisy."

Charley laughed to himself, her purpose was so obvious, but his heart
went out to her, for she was a friend, and, whatever came to him, Rosalie
would not be alone.

"I believe every word of yours," he said, shaking her hand, "and we'll
see, you and I, that no man marries her who isn't ready to do what you
say."

"Would you do it yourself--if it was you?" she asked, flushing for her
boldness.

"I would," he answered.

"Then do it," she said, and fled inside the house and shut the door.

"Mrs. Flynn--good Mrs. Flynn!" he said, and went back sadly to his
house, and shut himself up with his thoughts.  When night drew on he went
to bed, but he could not sleep.  He got up after a time, and taking pen
and paper, wrote for a long time.  Having finished, he took what he had
written, and placing it with the two packets-of money and pearls--which
he had brought from his old home, he addressed it to the Cure, and going
to the safe in the wall of the shop, placed them inside and locked the
door.

Then he went to bed, and slept soundly--the deep sleep of the just.




CHAPTER LVII

A BURNING FIERY FURNACE

Every man within the limits of the parish was in his bed, save one.  He
was a stranger who, once before, had visited Chaudiere for one brief day,
when he had been saved from death at the Red Ravine, and had fled the
village that night because, as he thought, he had heard the voice of his
old friend's ghost in the trees.  Since that time he had travelled in
many parishes, healing where he could, entertaining where he might,
earning money as the charlatan.  He was now on his way back through the
parishes to Montreal, and his route lay through Chaudiere.  He had hoped
to reach Chaudiere before nightfall--he remembered with fear the incident
from which he had fled many months before; but his horse had broken its
leg on a corduroy bridge, a few miles out from the parish in the hills,
and darkness came upon him before he could hide his wagon in the woods
and proceed afoot to Chaudiere.  He had shot his horse, and rolled it
into the swift torrent beneath the bridge.

Travelling the lonely road, he drank freely from the whiskey-horn he
carried, to keep his spirits up, so that by the time he came to the
outskirts of Chaudiere he was in a state of intoxication, and reeled
impudently along with the "Dutch courage" the liquor had given him.
Arrived at the first cluster of houses in the place, he paused uncertain.
Should he knock here or go on to the tavern?  He shivered at thought of
the tavern, for it was near it he had heard Charley Steele's voice
calling to him out of the trees.  If he knocked here, would the people
admit him in his present state?--he had sense enough to know that he was
very drunk.  As he shook his head in owlish gravity, he saw the church on
the hill not far away.  He chuckled to himself.  The carpet in the
chancel and the hassocks at the altar would make a good bed.  No fear of
Charley's ghost coming inside the church--it wouldn't be that kind of a
ghost.  As he travelled the intervening space, shrugging his shoulders,
staggering serenely, he told himself in confidence that he would leave
the church at dawn, go to the tavern, purchase a horse as soon as might
be, and get back to his wagon.

The church door was unlocked, and he entered and made his way to the
chancel, found surplices in the vestry and put a hassock inside one for a
pillow.  Then he sat down and drew the loose rug of the chancel-floor
over him, and took another drink from the whiskey horn.  Lighting his
pipe, he smoked for a while, but grew drowsy, and his pipe fell into his
lap.  With eyes nearly shut he struck another match, made to light his
pipe again, but threw the match away, still burning.  As he did so the
pipe dropped again from his mouth, and he fell back on the hassock-pillow
he had made.

The lighted match fell on a surplice which had dropped from his arms as
he came from the vestry, and set it afire.  In five minutes the whole
chancel was burning, and the sleeping man waked in the midst of smoke and
flame.  He staggered to his feet with a terror-stricken cry, stumbled
down the aisle, through the front door, and out into the night.  Reaching
the road, he turned his face again to the hill where his wagon lay hid.
If he could reach that, he would be safe; nobody would suspect him.  He
clutched the whiskey-horn tight and broke into a run.  As he passed
beyond the village his excited imagination heard Charley Steele's ghost
calling after him.  He ran harder.  The voice kept calling from
Chaudiere.

Not Charley's voice, but the voices of many people in Chaudiere were
calling.  Some wakeful person had seen the glare in the church windows
and had given the alarm, and now there rang through the streets the call-
"Fire! Fire! Fire!"

Charley and Jo were among the last to wake, for both had slept soundly,
but Jo was roused by a handful of gravel thrown at his window and a
warning cry, and a few moments later he and Charley were in the street
with a hurrying crowd.  Over all the village was a red glare, lighting up
the sky, burnishing the trees.  The church was a mass of flames.

Charley was as pale as the rest of the crowd; for he thought of the Cure,
he thought of this people to whom their church meant more than home and
vastly more than friend and fortune.  His heart was with them all: not
because it was their church that was burning, but because it was
something dear to them.

Reaching the hill, he saw the Cure coming from the vestry of the burning
church, bearing some vessels of the altar.  Depositing them in the arms
of his weeping sister, he turned again towards the door.  People clung to
him, and would not let him go.

"See, it is all inflames," they cried.  "Your cassock is singed.  You
shall not go."

At that moment Charley and Portugais came up.  A hurried question to the
Cure from Charley, a key handed over, a nod from Jo, and before the Cure
could prevent them the two men had rushed through the smoke and flame
into the vestry, Portugais holding Charley's hand.

The crowd outside waited in a terrible anxiety.  The timbers of the
chancel portion of the building seemed about to fall, and still the two
men did not appear.  The people called; the Cure clinched his hands at
his side--he was too fearful even to pray.

But now the two men appeared, loaded with the few treasures of the
church.  They were scorched and singed, and the beards of both were
burned, but, stumbling and exhausted, they brought their loads to the
eager arms of the waiting habitants.

Then from the other end of the church came a cry: "The little cross--the
little iron cross!"  Then another cry: "Rosalie Evanturel!  Rosalie
Evanturel!"  Some one came running to the Cure.

"Rosalie Evanturel has gone inside for the little cross on the pillar.
She is in the flames; the door has fallen in.  She can't get out again."

With a hoarse cry, Charley darted back inside the vestry door.  A cry of
horror went up.

It was only a minute and a half, but it seemed like years, and then a man
in flames appeared in the fiery porch--and not alone.  He carried a girl
in his arms.  He wavered even at the threshold with the timbers swaying
overhead, but, with a last effort, he plunged forward through the
furnace, and was caught by eager hands on the margin of endurable heat.
The two were smothered in quilts brought from the Cure's house, and
carried swiftly to the cool safety of the grass and trees beyond.  The
woman had fainted in the flame of the church; the man dropped insensible
as they caught her from his arms.

As they tore away Charley's coat muffling his face, and opened his shirt,
they stared in awe.  The cross which Rosalie had torn from the pillar,
Charley had thrust into his bosom, and there it now lay on the red scar
made by itself in the hands of Louis Trudel.

M. Loisel waved the people back.  He raised Charley's head.  The Abbe
Rossignol, who had just arrived with the Seigneur, lifted the cross from
the insensible man's breast.

He started when he saw the scar.  Then he remembered the tale he had
heard.  He turned away gravely to his brother.  "Was it the cross or the
woman he went for?" he asked.

"Great God--do you ask!" the Seigneur said indignantly.  "And he
deserves her," he muttered under his breath.

Charley opened his eyes.  "Is she safe?" he asked, starting up.

"Unscathed, my son," the Cure said.

Was this tailor-man not his son?  Had he not thirsted for his soul as a
hart for the water-brooks?

"I am very sorry for you, Monsieur," said Charley.

"It is God's will," was the reply, in a choking voice.  "It will be years
before we have another church--many, many years."

The roof gave way with a crash, and the spire shot down into the flaming
debris.

The people groaned.

"It will cost sixty thousand dollars to build it up again," said Filion
Lacasse.

"We have three thousand dollars from the Passion Play," said the Notary.
"That could go towards it."

"We have another two thousand in the bank," said Maximilian Cour.

"But it will take years," said the saddler disconsolately.

Charley looked at the Cure, mournful and broken but calm.  He saw the
Seigneur, gloomy and silent, standing apart.  He saw the people in
scattered groups, looking more homeless than if they had no homes.  Some
groups were silent; others discussed angrily the question, who was the
incendiary--that it had been set on fire seemed certain.

"I said no good would come of the play-acting," said the Seigneur's
groom, and was flung into the ditch by Filion Lacasse.

Presently Charley staggered to his feet, purpose in his face.  These
people, from the Cure and Seigneur to the most ignorant habitant, were
hopeless and inert.  The pride of their lives was gone.

"Gather the people together," he said to the Notary and Filion Lacasse.
Then he turned to the Cure and the Seigneur.

"With your permission, messieurs," he said, "I will do a harder thing
than I have ever done.  I will speak to them all."

Wondering, M. Loisel added his voice to the Notary's, and the word went
round.  Slowly they all made their way to a spot the Cure indicated.

Charley stood on the embankment above the road, the notables of the
parish round him.

Rosalie had been taken to the Cure's house.  In that wild moment in the
church when she had fallen insensible in Charley's arms, a new feeling
had sprung up in her.  She loved him in every fibre, but she had a
strange instinct, a prescience, that she was lying on his breast for the
last time.  She had wound her arms round his neck, and, as his lips
closed on hers, she had cried: "We shall die together--together."

As she lay in the Cure's house, she thought only of that moment.

"What are they cheering for?" she asked, as a great noise came to her
through the window.

"Run and see," said the Cure's sister to Mrs. Flynn, and the fat woman
hurried away.

Rosalie raised herself so that she could look out of the window.  "I can
see him," she cried.

"See whom?" asked the Cure's sister.

"Monsieur," she answered, with a changed voice.  "He is speaking.  They
are cheering him."

Ten minutes later, the Cure and the Notary entered the room.  M. Loisel
came forward to Rosalie, and took her hands in his.

"You should not have done it," he said.

"I wanted to do something," she replied.  "To get the cross for you
seemed the only payment I could make for all your goodness to me."

"It nearly cost you your life--and the life of another," he said, shaking
his head reproachfully.

Cheering came again from the burning church.  "Why do they cheer?" she
asked.

"Why do they cheer?  Because the man we have feared, Monsieur Mallard--"

"I never feared him," said Rosalie, scarcely above her breath.

"Because he has taught them the way to a new church again--and at once,
at once, my child."

"A remarkable man!" said Narcisse Dauphin.  "There never was such a
speech.  Never in any courtroom was there such an appeal."

"What did he do?" asked Mademoiselle Loisel, her hand in Rosalie's.

"Everything," answered the Cure.  "There he stood in his tattered
clothes, the beard burnt to his chin, his hands scorched, his eyes
bloodshot, and he spoke--"

"'With the tongues of men and of angels,'" said M. Dauphin
enthusiastically.

The Cure frowned and continued: "'You look on yonder burning walls,' he
said, 'and wonder when they will rise again on this hill made sacred by
the burial of your beloved, by the christening of your children, the
marriages which have given you happy homes, and the sacraments which are
to you the laws of your lives.  You give one-twentieth of your income
yearly towards your church--then give one-fortieth of all you possess
today, and your church will be begun in a month.  Before a year goes
round you will come again to this venerable spot and enter another church
here.  Your vows, your memories, and your hopes will be purged by fire.
All that you possess will be consecrated by your free-will offerings.'
--Ah, if I could but remember what came afterwards!  It was all
eloquence, and generous and noble thought."

"He spoke of you," said the Notary--"he spoke the truth; and the people
cheered.  He said that the man outside the walls could sometimes tell the
besieged the way relief would come.  Never again shall I hear such a
speech."

"What are they going to do?" asked Rosalie, and withdrew her trembling
hand from that of Madame Dugal.

"This very day, at my office, they will bring their offerings, and we
will begin at once," answered M. Dauphin.  "There is no man in Chaudiere
but will take the stocking from the hole, the bag from the chest, the
credit from the bank, the grain from the barn for the market, or make the
note of hand to contribute one-fortieth of all he is worth for the
rebuilding of the church."

"Notes of hand are not money," said the Cure's sister, the practical
sense ever uppermost.

"They shall all be money--hard cash," said the Notary.  "The Seigneur is
going to open a sort of bank, and take up the notes of hand, and give
bank-bills in return.  To-day I go with his steward to Quebec to get the
money."

"What does the Abbe Rossignol say?" said the Cure's sister.

"Our church and parish are our own," interposed the Cure proudly.  "We do
our duty and fear no abbe."

"Voila!" said M. Dauphin, "he never can keep hands off.  I saw him go to
Jo Portugais a little while ago.  'Remember!' he said--I can't make out
what he was after.  We have enough to remember to-day, for sure."

"Good may come of it, perhaps," said M. Loisel, looking sadly out upon
the ruins of his church.

"See, 'tis the sunrise!" said Mrs. Flynn's voice from the corner, her
face towards the eastern window.




CHAPTER LVIII

WITH HIS BACK TO THE WALL

In four days ten thousand dollars in notes and gold had been brought to
the office of the Notary by the faithful people of Chaudiere.  All day in
turn M. Loisel and M. Rossignol sat in the office and received that which
represented one-fortieth of the value of each man's goods, estate, and
wealth--the fortieth value of a woodsawyer's cottage, or a widow's
garden.  They did it impartially for all, as the Cure and three of the
best-to-do habitants had done for the Seigneur, whose four thousand
dollars had been paid in first of all.

Charley had been confined to his room for three days, because of his
injuries and a feverish cold he had caught, and the habitants did not
disturb his quiet.  But Mrs. Flynn took him broth made by Rosalie's
hands, and Rosalie fought with her desire to go to him and nurse him.
She was not, however, the Rosalie of the old impulse and impetuous
resolve--the arrow had gone too deep; she waited till she could see his
face again and look into his eyes.  Not apathy, but a sense of the
inevitable was upon her, and pale and fragile, but with a calm spirit,
she waited for she knew not what.

She felt that the day of fate was closing down.  She must hold herself
ready for the hour when he would need her most.  At first, when the
conviction had come to her that the end of all was near, she had
revolted.  She had had impulse to go to him at all hazards, to say to
him: "Come away--anywhere, anywhere!"  But that had given place to the
deeper thing in her, and something of Charley's spirit of stoic waiting
had come upon her.

She watched the people going to the Notary's office with their tributes
and free-will offerings, and they seemed like people in a play--these
days she lived no life which was theirs.  It was a dream, unimportant
and temporary.  She was feeling what was behind all life, and permanent.
It could not last, but there it was; and she could not return to the
transitory till this cloud of fate was lifted.  She was much too young to
suffer so, but the young ever suffer most.

On the fourth day she saw Charley.  He came from his shop and went to the
Notary's office.  At first she was startled, for he was clean-shaven--the
fire had burned his beard to the skin.  She saw a different man, far
removed from this life about them both--individual, singular.  He was
pale, and his eye-glass, with the cleanshaven face, gave an impression of
refined separateness.  She did not know that the same look was in both
their faces.  She watched him till he entered the Notary's shop, then she
was called away to her duties.

Charley had come to give his one-fortieth with the rest.  When he entered
the Notary's office, the Seigneur and M. Dauphin stood up to greet him.
They congratulated him on his recovery, while feeling also that the
change in his personal appearance somehow affected their relations.
A crowd gathered round the door of the shop.  When Charley made his
offering, with a statement of his goods and income, the Seigneur and
Notary did not know what to do.  They were disposed to decline it, for
since Monsieur was no Catholic, it was not his duty to help.  At this
moment of delicate anxiety M. Loisel entered.  With a swift bright flush
to his cheek he saw the difficulty, and at once accepted freely.

"God bless you," he said, as he took the money, and Charley left.  "It
shall build the doorway of my church."

Later in the day the Cure sent for Charley.  There were grave matters to
consider, and his counsel was greatly needed.  They had all come to
depend on the soundness of his judgment.  It had never gone astray in
Chaudiere, they said.  They owed to him this extraordinary scheme, which
would be an example to all modern Christianity.  They told him so.  He
said nothing in reply.

In an hour he had planned for them a scheme for the consideration of
contractors; had drawn, with the help of M. Loisel, an architect's rough
plan of the new church, and, his old professional instincts keenly alive,
had lucidly suggested the terms and safeguards of the contracts.

Then came the question of the money contributed.  The day before, M.
Dauphin and the Seigneur's steward had arrived in safety from Quebec with
twenty thousand dollars in bank-bills.  These M. Rossignol had exchanged
for the notes of hand of such of the habitants as had not ready cash to
give.  All of this twenty thousand dollars had been paid over.  They had
now thirty thousand dollars in cash, besides three thousand which the
Cure had at his house, the proceeds of the Passion Play.  It was proposed
to send this large sum to the bank in Quebec in another two days, when
the whole contributions should be complete.

As to the safety of the money, the timid M. Dauphin did not care to take
responsibility.  Strangers were still arriving, ignorant of the fact that
the Passion Play had ceased, and some of them must be aware that this
large sum of money was in the parish--no doubt also knew that it was in
his house.  It was therefore better, he urged, that M. Rossignol or the
Cure should take charge of it.  M. Loisel urged that secrecy as to the
resting-place of the money was important.  It was better that it should
be deposited in the most unlikely place, and with some unofficial person
who might not be supposed to have it in charge.

"I have it!" said the Seigneur.  "The money shall be placed in old Louis
Trudel's safe in the wall of the tailor-shop."

It was so arranged, after Charley's protests of unwillingness, and
counter-appeals from the others.  That evening at sundown thirty-three
thousand dollars was deposited in the safe in the old stone wall of the
tailorshop, and the lock was sealed with the parish seal.

But the Notary's wife had wormed the secret from her husband, and she
found it hard to keep.  She told it to Maximilian Cour, and he kept it.
She told it to her cousin, the wife of Filion Lacasse, and she did not
keep it.  Before twenty-four hours went round, a dozen people knew it.

The evening of the second day, another two thousand dollars was added to
the treasure, and the lock was again sealed--with the utmost secrecy.
Charley and Jo Portugais, the infidel and the murderer, were thus the
sentries to the peace of a parish, the bankers of its gifts, the security
for the future of the church of Chaudiere.  Their weapons of defence were
two old pistols belonging to the Seigneur.

"Money is the master of the unexpected," the Seigneur had said as he
handed them over.  He chuckled for hours afterwards as he thought of his
epigram.  That night, as he turned over in bed for the third time, as was
his custom before going to sleep, another epigram came to him--"Money is
the only fox hunted night and day."  He kept repeating it over and over
again with vain pride.

The truth of M. Rossignol's aphorisms had been demonstrated several days
before.  On his return from Quebec with the twenty thousand dollars of
the Seigneur's money, M. Dauphin had dwelt with great pride on the
discretion and energy he and the steward had shown; had told dramatically
of the skill which had enabled them to make a journey of such importance
so secretly and safely; had covered himself with blushes for his own
coolness and intrepidity.  Fortune had, however, favoured his reputation
and his intrepidity, for he had been pursued from the hour he and his
companion left Quebec.  A taste for the picturesque had impelled him to
arrange for two relays of horses, and this fact saved him and the twenty
thousand dollars he carried.  Two hours after he had left Quebec, four
determined men had got upon his trail, and had only been prevented from
overtaking him by the freshness of the horses which his dramatic
foresight had provided.

The leader of these four pursuers was Billy Wantage, who had come to know
of the curious action of the Seigneur of Chaudiere from an intimate
friend, a clerk in the bank.  Billy's fortunes were now in a bad way,
and, in desperate straits for money, he had planned this bold attempt at
the highwayman's art with two gamblers, to whom he owed money, and a
certain notorious horse-trader of whom he had made a companion of late.
Having escaped punishment for a crime once before, through Charley's
supposed death, the immunity nerved him to this later and more dangerous
enterprise.  The four rode as hard as their horses would permit, but M.
Dauphin and his companion kept always an hour or more ahead, and, from
the high hills overlooking the village, Billy and his friends saw the two
enter it safely in the light of evening.

His three friends urged Billy to turn back, since they were out of
provisions and had no shelter.  It was unwise to go to a tavern or a
farmer's house, where they must certainly be suspected.  Billy, however,
determined to make an effort to find the banking-place of the money, and
refused to turn back without a trial.  He therefore proposed that they
should separate, going different directions, secure accommodation for the
night, rest the following day, and meet the next night at a point
indicated.  This was agreed upon, and they separated.

When the four met again, Billy had nothing to communicate, as he had been
taken ill during the night before, and had been unable to go secretly
into Chaudiere village.  They separated once more.  When they met the
next night Billy was accompanied by an old confederate.  As he was
entering Chaudiere the previous evening, he had met John Brown, with his
painted wagon and a new mottled horse.  John Brown had news of importance
to give; for, in the stable-yard of the village tavern, he had heard one
habitant confide to another that the money for the new church was kept in
the safe of the tailor-shop.  John Brown was as ready to share in Billy's
second enterprise as he had been to incite him to his first crime.

So it was that as the Seigneur made his epigram and gloated over it, the
five men, with horses at a convenient distance, armed to the teeth, broke
stealthily into Charley's house.

They entered silently through the kitchen window, and made their way into
the little hall.  Two stood guard at the foot of the stairs, and three
crept into the shop.

This night Jo Portugais was sleeping up-stairs, while Charley lay upon
the bench in the tailor-shop.  Charley heard the door open, heard
unfamiliar steps, seized his pistol, and, springing up, with his back to
the safe, called out loudly to Jo.  As he dimly saw men rush at him, he
fired.  The bullet reached its mark, and one man fell dead.  At that
moment a dark-lantern was turned full on Charley, and a pistol was fired
pointblank at him.

As he fell, shot through the breast, the man who had fired dropped the
lantern with a shriek of terror.  He had seen the ghost of his brother-
in-law-Charley Steele.

With a quaking cry of warning to the others, Billy bolted from the house,
followed by his companions, two of whom were struggling with Jo Portugais
on the stairway.  These now also broke and ran.

Jo rushed into the shop, and saw, as he thought, Charley lying dead--
saw the robber dead upon the floor.  His master and friend gone, the
conviction seized him that his own time had come.  He would give himself
to justice now--but to God's justice, not to man's.  The robbers were
four to one, and he would avenge his master's death and give his own life
to do it!  It was all the thought of a second.  He rushed out after the
robbers, shouting as he ran, to awake the villagers.  He heard the
marauders ahead of him, and, fleet of foot, rushed on.  Reaching them as
they mounted, he fired, and brought down his man--a shivering quack-
doctor, who, like his leader, had seen a sight in the tailor-shop that
struck terror to his soul.  Two of the others then fired at Jo, who had
caught a horse by the head.  He fell without a sound, and lay upon his
face--he did not hear the hoofs of the escaping horses nor any other
sound.  He had fallen without a pang beside the quackdoctor, whose
medicines would never again quicken a pulse in his own body or any other.

Behind, in the village, frightened people flocked about the tailor-shop.
Within, Mrs. Flynn and the Notary crudely but tenderly bound up the
dreadful wound in Charley's side, while Rosalie pillowed his head on her
bosom.

With a strange quietness Rosalie gave orders to the Notary and Mrs.
Flynn.  There was a light in her eyes--an unnatural light--of strength
and presence of mind.  Her hand was steady, and as gently as a mother
with a child she wiped the moist forehead, and poured a little brandy
between the set teeth.

"Stand back--give him air," she said, in a voice of authority to those
who crowded round.

People fell back in awe, for, amid tears and excitement and fear, this
girl had a strange convincing calm.  By the time Charley's wound was
stopped, messengers were on the way to the Cure and the Seigneur.  By
Rosalie's instructions the dead body of the robber was removed, Charley's
bed up-stairs was prepared for him, a fire was lighted, and twenty hands
were ready to do accurately her will.  Now and again she felt his pulse,
and she watched his face intently.  In her bitter sorrow her heart had a
sort of thankfulness, for his head was on her breast, he was in her arms.
It had been given her once more to come first to his rescue, and with one
wild cry, unheard by any one, to call out his beloved name.

The world of Chaudiere, roused by the shooting, had then burst in upon
them; but that one moment had been hers, no matter what came after.  She
had no illusions--she knew that the end was near: the end of all for him
and for them both.

The Cure entered and hurried forward.  There was the seal of the parish
intact on the door of the safe, but at what cost!

"He has given his life for the church," he said, then commanded all to
leave, save those needed to carry the wounded man up-stairs.

Still it was Rosalie that directed the removal.  She held his hand; she
saw that he was carefully laid down; she raised his head to a proper
height; she moistened his lips and fanned him.  Meanwhile the Cure fell
upon his knees, and the noise of talk and whispering ceased in the house.

But presently there was loud murmuring and shuffling of feet outside
again, and Rosalie left the room hurriedly and went below to stop it.
She met the men who were bringing the body of Jo Portugais into the shop.

Up-stairs the Cure's voice prayed: "Of Thy mercy, O Lord, hear our
prayer.  Grant that he be brought into Thy Church ere his last hour come.
Forgive, O Lord--"

Charley stirred and opened his eyes.  He saw the Cure bowed in prayer; he
heard the trembling voice.  He touched the white head with his hand.




CHAPTER LIX

IN WHICH CHARLEY MEETS A STRANGER

The Cure came to his feet with a joyful cry.  "Monsieur--my son," he
said, bending over him.

"Is it all over?" Charley asked calmly, almost cheerfully.  Death now
was the only solution of life's problems, and he welcomed it from the
void.

The Cure went to the door and locked it.  The deepest desire of his life
must here be uttered, his great aspiration be realised.

"My son," he said, as he came softly to the bedside again, "you have
given to us all you had--your charity, your wisdom, your skill.  You have
"--it was hard, but the man's wound was mortal, and it must be said "you
have consecrated our new church with your blood.  You have given all to
us; we will give all to you--"

There was a soft knocking at the door.  He went and opened it a very
little.  "He is conscious, Rosalie," he whispered.  "Wait--wait--one
moment."

Then came the Seigneur's voice saying that Jo was gone, and that all the
robbers had escaped, save the two disposed of by Charley and Jo.

The Cure turned to the bed once more.  "What did he say about Jo?"
Charley asked.

"He is dead, my son, and the quack-doctor also.  The others have
escaped."

Charley turned his face away.  "Au revoir, Jo," he said into the great
distance.

Then there was silence for a moment, while outside the door a girl
prayed, with an old woman's arm around her.

The Cure leaned over Charley again.  "Shall not the sacraments of the
Church comfort you in your last hours?" he said.  "It is the way, the
truth, and the life.  It is the Voice that says: 'Peace' to the vexed
mind.  Human intellect is vanity; only the soul survives.  Will you not
hear the Voice?  Will you not give us who love and honour you the right
to make you ours for ever?  Will you not come to the bosom of that Church
for which you have given all?"

"Tell them so," Charley said, and he motioned towards the window, under
which the people were gathered.

With a glad exclamation the Cure hastened to the window, and, in a voice
of sorrowful exultation, spoke to the people below.

Charley reckoned swiftly with his fate.  What was there now to do?  If
his wound was not mortal, what tragedy might now come!  For Billy's hand
--the hand of Kathleen's brother--had brought him low.  If the robbers
and murderers were captured, he must be dragged into the old life, and to
what an issue--all the old problems carried into more terrible
conditions.  And Rosalie--in his half-consciousness he had felt her near
him; he felt her near him now.  Rosalie--in any case, what could there be
for her?  Nothing.  He had heard the Cure whisper her name at the door.
She was outside-praying for him.  He stretched out a hand as though he
saw her, and his lips framed her name.  In his weakness and fading life
he had no anguish in the thought of her.  Life and Love were growing
distant though he loved her as few love and live.  She would be removed
from want by him--there were the pearls and the money in the safe with
the money of the Church; there was the letter to the Cure, his last
testament, leaving all to her.  He, sleeping, would fear no foe; she,
awake in the living world, would hold him in dear remembrance.  Death
were the better thing for all.  Then Kathleen in her happiness would be
at peace; and even Billy might go unmolested, for, who was there to
recognise Billy, now that Portugais was dead?

He heard the Cure's voice at the window--"Oh, my dear people, God has
given him to us at last.  I go now to prepare him for his long journey,
to--"

Charley realised and shuddered.  Receive the sacraments of the Church?
Be made ready by the priest for his going hence--end all the soul's
interrogations, with the solving of his own mortal problems?  Say "I
believe," confess his sins, and, receiving absolution, lie down in peace.

He suddenly raised himself on his elbow, flinging his body over.  The
bandage of his wound was displaced, and blood gushed out upon the white
clothes of the bed.  "Rosalie!" he gasped.  "Rosalie, my love!  God keep
.  .  .  "

As he sank back he heard the priest's anguished voice above him, calling
for help.  He smiled.

"Rosalie--" he whispered.  The priest ran and unlocked the door, and
Rosalie entered, followed by the Seigneur and Mrs. Flynn.

"Quick!  Quick!" said the priest.  "The bandage slipped."

The bandage slipped--or was it slipped?  Who knows!

Blind with agony, and as in a direful dream, Rosalie made her way to the
bed.  The sight of his ensanguined body roused her, and, murmuring his
name--continually murmuring his name--she assisted Mrs. Flynn to bind up
the wound again.  Standing where she stood when she had stayed Louis
Trudel's arm long ago, with an infinite tenderness she touched the scar-
the scar of the cross--on his breast.  Terrible as was her grief, her
heart had its comfort in the thought--who could rob her of that for
ever?--that he would die a martyr.  It did not matter now who knew the
story of her love.  It could not do him harm.  She was ready to proclaim
it to all the world.  And those who watched knew that they were in the
presence of a great human love.

The priest made ready to receive the unconscious man into the Church.
Had Charley not said, "Tell them so?"  Was it not now his duty to say the
sacred offices over a son of the Church in his last bitter hour?  So it
was done while he lay unconscious.

For hours he lay still, and then the fevered blood, poisoned by the
bullet which had brought him down, made him delirious, gave him
hallucinations--open-eyed illusions.  All the time Rosalie knelt at the
foot of the bed, her piteous tearless eyes for ever fixed on his face.

Towards evening, with an unnatural strength, he sat up in bed.

"See," he whispered, "that woman in the corner there.  She has come to
take me, but I will not go."  Fantasy after fantasy possessed him-
fantasy, strangely mixed with facts of his own past.  Now it was
Kathleen, now Billy, now Jo Portugais, now John Brown, now Suzon
Charlemagne at the Cote Dorion, again Jo Portugais.  In strange, touching
sentences he spoke to them, as though they were present before him.  At
length he stopped abruptly, and gazed straight before him--over the head
of Rosalie into the distance.

"See," he said, pointing, "who is that?  Who?  I can't see his face--it
is covered.  So tall-so white!  He is opening his arms to me.  He is
coming--closer--closer.  Who is it?"

"It is Death, my son," said the priest in his ear, with a pitying
gentleness.

The Cure's voice seemed to calm the agitated sense, to bring it back to
the outer precincts of understanding.  There was an awe-struck silence as
the dying man fumbled, fumbled, over his breast, found his eye-glass,
and, with a last feeble effort, raised it to his eye, shining now with an
unearthly fire.  The old interrogation of the soul, the elemental habit
outlived all else in him.  The idiosyncrasy of the mind automatically
expressed itself.

"I beg--your--pardon," he whispered to the imagined figure, and the light
died out of his eyes, "have I--ever--been--introduced--to you?"

"At the hour of your birth, my son," said the priest, as a sobbing cry
came from the foot of the bed.

But Charley did not hear.  His ears were for ever closed to the voices of
life and time.




CHAPTER LX

THE HAND AT THE DOOR

The eve of the day of the memorable funeral two belated visitors to the
Passion Play arrived in the village, unknowing that it had ended, and of
the tragedy which had set a whole valley mourning; unconscious that they
shared in the bitter fortunes of the tailor-man, of whom men and women
spoke with tears.  Affected by the gloom of the place, the two visitors
at once prepared for their return journey, but the manner of the
tailorman's death arrested their sympathies, touched the humanity in
them.  The woman was much impressed.

They asked to see the body of the man.  They were taken to the door of
the tailor-shop, while their horses were being brought round.  Within the
house itself they were met by an old Irishwoman, who, in response to
their wish "to see the brave man's body," showed them into a room where a
man lay dead with a bullet through his heart.  It was the body of Jo
Portugais, whose master and friend lay in another room across the
hallway.  The lady turned back in disappointment--the dead man was little
like a hero.

The Irishwoman had meant to deceive her, for at this moment a girl who
loved the tailor was kneeling beside his body, and, if possible, Mrs.
Flynn would have no curious eyes look upon that scene.

When the visitors came into the hall again, the man said: "There was
another; Kathleen--a woodsman."  But standing by the nearly closed door,
behind which lay the dead tailor of Chaudiere--they could see the holy
candles flickering within--Kathleen whispered "We've seen the tailor--
that's enough.  It's only the woodsman there.  I prefer not, Tom."

With his fingers at the latch, the man hesitated, even as Mrs. Flynn
stepped apprehensively forward; then, shrugging a shoulder, he responded
to Kathleen's hand on his arm.  They went down the stairs together, and
out to their carriage.

As they drove away, Kathleen said: "It's strange that men who do such
fine things should look so commonplace."

"The other one might have been more uncommon," he replied.

"I wonder!" she said, with a sigh of relief, as they passed the bounds
of the village.  Then she caught herself flushing, for she suddenly
realised that the exclamation was one so often on the lips of a dead,
disgraced man whose name she once had borne.

If the door of the little room upstairs had opened to the fingers of the
man beside her, the tailor of Chaudiere, though dead, would have been
dearly avenged.




CHAPTER LXI

THE CURE SPEAKS

The Cure stood with his back to the ruins of the church, at his feet two
newly made graves, and all round, with wistful faces, crowds of reverent
habitants.  A benignant sorrow made his voice in perfect temper with the
pensive striving of this latest day of spring.  At the close of his
address he said:

"I owe you much, my people.  I owe him more, for it was given him, who
knew not God, to teach us how to know Him better.  For his past, it is
not given you to know.  It is hidden in the bosom of the Church.  Sinner
he once was, criminal never, as one can testify who knows all"--he turned
to the Abbe Rossignol, who stood beside him, grave and compassionate--
"and his sins were forgiven him.  He is the one sheaf which you and I may
carry home rejoicing from the pagan world of unbelief.  What he had in
life he gave to us, and in death he leaves to our church all that he has
not left to a woman he loved--to Rosalie Evanturel."

There was a gasping murmur among the people, but they stilled again, and
strained to hear.

"He leaves her a little fortune, and to us all else he had.  Let us pray
for his soul, and let us comfort her who, loving deeply, reaped no
harvest of love.

"The law may never reach his ruthless murderers, for there is none to
recognise their faces; and were they ten times punished, how should it
avail us now!  Let us always remember that, in his grave, our friend
bears on his breast the little iron cross we held so dear.  That is all
we could give--our dearest treasure.  I pray God that, scarring his
breast in life, it may heal all his woes in death, and be a saving image
on his bosom in the Presence at the last."

He raised his hands in benediction.




EPILOGUE

Never again was there a Passion Play in the Chaudiere Valley.  Spring-
times and harvests and long winters came and went, and a blessing seemed
to be upon the valley, for men prospered, and no untoward things befel
the people.  So it was for twenty years, wherein there had been going and
coming in quiet.  Some had gone upon short mortal journeys and had come
back, some upon long immortal voyages, and had never returned.  Of the
last were the Seigneur and a woman once a Magdalene; but in a house
beside a beautiful church, with a noble doorway, lived the Cure, M.
Loisel, aged and serene.  There never was a day, come rain or shine, in
which he was not visited by a beautiful woman, whose life was one with
the people of the valley.

There was no sorrow in the parish which the lady did not share, with the
help of an old Irishwoman called Mrs. Flynn.  Was there sickness in the
parish, her hand smoothed the pillow and soothed the pain.  Was there
trouble anywhere, her face brought light to the door way.  Did any suffer
ill-repute, her word helped to restore the ruined name.  They did not
know that she forgave so much in all the world, because she thought she
had so much in herself to forgive.

She was ever called "Madame Rosalie," and she cherished the name, and
gave commands that when her grave came to be made near to a certain other
grave, Madame Rosalie should be carved upon the stone.  Cheerfulness and
serenity were ever with her, undisturbed by wish to probe the mystery of
the life which had once absorbed her own.  She never sought to know
whence the man came; it was sufficient to know whither he had gone, and
that he had been hers for a brief dream of life.  It was better to have
lived the one short thrilling hour with all its pain, than never to have
known what she knew or felt what she had felt.  The mystery deepened her
romance, and she was even glad that the ruffians who slew him were never
brought to justice.  To her mind they were but part of the mystic
machinery of fate.

For her the years had given many compensations, and so she told the Cure,
one midsummer day, when she brought to visit him the orphaned son of
Paulette Dubois, graduated from his college in France and making ready to
go to the far East.

"I have had more than I deserve--a thousand times," she said.

The Cure smiled, and laid a gentle hand upon her own.  "It is right for
you to think so," he said, "but after a long life, I am ready to say
that, one way or another, we earn all the real happiness we have.  I mean
the real happiness--the moments, my child.  I once had a moment full of
happiness."

"May I ask?" she said.

"When my heart first went out to him"--he turned his face towards the
churchyard.

"He was a great man," she said proudly.

The Cure looked at her benignly: she was a woman, and she had loved the
man.  He had, however, come to a stage of life where greatness alone
seemed of little moment.  He forbore to answer her, but he pressed her
hand.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Youth is the only comrade for youth






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "RIGHT OF WAY":

A left-handed boy is all right in the world
Always hoping the best from the worst of us
Damnable propinquity
Good fathers think they have good daughters
Have not we all something to hide--with or without shame?
He has wheeled his nuptial bed into the street
He left his fellow-citizens very much alone
He had had acquaintances, but never friendships, and never loves
Hugging the chain of denial to his bosom
I have a good memory for forgetting
I am only myself when I am drunk
I should remember to forget it
Importunity with discretion was his motto
In all secrets there is a kind of guilt
Is the habit of good living mere habit and mere acting
It is good to live, isn't it?
Know how bad are you, and doesn't mind
Liquor makes me human
Nervous legs at a gallop
Pathetically  in earnest
Shure, if we could always be 'about the same,' we'd do
So say your prayers, believe all you can, don't ask questions
Strike first and heal after--"a kick and a lick"
Suspicion, the bane of sick old age
Things that once charmed charm less
Was not civilisation a mistake
Who knows!
Youth is the only comrade for youth






MICHEL AND ANGELE, Complete

[A Ladder of Swords]

By Gilbert Parker




INTRODUCTION

If it does not seem too childish a candour to say so, 'Michel and Angele'
always seems to me like some old letter lifted out of an ancient cabinet
with the faint perfume of bygone days upon it.  Perhaps that is because
the story itself had its origin in a true but brief record of some good
Huguenots who fled from France and took refuge in England, to be found,
as the book declares, at the Walloon Church, in Southampton.

The record in the first paragraphs of the first chapter of the book
fascinated my imagination, and I wove round Michel de la Foret and Angele
Aubert a soft, bright cloud of romance which would not leave my vision
until I sat down and wrote out what, in the writing, seemed to me a true
history.  It was as though some telepathy between the days of Elizabeth
and our own controlled me--self-hypnotism, I suppose; but still, there it
was.  The story, in its original form, was first published in 'Harper's
Weekly' under the name of Michel and Angele, but the fear, I think, that
many people would mispronounce the first word of the title, induced me to
change it when, double in length, it became a volume called 'A Ladder of
Swords'.

As it originally appeared, I wrote it in the Island of Jersey, out at the
little Bay of Rozel in a house called La Chaire, a few yards away from
the bay itself, and having a pretty garden with a seat at its highest
point, from which, beyond the little bay, the English Channel ran away to
the Atlantic.  It was written in complete seclusion.  I had no visitors;
there was no one near, indeed, except the landlord of the little hotel in
the bay, and his wife.  All through the Island, however, were people whom
I knew, like the Malet de Carterets, the Lemprieres, and old General
Pipon, for whom the Jersey of three hundred years ago was as near as the
Jersey of to-day, so do the Jersiais prize, cultivate, and conserve every
hour of its recorded history.

As the sea opens out to a vessel making between the promontories to the
main, so, while writing this tale which originally was short, the larger
scheme of 'The Battle of the Strong' spread out before me, luring me, as
though in the distance were the Fortunate Isles.  Eight years after
'Michel and Angele' was written and first published in 'Harper's Weekly',
I decided to give it the dignity of a full-grown romance.  For years I
had felt that it had the essentials for a larger canvas, and at the
earnest solicitation of Messrs. Harper & Brothers I settled to do what
had long been in my mind.  The narrative grew as naturally from what it
was to larger stature as anything that had been devised upon a greater
scale at the beginning; and in London town I had the same joy in the
company of Michel and Angele--and a vastly increased joy in the company
of Lempriere, the hulking, joyous giant--as I had years before in Jersey
itself when the story first stirred in my mind and reached my pen.

While adverse reviews of the book were few if any, it cannot be said that
this romance is a companion in popularity with, for instance, 'The Right
of Way'.  It had its friends, but it has apparently appealed to smaller
audiences--to those who watch the world go by; who are not searching for
the exposure of life's grim realities; who do not seek the clinic of the
soul's tragedies.  There was tragedy here, but there was comedy too;
there was also joy and faith, patience and courage.  The book, taken by
itself, could not make a permanent reputation for any man, but it has its
place in the scheme of my work, and I would not have it otherwise than it
is.




A NOTE

There will be found a few anachronisms in this tale, but none so
important as to give a wrong impression of the events of Queen
Elizabeth's reign.




MICHEL AND ANGELE

CHAPTER I

If you go to Southampton and search the register of the Walloon Church
there, you will find that in the summer of 157_,

     "Madame Vefue de Montgomery with all her family and servants were
     admitted to the Communion"--"Tous ceux cj furent Recus la a Cene du
     157_, comme passans, sans avoir Rendu Raison de la foj, mes sur la
     tesmognage de Mons. Forest, Ministre de Madame, quj certifia quj ne
     cognoisoit Rien en tout ceux la po' quoy Il ne leur deust administre
     la Cene s'il estoit en lieu po' a ferre."

There is another striking record, which says that in August of the same
year Demoiselle Angele Claude Aubert, daughter of Monsieur de la Haie
Aubert, Councillor of the Parliament of Rouen, was married to Michel de
la Foret, of the most noble Flemish family of that name.

When I first saw these records, now grown dim with time, I fell to
wondering what was the real life-history of these two people.  Forthwith,
in imagination, I began to make their story piece by piece; and I had
reached a romantic 'denoument' satisfactory to myself and in sympathy
with fact, when the Angel of Accident stepped forward with some "human
documents."  Then I found that my tale, woven back from the two obscure
records I have given, was the true story of two most unhappy yet most
happy people.  From the note struck in my mind, when my finger touched
that sorrowful page in the register of the Church of the Refugees at
Southampton, had spread out the whole melody and the very book of the
song.

One of the later-discovered records was a letter, tear-stained, faded,
beautifully written in old French, from Demoiselle Angele Claude Aubert
to Michel de la Foret at Anvers in March of the year 157_.  The letter
lies beside me as I write, and I can scarcely believe that three and a
quarter centuries have passed since it was written, and that she who
wrote it was but eighteen years old at the time.  I translate it into
English, though it is impossible adequately to carry over either the
flavour or the idiom of the language:

     Written on this May Day of the year 157_, at the place hight Rozel
     in the Manor called of the same of Jersey Isle, to Michel de la
     Foret, at Anvers in Flanders.

     MICHEL, Thy good letter by safe carriage cometh to my hand, bringing
     to my heart a lightness it hath not known since that day when I was
     hastily carried to the port of St. Malo, and thou towards the King
     his prison.  In what great fear have I lived, having no news of thee
     and fearing all manner of mischance!  But our God hath benignly
     saved thee from death, and me He hath set safely here in this isle
     of the sea.

     Thou hast ever been a brave soldier, enduring and not fearing; thou
     shalt find enow to keep thy blood stirring in these days of trial
     and peril to us who are so opprobriously called Les Huguenots.  If
     thou wouldst know more of my mind thereupon, come hither.  Safety is
     here, and work for thee--smugglers and pirates do abound on these
     coasts, and Popish wolves do harry the flock even in this island
     province of England.  Michel, I plead for the cause which thou hast
     nobly espoused, but--alas! my selfish heart, where thou art lie work
     and fighting, and the same high cause, and sadly, I confess, it is
     for mine own happiness that I ask thee to come.  I wot well that
     escape from France hath peril, that the way hither from that point
     upon yonder coast called Carteret is hazardous, but yet-but yet all
     ways to happiness are set with hazard.

     If thou dost come to Carteret thou wilt see two lights turning this-
     wards: one upon a headland called Tour de Rozel, and one upon the
     great rock called of the Ecrehos.  These will be in line with thy
     sight by the sands of Hatainville.  Near by the Tour de Rozel shall
     I be watching and awaiting thee.  By day and night doth my prayer
     ascend for thee.

     The messenger who bears this to thee (a piratical knave with a most
     kind heart, having, I am told, a wife in every port of France and of
     England the south, a most heinous sin!) will wait for thy answer, or
     will bring thee hither, which is still better.  He is worthy of
     trust if thou makest him swear by the little finger of St. Peter.
     By all other swearings he doth deceive freely.

     The Lord make thee true, Michel.  If thou art faithful to me, I
     shall know how faithful thou art in all; for thy vows to me were
     most frequent and pronounced, with a full savour that might warrant
     short seasoning.  Yet, because thou mayst still be given to such
     dear fantasies of truth as were on thy lips in those dark days
     wherein thy sword saved my life 'twixt Paris and Rouen, I tell thee
     now that I do love thee, and shall so love when, as my heart
     inspires me, the cloud shall fall that will hide us from each other
     forever.

                                             ANGELE.

     An Afterword:

     I doubt not we shall come to the heights where there is peace,
     though we climb thereto by a ladder of swords.  A.


Some years before Angele's letter was written, Michel de la Foret had
become an officer in the army of Comte Gabriel de Montgomery, and fought
with him until what time the great chief was besieged in the Castle of
Domfront in Normandy.  When the siege grew desperate, Montgomery besought
the intrepid young Huguenot soldier to escort Madame de Montgomery to
England, to be safe from the oppression and misery sure to follow any
mishap to this noble leader of the Camisards.

At the very moment of departure of the refugees from Domfront with the
Comtesse, Angele's messenger--the "piratical knave with the most kind
heart "presented himself, delivered her letter to De la Foret, and
proceeded with the party to the coast of Normandy by St. Brieuc.
Embarking there in a lugger which Buonespoir the pirate secured for them,
they made for England.

Having come but half-way of the Channel, the lugger was stopped by an
English frigate.  After much persuasion the captain of the frigate agreed
to land Madame de Montgomery upon the island of Jersey, but forced De la
Foret to return to the coast of France; and Buonespoir elected to return
with him.




CHAPTER II

Meanwhile Angele had gone through many phases of alternate hope and
despair.  She knew that Montgomery the Camisard was dead, and a rumour,
carried by refugees, reached her that De la Foret had been with him to
the end.  To this was presently added the word that De la Foret had been
beheaded.  But one day she learned that the Comtesse de Montgomery was
sheltered by the Governor, Sir Hugh Pawlett, her kinsman, at Mont Orgueil
Castle.  Thither she went in fear from her refuge at Rozel, and was
admitted to the Comtesse.  There she learned the joyful truth that De la
Foret had not been slain, and was in hiding on the coast of Normandy.

The long waiting was a sore trial, yet laughter was often upon her lips
henceforth.  The peasants, the farmers and fishermen of Jersey, at first
--as they have ever been--little inclined towards strangers, learned at
last to look for her in the fields and upon the shore, and laughed in
response, they knew not why, to the quick smiling of her eyes.  She even
learned to speak their unmusical but friendly Norman-Jersey French.
There were at least a half-dozen fishermen who, for her, would have gone
at night straight to the Witches' Rock in St. Clement's Bay--and this was
bravery unmatched.

It came to be known along the coast that "Ma'm'selle" was waiting for a
lover fleeing from the French coast.  This gave her fresh interest in the
eyes of the serfs and sailors and their women folk, who at first were not
inclined towards the Huguenot maiden, partly because she was French, and
partly because she was not a Catholic.  But even these, when they saw
that she never talked religiously, that she was fast learning to speak
their own homely patois, and that in the sickness of their children she
was untiring in her kindness, forgave the austerity of the gloomy-browed
old man her father, who spoke to them distantly, or never spoke at all;
and her position was secure.  Then, upon the other hand, the gentry of
the manors, seeing the friendship grow between her and the Comtesse de
Montgomery at Mont Orgueil Castle, made courteous advances towards her
father, and towards herself through him.

She could scarce have counted the number of times she climbed the great
hill like a fortress at the lift of the little bay of Rozel, and from the
Nez du Guet scanned the sea for a sail and the sky for fair weather.
When her eyes were not thus busy, they were searching the lee of the
hillside round for yellow lilies, and the valley below for the campion,
the daffodil, and the thousand pretty ferns growing in profusion there.
Every night she looked out to see that her signal fire was lit upon the
Nez du Guet, and she never went to bed without taking one last look over
the sea, in the restless inveterate hope which at once sustained her and
devoured her.

But the longest waiting must end.  It came on the evening of the very day
that the Seigneur of Rozel went to Angele's father and bluntly told him
he was ready to forego all Norman-Jersey prejudice against the French and
the Huguenot religion, and take Angele to wife without penny or estate.

In reply to the Seigneur, Monsieur Aubert said that he was conscious of
an honour, and referred Monsieur to his daughter, who must answer for
herself; but he must tell Monsieur of Rozel that Monsieur's religion
would, in his own sight, be a high bar to the union.  To that the
Seigneur said that no religion that he had could be a bar to anything at
all; and so long as the young lady could manage her household, drive a
good bargain with the craftsmen and hucksters, and have the handsomest
face and manners in the Channel Islands, he'd ask no more; and she might
pray for him and his salvation without let or hindrance.

The Seigneur found the young lady in a little retreat among the rocks,
called by the natives La Chaire.  Here she sat sewing upon some coarse
linen for a poor fisherwoman's babe when the Seigneur came near.  She
heard the scrunch of his heels upon the gravel, the clank of his sword
upon the rocks, and looked up with a flush, her needle poised; for none
should know of her presence in this place save her father.  When she saw
who was her visitor, she rose.  After greeting and compliment, none too
finely put, but more generous than fitted with Jersey parsimony, the
gentleman of Rozel came at once to the point.

"My name is none too bad," said he--"Raoul Lempriere, of the Lemprieres
that have been here since Rollo ruled in Normandy.  My estate is none
worse than any in the whole islands; I have more horses and dogs than any
gentleman of my acres; and I am more in favour at court than De Carteret
of St. Ouen's.  I am the Queen's butler, and I am the first that royal
favour granted to set up three dove-cotes, one by St. Aubin's, one by St.
Helier's, and one at Rozel: and--and," he added, with a lumbering attempt
at humour--"and, on my oath, I'll set up another dove-cote with out my
sovereign's favour, with your leave alone.  By our Lady, I do love that
colour in yon cheek!  Just such a colour had my mother when she snatched
from the head of my cousin of Carteret's milk-maid wife the bonnet of a
lady of quality and bade her get to her heifers.  God's beauty!  but 'tis
a colour of red primroses in thy cheeks and blue campions in thine eyes.
Come, I warrant I can deepen that colour"--he bowed low--"Madame of
Rozel, if it be not too soon!"

The girl listened to this cheerful and loquacious proposal and courtship
all in one, ending with the premature bestowal of a title, in mingled
anger, amusement, disdain, and apprehension.  Her heart fluttered, then
stood still, then flew up in her throat, then grew terribly hot and hurt
her, so that she pressed her hand to her bosom as though that might ease
it.  By the time he had finished, drawn himself up, and struck his foot
upon the ground in burly emphasis of his devoted statements, the girl had
sufficiently recovered to answer him composedly, and with a little glint
of demure humour in her eyes.  She loved another man; she did not care so
much as a spark for this happy, swearing, swashbuckling gentleman; yet
she saw he had meant to do her honour.  He had treated her as courteously
as was in him to do; he chose her out from all the ladies of his
acquaintance to make her an honest offer of his hand--he had said nothing
about his heart; he would, should she marry him, throw her scraps of
good-humour, bearish tenderness, drink to her health among his fellows,
and respect and admire her--even exalt her almost to the rank of a man
in his own eyes; and he had the tolerance of the open-hearted and open-
handed man.  All these things were as much a compliment to her as though
she were not a despised Huguenot, an exiled lady of no fortune.  She
looked at him a moment with an almost solemn intensity, so that he
shifted his ground uneasily, but at once smiled encouragingly, to relieve
her embarrassment at the unexpected honour done her.  She had remained
standing; now, as he made a step towards her, she sank down upon the
seat, and waved him back courteously.

"A moment, Monsieur of Rozel," she ventured.  "Did my father send you to
me?"

He inclined his head and smiled again.

"Did you say to him what you have said to me?" she asked, not quite
without a touch of malice.

"I left out about the colour in the cheek," he answered, with a smirk at
what he took to be the quickness of his wit.

"You kept your paint-pot for me," she replied softly.

"And the dove-cote, too," he rejoined, bowing finely, and almost carried
off his feet by his own brilliance.  She became serious at once--so
quickly that he was ill prepared for it, and could do little but stare
and pluck at the tassel of his sword; for he was embarrassed before this
maiden, who changed as quickly as the currents change under the brow of
the Couperon Cliff, behind which lay his manor-house of Rozel.

"I have visited at your manor, Monsieur of Rozel.  I have seen the state
in which you live, your retainers, your men-at-arms, your farming-folk,
and your sailormen.  I know how your Queen receives you; how your honour
is as stable as your fief."

He drew himself up again proudly.  He could understand this speech.

"Your horses and your hounds I have seen," she added, "your men-servants
and your maid-servants, your fields of corn, your orchards, and your
larder.  I have sometimes broken the Commandment and coveted them and
envied you."

"Break the Commandment again, for the last time," he cried, delighted and
boisterous.  "Let us not waste words, lady.  Let's kiss and have it
over."

Her eyes flashed.  "I coveted them and envied you; but then, I am but a
vain girl at times, and vanity is easier to me than humbleness."

"Blood of man, but I cannot understand so various a creature!" he broke
in, again puzzled.

"There is a little chapel in the dell beside your manor, Monsieur.  If
you will go there, and get upon your knees, and pray till the candles no
more burn, and the Popish images crumble in their places, you will yet
never understand myself or any woman."

"There's no question of Popish images between us," he answered, vainly
trying for foothold.  "Pray as you please, and I'll see no harm comes to
the Mistress of Rozel."

He was out of his bearings and impatient.  Religion to him was a dull
recreation invented chiefly for women.  She became plain enough now.
"'Tis no images nor religion that stands between us," she answered,
"though they might well do so.  It is that I do not love you, Monsieur of
Rozel."

His face, which had slowly clouded, suddenly cleared.  "Love! Love!"  He
laughed good-humouredly.  "Love comes, I'm told, with marriage.  But we
can do well enough without fugling on that pipe.  Come, come, dost think
I'm not a proper man and a gentleman?  Dost think I'll not use thee well
and 'fend thee, Huguenot though thou art, 'gainst trouble or fret or any
man's persecutions--be he my Lord Bishop, my Lord Chancellor, or King of
France, or any other?"

She came a step closer to him, even as though she would lay a hand upon
his arm.  "I believe that you would do all that in you lay," she answered
steadily.  "Yours is a rough wooing, but it is honest--"

"Rough! Rough!" he protested, for he thought he had behaved like some
Adonis.  Was it not ten years only since he had been at Court!

"Be assured, Monsieur, that I know how to prize the man who speaks after
the light given him.  I know that you are a brave and valorous gentleman.
I must thank you most truly and heartily, but, Monsieur, you and yours
are not for me.  Seek elsewhere, among your own people, in your own
religion and language and position, the Mistress of Rozel."

He was dumfounded.  Now he comprehended the plain fact that he had been
declined.

"You send me packing!" he blurted out, getting red in the face.

"Ah, no!  Say it is my misfortune that I cannot give myself the great
honour," she said; in her tone a little disdainful dryness, a little
pity, a little feeling that here was a good friend lost.

"It's not because of the French soldier that was with Montgomery at
Domfront?--I've heard that story.  But he's gone to heaven, and 'tis vain
crying for last year's breath," he added, with proud philosophy.

"He is not dead.  And if he were," she added, "do you think, Monsieur,
that we should find it easier to cross the gulf between us?"

"Tut, tut, that bugbear Love!" he said shortly.  "And so you'd lose a
good friend for a dead lover?  I' faith, I'd befriend thee well if thou
wert my wife, Ma'm'selle."

"It is hard for those who need friends to lose them," she answered sadly.

The sorrow of her position crept in upon her and filled her eyes with
tears.  She turned them to the sea-instinctively towards that point on
the shore where she thought it likely Michel might be; as though by
looking she might find comfort and support in this hard hour.

Even as she gazed into the soft afternoon light she could see, far over,
a little sail standing out towards the Ecrehos.  Not once in six months
might the coast of France be seen so clearly.  One might almost have
noted people walking on the beach.  This was no good token, for when that
coast may be seen with great distinctness a storm follows hard after.
The girl knew this; and though she could not know that this was Michel de
la Foret's boat, the possibility fixed itself in her mind.  She quickly
scanned the horizon.  Yes, there in the north-west was gathering a dark-
blue haze, hanging like small filmy curtains in the sky.

The Seigneur of Rozel presently broke the silence so awkward for him.
He had seen the tears in her eyes, and though he could not guess the
cause, he vaguely thought it might be due to his announcement that she
had lost a friend.  He was magnanimous at once, and he meant what he said
and would stand by it through thick and thin.

"Well, well, I'll be thy everlasting friend if not thy husband," he said
with ornate generosity.  "Cheer thy heart, lady."

With a sudden impulse she seized his hand and kissed it, and, turning,
ran swiftly down the rocks towards her home.

He stood and looked after her, then, dumfounded, at the hand she had
kissed.

"Blood of my heart!" he said, and shook his head in utter amazement.

Then he turned and looked out upon the Channel.  He saw the little boat
Angele had descried making from France.  Glancing at the sky, "What fools
come there!" he said anxiously.

They were Michel de la Foret and Buonespoir the pirate, in a black-
bellied cutter with red sails.




CHAPTER III

For weeks De la Foret and Buonespoir had lain in hiding at St. Brieuc.
At last Buonespoir declared all was ready once again.  He had secured for
the Camisard the passport and clothes of a priest who had but just died
at Granville.  Once again they made the attempt to reach English soil.

Standing out from Carteret on the Belle Suzanne, they steered for the
light upon the Marmotier Rocks of the Ecrehos, which Angele had paid a
fisherman to keep going every night.  This light had caused the French
and English frigates some uneasiness, and they had patrolled the Channel
from Cap de la Hague to the Bay of St. Brieuc with a vigilance worthy of
a larger cause.  One fine day an English frigate anchored off the
Ecrehos, and the fisherman was seized.  He, poor man, swore that he kept
the light burning to guide his brother fishermen to and fro between
Boulay Bay and the Ecrehos.  The captain of the frigate tried severities;
but the fisherman stuck to his tale, and the light burned on as before--
a lantern stuck upon a pole.  One day, with a telescope, Buonespoir had
seen the exact position of the staff supporting the light, and had mapped
out his course accordingly.  He would head straight for the beacon and
pass between the Marmotier and the Maitre Ile, where is a narrow channel
for a boat drawing only a few feet of water.  Unless he made this, he
must run south and skirt the Ecriviere Rock and bank, where the streams
setting over the sandy ridges make a confusing perilous sea to mariners
in bad weather.  Else, he must sail north between the Ecrehos and the
Dirouilles, in the channel called Etoc, a tortuous and dangerous passage
save in good weather, and then safe only to the mariner who knows the
floor of that strait like his own hand.  De la Foret was wholly in the
hands of Buonespoir, for he knew nothing of these waters and coasts; also
he was a soldier and no sailor.

They cleared Cape Carteret with a fair wind from the north-east, which
should carry them safely as the bird flies to the haven of Rozel.  The
high, pinkish sands of Hatainville were behind them; the treacherous
Taillepied Rocks lay to the north, and a sweet sea before.  Nothing could
have seemed fairer and more hopeful.  But a few old fishermen on shore at
Carteret shook their heads dubiously, and at Port Bail, some miles below,
a disabled naval officer, watching through a glass, rasped out,
"Criminals or fools!"  But he shrugged his shoulders, for if they were
criminals he was sure they would expiate their crimes this night, and if
they were fools--he had no pity for fools.

But Buonespoir knew his danger.  Truth is, he had chosen this night
because they would be safest from pursuit, because no sensible seafaring
man, were he King's officer or another, would venture forth upon the
impish Channel, save to court disaster.  Pirate, and soldier in priest's
garb, had frankly taken the chances.

With a fair wind they might, with all canvas set--mainsail, foresail,
jib, and fore-topsail--make Rozel Bay within two hours and a quarter.
All seemed well for a brief half-hour.  Then, even as the passage between
the Marmotier and the Ecrehos opened out, the wind suddenly shifted from
the north-east to the southwest and a squall came hurrying on them--a few
moments too soon; for, had they been clear of the Ecrehos, clear of the
Taillepieds, Felee Bank, and the Ecriviere, they could have stood out
towards the north in a more open sea.

Yet there was one thing in their favour: the tide was now running hard
from the north-west, so fighting for them while the wind was against
them.  Their only safety lay in getting beyond the Ecrehos.  If they
attempted to run in to the Marmotier for safety, they would presently be
at the mercy of the French.  To trust their doubtful fortunes and bear on
was the only way.  The tide was running fast.  They gave the mainsail to
the wind still more, and bore on towards the passage.  At last, as they
were opening on it, the wind suddenly veered full north-east.  The sails
flapped, the boat seemed to hover for a moment, and then a wave swept her
towards the rocks.  Buonespoir put the helm hard over, she went about,
and they close-hauled her as she trembled towards the rocky opening.

This was the critical instant.  A heavy sea was running, the gale was
blowing hard from the north-east, and under the close-hauled sail the
Belle Suzanne was lying over dangerously.  But the tide, too, was running
hard from the south, fighting the wind; and, at the moment when all
seemed terribly uncertain, swept them past the opening and into the
swift-running channel, where the indraught sucked them through to the
more open water beyond.

Although the Belle Suzanne was in more open water now, the danger was not
over.  Ahead lay a treacherous sea, around them roaring winds, and the
perilous coast of Jersey beyond all.

"Do you think we shall land?" quietly asked De la Foret, nodding towards
the Jersey coast.

"As many chances 'gainst it as for it, M'sieu'," said Buonespoir, turning
his face to the north, for the wind had veered again to north-east, and
he feared its passing to the north-west, giving them a head-wind and a
swooping sea.

Night came down, but with a clear sky and a bright moon; the wind,
however, not abating.  The next three hours were spent in tacking, in
beating towards the Jersey coast under seas which almost swamped them.
They were standing off about a mile from the island, and could see
lighted fires and groups of people upon the shore, when suddenly a gale
came out from the southwest, the wind having again shifted.  With an
oath, Buonespoir put the helm hard over, the Belle Suzanne came about
quickly, but as the gale struck her, the mast snapped like a pencil, she
heeled over, and the two adventurers were engulfed in the waves.

A cry of dismay went up from the watchers on the shore.  They turned with
a half-conscious sympathy towards Angele, for her story was known by all,
and in her face they read her mortal fear, though she made no cry, but
only clasped her hands in agony.  Her heart told her that yonder Michel
de la Foret was fighting for his life.  For an instant only she stood,
the terror of death in her eyes, then she turned to the excited fishermen
near.

"Men, oh men," she cried, "will you not save them?  Will no one come with
me?"

Some shook their heads sullenly, others appeared uncertain, but their
wives and children clung to them, and none stirred.  Looking round
helplessly, Angele saw the tall figure of the Seigneur of Rozel.  He had
been watching the scene for some time.  Now he came quickly to her.

"Is it the very man?" he asked her, jerking a finger towards the
struggling figures in the sea.

"Yes, oh yes," she replied, nodding her head piteously.  "God tells my
heart it is."

Her father drew near and interposed.

"Let us kneel and pray for two dying men," said he, and straightway knelt
upon the sand.

"By St. Martin, we've better medicine than that, apothecary!" said
Lempriere of Rozel loudly, and, turning round, summoned two serving-men.
"Launch my strong boat," he added.  "We will pick these gentlemen from
the brine, or know the end of it all."

The men hurried gloomily to the long-boat, ran her down to the shore and
into the surf.

"You are going--you are going to save him, dear Seigneur?" asked the
girl tremulously.

"To save him--that's to be seen, mistress," answered Lempriere, and
advanced to the fishermen.  By dint of hard words, and as hearty
encouragement and promises, he got a half-dozen strong sailors to man the
boat.

A moment after, they were all in.  At a motion from the Seigneur, the
boat was shot out into the surf, and a cheer from the shore gave heart to
De la Foret and Buonespoir, who were being driven upon the rocks.

The Jerseymen rowed gallantly; and the Seigneur, to give them heart,
promised a shilling, a capon, and a gallon of beer to each, if the rescue
was made.  Again and again the two men seemed to sink beneath the sea,
and again and again they came to the surface and battled further, torn,
battered, and bloody, but not beaten.  Cries of "We're coming, gentles,
we're coming!" from the Seigneur of Rozel, came ringing through the surf
to the dulled ears of the drowning men, and they struggled on.

There never was a more gallant rescue.  Almost at their last gasp the two
were rescued.

"Mistress Aubert sends you welcome, sir, if you be Michel de la Foret,"
said Lempriere of Rozel, and offered the fugitive his horn of liquor as
he lay blown and beaten in the boat.

"I am he," De la Foret answered.  "I owe you my life, Monsieur," he
added.

Lempriere laughed.  "You owe it to the lady; and I doubt you can properly
pay the debt," he answered, with a toss of the head; for had not the lady
refused him, the Seigneur of Rozel, six feet six in height, and all else
in proportion, while this gentleman was scarce six feet.

"We can have no quarrel upon the point," answered De la Foret, reaching
out his hand; "you have at least done tough work for her, and if I cannot
pay in gold, I can in kind.  It was a generous deed, and it has made a
friend for ever of Michel de la Foret."

"Raoul Lempriere of Rozel they call me, Michel de la Foret, and by Rollo
the Duke, but I'll take your word in the way of friendship, as the lady
yonder takes it for riper fruit!  Though, faith, 'tis fruit of a short
summer, to my thinking."

All this while Buonespoir the pirate, his face covered with blood, had
been swearing by the little finger of St. Peter that each Jerseyman there
should have the half of a keg of rum.  He went so far in gratitude as to
offer the price of ten sheep which he had once secretly raided from the
Seigneur of Rozel and sold in France; for which he had been seized on his
later return to the island, and had escaped without punishment.

Hearing, Lempriere of Rozel roared at him in anger: "Durst speak to me!
For every fleece you thieved I'll have you flayed with bow-strings if
ever I sight your face within my boundaries."

"Then I'll fetch and carry no more for M'sieu' of Rozel," said
Buonespoir, in an offended tone, but grinning under his reddish beard.

"When didst fetch and carry for me, varlet?" Lempriere roared again.

"When the Seigneur of Rozel fell from his horse, overslung with sack, the
night of the royal Duke's visit, and the footpads were on him, I carried
him on my back to the lodge of Rozel Manor.  The footpads had scores to
settle with the great Rozel."

For a moment the Seigneur stared, then roared again, but this time with
laughter.

"By the devil and Rollo, I have sworn to this hour that there was no man
in the isle could have carried me on his shoulders.  And I was right, for
Jersiais you're none, neither by adoption nor grace, but a citizen of the
sea."

He laughed again as a wave swept over them, drenching them, and a sudden
squall of wind came out of the north.  "There's no better head in the
isle than mine for measurement and thinking, and I swore no man under
eighteen stone could carry me, and I am twenty-five--I take you to be
nineteen stone, eh?"

"Nineteen, less two ounces," grinned Buonespoir.

"I'll laugh De Carteret of St. Ouen's out of his stockings over this,"
answered Lempriere.  "Trust me for knowing weights and measures!  Look
you, varlet, thy sins be forgiven thee.  I care not about the fleeces, if
there be no more stealing.  St. Ouen's has no head--I said no one man in
Jersey could have done it--I'm heavier by three stone than any man in the
island."  Thereafter there was little speaking among them, for the danger
was greater as they neared the shore.  The wind and the sea were against
them; the tide, however, was in their favour.  Others besides M. Aubert
offered up prayers for the safe-landing of the rescued and rescuers.
Presently an ancient fisherman broke out into a rude sailor's chanty, and
every voice, even those of the two Huguenots, took it up:

          "When the Four Winds, the Wrestlers, strive with the Sun,
          When the Sun is slain in the dark;
          When the stars burn out, and the night cries
          To the blind sea-reapers, and they rise,
          And the water-ways are stark--
               God save us when the reapers reap!
          When the ships sweep in with the tide to the shore,
          And the little white boats return no more;
          When the reapers reap, Lord give Thy sailors sleep,
          If Thou cast us not upon the shore,
          To bless Thee evermore:
          To walk in Thy sight as heretofore
          Though the way of the Lord be steep!
          By Thy grace,
          Show Thy face,
               Lord of the land and the deep!"

The song stilled at last.  It died away in the roar of the surf,
in the happy cries of foolish women, and the laughter of men back from
a dangerous adventure.  As the Seigneur's boat was drawn up the shore,
Angele threw herself into the arms of Michel de la Foret, the soldier
dressed as a priest.

Lempriere of Rozel stood abashed before this rich display of feeling.
In his hottest youth he could not have made such passionate motions of
affection.  His feelings ran neither high nor broad, but neither did they
run low and muddy.  His nature was a straight level of sensibility--a
rough stream between high banks of prejudice, topped with the foam of
vanity, now brawling in season, and now going steady and strong to the
sea.  Angele had come to feel what he was beneath the surface.  She felt
how unimaginative he was, and how his humour, which was but the horse-
play of vanity, helped him little to understand the world or himself.
His vanity was ridiculous, his self-importance was against knowledge or
wisdom; and Heaven had given him a small brain, a big and noble heart, a
pedigree back to Rollo, and the absurd pride of a little lord in a little
land.  Angele knew all this; but realised also that he had offered her
all he was able to offer to any woman.

She went now and put out both hands to him.  "I shall ever pray God's
blessing on the lord of Rozel," she said, in a low voice.

"'Twould fit me no better than St. Ouen's sword fits his fingers.  I'll
take thine own benison, lady--but on my cheek, not on my hand as this day
before at four of the clock."  His big voice lowered.  "Come, come, the
hand thou kissed, it hath been the hand of a friend to thee, as Raoul
Lempriere of Rozel said he'd be.  Thy lips upon his cheek, though it be
but a rough fellow's fancy, and I warrant, come good, come ill, Rozel's
face will never be turned from thee.  Pooh, pooh! let yon soldier-priest
shut his eyes a minute; this is 'tween me and thee; and what's done
before the world's without shame."

He stopped short, his black eyes blazing with honest mirth and kindness,
his breath short, having spoken in such haste.

Her eyes could scarce see him, so full of tears were they; and, standing
on tiptoe, she kissed him upon each cheek.

"'Tis much to get for so little given," she said, with a quiver in her
voice; "yet this price for friendship would be too high to pay to any
save the Seigneur of Rozel."

She hastily turned to the men who had rescued Michel and Buonespoir.
"If I had riches, riches ye should have, brave men of Jersey," she said;
"but I have naught save love and thanks, and my prayers too, if ye will
have them."

"'Tis a man's duty to save his fellow an' he can," cried a gaunt
fisherman, whose daughter was holding to his lips a bowl of conger-eel
soup.

"'Twas a good deed to send us forth to save a priest of Holy Church,"
cried a weazened boat-builder with a giant's arm, as he buried his face
in a cup of sack, and plunged his hand into a fishwife's basket of
limpets.

"Aye, but what means she by kissing and arm-getting with a priest?"
cried a snarling vraic-gatherer.  "'Tis some jest upon Holy Church, or
yon priest is no better than common men but an idle shame."

By this time Michel was among them.  "Priest I am none, but a soldier,"
he said in a loud voice, and told them bluntly the reasons for his
disguise; then, taking a purse from his pocket, thrust into the hands of
his rescuers and their families pieces of silver and gave them brave
words of thanks.

But the Seigneur was not to be outdone in generosity.  His vanity ran
high; he was fain to show Angele what a gorgeous gentleman she had failed
to make her own; and he was in ripe good-humour all round.

"Come, ye shall come, all of ye, to the Manor of Rozel, every man and
woman here.  Ye shall be fed, and fuddled too ye shall be an' ye will;
for honest drink which sends to honest sleep hurts no man.  To my kitchen
with ye all; and you, messieurs"--turning to M. Aubert and De la Fore-
"and you, Mademoiselle, come, know how open is the door and full the
table at my Manor of Rozel--St. Ouen's keeps a beggarly board."




CHAPTER IV

Thus began the friendship of the bragging Seigneur of Rozel for the
three Huguenots, all because he had seen tears in a girl's eyes and
misunderstood them, and because the same girl had kissed him.  His pride
was flattered that they should receive protection from him, and the
flattery became almost a canonising when De Carteret of St. Ouen's
brought him to task for harbouring and comforting the despised Huguenots;
for when De Carteret railed he was envious.  So henceforth Lempriere
played Lord Protector with still more boisterous unction.  His pride knew
no bounds when, three days after the rescue, Sir Hugh Pawlett, the
Governor, answering De la Foret's letter requesting permission to visit
the Comtesse de Montgomery, sent him word to fetch De la Foret to Mont
Orgueil Castle.  Clanking and blowing, he was shown into the great hall
with De la Foret, where waited Sir Hugh and the widow of the renowned
Camisard.  Clanking and purring like an enormous cat, he turned his head
away to the window when De la Foret dropped on his knees and kissed the
hand of the Comtesse, whose eyes were full of tears.  Clanking and
gurgling, he sat to a mighty meal of turbot, eels, lobsters, ormers,
capons, boar's head, brawn, and mustard, swan, curlew, and spiced meats.
This he washed down with bastard, malmsey, and good ale, topped with
almonds, comfits, perfumed cherries with "ipocras," then sprinkled
himself with rose-water and dabbled his face and hands in it.  Filled to
the turret, he lurched to his feet, and drinking to Sir Hugh's toast, 27

"Her sacred Majesty!" he clanked and roared.  "Elizabeth!" as though
upon the field of battle.  He felt the star of De Carteret declining and
Rozel's glory ascending like a comet.  Once set in a course, nothing
could change him.  Other men might err, but once right, the Seigneur of
Rozel was everlasting.

Of late he had made the cause of Michel de la Foret and Angele Aubert
his own.  For this he had been raked upon the coals by De Carteret of St.
Ouen's and his following, who taunted him with the saying: "Save a thief
from hanging and he'll cut your throat."  Not that there was ill feeling
against De la Foret in person.  He had won most hearts by a frank yet
still manner, and his story and love for Angele had touched the women
folk where their hearts were softest.  But the island was not true to
itself or its history if it did not divide itself into factions, headed
by the Seigneurs, and there had been no ground for good division for five
years till De la Foret came.

Short of actual battle, this new strife was the keenest ever known,
for Sir Hugh Pawlett was ranged on the side of the Seigneur of Rozel.
Kinsman of the Comtesse de Montgomery, of Queen Elizabeth's own
Protestant religion, and admiring De la Foret, he had given every
countenance to the Camisard refugee.  He had even besought the Royal
Court of Jersey to grant a pardon to Buonespoir the pirate, on condition
that he should never commit a depredation upon an inhabitant of the
island--this he was to swear to by the little finger of St. Peter.
Should he break his word, he was to be banished the island for ten years,
under penalty of death if he returned.  When the hour had come for
Buonespoir to take the oath, he failed to appear; and the next morning
the Seigneur of St. Ouen's discovered that during the night his cellar
had been raided of two kegs of canary, many flagons of muscadella, pots
of anchovies and boxes of candied "eringo," kept solely for the visit
which the Queen had promised the island.  There was no doubt of the
misdemeanant, for Buonespoir returned to De Carteret from St. Brieuc the
gabardine of one of his retainers, in which he had carried off the stolen
delicacies.

This aggravated the feud between the partisans of St. Ouen's and Rozel,
for Lempriere of Rozel had laughed loudly when he heard of the robbery,
and said "'Tis like St. Ouen's to hoard for a Queen and glut a pirate.
We feed as we get at Rozel, and will feed the Court well too when it
comes, or I'm no butler to Elizabeth."

But trouble was at hand for Michel and for his protector.  The spies of
Catherine de Medici, mother of the King of France, were everywhere.
These had sent word that De la Foret was now attached to the meagre suite
of the widow of the great Camisard Montgomery, near the Castle of Mont
Orgueil.  The Medici, having treacherously slain the chief, became mad
with desire to slay the lieutenant.  She was set to have the man, either
through diplomacy with England, or to end him by assassination through
her spies.  Having determined upon his death, with relentless soul she
pursued the cause as closely as though this exiled soldier were a
powerful enemy at the head of an army in France.

Thus it was that she wrote to Queen Elizabeth, asking that "this arrant
foe of France, this churl, conspirator, and reviler of the Sacraments,
be rendered unto our hands for well-deserved punishment as warning to all
such evil-doers."  She told Elizabeth of De la Foret's arrival in Jersey,
disguised as a priest of the Church of France, and set forth his doings
since landing with the Seigneur of Rozel.  Further she went on to say to
"our sister of England" that "these dark figures of murder and revolt be
a peril to the soft peace of this good realm."

To this, Elizabeth, who had no knowledge of Michel, who desired peace
with France at this time, who had favours to ask of Catherine, and who
in her own realm had fresh reason to fear conspiracy through the Queen of
the Scots and others, replied forthwith that "If this De la Foret falleth
into our hands, and if it were found he had in truth conspired against
France its throne, had he a million lives, not one should remain."
Having despatched this letter, she straightway sent a messenger to Sir
Hugh Pawlett in Jersey, making quest of De la Foret, and commanding that
he should be sent to her in England at once.

When the Queen's messenger arrived at Orgueil Castle, Lempriere chanced
to be with Sir Hugh Pawlett, and the contents of Elizabeth's letter were
made known to him.

At the moment Monsieur of Rozel was munching macaroons and washing them
down with canary.  The Governor's announcement was such a shock that he
choked and coughed, the crumbs flying in all directions; and another pint
of canary must be taken to flush his throat.  Thus cleared for action, he
struck out.

"'Tis St. Ouen's work," he growled.

"'Tis the work of the Medici," said Sir Hugh.  "Read," he added, holding
out the paper.

Now Lempriere of Rozel had a poor eye for reading.  He had wit enough to
wind about the difficulty.

"If I see not the Queen's commands, I've no warrant but Sir Hugh
Pawlett's words, and I'll to London and ask 'fore her Majesty's face if
she wrote them, and why.  I'll tell my tale and speak my mind, I pledge
you, sir."

"You'll offend her Majesty.  Her commands are here."  Pawlett tapped the
letter with his finger.

"I'm butler to the Queen, and she will list to me.  I'll not smirk and
caper like St. Ouen's; I'll bear me like a man not speaking for himself.
I'll speak as Harry her father spoke--straight to the purpose.  .  .  .
No, no, no, I'm not to be wheedled, even by a Pawlett, and you shall not
ask me.  If you want Michel de la Foret, come and take him.  He is in my
house.  But ye must take him, for come he shall not!"

"You will not oppose the Queen's officers?"

"De la Foret is under my roof.  He must be taken.  I will give him up
to no one; and I'll tell my sovereign these things when I see her in her
palace."

"I misdoubt you'll play the bear," said Pawlett, with a dry smile.

"The Queen's tongue is none so tame.  I'll travel by my star, get sweet
or sour."

"Well, well, 'give a man luck, and throw him into the sea,' is the old
proverb.  I'm coming for your friend to-night."

"I'll be waiting with my fingers on the door, sir," said Rozel, with a
grim vanity and an outrageous pride in himself.




CHAPTER V

The Seigneur of Rozel found De la Foret at the house of M. Aubert.  His
face was flushed with hard riding, and perhaps the loving attitude of
Michel and Angele deepened it, for at the garden gate the lovers were
saying adieu.

"You have come for Monsieur de la Foret?" asked Angele anxiously.  Her
quick look at the Seigneur's face had told her there were things amiss.

"There's commands from the Queen.  They're for the ears of De la Foret,"
said the Seigneur.

"I will hear them too," said Angele, her colour going, her bearing
determined.

The Seigneur looked down at her with boyish appreciation, then said to
De la Foret: "Two Queens make claim for you.  The wolfish Catherine
writes to England for her lost Camisard, with much fool's talk about
'dark figures,' and 'conspirators,' 'churls,' and foes of 'soft peace';
and England takes the bait and sends to Sir Hugh Pawlett yonder.  And, in
brief, Monsieur, the Governor is to have you under arrest and send you to
England.  God knows why two Queens make such a pother over a fellow with
naught but a sword and a lass to love him--though, come to think,
'a man's a man if he have but a hose on his head,' as the proverb runs."

De la Foret smiled, then looked grave, as he caught sight of Angele's
face.  "'Tis arrest, then?" he asked.

"'Tis come willy nilly," answered the Seigneur.  "And once they've forced
you from my doors, I'm for England to speak my mind to the Queen.  I can
make interest for her presence--I hold court office," he added with
puffing confidence.

Angele looked up at him with quick tears, yet with a smile on her lips.

"You are going to England for Michel's sake?" she said in a low voice.

"For Michel, or for you, or for mine honour, what matter, so that I go!"
he answered, then added: "there must be haste to Rozel, friend, lest the
Governor take Lempriere's guest like a potato-digger in the fields."

Putting spurs to his horse, he cantered heavily away, not forgetting to
wave a pompous farewell to Angele.  De la Foret was smiling as he turned
to Angele.  She looked wonderingly at him, for she had felt that she must
comfort him, and she looked not for this sudden change in his manner.

"Is prison-going so blithe, then?" she asked, with a little uneasy laugh
which was half a sob.

"It will bring things to a head," he answered.  "After danger and busy
days, to be merely safe, it is scarce the life for Michel de la Foret.
I have my duty to the Comtesse; I have my love for you; but I seem of
little use by contrast with my past.  And yet, and yet," he added, half
sadly, "how futile has been all our fighting, so far as human eye can
see."

"Nothing is futile that is right, Michel," the girl replied.  "Thou hast
done as thy soul answered to God's messages: thou hast fought when thou
couldst, and thou hast sheathed thy blade when there was naught else to
do.  Are not both right?"

He clasped her to his breast; then, holding her from him a little, looked
into her eyes steadily a moment.  "God hath given thee a true heart, and
the true heart hath wisdom," he answered.

"You will not seek escape?  Nor resist the Governor?" she asked eagerly.

"Whither should I go?  My place is here by you, by the Comtesse de
Montgomery.  One day it may be I shall return to France, and to our
cause--"

"If it be God's will."

"If it be God's will."

"Whatever comes, you will love me, Michel?"

"I will love you, whatever comes."

"Listen."  She drew his head down.  "I am no dragweight to thy life?
Thou wouldst not do otherwise if there were no foolish Angele?"

He did not hesitate.  "What is best is.  I might do otherwise if there
were no Angele in my life to pilot my heart, but that were worse for me."

"Thou art the best lover in all the world."

"I hope to make a better husband.  To-morrow is carmine-lettered in my
calendar, if thou sayst thou wilt still have me under the sword of the
Medici."

Her hand pressed her heart suddenly.  "Under the sword, if it be God's
will," she answered.  Then, with a faint smile: "But no, I will not
believe the Queen of England will send thee, one of her own Protestant
faith, to the Medici."

"And thou wilt marry me?"

"When the Queen of England approves thee," she answered, and buried her
face in the hollow of his arm.

An hour later Sir Hugh Pawlett came to the manor-house of Rozel with
two-score men-at-arms.  The Seigneur himself answered the Governor's
knocking, and showed himself in the doorway, with a dozen halberdiers
behind him.

"I have come seeking Michel de la Foret," said the Governor.

"He is my guest."

"I have the Queen's command to take him."

"He is my cherished guest."

"Must I force my way?"

"Is it the Queen's will that blood be shed?"

"The Queen's commands must be obeyed."

"The Queen is a miracle of the world, God save her!  What is the charge
against him?"

"Summon Michel de la Foret, 'gainst whom it lies."

"He is my guest; ye shall have him only by force."  The Governor turned
to his men.  "Force the passage and search the house," he commanded.

The company advanced with levelled pikes, but at a motion from the
Seigneur his men fell back before them, and, making a lane, disclosed
Michel de la Foret at the end of it.  Michel had not approved of
Lempriere's mummery of defence, but he understood from what good spirit
it sprung, and how it flattered the Seigneur's vanity to make show of
resistance.

The Governor greeted De la Foret with a sour smile, read to him the
Queen's writ, and politely begged his company towards Mont Orgueil
Castle.

"I'll fetch other commands from her Majesty, or write me down a pedlar of
St. Ouen's follies," the Seigneur said from his doorway, as the Governor
and De la Foret bade him good-bye and took the road to the Castle.




CHAPTER VI

Michel de la Foret was gone, a prisoner.  From the dusk of the trees by
the little chapel of Rozel, Angele had watched his exit in charge of the
Governor's men.  She had not sought to show her presence: she had seen
him--that was comfort to her heart; and she would not mar the memory of
that last night's farewell by another before these strangers.  She saw
with what quiet Michel bore his arrest, and she said to herself, as the
last halberdier vanished:

"If the Queen do but speak with him, if she but look upon his face and
hear his voice, she must needs deal kindly by him.  My Michel--ah, it is
a face for all men to trust and all women--"

But she sighed and averted her head as though before prying eyes.

The bell of Rozel Chapel broke gently on the evening air; the sound,
softened by the leaves and mellowed by the wood of the great elm-trees,
billowed away till it was lost in faint reverberation in the sea beneath
the cliffs of the Couperon, where a little craft was coming to anchor in
the dead water.

At first the sound of the bell soothed her, softening the thought of the
danger to Michel.  She moved with it towards the sea, the tones of her
grief chiming with it.  Presently, as she went, a priest in cassock and
robes and stole crossed the path in front of her, an acolyte before him
swinging a censer, his voice chanting Latin verses from the service for
the sick, in his hands the sacred elements of the sacrament for the
dying.  The priest was fat and heavy, his voice was lazy, his eyes
expressionless, and his robes were dirty.  The plaintive, peaceful
sense which the sound of the vesper bell had thrown over Angele's sad
reflections passed away, and the thought smote her that, were it not for
such as this black-toothed priest, Michel would not now be on his way to
England, a prisoner.  To her this vesper bell was the symbol of tyranny
and hate.  It was fighting, it was martyrdom, it was exile, it was the
Medici.  All that she had borne, all that her father had borne, the
thought of the home lost, the mother dead before her time, the name
ruined, the heritage dispossessed, the red war of the Camisards, the
rivulets of blood in the streets of Paris and of her loved Rouen, smote
upon her mind, and drove her to her knees in the forest glade, her hands
upon her ears to shut out the sound of the bell.  It came upon her that
the bell had said "Peace!  Peace!" to her mind when there should be no
peace; that it had said "Be patient!" when she should be up and doing;
that it had whispered "Stay!" when she should tread the path her lover
trod, her feet following in his footsteps as his feet had trod in hers.

She pressed her hands tight upon her ears and prayed with a passion and
a fervour she had never known before.  A revelation seemed to come upon
her, and, for the first time, she was a Huguenot to the core.  Hitherto
she had suffered for her religion because it was her mother's broken
life, her father's faith, and because they had suffered, and her lover
had suffered.  Her mind had been convinced, her loyalty had been
unwavering, her words for the great cause had measured well with her
deeds.  But new senses were suddenly born in her, new eyes were given
to her mind, new powers for endurance to her soul.  She saw now as the
martyrs of Meaux had seen; a passionate faith descended on her as it had
descended on them; no longer only patient, she was fain for action.
Tears rained from her eyes.  Her heart burst itself in entreaty and
confession.

"Thy light shall be my light, and Thy will my will, O Lord," she cried at
the last.  "Teach me Thy way, create a right spirit within me.  Give me
boldness without rashness, and hope without vain thinking.  Bear up my
arms, O Lord, and save me when falling.  A poor Samaritan am I.  Give me
the water that shall be a well of water springing up to everlasting life,
that I thirst not in the fever of doing.  Give me the manna of life to
eat that I faint not nor cry out in plague, pestilence, or famine.  Give
me Thy grace, O God, as Thou hast given it to Michel de la Foret, and
guide my feet as I follow him in life and in death, for Christ's sake.
Amen."

As she rose from her knees she heard the evening gun from the castle of
Mont Orgueil, whither Michel was being borne by the Queen's men.  The
vesper bell had stopped.  Through the wood came the salt savour of the
sea on the cool sunset air.  She threw back her head and walked swiftly
towards it, her heart beating hard, her eyes shining with the light of
purpose, her step elastic with the vigour of youth and health.  A
quarter-hour's walking brought her to the cliff of the Couperon.

As she gazed out over the sea, however, a voice in the bay below caught
her ear.  She looked down.  On the deck of the little craft which had
entered the harbour when the vesper bell was ringing stood a man who
waved a hand up towards her, then gave a peculiar call.  She stared with
amazement: it was Buonespoir the pirate.  What did this mean?  Had God
sent this man to her, by his presence to suggest what she should do in
this crisis in her life?  For even as she ran down the shore towards him,
it came to her mind that Buonespoir should take her in his craft to
England.

What to do in England?  Who could tell?  She only knew that a voice
called her to England, to follow the footsteps of Michel de la Foret, who
even this night would be setting forth in the Governor's brigantine for
London.

Buonespoir met her upon the shore, grinning like a boy.

"God save you, lady!" he said.

"What brings you hither, friend?" she asked.

If he had said that a voice had called him hither as one called her to
England, it had not sounded strange; for she was not thinking that this
was one who superstitiously swore by the little finger of St. Peter, but
only that he was the man who had brought her Michel from France, who had
been a faithful friend to her and to her father.

"What brings me hither?" Buonespoir laughed low in his chest.  "Even to
fetch to the Seigneur of Rozel, a friend of mine by every token of
remembrance, a dozen flagons of golden muscadella."

To Angele no suggestion flashed that these flagons of muscadella had
come from the cellar of the Seigneur of St. Ouen's, where they had been
reserved for a certain royal visit.  Nothing was in her mind save the one
thought-that she must follow Michel.

"Will you take me to England?" she asked, putting a hand quickly on his
arm.

He had been laughing hard, picturing to himself what Lempriere of Rozel
would say when he sniffed the flagon of St. Ouen's best wine, and for an
instant he did not take in the question; but he stared at her now as the
laugh slowly subsided through notes of abstraction and her words worked
their way into his brain.

"Will you take me, Buonespoir?" she urged.  "Take you--?" he questioned.

"To England."

"And myself to Tyburn?"

"Nay, to the Queen."

"'Tis the same thing.  Head of Abel!  Elizabeth hath heard of me.  The
Seigneur of St. Ouen's and others have writ me down a pirate to her.  She
would not pardon the muscadella," he added, with another laugh, looking
down where the flagons lay.

"She must pardon more than that," exclaimed Angele, and hastily she told
him of what had happened to Michel de la Foret, and why she would go.

"Thy father, then?" he asked, scowling hard in his attempt to think it
out.

"He must go with me--I will seek him now."

"It must be at once, i' faith, for how long, think you, can I stay here
unharmed?  I was sighted off St. Ouen's shore a few hours agone."

"To-night?" she asked.

"By twelve, when we shall have the moon and the tide," he answered.
"But hold!" he hastily added.  "What, think you, could you and your
father do alone in England?  And with me it were worse than alone.  These
be dark times, when strangers have spies at their heels, and all
travellers are suspect."

"We will trust in God," she answered.

"Have you money?" he questioned--"for London, not for me," he added
hastily.

"Enough," she replied.

"The trust with the money is a weighty matter," he added; "but they
suffice not.  You must have 'fending."

"There is no one," she answered sadly, "no one save--"

"Save the Seigneur of Rozel!" Buonespoir finished the sentence.  "Good.
You to your father, and I to the Seigneur.  If you can fetch your father
by your pot-of-honey tongue, I'll fetch the great Lempriere with
muscadella.  Is't a bargain?"

"In which I gain all," she answered, and again touched his arm with her
finger-tips.

"You shall be aboard here at ten, and I will join you on the stroke of
twelve," he said, and gave a low whistle.

At the signal three men sprang up like magic out of the bowels of the
boat beneath them, and scurried over the side; three as ripe knaves as
ever cheated stocks and gallows, but simple knaves, unlike their master.
Two of them had served with Francis Drake in that good ship of his lying
even now not far from Elizabeth's palace at Greenwich.  The third was a
rogue who had been banished from Jersey for a habitual drunkenness which
only attacked him on land--at sea he was sacredly sober.  His name was
Jean Nicolle.  The names of the other two were Herve Robin and Rouge le
Riche, but their master called them by other names.

"Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego," said Buonespoir in ceremony, and waved
a hand of homage between them and Angele.  "Kiss dirt, and know where
duty lies.  The lady's word on my ship is law till we anchor at the
Queen's Stairs at Greenwich.  So, Heaven help you, Shadrach, Meshach, and
Abednego!" said Buonespoir.

A wave of humour passed over Angele's grave face, for a stranger quartet
never sailed high seas together: one blind of an eye, one game of a leg,
one bald as a bottle and bereft of two front teeth; but Buonespoir was
sound of wind and limb, his small face with the big eyes lost in the
masses of his red hair, and a body like Hercules.  It flashed through
Angele's mind even as she answered the gurgling salutations of the
triumvirate that they had been got together for no gentle summer sailing
in the Channel.  Her conscience smote her that she should use such
churls; but she gave it comfort by the thought that while serving her
they could do naught worse; and her cause was good.  Yet they presented
so bizarre an aspect, their ugliness was so varied and particular, that
she almost laughed.  Buonespoir understood her thoughts, for with a look
of mocking innocence in his great blue eyes he waved a hand again towards
the graceless trio, and said, "For deep-sea fishing."  Then he solemnly
winked at the three.

A moment later Angele was speeding along the shore towards her home on
the farther hillside up the little glen; and within an hour Buonespoir
rolled from the dusk of the trees by the manor-house of Rozel and knocked
at the door.  He carried on his head, as a fishwife carries a tray of
ormers, a basket full of flagons of muscadella; and he did not lower the
basket when he was shown into the room where the Seigneur of Rozel was
sitting before a trencher of spiced veal and a great pot of ale.
Lempriere roared a hearty greeting to the pirate, for he was in a sour
humour because of the taking off of Michel de la Foret; and of all men
this pirate-fellow, who had quips and cranks, and had played tricks on
his cousin of St. Ouen's, was most welcome.

"What's that on your teacup of a head?" he roared again as Buonespoir
grinned pleasure at the greeting.  "Muscadella," said Buonespoir, and
lowered the basket to the table.

Lempriere seized a flagon, drew it forth, looked closely at it, then
burst into laughter, and spluttered: "St. Ouen's muscadella, by the hand
of Rufus!"

Seizing Buonespoir by the shoulders, he forced him down upon a bench at
the table, and pushed the trencher of spiced meat against his chest.
"Eat, my noble lord of the sea and master of the cellar," he gurgled out,
and, tipping the flagon of muscadella, took a long draught.  "God-a-
mercy--but it has saved my life," he gasped in satisfaction as he lay
back in his great chair, and put his feet on the bench whereon Buonespoir
sat.

They raised their flagons and toasted each other, and Lempriere burst
forth into song, in the refrain of which Buonespoir joined boisterously:

              "King Rufus he did hunt the deer,
                 With a hey ho, come and kiss me, Dolly!
               It was the spring-time of the year,
                 Hey ho, Dolly shut her eyes!
               King Rufus was a bully boy,
               He hunted all the day for joy,
               Sweet Dolly she was ever coy:
                 And who would e'er be wise
                 That looked in Dolly's eyes?

               "King Rufus he did have his day,
                 With a hey ho, come and kiss me, Dolly!
               So get ye forth where dun deer play--
                 Hey ho, Dolly comes again!
               The greenwood is the place for me,
               For that is where the dun deer be,
               'Tis where my Dolly comes to me:
                 And who would stay at home,
                 That might with Dolly roam?
               Sing hey ho, come and kiss me, Dolly!"

Lempriere, perspiring with the exertion, mopped his forehead, then lapsed
into a plaintive mood.

"I've had naught but trouble of late," he wheezed.  "Trouble, trouble,
trouble, like gnats on a filly's flank!" and in spluttering words, twice
bracketed in muscadella, he told of Michel de la Foret's arrest, and of
his purpose to go to England if he could get a boat to take him.

"'Tis that same business brings me here," said Buonespoir, and forthwith
told of his meeting with Angele and what was then agreed upon.

"You to go to England!" cried Lempriere amazed.  "They want you for
Tyburn there."

"They want me for the gallows here," said Buonespoir.  Rolling a piece of
spiced meat in his hand, he stuffed it into his mouth and chewed till the
grease came out of his eyes, and took eagerly from a servant a flagon of
malmsey and a dish of ormers.

"Hush, chew thy tongue a minute!" said the Seigneur, suddenly starting
and laying a finger beside his nose.  "Hush!" he said again, and looked
into the flicker of the candle by him with half-shut eyes.

"May I have no rushes for a bed, and die like a rat in a moat, if I don't
get thy pardon too of the Queen, and bring thee back to Jersey, a thorn
in the side of De Carteret for ever!  He'll look upon thee assoilzied by
the Queen, spitting fire in his rage, and no canary or muscadella in his
cellar."

It came not to the mind of either that this expedition would be made at
cost to themselves.  They had not heard of Don Quixote, and their gifts
were not imitative.  They were of a day when men held their lives as
lightly as many men hold their honour now; when championship was as the
breath of life to men's nostrils, and to adventure for what was worth
having or doing in life the only road of reputation.

Buonespoir was as much a champion in his way as Lempriere of Rozel.
They were of like kidney, though so far apart in rank.  Had Lempriere
been born as low and as poor as Buonespoir, he would have been a pirate
too, no doubt; and had Buonespoir been born as high as the Seigneur, he
would have carried himself with the same rough sense of honour, with as
ripe a vanity; have been as naive, as sincere, as true to the real heart
of man untaught in the dissimulation of modesty or reserve.  When they
shook hands across the trencher of spiced veal, it was as man shakes hand
with man, not man with master.

They were about to start upon their journey when there came a knocking at
the door.  On its being opened the bald and toothless Abednego stumbled
in with the word that immediately after Angele and her father came aboard
the Honeyflower some fifty halberdiers suddenly appeared upon the
Couperon.  They had at once set sail, and got away even before the
sailors had reached the shore.  As they had rounded the point, where they
were hid from view, Abednego dropped overboard and swam ashore on the
rising tide, making his way to the manor to warn Buonespoir.  On his way
hither, stealing through the trees, he had passed a half-score of
halberdiers making for the manor, and he had seen others going towards
the shore.

Buonespoir looked to the priming of his pistols, and buckling his belt
tightly about him, turned to the Seigneur and said: "I will take my
chances with Abednego.  Where does she lie--the Honeyflower, Abednego?"

"Off the point called Verclut," answered the little man, who had
travelled with Francis Drake.

"Good; we will make a run for it, flying dot-and-carry-one as we go."

While they had been speaking the Seigneur had been thinking; and now,
even as several figures appeared at a little distance in the trees,
making towards the manor, he said, with a loud laugh:

"No.  'Tis the way of a fool to put his head between the door and the
jamb.  'Tis but a hundred yards to safety.  Follow me--to the sea--
Abednego last.  This way, bullies!"

Without a word all three left the house and walked on in the order
indicated, as De Carteret's halberdiers ran forward threatening.

"Stand!" shouted the sergeant of the halberdiers.  "Stand, or we fire!"

But the three walked straight on unheeding.  When the sergeant of the
men-at-arms recognised the Seigneur, he ordered down the blunderbusses.

"We come for Buonespoir the pirate," said the sergeant.

"Whose warrant?" said the Seigneur, fronting the halberdiers, Buonespoir
and Abednego behind him.  "The Seigneur of St. Ouen's," was the reply.

"My compliments to the Seigneur of St. Ouen's, and tell him that
Buonespoir is my guest," he bellowed, and strode on, the halberdiers
following.  Suddenly the Seigneur swerved towards the chapel and
quickened his footsteps, the others but a step behind.  The sergeant of
the halberdiers was in a quandary.  He longed to shoot, but dared not,
and while he was making up his mind what to do, the Seigneur had reached
the chapel door.  Opening it, he quickly pushed Buonespoir and Abednego
inside, whispering to them, then slammed the door and put his back
against it.

There was another moment's hesitation on the sergeant's part, then a door
at the other end of the chapel was heard to open and shut, and the
Seigneur laughed loudly.  The halberdiers ran round the chapel.  There
stood Buonespoir and Abednego in a narrow roadway, motionless and
unconcerned.  The halberdiers rushed forward.

"Perquage!  Perquage!  Perquage!" shouted Buonespoir, and the bright
moonlight showed him grinning.  For an instant there was deadly
stillness, in which the approaching footsteps of the Seigneur sounded
loud.

"Perquage!" Buonespoir repeated.

"Perquage!  Fall back!" said the Seigneur, and waved off the pikes of
the halberdiers.  "He has sanctuary to the sea."

This narrow road in which the pirates stood was the last of three in the
Isle of Jersey running from churches to the sea, in which a criminal was
safe from arrest by virtue of an old statute.  The other perquages had
been taken away; but this one of Rozel remained, a concession made by
Henry VIII to the father of this Raoul Lempriere.  The privilege had been
used but once in the present Seigneur's day, because the criminal must be
put upon the road from the chapel by the Seigneur himself, and he had
used his privilege modestly.

No man in Jersey but knew the sacredness of this perquage, though it was
ten years since it had been used; and no man, not even the Governor
himself, dare lift his hand to one upon that road.

So it was that Buonespoir and Abednego, two fugitives from justice,
walked quietly to the sea down the perquage, halberdiers, balked of their
prey, prowling on their steps and cursing the Seigneur of Rozel for his
gift of sanctuary: for the Seigneur of St. Ouen's and the Royal Court had
promised each halberdier three shillings and all the ale he could drink
at a sitting, if Buonespoir was brought in alive or dead.

In peace and safety the three boarded the Honeyflower off the point
called Verclut, and set sail for England, just seven hours after Michel
de la Foret had gone his way upon the Channel, a prisoner.




CHAPTER VII

A fortnight later, of a Sunday morning, the Lord Chamberlain of England
was disturbed out of his usual equanimity.  As he was treading the rushes
in the presence-chamber of the Royal Palace at Greenwich, his eye busy in
inspection--for the Queen would soon pass on her way to chapel--his head
nodding right and left to archbishop, bishop, councillors of state,
courtiers, and officers of the crown, he heard a rude noise at the door
leading into the ante-chapel, where the Queen received petitions from the
people.  Hurrying thither in shocked anxiety, he found a curled gentleman
of the guard, resplendent in red velvet and gold chains, in peevish
argument with a boisterous Seigneur of a bronzed good-humoured face, who
urged his entrance to the presence-chamber.

The Lord Chamberlain swept down upon the pair like a flamingo with wings
outspread.  "God's death, what means this turmoil?  Her Majesty comes
hither!" he cried, and scowled upon the intruder, who now stepped back a
little, treading on the toes of a huge sailor with a small head and bushy
red hair and beard.

"Because her Majesty comes I come also," the Seigneur interposed grandly.

"What is your name and quality?"

"Yours first, and I shall know how to answer."

"I am the Lord Chamberlain of England."

"And I, my lord, am Lempriere, Seigneur of Rozel--and butler to the
Queen."

"Where is Rozel?" asked my Lord Chamberlain.

The face of the Seigneur suddenly flushed, his mouth swelled, and then
burst.

"Where is Rozel!" he cried in a voice of rage.  "Where is Rozel!  Have
you heard of Hugh Pawlett," he asked, with a huge contempt--" of Governor
Hugh Pawlett?"  The Lord Chamberlain nodded.  "Then ask his Excellency
when next you see him, Where is Rozel?  But take good counsel and keep
your ignorance from the Queen," he added.  "She has no love for stupids."
"You say you are butler to the Queen?  Whence came your commission?"
said the Lord Chamberlain, smiling now; for Lempriere's words and ways
were of some simple world where odd folk lived, and his boyish vanity
disarmed anger.

"By royal warrant and heritage.  And of all of the Jersey Isle, I only
may have dove-totes, which is the everlasting thorn in the side of De
Carteret of St. Ouen's.  Now will you let me in, my lord?" he said, all
in a breath.

At a stir behind him the Lord Chamberlain turned, and with a horrified
exclamation hurried away, for the procession from the Queen's apartments
had already entered the presence-chamber: gentlemen, barons, earls,
knights of the garter, in brave attire, with bare heads and sumptuous
calves.  The Lord Chamberlain had scarce got to his place when the
Chancellor, bearing the seals in a red silk purse, entered, flanked by
two gorgeous folk with the royal sceptre and the sword of state in a red
scabbard, all flourished with fleur-de-lis.  Moving in and out among them
all was the Queen's fool, who jested and shook his bells under the noses
of the highest.

It was an event of which the Seigneur of Rozel told to his dying day:
that he entered the presence-chamber of the Royal Palace of Greenwich at
the same instant as the Queen--"Rozel at one end, Elizabeth at the other,
and all the world at gaze," he was wont to say with loud guffaws.  But
what he spoke of afterwards with preposterous ease and pride was neither
pride nor ease at the moment; for the Queen's eyes fell on him as he
shoved past the gentlemen who kept the door.  For an instant she stood
still, regarding him intently, then turned quickly to the Lord
Chamberlain in inquiry, and with sharp reproof too in her look.  The Lord
Chamberlain fell on his knee and with low uncertain voice explained the
incident.

Elizabeth again cast her eyes towards Lempriere, and the Court, following
her example, scrutinised the Seigneur in varied styles of insolence or
curiosity.  Lempriere drew himself up with a slashing attempt at
composure, but ended by flaming from head to foot, his face shining like
a cock's comb, the perspiration standing out like beads upon his
forehead, his eyes gone blind with confusion.  That was but for a moment,
however, and then, Elizabeth's look being slowly withdrawn from him, a
curious smile came to her lips, and she said to the Lord Chamberlain:
"Let the gentleman remain."

The Queen's fool tripped forward and tapped the Lord Chamberlain on the
shoulder.  "Let the gentleman remain, gossip, and see you that remaining
he goeth not like a fly with his feet in the porridge."  With a flippant
step before the Seigneur, he shook his bells at him.  "Thou shalt stay,
Nuncio, and staying speak the truth.  So doing you shall be as noted as a
comet with three tails.  You shall prove that man was made in God's
image.  So lift thy head and sneeze--sneezing is the fashion here; but
see that thou sneeze not thy head off as they do in Tartary.  'Tis worth
remembrance."

Rozel's self-importance and pride had returned.  The blood came back
to his heart, and he threw out his chest grandly; he even turned to
Buonespoir, whose great figure might be seen beyond the door, and winked
at him.  For a moment he had time to note the doings of the Queen and her
courtiers with wide-eyed curiosity.  He saw the Earl of Leicester,
exquisite, haughty, gallant, fall upon his knee, and Elizabeth slowly
pull off her glove and with a none too gracious look give him her hand
to kiss, the only favour of the kind granted that day.  He saw Cecil, her
Minister, introduce a foreign noble, who presented his letters.  He heard
the Queen speak in a half-dozen different languages, to people of various
lands, and he was smitten with amazement.

But as Elizabeth came slowly down the hall, her white silk gown fronted
with great pearls flashing back the light, a marchioness bearing the
train, the crown on her head glittering as she turned from right to left,
her wonderful collar of jewels sparkling on her uncovered bosom, suddenly
the mantle of black, silver-shotted silk upon her shoulders became to
Lempriere's heated senses a judge's robe, and Elizabeth the august judge
of the world.  His eyes blinded again, for it was as if she was bearing
down upon him.  Certainly she was looking at him now, scarce heeding the
courtiers who fell to their knees on either side as she came on.  The red
doublets of the fifty Gentlemen Pensioners--all men of noble families
proud to do this humble yet distinguished service--with battle-axes, on
either side of her, seemed to Lempriere on the instant like an army with
banners threatening him.  From the ante-chapel behind him came the cry of
the faithful subjects who, as the gentleman-at-arms fell back from the
doorway, had but just caught a glimpse of her Majesty--"Long live
Elizabeth!"

It seemed to Lempriere that the Gentlemen Pensioners must beat him down
as they passed, yet he stood riveted to the spot; and indeed it was true
that he was almost in the path of her Majesty.  He was aware that two
gentlemen touched him on the shoulder and bade him retire; but the Queen
motioned to them to desist.  So, with the eyes of the whole court on him
again, and Elizabeth's calm curious gaze fixed, as it were, on his
forehead, he stood still till the flaming Gentlemen Pensioners were
within a few feet of him, and the battle-axes were almost over his head.

The great braggart was no better now than a wisp of grass in the wind,
and it was more than homage that bent him to his knees as the Queen
looked him full in the eyes.  There was a moment's absolute silence, and
then she said, with cold condescension:

"By what privilege do you seek our presence?"

"I am Raoul Lempriere, Seigneur of Rozel, your high Majesty," said the
choking voice of the Jerseyman.  The Queen raised her eyebrows.  "The man
seems French.  You come from France?"

Lempriere flushed to his hair--the Queen did not know him, then!  "From
Jersey Isle, your sacred Majesty."

"Jersey Isle is dear to us.  And what is your warrant here?"

"I am butler to your Majesty, by your gracious Majesty's patent, and I
alone may have dove-cotes in the isle; and I only may have the perquage-
on your Majesty's patent.  It is not even held by De Carteret of St.
Ouen's."

The Queen smiled as she had not smiled since she entered the presence-
chamber.  "God preserve us," she said--"that I should not have recognised
you!  It is, of course, our faithful Lempriere of Rozel."

The blood came back to the Seigneur's heart, but he did not dare look up
yet, and he did not see that Elizabeth was in rare mirth at his words;
and though she had no ken or memory of him, she read his nature and was
mindful to humour him.  Beckoning Leicester to her side, she said a few
words in an undertone, to which he replied with a smile more sour than
sweet.

"Rise, Monsieur of Rozel," she said.

The Seigneur stood up, and met her gaze faintly.  "And so, proud
Seigneur, you must needs flout e'en our Lord Chamberlain, in the name of
our butler with three dove-cotes and the perquage.  In sooth thy office
must not be set at naught lightly--not when it is flanked by the
perquage.  By my father's doublet, but that frieze jerkin is well cut;
it suits thy figure well--I would that my Lord Leicester here had such a
tailor.  But this perquage--I doubt not there are those here at Court who
are most ignorant of its force and moment.  My Lord Chamberlain, my Lord
Leicester, Cecil here--confusion sits in their faces.  The perquage,
which my father's patent approved, has served us well, I doubt not, is a
comfort to our realm and a dignity befitting the wearer of that frieze
jerkin.  Speak to their better understanding, Monsieur of Rozel."

"Speak, Nuncio, and you shall have comforts, and be given in marriage,
multiple or singular, even as I," said the fool, and touched him on the
breast with his bells.

Lempriere had recovered his heart, and now was set full sail in the
course he had charted for himself in Jersey.  In large words and larger
manner he explained most innocently the sacred privilege of perquage.
"And how often have you used the right, friend?" asked Elizabeth.

"But once in ten years, your noble Majesty."  "When last?"

"But yesterday a week, your universal Majesty."  Elizabeth raised her
eyebrows.  "Who was the criminal, what the occasion?"

"The criminal was one Buonespoir, the occasion our coming hither to wait
upon the Queen of England and our Lady of Normandy, for such is your
well-born Majesty to your loyal Jersiais."  And thereupon he plunged into
an impeachment of De Carteret of St. Ouen's, and stumbled through a blunt
broken story of the wrongs and the sorrows of Michel and Angele and the
doings of Buonespoir in their behalf.

Elizabeth frowned and interrupted him.  "I have heard of this Buonespoir,
Monsieur, through others than the Seigneur of St. Ouen's.  He is an
unlikely squire of dames.  There's a hill in my kingdom has long bided
his coming.  Where waits the rascal now?"

"In the ante-chapel, your Majesty."

"By the rood!" said Elizabeth in sudden amazement.  "In my ante-chapel,
forsooth!"

She looked beyond the doorway and saw the great red-topped figure of
Buonespoir, his good-natured, fearless fare, his shock of hair, his clear
blue eye--he was not thirty feet away.

"He comes to crave pardon for his rank offences, your benignant Majesty,"
said Lempriere.

The humour of the thing rushed upon the Queen.  Never before were two
such naive folk at court.  There was not a hair of duplicity in the heads
of the two, and she judged them well in her mind.

"I will see you stand together--you and your henchman," she said to
Rozel, and moved on to the antechapel, the Court following.  Standing
still just inside the doorway, she motioned Buonespoir to come near.  The
pirate, unconfused, undismayed, with his wide blue asking eyes, came
forward and dropped upon his knees.  Elizabeth motioned Lempriere to
stand a little apart.

Thereupon she set a few questions to Buonespoir, whose replies,
truthfully given, showed that he had no real estimate of his crimes, and
was indifferent to what might be their penalties.  He had no moral sense
on the one hand, on the other, no fear.

Suddenly she turned to Lempriere again.  "You came, then, to speak for
this Michel de la Foret, the exile--?"

"And for the demoiselle Angele Aubert, who loves him, your Majesty."

"I sent for this gentleman exile a fortnight ago--" She turned towards
Leicester inquiringly.

"I have the papers here, your Majesty," said Leicester, and gave a packet
over.

"And where have you De la Foret?" said Elizabeth.  "In durance, your
Majesty."

"When came he hither?"

"Three days gone," answered Leicester, a little gloomily, for there was
acerbity in Elizabeth's voice.  Elizabeth seemed about to speak, then
dropped her eyes upon the papers, and glanced hastily at their contents.

"You will have this Michel de la Foret brought to my presence as fast as
horse can bring him, my Lord," she said to Leicester.  "This rascal of
the sea--Buonespoir--you will have safe bestowed till I recall his
existence again," she said to a captain of men-at-arms; "and you,
Monsieur of Rozel, since you are my butler, will get you to my dining-
room, and do your duty--the office is not all perquisites," she added
smoothly.  She was about to move on, when a thought seemed to strike her,
and she added, "This Mademoiselle and her father whom you brought hither-
where are they?"

"They are even within the palace grounds, your imperial Majesty,"
answered Lempriere.

"You will summon them when I bid you," she said to the Seigneur; "and you
shall see that they have comforts and housing as befits their station,"
she added to the Lord Chamberlain.

So did Elizabeth, out of a whimsical humour, set the highest in the land
to attend upon unknown, unconsidered exiles.





ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Boldness without rashness, and hope without vain thinking
Nothing is futile that is right
Religion to him was a dull recreation invented chiefly for women






MICHEL AND ANGELE

[A Ladder of Swords]

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.



CHAPTER VIII

Five minutes later, Lempriere of Rozel, as butler to the Queen, saw a
sight of which he told to his dying day.  When, after varied troubles
hereafter set down, he went back to Jersey, he made a speech before the
Royal Court, in which he told what chanced while Elizabeth was at chapel.

"There stood I, butler to the Queen," he said, with a large gesture,
"but what knew I of butler's duties at Greenwich Palace!  Her Majesty had
given me an office where all the work was done for me.  Odds life, but
when I saw the Gentleman of the Rod and his fellow get down on their
knees to lay the cloth upon the table, as though it was an altar at
Jerusalem, I thought it time to say my prayers.  There was naught but
kneeling and retiring.  Now it was the salt-cellar, the plate, and the
bread; then it was a Duke's Daughter--a noble soul as ever lived--with a
tasting-knife, as beautiful as a rose; then another lady enters who
glares at me, and gets to her knees as does the other.  Three times up
and down, and then one rubs the plate with bread and salt, as solemn as
St. Ouen's when he says prayers in the Royal Court.  Gentles, that was a
day for Jersey.  For there stood I as master of all, the Queen's butler,
and the greatest ladies of the land doing my will--though it was all
Persian mystery to me, save when the kettle-drums began to beat and the
trumpet to blow, and in walk bareheaded the Yeomen of the Guard, all
scarlet, with a golden rose on their backs, bringing in a course of
twenty-four gold dishes; and I, as Queen's butler, receiving them.

"Then it was I opened my mouth amazed at the endless dishes filled with
niceties of earth, and the Duke's Daughter pops onto my tongue a mouthful
of the first dish brought, and then does the same to every Yeoman of the
Guard that carried a dish--that her notorious Majesty be safe against the
hand of poisoners.  There was I, fed by a Duke's Daughter; and thus was
Jersey honoured; and the Duke's Daughter whispers to me, as a dozen other
unmarried ladies enter, 'The Queen liked not the cut of your frieze
jerkin better than do I, Seigneur.'  With that she joins the others, and
they all kneel down and rise up again, and lifting the meat from the
table, bear it into the Queen's private chamber.

"When they return, and the Yeomen of the Guard go forth, I am left alone
with these ladies, and there stand with twelve pair of eyes upon me,
little knowing what to do.  There was laughter in the faces of some, and
looks less taking in the eyes of others; for my Lord Leicester was to
have done the duty I was set to do that day, and he the greatest gallant
of the kingdom, as all the world knows.  What they said among themselves
I know not, but I heard Leicester's name, and I guessed that they were
mostly in the pay of his soft words.  But the Duke's Daughter was on my
side, as was proved betimes when Leicester made trouble for us who went
from Jersey to plead the cause of injured folk.  Of the Earl's enmity to
me--a foolish spite of a great nobleman against a Norman-Jersey
gentleman--and of how it injured others for the moment, you all know; but
we had him by the heels before the end of it, great earl and favourite as
he was."

In the same speech Lempriere told of his audience with the Queen, even as
she sat at dinner, and of what she said to him; but since his words give
but a partial picture of events, the relation must not be his.

When the Queen returned from chapel to her apartments, Lempriere was
called by an attendant, and he stood behind the Queen's chair until she
summoned him to face her.  Then, having finished her meal, and dipped her
fingers in a bowl of rose-water, she took up the papers Leicester had
given her--the Duke's Daughter had read them aloud as she ate--and said:

"Now, my good Seigneur of Rozel, answer me these few questions: First,
what concern is it of yours whether this Michel de la Foret be sent back
to France, or die here in England?"

"I helped to save his life at sea--one good turn deserves another, your
high-born Majesty."

The Queen looked sharply at him, then burst out laughing.

"God's life, but here's a bull making epigrams!" she said.  Then her
humour changed.  "See you, my butler of Rozel, you shall speak the truth,
or I'll have you where that jerkin will fit you not so well a month
hence.  Plain answers I will have to plain questions, or De Carteret of
St. Ouen's shall have his will of you and your precious pirate.  So bear
yourself as you would save your head and your honours."

Lempriere of Rozel never had a better moment than when he met the Queen
of England's threats with faultless intrepidity.  "I am concerned about
my head, but more about my honours, and most about my honour," he
replied.  "My head is my own, my honours are my family's, for which I
would give my head when needed; and my honour defends both until both are
naught--and all are in the service of my Queen."

Smiling, Elizabeth suddenly leaned forward, and, with a glance of
satisfaction towards the Duke's Daughter, who was present, said:

"I had not thought to find so much logic behind your rampant skull," she
said.  "You've spoken well, Rozel, and you shall speak by the book to the
end, if you will save your friends.  What concern is it of yours whether
Michel de la Foret live or die?"

"It is a concern of one whom I've sworn to befriend, and that is my
concern, your ineffable Majesty."  "Who is the friend?"

"Mademoiselle Aubert."

"The betrothed of this Michel de la Foret?"

"Even so, your exalted Majesty.  But I made sure De la Foret was dead
when I asked her to be my wife."

"Lord, Lord, Lord, hear this vast infant, this hulking baby of a
Seigneur, this primeval innocence!  Listen to him, cousin," said the
Queen, turning again to the Duke's Daughter.  "Was ever the like of it in
any kingdom of this earth?  He chooses a penniless exile--he, a butler to
the Queen, with three dove-cotes and the perquage--and a Huguenot withal.
He is refused; then comes the absent lover over sea, to shipwreck; and
our Seigneur rescues him, 'fends him; and when yon master exile is in
peril, defies his Queen's commands"--she tapped the papers lying beside
her on the table--"then comes to England with the lady to plead the case
before his outraged sovereign, with an outlawed buccaneer for comrade and
lieutenant.  There is the case, is't not?"

"I swore to be her friend," answered Lempriere stubbornly, "and I have
done according to my word."

"There's not another nobleman in my kingdom who would not have thought
twice about the matter, with the lady aboard his ship on the high seas-
'tis a miraculous chivalry, cousin," she added to the Duke's Daughter,
who bowed, settled herself again on her velvet cushion, and looked out of
the corner of her eyes at Lempriere.

"You opposed Sir Hugh Pawlett's officers who went to arrest this De la
Foret," continued Elizabeth.  "Call you that serving your Queen?  Pawlett
had our commands."

"I opposed them but in form, that the matter might the more surely be
brought to your Majesty's knowledge."

"It might easily have brought you to the Tower, man."

"I had faith that your Majesty would do right in this, as in all else.
So I came hither to tell the whole story to your judicial Majesty."

"Our thanks for your certificate of character," said the Queen, with
amused irony.  "What is your wish?  Make your words few and plain."

"I desire before all that Michel de la Foret shall not be returned to the
Medici, most radiant Majesty."

"That's plain.  But there are weighty matters 'twixt France and England,
and De la Foret may turn the scale one way or another.  What follows,
beggar of Rozel?"

"That Mademoiselle Aubert and her father may live without let or
hindrance in Jersey."

"That you may eat sour grapes ad eternam?  Next?"

"That Buonespoir be pardoned all offences and let live in Jersey on
pledge that he sin no more, not even to raid St. Ouen's cellars of the
muscadella reserved for your generous Majesty."

There was such humour in Lempriere's look as he spoke of the muscadella
that the Queen questioned him closely upon Buonespoir's raid; and so
infectious was his mirth, as he told the tale, that Elizabeth, though she
stamped her foot in assumed impatience, smiled also.

"You shall have your Buonespoir, Seigneur," she said; "but for his future
you shall answer as well as he."

"For what he does in Jersey Isle, your commiserate Majesty?"

"For crime elsewhere, if he be caught, he shall march to Tyburn, friend,"
she answered.  Then she hurriedly added: "Straightway go and bring
Mademoiselle and her father hither.  Orders are given for their disposal.
And to-morrow at this hour you shall wait upon me in their company.  I
thank you for your services as butler this day, Monsieur of Rozel.  You
do your office rarely."

As the Seigneur left Elizabeth's apartments, he met the Earl of Leicester
hurrying thither, preceded by the Queen's messenger.  Leicester stopped
and said, with a slow malicious smile: "Farming is good, then--you have
fine crops this year on your holding?"

The point escaped Lempriere at first, for the favourite's look was all
innocence, and he replied: "You are mistook, my lord.  You will remember
I was in the presence-chamber an hour ago, my lord.  I am Lempriere,
Seigneur of Rozel, butler to her Majesty."

"But are you, then?  I thought you were a farmer and raised cabbages."
Smiling, Leicester passed on.

For a moment the Seigneur stood pondering the Earl's words and angrily
wondering at his obtuseness.  Then suddenly he knew he had been mocked,
and he turned and ran after his enemy; but Leicester had vanished into
the Queen's apartments.

The Queen's fool was standing near, seemingly engaged in the light
occupation of catching imaginary flies, buzzing with his motions.  As
Leicester disappeared he looked from under his arm at Lempriere.  "If a
bird will not stop for the salt to its tail, then the salt is damned,
Nuncio; and you must cry David!  and get thee to the quarry."

Lempriere stared at him swelling with rage; but the quaint smiling of the
fool conquered him, and instead of turning on his heel, he spread himself
like a Colossus and looked down in grandeur.  "And wherefore cry David!
and get quarrying?" he asked.  "Come, what sense is there in thy words,
when I am wroth with yonder nobleman?"

"Oh, Nuncio, Nuncio, thou art a child of innocence and without history.
The salt held not the bird for the net of thy anger, Nuncio; so it is
meet that other ways be found.  David the ancient put a stone in a sling
and Goliath laid him down like an egg in a nest--therefore, Nuncio, get
thee to the quarry.  Obligato, which is to say Leicester yonder, hath no
tail--the devil cut it off and wears it himself.  So let salt be damned,
and go sling thy stone!"

Lempriere was good-humoured again.  He fumbled in his purse and brought
forth a gold-piece.  "Fool, thou hast spoken like a man born sensible and
infinite.  I understand thee like a book.  Thou hast not folly and thou
shalt not be answered as if thou wast a fool.  But in terms of gold shalt
thou have reply."  He put the gold-piece in the fool's hand and slapped
him on the shoulder.

"Why now, Nuncio," answered the other, "it is clear that there is a fool
at Court, for is it not written that a fool and his money are soon
parted?  And this gold-piece is still hot with running 'tween thee and
me."

Lempriere roared.  "Why, then, for thy hit thou shalt have another gold-
piece, gossip.  But see"--his voice lowered--"know you where is my
friend, Buonespoir, the pirate?  Know you where he is in durance?"

"As I know marrow in a bone I know where he hides, Nuncio, so come with
me," answered the fool.

"If De Carteret had but thy sense, we could live at peace in Jersey,"
rejoined Lempriere, and strode ponderously after the light-footed fool
who capered forth singing:

              "Come hither, O come hither,
                 There's a bride upon her bed;
               They have strewn her o'er with roses,
                 There are roses 'neath her head:
               Life is love and tears and laughter,
                 But the laughter it is dead
               Sing the way to the Valley, to the Valley!
                 Hey, but the roses they are red!"




CHAPTER IX

The next day at noon, as her Majesty had advised the Seigneur, De la
Foret was ushered into the presence.  The Queen's eye quickened as she
saw him, and she remarked with secret pleasure the figure and bearing of
this young captain of the Huguenots.  She loved physical grace and
prowess with a full heart.  The day had almost passed when she would
measure all men against Leicester in his favour; and he, knowing this
clearly now, saw with haughty anxiety the gradual passing of his power,
and clutched futilely at the vanishing substance.  Thus it was that he
now spent his strength in getting his way with the Queen in little
things.  She had been so long used to take his counsel--in some part wise
and skilful--that when she at length did without it, or followed her own
mind, it became a fever with him to let no chance pass for serving his
own will by persuading her out of hers.  This was why he had spent an
hour the day before in sadly yet vaguely reproaching her for the slight
she put upon him in the presence-chamber by her frown; and another in
urging her to come to terms with Catherine de Medici in this small
affair--since the Frenchwoman had set her revengeful heart upon it--that
larger matters might be settled to the gain of England.  It was not so
much that he had reason to destroy De la Foret, as that he saw that the
Queen was disposed to deal friendly by him and protect him.  He did not
see the danger of rousing in the Queen the same unreasoning tenaciousness
of will upon just such lesser things as might well be left to her
advisers.  In spite of which he almost succeeded, this very day, in
regaining, for a time at least, the ground he had lost with her.  He had
never been so adroit, so brilliant, so witty, so insinuating; and he left
her with the feeling that if he had his way concerning De la Foret--a
mere stubborn whim, with no fair reason behind it--his influence would
be again securely set.  The sense of crisis was on him.

On Michel de la Foret entering the presence the Queen's attention had
become riveted.  She felt in him a spirit of mastery, yet of unselfish
purpose.  Here was one, she thought, who might well be in her household,
or leading a regiment of her troops.  The clear fresh face, curling hair,
direct look, quiet energy, and air of nobility--this sort of man could
only be begotten of a great cause; he were not possible in idle or
prosperous times.

Elizabeth looked him up and down, then affected surprise.  "Monsieur de
la Foret," she said, "I do not recognise you in this attire"--glancing
towards his dress.

De la Foret bowed, and Elizabeth continued, looking at a paper in her
hand: "You landed on our shores of Jersey in the robes of a priest of
France.  The passport for a priest of France was found upon your person
when our officers in Jersey made search of you.  Which is yourself--
Michel de la Foret, soldier, or a priest of France?"

De la Foret replied gravely that he was a soldier, and that the priestly
dress had been but a disguise.

"In which papist attire, methinks, Michel de la Foret, soldier and
Huguenot, must have been ill at ease--the eagle with the vulture's wing.
What say you, Monsieur?"

"That vulture's wing hath carried me to a safe dove-cote, your gracious
Majesty," he answered, with a low obeisance.

"I'm none so sure of that, Monsieur," was Elizabeth's answer, and
she glanced quizzically at Leicester, who made a gesture of annoyance.
"Our cousin France makes you to us a dark intriguer and conspirator, a
dangerous weed in our good garden of England, a 'troublous, treacherous
violence'--such are you called, Monsieur."

"I am in your high Majesty's power," he answered, "to do with me as it
seemeth best.  If your Majesty wills it that I be returned to France,
I pray you set me upon its coast as I came from it, a fugitive.  Thence
will I try to find my way to the army and the poor stricken people of
whom I was.  I pray for that only, and not to be given to the red hand of
the Medici."

"Red hand--by my faith, but you are bold, Monsieur!"

Leicester tapped his foot upon the floor impatiently, then caught the
Queen's eye, and gave her a meaning look.

De la Foret saw the look and knew his enemy, but he did not quail.  "Bold
only by your high Majesty's faith, indeed," he answered the Queen, with
harmless guile.

Elizabeth smiled.  She loved such flattering speech from a strong man.
It touched a chord in her deeper than that under Leicester's finger.
Leicester's impatience only made her more self-willed on the instant.

"You speak with the trumpet note, Monsieur," she said to De la Foret.
"We will prove you.  You shall have a company in my Lord Leicester's army
here, and we will send you upon some service worthy of your fame."

"I crave your Majesty's pardon, but I cannot do it," was De la Foret's
instant reply.  "I have sworn that I will lift my sword in one cause
only, and to that I must stand.  And more--the widow of my dead chief,
Gabriel de Montgomery, is set down in this land unsheltered and alone.
I have sworn to one who loves her, and for my dead chief's sake, that I
will serve her and be near her until better days be come and she may
return in quietness to France.  In exile we few stricken folk must stand
together, your august Majesty."

Elizabeth's eye flashed up.  She was impatient of refusal of her favour.
She was also a woman, and that De la Foret should flaunt his devotion to
another woman was little to her liking.  The woman in her, which had
never been blessed with a noble love, was roused.  The sourness of a
childless, uncompanionable life was stronger for the moment than her
strong mind and sense.

"Monsieur has sworn this, and Monsieur has sworn that," she said
petulantly--" and to one who loveth a lady, and for a cause--tut, tut,
tut!--"

Suddenly a kind of intriguing laugh leaped into her eye, and she turned
to Leicester and whispered in his ear.  Leicester frowned, then smiled,
and glanced up and down De la Foret's figure impertinently.

"See, Monsieur de la Foret," she added; "since you will not fight, you
shall preach.  A priest you came into my kingdom, and a priest you shall
remain; but you shall preach good English doctrine and no Popish folly."

De la Foret started, then composed himself, and before he had time to
reply, Elizabeth continued: "Partly for your own sake am I thus gracious;
for as a preacher of the Word I have not need to give you up, according
to agreement with our brother of France.  As a rebel and conspirator I
were bound to do so, unless you were an officer of my army.  The Seigneur
of Rozel has spoken for you, and the Comtesse de Montgomery has written a
pleading letter.  Also I have from another source a tearful prayer--the
ink is scarce dry upon it--which has been of service to you.  But I
myself have chosen this way of escape for you.  Prove yourself worthy,
and all may be well--but prove yourself you shall.  You have prepared
your own brine, Monsieur; in it you shall pickle."

She smiled a sour smile, for she was piqued, and added: "Do you think I
will have you here squiring of distressed dames, save as a priest?  You
shall hence to Madame of Montgomery as her faithful chaplain, once I have
heard you preach and know your doctrine."

Leicester almost laughed outright in the young man's face now, for he had
no thought that De la Foret would accept, and refusal meant the exile's
doom.

It seemed fantastic that this noble gentleman, this very type of the
perfect soldier, with the brown face of a picaroon and an athletic valour
of body, should become a preacher even in necessity.

Elizabeth, seeing De la Foret's dumb amazement and anxiety, spoke up
sharply: "Do this, or get you hence to the Medici, and Madame of
Montgomery shall mourn her protector, and Mademoiselle your mistress
of the vermilion cheek, shall have one lover the less; which, methinks,
our Seigneur of Rozel would thank me for."

De la Foret started, his lips pressed firmly together in effort of
restraint.  There seemed little the Queen did not know concerning him;
and reference to Angele roused him to sharp solicitude.

"Well, well?" asked Elizabeth impatiently, then made a motion to
Leicester, and he, going to the door, bade some one to enter.

There stepped inside the Seigneur of Rozel, who made a lumbering
obeisance, then got to his knees before the Queen.

"You have brought the lady safely--with her father?" she asked.

Lempriere, puzzled, looked inquiringly at the Queen, then replied: "Both
are safe without, your infinite Majesty."

De la Foret's face grew pale.  He knew now for the first time that Angele
and her father were in England, and he looked Lempriere suspiciously in
the eyes; but the swaggering Seigneur met his look frankly, and bowed
with ponderous and genial gravity.

Now De la Foret spoke.  "Your high Majesty," said he, "if I may ask
Mademoiselle Aubert one question in your presence--"

"Your answer now; the lady in due season," interposed the Queen.

"She was betrothed to a soldier, she may resent a priest," said De la
Foret, with a touch of humour, for he saw the better way was to take the
matter with some outward ease.

Elizabeth smiled.  "It is the custom of her sex to have a fondness for
both," she answered, with an acid smile.  "But your answer?"

De la Foret's face became exceeding grave.  Bowing his head, he said:
"My sword has spoken freely for the Cause; God forbid that my tongue
should not speak also.  I will do your Majesty's behest."

The jesting word that was upon the royal lips came not forth, for De la
Foret's face was that of a man who had determined a great thing, and
Elizabeth was one who had a heart for high deeds.  "The man is brave
indeed," she said under her breath, and, turning to the dumfounded
Seigneur, bade him bring in Mademoiselle Aubert.

A moment later Angele entered, came a few steps forward, made obeisance,
and stood still.  She showed no trepidation, but looked before her
steadily.  She knew not what was to be required of her, she was a
stranger in a strange land; but persecution and exile had gone far
to strengthen her spirit and greaten her composure.

Elizabeth gazed at the girl coldly and critically.  To women she was not
over-amiable; but as she looked at the young Huguenot maid, of this calm
bearing, warm of colour, clear of eye, and purposeful of face, some thing
kindled in her.  Most like it was that love for a cause, which was more
to be encouraged by her than any woman's love for a man, which as she
grew older inspired her with aversion, as talk of marriage brought
cynical allusions to her lips.

"I have your letter and its protests and its pleadings.  There were fine
words and adjurations--are you so religious, then?" she asked brusquely.

"I am a Huguenot, your noble Majesty," answered the girl, as though that
answered all.

"How is it, then, you are betrothed to a roistering soldier?" asked the
Queen.

"Some must pray for Christ's sake, and some must fight, your most
christian Majesty," answered the girl.  "Some must do both," rejoined the
Queen, in a kinder voice, for the pure spirit of the girl worked upon
her.  "I am told that Monsieur de la Foret fights fairly.  If he can pray
as well, methinks he shall have safety in our kingdom, and ye shall all
have peace.  On Trinity Sunday you shall preach in my chapel, Monsieur de
la Foret, and thereafter you shall know your fate."

She rose.  "My Lord," she said to Leicester, on whose face gloom had
settled, "you will tell the Lord Chamberlain that Monsieur de la Foret's
durance must be made comfortable in the west tower of my palace till
chapel-going of Trinity Day.  I will send him for his comfort and
instruction some sermons of Latimer."

She stepped down from the dais.  "You will come with me, mistress," she
said to Angele, and reached out her hand.

Angele fell on her knees and kissed it, tears falling down her cheek,
then rose and followed the Queen from the chamber.  She greatly desired
to look backward towards De la Foret, but some good angel bade her not.
She realised that to offend the Queen at this moment might ruin all; and
Elizabeth herself was little like to offer chance for farewell and love-
tokens.

So it was that, with bowed head, Angele left the room with the Queen of
England, leaving Lempriere and De la Foret gazing at each other, the one
bewildered, the other lost in painful reverie, and Leicester smiling
maliciously at them both.




CHAPTER X

Every man, if you bring him to the right point, if you touch him in the
corner where he is most sensitive, where he most lives, as it were; if
you prick his nerves with a needle of suggestion where all his passions,
ambitions and sentiments are at white heat, will readily throw away the
whole game of life in some mad act out of harmony with all he ever did.
It matters little whether the needle prick him by accident or blunder or
design, he will burst all bounds, and establish again the old truth that
each of us will prove himself a fool given perfect opportunity.  Nor need
the occasion of this revolution be a great one; the most trivial event
may produce the great fire which burns up wisdom, prudence and habit.

The Earl of Leicester, so long counted astute, clearheaded, and well-
governed, had been suddenly foisted out of balance, shaken from his
imperious composure, tortured out of an assumed and persistent urbanity,
by the presence in Greenwich Palace of a Huguenot exile of no seeming
importance, save what the Medici grimly gave him by desiring his head.
It appeared absurd that the great Leicester, whose nearness to the throne
had made him the most feared, most notable, and, by virtue of his
opportunities, the most dramatic figure in England, should have sleepless
nights by reason of a fugitive like Michel de la Foret.  On the surface
it was preposterous that he should see in the Queen's offer of service to
the refugee evidence that she was set to grant him special favours; it
was equally absurd that her offer of safety to him on pledge of his
turning preacher should seem proof that she meant to have him near her.
Elizabeth had left the presence-chamber without so much as a glance at
him, though she had turned and looked graciously at the stranger.  He had
hastily followed her, and thereafter impatiently awaited a summons which
never came, though he had sent a message that his hours were at her
Majesty's disposal.  Waiting, he saw Angele's father escorted from the
palace by a Gentleman Pensioner to a lodge in the park; he saw Michel de
la Foret taken to his apartments; he saw the Seigneur of Rozel walking in
the palace grounds with such possession as though they were his own,
self-content in every motion of his body.

Upon the instant the great Earl was incensed out of all proportion to the
affront of the Seigneur's existence.  He suddenly hated Lempriere only
less than he hated Michel de la Foret.  As he still waited irritably for
a summons from Elizabeth, he brooded on every word and every look she had
given him of late; he recalled her manner to him in the ante-chapel the
day before, and the admiring look she cast on De la Foret but now.  He
had seen more in it than mere approval of courage and the self-reliant
bearing of a refugee of her own religion.

These were days when the soldier of fortune mounted to high places.  He
needed but to carry the banner of bravery, and a busy sword, and his way
to power was not hindered by poor estate.  To be gently born was the one
thing needful, and Michel de la Foret was gently born; and he had still
his sword, though he chose not to use it in Elizabeth's service.  My Lord
knew it might be easier for a stranger like De la Foret, who came with no
encumbrance, to mount to place in the struggles of the Court, than for an
Englishman, whose increasing and ever-bolder enemies were undermining on
every hand, to hold his own.

He began to think upon ways and means to meet this sudden preference of
the Queen, made sharply manifest as he waited in the ante-chamber, by a
summons to the refugee to enter the Queen's apartments.  When the refugee
came forth again he wore a sword the Queen had sent him, and a packet of
Latimer's sermons were under his arm.  Leicester was unaware that
Elizabeth herself did not see De la Foret when he was thus hastily
called; but that her lady-in-waiting, the Duke's Daughter, who figured
so largely in the pictures Lempriere drew of his experiences at Greenwich
Palace, brought forth the sermons and the sword, with this message from
the Queen:

"The Queen says that it is but fair to the sword to be by Michel de la
Foret's side when the sermons are in his hand, that his choice have every
seeming of fairness.  For her Majesty says it is still his choice between
the Sword and the Book till Trinity Day."

Leicester, however, only saw the sword at the side of the refugee and the
gold-bound book under his arm as he came forth, and in a rage he left the
palace and gloomily walked under the trees, denying himself to every one.

To seize De la Foret, and send him to the Medici, and then rely on
Elizabeth's favour for his pardon, as he had done in the past?  That
might do, but the risk to England was too great.  It would be like the
Queen, if her temper was up, to demand from the Medici the return of De
la Foret, and war might ensue.  Two women, with two nations behind them,
were not to be played lightly against each other, trusting to their
common sense and humour.

As he walked among the trees, brooding with averted eyes, he was suddenly
faced by the Seigneur of Rozel, who also was shaken from his discretion
and the best interests of the two fugitives he was bound to protect, by a
late offence against his own dignity.  A seed of rancour had been sown in
his mind which had grown to a great size and must presently burst into a
dark flower of vengeance.  He, Lempriere of Rozel, with three dovecotes,
the perquage, and the office of butler to the Queen, to be called a
"farmer," to be sneered at--it was not in the blood of man, not in the
towering vanity of a Lempriere, to endure it at any price computable to
mortal mind.

Thus there were in England on that day two fools (there are as many now),
and one said:

"My Lord Leicester, I crave a word with you."

"Crave on, good fellow," responded Leicester with a look of boredom,
making to pass by.

"I am Lempriere, lord of Rozel, my lord--"

"Ah yes, I took you for a farmer," answered Leicester.  "Instead of that,
I believe you keep doves, and wear a jerkin that fits like a king's.
Dear Lord, so does greatness come with girth!"

"The King that gave me dove-cotes gave me honour, and 'tis not for the
Earl of Leicester to belittle it."

"What is your coat of arms?" said Leicester with a faint smile, but in
an assumed tone of natural interest.

"A swan upon a sea of azure, two stars above, and over all a sword with a
wreath around its point," answered Lempriere simply, unsuspecting irony,
and touched by Leicester's flint where he was most like to flare up with
vanity.

"Ah!" said Leicester.  "And the motto?"

"Mea spes supra stella--my hope is beyond the stars."

"And the wreath--of parsley, I suppose?"

Now Lempriere understood, and he shook with fury as he roared:

"Yes, by God, and to be got at the point of the sword, to put on the
heads of insolents like Lord Leicester!"  His face was flaming, he was
like a cock strutting upon a stable mound.

There fell a slight pause, and then Leicester said: "To-morrow at
daylight, eh?"

"Now, my lord, now!"

"We have no seconds."

"'Sblood!  'Tis not your way, my lord, to be stickling in detail of
courtesy."

"'Tis not the custom to draw swords in secret, Lempriere of Rozel.  Also
my teeth are not on edge to fight you."

Lempriere had already drawn his sword, and the look of his eyes was as
that of a mad bull in a ring.  "You won't fight with me--you don't think
Rozel your equal?"  His voice was high.

Leicester's face took on a hard, cruel look.  "We cannot fight among the
ladies," he said quietly.  Lempriere followed his glance, and saw the
Duke's Daughter and another in the trees near by.

He hastily put up his sword.  "When, my lord?" he asked.

"You will hear from me to-night," was the answer, and Leicester went
forward hastily to meet the ladies--they had news no doubt.

Lempriere turned on his heel and walked quickly away among the trees
towards the quarters where Buonespoir was in durance, which was little
more severe than to keep him within the palace yard.  There he found the
fool and the pirate in whimsical converse.

The fool had brought a letter of inquiry and warm greeting from Angele to
Buonespoir, who was laboriously inditing one in return.  When Lempriere
entered the pirate greeted him jovially.

"In the very pinch of time you come," he said.  "You have grammar and
syntax and etiquette."

"'Tis even so, Nuncio," said the fool.  "Here is needed prosody
potential.  Exhale!"

The three put their heads together above the paper.




CHAPTER XI

"I would know your story.  How came you and yours to this pass?  Where
were you born?  Of what degree are you?  And this Michel de la Foret,
when came he to your feet--or you to his arms?  I would know all.  Begin
where life began; end where you sit here at the feet of Elizabeth.  This
other cushion to your knees.  There--now speak.  We are alone."

Elizabeth pushed a velvet cushion towards Angele, where she half-knelt,
half-sat on the rush-strewn floor of the great chamber.  The warm light
of the afternoon sun glowed through the thick-tinted glass high up, and,
in the gleam, the heavy tapestries sent by an archduke, once suitor for
Elizabeth's hand, emerged with dramatic distinctness, and peopled the
room with silent watchers of the great Queen and the nobly-born but poor
and fugitive Huguenot.  A splendid piece of sculpture--Eleanor, wife of
Edward--given Elizabeth by another royal suitor, who had sought to be her
consort through many years, caught the warm bath of gold and crimson from
the clerestory and seemed alive and breathing.  Against the pedestal the
Queen had placed her visitor, the red cushions making vivid contrast to
her white gown and black hair.  In the half-kneeling, half-sitting
posture, with her hands clasped before her, so to steady herself to
composure, Angele looked a suppliant--and a saint.  Her pure,
straightforward gaze, her smooth, urbane forehead, the guilelessness
that spoke in every feature, were not made worldly by the intelligence
and humour reposing in the brown depths of her eyes.  Not a line vexed
her face or forehead.  Her countenance was of a singular and almost
polished smoothness, and though her gown was severely simple by
comparison with silks and velvets, furs and ruffles of a gorgeous Court
at its most gorgeous period, yet in it here and there were touches of
exquisite fineness.  The black velvet ribbon slashing her sleeves, the
slight cloud-like gathering of lace at the back of her head, gave a
distinguished softness to her appearance.

She was in curious contrast to the Queen, who sat upon heaped-up
cushions, her rich buff and black gown a blaze of jewels, her yellow
hair, now streaked with grey, roped with pearls, her hands heavy with
rings, her face past its youth, past its hopefulness, however noble and
impressive, past its vivid beauty.  Her eyes wore ever a determined look,
were persistent and vigilant, with a lurking trouble, yet flooded, too,
by a quiet melancholy, like a low, insistent note that floats through an
opera of passion, romance, and tragedy; like a tone of pathos giving deep
character to some splendid pageant, which praises whilst it commemorates,
proclaiming conquest while the grass has not yet grown on quiet houses
of the children of the sword who no more wield the sword.  Evasive,
cautious, secretive, creator of her own policy, she had sacrificed her
womanhood to the power she held and the State she served.  Vain,
passionate, and faithful, her heart all England and Elizabeth, the hunger
for glimpses of what she had never known, and was never to know, thrust
itself into her famished life; and she was wont to indulge, as now, in
fancies and follow some emotional whim with a determination very like to
eccentricity.

That, at this time, when great national events were forward, when
conspiracies abounded, when Parliament was grimly gathering strength to
compel her to marry; and her Council were as sternly pursuing their
policy for the destruction of Leicester; while that very day had come
news of a rising in the North and of fresh Popish plots hatched in
France--that in such case, this day she should set aside all business,
refuse ambassadors and envoys admission, and occupy herself with two
Huguenot refugees seemed incredible to the younger courtiers.  To such
as Cecil, however, there was clear understanding.  He knew that when she
seemed most inert, most impassive to turbulent occurrences, most careless
of consequences, she was but waiting till, in her own mind, her plans
were grown; so that she should see her end clearly ere she spoke or
moved.  Now, as the great minister showed himself at the door of the
chamber and saw Elizabeth seated with Angele, he drew back instinctively,
expectant of the upraised hand which told him he must wait.  And, in
truth, he was nothing loth to do so, for his news he cared little to
deliver, important though it was that she should have it promptly and act
upon it soon.  He turned away with a feeling of relief, however, for this
gossip with the Huguenot maid would no doubt interest her, give new
direction to her warm sympathies, which if roused in one thing were ever
more easily roused in others.  He knew that a crisis was nearing in the
royal relations with Leicester.  In a life of devotion to her service he
had seen her before in this strange mood, and he could feel that she was
ready for an outburst.  As he thought of De la Foret and the favour with
which she had looked at him he smiled grimly, for if it meant aught it
meant that it would drive Leicester to some act which would hasten his
own doom; though, indeed, it might also make another path more difficult
for himself, for the Parliament, for the people.

Little as Elizabeth could endure tales of love and news of marriage;
little as she believed in any vows, save those made to herself; little
as she was inclined to adjust the rough courses of true love, she was the
surgeon to this particular business, and she had the surgeon's love of
laying bare even to her own cynicism the hurt of the poor patient under
her knife.  Indeed, so had Angele impressed her that for once she thought
she might hear the truth.  Because she saw the awe in the other's face
and a worshipping admiration of the great protectress of Protestantism,
who had by large gifts of men and money in times past helped the Cause,
she looked upon her here with kindness.

"Speak now, mistress fugitive, and I will listen," she added, as Cecil
withdrew; and she made a motion to musicians in a distant gallery.

Angele's heart fluttered to her mouth, but the soft, simple music helped
her, and she began with eyes bent upon the ground, her linked fingers
clasping and unclasping slowly.

"I was born at Rouen, your high Majesty," she said.  "My mother was a
cousin of the Prince of Passy, the great Protestant--"

"Of Passy--ah!" said Elizabeth amazed.  "Then you are Protestants
indeed; and your face is no invention, but cometh honestly.  No, no,
'tis no accident--God rest his soul, great Passy!"

"She died--my mother--when I was a little child.  I can but just remember
her--so brightly quiet, so quick, so beautiful.  In Rouen life had little
motion; but now and then came stir and turmoil, for war sent its message
into the old streets, and our captains and our peasants poured forth to
fight for the King.  Once came the King and Queen--Francis and Mary--"

Elizabeth drew herself upright with an exclamation.  "Ah, you have seen
her--Mary of Scots," she said sharply.  "You have seen her?"

"As near as I might touch her with my hand, as near as is your high
Majesty.  She spoke to me--my mother's father was in her train;--as yet
we had not become Huguenots, nor did we know her Majesty as now the world
knows.  They came, the King and Queen--and that was the beginning."

She paused, and looked shyly at Elizabeth, as though she found it hard to
tell her story.

"And the beginning, it was--?" said Elizabeth, impatient and intent.

"We went to Court.  The Queen called my mother into her train.  But it
was in no wise for our good.  At Court my mother pined away--and so she
died in durance."

"Wherefore in durance?"

"To what she saw she would not shut her eyes; to what she heard she would
not close her soul; what was required of her she would not do."

"She would not obey the Queen?"

"She could not obey those whom the Queen favoured.  Then the tyranny that
broke her heart--"

The Queen interrupted her.

"In very truth, but 'tis not in France alone that Queen's favourites
grasp the sceptre and speak the word.  Hath a Queen a thousand eyes--can
she know truth where most dissemble?"

"There was a man--he could not know there was one true woman there, who
for her daughter's sake, for her desired advancement, and because she was
cousin of Passy, who urged it, lived that starved life; this man, this
prince, drew round her feet snares, set pit-falls for her while my father
was sent upon a mission.  Steadfast she kept her soul unspotted; but it
wore away her life.  The Queen would not permit return to Rouen--who can
tell what tale was told her by one whom she foiled?  And so she stayed.
In this slow, savage persecution, when she was like a bird that, thinking
it is free, flieth against the window-pane and falleth back beaten, so
did she stay, and none could save her.  To cry out, to throw herself upon
the spears, would have been ruin of herself, her husband and her child;
and for these she lived."

Elizabeth's eyes had kindled.  Perhaps never in her life had the life at
Court been so exposed to her.  The simple words, meant but to convey the
story, and with no thought behind, had thrown a light on her own Court,
on her own position.  Adept in weaving a sinuous course in her policy,
in making mazes for others to tread, the mazes which they in turn
prepared had never before been traced beneath her eyes to the same
vivid and ultimate effect.

"Help me, ye saints, but things are not at such a pass in this place!"
she said abruptly, but with weariness in her voice.  "Yet sometimes I
know not.  The Court is a city by itself, walled and moated, and hath a
life all its own.  'If there be found ten honest men within the city yet
will I save it,' saith the Lord.  By my father's head, I would not risk
a finger on the hazard if this city, this Court of Elizabeth were set
'twixt the fire from Heaven and eternal peace.  In truth, child, I would
lay me down and die in black disgust were it not that one might come
hereafter would make a very Sodom or Gomorrah of this land: and out
yonder--out in all my counties, where the truth of England is among my
poor burgesses, who die for the great causes which my nobles profess but
risk not their lives--out yonder all that they have won, and for which I
have striven, would be lost.  .  .  .  Speak on.  I have not heard so
plain a tongue and so little guile these twenty years."

Angele continued, more courage in her voice.  "In the midst of it all
came the wave of the new faith upon my mother.  And before ill could fall
upon her from her foes, she died and was at rest.  Then we returned to
Rouen, my father and I, and there we lived in peril, but in great
happiness of soul until the day of massacre.  That night in Paris
we were given greatly of the mercy of God."

"You were there--you were in the massacre at Paris?"

In the house of the Duke of Langon, with whom was resting after a
hazardous enterprise, Michel de la Foret."

"And here beginneth the second lesson," said the Queen with a smile on
her lips; but there was a look of scrutiny in her eyes, and something
like irony in her tone.  "And I will swear by all the stars of Heaven
that this Michel saved ye both.  Is it not so?"

"It is even so.  By his skill and bravery we found our way to safety,
and in a hiding-place near to our loved Rouen watched him return from the
gates of death."

"He was wounded then?"

"Seven times wounded, and with as little blood left in him as would fill
a cup.  But it was summer, and we were in the hills, and they brought us,
our friends of Rouen, all that we had need of; and so God was with us.

"But did he save thy life, except by skill, by indirect and fortunate
wisdom?  Was there deadly danger upon thee?  Did he beat down the sword
of death?"

"He saved my life thrice directly.  The wounds he carried were got by
interposing his own sword 'twixt death and me."

"And that hath need of recompense?"

"My life was little worth the wounds he suffered; but I waited not until
he saved it to owe it unto him.  All that it is was his before he drew
the sword."

"And 'tis this ye would call love betwixt ye--sweet givings and takings
of looks, and soft sayings, and unchangeable and devouring faith.  Is't
this--and is this all?"

The girl had spoken out of an innocent heart, but the challenge in the
Queen's voice worked upon her, and though she shrank a little, the
fulness of her soul welled up and strengthened her.  She spoke again,
and now in her need and in her will to save the man she loved, by making
this majesty of England his protector, her words had eloquence.

"It is not all, noble Queen.  Love is more than that.  It is the waking
in the poorest minds, in the most barren souls, of something greater than
themselves--as a chemist should find a substance that would give all
other things by touching of them a new and higher value; as light and
sun draw from the earth the tendrils of the seed that else had lain
unproducing.  'Tis not alone soft words and touch of hand or lip.  This
caring wholly for one outside one's self kills that self which else would
make the world blind and deaf and dumb.  None hath loved greatly but hath
helped to love in others.  Ah, most sweet Majesty, for great souls like
thine, souls born great, this medicine is not needful, for already hath
the love of a nation inspired and enlarged it; but for souls like mine
and of so many, none better and none worse than me, to love one other
soul deeply and abidingly lifts us higher than ourselves.  Your Majesty
hath been loved by a whole people, by princes and great men in a
different sort--is it not the world's talk that none that ever reigned
hath drawn such slavery of princes, and of great nobles who have courted
death for hopeless love of one beyond their star?  And is it not written
in the world's book also that the Queen of England hath loved no man, but
hath poured out her heart to a people; and hath served great causes in
all the earth because of that love which hath still enlarged her soul,
dowered at birth beyond reckoning?"  Tears filled her eyes.  "Ah, your
supreme Majesty, to you whose heart is universal, the love of one poor
mortal seemeth a small thing, but to those of little consequence it is
the cable by which they unsteadily hold over the chasm 'twixt life and
immortality.  To thee, oh greatest monarch of the world, it is a staff
on which thou need'st not lean, which thou hast never grasped; to me
it is my all; without it I fail and fall and die."

She had spoken as she felt, yet, because she was a woman and guessed
the mind of another woman, she had touched Elizabeth where her armour
was weakest.  She had suggested that the Queen had been the object of
adoration, but had never given her heart to any man; that hers was the
virgin heart and life; and that she had never stooped to conquer.
Without realising it, and only dimly moving with that end in view, she
had whetted Elizabeth's vanity.  She had indeed soothed a pride wounded
of late beyond endurance, suspecting, as she did, that Leicester had
played his long part for his own sordid purposes, that his devotion was
more alloy than precious metal.  No note of praise could be pitched too
high for Elizabeth, and if only policy did not intervene, if but no
political advantage was lost by saving De la Foret, that safety seemed
now secure.

"You tell a tale and adorn it with good grace," she said, and held out
her hand.  Angele kissed it.  "And you have said to Elizabeth what none
else dared to say since I was Queen here.  He who hath never seen the
lightning hath no dread of it.  I had not thought there was in the world
so much artlessness, with all the power of perfect art.  But we live to
be wiser.  Thou shalt continue in thy tale.  Thou hast seen Mary, once
Queen of France, now Queen of Scots--answer me fairly; without if, or
though, or any sort of doubt, the questions I shall put.  Which of us
twain, this ruin-starred queen or I, is of higher stature?"

"She hath advantage in little of your Majesty," bravely answered Angele.

"Then," answered Elizabeth sourly, "she is too high, for I myself am
neither too high nor too low.  .  .  .  And of complexion, which is the
fairer?"

"Her complexion is the fairer, but your Majesty's countenance hath truer
beauty, and sweeter majesty."  Elizabeth frowned slightly, then said:

"What exercises did she take when you were at the Court?"

"Sometimes she hunted, your Majesty, and sometimes she played upon the
virginals."

"Did she play to effect?"

"Reasonably, your noble Majesty."

"You shall hear me play, and then speak truth upon us, for I have known
none with so true a tongue since my father died."

Thereon she called to a lady who waited near in a little room to bring an
instrument; but at that moment Cecil appeared again at the door, and his
face seeming to show anxiety, Elizabeth, with a sigh, beckoned him to
enter.

"Your face, Cecil, is as long as a Lenten collect.  What raven croaks in
England on May Day eve?"  Cecil knelt before her, and gave into her hand
a paper.

"What record runs here?" she asked querulously.  "A prayer of your
faithful Lords and Commons that your Majesty will grant speech with their
chosen deputies to lay before your Majesty a cause they have at heart."

"Touching of--?" darkly asked the Queen.

"The deputies wait even now--will not your Majesty receive them?  They
have come humbly, and will go hence as humbly on the instant, if the hour
is ill chosen."

Immediately Elizabeth's humour changed.  A look of passion swept across
her face, but her eyes lighted, and her lips smiled proudly.  She avoided
troubles by every means, fought off by subtleties the issues which she
must meet; but when the inevitable hour came none knew so well to meet it
as though it were a dearest friend, no matter what the danger, how great
the stake.

"They are here at my door, these good servants of the State--shall they
be kept dangling?" she said loudly.  "Though it were time for prayers
and God's mercy yet should they speak with me, have my counsel, or my
hand upon the sacred parchment of the State.  Bring them hither, Cecil.
Now we shall see--Now you shall see, Angele of Rouen, now you shall see
how queens shall have no hearts to call their own, but be head and heart
and soul and body at the will of every churl who thinks he serves the
State and knows the will of Heaven.  Stand here at my left hand.  Mark
the players and the play."

Kneeling, the deputies presented a resolution from the Lords and Commons
that the Queen should, without more delay, in keeping with her oft-
expressed resolve and the promise of her Council, appoint one who should
succeed to the throne in case of her death "without posterity."  Her
faithful people pleaded with her gracious Majesty to forego unwillingness
to marry and seek a consort worthy of her supreme consideration, to be
raised to a place beside her near that throne which she had made the
greatest in the world.

Gravely, solemnly, the chief members of the Lords and Commons spoke, and
with as weighty pauses and devoted protestations as though this were the
first time their plea had been urged, this obvious duty had been set out
before her.  Long ago in the flush and pride of her extreme youth and the
full assurance of the fruits of marriage, they had spoken with the same
sober responsibility; and though her youth had gone and the old certainty
had for ever disappeared, they spoke of her marriage and its consequences
as though it were still that far-off yesterday.  Well for them that they
did so, for though time had flown and royal suitors without number had
become figures dim in the people's mind, Elizabeth, fed upon adulation,
invoked, admired, besieged by young courtiers, flattered by maids who
praised her beauty, had never seen the hands of the clock pass high noon,
and still remained under the dearest and saddest illusion which can rest
in a woman's mind.  Long after the hands of life's clock had moved into
afternoon, the ancient prayer was still gravely presented that she should
marry and give an heir to England's crown; and she as solemnly listened
and dropped her eyes, and strove to hide her virgin modesty behind a high
demeanour which must needs sink self in royal duty.

"These be the dear desires of your supreme Majesty's faithful Lords and
Commons and the people of the shires whose wills they represent.  Your
Majesty's life, God grant it last beyond that of the youngest of your
people so greatly blessed in your rule!  But accidents of time be many;
and while the world is full of guile, none can tell what peril may beset
the crown, if your Majesty's wisdom sets not apart, gives not to her
country, one whom the nation can surround with its care, encompass
lovingly by its duty."

The talk with Angele had had a curious influence upon the Queen.
It was plain that now she was moved by real feeling, and that, though
she deceived herself, or pretended so to do, shutting her eyes to sober
facts, and dreaming old dreams--as it were, in a world where never was a
mirror nor a timepiece--yet there was working in her a fresher spirit,
urging her to a fairer course than she had shaped for many a day.

"My lords and gentlemen and my beloved subjects," she answered presently,
and for an instant set her eyes upon Angele, then turned to them again,
"I pray you stand and hear me.  .  .  .  Ye have spoken fair words to my
face, and of my face, and of the person of this daughter of great Henry,
from whom I got whatever grace or manner or favour is to me; and by all
your reasoning you do flatter the heart of the Queen of England, whose
mind indeed sleeps not in deed or desire for this realm.  Ye have drawn a
fair picture of this mortal me, and though from the grace of the picture
the colours may fade by time, may give by weather, may be spoiled by
chance, yet my loyal mind, nor time with her swift wings shall overtake,
nor the misty clouds may darken, nor chance with her slippery foot may
overthrow.  It sets its course by the heart of England, and when it
passeth there shall be found that one shall be left behind who shall be
surety of all that hath been lying in the dim warehouse of fate for
England's high future.  Be sure that in this thing I have entered into
the weigh-house, and I hold the balance, and ye shall be well satisfied.
Ye have been fruitful in counsel, ye have been long knitting a knot never
tied, ye shall have comfort soon.  But know ye beyond peradventure that I
have bided my time with good reason.  If our loom be framed with rotten
hurdles, when our web is well-ny done, our work is yet to begin.  Against
mischance and dark discoveries my mind, with knowledge hidden from you,
hath been firmly arrayed.  If it be in your thought that I am set against
a marriage which shall serve the nation, purge yourselves, friends, of
that sort of heresy, for the belief is awry.  Though I think that to be
one and always one, neither mated nor mothering, be good for a private
woman, for a prince it is not meet.  Therefore, say to my Lords and
Commons that I am more concerned for what shall chance to England when I
am gone than to linger out my living thread.  I hope, my lords and
gentlemen, to die with a good Nunc Dimittis, which could not be if I did
not give surety for the nation after my graved bones.  Ye shall hear
soon--ye shall hear and be satisfied, and so I give you to the care of
Almighty God."

Once more they knelt, and then slowly withdrew, with faces downcast and
troubled.  They had secret knowledge which she did not yet possess, but
which at any moment she must know, and her ambiguous speech carried no
conviction to their minds.  Yet their conference with her was most
opportune, for the news she must presently receive, brought by a
messenger from Scotland who had outstripped all others, would no doubt
move her to action which should set the minds of the people at rest, and
go far to stem the tide of conspiracy flowing through the kingdom.

Elizabeth stood watching them, and remained gazing after they had
disappeared; then rousing herself, she turned to leave the room, and
beckoned to Angele to follow.




CHAPTER XII

As twilight was giving place to night Angele was roused from the reverie
into which she had fallen, by the Duke's Daughter, who whispered to her
that if she would have a pleasure given to but few, she would come
quickly.  Taking her hand the Duke's Daughter--as true and whimsical a
spirit as ever lived in troubled days and under the aegis of the sword-
led her swiftly to the Queen's chamber.  They did not enter, but waited
in a quiet gallery.

"The Queen is playing upon the virginals, and she playeth best when
alone; so stand you here by this tapestry, and you shall have pleasure
beyond payment," said the Duke's Daughter.

Angele had no thought that the Queen of her vanity had commanded that she
be placed there as though secretly, and she listened dutifully at first;
but presently her ears were ravished; and even the Duke's Daughter showed
some surprise, for never had she heard the Queen play with such grace and
feeling.  The countenance of the musician was towards them, and at last,
as though by accident, Elizabeth looked up and saw the face of her lady.

"Spy, spy," she cried.  "Come hither--come hither, all of you!"

When they had descended and knelt to her, she made as if she would punish
the Duke's Daughter by striking her with a scarf that lay at her hand,
but to Angele she said:

"How think you then, hath that other greater skill--Darnley's wife I
mean?"

"Not she or any other hath so delighted me," said Angele, with worship in
her eyes--so doth talent given to majesty become lifted beyond its
measure.

The Queen's eyes lighted.  "We shall have dancing, then," she said.  "The
dance hath charms for me.  We shall not deny our youth.  The heart shall
keep as young as the body."

An instant later the room was full of dancers, and Elizabeth gave her
hand to Leicester, who bent every faculty to pleasing her.  His face had
darkened as he had seen Angele beside her, but the Queen's graciousness,
whether assumed or real, had returned, and her face carried a look of
triumph and spirit and delight.  Again and again she glanced towards
Angele, and what she saw evidently gave her pleasure, for she laughed and
disported herself with grace and an agreeable temper, and Leicester lent
himself to her spirit with adroit wit and humility.  He had seen his
mistake of the morning, and was now intent to restore himself to favour.

He succeeded well, for the emotions roused in Elizabeth during the day,
now heightened by vanity and emulation, found in him a centre upon which
they could converge; and, in her mind, Angele, for the nonce, was
disassociated from any thought of De la Foret.  Leicester's undoubted
gifts were well and cautiously directed, and his talent of assumed
passion--his heart was facile, and his gallantry knew no bounds--was
put to dexterous use, convincing for the moment.  The Queen seemed
all complaisance again.  Presently she had Angele brought to her.

"How doth her dance compare-she who hath wedded Darnley?"

"She danceth not so high nor disposedly, with no such joyous lightness as
your high Majesty, but yet she moveth with circumspection."

"Circumspection--circumspection, that is no gift in dancing, which should
be wilful yet airily composed, thoughtless yet inducing.  Circumspection!
--in nothing else hath Mary shown it where she should.  'Tis like this
Queen perversely to make a psalm of dancing, and then pirouette with
sacred duty.  But you have spoken the truth, and I am well content.  So
get you to your rest."

She tapped Ange'le's cheek.  "You shall remain here to-night.  'Tis too
late for you to be sent abroad."  She was about to dismiss her, when
there was a sudden stir.  Cecil had entered and was making his way to the
Queen, followed by two strangers.  Elizabeth waited their approach.

"Your gracious Majesty," said Cecil, in a voice none heard save
Elizabeth, for all had fallen back at a wave of her hand, "the Queen of
Scots is the mother of a fair son."

Elizabeth's face flushed, then became pale, and she struck her knee with
her clinched hand.  "Who bringeth the news?" she inquired in a sharp
voice.

"Sir Andrew Melvill here."

"Who is with him yonder?"

"One who hath been attached to the Queen of Scots."

"He hath the ill look of such an one," she answered, and then said below
her breath bitterly: "She hath a son--and I am but a barren stock."

Rising, she added hurriedly: "We will speak to the people at the May Day
sports to-morrow.  Let there be great feasting."

She motioned to Sir Andrew Melvill to come forward, and with a gesture of
welcome and a promise of speech with him on the morrow she dismissed
them.

Since the two strangers had entered, Angele's eyes had been fastened on
the gentleman who accompanied Sir Andrew Melvill.  Her first glance at
him had sent a chill through her, and she remained confused and
disturbed.  In vain her memory strove to find where the man was set in
her past.  The time, the place, the event eluded her, but a sense of
foreboding possessed her; and her eyes followed him with strained anxiety
as he retired from the presence.




CHAPTER XIII

As had been arranged when Lempriere challenged Leicester, they met soon
after dawn among the trees beside the Thames.  A gentleman of the court,
to whom the Duke's Daughter had previously presented Lempriere, gaily
agreed to act as second, and gallantly attended the lord of Rozel in his
adventurous enterprise.  There were few at Court who had not some grudge
against Leicester, few who would not willingly have done duty at such a
time; for Leicester's friends were of fair-weather sort, ready to defend
him, to support him, not for friendship but for the crumbs that dropped
from the table of his power.  The favourite himself was attended by the
Earl of Ealing, a youngster who had his spurs to win, who thought it
policy to serve the great time-server.  Two others also came.

It was a morning little made for deeds of rancour or of blood.  As they
passed, the early morning mists above the green fields of Kent and Essex
were being melted by the summer sun.  The smell of ripening fruit came on
them with pungent sweetness, their feet crashed odorously through clumps
of tiger-lilies, and the dew on the ribbon-grass shook glistening drops
upon their velvets.  Overhead the carolling of the thrush came swimming
recklessly through the trees, and far over in the fields the ploughmen
started upon the heavy courses of their labour; while here and there
poachers with bows and arrows slid through the green undergrowth, like
spies hovering on an army's flank.

To Lempriere the morning carried no impression save that life was well
worth living.  No agitation passed across his nerves, no apprehension
reached his mind.  He had no imagination; he loved the things that his
eyes saw because they filled him with enjoyment; but why they were, or
whence they came, or what they meant or boded, never gave him meditation.
A vast epicurean, a consummate egotist, ripe with feeling and rich with
energy, he could not believe that when he spoke the heavens would not
fall.  The stinging sweetness of the morning was a tonic to all his
energies, an elation to his mind; he swaggered through the lush grasses
and boskage as though marching to a marriage.

Leicester, on his part, no more caught at the meaning of the morning, at
the long whisper of enlivened nature, than did his foe.  The day gave to
him no more than was his right.  If the day was not fine, then Leicester
was injured; but if the day was fine, then Leicester had his due.  Moral
blindness made him blind for the million deep teachings trembling round
him.  He felt only the garish and the splendid.  So it was that at
Kenilworth, where his Queen had visited him, the fetes that he had held
would far outshine the fete which would take place in Greenwich Park on
this May Day.  The fete of this May Day would take place, but would he
see it?  The thought flashed through his mind that he might not; but he
trod it under foot; not through an inborn, primitive egotism like that
of Lempriere, but through an innate arrogance, an unalterable belief that
Fate was ever on his side.  He had played so many tricks with Fate, had
mocked while taking its gifts so often, that, like the son who has
flouted his indulgent father through innumerable times, he conceived that
he should never be disinherited.  It irked him that he should be fighting
with a farmer, as he termed the Seigneur of the Jersey Isle; but there
was in the event, too, a sense of relief, for he had a will for murder.
Yesterday's events were still fresh in his mind; and he had a feeling
that the letting of Lempriere's blood would cool his own and be some cure
for the choler which the presence of these strangers at the Court had
wrought in him.

There were better swordsmen in England than he, but his skill was
various, and he knew tricks of the trade which this primitive Norman
could never have learnt.  He had some touch of wit, some biting
observation, and, as he neared the place of the encounter, he played upon
the coming event with a mordant frivolity.  Not by nature a brave man,
he was so much a fatalist, such a worshipper of his star, that he had
acquired an artificial courage which had served him well.  The unschooled
gentlemen with him roared with laughter at his sallies, and they came to
the place of meeting as though to a summer feast.

"Good-morrow, nobility," said Leicester with courtesy overdone, and
bowing much too low.  "Good-morrow, valentine," answered Lempriere,
flushing slightly at the disguised insult, and rising to the moment.

"I hear the crop of fools is short this year in Jersey, and through no
fault of yours--you've done your best most loyally," jeered Leicester, as
he doffed his doublet, his gentlemen laughing in derision.

"'Tis true enough, my lord, and I have come to find new seed in England,
where are fools to spare; as I trust in Heaven one shall be spared on
this very day for planting yonder."

He was eaten with rage, but he was cool and steady.

He was now in his linen and small clothes and looked like some untrained
Hercules.

"Well said, nobility," laughed Leicester with an ugly look.  "'Tis seed
time--let us measure out the seed.  On guard!"

Never were two men such opposites, never two so seemingly ill-matched.
Leicester's dark face and its sardonic look, his lithe figure, the
nervous strength of his bearing, were in strong contrast to the bulking
breadth, the perspiring robustness of Lempriere of Rozel.  It was not
easy of belief that Lempriere should be set to fight this toreador of a
fighting Court.  But there they stood, Lempriere's face with a great-eyed
gravity looming above his rotund figure like a moon above a purple cloud.
But huge and loose though the Seigneur's motions seemed, he was as intent
as though there were but two beings in the universe, Leicester and
himself.  A strange alertness seemed to be upon him, and, as Leicester
found when the swords crossed, he was quicker than his bulk gave warrant.
His perfect health made his vision sure; and, though not a fine
swordsman, he had done much fighting in his time, had been ever ready for
the touch of steel; and had served some warlike days in fighting France,
where fate had well befriended him.  That which Leicester meant should be
by-play of a moment became a full half-hour's desperate game.  Leicester
found that the thrust--the fatal thrust learned from an Italian master--
he meant to give, was met by a swift precision, responding to quick
vision.  Again and again he would have brought the end, but Lempriere
heavily foiled him.  The wound which the Seigneur got at last, meant to
be mortal, was saved from that by the facility of a quick apprehension.
Indeed, for a time the issue had seemed doubtful, for the endurance and
persistence of the Seigneur made for exasperation and recklessness in his
antagonist, and once blood was drawn from the wrist of the great man; but
at length Lempriere went upon the aggressive.  Here he erred, for
Leicester found the chance for which he had manoeuvred--to use the feint
and thrust got out of Italy.  He brought his enemy low, but only after a
duel the like of which had never been seen at the Court of England.  The
toreador had slain his bull at last, but had done no justice to his
reputation.  Never did man more gallantly sustain his honour with
heaviest odds against him than did the Seigneur of Rozel that day.

As he was carried away by the merry gentlemen of the Court, he called
back to the favourite:

"Leicester is not so great a swordsman after all.  Hang fast to your
honours by the skin of your teeth, my lord."




CHAPTER XIV

It was Monday, and the eyes of London and the Court were turned towards
Greenwich Park, where the Queen was to give entertainment to the French
Envoy who had come once more to urge upon the Queen marriage with a son
of the Medici, and to obtain an assurance that she would return to France
the widow of the great Montgomery and his valiant lieutenant, Michel de
la Foret.  The river was covered with boats and barges, festooned,
canopied, and hung with banners and devices; and from sunrise music and
singing conducted down the stream the gaily dressed populace--for those
were the days when a man spent on his ruff and his hose and his russet
coat as much as would feed and house a family for a year; when the fine-
figured ruflier with sables about his neck, corked slipper, trimmed
buskin, and cloak of silk or damask furred, carried his all upon his
back.

Loud-voiced gallants came floating by; men of a hundred guilds bearing
devices pompously held on their way to the great pageant; country
bumpkins up from Surrey roystered and swore that there was but one land
that God had blessed, and challenged the grinning watermen from Gravesend
and Hampton Court to deny it; and the sun with ardour drove from the sky
every invading cloud, leaving Essex and Kent as far as eye could see
perfect green gardens of opulence.

Before Elizabeth had left her bed, London had emptied itself into
Greenwich Park.  Thither the London Companies had come in their varied
dazzling accoutrements--hundreds armed in fine corselets bearing the long
Moorish pike; tall halberdiers in the unique armour called Almainrivets,
and gunners or muleteers equipped in shirts of mail with morions or steel
caps.  Here too were to come the Gentlemen Pensioners, resplendent in
scarlet, to "run with the spear;" and hundreds of men-at-arms were set
at every point to give garish bravery to all.  Thousands of citizens,
openmouthed, gazed down the long arenas of green festooned with every
sort of decoration and picturesque invention.  Cages of large birds from
the Indies, fruits, corn, fishes, grapes, hung in the trees, players
perched in the branches discoursed sweet music, and poets recited their
verses from rustic bridges or on platforms with weapons and armour hung
trophy-wise on ragged staves.  Upon a small lake a dolphin four-and-
twenty feet in length came swimming, within its belly a lively orchestra;
Italian tumblers swung from rope to bar; and crowds gathered at the
places where bear and bull-baiting were to excite the none too fastidious
tastes of the time.

All morning the gay delights went on, and at high noon the cry was
carried from mouth to mouth: "The Queen!  The Queen!"

She appeared on a balcony surrounded by her lords and ladies, and there
received the diplomatists, speaking at length to the French Envoy in a
tone of lightness and elusive cheerfulness which he was at a loss to
understand and tried in vain to pierce by cogent remarks bearing on
matters of moment involved in his embassage.  Not far away stood
Leicester, but the Queen had done no more than note his presence by a
glance, and now and again with ostentatious emphasis she spoke to Angele,
whom she had had brought to her in the morning before chapel-going.  Thus
early, after a few questions and some scrutiny, she had sent her in
charge of a gentleman-at-arms and a maid of the Duke's Daughter to her
father's lodging, with orders to change her robe, to return to the palace
in good time before noon, and to bring her father to a safe place where
he could watch the pleasures of the people.  When Angele came to the
presence again she saw that the Queen was wearing a gown of pure white
with the sleeves shot with black, such as she herself had worn when
admitted to audience yesterday.  Vexed, agitated, embittered as Elizabeth
had been by the news brought to her the night before, she had kept her
wardrobers and seamstresses at work the whole night to alter a white
satin habit to the simplicity and style of that which Angele had worn.

"What think you of my gown, my lady refugee?" she said to Angele at
last, as the Gentlemen Pensioners paraded in the space below, followed by
the Knights Tilters--at their head the Queen's Champion, Sir Henry Lee:
twenty-five of the most gallant and favoured of the courtiers of
Elizabeth, including the gravest of her counsellors and the youngest
gallant who had won her smile, Master Christopher Hatton.  Some of these
brave suitors, taken from the noblest families, had appeared in the tilt-
yard every anniversary of the year of her accession, and had lifted their
romantic office, which seemed but the service of enamoured knights, into
an almost solemn dignity.

The vast crowd disposed itself around the great improvised yard where the
Knights Tilters were to engage, and the Queen, followed by her retinue,
descended to the dais which had been set up near the palace.  Her white
satin gown, roped with pearls only at the neck and breast, glistened in
the bright sun, and her fair hair took on a burnished radiance.  As
Angele passed with her in the gorgeous procession, she could not but view
the scene with admiring eye, albeit her own sweet sober attire, a pearly
grey, seemed little in keeping; for the ladies and lords were most richly
attired, and the damask and satin cloaks, crimson velvet gowns, silk
hoods, and jewelled swords and daggers made a brave show.  She was like
some moth in a whorl of butterflies.

Her face was pale, and her eye had a curious disturbed look, as though
they had seen frightening things.  The events of last evening had tried
her simple spirit, and she shrank from this glittering show; but the
knowledge that her lover's life was in danger, and that her happiness was
here and now at stake, held her bravely to her place, beset as it was
with peril; for the Queen, with that eccentricity which had lifted her up
yesterday, might cast her down to-day, and she had good reason to fear
the power and influence of Leicester, whom she knew with a sure instinct
was intent on Michel's ruin.  Behind all her nervous shrinking and her
heart's doubt, the memory of the face of the stranger she had seen last
night with Sir Andrew Melvill tortured her.  She could not find the time
and place where she had seen the eyes that, in the palace, had filled
her with mislike and abhorrence as they looked upon the Queen.  Again
and again in her fitful sleep had she dreamt of him, and a sense of
foreboding was heavy upon her--she seemed to hear the footfall of coming
disaster.  The anxiety of her soul lent an unnatural brightness to her
eyes; so that more than one enamoured courtier made essay to engage her
in conversation, and paid her deferential compliment when the Queen's
eyes were not turned her way.  Come to the dais, she was placed not far
from her Majesty, beside the Duke's Daughter, whose whimsical nature
found frequent expression in what the Queen was wont to call "a merry
volt."  She seemed a privileged person, with whom none ventured to take
liberties, and against whom none was entitled to bear offence, for her
quips were free from malice, and her ingenuity in humour of mark.  She it
was who had put into the Queen's head that morning an idea which was
presently to startle Angele and all others.

Leicester was riding with the Knights Tilters, and as they cantered
lightly past the dais, trailing their spears in obeisance, Elizabeth
engaged herself in talk with Cecil, who was standing near, and appeared
not to see the favourite.  This was the first time since he had mounted
to good fortune that she had not thrown him a favour to pick up with his
spear and wear in her honour, and he could scarce believe that she had
meant to neglect him.  He half halted, but she only deigned an
inclination of the head, and he spurred his horse angrily on with a
muttered imprecation, yet, to all seeming, gallantly paying homage.

"There shall be doings ere this day is done.  'Beware the Gipsy'!" said
the Duke's Daughter in a low tone to Angele, and she laughed.  lightly.

"Who is the Gipsy?" asked Angele, with good suspicion, however.

"Who but Leicester," answered the other.  "Is he not black enough?"

"Why was he so called?  Who put the name upon Who but the Earl of Sussex
as he died--as noble a chief, as true a counsellor as ever spoke truth to
a Queen.  But truth is not all at Court, and Sussex was no flatterer.
Leicester bowed under the storm for a moment when Sussex showed him in
his true colours; but Sussex had no gift of intrigue, the tide turned,
and so he broke his heart, and died.  But he left a message which I
sometimes remember with my collects.  'I am now passing to another
world,' said he, 'and must leave you to your fortunes and to the Queen's
grace and goodness; but beware the Gipsy, for he will be too hard for all
of you; you know not the beast so well as I do.' But my Lord Sussex was
wrong.  One there is who knows him through and through, and hath little
joy in the knowing."

The look in the eyes of the Duke's Daughter became like steel and her
voice hardened, and Angele realised that Leicester had in this beautiful
and delicate maid-of-honour as bitter an enemy as ever brought down the
mighty from their seats; that a pride had been sometime wounded, suffered
an unwarrantable affront, which only innocence could feel so acutely.
Her heart went out to the Duke's Daughter as it had never gone out to any
of her sex since her mother's death, and she showed her admiration in her
glance.  The other saw it and smiled, slipping a hand in hers for a
moment; and then a look, half-debating, half-triumphant, came into her
face as her eyes followed Leicester down the green stretches of the
tilting-yard.

The trumpet sounded, the people broke out in shouts of delight, the
tilting began.  For an hour the handsome joust went on, the Earl of
Oxford, Charles Howard, Sir Henry Lee, Sir Christopher Hatton, and
Leicester challenging, and so even was the combat that victory seemed to
settle in the plumes of neither, though Leicester of them all showed not
the greatest skill, while in some regards greatest grace and deportment.
Suddenly there rode into the lists, whence, no one seemed to know, so
intent had the public gaze been fixed, so quickly had he come, a mounted
figure all in white, and at the moment when Sir Henry Lee had cried aloud
his challenge for the last time.  Silence fell as the bright figure
cantered down the list, lifted the gauge, and sat still upon his black
steed.  Consternation fell.  None among the people or the Knights Tilters
knew who the invader was, and Leicester called upon the Masters of the
Ceremonies to demand his name and quality.  The white horseman made no
reply, but sat unmoved, while noise and turmoil suddenly sprang up around
him.

Presently the voice of the Queen was heard clearly ringing through the
lists.  "His quality hath evidence.  Set on."

The Duke's Daughter laughed, and whispered mischievously in Angele's ear.

The gentlemen of England fared ill that day in the sight of all the
people, for the challenger of the Knights Tilters was more than a match
for each that came upon him.  He rode like a wild horseman of Yucatan.
Wary, resourceful, sudden in device and powerful in onset, he bore all
down, until the Queen cried: "There hath not been such skill in England
since my father rode these lists.  Three of my best gentlemen down, and
it hath been but breathing to him.  Now, Sir Harry Lee, it is thy turn,"
she laughed as she saw the champion ride forward; "and next 'tis thine,
Leicester.  Ah, Leicester would have at him now!" she added sharply, as
she saw the favourite spur forward before the gallant Lee.  "He is full
of choler--it becomes him, but it shall not be; bravery is not all.  And
if he failed "she smiled acidly--"he would get him home to Kenilworth and
show himself no more--if he failed, and the White Knight failed not!
What think you, dove?" she cried to the Duke's Daughter.  "Would he not
fall in the megrims for that England's honour had been over thrown?
Leicester could not live if England's honour should be toppled down like
our dear Chris Hatton and his gallants yonder."

The Duke's Daughter curtsied.  "Methinks England's honour is in little
peril--your Majesty knows well how to 'fend it.  No subject keeps it."

"If I must 'fend it, dove, then Leicester there must not fight to-day.
It shall surely be Sir Harry Lee.  My Lord Leicester must have the place
of honour at the last," she called aloud.  Leicester swung his horse
round and galloped to the Queen.

"Your Majesty," he cried in suppressed anger, "must I give place?"

"When all have failed and Leicester has won, then all yield place to
Leicester," said the Queen drily.  The look on his face was not good to
see, but he saluted gravely and rode away to watch the encounter between
the most gallant Knight Tilter in England and the stranger.  Rage was in
his heart, and it blinded him to the certainty of his defeat, for he was
not expert in the lists.  But by a sure instinct he had guessed the
identity of the White Horseman, and every nerve quivered with desire to
meet him in combat.  Last night's good work seemed to have gone for
naught.  Elizabeth's humour had changed; and to-day she seemed set on
humiliating him before the nobles who hated him, before the people who
had found in him the cause why the Queen had not married, so giving no
heir to the throne.  Perturbed and charged with anger as he was, however,
the combat now forward soon chained his attention.  Not in many a year
had there been seen in England such a display of skill and determination.
The veteran Knight Tilter, who knew that the result of this business
meant more than life to him, and that more than the honour of his
comrades was at stake--even the valour of England which had been
challenged--fought as he had never fought before, as no man had fought
in England for many a year.  At first the people cried aloud their
encouragement; but as onset and attack after onset and attack showed that
two masters of their craft, two desperate men, had met, and that the
great sport had become a vital combat between their own champion and the
champion of another land--Spain, France, Denmark, Russia, Italy?--a hush
spread over the great space, and every eye was strained; men gazed with
bated breath.

The green turf was torn and mangled, the horses reeked with sweat and
foam, but overhead the soaring skylark sang, as it were, to express the
joyance of the day.  During many minutes the only sound that broke the
stillness was the clash of armed men, the thud of hoofs, and the snorting
and the wild breathing of the chargers.  The lark's notes, however,
ringing out over the lists freed the tongue of the Queen's fool, who
suddenly ran out into the lists, in his motley and cap and bells, and in
his high trilling voice sang a fool's song to the fighting twain:

              "Who would lie down and close his eyes
                 While yet the lark sings o'er the dale?
               Who would to Love make no replies,
                 Nor drink the nut-brown ale,
               While throbs the pulse, and full 's the purse
                 And all the world 's for sale?"

Suddenly a cry of relief, of roaring excitement, burst from the people.
Both horsemen and their chargers were on the ground.  The fight was over,
the fierce game at an end.  That which all had feared, even the Queen
herself, as the fight fared on, had not come to pass--England's champion
had not been beaten by the armed mystery, though the odds had seemed
against him.

              "Though wintry blasts may prove unkind,
                 When winter's past we do forget;
               Love's breast in summer time is kind,
                 And all 's well while life 's with us yet
                   Hey, ho, now the lark is mating,
                   Life's sweet wages are in waiting!"

Thus sang the fool as the two warriors were helped to their feet.
Cumbered with their armour, and all dust-covered and blood-stained,
though not seriously hurt, they were helped to their horses, and rode to
the dais where the Queen sat.

"Ye have fought like men of old," she said, "and neither had advantage
at the last.  England's champion still may cry his challenge and not be
forsworn, and he who challenged goeth in honour again from the lists.
You, sir, who have challenged, shall we not see your face or hear your
voice?  For what country, for what prince lifted you the gauge and
challenged England's honour?"

"I crave your high Majesty's pardon"--Angele's heart stood still.  Her
love had not pierced his disguise, though Leicester's hate had done so on
the instant--"I crave your noble Majesty's grace," answered the stranger,
"that I may still keep my face covered in humility.  My voice speaks for
no country and for no prince.  I have fought for mine own honour, and to
prove to England's Queen that she hath a champion who smiteth with strong
arm, as on me and my steed this hath been seen to-day."

"Gallantly thought and well said," answered Elizabeth; "but England's
champion and his strong arm have no victory.  If gifts were given they
must needs be cut in twain.  But answer me, what is your country?  I will
not have it that any man pick up the gauge of England for his own honour.
What is your country?

"I am an exile, your high Majesty; and the only land for which I raise my
sword this day is that land where I have found safety from my enemies."

The Queen turned and smiled at the Duke's Daughter.  "I knew not where my
own question might lead, but he hath turned it to full account," she
said, under her breath.  "His tongue is as ready as his spear.  Then ye
have both laboured in England's honour, and I drink to you both," she
added, and raised to her lips a glass of wine which a page presented.
"I love ye both--in your high qualities," she hastened to add with dry
irony, and her eye rested mockingly on Leicester.

"My lords and gentlemen and all of my kingdom," she added in a clear
voice, insistent in its force, "ye have come upon May Day to take delight
of England in my gardens, and ye are welcome.  Ye have seen such a sight
as doeth good to the eyes of brave men.  It hath pleased me well, and I
am constrained to say to you what, for divers great reasons, I have kept
to my own counsels, labouring for your good.  The day hath come, however,
the day and the hour when ye shall know that wherein I propose to serve
you as ye well deserve.  It is my will--and now I see my way to its good
fulfilment--that I remain no longer in that virgin state wherein I have
ever lived."

Great cheering here broke in, and for a time she could get no further.
Ever alive to the bent of the popular mind, she had chosen a perfect
occasion to take them into her confidence--however little or much she
would abide by her words, or intended the union of which she spoke.  In
the past she had counselled with her great advisers, with Cecil and the
rest, and through them messages were borne to the people; but now she
spoke direct to them all, and it had its immediate reward--the
acclamations were as those with which she was greeted when she first
passed through the streets of London on inheriting the crown.

Well pleased, she continued: "This I will do with expedition and
weightiest judgment, for of little account though I am, he that sits
with the Queen of England in this realm must needs be a prince indeed....
So be ye sure of this that ye shall have your heart-most wishes, and
there shall be one to come after me who will wear this crown even as
I have worn, in direct descent, my father's crown.  Our dearest sister,
the Queen of the Scots, hath been delivered of a fair son; and in high
affection the news thereof she hath sent me, with a palfry which I shall
ride among you in token of the love I bear her Majesty.  She hath in her
time got an heir to the throne with which we are ever in kinship and
alliance, and I in my time shall give ye your heart's desire."

Angele, who had, with palpitating heart and swimming head, seen Michel de
la Foret leave the lists and disappear among the trees, as mysteriously
as he came, was scarce conscious of the cheers and riotous delight that
followed Elizabeth's tactful if delusive speech to the people.  A few
whispered words from the Duke's Daughter had told her that Michel had
obeyed the Queen's command in entering the lists and taking up the
challenge; and that she herself, carrying the royal message to him and
making arrangements for his accoutrement and mounting, had urged him to
obedience.  She observed drily that he had needed little pressure, and
that his eyes had lighted at the prospect of the combat.  Apart from his
innate love of fighting, he had realised that in the moment of declining
to enter the Queen's service he had been at a disadvantage, and that his
courage was open to attack by the incredulous or malicious.  This would
have mattered little were it not that he had been given unusual
importance as a prisoner by the Queen's personal notice of himself.  He
had, therefore, sprung to the acceptance, and sent his humble duty to the
Queen by her winsome messenger, who, with conspicuous dramatic skill, had
arranged secretly, with the help of a Gentleman Pensioner and the Master
of the Horse, his appearance and his exit.  That all succeeded as she had
planned quickened her pulses, and made her heart still warmer to Angele,
who, now that all was over, and her Huguenot lover had gone his
mysterious ways, seemed lost in a troubled reverie.

It was a troubled reverie indeed, for Angele's eyes were on the stranger
who was present with Sir Andrew Melvill the night before.  Her gaze upon
him now became fixed and insistent, for the sense of foreboding so heavy
on her deepened to a torturing suspense.  Where had she seen this man
before?  To what day or hour in her past did he belong?  What was there
in his smooth, smiling, malicious face that made her blood run cold?  As
she watched him, he turned his head.  She followed his eyes.  The horse
which Mary Queen of Scots had sent with the message of the birth of her
son was being led to the Queen by the dark browed, pale-faced churl who
had brought it from Scotland.  She saw a sharp dark look pass between the
two.

Suddenly her sight swam, she swayed and would have fainted, but
resolution steadied her, and a low exclamation broke from her lips.
Now she knew!

The face that had eluded her was at last in the grasp of horrified
memory.  It was the face of one who many years ago was known to have
poisoned the Due de Chambly by anointing the pommel of his saddle with a
delicate poison which the rider would touch, and touching would, perhaps,
carry to his nostrils or mouth as he rode, and die upon the instant.  She
herself had seen the Due de Chambly fall; had seen this man fly from
Paris for his life; and had thereafter known of his return to favour at
the court of Mary and Francis, for nothing could be proved against him.
The memory flashed like lightning through her brain.  She moved swiftly
forward despite the detaining hand of the Duke's Daughter.  The Queen was
already mounted, her hand already upon the pommel of the saddle.

Elizabeth noted the look of anguished anxiety in Angele's eyes, her
face like that of one who had seen souls in purgatory; and some swift
instinct, born of years upon years of peril in old days when her life was
no boon to her enemies, made her lean towards the girl, whose quick
whispered words were to her as loud as thunder.  She was, however,
composed and still.  Not a tremor passed through her.

"Your wish is granted, mistress," she said aloud, then addressed a word
to Cecil at her side, who passed on her command.  Presently she turned
slowly to the spot where Sir Andrew Melvill and the other sat upon their
horses.  She scanned complacently the faces of both, then her eyes
settled steadily on the face of the murderer.  Still gazing intently she
drew the back of her gloved fingers along the pommel.  The man saw the
motion, unnoted and unsignificant to any other save Angele, meaningless
even to Melvill, the innocent and honest gentleman at his side; and he
realised that the Queen had had a warning.  Noting the slight stir among
the gentlemen round him, he knew that his game was foiled, that there was
no escape.  He was not prepared for what followed.

In a voice to be heard only at small distance, the Queen said calmly:

"This palfry sent me by my dear sister of Scotland shall bear me among
you, friends; and in days to come I will remember how she hath given new
life to me by her loving message.  Sir Andrew Melvill, I shall have
further speech with you; and you, sir,"--speaking to the sinister figure
by his side--"come hither."

The man dismounted, and with unsteady step came forward.  Elizabeth held
out her gloved hand for him to kiss.  His face turned white.  It was come
soon, his punishment.  None knew save Angele and the Queen the doom that
was upon him, if Angele's warning was well-founded.  He knelt, and bent
his head over her hand.

"Salute, sir," she said in a low voice.

He touched his lips to her fingers.  She pressed them swiftly against his
mouth.  An instant, then he rose and stepped backwards to his horse.
Tremblingly, blindly, he mounted.

A moment passed, then Elizabeth rode on with her ladies behind her, her
gentlemen beside her.  As she passed slowly, the would-be regicide swayed
and fell from his horse, and stirred no more.

Elizabeth rode on, her hand upon the pommel of the saddle.  So she rode
for a full half-hour, and came back to her palace.  But she raised not
her gloved right hand above the pommel, and she dismounted with exceeding
care.

That night the man who cared for the horse died secretly as had done his
master, with the Queen's glove pressed to his nostrils by one whom Cecil
could trust.  And the matter was hidden from the Court and the people;
for it was given out that Melvill's friend had died of some heart
trouble.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Each of us will prove himself a fool given perfect opportunity
No note of praise could be pitched too high for Elizabeth
She had never stooped to conquer






MICHEL AND ANGELE

[A Ladder of Swords]

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.



CHAPTER XV

It seemed an unspeakable smallness in a man of such high place in the
State, whose hand had tied and untied myriad knots of political and court
intrigue, that he should stoop to a game which any pettifogging hanger-on
might play-and reap scorn in the playing.  By insidious arts, Leicester
had in his day turned the Queen's mind to his own will; had foiled the
diplomacy of the Spaniard, the German and the Gaul; had by subterranean
means checkmated the designs of the Medici; had traced his way through
plot and counter-plot, hated by most, loved by none save, maybe, his
Royal mistress to whom he was now more a custom than a cherished friend.
Year upon year he had built up his influence.  None had championed him
save himself, and even from the consequences of rashness and folly he had
risen to a still higher place in the kingdom.  But such as Leicester are
ever at last a sacrifice to the laborious means by which they achieve
their greatest ends-means contemptible and small.

To the great intriguers every little detail, every commonplace
insignificance is used--and must be used by them alone--to further their
dark causes.  They cannot trust their projects to brave lieutenants, to
faithful subordinates.  They cannot say, "Here is the end; this is the
work to be done; upon your shoulders be the burden!"  They must "stoop to
conquer."  Every miserable detail becomes of moment, until by-and-by the
art of intrigue and conspiracy begins to lose proportion in their minds.
The detail has ever been so important, conspiracy so much second nature,
that they must needs be intriguing and conspiring when the occasion is
trifling and the end negligible.

To all intriguers life has lost romance; there is no poem left in nature;
no ideal, personal, public or national, detains them in its wholesome
influence; no great purpose allures them; they have no causes for which
to die--save themselves.  They are so honeycombed with insincerity and
the vice of thought, that by-and-by all colours are as one, all pathways
the same; because, whichever hue of light breaks upon their world they
see it through the grey-cloaked mist of falsehood; and whether the path
be good or bad they would still walk in it crookedly.  How many men and
women Leicester had tracked or lured to their doom; over how many men and
women he had stepped to his place of power, history speaks not carefully;
but the traces of his deeds run through a thousand archives, and they
suggest plentiful sacrifices to a subverted character.

Favourite of a Queen, he must now stoop to set a trap for the ruin of
as simple a soul as ever stepped upon the soil of England; and his dark
purposes had not even the excuse of necessity on the one hand, of love or
passion on the other.  An insane jealousy of the place the girl had won
in the consideration of the Queen, of her lover who, he thought, had won
a still higher place in the same influence, was his only motive for
action at first.  His cruelty was not redeemed even by the sensuous
interest the girl might arouse in a reckless nature by her beauty and her
charm.

So the great Leicester--the Gipsy, as the dead Sussex had called him--lay
in wait in Greenwich Park for Angele to pass, like some orchard thief in
the blossoming trees.  Knowing the path by which she would come to her
father's cottage from the palace, he had placed himself accordingly.
He had thought he might have to wait long or come often for the perfect
opportunity; but it seemed as if Fate played his game for him, and that
once again the fruit he would pluck should fall into his palm.  Bright-
eyed, and elated from a long talk with the Duke's Daughter, who had given
her a message from the Queen, Angele had abstractedly taken the wrong
path in the wood.  Leicester saw that it would lead her into the maze
some distance off.  Making a detour, he met her at the moment she
discovered her mistake.  The light from the royal word her friend had
brought was still in her face; but it was crossed by perplexity now.

He stood still as though astonished at seeing her, a smile upon his face.
So perfectly did he play his part that she thought the meeting
accidental; and though in her heart she had a fear of the man and knew
how bitter an enemy he was of Michel's, his urbane power, his skilful
diplomacy of courtesy had its way.  These complicated lives, instinct
with contradiction, have the interest of forbidden knowledge.  The dark
experiences of life leave their mark and give such natures that touch of
mystery which allures even those who have high instincts and true
feelings, as one peeps over a hidden depth and wonders what lies beyond
the dark.  So Angele, suddenly arrested, was caught by the sense of
mystery in the man, by the fascination of finesse, of dark power; and it
was womanlike that all on an instant she should dream of the soul of
goodness in things evil.

Thus in life we are often surprised out of long years of prejudice, and
even of dislike and suspicion, by some fortuitous incident, which might
have chanced to two who had every impulse towards each other, not such
antagonisms as lay between Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and this
Huguenot refugee.  She had every cue to hate hum.  Each moment of her
life in England had been beset with peril because of him-peril to the
man she loved, therefore peril to herself.  And yet, so various is the
nature of woman, that, while steering straitly by one star, she levies
upon the light of other stars.  Faithful and sincere, yet loving power,
curious and adventurous, she must needs, without intention, without
purpose, stray into perilous paths.

As Leicester stepped suddenly into Angele's gaze, she was only, as it
were, conscious of a presence in itself alluring by virtue of the history
surrounding it.  She was surprised out of an instinctive dislike, and the
cue she had to loathe him was for the moment lost.

Unconsciously, unintentionally, she smiled at him now, then, realising,
retreated, shrinking from him, her face averted.  Man or woman had found
in Leicester the delicate and intrepid gamester, exquisite in the choice
of detail, masterful in the breadth of method.  And now, as though his
whole future depended on this interview, he brought to bear a life-long
skill to influence her.  He had determined to set the Queen against her.
He did not know--not even he--that she had saved the Queen's life on that
auspicious May Day when Harry Lee had fought the white knight Michel de
la Foret and halved the honours of the lists with him.  If he had but
known that the Queen had hid from him this fact--this vital thing
touching herself and England, he would have viewed his future with a
vaster distrust.  But there could be no surer sign of Elizabeth's growing
coldness and intended breach than that she had hid from him the dreadful
incident of the poisoned glove, and the swift execution of the would-be
murderer, and had made Cecil her only confidant.  But he did know that
Elizabeth herself had commanded Michel de la Foret to the lists; and his
mad jealousy impelled him to resort to a satanic cunning towards these
two fugitives, who seemed to have mounted within a few short days as far
as had he in thrice as many years to a high place in the regard of the
Majesty of England.

To disgrace them both; to sow distrust of the girl in the Queen's mind;
to make her seem the opposite of what she was; to drop in her own mind
suspicion of her lover; to drive her to some rash act, some challenge of
the Queen herself--that was his plan.  He knew how little Elizabeth's
imperious spirit would brook any challenge from this fearless girl
concerning De la Foret.  But to convince her that the Queen favoured
Michel in some shadowed sense, that De la Foret was privy to a dark
compact--so deep a plot was all worthy of a larger end.  He had well
inspired the Court of France through its ambassador to urge the Medici to
press actively and bitterly for De la Foret's return to France and to the
beheading sword that waited for him; and his task had been made light by
international difficulties, which made the heart of Elizabeth's foreign
policy friendship with France and an alliance against Philip of Spain.
She had, therefore, opened up, even in the past few days, negotiations
once again for the long-talked-of marriage with the Duke of Anjou, the
brother of the King, son of the Medici.  State policy was involved, and,
if De la Foret might be a counter, the pledge of exchange in the game,
as it were, the path would once more be clear.

He well believed that Elizabeth's notice of De la Foret was but a fancy
that would pass, as a hundred times before such fancies had come and
gone; but against that brighter prospect there lay the fact that never
before had she shown himself such indifference.  In the past she had
raged against him, she had imprisoned him; she had driven him from her
presence in her anger, but always her paroxysms of rage had been
succeeded by paroxysms of tenderness.  Now he saw a colder light in the
sky, a greyer horizon met his eye.  So at every corner of the compass he
played for the breaking of the spell.

Yet as he now bowed low before Angele there seemed to show in his face a
very candour of surprise, of pleasure, joined to a something friendly and
protective in his glance and manner.  His voice insinuated that bygones
should be bygones; it suggested that she had misunderstood him.  It
pleaded against the injustice of her prejudice.

"So far from home!" he said with a smile.

"More miles from home," she replied, thinking of never-returning days in
France, "than I shall ever count again."

"But no, methinks the palace is within a whisper," he responded.

"Lord Leicester knows well I am a prisoner; that I no longer abide in the
palace," she answered.

He laughed lightly.  "An imprisonment in a Queen's friendship.  I bethink
me, it is three hours since I saw you go to the palace.  It is a few
worthless seconds since you have got your freedom."

She nettled at his tone.  "Lord Leicester takes great interest in my
unimportant goings and comings.  I cannot think it is because I go and
come."

He chose to misunderstand her meaning.  Drawing closer he bent over her
shoulder.  "Since your arrival here, my only diary is the tally of your
coming and going."  Suddenly, as though by an impulse of great frankness,
he added in a low tone:

"And is it strange that I should follow you--that I should worship grace
and virtue?  Men call me this and that.  You have no doubt been filled
with dark tales of my misdeeds.  Has there been one in the Court, even
one, who, living by my bounty or my patronage, has said one good word of
me?  And why?  For long years the Queen, who, maybe, might have been
better counselled, chose me for her friend, adviser--because I was true
to her.  I have lived for the Queen, and living for her have lived for
England.  Could I keep--I ask you, could I keep myself blameless in the
midst of flattery, intrigue, and conspiracy?  I admit that I have played
with fiery weapons in my day; and must needs still do so.  The
incorruptible cannot exist in the corrupted air of this Court.  You have
come here with the light of innocence and truth about you.  At first I
could scarce believe that such goodness lived, hardly understood it.  The
light half-blinded and embarrassed; but, at last, I saw!  You of all this
Court have made me see what sort of life I might have lived.  You have
made me dream the dreams of youth and high unsullied purpose once again.
Was it strange that in the dark pathways of the Court I watched your
footsteps come and go, carrying radiance with you?  No--Leicester has
learned how sombre, sinister, has been his past, by a presence which is
the soul of beauty, of virtue, and of happy truth.  Lady, my heart is
yours.  I worship you."

Overborne for the moment by the eager, searching eloquence of his words,
she had listened bewildered to him.  Now she turned upon him with panting
breath and said:

"My lord, my lord, I will hear no more.  You know I love Monsieur de la
Foret, for whose sake I am here in England--for whose sake I still
remain."

"'Tis a labour of love but ill requited," he answered with suggestion in
his tone.

"What mean you, my lord?" she asked sharply, a kind of blind agony in
her voice; for she felt his meaning, and though she did not believe him,
and knew in her soul he slandered, there was a sting, for slander ever
scorches where it touches.

"Can you not see?" he said.  "May Day--why did the Queen command him to
the lists?  Why does she keep him here-in the palace?  Why, against the
will of France, her ally, does she refuse to send him forth?  Why,
unheeding the laughter of the Court, does she favour this unimportant
stranger, brave though he be?  Why should she smile upon him?  .  .  .
Can you not see, sweet lady?"

"You know well why the Queen detains him here," she answered calmly now.
"In the Queen's understanding with France, exiles who preach the faith
are free from extradition.  You heard what the Queen required of him--
that on Trinity Day he should preach before her, and upon this preaching
should depend his safety."

"Indeed, so her Majesty said with great humour," replied Leicester.  "So
indeed she said; but when we hide our faces a thin veil suffices.  The
man is a soldier--a soldier born.  Why should he turn priest now?  I pray
you, think again.  He was quick of wit; the Queen's meaning was clear to
him; he rose with seeming innocence to the fly, and she landed him at the
first toss.  But what is forward bodes no good to you, dear star of
heaven.  I have known the Queen for half a lifetime.  She has wild whims
and dangerous fancies, fills her hours of leisure with experiences--an
artist is the Queen.  She means no good to you."

She had made as if to leave him, though her eyes searched in vain for the
path which she should take; but she now broke in impatiently:

"Poor, unnoted though I am, the Queen of England is my friend," she
answered.  "What evil could she wish me?  From me she has naught to fear.
I am not an atom in her world.  Did she but lift her finger I am done.
But she knows that, humble though I be, I would serve her to my last
breath; because I know, my Lord Leicester, how many there are who serve
her foully, faithlessly; and there should be those by her who would serve
her singly."

His eyes half closed, he beat his toe upon the ground.  He frowned, as
though he had no wish to hurt her by words which he yet must speak.  With
calculated thought he faltered.

"Yet do you not think it strange," he said at last, "that Monsieur de la
Foret should be within the palace ever, and that you should be banished
from the palace?  Have you never seen the fly and the spider in the web?
Do you not know that they who have the power to bless or ban, to give joy
or withhold it, appear to give when they mean to withhold?  God bless us
all--how has your innocence involved your judgment!"

She suddenly flushed to the eyes.  "I have wit enough," she said acidly,
"to feel that truth which life's experience may not have taught me.  It
is neither age nor evil that teaches one to judge 'twixt black and white.
God gives the true divination to human hearts that need."

It was a contest in which Leicester revelled--simplicity and single-
mindedness against the multifarious and double-tongued.  He had made many
efforts in his time to conquer argument and prejudice.  When he chose,
none could be more insinuating or turn the flank of a proper argument by
more adroit suggestion.  He used his power now.

"You think she means well by you?  You think that she, who has a thousand
ladies of a kingdom at her call, of the best and most beautiful--and
even," his voice softened, "though you are more beautiful than all, that
beauty would soften her towards you?  When was it Elizabeth loved beauty?
When was it that her heart warmed towards those who would love or wed?
Did she not imprison me, even in these palace grounds, for one whole year
because I sought to marry?  Has she not a hundred times sent from her
presence women with faces like flowers because they were in contrast to
her own?  Do you see love blossoming at this Court?  God's Son! but she
would keep us all like babes in Eden an' she could, unmated and unloved."

He drew quickly to her and leant over her, whispering down her shoulder.
"Do you think there is any reason why all at once she should change her
mind and cherish lovers?"

She looked up at him fearlessly and firmly.

"In truth, I do.  My Lord Leicester, you have lived in the circle of her
good pleasure, near to her noble Majesty, as you say, for half a
lifetime.  Have you not found a reason why now or any time she should
cherish love and lovers?  Ah, no, you have seen her face, you have heard
her voice, but you have not known her heart!"

"Ah, opportunity lacked," he said in irony and with a reminiscent smile.
"I have been busy with State affairs, I have not sat on cushions,
listening to royal fingers on the virginals.  Still, I ask you, do you
think there is a reason why from her height she should stoop down to
rescue you or give you any joy?  Wherefore should the Queen do aught to
serve you?  Wherefore should she save your lover?"

It was on Angele's lips to answer, "Because I saved her life on May Day."
It was on her lips to tell of the poisoned glove, but she only smiled,
and said:

"But, yes, I think, my lord, there is a reason, and in that reason I have
faith."

Leicester saw how firmly she was fixed in her idea, how rooted was her
trust in the Queen's intentions towards her; and he guessed there was
something hidden which gave her such supreme confidence.

"If she means to save him, why does she not save him now?  Why not end
the business in a day--not stretch it over these long mid-summer weeks?"

"I do not think it strange," she answered.  "He is a political prisoner.
Messages must come and go between England and France.  Besides, who
calleth for haste?  Is it I who have most at stake?  It is not the first
time I have been at Court, my lord.  In these high places things are
orderly,"--a touch of sarcasm came into her tone,--"life is not a mighty
rushing wind, save to those whom vexing passion drives to hasty deeds."

She made to move on once more, but paused, still not certain of her way.

"Permit me to show you," he said with a laugh and a gesture towards a
path.  "Not that--this is the shorter.  I will take you to a turning
which leads straight to your durance--and another which leads elsewhere."

She could not say no, because she had, in very truth, lost her way, and
she might wander far and be in danger.  Also, she had no fear of him.
Steeled to danger in the past, she was not timid; but, more than all, the
game of words between them had had its fascination.  The man himself, by
virtue of what he was, had his fascination also.  The thing inherent in
all her sex, to peep over the hedge, to skirt dangerous fires lightly, to
feel the warmth distantly and not be scorched--that was in her, too; and
she lived according to her race and the long predisposition of the ages.
Most women like her--as good as she--have peeped and stretched out hands
to the alluring fire and come safely through, wiser and no better.  But
many, too, bewildered and confused by what they see--as light from a
mirror flashed into the eye half blinds--have peeped over the hedge and,
miscalculating their power of self-control, have entered in, and returned
no more into the quiet garden of unstraying love.

Leicester quickly put on an air of gravity.  "I warn you that danger lies
before you.  If you cross the Queen--and you will cross the Queen when
you know the truth, as I know it--you will pay a heavy price for refusing
Leicester as your friend."

She made a protesting motion and seemed about to speak, but suddenly,
with a passionate gesture, Leicester added: "Let them go their way.
Monsieur de la Foret will be tossed aside before another winter comes.
Do you think he can abide here in the midst of plot and intrigue, and
hated by the people of the Court?  He is doomed.  But more, he is
unworthy of you; while I can serve you well, and I can love you well."
She shrank away from him.  "No, do not turn from me, for in very truth,
Leicester's heart has been pierced by the inevitable arrow.  You think I
mean you evil?"

He paused with a sudden impulse continued: "No! no!  And if there be a
saving grace in marriage, marriage it shall be, if you will but hear me.
You shall be my wife--Leicester's wife.  As I have mounted to power so I
will hold power with you--with you, the brightest spirit that ever
England saw.  Worthy of a kingdom with you beside me, I shall win to
greater, happier days; and at Kenilworth, where kings and queens have
lodged, you shall be ruler.  We will leave this Court until Elizabeth,
betrayed by those who know not how to serve her, shall send for me again.
Here--the power behind the throne--you and I will sway this realm through
the aging, sentimental Queen.  Listen, and look at me in the eyes--
I speak the truth, you read my heart.  You think I hated you and hated De
la Foret.  By all the gods, it's true I hated him, because I saw that he
would come between me and the Queen.  A man must have one great passion.
Life itself must be a passion.  Power was my passion--power, not the
Queen.  You have broken all that down.  I yield it all to you--for your
sake and my own.  I would steal from life yet before my sun goes to its
setting a few years of truth and honesty and clear design.  At heart I am
a patriot--a loyal Englishman.  Your cause--the cause of Protestantism--
did I not fight for it at Rochelle?  Have I not ever urged the Queen to
spend her revenue for your cause, to send her captains and her men to
fight for it?"

She raised her head in interest, and her lips murmured: "Yes, yes, I know
you did that."

He saw his advantage and pursued it.  "See, I will be honest with you--
honest, at last, as I have wished in vain to be, for honesty was
misunderstood.  It is not so with you--you understand.  Dear, light of
womanhood, I speak the truth now.  I have been evil in my day I admit it
--evil because I was in the midst of evil.  I betrayed because I was
betrayed; I slew, else I should have been slain.  We have had dark days
in England, privy conspiracy and rebellion; and I have had to thread my
way through dreadful courses by a thousand blind paths.  Would it be no
joy to you if I, through your influence, recast my life--remade my
policy, renewed my youth--pursuing principle where I have pursued
opportunity?  Angele, come to Kenilworth with me.  Leave De la Foret to
his fate.  The way to happiness is with me.  Will you come?"

He had made his great effort.  As he spoke he almost himself believed
that he told the truth.  Under the spell of his own emotional power it
seemed as though he meant to marry her, as though he could find happiness
in the union.  He had almost persuaded himself to be what he would have
her to believe he might be.

Under the warmth and convincing force of his words her pulses had beat
faster, her heart had throbbed in her throat, her eyes had glistened;
but not with that light which they had shed for Michel de la Foret.
How different was this man's wooing--its impetuous, audacious, tender
violence, with that quiet, powerful, almost sacred gravity of her
Camisard lover!  It is this difference--the weighty, emotional
difference--between a desperate passion and a pure love which has ever
been so powerful in twisting the destinies of a moiety of the world to
misery, who otherwise would have stayed contented, inconspicuous and
good.  Angele would have been more than human if she had not felt the
spell of the ablest intriguer, of the most fascinating diplomatist of his
day.

Before he spoke of marriage the thrill--the unconvincing thrill though it
was--of a perilous temptation was upon her; but the very thing most meant
to move her only made her shudder; for in her heart of hearts she knew
that he was ineradicably false.  To be married to one constitutionally
untrue would be more terrible a fate for her than to be linked to him in
a lighter, more dissoluble a bond.  So do the greatest tricksters of this
world overdo their part, so play the wrong card when every past
experience suggests it is the card to play.  He knew by the silence that
followed his words, and the slow, steady look she gave him, that she was
not won nor on the way to the winning.

"My lord," she said at last, and with a courage which steadied her
affrighted and perturbed innocence, "you are eloquent, you are fruitful
of flattery, of those things which have, I doubt not, served you well in
your day.  But, if you see your way to a better life, it were well you
should choose one of nobler mould than I.  I am not made for sacrifice,
to play the missioner and snatch brands from the burning.  I have enough
to do to keep my own feet in the ribbon-path of right.  You must look
elsewhere for that guardian influence which is to make of you a paragon."

"No, no," he answered sharply, "you think the game not worth the candle
--you doubt me and what I can do for you; my sincerity, my power you
doubt."

"Indeed, yes, I doubt both," she answered gravely, "for you would have me
believe that I have power to lead you.  With how small a mind you credit
me!  You think, too, that you sway this kingdom; but I know that you
stand upon a cliff's edge, and that the earth is fraying 'neath your
tread.  You dare to think that you have power to drag down with you the
man who honours me with--"

"With his love, you'd say.  Yet he will leave you fretting out your soul
until the sharp-edged truth cuts your heart in twain.  Have you no pride?
I care not what you say of me--say your worst, and I will not resent it,
for I will still prove that your way lies with me."

She gave a bitter sigh, and touched her forehead with trembling fingers.
"If words could prove it, I had been convinced but now, for they are well
devised, and they have music too; but such a music, my lord, as would
drown the truth in the soul of a woman.  Your words allure, but you have
learned the art of words.  You yourself--oh, my lord, you who have tasted
all the pleasures of this world, could you then have the heart to steal
from one who has so little that little which gives her happiness?"

"You know not what can make you happy--I can teach you that.  By God's
Son!  but you have wit and intellect and are a match for a prince, not
for a cast off Camisard.  I shall ere long be Lord--Lieutenant of
these Isles-of England and Ireland.  Come to my nest.  We will fly far
--ah, your eye brightens, your heart leaps to mine--I feel it now, I--"

"Oh, have done, have done," she passionately broke in; "I would rather
die, be torn upon the rack, burnt at the stake, than put my hand in
yours!  And you do not wish it--you speak but to destroy, not to cherish.
While you speak to me I see all those"--she made a gesture as though to
put something from her "all those to whom you have spoken as you have
done to me.  I hear the myriad falsehoods you have told--one whelming
confusion.  I feel the blindness which has crept upon them--those poor
women--as you have sown the air with the dust of the passion which you
call love.  Oh, you never knew what love meant, my lord!  I doubt if,
when you lay in your mother's arms, you turned to her with love.  You
never did one kindly act for love, no generous thought was ever born in
you by love.  Sir, I know it as though it were written in a book; your
life has been one long calculation--your sympathy or kindness a
calculated thing.  Good-nature, emotion you may have had, but never the
divine thing by which the world is saved.  Were there but one little
place where that Eden flower might bloom within your heart, you could not
seek to ruin that love which lives in mine and fills it, conquering all
the lesser part of me.  I never knew of how much love I was capable until
I heard you speak today.  Out of your life's experience, out of all that
you have learned of women good and evil, you--for a selfish, miserable
purpose--would put the gyves upon my wrists, make me a pawn in your dark
game; a pawn which you would lose without a thought as the game went on.

"If you must fight, my lord, if you must ruin Monsieur de la Foret and a
poor Huguenot girl, do it by greater means than this.  You have power,
you say.  Use it then; destroy us, if you will.  Send us to the Medici:
bring us to the block, murder us--that were no new thing to Lord
Leicester.  But do not stoop to treachery and falsehood to thrust us
down.  Oh, you have made me see the depths of shame to-day!  But yet,"
her voice suddenly changed, a note of plaintive force filled it--"I have
learned much this hour--more than I ever knew.  Perhaps it is that we
come to knowledge only through fire and tears."  She smiled sadly.
"I suppose that sometime some day, this page of life would have scorched
my sight.  Oh, my lord, what was there in me that you dared speak so to
me?  Was there naught to have stayed your tongue and stemmed the tide in
which you would engulf me?"  He had listened as in a dream at first.  She
had read him as he might read himself, had revealed him with the certain
truth, as none other had done in all his days.  He was silent for a long
moment, then raised his hand in protest.

"You have a strange idea of what makes offence and shame.  I offered you
marriage," he said complacently.  "And when I come to think upon it,
after all that you have said, fair Huguenot, I see no cause for railing.
You call me this and that; to you I am a liar, a rogue, a cut-throat,
what you will; and yet, and yet, I will have my way--I will have my way
in the end."

"You offered me marriage--and meant it not.  Do I not know?  Did you rely
so little on your compelling powers, my lord, that you must needs resort
to that bait?  Do you think that you will have your way to-morrow if you
have failed to-day?"

With a quick change of tone and a cold, scornful laugh he rejoined: "Do
you intend to measure swords with me?"

"No, no, my lord," she answered quietly; "what should one poor unfriended
girl do in contest with the Earl of Leicester?  But yet, in very truth,
I have friends, and in my hour of greatest need I shall go seeking."

She was thinking of the Queen.  He guessed her thought.

"You will not be so mad," he said urbanely again.  "Of what can you
complain to the Queen?  Tut, tut, you must seek other friends than the
Majesty of England!"

"Then, my lord, I will," she answered bravely.  "I will seek the help of
such a Friend as fails not when all fails, even He who putteth down the
mighty from their seats and exalteth the humble."

"Well, well, if I have not touched your heart," he answered gallantly,
"I at least have touched your wit and intellect.  Once more I offer you
alliance.  Think well before you decline."

He had no thought that he would succeed, but it was ever his way to
return to the charge.  It had been the secret of his life's success so
far.  He had never taken a refusal.  He had never believed that when man
or woman said no that no was meant; and, if it were meant, he still
believed that constant dropping would wear away the stone.  He still held
that persistence was the greatest lever in the world, that unswerving
persistence was the master of opportunity.

They had now come to two paths in the park leading different ways.

"This road leads to Kenilworth, this to your prison," he said with a slow
gesture, his eyes fixed upon hers.  "I will go to my prison, then," she
said, stepping forward, "and alone, by your leave."

Leicester was a good sportsman.  Though he had been beaten all along the
line, he hid his deep chagrin, choked down the rage that was in him.
Smiling, he bowed low.

"I will do myself the honour to visit your prison to-morrow," he said.

"My father will welcome you, my lord," she answered, and, gathering up
her skirt, ran down the pathway.

He stood unmoving, and watched her disappear.  "But I shall have my way
with them both," he said aloud.

The voice of a singer sounded in the green wood.  Half consciously
Leicester listened.  The words came shrilling through the trees:

                   "Oh, love, it is a lily flower,
                    (Sing, my captain, sing, my lady!)
                    The sword shall cleave it,
                    Life shall leave it
                    Who shall know the hour?
                    (Sing, my lady, still!)"

Presently the jingling of bells mingled with the song, then a figure in
motley burst upon him.  It was the Queen's fool.

"Brother, well met--most happily met!" he cried.  "And why well met,
fool?" asked Leicester.  "Prithee, my work grows heavy, brother.  I seek
another fool for the yoke.  Here are my bells for you.  I will keep my
cap.  And so we will work together, fool: you for the morning, I for the
afternoon, and the devil take the night-time!  So God be with you,
Obligato!"

With a laugh he leaped into the undergrowth, and left Leicester standing
with the bells in his hand.




CHAPTER XVI

Angele had come to know, as others in like case have ever done, how
wretched indeed is that poor man that hangs on princes' favours.  She had
saved the Queen's life upon May Day, and on the evening of that day the
Queen had sent for her, had made such high and tender acknowledgment of
her debt as would seem to justify for her perpetual honour.  And what
Elizabeth said she meant; but in a life set in forests of complications
and opposing interests the political overlapped the personal in her
nature.  Thus it was that she had kept the princes of the world dangling,
advancing towards marriage with them, retreating suddenly, setting off
one house against the other, allying herself to one European power
to-day, with another to-morrow, her own person and her crown the pawn
with which she played.  It was not a beautiful thing in a woman, but it
was what a woman could do; and, denied other powers given to men--as to
her father--she resorted to astute but doubtful devices to advance her
diplomacy.  Over all was self-infatuation, the bane of princes, the curse
of greatness, the source of wide injustice.  It was not to be expected,
as Leicester had said, that Elizabeth, save for the whim of the moment,
would turn aside to confer benefit upon Angele or to keep her in mind,
unless constrained to do so for some political reason.

The girl had charmed the Queen, had, by saving her life, made England
her long debtor; but Leicester had judged rightly in believing that the
Queen might find the debt irksome; that her gratitude would be corroded
by other destructive emotions.  It was true that Angele had saved her
life, but Michel had charmed her eye.  He had proved himself a more
gallant fighter than any in her kingdom; and had done it, as he had said,
in her honour.  So, as her admiration for Michel grew, her debt to Angele
became burdensome; and, despite her will, there stole into her mind the
old petulance and smothered anger against beauty and love and marriage.
She could ill bear that one near her person should not be content to
flourish in the light and warmth of her own favour, setting aside all
other small affections.  So it was that she had sent Angele to her father
and kept De la Foret in the palace.  Perplexed, troubled by new
developments, the birth of a son to Mary Queen of Scots, the demand of
her Parliament that she should marry, the pressure of foreign policy
which compelled her to open up again negotiations for marriage with the
Duke of Anjou--all these combined to detach her from the interest she had
suddenly felt in Angele.  But, by instinct, she knew also that Leicester,
through jealousy, had increased the complication; and, fretful under the
long influence he had had upon her, she steadily lessened intercourse
with him.  The duel he fought with Lempriere on May Day came to her ears
through the Duke's Daughter, and she seized upon it with sharp petulance.
First she ostentatiously gave housing and care to Lempriere, and went to
visit him; then, having refused Leicester audience, wrote to him.

"What is this I hear," she scrawled upon the paper, "that you have forced
a quarrel with the Lord of Rozel, and have well-ny ta'en his life!  Is
swording then your dearest vice that you must urge it on a harmless
gentle man, and my visitor?  Do you think you hold a charter of freedom
for your self-will?  Have a care, Leicester, or, by God!  you shall know
another sword surer than your own."

The rage of Leicester on receiving this knew no bounds; for though he had
received from Elizabeth stormy letters before, none had had in it the
cold irony of this missive.  The cause of it?  Desperation seized him.
With a mad disloyalty he read in every word of Elizabeth's letter, Michel
de la Foret, refugee.  With madder fury he determined to strike for the
immediate ruin of De la Foret, and Angele with him--for had she not
thrice repulsed him as though he had been some village captain?  After
the meeting in the maze he had kept his promise of visiting her "prison."
By every art, and without avail, he had through patient days sought to
gain an influence over her; for he saw that if he could but show the
Queen that the girl was open to his advances, accepted his protection,
her ruin would be certain--in anger Elizabeth would take revenge upon
both refugees.  But however much he succeeded with Monsieur Aubert, he
failed wholly with Angele.  She repulsed him still with the most certain
courtesy, with the greatest outward composure; but she had to make her
fight alone, for the Queen forbade intercourse with Michel, and she must
have despaired but for the messages sent now and then by the Duke's
Daughter.

Through M. Aubert, to whom Leicester was diligently courteous, and whom
he sought daily, discussing piously the question of religion so dear to
the old man's heart, he strove to foster in Angele's mind the suspicion
he had ventured at their meeting in the maze, that the Queen, through
personal interest in Michel, was saving his life to keep him in her
household.  So well did he work on the old man's feelings that when he
offered his own protection to M. Aubert and Angele, whatever the issue
with De la Foret might be, he was met with an almost tearful response of
gratitude.  It was the moment to convey a deep distrust of De la Foret to
the mind of the old refugee, and it was subtly done.

Were it not better to leave the Court where only danger surrounded them,
and find safety on Leicester's own estate, where no man living could
molest them?  Were it not well to leave Michel de la Foret to his fate,
what ever it would be?  Thrice within a week the Queen had sent for De la
Foret--what reason was there for that, unless the Queen had a secret
personal interest in him?  Did M. Aubert think it was only a rare touch
of humour which had turned De la Foret into a preacher, and set his fate
upon a sermon to be preached before the Court?  He himself had long held
high office, had been near to her Majesty, and he could speak with more
knowledge than he might use--it grieved him that Mademoiselle Aubert
should be placed in so painful a position.

Sometimes as the two talked Angele would join them; and then there was
a sudden silence, which made her flush with embarrassment, anxiety or
anger.  In vain did she assume a cold composure, in vain school herself
to treat Leicester with a precise courtesy; in vain her heart protested
the goodness of De la Foret and high uprightness of the Queen; the
persistent suggestions of the dark Earl worked upon her mind in spite
of all.  Why had the Queen forbidden her to meet Michel, or write to him,
or to receive letters from him?  Why had the Queen, who had spoken such
gratitude, deserted her?  And now even the Duke's Daughter wrote to her
no more, sent her no further messages.  She felt herself a prisoner, and
that the Queen had forgotten her debt.  She took to wandering to that
part of the palace-grounds where she could see the windows of the tower
her lover inhabited.  Her old habit of cheerful talk deserted her, and
she brooded.  It was long before she heard of the duel between the
Seigneur and Lord Leicester--the Duke's Daughter had kept this from her,
lest she should be unduly troubled--and when, in anxiety, she went to the
house where Lempriere had been quartered, he had gone, none could tell
her whither.  Buonespoir was now in close confinement, by secret orders
of Leicester, and not allowed to walk abroad; and thus with no friend
save her father, now so much under the influence of the Earl, she was
bitterly solitary.  Bravely she fought the growing care and suspicion in
her heart; but she was being tried beyond her strength.  Her father had
urged her to make personal appeal to the Queen; and at times, despite her
better judgment, she was on the verge of doing so.  Yet what could she
say?  She could not go to the Queen of England and cry out, like a silly
milk-maid: "You have taken my lover--give him back to me!"  What proof
had she that the Queen wanted her lover?  And if she spoke, the
impertinence of the suggestion might send back to the fierce Medici that
same lover, to lose his head.

Leicester, who now was playing the game as though it were a hazard for
states and kingdoms, read the increasing trouble in her face; and waited
confidently for the moment when in desperation she would lose her self-
control and go to the Queen.

But he did not reckon with the depth of the girl's nature and her true
sense of life.  Her brain told her that what she was tempted to do she
should not; that her only way was to wait; to trust that the Queen of
England was as much true woman as Queen, and as much Queen as true woman;
and that the one was held in high equipoise by the other.  Besides,
Trinity Day would bring the end of it all, and that was not far off.  She
steeled her will to wait till then, no matter how dark the sky might be.

As time went on, Leicester became impatient.  He had not been able to
induce M. Aubert to compel Angele to accept a quiet refuge at Kenilworth;
he saw that this plan would not work, and he deployed his mind upon
another.  If he could but get Angele to seek De la Foret in his apartment
in the palace, and then bring the matter to Elizabeth's knowledge with
sure proof, De la Foret's doom would be sealed.  At great expense,
however; for, in order to make the scheme effective, Angele should visit
De la Foret at night.  This would mean the ruin of the girl as well.
Still that could be set right; because, once De la Foret was sent to the
Medici the girl's character could be cleared; and, if not, so much the
surer would she come at last to his protection.  What he had professed in
cold deliberation had become in some sense a fact.  She had roused in him
an eager passion.  He might even dare, when De la Foret was gone, to
confess his own action in the matter to the Queen, once she was again
within his influence.  She had forgiven him more than that in the past,
when he had made his own mad devotion to herself excuse for his rashness
or misconduct.

He waited opportunity, he arranged all details carefully, he secured the
passive agents of his purpose; and when the right day came he acted.

About ten o'clock one night, a half-hour before the closing of the palace
gates, when no one could go in or go out save by permit of the Lord
Chamberlain, a footman from a surgeon of the palace came to Angele,
bearing a note which read:

     "Your friend is very ill, and asks for you.  Come hither alone; and
     now, if you would come at all."

Her father was confined to bed with some ailment of the hour, and asleep
--it were no good to awaken him.  Her mind was at once made up.  There
was no time to ask permission of the Queen.  She knew the surgeon's
messengers by sight, this one was in the usual livery, and his master's
name was duly signed.  In haste she made herself ready, and went forth
into the night with the messenger, her heart beating hard, a pitiful
anxiety shaking her.  Her steps were fleet between the lodge and the
palace.  They were challenged nowhere, and the surgeon's servant,
entering a side door of the palace, led her hastily through gloomy halls
and passages where they met no one, though once in a dark corridor some
one brushed against her.  She wondered why there were no servants to show
the way, why the footman carried no torch or candle; but haste and
urgency seemed due excuse, and she thought only of Michel, and that she
would soon see him-dying, dead perhaps before she could touch his hand!
At last they emerged into a lighter and larger hallway, where her guide
suddenly paused, and said to Angel, motioning towards a door: "Enter.
He is there."

For a moment she stood still, scarce able to breathe, her heart hurt her
so.  It seemed to her as though life itself was arrested.  As the
servant, without further words, turned and left her, she knocked, opened
the door without awaiting a reply, and stepping into semidarkness, said
softly:

"Michel!  Michel!"




CHAPTER XVII

At Angle's entrance a form slowly raised itself on a couch, and a voice,
not Michel's, said: "Mademoiselle--by our Lady, 'tis she!"

It was the voice of the Seigneur of Rozel, and Angle started back amazed.

"You, Monsieur--you!" she gasped.  "It was you that sent for me?"

"Send?  Not I--I have not lost my manners yet.  Rozel at Court is no
greater fool than Lempriere in Jersey."

Angle wrung her hands.  "I thought it De la Foret who was ill.  The
surgeon said to come quickly."  Lempriere braced himself against the
wall, for he was weak, and his fever still high.  "Ill?--not he.  As
sound in body and soul as any man in England.  That is a friend, that De
la Foret lover of yours, or I'm no butler to the Queen.  He gets leave
and brings me here and coaxes me back to life again--with not a wink of
sleep for him these five days past till now."

Angel had drawn nearer, and now stood beside the couch, trembling and
fearful, for it came to her mind that she had been made the victim of
some foul device.  The letter had read: "Your friend is ill."  True,
the Seigneur was her friend, but he had not sent for her.

"Where is De la Foret?" she asked quickly.  "Yonder, asleep," said
the Seigneur, pointing to a curtain which divided the room from one
adjoining.  Angel ran quickly towards the door, then stopped short.  No,
she would not waken him.  She would go back at once.  She would leave the
palace by the way she came.  Without a word she turned and went towards
the door opening into the hallway.  With her hand upon the latch she
stopped short again; for she realised that she did not know her way
through the passages and corridors, and that she must make herself known
to the servants of the palace to obtain guidance and exit.  As she stood
helpless and confused, the Seigneur called hoarsely: "De la Foret--De la
Foret!"  Before Angele could decide upon her course, the curtain of the
other room was thrust aside, and De la Foret entered.  He was scarce
awake, and he yawned contentedly.  He did not see Angele, but turned
towards Lempriere.  For once the Seigneur had a burst of inspiration.
He saw that Angele was in the shadow, and that De la Foret had not
observed her.  He determined that the lovers should meet alone.

"Your arm, De la Foret," he grunted.  "I'll get me to the bed in yonder
room--'tis easier than this couch."  "Two hours ago you could not bear
the bed, and must get you to the couch--and now!  Seigneur, do you know
the weight you are?" he added, laughing, as he stooped, and helping
Lempriere gently to his feet, raised him slowly in his arms and went
heavily with him to the bedroom.  Angele watched him with a strange
thrill of timid admiration and delight.  Surely it could not be that
Michel--her Michel--could be bought from his allegiance by any influence
on earth.  There was the same old simple laugh on his lips, as, with
chaffing words, he carried the huge Seigneur to the other room.  Her
heart acquitted him then and there of all blame, past or to come.

"Michel!" she said aloud involuntarily--the call of her spirit which
spoke on her lips against her will.

De la Foret had helped Lempriere to the bed again as he heard his name
called, and he stood suddenly still, looking straight before him into
space.  Angele's voice seemed ghostly and unreal.

"Michel!" he heard again, and he came forward into the room where she
was.  Yet once again she said the word scarcely above a whisper, for the
look of rapt wonder and apprehension in his manner overcame her.  Now he
turned towards her, where she stood in the shadow by the door.  He saw
her, but even yet he did not stir, for she seemed to him still an
apparition.

With a little cry she came forward to him.  "Michel--help me!" she
murmured, and stretched out her hands.  With a cry of joy he took her in
his arms and pressed her to his heart.  Then a realisation of danger came
to him.

"Why did you come?" he asked.

She told him hastily.  He heard with astonishment, and then said: "There
is some foul trick here.  Have you the message?"  She handed it to him.
"It is the surgeon's writing, verily," he said; "but it is still a
trick, for the sick man here is Rozel.  I see it all.  You and I
forbidden to meet--it was a trick to bring you here."

"Oh, let me go!" she cried.  "Michel, Michel, take me hence."  She
turned towards the door.

"The gates are closed," he said, as a cannon boomed on the evening air.

Angele trembled violently.  "Oh, what will come of this?" she cried, in
tearful despair.

"Be patient, sweet, and let me think," he answered.  At that moment there
came a knocking at the door, then it was thrown open, and there stepped
inside the Earl of Leicester, preceded by a page bearing a torch.

"Is Michel de la Foret within?" he called; then stopped short, as though
astonished, seeing Angele.  "So!  so!" he said, with a contemptuous
laugh.  Michel de la Foret's fingers twitched.  He quickly stepped in
front of Angele, and answered: "What is your business here, my lord?"

Leicester languorously took off a glove, and seemed to stifle a yawn in
it; then said: "I came to take you into my service, to urge upon you for
your own sake to join my troops, going upon duty in the North; for I fear
that if you stay here the Queen Mother of France will have her way.  But
I fear I am too late.  A man who has sworn himself into service d'amour
has no time for service de la guerre."

"I will gladly give an hour from any service I may follow to teach the
Earl of Leicester that he is less a swordsman than a trickster."

Leicester flushed, but answered coolly: "I can understand your chagrin.
You should have locked your door.  It is the safer custom."  He bowed
lightly towards Angele.  "You have not learned our English habits of
discretion, Monsieur de la Foret.  I would only do you service.  I
appreciate your choler.  I should be no less indignant.  So, in the
circumstances, I will see that the gates are opened, of course you did
not realise the flight of time,--and I will take Mademoiselle to her
lodgings.  You may rely on my discretion.  I am wholly at your service
--tout a vous, as who should say in your charming language."

The insolence was so veiled in perfect outward courtesy that it must have
seemed impossible for De la Foret to reply in terms equal to the moment.
He had, however, no need to reply, for the door of the room suddenly
opened, and two pages stepped inside with torches.

They were followed by a gentleman in scarlet and gold, who said, "The
Queen!" and stepped aside.

An instant afterwards Elizabeth, with the Duke's Daughter, entered.

The three dropped upon their knees, and Elizabeth waved without the pages
and the gentleman-in-waiting.  When the doors closed, the Queen eyed the
three kneeling figures, and as her glance fell on Leicester a strange
glitter came into her eyes.  She motioned all to rise, and with a hand
upon the arm of the Duke's Daughter, said to Leicester:

"What brings the Earl of Leicester here?"

"I came to urge upon Monsieur the wisdom of holding to the Sword and
leaving the Book to the butter-fingered religious.  Your Majesty needs
good soldiers."

He bowed, but not low, and it was clear he was bent upon a struggle.  He
was confounded by the Queen's presence, he could not guess why she should
have come; and that she was prepared for what she saw was clear.

"And brought an eloquent pleader with you?"  She made a scornful gesture
towards Angele.

"Nay, your Majesty; the lady's zeal outran my own, and crossed the
threshold first."

The Queen's face wore a look that Leicester had never seen on it before,
and he had observed it in many moods.

"You found the lady here, then?"

"With Monsieur alone.  Seeing she was placed unfortunately, I offered to
escort her hence to her father.  But your Majesty came upon the moment."

There was a ring of triumph in Leicester's voice.  No doubt, by some
chance, the Queen had become aware of Angele's presence, he thought.
Fate had forestalled the letter he had already written on this matter
and meant to send her within the hour.  Chance had played into his hands
with perfect suavity.  The Queen, less woman now than Queen, enraged by
the information got he knew not how, had come at once to punish the gross
breach of her orders and a dark misconduct-so he thought.

The Queen's look, as she turned it on Angele, apparently had in it what
must have struck terror to even a braver soul than that of the helpless
Huguenot girl.

"So it is thus you spend the hours of night?  God's faith, but you are
young to be so wanton!" she cried in a sharp voice.  "Get you from my
sight and out of my kingdom as fast as horse and ship may carry you--as
feet may bear you."  Leicester's face lighted to hear.  "Your high
Majesty," pleaded the girl, dropping on her knees, "I am innocent.  As
God lives, I am innocent."

"The man, then, only is guilty?" the Queen rejoined with scorn.  "Is it
innocent to be here at night, my palace gates shut, with your lover-
alone?"  Leicester laughed at the words.

"Your Majesty, oh, your gracious Majesty, hear me.  We were not alone--
not alone--"

There was a rustle of curtains, a heavy footstep, and Lempriere of Rozel
staggered into the room.  De la Foret ran to help him, and throwing an
arm around him, almost carried him towards the couch.  Lempriere,
however, slipped from De la Foret's grasp to his knees on the floor
before the Queen.

"Not alone, your high and sacred Majesty, I am here--I have been here
through all.  I was here when Mademoiselle came, brought hither by trick
of some knave not fit to be your immortal Majesty's subject.  I speak the
truth, for I am butler to your Majesty and no liar.  I am Lempriere of
Rozel."

No man's self-control could meet such a surprise without wavering.
Leicester was confounded, for he had not known that Lempriere was housed
with De la Foret.  For a moment he could do naught but gaze at Lempriere.
Then, as the Seigneur suddenly swayed and would have fallen, the instinct
of effective courtesy, strong in him, sent him with arms outstretched to
lift him up.  Together, without a word, he and De la Foret carried him to
the couch and laid him down.  That single act saved Leicester's life.
There was something so naturally (though, in truth, it was so
hypocritically) kind in the way he sprang to his enemy's assistance that
an old spirit of fondness stirred in the Queen's breast, and she looked
strangely at him.  When, however, they had disposed of Lempriere and
Leicester had turned again towards her, she said: "Did you think I had no
loyal and true gentlemen at my Court, my lord?  Did you think my leech
would not serve me as fair as he would serve the Earl of Leicester?  You
have not bought us all, Robert Dudley, who have bought and sold so long.
The good leech did your bidding and sent your note to the lady; but there
your bad play ended and Fate's began.  A rabbit's brains, Leicester--and
a rabbit's end.  Fate has the brains you need."

Leicester's anger burst forth now under the lash of ridicule.  "I cannot
hope to win when your Majesty plays Fate in caricature."

With a little gasp of rage Elizabeth leaned over and slapped his face
with her long glove.  "Death of my life, but I who made you do unmake
you!" she cried.

He dropped his hand on his sword.  "If you were but a man, and not--" he
said, then stopped short, for there was that in the Queen's face which
changed his purpose.  Anger was shaking her, but there were tears in her
eyes.  The woman in her was stronger than the Queen.  It was nothing to
her at this moment that she might have his life as easily as she had
struck his face with her glove; this man had once shown the better part
of himself to her, and the memory of it shamed her for his own sake now.
She made a step towards the door, then turned and spoke:

"My Lord, I have no palace and no ground wherein your footstep will not
be trespass.  Pray you, remember."

She turned towards Lempriere, who lay on his couch faint and panting.
"For you, my Lord of Rozel, I wish you better health, though you have
lost it somewhat in a good cause."

Her glance fell on De la Foret.  Her look softened.  "I will hear you
preach next Sunday, sir."

There was an instant's pause, and then she said to Angele, with gracious
look and in a low voice: "You have heard from me that calumny which the
innocent never escape.  To try you I neglected you these many days; to
see your nature even more truly than I knew it, I accused you but now.
You might have been challenged first by one who could do you more harm
than Elizabeth of England, whose office is to do good, not evil.  Nets
are spread for those whose hearts are simple, and your feet have been
caught.  Be thankful that we understand; and know that Elizabeth is your
loving friend.  You have had trials--I have kept you in suspense--there
has been trouble for us all; but we are better now; our minds are more
content; so all may be well, please God!  You will rest this night with
our lady-dove here, and to-morrow early you shall return in peace to your
father.  You have a good friend in our cousin."  She made a gentle motion
towards the Duke's Daughter.  "She has proved it so.  In my leech
she has a slave.  To her you owe this help in time of need.  She hath
wisdom, too, and we must listen to her, even as I have done this day."

She inclined her head towards the door.  Leicester opened it, and as she
passed out she gave him one look which told him that his game was lost,
if not for ever, yet for time uncertain and remote.  "You must not blame
the leech, my lord," she said, suddenly turning back.  "The Queen of
England has first claim on the duty of her subjects.  They serve me for
love; you they help at need as time-servers."

She stepped on, then paused again and looked back.  "Also I forbid
fighting betwixt you," she said, in a loud voice, looking at De la Foret
and Leicester.

Without further sign or look, she moved on.  Close behind came Angele and
the Duke's Daughter, and Leicester followed at some distance.




CHAPTER XVIII

Not far from the palace, in a secluded place hidden by laburnum, roses,
box and rhododendrons, there was a quaint and beautiful retreat.  High
up on all sides of a circle of green the flowering trees and shrubs
interlaced their branches, and the grass, as smooth as velvet, was of
such a note as soothed the eye and quieted the senses.  In one segment of
the verdant circle was a sort of open bower made of poles, up which roses
climbed and hung across in gay festoons; and in two other segments mossy
banks made resting-places.  Here, in days gone by, when Robert Dudley,
Earl of Leicester, first drew the eyes of his Queen upon him, Elizabeth
came to listen to his vows of allegiance, which swam in floods of
passionate devotion to her person.  Christopher Hatton, Sir Henry Lee,
the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Sussex, a race of gallants, had knelt
upon this pleasant sward.  Here they had declared a devotion that,
historically platonic, had a personal passion which, if rewarded by no
personal requital, must have been an expensive outlay of patience and
emotion.

But those days had gone.  Robert Dudley had advanced far past his
fellows, had locked himself into the chamber of the Queen's confidence,
had for long proved himself necessary to her, had mingled deference and
admiration with an air of monopoly, and had then advanced to an air of
possession, of suggested control.  Then had begun his decline.  England
and England's Queen could have but one ruler, and upon an occasion in the
past Elizabeth made it clear by the words she used: "God's death, my
Lord, I have wished you well; but my favour is not so locked up for you
that others shall not partake thereof; and, if you think to rule here,
I will take a course to see you forthcoming.  I will have here but one
mistress and no master."

In these words she but declared what was the practice of her life, the
persistent passion of her rule.  The world could have but one sun, and
every man or woman who sought its warmth must be a sun-worshipper.  There
could be no divided faith, no luminaries in the sky save those which
lived by borrowed radiance.

Here in this bright theatre of green and roses poets had sung the praises
of this Queen to her unblushing and approving face; here ladies thrice as
beautiful as she had begged her to tell them the secret of her beauty, so
much greater than that of any living woman; and she was pleased even when
she knew they flattered but to gain her smile--it was the tribute that
power exacts.  The place was a cenotaph of past romance and pleasure.
Every leaf of every tree and flower had impressions of glories, of love,
ambition and intrigue, of tears and laughter, of joyousness and ruin.
Never a spot in England where so much had been said and done, so far
reaching in effect and influence.  But its glory was departed, its day
was done, it was a place of dreams and memories: the Queen came here no
more.  Many years had withered since she had entered this charmed spot;
and that it remained so fine was but evidence of the care of those to
whom she had given strict orders seven years past, that in and out of
season it must be ever kept as it had erstwhile been.  She had never
entered the place since the day the young Marquis of Wessex, whom she had
imprisoned for marrying secretly and without her consent, on his release
came here, and, with a concentrated bitterness and hate, had told her
such truths as she never had heard from man or woman since she was born.
He had impeached her in such cold and murderous terms as must have made
wince even a woman with no pride.  To Elizabeth it was gall and wormwood.
When he at last demanded the life of the young wife who had died in
enforced seclusion, because she had married the man she loved, Elizabeth
was so confounded that she hastily left the place, saying no word in
response.  This attack had been so violent, so deadly, that she had
seemed unnerved, and forbore to command him to the Tower or to death.

"You, in whose breast love never stirred, deny the right to others whom
God blessed with it," he cried.  "Envious of mortal happiness that dare
exist outside your will or gift, you sunder and destroy.  You, in whose
hands was power to give joy, gave death.  What you have sown you shall
reap.  Here on this spot I charge you with high treason, with treachery
to the people over whom you have power as a trust, which trust you have
made a scourge."

With such words as these he had assailed her, and for the first time in
her life she had been confounded.  In safety he had left the place, and
taken his way to Italy, from which he had never returned, though she had
sent for him in kindness.  Since that day Elizabeth had never come
hither; and by-and-by none of her Court came save the Duke's Daughter,
and her fool, who both made it their resort.  Here the fool came upon the
Friday before Trinity Day, bringing with him Lempriere and Buonespoir,
to whom he had much attached himself.

It was a day of light and warmth, and the place was like a basket of
roses.  Having seen the two serving-men dispose, in a convenient place,
the refreshment which Lempriere's appetite compelled, the fool took
command of the occasion and made the two sit upon a bank, while he
prepared the repast.

Strangest of the notable trio was the dwarfish fool with his shaggy black
head, twisted mouth, and watchful, wandering eye, whose foolishness was
but the flaunting cover of shrewd observation and trenchant vision.
Going where he would, and saying what he listed, now in the Queen's inner
chamber, then in the midst of the Council, unconsidered, and the butt of
all, he paid for his bed and bounty by shooting shafts of foolery which
as often made his listeners shrink as caused their laughter.  The Queen
he called Delicio, and Leicester, Obligato--as one who piped to another's
dance.  He had taken to Buonespoir at the first glance, and had
frequented him, and Lempriere had presently been added to his favour.
He had again and again been messenger between them, as also of late
between Angele and Michel, whose case he viewed from a stand-point of
great cheerfulness, and treated them as children playing on the sands--
as, indeed, he did the Queen and all near to her.  But Buonespoir, the
pirate, was to him reality and the actual, and he called him Bono
Publico.  At first Lempriere, ever jealous of his importance, was
inclined to treat him with elephantine condescension; but he could not
long hold out against the boon archness of the jester, and he collapsed
suddenly into as close a friendship as that between himself and
Buonespoir.

A rollicking spirt was his own fullest stock-in-trade, and it won him
like a brother.

So it was that here, in the very bosom of the forest, lured by the pipe
the fool played, Lempriere burst forth into song, in one hand a bottle
of canary, in the other a handful of comfits:

                   "Duke William was a Norman
                    (Spread the sail to the breeze!)
                    That did to England ride;
                    At Hastings by the Channel
                    (Drink the wine to the lees!)
                    Our Harold the Saxon died.
                    If there be no cakes from Normandy,
                    There'll be more ale in England!"

"Well sung, nobility, and well said," cried Buonespoir, with a rose by
the stem in his mouth, one hand beating time to the music, the other
clutching a flagon of muscadella; "for the Normans are kings in England,
and there's drink in plenty at the Court of our Lady Duchess."

"Delicio shall never want while I have a penny of hers to spend," quoth
the fool, feeling for another tune.  "Should conspirators prevail, and
the damnedest be, she hath yet the Manor of Rozel and my larder," urged
Lempriere, with a splutter through the canary.

"That shall be only when the Fifth wind comes--it is so ordained,
Nuncio!" said the fool blinking.  Buonespoir set down his flagon.
"And what wind is the Fifth wind?" he asked, scratching his bullethead,
his child-like, widespread eyes smiling the question.

"There be now four winds--the North wind and his sisters, the East, the
West, and South.  When God sends a Fifth wind, then conspirators shall
wear crowns.  Till then Delicio shall sow and I shall reap, as is
Heaven's will."

Lempriere lay back and roared with laughter.  "Before Belial, there never
was such another as thou, fool.  Conspirators shall die and not prevail,
for a man may not marry his sister, and the North wind shall have no
progeny.  So there shall be no Fifth wind."

"Proved, proved," cried the fool.  "The North wind shall go whistle for a
mate--there shall be no Fifth wind.  So, Delicio shall still sail by the
compass, and shall still compass all, and yet be compassed by none; for
it is written, Who compasseth Delicio existeth not."

Buonespoir watched a lark soaring, as though its flight might lead him
through the fool's argument clearly.  Lempriere closed his eye, and
struggled with it, his lips outpursed, his head sunk on his breast.
Suddenly his eyes opened, he brought the bottle of canary down with a
thud on the turf.  "'Fore Michael and all angels, I have it, fool; I
travel, I conceive.  De Carteret of St. Ouen's must have gone to the
block ere conceiving so.  I must conceive thus of the argument.  He who
compasseth the Queen existeth not, for compassing, he dieth."

"So it is by the hour-glass and the fortune told in the porringer.  You
have conceived like a man, Nuncio."

"And conspirators, I conceive, must die, so long as there be honest men
to slay them," rejoined the Seigneur.

"Must only honest men slay conspirators?  Oh, Shadrach, Meshach, and
Abednego!" wheezed Buonespoir with a grin.  He placed his hand upon his
head in self-pity.  "Buonespoir, art thou damned by muscadella?" he
murmured.

"But thou art purged of the past, Bono Publico," answered the fool.
"Since Delicio hath looked upon thee she hath shredded the Tyburn lien
upon thee--thou art flushed like a mountain spring; and conspirators
shall fall down by thee if thou, passant, dost fall by conspirators in
the way.  Bono Publico, thou shalt live by good company.  Henceforth
contraband shall be spurned and the book of grace opened."

Buonespoir's eyes laughed like a summer sky, but he scratched his head
and turned over the rose-stem in his mouth reflectively.  "So be it,
then, if it must be; but yesterday the Devon sea-sweeper, Francis Drake,
overhauled me in my cottage, coming from the Queen, who had infused him
of me.  'I have heard of you from a high masthead,' said he.  'If the
Spanish main allure you, come with me.  There be galleons yonder still;
they shall cough up doubloons.'  'It hath a sound of piracy,' said I.
'I am expurgated.  My name is written on clean paper now, blessed be the
name of the Queen!'  'Tut, tut, Buonesperado,' laughed he, 'you shall
forget that Tyburn is not a fable if you care to have doubloons reminted
at the Queen's mint.  It is meet Spanish Philip's head be molted to
oblivion, and Elizabeth's raised, so that good silver be purged of Popish
alloy.'  But that I had sworn by the little finger of St. Peter when the
moon was full, never to leave the English seas, I also would have gone
with Drake of Devon this day.  It is a man and a master of men that Drake
of Devon."

"'Tis said that when a man hath naught left but life, and hath treated
his honour like a poor relation, he goes to the Spanish main with Drake
and Grenville," said Lempriere.

"Then must Obligato go, for he hath such credentials," said the fool,
blowing thistle-down in the air.  "Yesterday was no Palm Sunday to
Leicester.  Delicio's head was high.  'Imperial Majesty,' quoth Obligato,
his knees upon the rushes, 'take my life but send me not forth into
darkness where I shall see my Queen no more.  By the light of my Queen's
eyes have I walked, and pains of hell are my Queen's displeasure.'
'Methinks thy humbleness is tardy,' quoth Delicio.  'No cock shall crow
by my nest,' said she.  'And, by the mantle of Elijah, I am out with sour
faces and men of phlegm and rheum.  I will be gay once more.  So get thee
gone to Kenilworth, and stray not from it on thy peril.  Take thy malaise
with thee, and I shall laugh again.'  Behold he goeth.  So that was the
end of Obligato, and now cometh another tune."

"She hath good cheer?" asked Lempriere eagerly.  "I have never seen
Delicio smile these seven years as she smiled to-day; and when she kissed
Amicitia I sent for my confessor and made my will.  Delicio hath come to
spring-time, and the voice of the turtle is in her ear."  "Amicitia--and
who is Amicitia?" asked Lempriere, well flushed with wine.

"She who hath brought Obligato to the diminuendo and finale," answered
the fool; "even she who hath befriended the Huguenottine of the black
eyes."

"Ah, she, the Duke's Daughter--v'la, that is a flower of a lady!  Did she
not say that my jerkin fitted neatly when I did act as butler to her
adorable Majesty three months syne?  She hath no mate in the world save
Mademoiselle Aubert, whom I brought hither to honour and to fame."

"To honour and fame, was it--but by the hill of desperandum, Nuncio,"
said the fool, prodding him with his stick of bells.

"'Desperandum'!  I know not Latin; it amazes me," said Lempriere, waving
a lofty hand.

"She--the Huguenottine--was a-mazed also, and from the maze was played by
Obligato."

"How so!  how so!" cried the Seigneur, catching at his meaning.  "Did
Leicester waylay and siege?  'Sblood, had I known this, I'd have broached
him and swallowed him even on crutches."

"She made him raise the siege, she turned his own guns upon him, and in
the end hath driven him hence."  By rough questioning Lempriere got from
the fool by snatches the story of the meeting in the maze, which had left
Leicester standing with the jester's ribboned bells in his hand.  Then
the Seigneur got to his feet, and hugged the fool, bubbling with
laughter.

"By all the blood of all the saints, I will give thee burial in my own
grave when all's done," he spluttered; "for there never was such fooling,
never such a wise fool come since Confucius and the Khan.  Good be with
you, fool, and thanks be for such a lady.  Thanks be also for the Duke's
Daughter.  Ah, how she laid Leicester out!  She washed him up the shore
like behemoth, and left him gaping."

Buonespoir intervened.  "And what shall come of it?  What shall be the
end?  The Honeyflower lies at anchor--there be three good men in waiting,
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and--"

The Seigneur interrupted.  "There's little longer waiting.  All's well!
Her high hereditary Majesty smiled on me when she gave Leicester conge
and fiery quittance.  She hath me in favour, and all shall be well with
Michel and Angele.  O fool, fool, fantastic and flavoured fool, sing me
a song of good content, for if this business ends not with crescendo and
bell-ringing, I am no butler to the Queen nor keep good company!"

Seating themselves upon the mossy bank, their backs to the westward sun,
the fool peered into the green shadows and sang with a soft melancholy an
ancient song that another fool had sung to the first Tudor:

                   "When blows the wind and drives the sleet,
                    And all the trees droop down;
                    When all the world is sad,
                    'tis meet Good company be known:
                    And in my heart good company
                    Sits by the fire and sings to me.

                   "When warriors return, and one
                    That went returns no more;
                    When dusty is the road we run,
                    And garners have no store;
                    One ingle-nook right warm shall be
                    Where my heart hath good company.

                   "When man shall flee and woman fail,
                    And folly mock and hope deceive,
                    Let cowards beat the breast and wail,
                    I'll homeward hie; I will not grieve:
                    I'll draw the blind, I'll there set free
                    My heart's beloved boon company.

                   "When kings shall favour, ladies call
                    My service to their side;
                    When roses grow upon the wall
                    Of life, with love inside;
                    I'll get me home with joy to be
                    In my heart's own good company!"

"Oh, fool, oh, beneficent fool, well done!  'Tis a song for a man--
'twould shame De Carteret of St. Ouen's to his knees," cried Lempriere.

"Oh, benignant fool, well done!  'twould draw me from my meals," said a
voice behind the three; and, turning hastily about, they saw, smiling and
applausive, the Duke's Daughter.  Beside her was Angele.

The three got to their feet, and each made obeisance after his kind-
Buonespoir ducking awkwardly, his blue eyes bulging with pleasure,
Lempriere swelling with vanity and spreading wide acknowledgment of their
presence, the fool condescending a wave of welcome.  "Oh!  abundant
Amicitia!" cried the fool to the Duke's Daughter, "thou art saved by so
doing.  So get thee to thanksgiving and God's mercy."

"Wherefore am I saved by being drawn from my meals by thy music, fool?"
she asked, linking her arm in Angele's.

"Because thou art more enamoured of lampreys than of man; and it is
written that thou shalt love thy fellow man, and he that loveth not is
lost: therefore thou art lost if thou lingerest at meals."

"Is it so, then?  And this lady--what thinkest thou?  Must she also
abstain and seek good company?"

"No, verily, Amicitia, for she is good company itself, and so she may
sleep in the larder and have no fear."

"And what think you--shall she be happy?  Shall she have gifts of fate?"

"Discriminately so, Amicitia.  She shall have souvenirs and no suspicions
of Fate.  But she shall not linger here, for all lingerers in Delicio's
Court are spied upon--not for their soul's good.  She shall go hence,
and--"

"Ay, princely lady, she shall go hence," interposed Lempriere, who had
panted to speak, and could bear silence no longer.  "Her high Majesty
will kiss her on the brow, and in Jersey Isle she shall blossom and bloom
and know bounty--or never more shall I have privilege and perquage."

He lumbered forward and kissed Angele's hand as though conferring
distinction, but with great generosity.  "I said that all should go well,
and so it shall.  Rozel shall prevail.  The Queen knows on what rock to
build, as I made warrant for her, and will still do so."

His vanity was incorrigible, but through it ran so child-like a spirit
that it bred friendship and repulsed not.  The Duke's Daughter pressed
the arm of Angele, who replied:

"Indeed it has been so according to your word, and we are--I am--shall
ever be beholden.  In storm you have been with us, so true a pilot and so
brave a sailor; and if we come to port and the quiet shore, there shall
be spread a feast of remembrance which shall never grow cold, Seigneur."

                   "One ingle-nook right warm shall be
                    Where my heart hath good company,"

sang the fool, and catching by the arm Buonespoir, who ducked his head in
farewell, ran him into the greenwood.  Angele came forward as if to stay
Buonespoir, but stopped short reflectively.  As she did so, the Duke's
Daughter whispered quickly into Lempriere's ear.

Swelling with pride he nodded, and said: "I will reach him and discover
myself to him, and bring him, if he stray, most undoubted and infallible
lady," and with an air of mystery he made a heavily respectful exit.

Left alone, the two ladies seated themselves in the bower of roses, and
for a moment were silent.  Presently the Duke's Daughter laughed aloud.

"In what seas of dear conceit swims your leviathan Seigneur, heart's-
ease?"

Angele stole a hand into the cool palm of the other.  "He was builded for
some lonely sea all his own.  Creation cheated him.  But God give me ever
such friends as he, and I shall indeed 'have good company' and fear no
issue."  She sighed.

"Remains there still a fear?  Did you not have good promise in the
Queen's words that night?"

"Ay, so it seemed, and so it seemed before--on May Day, and yet--"

"And yet she banished you, and tried you, and kept you heart-sick?
Sweet, know you not how bitter a thing it is to owe a debt of love to one
whom we have injured?  So it was with her.  The Queen is not a saint, but
very woman.  Marriage she hath ever contemned and hated; men she hath
desired to keep her faithful and impassioned servitors.  So does power
blind us.  And the braver the man, the more she would have him in her
service, at her feet, the centre of the world."

"I had served her in a crisis, an hour of peril.  Was naught due me?"

The Duke's Daughter drew her close.  "She never meant but that all should
be well.  And because you had fastened on her feelings as never I have
seen another of your sex, so for the moment she resented it; and because
De la Foret was yours--ah, if you had each been naught to the other, how
easy it would have run!  Do you not understand?"

"Nay, then, and yea, then--and I put it from me.  See, am I not happy
now?  Upon your friendship I build."

"Sweet, I did what I could.  Leicester filled her ears with poison
every day, mixed up your business and great affairs with France,
sought to convey that you both were not what you are; until at last I
countermarched him."  She laughed merrily.  "Ay, I can laugh now, but it
was all hanging by a thread, when my leech sent his letter that brought
you to the palace.  It had grieved me that I might not seek you, or write
to you in all those sad days; but the only way to save you was by keeping
the Queen's command; for she had known of Leicester's visits to you, of
your meeting in the maze, and she was set upon it that alone, all alone,
you should be tried to the last vestige of your strength.  If you had
failed--"

"If I had failed--" Angele closed her eyes and shuddered.  "I had not
cared for myself, but Michel--" "If you had failed, there had been no
need to grieve for Michel.  He then had not grieved for thee.  But see,
the wind blows fair, and in my heart I have no fear of the end.  You
shall go hence in peace.  This morning the Queen was happier than I have
seen her these many years: a light was in her eye brighter than showeth
to the Court.  She talked of this place, recalled the hours spent here,
spoke even softly of Leicester.  And that gives me warrant for the
future.  She has relief in his banishment, and only recalls older and
happier days when, if her cares were no greater, they were borne by the
buoyancy of girlhood and youth.  Of days spent here she talked until mine
own eyes went blind.  She said it was a place for lovers, and if she knew
any two lovers who were true lovers, and had been long parted, she would
send them here."

"There be two true lovers, and they have been long parted," murmured
Angele.

"But she commanded these lovers not to meet till Trinity Day, and she
brooks not disobedience even in herself.  How could she disobey her own
commands?  But"--her eyes were on the greenwood and the path that led
into the circle--"but she would shut her eyes to-day, and let the world
move on without her, let lovers thrive, and birds be nesting without heed
or hap.  Disobedience shall thrive when the Queen connives at it--and so
I leave you to your disobedience, sweet."

With a laugh she sprang to her feet, and ran.  Amazed and bewildered
Angele gazed after her.  As she stood looking she heard her name called
softly.

Turning, she saw Michel.  They were alone.




CHAPTER XIX

When De la Foret and Angele saw the Queen again it was in the royal
chapel.

Perhaps the longest five minutes of M. de la Foret's life were those in
which he waited the coming of the Queen on that Trinity Sunday which was
to decide his fate.  When he saw Elizabeth enter the chapel his eyes
swam, till the sight of them was lost in the blur of colour made by the
motions of gorgeously apparelled courtiers and the people of the
household.  When the Queen had taken her seat and all was quiet, he
struggled with himself to put on such a front of simple boldness as he
would wear upon day of battle.  The sword the Queen had given him was at
his side, and his garb was still that of a gentleman, not of a Huguenot
minister such as Elizabeth in her grim humour, and to satisfy her bond
with France, would make of him this day.

The brown of his face had paled in the weeks spent in the palace and in
waiting for this hour; anxiety had toned the ruddy vigour of his bearing;
but his figure was the figure of a soldier, and his hand that of a strong
man.  He shook a little as he bowed to her Majesty, but that passed, and
when at last his eye met that of the Duke's Daughter he grew steady; for
she gave him as plainly as though her tongue spoke, a message from
Angele.  Angele herself he did not see--she was kneeling in an obscure
corner, her father's hand in hers, all the passion of her life pouring
out in prayer.

De la Foret drew himself up with an iron will.  No nobler figure of a man
ever essayed to preach the Word, and so Elizabeth thought; and she
repented of the bitter humour which had set this trial as his chance of
life in England and his freedom from the hand of Catherine.  The man
bulked larger in her eyes than he had ever done, and she struggled with
herself to keep the vow she had made to the Duke's Daughter the night
that Angele had been found in De la Foret's rooms.  He had been the
immediate cause, fated or accidental, of the destined breach between
Leicester and herself; he had played a significant part in her own life.
Glancing at her courtiers, she saw that none might compare with him, the
form and being of calm boldness and courage.  She sighed she knew scarce
why.

When De la Foret first opened his mouth and essayed to call the
worshippers to prayer, no words came forth--only a dry whisper.  Some
ladies simpered, and more than one courtier laughed silently.  Michel
saw, and his face flamed up.  But he laid a hand on himself, and a moment
afterwards his voice came forth, clear, musical, and resonant, speaking
simple words, direct and unlacquered sentences, passionately earnest
withal.  He stilled the people to a unison of sentiment, none the less
interested and absorbed because it was known that he had been the cause
of the great breach between the Queen and the favourite.  Ere he had
spoken far, flippant gallants had ceased to flutter handkerchiefs, to
move their swords idly upon the floor.

He took for his text: "Stand and search for the old paths."  The
beginning of all systems of religion, the coming of the Nazarene, the
rise and growth of Christianity, the martyrdoms of the early church, the
invasion of the truth by false doctrine, the abuses of the Church, the
Reformation, the martyrdom of the Huguenots for the return to the early
principles of Christianity, the "search for the old paths," he set forth
in a tone generous but not fiery, presently powerful and searching, yet
not declamatory.  At the last he raised the sword that hung by his side,
and the Book that lay before him, and said:

"And what matter which it is we wield--this steel that strikes for God,
or this Book which speaks of Him?  For the Book is the sword of the
Spirit, and the sword is the life of humanity; for all faith must be
fought for, and all that is has been won by strife.  But the paths
wherein ye go to battle must be the old paths; your sword shall be your
staff by day, and the Book your lantern by night.  That which ye love ye
shall teach, and that which ye teach ye shall defend; and if your love be
a true love your teaching shall be a great teaching, and your sword a
strong sword which none may withstand.  It shall be the pride of
sovereign and of people; and so neither 'height, nor depth, nor any other
creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.'"

Ere he had ended, some of the ladies were overcome, the eyes of the
Duke's Daughter were full of tears, and Elizabeth said audibly, when he
ceased speaking: "On my soul, I have no bishop with a tongue like his.
Would that my Lord of Ely were here to learn how truth should be spoke.
Henceforth my bishops shall first be Camisards."

Of that hour's joyful business the Queen wrote thus to the Medici before
the day was done:

Cancelling all other letters on the matter, this M. de la Foret shall
stay in my kingdom.  I may not be the headsman of one of my faith--as
eloquent a preacher as he was a brave soldier.  Abiding by the strict
terms of our treaty with my brother of France, he shall stay with us in
peace, and in our own care.  He hath not the eloquence of a Knox, but he
hath the true thing in him, and that speaks.

To the Duke's Daughter the Queen said: "On my soul, he shall be married
instantly, or my ladies will carry him off and murder him for love."

And so it was that the heart of Elizabeth the Queen warmed again and
dearly towards two Huguenot exiles, and showed that in doing justice she
also had not so sour a heart towards her sex as was set down to her
credit.  Yet she made one further effort to keep De la Foret in her
service.  When Michel, once again, declined, dwelt earnestly on his duty
towards the widow of his dead chief, and begged leave to share her exile
in Jersey, Elizabeth said: "On my soul, but I did not think there was any
man on earth so careless of princes' honours!"

To this De la Foret replied that he had given his heart and life to one
cause, and since Montgomery had lost all, even life, the least Michel de
la Foret could do was to see that the woman who loved him be not
unprotected in the world.  Also, since he might not at this present fight
for the cause, he could speak for it; and he thanked the Queen of England
for having shown him his duty.  All that he desired was to be quiet for a
space somewhere in "her high Majesty's good realm," till his way was
clear to him.

"You would return to Jersey, then, with our friend of Rozel?" Elizabeth
said, with a gesture towards Lempriere, who, now recovered from his
wound, was present at the audience.

De la Foret inclined his head.  "If it be your high Majesty's pleasure."

And Lempriere of Rozel said: "He would return with myself your noble
Majesty's friend before all the world, and Buonespoir his ship the
Honeyflower."

Elizabeth's lips parted in a smile, for she was warmed with the luxury of
doing good, and she answered:

"I know not what the end of this will be, whether our loyal Lempriere
will become a pirate or Buonespoir a butler to my Court; but it is too
pretty a hazard to forego in a world of chance.  By the rood, but I have
never, since I sat on my father's throne, seen black so white as I have
done this past three months.  You shall have your Buonespoir, good Rozel;
but if he plays pirate any more--tell him this from his Queen--upon an
English ship, I will have his head, if I must needs send Drake of Devon
to overhaul him."

That same hour the Queen sent for Angele, and by no leave, save her own,
arranged the wedding-day, and ordained that it should take place at
Southampton, whither the Comtesse de Montgomery had come on her way to
Greenwich to plead for the life of Michel de la Foret, and to beg
Elizabeth to relieve her poverty.  Both of which things Elizabeth did,
as the annals of her life record.

After Elizabeth--ever self-willed--had declared her way about the
marriage ceremony, looking for no reply save that of silent obedience,
she made Angele sit at her feet and tell her whole story again from first
to last.  They were alone, and Elizabeth showed to this young refugee
more of her own heart than any other woman had ever seen.  Not by words
alone, for she made no long story; but once she stooped and kissed Angele
upon the cheek, and once her eyes filled up with tears, and they dropped
upon her lap unheeded.  All the devotion shown herself as a woman had
come to naught; and it may be that this thought stirred in her now.  She
remembered how Leicester and herself had parted, and how she was denied
all those soft resources of regret which were the right of the meanest
women in her realm.  For, whatever she might say to her Parliament and
people, she knew that all was too late--that she would never marry and
that she must go childless and uncomforted to her grave.  Years upon
years of delusion of her people, of sacrifice to policy, had at last
become a self-delusion, to which her eyes were not full opened yet--she
sought to shut them tight.  But these refugees, coming at the moment of
her own struggle, had changed her heart from an ever-growing bitterness
to human sympathy.  When Angele had ended her tale once more, the Queen
said:

"God knows, ye shall not linger in my Court.  Such lives have no place
here.  Get you back to my Isle of Jersey, where ye may live in peace.
Here all is noise, self-seeking and time-service.  If ye twain are not
happy I will say the world should never have been made."

Before they left Greenwich Palace--M. Aubert and Angele, De la Foret,
Lempriere, and Buonespoir--the Queen made Michel de la Foret the gift of
a chaplaincy to the Crown.  To Monsieur Aubert she gave a small pension,
and in Angele's hands she placed a deed of dower worthy of a generosity
greater than her own.

At Southampton, Michel and Angele were married by royal license,
and with the Comtesse de Montgomery set sail in Buonespoir's boat,
the Honeyflower, which brought them safe to St. Helier's, in the Isle
of Jersey.




CHAPTER XX

Followed several happy years for Michel and Angele.  The protection of
the Queen herself, the chaplaincy she had given De la Foret, the
friendship with the Governor of the island; and the boisterous tales
Lempriere had told of those days at Greenwich Palace quickened the
sympathy and held the interest of the people at large; while the simple
lives of the two won their way into the hearts of all, even, at last, to
that of De Carteret of St. Ouen's.  It was Angele herself who brought the
two Seigneurs together at her own good table; and it needed all her tact
on that occasion to prevent the ancient foes from drinking all the wine
in her cellar.

There was no parish in Jersey that did not know their goodness, but
mostly in the parishes of St. Martin's and Rozel were their faithful
labours done.  From all parts of the island people came to hear Michel
speak, though that was but seldom; and when he spoke he always wore the
sword the Queen had given him, and used the Book he had studied in her
palace.  It was to their home that Buonespoir the pirate--faithful to his
promise to the Queen that he would harry English ships no more came
wounded, after an engagement with a French boat sent to capture him,
carried thither by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.  It was there he
died, after having drunk a bottle of St. Ouen's muscadella, brought
secretly to him by his unchanging friend, Lempriere, so hastening the
end.

The Comtesse de Montgomery, who lived in a cottage near by, came
constantly to the little house on the hillside by Rozel Bay.  She had
never loved her own children more than she did the brown-haired child
with the deep-blue eyes, which was the one pledge of the great happiness
of Michel and Angele.

Soon after this child was born, M. Aubert had been put to rest in St.
Martin's churchyard, and there his tombstone might be seen so late as a
hundred years ago.  So things went softly by for seven years, and then
Madame de Montgomery journeyed to England, on invitation of the Queen and
to better fortune, and Angele and De la Foret were left to their quiet
life in Jersey.  Sometimes this quiet was broken by bitter news from
France, of fresh persecution, and fresh struggle on the part of the
Huguenots.  Thereafter for hours, sometimes for days, De la Foret would
be lost in sorrowful and restless meditation; and then he fretted against
his peaceful calling and his uneventful life.  But the gracious hand of
his wife and the eyes of his child led him back to cheerful ways again.

Suddenly one day came the fearful news from England that the plague had
broken out, and that thousands were dying.  The flight from London was
like the flight of the children of Israel into the desert.  The dead-
carts filled with decaying bodies rattled through the foul streets, to
drop their horrid burdens into the great pit at Aldgate; the bells of
London tolled all day and all night for the passing of human souls.
Hundreds of homes, isolated because of a victim of the plague found
therein, became ghastly breeding-places of the disease, and then silent,
disgusting graves.  If a man shivered in fear, or staggered from
weakness, or for very hunger turned sick, he was marked as a victim, and
despite his protests was huddled away with the real victims to die the
awful death.  From every church, where clergy were left to pray, went up
the cry for salvation from "plague, pestilence, and famine."  Scores of
ships from Holland and from France lay in the Channel, not allowed to
touch the shores of England, nor permitted to return whence they came.
On the very day that news of this reached Jersey, came a messenger from
the Queen of England for Michel de la Foret to hasten to her Court for
that she had need of him, and it was a need which would bring him honour.
Even as the young officer who brought the letter handed it to De la Foret
in the little house on the hill-side above Rozel Bay, he was taken
suddenly ill, and fell at the Camisard's feet.

De la Foret straightway raised him in his arms.  He called to his wife,
but, bidding her not come near, he bore the doomed man away to the lonely
Ecrehos Rocks lying within sight of their own doorway.  Suffering no one
to accompany him, he carried the sick man to the boat which had brought
the Queen's messenger to Rozel Bay.  The sailors of the vessel fled, and
alone De la Foret set sail for the Ecrehos.

There upon the black rocks the young man died, and Michel buried him in
the shore-bed of the Maitre Ile.  Then, after two days--for he could bear
suspense no longer--he set sail for Jersey.  Upon that journey there is
no need to dwell.  Any that hath ever loved a woman and a child must
understand.  A deep fear held him all the way, and when he stepped on
shore at Rozel Bay he was as one who had come from the grave, haggard and
old.

Hurrying up the hillside to his doorway, he called aloud to his wife, to
his child.  Throwing open the door, he burst in.  His dead child lay upon
a couch, and near by, sitting in a chair, with the sweat of the dying on
her brow, was Angele.  As he dropped on his knee beside her, she smiled
and raised her hand as if to touch him, but the hand dropped and the head
fell forward on his breast.  She was gone into a greater peace.

Once more Michel made a journey-alone--to the Ecrehos, and there, under
the ruins of the old Abbey of Val Richer, he buried the twain he had
loved.  Not once in all the terrible hours had he shed a tear; not once
had his hand trembled; his face was like stone, and his eyes burned with
an unearthly light.

He did not pray beside the graves; but he knelt and kissed the earth
again and again.  He had doffed his robes of peace, and now wore the garb
of a soldier, armed at all points fully.  Rising from his knees, he
turned his face towards Jersey.

"Only mine!  Only mine!" he said aloud in a dry, bitter voice.

In the whole island, only his loved ones had died of the plague.  The
holiness and charity and love of Michel and Angele had ended so!

When once more he set forth upon the Channel, he turned his back on
Jersey and shaped his course towards France, having sent Elizabeth his
last excuses for declining a service which would have given him honour,
fame and regard.  He was bent upon a higher duty.

Not long did he wait for the death he craved.  Next year, in a Huguenot
sortie from Anvers, he was slain.  He died with these words on his lips:

"Maintenant, Angele!"

In due time the island people forgot them both, but the Seigneur of Rozel
caused a stone to be set up on the highest point of land that faces
France, and on the stone were carved the names of Michel and Angele.
Having done much hard service for his country and for England's Queen,
Lempriere at length hung up his sword and gave his years to peace.  From
the Manor of Rozel he was wont to repair constantly to the little white
house, which remained as the two had left it,--his own by order of the
Queen,--and there, as time went on, he spent most of his days.  To the
last he roared with laughter if ever the name of Buonespoir was mentioned
in his presence; he swaggered ever before the Royal Court and De Carteret
of St. Ouen's; and he spoke proudly of his friendship with the Duke's
Daughter, who had admired the cut of his jerkin at the Court of
Elizabeth.  But in the house where Angele had lived he moved about as
though in the presence of a beloved sleeper he would not awake.

Michel and Angele had had their few years of exquisite life and love,
and had gone; Lempriere had longer measure of life and little love, and
who shall say which had more profit of breath and being?  The generations
have passed away, and the Angel of Equity hath a smiling pity as she
scans the scales and the weighing of the Past.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Never believed that when man or woman said no that no was meant
Slander ever scorches where it touches






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "MICHEL AND ANGELE":

Boldness without rashness, and hope without vain thinking
Each of us will prove himself a fool given perfect opportunity
Never believed that when man or woman said no that no was meant
No note of praise could be pitched too high for Elizabeth
Nothing is futile that is right
Religion to him was a dull recreation invented chiefly for women
She had never stooped to conquer
Slander ever scorches where it touches






JOHN ENDERBY

By Gilbert Parker



I

Of all the good men that Lincolnshire gave to England to make her proud,
strong and handsome, none was stronger, prouder and more handsome than
John Enderby, whom King Charles made a knight against his will.

"Your gracious Majesty," said John Enderby, when the King was come to
Boston town on the business of draining the Holland fen and other matters
more important and more secret, "the honour your Majesty would confer is
well beyond a poor man like myself, for all Lincolnshire knows that I am
driven to many shifts to keep myself above water.  Times have been hard
these many years, and, craving your Majesty's pardon, our taxes have been
heavy."

"Do you refuse knighthood of his Majesty?" asked Lord Rippingdale, with
a sneer, patting the neck of his black stallion with a gloved hand.

"The King may command my life, my Lord Rippingdale," was Enderby's reply,
"he may take me, body and bones and blood, for his service, but my poor
name must remain as it is when his Majesty demands a price for honouring
it."

"Treason," said Lord Rippingdale just so much above his breath as the
King might hear.

"This in our presence!" said the King, tapping his foot upon the ground,
his brows contracting, and the narrow dignity of the divine right lifting
his nostrils scornfully.

"No treason, may it please your Majesty," said Enderby, "and it were
better to speak boldly to the King's face than to be disloyal behind
his back.  My estates will not bear the tax which the patent of this
knighthood involves.  I can serve the country no better as Sir John
Enderby than as plain John Enderby, and I can serve my children best by
shepherding my shattered fortunes for their sakes."

For a moment Charles seemed thoughtful, as though Enderby's reasons
appealed to him, but Lord Rippingdale had now the chance which for ten
years he had invited, and he would not let it pass.

"The honour which his Majesty offers, my good Lincolnshire squire, is
more to your children than the few loaves and fishes which you might
leave them.  We all know how miserly John Enderby has grown."

Lord Rippingdale had touched the tenderest spot in the King's mind.  His
vanity was no less than his impecuniosity, and this was the third time in
one day he had been defeated in his efforts to confer an honour, and
exact a price beyond all reason for that honour.  The gentlemen he had
sought had found business elsewhere, and were not to be seen when his
messengers called at their estates.  It was not the King's way to give
anything for nothing.  Some of these gentlemen had been benefited by the
draining of the Holland fens, which the King had undertaken, reserving a
stout portion of the land for himself; but John Enderby benefited
nothing, for his estates lay further north, and near the sea, not far
from the town of Mablethorpe.  He had paid all the taxes which the King
had levied and had not murmured beyond his own threshold.

He spoke his mind with candour, and to him the King was still a man to
whom the truth was to be told with directness, which was the highest
honour one man might show another.

"Rank treason!" repeated Lord Rippingdale, loudly.  "Enderby has been in
bad company, your Majesty.  If you are not wholly with the King, you are
against him.  'He that is not with me is against me, and he that
gathereth not with me scattereth abroad.'"

A sudden anger seized the King, and turning, he set foot in the stirrup,
muttering something to himself, which boded no good for John Enderby.
A gentleman held the stirrup while he mounted, and, with Lord Rippingdale
beside him in the saddle, he turned and spoke to Enderby.  Self-will and
resentment were in his tone.  "Knight of Enderby we have made you," he
said, "and Knight of Enderby you shall remain.  Look to it that you pay
the fees for the accolade."

"Your Majesty," said Enderby, reaching out his hand in protest, "I will
not have this greatness you would thrust upon me.  Did your Majesty need,
and speak to me as one gentleman to another in his need, then would I
part with the last inch of my land; but to barter my estate for a gift
that I have no heart nor use for--your Majesty, I cannot do it."

The hand of the King twisted in his bridle-rein, and his body stiffened
in anger.

"See to it, my Lord Rippingdale," he said, "that our knight here pays to
the last penny for the courtesy of the accolade.  You shall levy upon his
estate."

"We are both gentlemen, your Majesty, and my rights within the law are no
less than your Majesty's," said Enderby stoutly.

"The gentleman forgets that the King is the fountain of all law," said
Lord Rippingdale obliquely to the King.

"We will make one new statute for this stubborn knight," said Charles;
"even a writ of outlawry.  His estates shall be confiscate to the Crown.
Go seek a King and country better suited to your tastes, our rebel Knight
of Enderby."

"I am still an Enderby of Enderby, and a man of Lincolnshire, your
Majesty," answered the squire, as the King rode towards Boston church,
where presently he should pray after this fashion with his subjects there
assembled:

     "Most heartily we beseech Thee with Thy favour to behold our most
     gracious sovereign King Charles.  Endue him plenteously with
     Heavenly gifts; grant him in health and wealth long to live;
     strengthen him that he may vanquish and overcome all his enemies;
     and, finally, after this life, he may attain everlasting joy and
     felicity."

With a heavy heart Enderby turned homewards; that is, towards Mablethorpe
upon the coast, which lies between Saltfleet Haven and Skegness, two
ports that are places of mark in the history of the kingdom, as all the
world knows.

He had never been so vexed in his life.  It was not so much anger against
the King, for he had great reverence for the monarchy of England; but
against Lord Rippingdale his mind was violent.  Years before, in a
quarrel between the Earl of Lindsey and Lord Rippingdale, upon a public
matter which Parliament settled afterwards, he had sided with the Earl of
Lindsey.  The two Earls had been reconciled afterwards, but Lord
Rippingdale had never forgiven Enderby.

In Enderby's brain ideas worked somewhat heavily; but to-day his
slumberous strength was infused with a spirit of action and the warmth of
a pervasive idea.  There was no darkness in his thoughts, but his pulse
beat heavily and he could hear the veins throbbing under his ear
impetuously.  Once or twice as he rode on in the declining afternoon he
muttered to himself.  Now it was: "My Lord Rippingdale, indeed!" or "Not
even for a King!" or "Sir John Enderby, forsooth!  Sir John Enderby,
forsooth!"  Once again he spoke, reining in his horse beside a tall cross
at four corners, near Stickford by the East Fen.  Taking off his hat he
prayed:

"Thou just God, do Thou judge between my King and myself.  Thou knowest
that I have striven as an honest gentleman to do right before all men.
When I have seen my sin, oh, Lord, I have repented!  Now I have come upon
perilous times, the gins are set for my feet.  Oh, Lord, establish me in
true strength!  Not for my sake do I ask that Thou wilt be with me and
Thy wisdom comfort me, but for the sake of my good children.  Wilt Thou
spare my life in these troubles until they be well formed; till the lad
have the bones of a man, and the girl the wise thought of a woman--for
she hath no mother to shield and teach her.  And if this be a wrong
prayer, my God, forgive it: for I am but a blundering squire, whose
tongue tells lamely what his heart feels."

His head was bowed over his horse's neck, his face turned to the cross,
his eyes were shut, and he did not notice the strange and grotesque
figure that suddenly appeared from among the low bushes by the fen near
by.

It was an odd creature perched upon stilts; one of those persons called
the stilt-walkers.  They were no friends of the King, nor of the Earl of
Lindsey, nor of my Lord Rippingdale, for the draining of these fens took
from them their means of living.  They were messengers, postmen and
carriers across the wide stretch of country from Spilsby, even down to
the river Witham, and from Boston Deep down to Market Deeping and over to
the sea.  Since these fens were drained one might travel from Market
Deeping to the Wolds without wetting a foot.

"Aw'll trooble thee a moment, maister," said the peasant.  "A stilt-
walker beant nowt i' the woorld.  Howsome'er, aw've a worrd to speak i'
thy ear."

Enderby reined in his horse, and with a nod of complaisance (for he was a
man ever kind to the poor, and patient with those who fared ill in the
world) he waited for the other to speak.

"Thoo'rt the great Enderby of Enderby, maister," said the peasant,
ducking his head and then putting on his cap; "aw've known thee sin tha
wast no bigger nor a bit grass'opper i' the field.  Wilt tha ride long,
Sir John Enderby, and aw'll walk aside thee, ma grey nag with thy
sorrel."  He glanced down humorously at his own long wooden legs.

Enderby turned his horse round and proceeded on his way slowly, the old
man striding along beside him like a stork.

"Why do you dub me Knight?" he asked, his eyes searching the face of the
old man.

"Why shouldna aw call thee Knight if the King calls thee Knight?  It is
the dooty of a common man to call thee Sir John, and tak off his hat at
saying o' it."  His hat came off, and he nodded in such an odd way that
Enderby burst out into a good honest laugh.  "Dooth tha rememba little
Tom Dowsby that went hoonting wi' thee when tha wert not yet come to
age?" continued the stilt-walker.  "Doost tha rememba when, for a jest,
thee and me stopped the lord bishop, tha own uncle, in the highway at
midnight, and took his poorse from him, and the rich gold chain from his
neck?  And doost tha rememba that tha would have his apron too, for tha
said that if it kept a bishop clean, wouldna it keep highwaymen clean,
whose work was not so clean as a bishop's?  Sir John Enderby, aw loove
thee better than the King, an' aw loove thee better than my Lord
Rippin'dale-ay, theere's a sour heart in a goodly body!"

John Enderby reined up his horse and looked the stilt-walker in the face.

"Are you little Tom Dowsby?" exclaimed he.  "Are you that scamp?"  He
laughed all at once as though he had not a trouble in the world.  "And do
you keep up your evil practices?  Do you still waylay bishops?"

"If aw confessed to Heaven or man, aw would confess to thee, Sir John
Enderby; but aw'll confess nowt."

"And how know you that I am Sir John Enderby?"

"Even in Sleaford town aw kem to know it.  Aw stood no further from his
Majesty and Lord Rippin'dale than aw stand from you, when the pair talked
by the Great Boar inn.  Where doos tha sleep to-night?"

"At Spilsby."

"To-night the King sleeps at Sutterby on the Wolds.  'Tis well for thee
tha doost not bide wi' his Majesty.  Theer, aw've done thee a service."

"What service have you done me?"

"Aw've told thee that tha moost sleep by Spilsby when the King sleeps at
Sutterby.  Fare-thee-well, maister."

Doffing his cap once more, the stilt-walker suddenly stopped, and,
turning aside, made his way with an almost incredible swiftness across
the fen, taking the ditches with huge grotesque strides.  Enderby looked
back and watched him for a moment curiously.  Suddenly the man's words
began to repeat themselves in Enderby's head: "To-night the King sleeps
at Sutterby on the Wolds.  'Tis well for thee tha doost not bide wi' his
Majesty."  Presently a dozen vague ideas began to take form.  The man had
come to warn him not to join the King at Sutterby.

There was some plot against Charles!  These stiltwalkers were tools in
the hands of the King's foes, who were growing more powerful every day.
He would sleep to-night, not at Spilsby, but at Sutterby.  He was a loyal
subject; no harm that he could prevent should come to the King.

Before you come to Sutterby on the Wolds, as you travel north to the
fenland, there is a combe through which the highway passes, and a stream
which has on one side many rocks and boulders, and on the other a sort of
hedge of trees and shrubs.  It was here that the enemies of the King,
that is, some stilt-walkers, with two dishonourable gentlemen who had
suffered from the King's oppressions, placed themselves to way lay his
Majesty.  Lord Rippingdale had published it abroad that the King's route
was towards Horncastle, but at Stickney by the fens the royal party
separated, most of the company passing on to Horncastle, while Charles,
Lord Rippingdale and two other cavaliers proceeded on a secret visit to a
gentleman at Louth.

It was dark when the King and his company came to the combe.  Lord
Rippingdale suggested to his Majesty that one of the gentlemen should
ride ahead to guard against surprise or ambush, but the King laughed,
and said that his shire of Lincoln bred no brigands, and he rode on.
He was in the coach with a gentleman beside him, and Lord Rippingdale
rode upon the right.  Almost as the hoofs of the leaders plunged into the
stream there came the whinny of a horse from among the boulders.
Alarmed, the coachman whipped up his team and Lord Rippingdale clapped
his hand upon his sword.

Even as he did it two men sprang out from among the rocks, seized the
horses' heads, and a dozen others swarmed round, all masked and armed,
and calling upon the King's party to surrender, and to deliver up their
valuables.  One ruffian made to seize the bridle of Lord Rippingdale's
horse, but my lord's sword severed the fellow's hand at the wrist.

"Villain," he shouted, "do you know whom you attack?"

For answer, shots rang out; and as the King's gentlemen gathered close to
the coach to defend him, the King himself opened the door and stepped
out.  As he did so a stilt struck him on the head.  Its owner had aimed
it at Lord Rippingdale; but as my lord's horse plunged, it missed him,
and struck the King fair upon the crown of the head.  He swayed, groaned
and fell back into the open door of the coach.  Lord Rippingdale was at
once beside him, sword drawn, and fighting gallantly.

"Scoundrels," he cried, "will you kill your King?"

"We will have the money which the King carries," cried one of his
assailants.  "The price of three knighthoods and the taxes of two shires
we will have."

One of the King's gentlemen had fallen, and another was wounded.  Lord
Rippingdale was hard pressed, but in what seemed the last extremity of
the King and his party there came a shout from the other side of the
stream:

"God save the King!  For the King!  For the King!"

A dozen horsemen splashed their way across the stream, and with swords
and pistols drove through the King's assailants and surrounded his coach.
The ruffians made an attempt to rally and resist the onset, but presently
broke and ran, pursued by a half-dozen of his Majesty's defenders.  Five
of the assailants were killed and several were wounded.

As Lord Rippingdale turned to Charles to raise him, the coach-door was
opened upon the other side, a light was thrust in, and over the
unconscious body of the King my lord recognised John Enderby.

"His Majesty"--began John Enderby.

"His Majesty is better," replied Lord Rippingdale, as the King's eyes
half opened.  "You lead these gentlemen?  This should bring you a
barony,--Sir John," my lord added, half graciously, half satirically; for
the honest truth of this man's nature vexed him.  "The King will thank
you."

"John Enderby wants no reward for being a loyal subject, my lord,"
answered Enderby.

Then with another glance at the King, in which he knew that his Majesty
was recovered, he took off his hat, bowed, and, mounting his horse, rode
away without a word.

At Sutterby the gentlemen received gracious thanks of the King who had
been here delivered from the first act of violence made against him in
his reign.

Of the part which Enderby had played Lord Rippingdale said no more to the
King than this:

"Sir John Enderby was of these gentlemen who saved your Majesty's life.
Might it not seem to your Majesty that--"

"Was he of them?" interrupted the King kindly; then, all at once, out of
his hurt vanity and narrow self-will, he added petulantly: "When he hath
paid for the accolade of his knighthood, then will we welcome him to us,
and make him Baron of Enderby."

Next day when Enderby entered the great iron gates of the grounds of
Enderby House the bell was ringing for noon.  The house was long and low,
with a fine tower in the centre, and two wings ran back, forming the
court-yard, which would have been entirely inclosed had the stables moved
up to complete the square.

When Enderby came out into the broad sweep of grass and lawn, flanked on
either side by commendable trees, the sun shining brightly, the rooks
flying overhead, and the smell of ripe summer in the air, he drew up his
horse and sat looking before him.

"To lose it!  To lose it!" he said, and a frown gathered upon his
forehead.

Even as he looked, the figure of a girl appeared in the great doorway.
Catching sight of the horseman, she clapped her hands and waved them
delightedly.

Enderby's face cleared, as the sun breaks through a mass of clouds and
lightens all the landscape.  The slumberous eyes glowed, the square head
came up.  In five minutes he had dismounted at the great stone steps and
was clasping his daughter in his arms.

"Felicity, my dear daughter!" he said, tenderly and gravely.

She threw back her head with a gaiety which bespoke the bubbling laughter
in her heart, and said:

"Booh! to thy solemn voice.  Oh, thou great bear, dost thou love me with
tears in thine eyes?"

She took his hand and drew him inside the house, where, laying aside his
hat and gloves and sword, they passed into the great library.

"Come, now, tell me all the places thou hast visited," she said, perching
herself on his arm-chair.

He told her, and she counted them off one by one upon her fingers.

"That is ninety miles of travel thou hast had.  What is the most pleasing
thing thou hast seen?"

"It was in Stickford by the fen," he answered, after a perplexed pause.
"There was an old man upon the roadside with his head bowed in his hands.
Some lads were making sport of him, for he seemed so woe-begone and old.
Two cavaliers of the King came by.  One of them stopped and drove the
lads away, then going to the old man, he said: 'Friend, what is thy
trouble?' The old man raised his melancholy face and answered: 'Aw'm
afeared, sir.' 'What fear you?' inquired the young gentleman.  'I fear ma
wife, sir,' replied the old man.  At that the other cavalier sat back in
his saddle and guffawed merrily.  'Well, Dick,' said he to his friend,
'that is the worst fear in this world.  Ah, Dick, thou hast ne'er been
married!'  'Why do you fear your wife?' asked Dick.  'Aw've been robbed
of ma horse and saddle and twelve skeins o' wool.  Aw'm lost, aw'm
ruined and shall raise ma head nevermore.  To ma wife aw shall ne'er
return.'  'Tut tut, man,' said Dick, 'get back to your wife.  You are
master of your own house; you rule the roost.  What is a wife?  A wife's
a woman.  You are a man.  You are bigger and stronger, your bones are
harder.  Get home and wear a furious face and batter in the door and say:
"What, ho, thou huzzy!"  Why, man, fear you the wife of your bosom?'
The old man raised his head and said: 'Tha doost not know ma wife or tha
wouldst not speak like that.'  At that Dick laughed and said: 'Fellow, I
do pity thee;' and taking the old man by the shoulders, he lifted him
on his own horse and took him to the village fair.  There he bought him
twelve skeins of wool and sent him on his way rejoicing, with a horse
worth five times his own."

With her chin in her hands the girl had listened intently to the story.
When it was finished she said: "What didst thou say was the gentleman's
name?"

"His friend called him Dick.  He is a poor knight, one Sir Richard
Mowbray, of Leicester, called at Court and elsewhere Happy Dick Mowbray,
for they do say a happier and braver heart never wore the King's
uniform."

"Indeed I should like to know that Sir Richard Mowbray.  And, tell me
now, who is the greatest person thou hast seen in thy absence?"

"I saw the King--at Boston town."

"The King!  The King!"  Her eyes lightened, her hands clapped merrily.
"What did he say to thee?  Now, now, there is that dark light in thine
eyes again.  I will not have it so!"  With her thumbs she daintily drew
down the eyelids and opened them again.  "There, that's better.  Now what
did the King say to thee?"

"He said to me that I should be Sir John Enderby, of Enderby."

"A knight!  A knight!  He made thee a knight?" she asked gaily.  She
slipped from his knee and courtesied before him, then seeing the
heaviness of his look, she added: "Booh, Sir John Enderby, why dost thou
look so grave?  Is knighthood so big a burden thou dost groan under it?"

"Come here, my lass," he said gently.  "Thou art young, but day by day
thy wisdom grows, and I can trust thee.  It is better thou shouldst know
from my own lips the peril this knighthood brings, than that trouble
should suddenly fall and thou be unprepared."

Drawing her closely to him he told her the story of his meeting with the
King; of Lord Rippingdale; of the King's threat to levy upon his estates
and to issue a writ of outlawry against him.

For a moment the girl trembled, and Enderby felt her hands grow cold in
his own, for she had a quick and sensitive nature and passionate
intelligence and imagination.

"Father," she cried pantingly, indignantly, "the King would make thee an
outlaw, would seize upon thy estates, because thou wouldst not pay the
price of a paltry knighthood!"  Suddenly her face flushed, the blood came
back with a rush, and she stood upon her feet.  "I would follow thee to
the world's end rather than that thou shouldst pay one penny for that
honour.  The King offered thee knighthood?  Why, two hundred years before
the King was born, an Enderby was promised an earldom.  Why shouldst thou
take a knighthood now?  Thou didst right, thou didst right."  Her fingers
clasped in eager emphasis.

"Dost thou not see, my child," said he, "that any hour the King's troops
may surround our house and take me prisoner and separate thee from me?
I see but one thing to do; even to take thee at once from here and place
thee with thy aunt, Mistress Falkingham, in Shrewsbury."

"Father," the girl said, "thou shalt not put me away from thee.
Let the King's men surround Enderby House and the soldiers and my Lord
Rippingdale levy upon the estates of Enderby.  Neither his Majesty nor my
Lord Rippingdale dare put a finger upon me--I would tear their eyes out."

Enderby smiled half sadly at her, and answered "The fear of a woman is
one of the worst fears in this world.  Booh!"

So ludicrously did he imitate her own manner of a few moments before that
humour drove away the flush of anger from her face, and she sat upon his
chair-arm and said:

"But we will not part; we will stand here till the King and Lord
Rippingdale do their worst--is it not so, father?"

He patted her head caressingly.

"Thou sayest right, my lass; we will remain at Enderby.  Where is thy
brother Garrett?"

"He has ridden over to Mablethorpe, but will return within the hour," she
replied.

At that moment there was a sound of hoofs in the court-yard.  Running to
a rear window of the library Mistress Felicity clapped her hands and
said:

"It is he--Garrett."

Ten minutes afterwards the young man entered.  He was about two years
older than his sister; that is, seventeen.  He was very tall for his age,
with dark hair and a pale dry face, and of distinguished bearing.  Unlike
his father, he was slim and gracefully built, with no breadth or power to
his shoulders, but with an athletic suppleness and a refinement almost
womanlike.  He was tenacious, overbearing, self-willed, somewhat silent
and also somewhat bad-tempered.

There was excitement in his eye as he entered.  He came straight to his
father, giving only a nod to Mistress Felicity, who twisted her head in a
demure little way, as though in mockery of his important manner.

"Booh!--my lord duke!" she said almost under her breath.

"Well, my son," said Enderby, giving him his hand, "your face has none so
cheerful a look.  Hast thou no welcome for thy father?"

"I am glad you are home again, sir," said young Enderby, more dutifully
than cordially.

There was silence for a moment.

"You do not ask my news," said his father, eyeing him debatingly.

"I have your news, sir," was the young man's half sullen reply.

His sister came near her father, where she could look her brother
straight in the face, and her deep blue eyes fixed upon him intently.
The smile almost faded from her lips, and her square chin seemed suddenly
to take on an air of seriousness and strength.

"Well, sir?" asked his father.

"That you, sir, have refused a knighthood of the King; that he insists
upon your keeping it; that he is about to levy upon your estates: and
that you are outlawed from England."

"And what think you about the matter?" asked his father.

"I think it is a gentleman's duty to take the King's gifts without
question," answered the young man.

"Whether the King be just or not, eh?  Where would England have been, my
son, if the barons had submitted to King John?  Where would the Enderbys
have been had they not withstood the purposes of Queen Mary?  Come, come,
the King has a chance to prove himself as John Enderby has proven
himself.  Midst other news, heard you not that last night I led a dozen
gentlemen to the rescue of the King?"

"'Twas said in the village that his Majesty would remove his interdict
and make you a baron, sir, if you met his levy for the knighthood."

"That I shall never do.  Answer me, my son, do you stand with the King or
with your father in this?"

"I am an Enderby," answered the youth, moodily, "and I stand with the
head of our house."

That night as candles were being lighted, three score of the King's men,
headed by Lord Rippingdale, placed themselves before the house, and an
officer was sent forward to summon forth John Enderby.

Enderby had gathered his men together, and they were posted for defence
at the doorways and entrances, and along the battlements.  The windows
were all heavily shuttered and barred.

The young officer commissioned to demand an interview with Enderby came
forward and knocked at the great entrance door.  It opened presently and
showed within the hallway a dozen men well armed.  Enderby came forward
to meet him.

"I am Sir Richard Mowbray," said the newcomer.  "I am sent by Lord
Rippingdale, who arrives on a mission from his Majesty."

Enderby, recognising his visitor, was mild in his reply.

"Sir Richard Mowbray, I pray you tell Lord Rippingdale that he is
welcome--as commissioner of the King."

Mowbray smiled and bowed.

"My lord begs me to ask that you will come forth and speak with him, Sir
John?"

"My compliments to Lord Rippingdale, Sir Richard, and say that I can
better entertain his Majesty's commissioner within my own house."

"And all who wait with him?" asked the young officer, with a dry sort of
smile.

"My lord, and his officers and gentlemen, but not his troopers."

Mowbray bowed, and as he lifted his head again he saw the face of
Mistress Felicity looking through the doorway of the library.  Their eyes
met.  On a sudden a new impulse came to his thoughts.

"Sir John Enderby," said he, "I know how honourable a man you are, and I
think I know the way you feel.  But, as one gentleman to another, permit
me a word of counsel.  'Twere better to humour my Lord Rippingdale, and
to yield up to the King's demands, than to lose all.  Lack of money and
estate--that is hard enough on a single man like me, but with a gentleman
who has the care of a daughter, perhaps"--his look again met the young
lady's face--"the case is harder.  A little yielding on your part--"

"I will not yield," was Enderby's reply.

Mowbray bowed once more, and retired without more speaking.

In a few moments he returned, Lord Rippingdale with him.  The entrance
doors were once more opened, and my lord, in a temper, at once began:

"You press your courtesies too far, Sir John Enderby."

"Less strenuously than the gentlemen of the road pressed their
discourtesies upon his Majesty and yourself last night, my lord."

"I am come upon that business.  For your bravery and loyalty, if you will
accept the knighthood, and pay the sum set as the courtesy of the
accolade, his Majesty will welcome you at Court, and raise you to a
barony.  But his Majesty must see that his dignity be not injured."

"The King may have my life and all my goods as a gift, but I will not
give either by these indirect means.  It does not lie in a poor squire
like me to offend the King's dignity."

"You are resolved?"

"I am resolved," answered Enderby, stubbornly.  "Then you must bear the
consequences, and yield up your estates and person into my hands.
Yourself and your family are under arrest, to be dealt with hereafter as
his Majesty sees fit."

"I will not yield up my estates, nor my person, nor my son and daughter,
of my free will."

With an incredulous smile, Rippingdale was about to leave and enter upon
a siege of the house, when he saw young Enderby and caught a strange look
in his face.

"Young gentleman," said he, "are you a cipher in this game?  A barony
hangs on this.  Are you as stubborn and unruly as the head of your
house?"

Garrett Enderby made no reply, but turned and walked into the library,
his father's and sister's eyes following him in doubt and dismay, for the
chance was his at that moment to prove himself.

A moment afterwards Lord Rippingdale was placing his men to attack the
house, disposing of some to secure a timber to batter in the door, and of
some to make assaults upon the rear of the building.  Enderby had placed
his men advantageously to resist attack, giving the defence of the rear
of the house to his son.  Mistress Felicity he had sent to an upper room
in the care of her aunt.

Presently the King's men began the action, firing wherever a figure
showed itself, and carrying a log to batter in the entrance door.
Enderby's men did good work, bringing down four of the besiegers at the
first volley.

Those who carried the log hesitated for a moment, and Enderby called
encouragingly to his men.

At this exciting moment, while calling to his men, he saw what struck him
dumb--his son hurrying forward with a flag of truce to Lord Rippingdale!
Instantly my lord commanded his men to retire.

"Great God!" said Sir John, with a groan, "my son--my only son--
a traitor!"  Turning to his men he bade them cease firing.

Throwing open the entrance doors, he stood upon the steps and waited for
Lord Rippingdale.

"You see, Sir John Enderby, your son--" began my lord.

"It was to maintain my rights, and for my son's sake and my daughter's,
that I resisted the command of the King," interrupted the distressed and
dishonoured gentleman, "but now--"

"But now you yield?"

He inclined his head, then looking down to the place where his son stood,
he said:

"My son--my only son!"  And his eyes filled with tears.

His distress was so moving that even Rippingdale was constrained to say:

"He did it for your sake.  His Majesty will--" With a gesture of despair
Enderby turned and entered the house, and passed into the library, where
he found his daughter.  Pale and tearful she threw herself into his arms.

At eleven o'clock that night as they sat in the same room, while Lord
Rippingdale and his officers supped in the dining-room, Sir Richard
Mowbray hurriedly entered.

"Come quickly," said he; "the way is clear--here by this window.  The
sentinels are drunk.  You will find horses by the gate of the grape-
garden, and two of your serving-men mounted.  They will take you to a
hiding-place on the coast--I have instructed them."

As he talked he helped them through the window, and bade them good-bye
hurriedly; but he did not let Mistress Felicity's hand drop till he had
kissed it and wished her a whispered God-speed.

When they had gone he listened for a time, but hearing no sound of
surprise or discovery, he returned to the supper room, where Garrett
Enderby sat drinking with Lord Rippingdale and the cavaliers.




II

Seven years went by before John Enderby saw his son again or set foot in
Enderby House.  Escaping to Holland on a night when everything was taken
from him save his honour and his daughter, he had lived there with
Mistress Felicity, taking service in the army of the country.

Outlaw as he was, his estates given over to his son who now carried a
knighthood bestowed by King Charles, he was still a loyal subject to the
dynasty which had dishonoured him.  When the King was beheaded at
Whitehall he mourned and lamented the miserable crime with the best of
his countrymen.

It was about this time that he journeyed into France, and there he stayed
with his daughter two years.  Mistress Falkingham, her aunt, was with
her, and watched over her as carefully as when she was a child in Enderby
House.

About this time, Cromwell, urged by solicitous friends of the outlaw,
sent word to him to return to England, that he might employ him in
foreign service, if he did not care to serve in England itself.
Cromwell's message was full of comforting reflections upon his sufferings
and upon the injustice that had been done to him by the late King.  For
his daughter's sake, who had never been entirely happy out of England,
Enderby returned, and was received with marked consideration by Cromwell
at Whitehall.

"Your son, sir," said Cromwell, "hath been a follower of the man of sin.
He was of those notorious people who cried out against the work of God's
servants when Charles paid the penalty of his treason at Whitehall.  Of
late I have received news that he is of those children of Belial who are
intriguing to bring back the second Charles.  Two days ago he was bidden
to leave Enderby House.  If he be found among those who join the Scotch
army to fight for the Pretender, he shall bear the penalty of his
offence."

"He has been ill advised, your Highness," said Enderby.

"He shall be advised better," was the stern reply.  "We will have peace
in England, and we will, by the help of the Lord's strong arm, rid this
realm of these recalcitrant spirits.  For you, sir, you shall return to
your estate at Enderby, and we will use you abroad as opportunity shall
occur.  Your son has taken to himself the title which the man of sin
conferred upon you, to your undoing."

"Your Highness," replied Enderby, "I have but one desire, and that is
peace.  I have been outlawed from England so long, and my miseries have
been so great, that I accept gladly what the justice of your Highness
gives thus freely.  But I must tell your Highness that I was no enemy of
King Charles, and am no foe to his memory.  The wrong was done by him to
me, and not returned by me to him, and the issue is between our Maker and
ourselves.  But it is the pride of all Englishmen that England be well
governed, and strong and important in the eyes of the nations; and all
these things has your Highness achieved.  I will serve my country
honourably abroad, or rest peacefully here on my own estate, lifting no
hand against your Highness, though I hold to the succession in the
monarchy."

Cromwell looked at him steadily and frowningly for a minute, then
presently, his face clearing, he said: "Your words, detached from your
character, sir, would be traitorous; but as we stand, two gentlemen of
England face to face, they seem to me like the words of an honest man,
and I love honesty before all other, things.  Get to your home, sir.
You must not budge from it until I send for you.  Then, as proof of your
fidelity to the ruler of your country, you shall go on whatever mission I
send you."

"Your Highness, I will do what seems my duty in the hour of your
summons."

"You shall do the will of the Lord," answered the Protector, and, bowing
a farewell, turned upon his heel.  Enderby looked after him a moment,
then moved towards the door, and as he went out to mount his horse he
muttered to himself:

"The will of the Lord as ordained by Oliver Cromwell--humph!"

Then he rode away up through Trafalgar Square and into the Tottenham
Court Road, and so on out into the Shires until he came to Enderby House.

Outside all was as he had left it seven years before, though the hedges
were not so well kept and the grass was longer before the house.  An air
of loneliness pervaded all the place.  No one met him at the door.  He
rode round into the court-yard and called.  A man-servant came out.  From
him he learned that four of Cromwell's soldiers were quartered in the
house, that all the old servants, save two, were gone, and that his son
had been expelled the place by Cromwell's order two days before.  Inside
the house there was less change.  Boon companion of the boisterous
cavaliers as his son had been, the young man's gay hours had been spent
more away from Enderby House than in it.

When young Enderby was driven from his father's house by Cromwell, he
determined to join the Scotch army which was expected soon to welcome
Charles the Second from France.  There he would be in contact with Lord
Rippingdale and his Majesty.  When Cromwell was driven from his place,
great honours might await him.  Hearing in London, however, that his
father had returned, and was gone on to the estate, he turned his horse
about and rode back again, travelling by night chiefly, and reached
Enderby House four days after his father's arrival there.

He found his father seated alone at the dinner-table.  Swinging wide open
the door of the dining-room he strode in aggressively.

The old man stood up in his place at the table and his eyes brightened
expectantly when he saw his son, for his brain was quickened by the
thought that perhaps, after all his wrong-doing, the boy had come back
to stand by him, a repentant prodigal.  He was a man of warm and firm
spirit, and now his breast heaved with his emotions.  This boy had been
the apple of his eye.  Since the day of his birth he had looked for great
things from him, and had seen in him the refined perpetuation of the
sturdy race of the Enderbys.  He counted himself but a rough sort of
country gentleman, and the courtly face of his son had suggested the
country gentleman cast in a finer mould.  He was about to speak kindly as
of old, but the young man, with clattering spurs, came up to the other
end of the table, and with a dry insolence said:

"By whose invitation do you come here?"

The blood fled from the old man's heart.  For a moment he felt sick, and
his face turned white.  He dropped his head a little and looked at his
son steadily and mournfully.

"Shall a man need an invitation to his own house, my son?" he said at
last.

The arrogant lips of the young man tightened; he tossed up his head.
"The house is mine.  I am the master here.  You are an outlaw."

"An outlaw no longer," answered the old man, "for the Protector has
granted me again the home of which I was cruelly dispossessed."

"The Protector is a rebel!" returned the young man, and his knuckles
rapped petulantly upon the table.  "I stand for the King--for King
Charles the Second.  When you were dispossessed, his late martyred
Majesty made me master of this estate and a knight also."

The old man's hands clinched, in the effort to rule himself to quietness.

"You are welcome to the knighthood which I have never accepted," said he;
"but for these estates--"  All at once a fierce anger possessed him,
and the great shoulders heaved up and down with emotion--"but for these
estates, sir, no law nor king can take them from me.  I am John Enderby,
the first son of a first son, the owner of these lands since the time my
mother gave me birth.  You, sir, are the first of our name that ever was
a traitor to his house."

So intent were the two that they did not see or hear three men who drew
aside the curtains at the end of the room and stood spying upon them--
three of Cromwell's men.  Young Enderby laughed sneeringly and answered:

"It was a King of England that gave Enderby Manor to the Enderbys.  The
King is the source of all estate and honour, and I am loyal to the King.
He is a traitor who spurns the King's honour and defies it.  He is a
traitor who links his fortunes with that vile, murderous upstart, that
blethering hypocrite, Oliver Cromwell.  I go to Scotland to join King
Charles, and before three months are over his Majesty will have come into
his own again and I also into my own here at Enderby."

The old man trembled with the fierceness of his emotions.

"I only am master here," he said, "and I should have died upon this
threshold ere my Lord Rippingdale and the King's men had ever crossed it,
but for you, an Enderby, who deserted me in the conflict--a coward who
went over to the enemies of our house."

The young man's face twitched with a malignant anger.  He suddenly
started forward, and with a sidelong blow struck his father with the flat
of his sword.  A red ridge of bruised flesh instantly rose upon the old
man's cheek and ear.  He caught the arm of the chair by which he stood,
staggering back as though he had received a mortal wound.

"No, no, no!" he said, his voice gulping with misery and horror. --"No,
no!  Kill me, if you will--I but cannot fight you.  Oh, my God, my God!"
he gasped scarcely above a whisper.  "Unnatural-unnatural!"  He said no
more, for, upon the instant, four men entered the room.  They were of
Cromwell's Ironsides.  Young Enderby looked round swiftly, ready to
fight, but he saw at once that he was trapped.  The old man also laid his
hand upon his sword, but he saw that the case was hopeless.  He dropped
into his chair and leaned his head upon his hands.

                    ......................

Two months went by.  The battle of Dunbar was fought, and Charles had
lost it.  Among the prisoners was Garrett Enderby, who had escaped from
his captors on the way from Enderby House to London, and had joined the
Scottish army.  He was now upon trial for his life.  Cromwell's anger
against him was violent.  The other prisoners of war were treated as
such, and were merely confined to prison, but young Enderby was charged
with blasphemy and sedition, and with assaulting one of Cromwell's
officers--for on the very day that young Enderby made the assault,
Cromwell's foreign commission for John Enderby was on its way to
Lincolnshire.

Of the four men who had captured Garrett Enderby at Enderby House, three
had been killed in battle, and the other had deserted.  The father was
thus the chief witness against his son.  He was recalled from Portugal
where he had been engaged upon Cromwell's business.

The young man's judges leaned forward expectantly as John Enderby took
his place.  The Protector himself sat among them.

"What is your name, sir?" asked Cromwell.  "John Enderby, your
Highness."

"It hath been said that you hold a title given you by the man of sin."

"I have never taken a title from any man, your Highness."

A look of satisfaction crossed the gloomy and puritanical faces of the
officers of the court-martial.  Other questions were put, and then came
the vital points.  To the first of these, as to whether young Enderby had
uttered malignant and seditious libels against the Protector, the old man
would answer nothing.

"What speech hath ever been between my son and myself," he said, "is
between my son and myself only."  A start of anger travelled round the
circle of the court-martial.  Young Enderby watched his father curiously
and sullenly.

"Duty to country comes before all private feeling," said Cromwell.
"I command you, sir, on peril of a charge of treason against yourself, to
answer the question of the Court.  'If thy right hand offend thee, cut it
off; if thy foot cause thee to stumble, heave it to the shambles.  The
pernicious branch of the just tree shall be cloven and cast into the
brush-heap.'  You are an officer of this commonwealth, sir?" asked
Cromwell, again.

"By your Highness's permission," he replied.

"Did your son strike you upon the face with the flat of his sword upon
the night recorded in this charge against him?"

"What acts have passed between my son and myself are between my son and
myself only," replied Enderby, steadily.  He did not look at his son, but
presently the tears rolled down his cheeks, so that more than one of his
judges who had sons of their own were themselves moved.  But they took
their cue from the Protector, and made no motion towards the old man's
advantage.  Once more Cromwell essayed to get Enderby's testimony, but,
"I will not give witness against my son," was his constant and dogged
reply.  At last Cromwell rose in anger.

"We will have justice in this realm of England," said he, "though it turn
the father against the son and the son against the father.  Though the
house be divided against itself yet the Lord's work shall be done."

Turning his blazing eyes upon John Enderby, he said: "Troublous and
degenerate man, get gone from this country, and no more set foot in it
on peril of your life.  We recalled you from outlawry, believing you to
be a true lover of your country, but we find you malignant, seditious
and dangerous."

He turned towards the young man.

"You, sir, shall get you back to prison until other witnesses be found.
Although we know your guilt, we will be formal and just."

With an impatient nod to an officer beside him, he waved his hand towards
father and son.

As he was about to leave the room, John Enderby stretched out a hand to
him appealingly.

"Your Highness," said he, "I am an old man."

"Will you bear witness in this cause?" asked Cromwell, his frown
softening a little.

"Your Highness, I have suffered unjustly; the lad is bone of my bone and
flesh of my flesh.  I cannot--"

With an angry wave of the hand Cromwell walked heavily from the room.

Some touch of shame came to the young man's cold heart, and he spoke to
his father as the officers were about to lead him away.

"I have been wrong, I have misunderstood you, sir," he said, and he
seemed about to hold out his hand.  But it was too late.  The old man
turned on him, shaking his shaggy head.

"Never, sir, while I live.  The wrong to me is little.  I can take my
broken life into a foreign land and die dishonoured and forgotten.  But
my other child, my one dear child who has suffered year after year with
me--for the wrong you have done her, I never, never, never will forgive
you.  Not for love of you have I spoken as I did to-day, but for the
honour of the Enderbys and because you were the child of your mother."

Two days later at Southampton the old man boarded a little packet-boat
bound for Havre.




III

The years went by again.  At last all was changed in England.  The
monarchy was restored, and the land was smiling and content.  One day
there was a private reading in the Queen's chamber of the palace.  The
voice of the reader moved in pleasant yet vibrant modulations:

     "The King was now come to a time when his enemies wickedly began to
     plot against him secretly and to oppose him in his purposes; which,
     in his own mind, were beneficent and magnanimous.  From the shire
     where his labours had been most unselfish came the first malignant
     insult to his person and the first peril to his life, prefiguring
     the hellish plots and violence which drove him to his august
     martyrdom--"

The King had entered quietly as the lady-in-waiting read this passage to
the Queen, and, attracted by her voice, continued to listen, signifying
to the Queen, by a gesture, that she and her ladies were not to rise.
This was in the time when Charles was yet devoted to his Princess of
Portugal, and while she was yet happy and undisturbed by rumours--or
assurances--of her Lord's wandering affections.

"And what shire was that?" asked the King at that point where the
chronicler spoke of his royal father's "august martyrdom."

"The shire of Lincoln, your Majesty," said the young lady who read,
flushing.  Then she rose from her footstool at the Queen's feet, and made
the King an elaborate courtesy.

Charles waved a gentle and playful gesture of dissent from her extreme
formality, and, with a look of admiration, continued:

"My Lord Rippingdale should know somewhat of that 'first violence' of
which you have read, Mistress Falkingham.  He is of Lincolnshire."

"He knows all, your Majesty; he was present at that 'first violence.'"

"It would be amusing for Rippingdale to hear these records--my Lord
Clarendon's, are they not?  Ah--not in the formal copy of his work?  And
by order of my Lord Rippingdale?  Indeed!  And wherefore, my Lord
Rippingdale?"

"Shall I read on, your Majesty?" asked the young lady, with heightened
colour, and a look of adventure and purpose in her eyes.  Perhaps, too,
there was a look of anger in them--not against the King, for there was a
sort of eagerness or appealing in the glance she cast towards his
Majesty.

The Queen lifted her eyes to the King half doubtfully, for the question
seemed to her perilous, Charles being little inclined, as a rule, to
listen to serious reading, though he was ever gay in conversation, and
alert for witty badinage.  His Majesty, however, seemed more than
complaisant; he was even boyishly eager.

The young lady had been but a short time in the household, having come
over with the Queen from Portugal, where she had been brought to the
notice of the then Princess by her great coolness and bravery in rescuing
a young lady of Lisbon from grave peril.  She had told the Princess then
that she was the daughter of an exiled English gentleman, and was in the
care of her aunt, one Mistress Falkingham, while her father was gone on
an expedition to Italy.  The Princess, eager to learn English, engaged
her, and she had remained in the palace till the Princess left for
England.  A year passed, and then the Queen of England sent for her, and
she had been brought close to the person of her Majesty.

At a motion from Charles, who sat upon a couch, idly tapping the buckles
on his shoes with a gold-handled staff, the young lady placed herself
again at the Queen's feet and continued reading:

     "It was when the King was come to Boston town upon the business of
     the Fens and to confer sundry honours and inquire into the taxes,
     and for further purpose of visiting a good subject at Louth, who
     knew of the secret plans of Pym and Hampden, that this shameful
     violence befel our pious and illustrious prince.  With him was my
     Lord Rippingdale and--"

"Ah, ah, my Lord Rippingdale!" said Charles, half aloud, "so this is
where my lord and secret history meet--my dear, dumb lord."

Continuing, the young lady read a fair and just account of the King's
meeting with John Enderby, of Enderby's refusal to accept the knighthood,
and of his rescue of the King at Sutterby.

"Enderby?  Enderby?" interjected the King, "that was not one Sir Garrett
Enderby who was with the Scottish army at Dunbar?"

"No, your Majesty," said the young lady, scarcely looking up from the
page she held, "Sir Garrett Enderby died in Portugal, where he fled,
having escaped from prison and Cromwell's vengeance."

"What Enderby did this fine thing then?  My faith, my martyred father had
staunch men--even in Lincolnshire."

"The father of Sir Garrett Enderby it was, your Majesty."

"How came the son by the knighthood?  'S'death, it seems to me I have a
memory of this thing somewhere, if I could but find it!"

"His gracious Majesty of sacred memory gave him his knighthood."

"Let me hear the whole story.  Is it all there, Mistress Falkingham?"
said the King, nodding towards the pages she held.

"It is not all here, your Majesty; but I can tell what so many in England
know, and something of what no one in England knows."

The Queen put out her hand as if to stay the telling, for she saw what an
impression her fair reader had made upon the King.  But the young lady
saw no one save Charles--she did not note the entrance of two gentle men,
one of whom looked at her in surprise.  This was Sir Richard Mowbray of
Leicester.  The other was Lord Rippingdale (now lord chamberlain), who
had brought Sir Richard thither at the request of the King.  Sir Richard
had been momentarily expected on his return from a mission to Spain, and
my Lord had orders to bring him to the King on the very instant of his
arrival.

The King waved his hand when Lord Rippingdale would have come forward,
and the young lady continued with the history of John Enderby.  She
forgot her surroundings.  It seemed as though she were giving vent to the
suppressed feelings, imaginations, sufferings and wrongs of years.
Respectfully, but sadly, when speaking of the dead King; eloquently,
tenderly, when speaking of her father; bitterly, when speaking of Oliver
Cromwell, she told the story with a point, a force and a passionate
intelligence, which brought to the face of Charles a look of serious
admiration.  He straightened himself where he sat, and did not let his
eyes wander from the young lady's face.  As she spoke of Sir Garrett
Enderby and his acts--his desertion when Lord Rippingdale laid siege to
the house, his quarrel with his father, the trial of the son, the
father's refusal to testify against him, and the second outlawing by
Cromwell--her voice faltered, but she told the tale bravely and
determinedly; for she now saw Lord Rippingdale in the chamber.  Whenever
she had mentioned his name in the narrative, it was with a slight
inflection of scorn, which caused the King to smile; and when she spoke
of the ruin of Enderby House, her brother's death and her father's years
of exile, tears came into the Queen's eyes, and the King nodded his head
in sympathy.

Sir Richard Mowbray, with face aflame, watched her closely.  As she
finished her story he drew aside to where she could not see him without
turning round.  But Lord Rippingdale she saw with ease, and she met his
eyes firmly, and one should say, with some malicious triumph, were she
not a woman.

"My lord Rippingdale," said the King, slowly and bitingly, "what shall be
done to the man whom the King delighteth to honour?"

"Were I Mordecai I could better answer that question, Sir," was my Lord's
reply.

"Perhaps my Lord Rippingdale could answer for Haman, then," returned his
Majesty.

"My imagination is good, but not fifty cubits high, Sir."

The answer pleased the King.  For he ever turned life into jest--his
sorrows and his joys.  He rose motioning towards the door, and Lord
Rippingdale passed out just behind him, followed by Sir Richard Mowbray,
who stole a glance at the young chronicler as he went.  She saw him, then
recognised him, and flushed scarlet.

She did not dare, however, to let him come to her.  He understood, and he
went his way after the King and Lord Rippingdale.

In all the years that had passed since the night he had helped her father
and herself to escape from Enderby House; since he aided them to leave
their hiding-place on the coast and escape to Holland, she had never
forgotten his last words to her, the laughing look of his eyes, the
pressure of his hand.  Many a time since she had in her own mind thought
of him as she had heard her father call him, even as "Happy Dick
Mowbray!" and the remembrance of his joyous face had been a help to her
in all her sufferings.  His brown hair was now streaked with grey, but
the light in the face was the same; there was the same alertness and
buoyant health in the figure and the same row of laughing white teeth.

As she stood watching the departing figure, she scarcely knew that the
Queen was preparing to go to her bed-chamber.  She became aware of it
definitely by the voice of her Majesty, now somewhat petulant.

Two hours later she was walking alone in one of the galleries when,
hearing a gentle step behind her, she turned and saw the King.  She made
an obeisance and was about to move on, when he stopped her, speaking
kindly to her, and thanking her for the great pleasure she had given him
that afternoon.

"What should be done for this quasi knight of Enderby?" asked the King.

"He saved the life of the King," she said; then boldly, confidently,
"your Majesty, for conscience sake he lost all--what can repay him for
his dishonoured years and his ruined home!"

"What think you, Mistress, should be done with him?  Speak freely of the
man whom the King delighteth to honour."

She felt the sincerity under the indolent courtesy, and spoke as only a
woman can speak for those she loves.  "Your Majesty, he should have the
earldom promised his ancestor by Wolsey, and his estates restored to him
as he left them."

The King laughed dryly.

"He might refuse the large earldom, as he scorned the little knighthood."

"If your Majesty secured him estates suitable to his rank he could have
no reason to refuse.  He was solicitous and firm then for his son--but
now!"

Her reply was as diplomatic and suggestive as it was sincere, and Charles
loved such talents.

"Upon my soul, dear Mistress Falkingham, I love your cleverness," said
the King, "and I will go further, I--" He stooped and whispered in her
ear, but she drew back in affright and anxiety.

"Oh, your Majesty, your Majesty," she said, "I had not thought--"

She moved on distractedly, but he put out his hand and stayed her.

"Ah, a moment, sweetheart," he urged.

"I must go to the Queen," she answered hurriedly.  "Oh, your Majesty,
your Majesty," she repeated, "would you ruin me?"  Her eyes filled with
tears.  "Until the Queen welcomed me here I have had nothing but sorrow.
I am friendless and alone."

"No, no," said Charles, kindly, "not alone while Charles is King in
England."

"I am little more than an orphan here," she said, "for my father is now
only a common soldier, your Majesty, and--"

"A common soldier!" repeated Charles a little stiffly; "they told me he
was a gentleman of England doing service in Italy."

"My father is in your Majesty's household guard," she answered.  "He was
John Enderby--alas! none would recognise him now as such."

The King stared at her a moment.  "You--you--Mistress--you are John
Enderby's daughter?"

Her reply was scarce above a whisper.  "His only child, Sir."

"Upon my soul!  Upon my soul!" was all Charles said for a moment, and
then he added: "Why did you not speak before?"

"My father would not permit me, your Majesty.  He is only returned to
England these few months."

"He is here to--?"

"To be near to myself, Sir."

The King bowed low over her hand.

"Mistress Enderby," said he, frankly, "we are honoured by your presence
in this place.  To-morrow morning at eleven your father shall come to us.
You are still but a child in face," he said; "and yet--eh?"

"I am twenty-seven years old," she answered frankly.

"Quite old enough to be a countess," he said charmingly, "and young
enough to enjoy the honours thereof."  So saying he bowed again, and with
a gracious smile dismissed her.  She went so quickly that she did not see
two gentlemen almost at her elbow as she left the gallery.  One of them
was Lord Rippingdale.

"Ha," said my lord, with a wicked smile, "a new violet in the King's
garden!"

His companion turned on him swiftly.

"My lord," said he, "this is the second time to-day you have slandered
this lady."

The other lifted his eyebrows.

"Is it a slander to say that the King finds a lady charming at any hour
o' the clock?" he rejoined.

Sir Richard slapped him across the cheek with his glove.

"I take a pleasant duty from John Enderby's shoulders, my lord.  I will
meet you at your pleasure."

The next morning at sunrise Lord Rippingdale declared with his last
breath that he did not know the lady was John Enderby's daughter, and he
begged Sir Richard to carry to Enderby his regret for all past wrongs.

Sir Richard came in upon the King at the moment that his Majesty was
receiving John Enderby--a whiteheaded old man, yet hale and strong, and
wearing the uniform of the King's Guard.  The fire of Enderby's eye was
not quenched.  The King advanced towards him, and said:

"You are welcome to our Court, Squire Enderby.  You have been absent too
long.  You will honour us by accepting a tardy justice--without a price,"
he added, in a low tone.

"Your Majesty," said Enderby, "for me justice comes too late, but for my
child--"

"An earldom can never come too late--eh?" asked the King, smiling gaily.

"For me, your Majesty, all comes too late except--" his voice shook a
little--"except the house where I was born."

Charles looked at him gravely.

"Upon my soul, Enderby," said he, "you are a man to be envied.  We will
not rob you of your good revenge on our house or of your independence.
But still we must have our way.  Your daughter,"--he turned lightly
towards Felicity,--"if she will not refuse me, and she cannot upon the
ground that you refused my father--she shall be Countess of Enderby in
her own right; with estates in keeping."

Womanlike, Mistress Felicity had no logical argument against an honour so
munificently ordained.  "And now for your estates--who holds them?"
asked the King.

"Lord Rippingdale, your Majesty," answered Enderby.

"Yes, yes, my lord Haman!  We have already sent for him.  It is long past
the time."  His brow darkened.

Sir Richard Mowbray stepped forward and said: "Your Majesty, Lord
Rippingdale is beyond obedience or reparation;" and then he gave the
message of the dead man to John Enderby.

A month later Mowbray was permitted to return to Court, and with him came
John Enderby and the Countess of Enderby.  When Charles was told how
matters had gone between the younger two, he gave vent to a mock
indignation; and in consequence he made Sir Richard Mowbray an earl also,
that, as he said, they might both be at the same nearness to him; for
etiquette was tyrannical, and yet he did not know which of them he loved
better!

As for the man so long dishonoured, Charles swore that since John Enderby
came not to the King at Court, the King would go to him at Enderby.  And
go he did in good temper and in great friendship for many a year.






"THERE IS SORROW ON THE SEA"


By Gilbert Parker





I

                              "YORK FACTORY, HUDSON'S BAY,
                                   "23rd September, 1747.

"MY DEAR COUSIN FANNY,--It was a year last April Fool's Day, I left you
on the sands there at Mablethorpe, no more than a stone's throw from the
Book-in-Hand Inn, swearing that you should never see me or hear from me
again.  You remember how we saw the coast-guards flash their lights here
and there, as they searched the sands for me? how one came bundling down
the bank, calling, 'Who goes there?'  You remember that when I said, 'A
friend,' he stumbled, and his light fell to the sands and went out, and
in the darkness you and I stole away: you to your home, with a
whispering, 'God-bless-you, Cousin Dick,' over your shoulder, and I with
a bit of a laugh that, maybe, cut to the heart, and that split in a sob
in my own throat--though you didn't hear that.

"'Twas a bad night's work that, Cousin Fanny, and maybe I wish it undone,
and maybe I don't; but a devil gets into the heart of a man when he has
to fly from the lass he loves, while the friends of his youth go hunting
him with muskets, and he has to steal out of the backdoor of his own
country and shelter himself, like a cold sparrow, up in the eaves of the
world.

"Ay, lass, that's how I left the fens of Lincolnshire a year last April
Fool's Day.  There wasn't a dyke from, Lincoln town to Mablethorpe that I
hadn't crossed with a running jump; and there wasn't a break in the
shore, or a sink-hole in the sand, or a clump of rushes, or a samphire
bed, from Skegness to Theddlethorpe, that I didn't know like every line
of your face.  And when I was a slip of a lad-ay, and later too--how you
and I used to snuggle into little nooks of the sand-hills, maybe just
beneath the coast-guard's hut, and watch the tide come swilling in-water-
daisies you used to call the breaking surf, Cousin Fanny.  And that was
like you, always with a fancy about everything you saw.  And when the
ships, the fishing-smacks with their red sails, and the tall-masted brigs
went by, taking the white foam on their canvas, you used to wish that you
might sail away to the lands you'd heard tell of from old skippers that
gathered round my uncle's fire in the Book-in-Hand.  Ay, a grand thing I
thought it would be, too, to go riding round the world on a well-washed
deck, with plenty of food and grog, and maybe, by-and-by, to be first
mate, and lord it from fo'castle bunk to stern-rail.

"You did not know, did you, who was the coast-guardsman that stumbled as
he came on us that night?  It looked a stupid thing to do that, and let
the lantern fall.  But, lass, 'twas done o' purpose.  That was the one
man in all the parish that would ha' risked his neck to let me free.
'Twas Lancy Doane, who's give me as many beatings in his time as I him.
We were always getting foul one o' t'other since I was big enough to shy
a bit of turf at him across a dyke, and there isn't a spot on's body that
I haven't hit, nor one on mine that he hasn't mauled.  I've sat on his
head, and he's had his knee in my stomach till I squealed, and we never
could meet without back-talking and rasping 'gainst the grain.  The night
before he joined the coast-guardsmen, he was down at the Book-in-Hand,
and 'twas little like that I'd let the good chance pass--I might never
have another; for Gover'ment folk will not easy work a quarrel on their
own account.  I mind him sittin' there on the settle, his shins against
the fire, a long pipe going, and Casey of the Lazy Beetle, and Jobbin the
mate of the Dodger, and Little Faddo, who had the fat Dutch wife down by
the Ship Inn, and Whiggle the preaching blacksmith.  And you were
standin' with your back to the shinin' pewters, and the great jug of ale
with the white napkin behind you; the light o' the fire wavin' on your
face, and your look lost in the deep hollow o' the chimney.  I think of
you most as you were that minute, Cousin Fanny, when I come in.  I tell
you straight and fair, that was the prettiest picture I ever saw; and
I've seen some rare fine things in my travels.  'Twas as if the thing had
been set by some one, just to show you off to your best.  Here you were,
a slip of a lass, straight as a bulrush, and your head hangin' proud on
your shoulders; yet modest too, as you can see off here in the North the
top of the golden-rod flower swing on its stem.  You were slim as slim,
and yet there wasn't a corner on you; so soft and full and firm you were,
like the breast of a quail; and I mind me how the shine of your cheeks
was like the glimmer of an apple after you've rubbed it with a bit of
cloth.  Well, there you stood in some sort of smooth, plain, clingin'
gown, a little bit loose and tumblin' at the throat, and your pretty foot
with a brown slipper pushed out, just savin' you from bein' prim.  That's
why the men liked you--you didn't carry a sermon in your waist-ribbon,
and the Lord's Day in the lift o' your chin; but you had a smile to give
when 'twas the right time for it, and men never said things with you
there that they'd have said before many another maid.

"'Twas a thing I've thought on off here, where I've little to do but
think, how a lass like you could put a finger on the lip of such rough
tykes as Faddo, Jobbin, and the rest, keepin' their rude words under flap
and button.  Do you mind how, when I passed you comin' in, I laid my hand
on yours as it rested on the dresser?  That hand of yours wasn't a tiny
bit of a thing, and the fingers weren't all taperin' like a simperin'
miss from town, worked down in the mill of quality and got from graftin'
and graftin', like one of them roses from the flower-house at Mablethorpe
Hall--not fit to stand by one o' them that grew strong and sweet with no
fancy colour, in the garden o' the Book-in-Hand.  Yours was a hand that
talked as much as your lips or face, as honest and white; and the palm
all pink, and strong as strong could be, and warmin' every thread in a
man's body when he touched it.  Well, I touched your hand then, and you
looked at me and nodded, and went musin' into the fire again, not seemin'
to hear our gabble.

"But, you remember--don't you?--how Jobbin took to chaffin' of Lancy
Doane, and how Faddo's tongue got sharper as the time got on, and many a
nasty word was said of coast-guards and excisemen, and all that had to do
with law and gover'ment.  Cuts there were at some of Laney's wild doings
in the past, and now and then they'd turn to me, saying what they thought
would set me girdin' Lancy too.  But I had my own quarrel, and I wasn't
to be baited by such numskulls.  And Lancy--that was a thing I couldn't
understand--he did no more than shrug his shoulder and call for more ale,
and wish them all good health and a hundred a year.  I never thought he
could ha' been so patient-like.  But there was a kind of little smile,
too, on his face, showin' he did some thinkin'; and I guessed he was
bidin' his time.

"I wasn't as sharp as I might ha' been, or I'd ha' seen what he was
waitin' for, with that quiet provokin' smile on his face, and his eyes
smoulderin' like.  I don't know to this day whether you wanted to leave
the room when you did, though 'twas about half after ten o'clock, later
than I ever saw you there before.  But when my uncle come in from Louth,
and give you a touch on the shoulder, and said: 'To bed wi' you, my
lass,' you waited for a minute longer, glancin' round on all of us, at
last lookin' steady at Lancy; and he got up from his chair, and took off
his hat to you with a way he had.  You didn't stay a second after that,
but went away straight, sayin' good-night to all of us, but Lancy was the
only one on his feet.

"Just as soon as the door was shut behind you, Lancy turned round to the
fire, and pushed the log with his feet in a way a man does when he's
think-in' a bit.  And Faddo give a nasty laugh, and said:

"' Theer's a dainty sitovation.  Theer's Mr. Thomas Doane, outlaw and
smuggler, and theer's Mr. Lancy Doane his brother, coast-guardsman.  Now,
if them two should 'appen to meet on Lincolnshire coast, Lord, theer's a
sitovation for ye--Lord, theer's a cud to chew!  'Ere's one gentleman
wants to try 'is 'and at 'elpin' Prince Charlie, and when 'is Up doesn't
amount to anythink, what does the King on 'is throne say?  He says, "As
for Thomas Doane, Esquire, aw've doone wi' 'im."  And theer's another
gentleman, Mr. Lancy Doane, Esquire.  He turns pious, and says, "Aw'm
goin' for a coast-guardsman."  What does the King on his throne say?  'E
says, 'Theer's the man for me.'"

But aw says, "Aw've doone, aw've doone wi' Mr. Lancy Doane, Esquire, and
be damned to 'im!"  He! he!  Theer's a fancy sitovation for ye.  Mr.
Thomas Doane, Esquire, smuggler and outlaw, an' Mr. Lancy Doane, Esquire,
coast-guardsman.  Aw've doone.  Ho! ho!  That gits into my crop.'

"I tell you these things, Cousin Fanny, because I'm doubtin' if you ever
heard them, or knew exactly how things stood that night.  I never was a
friend of Lancy Doane, you understand, but it's only fair that the truth
be told about that quarrel, for like as not he wouldn't speak himself,
and your father was moving in and out; and, I take my oath, I wouldn't
believe Faddo and the others if they was to swear on the Bible.  Not that
they didn't know the truth when they saw it, but they did love just to
let their fancy run.  I'm livin' over all the things that happened that
night--livin' them over to-day, when everything's so quiet about me here,
so lonesome.  I wanted to go over it all, bit by bit, and work it out in
my head, just as you and I used to do the puzzle games we played in the
sands.  And maybe, when you're a long way off from things you once lived,
you can see them and understand them better.  Out here, where it's so
lonely, and yet so good a place to live in, I seem to get the hang o'
the world better, and why some things are, and other things aren't;
and I thought it would pull at my heart to sit down and write you a long
letter, goin' over the whole business again; but it doesn't.  I suppose I
feel as a judge does when he goes over a lot of evidence, and sums it all
up for the jury.  I don't seem prejudiced one way or another.  But I'm
not sure that I've got all the evidence to make me ken everything; and
that's what made me bitter wild the last time that I saw you.  Maybe you
hadn't anything to tell me, and maybe you had, and maybe, if you ever
write to me out here, you'll tell me if there's anything I don't know
about them days.

"Well, I'll go back now to what happened when Faddo was speakin' at my
uncle's bar.  Lancy Doane was standin' behind the settle, leanin' his
arms on it, and smokin' his pipe quiet.  He waited patient till Faddo had
done, then he comes round the settle, puts his pipe up in the rack
between the rafters, and steps in front of Faddo.  If ever the devil was
in a man's face, it looked out of Lancy Doane's that minute.  Faddo had
touched him on the raw when he fetched out that about Tom Doane.  All of
a sudden Lancy swings, and looks at the clock.

"'It's half-past ten, Jim Faddo,' said he, 'and aw've got an hour an' a
half to deal wi' you as a Lincolnshire lad.  At twelve o'clock aw'm the
Gover'ment's, but till then aw'm Lancy Doane, free to strike or free to
let alone; to swallow dirt or throw it; to take a lie or give it.  And
now list to me; aw'm not goin' to eat dirt, and aw'm goin' to give you
the lie, and aw'm goin' to break your neck, if I swing for it to-morrow,
Jim Faddo.  And here's another thing aw'll tell you.  When the clock
strikes twelve, on the best horse in the country aw'll ride to
Theddlethorpe, straight for the well that's dug you know where, to find
your smuggled stuff, and to run the irons round your wrists.  Aw'm
dealin' fair wi' you that never dealt fair by no man.  You never had an
open hand nor soft heart; and because you've made money, not out o'
smugglin' alone, but out o' poor devils of smugglers that didn't know
rightly to be rogues, you think to fling your dirt where you choose.
But aw'll have ye to-night as a man, and aw'll have ye to-night as
a King's officer, or aw'll go damned to hell.'

"Then he steps back a bit very shiny in the face, and his eyes like
torchlights, but cool and steady.  'Come on now,' he says, 'Jim Faddo,
away from the Book-in-Hand, and down to the beach under the sand-hills,
and we'll see man for man--though, come to think of it, y 'are no man,'
he said--'if ye'll have the right to say when aw'm a King's officer that
you could fling foul words in the face of Lancy Doane.  And a word more,'
he says; 'aw wouldn't trust ye if an Angel o' Heaven swore for ye.  Take
the knife from the belt behind your back there, and throw it on the
table, for you wouldn't bide by no fair rules o' fightin'.  Throw the
knife on the table,' he says, comin' a step forward.

"Faddo got on to his feet.  He was bigger built than Lancy, and a bit
taller, and we all knew he was devilish strong in his arms.  There was a
look in his face I couldn't understand.  One minute I thought it was
fear, and another I thought it was daze; and maybe it was both.  But all
on a sudden something horrible cunnin' come into it, and ugly too.

"'Go to the well, then, since ye've found out all about it,' he says,
'but aw've an hour and a half start o' ye, Lancy Doane.'

"'Ye've less than that,' says Lancy back to him, 'if ye go with me to the
sands first.'

"At that my uncle stepped in to say a word for peacemakin', but Lancy
would have none of it.  'Take the knife and throw it on the table,' he
said to Faddo once more, and Faddo took it out and threw it down.

"'Come on, then,' Faddo says, with a sneerin' laugh; 'we'll see by
daybreak who has the best o' this night's work,' and he steps towards the
door.

"'Wait a minute,' says Lancy, gettin' in front of him.  'Now take the
knife from your boot.  Take it,' he says again, 'or aw will.  That's like
a man, to go to a fist fight wi' knives.  Take it,' he said.  'Aw'll gi'
ye till aw count four, and if ye doan't take it, aw'll take it meself.
One!' he says steady and soft.  'Two!' Faddo never moved.  'Three!' The
silence made me sick, and the clock ticked like hammers.  'Four!' he
said, and then he sprang for the boot, but Faddo's hand went down like
lightnin' too.  I couldn't tell exactly how they clinched but once or
twice I saw the light flash on the steel.  Then they came down together,
Faddo under, and when I looked again Faddo was lying eyes starin' wide,
and mouth all white with fear, for Lancy was holding the knife-point at
his throat.  'Stir an inch,' says Lancy, 'and aw'll pin ye to the lid o'
hell.'

"Three minutes by the clock he knelt there on Faddo's chest, the knife-
point touching the bone in's throat.  Not one of us stirred, but just
stood lookin', and my own heart beat so hard it hurt me, and my uncle
steadyin' himself against the dresser.  At last Lancy threw the knife
away into the fire.

"'Coward!' he said.  'A man would ha' taken the knife.  Did you think aw
was goin' to gie my neck to the noose just to put your knife to proper
use?  But don't stir till aw gie you the word, or aw'll choke the breath
o' life out o' ye.'

"At that Faddo sprung to clinch Laney's arms, but Laney's fingers caught
him in the throat, and I thought surely Faddo was gone, for his tongue
stood out a finger-length, and he was black in the face.

"'For God's sake, Lancy,' said my uncle, steppin' forward, 'let him go.'

"At that Lancy said: 'He's right enough.  It's not the first time aw've
choked a coward.  Throw cold water on him and gi' 'im brandy.'

"Sure enough, he wasn't dead.  Lancy stood there watchin' us while we
fetched Faddo back, and I tell you, that was a narrow squeak for him.
When he got his senses again, and was sittin' there lookin' as if he'd
been hung and brought back to life, Lancy says to him: 'There, Jim Faddo,
aw've done wi' you as a man, and at twelve o'clock aw'll begin wi' you as
King's officer.'  And at that, with a good-night to my uncle and all of
us, he turns on his heels and leaves the Book-in-Hand.

"I tell you, Cousin Fanny, though I'd been ripe for quarrel wi' Lancy
Doane myself that night, I could ha' took his hand like a brother, for
I never saw a man deal fairer wi' a scoundrel than he did wi' Jim Faddo.
You see, it wasn't what Faddo said about himself that made Laney wild,
but that about his brother Tom; and a man doesn't like his brother spoken
ill of by dirt like Faddo, be it true or false.  And of Laney's brother
I'm goin' to write further on in this letter, for I doubt that you know
all I know about him, and the rest of what happened that night and
afterwards."



"DEAR COUSIN FANNY, I canna write all I set out to, for word come to me,
just as I wrote the last sentence above, that the ship was to leave port
three days sooner than was fixed for when I began.  I have been rare and
busy since then, and I have no time to write more.  And so 'twill be
another year before you get a word from me; but I hope that when this
letter comes you'll write one back to me by the ship that sails next
summer from London.  The summer's short and the winter's long here,
Cousin Fanny, and there's more snow than grass; and there's more flowers
in a week in Mablethorpe than in a whole year here.  But, lass, the sun
shines always, and my heart keeps warm in thinkin' of you, and I ask you
to forgive me for any harsh word I ever spoke, not forgettin' that last
night when I left you on the sands, and stole away like a thief across
the sea.  I'm going to tell you the whole truth in my next letter, but
I'd like you to forgive me before you know it all, for 'tis a right
lonely and distant land, this, and who can tell what may come to pass in
twice a twelve month!  Maybe a prayer on lips like mine doesn't seem in
place, for I've not lived as parson says man ought to live, but I think
the Lord will have no worse thought o' me when I say, God bless thee,
lass, and keep thee safe as any flower in His garden that He watereth
with His own hand.  Write to me, lass: I love thee still, I do love thee.

                                                  "DICK ORRY."




II

                                        THE BOOK-IN-HAND INN,
                                     MABLETHORPE, LINCOLNSHIRE.
                                           May-Day, 1749.

"DEAR COUSIN DICK,--I think I have not been so glad in many years as when
I got your letter last Guy Fawkes Day.  I was coming from the church
where the parson preached on plots and treasons, and obedience to the
King, when I saw the old postman coming down the road.  I made quickly to
him, I know not why, for I had not thought to hear from you, and before I
reached him he held up his hand, showing me the stout packet which
brought me news of you.  I hurried with it to the inn, and went straight
to my room and sat down by the window, where I used to watch for your
coming with the fishing fleet, down the sea from the Dogger Bank.  I was
only a girl, a young girl, then, and the Dogger Bank was, to my mind, as
far off as that place you call York Factory, in Hudson's Bay, is to me
now.  And yet I did not know how very far it was until our schoolmaster
showed me on a globe how few days' sail it is to the Dogger Bank, and how
many to York Factory.

"But I will tell you of my reading of your letter, and of what I thought.
But first I must go back a little.  When you went away that wild, dark
night, with bitter words on your lips to me, Cousin Dick, I thought I
should never feel the same again.  You did not know it, but I was bearing
the misery of your trouble and of another's also, and of my own as well;
and so I said over and over again, Oh, why will men be hard on women?
Why do they look for them to be iron like themselves, bearing double
burdens as most women do?  But afterwards I settled to a quietness which
I would not have you think was happiness, for I have given up thought
of that.  Nor would I have you think me bearing trouble sweetly, for
sometimes I was most hard and stubborn.  But I lived on in a sort of
stillness till that morning when, sitting by my window, I read all you
had written to me.  And first of all I must tell you how my heart was
touched at your words about our childhood together.  I had not thought it
lay so deep in your mind, Cousin Dick.  It always stays in mine; but
then, women have more memories than men.  The story of that night I knew;
but never fully as you have told it to me in your letter.  Of what
happened after Lancy Doane left the inn, of which you have not written,
but promised the writing in your next letter, I think I know as well as
yourself.  Nay, more, Cousin Dick.  There are some matters concerning
what followed that night and after, which I know, and you do not know.
But you have guessed there was something which I did not tell you, and so
there was.  And I will tell you of them now.  But I will take up the
thread of the story where you dropped it, and reel it out.

"You left the inn soon after Lancy Doane, and James Faddo went then too,
riding hard for Theddlethorpe, for he knew that in less than an hour the
coast-guards would be rifling the hiding places of his smuggled stuff.
You did not take a horse, but, getting a musket, you walked the sands
hard to Theddlethorpe.

"I know it all, though you did not tell me, Cousin Dick.  You had no
purpose in going, save to see the end of a wretched quarrel and a
smuggler's ill scheme.  You carried a musket for your own safety, not
with any purpose.  It was a day of weight in your own life, for on one
side you had an offer from the Earl Fitzwilliam to serve on his estate;
and on the other to take a share in a little fleet of fishing smacks,
of which my father was part owner.  I think you know to which side I
inclined, but that now is neither here nor there; and, though you did not
tell me, as you went along the shore you were more intent on handing
backwards and forwards in your mind your own affairs, than of what should
happen at Theddlethorpe.  And so you did not hurry as you went, and, as
things happened, you came to Faddo's house almost at the same moment with
Lancy Doane and two other mounted coast-guards.

"You stood in the shadow while they knocked at Faddo's door.  You were so
near, you could see the hateful look in his face.  You were surprised he
did not try to stand the coast-guards off.  You saw him, at their
bidding, take a lantern, and march with them to a shed standing off a
little from the house, nearer to the shore.  Going a roundabout swiftly,
you came to the shed first, and posted yourself at the little window on
the sea-side.  You saw them enter with the lantern, saw them shift a
cider press, uncover the floor, and there beneath, in a dry well, were
barrels upon barrels of spirits, and crouched among them was a man whom
you all knew at once--Laney's brother, Tom.  That, Cousin Dick, was Jim
Faddo's revenge.  Tom Doane had got refuge with him till he should reach
his brother, not knowing Lancy was to be coast-guard.  Faddo, coming back
from Mablethorpe, told Tom the coast-guards were to raid him that night;
and he made him hide in this safe place, as he called it, knowing that
Lancy would make for it.

"For a minute after Tom was found no man stirred.  Tom was quick of brain
and wit--would it had always been put, to good purposes!--and saw at once
Faddo's treachery.  Like winking he fired at the traitor, who was almost
as quick to return the fire.  What made you do it I know not, unless it
was you hated treachery; but, sliding in at the open door behind the
coast-guards, you snatched the lantern from the hands of one, threw it
out of the open door, and, thrusting them aside, called for Tom to follow
you.  He sprang towards you over Faddo's body, even as you threw the
lantern, and, catching his arm, you ran with him towards the dyke.

"'Ready for a great jump!' you said.  'Your life hangs on it.' He was
even longer of leg than you.  'Is it a dyke?' he whispered, as the shots
from three muskets rang after you.  'A dyke.  When I count three, jump,'
you answered.  I have read somewhere of the great leap that one Don
Alvarado, a Spaniard, made in Mexico, but surely never was a greater leap
than you two made that night, landing safely on the other side, and
making for the sea-shore.  None of the coast guardsmen, not even Lancy,
could make the leap, for he was sick and trembling, though he had fired
upon his own brother.  And so they made for the bridge some distance
above, just as the faint moon slipped behind a cloud and hid you from
their sight.

"That is no country to hide in, as you know well, no caves, or hills, or
mazy coombes, just a wide, flat, reedy place, broken by open woods.  The
only refuge for both now was the sea.  'Twas a wild run you two made,
side by side, down that shore, keeping close within the gloom of the
sand-hills, the coast-guards coming after, pressing you closer than they
thought at the time, for Tom Doane had been wounded in the leg.  But
Lancy sent one back for the horses, he and the other coming on; and so,
there you were, two and two.  'Twas a cruel task for Lancy that night,
enough to turn a man's hair grey.  But duty was duty, though those two
lads were more to each other than most men ever are.  You know how it
ended.  But I want to go all over it just to show you that I understand.
You were within a mile of Mablethorpe, when you saw a little fishing
smack come riding in, and you made straight for it.  Who should be in the
smack but Solby, the canting Baptist, who was no friend to you or my
uncle, or any of us.  You had no time for bargaining or coaxing, and so,
at the musket's mouth, you drove him from the boat, and pushed it out
just as Lancy and his men came riding up.  Your sail was up, and you
turned the lugger to the wind in as little time as could be, but the
coast-guardsmen rode after you, calling you to give in.  No man will ever
know the bitter trouble in Laney's heart when he gave the order to fire
on you, though he did not fire himself.  And you--do I not know, Cousin
Dick, what you did?  Tom Doane was not the man to fire at the three dark
figures riding you down, not knowing which was his brother.  But you, you
understood that; and you were in, you said to yourself, and you'd play
the game out, come what would.  You raised your musket and drew upon a
figure.  At that moment a coast-guard's musket blazed, and you saw the
man you had drawn on was Lancy Doane.  You lowered your musket, and as
you did a ball struck you on the wrist.

"Oh, I have thanked God a hundred times, dear Cousin Dick, that you fired
no shot that night, but only helped a hunted, miserable man away, for you
did get free.  Just in the nick of time your sail caught the wind, and
you steered for the open sea.  Three days from that, Tom Doane was safe
in the Low Country, and you were on your way back to Lincolnshire.  You
came by a fishing boat to Saltfleet Haven, and made your way down the
coast towards Mablethorpe.  Passing Theddlethorpe, you went up to Faddo's
house, and, looking through the window, you saw Faddo, not dead, but
being cared for by his wife.  Then you came on to Mablethorpe, and
standing under my window, at the very moment when I was on my knees
praying for the safety of those who travelled by sea, you whistled like a
quail from the garden below--the old signal.  Oh, how my heart stood
still a moment and then leaped, for I knew it was you!  I went down to
the garden, and there you were.  Oh, but I was glad to see you, Cousin
Dick!

"You remember how I let you take me in your arms for an instant, and then
I asked if he was safe.  And when you told me that he was, I burst into
tears, and I asked you many questions about him.  And you answered them
quickly, and then would have taken me in your arms again.  But I would
not let you, for then I knew--I knew that you loved me, and, oh, a
dreadful feeling came into my heart, and I drew back, and could have sunk
upon the ground in misery, but that there came a thought of your safety!
He was safe, but you--you were here, where reward was posted for you.  I
begged you to come into the house, that I might hide you there, but you
would not.  You had come for one thing, you said, and only one.  An hour
or two, and then you must be gone for London.  And so you urged me to the
beach.  I was afraid we might be seen, but you led me away from the
cottages near to the little bridge which crosses the dyke.  By that way
we came to the sands, as we thought unnoted.  But no, who should it be to
see us but that canting Baptist, Solby!  And so the alarm was given.  You
had come, dear Cousin Dick, to ask me one thing--if I loved you?  and if,
should you ever be free to come back, I would be your wife?  I did not
answer you; I could not answer you; and, when you pressed me, I begged
you to have pity on me and not to speak of it.  You thought I was not
brave enough to love a man open to the law.  As if--as if I knew not that
what you did came out of a generous, reckless heart.  And on my knees--
oh, on my knees--I ought to have thanked you for it!  But I knew not what
to say; my lips were closed.  And just then shots were fired, and we saw
the coast-guards' lights.  Then came Lancy Doane stumbling down the
banks, and our parting--our parting.  Your bitter laugh as you left me
has rung in my ears ever since.

"Do not think we have been idle here in your cause, for I myself went to
Earl Fitzwilliam and told him the whole story, and how you had come to
help Tom Doane that night.  How do I know of it all?  Because I have seen
a letter from Tom Doane.  Well, the Earl promised to lay your case before
the King himself, and to speak for you with good eager entreaty.  And so,
it may be, by next time I write, there will go good news to you, and--
will you then come back, dear Cousin Dick?

"And now I want to tell you what I know, and what you do not know.
Tom Doane had a wife in Mablethorpe.  He married her when she was but
sixteen--a child.  But she was afraid of her father's anger, and her
husband soon after went abroad, became one of Prince Charlie's men, and
she's never seen him since.  She never really loved him, but she never
forgot that she was his wife; and she always dreaded his coming back; as
well she might, for you see what happened when he did come.  I pitied
her, dear Cousin Dick, with all my heart; and when Tom Doane died on the
field of battle in Holland last year, I wept with her and prayed for her.
And you would have wept too, man though you are, if you had seen how
grateful she was that he died in honourable fighting and not in a
smuggler's cave at Theddlethorpe.  She blessed you for that, and she
never ceases to work with me for the King's pardon for you.

"There is no more to say now, dear Cousin Dick, save that I would have
you know I think of you with great desire of heart for your well-being,
and I pray God for your safe return some day to the good country which,
pardoning you, will cast you out no more.

                    "I am, dear Cousin Dick,

                         "Thy most affectionate Cousin,

                                   "FANNY."

"Afterword--Dear Dick, my heart bursts for joy.  Enclosed here is thy
pardon, sent by the good Earl Fitzwilliam last night.  I could serve him
on my knees for ever.  Dick, she that was Tom Doane's wife, she loves
thee.  Wilt thou not come back to her?

"In truth, she always loved thee.  She was thy cousin; she is thy Fanny.
Now thou knowest all."






DONOVAN PASHA AND SOME PEOPLE OF EGYPT, Complete

By Gilbert Parker



CONTENTS

Volume 1.
WHILE THE LAMP HOLDS OUT TO BURN
THE PRICE OF THE GRINDSTONE-AND THE DRUM
THE DESERTION OF MAHOMMED SELIMON
THE REEF OF NORMAN'S WOE

Volume 2.
FIELDING HAD AN ORDERLY
THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE
A TREATY OF PEACE
AT THE MERCY OF TIBERIUS
ALL THE WORLD'S MAD

Volume 3.
THE MAN AT THE WHEEL
A TYRANT AND A LADY

Volume 4.
A YOUNG LION OF DEDAN
HE WOULD NOT BE DENIED
THE FLOWER OF THE FLOCK
THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS



INTRODUCTION

To the FOREWORD of this book I have practically nothing to add.  It
describes how the book was planned, and how at last it came to be
written.  The novel--'The Weavers'--of which it was the herald, as one
might say, was published in 1907.  The reception of Donovan Pasha
convinced me beyond peradventure, that the step I took in enlarging my
field of work was as wise in relation to my art as in its effect upon my
mind, temperament and faculty for writing.  I knew Egypt by study quite
as well as I knew the Dominion of Canada, the difference being, of
course, that the instinct for the life of Canada was part of my very
being itself; but there are great numbers of people who live their lives
for fifty or seventy or eighty years in a country, and have no real
instinct for understanding.  There are numberless Canadians who do not
understand Canada, Englishmen who know nothing of England, and Americans
who do not understand the United States.  If it is so that I have some
instinct for the life of Canada, and have expressed it to the world
with some accuracy and fidelity, it is apparent that the capacity for
understanding could not be limited absolutely to one environment.  That I
understood Canada could not be established by the fact that I had spent
my boyhood there, but only by the fact that some inner vision permitted
me to see it as it really was.  That inner vision, however, if it was
anything at all was not in blinders, seeing only one section of the life
of the world.  Relatively it might see more deeply, more intimately in
that place where habit of life had made the man familiar with all its
detail, but the same vision turned elsewhere to fields where study and
sympathy played a devoted part, could not fail to see; though the
workman's craft, which made material the vision, might fail.

The reception given Donovan Pasha convinced me that neither the vision
nor the craftsmanship had wholly failed, whatever the degree of success
which had been reached.  Anglo-Egyptians approved the book.  Its pages
passed through the hands of an Englishman who had done over twenty years'
service in the British army in Egypt and in official positions in the
Egyptian administration, and I do not think that he made six corrections
in the whole three hundred pages.  He had himself a great gift for both
music and painting; he was essentially exacting where any literature
touching Egypt was concerned; but I am glad to think that, whatever he
thought of the book as fiction, he did not find it necessary to grant
absolution as to the facts and the details of incidents in character and
life pourtrayed in Donovan Pasha.

Who the original of 'Donovan Pasha' was I shall never say, but he was
real.  There is, however, in the House of Commons today a young and
active politician once in the Egyptian service, and who bears a most
striking resemblance to the purely imaginary portrait which Mr. Talbot
Kelly, the artist, drew of the Dicky Donovan of the book.  This young
politician, with his experience in the diplomatic service, is in manner,
disposition, capacity, and in his neat, fine, and alert physical frame,
the very image of Dicky Donovan, as in my mind I perceived him; and when
I first saw him I was almost thunderstruck, because he was to me Dicky
Donovan come to life.  There was nothing Dicky Donovan did or said or saw
or heard which had not its counterpart in actual things in Egypt.  The
germ of most of the stories was got from things told me, or things that I
saw, heard of, or experienced in Egypt itself.  The first story of the
book--'While the Lamp Holds out to Burn'--was suggested to me by an
incident which I saw at a certain village on the Nile, which I will not
name.  Suffice it to say that the story in the main was true.  Also the
chief incident of the story, called 'The Price of the Grindstone--and the
Drum', is true.  The Mahommed Seti of that story was the servant of a
friend of mine, and he did in life what I made him do in the tale.
'On the Reef of Norman's Woe', which more than one journal singled out as
showing what extraordinary work was being done in Egypt by a handful of
British officials, had its origin in something told me by my friend Sir
John Rogers, who at one time was at the head of the Sanitary Department
of the Government of Egypt.

I could take the stories one by one, and show the seeds from which this
little plantation of fiction sprang, but I will not go further than to
refer to a story called 'Fielding Had an Orderly', the idea of which was
contained in the experience of a British official whose courage was as
cool as his wit, and both were extremely dangerous weapons, used at times
against those who were opposed to him.  When I read a book like 'Said the
Fisherman', however, with its wonderfully intimate knowledge of Oriental
life and the thousand nuances which only the born Orientalist can give,
I look with tempered pride upon Donovan Pasha.  Still I think that it
caught and held some phases of Egyptian life which the author of 'Said
the Fisherman' might perhaps miss, since the observation of every artist
has its own idiosyncrasy, and what strikes one observer will not strike
another.




A FOREWORD

It is now twelve years since I began giving to the public tales of life
in lands well known to me.  The first of them were drawn from Australia
and the Islands of the Southern Pacific, where I had lived and roamed in
the middle and late Eighties.  They appeared in various English
magazines, and were written in London far from the scenes which suggested
them.  None of them were written on the spot, as it were.  I did not
think then, and I do not think now, that this was perilous to their
truthfulness.  After many years of travel and home-staying observation
I have found that all worth remembrance, the salient things and scenes,
emerge clearly out of myriad impressions, and become permanent in mind
and memory.  Things so emerging are typical at least, and probably true.

Those tales of the Far South were given out with some prodigality.  They
did not appear in book form, however; for, at the time I was sending out
these Antipodean sketches, I was also writing--far from the scenes where
they were laid--a series of Canadian tales, many of which appeared in the
'Independent' of New York, in the 'National Observer', edited by Mr.
Henley, and in the 'Illustrated London News'.  By accident, and on the
suggestion of my friend Mr. Henley, the Canadian tales 'Pierre and his
People' were published first; with the result that the stories of the
Southern Hemisphere were withheld from publication, though they have been
privately printed and duly copyrighted.  Some day I may send them forth,
but meanwhile I am content to keep them in my own care.

Moved always by deep interest in the varied manifestations of life in
different portions of the Empire, five or six years ago I was attracted
to the Island of Jersey, in the Channel Sea, by the likeness of the
origin of her people with that of the French-Canadians.  I went to live
at St. Heliers for a time, and there wrote a novel called 'The Battle of
the Strong'.

Nor would it be thought strange that, having visited another and newer
sphere of England's influence, Egypt to wit, in 1889, I should then
determine that, when I could study the country at leisure, I should try
to write of the life there, so full of splendour and of primitive
simplicity; of mystery and guilt; of cruel indolence and beautiful
industry; of tyranny and devoted slavery; of the high elements of a true
democracy and the shameful practices of a false autocracy; all touched
off by the majesty of an ancient charm, the nobility of the remotest
history.

The years went by, and, four times visiting Egypt, at last I began to
write of her.  That is now five years ago.  From time to time the stories
which I offer to the public in this volume were given forth.  It is
likely that the old Anglo-Egyptian and the historical student may find
some anachronisms and other things to criticise; but the anachronisms are
deliberate, and even as in writing of Canada and Australia, which I know
very well, I have here, perhaps, sacrificed superficial exactness while
trying to give the more intimate meaning and spirit.  I have never
thought it necessary to apologise for this disregard of photographic
accuracy,--that may be found in my note-books,--and I shall not begin to
do so now.  I shall be sufficiently grateful if this series of tales does
no more than make ready the way for the novel of Egyptian life on which I
have been working for some years.  It is an avant courier.  I hope,
however, that it may be welcomed for its own sake.
                                                       G.  P.


NOTE: A Glossary will be found at the end of the volume.




WHILE THE LAMP HOLDS OUT TO BURN

There is a town on the Nile which Fielding Bey called Hasha, meaning
"Heaven Forbid!"  He loathed inspecting it.  Going up the Nile, he would
put off visiting it till he came down; coming down, he thanked his fates
if accident carried him beyond it.  Convenient accidents sometimes did
occur: a murder at one of the villages below it, asking his immediate
presence; a telegram from his Minister at Cairo, requiring his return;
or a very low Nile, when Hasha suddenly found itself a mile away from the
channel and there was no good place to land.  So it was that Hasha, with
little inspection, was the least reputable and almost the dirtiest town
on the Nile; for even in those far-off days the official Englishman had
his influence, especially when Kubar Pasha was behind him.  Kubar had his
good points.

There were certain definite reasons, however, why Fielding Bey shrank
from visiting Hasha.  Donovan Pasha saw something was wrong from the
first moment Hasha was mentioned.

On a particular day they were lying below at another village, on the
Amenhotep.  Hasha was the next place marked red on the map, and that
meant inspection.  When Dicky Donovan mentioned Hasha, Fielding Bey
twisted a shoulder and walked nervously up and down the deck.  He stayed
here for hours: to wait for the next post, he said-serious matters
expected from head quarters.  He appeared not to realise that letters
would get to Hasha by rail as quickly as by the Amenhotep.

Every man has a weak spot in his character, a sub-rosa, as it were, in
his business of life; and Dicky fancied he had found Fielding Bey's.
While they waited, Fielding made a pretence of working hard--for he
really was conscientious--sending his orderly for the mamour--
[magistrate]--and the omdah--[head of a village]--, and holding fatuous
conferences; turning the hose on the local dairymen and butchers and
dategrowers, who came with backsheesh in kind; burying his nose in
official papers; or sending for Holgate, the Yorkshire engineer, to find
out what the run would be to the next stopping-place beyond Hasha.  Twice
he did this; which was very little like Fielding Bey.  The second time,
when Holgate came below to his engine, Dicky was there playing with a
Farshoot dog.

"We don't stop at Hasha, then?" Dicky asked, and let the Farshoot fasten
on his leggings.

Holgate swung round and eyed Dicky curiously, a queer smile at his lips.

"Not if Goovnur can 'elp, aw give ye ma woord, sir," answered Holgate.

Fielding was affectionately called "the Governor" by his subordinates and
friends.

"We all have our likes and dislikes," rejoined Dicky casually, and blew
smoke in the eyes of the Farshoot.  "Aye, aw've seen places that bad!
but Hasha has taaste of its own in Goovnur's mouth, ma life on't!"
"Never can tell when a thing'll pall on the taste.  Hasha's turn with the
Governor now, eh?" rejoined Dicky.

Dicky's way of getting information seemed guileless, and Holgate opened
his basket as wide as he knew.  "Toorn, didst tha sway" (Holgate talked
broadly to Dicky always, for Dicky had told him of his aunt, Lady
Carmichael, who lived near Halifax in Yorkshire), "toorn, aw warrant!
It be reg'lar as kitchen-fire, this Hasha business, for three years, ever
sin' aw been scrapin' mud o' Nile River."

"That was a nasty row they had over the cemetery three years ago, the
Governor against the lot, from mamour to wekeel!"

Holgate's eyes flashed, and he looked almost angrily down at Dicky, whose
hand was between the teeth of the playful Farshoot.

"Doost think--noa, tha canst not think that Goovnur be 'feared o' Hasha
fook.  Thinks't tha, a man that told 'em all--a thousand therr--that he'd
hang on nearest tree the foorst that disobeyed him, thinks't tha that
Goovnur's lost his nerve by that?"

"The Governor never loses his nerve, Holgate," said Dicky, smiling and
offering a cigar.  "There's such a thing as a man being afraid to trust
himself where he's been in a mess, lest he hit out, and doesn't want to."

Holgate, being excited, was in a fit state to tell the truth, if he knew
it; which was what Dicky had worked for; but Holgate only said:

"It bean't fear, and it bean't milk o' human kindness.  It be soort o'
thing a man gets.  Aw had it once i' Bradford, in Little Cornish Street.
Aw saw a faace look out o' window o' hoose by tinsmith's shop, an' that
faace was like hell's picture-aye, 'twas a killiagous faace that!  Aw
never again could pass that house.  'Twas a woman's faace.  Horrible
'twas, an' sore sad an' flootered aw were, for t' faace was like a lass
aw loved when aw wur a lad."

"I should think it was something like that," answered Dicky, his eyes
wandering over the peninsula beyond which lay Hasha.

"Summat, aw be sure," answered Holgate, "an' ma woord on't .  .  .  ah,
yon coomes orderly wi' post for Goovnur.  Now it be Hasha, or it be not
Hasha, it be time for steam oop."

Holgate turned to his engine as Dicky mounted the stairs and went to
Fielding's cabin, where the orderly was untying a handkerchief
overflowing with letters.

As Fielding read his official letters his face fell more and more.  When
he had read the last, he sat for a minute without speaking, his brow very
black.  There was no excuse for pushing past Hasha.  He had not been
there for over a year.  It was his duty to inspect the place: he had a
conscience; there was time to get to Hasha that afternoon.  With an
effort he rose, hurried along the deck, and called down to Holgate:
"Full-steam to Hasha!"

Then, with a quick command to the reis, who was already at the wheel, he
lighted a cigar, and, joining Dicky Donovan, began to smoke and talk
furiously.  But he did not talk of Hasha.

At sunset the Amenhotep drew in to the bank by Hasha, and, from the deck,
Fielding Bey saluted the mamour, the omdah and his own subordinates, who,
buttoning up their coats as they came, hurried to the bank to make
salaams to him.  Behind them, at a distance, came villagers, a dozen
ghaffirs armed with naboots of dom-wood, and a brace of well-mounted,
badly-dressed policemen, with seats like a monkey on a stick.  The
conferences with the mamour and omdah were short, in keeping with the
temper of "Fielding Saadat"; and long into the night Dicky lay and looked
out of his cabin window to the fires on the banks, where sat Mahommed
Seti the servant, the orderly, and some attendant ghaffirs, who, feasting
on the remains of the effendi's supper, kept watch.  For Hasha was noted
for its robbers.  It was even rumoured that the egregious Selamlik Pasha,
with the sugar plantation near by--"Trousers," Dicky called him when he
saw him on the morrow, because of the elephantine breeks he wore--was not
averse to sending his Abyssinian slaves through the sugar-cane to waylay
and rob, and worse, maybe.

By five o'clock next day the inspection was over.  The streets had been
swept for the Excellency--which is to say Saadat--the first time in a
year.  The prison had been cleaned of visible horrors, the first time in
a month.  The last time it was ordered there had been a riot among the
starving, infested prisoners; earth had been thrown over the protruding
bones of the dear lamented dead in the cemetery; the water of the
ablution places in the mosque had been changed; the ragged policemen had
new putties; the kourbashes of the tax-gatherers were hid in their
yeleks; the egregious Pasha wore a greasy smile, and the submudir, as he
conducted Fielding--"whom God preserve and honour!"--through the prison
and through the hospital, where goat's milk had been laid on for this
especial day, smirked gently through the bazaar above his Parisian
waistcoat.

But Fielding, as he rode on Selamlik Pasha's gorgeous black donkey from
Assiout, with its crimson trappings, knew what proportion of improvement
this "hankypanky," as Dicky called it, bore to the condition of things at
the last inspection.  He had spoken little all day, and Dicky had noticed
that his eye was constantly turning here and there, as though looking for
an unwelcome something or somebody.

At last the thing was over, and they were just crossing the canal, the
old Bahr-el-Yusef, which cuts the town in twain as the river Abana does
Damascus, when Dicky saw nearing them a heavily-laden boat, a cross
between a Thames house-boat and an Italian gondola, being drawn by one
poor raw-bone--raw-bone in truth, for there was on each shoulder a round
red place, made raw by the unsheathed ropes used as harness.  The beast's
sides were scraped as a tree is barked, and the hind quarters gored as
though by a harrow.  Dicky was riding with the mamour of the district,
Fielding was a distance behind with Trousers and the Mudir.  Dicky pulled
up his donkey, got off and ran towards the horse, pale with fury; for he
loved animals better than men, and had wasted his strength beating
donkey-boys with the sticks they used on their victims.  The boat had now
reached a point opposite the mudirieh, its stopping-place; and the raw-
bone, reeking with sweat and blood, stood still and trembled, its knees
shaking with the strain just taken off them, its head sunk nearly to the
ground.

Dicky had hardly reached the spot when a figure came running to the poor
waler with a quick stumbling motion.  Dicky drew back in wonder, for
never had he seen eyes so painful as these that glanced from the tortured
beast to himself--staring, bulbous, bloodshot, hunted eyes; but they were
blue, a sickly, faded blue; and they were English!  Dicky's hand was, on
his pistol, for his first impulse had been to shoot the rawbone; but it
dropped away in sheer astonishment at the sight of this strange figure in
threadbare dirty clothes and riding-breeches made by shearing the legs of
a long pair--cut with an unsteady hand, for the edges were jagged and
uneven, and the man's bare leg showed above the cast-off putties of a
policeman.  The coat was an old khaki jacket of a Gippy soldier, and,
being scant of buttons, doubtful linen showed beneath.  Above the hook-
nose, once aristocratic, now vulture-like and shrunken like that of
Rameses in his glass case at Ghizeh, was a tarboosh tilting forward over
the eyes, nearly covering the forehead.  The figure must have been very
tall once, but it was stooped now, though the height was still well above
medium.  Hunted, haunted, ravaged and lost, was the face, and the long
grey moustache, covering the chin almost, seemed to cover an immeasurable
depravity.

Dicky took it all in at a glance, and wondered with a bitter wonder; for
this was an Englishman, and behind him and around him, though not very
near him, were Arabs, Soudanese, and Fellaheen, with sneering yet
apprehensive faces.

As Dicky's hand dropped away from his pistol, the other shot out
trembling, graceful, eager fingers, the one inexpressibly gentlemanly
thing about him.

"Give it to me--quick!" he said, and he threw a backward glance towards
the approaching group--Fielding, the egregious Pasha, and the rest.

Dicky did not hesitate; he passed the pistol over.  The Lost One took the
pistol, cocked it, and held it to the head of the waler, which feebly
turned to him in recognition.

"Good-bye, old man!" he said, and fired.

The horse dropped, kicked, struggled once or twice, and was gone.

"If you know the right spot, there's hardly a kick," said the Lost One,
and turned to face the Pasha, who had whipped his donkey forward on them,
and sat now livid with rage, before the two.  He stood speechless for a
moment, for his anger had forced the fat of his neck up into his throat.

But Dicky did not notice the Pasha.  His eye was fixed on Fielding Bey,
and the eye of Fielding Bey was on the Lost One.  All at once Dicky
understood why it was that Fielding Bey had shrunk from coming to Hasha.
Fielding might have offered many reasons, but this figure before them was
the true one.  Trouble, pity, anxiety, pride, all were in Fielding's
face.  Because the Lost One was an Englishman, and the race was shamed
and injured by this outcast?  Not that alone.  Fielding had the natural
pride of his race, but this look was personal.  He glanced at the dead
horse, at the scarred sides, the raw shoulders, the corrugated haunches,
he saw the pistol in the Lost One's hand, and then, as a thread of light
steals between the black trees of a jungle, a light stole across
Fielding's face for a moment.  He saw the Lost One hand the pistol back
to Dicky and fix his debauched blue eyes on the Pasha.  These blue eyes
did not once look at Fielding, though they were aware of his presence.

"Son of a dog!" said the Pasha, and his fat forefinger convulsively
pointed to the horse.

The Lost One's eyes wavered a second, as though their owner had not the
courage to abide the effect of his action, then they quickened to a point
of steadiness, as a lash suddenly knots for a crack in the hand of a
postilion.

"Swine!" said the Lost One into the Pasha's face, and his round
shoulders drew up a little farther, so that he seemed more like a man
among men.  His hands fell on his hips as, in his mess, an officer with
no pockets drops his knuckles on his waist-line for a stand-at-ease.

The egregious Selamlik Pasha stood high in favour with the Khedive: was
it not he who had suggested a tax on the earnings of the dancing girls,
the Ghazeeyehs, and did he not himself act as the first tax-gatherer?
Was it not Selamlik Pasha also who whispered into the ear of the
Mouffetish that a birth-tax and a burial-tax should be instituted?
And had he not seen them carried out in the mudiriehs under his own
supervision?  Had he not himself made the Fellaheen pay thrice over for
water for their onion-fields?  Had he not flogged an Arab to death with
his own hand, the day before Fielding's and Dicky's arrival, and had he
not tried to get this same Arab's daughter into his harem--this Selamlik
Pasha!

The voice of the Lost One suddenly rose shrill and excited, and he
shouted at the Pasha.  "Swine! swine! swine!  .  .  .  Kill your slaves
with a kourbash if you like, but a bullet's the thing for a waler!--Swine
of a leper!"

The whole frame of the Lost One was still, but the voice was shaking,
querulous, half hysterical; the eyes were lighted with a terrible
excitement, the lips under the grey moustache twitched; the nervous
slipshod dignity of carriage was in curious contrast to the disordered
patchwork dress.

The trouble on Fielding's face glimmered with a little ray of hope now.
Dicky came over to him, and was about to speak, but a motion of
Fielding's hand stopped him.  The hand said: "Let them fight it out."

In a paroxysm of passion Selamlik Pasha called two Abyssinian slaves
standing behind.  "This brother of a toad to prison!" he said.

The Lost One's eyes sought Dicky like a flash.  Without a word, and as
quick as the tick of a clock, Dicky tossed over his pistol to the Lost
One, who caught it smoothly, turned it in his hand, and levelled it at
the Abyssinians.

"No more of this damned nonsense, Pasha," said Fielding suddenly.  "He
doesn't put a high price on his life, and you do on yours.  I'd be
careful!"

"Steady, Trousers!" said Dicky in a soft voice, and smiled his girlish
smile.

Selamlik Pasha stared for a moment in black anger, then stuttered forth:
"Will you speak for a dog of a slave that his own country vomits out?"

"Your mother was a slave of Darfur, Pasha," answered Fielding, in a low
voice; "your father lost his life stealing slaves.  Let's have no airs
and graces."

Dicky's eyes had been fixed on the Lost One, and his voice now said in
its quaint treble: "Don't get into a perspiration.  He's from where we
get our bad manners, and he messes with us to-night, Pasha."

The effect of these words was curious.  Fielding's face was a blank
surprise, and his mouth opened to say no, but he caught Dicky's look and
the word was not uttered.  The Pasha's face showed curious incredulity;
under the pallor of the Lost One's a purplish flush crept, stayed a
moment, then faded away, and left it paler than before.

"We've no more business, I think, Pasha," said Fielding brusquely, and
turned his donkey towards the river.  The Pasha salaamed without a word,
his Abyssinian slaves helped him on his great white donkey, and he
trotted away towards the palace, the trousers flapping about his huge
legs.  The Lost One stood fingering the revolver.  Presently he looked up
at Dicky, and, standing still, held out the pistol.

"Better keep it," said Dicky; "I'll give you some peas for it to-night.
Speak to the poor devil, Fielding," he added quickly, in a low tone.

Fielding turned in his saddle.  "Seven's the hour," he said, and rode on.

"Thanks, you fellows," said the Lost One, and walked swiftly away.

As they rode to the Amenhotep Dicky did not speak, but once he turned
round to look after the outcast, who was shambling along the bank of the
canal.

When Fielding and Dicky reached the deck of the Amenhotep, and Mahommed
Seti had brought refreshment, Dicky said: "What did he do?"

Fielding's voice was constrained and hard: "Cheated at cards."

Dicky's lips tightened.  "Where?"

"At Hong Kong."

"Officer?"

"In the Buffs."

Dicky drew a long breath.  "He's paid the piper."

"Naturally.  He cheated twice."

"Cheated twice--at cards!"  Dicky's voice was hard now.  "Who was he?"

"Heatherby--Bob Heatherby!"

"Bob Heatherby--gad!  Fielding, I'm sorry--I couldn't have guessed, old
man.  Mrs. Henshaw's brother!"

Fielding nodded.  Dicky turned his head away; for Fielding was in love
with Mrs. Henshaw, the widow of Henshaw of the Buffs.  He realised now
why Fielding loathed Hasha so.

"Forgive me for asking him to mess, guv'nor."

Fielding laughed a little uneasily.  "Never mind.  You see, it isn't the
old scores only that bar him.  He's been a sweep out here.  Nothing he
hasn't done.  Gone lower and lower and lower.  Tax-gatherer with a
kourbash for old Selamlik the beast.  Panderer for the same.  Sweep of
the lowest sort!"

Dicky's eyes flashed.  "I say, Fielding, it would be rather strange if he
hadn't gone down, down, down.  A man that's cheated at cards never finds
anybody to help him up, up, up.  The chances are dead against him.  But
he stood up well to-day, eh?"

"I suppose blood will tell at last in the very worst."

             "'And while the lamp holds out to burn
               The vilest sinner may return--'"

hummed Dicky musingly.  Then he added slowly: "Fielding, fellows of that
kind always flare up a bit according to Cavendish, just before the end.
I've seen it once or twice before.  It's the last clutch at the grass as
they go slip--slip--slipping down.  Take my word for it, Heatherby's near
the finish."

"I shouldn't wonder.  Selamlik, the old leper, 'll lay in wait for him.
He'll get lost in the sugar-cane one of these evenings soon."

"Couldn't we .  .  ." Dicky paused.

Fielding started, looked at Dicky intently, and then shook his head
sadly.  "It's no good, Dicky.  It never is."

"'While the lamp holds out to burn .  .  .'" said Dicky, and lighted
another cigarette.

Precisely at seven o'clock Heatherby appeared.  He had on a dress-suit,
brown and rusty, a white tie made of a handkerchief torn in two, and a
pair of patent leather shoes, scraggy and cracked.

Fielding behaved well, Dicky was amiable and attentive, and the dinner
being ready to the instant, there was no waiting, there were no awkward
pauses.  No names of English people were mentioned, England was not
named; nor Cairo, nor anything that English people abroad love to
discuss.  The fellah, the pasha, the Soudan were the only topics.  Under
Fielding's courtesy and Dicky's acute suggestions, Heatherby's weakened
brain awaked, and he talked intelligently, till the moment coffee was
brought in.  Then, as Mahommed Seti retired, Heatherby suddenly threw
himself forward, his arms on the table, and burst into sobs.

"Oh, you fellows, you fellows!" he said.  There was silence for a
minute, then he sobbed out again: "It's the first time I've been treated
like a gentleman by men that knew me, these fifteen years.  It--it gets
me in the throat!"

His body shook with sobs.  Fielding and Dicky were uncomfortable, for
these were not the sobs of a driveller or a drunkard.  Behind them was
the blank failure of a life--fifteen years of miserable torture, of
degradation, of a daily descent lower into the pit, of the servitude of
shame.  When at last he raised his streaming eyes, Fielding and Dicky
could see the haunting terror of the soul, at whose elbow, as it were,
every man cried: "You are without the pale!"  That look told them how
Heatherby of the Buffs had gone from table d'hote to table d'hote of
Europe, from town to town, from village to village, to make acquaintances
who repulsed him when they discovered who he really was.

Shady Heatherby, who cheated at cards!

Once Fielding made as if to put a hand on his shoulder and speak to him,
but Dicky intervened with a look.  The two drank their coffee, Fielding
a little uneasily; but yet in his face there was a new look: of inquiry,
of kindness, even of hope.

Presently Dicky flashed a look and nodded towards the door, and Fielding
dropped his cigar and went on deck, and called down to Holgate the
engineer:

"Get up steam, and make for Luxor.  It's moonlight, and we're safe enough
in this high Nile, eh, Holgate?"

"Safe enough, or aw'm a Dootchman," said Holgate.  Then they talked in a
low voice together.  Down in the saloon, Dicky sat watching Heatherby.
At last the Lost One raised his head again.

"It's worth more to me, this night, than you fellows know," he said
brokenly.

"That's all right," said Dicky.  "Have a cigar?"

He shook his head.  "It's come at the right time.  I wanted to be treated
like an Englishman once more--just once more."

"Don't worry.  Take in a reef and go steady for a bit.  The milk's spilt,
but there are other meadows.  .  .  ."  Dicky waved an arm up the river,
up towards the Soudan!

The Lost One nodded, then his eyes blazed up and took on a hungry look.
His voice suddenly came in a whisper.

"Gordon was a white man.  Gordon said to me three years ago: 'Come with
me, I'll help you on.  You don't need to live, if you don't want to.
Most of us will get knocked out up there in the Soudan.'  Gordon said
that to me.  But there was another fellow with Gordon who knew me,
and I couldn't face it.  So I stayed behind here.  I've been everything,
anything, to that swine, Selamlik Pasha; but when he told me yesterday to
bring him the daughter of the Arab he killed with his kourbash, I jibbed.
I couldn't stand that.  Her father had fed me more than once.  I jibbed
--by God, I jibbed!  I said I was an Englishman, and I'd see him damned
first.  I said it, and I shot the horse, and I'd have shot him--what's
that?"

There was a churning below.  The Amenhotep was moving from the bank.

"She's going--the boat's going," said the Lost One, trembling to his
feet.

"Sit down," said Dicky, and gripped him by the arm.  "Where are you
taking me?" asked Heatherby, a strange, excited look in his face.

"Up the river."

He seemed to read Dicky's thoughts--the clairvoyance of an overwrought
mind: "To--to Assouan?"  The voice had a curious far-away sound.

"You shall go beyond Assouan," said Dicky.  "To--to Gordon?"  Heatherby's
voice was husky and indistinct.

"Yes, here's Fielding; he'll give you the tip.  Sit down."  Dicky gently
forced him down into a chair.  Six months later, a letter came to Dicky
from an Egyptian officer, saying that Heatherby of the Buffs had died
gallantly fighting in a sortie sent by Gordon into the desert.

"He had a lot of luck," mused Dicky as he read.  "They don't end that way
as a rule."

Then he went to Fielding, humming a certain stave from one of Watts's
hymns.






THE PRICE OF THE GRINDSTONE--AND THE DRUM

He lived in the days of Ismail the Khedive, and was familiarly known as
the Murderer.  He had earned his name, and he had no repentance.  From
the roof of a hut in his native village of Manfaloot he had dropped a
grindstone on the head of Ebn Haroun, who contended with him for the
affections of Ahassa, the daughter of Haleel the barber, and Ebn Haroun's
head was flattened like the cover of a pie.  Then he had broken a cake of
dourha bread on the roof for the pigeons above him, and had come down
grinning to the street, where a hesitating mounted policeman fumbled with
his weapon, and four ghaffirs waited for him with their naboots.

Seti then had weighed his chances, had seen the avenging friends of Ebn
Haroun behind the ghaffirs, and therefore permitted himself to be marched
off to the mudirieh.  There the Mudir glared at him and had him loaded
with chains and flung into the prison, where two hundred convicts arrayed
themselves against myriad tribes which, killed individually, made a spot
on the wall no bigger than a threepenny-bit!  The carnage was great, and
though Seti was sleepless night after night it was not because of his
crime.  He found some solace, however, in provoking his fellow-prisoners
to assaults upon each other; and every morning he grinned as he saw the
dead and wounded dragged out into the clear sunshine.

The end to this came when the father of Seti, Abou Seti, went at night to
the Mudir and said deceitfully: "Effendi, by the mercy of Heaven I have
been spared even to this day; for is it not written in the Koran that a
man shall render to his neighbour what is his neighbour's?  What should
Abou Seti do with ten feddans of land, while the servant of Allah, the
Effendi Insagi, lives?  What is honestly mine is eight feddans, and the
rest, by the grace of God, is thine, O effendi."

Every feddan he had he had honestly earned, but this was his way of
offering backsheesh.

And the Mudir had due anger and said: "No better are ye than a Frank to
have hidden the truth so long and waxed fat as the Nile rises and falls.
The two feddans, as thou sayest, are mine."

Abou Seti bowed low, and rejoined, "Now shall I sleep in peace, by the
grace of Heaven, and all my people under my date-trees--and all my
people?" he added, with an upward look at the Mudir.

"But the rentals of the two feddans of land these ten years--thou hast
eased thy soul by bringing the rentals thereof?"

Abou Seti's glance fell and his hands twitched.  His fingers fumbled with
his robe of striped silk.  He cursed the Mudir in his heart for his
bitter humour; but was not his son in prison, and did it not lie with the
Mudir whether he lived or died?  So he answered:

"All-seeing and all-knowing art thou, O effendi, and I have reckoned the
rentals even to this hour for the ten years--fifty piastres for each
feddan--"

"A hundred for the five years of high Nile," interposed the Mudir.

"Fifty for the five lean years, and a hundred for the five fat years,"
said Abou Seti, and wished that his words were poisoned arrows, that they
might give the Mudir many deaths at once.  "And may Allah give thee
greatness upon thy greatness!"

"God prosper thee also, Abou Seti, and see that thou keep only what is
thine own henceforth.  Get thee gone in peace."

"At what hour shall I see the face of my son alive?" asked Abou Seti in
a low voice, placing his hand upon his turban in humility.

"To-morrow at even, when the Muezzin calls from the mosque of El Hassan,
be thou at the west wall of the prison by the Gate of the Prophet's
Sorrow, with thy fastest camel.  Your son shall ride for me through the
desert even to Farafreh, and bear a letter to the bimbashi there.  If he
bear it safely, his life is his own; if he fail, look to thy feddans of
land!"

"God is merciful, and Seti is bone of my bone," said Abou Seti, and laid
his hand again upon his turban.  That was how Mahommed Seti did not at
once pay the price of the grindstone, but rode into the desert bearing
the message of the Mudir and returned safely with the answer, and was
again seen in the cafes of Manfaloot.  And none of Ebn Haroun's friends
did aught, for the world knew through whom it was that Seti lived--and
land was hard to keep in Manfaloot and the prison near.

But one day a kavass of the Khedive swooped down on Manfaloot, and twenty
young men were carried off in conscription.  Among them was Seti, now
married to Ahassa, the fellah maid for whom the grindstone had fallen on
Ebn Haroun's head.  When the fatal number fell to him and it was ordained
that he must go to Dongola to serve in the Khedive's legions, he went to
his father, with Ahassa wailing behind him.

"Save thyself," said the old man with a frown.

"I have done what I could--I have sold my wife's jewels," answered Seti.

"Ten piastres!" said old Abou Seti grimly.  "Twelve," said Seti, grinning
from ear to ear.  Thou wilt add four feddans of land to that I will
answer for the Mudir."

"Thy life only cost me two feddans.  Shall I pay four to free thee of
serving thy master the Khedive?  Get thee gone into the Soudan.  I do not
fear for thee: thou wilt live on.  Allah is thy friend.  Peace be with
thee!"



II

So it was that the broad-shouldered Seti went to be a soldier, with all
the women of the village wailing behind him, and Ahassa his wife covering
her head with dust and weeping by his side as he stepped out towards
Dongola.  For himself, Seti was a philosopher; that is to say, he was a
true Egyptian.  Whatever was, was to be; and Seti had a good digestion,
which is a great thing in the desert.  Moreover, he had a capacity for
foraging--or foray.  The calmness with which he risked his life for an
onion or a water-bag would have done credit to a prince of buccaneers.
He was never flustered.  He had dropped a grindstone on the head of his
rival, but the smile that he smiled then was the same smile with which he
suffered and forayed and fought and filched in the desert.  With a back
like a door, and arms as long and strong as a gorilla's, with no moral
character to speak of, and an imperturbable selfishness, even an ignorant
Arab like Seti may go far.  More than once his bimbashi drew a sword to
cut him down for the peaceful insolent grin with which he heard himself
suddenly charged with very original crimes; but even the officer put his
sword up again, because he remembered that though Seti was the curse of
the regiment on the march, there was no man like him in the day of
battle.  Covered with desert sand and blood, and fighting and raging
after the manner of a Sikh, he could hold ten companies together like a
wall against a charge of Dervishes.  The bimbashi rejoiced at this, for
he was a coward; likewise his captain was a coward, and so was his
lieutenant: for they were half Turks, half Gippies, who had seen Paris
and had not the decency to die there.  Also it had been discovered that
no man made so good a spy or envoy as Seti.  His gift for lying was
inexpressible: confusion never touched him; for the flattest
contradictions in the matter of levying backsheesh he always found an
excuse.  Where the bimbashi and his officers were afraid to go lest the
bald-headed eagle and the vulture should carry away their heads as tit-
bits to the Libyan hills, Seti was sent.  In more than one way he always
kept his head.  He was at once the curse and the pride of the regiment.
For his sins he could not be punished, and his virtues were of value only
to save his life.

In this fashion, while his regiment thinned out by disease, famine,
fighting, and the midnight knife, Seti came on to Dongola, to Berber, to
Khartoum; and he grinned with satisfaction when he heard that they would
make even for Kordofan.  He had outlived all the officers who left
Manfaloot with the regiment save the bimbashi, and the bimbashi was
superstitious and believed that while Seti lived he would live.
Therefore, no clansman ever watched his standard flying in the van as the
bimbashi--from behind--watched the long arm of Seti slaying, and heard
his voice like a brass horn above all others shouting his war-cry.

But at Khartoum came Seti's fall.  Many sorts of original sin had been
his, with profit and prodigious pleasure, but when, by the supposed
orders of the bimbashi, he went through Khartoum levying a tax upon every
dancing-girl in the place and making her pay upon the spot at the point
of a merciless tongue, he went one step too far.  For his genius had
preceded that of Selamlik Pasha, the friend of the Mouffetish at Cairo,
by one day only.  Selamlik himself had collected taxes on dancing-girls
all the way from Cairo to Khartoum; and to be hoist by an Arab in a foot
regiment having no authority and only a limitless insolence, was more
than the Excellency could bear.

To Selamlik Pasha the bimbashi hastily disowned all knowledge of Seti's
perfidy, but both were brought out to have their hands and feet and heads
cut off in the Beit-el-Mal, in the presence of the dancing-girls and the
populace.  In the appointed place, when Seti saw how the bimbashi wept--
for he had been to Paris and had no Arab blood in him; how he wrung his
hands--for had not absinthe weakened his nerves in the cafes of St.
Michel?--when Seti saw that he was no Arab and was afraid to die, then he
told the truth to Selamlik Pasha.  He even boldly offered to tell the
pasha where half his own ill-gotten gains were hid, if he would let the
bimbashi go.  Now, Selamlik Pasha was an Egyptian, and is it not written
in the Book of Egypt that no man without the most dangerous reason may
refuse backsheesh?  So it was that Selamlik talked to the Ulema, the holy
men, who were there, and they urged him to clemency, as holy men will,
even in Egypt--at a price.

So it was also that the bimbashi went back to his regiment with all his
limbs intact.  Seti and the other half of his ill-gotten gains were left.
His hands were about to be struck off, when he realised of how little
account his gold would be without them; so he offered it to Selamlik
Pasha for their sake.  The pasha promised, and then, having found the
money, serenely prepared the execution.  For his anger was great.  Was
not the idea of taxing the dancing-girls his very own, the most original
tax ever levied in Egypt?  And to have the honour of it filched from him
by a soldier of Manfaloot--no, Mahommed Seti should be crucified!

And Seti, the pride and the curse of his regiment, would have been
crucified between two palms on the banks of the river had it not been for
Fielding Bey, the Englishman--Fielding of St. Bartholomew's--who had
burned gloriously to reform Egypt root and branch, and had seen the fire
of his desires die down.  Fielding Bey saved Seti, but not with
backsheesh.

Fielding intervened.  He knew Selamlik Pasha well, and the secret of his
influence over him is for telling elsewhere.  But whatever its source, it
gave Mahommed Seti his life.  It gave him much more, for it expelled him
from the Khedive's army.  Now soldiers without number, gladly risking
death, had deserted from the army of the Khedive; they had bought
themselves out with enormous backsheesh, they had been thieves,
murderers, panderers, that they might be freed from service by some
corrupt pasha or bimbashi; but no one in the knowledge of the world had
ever been expelled from the army of the Khedive.

There was a satanic humour in the situation pleasant to the soul of
Mahommed Seti, if soul his subconsciousness might be called.  In the
presence of his regiment, drawn up in the Beit-el-Mal, before his
trembling bimbashi, whose lips were now pale with terror at the loss of
his mascot, Mahommed Seti was drummed out of line, out of his regiment,
out of the Beit-el-Mal.  It was opera boufe, and though Seti could not
know what opera boufe was, he did know that it was a ridiculous fantasia,
and he grinned his insolent grin all the way, even to the corner of the
camel-market, where the drummer and the sergeant and his squad turned
back from ministering a disgrace they would gladly have shared.

Left at the corner of the camel-market, Mahommed Seti planned his future.
At first it was to steal a camel and take the desert for Berber.  Then he
thought of the English hakim, Fielding Bey, who had saved his life.  Now,
a man who has saved your life once may do it again; one favour is always
the promise of another.  So Seti, with a sudden inspiration, went
straight to the house of Fielding Bey and sat down before it on his mat.

With the setting of the sun came a clatter of tins and a savoury odour
throughout Khartoum to its farthest precincts, for it was Ramadan, and no
man ate till sunset.  Seti smiled an avid smile, and waited.  At last he
got up, turned his face towards Mecca, and said his prayers.  Then he
lifted the latch of Fielding's hut, entered, eyed the medicine bottles
and the surgical case with childish apprehension, and made his way to the
kitchen.  There he foraged.  He built a fire; his courage grew; he ran to
the bazaar, and came back with an armful of meats and vegetables.

So it was that when Fielding returned he found Mahommed Seti and a
savoury mess awaiting him.  Also there was coffee and a bottle of brandy
which Seti had looted in the bazaar.  In one doorway stood Fielding; in
another stood Mahommed Seti, with the same grin which had served his
purpose all the way from Cairo, his ugly face behind it, and his
prodigious shoulders below it, and the huge chest from which came forth,
like the voice of a dove:

"God give thee long life, saadat el bey!"

Now an M.D. degree and a course in St. Bartholomew's Hospital do not
necessarily give a knowledge of the human soul, though the outlying lands
of the earth have been fattened by those who thought there was knowledge
and salvation in a conquered curriculum.  Fielding Bey, however, had
never made pretence of understanding the Oriental mind, so he discreetly
took his seat and made no remarks.  From sheer instinct, however, when he
came to the coffee he threw a boot which caught Mahommed Seti in the
middle of the chest, and said roughly: "French, not Turkish, idiot!"

Then Mahommed Seti grinned, and he knew that he was happy; for it was
deep in his mind that that was the Inglesi's way of offering a long
engagement.  In any case Seti had come to stay.  Three times he made
French coffee that night before it suited, and the language of Fielding
was appropriate in each case.  At last a boot, a native drum, and a wood
sculpture of Pabst the lion-headed goddess, established perfect relations
between them.  They fell into their places of master and man as
accurately as though the one had smitten and the other served
for twenty years.

The only acute differences they had were upon two points--the cleaning of
the medicine bottles and surgical instruments, and the looting.  But it
was wonderful to see how Mahommed Seti took the kourbash at the hands of
Fielding, when he shied from the medicine bottles.  He could have broken,
or bent double with one twist, the weedy, thin-chested Fielding.  But
though he saw a deadly magic and the evil eye in every stopper, and
though to him the surgical instruments were torturing steels which the
devil had forged for his purposes, he conquered his own prejudices so far
as to assist in certain bad cases which came in Fielding's way on the
journey down the Nile.

The looting was a different matter.  Had not Mahommed Seti looted all his
life--looted from his native village to the borders of Kordofan?  Did he
not take to foray as a wild ass to bersim?  Moreover, as little Dicky
Donovan said humorously yet shamelessly when he joined them at Korosko:
"What should a native do but loot who came from Manfaloot?"

Dicky had a prejudice against the Murderer, because he was a murderer;
and Mahommed Seti viewed with scorn any white man who was not Fielding;
much more so one who was only five feet and a trifle over.  So for a time
there was no sympathy between the two.  But each conquered the other in
the end.  Seti was conquered first.

One day Dicky, with a sudden burst of generosity--for he had a button to
his pocket--gave Mahommed Seti a handful of cigarettes.  The next day
Seti said to Fielding: "Behold, God has given thee strong men for
friends.  Thou hast Mahommed Seti"--his chest blew out like a bellows--
"and thou hast Donovan Pasha."

Fielding grunted.  He was not a fluent man, save in forbidden language,
and Seti added:

"Behold thou, saadat el bey, who opens a man's body and turns over his
heart with a sword-point, and sewing him up with silken cords bids him
live again, greatness is in thy house!  Last night thy friend, Donovan
Pasha, gave into my hands a score of those cigarettes which are like the
smell of a camel-yard.  In the evening, having broken bread and prayed,
I sat down at the door of the barber in peace to smoke, as becomes a man
who loves God and His benefits.  Five times I puffed, and then I stayed
my lips, for why should a man die of smoke when he can die by the sword?
But there are many men in Korosko whose lives are not as clean linen.
These I did not love.  I placed in their hands one by one the cigarettes,
and with their blessings following me I lost myself in the dusk and
waited."

Mahommed Seti paused.  On his face was a smile of sardonic retrospection.

"Go on, you fool!" grunted Fielding.

"Nineteen sick men, unworthy followers of the Prophet, thanked Allah in
the mosque to-day that their lives were spared.  Donovan Pasha is a great
man and a strong, effendi!  We be three strong men together."

Dicky Donovan's conversion to a lasting belief in Mahommed Seti came a
year later.

The thing happened at a little sortie from the Nile.  Fielding was chief
medical officer, and Dicky, for the moment, was unattached.  When the
time came for starting, Mahommed Seti brought round Fielding's horse and
also Dicky Donovan's.  Now, Mahommed Seti loved a horse as well as a
Bagarra Arab, and he had come to love Fielding's waler Bashi-Bazouk as a
Farshoot dog loves his master.  And Bashi-Bazouk was worthy of Seti's
love.  The sand of the desert, Seti's breath and the tail of his yelek
made the coat of Bashi-Bazouk like silk.  It was the joy of the regiment,
and the regiment knew that Seti had added a new chapter to the Koran
concerning horses, in keeping with Mahomet's own famous passage

                   "By the CHARGERS that pant,
                    And the hoofs that strike fire,
                    And the scourers at dawn,
                    Who stir up the dust with it,
                    And cleave through a host with it!"

But Mahomet's phrases were recited in the mosque, and Seti's, as he
rubbed Bashi-Bazouk with the tail of his yelek.

There was one thing, however, that Seti loved more than horses, or at
least as much.  Life to him was one long possible Donnybrook Fair.  That
was why, although he was no longer in the army, when Fielding and Dicky
mounted for the sortie he said to Fielding:

"Oh, brother of Joshua and all the fighters of Israel, I have a bobtailed
Arab.  Permit me to ride with thee."  And Fielding replied: "You will
fight the barn-yard fowl for dinner; get back to your stew-pots."

But Seti was not to be fobbed off.  "It is written that the Lord, the
Great One, is compassionate and merciful.  Wilt thou then, O saadat."

Fielding interrupted: "Go, harry the onion-field for dinner.  You're a
dog of a slave, and a murderer too: you must pay the price of that
grindstone!"

But Seti hung by the skin of his teeth to the fringe of Fielding's good-
nature--Fielding's words only were sour and wrathful.  So Seti grinned
and said: "For the grindstone, behold it sent Ebn Haroun to the mercy of
God.  Let him rest, praise be to God!"

"You were drummed out of the army.  You can't fight," said Fielding
again; but he was smiling under his long moustache.

"Is not a bobtailed nag sufficient shame?  Let thy friend ride the
bobtailed nag and pay the price of the grindstone and the drum," said
Seti.

"Fall in!" rang the colonel's command, and Fielding, giving Seti a
friendly kick in the ribs, galloped away to the troop.

Seti turned to the little onion-garden.  His eye harried it for a moment,
and he grinned.  He turned to the doorway where a stew-pot rested, and
his mind dwelt cheerfully on the lamb he had looted for Fielding's
dinner.  But last of all his eye rested upon his bobtailed Arab, the
shameless thing in an Arab country, where every horse rears his tail as a
peacock spreads his feathers, as a marching Albanian lifts his foot.  The
bobtailed Arab's nose was up, his stump was high.  A hundred times he had
been in battle; he was welted and scarred like a shoe-maker's apron.  He
snorted his cry towards the dust rising like a surf behind the heels of
the colonel's troop.

Suddenly Seti answered the cry--he answered the cry and sprang forward.

That was how in the midst of a desperate melee twenty miles away on the
road to Dongola little Dicky Donovan saw Seti riding into the thick of
the fight armed only with a naboot of domwood, his call, "Allala-Akbar!"
rising like a hoarse-throated bugle, as it had risen many a time in the
old days on the road from Manfaloot.  Seti and his bobtailed Arab, two
shameless ones, worked their way to the front.  Not Seti's strong right
arm alone and his naboot were at work, but the bobtailed Arab, like an
iron-handed razor toothed shrew, struck and bit his way, his eyes
bloodred like Seti's.  The superstitious Dervishes fell back before this
pair of demons; for their madness was like the madness of those who at
the Dosah throw themselves beneath the feet of the Sheikh's horse by the
mosque of El Hassan in Cairo.  The bobtailed Arab's lips were drawn back
over his assaulting teeth in a horrible grin.  Seti grinned too, the grin
of fury and of death.

Fielding did not know how it was that, falling wounded from his horse,
he was caught by strong arms, as Bashi-Bazouk cleared him at a bound and
broke into the desert.  But Dicky Donovan, with his own horse lanced
under him, knew that Seti made him mount the bobtailed Arab with Fielding
in front of him, and that a moment later they had joined the little band
retreating to Korosko, having left sixty of their own dead on the field,
and six times that number of Dervishes.

It was Dicky Donovan who cooked Fielding's supper that night, having
harried the onion-field and fought the barn-yard fowl, as Fielding had
commanded Seti.

But next evening at sunset Mahommed Seti came into the fort, slashed and
bleeding, with Bashi-Bazouk limping heavily after him.

Fielding said that Seti's was the good old game for which V.C.'s were the
reward--to run terrible risks to save a life in the face of the enemy;
but, heretofore, it had always been the life of a man, not of a horse.
To this day the Gippies of that regiment still alive do not understand
why Seti should have stayed behind and risked his life to save a horse
and bring him wounded back to his master.  But little Dicky Donovan
understood, and Fielding understood; and Fielding never afterwards
mounted Bashi-Bazouk but he remembered.  It was Mahommed Seti who taught
him the cry of Mahomet:

                   "By the CHARGERS that pant,
                    And the hoofs that strike fire,
                    And the scourers at dawn,
                    Who stir up the dust with it,
                    And cleave through a host with it!"

And in the course of time Mahommed Seti managed to pay the price of the
grindstone and also of the drum.






THE DESERTION OF MAHOMMED SELIM

The business began during Ramadan; how it ended and where was in the
mouth of every soldier between Beni Souef and Dongola, and there was not
a mud hut or a mosque within thirty miles of Mahommed Selim's home, not a
khiassa or felucca dropping anchor for gossip and garlic below the
mudirieh, but knew the story of Soada, the daughter of Wassef the camel-
driver.

Soada was pretty and upright, with a full round breast and a slim figure.
She carried a balass of water on her head as gracefully as a princess a
tiara.  This was remarked by occasional inspectors making their official
rounds, and by more than one khowagah putting in with his dahabeah where
the village maidens came to fill their water-jars.  Soada's trinkets and
bracelets were perhaps no better than those of her companions, but her
one garment was of the linen of Beni Mazar, as good as that worn by the
Sheikh-Elbeled himself.

Wassef the camel-driver, being proud of Soada, gave her the advantage of
his frequent good fortune in desert loot and Nile backsheesh.  But Wassef
was a hard man for all that, and he grew bitter and morose at last,
because he saw that camel-driving must suffer by the coming of the
railway.  Besides, as a man gets older he likes the season of Ramadan
less, for he must fast from sunrise to sunset, though his work goes on;
and, with broken sleep, having his meals at night, it is ten to one but
he gets irritable.

So it happened that one evening just at sunset, Wassef came to his hut,
with the sun like the red rim of a huge thumb-nail in the sky behind him,
ready beyond telling for his breakfast, and found nothing.  On his way
home he had seen before the houses and cafes silent Mussulmans with
cigarettes and matches in their fingers, cooks with their hands on the
lids of the cooking pots, where the dourha and onions boiled; but here
outside his own doorway there was no odour, and there was silence within.

"Now, by the beard of the Prophet," he muttered, "is it for this I have
fed the girl and clothed her with linen from Beni Mazar all these years!"
And he turned upon his heel, and kicked a yellow cur in the ribs; then he
went to the nearest cafe, and making huge rolls of forcemeat with his
fingers crammed them into his mouth, grunting like a Berkshire boar.  Nor
did his anger cease thereafter, for this meal of meat had cost him five
piastres--the second meal of meat in a week.

As Wassef sat on the mastaba of the cafe sullen and angry, the village
barber whispered in his ear that Mahommed Selim and Soada had been
hunting jackals in the desert all afternoon.  Hardly had the barber fled
from the anger of Wassef, when a glittering kavass of the Mouffetish at
Cairo passed by on a black errand of conscription.  With a curse Wassef
felt in his vest for his purse, and called to the kavass--the being more
dreaded in Egypt than the plague.

That very night the conscription descended upon Mahommed Selim, and by
sunrise he was standing in front of the house of the Mamour with twelve
others, to begin the march to Dongola.  Though the young man's father
went secretly to the Mamour, and offered him backsheesh, even to the tune
of a feddan of land, the Mamour refused to accept it.  That was a very
peculiar thing, because every Egyptian official, from the Khedive down to
the ghafhr of the cane-fields, took backsheesh in the name of Allah.

Wassef the camel-driver was the cause.  He was a deep man and a strong;
and it was through him the conscription descended upon Mahommed Selim--
"son of a burnt father," as he called him--who had gone shooting jackals
in the desert with his daughter, and had lost him his breakfast.
Wassef's rage was quiet but effective, for he had whispered to some
purpose in the ear of the Mamour as well as in that of the dreaded kavass
of conscription.  Afterwards, he had gone home and smiled at Soada his
daughter when she lied to him about the sunset breakfast.

With a placid smile and lips that murmured, "Praise be to God," the
malignant camel-driver watched the shrieking women of the village
throwing dust on their heads and lamenting loudly for the thirteen young
men of Beni Souef who were going forth never to return--or so it seemed
to them; for of all the herd of human kine driven into the desert before
whips and swords, but a moiety ever returned, and that moiety so battered
that their mothers did not know them.  Therefore, at Beni Souef that
morning women wept, and men looked sullenly upon the ground--all but
Wassef the camel-driver.

It troubled the mind of Wassef that Mahommed Selim made no outcry at his
fate.  He was still more puzzled when the Mamour whispered to him that
Mahommed Selim had told the kavass and his own father that since it was
the will of God, then the will of God was his will, and he would go.
Wassef replied that the Mamour did well not to accept the backsheesh of
Mahommed Selim's father, for the Mouffetish at the palace of Ismail would
have heard of it, and there would have been an end to the Mamour.  It was
quite a different matter when it was backsheesh for sending Mahommed
Selim to the Soudan.

With a shameless delight Wassef went to the door of his own home, and,
calling to Soada, told her that Mahommed Selim was among the conscripts.
He also told her that the young man was willing to go, and that the
Mamour would take no backsheesh from his father.  He looked to see her
burst into tears and wailing, but she only stood and looked at him like
one stricken blind.  Wassef laughed, and turned on his heel; and went
out: for what should he know of the look in a woman's face--he to whom
most women were alike, he who had taken dancing-girls with his camels
into the desert many a time?  What should he know of that love which
springs once in every woman's heart, be she fellah or Pharaoh's daughter?

When he had gone, Soada groped her way blindly to the door and out into
the roadway.  Her lips moved, but she only said: "Mahommed--Mahommed
Selim!"  Her father's words knelled in her ear that her lover was willing
to go, and she kept saying brokenly: "Mahommed--Mahommed Selim!"  As the
mist left her eyes she saw the conscripts go by, and Mahommed Selim was
in the rear rank.  He saw her also, but he kept his head turned away,
taking a cigarette from young Yusef, the drunken ghaffir, as they passed
on.

Unlike the manner of her people, Soada turned and went back into her
house, and threw herself upon the mud floor, and put the folds of her
garment in her mouth lest she should cry out in her agony.  A whole day
she lay there and did not stir, save to drink from the water-bottle which
old Fatima, the maker of mats, had placed by her side.  For Fatima
thought of the far-off time when she loved Hassan the potter, who had
been dragged from his wheel by a kavass of conscription and lost among
the sands of the Libyan desert; and she read the girl's story.

That evening, as Wassef the camel-driver went to the mosque to pray,
Fatima cursed him, because now all the village laughed secretly at the
revenge that Wassef had taken upon the lover of his daughter.  A few
laughed the harder because they knew Wassef would come to feel it had
been better to have chained Mahommed Selim to a barren fig-tree and kept
him there until he married Soada, than to let him go.  He had
mischievously sent him into that furnace which eats the Fellaheen to the
bones, and these bones thereafter mark white the road of the Red Sea
caravans and the track of the Khedive's soldiers in the yellow sands.

When Fatima cursed Wassef he turned and spat at her; and she went back
and sat on the ground beside Soada, and mumbled tags from the Koran above
her for comfort.  Then she ate greedily the food which Soada should have
eaten; snatching scraps of consolation in return for the sympathy she
gave.

The long night went, the next day came, and Soada got up and began to
work again.  And the months went by.




II

One evening, on a day which had been almost too hot for even the seller
of liquorice-water to go by calling and clanging, Wassef the camel-driver
sat at the door of a malodorous cafe and listened to a wandering welee
chanting the Koran.  Wassef was in an ill-humour: first, because the day
had been so hot; secondly, because he had sold his ten-months' camel at a
price almost within the bounds of honesty; and thirdly, because a score
of railway contractors and subs. were camped outside the town.  Also,
Soada had scarcely spoken to him for three days past.

In spite of all, Soada had been the apple of his eye, although he had
sworn again and again that next to a firman of the Sultan, a ten-months'
camel was the most beautiful thing on earth.  He was in a bitter humour.
This had been an intermittent disease with him almost since the day
Mahommed Selim had been swallowed up by the Soudan; for, like her mother
before her, Soada had no mind to be a mat for his feet.  Was it not even
said that Soada's mother was descended from an English slave with red
hair, who in the terrible disaster at Damietta in 1805 had been carried
away into captivity on the Nile, where he married a fellah woman and died
a good Mussulman?

Soada's mother had had red-brown hair, and not black as becomes a fellah
woman; but Wassef was proud of this ancient heritage of red hair, which
belonged to a field-marshal of Great Britain--so he swore by the beard of
the Prophet.  That is why he had not beaten Soada these months past when
she refused to answer him, when with cold stubbornness she gave him
his meals or withheld them at her will.  He was even a little awed by her
silent force of will, and at last he had to ask her humbly for a savoury
dish which her mother had taught her to make--a dish he always ate upon
the birthday of Mahomet Ali, who had done him the honour to flog him with
his own kourbash for filching the rations of his Arab charger.

But this particular night Wassef was bitter, and watched with stolid
indifference the going down of the sun, the time when he usually said his
prayers.  He was in so ill a humour that he would willingly have met his
old enemy, Yusef, the drunken ghaffir, and settled their long-standing
dispute for ever.  But Yusef came not that way.  He was lying drunk with
hashish outside the mosque El Hassan, with a letter from Mahommed Selim
in his green turban--for Yusef had been a pilgrimage to Mecca and might
wear the green turban.

But if Yusef came not by the cafe where Wassef sat glooming, some one
else came who quickly roused Wassef from his phlegm.  It was Donovan
Pasha, the young English official, who had sat with him many a time at
the door of his but and asked him questions about Dongola and Berber and
the Soudanese.  And because Dicky spoke Arabic, and was never known to
have aught to do with the women of Beni Souef, he had been welcome; and
none the less because he never frowned when an Arab told a lie.

"Nehar-ak koom said, Mahommed Wassef," said Dicky; and sat upon a bench
and drew a narghileh to him, wiping the ivory mouthpiece with his
handkerchief.

"Nehar-ak said, saadat el Pasha," answered Wassef, and touched lips,
breast, and forehead with his hand.  Then they shook hands, thumbs up,
after the ancient custom.  And once more, Wassef touched his breast, his
lips, and his forehead.

They sat silent too long for Wassef's pleasure, for he took pride in what
he was pleased to call his friendship with Donovan Pasha, and he could
see his watchful neighbours gathering at a little distance.  It did not
suit his book that they two should not talk together.

"May Allah take them to his mercy!--A regiment was cut to pieces by the
Dervishes at Dongola last quarter of the moon," he said.

"It was not the regiment of Mahommed Selim," Dicky answered slowly, with
a curious hard note in his voice.

"All blessings do not come at once--such is the will of God!" answered
Wassef with a sneer.

"You brother of asses," said Dicky, showing his teeth a little, "you
brother of asses of Bagdad!"

"Saadat el basha!" exclaimed Wassef, angry and dumfounded.

"You had better have gone yourself, and left Mahommed Selim your camels
and your daughter," continued Dicky, his eyes straight upon Wassef's.

"God knows your meaning," said Wassef in a sudden fright; for the
Englishman's tongue was straight, as he well knew.

"They sneer at you behind your back, Mahommed Wassef.  No man in the
village dare tell you, for you have no friends, but I tell you, that you
may save Soada before it is too late.  Mahommed Selim lives; or lived
last quarter of the moon, so says Yusef the ghaffir.  Sell your ten-
months' camel, buy the lad out, and bring him back to Soada."

"Saadat!" said Wassef, in a quick fear, and dropped the stem of the
narghileh, and got to his feet.  "Saadat el basha!"

"Before the Nile falls and you may plant yonder field with onions,"
answered Dicky, jerking his head towards the flooded valley, "her time
will be come!"

Wassef's lips were drawn, like shrivelled parchment over his red gums,
the fingers of his right hand fumbled in his robe.

"There's no one to kill--keep quiet!" said Dicky, But Wassef saw near by
the faces of the villagers, and on every face he thought he read a smile,
a sneer; though in truth none sneered, for they were afraid of his
terrible anger.  Mad with fury he snatched the turban from his head and
threw it on the ground.  Then suddenly he gave one cry, "Allah!" a
vibrant clack like a pistol-shot, for he saw Yusef, the drunken ghaffir,
coming down the road.

Yusef heard that cry of "Allah!" and he knew that the hour had come for
settling old scores.  The hashish clouds lifted from his brain, and he
gripped his naboot of the hard wood of the dom-palm, and, with a cry like
a wolf, came on.

It would have been well for Wassef the camel-driver if he had not taken
the turban from his head, for before he could reach Yusef with his
dagger, he went down, his skull cracking like the top of an egg under a
spoon.




III

Thus it was that Soada was left to fight her battle alone.  She did not
weep or wail when Wassef's body was brought home and the moghassil and
hanouti came to do their offices.  She did not smear her hair with mud,
nor was she moved by the wailing of the mourning women nor the chanters
of the Koran.  She only said to Fatima when all was over: "It is well;
he is gone from my woe to the mercy of God!  Praise be to God!"  And she
held her head high in the village still, though her heart was in the
dust.

She would have borne her trouble alone to the end, but that she was
bitten on the arm by one of her father's camels the day they were sold in
the marketplace.  Then, helpless and suffering and fevered, she yielded
to the thrice-repeated request of Dicky Donovan, and was taken to the
hospital at Assiout, which Fielding Bey, Dicky's friend, had helped to
found.

But Soada, as her time drew near and the terror of it stirred her heart,
cast restless eyes upon the whitewashed walls and rough floors of the
hospital.  She longed for the mud hut at Beni Souef, and the smell of the
river and the little field of onions she planted every year.  Day by day
she grew harder of heart against those who held her in the hospital--for
to her it was but a prison.  She would not look when the doctor came, and
she would not answer, but kept her eyes closed; and she did not shrink
when they dressed the arm so cruelly wounded by the camel's teeth, but
lay still and dumb.

Now, a strange thing happened, for her hair which had been so black
turned brown, and grew browner and browner till it was like the hair of
her mother, who, so the Niline folk said, was descended from the English
soldier-slave with red hair.

Fielding Bey and Dicky came to see her in hospital once before they
returned to Cairo; but Soada would not even speak to them, though she
smiled when they spoke to her; and no one else ever saw her smile during
the days she spent in that hospital with the red floor and white walls
and the lazy watchman walking up and down before the door.  She kept her
eyes closed in the daytime; but at night they were always open--always.
Pictures of all she had lived and seen came back to her then--pictures of
days long before Mahommed Selim came into her life.  Mahommed Selim!  She
never spoke the words now, but whenever she thought them her heart shrank
in pain.  Mahommed Selim had gone like a coward into the desert, leaving
her alone.

Her mind dwelt on the little mud hut and the onion field, and she saw
down by the foreshore of the river the great khiassas from Assouan and
Luxor laden with cotton or dourha or sugar-cane, their bent prows hooked
in the Nile mud.  She saw again the little fires built along the shore
and atop of the piles of grain, round which sat the white, the black, and
the yellow-robed riverine folk in the crimson glare; while from the banks
came the cry: "Alla-haly, 'm alla-haly!" as stalwart young Arabs drew in
from the current to the bank some stubborn, overloaded khiassa.  She
heard the snarl of the camels as they knelt down before her father's but
to rest before the journey into the yellow plains of sand beyond.  She
saw the seller of sweetmeats go by calling--calling.  She heard the
droning of the children in the village school behind the hut, the dull
clatter of Arabic consonants galloping through the Koran.  She saw the
moon--the full moon-upon the Nile, the wide acreage of silver water
before the golden-yellow and yellow-purple of the Libyan hills behind.

She saw through her tears the sweet mirage of home, and her heart
rebelled against the prison where she lay.  What should she know of
hospitals--she whose medicaments had been herbs got from the Nile valley
and the cool Nile mud?  Was it not the will of God if we lived or the
will of God if we died?  Did we not all lie in the great mantle of the
mercy of God, ready to be lifted up or to be set down as He willed?  They
had prisoned her here; there were bars upon the windows, there were
watchmen at the door.

At last she could bear it no longer; the end of it all came.  She stole
out over the bodies of the sleeping watchmen, out into the dusty road
under the palms, down to the waterside, to the Nile--the path leading
homewards.  She must go down the Nile, hiding by day, travelling by
night--the homing bird with a broken wing-back to the but where she had
lived so long with Wassef the camel-driver; back where she could lie in
the dusk of her windowless home, shutting out the world from her
solitude.  There she could bear the agony of her hour.

Drinking the water of the Nile, eating the crumbs of dourha bread she had
brought from the hospital, getting an onion from a field, chewing shreds
of sugarcane, hiding by day and trudging on by night, hourly growing
weaker, she struggled towards Beni Souef.  Fifty--forty--thirty--ten--
five miles!  Oh!  the last two days, her head so hot and her brain
bursting, and a thousand fancies swimming before her eyes, her heart
fluttering, fluttering--stopping, going on--stopping, going on.

It was only the sound of the river--the Nile, Mother of Egypt, crooning
to her disordered spirit, which kept her on her feet.  Five miles, four
miles, three miles, two, and then--she never quite remembered how she
came to the hut where she was born.  Two miles--two hours of incredible
agony, now running, now leaning against a palm tree, now dropping to her
knees, now fighting on and on, she came at last to the one spot in the
world where she could die in peace.

As she staggered, stumbled, through the village, Yusef, the drunken
ghaffir, saw her.  He did not dare speak to her, for had he not killed
her father, and had he not bought himself free of punishment from the
Mudir?  So he ran to old Fatima and knocked upon her door with his
naboot, crying: "In the name of Allah get thee to the hut of Wassef the
camel-driver!"

Thus it was that Soada, in her agony, heard a voice say out of the
infinite distance: "All praise to Allah, he hath even now the strength of
a year-old child!"




IV

That night at sunset, as Soada lay upon the sheepskin spread for her,
with the child nestled between her arm and her breast, a figure darkened
the doorway, and old Fatima cried out:

"Mahommed Selim!"

With a gasping sound Soada gathered the child quickly to her breast, and
shrank back to the wall.  This surely was the ghost of Mahommed Selim--
this gaunt, stooping figure covered with dust.

"Soada, in the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful, Soada,
beautiful one!"

Mahommed Selim, once the lithe, the straight, the graceful, now bent,
awkward, fevered, all the old daring gone from him, stood still in the
middle of the room, humbled before the motherhood in his sight.

"Brother of jackals," cried old Fatima, "what dost thou here?  What dost
thou here, dog of dogs!"  She spat at him.

He took no notice.  "Soada," he said eagerly, prayerfully, and his voice,
though hoarse, was softer than she had ever heard it.  "Soada, I have
come through death to thee--Listen, Soada!  At night, when sleep was upon
the barrack-house, I stole out to come to thee.  My heart had been hard.
I had not known how much I loved thee--"

Soada interrupted him.  "What dost thou know of love, Mahommed Selim?
The blood of the dead cries from the ground."

He came a step nearer.  "The blood of Wassef the camel-driver is upon my
head," he said.  "In the desert there came news of it.  In the desert,
even while we fought the wild tribes, one to ten, a voice kept crying in
my ear, even as thou hast cried, 'What didst thou know of love, Mahommed
Selim!'  One by one the men of Beni Souef fell round me; one by one they
spoke of their village and of their women, and begged for a drop of
water, and died.  And my heart grew hot within me, and a spirit kept
whispering in my ear: 'Mahommed Selim, think of the village thou hast
shamed, of Soada thou hast wronged!  No drop of water shall cheer thy
soul in dying!'"

Fatima and Soada listened now with bated breath, for this was the voice
of one who had drunk the vinegar and gall of life.

"When the day was done, and sleep was upon the barrack-house, my heart
waked up and I knew that I loved Soada as I had never loved her.  I ran
into the desert, and the jackals flew before me--outcasts of the desert,
they and I.  Coming to the tomb of Amshar the sheikh, by which was a
well, there I found a train of camels.  One of these I stole, and again I
ran into the desert, and left the jackals behind.  Hour after hour, day
and night, I rode on.  But faintness was upon me, and dreams came.  For
though only the sands were before me, I seemed to watch the Nile running-
-running, and thou beside it, hastening with it, hastening, hastening
towards thy home.  And Allah put a thorn into my heart, that a sharp pain
went through my body--and at last I fell."

Soada's eyes were on him now with a strange, swimming brilliancy.

"Mahommed--Mahommed Selim, Allah touched thine eyes that thou didst see
truly," she said eagerly.  "Speak not till I have done," he answered.
"When I waked again I was alone in the desert, no food, no water, and the
dead camel beside me.  But I had no fear.  'If it be God's will,' said I,
'then I shall come unto Soada.  If it be not God's will, so be it: for
are we not on the cushion of His mercy, to sleep or to wake, to live or
to die?'"

He paused, tottering, and presently sank upon the ground, his hands
drooped before him, his head bent down.  Old Fatima touched him on the
shoulder.

"Brother of vultures didst thou go forth; brother of eagles dost thou
return," she said.  "Eat, drink, in the house of thy child and its
mother."

"Shall the unforgiven eat or drink?" he asked, and he rocked his body to
and fro, like one who chants the Koran in a corner of El Azhar,
forgetting and forgotten.

Soada's eyes were on him now as though they might never leave him again;
and she dragged herself little by little towards him, herself and the
child--little by little, until at last she touched his feet, and the
child's face was turned towards him from its mother's breast.

"Thou art my love, Mahommed Selim," she said.  He raised his head from
his hands, a hunger of desire in his face.

"Thou art my lord," she added: "art thou not forgiven?  The little one is
thine and mine," she whispered.  "Wilt thou not speak to him?"

"Lest Allah should strike me with blindness and dry up the juice of my
veins, I will not touch thee or the child until all be righted.  Food
will I not eat, nor water drink until thou art mine--by the law of the
Prophet, mine."

Laying down the water-jar, and the plate of dourha bread, old Fatima
gathered her robe about her, and cried as she ran from the house:
"Marriage and fantasia thou shalt have this hour."

The stiffness seemed to pass from her bones as she ran through the
village to the house of the Omdah.  Her voice, lifting shrilly, sang the
Song of Haleel, the song of the newly married, till it met the chant of
the Muezzin on the tower of the mosque El Hassan, and mingled with it,
dying away over the fields of bersim and the swift-flowing Nile.

That night Mahommed Selim and Soada the daughter of Wassef the camel-
driver were married, but the only fantasia they held was their own low
laughter over the child.  In the village, however, people were little
moved to smile, for they knew that Mahommed Selim was a deserter from the
army of the Khedive at Dongola, and that meant death.  But no one told
Soada this, and she did not think; she was content to rest in the
fleeting dream.

"Give them twenty-four hours," said the black-visaged fat sergeant of
cavalry come to arrest Mahommed Selim for desertion.

The father of Mahommed Selim again offered the Mamour a feddan of land if
the young man might go free, and to the sergeant he offered a she-camel
and a buffalo.  To no purpose.  It was Mahommed Selim himself who saved
his father's goods to him.  He sent this word to the sergeant by Yusef
the drunken ghaffir: "Give me to another sunset and sunrise, and what I
have is thine--three black donkeys of Assiout rented to old Abdullah the
sarraf."

Because with this offer he should not only have backsheesh but the man
also, the fat sergeant gave him leave.  When the time was up, and
Mahommed Selim drew Soada's face to his breast, he knew that it was the
last look and last embrace.

"I am going back," he said; "my place is empty at Dongola."

"No, no, thou shalt not go," she cried.  "See how the little one loves
thee," she urged, and, sobbing, she held the child up to him.

But he spoke softly to her, and at last she said: "Kiss me, Mahommed
Selim.  Behold now thy discharge shall be bought from the palace of the
Khedive, and soon thou wilt return," she cried.

"If it be the will of God," he answered; "but the look of thine eyes I
will take with me, and the face of the child here."  He thrust a finger
into the palm of the child, and the little dark hand closed round it.
But when he would have taken it away, the little hand still clung, though
the eyes were scarce opened upon life.

"See, Mahommed Selim," Soada cried, "he would go with thee."

"He shall come to me one day, by the mercy of God," answered Mahommed
Selim.

Then he went out into the market-place and gave himself up to the fat
sergeant.  As they reached the outskirts of the village a sorry camel
came with a sprawling gallop after them, and swaying and rolling above it
was Yusef, the drunken ghaffir, his naboot of dom-wood across his knees.

"What dost thou come for, friend of the mercy of God?" asked Mahommed
Selim.

"To be thy messenger, praise be to God!" answered Yusef, swinging his
water-bottle clear for a drink.




V

In Egypt, the longest way round is not the shortest way home, and that
was why Mahommed Selim's court-martial took just three minutes and a
half; and the bimbashi who judged him found even that too long, for he
yawned in the deserter's face as he condemned him to death.

Mahommed Selim showed no feeling when the sentence was pronounced.  His
face had an apathetic look.  It seemed as if it were all one to him.  But
when they had turned him round to march to the shed where he was to be
kept, till hung like a pig at sunrise, his eyes glanced about restlessly.
For even as the sentence had been pronounced a new idea had come into his
mind.  Over the heads of the Gippy soldiers, with their pipestem legs,
his look flashed eagerly, then a little painfully--then suddenly stayed,
for it rested on the green turban of Yusef, the drunken ghaffir.  Yusef's
eyes were almost shut; his face had the grey look of fresh-killed veal,
for he had come from an awful debauch of hashish.

"Allah!  Allah!" cried Mahommed Selim, for that was the sound which
always waked the torpid brain of Yusef since Wassef the camel-driver's
skull had crackled under his naboot.

Yusef's wide shoulders straightened back, his tongue licked his lips, his
eyes stared before him, his throat was dry.  He licked his lips again.
"Allah!" he cried and ran forward.

The soldiers thrust Yusef back.  Mahommed Selim turned and whispered to
the sergeant.

"Backsheesh!" he said; "my grey Arab for a word with Yusef the ghaffir."

"Malaish!" said the sergeant; and the soldiers cleared a way for Yusef.

The palms of the men from Beni Souef met once, twice, thrice; they
touched their lips, their breasts, their foreheads, with their hands,
three times.  Then Mahommed Selim fell upon the breast of Yusef and
embraced him.  Doing so he whispered in his ear:

"In the name of Allah, tell Soada I died fighting the Dervishes!"

"So be it, in God's name!" said Yusef.  "A safe journey to you, brother
of giants."

Next morning at sunrise, between two dom-palms, stood Mahommed Selim; but
scarce a handful of the soldiers sent to see him die laughed when the
rope was thrown over his head.  For his story had gone abroad, and it was
said that he was mad--none but a madman would throw away his life for a
fellah woman.  And was it not written that a madman was one beloved of
Allah, who had taken his spirit up into heaven, leaving only the
disordered body behind?

If, at the last moment, Mahommed Selim had but cried out: "I am mad; with
my eyes I have seen God!" no man would have touched the rope that hanged
him up that day.

But, according to the sacred custom, he only asked for a bowl of water,
drank it, said "Allah!" and bowed his head three times towards Mecca--
and bowed his head no more.

Before another quarter was added to the moon, Yusef, the drunken ghaffir,
at the door of Soada's hut in Beni Souef, told old Fatima the most
wonderful tale, how Mahommed Selim had died on his sheepskin, having
killed ten Dervishes with his own hand; and that a whole regiment had
attended his funeral.

This is to the credit of Yusef's account, that the last half of his
statement was no lie.






ON THE REEF OF NORMAN'S WOE

              "It was the schooner Hesperus
               That sailed the wintry sea;
               And the skipper had taken his little daughter
               To bear him company.
                    -------------------
               Such was the wreck of the Hesperus
               In the midnight and the snow!
               Christ save us all from a death like this,
               On the reef of Norman's woe!"

Only it was not the schooner Hesperus, and she did not sail the wintry
sea.  It was the stern-wheeled tub Amenhotep, which churned her way up
and down the Nile, scraping over sand banks, butting the shores with
gaiety embarrassing--for it was the time of cholera, just before the
annual rise of the Nile.  Fielding Bey, the skipper, had not taken his
little daughter, for he had none; but he had taken little Dicky Donovan,
who had been in at least three departments of the Government, with
advantage to all.

Dicky was dining with Fielding at the Turf Club, when a telegram came
saying that cholera had appeared at a certain village on the Nile.
Fielding had dreaded this, had tried to make preparation for it, had
begged of the Government this reform and that--to no purpose.  He knew
that the saving of the country from an epidemic lay with his handful of
Englishmen and the faithful native officials; but chiefly with the
Englishmen.  He was prepared only as a forlorn hope is prepared, with
energy, with personal courage, with knowledge; and never were these more
needed.

With the telegram in his hand, he thought of his few English assistants,
and sighed; for the game they would play was the game of Hercules and
Death over the body of Alcestis.

Dicky noted the sigh, read the telegram, drank another glass of claret,
lighted a cigarette, drew his coffee to him, and said: "The Khedive is
away--I'm off duty; take me."

Fielding looked surprised, yet with an eye of hope.  If there was one man
in Egypt who could do useful work in the business, it was little Dicky
Donovan, who had a way with natives such as no man ever had in Egypt; who
knew no fear of anything mortal; who was as tireless as a beaver, as
keen-minded as a lynx is sharp-eyed.  It was said to Dicky's discredit
that he had no heart, but Fielding knew better.  When Dicky offered
himself now, Fielding said, almost feverishly: "But, dear old D., you
don't see--"

"Don't I?--Well, then,

             "'What are the blessings of the sight?--
               Oh, tell your poor blind boy!'"

What Fielding told him did not alter his intention, nor was it Fielding's
wish that it should, though he felt it right to warn the little man what
sort of thing was in store for them.

"As if I don't know, old lime-burner!" answered Dicky coolly.

In an hour they were on the Amenhotep, and in two hours they were on the
way--a floating hospital--to the infected district of Kalamoun.  There
the troubles began.  It wasn't the heat, and it wasn't the work, and it
wasn't the everlasting care of the sick: it was the ceaseless hunt for
the disease-stricken, the still, tireless opposition of the natives, the
remorseless deception, the hopeless struggle against the covert odds.
With nothing behind: no support from the Government, no adequate
supplies, few capable men; and all the time the dead, inert, dust-
powdered air; the offices of policeman, doctor, apothecary, even
undertaker and gravedigger, to perform; and the endless weeks of it all.
A handful of good men under two leaders of nerve, conscience and ability,
to fight an invisible enemy, which, gaining headway, would destroy its
scores of thousands!

At the end of the first two months Fielding Bey became hopeless.

"We can't throttle it," he said to Dicky Donovan.  "They don't give us
the ghost of a chance.  To-day I found a dead-un hid in an oven under a
heap of flour to be used for to-morrow's baking; I found another doubled
up in a cupboard, and another under a pile of dourha which will be ground
into flour."

"With twenty ghaffirs I beat five cane and dourha fields this morning,"
said Dicky.  "Found three cases.  They'd been taken out of the village
during the night."

"Bad ones?"

"So so.  They'll be worse before they're better.  That was my morning's
flutter.  This afternoon I found the huts these gentlemen call their
homes.  I knocked holes in the roofs per usual, burnt everything that
wasn't wood, let in the light o' heaven, and splashed about limewash and
perchloride.  That's my day's tot-up.  Any particular trouble?" he
added, eyeing Fielding closely.

Fielding fretfully jerked his foot on the floor, and lighted his pipe,
the first that day.

"Heaps.  I've put the barber in prison, and given the sarraf twenty
lashes for certifying that the death of the son of the Mamour was el
aadah--the ordinary.  It was one of the worst cases I've ever seen.  He
fell ill at ten and was dead at two, the permis d'inhumation was given at
four, and the usual thing occurred: the bodywashers got the bedding and
clothing, and the others the coverlet.  God only knows who'll wear that
clothing, who'll sleep in that bed!"

"If the Lord would only send them sense, we'd supply sublimate solution--
douche and spray, and zinc for their little long boxes of bones," mused
Dicky, his eyes half shut, as he turned over in his hands some scarabs a
place-hunting official had brought him that day.  "Well, that isn't all?"
he added, with a quick upward glance and a quizzical smile.  His eyes,
however, as they fell on Fielding's, softened in a peculiar way, and a
troubled look flashed through them; for Fielding's face was drawn and
cold, though the eyes were feverish, and a bright spot burned on his high
cheek-bones.

"No, it isn't all, Dicky.  The devil's in the whole business.  Steady,
sullen opposition meets us at every hand.  Norman's been here--rode over
from Abdallah--twenty-five miles.  A report's going through the native
villages, started at Abdallah, that our sanitary agents are throwing
yellow handkerchiefs in the faces of those they're going to isolate."

"That's Hoskai Bey's yellow handkerchief.  He's a good man, but he blows
his nose too much, and blows it with a flourish.  .  .  .  Has Norman
gone back?"

"No, I've made him lie down in my cabin.  He says he can't sleep, says he
can only work.  He looks ten years older.  Abdallah's an awful place, and
it's a heavy district.  The Mamour there's a scoundrel.  He has
influenced the whole district against Norman and our men.  Norman--you
know what an Alexander-Hannibal baby it is, all the head of him good for
the best sort of work anywhere, all the fat heart of him dripping
sentiment--gave a youngster a comfit the other day.  By some infernal
accident the child fell ill two days afterwards--it had been sucking its
father's old shoe--and Norman just saved its life by the skin of his
teeth.  If the child had died, there'd have been a riot probably.  As it
is, there's talk that we're scattering poisoned sweetmeats to spread the
disease.  He's done a plucky thing, though.  .  .  ."  He paused.  Dicky
looked up inquiringly, and Fielding continued.  "There's a fellow called
Mustapha Kali, a hanger-on of the Mudir of the province.  He spread a
report that this business was only a scare got up by us; that we poisoned
the people and buried them alive.  What does Norman do?  He promptly
arrests him, takes him to the Mudir, and says that the brute must be
punished or he'll carry the matter to the Khedive."

"Here's to you, Mr. Norman!" said Dicky, with a little laugh.  "What
does the Mudir do?"

"Doesn't know what to do.  He tells Norman to say to me that if he puts
the fellow in prison there'll be a riot, for they'll make a martyr of
him.  If he fines him it won't improve matters.  So he asks me to name
a punishment which'll suit our case.  He promises to give it 'his most
distinguished consideration.'"

"And what's your particular poison for him?" asked Dicky, with his eyes
on the Cholera Hospital a few hundred yards away.

"I don't know.  If he's punished in the ordinary way it will only make
matters worse, as the Mudir says.  Something's needed that will play our
game and turn the tables on the reptile too."

"A sort of bite himself with his own fangs, eh?"  Dicky seemed only idly
watching the moving figures by the hospital.

"Yes, but what is it?  I can't inoculate him with bacilli.  That's what'd
do the work, I fancy."

"Pocket your fancy, Fielding," answered Dicky.  "Let me have a throw."

"Go on.  If you can't hit it off, it's no good, for my head doesn't think
these days: it only sees, and hears, and burns."

Dicky eyed Fielding keenly, and then, pouring out some whiskey for
himself, put the bottle on the floor beside him, casually as it were.
Then he said, with his girlish laugh, not quite so girlish these days:
"I've got his sentence pat--it'll meet the case, or you may say, 'Cassio,
never more be officer of mine.'"

He drew over a piece of paper lying on the piano--for there was a piano
on the Amenhotep, and with what seemed an audacious levity Fielding
played in those rare moments when they were not working or sleeping; and
Fielding could really play!  As Dicky wrote he read aloud in a kind of
legal monotone:

     The citizen Mustapha Kali having asserted that there is no cholera,
     and circulated various false statements concerning the treatment of
     patients, is hereby appointed as hospital-assistant for three
     months, in the Cholera Hospital of Kalamoun, that he may have
     opportunity of correcting his opinions.
                         --Signed Ebn ben Hari, Mudir of Abdallah.

Fielding lay back and laughed--the first laugh on his lips for a
fortnight.  He laughed till his dry, fevered lips took on a natural
moisture, and he said at last: "You've pulled it off, D.  That's
masterly.  You and Norman have the only brains in this show.  I get
worse every day; I do--upon my soul!"

There was a curious anxious look in Dicky's eyes, but he only said: "You
like it?  Think it fills the bill, eh?"

"If the Mudir doesn't pass the sentence I'll shut up shop."  He leaned
over anxiously to Dicky and gripped his arm.  "I tell you this pressure
of opposition has got to be removed, or we'll never get this beast of an
epidemic under, but we'll go under instead, my boy."

"Oh, we're doing all right," Dicky answered, with only apparent
carelessness.  "We've got inspection of the trains, we've got some sort
of command of the foreshores, we've got the water changed in the mosques,
we've closed the fountains, we've stopped the markets, we've put
Sublimate Pasha and Limewash Effendi on the war-path, and--"

"And the natives believe in lighted tar-barrels and a cordon sanitaire!
No, D., things must take a turn, or the game's lost and we'll go with it.
Success is the only thing that'll save their lives--and ours: we couldn't
stand failure in this.  A man can walk to the gates of hell to do the
hardest trick, and he'll come back one great blister and live, if he's
done the thing he set out for; but if he doesn't do it, he falls into the
furnace.  He never comes back.  Dicky, things must be pulled our way, or
we go to deep damnation."

Dicky turned a little pale, for there was high nervous excitement in
Fielding's words; and for a moment he found it hard to speak.  He was
about to say something, however, when Fielding continued.

"Norman there,"--he pointed to the deck-cabin, "Norman's the same.  He
says it's do or die; and he looks it.  It isn't like a few fellows
besieged by a host.  For in that case you wait to die, and you fight to
the last, and you only have your own lives.  But this is different.
We're fighting to save these people from themselves; and this slow,
quiet, deadly work, day in, day out, in the sickening sun and smell-
faugh!  the awful smell in the air--it kills in the end, if you don't
pull your game off.  You know it's true."

His eyes had an eager, almost prayerful look; he was like a child in his
simple earnestness.  His fingers moved over the maps on the table, in
which were little red and white and yellow flags, the white flags to mark
the towns and villages where they had mastered the disease, the red flags
to mark the new ones attacked, the yellow to indicate those where the
disease was raging.  His fingers touched one of the flags, and he looked
down.

"See, D.  Here are two new places attacked to-day.

"I must ride over to Abdallah when Norman goes.  It's all so hopeless!"

"Things will take a turn," rejoined Dicky, with a forced gaiety.  "You
needn't ride over to Abdallah.  I'll go with Norman, and what's more I'll
come back here with Mustapha Kali."

"You'll go to the Mudir?" asked Fielding eagerly.  He seemed to set so
much store by this particular business.

"I'll bring the Mudir too, if there's any trouble," said Dicky grimly;
though it is possible he did not mean what he said.

Two hours later Fielding, Dicky, and Norman were in conference, extending
their plans of campaign.  Fielding and Norman were eager and nervous, and
their hands and faces seemed to have taken on the arid nature of the
desert.  Before they sat down Dicky had put the bottle of whiskey out of
easy reach; for Fielding, under ordinary circumstances the most
abstemious of men, had lately, in his great fatigue and overstrain,
unconsciously emptied his glass more often than was wise for a campaign
of long endurance.  Dicky noticed now, as they sat round the table, that
Norman's hand went to the coffee-pot as Fielding's had gone to his glass.
What struck him as odd also was that Fielding seemed to have caught
something of Norman's manner.  There was the same fever in the eyes,
though Norman's face was more worn and the eyes more sunken.  He looked
like a man that was haunted.  There was, too, a certain air of
helplessness about him, a primitive intensity almost painful.  Dicky saw
Fielding respond to this in a curious way--it was the kind of fever that
passes quickly from brain to brain when there is not sound bodily health
commanded by a cool intelligence to insulate it.  Fielding had done the
work of four men for over two months, and, like most large men, his
nerves had given in before Dicky's, who had done six men's work at least,
and, by his power of organisation and his labour-saving intelligence,
conserved the work of another fifty.

The three were sitting silent, having arranged certain measures, when
Norman sprang to his feet excitedly and struck the table with his hand.

"It's no use, sir," he said to Fielding, "I'll have to go.  I'm no good.
I neglect my duty.  I was to be back at Abdallah at five.  I forgot all
about it.  A most important thing.  A load of fessikh was landed at
Minkari, five miles beyond Abdallah.  We've prohibited fessikh.  I was
going to seize it.  .  .  .  It's no good.  It's all so hopeless here."

Dicky knew now that the beginning of the end had come for Norman.  There
were only two things to do: get him away shooting somewhere, or humour
him here.  But there was no chance for shooting till things got very much
better.  The authorities in Cairo would never understand, and the
babbling social-military folk would say that they had calmly gone
shooting while pretending to stay the cholera epidemic.  It wouldn't be
possible to explain that Norman was in a bad way, and that it was done to
give him half a chance of life.

Fielding also ought to have a few days clear away from this constant
pressure and fighting, and the sounds and the smells of death; but it
could not be yet.  Therefore, to humour them both was the only thing,
and Norman's was the worse case.  After all, they had got a system of
sanitary supervision, they had the disease by the throat, and even in
Cairo the administration was waking up a little.  The crisis would soon
pass perhaps, if a riot could be stayed and the natives give up their
awful fictions of yellow handkerchiefs, poisoned sweetmeats, deadly
limewash, and all such nonsense.

So Dicky said now, "All right, Norman; come along.  You'll seize that
fessikh, and I'll bring back Mustapha Kali.  We'll work him as he has
never worked in his life.  He'll be a living object-lesson.  We'll have
all Upper Egypt on the banks of the Nile waiting to see what happens to
Mustapha."

Dicky laughed, and Fielding responded feebly; but Norman was looking at
the hospital with a look too bright for joy, too intense for despair.

"I found ten in a corner of a cane-field yesterday," he said dreamily.
"Four were dead, and the others had taken the dead men's smocks as
covering."  He shuddered.  "I see nothing but limewash, smell nothing but
carbolic.  It's got into my head.  Look here, old man, I can't stand it.
I'm no use," he added pathetically to Fielding.

"You're right enough, if you'll not take yourself so seriously," said
Dicky jauntily.  "You mustn't try to say, 'Alone I did it.'  Come along.
Fill your tobacco-pouch.  There are the horses.  I'm ready."

He turned to Fielding.

"It's going to be a stiff ride, Fielding.  But I'll do it in twenty-four
hours, and bring Mustapha Kali too--for a consideration."

He paused, and Fielding said, with an attempt at playfulness: "Name your
price."

"That you play for me, when I get back, the overture of 'Tannhauser'.
Play it, mind; no tuning-up sort of thing, like last Sunday's
performance.  Practise it, my son!  Is it a bargain?  I'm not going to
work for nothing a day."

He watched the effect of his words anxiously, for he saw how needful
it was to divert Fielding's mind in the midst of all this "plague,
pestilence, and famine."  For days Fielding had not touched the piano,
the piano which Mrs. Henshaw, widow of Henshaw of the Buffs, had insisted
on his taking with him a year before, saying that it would be a cure for
loneliness when away from her.  During the first of these black days
Fielding had played intermittently for a few moments at a time, and Dicky
had noticed that after playing he seemed in better spirits.  But lately
the disease of a ceaseless unrest, of constant sleepless work, was on
him.  He had not played for near a week, saying, in response to Dicky's
urging, that there was no time for music.  And Dicky knew that presently
there would be no time to eat, and then no time to sleep; and then, the
worst!

Dicky had pinned his faith and his friendship to Fielding, and he saw no
reason why he should lose his friend because Madame Cholera was stalking
the native villages, driving the fellaheen before her like sheep to the
slaughter.

"Is it a bargain?" he added, as Fielding did not at once reply.  If
Fielding would but play it would take the strain off his mind at times.

"All right, D., I'll see what I can do with it," said Fielding, and with
a nod turned to the map with the little red and white and yellow flags,
and began to study it.

He did not notice that one of his crew abaft near the wheel was watching
him closely, while creeping along the railing on the pretence of cleaning
it.  Fielding was absorbed in making notes upon a piece of paper and
moving the little flags about.  Now he lit a cigar and began walking up
and down the deck.

The Arab disappeared, but a few minutes afterwards returned.  The deck
was empty.  Fielding had ridden away to the village.  The map was still
on the table.  With a frightened face the Arab peered at it, then going
to the side he called down softly, and there came up from the lower deck
a Copt, the sarraf of the village, who could read English fairly.  The
Arab pointed to the map, and the Copt approached cautiously.  A few feet
away he tried to read what was on the map, but, unable to do so, drew
closer, pale-faced and knockkneed, and stared at the map and the little
flags.  An instant after he drew back, and turned to the Arab.  "May God
burn his eyes!  He sends the death to the village by moving the flags.
May God change him into a dog to be beaten to death!  The red is to
begin, the white flag is for more death, the yellow is for enough.
See--may God cut off his hand!--he has moved the white flag to our
village."  He pointed in a trembling fear, half real, half assumed--
for he was of a nation of liars.

During the next half-hour at least a dozen Arabs came to look at the map,
but they disappeared like rats in a hole when, near midnight, Fielding's
tall form appeared on the bank above.

It was counted to him as a devil's incantation, the music that he played
that night, remembering his promise to Dicky Donovan.  It was music
through which breathed the desperate, troubled, aching heart and tortured
mind of an overworked strong man.  It cried to the night its trouble; but
far over in the Cholera Hospital the sick heard it and turned their faces
towards it eagerly.  It pierced the apathy of the dying.  It did more,
for it gave Fielding five hours' sleep that night; and though he waked to
see one of his own crew dead on the bank, he tackled the day's labour
with more hope than he had had for a fortnight.

As the day wore on, however, his spirits fell, for on every hand was
suspicion, unrest, and opposition, and his native assistants went
sluggishly about their work.  It was pathetic and disheartening to see
people refusing to be protected, the sick refusing to be relieved, all
stricken with fear, yet inviting death by disobeying the Inglesi.

Kalamoun was hopeless; yet twenty-four hours earlier Fielding had fancied
there was a little light in the darkness.  That night Fielding's music
gave him but two hours' sleep, and he had to begin the day on a brandy-
and-soda.  Wherever he went open resistance blocked his way, hisses and
mutterings followed him, the sick were hid in all sorts of places, and
two of his assistants deserted before noon.  Things looked ominous
enough, and at five o'clock he made up his mind that Egypt would be
overrun with cholera, and that he should probably have to defend himself
and the Amenhotep from rioters, for the native police would be useless.

But at five o'clock Dicky Donovan came in a boat, and with him Mustapha
Kali under a native guard of four men.  The Mudir's sense of humour had
been touched, and this sense of humour probably saved the Mudir from
trouble, for it played Dicky's game for him.

Mustapha Kali had been sentenced to serve in the Cholera Hospital of
Kalamoun, that he might be cured of his unbelief.  At first he had taken
his fate hardly, but Dicky had taunted him and then had suggested that a
man whose conscience was clear and convictions good would carry a high
head in trouble.  Dicky challenged him to prove his libels by probing the
business to the bottom, like a true scientist.  All the way from Abdallah
Dicky talked to him so, and at last the only answer Mustapha Kali would
make was, "Malaish no matter!"

Mustapha Kali pricked up his ears with hope as he saw the sullen crowds
from Kalamoun gathering on the shore to watch his deportation to the
Cholera Hospital; and, as he stepped from the khiassa, he called out
loudly:

"They are all dogs and sons of dogs, and dogs were their grandsires.  No
good is in a dog the offspring of a dog.  Whenever these dogs scratch the
ground the dust of poison is in the air, and we die."

"You are impolite, Mustapha Kali," said Dicky coolly, and offered him a
cigarette.

The next three days were the darkest in Dicky Donovan's career.  On the
first day there came word that Norman, overwrought, had shot himself.  On
the next, Mustapha Kali in a fit of anger threw a native policeman into
the river, and when his head appeared struck it with a barge-pole, and
the man sank to rise no more.  The three remaining policemen, two of whom
were Soudanese, and true to Dicky, bound him and shut him up in a hut.
When that evening Fielding refused to play, Dicky knew that Norman's fate
had taken hold of him, and that he must watch his friend every minute--
that awful vigilance which kills the watcher in the end.  Dicky said to
himself more than once that day:

              "Christ save us all from a death like this,
               On the reef of Norman's woe!"

But it was not Dicky who saved Fielding.  On the third day the long-
deferred riot broke out.  The Copt and the Arab had spread the report
that Fielding brought death to the villages by moving the little flags
on his map.  The populace rose.

Fielding was busy with the map at the dreaded moment that hundreds of the
villagers appeared upon the bank and rushed the Amenhotep.  Fielding and
Dicky were both armed, but Fielding would not fire until he saw that his
own crew had joined the rioters on the bank.  Then, amid a shower of
missiles, he shot the Arab who had first spread the report about the map
and the flags.

Now Dicky and he were joined by Holgate, the Yorkshire engineer of the
Amenhotep, and together the three tried to hold the boat.  Every native
had left them.  They were obliged to retreat aft to the deckcabin.
Placing their backs against it, they prepared to die hard.  No one could
reach them from behind, at least.

It was an unequal fight.  All three had received slight wounds, but the
blood-letting did them all good.  Fielding was once more himself; nervous
anxiety, unrest, had gone from him.  He was as cool as a cucumber.  He
would not go shipwreck now "on the reef of Norman's woe."  Here was a
better sort of death.  No men ever faced it with quieter minds than did
the three.  Every instant brought it nearer.

All at once there was a cry and a stampede in the rear of the attacking
natives.  The crowd suddenly parted like two waves, and retreated; and
Mustapha Kali, almost naked, and supported by a stolid Soudanese, stood
before the three.  He was pallid, his hands and brow were dripping sweat,
and there was a look of death in his eyes.

"I have cholera, effendi!" he cried.  "Take me to Abdallah to die, that
I may be buried with my people and from mine own house."

"Is it not poison?" asked Fielding grimly, yet seeing now a ray of hope
in the sickening business.

"It is cholera, effendi.  Take me home to die."

"Very well.  Tell the people so, and I will take you home, and I will
bury you with your fathers," said Fielding.

Mustapha Kali turned slowly.  "I am sick of cholera," he said as loudly
as he could to the awe-stricken crowd.  "May God not cool my resting-
place if it be not so!"

"Tell the people to go to their homes and obey us," said Dicky, putting
away his pistol.

"These be good men, I have seen with mine own eyes," said Mustapha
hoarsely to the crowd.  "It is for your good they do all.  Have I not
seen?  Let God fill both my hands with dust if it be not so!  God hath
stricken me, and behold I give myself into the hands of the Inglesi, for
I believe!"

He would have fallen to the ground, but Dicky and the Soudanese caught
him and carried him down to the bank, while the crowd scuttled from the
boat, and Fielding made ready to bear the dying man to Abdallah--a race
against death.

Fielding brought Mustapha Kali to Abdallah in time to die there, and
buried him with his fathers; and Dicky stayed behind to cleanse Kalamoun
with perchloride and limewash.

The story went abroad and travelled fast, and the words of Mustapha Kali,
oft repeated, became as the speech of a holy man; and the people no
longer hid their dead, but brought them to the Amenhotep.

This was the beginning of better things; the disease was stayed.

And for all the things that these men did--Fielding Bey and Donovan
Pasha--they got naught but an Egyptian ribbon to wear on the breast and
a laboured censure from the Administration for overrunning the budget
allowance.

Dicky, however, seemed satisfied, for Fielding's little barque of life
had not gone down "On the reef of Norman's woe."  Mrs. Henshaw felt so
also when she was told all, and she disconcerted Dicky by bursting into
tears.

"Why those tears?" said Dicky to Fielding afterwards; "I wasn't
eloquent."




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

A look too bright for joy, too intense for despair
His gift for lying was inexpressible
One favour is always the promise of another






DONOVAN PASHA AND SOME PEOPLE OF EGYPT

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.



FIELDING HAD AN ORDERLY
THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE
A TREATY OF PEACE
AT THE MERCY OF TIBERIUS
ALL THE WORLD'S MAD



FIELDING HAD AN ORDERLY

His legs were like pipe-stems, his body was like a board, but he was
straight enough, not unsoldierly, nor so bad to look at when his back was
on you; but when he showed his face you had little pleasure in him.  It
seemed made of brown putty, the nose was like india-rubber, and the eyes
had that dull, sullen look of a mongrel got of a fox-terrier and a bull-
dog.  Like this sort of mongrel also his eyes turned a brownish-red when
he was excited.

You could always tell when something had gone wrong with Ibrahim the
Orderly, by that curious dull glare in his eyes.  Selamlik Pasha said to
Fielding that it was hashish; Fielding said it was a cross breed of
Soudanese and fellah.  But little Dicky Donovan said it was something
else, and he kept his eye upon Ibrahim.  And Dicky, with all his faults,
could screw his way from the front of a thing to the back thereof like no
other civilised man you ever knew.  But he did not press his opinions
upon Fielding, who was an able administrator and a very clever fellow
also, with a genial habit of believing in people who served him: and that
is bad in the Orient.

As an orderly Ibrahim was like a clock: stiff in his gait as a pendulum,
regular as a minute.  He had no tongue for gossip either, so far as
Fielding knew.  Also, five times a day he said his prayers--an unusual
thing for a Gippy soldier-servant; for as the Gippy's rank increases he
soils his knees and puts his forehead in the dust with discretion.  This
was another reason why Dicky suspected him.

It was supposed that Ibrahim could not speak a word of English;
and he seemed so stupid, he looked so blank, when English was spoken,
that Fielding had no doubt the English language was a Tablet of Abydos to
him.  But Dicky was more wary, and waited.  He could be very patient and
simple, and his delicate face seemed as innocent as a girl's when he said
to Ibrahim one morning: "Ibrahim, brother of scorpions, I'm going to
teach you English!" and, squatting like a Turk on the deck of the
Amenhotep, the stern-wheeled tub which Fielding called a steamer, he
began to teach Ibrahim.

"Say 'Good-morning, kind sir,'" he drawled.

No tongue was ever so thick, no throat so guttural, as Ibrahim's when he
obeyed this command.  That was why suspicion grew the more in the mind of
Dicky.  But he made the Gippy say: "Good-morning, kind sir," over and
over again.  Now, it was a peculiar thing that Ibrahim's pronunciation
grew worse every time; which goes to show that a combination of Soudanese
and fellah doesn't make a really clever villain.  Twice, three times,
Dicky gave him other words and phrases to say, and practice made Ibrahim
more perfect in error.

Dicky suddenly enlarged the vocabulary thus: "An old man had three sons:
one was a thief, another a rogue, and the worst of them all was a
soldier.  But the soldier died first!"

As he said these words he kept his eyes fixed on Ibrahim in a smiling,
juvenile sort of way; and he saw the colour--the brownish-red colour--
creep slowly into Ibrahim's eyes.  For Ibrahim's father had three sons:
and certainly one was a thief, for he had been a tax-gatherer; and one
was a rogue, for he had been the servant of a Greek money-lender; and
Ibrahim was a soldier!

Ibrahim was made to say these words over and over again, and the red fire
in his eyes deepened as Dicky's face lighted up with what seemed a mere
mocking pleasure, a sort of impish delight in teasing, like that of a
madcap girl with a yokel.  Each time Ibrahim said the words he jumbled
them worse than before.  Then Dicky asked him if he knew what an old man
was, and Ibrahim said no.  Dicky said softly in Arabic that the old man
was a fool to have three such sons--a thief and a rogue and a soldier.
With a tender patience he explained what a thief and a rogue were, and
his voice was curiously soft when he added, in Arabic: "And the third son
was like you, Mahommed--and he died first."

Ibrahim's eyes gloomed under the raillery--under what he thought the
cackle of a detested Inglesi with a face like a girl, of an infidel who
had a tongue that handed you honey on the point of a two-edged sword.
In his heart he hated this slim small exquisite as he had never hated
Fielding.  His eyes became like little pots of simmering blood, and he
showed his teeth in a hateful way, because he was sure he should glut his
hatred before the moon came full.

Little Dicky Donovan knew, as he sleepily told Ibrahim to go, that for
months the Orderly had listened to the wholesome but scathing talk of
Fielding and himself on the Egyptian Government, and had reported it to
those whose tool and spy he was.

That night, the stern-wheeled tub, the Amenhotep, lurched like a turtle
on its back into the sands by Beni Hassan.  Of all the villages of Upper
Egypt, from the time of Rameses, none has been so bad as Beni Hassan.
Every ruler of Egypt, at one time or another, has raided it and razed it
to the ground.  It was not for pleasure that Fielding sojourned there.

This day, and for three days past, Fielding had been abed in his cabin
with a touch of Nilotic fever.  His heart was sick for Cairo, for he had
been three months on the river; and Mrs. Henshaw was in Cairo--Mrs.
Henshaw, the widow of Henshaw of the Buffs, who lived with her brother, a
stone's-throw from the Esbekieh Gardens.  Fielding longed for Cairo, but
Beni Hassan intervened.  The little man who worried Ibrahim urged him the
way his private inclinations ran, but he was obdurate: duty must be done.

Dicky Donovan had reasons other than private ones for making haste to
Cairo.  During the last three days they had stopped at five villages on
the Nile, and in each place Dicky, who had done Fielding's work of
inspection for him, had been met with unusual insolence from the Arabs
and fellaheen, officials and others; and the prompt chastisement he
rendered with his riding-whip in return did not tend to ease his mind,
though it soothed his feelings.  There had been flying up the river
strange rumours of trouble down in Cairo, black threats of rebellion--
of a seditious army in the palm of one man's hand.  At the cafes on the
Nile, Dicky himself had seen strange gatherings, which dispersed as he
came on them.  For, somehow, his smile had the same effect as other men's
frowns.

This evening he added a whistle to his smile as he made his inspection of
the engine-room and the galley and every corner of the Amenhotep,
according to his custom.  What he whistled no man knew, not even himself.
It was ready-made.  It might have been a medley, but, as things happened,
it was an overture; and by the eyes, the red-litten windows of the mind
of Mahommed Ibrahim, who squatted beside the Yorkshire engineer at the
wheel, playing mankalah, he knew it was an overture.

As he went to his cabin he murmured to himself "There's the devil to pay:
now I wonder who pays?"  Because he was planning things of moment, he
took a native drum down to Fielding's cabin, and made Fielding play it,
native fashion, as he thrummed his own banjo and sang the airy ballad,
"The Dragoons of Enniskillen."  Yet Dicky was thinking hard all the time.

Now there was in Beni Hassan a ghdzeeyeh, a dancing-woman of the Ghawazee
tribe, of whom, in the phrase of the moralists, the less said the better.
What her name was does not matter.  She was well-to-do.  She had a
husband who played the kemengeh for her dancing.  She had as good a house
as the Omdah, and she had two female slaves.

Dicky Donovan was of that rare type of man who has the keenest desire to
know all things, good or evil, though he was fastidious when it came to
doing them.  He had a gift of keeping his own commandments.  If he had
been a six-footer and riding eighteen stone--if he hadn't been, as
Fielding often said, so "damned finicky," he might easily have come a
cropper.  For, being absolutely without fear, he did what he listed and
went where he listed.  An insatiable curiosity was his strongest point,
save one.  If he had had a headache--though he never had--he would at
once have made an inquiry into the various kinds of headache possible to
mortal man, with pungent deductions from his demonstrations.  So it was
that when he first saw a dancing-girl in the streets of Cairo he could
not rest until by circuitous routes he had traced the history of dancing-
girls back through the ages, through Greece and the ruby East, even to
the days when the beautiful bad ones were invited to the feasts of the
mighty, to charm the eyes of King Seti or Queen Hatsu.

He was an authority on the tribe of the Ghawazee, proving, to their
satisfaction and his own, their descent from the household of Haroon al
Rashid.  He was, therefore, welcome among them.  But he had found also,
as many another wise man has found in "furrin parts," that your greatest
safety lies in bringing tobacco to the men and leaving the women alone.
For, in those distant lands, a man may sell you his nuptial bed, but he
will pin the price of it to your back one day with the point of a lance
or the wedge of a hatchet.

Herebefore will be found the reason why Dicky Donovan--twenty-five and
no moustache, pink-cheeked and rosy-hearted, and "no white spots on his
liver"--went straight, that particular night, to the house of the chief
dancing-girl of Beni Hassan for help in his trouble.  From her he had
learned to dance the dance of the Ghawazee.  He had learned it so that,
with his insatiable curiosity, his archaeological instinct, he should be
able to compare it with the Nautch dance of India, the Hula-Hula of the
Sandwich Islanders, the Siva of the Samoans.

A half-hour from the time he set his foot in Beni Hassan two dancing-
girls issued from the house of the ghdzeeyeh, dressed in shintiydn and
muslin tarah, anklets and bracelets, with gold coins about the forehead
--and one was Dicky Donovan.  He had done the rare thing: he had trusted
absolutely that class of woman who is called a "rag" in that far country,
and a "drab" in ours.  But he was a judge of human nature, and judges of
human nature know you are pretty safe to trust a woman who never trusts,
no matter how bad she is, if she has no influence over you.  He used to
say that the better you are and the worse she is, the more you can trust
her.  Other men may talk, but Dicky Donovan knows.

What Dicky's aunt, the Dowager Lady Carmichael, would have said to have
seen Dicky flaunting it in the clothes of a dancing-girl through the
streets of vile Beni Hassan, must not be considered.  None would have
believed that his pink-and-white face and slim hands and staringly white
ankles could have been made to look so boldly handsome, so impeachable.
But henna in itself seems to have certain qualities of viciousness in its
brownish-red stain, and Dicky looked sufficiently abandoned.  The risk
was great, however, for his Arabic was too good and he had to depend upon
the ghdzeeyeh's adroitness, on the peculiar advantage of being under the
protection of the mistress of the house as large as the Omdah's.

From one cafe to another they went.  Here a snakecharmer gathered a
meagre crowd about him; there an 'A'l'meh, or singing-girl, lilted a
ribald song; elsewhere hashish-smokers stretched out gaunt, loathsome
fingers towards them; and a Sha'er recited the romance of Aboo Zeyd.  But
Dicky noticed that none of the sheikhs, none of the great men of the
village, were at these cafes; only the very young, the useless, the
licentious, or the decrepit.  But by flickering fires under the palm-
trees were groups of men talking and gesticulating; and now and then an
Arab galloped through the street, the point of his long lance shining.
Dicky felt a secret, like a troubled wind, stirring through the place,
a movement not explainable by his own inner tremulousness.

At last they went to the largest cafe beside the Mosque of Hoseyn.  He
saw the Sheikh-el-beled sitting on his bench, and, grouped round him,
smoking, several sheikhs and the young men of the village.  Here he and
the ghdzeeyeh danced.  Few noticed them; for which Dicky was thankful;
and he risked discovery by coming nearer the circle.  He could, however,
catch little that they said, for they spoke in low tones, the Sheikh-el-
beled talking seldom, but listening closely.

The crowd around the cafe grew.  Occasionally an Arab would throw back
his head and cry: "Allahu Akbar!"  Another drew a sword and waved it in
the air.  Some one in front of him whispered one startling word to a
camel-driver.

Dicky had got his cue.  To him that whisper was as loud and clear as the
"La ilaha illa-llah!" called from the top of a mosque.  He understood
Ibrahim the Orderly now; he guessed all--rebellion, anarchy, massacre.
A hundred thoughts ran through his head: what was Ibrahim's particular
part in the swaggering scheme was the first and the last of them.

Ibrahim answered for himself, for at that moment he entered the burning
circle.  A movement of applause ran round, then there was sudden silence.
The dancing-girls were bid to stop their dancing, were told to be gone.
The ghazeeyeh spat at them in an assumed anger, and said that none but
swine of Beni Hassan would send a woman away hungry.  And because the
dancing-girl has power in the land, the Sheikh-el-beled waved his hand
towards the cafe, hastily calling the name of a favourite dish.  Eyes
turned unconcernedly towards the brown clattering ankles of the two as
they entered the cafe and seated themselves immediately behind where the
Sheikh-el-beled squatted.  Presently Dicky listened to as sombre a tale
as ever was told in the darkest night.  The voice of the tale-teller was
that of Ibrahim, and the story was this: that the citadel at Cairo was
to be seized, that the streets of Alexandria were to be swept free of
Europeans, that every English official between Cairo and Kordofan was to
be slain.  Mahommed Ibrahim, the spy, who knew English as well as Donovan
Pasha knew Arabic, was this very night to kill Fielding Bey with his own
hand!

This night was always associated in Dicky's mind with the memory of
stewed camel's-meat.  At Ibrahim's words he turned his head from the rank
steam, and fingered his pistol in the loose folds of his Arab trousers.
The dancing-girl saw the gesture and laid a hand upon his arm.

"Thou art one against a thousand," she whispered; "wait till thou art one
against one."

He dipped his nose in the camel-stew, for some one poked a head in at the
door--every sense in him was alert, every instinct alive.

"To-night," said Mahommed Ibrahim, in the hoarse gutturals of the
Bishareen, "it is ordered that Fielding Bey shall die--and by my hand,
mine own, by the mercy of God!  And after Fielding Bey the clean-faced
ape that cast the evil eye upon me yesterday, and bade me die.  'An old
man had three sons,' said he, the infidel dog, 'one was a thief, another
a rogue, and the third a soldier--and the soldier died first.'  'A camel
of Bagdad,' he called me.  Into the belly of a dead camel shall he go, be
sewn up like a cat's liver in a pudding, and cast into the Nile before
God gives tomorrow a sun."

Dicky pushed away the camel-stew.  "It is time to go," he said.

The ghdzeeyeh rose with a laugh, caught Dicky by the hand, sprang out
among the Arabs, and leapt over the head of the village barber, calling
them all "useless, sodden greybeards, with no more blood than a Nile
shad, poorer than monkeys, beggars of Beni Hassan!"  Taking from her
pocket a handful of quarter-piastres, she turned on her heels and tossed
them among the Arabs with a contemptuous laugh.  Then she and Dicky
disappeared into the night.




II

When Dicky left her house, clothed in his own garments once more, but the
stains of henna still on his face and hands and ankles, he pressed into
the ghazeeyeh's hand ten gold-pieces.  She let them fall to the ground.

"Love is love, effendi," she said.  "Money do they give me for what is no
love.  She who gives freely for love takes naught in return but love, by
the will of God!"  And she laid a hand upon his arm.

"There is work to do!" said Dicky; and his hand dropped to where his
pistol lay--but not to threaten her.  He was thinking of others.

"To-morrow," she said; "to-morrow for that, effendi," and her beautiful
eyes hung upon his.

"There's corn in Egypt, but who knows who'll reap it to-morrow?  And I
shall be in Cairo to-morrow."

"I also shall be in Cairo to-morrow, O my lord and master!" she
answered.

"God give you safe journey," answered Dicky, for he knew it was useless
to argue with a woman.  He was wont to say that you can resolve all women
into the same simple elements in the end.

Dicky gave a long perplexed whistle as he ran softly under the palms
towards the Amenhotep, lounging on the mud bank.  Then he dismissed the
dancing-girl from his mind, for there was other work to do.  How he
should do it he planned as he opened the door of Fielding's cabin softly
and saw him in a deep sleep.

He was about to make haste on deck again, where his own nest was, when,
glancing through the window, he saw Mahommed Ibrahim stealing down the
bank to the boat's side.  He softly drew-to the little curtain of the
cabin window, leaving only one small space through which the moonlight
streamed.  This ray of light fell just across the door through which
Mahommed Ibrahim would enter.  The cabin was a large one, the bed was in
the middle.  At the head was a curtain slung to protect the sleeper from
the cold draughts of the night.

Dicky heard a soft footstep in the companionway, then before the door.
He crept behind the curtain.  Mahommed Ibrahim was listening without.
Now the door opened very gently, for this careful Orderly had oiled the
hinges that very day.  The long flabby face, with the venomous eyes,
showed in the streak of moonlight.  Mahommed Ibrahim slid inside, took a
step forward and drew a long knife from his sleeve.  Another move towards
the sleeping man, and he was near the bed; another, and he was beside it,
stooping over.  .  .

Now, a cold pistol suddenly thrust in your face is disconcerting, no
matter how well laid your plans.  It was useless for the Orderly to raise
his hand: a bullet is quicker than the muscles of the arm and the stroke
of a knife.

The two stood silent an instant, the sleeping man peaceful between them.
Dicky made a motion of his head towards the door.  Mahommed Ibrahim
turned.  Dicky did not lower his pistol as the Orderly, obeying, softly
went as he had softly come.  Out through the doorway, up the stairs, then
upon the moonlit deck, the cold muzzle of the pistol at the head of
Mahommed Ibrahim.

Dicky turned now, and faced him, the pistol still pointed.

Then Mahommed Ibrahim spoke.  "Malaish!" he said.  That was contempt.
It was Mahommedan resignation; it was the inevitable.  "Malaish--no
matter!" he said again; and "no matter" was in good English.

Dicky's back was to the light, the Orderly's face in the full glow of it.
Dicky was standing beside the wire communicating with the engineer's
cabin.  He reached out his hand and pulled the hook.  The bell rang
below.  The two above stood silent, motionless, the pistol still
levelled.

Holgate, the young Yorkshire engineer, pulled himself up to the deck two
steps of the ladder at a time.  "Yes, sir," he said, coming forward
quickly, but stopping short when he saw the levelled pistol.  "Drop the
knife, Ibrahim," said Dicky in a low voice.  The Orderly dropped the
knife.

"Get it, Holgate," said Dicky; and Holgate stooped and picked it up.
Then he told Holgate the story in a few words.  The engineer's fingers
tightened on the knife.

"Put it where it will be useful, Holgate," said Dicky.  Holgate dropped
it inside his belt.

"Full steam, and turn her nose to Cairo.  No time to lose!"  He had told
Holgate earlier in the evening to keep up steam.

He could see a crowd slowly gathering under the palm-trees between the
shore and Beni Hassan.  They were waiting for Mahommed Ibrahim's signal.

Holgate was below, the sailors were at the cables.  "Let go ropes!"
Dicky called.

A minute later the engine was quietly churning away below; two minutes
later the ropes were drawn in; half a minute later still the nose of the
Amenhotep moved in the water.  She backed from the Nile mud, lunged free.

"An old man had three sons; one was a thief, another a rogue, and the
worst of the three was a soldier--and he dies first!  What have you got
to say before you say your prayers?" said Dicky to the Orderly.

"Mafish!" answered Mahommed Ibrahim, moveless.  "Mafish--nothing!"  And
he said "nothing" in good English.

"Say your prayers then, Mahommed Ibrahim," said Dicky in that voice like
a girl's; and he backed a little till he rested a shoulder against the
binnacle.

Mahommed Ibrahim turned slightly till his face was towards the east.  The
pistol now fell in range with his ear.  The Orderly took off his shoes,
and, standing with his face towards the moon, and towards Mecca, he
murmured the fatihah from the Koran.  Three times he bowed, afterwards he
knelt and touched the deck with his forehead three times also.  Then he
stood up.  "Are you ready?" asked Dicky.

"Water!" answered Mahommed Ibrahim in English.  Dicky had forgotten that
final act of devotion of the good Mahommedan.  There was a filter of
Nile-water near.  He had heard it go drip-drip, drip-drip, as Mahommed
Ibrahim prayed.

"Drink," he said, and pointed with his finger.  Mahommed Ibrahim took the
little tin cup hanging by the tap, half filled it, drank it off, and
noiselessly put the cup back again.  Then he stood with his face towards
the pistol.

"The game is with the English all the time," said Dicky softly.

"Malaish!" said Mahommed.  "Jump," said Dicky.

One instant's pause, and then, without a sound, Ibrahim sprang out over
the railing into the hard-running current, and struck out for the shore.
The Amenhotep passed him.  He was in the grasp of a whirlpool so strong
that it twisted the Amenhotep in her course.  His head spun round like a
water-fly, and out of the range of Dicky's pistol he shrieked to the
crowd on the shore.  They burst from the palm-trees and rushed down to
the banks with cries of rage, murder, and death; for now they saw him
fighting for his life.  But the Amenhotep's nose was towards Cairo, and
steam was full on, and she was going fast.  Holgate below had his men
within range of a pistol too.  Dicky looked back at the hopeless fight as
long as he could see.

Down in his cabin Fielding Bey slept peacefully, and dreamed of a woman
in Cairo.






THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE

In spite of being an Englishman with an Irish name and a little Irish
blood, Dicky Donovan had risen high in the favour of the Khedive,
remaining still the same Dicky Donovan he had always been--astute but
incorruptible.  While he was favourite he used his power wisely, and it
was a power which had life and death behind it.  When therefore, one day,
he asked permission to take a journey upon a certain deadly business of
justice, the Khedive assented to all he asked, but fearing for his
safety, gave him his own ring to wear and a line under his seal.

With these Dicky set forth for El Medineh in the Fayoum, where his
important business lay.  As he cantered away from El Wasta, out through
the green valley and on into the desert where stands the Pyramid of
Maydoum, he turned his business over and over in his mind, that he might
study it from a hundred sides.  For miles he did not see a human being--
only a caravan of camels in the distance, some vultures overhead and the
smoke of the train behind him by the great river.  Suddenly, however, as
he cantered over the crest of a hill, he saw in the desert-trail before
him a foot-traveller, who turned round hastily, almost nervously, at the
sound of his horse's feet.

It was the figure of a slim, handsome youth, perhaps twenty, perhaps
thirty.  The face was clean-shaven, and though the body seemed young and
the face was unlined, the eyes were terribly old.  Pathos and fanaticism
were in the look, so Dicky Donovan thought.  He judged the young Arab to
be one of the holy men who live by the gifts of the people, and who do
strange acts of devotion; such as sitting in one place for twenty years,
or going without clothes, or chanting the Koran ten hours a day, or
cutting themselves with knives.  But this young man was clothed in the
plain blue calico of the fellah, and on his head was a coarse brown fez
of raw wool.  Yet round the brown fez was a green cloth, which may only
be worn by one who has been a pilgrimage to Mecca.

"Nehar-ak koom said--God be with you!" said Dicky in Arabic.

"Nehar-ak said, efendi--God prosper thy greatness!" was the reply, in a
voice as full as a man's, but as soft as a woman's--an unusual thing in
an Arab.  "Have you travelled far?" asked Dicky.

"From the Pyramid of Maydoum, effendi," was the quiet reply.

Dicky laughed.  "A poor tavern; cold sleeping there, Mahommed."

"The breath of Allah is warm," answered the Arab.  Dicky liked the lad's
answer.  Putting a hand in his saddle-bag, he drew out a cake of dourha
bread and some onions--for he made shift to live as the people lived,
lest he should be caught unawares some time, and die of the remembrance
of too much luxury in the midst of frugal fare.

"Plenty be in your home, Mahommed!" he said, and held out the bread and
onions.

The slim hands came up at once and took the food, the eyes flashed a
strange look at Dicky.  "God give you plenty upon your plenty, effendi,
and save your soul and the souls of your wife and children, if it be your
will, effendi!"

"I have no wife, praise be to God," said Dicky; "but if I had, her soul
would be saved before my own, or I'm a dervish!"  Then something moved
him further, and he unbuttoned his pocket--for there really was a button
to Dicky's pocket.  He drew out a five-piastre piece, and held it down to
the young Arab.  "For the home-coming after Mecca," he said, and smiled.

The young Arab drew back.  "I will eat thy bread, but no more, effendi,"
he said quickly.

"Then you're not what I thought you were," said Dicky under his breath,
and, with a quick good-bye, struck a heel into the horse's side and
galloped away toward El Medineh.

In El Medineh Dicky went about his business--a bitter business it was, as
all Egypt came to know.  For four days he pursued it, without halting and
in some danger, for, disguise himself as he would in his frequenting of
the cafes, his Arabic was not yet wholly perfect.  Sometimes he went
about in European dress, and that was equally dangerous, for in those
days the Fayoum was a nest of brigandage and murder, and an European--an
infidel dog--was fair game.

But Dicky had two friends--the village barber, and the moghassil of the
dead, or body-washer, who were in his pay; and for the moment they were
loyal to him.  For his purpose, too, they were the most useful of
mercenaries: for the duties of a barber are those of a valet-de-chambre,
a doctor, registrar and sanitary officer combined; and his coadjutor in
information and gossip was the moghassil, who sits and waits for some one
to die, as a raven on a housetop waits for carrion.  Dicky was patient,
but as the days went by and nothing came of all his searching, his lips
tightened and his eyes became more restless.  One day, as he sat in his
doorway twisting and turning things in his mind, with an ugly knot in his
temper, the barber came to him quickly.

"Saadat el basha, I have found the Englishwoman, by the mercy of Allah!"

Dicky looked at Achmed Hariri for a moment without stirring or speaking;
his lips relaxed, his eyes softening with satisfaction.

"She is living?"

"But living, saadat el basha."

Dicky started to his feet.  "At the mudirieh?"

"At the house of Azra, the seller of sherbet, saadat el basha."

"When did she leave the mudirieh?"

"A week past, effendi."

"Why did she leave?"

"None knows save the sister of Azra, who is in the harem.  The
Englishwoman was kind to her when she was ill, and she gave her aid."

"The Mudir has not tried to find her?"

"Will the robber make a noise if the horse he has stolen breaks free,
effendi?"

"Why has she not flown the place?"

"Effendi, can the broken-winged bird fly!"

"She is ill?"  He caught the barber by the arm.

"As a gazelle with an arrow in its breast."

Dicky's small hand tightened like a vice on the barber's thin arm.  "And
he who sped the arrow, Achmed Hariri?"

Achmed Hariri was silent.

"Shall he not die the death?"

Achmed Hariri shrank back.

Dicky drew from his pocket a paper with seals, and held it up to the
barber's eyes.  The barber stared, drew back, salaamed, bowed his head,
and put a hand upon his turban as a slave to his master.

"Show me the way, Mahommed," said Dicky, and stepped out.

Two hours later Dicky, with pale face, and fingers clutching his heavy
riding-whip fiercely, came quickly towards the bridge where he must cross
to go to the mudirieh.  Suddenly he heard an uproar, and saw men hurrying
on in front of him.  He quickened his footsteps, and presently came to a
house on which had been freshly painted those rough, staring pictures of
"accidents by flood and field," which Mecca pilgrims paint on their
houses like hatchments, on their safe return--proclamation of their
prestige.

Presently he saw in the grasp of an infuriated crowd the Arab youth he
had met in the desert, near the Pyramid of Maydoum.  Execrations,
murderous cries arose from the mob.  The youth's face was deathly pale,
but it had no fear.  Upon the outskirts of the crowd hung women, their
robes drawn half over their faces, crying out for the young man's death.
Dicky asked the ghaflir standing by what the youth had done.

"It is no youth, but a woman," he answered--"the latest wife of the
Mudir.  In a man's clothes--"

He paused, for the head sheikh of El Medineh, with two Ulema, entered the
throng.  The crowd fell back.  Presently the Sheikh-el-beled mounted the
mastaba by the house, the holy men beside him, and pointing to the Arab
youth, spoke loudly:

"This sister of scorpions and crocodiles has earned a thousand deaths.
She was a daughter of a pasha, and was lifted high.  She was made the
wife of Abbas Bey, our Mudir.  Like a wanton beast she cut off her hair,
clothed herself as a man, journeyed to Mecca, and desecrated the tomb of
Mahomet, who hath written that no woman, save her husband of his goodness
bring her, shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

He paused, and pointed to the rough pictures on the walls.  "This
morning, dressed as a man, she went in secret to the sacred purple pillar
for barren women in the Mosque of Amrar, by the Bahr-el-Yusef, and was
found there with her tongue to it.  What shall be done to this accursed
tree in the garden of Mahomet?"

"Cut it down!" shouted the crowd; and the Ulema standing beside the
Sheikh-el-beled said: "Cut down for ever the accursed tree."

"To-morrow, at sunrise, she shall die as a blasphemer, this daughter of
Sheitan the Evil One," continued the holy men.

"What saith the Mudir?" cried a tax-gatherer.  "The Mudir himself shall
see her die at sunrise," answered the chief of the Ulema.

Shouts of hideous joy went up.  At that moment the woman's eyes met
Dicky's, and they suddenly lighted.  Dicky picked his way through the
crowd, and stood before the Sheikh-el-beled.  With an Arab salute, he
said:

"I am, as you know, my brother, a friend of our master the Khedive, and I
carry his ring on my finger."  The Sheikh-el-beled salaamed as Dicky held
up his hand, and a murmur ran through the crowd.  "What you have done to
the woman is well done, and according to your law she should die.  But
will ye not let her tell her story, so it may be written down, that when
perchance evil voices carry the tale to the Khedive he shall have her own
words for her condemnation?"

The Ulema looked at the Sheikh-el-beled, and he made answer: "It is well
said; let the woman speak, and her words be written down."

"Is it meet that all should hear?" asked Dicky, for he saw the look in
the woman's eyes.  "Will she not speak more freely if we be few?"

"Let her be taken into the house," said the Sheikhel-beled.  Turning to
the holy men, he added: "Ye and the Inglesi shall hear."

When they were within the house, the woman was brought in and stood
before them.

"Speak," said the Sheikh-el-beled to her roughly.  She kept her eyes
fixed on Dicky as she spoke: "For the thing I have done I shall answer.
I had no joy in the harem.  I gave no child to my lord, though often I
put my tongue to the sacred pillar of porphyry in the Mosque of Amrar.
My lord's love went from me.  I was placed beneath another in the harem.
.  .  .  Was it well?  Did I not love my lord?  was the sin mine that no
child was born to him?  It is written that a woman's prayers are of no
avail, that her lord must save her at the last, if she hath a soul to be
saved.  .  .  .  Was the love of my lord mine?"  She paused, caught a
corner of her robe and covered her face.

"Speak on, O woman of many sorrows," said Dicky.  She partly uncovered
her face, and spoke again: "In the long night, when he came not and I was
lonely and I cried aloud, and only the jackals beyond my window answered,
I thought and thought.  My brain was wild, and at last I said: 'Behold, I
will go to Mecca as the men go, and when the fire rises from the
Prophet's tomb, bringing blessing and life to all, it may be that I shall
have peace, and win heaven as men win it.  For behold!  what is my body
but a man's body, for it beareth no child.  And what is my soul but a
man's soul, that dares to do this thing!' .  .  ."

"Thou art a blasphemer," broke in the chief of the Ulema.

She gave no heed, but with her eyes on Dicky continued:

"So I stole forth in the night with an old slave, who was my father's
slave, and together we went to Cairo.  .  .  .  Behold, I have done all
that Dervishes do: I have cut myself with knives, I have walked the
desert alone, I have lain beneath the feet of the Sheikh's horse when he
makes his ride over the bodies of the faithful, I have done all that a
woman may do and all that a man may do, for the love I bore my lord.  Now
judge me as ye will, for I may do no more."

When she had finished, Dicky turned to the Sheikhel-beled and said: "She
is mad.  Behold, Allah hath taken her wits!  She is no more than a wild
bird in the wilderness."

It was his one way to save her; for among her people the mad, the blind,
and the idiot are reputed highly favoured of God.

The Sheikh-el-beled shook his head.  "She is a blasphemer.  Her words are
as the words of one who holds the sacred sword and speaks from the high
pulpit," he said sternly; and his dry lean face hungered like a wolf's
for the blood of the woman.

"She has blasphemed," said the Ulema.

Outside the house, quietness had given place to murmuring, murmuring to a
noise, and a noise to a tumult, through which the yelping and howling of
the village dogs streamed.

"She shall be torn to pieces by wild dogs," said the Sheikh-el-beled.

"Let her choose her own death," said Dicky softly; and, lighting a
cigarette, he puffed it indolently into the face of the Arab sitting
beside him.  For Dicky had many ways of showing hatred, and his tobacco
was strong.  The sea has its victims, so had Dicky's tobacco.

"The way of her death shall be as we choose," said the Sheikh-el-beled,
his face growing blacker, his eyes enlarging in fury.

Dicky yawned slightly, his eyes half closed.  He drew in a long breath of
excoriating caporal, held it for a moment, and then softly ejected it in
a cloud which brought water to the eyes of the Sheikh-el-beled.  Dicky
was very angry, but he did not look it.  His voice was meditative, almost
languid as he said:

"That the woman should die seems just and right--if by your kindness and
the mercy of God ye will let me speak.  But this is no court, it is no
law: it is mere justice ye would do."

"It is the will of the people," the chief of the Ulema interjected.  "It
is the will of Mussulmans, of our religion, of Mahomet," he said.

"True, O beloved of Heaven, who shall live for ever," said Dicky, his
lips lost in an odorous cloud of 'ordinaire.'  "But there be evil tongues
and evil hearts; and if some son of liars, some brother of foolish tales,
should bear false witness upon this thing before our master the Khedive,
or his gentle Mouffetish--"

"His gentle Mouffetish" was scarcely the name to apply to Sadik Pasha,
the terrible right-hand of the Khedive.  But Dicky's tongue was in his
cheek.

"There is the Mudir," said the Sheikh-el-beled: "he hath said that the
woman should die, if she were found."

"True; but if the Mudir should die, where would be his testimony?" asked
Dicky, and his eyes half closed, as though in idle contemplation of a
pleasing theme.  "Now," he added, still more negligently, "I shall see
our master the Khedive before the moon is full.  Were it not well that I
should be satisfied for my friends?"

Dicky smiled, and looked into the eyes of the Mussulmans with an
incorruptible innocence; he ostentatiously waved the cigarette smoke away
with the hand on which was the ring the Khedive had given him.

"Thy tongue is as the light of a star," said the bright-eyed Sheikh-el-
beled; "wisdom dwelleth with thee."  The woman took no notice of what
they said.  Her face showed no sign of what she thought; her eyes were
unwaveringly fixed on the distance.

"She shall choose her own death," said the Sheikhel-beled; "and I will
bear word to the Mudir."

"I dine with the Mudir to-night; I will carry the word," said Dicky; "and
the death that the woman shall die will be the death he will choose."

The woman's eyes came like lightning from the distance, and fastened upon
his face.  Then he said, with the back of his hand to his mouth to hide a
yawn:

"The manner of her death will please the Mudir.  It must please him."

"What death does this vulture among women choose to die?" said the
Sheikh-el-beled.

Her answer could scarcely be heard in the roar and the riot surrounding
the hut.

A half-hour later Dicky entered the room where the Mudir sat on his divan
drinking his coffee.  The great man looked up in angry astonishment--for
Dicky had come unannounced-and his fat hands twitched on his breast,
where they had been folded.  His sallow face turned a little green.
Dicky made no salutation.

"Dog of an infidel!" said the Mudir under his breath.

Dicky heard, but did no more than fasten his eyes upon the Mudir for a
moment.

"Your business?" asked the Mudir.

"The business of the Khedive," answered Dicky, and his riding-whip tapped
his leggings.  "I have come about the English girl."  As he said this, he
lighted a cigarette slowly, looking, as it were casually, into the
Mudir's eyes.

The Mudir's hand ran out like a snake towards a bell on the cushions, but
Dicky shot forward and caught the wrist in his slim, steel-like fingers.
There was a hard glitter in his eyes as he looked down into the eyes of
the master of a hundred slaves, the ruler of a province.

"I have a command of the Khedive to bring you to Cairo, and to kill you
if you resist," said Dicky.  "Sit still--you had better sit still," he
added, in a soothing voice behind which was a deadly authority.

The Mudir licked his dry, colourless lips, and gasped, for he might make
an outcry, but he saw that Dicky would be quicker.  He had been too long
enervated by indulgence to make a fight.

"You'd better take a drink of water," said Dicky, seating himself upon a
Louis Quinze chair, a relic of civilisation brought by the Mudir from
Paris into an antique barbarism.  Then he added sternly: "What have you
done with the English girl?"

"I know nothing of an English girl," answered the Mudir.

Dicky's words were chosen as a jeweller chooses stones for the ring of a
betrothed woman.  "You had a friend in London, a brother of hell like
yourself.  He, like you, had lived in Paris; and that is why this thing
happened.  You had your own women slaves from Kordofan, from Circassia,
from Syria, from your own land.  It was not enough: you must have an
English girl in your harem.  You knew you could not buy her, you knew
that none would come to you for love, neither the drab nor the lady.
None would lay her hand in that of a leprous dog like yourself.  So you
lied, your friend lied for you--sons of dogs of liars all of you, beasts
begotten of beasts!  You must have a governess for your children,
forsooth!  And the girl was told she would come to a palace.  She came
to a stable, and to shame and murder."

Dicky paused.

The fat, greasy hands of the Mudir fumbled towards the water-glass.  It
was empty, but he raised it to his lips and drained the air.

Dicky's eyes fastened him like arrows.  "The girl died an hour ago," he
continued.  "I was with her when she died.  You must pay the price, Abbas
Bey."  He paused.

There was a moment's silence, and then a voice, dry like that of one who
comes out of chloroform, said: "What is the price?"

The little touch of cruelty in Dicky's nature, working with a sense of
justice and an ever-ingenious mind, gave a pleasant quietness to the
inveterate hate that possessed him.  He thought of another woman--of her
who was to die to-morrow.

"There was another woman," said Dicky: "one of your own people.  She was
given a mind and a soul.  You deserted her in your harem--what was there
left for her to think of but death?  She had no child.  But death was a
black prospect; for you would go to heaven, and she would be in the outer
darkness; and she loved you!  A woman's brain thinks wild things.  She
fled from you, and went the pilgrimage to Mecca.  She did all that a man
might do to save her soul, according to Mahomet.  She is to die to-morrow
by the will of the people--and the Mudir of the Fayoum."

Dicky paused once more.  He did not look at the Mudir, but out of the
window towards the Bahr-el-Yusef, where the fellaheen of the Mudir's
estate toiled like beasts of burden with the barges and the great
khiassas laden with cotton and sugar-cane.

"God make your words merciful!" said the Mudir.  "What would you have me
do?"

"The Khedive, our master, has given me your life," said Dicky.  "I will
make your end easy.  The woman has done much to save her soul.  She
buries her face in the dust because she hath no salvation.  It is written
in the Koran that a man may save the soul of his wife.  You have your
choice: will you come to Cairo to Sadik Pasha, and be crucified like a
bandit of your own province, or will you die with the woman in the
Birket-el-Kurun to-morrow at sunrise, and walk with her into the Presence
and save her soul, and pay the price of the English life?"

"Malaish!" answered the Mudir.  "Water," he added quickly.  He had no
power to move, for fear had paralysed him.  Dicky brought him a goolah of
water.

The next morning, at sunrise, a strange procession drew near to the
Birket-el-Kurun.  Twenty ghaffirs went ahead with their naboots; then
came the kavasses, then the Mudir mounted, with Dicky riding beside,
his hand upon the holster where his pistol was.  The face of the Mudir
was like a wrinkled skin of lard, his eyes had the look of one drunk with
hashish.  Behind them came the woman, and now upon her face there was
only a look of peace.  The distracted gaze had gone from her eyes, and
she listened without a tremor to the voices of the wailers behind.

Twenty yards from the lake, Dicky called a halt--Dicky, not the Mudir.
The soldiers came forward and put heavy chains and a ball upon the
woman's ankles.  The woman carried the ball in her arms to the very verge
of the lake, by the deep pool called "The Pool of the Slaughtered One."

Dicky turned to the Mudir.  "Are you ready?" he said.

"Inshallah!" said the Mudir.

The soldiers made a line, but the crowd overlapped the line.  The
fellaheen and Bedouins looked to see the Mudir summon the Ulema to
condemn the woman to shame and darkness everlasting.  But suddenly Abbas
Bey turned and took the woman's right hand in his left.

Her eyes opened in an ecstasy.  "O lord and master, I go to heaven with
thee!" she said, and threw herself forward.

Without a sound the heavy body of the Mudir lurched forward with her, and
they sank into the water together.  A cry of horror and wonder burst from
the crowd.

Dicky turned to them, and raised both hands.

"In the name of our master the Khedive!" he cried.

Above the spot where the two had sunk floated the red tarboosh of the
Mudir of the Fayoum.






A TREATY OF PEACE

Mr. William Sowerby, lieutenant in the Mounted Infantry, was in a
difficult situation, out of which he was little likely to come with
credit--or his life.  It is a dangerous thing to play with fire, so it
is said; it is a more dangerous thing to walk rough-shod over Oriental
customs.  A man ere this has lost his life by carrying his shoe-leather
across the threshold of a mosque, and this sort of thing William Sowerby
knew, and of his knowledge he heeded.  He did not heed another thing,
however; which is, that Oriental ladies are at home to but one man in all
the world, and that your acquaintance with them must be modified by a
mushrabieh screen, a yashmak, a shaded, fast-driving brougham, and a
hideous eunuch.

William Sowerby had not been long in Egypt, he had not travelled very
far or very wide in the Orient; and he was an impressionable and harmless
young man whose bark and bite were of equal value.  His ideas of a harem
were inaccurately based on the legend that it is necessarily the
habitation of many wives and concubines and slaves.  It had never
occurred to him that there might be a sort of family life in a harem;
that a pasha or a bey might have daughters as well as wives; or might
have only one wife--which is less expensive; and that a harem is not
necessarily the heaven of a voluptuary, an elysium of rosy-petalled love
and passion.  Yet he might have known it all, and should have known it
all, if he had taken one-fifth of the time to observe and study Egyptian
life which he gave to polo and golf and racquets.  Yet even if he had
known the life from many stand-points he would still have cherished
illusions, for, as Dicky Donovan, who had a sense of satire, said in some
satirical lines, the cherished amusements of more than one dinner table:

                   "Oh, William William Sowerby
                    Has come out for to see
                    The way of a bimbashi
                    With Egyptian Cavalree.
                    But William William Sowerby
                    His eyes do open wide
                    When he sees the Pasha's chosen
                    In her "bruggam" and her pride.
                    And William William Sowerby,
                    He has a tender smile,
                    Which will bring him in due season
                    To the waters of the Nile
                    And the cheery crocodile!"

It can scarcely be said that Dicky was greatly surprised when Mahommed
Yeleb, the servant of "William William Sowerby," came rapping at his door
one hot noon-day with a dark tale of disaster to his master.  This was
the heart of the thing--A languid, bored, inviting face, and two dark
curious eyes in a slow-driving brougham out on the Pyramid Road;
William's tender, answering smile; his horse galloping behind to within a
discreet distance of the palace, where the lady alighted, shadowed by the
black-coated eunuch.  The same thing for several days, then a device to
let the lady know his name, then a little note half in Arabic, half in
French, so mysterious, so fascinating--William Sowerby walked on air!
Then, a nocturnal going forth, followed by his frightened servant, who
dared not give a warning, for fear of the ever-ready belt which had
scarred his back erstwhile; the palace wall, an opening door, the figure
of his master passing through, the closing gate; and then no more--
nothing more, for a long thirty-six hours!

Mahommed Yeleb's face would have been white if his skin had permitted--
it was a sickly yellow; his throat was guttural with anxiety, his eyes
furtive and strained, for was he not the servant of his master, and might
not he be marked for the early tomb if, as he was sure, his master was
gone that way?

"Aiwa, efendi, it is sure," he said to Dicky Donovan, who never was
surprised at anything that happened.  He had no fear of anything that
breathed; and he kept his place with Ismail because he told the truth
pitilessly, was a poorer man than the Khedive's barber, and a beggar
beside the Chief Eunuch; also, because he had a real understanding of the
Oriental mind, together with a rich sense of humour.

"What is sure?" said Dicky to the Arab with assumed composure; for
it was important that he should show neither anxiety nor astonishment,
lest panic seize the man, and he should rush abroad with grave scandal
streaming from his mouth, and the English fat be in the Egyptian fire for
ever.  "What is sure, Mahommed Yeleb?" repeated Dicky, lighting a
cigarette idly.

"It is as God wills; but as the tongue of man speaks, so is he--Bimbashi
Sowerby, my master--swallowed up these thirty-six hours in the tomb
prepared for him by Selamlik Pasha."

Dicky felt his eyelids twitch, and he almost gave a choking groan of
anxiety, for Selamlik Pasha would not spare the invader of his harem; an
English invader would be a delicate morsel for his pitiless soul.  He
shuddered inwardly at the thought of what might have occurred, what might
occur still.

If Sowerby had been trapped and was already dead, the knowledge would
creep through the bazaars like a soft wind of the night, and all the Arab
world would rejoice that a cursed Inglesi, making the unpardonable breach
of their code, had been given to the crocodiles, been smothered, or
stabbed, or tortured to death with fire.  And, if it were so, what could
be done?  Could England make a case of it, avenge the life of this young
fool who had disgraced her in the eyes of the world, of the envious
French in Cairo, and of that population of the palaces who hated her
because Englishmen were the enemies of backsheesh, corruption, tyranny,
and slavery?  And to what good the attempt?  Exists the personal law of
the Oriental palace, and who may punish any there save by that personal
law?  What outside law shall apply to anything that happens within those
mysterious walls?  Who shall bear true witness, when the only judge is he
whose palace it is?  Though twenty nations should unite to judge, where
might proof be found--inside the palace, where all men lie and bear false
witness?

If Sowerby was not dead, then resort to force?  Go to Selamlik Pasha the
malignant, and demand the young officer?  How easy for Selamlik Pasha to
deny all knowledge of his existence!  Threaten Selamlik--and raise a
Mahommedan crusade?  That would not do.

Say nought, then, and let Sowerby, who had thrust his head into the jaws
of the tiger, get it out as best he might, or not get it out, as the case
might be?

Neither was that possible to Dicky Donovan, even if it were the more
politic thing to do, even if it were better for England's name.  Sowerby
was his friend, as men of the same race are friends together in a foreign
country.  Dicky had a poor opinion of Sowerby's sense or ability, and yet
he knew that if he were in Sowerby's present situation--living or dead--
Sowerby would spill his blood a hundred useless times, if need be, to
save him.

He had no idea of leaving Sowerby where he was, if alive; or of not
avenging him one way or another if dead.  But how that might be he was
not on the instant sure.  He had been struck as with a sudden blindness
by the news, though he showed nothing of this to Mahommed Yeleb.  His
chief object was to inspire the Arab with confidence, since he was
probably the only man outside Selamlik's palace who knew the thing as
yet.  It was likely that Selamlik Pasha would be secret till he saw
whether Sowerby would be missed and what inquiry was made for him.  It
was important to Dicky, in the first place, that this Mahommed Yeleb be
kept quiet, by being made a confidant of his purposes so far as need be,
an accomplice in his efforts whatever they should be.  Kept busy, with a
promise of success and backsheesh when the matter was completed, the Arab
would probably remain secret.  Besides, as Dicky said to himself, while
Mahommed kept his head, he would not risk parading himself as the servant
of the infidel who had invaded the Pasha's harem.  Again, it was certain
that he had an adequate devotion to his master, who had given him as many
ha'pence as kicks, and many cast-off underclothes and cigarettes.

Thus it was that before Dicky had arranged what he should do, though
plans were fusing in his brain, he said to Mahommed Yeleb seriously,
as befitting the crime Sowerby had committed--evenly, as befitted the
influence he wished to have over the Arab: "Keep your tongue between
your teeth, Mahommed.  We will pull him through all right."

"But, effendi, whom God honour, for greatness is in all thy ways, friend
of the Commander of the Faithful as thou art--but, saadat el basha, if he
be dead?"

"He is not dead.  I know it by the eyes of my mind, Mahommed--yea, by the
hairs of my head, he is not dead!"

"Saadat el basha, thou art known as the truth-teller and the
incorruptible--this is the word of the Egyptian and of the infidel
concerning thee.  I kiss thy feet.  For it is true he hath deserved
death, but woe be to him by whom his death cometh!  And am I not his
servant to be with him while he hath life, and hath need of me?  If thou
sayest he is alive, then is he alive, and my heart rejoices."

Dicky scarcely heard what the Arab said, for the quick conviction he had
had that Sowerby was alive was based on the fact, suddenly remembered,
that Selamlik Pasha had only returned from the Fayoum this very morning,
and that therefore he could not as yet have had any share in the fate of
Sowerby, but had probably been sent for by the Chief Eunuch.  It was but
an hour since that he had seen Selamlik Pasha driving hastily towards his
palace.

His mind was instantly made up, his plans formed to his purpose.

"Listen, Mahommed," he said to the Arab.  "Listen to each word I say, as
though it were the prayer to take thee into Paradise.  Go at once to
Selamlik Pasha.  Carry this ring the Khedive gave to me--he will know it.
Do not be denied his presence.  Say that it is more than life and death;
that it is all he values in the world.  Once admitted, say these words:
'Donovan Pasha knows all, and asks an audience at midnight in this
palace.  Until that hour Donovan Pasha desires peace.  For is it not the
law, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth?  Is not a market a place
to buy and sell?'"

Four times did Dicky make the Arab repeat the words after him, till they
ran like water from his tongue, and dismissed him upon the secret errand
with a handful of silver.

Immediately the Arab had gone, Dicky's face flushed with excitement, in
the reaction from his lately assumed composure.  For five minutes he
walked up and down, using language scarcely printable, reviling Sowerby,
and setting his teeth in anger.  But he suddenly composed himself, and,
sitting down, stared straight before him for a long time without stirring
a muscle.  There was urgent need of action, but there was more urgent
need of his making no mistake, of his doing the one thing necessary, for
Sowerby could only be saved in one way, not many.

It was useless to ask the Khedive's intervention--Ismail dared not go
against Selamlik in this.  Whatever was done must be done between
Selamlik Pasha, the tigerish libertine, and Richard Donovan, the little
man who, at the tail end of Ismail's reign, was helping him hold things
together against the black day of reckoning, "prepared for the devil and
all his angels," as Dicky had said to Ismail on this very momentous
morning, when warning him of the perils in his path.  Now Dicky had been
at war with Selamlik ever since, one day long ago on the Nile, he and
Fielding had thwarted his purposes; and Dicky had earned the Pasha's
changeless hatred by calling him "Trousers"--for this name had gone
up and down throughout Egypt as a doubtful story travels, drawing easy
credit everywhere.  Those were the days when Dicky was irresponsible.
Of all in Egypt who hated him most, Selamlik Pasha was the chief.  But
most people hated Selamlik, so the world was not confounded by the great
man's rage, nor did they dislike Dicky simply because the Pasha chose to
do so.  Through years Selamlik had built up his power, until even the
Khedive feared him, and would have been glad to tie a stone round his
neck and drop him into the Nile.  But Ismail could no longer do this sort
of thing without some show of reason--Europe was hanging on his actions,
waiting for the apt moment to depose him.

All this Dicky knew, and five minutes from the time Mahommed Yeleb had
left him he was on his way to Ismail's palace, with his kavass behind
him, cool and ruminating as usual, now answering a salute in Turkish
fashion, now in English, as Egyptians or Europeans passed him.




II

There was one being in the Khedive's palace whose admiration for Dicky
was a kind of fetish, and Dicky loathed him.  Twice had Dicky saved
this Chief Eunuch's life from Ismail's anger, and once had he saved his
fortune--not even from compassion, but out of his inherent love of
justice.  As Dicky had said: "Let him die--for what he has done, not for
something he has not done.  Send him to the devil with a true bill of
crime."  So it was that Dicky, who shrank from the creature whom
Ministers and Pashas fawned upon--so powerful was his unique position in
the palace--went straight to him now to get his quid-pro-quo, his measure
for measure.

The tall, black-coated, smooth-faced creature, silent and watchful and
lean, stepped through the doorway with the footfall of a cat.  He slid
forward, salaamed to the floor-Dicky wondered how a body could open and
shut so like the blade of a knife--and, catching Dicky's hand, kissed it.

"May thy days be watered with the dew of heaven, saadat el basha," said
the Chief Eunuch.

"Mine eyes have not seen since thy last withdrawal," answered Dicky
blandly, in the high-flown Oriental way.

"Thou hast sent for me.  I am thy slave."

"I have sent for thee, Mizraim.  And thou shalt prove thyself, once for
all, whether thy hand moves as thy tongue speaks."

"To serve thee I will lay down my life--I will blow it from me as the
wind bloweth the cotton flower.  Have I not spoken thus since the Feast
of Beiram, now two years gone?"

Dicky lowered his voice.  "Both Mustapha Bey, that son of the he-wolf
Selamlik Pasha, still follow the carriage of the Khedive's favourite,
and hang about the walls, and seek to corrupt thee with gold, Mahommed
Mizraim?"

"Saadat el basha, but for thy word to wait, the Khedive had been told
long since."

"It is the sport to strike when the sword cuts with the longest arm, O
son of Egypt!"

The face of Mizraim was ugly with the unnatural cruelty of an unnatural
man.  "Is the time at hand, saadat el basha?"

"You hate Selamlik Pasha?"

"As the lion the jackal."

Dicky would have laughed in scorn if he might have dared--this being to
class himself with lions!  But the time was not fit for laughter.  "And
the son of Selamlik Pasha, the vile Mustapha Bey?" he asked.

"I would grind him like corn between the stones!  Hath he not sent
messages by the women of the bazaar to the harem of my royal master, to
whom God give glory in heaven?  Hath he not sought to enter the harem as
a weasel crawls under a wall?  Hath he not sought to steal what I hoard
by a mighty hand and the eye of an eagle for Ismail the Great?  Shall I
love him more than the dog that tears the throat of a gazelle?"  The
gesture of cruelty he made was disgusting to the eyes of Dicky Donovan,
but he had in his mind the peril to Sowerby, and he nodded his head in
careless approval, as it were.

"Then, Mizraim, thou son of secrecy and keeper of the door, take heed to
what I say, and for thine honour and my need do as I will.  Thou shalt
to-night admit Mustapha Bey to the harem--at the hour of nine o'clock!"

"Saadat el basha!"  The eunuch's face was sickly in its terrified wonder.

"Even so.  At nine."

"But, saadat--"

"Bring him secretly, even to the door of the favourite's room; then, have
him seized and carried to a safe place till I send for him."

"Ah, saadat el basha--"  The lean face of the creature smiled, and the
smile was not nice to see.

"Let no harm be done him, but await my messenger, Mahommed Yeleb, and
whatsoever he bids you to do, do it; for I speak."

"Ah, saadat el basha, you would strike Selamlik Pasha so--the great
beast, the black river pig, the serpent of the slime....!"

"You will do this thing, Mizraim?"

"I shall lure him, as the mirage the pilgrim.  With joy I will do this,
and a hundred times more."

"Even if I asked of thee the keys of the harem?" asked Dicky grimly.

"Effendi, thou wouldst not ask.  All the world knows thee.  For thee the
harem hath no lure.  Thou goest not by dark ways to deeds for thine own
self.  Thou hast honour.  Ismail himself would not fear thee."

"See, thou master of many, squeak not thy voice so high.  Ismail will
take thy head and mine, if he discovers to-night's business.  Go then
with a soft tread, Mizraim.  Let thy hand be quick on his mouth, and
beware that no one sees!"




III

Upon the stroke of midnight Dicky entered the room where Selamlik Pasha
awaited him with a malicious and greasy smile, in which wanton cruelty
was uppermost.  Selamlik Pasha knew well the object of this meeting.  He
had accurately interpreted the message brought by Mahommed Yeleb.  He
knew his power; he knew that the Englishman's life was in his hands to do
with what he chose, for the law of the harem which defies all outside law
was on his side.  But here he was come to listen to Dicky Donovan, the
arrogant little favourite, pleading for the life of the English boy who
had done the thing for which the only penalty was death.

Dicky showed no emotion as he entered the room, but salaamed, and said:
"Your Excellency is prompt.  Honour and peace be upon your Excellency!"
"Honour and the bounty of the stars be upon thee, saadat el basha!"

There was a slight pause, in which Dicky seated himself, lighted a
cigarette, and summoned a servant, of whom he ordered coffee.  They did
not speak meantime, but Dicky sat calmly, almost drowsily, smoking, and
Selamlik Pasha sat with greasy hands clasping and unclasping, his yellow
eyes fixed on Dicky with malevolent scrutiny.

When the coffee was brought, the door had been shut, and Dicky had drawn
the curtain across, Selamlik Pasha said: "What great affair brings us
together here, saadat el basha?"

"The matter of the Englishman you hold a prisoner, Excellency."

"It is painful, but he is dead," said the Pasha, with a grimace of
cruelty.

Dicky's eyes twitched slightly, but he answered with coolness, thrusting
his elbow into the cushions and smoking hard: "But, no, he is not dead.
Selamlik Pasha has as great an instinct for a bargain as for revenge.
Also Selamlik Pasha would torture before he kills.  Is it not so?"

"What is your wish?"

"That the man be set free, Excellency."

"He has trespassed.  He has stolen his way into the harem.  The infidel
dog has defiled the house of my wives."

"He will marry the woman, with your permission, Excellency.  He loved
her--so it would seem."

"He shall die--the dog of an infidel!"

Dicky was now satisfied that Sowerby was alive, and that the game was
fairly begun.  He moved slowly towards his purpose.

"I ask his life, as a favour to me.  The Khedive honours me, and I can
serve you betimes, Excellency."

"You called me 'Trousers,' and all Egypt laughed," answered the Pasha
malignantly.

"I might have called you worse, but I did not.  You may call me what you
will--I will laugh."

"I will call you a fool for bringing me here to laugh at you, who now
would kiss Selamlik Pasha's shoe.  I would he were your brother.  I would
tear out his fingernails, pierce his eyes, burn him with hot irons, pour
boiling oil over him and red cinders down his throat--if he were your
brother."

"Remember I am in the confidence of the Khedive, Pasha."

"Ismail!  What dare he do?  Every Egyptian in the land would call him
infidel.  Ismail would dare do nothing."  His voice was angrily guttural
with triumph.

"England will ask the price of the young man's life of you, Excellency."

"England dare not move--is thy servant a fool?  Every Mussulman in the
land would raise the green flag--the Jehad would be upon ye!"

"He is so young.  He meant no ill.  The face of your daughter drew him
on.  He did not realise his crimen--or its penalty."

"It is a fool's reasoning.  Because he was a stranger and an infidel, so
has he been told of dark things done to those who desecrate our faith."

"Had he been an Egyptian or a Turk--"

"I should slay him, were he Ismail himself.  Mine own is mine own, as
Mahomet hath said.  The man shall die--and who shall save him?  Not even
the Sultan himself."

"There are concessions in the Fayoum--you have sought them long."

"Bah!"

"There is the Grand Cordon of the Mejidieh; there is a way to it,
Excellency."

"The man's blood!"

"There is a high office to be vacant soon, near to the person of the
Khedive, with divers moneys and loans--"

"To see Donovan Pasha cringe and beg is better."

"There is that mercy which one day you may have to ask for yourself or
for your own--"

"The fool shall die.  And who shall save him?"

"Well, I will save him," said Dicky, rising slowly to his feet.

"Pish!  Go to the Khedive with the tale, and I will kill the man within
the hour, and tell it abroad, and we shall see where Donovan Pasha will
stand to-morrow.  The Khedive is not stronger than his people--and there
are the French, and others!"  He spat upon the floor at Dicky's feet.
"Go, tell the Khedive what you will, dog of an Englishman, son of a dog
with a dog's heart!"  Dicky took a step forward, with an ominous flare of
colour in his cheek.  There was a table between him and Selamlik Pasha.
He put both hands upon it, and leaning over said in a voice of steel:

"So be it, then.  Shall I go to the Khedive and say that this night
Mustapha Bey, eldest and chosen son of Selamlik Pasha, the darling of his
fat heart, was seized by the Chief Eunuch, the gentle Mizraim, in the
harem of his Highness?  Shall I tell him that, Trousers?"

As Dicky spoke, slowly, calmly, Selamlik Pasha turned a greenish-yellow,
his eyes started from his head, his hand chafed the air.

"Mustapha Bey--Khedive's harem!" he stammered in a husky voice.

"By the gentle Mizraim, I said," answered Dicky.  "Is Mustapha Bey's life
worth an hour's purchase?  Is Selamlik Pasha safe?"

"Is--is he dead?" gasped the cowardly Egyptian, furtively glancing
towards the door.  Suddenly he fell back fainting, and Dicky threw some
water in his face, then set a cup of it beside him.

"Drink, and pull yourself together, if you would save yourself," said
Dicky.

"Save--save myself," said Selamlik Pasha, recovering; then, with quick
suspicion, and to gain time, added quickly: "Ah, it is a trick!  He is
not a prisoner--you lie!"

"I have not a reputation for lying," rejoined Dicky quietly.  "But see!"
he added; and throwing open a door, pointed to where the Chief Eunuch
stood with Mahommed Yeleb, Mustapha Bey gagged and bound between them.
Dicky shut the door again, as Selamlik Pasha shrank back among the
cushions, cowardice incarnate.

"You thought," said Dicky with a soft fierceness" you thought that I
would stoop to bargain with Selamlik Pasha and not know my way out of the
bargain?  You thought an Englishman would beg, even for a life, of such
as you!  You thought me, Donovan Pasha, such a fool!"

"Mercy, Excellency!" said Selamlik, spreading out his hands.

Dicky laughed.  "You called me names, Selamlik--a dog, and the son of a
dog with a dog's heart.  Was it wise?"

"Is there no way?  Can no bargain be made?"

Dicky sat down, lighting a cigarette.

"To save a scandal in Egypt," answered Dicky drily, "I am ready to grant
you terms."

"Speak-Excellency."

"The life of the Englishman for the life of your son and your own.  Also,
the freedom of the six Circassian slaves whom you house now at Beni
Hassan, ready to bring to your palace.  Also, for these slaves two
hundred Turkish pounds apiece.  Also, your written word that you will
bring no more slaves into Egypt.  Is the bargain fair?"

"Mizraim may still betray us," said Selamlik, trembling, with relief, but
yet apprehensive.

"Mizraim is in my power--he acts for me," said Dicky.  "Whose life is
safe here save my own?"

"Malaish!  It shall be as your will is, Excellency," answered Selamlik
Pasha, in a shaking voice; and he had time to wonder even then how an
Englishman could so outwit an Oriental.  It was no matter how Mustapha
Bey, his son, was lured; he had been seized in the harem, and all truth
can be forsworn in Egypt, and the game was with this Donovan Pasha.

"Send to your palace, commanding that the Englishman be brought here,"
said Dicky.  Selamlik Pasha did so.

Sowerby of the Mounted Infantry was freed that night, and the next day
Dicky Donovan had six Circassian slaves upon his hands.  He passed them
over to the wife of Fielding Bey with whom he had shared past secrets and
past dangers.

Selamlik Pasha held his peace in fear; and the Khedive and Cairo never
knew why there was a truce to battle between Dicky Donovan and that vile
Pasha called Trousers.






AT THE MERCY OF TIBERIUS

In a certain year when Dicky Donovan was the one being in Egypt who had
any restraining influence on the Khedive, he suddenly asked leave of
absence to visit England.  Ismail granted it with reluctance, chiefly
because he disliked any interference with his comforts, and Dicky was one
of them--in some respects the most important.

"My friend," he said half petulantly to Dicky, as he tossed the plans for
a new palace to his secretary and dismissed him, are you not happy here?
Have you not all a prince can give?"

"Highness," answered Dicky, "I have kith and kin in England.  Shall a man
forget his native land?"  The Khedive yawned, lighted a cigarette, and
murmured through the smoke: "Inshallah!  It might be pleasant--betimes."

"I have your Highness's leave to go?" asked Dicky.  "May God preserve
your head from harm!" answered Ismail in farewell salutation, and,
taking a ring from his finger set with a large emerald, he gave it to
Dicky.  "Gold is scarce in Egypt," he went on, "but there are jewels
still in the palace--and the Khedive's promises-to-pay with every money-
barber of Europe!" he added, with a cynical sneer, and touched his
forehead and his breast courteously as Dicky retired.

Outside the presence Dicky unbuttoned his coat like an Englishman again,
and ten minutes later flung his tarboosh into a corner of the room; for
the tarboosh was the sign of official servitude, and Dicky was never the
perfect official.  Initiative was his strong point, independence his
life; he loathed the machine of system in so far as he could not command
it; he revolted at being a cog in the wheel.  Ismail had discovered this,
and Dicky had been made a kind of confidential secretary who seldom wrote
a line.  By his influence with Ismail he had even more power at last than
the Chief Eunuch or the valet-de-chambre, before whom the highest
officials bowed low.  He was hated profoundly by many of the household,
cultivated by certain of the Ministers, fawned upon by outsiders, trusted
by the Khedive, and entirely believed in by the few Englishmen and
Frenchmen who worked for decent administration faithfully but without
hope and sometimes with nausea.

It was nausea that had seized upon Dicky at last, nausea and one other
thing--the spirit of adventure, an inveterate curiosity.  His was the
instinct of the explorer, his feet were the feet of the Wandering Jew.
He knew things behind closed doors by instinct; he was like a thought-
reader in the sure touch of discovery; the Khedive looked upon him as
occult almost and laughed in the face of Sadik the Mouffetish when he
said some evil things of Dicky.  Also, the Khedive told the Mouffetish
that if any harm came to Dicky there would come harm to him.  The Khedive
loved to play one man off against another, and the death of Sadik or the
death of Dicky would have given him no pain, if either seemed necessary.
For the moment, however, he loved them both after his fashion; for Sadik
lied to him, and squeezed the land dry, and flailed it with kourbashes
for gold for his august master and himself; and Dicky told him the truth
about everything--which gave the Khedive knowledge of how he really stood
all round.

Dicky told the great spendthrift the truth about himself; but he did not
tell the truth when he said he was going to England on a visit to his
kith and kin.  Seized by the most irresistible curiosity of his life,
moved by desire for knowledge, that a certain plan in his mind might be
successfully advanced he went south and east, not west and north.

For four months Egypt knew him not.  For four months the Khedive was
never told the truth save by European financiers, when truths were
obvious facts; for four long months never saw a fearless or an honest eye
in his own household.  Not that it mattered in one sense; but Ismail was
a man of ideas, a sportsman of a sort, an Iniquity with points; a man who
chose the broad way because it was easier, not because he was
remorseless.  At the start he meant well by his people, but he meant
better by himself; and not being able to satisfy both sides of the
equation, he satisfied one at the expense of the other and of that x
quantity otherwise known as Europe.  Now Europe was heckling him; the
settling of accounts was near.  Commissioners had been sent to find where
were the ninety millions he had borrowed.  Only Ismail and Sadik the
Mouffetish, once slave and foster-brother, could reply.  The Khedive
could not long stave off the evil day when he must "pay the debt of the
lobster," and Sadik give account of his stewardship.  Meanwhile, his mind
turned to the resourceful little Englishman with the face of a girl and
the tongue of an honest man.

But the day Dicky had set for his return had come and gone, and Dicky
himself had not appeared.  With a grim sort of satisfaction, harmonious
with his irritation, Ismail went forth with his retinue to the Dosah, the
gruesome celebration of the Prophet's birthday, following on the return
of the pilgrimage from Mecca.  At noon he entered his splendid tent at
one side of a square made of splendid tents, and looked out listlessly,
yet sourly, upon the vast crowds assembled--upon the lines of banners,
the red and green pennons embroidered with phrases from the Koran.  His
half-shut, stormy eyes fell upon the tent of the chief of the dervishes,
and he scarcely checked a sneer, for the ceremony to be performed
appealed to nothing in him save a barbaric instinct, and this barbaric
instinct had been veneered by French civilisation and pierced by the
criticism of one honest man.  His look fell upon the long pathway
whereon, for three hundred yards, matting had been spread.  It was a
field of the cloth of blood; for on this cloth dervishes returned from
Mecca, mad with fanaticism and hashish, would lie packed like herrings,
while the Sheikh of the Dosah rode his horse over their bodies, a
pavement of human flesh and bone.

As the Khedive looked, his lip curled a little, for he recalled what
Dicky Donovan had said about it; how he had pleaded against it,
describing loathsome wounds and pilgrims done to death.  Dicky had ended
his brief homily by saying: "And isn't that a pretty dish to set before a
king!" to Ismail's amusement; for he was no good Mussulman, no Mussulman
at all, in fact, save in occasional violent prejudices got of inheritance
and association.

To-day, however, Ismail was in a bad humour with Dicky and with the
world.  He had that very morning flogged a soldier senseless with his own
hand; he had handed over his favourite Circassian slave to a ruffian Bey,
who would drown her or sell her within a month; and he had dishonoured
his own note of hand for fifty thousand pounds to a great merchant who
had served him not wisely but too well.  He was not taking his troubles
quietly, and woe be to the man or woman who crossed him this day!
Tiberius was an hungered for a victim to his temper.  His entourage knew
it well, and many a man trembled that day for his place, or his head, or
his home.  Even Sadik the Mouffetish--Sadik, who had four hundred women
slaves dressed in purple and fine linen--Sadik, whose kitchen alone cost
him sixty thousand pounds a year, the price of whose cigarette ash-trays
was equal to the salary of an English consul--even Sadik, foster-brother,
panderer, the Barabbas of his master, was silent and watchful to-day.

And Sadik, silent and watchful and fearful, was also a dangerous man.
As Sadik's look wandered over the packed crowds, his faded eyes scarce
realising the bright-coloured garments of the men, the crimson silk tents
and banners and pennons, the gorgeous canopies and trappings and plumes
of the approaching dervishes, led by the Amir-el-Haj or Prince of the
Pilgrims, returned from Mecca, he wondered what lamb for the sacrifice
might be provided to soothe the mind of his master.  He looked at the
matting in the long lane before them, and he knew that the bodies which
would lie here presently, yielding to the hoofs of the Sheikh's horse,
were not sufficient to appease the rabid spirit tearing at the Khedive's
soul.  He himself had been flouted by one ugly look this morning, and one
from Ismail was enough.

It did his own soul good now to see the dervish fanatics foaming at the
mouth, their eyes rolling, as they crushed glass in their mouths and ate
it, as they swallowed fire, as they tore live serpents to pieces with
their teeth and devoured them, as they thrust daggers and spikes of steel
through their cheeks, and gashed their breasts with knives and swords.
He watched the effect of it on the Khedive; but Ismail had seen all this
before, and he took it in the stride.  This was not sufficient.

Sadik racked his brain to think who in the palace or in official life
might be made the scapegoat, upon whom the dark spirit in the heart of
the Khedive might be turned.  His mean, colourless eyes wandered
inquiringly over the crowd, as the mad dervishes, half-naked, some with
masses of dishevelled hair, some with no hair at all, bleached, haggard,
moaning and shrieking, threw themselves to the ground on the matting,
while attendants pulled off their slippers and placed them under their
heads, which lay face downwards.  At last Sadik's eyes were arrested by a
group of ten dervishes, among them one short in stature and very slight,
whose gestures were not so excited as those of his fellows.  He also saw
that one or two of the dervishes watched the slight man covertly.

Five of the little group suddenly threw themselves upon the matting,
adding their bodies to the highway of bones and flesh.  Then another and
another did the same, leaving three who, with the little man, made a
fanatical chorus.  Now the three near the little man began to cut
themselves with steel and knives, and one set fire to his jibbeh and
began to chew the flames.  Yet the faces of all three were turned towards
the little man, who did no more than shriek and gesticulate and sway his
body wildly up and down.  He was tanned and ragged and bearded and thin,
and there was a weird brilliance in his eyes, which watched his
companions closely.

So fierce and frenzied were the actions of those with him, that the
attention of the Khedive was drawn; and Sadik, looking at his master,
saw that his eyes also were intently fixed on the little man.  At that
instant the little man himself caught the eye of the Khedive, and Ismail
involuntarily dropped a hand upon his sword, for some gesture of this
dervish, some familiar turn of his body, startled him.  Where had he seen
the gesture before?  Who was this pilgrim who did not cut and wound
himself like his companions?  Suddenly the three mad dervishes waved
their hands towards the matting and shrieked something into his ear.  The
little man's eyes shot a look at the Khedive.  Ismail's ferret eye
fastened on him, and a quick fear as of assassination crossed his face as
the small dervish ran forward with the other three to the lane of human
flesh, where there was still a gap to be filled, and the cry rose up that
the Sheikh of the Dosah had left his tent and was about to begin his
direful ride.

Sadik the Mouffetish saw the Khedive's face, and suddenly said in his
ear: "Shall my slave seize him, Highness whom God preserve?"

The Khedive did not reply, for at that moment he recognised the dervish;
and now he understood that Dicky Donovan had made the pilgrimage to Mecca
with the Mahmal caravan; that an infidel had desecrated the holy city;
and that his Englishman had lied to him.  His first impulse was to have
Dicky seized and cast to the crowd, to be torn to pieces.  Dicky's eyes
met his without wavering--a desperate yet resolute look--and Ismail knew
that the little man would sell his life dearly, if he had but half a
chance.  He also saw in Dicky's eyes the old honesty, the fearless
straightforwardness--and an appeal too, not humble, but still eager and
downright.  Ismail's fury was great, for the blue devils had him by the
heels that day; but on the instant he saw the eyes of Sadik the
Mouffetish, and their cunning, cruelty, and soulless depravity, their
present search for a victim to his master's bad temper, acted at once
on Ismail's sense of humour.  He saw that Sadik half suspected something,
he saw that Dicky's three companions suspected, and his mind was made up
on the instant--things should take their course--he would not interfere.
He looked Dicky squarely in the face, and Dicky knew that the Khedive's
glance said as plainly as words:

"Fool of an Englishman, go on!  I will not kill you, but I will not save
you.  The game is in your hands alone.  You can only avert suspicion by
letting the Sheikh of the Dosah make a bridge of your back.  Mecca is a
jest you must pay for."

With the wild cry of a dervish fanatic Dicky threw himself down, his head
on his arms, and the vengeful three threw themselves down beside him.
The attendants pulled off their slippers and thrust them under their
faces, and now the siais of the Sheikh ran over their bodies lightly,
calling out for all to lie still--the Sheikh was coming on his horse.

Dicky weighed his chances with a little shrinking, but with no fear: he
had been in imminent danger for four long months, and he was little
likely to give way now.  The three men lying beside him had only
suspected him for the last three days, and during that time they had
never let him out of heir sight.  What had roused their suspicion he did
not know: probably a hesitation concerning some Arab custom or the
pronunciation of some Arab word--the timbre of the Arab voice was rougher
and heavier.  There had been no chance of escape during these three days,
for his three friends had never left his side, and now they were beside
him.  His chances were not brilliant.  If he escaped from the iron hoofs
of the Sheikh's horse, if the weight did not crush the life out of his
small body, there was a fair chance; for to escape unhurt from the Dosah
is to prove yourself for ever a good Mussulman, who has undergone the
final test and is saved evermore by the promise of the Prophet.  But even
if he escaped unhurt, and the suspicions of his comrades were allayed,
what would the Khedive do?  The Khedive had recognised him, and had done
nothing--so far.  Yet Ismail, the chief Mussulman in Egypt, should have
thrown him like a rat to the terriers!  Why he had acted otherwise he was
not certain: perhaps to avoid a horrible sensation at the Dosah and the
outcry of the newspapers of Europe; perhaps to have him assassinated
privately; perhaps, after all, to pardon him.  Yet this last alternative
was not reasonable, save from the stand-point that Ismail had no religion
at all.

Whatever it was to be, his fate would soon come, and in any case he had
done what only one European before him had done--he had penetrated to the
tomb of Mahomet at Mecca.  Whatever should come, he had crowded into his
short life a thousand unusual and interesting things.  His inveterate
curiosity had served him well, and he had paid fairly for the candles of
his game.  He was ready.

Low moans came to his ears.  He could hear the treading hoofs of the
Sheikh's horse.  Nearer and nearer the frightened animal came; the shout
of those who led the horse was in his ears: "Lie close and still, O
brothers of giants!" he heard the ribs of a man but two from him break-
he heard the gurgle in the throat of another into whose neck the horse's
hoof had sunk.  He braced himself and drew his breast close to the
ground.

He could hear now the heavy breathing of the Sheikh of the Dosah, who, to
strengthen himself for his ride, had taken a heavy dose of hashish.  The
toe of the Arab leading the horse touched his head, then a hoof was on
him--between the shoulders, pressing-pressing down, the iron crushing
into the flesh--down--down--down, till his eyes seemed to fill with
blood.  Then another hoof--and this would crush the life out of him.  He
gasped, and nerved himself.  The iron shoe came down, slipped a little,
grazed his side roughly, and sank between himself and the dervish next
him, who had shrunk away at the last moment.

A mad act; for the horse stumbled, and in recovering himself plunged
forward heavily.  Dicky expected the hind hoofs to crush down on his back
or neck, and drew in his breath; but the horse, excited by the cries of
the people, drove clear of him, and the hind hoofs fell with a sickening
thud on the back and neck of the dervish who had been the cause of the
disaster.

Dicky lay still for a moment to get his breath, then sprang to his feet
lightly, cast a swift glance of triumph towards the Khedive, and turned
to the dervishes who had lain beside him.  The man who had shrunk away
from the horse's hoofs was dead, the one on the other side was badly
wounded, and the last, bruised and dazed, got slowly to his feet.

"God is great," said Dicky to him: "I have no hurt, Mahommed."

"It is the will of God.  Extolled be Him who created thee!" answered the
dervish, all suspicion gone, and admiration in his eyes, as Dicky cried
his Allah Kerim--"God is bountiful!"

A kavass touched Dicky on the arm.

"His Highness would speak with you," he said.  Dicky gladly turned his
back on the long lane of frantic immolation and the sight of the wounded
and dead being carried away.  Coming over to the Khedive he salaamed, and
kneeling on the ground touched the toe of Ismail's boot with his
forehead.

Ismail smiled, and his eyes dropped with satisfaction upon the prostrate
Dicky.  Never before had an Englishman done this, and that Dicky, of all
Englishmen, should do it gave him an ironical pleasure which chased his
black humour away.

"It is written that the true believer shall come unscathed from the hoofs
of the horse.  Thou hast no hurt, Mahommed?"

"None, Highness, whose life God preserve," said Dicky in faultless
Arabic, with the eyes of Sadik upon him searching his mystery.

"May the dogs bite the heart of thine enemies!  What is thy name?" said
Ismail.

"Rekab, so God wills, Highness."

"Thine occupation?"

"I am a poor scribe, Highness," answered Dicky with a dangerous humour,
though he had seen a look in the Khedive's face which boded only safety.

"I have need of scribes.  Get you to the Palace of Abdin, and wait upon
me at sunset after prayers," said Ismail.

"I am the slave of your Highness.  Peace be on thee, O Prince of the
Faithful!"

"A moment, Mahommed.  Hast thou wife or child?"

"None, Highness."

"Nor kith nor kin?"  Ismail's smile was grim.

"They be far away, beyond the blessed rule of your Highness."

"Thou wilt desire to return to them.  How long wilt thou serve me?"
asked Ismail slowly.

"Till the two Karadh-gatherers return," answered Dicky, quoting the old
Arabic saying which means for ever, since the two Karadh-gatherers who
went to gather the fruit of the sant and the leaves of the selem never
returned.

"So be it," said the Khedive, and, rising, waved Dicky away.  "At
sunset!"

"At sunset after prayers, Highness," answered Dicky, and was instantly
lost in the throng which now crowded upon the tent to see the Sheikh of
the Dosah arrive to make obeisance to Ismail.

That night at sunset, Dicky, once more clothed and shaven and well
appointed, but bronzed and weatherbeaten, was shown into the presence of
the Khedive, whose face showed neither pleasure nor displeasure.

"You have returned from your kith and kin in England?" asked Ismail,
with malicious irony.

"I have no excuses, Highness.  I have done what I set out to do."

"If I had given you to death as an infidel who had defiled the holy tomb
and the sacred city--"

"Your Highness would have lost a faithful servant," answered Dicky.  "I
took my chances."

"Even now it would be easy to furnish--accidents for you."

"But not wise, Highness, till my story is told."

"Sadik Pasha suspects you."

"I suspect Sadik Pasha," answered Dicky.

"Of what?" inquired Ismail, starting.  "He is true to me--Sadik is true
to me?" he urged, with a shudder; for if Sadik was false in this crisis,
with Europe clamouring for the payment of debts and for reforms, where
should he look for faithful knavery?

"He will desert your Highness in the last ditch.  Let me tell your
Highness the truth, in return for saving my life.  Your only salvation
lies in giving up to the creditors of Egypt your own wealth, and also
Sadik's, which is twice your own."

"Sadik will not give it up."

"Is not Ismail the Khedive master in Egypt?"

"Sit down and smoke," said Ismail eagerly, handing Dicky a cigarette.

                    ......................

When Dicky left the Khedive at midnight, he thought he saw a better day
dawning for Egypt.  He felt also that he had done the land a good turn
in trying to break the shameless contract between Ismail and Sadik the
Mouffetish; and he had the Khedive's promise that it should be broken,
given as Ismail pinned on his breast the Order of the Mejidieh.

He was not, however, prepared to hear of the arrest of the Mouffetish
before another sunset, and then of his hugger-mugger death, of which the
world talks to this day; though the manner of it is only known to a few,
and to them it is an ugly memory.






ALL THE WORLD'S MAD

Up to thirty-two years of age David Hyam, of the village of Framley, in
Staffordshire, was not a man of surprises.  With enough of this world's
goods to give him comfort of body and suave gravity of manner, the figure
he cut was becoming to his Quaker origin and profession.  No one
suspected the dynamic possibilities of his nature till a momentous day in
August, in the middle Victorian period, when news from Bristol came that
an uncle in chocolate had died and left him the third of a large fortune,
without condition or proviso.

This was of a Friday, and on the Saturday following David did his first
startling act--he offered marriage to Hope Marlowe, the only Quaker girl
in Framley who had ever dared to discard the poke bonnet even for a day,
and who had been publicly reproved for laughing in meeting--for Mistress
Hope had a curious, albeit demure and suggestive, sense of humour; she
was, in truth, a kind of sacred minuet in grey.  Hope had promptly
accepted David, at the same time taunting him softly with the fact that
he had recklessly declared he would never marry, even saying profanely
that upon his word and honour he never would!  She repeated to him what
his own mother once replied to his audacious worldly protests:

"If thee say thee will never, never, never do a thing, thee will some day
surely do it."

Then, seeing that David was a bit chagrined, Hope slipped one hand into
his, drew him back within the door, lifted the shovel hat off his
forehead, and whispered with a coquetry unworthy a Quaker maid:

"But thee did not say, friend David, thee would never, never, never smite
thy friend on both cheeks after she had flouted thee."

Having smitten her on both cheeks, after the manner of foolish men, David
gravely got him to his home and to a sound sleep that night.  Next
morning, the remembrance of the pleasant smiting roused him to an
outwardly sedate and inwardly vainglorious courage.  Going with steady
steps to the Friends' meeting-house at the appointed time, the Spirit
moved him, after a decorous pause, to announce his intended marriage to
the prettiest Quaker in Framley, even the maid who had shocked the
community's sense of decorum and had been written down a rebel--though
these things he did not say.

From the recesses of her poke bonnet Hope watched the effect of David's
words upon the meeting; but when the elders turned and looked at her, as
became her judges before the Lord, her eyes dropped; also her heart
thumped so hard she could hear it; and in the silence that followed it
seemed to beat time to the words like the pendulum of a clock: "Fear not-
Love on!  Fear not--Love on!"  But the heart beat faster still, the eyes
came up quickly, and the face flushed a deep, excited red when David,
rising again, said that, with the consent of the community--a consent
which his voice subtly insisted upon--he would take a long journey into
the Holy Land, into Syria, travelling to Baalbec and Damascus, and even
beyond as far as the desolate city of Palmyra; and then, afterwards, into
Egypt, where Joseph and the sons of Israel were captive aforetime.  He
would fain visit the Red Sea, and likewise confer with the Coptic
Christians in Egypt, "of whom thee and me have read to our comfort," he
added piously, looking at friend Fairley, the oldest and heretofore the
richest man in the community.

Friend Fairley rejoiced now that he had in by-gone days lent David books
to read; but he rejoiced secretly, for though his old bookman's heart
warmed at the thought that he should in good time hear, from one who had
seen with his own eyes, of the wonders of the East, it became him to
assume a ponderous placidity--for Framley had always been doubtful of his
bookishness and its influence on such as David.  They said it boded no
good; there were those even who called Fairley "a new light," that schism
in a sect.

These God-fearing, dull folk were present now, and, disapproving of
David's choice in marriage, disapproved far more of its consequence; for
so they considered the projected journey into the tumultuous world and
the garish Orient.  In the end, however, an austere approval was
promised, should the solemn commission of men and women appointed to
confer with and examine the candidates find in their favour--as in this
case they would certainly do; for thirty thousand pounds bulked potently
even in this community of unworldly folk, though smacking somewhat of the
world, the flesh and the devil.

If David, however, would stand to the shovel hat, and if Hope would be
faithful for ever to the poke bonnet and grey cloth, all might yet be
well.  At the same time, they considered that friend David's mind was
distracted by the things of this world, and they reasoned with the Lord
in prayer upon the point in David's presence.

In worldly but religiously controlled dudgeon David left the meeting-
house, and inside the door of Hope's cottage said to his own mother and
to hers some bitter and un-Quaker-like things against the stupid world--
for to him as yet the world was Framley, though he would soon mend that.

When he had done speaking against "the mad wits that would not see," Hope
laid her cool fingers on his arm and said, with a demure humour: "All the
world's mad but thee and me, David--and thee's a bit mad!"

So pleased was David's mother with this speech that then and there she
was reconciled to Hope's rebellious instincts, and saw safety for her son
in the hands of the quaint, clear-minded daughter of her old friend and
kinswoman, Mercy Marlowe.



II

Within three months David and Hope had seen the hills of Moab from the
top of the Mount of Olives; watched the sun go down over the Sea of
Galilee; plucked green boughs from the cedars on Lebanon; broken into
placid exclamations of delight in the wild orchard of nectarine blossoms
by the lofty ruins of Baalbac; walked in that street called Straight at
Damascus; journeyed through the desert with a caravan to Palmyra when the
Druses were up; and, at last, looked upon the spot where lived that
Pharaoh who knew not Joseph.

In this land they stayed; and even now far up the Nile you will hear of
the Two Strange People who travelled the river even to Dongola and some
way back--only some way back, for a long time.  In particular you will
hear of them from an old dragoman called Mahommed Ramadan Saggara, and a
white-haired jeweller of Assiout, called Abdul Huseyn.  These two men
still tell the tale of the two mad English folk with faces like no
English people ever seen in Egypt, who refused protection in their
travels, but went fearlessly among the Arabs everywhere, to do good and
fear not.  The Quaker hat and saddened drab worked upon the Arab mind to
advantage.

In Egypt, David and Hope found their pious mission--though historians
have since called it "whimsical and unpractical": David's to import the
great Syrian donkey, which was to banish the shame of grossly burdening
the small donkey of the land of Pharaoh; and Hope's to build schools
where English should be taught, to exclude "that language of Belial,"
as David called French.  When their schemes came home to Framley, with an
order on David's bankers for ten thousand pounds, grey-garbed
consternation walked abroad, and in meeting the First Day following no
one prayed or spoke for an hour or more.  At last, however, friend
Fairley rose in his place and said:

"The Lord shall deliver the heathen into their hands."

Then the Spirit moved freely and severely among them all, and friend
Fairley was, as he said himself, "crowded upon the rails by the yearlings
of the flock."  For he alone of all Framley believed that David and Hope
had not thrown away the Quaker drab, the shovel hat and the poke bonnet,
and had gone forth fashionable, worldly and an hungered, among the
fleshpots of Egypt.  There was talk of gilded palaces, Saracenic
splendours and dark suggestions from the Arabian Nights.

Still, the ten thousand pounds went to David and Hope where they
smilingly laboured through the time of high Nile and low Nile, and
khamsin and sirocco, and cholera, and, worse than all, the banishments
to the hot Siberia of Fazougli.

But Mahommed Ramadan Saggara babbles yet of the time when, for one day,
David threw away his shovel hat; and Abdul Huseyn, the jeweller, tells
how, on the same day, the Sitt--that is, Hope--bought of him a ring of
turquoises and put it on her finger with a curious smile.

That day David and Hope, the one in a pith helmet, the other with a
turquoise ring on her left hand, went to dine with Shelek Pasha, the
Armenian Governor of the province, a man of varied talents, not least of
which was deceit of an artistic kind.  For, being an Armenian, he said he
was a true Christian, and David believed him, though Hope did not; and
being an Oriental, he said he told the truth; and again David believed
him, though Hope did not.  He had a red beard, an eye that glinted red
also, and fat, smooth fingers which kept playing with a string of beads
as though it were a rosary.

As hard as he worked to destroy the Quaker in David, she worked against
him; and she did not fear the end, for she believed in David Hyam of
Framley.  It was Shelek Pasha's influence, persistently and adroitly used
for two years, which made friend David at last put aside for this one day
his Quaker hat.  And the Pasha rejoiced; for, knowing human nature after
a fashion, he understood that when you throw the outer sign away--the
sign to you since your birth, like the fingers of your hand--the inner
grace begins decadence and in due time disappears.

Shelek Pasha had awaited this with Oriental patience, for he was sure
that if David gave way in one thing he would give way in all--and with a
rush, some day.  Now, at last, he had got David and Hope to dine with
him; he had his meshes of deceit around them.

When they came to dinner Shelek Pasha saw the turquoise ring upon the
finger of friend Hope, and this startled him and pleased him.  Here, he
knew, was his greatest enemy where David was concerned, and yet this
pretty Saint Elizabeth was wearing a fine turquoise ring with a poke
bonnet, in a very worldly fashion.  He almost rubbed his eyes, it was so
hard to believe; for time and again he had offered antichi in bracelets,
rings and scarabs, and fine cottons from Beni-Mazar; and had been
promptly and firmly told that the Friends wore no jewelry nor gay attire.
Shelek Pasha, being a Christian--after the Armenian fashion--then desired
to learn of this strange religion, that his own nature might be bettered,
for, alas!  snares for the soul are many in the Orient.  For this Hope
had quietly but firmly referred him to David.

Then he had tried another tack: he had thrown in his interest with her
first school in his mudirieh; he got her Arab teachers from Cairo who
could speak English; he opened the large schoolhouse himself with great
ceremony, and with many kavasses in blue and gold.  He said to himself
that you never could tell what would happen in this world, and it was
well to wait, and to watch the approach of that good angel Opportunity.

With all his devices, however, he could not quite understand Hope, and he
walked warily, lest through his lack of understanding he should, by some
mischance, come suddenly upon a reef, and his plans go shipwreck.  Yet
all the time he laughed in his sleeve, for he foresaw the day when all
this money the Two Strange People were spending in his mudirieh should
become his own.  If he could not get their goods and estates peaceably,
riots were so easy to arrange; he had arranged them before.  Then, when
the Two Strange People had been struck with panic, the Syrian donkey-
market, and the five hundred feddans of American cotton, and the new
schools would be his for a song--or a curse.

When he saw the turquoise ring on the finger of the little Quaker lady he
fancied he could almost hear the accompaniment of the song.  He tore away
tender portions of roasted lamb with his fingers, and crammed them into
his mouth, rejoicing.  With the same greasy fingers he put upon Hope's
plate a stuffed cucumber, and would have added a clammy sweet and a
tumbler of sickly sherbet at the same moment; but Hope ate nothing save a
cake of dourha bread, and drank only a cup of coffee.

Meanwhile, Shelek Pasha talked of the school, of the donkey-market,
the monopoly of which the Khedive had granted David; and of the new
prosperous era opening up in Egypt, due to the cotton David had
introduced as an experiment.  David's heart waxed proud within him that
he had walked out of Framley to the regeneration of a country.  He
likened himself to Joseph, son of Jacob; and at once the fineness of his
first purposes became blunted.

As Shelek Pasha talked on, of schools, of taxes, of laws, of government,
to David, with no hat on--Samson without his hair--Hope's mind was
working as it had never worked before.  She realised what a prodigious
liar Shelek Pasha was; for, talking benignly of equitable administration
as he did, she recalled the dark stories she had heard of rapine and
cruel imprisonment in this same mudirieh.

Suddenly Shelek Pasha saw the dark-blue eyes fastened upon his face
with a curious intentness, a strange questioning; and the blue of the
turquoise on the hand folded over the other in the grey lap did not quite
reassure him.  He stopped talking, and spoke in a low voice to his
kavass, who presently brought a bottle of champagne--a final proof that
Shelek Pasha was not an ascetic or a Turk.  As the bottle was being
opened the Pasha took up his string of beads and began to finger them,
for the blue eyes in the poke bonnet were disconcerting.  He was about to
speak when Hope said, in a clear voice:

"Thee has a strange people beneath thee.  Thee rules by the sword,
or the word of peace, friend?"  The fat, smooth hands fingered the beads
swiftly.  Shelek Pasha was disturbed, as he proved by replying in French
--he had spent years of his youth in France: "Par la force morale,
toujours, madame--by moral force, always," he hastened to add in English.
Then, casting down his eyes with truly Armenian modesty, he continued in
Arabic: "By the word of peace, oh woman of the clear eyes--to whom God
give length of days!"

Shelek Pasha smiled a greasy smile, and held the bottle of champagne over
the glass set for friend David.

Never in his life had David the Quaker tasted champagne.  In his eyes, in
the eyes of Framley, it had been the brew especially prepared by Sheitan
to tempt to ruin the feeble ones of the earth.  But the doublet of
David's mind was all unbraced now; his hat was off, his Quaker drab was
spotted with the grease of a roasted lamb.  He had tasted freedom; he was
near to license now.

He took his hand from the top of the glass, and the amber liquid and the
froth poured in.  At that instant he saw Hope's eyes upon his, he saw her
hand go to the poke bonnet, as it were to unloosen the strings.  He saw
for the first time the turquoise ring; he saw the eyes of Shelek Pasha on
Hope with a look prophesying several kinds of triumph, none palatable to
him; and he stopped short on that road easy of gradient, which Shelek
Pasha was macadamising for him.  He put his hand up as though to pull his
hat down over his eyes, as was his fashion when troubled or when he was
setting his mind to a task.

The hat was not there; but Hope's eyes were on his, and there were a
hundred Quaker hats or Cardinals' hats in them.  He reached out quickly
and caught Hope's hand as it undid the strings of her grey bonnet.  "Will
thee be mad, Hope?"

"All the world's mad but thee and me, David, and thee's a bit mad," she
answered in the tongue of Framley.

"The gaud upon thy hand?" he asked sternly; and his eyes flashed from
her to Shelek Pasha, for a horrible suspicion crept into his brain--a
shameless suspicion; but even a Quaker may be human and foolish, as
history has shown.

"The wine at thine elbow, David, and thine hat!" she answered steadily.

David, the friend of peace, was bitterly angry.  He caught up the glass
of champagne and dashed it upon the fine prayer-rug which Shelek Pasha
had, with a kourbash, collected for taxes from a Greek merchant back from
Tiflis--the rug worth five hundred English pounds, the taxes but twenty
Turkish pounds.

"Thee is a villain, friend," he said to Shelek Pasha in a voice like a
noise in a barrel; "I read thee as a book."

"But through the eyes of your wife, effendi; she read me first--we
understand each other!" answered the Governor with a hateful smile,
knowing the end of one game was at hand, and beginning another instantly
with an intelligent malice.

Against all Quaker principles David's sinful arm was lifted to strike,
but Hope's hand prevented him, and Shelek Pasha motioned back the
Abyssinian slaves who had sprung forward menacingly from behind a screen.

Hope led the outraged David, hatless, into the street.




III

That evening the Two Strange People went to Abdul Huseyn, the jeweller,
and talked with him for more than an hour; for Abdul Huseyn, as Egyptians
go, was a kindly man.  He had taught Arabic to David and Hope.  He would
have asked more than twelve pieces of silver to betray them.

The next afternoon a riot occurred around the house of the Two Strange
People and the school they had built; and Shelek Pasha would have had
his spite of them, and his will of the donkey-market, the school, and
the cotton-fields, but for Abdul Huseyn and three Sheikhs, friends of
his--at a price--who addressed the crowd and quieted them.  They declared
that the Two were mad folk with whom even the English folk would have
naught to do; that they were of those from whom God had taken the souls,
leaving their foolish bodies on earth, and were therefore to be cared for
and protected, as the Koran said, be they infidel or the Faithful.

Furthermore, said Abdul Huseyn, in proof of their madness and a certain
sort of holiness, they wore hats always, as Arabs wore their turbans,
and were as like good Mahommedans as could be, sitting down to speak and
standing up to pray.  He also added that they could not be enemies of the
Faithful, or a Christian Mudir would not have turned against them.  And
Abdul Huseyn prevailed against Shelek Pasha--at a price; for Hope, seeing
no need for martyrdom, had not hesitated to open her purse.

Three days afterward, David, with Abdul Huseyn, went to the Palace of
the Khedive at Cairo, and within a week Shelek Pasha was on his way to
Fazougli, the hot Siberia.  For the rage of the Khedive was great when he
heard what David and Abdul Huseyn told him of the murderous riot Shelek
Pasha had planned.  David, being an honest Quaker--for now again he wore
his shovel hat--did not realise that the Khedive had only hungered for
this chance to confiscate the goods of Shelek Pasha.  Was it not justice
to take for the chosen ruler of the Faithful the goods an Armenian
Christian had stolen from the poor?  Before David left the Palace the
Khedive gave him the Order of the Mejidfeh, in token of what he had done
for Egypt.

In the end, however, David took three things only out of Egypt: his wife,
the Order of the Mejidfeh, and Shelek Pasha's pardon, which he strove for
as hard as he had striven for his punishment, when he came to know the
Khedive had sent the Mudir to Fazougli merely that he might despoil him.
He only achieved this at last, again on the advice of Abdul Huseyn, by
giving the Khedive as backsheesh the Syrian donkey-market, the five
hundred feddans of cotton, and Hope's new school.  Then, believing in no
one in Egypt any more, he himself went with an armed escort and his
Quaker hat, and the Order of the Khedive, to Fazougli, and brought Shelek
Pasha penniless to Cairo.

Nowadays, on the mastaba before his grandson's door, Abdul Huseyn, over
ninety "by the grace of Allah," still tells of the backsheesh he secured
from the Two Strange People for his help on a certain day.

In Framley, where the whole truth never came, David and Hope occasionally
take from a secret drawer the Order of the Mejidfeh to look at it, and,
as David says, to "learn the lesson of Egypt once again."  Having learned
it to some purpose--and to the lifelong edification of old friend
Fairley, the only one who knew the whole truth--they founded three great
schools for Quaker children.  They were wont to say to each other, as the
hurrying world made inroads on the strict Quaker life to which they had
returned: "All the world's mad but thee and me, and thee's a bit mad."




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

All the world's mad but thee and me
He had tasted freedom; he was near to license






DONOVAN PASHA AND SOME PEOPLE OF EGYPT

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.



THE MAN AT THE WHEEL
A TYRANT AND A LADY




THE MAN AT THE WHEEL

Wyndham Bimbashi's career in Egypt had been a series of mistakes.  In the
first place he was opinionated, in the second place he never seemed to
have any luck; and, worst of all, he had a little habit of doing grave
things on his own lightsome responsibility.  This last quality was
natural to him, but he added to it a supreme contempt for the native
mind and an unhealthy scorn of the native official.  He had not that
rare quality, constantly found among his fellow-countrymen, of working
the native up through his own medium, as it were, through his own customs
and predispositions, to the soundness of Western methods of government.
Therefore, in due time he made some dangerous mistakes.  By virtue of
certain high-handed actions he was the cause of several riots in native
villages, and he had himself been attacked at more than one village as he
rode between the fields of sugar-cane.  On these occasions he had behaved
very well--certainly no one could possibly doubt his bravery; but that
was a small offset to the fact that his want of tact and his overbearing
manner had been the means of turning a certain tribe of Arabs loose upon
the country, raiding and killing.

But he could not, or would not, see his own vain stupidity.  The climax
came in a foolish sortie against the Arab tribe he had offended.  In that
unauthorised melee, in covert disobedience to a general order not to
attack, unless at advantage--for the Gippies under him were raw levies--
his troop was diminished by half; and, cut off from the Nile by a flank
movement of the Arabs, he was obliged to retreat and take refuge in the
well-fortified and walled house which had previously been a Coptic
monastery.

Here, at last, the truth came home to Wyndham bimbashi.  He realised that
though in his six years' residence in the land he had acquired a command
of Arabic equal to that of others who had been in the country twice that
time, he had acquired little else.  He awoke to the fact that in his
cock-sure schemes for the civil and military life of Egypt there was
not one element of sound sense; that he had been all along an egregious
failure.  It did not come home to him with clear, accurate conviction--
his brain was not a first-rate medium for illumination; but the facts
struck him now with a blind sort of force; and he accepted the blank
sensation of failure.  Also, he read in the faces of those round him an
alien spirit, a chasm of black misunderstanding which his knowledge of
Arabic could never bridge over.

Here he was, shut up with Gippies who had no real faith in him, in the
house of a Sheikh whose servants would cut his throat on no provocation
at all; and not an eighth of a mile away was a horde of Arabs--a circle
of death through which it was impossible to break with the men in his
command.  They must all die here, if they were not relieved.

The nearest garrison was at Kerbat, sixty miles away, where five hundred
men were stationed.  Now that his cup of mistakes was full, Wyndham
bimbashi would willingly have made the attempt to carry word to the
garrison there.  But he had no right to leave his post.  He called for
a volunteer.  No man responded.  Panic was upon the Gippies.  Though
Wyndham's heart sickened within him, his lips did not frame a word of
reproach; but a blush of shame came into his face, and crept up to his
eyes, dimming them.  For there flashed through his mind what men at home
would think of him when this thing, such an end to his whole career,
was known.  As he stood still, upright and confounded, some one touched
his arm.

It was Hassan, his Soudanese servant.  Hassan was the one person in Egypt
who thoroughly believed in him.  Wyndham was as a god to Hassan, though
this same god had given him a taste of a belt more than once.  Hassan
had not resented the belt, though once, in a moment of affectionate
confidence, he had said to Wyndham that when his master got old and died
he would be the servant of an American or a missionary, "which no whack
Mahommed."

It was Hassan who now volunteered to carry word to the garrison at
Kerbat.

"If I no carry, you whack me with belt, Saadat," said Hassan, whose logic
and reason were like his master's, neither better nor worse.

"If you do, you shall have fifty pounds--and the missionary," answered
Wyndham, his eyes still cloudy and his voice thick; for it touched him in
a tender nerve that this one Soudanese boy should believe in him and do
for him what he would give much to do for the men under him.  For his
own life he did not care--his confusion and shame were so great.

He watched Hassan steal out into the white brilliance of the night.

"Mind you keep a whole skin, Hassan," he said, as the slim lad with the
white teeth, oily hair, and legs like ivory, stole along the wall, to
drop presently on his belly and make for some palm-trees a hundred yards
away.

The minutes went by in silence; an hour went by; the whole night went by;
Hassan had got beyond the circle of trenchant steel.

They must now abide Hassan's fate; but another peril was upon them.
There was not a goolah of water within the walls!

It was the time of low Nile when all the land is baked like a crust of
bread, when the creaking of the shadoofs and the singing croak of the
sakkia are heard the night long like untiring crickets with throats of
frogs.  It was the time succeeding the khamsin, when the skin dries like
slaked lime and the face is for ever powdered with dust; and the
fellaheen, in the slavery of superstition, strain their eyes day and
night for the Sacred Drop, which tells that the flood is flowing fast
from the hills of Abyssinia.

It was like the Egyptian that nothing should be said to Wyndham about the
dearth of water until it was all gone.  The house of the Sheikh, and its
garden, where were a pool and a fountain, were supplied from the great
Persian wheel at the waterside.  On this particular sakkia had been wont
to sit all day a patient fellah, driving the blindfolded buffaloes in
their turn.  It was like the patient fellah, when the Arabs, in pursuit
of Wyndham and his Gippies, suddenly cut in between him and the house, to
deliver himself over to the conqueror, with his hand upon his head in
sign of obedience.

It was also like the gentle Egyptian that he eagerly showed the besiegers
how the water could be cut off from the house by dropping one of the
sluice-gates; while, opening another, all the land around the Arab
encampments might be well watered, the pools well filled, and the grass
kept green for horses and camels.  This was the reason that Wyndham
bimbashi and his Gippies, and the Sheikh and his household, faced the
fact, the morning after Hassan left, that there was scarce a goolah of
water for a hundred burning throats.  Wyndham understood now why the
Arabs sat down and waited, that torture might be added to the oncoming
death of the Englishman, his natives, and the "friendlies."

All that day terror and ghastly hate hung like a miasma over the besieged
house and garden.  Fifty eyes hungered for the blood of Wyndham bimbashi;
not because he was Wyndham bimbashi, but because the heathen in these men
cried out for sacrifice; and what so agreeable a sacrifice as the
Englishman who had led them into this disaster and would die so well
--had they ever seen an Englishman who did not die well?

Wyndham was quiet and watchful, and he cudgelled his bullet-head, and
looked down his long nose in meditation all the day, while his tongue
became dry and thick, and his throat seemed to crack like roasting
leather.  At length he worked the problem out.  Then he took action.

He summoned his troop before him, and said briefly: "Men, we must have
water.  The question is, who is going to steal out to the sakkia to-
night, to shut the one sluice and open the other?"

No one replied.  No one understood quite what Wyndham meant.  Shutting
one sluice and opening the other did not seem to meet the situation.
There was the danger of getting to the sakkia, but there was also an
after.  Would it be possible to shut one sluice and open the other
without the man at the wheel knowing?  Suppose you killed the man at the
wheel--what then?

The Gippies and the friendlies scowled, but did not speak.  The bimbashi
was responsible for all; he was an Englishman, let him get water for
them, or die like the rest of them--perhaps before them!

Wyndham could not travel the sinuosities of their minds, and it would not
have affected his purpose if he could have done so.  When no man replied,
he simply said:

"All right, men.  You shall have water before morning.  Try and hold out
till then."  He dismissed them.  For a long time he walked up and down
the garden of straggling limes, apparently listless, and smoking hard.
He reckoned carefully how long it would take Hassan to get to Kerbat, and
for relief to come.  He was fond of his pipe, and he smoked now as if it
were the thing he most enjoyed in the world.  He held the bowl in the
hollow of his hand almost tenderly.  He seemed unconscious of the
scowling looks around him.  At last he sat down on the ledge of the rude
fountain, with his face towards the Gippies and the Arabs squatted on the
ground, some playing mankalah, others sucking dry lime leaves, many
smoking apathetically.

One man with the flicker of insanity in his eyes suddenly ran forward and
threw himself on the ground before Wyndham.

"In the name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful--water!" he cried.
"Water--I am dying, effendi whom God preserve!"

"Nile water is sweet; you shall drink it before morning, Mahommed,"
answered Wyndham quietly.  "God will preserve your life till the Nile
water cools your throat."

"Before dawn, O effendi?" gasped the Arab.  "Before dawn, by the mercy
of God," answered Wyndham; and for the first time in his life he had a
burst of imagination.  The Orient had touched him at last.

"Is not the song of the sakkia in thine ear, Mahommed?" he said

    "Turn, O Sakkia, turn to the right, and turn to the left.
     The Nile floweth by night and the balasses are filled at dawn--
     The maid of the village shall bear to thy bed the dewy grey
          goolah at dawn
                    Turn, O Sakkia!"

Wyndham was learning at last the way to the native mind.

The man rose from his knees.  A vision of his home in the mirkaz of
Minieh passed before him.  He stretched out his hands, and sang in the
vibrating monotone of his people:

    "Turn, O Sakkia, turn to the right, and turn to the left:
     Who will take care of me, if my father dies?
     Who will give me water to drink, and the cucumber vine at my door--
     Turn, O Sakkia!"

Then he crept back again to the wall of the house, where he huddled
between a Berberine playing a darabukkeh and a man of the Fayoum who
chanted the fatihah from the Koran.

Wyndham looked at them all and pondered.  "If the devils out there would
only attack us," he said between his teeth, "or if we could only attack
them!" he added, and he nervously hastened his footsteps; for to him
this inaction was terrible.  "They'd forget their thirst if they were
fighting," he muttered, and then he frowned; for the painful neighing of
the horses behind the house came to his ear.  In desperation he
went inside and climbed to the roof, where he could see the circle of the
enemy.

It was no use.  They were five to one, and his Gippies were demoralised.
It would be a fine bit of pluck to try and cut his way through the Arabs
to the Nile--but how many would reach it?

No, he had made his full measure of mistakes, he would not add to the
list.  If Hassan got through to Kerbat his Gippies here would no doubt be
relieved, and there would be no more blood on his head.  Relieved?  And
when they were relieved, what of himself, Wyndham bimbashi?  He knew what
men would say in Cairo, what men would say at the War Office in London
town, at "The Rag"--everywhere!  He could not look his future in the
face.  He felt that every man in Egypt, save himself, had known all along
that he was a complete failure.

It did not matter while he himself was not conscious of it; but now that
the armour-plate of conceit protecting his honest mind had been torn away
on the reefs of foolish deeds, it mattered everything.  For when his
conceit was peeled away, there was left a crimson cuticle of the Wyndham
pride.  Certainly he could not attack the Arabs--he had had his eternal
fill of sorties.

Also he could not wait for the relief party, for his Gippies and the
friendlies were famishing, dying of thirst.  He prayed for night.  How
slowly the minutes, the hours passed; and how bright was the moon when it
rose! brighter even than it was when Hassan crept out to steal through
the Arab lines.

                    .....................

At midnight, Wyndham stole softly out of a gate in the garden wall, and,
like Hassan, dropping to the ground, crept towards a patch of maize lying
between the house and the river.  He was dressed like a fellah, with the
long blue yelek, and a poor wool fez, and round the fez was a white
cloth, as it were to protect his mouth from the night air, after the
manner of the peasant.

The fires of the enemy were dying down, and only here and there Arabs
gossiped or drank coffee by the embers.  At last Wyndham was able to drop
into the narrow channel, now dry, through which, when the sluice was open
and the sakkia turned, the water flowed to the house.  All went well till
he was within a hundred yards of the wheel, though now and again he could
hear sentries snoring or talking just above him.  Suddenly he heard
breathing an arm's length before him, then a figure raised itself and a
head turned towards him.  The Arab had been asleep, but his hand ran to
his knife by instinct--too late, for Wyndham's fingers were at his
throat, and he had neither time nor chance to cry Allah!  before the
breath left him.

Wyndham crept on.  The sound of the sakkia was in his ears--the long,
creaking, crying song, filling the night.  And now there arose the Song
of the Sakkia from the man at the wheel:

    "Turn, O Sakkia, turn to the right, and turn to the left;
     The heron feeds by the water side--shall I starve in my onion-field!
     Shall the Lord of the World withhold his tears that water the land--
     Turn, O Sakkia!"

.  .  .  The hard white stars, the cold blue sky, the far-off Libyan
hills in a gold and opal glow, the smell of the desert, the deep swish of
the Nile, the Song of the Sakkia.  .  .  .

Wyndham's heart beat faster, his blood flowed quicker, he strangled a
sigh in his breast.  Here, with death on every hand, with immediate and
fearful peril before him, out of the smell of the desert and the ghostly
glow of the Libyan hills there came a memory--the memory of a mistake he
had made years before with a woman.  She had never forgiven him for the
mistake--he knew it at last.  He knew that no woman could ever forgive
the blunder he had made--not a blunder of love but a blunder of self-will
and an unmanly, unmannerly conceit.  It had nearly wrecked her life: and
he only realised it now, in the moment of clear-seeing which comes to
every being once in a lifetime.  Well, it was something to have seen the
mistake at last.

He had come to the sluice-gate.  It was impossible to open it without the
fellah on the water-wheel seeing him.

There was another way.  He crept close and closer to the wheel.  The
breath of the blindfolded buffalo was in his face, he drew himself up
lightly and quickly beside the buffalo--he was making no blunder now.

Suddenly he leapt from behind the buffalo upon the fellah and smothered
his mouth in the white cloth he had brought.  There was a moment's
struggle, then, as the wheel went slower and slower, and the patient
buffalo stopped, Wyndham dropped the gagged, but living, fellah into a
trench by the sakkia and, calling to the buffalo, slid over swiftly,
opened the sluice-gate of the channel which fed the house, and closed
that leading to the Arab encampment.

Then he sat down where the fellah had sat, and the sakkia droned its
mystic music over the river, the desert, and the plain.  But the buffalo
moved slowly-the fellah's song had been a spur to its travel, as the
camel-driver's song is to the caravan in the waste of sands.  Wyndham
hesitated an instant, then, as the first trickle of water entered the
garden of the house where his Gippies and the friendlies were, his voice
rose in the Song of the Sakkia:

    "Turn, O Sakkia, turn to the right, and turn to the left:
     Who will take care of me, if my father dies?
     Who will give me water to drink, and the cucumber vine at my door
     Turn, O Sakkia!"

If he had but one hour longer there would be enough water for men and
horses for days, twenty jars of water pouring all the time!

Now and again a figure came towards the wheel, but not close enough to
see that the one sluice-gate had been shut and the other opened.  A half-
hour passed, an hour, and then the end came.

The gagged fellah had managed to free his mouth, and though his feet were
bound also and he could not loose them, he gave a loud call for help.
From dying fires here and there Arab sentries sprang to their feet with
rifles and lances.

Wyndham's work was done.  He leapt from the sakkia, and ran towards the
house.  Shot after shot was fired at him, lances were thrown, and once an
Arab barred his way suddenly.  He pistoled him and ran on.  A lance
caught him in the left arm.  He tore it out and pushed forward.  Stooping
once, he caught up a sword from the ground.  When he was within fifty
yards of the house, four Arabs intercepted him.  He slashed through, then
turned with his pistol and fired as he ran quickly towards the now open
gate.  He was within ten yards of it, and had fired his last shot, when a
bullet crashed through his jaw.

A dozen Gippies ran out, dragged him in, and closed the gate.

The last thing Wyndham did before he died in the grey of dawn--and this
is told of him by the Gippies themselves-was to cough up the bullet from
his throat, and spit it out upon the ground.  The Gippies thought it a
miraculous feat, and that he had done it in scorn of the Arab foe.

Before another sunrise and sunset had come, Wyndham bimbashi's men were
relieved by the garrison of Kerbat, after a hard fight.

There are Englishmen in Egypt who still speak slightingly of Wyndham
bimbashi, but the British officer who buried him hushed a gossiping
dinner-party a few months ago in Cairo by saying:

         "Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that's gone,
            And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him;
          But little he'll reek, if they let him sleep on
            In the grave where his Gippies have laid him."

And he did not apologise for paraphrasing the famous ballad.  He has
shamed Egypt at last into admiration for Wyndham bimbashi: to the deep
satisfaction of Hassan, the Soudanese boy, who received his fifty pounds,
and to this day wears the belt which once kept him in the narrow path of
duty.






A TYRANT AND A LADY

When Donovan Pasha discovered the facts for the first time, he found more
difficulty in keeping the thing to himself than he had ever found with
any other matter in Egypt.  He had unearthed one of those paradoxes which
make for laughter--and for tears.  It gave him both; he laughed till he
cried.  Then he went to the Khedivial Club and ordered himself four
courses, a pint of champagne and a glass of '48 port, his usual dinner
being one course, double portion, and a pint of claret.  As he sat eating
he kept reading a letter over and over, and each time he read he grinned
--he did not smile like a well-behaved man of the world, he did not
giggle like a well-veneered Egyptian back from Paris, he chuckled
like a cabman responding to a liberal fare and a good joke.  A more
unconventional little man never lived.  Simplicity was his very life,
and yet he had a gift for following the sinuosities of the Oriental mind;
he had a quality almost clairvoyant, which came, perhaps, from his Irish
forebears.  The cross-strain of English blood had done him good too; it
made him punctilious and kept his impulses within secure bounds.  It also
made him very polite when he was angry, and very angry when any one tried
to impose upon him, or flatter him.

The letter he read so often was from Kingsley Bey, the Englishman, who,
coming to Egypt penniless, and leaving estates behind him encumbered
beyond release, as it would seem, had made a fortune and a name in a
curious way.  For years he had done no good for himself, trying his hand
at many things--sugar, salt, cotton, cattle, but always just failing to
succeed, though he came out of his enterprises owing no one.  Yet he had
held to his belief that he would make a fortune, and he allowed his
estates to become still more encumbered, against the advice of his
solicitors, who grew more irritable as interest increased and rents
further declined.  The only European in Egypt who shared his own belief
in himself was Dicky Donovan.  Something in the unfailing good-humour,
the buoyant energy, the wide imagination of the man seized Dicky,
warranted the conviction that he would yet make a success.  There were
reasons why sugar, salt, cotton, cattle and other things had not done
well.  Taxes, the corvee, undue influence in favour of pashas who could
put his water on their land without compensation, or unearthed old unpaid
mortgages on his land, or absorbed his special salt concession in the
Government monopoly, or suddenly put a tax on all horses and cattle not
of native breed; all these and various other imposts, exactions, or
interferences engineered by the wily Mamour, the agent of the mouffetish,
or the intriguing Pasha, killed his efforts, in spite of labours
unbelievable.  The venture before the last had been sugar, and when he
arrived in Cairo, having seen his fields and factories absorbed in the
Khedive's domains, he had but one ten pounds to his name.

He went to Dicky Donovan and asked the loan of a thousand pounds.  It
took Dicky's breath away.  His own banking account seldom saw a thousand
--deposit.  Dicky told Kingsley he hadn't got it.  Kingsley asked him to
get it--he had credit, could borrow it from the bank, from the Khedive
himself!  The proposal was audacious--Kingsley could offer no security
worth having.  His enthusiasm and courage were so infectious, however,
though his ventures had been so fruitless, that Dicky laughed in his
face.  Kingsley's manner then suddenly changed, and he assured Dicky
that he would receive five thousand pounds for the thousand within a
year.  Now, Dicky knew that Kingsley never made a promise to any one that
he did not fulfil.  He gave Kingsley the thousand pounds.  He did more.
He went to the Khedive with Kingsley's whole case.  He spoke as he had
seldom spoken, and he secured a bond from Ismail, which might not be
broken.  He also secured three thousand pounds of the Khedive's
borrowings from Europe, on Kingsley's promise that it should be returned
five-fold.

That was how Kingsley got started in the world again, how he went mining
in the desert afar, where pashas and mamours could not worry him.  The
secret of his success was purely Oriental.  He became a slave-owner.  He
built up a city of the desert round him.  He was its ruler.  Slavery gave
him steady untaxed labour.  A rifle-magazine gave him security against
marauding tribes, his caravans were never over powered; his blacks were
his own.  He had a way with them; they thought him the greatest man in
the world.  Now, at last, he was rich enough.  His mines were worked out,
too, and the market was not so good; he had supplied it too well.
Dicky's thousand had brought him five thousand, and Ismail's three
thousand had become fifteen thousand, and another twenty thousand
besides.  For once the Khedive had found a kind of taxation, of which he
got the whole proceeds, not divided among many as heretofore.  He got it
all.  He made Kingsley a Bey, and gave him immunity from all other
imposts or taxation.  Nothing but an Egyptian army could have removed him
from his desert-city.

Now, he was coming back--to-night at ten o'clock he would appear at the
Khedivial Club, the first time in seven years.  But this was not all.  He
was coming back to be married as soon as might be.

This was the thing which convulsed Dicky.

Upon the Nile at Assiout lived a young English lady whose life was
devoted to agitation against slavery in Egypt.  Perhaps the Civil War in
America, not so many years before, had fired her spirit; perhaps it was
pious enthusiasm; perhaps it was some altruistic sentiment in her which
must find expression; perhaps, as people said, she had had a love affair
in England which had turned out badly.  At any rate she had come over to
Egypt with an elderly companion, and, after a short stay at the
Consulate, had begun the career of the evangel.  She had now and then
created international difficulty, and Ismail, tolerant enough, had been
tempted to compel her to leave the country, but, with a zeal which took
on an aspect of self-opinionated audacity, she had kept on.  Perhaps her
beauty helped her on her course--perhaps the fact that her superb egotism
kept her from being timorous, made her career possible.  In any case,
there she was at Assiout, and there she had been for years, and no
accident had come to her; and, during the three months she was at
Cairo every year, pleading against slavery and the corvee, she increased
steadily the respect in which she was held; but she was considered mad as
Gordon.  So delighted had Ismail been by a quiet, personal attack she
made upon him, that without malice, and with an obtuse and impulsive
kindness, he sent her the next morning a young Circassian slave, as a
mark of his esteem, begging her through the swelling rhetoric of his
messenger to keep the girl, and more than hinting at her value.  It
stupefied her, and the laughter of Cairo added to her momentary
embarrassment; but she kept the girl, and prepared to send her back
to her people.

The girl said she had no people, and would not go; she would stay with
"My Lady"--she would stay for ever with "My Lady."  It was confusing, but
the girl stayed, worshipping the ground "My Lady" walked on.  In vain My
Lady educated her.  Out of hearing, she proudly told whoever would listen
that she was "My Lady's slave."  It was an Egyptian paradox; it was in
line with everything else in the country, part of the moral opera boufe.

In due course, the lady came to hear of the English slave-owner, who
ruled the desert-city and was making a great fortune out of the labours
of his slaves.  The desert Arabs who came down the long caravan road,
white with bleached bones, to Assiout, told her he had a thousand slaves.
Against this Englishman her anger, was great.  She unceasingly condemned
him, and whenever she met Dicky Donovan she delivered her attack with
delicate violence.  Did Dicky know him?  Why did not he, in favour with
Ismail, and with great influence, stop this dreadful and humiliating
business?  It was a disgrace to the English name.  How could we preach
freedom and a higher civilisation to the Egyptians while an Englishman
enriched himself and ruled a province by slavery?  Dicky's invariable
reply was that we couldn't, and that things weren't moving very much
towards a higher civilisation in Egypt.  But he asked her if she ever
heard of a slave running away from Kingsley Bey, or had she ever heard
of a case of cruelty on his part?  Her reply was that he had given slaves
the kourbash, and had even shot them.  Dicky thereupon suggested that
Kingsley Bey was a government, and that the kourbash was not yet
abolished in the English navy, for instance; also that men had to be shot
sometimes.

At last she had made a direct appeal to Kingsley Bey.  She sent an
embassy to him--Dicky prevented her from going herself; he said he would
have her deported straightway, if she attempted it.  She was not in such
deadly earnest that she did not know he would keep his word, and that the
Consulate could not help her would have no time to do so.  So, she
confined herself to an elaborate letter, written in admirable English and
inspired by most noble sentiments.  The beauty that was in her face was
in her letter in even a greater degree.  It was very adroit, too, very
ably argued, and the moral appeal was delicate and touching, put with an
eloquence at once direct and arresting.  The invocation with which the
letter ended was, as Kingsley Bey afterwards put it, "a pitch of poetry
and humanity never reached except by a Wagner opera."

Kingsley Bey's response to the appeal was a letter to the lady, brought
by a sarraf, a mamour and six slaves, beautifully mounted and armed,
saying that he had been deeply moved by her appeal, and as a proof of the
effect of her letter, she might free the six slaves of his embassy.  This
she straightway did joyfully, and when they said they wished to go to
Cairo, she saw them and their horses off on the boat with gladness, and
she shook them each by the hand and prayed Heaven in their language to
give them long plumes of life and happiness.  Arrived at Cairo these
freemen of Assiout did as they had been ordered by Kingsley--found
Donovan Pasha, delivered a certain letter to him, and then proceeded,
also as they had been ordered, to a certain place in the city, even to
Ismail's stables, to await their master's coming.

This letter was now in Dicky's hand, and his mirth was caused by the
statement that Kingsley Bey had declared that he was coming to marry My
Lady--she really was "My Lady," the Lady May Harley; that he was coming
by a different route from "his niggers," and would be there the same day.
Dicky would find him at ten o'clock at the Khedivial Club.

My Lady hated slavery--and unconsciously she kept a slave; she regarded
Kingsley Bey as an enemy to civilisation and to Egypt, she detested him
as strongly as an idealistic nature could and should--and he had set out
to marry her, the woman who had bitterly arraigned him at the bar of her
judgment.  All this play was in Dicky's hands for himself to enjoy, in a
perfect dress rehearsal ere ever one of the Cairene public or the English
world could pay for admission and take their seats.  Dicky had in more
senses than one got his money's worth out of Kingsley Bey.  He wished he
might let the Khedive into the secret at once, for he had an opinion of
Ismail's sense of humour; had he not said that very day in the presence
of the French Consul, "Shut the window, quick!  If the consul sneezes,
France will demand compensation!"  But Dicky was satisfied that things
should be as they were.  He looked at the clock--it was five minutes to
ten.  He rose from the table, and went to the smoking-room.  In vain it
was sought to draw him into the friendly circles of gossiping idlers and
officials.  He took a chair at the very end of the room and opposite the
door, and waited, watching.

Precisely at ten the door opened and a tall, thin, loose-knit figure
entered.  He glanced quickly round, saw Dicky, and swung down the room,
nodding to men who sprang to their feet to greet him.  Some of the
Egyptians looked darkly at him, but he smiled all round, caught at one or
two hands thrust out to him, said: "Business--business first!" in a deep
bass voice, and, hastening on, seized both of Dicky's hands in his, then
his shoulders, and almost roared: "Well, what do you think of it?  Isn't
it all right?  Am I, or am I not, Dicky Pasha?"

"You very much are," answered Dicky, thrust a cigar at him, and set him
down in the deepest chair he could find.  He sprawled wide, and lighted
his cigar, then lay back and looked down his long nose at his friend.

"I mean it, too," he said after a minute, and reached for a glass of
water the waiter brought.  "No, thanks, no whiskey--never touch it--good
example to the slaves!"  He laughed long and low, and looked at Dicky out
of the corner of his eye.  "Good-looking lot I sent you, eh?"

"Oosters, every one of 'em.  Butter wouldn't melt in their mouths.  I
learnt their grin, it suits my style of beauty."  Dicky fitted the action
to the word.  "You'll start with me in the morning to Assiout?"

"I can start, but life and time are short."

"You think I can't and won't marry her?"

"This isn't the day of Lochinvar."

"This is the day of Kingsley Bey, Dicky Pasha."

Dicky frowned.  He had a rare and fine sense where women were concerned,
were they absent or present.  "How very artless--and in so short a time,
too!" he said tartly.

Kingsley laughed quietly.  "Art is long, but tempers are short!" he
retorted.

Dicky liked a Roland for his Oliver.  "It's good to see you back again,"
he said, changing the subject.

"How long do you mean to stay?"

"Here?" Dicky nodded.  "Till I'm married."

Dicky became very quiet, a little formal, and his voice took on a curious
smoothness, through which sharp suggestion pierced.

"So long?--Enter our Kingsley Bey into the underground Levantine world."

This was biting enough.  To be swallowed up by Cairo life and all that it
involves, was no fate to suggest to an Englishman, whose opinion of the
Levantine needs no defining.  "Try again, Dicky," said Kingsley, refusing
to be drawn.  "This is not one huge joke, or one vast impertinence, so
far as the lady is concerned.  I've come back-b-a-c-k" (he spelled the
word out), "with all that it involves.  I've come back, Dicky."

He quieted all at once, and leaned over towards his friend.  "You know
the fight I've had.  You know the life I've lived in Egypt.  You know
what I left behind me in England--nearly all.  You've seen the white man
work.  You've seen the black ooster save him.  You've seen the ten-times-
a-failure pull out.  Have I played the game?  Have I acted squarely?
Have I given kindness for kindness, blow for blow?  Have I treated my
slaves like human beings?  Have I--have I won my way back to life--life?"
He spread out a hand with a little grasping motion.  "Have I saved the
old stand off there in Cumberland by the sea, where you can see the snow
on Skaw Fell?  Have I?  Do you wonder that I laugh?  Ye gods and little
fishes!  I've had to wear a long face years enough--seven hard years,
seven fearful years, when I might be murdered by a slave, and I and my
slaves might be murdered by some stray brigade, under some general of
Ismail's, working without orders, without orders, of course--oh, very
much of course!  Why shouldn't I play the boy to-day, little Dicky
Donovan?  I am a Mahommedan come Christian again.  I am a navvy again
come gentleman.  I am an Arab come Englishman once more.

"I am an outcast come home.  I am a dead man come to life."

Dicky leaned over and laid a hand on his knee.  "You are a credit to
Cumberland," he said.  "No other man could have done it.  I won't ask any
more questions.  Anything you want of me, I am with you, to do, or say,
or be."

"Good.  I want you to go to Assiout to-morrow."

"Will you see Ismail first?  It might be safer--good policy."

"I will see My Lady first.  .  .  .  Trust me.  I know what I'm doing.
You will laugh as I do."  Laughter broke from his lips.  It was as though
his heart was ten years old.  Dicky's eyes moistened.  He had never seen
anything like it--such happiness, such boyish confidence.  And what had
not this man experienced!  How had he drunk misfortune to the dregs!
What unbelievable optimism had been his!  How had he been at once hard
and kind, tyrannical and human, defiant and peaceful, daring yet
submissive, fierce yet just!  And now, here, with so much done, with a
great fortune and great power, a very boy, he was planning to win the
heart of, and marry, his avowed foe, the woman who had condemned him
without stint.




II

On her wide veranda, a stone's-throw from the banks of the Nile, My Lady
sat pen in hand and paper-pad upon her knee.  She had written steadily
for an hour, and now she raised her head to look out on the swift-
flowing, muddy water, where broad khiassas floated down the stream, laden
with bersim; where feluccas covered the river, bearing natives and
donkeys; where faithful Moslems performed their ablutions, and other
faithful Moslems, their sandals laid aside, said their prayers with their
faces towards Mecca, oblivious of all around; where blue-robed women
filled their goolahs with water, and bore them away, steady and stately;
where a gang of conscripts, chained ankle to ankle, followed by a crowd
of weeping and wailing women, were being driven to the anchorage of the
stern-wheeled transport-steamer.  All these sights she had seen how many
hundred times!  To her it was all slavery.  The laden khiassas
represented the fruits of enforced labour; the ablutions and prayers were
but signs of submission to the tyranny of a religion designed for the
benefit of the few at the expense of the many, a creed and code of gross
selfishness--were not women only admitted to Heaven by the intercession
of their husbands and after unceasing prayer?  Whether beasts of burden,
the girl with the goolah, women in the harem, or servants of pleasure,
they were all in the bonds of slavery, and the land was in moral
darkness.  So it seemed to her.

How many times had she written these things in different forms and to
different people--so often, too often, to the British Consul at Cairo,
whose patience waned.  At first, the seizure of conscripts, with all that
it involved, had excited her greatly.  It had required all her common-
sense to prevent her, then and there, protesting, pleading, with the
kavass, who did the duty of Ismail's Sirdar.  She had confined herself,
however, to asking for permission to give the men cigarettes and
slippers, dates and bread, and bags of lentils for soup.  Even this was
not unaccompanied by danger, for the Mahommedan mind could not at first
tolerate the idea of a lady going unveiled; only fellah women, domestic
cattle, bared their faces to the world.  The conscripts, too, going to
their death--for how few of them ever returned?--leaving behind all hope,
all freedom, passing to starvation and cruelty, at last to be cut down by
the Arab, or left dying of illness in the desert, they took her gifts
with sullen faces.  Her beautiful freedom was in such contrast to their
torture, slavery of a direful kind.  But as again and again the kavasses
came and opened midnight doors and snatched away the young men, her
influence had grown so fast that her presence brought comfort, and she
helped to assuage the grief of the wailing women.  She even urged upon
them that philosophy of their own, which said "Malaish" to all things--
the "It is no matter," of the fated Hamlet.  In time she began to be
grateful that an apathetic resignation, akin to the quiet of despair,
was the possession of their race.  She was far from aware that something
in their life, of their philosophy, was affecting her understanding.
She had a strong brain and a stronger will, but she had a capacity for
feeling greater still, and this gave her imagination, temperament, and--
though it would have shocked her to know it--a certain credulity, easily
transmutable into superstition.  Yet, as her sympathies were, to some
extent, rationalised by stern fact and everlasting custom, her opposition
to some things became more active and more fervid.

Looking into the distance, she saw two or three hundred men at work on a
canal, draining the property of Selamlik Pasha, whose tyrannies,
robberies, and intrigues were familiar to all Egypt, whose palaces were
almost as many as those of the notorious Mouffetish.  These men she saw
now working in the dread corvee had been forced from their homes by a
counterfeit Khedivial order.  They had been compelled to bring their own
tools, and to feed and clothe and house themselves, without pay or
reward, having left behind them their own fields untilled, their own
dourha unreaped, their date-palms, which the tax-gatherer confiscated.
Many and many a time--unless she was prevented, and this at first had
been often--she had sent food and blankets to these poor creatures who,
their day's work done, prayed to God as became good Mahommedans, and,
without covering, stretched themselves out on the bare ground to sleep.

It suggested that other slavery, which did not hide itself under the
forms of conscription and corvee.  It was on this slavery her mind had
been concentrated, and against it she had turned her energies and her
life.  As she now sat, pen in hand, the thought of how little she had
done, how futile had been all her crusade, came to her.  Yet there was,
too, a look of triumph in her eyes.  Until three days ago she had seen
little result from her labours.  Then had come a promise of better
things.  From the Englishman, against whom she had inveighed, had been
sent an olive branch, a token--of conversion?  Had he not sent six slaves
for her to free, and had she not freed them?  That was a step.  She
pictured to herself this harsh expatriated adventurer, this desert ruler,
this slave-holder--had he been a slave-dealer she could herself have
gladly been his executioner--surrounded by his black serfs, receiving her
letter.  In her mind's eye she saw his face flush as he read her burning
phrases, then turn a little pale, then grow stern.

She saw him, after a sleepless night, haunted by her warnings, her appeal
to his English manhood.  She saw him rise, meditative and relenting, and
send forthwith these slaves for her to free.  Her eye glistened again,
as it had shone while she had written of this thing to the British Consul
at Cairo, to her father in England, who approved of her sympathies and
lamented her actions.  Had her crusade been altogether fruitless, she
asked herself.  Ismail's freed Circassian was in her household, being
educated like an English girl, lifted out of her former degradation, made
to understand "a higher life"; and yesterday she had sent away six
liberated slaves, with a gold-piece each, as a gift from a free woman to
free men.  It seemed to her for a moment now, as she sat musing and
looking, that her thirty years of life had not been--rather, might not
be-in vain.

There was one other letter she would write--to Donovan Pasha, who had not
been ardent in her cause, yet who might have done so much through his
influence with Ismail, who, it was said, liked him better than any
Englishman he had known, save Gordon.  True, Donovan Pasha had steadily
worked for the reduction of the corvee, and had, in the name of the
Khedive, steadily reduced private corvee, but he had never set his face
against slavery, save to see that no slave-dealing was permitted below
Assouan.  Yet, with her own eyes she had seen Abyssinian slaves sold
in the market-place of Assiout.  True, when she appealed to him, Donovan
Pasha had seen to it that the slave-dealers were severely punished, but
the fact remained that he was unsympathetic on the large issue.  When
appealed to, the British Consul had petulantly told her that Donovan
Pasha was doing more important work.  Yet she could only think of England
as the engine of civilisation, as an evangelising power, as the John the
Baptist of the nations--a country with a mission.  For so beautiful a
woman, of so worldly a stock, of a society so in the front of things, she
had some Philistine notions, some quite middle-class ideals.  It was like
a duchess taking to Exeter Hall; but few duchesses so afflicted had been
so beautiful and so young, so much of the worldly world--her father was
high in the household of an illustrious person.  .  .  .  If she could
but make any headway against slavery--she had as disciples ten Armenian
pashas, several wealthy Copts, a number of Arab sheikhs, and three
Egyptian princes, sympathetic rather than active--perhaps, through her
father, she might be able to move the illustrious person, and so, in
time, the Government of England.

It was a delightful dream--the best she had imagined for many a day.  She
was roused from it by the scream of a whistle, and the hoonch-hoonch of a
sternwheel steamer.  A Government boat was hastening in to the bank,
almost opposite her house.  She picked up the field-glass from the
window-sill behind her, and swept the deck of the steamer.  There were
two figures in English dress, though one wore the tarboosh.  The figure
shorter and smaller than the other she recognised.  This was Donovan
Pasha.  She need not write her letter to him, then.  He would be sure to
visit her.  Disapprove of him as she did from one stand-point, he always
excited in her feelings of homesickness, of an old life, full of
interests--music, drama, art, politics, diplomacy, the court, the
hunting-field, the quiet house-party.  He troubled her in a way too,
for his sane certainty, set against her aspiring credulity, arrested,
even commanded, her sometimes.

Instinctively she put out her hand to gather in flying threads of hair,
she felt at the pearl fastening of her collar, she looked at her brown
shoes and her dress, and was satisfied.  She was spotless.  And never had
her face shone--really shone--to such advantage.  It had not now the
brilliant colours of the first years.  The climate, her work in hospital
building, her labours against slavery, had touched her with a little
whiteness.  She was none the less good to see.

Who was this striding along with Donovan Pasha, straight towards her
house?  No one she had ever seen in Egypt, and yet in manner like some
one she had seen before--a long time before.  Her mind flashed back
through the years to the time when she was a girl, and visited old
friends of her father in a castle looking towards Skaw Fell, above the
long valley of the Nidd.  A kind of mist came before her eyes now.

When she really saw again, they were at the steps of the veranda, and
Donovan Pasha's voice was greeting her.  Then, as, without a word but
with a welcoming smile, she shook hands with Dicky, her look was held,
first by a blank arrest of memory, then by surprise.

Dicky turned for his office of introduction but was stayed by the look
of amusement in his friend's face, and by the amazed recognition in that
of My Lady.  He stepped back with an exclamation, partly of chagrin.
He saw that this recognition was no coincidence, so far as the man was
concerned, though the woman had been surprised in a double sense.  He
resented the fact that Kingsley Bey had kept this from him--he had the
weakness of small-statured men and of diplomatic people who have
reputations for knowing and doing.  The man, all smiling, held out his
hand, and his look was quizzically humorous as he said:

"You scarcely looked to see me here, Lady May?"  Her voice trembled with
pleasure.  "No, of course.  When did you come, Lord Selden?  .  .  .
Won't you sit down?"

That high green terrace of Cumberland, the mist on Skaw Fell, the sun out
over the sea, they were in her eyes.  So much water had gone under the
bridges since!

"I was such a young girl then--in short frocks--it was a long time ago,
I fear," she added, as if in continuation of the thought flashing through
her mind.  "Let me see," she went on fearlessly; "I am thirty; that was
thirteen years ago."

"I am thirty-seven, and still it is thirteen years ago."

"You look older, when you don't smile," she added, and glanced at his
grey hair.

He laughed now.  She was far, far franker than she was those many years
ago, and it was very agreeable and refreshing.  "Donovan, there, reproved
me last night for frivolity," he said.

"If Donovan Pasha has become grave, then there is hope for Egypt," she
said, turning to Dicky with a new brightness.

"When there's hope for Egypt, I'll have lost my situation, and there'll
be reason for drawing a long face," said Dicky, and got the two at such
an angle that he could watch them to advantage.  "I thrive while it's
opera boufe.  Give us the legitimate drama, and I go with Ismail."

The lady shrank a little.  "If it weren't you, Donovan Pasha, I should
say that, associated with Ismail, as you are, you are as criminal as he."

"What is crime in one country, is virtue in another," answered Dicky.
"I clamp the wheel sometimes to keep it from spinning too fast.  That's
my only duty.  I am neither Don Quixote nor Alexander Imperator."

She thought he was referring obliquely to the corvee and the other thing
in which her life-work was involved.  She became severe.  "It is
compromising with evil," she said.

"No.  It's getting a breakfast-roll instead of the whole bakery," he
answered.

"What do you think?" she exclaimed, turning to Kingsley.

"I think there's one man in Egypt who keeps the boiler from bursting," he
answered.

"Oh, don't think I undervalue his Excellency here," she said with a
little laugh.  "It is because he is strong, because he matters so much,
that one feels he could do more.  Ismail thinks there is no one like him
in the world."

"Except Gordon," interrupted Kingsley.

"Except Gordon, of course; only Gordon isn't in Egypt.  And he would do
no good in Egypt.  The officials would block his way.  It is only in the
Soudan that he could have a free hand, be of real use.  There, a man, a
real man, like Gordon, could show the world how civilisation can be
accepted by desert races, despite a crude and cruel religion and low
standards of morality."

"All races have their social codes--what they call civilisation,"
rejoined Kingsley.  "It takes a long time to get custom out of the blood,
especially when it is part of the religion.  I'm afraid that expediency
isn't the motto of those who try to civilise the Orient and the East."

"I believe in struggling openly for principle," she observed a little
acidly.

"Have you succeeded?" he asked, trying to keep his gravity.  "How about
your own household, for instance?  Have you Christianised and civilised
your people--your niggers, and the others?"

She flushed indignantly, but held herself in control.  She rang a bell.
"I have no 'niggers,'" she answered quietly.  "I have some Berberine
servants, two fellah boatmen, an Egyptian gardener, an Arab cook, and a
Circassian maid.  They are, I think, devoted to me."

A Berberine servant appeared.  "Tea, Mahommed," she said.  "And tell
Madame that Donovan Pasha is here.  My cousin admires his Excellency so
much," she added to Kingsley, laughing.  "I have never had any real
trouble with them," she continued with a little gesture of pride towards
the disappearing Berberine.

"There was the Armenian," put in Dicky slyly; "and the Copt sarraf.  They
were no credit to their Christian religion, were they?"

"That was not the fault of the religion, but of the generations of
oppression--they lie as a child lies, to escape consequences.  Had they
not been oppressed they would have been good Christians in practice as in
precept."

"They don't steal as a child steals," laughed Dicky.

"Armenians are Oriental through and through.  They no more understand the
Christian religion than the Soudanese understand freedom."

He touched the right note this time.  Kingsley flashed a half-startled,
half-humorous look at him; the face of the lady became set, her manner
delicately frigid.  She was about to make a quiet, severe reply, but
something overcame her, and her eyes, her face, suddenly glowed.  She
leaned forward, her hands clasped tightly on her knees--Kingsley could
not but note how beautiful and brown they were, capable, handsome,
confident hands--and, in a voice thrilling with feeling, said:

"What is there in the life here that gets into the eyes of Europeans and
blinds them?  The United States spent scores of thousands of lives to
free the African slave.  England paid millions, and sacrificed ministries
and men, to free the slave; and in England, you--you, Donovan Pasha, and
men like you, would be in the van against slavery.  Yet here, where
England has more influence than any other nation--"

"More power, not influence," Dicky interrupted smiling.

"Here, you endure, you encourage, you approve of it.  Here, an Englishman
rules a city of slaves in the desert and grows rich out of their labour.
What can we say to the rest of the world, while out there in the desert"
--her eyes swept over the grey and violet hills--"that man, Kingsley Bey,
sets at defiance his race, his country, civilisation, all those things in
which he was educated?  Egypt will not believe in English civilisation,
Europe will not believe in her humanity and honesty, so long as he
pursues his wicked course."

She turned with a gesture of impatience, and in silence began to pour the
tea the servant had brought, with a message that Madame had a headache.
Kingsley Bey was about to speak--it was so unfair to listen, and she
would forgive this no more readily than she would forgive slavery.  Dicky
intervened, however.

"He isn't so black as he's painted, personally.  He's a rash, inflammable
sort of fellow, who has a way with the native--treats him well, too,
I believe.  Very flamboyant, doomed to failure, so far as his merit is
concerned, but with an incredible luck.  He gambled, and he lost a dozen
times; and then gambled again, and won.  That's the truth, I fancy.  No
real stuff in him whatever."

Their hostess put down her tea-cup, and looked at Dicky in blank
surprise.  Not a muscle in his face moved.  She looked at Kingsley.  He
had difficulty in restraining himself, but by stooping to give her fox-
terrier a piece of cake, he was able to conceal his consternation.

"I cannot--cannot believe it," she said slowly.  "The British Consul does
not speak of him like that."

"He is a cousin of the Consul," urged Dicky.  "Cousin--what cousin?  I
never heard--he never told me that."

"Oh, nobody tells anything in Egypt, unless he's kourbashed or thumb-
screwed.  It's safer to tell nothing, you know."

"Cousin!  I didn't know there were Kingsleys in that family.  What reason
could the Consul have for hiding the relationship?"

"Well, I don't know, you must ask Kingsley.  Flamboyant and garrulous as
he is, he probably won't tell you that."

"If I saw Kingsley Bey, I should ask him questions which interest me
more.  I should prefer, however, to ask them through a lawyer--to him in
the prisoner's dock."

"You dislike him intensely?"

"I detest him for what he has done; but I do not despise him as you
suggest I should.  Flamboyant, garrulous--I don't believe that.  I think
him, feel him, to be a hard man, a strong man, and a bad man--if not
wholly bad."

"Yet you would put him in the prisoner's dock," interposed Kingsley
musingly, and wondering how he was to tell her that Lord Selden and
Kingsley Bey were one and the same person.

"Certainly.  A man who commits public wrongs should be punished.  Yet I
am sorry that a man so capable should be so inhuman."

"Your grandfather was inhuman," put in Kingsley.  "He owned great West
Indian slave properties.

"He was culpable, and should have been punished--and was; for we are all
poor at last.  The world has higher, better standards now, and we should
live up to them.  Kingsley Bey should live up to them."

"I suppose we might be able to punish him yet," said Dicky meditatively.
"If Ismail turned rusty, we could soon settle him, I fancy.  Certainly,
you present a strong case."  He peered innocently into the distance.

"But could it be done--but would you?" she asked, suddenly leaning
forward.  "If you would, you could--you could!"

"If I did it at all, if I could make up my mind to it, it should be done
thoroughly--no half measures."

"What would be the whole measures?" she asked eagerly, but with a
certain faint shrinking, for Dicky seemed cold-blooded.

"Of course you never could tell what would happen when Ismail throws the
slipper.  This isn't a country where things are cut and dried, and done
according to Hoyle.  You get a new combination every time you pull a
string.  Where there's no system and a thousand methods you have to run
risks.  Kingsley Bey might get mangled in the machinery."

She shrank a little.  "It is all barbarous."

"Well, I don't know.  He is guilty, isn't he?  You said you would like to
see him in the prisoner's dock.  You would probably convict him of
killing as well as slavery.  You would torture him with prison, and then
hang him in the end.  Ismail would probably get into a rage--pretended,
of course--and send an army against him.  Kingsley would make a fight for
it, and lose his head--all in the interest of a sudden sense of duty on
the part of the Khedive.  All Europe would applaud--all save England, and
what could she do?  Can she defend slavery?  There'll be no kid-gloved
justice meted out to Kingsley by the Khedive, if he starts a campaign
against him.  He will have to take it on the devil's pitchfork.  You must
be logical, you know.

"You can't have it both ways.  If he is to be punished, it must be after
the custom of the place.  This isn't England."

She shuddered slightly, and Dicky went on: "Then, when his head's off,
and his desert-city and his mines are no more, and his slaves change
masters, comes a nice question.  Who gets his money?  Not that there's
any doubt about who'll get it, but, from your standpoint, who should get
it?"

She shook her head in something like embarrassment.

"Money got by slavery--yes, who should get it?" interposed Kingsley
carefully, for her eyes had turned to him for help.  "Would you favour
his heirs getting it?  Should it go to the State?  Should it go to the
slaves?  Should it go to a fund for agitation against slavery?  .  .  .
You, for instance, could make use of a fortune like his in a cause like
that, could you not?" he asked with what seemed boyish simplicity.

The question startled her.  "I--I don't know.  .  .  .  But certainly
not," she hastened to add; "I couldn't touch the money.  It is absurd--
impossible."

"I can't see that," steadily persisted Kingsley.  "This money was made
out of the work of slaves.  Certainly they were paid--they were, weren't
they?" he asked with mock ignorance, turning to Dicky, who nodded assent.
"They were paid wages by Kingsley--in kind, I suppose, but that's all
that's needed in a country like the Soudan.  But still they had to work,
and their lives and bodies were Kingsley's for the time being, and the
fortune wouldn't have been made without them; therefore, according to the
most finely advanced theories of labour and ownership, the fortune is
theirs as much as Kingsley's.  But, in the nature of things, they
couldn't have the fortune.  What would they do with it?  Wandering tribes
don't need money.  Barter and exchange of things in kind is the one form
of finance in the Soudan.  Besides, they'd cut each other's throats the
very first day they got the fortune, and it would strew the desert sands.
It's all illogical and impossible--"

"Yes, yes, I quite see that," she interposed.

"But you surely can see how the fortune could be applied to saving those
races from slavery.  What was wrung from the few by forced labour and
loss of freedom could be returned to the many by a sort of national
salvation.  You could spend the fortune wisely--agents and missionaries
everywhere; in the cafes, in the bazaars, in the palace, at court.
Judicious gifts: and, at last, would come a firman or decree putting down
slavery, on penalty of death.  The fortune would all go, of course, but
think of the good accomplished!"

"You mean that the fortune should be spent in buying the decree--in
backsheesh?" she asked bewildered, yet becoming indignant.

"Well, it's like company promoting," Dicky interposed, hugely enjoying
the comedy, and thinking that Kingsley had put the case shrewdly.  It was
sure to confuse her.  "You have to clear the way, as it were.  The
preliminaries cost a good deal, and those who put the machinery in
working order have to be paid.  Then there's always some important person
who holds the key of the situation; his counsel has to be asked.  Advice
is very expensive."

"It is gross and wicked!" she flashed out.

"But if you got your way?  If you suppressed Kingsley Bey, rid the world
of him--well, well, say, banished him," he quickly added, as he saw her
fingers tremble--" and got your decree, wouldn't it be worth while?  Fire
is fought with fire, and you would be using all possible means to do what
you esteem a great good.  Think of it--slavery abolished, your work
accomplished, Kingsley Bey blotted out!"

Light and darkness were in her face at once.  Her eyes were bright, her
brows became knitted, her foot tapped the floor.  Of course it was all
make-believe, this possibility, but it seemed too wonderful to think of
--slavery abolished, and through her; and Kingsley Bey, the renegade
Englishman, the disgrace to his country, blotted out.

"Your argument is not sound in many ways," she said at last, trying to
feel her course.  "We must be just before all.  The whole of the fortune
was not earned by slaves.  Kingsley Bey's ability and power were the
original cause of its existence.  Without him there would have been no
fortune.  Therefore, it would not be justice to give it, even indirectly,
to the slaves for their cause."

"It would be penalty--Kingsley Bey's punishment," said Dicky slyly.

"But I thought he was to be blotted out," she said ironically, yet
brightening, for it seemed to her that she was proving herself
statesmanlike, and justifying her woman's feelings as well.

"When he is blotted out, his fortune should go where it can remedy the
evil of his life."

"He may have been working for some good cause," quietly put in Kingsley.
"Should not that cause get the advantage of his 'ability and power,' as
you have called it, even though he was mistaken, or perverted, or cruel?
Shouldn't an average be struck between the wrong his 'ability and power'
did and the right that same 'ability and power' was intended to advance?"

She turned with admiration to Kingsley.  "How well you argue--I remember
you did years ago.  I hate slavery and despise and hate slave-dealers and
slave-keepers, but I would be just, too, even to Kingsley Bey.  But what
cause, save his own comfort and fortune, would he be likely to serve?
Do you know him?" she added eagerly.

"Since I can remember," answered Kingsley, looking through the field-
glasses at a steamer coming up the river.

"Would you have thought that he would turn out as he has?" she asked
simply.  "You see, he appears to me so dark and baleful a figure that I
cannot quite regard him as I regard you, for instance.  I could not
realise knowing such a man."

"He had always a lot of audacity," Kingsley replied slowly, "and he
certainly was a schemer in his way, but that came from his helpless
poverty."

"Was he very poor?" she asked eagerly.

"Always.  And he got his estates heavily encumbered.  Then there were
people--old ladies--to have annuities, and many to be provided for, and
there was little chance in England for him.  Good-temper and brawn
weren't enough."

"Egypt's the place for mother-wit," broke in Dicky.  "He had that anyhow.
As to his unscrupulousness, of course that's as you may look at it."

"Was he always unscrupulous?" she asked.  "I have thought him cruel and
wicked nationally--un-English, shamefully culpable; but a man who is
unscrupulous would do mean low things, and I should like to think that
Kingsley is a villain with good points.  I believe he has them, and I
believe that deep down in him is something English and honourable after
all--something to be reckoned with, worked on, developed.  See, here is a
letter I had from him two days ago"--she drew it from her pocket and
handed it over to Dicky.  "I cannot think him hopeless altogether .  .  .
I freed the slaves who brought the letter, and sent them on to Cairo.  Do
you not feel it is hopeful?" she urged, as Dicky read the letter slowly,
making sotto voce remarks meanwhile.

"Brigands and tyrants can be gallant--there are plenty of instances on
record.  What are six slaves to him?"

"He has a thousand to your one," said Kingsley slowly, and as though not
realising his words.

She started, sat up straight in her chair, and looked at him indignantly.
"I have no slaves," she said.

Kingsley Bey had been watching the Circassian girl Mata, in the garden
for some time, and he had not been able to resist the temptation to make
the suggestion that roused her now.

"I think the letter rather high-flown," said Dicky, turning the point,
and handing the open page to Kingsley.  "It looks to me as though written
with a purpose."

"What a cryptic remark!" said Kingsley laughing, yet a little chagrined.
"What you probably wish to convey is that it says one thing and means
another."

"Suppose it does," interposed the lady.  "The fact remains that he
answered my appeal, which did not mince words, in most diplomatic and
gentlemanly language.  What do you think of the letter?" she asked,
turning to Kingsley, and reaching a hand for it.

"I'll guarantee our friend here could do no better, if he sat up all
night," put in Dicky satirically.

"You are safe in saying so, the opportunity being lacking."  She laughed,
and folded it up.

"I believe Kingsley Bey means what he says in that letter.  Whatever his
purpose, I honestly think that you might have great influence over him,"
mused Dicky, and, getting up, stepped from the veranda, as though to go
to the bank where an incoming steamer they had been watching was casting
anchor.  He turned presently, however, came back a step and said "You
see, all our argument resolves itself into this: if Kingsley is to be
smashed only Ismail can do it.  If Ismail does it, Kingsley will have
the desert for a bed, for he'll not run, and Ismail daren't spare him.
Sequel, all his fortune will go to the Khedive.  Question, what are we
going to do about it?"

So saying he left them, laughing, and went down the garden-path to the
riverside.  The two on the veranda sat silent for a moment, then Kingsley
spoke.

"These weren't the things we talked about when we saw the clouds gather
over Skaw Fell and the sun shine on the Irish Sea.  We've done and seen
much since then.  Multitudes have come and gone in the world--and I have
grown grey!" he added with a laugh.

"I've done little-nothing, and I meant and hoped to do much," she almost
pleaded.  "I've grown grey too."

"Not one grey hair," he said, with an admiring look.  "Grey in spirit
sometimes," she reflected with a tired air.  "But you--forgive me, if I
haven't known what you've done.  I've lived out of England so long.  You
may be at the head of the Government, for all I know.  You look to me as
though you'd been a success.  Don't smile.  I mean it.  You look as
though you'd climbed.  You haven't the air of an eldest son whose way is
cut out for him, with fifty thousand a year for compensation.  What have
you been doing?  What has been your work in life?"

"The opposite of yours."

He felt himself a ruffian, but he consoled himself with the thought that
the end at which he aimed was good.  It seemed ungenerous to meet her
simple honesty by such obvious repartee, but he held on to see where the
trail would lead.

"That doesn't seem very clear," she said in answer.  "Since I came out
here I've been a sort of riverine missionary, an apostle with no
followers, a reformer with a plan of salvation no one will accept."

"We are not stronger than tradition, than the long custom of ages bred
in the bone and practised by the flesh.  You cannot change a people by
firmans; you must educate them.  Meanwhile, things go on pretty much the
same.  You are a generation before your time.  It is a pity, for you have
saddened your youth, and you may never live to see accomplished what you
have toiled for."

"Oh, as to that--as to that .  .  ."  She smoothed back her hair lightly,
and her eyes wandered over the distant hills-mauve and saffron and opal,
and tender with the mist of evening.  "What does it matter!" she added.
"There are a hundred ways to live, a hundred things to which one might
devote one's life.  And as the years went on we'd realise how every form
of success was offset by something undone in another direction, something
which would have given us joy and memory and content--so it seems.  But--
but we can only really work out one dream, and it is the working out--
a little or a great distance--which satisfies.  I have no sympathy with
those who, living out their dreams, turn regretfully to another course or
another aim, and wonder-wonder, if a mistake hasn't been made.  Nothing
is a mistake which comes of a good aim, of the desire for wrongs righted,
the crooked places made straight.  Nothing matters so that the dream was
a good one and the heart approves and the eyes see far."

She spoke as though herself in a dream, her look intent on the glowing
distance, as though unconscious of his presence.

"It's good to have lived among mountains and climbed them when you were
young.  It gives you bigger ideas of things.  You could see a long way
with the sun behind you, from Skaw Fell."

He spoke in a low voice, and her eyes drew back from the distance and
turned on him.  She smiled.

"I don't know.  I suppose it gives one proportion, though I've been told
by Donovan Pasha and the Consul that I have no sense of proportion.  What
difference does it make?  It is the metier of some people of this world
to tell the truth, letting it fall as it will, and offend where it will,
to be in a little unjust maybe, measure wrongly here and there, lest the
day pass and nothing be done.  It is for the world to correct, to adjust,
to organise, to regulate the working of the truth.  One person cannot do
all."

Every minute made him more and more regretful, while it deepened his
feelings for her.  He saw how far removed was her mind from the sordid
views of things, and how sincere a philosophy governed her actions and
her mission.

He was about to speak, but she continued: "I suppose I've done unwise
things from a worldly, a diplomatic, and a political point of view.
I've--I've broken my heart on the rock of the impossible, so my father
says.  .  .  .  But, no, I haven't broken my heart.  I have only given it
a little too much hope sometimes, too much disappointment at others.  In
any case--can one be pardoned for quoting poetry in these days?  I don't
know, I've been so long out of the world--

                   'Bruised hearts when all is ended,
                    Bear the better all after-stings;
                    Broken once, the citadel mended
                    Standeth through all things.'

I'm not--not hopeless, though I've had a long hard fight here in Egypt;
and I've done so little."  .  .  .  She kept smoothing out the letter she
had had from Kingsley Bey, as though unconsciously.  "But it is coming,
the better day.  I know it.  Some one will come who will do all that I
have pleaded for--stop the corvee and give the peasants a chance; stop
slavery, and purify the harem and start the social life on a higher
basis; remove a disgrace from the commerce of an afflicted land; remove
--remove once for all such men as Kingsley Bey; make it impossible for
fortunes to be made out of human flesh and blood."  She had the rapt look
of the dreamer.  Suddenly she recovered her more worldly mood: "What are
you doing here?" she added.  "Have you come to take up official life?
Have you some public position--of responsibility?  Ah, perhaps,"--she
laughed almost merrily,--"you are the very man; the great reformer.
Perhaps you think and feel as I do, though you've argued against me.
Perhaps you only wanted to see how real my devotion to this cause is.
Tell me, are you only a tourist--I was going to say idler, but I know you
are not; you have the face of a man who does things--are you tourist or
worker here?  What does Egypt mean to you?  That sounds rather non-
conformist, but Egypt, to me, is the saddest, most beautiful, most
mysterious place in the world.  All other nations, all other races, every
person in the world should be interested in Egypt.  Egypt is the lost
child of Creation--the dear, pitiful waif of genius and mystery of the
world.  She has kept the calendar of the ages--has outlasted all other
nations, and remains the same as they change and pass.  She has been the
watcher of the world, the one who looks on, and suffers, as the rest of
the nations struggle for and wound her in their turn.  What does Egypt
mean to you?  What would you do for her--anything?"

There was no more satirical laughter in his eyes.  He was deeply in
earnest, disturbed, even excited.  "Egypt means everything in the world
to me.  I would do what I could for her."

"What has she done for you?"

"She has brought me to you again--to make me know that what you were by
Skaw Fell all those years ago, you are now, and a thousand times more."

She parried the dangerous meaning in his voice, refused to see the
tenderness in his manner.

"I'm very sorry to hear that," she added in a tone vainly trying to be
unconcerned.  "It is a pity that our youth pursues us in forms so little
desirable.  .  .  .  Who are they?" she added quickly, nodding towards
the shore, from which Dicky was coming with an Egyptian officer and a
squad of soldiers.

"H'm," he responded laughing, "it looks like a matter of consequence.  A
Pasha, I should think, to travel with an escort like that."

"They're coming here," she added, and, calling to her servant, ordered
coffee.

Suddenly Kingsley got to his feet, with a cry of consternation; but sat
down again smiling with a shrug of the shoulders.

"What is it?" she asked, with something like anxiety, for she had seen
the fleeting suspicion in his look.

"I don't know," he answered lightly, and as though the suspicion had
gone.  He watched Dicky and his companions closely, however, though he
chatted unconcernedly while they stood in apparent debate, and presently
came on.  Dicky was whistling softly, but with an air of perplexity, and
he walked with a precision of step which told Kingsley of difficulty
ahead.  He had not long to wait, and as Dicky drew nearer and looked him
in the eyes, he came to his feet again, his long body gathering itself
slowly up, as though for deliberate action.  He felt trouble in the air,
matters of moment, danger for himself, though of precisely what sort was
not clear.  He took a step forward, as though to shield the lady from
possible affront.

"I fancy they want to see me," he said.  He recognised the officer--
Foulik Pasha of the Khedive's household.

The Pasha salaamed.  Dicky drew over to the lady, with a keen warning
glance at Kingsley.  The Pasha salaamed again, and Kingsley responded in
kind.  "Good-day to you, Pasha," he said.

"May the dew of the morning bring flowers to your life, Excellency," was
the reply.  He salaamed now towards the lady, and Kingsley murmured his
name to her.

"Will you not be seated," she said, and touched a chair as though to sit
down, yet casting a doubtful glance at the squad of men and the brilliant
kavass drawn up near by.  The Pasha looked from one to the other, and
Kingsley spoke.

"What is it, Pasha?  Her ladyship doesn't know why she should be
honoured."

"But that makes no difference," she interposed.  "Here is coffee--ah,
that's right, cigarettes too!  But, yes, you will take my coffee, Pasha,"
she urged.

The insolent look which had gathered in the man's face cleared away.  He
salaamed, hesitated, and took the coffee, then salaamed again to her.

She had caught at a difficulty; an instinctive sense of peril had taken
possession of her; and, feeling that the danger was for the Englishman
who had come to her out of her old life, she had interposed a diplomatic
moment.  She wanted to gain time before the mystery broke over her.  She
felt something at stake for herself.  Premonition, a troubling of the
spirit, told her that she was in the presence of a crisis out of which
she would not come unchanged.

Dicky was talking now, helping her--asking the Pasha questions of his
journey up the river, of the last news from Europe, of the Khedive's
health, though he and Kingsley had only left Cairo a half-day before the
Pasha.

The officer thanked the lady and salaamed again, then turned towards
Kingsley.

"You wished to speak with me, perhaps, Pasha," said Kingsley.

"If a moment of your time may have so little honour, saadat el bey."

Kingsley moved down the veranda shoulder to shoulder with the Pasha, and
the latter's men, responding to a glance, moved down also.  Kingsley saw,
but gave no heed.

"What's up, Pasha?" he asked in a low voice.  "The Khedive commands your
return to Cairo."

"With you?"

"So, effendi."

"Compulsion, eh?  I don't see quite.  I'm an Englishman, not a fellah."

"But I have my commands, saadat el bey."

"What's the row, Pasha?"

"Is it for the servant to know the mind of his master?"

"And if I don't go?"

The Pasha pointed to his men, and motioned towards the boat where forty
or fifty others showed.  "Bosh, Pasha!  That's no reason.  That's
flummery, and you know and the Highness knows it.  That would have been
all very well in the desert, but this is not the desert, and I'm not
doing business with the Highness any more.  What's the penalty if I don't
go?"

"Twenty men will lose their heads to-morrow morning, a riot will occur,
the bank where much gold is will be broken into, some one will be made
poor, and--"

"Come, never mind twaddle about my money--we'll see about that.  Those
twenty men--my men?"

"Your men, saadat el bey."

"They're seized?"

"They are in prison."

"Where?"

"At Abdin Palace."

Kingsley Bey had had a blow, but he was not dumfounded.  In Egypt, the
wise man is never surprised at anything, and Kingsley had gone from
experience to experience without dismay.  He realised the situation at
once.  The Khedive had been worked upon by some one in the circle, and
had put on this pressure, for purposes of backsheesh, or blackmail, or
whatever it might be called.  His mind was made up at once.

"Very well, Pasha.  Though there's no reason why I should go with you
except to suit myself.  You'll excuse me for a moment, please."  He
turned back.  Meanwhile, Dicky had been distracting the mind of the lady
with evasive and cheerful suggestions of urgent business calling Kingsley
to Cairo.  He saw the plot that had been laid, and it made him very
angry, but nothing could be done until he met the Khedive.

He guessed who had filled the Khedive's mind with cupidity.  He had seen
old Selamlik Pasha, who had lent the Khedive much money, entering the
palace as he left with Kingsley Bey thirty-six hours before.  He had hope
that he could save the situation, but meanwhile he was concerned for the
new situation created here at Assiout.  What would Kingsley do?  He knew
what he himself would do in the circumstances, but in crises few men of
character do the necessary thing in exactly the same way.  Here was
comedy of a high order, a mystery and necessary revelation of singular
piquancy.  To his thinking the revelation was now overdue.

He looked at the woman beside him, and he saw in her face a look it never
had had before.  Revelation of a kind was there; beauty, imagination,
solicitude, delicate wonder were there.  It touched him.  He had never
been arrested on his way of life by any dream of fair women, or any dream
of any woman.  It did not seem necessary--no one was necessary to him;
he lived his real life alone, never sharing with any one that of himself
which was not part of the life he lived before the world.  Yet he had
always been liked by men, and he had been agreeable in the sight of more
women than he knew, this little man with a will of iron and a friendly
heart.  But he laughed silently now as he saw Kingsley approaching; the
situation was so beautifully invented.  It did not seem quite like a
thing in real life.  In any other country than Egypt it would have been
comic opera--Foulik Pasha and his men so egregiously important; Kingsley
so overwhelmed by the duty that lay before him; the woman in a
whimsically embarrassing position with the odds, the laugh, against her,
yet little likely to take the obvious view of things and so make possible
a commonplace end.  What would she do?  What would Kingsley do?  What
would he, Dicky Donovan, do?  He knew by the look in Kingsley's eyes that
it was time for him to go.  He moved down to Foulik Pasha, and, taking
his arm, urged him towards the shore with a whispered word.  The Pasha
responded, followed by his men, but presently turned and, before Dicky
could intervene--for he wanted Kingsley to make his own revelation--said
courteously:

"May the truth of Allah be with you, I will await you at the boat,
Kingsley Bey."

Dicky did not turn round, but, with a sharp exclamation of profanity,
drew Foulik Pasha on his imbecile way.

As for Kingsley Bey, he faced a woman who, as the truth dawned upon her,
stared at him in a painful silence for a moment, and then drew back to
the doorway of the house as though to find sudden refuge.  Kingsley's
head went round.  Nothing had gone according to his anticipations.
Foulik Pasha had upset things.

"Now you know--I wished to tell you myself," he said.

She answered at once, quietly, coldly, and with an even formal voice:
"I did not know your name was Kingsley."

"It was my grandmother's name."

"I had forgotten--that is of no consequence, however; but--" she stopped.

"You realise that I am--"

"Yes, of course, Kingsley Bey--I quite understand.  I thought you Lord
Selden, an English gentleman.  You are--" she made an impatient gesture--
"well, you are English still!"

He was hit hard.  The suggestion of her voice was difficult to bear.

"I am not so ungentlemanly as you think.  I meant to tell you--almost at
once.  I thought that as an old friend I might wait a moment or two.  The
conversation got involved, and it grew harder every minute.  Then Foulik
Pasha came-and now.  .  .  ."

She showed no signs of relenting.  "It was taking advantage of an old-
acquaintance.  Against your evil influence here I have been working for
years, while you have grown rich out of the slavery I detest.  You will
pardon my plain speaking, but this is not London, and one has had to
learn new ways in this life here.  I do not care for the acquaintance of
slave-drivers, I have no wish to offer them hospitality.  The world is
large and it belongs to other people, and one has to endure much when one
walks abroad; but this house is my own place, a little spot all my own,
and I cherish it.  There are those who come to the back door, and they
are fed and clothed and sent away by the hand of charity; there are those
who come to the front door, and I welcome them gladly--all that I have is
theirs; there are those who come to a side door, when no one sees, and
take me unawares, and of them I am afraid, their presence I resent.  My
doors are not open to slave-drivers."

"What is the difference between the letter from the slave-driver's hand
and the slave-driver himself?"

She started and flushed deeply.  She took the letter slowly from her
pocket and laid it on the table.

"I thought it a letter from a man who was openly doing wrong, and who
repented a little of his wrongdoing.  I thought it a letter from a
stranger, from an Englishman who, perhaps, had not had such advantages
of birth and education as came to you."

"Yet you had a good opinion of the letter.  There seemed no want of
education and all that there--won't you be reasonable, and let me
explain?  Give me half a chance."

"I do not see that explanation can mend anything.  The men you sent me to
free: that was a-well, call it a manoeuvre, to achieve what, I cannot
tell.  Is it not so?  The men are not free.  Is it not so?"

"I am afraid they are not free," he answered, smiling in spite of
himself.

"Your coming here was a manoeuvre also--for what purpose I do not know.
Yet it was a manoeuvre, and I am--or was to be--the victim of the plot."
She smiled scornfully.  "I trust you may yet be the victim of your own
conduct."

"In more ways than one, maybe.  Don't you think, now that the tables are
turned, that you might have mercy on 'a prisoner and a captive'?"

She looked at him inquiringly, then glanced towards the shore where Dicky
stood talking with Foulik Pasha.  Her eyes came back slowly and again
asked a question.  All at once intelligence flashed into them.

"You wished to see Kingsley Bey a prisoner; you have your wish," he said
smiling.

"Whose prisoner?" she asked, still coldly.  "The Khedive's."

A flash of triumph crossed her face.  Her heart beat hard.  Had it come
at last, the edict to put down slavery?  Had the Khedive determined to
put an end to the work of Kingsley Bey in his desert-city-and to Kingsley
Bey himself?  .  .  .  Her heart stopped beating now.  She glanced
towards Dicky Donovan, and her pulses ran more evenly again.  Would the
Khedive have taken such a step unless under pressure?  And who in Egypt
could have, would have, persuaded him, save Dicky Donovan?  Yet Dicky was
here with his friend Kingsley Bey.  The mystery troubled her, and the
trouble got into her eyes.

"You are going to Cairo?" she said, glancing towards the boat.

"It would seem so."

"And Donovan Pasha goes too?"

"I hope so.  I am not sure."

"But he must go," she said a little sharply.

"Yes?"

"He--you must have somebody, and he has great power."

"That might or might not be to my benefit.  After all, what does it
matter?"--He saw that she was perturbed, and he pressed his advantage.

She saw, however, and retreated.  "We reap as we sow," she said, and made
as if to go inside the house.  "You have had the game, you must pay for
the candles out of your earnings."

"I don't mind paying what's fair.  I don't want other people to pay."

She turned angrily on him, he could not tell why.  "You don't want others
to pay!  As if you could do anything that doesn't affect others.  Did you
learn that selfishness at Skaw Fell, or was it born with you?  You are of
those who think they earn all their own success and happiness, and then,
when they earn defeat and despair, are surprised that others suffer.  As
if our penalties were only paid by ourselves!  Egotism, vanity!  So long
as you have your dance, it matters little to you who pays for the tune."

"I am sorry."  He was bewildered; he had not expected this.

"Does a man stoop to do in a foreign land what he would not do in his own
country--dare not do?--One is so helpless--a woman!  Under cover of an
old friend ship--ah!"  She suddenly turned, and, before he could say a
word, disappeared inside the house.  He spoke her name once, twice; he
ventured inside the house, and called, but she did not come.  He made his
way to the veranda, and was about to leave for the shore, when he heard a
step behind him.  He turned quickly.  It was the Circassian girl, Mata.

He spoke to her in Arabic, and she smiled at him.  "What is it?" he
asked, for he saw she had come from her mistress.

"My Lady begs to excuse--but she is tired," she said in English, which
she loved to use.

"I am to go on--to prison, then?"

"I suppose.  It has no matter.  My Lady is angry.  She has to say, 'Thank
you, good-bye.'  So, goodbye," she added naively, and held out her hand.

Kingsley laughed, in spite of his discomfiture, and shook it.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"I am My Lady's slave," she said proudly.

"No, no--her servant.  You can come and go as you like.  You have wages."

"I am Mata, the slave--My Lady's slave.  All the world knows I am her
slave.  Was I not given her by the Khedive whose slave I was?  May the
leaves of life be green always, but I am Mata the slave," she said
stubbornly, shaking her head.

"Do you tell My Lady so?"

"Wherefore should I tell My Lady what she knows?  Is not the truth the
truth?  Good-night!  I had a brother who went to prison.  His grave is by
Stamboul.  Good-night, effendi.  He was too young to die, but he had
gold, and the captain of the citadel needed money.  So, he had to die.
Malaish!  He is in the bosom of God, and prison does not last forever.
Goodnight, effendi.  If you, effendi, are poor, it is well; no man will
desire your life.  Then you can be a slave, and have quiet nights.  If
you are rich, effendi, remember my brother.  Good-night, effendi.  May
sacrifices be yours .  .  .  and My Lady says good-night."  Kingsley gave
her a gold-piece and went down to Foulik Pasha.

As they steamed away Kingsley looked in vain to the house on the shore.
There was no face at window or door, no sign of life about the place.

"Well, my bold bey," said Donovan Pasha to him at last, "what do you
think of Egypt now?"

"I'm not thinking of Egypt now."

"Did the lady deeply sympathise?  Did your prescription work?"

"You know it didn't.  Nothing worked.  This fool Foulik came at the wrong
moment."

"It wouldn't have made any difference.  You see you were playing with
marked cards, and that is embarrassing.  You got a certificate of
character by--"

"Yes, I know.  That's what she said.  Never mind.  I've played as I meant
to play, and I'll abide the result.  I said I'd marry her, and I mean to,
though she gently showed me the door--beautiful, proud person!"

"She is much too good for you."

"What does that matter, if she doesn't think so?"

"My opinion is she'll never touch you or your slave-gold with a mile-
measure."

Dicky did not think this, but it was his way of easing his own mind.
Inwardly he was studying the situation, and wondering how he could put
Kingsley's business straight.

"She thinks I'm still a 'slave-driver,' as she calls it--women are so
innocent.  You did your part, as well as could be expected, I'm bound to
say.  I only wish I wasn't so much trouble to you.  I owe you a lot,
Dicky Pasha--everything!  You got me the golden shillings to start with;
you had faith in me; you opened the way to fortune, to the thing that's
more than fortune--to success."

"I'm not altogether proud of you.  You've messed things to-day."

"I'll set them right to-morrow--with your help.  Ismail is going a bit
large this time."

"He is an Oriental.  A life or two--think of Sadik Pasha.  Your men--"

"Well?  You think he'd do it--think he'd dare to do it?"

"Suppose they disappeared?  Who could prove that Ismail did it?  And if
it could be proved--they're his own subjects, and the Nile is near!  Who
can say him nay?"

"I fancy you could--and I would."

"I can do something.  I've done a little in my day; but my day, like
Ismail's, is declining.  They are his subjects, and he needs money, and
he puts a price on their heads--that's about the size of it.  Question
How much will you have to pay?  How much have you in Cairo at the bank?"

"Only about ten thousand pounds."

"He'd take your draft on England, but he'll have that ten thousand
pounds, if he can get it."

"That doesn't matter, but as for my arrest--"

"A trick, on some trumped-up charge.  If he can hold you long enough
to get some of your cash, that's all he wants.  He knows he's got no
jurisdiction over you--not a day's hold.  He knows you'd give a good deal
to save your men."

"Poor devils!  But to be beaten by this Egyptian bulldozer--not if I know
it, Dicky"

"Still, it may be expensive."

"Ah!"  Kingsley Bey sighed, and his face was clouded, but Dicky knew he
was not thinking of Ismail or the blackmail.  His eyes were on the house
by the shore, now disappearing, as they rounded a point of land.

"Ah" said Donovan Pasha, but he did not sigh.




III

"Ah!" said a lady, in a dirty pink house at Assiout, with an accent
which betrayed a discovery and a resolution, "I will do it.  I may be of
use some way or another.  The Khedive won't dare--but still the times are
desperate.  As Donovan Pasha said, it isn't easy holding down the safety-
valve all the time, and when it flies off, there will be dark days for
all of us.  .  .  .  An old friend--bad as he is!  Yes, I will go."

Within forty-eight hours of Donovan Pasha's and Kingsley Bey's arrival in
Cairo the lady appeared there, and made inquiries of her friends.  No one
knew anything.  She went to the Consulate, and was told that Kingsley Bey
was still in prison, that the Consulate had not yet taken action.

She went to Donovan Pasha, and he appeared far more mysterious and
troubled than he really was.  Kingsley Bey was as cheerful as might be
expected, he said, but the matter was grave.  He was charged with the
destruction of the desert-city, and maintaining an army of slaves in the
Khedive's dominions--a menace to the country.

"But it was with the Khedive's connivance," she said.  "Who can prove
that?  It's a difficult matter for England to handle, as you can see."

This was very wily of Dicky Donovan, for he was endeavouring to create
alarm and sympathy in the woman's mind by exaggerating the charge.  He
knew that in a few days at most Kingsley Bey would be free.  He had
himself given Ismail a fright, and had even gone so far as to suggest
inside knowledge of the plans of Europe concerning Egypt.  But if he
could deepen the roots of this comedy for Kingsley's benefit--and for the
lady's--it was his duty so to do.

"Of course," he made haste to add, "you cannot be expected to feel
sympathy for him.  In your eyes, he is a criminal.  He had a long
innings, and made a mint of money.  We must do all we can, and, of
course, we'll save his life--ah, I'm sure you wouldn't exact the fullest
penalty on him!"

Dicky was more than wily; he was something wicked.  The suggestion of
danger to Kingsley's life had made her wince, and he had added another
little barbed arrow to keep the first company.  The cause was a good one.
Hurt now to heal afterwards--and Kingsley was an old friend, and a good
fellow.  Anyhow, this work was wasting her life, and she would be much
better back in England, living a civilised life, riding in the Row, and
slumming a little, in the East End, perhaps, and presiding at meetings
for the amelioration of the unameliorated.  He was rather old-fashioned
in his views.  He saw the faint trouble in her eyes and face, and he made
up his mind that he would work while it was yet the day.  He was about to
speak, but she suddenly interposed a question.

"Is he comfortable?  How does he take it?"

"Why, all right.  You know the kind of thing: mud walls and floor--quite
dry, of course--and a sleeping-mat, and a balass of water, and cakes of
dourha, and plenty of time to think.  After all, he's used to primitive
fare."

Donovan Pasha was drawing an imaginary picture, and drawing it with
effect.  He almost believed it as his artist's mind fashioned it.  She
believed it, and it tried her.  Kingsley Bey was a criminal, of course,
but he was an old friend; he had offended her deeply also, but that was
no reason why he should be punished by any one save herself.  Her regimen
of punishments would not necessarily include mud walls and floor, and a
sleeping-mat and a balass of water; and whatever it included it should
not be administered by any hand save her own.  She therefore resented,
not quite unselfishly, this indignity and punishment the Khedive had
commanded.

"When is he to be tried?"

"Well, that is hardly the way to put it.  When he can squeeze the Khedive
into a corner he'll be free, but it takes time.  We have to go carefully,
for it isn't the slave-master alone, it's those twenty slaves of his,
including the six you freed.  Their heads are worth a good deal to the
Khedive, he thinks."

She was dumfounded.  "I don't understand," she said helplessly.

"Well, the Khedive put your six and fourteen others in prison for treason
or something--it doesn't matter much here what it is.  His game is to
squeeze Kingsley's gold orange dry, if he can."

A light broke over her face.  "Ah, now I see," she said, and her face
flushed deeply with anger and indignation.  "And you--Donovan Pasha, you
who are supposed to have influence with the Khedive, who are supposed to
be an English influence over him, you can speak of this quietly,
patiently, as a matter possible to your understanding.  This barbarous,
hideous black mail!  This cruel, dreadful tyranny!  You, an Englishman,
remain in the service of the man who is guilty of such a crime!"  Her
breath came hard.

"Well, it seems the wisest thing to do as yet.  You have lived a long
time in Egypt, you should know what Oriental rule is.  Question: Is one
bite of a cherry better than no bite of a cherry?  Egypt is like a
circus, but there are wild horses in the ring, and you can't ride them
just as you like.  If you keep them inside the barriers, that's
something.  Of course, Kingsley made a mistake in a way.  He didn't
start his desert-city and his slavery without the consent of the Khedive;
he shouldn't have stopped it and gone out of business without the same
consent.  It cut down the Effendina's tribute."

He spoke slowly, counting every word, watching the effect upon her.  He
had much to watch, and he would have seen more if he had known women
better.

"He has abandoned the mines--his city--and slavery?" she asked
chokingly, confusedly.  It seemed hard for her to speak.

"Yes, yes, didn't you know?  Didn't he tell you?"  She shook her head.
She was thinking back-remembering their last conversation, remembering
how sharp and unfriendly she had been with him.  He had even then freed
his slaves, had given her slaves to free.

"I wonder what made him do it?" added Dicky.  "He had made a great
fortune--poor devil, he needed it, for the estates were sweating under
the load.  I wonder what made him do it?"

She looked at him bewilderedly for a moment, then, suddenly, some faint
suspicion struck her.

"You should know.  You joined with him in deceiving me at Assiout."

"But, no," he responded quickly, and with rare innocence, "the situation
was difficult.  You already knew him very well, and it was the force of
circumstances--simply the force of circumstances.  Bad luck--no more.
He was innocent, mine was the guilt.  I confess I was enjoying the thing,
because--because, you see he had deceived me, actually deceived me, his
best friend.  I didn't know he knew you personally, till you two met on
that veranda at Assiout, and--"

"And you made it difficult for him to explain at once--I remember."

"I'm afraid I did.  I've got a nasty little temper at times, and I had a
chance to get even.  Then things got mixed, and Foulik Pasha upset the
whole basket of plums.  Besides, you see, I'm a jealous man, an envious
man, and you never looked so well as you did that day, unless it's
to-day."

She was about to interrupt him, but he went on.

"I had begun to feel that we might have been better friends, you and I;
that--that I might have helped you more; that you had not had the
sympathy you deserved; that civilisation was your debtor, and that--"

"No, no, no, you must not speak that way to me," she interposed with
agitation.  "It--it is not necessary.  It doesn't bear on the matter.
And you've always been a good friend--always a good friend," she added
with a little friendly quiver in her voice, for she was not quite sure of
herself.

Dicky had come out in a new role, one wherein he would not have been
recognised.  It was probably the first time he had ever tried the
delicate social art of playing with fire of this sort.  It was all true
in a way, but only in a way.  The truest thing about it was that it was
genuine comedy, in which there were two villains, and no hero, and one
heroine.

"But there it is," he repeated, having gone as far as his cue warranted.
"I didn't know he had given up his desert-city till two days before you
did, and I didn't know he knew you, and I don't know why he gave up his
desert-city--do you?"

There was a new light in her eyes, a new look in her face.  She was not
sure but that she had a glimmering of the reason.  It was a woman's
reason, and it was not without a certain exquisite egotism and vanity,
for she remembered so well the letter she had written him--every word was
etched into her mind; and she knew by heart every word of his reply.
Then there were the six slaves he sent to her-and his coming immediately
afterwards.  .  .  .  For a moment she seemed to glow, and then the
colour slowly faded and left her face rather grey and very quiet.

He might not be a slave-driver now, but he had been one--and the world of
difference it made to her!  He had made his great fortune out of the work
of the men employed as slaves, and--she turned away to the window with a
dejected air.  For the first time the real weight of the problem pressed
upon her heavily.

"Perhaps you would like to see him," said Dicky.  "It might show that you
were magnanimous."

"Magnanimous!  It will look like that--in a mud-cell, with mud floor, and
a piece of matting."

"And a balass of water and dourha-cakes," said Dicky in a childlike way,
and not daring to meet her eyes.

He stroked his moustache with his thumb-nail in a way he had when
perplexed.  Kingsley Bey was not in a mud-cell, with a mat and a balass
of water, but in a very decent apartment indeed, and Dicky was trying to
work the new situation out in his mind.  The only thing to do was to have
Kingsley removed to a mud-cell, and not let him know the author of his
temporary misfortune and this new indignity.  She was ready to visit him
now--he could see that.  He made difficulties, however, which would
prevent their going at once, and he arranged with her to go to Kingsley
in the late afternoon.

Her mind was in confusion, but one thing shone clear through the
confusion, and it was the iniquity of the Khedive.  It gave her a
foothold.  She was deeply grateful for it.  She could not have moved
without it.  So shameful was the Khedive in her eyes that the prisoner
seemed Criminal made Martyr.

She went back to her hotel flaming with indignation against Ismail.
It was very comforting to her to have this resource.  The six slaves
whom she had freed--the first-fruits of her labours: that they should be
murdered!  The others who had done no harm, who had been slaves by
Ismail's consent, that they should be now in danger of their lives
through the same tyrant!  That Kingsley Bey, who had been a slave-master
with Ismail's own approval and to his advantage, should now--she glowed
with pained anger.  .  .  .  She would not wait till she had seen
Kingsley Bey, or Donovan Pasha again; she herself would go to Ismail
at once.

So, she went to Ismail, and she was admitted, after long waiting in an
anteroom.  She would not have been admitted at all, if it had not been
for Dicky, who, arriving just before her on the same mission, had seen
her coming, and guessed her intention.  He had then gone in to the
Khedive with a new turn to his purposes, a new argument and a new
suggestion, which widened the scope of the comedy now being played.
He had had a struggle with Ismail, and his own place and influence had
been in something like real danger, but he had not minded that.  He had
suggested that he might be of service to Egypt in London and Paris.  That
was very like a threat, but it was veiled by a look of genial innocence
which Ismail admired greatly.  He knew that Donovan Pasha could hasten
the crisis coming on him.  He did not believe that Donovan Pasha would,
but that did not alter the astuteness and value of the move; and,
besides, it was well to run no foolish risks and take no chances.  Also,
he believed in Donovan Pasha's honesty.  He despised him in a worldly
kind of way, because he might have been rich and splendid, and he was
poor and unassuming.  He wanted Kingsley Bey's fortune, or a great slice
of it, but he wanted it without a struggle with Dicky Donovan, and with
the British Consulate--for that would come, too, directly.  It gave him
no security to know that the French would be with him--he knew which
country would win in the end.  He was preying on Kingsley Bey's humanity,
and he hoped to make it well worth while.  And all he thought and planned
was well understood by Dicky.

Over their coffee they both talked from long distances towards the
point of attack and struggle, Ismail carelessly throwing in glowing
descriptions of the palaces he was building.  Dicky never failed to show
illusive interest, and both knew that they were not deceiving the other,
and both came nearer to the issue by devious processes, as though these
processes were inevitable.  At last Dicky suddenly changed his manner and
came straight to the naked crisis.

"Highness, I have an invitation for Kingsley Bey to dine at the British
Consulate to-night.  You can spare his presence?"

"My table is not despicable.  Is he not comfortable here?"

"Is a mud floor, with bread and water and a sleeping-mat, comfortable?"

"He is lodged like a friend."

"He is lodged like a slave--in a cell."

"They were not my orders."

"Effendina, the orders were mine."

"Excellency!"

"Because there were no orders and Foulik Pasha was sleepless with anxiety
lest the prisoner should escape, fearing your Highness's anger, I gave
orders and trusted your Highness to approve."

Ismail saw a mystery in the words, and knew that it was all to be part of
Dicky's argument in the end.  "So be it, Excellency," he said, "thou hast
breathed the air of knowledge, thine actions shine.  In what quarter of
the palace rests he?  And Foulik Pasha?"

"Foulik Pasha sits by his door, and the room is by the doorway where the
sarrafs keep the accounts for the palaces your Highness builds.  Also,
abides near, the Greek, who toils upon the usury paid by your Highness
to Europe."

Ismail smiled.  The allusions were subtle and piercing.  There was a
short pause.  Each was waiting.  Dicky changed the attack.  "It is a pity
we should be in danger of riot at this moment, Highness."

"If riots come, they come.  It is the will of God, Excellency.  But in
our hand lies order.  We will quiet the storm, if a storm fall."

"There will be wreck somewhere."

"So be it.  There will be salvage."

"Nothing worth a riot, Highness."

The Khedive eyed Dicky with a sudden malice and a desire to slay--to slay
even Donovan Pasha.  He did not speak, and Dicky continued negligently:
"Prevention is better than cure."

The Khedive understood perfectly.  He knew that Dicky had circumvented
him, and had warned the Bank.

Still the Khedive did not speak.  Dicky went on.  "Kingsley Bey deposited
ten thousand pounds--no more.  But the gold is not there; only Kingsley
Bey's credit."

"His slaves shall die to-morrow morning."

"Not so, Highness."

The Khedive's fingers twisted round the chair-arm savagely.

"Who will prevent it?"

"Your Highness will.  Your Highness could not permit it--the time is far
past.  Suppose Kingsley Bey gave you his whole fortune, would it save one
palace or pay one tithe of your responsibilities?  Would it lengthen the
chain of safety?"

"I am safe."

"No, Highness.  In peril--here with your own people, in Europe with the
nations.  Money will not save you."

"What then?"

"Prestige.  Power--the Soudan.  Establish yourself in the Soudan with a
real army.  Let your name be carried to the Abyssinian mountains as the
voice of the eagle."

"Who will carry it?"  He laughed disdainfully, with a bitter, hopeless
kind of pride.  "Who will carry it?"

"Gordon-again."

The Khedive started from his chair, and his sullen eye lighted to
laughter.  He paced excitedly to and fro for a minute, and then broke
out:

"Thou hast said it!  Gordon--Gordon--if he would but come again!--But it
shall be so, by the beard of God's prophet, it shall.  Thou hast said the
thing that has lain in my heart.  Have I had honour in the Soudan since
his feet were withdrawn?  Where is honour and tribute and gold since his
hand ruled--alone without an army?  It is so--Inshallah!  but it is so.
He shall come again, and the people's eyes will turn to Khartoum and
Darfdr and Kordofan, and the greedy nations will wait.  Ah, my friend,
but the true inspiration is thine!  I will send for Gordon to night--even
to-night.  Thou shalt go--no, no, not so.  Who can tell--I might look for
thy return in vain!  But who--who, to carry my word to Gordon?"

"Your messenger is in the anteroom," said Dicky with a sudden thought.

"Who is it, son of the high hills?"

"The lady at Assiout--she who is such a friend to Gordon as I am to thee,
Highness."

"She whose voice and hand are against slavery?"

"Even so.  It is good that she return to England there to remain.  Send
her."

"Why is she here?"  The Khedive looked suspiciously at Dicky, for it
seemed that a plot had been laid.

Thereupon, Dicky told the Khedive the whole story, and not in years had
Ismail's face shown such abandon of humour.

"By the will of God, but it shall be!" he said.  "She shall marry
Kingsley Bey, and he shall go free."

"But not till she has seen him and mourned over him in his cell, with the
mud floor and the balass of water."

The Khedive laughed outright and swore in French.  "And the cakes of
dourha!  I will give her as a parting gift the twenty slaves, and she
shall bring her great work to a close in the arms of a slaver.  It is
worth a fortune."

"It is worth exactly ten thousand pounds to your Highness--ten thousand
pounds neither more nor less."

Ismail questioned.

"Kingsley Bey would make last tribute of thus much to your Highness."

Ismail would not have declined ten thousand centimes.  "Malaish!" he
said, and called for coffee, while they planned what should be said to
his Ambassadress from Assiout.

She came trembling, yet determined, and she left with her eyes full of
joyful tears.  She was to carry the news of his freedom and the freedom
of his slaves to Kingsley Bey, and she--she, was to bear to Gordon, the
foe of slavery, the world's benefactor, the message that he was to come
and save the Soudan.  Her vision was enlarged, and never went from any
prince a more grateful supplicant and envoy.

Donovan Pasha went with her to the room with the mud floor where Kingsley
Bey was confined.

"I owe it all to you," she said as they hastened across the sun-swept
square.  "Ah, but you have atoned!  You have done it all at once, after
these long years."

"Well, well, the time is ripe," said Dicky piously.  They found Kingsley
Bey reading the last issue of the French newspaper published in Cairo.
He was laughing at some article in it abusive of the English, and seemed
not very downcast; but at a warning sign and look from Dicky, he became
as grave as he was inwardly delighted at seeing the lady of Assiout.

As Kingsley Bey and the Ambassadress shook hands, Dicky said to her:
"I'll tell him, and then go."  Forthwith he said: "Kingsley Bey, son of
the desert, and unhappy prisoner, the prison opens its doors.  No more
for you the cold earth for a bed--relieved though it be by a sleeping-
mat.  No more the cake of dourha and the balass of Nile water.
Inshallah, you are as free as a bird on the mountain top, to soar
to far lands and none to say thee nay."

Kingsley Bey caught instantly at the meaning lying beneath Dicky's
whimsical phrases, and he deported himself accordingly.  He looked
inquiringly at the Ambassadress, and she responded:

"We come from the Khedive, and he bids us carry you his high
considerations--"

"Yes, 'high considerations,' he said," interjected Dicky with his eye
towards a fly on the ceiling.

"And to beg your company at dinner to-night."

"And the price?" asked Kingsley, feeling his way carefully, for he
wished no more mistakes where this lady was concerned.  At Assiout he had
erred; he had no desire to be deceived at Cairo.  He did not know how he
stood with her, though her visit gave him audacious hopes.  Her face was
ruled to quietness now, and only in the eyes resolutely turned away was
there any look which gave him assurance.  He seemed to hear her talking
from the veranda that last day at Assiout; and it made him discreet at
least.

"Oh, the price!" murmured Dicky, and he seemed to study the sleepy
sarraf who pored over his accounts in the garden.  "The price is
'England, home, and beauty.'  Also to prop up the falling towers of
Khedivia--ten thousand pounds!  Also, Gordon."

Kingsley Bey appeared, as he was, mystified, but he was not inclined to
spoil things by too much speaking.  He looked inquiry.

At that moment an orderly came running towards the door--Dicky had
arranged for that.  Dicky started, and turned to the lady.  "You tell
him.  This fellow is coming for me.  I'll be back in a quarter of an
hour."  He nodded to them both and went out to the orderly, who followed
his footsteps to the palace.

"You've forgiven me for everything--for everything at Assiout, I mean?"
he asked.

"I have no desire to remember," she answered.  "About Gordon--what is
it?"

"Ah, yes, about Gordon!"  She drew herself up a little.  "I am to go to
England--for the Khedive, to ask Gordon to save the Soudan."

"Then you've forgiven the Khedive?" he inquired with apparent innocence.

"I've no wish to prevent him showing practical repentance," she answered,
keenly alive to his suggestion, and a little nettled.  "It means no more
slavery.  Gordon will prevent that."

"Will he?" asked Kingsley, again with muffled mockery.

"He is the foe of slavery.  How many, many letters I have had from him!
He will save the Soudan--and Egypt too."

"He will be badly paid--the Government will stint him.  And he will give
away his pay--if he gets any."

She did not see his aim, and her face fell.  "He will succeed for all
that."

"He can levy taxes, of course."

"But he will not-for himself."

"I will give him twenty thousand pounds, if he will take it."

"You--you!--will give him--" Her eyes swam with pleasure.  "Ah, that is
noble!  That makes wealth a glory, to give it to those who need it.  To
save those who are down-trodden, to help those who labour for the good of
the world, to--" she stopped short, for all at once she remembered-
remembered whence his money came.  Her face suffused.  She turned to the
door.  Confusion overmastered her for the moment.  Then, anger at herself
possessed her.  On what enterprise was she now embarked?  Where was her
conscience?  For what was she doing all this?  What was the true meaning
of her actions?  Had it been to circumvent the Khedive?  To prevent him
from doing an unjust, a despicable, and a dreadful thing?  Was it only to
help the Soudan?  Was it but to serve a high ideal, through an ideal
life--through Gordon?

It came upon her with embarrassing force.  For none of these things was
she striving.  She was doing all for this man, against whose influence
she had laboured, whom she had bitterly condemned, and whose fortune she
had called blood-money and worse.  And now...

She knew the truth, and it filled her heart with joy and also pain.  Then
she caught at a straw: he was no slave-driver now.  He had--

"May I not help you--go with you to England?" he questioned over her
shoulder.

"Like Alexander Selkirk 'I shall finish my journey alone,'" she said,
with sudden but imperfectly assumed acerbity.

"Will you not help me, then?" he asked.  "We could write a book
together."

"Oh, a book!" she said.

"A book of life," he whispered.

"No, no, no--can't you see?--oh, you are playing me like a ball!"

"Only to catch you," he said, in a happier tone.

"To jest, when I am so unhappy!" she murmured.

"My jest is the true word."

She made a last rally.  "Your fortune was made out of slave labour."

"I have given up the slaves."

"You have the fortune."

"I will give it all to you--to have your will with it.  Now it is won,
I would give it up and a hundred times as much to hear you say, 'Come to
Skaw Fell again."'

Did he really mean it?  She thought he did.  And it seemed the only way
out of the difficulty.  It broke the impasse.

It was not necessary, however, to spend the future in the way first
suggested to her mind.  They discussed all that at Skaw Fell months
later.

Human nature is weak and she has become a slavedriver, after all.
But he is her only slave, and he hugs his bondage.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

As if our penalties were only paid by ourselves!
Credulity, easily transmutable into superstition
Paradoxes which make for laughter--and for tears
What is crime in one country, is virtue in another
Women only admitted to Heaven by the intercession of husbands






DONOVAN PASHA AND SOME PEOPLE OF EGYPT

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 4.



A YOUNG LION OF DEDAN
HE WOULD NOT BE DENIED
THE FLOWER OF THE FLOCK
THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS




A YOUNG LION OF DEDAN

Looking from the minaret the Two could see, far off, the Pyramids of
Ghizeh and Sakkara, the wells of Helouan, the Mokattam Hills, the tombs
of the Caliphs, the Khedive's palace at distant Abbasiyeh.  Nearer by,
the life of the city was spread out.  Little green oases of palms emerged
from the noisy desert of white stone and plaster.  The roofs of the
houses, turned into gardens and promenades, made of the huge superficial
city one broken irregular pavement.  Minarets of mosques stood up like
giant lamp-posts along these vast, meandering streets.  Shiftless
housewives lolled with unkempt hair on the housetops; women of the harem
looked out of the little mushrabieh panels in the clattering, narrow
bazaars.

Just at their feet was a mosque--one of the thousand nameless mosques of
Cairo.  It was the season of Ramadan, and a Friday, the Sunday of the
Mahommedan--the Ghimah.

The "Two" were Donovan Pasha, then English Secretary to the Khedive,
generally known as "Little Dicky Donovan," and Captain Renshaw, of the
American Consulate.  There was no man in Egypt of so much importance as
Donovan Pasha.  It was an importance which could neither be bought nor
sold.

Presently Dicky touched the arm of his companion.  "There it comes!" he
said.

His friend followed the nod of Dicky's head, and saw, passing slowly
through a street below, a funeral procession.  Near a hundred blind men
preceded the bier, chanting the death-phrases.  The bier was covered by a
faded Persian shawl, and it was carried by the poorest of the fellaheen,
though in the crowd following were many richly attired merchants of the
bazaars.  On a cart laden with bread and rice two fellaheen stood and
handed, or tossed out, food to the crowd--token of a death in high
places.  Vast numbers of people rambled behind chanting, and a few women,
near the bier, tore their garments, put dust on their heads, and kept
crying: "Salem ala ahali!--Remember us to our friends!"

Walking immediately behind the bier was one conspicuous figure, and there
was a space around him which none invaded.  He was dressed in white, like
an Arabian Mahommedan, and he wore the green turban of one who has been
the pilgrimage to Mecca.

At sight of him Dicky straightened himself with a little jerk, and his
tongue clicked with satisfaction.  "Isn't he, though--isn't he?" he
said, after a moment.  His lips, pressed together, curled in with a trick
they had when he was thinking hard, planning things.

The other forbore to question.  The notable figure had instantly arrested
his attention, and held it until it passed from view.

"Isn't he, though, Yankee?" Dicky repeated, and pressed a knuckle into
the other's waistcoat.

"Isn't he what?"

"Isn't he bully--in your own language?"

"In figure; but I couldn't see his face distinctly."

"You'll see that presently.  You could cut a whole Egyptian Ministry out
of that face, and have enough left for an American president or the head
of the Salvation Army.  In all the years I've spent here I've never seen
one that could compare with him in nature, character, and force.  A few
like him in Egypt, and there'd be no need for the money-barbers of
Europe."

"He seems an ooster here--you know him?"

"Do I!"  Dicky paused and squinted up at the tall Southerner.  "What do
you suppose I brought you out from your Consulate for to see--the view
from Ebn Mahmoud?  And you call yourself a cute Yankee?"

"I'm no more a Yankee than you are, as I've told you before," answered
the American with a touch of impatience, yet smilingly.  "I'm from South
Carolina, the first State that seceded."

"Anyhow, I'm going to call you Yankee, to keep you nicely disguised.
This is the land of disguises."

"Then we did not come out to see the view?" the other drawled.  There
was a quickening of the eye, a drooping of the lid, which betrayed a
sudden interest, a sense of adventure.

Dicky laid his head back and laughed noiselessly.  "My dear Renshaw,
with all Europe worrying Ismail, with France in the butler's pantry and
England at the front door, do the bowab and the sarraf go out to take air
on the housetops, and watch the sun set on the Pyramids and make a
rainbow of the desert?  I am the bowab and the sarraf, the man-of-all-
work, the Jack-of-all-trades, the 'confidential' to the Oriental
spendthrift.  Am I a dog to bay the moon--have I the soul of a tourist
from Liverpool or Poughkeepsie?"

The lanky Southerner gripped his arm.  "There's a hunting song of the
South," he said, "and the last line is, 'The hound that never tires.'
You are that, Donovan Pasha--"

"I am 'little Dicky Donovan,' so they say," interrupted the other.

"You are the weight that steadies things in this shaky Egypt.  You are
you, and you've brought me out here because there's work of some kind to
do, and because--"

"And because you're an American, and we speak the same language."

"And our Consulate is all right, if needed, whatever it is.  You've
played a square game in Egypt.  You're the only man in office who hasn't
got rich out of her, and--"

"I'm not in office."

"You're the power behind the throne, you're--"

"I'm helpless--worse than helpless, Yankee.  I've spent years of my life
here.  I've tried to be of some use, and play a good game for England;
and keep a conscience too, but it's been no real good.  I've only staved
off the crash.  I'm helpless, now.  That's why I'm here."

He leaned forward, and looked out of the minaret and down towards the
great locked gates of the empty mosque.

Renshaw put his hand on Dicky's shoulder.  "It's the man in white yonder
you're after?"

Dicky nodded.  "It was no use as long as she lived.  But she's dead--her
face was under that old Persian shawl--and I'm going to try it on."

"Try what on?"

"Last night I heard she was sick.  I heard at noon to-day that she was
gone; and then I got you to come out and see the view!"

"What are you going to do with him?"

"Make him come back."

"From where?"

"From the native quarter and the bazaars.  He was for years in Abdin
Palace."

"What do you want him for?"

"It's a little gamble for Egypt.  There's no man in Egypt Ismail loves
and fears so much--"

"Except little Dicky Donovan!"

"That's all twaddle.  There's no man Ismail fears so much, because
he's the idol of the cafes and the bazaars.  He's the Egyptian in Egypt
to-day.  You talk about me?  Why, I'm the foreigner, the Turk, the
robber, the man that holds the lash over Egypt.  I'd go like a wisp of
straw if there was an uprising."

"Will there be an uprising?"  The Southerner's fingers moved as though
they were feeling a pistol.

"As sure as that pyramid stands.  Everything depends on the kind of
uprising.  I want one kind.  There may be another."

"That's what you are here for?"

"Exactly."

"Who is he?"

"Wait."

"What is his story?"

"She was."  He nodded towards the funeral procession.

"Who was she?"

"She was a slave."  Then, after a pause, "She was a genius too.  She saw
what was in him.  She was waiting--but death couldn't wait, so .  .  .
Every thing depends.  What she asked him to do, he'll do."

"But if she didn't ask?"

"That's it.  She was sick only seventeen hours--sick unto death.  If she
didn't ask, he may come my way."

Again Dicky leaned out of the minaret, and looked down towards the gates
of the mosque, where the old gatekeeper lounged half-asleep.  The noise
of the-procession had died away almost, had then revived, and from beyond
the gates of the mosque could be heard the cry of the mourners: "Salem
ala ahali!"

There came a knocking, and the old porter rose up, shuffled to the great
gates, and opened.  For a moment he barred the way, but when the bearers
pointed to the figure in white he stepped aside and salaamed low.

"He is stone-deaf, and hasn't heard, or he'd have let her in fast
enough," said Dicky.

"It's a new thing for a woman to be of importance in an Oriental
country," said Renshaw.

"Ah, that's it!  That's where her power was.  She, with him, could do
anything.  He, with her, could have done anything.  .  .  .  Stand back
there, where you can't be seen--quick," added Dicky hurriedly.  They both
drew into a corner.

"I'm afraid it was too late.  He saw me," added Dicky.

"I'm afraid he did," said Renshaw.

"Never mind.  It's all in the day's work.  He and I are all right.  The
only danger would lie in the crowd discovering us in this holy spot,
where the Muezzin calls to prayer, and giving us what for, before he
could interfere."

"I'm going down from this 'holy spot,'" said Renshaw, and suited the
action to the word.

"Me too, Yankee," said Dicky, and they came halfway down the tower.  From
this point they watched the burial, still well above the heads of the
vast crowd, through which the sweetmeat and sherbet sellers ran, calling
their wares and jangling their brass cups.

"What is his name?" said Renshaw.

"Abdalla."

"Hers?"

"Noor-ala-Noor."

"What does that mean?"

"Light from the Light."




II

The burial was over.  Hundreds had touched the coffin, taking a last
farewell.  The blind men had made a circle round the grave, hiding the
last act of ritual from the multitude.  The needful leaves, the graceful
pebbles, had been deposited, the myrtle blooms and flowers had been
thrown, and rice, dates, bread, meat, and silver pieces were scattered
among the people.  Some poor men came near to the chief mourner.

"Behold, effendi, may our souls be thy sacrifice, and may God give
coolness to thine eyes, speak to us by the will of God!"

For a moment the white-robed figure stood looking at them in silence;
then he raised his hand and motioned towards the high pulpit, which was
almost underneath the place where Dicky and Renshaw stood.  Going over,
he mounted the steps, and the people followed and crowded upon the
pulpit.

"A nice jack-pot that," said Renshaw, as he scanned the upturned faces
through the opening in the wall.  "A pretty one-eyed lot."

"Shows how they love their country.  Their eyes were put out by their
mothers when they were babes, to avoid conscription.  .  .  .  Listen,
Yankee: Egypt is talking.  Now, we'll see!"

Dicky's lips were pressed tight together, and he stroked his faint
moustache with a thumb-nail meditatively.  His eyes were not on the
speaker, but on the distant sky, the Mokattam Hills and the forts
Napoleon had built there.  He was listening intently to Abdalla's high,
clear voice, which rang through the courts of the ruined mosque.

"In the name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful, children of Egypt,
listen.  Me ye have known years without number, and ye know that I am of
you, as ye are of me.  Our feet are in the same shoes, we gather from the
same date-palm, of the same goolah we drink.  My father's father--now in
the bosom of God, praise be to God!--builded this mosque; and my father,
whose soul abides in peace with God, he cherished it till evil days came
upon this land.  'Be your gifts to this mosque neither of silver nor
copper, but of tears and prayers,' said my father, Ebn Abdalla, ere he
unrolled his green turban and wound himself in it for his winding-sheet.
'Though it be till the Karadh-gatherers return, yet shall ye replace nor
stone nor piece of wood, save in the gates thereof, till good days come
once more, and the infidel and the Turk be driven from the land.' Thus
spake my father.  .  .  ."

There came a stir and a murmuring among the crowd, and cries of "Allahu
Akbar!"  "Peace, peace!" urged the figure in white.  "Nay, make no
noise.  This is the house of the dead, of one who hath seen God.  .  .  .
'Nothing shall be repaired, save the gates of the mosque of Ebn Mahmoud,
the mosque of my father's father,' so said my father.  Also said he, 'And
one shall stand at the gates and watch, though the walls crumble away,
till the day when the land shall again be our land, and the chains of the
stranger be forged in every doorway.' .  .  .  But no, ye shall not lift
up your voices in anger.  This is the abode of peace, and the mosque is
my mosque, and the dead my dead."

"The dead is our dead, effendi--may God give thee everlasting years!"
called a blind man from the crowd.  Up in the tower Dicky had listened
intently, and as the speech proceeded his features contracted; once he
gripped the arm of Renshaw.

"It's coming on to blow," he said, in the pause made by the blind man's
interruption.  "There'll be shipwreck somewhere."

"Ye know the way by which I came," continued Abdalla loudly.  "Nothing is
hid from you.  I came near to the person of the Prince, whom God make
wise while yet the stars of his life give light!  In the palace of Abdin
none was preferred before me.  I was much in the sun, and mine eyes were
dazzled.  Yet in season I spake the truth, and for you I laboured.  But
not as one hath a life to give and seeks to give it.  For the dazzle that
was in mine eyes hid from me the fulness of your trials.  But an end
there was to these things.  She came to the palace a slave-Noor-ala-Noor.
.  .  .  Nay, nay, be silent still, my brothers.  Her soul was the soul
of one born free.  On her lips was wisdom.  In her heart was truth like a
flaming sword.  To the Prince she spoke not as a slave to a slave, but in
high level terms.  He would have married her, but her life lay in the
hollow of her hand, and the hand was a hand to open and shut according as
the soul willed.  She was ready to close it so that none save Allah might
open it again.  Then in anger the Prince would have given her to his
bowab at the gates, or to the Nile, after the manner of a Turk or a
Persian tyrant--may God purge him of his loathsomeness .  .  .  !"

He paused, as though choking with passion and grief, and waved a hand
over the crowd in agitated command.

"Here's the old sore open at last--which way now?" said Dicky in a
whisper.  "It's the toss of a penny where he'll pull up.  As I thought
 .  .  .  'Sh!" he added as Renshaw was about to speak.

Abdalla continued.  "Then did I stretch forth my hand, and, because I
loved her, a slave with the freedom of God in her soul and on her face,
I said, 'Come with me,' and behold!  she came, without a word, for our
souls spake to each other, as it was in the olden world, ere the hearts
of men were darkened.  I, an Egyptian of a despised and down-trodden
land, where all men save the rich are slaves, and the rich go in the
fear of their lives; she, a woman from afar, of that ancient tribe who
conquered Egypt long ago--we went forth from the palace alone and
penniless.  He, the Prince, dared not follow to do me harm, for my
father's father ye knew, and my father ye knew, and me ye knew since I
came into the world, and in all that we had ye shared while yet we had to
give; yea, and he feared ye.  We lived among ye, poor as ye are poor, yet
rich for that Egypt was no poorer because of us."  He waved his hand as
though to still the storm he was raising.  .  .  .  "If ye call aloud, I
will drive ye from this place of peace, this garden of her who was called
Light from the Light.  It hath been so until yesterday, when God stooped
and drew the veil from her face, and she dropped the garment of life and
fled from the world.  .  .  .  Go, go hence," he added, his voice thick
with sorrow.  "But ere ye go, answer me, as ye have souls that desire God
and the joys of Paradise, will ye follow where I go, when I come to call
ye forth?  Will ye obey, if I command?"

"By the will of God, thou hast purchased our hearts we will do thy will
for ever," was the answer of the throng.

"Go then, bring down the infidels that have stood in the minaret above,
where the Muezzin calls to prayer;" sharply called Abdalla, and waved an
arm towards the tower where Dicky and Renshaw were.

An oath broke from the lips of the Southerner; but Dicky smiled.  "He's
done it in style," he said.  "Come along."  He bounded down the steps to
the doorway before the crowd had blocked the way.  "They might toss us
out of that minaret," he added, as they both pushed their way into the
open.

"You take too many risks, effendi," he called up to Abdalla in French,
as excited Arabs laid hands upon them, and were shaken off.  "Call away
these fools!" he added coolly to the motionless figure watching from the
pulpit stairs.

Cries of "Kill-kill the infidels!" resounded on all sides; but Dicky
called up again to Abdalla.  "Stop this nonsense, effendi."  Then,
without awaiting an answer, he shouted to the crowd: "I am Donovan Pasha.
Touch me, and you touch Ismail.  I haven't come to spy, but to sorrow
with you for Noor-ala-Noor, whose soul is with God, praise be to God, and
may God give her spirit to you!  I have come to weep for him in whom
greatness speaks; I have come for love of Abdalla the Egyptian.  .  .  .
Is it a sin to stand apart in silence and to weep unseen?  Was it a sin
against the Moslem faith that in this minaret I prayed God to comfort
Abdalla, grandson of Ebn Mahmoud, Egyptian of the Egyptians?  Was it not
I who held Ismail's hand, when he--being in an anger--would have scoured
the bazaars with his horsemen for Abdalla and Noor-ala-Noor?  This is
known to Abdalla, whom God preserve and exalt.  Is not Abdalla friend to
Donovan Pasha?"

Dicky was known to hundreds present.  There was not a merchant from the
bazaars but had had reason to appreciate his presence, either by friendly
gossip over a cup of coffee, or by biting remarks in Arabic, when they
lied to him, or by the sweep of his stick over the mastaba and through
the chattels of some vile-mouthed pedlar who insulted English ladies whom
he was escorting through the bazaar.  They knew his face, his tongue, and
the weight and style of his arm; and though they would cheerfully have
seen him the sacrifice of the Jehad to the cry of Alldhu Akbar! they
respected him for himself, and they feared him because he was near to the
person of Ismail.

He was the more impressive because in the midst of wealth and splendour
he remained poor: he had more than once bought turquoises and opals and
horses and saddlery, which he paid for in instalments, like any little
merchant.  Those, therefore, who knew him, were well inclined to leave
him alone, and those who did not know him were impressed by his speech.
If it was true that he was friend to Abdalla, then his fate was in the
hand of God, not theirs.  They all had heard of little Donovan Pasha,
whom Ismail counted only less than Gordon Pasha, the mad Englishman, who
emptied his pocket for an old servant, gave his coat to a beggar, and
rode in the desert so fast that no Arab could overtake him.

"Call off your terriers, effendi," said Dicky again in French; for
Renshaw was restive under the hands that were laid on his arm, and the
naboots that threatened him.  "My friend here is American.  He stands for
the United States in Egypt."

Abdalla had not moved a muscle during the disturbance, or during Dicky's
speech.  He seemed but the impassive spectator, though his silence and
the look in his eyes were ominous.  It would appear as though he waited
to see whether the Englishman and his friend could free themselves from
danger.  If they could, then it was God's will; if they could not,
Malaish!  Dicky understood.  In this he read Abdalla like a parchment,
and though he had occasion to be resentful, he kept his nerves and his
tongue in an equable mood.  He knew that Abdalla would speak now.  The
Egyptian raised his hand.

"In the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful, go your ways," he
said loudly.  "It is as Donovan Pasha says, he stayed the hand of Ismail
for my sake.  Noor-ala-Noor, the Light from the Light, saw into his
heart, and it was the honest heart of a fool.  And these are the words of
the Koran, That the fool is one whom God has made His temple for a
season, thereafter withdrawing.  None shall injure the temple.  Were not
your hearts bitter against him, and when he spoke did ye not soften?  He
hath no inheritance of Paradise, but God shall blot him out in His own
time.  Bismillah!  God cool his resting-place in that day.  Donovan
Pasha's hand is for Egypt, not against her.  We are brothers, though the
friendship of man is like the shade of the acacia.  Yet while the
friendship lives, it lives.  When God wills it to die, it dies.  .  .  ."
He waved his hand towards the gateway, and came slowly down the steep
steps.

With a curious look in his eyes, Dicky watched the people go.  Another
curious look displaced it and stayed, as Abdalla silently touched his
forehead, his lips, and his heart three times, and then reached out a
hand to Dicky and touched his palm.  Three times they touched palms, and
then Abdalla saluted Renshaw in the same fashion, making the gestures
once only.

From the citadel came the boom of the evening gun.  Without a word
Abdalla left them, and, going apart, he turned his face towards Mecca and
began his prayers.  The court-yard of the mosque was now empty, save for
themselves alone.

The two walked apart near the deserted fountain in the middle of the
court-yard.  "The friendship of man is like the shade of the acacia.  Yet
while the friendship lives, it lives.  When God wills it to die, it
dies!" mused Dicky with a significant smile.  "Friendship walks on thin
ice in the East, Yankee."

"See here, Donovan Pasha, I don't like taking this kind of risk without a
gun," said Renshaw.

"You're an official, a diplomat; you mustn't carry a gun."

"It's all very fine, but it was a close shave for both of us.  You've got
an object--want to get something out of it.  But what do I get for my
money?"

"Perhaps the peace of Europe.  Perhaps a page of reminiscences for the
'New York World'.  Perhaps some limelight chapters of Egyptian history.
Perhaps a little hari-kari.  Don't you feel it in the air?"  Dicky drew
in a sibilant breath.  "All this in any other country would make you
think you were having a devil of a time.  It's on the regular 'menoo'
here, and you don't get a thrill."

"The peace of Europe--Abdalla has something to do with that?"

"Multiply the crowd here a thousand times as much, and that's what he
could represent in one day.  Give him a month, and every man in Egypt
would be collecting his own taxes where he could find 'em.  Abdalla there
could be prophet and patriot to-morrow, and so he will be soon, and to
evil ends, if things don't take a turn.  That Egyptian-Arab has a tongue,
he has brains, he has sorrow, he loved Noor-ala-Noor.  Give a man the
egotism of grief, and eloquence, and popularity, and he'll cut as sharp
as the khamsin wind.  The dust he'll raise will blind more eyes than you
can see in a day's march, Yankee.  You may take my word for it."

Renshaw looked at Dicky thoughtfully.  "You're wasting your life here.
You'll get nothing out of it.  You're a great man, Donovan Pasha, but
others'll reap where you sowed."

Dicky laughed softly.  "I've had more fun for my money than most men of
my height and hair--" he stroked his beardless chin humorously.  "And the
best is to come, Yankee.  This show is cracking.  The audience are going
to rush it."

Renshaw laid a hand on his shoulder.  "Pasha, to tell you God's truth, I
wouldn't have missed this for anything; but what I can't make out is, why
you brought me here.  You don't do things like that for nothing.  You bet
you don't.  You'd not put another man in danger, unless he was going to
get something out of it, or somebody was.  It looks so damned useless.
You've done your little job by your lonesome, anyhow.  I was no use."

"Your turn comes," said Dicky, flashing a look of friendly humour at him.
"America is putting her hand in the dough--through you.  You'll know, and
your country'll know, what's going on here in the hum of the dim bazaars.
Ismail's got to see how things stand, and you've got to help me tell him.
You've got to say I tell the truth, when the French gentlemen, who have
their several spokes in the Egyptian wheel, politely say I lie.  Is it
too much, or too little, Yankee?"

Renshaw almost gulped.  "By Jerusalem!" was all he could say.  "And we
wonder why the English swing things as they do!" he growled, when his
breath came freely.

Abdalla had finished his prayers; he was coming towards them.  Dicky went
to meet him.

"Abdalla, I'm hungry," he said; "so are you.  You've eaten nothing since
sunset, two days ago."

"I am thirsty, saadat el basha," he answered, and his voice was husky.

"Come, I will give you to eat, by the goodness of God."

It was the time of Ramadan, when no Mahommedan eats food or touches
liquid from the rising to the going down of the sun.  As the sunset-gun
boomed from the citadel, lids had been snatched off millions of cooking-
pots throughout the land, and fingers had been thrust into the meat and
rice of the evening feast, and their owner had gulped down a bowl of
water.  The smell of a thousand cooking-pots now came to them over the
walls of the mosque.  Because of it, Abdalla's command to the crowd to
leave had been easier of acceptance.  Their hunger had made them
dangerous.  Danger was in the air.  The tax-gatherers had lately gone
their rounds, and the agents of the Mouffetish had wielded the kourbash
without mercy and to some purpose.  It was perhaps lucky that the
incident had occurred within smell of the evening feasts and near the
sounding of the sunset-gun.




III

A half-hour later, as Abdalla thrust his fingers into the dish and handed
Dicky a succulent cucumber filled with fried meat, the latter said to
him: "It is the wish of the Effendina, my friend.  It comes as the will
of God; for even as Noor-ala-Noor journeyed to the bosom of God by your
will, and by your prayers, being descended from Mahomet as you are, even
then Ismail, who knew naught of your sorrow, said to me, 'In all Egypt
there is one man, and one only, for whom my soul calls to go into the
desert with Gordon,' and I answered him and said: 'Inshallah, Effendina,
it is Abdalla, the Egyptian.'  And he laid his hand upon his head--I have
seen him do that for no man since I came into his presence--and said:
'My soul calls for him.  Find him and bid him to come.  Here is my
ring.'"

Dicky took from his pocket a signet-ring, which bore a passage from the
Koran, and laid it beside Abdalla's drinking-bowl.

"What is Ismail to me--or the far tribes of the Soudan!  Here are my
people," was the reply.  Abdalla motioned to the next room, where the
blind men ate their evening meal, and out to the dimly lighted streets
where thousands of narghilehs and cigarettes made little smoky clouds
that floated around white turbans and dark faces.  "When they need me,
I will speak; when they cry to me, I will unsheathe the sword of Ebn
Mahmoud, who fought with Mahomet Ali and saved the land from the Turk."

Renshaw watched the game with an eagerness unnoticeable in his manner.
He saw how difficult was the task before Dicky.  He saw an Oriental
conscious of his power, whose heart was bitter, and whose soul, in
its solitude, revolted and longed for action.  It was not moved by a pure
patriotism, but what it was moved by served.  That dangerous temper,
which would have let Dicky, whom he called friend, and himself go down
under the naboots of the funeral multitude, with a "Malaish" on his
tongue, was now in leash, ready to spring forth in the inspired hour;
and the justification need not be a great one.  Some slight incident
might set him at the head of a rabble which would sweep Cairo like a
storm.  Yet Renshaw saw, too, that once immersed in the work his mind
determined on, the Egyptian would go forward with relentless force.  In
the excitement of the moment it seemed to him that Egypt was hanging in
the balance.

Dicky was eating sweetmeats like a girl.  He selected them with great
care.  Suddenly Abdalla touched his hand.  "Speak on.  Let all thy
thoughts be open--stay not to choose, as thou dost with the sweetmeats.
I will choose: do thou offer without fear.  I would not listen to Ismail;
to thee I am but as a waled to bear thy shoes in my hand."

Dicky said nothing for a moment, but appeared to enjoy the comfit he
was eating.  He rolled it over his tongue, and his eyes dwelt with a
remarkable simplicity and childlike friendliness on Abdalla.  It was as
though there was really nothing vital at stake.  .  .  .  Yet he was
probing, probing without avail into Abdalla's mind and heart, and was
never more at sea in his life.  It was not even for Donovan Pasha to read
the Oriental thoroughly.  This man before him had the duplicity or
evasion of the Oriental; delicately in proportion to his great ability,
yet it was there--though in less degree than in any Arab he had ever
known.  It was the more dangerous because so subtle.  It held surprise
--it was an unknown quantity.  The most that Dicky could do was to feel
subtly before him a certain cloud of the unexpected.  He was not sure
that he deceived Abdalla by his simple manner, yet that made little
difference.  The Oriental would think not less of him for dissimulation,
but rather more.  He reached over and put a comfit in the hand of
Abdalla.

"Let us eat together," he said, and dropped a comfit into his own mouth.

Abdalla ate, and Dicky dipped his fingers in the basin before them,
saying, as he lifted them again: "I will speak as to my brother.  Ismail
has staked all on the Soudan.  If, in the will of God, he is driven from
Berber, from Dongola, from Khartoum, from Darfar, from Kassala, his power
is gone.  Egypt goes down like the sun at evening.  Ismail will be like a
withered gourd.  To establish order and peace and revenue there, he is
sending the man his soul loves, whom the nations trust, to the cities of
the desert.  If it be well with Gordon, it will be well with the desert-
cities.  But Gordon asks for one man--an Egyptian--who loves the land and
is of the people, to speak for him, to counsel with him, to show the
desert tribes that Egypt gives her noblest to rule and serve them.
There is but one man--Abdalla the Egyptian.  A few years yonder in the
desert--power, glory, wealth won for Egypt, the strength of thine arms
known, the piety of thy spirit proven, thy name upon every tongue--on thy
return, who then should fear for Egypt!"

Dicky was playing a dangerous game, and Renshaw almost shrank from his
words.  He was firing the Egyptian's mind, but to what course he knew
not.  If to the Soudan, well; if to remain, what conflagration might not
occur!  Dicky staked all.

"Here, once more, among thy people, returned from conquest and the years
of pilgrimage in the desert, like a prophet of old, thy zeal would lead
the people, and once more Egypt should bloom like the rose.  Thou wouldst
be sirdar, mouffetish, pasha, all things soever.  This thou wouldst be
and do, thou, Abdalla the Egyptian."

Dicky had made his great throw; and he sat back, perhaps a little paler
than was his wont, but apparently serene and earnest and steady.

The effect upon Abdalla could only be judged by his eyes, which burned
like fire as they fixed upon Dicky's face.  The suspense was painful, for
he did not speak for a long time.  Renshaw could have shrieked with
excitement.  Dicky lighted a cigarette and tossed a comfit at a pariah
dog.  At last Abdalla rose.  Dicky rose with him.

"Thou, too, hast a great soul, or mine eyes are liars," Abdalla said.
"Thou lovest Egypt also.  This Gordon--I am not his friend.  I will not
go with him.  But if thou goest also with Gordon, then I will go with
thee.  If thou dost mean well by Egypt, and thy words are true, thou also
wilt go.  As thou speakest, let it be."

A mist came before Dicky's eyes--the world seemed falling into space, his
soul was in a crucible.  The struggle was like that of a man with death,
for this must change the course of his life, to what end God only knew.
All that he had been to Egypt, all that Egypt had been to him, came to
him.  But he knew that he must not pause.  Now was his moment, and now
only.  Before the mist had cleared from his eyes he gave his hand into
Abdalla's.

"In God's name, so be it.  I also will go with Gordon, and thou with me,"
he said.






HE WOULD NOT BE DENIED

"He was achin' for it--turrible achin' for it--an' he would not be
denied!" said Sergeant William Connor, of the Berkshire Regiment, in the
sergeants' mess at Suakim, two nights before the attack on McNeill's
zeriba at Tofrik.

"Serve 'im right.  Janders was too bloomin' suddint," skirled Henry
Withers of the Sick Horse Depot from the bottom of the table.

"Too momentary, I believe you," said Corporal Billy Bagshot.

At the Sick Horse Depot Connor had, without good cause, made some
disparaging remarks upon the charger ridden by Subadar Goordit Singh at
the fight at Dihilbat Hill, which towers over the village of Hashin.
Subadar Goordit Singh heard the remarks, and, loving his welted, gibbet-
headed charger as William Connor loved any woman who came his way, he
spat upon the ground the sergeant's foot covered, and made an evil-
smiling remark.  Thereupon Connor laid siege to the white-toothed, wild-
bearded Sikh with words which suddenly came to renown, and left not a
shred of glory to the garment of vanity the hillman wore.

He insinuated that the Sikh's horse was wounded at Hashin from behind by
backing too far on the Guards' Brigade on one side and on the Royal
Mounted Infantry on the other.  This was ungenerous and it was not true,
for William Connor knew well the reputation of the Sikhs; but William's
blood was up, and the smile of the Subadar was hateful in his eyes.  The
truth was that the Berkshire Regiment had had its chance at Dihilbat Hill
and the Sikhs had not.  But William Connor refused to make a distinction
between two squadrons of Bengal Cavalry which had been driven back upon
the Guards' square and the Sikhs who fretted on their bits, as it were.

The Berkshire Regiment had done its work in gallant style up the steep
slopes of Dihilbat, had cleared the summit of Osman Digna's men, and
followed them with a raking fire as they retreated wildly into the mimosa
bushes on the plain.  The Berkshires were not by nature proud of stomach,
but Connor was a popular man, and the incident of the Sick Horse Depot,
as reported by Corporal Bagshot, who kept a diary and a dictionary,
tickled their imagination, and they went forth and swaggered before the
Indian Native Contingent, singing a song made by Bagshot and translated
into Irish idiom by William Connor.  The song was meant to humiliate the
Indian Native Contingent, and the Sikhs writhed under the raillery and
looked black-so black that word was carried to McNeill himself, who sent
orders to the officers of the Berkshire Regiment to give the offenders a
dressing down; for the Sikhs were not fellaheen, to be heckled with
impunity.

That was why, twenty-four hours after the offending song was made, it was
suppressed; and in the sergeants' mess William Connor told the story how,
an hour before, he had met Subadar Goordit Singh in the encampment, and
the Subadar in a rage at the grin on Connor's face had made a rush at
him, which the Irishman met with his foot, spoiling his wind.  That had
ended the incident for the moment, for the Sikh remembered in time, and
William Connor had been escorted "Berkshire way" by Corporal Bagshot and
Henry Withers.  As the tale was told over and over again, there came
softly from the lips of the only other Irishman in the regiment, Jimmy
Coolin, a variant verse of the song that the great McNeill had stopped:

                   "Where is the shame of it,
                    Where was the blame of it,
                    William Connor dear?"

It was well for Graham, Hunter, McNeill, and their brigades that William
Connor and the Berkshires and the Subadar Goordit Singh had no idle time
in which to sear their difficulties, for, before another khamsin gorged
the day with cutting dust, every department of the Service, from the
Commissariat to the Balloon Detachment, was filling marching orders.
There was a collision, but it was the agreeable collision of preparation
for a fight, for it was ordained that the Berkshires and the Sikhs should
go shoulder to shoulder to establish a post in the desert between Suakim
and Tamai.

"D'ye hear that, William Connor dear?" said Private Coolin when the
orders came.  "An' y'll have Subadar Goordit Singh with his kahars and
his bhistis and his dhooly bearers an' his Lushai dandies an' his
bloomin' bullock-carts steppin' on y'r tail as ye travel, Misther
Connor!"

"Me tail is the tail of a kangaroo; I'm strongest where they tread on me,
Coolin," answered Connor.  "An' drinkin' the divil's chlorides from the
tins of the mangy dhromedairy has turned me insides into a foundry.  I'm
metal-plated, Coolin."

"So ye'll need if ye meet the Subadar betune the wars!"

"Go back to y'r condinsation, Coolin.  Bring water to the thirsty be
gravitation an' a four-inch main, an' shtrengthen the Bowl of the Subadar
wid hay-cake, for he'll want it agin the day he laves Tamai behind!  Go
back to y'r condinsation, Coolin, an' take truth to y'r Bowl that there's
many ways to die, an' one o' thim's in the commysariat, Coolin--shame for
ye!"

Coolin had been drafted into the Commissariat and was now variously
employed, but chiefly at the Sandbag Redoubt, where the condensing ship
did duty, sometimes at the southeast end of the harbour where the Indian
Contingent watered.  Coolin hated the duty, and because he was in a
bitter mood his tongue was like a leaf of aloe.

"I'll be drinkin' condinsed spirits an' 'atin' hay-cake whip the vultures
do be peckin' at what's lift uv ye whip the Subadar's done wid ye.
I'd a drame about ye last noight, William Connor dear--three times
I dramed it."

Suddenly Connor's face was clouded.  "Whist, thin, Coolin," said he
hoarsely.  "Hadendowas I've no fear uv, an' Subadars are Injy nagurs
anyhow, though fellow-soldiers uv the Queen that's good to shtand befront
uv biscuit-boxes or behoind thim; an' wan has no fear of the thing that's
widout fear, an' death's iron enters in aisy whip mortial strength's
behind it.  But drames--I've had enough uv drames in me toime, I have
that, Coolin!"  He shuddered a little.  "What was it ye dramed again,
Coolin?  Was there anything but the dramin'--anny noise, or sound, or
spakin'?"

Coolin lied freely, for to disturb William Connor was little enough
compensation for being held back at Suakim while the Berkshires and the
Sikhs were off for a scrimmage in the desert.

"Nothin' saw I wid open eye, an' nothin' heard," he answered; "but I
dramed twice that I saw ye lyin' wid y'r head on y'r arm and a hole in
y'r jacket.  Thin I waked suddin', an' I felt a cold wind goin' over me--
three toimes; an' a hand was laid on me own face, an' it was cold an'
smooth-like the hand uv a Sikh, William Connor dear."

Connor suddenly caught Coolin's arm.  "D'ye say that!" said he.  "Shure,
I'll tell ye now why the chills rin down me back whin I hear uv y'r
drame.  Thrue things are drames, as I'll prove to ye--as quare as
condinsation an' as thrue, Coolin; fer condinsation comes out uv nothin',
and so do drames..  .  .  There was Mary Haggarty, Coolin--ye'll not be
knowin' Mary Haggarty.  It was mornin' an' evenin' an' the first day uv
the world where she were.  That was Mary Haggarty.  An' ivery shtep she
tuk had the spring uv the first sod of Adin.  Shure no, ye didn't know
Mary Haggarty, an' ye niver will, Coolin, fer the sod she trod she's
lyin' under, an' she'll niver rise up no more."

"Fer choice I'll take the sod uv Erin to the sand uv the Soudan," said
Coolin.

"Ye'll take what ye can get, Coolin; fer wid a splinterin' bullet in y'r
gizzard ye lie where ye fall."

"But Mary Haggarty, Connor?"

"I was drinkin' hard, ye understand, Coolin--drinkin', loike a
dhromedairy--ivery day enough to last a wake, an' Mary tryin' to stop me
betimes.  At last I tuk the pledge--an' her on promise.  An' purty, purty
she looked thin, an' shtepping light an' fine, an' the weddin' was coming
an.  But wan day there was a foire, an' the police coort was burned down,
an' the gaol was that singed they let the b'ys out, an' we rushed the
police an' carried off the b'ys, an'--"

"An' ye sweltered in the juice!" broke in Coolin with flashing eyes,
proud to have roused Connor to this secret tale, which he would tell to
the Berkshires as long as they would listen, that it should go down
through a long line of Berkshires, as Coolin's tale of William Connor.

"An' I sweltered in the swill," said Connor, his eye with a cast quite
shut with emotion, and the other nearly so.  "An' wance broke out agin
afther tin months' goin' wake and watery, was like a steer in the corn.
There was no shtoppin' me, an'--"

"Not Mary Haggarty aither?"

"Not Mary Haggarty aither."

"O, William Connor dear!"

"Ye may well say, 'O, William Connor dear!' 'Twas what she said day by
day, an' the heart uv me loike Phararyoh's.  Thrue it is, Coolin, that
the hand uv mortial man has an ugly way uv squazin' a woman's heart dry
whin, at last, to his coaxin' she lays it tinder an' onsuspectin' on the
inside grip uv it."

"But the heart uv Mary Haggarty, Connor?"

"'Twas loike a flower under y'r fut, Coolin, an' a heavy fut is to you.
She says to me wan day, 'Ye're breakin' me heart, William Connor,' says
she.  'Thin I'll sodder it up agin wid the help uv the priest,' says I.
'That ye will not do,' says she; 'wance broken, 'tis broke beyond
mendin'.'  'Go an wid ye, Mary Haggarty darlin',' says I, laughin' in her
face, 'hivin is y'r home.'  'Yes, I'll be goin' there, William Connor,'
says she, 'I'll be goin' there betimes, I hope.'  'How will it be?' says
I; 'be fire or wateer, Mary darlin'?' says I.  'Ye shall know whin it
comes,' says she, wid a quare look in her eye."

"An' ye did?" asked Coolin, open-mouthed and staring; for never had he
seen Connor with aught on his face but a devil-may-care smile.

"Ordered away we was next avenin', an' sorra the glimpse of Mary Haggarty
to me--for Headquarters is a lady that will not be denied.  Away we wint
overseas.  Shlapin' I was wan night in a troop-ship in the Bay uv Biscay;
an' I dramed I saw Mary walkin' along the cliff by--well, 'tis no matter,
fer ye've niver been there, an 'tis no place to go to unheedin'.  Manny
an' manny a time I'd walked wid Mary Haggarty there.  There's a steep
hill betune two pints uv land.  If ye go low on't ye're safe enough--if
ye go high it crumbles, an' down ye shlip a hunder fut into the say.  In
me drame I saw Mary onthinkin', or thinkin' maybe about me an' not about
the high path or the low--though 'tis only the low that's used these
twinty years.  Her head was down.  I tried to call her.  She didn't hear,
but wint an an' an.  All at wanst I saw the ground give way. She shlipped
an' snatched at the spinifex.  Wan minnit she held, an' thin slid down,
down into the say.  An' I woke callin' 'Mary--Mary' in me throat."

"Ye dramed it wance only, Connor?" said Coolin, with the insolent grin
gone out of his eyes.

"I dramed it three times, an' the last time, whin I waked, I felt a cold
wind go over me.  Thin a hand touched me face--the same as you, Coolin,
the same as you.  Drames are thrue things, Coolin."

"It was thrue, thin, Connor?"

A look of shame and a curious look of fear crept into Coolin's face; for
though it was not true he had dreamed of the hand on his face and the
cold wind blowing over him, it was true he had dreamed he saw Connor
lying on the ground with a bullet-hole in his tunic.  But Coolin, being
industrious at his trencher, often had dreams, and one more or less
horrible about Connor had not seemed to him to matter at all.  It
had sufficed, however, to give him a cue to chaff the man who had knocked
the wind out of Subadar Goordit Singh, and who must pay for it one hour
or another in due course, as Coolin and the Berkshires knew full well.

"It was thrue, thin, William Connor?" repeated Coolin.

"As thrue as that yander tripod pump kills wan man out uv ivery fifty.
As thrue as that y'r corn-beef from y'r commysariat tins gives William
Connor thirst, Coolin."

"She was drownded, Connor?" asked Coolin in a whisper.

"As I dramed it, an' allowin' fer difference uv time, at the very hour,
Coolin.  'Tis five years ago, an' I take it hard that Mary Haggarty
spakes to me through you.  'Tis a warnin', Coolin."

"'Twas a lie I told you, Connor--'twas a lie!"  And Coolin tried to grin.

Connor's voice was like a woman's, soft and quiet, as he answered: "Ye'll
lie fast enough, Coolin, whin the truth won't sarve; but the truth has
sarved its turn this time."

"Aw, Connor dear, only wan half's thrue.  As I'm a man--only wan half."

"Go an to y'r condinsation, Coolin, fer the face uv ye's not fit fer
dacint company, wan side paralytic wid lyin', an' the other struck simple
wid tellin' the truth.  An' see, Coolin, fer the warnin' she give ye fer
me, the kit I lave is yours, an' what more, be the will uv God!  An' what
ye've told me ye'll kape to y'self, Coolin, or hell shall be your
portion."

"He tuk it fer truth an' a warnin', an' he would not be denied," said
Coolin to Henry Withers, of the Sick Horse Depot, two hours afterwards,
when the Berkshires and the Sikhs and the Bengalese were on the march
towards Tamai.

"The bloomin' trick is between the Hadendowas and the Subadar," answered
he of the Sick Horse Depot.  "Ye take it fer a warnin', thin?" asked
Coolin uneasily.

"I believe you," answered Henry Withers.

As for William Connor, when he left Suakim, his foot was light, his
figure straight, and he sent a running fire of laughter through his
company by one or two "insinsible remarks," as Coolin called them.

Three hours' marching in the Soudan will usually draw off the froth of a
man's cheerfulness, but William Connor was as light of heart at Tofrik as
at Suakim, and he saw with pleasure two sights--the enemy in the distance
and the 15th Sikhs on their right flank, with Subadar Goordit Singh in
view.

"There's work 'ere to-day for whoever likes it on the 'op!" said Henry
Withers, of the Sick Horse Depot, as he dragged his load of mimosa to the
zeriba; for he had got leave to come on with his regiment.

"You'll find it 'otter still when the vedettes and Cossack Posts come
leadin' in the Osnum Digners.  If there ain't hoscillations on that
rectangle, strike me in the night-lights!" said Corporal Bagshot, with
his eye on the Bengalese.  "Blyme, if the whole bloomin' parallogram
don't shiver," he added; "for them Osnum Digners 'as the needle, and
they're ten to one, or I'm a bloater!"

"There's Gardner guns fer the inimy an' Lushai dandies fer us," broke in
Connor, as he drove a stake in the ground, wet without and dry within--"
an' Gardner guns are divils on the randan.  Whin they get to work it's
like a self-actin' abbatoir."

"I 'opes ye like it, Connor.  Bloomin' picnic for you when the Osnum
Digners eat sand.  What ho!"

"I have no swarms of conscience there, Billy Bag; shot.  For the bones uv
me frinds that's lyin' in this haythen land, I'll clane as fur as I can
reach.  An' I'll have the run uv me belt to-day, an--" he added, then
stopped short as the order came from McNeill that the Berkshires should
receive dinner by half-battalions.

"An' 'igh time," said Corporal Bagshot.  "What with marchin' and
zeribakin' and the sun upon me tank since four this mornin', I'm dead for
food and buried for water.  I ain't no bloomin' salamanker to be grilled
and say thank-ye, and I ain't no bloomin' camomile to bring up me larder
and tap me tank when Coolin's commissaryat hasn't no orders."

"Shure ye'll run better impty, Billy boy," said Connor.  "An' what fer do
ye need food before y'r execution?" he added, with a twist of his mouth.

"Before execution, ye turkey-cock--before execution is the time to eat
and drink.  How shall the bloomin' carnage gore the Libyan sands, if
there ain't no refreshment for the vitals and the diagrams?"

"Come an wid ye to y'r forage-cake, thin-an' take this to ye," added
Connor slyly, as he slipped a little nickel-plated flask into Billy
Bagshot's hand.

"With a Woking crematory in y'r own throat.  See you bloomin' furder!"
answered Billy Bagshot.

"I'm not drinkin' to-day," answered Connor, with a curious look in the
eye that had no cast.  "I'm not drinkin', you understand."

"Ain't it a bit momentary?" asked Bagshot, as they sat down.

"Momentary betimes," answered Connor evasively.  "Are you eatin' at this
bloomin' swaree, then?"  "I'm niver aff me forage-cake," answered Connor,
and he ate as if he had had his tooth in nothing for a month.

A quarter of an hour later, the Sikhs were passing the Berkshire zeriba,
and the Berkshires, filing out, joined them to cut brushwood.  A dozen
times the Subadar Goordit Singh almost touched shoulders with Connor, but
neither spoke, and neither saw directly; for if once they saw each
other's eyes the end might come too soon, to the disgrace of two
regiments.

Suddenly, the forbidden song on William Connor and the Subadar arose
among the Berkshires.  No one knew who started it, but it probably was
Billy Bagshot, who had had more than a double portion of drink, and was
seized with a desire to celebrate his thanks to Connor thus.

In any case the words ran along the line, and were carried up in a shout
amid the crackling of the brushwood:

                   "Where was the shame of it,
                    Where was the blame of it,
                    William Connor dear?"

That sort of special providence which seems to shelter the unworthy, gave
India and the Berkshires honour that hour when the barometer registered
shame; for never was mercury more stormy than shot up in the artery of
two men's wills when that song rose over the zeriba at Tofrik.  They were
not fifty feet apart at the time, and at the lilt of that chorus they
swung towards each other like two horses to the bugle on parade.

"A guinea to a brown but Janders goes large!" said Billy Bagshot under
his breath, his eye on the Subadar and repenting him of the song.

But Janders did not go large; for at that very moment there came the
bugle-call for the working parties to get into the zeriba, as from the
mimosa scrub came hundreds upon hundreds of "Osnum Digners" hard upon the
heels of the vedettes.

"The Hadendowas 'as the privilege," said Billy Bagshot, as the Berkshires
and the Sikhs swung round and made for the zeriba.

"What's that ye say?" cried Connor, as the men stood to their arms.

"Looked as if the bloomin' hontray was with the Subadar, but the
Hadendowas 'as the honour to hinvite sweet William!"

"Murther uv man--look--look, ye Berkshire boar!  The Bengals is breakin'
line!"

"Oscillations 'as begun!" said Bagshot, as, disorganised by the vedettes
riding through their flank into the zeriba, the Bengalese wavered.

"'Tis your turn now--go an to y'r gruel!" said Connor, as Bagshot with
his company and others were ordered to move over to the Bengalese and
steady them.

"An' no bloomin' sugar either," Bagshot called back as he ran.

"Here's to ye thin!" shouted Connor, as the enemy poured down on their
zeriba on the west and the Bengalese retreated on them from the east, the
Billy Bagshot detachment of Berkshires rallying them and firing steadily,
the enemy swarming after and stampeding the mules and camels.  Over the
low bush fence, over the unfinished sand-bag parapet at the southwest
salient, spread the shrieking enemy like ants, stabbing and cutting.  The
Gardner guns, as Connor had said, were "fer the inimy," but the Lushai
dandies were for the men that managed them that day; for the enemy came
too soon--in shrieking masses to a hand-to-hand melee.

What India lost that hour by the Bengalese the Sikhs won back.  Side by
side with them the Berkshires cursed and raged and had their way; and
when the Sikhs drew over and laid themselves along the English lines a
wild cheer went up from the Berkshires.  Wounded men spluttered their
shouts from mouths filled with blood, and to the welcoming roars of the
Berkshires the Sikhs showed their teeth in grim smiles, "and done
things," as Billy Bagshot said when it was all over.

But by consent of every man who fought under McNeill that day, the
biggest thing done among the Sikhs happened in the fiercest moment of the
rush on the Berkshire zeriba.  Billy Bagshot told the story that night,
after the Lushai dandies had carried off the wounded and the sands of the
desert had taken in the dead.

"Tyke it or leave it, 'e 'ad the honours of the day," said Bagshot, "'e
and Janders--old Subadar Goordit Singh.  It myde me sick to see them
Bengalesey, some of 'em 'ookin' it to Suakim, some of 'em retirin' on the
seraphim, which is another name for Berkshires.  It ain't no sweet levee
a-tryin' to rally 'eathen 'ands to do their dooty.  So we 'ad to cover
'em back into the zeriba of the seraphim--which is our glorious selves.
A bloomin' 'asty puddin' was that tournamong, but it wasn't so bloomin'
'asty that the Subadar and William Connor didn't finish what they started
for to do when the day was young."

"Did Janders stick the b'y?" asked Coolin, who had just come in from
Suakim with the Commissariat camels.  "Shure, I hope to God he didn't!"
He was pale and wild of eye.

"Did a bloomin' sparrow give you 'is brains when you was changed at
birth?  Stick William Connor--I believe you not!  This is what 'appened,
me bloomin' sanitary.  When I got back be'ind the 'eavenly parapet, there
was William Connor in a nice little slaughter-house of 'is own.  'E was
doin' of 'isself proud--too busy to talk.  All at once 'e spies a flag
the Osnum Digners 'ad planted on the 'eavenly parapet.  'E opens 'is
mouth and gives one yell, and makes for that bit of cotton.  'E got
there, for 'e would not be denied.  'E got there an' 'e couldn't get
back.  But 'e made a rush for it--"

"A divil he was on rushes," broke in Private Coolin, wiping his mouth
nervously.

"'E's the pride of 'is 'ome and the bloomin' brigade, bar one, which is
the Subadar Goordit Singh.  For w'en the Subadar sees Connor in 'is 'ole,
a cut across 'is jaw, doin' of 'is trick alone, away goes Subadar Goordit
Singh and two of 'is company be'ind 'im for to rescue.  'E cut with 'is
sword like a bloomin' picture.  'E didn't spare 'is strength, and 'e
didn't spare the Osnum Digners.  An' 'e comeback, an' he brought with him
William Connor--that's all what come back."

"How long did William live?" asked Coolin.  "He was a good frind to me
was Connor, a thrue frind he was to me.  How long did the b'y live?"

'E lived long enough to 'ave McNeill shake 'im by the 'and.  'E lived
long enough to say to the Subadar Goordit Singh, 'I would take scorn uv
me to lave widout askin' y'r pardon, Subadar.'  And the Subadar took 'is
'and and salaamed, and showed 'is teeth, which was meant friendly."

"What else did Connor say?" asked Coolin, eagerly.  "'E said 'is
kit was for you that's spoilin' a good name in the condinsation of the
Commissaryat, Coolin."  "But what else?" urged Coolin.  "Nothin' about
a drame at all?"

"Who's talkin' about dreams!" said Bagshot.  'E wasn't no bloomin' poet.
'E was a man.  What 'e said 'e said like a man.  'E said 'e'd got word
from Mary--which is proper that a man should do when 'e's a-chuckin' of
'is tent-pegs.  If 'e ain't got no mother--an' Connor 'adn't 'is wife or
'is sweetheart 'as the honour."

"Oh, blessed God," said Coolin, "I wish I hadn't towld him--I wish I
hadn't towld the b'y."

"Told 'im wot?" said Bagshot.

But Coolin of the Commissariat did not answer; his head was on his arms,
and his arms were on his knees.






THE FLOWER OF THE FLOCK

"'E was a flower," said Henry Withers of the Sick Horse Depot.

"A floower in front garden!" ironically responded Holgate, the Yorkshire
engineer, as he lay on his back on the lower deck of the Osiris, waiting
for Fielding Pasha's orders to steam up the river.

"'E was the bloomin' flower of the flock," said Henry Withers, with a
cross between a yawn and a sigh, and refusing to notice Holgate's
sarcasm.

"Aw've heerd on 'em, the floowers o' the flock--they coom to a bad end
mostwise in Yorkshire--nipped in t' bood loike!  Was tha friend nipped
untimely?"

"I'd give a bloomin' camomile to know!"

"Deserted or summat?"

"Ow yus, 'e deserted--to Khartoum," answered Withers with a sneer.

"The 'owlin' sneak went in 'idin' with Gordon at Khartoum!"

"Aye, aw've heerd o' Gordon a bit," said Holgate dubiously, intent to
further anger the Beetle, as Henry Withers was called.

"Ow yus, ow verily yus!  An' y've 'eard o' Julius Caesar, an'
Nebucha'nezzar, an' Florence Noightingyle, 'aven't you--you wich is
chiefly bellyband and gullet."

"Aye, aw've eaten too mooch to-day," rejoined Holgate placidly, refusing
to see insult.  "Aw don't see what tha friend was doin' at Khartoum wi'
Goordon."

'E was makin' Perry Davis' Pain Killer for them at 'ome who wouldn't send
Gordon 'elp when the 'eathen was at 'is doors a 'underd to one.  'E was
makin' it for them to soothe their bloomin' pains an' sorrers when Gordon
an' Macnamara 'ad cried 'elp! for the lawst toime!"

"Aw've taken off ma hat to Goordon's nevvy-he be a fine man-head for
macheens he has"-Holgate's eyes dwelt on his engine lovingly; "but aw've
heerd nowt o' Macnamara-never nowt o' him.  Who was Macnamara?"

'E was the bloomin' flower of the flock-'e was my pal as took service in
the Leave-me-alone-to-die Regiment at Khartoum."

"Aw've never read o' Macnamara.  Dost think tha'll ever know how he
went?"

"I ain't sayin' 'as 'e went, an' I ain't thinkin' as 'e went.  I'm
waitin' like a bloomin' telegarpher at the end of a wire.  'E was the
pick o' fifteen 'underd men was Macnamara."

"What sent t' laad to Goordon?"

"A-talkin' of 'isself silly to two lydies at onct."

"Aye, theer's the floower o' the flock.  Breakin' hearts an' spoilin'
lives--aw've seen them floowers bloomin'."

'E didn't break no witherin' 'earts, an' 'e didn't spoil no lives.  The
lydies was both married afore Macnamara got as far as Wady Halfar.  'E
break 'earts--not much!  'E went to Khartoum to be quiet."

"Aw'm pityin' the laads that married them lasses."

"'Ere, keep your bloomin' pity.  I wuz one.  An' if your pity's 'urtin'
yer, think of 'im as 'adn't no wife nor kid to say when 'e's dead, 'Poor
Peter Macnamara, 'e is gone."'

"A good job too, aw'm thinkin'."

"An' a bloornin' 'ard 'eart y' 'ave.  Wantin' of a man to die without
leavin' 'is mark--'is bleedin' 'all mark on the world.  I 'ave two--two
kids I 'ave; an' so 'elp me Gawd, things bein' as they are, I wouldn't
say nothin' if one of 'em was Macnamara's--wich it ain't--no fear!"

"Was Macnamara here you wouldn't say thaat to his faace, aw'm thinkin'."

"I'd break 'is 'ulkin' neck first.  I ain't puttin' these things on the
'oardins, an' I ain't thinkin' 'em, if 'ee's alive in the clutches of the
'eathen Kalifer at Homdurman.  There's them as says 'e is, an' there's
them as says 'e was cut down after Gordon.  But it's only Gawd-forsaken
Arabs as says it, an' they'll lie wichever way you want 'em."

"Aye, laad, but what be great foolks doin' at Cairo?  They be sendin'
goold for Slatin an' Ohrwalder by sooch-like heathen as lie to you.  If
Macnamara be alive, what be Macnamara doin'?  An' what be Wingate an'
Kitchener an' great foolks at Cairo doin'?"

"They're sayin', 'Macnamara, 'oos 'e?  'E ain't no class.  'Oo wants
Macnamara!'"

Holgate raised himself on his elbow, a look of interest in his face,
which he tried to disguise.  "See, laad," he said, "why does tha not send
messenger thaself--a troosty messenger?"

"'Ere, do you think I'm a bloomin' Crosus?  I've done the trick twice-ten
pounds o' loot once, an' ten golden shillin's another.  Bloomin' thieves
both of 'em--said they wuz goin' to Homdurman, and didn't not much!  But
one of 'em went to 'eaven with cholery, an' one is livin' yet with a
crooked leg, with is less than I wuz workin' for."

Holgate was sitting bolt upright now.  "Didst tha save them ten sooverins
to get news o' Macnamara, laad?"

"Think I bloomin' well looted 'em--go to 'ell!" said Henry Withers of
the Sick Horse Depot, and left the lower deck of the Osiris in a fit of
sudden anger.




II

Up in Omdurman Peter Macnamara knew naught of this.  He ran behind his
master's horse, he sat on his master's mat, he stood in the sun before
his master's door, barefooted and silent and vengeful in his heart, but
with a grin on his face.  When Khartoum fell he and Slatin had been
thrown into the Saier loaded with irons.  Then, when the Mahdi died he
had been made the slave of the Khalifa's brother, whose vanity was
flattered by having a European servant.  The Khalifa Abdullah being angry
one day with his brother, vented his spite by ordering Macnamara back to
prison again.  Later the Khalifa gave him to a favourite Emir for a
servant; but that service was of short duration, for on a certain morning
Macnamara's patience gave way under the brutality of his master, and he
refused to help him on his horse.  This was in the presence of the
Khalifa, and Abdullah was so delighted at the discomfiture of the Emir
that he saved the Irishman's life, and gave him to Osman Wad Adam, after
he had been in irons three months and looked no better than a dead man.
Henceforth things went better, for Osman Wad Adam was an Arab with a
sense of humour, very lazy and very licentious, and Macnamara's Arabic
was a source of enjoyment to him in those hours when he did nothing but
smoke and drink bad coffee.  Also Macnamara was an expert with horses,
and had taught the waler, which Osman Wad Adam had looted from Khartoum,
a number of admired tricks.

Macnamara wished many a time that he could take to the desert with the
waler; but the ride that he must ride to Wady Halfa was not for a horse.
None but a camel could do it.  Besides, he must have guides, and how was
he to pay guides?  More than once he had tried to get a word with Slatin,
but that was dangerous for them both--most dangerous for Slatin, who was
now the servant of the Khalifa Abdullah himself.  Slatin was always
suspected, and was therefore watched carefully; but the Khalifa knew that
Macnamara had no chance to escape, for he had no friends in Cairo, no
money, and no more could have bought a camel than a kingdom.  Escaping
from the city itself, he could but die in the desert.

He had only one Arab friend--little Mahommed Nafar the shoemaker.  The
shoemaker was friendly to him for a great kindness done in the days when
they both lived in Khartoum and ere the Arab deserted to the camp of the
Mahdi.  But what help could Mahommed Nafar give him unless he had money?
With plenty of money the shoemaker might be induced to negotiate with
Arab merchants coming from Dongola or Berber into Omdurman to get camels,
and arrange an escape down the desert to Wady Halfa; but where was the
money to come from?

One day, at a great review, when the roar of the drums rivalled the
hoarse shouts of the Mahdists, and the Baggaras, for a diversion, looted
one quarter of the town, Macnamara was told by his master that Slatin
had been given by the Khalifa to Mahommed Sherif, and was going to
Darfur.  As a kind of farewell barbecue, whether or not intended by the
Khalifa as a warning to his departing general, ten prisoners had their
feet and hands cut off in the Beit-el-Mal, and five lost their heads as
well as their hands and feet.

"It makes my blood run cold," said Slatin softly in English, as Macnamara
passed him, walking at his master's stirrup.

"Mine's boilin', sir!" answered Macnamara.

Slatin's eyes took on a more cheerful look than they usually carried, for
it was many a day since he had been addressed with respect, and the "sir"
touched a mellow chord within him--memory of the days when he was
Governor of Darfur.  Suddenly he saw the Khalifa's eyes fixed on
Macnamara, and the look, for a wonder, was not unfriendly.  It came to
him that perhaps the Khalifa meant to take Macnamara for his own servant,
for it flattered his vanity to have a white man at his stirrup and on his
mat.  He knew that the Khalifa was only sending himself to Darfur that he
might be a check upon Mahommed Sherif.  He did not think that Macnamara's
position would be greatly bettered, save perhaps in bread and onions, by
being taken into the employ of the Khalifa.  His life would certainly not
be safer.  But, if it was to be, perhaps he could do a good turn to
Macnamara by warning him, by planting deep in the Khalifa's mind the
Irishman's simple-minded trustworthiness.  When, therefore, the Khalifa
suddenly turned and asked him about Macnamara he chose his words
discreetly.  The Khalifa, ever suspicious, said that Macnamara had been
thrown into prison twice for insubordination.  To this Slatin replied:

"Sire, what greater proof could be had of the man's simplicity?  His life
is in your hands, sire.  Would he have risked it, had he not been the
most simpleminded of men?  But you who read men's hearts, sire, as others
read a book, you know if I speak truth."  Slatin bent his head in
humility.

The flattery pleased the Khalifa.

"Summon Osman Wad Adam and the man to me," he said.

In the questioning that followed, Macnamara's Arabic and his
understanding of it was so bad that it was necessary for Slatin to ask
him questions in English.  This was a test of Macnamara, for Slatin said
some things in English which were not for the Khalifa's knowing.  If
Macnamara's face changed, if he started, Abdullah's suspicions, ever
ready, would have taken form.

But Macnamara's wits were not wool-gathering, and when Slatin said to
him, "If I escape, I will try to arrange yours," Macnamara replied, with
a respectful but placid stolidity: "Right, sir.  Where does the old
sinner keep his spoof?"

It was now for Slatin to keep a hold on himself, for Macnamara's reply
was unexpected.  Ruling his face to composure, however, he turned to the
Khalifa and said that up to this moment Macnamara had not been willing to
become a Mahommedan, but his veneration for the Mahdi's successor was so
great that he would embrace the true faith by the mercy of God and the
permission of the Khalifa.  When the Khalifa replied that he would accept
the convert into the true faith at once, Slatin then said to Macnamara:

"Come now, my man, I've promised that you will become a Mahommedan--it's
your best chance of safety."

"I'll see him on the devil's pitchfork first," said Macnamara; but he did
not change countenance.  "I'm a Protestant and I'll stand be me baptism."

"You'll lose your head, man," answered Slatin.  "Don't be a fool."

"I'm keepin' to what me godfathers and godmothers swore for me," answered
Macnamara stubbornly.  "You must pretend for a while, or you'll be dead
in an hour--and myself too."

"You--that's a different nose on me face," answered Macnamara.  "But
suppose I buck when I get into the mosque--no, begobs, I'll not be doin'
it!"

"I'll say to him that you'll do it with tears of joy, if you can have a
month for preparation."

"Make it two an' I'm your man, seein' as you've lied for me, sir.  But on
wan condition--where does he keep his coin?"

"If you try that on, you'll die bit by bit like the men in the Beit-el-
Mal to-day," answered Slatin quickly.  "I'm carvin' me own mutton, thank
ye kindly, sir," answered Macnamara.

"I've heard that part of his treasure is under his own room," went on
Slatin quickly, for he saw that the Khalifa's eyes had a sinister look-
the conversation had been too long.

"Speak no more!" said Abdullah sharply.  "What is it you say, my son?"
he added to Slatin.

"He has been telling me that he is without education even in his own
faith, and that he cannot learn things quickly.  Also he does not
understand what to do in the mosque, or how to pray, and needs to be
taught.  He then asked what was impossible, and I had to argue with him,
sire."

"What did he ask?" asked the Khalifa, his fierce gaze on Macnamara.

"He wished to be taught by yourself, sire.  He said that if you taught
him he would understand.  I said that you were the chosen Emperor of the
Faithful, the coming king of the world, but he replied that the prophets
of old taught their disciples with their own tongues."

It was a bold lie, but the Khalifa was flattered, and made a motion of
assent.  Slatin, seeing his advantage, added:

"I told him that you could not spare the time to teach him, sire; but he
said that if you would talk to him for a little while every day for a
month, after he had studied Arabic for two months, he would be ready to
follow your majesty through life and death."

"Approach, my son," said the Khalifa to Macnamara suddenly.  Macnamara
came near.  He understood Arabic better than he had admitted, and he saw
in this three months' respite, if it were granted, the chance to carry
out a plan that was in his mind.  The Khalifa held out a hand to him, and
Macnamara, boiling with rage inwardly and his face flushing--which the
Khalifa mistook for modesty--kissed it.

"You shall have two moons to learn Arabic of a good teacher every day,
and then for one moon I myself will instruct you in the truth," said
Abdullah.  "You shall wait at my door and walk by my stirrup and teach my
horse as you have taught the English horse of Osman Wad Adam.  Thy
faithful service I will reward, and thy unfaithfulness I will punish with
torture and death."

"I'll cut the price of the kiss on those dirty fingers from a dervish
joint," muttered Macnamara to himself, as he took his place that evening
at the Khalifa's door.

One thing Macnamara was determined on.  He would never pray in a
Mahommedan mosque, he would never turn Mahommedan even for a day.  The
time had come when he must make a break for liberty.  He must have money.
With money Mahommed Nafar, who was now his teacher--Slatin had managed
that--would move for him.

Under the spur of his purpose Macnamara rapidly acquired Arabic, and
steadfastly tried to make Mahommed Nafar his friend, for he liked the
little man, and this same little man was the only Arab, save one, from
first to last, whom he would not have spitted on a bayonet.  At first he
chafed under the hourly duplicity necessary in his service to the
Khalifa, then he took an interest in it, and at last he wept tears of joy
over his dangerous proficiency.  Day after day Macnamara waited, in the
hope of making sure that the Khalifa's treasure was under the room where
he slept.  Upon the chance of a successful haul, he had made fervid
promises, after the fashion of his race, to the shoemaker Mahommed Nafar.
At first the shoemaker would have nothing to do with it: helping
prisoners to escape meant torture and decapitation; but then he hated the
Khalifa, whose Baggaras had seized his property, and killed his wife and
children; and in the end Macnamara prevailed.  Mahommed Nafar found some
friendly natives from the hills of Gilif, who hated the Khalifa and his
tyrannous governments, and at last they agreed to attempt the escape.




III

A month went by.  Lust, robbery, and murder ruled in Omdurman.  The river
thickened with its pollution, the trees within the walls sickened of its
poison, the bones of the unburied dead lay in the moat beyond the gates,
and, on the other side of the river, desolate Khartoum crumbled over the
streets and paths and gardens where Gordon had walked.  The city was a
pit of infamy, where struggled, or wallowed, or died to the bellowing of
the Khalifa's drum and the hideous mirth of his Baggaras, the victims of
Abdullah.  But out in the desert--the Bayuda desert--between Omdurman and
Old Dongola, there was only peace.  Here and there was "a valley of dry
bones," but the sand had washed the bones clean, the vultures had had
their hour and flown away, the debris of deserted villages had been
covered by desert storms, and the clear blue sky and ardent sun were over
all, joyous and immaculate.  Out in the desert there was only the life-
giving air, the opal sands, the plaintive evening sky, the eager morning
breeze, the desolated villages, and now and then in the vast expanse,
stretching hundreds and hundreds of miles south, an oasis as a gem set
in a cloth of faded gold.

It would have seemed to any natural man better to die in the desert than
to live in Omdurman.  So thought a fugitive who fled day and night
through the Bayuda desert, into the sandy wastes, beyond whose utmost
limits lay Wady Halfa, where the English were.

Macnamara had conquered.  He had watched his chance when two of the black
guard were asleep, and the Khalifa was in a stupor of opium in the harem,
had looted Abdullah's treasure, and carried the price of the camels and
the pay of the guides to Mahommed Nafar the shoemaker.

His great sprawling camel, the best that Mahommed Nafar could buy of Ebn
Haraf, the sheikh in the Gilif Hills, swung down the wind with a long,
reaching stride, to the point where the sheikh would meet him, and send
him on his way with a guide.  If he reached the rendezvous safely, there
was a fair chance of final escape.

Moonlight, and the sand swishing from under the velvet hoofs of the
camel, the silence like a filmy cloak, sleep everywhere, save at the eyes
of the fugitive.  Hour after hour they sprawled down the waste, and for
numberless hours they must go on and on, sleepless, tireless, alert, if
the man was to be saved at all.  As morning broke he turned his eye here
and there, fearful of discovery and pursuit.  Nothing.  He was alone with
the sky and the desert and his fate.  Another two hours and he would be
at the rendezvous, in the cover of the hills, where he would be safe for
a moment at least.  But he must keep ahead of all pursuit, for if
Abdullah's people should get in front of him he would be cut off from all
hope.  There is little chance to run the blockade of the desert where a
man may not hide, where there is neither water, nor feed, nor rest, once
in a hundred miles or more.

For an hour his eyes were fixed, now on the desert behind him, whence
pursuit should come, now on the golden-pink hills before him, where was
sanctuary for a moment, at least.  .  .  .  Nothing in all the vast space
but blue and grey-the sky and the sand, nothing that seemed of the world
he had left; nothing save the rank smell of the camel, and the Arab song
he sang to hasten the tired beast's footsteps.  Mahommed Nafar had taught
him the song, saying that it was as good to him as another camel on a
long journey.  His Arabic, touched off with the soft brogue of Erin,
made a little shrill by weariness and peril, was not the Arabic of
Abdin Palace, but yet, under the spell, the camel's head ceased swaying
nervously, the long neck stretched out bravely, and they came on together
to the Gilif Hills, comrades in distress, gallant and unafraid.  .  .  .
Now the rider looked back less than before, for the hills were near, he
was crossing a ridge which would hide him from sight for a few miles, and
he kept his eyes on the opening in the range where a few domtrees marked
the rendezvous.  His throat was dry, for before the night was half over
he had drunk the little water he carried; but the Arab song still came
from his lips:

              "Doos ya lellee!  Doos ya lellee!
               Tread, O joy of my life, tread lightly!
               Thy feet are the wings of a dove,
               And thy heart is of fire.  On thy wounds
               I will pour the king's salve.  I will hang
               On thy neck the long chain of wrought gold,
               When the gates of Bagdad are before us--
               Doos ya lellee!  Doos ya lellee!"

He did not cease singing it until the camel had staggered in beneath the
dom-trees where Ebn Mazar waited.  Macnamara threw himself on the ground
beside the prostrate camel which had carried him so well, and gasped,
"Water!"  He drank so long from Ebn Haraf's water-bag that the Arab took
it from him.  Then he lay on the sands hugging the ground close like a
dog, till the sheikh roused him with the word that he must mount another
camel, this time with a guide, Mahmoud, a kinsman of his own, who must
risk his life-at a price.  Half the price was paid by Macnamara to the
sheikh before they left the shade of the palm-trees, and, striking
through the hills, emerged again into the desert farther north.

In the open waste the strain and the peril began again, but Mahmoud,
though a boy in years, was a man in wisdom and a "brother of eagles" in
endurance: and he was the second Arab who won Macnamara's heart.

It was Mahmoud's voice now that quavered over the heads of the camels and
drove them on; it was his eye which watched the horizon.  The hours went
by, and no living thing appeared in the desert, save a small cloud of
vultures, heavy from feasting on a camel dead in the waste, and a dark-
brown snake flitting across their path.  Nothing all day save these, and
nothing all the sleepless night save a desert wolf stealing down the
sands.  Macnamara's eyes burned in his head with weariness, his body
became numb, but Mahommed Mahmoud would allow no pause.  They must get so
far ahead the first two days that Abdullah's pursuers might not overtake
them, he said.  Beyond Dongola, at a place appointed, other camels would
await them, if Mahmoud's tribesmen there kept faith.

For two days and nights Macnamara had not slept, for forty-six hours he
had been constantly in the saddle, but Mahommed Mahmoud allowed him
neither sleep nor rest.

Dongola came at last, lying far away on their right.  With Dongola, fresh
camels; and the desert flight began again.  Hour after hour, and not a
living thing; and then, at last, a group of three Arabs on camels
going south, far over to their right.  These suddenly turned and rode
down on them.

"We must fight," said Mahmoud; "for they see you are no Arab."

"I'll take the one with the jibbeh," said Macnamara coolly, with a pistol
in his left hand and a sword in his right.  "I'll take him first.  Here's
the tap off yer head, me darlin's!" he added as they turned and faced
the dervishes.

"We must kill them all, or be killed," said Mahmoud, as the dervishes
suddenly stopped, and the one with the jibbeh called to Mahmoud:

"Whither do you fly with the white Egyptian?"

"If you come and see you will know, by the mercy of God!" answered
Mahmoud.

The next instant the dervishes charged.  Macnamara marked his man, and
the man with the jibbeh fell from his camel.  Mahmoud fired his carbine,
missed, and closed with his enemy.  Macnamara, late of the 7th Hussars,
swung his Arab sword as though it were the regulation blade and he in
sword practice at Aldershot, and catching the blade of his desert foe,
saved his own neck and gave the chance of a fair hand-to-hand combat.

He met the swift strokes of the dervish with a cool certainty.  His
weariness passed from him; the joy of battle was on him.  He was wounded
twice-in the shoulder and the head.  Now he took the offensive.  Once or
twice he circled slowly round the dervish, whose eyes blazed, whose mouth
was foaming with fury; then he came on him with all the knowledge and the
skill he had got in little Indian wars.  He came on him, and the dervish
fell, his head cut through like a cheese.

Then Macnamara turned, to see Mahmoud and the third dervish on the
ground, struggling in each other's arms.  He started forward, but before
he could reach the two, Mahmoud jumped to his feet with a reeking knife,
and waved it in the air.

"He was a kinsman, but he had to die," said Mahmoud as they mounted.  He
turned towards the bodies, then looked at the camels flying down the
desert towards Dongola.

"It is as God wills now," he said.  "Their tribesmen will follow when
they see the camels.  See, my camel is wounded!" he added, with a gasp.




IV

Two days following, towards evening, two wounded men on foot trudged
through the desert haggard and bent.  The feet of one--an Arab--had on
a pair of red slippers, the feet of the other were bare.  Mahmoud and
Macnamara were in a bad way.  They were in very truth "walking against
time."  Their tongues were thick in their mouths, their feet were
lacerated and bleeding, they carried nothing now save their pistols and
their swords, and a small bag of dates hanging at Macnamara's belt.
Prepared for the worst, they trudged on with blind hope, eager to die
fighting if they must die, rather than to perish of hunger and thirst in
the desert.  Another day, and they would be beyond the radius of the
Khalifa's power: but would they see another day?

They thought that question answered, when, out of the evening pink and
opal and the golden sand behind them, they saw three Arabs riding.  The
friends of the slain dervishes were come to take revenge, it seemed.

The two men looked at each other, but they did not try to speak.
Macnamara took from his shirt a bag of gold and offered it to Mahmoud.
It was the balance of the payment promised to Ebn Mazar.  Mahmoud
salaamed and shook his head, then in a thick voice: "It is my life and
thy life.  If thou diest, I die.  If thou livest, the gold is Ebn
Haraf's.  At Wady Halfa I will claim it, if it be the will of God."

The words were thick and broken, but Macnamara understood him, and they
turned and faced their pursuers, ready for life or death, intent to kill
--and met the friends of Ebn Haraf, who had been hired to take them on to
Wady Halfa!  Their rescuers had been pursued, and had made a detour and
forced march, thus coming on them before the time appointed.  In three
days more they were at Wady Halfa.

Mahmoud lived to take back to Ebn Mazar the other hundred pounds of the
gold Macnamara had looted from the Khalifa; and he also took something
for himself from the British officers at Wady Halfa.  For him nothing
remained of the desperate journey but a couple of scars.

It was different with Macnamara.  He had to take a longer journey still.
He was not glad to do it, for he liked the look of the English faces
round him, and he liked what they said to him.  Also, he was young enough
to "go a-roaming still," as he said to Henry Withers.  Besides, it sorely
hurt his pride that no woman or child of his would be left behind to
lament him.  Still, when Henry told him he had to go, he took it like a
man.

"'Ere, it ain't no use," said Henry to him the day he got to Wady Halfa.
"'Ere, old pal, it ain't no use.  You 'ave to take your gruel, an' you
'ave to take it alone.  What I want to tell yer quiet and friendly, old
pal, is that yer drawfted out--all the way out--for good."

"'Sh-did ye think I wasn't knowin' it, me b'y?"  Macnamara's face
clouded.  "Did ye think I wasn't knowin' it?  Go an' lave me alone," he
added quickly.

Henry Withers went out pondering, for he was sure it was not mere dying
that fretted Macnamara.

The next day the end of it all came.  Henry Withers had pondered, and his
mind was made up to do a certain thing.  Towards evening he sat alone in
the room where Macnamara lay asleep--almost his very last sleep.  All at
once Macnamara's eyes opened wide.  "Kitty, Kitty, me darlin'," he
murmured vaguely.  Then he saw Henry Withers.

"I'm dyin'," he said, breathing heavily.  "Don't call anny one, Hinry,"
he added brokenly.  "Dyin's that aisy--aisy enough, but for wan thing."

"'Ere, speak out, Pete."

"Sure, there's no wan but you, Withers, not a wife nor a child av me own
to say, 'Poor Peter Macnamara, he is gone."'

"There's one," said Henry Withers firmly.  "There's one, old pal."

"Who's that?" said Macnamara huskily.  "Kitty."

"She's no wife," said Macnamara, shaking his head.  "Though she'd ha'
been that, if it hadn't been for Mary Malone."

"She's mine, an' she 'as the marriage lines," said Henry Withers.  "An'
there's a kid-wich ain't mine--born six months after!  'Oo says no kid
won't remark, 'Poor Peter Macnamara, 'ee is gone, wich'ee was my fader!"'

Macnamara trembled; the death-sweat dropped from his forehead as he
raised himself up.

"Kitty--a kid av mine--and she married to Hinry Withers--an' you saved
me, too!--" Macnamara's eyes were wild.

Henry Withers took his hand.

"'Ere, it's all right, old pal," he said cheerfully.  "What's the kid's
name?" said Macnamara.  "Peter--same as yours."

The voice was scarce above a breath.  "Sure, I didn't know at all.  An'
you forgive me, Hinry darlin', you forgive me?"

"I've nothing to forgive," said Henry Withers.

A smile lighted the blanched face of the dying man.  "Give me love to the
b'y--to Peter Macnamara," he said, and fell back with a smile on his
face.

"I'd do it again.  Wot's a lie so long as it does good?" said Henry
Withers afterwards to Holgate the engineer.  "But tell 'er--tell Kitty--
no fear!  I ain't no bloomin' fool.  'E's 'appy--that's enough.  She'd
cut me 'eart out, if she knowed I'd lied that lie."






THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS


I

Dimsdale's prospects had suddenly ceased by the productive marriage of a
rich uncle late in life; and then his career began.  He went to Egypt at
the time when men who knew things had their chance to do things.  His
information was general and discursive, but he had a real gift for
science: an inheritance from a grandfather who received a peerage for
abstruse political letters written to the Times and lectures before the
Royal Institution.  Besides, he had known well and loved inadvertently
the Hon. Lucy Gray, who kept a kind of social kindergarten for confiding
man, whose wisdom was as accurate as her face was fair, her manners
simple, and her tongue demure and biting.

Egypt offered an opportunity for a man like Dimsdale, and he always said
that his going there was the one inspiration of his life.  He did not
know that this inspiration came from Lucy Gray.  She had purposely thrown
him in the way of General Duncan Pasha, who, making a reputation in
Egypt, had been rewarded by a good command in England and a K.C.B.

After a talk with the General, who had spent his Egyptian days in the
agreeable strife with native premiers and hesitating Khedives, Dimsdale
rose elated, with his mission in his hand.  After the knock-down blow his
uncle had given him, he was in a fighting mood.  General Duncan's tale
had come at the psychological moment, and hot with inspiration he had
gone straight off to Lucy Gray with his steamship ticket in his pocket,
and told her he was going to spend his life in the service of the pasha
and the fellah.  When she asked him a little bitingly what form his
disciplined energy would take, he promptly answered: "Irrigation."

She laughed in his face softly.  "What do you know about irrigation?"
she asked.

"I can learn it--it's the game to play out there, I'm sure of that," he
answered.

"It doesn't sound distinguished," she remarked drily.  Because she smiled
satirically at him, and was unresponsive to his enthusiasm, and gave him
no chance to tell her of the nobility of the work in which he was going
to put his life; of the work of the Pharaohs in their day, the hope of
Napoleon in his, and the creed Mahomet Ali held and practised, that the
Nile was Egypt and Egypt was irrigation--because of this he became angry,
said unkind things, drew acid comments upon himself, and left her with a
last good-bye.  He did not realise that he had played into the hands of
Lucy Gray in a very childish manner.  For in scheming that he should go
to Egypt she had planned also that he should break with her; for she
never had any real intention of marrying him, and yet it was difficult to
make him turn his back on her, while at the same time she was too tender
of his feelings to turn her back on him.  She held that anger was the
least injurious of all grounds for separation.  In anger there was no
humiliation.  There was something dignified and brave about a quarrel,
while a growing coolness which must end in what the world called
"jilting" was humiliating.  Besides, people who quarrel and separate may
meet again and begin over again: impossible in the other circumstance.



II

In Egypt Dimsdale made a reputation; not at once, but he did make it.
The first two years of his stay he had plenty to do.  At the end of the
time he could have drawn a map of the Nile from Uganda to the Barrages;
he knew the rains in each district from the region of the Sadds to the
Little Borillos; there was not a canal, from the small Bahr Shebin to the
big Rayeh Menoufieh or the majestic Ibrahimieh, whose slope, mean
velocity and discharge he did not know; and he carried in his mind every
drainage cut and contour from Tamis to Damanhur, from Cairo to Beltim.
He knew neither amusement nor society, for every waking hour was spent in
the study of the Nile and what the Nile might do.

After one of his journeys up the Nile, Imshi Pasha, the Minister of the
Interior, said to him: "Ah, my dear friend, with whom be peace and power,
what have you seen as you travel?"

"I saw a fellah yesterday who has worked nine months on the corvee--
six months for the Government and three for a Pasha, the friend of the
Government.  He supplied his own spades and baskets; his lantern was at
the service of the Khedive; he got his own food as best he could.  He had
one feddan of land in his own village, but he had no time to work it or
harvest it.  Yet he had to pay a house-tax of five piastres, a war-tax of
five piastres, a camel-tax of five piastres, a palm-tax of five piastres,
a salt-tax of nine piastres, a poll-tax of thirty piastres, a land-tax of
ninety piastres.  The canal for which he was taxed gave his feddan of
land no water, for the Pasha, the friend of the Government, took all the
water for his own land."

Prince Imshi stifled a yawn.  "I have never seen so much at one breath,
my friend.  And having seen, you feel now that Egypt must be saved--eh?"

This Pasha was an Egyptian of the Egyptians--a Turk of the Turks,
Oriental in mind with the polish of a Frenchman.  He did not like
Dimsdale, but he did not say so.  He knew it was better to let a man
have his fling and come a cropper over his own work than to have him
unoccupied, excited, and troublesome, especially when he was an
Englishman and knew about what he was talking.  Imshi Pasha saw that
Dimsdale was a dangerous man, as all enthusiasts are, no matter how
right-headed; but it comforted him to think that many a reformer, from
Amenhotep down, had, as it were, cut his own throat in the Irrigation
Department.  Some had tried to distribute water fairly, efficiently and
scientifically, but most of them had got lost in the underbush of
officialdom, and never got out of the wood again.  This wood is called
Backsheesh.  Reformers like Dimsdale had drawn straight lines of purpose
for the salvation of the country, and they had seen these straight lines
go crooked under their very eyes, with a devilish smoothness.  Therefore
Imshi Pasha, being a wise man and a deep-dyed official who had never yet
seen the triumph of the reformer and the honest Aryan, took Dimsdale's
hands and said suddenly, with a sorrowful break in his voice:

"Behold, my friend, to tell the whole truth as God gives it, it is time
you have come.  Egypt has waited for you--the man who sees and knows.  I
have watched you for two years.  I have waited, but now the time is ripe.
You shall stretch your arm over Egypt and it will rise to you.  You shall
have paper for plans, and men and money for travel and works-cuttings,
and pumps, and sand-bags for banks and barrages.  You shall be second in
your department--but first in fact, for shall not I, your friend, be your
chief?  And you shall say 'Go there,' and they shall go, and 'Come here,'
and they shall come.  For my soul is with you for Egypt, O friend of the
fellah and saviour of the land.  Have I not heard of the great reservoirs
you would make in the Fayoum, of the great dam at Assouan?  Have I not
heard, and waited, and watched?  and now .  .  ."

He paused and touched his breast and his forehead in respect.

Dimsdale was well-nigh taken off his feet.  It seemed too wonderful to be
true--a free hand in Egypt, and under Imshi Pasha, the one able Minister
of them all, who had, it was said, always before resisted the irrigation
schemes of the foreigners, who believed only in the corroee and fate!

Dimsdale rejoiced that at the beginning of his career he had so inspired
the powerful one with confidence.  With something very like emotion he
thanked the Minister.

"Yes, my dear friend," answered the Pasha, "the love of Egypt has helped
us to understand each other.  And we shall know each other better still
by-and-by -by-and-by.  .  .  .  You shall be gazetted to-morrow.  Allah
preserve you from all error!"




III

This began the second period of Dimsdale's career.  As he went forth
from Cairo up the Nile with great designs in his mind, and an approving
Ministry behind him, he had the feeling of a hunter with a sure quarry
before him.  Now he remembered Lucy Gray; and he flushed with a
delightful and victorious indignation remembering his last hour with her.
He even sentimentally recalled a song he once wrote for her sympathetic
voice.  The song was called "No Man's Land."  He recited two of the
verses to himself now, with a kind of unction:

     "And we have wandered far, my dear, and we have loved apace;
       A little hut we built upon the sand;
     The sun without to brighten it-within your golden face:
       O happy dream, O happy No Man's Land!

     "The pleasant furniture of spring was set in all the fields,
       And sweet and wholesome all the herbs and flowers;
     Our simple cloth, my dear, was spread with all the orchard yields,
       And frugal only were the passing hours."

A wave of feeling passed over him suddenly.  Those verses were youth, and
youth was gone, with all its flushed and spirited dalliance and reckless
expenditure of feeling.  Youth was behind him, and love was none of his,
nor any cares of home, nor wife nor children; nothing but ambition now,
and the vanity of successful labour.

Sitting on the deck of the Sefi at El Wasta, he looked round him.  In the
far distance was the Maydoum Pyramid, "the Imperfect One," unexplored by
man these thousands of years, and all round it the soft yellowish desert,
with a mirage quivering over it in the distance, a mirage of trees and
water and green hills.  A caravan lounged its way slowly into the waste.
At the waterside, here and there devout Mahommedans were saying their
prayers, now standing, now bowing towards the east, now kneeling and
touching the ground with the forehead.  Then, piercing and painfully
musical, came the call of the Muezzin from the turret of the mosque a
quarter of a mile away.  Near by the fellah worked in his onion-field;
and on the khiassas loaded with feddan at the shore, just out of the
current, and tied up for the night, sat the riverine folk eating their
dourha and drinking black coffee.  Now Dimsdale noticed that, nearer
still, just below the Sefi, on the shore, sat a singing-girl, an a'l'meh,
with a darkfaced Arab beside her, a kemengeh in his lap.  Looking down,
Dimsdale caught their eyes, nodded to them, and the singing-girl and the
kemengeh-player got to their feet and salaamed.  The girl's face was in
the light of evening.  Her dark skin took on a curious reddish radiance,
her eyes were lustrous and her figure beautiful.  The kemengeh-player
stood with his instrument ready, and he lifted it in a kind of appeal.
Dimsdale beckoned them up on deck.  Lighting a cigarette, he asked the
a'l'meh to sing.  Her voice had the curious vibrant note of the Arab, and
the words were in singular sympathy with Dimsdale's thoughts:

         "I have a journey to make, and perils are in hiding,
          Many moons must I travel, many foes meet;
          A morsel of bread my food, a goolah of water for drinking,
          Desert sand for my bed, the moonlight my sheet.  .  .  .
          Come, my love, to the scented palms:
          Behold, the hour of remembrance!"

For the moment Dimsdale ceased to be the practical scientist--he was all
sentimentalist.  He gave himself the luxury of retrospection, he enjoyed
the languorous moment; the music, the voice, the tinkle of the
tambourine, the girl herself, sinuous, sensuous.  It struck him that he
had never seen an a'l'meh so cleanly and so finely dressed, so graceful,
so delicate in manner.  It struck him also that the kemengeh-player was
a better-class Arab than he had ever met.  The man's face attracted him,
fascinated him.  As he looked it seemed familiar.  He studied it, he
racked his brain to recall it.  Suddenly he remembered that it was like
the face of a servant of Imshi Pasha--a kind of mouffetish of his
household.  Now he studied the girl.  He had never seen her before;
of that he was sure.  He ordered them coffee, and handed the girl a
goldpiece.  As he did so, he noticed that among several paste rings she
wore one of value.  All at once the suspicion struck him: Imshi Pasha had
sent the girl--to try him perhaps, to gain power over him maybe, as women
had gained power over strong men before.  But why should Imshi Pasha send
the girl and his mouffetish on this miserable mission?  Was not Imshi
Pasha his friend?

Quietly smoking his cigarette, he said to the man: "You may go, Mahommed
Melik; I have had enough.  Take your harem with you," he added quickly.

The man scarcely stirred a muscle, the woman flushed deeply.

"So be it, effendi," answered the man, rising unmoved, for his sort
know not shame.  He beckoned to the girl.  For an instant she stood
hesitating, then with sudden fury she threw on the table beside him the
gold-piece Dimsdale had given her.

"Magnoon!" she said, with blazing eyes, and ran after the man.

"I may be a fool, my dear," Dimsdale said after her; "but you might say
the same of the Pasha who sent you here."

Dimsdale was angry for a moment, and he said some hard words of Imshi
Pasha as he watched the two decoys hurry away into the dusk.  He thought
it nothing more serious than an attempt to know of what stuff he was
made.  He went to bed with dreams of vast new areas watered for summer
rice, of pumping-stations lifting millions of cubic metres of water per
day; of dykes to be protected by bulrushes and birriya weeds; of great
desert areas washed free of carbonates and sulphates and selling at
twenty pounds an acre; of a green Egypt with three crops, and himself the
Regenerator, the Friend of the Fellah.

In this way he soon forgot that he had remembered Lucy Gray, and the
incident of the girl ceased to trouble.  His progress up the river,
however, was marked by incidents whose significance he did not at once
see.  Everywhere his steamer stopped people came with backsheesh in the
shape of butter, cream, flour, eggs, fowls, cloths, and a myriad things.
Jewels from mummy cases, antichi, donkeys, were offered him: all of which
he steadfastly refused, sometimes with contumely.  Officials besought his
services with indelicate bribes, and by devious hospitalities and
attentions more than one governor sought to bring his projects for
irrigation in line with their own particular duplicities.

"Behold, effendi," said one to whom Dimsdale's honesty was monstrous,
"may God preserve you from harm--the thing has not been known, that all
men shall fare alike!  It is not the will of God."

"It is the will of God that water shall be distributed as I am going to
distribute it; and that is, according to every man's just claim,"
answered Dimsdale stubbornly, and he did not understand the vague smile
which met his remark.

It took him a long time to realise that his plans, approved by Imshi
Pasha, were constantly coming to naught; that after three years' work,
and extensive invention and travel, and long reports to the Ministry, and
encouragement on paper, he had accomplished nothing; and that he had no
money with which to accomplish anything.  Day in, day out, week in, week
out, month in, month out, when the whole land lay sweltering with the
moist heat of flood-time, in the period of the khamsin, in the dry heat
which turned the hair grey and chapped the skin like a bitter wind, he
slaved and schemed, the unconquerable enthusiast, who built houses which
immediately fell down.

Fifty times his schemes seemed marching to fulfilment; but something
always intervened.  He wrote reams of protest, he made many arid journeys
to Cairo, he talked himself hoarse; and always he was met by the
sympathetic smiling of Imshi Pasha, by his encouraging approval.

"Ah, my dear friend, may.  Heaven smooth your path!  It is coming right.
All will be well.  Time is man's friend.  The dam shall be built.
The reservoirs shall be made.  But we are in the hands of the nations.
Poor Egypt cannot act alone--our Egypt that we love.  The Council sits
to-morrow--we shall see."  This was the fashion of the Pasha's speech.

After the sitting of the Council, Dimsdale would be sent away with
unfruitful promises.

Futility was written over the Temple of Endeavour, and by-and-by Dimsdale
lost hope and health and heart.  He had Nilotic fever, he had ophthalmia;
and hot with indomitable will, he had striven to save one great basin
from destruction, for one whole week, without sleeping or resting night
and day: working like a navvy, sleeping like a fellah, eating like a
Bedouin.

Then the end came.  He was stricken down, and lay above Assouan in a hut
by the shore, from which he could see the Temple of Philoe, and Pharaoh's
Bed, and the great rocks, and the swift-flowing Nile.  Here lay his
greatest hope, the splendid design of his life--the great barrage of
Assouan.  With it he could add to the wealth of Egypt one-half.  He had
believed in it, had worked for it and how much else!  and his dreams and
his working had come to naught.  He was sick to death--not with illness
alone, but with disappointment and broken hopes and a burden beyond the
powers of any one man.

He saw all now: all the falsehood and treachery and corruption.  He
realised that Imshi Pasha had given him his hand that he might ruin
himself, that his own schemes might overwhelm him in the end.  At every
turn he had been frustrated--by Imshi Pasha: three years of underground
circumvention, with a superficial approval and a mock support.

He lay and looked at the glow, the sunset glow of pink and gold on the
Libyan Hills, and his fevered eyes scarcely saw them; they were only a
part of this last helpless, senseless dream.  Life itself was very far
away-practical, generous, hot-blooded life.  This distance was so ample
and full and quiet, this mystery of the desert and the sky was so
immense, the spirit of it so boundless, that in the judgment of his soul
nothing mattered now.  As he lay in reverie, he heard his servant
talking: it was the tale of the Mahdi and British valour and hopeless
fighting, and a red martyrdom set like a fixed star in a sunless sky.
What did it matter--what did it all matter, in this grave tremendous
quiet wherein his soul was hasting on?

The voices receded; he was alone with the immeasurable world; he fell
asleep.




IV

When he woke again it was to find at his bedside a kavass from Imshi
Pasha at Cairo.  He shrank inwardly.  The thought of the Pasha merely
nauseated him, but to the kavass he said: "What do you want, Mahommed?"

The kavass smiled; his look was agreeably mysterious, his manner humbly
confidential, his tongue officially deliberate.

"Efendina chok yasha--May the great lord live for ever!  I bring good
news."

"Leave of absence, eh?"--rejoined Dimsdale feebly, yet ironically; for
that was the thing he expected now of the Minister, who had played him
like a ball on a racquet these three years past.

The kavass handed him a huge blue envelope, salaaming impressively.

"May my life be thy sacrifice, effendi," he said, and salaamed again.
"It is my joy to be near you."

"We have tasted your absence and found it bitter, Mahommed," Dimsdale
answered in kind, with a touch of plaintive humour, letting the envelope
fall from his fingers on the bed, so little was he interested in any
fresh move of Imshi Pasha.  "More tricks," he said to himself between his
teeth.

"Shall I open it, effendi?  It is the word that thy life shall carry
large plumes."

"What a blitherer you are, Mahommed!  Rip it open and let's have it
over."

The kavass handed him a large letter, pedantically and rhetorically
written; and Dimsdale, scarce glancing at it, sleepily said: "Read it
out, Mahommed.  Skip the flummery in it, if you know how."

Two minutes later Dimsdale sat up aghast with a surprise that made his
heart thump painfully, made his head go round.  For the letter conveyed
to him the fact that there had been placed to the credit of his
department, subject to his own disposal for irrigation works, the
sum of eight hundred thousand pounds; and appended was the copy of a
letter from the Caisse de la Dette granting three-fourths of this sum,
and authorising its expenditure.  Added to all was a short scrawl
from Imshi Pasha himself, beginning, "God is with the patient, my dear
friend," and ending with the remarkable statement: "Inshallah, we shall
now reap the reward of our labours in seeing these great works
accomplished at last, in spite of the suffering thrust upon us by our
enemies--to whom perdition come."

Eight hundred thousand pounds!

In a week Dimsdale was at work again.  In another month he was at Cairo,
and the night after his arrival he attended a ball at the Khedive's
Palace.  To Fielding Bey he poured out the wonder of his soul at the
chance that had been given him at last.  He seemed to think it was his
own indomitable patience, the work that he had done, and his reports,
which had at last shamed the Egyptian Government and the Caisse de la
Dette into doing the right thing for the country and to him.

He was dumfounded when Fielding replied: "Not much, my Belisarius.  As
Imshi Pasha always was, so he will be to the end.  It wasn't Imshi Pasha,
and it wasn't English influence, and it wasn't the Caisse de la Dette,
each by its lonesome, or all together by initiative."

"What was it--who was it, then?" inquired Dimsdale breathlessly.  "Was
it you?--I know you've worked for me.  It wasn't backsheesh anyhow.  But
Imshi Pasha didn't turn honest and patriotic for nothing--I know that."

Fielding, who had known him all his life, looked at him curiously for a
moment, and then, in a far-away, sort of voice, made recitative:

                  "'Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray,
                      And when I crossed the wild,
                    I chanced to see at break of day
                      The solitary child.'"

Dimsdale gasped.  "Lucy Gray!" he said falteringly.

Fielding nodded.  "You didn't know, of course.  She's been here for six
months--has more influence than the whole diplomatic corps.  Twists old
Imshi Pasha round her little finger.  She has played your game
handsomely--I've been in her confidence.  Wordsworth was wrong when he
wrote:

                  "'No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
                      She dwelt on a wide moor:
                    The sweetest thing that ever grew
                      Beside a human door--'

For my wife's been her comrade.  And her mate--would you like to know her
mate?  She's married, you know."

Dimsdale's face was pale.  He was about to reply, when a lady came into
view, leaning on the arm of an Agency Secretary.  At first she did not
see Dimsdale, then within a foot or two of him she suddenly stopped.  The
Secretary felt her hand twitch on his arm; then she clenched the fingers
firmly on her fan.

"My dear Dimsdale," Fielding said, "you must let me introduce you to Mrs.
St. John."

Dimsdale behaved very well, the lady perfectly.  She held out both her
hands to him.

"We are old, old friends, Mr. Dimsdale and I.  I have kept the next dance
for him," she added, turning to Fielding, who smiled placidly and left
with the Secretary.

For a moment there was silence, then she said quietly: "Let me
congratulate you on all you have done.  Everybody is talking about you.
They say it is wonderful how you have made things come your way.  .  .  .
I am very, very glad."

Dimsdale was stubborn and indignant and anything a man can be whose amour
propre has had a shock.

"I know all," he said bluntly.  "I know what you've done for me."

"Well, are you as sorry I did it as I am to know you know it?" she asked
just a little faintly, for she had her own sort of heart, and it worked
in its own sort of way.

"Why this sudden interest in my affairs?  You laughed at me when I made
up my mind to come to Egypt."

"That was to your face.  I sent you to Egypt."

"You sent me?"

"I made old General Duncan talk to you.  The inspiration was mine.  I
also wrote to Fielding Pasha--and at last he wrote to me to come."

"You--why--"

"I know more about irrigation than any one in England," she continued
illogically.  "I've studied it.

"I have all your reports.  That's why I could help you here.  They saw I
knew."

Dimsdale shook a little.  "I didn't understand," he said.

"You don't know my husband, I think," she added, rising slowly.  "He is
coming yonder with Imshi Pasha."

"I know of him--as a millionaire," he answered, in a tone of mingled
emotions.

"I must introduce you," she said, and seemed to make an effort to hold
herself firmly.  "He will have great power here.  Come and see me
to-morrow," she added in an even voice.  "Please come--Harry."

In another minute Dimsdale heard the great financier Arnold St. John say
that the name of Dimsdale would be for ever honoured in Egypt.




GLOSSARY

Aiwa, effendi----Yea, noble sir.
Allah----God.
Allah-haly 'm alla-haly----A singsong of river-workers.
Allah Kerim----God is bountiful.
Allshu Akbar----God is most Great.
A'l'meh----Female professional singers
Antichi----Antiquities.

Backsheesh----Tip, douceur, bribe.
Balass----Earthen vessel for carrying water.
Basha----Pasha.
Bersim----Grass.
Bimbashi----Major.
Bishareen----A native tribe.
Bismillah----In the name of God.
Bowab----A doorkeeper.

Corvee----Forced labour.

Dahabeah----A Nile houseboat with large lateen sails.
Darabukkeh----A drum made of a skin stretched over an earthenware funnel.
Doash----(Literally) Treading.  A ceremony performed on the return of the
         Holy Carpet from Mecca.
Dourha----Maize.

Effendina----Highness.
El aadah----The ordinary.
El Azhar----The Arab University at Cairo.
Fantasia----Celebration with music, dancing, and processions.
Farshoot----The name of a native tribe.
Fatihah----The opening chapter of the Koran, recited at weddings, etc.

Feddan----The most common measure of land--a little less than an acre.
          Also dried hay.
Fellah (plu. fellaheen)----The Egyptian peasant.
Felucca----A small boat, propelled by oars or sails.
Fessikh----Salted fish.
Ghaffirs----Humble village officials.
Ghawdzee----The tribe of public dancing-girls.  A female of this tribe is
            called "Ghazeeyeh," and a man "Ghazee," but the plural
            Ghawazee is generally understood as applying to the female.
Ghimah----The Mahommedan Sunday.

Gippy----Colloquial name for an Egyptian soldier.
Goolah----Porous water-jar of Nile mud.
Hakim----Doctor.
Hanouti----Funeral attendants.
Hari-kari----An Oriental form of suicide.
Hashish----Leaves of hemp.
Inshallah----God willing.
Jibbeh----Long coat or smock, worn by dervishes.
Kavass----An orderly.
Kemengeh----A cocoanut fiddle.
Khamsin----A hot wind of Egypt and the Soudan.
Khedive----The title granted in 1867 by the Sultan of Turkey to the ruler
           of Egypt.
Khiassa----Small boat.
Khowagah----Gentleman.
Koran----The Scriptures of the Mahommedans.
Kourbash----A stick, a whip.

La ilaha illa-llah----There is no God but God.
Mafish----Nothing.
Magnoon----Fool.
Malaish----No matter.
Mamour----A magistrate.
Mankalah----A game.
Mastaba----A bench.
Mejidieh----A Turkish Order.
Mirkaz----District.
Moghassils----Washers of the dead.
Moufetish----High steward.
Mudir----A Governor of a Mudirieh or province.
Muezzin----The sheikh of the mosque who calls to prayer.
Mushrabieh----Lattice window.

Naboot----Quarter staff.
Narghileh----The Oriental tobacco-pipe.
Nehar-ak koom said----Greeting to you.
Omdah----The head of a village.
Ooster----One of the best sort.

Ramadan----The Mahommedan season of fasting.
Reis----Pilot.

Saadat el basha----Excellency.
Sais----Groom.
Sakkia----Persian water-wheel.
Salaam----A salutation of the East; an obeisance, performed by bowing
          very low and placing the right palm on the forehead and on the
          breast.
Sarraf----An accountant.
Shadoof----Bucket and pole used by natives for lifting water.
Sha'er----A reciter.  (The singular of Sho'ara, properly signifying a
          poet.)
Sheikh-el-beled----Head of a village.
Shintiyan----Very wide trousers, worn by the women of the middle and
             higher orders.
Sitt----"The Lady."

Tarboosh----Fez or native turban.
Tarah----A veil for the head.
Ulema----Learned men.

Waled----A boy.
Wekeel----A deputy.
Welee----A favourite of Heaven; colloquially a saint.

Yashmak----A veil for the lower part of the face.
Yelek----A long vest or smock, worn over the shirt and shintiyan.

Zeriba----A palisade.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Anger was the least injurious of all grounds for separation
Dangerous man, as all enthusiasts are
Oriental would think not less of him for dissimulation
The friendship of man is like the shade of the acacia
Vanity of successful labour






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "DONOVAN PASHA":

A look too bright for joy, too intense for despair
All the world's mad but thee and me
Anger was the least injurious of all grounds for separation
As if our penalties were only paid by ourselves!
Credulity, easily transmutable into superstition
Dangerous man, as all enthusiasts are
He had tasted freedom; he was near to license
His gift for lying was inexpressible
One favour is always the promise of another
Oriental would think not less of him for dissimulation
Paradoxes which make for laughter--and for tears
The friendship of man is like the shade of the acacia
Vanity of successful labour
What is crime in one country, is virtue in another
Women only admitted to Heaven by the intercession of husbands






THE WEAVERS

By Gilbert Parker




CONTENTS

BOOK I
I.        AS THE SPIRIT MOVED
II.       THE GATES OF THE WORLD
III.      BANISHED
IV.       THE CALL

BOOK II

V.        THE WIDER WAY
VI.       "HAST THOU NEVER BILLED A MANY"
VII.      THE COMPACT
VIII.     FOR HIS SOUL'S SAKE AND THE LAND'S SAKE
IX.       THE LETTER, THE NIGHT, AND THE WOMAN
X.        THE FOUR WHO KNEW
XI.       AGAINST THE HOUR OF MIDNIGHT
XII.      THE JEHAD AND THE LIONS
XIII.     ACHMET THE ROPEMAKER STRIKES
XIV.      BEYOND THE PALE

BOOK III
XV.       SOOLSBY'S HAND UPON THE CURTAIN
XVI.      THE DEBT AND THE ACCOUNTING
XVII.     THE WOMAN OF THE CROSS-ROADS
XVIII.    TIME, THE IDOL-BREAKER
XIX.      SHARPER THAN A SWORD
XX.       EACH AFTER HIS OWN ORDER
XXI.      "THERE IS NOTHING HIDDEN WHICH SHALL NOT BE REVEALED"
XXII.     AS IN A GLASS DARKLY
XXIII.    THE TENTS OF CUSHAN
XXIV.     THE QUESTIONER
XXV.      THE VOICE THROUGH THE DOOR
XXVI.     "I OWE YOU NOTHING"
XXVII.    THE AWAKENING

BOOK IV
XXVIII.   NAHOUM TURNS THE SCREW
XXIX.     THE RECOIL
XXX.      LACEY MOVES
XXXI.     THE STRUGGLE IN THE DESERT
XXXII.    FORTY STRIPES SAVE ONE
XXXIII.   THE DARK INDENTURE
XXXIV.    NAHOUM DROPS THE MASK

BOOK V
XXXV.     THE FLIGHT OF THE WOUNDED
XXXVI.    "IS IT ALWAYS SO-IN LIFE?"
XXXVII.   THE FLYING SHUTTLE
XXXVIII.  JASPER KIMBER SPEAKS
XXXIX.    FAITH JOURNEYS TO LONDON

BOOK VI
XL.       HYLDA SEEKS NAHOUM
XLI.      IN THE LAND OF SHINAR
XLII.     THE LOOM OF DESTINY




INTRODUCTION

When I turn over the hundreds of pages of this book, I have a feeling
that I am looking upon something for which I have no particular
responsibility, though it has a strange contour of familiarity.  It is as
though one looks upon a scene in which one had lived and moved, with the
friendly yet half-distant feeling that it once was one's own possession
but is so no longer.  I should think the feeling to be much like that of
the old man whose sons, gone to distant places, have created their own
plantations of life and have themselves become the masters of
possessions.  Also I suppose that when I read the story through again
from the first page to the last, I shall recreate the feeling in which
I lived when I wrote it, and it will become a part of my own identity
again.  That distance between himself and his work, however, which
immediately begins to grow as soon as a book leaves the author's hands
for those of the public, is a thing which, I suppose, must come to one
who produces a work of the imagination.  It is no doubt due to the fact
that every piece of art which has individuality and real likeness to the
scenes and character it is intended to depict is done in a kind of
trance.  The author, in effect, self-hypnotises himself, has created
an atmosphere which is separate and apart from that of his daily
surroundings, and by virtue of his imagination becomes absorbed in that
atmosphere.  When the book is finished and it goes forth, when the
imagination is relaxed and the concentration of mind is withdrawn, the
atmosphere disappears, and then.  One experiences what I feel when I take
up 'The Weavers' and, in a sense, wonder how it was done, such as it is.

The frontispiece of the English edition represents a scene in the House
of Commons, and this brings to my mind a warning which was given me
similar to that on my entering new fields outside the one in which I
first made a reputation in fiction.  When, in a certain year, I
determined that I would enter the House of Commons I had many friends
who, in effect, wailed and gnashed their teeth.  They said that it would
be the death of my imaginative faculties; that I should never write
anything any more; that all the qualities which make literature living
and compelling would disappear.  I thought this was all wrong then, and I
know it is all wrong now.  Political life does certainly interfere with
the amount of work which an author may produce.  He certainly cannot
write a book every year and do political work as well, but if he does not
attempt to do the two things on the same days, as it were, but in blocks
of time devoted to each separately and respectively, he will only find,
as I have found, that public life  the conflict of it, the accompanying
attrition of mind, the searching for the things which will solve the
problems of national life, the multitudinous variations of character with
which one comes in contact, the big issues suddenly sprung upon the
congregation of responsible politicians, all are stimulating to the
imagination, invigorating to the mind, and marvellously freshening to
every literary instinct.  No danger to the writer lies in doing political
work, if it does not sap his strength and destroy his health.  Apart from
that, he should not suffer.  The very spirit of statesmanship is
imagination, vision; and the same quality which enables an author to
realise humanity for a book is necessary for him to realise humanity in
the crowded chamber of a Parliament.

So far as I can remember, whatever was written of The Weavers, no critic
said that it lacked imagination.  Some critics said it was too crowded
with incident; that there was enough incident in it for two novels; some
said that the sweep was too wide, but no critic of authority declared
that the book lacked vision or the vivacity of a living narrative.  It is
not likely that I shall ever write again a novel of Egypt, but I have
made my contribution to Anglo-Egyptian literature, and I do not think I
failed completely in showing the greatness of soul which enabled one man
to keep the torch of civilisation, of truth, justice, and wholesome love
alight in surroundings as offensive to civilisation as was Egypt in the
last days of Ismail Pasha--a time which could be well typified by the
words put by Bulwer Lytton in the mouth of Cardinal Richelieu:

              "I found France rent asunder,
               Sloth in the mart and schism in the temple;
               Broils festering to rebellion; and weak laws
               Rotting away with rust in antique sheaths.
               I have re-created France; and, from the ashes
               Of the old feudal and decrepit carcase,
               Civilisation on her luminous wings
               Soars, phoenix-like, to Jove!"

Critics and readers have endeavoured to identify the main characteristics
of The Weavers with figures in Anglo-Egyptian and official public life.
David Claridge was, however, a creature of the imagination.  It has been
said that he was drawn from General Gordon.  I am not conscious of having
taken Gordon for David's prototype, though, as I was saturated with all
that had been written about Gordon, there is no doubt that something of
that great man may have found its way into the character of David
Claridge.  The true origin of David Claridge, however, may be found in a
short story called 'All the World's Mad', in Donovan Pasha, which was
originally published by Lady Randolph Churchill in an ambitious but
defunct magazine called 'The Anglo-Saxon Review'.  The truth is that
David Claridge had his origin in a fairly close understanding of, and
interest in, Quaker life.  I had Quaker relatives through the marriage of
a connection of my mother, and the original of Benn Claridge, the uncle
of David, is still alive, a very old man, who in my boyhood days wore the
broad brim and the straight preacher-like coat of the old-fashioned
Quaker.  The grandmother of my wife was also a Quaker, and used the
"thee" and "thou" until the day of her death.

Here let me say that criticism came to me from several quarters both in
England and America on the use of these words thee and thou, and
statements were made that the kind of speech which I put into David
Claridge's mouth was not Quaker speech.  For instance, they would not
have it that a Quaker would say, "Thee will go with me"--as though they
were ashamed of the sweet inaccuracy of the objective pronoun being used
in the nominative; but hundreds of times I have myself heard Quakers use
"thee" in just such a way in England and America.  The facts are,
however, that Quakers differ extensively in their habits, and there grew
up in England among the Quakers in certain districts a sense of shame
for false grammar which, to say the least, was very childish.  To be
deliberately and boldly ungrammatical, when you serve both euphony and
simplicity, is merely to give archaic charm, not to be guilty of an
offence.  I have friends in Derbyshire who still say "Thee thinks,"
etc., and I must confess that the picture of a Quaker rampant over my
deliberate use of this well-authenticated form of speech produced to my
mind only the effect of an infuriated sheep, when I remembered the
peaceful attribute of Quaker life and character.  From another quarter
came the assurance that I was wrong when I set up a tombstone with a name
upon it in a Quaker graveyard.  I received a sarcastic letter from a lady
on the borders of Sussex and Surrey upon this point, and I immediately
sent her a first-class railway ticket to enable her to visit the Quaker
churchyard at Croydon, in Surrey, where dead and gone Quakers have
tombstones by the score, and inscriptions on them also.  It is a good
thing to be accurate; it is desperately essential in a novel.  The
average reader, in his triumph at discovering some slight error of
detail, would consign a masterpiece of imagination, knowledge of life
and character to the rubbish-heap.

I believe that 'The Weavers' represents a wider outlook of life, closer
understanding of the problems which perplex society, and a clearer view
of the verities than any previous book written by me, whatever its
popularity may have been.  It appealed to the British public rather more
than 'The Right of Way', and the great public of America and the Oversea
Dominions gave it a welcome which enabled it to take its place beside
'The Right of Way', the success of which was unusual.




NOTE

This book is not intended to be an historical novel, nor are its
characters meant to be identified with well-known persons connected with
the history of England or of Egypt; but all that is essential in the tale
is based upon, and drawn from, the life of both countries.  Though Egypt
has greatly changed during the past generation, away from Cairo and the
commercial centres the wheels of social progress have turned but slowly,
and much remains as it was in the days of which this book is a record in
the spirit of the life, at least.
                                             G. P.




          "Dost thou spread the sail, throw the spear, swing the axe, lay
          thy hand upon the plough, attend the furnace door, shepherd the
          sheep upon the hills, gather corn from the field, or smite the
          rock in the quarry?  Yet, whatever thy task, thou art even as
          one who twists the thread and throws the shuttle, weaving the
          web of Life.  Ye are all weavers, and Allah the Merciful, does
          He not watch beside the loom?"




BOOK I

CHAPTER I

AS THE SPIRIT MOVED

The village lay in a valley which had been the bed of a great river in
the far-off days when Ireland, Wales and Brittany were joined together
and the Thames flowed into the Seine.  The place had never known turmoil
or stir.  For generations it had lived serenely.

Three buildings in the village stood out insistently, more by the
authority of their appearance and position than by their size.  One was a
square, red-brick mansion in the centre of the village, surrounded by a
high, redbrick wall enclosing a garden.  Another was a big, low, graceful
building with wings.  It had once been a monastery.  It was covered with
ivy, which grew thick and hungry upon it, and it was called the
Cloistered House.  The last of the three was of wood, and of no great
size--a severely plain but dignified structure, looking like some
council-hall of a past era.  Its heavy oak doors and windows with diamond
panes, and its air of order, cleanliness and serenity, gave it a
commanding influence in the picture.  It was the key to the history of
the village--a Quaker Meeting-house.

Involuntarily the village had built itself in such a way that it made a
wide avenue from the common at one end to the Meeting-house on the gorse-
grown upland at the other.  With a demure resistance to the will of its
makers the village had made itself decorative.  The people were
unconscious of any attractiveness in themselves or in their village.
There were, however, a few who felt the beauty stirring around them.
These few, for their knowledge and for the pleasure which it brought,
paid the accustomed price.  The records of their lives were the only
notable history of the place since the days when their forefathers
suffered for the faith.

One of these was a girl--for she was still but a child when she died;
and she had lived in the Red Mansion with the tall porch, the wide garden
behind, and the wall of apricots and peaches and clustering grapes.  Her
story was not to cease when she was laid away in the stiff graveyard
behind the Meeting-house.  It was to go on in the life of her son, whom
to bring into the world she had suffered undeserved, and loved with a
passion more in keeping with the beauty of the vale in which she lived
than with the piety found on the high-backed seats in the Quaker Meeting-
house.  The name given her on the register of death was Mercy Claridge,
and a line beneath said that she was the daughter of Luke Claridge, that
her age at passing was nineteen years, and that "her soul was with the
Lord."

Another whose life had given pages to the village history was one of
noble birth, the Earl of Eglington.  He had died twenty years after the
time when Luke Claridge, against the then custom of the Quakers, set up a
tombstone to Mercy Claridge's memory behind the Meeting-house.  Only
thrice in those twenty years had he slept in a room of the Cloistered
House.  One of those occasions was the day on which Luke Claridge put up
the grey stone in the graveyard, three years after his daughter's death.
On the night of that day these two men met face to face in the garden of
the Cloistered House.  It was said by a passer-by, who had involuntarily
overheard, that Luke Claridge had used harsh and profane words to Lord
Eglington, though he had no inkling of the subject of the bitter talk.
He supposed, however, that Luke had gone to reprove the other for a
wasteful and wandering existence; for desertion of that Quaker religion
to which his grandfather, the third Earl of Eglington, had turned in the
second half of his life, never visiting his estates in Ireland, and
residing here among his new friends to his last day.  This listener--John
Fairley was his name--kept his own counsel.  On two other occasions had
Lord Eglington visited the Cloistered House in the years that passed, and
remained many months.  Once he brought his wife and child.  The former
was a cold, blue-eyed Saxon of an old family, who smiled distantly upon
the Quaker village; the latter, a round-headed, warm-faced youth, with a
bold, menacing eye, who probed into this and that, rushed here and there
as did his father; now built a miniature mill; now experimented at some
peril in the laboratory which had been arranged in the Cloistered House
for scientific experiments; now shot partridges in the fields where
partridges had not been shot for years; and was as little in the picture
as his adventurous father, though he wore a broad-brimmed hat, smiling
the while at the pain it gave to the simple folk around him.

And yet once more the owner of the Cloistered House returned alone.  The
blue-eyed lady was gone to her grave; the youth was abroad.  This time he
came to die.  He was found lying on the floor of his laboratory with a
broken retort in fragments beside him.  With his servant, Luke Claridge
was the first to look upon him lying in the wreck of his last experiment,
a spirit-lamp still burning above him, in the grey light of a winter's
morning.  Luke Claridge closed the eyes, straightened the body, and
crossed the hands over the breast which had been the laboratory of many
conflicting passions of life.

The dead man had left instructions that his body should be buried in the
Quaker graveyard, but Luke Claridge and the Elders prevented that--he had
no right to the privileges of a Friend; and, as the only son was afar,
and no near relatives pressed the late Earl's wishes, the ancient family
tomb in Ireland received all that was left of the owner of the Cloistered
House, which, with the estates in Ireland and the title, passed to the
wandering son.




CHAPTER II

THE GATES OF THE WORLD

Stillness in the Meeting-house, save for the light swish of one
graveyard-tree against the window-pane, and the slow breathing of the
Quaker folk who filled every corner.  On the long bench at the upper end
of the room the Elders sat motionless, their hands on their knees,
wearing their hats; the women in their poke-bonnets kept their gaze upon
their laps.  The heads of all save three were averted, and they were Luke
Claridge, his only living daughter, called Faith, and his dead daughter's
son David, who kept his eyes fixed on the window where the twig flicked
against the pane.  The eyes of Faith, who sat on a bench at one side,
travelled from David to her father constantly; and if, once or twice, the
plain rebuke of Luke Claridge's look compelled her eyes upon her folded
hands, still she was watchful and waiting, and seemed demurely to defy
the convention of unblinking silence.  As time went on, others of her sex
stole glances at Mercy's son from the depths of their bonnets; and at
last, after over an hour, they and all were drawn to look steadily at the
young man upon whose business this Meeting of Discipline had been called.
The air grew warmer and warmer, but no one became restless; all seemed as
cool of face and body as the grey gowns and coats with grey steel buttons
which they wore.

At last a shrill voice broke the stillness.  Raising his head, one of the
Elders said: "Thee will stand up, friend."  He looked at David.

With a slight gesture of relief the young man stood up.  He was good to
look at-clean-shaven, broad of brow, fine of figure, composed of
carriage, though it was not the composure of the people by whom he was
surrounded.  They were dignified, he was graceful; they were consistently
slow of movement, but at times his quick gestures showed that he had not
been able to train his spirit to that passiveness by which he lived
surrounded.  Their eyes were slow and quiet, more meditative than
observant; his were changeful in expression, now abstracted, now dark and
shining as though some inner fire was burning.  The head, too, had a
habit of coming up quickly with an almost wilful gesture, and with an air
which, in others, might have been called pride.

"What is thy name?" said another owl-like Elder to him.

A gentle, half-amused smile flickered at the young man's lips for an
instant, then, "David Claridge--still," he answered.

His last word stirred the meeting.  A sort of ruffle went through the
atmosphere, and now every eye was fixed and inquiring.  The word was
ominous.  He was there on his trial, and for discipline; and it was
thought by all that, as many days had passed since his offence was
committed, meditation and prayer should have done their work.  Now,
however, in the tone of his voice, as it clothed the last word, there was
something of defiance.  On the ear of his grandfather, Luke Claridge, it
fell heavily.  The old man's lips closed tightly, he clasped his hands
between his knees with apparent self-repression.

The second Elder who had spoken was he who had once heard Luke Claridge
use profane words in the Cloistered House.  Feeling trouble ahead, and
liking the young man and his brother Elder, Luke Claridge, John Fairley
sought now to take the case into his own hands.

"Thee shall never find a better name, David," he said, "if thee live a
hundred years.  It hath served well in England.  This thee didst do.
While the young Earl of Eglington was being brought home, with noise and
brawling, after his return to Parliament, thee mingled among the
brawlers; and because some evil words were said of thy hat and thy
apparel, thee laid about thee, bringing one to the dust, so that his life
was in peril for some hours to come.  Jasper Kimber was his name."

"Were it not that the smitten man forgave thee, thee would now be in a
prison cell," shrilly piped the Elder who had asked his name.

"The fight was fair," was the young man's reply.  "Though I am a Friend,
the man was English."

"Thee was that day a son of Belial," rejoined the shrill Elder.  "Thee
did use thy hands like any heathen sailor--is it not the truth?"

"I struck the man.  I punished him--why enlarge?"

"Thee is guilty?"

"I did the thing."

"That is one charge against thee.  There are others.  Thee was seen to
drink of spirits in a public-house at Heddington that day.  Twice--
thrice, like any drunken collier."

"Twice," was the prompt correction.

There was a moment's pause, in which some women sighed and others folded
and unfolded their hands on their laps; the men frowned.

"Thee has been a dark deceiver," said the shrill Elder again, and with a
ring of acrid triumph; "thee has hid these things from our eyes many
years, but in one day thee has uncovered all.  Thee--"

"Thee is charged," interposed Elder Fairley, "with visiting a play this
same day, and with seeing a dance of Spain following upon it."

"I did not disdain the music," said the young man drily; "the flute, of
all instruments, has a mellow sound."  Suddenly his eyes darkened, he
became abstracted, and gazed at the window where the twig flicked softly
against the pane, and the heat of summer palpitated in the air.  "It has
good grace to my ear," he added slowly.

Luke Claridge looked at him intently.  He began to realize that there
were forces stirring in his grandson which had no beginning in Claridge
blood, and were not nurtured in the garden with the fruited wall.  He was
not used to problems; he had only a code, which he had rigidly kept.  He
had now a glimmer of something beyond code or creed.

He saw that the shrill Elder was going to speak.  He intervened.  "Thee
is charged, David," he said coldly, "with kissing a woman--a stranger and
a wanton--where the four roads meet 'twixt here and yonder town."  He
motioned towards the hills.

"In the open day," added the shrill Elder, a red spot burning on each
withered cheek.

"The woman was comely," said the young man, with a tone of irony,
recovering an impassive look.

A strange silence fell, the women looked down; yet they seemed not so
confounded as the men.  After a moment they watched the young man with
quicker flashes of the eye.

"The answer is shameless," said the shrill Elder.  "Thy life is that of a
carnal hypocrite."

The young man said nothing.  His face had become very pale, his lips were
set, and presently he sat down and folded his arms.

"Thee is guilty of all?" asked John Fairley.

His kindly eye was troubled, for he had spent numberless hours in this
young man's company, and together they had read books of travel and
history, and even the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe, though drama was
anathema to the Society of Friends--they did not realize it in the life
around them.  That which was drama was either the visitation of God or
the dark deeds of man, from which they must avert their eyes.  Their own
tragedies they hid beneath their grey coats and bodices; their dirty
linen they never washed in public, save in the scandal such as this where
the Society must intervene.  Then the linen was not only washed, but duly
starched, sprinkled, and ironed.

"I have answered all.  Judge by my words," said David gravely.

"Has repentance come to thee?  Is it thy will to suffer that which we may
decide for thy correction?" It was Elder Fairley who spoke.  He was
determined to control the meeting and to influence its judgment.  He
loved the young man.

David made no reply; he seemed lost in thought.  "Let the discipline
proceed--he hath an evil spirit," said the shrill Elder.

"His childhood lacked in much," said Elder Fairley patiently.

To most minds present the words carried home--to every woman who had a
child, to every man who had lost a wife and had a motherless son.  This
much they knew of David's real history, that Mercy Claridge, his mother,
on a visit to the house of an uncle at Portsmouth, her mother's brother,
had eloped with and was duly married to the captain of a merchant ship.
They also knew that, after some months, Luke Claridge had brought her
home; and that before her child was born news came that the ship her
husband sailed had gone down with all on board.  They knew likewise that
she had died soon after David came, and that her father, Luke Claridge,
buried her in her maiden name, and brought the boy up as his son, not
with his father's name but bearing that name so long honoured in England,
and even in the far places of the earth--for had not Benn Claridge,
Luke's brother, been a great carpet-merchant, traveller, and explorer in
Asia Minor, Egypt, and the Soudan--Benn Claridge of the whimsical speech,
the pious life?  All this they knew; but none of them, to his or her
knowledge, had ever seen David's father.  He was legendary; though there
was full proof that the girl had been duly married.  That had been laid
before the Elders by Luke Claridge on an occasion when Benn Claridge, his
brother was come among them again from the East.

At this moment of trial David was thinking of his uncle, Benn Claridge,
and of his last words fifteen years before when going once again to the
East, accompanied by the Muslim chief Ebn Ezra, who had come with him to
England on the business of his country.  These were Benn Claridge's
words: "Love God before all, love thy fellow-man, and thy conscience will
bring thee safe home, lad."

"If he will not repent, there is but one way," said the shrill Elder.

"Let there be no haste," said Luke Claridge, in a voice that shook a
little in his struggle for self-control.

Another heretofore silent Elder, sitting beside John Fairley, exchanged
words in a whisper with him, and then addressed them.  He was a very
small man with a very high stock and spreading collar, a thin face, and
large wide eyes.  He kept his chin down in his collar, but spoke at the
ceiling like one blind, though his eyes were sharp enough on occasion.
His name was Meacham.

"It is meet there shall be time for sorrow and repentance," he said.
"This, I pray you all, be our will: that for three months David live
apart, even in the hut where lived the drunken chair-maker ere he
disappeared and died, as rumour saith--it hath no tenant.  Let it be that
after to-morrow night at sunset none shall speak to him till that time be
come, the first day of winter.  Till that day he shall speak to no man,
and shall be despised of the world, and--pray God--of himself.  Upon the
first day of winter let it be that he come hither again and speak with
us."

On the long stillness of assent that followed there came a voice across
the room, from within a grey-and-white bonnet, which shadowed a delicate
face shining with the flame of the spirit within.  It was the face of
Faith Claridge, the sister of the woman in the graveyard, whose soul was
"with the Lord," though she was but one year older and looked much
younger than her nephew, David.

"Speak, David," she said softly.  "Speak now.  Doth not the spirit move
thee?"

She gave him his cue, for he had of purpose held his peace till all had
been said; and he had come to say some things which had been churning in
his mind too long.  He caught the faint cool sarcasm in her tone, and
smiled unconsciously at her last words.  She, at least, must have reasons
for her faith in him, must have grounds for his defence in painful days
to come; for painful they must be, whether he stayed to do their will, or
went into the fighting world where Quakers were few and life composite of
things they never knew in Hamley.

He got to his feet and clasped his hands behind his back.  After an
instant he broke silence.

"All those things of which I am accused, I did; and for them is asked
repentance.  Before that day on which I did these things was there
complaint, or cause for it?  Was my life evil?  Did I think in secret
that which might not be done openly?  Well, some things I did secretly.
Ye shall hear of them.  I read where I might, and after my taste, many
plays, and found in them beauty and the soul of deep things.  Tales I
have read, but a few, and John Milton, and Chaucer, and Bacon, and
Montaigne, and Arab poets also, whose books my uncle sent me.  Was this
sin in me?"

"It drove to a day of shame for thee," said the shrill Elder.

He took no heed, but continued: "When I was a child I listened to the
lark as it rose from the meadow; and I hid myself in the hedge that,
unseen, I might hear it sing; and at night I waited till I could hear the
nightingale.  I have heard the river singing, and the music of the trees.
At first I thought that this must be sin, since ye condemn the human
voice that sings, but I could feel no guilt.  I heard men and women sing
upon the village green, and I sang also.  I heard bands of music.  One
instrument seemed to me more than all the rest.  I bought one like it,
and learned to play.  It was the flute--its note so soft and pleasant.
I learned to play it--years ago--in the woods of Beedon beyond the hill,
and I have felt no guilt from then till now.  For these things I have no
repentance."

"Thee has had good practice in deceit," said the shrill Elder.

Suddenly David's manner changed.  His voice became deeper; his eyes took
on that look of brilliance and heat which had given Luke Claridge anxious
thoughts.

"I did, indeed, as the spirit moved me, even as ye have done."

"Blasphemer, did the spirit move thee to brawl and fight, to drink and
curse, to kiss a wanton in the open road?  What hath come upon thee?"
Again it was the voice of the shrill Elder.

"Judge me by the truth I speak," he answered.  "Save in these things my
life has been an unclasped book for all to read."

"Speak to the charge of brawling and drink, David," rejoined the little
Elder Meacham with the high collar and gaze upon the ceiling.

"Shall I not speak when I am moved?  Ye have struck swiftly; I will draw
the arrow slowly from the wound.  But, in truth, ye had good right to
wound.  Naught but kindness have I had among you all; and I will answer.
Straightly have I lived since my birth.  Yet betimes a torturing unrest
of mind was used to come upon me as I watched the world around us.  I saw
men generous to their kind, industrious and brave, beloved by their
fellows; and I have seen these same men drink and dance and give
themselves to coarse, rough play like young dogs in a kennel.  Yet, too,
I have seen dark things done in drink--the cheerful made morose, the
gentle violent.  What was the temptation?  What the secret?  Was it but
the low craving of the flesh, or was it some primitive unrest, or craving
of the soul, which, clouded and baffled by time and labour and the wear
of life, by this means was given the witched medicament--a false freedom,
a thrilling forgetfulness?  In ancient days the high, the humane, in
search of cure for poison, poisoned themselves, and then applied the
antidote.  He hath little knowledge and less pity for sin who has never
sinned.  The day came when all these things which other men did in my
sight I did--openly.  I drank with them in the taverns--twice I drank.
I met a lass in the way.  I kissed her.  I sat beside her at the roadside
and she told me her brief, sad, evil story.  One she had loved had left
her.  She was going to London.  I gave her what money I had--"

"And thy watch," said a whispering voice from the Elders' bench.

"Even so.  And at the cross-roads I bade her goodbye with sorrow."

"There were those who saw," said the shrill voice from the bench.

"They saw what I have said--no more.  I had never tasted spirits in my
life.  I had never kissed a woman's lips.  Till then I had never struck
my fellow-man; but before the sun went down I fought the man who drove
the lass in sorrow into the homeless world.  I did not choose to fight;
but when I begged the man Jasper Kimber for the girl's sake to follow and
bring her back, and he railed at me and made to fight me, I took off my
hat, and there I laid him in the dust."

"No thanks to thee that he did not lie in his grave," observed the shrill
Elder.

"In truth I hit hard," was the quiet reply.

"How came thee expert with thy fists?" asked Elder Fairley, with the
shadow of a smile.

"A book I bought from London, a sack of corn, a hollow leather ball, and
an hour betimes with the drunken chair-maker in the hut by the lime-kiln
on the hill.  He was once a sailor and a fighting man."

A look of blank surprise ran slowly along the faces of the Elders.  They
were in a fog of misunderstanding and reprobation.

"While yet my father"--he looked at Luke Claridge, whom he had ever been
taught to call his father--"shared the great business at Heddington, and
the ships came from Smyrna and Alexandria, I had some small duties, as is
well known.  But that ceased, and there was little to do.  Sports are
forbidden among us here, and my body grew sick, because the mind had no
labour.  The world of work has thickened round us beyond the hills.  The
great chimneys rise in a circle as far as eye can see on yonder crests;
but we slumber and sleep."

"Enough, enough," said a voice from among the women.  "Thee has a friend
gone to London--thee knows the way.  It leads from the cross-roads!"

Faith Claridge, who had listened to David's speech, her heart panting,
her clear grey eyes--she had her mother's eyes--fixed benignly on him,
turned to the quarter whence the voice came.  Seeing who it was--a widow
who, with no demureness, had tried without avail to bring Luke Claridge
to her--her lips pressed together in a bitter smile, and she said to her
nephew clearly:

"Patience Spielman hath little hope of thee, David.  Hope hath died in
her."

A faint, prim smile passed across the faces of all present, for all knew
Faith's allusion, and it relieved the tension of the past half-hour.
From the first moment David began to speak he had commanded his hearers.
His voice was low and even; but it had also a power which, when put to
sudden quiet use, compelled the hearer to an almost breathless silence,
not so much to the meaning of the words, but to the tone itself, to the
man behind it.  His personal force was remarkable.  Quiet and pale
ordinarily, his clear russet-brown hair falling in a wave over his
forehead, when roused, he seemed like some delicate engine made to do
great labours.  As Faith said to him once, "David, thee looks as though
thee could lift great weights lightly."  When roused, his eyes lighted
like a lamp, the whole man seemed to pulsate.  He had shocked, awed, and
troubled his listeners.  Yet he had held them in his power, and was
master of their minds.  The interjections had but given him new means to
defend himself.  After Faith had spoken he looked slowly round.

"I am charged with being profane," he said.  "I do not remember.  But is
there none among you who has not secretly used profane words and, neither
in secret nor openly, has repented?  I am charged with drinking.  On one
day of my life I drank openly.  I did it because something in me kept
crying out, 'Taste and see!'  I tasted and saw, and know; and I know that
oblivion, that brief pitiful respite from trouble, which this evil
tincture gives.  I drank to know; and I found it lure me into a new
careless joy.  The sun seemed brighter, men's faces seemed happier, the
world sang about me, the blood ran swiftly, thoughts swarmed in my brain.
My feet were on the mountains, my hands were on the sails of great ships;
I was a conqueror.  I understood the drunkard in the first withdrawal
begotten of this false stimulant.  I drank to know.  Is there none among
you who has, though it be but once, drunk secretly as I drank openly?  If
there be none, then I am condemned."

"Amen," said Elder Fairley's voice from the bench.  "In the open way by
the cross-roads I saw a woman.  I saw she was in sorrow.  I spoke to her.
Tears came to her eyes.  I took her hand, and we sat down together.  Of
the rest I have told you.  I kissed her--a stranger.  She was comely.
And this I know, that the matter ended by the cross-roads, and that by
and forbidden paths have easy travel.  I kissed the woman openly--is
there none among you who has kissed secretly, and has kept the matter
hidden?  For him I struck and injured, it was fair.  Shall a man be
beaten like a dog?  Kimber would have beaten me."

"Wherein has it all profited?" asked the shrill Elder querulously.

"I have knowledge.  None shall do these things hereafter but I shall
understand.  None shall go venturing, exploring, but I shall pray for
him."

"Thee will break thy heart and thy life exploring," said Luke Claridge
bitterly.  Experiment in life he did not understand, and even Benn
Claridge's emigration to far lands had ever seemed to him a monstrous and
amazing thing, though it ended in the making of a great business in which
he himself had prospered, and from which he had now retired.  He suddenly
realized that a day of trouble was at hand with this youth on whom his
heart doted, and it tortured him that he could not understand.

"By none of these things shall I break my life," was David's answer now.

For a moment he stood still and silent, then all at once he stretched out
his hands to them.  "All these things I did were against our faith.  I
desire forgiveness.  I did them out of my own will; I will take up your
judgment.  If there be no more to say, I will make ready to go to old
Soolsby's hut on the hill till the set time be passed."

There was a long silence.  Even the shrill Elder's head was buried in
his breast.  They were little likely to forego his penalty.  There was
a gentle inflexibility in their natures born of long restraint and
practised determination.  He must go out into blank silence and
banishment until the first day of winter.  Yet, recalcitrant as they held
him, their secret hearts were with him, for there was none of them but
had had happy commerce with him; and they could think of no more bitter
punishment than to be cut off from their own society for three months.
They were satisfied he was being trained back to happiness and honour.

A new turn was given to events, however.  The little wizened Elder
Meacham said: "The flute, friend--is it here?"

"I have it here," David answered.

"Let us have music, then."

"To what end?" interjected the shrill Elder.

"He hath averred he can play," drily replied the other.  "Let us judge
whether vanity breeds untruth in him."

The furtive brightening of the eyes in the women was represented in the
men by an assumed look of abstraction in most; in others by a bland
assumption of judicial calm.  A few, however, frowned, and would have
opposed the suggestion, but that curiosity mastered them.  These watched
with darkening interest the flute, in three pieces, drawn from an inner
pocket and put together swiftly.

David raised the instrument to his lips, blew one low note, and then a
little run of notes, all smooth and soft.  Mellowness and a sober
sweetness were in the tone.  He paused a moment after this, and seemed
questioning what to play.  And as he stood, the flute in his hands, his
thoughts took flight to his Uncle Benn, whose kindly, shrewd face and
sharp brown eyes were as present to him, and more real, than those of
Luke Claridge, whom he saw every day.  Of late when he had thought of
his uncle, however, alternate depression and lightness of spirit had
possessed him.  Night after night he had troubled sleep, and he had
dreamed again and again that his uncle knocked at his door, or came and
stood beside his bed and spoke to him.  He had wakened suddenly and said
"Yes" to a voice which seemed to call to him.

Always his dreams and imaginings settled round his Uncle Benn, until he
had found himself trying to speak to the little brown man across the
thousand leagues of land and sea.  He had found, too, in the past that
when he seemed to be really speaking to his uncle, when it seemed as
though the distance between them had been annihilated, that soon
afterwards there came a letter from him.  Yet there had not been more
than two or three a year.  They had been, however, like books of many
pages, closely written, in Arabic, in a crabbed characteristic hand, and
full of the sorrow and grandeur and misery of the East.  How many books
on the East David had read he would hardly have been able to say; but
something of the East had entered into him, something of the philosophy
of Mahomet and Buddha, and the beauty of Omar Khayyam had given a touch
of colour and intellect to the narrow faith in which he had been
schooled.  He had found himself replying to a question asked of him in
Heddington, as to how he knew that there was a God, in the words of a
Muslim quoted by his uncle: "As I know by the tracks in the sand whether
a Man or Beast has passed there, so the heaven with its stars, the earth
with its fruits, show me that God has passed."  Again, in reply to the
same question, the reply of the same Arab sprang to his lips--"Does the
Morning want a Light to see it by?"

As he stood with his flute--his fingers now and then caressingly rising
and falling upon its little caverns, his mind travelled far to those
regions he had never seen, where his uncle traded, and explored.
Suddenly, the call he had heard in his sleep now came to him in this
waking reverie.  His eyes withdrew from the tree at the window, as if
startled, and he almost called aloud in reply; but he realised where he
was.  At last, raising the flute to his lips, as the eyes of Luke
Claridge closed with very trouble, he began to play.

Out in the woods of Beedon he had attuned his flute to the stir of
leaves, the murmur of streams, the song of birds, the boom and burden of
storm; and it was soft and deep as the throat of the bell-bird of
Australian wilds.  Now it was mastered by the dreams he had dreamed of
the East: the desert skies, high and clear and burning, the desert
sunsets, plaintive and peaceful and unvaried--one lovely diffusion, in
which day dies without splendour and in a glow of pain.  The long velvety
tread of the camel, the song of the camel-driver, the monotonous chant of
the river-man, with fingers mechanically falling on his little drum, the
cry of the eagle of the Libyan Hills, the lap of the heavy waters of the
Dead Sea down by Jericho, the battle-call of the Druses beyond Damascus,
the lonely gigantic figures at the mouth of the temple of Abou Simbel,
looking out with the eternal question to the unanswering desert, the
delicate ruins of moonlit Baalbec, with the snow mountains hovering
above, the green oases, and the deep wells where the caravans lay down in
peace--all these were pouring their influences on his mind in the little
Quaker village of Hamley where life was so bare, so grave.

The music he played was all his own, was instinctively translated from
all other influences into that which they who listened to him could
understand.  Yet that sensuous beauty which the Quaker Society was so
concerned to banish from any part in their life was playing upon them
now, making the hearts of the women beat fast, thrilling them, turning
meditation into dreams, and giving the sight of the eyes far visions of
pleasure.  So powerful was this influence that the shrill Elder twice
essayed to speak in protest, but was prevented by the wizened Elder
Meacham.  When it seemed as if the aching, throbbing sweetness must
surely bring denunciation, David changed the music to a slow mourning
cadence.  It was a wail of sorrow, a march to the grave, a benediction, a
soft sound of farewell, floating through the room and dying away into the
mid-day sun.

There came a long silence after, and David sat with unmoving look upon
the distant prospect through the window.  A woman's sob broke the air.
Faith's handkerchief was at her eyes.  Only one quick sob, but it had
been wrung from her by the premonition suddenly come that the brother--
he was brother more than nephew--over whom her heart had yearned had,
indeed, come to the cross-roads, and that their ways would henceforth
divide.  The punishment or banishment now to be meted out to him was as
nothing.  It meant a few weeks of disgrace, of ban, of what, in effect,
was self-immolation, of that commanding justice of the Society which no
one yet save the late Earl of Eglington had defied.  David could refuse
to bear punishment, but such a possibility had never occurred to her or
to any one present.  She saw him taking his punishment as surely as
though the law of the land had him in its grasp.  It was not that which
she was fearing.  But she saw him moving out of her life.  To her this
music was the prelude of her tragedy.

A moment afterwards Luke Claridge arose and spoke to David in austere
tones: "It is our will that thee begone to the chair-maker's but upon the
hill till three months be passed, and that none have speech with thee
after sunset to-morrow even."

"Amen," said all the Elders.

"Amen," said David, and put his flute into his pocket, and rose to go.




CHAPTER III

BANISHED

The chair-maker's hut lay upon the north hillside about half-way between
the Meeting-house at one end of the village and the common at the other
end.  It commanded the valley, had no house near it, and was sheltered
from the north wind by the hill-top which rose up behind it a hundred
feet or more.  No road led to it--only a path up from the green of the
village, winding past a gulley and the deep cuts of old rivulets now
over grown by grass or bracken.  It got the sun abundantly, and it was
protected from the full sweep of any storm.  It had but two rooms, the
floor was of sanded earth, but it had windows on three sides, east, west,
and south, and the door looked south.  Its furniture was a plank bed, a
few shelves, a bench, two chairs, some utensils, a fireplace of stone, a
picture of the Virgin and Child, and of a cardinal of the Church of Rome
with a red hat--for the chair-maker had been a Roman Catholic, the only
one of that communion in Hamley.  Had he been a Protestant his vices
would have made him anathema, but, being what he was, his fellow-
villagers had treated him with kindness.

After the half-day in which he was permitted to make due preparations,
lay in store of provisions, and purchase a few sheep and hens, hither
came David Claridge.  Here, too, came Faith, who was permitted one hour
with him before he began his life of willing isolation.  Little was said
as they made the journey up the hill, driving the sheep before them, four
strong lads following with necessities--flour, rice, potatoes, and
suchlike.

Arrived, the goods were deposited inside the hut, the lads were
dismissed, and David and Faith were left alone.  David looked at his
watch.  They had still a handful of minutes before the parting.  These
flew fast, and yet, seated inside the door, and looking down at the
village which the sun was bathing in the last glowing of evening, they
remained silent.  Each knew that a great change had come in their
hitherto unchanging life, and it was difficult to separate premonition
from substantial fact.  The present fact did not represent all they felt,
though it represented all on which they might speak together now.

Looking round the room, at last Faith said: "Thee has all thee needs,
David?  Thee is sure?"

He nodded.  "I know not yet how little man may need.  I have lived in
plenty."

At that moment her eyes rested on the Cloistered House.

"The Earl of Eglington would not call it plenty."  A shade passed over
David's face.  "I know not how he would measure.  Is his own field so
wide?"

"The spread of a peacock's feather."

"What does thee know of him?" David asked the question absently.

"I have eyes to see, Davy."  The shadows from that seeing were in her
eyes as she spoke, but he did not observe them.

"Thee sees but with half an eye," she continued.  "With both mine I have
seen horses and carriages, and tall footmen, and wine and silver, and
gilded furniture, and fine pictures, and rolls of new carpet--of Uncle
Benn's best carpets, Davy--and a billiard-table, and much else."

A cloud slowly gathered over David's face, and he turned to her with an
almost troubled surprise.  "Thee has seen these things--and how?"

"One day--thee was in Devon--one of the women was taken ill.  They sent
for me because the woman asked it.  She was a Papist; but she begged that
I should go with her to the hospital, as there was no time to send to
Heddington for a nurse.  She had seen me once in the house of the toll-
gate keeper.  Ill as she was, I could have laughed, for, as we went in
the Earl's carriage to the hospital-thirty miles it was--she said she
felt at home with me, my dress being so like a nun's.  It was then I saw
the Cloistered House within and learned what was afoot."

"In the Earl's carriage indeed--and the Earl?"

"He was in Ireland, burrowing among those tarnished baubles, his titles,
and stripping the Irish Peter to clothe the English Paul."

"He means to make Hamley his home?  From Ireland these furnishings come?"

"So it seems.  Henceforth the Cloistered House will have its doors flung
wide.  London and all the folk of Parliament will flutter along the dunes
of Hamley."

"Then the bailiff will sit yonder within a year, for he is but a starved
Irish peer."

"He lives to-day as though he would be rich tomorrow.  He bids for fame
and fortune, Davy."

"'Tis as though a shirtless man should wear a broadcloth coat over a
cotton vest."

"The world sees only the broadcloth coat.  For the rest--"

"For the rest, Faith?"

"They see the man's face, and--"

His eyes were embarrassed.  A thought had flashed into his mind which he
considered unworthy, for this girl beside him was little likely to dwell
upon the face of a renegade peer, whose living among them was a constant
reminder of his father's apostasy.  She was too fine, dwelt in such high
spheres, that he could not think of her being touched by the glittering
adventures of this daring young member of Parliament, whose book of
travels had been published, only to herald his understood determination
to have office in the Government, not in due time, but in his own time.
What could there be in common between the sophisticated Eglington and
this sweet, primitively wholesome Quaker girl?

Faith read what was passing in his mind.  She flushed--slowly flushed
until her face--and eyes were one soft glow, then she laid a hand upon
his arm and said: "Davy, I feel the truth about him--no more.  Nothing of
him is for thee or me.  His ways are not our ways."  She paused, and then
said solemnly: "He hath a devil.  That I feel.  But he hath also a mind,
and a cruel will.  He will hew a path, or make others hew it for him.  He
will make or break.  Nothing will stand in his way, neither man nor
thing, those he loves nor those he hates.  He will go on--and to go on,
all means, so they be not criminal, will be his.  Men will prophesy great
things for him--they do so now.  But nothing they prophesy, Davy, keeps
pace with his resolve."

"How does thee know these things?"

His question was one of wonder and surprise.  He had never before seen in
her this sharp discernment and criticism.

"How know I, Davy?  I know him by studying thee.  What thee is not he is.
What he is thee is not."  The last beams of the sun sent a sudden glint
of yellow to the green at their feet from the western hills, rising far
over and above the lower hills of the village, making a wide ocean of
light, at the bottom of which lay the Meeting-house and the Cloistered
House, and the Red Mansion with the fruited wall, and all the others,
like dwellings at the bottom of a golden sea.  David's eyes were on the
distance, and the far-seeing look was in his face which had so deeply
impressed Faith in the Meeting-house, by which she had read his future.

"And shall I not also go on?" he asked.

"How far, who can tell?"

There was a plaintive note in her voice--the unavailing and sad protest
of the maternal spirit, of the keeper of the nest, who sees the brood fly
safely away, looking not back.

"What does thee see for me afar, Faith?"  His look was eager.

"The will of God, which shall be done," she said with a sudden
resolution, and stood up.  Her hands were lightly clasped before her like
those of Titian's Mater Dolorosa among the Rubens and Tintorettos of the
Prado, a lonely figure, whose lot it was to spend her life for others.
Even as she already had done; for thrice she had refused marriages
suitable and possible to her.  In each case she had steeled her heart
against loving, that she might be all in all to her sister's child and to
her father.  There is no habit so powerful as the habit of care of
others.  In Faith it came as near being a passion as passion could have a
place in her even-flowing blood, under that cool flesh, governed by a
heart as fair as the apricot blossoms on the wall in her father's garden.
She had been bitterly hurt in the Meeting-house; as bitterly as is many a
woman when her lover has deceived her.  David had acknowledged before
them all that he had played the flute secretly for years!  That he should
have played it was nothing; that she should not have shared his secret,
and so shared his culpability before them all, was a wound which would
take long to heal.

She laid her hand upon his shoulder suddenly with a nervous little
motion.

"And the will of God thee shall do to His honour, though thee is outcast
to-day.  .  .  .  But, Davy, the music-thee kept it from me."

He looked up at her steadily; he read what was in her mind.

"I hid it so, because I would not have thy conscience troubled.  Thee
would go far to smother it for me; and I was not so ungrateful to thee.
I did it for good to thee."

A smile passed across her lips.  Never was woman so grateful, never wound
so quickly healed.  She shook her head sadly at him, and stilling the
proud throbbing of her heart, she said:

"But thee played so well, Davy!"

He got up and turned his head away, lest he should laugh outright.  Her
reasoning--though he was not worldly enough to call it feminine, and
though it scarce tallied with her argument--seemed to him quite her own.

"How long have we?" he said over his shoulder.  "The sun is yet five
minutes up, or more," she said, a little breathlessly, for she saw his
hand inside his coat, and guessed his purpose.

"But thee will not dare to play--thee will not dare," she said, but more
as an invitation than a rebuke.  "Speech was denied me here, but not my
music.  I find no sin in it."

She eagerly watched him adjust the flute.  Suddenly she drew to him the
chair from the doorway, and beckoned him to sit down.  She sat where she
could see the sunset.

The music floated through the room and down the hillside, a searching
sweetness.

She kept her face ever on the far hills.  It went on and on.  At last it
stopped.  David roused himself, as from a dream.  "But it is dark!" he
said, startled.  "It is past the time thee should be with me.  My
banishment began at sunset."

"Are all the sins to be thine?" she asked calmly.  She had purposely let
him play beyond the time set for their being together.

"Good-night, Davy."  She kissed him on the cheek.  "I will keep the music
for the sin's remembrance," she added, and went out into the night.




CHAPTER IV

THE CALL

"England is in one of those passions so creditable to her moral sense,
so illustrative of her unregulated virtues.  We are living in the first
excitement and horror of the news of the massacre of Christians at
Damascus.  We are full of righteous and passionate indignation.  'Punish
--restore the honour of the Christian nations' is the proud appeal of
prelate, prig, and philanthropist, because some hundreds of Christians
who knew their danger, yet chose to take up their abode in a fanatical
Muslim city of the East, have suffered death."

The meeting had been called in answer to an appeal from Exeter Hall.
Lord Eglington had been asked to speak, and these were among his closing
words.

He had seen, as he thought, an opportunity for sensation.  Politicians
of both sides, the press on all hands, were thundering denunciations upon
the city of Damascus, sitting insolent and satiated in its exquisite
bloom of pear and nectarine, and the deed itself was fading into that
blank past of Eastern life where there "are no birds in last year's
nest."  If he voyaged with the crowd, his pennant would be lost in the
clustering sails!  So he would move against the tide, and would startle,
even if he did not convince.

"Let us not translate an inflamed religious emotion into a war," he
continued.  "To what good?  Would it restore one single life in Damascus?
Would it bind one broken heart?  Would it give light to one darkened
home?  Let us have care lest we be called a nation of hypocrites.  I will
neither support nor oppose the resolution presented; I will content
myself with pointing the way to a greater national self-respect."

Mechanically, a few people who had scarcely apprehended the full force of
his remarks began to applaud; but there came cries of "'Sh! 'Sh!" and
the clapping of hands suddenly stopped.  For a moment there was absolute
silence, in which the chairman adjusted his glasses and fumbled with the
agenda paper in his confusion, scarcely knowing what to do.  The speaker
had been expected to second the resolution, and had not done so.  There
was an awkward silence.  Then, in a loud whisper, some one said:

"David, David, do thee speak."

It was the voice of Faith Claridge.  Perturbed and anxious, she had come
to the meeting with her father.  They had not slept for nights, for the
last news they had had of Benn Claridge was from the city of Damascus,
and they were full of painful apprehensions.

It was the eve of the first day of winter, and David's banishment was
over.  Faith had seen David often at a distance--how often had she stood
in her window and looked up over the apricot-wall to the chair-maker's
hut on the hill!  According to his penalty David had never come to Hamley
village, but had lived alone, speaking to no one, avoided by all, working
out his punishment.  Only the day before the meeting he had read of the
massacre at Damascus from a newspaper which had been left on his doorstep
overnight.  Elder Fairley had so far broken the covenant of ostracism and
boycott, knowing David's love for his Uncle Benn.

All that night David paced the hillside in anxiety and agitation, and saw
the sun rise upon a new world--a world of freedom, of home-returning, yet
a world which, during the past four months, had changed so greatly that
it would never seem the same again.

The sun was scarce two hours high when Faith and her father mounted the
hill to bring him home again.  He had, however, gone to Heddington to
learn further news of the massacre.  He was thinking of his Uncle Benn-
all else could wait.  His anxiety was infinitely greater than that of
Luke Claridge, for his mind had been disturbed by frequent premonitions;
and those sudden calls in his sleep-his uncle's voice--ever seemed to be
waking him at night.  He had not meant to speak at the meeting, but the
last words of the speaker decided him; he was in a flame of indignation.
He heard the voice of Faith whisper over the heads of the people.
"David, David, do thee speak."  Turning, he met her eyes, then rose to
his feet, came steadily to the platform, and raised a finger towards the
chairman.

A great whispering ran through the audience.  Very many recognised him,
and all had heard of him--the history of his late banishment and self-
approving punishment were familiar to them.  He climbed the steps of the
platform alertly, and the chairman welcomed him with nervous pleasure.
Any word from a Quaker, friendly to the feeling of national indignation,
would give the meeting the new direction which all desired.

Something in the face of the young man, grown thin and very pale during
the period of long thought and little food in the lonely and meditative
life he had led; something human and mysterious in the strange tale of
his one day's mad doings, fascinated them.  They had heard of the liquor
he had drunk, of the woman he had kissed at the cross-roads, of the man
he had fought, of his discipline and sentence.  His clean, shapely
figure, and the soft austerity of the neat grey suit he wore, his broad-
brimmed hat pushed a little back, showing well a square white forehead--
all conspired to send a wave of feeling through the audience, which
presently broke into cheering.

Beginning with the usual formality, he said: "I am obliged to differ from
nearly every sentiment expressed by the Earl of Eglington, the member for
Levizes, who has just taken his seat."

There was an instant's pause, the audience cheered, and cries of delight
came from all parts of the house.  "All good counsel has its sting," he
continued, "but the good counsel of him who has just spoken is a sting in
a wound deeper than the skin.  The noble Earl has bidden us to be
consistent and reasonable.  I have risen here to speak for that to which
mere consistency and reason may do cruel violence.  I am a man of peace,
I am the enemy of war--it is my faith and creed; yet I repudiate the
principle put forward by the Earl of Eglington, that you shall not clinch
your hand for the cause which is your heart's cause, because, if you
smite, the smiting must be paid for."

He was interrupted by cheers and laughter, for the late event in his own
life came to them to point his argument.

"The nation that declines war may be refusing to inflict that just
punishment which alone can set the wrong-doers on the better course.  It
is not the faith of that Society to which I belong to decline correction
lest it may seem like war."

The point went home significantly, and cheering followed.  "The high
wall of Tibet, a stark refusal to open the door to the wayfarer, I can
understand; but, friend"--he turned to the young peer--"friend, I cannot
understand a defence of him who opens the door upon terms of mutual
hospitality, and then, in the red blood of him who has so contracted,
blots out the just terms upon which they have agreed.  Is that thy faith,
friend?"

The repetition of the word friend was almost like a gibe, though it was
not intended as such.  There was none present, however, but knew of the
defection of the Earl's father from the Society of Friends, and they
chose to interpret the reference to a direct challenge.  It was a
difficult moment for the young Earl, but he only smiled, and cherished
anger in his heart.

For some minutes David spoke with force and power, and he ended with
passionate solemnity.  His voice rang out: "The smoke of this burning
rises to Heaven, the winds that wail over scattered and homeless dust
bear a message of God to us.  In the name of Mahomet, whose teaching
condemns treachery and murder, in the name of the Prince of Peace, who
taught that justice which makes for peace, I say it is England's duty to
lay the iron hand of punishment upon this evil city and on the Government
in whose orbit it shines with so deathly a light.  I fear it is that one
of my family and of my humble village lies beaten to death in Damascus.
Yet not because of that do I raise my voice here to-day.  These many
years Benn Claridge carried his life in his hands, and in a good cause it
was held like the song of a bird, to be blown from his lips in the day of
the Lord.  I speak only as an Englishman.  I ask you to close your minds
against the words of this brilliant politician, who would have you settle
a bill of costs written in Christian blood, by a promise to pay, got
through a mockery of armed display in those waters on which once looked
the eyes of the Captain of our faith.  Humanity has been put in the
witness-box of the world; let humanity give evidence."

Women wept.  Men waved their hats and cheered; the whole meeting rose to
its feet and gave vent to its feelings.

For some moments the tumult lasted, Eglington looking on with face
unmoved.  As David turned to leave the table, however, he murmured,
"Peacemaker!  Peacemaker!" and smiled sarcastically.

As the audience resumed their seats, two people were observed making
their way to the platform.  One was Elder Fairley, leading the way to a
tall figure in a black robe covering another coloured robe, and wearing a
large white turban.  Not seeing the new-comers, the chairman was about to
put the resolution; but a protesting hand from John Fairley stopped him,
and in a strange silence the two new-comers mounted the platform.  David
rose and advanced to meet them.  There flashed into his mind that this
stranger in Eastern garb was Ebn Ezra Bey, the old friend of Benn
Claridge, of whom his uncle had spoken and written so much.  The same
instinct drew Ebn Ezra Bey to him--he saw the uncle's look in the
nephew's face.  In a breathless stillness the Oriental said in perfect
English, with a voice monotonously musical:

"I came to thy house and found thee not.  I have a message for thee from
the land where thine uncle sojourned with me."

He took from a wallet a piece of paper and passed it to David, adding: "I
was thine uncle's friend.  He hath put off his sandals and walketh with
bare feet!" David read eagerly.

"It is time to go, Davy," the paper said.  "All that I have is thine.
Go to Egypt, and thee shall find it so.  Ebn Ezra Bey will bring thee.
Trust him as I have done.  He is a true man, though the Koran be his
faith.  They took me from behind, Davy, so that I was spared temptation
--I die as I lived, a man of peace.  It is too late to think how it might
have gone had we met face to face; but the will of God worketh not
according to our will.  I can write no more.  Luke, Faith, and Davy--dear
Davy, the night has come, and all's well.  Good morrow, Davy.  Can you
not hear me call?  I have called thee so often of late!  Good morrow!
Good morrow!  .  .  .  I doff my hat, Davy--at last--to God!"

David's face whitened.  All his visions had been true visions, his dreams
true dreams.  Brave Benn Claridge had called to him at his door--" Good
morrow!  Good morrow!  Good morrow!"  Had he not heard the knocking and
the voice?  Now all was made clear.  His path lay open before him--a far
land called him, his quiet past was infinite leagues away.  Already the
staff was in his hands and the cross-roads were sinking into the distance
behind.  He was dimly conscious of the wan, shocked face of Faith in the
crowd beneath him, which seemed blurred and swaying, of the bowed head of
Luke Claridge, who, standing up, had taken off his hat in the presence of
this news of his brother's death which he saw written in David's face.
David stood for a moment before the great throng, numb and speechless.
"It is a message from Damascus," he said at last, and could say no more.

Ebn Ezra Bey turned a grave face upon the audience.

Will you hear me?" he said.  "I am an Arab."  "Speak--speak!" came from
every side.

"The Turk hath done his evil work in Damascus," he said.  "All the
Christians are dead--save one; he hath turned Muslim, and is safe."  His
voice had a note of scorn.  "It fell sudden and swift like a storm in
summer.  There were no paths to safety.  Soldiers and those who led them
shared in the slaying.  As he and I who had travelled far together these
many years sojourned there in the way of business, I felt the air grow
colder, I saw the cloud gathering.  I entreated, but he would not go.
If trouble must come, then he would be with the Christians in their
peril.  At last he saw with me the truth.  He had a plan of escape.
There was a Christian weaver with his wife in a far quarter--against my
entreaty he went to warn them.  The storm broke.  He was the first to
fall, smitten in 'that street called Straight.'  I found him soon after.
Thus did he speak to me--even in these words: 'The blood of women and
children shed here to-day shall cry from the ground.  Unprovoked the host
has turned wickedly upon his guest.  The storm has been sown, and the
whirlwind must be reaped.  Out of this evil good shall come.  Shall not
the Judge of all the earth do right?'  These were his last words to me
then.  As his life ebbed out, he wrote a letter which I have brought
hither to one"--he turned to David--"whom he loved.  At the last he took
off his hat, and lay with it in his hands, and died.  .  .  .  I am a
Muslim, but the God of pity, of justice, and of right is my God; and in
His name be it said that was a crime of Sheitan the accursed."

In a low voice the chairman put the resolution.  The Earl of Eglington
voted in its favour.

Walking the hills homeward with Ebn Ezra Bey, Luke, Faith, and John
Fairley, David kept saying over to himself the words of Benn Claridge:
"I have called thee so often of late.  Good morrow!  Good morrow!  Good
morrow!  Can you not hear me call?"





ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

There is no habit so powerful as the habit of care of others






THE WEAVERS

By Gilbert Parker



BOOK II.


V.        THE WIDER WAY
VI.       "HAST THOU NEVER BILLED A MANY"
VII.      THE COMPACT
VIII.     FOR HIS SOUL'S SAKE AND THE LAND'S SAKE
IX.       THE LETTER, THE NIGHT, AND THE WOMAN
X.        THE FOUR WHO KNEW
XI.       AGAINST THE HOUR OF MIDNIGHT
XII.      THE JEHAD AND THE LIONS
XIII.     ACHMET THE ROPEMAKER STRIKES
XIV.      BEYOND THE PALE



CHAPTER V

THE WIDER WAY

Some months later the following letter came to David Claridge in Cairo
from Faith Claridge in Hamley:

     David, I write thee from the village and the land of the people
     which thou didst once love so well.  Does thee love them still?
     They gave thee sour bread to eat ere thy going, but yet thee didst
     grind the flour for the baking.  Thee didst frighten all who knew
     thee with thy doings that mad midsummer time.  The tavern, the
     theatre, the cross-roads, and the cockpit--was ever such a day!

     Now, Davy, I must tell of a strange thing.  But first, a moment.
     Thee remembers the man Kimber smitten by thee at the public-house on
     that day?  What think thee has happened?  He followed to London the
     lass kissed by thee, and besought her to return and marry him.  This
     she refused at first with anger; but afterwards she said that, if in
     three years he was of the same mind, and stayed sober and hard-
     working meanwhile, she would give him an answer, she would consider.
     Her head was high.  She has become maid to a lady of degree, who has
     well befriended her.

     How do I know these things?  Even from Jasper Kimber, who, on his
     return from London, was taken to his bed with fever.  Because of the
     hard blows dealt him by thee, I went to make amends.  He welcomed
     me, and soon opened his whole mind.  That mind has generous moments,
     David, for he took to being thankful for thy knocks.

     Now for the strange thing I hinted.  After visiting Jasper Kimber at
     Heddington, as I came back over the hill by the path we all took
     that day after the Meeting--Ebn Ezra Bey, my father, Elder Fairley,
     and thee and me--I drew near the chairmaker's but where thee lived
     alone all those sad months.  It was late evening; the sun had set.
     Yet I felt that I must needs go and lay my hand in love upon the
     door of the empty hut which had been ever as thee left it.  So I
     came down the little path swiftly, and then round the great rock,
     and up towards the door.  But, as I did so, my heart stood still,
     for I heard voices.  The door was open, but I could see no one.  Yet
     there the voices sounded, one sharp and peevish with anger, the
     other low and rough.  I could not hear what was said.  At last, a
     figure came from the door and went quickly down the hillside.  Who,
     think thee, was it?  Even "neighbour Eglington."  I knew the walk
     and the forward thrust of the head.  Inside the hut all was still.
     I drew near with a kind of fear, but yet I came to the door and
     looked in.

     As I looked into the dusk, my limbs trembled under me, for who
     should be sitting there, a half-finished chair between his knees,
     but Soolsby the old chair-maker!  Yes, it was he.  There he sat
     looking at me with his staring blue eyes and shock of redgrey hair.
     "Soolsby!  Soolsby!" said I, my heart hammering at my breast; for
     was not Soolsby dead and buried?  His eyes stared at me in fright.
     "Why do you come?" he said in a hoarse whisper.  "Is he dead, then?
     Has harm come to him?"

     By now I had recovered myself, for it was no ghost I saw, but a
     human being more distraught than was myself.  "Do you not know me,
     Soolsby?" I asked.  "You are Mercy Claridge from beyond--beyond and
     away," he answered dazedly.  "I am Faith Claridge, Soolsby,"
     answered I.  He started, peered forward at me, and for a moment he
     did not speak; then the fear went from his face.  "Ay, Faith
     Claridge, as I said," he answered, with apparent understanding, his
     stark mood passing.  "No, thee said Mercy Claridge, Soolsby," said
     I, "and she has been asleep these many years."  "Ay, she has slept
     soundly, thanks be to God!" he replied, and crossed himself.  "Why
     should thee call me by her name?" I inquired.  "Ay, is not her tomb
     in the churchyard?" he answered, and added quickly, "Luke Claridge
     and I are of an age to a day--which, think you, will go first?"

     He stopped weaving, and peered over at me with his staring blue
     eyes, and I felt a sudden quickening of the heart.  For, at the
     question, curtains seemed to drop from all around me, and leave me
     in the midst of pains and miseries, in a chill air that froze me to
     the marrow.  I saw myself alone--thee in Egypt and I here, and none
     of our blood and name beside me.  For we are the last, Davy, the
     last of the Claridges.  But I said coldly, and with what was near to
     anger, that he should link his name and fate with that of Luke
     Claridge: "Which of ye two goes first is God's will, and according
     to His wisdom.  Which, think thee," added I--and now I cannot
     forgive myself for saying it--"which, think thee, would do least
     harm in going?"  "I know which would do most good," he answered,
     with a harsh laugh in his throat.  Yet his blue eyes looked kindly
     at me, and now he began to nod pleasantly.  I thought him a little
     mad, but yet his speech had seemed not without dark meaning.  "Thee
     has had a visitor," I said to him presently.  He laughed in a
     snarling way that made me shrink, and answered: "He wanted this and
     he wanted that--his high-handed, second-best lordship.  Ay, and he
     would have it, because it pleased him to have it--like his father
     before him.  A poor sparrow on a tree-top, if you tell him he must
     not have it, he will hunt it down the world till it is his, as
     though it was a bird of paradise.  And when he's seen it fall at
     last, he'll remember but the fun of the chase; and the bird may get
     to its tree-top again--if it can--if it can--if it can, my lord!
     That is what his father was, the last Earl, and that is what he is
     who left my door but now.  He came to snatch old Soolsby's palace,
     his nest on the hill, to use it for a telescope, or such whimsies.
     He has scientific tricks like his father before him.  Now is it
     astronomy, and now chemistry, and suchlike; and always it is the
     Eglington mind, which let God A'mighty make it as a favour.  He
     would have old Soolsby's palace for his spy-glass, would he then?
     It scared him, as though I was the devil himself, to find me here.
     I had but come back in time--a day later, and he would have sat here
     and seen me in the Pit below before giving way.  Possession's nine
     points were with me; and here I sat and faced him; and here he
     stormed, and would do this and should do that; and I went on with my
     work.  Then he would buy my Colisyum, and I wouldn't sell it for all
     his puffball lordship might offer.  Isn't the house of the snail as
     much to him as the turtle's shell to the turtle?  I'll have no
     upstart spilling his chemicals here, or devilling the stars from a
     seat on my roof."  "Last autumn," said I, "David Claridge was housed
     here.  Thy palace was a prison then."  "I know well of that.
     Haven't I found his records here?  And do you think his makeshift
     lordship did not remind me?"  "Records?  What records, Soolsby?"
     asked I, most curious.  "Writings of his thoughts which he forgot--
     food for mind and body left in the cupboard."  "Give them to me upon
     this instant, Soolsby," said I.  "All but one," said he, "and that
     is my own, for it was his mind upon Soolsby the drunken chair-maker.
     God save him from the heathen sword that slew his uncle.  Two better
     men never sat upon a chair!"  He placed the papers in my hand, all
     save that one which spoke of him.  Ah, David, what with the flute
     and the pen, banishment was no pain to thee!  .  .  .  He placed the
     papers, save that one, in my hands, and I, womanlike, asked again
     for all.  "Some day," said he, "come, and I will read it to you.
     Nay, I will give you a taste of it now," he added, as he brought
     forth the writing.  "Thus it reads."

     Here are thy words, Davy.  What think thee of them now?

     "As I dwell in this house I know Soolsby as I never knew him when he
     lived, and though, up here, I spent many an hour with him.  Men
     leave their impressions on all around them.  The walls which have
     felt their look and their breath, the floor which has taken their
     footsteps, the chairs in which they have sat, have something of
     their presence.  I feel Soolsby here at times so sharply that it
     would seem he came again and was in this room, though he is dead and
     gone.  I ask him how it came he lived here alone; how it came that
     he made chairs, he, with brains enough to build great houses or
     great bridges; how it was that drink and he were such friends; and
     how he, a Catholic, lived here among us Quakers, so singular,
     uncompanionable, and severe.  I think it true, and sadly true, that
     a man with a vice which he is able to satisfy easily and habitually,
     even as another satisfies a virtue, may give up the wider actions of
     the world and the possibilities of his life for the pleasure which
     his one vice gives him, and neither miss nor desire those greater
     chances of virtue or ambition which he has lost.  The simplicity of
     a vice may be as real as the simplicity of a virtue."

     Ah, David, David, I know not what to think of those strange words;
     but old Soolsby seemed well to understand thee, and he called thee
     "a first-best gentleman."  Is my story long?  Well, it was so
     strange, and it fixed itself upon my mind so deeply, and thy
     writings at the hut have been so much in my hands and in my mind,
     that I have put it all down here.  When I asked Soolsby how it came
     he had been rumoured dead, he said that he himself had been the
     cause of it; but for what purpose he would not say, save that he was
     going a long voyage, and had made up his mind to return no more.  "I
     had a friend," he said, "and I was set to go and see that friend
     again.  .  .  .  But the years go on, and friends have an end.  Life
     spills faster than the years," he said.  And he would say no more,
     but would walk with me even to my father's door.  "May the Blessed
     Virgin and all the Saints be with you," he said at parting, "if you
     will have a blessing from them.  And tell him who is beyond and away
     in Egypt that old Soolsby's busy making a chair for him to sit in
     when the scarlet cloth is spread, and the East and West come to
     salaam before him.  Tell him the old man says his fluting will be
     heard."

     And now, David, I have told thee all, nearly.  Remains to say that
     thy one letter did our hearts good.  My father reads it over and
     over, and shakes his head sadly, for, truth is, he has a fear that
     the world may lay its hand upon thee.  One thing I do observe, his
     heart is hard set against Lord Eglington.  In degree it has ever
     been so; but now it is like a constant frown upon his forehead.  I
     see him at his window looking out towards the Cloistered House; and
     if our neighbour comes forth, perhaps upon his hunter, or now in his
     cart, or again with his dogs, he draws his hat down upon his eyes
     and whispers to himself.  I think he is ever setting thee off
     against Lord Eglington; and that is foolish, for Eglington is but a
     man of the earth earthy.  His is the soul of the adventurer.

     Now what more to be set down?  I must ask thee how is thy friend Ebn
     Ezra Bey?  I am glad thee did find all he said was true, and that in
     Damascus thee was able to set a mark by my uncle's grave.  But that
     the Prince Pasha of Egypt has set up a claim against my uncle's
     property is evil news; though, thanks be to God, as my father says,
     we have enough to keep us fed and clothed and housed.  But do thee
     keep enough of thy inheritance to bring thee safe home again to
     those who love thee.  England is ever grey, Davy, but without thee
     it is grizzled--all one "Quaker drab," as says the Philistine.  But
     it is a comely and a good land, and here we wait for thee.

     In love and remembrance.

     I am thy mother's sister, thy most loving friend.

                                             FAITH.


David received this letter as he was mounting a huge white Syrian donkey
to ride to the Mokattam Hills, which rise sharply behind Cairo, burning
and lonely and large.  The cities of the dead Khalifas and Mamelukes
separated them from the living city where the fellah toiled, and Arab,
Bedouin, Copt strove together to intercept the fruits of his toiling, as
it passed in the form of taxes to the Palace of the Prince Pasha; while
in the dark corners crouched, waiting, the cormorant usurers--Greeks,
Armenians, and Syrians, a hideous salvage corps, who saved the house of
a man that they might at last walk off with his shirt and the cloth under
which he was carried to his grave.  In a thousand narrow streets and
lanes, in the warm glow of the bazaars, in earth-damp huts, by blistering
quays, on the myriad ghiassas on the river, from long before sunrise till
the sunset-gun boomed from the citadel rising beside the great mosque
whose pinnacles seem to touch the blue, the slaves of the city of Prince
Kaid ground out their lives like corn between the millstones.

David had been long enough in Egypt to know what sort of toiling it was.
A man's labour was not his own.  The fellah gave labour and taxes and
backsheesh and life to the State, and the long line of tyrants above him,
under the sting of the kourbash; the high officials gave backsheesh to
the Prince Pasha, or to his Mouffetish, or to his Chief Eunuch, or to his
barber, or to some slave who had his ear.

But all the time the bright, unclouded sun looked down on a smiling land,
and in Cairo streets the din of the hammers, the voices of the boys
driving heavily laden donkeys, the call of the camel-drivers leading
their caravans into the great squares, the clang of the brasses of the
sherbet-sellers, the song of the vendor of sweetmeats, the drone of the
merchant praising his wares, went on amid scenes of wealth and luxury,
and the city glowed with colour and gleamed with light.  Dark faces
grinned over the steaming pot at the door of the cafes, idlers on the
benches smoked hasheesh, female street-dancers bared their faces
shamelessly to the men, and indolent musicians beat on their tiny drums,
and sang the song of "O Seyyid," or of "Antar"; and the reciter gave his
sing-song tale from a bench above his fellows.  Here a devout Muslim,
indifferent to the presence of strangers, turned his face to the East,
touched his forehead to the ground, and said his prayers.  There, hung to
a tree by a deserted mosque near by, the body of one who was with them
all an hour before, and who had paid the penalty for some real or
imaginary crime; while his fellows blessed Allah that the storm had
passed them by.  Guilt or innocence did not weigh with them; and the dead
criminal, if such he were, who had drunk his glass of water and prayed to
Allah, was, in their sight, only fortunate and not disgraced, and had
"gone to the bosom of Allah."  Now the Muezzin from a minaret called to
prayer, and the fellah in his cotton shirt and yelek heard, laid his load
aside, and yielded himself to his one dear illusion, which would enable
him to meet with apathy his end--it might be to-morrow!--and go forth to
that plenteous heaven where wives without number awaited him, where
fields would yield harvests without labour, where rich food in gold
dishes would be ever at his hand.  This was his faith.

David had now been in the country six months, rapidly perfecting his
knowledge of Arabic, speaking it always to his servant Mahommed Hassan,
whom he had picked from the streets.  Ebn Ezra Bey had gone upon his own
business to Fazougli, the tropical Siberia of Egypt, to liberate, by
order of Prince Kaid,--and at a high price--a relative banished there.
David had not yet been fortunate with his own business--the settlement
of his Uncle Benn's estate--though the last stages of negotiation with
the Prince Pasha seemed to have been reached.  When he had brought the
influence of the British Consulate to bear, promises were made, doors
were opened wide, and Pasha and Bey offered him coffee and talked to him
sympathetically.  They had respect for him more than for most Franks,
because the Prince Pasha had honoured him with especial favour.  Perhaps
because David wore his hat always and the long coat with high collar like
a Turk, or because Prince Kaid was an acute judge of human nature, and
also because honesty was a thing he greatly desired--in others--and never
found near his own person; however it was, he had set David high in his
esteem at once.  This esteem gave greater certainty that any backsheesh
coming from the estate of Benn Claridge would not be sifted through many
hands on its way to himself.  Of Benn Claridge Prince Kaid had scarcely
even heard until he died; and, indeed, it was only within the past few
years that the Quaker merchant had extended his business to Egypt and had
made his headquarters at Assiout, up the river.

David's donkey now picked its way carefully through the narrow streets of
the Moosky.  Arabs and fellaheen squatting at street corners looked at
him with furtive interest.  A foreigner of this character they had never
before seen, with coat buttoned up like an Egyptian official in the
presence of his superior, and this wide, droll hat on his head.  David
knew that he ran risks, that his confidence invited the occasional
madness of a fanatical mind, which makes murder of the infidel a passport
to heaven; but as a man he took his chances, and as a Christian he
believed he would suffer no mortal hurt till his appointed time.  He was
more Oriental, more fatalist, than he knew.  He had also early in his
life learned that an honest smile begets confidence; and his face, grave
and even a little austere in outline, was usually lighted by a smile.

From the Mokattam Hills, where he read Faith's letter again, his back
against one of the forts which Napoleon had built in his Egyptian days,
he scanned the distance.  At his feet lay the great mosque, and the
citadel, whose guns controlled the city, could pour into it a lava stream
of shot and shell.  The Nile wound its way through the green plains,
stretching as far to the north as eye could see between the opal and
mauve and gold of the Libyan Hills.  Far over in the western vista a long
line of trees, twining through an oasis flanking the city, led out to a
point where the desert abruptly raised its hills of yellow sand.  Here,
enormous, lonely, and cynical, the pyramids which Cheops had built, the
stone sphinx of Ghizeh, kept faith with the desert in the glow of
rainless land-reminders ever that the East, the mother of knowledge, will
by knowledge prevail; that:

                   "The thousand years of thy insolence
                    The thousand years of thy faith,
                    Will be paid in fiery recompense,
                    And a thousand years of bitter death."


"The sword--for ever the sword," David said to himself, as he looked:
"Rameses and David and Mahomet and Constantine, and how many conquests
have been made in the name of God!  But after other conquests there have
been peace and order and law.  Here in Egypt it is ever the sword, the
survival of the strongest."

As he made his way down the hillside again he fell to thinking upon all
Faith had written.  The return of the drunken chair-maker made a deep
impression on him--almost as deep as the waking dreams he had had of his
uncle calling him.

"Soolsby and me--what is there between Soolsby and me?" he asked himself
now as he made his way past the tombs of the Mamelukes.  "He and I are as
far apart as the poles, and yet it comes to me now, with a strange
conviction, that somehow my life will be linked with that of the drunken
Romish chair-maker.  To what end?"  Then he fell to thinking of his Uncle
Benn.  The East was calling him.  "Something works within me to hold me
here, a work to do."

From the ramparts of the citadel he watched the sun go down, bathing the
pyramids in a purple and golden light, throwing a glamour over all the
western plain, and making heavenly the far hills with a plaintive colour,
which spoke of peace and rest, but not of hope.  As he stood watching, he
was conscious of people approaching.  Voices mingled, there was light
laughter, little bursts of admiration, then lower tones, and then he was
roused by a voice calling.  He turned round.  A group of people were
moving towards the exit from the ramparts, and near himself stood a man
waving an adieu.

"Well, give my love to the girls," said the man cheerily.  Merry faces
looked back and nodded, and in a moment they were gone.  The man turned
round, and looked at David, then he jerked his head in a friendly sort of
way and motioned towards the sunset.

"Good enough, eh?"

"Surely, for me," answered David.  On the instant he liked the red,
wholesome face, and the keen, round, blue eyes, the rather opulent
figure, the shrewd, whimsical smile, all aglow now with beaming
sentimentality, which had from its softest corner called out:
"Well, give my love to the girls."

"Quaker, or I never saw Germantown and Philadelphy," he continued, with a
friendly manner quite without offence.  "I put my money on Quakers every
time."

"But not from Germantown or Philadelphia," answered David, declining a
cigar which his new acquaintance offered.

"Bet you, I know that all right.  But I never saw Quakers anywhere else,
and I meant the tribe and not the tent.  English, I bet?  Of course, or
you wouldn't be talking the English language--though I've heard they talk
it better in Boston than they do in England, and in Chicago they're
making new English every day and improving on the patent.  If Chicago
can't have the newest thing, she won't have anything.  'High hopes that
burn like stars sublime,' has Chicago.  She won't let Shakespeare or
Milton be standards much longer.  She won't have it--simply won't have
England swaggering over the English language.  Oh, she's dizzy, is
Chicago--simply dizzy.  I was born there.  Parents, one Philadelphy, one
New York, one Pawtucket--the Pawtucket one was the step-mother.  Father
liked his wives from the original States; but I was born in Chicago.  My
name is Lacey--Thomas Tilman Lacey of Chicago."

"I thank thee," said David.

"And you, sir?"

"David Claridge."

"Of--?"

"Of Hamley."

"Mr. Claridge of Hamley.  Mr. Claridge, I am glad to meet you."  They
shook hands.  "Been here long, Mr. Claridge?"

"A few months only."

"Queer place--gilt-edged dust-bin; get anything you like here, from a
fresh gutter-snipe to old Haroun-al-Raschid.  It's the biggest jack-pot
on earth.  Barnum's the man for this place--P. T. Barnum.  Golly, how the
whole thing glitters and stews!  Out of Shoobra his High Jinks Pasha
kennels with his lions and lives with his cellars of gold, as if he was
going to take them with him where he's going--and he's going fast.  Here
--down here, the people, the real people, sweat and drudge between a cake
of dourha, an onion, and a balass of water at one end of the day, and a
hemp collar and their feet off the ground at the other."

"You have seen much of Egypt?" asked David, feeling a strange confidence
in the garrulous man, whose frankness was united to shrewdness and a
quick, observant eye.

"How much of Egypt I've seen, the Egypt where more men get lost, strayed,
and stolen than die in their beds every day, the Egypt where a eunuch is
more powerful than a minister, where an official will toss away a life as
I'd toss this cigar down there where the last Mameluke captain made his
great jump, where women--Lord A'mighty! where women are divorced by one
evil husband, by the dozen, for nothing they ever did or left undone,
and yet 'd be cut to pieces by their own fathers if they learned that
'To step aside is human--'  Mr. Claridge, of that Egypt I don't know much
more'n would entitle me to say, How d'ye do.  But it's enough for me.
You've seen something--eh?"

"A little.  It is not civilised life here.  Yet--yet a few strong
patriotic men--"

Lacey looked quizzically at David.

"Say," he said, "I thought that about Mexico once.  I said Manana--
this Manana is the curse of Mexico.  It's always to-morrow--to-morrow
--to-morrow.  Let's teach 'em to do things to-day.  Let's show 'em what
business means.  Two million dollars went into that experiment, but
Manana won.  We had good hands, but it had the joker.  After five years
I left, with a bald head at twenty-nine, and a little book of noble
thoughts--Tips for the Tired, or Things you can say To-day on what you
can do to-morrow.  I lost my hair worrying, but I learned to be patient.
The Dagos wanted to live in their own way, and they did.  It's one thing
to be a missionary and say the little word in season; it's another to
run your soft red head against a hard stone wall.  I went to Mexico a
conquistador, I left it a child of time, who had learned to smile; and
I left some millions behind me, too.  I said to an old Padre down there
that I knew--we used to meet in the Cafe Manrique and drink chocolate--
I said to him, 'Padre, the Lord's Prayer is a mistake down here.'
'Si, senor,' he said, and smiled his far-away smile at me.  'Yes,' said
I, 'for you say in the Lord's Prayer, "Give us this day our daily
bread."'  'Si, senor,' he says, 'but we do not expect it till to-morrow!'
The Padre knew from the start, but I learned at great expense, and went
out of business--closed up shop for ever, with a bald head and my Tips
for the Tired.  Well, I've had more out of it all, I guess, than if I'd
trebled the millions and wiped Manana off the Mexican coat of arms."

"You think it would be like that here?" David asked abstractedly.

Lacey whistled.  "There the Government was all right and the people all
wrong.  Here the people are all right and the Government all wrong.  Say,
it makes my eyes water sometimes to see the fellah slogging away.  He's a
Jim-dandy--works all day and half the night, and if the tax-gatherer
isn't at the door, wakes up laughing.  I saw one"--his light blue eyes
took on a sudden hardness--"laughing on the other side of his mouth one
morning.  They were 'kourbashing' his feet; I landed on them as the soles
came away.  I hit out."  His face became grave, he turned the cigar round
in his mouth.  "It made me feel better, but I had a close call.  Lucky
for me that in Mexico I got into the habit of carrying a pop-gun.  It
saved me then.  But it isn't any use going on these special missions.
We Americans think a lot of ourselves.  We want every land to do as
we do; and we want to make 'em do it.  But a strong man here at the
head, with a sword in his hand, peace in his heart, who'd be just and
poor--how can you make officials honest when you take all you can get
yourself--!  But, no, I guess it's no good.  This is a rotten cotton
show."

Lacey had talked so much, not because he was garrulous only, but because
the inquiry in David's eyes was an encouragement to talk.  Whatever his
misfortunes in Mexico had been, his forty years sat lightly on him, and
his expansive temperament, his childlike sentimentality, gave him an
appearance of beaming, sophisticated youth.  David was slowly
apprehending these things as he talked--subconsciously, as it were;
for he was seeing pictures of the things he himself had observed, through
the lens of another mind, as primitive in some regards as his own, but
influenced by different experiences.

"Say, you're the best listener I ever saw," added Lacey, with a laugh.

David held out his hand.  "Thee sees things clearly," he answered.

Lacey grasped his hand.

At that moment an orderly advanced towards them.  "He's after us--one of
the Palace cavalry," said Lacey.

"Effendi--Claridge Effendi!  May his grave be not made till the karadh-
gatherers return," said the orderly to David.

"My name is Claridge," answered David.

"To the hotel, effendi, first, then to the Mokattam Hills after thee,
then here--from the Effendina, on whom be God's peace, this letter for
thee."

David took the letter.  "I thank thee, friend," he said.

As he read it, Lacey said to the orderly in Arabic "How didst thou know
he was here?"

The orderly grinned wickedly.

"Always it is known what place the effendi honours.  It is not dark where
he uncovers his face."

Lacey gave a low whistle.

"Say, you've got a pull in this show," he said, as David folded up the
letter and put it in his pocket.

"In Egypt, if the master smiles on you, the servant puts his nose in the
dust."

"The Prince Pasha bids me to dinner at the Palace to-night.  I have no
clothes for such affairs.  Yet--" His mind was asking itself if this was
a door opening, which he had no right to shut with his own hand.  There
was no reason why he should not go; therefore there might be a reason why
he should go.  It might be, it no doubt was, in the way of facilitating
his business.  He dismissed the orderly with an affirmative and
ceremonial message to Prince Kaid--and a piece of gold.

"You've learned the custom of the place," said Lacey, as he saw the gold
piece glitter in the brown palm of the orderly.

"I suppose the man's only pay is in such service," rejoined David.
"It is a land of backsheesh.  The fault is not with the people; it is
with the rulers.  I am not sorry to share my goods with the poor."

"You'll have a big going concern here in no time," observed Lacey.  "Now,
if I had those millions I left in Mexico--"  Suddenly he stopped.  "Is it
you that's trying to settle up an estate here--at Assiout--belonged to an
uncle?"

David inclined his head.

"They say that you and Prince Kaid are doing the thing yourselves, and
that the pashas and judges and all the high-mogul sharks of the Medjidie
think that the end of the world has come.  Is that so?"

"It is so, if not completely so.  There are the poor men and humble--the
pashas and judges and the others of the Medjidie, as thee said, are not
poor.  But such as the orderly yonder--"  He paused meditatively.

Lacey looked at David with profound respect.  "You make the poorest
your partners, your friends.  I see, I see.  Jerusalem, that's masterly!
I admire you.  It's a new way in this country."  Then, after a moment:
"It'll do--by golly, it'll do!  Not a bit more costly, and you do some
good with it.  Yes--it--will--do."

"I have given no man money save in charity and for proper service done
openly," said David, a little severely.

"Say--of course.  And that's just what isn't done here.  Everything goes
to him who hath, and from him who hath not is taken away even that which
he hath.  One does the work and another gets paid--that's the way here.
But you, Mr. Claridge, you clinch with the strong man at the top, and,
down below, you've got as your partners the poor man, whose name is
Legion.  If you get a fall out of the man at the top, you're solid with
the Legion.  And if the man at the top gets up again and salaams and
strokes your hand, and says, 'Be my brother,' then it's a full Nile, and
the fig-tree putteth forth its tender branches, and the date-palm
flourisheth, and at the village pond the thanksgiving turkey gobbles and
is glad.  'Selah'!"

The sunset gun boomed out from the citadel.  David turned to go, and
Lacey added:

"I'm waiting for a pasha who's taking toll of the officers inside there
--Achmet Pasha.  They call him the Ropemaker, because so many pass
through his hands to the Nile.  The Old Muslin I call him, because he's
so diaphanous.  Thinks nobody can see through him, and there's nobody
that can't.  If you stay long in Egypt, you'll find that Achmet is the
worst, and Nahoum the Armenian the deepest, pasha in all this sickening
land.  Achmet is cruel as a tiger to any one that stands in his way;
Nahoum, the whale, only opens out to swallow now and then; but when
Nahoum does open out, down goes Jonah, and never comes up again.  He's a
deep one, and a great artist is Nahoum.  I'll bet a dollar you'll see
them both to-night at the Palace--if Kaid doesn't throw them to the lions
for their dinner before yours is served.  Here one shark is swallowed by
another bigger, till at last the only and original sea-serpent swallows
'em all."

As David wound his way down the hills, Lacey waved a hand after him.

"Well, give my love to the girls," he said.




CHAPTER VI

"HAST THOU NEVER KILLED A MAN?"

"Claridge Effendi!"

As David moved forward, his mind was embarrassed by many impressions.
He was not confused, but the glitter and splendour, the Oriental
gorgeousness of the picture into which he stepped, excited his eye,
roused some new sense in him.  He was a curious figure in those
surroundings.  The consuls and agents of all the nations save one were
in brilliant uniform, and pashas, generals, and great officials were
splendid in gold braid and lace, and wore flashing Orders on their
breasts.  David had been asked for half-past eight o'clock, and he was
there on the instant; yet here was every one assembled, the Prince Pasha
included.  As he walked up the room he suddenly realised this fact, and,
for a moment, he thought he had made a mistake; but again he remembered
distinctly that the letter said half-past eight, and he wondered now if
this had been arranged by the Prince--for what purpose?  To afford
amusement to the assembled company?  He drew himself up with dignity,
his face became graver.  He had come in a Quaker suit of black
broadcloth, with grey steel buttons, and a plain white stock; and he wore
his broad-brimmed hat--to the consternation of the British Consul-General
and the Europeans present, to the amazement of the Turkish and native
officials, who eyed him keenly.  They themselves wore red tarbooshes, as
did the Prince; yet all of them knew that the European custom of showing
respect was by doffing the hat.  The Prince Pasha had settled that with
David, however, at their first meeting, when David had kept on his hat
and offered Kaid his hand.

Now, with amusement in his eyes, Prince Kaid watched David coming up the
great hall.  What his object was in summoning David for an hour when all
the court and all the official Europeans should be already present,
remained to be seen.  As David entered, Kaid was busy receiving salaams,
and returning greeting, but with an eye to the singularly boyish yet
gallant figure approaching.  By the time David had reached the group, the
Prince Pasha was ready to receive him.

"Friend, I am glad to welcome thee," said the Effendina, sly humour
lurking at the corner of his eye.  Conscious of the amazement of all
present, he held out his hand to David.

"May thy coming be as the morning dew, friend," he added, taking David's
willing hand.

"And thy feet, Kaid, wall in goodly paths, by the grace of God the
compassionate and merciful."

As a wind, unfelt, stirs the leaves of a forest, making it rustle
delicately, a whisper swept through the room.  Official Egypt was
dumfounded.  Many had heard of David, a few had seen him, and now all
eyed with inquisitive interest one who defied so many of the customs of
his countrymen; who kept on his hat; who used a Mahommedan salutation
like a true believer; whom the Effendina honoured--and presently honoured
in an unusual degree by seating him at table opposite himself, where his
Chief Chamberlain was used to sit.

During dinner Kaid addressed his conversation again and again to David,
asking questions put to disconcert the consuls and other official folk
present, confident in the naive reply which would be returned.  For there
was a keen truthfulness in the young man's words which, however suave and
carefully balanced, however gravely simple and tactful, left no doubt as
to their meaning.  There was nothing in them which could be challenged,
could be construed into active criticism of men or things; and yet much
he said was horrifying.  It made Achmet Pasha sit up aghast, and Nahoum
Pasha, the astute Armenian, for a long time past the confidant and
favourite of the Prince Pasha, laugh in his throat; for, if there was
a man in Egypt who enjoyed the thrust of a word or the bite of a phrase,
it was Nahoum.  Christian though he was, he was, nevertheless, Oriental
to his farthermost corner, and had the culture of a French savant.  He
had also the primitive view of life, and the morals of a race who, in the
clash of East and West, set against Western character and directness, and
loyalty to the terms of a bargain, the demoralised cunning of the desert
folk; the circuitous tactics of those who believed that no man spoke the
truth directly, that it must ever be found beneath devious and misleading
words, to be tracked like a panther, as an Antipodean bushman once said,
"through the sinuosities of the underbrush."  Nahoum Pasha had also a
rich sense of grim humour.  Perhaps that was why he had lived so near the
person of the Prince, had held office so long.  There were no Grand
Viziers in Egypt; but he was as much like one as possible, and he had one
uncommon virtue, he was greatly generous.  If he took with his right hand
he gave with his left; and Mahommedan as well as Copt and Armenian, and
beggars of every race and creed, hung about his doors each morning to
receive the food and alms he gave freely.

After one of David's answers to Kaid, which had had the effect of causing
his Highness to turn a sharp corner of conversation by addressing himself
to the French consul, Nahoum said suavely:

"And so, monsieur, you think that we hold life lightly in the East--that
it is a characteristic of civilisation to make life more sacred, to
cherish it more fondly?"

He was sitting beside David, and though he asked the question casually,
and with apparent intention only of keeping talk going, there was a
lurking inquisition in his eye.  He had seen enough to-night to make him
sure that Kaid had once more got the idea of making a European his
confidant and adviser; to introduce to his court one of those mad
Englishmen who cared nothing for gold--only for power; who loved
administration for the sake of administration and the foolish joy of
labour.  He was now set to see what sort of match this intellect could
play, when faced by the inherent contradictions present in all truths or
the solutions of all problems.

"It is one of the characteristics of that which lies behind civilisation,
as thee and me have been taught," answered David.

Nahoum was quick in strategy, but he was unprepared for David's knowledge
that he was an Armenian Christian, and he had looked for another answer.

But he kept his head and rose to the occasion.  "Ah, it is high, it is
noble, to save life--it is so easy to destroy it," he answered.  "I saw
his Highness put his life in danger once to save a dog from drowning.  To
cherish the lives of others, and to be careless of our own; to give that
of great value as though it were of no worth--is it not the Great
Lesson?"  He said it with such an air of sincerity, with such
dissimulation, that, for the moment, David was deceived.  There was,
however, on the face of the listening Kaid a curious, cynical smile.
He had heard all, and he knew the sardonic meaning behind Nahoum's words.

Fat High Pasha, the Chief Chamberlain, the corrupt and corruptible,
intervened.  "It is not so hard to be careless when care would be
useless," he said, with a chuckle.  "When the khamsin blows the dust-
storms upon the caravan, the camel-driver hath no care for his camels.
'Malaish!' he says, and buries his face in his yelek."

"Life is beautiful and so difficult--to save," observed Nahoum, in a tone
meant to tempt David on one hand and to reach the ears of the notorious
Achmet Pasha, whose extortions, cruelties, and taxations had built his
master's palaces, bribed his harem, given him money to pay the interest
on his European loans, and made himself the richest man in Egypt, whose
spies were everywhere, whose shadow was across every man's path.  Kaid
might slay, might toss a pasha or a slave into the Nile now and then,
might invite a Bey to visit him, and stroke his beard and call him
brother and put diamond-dust in the coffee he drank, so that he died
before two suns came and went again, "of inflammation and a natural
death"; but he, Achmet Pasha, was the dark Inquisitor who tortured every
day, for whose death all men prayed, and whom some would have slain, but
that another worse than himself might succeed him.

At Nahoum's words the dusky brown of Achmet's face turned as black as the
sudden dilation of the pupil of an eye deepens its hue, and he said with
a guttural accent:

"Every man hath a time to die."

"But not his own time," answered Nahoum maliciously.

"It would appear that in Egypt he hath not always the choice of the
fashion or the time," remarked David calmly.  He had read the malice
behind their words, and there had flashed into his own mind tales told
him, with every circumstance of accuracy, of deaths within and without
the Palace.  Also he was now aware that Nahoum had mocked him.  He was
concerned to make it clear that he was not wholly beguiled.

"Is there, then, for a man choice of fashion or time in England,
effendi?" asked Nahoum, with assumed innocence.

"In England it is a matter between the Giver and Taker of life and
himself--save where murder does its work," said David.

"And here it is between man and man--is it that you would say?" asked
Nahoum.

"There seem wider privileges here," answered David drily.

"Accidents will happen, privileges or no," rejoined Nahoum, with lowering
eyelids.

The Prince intervened.  "Thy own faith forbids the sword, forbids war,
or--punishment."

"The Prophet I follow was called the Prince of Peace, friend," answered
David, bowing gravely across the table.

"Hast thou never killed a man?" asked Kaid, with interest in his eyes.
He asked the question as a man might ask another if he had never visited
Paris.

"Never, by the goodness of God, never," answered David.

"Neither in punishment nor in battle?"

"I am neither judge nor soldier, friend."

"Inshallah, thou hast yet far to go!  Thou art young yet.  Who can tell?"

"I have never so far to go as that, friend," said David, in a voice that
rang a little.

"To-morrow is no man's gift."

David was about to answer, but chancing to raise his eyes above the
Prince Pasha's head, his glance was arrested and startled by seeing a
face--the face of a woman-looking out of a panel in a mooshrabieh screen
in a gallery above.  He would not have dwelt upon the incident, he would
have set it down to the curiosity of a woman of the harem, but that the
face looking out was that of an English girl, and peering over her
shoulder was the dark, handsome face of an Egyptian or a Turk.

Self-control was the habit of his life, the training of his faith,
and, as a rule, his face gave little evidence of inner excitement.
Demonstration was discouraged, if not forbidden, among the Quakers, and
if, to others, it gave a cold and austere manner, in David it tempered to
a warm stillness the powerful impulses in him, the rivers of feeling
which sometimes roared through his veins.

Only Nahoum Pasha had noticed his arrested look, so motionless did he
sit; and now, without replying, he bowed gravely and deferentially to
Kaid, who rose from the table.  He followed with the rest.  Presently the
Prince sent Higli Pasha to ask his nearer presence.

The Prince made a motion of his hand, and the circle withdrew.  He waved
David to a seat.

"To-morrow thy business shall be settled," said the Prince suavely, "and
on such terms as will not startle.  Death-tribute is no new thing in the
East.  It is fortunate for thee that the tribute is from thy hand to my
hand, and not through many others to mine."

"I am conscious I have been treated with favour, friend," said David.
"I would that I might show thee kindness.  Though how may a man of no
account make return to a great Prince?"

"By the beard of my father, it is easily done, if thy kindness is a real
thing, and not that which makes me poorer the more I have of it--as
though one should be given a herd of horses which must not be sold but
still must be fed."

"I have given thee truth.  Is not truth cheaper than falsehood?"

"It is the most expensive thing in Egypt; so that I despair of buying
thee.  Yet I would buy thee to remain here--here at my court; here by my
hand which will give thee the labour thou lovest, and will defend thee if
defence be needed.  Thou hast not greed, thou hast no thirst for honour,
yet thou hast wisdom beyond thy years.  Kaid has never besought men, but
he beseeches thee.  Once there was in Egypt, Joseph, a wise youth, who
served a Pharaoh, and was his chief counsellor, and it was well with the
land.  Thy name is a good name; well-being may follow thee.  The ages
have gone, and the rest of the world has changed, but Egypt is the same
Egypt, the Nile rises and falls, and the old lean years and fat years
come and go.  Though I am in truth a Turk, and those who serve and rob me
here are Turks, yet the fellah is the same as he was five thousand years
ago.  What Joseph the Israelite did, thou canst do; for I am no more
unjust than was that Rameses whom Joseph served.  Wilt thou stay with
me?"

David looked at Kaid as though he would read in his face the reply that
he must make, but he did not see Kaid; he saw, rather, the face of one he
had loved more than Jonathan had been loved by the young shepherd-prince
of Israel.  In his ears he heard the voice that had called him in his
sleep-the voice of Benn Claridge; and, at the same instant, there flashed
into his mind a picture of himself fighting outside the tavern beyond
Hamley and bidding farewell to the girl at the crossroads.

"Friend, I cannot answer thee now," he said, in a troubled voice.

Kaid rose.  "I will give thee an hour to think upon it.  Come with me."
He stepped forward.  "To-morrow I will answer thee, Kaid."

"To-morrow there is work for thee to do.  Come."  David followed him.

The eyes that followed the Prince and the Quaker were not friendly.  What
Kaid had long foreshadowed seemed at hand: the coming of a European
counsellor and confidant.  They realised that in the man who had just
left the room with Kaid there were characteristics unlike those they had
ever met before in Europeans.

"A madman," whispered High Pasha to Achmet the Ropemaker.

"Then his will be the fate of the swine of Gadarene," said Nahoum Pasha,
who had heard.

"At least one need not argue with a madman."  The face of Achmet the
Ropemaker was not more pleasant than his dark words.

"It is not the madman with whom you have to deal, but his keeper,"
rejoined Nahoum.

Nahoum's face was heavier than usual.  Going to weight, he was still
muscular and well groomed.  His light brown beard and hair and blue eyes
gave him a look almost Saxon, and bland power spoke in his face and in
every gesture.

He was seldom without the string of beads so many Orientals love to
carry, and, Armenian Christian as he was, the act seemed almost
religious.  It was to him, however, like a ground-wire in telegraphy--
it carried off the nervous force tingling in him and driving him to
impulsive action, while his reputation called for a constant outward
urbanity, a philosophical apathy.  He had had his great fight for place
and power, alien as he was in religion, though he had lived in Egypt
since a child.  Bar to progress as his religion had been at first, it had
been an advantage afterwards; for, through it, he could exclude himself
from complications with the Wakfs, the religious court of the Muslim
creed, which had lands to administer, and controlled the laws of marriage
and inheritance.  He could shrug his shoulders and play with his beads,
and urbanely explain his own helplessness and ineligibility when his
influence was summoned, or it was sought to entangle him in warring
interests.  Oriental through and through, the basis of his creed was
similar to that of a Muslim: Mahomet was a prophet and Christ was a
prophet.  It was a case of rival prophets--all else was obscured into a
legend, and he saw the strife of race in the difference of creed.  For
the rest, he flourished the salutations and language of the Arab as
though they were his own, and he spoke Arabic as perfectly as he did
French and English.

He was the second son of his father.  The first son, who was but a year
older, and was as dark as he was fair, had inherited--had seized--all his
father's wealth.  He had lived abroad for some years in France and
England.  In the latter place he had been one of the Turkish Embassy,
and, having none of the outward characteristics of the Turk, and being
in appearance more of a Spaniard than an Oriental, he had, by his gifts,
his address and personal appearance, won the good-will of the Duchess of
Middlesex, and had had that success all too flattering to the soul of a
libertine.  It had, however, been the means of his premature retirement
from England, for his chief at the Embassy had a preference for an
Oriental entourage.  He was called Foorgat Bey.

Sitting at table, Nahoum alone of all present had caught David's arrested
look, and, glancing up, had seen the girl's face at the panel of
mooshrabieh, and had seen also over her shoulder the face of his brother,
Foorgat Bey.  He had been even more astonished than David, and far more
disturbed.  He knew his brother's abilities; he knew his insinuating
address--had he not influenced their father to give him wealth while he
was yet alive?  He was aware also that his brother had visited the Palace
often of late.  It would seem as though the Prince Pasha was ready to
make him, as well as David, a favourite.  But the face of the girl--it
was an English face!  Familiar with the Palace, and bribing when it was
necessary to bribe, Foorgat Bey had evidently brought her to see the
function, there where all women were forbidden.  He could little imagine
Foorgat doing this from mere courtesy; he could not imagine any woman,
save one wholly sophisticated, or one entirely innocent, trusting herself
with him--and in such a place.  The girl's face, though not that of one
in her teens, had seemed to him a very flower of innocence.

But, as he stood telling his beads, abstractedly listening to the scandal
talked by Achmet and Higli, he was not thinking of his brother, but of
the two who had just left the chamber.  He was speculating as to which
room they were likely to enter.  They had not gone by the door convenient
to passage to Kaid's own apartments.  He would give much to hear the
conversation between Kaid and the stranger; he was all too conscious of
its purport.  As he stood thinking, Kaid returned.  After looking round
the room for a moment, the Prince came slowly over to Nahoum, and,
stretching out a hand, stroked his beard.

"Oh, brother of all the wise, may thy sun never pass its noon!" said
Kaid, in a low, friendly voice.

Despite his will, a shudder passed through Nahoum Pasha's frame.
How often in Egypt this gesture and such words were the prelude to
assassination, from which there was no escape save by death itself.  Into
Nahoum's mind there flashed the words of an Arab teacher, "There is no
refuge from God but God Himself," and he found himself blindly wondering,
even as he felt Kaid's hand upon his beard and listened to the honeyed
words, what manner of death was now preparing for him, and what death of
his own contriving should intervene.  Escape, he knew, there was none, if
his death was determined on; for spies were everywhere, and slaves in the
pay of Kaid were everywhere, and such as were not could be bought or
compelled, even if he took refuge in the house of a foreign consul.  The
lean, invisible, ghastly arm of death could find him, if Kaid willed,
though he delved in the bowels of the Cairene earth, or climbed to an
eagle's eyrie in the Libyan Hills.  Whether it was diamond-dust or
Achmet's thin thong that stopped the breath, it mattered not; it was
sure.  Yet he was not of the breed to tremble under the descending sword,
and he had long accustomed himself to the chance of "sudden demise."  It
had been chief among the chances he had taken when he entered the high
and perilous service of Kaid.  Now, as he felt the secret joy of these
dark spirits surrounding him--Achmet, and High Pasha, who kept saying
beneath his breath in thankfulness that it was not his turn, Praise be to
God!--as he, felt their secret self-gratulations, and their evil joy over
his prospective downfall, he settled himself steadily, made a low
salutation to Kaid, and calmly awaited further speech.  It came soon
enough.

"It is written upon a cucumber leaf--does not the world read it?--that
Nahoum Pasha's form shall cast a longer shadow than the trees; so that
every man in Egypt shall, thinking on him, be as covetous as Ashaah, who
knew but one thing more covetous than himself--the sheep that mistook the
rainbow for a rope of hay, and, jumping for it, broke his neck."

Kaid laughed softly at his own words.

With his eye meeting Kaid's again, after a low salaam, Nahoum made
answer:

"I would that the lance of my fame might sheathe itself in the breasts of
thy enemies, Effendina."

"Thy tongue does that office well," was the reply.  Once more Kaid laid
a gentle hand upon Nahoum's beard.  Then, with a gesture towards the
consuls and Europeans, he said to them in French: "If I might but beg
your presence for yet a little time!"  Then he turned and walked away.
He left by a door leading to his own apartments.

When he had gone, Nahoum swung slowly round and faced the agitated
groups.

"He who sleeps with one eye open sees the sun rise first," he said, with
a sarcastic laugh.  "He who goes blindfold never sees it set."

Then, with a complacent look upon them all, he slowly left the room by
the door out of which David and Kaid had first passed.

Outside the room his face did not change.  His manner had not been
bravado.  It was as natural to him as David's manner was to himself.
Each had trained himself in his own way to the mastery of his will, and
the will in each was stronger than any passion of emotion in them.  So
far at least it had been so.  In David it was the outcome of his faith,
in Nahoum it was the outcome of his philosophy, a simple, fearless
fatalism.

David had been left by Kaid in a small room, little more than an alcove,
next to a larger room richly furnished.  Both rooms belonged to a
spacious suite which lay between the harem and the major portion of the
Palace.  It had its own entrance and exits from the Palace, opening on
the square at the front, at the back opening on its own garden, which
also had its own exits to the public road.  The quarters of the Chief
Eunuch separated the suite from the harem, and Mizraim, the present Chief
Eunuch, was a man of power in the Palace, knew more secrets, was more
courted, and was richer than some of the princes.  Nahoum had an office
in the Palace, also, which gave him the freedom of the place, and brought
him often in touch with the Chief Eunuch.  He had made Mizraim a fast
friend ever since the day he had, by an able device, saved the Chief
Eunuch from determined robbery by the former Prince Pasha, with whom he
had suddenly come out of favour.

When Nahoum left the great salon, he directed his steps towards the
quarters of the Chief Eunuch, thinking of David, with a vague desire for
pursuit and conflict.  He was too much of a philosopher to seek to do
David physical injury--a futile act; for it could do him no good in the
end, could not mend his own fortunes; and, merciless as he could be on
occasion, he had no love of bloodshed.  Besides, the game afoot was not
of his making, and he was ready to await the finish, the more so because
he was sure that to-morrow would bring forth momentous things.  There was
a crisis in the Soudan, there was trouble in the army, there was dark
conspiracy of which he knew the heart, and anything might happen
to-morrow!  He had yet some cards to play, and Achmet and Higli--and
another very high and great--might be delivered over to Kaid's deadly
purposes rather than himself tomorrow.  What he knew Kaid did not know.
He had not meant to act yet; but new facts faced him, and he must make
one struggle for his life.  But as he went towards Mizraim's quarters he
saw no sure escape from the stage of those untoward events, save by the
exit which is for all in some appointed hour.

He was not, however, more perplexed and troubled than David, who, in the
little room where he had been brought and left alone with coffee and
cigarettes, served by a slave from some distant portion of the Palace,
sat facing his future.

David looked round the little room.  Upon the walls hung weapons of every
kind--from a polished dagger of Toledo to a Damascus blade, suits of
chain armour, long-handled, two-edged Arab swords, pistols which had been
used in the Syrian wars of Ibrahim, lances which had been taken from the
Druses at Palmyra, rude battle-axes from the tribes of the Soudan, and
neboots of dom-wood which had done service against Napoleon at Damietta.
The cushions among which he sat had come from Constantinople, the rug at
his feet from Tiflis, the prayer-rug on the wall from Mecca.

All that he saw was as unlike what he had known in past years as though
he had come to Mars or Jupiter.  All that he had heard recalled to him
his first readings in the Old Testament--the story of Nebuchadnezzar, of
Belshazzar, of Ahasuerus--of Ahasuerus!  He suddenly remembered the face
he had seen looking down at the Prince's table from the panel of
mooshrabieh.  That English face--where was it?  Why was it there?  Who
was the man with her?  Whose the dark face peering scornfully over her
shoulder?  The face of an English girl in that place dedicated to sombre
intrigue, to the dark effacement of women, to the darker effacement of
life, as he well knew, all too often!  In looking at this prospect for
good work in the cause of civilisation, he was not deceived, he was not
allured.  He knew into what subterranean ways he must walk, through what
mazes of treachery and falsehood he must find his way; and though he did
not know to the full the corruption which it was his duty to Kaid to turn
to incorruption, he knew enough to give his spirit pause.  What would be
--what could be--the end?  Would he not prove to be as much out of place
as was the face of that English girl?  The English girl!  England rushed
back upon him--the love of those at home; of his father, the only father
he had ever known; of Faith, the only mother or sister he had ever known;
of old John Fairley; the love of the woods and the hills where he had
wandered came upon him.  There was work to do in England, work too little
done--the memory of the great meeting at Heddington flashed upon him.
Could his labour and his skill, if he had any, not be used there?  Ah,
the green fields, the soft grey skies, the quiet vale, the brave, self-
respecting, toiling millions, the beautiful sense of law and order and
goodness!  Could his gifts and labours not be used there?  Could not--

He was suddenly startled by a smothered cry, then a call of distress.
It was the voice of a woman.

He started up.  The voice seemed to come from a room at his right; not
that from which he had entered, but one still beyond this where he was.
He sprang towards the wall and examined it swiftly.  Finding a division
in the tapestry, he ran his fingers quickly and heavily down the crack
between.  It came upon the button of a spring.  He pressed it, the door
yielded, and, throwing it back, he stepped into the room-to see a woman
struggling to resist the embraces and kisses of a man.  The face was that
of the girl who had looked out of the panel in the mooshrabieh screen.
Then it was beautiful in its mirth and animation, now it was pale and
terror-stricken, as with one free hand she fiercely beat the face pressed
to hers.

The girl only had seen David enter.  The man was not conscious of his
presence till he was seized and flung against the wall.  The violence of
the impact brought down at his feet two weapons from the wall above him.
He seized one-a dagger-and sprang to his feet.  Before he could move
forward or raise his arm, however, David struck him a blow in the neck
which flung him upon a square marble pedestal intended for a statue.  In
falling his head struck violently a sharp corner of the pedestal.  He
lurched, rolled over on the floor, and lay still.

The girl gave a choking cry.  David quickly stooped and turned the body
over.  There was a cut where the hair met the temple.  He opened the
waistcoat and thrust his hand inside the shirt.  Then he felt the pulse
of the limp wrist.

For a moment he looked at the face steadily, almost contemplatively it
might have seemed, and then drew both arms close to the body.

Foorgat Bey, the brother of Nahoum Pasha, was dead.

Rising, David turned, as if in a dream, to the girl.  He made a motion of
the hand towards the body.  She understood.  Dismay was in her face, but
the look of horror and desperation was gone.  She seemed not to realise,
as did David, the awful position in which they were placed, the deed
which David had done, the significance of the thing that lay at their
feet.

"Where are thy people?" said David.  "Come, we will go to them."

"I have no people here," she said, in a whisper.

"Who brought thee?"

She made a motion behind her towards the body.  David glanced down.  The
eyes of the dead man were open.  He stooped and closed them gently.  The
collar and tie were disarranged; he straightened them, then turned again
to her.

"I must take thee away," he said calmly.  "But it must be secretly."  He
looked around, perplexed.  "We came secretly.  My maid is outside the
garden--in a carriage.  Oh, come, let us go, let us escape.  They will
kill you--!"  Terror came into her face again.  "Thee, not me, is in
danger--name, goodness, future, all.  .  .  .  Which way did thee come?"

"Here--through many rooms--" She made a gesture to curtains beyond.
"But we first entered through doors with sphinxes on either side,
with a room where was a statue of Mehemet Ali."

It was the room through which David had come with Kaid.  He took her
hand.  "Come quickly.  I know the way.  It is here," he said, pointing to
the panel-door by which he had entered.

Holding her hand still, as though she were a child, he led her quickly
from the room, and shut the panel behind them.  As they passed through,
a hand drew aside the curtains on the other side of the room which they
were leaving.

Presently the face of Nahoum Pasha followed the hand.  A swift glance to
the floor, then he ran forward, stooped down, and laid a hand on his
brother's breast.  The slight wound on the forehead answered his rapid
scrutiny.  He realised the situation as plainly as if it had been written
down for him--he knew his brother well.

Noiselessly he moved forward and touched the spring of the door through
which the two had gone.  It yielded, and he passed through, closed the
door again and stealthily listened, then stole a look into the farther
chamber.  It was empty.  He heard the outer doors close.  For a moment he
listened, then went forward and passed through into the hall.  Softly
turning the handle of the big wooden doors which faced him, he opened
them an inch or so, and listened.  He could hear swiftly retreating
footsteps.  Presently he heard the faint noise of a gate shutting.  He
nodded his head, and was about to close the doors and turn away, when his
quick ear detected footsteps again in the garden.  Some one--the man,
of course--was returning.

"May fire burn his eyes for ever!  He would talk with Kald, then go again
among them all, and so pass out unsuspected and safe.  For who but I--who
but I could say he did it?  And I--what is my proof?  Only the words
which I speak."

A scornful, fateful smile passed over his face.  "'Hast thou never killed
a man?' said Kaid.  'Never,' said he--'by the goodness of God, never!'
The voice of Him of Galilee, the hand of Cain, the craft of Jael.  But
God is with the patient."

He went hastily and noiselessly-his footfall was light for so heavy a
man-through the large room to the farther side from that by which David
and Kaid had first entered.  Drawing behind a clump of palms near a door
opening to a passage leading to Mizraim's quarters, he waited.  He saw
David enter quickly, yet without any air of secrecy, and pass into the
little room where Kaid had left him.

For a long time there was silence.

The reasons were clear in Nahoum's mind why he should not act yet.  A new
factor had changed the equation which had presented itself a short half
hour ago.

A new factor had also entered into the equation which had been presented
to David by Kaid with so flattering an insistence.  He sat in the place
where Kaid had left him, his face drawn and white, his eyes burning, but
with no other "sign of agitation.  He was frozen and still.  His look was
fastened now upon the door by which the Prince Pasha would enter, now
upon the door through which he had passed to the rescue of the English
girl, whom he had seen drive off safely with her maid.  In their swift
passage from the Palace to the carriage, a thing had been done of even
greater moment than the killing of the sensualist in the next room.  In
the journey to the gateway the girl David served had begged him to escape
with her.  This he had almost sharply declined; it would be no escape, he
had said.  She had urged that no one knew.  He had replied that Kaid
would come again for him, and suspicion would be aroused if he were gone.

"Thee has safety," he had said.  "I will go back.  I will say that I
killed him.  I have taken a life, I will pay for it as is the law."

Excited as she was, she had seen the inflexibility of his purpose.  She
had seen the issue also clearly.  He would give himself up, and the whole
story would be the scandal of Europe.

"You have no right to save me only to kill me," she had said desperately.
"You would give your life, but you would destroy that which is more than
life to me.  You did not intend to kill him.  It was no murder, it was
punishment."  Her voice had got harder.  "He would have killed my life
because he was evil.  Will you kill it because you are good?  Will you be
brave, quixotic, but not pitiful?  .  .  .  No, no, no!" she had said,
as his hand was upon the gate, "I will not go unless you promise that you
will hide the truth, if you can."  She had laid her hand upon his
shoulder with an agonised impulse.  "You will hide it for a girl who will
cherish your memory her whole life long.  Ah--God bless you!"

She had felt that she conquered before he spoke as, indeed, he did not
speak, but nodded his head and murmured something indistinctly.  But that
did not matter, for she had won; she had a feeling that all would be
well.  Then he had placed her in her carriage, and she was driven swiftly
away, saying to herself half hysterically: "I am safe, I am safe.  He
will keep his word."

Her safety and his promise were the new factor which changed the equation
for which Kaid would presently ask the satisfaction.  David's life had
suddenly come upon problems for which his whole past was no preparation.
Conscience, which had been his guide in every situation, was now
disarmed, disabled, and routed.  It had come to terms.

In going quickly through the room, they had disarranged a table.  The
girl's cloak had swept over it, and a piece of brie-a-brae had been
thrown upon the floor.  He got up and replaced it with an attentive air.
He rearranged the other pieces on the table mechanically, seeing, feeling
another scene, another inanimate thing which must be for ever and for
ever a picture burning in his memory.  Yet he appeared to be casually
doing a trivial and necessary act.  He did not definitely realise his
actions; but long afterwards he could have drawn an accurate plan of the
table, could have reproduced upon it each article in its exact place as
correctly as though it had been photographed.  There were one or two
spots of dust or dirt on the floor, brought in by his boots from the
garden.  He flicked them aside with his handkerchief.

How still it was!  Or was it his life which had become so still?  It
seemed as if the world must be noiseless, for not a sound of the life in
other parts of the Palace came to him, not an echo or vibration of the
city which stirred beyond the great gateway.  Was it the chilly hand of
death passing over everything, and smothering all the activities?  His
pulses, which, but a few minutes past, were throbbing and pounding like
drums in his ears, seemed now to flow and beat in very quiet.  Was this,
then, the way that murderers felt, that men felt who took human life--so
frozen, so little a part of their surroundings?  Did they move as dead
men among the living, devitalised, vacuous calm?

His life had been suddenly twisted out of recognition.  All that his
habit, his code, his morals, his religion, had imposed upon him had been
overturned in one moment.  To take a human life, even in battle, was
against the code by which he had ever been governed, yet he had taken
life secretly, and was hiding it from the world.

Accident?  But had it been necessary to strike at all?  His presence
alone would have been enough to save the girl from further molestation;
but, he had thrown himself upon the man like a tiger.  Yet, somehow, he
felt no sorrow for that.  He knew that if again and yet again he were
placed in the same position he would do even as he had done--even as he
had done with the man Kimber by the Fox and Goose tavern beyond Hamley.
He knew that the blow he had given then was inevitable, and he had never
felt real repentance.  Thinking of that blow, he saw its sequel in the
blow he had given now.  Thus was that day linked with the present, thus
had a blow struck in punishment of the wrong done the woman at the
crossroads been repeated in the wrong done the girl who had just left
him.

A sound now broke the stillness.  It was a door shutting not far off.
Kaid was coming.  David turned his face towards the room where Foorgat
Bey was lying dead.  He lifted his arms with a sudden passionate gesture.
The blood came rushing through his veins again.  His life, which had
seemed suspended, was set free; and an exaltation of sorrow, of pain, of
action, possessed him.

"I have taken a life, O my God!" he murmured.  "Accept mine in service
for this land.  What I have done in secret, let me atone for in secret,
for this land--for this poor land, for Christ's sake!"

Footsteps were approaching quickly.  With a great effort of the will he
ruled himself to quietness again.  Kaid entered, and stood before him in
silence.  David rose.  He looked Kaid steadily in the eyes.  "Well?"
said Kaid placidly.

"For Egypt's sake I will serve thee," was the reply.  He held out his
hand.  Kaid took it, but said, in smiling comment on the action: "As the
Viceroy's servant there is another way!"

"I will salaam to-morrow, Kaid," answered David.

"It is the only custom of the place I will require of thee, effendi.
Come."

A few moments later they were standing among the consuls and officials in
the salon.

"Where is Nahoum?" asked Kaid, looking round on the agitated throng.

No one answered.  Smiling, Kaid whispered in David's ear.




CHAPTER VII

THE COMPACT

One by one the lights went out in the Palace.  The excited guests were
now knocking at the doors of Cairene notables, bent upon gossip of the
night's events, or were scouring the bazaars for ears into which to pour
the tale of how David was exalted and Nahoum was brought low; how, before
them all, Kaid had commanded Nahoum to appear at the Palace in the
morning at eleven, and the Inglesi, as they had named David, at ten.  But
they declared to all who crowded upon their words that the Inglesi left
the Palace with a face frozen white, as though it was he that had met
debacle, while Nahoum had been as urbane and cynical as though he had
come to the fulness of his power.

Some, on hearing this, said: "Beware Nahoum!"  But those who had been at
the Palace said: "Beware the Inglesi!"  This still Quaker, with the white
shining face and pontifical hat, with his address of "thee" and "thou,"
and his forms of speech almost Oriental in their imagery and simplicity,
himself an archaism, had impressed them with a sense of power.  He had
prompted old Diaz Pasha to speak of him as a reincarnation, so separate
and withdrawn he seemed at the end of the evening, yet with an uncanny
mastery in his dark brown eyes.  One of the Ulema, or holy men, present
had said in reply to Diaz: "It is the look of one who hath walked with
Death and bought and sold with Sheitan the accursed."  To Nahoum Pasha,
Dim had said, as the former left the Palace, a cigarette between his
fingers: "Sleep not nor slumber, Nahoum.  The world was never lost by one
earthquake."  And Nahoum had replied with a smooth friendliness: "The
world is not reaped in one harvest."

"The day is at hand--the East against the West," murmured old Diaz, as he
passed on.

"The day is far spent," answered Nahoum, in a voice unheard by Diaz; and,
with a word to his coachman, who drove off quickly, he disappeared in the
shrubbery.

A few minutes later he was tapping at the door of Mizraim, the Chief
Eunuch.  Three times he tapped in the same way.  Presently the door
opened, and he stepped inside.  The lean, dark figure of Mizraim bowed
low; the long, slow fingers touched the forehead, the breast, and the
lips.

"May God preserve thy head from harm, excellency, and the night give thee
sleep," said Mizraim.  He looked inquiringly at Nahoum.

"May thy head know neither heat nor cold, and thy joys increase,"
responded Nahoum mechanically, and sat down.

To an European it would have seemed a shameless mockery to have wished
joy to this lean, hateful dweller in the between-worlds; to Nahoum it was
part of a life which was all ritual and intrigue, gabbling superstition
and innate fatalism, decorated falsehood and a brave philosophy.

"I have work for thee at last, Mizraim," said Nahoum.

"At last?"

"Thou hast but played before.  To-night I must see the sweat of thy
brow."

Mizraim's cold fingers again threw themselves against his breast,
forehead, and lips, and he said:

"As a woman swims in a fountain, so shall I bathe in sweat for thee, who
hath given with one hand and hath never taken with the other."

"I did thee service once, Mizraim--eh?"

"I was as a bird buffeted by the wind; upon thy masts my feet found rest.
Behold, I build my nest in thy sails, excellency."

"There are no birds in last year's nest, Mizraim, thou dove," said
Nahoum, with a cynical smile.  "When I build, I build.  Where I swear by
the stone of the corner, there am I from dark to dark and from dawn to
dawn, pasha."  Suddenly he swept his hand low to the ground and a ghastly
sort of smile crossed over his face.  "Speak--I am thy servant.  Shall I
not hear?  I will put my hand in the entrails of Egypt, and wrench them
forth for thee."

He made a gesture so cruelly, so darkly, suggestive that Nahoum turned
his head away.  There flashed before his mind the scene of death in which
his own father had lain, butchered like a beast in the shambles, a victim
to the rage of Ibrahim Pasha, the son of Mehemet Ali.

"Then listen, and learn why I have need of thee to-night."

First, Nahoum told the story of David's coming, and Kaid's treatment of
himself, the foreshadowing of his own doom.  Then of David and the girl,
and the dead body he had seen; of the escape of the girl, of David's
return with Kaid--all exactly as it had happened, save that he did; not
mention the name of the dead man.

It did not astonish Mizraim that Nahoum had kept all this secret.  That
crime should be followed by secrecy and further crime, if need be, seems
natural to the Oriental mind.  Mizraim had seen removal follow upon
removal, and the dark Nile flowed on gloomily, silently, faithful to the
helpless ones tossed into its bosom.  It would much have astonished him
if Nahoum had not shown a gaping darkness somewhere in his tale, and he
felt for the key to the mystery.

"And he who lies dead, excellency?"

"My brother."

"Foorgat Bey!"

"Even he, Mizraim.  He lured the girl here--a mad man ever.  The other
madman was in the next room.  He struck--come, and thou shalt see."

Together they felt their way through the passages and rooms, and
presently entered the room where Foorgat Bey was lying.  Nahoum struck a
light, and, as he held the candle, Mizraim knelt and examined the body
closely.  He found the slight wound on the temple, then took the candle
from Nahoum and held it close to the corner of the marble pedestal.  A
faint stain of blood was there.  Again he examined the body, and ran his
fingers over the face and neck.  Suddenly he stopped, and held the light
close to the skin beneath the right jaw.  He motioned, and Nahoum laid
his fingers also on the spot.  There was a slight swelling.

"A blow with the fist, excellency--skilful, and English."  He looked
inquiringly at Nahoum.  "As a weasel hath a rabbit by the throat, so is
the Inglesi in thy hands."

Nahoum shook his head.  "And if I went to Kaid, and said, 'This is the
work of the Inglesi,' would he believe?  Kaid would hang me for the lie--
would it be truth to him?  What proof have I, save the testimony
of mine own eyes?  Egypt would laugh at that.  Is it the time, while
yet the singers are beneath the windows, to assail the bride?  All
bridegrooms are mad.  It is all sunshine and morning with the favourite,
the Inglesi.  Only when the shadows lengthen may he be stricken.  Not
now."

"Why dost thou hide this from Kaid, O thou brother of the eagle?"

"For my gain and thine, keeper of the gate.  To-night I am weak, because
I am poor.  To-morrow I shall be rich and, it may be, strong.  If Kaid
knew of this tonight, I should be a prisoner before cockcrow.  What
claims has a prisoner?  Kaid would be in my brother's house at dawn,
seizing all that is there and elsewhere, and I on my way to Fazougli, to
be strangled or drowned."

"O wise and far-seeing!  Thine eye pierces the earth.  What is there to
do?  What is my gain--what thine?"

"Thy gain?  The payment of thy debt to me."  Mizraim's face lengthened.
His was a loathsome sort of gratitude.  He was willing to pay in kind;
but what Oriental ever paid a debt without a gift in return, even as a
bartering Irishman demands his lucky penny.

"So be it, excellency, and my life is thine to spill upon the ground, a
scarlet cloth for thy feet.  And backsheesh?"

Nahoum smiled grimly.  "For backsheesh, thy turban full of gold."

Mizraim's eyes glittered-the dull black shine of a mongrel terrier's.  He
caught the sleeve of Nahoum's coat and kissed it, then kissed his hand.

Thus was their bargain made over the dead body; and Mizraim had an almost
superstitious reverence for the fulfilment of a bond, the one virtue
rarely found in the Oriental.  Nothing else had he, but of all men in
Egypt he was the best instrument Nahoum could have chosen; and of all men
in Egypt he was the one man who could surely help him.

"What is there now to do, excellency?"

"My coachman is with the carriage at the gate by which the English girl
left.  It is open still.  The key is in Foorgat's pocket, no doubt;
stolen by him, no doubt also.  .  .  .  This is my design.  Thou wilt
drive him"--he pointed to the body--"to his palace, seated in the
carriage as though he were alive.  There is a secret entrance.  The bowab
of the gate will show the way; I know it not.  But who will deny thee?
Thou comest from high places--from Kaid.  Who will speak of this?  Will
the bowab?  In the morning Foorgat will be found dead in his bed!  The
slight bruise thou canst heal--thou canst?"

Mizraim nodded.  "I can smooth it from the sharpest eye."

"At dawn he will be found dead; but at dawn I shall be knocking at his
gates.  Before the world knows I shall be in possession.  All that is his
shall be mine, for at once the men of law shall be summoned, and my
inheritance secured before Kaid shall even know of his death.  I shall
take my chances for my life."

"And the coachman, and the bowab, and others it may be?"

"Shall not these be with thee--thou, Kaid's keeper of the harem, the lion
at the door of his garden of women?  Would it be strange that Foorgat,
who ever flew at fruit above his head, perilous to get or keep, should be
found on forbidden ground, or in design upon it?  Would it be strange to
the bowab or the slave that he should return with thee stark and still?
They would but count it mercy of Kaid that he was not given to the
serpents of the Nile.  A word from thee--would one open his mouth?  Would
not the shadow of thy hand, of the swift doom, be over them?  Would not
a handful of gold bind them to me?  Is not the man dead?  Are they not
mine--mine to bind or break as I will?"

"So be it!  Wisdom is of thee as the breath of man is his life.  I will
drive Foorgat Bey to his home."

A few moments later all that was left of Foorgat Bey was sitting in his
carriage beside Mizraim the Chief Eunuch--sitting upright, stony, and
still, and in such wise was driven swiftly to his palace.




CHAPTER VIII

FOR HIS SOUL'S SAKE AND THE LAND'S SAKE

David came to know a startling piece of news the next morning-that
Foorgat Bey had died of heart-disease in his bed, and was so found by his
servants.  He at once surmised that Foorgat's body had been carried out
of the Palace; no doubt that it might not be thought he had come to his
death by command of Kaid.  His mind became easier.  Death, murder, crime
in Egypt was not a nine days' wonder; it scarce outlived one day.  When a
man was gone none troubled.  The dead man was in the bosom of Allah; then
why should the living be beset or troubled?  If there was foul play, why
make things worse by sending another life after the life gone, even in
the way of justice?

The girl David saved had told him her own name, and had given him the
name of the hotel at which she was staying.  He had an early breakfast,
and prepared to go to her hotel, wishing to see her once more.  There
were things to be said for the first and last time and then be buried for
ever.  She must leave the country at once.  In this sick, mad land, in
this whirlpool of secret murder and conspiracy, no one could tell what
plot was hatching, what deeds were forward; and he could not yet be sure
that no one save himself and herself knew who had killed Foorgat Bey.
Her perfect safety lay in instant flight.  It was his duty to see that
she went, and at once--this very day.  He would go and see her.

He went to the hotel.  There he learned that, with her aunt, she had left
that morning for Alexandria en route to England.

He approved her wisdom, he applauded her decision.  Yet--yet, somehow,
as he bent his footsteps towards his lodgings again he had a sense of
disappointment, of revelation.  What might happen to him--evidently that
had not occurred to her.  How could she know but that his life might be
in danger; that, after all, they might have been seen leaving the fatal
room?  Well, she had gone, and with all his heart he was glad that she
was safe.

His judgment upon last night's event was not coloured by a single
direct criticism upon the girl.  But he could not prevent the suggestion
suddenly flashing into his mind that she had thought of herself first and
last.  Well, she had gone; and he was here to face the future,
unencumbered by aught save the weight of his own conscience.

Yet, the weight of his conscience!  His feet were still free--free for
one short hour before he went to Kaid; but his soul was in chains.  As he
turned his course to the Nile, and crossed over the great bridge, there
went clanking by in chains a hundred conscripts, torn from their homes in
the Fayoum, bidding farewell for ever to their friends, receiving their
last offerings, for they had no hope of return.  He looked at their
haggard and dusty faces, at their excoriated ankles, and his eyes closed
in pain.  All they felt he felt.  What their homes were to them, these
fellaheen, dragged forth to defend their country, to go into the desert
and waste their lives under leaders tyrannous, cruel, and incompetent,
his old open life, his innocence, his integrity, his truthfulness and
character, were to him.  By an impulsive act, by a rash blow, he had
asserted his humanity; but he had killed his fellow-man in anger.  He
knew that as that fatal blow had been delivered, there was no thought of
punishment--it was blind anger and hatred: it was the ancient virus
working which had filled the world with war, and armed it at the expense,
the bitter and oppressive expense, of the toilers and the poor.  The
taxes for wars were wrung out of the sons of labour and sorrow.  These
poor fellaheen had paid taxes on everything they possessed.  Taxes,
taxes, nothing but taxes from the cradle!  Their lands, houses, and palm-
trees would be taxed still, when they would reap no more.  And having
given all save their lives, these lives they must now give under the whip
and the chain and the sword.

As David looked at them in their single blue calico coverings, in which
they had lived and slept-shivering in the cold night air upon the bare
ground--these thoughts came to him; and he had a sudden longing to follow
them and put the chains upon his own arms and legs, and go forth and
suffer with them, and fight and die?  To die were easy.  To fight?. . . .
Was it then come to that?  He was no longer a man of peace, but a man of
the sword; no longer a man of the palm and the evangel, but a man of
blood and of crime!  He shrank back out of the glare of the sun; for it
suddenly seemed to him that there was written upon his fore head, "This
is a brother of Cain."  For the first time in his life he had a shrinking
from the light, and from the sun which he had loved like a Persian, had,
in a sense, unconsciously worshipped.

He was scarcely aware where he was.  He had wandered on until he had come
to the end of the bridge and into the great groups of traffickers who, at
this place, made a market of their wares.  Here sat a seller of sugar
cane; there wandered, clanking his brasses, a merchant of sweet waters;
there shouted a cheap-jack of the Nile the virtues of a knife from
Sheffield.  Yonder a camel-driver squatted and counted his earnings; and
a sheepdealer haggled with the owner of a ghiassa bound for the sands of
the North.  The curious came about him and looked at him, but he did not
see or hear.  He sat upon a stone, his gaze upon the river, following
with his eyes, yet without consciously observing, the dark riverine
population whose ways are hidden, who know only the law of the river and
spend their lives in eluding itpirates and brigands now, and yet again
the peaceful porters of commerce.

To his mind, never a criminal in this land but less a criminal than he!
For their standard was a standard of might the only right; but he--his
whole life had been nurtured in an atmosphere of right and justice, had
been a spiritual demonstration against force.  He was with out fear, as
he was without an undue love of life.  The laying down of his life had
never been presented to him; and yet, now that his conscience was his
only judge, and it condemned him, he would gladly have given his life to
pay the price of blood.

That was impossible.  His life was not his own to give, save by suicide;
and that would be the unpardonable insult to God and humanity.  He had
given his word to the woman, and he would keep it.  In those brief
moments she must have suffered more than most men suffer in a long life.
Not her hand, however, but his, had committed the deed.  And yet a sudden
wave of pity for her rushed over him, because the conviction seized him
that she would also in her heart take upon herself the burden of his
guilt as though it were her own.  He had seen it in the look of her face
last night.

For the sake of her future it was her duty to shield herself from any
imputation which might as unjustly as scandalously arise, if the facts of
that black hour ever became known.  Ever became known?  The thought that
there might be some human eye which had seen, which knew, sent a shiver
through him.

"I would give my life a thousand times rather than that," he said aloud
to the swift-flowing river.  His head sank on his breast.  His lips
murmured in prayer:

"But be merciful to me, Thou just Judge of Israel, for Thou hast made me,
and Thou knowest whereof I am made.  Here will I dedicate my life to Thee
for the land's sake.  Not for my soul's sake, O my God!  If it be Thy
will, let my soul be cast away; but for the soul of him whose body I
slew, and for his land, let my life be the long sacrifice."

Dreams he had had the night before--terrible dreams, which he could never
forget; dreams of a fugitive being hunted through the world, escaping and
eluding, only to be hemmed in once more; on and on till he grew grey and
gaunt, and the hunt suddenly ended in a great morass, into which he
plunged with the howling world behind him.  The grey, dank mists came
down on him, his footsteps sank deeper and deeper, and ever the cries, as
of damned spirits, grew in his ears.  Mocking shapes flitted past him,
the wings of obscene birds buffeted him, the morass grew up about him;
and now it was all a red moving mass like a dead sea heaving about him.
With a moan of agony he felt the dolorous flood above his shoulders, and
then a cry pierced the gloom and the loathsome misery, and a voice he
knew called to him, "David, David, I am coming!" and he had awaked with
the old hallucination of his uncle's voice calling to him in the dawn.

It came to him now as he sat by the water-side, and he raised his face to
the sun and to the world.  The idlers had left him alone; none were
staring at him now.  They were all intent on their own business, each man
labouring after his kind.  He heard the voice of a riverman as he toiled
at a rope standing on the corn that filled his ghiassa from end to end,
from keel to gunwale.  The man was singing a wild chant of cheerful
labour, the soul of the hard-smitten of the earth rising above the rack
and burden of the body:

         "O, the garden where to-day we sow and to-morrow we reap!
          O, the sakkia turning by the garden walls;
          O, the onion-field and the date-tree growing,
          And my hand on the plough-by the blessing of God;
          Strength of my soul, O my brother, all's well!"

The meaning of the song got into his heart.  He pressed his hand to his
breast with a sudden gesture.  It touched something hard.  It was his
flute.  Mechanically he had put it in his pocket when he dressed in the
morning.  He took it out and looked at it lovingly.  Into it he had
poured his soul in the old days--days, centuries away, it seemed now.  It
should still be the link with the old life.  He rose and walked towards
his home again.  The future spread clearly before him.  Rapine, murder,
tyranny, oppression, were round him on every side, and the ruler of the
land called him to his counsels.  Here a great duty lay--his life for
this land, his life, and his love, and his faith.  He would expiate his
crime and his sin, the crime of homicide for which he alone was
responsible, the sin of secrecy for which he and another were
responsible.  And that other?  If only there had been but one word
of understanding between them before she left!

At the door of his house stood the American whom he had met at the
citadel yesterday-it seemed a hundred years ago.

"I've got a letter for you," Lacey said.  "The lady's aunt and herself
are cousins of mine more or less removed, and originally at home in the
U. S. A.  a generation ago.  Her mother was an American.  She didn't know
your name--Miss Hylda Maryon, I mean.  I told her, but there wasn't time
to put it on."  He handed over the unaddressed envelope.

David opened the letter, and read:

"I have seen the papers.  I do not understand what has happened, but I
know that all is well.  If it were not so, I would not go.  That is the
truth.  Grateful I am, oh, believe me!  So grateful that I do not yet
know what is the return which I must make.  But the return will be made.
I hear of what has come to you--how easily I might have destroyed all!
My thoughts blind me.  You are great and good; you will know at least
that I go because it is the only thing to do.  I fly from the storm with
a broken wing.  Take now my promise to pay what I owe in the hour Fate
wills--or in the hour of your need.  You can trust him who brings this to
you; he is a distant cousin of my own.  Do not judge him by his odd and
foolish words.  They hide a good character, and he has a strong nature.
He wants work to do.  Can you give it?  Farewell."

David put the letter in his pocket, a strange quietness about his heart.

He scarcely realised what Lacey was saying.  "Great girl that.  Troubled
about something in England, I guess.  Going straight back."

David thanked him for the letter.  Lacey became red in the face.  He
tried to say something, but failed.  "Thee wishes to say something to me,
friend?" asked David.

"I'm full up; I can't speak.  But, say--"

"I am going to the Palace now.  Come back at noon if you will."

He wrung David's hand in gratitude.  "You're going to do it.  You're
going to do it.  I see it.  It's a great game--like Abe Lincoln's.  Say,
let me black your boots while you're doing it, will you?"

David pressed his hand.




CHAPTER IX

THE LETTER, THE NIGHT, AND THE WOMAN

     "To-day has come the fulfilment of my dream, Faith.  I am given to
     my appointed task; I am set on a road of life in which there is no
     looking back.  My dreams of the past are here begun in very truth
     and fact.  When, in the night, I heard Uncle Benn calling, when in
     the Meeting-house voices said, 'Come away, come away, and labour,
     thou art idle,' I could hear my heart beat in the ardour to be off.
     Yet I knew not whither.  Now I know.

     "Last night the Prince Pasha called me to his Council, made me
     adviser, confidant, as one who has the ear of his captain--after he
     had come to terms with me upon that which Uncle Benn left of land
     and gold.  Think not that he tempted me.

     "Last night I saw favourites look upon me with hate because of
     Kaid's favour, though the great hall was filled with show of
     cheerful splendour, and men smiled and feasted.  To-day I know that
     in the Palace where I was summoned to my first: duty with the
     Prince, every step I took was shadowed, every motion recorded, every
     look or word noted and set down.  I have no fear of them.  They are
     not subtle enough for the unexpected acts of honesty in the life of
     a true man.  Yet I do not wonder men fail to keep honest in the
     midst of this splendour, where all is strife as to who shall have
     the Prince's favour; who shall enjoy the fruits of bribery,
     backsheesh, and monopoly; who shall wring from the slave and the
     toil-ridden fellah the coin his poor body mints at the corvee, in
     his own taxed fields of dourha and cucumbers.

     "Is this like anything we ever dreamed at Hamley, Faith?  Yet here
     am I set, and here shall I stay till the skein be ravelled out.
     Soon I shall go into the desert upon a mission to the cities of the
     South, to Dongola, Khartoum, and Darfur and beyond; for there is
     trouble yonder, and war is near, unless it is given to me to bring
     peace.  So I must bend to my study of Arabic, which I am thankful I
     learned long ago.  And I must not forget to say that I shall take
     with me on my journey that faithful Muslim Ebn Ezra.  Others I shall
     take also, but of them I shall write hereafter.

     "I shall henceforth be moving in the midst of things which I was
     taught to hate.  I pray that I may not hate them less as time goes
     on.  To-morrow I shall breathe the air of intrigue, shall hear
     footsteps of spies behind me wherever I go; shall know that even the
     roses in the garden have ears; that the ground under my feet will
     telegraph my thoughts.  Shall I be true?  Shall I at last whisper,
     and follow, and evade, believe in no one, much less in myself, steal
     in and out of men's confidences to use them for my own purposes?
     Does any human being know what he can bear of temptation or of the
     daily pressure of the life around him?  what powers of resistance
     are in his soul?  how long the vital energy will continue to throw
     off the never-ending seduction, the freshening force of evil?
     Therein lies the power of evil, that it is ever new, ever fortified
     by continuous conquest and achievements.  It has the rare fire of
     aggression; is ever more upon the offence than upon the defence;
     has, withal, the false lure of freedom from restraint, the throbbing
     force of sympathy.

     "Such things I dreamed not of in Soolsby's but upon the hill, Faith,
     though, indeed, that seemed a time of trial and sore-heartedness.
     How large do small issues seem till we have faced the momentous
     things!  It is true that the larger life has pleasures and expanding
     capacities; but it is truer still that it has perils, events which
     try the soul as it is never tried in the smaller life--unless,
     indeed, the soul be that of the Epicurean.  The Epicurean I well
     understand, and in his way I might have walked with a wicked grace.
     I have in me some hidden depths of luxury, a secret heart of
     pleasure, an understanding for the forbidden thing.  I could have
     walked the broad way with a laughing heart, though, in truth, habit
     of mind and desire have kept me in the better path.  But offences
     must come, and woe to him from whom the offence cometh!  I have
     begun now, and only now, to feel the storms that shake us to our
     farthest cells of life.  I begin to see how near good is to evil;
     how near faith is to unfaith; and how difficult it is to judge from
     actions only; how little we can know to-day what we shall feel
     tomorrow.  Yet one must learn to see deeper, to find motive, not in
     acts that shake the faith, but in character which needs no
     explanation, which--"

He paused, disturbed.  Then he raised his head, as though not conscious
of what was breaking the course of his thoughts.  Presently he realised a
low, hurried knocking at his door.  He threw a hand over his eyes, and
sprang up.  An instant later the figure of a woman, deeply veiled, stood
within the room, beside the table where he had been writing.  There was
silence as they faced each other, his back against the door.

"Oh, do you not know me?" she said at last, and sank into the chair
where he had been sitting.

The question was unnecessary, and she knew it was so; but she could not
bear the strain of the silence.  She seemed to have risen out of the
letter he had been writing; and had he not been writing of her--of what
concerned them both?  How mean and small-hearted he had been, to have
thought for an instant that she had not the highest courage, though in
going she had done the discreeter, safer thing.  But she had come--she
had come!

All this was in his eyes, though his face was pale and still.  He was
almost rigid with emotion, for the ancient habit of repose and self-
command of the Quaker people was upon him.

"Can you not see--do you not know?" she repeated, her back upon him now,
her face still veiled, her hands making a swift motion of distress.

"Has thee found in the past that thee is so soon forgotten?"

"Oh, do not blame me!"  She raised her veil suddenly, and showed a face
as pale as his own, and in the eyes a fiery brightness.  "I did not know.
It was so hard to come--do not blame me.  I went to Alexandria--I felt
that I must fly; the air around me seemed full of voices crying out.  Did
you not understand why I went?"

"I understand," he said, coming forward slowly.  "Thee should not have
returned.  In the way I go now the watchers go also."

"If I had not come, you would never have understood," she answered
quickly.  "I am not sorry I went.  I was so frightened, so shaken.  My
only thought was to get away from the terrible Thing.  But I should have
been sorry all my life long had I not come back to tell you what I feel,
and that I shall never forget.  All my life I shall be grateful.  You
have saved me from a thousand deaths.  Ah, if I could give you but one
life!  Yet--yet--oh, do not think but that I would tell you the whole
truth, though I am not wholly truthful.  See, I love my place in the
world more than I love my life; and but for you I should have lost all."

He made a protesting motion.  "The debt is mine, in truth.  But for you I
should never have known what, perhaps--" He paused.

His eyes were on hers, gravely speaking what his tongue faltered to say.
She looked and looked, but did not understand.  She only saw troubled
depths, lighted by a soul of kindling purpose.  "Tell me," she said,
awed.

"Through you I have come to know--"  He paused again.  What he was going
to say, truthful though it was, must hurt her, and she had been sorely
hurt already.  He put his thoughts more gently, more vaguely.

"By what happened I have come to see what matters in life.  I was behind
the hedge.  I have broken through upon the road.  I know my goal now.
The highway is before me."

She felt the tragedy in his words, and her voice shook as she spoke.  "I
wish I knew life better.  Then I could make a better answer.  You are on
the road, you say.  But I feel that it is a hard and cruel road--oh, I
understand that at least!  Tell me, please, tell me the whole truth.  You
are hiding from me what you feel.  I have upset your life, have I not?
You are a Quaker, and Quakers are better than all other Christian people,
are they not?  Their faith is peace, and for me, you--" She covered her
face with her hands for an instant, but turned quickly and looked him in
the eyes: "For me you put your hand upon the clock of a man's life, and
stopped it."

She got to her feet with a passionate gesture, but he put a hand gently
upon her arm, and she sank back again.  "Oh, it was not you; it was I who
did it!" she said.  "You did what any man of honour would have done,
what a brother would have done."

"What I did is a matter for myself only," he responded quickly.  "Had I
never seen your face again it would have been the same.  You were the
occasion; the thing I did had only one source, my own heart and mind.
There might have been another way; but for that way, or for the way I did
take, you could not be responsible."

"How generous you are!"  Her eyes swam with tears; she leaned over the
table where he had been writing, and the tears dropped upon his letter.
Presently she realised this, and drew back, then made as though to dry
the tears from the paper with her handkerchief.  As she did so the words
that he had written met her eye: "'But offences must come, and woe to him
from whom the offence cometh!'  I have begun now, and only now, to feel
the storms that shake us to our farthest cells of life."

She became very still.  He touched her arm and said heavily: "Come away,
come away."

She pointed to the words she had read.  "I could not help but see, and
now I know what this must mean to you."

"Thee must go at once," he urged.  "Thee should not have come.  Thee was
safe--none knew.  A few hours and it would all have been far behind.  We
might never have met again."

Suddenly she gave a low, hysterical laugh.  "You think you hide the real
thing from me.  I know I'm ignorant and selfish and feeble-minded, but I
can see farther than you think.  You want to tell the truth about--about
it, because you are honest and hate hiding things, because you want to be
punished, and so pay the price.  Oh, I can understand!  If it were not
for me you would not.  .  .  .  "  With a sudden wild impulse she got to
her feet.  "And you shall not," she cried.  "I will not have it."  Colour
came rushing to her cheeks.

"I will not have it.  I will not put myself so much in your debt.  I will
not demand so much of you.  I will face it all.  I will stand alone."

There was a touch of indignation in her voice.  Somehow she seemed moved
to anger against him.  Her hands were clasped at her side rigidly, her
pulses throbbing.  He stood looking at her fixedly, as though trying to
realise her.  His silence agitated her still further, and she spoke
excitedly:

"I could have, would have, killed him myself without a moment's regret.
He had planned, planned--ah, God, can you not see it all!  I would have
taken his life without a thought.  I was mad to go upon such an
adventure, but I meant no ill.  I had not one thought that I could not
have cried out from the housetops, and he had in his heart--he had what
you saw.  But you repent that you killed him--by accident, it was by
accident.  Do you realise how many times others have been trapped by him
as was I?  Do you not see what he was--as I see now?  Did he not say as
much to me before you came, when I was dumb with terror?  Did he not make
me understand what his whole life had been?  Did I not see in a flash the
women whose lives he had spoiled and killed?  Would I have had pity?
Would I have had remorse?  No, no, no!  I was frightened when it was
done, I was horrified, but I was not sorry; and I am not sorry.  It was
to be.  It was thetrue end to his vileness.  Ah!"

She shuddered, and buried her face in her hands for a moment, then went
on: "I can never forgive myself for going to the Palace with him.  I was
mad for experience, for mystery; I wanted more than the ordinary share of
knowledge.  I wanted to probe things.  Yet I meant no wrong.  I thought
then nothing of which I shall ever be ashamed.  But I shall always be
ashamed because I knew him, because he thought that I--oh, if I were a
man, I should be glad that I had killed him, for the sake of all honest
women!"

He remained silent.  His look was not upon her, he seemed lost in a
dream; but his face was fixed in trouble.

She misunderstood his silence.  "You had the courage, the impulse to--to
do it," she said keenly; "you have not the courage to justify it.  I will
not have it so.

"I will tell the truth to all the world.  I will not shrink I shrank
yesterday because I was afraid of the world; to-day I will face it, I
will--"

She stopped suddenly, and another look flashed into her face.  Presently
she spoke in a different tone; a new light had come upon her mind.  "But
I see," she added.  "To tell all is to make you the victim, too, of what
he did.  It is in your hands; it is all in your hands; and I cannot speak
unless--unless you are ready also."

There was an unintended touch of scorn in her voice.  She had been
troubled and tried beyond bearing, and her impulsive nature revolted at
his silence.  She misunderstood him, or, if she did not wholly
misunderstand him, she was angry at what she thought was a needless
remorse or sensitiveness.  Did not the man deserve his end?

"There is only one course to pursue," he rejoined quietly, "and that is
the course we entered upon last night.  I neither doubted yourself nor
your courage.  Thee must not turn back now.  Thee must not alter the
course which was your own making, and the only course which thee could,
or I should, take.  I have planned my life according to the word I gave
you.  I could not turn back now.  We are strangers, and we must remain
so.  Thee will go from here now, and we must not meet again.  I am--"

"I know who you are," she broke in.  "I know what your religion is; that
fighting and war and bloodshed is a sin to you."

"I am of no family or place in England," he went on calmly.  "I come of
yeoman and trading stock; I have nothing in common with people of rank.
Our lines of life will not cross.  It is well that it should be so.  As
to what happened--that which I may feel has nothing to do with whether I
was justified or no.  But if thee has thought that I have repented doing
what I did, let that pass for ever from your mind.  I know that I should
do the same, yes, even a hundred times.  I did according to my nature.
Thee must not now be punished cruelly for a thing thee did not do.
Silence is the only way of safety or of justice.  We must not speak of
this again.  We must each go our own way."

Her eyes were moist.  She reached out a hand to him timidly.  "Oh,
forgive me," she added brokenly, "I am so vain, so selfish, and that
makes one blind to the truth.  It is all clearer now.  You have shown me
that I was right in my first impulse, and that is all I can say for
myself.  I shall pray all my life that it will do you no harm in the
end."

She remained silent, for a moment adjusting her veil, preparing to go.
Presently she spoke again: "I shall always want to know about you--what
is happening to you.  How could it be otherwise?"

She was half realising one of the deepest things in existence, that the
closest bond between two human beings is a bond of secrecy upon a thing
which vitally, fatally concerns both or either.  It is a power at once
malevolent and beautiful.  A secret like that of David and Hylda will do
in a day what a score of years could not accomplish, will insinuate
confidences which might never be given to the nearest or dearest.  In
neither was any feeling of the heart begotten by their experiences; and
yet they had gone deeper in each other's lives than any one either had
known in a lifetime.  They had struck a deeper note than love or
friendship.  They had touched the chord of a secret and mutual experience
which had gone so far that their lives would be influenced by it for ever
after.  Each understood this in a different way.

Hylda looked towards the letter lying on the table.  It had raised in her
mind, not a doubt, but an undefined, undefinable anxiety.  He saw the
glance, and said: "I was writing to one who has been as a sister to me.
She was my mother's sister though she is almost as young as I.  Her name
is Faith.  There is nothing there of what concerns thee and me, though it
would make no difference if she knew."  Suddenly a thought seemed to
strike him.  "The secret is of thee and me.  There is safety.  If it
became another's, there might be peril.  The thing shall be between us
only, for ever?"

"Do you think that I--"

"My instinct tells me a woman of sensitive mind might one day, out of an
unmerciful honesty, tell her husband--"

"I am not married-"

"But one day--"

She interrupted him.  "Sentimental egotism will not rule me.  Tell me,"
she added, "tell me one thing before I go.  You said that your course was
set.  What is it?"

"I remain here," he answered quietly.  "I remain in the service of Prince
Kaid."

"It is a dreadful government, an awful service--" "That is why I stay."

"You are going to try and change things here--you alone?"

"I hope not alone, in time."

"You are going to leave England, your friends, your family, your place--
in Hamley, was it not?  My aunt has read of you--my cousin--" she paused.

"I had no place in Hamley.  Here is my place.  Distance has little to do
with understanding or affection.  I had an uncle here in the East for
twenty-five years, yet I knew him better than all others in the world.
Space is nothing if minds are in sympathy.  My uncle talked to me over
seas and lands.  I felt him, heard him speak."

"You think that minds can speak to minds, no matter what the distance--
real and definite things?"

"If I were parted from one very dear to me, I would try to say to him or
her what was in my mind, not by written word only, but by the flying
thought."

She sat down suddenly, as though overwhelmed.  "Oh, if that were
possible!" she said.  "If only one could send a thought like that!"
Then with an impulse, and the flicker of a sad smile, she reached out a
hand.  "If ever in the years to come you want to speak to me, will you
try to make me understand, as your uncle did with you?"

"I cannot tell," he answered.  "That which is deepest within us obeys
only the laws of its need.  By instinct it turns to where help lies,
as a wild deer, fleeing, from captivity, makes for the veldt and the
watercourse."

She got to her feet again.  "I want to pay my debt," she said solemnly.
"It is a debt that one day must be paid--so awful--so awful!"  A swift
change passed over her.  She shuddered, and grew white.  "I said brave
words just now," she added in a hoarse whisper, "but now I see him lying
there cold and still, and you stooping over him.  I see you touch his
breast, his pulse.  I see you close his eyes.  One instant full of the
pulse of life, the next struck out into infinite space.  Oh, I shall
never--how can I ever-forget!"  She turned her head away from him, then
composed herself again, and said quietly, with anxious eyes: "Why was
nothing said or done?  Perhaps they are only waiting.  Perhaps they know.
Why was it announced that he died in his bed at home?"

"I cannot tell.  When a man in high places dies in Egypt, it may be one
death or another.  No one inquires too closely.  He died in Kaid Pasha's
Palace, where other men have died, and none has inquired too closely.
To-day they told me at the Palace that his carriage was seen to leave
with himself and Mizraim the Chief Eunuch.  Whatever the object, he was
secretly taken to his house from the Palace, and his brother Nahoum
seized upon his estate in the early morning.

"I think that no one knows the truth.  But it is all in the hands of God.
We can do nothing more.  Thee must go.  Thee should not have come.  In
England thee will forget, as thee should forget.  In Egypt I shall
remember, as I should remember."

"Thee," she repeated softly.  "I love the Quaker thee.  My grandmother
was an American Quaker.  She always spoke like that.  Will you not use
thee and thou in speaking to me, always?"

"We are not likely to speak together in any language in the future," he
answered.  "But now thee must go, and I will--"

"My cousin, Mr. Lacey, is waiting for me in the garden," she answered.
"I shall be safe with him."  She moved towards the door.  He caught the
handle to turn it, when there came the noise of loud talking, and the
sound of footsteps in the court-yard.  He opened the door slightly and
looked out, then closed it quickly.  "It is Nahoum Pasha," he said.
"Please, the other room," he added, and pointed to a curtain.  "There is
a window leading on a garden.  The garden-gate opens on a street leading
to the Ezbekiah Square and your hotel."

"But, no, I shall stay here," she said.  She drew down her veil, then
taking from her pocket another, arranged it also, so that her face was
hidden.

"Thee must go," he said--"go quickly."  Again he pointed.

"I will remain," she rejoined, with determination, and seated herself in
a chair.




CHAPTER X

THE FOUR WHO KNEW

There was a knocking at the door.  David opened it.  Nahoum Pasha stepped
inside, and stood still a moment looking at Hylda.  Then he made low
salutation to her, touched his hand to his lips and breast saluting
David, and waited.

"What is thy business, pasha?" asked David quietly, and motioned towards
a chair.

"May thy path be on the high hills, Saadat-el-basha.  I come for a favour
at thy hands."  Nahoum sat down.  "What favour is mine to give to Nahoum
Pasha?"

"The Prince has given thee supreme place--it was mine but yesterday.  It
is well.  To the deserving be the fruits of deserving."

"Is merit, then, so truly rewarded here?" asked David quietly.

"The Prince saw merit at last when he chose your Excellency for
councillor."

"How shall I show merit, then, in the eyes of Nahoum Pasha?"

"Even by urging the Prince to give me place under him again.  Not as
heretofore--that is thy place--yet where it may be.  I have capacity.
I can aid thee in the great task.  Thou wouldst remake our Egypt--and my
heart is with you.  I would rescue, not destroy.  In years gone by I
tried to do good to this land, and I failed.  I was alone.  I had not the
strength to fight the forces around me.  I was overcome.  I had too
little faith.  But my heart was with the right--I am an Armenian and a
Christian of the ancient faith.  I am in sorrow.  Death has humbled me.
My brother Foorgat Bey--may flowers bloom for ever on his grave!--he is
dead,"--his eyes were fixed on those of David, as with a perfectly
assured candour--"and my heart is like an empty house.  But man must not
be idle and live--if Kaid lets me live.  I have riches.  Are not
Foorgat's riches mine, his Palace, his gardens, his cattle, and his
plantations, are they not mine?  I may sit in the court-yard and hear the
singers, may listen to the tale-tellers by the light of the moon; I may
hear the tales of Al-Raschid chanted by one whose tongue never falters,
and whose voice is like music; after the manner of the East I may give
bread and meat to the poor at sunset; I may call the dancers to the
feast.  But what comfort shall it give?  I am no longer a youth.  I would
work.  I would labour for the land of Egypt, for by work shall we fulfil
ourselves, redeem ourselves.  Saadat, I would labour, but my master has
taken away from me the anvil, the fire, and the hammer, and I sit without
the door like an armless beggar.  What work to do in Egypt save to help
the land, and how shall one help, save in the Prince's service?  There
can be no reform from outside.  If I laboured for better things outside
Kaid's Palace, how long dost thou think I should escape the Nile, or the
diamond-dust in my coffee?  The work which I did, is it not so that it,
with much more, falls now to thy hands, Saadat, with a confidence from
Kaid that never was mine?"

"I sought not the office."

"Have I a word of blame?  I come to ask for work to do with thee.  Do I
not know Prince Kaid?  He had come to distrust us all.  As stale water
were we in his taste.  He had no pleasure in us, and in our deeds he
found only stones of stumbling.  He knew not whom to trust.  One by one
we all had yielded to ceaseless intrigue and common distrust of each
other, until no honest man was left; till all were intent to save their
lives by holding power; for in this land to lose power is to lose life.
No man who has been in high place, has had the secrets of the Palace and
the ear of the Prince, lives after he has lost favour.  The Prince, for
his safety, must ensure silence, and the only silence in Egypt is the
grave.  In thee, Saadat, Kaid has found an honest man.  Men will call
thee mad, if thou remainest honest, but that is within thine own bosom
and with fate.  For me, thou hast taken my place, and more.  Malaish, it
is the decree of fate, and I have no anger.  I come to ask thee to save
my life, and then to give me work."

"How shall I save thy life?"

"By reconciling the Effendina to my living, and then by giving me
service, where I shall be near to thee; where I can share with thee,
though it be as the ant beside the beaver, the work of salvation in
Egypt.  I am rich since my brother was--"  He paused; no covert look was
in his eyes, no sign of knowledge, nothing but meditation and sorrowful
frankness--"since Foorgat passed away in peace, praise be to God!  He lay
on his bed in the morning, when one came to wake him, like a sleeping
child, no sign of the struggle of death upon him."

A gasping sound came from the chair where Hylda sat; but he took no
notice.  He appeared to be unconscious of David's pain-drawn face, as he
sat with hands upon his knees, his head bent forward listening, as though
lost to the world.

"So did Foorgat, my brother, die while yet in the fulness of his manhood,
life beating high in his veins, with years before him to waste.  He was a
pleasure-lover, alas! he laid up no treasure of work accomplished; and so
it was meet that he should die as he lived, in a moment of ease.  And
already he is forgotten.  It is the custom here.  He might have died by
diamond-dust, and men would have set down their coffee-cups in surprise,
and then would have forgotten; or he might have been struck down by the
hand of an assassin, and, unless it was in the Palace, none would have
paused to note it.  And so the sands sweep over his steps upon the shore
of time."

After the first exclamation of horror, Hylda had sat rigid, listening
as though under a spell.  Through her veil she gazed at Nahoum with a
cramping pain at her heart, for he seemed ever on the verge of the truth
she dreaded; and when he spoke the truth, as though unconsciously, she
felt she must cry out and rush from the room.  He recalled to her the
scene in the little tapestried room as vividly as though it was there
before her eyes, and it had for the moment all the effect of a hideous
nightmare.  At last, however, she met David's eyes, and they guided her,
for in them was a steady strength and force which gave her confidence.
At first he also had been overcome inwardly, but his nerves were cool,
his head was clear, and he listened to Nahoum, thinking out his course
meanwhile.

He owed this man much.  He had taken his place, and by so doing had
placed his life in danger.  He had killed the brother upon the same day
that he had dispossessed the favourite of office; and the debt was heavy.
In office Nahoum had done after his kind, after the custom of the place
and the people; and yet, as it would seem, the man had had stirrings
within him towards a higher path.  He, at any rate, had not amassed
riches out of his position, and so much could not be said of any other
servant of the Prince Pasha.  Much he had heard of Nahoum's powerful
will, hidden under a genial exterior, and behind his friendly, smiling
blue eyes.  He had heard also of cruelty--of banishment, and of enemies
removed from his path suddenly, never to be seen again; but, on the
whole, men spoke with more admiration of him than of any other public
servant, Armenian Christian in a Mahommedan country though he was.  That
very day Kaid had said that if Nahoum had been less eager to control the
State, he might still have held his place.  Besides, the man was a
Christian--of a mystic, half-legendary, obscure Christianity; yet having
in his mind the old faith, its essence and its meaning, perhaps.  Might
not this Oriental mind, with that faith, be a power to redeem the land?
It was a wonderful dream, in which he found the way, as he thought, to
atone somewhat to this man for a dark injury done.

When Nahoum stopped speaking David said: "But if I would have it, if it
were well that it should be, I doubt I have the power to make it so."

"Saadat-el-bdsha, Kaid believes in thee to-day; he will not believe
to-morrow if thou dost remain without initiative.  Action, however
startling, will be proof of fitness.  His Highness shakes a long spear.
Those who ride with him must do battle with the same valour.  Excellency,
I have now great riches--since Death smote Foorgat Bey in the forehead"
--still his eyes conveyed no meaning, though Hylda shrank back--"and I
would use them for the good thou wouldst do here.  Money will be needed,
and sufficient will not be at thy hand-not till new ledgers be opened,
new balances struck."

He turned to Hylda quietly, and with a continued air of innocence said:
"Shall it not be so-madame?  Thou, I doubt not, are of his kin.  It would
seem so, though I ask pardon if it be not so--wilt thou not urge his
Excellency to restore me to Kaid's favour?  I know little of the English,
though I know them humane and honest; but my brother, Foorgat Bey, he
was much among them, lived much in England, was a friend to many great
English.  Indeed, on the evening that he died I saw him in the gallery of
the banquet-room with an English lady--can one be mistaken in an English
face?  Perhaps he cared for her; perhaps that was why he smiled as he lay
upon his bed, never to move again.  Madame, perhaps in England thou mayst
have known my brother.  If that is so, I ask thee to speak for me to his
Excellency.  My life is in danger, and I am too young to go as my brother
went.  I do not wish to die in middle age, as my brother died."

He had gone too far.  In David's mind there was no suspicion that Nahoum
knew the truth.  The suggestion in his words had seemed natural; but,
from the first, a sharp suspicion was in the mind of Hylda, and his last
words had convinced her that if Nahoum did not surely know the truth, he
suspected it all too well.  Her instinct had pierced far; and as she
realised his suspicions, perhaps his certainty, and heard his words of
covert insult, which, as she saw, David did not appreciate, anger and
determination grew in her.  Yet she felt that caution must mark her
words, and that nothing but danger lay in resentment.  She felt the
everlasting indignity behind the quiet, youthful eyes, the determined
power of the man; but she saw also that, for the present, the course
Nahoum suggested was the only course to take.  And David must not even
feel the suspicion in her own mind, that Nahoum knew or suspected the
truth.  If David thought that Nahoum knew, the end of all would come at
once.  It was clear, however, that Nahoum meant to be silent, or he would
have taken another course of action.  Danger lay in every direction, but,
to her mind, the least danger lay in following Nahoum's wish.

She slowly raised her veil, showing a face very still now, with eyes as
steady as David's.  David started at her action, he thought it rash; but
the courage of it pleased him, too.

"You are not mistaken," she said slowly in French; "your brother was
known to me.  I had met him in England.  It will be a relief to all his
friends to know that he passed away peacefully."  She looked him in the
eyes determinedly.  "Monsieur Claridge is not my kinsman, but he is my
fellow-countryman.  If you mean well by monsieur, your knowledge and your
riches should help him on his way.  But your past is no guarantee of good
faith, as you will acknowledge."

He looked her in the eyes with a far meaning.  "But I am giving
guarantees of good faith now," he said softly.  "Will you--not?"

She understood.  It was clear that he meant peace, for the moment at
least.

"If I had influence I would advise him to reconcile you to Prince Kaid,"
she said quietly, then turned to David with an appeal in her eyes.

David stood up.  "I will do what I can," he said.  "If thee means as well
by Egypt as I mean by thee, all may be well for all."

"Saadat!  Saadat!" said Nahoum, with show of assumed feeling, and made
salutation.  Then to Hylda, making lower salutation still, he said: "Thou
hast lifted from my neck the yoke.  Thou hast saved me from the shadow
and the dust.  I am thy slave."  His eyes were like a child's, wide and
confiding.

He turned towards the door, and was about to open it, when there came a
knocking, and he stepped back.  Hylda drew down her veil.  David opened
the door cautiously and admitted Mizraim the Chief Eunuch.  Mizraim's
eyes searched the room, and found Nahoum.

"Pasha," he said to Nahoum, "may thy bones never return to dust, nor the
light of thine eyes darken!  There is danger."

Nahoum nodded, but did not speak.

"Shall I speak, then?"  He paused and made low salutation to David,
saying, "Excellency, I am thine ox to be slain."

"Speak, son of the flowering oak," said Nahoum, with a sneer in his
voice.  "What blessing dost thou bring?"

"The Effendina has sent for thee."

Nahoum's eyes flashed.  "By thee, lion of Abdin?"  The lean, ghastly
being smiled.  "He has sent a company of soldiers and Achmet Pasha."

"Achmet!  Is it so?  They are here, Mizraim, watcher of the morning?"

"They are at thy palace--I am here, light of Egypt."

"How knewest thou I was here?"

Mizraim salaamed.  "A watch was set upon thee this morning early.  The
watcher was of my slaves.  He brought the word to me that thou wast here
now.  A watcher also was set upon thee, Excellency"--he turned to David.
"He also was of my slaves.  Word was delivered to his Highness that thou"
--he turned to Nahoum again--"wast in thy palace, and Achmet Pasha
went thither.  He found thee not.  Now the city is full of watchers, and
Achmet goes from bazaar to bazaar, from house to house which thou was
wont to frequent--and thou art here."

"What wouldst thou have me do, Mizraim?"

"Thou art here; is it the house of a friend or a foe?"  Nahoum did not
answer.  His eyes were fixed in thought upon the floor, but he was
smiling.  He seemed without fear.

"But if this be the house of a friend, is he safe here?" asked David.

"For this night, it may be," answered Mizraim, "till other watchers be
set, who are no slaves of mine.  Tonight, here, of all places in Cairo,
he is safe; for who could look to find him where thou art who hast taken
from him his place and office, Excellency--on whom the stars shine for
ever!  But in another day, if my lord Nahoum be not forgiven by the
Effendina, a hundred watchers will pierce the darkest corner of the
bazaar, the smallest room in Cairo."

David turned to Nahoum.  "Peace be to thee, friend.  Abide here till
to-morrow, when I will speak for thee to his Highness, and, I trust,
bring thee pardon.  It shall be so--but I shall prevail," he added, with
slow decision; "I shall prevail with him.  My reasons shall convince his
Highness."

"I can help thee with great reasons, Saadat," said Nahoum.  "Thou shalt
prevail.  I can tell thee that which will convince Kaid."

While they were speaking, Hylda had sat motionless watching.  At first
it seemed to her that a trap had been set, and that David was to be the
victim of Oriental duplicity; but revolt, as she did, from the miserable
creature before them, she saw at last that he spoke the truth.

"Thee will remain under this roof to-night, pasha?" asked David.

"I will stay if thy goodness will have it so," answered Nahoum slowly.
"It is not my way to hide, but when the storm comes it is well to
shelter."

Salaaming low, Mizraim withdrew, his last glance being thrown towards
Hylda, who met his look with a repugnance which made her face rigid.  She
rose and put on her gloves.  Nahoum rose also, and stood watching her
respectfully.

"Thee will go?" asked David, with a movement towards her.

She inclined her head.  "We have finished our business, and it is late,"
she answered.

David looked at Nahoum.  "Thee will rest here, pasha, in peace.  In a
moment I will return."  He took up his hat.

There was a sudden flash of Nahoum's eyes, as though he saw an outcome of
the intention which pleased him, but Hylda, saw the flash, and her senses
were at once alarmed.

"There is no need to accompany me," she said.  "My cousin waits for me."

David opened the door leading into the court-yard.  It was dark, save for
the light of a brazier of coals.  A short distance away, near the outer
gate, glowed a star of red light, and the fragrance of a strong cigar
came over.

"Say, looking for me?" said a voice, and a figure moved towards David.
"Yours to command, pasha, yours to command."  Lacey from Chicago held out
his hand.

"Thee is welcome, friend," said David.

"She's ready, I suppose.  Wonderful person, that.  Stands on her own feet
every time.  She don't seem as though she came of the same stock as me,
does she?"

"I will bring her if thee will wait, friend."

"I'm waiting."  Lacey drew back to the gateway again and leaned against
the wall, his cigar blazing in the dusk.

A moment later David appeared in the garden again, with the slim,
graceful figure of the girl who stood "upon her own feet."  David drew
her aside for a moment.  "Thee is going at once to England?" he asked.

"To-morrow to Alexandria.  There is a steamer next day for Marseilles.
In a fortnight more I shall be in England."

"Thee must forget Egypt," he said.  "Remembrance is not a thing of the
will," she answered.

"It is thy duty to forget.  Thee is young, and it is spring with thee.
Spring should be in thy heart.  Thee has seen a shadow; but let it not
fright thee."

"My only fear is that I may forget," she answered.

"Yet thee will forget."

With a motion towards Lacey he moved to the gate.  Suddenly she turned to
him and touched his arm.  "You will be a great man herein Egypt," she
said.  "You will have enemies without number.  The worst of your enemies
always will be your guest to-night."

He did not, for a moment, understand.  "Nahoum?" he asked.  "I take his
place.  It would not be strange; but I will win him to me."

"You will never win him," she answered.  "Oh, trust my instinct in this!
Watch him.  Beware of him."  David smiled slightly.  "I shall have need
to beware of many.  I am sure thee does well to caution me.  Farewell,"
he added.

"If it should be that I can ever help you--" she said, and paused.

"Thee has helped me," he replied.  "The world is a desert.  Caravans from
all quarters of the sun meet at the cross-roads.  One gives the other
food or drink or medicine, and they move on again.  And all grows dim
with time.  And the camel-drivers are forgotten; but the cross-roads
remain, and the food and the drink and the medicine and the cattle helped
each caravan upon the way.  Is it not enough?"

She placed her hand in his.  It lay there for a moment.  "God be with
thee, friend," he said.

The next instant Thomas Tilman Lacey's drawling voice broke the silence.

"There's something catching about these nights in Egypt.  I suppose it's
the air.  No wind--just the stars, and the ultramarine, and the nothing
to do but lay me down and sleep.  It doesn't give you the jim-jumps like
Mexico.  It makes you forget the world, doesn't it?  You'd do things here
that you wouldn't do anywhere else."

The gate was opened by the bowab, and the two passed through.  David was
standing by the brazier, his hand held unconsciously over the coals, his
eyes turned towards them.  The reddish flame from the fire lit up his
face under the broad-brimmed hat.  His head, slightly bowed, was thrust
forward to the dusk.  Hylda looked at him steadily for a moment.  Their
eyes met, though hers were in the shade.  Again Lacey spoke.  "Don't be
anxious.  I'll see her safe back.  Good-bye.  Give my love to the girls."

David stood looking at the closed gate with eyes full of thought and
wonder and trouble.  He was not thinking of the girl.  There was no
sentimental reverie in his look.  Already his mind was engaged in
scrutiny of the circumstances in which he was set.  He realised fully his
situation.  The idealism which had been born with him had met its reward
in a labour herculean at the least, and the infinite drudgery of the
practical issues came in a terrible pressure of conviction to his mind.
The mind did not shrink from any thought of the dangers in which he would
be placed, from any vision of the struggle he must have with intrigue,
and treachery and vileness.  In a dim, half-realised way he felt that
honesty and truth would be invincible weapons with a people who did not
know them.  They would be embarrassed, if not baffled, by a formula of
life and conduct which they could not understand.

It was not these matters that vexed him now, but the underlying forces of
life set in motion by the blow which killed a fellow-man.  This fact had
driven him to an act of redemption unparalleled in its intensity and
scope; but he could not tell--and this was the thought that shook his
being--how far this act itself, inspiring him to a dangerous and immense
work in life, would sap the best that was in him, since it must remain a
secret crime, for which he could not openly atone.  He asked himself as
he stood by the brazier, the bowab apathetically rolling cigarettes at
his feet, whether, in the flow of circumstance, the fact that he could
not make open restitution, or take punishment for his unlawful act, would
undermine the structure of his character.  He was on the threshold of his
career: action had not yet begun; he was standing like a swimmer on a
high shore, looking into depths beneath which have never been plumbed by
mortal man, wondering what currents, what rocks, lay beneath the surface
of the blue.  Would his strength, his knowledge, his skill, be equal to
the enterprise?  Would he emerge safe and successful, or be carried away
by some strong undercurrent, be battered on unseen rocks?

He turned with a calm face to the door behind which sat the displaced
favourite of the Prince, his mind at rest, the trouble gone out of his
eyes.

"Uncle Benn!  Uncle Benn!" he said to himself, with a warmth at his
heart as he opened the door and stepped inside.

Nahoum sat sipping coffee.  A cigarette was between his fingers.  He
touched his hand to his forehead and his breast as David closed the door
and hung his hat upon a nail.  David's servant, Mahommed Hassan, whom he
had had since first he came to Egypt, was gliding from the room--a large,
square-shouldered fellow of over six feet, dressed in a plain blue yelek,
but on his head the green turban of one who had done a pilgrimage to
Mecca.  Nahoum waved a hand after Mahommed and said:

"Whence came thy servant sadat?"

"He was my guide to Cairo.  I picked him from the street."

Nahoum smiled.  There was no malice in the smile, only, as it might seem,
a frank humour.  "Ah, your Excellency used independent judgment.  Thou
art a judge of men.  But does it make any difference that the man is a
thief and a murderer--a murderer?"

David's eyes darkened, as they were wont to do when he was moved or
shocked.

"Shall one only deal, then, with those who have neither stolen nor slain
--is that the rule of the just in Egypt?"

Nahoum raised his eyes to the ceiling as though in amiable inquiry, and
began to finger a string of beads as a nun might tell her paternosters.
"If that were the rule," he answered, after a moment, "how should any man
be served in Egypt?  Hereabouts is a man's life held cheap, else I had
not been thy guest to-night; and Kaid's Palace itself would be empty, if
every man in it must be honest.  But it is the custom of the place for
political errors to be punished by a hidden hand; we do not call it
murder."

"What is murder, friend?"

"It is such a crime as that of Mahommed yonder, who killed--"

David interposed.  "I do not wish to know his crime.  That is no affair
between thee and me."

Nahoum fingered his beads meditatively.  "It was an affair of the
housetops in his town of Manfaloot.  I have only mentioned it because I
know what view the English take of killing, and how set thou art to have
thy household above reproach, as is meet in a Christian home.  So, I took
it, would be thy mind--which Heaven fill with light for Egypt's sake!--
that thou wouldst have none about thee who were not above reproach,
neither liars, nor thieves, nor murderers."

"But thee would serve with me, friend," rejoined David quietly.  "Thee
has men's lives against thy account."

"Else had mine been against their account."

"Was it not so with Mahommed?  If so, according to the custom of the
land, then Mahommed is as immune as thou art."

"Saadat, like thee I am a Christian, yet am I also Oriental, and what is
crime with one race is none with another.  At the Palace two days past
thou saidst thou hadst never killed a man; and I know that thy religion
condemns killing even in war.  Yet in Egypt thou wilt kill, or thou shalt
thyself be killed, and thy aims will come to naught.  When, as thou
wouldst say, thou hast sinned, hast taken a man's life, then thou wilt
understand.  Thou wilt keep this fellow Mahommed, then?"

"I understand, and I will keep him."

"Surely thy heart is large and thy mind great.  It moveth above small
things.  Thou dost not seek riches here?"

"I have enough; my wants are few."

"There is no precedent for one in office to withhold his hand from profit
and backsheesh."

"Shall we not try to make a precedent?"

"Truthfulness will be desolate--like a bird blown to sea, beating 'gainst
its doom."

"Truth will find an island in the sea."

"If Egypt is that sea, Saadat, there is no island."

David came over close to Nahoum, and looked him in the eyes.

"Surely I can speak to thee, friend, as to one understanding.  Thou art a
Christian--of the ancient fold.  Out of the East came the light.  Thy
Church has preserved the faith.  It is still like a lamp in the mist and
the cloud in the East.  Thou saidst but now that thy heart was with my
purpose.  Shall the truth that I would practise here not find an island
in this sea--and shall it not be the soul of Nahoum Pasha?"

"Have I not given my word?  Nay, then, I swear it by the tomb of my
brother, whom Death met in the highway, and because he loved the sun,
and the talk of men, and the ways of women, rashly smote him out of the
garden of life into the void.  Even by his tomb I swear it."

"Hast thou, then, such malice against Death?  These things cannot happen
save by the will of God."

"And by the hand of man.  But I have no cause for revenge.  Foorgat died
in his sleep like a child.  Yet if it had been the hand of man, Prince
Kaid or any other, I would not have held my hand until I had a life for
his."

"Thou art a Christian, yet thou wouldst meet one wrong by another?"

"I am an Oriental."  Then, with a sudden change of manner, he added:
"But thou hast a Christianity the like of which I have never seen.  I
will learn of thee, Saadat, and thou shalt learn of me also many things
which I know.  They will help thee to understand Egypt and the place
where thou wilt be set--if so be my life is saved, and by thy hand."

Mahommed entered, and came to David.  "Where wilt thou sleep, Saadat?"
he asked.

"The pasha will sleep yonder," David replied, pointing to another room.
"I will sleep here."  He laid a hand upon the couch where he sat.

Nahoum rose and, salaaming, followed Mahommed to the other room.

In a few moments the house was still, and remained so for hours.  Just
before dawn the curtain of Nahoum's room was drawn aside, the Armenian
entered stealthily, and moved a step towards the couch where David lay.
Suddenly he was stopped by a sound.  He glanced towards a corner near
David's feet.  There sat Mahommed watching, a neboot of dom-wood across
his knees.

Their eyes remained fixed upon each other for a moment.  Then Nahoum
passed back into his bedroom as stealthily as he had come.

Mahommed looked closely at David.  He lay with an arm thrown over his
head, resting softly, a moisture on his forehead as on that of a sleeping
child.

"Saadat!  Saadat!" said Mahommed softly to the sleeping figure, scarcely
above his breath, and then with his eyes upon the curtained room
opposite, began to whisper words from the Koran:

"In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful--"




CHAPTER XI

AGAINST THE HOUR OF MIDNIGHT

Achmet the Ropemaker was ill at ease.  He had been set a task in which
he had failed.  The bright Cairene sun starkly glittering on the French
chandeliers and Viennese mirrors, and beating on the brass trays and
braziers by the window, irritated him.  He watched the flies on the wall
abstractedly; he listened to the early peripatetic salesmen crying their
wares in the streets leading to the Palace; he stroked his cadaverous
cheek with yellow fingers; he listened anxiously for a footstep.
Presently he straightened himself up, and his fingers ran down the front
of his coat to make sure that it was buttoned from top to bottom.  He
grew a little paler.  He was less stoical and apathetic than most
Egyptians.  Also he was absurdly vain, and he knew that his vanity would
receive rough usage.

Now the door swung open, and a portly figure entered quickly.  For so
large a man Prince Kaid was light and subtle in his movements.  His face
was mobile, his eye keen and human.

Achmet salaamed low.  "The gardens of the First Heaven be thine, and the
uttermost joy, Effendina," he said elaborately.

"A thousand colours to the rainbow of thy happiness," answered Kaid
mechanically, and seated himself cross-legged on a divan, taking a
narghileh from the black slave who had glided ghostlike behind him.

"What hour didst thou find him?  Where hast thou placed him?" he added,
after a moment.

Achmet salaamed once more.  "I have burrowed without ceasing, but the
holes are empty, Effendina," he returned, abjectly and nervously.

He had need to be concerned.  The reply was full of amazement and anger.
"Thou hast not found him?  Thou hast not brought Nahoum to me?"  Kaid's
eyes were growing reddish; no good sign for those around him, for any
that crossed him or his purposes.

"A hundred eyes failed to search him out.  Ten thousand piastres did not
find him; the kourbash did not reveal him."

Kaid's frown grew heavier.  "Thou shalt bring Nahoum to me by midnight
to-morrow!"

"But if he has escaped, Effendina?"  Achmet asked desperately.  He had a
peasant's blood; fear of power was ingrained.

"What was thy business but to prevent escape?  Son of a Nile crocodile,
if he has escaped, thou too shalt escape from Egypt--into Fazougli.
Fool, Nahoum is no coward.  He would remain.  He is in Egypt."

"If he be in Egypt, I will find him, Effendina.  Have I ever failed?
When thou hast pointed, have I not brought?  Have there not been many,
Effendina?  Should I not bring Nahoum, who has held over our heads the
rod?"

Kaid looked at him meditatively, and gave no answer to the question.
"He reached too far," he muttered.  "Egypt has one master only."

The door opened softly and the black slave stole in.  His lips moved, but
scarce a sound travelled across the room.  Kaid understood, and made a
gesture.  An instant afterwards the vast figure of Higli Pasha bulked
into the room.  Again there were elaborate salutations and salaams, and
Kaid presently said:

"Foorgat?"

"Effendina," answered High, "it is not known how he died.  He was in this
Palace alive at night.  In the morning he was found in bed at his own
home."

"There was no wound?"

"None, Effendina."

"The thong?"

"There was no mark, Effendina."

"Poison?"

"There was no sign, Effendina."

"Diamond-dust?"

"Impossible, Effendina.  There was not time.  He was alive and well here
at the Palace at eleven, and--" Kaid made an impatient gesture.  "By the
stone in the Kaabah, but it is not reasonable that Foorgat should die in
his bed like a babe and sleep himself into heaven!  Fate meant him for a
violent end; but ere that came there was work to do for me.  He had a
gift for scenting treason--and he had treasure."  His eyes shut and
opened again with a look not pleasant to see.  "But since it was that he
must die so soon, then the loan he promised must now be a gift from the
dead, if he be dead, if he be not shamming.  Foorgat was a dire jester."

"But now it is no jest, Effendina.  He is in his grave."

"In his grave!  Bismillah!  In his grave, dost thou say?"

High's voice quavered.  "Yesterday before sunset, Effendina.  By Nahoum's
orders."

"I ordered the burial for to-day.  By the gates of hell, but who shall
disobey me!"

"He was already buried when the Effendina's orders came," High pleaded
anxiously.

"Nahoum should have been taken yesterday," he rejoined, with malice in
his eyes.

"If I had received the orders of the Effendina on the night when the
Effendina dismissed Nahoum--" Achmet said softly, and broke off.

"A curse upon thine eyes that did not see thy duty!" Kaid replied
gloomily.  Then he turned to High.  "My seal has been put upon Foorgat's
doors?  His treasure-places have been found?  The courts have been
commanded as to his estate, the banks--"

"It was too late, Effendina," replied High hopelessly.  Kaid got to his
feet slowly, rage possessing him.  "Too late!  Who makes it too late when
I command?"

"When Foorgat was found dead, Nahoum at once seized the palace and the
treasures.  Then he went to the courts and to the holy men, and claimed
succession.  That was while it was yet early morning.  Then he instructed
the banks.  The banks hold Foorgat's fortune against us, Effendina."

"Foorgat had turned Mahommedan.  Nahoum is a Christian.  My will is law.
Shall a Christian dog inherit from a true believer?  The courts, the
Wakfs shall obey me.  And thou, son of a burnt father, shalt find Nahoum!
Kaid shall not be cheated.  Foorgat pledged the loan.  It is mine.  Allah
scorch thine eyes!" he added fiercely to Achmet, "but thou shalt find
this Christian gentleman, Nahoum."

Suddenly, with a motion of disgust, he sat down, and taking the stem of
the narghileh, puffed vigorously in silence.  Presently in a red fury he
cried: "Go--go--go, and bring me back by midnight Nahoum, and Foorgat's
treasures, to the last piastre.  Let every soldier be a spy, if thine own
spies fail."

As they turned to go, the door opened again, the black slave appeared,
and ushered David into the room.  David salaamed, but not low, and stood
still.

On the instant Kaid changed,  The rage left his face.  He leaned forward
eagerly, the cruel and ugly look faded slowly from his eyes.

"May thy days of life be as a river with sands of gold, effendi," he said
gently.  He had a voice like music.  "May the sun shine in thy heart and
fruits of wisdom flourish there, Effendina," answered David quietly.  He
saluted the others gravely, and his eyes rested upon Achmet in a way
which Higli Pasha noted for subsequent gossip.

Kaid pulled at his narghileh for a moment, mumbling good-humouredly to
himself and watching the smoke reel away; then, with half-shut eyes, he
said to David: "Am I master in Egypt or no, effendi?"

"In ruling this people the Prince of Egypt stands alone," answered David.
"There is no one between him and the people.  There is no Parliament."

"It is in my hand, then, to give or to withhold, to make or to break?"
Kaid chuckled to have this tribute, as he thought, from a Christian, who
did not blink at Oriental facts, and was honest.

David bowed his head to Kaid's words.

"Then if it be my hand that lifts up or casts down, that rewards or that
punishes, shall my arm not stretch into the darkest corner of Egypt to
bring forth a traitor?  Shall it not be so?"

"It belongs to thy power," answered David.  "It is the ancient custom of
princes here.  Custom is law, while it is yet the custom."

Kaid looked at him enigmatically for a moment, then smiled grimly--he
saw the course of the lance which David had thrown.  He bent his look
fiercely on Achmet and Higli.  "Ye have heard.  Truth is on his lips.
I have stretched out my arm.  Ye are my arm, to reach for and gather in
Nahoum and all that is his."  He turned quickly to David again.  "I have
given this hawk, Achmet, till to-morrow night to bring Nahoum to me," he
explained.

"And if he fails--a penalty?  He will lose his place?" asked David, with
cold humour.

"More than his place," Kaid rejoined, with a cruel smile.

"Then is his place mine, Effendina," rejoined David, with a look which
could give Achmet no comfort.  "Thou will bring Nahoum--thou?" asked
Kaid, in amazement.

"I have brought him," answered David.  "Is it not my duty to know the
will of the Effendina and to do it, when it is just and right?"

"Where is he--where does he wait?" questioned Kaid eagerly.

"Within the Palace--here," replied David.  "He awaits his fate in thine
own dwelling, Effendina."  Kaid glowered upon Achmet.  "In the years
which Time, the Scytheman, will cut from thy life, think, as thou fastest
at Ramadan or feastest at Beiram, how Kaid filled thy plate when thou
wast a beggar, and made thee from a dog of a fellah into a pasha.  Go to
thy dwelling, and come here no more," he added sharply.  "I am sick of
thy yellow, sinful face."

Achmet made no reply, but, as he passed beyond the door with Higli, he
said in a whisper: "Come--to Harrik and the army!  He shall be deposed.
The hour is at hand."  High answered him faintly, however.  He had not
the courage of the true conspirator, traitor though he was.

As they disappeared, Kaid made a wide gesture of friendliness to David,
and motioned to a seat, then to a narghileh.  David seated himself, took
the stem of a narghileh in his mouth for an instant, then laid it down
again and waited.

"Nahoum--I do not understand," Kaid said presently, his eyes gloating.

"He comes of his own will, Effendina."

"Wherefore?"  Kaid could not realise the truth.  This truth was not
Oriental on the face of it.  "Effendina, he comes to place his life in
thy hands.  He would speak with thee."

"How is it thou dost bring him?"

"He sought me to plead for him with thee, and because I knew his peril,
I kept him with me and brought him hither but now."

"Nahoum went to thee?"  Kaid's eyes peered abstractedly into the distance
between the almost shut lids.  That Nahoum should seek David, who had
displaced him from his high office, was scarcely Oriental, when his every
cue was to have revenge on his rival.  This was a natural sequence to his
downfall.  It was understandable.  But here was David safe and sound.
Was it, then, some deeper scheme of future vengeance?  The Oriental
instinctively pierced the mind of the Oriental.  He could have realised
fully the fierce, blinding passion for revenge which had almost overcome
Nahoum's calculating mind in the dark night, with his foe in the next
room, which had driven him suddenly from his bed to fall upon David, only
to find Mahommed Hassan watching--also with the instinct of the Oriental.

Some future scheme of revenge?  Kaid's eyes gleamed red.  There would be
no future for Nahoum.  "Why did Nahoum go to thee?" he asked again
presently.

"That I might beg his life of thee, Highness, as I said," David replied.

"I have not ordered his death."

David looked meditatively at him.  "It was agreed between us yesterday
that I should speak plainly--is it not so?"

Kaid nodded, and leaned back among the cushions.

"If what the Effendina intends is fulfilled, there is no other way but
death for Nahoum," added David.  "What is my intention, effendi?"

"To confiscate the fortune left by Foorgat Bey.  Is it not so?"

"I had a pledge from Foorgat--a loan."

"That is the merit of the case, Effendina.  I am otherwise concerned.
There is the law.  Nahoum inherits.  Shouldst thou send him to Fazougli,
he would still inherit."

"He is a traitor."

"Highness, where is the proof?"

"I know.  My friends have disappeared one by one--Nahoum.  Lands have
been alienated from me--Nahoum.  My income has declined--Nahoum.  I have
given orders and they have not been fulfilled--Nahoum.  Always, always
some rumour of assassination, or of conspiracy, or the influence and
secret agents of the Sultan--all Nahoum.  He is a traitor.  He has grown
rich while I borrow from Europe to pay my army and to meet the demands of
the Sultan."

"What man can offer evidence in this save the Effendina who would profit
by his death?"

"I speak of what I know.  I satisfy myself.  It is enough."

"Highness, there is a better way; to satisfy the people, for whom thee
lives.  None should stand between.  Is not the Effendina a father to
them?"

"The people!  Would they not say Nahoum had got his due if he were
blotted from their sight?"

"None has been so generous to the poor, so it is said by all.  His hand
has been upon the rich only.  Now, Effendina, he has brought hither the
full amount of all he has received and acquired in thy service.  He would
offer it in tribute."

Kaid smiled sardonically.  "It is a thin jest.  When a traitor dies the
State confiscates his goods!"

"Thee calls him traitor.  Does thee believe he has ever conspired against
thy life?"

Kaid shrugged his shoulders.

"Let me answer for thee, Effendina.  Again and again he has defeated
conspiracy.  He has blotted it out--by the sword and other means.  He has
been a faithful servant to his Prince at least.  If he has done after the
manner of all others in power here, the fault is in the system, not in
the man alone.  He has been a friend to thee, Kaid."

"I hope to find in thee a better."

"Why should he not live?"

"Thou hast taken his place."

"Is it, then, the custom to destroy those who have served thee, when they
cease to serve?"  David rose to his feet quickly.  His face was shining
with a strange excitement.  It gave him a look of exaltation, his lips
quivered with indignation.  "Does thee kill because there is silence in
the grave?"

Kaid blew a cloud of smoke slowly.  "Silence in the grave is a fact
beyond dispute," he said cynically.

"Highness, thee changes servants not seldom," rejoined David meaningly.
"It may be that my service will be short.  When I go, will the long arm
reach out for me in the burrows where I shall hide?"

Kaid looked at him with ill-concealed admiration.  "Thou art an
Englishman, not an Egyptian, a guest, not a subject, and under no law
save my friendship."  Then he added scornfully: "When an Englishman in
England leaves office, no matter how unfaithful, though he be a friend of
any country save his own, they send him to the House of Lords--or so I
was told in France when I was there.  What does it matter to thee what
chances to Nahoum?  Thou hast his place with me.  My secrets are thine.
They shall all be thine--for years I have sought an honest man.  Thou art
safe whether to go or to stay."

"It may be so.  I heed it not.  My life is as that of a gull--if the wind
carry it out to sea, it is lost.  As my uncle went I shall go one day.
Thee will never do me ill; but do I not know that I shall have foes at
every corner, behind every mooshrabieh screen, on every mastaba, in the
pasha's court-yard, by every mosque?  Do I not know in what peril I serve
Egypt?"

"Yet thou wouldst keep alive Nahoum!  He will dig thy grave deep, and
wait long."

"He will work with me for Egypt, Effendina."  Kaid's face darkened.

"What is thy meaning?"

"I ask Nahoum's life that he may serve under me, to do those things thou
and I planned yesterday--the land, taxation, the army, agriculture, the
Soudan.  Together we will make Egypt better and greater and richer--the
poor richer, even though the rich be poorer."

"And Kaid--poorer?"

"When Egypt is richer, the Prince is richer, too.  Is not the Prince
Egypt?  Highness, yesterday--yesterday thee gave me my commission.  If
thee will not take Nahoum again into service to aid me, I must not
remain.  I cannot work alone."

"Thou must have this Christian Oriental to work with thee?"  He looked at
David closely, then smiled sardonically, but with friendliness to David
in his eyes.  "Nahoum has prayed to work with thee, to be a slave where
he was master?  He says to thee that he would lay his heart upon the
altar of Egypt?"  Mordant, questioning humour was in his voice.

David inclined his head.

"He would give up all that is his?"

"It is so, Effendina."

"All save Foorgat's heritage?"

"It belonged to their father.  It is a due inheritance."

Kaid laughed sarcastically.  "It was got in Mehemet Ali's service."

"Nathless, it is a heritage, Effendina.  He would give that fortune back
again to Egypt in work with me, as I shall give of what is mine, and of
what I am, in the name of God, the all-merciful!"

The smile faded out of Kaid's face, and wonder settled on it.  What
manner of man was this?  His life, his fortune for Egypt, a country alien
to him, which he had never seen till six months ago!  What kind of being
was behind the dark, fiery eyes and the pale, impassioned face?  Was he
some new prophet?  If so, why should he not have cast a spell upon
Nahoum?  Had he not bewitched himself, Kaid, one of the ablest princes
since Alexander or Amenhotep?  Had Nahoum, then, been mastered and won?
Was ever such power?  In how many ways had it not been shown!  He had
fought for his uncle's fortune, and had got it at last yesterday without
a penny of backsheesh.  Having got his will, he was now ready to give
that same fortune to the good of Egypt--but not to beys and pashas and
eunuchs (and that he should have escaped Mizraim was the marvel beyond
all others!), or even to the Prince Pasha; but to that which would make
"Egypt better and greater and richer--the poor richer, even though the
rich be poorer!" Kaid chuckled to himself at that.  To make the rich
poorer would suit him well, so long as he remained rich.  And, if riches
could be got, as this pale Frank proposed, by less extortion from the
fellah and less kourbash, so much the happier for all.

He was capable of patriotism, and this Quaker dreamer had stirred it in
him a little.  Egypt, industrial in a real sense; Egypt, paying her own
way without tyranny and loans: Egypt, without corvee, and with an army
hired from a full public purse; Egypt, grown strong and able to resist
the suzerainty and cruel tribute--that touched his native goodness of
heart, so long, in disguise; it appealed to the sense of leadership in
him; to the love of the soil deep in his bones; to regard for the common
people--for was not his mother a slave?  Some distant nobleness trembled
in him, while yet the arid humour of the situation flashed into his eyes,
and, getting to his feet, he said to David: "Where is Nahoum?"

David told him, and he clapped his hands.  The black slave entered,
received an order, and disappeared.  Neither spoke, but Kaid's face was
full of cheerfulness.

Presently Nahoum entered and salaamed low, then put his hand upon his
turban.  There was submission, but no cringing or servility in his
manner.  His blue eyes looked fearlessly before him.  His face was not
paler than its wont.  He waited for Kaid to speak.

"Peace be to thee," Kaid murmured mechanically.

"And to thee, peace, O Prince," answered Nahoum.  "May the feet of Time
linger by thee, and Death pass thy house forgetful."

There was silence for a moment, and then Kaid spoke again.  "What are thy
properties and treasure?" he asked sternly.

Nahoum drew forth a paper from his sleeve, and handed it to Kaid without
a word.  Kaid glanced at it hurriedly, then said: "This is but nothing.
What hast thou hidden from me?"

"It is all I have got in thy service, Highness," he answered boldly.
"All else I have given to the poor; also to spies--and to the army."

"To spies--and to the army?" asked Kaid slowly, incredulously.

"Wilt thou come with me to the window, Effendina?"  Kaid, wondering, went
to the great windows which looked on to the Palace square.  There, drawn
up, were a thousand mounted men as black as ebony, wearing shining white
metal helmets and fine chain-armour and swords and lances like medieval
crusaders.  The horses, too, were black, and the mass made a barbaric
display belonging more to another period in the world's history.  This
regiment of Nubians Kaid had recruited from the far south, and had
maintained at his own expense.  When they saw him at the window now,
their swords clashed on their thighs and across their breasts, and they
raised a great shout of greeting.

"Well?" asked Kaid, with a ring to the voice.  "They are loyal,
Effendina, every man.  But the army otherwise is honeycombed with
treason.  Effendina, my money has been busy in the army paying and
bribing officers, and my spies were costly.  There has been sedition--
conspiracy; but until I could get the full proofs I waited; I could but
bribe and wait.  Were it not for the money I had spent, there might have
been another Prince of Egypt."

Kald's face darkened.  He was startled, too.  He had been taken unawares.
"My brother Harrik--!"

"And I should have lost my place, lost all for which I cared.  I had no
love for money; it was but a means.  I spent it for the State--for the
Effendina, and to keep my place.  I lost my place, however, in another
way."

"Proofs!  Proofs!"  Kaid's voice was hoarse with feeling.

"I have no proofs against Prince Harrik, no word upon paper.  But there
are proofs that the army is seditious, that, at any moment, it may
revolt."

"Thou hast kept this secret?" questioned Kaid darkly and suspiciously.

"The time had not come.  Read, Effendina," he added, handing some papers
over.

"But it is the whole army!" said Kaid aghast, as he read.  He was
convinced.

"There is only one guilty," returned Nahoum.  Their eyes met.  Oriental
fatalism met inveterate Oriental distrust and then instinctively Kaid's
eyes turned to David.  In the eyes of the Inglesi was a different thing.
The test of the new relationship had come.  Ferocity was in his heart, a
vitriolic note was in his voice as he said to David, "If this be true--
the army rotten, the officers disloyal, treachery under every tunic--
bismillah, speak!"

"Shall it not be one thing at a time, Effendina?" asked David.  He made
a gesture towards Nahoum.  Kaid motioned to a door.  "Wait yonder," he
said darkly to Nahoum.  As the door opened, and Nahoum disappeared
leisurely and composedly, David caught a glimpse of a guard of armed
Nubians in leopard-skins filed against the white wall of the other room.

"What is thy intention towards Nahoum, Effendina?" David asked
presently.

Kaid's voice was impatient.  "Thou hast asked his life--take it; it is
thine; but if I find him within these walls again until I give him leave,
he shall go as Foorgat went."

"What was the manner of Foorgat's going?" asked David quietly.

"As a wind blows through a court-yard, and the lamp goes out, so he went
--in the night.  Who can say?  Wherefore speculate?  He is gone.  It is
enough.  Were it not for thee, Egypt should see Nahoum no more."

David sighed, and his eyes closed for an instant.  "Effendina, Nahoum has
proved his faith--is it not so?"  He pointed to the documents in Kaid's
hands.

A grim smile passed over Kaid's face.  Distrust of humanity, incredulity,
cold cynicism, were in it.  "Wheels within wheels, proofs within proofs,"
he said.  "Thou hast yet to learn the Eastern heart.  When thou seest
white in the East, call it black, for in an instant it will be black.
Malaish, it is the East!  Have I not trusted--did I not mean well by all?
Did I not deal justly?  Yet my justice was but darkness of purpose, the
hidden terror to them all.  So did I become what thou findest me and dost
believe me--a tyrant, in whose name a thousand do evil things of which I
neither hear nor know.  Proof!  When a woman lies in your arms, it is not
the moment to prove her fidelity.  Nahoum has crawled back to my feet
with these things, and by the beard of the Prophet they are true!"  He
looked at the papers with loathing.  "But what his purpose was when he
spied upon and bribed my army I know not.  Yet, it shall be said, he has
held Harrik back--Harrik, my brother.  Son of Sheitan and slime of the
Nile, have I not spared Harrik all these years!"

"Hast thou proof, Effendina?"

"I have proof enough; I shall have more soon.  To save their lives,
these, these will tell.  I have their names here."  He tapped the papers.
"There are ways to make them tell.  Now, speak, effendi, and tell me what
I shall do to Harrik."

"Wouldst thou proclaim to Egypt, to the Sultan, to the world that the
army is disloyal?  If these guilty men are seized, can the army be
trusted?  Will it not break away in fear?  Yonder Nubians are not enough
--a handful lost in the melee.  Prove the guilt of him who perverted the
army and sought to destroy thee.  Punish him."

"How shall there be proof save through those whom he has perverted?
There is no writing."

"There is proof," answered David calmly.

"Where shall I find it?" Kaid laughed contemptuously.

"I have the proof," answered David gravely.  "Against Harrik?"

"Against Prince Harrik Pasha."

"Thou--what dost thou know?"

"A woman of the Prince heard him give instructions for thy disposal,
Effendina, when the Citadel should turns its guns upon Cairo and the
Palace.  She was once of thy harem.  Thou didst give her in marriage,
and she came to the harem of Prince Harrik at last.  A woman from without
who sang to her--a singing girl, an al'mah--she trusted with the paper to
warn thee, Effendina, in her name.  Her heart had remembrance of thee.
Her foster-brother Mahommed Hassan is my servant.  Him she told, and
Mahommed laid the matter before me this morning.  Here is a sign by which
thee will remember her, so she said.  Zaida she was called here."  He
handed over an amulet which had one red gem in the centre.

Kaid's face had set into fierce resolution, but as he took the amulet his
eyes softened.

"Zaida.  Inshallah!  Zaida, she was called.  She has the truth almost of
the English.  She could not lie ever.  My heart smote me concerning her,
and I gave her in marriage."  Then his face darkened again, and his teeth
showed in malice.  A demon was roused in him.  He might long ago have
banished the handsome and insinuating Harrik, but he had allowed him
wealth and safety--and now .  .  .

His intention was unmistakable.

"He shall die the death," he said.  "Is it not so?" he added fiercely to
David, and gazed at him fixedly.  Would this man of peace plead for the
traitor, the would-be fratricide?

"He is a traitor; he must die," answered David slowly.

Kald's eyes showed burning satisfaction.  "If he were thy brother, thou
wouldst kill him?"

"I would give a traitor to death for the country's sake.  There is no
other way."

"To-night he shall die."

"But with due trial, Effendina?"

"Trial--is not the proof sufficient?"

"But if he confess, and give evidence himself, and so offer himself to
die?"

"Is Harrik a fool?" answered Kaid, with scorn.

If there be a trial and sentence is given, the truth concerning the army
must appear.  Is that well?  Egypt will shake to its foundations--to the
joy of its enemies."

"Then he shall die secretly."

"The Prince Pasha of Egypt will be called a murderer."

Kaid shrugged his shoulders.

"The Sultan--Europe--is it well?"

"I will tell the truth," Kaid rejoined angrily.

"If the Effendina will trust me, Prince Harrik shall confess his crime
and pay the penalty also."

"What is thy purpose?"

"I will go to his palace and speak with him."

"Seize him?"

"I have no power to seize him, Effendina."

"I will give it.  My Nubians shall go also."

"Effendina, I will go alone.  It is the only way.  There is great danger
to the throne.  Who can tell what a night will bring forth?"

"If Harrik should escape--"

"If I were an Egyptian and permitted Harrik to escape, my life would pay
for my failure.  If I failed, thou wouldst not succeed.  If I am to serve
Egypt, there must be trust in me from thee, or it were better to pause
now.  If I go, as I shall go, alone, I put my life in danger--is it not
so?"

Suddenly Kaid sat down again among his cushions.  "Inshallah!  In the
name of God, be it so.  Thou art not as other men.  There is something in
thee above my thinking.  But I will not sleep till I see thee again."

"I shall see thee at midnight, Effendina.  Give me the ring from thy
finger."

Kaid passed it over, and David put it in his pocket.  Then he turned to
go.

"Nahoum?" he asked.

"Take him hence.  Let him serve thee if it be thy will.  Yet I cannot
understand it.  The play is dark.  Is he not an Oriental?"

"He is a Christian."

Kaid laughed sourly, and clapped his hands for the slave.

In a moment David and Nahoum were gone.  "Nahoum, a Christian!
Bismillah!" murmured Kaid scornfully, then fell to pondering darkly over
the evil things he had heard.

Meanwhile the Nubians in their glittering armour waited without in the
blistering square.




CHAPTER XII

THE JEHAD AND THE LIONS

"Allah hu Achbar!  Allah hu Achbar!  Ashhadu an la illaha illalla!"  The
sweetly piercing, resonant voice of the Muezzin rang far and commandingly
on the clear evening air, and from bazaar and crowded street the faithful
silently hurried to the mosques, leaving their slippers at the door,
while others knelt where the call found them, and touched their foreheads
to the ground.

In his palace by the Nile, Harrik, the half-brother of the Prince Pasha,
heard it, and breaking off from conversation with two urgent visitors,
passed to an alcove near, dropping a curtain behind him.  Kneeling
reverently on the solitary furniture of the room--a prayer-rug from
Medina--he lost himself as completely in his devotions as though his life
were an even current of unforbidden acts and motives.

Cross-legged on the great divan of the room he had left, his less pious
visitors, unable to turn their thoughts from the dark business on which
they had come, smoked their cigarettes, talking to each other in tones so
low as would not have been heard by a European, and with apparent
listlessness.

Their manner would not have indicated that they were weighing matters of
life and death, of treason and infamy, of massacre and national shame.
Only the sombre, smouldering fire of their eyes was evidence of the
lighted fuse of conspiracy burning towards the magazine.  One look of
surprise had been exchanged when Harrik Pasha left them suddenly--time
was short for what they meant to do; but they were Muslims, and they
resigned themselves.

"The Inglesi must be the first to go; shall a Christian dog rule over
us?"

It was Achmet the Ropemaker who spoke, his yellow face wrinkling with
malice, though his voice but murmured hoarsely.

"Nahoum will kill him."  Higli Pasha laughed low--it was like the gurgle
of water in the narghileh--a voice of good nature and persuasiveness from
a heart that knew no virtue.  "Bismillah!  Who shall read the meaning of
it?  Why has he not already killed?"

"Nahoum would choose his own time--after he has saved his life by the
white carrion.  Kaid will give him his life if the Inglesi asks.  The
Inglesi, he is mad.  If he were not mad, he would see to it that Nahoum
was now drying his bones in the sands."

"What each has failed to do for the other shall be done for them,"
answered Achmet, a hateful leer on his immobile features.  "To-night many
things shall be made right.  To-morrow there will be places empty and
places filled.  Egypt shall begin again to-morrow."

"Kaid?"

Achmet stopped smoking for a moment.  "When the khamsin comes, when the
camels stampede, and the children of the storm fall upon the caravan, can
it be foretold in what way Fate shall do her work?  So but the end be the
same--malaish!  We shall be content tomorrow."

Now he turned and looked at his companion as though his mind had chanced
on a discovery.  "To him who first brings word to a prince who inherits,
that the reigning prince is dead, belong honour and place," he said.

"Then shall it be between us twain," said High, and laid his hot palm
against the cold, snaky palm of the other.  "And he to whom the honour
falls shall help the other."

"Aiwa, but it shall be so," answered Achmet, and then they spoke in lower
tones still, their eyes on the curtain behind which Harrik prayed.

Presently Harrik entered, impassive, yet alert, his slight, handsome
figure in sharp contrast to the men lounging in the cushions before him,
who salaamed as he came forward.  The features were finely chiselled, the
forehead white and high, the lips sensuous, the eyes fanatical, the look
concentrated yet abstracted.  He took a seat among the cushions, and,
after a moment, said to Achmet, in a voice abnormally deep and powerful:
"Diaz--there is no doubt of Diaz?"

"He awaits the signal.  The hawk flies not swifter than Diaz will act."

"The people--the bazaars--the markets?"

"As the air stirs a moment before the hurricane comes, so the whisper has
stirred them.  From one lip to another, from one street to another, from
one quarter to another, the word has been passed--'Nahoum was a
Christian, but Nahoum was an Egyptian whose heart was Muslim.  The
stranger is a Christian and an Inglesi.  Reason has fled from the Prince
Pasha, the Inglesi has bewitched him.  But the hour of deliverance
draweth nigh.  Be ready!  To-night!'  So has the whisper gone."

Harrik's eyes burned.  "God is great," he said.  "The time has come.  The
Christians spoil us.  From France, from England, from Austria--it is
enough.  Kaid has handed us over to the Greek usurers, the Inglesi and
the Frank are everywhere.  And now this new-comer who would rule Kaid,
and lay his hand upon Egypt like Joseph of old, and bring back Nahoum,
to the shame of every Muslim--behold, the spark is to the tinder, it
shall burn."

"And the hour, Effendina?"

"At midnight.  The guns to be trained on the Citadel, the Palace
surrounded.  Kaid's Nubians?"

"A hundred will be there, Effendina, the rest a mile away at their
barracks."  Achmet rubbed his cold palms together in satisfaction.

"And Prince Kaid, Effendina?" asked Higli cautiously.

The fanatical eyes turned away.  "The question is foolish--have ye no
brains?" he said impatiently.

A look of malignant triumph flashed from Achmet to High, and he said,
scarce above a whisper: "May thy footsteps be as the wings of the eagle,
Effendina.  The heart of the pomegranate is not redder than our hearts
are red for thee.  Cut deep into our hearts, and thou shalt find the last
beat is for thee--and for the Jehad!"

"The Jehad--ay, the Jehad!  The time is at hand," answered Harrik,
glowering at the two.  "The sword shall not be sheathed till we have
redeemed Egypt.  Go your ways, effendis, and peace be on you and on all
the righteous worshippers of God!"

As High and Achmet left the palace, the voice of a holy man--admitted
everywhere and treated with reverence--chanting the Koran, came
somnolently through the court-yard: "Bismillah hirrahmah, nirraheem.
Elhamdu lillahi sabbila!"

Rocking his body backwards and forwards and dwelling sonorously on each
vowel, the holy man seemed the incarnation of Muslim piety; but as the
two conspirators passed him with scarce a glance, and made their way to a
small gate leading into the great garden bordering on the Nile, his eyes
watched them sharply.  When they had passed through, he turned towards
the windows of the harem, still chanting.  For a long time he chanted.
An occasional servant came and went, but his voice ceased not, and he
kept his eyes fixed ever on the harem windows.

At last his watching had its reward.  Something fluttered from a window
to the ground.  Still chanting, he rose and began walking round the great
court-yard.  Twice he went round, still chanting, but the third time he
stooped to pick up a little strip of linen which had fallen from the
window, and concealed it in his sleeve.  Presently he seated himself
again, and, still chanting, spread out the linen in his palm and read the
characters upon it.  For an instant there was a jerkiness to the voice,
and then it droned on resonantly again.  Now the eyes of the holy man
were fixed on the great gates through which strangers entered, and he was
seated in the way which any one must take who came to the palace doors.

It was almost dark, when he saw the bowab, after repeated knocking,
sleepily and grudgingly open the gates to admit a visitor.  There seemed
to be a moment's hesitation on the bowab's part, but he was presently
assured by something the visitor showed him, and the latter made his way
deliberately to the palace doors.  As the visitor neared the holy man,
who chanted on monotonously, he was suddenly startled to hear between the
long-drawn syllables the quick words in Arabic:


"Beware, Saadat!  See, I am Mahommed Hassan, thy servant!  At midnight
they surround Kaid's palace--Achmet and Higli--and kill the Prince Pasha.
Return, Saadat.  Harrik will kill thee."

David made no sign, but with a swift word to the faithful Mahommed
Hassan, passed on, and was presently admitted to the palace.  As the
doors closed behind him, he would hear the voice of the holy man still
chanting: "Waladalleen--Ameen-Ameen!  Waladalleen--Ameen!"

The voice followed him, fainter and fainter, as he passed through the
great bare corridors with the thick carpets on which the footsteps made
no sound, until it came, soft and undefined, as it were from a great
distance.  Then suddenly there fell upon him a sense of the peril of his
enterprise.  He had been left alone in the vast dim hall while a slave,
made obsequious by the sight of the ring of the Prince Pasha, sought his
master.  As he waited he was conscious that people were moving about
behind the great screens of mooshrabieh which separated this room from
others, and that eyes were following his every motion.  He had gained
easy ingress to this place; but egress was a matter of some speculation.
The doors which had closed behind him might swing one way only!  He had
voluntarily put himself in the power of a man whose fatal secret he knew.
He only felt a moment's apprehension, however.  He had been moved to come
from a whisper in his soul; and he had the sure conviction of the
predestinarian that he was not to be the victim of "The Scytheman" before
his appointed time.  His mind resumed its composure, and he watchfully
waited the return of the slave.

Suddenly he was conscious of some one behind him, though he had heard no
one approach.  He swung round and was met by the passive face of the
black slave in personal attendance on Harrik.  The slave did not speak,
but motioned towards a screen at the end of the room, and moved towards
it.  David followed.  As they reached it, a broad panel opened, and they
passed through, between a line of black slaves.  Then there was a sudden
darkness, and a moment later David was ushered into a room blazing with
light.  Every inch of the walls was hung with red curtains.  No door was
visible.  He was conscious of this as the panel clicked behind him, and
the folds of the red velvet caught his shoulder in falling.  Now he saw
sitting on a divan on the opposite side of the room Prince Harrik.

David had never before seen him, and his imagination had fashioned a
different personality.  Here was a combination of intellect, refinement,
and savagery.  The red, sullen lips stamped the delicate, fanatical face
with cruelty and barbaric indulgence, while yet there was an intensity in
the eyes that showed the man was possessed of an idea which mastered him
--a root-thought.  David was at once conscious of a complex personality,
of a man in whom two natures fought.  He understood it.  By instinct
the man was a Mahdi, by heredity he was a voluptuary, that strange
commingling of the religious and the evil found in so many criminals.
In some far corner of his nature David felt something akin.  The
rebellion in his own blood against the fine instinct of his Quaker faith
and upbringing made him grasp the personality before him.  Had he himself
been born in these surroundings, under these influences!  The thought
flashed through his mind like lightning, even as he bowed before Harrik,
who salaamed and said: "Peace be unto thee!" and motioned him to a seat
on a divan near and facing him.

"What is thy business with me, effendi?" asked Harrik.

"I come on the business of the Prince Pasha," answered David.

Harrik touched his fez mechanically, then his breast and lips, and a
cruel smile lurked at the corners of his mouth as he rejoined:

"The feet of them who wear the ring of their Prince wait at no man's
door.  The carpet is spread for them.  They go and they come as the feet
of the doe in the desert.  Who shall say, They shall not come; who shall
say, They shall not return!"

Though the words were spoken with an air of ingenuous welcome, David felt
the malignity in the last phrase, and knew that now was come the most
fateful moment of his life.  In his inner being he heard the dreadful
challenge of Fate.  If he failed in his purpose with this man, he would
never begin his work in Egypt.  Of his life he did not think--his life
was his purpose, and the one was nothing without the other.  No other man
would have undertaken so Quixotic an enterprise, none would have exposed
himself so recklessly to the dreadful accidents of circumstance.  There
had been other ways to overcome this crisis, but he had rejected them for
a course fantastic and fatal when looked at in the light of ordinary
reason.  A struggle between the East and the West was here to be fought
out between two wills; between an intellectual libertine steeped in
Oriental guilt and cruelty and self-indulgence, and a being selfless,
human, and in an agony of remorse for a life lost by his hand.

Involuntarily David's eyes ran round the room before he replied.  How
many slaves and retainers waited behind those velvet curtains?

Harrik saw the glance and interpreted it correctly.  With a look of dark
triumph he clapped his hands.  As if by magic fifty black slaves
appeared, armed with daggers.  They folded their arms and waited like
statues.

David made no sign of discomposure, but said slowly: "Dost thou think I
did not know my danger, Eminence?  Do I seem to thee such a fool?  I came
alone as one would come to the tent of a Bedouin chief whose son one had
slain, and ask for food and safety.  A thousand men were mine to command,
but I came alone.  Is thy guest imbecile?  Let them go.  I have that to
say which is for Prince Harrik's ear alone."

An instant's hesitation, and Harrik motioned the slaves away.  "What is
the private word for my ear?" he asked presently, fingering the stem of
the narghileh.

"To do right by Egypt, the land of thy fathers and thy land; to do right
by the Prince Pasha, thy brother."

"What is Egypt to thee?  Why shouldst thou bring thine insolence here?
Couldst thou not preach in thine own bazaars beyond the sea?"

David showed no resentment.  His reply was composed and quiet.  "I am
come to save Egypt from the work of thy hands."

"Dog of an unbeliever, what hast thou to do with me, or the work of my
hands?"

David held up Kaid's ring, which had lain in his hand.  "I come from the
master of Egypt--master of thee, and of thy life, and of all that is
thine."

"What is Kaid's message to me?" Harrik asked, with an effort at
unconcern, for David's boldness had in it something chilling to his
fierce passion and pride.

"The word of the Effendina is to do right by Egypt, to give thyself to
justice and to peace."

"Have done with parables.  To do right by Egypt wherein, wherefore?"
The eyes glinted at David like bits of fiery steel.

"I will interpret to thee, Eminence."

"Interpret."  Harrik muttered to himself in rage.  His heart was dark,
he thirsted for the life of this arrogant Inglesi.  Did the fool not see
his end?  Midnight was at hand!  He smiled grimly.

"This is the interpretation, O Prince!  Prince Harrik has conspired
against his brother the Prince Pasha, has treacherously seduced officers
of the army, has planned to seize Cairo, to surround the Palace and take
the life of the Prince of Egypt.  For months, Prince, thee has done this:
and the end of it is that thee shall do right ere it be too late.  Thee
is a traitor to thy country and thy lawful lord."

Harrik's face turned pale; the stem of the narghileh shook in his
fingers.  All had been discovered, then!  But there was a thing of dark
magic here.  It was not a half-hour since he had given the word to strike
at midnight, to surround the Palace, and to seize the Prince Pasha.
Achmet--Higli, had betrayed him, then!  Who other?  No one else knew
save Zaida, and Zaida was in the harem.  Perhaps even now his own palace
was surrounded.  If it was so, then, come what might, this masterful
Inglesi should pay the price.  He thought of the den of lions hard by,
of the cage of tigers-the menagerie not a thousand feet away.  He could
hear the distant roaring now, and his eyes glittered.  The Christian to
the wild beasts!  That at least before the end.  A Muslim would win
heaven by sending a Christian to hell.

Achmet--Higli!  No others knew.  The light of a fateful fanaticism was in
his eyes.  David read him as an open book, and saw the madness come upon
him.

"Neither Higli, nor Achmet, nor any of thy fellow-conspirators has
betrayed thee," David said.  "God has other voices to whisper the truth
than those who share thy crimes.  I have ears, and the air is full of
voices."

Harrik stared at him.  Was this Inglesi, then, with the grey coat,
buttoned to the chin, and the broad black hat which remained on his head
unlike the custom of the English--was he one of those who saw visions and
dreamed dreams, even as himself!  Had he not heard last night a voice
whisper through the dark "Harrik, Harrik, flee to the desert!  The lions
are loosed upon thee!"  Had he not risen with the voice still in his ears
and fled to the harem, seeking Zaida, she who had never cringed before
him, whose beauty he had conquered, but whose face turned from him when
he would lay his lips on hers?  And, as he fled, had he not heard, as it
were, footsteps lightly following him--or were they going before him?
Finding Zaida, had he not told her of the voice, and had she not said:
"In the desert all men are safe--safe from themselves and safe from
others; from their own acts and from the acts of others"?  Were the
lions, then, loosed upon him?  Had he been betrayed?

Suddenly the thought flashed into his mind that his challenger would not
have thrust himself into danger, given himself to the mouth of the Pit,
if violence were intended.  There was that inside his robe, than which
lightning would not be more quick to slay.  Had he not been a hunter of
repute?  Had he not been in deadly peril with wild beasts, and was he not
quicker than they?  This man before him was like no other he had ever
met.  Did voices speak to him?  Were there, then, among the Christians
such holy men as among the Muslims, who saw things before they happened,
and read the human mind?  Were there sorcerers among them, as among the
Arabs?

In any case his treason was known.  What were to be the consequences?
Diamond-dust in his coffee?  To be dropped into the Nile like a dog?  To
be smothered in his sleep?--For who could be trusted among all his slaves
and retainers when it was known he was disgraced, and that the Prince
Pasha would be happier if Harrik were quiet for ever?

Mechanically he drew out his watch and looked at it.  It was nine
o'clock.  In three hours more would have fallen the coup.  But from this
man's words he knew that the stroke was now with the Prince Pasha.  Yet,
if this pale Inglesi, this Christian sorcerer, knew the truth in a vision
only, and had not declared it to Kaid, there might still be a chance of
escape.  The lions were near--it would be a joy to give a Christian to
the lions to celebrate the capture of Cairo and the throne.  He listened
intently to the distant rumble of the lions.  There was one cage
dedicated to vengeance.  Five human beings on whom his terrible anger
fell in times past had been thrust into it alive.  Two were slaves, one
was an enemy, one an invader of his harem, and one was a woman, his wife,
his favourite, the darling of his heart.  When his chief eunuch accused
her of a guilty love, he had given her paramour and herself to that awful
death.  A stroke of the vast paw, a smothered roar as the teeth gave into
the neck of the beautiful Fatima, and then--no more.  Fanaticism had
caught a note of savage music that tuned it to its height.

"Why art thou here?  For what hast thou come?  Do the spirit voices give
thee that counsel?" he snarled.

"I am come to ask Prince Harrik to repair the wrong he has done.  When
the Prince Pasha came to know of thy treason--"

Harrik started.  "Kaid believes thy tale of treason?" he burst out.

"Prince Kaid knows the truth," answered David quietly.  "He might have
surrounded this palace with his Nubians, and had thee shot against the
palace walls.  That would have meant a scandal in Egypt and in Europe.
I besought him otherwise.  It may be the scandal must come, but in
another way, and--"

"That I, Harrik, must die?"  Harrik's voice seemed far away.  In his own
ears it sounded strange and unusual.  All at once the world seemed to be
a vast vacuum in which his brain strove for air, and all his senses were
numbed and overpowered.  Distempered and vague, his soul seemed spinning
in an aching chaos.  It was being overpowered by vast elements, and life
and being were atrophied in a deadly smother.  The awful forces behind
visible being hung him in the middle space between consciousness and
dissolution.  He heard David's voice, at first dimly, then
understandingly.

"There is no other way.  Thou art a traitor.  Thou wouldst have been a
fratricide.  Thou wouldst have put back the clock in Egypt by a hundred
years, even to the days of the Mamelukes--a race of slaves and murderers.
God ordained that thy guilt should be known in time.  Prince, thou art
guilty.  It is now but a question how thou shalt pay the debt of
treason."

In David's calm voice was the ring of destiny.  It was dispassionate,
judicial; it had neither hatred nor pity.  It fell on Harrik's ear as
though from some far height.  Destiny, the controller--who could escape
it?

Had he not heard the voices in the night--"The lions are loosed upon
thee"?  He did not answer David now, but murmured to himself like one in
a dream.

David saw his mood, and pursued the startled mind into the pit of
confusion.  "If it become known to Europe that the army is disloyal,
that its officers are traitors like thee, what shall we find?  England,
France, Turkey, will land an army of occupation.  Who shall gainsay
Turkey if she chooses to bring an army here and recover control, remove
thy family from Egypt, and seize upon its lands and goods?  Dost thou not
see that the hand of God has been against thee?  He has spoken, and thy
evil is discovered."

He paused.  Still Harrik did not reply, but looked at him with dilated,
fascinated eyes.  Death had hypnotised him, and against death and destiny
who could struggle?  Had not a past Prince Pasha of Egypt safeguarded
himself from assassination all his life, and, in the end, had he not been
smothered in his sleep by slaves?

"There are two ways only," David continued--"to be tried and die publicly
for thy crimes, to the shame of Egypt, its present peril, and lasting
injury; or to send a message to those who conspired with thee, commanding
them to return to their allegiance, and another to the Prince Pasha,
acknowledging thy fault, and exonerating all others.  Else, how many of
thy dupes shall die!  Thy choice is not life or death, but how thou shalt
die, and what thou shalt do for Egypt as thou diest.  Thou didst love
Egypt, Eminence?"

David's voice dropped low, and his last words had a suggestion which went
like an arrow to the source of all Harrik's crimes, and that also which
redeemed him in a little.  It got into his inner being.  He roused
himself and spoke, but at first his speech was broken and smothered.

"Day by day I saw Egypt given over to the Christians," he said.  "The
Greek, the Italian, the Frenchman, the Englishman, everywhere they
reached out, their hands and took from us our own.  They defiled our
mosques; they corrupted our life; they ravaged our trade, they stole our
customers, they crowded us from the streets where once the faithful lived
alone.  Such as thou had the ear of the Prince, and such as Nahoum, also
an infidel, who favoured the infidels of Europe.  And now thou hast come,
the most dangerous of them all!  Day by day the Muslim has loosed his
hold on Cairo, and Alexandria, and the cities of Egypt.  Street upon
street knows him no more.  My heart burned within me.  I conspired for
Egypt's sake.  I would have made her Muslim once again.  I would have
fought the Turk and the Frank, as did Mehemet Ali; and if the infidels
came, I would have turned them back; or if they would not go, I would
have destroyed them here.  Such as thou should have been stayed at the
door.  In my own house I would have been master.  We seek not to take up
our abode in other nations and in the cities of the infidel.  Shall we
give place to them on our own mastaba, in our own court-yard--hand to
them the keys of our harems?  I would have raised the Jehad if they vexed
me with their envoys and their armies."  He paused, panting.

"It would not have availed," was David's quiet answer.  "This land may
not be as Tibet--a prison for its own people.  If the door opens outward,
then must it open inward also.  Egypt is the bridge between the East and
the West.  Upon it the peoples of all nations pass and repass.  Thy plan
was folly, thy hope madness, thy means to achieve horrible.  Thy dream is
done.  The army will not revolt, the Prince will not be slain.  Now only
remains what thou shalt do for Egypt--"

"And thou--thou wilt be left here to lay thy will upon Egypt.  Kaid's ear
will be in thy hand--thou hast the sorcerer's eye.  I know thy meaning.
Thou wouldst have me absolve all, even Achmet, and Higli, and Diaz, and
the rest, and at thy bidding go out into the desert"--he paused--"or into
the grave."

"Not into the desert," rejoined David firmly.  "Thou wouldst not rest.
There, in the desert, thou wouldst be a Mahdi.  Since thou must die, wilt
thou not order it after thine own choice?  It is to die for Egypt."

"Is this the will of Kaid?" asked Harrik, his voice thick with wonder,
his brain still dulled by the blow of Fate.

"It was not the Effendina's will, but it hath his assent.  Wilt thou
write the word to the army and also to the Prince?"

He had conquered.  There was a moment's hesitation, then Harrik picked up
paper and ink that lay near, and said: "I will write to Kaid.  I will
have naught to do with the army."

"It shall be the whole, not the part," answered David determinedly.  "The
truth is known.  It can serve no end to withhold the writing to the army.
Remember what I have said to thee.  The disloyalty of the army must not
be known.  Canst thou not act after the will of Allah, the all-powerful,
the all-just, the all-merciful?"

There was an instant's pause, and then suddenly Harrik placed the paper
in his palm and wrote swiftly and at some length to Kaid.  Laying it
down, he took another and wrote but a few words--to Achmet and Diaz.
This message said in brief, "Do not strike.  It is the will of Allah.
The army shall keep faithful until the day of the Mahdi be come.
I spoke before the time.  I go to the bosom of my Lord Mahomet."

He threw the papers on the floor before David, who picked them up, read
them, and put them into his pocket.

"It is well," he said.  "Egypt shall have peace.  And thou, Eminence?"

"Who shall escape Fate?  What I have written I have written."

David rose and salaamed.  Harrik rose also.  "Thou wouldst go, having
accomplished thy will?" Harrik asked, a thought flashing to his mind
again, in keeping with his earlier purpose.  Why should this man be left
to trouble Egypt?

David touched his breast.  "I must bear thy words to the Palace and the
Citadel."

"Are there not slaves for messengers?"  Involuntarily Harrik turned his
eyes to the velvet curtains.  No fear possessed David, but he felt the
keenness of the struggle, and prepared for the last critical moment of
fanaticism.

"It were a foolish thing to attempt my death," he said calmly.  "I have
been thy friend to urge thee to do that which saves thee from public
shame, and Egypt from peril.  I came alone, because I had no fear that
thou wouldst go to thy death shaming hospitality."

"Thou wast sure I would give myself to death?"

"Even as that I breathe.  Thou wert mistaken; a madness possessed thee;
but thou, I knew, wouldst choose the way of honour.  I too have had
dreams--and of Egypt.  If it were for her good, I would die for her."

"Thou art mad.  But the mad are in the hands of God, and--"

Suddenly Harrik stopped.  There came to his ears two distant sounds--the
faint click of horses' hoofs and that dull rumble they had heard as they
talked, a sound he loved, the roar of his lions.

He clapped his hands twice, the curtains parted opposite, and a slave
slid silently forward.

"Quick!  The horses!  What are they?  Bring me word," he said.

The slave vanished.  For a moment there was silence.  The eyes of the two
men met.  In the minds of both was the same thing.

"Kaid! The Nubians!" Harrik said, at last.  David made no response.

The slave returned, and his voice murmured softly, as though the matter
were of no concern: "The Nubians--from the Palace."  In an instant he was
gone again.

"Kaid had not faith in thee," Harrik said grimly.  "But see, infidel
though thou art, thou trustest me, and thou shalt go thy way.  Take them
with thee, yonder jackals of the desert.  I will not go with them.  I did
not choose to live; others chose for me; but I will die after my own
choice.  Thou hast heard a voice, even as I.  It is too late to flee to
the desert.  Fate tricks me.  'The lions are loosed on thee'--so the
voice said to me in the night.  Hark!  dost thou not hear them--the
lions, Harrik's lions, got out of the uttermost desert?"

David could hear the distant roar, for the menagerie was even part of the
palace itself.

"Go in peace," continued Harrik soberly and with dignity, "and when Egypt
is given to the infidel and Muslims are their slaves, remember that
Harrik would have saved it for his Lord Mahomet, the Prophet of God."

He clapped his hands, and fifty slaves slid from behind the velvet
curtains.

"I have thy word by the tomb of thy mother that thou wilt take the
Nubians hence, and leave me in peace?" he asked.

David raised a hand above his head.  "As I have trusted thee, trust thou
me, Harrik, son of Mahomet."  Harrik made a gesture of dismissal, and
David salaamed and turned to go.  As the curtains parted for his exit,
he faced Harrik again.  "Peace be to thee," he said.

But, seated in his cushions, the haggard, fanatical face of Harrik was
turned from him, the black, flaring eyes fixed on vacancy.  The curtain
dropped behind David, and through the dim rooms and corridors he passed,
the slaves gliding beside him, before him, and behind him, until they
reached the great doors.  As they swung open and the cool night breeze
blew in his face, a great suspiration of relief passed from him.  What he
had set out to do would be accomplished in all.  Harrik would
keep his word.  It was the only way.

As he emerged from the doorway some one fell at his feet, caught his
sleeve and kissed it.  It was Mahommed Hassan.  Behind Mahommed was a
little group of officers and a hundred stalwart Nubians.  David motioned
them towards the great gates, and, without speaking, passed swiftly down
the pathway and emerged upon the road without.  A moment later he was
riding towards the Citadel with Harrik's message to Achmet.  In the red-
curtained room Harrik sat alone, listening until he heard the far clatter
of hoofs, and knew that the Nubians were gone.  Then the other distant
sound which had captured his ear came to him again.  In his fancy it grew
louder and louder.  With it came the voice that called him in the night,
the voice of a woman--of the wife he had given to the lions for a crime
against him which she did not commit, which had haunted him all the
years.  He had seen her thrown to the king of them all, killed in one
swift instant, and dragged about the den by her warm white neck--this
slave wife from Albania, his adored Fatima.  And when, afterwards, he
came to know the truth, and of her innocence, from the chief eunuch who
with his last breath cleared her name, a terrible anger and despair had
come upon him.  Time and intrigue and conspiracy had distracted his mind,
and the Jehad became the fixed aim and end of his life.  Now this was
gone.  Destiny had tripped him up.  Kaid and the infidel Inglesi had won.

As the one great passion went out like smoke, the woman he loved, whom
he had given to the lions, the memory of her, some haunting part of her,
possessed him, overcame him.  In truth, he had heard a voice in the
night, but not the voice of a spirit.  It was the voice of Zaida, who,
preying upon his superstitious mind--she knew the hallucination which
possessed him concerning her he had cast to the lions--and having given
the terrible secret to Kaid, whom she had ever loved, would still save
Harrik from the sure vengeance which must fall upon him.  Her design had
worked, but not as she intended.  She had put a spell of superstition on
him, and the end would be accomplished, but not by flight to the desert.

Harrik chose the other way.  He had been a hunter.

He was without fear.  The voice of the woman he loved called him.  It
came to him through the distant roar of the lions as clear as when, with
one cry of "Harrik !" she had fallen beneath the lion's paw.  He knew now
why he had kept the great beast until this hour, though tempted again and
again to slay him.

Like one in a dream, he drew a dagger from the cushions where he sat, and
rose to his feet.  Leaving the room and passing dark groups of waiting
slaves, he travelled empty chambers and long corridors, the voices of the
lions growing nearer and nearer.  He sped faster now, and presently came
to two great doors, on which he knocked thrice.  The doors opened, and
two slaves held up lights for him to enter.  Taking a torch from one of
them, he bade them retire, and the doors clanged behind them.

Harrik held up the torch and came nearer.  In the centre of the room was
a cage in which one great lion paced to and fro in fury.  It roared at
him savagely.  It was his roar which had come to Harrik through the
distance and the night.  He it was who had carried Fatima, the beloved,
about his cage by that neck in which Harrik had laid his face so often.

The hot flush of conflict and the long anger of the years were on him.
Since he must die, since Destiny had befooled him, left him the victim of
the avengers, he would end it here.  Here, against the thing of savage
hate which had drunk of the veins and crushed the bones of his fair wife,
he would strike one blow deep and strong and shed the blood of sacrifice
before his own was shed.

He thrust the torch into the ground, and, with the dagger grasped
tightly, carefully opened the cage and stepped inside.  The door clicked
behind him.  The lion was silent now, and in a far corner prepared to
spring, crouching low.

"Fatima!" Harrik cried, and sprang forward as the wild beast rose at
him.  He struck deep, drew forth the dagger--and was still.




CHAPTER XIII

ACHMET THE ROPEMAKER STRIKES

War!  War!  The chains of the conscripts clanked in the river villages;
the wailing of the women affrighted the pigeons in a thousand dovecotes
on the Nile; the dust of despair was heaped upon the heads of the old,
who knew that their young would no more return, and that the fields of
dourha would go ungathered, the water-channels go unattended, and the
onion-fields be bare.  War!  War!  War!  The strong, the broad-shouldered
--Aka, Mahmoud, Raschid, Selim, they with the bodies of Seti and the
faces of Rameses, in their blue yeleks and unsandalled feet--would go
into the desert as their forefathers did for the Shepherd Kings.  But
there would be no spoil for them--no slaves with swelling breasts and
lips of honey; no straight-limbed servants of their pleasure to wait on
them with caressing fingers; no rich spoils carried back from the fields
of war to the mud hut, the earth oven, and the thatched roof; no rings of
soft gold and necklaces of amber snatched from the fingers and bosoms of
the captive and the dead.  Those days were no more.  No vision of loot or
luxury allured these.  They saw only the yellow sand, the ever-receding
oasis, the brackish, undrinkable water, the withered and fruitless date-
tree, handfuls of dourha for their food by day, and the keen, sharp night
to chill their half-dead bodies in a half-waking sleep.  And then the
savage struggle for life--with all the gain to the pashas and the beys,
and those who ruled over them; while their own wounds grew foul, and, in
the torturing noon-day heat of the white waste, Death reached out and
dragged them from the drooping lines to die.  Fighting because they must
fight--not patriot love, nor understanding, nor sacrifice in their
hearts.  War!  War!  War!  War!

David had been too late to stop it.  It had grown to a head with
revolution and conspiracy.  For months before he came conscripts had been
gathered in the Nile country from Rosetta to Assouan, and here and there,
far south, tribes had revolted.  He had come to power too late to devise
another course.  One day, when this war was over, he would go alone, save
for a faithful few, to deal with these tribes and peoples upon another
plane than war; but here and now the only course was that which had been
planned by Kaid and those who counselled him.  Troubled by a deep danger
drawing near, Kaid had drawn him into his tough service, half-blindly
catching at his help, with a strange, almost superstitious belief that
luck and good would come from the alliance; seeing in him a protection
against wholesale robbery and debt--were not the English masters of
finance, and was not this Englishman honest, and with a brain of fire
and an eye that pierced things?

David had accepted the inevitable.  The war had its value.  It would draw
off to the south--he would see that it was so--Achmet and Higli and Diaz
and the rest, who were ever a danger.  Not to himself: he did not think
of that; but to Kaid and to Egypt.  They had been out-manoeuvred, beaten,
foiled, knew who had foiled them and what they had escaped; congratulated
themselves, but had no gratitude to him, and still plotted his
destruction.  More than once his death had been planned, but the dark
design had come to light--now from the workers of the bazaars, whose
wires of intelligence pierced everywhere; now from some hungry fellah
whose yelek he had filled with cakes of dourha beside a bread-shop; now
from Mahommed Hassan, who was for him a thousand eyes and feet and hands,
who cooked his food, and gathered round him fellaheen or Copts or
Soudanese or Nubians whom he himself had tested and found true, and ruled
them with a hand of plenty and a rod of iron.  Also, from Nahoum's spies
he learned of plots and counterplots, chiefly on Achmet's part; and these
he hid from Kaid, while he trusted Nahoum--and not without reason, as
yet.

The day of Nahoum's wrath and revenge was not yet come; it was his deep
design to lay the foundation for his own dark actions strong on a rock of
apparent confidence and devotion.  A long torture and a great over-
whelming was his design.  He knew himself to be in the scheme of a
master-workman, and by-and-by he would blunt the chisel and bend the saw;
but not yet.  Meanwhile, he hated, admired, schemed, and got a sweet
taste on his tongue from aiding David to foil Achmet--Higli and Diaz were
of little account; only the injury they felt in seeing the sluices being
closed on the stream of bribery and corruption kept them in the toils of
Achmet's conspiracy.  They had saved their heads, but they had not
learned their lesson yet; and Achmet, blinded by rage, not at all.
Achmet did not understand clemency.  One by one his plots had failed,
until the day came when David advised Kaid to send him and his friends
into the Soudan, with the punitive expedition under loyal generals.  It
was David's dream that, in the field of war, a better spirit might enter
into Achmet and his friends; that patriotism might stir in them.

The day was approaching when the army must leave.  Achmet threw dice once
more.

Evening was drawing down.  Over the plaintive pink and golden glow of
sunset was slowly being drawn a pervasive silver veil of moonlight.  A
caravan of camels hunched alone in the middle distance, making for the
western desert.  Near by, village life manifested itself in heavily laden
donkeys; in wolfish curs stealing away with refuse into the waste; in
women, upright and modest, bearing jars of water on their heads; in
evening fires, where the cover of the pot clattered over the boiling mass
within; in the voice of the Muezzin calling to prayer.

Returning from Alexandria to Cairo in the special train which Kaid had
sent for him, David watched the scene with grave and friendly interest.
There was far, to go before those mud huts of the thousand years would
give place to rational modern homes; and as he saw a solitary horseman
spread his sheepskin on the ground and kneel to say his evening prayer,
as Mahomet had done in his flight between Mecca and Medina, the distance
between the Egypt of his desire and the ancient Egypt that moved round
him sharply impressed his mind, and the magnitude of his task settled
heavily on his spirit.

"But it is the beginning--the beginning," he said aloud to himself,
looking out upon the green expanses of dourha and Lucerne, and eyeing
lovingly the cotton-fields here and there, the origin of the industrial
movement he foresaw--"and some one had to begin.  The rest is as it must
be--"

There was a touch of Oriental philosophy in his mind--was it not Galilee
and the Nazarene, that Oriental source from which Mahomet also drew?  But
he added to the "as it must be" the words, "and as God wills."  He was
alone in the compartment with Lacey, whose natural garrulity had had a
severe discipline in the months that had passed since he had asked to be
allowed to black David's boots.  He could now sit for an hour silent,
talking to himself, carrying on unheard conversations.  Seeing David's
mood, he had not spoken twice on this journey, but had made notes in a
little "Book of Experience,"--as once he had done in Mexico.  At last,
however, he raised his head, and looked eagerly out of the window as
David did, and sniffed.

"The Nile again," he said, and smiled.  The attraction of the Nile was
upon him, as it grows on every one who lives in Egypt.  The Nile and
Egypt--Egypt and the Nile--its mystery, its greatness, its benevolence,
its life-giving power, without which Egypt is as the Sahara, it conquers
the mind of every man at last.

"The Nile, yes," rejoined David, and smiled also.  "We shall cross it
presently."

Again they relapsed into silence, broken only by the clang, clang of the
metal on the rails, and then presently another, more hollow sound--the
engine was upon the bridge.  Lacey got up and put his head out of the
window.  Suddenly there was a cry of fear and horror over his head, a
warning voice shrieking:

"The bridge is open--we are lost.  Effendi--master--Allah!"  It was the
voice of Mahommed Hassan, who had been perched on the roof of the car.

Like lightning Lacey realised the danger, and saw the only way of escape.
He swung open the door, even as the engine touched the edge of the abyss
and shrieked its complaint under the hand of the terror-stricken
driver, caught David's shoulder, and cried: "Jump-jump into the river--
quick!"

As the engine toppled, David jumped--there was no time to think,
obedience was the only way.  After him sprang, far down into the grey-
blue water, Lacey and Mahommed.  When they came again to the surface, the
little train with its handful of human freight had disappeared.

Two people had seen the train plunge to destruction--the solitary
horseman whom David had watched kneel upon his sheepskin, and who now
from a far hill had seen the disaster, but had not seen the three jump
for their lives, and a fisherman on the bank, who ran shouting towards a
village standing back from the river.

As the fisherman sped shrieking and beckoning to the villagers, David,
Lacey, and Mahommed fought for their lives in the swift current, swimming
at an angle upstream towards the shore; for, as Mahommed warned them,
there were rocks below.  Lacey was a good swimmer, but he was heavy, and
David was a better, but Mahommed had proved his merit in the past on many
an occasion when the laws of the river were reaching out strong hands for
him.  Now, as Mahommed swam, he kept moaning to himself, cursing his
father and his father's son, as though he himself were to blame for the
crime which had been committed.  Here was a plot, and he had discovered
more plots than one against his master.  The bridge-opener--when he found
him he would take him into the desert and flay him alive; and find him he
would.  His watchful eyes were on the hut by the bridge where this man
should be.  No one was visible.  He cursed the man and all his ancestry
and all his posterity, sleeping and waking, until the day when he,
Mahommed, would pinch his flesh with red hot irons.  But now he had other
and nearer things to occupy him, for in the fierce struggle towards the
shore Lacey found himself failing, and falling down the stream.
Presently both Mahommed and David were beside him, Lacey angrily
protesting to David that he must save himself.

"Say, think of Egypt and all the rest.  You've got to save yourself--let
me splash along!" he spluttered, breathing hard, his shoulders low in
the water, his mouth almost submerged.

But David and Mahommed fought along beside him, each determined that it
must be all or none; and presently the terror-stricken fisherman who had
roused the village, still shrieking deliriously, came upon them in a
flat-bottomed boat manned by four stalwart fellaheen, and the tragedy of
the bridge was over.  But not the tragedy of Achmet the Ropemaker.




CHAPTER XIV

BEYOND THE PALE

Mahommed Hassan had vowed a vow in the river, and he kept it in so far as
was seemly.  His soul hungered for the face of the bridge-opener, and the
hunger grew.  He was scarce passed from the shivering Nile into a dry
yelek, had hardly taken a juicy piece from the cooking-pot at the house
of the village sheikh, before he began to cultivate friends who could
help him, including the sheikh himself; for what money Mahommed lacked
was supplied by Lacey, who had a reasoned confidence in him, and by the
fiercely indignant Kaid himself, to whom Lacey and Mahommed went
secretly, hiding their purpose from David.  So, there were a score of
villages where every sheikh, eager for gold, listened for the whisper of
the doorways, and every slave and villager listened at the sheikh's door.
But neither to sheikh nor to villager was it given to find the man.

But one evening there came a knocking at the door of the house which
Mahommed still kept in the lowest Muslim quarter of the town, a woman who
hid her face and was of more graceful figure than was familiar in those
dark purlieus.  The door was at once opened, and Mahommed, with a cry,
drew her inside.

"Zaida--the peace of God be upon thee," he said, and gazed lovingly yet
sadly upon her, for she had greatly changed.

"And upon thee peace, Mahommed," she answered, and sat upon the floor,
her head upon her breast.

"Thou hast trouble  at," he said, and put some cakes of dourha and a
meated cucumber beside her.  She touched the food with her fingers, but
did not eat.  "Is thy grief, then, for thy prince who gave himself to the
lions?" he asked.

"Inshallah!  Harrik is in the bosom of Allah.  He is with Fatima in the
fields of heaven--was I as Fatima to him?  Nay, the dead have done with
hurting."

"Since that night thou hast been lost, even since Harrik went.  I
searched for thee, but thou wert hid.  Surely, thou knewest mine eyes
were aching and my heart was cast down--did not thou and I feed at the
same breast?"

"I was dead, and am come forth from the grave; but I shall go again into
the dark where all shall forget, even I myself; but there is that which I
would do, which thou must do for me, even as I shall do good to thee,
that which is the desire of my heart."

"Speak, light of the morning and blessing of thy mother's soul," he said,
and crowded into his mouth a roll of meat and cucumber.  "Against thy
feddan shall be set my date-tree; it hath been so ever."

"Listen then, and by the stone of the Kaabah, keep the faith which has
been throe and mine since my mother, dying, gave me to thy mother, whose
milk gave me health and, in my youth, beauty--and, in my youth, beauty!"
Suddenly she buried her face in her veil, and her body shook with sobs
which had no voice.  Presently she continued: "Listen, and by Abraham and
Christ and all the Prophets, and by Mahomet the true revealer, give me
thine aid.  When Harrik gave his life to the lions, I fled to her whom I
had loved in the house of Kaid--Laka the Syrian, afterwards the wife of
Achmet Pasha.  By Harrik's death I was free--no more a slave.  Once Laka
had been the joy of Achmet's heart, but, because she had no child, she
was despised and forgotten.  Was it not meet I should fly to her whose
sorrow would hide my loneliness?  And so it was--I was hidden in the
harem of Achmet.  But miserable tongues--may God wither them!--told
Achmet of my presence.  And though I was free, and not a bondswoman, he
broke upon my sleep.  .  .  ."

Mahommed's eyes blazed, his dark skin blackened like a coal, and he
muttered maledictions between his teeth.  ".  .  .  In the morning there
was a horror upon me, for which there is no name.  But I laughed also
when I took a dagger and stole from the harem to find him in the quarters
beyond the women's gate.  I found him, but I held my hand, for one was
with him who spake with a tone of anger and of death, and I listened.
Then, indeed, I rejoiced for thee, for I have found thee a road to honour
and fortune.  The man was a bridge-opener--" "Ah!--O, light of a thousand
eyes, fruit of the tree of Eden!" cried Mahommed, and fell on his knees
at her feet, and would have kissed them, but that, with a cry, she said:
"Nay, nay, touch me not.  But listen.  .  .  .  Ay, it was Achmet who
sought to drown thy Pasha in the Nile.  Thou shalt find the man in the
little street called Singat in the Moosky, at the house of Haleel the
date-seller."

Mahommed rocked backwards and forwards in his delight.  "Oh, now art thou
like a lamp of Paradise, even as a star which leadeth an army of stars,
beloved," he said.  He rubbed his hands together.  "Thy witness and his
shall send Achmet to a hell of scorpions, and I shall slay the bridge-
opener with my own hand--hath not the Effendina secretly said so to me,
knowing that my Pasha, the Inglesi, upon whom be peace for ever and
forever, would forgive him.  Ah, thou blossom of the tree of trees--"

She rose hastily, and when he would have kissed her hand she drew back to
the wall.  "Touch me not--nay, then, Mahommed, touch me not--"

"Why should I not pay thee honour, thou princess among women?  Hast thou
not the brain of a man, and thy beauty, like thy heart, is it not--"

She put out both her hands and spoke sharply.  "Enough, my brother,"
she said.  "Thou hast thy way to great honour.  Thou shalt yet have a
thousand feddans of well-watered land and slaves to wait upon thee.  Get
thee to the house of Haleel.  There shall the blow fall on the head of
Achmet, the blow which was mine to strike, but that Allah stayed my hand
that I might do thee and thy Pasha good, and to give the soul-slayer and
the body-slayer into the hands of Kaid, upon whom be everlasting peace!"
Her voice dropped low.  "Thou saidst but now that I had beauty.  Is there
yet any beauty in my face?"  She lowered her yashmak and looked at him
with burning eyes.

"Thou art altogether beautiful," he answered, "but there is a strangeness
to thy beauty like none I have seen; as if upon the face of an angel
there fell a mist--nay, I have not words to make it plain to thee."

With a great sigh, and yet with the tenseness gone from her eyes, she
slowly drew the veil up again till only her eyes were visible.  "It is
well," she answered.  "Now, I have heard that to-morrow night Prince Kaid
will sit in the small court-yard of the blue tiles by the harem to feast
with his friends, ere the army goes into the desert at the next sunrise.
Achmet is bidden to the feast."

"It is so, O beloved!"

"There will be dancers and singers to make the feast worthy?"

"At such a time it will be so."

"Then this thou shalt do.  See to it that I shall be among the singers,
and when all have danced and sung, that I shall sing, and be brought
before Kaid."

"Inshallah!  It shall be so.  Thou dost desire to see Kaid--in truth,
thou hast memory, beloved."

She made a gesture of despair.  "Go upon thy business.  Dost thou not
desire the blood of Achmet and the bridge-opener?"

Mahommed laughed, and joyfully beat his breast, with whispered
exclamations, and made ready to go.  "And thou?" he asked.

"Am I not welcome here?" she replied wearily.  "O, my sister, thou art
the master of my life and all that I have," he exclaimed, and a moment
afterwards he was speeding towards Kaid's Palace.

For the first time since the day of his banishment Achmet the Ropemaker
was invited to Kaid's Palace.  Coming, he was received with careless
consideration by the Prince.  Behind his long, harsh face and sullen eyes
a devil was raging, because of all his plans that had gone awry, and
because the man he had sought to kill still served the Effendina, putting
a blight upon Egypt.  To-morrow he, Achmet, must go into the desert with
the army, and this hated Inglesi would remain behind to have his will
with Kaid.  The one drop of comfort in his cup was the fact that the
displeasure of the Effendina against himself was removed, and that he
had, therefore, his foot once more inside the Palace.  When he came back
from the war he would win his way to power again.  Meanwhile, he cursed
the man who had eluded the death he had prepared for him.  With his own
eyes had he not seen, from the hill top, the train plunge to destruction,
and had he not once more got off his horse and knelt upon his sheepskin
and given thanks to Allah--a devout Arab obeying the sunset call to
prayer, as David had observed from the train?

One by one, two by two, group by group, the unveiled dancers came and
went; the singers sang behind the screen provided for them, so that none
might see their faces, after the custom.  At last, however, Kaid and his
guests grew listless, and smoked and talked idly.  Yet there was in the
eyes of Kaid a watchfulness unseen by any save a fellah who squatted in a
corner eating sweetmeats, and a hidden singer waiting until she should be
called before the Prince Pasha.  The singer's glances continually flashed
between Kaid and Achmet.  At last, with gleaming eyes, she saw six Nubian
slaves steal silently behind Achmet.  One, also, of great strength, came
suddenly and stood before him.  In his hands was a leathern thong.

Achmet saw, felt the presence of the slaves behind him, and shrank back
numbed and appalled.  A mist came before his eyes; the voice he heard
summoning him to stand up seemed to come from infinite distances.  The
hand of doom had fallen like a thunderbolt.  The leathern thong in the
hands of the slave was the token of instant death.  There was no chance
of escape.  The Nubians had him at their mercy.  As his brain struggled
to regain its understanding, he saw, as in a dream, David enter the
court-yard and come towards Kaid.

Suddenly David stopped in amazement, seeing Achmet.  Inquiringly he
looked at Kaid, who spoke earnestly to him in a low tone.  Whereupon
David turned his head away, but after a moment fixed his eyes on Achmet.

Kaid motioned all his startled guests to come nearer.  Then in strong,
unmerciful voice he laid Achmet's crime before them, and told the story
of the bridge-opener, who had that day expiated his crime in the desert
by the hands of Mahommed--but not with torture, as Mahommed had hoped
might be.

"What shall be his punishment--so foul, so wolfish?" Kaid asked of them
all.  A dozen voices answered, some one terrible thing, some another.

"Mercy!" moaned Achmet aghast.  "Mercy, Saadat!" he cried to David.

David looked at him calmly.  There was little mercy in his eyes as he
answered: "Thy crimes sent to their death in the Nile those who never
injured thee.  Dost thou quarrel with justice?  Compose thy soul, and I
pray only the Effendina to give thee that seemly death thou didst deny
thy victims."  He bowed respectfully to Kaid.

Kaid frowned.  "The ways of Egypt are the ways of Egypt, and not of the
land once thine," he answered shortly.  Then, under the spell of that
influence which he had never yet been able to resist, he added to the
slaves: "Take him aside.  I will think upon it.  But he shall die at
sunrise ere the army goes.  Shall not justice be the gift of Kaid for an
example and a warning?  Take him away a little.  I will decide."

As Achmet and the slaves disappeared into a dark corner of the court-
yard, Kaid rose to his feet, and, upon the hint, his guests, murmuring
praises of his justice and his mercy and his wisdom, slowly melted from
the court-yard; but once outside they hastened to proclaim in the four
quarters of Cairo how yet again the English Pasha had picked from the
Tree of Life an apple of fortune.

The court-yard was now empty, save for the servants of the Prince, David
and Mahommed, and two officers in whom David had advised Kaid to put
trust.  Presently one of these officers said: "There is another singer,
and the last.  Is it the Effendina's pleasure?"

Kaid made a gesture of assent, sat down, and took the stem of a narghileh
between his lips.  For a moment there was silence, and then, out upon the
sweet, perfumed night, over which the stars hung brilliant and soft and
near, a voice at first quietly, then fully, and palpitating with feeling,
poured forth an Eastern love song:

         "Take thou thy flight, O soul!  Thou hast no more
          The gladness of the morning!  Ah, the perfumed roses
          My love laid on my bosom as I slept!
          How did he wake me with his lips upon mine eyes,
          How did the singers carol--the singers of my soul
          That nest among the thoughts of my beloved! .  .  .
          All silent now, the choruses are gone,
          The windows of my soul are closed; no more
          Mine eyes look gladly out to see my lover come.
          There is no more to do, no more to say:
          Take flight, my soul, my love returns no more!"

At the first note Kaid started, and his eyes fastened upon the screen
behind which sat the singer.  Then, as the voice, in sweet anguish,
filled the court-yard, entrancing them all, rose higher and higher, fell
and died away, he got to his feet, and called out hoarsely: "Come--come
forth!"

Slowly a graceful, veiled figure came from behind the great screen.  He
took a step forward.

"Zaida!  Zaida!" he said gently, amazedly.

She salaamed low.  "Forgive me, O my lord!" she said, in a whispering
voice, drawing her veil about her head.  "It was my soul's desire to look
upon thy face once more."

"Whither didst thou go at Harrik's death?  I sent to find thee, and give
thee safety; but thou wert gone, none knew where."

"O my lord, what was I but a mote in thy sun, that thou shouldst seek
me?"

Kaid's eyes fell, and he murmured to himself a moment, then he said
slowly: "Thou didst save Egypt, thou and my friend"--he gestured towards
David"--and my life also, and all else that is worth.  Therefore bounty,
and safety, and all thy desires were thy due.  Kaid is no ingrate--no,
by the hand of Moses that smote at Sinai!"

She made a pathetic motion of her hands.  "By Harrik's death I am free, a
slave no longer.  O my lord, where I go bounty and famine are the same."

Kaid took a step forward.  "Let me see thy face," he said, something
strange in her tone moving him with awe.

She lowered her veil and looked him in the eyes.  Her wan beauty smote
him, conquered him, the exquisite pain in her face filled Kaid's eyes
with foreboding, and pierced his heart.

"O cursed day that saw thee leave these walls!  I did it for thy good--
thou wert so young; thy life was all before thee!  But now--come, Zaida,
here in Kaid's Palace thou shalt have a home, and be at peace, for I see
that thou hast suffered.  Surely it shall be said that Kaid honours
thee."  He reached out to take her hand.

She had listened like one in a dream, but, as he was about to touch her,
she suddenly drew back, veiled her face, save for the eyes, and said in a
voice of agony: "Unclean, unclean!  My lord, I am a leper!"

An awed and awful silence fell upon them all.  Kaid drew back as though
smitten by a blow.

Presently, upon the silence, her voice sharp with agony said: "I am a
leper, and I go to that desert place which my lord has set apart for
lepers, where, dead to the world, I shall watch the dreadful years come
and go.  Behold, I would die, but that I have a sister there these many
years, and her sick soul lives in loneliness.  O my lord, forgive me!
Here was I happy; here of old I did sing to thee, and I came to sing to
thee once more a death-song.  Also, I came to see thee do justice, ere I
went from thy face for ever."

Kaid's head was lowered on his breast.  He shuddered.  "Thou art so
beautiful--thy voice, all!  Thou wouldst see justice--speak!  Justice
shall be made plain before thee."

Twice she essayed to speak, and could not; but from his sweetmeats and
the shadows Mahommed crept forward, kissed the ground before Kaid, and
said: "Effendina, thou knowest me as the servant of thy high servant,
Claridge Pasha."

"I know thee--proceed."

"Behold, she whom God has smitten, man smote first.  I am her foster-
brother--from the same breast we drew the food of life.  Thou wouldst do
justice, O Effendina; but canst thou do double justice--ay, a
thousandfold?  Then"--his voice raised almost shrilly--"then do it upon
Achmet Pasha.  She--Zaida--told me where I should find the bridge-
opener."

"Zaida once more!" Kaid murmured.

"She had learned all in Achmet's harem--hearing speech between Achmet and
the man whom thou didst deliver to my hands yesterday."

"Zaida-in Achmet's harem?" Kaid turned upon her.

Swiftly she told her dreadful tale, how, after Achmet had murdered all of
her except her body, she rose up to kill herself; but fainting, fell upon
a burning brazier, and her hand thrust accidentally in the live coals
felt no pain.  "And behold, O my lord, I knew I was a leper; and I
remembered my sister and lived on."  So she ended, in a voice numbed and
tuneless.

Kaid trembled with rage, and he cried in a loud voice: "Bring Achmet
forth."

As the slave sped upon the errand, David laid a hand on Kaid's arm, and
whispered to him earnestly.  Kaid's savage frown cleared away, and his
rage calmed down; but an inflexible look came into his face, a look which
petrified the ruined Achmet as he salaamed before him.

"Know thy punishment, son of a dog with a dog's heart, and prepare for a
daily death," said Kaid.  "This woman thou didst so foully wrong, even
when thou didst wrong her, she was a leper."

A low cry broke from Achmet, for now when death came he must go unclean
to the after-world, forbidden Allah's presence.  Broken and abject he
listened.

"She knew not, till thou wert gone," continued Kaid.  She is innocent
before the law.  But thou--beast of the slime--hear thy sentence.  There
is in the far desert a place where lepers live.  There, once a year, one
caravan comes, and, at the outskirts of the place unclean, leaves food
and needful things for another year, and returns again to Egypt after
many days.  From that place there is no escape--the desert is as the sea,
and upon that sea there is no ghiassa to sail to a farther shore.  It is
the leper land.  Thither thou shalt go to wait upon this woman thou hast
savagely wronged, and upon her kind, till thou diest.  It shall be so."

"Mercy! Mercy!" Achmet cried, horror-stricken, and turned to David.
"Thou art merciful.  Speak for me, Saadat."

"When didst thou have mercy?" asked David.  "Thy crimes are against
humanity."

Kaid made a motion, and, with dragging feet, Achmet passed from the
haunts of familiar faces.

For a moment Kaid stood and looked at Zaida, rigid and stricken in that
awful isolation which is the leper's doom.  Her eyes were closed, but her
head was high.  "Wilt thou not die?" Kaid asked her gently.

She shook her head slowly, and her hands folded on her breast.  "My
sister is there," she said at last.  There was an instant's stillness,
then Kaid added with a voice of grief: "Peace be upon thee, Zaida.  Life
is but a spark.  If death comes not to-day, it will tomorrow, for thee--
for me.  Inshallah, peace be upon thee!"

She opened her eyes and looked at him.  Seeing what was in his face, they
lighted with a great light for a moment.

"And upon thee peace, O my lord, for ever and for ever!" she said
softly, and, turning, left the court-yard, followed at a distance by
Mahommed Hassan.

Kaid remained motionless looking after her.

David broke in on his abstraction.  "The army at sunrise--thou wilt speak
to it, Effendina?"

Kaid roused himself.  "What shall I say?" he asked anxiously.

"Tell them they shall be clothed and fed, and to every man or his family
three hundred piastres at the end."

"Who will do this?" asked Kaid incredulously.  "Thou, Effendina--Egypt
and thou and I."

"So be it," answered Kaid.

As they left the court-yard, he said suddenly to an officer behind him:

"The caravan to the Place of Lepers--add to the stores fifty camel-loads
this year, and each year hereafter.  Have heed to it.  Ere it starts,
come to me.  I would see all with mine own eyes."




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Begin to see how near good is to evil
But the years go on, and friends have an end
Does any human being know what he can bear of temptation
Heaven where wives without number awaited him
Honesty was a thing he greatly desired--in others
How little we can know to-day what we shall feel tomorrow
How many conquests have been made in the name of God
One does the work and another gets paid
To-morrow is no man's gift
We want every land to do as we do; and we want to make 'em do it






THE WEAVERS

By Gilbert Parker


BOOK III.


XV.       SOOLSBY'S HAND UPON THE CURTAIN
XVI.      THE DEBT AND THE ACCOUNTING
XVII.     THE WOMAN OF THE CROSS-ROADS
XVIII.    TIME, THE IDOL-BREAKER
XIX.      SHARPER THAN A SWORD
XX.       EACH AFTER HIS OWN ORDER
XXI.      "THERE IS NOTHING HIDDEN WHICH SHALL NOT BE REVEALED"
XXII.     AS IN A GLASS DARKLY
XXIII.    THE TENTS OF CUSHAN
XXIV.     THE QUESTIONER
XXV.      THE VOICE THROUGH THE DOOR
XXVI.     "I OWE YOU NOTHING"
XXVII.    THE AWAKENING



CHAPTER XV

SOOLSBY'S HAND UPON THE CURTAIN

Faith raised her eyes from the paper before her and poised her head
meditatively.

"How long is it, friend, since--"

"Since he went to Egypt?"

"Nay, since thee--"

"Since I went to Mass?" he grumbled humorously.

She laughed whimsically.  "Nay, then, since thee made the promise--"

"That I would drink no more till his return--ay, that was my bargain;
till then and no longer!  I am not to be held back then, unless I change
my mind when I see him.  Well, 'tis three years since--"

"Three years!  Time hasn't flown.  Is it not like an old memory, his
living here in this house, Soolsby, and all that happened then?"

Soolsby looked at her over his glasses, resting his chin on the back of
the chair he was caning, and his lips worked in and out with a suppressed
smile.

"Time's got naught to do with you.  He's afeard of you," he continued.
"He lets you be."

"Friend, thee knows I am almost an old woman now."  She made marks
abstractedly upon the corner of a piece of paper.  "Unless my hair turns
grey presently I must bleach it, for 'twill seem improper it should
remain so brown."

She smoothed it back with her hand.  Try as she would to keep it trim
after the manner of her people, it still waved loosely on her forehead
and over her ears.  And the grey bonnet she wore but added piquancy to
its luxuriance, gave a sweet gravity to the demure beauty of the face it
sheltered.

"I am thirty now," she murmured, with a sigh, and went on writing.

The old man's fingers moved quickly among the strips of cane, and, after
a silence, without raising his head, he said: "Thirty, it means naught."

"To those without understanding," she rejoined drily.

"'Tis tough understanding why there's no wedding-ring on yonder finger.
There's been many a man that's wanted it, that's true--the Squire's son
from Bridgley, the lord of Axwood Manor, the long soldier from Shipley
Wood, and doctors, and such folk aplenty.  There's where understanding
fails."

Faith's face flushed, then it became pale, and her eyes, suffused,
dropped upon the paper before her.  At first it seemed as though she must
resent his boldness; but she had made a friend of him these years past,
and she knew he meant no rudeness.  In the past they had talked of things
deeper and more intimate still.  Yet there was that in his words which
touched a sensitive corner of her nature.

"Why should I be marrying?" she asked presently.  "There was my sister's
son all those years.  I had to care for him."

"Ay, older than him by a thimbleful!" he rejoined.

"Nay, till he came to live in this hut alone older by many a year.  Since
then he is older than me by fifty.  I had not thought of marriage before
he went away.  Squire's son, soldier, or pillman, what were they to me!
He needed me.  They came, did they?  Well, and if they came?"

"And since the Egyptian went?"

A sort of sob came into her throat.  "He does not need me, but he may--he
will one day; and then I shall be ready.  But now--"

Old Soolsby's face turned away.  His house overlooked every house in the
valley beneath: he could see nearly every garden; he could even recognise
many in the far streets.  Besides, there hung along two nails on the wall
a telescope, relic of days when he sailed the main.  The grounds of the
Cloistered House and the fruit-decked garden-wall of the Red Mansion were
ever within his vision.  Once, twice, thrice, he had seen what he had
seen, and dark feelings, harsh emotions, had been roused in him.

"He will need us both--the Egyptian will need us both one day," he
answered now; "you more than any, me because I can help him, too--ay,
I can help him.  But married or single you could help him; so why waste
your days here?"

"Is it wasting my days to stay with my father?  He is lonely, most lonely
since our Davy went away; and troubled, too, for the dangers of that life
yonder.  His voice used to shake when he prayed, in those days when Davy
was away in the desert, down at Darfur and elsewhere among the rebel
tribes.  He frightened me then, he was so stern and still.  Ah, but that
day when we knew he was safe, I was eighteen, and no more!" she added,
smiling.  "But, think you, I could marry while my life is so tied to him
and to our Egyptian?"

No one looking at her limpid, shining blue eyes but would have set her
down for twenty-three or twenty-four, for not a line showed on her smooth
face; she was exquisite of limb and feature, and had the lissomeness of a
girl of fifteen.  There was in her eyes, however, an unquiet sadness; she
had abstracted moments when her mind seemed fixed on some vexing problem.
Such a mood suddenly came upon her now.  The pen lay by the paper
untouched, her hands folded in her lap, and a long silence fell upon
them, broken only by the twanging of the strips of cane in Soolsby's
hands.  At last, however, even this sound ceased; and the two scarce
moved as the sun drew towards the middle afternoon.  At last they were
roused by the sound of a horn, and, looking down, they saw a four-in-hand
drawing smartly down the road to the village over the gorse-spread
common, till it stopped at the Cloistered House.  As Faith looked, her
face slightly flushed.  She bent forward till she saw one figure get down
and, waving a hand to the party on the coach as it moved on, disappear
into the gateway of the Cloistered House.

"What is the office they have given him?" asked Soolsby, disapproval in
his tone, his eyes fixed on the disappearing figure.

"They have made Lord Eglington Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs," she
answered.

"And what means that to a common mind?"

"That what his Government does in Egypt will mean good or bad to our
Egyptian," she returned.

"That he can do our man good or ill?" Soolsby asked sharply--"that he,
yonder, can do that?"

She inclined her head.

"When I see him doing ill--well, when I see him doing that"--he snatched
up a piece of wood from the floor--"then I will break him, so!"

He snapped the stick across his knee, and threw the pieces on the ground.
He was excited.  He got to his feet and walked up and down the little
room, his lips shut tight, his round eyes flaring.

Faith watched him in astonishment.  In the past she had seen his face
cloud over, his eyes grow sulky, at the mention of Lord Eglington's name;
she knew that Soolsby hated him; but his aversion now was more definite
and violent than he had before shown, save on that night long ago when
David went first to Egypt, and she had heard hard words between them in
this same hut.  She supposed it one of those antipathies which often grow
in inverse ratio to the social position of those concerned.  She replied
in a soothing voice:

"Then we shall hope that he will do our Davy only good."

"You would not wish me to break his lordship?  You would not wish it?"
He came over to her, and looked sharply at her.  "You would not wish it?"
he repeated meaningly.

She evaded his question.  "Lord Eglington will be a great man one day
perhaps," she answered.  "He has made his way quickly.  How high he has
climbed in three years--how high!"

Soolsby's anger was not lessened.  "Pooh!  Pooh!  He is an Earl.  An Earl
has all with him at the start--name, place, and all.  But look at our
Egyptian!  Look at Egyptian David--what had he but his head and an honest
mind?  What is he?  He is the great man of Egypt.  Tell me, who helped
Egyptian David?  That second-best lordship yonder, he crept about coaxing
this one and wheedling that.  I know him--I know him.  He wheedles and
wheedles.  No matter whether 'tis a babe or an old woman, he'll talk, and
talk, and talk, till they believe in him, poor folks!  No one's too small
for his net.  There's Martha Higham yonder.  She's forty five.  If he
sees her, as sure as eggs he'll make love to her, and fill her ears with
words she'd never heard before, and 'd never hear at all if not from him.
Ay, there's no man too sour and no woman too old that he'll not blandish,
if he gets the chance."

As he spoke Faith shut her eyes, and her fingers clasped tightly
together--beautiful long, tapering fingers, like those in Romney's
pictures.  When he stopped, her eyes opened slowly, and she gazed before
her down towards that garden by the Red Mansion where her lifetime had
been spent.

"Thee says hard words, Soolsby," she rejoined gently.  "But maybe thee is
right."  Then a flash of humour passed over her face.  "Suppose we ask
Martha Higham if the Earl has 'blandished' her.  If the Earl has
blandished Martha, he is the very captain of deceit.  Why, he has himself
but twenty-eight years.  Will a man speak so to one older than himself,
save in mockery?  So, if thee is right in this, then--then if he speak
well to deceive and to serve his turn, he will also speak ill; and he
will do ill when it may serve his turn; and so he may do our Davy ill,
as thee says, Soolsby."

She rose to her feet and made as if to go, but she kept her face from
him.  Presently, however, she turned and looked at him.  "If he does ill
to Davy, there will be those like thee, Soolsby, who will not spare him."

His fingers opened and shut maliciously, he nodded dour assent.  After an
instant, while he watched her, she added: "Thee has not heard my lord is
to marry?"

"Marry--who is the blind lass?"

"Her name is Maryon, Miss Hylda Maryon: and she has a great fortune.  But
within a month it is to be."

"Thee remembers the woman of the cross-roads, her that our Davy--"

"Her the Egyptian kissed, and put his watch in her belt--ay,
Kate Heaver!"

"She is now maid to her Lord Eglington will wed.  She is to spend
to-night with us."

"Where is her lad that was, that the Egyptian rolled like dough in a
trough?"

"Jasper Kimber?  He is at Sheffield.  He has been up and down, now sober
for a year, now drunken for a month, now in, now out of a place, until
this past year.  But for this whole year he has been sober, and he may
keep his pledge.  He is working in the trades-unions.  Among his fellow-
workers he is called a politician--if loud speaking and boasting can make
one.  Yet if these doings give him stimulant instead of drink, who shall
complain?"

Soolsby's head was down.  He was looking out over the far hills, while
the strips of cane were idle in his hands.  "Ay, 'tis true--'tis true,"
he nodded.  "Give a man an idee which keeps him cogitating, makes him
think he's greater than he is, and sets his pulses beating, why, that's
the cure to drink.  Drink is friendship and good company and big thoughts
while it lasts; and it's lonely without it, if you've been used to it.
Ay, but Kimber's way is best.  Get an idee in your noddle, to do a thing
that's more to you than work or food or bed, and 'twill be more than
drink, too."

He nodded to himself, then began weaving the strips of cane furiously.
Presently he stopped again, and threw his head back with a chuckle.
"Now, wouldn't it be a joke, a reg'lar first-class joke, if Kimber and
me both had the same idee, if we was both workin' for the same thing--
an' didn't know it?  I reckon it might be so."

"What end is thee working for, friend?  If the public prints speak true,
Kimber is working to stand for Parliament against Lord Eglington."

Soolsby grunted and laughed in his throat.  "Now, is that the game of
Mister Kimber?  Against my Lord Eglington!  Hey, but that's a joke, my
lord!"

"And what is thee working for, Soolsby?"

"What do I be working for?  To get the Egyptian back to England--what
else?"

"That is no joke."

"Ay, but 'tis a joke."  The old man chuckled.  "'Tis the best joke in the
boilin'."  He shook his head and moved his body backwards and forwards
with glee.  "Me and Kimber!  Me and Kimber!" he roared, "and neither of
us drunk for a year--not drunk for a whole year.  Me and Kimber--and
him!"

Faith put her hand on his shoulder.  "Indeed, I see no joke, but only
that which makes my heart thankful, Soolsby."

"Ay, you will be thankful, you will be thankful, by-and-by," he said,
still chuckling, and stood up respectfully to show her out.




CHAPTER XVI

THE DEBT AND THE ACCOUNTING

His forehead frowning, but his eyes full of friendliness, Soolsby watched
Faith go down the hillside and until she reached the main road.  Here,
instead of going to the Red Mansion, she hesitated a moment, and then
passed along a wooded path leading to the Meetinghouse, and the
graveyard.  It was a perfect day of early summer, the gorse was in full
bloom, and the may and the hawthorn were alive with colour.  The path she
had taken led through a narrow lane, overhung with blossoms and greenery.
By bearing away to the left into another path, and making a detour, she
could reach the Meeting-house through a narrow lane leading past a now
disused mill and a small, strong stream flowing from the hill above.

As she came down the hill, other eyes than Soolsby's watched her.  From
his laboratory--the laboratory in which his father had worked, in which
he had lost his life--Eglington had seen the trim, graceful figure.  He
watched it till it moved into the wooded path.  Then he left his garden,
and, moving across a field, came into the path ahead of her.  Walking
swiftly, he reached the old mill, and waited.

She came slowly, now and again stooping to pick a flower and place it in
her belt.  Her bonnet was slung on her arm, her hair had broken a little
loose and made a sort of hood round the face, so still, so composed, into
which the light of steady, soft, apprehending eyes threw a gentle
radiance.  It was a face to haunt a man when the storm of life was round
him.  It had, too, a courage which might easily become a delicate
stubbornness, a sense of duty which might become sternness, if roused by
a sense of wrong to herself or others.

She reached the mill and stood and listened towards the stream and the
waterfall.  She came here often.  The scene quieted her in moods of
restlessness which came from a feeling that her mission was interrupted,
that half her life's work had been suddenly taken from her.  When David
went, her life had seemed to shrivel; for with him she had developed as
he had developed; and when her busy care of him was withdrawn, she had
felt a sort of paralysis which, in a sense, had never left her.  Then
suitors had come--the soldier from Shipley Wood, the lord of Axwood
Manor, and others, and, in a way, a new sense was born in her, though she
was alive to the fact that the fifteen thousand pounds inherited from her
Uncle Benn had served to warm the air about her into a wider circle.  Yet
it was neither to soldier, nor squire, nor civil engineer, nor surgeon
that the new sense stirring in her was due.  The spring was too far
beneath to be found by them.

When, at last, she raised her head, Lord Eglington was in the path,
looking at her with a half-smile.  She did not start, but her face turned
white, and a mist came before her eyes.

Quickly, however, as though fearful lest he should think he could trouble
her composure, she laid a hand upon herself.

He came near to her and held out his hand.  "It has been a long six
months since we met here," he said.

She made no motion to take his hand.  "I find days grow shorter as I grow
older," she rejoined steadily, and smoothed her hair with her hand,
making ready to put on her bonnet.

"Ah, do not put it on," he urged quickly, with a gesture.  "It becomes
you so--on your arm."

She had regained her self-possession.  Pride, the best weapon of a woman,
the best tonic, came to her resource.  "Thee loves to please thee at any
cost," she replied.  She fastened the grey strings beneath her chin.

"Would it be costly to keep the bonnet on your arm?"

"It is my pleasure to have it on my head, and my pleasure has some value
to myself."

"A moment ago," he rejoined laughing, "it was your pleasure to have it on
your arm."

"Are all to be monotonous except Lord Eglington?  Is he to have the only
patent of change?"

"Do I change?"  He smiled at her with a sense of inquisition, with an air
that seemed to say, "I have lifted the veil of this woman's heart; I am
the master of the situation."

She did not answer to the obvious meaning of his words, but said:

"Thee has done little else but change, so far as eye can see.  Thee and
thy family were once of Quaker faith, but thee is a High Churchman now.
Yet they said a year ago thee was a sceptic or an infidel."

"There is force in what you say," he replied.  "I have an inquiring mind;
I am ever open to reason.  Confucius said: 'It is only the supremely wise
or the deeply ignorant who never alter.'"

"Thee has changed politics.  Thee made a 'sensation, but that was not
enough.  Thee that was a rebel became a deserter."

He laughed.  "Ah, I was open to conviction!  I took my life in my hands,
defied consequences."  He laughed again.

"It brought office."

"I am Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs," he murmured complacently.

"Change is a policy with thee, I think.  It has paid thee well, so it
would seem."

"Only a fair rate of interest for the capital invested and the risks I've
taken," he answered with an amused look.

"I do not think that interest will increase.  Thee has climbed quickly,
but fast climbing is not always safe climbing."

His mood changed.  His voice quickened, his face lowered.  "You think I
will fail?  You wish me to fail?"

"In so far as thee acts uprightly, I wish thee well.  But if, out of
office, thee disregards justice and conscience and the rights of others,
can thee be just and faithful in office?  Subtlety will not always avail.
The strong man takes the straight course.  Subtlety is not intellect."

He flushed.  She had gone to the weakest point in his defences.  His
vanity was being hurt.  She had an advantage now.

"You are wrong," he protested.  "You do not understand public life, here
in a silly Quaker village."

"Does thee think that all that happens in 'public life' is of
consequence?  That is not sensible.  Thee is in the midst of a thousand
immaterial things, though they have importance for the moment.  But the
chief things that matter to all, does thee not know that a 'silly Quaker
village' may realise them to the full--more fully because we see them
apart from the thousand little things that do not matter?  I remember a
thing in political life that mattered.  It was at Heddington after the
massacre at Damascus.  Does thee think that we did not know thee spoke
without principle then, and only to draw notice?"

"You would make me into a demagogue," he said irritably.

"Thee is a demagogue," she answered candidly.

"Why did you never say all this to me long ago?  Years have passed since
then, and since then you and I have--have been friends.  You have--"

He paused, for she made a protesting motion, and a fire sprang into her
eyes.  Her voice got colder.  "Thee made me believe--ah, how many times
did we speak together?  Six times it was, not more.  Thee made me believe
that what I thought or said helped thee to see things better.  Thee said
I saw things truly like a child, with the wisdom of a woman.  Thee
remembers that?"

"It was so," he put in hastily.

"No, not for a moment so, though I was blinded to think for an instant
that it was.  Thee subtly took the one way which could have made me
listen to thee.  Thee wanted help, thee said; and if a word of mine could
help thee now and then, should I withhold it, so long as I thought thee
honest?"

"Do you think I was not honest in wanting your friendship?"

"Nay, it was not friendship thee wanted, for friendship means a giving
and a getting.  Thee was bent on getting what was, indeed, of but little
value save to the giver; but thee gave nothing; thee remembered nothing
of what was given thee."

"It is not so, it is not so," he urged eagerly, nervously.  "I gave, and
I still give."

"In those old days, I did not understand," she went on, "what it was thee
wanted.  I know now.  It was to know the heart and mind of a woman--of a
woman older than thee.  So that thee should have such sort of experience,
though I was but a foolish choice of the experiment.  They say thee has a
gift for chemistry like thy father; but if thee experiments no more
wisely in the laboratory than with me, thee will not reach distinction."

"Your father hated my father and did not believe in him, I know not why,
and you are now hating and disbelieving me."

"I do not know why my father held the late Earl in abhorrence; I know he
has no faith in thee; and I did ill in listening to thee, in believing
for one moment there was truth in thee.  But no, no, I think I never
believed it.  I think that even when thee said most, at heart I believed
least."

"You doubt that?  You doubt all I said to you?" he urged softly, coming
close to her.

She drew aside slightly.  She had steeled herself for this inevitable
interview, and there was no weakening of her defences; but a great
sadness came into her eyes, and spread over her face, and to this was
added, after a moment, a pity which showed the distance she was from him,
the safety in which she stood.

"I remember that the garden was beautiful, and that thee spoke as though
thee was part of the garden.  Thee remembers that, at our meeting in the
Cloistered House, when the woman was ill, I had no faith in thee; but
thee spoke with grace, and turned common things round about, so that they
seemed different to the ear from any past hearing; and I listened.  I did
not know, and I do not know now, why it is my duty to shun any of thy
name, and above all thyself; but it has been so commanded by my father
all my life; and though what he says may be in a little wrong, in much it
must ever be right."

"And so, from a hatred handed down, your mind has been tuned to shun even
when your heart was learning to give me a home--Faith?"

She straightened herself.  "Friend, thee will do me the courtesy to
forget to use my Christian name.  I am not a child-indeed, I am well on
in years"--he smiled--"and thee has no friendship or kinship for warrant.
If my mind was tuned to shun thee, I gave proof that it was willing to
take thee at thine own worth, even against the will of my father, against
the desire of David, who knew thee better than I--he gauged thee at first
glance."

"You have become a philosopher and a statesman," he said ironically.
"Has your nephew, the new Joseph in Egypt, been giving you instructions
in high politics?  Has he been writing the Epistles of David to the
Quakers?"

"Thee will leave his name apart," she answered with dignity.  "I have
studied neither high politics nor statesmanship, though in the days when
thee did flatter me thee said I had a gift for such things.  Thee did not
speak the truth.  And now I will say that I do not respect thee.  No
matter how high thee may climb, still I shall not respect thee; for thee
will ever gain ends by flattery, by subtlety, and by using every man and
every woman for selfish ends.  Thee cannot be true-not even to that which
by nature is greatest in thee.".

He withered under her words.

"And what is greatest in me?" he asked abruptly, his coolness and self-
possession striving to hold their own.

"That which will ruin thee in the end."  Her eyes looked beyond his into
the distance, rapt and shining; she seemed scarcely aware of his
presence.  "That which will bring thee down--thy hungry spirit of
discovery.  It will serve thee no better than it served the late Earl.
But thee it will lead into paths ending in a gulf of darkness."

"Deborah!" he answered, with a rasping laugh.  "Continuez!  Forewarned
is forearmed."

"No, do not think I shall be glad," she answered, still like one in a
dream.  "I shall lament it as I lament--as I lament now.  All else fades
away into the end which I see for thee.  Thee will live alone without a
near and true friend, and thee will die alone, never having had a true
friend.  Thee will never be a true friend, thee will never love truly man
or woman, and thee will never find man or woman who will love thee truly,
or will be with thee to aid thee in the dark and falling days."

"Then," he broke in sharply, querulously, "then, I will stand alone.
I shall never come whining that I have been ill-used, to fate or fortune,
to men or to the Almighty."

"That I believe.  Pride will build up in thee a strength which will be
like water in the end.  Oh, my lord," she added, with a sudden change in
her voice and manner, "if thee could only be true--thee who never has
been true to any one!"

"Why does a woman always judge a man after her own personal experience
with him, or what she thinks is her own personal experience?"

A robin hopped upon the path before her.  She watched it for a moment
intently, then lifted her head as the sound of a bell came through the
wood to her.  She looked up at the sun, which was slanting towards
evening.  She seemed about to speak, but with second thought, moved on
slowly past the mill and towards the Meeting-house.  He stepped on beside
her.  She kept her eyes fixed in front of her, as though oblivious of his
presence.

"You shall hear me speak.  You shall listen to what I have to say, though
it is for the last time," he urged stubbornly.  "You think ill of me.
Are you sure you are not pharisaical?"

"I am honest enough to say that which hurts me in the saying.  I do not
forget that to believe thee what I think is to take all truth from what
thee said to me last year, and again this spring when the tulips first
came and there was good news from Egypt."

"I said," he rejoined boldly, "that I was happier with you than with any
one else alive.  I said that what you thought of me meant more to me than
what any one else in the world thought; and that I say now, and will
always say it."

The old look of pity came into her face.  "I am older than thee by two
years," she answered quaintly, "and I know more of real life, though I
have lived always here.  I have made the most of the little I have seen;
thee has made little of the much that thee has seen.  Thee does not know
the truth concerning thee.  Is it not, in truth, vanity which would have
me believe in thee?  If thee was happier with me than with any one alive,
why then did thee make choice of a wife even in the days thee was
speaking to me as no man shall ever speak again?  Nothing can explain
so base a fact.  No, no, no, thee said to me what thee said to others,
and will say again without shame.  But--but see, I will forgive; yes, I
will follow thee with good wishes, if thee will promise to help David,
whom thee has ever disliked, as, in the place held by thee, thee can do
now.  Will thee offer this one proof, in spite of all else that
disproves, that thee spoke any words of truth to me in the Cloistered
House, in the garden by my father's house, by yonder mill, and hard by
the Meeting-house yonder-near to my sister's grave by the willow-tree?
Will thee do that for me?"

He was about to reply, when there appeared in the path before them Luke
Claridge.  His back was upon them, but he heard their footsteps and swung
round.  As though turned to stone, he waited for them.  As they
approached, his lips, dry and pale, essayed to speak, but no sound came.
A fire was in his eyes which boded no good.  Amazement, horror, deadly
anger, were all there, but, after a moment, the will behind the tumult
commanded it, the wild light died away, and he stood calm and still
awaiting them.  Faith was as pale as when she had met Eglington.  As she
came nearer, Luke Claridge said, in a low voice:

"How do I find thee in this company, Faith?"  There was reproach
unutterable in his voice, in his face.  He seemed humiliated and shamed,
though all the while a violent spirit in him was struggling for the
mastery.

"As I came this way to visit my sister's grave I met my lord by the mill.
He spoke to me, and, as I wished a favour of him, I walked with him
thither--but a little way.  I was going to visit my sister's grave."

"Thy sister's grave!"  The fire flamed up again, but the masterful will
chilled it down, and he answered: "What secret business can thee have
with any of that name which I have cast out of knowledge or notice?"

Ignorant as he was of the old man's cause for quarrel or dislike,
Eglington felt himself aggrieved, and, therefore, with an advantage.

"You had differences with my father, sir," he said.  "I do not know what
they were, but they lasted his lifetime, and all my life you have treated
me with aversion.  I am not a pestilence.  I have never wronged you.
I have lived your peaceful neighbour under great provocation, for your
treatment would have done me harm if my place were less secure.  I think
I have cause for complaint."

"I have never acted in haste concerning thee, or those who went before
thee.  What business had thee with him, Faith?" he asked again.  His
voice was dry and hard.

Her impulse was to tell the truth, and so for ever have her conscience
clear, for there would never be any more need for secrecy.  The wheel of
understanding between Eglington and herself had come full circle, and
there was an end.  But to tell the truth would be to wound her father, to
vex him against Eglington even as he had never yet been vexed.  Besides,
it was hard, while Eglington was there, to tell what, after all, was the
sole affair of her own life.  In one literal sense, Eglington was not
guilty of deceit.  Never in so many words had he said to her: "I love
you;" never had he made any promise to her or exacted one; he had done no
more than lure her to feel one thing, and then to call it another thing.
Also there was no direct and vital injury, for she had never loved him;
though how far she had travelled towards that land of light and trial she
could never now declare.  These thoughts flashed through her mind as she
stood looking at her father.  Her tongue seemed imprisoned, yet her soft
and candid eyes conquered the austerity in the old man's gaze.

Eglington spoke for her.

"Permit me to answer, neighbour," he said.  "I wished to speak with
your daughter, because I am to be married soon, and my wife will, at
intervals, come here to live.  I wished that she should not be shunned
by you and yours as I have been.  She would not understand, as I do not.
Yours is a constant call to war, while all your religion is an appeal for
peace.  I wished to ask your daughter to influence you to make it
possible for me and mine to live in friendship among you.  My wife will
have some claims upon you.  Her mother was an American, of a Quaker
family from Derbyshire.  She has done nothing to merit your aversion."

Faith listened astonished and baffled.  Nothing of this had he said to
her.  Had he meant to say it to her?  Had it been in his mind?  Or was it
only a swift adaptation to circumstances, an adroit means of working upon
the sympathies of her father, who, she could see, was in a quandary?
Eglington had indeed touched the old man as he had not been touched in
thirty years and more by one of his name.  For a moment the insinuating
quality of the appeal submerged the fixed idea in a mind to which the
name of Eglington was anathema.

Eglington saw his advantage.  He had felt his way carefully, and he
pursued it quickly.  "For the rest, your daughter asked what I was ready
to offer--such help as, in my new official position, I can give to
Claridge Pasha in Egypt.  As a neighbour, as Minister in the Government,
I will do what I can to aid him."

Silent and embarrassed, the old man tried to find his way.  Presently he
said tentatively: "David Claridge has a title to the esteem of all
civilised people."  Eglington was quick with his reply.  "If he succeeds,
his title will become a concrete fact.  There is no honour the Crown
would not confer for such remarkable service."

The other's face darkened.  "I did not speak, I did not think, of handles
to his name.  I find no good in them, but only means for deceiving and
deluding the world.  Such honours as might make him baronet, or duke,
would add not a cubit to his stature.  If he had such a thing by right"
--his voice hardened, his eyes grew angry once again--"I would wish it
sunk into the sea."

"You are hard on us, sir, who did not give ourselves our titles, but took
them with our birth as a matter of course.  There was nothing inspiring
in them.  We became at once distinguished and respectable by patent."

He laughed good-humouredly.  Then suddenly he changed, and his eyes took
on a far-off look which Faith had seen so often in the eyes of David,
but in David's more intense and meaning, and so different.  With what
deftness and diplomacy had he worked upon her father!  He had crossed a
stream which seemed impassable by adroit, insincere diplomacy.

She saw that it was time to go, while yet Eglington's disparagement of
rank and aristocracy was ringing in the old man's ears; though she knew
there was nothing in Eglington's equipment he valued more than his title
and the place it gave him.  Grateful, however, for his successful
intervention, Faith now held out her hand.

"I must take my father away, or it will be sunset before we reach the
Meeting-house," she said.  "Goodbye-friend," she added gently.

For an instant Luke Claridge stared at her, scarce comprehending that his
movements were being directed by any one save himself.  Truth was, Faith
had come to her cross-roads in life.  For the first time in her memory
she had seen her father speak to an Eglington without harshness; and, as
he weakened for a moment, she moved to take command of that weakness,
though she meant it to seem like leading.  While loving her and David
profoundly, her father had ever been quietly imperious.  If she could but
gain ascendency even in a little, it might lead to a more open book of
life for them both.

Eglington held out his hand to the old man.  "I have kept you too long,
sir.  Good-bye--if you will."

The offered hand was not taken, but Faith slid hers into the old man's
palm, and pressed it, and he said quietly to Eglington:

"Good evening, friend."

"And when I bring my wife, sir?" Eglington added, with a smile.

"When thee brings the lady, there will be occasion to consider--there
will be occasion then."

Eglington raised his hat, and turned back upon the path he and Faith had
travelled.

The old man stood watching him until he was out of view.  Then he seemed
more himself.  Still holding Faith's hand, he walked with her on the
gorse-covered hill towards the graveyard.

"Was it his heart spoke or his tongue--is there any truth in him?" he
asked at last.

Faith pressed his hand.  "If he help Davy, father--"

"If he help Davy; ay, if he help Davy!  Nay, I cannot go to the
graveyard, Faith.  Take me home," he said with emotion.

His hand remained in hers.  She had conquered.  She was set upon a new
path of influence.  Her hand was upon the door of his heart.

"Thee is good to me, Faith," he said, as they entered the door of the Red
Mansion.

She glanced over towards the Cloistered House.  Smoke was coming from the
little chimney of the laboratory.




CHAPTER XVII

THE WOMAN OF THE CROSS-ROADS

The night came down slowly.  There was no moon, the stars were few, but a
mellow warmth was in the air.  At the window of her little sitting-room
up-stairs Faith sat looking out into the stillness.  Beneath was the
garden with its profusion of flowers and fruit; away to the left was the
common; and beyond-far beyond--was a glow in the sky, a suffused light,
of a delicate orange, merging away into a grey-blueness, deepening into
a darker blue; and then a purple depth, palpable and heavy with a
comforting silence.

There was something alluring and suggestive in the soft, smothered
radiance.  It had all the glamour of some distant place of pleasure and
quiet joy, of happiness and ethereal being.  It was, in fact, the far-off
mirror of the flaming furnace of the great Heddington factories.  The
light of the sky above was a soft radiance, as of a happy Arcadian land;
the fire of the toil beneath was the output of human striving, an
intricate interweaving of vital forces which, like some Titanic machine,
wrought out in pain--a vast destiny.

As Faith looked, she thought of the thousands beneath struggling and
striving, none with all desires satisfied, some in an agony of want and
penury, all straining for the elusive Enough; like Sisyphus ever rolling
the rock of labour up a hill too steep for them.

Her mind flew to the man Kimber and his task of organising labour for its
own advance.  What a life-work for a man!  Here might David have spent
his days, here among his own countrymen, instead of in that far-off land
where all the forces of centuries were fighting against him.  Here the
forces would have been fighting for him; the trend was towards the
elevation of the standards of living and the wider rights of labour,
to the amelioration of hard conditions of life among the poor.  David's
mind, with its equity, its balance, and its fire--what might it not have
accomplished in shepherding such a cause, guiding its activity?

The gate of the garden clicked.  Kate Heaver had arrived.  Faith got to
her feet and left the room.

A few minutes later the woman of the cross-roads was seated opposite
Faith at the window.  She had changed greatly since the day David had
sent her on her way to London and into the unknown.  Then there had been
recklessness, something of coarseness, in the fine face.  Now it was
strong and quiet, marked by purpose and self-reliance.

Ignorance had been her only peril in the past, as it had been the cause
of her unhappy connection with Jasper Kimber.  The atmosphere in which
she was raised had been unmoral; it had not been consciously immoral.
Her temper and her indignation against her man for drinking had been the
means of driving them apart.  He would have married her in those days, if
she had given the word, for her will was stronger than his own; but she
had broken from him in an agony of rage and regret and despised love.

She was now, again, as she had been in those first days before she went
with Jasper Kimber; when she was the rose-red angel of the quarters; when
children were lured by the touch of her large, shapely hands; when she
had been counted a great nurse among her neighbours.  The old simple
untutored sympathy was in her face.

They sat for a long time in silence, and at length Faith said: "Thee is
happy now with her who is to marry Lord Eglington?"

Kate nodded, smiling.  "Who could help but be happy with her!  Yet a
temper, too--so quick, and then all over in a second.  Ah, she is one
that'd break her heart if she was treated bad; but I'd be sorry for him
that did it.  For the like of her goes mad with hurting, and the mad cut
with a big scythe."

"Has thee seen Lord Eglington?"

"Once before I left these parts and often in London."  Her voice was
constrained; she seemed not to wish to speak of him.

"Is it true that Jasper Kimber is to stand against him for Parliament?"

"I do not know.  They say my lord has to do with foreign lands now.  If
he helps Mr. Claridge there, then it would be a foolish thing for Jasper
to fight him; and so I've told him.  You've got to stand by those that
stand by you.  Lord Eglington has his own way of doing things.  There's
not a servant in my lady's house that he hasn't made his friend.  He's
one that's bound to have his will.  I heard my lady say he talks better
than any one in England, and there's none she doesn't know from duchesses
down."

"She is beautiful?" asked Faith, with hesitation.

"Taller than you, but not so beautiful."

Faith sighed, and was silent for a moment, then she laid a hand upon the
other's shoulder.  "Thee has never said what happened when thee first got
to London.  Does thee care to say?"

"It seems so long ago," was the reply.  .  .  .  "No need to tell of the
journey to London.  When I got there it frightened me at first.  My head
went round.  But somehow it came to me what I should do.  I asked my way
to a hospital.  I'd helped a many that was hurt at Heddington and
thereabouts, and doctors said I was as good as them that was trained.
I found a hospital at last, and asked for work, but they laughed at me--
it was the porter at the door.  I was not to be put down, and asked to
see some one that had rights to say yes or no.  So he opened the door and
told me to go.  I said he was no man to treat a woman so, and I would not
go.  Then a fine white-haired gentleman came forward.  He had heard all
we had said, standing in a little room at one side.  He spoke a kind word
or two, and asked me to go into the little room.  Before I had time to
think, he came to me with the matron, and left me with her.  I told her
the whole truth, and she looked at first as if she'd turn me out.  But
the end of it was I stayed there for the night, and in the morning the
old gentleman came again, and with him his lady, as kind and sharp of
tongue as himself, and as big as three.  Some things she said made my
tongue ache to speak back to her; but I choked it down.  I went to her to
be a sort of nurse and maid.  She taught me how to do a hundred things,
and by-and-by I couldn't be too thankful she had taken me in.  I was with
her till she died.  Then, six months ago I went to Miss Maryon, who knew
about me long before from her that died.  With her I've been ever since--
and so that's all."

"Surely God has been kind to thee."

"I'd have gone down--down--down, if it hadn't been for Mr. Claridge at
the cross-roads."

"Does thee think I shall like her that will live yonder?" She nodded
towards the Cloistered House.  "There's none but likes her.  She will
want a friend, I'm thinking.  She'll be lonely by-and-by.  Surely, she
will be lonely."

Faith looked at her closely, and at last leaned over, and again laid a
soft hand on her shoulder.  "Thee thinks that--why?"

"He cares only what matters to himself.  She will be naught to him but
one that belongs.  He'll never try to do her good.  Doing good to any but
himself never comes to his mind."

"How does thee know him, to speak so surely?"

"When, at the first, he gave me a letter for her one day, and slipped a
sovereign into my hand, and nodded, and smiled at me, I knew him right
enough.  He never could be true to aught."

"Did thee keep the sovereign?" Faith asked anxiously.

"Ay, that I did.  If he was for giving his money away, I'd take it fast
enough.  The gold gave father boots for a year.  Why should I mind?"

Faith's face suffused.  How low was Eglington's estimate of humanity!

In the silence that followed the door of her room opened, and her father
entered.  He held in one hand a paper, in the other a candle.  His face
was passive, but his eyes were burning.

"David--David is coming," he cried, in a voice that rang.  "Does thee
hear, Faith?  Davy is coming home!"  A woman laughed exultantly.  It was
not Faith.  But still two years passed before David came.




CHAPTER XVIII

TIME, THE IDOL-BREAKER

Lord Windlehurst looked meditatively round the crowded and brilliant
salon.  His host, the Foreign Minister, had gathered in the vast golden
chamber the most notable people of a most notable season, and in as
critical a period of the world's politics as had been known for a quarter
of a century.  After a moment's survey, the ex-Prime-Minister turned to
answer the frank and caustic words addressed to him by the Duchess of
Snowdon concerning the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs.  Presently he
said:

"But there is method in his haste, dear lady.  He is good at his
dangerous game.  He plays high, he plunges; but, somehow, he makes it do.
I've been in Parliament a generation or so, and I've never known an
amateur more daring and skilful.  I should have given him office had I
remained in power.  Look at him, and tell me if he wouldn't have been
worth the backing."

As Lord Windlehurst uttered the last word with an arid smile, he looked
quizzically at the central figure of a group of people gaily talking.

The Duchess impatiently tapped her knee with a fan.  "Be thankful you
haven't got him on your conscience," she rejoined.  "I call Eglington
unscrupulous and unreliable.  He has but one god--getting on; and he has
got on, with a vengeance.  Whenever I look at that dear thing he's
married, I feel there's no trusting Providence, who seems to make the
deserving a footstool for the undeserving.  I've known Hylda since she
was ten, and I've known him since the minute he came into the world, and
I've got the measure of both.  She is the finest essence the middle class
can distil, and he, oh, he's paraffin-vin ordinaire, if you like it
better, a selfish, calculating adventurer!"

Lord Windlehurst chuckled mordantly.  "Adventurer!  That's what they
called me--with more reason.  I spotted him as soon as he spoke in the
House.  There was devilry in him, and unscrupulousness, as you say; but,
I confess, I thought it would give way to the more profitable habit of
integrity, and that some cause would seize him, make him sincere and
mistaken, and give him a few falls.  But in that he was more original
than I thought.  He is superior to convictions.  You don't think he
married yonder Queen of Hearts from conviction, do you?"

He nodded towards a corner where Hylda, under a great palm, and backed by
a bank of flowers, stood surrounded by a group of people palpably amused
and interested; for she had a reputation for wit--a wit that never hurt,
and irony that was only whimsical.

"No, there you are wrong," the Duchess answered.  "He married from
conviction, if ever a man did.  Look at her beauty, look at her fortune,
listen to her tongue.  Don't you think conviction was easy?"

Lord Windlehurst looked at Hylda approvingly.  She has the real gift--
little information, but much knowledge, the primary gift of public life.
Information is full of traps; knowledge avoids them, it reads men; and
politics is men--and foreign affairs, perhaps!  She is remarkable.  I've
made some hay in the political world, not so much as the babblers think,
but I hadn't her ability at twenty-five."

"Why didn't she see through Eglington?"

"My dear Betty, he didn't give her time.  He carried her off her feet.
You know how he can talk."

"That's the trouble.  She was clever, and liked a clever man, and he--!"

"Quite so.  He'd disprove his own honest parentage, if it would help him
on--as you say."

"I didn't say it.  Now don't repeat that as from me.  I'm not clever
enough to think of such things.  But that Eglington lot--I knew his
father and his grandfather.  Old Broadbrim they called his grandfather
after he turned Quaker, and he didn't do that till he had had his fling,
so my father used to say.  And Old Broadbrim's father was called I-want-
to-know.  He was always poking his nose into things, and playing at being
a chemist-like this one and the one before.  They all fly off.  This
one's father used to disappear for two or three years at a time.  This
one will fly off, too.  You'll see!

"He is too keen on Number One for that, I fancy.  He calculates like a
mathematician.  As cool as a cracksman of fame and fancy."

The Duchess dropped the fan in her lap.  "My dear, I've said nothing as
bad as that about him.  And there he is at the Foreign Office!"

"Yet, what has he done, Betty, after all?  He has never cheated at cards,
or forged a cheque, or run away with his neighbour's wife."

"There's no credit in not doing what you don't want to do.  There's no
virtue in not falling, when you're not tempted.  Neighbour's wife!  He
hasn't enough feeling to face it.  Oh no, he'll not break the heart of
his neighbour's wife.  That's melodrama, and he's a cold-blooded artist.
He will torture that sweet child over there until she poisons him, or
runs away."

"Isn't he too clever for that?  She has a million!"

"He'll not realise it till it's all over.  He's too selfish to see--how I
hate him!"

Lord Windlehurst smiled indulgently at her.  "Ah, you never hated any
one--not even the Duke."

"I will not have you take away my character.  Of course I've hated, or I
wouldn't be worth a button.  I'm not the silly thing you've always
thought me."

His face became gentler.  "I've always thought you one of the wisest
women of this world--adventurous, but wise.  If it weren't too late, if
my day weren't over, I'd ask the one great favour, Betty, and--"

She tapped his arm sharply with her fan.  "What a humbug you are--the
Great Pretender!  But tell me, am I not right about Eglington?"

Windlehurst became grave.  "Yes, you are right--but I admire him, too.
He is determined to test himself to the full.  His ambition is boundless
and ruthless, but his mind has a scientific turn--the obligation of
energy to apply itself, of intelligence to engage itself to the farthest
limit.  But service to humanity--"

"Service to humanity!" she sniffed.

"Of course he would think it 'flap-doodle'--except in a speech; but
I repeat, I admire him.  Think of it all.  He was a poor Irish peer,
with no wide circle of acquaintance, come of a family none too popular.
He strikes out a course for himself--a course which had its dangers,
because it was original.  He determines to become celebrated--by becoming
notorious first.  He uses his title as a weapon for advancement as though
he were a butter merchant.  He plans carefully and adroitly.  He writes
a book of travel.  It is impudent, and it traverses the observations of
authorities, and the scientific geographers prance with rage.  That was
what he wished.  He writes a novel.  It sets London laughing at me, his
political chief.  He knew me well enough to be sure I would not resent
it.  He would have lampooned his grandmother, if he was sure she would
not, or could not, hurt him.  Then he becomes more audacious.  He
publishes a monograph on the painters of Spain, artificial, confident,
rhetorical, acute: as fascinating as a hide-and-seek drawing-room play--
he is so cleverly escaping from his ignorance and indiscretions all the
while.  Connoisseurs laugh, students of art shriek a little, and Ruskin
writes a scathing letter, which was what he had played for.  He had got
something for nothing cheaply.  The few who knew and despised him did not
matter, for they were able and learned and obscure, and, in the world
where he moves, most people are superficial, mediocre, and 'tuppence
coloured.' It was all very brilliant.  He pursued his notoriety, and got
it."

"Industrious Eglington!"

"But, yes, he is industrious.  It is all business.  It was an enormous
risk, rebelling against his party, and leaving me, and going over; but
his temerity justified itself, and it didn't matter to him that people
said he went over to get office as we were going out.  He got the office-
and people forget so soon.  Then, what does he do--"

"He brings out another book, and marries a wife, and abuses his old
friends--and you."

"Abuse?  With his tongue in his cheek, hoping that I should reply.
Dev'lishly ingenious!  But on that book of Electricity and Disease he
scored.  In most other things he's a barber-shop philosopher, but in
science he has got a flare, a real talent.  So he moves modestly in this
thing, for which he had a fine natural gift and more knowledge than he
ever had before in any department, whose boundaries his impertinent and
ignorant mind had invaded.  That book gave him a place.  It wasn't full
of new things, but it crystallised the discoveries, suggestions, and
expectations of others; and, meanwhile, he had got a name at no cost.  He
is so various.  Look at it dispassionately, and you will see much to
admire in his skill.  He pleases, he amuses, he startles, he baffles, he
mystifies."

The Duchess made an impatient exclamation.  "The silly newspapers call
him a 'remarkable man, a personality.' Now, believe me, Windlehurst, he
will overreach himself one of these days, and he'll come down like a
stick."

"There you are on solid ground.  He thinks that Fate is with him, and
that, in taking risks, he is infallible.  But the best system breaks at
political roulette sooner or later.  You have got to work for something
outside yourself, something that is bigger than the game, or the end is
sickening."

"Eglington hasn't far to go, if that's the truth."

"Well, well, when it comes, we must help him--we must help him up again."

The Duchess nervously adjusted her wig, with ludicrously tiny fingers for
one so ample, and said petulantly: "You are incomprehensible.  He has
been a traitor to you and to your party, he has thrown mud at you, he has
played with principles as my terrier plays with his rubber ball, and yet
you'll run and pick him up when he falls, and--"

"'And kiss the spot to make it well,'" he laughed softly, then added with
a sigh: "Able men in public life are few; 'far too few, for half our
tasks; we can spare not one.'  Besides, my dear Betty, there is his
pretty lass o' London."

The Duchess was mollified at once.  "I wish she had been my girl," she
said, in a voice a little tremulous.  "She never needed looking after.
Look at the position she has made for herself.  Her father wouldn't go
into society, her mother knew a mere handful of people, and--"

"She knew you, Betty."

"Well, suppose I did help her a little--I was only a kind of reference.
She did the rest.  She's set a half-dozen fashions herself--pure genius.
She was born to lead.  Her turnouts were always a little smarter, her
horses travelled a little faster, than other people's.  She took risks,
too, but she didn't play a game; she only wanted to do things well.  We
all gasped when she brought Adelaide to recite from 'Romeo and Juliet' at
an evening party, but all London did the same the week after."

"She discovered, and the Duchess of Snowdon applied the science.
Ah, Betty, don't think I don't agree.  She has the gift.  She has
temperament.  No woman should have temperament.  She hasn't scope enough
to wear it out in some passion for a cause.  Men are saved in spite of
themselves by the law of work.  Forty comes to a man of temperament,
and then a passion for a cause seizes him, and he is safe.  A woman of
temperament at forty is apt to cut across the bows of iron-clad
convention and go down.  She has temperament, has my lady yonder, and I
don't like the look of her eyes sometimes.  There's dark fire smouldering
in them.  She should have a cause; but a cause to a woman now-a-days
means 'too little of pleasure, too much of pain,' for others."

"What was your real cause, Windlehurst?  You had one, I suppose, for
you've never had a fall."

"My cause?  You ask that?  Behold the barren figtree!  A lifetime in my
country's service, and you who have driven me home from the House in your
own brougham, and told me that you understood--oh, Betty!"

She laughed.  "You'll say something funny as you're dying, Windlehurst."

"Perhaps.  But it will be funny to know that presently I'll have a secret
that none of you know, who watch me 'launch my pinnace into the dark.'
But causes?  There are hundreds, and all worth while.  I've come here
to-night for a cause--no, don't start, it's not you, Betty, though you
are worth any sacrifice.  I've come here to-night to see a modern
Paladin, a real crusader:

"'Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims
into his ken.'"

"Yes, that's poetry, Windlehurst, and you know I love it-I've always kept
yours.  But who's the man--the planet?"

"Egyptian Claridge."

"Ah, he is in England?"

"He will be here to-night; you shall see him."

"Really!  What is his origin?"

He told her briefly, adding: "I've watched the rise of Claridge Pasha.
I've watched his cause grow, and now I shall see the man--ah, but here
comes our lass o' London!"

The eyes of both brightened, and a whimsical pleasure came to the mask-
like face of Lord Windlehurst.  There was an eager and delighted look in
Hylda's face also as she quickly came to them, her cavaliers following.

The five years that had passed since that tragic night in Cairo had been
more than kind to her.  She was lissome, radiant, and dignified, her face
was alive with expression, and a delicate grace was in every movement.
The dark lashes seemed to have grown longer, the brown hair fuller, the
smile softer and more alluring.

"She is an invaluable asset to the Government," Lord Windlehurst murmured
as she came.  "No wonder the party helped the marriage on.  London
conspired for it, her feet got tangled in the web--and he gave her no
time to think.  Thinking had saved her till he came."

By instinct Lord Windlehurst knew.  During the first year after the
catastrophe at Kaid's Palace Hylda could scarcely endure the advances
made by her many admirers, the greatly eligible and the eager ineligible,
all with as real an appreciation of her wealth as of her personal
attributes.  But she took her place in London life with more than the
old will to make for herself, with the help of her aunt Conyngham,
an individual position.

The second year after her visit to Egypt she was less haunted by the dark
episode of the Palace, memory tortured her less; she came to think of
David and the part he had played with less agitation.  At first the
thought of him had moved her alternately to sympathy and to revolt.
His chivalry had filled her with admiration, with a sense of confidence,
of dependence, of touching and vital obligation; but there was, too,
another overmastering feeling.  He had seen her life naked, as it were,
stripped of all independence, with the knowledge of a dangerous
indiscretion which, to say the least, was a deformity; and she inwardly
resented it, as one would resent the exposure of a long-hidden physical
deformity, even by the surgeon who saved one's life.  It was not a very
lofty attitude of mind, but it was human--and feminine.

These moods had been always dissipated, however, when she recalled,
as she did so often, David as he stood before Nahoum Pasha, his soul
fighting in him to make of his enemy--of the man whose brother he had
killed--a fellow-worker in the path of altruism he had mapped out for
himself.  David's name had been continually mentioned in telegraphic
reports and journalistic correspondence from Egypt; and from this source
she had learned that Nahoum Pasha was again high in the service of Prince
Kaid.  When the news of David's southern expedition to the revolting
slave-dealing tribes began to appear, she was deeply roused.  Her
agitation was the more intense because she never permitted herself to
talk of him to others, even when his name was discussed at dinner-tables,
accompanied by strange legends of his origin and stranger romances
regarding his call to power by Kaid.

She had surrounded him with romance; he seemed more a hero of history
than of her own real and living world, a being apart.  Even when there
came rumblings of disaster, dark dangers to be conquered by the Quaker
crusader, it all was still as of another life.  True it was, that when
his safe return to Cairo was announced she had cried with joy and relief;
but there was nothing emotional or passionate in her feeling; it was the
love of the lower for the higher, the hero-worship of an idealist in
passionate gratitude.

And, amid it all, her mind scarcely realised that they would surely meet
again.  At the end of the second year the thought had receded into an
almost indefinite past.  She was beginning to feel that she had lived
two lives, and that this life had no direct or vital bearing upon her
previous existence, in which David had moved.  Yet now and then the
perfume of the Egyptian garden, through which she had fled to escape from
tragedy, swept over her senses, clouded her eyes in the daytime, made
them burn at night.

At last she had come to meet and know Eglington.  From the first moment
they met he had directed his course towards marriage.  He was the man of
the moment.  His ambition seemed but patriotism, his ardent and
overwhelming courtship the impulse of a powerful nature.  As Lord
Windlehurst had said, he carried her off her feet, and, on a wave of
devotion and popular encouragement, he had swept her to the altar,

The Duchess held both her hands for a moment, admiring her, and,
presently, with a playful remark upon her unselfishness, left her alone
with Lord Windlehurst.

As they talked, his mask-like face became lighted from the brilliant fire
in the inquisitorial eyes, his lips played with topics of the moment in a
mordant fashion, which drew from her flashing replies.  Looking at her,
he was conscious of the mingled qualities of three races in her--English,
Welsh, and American-Dutch of the Knickerbocker strain; and he contrasted
her keen perception and her exquisite sensitiveness with the purebred
Englishwomen round him, stately, kindly, handsome, and monotonously
intelligent.

"Now I often wonder," he said, conscious of, but indifferent to, the
knowledge that he and the brilliant person beside him were objects of
general attention--"I often wonder, when I look at a gathering like this,
how many undiscovered crimes there are playing about among us.  They
never do tell--or shall I say, we never do tell?"

All day, she knew not why, Hylda had been nervous and excited.  Without
reason his words startled her.  Now there flashed before her eyes a room
in a Palace at Cairo, and a man lying dead before her.  The light slowly
faded out of her eyes, leaving them almost lustreless, but her face was
calm, and the smile on her lips stayed.  She fanned herself slowly, and
answered nonchalantly: "Crime is a word of many meanings.  I read in the
papers of political crimes--it is a common phrase; yet the criminals
appear to go unpunished."

"There you are wrong," he answered cynically.  "The punishment is, that
political virtue goes unrewarded, and in due course crime is the only
refuge to most.  Yet in politics the temptation to be virtuous is great."

She laughed now with a sense of relief.  The intellectual stimulant
had brought back the light to her face.  "How is it, then, with you--
inveterate habit or the strain of the ages?  For they say you have not
had your due reward."

He smiled grimly.  "Ah, no, with me virtue is the act of an inquiring
mind--to discover where it will lead me.  I began with political crime--
I was understood!  I practise political virtue: it embarrasses the world,
it fogs them, it seems original, because so unnecessary.  Mine is the
scientific life.  Experiment in old substances gives new--well, say, new
precipitations.  But you are scientific, too.  You have a laboratory, and
have much to do--with retorts."

"No, you are thinking of my husband.  The laboratory is his."

"But the retorts are yours."

"The precipitations are his."

"Ah, well, at least you help him to fuse the constituents!  .  .  .  But
now, be quite confidential to an old man who has experimented too.  Is
your husband really an amateur scientist, or is he a scientific amateur?
Is it a pose or a taste?  I fiddled once--and wrote sonnets; one was a
pose, the other a taste."

It was mere persiflage, but it was a jest which made an unintended wound.
Hylda became conscious of a sudden sharp inquiry going on in her mind.
There flashed into it the question, Does Eglington's heart ever really
throb for love of any object or any cause?  Even in moments of greatest
intimacy, soon after marriage, when he was most demonstrative towards
her, he had seemed preoccupied, except when speaking about himself and
what he meant to do.  Then he made her heart throb in response to his
confident, ardent words--concerning himself.  But his own heart, did it
throb?  Or was it only his brain that throbbed?

Suddenly, with an exclamation, she involuntarily laid a hand upon
Windlehurst's arm.  She was looking down the room straight before her to
a group of people towards which other groups were now converging,
attracted by one who seemed to be a centre of interest.

Presently the eager onlookers drew aside, and Lord Windlehurst observed
moving up the room a figure he had never seen before.  The new-comer was
dressed in a grey and blue official dress, unrelieved save by silver
braid at the collar and at the wrists.  There was no decoration, but on
the head was a red fez, which gave prominence to the white, broad
forehead, with the dark hair waving away behind the ears.  Lord
Windlehurst held his eye-glass to his eye in interested scrutiny.  "H'm,"
he said, with lips pursed out, "a most notable figure, a most remarkable
face!  My dear, there's a fortune in that face.  It's a national asset."

He saw the flush, the dumb amazement, the poignant look in Lady
Eglington's face, and registered it in his mind.  "Poor thing," he said
to himself, "I wonder what it is all about--I wonder.  I thought she had
no unregulated moments.  She gave promise of better things."  The Foreign
Minister was bringing his guest towards them.  The new-comer did not look
at them till within a few steps of where they stood.  Then his eyes met
those of Lady Eglington.  For an instant his steps were arrested.  A
swift light came into his face, softening its quiet austerity and
strength.

It was David.




CHAPTER XIX

SHARPER THAN A SWORD

A glance of the eye was the only sign of recognition between David and
Hylda; nothing that others saw could have suggested that they had ever
met before.  Lord Windlehurst at once engaged David in conversation.

At first when Hylda had come back from Egypt, those five years ago, she
had often wondered what she would think or do if she ever were to see
this man again; whether, indeed, she could bear it.  Well, the moment and
the man had come.  Her eyes had gone blind for an instant; it had seemed
for one sharp, crucial moment as though she could not bear it; then the
gulf of agitation was passed, and she had herself in hand.

While her mind was engaged subconsciously with what Lord Windlehurst and
David said, comprehending it all, and, when Lord Windlehurst appealed to
her, offering by a word contribution to the 'pourparler', she was
studying David as steadily as her heated senses would permit her.

He seemed to her to have put on twenty years in the steady force of his
personality--in the composure of his bearing, in the self-reliance of his
look, though his face and form were singularly youthful.  The face was
handsome and alight, the look was that of one who weighed things; yet she
was conscious of a great change.  The old delicate quality of the
features was not so marked, though there was nothing material in the
look, and the head had not a sordid line, while the hand that he now and
again raised, brushing his forehead meditatively, had gained much in
strength and force.  Yet there was something--something different, that
brought a slight cloud into her eyes.  It came to her now, a certain
melancholy in the bearing of the figure, erect and well-balanced as it
was.  Once the feeling came, the certainty grew.  And presently she found
a strange sadness in the eyes, something that lurked behind all that he
did and all that he was, some shadow over the spirit.  It was even more
apparent when he smiled.

As she was conscious of this new reading of him, a motion arrested her
glance, a quick lifting of the head to one side, as though the mind had
suddenly been struck by an idea, the glance flying upward in abstracted
questioning.  This she had seen in her husband, too, the same brisk
lifting of the head, the same quick smiling.  Yet this face, unlike
Eglington's, expressed a perfect single-mindedness; it wore the look of a
self-effacing man of luminous force, a concentrated battery of energy.
Since she had last seen him every sign of the provincial had vanished.
He was now the well-modulated man of affairs, elegant in his simplicity
of dress, with the dignified air of the intellectual, yet with the
decision of a man who knew his mind.

Lord Windlehurst was leaving.  Now David and she were alone.  Without a
word they moved on together through the throng, the eyes of all following
them, until they reached a quiet room at one end of the salon, where were
only a few people watching the crowd pass the doorway.

"You will be glad to sit," he said, motioning her to a chair beside some
palms.  Then, with a change of tone, he added: "Thee is not sorry I am
come?"

Thee--the old-fashioned simple Quaker word!  She put her fingers to her
eyes.  Her senses were swimming with a distant memory.  The East was in
her brain, the glow of the skies, the gleam of the desert, the swish of
the Nile, the cry of the sweet-seller, the song of the dance-girl, the
strain of the darabukkeh, the call of the skis.  She saw again the
ghiassas drifting down the great river, laden with dourha; she saw the
mosque of the blue tiles with its placid fountain, and its handful of
worshippers praying by the olive-tree.  She watched the moon rise above
the immobile Sphinx, she looked down on the banqueters in the Palace,
David among them, and Foorgat Bey beside her.  She saw Foorgat Bey again
lying dead at her feet.  She heard the stir of the leaves; she caught the
smell of the lime-trees in the Palace garden as she fled.  She recalled
her reckless return to Cairo from Alexandria.  She remembered the little
room where she and David, Nahoum and Mizraim, crossed a bridge over a
chasm, and stood upon ground which had held good till now--till this
hour, when the man who had played a most vital part in her life had
come again out of a land which, by some forced obliquity of mind and
stubbornness of will, she had assured herself she would never see again.

She withdrew her hand from her eyes, and saw him looking at her calmly,
though his face was alight.  "Thee is fatigued," he said.  "This is
labour which wears away the strength."  He made a motion towards the
crowd.

She smiled a very little, and said: "You do not care for such things as
this, I know.  Your life has its share of it, however, I suppose."

He looked out over the throng before he answered.  "It seems an eddy of
purposeless waters.  Yet there is great depth beneath, or there were no
eddy; and where there is depth and the eddy there is danger--always."
As he spoke she became almost herself again.  "You think that deep
natures have most perils?"

"Thee knows it is so.  Human nature is like the earth: the deeper the
plough goes into the soil unploughed before, the more evil substance is
turned up--evil that becomes alive as soon as the sun and the air fall
upon it."

"Then, women like me who pursue a flippant life, who ride in this merry-
go-round"--she made a gesture towards the crowd beyond--"who have no
depth, we are safest, we live upon the surface."  Her gaiety was forced;
her words were feigned.

"Thee has passed the point of danger, thee is safe," he answered
meaningly.

"Is that because I am not deep, or because the plough has been at work?"
she asked.  "In neither case I am not sure you are right."

"Thee is happily married," he said reflectively; "and the prospect is
fair."

"I think you know my husband," she said in answer, and yet not in answer.

"I was born in Hamley where he has a place--thee has been there?" he
asked eagerly.

"Not yet.  We are to go next Sunday, for the first time to the Cloistered
House.  I had not heard that my husband knew you, until I saw in the
paper a few days ago that your home was in Hamley.  Then I asked
Eglington, and he told me that your family and his had been neighbours
for generations."

"His father was a Quaker," David rejoined, "but he forsook the faith."

"I did not know," she answered, with some hesitation.  There was no
reason why, when she and Eglington had talked of Hamley, he should not
have said his own father had once been a Quaker; yet she had dwelt so
upon the fact that she herself had Quaker blood, and he had laughed so
much over it, with the amusement of the superior person, that his silence
on this one point struck her now with a sense of confusion.

"You are going to Hamley--we shall meet there?" she continued.

"To-day I should have gone, but I have business at the Foreign Office
to-morrow.  One needs time to learn that all 'private interests and
partial affections' must be sacrificed to public duty."

"But you are going soon?  You will be there on Sunday?"

"I shall be there to-morrow night, and Sunday, and for one long week at
least.  Hamley is the centre of the world, the axle of the universe--you
shall see.  You doubt it?" he added, with a whimsical smile.

"I shall dispute most of what you say, and all that you think, if you do
not continue to use the Quaker 'thee' and 'thou'--ungrammatical as you
are so often."

"Thee is now the only person in London, or in England, with whom I use
'thee' and 'thou.'  I am no longer my own master, I am a public servant,
and so I must follow custom."

"It is destructive of personality.  The 'thee' and 'thou' belong to you.
I wonder if the people of Hamley will say 'thee' and 'thou' to me.  I
hope, I do hope they will."

"Thee may be sure they will.  They are no respecters of persons there.
They called your husband's father Robert--his name was Robert.  Friend
Robert they called him, and afterwards they called him Robert Denton till
he died."

"Will they call me Hylda?" she asked, with a smile.  "More like they
will call thee Friend Hylda; it sounds simple and strong," he replied.

"As they call Claridge Pasha Friend David," she answered, with a smile.
"David is a good name for a strong man."

"That David threw a stone from a sling and smote a giant in the forehead.
The stone from this David's sling falls into the ocean and is lost
beneath the surface."

His voice had taken on a somewhat sombre tone, his eyes looked away into
the distance; yet he smiled too, and a hand upon his knee suddenly closed
in sympathy with an inward determination.

A light of understanding came into her face.  They had been keeping
things upon the surface, and, while it lasted, he seemed a lesser man
than she had thought him these past years.  But now--now there was the
old unschooled simplicity, the unique and lonely personality, the homely
soul and body bending to one root-idea, losing themselves in a wave of
duty.  Again he was to her, once more, the dreamer, the worker, the
conqueror--the conqueror of her own imagination.  She had in herself the
soul of altruism, the heart of the crusader.  Touched by the fire of a
great idea, she was of those who could have gone out into the world
without wallet or scrip, to work passionately for some great end.

And she had married the Earl of Eglington!

She leaned towards David, and said eagerly: "But you are satisfied--you
are satisfied with your work for poor Egypt?"

"Thee says 'poor Egypt,'" he answered, "and thee says well.  Even now she
is not far from the day of Rameses and Joseph.  Thee thinks perhaps thee
knows Egypt--none knows her."

"You know her--now?"

He shook his head slowly.  "It is like putting one's ear to the mouth of
the Sphinx.  Yet sometimes, almost in despair, when I have lain down in
the desert beside my camel, set about with enemies, I have got a message
from the barren desert, the wide silence, and the stars."  He paused.

"What is the message that comes?" she asked softly.  "It is always the
same: Work on!  Seek not to know too much, nor think that what you do is
of vast value.  Work, because it is yours to be adjusting the machinery
in your own little workshop of life to the wide mechanism of the universe
and time.  One wheel set right, one flying belt adjusted, and there is a
step forward to the final harmony--ah, but how I preach!" he added
hastily.

His eyes were fixed on hers with a great sincerity, and they were clear
and shining, yet his lips were smiling--what a trick they had of smiling!
He looked as though he should apologise for such words in such a place.

She rose to her feet with a great suspiration, with a light in her eyes
and a trembling smile.

"But no, no, no, you inspire one.  Thee inspires me," she said, with a
little laugh, in which there was a note of sadness.  "I may use 'thee,'
may I not, when I will?  I am a little a Quaker also, am I not?  My
people came from Derbyshire, my American people, that is--and only forty
years ago.  Almost thee persuades me to be a Quaker now," she added.
"And perhaps I shall be, too," she went on, her eyes fixed on the crowd
passing by, Eglington among them.

David saw Eglington also, and moved forward with her.

"We shall meet in Hamley," she said composedly, as she saw her husband
leave the crush and come towards her.  As Eglington noticed David,
a curious enigmatical glance flashed from his eyes.  He came forward,
however, with outstretched hand.

"I am sorry I was not at the Foreign Office when you called to-day.
Welcome back to England, home--and beauty."  He laughed in a rather
mirthless way, but with a certain empressement, conscious, as he always
was, of the onlookers.  "You have had a busy time in Egypt?" he
continued cheerfully, and laughed again.

David laughed slightly, also, and Hylda noticed that it had a certain
resemblance in its quick naturalness to that of her husband.

"I am not sure that we are so busy there as we ought to be," David
answered.  "I have no real standards.  I am but an amateur, and have
known nothing of public life.  But you should come and see."

"It has been in my mind.  An ounce of eyesight is worth a ton of print.
My lady was there once, I believe"--he turned towards her--"but before
your time, I think.  Or did you meet there, perhaps?"  He glanced at both
curiously.  He scarcely knew why a thought flashed into his mind--as
though by some telepathic sense; for it had never been there before,
and there was no reason for its being there now.

Hylda saw what David was about to answer, and she knew instinctively that
he would say they had never met.  It shamed her.  She intervened as she
saw he was about to speak.

"We were introduced for the first time to-night," she said; "but Claridge
Pasha is part of my education in the world.  It is a miracle that Hamley
should produce two such men," she added gaily, and laid her fan upon her
husband's arm lightly.  "You should have been a Quaker, Harry, and then
you two would have been--"

"Two Quaker Don Quixotes," interrupted Eglington ironically.

"I should not have called you a Don Quixote," his wife lightly rejoined,
relieved at the turn things had taken.  "I cannot imagine you tilting at
wind-mills--"

"Or saving maidens in distress?  Well, perhaps not; but you do not
suggest that Claridge Pasha tilts at windmills either--or saves maidens
in distress.  Though, now I come to think, there was an episode."  He
laughed maliciously.  "Some time ago it was--a lass of the cross-roads.
I think I heard of such an adventure, which did credit to Claridge
Pasha's heart, though it shocked Hamley at the time.  But I wonder,
was the maiden really saved?"

Lady Eglington's face became rigid.  "Well, yes," she said slowly, "the
maiden was saved.  She is now my maid.  Hamley may have been shocked, but
Claridge Pasha has every reason to be glad that he helped a fellow-being
in trouble."

"Your maid--Heaver?" asked Eglington in surprise, a swift shadow
crossing his face.

"Yes; she only told me this morning.  Perhaps she had seen that Claridge
Pasha was coming to England.  I had not, however.  At any rate, Quixotism
saved her."

David smiled.  "It is better than I dared to hope," he remarked quietly.

"But that is not all," continued Hylda.  "There is more.  She had been
used badly by a man who now wants to marry her--has tried to do so for
years.  Now, be prepared for a surprise, for it concerns you rather
closely, Eglington.  Fate is a whimsical jade.  Whom do you think it is?
Well, since you could never guess, it was Jasper Kimber."

Eglington's eyes opened wide.  "This is nothing but a coarse and
impossible stage coincidence," he laughed.  "It is one of those tricks
played by Fact to discredit the imagination.  Life is laughing at us
again.  The longer I live, the more I am conscious of being an object of
derision by the scene-shifters in the wings of the stage.  What a cynical
comedy life is at the best!"

"It all seems natural enough," rejoined David.

"It is all paradox."

"Isn't it all inevitable law?  I have no belief in 'antic Fate.'"

Hylda realised, with a new and poignant understanding, the difference of
outlook on life between the two men.  She suddenly remembered the words
of Confucius, which she had set down in her little book of daily life:
"By nature we approximate, it is only experience that drives us apart."

David would have been content to live in the desert all his life for the
sake of a cause, making no calculations as to reward.  Eglington must
ever have the counters for the game.

"Well, if you do not believe in 'antic Fate,' you must be greatly puzzled
as you go on," he rejoined, laughing; "especially in Egypt, where the
East and the West collide, race against race, religion against religion,
Oriental mind against Occidental intellect.  You have an unusual quantity
of Quaker composure, to see in it all 'inevitable law.'  And it must be
dull.  But you always were, so they say in Hamley, a monument of
seriousness."

"I believe they made one or two exceptions," answered David drily.
"I had assurances."

Eglington laughed boyishly.  "You are right.  You achieved a name for
humour in a day--'a glass, a kick, and a kiss,' it was.  Do you have such
days in Egypt?"

"You must come and see," David answered lightly, declining to notice the
insolence.  "These are critical days there.  The problems are worthy of
your care.  Will you not come?"

Eglington was conscious of a peculiar persuasive influence over himself
that he had never felt before.  In proportion, however, as he felt its
compelling quality, there came a jealousy of the man who was its cause.
The old antagonism, which had had its sharpest expression the last time
they had met on the platform at Heddington, came back.  It was one strong
will resenting another--as though there was not room enough in the wide
world of being for these two atoms of life, sparks from the ceaseless
wheel, one making a little brighter flash than the other for the moment,
and then presently darkness, and the whirring wheel which threw them off,
throwing off millions of others again.

On the moment Eglington had a temptation to say something with an edge,
which would show David that his success in Egypt hung upon the course
that he himself and the weak Foreign Minister, under whom he served,
would take.  And this course would be his own course largely, since he
had been appointed to be a force and strength in the Foreign Office which
his chief did not supply.  He refrained, however, and, on the moment,
remembered the promise he had given to Faith to help David.

A wave of feeling passed over him.  His wife was beautiful, a creature of
various charms, a centre of attraction.  Yet he had never really loved
her--so many sordid elements had entered into the thought of marriage
with her, lowering the character of his affection.  With a perversity
which only such men know, such heart as he had turned to the unknown
Quaker girl who had rebuked him, scathed him, laid bare his soul before
himself, as no one ever had done.  To Eglington it was a relief that
there was one human being--he thought there was only one--who read him
through and through; and that knowledge was in itself as powerful an
influence as was the secret between David and Hylda.  It was a kind of
confessional, comforting to a nature not self-contained.  Now he
restrained his cynical intention to deal David a side-thrust,
and quietly said:

"We shall meet at Hamley, shall we not?  Let us talk there, and not at
the Foreign Office.  You would care to go to Egypt, Hylda?"

She forced a smile.  "Let us talk it over at Hamley."  With a smile to
David she turned away to some friends.

Eglington offered to introduce David to some notable people, but he said
that he must go--he was fatigued after his journey.  He had no wish to be
lionised.

As he left the salon, the band was playing a tune that made him close his
eyes, as though against something he would not see.  The band in Kaid's
Palace had played it that night when he had killed Foorgat Bey.




CHAPTER XX

EACH AFTER HIS OWN ORDER

With the passing years new feelings had grown up in the heart of Luke
Claridge.  Once David's destiny and career were his own peculiar and
self-assumed responsibility.  "Inwardly convicted," he had wrenched the
lad away from the natural circumstances of his life, and created a scheme
of existence for him out of his own conscience--a pious egoist.

After David went to Egypt, however, his mind involuntarily formed the
resolution that "Davy and God should work it out together."

He had grown very old in appearance, and his quiet face was almost
painfully white; but the eyes burned with more fire than in the past.
As the day approached when David should arrive in England, he walked by
himself continuously, oblivious of the world round him.  He spoke to no
one, save the wizened Elder Meacham, and to John Fairley, who rightly
felt that he had a share in the making of Claridge Pasha.

With head perched in the air, and face half hidden in his great white
collar, the wizened Elder, stopping Luke Claridge in the street one day,
said:

"Does thee think the lad will ride in Pharaoh's chariot here?"

There were sly lines of humour about the mouth of the wizened Elder as he
spoke, but Luke Claridge did not see.

"Pride is far from his heart," he answered portentously.  "He will ride
in no chariot.  He has written that he will walk here from Heddington,
and none is to meet him."

"He will come by the cross-roads, perhaps," rejoined the other piously.
"Well, well, memory is a flower or a rod, as John Fox said, and the
cross-roads have memories for him."

Again flashes of humour crossed his face, for he had a wide humanity, of
insufficient exercise.

"He has made full atonement, and thee does ill to recall the past,
Reuben," rejoined the other sternly.

"If he has done no more that needs atonement than he did that day at the
cross-roads, then has his history been worthy of Hamley," rejoined the
wizened Elder, eyes shut and head buried in his collar.  "Hamley made
him--Hamley made him.  We did not spare advice, or example, or any
correction that came to our minds--indeed, it was almost a luxury.  Think
you, does he still play the flute--an instrument none too grave, Luke?"

But, to this, Luke Claridge exclaimed impatiently and hastened on; and
the little wizened Elder chuckled to himself all the way to the house of
John Fairley.  None in Hamley took such pride in David as did these two
old men, who had loved him from a child, but had discreetly hidden their
favour, save to each other.  Many times they had met and prayed together
in the weeks when his life was in notorious danger in the Soudan.

As David walked through the streets of Heddington making for the open
country, he was conscious of a new feeling regarding the place.  It was
familiar, but in a new sense.  Its grimy, narrow streets, unlovely
houses, with shut windows, summer though it was, and no softening
influences anywhere, save here and there a box of sickly geraniums in the
windows, all struck his mind in a way they had never done before.  A mile
away were the green fields, the woods, the roadsides gay with flowers and
shrubs-loveliness was but over the wall, as it were; yet here the
barrack-like houses, the grey, harsh streets, seemed like prison walls,
and the people in them prisoners who, with every legal right to call
themselves free, were as much captives as the criminal on some small
island in a dangerous sea.  Escape--where?  Into the gulf of no work and
degradation?

They never lifted their eyes above the day's labour.  They were scarce
conscious of anything beyond.  What were their pleasures?  They had
imitations of pleasures.  To them a funeral or a wedding, a riot or a
vociferous band, a dog-fight or a strike, were alike in this, that they
quickened feelings which carried them out of themselves, gave them a
sense of intoxication.

Intoxication?  David remembered the far-off day of his own wild rebellion
in Hamley.  From that day forward he had better realised that in the
hearts of so many of the human race there was a passion to forget
themselves; to blot out, if for a moment only, the troubles of life and
time; or, by creating a false air of exaltation, to rise above them.
Once in the desert, when men were dying round him of fever and dysentery,
he had been obliged, exhausted and ill, scarce able to drag himself from
his bed, to resort to an opiate to allay his own sufferings, that he
might minister to others.  He remembered how, in the atmosphere it had
created--an intoxication, a soothing exhilaration and pervasive thrill--
he had saved so many of his followers.  Since then the temptation had
come upon him often when trouble weighed or difficulties surrounded him
--accompanied always by recurrence of fever--to resort to the insidious
medicine.  Though he had fought the temptation with every inch of his
strength, he could too well understand those who sought for "surcease of
pain"

                   "Seeking for surcease of pain,
                    Pilgrim to Lethe I came;
                    Drank not, for pride was too keen,
                    Stung by the sound of a name!"

As the plough of action had gone deep into his life and laid bare his
nature to the light, there had been exposed things which struggled for
life and power in him, with the fiery strength which only evil has.

The western heavens were aglow.  On every hand the gorse and the may were
in bloom, the lilacs were coming to their end, but wild rhododendrons
were glowing in the bracken, as he stepped along the road towards the
place where he was born.  Though every tree and roadmark was familiar,
yet he was conscious of a new outlook.  He had left these quiet scenes
inexperienced and untravelled, to be thrust suddenly into the thick of a
struggle of nations over a sick land.  He had worked in a vortex of
debilitating local intrigue.  All who had to do with Egypt gained except
herself, and if she moved in revolt or agony, they threatened her.
Once when resisting the pressure and the threats of war of a foreign
diplomatist, he had, after a trying hour, written to Faith in a burst of
passionate complaint, and his letter had ended with these words.

                   "In your onward march, O men,
                    White of face, in promise whiter,
                    You unsheath the sword, and then
                    Blame the wronged as the fighter.

                   "Time, ah, Time, rolls onward o'er
                    All these foetid fields of evil,
                    While hard at the nation's core
                    Eats the burning rust and weevill

                   "Nathless, out beyond the stars
                    Reigns the Wiser and the Stronger,
                    Seeing in all strifes and wars
                    Who the wronged, who the wronger."

Privately he had spoken thus, but before the world he had given way to
no impulse, in silence finding safety from the temptation to diplomatic
evasion.  Looking back over five years, he felt now that the sum of his
accomplishment had been small.

He did not realise the truth.  When his hand was almost upon the object
for which he had toiled and striven--whether pacifying a tribe, meeting a
loan by honest means, building a barrage, irrigating the land, financing
a new industry, or experimenting in cotton--it suddenly eluded him.
Nahoum had snatched it away by subterranean wires.  On such occasions
Nahoum would shrug his shoulders, and say with a sigh, "Ah, my friend,
let us begin again.  We are both young; time is with us; and we will
flourish palms in the face of Europe yet.  We have our course set by a
bright star.  We will continue."

Yet, withal, David was the true altruist.  Even now as he walked this
road which led to his old home, dear to him beyond all else, his thoughts
kept flying to the Nile and to the desert.

Suddenly he stopped.  He was at the cross-roads.  Here he had met Kate
Heaver, here he had shamed his neighbours--and begun his work in life.
He stood for a moment, smiling, as he looked at the stone where he had
sat those years ago, his hand feeling instinctively for his flute.
Presently he turned to the dusty road again.

Walking quickly away, he swung into the path of the wood which would
bring him by a short cut to Hamley, past Soolsby's cottage.  Here was the
old peace, the old joy of solitude among the healing trees.  Experience
had broadened his life, had given him a vast theatre of work; but the
smell of the woods, the touch of the turf, the whispering of the trees,
the song of the birds, had the ancient entry to his heart.

At last he emerged on the hill where Soolsby lived.  He had not meant, if
he could help it, to speak to any one until he had entered the garden of
the Red Mansion, but he had inadvertently come upon this place where he
had spent the most momentous days of his life, and a feeling stronger
than he cared to resist drew him to the open doorway.  The afternoon sun
was beating in over the threshold as he reached it, and, at his footstep,
a figure started forward from the shadow of a corner.

It was Kate Heaver.

Surprise, then pain showed in her face; she flushed, was agitated.

"I am sorry.  It's too bad--it's hard on him you should see," she said in
a breath, and turned her head away for an instant; but presently looked
him in the face again, all trembling and eager.  "He'll be sorry enough
to-morrow," she added solicitously, and drew away from something, she had
been trying to hide.

Then David saw.  On a bench against a wall lay old Soolsby--drunk.
A cloud passed across his face and left it pale.

"Of course," he said simply, and went over and touched the heaving
shoulders reflectively.  "Poor Soolsby!"

"He's been sober four years--over four," she said eagerly.  "When he knew
you'd come again, he got wild, and he would have the drink in spite of
all.  Walking from Heddington, I saw him at the tavern, and brought him
home."

"At the tavern--" David said reflectively.

"The Fox and Goose, sir."  She turned her face away again, and David's
head came up with a quick motion.  There it was, five years ago, that he
had drunk at the bar, and had fought Jasper Kimber.

"Poor fellow!" he said again, and listened to Soolsby's stertorous
breathing, as a physician looks at a patient whose case he cannot
control, does not wholly understand.

The hand of the sleeping man was suddenly raised, his head gave a jerk,
and he said mumblingly: "Claridge for ever!"

Kate nervously intervened.  "It fair beat him, your coming back, sir.
It's awful temptation, the drink.  I lived in it for years, and it's
cruel hard to fight it when you're worked up either way, sorrow or joy.
There's a real pleasure in being drunk, I'm sure.  While it lasts you're
rich, and you're young, and you don't care what happens.  It's kind of
you to take it like this, sir, seeing you've never been tempted and
mightn't understand."  David shook his head sadly, and looked at Soolsby
in silence.

"I don't suppose he took a quarter what he used to take, but it made him
drunk.  'Twas but a minute of madness.  You've saved him right enough."

"I was not blaming him.  I understand--I understand."

He looked at her clearly.  She was healthy and fine-looking, with large,
eloquent eyes.  Her dress was severe and quiet, as became her occupation
--a plain, dark grey, but the shapely fulness of the figure gave softness
to the outlines.  It was no wonder Jasper Kimber wished to marry her;
and, if he did, the future of the man was sure.  She had a temperament
which might have made her an adventuress--or an opera-singer.  She had
been touched in time, and she had never looked back.

"You are with Lady Eglington now, I have heard?" he asked.

She nodded.

"It was hard for you in London at first?"

She met his look steadily.  "It was easy in a way.  I could see round me
what was the right thing to do.  Oh, that was what was so awful in the
old life over there at Heddington,"--she pointed beyond the hill, "we
didn't know what was good and what was bad.  The poor people in big
working-places like Heddington ain't much better than heathens, leastways
as to most things that matter.  They haven't got a sensible religion, not
one that gets down into what they do.  The parson doesn't reach them--he
talks about church and the sacraments, and they don't get at what good
it's going to do them.  And the chapel preachers ain't much better.
They talk and sing and pray, when what the people want is light,
and hot water, and soap, and being shown how to live, and how to bring
up children healthy and strong, and decent-cooked food.  I'd have food-
hospitals if I could, and I'd give the children in the schools one good
meal a day.  I'm sure the children of the poor go wrong and bad more
through the way they live than anything.  If only they was taught right
--not as though they was paupers!  Give me enough nurses of the right
sort, and enough good, plain cooks, and meat three times a week, and milk
and bread and rice and porridge every day, and I'd make a new place of
any town in England in a year.  I'd--"

She stopped all at once, however, and flushing, said: "I didn't stop to
think I was talking to you, sir."

"I am glad you speak to me so," he answered gently.  "You and I are both
reformers at heart."

"Me?  I've done nothing, sir, not any good to anybody or anything."

"Not to Jasper Kimber?"

"You did that, sir; he says so; he says you made him."

A quick laugh passed David's lips.  "Men are not made so easily.  I think
I know the trowel and the mortar that built that wall!  Thee will marry
him, friend?"

Her eyes burned as she looked at him.  She had been eternally
dispossessed of what every woman has the right to have--one memory
possessing the elements of beauty.  Even if it remain but for the moment,
yet that moment is hers by right of her sex, which is denied the wider
rights of those they love and serve.  She had tasted the cup of
bitterness and drunk of the waters of sacrifice.  Married life had no
lure for her.  She wanted none of it.  The seed of service had, however,
taken root in a nature full of fire and light and power, undisciplined
and undeveloped as it was.  She wished to do something--the spirit of
toil, the first habit of the life of the poor, the natural medium for the
good that may be in them, had possession of her.

This man was to her the symbol of work.  To have cared for his home, to
have looked after his daily needs, to have sheltered him humbly from
little things, would have been her one true happiness.  And this was
denied her.  Had she been a man, it would have been so easy.  She could
have offered to be his servant; could have done those things which she
could do better than any, since hers would be a heart-service.

But even as she looked at him now, she had a flash of insight and
prescience.  She had, from little things said or done, from newspapers
marked and a hundred small indications, made up her mind that her
mistress's mind dwelt much upon "the Egyptian."  The thought flashed now
that she might serve this man, after all; that a day might come when she
could say that she had played a part in his happiness, in return for all
he had done for her.  Life had its chances--and strange things had
happened.  In her own mind she had decided that her mistress was not
happy, and who could tell what might happen?  Men did not live for ever!
The thought came and went, but it left behind a determination to answer
David as she felt.

"I will not marry Jasper," she answered slowly.  "I want work, not
marriage."

"There would be both," he urged.

"With women there is the one or the other, not both."

"Thee could help him.  He has done credit to himself, and he can do good
work for England.  Thee can help him."

"I want work alone, not marriage, sir."

"He would pay thee his debt."

"He owes me nothing.  What happened was no fault of his, but of the life
we were born in.  He tired of me, and left me.  Husbands tire of their
wives, but stay on and beat them."

"He drove thee mad almost, I remember."

"Wives go mad and are never cured, so many of them.  I've seen them die,
poor things, and leave the little ones behind.  I had the luck wi' me.
I took the right turning at the cross-roads yonder."

"Thee must be Jasper's wife if he asks thee again," he urged.

"He will come when I call, but I will not call," she answered.

"But still thee will marry him when the heart is ready," he persisted.
"It shall be ready soon.  He needs thee.  Good-bye, friend.  Leave
Soolsby alone.  He will be safe.  And do not tell him that I have seen
him so."  He stooped over and touched the old man's shoulder gently.

He held out his hand to her.  She took it, then suddenly leaned over and
kissed it.  She could not speak.

He stepped to the door and looked out.  Behind the Red Mansion the sun
was setting, and the far garden looked cool and sweet.  He gave a happy
sigh, and stepped out and down.

As he disappeared, the woman dropped into a chair, her arms upon a table.
Her body shook with sobs.  She sat there for an hour, and then, when the
sun was setting, she left the drunken man sleeping, and made her way down
the hill to the Cloistered House.  Entering, she was summoned to her
mistress's room.  "I did not expect my lady so soon," she said,
surprised.

"No; we came sooner than we expected.  Where have you been?"

"At Soolsby's hut on the hill, my lady."

"Who is Soolsby?"

Kate told her all she knew, and of what had happened that afternoon--but
not all.




CHAPTER XXI

"THERE IS NOTHING HIDDEN WHICH SHALL NOT BE REVEALED"

A fortnight had passed since they had come to Hamley--David, Eglington,
and Hylda--and they had all travelled a long distance in mutual
understanding during that time, too far, thought Luke Claridge, who
remained neutral and silent.  He would not let Faith go to the Cloistered
House, though he made no protest against David going; because he
recognised in these visits the duty of diplomacy and the business of the
nation--more particularly David's business, which, in his eyes, swallowed
all.  Three times David had gone to the Cloistered House; once Hylda and
he had met in the road leading to the old mill, and once at Soolsby's
hut.  Twice, also, in the garden of his old home he had seen her, when
she came to visit Faith, who had captured her heart at once.  Eglington
and Faith had not met, however.  He was either busy in his laboratory,
or with his books, or riding over the common and through the woods,
and their courses lay apart.

But there came an afternoon when Hylda and David were a long hour
together at the Cloistered House.  They talked freely of his work in
Egypt.  At last she said: "And Nahoum Pasha?"

"He has kept faith."

"He is in high place again?"

"He is a good administrator."

"You put him there!"

"Thee remembers what I said to him, that night in Cairo?"

Hylda closed her eyes and drew in a long breath.  Had there been a word
spoken that night when she and David and Nahoum met which had not bitten
into her soul!  That David had done so much in Egypt without ruin or
death was a tribute to his power.  Nevertheless, though Nahoum had not
struck yet, she was certain he would one day.  All that David now told
her of the vicissitudes of his plans, and Nahoum's sympathy and help,
only deepened this conviction.  She could well believe that Nahoum gave
David money from his own pocket, which he replaced by extortion from
other sources, while gaining credit with David for co-operation.
Armenian Christian Nahoum might be, but he was ranged with the East
against the West, with the reactionary and corrupt against advance,
against civilisation and freedom and equality.  Nahoum's Christianity was
permeated with Orientalism, the Christian belief obscured by the theism
of the Muslim.  David was in a deadlier struggle than he knew.  Yet it
could serve no good end to attempt to warn him now.  He had outlived
peril so far; might it not be that, after all, he would win?

So far she had avoided Nahoum's name in talks with David.  She could
scarcely tell why she did, save that it opened a door better closed,
as it were; but the restraint had given way at last.

"Thee remembers what I said that night?" David repeated slowly.

"I remember--I understand.  You devise your course and you never change.
It is like building on a rock.  That is why nothing happens to you as bad
as might happen."

"Nothing bad ever happens to me."

"The philosophy of the desert," she commented smiling.  "You are living
in the desert even when you are here.  This is a dream; the desert and
Egypt only are real.

"That is true, I think.  I seem sometimes like a sojourner here, like a
spirit 'revisiting the scenes of life and time.'"  He laughed boyishly.

"Yet you are happy here.  I understand now why and how you are what you
are.  Even I that have been here so short a time feel the influence upon
me.  I breathe an air that, somehow, seems a native air.  The spirit of
my Quaker grandmother revives in me.  Sometimes I sit hours thinking,
scarcely stirring; and I believe I know now how people might speak to
each other without words.  Your Uncle Benn and you--it was so with you,
was it not?  You heard his voice speaking to you sometimes; you
understood what he meant to say to you?  You told me so long ago."

David inclined his head.  "I heard him speak as one might speak through
a closed door.  Sometimes, too, in the desert I have heard Faith speak
to me."

"And your grandfather?"

"Never my grandfather--never.  It would seem as though, in my thoughts,
I could never reach him; as though masses of opaque things lay between.
Yet he and I--there is love between us.  I don't know why I never hear
him."

"Tell me of your childhood, of your mother.  I have seen her grave under
the ash by the Meeting-house, but I want to know of her from you."

"Has not Faith told you?"

"We have only talked of the present.  I could not ask her; but I can ask
you.  I want to know of your mother and you together."

"We were never together.  When I opened my eyes she closed hers.  It was
so little to get for the life she gave.  See, was it not a good face?"
He drew from his pocket a little locket which Faith had given him years
ago, and opened it before her.

Hylda looked long.  "She was exquisite," she said, "exquisite."

"My father I never knew either.  He was a captain of a merchant ship.
He married her secretly while she was staying with an aunt at Portsmouth.
He sailed away, my mother told my grandfather all, and he brought her
home here.  The marriage was regular, of course, but my grandfather,
after announcing it, and bringing it before the Elders, declared that she
should never see her husband again.  She never did, for she died a few
months after, when I came, and my father died very soon, also.  I never
saw him, and I do not know if he ever tried to see me.  I never had any
feeling about it.  My grandfather was the only father I ever knew, and
Faith, who was born a year before me, became like a sister to me, though
she soon made other pretensions!"  He laughed again, almost happily.
"To gain an end she exercised authority as my aunt!"

"What was your father's name?"

"Fetherdon--James Fetherdon."

"Fetherdon--James Fetherdon !"  Involuntarily Hylda repeated the name
after him.  Where had she heard the name before--or where had she seen
it?  It kept flashing before her eyes.  Where had she seen it?  For days
she had been rummaging among old papers in the library of the Cloistered
House, and in an old box full of correspondence and papers of the late
countess, who had died suddenly.  Was it among them that she had seen the
name?  She could not tell.  It was all vague, but that she had seen it or
heard it she was sure.

"Your father's people, you never knew them?"

He shook his head.  "Nor of them.  Here was my home--I had no desire to
discover them.  We draw in upon ourselves here."

"There is great force in such a life and such a people," she answered.
"If the same concentration of mind could be carried into the wide life of
the world, we might revolutionise civilisation; or vitalise and advance
it, I mean--as you are doing in Egypt."

"I have done nothing in Egypt.  I have sounded the bugle--I have not had
my fight."

"That is true in a sense," she replied.  "Your real struggle is before
you.  I do not know why I say it, but I do say it; I feel it.  Something
here"--she pressed her hand to her heart--"something here tells me that
your day of battle is yet to come."  Her eyes were brimming and full of
excitement.  "We must all help you."  She gained courage with each word.
"You must not fight alone.  You work for civilisation; you must have
civilisation behind you."  Her hands clasped nervously; there was a catch
in her throat.  "You remember then, that I said I would call to you one
day, as your Uncle Benn did, and you should hear and answer me.  It shall
not be that I will call.  You--you will call, and I will help you if I
can.  I will help, no matter what may seem to prevent, if there is
anything I can do.  I, surely I, of all the world owe it to you to do
what I can, always.

"I owe so much--you did so much.  Oh, how it haunts me!  Sometimes in the
night I wake with a start and see it all--all!"

The flood which had been dyked back these years past had broken loose in
her heart.

Out of the stir and sweep of social life and duty, of official and
political ambition-heart-hungry, for she had no child; heart-lonely,
though she had scarce recognised it in the duties and excitements round
her--she had floated suddenly into this backwater of a motionless life in
Hamley.  Its quiet had settled upon her, the shackles of her spirit had
been loosed, and dropped from her; she had suddenly bathed her heart and
soul in a freer atmosphere than they had ever known before.  And David
and Hamley had come together.  The old impulses, dominated by a divine
altruism, were swinging her out upon a course leading she knew not,
reeked not, whither--for the moment reeked not.  This man's career, the
work he was set to do, the ideal before him, the vision of a land
redeemed, captured her, carried her panting into a resolve which, however
she might modify her speech or action, must be an influence in her life
hereafter.  Must the penance and the redemption be his only?  This life
he lived had come from what had happened to her and to him in Egypt.
In a deep sense her life was linked with his.

In a flash David now felt the deep significance of their relations.
A curtain seemed suddenly to have been drawn aside.  He was blinded for
a moment.  Her sympathy, her desire to help, gave him a new sense of hope
and confidence, but--but there was no room in his crusade for any woman;
the dear egotism of a life-dream was masterful in him, possessed him.

Yet, if ever his heart might have dwelt upon a woman with thought of the
future, this being before him--he drew himself up with a start!  .  .  .
He was going to Egypt again in a few days; they might probably never meet
again--would not, no doubt--should not.  He had pressed her husband to go
to Egypt, but now he would not encourage it; he must "finish his journey
alone."

He looked again in her eyes, and their light and beauty held him.  His
own eyes swam.  The exaltation of a great idea was upon them, was a bond
of fate between them.  It was a moment of peril not fully realised by
either.  David did realise, however, that she was beautiful beyond all
women he had ever seen--or was he now for the first time really aware of
the beauty of woman?  She had an expression, a light of eye and face,
finely alluring beyond mere outline of feature.  Yet the features were
there, too, regular and fine; and her brown hair waving away from her
broad, white forehead over eyes a greyish violet in colour gave her a
classic distinction.  In the quietness of the face there was that strain
of the Quaker, descending to her through three generations, yet enlivened
by a mind of impulse and genius.

They stood looking at each other for a moment, in which both had taken a
long step forward in life's experience.  But presently his eyes looked
beyond her, as though at something that fascinated them.

"Of what are you thinking?  What do you see?" she asked.

"You, leaving the garden of my house in Cairo, I standing by the fire,"
he answered, closing his eyes for an instant.

"It is what I saw also," she said breathlessly.  "It is what I saw and
was thinking of that instant."  When, as though she must break away from
the cords of feeling drawing her nearer and nearer to him, she said, with
a little laugh, "Tell me again of my Chicago cousin?  I have not had a
letter for a year."

"Lacey, he is with me always.  I should have done little had it not been
for him.  He has remarkable resource; he is never cast down.  He has but
one fault."

"What is that?"

"He is no respecter of persons.  His humour cuts deep.  He has a wide
heart for your sex.  When leaving the court of the King of Abyssinia he
said to his Majesty: 'Well, good-bye, King.  Give my love to the girls.'"

She laughed again.  "How absurd and childish he is!  But he is true and
able.  And how glad you should be that you are able to make true friends,
without an effort.  Yesterday I met neighbour Fairley, and another little
old Elder who keeps his chin in his collar and his eyes on the sky.  They
did little else but sing your praises.  One might have thought that you
had invented the world-or Hamley."

"Yet they would chafe if I were to appear among them without these."  He
glanced down at the Quaker clothes he wore, and made a gesture towards
the broadbrimmed hat reposing on a footstool near by.

"It is good to see that you are not changed, not spoiled at all," she
remarked, smiling.  "Though, indeed, how could you be, who always work
for others and never for yourself?  All I envy you is your friends.  You
make them and keep them so."

She sighed, and a shadow came into her eyes suddenly.  She was thinking
of Eglington.  Did he make friends--true friends?  In London--was there
one she knew who would cleave to him for love of him?  In England--had
she ever seen one?  In Hamley, where his people had been for so many
generations, had she found one?

Herself?  Yes, she was his true friend.  She would do what would she not
do to help him, to serve his interests?  What had she not done since she
married Her fortune, it was his; her every waking hour had been filled
with something devised to help him on his way.  Had he ever said to her:
"Hylda, you are a help to me"?  He had admired her--but was he singular
in that?  Before she married there were many--since, there had been many
--who had shown, some with tact and carefulness, others with a crudeness
making her shudder, that they admired her; and, if they might, would have
given their admiration another name with other manifestations.  Had she
repelled it all?  She had been too sure of herself to draw her skirts
about her; she was too proud to let any man put her at any disadvantage.
She had been safe, because her heart had been untouched.  The Duchess of
Snowdon, once beautiful, but now with a face like a mask, enamelled and
rouged and lifeless, had said to her once: "My dear, I ought to have died
at thirty.  When I was twenty-three I wanted to squeeze the orange dry in
a handful of years, and then go out suddenly, and let the dust of
forgetfulness cover my bones.  I had one child, a boy, and would have no
more; and I squeezed the orange!  But I didn't go at thirty, and yet the
orange was dry.  My boy died; and you see what I am--a fright, I know it;
and I dress like a child of twenty; and I can't help it."

There had been moments, once, when Hylda, too, had wished to squeeze the
orange dry, but something behind, calling to her, had held her back.  She
had dropped her anchor in perilous seas, but it had never dragged.

"Tell me how to make friends--and keep them," she added gaily.

"If it be true I make friends, thee taught me how," he answered, "for
thee made me a friend, and I forget not the lesson."

She smiled.  "Thee has learnt another lesson too well," she answered
brightly.  "Thee must not flatter.  It is not that which makes thee keep
friends.  Thee sees I also am speaking as they do in Hamley--am I not
bold?  I love the grammarless speech."

"Then use it freely to-day, for this is farewell," he answered, not
looking at her.

"This--is--farewell," she said slowly, vaguely.  Why should it startle
her so?  "You are going so soon--where?"

"To-morrow to London, next week to Egypt."

She laid a hand upon herself, for her heart was beating violently.  "Thee
is not fair to give no warning--there is so much to say," she said, in so
low a tone that he could scarcely hear her.  "There is the future, your
work, what we are to do here to help.  What I am to do.

"Thee will always be a friend to Egypt, I know," he answered.  "She needs
friends.  Thee has a place where thee can help."

"Will not right be done without my voice?" she asked, her eyes half
closing.  "There is the Foreign Office, and English policy, and the
ministers, and--and Eglington.  What need of me?"

He saw the thought had flashed into her mind that he did not trust her
husband.  "Thee knows and cares for Egypt, and knowing and caring make
policy easier to frame," he rejoined.

Suddenly a wave of feeling went over her.  He whose life had been flung
into this field of labour by an act of her own, who should help him but
herself?

But it all baffled her, hurt her, shook her.  She was not free to help as
she wished.  Her life belonged to another; and he exacted the payment of
tribute to the uttermost farthing.  She was blinded by the thought.  Yet
she must speak.  "I will come to Egypt--we will come to Egypt," she said
quickly.  "Eglington shall know, too; he shall understand.  You shall
have his help.  You shall not work alone."

"Thee can work here," he said.  "It may not be easy for Lord Eglington to
come."

"You pressed it on him."

Their eyes met.  She suddenly saw what was in his mind.

"You know best what will help you most," she added gently.

"You will not come?" he asked.

"I will not say I will not come--not ever," she answered firmly.  "It may
be I should have to come."  Resolution was in her eyes.  She was thinking
of Nahoum.  "I may have to come," she added after a pause, "to do right
by you."

He read her meaning.  "Thee will never come," he continued confidently.
He held out his hand.  "Perhaps I shall see you in town," she rejoined,
as her hand rested in his, and she looked away.  "When do you start for
Egypt?"

"To-morrow week, I think," he answered.  "There is much to do."

"Perhaps we shall meet in town," she repeated.  But they both knew they
would not.

"Farewell," he said, and picked up his hat.

As he turned again, the look in her eyes brought the blood to his face,
then it became pale.  A new force had come into his life.

"God be good to thee," he said, and turned away.

She watched him leave the room and pass through the garden.

"David!  David!" she said softly after him.

At the other end of the room her husband, who had just entered, watched
her.  He heard her voice, but did not hear what she said.

"Come, Hylda, and have some music," he said brusquely.

She scrutinised him calmly.  His face showed nothing.  His look was
enigmatical.

"Chopin is the thing for me," he said, and opened the piano.




CHAPTER XXII

AS IN A GLASS DARKLY

It was very quiet and cool in the Quaker Meeting-house, though outside
there was the rustle of leaves, the low din of the bees, the whistle of a
bird, or the even tread of horses' hoofs as they journeyed on the London
road.  The place was full.  For a half-hour the worshippers had sat
voiceless.  They were waiting for the spirit to move some one to speak.
As they waited, a lady entered and glided into a seat.  Few saw, and
these gave no indication of surprise, though they were little used to
strangers, and none of the name borne by this lady had entered the
building for many years.  It was Hylda.

At last the silence was broken.  The wizened Elder, with eyes upon the
ceiling and his long white chin like ivory on his great collar, began to
pray, sitting where he was, his hands upon his knees.  He prayed for all
who wandered "into by and forbidden paths."  He prayed for one whose work
was as that of Joseph, son of Jacob; whose footsteps were now upon the
sea, and now upon the desert; whose way was set among strange gods and
divers heresies--"'For there must also be heresies, that they which are
approved may be made manifest among the weak.'"  A moment more, and then
he added: "He hath been tried beyond his years; do Thou uphold his hands.
Once with a goad did we urge him on, when in ease and sloth he was among
us, but now he spurreth on his spirit and body in too great haste.  O put
Thy hand upon the bridle, Lord, that He ride soberly upon Thy business."

There was a longer silence now, but at last came the voice of Luke
Claridge.

"Father of the fatherless," he said, "my days are as the sands in the
hour-glass hastening to their rest; and my place will soon be empty.  He
goeth far, and I may not go with him.  He fighteth alone, like him that
strove with wild beasts at Ephesus; do Thou uphold him that he may bring
a nation captive.  And if a viper fasten on his hand, as chanced to Paul
of old, give him grace to strike it off without hurt.  O Lord, he is to
me, Thy servant, as the one ewe lamb; let him be Thine when Thou
gatherest for Thy vineyard!"

"And if a viper fasten on his hand--" David passed his hand across his
forehead and closed his eyes.  The beasts at Ephesus he had fought, and
he would fight them again--there was fighting enough to do in the land of
Egypt.  And the viper would fasten on his hand--it had fastened on his
hand, and he had struck it off; but it would come again, the dark thing
against which he had fought in the desert.

Their prayers had unnerved him, had got into that corner of his nature
where youth and its irresponsibility loitered yet.  For a moment he was
shaken, and then, looking into the faces of the Elders, said: "Friends, I
go again upon paths that lead into the wilderness.  I know not if I ever
shall return.  Howsoe'er that may be, I shall walk with firmer step
because of all ye do for me."

He closed his eyes and prayed: "O God, I go into the land of ancient
plagues and present pestilence.  If it be Thy will, bring me home to this
good land, when my task is done.  If not, by Thy goodness let me be as a
stone set by the wayside for others who come after; and save me from the
beast and from the viper.  'Thou art faithful, who wilt not suffer us to
be tempted above that we are able; but wilt with the temptation also make
a way of escape, that we may be able to bear it!'"

He sat down, and all grew silent again; but suddenly some one sobbed
aloud-sobbed, and strove to stay the sobbing, and could not, and, getting
up, hastened towards the door.

It was Faith.  David heard, and came quickly after her.  As he took her
arm gently, his eyes met those of Hylda.  She rose and came out also.

"Will thee take her home?" he said huskily.  "I can bear no more."

Hylda placed her arm round Faith, and led her out under the trees and
into the wood.  As they went, Faith looked back.

"Oh, forgive me, forgive me, Davy," she said softly.

Three lights burned in Hamley: one in the Red Mansion, one in the
Cloistered House, and one in Soolsby's hut upon the hill.  In the Red
Mansion old Luke Claridge, his face pale with feeling, his white hair
tumbling about, his head thrust forward, his eyes shining, sat listening,
as Faith read aloud letters which Benn Claridge had written from the East
many years before.  One letter, written from Bagdad, he made her read
twice.  The faded sheet had in it the glow and glamour of the East; it
was like a heart beating with life; emotion rose and fell in it like the
waves of the sea.  Once the old man interrupted Faith.

"Davy--it is as though Davy spoke.  It is like Davy--both Claridge, both
Claridge," he said.  "But is it not like Davy?  Davy is doing what it was
in Benn's heart to do.  Benn showed the way; Benn called, and Davy came."

He laid both hands upon his knees and raised his eyes.  "O Lord, I have
sought to do according to Thy will," he whispered.  He was thinking of a
thing he had long hidden.  Through many years he had no doubt, no qualm;
but, since David had gone to Egypt, some spirit of unquiet had worked in
him.  He had acted against the prayer of his own wife, lying in her
grave--a quiet-faced woman, who had never crossed him, who had never
shown a note of passion in all her life, save in one thing concerning
David.  Upon it, like some prophetess, she had flamed out.  With the
insight which only women have where children are concerned, she had told
him that he would live to repent of what he had done.  She had died soon
after, and was laid beside the deserted young mother, whose days had
budded and blossomed, and fallen like petals to the ground, while yet it
was the spring.

Luke Claridge had understood neither, not his wife when she had said:
"Thee should let the Lord do His own work, Luke," nor his dying daughter
Mercy, whose last words had been: "With love and sorrow I have sowed; he
shall reap rejoicing--my babe.  Thee will set him in the garden in the
sun, where God may find him--God will not pass him by.  He will take him
by the hand and lead him home."  The old man had thought her touched by
delirium then, though her words were but the parable of a mind fed by the
poetry of life, by a shy spirit, to which meditation gave fancy and
farseeing.  David had come by his idealism honestly.  The half-mystical
spirit of his Uncle Benn had flowed on to another generation through the
filter of a woman's sad soul.  It had come to David a pure force, a
constructive and practical idealism.

Now, as Faith read, there were ringing in the old man's ears the words
which David's mother had said before she closed her eyes and passed away:
"Set him in the garden in the sun, where God may find him--God will not
pass him by."  They seemed to weave themselves into the symbolism of Benn
Claridge's letter, written from the hills of Bagdad.

"But," the letter continued, "the Governor passed by with his suite, the
buckles of the harness of his horses all silver, his carriage shining
with inlay of gold, his turban full of precious stones.  When he had
passed, I said to a shepherd standing by, 'If thou hadst all his wealth,
shepherd, what wouldst thou do?' and he answered, 'If I had his wealth, I
would sit on the south side of my house in the sun all day and every
day.'  To a messenger of the Palace, who must ever be ready night and day
to run at his master's order, I asked the same.  He replied, 'If I had
all the Effendina's wealth, I would sleep till I died.'  To a blind
beggar, shaking the copper in his cup in the highways, pleading dumbly to
those who passed, I made similar inquisition, and he replied 'If the
wealth of the exalted one were mine, I would sit on the mastaba by the
bake-house, and eat three times a day, save at Ramadan, when I would
bless Allah the compassionate and merciful, and breakfast at sunset with
the flesh of a kid and a dish of dates.'  To a woman at the door of a
tomb hung with relics of hundreds of poor souls in misery, who besought
the buried saint to intercede for her with Allah, I made the same
catechism, and she answered, 'Oh, effendi, if his wealth were mine,
I would give my son what he has lost.'  'What has he lost, woman?' said
I; and she answered: 'A little house with a garden, and a flock of ten
goats, a cow and a dovecote, his inheritance of which he has been
despoiled by one who carried a false debt 'gainst his dead father.'  And
I said to her: 'But if thy wealth were as that of the ruler of the city,
thy son would have no need of the little house and garden and the flock
of goats, and a cow and a dovecote.'  Whereupon she turned upon me in
bitterness, and said: 'Were they not his own as the seed of his father?
Shall not one cherish that which is his own, which cometh from seed to
seed?  Is it not the law?'  'But,' said I, 'if his wealth were thine,
there would be herds of cattle, and flocks of sheep, and carpets spread,
and the banquet-tables, and great orchards.'  But she stubbornly shook
her head.  'Where the eagle built shall not the young eagle nest?  How
should God meet me in the way and bless him who stood not by his birth
right?  The plot of ground was the lad's, and all that is thereon.
I pray thee, mock me not.'  God knows I did not mock her, for her words
were wisdom.  So did it work upon me that, after many days, I got for the
lad his own again, and there he is happier, and his mother happier, than
the Governor in his palace.  Later I did learn some truths from the
shepherd, the messenger, and the beggar, and the woman with the child;
but chiefly from the woman and the child.  The material value has no
relation to the value each sets upon that which is his own.  Behind this
feeling lies the strength of the world.  Here on this hill of Bagdad I am
thinking these things.  And, Luke, I would have thee also think on my
story of the woman and the child.  There is in it a lesson for thee."

When Luke Claridge first read this letter years before, he had put it
from him sternly.  Now he heard it with a soft emotion.  He took the
letter from Faith at last and put it in his pocket.  With no apparent
relevancy, and laying his hand on Faith's shoulder, he said:

"We have done according to our conscience by Davy--God is our witness,
so!"

She leaned her cheek against his hand, but did not speak.

In Soolsby's hut upon the hill David sat talking to the old chair-maker.
Since his return he had visited the place several times, only to find
Soolsby absent.  The old man, on awaking from his drunken sleep, had been
visited by a terrible remorse, and, whenever he had seen David coming,
had fled into the woods.  This evening, however, David came in the dark,
and Soolsby was caught.

When David entered first, the old man broke down.  He could not speak,
but leaned upon the back of a chair, and though his lips moved, no sound
came forth.  But David took him by the shoulders and set him down, and
laughed gently in his face, and at last Soolsby got voice and said:

"Egyptian!  O Egyptian!"

Then his tongue was loosened and his eye glistened, and he poured out
question after question, many pertinent, some whimsical, all frankly
answered by David.  But suddenly he stopped short, and his eyes sank
before the other, who had laid a hand upon his knee.

"But don't, Egyptian, don't!  Don't have aught to do with me.  I'm only a
drunken swine.  I kept sober four years, as she knows--as the Angel down
yonder in the Red Mansion knows; but the day you came, going out to meet
you, I got drunk--blind drunk.  I had only been pretending all the time.
I was being coaxed along--made believe I was a real man, I suppose.  But
I wasn't.  I was a pillar of sand.  When pressure came I just broke down
--broke down, Egyptian.  Don't be surprised if you hear me grunt.  It's
my natural speech.  I'm a hog, a drink-swilling hog.  I wasn't decent
enough to stay sober till you had said 'Good day,' and 'How goes it,
Soolsby?' I tried it on; it was no good.  I began to live like a man, but
I've slipped back into the ditch.  You didn't know that, did you?"

David let him have his say, and then in a low voice said: "Yes, I knew
thee had been drinking, Soolsby."  He started.  "She told you--Kate
Heaver--"

"She did not tell me.  I came and found you here with her.  You were
asleep."

"A drunken sweep!"  He spat upon the ground in disgust at himself.

"I ought never have comeback here," he added.  "It was no place for me.
But it drew me.  I didn't belong; but it drew me."

"Thee belongs to Hamley.  Thee is an honour to Hamley, Soolsby."

Soolsby's eyes widened; the blurred look of rage and self-reproach in
them began to fade away.

"Thee has made a fight, Soolsby, to conquer a thing that has had thee by
the throat.  There's no fighting like it.  It means a watching every
hour, every minute--thee can never take the eye off it.  Some days it's
easy, some days it's hard, but it's never so easy that you can say,
'There is no need to watch.'  In sleep it whispers and wakes you; in the
morning, when there are no shadows, it casts a shadow on the path.  It
comes between you and your work; you see it looking out of the eyes of a
friend.  And one day, when you think it has been conquered, that you have
worn it down into oblivion and the dust, and you close your eyes and say,
'I am master,' up it springs with fury from nowhere you can see, and
catches you by the throat; and the fight begins again.  But you sit
stronger, and the fight becomes shorter; and after many battles, and you
have learned never to be off guard, to know by instinct where every
ambush is, then at last the victory is yours.  It is hard, it is bitter,
and sometimes it seems hardly worth the struggle.  But it is--it is worth
the struggle, dear old man."

Soolsby dropped on his knees and caught David by the arms.  "How did you
know-how did you know?" he asked hoarsely.  "It's been just as you say.
You've watched some one fighting?"

"I have watched some one fighting--fighting," answered David clearly, but
his eyes were moist.

"With drink, the same as me?"

"No, with opium--laudanum."

"Oh, I've heard that's worse, that it makes you mad, the wanting it."

"I have seen it so."

"Did the man break down like me?"

"Only once, but the fight is not yet over with him."  "Was he--an
Englishman?"

David inclined his head.  "It's a great thing to have a temptation to
fight, Soolsby.  Then we can understand others."

"It's not always true, Egyptian, for you have never had temptation to
fight.  Yet you know it all."

"God has been good to me," David answered, putting a hand on the old
man's shoulder.  "And thee is a credit to Hamley, friend.  Thee will
never fall again."

"You know that--you say that to me!  Then, by Mary the mother of God, I
never will be a swine again," he said, getting to his feet.

"Well, good-bye, Soolsby.  I go to-morrow," David said presently.

Soolsby frowned; his lips worked.  "When will you come back?" he asked
eagerly.

David smiled.  "There is so much to do, they may not let me come--not
soon.  I am going into the desert again."

Soolsby was shaking.  He spoke huskily.  "Here is your place," he said.
"You shall come back--Oh, but you shall come back, here, where you
belong."

David shook his head and smiled, and clasped the strong hand again.  A
moment later he was gone.  From the door of the but Soolsby muttered to
himself:

"I will bring you back.  If Luke Claridge doesn't, then I will bring you
back.  If he dies, I will bring you--no, by the love of God, I will bring
you back while he lives!"

                    ...........................

Two thousand miles away, in a Nile village, women sat wailing in dark
doorways, dust on their heads, black mantles covering their faces.  By
the pond where all the people drank, performed their ablutions, bathed
their bodies and rinsed their mouths, sat the sheikh-el-beled, the
village chief, taking counsel in sorrow with the barber, the holy man,
and others.  Now speaking, now rocking their bodies to and fro, in the
evening sunlight, they sat and watched the Nile in flood covering the
wide wastes of the Fayoum, spreading over the land rich deposits of earth
from the mountains of Abyssinia.  When that flood subsided there would be
fields to be planted with dourha and onions and sugar-cane; but they
whose strong arms should plough and sow and wield the sickle, the youth,
the upstanding ones, had been carried off in chains to serve in the army
of Egypt, destined for the far Soudan, for hardship, misery, and death,
never to see their kindred any more.  Twice during three months had the
dread servant of the Palace come and driven off their best like sheep to
the slaughter.  The brave, the stalwart, the bread-winners, were gone;
and yet the tax-gatherer would come and press for every impost--on the
onion-field, the date-palm, the dourha-field, and the clump of sugar-
cane, as though the young men, the toilers, were still there.  The old
and infirm, the children, the women, must now double and treble their
labour.  The old men must go to the corvee, and mend the banks of the
Nile for the Prince and his pashas, providing their own food, their own
tools, their own housing, if housing there would be--if it was more than
sleeping under a bush by the riverside, or crawling into a hole in the
ground, their yeleks their clothes by day, their only covering at night.

They sat like men without hope, yet with the proud, bitter mien of those
who had known good and had lost it, had seen content and now were
desolate.

Presently one--a lad--the youngest of them, lifted up his voice and began
to chant a recitative, while another took a small drum and beat it in
unison.  He was but just recovered from an illness, or he had gone also
in chains to die for he knew not what, leaving behind without hope all
that he loved:

         "How has the cloud fallen, and the leaf withered on the tree,
          The lemon-tree, that standeth by the door.
          The melon and the date have gone bitter to the taste,
          The weevil, it has eaten at the core
          The core of my heart, the mildew findeth it.
          My music, it is but the drip of tears,
          The garner empty standeth, the oven hath no fire,
          Night filleth me with fears.
          O Nile that floweth deeply, hast thou not heard his voice?
          His footsteps hast thou covered with thy flood?
          He was as one who lifteth up the yoke,
          He was as one who taketh off the chain,
          As one who sheltereth from the rain,
          As one who scattereth bread to the pigeons flying.
          His purse was at his side, his mantle was for me,
          For any who passeth were his mantle and his purse,
          And now like a gourd is he withered from our eyes.
          His friendship, it was like a shady wood
          Whither has he gone?--Who shall speak for us?
          Who shall save us from the kourbash and the stripes?
          Who shall proclaim us in the palace?
          Who shall contend for us in the gate?
          The sakkia turneth no more; the oxen they are gone;
          The young go forth in chains, the old waken in the night,
          They waken and weep, for the wheel turns backward,
          And the dark days are come again upon us--
          Will he return no more?
          His friendship was like a shady wood,
          O Nile that floweth deeply, hast thou not heard his voice?
          Hast thou covered up his footsteps with thy flood?
          The core of my heart, the mildew findeth it!"

Another-an old man-took up the strain, as the drum kept time to the beat
of the voice with its undulating call and refrain:

"When his footsteps were among us there was peace;
War entered not the village, nor the call of war.
Now our homes are as those that have no roofs.
As a nest decayed, as a cave forsaken,
As a ship that lieth broken on the beach,
Is the house where we were born.
Out in the desert did we bury our gold,
We buried it where no man robbed us, for his arm was strong.
Now are the jars empty, gold did not avail
To save our young men, to keep them from the chains.
God hath swallowed his voice, or the sea hath drowned it,
Or the Nile hath covered him with its flood;
Else would he come when our voices call.
His word was honey in the prince's ear
Will he return no more?"

And now the sheikh-el-beled spoke.  "It hath been so since Nahoum Pasha
passed this way four months agone.  He hath changed all.  War will not
avail.  David Pasha, he will come again.  His word is as the centre of
the world.  Ye have no hope, because ye see the hawks among the starving
sheep.  But the shepherd will return from behind the hill, and the hawks
will flee away.

".  .  .  Behold, once was I in the desert.  Listen, for mine are the
words of one who hath travelled far--was I not at Damascus and Palmyra
and Bagdad, and at Medina by the tomb of Mahomet?"

Reverently he touched the green turban on his head, evidence of his
journey to Mahomet's tomb.  "Once in the desert I saw afar off an oasis
of wood and water, and flying things, and houses where a man might rest.
And I got me down from my camel, and knelt upon my sheepskin, and gave
thanks in the name of Allah.  Thereupon I mounted again and rode on
towards that goodly place.  But as I rode it vanished from my sight.
Then did I mourn.  Yet once again I saw the trees, and flocks of pigeons
and waving fields, and I was hungry and thirsty, and longed exceedingly.
Yet got I down, and, upon my sheep-skin, once more gave thanks to Allah.
And I mounted thereafter in haste and rode on; but once again was I
mocked.  Then I cried aloud in my despair.  It was in my heart to die
upon the sheep-skin where I had prayed; for I was burned up within, and
there seemed naught to do but say malaish, and go hence.  But that goodly
sight came again.  My heart rebelled that I should be so mocked.  I bent
down my head upon my camel that I might not see, yet once more I loosed
the sheep-skin.  Lifting up my heart, I looked again, and again I took
hope and rode on.  Farther and farther I rode, and lo!  I was no longer
mocked; for I came to a goodly place of water and trees, and was saved.
So shall it be with us.  We have looked for his coming again, and our
hearts have fallen and been as ashes, for that he has not come.  Yet
there be mirages, and one day soon David Pasha will come hither, and our
pains shall be eased."

"Aiwa, aiwa--yes, yes," cried the lad who had sung to them.

"Aiwa, aiwa," rang softly over the pond, where naked children stooped to
drink.

The smell of the cooking-pots floated out from the mud-houses near by.

"Malaish," said one after another, "I am hungry.  He will come again-
perhaps to-morrow."  So they moved towards the houses over the way.

One cursed his woman for wailing in the doorway; one snatched the lid
from a cooking-pot; one drew from an oven cakes of dourha, and gave them
to those who had none; one knelt and bowed his forehead to the ground in
prayer; one shouted the name of him whose coming they desired.

So was David missed in Egypt.




CHAPTER XXIII

THE TENTS OF CUSHAN

          "I saw the tents of Cushan in affliction, and the curtains
          of the Land of Midian did tremble."

A Hurdy-Gurdy was standing at the corner, playing with shrill insistence
a medley of Scottish airs.  Now "Loch Lomond" pleaded for pennies from
the upper windows:

              "For you'll tak' the high road,
               and I'll tak' the low road,
               And I'll be in Scotland before ye:
               But I and my true love will never meet again,
               On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond!"

The hurdy-gurdy was strident and insistent, but for a long time no
response came.  At last, however, as the strains of "Loch Lomond" ceased,
a lady appeared on the balcony of a drawing-room, and, leaning over a
little forest of flowers and plants, threw a half-crown to the sorry
street-musician.  She watched the grotesque thing trundle away, then
entering the house again, took a 'cello from the corner of the room and
tuned the instrument tenderly.  It was Hylda.

Something of the peace of Hamley had followed her to London, but the
poignant pain of it had come also.  Like Melisande, she had looked into
the quiet pool of life and had seen her own face, its story and its
foreshadowings.  Since then she had been "apart."  She had watched life
move on rather than shared in its movement.  Things stood still for her.
That apathy of soul was upon her which follows the inward struggle that
exhausts the throb and fret of inward emotions, leaving the mind
dominant, the will in abeyance.

She had become conscious that her fate and future were suspended over a
chasm, as, on the trapeze of a balloon, an adventurous aeronaut hangs
uncertain over the hungry sea, waiting for the coming wind which will
either blow the hazardous vessel to its doom or to safe refuge on the
land.

She had not seen David after he left Hamley.  Their last words had been
spoken at the Meeting-house, when he gave Faith to her care.  That scene
came back to her now, and a flush crept slowly over her face and faded
away again.  She was recalling, too, the afternoon of that day when she
and David had parted in the drawing-room of the Cloistered House, and
Eglington had asked her to sing.  She thought of the hours with Eglington
that followed, first at the piano and afterwards in the laboratory, where
in his long blue smock he made experiments.  Had she not been conscious
of something enigmatical in his gaiety that afternoon, in his cheerful
yet cheerless words, she would have been deeply impressed by his
appreciation of her playing, and his keen reflections on the merits of
the composers; by his still keener attention to his subsequent
experiments, and his amusing comments upon them.  But, somehow, that very
cheerless cheerfulness seemed to proclaim him superficial.  Though she
had no knowledge of science, she instinctively doubted his earnestness
even in this work, which certainly was not pursued for effect.  She had
put the feeling from her, but it kept returning.  She felt that in
nothing did he touch the depths.  Nothing could possess him wholly;
nothing inherent could make him self-effacing.

Yet she wondered, too, if she was right, when she saw his fox-terrier
watching him, ever watching him with his big brown eyes as he buoyantly
worked, and saw him stoop to pat its head.  Or was this, after all, mere
animalism, mere superficial vitality, love of health and being?  She
shuddered, and shut her eyes, for it came home to her that to him she was
just such a being of health, vitality and comeliness, on a little higher
plane.  She put the thought from her, but it had had its birth, and it
would not down.  He had immense vitality, he was tireless, and abundant
in work and industry; he went from one thing to another with ease and
swiftly changing eagerness.  Was it all mere force--mere man and mind?
Was there no soul behind it?  There in the laboratory she had laid her
hand on the terrier, and prayed in her heart that she might understand
him for her own good, her own happiness, and his.  Above all else she
wanted to love him truly, and to be loved truly, and duty was to her a
daily sacrifice, a constant memorial.  She realised to the full that
there lay before her a long race unilluminated by the sacred lamp which,
lighted at the altar, should still be burning beside the grave.

Now, as she thought of him, she kept saying to herself: "We should have
worked out his life together.  Work together would have brought peace.
He shuts me out--he shuts me out."

At last she drew the bow across the instrument, once, twice, and then she
began to play, forgetful of the world.  She had a contralto voice, and
she sang with a depth of feeling and a delicate form worthy of a
professional; on the piano she was effective and charming, but into the
'cello she poured her soul.

For quite an hour she played with scarce an interruption.  At last, with
a sigh, she laid the instrument against her knee and gazed out of the
window.  As she sat lost in her dream--a dream of the desert--a servant
entered with letters.  One caught her eye.  It was from Egypt--from her
cousin Lacey.  Her heart throbbed violently, yet she opened the official-
looking envelope with steady fingers.  She would not admit even to her
self that news from the desert could move her so.  She began to read
slowly, but presently, with a little cry, she hastened through the pages.
It ran:

                                             THE SOUDAN.

     DEAR LADY COUSIN,

     I'm still not certain how I ought to style you, but I thought I'd
     compromise as per above.  Anyway, it's a sure thing that I haven't
     bothered you much with country-cousin letters.  I figure, however,
     that you've put some money in Egypt, so to speak, and what happens
     to this sandy-eyed foundling of the Nile you would like to know.  So
     I've studied the only "complete letter-writer" I could find between
     the tropic of Capricorn and Khartoum, and this is the contemptible
     result, as the dagos in Mexico say.  This is a hot place by reason
     of the sun that shines above us, and likewise it is hot because of
     the niggers that swarm around us.  I figure, if we get out of this
     portion of the African continent inside our skins, that we will have
     put up a pretty good bluff, and pulled off a ticklish proposition.

     It's a sort of early Christian business.  You see, David the Saadat
     is great on moral suasion--he's a master of it; and he's never
     failed yet--not altogether; though there have been minutes by a
     stop-watch when I've thought it wouldn't stand the strain.  Like the
     Mississippi steamboat which was so weak that when the whistle blew
     the engines stopped!  When those frozen minutes have come to us,
     I've tried to remember the correct religious etiquette, but I've not
     had much practise since I stayed with Aunt Melissa, and lived on
     skim-milk and early piety.  When things were looking as bad as they
     did for Dives, "Now I lay me down to sleep," and "For what we are
     about to receive," was all that I could think of.  But the Saadat,
     he's a wonder from Wondertown.  With a little stick, or maybe his
     flute under his arm, he'll smile and string these heathen along,
     when you'd think they weren't waiting for anybody.  A spear took off
     his fez yesterday.  He never blinked--he's a jim-dandy at keeping
     cool; and when a hundred mounted heathens made a rush down on him
     the other day, spears sticking out like quills on a porcupine--2.5
     on the shell-road the chargers were going--did he stir?  Say, he
     watched 'em as if they were playing for his benefit.  And sure
     enough, he was right.  They parted either side of him when they were
     ten feet away, and there he was quite safe, a blessing in the storm,
     a little rock island in the rapids--but I couldn't remember a proper
     hymn of praise to say.

     There's no getting away from the fact that he's got a will or
     something, a sort of force different from most of us, or perhaps any
     of us.  These heathen feel it, and keep their hands off him.  They
     say he's mad, but they've got great respect for mad people, for they
     think that God has got their souls above with Him, and that what's
     left behind on earth is sacred.  He talks to'em, too, like a father
     in Israel; tells 'em they must stop buying and selling slaves, and
     that if they don't he will have to punish them!  And I sit holding
     my sides, for we're only two white men and forty "friendlies"
     altogether, and two revolvers among us; and I've got the two!  And
     they listen to his blarneying, and say, "Aiwa, Saadat!  aiwa,
     Saadat!" as if he had an army of fifty thousand behind him.
     Sometimes I've sort of hinted that his canoe was carrying a lot of
     sail; but my! he believes in it all as if there wasn't a spear or a
     battle-axe or a rifle within a hundred miles of him.  We've been at
     this for two months now, and a lot of ground we covered till we got
     here.  I've ridden the gentle camel at the rate of sixty and seventy
     miles a day--sort of sweeping through the land, making treaties,
     giving presents, freeing slaves, appointing governors and sheikhs-
     el-beled, doing it as if we owned the continent.  He mesmerised 'em,
     simply mesmerised 'em-till we got here.  I don't know what happened
     then.  Now we're distinctly rating low, the laugh is on us somehow.
     But he--mind it?  He goes about talking to the sheikhs as though we
     were all eating off the same corn-cob, and it seems to stupefy them;
     they don't grasp it.  He goes on arranging for a post here and a
     station there, and it never occurs to him that it ain't really
     actual.  He doesn't tell me, and I don't ask him, for I came along
     to wipe his stirrups, so to speak.  I put my money on him, and I'm
     not going to worry him.  He's so dead certain in what he does, and
     what he is, that I don't lose any sleep guessing about him.  It will
     be funny if we do win out on this proposition--funnier than
     anything.

     Now, there's one curious thing about it all which ought to be
     whispered, for I'm only guessing, and I'm not a good guesser; I
     guessed too much in Mexico about three railways and two silvermines.
     The first two days after we came here, everything was all right.
     Then there came an Egyptian, Halim Bey, with a handful of niggers
     from Cairo, and letters for Claridge Pasha.

     From that minute there was trouble.  I figure it out this way: Halim
     was sent by Nahoum Pasha to bring letters that said one thing to the
     Saadat, and, when quite convenient, to say other things to Mustafa,
     the boss-sheikh of this settlement.  Halim Bey has gone again, but
     he has left his tale behind him.  I'd stake all I lost, and more
     than I ever expect to get out of Mexico on that, and maybe I'll get
     a hatful out of Mexico yet.  I had some good mining propositions
     down there.  The Saadat believes in Nahoum, and has made Nahoum what
     he is; and on the surface Nahoum pretends to help him; but he is
     running underground all the time.  I'd like to help give him a villa
     at Fazougli.  When the Saadat was in England there was a bad time in
     Egypt.  I was in Cairo; I know.  It was the same bad old game--the
     corvee, the kourbash, conscription, a war manufactured to fill the
     pockets of a few, while the poor starved and died.  It didn't come
     off, because the Saadat wasn't gone long enough, and he stopped it
     when he came back.  But Nahoumhe laid the blame on others, and the
     Saadat took his word for it, and, instead of a war, there came this
     expedition of his own.

     Ten days later.--Things have happened.  First, there's been awful
     sickness among the natives, and the Saadat has had his chance.  His
     medicine-chest was loaded, he had a special camel for it--and he has
     fired it off.  Night and day he has worked, never resting, never
     sleeping, curing most, burying a few.  He looks like a ghost now,
     but it's no use saying or doing anything.  He says: "Sink your own
     will; let it be subject to a higher, and you need take no thought."
     It's eating away his life and strength, but it has given us our
     return tickets, I guess.  They hang about him as if he was Moses in
     the wilderness smiting the rock.  It's his luck.  Just when I get
     scared to death, and run down and want a tonic, and it looks as if
     there'd be no need to put out next week's washing, then his luck
     steps in, and we get another run.  But it takes a heap out of a man,
     getting scared.  Whenever I look on a lot of green trees and cattle
     and horses, and the sun, to say nothing of women and children, and
     listen to music, or feel a horse eating up the ground under me, 2.10
     in the sand, I hate to think of leaving it, and I try to prevent it.
     Besides, I don't like the proposition of going, I don't know where.
     That's why I get seared.  But he says that it's no more than turning
     down the light and turning it up again.  They used to call me a
     dreamer in Mexico, because I kept seeing things that no one else had
     thought of, and laid out railways and tapped mines for the future;
     but I was nothing to him.  I'm a high-and-dry hedge-clipper
     alongside.  I'm betting on him all the time; but no one seems to be
     working to make his dreams come true, except himself.  I don't
     count; I'm no good, no real good.  I'm only fit to run the
     commissariat, and see that he gets enough to eat, and has a safe
     camel, and so on.

     Why doesn't some one else help him?  He's working for humanity.
     Give him half a chance, and Haroun-al-Raschid won't be in it.  Kaid
     trusts him, depends on him, stands by him, but doesn't seem to know
     how to help him when help would do most good.  The Saadat does it
     all himself; and if it wasn't that the poor devil of a fellah sees
     what he's doing, and cottons to him, and the dervishes and Arabs
     feel he's right, he might as well leave.  But it's just there he
     counts.  There's something about him, something that's Quaker in
     him, primitive, silent, and perceptive--if that's a real word--which
     makes them feel that he's honest, and isn't after anything for
     himself.  Arabs don't talk much; they make each other understand
     without many words.  They think with all their might on one thing at
     a time, and they think things into happening--and so does he.  He's
     a thousand years old, which is about as old-fashioned as I mean, and
     as wise, and as plain to read as though you'd write the letters of
     words as big as a date-palm.  That's where he makes the running with
     them, and they can read their title clear to mansions in the skies!

     You should hear him talk with Ebn Ezra Bey--perhaps you don't know
     of Ezra?  He was a friend of his Uncle Benn, and brought the news of
     his massacre to England, and came back with the Saadat.  Well, three
     days ago Ebn Ezra came, and there came with him, too, Halim Bey, the
     Egyptian, who had brought the letters to us from Cairo.  Elm Ezra
     found him down the river deserted by his niggers, and sick with this
     new sort of fever, which the Saadat is knocking out of time.  And
     there he lies, the Saadat caring for him as though he was his
     brother.  But that's his way; though, now I come to think of it, the
     Saadat doesn't suspect what I suspect, that Halim Bey brought word
     from Nahoum to our sheikhs here to keep us here, or lose us, or do
     away with us.  Old Ebn Ezra doesn't say much himself, doesn't say
     anything about that; but he's guessing the same as me.  And the
     Saadat looks as though he was ready for his grave, but keeps going,
     going, going.  He never seems to sleep.  What keeps him alive I
     don't know.  Sometimes I feel clean knocked out myself with the
     little I do, but he's a travelling hospital all by his lonesome.

     Later.--I had to stop writing, for things have been going on--
     several.  I can see that Ebn Ezra has told the Saadat things that
     make him want to get away to Cairo as soon as possible.  That it's
     Nahoum Pasha and others--oh, plenty of others, of course--I'm
     certain; but what the particular game is I don't know.  Perhaps you
     know over in England, for you're nearer Cairo than we are by a few
     miles, and you've got the telegraph.  Perhaps there's a revolution,
     perhaps there's been a massacre of Europeans, perhaps Turkey is
     kicking up a dust, perhaps Europe is interfering--all of it, all at
     once.

     Later still.--I've found out it's a little of all, and the Saadat is
     ready to go.  I guess he can go now pretty soon, for the worst of
     the fever is over.  But something has happened that's upset him-
     knocked him stony for a minute.  Halim Bey was killed last night--by
     order of the sheikhs, I'm told; but the sheikhs won't give it away.
     When the Saadat went to them, his eyes blazing, his face pale as a
     sheet, and as good as swore at them, and treated them as though he'd
     string them up the next minute, they only put their hands on their
     heads, and said they were "the fallen leaves for his foot to
     scatter," the "snow on the hill for his breath to melt"; but they
     wouldn't give him any satisfaction.  So he came back and shut
     himself up in his tent, and he sits there like a ghost all
     shrivelled up for want of sleep, and his eyes like a lime-kiln
     burning; for now he knows this at least, that Halim Bey had brought
     some word from Kaid's Palace that set these Arabs against him, and
     nearly stopped my correspondence.  You see, there's a widow in
     Cairo--she's a sister of the American consul, and I've promised to
     take her with a party camping in the Fayoum--cute as she can be, and
     plays the guitar.  But it's all right now, except that the Saadat is
     running too close and fine.  If he has any real friends in England
     among the Government people, or among those who can make the
     Government people sit up, and think what's coming to Egypt and to
     him, they'll help him now when he needs it.  He'll need help real
     bad when he gets back to Cairo--if we get that far.  It isn't yet a
     sure thing, for we've got to fight in the next day or two--I forgot
     to tell you that sooner.  There's a bull-Arab on the rampage with
     five thousand men, and he's got a claim out on our sheikh, Mustafa,
     for ivory he has here, and there's going to be a scrimmage.  We've
     got to make for a better position to-morrow, and meet Abdullah, the
     bull-Arab, further down the river.  That's one reason why Mustafa
     and all our friends here are so sweet on us now.  They look on the
     Saadat as a kind of mascot, and they think that he can wipe out the
     enemy with his flute, which they believe is a witch-stick to work
     wonders.

     He's just sent for me to come, and I must stop soon.  Say, he hasn't
     had sleep for a fortnight.  It's too much; he can't stand it.  I
     tried it, and couldn't.  It wore me down.  He's killing himself for
     others.  I can't manage him; but I guess you could.  I apologise,
     dear Lady Cousin.  I'm only a hayseed, and a failure, but I guess
     you'll understand that I haven't thought only of myself as I wrote
     this letter.  The higher you go in life the more you'll understand;
     that's your nature.  I'll get this letter off by a nigger to-morrow,
     with those the Saadat is sending through to Cairo by some
     friendlies.  It's only a chance; but everything's chance here now.
     Anyhow, it's safer than leaving it till the scrimmage.  If you get
     this, won't you try and make the British Government stand by the
     Saadat?  Your husband, the lord, could pull it off, if he tried; and
     if you ask him, I guess he'd try.  I must be off now.  David Pasha
     will be waiting.  Well, give my love to the girls!

               Your affectionate cousin,

                                        TOM LACEY.

     P. S.--I've got a first-class camel for our scrimmage day after
     to-morrow.  Mustafa sent it to me this morning.  I had a fight on
     mules once, down at Oaxaca, but that was child's play.  This will be
     "slaughter in the pan," if the Saadat doesn't stop it somehow.
     Perhaps he will.  If I wasn't so scared I'd wish he couldn't stop
     it, for it will be a way-up Barbarian scrap, the tongs and the
     kettle, a bully panjandrum.  It gets mighty dull in the desert when
     you're not moving.  But "it makes to think," as the French say.
     Since I came out here I've had several real centre thoughts, sort of
     main principles-key-thoughts, that's it.  What I want now is a sort
     of safety-ring to string 'em on and keep 'em safe; for I haven't a
     good memory, and I get mighty rattled sometimes.  Thoughts like
     these are like the secret of a combination lock; they let you into
     the place where the gold and securities and title-deeds of life are.
     Trouble is, I haven't got a safety-ring, and I'm certain to lose
     them.  I haven't got what you'd call an intellectual memory.  Things
     come in flashes to me out of experiences, and pull me up short, and
     I say, "Yes, that's it--that's it; I understand."  I see why it's
     so, and what it means, and where it leads, and how far it spreads.
     It's five thousand years old.  Adam thought it after Cain killed
     Abel, or Abel thought it just before he died, or Eve learned it from
     Lilith, or it struck Abraham when he went to sacrifice Isaac.
     Sometimes things hit me deep like that here in the desert.  Then I
     feel I can see just over on the horizon the tents of Moab in the
     wilderness; that yesterday and to-day are the same; that I've
     crossed the prairies of the everlasting years, and am playing about
     with Ishmael in the wild hills, or fighting with Ahab.  Then the
     world and time seem pretty small potatoes.

     You see how it is.  I never was trained to think, and I get stunned
     by thoughts that strike me as being dug right out of the centre.
     Sometimes I'd like to write them down; but I can't write; I can only
     talk as I'm talking to you.  If you weren't so high up, and so much
     cleverer than I am, and such a thinker, I'd like you to be my
     safety-ring, if you would.  I could tell the key-thoughts to you
     when they came to me, before I forgot them with all their bearings;
     and by-and-by they'd do me a lot of good when I got away from this
     influence, and back into the machinery of the Western world again.
     If you could come out here, if you could feel what I feel here--and
     you would feel a thousand times as much--I don't know what you
     wouldn't do.

     It's pretty wonderful.  The nights with the stars so white and
     glittering, and so near that you'd think you could reach up and hand
     them down; the dark, deep, blue beyond; such a width of life all
     round you, a sort of never-ending space, that everything you ever
     saw or did seems little, and God so great in a kind of hovering
     sense like a pair of wings; and all the secrets of time coming out
     of it all, and sort of touching your face like a velvet wind.  I
     expect you'll think me sentimental, a first-class squash out of the
     pumpkin-garden; but it's in the desert, and it gets into you and
     saturates you, till you feel that this is a kind of middle space
     between the world of cities, and factories, and railways, and
     tenement-houses, and the quiet world to come--a place where they
     think out things for the benefit of future generations, and convey
     them through incarnations, or through the desert.  Say, your
     ladyship, I'm a chatterer, I'm a two-cent philosopher, I'm a baby;
     but you are too much like your grandmother, who was the daughter of
     a Quaker like David Pasha, to laugh at me.

     I've got a suit of fine chain-armour which I bought of an Arab down
     by Darfur.  I'm wondering if it would be too cowardly to wear it in
     the scrap that's coming.  I don't know, though, but what I'll wear
     it, I get so scared.  But it will be a frightful hot thing under my
     clothes, and it's hot enough without that, so I'm not sure.  It
     depends how much my teeth chatter when I see "the dawn of battle."

     I've got one more thing before I stop.  I'm going to send you a
     piece of poetry which the Saadat wrote, and tore in two, and threw
     away.  He was working off his imagination, I guess, as you have to
     do out here.  I collected it and copied it, and put in the
     punctuation--he didn't bother about that.  Perhaps he can't
     punctuate.  I don't understand quite what the poetry means, but
     maybe you will.  Anyway, you'll see that it's a real desert piece.
     Here it is:


                         "THE DESERT ROAD

              "In the sands I lived in a hut of palm,
               There was never a garden to see;
               There was never a path through the desert calm,
               Nor a way through its storms for me.

              "Tenant was I of a lone domain;
               The far pale caravans wound
               To the rim of the sky, and vanished again;
               My call in the waste was drowned.

              "The vultures came and hovered and fled;
               And once there stole to my door
               A white gazelle, but its eyes were dread
               With the hurt of the wounds it bore.

              "It passed in the dusk with a foot of fear,
               And the white cold mists rolled in;

               "And my heart was the heart of a stricken deer,
               Of a soul in the snare of sin.

              "My days they withered like rootless things,
               And the sands rolled on, rolled wide;
               Like a pelican I, with broken wings,
               Like a drifting barque on the tide.

              "But at last, in the light of a rose-red day,
               In the windless glow of the morn,
               From over the hills and from far away,
               You came--ah, the joy of the morn!

              "And wherever your footsteps fell, there crept
               A path--it was fair and wide:
               A desert road which no sands have swept,
               Where never a hope has died.

              "I followed you forth, and your beauty held
               My heart like an ancient song;
               By that desert road to the blossoming plains
               I came-and the way was long!

              "So I set my course by the light of your eyes;
               I care not what fate may send;
               On the road I tread shine the love-starred skies--
               The road with never an end."

     Not many men can do things like that, and the other things, too,
     that he does.  Perhaps he will win through, by himself, but is it
     fair to have him run the risk?  If he ever did you a good turn, as
     you once said to me he did, won't you help him now?  You are on the
     inside of political things, and if you make up your mind to help,
     nothing will stop you--that was your grandmother's way.  He ought to
     get his backing pretty soon, or it won't be any good.  .  .  .  I
     hear him at his flute.  I expect he's tired waiting for me.  Well,
     give my love to the girls!
                                                  T.  L.


As Hylda read, she passed through phases of feeling begotten of new
understanding which shook her composure.  She had seen David and all that
David was doing; Egypt, and all that was threatening the land through the
eyes of another who told the whole truth--except about his own cowardice,
which was untrue.  She felt the issues at stake.  While the mention of
David's personal danger left her sick for a moment, she saw the wider
peril also to the work he had set out to do.

What was the thing without the man?  It could not exist--it had no
meaning.  Where was he now?  What had been the end of the battle?  He had
saved others, had he saved himself?  The most charmed life must be
pierced by the shaft of doom sooner or later; but he was little more than
a youth yet, he had only just begun!

"And the Saadat looks as though he was ready for his grave--but keeps
going, going, going.!"  The words kept ringing in her ears.  Again: "And
he sits there like a ghost all shrivelled up for want of sleep, and his
eyes like a lime-kiln burning.  .  .  .  He hasn't had sleep for a
fortnight.  .  .  .  He's killing himself for others."

Her own eyes were shining with a dry, hot light, her lips were quivering,
but her hands upon the letter were steady and firm.  What could she do?

She went to a table, picked up the papers, and scanned them hurriedly.
Not a word about Egypt.  She thought for a moment, then left the drawing-
room.  Passing up a flight of stairs to her husband's study, she knocked
and entered.  It was empty; but Eglington was in the house, for a red
despatch-box lay open on his table.  Instinctively she glanced at the
papers exposed in the box, and at the letters beside it.  The document on
the top of the pile in the box related to Cyprus--the name caught her
eye.  Another document was half-exposed beneath it.  Her hand went to her
heart.  She saw the words, "Soudan" and "Claridge Pasha."  She reached
for it, then drew back her hand, and her eyes closed as though to shut it
out from her sight.  Why should she not see it?  They were her husband's
papers, husband and wife were one.  Husband and wife one!  She shrank
back.  Were they one?  An overmastering desire was on her.  It seemed
terrible to wait, when here before her was news of David, of life or
death.  Suddenly she put out her hand and drew the Cyprus paper over the
Egyptian document, so that she might not see it.

As she did so the door opened on her, and Eglington entered.  He had seen
the swift motion of her hand, and again a look peculiar to him crossed
his face, enigmatical, cynical, not pleasant to see.

She turned on him slowly, and he was aware of her inward distress to some
degree, though her face was ruled to quietness.

He nodded at her and smiled.  She shrank, for she saw in his nod and his
smile that suggestion of knowing all about everything and everybody, and
thinking the worst, which had chilled her so often.  Even in their short
married life it had chilled those confidences which she would gladly have
poured out before him, if he had been a man with an open soul.  Had there
been joined to his intellect and temperament a heart capable of true
convictions and abiding love, what a man he might have been!  But his
intellect was superficial, and his temperament was dangerous, because
there were not the experiences of a soul of truth to give the deeper hold
upon the meaning of life.  She shrank now, as, with a little laugh and
glancing suggestively at the despatch-box, he said:

"And what do you think of it all?"

She felt as though something was crushing her heart within its grasp, and
her eyes took on a new look of pain.  "I did not read the papers," she
answered quietly.

"I saw them in your fingers.  What creatures women are--so dishonourable
in little things," he said ironically.

She laid a hand on his.  "I did not read them, Harry," she urged.

He smiled and patted her arm.  "There, there, it doesn't matter," he
laughed.  He watched her narrowly.  "It matters greatly," she answered
gently, though his words had cut her like a knife.  "I did not read the
papers.  I only saw the word 'Cyprus' on the first paper, and I pushed it
over the paper which had the word 'Egypt' on it 'Egypt' and 'Claridge,'
lest I should read it.  I did not wish to read it.  I am not
dishonourable, Harry."

He had hurt her more than he had ever done; and only the great matter
at stake had prevented the lesser part of her from bursting forth in
indignation, from saying things which she did not wish to say.  She had
given him devotion--such devotion, such self-effacement in his career as
few women ever gave.  Her wealth--that was so little in comparison with
the richness of her nature--had been his; and yet his vast egotism took
it all as his right, and she was repaid in a kind of tyranny, the more
galling and cruel because it was wielded by a man of intellect and
culture, and ancient name and tradition.  If he had been warned that
he was losing his wife's love, he would have scouted the idea, his self-
assurance was so strong, his vanity complete.  If, however, he had been
told that another man was thinking of his wife, he would have believed
it, as he believed now that David had done; and he cherished that belief,
and let resentment grow.  He was the Earl of Eglington, and no matter
what reputation David had reached, he was still a member of a Quaker
trader's family, with an origin slightly touched with scandal.  Another
resentment, however, was steadily rising in him.  It galled him that
Hylda should take so powerful an interest in David's work in Egypt; and
he knew now that she had always done so.  It did not ease his vexed
spirit to know that thousands of others of his fellow-countrymen did the
same.  They might do so, but she was his wife, and his own work was the
sun round which her mind and interest should revolve.

"Why should you be so keen about Egypt and Claridge Pasha?" he said to
her now.

Her face hardened a little.  Had he the right to torture her so?  To
suspect her?  She could read it in his eyes.  Her conscience was clear.
She was no man's slave.  She would not be any man's slave.  She was
master of her own soul.  What right had he to catechise her--as though
she were a servant or a criminal?  But she checked the answer on her
tongue, because she was hurt deeper than words could express, and she
said, composedly:

"I have here a letter from my cousin Lacey, who is with Claridge Pasha.
It has news of him, of events in the Soudan.  He had fever, there was to
be a fight, and I wished to know if you had any later news.  I thought
that document there might contain news, but I did not read it.  I
realised that it was not yours, that it belonged to the Government, that
I had no right.  Perhaps you will tell me if you have news.  Will you?"
She leaned against the table wearily, holding her letter.

"Let me read your letter first," he said wilfully.

A mist seemed to come before her eyes; but she was schooled to self-
command, and he did not see he had given her a shock.  Her first impulse
was to hand the letter over at once; then there came the remembrance of
all it contained, all it suggested.  Would he see all it suggested?  She
recalled the words Lacey had used regarding a service which David had
once done her.  If Eglington asked, what could she say?  It was not her
secret alone, it was another's.  Would she have the right, even if she
wished it, to tell the truth, or part of the truth?  Or, would she be
entitled to relate some immaterial incident which would evade the real
truth?  What good could it do to tell the dark story?  What could it
serve?  Eglington would horribly misunderstand it--that she knew.  There
were the verses also.  They were more suggestive than anything else,
though, indeed, they might have referred to another woman, or were merely
impersonal; but she felt that was not so.  And there was Eglington's
innate unbelief in man and woman!  Her first impulse held, however.  She
would act honestly.  She would face whatever there was to face.  She
would not shelter herself; she would not give him the right in the future
to say she had not dealt fairly by him, had evaded any inquest of her
life or mind which he might make.

She gave him the letter, her heart standing still, but she was filled
with a regnant determination to defend herself, to defend David against
any attack, or from any consequences.

All her life and hopes seemed hanging in the balance, as he began to read
the letter.  With fear she saw his face cloud over, heard an impatient
exclamation pass his lips.  She closed her eyes to gather strength for
the conflict which was upon her.  He spoke, and she vaguely wondered what
passage in the letter had fixed his attention.  His voice seemed very far
away.  She scarcely understood.  But presently it pierced the clouds of
numbness between them, and she realised what he was saying:

"Vulgar fellow--I can't congratulate you upon your American cousin.  So,
the Saadat is great on moral suasion, master of it--never failed yet--not
altogether--and Aunt Melissa and skim-milk and early piety!'  And 'the
Saadat is a wonder from Wondertown'--like a side-show to a circus, a
marvel on the flying trapeze!  Perhaps you can give me the sense of the
letter, if there is any sense in it.  I can't read his writing, and it
seems interminable.  Would you mind?"

A sigh of relief broke from her.  A weight slipped away from her heart
and brain.  It was as though one in armour awaited the impact of a heavy,
cruel, overwhelming foe, who suddenly disappeared, and the armour fell
from the shoulders, and breath came easily once again.

"Would you mind?" he repeated drily, as he folded up the letter slowly.

He handed it back to her, the note of sarcasm in his voice pricking her
like the point of a dagger.  She felt angered with herself that he could
rouse her temper by such small mean irony.  She had a sense of bitter
disappointment in him--or was it a deep hurt?--that she had not made him
love her, truly love her.  If he had only meant the love that he swore
before they had married!  Why had he deceived her?  It had all been in
his hands, her fate and future; but almost before the bridal flowers had
faded, she had come to know two bitter things: that he had married with a
sordid mind; that he was incapable of the love which transmutes the half-
comprehending, half-developed affection of the maid into the absorbing,
understanding, beautiful passion of the woman.  She had married not
knowing what love and passion were; uncomprehending, and innocent because
uncomprehending; with a fine affection, but capable of loving wholly.
One thing had purified her motives and her life--the desire to share with
Eglington his public duty and private hopes, to be his confidante, his
friend, his coadjutor, proud of him, eager for him, determined to help
him.  But he had blocked the path to all inner companionship.  He did no
more than let her share the obvious and outer responsibilities of his
life.  From the vital things, if there were vital things, she was shut
out.  What would she not give for one day of simple tenderness and quiet
affection, a true day with a true love!

She was now perfectly composed.  She told him the substance of the
letter, of David's plight, of the fever, of the intended fight, of Nahoum
Pasha, of the peril to David's work.  He continued to interrogate her,
while she could have shrieked out the question, "What is in yonder
document?  What do you know?  Have you news of his safety?"  Would he
never stop his questioning?  It was trying her strength and patience
beyond endurance.  At last he drew the document slowly from the despatch-
box, and glanced up and down it musingly.  "I fancy he won the battle,"
he said slowly, "for they have news of him much farther down the river.
But from this letter I take it he is not yet within the zone of safety--
so Nahoum Pasha says."  He flicked the document upwards with his thumb.

"What is our Government doing to help him?" she asked, checking her
eagerness.

His heart had gradually hardened towards Egypt.  Power had emphasised
a certain smallness in him.  Personal considerations informed the policy
of the moment.  He was not going to be dragged at the chariot-wheels of
the Quaker.  To be passive, when David in Egypt had asked for active
interest; to delay, when urgency was important to Claridge Pasha; to
speak coldly on Egyptian affairs to his chief, the weak Foreign
Secretary, this was the policy he had begun.

So he answered now: "It is the duty of the Egyptian Government to help
him--of Prince Kaid, of Nahoum Pasha, who is acting for him in his
absence, who governs finance, and therefore the army.  Egypt does not
belong to England."

"Nahoum Pasha is his enemy.  He will do nothing to help, unless you force
him."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because I know Nahoum Pasha."

"When did you know Nahoum?"

"In Egypt, years ago."

"Your acquaintance is more varied than I thought," he said sarcastically.

"Oh, do not speak to me like that!" she returned, in a low, indignant
voice.

"Do not patronise me; do not be sarcastic."

"Do not be so sensitive," he answered unemotionally.

"You surely do not mean that you--that the Government will not help him?
He is doing the work of Europe, of civilisation, of Christianity there.
He is sacrificing himself for the world.  Do you not see it?  Oh, but you
do!  You would realise his work if you knew Egypt as I have seen it."

"Expediency must govern the policy of nations," he answered critically.

"But, if through your expediency he is killed like a rat in a trap, and
his work goes to pieces--all undone!  Is there no right in the matter?"

"In affairs of state other circumstances than absolute 'right' enter.
Here and there the individual is sacrificed who otherwise would be saved
--if it were expedient."

"Oh, Eglington!  He is of your own county, of your own village, is your
neighbour, a man of whom all England should be proud.  You can intervene
if you will be just, and say you will.  I know that intervention has been
discussed in the Cabinet."

"You say he is of my county.  So are many people, and yet they are not
county people.  A neighbour he was, but more in a Scriptural than social
sense."  He was hurting her purposely.

She made a protesting motion of her hand.  "No, no, no, do not be so
small.  This is a great matter.  Do a great thing now; help it to be done
for your own honour, for England's honour--for a good man's sake, for
your country's sake."

There came a knock at the door.  An instant afterwards a secretary
entered.  "A message from the Prime Minister, sir."  He handed over a
paper.

"Will you excuse me?" he asked Hylda suavely, in his eyes the
enigmatical look that had chilled her so often before.  She felt that her
appeal had been useless.  She prepared to leave the room.  He took her
hand, kissed it gallantly, and showed her out.  It was his way--too civil
to be real.

Blindly she made her way to her room.  Inside, she suddenly swayed and
sank fainting to the ground, as Kate Heaver ran forward to her.  Kate saw
the letter in the clinched hand.  Loosening it, she read two or three
sentences with a gasp.  They contained Tom Lacey's appeal for David.  She
lifted Hylda's head to her shoulder with endearing words, and chafed the
cold hands, murmuring to herself the while.




CHAPTER XXIV

THE QUESTIONER

"What has thee come to say?"

Sitting in his high-backed chair, Luke Claridge seemed a part of its
dignified severity.  In the sparsely furnished room with its uncarpeted
floor, its plain teak table, its high wainscoting and undecorated walls,
the old man had the look of one who belonged to some ancient consistory,
a judge whose piety would march with an austerity that would save a human
soul by destroying the body, if need be.

A crisis had come, vaguely foreseen, sombrely eluded.  A questioner was
before him who, poor, unheeded, an ancient victim of vice, could yet
wield a weapon whose sweep of wounds would be wide.  Stern and masterful
as he looked in his arid isolation, beneath all was a shaking anxiety.

He knew well what the old chair-maker had come to say, but, in the
prologue of the struggle before him, he was unwittingly manoeuvring for
position.

"Speak," he added presently, as Soolsby fumbled in his great loose
pockets, and drew forth a paper.  "What has thee to say?"

Without a word, Soolsby handed over the paper, but the other would not
take it.

"What is it?" he asked, his lips growing pale.  "Read--if thee can
read."

The gibe in the last words made the colour leap into Soolsby's face, and
a fighting look came.  He too had staved off this inevitable hour, had
dreaded it, but now his courage shot up high.

"Doost think I have forgotten how to read since the day I put my hand to
a writing you've hid so long from them it most concerns?  Ay, I can read,
and I can write, and I will prove that I can speak too before I've done."

"Read--read," rejoined the old man hoarsely, his hands tightly gripping
the chair-arm.

"The fever caught him at Shendy--that is the place--"

"He is not dead--David is not dead?" came the sharp, pained
interruption.  The old man's head strained forward, his eyes were misty
and dazed.

Soolsby's face showed no pity for the other's anxiety; it had a kind of
triumph in it.  "Nay, he is living," he answered.  "He got well of the
fever, and came to Cairo, but he's off again into the desert.  It's the
third time.  You can't be tempting Providence for ever.  This paper here
says it's too big a job for one man--like throwing a good life away.
Here in England is his place, it says.  And so say I; and so I have come
to say, and to hear you say so, too.  What is he there?  One man against
a million.  What put it in his head that he thinks he can do it?"

His voice became lower; he fixed his eyes meaningly on the other.  "When
a man's life got a twist at the start, no wonder it flies off madlike to
do the thing that isn't to be done, and leave undone the thing that's
here for it to do.  Doost think a straight line could come from the
crooked line you drew for him?"

"He is safe--he is well and strong again?" asked the old man painfully.
Suddenly he reached out a hand for the paper.  "Let me read," he said, in
a voice scarce above a whisper.

He essayed to take the paper calmly, but it trembled in his hands.  He
spread it out and fumbled for his glasses, but could not find them, and
he gazed helplessly at the page before him.  Soolsby took the paper from
him and read slowly:

".  .  .  Claridge Pasha has done good work in Egypt, but he is a
generation too soon, it may be two or three too soon.  We can but regard
this fresh enterprise as a temptation to Fate to take from our race one
of the most promising spirits and vital personalities which this
generation has produced.  It is a forlorn hope.  Most Englishmen familiar
with Claridge Pasha's life and aims will ask--"

An exclamation broke from the old man.  In the pause which followed he
said: "It was none of my doing.  He went to Egypt against my will."

"Ay, so many a man's said that's not wanted to look his own acts straight
in the face.  If Our Man had been started different, if he'd started in
the path where God A'mighty dropped him, and not in the path Luke
Claridge chose, would he have been in Egypt to-day wearing out his life?
He's not making carpets there, he's only beating them."

The homely illustration drawn from the business in which he had been
interested so many years went home to Claridge's mind.  He shrank back,
and sat rigid, his brows drawing over the eyes, till they seemed sunk in
caverns of the head.  Suddenly Soolsby's voice rose angrily.  Luke
Claridge seemed so remorseless and unyielding, so set in his vanity and
self-will!  Soolsby misread the rigid look in the face, the pale
sternness.  He did not know that there had suddenly come upon Luke
Claridge the full consciousness of an agonising truth--that all he had
done where David was concerned had been a mistake.  The hard look, the
sternness, were the signals of a soul challenging itself.

"Ay, you've had your own will," cried Soolsby mercilessly.  "You've said
to God A'mighty that He wasn't able to work out to a good end what He'd
let happen; and so you'd do His work for Him.  You kept the lad hid away
from the people that belonged to him, you kept him out of his own, and
let others take his birthright.  You put a shame upon him, hiding who his
father and his father's people were, and you put a shame upon her that
lies in the graveyard--as sweet a lass, as good, as ever lived on earth.
Ay, a shame and a scandal!  For your eyes were shut always to the
sidelong looks, your ears never heard the things people said--'A good-
for-nothing ship-captain, a scamp and a ne'er-do-weel, one that had a
lass at every port, and, maybe, wives too; one that none knew or ever had
seen--a pirate maybe, or a slave-dealer, or a jail-bird, for all they
knew!  Married--oh yes, married right enough, but nothing else--not even
a home.  Just a ring on the finger, and then, beyond and away!'  Around
her life that brought into the world our lad yonder you let a cloud draw
down; and you let it draw round his, too, for he didn't even bear his
father's name--much less knew who his father was--or live in his father's
home, or come by his own in the end.  You gave the lad shame and scandal.
Do you think, he didn't feel it, was it much or little?  He wasn't
walking in the sun, but--"

"Mercy!  Mercy!" broke in the old man, his hand before his eyes.  He was
thinking of Mercy, his daughter, of the words she had said to him when
she died, "Set him in the sun, father, where God can find him," and her
name now broke from his lips.

Soolsby misunderstood.  "Ay, there'll be mercy when right's been done
Our Man, and not till then.  I've held my tongue for half a lifetime, but
I'll speak now and bring him back.  Ay, he shall come back and take the
place that is his, and all that belongs to him.  That lordship yonder--
let him go out into the world and make his place as the Egyptian did.
He's had his chance to help Our Man, and he has only hurt, not helped
him.  We've had enough of his second-best lordship and his ways."

The old man's face was painful in its stricken stillness now.  He had
regained control of himself, his brain had recovered greatly from its
first suffusion of excitement.

"How does thee know my lord yonder has hurt and not helped him?" he
asked in an even voice, his lips tightening, however.  "How does thee
know it surely?"

"From Kate Heaver, my lady's maid.  My lady's illness--what was it?
Because she would help Our Man, and, out of his hatred, yonder second son
said that to her which no woman can bear that's a true woman; and then,
what with a chill and fever, she's been yonder ailing these weeks past.
She did what she could for him, and her husband did what he could against
him."

The old man settled back in his chair again.  "Thee has kept silent all
these years?  Thee has never told any that lives?"

"I gave my word to her that died--to our Egyptian's mother--that I would
never speak unless you gave me leave to speak, or if you should die
before me.  It was but a day before the lad was born.  So have I kept my
word.  But now you shall speak.  Ay, then, but you shall speak, or I'll
break my word to her, to do right by her son.  She herself would speak if
she was here, and I'll answer her, if ever I see her after Purgatory, for
speaking now."

The old man drew himself up in his chair as though in pain, and said very
slowly, almost thickly: "I shall answer also for all I did.  The spirit
moved me.  He is of my blood--his mother was dead--in his veins is
the blood that runs in mine.  His father--aristocrat, spendthrift,
adventurer, renegade, who married her in secret, and left her, bidding
her return to me, until he came again, and she to bear him a child--was
he fit to bring up the boy?"

He breathed heavily, his face became wan and haggard, as he continued:
"Restless on land or sea, for ever seeking some new thing, and when he
found it, and saw what was therein, he turned away forgetful.  God put it
into my heart to abjure him and the life around him.  The Voice made me
rescue the child from a life empty and bare and heartless and proud.
When he returned, and my child was in her grave, he came to me in secret;
he claimed the child of that honest lass whom he had married under a
false name.  I held my hand lest I should kill him, man of peace as I am.
Even his father--Quaker though he once became--did we not know ere the
end that he had no part or lot with us, that he but experimented with his
soul, as with all else?  Experiment--experiment--experiment, until at
last an Eglington went exploring in my child's heart, and sent her to her
grave--the God of Israel be her rest and refuge!  What should such high-
placed folk do stooping out of their sphere to us who walk in plain
paths?  What have we in common with them?  My soul would have none of
them--masks of men, the slaves of riches and titles, and tyrants over the
poor."

His voice grew hoarse and high, and his head bent forward.  He spoke as
though forgetful of Soolsby's presence: "As the East is from the West, so
were we separate from these lovers of this world, the self-indulgent, the
hard-hearted, the proud.  I chose for the child that he should stay with
me and not go to him, to remain among his own people and his own class.
He was a sinister, an evil man.  Was the child to be trusted with him?"

"The child was his own child," broke in Soolsby.  "Your daughter was his
lady--the Countess of Eglington!  Not all the Quakers in heaven or earth
could alter that.  His first-born son is Earl of Eglington, and has been
so these years past; and you, nor his second-best lordship there, nor all
the courts in England can alter that.  .  .  .  Ay, I've kept my peace,
but I will speak out now.  I was with the Earl--James Fetherdon he called
himself--when he married her that's gone to heaven, if any ever went to
heaven; and I can prove all.  There's proof aplenty, and 'tis a pity, ay,
God's pity!  that 'twas not used long ago.  Well I knew, as the years
passed, that the Earl's heart was with David, but he had not the courage
to face it all, so worn away was the man in him.  Ah, if the lad had
always been with him--who can tell?--he might have been different!
Whether so or not, it was the lad's right to take his place his mother
gave him, let be whatever his father was.  'Twas a cruel thing done to
him.  His own was his own, to run his race as God A'mighty had laid the
hurdles, not as Luke Claridge willed.  I'm sick of seeing yonder fellow
in Our Man's place, he that will not give him help, when he may; he that
would see him die like a dog in the desert, brother or no brother--"

"He does not know--Lord Eglington does not know the truth?" interposed
the old man in a heavy whisper.  "He does not know, but, if he knew,
would it matter to him!  So much the more would he see Our Man die yonder
in the sands.  I know the breed.  I know him yonder, the skim-milk lord.
There is no blood of justice, no milk of kindness in him.  Do you think
his father that I friended in this thing--did he ever give me a penny,
or aught save that hut on the hill that was not worth a pound a year?
Did he ever do aught to show that he remembered?--Like father like son.
I wanted naught.  I held my peace, not for him, but for her--for the
promise I made her when she smiled at me and said: 'If I shouldn't be
seeing thee again, Soolsby, remember; and if thee can ever prove a friend
to the child that is to be, prove it.'  And I will prove it now.  He must
come back to his own.  Right's right, and I will have it so.  More brains
you may have, and wealth you have, but not more common sense than any
common man like me.  If the spirit moved you to hold your peace, it moves
me to make you speak.  With all your meek face you've been a hard, stiff-
necked man, a tyrant too, and as much an aristocrat to such as me as any
lord in the land.  But I've drunk the mug of silence to the bottom.
I've--" He stopped short, seeing a strange look come over the other's
face, then stepped forward quickly as the old man half rose from his
chair, murmuring thickly:

"Mercy--David, my lord, come--!" he muttered, and staggered, and fell
into Soolsby's arms.

His head dropped forward on his breast, and with a great sigh he sank
into unconsciousness.  Soolsby laid him on a couch, and ran to the door
and called aloud for help.

                    ..........................

The man of silence was silent indeed now.  In the room where paralysis
had fallen on him a bed was brought, and he lay nerveless on the verge of
a still deeper silence.  The hours went by.  His eyes opened, he saw and
recognised them all, but his look rested only on Faith and Soolsby; and,
as time went on, these were the only faces to which he gave an answering
look of understanding.  Days wore away, but he neither spoke nor moved.

People came and went softly, and he gave no heed.  There was ever a
trouble in his eyes when they were open.  Only when Soolsby came did it
seem to lessen.  Faith saw this, and urged Soolsby to sit by him.  She
had questioned much concerning what had happened before the stroke fell,
but Soolsby said only that the old man had been greatly troubled about
David.  Once Lady Eglington, frail and gentle and sympathetic, came, but
the trouble deepened in his eyes, and the lids closed over them, so that
he might not see her face.

When she had gone, Soolsby, who had been present and had interpreted the
old man's look according to a knowledge all his own, came over to the
bed, leaned down and whispered: "I will speak now."

Then the eyes opened, and a smile faintly flickered at the mouth.

"I will speak now," Soolsby said again into the old man's ear.




CHAPTER XXV

THE VOICE THROUGH THE DOOR

That night Soolsby tapped at the door of the lighted laboratory of the
Cloistered House where Lord Eglington was at work; opened it, peered in,
and stepped inside.

With a glass retort in his hand Eglington faced him.  "What's this--what
do you want?" he demanded.

"I want to try an experiment," answered Soolsby grimly.

"Ah, a scientific turn!" rejoined Eglington coolly--looking at him
narrowly, however.  He was conscious of danger of some kind.

Then for a minute neither spoke.  Now that Soolsby had come to the moment
for which he had waited for so many ,years, the situation was not what he
had so often prefigured.  The words he had chosen long ago were gone from
his memory; in his ignorance of what had been a commonplace to Soolsby's
dark reflection so long, the man he had meant to bring low stood up
before him on his own ground, powerful and unabashed.

Eglington wore a blue smock, and over his eyes was a green shade to
protect them from the light, but they peered sharply out at the chair-
maker, and were boldly alive to the unexpected.  He was no physical
coward, and, in any case, what reason had he for physical fear in the
presence of this man weakened by vice and age?  Yet ever since he was a
boy there had existed between them an antagonism which had shown itself
in many ways.  There had ever been something sinister in Soolsby's
attitude to his father and himself.

Eglington vaguely knew that now he was to face some trial of mind and
nerve, but with great deliberation he continued dropping liquid from a
bottle into the glass retort he carried, his eyes, however, watchful of
his visitor, who involuntarily stared around the laboratory.

It was fifteen years since Soolsby had been in this room; and then he had
faced this man's father with a challenge on his tongue such as he meant
to speak now.  The smell of the chemicals, the carboys filled with acids,
the queer, tapering glasses with engraved measurements showing against
the coloured liquids, the great blue bottles, the mortars and pestles,
the microscopic instruments--all brought back the far-off, acrid scene
between the late Earl and himself.  Nothing had changed, except that now
there were wires which gave out hissing sparks, electrical instruments
invented since the earlier day; except that this man, gently dropping
acids into the round white bottle upon a crystal which gave off musty
fumes, was bolder, stronger, had more at stake than the other.

Slowly Eglington moved back to put the retort on a long table against the
wall, and Soolsby stepped forward till he stood where the electric sparks
were gently hissing about him.  Now Eglington leaned against the table,
poured some alcohol on his fingers to cleanse the acid from them, and
wiped them with a piece of linen, while he looked inquiringly at Soolsby.
Still, Soolsby did not speak.  Eglington lit a cigarette, and took away
the shade from his eyes.

"Well, now, what is your experiment?" he asked, "and why bring it here?
Didn't you know the way to the stables or the scullery?"

"I knew my way better here," answered Soolsby, steadying himself.

"Ah, you've been here often?" asked Eglington nonchalantly, yet feeling
for the cause of this midnight visit.

"It is fifteen years since I was here, my lord.  Then I came to see the
Earl of Eglington."

"And so history repeats itself every fifteen years!  You came to see the
Earl of Eglington then; you come to see the Earl of Eglington again--
after fifteen years!"

"I come to speak with him that's called the Earl of Eglington."

Eglington's eyes half closed, as though the light hurt them.  "That
sounds communistic, or is it pure Quakerism?  I believe they used to call
my father Friend Robert till he backslided.  But you are not a Quaker,
Soolsby, so why be too familiar?  Or is it merely the way of the old
family friend?"

"I knew your father before you were born, my lord--he troosted me then."

"So long?  And fifteen years ago--here?"  He felt a menace, vague and
penetrating.  His eyes were hard and cruel.

"It wasn't a question of troost then; 'twas one of right or wrong--naught
else."

"Ah--and who was right, and what was wrong?"  At that moment there came a
tap at the door leading into the living part of the house, and the butler
entered.  "The doctor--he has used up all his oxygen, my lord.  He begs
to know if you can give him some for Mr. Claridge.  Mr. Claridge is bad
to-night."

A sinister smile passed over Eglington's face.  "Who brings the message,
Garry?"

"A servant--Miss Claridge's, my lord."

An ironical look came into Eglington's eyes; then they softened a little.
In a moment he placed a jar of oxygen in the butler's hands.

"My compliments to Miss Claridge, and I am happy to find my laboratory of
use at last to my neighbours," he said, and the door closed upon the man.

Then he came back thoughtfully.  Soolsby had not moved.

"Do you know what oxygen's for, Soolsby?" he asked quizzically.

"No, my lord, I've never heerd tell of it."

"Well, if you brought the top of Ben Lomond to the bottom of a coal-mine
--breath to the breathless--that's it.

"You've been doing that to Mr. Claridge, my lord?"

"A little oxygen more or less makes all the difference to a man--it
probably will to neighbour Claridge, Soolsby; and so I've done him a good
turn."

A grim look passed over Soolsby's face.  "It's the first, I'm thinking,
my lord, and none too soon; and it'll be the last, I'm thinking, too.
It's many a year since this house was neighbourly to that."

Eglington's eyes almost closed, as he studied the other's face; then he
said: "I asked you a little while ago who was right and what was wrong
when you came to see my father here fifteen years ago.  Well?"

Suddenly a thought flashed into his eyes, and it seemed to course through
his veins like some anaesthetic, for he grew very still, and a minute
passed before he added quietly: "Was it a thing between my father and
Luke Claridge?  There was trouble--well, what was it?"  All at once he
seemed to rise above the vague anxiety that possessed him, and he
fingered inquiringly a long tapering glass of acids on the bench beside
him.  "There's been so much mystery, and I suppose it was nothing, after
all.  What was it all about?  Or do you know--eh?  Fifteen years ago you
came to see my father, and now you have come to see me--all in the light
o' the moon, as it were; like a villain in a play.  Ah, yes, you said it
was to make an experiment--yet you didn't know what oxygen was!  It's
foolish making experiments, unless you know what you are playing with,
Soolsby.  See, here are two glasses."  He held them up.  "If I poured one
into the other, we'd have an experiment--and you and I would be picked up
in fragments and carried away in a basket.  And that wouldn't be a
successful experiment, Soolsby."

"I'm not so sure of that, my lord.  Some things would be put right then."

"H'm, there would be a new Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and--"

"And Claridge Pasha would come back from Egypt, my lord," was the sharp
interjection.  Suddenly Soolsby's anger flared up, his hands twitched.
"You had your chance to be a friend to him, my lord.  You promised her
yonder at the Red Mansion that you would help him--him that never wronged
you, him you always wronged, and you haven't lifted hand to help him in
his danger.  A moment since you asked me who was right and what was
wrong.  You shall know.  If you had treated him right, I'd have held my
peace, and kept my word to her that's gone these thirty-odd years.  I'll
hold it no more, and so I told Luke Claridge.  I've been silent, but not
for your father's sake or yours, for he was as cruel as you, with no
heart, and a conscience like a pin's head, not big enough for use.  .  .
Ay, you shall know.  You are no more the Earl of Eglington than me.

"The Earl of Eglington is your elder brother, called David Claridge."

As Soolsby's words poured forth passionately, weighty, Eglington listened
like one in a dream.  Since this man entered the laboratory fifty reasons
for his coming had flashed across his mind; he had prepared himself at
many corners for defence, he had rallied every mental resource, he had
imagined a dozen dangerous events which his father and Luke Claridge
shared--with the balance against his father; but this thing was beyond
all speculation.  Yet on the instant the words were said he had a
conviction of their inevitable truth.  Even as they were uttered,
kaleidoscopic memories rushed in, and David's face, figure, personal
characteristics, flashed before him.  He saw, he felt, the likeness to
his father and himself; a thousand things were explained that could only
be explained by this fatal fact launched at him without warning.  It was
as though, fully armed for his battle of life, he had suddenly been
stripped of armour and every weapon, and left naked on the field.  But he
had the mind of the gamester, and the true gamester's self-control.  He
had taken chances so often that the tornado of ill-luck left him
standing.

"What proof have you?" he asked quietly.  Soolsby's explicit answer left
no ground for doubt.  He had not asked the question with any idea of
finding gaps in the evidence, but rather to find if there were a chance
for resistance, of escape, anywhere.  The marriage certificate existed;
identification of James Fetherdon with his father could be established by
Soolsby and Luke Claridge.

Soolsby and Luke Claridge!  Luke Claridge--he could not help but smile
cynically, for he was composed and calculating now.  A few minutes ago
he had sent a jar of oxygen to keep Luke Claridge alive!  But for it one
enemy to his career, to his future, would be gone.  He did not shrink
from the thought.  Born a gentleman, there were in him some degenerate
characteristics which heart could not drown or temperament refine.
Selfishness was inwoven with every fibre of his nature.

Now, as he stood with eyes fixed on Soolsby, the world seemed to narrow
down to this laboratory.  It was a vacuum where sensation was suspended,
and the million facts of ordinary existence disappeared into inactivity.
There was a fine sense of proportion in it all.  Only the bare essential
things that concerned him remained: David Claridge was the Earl of
Eglington, this man before him knew, Luke Claridge knew; and there was
one thing yet to know!  When he spoke his voice showed no excitement--the
tones were even, colourless.

"Does he know?"  In these words he acknowledged that he believed the tale
told him.

Soolsby had expected a different attitude; he was not easier in mind
because his story had not been challenged.  He blindly felt working in
the man before him a powerful mind, more powerful because it faced the
truth unflinchingly; but he knew that this did not mean calm acceptance
of the consequences.  He, not Eglington, was dazed and embarrassed, was
not equal to the situation.  He moved uneasily, changed his position.

"Does he know?" Eglington questioned again quietly.  There was no need
for Eglington to explain who he was.

"Of course he does not know--I said so.  If he knew, do you think he'd be
in Egypt and you here, my lord?"

Eglington was very quiet.  His intellect more than his passions were now
at work.

"I am not sure.  You never can tell.  This might not mean much to him.
He has got his work cut out; he wasn't brought up to this.  What he has
done is in line with the life he has lived as a pious Quaker.  What good
would it do to bring him back?  I have been brought up to it; I am used
to it; I have worked things out 'according to the state of life to which
I was called.'  Take what I've always had away from me, and I am
crippled; give him what he never had, and it doesn't work into his
scheme.  It would do him no good and me harm--Where's the use?  Besides,
I am still my father's son.  Don't you see how unreasonable you are?
Luke Claridge was right.  He knew that he and his belonged to a different
sphere.  He didn't speak.  Why do you speak now after all these years
when we are all set in our grooves?  It's silly to disturb us, Soolsby."

The voice was low, persuasive, and searching; the mind was working as it
had never worked before, to achieve an end by peaceful means, when war
seemed against him.  And all the time he was fascinated by the fact that
Soolsby's hand was within a few inches of a live electric wire, which, if
he touched, would probably complete "the experiment" he had come to make;
and what had been the silence of a generation would continue
indefinitely.  It was as though Fate had deliberately tempted him and
arranged the necessary conditions, for Soolsby's feet were in a little
pool of liquid which had been spilled on the floor--the experiment was
exact and real.

For minutes he had watched Soolsby's hand near the wire-had watched as he
talked, and his talk was his argument for non-interference against
warning the man who had come to destroy him and his career.  Why had Fate
placed that hand so near the wire there, and provided the other perfect
conditions for tragedy?  Why should he intervene?  It would never have
crossed his mind to do Soolsby harm, yet here, as the man's arm was
stretched out to strike him, Fate offered an escape.  Luke Claridge was
stricken with paralysis, no doubt would die; Soolsby alone stood in his
way.

"You see, Soolsby, it has gone on too long," he added, in a low,
penetrating tone.  "It would be a crime to alter things now.  Give him
the earldom and the estates, and his work in Egypt goes to pieces; he
will be spoiled for all he wants to do.  I've got my faults, but, on the
whole, I'm useful, and I play my part here, as I was born to it, as well
as most.  Anyhow, it's no robbery for me to have what has been mine by
every right except the accident of being born after him.  I think you'll
see that you will do a good thing to let it all be.  Luke Claridge, if he
was up and well, wouldn't thank you for it--have you got any right to
give him trouble, too?  Besides, I've saved his life to-night, and. . . .
and perhaps I might save yours, Soolsby, if it was in danger."

Soolsby's hand had moved slightly.  It was only an inch from the wire.
For an instant the room was terribly still.

An instant, and it might be too late.  An instant, and Soolsby would be
gone.  Eglington watched the hand which had been resting on the table
turn slowly over to the wire.  Why should he intervene?  Was it his
business?  This thing was not his doing.  Destiny had laid the train of
circumstance and accident, and who was stronger than Destiny?  In spite
of himself his eyes fixed themselves on Soolsby's hand.  It was but a
hair's breadth from the wire.  The end would come now.  Suddenly a voice
was heard outside the door.  "Eglington!" it called.

Soolsby started, his hand drew spasmodically away from the wire, and he
stepped back quickly.

The door opened, and Hylda entered.

"Mr. Claridge is dead, Eglington," she said.  Destiny had decided.




CHAPTER XXVI

"I OWE YOU NOTHING"

Beside the grave under the willow-tree another grave had been made.  It
was sprinkled with the fallen leaves of autumn.  In the Red Mansion
Faith's delicate figure moved forlornly among relics of an austere,
beloved figure vanished from the apricot-garden and the primitive
simplicity of wealth combined with narrow thought.

Since her father's death, the bereaved girl had been occupied by matters
of law and business, by affairs of the estate; but the first pressure was
over, long letters had been written to David which might never reach him;
and now, when the strain was withdrawn, the gentle mind was lost in a
grey mist of quiet suffering.  In Hamley there were but two in whom she
had any real comfort and help--Lady Eglington and the old chair-maker.
Of an afternoon or evening one or the other was to be seen in the long
high-wainscoted room, where a great fire burned, or in the fruitless
garden where the breeze stirred the bare branches.

Almost as deep a quiet brooded in the Cloistered House as in the home
where mourning enjoined movement in a minor key.  Hylda had not recovered
wholly from the illness which had stricken her down on that day in London
when she had sought news of David from Eglington, at such cost to her
peace and health and happiness.  Then had come her slow convalescence in
Hamley, and long days of loneliness, in which Eglington seemed to retreat
farther and farther from her inner life.  Inquiries had poured in from
friends in town, many had asked to come and see her; flowers came from
one or two who loved her benignly, like Lord Windlehurst; and now and
then she had some cheerful friend with her who cared for music or could
sing; and then the old home rang; but she was mostly alone, and Eglington
was kept in town by official business the greater part of each week.  She
did not gain strength as quickly as she ought to have done, and this was
what brought the Duchess of Snowdon down on a special mission one day of
early November.

Ever since the night she had announced Luke Claridge's death to
Eglington, had discovered Soolsby with him, had seen the look in her
husband's face and caught the tension of the moment on which she had
broken, she had been haunted by a hovering sense of trouble.  What had
Soolsby been doing in the laboratory at that time of night?  What was the
cause of this secret meeting?  All Hamley knew--she had long known--how
Luke Claridge had held the Cloistered House in abhorrence, and she knew
also that Soolsby worshipped David and Faith, and, whatever the cause of
the family antipathy, championed it.  She was conscious of a shadow
somewhere, and behind it all was the name of David's father, James
Fetherdon.  That last afternoon when she had talked with him, and he had
told her of his life, she had recalled the name as one she had seen or
heard, and it had floated into her mind at last that she had seen it
among the papers and letters of the late Countess of Eglington.

As the look in Eglington's face the night she came upon him and Soolsby
in the laboratory haunted her, so the look in her own face had haunted
Soolsby.  Her voice announcing Luke Claridge's death had suddenly opened
up a new situation to him.  It stunned him; and afterwards, as he saw
Hylda with Faith in the apricot-garden, or walking in the grounds of the
Cloistered House hour after hour alone or with her maid, he became vexed
by a problem greater than had yet perplexed him.  It was one thing to
turn Eglington out of his lands and home and title; it was another thing
to strike this beautiful being, whose smile had won him from the first,
whose voice, had he but known, had saved his life.  Perhaps the truth in
some dim way was conveyed to him, for he came to think of her a little as
he thought of Faith.

Since the moment when he had left the laboratory and made his way to the
Red Mansion, he and Eglington had never met face to face; and he avoided
a meeting.  He was not a blackmailer, he had no personal wrongs to
avenge, he had not sprung the bolt of secrecy for evil ends; and when he
saw the possible results of his disclosure, he was unnerved.  His mind
had seen one thing only, the rights of "Our Man," the wrong that had been
done him and his mother; but now he saw how the sword of justice, which
he had kept by his hand these many years, would cut both ways.  His mind
was troubled, too, that he had spoken while yet Luke Claridge lived, and
so broken his word to Mercy Claridge.  If he had but waited till the old
man died--but one brief half-hour--his pledge would have been kept.
Nothing had worked out wholly as he expected.  The heavens had not
fallen.  The "second-best lordship" still came and went, the wheels went
round as usual.  There was no change; yet, as he sat in his hut and
looked down into the grounds of the Cloistered House, he kept saying to
himself.

"It had to be told.  It's for my lord now.  He knows the truth.  I'll
wait and see.  It's for him to do right by Our Man that's beyond and
away."

The logic and fairness of this position, reached after much thinking,
comforted him.  He had done his duty so far.  If, in the end, the
"second-best lordship" failed to do his part, hid the truth from the
world, refused to do right by his half-brother, the true Earl, then would
be time to act again.  Also he waited for word out of Egypt; and he had a
superstitious belief that David would return, that any day might see him
entering the door of the Red Mansion.

Eglington himself was haunted by a spectre which touched his elbow by
day, and said: "You are not the Earl of Eglington," and at night laid a
clammy finger on his forehead, waking him, and whispering in his ear:
"If Soolsby had touched the wire, all would now be well!"  And as deep as
thought and feeling in him lay, he felt that Fate had tricked him--Fate
and Hylda.  If Hylda had not come at that crucial instant, the
chairmaker's but on the hill would be empty.  Why had not Soolsby told
the world the truth since?  Was the man waiting to see what course he
himself would take?  Had the old chair-maker perhaps written the truth
to the Egyptian--to his brother David.

His brother!  The thought irritated every nerve in him.  No note of
kindness or kinship or blood stirred in him.  If, before, he had had
innate antagonism and a dark, hovering jealousy, he had a black
repugnance now--the antipathy of the lesser to the greater nature,
of the man in the wrong to the man in the right.

And behind it all was the belief that his wife had set David above him--
by how much or in what fashion he did not stop to consider; but it made
him desire that death and the desert would swallow up his father's son
and leave no trace behind.

Policy?  His work in the Foreign Office now had but one policy so far as
Egypt was concerned.  The active sophistry in him made him advocate non-
intervention in Egyptian affairs as diplomatic wisdom, though it was but
personal purpose; and he almost convinced himself that he was acting from
a national stand-point.  Kaid and Claridge Pasha pursued their course of
civilisation in the Soudan, and who could tell what danger might not
bring forth?  If only Soolsby held his peace yet a while!

Did Faith know?  Luke Claridge was gone without speaking, but had Soolsby
told Faith?  How closely had he watched the faces round him at Luke
Claridge's funeral, to see if they betrayed any knowledge!

Anxious days had followed that night in the laboratory.  His boundless
egotism had widened the chasm between Hylda and himself, which had been
made on the day when she fell ill in London, with Lacey's letter in her
hand.  It had not grown less in the weeks that followed.  He nursed a
grievance which had, so far as he knew, no foundation in fact; he was
vaguely jealous of a man--his brother--thousands of miles away; he was
not certain how far Hylda had pierced the disguise of sincerity which he
himself had always worn, or how far she understood him.  He thought that
she shrank from what she had seen of his real self, much or little, and
he was conscious of so many gifts and abilities and attractive personal
qualities that he felt a sense of injury.  Yet what would his position
be without her?  Suppose David should return and take the estates and
titles, and suppose that she should close her hand upon her fortune and
leave him, where would he be?

He thought of all this as he sat in his room at the Foreign Office and
looked over St. James's Park, his day's work done.  He was suddenly
seized by a new-born anxiety, for he had been so long used to the open
purse and the unchecked stream of gold, had taken it so much as a matter
of course, as not to realise the possibility of its being withdrawn.
He was conscious of a kind of meanness and ugly sordidness in the
suggestion; but the stake--his future, his career, his position in the
world--was too high to allow him to be too chivalrous.  His sense of the
real facts was perverted.  He said to himself that he must be practical.

Moved by the new thought, he seized a time-table and looked up the
trains.  He had been ten days in town, receiving every morning a little
note from Hylda telling of what she had done each day; a calm, dutiful
note, written without pretence, and out of a womanly affection with which
she surrounded the man who, it seemed once--such a little while ago--must
be all in all to her.  She had no element of pretence in her.  What she
could give she gave freely, and it was just what it appeared to be.  He
had taken it all as his due, with an underlying belief that, if he chose
to make love to her again, he could blind her to all else in the world.
Hurt vanity and egotism and jealousy had prevented him from luring her
back to that fine atmosphere in which he had hypnotised her so few years
ago.  But suddenly, as he watched the swans swimming in the pond below, a
new sense of approaching loss, all that Hylda had meant in his march and
progress, came upon him; and he hastened to return to Hamley.

Getting out of the train at Heddington, he made up his mind to walk home
by the road that David had taken on his return from Egypt, and he left
word at the station that he would send for his luggage.

His first objective was Soolsby's hut, and, long before he reached it,
darkness had fallen.  From a light shining through the crack of the blind
he knew that Soolsby was at home.  He opened the door and entered without
knocking.  Soolsby was seated at a table, a map and a newspaper spread
out before him.  Egypt and David, always David and Egypt!

Soolsby got to his feet slowly, his eyes fixed inquiringly on his
visitor.

"I didn't knock," said Eglington, taking off his greatcoat and reaching
for a chair; then added, as he seated himself: "Better sit down,
Soolsby."

After a moment he continued: "Do you mind my smoking?"

Soolsby did not reply, but sat down again.  He watched Eglington light a
cigar and stretch out his hands to the wood fire with an air of comfort.

A silence followed.  Eglington appeared to forget the other's presence,
and to occupy himself with thoughts that glimmered in the fire.

At last Soolsby said moodily: "What have you come for, my lord?"

"Oh, I am my lord still, am I?" Eglington returned lazily.  "Is it a
genealogical tree you are studying there?"  He pointed to the map.

"I've studied your family tree with care, as you should know, my lord;
and a map of Egypt"--he tapped the parchment before him--"goes well with
it.  And see, my lord, Egypt concerns you too.  Lord Eglington is there,
and 'tis time he was returning-ay, 'tis time."

There was a baleful look in Soolsby's eyes.  Whatever he might think,
whatever considerations might arise at other times, a sinister feeling
came upon him when Eglington was with him.

"And, my lord," he went on, "I'd be glad to know that you've sent for
him, and told him the truth."

"Have you?"  Eglington flicked the ash from his cigar, speaking coolly.

Soolsby looked at him with his honest blue eyes aflame, and answered
deliberately: "I was not for taking your place, my lord.  'Twas my duty
to tell you, but the rest was between you and the Earl of Eglington."

"That was thoughtful of you, Soolsby.  And Miss Claridge?"

"I told you that night, my lord, that only her father and myself knew;
and what was then is now."

A look of relief stole across Eglington's face.  "Of course--of course.
These things need a lot of thought, Soolsby.  One must act with care--
no haste, no flurry, no mistakes."

"I would not wait too long, my lord, or be too careful."  There was
menace in the tone.

"But if you go at things blind, you're likely to hurt where you don't
mean to hurt.  When you're mowing in a field by a school-house, you must
look out for the children asleep in the grass.  Sometimes the longest way
round is the shortest way home."

"Do you mean to do it or not, my lord?  I've left it to you as a
gentleman."

"It's going to upset more than you think, Soolsby.  Suppose he, out there
in Egypt"--he pointed again to the map--"doesn't thank me for the
information.  Suppose he says no, and--"

"Right's right.  Give him the chance, my lord.  How can you know, unless
you tell him the truth?"

"Do you like living, Soolsby?"

"Do you want to kill me, my lord?"

There was a dark look in Eglington's face.  "But answer me, do you want
to live?"

"I want to live long enough to see the Earl of Eglington in his own
house."

"Well, I've made that possible.  The other night when you were telling me
your little story, you were near sending yourself into eternity--as near
as I am knocking this ash off my cigar."  His little finger almost
touched the ash.  "Your hand was as near touching a wire charged with
death.  I saw it.  It would have been better for me if you had gone; but
I shut off the electricity.  Suppose I hadn't, could I have been blamed?
It would have been an accident.  Providence did not intervene; I did.
You owe me something, Soolsby."

Soolsby stared at him almost blindly for a moment.  A mist was before his
eyes; but through the mist, though he saw nothing of this scene in which
he now was, he saw the laboratory, and himself and Eglington, and
Eglington's face as it peered at him, and, just before the voice called
outside, Eglington's eyes fastened on his hand.  It all flashed upon him
now, and he saw himself starting back at the sound of the voice.

Slowly he got up now, went to the door, and opened it.  "My lord, it is
not true," he said.  "You have not spoken like a gentleman.  It was my
lady's voice that saved me.  This is my castle, my lord--you lodge
yonder."  He pointed down into the darkness where the lights of the
village shone.  "I owe you nothing.  I pay my debts.  Pay yours, my lord,
to him that's beyond and away."

Eglington kept his countenance as he drew on his great-coat and slowly
passed from the house.

"I ought to have let you die, Soolsby.  Y'ou'll think better of this
soon.  But it's quite right to leave the matter to me.  It may take a
little time, but everything will come right.  Justice shall be done.
Well, good night, Soolsby.  You live too much alone, and imagination
is a bad thing for the lonely.  Good night-good night."

Going down the hill quickly, he said to himself: "A sort of second sight
he had about that wire.  But time is on my side, time and the Soudan--
and 'The heathen in his blindness.  .  .  .' I will keep what is mine.
I will keep it!"




CHAPTER XXVII

THE AWAKENING

In her heart of hearts Hylda had not greatly welcomed the Duchess of
Snowdon to Hamley.  There was no one whose friendship she prized more;
but she was passing through a phase of her life when she felt that she
was better apart, finding her own path by those intuitions and
perceptions which belonged to her own personal experience.  She vaguely
felt, what all realise sooner or later, that we must live our dark hours
alone.

Yet the frank downright nature of the once beautiful, now faded, Duchess,
the humorous glimmer in the pale-blue eyes, the droll irony and dry truth
of her speech, appealed to Hylda, made her smile a warm greeting when she
would rather have been alone.  For, a few days before, she had begun a
quest which had absorbed her, fascinated her.  The miner, finding his way
across the gap of a reef to pick up the vein of quartz at some distant
and uncertain point, could not have been more lost to the world than was
the young wife searching for a family skeleton, indefinitely embodied in
her imagination by the name, James Fetherdon.

Pile after pile of papers and letters of the late Earl and his Countess
had passed through her hands from chaos to order.  As she had read, hour
after hour, the diaries of the cold, blue-eyed woman, Sybil Eglington,
who had lived without love of either husband or son, as they, in turn,
lived without love of each other, she had been overwhelmed by the
revelation of a human heart, whose powers of expression were smothered by
a shy and awkward temperament.  The late Countess's letters were the
unclothing of a heart which had never expanded to the eyes of those whose
love would have broken up a natural reserve, which became at last a proud
coldness, and gave her a reputation for lack of feeling that she carried
to her grave.

In the diaries which Hylda unearthed--the Countess had died suddenly--
was the muffled cry of a soul tortured through different degrees of
misunderstanding; from the vague pain of suffered indifference, of being
left out of her husband's calculations, to the blank neglect narrowing
her life down to a tiny stream of duty, which was finally lost in the
sands.  She had died abroad, and alone, save for her faithful maid, who,
knowing the chasm that lay between her mistress and her lord, had brought
her letters and papers back to the Cloistered House, and locked them away
with all the other papers and correspondence which the Countess had
accumulated.

Among these papers was a letter to the late Lord Eglington written the
day before she died.  In the haste and confusion ensuing on her death,
the maid had not seen it.  It had never reached his hands, but lay in a
pocket of the dead woman's writing-portfolio, which Hylda had explored
without discovering.  Only a few hours, however, before the Duchess of
Snowdon came, Hylda had found again an empty envelope on which was
written the name, James Fetherdon.  The writing on the envelope was that
of Sybil Lady Eglington.

When she discovered the envelope, a sense of mystery and premonition
possessed her.  What was the association between the Countess of
Eglington and James Fetherdon, the father of David Claridge?  In vain she
searched among the voluminous letters and papers, for it would seem that
the dead woman had saved every letter she received, and kept copies of
numberless letters she had written.  But she had searched without avail.
Even the diaries, curiously frank and without reserve, never mentioned
the name, so far as she could find, though here and there were strange
allusive references, hints of a trouble that weighed her down, phrases of
exasperation and defiance.  One phrase, or the idea in it, was, however,
much repeated in the diaries during the course of years, and towards the
last almost feverishly emphasised--"Why should I bear it for one who
would bear nothing for me, for his sake, who would do nothing for my
sake?  Is it only the mother in me, not the love in me?"

These words were haunting Hylda's brain when the telegram from the
Duchess of Snowdon came.  They followed her to Heddington, whither she
went in the carriage to bring her visitor to Hamley, and kept repeating
themselves at the back of her mind through the cheerful rallying of the
Duchess, who spread out the wings of good-humour and motherly freedom
over her.

After all, it was an agreeable thing to be taken possession of, and "put
in her proper place," as the Duchess said; made to understand that her
own affairs were not so important, after all; and that it was far more
essential to hear the charming gossip about the new and most popular
Princess of Wales, or the quarrel between Dickens and Thackeray.  Yet,
after dinner, in the little sitting-room, where the Duchess, in a white
gown with great pink bows, fitter for a girl fresh from Confirmation, and
her cheeks with their fixed colour, which changed only at the discretion
of her maid, babbled of nothing that mattered, Hylda's mind kept turning
to the book of life an unhappy woman had left behind her.  The sitting-
room had been that of the late Countess also, and on the wall was an oil-
painting of her, stately and distant and not very alluring, though the
mouth had a sweetness which seemed unable to break into a smile.

"What was she really like--that wasn't her quite, was it?" asked Hylda,
at last, leaning her chin on the hand which held the 'cello she had been
playing.

"Oh, yes, it's Sybil Eglington, my dear, but done in wood; and she wasn't
the graven image that makes her out to be.  That's as most people saw
her; as the fellow that painted her saw her; but she had another side to
her.  She disapproved of me rather, because I was squeezing the orange
dry, and trying to find yesterday's roses in to-morrow's garden.  But she
didn't shut her door in my face--it's hard to do that to a Duchess; which
is one of the few advantages of living naked in the street, as it were,
with only the strawberry leaves to clothe you.  No, Sybil Eglington was a
woman who never had her chance.  Your husband's forbears were difficult,
my dear.  They didn't exactly draw you out.  She needed drawing out; and
her husband drove her back into her corner, where she sulked rather till
she died--died alone at Wiesbaden, with a German doctor, a stray curate,
and a stuttering maid to wish her bon voyage.  Yet I fancy she went glad
enough, for she had no memories, not even an affaire to repent of, and to
cherish.  La, la!  she wasn't so stupid, Sybil there, and she was an
ornament to her own sex and the despair of the other.  His Serene
Highness Heinrich of Saxe-Gunden fancied the task of breaking that ice,
and he was an adept and an Apollo, but it broke his reputation instead.

"No doubt she is happy now.  I shall probably never see!"

In spite of the poignant nature of the talk, Hylda could not but smile at
the last words.

"Don't despair," she rejoined; "one star differeth from another star in
glory, but that is no reason why they should not be on visiting terms."

"My dear, you may laugh--you may laugh, but I am sixty-five, and I am not
laughing at the idea of what company I may be obliged to keep presently.
In any case I'm sure I shall not be comfortable.  If I'm where she is, I
shall be dull; if I'm where her husband is, I'll have no reputation; and
if there is one thing I want, it is a spotless reputation--sometime."

Hylda laughed--the manner and the voice were so droll--but her face
saddened too, and her big eyes with the drooping lashes looked up
pensively at the portrait of her husband's mother.

"Was it ever a happy family, or a lucky family?" she asked.

"It's lucky now, and it ought to be happy now," was the meaning reply.

Hylda made no answer, but caught the strings of the 'cello lightly, and
shook her head reprovingly, with a smile meant to be playful.  For a
moment she played, humming to herself, and then the Duchess touched the
hand that was drawing the bow softly across the strings.  She had behind
her garishness a gift for sympathy and a keen intuition, delicacy, and
allusiveness.  She knew what to say and what to leave unsaid, when her
heart was moved.

"My darling," she said now, "you are not quite happy; but that is because
you don't allow yourself to get well.  You've never recovered from your
attack last summer; and you won't, until you come out into the world
again and see people.  This autumn you ought to have been at Homburg or
at Aix, where you'd take a little cure of waters and a great deal of cure
of people.  You were born to bask in friendship and the sun, and to draw
from the world as much as you deserve, a little from many, for all you
give in return.  Because, dearest, you are a very agreeable person, with
enough wit and humanity to make it worth the world's while to conspire to
make you do what will give it most pleasure, and let yourself get most--
and that's why I've come."

"What a person of importance I am!" answered Hylda, with a laugh that
was far from mirthful, though she caught the plump, wrinkled little hand
of the Duchess and pressed it.  "But really I'm getting well here fast.
I'm very strong again.  It is so restful, and one's days go by so
quietly."

"Yet, I'm not sure that it's rest you want.  I don't think it is.  You
want tonics--men and women and things.  Monte Carlo would do you a world
of good--I'd go with you.  Eglington gambles here"--she watched Hylda
closely--"why shouldn't you gamble there?"

"Eglington gambles?"  Hylda's face took on a frightened look, then it
cleared again, and she smiled.  "Oh, of course, with international
affairs, you mean.  Well, I must stay here and be the croupier."

"Nonsense!  Eglington is his own croupier.  Besides, he is so much in
London, and you so much here.  You sit with the distaff; he throws the
dice."

Hylda's lips tightened a little.  Her own inner life, what Eglington was
to her or she to Eglington, was for the ears of no human being, however
friendly.  She had seen little of him of late, but in one sense that had
been a relief, though she would have done anything to make that feeling
impossible.  His rather precise courtesy and consideration, when he was
with her, emphasised the distance between "the first fine careless
rapture" and this grey quiet.  And, strange to say, though in the first
five years after the Cairo days and deeds, Egypt seemed an infinite space
away, and David a distant, almost legendary figure, now Egypt seemed but
beyond the door--as though, opening it, she would stand near him who
represented the best of all that she might be capable of thinking.  Yet
all the time she longed for Eglington to come and say one word, which
would be like touching the lever of the sluice-gates of her heart, to let
loose the flood.  As the space grew between her and Eglington, her spirit
trembled, she shrank back, because she saw that sea towards which she was
drifting.

As she did not answer the last words of the Duchess, the latter said
presently: "When do you expect Eglington?"

"Not till the week-end; it is a busy week with him," Hylda answered; then
added hastily, though she had not thought of it till this moment: "I
shall probably go up to town with you to-morrow."

She did not know that Eglington was already in the house, and had given
orders to the butler that she was not to be informed of his arrival for
the present.

"Well, if you get that far, will you come with me to the Riviera, or to
Florence, or Sicily--or Cairo?" the other asked, adjusting her gold-
brown wig with her babyish hands.

Cairo!  Cairo!  A light shot up into Hylda's eyes.  The Duchess had
spoken without thought, but, as she spoke, she watched the sudden change
in Hylda.  What did it mean?  Cairo--why should Cairo have waked her so?
Suddenly she recalled certain vague references of Lord Windlehurst, and,
for the first time, she associated Hylda with Claridge Pasha in a way
which might mean much, account for much, in this life she was leading.

"Perhaps!  Perhaps!" answered Hylda abstractedly, after a moment.

The Duchess got to her feet.  She had made progress.  She would let her
medicine work.

"I'm going to bed, my dear.  I'm sixty-five, and I take my sleep when I
can get it.  Think it over, Sicily--Cairo!"

She left the room, saying to herself that Eglington was a fool, and that
danger was ahead.  "But I hold a red light--poor darling!" she said
aloud, as she went up the staircase.  She did not know that Eglington,
standing in a deep doorway, heard her, and seized upon the words eagerly
and suspiciously, and turned them over in his mind.

Below, at the desk where Eglington's mother used to write, Hylda sat with
a bundle of letters before her.  For some moments she opened, glanced
through them, and put them aside.  Presently she sat back in her chair,
thinking--her mind was invaded by the last words of the Duchess; and
somehow they kept repeating themselves with the words in the late
Countess's diary: "Is it only the mother in me, not the love in me?"
Mechanically her hand moved over the portfolio of the late Countess, and
it involuntarily felt in one of its many pockets.  Her hand came upon a
letter.  This had remained when the others had been taken out.  It was
addressed to the late Earl, and was open.  She hesitated a moment, then,
with a strange premonition and a tightening of her heart-strings, she
spread it out and read it.

At first she could scarcely see because of the mist in her eyes; but
presently her sight cleared, and she read quickly, her cheeks burning
with excitement, her heart throbbing violently.  The letter was the last
expression of a disappointed and barren life.  The slow, stammering
tongue of an almost silent existence had found the fulness of speech.
The fountains of the deep had been broken up, and Sybil Eglington's
repressed emotions, undeveloped passions, tortured by mortal sufferings,
and refined and vitalised by the atmosphere blown in upon her last hours
from the Hereafter, were set free, given voice and power at last.

The letter reviewed the life she had lived with her husband during
twenty-odd years, reproved herself for not speaking out and telling him
his faults at the beginning, and for drawing in upon herself, when she
might have compelled him to a truer understanding; and, when all that was
said, called him to such an account as only the dying might make--the
irrevocable, disillusionising truth which may not be altered, the
poignant record of failure and its causes.

     ".  .  .  I could not talk well, I never could, as a girl," the
     letter ran; "and you could talk like one inspired, and so
     speciously, so overwhelmingly, that I felt I could say nothing in
     disagreement, not anything but assent; while all the time I felt how
     hollow was so much you said--a cloak of words to cover up the real
     thought behind.  Before I knew the truth, I felt the shadow of
     secrecy in your life.  When you talked most, I felt you most
     secretive, and the feeling slowly closed the door upon all frankness
     and sympathy and open speech between us.  I was always shy and self-
     conscious and self-centred, and thought little of myself; and I
     needed deep love and confidence and encouragement to give out what
     was in me.  I gave nothing out, nothing to you that you wanted, or
     sought for, or needed.  You were complete, self-contained.  Harry,
     my beloved babe Harry, helped at first; but, as the years went on,
     he too began to despise me for my little intellect and slow
     intelligence, and he grew to be like you in all things--and
     secretive also, though I tried so hard to be to him what a mother
     should be.  Oh, Bobby, Bobby--I used to call you that in the days
     before we were married, and I will call you that now when all is
     over and done--why did you not tell me all?  Why did you not tell me
     that my boy, my baby Harry, was not your only child, that there had
     been another wife, and that your eldest son was alive?

     "I know all.  I have known all for years.  The clergyman who married
     you to Mercy Claridge was a distant relative of my mother's, and
     before he died he told me.  When you married her, he knew you only
     as James Fetherdon, but, years afterwards, he saw and recognised
     you.  He held his peace then, but at last he came to me.  And I did
     not speak.  I was not strong enough, nor good enough, to face the
     trouble of it all.  I could not endure the scandal, to see my own
     son take the second place--he is so brilliant and able and
     unscrupulous, like yourself; but, oh, so sure of winning a great
     place in the world, surer than yourself ever was, he is so
     calculating and determined and ambitious!  And though he loves me
     little, as he loves you little, too, yet he is my son, and for what
     he is we are both responsible, one way or another; and I had not the
     courage to give him the second place, and the Quaker, David
     Claridge, the first place.  Why Luke Claridge, his grandfather,
     chose the course he did, does not concern me, no more than why you
     chose secrecy, and kept your own firstborn legitimate son, of whom
     you might well be proud, a stranger to you and his rights all these
     years.  Ah, Eglington, you never knew what love was, you never had
     a heart--experiment, subterfuge, secrecy, 'reaping where you had
     not sowed, and gathering where you had not strawed.'  Always,
     experiment, experiment, experiment!

     "I shall be gone in a few hours--I feel it, but before I go I must
     try to do right, and to warn you.  I have had such bad dreams about
     you and Harry--they haunt me--that I am sure you will suffer
     terribly, will have some awful tragedy, unless you undo what was
     done long ago, and tell the truth to the world, and give your titles
     and estates where they truly belong.  Near to death, seeing how
     little life is, and how much right is in the end, I am sure that I
     was wrong in holding my peace; for Harry cannot prosper with this
     black thing behind him, and you cannot die happy if you smother up
     the truth.  Night after night I have dreamed of you in your
     laboratory, a vague, dark, terrifying dream of you in that
     laboratory which I have hated so.  It has always seemed to me the
     place where some native evil and cruelty in your blood worked out
     its will.  I know I am an ignorant woman, with no brain, but God has
     given me clear sight at the last, and the things I see are true
     things, and I must warn you.  Remember that.  .  .  ."

The letter ended there.  She had been interrupted or seized with illness,
and had never finished it, and had died a few hours afterwards; and the
letter was now, for the first time, read by her whom it most concerned,
into whose heart and soul the words sank with an immitigable pain and
agonised amazement.  A few moments with this death-document had
transformed Hylda's life.

Her husband and--and David, were sons of the same father; and the name
she bore, the home in which she was living, the estates the title
carried, were not her husband's, but another's--David's.  She fell back
in her chair, white and faint, but, with a great effort, she conquered
the swimming weakness which blinded her.  Sons of the same father!  The
past flashed before her, the strange likeness she had observed, the trick
of the head, the laugh, the swift gesture, the something in the voice.
She shuddered as she had done in reading the letter.  But they were
related only in name, in some distant, irreconcilable way--in a way
which did not warrant the sudden scarlet flush that flooded her face.
Presently she recovered herself.  She--what did she suffer, compared
with her who wrote this revelation of a lifetime of pain, of bitter and
torturing knowledge!  She looked up at the picture on the wall, at the
still, proud, emotionless face, the conventional, uninspired personality,
behind which no one had seen, which had agonised alone till the last.
With what tender yet pitiless hand had she laid bare the lives of her
husband and her son!  How had the neglected mother told the bitter truth
of him to whom she had given birth!  "So brilliant and able, and
unscrupulous, like yourself; but, oh, sure of winning a great place in
the world .  .  .  so calculating and determined and ambitious.  .  .  .
That laboratory which I have hated so.  It has always seemed to me the
place where some native evil and cruelty in your blood worked out its
will.  .  .  ."

With a deep-drawn sigh Hylda said to herself: "If I were dying to-morrow,
would I say that?  She loved them so--at first must have loved them so;
and yet this at the last!  And I--oh, no, no, no!"  She looked at a
portrait of Eglington on the table near, touched it caressingly, and
added, with a sob in her voice: "Oh, Harry, no, it is not true!  It is
not native evil and cruelty in your blood.  It has all been a mistake.
You will do right.  We will do right, Harry.  You will suffer, it will
hurt, the lesson will be hard--to give up what has meant so much to you;
but we will work it out together, you and I, my very dear.  Oh, say that
we shall, that....  " She suddenly grew silent.  A tremor ran through
her, she became conscious of his presence near her, and turned, as though
he were behind her.  There was nothing.  Yet she felt him near, and,
as she did so, the soul-deep feeling with which she had spoken to the
portrait fled.  Why was it that, so often, when absent from him, her
imagination helped her to make excuses for him, inspired her to press the
real truth out of sight, and to make believe that he was worthy of a love
which, but through some inner fault of her own, might be his altogether,
and all the love of which he was capable might be hers?

She felt him near her, and the feelings possessing her a moment before
slowly chilled and sank away.  Instinctively her eyes glanced towards the
door.  She saw the handle turn, and she slipped the letter inside the
portfolio again.

The door opened briskly now, and Eglington entered with what his enemies
in the newspaper press had called his "professional smile"--a criticism
which had angered his wife, chiefly because it was so near the truth.  He
smiled.  Smiling was part of his equipment, and was for any one at any
time that suited him.

Her eyes met his, and he noted in her something that he had never seen
before.  Something had happened.  The Duchess of Snowdon was in the
house; had it anything to do with her?  Had she made trouble?  There was
trouble enough without her.  He came forward, took Hylda's hand and
kissed it, then kissed her on the cheek.  As he did so, she laid a hand
on his arm with a sudden impulse, and pressed it.  Though his presence
had chilled the high emotions of a few moments before, yet she had to
break to him a truth which would hurt him, dismay him, rob his life of so
much that helped it; and a sudden protective, maternal sense was roused
in her, reached out to shelter him as he faced his loss and the call of
duty.

"You have just come?" she said, in a voice that, to herself, seemed far
away.

"I have been here some hours," he answered.  Secrecy again--always the
thing that had chilled the dead woman, and laid a cold hand upon herself
--"I felt the shadow of secrecy in your life.  When you talked most I
felt you most secretive, and the feeling slowly closed the door upon all
frankness and sympathy and open speech between us."

"Why did you not see me--dine with me?" she asked.  "What can the
servants think?"  Even in such a crisis the little things had place--
habit struck its note in the presence of her tragedy.

"You had the Duchess of Snowdon, and we are not precisely congenial;
besides, I had much to do in the laboratory.  I'm working for that new
explosive of which I told you.  There's fame and fortune in it, and I'm
on the way.  I feel it coming"--his eyes sparkled a little.  "I made it
right with the servants; so don't be apprehensive."

"I have not seen you for nearly a week.  It doesn't seem--friendly."

"Politics and science are stern masters," he answered gaily.

"They leave little time for your mistress," she rejoined meaningly.

"Who is my mistress?"

"Well, I am not greatly your wife," she replied.  "I have the dregs of
your life.  I help you--I am allowed to help you--so little, to share so
little in the things that matter to you."

"Now, that's imagination and misunderstanding," he rejoined.  "It has
helped immensely your being such a figure in society, and entertaining
so much, and being so popular, at any rate until very lately."

"I do not misunderstand," she answered gravely.  "I do not share your
real life.  I do not help you where your brain works, in the plans and
purposes and hopes that lie behind all that you do--oh, yes, I know your
ambitions and what positions you are aiming for; but there is something
more than that.  There is the object of it all, the pulse of it, the
machinery down, down deep in your being that drives it all.  Oh, I am not
a child!  I have some intellect, and I want--I want that we should work
it out together."

In spite of all that had come and gone, in spite of the dead mother's
words and all her own convictions, seeing trouble coming upon him, she
wanted to make one last effort for what might save their lives--her life-
-from shipwreck in the end.  If she failed now, she foresaw a bitter,
cynical figure working out his life with a narrowing soul, a hard spirit
unrelieved by the softening influence of a great love--even yet the woman
in her had a far-off hope that, where the law had made them one by book
and scrip, the love which should consecrate such a union, lift it above
an almost offensive relation, might be theirs.  She did not know how much
of her heart, of her being, was wandering over the distant sands of
Egypt, looking for its oasis.  Eglington had never needed or wanted more
than she had given him--her fortune, her person, her charm, her ability
to play an express and definite part in his career.  It was this material
use to which she was so largely assigned, almost involuntarily but none
the less truly, that had destroyed all of the finer, dearer, more
delicate intimacy invading his mind sometimes, more or less vaguely,
where Faith was concerned.  So extreme was his egotism that it had never
occurred to him, as it had done to the Duchess of Snowdon and Lord
Windlehurst, that he might lose Hylda herself as well as her fortune;
that the day might come when her high spirit could bear it no longer.  As
the Duchess of Snowdon had said: "It would all depend upon the other man,
whoever he might be."

So he answered her with superficial cheerfulness now; he had not the
depth of soul to see that they were at a crisis, and that she could bear
no longer the old method of treating her as though she were a child, to
be humoured or to be dominated.

"Well, you see all there is," he answered; "you are so imaginative,
crying for some moon there never was in any sky."

In part he had spoken the truth.  He had no high objects or ends or
purposes.  He wanted only success somehow or another, and there was no
nobility of mind or aspiration behind it.  In her heart of hearts she
knew it; but it was the last cry of her soul to him, seeking, though in
vain, for what she had never had, could never have.

"What have you been doing?" he added, looking at the desk where she had
sat, glancing round the room.  "Has the Duchess left any rags on the
multitude of her acquaintances?  I wonder that you can make yourself
contented here with nothing to do.  You don't look much stronger.  I'm
sure you ought to have a change.  My mother was never well here; though,
for the matter of that, she was never very well anywhere.  I suppose it's
the laboratory that attracts me here, as it did my father, playing with
the ancient forces of the world in these Arcadian surroundings--Arcady
without beauty or Arcadians."  He glanced up at his mother's picture.
"No, she never liked it--a very silent woman, secretive almost."

Suddenly her eyes flared up.  Anger possessed her.  She choked it down.
Secretive--the poor bruised soul who had gone to her grave with a broken
heart!

"She secretive?  No, Eglington," she rejoined gravely, "she was
congealed.  She lived in too cold an air.  She was not secretive, but yet
she kept a secret--another's."

Again Eglington had the feeling which possessed him when he entered the
room.  She had changed.  There was something in her tone, a meaning, he
had never heard before.  He was startled.  He recalled the words of the
Duchess as she went up the staircase.

What was it all about?

"Whose secrets did she keep?" he asked, calmly enough.

"Your father's, yours, mine," she replied, in a whisper almost.

"Secret?  What secret?  Good Lord, such mystery!"  He laughed
mirthlessly.

She came close to him.  "I am sorry--sorry, Harry," she said with
difficulty.  "It will hurt you, shock you so.  It will be a blow to you,
but you must bear it."

She tried to speak further, but her heart was beating so violently that
she could not.  She turned quickly to the portfolio on the desk, drew
forth the fatal letter, and, turning to the page which contained the
truth concerning David, handed it to him.  "It is there," she said.

He had great self-control.  Before looking at the page to which she had
directed his attention, he turned the letter over slowly, fingering the
pages one by one.  "My mother to my father," he remarked.

Instinctively he knew what it contained.  "You have been reading my
mother's correspondence," he added in cold reproof.

"Do you forget that you asked me to arrange her papers?" she retorted,
stung by his suggestion.

"Your imagination is vivid," he exclaimed.  Then he bethought himself
that, after all, he might sorely need all she could give, if things went
against him, and that she was the last person he could afford to
alienate; "but I do remember that I asked you that," he added--"no doubt
foolishly."

"Read what is there," she broke in, "and you will see that it was not
foolish, that it was meant to be."  He felt a cold dead hand reaching out
from the past to strike him; but he nerved himself, and his eyes searched
the paper with assumed coolness-even with her he must still be acting.
The first words he saw were: "Why did you not tell me that my boy, my
baby Harry, was not your only child, and that your eldest son was alive?"

So that was it, after all.  Even his mother knew.  Master of his nerves
as he was, it blinded him for a moment.  Presently he read on--the whole
page--and lingered upon the words, that he might have time to think what
he must say to Hylda.  Nothing of the tragedy of his mother touched him,
though he was faintly conscious of a revelation of a woman he had never
known, whose hungering caresses had made him, as a child, rather peevish,
when a fit of affection was not on him.  Suddenly, as he read the lines
touching himself, "Brilliant and able and unscrupulous....  and though he
loves me little, as he loves you little too," his eye lighted up with
anger, his face became pale--yet he had borne the same truths from Faith
without resentment, in the wood by the mill that other year.  For a
moment he stood infuriated, then, going to the fireplace, he dropped the
letter on the coals, as Hylda, in horror, started forward to arrest his
hand.

"Oh, Eglington--but no--no!  It is not honourable.  It is proof of all!"

He turned upon her slowly, his face rigid, a strange, cold light in his
eyes.  "If there is no more proof than that, you need not vex your mind,"
he said, commanding his voice to evenness.

A bitter anger was on him.  His mother had read him through and through--
he had not deceived her even; and she had given evidence against him to
Hylda, who, he had ever thought, believed in him completely.  Now there
was added to the miserable tale, that first marriage, and the rights
of David--David, the man who, he was convinced, had captured her
imagination.  Hurt vanity played a disproportionate part in this crisis.

The effect on him had been different from what Hylda had anticipated.
She had pictured him stricken and dumfounded by the blow.  It had never
occurred to her, it did not now, that he had known the truth; for,
of course, to know the truth was to speak, to restore to David his own,
to step down into the second and unconsidered place.  After all, to her
mind, there was no disgrace.  The late Earl had married secretly, but he
had been duly married, and he did not marry again until Mercy Claridge
was dead.  The only wrong was to David, whose grandfather had been even
more to blame than his own father.  She had looked to help Eglington in
this moment, and now there seemed nothing for her to do.  He was superior
to the situation, though it was apparent in his pale face and rigid
manner that he had been struck hard.

She came near to him, but there was no encouragement to her to play that
part which is a woman's deepest right and joy and pain in one--to comfort
her man in trouble, sorrow, or evil.  Always, always, he stood alone,
whatever the moment might be, leaving her nothing to do--" playing his
own game with his own weapons," as he had once put it.  Yet there was
strength in it too, and this came to her mind now, as though in excuse
for whatever else there was in the situation which, against her will,
repelled her.

"I am so sorry for you," she said at last.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"To lose all that has been yours so long."

This was their great moment.  The response to this must be the touchstone
of their lives.  A--half dozen words might alter all the future, might be
the watch word to the end of all things.  Involuntarily her heart
fashioned the response he ought to give--"I shall have you left, Hylda."

The air seemed to grow oppressive, and the instant's silence a torture,
and, when he spoke, his words struck a chill to her heart--rough notes of
pain.  "I have not lost yet," were his words.

She shrank.  "You will not hide it.  You will do right by--by him," she
said with difficulty.

"Let him establish his claim to the last item of fact," he said with
savage hate.

"Luke Claridge knew.  The proofs are but just across the way, no doubt,"
she answered, almost coldly, so had his words congealed her heart.

Their great moment had passed.  It was as though a cord had snapped that
held her to him, and in the recoil she had been thrown far off from him.
Swift as his mind worked, it had not seen his opportunity to win her to
his cause, to asphyxiate her high senses, her quixotic justice, by that
old flood of eloquence and compelling persuasion of the emotions with
which he had swept her to the altar--an altar of sacrifice.  He had not
even done what he had left London to do--make sure of her, by an alluring
flattery and devotion, no difficult duty with one so beautiful and
desirable; though neither love of beauty nor great desire was strong
enough in him to divert him from his course for an hour, save by his own
initiative.  His mother's letter had changed it all.  A few hours before
he had had a struggle with Soolsby, and now another struggle on the same
theme was here.  Fate had dealt illy with him, who had ever been its
spoiled child and favourite.  He had not learned yet the arts of defence
against adversity.

"Luke Claridge is dead," he answered sharply.  "But you will tell--him,
you will write to Egypt and tell your brother?" she said, the conviction
slowly coming to her that he would not.

"It is not my duty to displace myself, to furnish evidence against
myself--"

"You have destroyed the evidence," she intervened, a little scornfully.

"If there were no more than that--" He shrugged his shoulders
impatiently.

"Do you know there is more?" she asked searchingly.  "In whose interests
are you speaking?" he rejoined, with a sneer.  A sudden fury possessed
him.  Claridge Pasha--she was thinking of him!

"In yours--your conscience, your honour."

"There is over thirty years' possession on my side," he rejoined.

"It is not as if it were going from your family," she argued.

"Family--what is he to me!"

"What is any one to you?" she returned bitterly.

"I am not going to unravel a mystery in order to facilitate the cutting
of my own throat."

"It might be worth while to do something once for another's sake than
your own--it would break the monotony," she retorted, all her sense
tortured by his words, and even more so by his manner.

Long ago Faith had said in Soolsby's but that he "blandished" all with
whom he came in contact; but Hylda realised with a lacerated heart that
he had ceased to blandish her.  Possession had altered that.  Yet how had
he vowed to her in those sweet tempestuous days of his courtship when the
wind of his passion blew so hard!  Had one of the vows been kept?

Even as she looked at him now, words she had read some days before
flashed through her mind--they had burnt themselves into her brain:

                   "Broken faith is the crown of evils,
                    Broken vows are the knotted thongs
                    Set in the hands of laughing devils,
                    To scourge us for deep wrongs.

                   "Broken hearts, when all is ended,
                    Bear the better all after-stings;
                    Bruised once, the citadel mended,
                    Standeth through all things."

Suddenly he turned upon her with aggrieved petulance.  "Why are you so
eager for proof?"

"Oh, I have," she said, with a sudden flood of tears in her voice, though
her eyes were dry--"I have the feeling your mother had, that nothing will
be well until you undo the wrong your father did.  I know it was not your
fault.  I feel for you--oh, believe me, I feel as I have never felt,
could never feel, for myself.  It was brought on you by your father,
but you must be the more innocent because he was so guilty.  You have had
much out of it, it has helped you on your way.  It does not mean so much
now.  By-and-by another--an English-peerage may be yours by your own
achievement.  Let it go.  There is so much left, Harry.  It is a small
thing in a world of work.  It means nothing to me."  Once again, even
when she had given up all hope, seeing what was the bent of his mind--
once again she made essay to win him out of his selfishness.  If he would
only say, "I have you left," how she would strive to shut all else out of
her life!

He was exasperated.  His usual prescience and prudence forsook him.  It
angered him that she should press him to an act of sacrifice for the man
who had so great an influence upon her.  Perversity possessed him.
Lifelong egotism was too strong for wisdom, or discretion.

Suddenly he caught her hands in both of his and said hoarsely: "Do you
love me--answer me, do you love me with all your heart and soul?  The
truth now, as though it were your last word on earth."

Always self.  She had asked, if not in so many words, for a little love,
something for herself to feed on in the darkening days for him, for her,
for both; and he was thinking only of himself.

She shrank, but her hands lay passive in his.  "No, not with all my heart
and soul--but, oh--!"

He flung her hands from him.  "No, not with all your heart and soul--
I know!  You are willing to sacrifice me for him, and you think I do not
understand."

She drew herself up, with burning cheeks and flashing eyes.  "You
understand nothing--nothing.  If you had ever understood me, or any human
being, or any human heart, you would not have ruined all that might have
given you an undying love, something that would have followed you through
fire and flood to the grave.  You cannot love.  You do not understand
love.  Self--self, always self.  Oh, you are mad, mad, to have thrown it
all away, all that might have given happiness!  All that I have, all that
I am, has been at your service; everything has been bent and tuned to
your pleasure, for your good.  All has been done for you, with thought
of you and your position and your advancement, and now--now, when you
have killed all that might have been yours, you cry out in anger that it
is dying, and you insinuate what you should kill another for insinuating.
Oh, the wicked, cruel folly of it all!  You suggest--you dare!  I never
heard a word from David Claridge that might not be written on the
hoardings.  His honour is deeper than that which might attach to the
title of Earl of Eglington."

She seemed to tower above him.  For an instant she looked him in the eyes
with frigid dignity, but a great scorn in her face.  Then she went to the
door--he hastened to open it for her.

"You will be very sorry for this," he said stubbornly.  He was too
dumfounded to be discreet, too suddenly embarrassed by the turn affairs
had taken.  He realised too late that he had made a mistake, that he had
lost his hold upon her.

As she passed through, there suddenly flashed before her mind the scene
in the laboratory with the chairmaker.  She felt the meaning of it now.

"You do not intend to tell him--perhaps Soolsby has done so," she said
keenly, and moved on to the staircase.

He was thunderstruck at her intuition.  "Why do you want to rob
yourself?" he asked after her vaguely.  She turned back.  "Think of your
mother's letter that you destroyed," she rejoined solemnly and quietly.
"Was it right?"

He shut the door, and threw himself into a chair.  "I will put it
straight with her to-morrow," he said helplessly.

He sat for a half-hour silent, planning his course.

At last there came a tap at the door, and the butler appeared.

"Some one from the Foreign Office, my lord," he said.  A moment
afterwards a young official, his subordinate, entered.  "There's the
deuce to pay in Egypt, sir; I've brought the despatch," he said.



ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

A cloak of words to cover up the real thought behind
Antipathy of the lesser to the greater nature
Antipathy of the man in the wrong to the man in the right
Friendship means a giving and a getting
He's a barber-shop philosopher
Monotonously intelligent
No virtue in not falling, when you're not tempted
Of course I've hated, or I wouldn't be worth a button
Only the supremely wise or the deeply ignorant who never alter
Passion to forget themselves
Political virtue goes unrewarded
She knew what to say and what to leave unsaid
Smiling was part of his equipment
Sometimes the longest way round is the shortest way home
Soul tortured through different degrees of misunderstanding
The vague pain of suffered indifference
There's no credit in not doing what you don't want to do
Tricks played by Fact to discredit the imagination
We must live our dark hours alone
Woman's deepest right and joy and pain in one--to comfort






THE WEAVERS

By Gilbert Parker


BOOK IV.


XXVIII.   NAHOUM TURNS THE SCREW
XXIX.     THE RECOIL
XXX.      LACEY MOVES
XXXI.     THE STRUGGLE IN THE DESERT
XXXII.    FORTY STRIPES SAVE ONE
XXXIII.   THE DARK INDENTURE
XXXIV.    NAHOUM DROPS THE MASK




CHAPTER XXVIII

NAHOUM TURNS THE SCREW

Laughing to himself, Higli Pasha sat with the stem of a narghileh in his
mouth.  His big shoulders kept time to the quivering of his fat stomach.
He was sitting in a small court-yard of Nahoum Pasha's palace, waiting
for its owner to appear.  Meanwhile he exercised a hilarious patience.
The years had changed him little since he had been sent on that
expedition against the southern tribes which followed hard on David's
appointment to office.  As David had expected, few of the traitorous
officers returned.  Diaz had ignominiously died of the bite of a
tarantula before a blow had been struck, but Higli had gratefully
received a slight wound in the first encounter, which enabled him to beat
a safe retreat to Cairo.  He alone of the chief of the old conspirators
was left.  Achmet was still at the Place of Lepers, and the old nest of
traitors was scattered for ever.

Only Nahoum and Higli were left, and between these two there had never
been partnership or understanding.  Nahoum was not the man to trust to
confederates, and Higli Pasha was too contemptible a coadjutor.  Nahoum
had faith in no one save Mizraim the Chief Eunuch, but Mizraim alone was
better than a thousand; and he was secret--and terrible.  Yet Higli had a
conviction that Nahoum's alliance with David was a sham, and that David
would pay the price of misplaced confidence one day.  More than once when
David's plans had had a set-back, Higli had contrived a meeting with
Nahoum, to judge for himself the true position.

For his visit to-day he had invented a reason--a matter of finance; but
his real reason was concealed behind the malevolent merriment by which he
was now seized.  So absorbed was he that he did not heed the approach of
another visitor down an angle of the court-yard.  He was roused by a
voice.

"Well, what's tickling you so, pasha?"

The voice was drawling, and quite gentle; but at the sound of it, Higli's
laugh stopped short, and the muscles of his face contracted.  If there
was one man of whom he had a wholesome fear--why, he could not tell--it
was this round-faced, abrupt, imperturbable American, Claridge Pasha's
right-hand man.  Legends of resourcefulness and bravery had gathered
round his name.  "Who's been stroking your chin with a feather, pasha?"
he continued, his eye piercing the other like a gimlet.

"It was an amusing tale I heard at Assiout, effendi," was Higli's abashed
and surly reply.

"Oh, at Assiout!" rejoined Lacey.  "Yes, they tell funny stories at
Assiout.  And when were you at Assiout, pasha?"

"Two days ago, effendi."

"And so you thought you'd tell the funny little story to Nahoum as quick
as could be, eh?  He likes funny stories, same as you--damn, nice, funny
little stories, eh?"

There was something chilly in Lacey's voice now, which Higli did not
like; something much too menacing and contemptuous for a mere man-of-all-
work to the Inglesi.  Higli bridled up, his eyes glared sulkily.

"It is but my own business if I laugh or if I curse, effendi," he
replied, his hand shaking a little on the stem of the narghileh.

"Precisely, my diaphanous polyandrist; but it isn't quite your own affair
what you laugh at--not if I know it!"

"Does the effendi think I was laughing at him?"

"The effendi thinks not.  The effendi knows that the descendant of a
hundred tigers was laughing at the funny little story, of how the two
cotton-mills that Claridge Pasha built were burned down all in one night,
and one of his steamers sent down the cataract at Assouan.  A knock-down
blow for Claridge Pasha, eh?  That's all you thought of, wasn't it?  And
it doesn't matter to you that the cotton-mills made thousands better off,
and started new industries in Egypt.  No, it only matters to you that
Claridge Pasha loses half his fortune, and that you think his feet are
in the quicksands, and 'll be sucked in, to make an Egyptian holiday.
Anything to discredit him here, eh?  I'm not sure what else you know; but
I'll find out, my noble pasha, and if you've had your hand in it--but no,
you ain't game-cock enough for that!  But if you were, if you had a hand
in the making of your funny little story, there's a nutcracker that 'd
break the shell of that joke--"

He turned round quickly, seeing a shadow and hearing a movement.  Nahoum
was but a few feet away.  There was a bland smile on his face, a look of
innocence in his magnificent blue eye.  As he met Lacey's look, the smile
left his lips, a grave sympathy appeared to possess them, and he spoke
softly:

"I know the thing that burns thy heart, effendi, to whom be the flowers
of hope and the fruits of merit.  It is even so, a great blow has fallen.
Two hours since I heard.  I went at once to see Claridge Pasha, but found
him not.  Does he know, think you?" he added sadly.

"May your heart never be harder than it is, pasha, and when I left the
Saadat an hour ago, he did not know.  His messenger hadn't a steamer like
Higli Pasha there.  But he was coming to see you; and that's why I'm
here.  I've been brushing the flies off this sore on the hump of Egypt
while waiting."  He glanced with disdain at Higli.

A smile rose like liquid in the eye of Nahoum and subsided, then he
turned to Higli inquiringly.

"I have come on business, Excellency; the railway to Rosetta, and--"

"To-morrow--or the next day," responded Nahoum irritably, and turned
again to Lacey.

As Higli's huge frame disappeared through a gateway, Nahoum motioned
Lacey to a divan, and summoned a slave for cooling drinks.  Lacey's eyes
now watched him with an innocence nearly as childlike as his own.  Lacey
well knew that here was a foe worthy of the best steel.  That he was a
foe, and a malignant foe, he had no doubt whatever; he had settled the
point in his mind long ago; and two letters he had received from Lady
Eglington, in which she had said in so many words, "Watch Nahoum!" had
made him vigilant and intuitive.  He knew, meanwhile, that he was
following the trail of a master-hunter who covered up his tracks.  Lacey
was as certain as though he had the book of Nahoum's mind open in his
hand, that David's work had been torn down again--and this time with dire
effect--by this Armenian, whom David trusted like a brother.  But the
black doors that closed on the truth on every side only made him more
determined to unlock them; and, when he faltered as to his own powers,
he trusted Mahommed Hassan, whose devotion to David had given him eyes
that pierced dark places.

"Surely the God of Israel has smitten Claridge Pasha sorely.  My heart
will mourn to look upon his face.  The day is insulting in its
brightness," continued Nahoum with a sigh, his eyes bent upon Lacey,
dejection in his shoulders.

Lacey started.  "The God of Israel!"  How blasphemous it sounded from the
lips of Nahoum, Oriental of Orientals, Christian though he was also!

"I think, perhaps, you'll get over it, pasha.  Man is born to trouble,
and you've got a lot of courage.  I guess you could see other people bear
a pile of suffering, and never flinch."

Nahoum appeared not to notice the gibe.  "It is a land of suffering,
effendi," he sighed, "and one sees what one sees."

"Have you any idea, any real sensible idea, how those cotton-mills got
afire?"  Lacey's eyes were fixed on Nahoum's face.

The other met his gaze calmly.  "Who can tell!  An accident, perhaps,
or--"

"Or some one set the mills on fire in several places at once--they say
the buildings flamed out in every corner; and it was the only time in a
month they hadn't been running night and day.  Funny, isn't it?"

"It looks like the work of an enemy, effendi."  Nahoum shook his head
gravely.  "A fortune destroyed in an hour, as it were.  But we shall get
the dog.  We shall find him.  There is no hole deep enough to hide him
from us."

"Well, I wouldn't go looking in holes for him, pasha.

"He isn't any cave-dweller, that incendiary; he's an artist--no palace is
too unlikely for him.  No, I wouldn't go poking in mud-huts to find him."

"Thou dost not think that Higli Pasha--" Nahoum seemed startled out of
equanimity by the thought.  Lacey eyed him meditatively, and said
reflectively: "Say, you're an artist, pasha.  You are a guesser of the
first rank.  But I'd guess again.  Higli Pasha would have done it, if it
had ever occurred to him; and he'd had the pluck.  But it didn't, and he
hadn't.  What I can't understand is that the artist that did it should
have done it before Claridge Pasha left for the Soudan.  Here we were
just about to start; and if we'd got away south, the job would have done
more harm, and the Saadat would have been out of the way.  No, I can't
understand why the firebug didn't let us get clean away; for if the
Saadat stays here, he'll be where he can stop the underground mining."

Nahoum's self-control did not desert him, though he fully realised that
this man suspected him.  On the surface Lacey was right.  It would have
seemed better to let David go, and destroy his work afterwards, but he
had been moved by other considerations, and his design was deep.  His
own emissaries were in the Soudan, announcing David's determination to
abolish slavery, secretly stirring up feeling against him, preparing for
the final blow to be delivered, when he went again among the southern
tribes.  He had waited and waited, and now the time was come.  Had he,
Nahoum, not agreed with David that the time had come for the slave-trade
to go?  Had he not encouraged him to take this bold step, in the sure
belief that it would overwhelm him, and bring him an ignominious death,
embittered by total failure of all he had tried to do?

For years he had secretly loosened the foundations of David's work, and
the triumph of Oriental duplicity over Western civilisation and integrity
was sweet in his mouth.  And now there was reason to believe that, at
last, Kaid was turning against the Inglesi.  Everything would come at
once.  If all that he had planned was successful, even this man before
him should aid in his master's destruction.

"If it was all done by an enemy," he said, in answer to Lacey, at last,
"would it all be reasoned out like that?  Is hatred so logical?  Dost
thou think Claridge Pasha will not go now?  The troops are ready at Wady-
Halfa, everything is in order; the last load of equipment has gone.  Will
not Claridge Pasha find the money somehow?  I will do what I can.  My
heart is moved to aid him."

"Yes, you'd do what you could, pasha," Lacey rejoined enigmatically, "but
whether it would set the Saadat on his expedition or not is a question.
But I guess, after all, he's got to go.  He willed it so.  People may try
to stop him, and they may tear down what he does, but he does at last
what he starts to do, and no one can prevent him--not any one.  Yes, he's
going on this expedition; and he'll have the money, too."  There was a
strange, abstracted look in his face, as though he saw something which
held him fascinated.

Presently, as if with an effort, he rose to his feet, took the red fez
from his head, and fanned himself with it for a moment.  "Don't you
forget it, pasha; the Saadat will win.  He can't be beaten, not in a
thousand years.  Here he comes."

Nahoum got to his feet, as David came quickly through the small gateway
of the court-yard, his head erect, his lips smiling, his eyes sweeping
the place.  He came forward briskly to them.  It was plain he had not
heard the evil news.

"Peace be to thee, Saadat, and may thy life be fenced about with safety!"
said Nahoum.

David laid a hand on Lacey's arm and squeezed it, smiling at him with
such friendship that Lacey's eyes moistened, and he turned his head away.

There was a quiet elation in David's look.  "We are ready at last," he
said, looking from one to the other.  "Well, well," he added, almost
boyishly, "has thee nothing to say, Nahoum?"

Nahoum turned his head away as though overcome.  David's face grew
instantly grave.  He turned to Lacey.  Never before had he seen Lacey's
face with a look like this.  He grasped Lacey's arm.  "What is it?" he
asked quietly.  "What does thee want to say to me?"

But Lacey could not speak, and David turned again to Nahoum.  "What is
there to say to me?" he asked.  "Something has happened--what is it?
.  .  .  Come, many things have happened before.  This can be no worse.
Do thee speak," he urged gently.

"Saadat," said Nahoum, as though under the stress of feeling, "the
cotton-mills at Tashah and Mini are gone--burned to the ground."

For a moment David looked at him without sight in his eyes, and his face
grew very pale.  "Excellency, all in one night, the besom of destruction
was abroad," he heard Nahoum say, as though from great depths below him.
He slowly turned his head to look at Lacey.  "Is this true?" he asked at
last in an unsteady voice.  Lacey could not speak, but inclined his head.

David's figure seemed to shrink for a moment, his face had a withered
look, and his head fell forward in a mood of terrible dejection.

"Saadat!  Oh, my God, Saadat, don't take it so!" said Lacey brokenly,
and stepped between David and Nahoum.  He could not bear that the
stricken face and figure should be seen by Nahoum, whom he believed to be
secretly gloating.  "Saadat," he said brokenly, "God has always been with
you; He hasn't forgotten you now.

"The work of years," David murmured, and seemed not to hear.

"When God permits, shall man despair?" interposed Nahoum, in a voice
that lingered on the words.  Nahoum accomplished what Lacey had failed to
do.  His voice had pierced to some remote corner in David's nature, and
roused him.  Was it that doubt, suspicion, had been wakened at last?  Was
some sensitive nerve touched, that this Oriental should offer Christian
comfort to him in his need--to him who had seen the greater light?  Or
was it that some unreality in the words struck a note which excited a new
and subconscious understanding?  Perhaps it was a little of all three.
He did not stop to inquire.  In crises such as that through which he was
passing, the mind and body act without reason, rather by the primal
instinct, the certain call of the things that were before reason was.

"God is with the patient," continued Nahoum; and Lacey set his teeth to
bear this insult to all things.  But Nahoum accomplished what he had not
anticipated.  David straightened himself up, and clasped his hands behind
him.  By a supreme effort of the will he controlled himself, and the
colour came back faintly to his face.  "God's will be done," he said,
and looked Nahoum calmly in the eyes.  "It was no accident," he added
with conviction.  "It was an enemy of Egypt."  Suddenly the thing rushed
over him again, going through his veins like a poisonous ether, and
clamping his heart as with iron.  "All to do over again!" he said
brokenly, and again he caught Lacey's arm.

With an uncontrollable impulse Lacey took David's hand in his own warm,
human grasp.

"Once I thought I lost everything in Mexico, Saadat, and I understand
what you feel.  But all wasn't lost in Mexico, as I found at last, and I
got something, too, that I didn't put in.  Say, let us go from here.  God
is backing you, Saadat.  Isn't it all right--same as ever?"

David was himself again.  "Thee is a good man," he said, and through the
sadness of his eyes there stole a smile.  "Let us go," he said.  Then he
added in a businesslike way: "To-morrow at seven, Nahoum.  There is much
to do."

He turned towards the gate with Lacey, where the horses waited.  Mahommed
Hassan met them as they prepared to mount.  He handed David a letter.
It was from Faith, and contained the news of Luke Claridge's death.
Everything had come at once.  He stumbled into the saddle with a moan.

"At last I have drawn blood," said Nahoum to himself with grim
satisfaction, as they disappeared.  "It is the beginning of the end.
It will crush him-I saw it in his eyes.  God of Israel, I shall rule
again in Egypt!"




CHAPTER XXIX

THE RECOIL

It was a great day in the Muslim year.  The Mahmal, or Sacred Carpet,
was leaving Cairo on its long pilgrimage of thirty-seven days to Mecca
and Mahomet's tomb.  Great guns boomed from the Citadel, as the gorgeous
procession, forming itself beneath the Mokattam Hills, began its slow
march to where, seated in the shade of an ornate pavilion, Prince Kaid
awaited its approach to pay devout homage.  Thousands looked down at the
scene from the ramparts of the Citadel, from the overhanging cliffs, and
from the tops of the houses that hung on the ledges of rock rising
abruptly from the level ground, to which the last of the famed Mamelukes
leaped to their destruction.

Now to Prince Kaid's ears there came from hundreds of hoarse throats the
cry: "Allah!  Allah!  May thy journey be with safety to Arafat!"
mingling with the harsh music of the fifes and drums.

Kaid looked upon the scene with drawn face and lowering brows.  His
retinue watched him with alarm.  A whisper had passed that, two nights
before, the Effendina had sent in haste for a famous Italian physician
lately come to Cairo, and that since his visit Kaid had been sullen and
depressed.  It was also the gossip of the bazaars that he had suddenly
shown favour to those of the Royal House and to other reactionaries,
who had been enemies to the influence of Claridge Pasha.

This rumour had been followed by an official proclamation that no
Europeans or Christians would be admitted to the ceremony of the Sacred
Carpet.

Thus it was that Kaid looked out on a vast multitude of Muslims, in which
not one European face showed, and from lip to lip there passed the word,
"Harrik--Harrik--remember Harrik!  Kaid turns from the infidel!"

They crowded near the great pavilion--as near as the mounted Nubians
would permit--to see Kaid's face; while he, with eyes wandering over the
vast assemblage, was lost in dark reflections.  For a year he had
struggled against a growing conviction that some obscure disease was
sapping his strength.  He had hid it from every one, until, at last,
distress and pain had overcome him.  The verdict of the Italian expert
was that possible, but by no means certain, cure might come from an
operation which must be delayed for a month or more.

Suddenly, the world had grown unfamiliar to him; he saw it from afar; but
his subconscious self involuntarily registered impressions, and he moved
mechanically through the ceremonies and duties of the immediate present.
Thrown back upon himself, to fight his own fight, with the instinct of
primary life his mind involuntarily drew for refuge to the habits and
predispositions of youth; and for two days he had shut himself away from
the activities with which David and Nahoum were associated.  Being deeply
engaged with the details of the expedition to the Soudan, David had not
gone to the Palace; and he was unaware of the turn which things had
taken.

Three times, with slow and stately steps, the procession wound in a
circle in the great square, before it approached the pavilion where the
Effendina sat, the splendid camels carrying the embroidered tent wherein
the Carpet rested, and that which bore the Emir of the pilgrims, moving
gracefully like ships at sea.  Naked swordsmen, with upright and shining
blades, were followed by men on camels bearing kettle-drums.  After them
came Arab riders with fresh green branches fastened to the saddles like
plumes, while others carried flags and banners emblazoned with texts and
symbols.  Troops of horsemen in white woollen cloaks, sheikhs and
Bedouins with flowing robes and huge turbans, religious chiefs of the
great sects, imperturbable and statuesque, were in strange contrast to
the shouting dervishes and camel-drivers and eager pilgrims.

At last the great camel with its sacred burden stopped in front of Kaid
for his prayer and blessing.  As he held the tassels, lifted the gold-
fringed curtain, and invoked Allah's blessing, a half-naked sheikh ran
forward, and, raising his hand high above his head, cried shrilly:
"Kaid, Kaid, hearken!"

Rough hands caught him away, but Kaid commanded them to desist; and the
man called a blessing on him; and cried aloud:

"Listen, O Kaid, son of the stars and the light of day.  God hath exalted
thee.  Thou art the Egyptian of all the Egyptians.  In thy hand is power.
But thou art mortal even as I.  Behold, O Kaid, in the hour that I was
born thou wast born, I in the dust without thy Palace wall, thou amid the
splendid things.  But thy star is my star.  Behold, as God ordains, the
Tree of Life was shaken on the night when all men pray and cry aloud to
God--even the Night of the Falling Leaves.  And I watched the falling
leaves; and I saw my leaf, and it was withered, but only a little
withered, and so I live yet a little.  But I looked for thy leaf, thou
who wert born in that moment when I waked to the world.  I looked long,
but I found no leaf, neither green nor withered.  But I looked again upon
my leaf, and then I saw that thy name now was also upon my leaf, and that
it was neither green nor withered; but was a leaf that drooped as when an
evil wind has passed and drunk its life.  Listen, O Kaid!  Upon the tomb
of Mahomet I will set my lips, and it may be that the leaf of my life
will come fresh and green again.  But thou--wilt thou not come also to
the lord Mahomet's tomb?  Or"--he paused and raised his voice--"or wilt
thou stay and lay thy lips upon the cross of the infidel?  Wilt thou--"

He could say no more, for Kaid's face now darkened with anger.  He made a
gesture, and, in an instant, the man was gagged and bound, while a sullen
silence fell upon the crowd.  Kaid suddenly became aware of this change
of feeling, and looked round him.  Presently his old prudence and
subtlety came back, his face cleared a little, and he called aloud,
"Unloose the man, and let him come to me."  An instant after, the man
was on his knees, silent before him.

"What is thy name?" Kaid asked.

"Kaid Ibrahim, Effendina," was the reply.

"Thou hast misinterpreted thy dream, Kaid Ibrahim," answered the
Effendina.  "The drooping leaf was token of the danger in which thy life
should be, and my name upon thy leaf was token that I should save thee
from death.  Behold, I save thee.  Inshallah, go in peace!  There is no
God but God, and the Cross is the sign of a false prophet.  Thou art mad.
God give thee a new mind.  Go."

The man was presently lost in the sweltering, half-frenzied crowd; but he
had done his work, and his words rang in the ears of Kaid as he rode
away.

A few hours afterwards, bitter and rebellious, murmuring to himself, Kaid
sat in a darkened room of his Nile Palace beyond the city.  So few years
on the throne, so young, so much on which to lay the hand of pleasure, so
many millions to command; and yet the slave at his door had a surer hold
on life and all its joys and lures than he, Prince Kaid, ruler of Egypt!
There was on him that barbaric despair which has taken dreadful toll of
life for the decree of destiny.  Across the record of this day, as across
the history of many an Eastern and pagan tyrant, was written: "He would
not die alone."  That the world should go on when he was gone, that men
should buy and sell and laugh and drink, and flaunt it in the sun, while
he, Prince Kaid, would be done with it all.

He was roused by the rustling of a robe.  Before him stood the Arab
physician, Sharif Bey, who had been in his father's house and his own
for a lifetime.  It was many a year since his ministrations to Kaid had
ceased; but he had remained on in the Palace, doing service to those who
received him, and--it was said by the evil-tongued--granting certificates
of death out of harmony with dark facts, a sinister and useful figure.
His beard was white, his face was friendly, almost benevolent, but his
eyes had a light caught from no celestial flame.

His look was confident now, as his eyes bent on Kaid.  He had lived long,
he had seen much, he had heard of the peril that had been foreshadowed by
the infidel physician; and, by a sure instinct, he knew that his own
opportunity had come.  He knew that Kaid would snatch at any offered
comfort, would cherish any alleviating lie, would steal back from
science and civilisation and the modern palace to the superstition of the
fellah's hut.  Were not all men alike when the neboot of Fate struck them
down into the terrible loneliness of doom, numbing their minds?  Luck
would be with him that offered first succour in that dark hour.  Sharif
had come at the right moment for Sharif.

Kaid looked at him with dull yet anxious eyes.  "Did I not command that
none should enter?" he asked presently in a thick voice.

"Am I not thy physician, Effendina, to whom be the undying years?  When
the Effendina is sick, shall I not heal?  Have I not waited like a dog at
thy door these many years, till that time would come when none could heal
thee save Sharif?"

"What canst thou give me?"

"What the infidel physician gave thee not--I can give thee hope.  Hast
thou done well, oh, Effendina, to turn from thine own people?  Did not
thine own father, and did not Mehemet Ali, live to a good age?  Who were
their physicians?  My father and I, and my father's father, and his
father's father."

"Thou canst cure me altogether?" asked Kaid hesitatingly.

"Wilt thou not have faith in one of thine own race?  Will the infidel
love thee as do we, who are thy children and thy brothers, who are to
thee as a nail driven in the wall, not to be moved?  Thou shalt live--
Inshallah, thou shalt have healing and length of days!"

He paused at a gesture from Kaid, for a slave had entered and stood
waiting.

"What dost thou here?  Wert thou not commanded?" asked Kaid.

"Effendina, Claridge Pasha is waiting," was the reply.

Kaid frowned, hesitated; then, with a sudden resolve, made a gesture of
dismissal to Sharif Bey, and nodded David's admittance to the slave.

As David entered, he passed Sharif Bey, and something in the look on
the Arab physician's face--a secret malignancy and triumph--struck him
strangely.  And now a fresh anxiety and apprehension rose in his mind as
he glanced at Kaid.  The eye was heavy and gloomy, the face was clouded,
the lips once so ready to smile at him were sullen and smileless now.
David stood still, waiting.

"I did not expect thee till to-morrow, Saadat," said Kaid moodily at
last.

"The business is urgent?"  "Effendina," said David, with every nerve at
tension, yet with outward self-control, "I have to report--" He paused,
agitated; then, in a firm voice, he told of the disaster which had
befallen the cotton-mills and the steamer.

As David spoke, Kaid's face grew darker, his fingers fumbled vaguely with
the linen of the loose white robe he wore.  When the tale was finished he
sat for a moment apparently stunned by the news, then he burst out
fiercely:

"Bismillah, am I to hear only black words to-day?  Hast thou naught to
say but this--the fortune of Egypt burned to ashes!"

David held back the quick retort that came to his tongue.

"Half my fortune is in the ashes," he answered with dignity.  "The rest
came from savings never made before by this Government.  Is the work less
worthy in thy sight, Effendina, because it has been destroyed?  Would thy
life be less great and useful because a blow took thee from behind?"

Kaid's face turned black.  David had bruised an open wound.

"What is my life to thee--what is thy work to me?"

"Thy life is dear to Egypt, Effendina," urged David soothingly, "and my
labour for Egypt has been pleasant in thine eyes till now."

"Egypt cannot be saved against her will," was the moody response.  "What
has come of the Western hand upon the Eastern plough?"  His face grew
blacker; his heart was feeding on itself.

"Thou, the friend of Egypt, hast come of it, Effendina."

"Harrik was right, Harrik was right," Kaid answered, with stubborn gloom
and anger.  "Better to die in our own way, if we must die, than live in
the way of another.  Thou wouldst make of Egypt another England; thou
wouldst civilise the Soudan--bismillah, it is folly!"

"That is not the way Mehemet Ali thought, nor Ibrahim.  Nor dost thou
think so, Effendina," David answered gravely.  "A dark spirit is on thee.
Wouldst thou have me understand that what we have done together, thou and
I, was ill done, that the old bad days were better?"

"Go back to thine own land," was the surly answer.  "Nation after nation
ravaged Egypt, sowed their legions here, but the Egyptian has lived them
down.  The faces of the fellaheen are the faces of Thotmes and Seti.  Go
back.  Egypt will travel her own path.  We are of the East; we are
Muslim.  What is right to you is wrong to us.  Ye would make us over--
give us cotton beds and wooden floors and fine flour of the mill, and
cleanse the cholera-hut with disinfectants, but are these things all?
How many of your civilised millions would die for their prophet Christ?
Yet all Egypt would rise up from the mud-floor, the dourha-field and the
mud-hut, and would come out to die for Mahomet and Allah--ay, as Harrik
knew, as Harrik knew!  Ye steal into corners, and hide behind the
curtains of your beds to pray; we pray where the hour of prayer finds us
--in the street, in the market-place, where the house is building, the
horse being shod, or the money-changers are.  Ye hear the call of
civilisation, but we heap the Muezzin--"

He stopped, and searched mechanically for his watch.  "It is the hour the
Muezzin calls," said David gently.  "It is almost sunset.  Shall I open
the windows that the call may come to us?" he added.

While Kaid stared at him, his breast heaving with passion, David went to
a window and opened the shutters wide.

The Palace faced the Nile, which showed like a tortuous band of blue and
silver a mile or so away.  Nothing lay between but the brown sand, and
here and there a handful of dark figures gliding towards the river, or a
little train of camels making for the bare grey hills from the ghiassas
which had given them their desert loads.  The course of the Nile was
marked by a wide fringe of palms showing blue and purple, friendly and
ancient and solitary.  Beyond the river and the palms lay the grey-brown
desert, faintly touched with red.  So clear was the sweet evening air
that the irregular surface of the desert showed for a score of miles as
plainly as though it were but a step away.  Hummocks of sand--tombs and
fallen monuments gave a feeling as of forgotten and buried peoples; and
the two vast pyramids of Sakkarah stood up in the plaintive glow of the
evening skies, majestic and solemn, faithful to the dissolved and
absorbed races who had built them.  Curtains of mauve and saffron-red
were hung behind them, and through a break of cloud fringing the horizon
a yellow glow poured, to touch the tips of the pyramids with poignant
splendour.  But farther over to the right, where Cairo lay, there hung a
bluish mist, palpable and delicate, out of which emerged the vast
pyramids of Cheops; and beside it the smiling inscrutable Sphinx faced
the changeless centuries.  Beyond the pyramids the mist deepened into a
vast deep cloud of blue and purple, which seemed the end to some mystic
highway untravelled by the sons of men.

Suddenly there swept over David a wave of feeling such as had passed over
Kaid, though of a different nature.  Those who had built the pyramids
were gone, Cheops and Thotmes and Amenhotep and Chefron and the rest.
There had been reformers in those lost races; one age had sought to
better the last, one man had toiled to save--yet there only remained
offensive bundles of mummied flesh and bone and a handful of relics in
tombs fifty centuries old.  Was it all, then, futile?  Did it matter,
then, whether one man laboured or a race aspired?

Only for a moment these thoughts passed through his mind; and then, as
the glow through the broken cloud on the opposite horizon suddenly faded,
and veils of melancholy fell over the desert and the river and the palms,
there rose a call, sweetly shrill, undoubtingly insistent.  Sunset had
come, and, with it, the Muezzin's call to prayer from the minaret of a
mosque hard by.

David was conscious of a movement behind him--that Kaid was praying with
hands uplifted; and out on the sands between the window and the river he
saw kneeling figures here and there, saw the camel-drivers halt their
trains, and face the East with hands uplifted.  The call went on--"La
ilaha illa-llah !"

It called David, too.  The force and searching energy and fire in it
stole through his veins, and drove from him the sense of futility and
despondency which had so deeply added to his trouble.  There was
something for him, too, in that which held infatuated the minds
of so many millions.

A moment later Kaid and he faced each other again.  "Effendina," he said,
"thou wilt not desert our work now?"

"Money--for this expedition?  Thou hast it?" Kaid asked ironically.

"I have but little money, and it must go to rebuild the mills, Effendina.
I must have it of thee."

"Let them remain in their ashes."

"But thousands will have no work."

"They had work before they were built, they will have work now they are
gone."

"Effendina, I stayed in Egypt at thy request.  The work is thy work.
Wilt thou desert it?"

"The West lured me--by things that seemed.  Now I know things as they
are."

"They will lure thee again to-morrow," said David firmly, but with a
weight on his spirit.  His eyes sought and held Kaid's.  "It is too late
to go back; we must go forward or we shall lose the Soudan, and a Mahdi
and his men will be in Cairo in ten years."

For an instant Kaid was startled.  The old look of energy and purpose
leaped up into his eye; but it faded quickly again.  If, as the Italian
physician more than hinted, his life hung by a thread, did it matter
whether the barbarian came to Cairo?  That was the business of those who
came after.  If Sharif was right, and his life was saved, there would be
time enough to set things right.

"I will not pour water on the sands to make an ocean," he answered.
"Will a ship sail on the Sahara?  Bismillah, it is all a dream!  Harrik
was right.  But dost thou think to do with me as thou didst with Harrik?"
he sneered.  "Is it in thy mind?"

David's patience broke down under the long provocation.  "Know then,
Effendina," he said angrily, "that I am not thy subject, nor one beholden
to thee, nor thy slave.  Upon terms well understood, I have laboured
here.  I have kept my obligations, and it is thy duty to keep thy
obligations, though the hand of death were on thee.  I know not what has
poisoned thy mind, and driven thee from reason and from justice.  I know
that, Prince Pasha of Egypt as thou art, thou art as bound to me as any
fellah that agrees to tend my door or row my boat.  Thy compact with me
is a compact with England, and it shall be kept, if thou art an honest
man.  Thou mayst find thousands in Egypt who will serve thee at any
price, and bear thee in any mood.  I have but one price.  It is well
known to thee.  I will not be the target for thy black temper.  This is
not the middle ages; I am an Englishman, not a helot.  The bond must be
kept; thou shalt not play fast and loose.  Money must be found; the
expedition must go.  But if thy purpose is now Harrik's purpose, then
Europe should know, and Egypt also should know.  I have been thy right
hand, Effendina; I will not be thy old shoe, to be cast aside at thy
will."

In all the days of his life David had never flamed out as he did now.
Passionate as his words were, his manner was strangely quiet, but his
white and glistening face and his burning eyes showed how deep was his
anger.

As he spoke, Kaid sank upon the divan.  Never had he been challenged so.
With his own people he had ever been used to cringing and abasement, and
he had played the tyrant, and struck hard and cruelly, and he had been
feared; but here, behind David's courteous attitude, there was a scathing
arraignment of his conduct which took no count of consequence.  In other
circumstances his vanity would have shrunk under this whip of words, but
his native reason and his quick humour would have justified David.  In
this black distemper possessing him, however, only outraged egotism
prevailed.  His hands clenched and unclenched, his lips were drawn back
on his teeth in rage.

When David had finished, Kaid suddenly got to his feet and took a step
forward with a malediction, but a faintness seized him and he staggered
back.  When he raised his head again David was gone.




CHAPTER XXX

LACEY MOVES

If there was one glistening bead of sweat on the bald pate of Lacey of
Chicago there were a thousand; and the smile on his face was not less
shining and unlimited.  He burst into the rooms of the palace where David
had residence, calling: "Oyez!  Oyez!  Saadat!  Oh, Pasha of the Thousand
Tails!  Oyez!  Oyez!"

Getting no answer, he began to perform a dance round the room, which in
modern days is known as the negro cake-walk.  It was not dignified, but
it would have been less dignified still performed by any other living man
of forty-five with a bald head and a waist-band ten inches too large.
Round the room three times he went, and then he dropped on a divan.  He
gasped, and mopped his face and forehead, leaving a little island of
moisture on the top of his head untouched.  After a moment, he gained
breath and settled down a little.  Then he burst out:

         "Are you coming to my party, O effendi?
          There'll be high jinks, there'll be welcome, there'll be room;
          For to-morrow we are pulling stakes for Shendy.
          Are you coming to my party, O Nahoum?"

"Say, I guess that's pretty good on the spur of the moment," he wheezed,
and, taking his inseparable note book from his pocket, wrote the
impromptu down.  "I guess She'll like that-it rings spontaneous.  She'll
be tickled, tickled to death, when she knows what's behind it."  He
repeated it with gusto.  "She'll dote on it," he added--the person to
whom he referred being the sister of the American Consul, the little
widow, "cute as she can be," of whom he had written to Hylda in the
letter which had brought a crisis in her life.  As he returned the note-
book to his pocket a door opened.  Mahommed Hassan slid forward into the
room, and stood still, impassive and gloomy.  Lacey beckoned, and said
grotesquely:

        "'Come hither, come hither, my little daughter,
          And do not tremble so!'"

A sort of scornful patience was in Mahommed's look, but he came nearer
and waited.

"Squat on the ground, and smile a smile of mirth, Mahommed," Lacey said
riotously.  "'For I'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I'm to be Queen o'
the May!'"

Mahommed's face grew resentful.  "O effendi, shall the camel-driver laugh
when the camels are lost in the khamsin and the water-bottle is empty?"

"Certainly not, O son of the spreading palm; but this is not a desert,
nor a gaudy caravan.  This is a feast of all angels.  This is the day
when Nahoum the Nefarious is to be buckled up like a belt, and ridden in
a ring.  Where is the Saadat?"

"He is gone, effendi!  Like a mist on the face of the running water, so
was his face; like eyes that did not see, so was his look.  'Peace be to
thee, Mahommed, thou art faithful as Zaida,' he said, and he mounted and
rode into the desert.  I ran after till he was come to the edge of the
desert; but he sent me back, saying that I must wait for thee; and this
word I was to say, that Prince Kaid had turned his face darkly from him,
and that the finger of Sharif--"

"That fanatical old quack--Harrik's friend!"

"--that the finger of Sharif was on his pulse; but the end of all was in
the hands of God."

"Oh yes, exactly, the finger of Sharif on his pulse!  The old story-the
return to the mother's milk, throwing back to all the Pharaohs.  Well,
what then?" he added cheerfully, his smile breaking out again.  "Where
has he gone, our Saadat?"

"To Ebn Ezra Bey at the Coptic Monastery by the Etl Tree, where your
prophet Christ slept when a child."

Lacey hummed to himself meditatively.  "A sort of last powwow--Rome
before the fall.  Everything wrong, eh?  Kaid turned fanatic, Nahoum on
the tiles watching for the Saadat to fall, things trembling for want of
hard cash.  That's it, isn't it, Mahommed?"

Mahommed nodded, but his look was now alert, and less sombre.  He had
caught at something vital and confident in Lacey's tone.  He drew nearer,
and listened closely.

"Well, now, my gentle gazelle, listen unto me," continued Lacey.  He
suddenly leaned forward, and spoke in subdued but rapid tones.  "Say,
Mahommed, once upon a time there was an American man, with a shock of red
hair, and a nature like a spring-lock.  He went down to Mexico, with a
million or two of his own money got honestly by an undisputed will from
an undisputed father--you don't understand that, but it doesn't matter--
and with a few millions of other people's money, for to gamble in mines
and railways and banks and steamship companies--all to do with Mexico
what the Saadat has tried to do in Egypt with less money; but not for the
love of Allah, same as him.  This American was going to conquer like
Cortez, but his name was Thomas Tilman Lacey, and he had a lot of gall.
After years of earnest effort, he lost his hair and the millions of the
Infatuated Conquistadores.  And by-and-by he came to Cairo with a
thimbleful of income, and began to live again.  There was a civil war
going on in his own country, but he thought that one out of forty
millions would not be strictly missed.  So he stayed in Egypt; and the
tale of his days in Egypt, is it not written with a neboot of domwood in
the book of Mahommed Hassan the scribe?"

He paused and beamed upon the watchful Mahommed, who, if he did not
understand all that had been said, was in no difficulty as to the drift
and meaning of the story.

"Aiwa, effendi," he urged impatiently.  "It is a long ride to the Etl
Tree, and the day is far spent."

"Inshallah, you shall hear, my turtle-dove!  One day there came to Cairo,
in great haste, a man from Mexico, looking for the foolish one called T.
T. Lacey, bearing glad news.  And the man from Mexico blew his trumpet,
and straightway T. T. Lacey fell down dismayed.  The trumpet said that a
million once lost in Mexico was returned, with a small flock of other
millions; for a mine, in which it was sunk, had burst forth with a stony
stream of silver.  And behold!  Thomas Tilman Lacey, the despised waster
of his patrimony and of other people's treasure, is now, O son of the
fig-flower, richer than Kaid Pasha and all his eunuchs."

Suddenly Mahommed Hassan leaned forward, then backward, and, after the
fashion of desert folk, gave a shrill, sweet ululation that seemed to
fill the palace.

"Say, that's A1," Lacey said, when Mahommed's voice sank to a whisper of
wild harmony.  "Yes, you can lick my boots, my noble sheikh of
Manfaloot," he added, as Mahommed caught his feet and bent his head upon
them.  "I wanted to do something like that myself.  Kiss 'em, honey;
it'll do you good."

After a moment, Mahommed drew back and squatted before him in an attitude
of peace and satisfaction.  "The Saadat--you will help him?  You will
give him money?"

"Let's put it in this way, Mahommed: I'll invest in an expedition out of
which I expect to get something worth while--concessions for mines and
railways, et cetera."  He winked a round, blue eye.  "Business is
business, and the way to get at the Saadat is to talk business; but you
can make up your mind that,

        "'To-morrow, we are pulling stakes for Shendy!
          Are you coming to my party, O Nahoum?'"

"By the prophet Abraham, but the news is great news," said Mahommed with
a grin.  "But the Effendina?"

"Well, I'll try and square the Effendina," answered Lacey.  "Perhaps the
days of backsheesh aren't done in Egypt, after all."

"And Nahoum Pasha?" asked Mahommed, with a sinister look.

"Well, we'll try and square him, too, but in another way."

"The money, it is in Egypt?" queried Mahommed, whose idea was that money
to be real must be seen.  "Something that's as handy and as marketable,"
answered Lacey.  "I can raise half a million to-morrow; and that will do
a lot of what we want.  How long will it take to ride to the monastery?"

Mahommed told him.

Lacey was about to leave the room, when he heard a voice outside.
"Nahoum!" he said, and sat down again on the divan.  "He has come to see
the Saadat, I suppose; but it'll do him good to see me, perhaps.  Open
the sluices, Mahommed."

Yes, Nahoum would be glad to see the effendi, since Claridge Pasha was
not in Cairo.  When would Claridge Pasha return?  If, then, the effendi
expected to see the Saadat before his return to Cairo, perhaps he would
convey a message.  He could not urge his presence on the Saadat, since he
had not been honoured with any communication since yesterday.

"Well, that's good-mannered, anyhow, pasha," said Lacey with cheerful
nonchalance.  "People don't always know when they're wanted or not
wanted."

Nahoum looked at him guardedly, sighed and sat down.  "Things have grown
worse since yesterday," he said.  "Prince Kaid received the news badly."
He shook his head.  "He has not the gift of perfect friendship.  That is
a Christian characteristic; the Muslim does not possess it.  It was too
strong to last, maybe--my poor beloved friend, the Saadat."

"Oh, it will last all right," rejoined Lacey coolly.  "Prince Kaid has
got a touch of jaundice, I guess.  He knows a thing when he finds it,
even if he hasn't the gift of 'perfect friendship,' same as Christians
like you and me.  But even you and me don't push our perfections too far
--I haven't noticed you going out of your way to do things for your 'poor
beloved friend, the Saadat'."

"I have given him time, energy, experience--money."

Lacey nodded.  "True.  And I've often wondered why, when I've seen the
things you didn't give and the things you took away."

Nahoum's eyes half closed.  Lacey was getting to close quarters with
suspicion and allusion; but it was not his cue to resent them yet.

"I had come now to offer him help; to advance him enough to carry through
his expedition."

"Well, that sounds generous, but I guess he would get on without it,
pasha.  He would not want to be under any more obligations to you."

"He is without money.  He must be helped."

"Just so."

"He cannot go to the treasury, and Prince Kaid has refused.  Why should
he decline help from his friend?"  Suddenly Lacey changed his tactics.
He had caught a look in Nahoum's eyes which gave him a new thought.
"Well, if you've any proposition, pasha, I'll take it to him.  I'll be
seeing him to-night."

"I can give him fifty thousand pounds."

"It isn't enough to save the situation, pasha."

"It will help him over the first zareba."

"Are there any conditions?"  "There are no conditions, effendi."  "And
interest?"

"There would be no interest in money."

"Other considerations?"

"Yes, other considerations, effendi."

"If they were granted, would there be enough still in the stocking to
help him over a second zareba--or a third, perhaps?"

"That would be possible, even likely, I think.  Of course we speak in
confidence, effendi."

"The confidence of the 'perfect friendship.'"

"There may be difficulty, because the Saadat is sensitive; but it is the
only way to help him.  I can get the money from but one source; and to
get it involves an agreement."

"You think his Excellency would not just jump at it--that it might hurt
some of his prejudices, eh?"

"So, effendi."

"And me--where am I in it, pasha?"

"Thou hast great influence with his Excellency."

"I am his servant--I don't meddle with his prejudices, pasha."

"But if it were for his own good, to save his work here."

Lacey yawned almost ostentatiously.  "I guess if he can't save it himself
it can't be saved, not even when you reach out the hand of perfect
friendship.  You've been reaching out for a long time, pasha, and it
didn't save the steamer or the cotton-mills; and it didn't save us when
we were down by Sobat a while ago, and you sent Halim Bey to teach us to
be patient.  We got out of that nasty corner by sleight of hand, but not
your sleight of hand, pasha.  Your hand is a quick hand, but a sharp eye
can see the trick, and then it's no good, not worth a button."

There was something savage behind Nahoum's eyes, but they did not show
it; they blinked with earnest kindness and interest.  The time would come
when Lacey would go as his master should go, and the occasion was not far
off now; but it must not be forced.  Besides, was this fat, amorous-
looking factotum of Claridge Pasha's as Spartan-minded as his master?
Would he be superior to the lure of gold?  He would see.  He spoke
seriously, with apparent solicitude.

"Thou dost not understand, effendi.  Claridge Pasha must have money.
Prestige is everything in Egypt, it is everything with Kaid.  If Claridge
Pasha rides on as though nothing has happened--and money is the only
horse that can carry him--Kaid will not interfere, and his black mood
may pass; but any halting now and the game is done."

"And you want the game to go on right bad, don't you?  Well, I guess
you're right.  Money is the only winner in this race.  He's got to have
money, sure.  How much can you raise?  Oh, yes, you told me!  Well, I
don't think it's enough; he's got to have three times that; and if he
can't get it from the Government, or from Kaid, it's a bad lookout.
What's the bargain you have in your mind?"

"That the slave-trade continue, effendi."

Lacey did not wink, but he had a shock of surprise.  On the instant he
saw the trap--for the Saadat and for himself.

"He would not do it--not for money, pasha."

"He would not be doing it for money.  The time is not ripe for it, it is
too dangerous.  There is a time for all things.  If he will but wait!"

"I wouldn't like to be the man that'd name the thing to him.  As you say,
he's got his prejudices.  They're stronger than in most men."

"It need not be named to him.  Thou canst accept the money for him, and
when thou art in the Soudan, and he is going to do it, thou canst prevent
it."

"Tell him that I've taken the money and that he's used it, and he
oughtn't to go back on the bargain I made for him?  So that he'll be
bound by what I did?"

"It is the best way, effendi."

"He'd be annoyed," said Lacey with a patient sigh.

"He has a great soul; but sometimes he forgets that expediency is the
true policy."

"Yet he's done a lot of things without it.  He's never failed in what he
set out to do.  What he's done has been kicked over, but he's done it all
right, somehow, at last."

"He will not be able to do this, effendi, except with my help--and
thine."

"He's had quite a lot of things almost finished, too," said Lacey
reflectively, "and then a hand reached out in the dark and cut the wires
--cut them when he was sleeping, and he didn't know; cut them when he was
waking, and he wouldn't understand; cut them under his own eyes, and he
wouldn't see; because the hand that cut them was the hand of the perfect
friend."

He got slowly to his feet, as a cloud of colour drew over the face of
Nahoum and his eyes darkened with astonishment and anger.  Lacey put his
hands in his pockets and waited till Nahoum also rose.  Then he gathered
the other's eyes to his, and said with drawling scorn:

"So, you thought I didn't understand!  You thought I'd got a brain like a
peanut, and wouldn't drop onto your game or the trap you've set.  You'd
advance money--got from the slave-dealers to prevent the slave-trade
being stopped!  If Claridge Pasha took it and used it, he could never
stop the slave-trade.  If I took it and used it for him on the same
terms, he couldn't stop the slave-trade, though he might know no more
about the bargain than a babe unborn.  And if he didn't stand by the
bargain I made, and did prohibit slave-dealing, nothing'd stop the tribes
till they marched into Cairo.  He's been safe so far, because they
believed in him, and because he'd rather die a million deaths than go
crooked.  Say, I've been among the Dagos before--down in Mexico--and I'm
onto you.  I've been onto you for a good while; though there was nothing
I could spot certain; but now I've got you, and I'll break the 'perfect
friendship' or I'll eat my shirt.  I'll--"

He paused, realising the crisis in which David was moving, and that
perils were thick around their footsteps.  But, even as he thought of
them, he remembered David's own frank, fearless audacity in danger and
difficulty, and he threw discretion to the winds.  He flung his flag
wide, and believed with a belief as daring as David's that all would be
well.

"Well, what wilt thou do?" asked Nahoum with cool and deadly menace.
"Thou wilt need to do it quickly, because, if it is a challenge, within
forty-eight hours Claridge Pasha and thyself will be gone from Egypt--or
I shall be in the Nile."

"I'll take my chances, pasha," answered Lacey, with equal coolness.  "You
think you'll win.  It's not the first time I've had to tackle men like
you--they've got the breed in Mexico.  They beat me there, but I learned
the game, and I've learned a lot from you, too.  I never knew what your
game was here.  I only know that the Saadat saved your life, and got you
started again with Kaid.  I only know that you called yourself a
Christian, and worked on him till he believed in you, and Hell might
crackle round you, but he'd believe, till he saw your contract signed
with the Devil--and then he'd think the signature forged.  But he's got
to know now.  We are not going out of Egypt, though you may be going to
the Nile; but we are going to the Soudan, and with Kaid's blessing, too.
You've put up the bluff, and I take it.  Be sure you've got Kaid solid,
for, if you haven't, he'll be glad to know where you keep the money you
got from the slave-dealers."

Nahoum shrugged his shoulders.  "Who has seen the money?  Where is the
proof?  Kaid would know my reasons.  It is not the first time virtue has
been tested in Egypt, or the first time that it has fallen."

In spite of himself Lacey laughed.  "Say, that's worthy of a great
Christian intellect.  You are a bright particular star, pasha.  I take it
back--they'd learn a lot from you in Mexico.  But the only trouble with
lying is, that the demand becomes so great you can't keep all the cards
in your head, and then the one you forget does you.  The man that isn't
lying has the pull in the long run.  You are out against us, pasha, and
we'll see how we stand in forty-eight hours.  You have some cards up your
sleeve, I suppose; but--well, I'm taking you on.  I'm taking you on with
a lot of joy, and some sorrow, too, for we might have pulled off a big
thing together, you and Claridge Pasha, with me to hold the stirrups.
Now it's got to be war.  You've made it so.  It's a pity, for when we
grip there'll be a heavy fall."

"For a poor man thou hast a proud stomach."

"Well, I'll admit the stomach, pasha.  It's proud; and it's strong, too;
it's stood a lot in Egypt; it's standing a lot to-day."

"We'll ease the strain, perhaps," sneered Nahoum.  He made a perfunctory
salutation and walked briskly from the room.

Mahommed Hassan crept in, a malicious grin on his face.  Danger and
conflict were as meat and drink to him.

"Effendi, God hath given thee a wasp's sting to thy tongue.  It is well.
Nahoum Pasha hath Mizraim: the Saadat hath thee and me."

"There's the Effendina," said Lacey reflectively.  "Thou saidst thou
would 'square' him, effendi."

"I say a lot," answered Lacey rather ruefully.  "Come, Mahommed, the
Saadat first, and the sooner the better."




CHAPTER XXXI

THE STRUGGLE IN THE DESERT

     "And His mercy is on them that fear Him throughout all generations."

On the clear, still evening air the words rang out over the desert,
sonorous, imposing, peaceful.  As the notes of the verse died away the
answer came from other voices in deep, appealing antiphonal:

     "He hath showed strength with His arm, He hath scattered the proud
     in the imagination of their hearts."

Beyond the limits of the monastery there was not a sign of life; neither
beast nor bird, nor blade of grass, nor any green thing; only the perfect
immemorial blue, and in the east a misty moon, striving in vain to offer
light which the earth as yet rejected for the brooding radiance of the
descending sun.  But at the great door of the monastery there grew a
stately palm, and near by an ancient acacia-tree; and beyond the stone
chapel there was a garden of struggling shrubs and green things, with one
rose-tree which scattered its pink leaves from year to year upon the
loam, since no man gathered bud or blossom.

The triumphant call of the Magnificat, however beautiful, seemed
strangely out of place in this lonely island in a sea of sand.  It was
the song of a bannered army, marching over the battle-field with
conquering voices, and swords as yet unsheathed and red, carrying the
spoils of conquest behind the laurelled captain of the host.  The
crumbling and ancient walls were surrounded by a moat which a stranger's
foot crossed hardly from moon to moon, which the desert wayfarer sought
rarely, since it was out of the track of caravans, and because food was
scant in the refectory of this Coptic brotherhood.  It was scarce five
hours' ride from the Palace of the Prince Pasha: but it might have been a
thousand miles away, so profoundly separate was it from the world of
vital things and deeds of men.

As the chant rang out, confident, majestic, and serene, carried by voices
of power and shrill sweetness, which only the desert can produce, it
might have seemed to any listener that this monastery was all that
remained of some ancient kingdom of brimming, active cities, now lying
beneath the obliterating sand, itself the monument and memorial of a
breath of mercy of the Destroyer, the last refuge of a few surviving
captains of a departed greatness.  Hidden by the grey, massive walls,
built as it were to resist the onset of a ravaging foe, the swelling
voices might well have been those of some ancient order of valiant
knights, whose banners hung above them, the 'riclame' of their deeds.
But they were voices and voices only; for they who sang were as unkempt
and forceless as the lonely wall which shut them in from the insistent
soul of the desert.

Desolation?  The desert was not desolate.  Its face was bare and burning,
it slaked no man's thirst, gave no man food, save where scattered oases
were like the breasts of a vast mother eluding the aching lips of her
parched children; but the soul of the desert was living and inspiring,
beating with vitality.  It was life that burned like flame.  If the
water-skin was dry and the date-bag empty it smothered and destroyed; but
it was life; and to those who ventured into its embrace, obeying the
conditions of the sharp adventure, it gave what neither sea, nor green
plain, nor high mountain, nor verdant valley could give--a consuming
sense of power, which found its way to the deepest recesses of being.
Out upon the vast sea of sand, where the descending sun was spreading a
note of incandescent colour, there floated the grateful words:

     "He remembering His mercy hath holpen His servant Israel; as He
     promised to our forefathers, Abraham, and his seed for ever."

Then the antiphonal ceased; and together the voices of all within the
place swelled out in the Gloria and the Amen, and seemed to pass away in
ever-receding vibrations upon the desert, till it was lost in the
comforting sunset.

As the last note died away, a voice from beneath the palm-tree near the
door, deeper than any that had come from within, said reverently: "Ameen-
Ameen !"

He who spoke was a man well over sixty years, with a grey beard, lofty
benign forehead, and the eyes of a scholar and a dreamer.  As he uttered
the words of spiritual assent, alike to the Muslim and the Christian
religion, he rose to his feet, showing the figure of a man of action,
alert, well-knit, authoritative.  Presently he turned towards the East
and stretched a robe upon the ground, and with stately beauty of gesture
he spread out his hands, standing for a moment in the attitude of
aspiration.  Then, kneeling, he touched his turbaned head to the ground
three times, and as the sun drew down behind the sharp, bright line of
sand that marked the horizon, he prayed devoutly and long.  It was Ebn
Ezra Bey.

Muslim though he was, he had visited this monastery many times, to study
the ancient Christian books which lay in disordered heaps in an ill-kept
chamber, books which predated the Hegira, and were as near to the life of
the Early Church as the Scriptures themselves--or were so reputed.
Student and pious Muslim as he was, renowned at El Azhar and at every
Muslim university in the Eastern world, he swore by the name of Christ as
by that of Abraham, Isaac, and all the prophets, though to him Mahomet
was the last expression of Heaven's will to mankind.  At first received
at the monastery with unconcealed aversion, and not without danger to
himself, he had at last won to him the fanatical monks, who, in spirit,
kept this ancient foundation as rigid to their faith as though it were in
mediaeval times.  And though their discipline was lax, and their daily
duties orderless, this was Oriental rather than degenerate.  Here Ebn
Ezra had stayed for weeks at a time in the past, not without some
religious scandal, long since forgotten.

His prayers ended, he rose up slowly, once more spread out his hands in
ascription, and was about to enter the monastery, when, glancing towards
the west, he saw a horseman approaching.  An instinct told him who it was
before he could clearly distinguish the figure, and his face lighted with
a gentle and expectant smile.  Then his look changed.

"He is in trouble," he murmured.  "As it was with his uncle in Damascus,
so will it be with him.  Malaish, we are in the will of God!"

The hand that David laid in Ebn Ezra's was hot and nervous, the eyes that
drank in the friendship of the face which had seen two Claridges emptying
out their lives in the East were burning and famished by long fasting
of the spirit, forced abstinence from the pleasures of success and
fruition-haunting, desiring eyes, where flamed a spirit which consumed
the body and the indomitable mind.  The lips, however, had their old
trick of smiling, though the smile which greeted Ebn Ezra Bey had a
melancholy which touched the desert-worn, life-spent old Arab as he had
not been touched since a smile, just like this, flashed up at him from
the weather-stained, dying face of quaint Benn Claridge in a street of
Damascus.  The natural duplicity of the Oriental had been abashed and
inactive before the simple and astounding honesty of these two Quaker
folk.

He saw crisis written on every feature of the face before him.  Yet the
scanty meal they ate with the monks in the ancient room was enlivened by
the eager yet quiet questioning of David, to whom the monks responded
with more spirit than had been often seen in this arid retreat.  The
single torch which spluttered from the wall as they drank their coffee
lighted up faces as strange, withdrawn, and unconsciously secretive as
ever gathered to greet a guest.  Dim tales had reached them of this
Christian reformer and administrator, scraps of legend from stray camel-
drivers, a letter from the Patriarch commanding them to pray blessings on
his labours--who could tell what advantage might not come to the Coptic
Church through him, a Christian!  On the dull, torpid faces, light seemed
struggling to live for a moment, as David talked.  It was as though
something in their meagre lives, which belonged to undeveloped feelings,
was fighting for existence--a light struggling to break through murky
veils of inexperience.

Later, in the still night, however--still, though air vibrated
everywhere, as though the desert breathed an ether which was to fill
men's veins with that which quieted the fret and fever of life's
disillusions and forgeries and failures--David's speech with Ebn Ezra Bey
was of a different sort.  If, as it seems ever in the desert, an
invisible host of beings, once mortal, now immortal, but suspensive and
understanding, listened to the tale he unfolded, some glow of pity must
have possessed them; for it was an Iliad of herculean struggle against
absolute disaster, ending with the bitter news of his grandfather's
death.  It was the story of AEdipus overcome by events too strong for
soul to bear.  In return, as the stars wheeled on, and the moon stole to
the zenith, majestic and slow, Ebn Ezra offered to his troubled friend
only the philosophy of the predestinarian, mingled with the calm of the
stoic.  But something antagonistic to his own dejection, to the Muslim's
fatalism, emerged from David's own altruism, to nerve him to hope and
effort still.  His unconquerable optimism rose determinedly to the
surface, even as he summed up and related the forces working against him.

"They have all come at once," he said; "all the activities opposing me,
just as though they had all been started long ago at different points,
with a fixed course to run, and to meet and give me a fall in the hour
when I could least resist.  You call it Fate.  I call it what it proves
itself to be.  But here it is a hub of danger and trouble, and the spokes
of disaster are flying to it from all over the compass, to make the wheel
that will grind me; and all the old troop of Palace intriguers and
despoilers are waiting to heat the tire and fasten it on the machine of
torture.  Kaid has involved himself in loans which press, in foolish
experiments in industry without due care; and now from ill-health and bad
temper comes a reaction towards the old sinister rule, when the
Prince shuts his eyes and his agents ruin and destroy.  Three nations who
have intrigued against my work see their chance, and are at Kaid's elbow.
The fate of the Soudan is in the balance.  It is all as the shake of a
feather.  I can save it if I go; but, just as I am ready, my mills burn
down, my treasury dries up, Kaid turns his back on me, and the toil of
years is swept away in a night.  Thee sees it is terrible, friend?"

Ebn Ezra looked at him seriously and sadly for a moment, and then said:
"Is it given one man to do all?  If many men had done these things, then
there had been one blow for each.  Now all falls on thee, Saadat.  Is it
the will of God that one man should fling the lance, fire the cannon, dig
the trenches, gather food for the army, drive the horses on to battle,
and bury the dead?  Canst thou do all?"

David's eyes brightened to the challenge.  "There was the work to do, and
there were not the many to do it.  My hand was ready; the call came; I
answered.  I plunged into the river of work alone."

"Thou didst not know the strength of the currents, the eddies and the
whirlpools, the hidden rocks--and the shore is far off, Saadat."

"It is not so far but that, if I could get breath to gather strength,
I should reach the land in time.  Money--ah, but enough for this
expedition!  That over, order, quiet yonder, my own chosen men as
governors, and I could"--he pointed towards the southern horizon--
"I could plant my foot in Cairo, and from the centre control the great
machinery--with Kaid's help; and God's help.  A sixth of a million, and
Kaid's hand behind me, and the boat would lunge free of the sand-banks
and churn on, and churn on.  .  .  .  Friend," he added, with the winning
insistence that few found it possible to resist, "if all be well, and we
go thither, wilt thou become the governor-general yonder?  With thee to
rule justly where there is most need of justice, the end would be sure--
if it be the will of God."

Ebn Ezra Bey sat for a moment looking into the worn, eager face,
indistinct in the moonlight, then answered slowly: "I am seventy, and the
years smite hard as they pass, and there or here, it little matters when
I go, as I must go; and whether it be to bend the lance, or bear the flag
before thee, or rule a Mudirieh, what does it matter!  I will go with
thee," he added hastily; "but it is better thou shouldst not go.  Within
the last three days I have news from the South.  All that thou hast done
there is in danger now.  The word for revolt has passed from tribe to
tribe.  A tongue hath spoken, and a hand hath signalled "--his voice
lowered--" and I think I know the tongue and the hand!"  He paused; then,
as David did not speak, continued: "Thou who art wise in most things,
dost decline to seek for thy foe in him who eateth from the same dish
with thee.  Only when it is too late thou wilt defend thyself and all who
keep faith with thee."

David's face clouded.  "Nahoum, thou dost mean Nahoum?  But thou dost not
understand, and there is no proof."

"As a camel knows the coming storm while yet the sky is clear, by that
which the eye does not see, so do I feel Nahoum.  The evils thou hast
suffered, Saadat, are from his hand, if from any hand in Egypt--"

Suddenly he leaned over and touched David's arm.  "Saadat, it is of no
avail.  There is none in Egypt that desires good; thy task is too great.
All men will deceive thee; if not now, yet in time.  If Kaid favours thee
once more, and if it is made possible for thee to go to the Soudan, yet I
pray thee to stay here.  Better be smitten here, where thou canst get
help from thine own country, if need be, than yonder, where they but wait
to spoil thy work and kill thee.  Thou art young; wilt thou throw thy
life away?  Art thou not needed here as there?  For me it is nothing,
whether it be now or in a few benumbing years; but for thee--is there no
one whom thou lovest so well that thou wouldst not shelter thy life to
spare that life sorrow?  Is there none that thou lovest so, and that will
love thee to mortal sorrow, if thou goest without care to thy end too
soon?"

As a warm wind suddenly sweeps across the cool air of a summer evening
for an instant, suffocating and unnerving, so Ebn Ezra's last words swept
across David's spirit.  His breath came quicker, his eyes half closed.
"Is there none that thou lovest so, and that will love thee to mortal
sorrow, if--"

As a hand secretly and swiftly slips the lever that opens the sluice-
gates of a dike, while the watchman turns away for a moment to look at
the fields which the waters enrich and the homes of poor folk whom the
gates defend, so, in a moment, when off his guard, worn with watching and
fending, as it were, Ebn Ezra had sprung the lever, and a flood of
feeling swept over David, drowned him in its impulse and pent-up force.

"Is there none that thou lovest so--"  Of what use had been all his
struggle and his pain since that last day in Hamley--his dark fighting
days in the desert with Lacey and Mahommed, and his handful of faithful
followers, hemmed in by dangers, the sands swarming with Arabs who
feathered now to his safety, now to his doom, and his heart had hungered
for what he had denied it with a will that would not be conquered?
Wasted by toil and fever and the tension of danger and the care of
others dependent on him, he had also fought a foe which was ever at his
elbow, ever whispered its comfort and seduction in his ear, the insidious
and peace-giving, exalting opiate that had tided him over some black
places, and then had sought for mastery of him when he was back again in
the world of normal business and duty, where it appealed not as a
medicine, but as a perilous luxury.  And fighting this foe, which had a
voice so soothing, and words like the sound of murmuring waters, and a
cool and comforting hand that sought to lead him into gardens of
stillness and passive being, where he could no more hear the clangour and
vexing noises of a world that angered and agonised, there had also been
the lure of another passion of the heart, which was too perilously dear
to contemplate.  Eyes that were beautiful, and their beauty was not for
him; a spirit that was bright and glowing, but the brightness and the
glow might not renew his days.  It was hard to fight alone.  Alone he
was, for only to one may the doors within doors be opened-only to one so
dear that all else is everlastingly distant may the true tale of the life
beneath life be told.  And it was not for him--nothing of this; not even
the thought of it; for to think of it was to desire it, and to desire it
was to reach out towards it; and to reach out towards it was the end of
all.  There had been moments of abandonment to the alluring dream, such
as when he wrote the verses which Lacey had sent to Hylda from the
desert; but they were few.  Oft-repeated, they would have filled him with
an agitated melancholy impossible to be borne in the life which must be
his.

So it had been.  The deeper into life and its labours and experiences he
had gone, the greater had been his temptations, born of two passions, one
of the body and its craving, the other of the heart and its desires: and
he had fought on--towards the morning.

"Is there none that thou lovest so, and that will love thee to mortal
sorrow, if thou goest without care to thy end too soon?"  The desert, the
dark monastery, the acacia tree, the ancient palm, the ruinous garden,
disappeared.  He only saw a face which smiled at him, as it had done 'by
the brazier in the garden at Cairo, that night when she and Nahoum and
himself and Mizraim had met in the room of his house by the Ezbekieh
gardens, and she had gone out to her old life in England, and he had
taken up the burden of the East--that long six years ago.  His head
dropped in his hands, and all that was beneath the Quaker life he had led
so many years, packed under the crust of form and habit, and regulated
thought, and controlled emotion, broke forth now, and had its way with
him.

He turned away staggering and self-reproachful from the first question,
only to face the other--"And that will love thee to mortal sorrow, if
thou goest without care to thy end too soon."  It was a thought he had
never let himself dwell on for an instant in all the days since they had
last met.  He had driven it back to its covert, even before he could
recognise its face.  It was disloyal to her, an offence against all that
she was, an affront to his manhood to let the thought have place in his
mind even for one swift moment.  She was Lord Eglington's wife--there
could be no sharing of soul and mind and body and the exquisite devotion
of a life too dear for thought.  Nothing that she was to Eglington could
be divided with another, not for an hour, not by one act of impulse; or
else she must be less, she that might have been, if there had been no
Eglington--

An exclamation broke from him, and, as one crying out in one's sleep
wakes himself, so the sharp cry of his misery woke him from the trance of
memory that had been upon him, and he slowly became conscious of Ebn Ezra
standing before him.  Their eyes met, and Ebn Ezra spoke:

"The will of Allah be thy will, Saadat.  If it be to go to the Soudan,
I am thine; if it be to stay, I am thy servant and thy brother.  But
whether it be life or death, thou must sleep, for the young are like
water without sleep.  Thou canst not live in strength nor die with
fortitude without it.  For the old, malaish, old age is between a
sleeping and a waking!  Come, Saadat!  Forget not, thou must ride again
to Cairo at dawn."

David got slowly to his feet and turned towards the monastery.  The
figure of a monk stood in the doorway with a torch to light him to his
room.

He turned to Ebn Ezra again.  "Does thee think that I have aught of his
courage--my Uncle Benn?  Thou knowest me--shall I face it out as did he?"

"Saadat," the old man answered, pointing, "yonder acacia, that was he,
quick to grow and short to live; but thou art as this date-palm, which
giveth food to the hungry, and liveth through generations.  Peace be upon
thee," he added at the doorway, as the torch flickered towards the room
where David was to lie.

"And upon thee, peace!" answered David gently, and followed the smoky
light to an inner chamber.  The room in which David found himself was
lofty and large, but was furnished with only a rough wooden bed, a rug,
and a brazier.  Left alone, he sat down on the edge of the bed, and, for
a few moments, his mind strayed almost vaguely from one object to
another.  From two windows far up in the wall the moonlight streamed in,
making bars of light aslant the darkness.

Not a sound broke the stillness.  Yet, to his sensitive nerves, the air
seemed tingling with sensation, stirring with unseen activities.  Here
the spirit of the desert seemed more insistent in its piercing vitality,
because it was shut in by four stone walls.

Mechanically he took off his coat, and was about to fold and lay it on
the rug beside the bed, when something hard in one of the pockets knocked
against his knee.  Searching, he found and drew forth a small bottle
which, for many a month past, had lain in the drawer of a table where he
had placed it on his return from the Soudan.  It was an evil spirit which
sent this tiny phial to his hand at a moment when he had paid out of the
full treasury of his strength and will its accumulated deposit, leaving
him with a balance on which no heavy draft could be made.  His pulse
quickened, then his body stiffened with the effort at self-control.

Who placed this evil elixir in his pocket?  What any enemy of his work
had done was nothing to what might be achieved by the secret foe, who had
placed this anodyne within his reach at this the most critical moment of
his life.  He remembered the last time he had used it--in the desert:
two days of forgetfulness to the world, when it all moved by him, the
swarming Arabs, the train of camels, the loads of ivory, the slimy
crocodile on the sandbanks, the vultures hovering above unburied
carcasses, the kourbash descending on shining black shoulders,
corrugating bare brown bodies into cloven skin and lacerated flesh, a
fight between champions of two tribes who clasped and smote and struggled
and rained blows, and, both mortally wounded, still writhed in last
conflict upon the ground--and Mahommed Hassan ever at the tent door or by
his side, towering, watchful, sullen to all faces without, smiling to his
own, with dog-like look waiting for any motion of his hand or any
word....  Ah, Mahommed Hassan, it was he!  Mahommed had put this phial in
his pocket.  His bitter secret was not hidden from Mahommed.  And this
was an act of supreme devotion--to put at his hand the lulling, inspiring
draught.  Did this fellah servant know what it meant--the sin of it, the
temptation, the terrible joy, the blessed quiet; and then, the agonising
remorse, the withering self-hatred and torturing penitence?  No, Mahommed
only knew that when the Saadat was gone beyond his strength, when the
sleepless nights and feverish days came in the past, in their great
troubles, when men were dying and only the Saadat could save, that this
cordial lifted him out of misery and storm into calm.  Yet Mahommed must
have divined that it was a thing against which his soul revolted, or he
would have given it to him openly.  In the heart and mind of the giant
murderer, however, must have been the thought that now when trouble was
upon his master again, trouble which might end all, this supreme
destroyer of pain and dark memory and present misery, would give him the
comfort he needed--and that he would take it.

If he had not seen it, this sudden craving would not have seized him for
this eager beguiling, this soothing benevolence.  Yet here it was in his
hand; and even as it lay in his cold fingers--how cold they were, and his
head how burning!--the desire for it surged up in him.  And, as though
the thing itself had the magical power to summon up his troubles, that it
might offer the apathy and stimulus in one--even as it lured him, his
dangers, his anxieties, the black uncertainties massed, multiplied and
aggressive, rose before him, buffeted him, caught at his throat, dragged
down his shoulders, clutched at his heart.

Now, with a cry of agony, he threw the phial on the ground, and, sinking
on the bed, buried his face in his hands and moaned, and fought for
freedom from the cords tightening round him.  It was for him to realise
now how deep are the depths to which the human soul can sink, even while
labouring to climb.  Once more the sense of awful futility was on him: of
wasted toil and blenched force, veins of energy drained of their blood,
hope smitten in the way, and every dear dream shattered.  Was it, then,
all ended?  Was his work indeed fallen, and all his love undone?  Was his
own redemption made impossible?  He had offered up his life to this land
to atone for a life taken when she--when she first looked up with eyes of
gratitude, eyes that haunted him.  Was it, then, unacceptable?  Was it so
that he must turn his back upon this long, heart-breaking but beloved
work, this panacea for his soul, without which he could not pay the price
of blood?

Go back to England--to Hamley where all had changed, where the old man he
loved no longer ruled in the Red Mansion, where all that had been could
be no more?  Go to some other land, and there begin again another such a
work?  Were there not vast fields of human effort, effort such as his,
where he could ease the sorrow of living by the joy of a divine altruism?
Go back to Hamley?  Ah, no, a million times, no!  That life was dead, it
was a cycle of years behind him.  There could be no return.  He was in a
maelstrom of agony, his veins were afire, his lips were parched.  He
sprang from his bed, knelt down, and felt for the little phial he had
flung aside.  After a moment his hand caught it, clutched it.  But, even
at the crest of the wave of temptation, words that he had heard one night
in Hamley, that last night of all, flashed into his mind--the words
of old Luke Claridge's prayer, "And if a viper fasten on his hand,
O Lord--"

Suddenly he paused.  That scene in the old Meetinghouse swam before his
eyes, got into his brain.  He remembered the words of his own prayer, and
how he had then retreated upon the Power that gave him power, for a
draught of the one true tincture which braced the heart to throw itself
upon the spears of trial.  Now the trial had come, and that which was in
him as deep as being, the habit of youth, the mother-fibre and
predisposition, responded to the draught he had drunk then.  As a body
freed from the quivering, unrelenting grasp of an electric battery
subsides into a cool quiet, so, through his veins seemed to pass an ether
which stilled the tumult, the dark desire to drink the potion in his
hand, and escape into that irresponsible, artificial world, where he had
before loosened his hold on activity.

The phial slipped from his fingers to the floor.  He sank upon the side
of the bed, and, placing his hands on his knees, he whispered a few
broken words that none on earth was meant to hear.  Then he passed into a
strange and moveless quiet of mind and body.  Many a time in days gone
by--far-off days--had he sat as he was doing now, feeling his mind pass
into a soft, comforting quiet, absorbed in a sensation of existence, as
it were between waking and sleeping, where doors opened to new experience
and understanding, where the mind seemed to loose itself from the bonds
of human necessity and find a freer air.

Now, as he sat as still as the stone in the walls around him, he was
conscious of a vision forming itself before his eyes.  At first it was
indefinite, vague, without clear form, but at last it became a room dimly
outlined, delicately veiled, as it were.  Then it seemed, not that
the mist cleared, but that his eyes became stronger, and saw through the
delicate haze; and now the room became wholly, concretely visible.

It was the room in which he had said good-bye to Hylda.  As he gazed like
one entranced, he saw a figure rise from a couch, pale, agitated, and
beautiful, and come forward, as it were, towards him.  But suddenly the
mist closed in again upon the scene, a depth of darkness passed his eyes,
and he heard a voice say: "Speak--speak to me!"

He heard her voice as distinctly as though she were beside him--as,
indeed, she had stood before him but an instant ago.

Getting slowly to his feet, into the night he sent an answer to the call.

Would she hear?  She had said long ago that she would speak to him so.
Perhaps she had tried before.  But now at last he had heard and answered.
Had she heard?  Time might tell--if ever they met again.  But how good,
and quiet, and serene was the night!

He composed himself to sleep, but, as he lay waiting for that coverlet of
forgetfulness to be drawn over him, he heard the sound of bells soft and
clear.  Just such bells he had heard upon the common at Hamley.  Was it,
then, the outcome of his vision--a sweet hallucination?  He leaned upon
his elbow and listened.




CHAPTER XXXII

FORTY STRIPES SAVE ONE

The bells that rang were not the bells of Hamley; they were part of no
vision or hallucination, and they drew David out of his chamber into the
night.  A little group of three stood sharply silhouetted against the
moonlight, and towering above them was the spare, commanding form of Ebn
Ezra Bey.  Three camels crouched near, and beside them stood a Nubian lad
singing to himself the song of the camel-driver:

         "Fleet is thy foot: thou shalt rest by the Etl tree;
          Water shalt thou drink from the blue-deep well;
          Allah send His gard'ner with the green bersim,
          For thy comfort, fleet one, by the Etl tree.
          As the stars fly, have thy footsteps flown
          Deep is the well, drink, and be still once more;
          Till the pursuing winds panting have found thee
          And, defeated, sink still beside thee--
          By the well and the Etl tree."

For a moment David stood in the doorway listening to the low song of the
camel-driver.  Then he came forward.  As he did so, one of the two who
stood with Ebn Ezra moved towards the monastery door slowly.  It was a
monk with a face which, even in this dim light, showed a deathly
weariness.  The eyes looked straight before him, as though they saw
nothing of the world, only a goal to make, an object to be accomplished.
The look of the face went to David's heart--the kinship of pain was
theirs.

"Peace be to thee," David said gently, as the other passed him.

There was an instant's pause, and then the monk faced him with fingers
uplifted.  "The grace of God be upon thee, David," he said, and his eyes,
drawn back from the world where they had been exploring, met the other's
keenly.  Then he wheeled and entered the monastery.

"The grace of God be upon thee, David!"  How strange it sounded, this
Christian blessing in response to his own Oriental greeting, out in this
Eastern waste.  His own name, too.  It was as though he had been
transported to the ancient world where "Brethren" were so few that they
called each other by their "Christian" names--even as they did in Hamley
to-day.  In Hamley to-day!  He closed his eyes, a tremor running through
his body; and then, with an effort which stilled him to peace again, he
moved forward, and was greeted by Ebn Ezra, from whom the third member of
the little group had now drawn apart nearer to the acacia-tree, and was
seated on a rock that jutted from the sand.  "What is it?" David asked.

"Wouldst thou not sleep, Saadat?  Sleep is more to thee now than aught
thou mayst hear from any man.  To all thou art kind save thyself."

"I have rested," David answered, with a measured calmness, revealing to
his friend the change which had come since they parted an hour before.
They seated themselves under the palm-tree, and were silent for a moment,
then Ebn Ezra said:

"These come from the Place of Lepers."

David started slightly.  "Zaida?" he asked, with a sigh of pity.

"The monk who passed thee but now goes every year to the Place of Lepers
with the caravan, for a brother of this order stays yonder with the
afflicted, seeing no more the faces of this world which he has left
behind.  Afar off from each other they stand--as far as eye can see--and
after the manner of their faith they pray to Allah, and he who has just
left us finds a paper fastened with a stone upon the sand at a certain
place where he waits.  He touches it not, but reads it as it lies, and,
having read, heaps sand upon it.  And the message which the paper gives
is for me."

"For thee?  Hast thou there one who--"

"There was one, my father's son, though we were of different mothers; and
in other days, so many years ago, he did great wrong to me, and not to me
alone,"--the grey head bowed in sorrow--"but to one dearer to me than
life.  I hated him, and would have slain him, but the mind of Allah is
not the mind of man; and he escaped me.  Then he was stricken with
leprosy, and was carried to the place from whence no leper returns.  At
first my heart rejoiced; then, at last, I forgave him, Saadat--was he not
my father's son, and was the woman not gone to the bosom of Allah, where
is peace?  So I forgave and sorrowed for him--who shall say what miseries
are those which, minute to minute, day after day, and year upon year,
repeat themselves, till it is an endless flaying of the body and burning
of the soul!  Every year I send a message to him, and every year now this
Christian monk--there is no Sheikh-el-Islam yonder--brings back the
written message which he finds in the sand."

"And thee has had a message to-night?"

"The last that may come--God be praised, he goeth to his long home.  It
was written in his last hour.  There was no hope; he is gone.  And so,
one more reason showeth why I should go where thou goest, Saadat."

Casting his eyes toward the figure by the acacia-tree, his face clouded
and he pondered anxiously, looking at David the while.  Twice he essayed
to speak, but paused.

David's eyes followed his look.  "What is it?  Who is he--yonder?"

The other rose to his feet.  "Come and see, Saadat," he replied.
"Seeing, thou wilt know what to do."

"Zaida--is it of Zaida?" David asked.

"The man will answer for himself, Saadat."  Coming within a few feet of
the figure crouched upon the rock, Ebn Ezra paused and stretched out a
hand.  "A moment, Saadat.  Dost thou not see, dost thou not recognise
him?"

David intently studied the figure, which seemed unconscious of their
presence.  The shoulders were stooping and relaxed as though from great
fatigue, but David could see that the figure was that of a tall man.  The
head was averted, but a rough beard covered the face, and, in the light
of the fire, one hand that clutched it showed long and skinny and yellow
and cruel.  The hand fascinated David's eyes.  Where had he seen it?  It
flashed upon him--a hand clutching a robe, in a frenzy of fear, in the
court-yard of the blue tiles, in Kaid's Palace--Achmet the Ropemaker!
He drew back a step.

"Achmet," he said in a low voice.  The figure stirred, the hand dropped
from the beard and clutched the knee; but the head was not raised, and
the body remained crouching and listless.

"He escaped?" David said, turning to Ebn Ezra Bey.

"I know not by what means--a camel-driver bribed, perhaps, and a camel
left behind for him.  After the caravan had travelled a day's journey he
joined it.  None knew what to do.  He was not a leper, and he was armed."

"Leave him with me," said David.

Ebn Ezra hesitated.  "He is armed; he was thy foe--"

"I am armed also," David answered enigmatically, and indicated by a
gesture that he wished to be left alone.  Ebn Ezra drew away towards the
palm-tree, and stood at this distance watching anxiously, for he knew
what dark passions seize upon the Oriental--and Achmet had many things
for which to take vengeance.

David stood for a moment, pondering, his eyes upon the deserter.  "God
greet thee as thou goest, and His goodness befriend thee," he said
evenly.  There was silence, and no movement.  "Rise and speak," he added
sternly.  "Dost thou not hear?  Rise, Achmet Pasha!"

Achmet Pasha!  The head of the desolate wretch lifted, the eyes glared at
David for an instant, as though to see whether he was being mocked, and
then the spare figure stretched itself, and the outcast stood up.  The
old lank straightness was gone, the shoulders were bent, the head was
thrust forward, as though the long habit of looking into dark places had
bowed it out of all manhood.

"May grass spring under thy footstep, Saadat," he said, in a thick voice,
and salaamed awkwardly--he had been so long absent from life's
formularies.

"What dost thou here, pasha?" asked David formally.  "Thy sentence had
no limit."

"I could not die there," said the hollow voice, and the head sank farther
forward.  "Year after year I lived there, but I could not die among them.
I was no leper; I am no leper.  My penalty was my penalty, and I paid
it to the full, piastre by piastre of my body and my mind.  It was not
one death, it was death every hour, every day I stayed.  I had no mind.
I could not think.  Mummy-cloths were round my brain; but the fire burned
underneath and would not die.  There was the desert, but my limbs were
like rushes.  I had no will, and I could not flee.  I was chained to the
evil place.  If I stayed it was death, if I went it was death."

"Thou art armed now," said David suggestively.  Achmet laid a hand
fiercely upon a dagger under his robe.  "I hid it.  I was afraid.  I
could not die--my hand was like a withered leaf; it could not strike; my
heart poured out like water.  Once I struck a leper, that he might strike
and kill me; but he lay upon the ground and wept, for all his anger,
which had been great, died in him at last.  There was none other given to
anger there.  The leper has neither anger, nor mirth, nor violence, nor
peace.  It is all the black silent shame--and I was no leper."

"Why didst thou come?  What is there but death for thee here, or anywhere
thou goest!  Kaid's arm will find thee; a thousand hands wait to strike
thee."

"I could not die there--Dost thou think that I repent?" he added with
sudden fierceness.  "Is it that which would make me repent?  Was I worse
than thousands of others?  I have come out to die--to fight and die.
Aiwa, I have come to thee, whom I hated, because thou canst give me death
as I desire it.  My mother was an Arab slave from Senaar, and she was got
by war, and all her people.  War and fighting were their portion--as they
ate, as they drank and slept.  In the black years behind me among the
Unclean, there was naught to fight--could one fight the dead, and the
agony of death, and the poison of the agony!  Life, it is done for me--
am I not accursed?  But to die fighting--ay, fighting for Egypt, since it
must be, and fighting for thee, since it must be; to strike, and strike,
and strike, and earn death!  Must the dog, because he is a dog, die in
the slime?  Shall he not be driven from the village to die in the clean
sand?  Saadat, who will see in me Achmet Pasha, who did with Egypt what
he willed, and was swept away by the besom in thy hand?  Is there in me
aught of that Achmet that any should know?"

"None would know thee for that Achmet," answered David.

"I know, it matters not how--at last a letter found me, and the way of
escape--that thou goest again to the Soudan.  There will be fighting
there--"

"Not by my will," interrupted David.

"Then by the will of Sheitan the accursed; but there will be fighting--
am I not an Arab, do I not know?  Thou hast not conquered yet.  Bid me go
where thou wilt, do what thou wilt, so that I may be among the fighters,
and in the battle forget what I have seen.  Since I am unclean, and am
denied the bosom of Allah, shall I not go as a warrior to Hell, where men
will fear me?  Speak, Saadat, canst thou deny me this?"

Nothing of repentance, so far as he knew, moved the dark soul; but, like
some evil spirit, he would choose the way to his own doom, the place and
the manner of it: a sullen, cruel, evil being, unyielding in his evil,
unmoved by remorse--so far as he knew.  Yet he would die fighting, and
for Egypt "and for thee, if it must be so.  To strike, to strike, to
strike, and earn death!"  What Achmet did not see, David saw, the glimmer
of light breaking through the cloud of shame and evil and doom.  Yonder
in the Soudan more problems than one would be solved, more lives than one
be put to the extreme test.  He did not answer Achmet's question yet.
"Zaida--?" he said in a low voice.  The pathos of her doom had been a
dark memory.

Achmet's voice dropped lower as he answered.  "She lived till the day her
sister died.  I never saw her face; but I was sent to bear each day to
her door the food she ate and a balass of water; and I did according to
my sentence.  Yet I heard her voice.  And once, at last, the day she
died, she spoke to me, and said from inside the hut: 'Thy work is done,
Achmet.  Go in peace.'  And that night she lay down on her sister's
grave, and in the morning she was found dead upon it."

David's eyes were blinded with tears.  "It was too long," he said at
last, as though to himself.

"That day," continued Achmet, "there fell ill with leprosy the Christian
priest from this place who had served in that black service so long; and
then a fire leapt up in me.  Zaida was gone--I had brought food and a
balass of water to her door those many times; there was naught to do,
since she was gone--"

Suddenly David took a step nearer to him and looked into the sullen and
drooping eyes.  "Thou shalt go with me, Achmet.  I will do this unlawful
act for thee.  At daybreak I will give thee orders.  Thou shalt join me
far from here--if I go to the Soudan," he added, with a sudden
remembrance of his position; and he turned away slowly.

After a moment, with muttered words, Achmet sank down upon the stone
again, drew a cake of dourha from his inner robe, and began to eat.

The camel-boy had lighted a fire, and he sat beside it warming his hands
at the blaze and still singing to himself:

    "The bed of my love I will sprinkle with attar of roses,
     The face of my love I will touch with the balm
     With the balm of the tree from the farthermost wood,
     From the wood without end, in the world without end.
     My love holds the cup to my lips, and I drink of the cup,
     And the attar of roses I sprinkle will soothe like the evening dew,
     And the balm will be healing and sleep, and the cup I will drink,
     I will drink of the cup my love holds to my lips--"

David stood listening.  What power was there in desert life that could
make this poor camel-driver, at the end of a long day of weariness and
toil and little food and drink, sing a song of content and cheerfulness?
The little needed, the little granted, and no thought beyond--save the
vision of one who waited in the hut by the onion-field.  He gathered
himself together and tuned his mind to the scene through which he had
just passed, and then to the interview he would have with Kaid on the
morrow.  A few hours ago he had seen no way out of it all--he had had no
real hope that Kaid would turn to him again; but the last two hours had
changed all that.  Hope was alive in him.  He had fought a desperate
fight with himself, and he had conquered.  Then had come Achmet,
unrepentant, degraded still, but with the spirit of Something glowing--
Achmet to die for a cause, driven by that Something deep beneath the
degradation and the crime.  He had hope, and, as the camel-driver's voice
died away, and he lay down with a sheep-skin over him and went instantly
to sleep, David drew to the fire and sat down beside it.  Presently Ebn
Ezra came to urge him to go to bed, but he would not.  He had slept, he
said; he had slept and rested, and the night was good--he would wait.
Then the other brought rugs and blankets, and gave David some, and lay
down beside the fire, and watched and waited for he knew not what.  Ever
and ever his eyes were on David, and far back under the acacia-tree
Achmet slept as he had not slept since his doom fell on him.

At last Ebn Ezra Bey also slept; but David was awake with the night and
the benevolent moon and the marching stars.  The spirit of the desert was
on him, filling him with its voiceless music.  From the infinite
stretches of sand to the south came the irresistible call of life, as
soft as the leaves in a garden of roses, as deep as the sea.  This world
was still, yet there seemed a low, delicate humming, as of multitudinous
looms at a distance so great that the ear but faintly caught it--the
sound of the weavers of life and destiny and eternal love, the hands of
the toilers of all the ages spinning and spinning on; and he was part of
it, not abashed or dismayed because he was but one of the illimitable
throng.

The hours wore on, but still he sat there, peace in all his heart, energy
tingling softly through every vein, the wings of hope fluttering at his
ear.

At length the morning came, and, from the west, with the rising sun, came
a traveller swiftly, making for where he was.  The sleepers stirred
around him and waked and rose.  The little camp became alive.  As the
traveller neared the fresh-made fire, David saw that it was Lacey.  He
went eagerly to meet him.

"Thee has news," he said.  "I see it is so."  He held Lacey's hand in
his.

"Say, you are going on that expedition, Saadat.  You wanted money.  Will
a quarter of a million do?"  David's eyes caught fire.

From the monastery there came the voices of the monks:

     "O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands.  Serve the Lord with
     gladness, and come before His presence with a song."




CHAPTER XXXIII

THE DARK INDENTURE

Nahoum had forgotten one very important thing: that what affected David
as a Christian in Egypt would tell equally against himself.  If, in his
ill-health and dejection, Kaid drank deep of the cup of Mahomet, the red
eyes of fanaticism would be turned upon the Armenian, as upon the
European Christian.  He had forgotten it for the moment, but when, coming
into Kaid's Palace, a little knot of loiterers spat upon the ground and
snarled, "Infidel--Nazarene!" with contempt and hatred, the significance
of the position came home to him.  He made his way to a far quarter of
the Palace, thoughtfully weighing the circumstances, and was met by
Mizraim.

Mizraim salaamed.  "The height of thy renown be as the cedar of Lebanon,
Excellency."

"May thy feet tread the corn of everlasting fortune, son of Mahomet."

They entered the room together.  Nahoum looked at Mizraim curiously.  He
was not satisfied with what he saw.  Mizraim's impassive face had little
expression, but the eyes were furtively eager and sinister.

"Well, so it is, and if it is, what then?" asked Nahoum coolly.

"Ki di, so it is," answered Mizraim, and a ghastly smile came to his
lips.  This infidel pasha, Nahoum, had a mind that pierced to the meaning
of words ere they were spoken.  Mizraim's hand touched his forehead, his
breast, his lips, and, clasping and unclasping his long, snakelike
fingers, he began the story he had come to tell.

"The Inglesi, whom Allah confound, the Effendina hath blackened by a
look, his words have smitten him in the vital parts--"

"Mizraim, thou dove, speak to the purpose!"  Mizraim showed a dark
pleasure at the interruption.  Nahoum was impatient, anxious; that made
the tale better worth telling.

"Sharif and the discontented ones who dare not act, like the vultures,
they flee the living man, but swoop upon the corpse.  The consuls of
those countries who love not England or Claridge Pasha, and the holy men,
and the Cadi, all scatter smouldering fires.  There is a spirit in the
Palace and beyond which is blowing fast to a great flame."

"Then, so it is, great one, and what bodes it?"

"It may kill the Inglesi; but it will also sweep thee from the fields of
life where thou dost flourish."

"It is not against the foreigner, but against the Christian, Mizraim?"

"Thy tongue hath wisdom, Excellency."

"Thou art a Muslim--"

"Why do I warn thee?  For service done to me; and because there is none
other worth serving in Egypt.  Behold, it is my destiny to rule others,
to serve thee."

"Once more thy turban full of gold, Mizraim, if thou dost service now
that hath meaning and is not a belching of wind and words.  Thou hast a
thing to say--say it, and see if Nahoum hath lost his wit, or hath a
palsied arm."

"Then behold, pasha.  Are not my spies in all the Palace?  Is not my
scourge heavier than the whip of the horned horse?  Ki di, so it is.
This I have found.  Sharif hath, with others, made a plot which hath
enough powder in it to shake Egypt, and toss thee from thy high place
into the depths.  There is a Christian--an Armenian, as it chances; but
he was chosen because he was a Christian, and for that only.  His name is
Rahib.  He is a tent-maker.  He had three sons.  They did kill an effendi
who had cheated them of their land.  Two of them were hanged last week;
the other, caught but a few days since, is to hang within three days.
To-day Kaid goes to the Mosque of Mahmoud, as is the custom at this
festival.  The old man hath been persuaded to attempt the life of Kaid,
upon condition that his son--his Benjamin--is set free.  It will be but
an attempt at Kaid's life, no more; but the cry will go forth that a
Christian did the thing; and the Muslim flame will leap high."

"And the tent-maker?" asked Nahoum musingly, though he was turning over
the tale in his mind, seeing behind it and its far consequences.

"Malaish, what does it matter!  But he is to escape, and they are to hang
another Christian in his stead for the attempt on Kaid.  It hath no
skill, but it would suffice.  With the dervishes gone malboos, and the
faithful drunk with piety--canst thou not see the issue, pasha?  Blood
will be shed."

"The Jews of Europe would be angry," said Nahoum grimly but evenly.  "The
loans have been many, and Kaid has given a lien by the new canal at Suez.
The Jews will be angry," he repeated, "and for every drop of Christian
blood shed there would be a lanced vein here.  But that would not bring
back Nahoum Pasha," he continued cynically.  "Well, this is thy story,
Mizraim; this is what they would do.  Now what hast thou done to stop
their doing?"

"Am I not a Muslim?  Shall I give Sharif to the Nile?"

Nahoum smiled darkly.  "There is a simpler way.  Thy mind ever runs on
the bowstring and the sword.  These are great, but there is a greater.
It is the mocking finger.  At midnight, when Kaid goes to the Mosque
Mahmoud, a finger will mock the plotters till they are buried in
confusion.  Thou knowest the governor of the prisons--has he not need of
something?  Hath he never sought favours of thee?"

"Bismillah, but a week ago!"

"Then, listen, thou shepherd of the sheep--"

He paused, as there came a tap at the door, and a slave entered hurriedly
and addressed Nahoum.  "The effendi, Ebn Ezra Bey, whom thou didst set me
to watch, he hath entered the Palace, and asks for the Effendina."

Nahoum started, and his face clouded, but his eyes flashed fire.  He
tossed the slave a coin.  "Thou hast done well.  Where is he now?"

"He waits in the hall, where is the statue of Mehemet Ali and the lions."

"In an hour, Mizraim, thou shalt hear what I intend.  Peace be to thee!"

"And on thee, peace!" answered Mizraim, as Nahoum passed from the room,
and walked hastily towards the hall where he should find Ebn Ezra Bey.
Nearing the spot, he brought his step to a deliberate slowness, and
appeared not to notice the stately Arab till almost upon him.

"Salaam, effendi," he said smoothly, yet with inquisition in his eye,
with malice in his tone.

"Salaam, Excellency."

"Thou art come on the business of thy master?"

"Who is my master, Excellency?"

"Till yesterday it was Claridge Pasha.  Hast thou then forsaken him in
his trouble--the rat from the sinking ship?"

A flush passed over Ebn Ezra Bey's face, and his mouth opened with a gasp
of anger.  Oriental though he was, he was not as astute as this Armenian
Christian, who was purposely insulting him, that he might, in a moment of
heat, snatch from him the business he meant to lay before Kaid.  Nahoum
had not miscalculated.

"I have but one master, Excellency," Ebn Ezra answered quietly at last,
"and I have served him straightly.  Hast thou done likewise?"

"What is straight to thee might well be crooked to me, effendi."

"Thou art crooked as the finger of a paralytic."

"Yet I have worked in peace with Claridge Pasha for these years past,
even until yesterday, when thou didst leave him to his fate."

"His ship will sail when thine is crumbling on the sands, and all thou
art is like a forsaken cockatrice's nest."

"Is it this thou hast come to say to the Effendina?"

"What I have come to say to the Effendina is for the world to know after
it hath reached his ears.  I know thee, Nahoum Pasha.  Thou art a
traitor.  Claridge Pasha would abolish slavery, and thou dost receive
great sums of gold from the slave-dealers to prevent it."

"Is it this thou wilt tell Kaid?" Nahoum asked with a sneer.  "And hast
thou proofs?"

"Even this day they have come to my hands from the south."

"Yet I think the proofs thou hast will not avail; and I think that thou
wilt not show them to Kaid.  The gift of second thinking is a great gift.
Thou must find greater reason for seeking the Effendina."

"That too shall be.  Gold thou hadst to pay the wages of the soldiers of
the south.  Thou didst keep the gold and order the slave-hunt; and the
soldiers of the Effendina have been paid in human flesh and blood--ten
thousand slaves since Claridge Pasha left the Soudan, and three thousand
dead upon the desert sands, abandoned by those who hunted them when water
grew scarce and food failed.  To-day shall see thy fall."

At his first words Nahoum had felt a shock, from which his spirit reeled;
but an inspiration came to him on the moment; and he listened with a
saturnine coolness to the passionate words of the indignant figure
towering above him.  When Ebn Ezra had finished, he replied quietly:

"It is even as thou sayest, effendi.  The soldiers were paid in slaves
got in the slave-hunt; and I have gold from the slave-dealers.  I needed
it, for the hour is come when I must do more for Egypt than I have ever
done."

With a gesture of contempt Ebn Ezra made to leave, seeing an official of
the Palace in the distance.  Nahoum stopped him.  "But, one moment ere
thou dost thrust thy hand into the cockatrice's den.  Thou dost measure
thyself against Nahoum?  In patience and with care have I trained myself
for the battle.  The bulls of Bashan may roar, yet my feet are shod with
safety.  Thou wouldst go to Kaid and tell him thy affrighted tale.  I
tell thee, thou wilt not go.  Thou hast reason yet, though thy blood is
hot.  Thou art to Claridge Pasha like a brother--as to his uncle before
him, who furnished my father's palace with carpets.  The carpets still
soften the fall of my feet in my father's palace, as they did soften the
fall of my brother's feet, the feet of Foorgat Bey."

He paused, looking at Ebn Ezra with quiet triumph, though his eyes had
ever that smiling innocence which had won David in days gone by.  He was
turning his words over on the tongue with a relish born of long waiting.

"Come," he said presently--"come, and I will give thee reason why thou
wilt not speak with Kaid to-day.  This way, effendi."

He led the other into a little room hung about with rugs and tapestry,
and, going to the wall, he touched a spring.  "One moment here, effendi,"
he added quietly.  The room was as it had been since David last stood
within it.

"In this room, effendi," Nahoum said with cold deliberation, "Claridge
Pasha killed my brother, Foorgat Bey."

Ebn Ezra fell back as though he had been struck.  Swiftly Nahoum told him
the whole truth--even to the picture of the brougham, and the rigid,
upright figure passing through the night to Foorgat's palace, the gaunt
Mizraim piloting the equipage of death.

"I have held my peace for my own reasons, effendi.  Wilt thou then force
me to speak?  If thou dost still cherish Claridge Pasha, wilt thou see
him ruined?  Naught but ruin could follow the telling of the tale at this
moment--his work, his life, all done.  The scandal, the law, vengeance!
But as it is now, Kaid may turn to him again; his work may yet go on--he
has had the luck of angels, and Kaid is fickle.  Who can tell?"

Abashed and overwhelmed, Ebn Ezra Bey looked at him keenly.  "To tell of
Foorgat Bey would ruin thee also," he said.  "That thou knowest.  The
trick--would Kaid forgive it?  Claridge Pasha would not be ruined alone."

"Be it so.  If thou goest to Kaid with thy story, I go to Egypt with
mine.  Choose."

Ebn Ezra turned to go.  "The high God judge between him and thee," he
said, and, with bowed head, left the Palace.




CHAPTER XXXIV

NAHOUM DROPS THE MASK

"CLARIDGE PASHA!"

At the sound of the words, announced in a loud voice, hundreds of heads
were turned towards the entrance of the vast salon, resplendent with
gilded mirrors, great candelabra and chandeliers, golden hangings, and
divans glowing with robes of yellow silk.

It was the anniversary of Kaid's succession, and all entitled to come
poured into the splendid chamber.  The showy livery of the officials, the
loose, spacious, gorgeous uniforms of the officers, with the curved
jewelled scimitars and white turbans, the rich silk robes of the Ulema,
robe over robe of coloured silk with flowing sleeves and sumptuous silken
vests, the ample dignity of noble-looking Arabs in immense white turbans,
the dark straight Stambouli coat of the officials, made a picture of
striking variety and colour and interest.

About the centre of the room, laying palm to palm again and yet again,
touching lips and forehead and breast, speaking with slow, leisurely,
voices, were two Arab sheikhs from the far Soudan.  One of these showed a
singular interest in the movements of Nahoum Pasha as he entered the
chamber, and an even greater interest in David when he was announced; but
as David, in his journey up the chamber, must pass near him, he drew
behind a little group of officials, who whispered to each other excitedly
as David came on.  More than once before this same Sheikh Abdullah had
seen David, and once they had met, and had made a treaty of amity, and
Abdullah had agreed to deal in slaves no more; and yet within three
months had sent to Cairo two hundred of the best that could be found
between Khartoum and Senaar.  His business, of which Ebn Ezra Bey had due
knowledge, had now been with Nahoum.  The business of the other Arab, a
noble-looking and wiry Bedouin from the South, had been with Ebn Ezra
Bey, and each hid his business from his friend.  Abdullah murmured to
himself as David passed--a murmur of admiration and astonishment.  He had
heard of the disfavour in which the Inglesi was; but, as he looked at
David's face with its quiet smile, the influence which he felt in the
desert long ago came over him again.

"By Allah," he said aloud abstractedly, "it is a face that will not hide
when the khamsin blows!  Who shall gainsay it?  If he were not an infidel
he would be a Mahdi."

To this his Bedouin friend replied: "As the depths of the pool at Ghebel
Farik, so are his eyes.  You shall dip deep and you shall not find the
bottom.  Bismillah, I would fight Kaid's Nubians, but not this infidel
pasha!"

Never had David appeared to such advantage.  The victory over himself the
night before, the message of hope that had reached him at the monastery
in the desert, the coming of Lacey, had given him a certain quiet
masterfulness not reassuring to his foes.

As he entered the chamber but now, there flashed into his mind the scene
six years ago when, an absolute stranger, he had stepped into this
Eastern salon, and had heard his name called out to the great throng:
"Claridge efendi!"

He addressed no one, but he bowed to the group of foreign consuls-
general, looking them steadily in the eyes.  He knew their devices and
what had been going on of late, he was aware that his fall would mean a
blow to British prestige, and the calmness of his gaze expressed a
fortitude which had a disconcerting effect upon the group.  The British
Consul-General stood near by.  David advanced to him, and, as he did so,
the few who surrounded the Consul-General fell back.  David held out his
hand.  Somewhat abashed and ill at ease, the Consul-General took it.

"Have you good news from Downing Street?" asked David quietly.

The Consul-General hesitated for an instant, and then said: "There is no
help to be had for you or for what you are doing in that quarter."  He
lowered his voice.  "I fear Lord Eglington does not favour you; and he
controls the Foreign Minister.  I am very sorry.  I have done my best,
but my colleagues, the other consuls, are busy--with Lord Eglington."

David turned his head away for an instant.  Strange how that name sent a
thrill through him, stirred his blood!  He did not answer the Consul-
General, and the latter continued:

"Is there any hope?  Is the breach with Kaid complete?"

David smiled gravely.  "We shall see presently.  I have made no change in
my plans on the basis of a breach."

At that moment he caught sight of Nahoum some distance away and moved
towards him.  Out of the corner of his eye Nahoum saw David coming, and
edged away towards that point where Kaid would enter, and where the crowd
was greater.  As he did so Kaid appeared.  A thrill went through the
chamber.  Contrary to his custom, he was dressed in the old native
military dress of Mehemet Ali.  At his side was a jewelled scimitar, and
in his turban flashed a great diamond.  In his hand he carried a snuff-
box, covered with brilliants, and on his breast were glittering orders.

The eyes of the reactionaries flashed with sinister pleasure when they
saw Kaid.  This outward display of Orientalism could only be a reflex of
the mind.  It was the outer symbol of Kaid's return to the spirit of the
old days, before the influence of the Inglesi came upon him.  Every
corrupt and intriguing mind had a palpitation of excitement.

In Nahoum the sight of Kaid produced mixed feelings.  If, indeed, this
display meant reaction towards an entourage purely Arab, Egyptian, and
Muslim, then it was no good omen for his Christian self.  He drew near,
and placed himself where Kaid could see him.  Kaid's manner was cheerful,
but his face showed the effect of suffering, physical and mental.
Presently there entered behind him Sharif Bey, whose appearance was the
signal for a fresh demonstration.  Now, indeed, there could be no doubt
as to Kaid's reaction.  Yet if Sharif had seen Mizraim's face evilly
gloating near by he would have been less confident.

David was standing where Kaid must see him, but the Effendina gave no
sign of recognition.  This was so significant that the enemies of David
rejoiced anew.  The day of the Inglesi was over.  Again and again did
Kaid's eye wander over David's head.

David remained calm and watchful, neither avoiding nor yet seeking the
circle in which Kaid moved.  The spirit with which he had entered the
room, however, remained with him, even when he saw Kaid summon to him
some of the most fanatical members of the court circle, and engage them
in talk for a moment.  But as this attention grew more marked, a cloud
slowly gathered in the far skies of his mind.

There was one person in the great assembly, however, who seemed to be
unduly confident.  It was an ample, perspiring person in evening dress,
who now and again mopped a prematurely bald head, and who said to
himself, as Kaid talked to the reactionaries:

"Say, Kald's overdoing it.  He's putting potted chicken on the butter.
But it's working all right-r-i-g-h-t.  It's worth the backsheesh!"

At this moment Kaid fastened David with his look, and spoke in a tone so
loud that people standing at some distance were startled.

"Claridge Pasha!"

In the hush that followed David stepped forward.  "May the bounty of the
years be thine, Saadat," Kaid said in a tone none could misunderstand.

"May no tree in thy orchard wither, Effendina," answered David in a firm
voice.

Kaid beckoned him near, and again he spoke loudly: "I have proved thee,
and found thee as gold tried seven times by the fire, Saadat.  In the
treasury of my heart shall I store thee up.  Thou art going to the Soudan
to finish the work Mehemet Ali began.  I commend thee to Allah, and will
bid thee farewell at sunrise--I and all who love Egypt."

There was a sinister smile on his lips, as his eyes wandered over the
faces of the foreign consuls-general.  The look he turned on the
intriguers of the Palace was repellent; he reserved for Sharif a moody,
threatening glance, and the desperate hakim shrank back confounded from
it.  His first impulse was to flee from the Palace and from Cairo; but he
bethought himself of the assault to be made on Kaid by the tent-maker, as
he passed to the mosque a few hours later, and he determined to await the
issue of that event.  Exchanging glances with confederates, he
disappeared, as Kaid laid a hand on David's arm and drew him aside.

After viewing the great throng cynically for a moment Kaid said: "To-
morrow thou goest.  A month hence the hakim's knife will find the thing
that eats away my life.  It may be they will destroy it and save me; if
not, we shall meet no more."

David looked into his eyes.  "Not in a month shall thy work be completed,
Effendina.  Thou shalt live.  God and thy strong will shall make it so."

A light stole over the superstitious face.  "No device or hatred, or
plot, has prevailed against thee," Kaid said eagerly.  "Thou hast
defeated all--even when I turned against thee in the black blood of
despair.  Thou hast conquered me even as thou didst Harrik."

"Thou dost live," returned David drily.  "Thou dost live for Egypt's
sake, even as Harrik died for Egypt's sake, and as others shall die."

"Death hath tracked thee down how often!  Yet with a wave of the hand
thou hast blinded him, and his blow falls on the air.  Thou art beset by
a thousand dangers, yet thou comest safe through all.  Thou art an honest
man.  For that I besought thee to stay with me.  Never didst thou lie to
me.  Good luck hath followed thee.  Kismet!  Stay with me, and it may be
I shall be safe also.  This thought came to me in the night, and in the
morning was my reward, for Lacey effendi came to me and said, even as I
say now, that thou wilt bring me good luck; and even in that hour, by the
mercy of God, a loan much needed was negotiated.  Allah be praised!"

A glint of humour shot into David's eyes.  Lacey--a loan--he read it all!
Lacey had eased the Prince Pasha's immediate and pressing financial
needs--and, "Allah be praised!"  Poor human nature--backsheesh to a
Prince regnant!

"Effendina," he said presently, "thou didst speak of Harrik.  One there
was who saved thee then--" "Zaida!"  A change passed over Kaid's face.
"Speak!  Thou hast news of her?  She is gone?"  Briefly David told him
how Zaida was found upon her sister's grave.  Kaid's face was turned away
as he listened.

"She spoke no word of me?" Kaid said at last.  "To whom should she
speak?" David asked gently.  "But the amulet thou gavest her, set with
one red jewel, it was clasped in her hand in death."

Suddenly Kaid's anger blazed.  "Now shall Achmet die," he burst out.
"His hands and feet shall be burnt off, and he shall be thrown to the
vultures."

"The Place of the Lepers is sacred even from thee, Effendina," answered
David gravely.  "Yet Achmet shall die even as Harrik died.  He shall die
for Egypt and for thee, Effendina."

Swiftly he drew the picture of Achmet at the monastery in the desert.
"I have done the unlawful thing, Effendina," he said at last, "but thou
wilt make it lawful.  He hath died a thousand deaths--all save one."

"Be it so," answered Kaid gloomily, after a moment; then his face lighted
with cynical pleasure as he scanned once more the faces of the crowd
before him.  At last his eyes fastened on Nahoum.  He turned to David.

"Thou dost still desire Nahoum in his office?" he asked keenly.

A troubled look came into David's eyes, then it cleared away, and he said
firmly: "For six years we have worked together, Effendina.  I am surety
for his loyalty to thee."

"And his loyalty to thee?"

A pained look crossed over David's face again, but he said with a will
that fought all suspicion down: "The years bear witness."

Kaid shrugged his shoulders slightly.  "The years have perjured
themselves ere this.  Yet, as thou sayest, Nahoum is a Christian," he
added, with irony scarcely veiled.

Now he moved forward with David towards the waiting court.  David
searched the groups of faces for Nahoum in vain.  There were things
to be said to Nahoum before he left on the morrow, last suggestions
to be given.  Nahoum could not be seen.

Nahoum was gone, as were also Sharif and his confederates, and in the
lofty Mosque of Mahmoud soft lights were hovering, while the Sheikh-el-
Islam waited with Koran and scimitar for the ruler of Egypt to pray to
God and salute the Lord Mahomet.

At the great gateway in the Street of the Tent Makers Kaid paused on his
way to the Mosque Mahmoud.  The Gate was studded with thousands of nails,
which fastened to its massive timbers relics of the faithful, bits of
silk and cloth, and hair and leather; and here from time immemorial a
holy man had sat and prayed.  At the gateway Kaid salaamed humbly, and
spoke to the holy man, who, as he passed, raised his voice shrilly in an
appeal to Allah, commending Kaid to mercy and everlasting favour.  On
every side eyes burned with religious zeal, and excited faces were turned
towards the Effendina.  At a certain point there were little groups of
men with faces more set than excited.  They had a look of suppressed
expectancy.  Kald neared them, passed them, and, as he did so, they
looked at each other in consternation.  They were Sharif's confederates,
fanatics carefully chosen.  The attempt on Kaid's life should have been
made opposite the spot where they stood.  They craned their necks in
effort to find the Christian tent-maker, but in vain.

Suddenly they heard a cry, a loud voice calling.  It was Rahib the tent-
maker.  He was beside Kaid's stirrups, but no weapon was in his hand; and
his voice was calling blessings down on the Effendina's head for having
pardoned and saved from death his one remaining son, the joy of his old
age.  In all the world there was no prince like Kaid, said the tent-
maker; none so bountiful and merciful and beautiful in the eyes of men.
God grant him everlasting days, the beloved friend of his people, just to
all and greatly to be praised.

As the soldiers drove the old man away with kindly insistence--for Kaid
had thrown him a handful of gold--Mizraim, the Chief Eunuch, laughed
wickedly.  As Nahoum had said, the greatest of all weapons was the
mocking finger.  He and Mizraim had had their way with the governor of
the prisons, and the murderer had gone in safety, while the father stayed
to bless Kaid.  Rahib the tent-maker had fooled the plotters.  They were
mad in derision.  They did not know that Kaid was as innocent as
themselves of having pardoned the tent-maker's son.  Their moment had
passed; they could not overtake it; the match had spluttered and gone out
at the fuel laid for the fire of fanaticism.

The morning of David's departure came.  While yet it was dark he had
risen, and had made his last preparations.  When he came into the open
air and mounted, it was not yet sunrise, and in that spectral early
light, which is all Egypt's own, Cairo looked like some dream-city in a
forgotten world.  The Mokattam Hills were like vast dun barriers guarding
and shutting in the ghostly place, and, high above all, the minarets of
the huge mosque upon the lofty rocks were impalpable fingers pointing an
endless flight.  The very trees seemed so little real and substantial
that they gave the eye the impression that they might rise and float
away.  The Nile was hung with mist, a trailing cloud unwound from the
breast of the Nile-mother.  At last the sun touched the minarets of the
splendid mosque with shafts of light, and over at Ghizeh and Sakkarah the
great pyramids, lifting their heads from the wall of rolling blue mist
below, took the morning's crimson radiance with the dignity of four
thousand years.

On the decks of the little steamer which was to carry them south David,
Ebn Ezra, Lacey, and Mahommed waited.  Presently Kaid came, accompanied
by his faithful Nubians, their armour glowing in the first warm light of
the rising sun, and crowds of people, who had suddenly emerged, ran
shrilling to the waterside behind him.

Kaid's pale face had all last night's friendliness, as he bade David
farewell with great honour, and commended him to the care of Allah; and
the swords of the Nubians clashed against their breasts and on their
shields in salaam.

But there was another farewell to make; and it was made as David's foot
touched the deck of the steamer.  Once again David looked at Nahoum as he
had done six years ago, in the little room where they had made their bond
together.  There was the same straight look in Nahoum's eyes.  Was he not
to be trusted?  Was it not his own duty to trust?  He clasped Nahoum's
hand in farewell, and turned away.  But as he gave the signal to start,
and the vessel began to move, Nahoum came back.  He leaned over the
widening space and said in a low tone, as David again drew near:

"There is still an account which should be settled, Saadat.  It has
waited long; but God is with the patient.  There is the account of
Foorgat Bey."

The light fled from David's eyes and his heart stopped beating for a
moment.  When his eyes saw the shore again Nahoum was gone with Kaid.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Cherish any alleviating lie
Triumph of Oriental duplicity over Western civilisation
When God permits, shall man despair?






THE WEAVERS

By Gilbert Parker


BOOK V.


XXXV.     THE FLIGHT OF THE WOUNDED
XXXVI.    "IS IT ALWAYS SO-IN LIFE?"
XXXVII.   THE FLYING SHUTTLE
XXXVIII.  JASPER KIMBER SPEAKS
XXXIX.    FAITH JOURNEYS TO LONDON



CHAPTER XXXV

THE FLIGHT OF THE WOUNDED

              "And Mario can soothe with a tenor note
               The souls in purgatory."

"Non ti scordar di mi!"  The voice rang out with passionate stealthy
sweetness, finding its way into far recesses of human feeling.  Women of
perfect poise and with the confident look of luxury and social fame
dropped their eyes abstractedly on the opera-glasses lying in their laps,
or the programmes they mechanically fingered, and recalled, they knew not
why--for what had it to do with this musical narration of a tragic
Italian tale!--the days when, in the first flush of their wedded life,
they had set a seal of devotion and loyalty and love upon their arms,
which, long ago, had gone to the limbo of lost jewels, with the chaste,
fresh desires of worshipping hearts.  Young egotists, supremely happy and
defiant in the pride of the fact that they loved each other, and that it
mattered little what the rest of the world enjoyed, suffered, and
endured--these were suddenly arrested in their buoyant and solitary
flight, and stirred restlessly in their seats.  Old men whose days of
work were over; who no longer marshalled their legions, or moved at a nod
great ships upon the waters in masterful manoeuvres; whose voices were
heard no more in chambers of legislation, lashing partisan feeling to a
height of cruelty or lulling a storm among rebellious followers; whose
intellects no longer devised vast schemes of finance, or applied secrets
of science to transform industry--these heard the enthralling cry of a
soul with the darkness of eternal loss gathering upon it, and drew back
within themselves; for they too had cried like this one time or another
in their lives.  Stricken, they had cried out, and ambition had fled
away, leaving behind only the habit of living, and of work and duty.

As Hylda, in the Duchess of Snowdon's box, listened with a face which
showed nothing of what she felt, and looking straight at the stage before
her, the words of a poem she had learned but yesterday came to her mind,
and wove themselves into the music thrilling from the voice in the stage
prison:

    "And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
       For the fulness of the days?  Have we withered or agonised?
     Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue
        thence?
       Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?"

"And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence?  Was it then so?
The long weeks which had passed since that night at Hamley, when she had
told Eglington the truth about so many things, had brought no peace,
no understanding, no good news from anywhere.  The morning after she
had spoken with heart laid bare.  Eglington had essayed to have a
reconciliation; but he had come as the martyr, as one injured.  His
egotism at such a time, joined to his attempt to make light of things,
of treating what had happened as a mere "moment of exasperation," as "one
of those episodes inseparable from the lives of the high-spirited," only
made her heart sink and grow cold, almost as insensible as the flesh
under a spray of ether.  He had been neither wise nor patient.  She had
not slept after that bitter, terrible scene, and the morning had found
her like one battered by winter seas, every nerve desperately alert to
pain, yet tears swimming at her heart and ready to spring to her eyes at
a touch of the real thing, the true note--and she knew so well what the
true thing was!  Their great moment had passed, had left her withdrawn
into herself, firmly, yet without heart, performing the daily duties of
life, gay before the world, the delightful hostess, the necessary and
graceful figure at so many functions.

Even as Soolsby had done, who went no further than to tell Eglington his
dark tale, and told no one else, withholding it from "Our Man"; as Sybil
Lady Eglington had shrunk when she had been faced by her obvious duty, so
Hylda hesitated, but from better reason than either.  To do right in the
matter was to strike her husband--it must be a blow now, since her voice
had failed.  To do right was to put in the ancient home and house of
Eglington one whom he--with anger and without any apparent desire to have
her altogether for himself, all the riches of her life and love--had
dared to say commanded her sympathy and interest, not because he was a
man dispossessed of his rights, but because he was a man possessed of
that to which he had no right.  The insult had stung her, had driven her
back into a reserve, out of which she seemed unable to emerge.  How could
she compel Eglington to do right in this thing--do right by his own
father's son?

Meanwhile, that father's son was once more imperilling his life, once
more putting England's prestige in the balance in the Soudan, from which
he had already been delivered twice as though by miracles.  Since he had
gone, months before, there had been little news; but there had been much
public anxiety; and she knew only too well that there had been
'pourparlers' with foreign ministers, from which no action came safe-
guarding David.

Many a human being has realised the apathy, the partial paralysis of the
will, succeeding a great struggle, which has exhausted the vital forces.
Many a general who has fought a desperate and victorious fight after a
long campaign, and amid all the anxieties and miseries of war, has failed
to follow up his advantage, from a sudden lesion of the power for action
in him.  He has stepped from the iron routine of daily effort into a
sudden freedom, and his faculties have failed him, the iron of his will
has vanished.  So it was with Hylda.  She waited for she knew not what.
Was it some dim hope that Eglington might see the right as she saw it?
That he might realise how unreal was this life they were living,
outwardly peaceful and understanding, deluding the world, but inwardly a
place of tears.  How she dreaded the night and its recurrent tears, and
the hours when she could not sleep, and waited for the joyless morning,
as one lost on the moor, blanched with cold, waits for the sun-rise!
Night after night at a certain hour--the hour when she went to bed at
last after that poignant revelation to Eglington--she wept, as she had
wept then, heart-broken tears of disappointment, disillusion, loneliness;
tears for the bitter pity of it all; for the wasting and wasted
opportunities; for the common aim never understood or planned together;
for the precious hours lived in an air of artificial happiness and social
excitement; for a perfect understanding missed; for the touch which no
longer thrilled.

But the end of it all must come.  She was looking frail and delicate, and
her beauty, newly refined, and with a fresh charm, as of mystery or pain,
was touched by feverishness.  An old impatience once hers was vanished,
and Kate Heaver would have given a month's wages for one of those flashes
of petulance of other days ever followed by a smile.  Now the smile was
all too often there, the patient smile which comes to those who have
suffered.  Hardness she felt at times, where Eglington was concerned,
for he seemed to need her now not at all, to be self-contained, self-
dependent--almost arrogantly so; but she did not show it, and she was
outwardly patient.

In his heart of hearts Eglington believed that she loved him, that her
interest in David was only part of her idealistic temperament--the
admiration of a woman for a man of altruistic aims; but his hatred of
David, of what David was, and of his irrefutable claims, reacted on her.
Perverseness and his unhealthy belief that he would master her in the
end, that she would one day break down and come to him, willing to take
his view in all things, and to be his slave--all this drove him farther
and farther on a fatal, ever-broadening path.

Success had spoiled him.  He applied his gifts in politics, daringly
unscrupulous, superficially persuasive, intellectually insinuating, to
his wife; and she, who had been captured once by all these things, was
not to be captured again.  She knew what alone could capture her; and,
as she sat and watched the singers on the stage now, the divine notes of
that searching melody still lingering in her heart, there came a sudden
wonder whether Eglington's heart could not be wakened.  She knew that it
never had been, that he had never known love, the transfiguring and
reclaiming passion.  No, no, surely it could not be too late--her
marriage with him had only come too soon!  He had ridden over her without
mercy; he had robbed her of her rightful share of the beautiful and the
good; he had never loved her; but if love came to him, if he could but
once realise how much there was of what he had missed!  If he did not
save himself--and her--what would be the end?  She felt the cords drawing
her elsewhere; the lure of a voice she had heard in an Egyptian garden
was in her ears.  One night at Hamley, in an abandonment of grief-life
hurt her so--she had remembered the prophecy she had once made that she
would speak to David, and that he would hear; and she had risen from her
seat, impelled by a strange new feeling, and had cried: "Speak!  speak to
me!"  As plainly as she had ever heard anything in her life, she had
heard his voice speak to her a message that sank into the innermost
recesses of her being, and she had been more patient afterwards.  She had
no doubt whatever; she had spoken to him, and he had answered; but the
answer was one which all the world might have heard.

Down deep in her nature was an inalienable loyalty, was a simple,
old-fashioned feeling that "they two," she and Eglington, should cleave
unto each other till death should part.  He had done much to shatter
that feeling; but now, as she listened to Mario's voice, centuries of
predisposition worked in her, and a great pity awoke in her heart.  Could
she not save him, win him, wake him, cure him of the disease of Self?

The thought brought a light to her eyes which had not been there for many
a day.  Out of the deeps of her soul this mist of a pure selflessness
rose, the spirit of that idealism which was the real chord of sympathy
between her and Egypt.

Yes, she would, this once again, try to win the heart of this man; and so
reach what was deeper than heart, and so also give him that without which
his life must be a failure in the end, as Sybil Eglington had said.  How
often had those bitter anguished words of his mother rung in her ears--
"So brilliant and unscrupulous, like yourself; but, oh, so sure of
winning a great place in the world .  .  .  so calculating and determined
and ambitious !"  They came to her now, flashed between the eager
solicitous eyes of her mind and the scene of a perfect and everlasting
reconciliation which it conjured up--flashed and were gone; for her will
rose up and blurred them into mist; and other words of that true
palimpsest of Sybil Eglington's broken life came instead: "And though he
loves me little, as he loves you little too, yet he is my son, and for
what he is we are both responsible one way or another."  As the mother,
so the wife.  She said to herself now in sad paraphrase, "And though he
loves me little, yet he is my husband, and for what he is it may be that
I am in some sense responsible."  Yet he is my husband!  All that it was
came to her; the closed door, the drawn blinds; the intimacy which shut
them away from all the world; the things said which can only be said
without desecration between two honest souls who love each other; and
that sweet isolation which makes marriage a separate world, with its own
sacred revelation.  This she had known; this had been; and though the
image of the sacred thing had been defaced, yet the shrine was not
destroyed.

For she believed that each had kept the letter of the law; that, whatever
his faults, he had turned his face to no other woman.  If she had not
made his heart captive and drawn him by an ever-shortening cord of
attraction, yet she was sure that none other had any influence over him,
that, as he had looked at her in those short-lived days of his first
devotion, he looked at no other.  The way was clear yet.  There was
nothing irretrievable, nothing irrevocable, which would for ever stain
the memory and tarnish the gold of life when the perfect love should be
minted.  Whatever faults of mind or disposition or character were his--
or hers--there were no sins against the pledges they had made, nor the
bond into which they had entered.  Life would need no sponge.  Memory
might still live on without a wound or a cowl of shame.

It was all part of the music to which she listened, and she was almost
oblivious of the brilliant throng, the crowded boxes, or of the Duchess
of Snowdon sitting near her strangely still, now and again scanning the
beautiful face beside her with a reflective look.  The Duchess loved the
girl--she was but a girl, after all--as she had never loved any of her
sex; it had come to be the last real interest of her life.  To her eyes,
dimmed with much seeing, blurred by a garish kaleidoscope of fashionable
life, there had come a look which was like the ghost of a look she had,
how many decades ago.

Presently, as she saw Hylda's eyes withdraw from the stage, and look at
her with a strange, soft moisture and a new light in them, she laid her
fan confidently on her friend's knee, and said in her abrupt whimsical
voice: "You like it, my darling; your eyes are as big as saucers.  You
look as if you'd been seeing things, not things on that silly stage, but
what Verdi felt when he wrote the piece, or something of more account
than that."

"Yes, I've been seeing things," Hylda answered with a smile which came
from a new-born purpose, the dream of an idealist.  "I've been seeing
things that Verdi did not see, and of more account, too.  .  .  .
Do you suppose the House is up yet?"

A strange look flashed into the Duchess's eyes, which had been watching
her with as much pity as interest.  Hylda had not been near the House of
Commons this session, though she had read the reports with her usual
care.  She had shunned the place.

"Why, did you expect Eglington?" the Duchess asked idly, yet she was
watchful too, alert for every movement in this life where the footsteps
of happiness were falling by the edge of a precipice, over which she
would not allow herself to look.  She knew that Hylda did not expect
Eglington, for the decision to come to the opera was taken at the last
moment.

"Of course not--he doesn't know we are here.  But if it wasn't too late,
I thought I'd go down and drive him home."

The Duchess veiled her look.  Here was some new development in the
history which had been torturing her old eyes, which had given her and
Lord Windlehurst as many anxious moments as they had known in many a day,
and had formed them into a vigilance committee of two, who waited for the
critical hour when they should be needed.

"We'll go at once if you like," she replied.  "The opera will be over
soon.  We sent word to Windlehurst to join us, you remember, but he won't
come now; it's too late.  So, we'll go, if you like."

She half rose, but the door of the box opened, and Lord Windlehurst
looked in quizzically.  There was a smile on his face.

"I'm late, I know; but you'll forgive me--you'll forgive me, dear lady,"
he added to Hylda, "for I've been listening to your husband making a
smashing speech for a bad cause."

Hylda smiled.  "Then I must go and congratulate him," she answered, and
withdrew her hand from that of Lord Windlehurst, who seemed to hold it
longer than usual, and pressed it in a fatherly way.

"I'm afraid the House is up," he rejoined, as Hylda turned for her opera-
cloak; "and I saw Eglington leave Palace Yard as I came away."  He gave a
swift, ominous glance towards the Duchess, which Hylda caught, and she
looked at each keenly.

"It's seldom I sit in the Peers' Gallery," continued Windlehurst;
"I don't like going back to the old place much.  It seems empty and
hollow.  But I wouldn't have missed Eglington's fighting speech for a
good deal."

"What was it about?" asked Hylda as they left the box.  She had a sudden
throb of the heart.  Was it the one great question, that which had been
like a gulf of fire between them?

"Oh, Turkey--the unpardonable Turk," answered Windlehurst.  "As good a
defence of a bad case as I ever heard."

"Yes, Eglington would do that well," said the Duchess enigmatically,
drawing her cloak around her and adjusting her hair.  Hylda looked at her
sharply, and Lord Windlehurst slyly, but the Duchess seemed oblivious of
having said anything out of the way, and added: "It's a gift seeing all
that can be said for a bad cause, and saying it, and so making the other
side make their case so strong that the verdict has to be just."

"Dear Duchess, it doesn't always work out that way," rejoined Windlehurst
with a dry laugh.  "Sometimes the devil's advocate wins."

"You are not very complimentary to my husband," retorted Hylda, looking
him in the eyes, for she was not always sure when he was trying to baffle
her.

"I'm not so sure of that.  He hasn't won his case yet.  He has only
staved off the great attack.  It's coming--soon."

"What is the great attack?  What has the Government, or the Foreign
Office, done or left undone?"  "Well, my dear--" Suddenly Lord
Windlehurst remembered himself, stopped, put up his eyeglass, and with
great interest seemed to watch a gay group of people opposite; for the
subject of attack was Egypt and the Government's conduct in not helping
David, in view not alone of his present danger, but of the position of
England in the country, on which depended the security of her highway to
the East.  Windlehurst was a good actor, and he had broken off his words
as though the group he was now watching had suddenly claimed his
attention.  "Well, well, Duchess," he said reflectively, "I see a new
nine days' wonder yonder."  Then, in response to a reminder from Hylda,
he continued: "Ah, yes, the attack!  Oh, Persia--Persia, and our feeble
diplomacy, my dear lady, though you mustn't take that as my opinion,
opponent as I am.  That's the charge, Persia--and her cats."

The Duchess breathed a sigh of relief; for she knew what Windlehurst had
been going to say, and she shrank from seeing what she felt she would
see, if Egypt and Claridge Pasha's name were mentioned.  That night at
Harnley had burnt a thought into her mind which she did not like.  Not
that she had any pity for Eglington; her thought was all for this girl
she loved.  No happiness lay in the land of Egypt for her, whatever her
unhappiness here; and she knew that Hylda must be more unhappy still
before she was ever happy again, if that might be.  There was that
concerning Eglington which Hylda did not know, yet which she must know
one day--and then!  But why were Hylda's eyes so much brighter and softer
and deeper to-night?  There was something expectant, hopeful, brooding in
them.  They belonged not to the life moving round her, but were shining
in a land of their own, a land of promise.  By an instinct in each of
them they stood listening for a moment to the last strains of the opera.
The light leaped higher in Hylda's eyes.

"Beautiful--oh, so beautiful!" she said, her hand touching the Duchess's
arm.

The Duchess gave the slim warm fingers a spasmodic little squeeze.  "Yes,
darling, beautiful," she rejoined; and then the crowd began to pour out
behind them.

Their carriages were at the door.  Lord Windlehurst put Hylda in.  "The
House is up," he said.  "You are going on somewhere?"

"No--home," she said, and smiled into his old, kind, questioning eyes.
"Home!"

"Home!" he murmured significantly as he turned towards the Duchess and
her carriage.  "Home!" he repeated, and shook his head sadly.

"Shall I drive you to your house?" the Duchess asked.

"No, I'll go with you to your door, and walk back to my cell.  Home!" he
growled to the footman, with a sardonic note in the voice.

As they drove away, the Duchess turned to him abruptly.  "What did you
mean by your look when you said you had seen Eglington drive away from
the House?"

"Well, my dear Betty, she--the fly-away--drives him home now.  It has
come to that."

"To her house--Windlehurst, oh, Windlehurst!"

She sank back in the cushions, and gave what was as near a sob as she had
given in many a day.  Windlehurst took her hand.  "No, not so bad as that
yet.  She drove him to his club.  Don't fret, my dear Betty."

Home!  Hylda watched the shops, the houses, the squares, as she passed
westward, her mind dwelling almost happily on the new determination to
which she had come.  It was not love that was moving her, not love for
him, but a deeper thing.  He had brutally killed love--the full life of
it--those months ago; but there was a deep thing working in her which was
as near nobility as the human mind can feel.  Not in a long time had she
neared her home with such expectation and longing.  Often on the doorstep
she had shut her eyes to the light and warmth and elegance of it, because
of that which she did not see.  Now, with a thrill of pleasure, she saw
its doors open.  It was possible Eglington might have come home already.
Lord Windlehurst had said that he had left the House.  She did not ask if
he was in--it had not been her custom for a long time--and servants were
curious people; but she looked at the hall-table.  Yes, there was a hat
which had evidently just been placed there, and gloves, and a stick.  He
was at home, then.

She hurried to her room, dropped her opera-cloak on a chair, looked at
herself in the glass, a little fluttered and critical, and then crossed
the hallway to Eglington's bedroom.  She listened for a moment.  There
was no sound.  She turned the handle of the door softly, and opened it.
A light was burning low, but the room was empty.  It was as she thought,
he was in his study, where he spent hours sometimes after he came home,
reading official papers.  She went up the stairs, at first swiftly, then
more slowly, then with almost lagging feet.  Why did she hesitate?  Why
should a woman falter in going to her husband--to her own one man of all
the world?  Was it not, should it not be, ever the open door between
them?  Confidence--confidence--could she not have it, could she not get
it now at last?  She had paused; but now she moved on with quicker step,
purpose in her face, her eyes softly lighted.

Suddenly she saw on the floor an opened letter.  She picked it up, and,
as she did so, involuntarily observed the writing.  Almost mechanically
she glanced at the contents.  Her heart stood still.  The first words
scorched her eyes.

     "Eglington--Harry, dearest," it said, "you shall not go to sleep
     to-night without a word from me.  This will make you think of me
     when .  .  .  "

Frozen, struck as by a mortal blow, Hylda looked at the signature.  She
knew it--the cleverest, the most beautiful adventuress which the
aristocracy and society had produced.  She trembled from head to foot,
and for a moment it seemed that she must fall.  But she steadied herself
and walked firmly to Eglington's door.  Turning the handle softly, she
stepped inside.

He did not hear her.  He was leaning over a box of papers, and they
rustled loudly under his hand.  He was humming to himself that song she
heard an hour ago in Il Trovatore, that song of passion and love and
tragedy.  It sent a wave of fresh feeling over her.  She could not go
on--could not face him, and say what she must say.  She turned and passed
swiftly from the room, leaving the door open, and hurried down the
staircase.  Eglington heard now, and wheeled round.  He saw the open
door, listened to the rustle of her skirts, knew that she had been there.
He smiled, and said to himself:

"She came to me, as I said she would.  I shall master her--the full
surrender, and then--life will be easy then."

Hylda hurried down the staircase to her room, saw Kate Heaver waiting,
beckoned to her, caught up her opera-cloak, and together they passed down
the staircase to the front door.  Heaver rang a bell, a footman appeared,
and, at a word, called a cab.  A minute later they were ready:

"Snowdon House," Hylda said; and they passed into the night.




CHAPTER XXXVI

"IS IT ALWAYS SO--IN LIFE?"

The Duchess and her brother, an ex-diplomatist, now deaf and patiently
amiable and garrulous, had met on the doorstep of Snowdon House, and
together they insisted on Lord Windlehurst coming in for a talk.  The two
men had not met for a long time, and the retired official had been one of
Lord Windlehurst's own best appointments in other days.  The Duchess had
the carriage wait in consequence.

The ex-official could hear little, but he had cultivated the habit of
talking constantly and well.  There were some voices, however, which he
could hear more distinctly than others, and Lord Windlehurst's was one of
them--clear, well-modulated, and penetrating.  Sipping brandy and water,
Lord Windlehurst gave his latest quip.  They were all laughing heartily,
when the butler entered the room and said, "Lady Eglington is here, and
wishes to see your Grace."

As the butler left the room, the Duchess turned despairingly to
Windlehurst, who had risen, and was paler than the Duchess.  "It has
come," she said, "oh, it has come!  I can't face it."

"But it doesn't matter about you facing it," Lord Windlehurst rejoined.
"Go to her and help her, Betty.  You know what to do--the one thing."
He took her hand and pressed it.

She dashed the tears from her eyes and drew herself together, while her
brother watched her benevolently.

He had not heard what was said.  Betty had always been impulsive, he
thought to himself, and here was some one in trouble--they all came to
her, and kept her poor.

"Go to bed, Dick," the Duchess said to him, and hurried from the room.
She did not hesitate now.  Windlehurst had put the matter in the right
way.  Her pain was nothing, mere moral cowardice; but Hylda--!

She entered the other room as quickly as rheumatic limbs would permit.
Hylda stood waiting, erect, her eyes gazing blankly before her and rimmed
by dark circles, her face haggard and despairing.

Before the Duchess could reach her, she said in a hoarse whisper: "I have
left him--I have left him.  I have come to you."

With a cry of pity the Duchess would have taken the stricken girl in her
arms, but Hylda held out a shaking hand with the letter in it which had
brought this new woe and this crisis foreseen by Lord Windlehurst.
"There--there it is.  He goes from me to her--to that!"  She thrust the
letter into the Duchess's fingers.  "You knew--you knew!  I saw the look
that passed between you and Windlehurst at the opera.  I understand all
now.  He left the House of Commons with her--and you knew, oh, you knew!
All the world knows--every one knew but me."  She threw up her hands.
"But I've left him--I've left him, for ever."

Now the Duchess had her in her arms, and almost forcibly drew her to a
sofa.  "Darling, my darling," she said, "you must not give way.  It is
not so bad as you think.  You must let me help to make you understand."

Hylda laughed hysterically.  "Not so bad as I think!  Read--read it,"
she said, taking the letter from the Duchess's fingers and holding it
before her face.  "I found it on the staircase.  I could not help but
read it."  She sat and clasped and unclasped her hands in utter misery.
"Oh, the shame of it, the bitter shame of it!  Have I not been a good
wife to him?  Have I not had reason to break my heart?  But I waited,
and I wanted to be good and to do right.  And to-night I was going to try
once more--I felt it in the opera.  I was going to make one last effort
for his sake.  It was for his sake I meant to make it, for I thought him
only hard and selfish, and that he had never loved; and if he only loved,
I thought--"

She broke off, wringing her hands and staring into space, the ghost of
the beautiful figure that had left the Opera House with shining eyes.

The Duchess caught the cold hands.  "Yes, yes, darling, I know.  I
understand.  So does Windlehurst.  He loves you as much as I do.  We know
there isn't much to be got out of life; but we always hoped you would get
more than anybody else."

Hylda shrank, then raised her head, and looked at the Duchess with an
infinite pathos.  "Oh, is it always so--in life?  Is no one true?  Is
every one betrayed sometime?  I would die--yes, a thousand times yes, I
would rather die than bear this.  What do I care for life--it has cheated
me!  I meant well, and I tried to do well, and I was true to him in word
and deed even when I suffered most, even when--"

The Duchess laid a cheek against the burning head.  "I understand, my own
dear.  I understand--altogether."

"But you cannot know," the broken girl replied; "but through everything I
was true; and I have been tempted too when my heart was aching so, when
the days were so empty, the nights so long, and my heart hurt--hurt me.
But now, it is over, everything is done.  You will keep me here--ah, say
you will keep me here till everything can be settled, and I can go away
--far away--far--!"

She stopped with a gasping cry, and her eyes suddenly strained into the
distance, as though a vision of some mysterious thing hung before her.
The Duchess realised that that temptation, which has come to so many
disillusioned mortals, to end it all, to find quiet somehow, somewhere
out in the dark, was upon her.  She became resourceful and persuasively
commanding.

"But no, my darling," she said, "you are going nowhere.  Here in London
is your place now.  And you must not stay here in my house.  You must go
back to your home.  Your place is there.  For the present, at any rate,
there must be no scandal.  Suspicion is nothing, talk is nothing, and the
world forgets--"

"Oh, I do not care for the world or its forgetting!" the wounded girl
replied.  "What is the world to me!  I wanted my own world, the world of
my four walls, quiet and happy, and free from scandal and shame.  I
wanted love and peace there, and now .  .  .  !"

"You must be guided by those who love you.  You are too young to decide
what is best for yourself.  You must let Windlehurst and me think for
you; and, oh, my darling, you cannot know how much I care for your best
good!"

"I cannot, will not, bear the humiliation and the shame.  This letter
here--you see!"

"It is the letter of a woman who has had more affaires than any man in
London.  She is preternaturally clever, my dear--Windlehurst would tell
you so.  The brilliant and unscrupulous, the beautiful and the bad, have
a great advantage in this world.  Eglington was curious, that is all.
It is in the breed of the Eglingtons to go exploring, to experiment."

Hylda started.  Words from the letter Sybil Lady Eglington had left
behind her rushed into her mind: "Experiment, subterfuge, secrecy.
'Reaping where you had not sowed, and gathering where you had not
strawed.' Always experiment, experiment, experiment!"

"I have only been married three years," she moaned.  "Yes, yes, my
darling; but much may happen after three days of married life, and love
may come after twenty years.  The human heart is a strange thing."

"I was patient--I gave him every chance.  He has been false and
shameless.  I will not go on."

The Duchess pressed both hands hard, and made a last effort, looking into
the deep troubled eyes with her own grown almost beautiful with feeling
--the faded world-worn eyes.

"You will go back to-night-at once," she said firmly.  "To-morrow you
will stay in bed till noon-at any rate, till I come.  I promise you that
you shall not be treated with further indignity.  Your friends will stand
by you, the world will be with you, if you do nothing rash, nothing that
forces it to babble and scold.  But you must play its game, my dearest.
I'll swear that the worst has not happened.  She drove him to his club,
and, after a man has had a triumph, a woman will not drive him to his
club if--my darling, you must trust me!  If there must be the great
smash, let it be done in a way that will prevent you being smashed also
in the world's eyes.  You can live, and you will live.  Is there nothing
for you to do?  Is there no one for whom you would do something, who
would be heart-broken if you--if you went mad now?"

Suddenly a great change passed over Hylda.  "Is there no one for whom you
would do something?"  Just as in the desert a question like this had
lifted a man out of a terrible and destroying apathy, so this searching
appeal roused in Hylda a memory and a pledge.  "Is there no one for whom
you would do something?"  Was life, then, all over?  Was her own great
grief all?  Was her bitter shame the end?

She got to her feet tremblingly.  "I will go back," she said slowly and
softly.

"Windlehurst will take you home," the Duchess rejoined eagerly.  "My
carriage is at the door."

A moment afterwards Lord Windlehurst took Hylda's hands in his and held
them long.  His old, querulous eyes were like lamps of safety; his smile
had now none of that cynicism with which he had aroused and chastened the
world.  The pitiful understanding of life was there and a consummate
gentleness.  He gave her his arm, and they stepped out into the moonlit
night.  "So peaceful, so bright!" he said, looking round.

"I will come at noon to-morrow," called the Duchess from the doorway.

A light was still shining in Eglington's study when the carriage drove
up.  With a latch-key Hylda admitted herself and her maid.

The storm had broken, the flood had come.  The storm was over, but the
flood swept far and wide.




CHAPTER XXXVII

THE FLYING SHUTTLE

Hour after hour of sleeplessness.  The silver-tongued clock remorselessly
tinkled the quarters, and Hylda lay and waited for them with a hopeless
strained attention.  In vain she tried devices to produce that monotony
of thought which sometimes brings sleep.  Again and again, as she felt
that sleep was coming at last, the thought of the letter she had found
flashed through her mind with words of fire, and it seemed as if there
had been poured through every vein a subtle irritant.  Just such a
surging, thrilling flood she had felt in the surgeon's chair when she was
a girl and an anesthetic had been given.  But this wave of sensation led
to no oblivion, no last soothing intoxication.  Its current beat against
her heart until she could have cried out from the mere physical pain, the
clamping grip of her trouble.  She withered and grew cold under the
torture of it all--the ruthless spoliation of everything which made life
worth while or the past endurable.

About an hour after she had gone to bed she heard Eglington's step.  It
paused at her door.  She trembled with apprehension lest he should enter.
It was many a day since he had done so, but also she had not heard his
step pause at her door for many a day.  She could not bear to face it all
now; she must have time to think, to plan her course--the last course of
all.  For she knew that the next step must be the last step in her old
life, and towards a new life, whatever that might be.  A great sigh of
relief broke from her as she heard his door open and shut, and silence
fell on everything, that palpable silence which seems to press upon the
night-watcher with merciless, smothering weight.

How terribly active her brain was!  Pictures--it was all vivid pictures,
that awful visualisation of sorrow which, if it continues, breaks the
heart or wrests the mind from its sanity.  If only she did not see!  But
she did see Eglington and the Woman together, saw him look into her eyes,
take her hands, put his arm round her, draw her face to his!  Her heart
seemed as if it must burst, her lips cried out.  With a great effort of
the will she tried to hide from these agonies of the imagination, and
again she would approach those happy confines of sleep, which are the
only refuge to the lacerated heart; and then the weapon of time on the
mantelpiece would clash on the shield of the past, and she was wide awake
again.  At last, in desperation, she got out of bed, hurried to the
fireplace, caught the little sharp-tongued recorder in a nervous grasp,
and stopped it.

As she was about to get into bed again, she saw a pile of letters lying
on the table near her pillow.  In her agitation she had not noticed them,
and the devoted Heaver had not drawn her attention to them.  Now,
however, with a strange premonition, she quickly glanced at the
envelopes.  The last one of all was less aristocratic-looking than the
others; the paper of the envelope was of the poorest, and it had a
foreign look.  She caught it up with an exclamation.  The handwriting was
that of her cousin Lacey.

She got into bed with a mind suddenly swept into a new atmosphere, and
opened the flimsy cover.  Shutting her eyes, she lay still for a moment
--still and vague; she was only conscious of one thing, that a curtain
had dropped on the terrible pictures she had seen, and that her mind was
in a comforting quiet.  Presently she roused herself, and turned the
letter over in her hand.  It was not long--was that because its news was
bad news?  The first chronicles of disaster were usually brief!  She
smoothed the paper out-it had been crumpled and was a little soiled-and
read it swiftly.  It ran:

     DEAR LADY COUSIN--As the poet says, "Man is born to trouble as the
     sparks fly upward," and in Egypt the sparks set the stacks on fire
     oftener than anywhere else, I guess.  She outclasses Mexico as a
     "precious example" in this respect.  You needn't go looking for
     trouble in Mexico; it's waiting for you kindly.  If it doesn't find
     you to-day, well, manana.  But here it comes running like a native
     to his cooking-pot at sunset in Ramadan.  Well, there have been
     "hard trials" for the Saadat.  His cotton-mills were set on fire-
     can't you guess who did it?  And now, down in Cairo, Nahoum runs
     Egypt; for a messenger that got through the tribes worrying us tells
     us that Kaid is sick, and Nahoum the Armenian says, you shall, and
     you shan't, now.  Which is another way of saying, that between us
     and the front door of our happy homes there are rattlesnakes that
     can sting--Nahoum's arm is long, and his traitors are crawling under
     the canvas of our tents!

     I'm not complaining for myself.  I asked for what I've got, and,
     dear Lady Cousin, I put up some cash for it, too, as a man should.
     No, I don't mind for myself, fond as I am of loafing, sort of
     pottering round where the streets are in the hands of a pure police;
     for I've seen more, done more, thought more, up here, than in all my
     life before; and I've felt a country heaving under the touch of one
     of God's men--it gives you minutes that lift you out of the dust and
     away from the crawlers.  And I'd do it all over a thousand times for
     him, and for what I've got out of it.  I've lived.  But, to speak
     right out plain, I don't know how long this machine will run.
     There's been a plant of the worst kind.  Tribes we left friendly
     under a year ago are out against us; cities that were faithful have
     gone under to rebels.  Nahoum has sowed the land with the tale that
     the Saadat means to abolish slavery, to take away the powers of the
     great sheikhs, and to hand the country over to the Turk.  Ebn Ezra
     Bey has proofs of the whole thing, and now at last the Saadat knows
     too late that his work has been spoiled by the only man who could
     spoil it.  The Saadat knows it, but does he rave and tear his hair?
     He says nothing.  He stands up like a rock before the riot of
     treachery and bad luck and all the terrible burden he has to carry
     here.  If he wasn't a Quaker I'd say he had the pride of an
     archangel.  You can bend him, but you can't break him; and it takes
     a lot to bend him.  Men desert, but he says others will come to take
     their place.  And so they do.  It's wonderful, in spite of the holy
     war that's being preached, and all the lies about him sprinkled over
     this part of Africa, how they all fear him, and find it hard to be
     out on the war-path against him.  We should be gorging the vultures
     if he wasn't the wonder he is.  We need boats.  Does he sit down and
     wring his hands?  No, he organises, and builds them--out of scraps.
     Hasn't he enough food for a long siege?  He goes himself to the
     tribes that have stored food in their cities, and haven't yet
     declared against him, and he puts a hand on their hard hearts, and
     takes the sulkiness out of their eyes, and a fleet of ghiassas comes
     down to us loaded with dourha.  The defences of this place are
     nothing.  Does he fold his hands like a man of peace that he is,
     and say, 'Thy will be done'?  Not the Saadat.  He gets two soldier-
     engineers, one an Italian who murdered his wife in Italy twenty
     years ago, and one a British officer that cheated at cards and had
     to go, and we've got defences that'll take some negotiating.  That's
     the kind of man he is; smiling to cheer others when their hearts are
     in their boots, stern like a commander-in-chief when he's got to
     punish, and then he does it like steel; but I've seen him afterwards
     in his tent with a face that looks sixty, and he's got to travel a
     while yet before he's forty.  None of us dares be as afraid as we
     could be, because a look at him would make us so ashamed we'd have
     to commit suicide.  He hopes when no one else would ever hope.  The
     other day I went to his tent to wait for him, and I saw his Bible
     open on the table.  A passage was marked.  It was this:

     "Behold, I have taken out of thy hand the cup of trembling, even the
     dregs of the cup of my fury; thou shalt no more drink it again: "But
     I will put it into the hand of them that afflict thee; which have
     said to thy soul, Bow down, that we may go over; and thou hast laid
     thy body as the ground, and as the street, to them that went over.

     I'd like to see Nahoum with that cup of trembling in his hand, and
     I've got an idea, too, that it will be there yet.  I don't know how
     it is, but I never can believe the worst will happen to the Saadat.
     Reading those verses put hope into me.  That's why I'm writing to
     you, on the chance of this getting through by a native who is
     stealing down the river with a letter from the Saadat to Nahoum, and
     one to Kaid, and one to the Foreign Minister in London, and one to
     your husband.  If they reach the hands they're meant for, it may be
     we shall pan out here yet.  But there must be display of power; an
     army must be sent, without delay, to show the traitors that the game
     is up.  Five thousand men from Cairo under a good general would do
     it.  Will Nahoum send them?  Does Kaid, the sick man, know?  I'm not
     banking on Kaid.  I think he's on his last legs.  Unless pressure is
     put on him, unless some one takes him by the throat and says: If you
     don't relieve Claridge Pasha and the people with him, you will go to
     the crocodiles, Nahoum won't stir.  So, I am writing to you.
     England can do it.  The lord, your husband, can do it.  England will
     have a nasty stain on her flag if she sees this man go down without
     a hand lifted to save him.  He is worth another Alma to her
     prestige.  She can't afford to see him slaughtered here, where he's
     fighting the fight of civilisation.  You see right through this
     thing, I know, and I don't need to palaver any more about it.  It
     doesn't matter about me.  I've had a lot for my money, and I'm no
     use--or I wouldn't be, if anything happened to the Saadat.  No one
     would drop a knife and fork at the breakfast-table when my obit was
     read out--well, yes, there's one, cute as she can be, but she's lost
     two husbands already, and you can't be hurt so bad twice in the same
     place.  But the Saadat, back him, Hylda--I'll call you that at this
     distance.  Make Nahoum move.  Send four or five thousand men before
     the day comes when famine does its work and they draw the bowstring
     tight.

     Salaam and salaam, and the post is going out, and there's nothing in
     the morning paper; and, as Aunt Melissa used to say: "Well, so much
     for so much!"  One thing I forgot.  I'm lucky to be writing to you
     at all.  If the Saadat was an old-fashioned overlord, I shouldn't be
     here.  I got into a bad corner three days ago with a dozen Arabs--
     I'd been doing a little work with a friendly tribe all on my own,
     and I almost got caught by this loose lot of fanatics.  I shot
     three, and galloped for it.  I knew the way through the mines
     outside, and just escaped by the skin of my teeth.  Did the Saadat,
     as a matter of discipline, have me shot for cowardice?  Cousin
     Hylda, my heart was in my mouth as I heard them yelling behind me--
     and I never enjoyed a dinner so much in my life.  Would the Saadat
     have run from them?  Say, he'd have stayed and saved his life too.
     Well, give my love to the girls!

                    Your affectionate cousin,

                                        Tom LACEY.

     P.S.-There's no use writing to me.  The letter service is bad.  Send
     a few thousand men by military parcel-post, prepaid, with some red
     seals--majors and colonels from Aldershot will do.  They'll give the
     step to the Gyppies.  T.


Hylda closed her eyes.  A fever had passed from her veins.  Here lay her
duty before her--the redemption of the pledge she had made.  Whatever her
own sorrow, there was work before her; a supreme effort must be made for
another.  Even now it might be too late.  She must have strength for what
she meant to do.  She put the room in darkness, and resolutely banished
thought from her mind.

The sun had been up for hours before she waked.  Eglington had gone to
the Foreign Office.  The morning papers were full of sensational reports
concerning Claridge Pasha and the Soudan.  A Times leader sternly
admonished the Government.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

JASPER KIMBER SPEAKS

That day the adjournment of the House of Commons was moved "To call
attention to an urgent matter of public importance"--the position of
Claridge Pasha in the Soudan.  Flushed with the success of last night's
performance, stung by the attacks of the Opposition morning papers,
confident in the big majority behind, which had cheered him a few hours
before, viciously resenting the letter he had received from David that
morning, Eglington returned such replies to the questions put to him that
a fire of angry mutterings came from the forces against him.  He might
have softened the growing resentment by a change of manner, but his
intellectual arrogance had control of him for the moment; and he said to
himself that he had mastered the House before, and he would do so now.
Apart from his deadly antipathy to his half-brother, and the gain to
himself--to his credit, the latter weighed with him not so much, so set
was he on a stubborn course--if David disappeared for ever, there was at
bottom a spirit of anti-expansion, of reaction against England's world-
wide responsibilities.  He had no largeness of heart or view concerning
humanity.  He had no inherent greatness, no breadth of policy.  With
less responsibility taken, there would be less trouble, national and
international--that was his point of view; that had been his view long
ago at the meeting at Heddington; and his weak chief had taken it,
knowing nothing of the personal elements behind.

The disconcerting factor in the present bitter questioning in the House
was, that it originated on his own side.  It was Jasper Kimber who had
launched the questions, who moved the motion for adjournment.  Jasper had
had a letter from Kate Heaver that morning early, which sent him to her,
and he had gone to the House to do what he thought to be his duty.  He
did it boldly, to the joy of the Opposition, and with a somewhat sullen
support from many on his own side.  Now appeared Jasper's own inner
disdain of the man who had turned his coat for office.  It gave a lead to
a latent feeling among members of the ministerial party, of distrust, and
of suspicion that they were the dupes of a mind of abnormal cleverness
which, at bottom, despised them.

With flashing eyes and set lips, vigilant and resourceful, Eglington
listened to Jasper Kimber's opening remarks.

By unremitting industry Jasper had made a place for himself in the House.
The humour and vitality of his speeches, and his convincing advocacy of
the cause of the "factory folk," had gained him a hearing.  Thickset,
under middle size, with an arm like a giant and a throat like a bull,
he had strong common sense, and he gave the impression that he would wear
his heart out for a good friend or a great cause, but that if he chose to
be an enemy he would be narrow, unrelenting, and persistent.  For some
time the House had been aware that he had more than a gift for criticism
of the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

His speech began almost stumblingly, his h's ran loose, and his grammar
became involved, but it was seen that he meant business, that he had that
to say which would give anxiety to the Government, that he had a case
wherein were the elements of popular interest and appeal, and that he was
thinking and speaking as thousands outside the House would think and
speak.

He had waited for this hour.  Indirectly he owed to Claridge Pasha all
that he had become.  The day in which David knocked him down saw the
depths of his degradation reached, and, when he got up, it was to start
on a new life uncertainly, vaguely at first, but a new life for all that.
He knew, from a true source, of Eglington's personal hatred of Claridge
Pasha, though he did not guess their relationship; and all his interest
was enlisted for the man who had, as he knew, urged Kate Heaver to marry
himself--and Kate was his great ambition now.  Above and beyond these
personal considerations was a real sense of England's duty to the man who
was weaving the destiny of a new land.

"It isn't England's business?" he retorted, in answer to an interjection
from a faithful soul behind the ministerial Front Bench.  "Well, it
wasn't the business of the Good Samaritan to help the man that had been
robbed and left for dead by the wayside; but he did it.  As to David
Claridge's work, some have said that--I've no doubt it's been said in the
Cabinet, and it is the thing the Under-Secretary would say as naturally
as he would flick a fly from his boots--that it's a generation too soon.
Who knows that?  I suppose there was those that thought John the Baptist
was baptising too soon, that Luther preached too soon, and Savonarola was
in too great a hurry, all because he met his death and his enemies
triumphed--and Galileo and Hampden and Cromwell and John Howard were all
too soon.  Who's to be judge of that?  God Almighty puts it into some
men's minds to work for a thing that's a great, and maybe an impossible,
thing, so far as the success of the moment is concerned.  Well, for a
thing that has got to be done some time, the seed has to be sown, and
it's always sown by men like Claridge Pasha, who has shown millions of
people--barbarians and half-civilised alike--what a true lover of the
world can do.  God knows, I think he might have stayed and found a cause
in England, but he elected to go to the ravaging Soudan, and he is
England there, the best of it.  And I know Claridge Pasha--from his youth
up I have seen him, and I stand here to bear witness of what the working
men of England will say to-morrow.  Right well the noble lord yonder
knows that what I say is true.  He has known it for years.  Claridge
Pasha would never have been in his present position, if the noble lord
had not listened to the enemies of Claridge Pasha and of this country, in
preference to those who know and hold the truth as I tell it here to-day.
I don't know whether the noble lord has repented or not; but I do say
that his Government will rue it, if his answer is not the one word
'Intervention!'  Mistaken, rash or not, dreamer if you like, Claridge
Pasha should be relieved now, and his policy discussed afterwards.  I
don't envy the man who holds a contrary opinion; he'll be ashamed of it
some day.  But"--he pointed towards Eglington--"but there sits the
minister in whose hands his fate has been.  Let us hope that this speech
of mine needn't have been made, and that I've done injustice to his
patriotism and to the policy he will announce."

"A set-back, a sharp set-back," said Lord Windlehurst, in the Peers'
Gallery, as the cheers of the Opposition and of a good number of
ministerialists sounded through the Chamber.  There were those on the
Treasury Bench who saw danger ahead.  There was an attempt at a
conference, but Kimber's seconder only said a half-dozen words, and sat
down, and Eglington had to rise before any definite confidences could be
exchanged.  One word only he heard behind him as he got up.  It was the
word, "Temporise," and it came from the Prime Minister.

Eglington was in no mood for temporising.  Attack only nerved him.  He
was a good and ruthless fighter; and last night's intoxication of success
was still in his brain.  He did not temporise.  He did not leave a way of
retreat open for the Prime Minister, who would probably wind up the
debate.  He fought with skill, but he fought without gloves, and the
House needed gentle handling.  He had the gift of effective speech to a
rare degree, and when he liked he could be insinuating and witty, but he
had not genuine humour or good feeling, and the House knew it.  In debate
he was biting, resourceful, and unscrupulous.  He made the fatal mistake
of thinking that intellect and gifts of fence, followed by a brilliant
peroration, in which he treated the commonplaces of experienced minds as
though they were new discoveries and he was their Columbus, could
accomplish anything.  He had never had a political crisis, but one had
come now.

In his reply he first resorted to arguments of high politics, historical,
informative, and, in a sense, commanding; indeed, the House became
restless under what seemed a piece of intellectual dragooning.  Signs of
impatience appeared on his own side, and, when he ventured on a solemn
warning about hampering ministers who alone knew the difficulties of
diplomacy and the danger of wounding the susceptibilities of foreign
and friendly countries, the silence was broken by a voice that said
sneeringly, "The kid-glove Government!"

Then he began to lose place with the Chamber.  He was conscious of it,
and shifted his ground, pointing out the dangers of doing what the other
nations interested in Egypt were not prepared to do.

"Have you asked them?  Have you pressed them?" was shouted across
the House.  Eglington ignored the interjections.  "Answer!  Answer!"
was called out angrily, but he shrugged a shoulder and continued his
argument.  If a man insisted on using a flying-machine before the
principle was fully mastered and applied--if it could be mastered and
applied--it must not be surprising if he was killed.  Amateurs sometimes
took preposterous risks without the advice of the experts.  If Claridge
Pasha had asked the advice of the English Government, or of any of the
Chancellories of Europe, as to his incursions into the Soudan and his
premature attempts at reform, he would have received expert advice that
civilisation had not advanced to that stage in this portion of the world
which would warrant his experiments.  It was all very well for one man to
run vast risks and attempt quixotic enterprises, but neither he nor his
countrymen had any right to expect Europe to embroil itself on his
particular account.

At this point he was met by angry cries of dissent, which did not come
from the Opposition alone.  His lips set, he would not yield.  The
Government could not hold itself responsible for Claridge Pasha's relief,
nor in any sense for his present position.  However, from motives of
humanity, it would make representations in the hope that the Egyptian
Government would act; but it was not improbable, in view of past
experiences of Claridge Pasha, that he would extricate himself from his
present position, perhaps had done so already.  Sympathy and sentiment
were natural and proper manifestations of human society, but governments
were, of necessity, ruled by sterner considerations.  The House must
realise that the Government could not act as though it were wholly a free
agent, or as if its every move would not be matched by another move on
the part of another Power or Powers.

Then followed a brilliant and effective appeal to his own party to
trust the Government, to credit it with feeling and with a due regard
for English prestige and the honour brought to it by Claridge Pasha's
personal qualities, whatever might be thought of his crusading
enterprises.  The party must not fall into the trap of playing the game
of the Opposition.  Then, with some supercilious praise of the "worthy
sentiments" of Jasper Kimber's speech and a curt depreciation of its
reasoning, he declared that: "No Government can be ruled by clamour.  The
path to be trodden by this Government will be lighted by principles of
progress and civilisation, humanity and peace, the urbane power of
reason, and the persuasive influence of just consideration for the rights
of others, rather than the thunder and the threat of the cannon and the
sword!"

He sat down amid the cheers of a large portion of his party, for the end
of his speech had been full of effective if meretricious appeal.  But the
debate that followed showed that the speech had been a failure.  He had
not uttered one warm or human word concerning Claridge Pasha, and it was
felt and said, that no pledge had been given to insure the relief of the
man who had caught the imagination of England.

The debate was fierce and prolonged.  Eglington would not agree to any
modification of his speech, to any temporising.  Arrogant and insistent,
he had his way, and, on a division, the Government was saved by a mere
handful of votes--votes to save the party, not to indorse Eglington's
speech or policy.

Exasperated and with jaw set, but with a defiant smile, Eglington drove
straight home after the House rose.  He found Hylda in the library with
an evening paper in her hands.  She had read and reread his speech, and
had steeled herself for "the inevitable hour," to this talk which would
decide for ever their fate and future.

Eglington entered the room smiling.  He remembered the incident of the
night before, when she came to his study and then hurriedly retreated.
He had been defiant and proudly disdainful at the House and on the way
home; but in his heart of hearts he was conscious of having failed to
have his own way; and, like such men, he wanted assurance that he could
not err, and he wanted sympathy.  Almost any one could have given it to
him, and he had a temptation to seek that society which was his the
evening before; but he remembered that she was occupied where he could
not reach her, and here was Hylda, from whom he had been estranged,
but who must surely have seen by now that at Hamley she had been
unreasonable, and that she must trust his judgment.  So absorbed was he
with self and the failure of his speech, that, for a moment, he forgot
the subject of it, and what that subject meant to them both.

"What do you think of my speech, Hylda?" he asked, as he threw himself
into a chair.  "I see you have been reading it.  Is it a full report?"

She handed the paper over.  "Quite full," she answered evenly.

He glanced down the columns.  "Sentimentalists!" he said as his eye
caught an interjection.  "Cant!" he added.  Then he looked at Hylda, and
remembered once again on whom and what his speech had been made.  He saw
that her face was very pale.

"What do you think of my speech?" he repeated stubbornly.

"If you think an answer necessary, I regard it as wicked and
unpatriotic," she answered firmly.

"Yes, I suppose you would," he rejoined bitingly.  She got to her feet
slowly, a flush passing over her face.  "If you think I would, did you
not think that a great many other people would think so too, and for the
same reason?" she asked, still evenly, but very slowly.  "Not for the
same reason," he rejoined in a low, savage voice.

"You do not treat me well," she said, with a voice that betrayed no hurt,
no indignation.  It seemed to state a fact deliberately; that was all.

"No, please," she added quickly, as she saw him rise to his feet with
anger trembling at his lips.  "Do not say what is on your tongue to say.
Let us speak quietly to-night.  It is better; and I am tired of strife,
spoken and unspoken.  I have got beyond that.  But I want to speak of
what you did to-day in Parliament."

"Well, you have said it was wicked and unpatriotic," he rejoined, sitting
down again and lighting a cigar, in an attempt to be composed.

"What you said was that; but I am concerned with what you did.  Did your
speech mean that you would not press the Egyptian Government to relieve
Claridge Pasha at once?"

"Is that the conclusion you draw from my words?" he asked.

"Yes; but I wish to know beyond doubt if that is what you mean the
country to believe?"

"It is what I mean you to believe, my dear."

She shrank from the last two words, but still went on quietly, though her
eyes burned and she shivered.  "If you mean that you will do nothing, it
will ruin you and your Government," she answered.  "Kimber was right,
and--"

"Kimber was inspired from here," he interjected sharply.

She put her hand upon herself.  "Do you think I would intrigue against
you?  Do you think I would stoop to intrigue?" she asked, a hand
clasping and unclasping a bracelet on her wrist, her eyes averted, for
very shame that he should think the thought he had uttered.

"It came from this house--the influence," he rejoined.

"I cannot say.  It is possible," she answered; "but you cannot think that
I connive with my maid against you.  I think Kimber has reasons of his
own for acting as he did to-day.  He speaks for many besides himself; and
he spoke patriotically this afternoon.  He did his duty."

"And I did not?  Do you think I act alone?"

"You did not do your duty, and I think that you are not alone
responsible.  That is why I hope the Government will be influenced by
public feeling."  She came a step nearer to him.  "I ask you to relieve
Claridge Pasha at any cost.  He is your father's son.  If you do not,
when all the truth is known, you will find no shelter from the storm
that will break over you."

"You will tell--the truth?"

"I do not know yet what I shall do," she answered.  "It will depend on
you; but it is your duty to tell the truth, not mine.  That does not
concern me; but to save Claridge Pasha does concern me."

"So I have known."

Her heart panted for a moment with a wild indignation; but she quieted
herself, and answered almost calmly: "If you refuse to do that which is
honourable--and human, then I shall try to do it for you while yet I bear
your name.  If you will not care for your family honour, then I shall try
to do so.  If you will not do your duty, then I will try to do it for
you."  She looked him determinedly in the eyes.  "Through you I have lost
nearly all I cared to keep in the world.  I should like to feel that in
this one thing you acted honourably."

He sprang to his feet, bursting with anger, in spite of the inward
admonition that much that he prized was in danger, that any breach with
Hylda would be disastrous.  But self-will and his native arrogance
overruled the monitor within, and he said: "Don't preach to me, don't
play the martyr.  You will do this and you will do that!  You will save
my honour and the family name!  You will relieve Claridge Pasha, you will
do what Governments choose not to do; you will do what your husband
chooses not to do--Well, I say that you will do what your husband
chooses to do, or take the consequences."

"I think I will take the consequences," she answered.  "I will save
Claridge Pasha, if it is possible.  It is no boast.  I will do it, if it
can be done at all, if it is God's will that it should be done; and in
doing it I shall be conscious that you and I will do nothing together
again--never!  But that will not stop me; it will make me do it, the last
right thing, before the end."

She was so quiet, so curiously quiet.  Her words had a strange solemnity,
a tragic apathy.  What did it mean?  He had gone too far, as he had done
before.  He had blundered viciously, as he had blundered before.

She spoke again before he could collect his thoughts and make reply.

"I did not ask for too much, I think, and I could have forgiven and
forgotten all the hurts you have given me, if it were not for one thing.
You have been unjust, hard, selfish, and suspicious.  Suspicious--of me!
No one else in all the world ever thought of me what you have thought.
I have done all I could.  I have honourably kept the faith.  But you have
spoiled it all.  I have no memory that I care to keep.  It is stained.
My eyes can never bear to look upon the past again, the past with you--
never."

She turned to leave the room.  He caught her arm.  "You will wait till
you hear what I have to say," he cried in anger.  Her last words had
stung him so, her manner was so pitilessly scornful.  It was as though
she looked down on him from a height.  His old arrogance fought for
mastery over his apprehension.  What did she know?  What did she mean?
In any case he must face it out, be strong--and merciful and affectionate
afterwards.

"Wait, Hylda," he said.  "We must talk this out."

She freed her arm.  "There is nothing to talk out," she answered.
"So far as our relations are concerned, all reason for talk is gone."
She drew the fatal letter from the sash at her waist.  "You will think so
too when you read this letter again."  She laid it on the table beside
him, and, as he opened and glanced at it, she left the room.

He stood with the letter in his hand, dumfounded.  "Good God!" he said,
and sank into a chair.




CHAPTER XXXIX

FAITH JOURNEYS TO LONDON

Faith withdrew her eyes from Hylda's face, and they wandered helplessly
over the room.  They saw, yet did not see; and even in her trouble there
was some subconscious sense softly commenting on the exquisite refinement
and gentle beauty which seemed to fill the room; but the only definite
objects which the eyes registered at the moment were the flowers filling
every corner.  Hylda had been lightly adjusting a clump of roses when she
entered; and she had vaguely noticed how pale was the face that bent over
the flowers, how pale and yet how composed--as she had seen a Quaker
face, after some sorrow had passed over it, and left it like a quiet
sea in the sun, when wreck and ruin were done.  It was only a swift
impression, for she could think of but one thing, David and his safety.
She had come to Hylda, she said, because of Lord Eglington's position,
and she could not believe that the Government would see David's work
undone and David killed by the slave-dealers of Africa.

Hylda's reply had given her no hope that Eglington would keep the promise
he had made that evening long ago when her father had come upon them by
the old mill, and because of which promise she had forgiven Eglington so
much that was hard to forgive.  Hylda had spoken with sorrowful decision,
and then this pause had come, in which Faith tried to gain composure and
strength.  There was something strangely still in the two women.  From
the far past, through Quaker ancestors, there had come to Hylda now this
grey mist of endurance and self-control and austere reserve.  Yet behind
it all, beneath it all, a wild heart was beating.

Presently, as they looked into each other's eyes, and Faith dimly
apprehended something of Hylda's distress and its cause, Hylda leaned
over and spasmodically pressed her hand.

"It is so, Faith," she said.  "They will do nothing.  International
influences are too strong."  She paused.  "The Under-Secretary for
Foreign Affairs will do nothing; but yet we must hope.  Claridge Pasha
has saved himself in the past; and he may do so now, even though
it is all ten times worse.  Then, there is another way.  Nahoum Pasha can
save him, if he can be saved.  And I am going to Egypt--to Nahoum."

Faith's face blanched.  Something of the stark truth swept into her
brain.  She herself had suffered--her own life had been maimed, it had
had its secret bitterness.  Her love for her sister's son was that of a
mother, sister, friend combined, and he was all she had in life.  That he
lived, that she might cherish the thought of him living, was the one
thing she had; and David must be saved, if that might be; but this girl
--was she not a girl, ten years younger than herself?--to go to Egypt
to do--what?  She herself lived out of the world, but she knew the world!
To go to Egypt, and--"Thee will not go to Egypt.  What can thee do?" she
pleaded, something very like a sob in her voice.  "Thee is but a woman,
and David would not be saved at such a price, and I would not have him
saved so.  Thee will not go.  Say thee will not.  He is all God has left
to me in life; but thee to go--ah, no!  It is a bitter world--and what
could thee do?"

Hylda looked at her reflectively.  Should she tell Faith all, and take
her to Egypt?  No, she could not take her without telling her all, and
that was impossible now.  There might come a time when this wise and
tender soul might be taken into the innermost chambers, when all the
truth might be known; but the secret of David's parentage was Eglington's
concern most of all, and she would not speak now; and what was between
Nahoum and David was David's concern; and she had kept his secret all
these years.  No, Faith might not know now, and might not come with her.
On this mission she must go alone.

Hylda rose to her feet, still keeping hold of Faith's hand.  "Go back to
Hamley and wait there," she said, in a colourless voice.  "You can do
nothing; it may be I can do much.  Whatever can be done I can do, since
England will not act.  Pray for his safety.  It is all you can do.  It is
given to some to work, to others to pray.  I must work now."

She led Faith towards the door; she could not endure more; she must hold
herself firm for the journey and the struggle before her.  If she broke
down now she could not go forward; and Faith's presence roused in her an
emotion almost beyond control.

At the door she took both of Faith's hands in hers, and kissed her cheek.
"It is your place to stay; you will see that it is best.  Good-bye," she
added hurriedly, and her eyes were so blurred that she could scarcely see
the graceful, demure figure pass into the sunlit street.

That afternoon Lord Windlehurst entered the Duchess of Snowdon's presence
hurried and excited.  She started on seeing his face.

"What has happened?" she asked breathlessly.  "She is gone," he
answered.  "Our girl has gone to Egypt."

The Duchess almost staggered to her feet.  "Windlehurst--gone!" she
gasped.

"I called to see her.  Her ladyship had gone into the country, the
footman said.  I saw the butler, a faithful soul, who would die--or clean
the area steps--for her.  He was discreet; but he knew what you and I are
to her.  It was he got the tickets--for Marseilles and Egypt."

The Duchess began to cry silently.  Big tears ran down a face from which
the glow of feeling had long fled, but her eyes were sad enough.

"Gone--gone!  It is the end!" was all she could say.  Lord Windlehurst
frowned, though his eyes were moist.  "We must act at once.  You must go
to Egypt, Betty.  You must catch her at Marseilles.  Her boat does not
sail for three days.  She thought it went sooner, as it was advertised to
do.  It is delayed--I've found that out.  You can start to-night, and--
and save the situation.  You will do it, Betty?"

"I will do anything you say, as I have always done."  She dried her eyes.

"She is a good girl.  We must do all we can.  I'll arrange everything for
you myself.  I've written this paragraph to go into the papers to-morrow
morning: 'The Duchess of Snowdon, accompanied by Lady Eglington, left
London last night for the Mediterranean via Calais, to be gone for two
months or more.'  That is simple and natural.  I'll see Eglington.  He
must make no fuss.  He thinks she has gone to Hamley, so the butler says.
There, it's all clear.  Your work is cut out, Betty, and I know you will
do it as no one else can."

"Oh, Windlehurst," she answered, with a hand clutching at his arm, "if we
fail, it will kill me."

"If she fails, it will kill her," he answered, "and she is very young.
What is in her mind, who can tell?  But she thinks she can help Claridge
somehow.  We must save her, Betty."

"I used to think you had no real feeling, Windlehurst.  You didn't show
it," she said in a low voice.  "Ah, that was because you had too much,"
he answered.  "I had to wait till you had less."  He took out his watch.






THE WEAVERS

By Gilbert Parker


BOOK VI.


XL.       HYLDA SEEKS NAHOUM
XLI.      IN THE LAND OF SHINAR
XLII.     THE LOOM OF DESTINY




CHAPTER XL

HYLDA SEEKS NAHOUM

It was as though she had gone to sleep the night before, and waked
again upon this scene unchanged, brilliant, full of colour, a chaos of
decoration--confluences of noisy, garish streams of life, eddies of petty
labour.  Craftsmen crowded one upon the other in dark bazaars; merchants
chattered and haggled on their benches; hawkers clattered and cried their
wares.  It was a people that lived upon the streets, for all the houses
seemed empty and forsaken.  The sais ran before the Pasha's carriage, the
donkey-boys shrieked for their right of way, a train of camels calmly
forced its passage through the swirling crowds, supercilious and heavy-
laden.

It seemed but yesterday since she had watched with amused eyes the
sherbet-sellers clanking their brass saucers, the carriers streaming the
water from the bulging goatskins into the earthen bottles, crying, "Allah
be praised, here is coolness for thy throat for ever!" the idle singer
chanting to the soft kanoon, the chess-players in the shade of a high
wall, lost to the world, the dancing-girls with unveiled, shameless
faces, posturing for evil eyes.  Nothing had changed these past six
years.  Yet everything had changed.

She saw it all as in a dream, for her mind had no time for reverie or
retrospect; it was set on one thing only.

Yet behind the one idea possessing her there was a subconscious self
taking note of all these sights and sounds, and bringing moisture to her
eyes.  Passing the house which David had occupied on that night when he
and she and Nahoum and Mizraim had met, the mist of feeling almost
blinded her; for there at the gate sat the bowab who had admitted her
then, and with apathetic eyes had watched her go, in the hour when it
seemed that she and David Claridge had bidden farewell for ever, two
driftwood spars that touched and parted in the everlasting sea.  Here
again in the Palace square were Kaid's Nubians in their glittering armour
as of silver and gold, drawn up as she had seen them drawn then, to be
reviewed by their overlord.

She swept swiftly through the streets and bazaars on her mission to
Nahoum.  "Lady Eglington" had asked for an interview, and Nahoum had
granted it without delay.  He did not associate her with the girl for
whom David Claridge had killed Foorgat Pey, and he sent his own carriage
to bring her to the Palace.  No time had been lost, for it was less than
twenty-four hours since she had arrived in Cairo, and very soon she would
know the worst or the best.  She had put her past away for the moment,
and the Duchess of Snowdon had found at Marseilles a silent, determined,
yet gentle-tongued woman, who refused to look back, or to discuss
anything vital to herself and Eglington, until what she had come to Egypt
to do was accomplished.  Nor would she speak of the future, until the
present had been fully declared and she knew the fate of David Claridge.
In Cairo there were only varying rumours: that he was still holding out;
that he was lost; that he had broken through; that he was a prisoner--all
without foundation upon which she could rely.

As she neared the Palace entrance, a female fortune-teller ran forward,
thrusting towards her a gazelle's skin, filled with the instruments of
her mystic craft, and crying out: "I divine-I reveal!  What is present I
manifest!  What is absent I declare!  What is future I show!  Beautiful
one, hear me.  It is all written.  To thee is greatness, and thy heart's
desire.  Hear all!  See!  Wait for the revealing.  Thou comest from afar,
but thy fortune is near.  Hear and see.  I divine--I reveal.  Beautiful
one, what is future I show."

Hylda's eyes looked at the poor creature eagerly, pathetically.  If it
could only be, if she could but see one step ahead!  If the veil could
but be lifted!  She dropped some silver into the folds of the gazelle-
skin and waved the Gipsy away.  "There is darkness, it is all dark,
beautiful one," cried the woman after her, "but it shall be light.  I
show--I reveal!"

Inside these Palace walls there was a revealer of more merit, as she so
well and bitterly knew.  He could raise the veil--a dark and dangerous
necromancer, with a flinty heart and a hand that had waited long to
strike.  Had it struck its last blow?

Outside Nahoum's door she had a moment of utter weakness, when her knees
smote together, and her throat became parched; but before the door had
swung wide and her eyes swept the cool and shadowed room, she was as
composed as on that night long ago when she had faced the man who knew.

Nahoum was standing in a waiting and respectful attitude as she entered.
He advanced towards her and bowed low, but stopped dumfounded, as he saw
who she was.  Presently he recovered himself; but he offered no further
greeting than to place a chair for her where her face was in the shadow
and his in the light--time of crisis as it was, she noticed this and
marvelled at him.  His face was as she had seen it those years ago.  It
showed no change whatever.  The eyes looked at her calmly, openly, with
no ulterior thought behind, as it might seem.  The high, smooth forehead,
the full but firm lips, the brown, well-groomed beard, were all
indicative of a nature benevolent and refined.  Where did the duplicity
lie?  Her mind answered its own question on the instant; it lay in the
brain and the tongue.  Both were masterly weapons, an armament so
complete that it controlled the face and eyes and outward man into a
fair semblance of honesty.  The tongue--she remembered its insinuating
and adroit power, and how it had deceived the man she had come to try and
save.  She must not be misled by it.  She felt it was to be a struggle
between them, and she must be alert and persuasive, and match him word
for word, move for move.

"I am happy to welcome you here, madame," he said in English.  "It is
years since we met; yet time has passed you by."

She flushed ever so slightly--compliment from Nahoum Pasha!  Yet she must
not resent anything to-day; she must get what she came for, if it was
possible.  What had Lacey said?  "A few thousand men by parcel-post, and
some red seals-British officers."

"We meet under different circumstances," she replied meaningly.  "You
were asking a great favour then."

"Ah, but of you, madame?"

"I think you appealed to me when you were doubtful of the result."

"Well, madame, it may be so--but, yes, you are right; I thought you were
Claridge Pasha's kinswoman, I remember."

"Excellency, you said you thought I was Claridge Pasha's kinswoman."

"And you are not?" he asked reflectively.

He did not understand the slight change that passed over her face.  His
kinswoman--Claridge Pasha's kinswoman!

"I was not his kinswoman," she answered calmly.  "You came to ask a
favour then of Claridge Pasha; your life-work to do under him.  I
remember your words: 'I can aid thee in thy great task.  Thou wouldst
remake our Egypt, and my heart is with you.  I would rescue, not destroy.
.  .  .  I would labour, but my master has taken away from me the anvil,
the fire, and the hammer, and I sit without the door like an armless
beggar.'  Those were your words, and Claridge Pasha listened and
believed, and saved your life and gave you work; and now again you
have power greater than all others in Egypt."

"Madame, I congratulate you on a useful memory.  May it serve you as the
hill-fountain the garden in the city!  Those indeed were my words.  I
hear myself from your lips, and yet recognise myself, if that be not
vanity.  But, madame, why have you sought me?  What is it you wish to
know--to hear?"

He looked at her innocently, as though he did not know her errand; as
though beyond, in the desert, there was no tragedy approaching--or come.

"Excellency, you are aware that I have come to ask for news of Claridge
Pasha."  She leaned forward slightly, but, apart from her tightly
interlaced fingers, it would not have been possible to know that she was
under any strain.

"You come to me instead of to the Effendina.  May I ask why, madame?
Your husband's position--I did not know you were Lord Eglington's wife--
would entitle you to the highest consideration."

"I knew that Nahoum Pasha would have the whole knowledge, while the
Effendina would have part only.  Excellency, will you not tell me what
news You have?  Is Claridge Pasha alive?"

"Madame, I do not know.  He is in the desert.  He was surrounded.  For
over a month there has been no word-none.  He is in danger.  His way by
the river was blocked.  He stayed too long.  He might have escaped, but
he would insist on saving the loyal natives, on remaining with them,
since he could not bring them across the desert; and the river and the
desert are silent.  Nothing comes out of that furnace yonder.  Nothing
comes."

He bent his eyes upon her complacently.  Her own dropped.  She could not
bear that he should see the misery in them.

"You have come to try and save him, madame.  What did you expect to do?
Your Government did not strengthen my hands; your husband did nothing--
nothing that could make it possible for me to act.  There are many
nations here, alas!  Your husband does not take so great an interest in
the fate of Claridge Pasha as yourself, madame."

She ignored the insult.  She had determined to endure everything, if she
might but induce this man to do the thing that could be done--if it was
not too late.  Before she could frame a reply, he said urbanely:

"But that is not to be expected.  There was that between Claridge Pasha
and yourself which would induce you to do all you might do for him, to be
anxious for his welfare.  Gratitude is a rare thing--as rare as the
flower of the century--aloe; but you have it, madame."

There was no chance to misunderstand him.  Foorgat Bey--he knew the
truth, and had known it all these years.

"Excellency," she said, "if through me, Claridge Pasha--"

"One moment, madame," he interrupted, and, opening a drawer, took out a
letter.  "I think that what you would say may be found here, with much
else that you will care to know.  It is the last news of Claridge Pasha--
a letter from him.  I understand all you would say to me; but he who has
most at stake has said it, and, if he failed, do you think, madame, that
you could succeed?"

He handed her the letter with a respectful salutation.

"In the hour he left, madame, he came to know that the name of Foorgat
Bey was not blotted from the book of Time, nor from Fate's reckoning."

After all these years!  Her instinct had been true, then, that night so
long ago.  The hand that took the letter trembled slightly in spite of
her will, but it was not the disclosure Nahoum had made which caused her
agitation.  This letter she held was in David Claridge's hand, the first
she had ever seen, and, maybe, the last that he had ever written, or that
any one would ever see, a document of tears.  But no, there were no tears
in this letter!  As Hylda read it the trembling passed from her fingers,
and a great thrilling pride possessed her.  If tragedy had come, then it
had fallen like a fire from heaven, not like a pestilence rising from the
earth.  Here indeed was that which justified all she had done, what she
was doing now, what she meant to do when she had read the last word of it
and the firm, clear signature beneath.

     "Excellency [the letter began in English], I came into the desert
     and into the perils I find here, with your last words in my ear,
     'There is the matter of Foorgat Bey.'  The time you chose to speak
     was chosen well for your purpose, but ill for me.  I could not turn
     back, I must go on.  Had I returned, of what avail?  What could I do
     but say what I say here, that my hand killed Foorgat Bey; that I had
     not meant to kill him, though at the moment I struck I took no heed
     whether he lived or died.  Since you know of my sorrowful deed, you
     also know why Foorgat Bey was struck down.  When, as I left the bank
     of the Nile, your words blinded my eyes, my mind said in its misery:
     'Now, I see!'  The curtains fell away from between you and me, and I
     saw all that you had done for vengeance and revenge.  You knew all
     on that night when you sought your life of me and the way back to
     Kaid's forgiveness.  I see all as though you spoke it in my ear.
     You had reason to hurt me, but you had no reason for hurting Egypt,
     as you have done.  I did not value my life, as you know well, for it
     has been flung into the midst of dangers for Egypt's sake, how
     often!  It was not cowardice which made me hide from you and all the
     world the killing of Foorgat Bey.  I desired to face the penalty,
     for did not my act deny all that I had held fast from my youth up?
     But there was another concerned--a girl, but a child in years, as
     innocent and true a being as God has ever set among the dangers of
     this life, and, by her very innocence and unsuspecting nature, so
     much more in peril before such unscrupulous wiles as were used by
     Foorgat Bey.

     "I have known you many years, Nahoum, and dark and cruel as your
     acts have been against the work I gave my life to do, yet I think
     that there was ever in you, too, the root of goodness.  Men would
     call your acts treacherous if they knew what you had done; and so
     indeed they were; but yet I have seen you do things to others--not
     to me--which could rise only from the fountain of pure waters.  Was
     it partly because I killed Foorgat and partly because I came to
     place and influence and power, that you used me so, and all that I
     did?  Or was it the East at war with the West, the immemorial feud
     and foray?

     "This last I will believe; for then it will seem to be something
     beyond yourself--centuries of predisposition, the long stain of the
     indelible--that drove you to those acts of matricide.  Ay, it is
     that!  For, Armenian as you are, this land is your native land, and
     in pulling down what I have built up--with you, Nahoum, with you--
     you have plunged the knife into the bosom of your mother.  Did it
     never seem to you that the work which you did with me was a good
     work--the reduction of the corvee, the decrease of conscription, the
     lessening of taxes of the fellah, the bridges built, the canals dug,
     the seed distributed, the plague stayed, the better dwellings for
     the poor in the Delta, the destruction of brigandage, the slow
     blotting-out of exaction and tyranny under the kourbash, the quiet
     growth of law and justice, the new industries started--did not all
     these seem good to you, as you served the land with me, your great
     genius for finance, ay, and your own purse, helping on the things
     that were dear to me, for Egypt's sake?  Giving with one hand
     freely, did your soul not misgive you when you took away with the
     other?

     "When you tore down my work, you were tearing down your own; for,
     more than the material help I thought you gave in planning and
     shaping reforms, ay, far more than all, was the feeling in me which
     helped me over many a dark place, that I had you with me, that I was
     not alone.  I trusted you, Nahoum.  A life for a life you might have
     had for the asking; but a long torture and a daily weaving of the
     web of treachery--that has taken more than my life; it has taken
     your own, for you have killed the best part of yourself, that which
     you did with me; and here in an ever-narrowing circle of death I say
     to you that you will die with me.  Power you have, but it will
     wither in your grasp.  Kaid will turn against you; for with my
     failure will come a dark reaction in his mind, which feels the cloud
     of doom drawing over it.  Without me, with my work falling about his
     ears, he will, as he did so short a time ago, turn to Sharif and
     Higli and the rest; and the only comfort you will have will be that
     you destroyed the life of him who killed your brother.  Did you love
     your brother?  Nay, not more than did I, for I sent his soul into
     the void, and I would gladly have gone after it to ask God for the
     pardon of all his sins--and mine.  Think: I hid the truth, but why?
     Because a woman would suffer an unmerited scandal and shame.
     Nothing could recall Foorgat Bey; but for that silence I gave my
     life, for the land which was his land.  Do you betray it, then?

     "And now, Nahoum, the gulf in which you sought to plunge me when you
     had ruined all I did is here before me.  The long deception has
     nearly done its work.  I know from Ebn Ezra Bey what passed between
     you.  They are out against me--the slave-dealers--from Senaar to
     where I am.  The dominion of Egypt is over here.  Yet I could
     restore it with a thousand men and a handful of European officers,
     had I but a show of authority from Cairo, which they think has
     deserted me.

     "I am shut up here with a handful of men who can fight and thousands
     who cannot fight, and food grows scarcer, and my garrison is worn
     and famished; but each day I hearten them with the hope that you
     will send me a thousand men from Cairo.  One steamer pounding here
     from the north with men who bring commands from the Effendina, and
     those thousands out yonder beyond my mines and moats and guns will
     begin to melt away.  Nahoum, think not that you shall triumph over
     David Claridge.  If it be God's will that I shall die here, my work
     undone, then, smiling, I shall go with step that does not falter, to
     live once more; and another day the work that I began will rise
     again in spite of you or any man.

     "Nahoum, the killing of Foorgat Bey has been like a cloud upon all
     my past.  You know me, and you know I do not lie.  Yet I do not
     grieve that I hid the thing--it was not mine only; and if ever you
     knew a good woman, and in dark moments have turned to her, glad that
     she was yours, think what you would have done for her, how you would
     have sheltered her against aught that might injure her, against
     those things women are not made to bear.  Then think that I hid the
     deed for one who was a stranger to me, whose life must ever lay far
     from mine, and see clearly that I did it for a woman's sake, and not
     for this woman's sake; for I had never seen her till the moment I
     struck Foorgat Bey into silence and the tomb.  Will you not
     understand, Nahoum?

     "Yonder, I see the tribes that harry me.  The great guns firing make
     the day a burden, the nights are ever fretted by the dangers of
     surprise, and there is scarce time to bury the dead whom sickness
     and the sword destroy.  From the midst of it all my eyes turn to you
     in Cairo, whose forgiveness I ask for the one injury I did you;
     while I pray that you will seek pardon for all that you have done to
     me and to those who will pass with me, if our circle is broken.
     Friend, Achmet the Ropemaker is here fighting for Egypt.  Art thou
     less, then, than Achmet?  So, God be with thee.

                                        "DAVID CLARIDGE."


Without a pause Hylda had read the letter from the first word to the
last.  She was too proud to let this conspirator and traitor see what
David's words could do to her.  When she read the lines concerning
herself, she became cold from head to foot, but she knew that Nahoum
never took his eyes from her face, and she gave no outward sign of what
was passing within.  When she had finished it, she folded it up calmly,
her eyes dwelt for a moment on the address upon the envelope, and then
she handed it back to Nahoum without a word.  She looked him in the eyes
and spoke.  "He saved your life, he gave you all you had lost.  It was
not his fault that Prince Kaid chose him for his chief counsellor.  You
would be lying where your brother lies, were it not for Claridge Pasha."

"It may be; but the luck was with me; and I have my way."

She drew herself together to say what was hard to say.  "Excellency, the
man who was killed deserved to die.  Only by lies, only by subterfuge,
only because I was curious to see the inside of the Palace, and because I
had known him in London, did I, without a thought of indiscretion, give
myself to his care to come here.  I was so young; I did not know life, or
men--or Egyptians."  The last word was uttered with low scorn.

He glanced up quickly, and for the first time she saw a gleam of malice
in his eyes.  She could not feel sorry she had said it, yet she must
remove the impression if possible.

"What Claridge Pasha did, any man would have done, Excellency.  He
struck, and death was an accident.  Foorgat's temple struck the corner of
a pedestal.

"His death was instant.  He would have killed Claridge Pasha if it had
been possible--he tried to do so.  But, Excellency, if you have a
daughter, if you ever had a child, what would you have done if any man
had--"

"In the East daughters are more discreet; they tempt men less," he
answered quietly, and fingered the string of beads he carried.

"Yet you would have done as Claridge Pasha did.  That it was your brother
was an accident, and--"

"It was an accident that the penalty must fall on Claridge Pasha, and on
you, madame.  I did not choose the objects of penalty.  Destiny chose
them, as Destiny chose Claridge Pasha as the man who should supplant me,
who should attempt to do these mad things for Egypt against the judgment
of the world--against the judgment of your husband.  Shall I have better
judgment than the chancellories of Europe and England--and Lord
Eglington?"

"Excellency, you know what moves other nations; but it is for Egypt to
act for herself.  You ask me why I did not go to the Effendina.  I come
to you because I know that you could circumvent the Effendina, even
if he sent ten thousand men.  It is the way in Egypt."

"Madame, you have insight--will you not look farther still, and see that,
however good Claridge Pasha's work might be some day in the far future,
it is not good to-day.  It is too soon.  At the beginning of the
twentieth century, perhaps.  Men pay the penalty of their mistakes.
A man's life"--he watched her closely with his wide, benevolent eyes--"is
neither here nor there, nor a few thousands, in the destiny of a nation.
A man who ventures into a lion's den must not be surprised if he goes as
Harrik went--ah, perhaps you do not know how Harrik went!  A man who
tears at the foundations of a house must not be surprised if the timbers
fall on him and on his workmen.  It is Destiny that Claridge Pasha should
be the slayer of my brother, and a danger to Egypt, and one whose life is
so dear to you, madame.  You would have it otherwise, and so would I, but
we must take things as they are--and you see that letter.  It is seven
weeks since then, and it may be that the circle has been broken.  Yet it
may not be so.  The circle may be smaller, but not broken."

She felt how he was tempting her from word to word with a merciless
ingenuity; yet she kept to her purpose; and however hopeless it seemed,
she would struggle on.

"Excellency," she said in a low, pleading tone, "has he not suffered
enough?  Has he not paid the price of that life which you would not bring
back if you could?  No, in those places of your mind where no one can see
lies the thought that you would not bring back Foorgat Bey.  It is not an
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth that has moved you; it has not
been love of Foorgat Bey; it has been the hatred of the East for the
West.  And yet you are a Christian!  Has Claridge Pasha not suffered
enough, Excellency?  Have you not had your fill of revenge?  Have you
not done enough to hurt a man whose only crime was that he killed a man
to save a woman, and had not meant to kill?"

"Yet he says in his letter that the thought of killing would not have
stopped him."

"Does one think at such a moment?  Did he think? There was no time.  It
was the work of an instant.  Ah, Fate was not kind, Excellency!  If it
had been, I should have been permitted to kill Foorgat Bey with my own
hands."

"I should have found it hard to exact the penalty from you, madame."

The words were uttered in so neutral a way that they were enigmatical,
and she could not take offence or be sure of his meaning.

"Think, Excellency.  Have you ever known one so selfless, so good,
so true?  For humanity's sake, would you not keep alive such a man?
If there were a feud as old as Adam between your race and his, would you
not before this life of sacrifice lay down the sword and the bitter
challenge?  He gave you his hand in faith and trust, because your God was
his God, your prophet and lord his prophet and lord.  Such faith should
melt your heart.  Can you not see that he tried to make compensation for
Foorgat's death, by giving you your life and setting you where you are
now, with power to save or kill him?"

"You call him great; yet I am here in safety, and he is--where he is.
Have you not heard of the strife of minds and wills?  He represented the
West, I the East.  He was a Christian, so was I; the ground of our battle
was a fair one, and--and I have won."

"The ground of battle fair!" she protested bitterly.  "He did not know
that there was strife between you.  He did not fight you.  I think that
he always loved you, Excellency.  He would have given his life for you,
if it had been in danger.  Is there in that letter one word that any man
could wish unwritten when the world was all ended for all men?  But no,
there was no strife between you--there was only hatred on your part.  He
was so much greater than you that you should feel no rivalry, no strife.
The sword he carries cuts as wide as Time.  You are of a petty day in a
petty land.  Your mouth will soon be filled with dust, and you will be
forgotten.  He will live in the history of the world.  Excellency,
I plead for him because I owe him so much: he killed a man and brought
upon himself a lifelong misery for me.  It is all I can do, plead to you
who know the truth about him--yes, you know the truth--to make an effort
to save him.  It may be too late; but yet God may be waiting for you to
lift your hand.  You said the circle may be smaller, but it may be
unbroken still.  Will you not do a great thing once, and win a woman's
gratitude, and the thanks of the world, by trying to save one who makes
us think better of humanity?  Will you not have the name of Nahoum Pasha
linked with his--with his who thought you were his friend?  Will you not
save him?"

He got slowly to his feet, a strange look in his eyes.  "Your words are
useless.  I will not save him for your sake; I will not save him for the
world's sake; I will not save him--"

A cry of pain and grief broke from her, and she buried her face in her
hands.

"--I will not save him for any other sake than his own."

He paused.  Slowly, as dazed as though she had received a blow, Hylda
raised her face and her hands dropped in her lap.

"For any other sake than his own!"  Her eyes gazed at him in a
bewildered, piteous way.  What did he mean?  His voice seemed to come
from afar off.

"Did you think that you could save him?  That I would listen to you, if I
did not listen to him?  No, no, madame.  Not even did he conquer me; but
something greater than himself within himself, it conquered me."

She got to her feet gasping, her hands stretched out.  "Oh, is it true--
is it true?" she cried.

"The West has conquered," he answered.

"You will help him--you will try to save him?"  "When, a month ago, I
read the letter you have read, I tried to save him.  I sent secretly four
thousand men who were at Wady Halfa to relieve him--if it could be done;
five hundred to push forward on the quickest of the armed steamers, the
rest to follow as fast as possible.  I did my best.  That was a month
ago, and I am waiting--waiting and hoping, madame."

Suddenly she broke down.  Tears streamed from her eyes.  She sank into
the chair, and sobs shook her from head to foot.

"Be patient, be composed, madame," Nahoum said gently.  "I have tried you
greatly--forgive me.  Nay, do not weep.  I have hope.  We may hear from
him at any moment now," he added softly, and there was a new look in his
wide blue eyes as they were bent on her.




CHAPTER XLI

IN THE LAND OF SHINAR

     "Then I said to the angel that talked with me, Whither do these bear
     the Ephah?

     "And he said unto me, To build it an house in the land of Shinar;
     and it shall be established, and set there upon her own base."


David raised his head from the paper he was studying.  He looked at Lacey
sharply.  "And how many rounds of ammunition?" he asked.

"Ten thousand, Saadat."

"How many shells?" he continued, making notes upon the paper before him.

"Three hundred, Saadat."

"How many hundredweight of dourha?"  "Eighty--about."

"And how many mouths to feed?"  "Five thousand."

"How many fighters go with the mouths?"
"Nine hundred and eighty-of a kind."

"And of the best?'

"Well, say, five hundred."

"Thee said six hundred three days ago, Lacey."

"Sixty were killed or wounded on Sunday, and forty I reckon in the
others, Saadat."

The dark eyes flashed, the lips set.  "The fire was sickening--they fell
back?"

"Well, Saadat, they reflected--at the wrong time."

"They ran?"

"Not back--they were slow in getting on."

"But they fought it out?"

"They had to--root hog, or die.  You see, Saadat, in that five hundred
I'm only counting the invincibles, the up-and-at-'ems, the blind-goers
that 'd open the lid of Hell and jump in after the enemy."

The pale face lighted.  "So many!  I would not have put the estimate half
so high.  Not bad for a dark race fighting for they know not what!"

"They know that all right; they are fighting for you, Saadat."

David seemed not to hear.  "Five hundred--so many, and the enemy so near,
the temptation so great."

"The deserters are all gone to Ali Wad Hei, Saadat.  For a month there
have been only the deserted."

A hardness crept into the dark eyes.  "Only the deserted!"  He looked out
to where the Nile lost itself in the northern distance.  "I asked Nahoum
for one thousand men, I asked England for the word which would send them.
I asked for a thousand, but even two hundred would turn the scale--the
sign that the Inglesi had behind him Cairo and London.  Twenty weeks, and
nothing comes!"

He got to his feet slowly and walked up and down the room for a moment,
glancing out occasionally towards the clump of palms which marked the
disappearance of the Nile into the desert beyond his vision.  At
intervals a cannon-shot crashed upon the rarefied air, as scores of
thousands had done for months past, torturing to ear and sense and nerve.
The confused and dulled roar of voices came from the distance also; and,
looking out to the landward side, David saw a series of movements of the
besieging forces, under the Arab leader, Ali Wad Hei.  Here a loosely
formed body of lancers and light cavalry cantered away towards the south,
converging upon the Nile; there a troop of heavy cavalry in glistening
mail moved nearer to the northern defences; and between, battalions of
infantry took up new positions, while batteries of guns moved nearer to
the river, curving upon the palace north and south.  Suddenly David's
eyes flashed fire.  He turned to Lacey eagerly.  Lacey was watching with
eyes screwed up shrewdly, his forehead shining with sweat.

"Saadat," he said suddenly, "this isn't the usual set of quadrilles.
It's the real thing.  They're watching the river--waiting."

"But south!" was David's laconic response.  At the same moment he struck
a gong.  An orderly entered.  Giving swift instructions, he turned to
Lacey again.  "Not Cairo--Darfur," he added.

"Ebn Ezra Bey coming!  Ali Wad Hei's got word from up the Nile, I guess."

David nodded, and his face clouded.  "We should have had word also," he
said sharply.

There was a knock at the door, and Mahommed Hassan entered, supporting an
Arab, down whose haggard face blood trickled from a wound in the head,
while an arm hung limp at his side.

"Behold, Saadat--from Ebn Ezra Bey," Mahommed said.  The man drooped
beside him.

David caught a tin cup from a shelf, poured some liquor into it, and held
it to the lips of the fainting man.  "Drink," he said.  The Arab drank
greedily, and, when he had finished, gave a long sigh of satisfaction.
"Let him sit," David added.

When the man was seated on a sheepskin, the huge Mahommed squatting
behind like a sentinel, David questioned him.  "What is thy name--thy
news?" he asked in Arabic.

"I am called Feroog.  I come from Ebn Ezra Bey, to whom be peace!" he
answered.  "Thy messenger, Saadat, behold he died of hunger and thirst,
and his work became mine.  Ebn Ezra Bey came by the river.  .  .  ."
"He is near?" asked David impatiently.

"He is twenty miles away."

"Thou camest by the desert?"

"By the desert, Saadat, as Ebn Ezra effendi comes."

"By the desert!  But thou saidst he came by the river."

"Saadat, yonder, forty miles from where we are, the river makes a great
curve.  There the effendi landed in the night with four hundred men to
march hither.  But he commanded that the boats should come on slowly and
receive the attack in the river, while he came in from the desert."

David's eye flashed.  "A great device.  They will be here by midnight,
then, perhaps?"

"At midnight, Saadat, by the blessing of God."

"How wert thou wounded?"

"I came upon two of the enemy.  They were mounted.  I fought them.  Upon
the horse of one I came here."

"The other?"

"God is merciful, Saadat.  He is in the bosom of God."

"How many men come by the river?"

"But fifty, Saadat," was the answer, "but they have sworn by the stone in
the Kaabah not to surrender."

"And those who come with the effendi, with Ebn Ezra Bey, are they as
those who will not surrender?"

"Half of them are so.  They were with thee, as was I, Saadat, when the
great sickness fell upon us, and were healed by thee, and afterwards
fought with thee."  David nodded abstractedly, and motioned to Mahommed
to take the man away; then he said to Lacey: "How long do you think we
can hold out?"

"We shall have more men, but also more rifles to fire, and more mouths to
fill, if Ebn Ezra gets in, Saadat."

David raised his head.  "But with more rifles to fire away your ten
thousand rounds"--he tapped the paper on the table--"and eat the eighty
hundredweight of dourha, how long can we last?"

"If they are to fight, and with full stomachs, and to stake everything on
that one fight, then we can last two days.  No more, I reckon."

"I make it one day," answered David.  "In three days we shall have no
food, and unless help comes from Cairo, we must die or surrender.  It is
not well to starve on the chance of help coming, and then die fighting
with weak arms and broken spirit.  Therefore, we must fight to morrow,
if Ebn Ezra gets in to-night.  I think we shall fight well," he added.
"You think so?"

"You are a born fighter, Saadat."

A shadow fell on David's face, and his lips tightened.  "I was not born a
fighter, Lacey.  The day we met first no man had ever died by my hand or
by my will."

"There are three who must die at sunset--an hour from now-by thy will,
Saadat."

A startled look came into David's face.  "Who?" he asked.

"The Three Pashas, Saadat.  They have been recaptured."

"Recaptured!" rejoined David mechanically.

"Achmet Pasha got them from under the very noses of the sheikhs before
sunrise this morning."

"Achmet--Achmet Pasha!"  A light came into David's face again.

"You will keep faith with Achmet, Saadat.  He risked his life to get
them.  They betrayed you, and betrayed three hundred good men to death.
If they do not die, those who fight for you will say that it doesn't
matter whether men fight for you or betray you, they get the same stuff
off the same plate.  If we are going to fight to-morrow, it ought to be
with a clean bill of health."

"They served me well so long--ate at my table, fought with me.  But--but
traitors must die, even as Harrik died."  A stern look came into his
face.  He looked round the great room slowly.  "We have done our best,"
he said.  "I need not have failed, if there had been no treachery. . . ."

"If it hadn't been for Nahoum!"

David raised his head.  Supreme purpose came into his bearing.  A grave
smile played at his lips, as he gave that quick toss of the head which
had been a characteristic of both Eglington and himself.  His eyes shone-
a steady, indomitable light.  "I will not give in.  I still have hope.
We are few and they are many, but the end of a battle has never been
sure.  We may not fail even now.  Help may come from Cairo even to-
morrow."

"Say, somehow you've always pulled through before, Saadat.
When I've been most frightened I've perked up and stiffened my backbone,
remembering your luck.  I've seen a blue funk evaporate by thinking of
how things always come your way just when the worst seems at the worst."

David smiled as he caught up a small cane and prepared to go.  Looking
out of a window, he stroked his thin, clean-shaven face with a lean
finger.  Presently a movement in the desert arrested his attention.  He
put a field-glass to his eyes, and scanned the field of operations
closely once more.

"Good-good!" he burst out cheerfully.  "Achmet has done the one thing
possible.  The way to the north will be still open.  He has flung his men
between the Nile and the enemy, and now the batteries are at work."
Opening the door, they passed out.  "He has anticipated my orders," he
added.  "Come, Lacey, it will be an anxious night.  The moon is full, and
Ebn Ezra Bey has his work cut out--sharp work for all of us, and .  .  ."

Lacey could not hear the rest of his words in the roar of the artillery.
David's steamers in the river were pouring shot into the desert where the
enemy lay, and Achmet's "friendlies" and the Egyptians were making good
their new position.  As David and Lacey, fearlessly exposing themselves
to rifle fire, and taking the shortest and most dangerous route to where
Achmet fought, rode swiftly from the palace, Ebn Ezra's three steamers
appeared up the river, and came slowly down to where David's gunboats
lay.  Their appearance was greeted by desperate discharges of artillery
from the forces under Ali Wad Hei, who had received word of their coming
two hours before, and had accordingly redisposed his attacking forces.
But for Achmet's sharp initiative, the boldness of the attempt to cut off
the way north and south would have succeeded, and the circle of fire and
sword would have been complete.  Achmet's new position had not been
occupied before, for men were too few, and the position he had just left
was now exposed to attack.

Never since the siege began had the foe shown such initiative and
audacity.  They had relied on the pressure of famine and decimation by
sickness, the steady effects of sorties, with consequent fatalities and
desertions, to bring the Liberator of the Slaves to his knees.  Ebn Ezra
Bey had sought to keep quiet the sheikhs far south, but he had been shut
up in Darffur for months, and had been in as bad a plight as David.  He
had, however, broken through at last.  His ruse in leaving the steamers
in the night and marching across the desert was as courageous as it was
perilous, for, if discovered before he reached the beleaguered place,
nothing could save his little force from destruction.  There was one way
in from the desert to the walled town, and it was through that space
which Achmet and his men had occupied, and on which Ali Wad Hei might
now, at any moment, throw his troops.

David's heart sank as he saw the danger.  From the palace he had sent an
orderly with a command to an officer to move forward and secure the
position, but still the gap was open, and the men he had ordered to
advance remained where they were.  Every minute had its crisis.

As Lacey and himself left the town the misery of the place smote him in
the eyes.  Filth, refuse, debris filled the streets.  Sick and dying men
called to him from dark doorways, children and women begged for bread,
carcasses lay unburied, vultures hovering above them--his tireless
efforts had not been sufficient to cope with the daily horrors of the
siege.  But there was no sign of hostility to him.  Voices called
blessings on him from dark doorways, lips blanching in death commended
him to Allah, and now and then a shrill call told of a fighter who had
been laid low, but who had a spirit still unbeaten.  Old men and women
stood over their cooking-pots waiting for the moment of sunset; for it
was Ramadan, and the faithful fasted during the day--as though every day
was not a fast.

Sunset was almost come, as David left the city and galloped away
to send forces to stop the gap of danger before it was filled by the foe.
Sunset--the Three Pashas were to die at sunset!  They were with Achmet,
and in a few moments they would be dead.  As David and Lacey rode hard,
they suddenly saw a movement of men on foot at a distant point of the
field, and then a small mounted troop, fifty at most, detach themselves
from the larger force and, in close formation, gallop fiercely down on
the position which Achmet had left.  David felt a shiver of anxiety and
apprehension as he saw this sharp, sweeping advance.  Even fifty men,
well intrenched, could hold the position until the main body of Ali Wad
Hei's infantry came on.

They rode hard, but harder still rode Ali Wad Hei's troop of daring
Arabs.  Nearer and nearer they came.  Suddenly from the trenches, which
they had thought deserted, David saw jets of smoke rise, and a half-dozen
of the advancing troop fell from their saddles, their riderless horses
galloping on.

David's heart leaped: Achmet had, then, left men behind, hidden from
view; and these were now defending the position.  Again came the jets of
smoke, and again more Arabs dropped from their saddles.  But the others
still came on.  A thousand feet away others fell.  Twenty-two of the
fifty had already gone.  The rest fired their rifles as they galloped.
But now, to David's relief, his own forces, which should have moved half
an hour before, were coming swiftly down to cut off the approach of Ali
Wad Hei's infantry, and he turned his horse upon the position where a
handful of men were still emptying the saddles of the impetuous enemy.
But now all that were left of the fifty were upon the trenches.  Then
came the flash of swords, puffs of smoke, the thrust of lances, and
figures falling from the screaming, rearing horses.

Lacey's pistol was in his hand, David's sword was gripped tight, as they
rushed upon the melee.  Lacey's pistol snapped, and an Arab fell; again,
and another swayed in his saddle.  David's sword swept down, and a
turbaned head was gashed by a mortal stroke.  As he swung towards another
horseman, who had struck down a defender of the trenches, an Arab raised
himself in his saddle and flung a lance with a cry of terrible malice;
but, even as he did so, a bullet from Lacey's pistol pierced his
shoulder.  The shot had been too late to stop the lance, but sufficient
to divert its course.  It caught David in the flesh of the body under the
arm--a slight wound only.  A few inches to the right, however, and his
day would have been done.

The remaining Arabs turned and fled.  The fight was over.  As David,
dismounting, stood with dripping sword in his hand, in imagination, he
heard the voice of Kaid say to him, as it said that night when he killed
Foorgat Bey: "Hast thou never killed a man?"

For an instant it blinded him, then he was conscious that, on the ground
at his feet, lay one of the Three Pashas who were to die at sunset.  It
was sunset now, and the man was dead.  Another of the Three sat upon the
ground winding his thigh with the folds of a dead Arab's turban, blood
streaming from his gashed face.  The last of the trio stood before David,
stoical and attentive.  For a moment David looked at the Three, the dead
man and the two living men, and then suddenly turned to where the
opposing forces were advancing.  His own men were now between the
position and Ali Wad Hei's shouting fanatics.  They would be able to
reach and defend the post in time.  He turned and gave orders.  There
were only twenty men besides the two pashas, whom his commands also
comprised.  Two small guns were in place.  He had them trained on that
portion of the advancing infantry of Ali Wad Hei not yet covered by his
own forces.  Years of work and responsibility had made him master of many
things, and long ago he had learned the work of an artilleryman.  In a
moment a shot, well directed, made a gap in the ranks of the advancing
foe.  An instant afterwards a shot from the other gun fired by the
unwounded pasha, who, in his youth, had been an officer of artillery,
added to the confusion in the swerving ranks, and the force hesitated;
and now from Ebn Ezra Bey's river steamers, which had just arrived, there
came a flank fire.  The force wavered.  From David's gun another shot
made havoc.  They turned and fell back quickly.  The situation was saved.

As if by magic the attack of the enemy all over the field ceased.  By
sunset they had meant to finish this enterprise, which was to put the
besieged wholly in their hands, and then to feast after the day's
fasting.  Sunset had come, and they had been foiled; but hunger demanded
the feast.  The order to cease firing and retreat sounded, and three
thousand men hurried back to the cooking-pot, the sack of dourha, and the
prayer mat.  Malaish, if the infidel Inglesi was not conquered to-day,
he should be beaten and captured and should die to-morrow!  And yet there
were those among them who had a well-grounded apprehension that the
"Inglesi" would win in the end.

By the trenches, where five men had died so bravely, and a traitorous
pasha had paid the full penalty of a crime and won a soldier's death,
David spoke to his living comrades.  As he prepared to return to the
city, he said to the unwounded pasha: "Thou wert to die at sunset; it was
thy sentence."

And the pasha answered: "Saadat, as for death--I am ready to die, but
have I not fought for thee?"  David turned to the wounded pasha.

"Why did Achmet Pasha spare thee?"

"He did not spare us, Saadat.  Those who fought with us but now were to
shoot us at sunset, and remain here till other troops came.  Before
sunset we saw the danger, since no help came.  Therefore we fought to
save this place for thee."

David looked them in the eyes.  "Ye were traitors," he said, "and for an
example it was meet that ye should die.  But this that ye have done shall
be told to all who fight to-morrow, and men will know why it is I pardon
treachery.  Ye shall fight again, if need be, betwixt this hour and
morning, and ye shall die, if need be.  Ye are willing?"

Both men touched their foreheads, their lips, and their breasts.
"Whether it be death or it be life, Inshallah, we are true to thee,
Saadat!" one said, and the other repeated the words after him.  As they
salaamed David left them, and rode forward to the advancing forces.

Upon the roof of the palace Mahommed Hassan watched and waited, his eyes
scanning sharply the desert to the south, his ears strained to catch that
stir of life which his accustomed ears had so often detected in the
desert, when no footsteps, marching, or noises could be heard.  Below,
now in the palace, now in the defences, his master, the Saadat, planned
for the last day's effort on the morrow, gave directions to the officers,
sent commands to Achmet Pasha, arranged for the disposition of his
forces, with as strange a band of adherents and subordinates as ever men
had--adventurers, to whom adventure in their own land had brought no
profit; members of that legion of the non-reputable, to whom Cairo
offered no home; Levantines, who had fled from that underground world
where every coin of reputation is falsely minted, refugees from the storm
of the world's disapproval.  There were Greeks with Austrian names;
Armenians, speaking Italian as their native tongue; Italians of
astonishing military skill, whose services were no longer required by
their offended country; French Pizarros with a romantic outlook, even in
misery, intent to find new El Dorados; Englishmen, who had cheated at
cards and had left the Horse Guards for ever behind; Egyptian intriguers,
who had been banished for being less successful than greater intriguers;
but also a band of good gallant men of every nation.

Upon all these, during the siege, Mahommed Hassan had been a self-
appointed spy, and had indirectly added to that knowledge which made
David's decisive actions to circumvent intrigue and its consequences seem
almost supernatural.  In his way Mahommed was a great man.  He knew that
David would endure no spying, and it was creditable to his subtlety and
skill that he was able to warn his master, without being himself
suspected of getting information by dark means.  On the palace roof
Mahommed was happy to-night.  Tomorrow would be a great day, and, since
the Saadat was to control its destiny, what other end could there be but
happiness?  Had not the Saadat always ridden over all that had been in
his way?  Had not he, Mahommed, ever had plenty to eat and drink, and
money to send to Manfaloot to his father there, and to bribe when bribing
was needed?  Truly, life was a boon!  With a neboot of dom-wood across
his knees he sat in the still, moonlit night, peering into that distance
whence Ebn Ezra Bey and his men must come, the moon above tranquil and
pleasant and alluring, and the desert beneath, covered as it was with the
outrages and terrors of war, breathing softly its ancient music, that
delicate vibrant humming of the latent activities.  In his uncivilised
soul Mahommed Hassan felt this murmur, and even as he sat waiting to know
whether a little army would steal out of the south like phantoms into
this circle the Saadat had drawn round him, he kept humming to himself--
had he not been, was he not now, an Apollo to numberless houris who had
looked down at him from behind mooshrabieh screens, or waited for him in
the palm-grove or the cane-field?  The words of his song were not uttered
aloud, but yet he sang them silently--

    "Every night long and all night my spirit is moaning and crying
     O dear gazelle, that has taken away my peace!
     Ah! if my beloved come not, my eyes will be blinded with weeping
     Moon of my joy, come to me, hark to the call of my soul!"

Over and over he kept chanting the song.  Suddenly, however, he leaned
farther forward and strained his ears.  Yes, at last, away to the south-
east, there was life stirring, men moving--moving quickly.  He got to his
feet slowly, still listening, stood for a moment motionless, then, with a
cry of satisfaction, dimly saw a moving mass in the white moonlight far
over by the river.  Ebn Ezra Bey and his men were coming.  He started
below, and met David on the way up.  He waited till David had mounted the
roof, then he pointed.  "Now, Saadat!" he said.

"They have stolen in?"  David peered into the misty whiteness.

They are almost in, Saadat.  Nothing can stop them now."

"It is well done.  Go and ask Ebn Ezra effendi to come hither," he said.

Suddenly a shot was fired, then a hoarse shout came over the desert, then
there was silence again.

"They are in, Saadat," said Mahommed Hassan.

                    .......................

Day broke over a hazy plain.  On both sides of the Nile the river mist
spread wide, and the army of Ali Wad Hei and the defending forces were
alike veiled from each other and from the desert world beyond.  Down the
river for scores of miles the mist was heavy, and those who moved within
it and on the waters of the Nile could not see fifty feet ahead.  Yet
through this heavy veil there broke gently a little fleet of phantom
vessels, the noise of the paddle-wheels and their propellers muffled as
they moved slowly on.  Never had vessels taken such risks on the Nile
before, never had pilots trusted so to instinct, for there were sand-
banks and ugly drifts of rock here and there.  A safe journey for phantom
ships; but these armed vessels, filled by men with white, eager faces and
others with dark Egyptian features, were no phantoms.  They bristled with
weapons, and armed men crowded every corner of space.  For full two hours
from the first streak of light they had travelled swiftly, taking chances
not to be taken save in some desperate moment.  The moment was desperate
enough, if not for them.  They were going to the relief of besieged men,
with a message from Nahoum Pasha to Claridge Pasha, and with succour.
They had looked for a struggle up this river as they neared the
beleaguered city; but, as they came nearer and nearer, not a gun fired at
them from the forts on the banks out of the mists.  If they were heard
they still were safe from the guns, for they could not be seen, and those
on shore could not know whether they were friend or foe.  Like ghostly
vessels they passed on, until at last they could hear the stir and murmur
of life along the banks of the stream.

Boom!  boom!  boom!  Through the mist the guns of the city were pouring
shot and shell out into Ali Wad Hei's camp, and Ali Wad Hei laughed
contemptuously.  Surely now the Inglesi was altogether mad, and to-day,
this day after prayers at noon, he should be shot like a mad dog, for
yesterday's defeat had turned some of his own adherent sheikhs into angry
critics.  He would not wait for starvation to compel the infidel to
surrender.  He would win freedom to deal in human flesh and blood, and
make slave-markets where he willed, and win glory for the Lord Mahomet,
by putting this place to the sword; and, when it was over, he would have
the Inglesi's head carried on a pole through the city for the faithful to
mock at, a target for the filth of the streets.  So, by the will of
Allah, it should be done!

Boom!  boom!  boom!  The Inglesi was certainly mad, for never had there
been so much firing in any long day in all the siege as in this brief
hour this morning.  It was the act of a fool, to fire his shot and shell
into the mist without aim, without a clear target.  Ali Wad Hei scorned
to make any reply with his guns, but sat in desultory counsel with his
sheikhs, planning what should be done when the mists had cleared away.
But yesterday evening the Arab chief had offered to give the Inglesi life
if he would surrender and become a Muslim, and swear by the Lord Mahomet;
but late in the night he had received a reply which left only one choice,
and that was to disembowel the infidel, and carry his head aloft on a
spear.  The letter he had received ran thus in Arabic:

     "To Ali Wad Hei and All with Him:

     "We are here to live or to die as God wills, and not as ye will.  I
     have set my feet on the rock, and not by threats of any man shall I
     be moved.  But I say that for all the blood that ye have shed here
     there will be punishment, and for the slaves which ye have slain or
     sold there will be high price paid.  Ye have threatened the city and
     me--take us if ye can.  Ye are seven to one.  Why falter all these
     months?  If ye will not come to us, we shall come to you, rebellious
     ones, who have drawn the sword against your lawful ruler, the
     Effendina.
                                   "CLARIDGE PASHA"

It was a rhetorical document couched in the phraseology they best
understood; and if it begat derision, it also begat anger; and the
challenge David had delivered would be met when the mists had lifted from
the river and the plain.  But when the first thinning of the mists began,
when the sun began to dissipate the rolling haze, Ali Wad Hei and his
rebel sheikhs were suddenly startled by rifle-fire at close quarters, by
confused noises, and the jar and roar of battle.  Now the reason for the
firing of the great guns was plain.  The noise was meant to cover the
advance of David's men.  The little garrison, which had done no more than
issue in sorties, was now throwing its full force on the enemy in a last
desperate endeavour.  It was either success or absolute destruction.
David was staking all, with the last of his food, the last of his
ammunition, the last of his hopes.  All round the field the movement was
forward, till the circle had widened to the enemy's lines; while at the
old defences were only handfuls of men.  With scarce a cry David's men
fell on the unprepared foe; and he himself, on a grey Arab, a mark for
any lance or spear and rifle, rode upon that point where Ali Wad Hei's
tent was set.

But after the first onset, in which hundreds were killed, there began the
real noise of battle--fierce shouting, the shrill cries of wounded and
maddened horses as they struck with their feet, and bit as fiercely at
the fighting foe as did their masters.  The mist cleared slowly, and,
when it had wholly lifted, the fight was spread over every part of the
field of siege.  Ali Wad Hei's men had gathered themselves together after
the first deadly onslaught, and were fighting fiercely, shouting the
Muslim battle-cry, "Allah hu achbar!"  Able to bring up reinforcements,
the great losses at first sustained were soon made up, and the sheer
weight of numbers gave them courage and advantage.  By rushes with lance
and sword and rifle they were able, at last, to drive David's men back
upon their old defences with loss.  Then charge upon charge ensued, and
each charge, if it cost them much, cost the besieged more, by reason of
their fewer numbers.  At one point, however, the besieged became again
the attacking party.  This was where Achmet Pasha had command.  His men
on one side of the circle, as Ebn Ezra Bey's men on the other, fought
with a valour as desperate as the desert ever saw.  But David, galloping
here and there to order, to encourage, to prevent retreat at one point,
or to urge attack at another, saw that the doom of his gallant force was
certain; for the enemy were still four to one, in spite of the carnage of
the first attack.  Bullets hissed past him.  One carried away a button,
one caught the tip of his ear, one pierced the fez he wore; but he felt
nothing of this, saw nothing.  He was buried in the storm of battle
preparing for the end, for the final grim defence, when his men would
retreat upon the one last strong fort, and there await their fate.  From
this absorption he was roused by Lacey, who came galloping towards him.

"They've come, Saadat, they've come at last!  We're saved--oh, my God,
you bet we're all right now!  See!  See, Saadat!"

David saw.  Five steamers carrying the Egyptian flag were bearing around
the point where the river curved below the town, and converging upon
David's small fleet.  Presently the steamers opened fire, to encourage
the besieged, who replied with frenzied shouts of joy, and soon there
poured upon the sands hundreds of men in the uniform of the Effendina.
These came forward at the double, and, with a courage which nothing could
withstand, the whole circle spread out again upon the discomfited tribes
of Ali Wad Hei.  Dismay, confusion, possessed the Arabs.  Their river-
watchers had failed them, God had hidden His face from them; and when Ali
Wad Hei and three of his emirs turned and rode into the desert, their
forces broke and ran also, pursued by the relentless men who had suffered
the tortures of siege so long.  The chase was short, however, for they
were desert folk, and they returned to loot the camp which had menaced
them so long.

Only the new-comers, Nahoum's men, carried the hunt far; and they brought
back with them a body which their leader commanded to be brought to a
great room of the palace.  Towards sunset David and Ebn Ezra Bey and
Lacey came together to this room.  The folds of loose linen were lifted
from the face, and all three looked at it long in silence.  At last Lacey
spoke:

"He got what he wanted; the luck was with him.  It's better than
Leperland."

"In the bosom of Allah there is peace," said Ebn Ezra.  "It is well with
Achmet."

With misty eyes David stooped and took the dead man's hand in his for a
moment.  Then he rose to his feet and turned away.

"And Nahoum also--and Nahoum," he said presently.  "Read this," he added,
and put a letter from Nahoum into Ebn Ezra's hand.

Lacey reverently covered Achmet's face.  "Say, he got what he wanted," he
said again.




CHAPTER XLII

THE LOOM OF DESTINY

It was many a day since the Duchess of Snowdon had seen a sunrise, and
the one on which she now gazed from the deck of the dahabieh Nefert,
filled her with a strange new sense of discovery and revelation.  Her
perceptions were arrested and a little confused, and yet the undercurrent
of feeling was one of delight and rejuvenation.  Why did this sunrise
bring back, all at once, the day when her one lost child was born, and
she looked out of the windows of Snowdon Hall, as she lay still and
nerveless, and thought how wonderful and sweet and green was the world
she saw and the sky that walled it round?  Sunrise over the Greek Temple
of Philae and the splendid ruins of a farther time towering beside it!
In her sight were the wide, islanded Nile, where Cleopatra loitered with
Antony, the foaming, crashing cataracts above, the great quarries from
which ancient temples had been hewed, unfinished obelisks and vast blocks
of stone left where bygone workmen had forsaken them, when the invader
came and another dynasty disappeared into that partial oblivion from
which the Egyptian still emerges triumphant over all his conquerors,
unchanged in form and feature.  Something of its meaning got into her
mind.

"I wonder what Windlehurst would think of it.  He always had an eye for
things like that," she murmured; and then caught her breath, as she
added: "He always liked beauty."  She looked at her wrinkled, childish
hands.  "But sunsets never grow old," she continued, with no apparent
relevance.  "La, la, we were young once!"

Her eyes were lost again in the pinkish glow spreading over the grey-
brown sand of the desert, over the palm-covered island near.  "And now
it's others' turn, or ought to be," she murmured.

She looked to where, not far away, Hylda stood leaning over the railing
of the dahabieh, her eyes fixed in reverie on the farthest horizon line
of the unpeopled, untravelled plain of sand.

"No, poor thing, it's not her turn," she added, as Hylda, with a long
sigh, turned and went below.  Tears gathered in her pale blue eyes.  "Not
yet--with Eglington alive.  And perhaps it would be best if the other
never came back.  I could have made the world better worth living in if
I had had the chance--and I wouldn't have been a duchess!  La!  La!"

She relapsed into reverie, an uncommon experience for her; and her mind
floated indefinitely from one thing to another, while she was half
conscious of the smell of coffee permeating the air, and of the low
resonant notes of the Nubian boys, as, with locked shoulders, they
scrubbed the decks of a dahabieh near by with hempshod feet.

Presently, however, she was conscious of another sound--the soft clip of
oars, joined to the guttural, explosive song of native rowers; and,
leaning over the rail, she saw a boat draw alongside the Nefert.  From it
came the figure of Nahoum Pasha, who stepped briskly on deck, in his
handsome face a light which flashed an instant meaning to her.

"I know--I know!  Claridge Pasha--you have heard?" she said excitedly,
as he came to her.

He smiled and nodded.  "A messenger has arrived.  Within a few hours he
should be here."

"Then it was all false that he was wounded--ah, that horrible story of
his death!"

"Bismillah, it was not all false!  The night before the great battle he
was slightly wounded in the side.  He neglected it, and fever came on;
but he survived.  His first messengers to us were killed, and that is why
the news of the relief came so late.  But all is well at last.  I have
come to say so to Lady Eglington--even before I went to the Effendina."
He made a gesture towards a huge and gaily-caparisoned dahabieh not far
away.  "Kaid was right about coming here.  His health is better.  He
never doubted Claridge Pasha's return; it was une idee fixe.  He believes
a magic hand protects the Saadat, and that, adhering to him, he himself
will carry high the flower of good fortune and live for ever.  Kismet!  I
will not wait to see Lady Eglington.  I beg to offer to her my
congratulations on the triumph of her countryman."

His words had no ulterior note; but there was a shadow in his eyes which
in one not an Oriental would have seemed sympathy.

"Pasha, Pasha!" the Duchess called after him, as he turned to leave;
"tell me, is there any news from England--from the Government?"

"From Lord Eglington?  No," Nahoum answered meaningly.  "I wrote to him.
Did the English Government desire to send a message to Claridge Pasha,
if the relief was accomplished?  That is what I asked.  But there is no
word.  Malaish, Egypt will welcome him!"

She followed his eyes.  Two score of dahabiehs lay along the banks of the
Nile, and on the shore were encampments of soldiers, while flags were
flying everywhere.  Egypt had followed the lead of the Effendina.
Claridge Pasha's star was in its zenith.

As Nahoum's boat was rowed away, Hylda came on deck again, and the
Duchess hastened to her.  Hylda caught the look in her face.  "What has
happened?  Is there news?  Who has been here?" she asked.

The Duchess took her hands.  "Nahoum has gone to tell Prince Kaid.  He
came to you with the good news first," she said with a flutter.

She felt Hylda's hands turn cold.  A kind of mist filled the dark eyes,
and the slim, beautiful figure swayed slightly.  An instant only, and
then the lips smiled, and Hylda said in a quavering voice: "They will be
so glad in England."

"Yes, yes, my darling, that is what Nahoum said."  She gave Nahoum's
message to her.  "Now they'll make him a peer, I suppose, after having
deserted him.  So English!"

She did not understand why Hylda's hands trembled so, why so strange a
look came into her face, but, in an instant, the rare and appealing eyes
shone again with a light of agitated joy, and suddenly Hylda leaned over
and kissed her cheek.

"Smell the coffee," she said with assumed gaiety.  "Doesn't fair-and-
sixty want her breakfast?  Sunrise is a splendid tonic."  She laughed
feverishly.

"My darling, I hadn't seen the sun rise in thirty years, not since the
night I first met Windlehurst at a Foreign Office ball."

"You have always been great friends?"  Hylda stole a look at her.

"That's the queer part of it; I was so stupid, and he so clever.  But
Windlehurst has a way of letting himself down to your level.  He always
called me Betty after my boy died, just as if I was his equal.  La, la,
but I was proud when he first called me that--the Prime Minister of
England.  I'm going to watch the sun rise again to-morrow, my darling.  I
didn't know it was so beautiful, and gave one such an appetite."  She
broke a piece of bread, and, not waiting to butter it, almost stuffed it
into her mouth.

Hylda leaned over and pressed her arm.  "What a good mother Betty it is!"
she said tenderly.

Presently they were startled by the shrill screaming of a steamer
whistle, followed by the churning of the paddles, as she drove past and
drew to the bank near them.

"It is a steamer from Cairo, with letters, no doubt," said Hylda; and the
Duchess nodded assent, and covertly noted her look, for she knew that no
letters had arrived from Eglington since Hylda had left England.

A half-hour later, as the Duchess sat on deck, a great straw hat tied
under her chin with pale-blue ribbons, like a child of twelve, she was
startled by seeing the figure of a farmer-looking person with a shock of
grey-red hair, a red face, and with great blue eyes, appear before her in
the charge of Hylda's dragoman.

"This has come to speak with my lady," the dragoman said, "but my lady is
riding into the desert there."  He pointed to the sands.

The Duchess motioned the dragoman away, and scanned the face of the new-
comer shrewdly.  Where had she seen this strange-looking English peasant,
with the rolling walk of a sailor?

"What is your name, and where do you come from?" she asked, not without
anxiety, for there was something ominous and suggestive in the old man's
face.

"I come from Hamley, in England, and my name is Soolsby, your grace.  I
come to see my Lady Eglington."

Now she remembered him.  She had seen him in Hamley more than once.

"You have come far; have you important news for her ladyship?  Is there
anything wrong?" she asked with apparent composure, but with heavy
premonition.

"Ay, news that counts, I bring," answered Soolsby, "or I hadn't come this
long way.  'Tis a long way at sixty-five."

"Well, yes, at our age it is a long way," rejoined the Duchess in a
friendly voice, suddenly waving away the intervening air of class, for
she was half a peasant at heart.

"Ay, and we both come for the same end, I suppose," Soolsby added; "and a
costly business it is.  But what matters, so be that you help her
ladyship and I help Our Man."

"And who is 'Our Man'?" was the rejoinder.  "Him that's coming safe here
from the South--David Claridge," he answered.  "Ay, 'twas the first thing
I heard when I landed here, me that be come all these thousand miles to
see him, if so be he was alive."  Just then he caught sight of Kate
Heaver climbing the stair to the deck where they were.  His face flushed;
he hurried forward and gripped her by the arm, as her feet touched the
upper deck.  "Kate-ay, 'tis Kate!" he cried.  Then he let go her arm and
caught a hand in both of his and fondled it.  "Ay, ay, 'tis Kate!"  "What
is it brings you, Soolsby?" Kate asked anxiously.

"'Tis not Jasper, and 'tis not the drink-ay, I've been sober since, ever
since, Kate, lass," he answered stoutly.  "Quick, quick, tell me what it
is!" she said, frowning.  "You've not come here for naught, Soolsby."

Still holding her hand, he leaned over and whispered in her ear.  For an
instant she stood as though transfixed, and then, with a curious muffled
cry, broke away from him and turned to go below.

"Keep your mouth shut, lass, till proper time," he called after her, as
she descended the steps hastily again.  Then he came slowly back to the
Duchess.

He looked her in the face--he was so little like a peasant, so much more
like a sailor here with his feet on the deck of a floating thing.  "Your
grace is a good friend to her ladyship," he said at last deliberately,
"and 'tis well that you tell her ladyship.  As good a friend to her
you've been, I doubt not, as that I've been to him that's coming from
beyond and away."

"Go on, man, go on.  I want to know what startled Heaver yonder, what you
have come to say."

"I beg pardon, your grace.  One doesn't keep good news waiting, and 'tis
not good news for her ladyship I bring, even if it be for Claridge Pasha,
for there was no love lost 'twixt him and second-best lordship that's
gone."

"Speak, man, speak it out, and no more riddles," she interrupted sharply.

"Then, he that was my Lord Eglington is gone foreign--he is dead," he
said slowly.

The Duchess fell back in her chair.  For an instant the desert, the
temples, the palms, the Nile waters faded, and she was in some middle
world, in which Soolsby's voice seemed coming muffled and deep across a
dark flood; then she recovered herself, and gave a little cry, not unlike
that which Kate gave a few moments before, partly of pain, partly of
relief.

"Ay, he's dead and buried, too, and in the Quaker churchyard.  Miss
Claridge would have it so.  And none in Hamley said nay, not one."

The Duchess murmured to herself.  Eglington was dead--Eglington was dead
--Eglington was dead!  And David Claridge was coming out of the desert,
was coming to-day-now!

"How did it happen?" she asked, faintly, at last.

"Things went wrong wi' him--bad wrong in Parliament and everywhere, and
he didn't take it well.  He stood the world off like-ay, he had no temper
for black days.  He shut himself up at Hamley in his chemical place, like
his father, like his father before him.  When the week-end came, there he
was all day and night among his bottles and jars and wires.  He was after
summat big in experiment for explosives, so the papers said, and so he
said himself before he died, to Miss Claridge--ay, 'twas her he deceived
and treated cruel, that come to him when he was shattered by his
experimenting.  No patience, he had at last--and reckless in his chemical
place, and didn't realise what his hands was doing.  'Twas so he told
her, that forgave him all his deceit, and held him in her arms when he
died.  Not many words he had to speak; but he did say that he had never
done any good to any one--ay, I was standing near behind his bed and
heard all, for I was thinking of her alone with him, and so I would be
with her, and she would have it so.  Ay, and he said that he had misused
cruel her that had loved him, her ladyship, that's here.  He said he
had misused her because he had never loved her truly, only pride and
vainglory being in his heart.  Then he spoke summat to her that was there
to forgive him and help him over the stile 'twixt this field and it
that's Beyond and Away, which made her cry out in pain and say that he
must fix his thoughts on other things.  And she prayed out loud for him,
for he would have no parson there.  She prayed and prayed as never priest
or parson prayed, and at last he got quiet and still, and, when she
stopped praying, he did not speak or open his eyes for a longish while.
But when the old clock on the stable was striking twelve, he opened his
eyes wide, and when it had stopped, he said: 'It is always twelve by the
clock that stops at noon.  I've done no good.  I've earned my end.' He
looked as though he was waiting for the clock to go on striking, half
raising himself up in bed, with Miss Faith's arm under his head.  He
whispered to her then--he couldn't speak by this time.  'It's twelve
o'clock,' he said.  Then there came some words I've heard the priest say
at Mass, 'Vanitas, Vanitatum,'--that was what he said.  And her he'd lied
to, there with him, laying his head down on the pillow, as if he was her
child going to sleep.  So, too, she had him buried by her father, in the
Quaker burying-ground--ay, she is a saint on earth, I warrant."

For a moment after he had stopped the Duchess did not speak, but kept
untying and tying the blue ribbons under her chin, her faded eyes still
fastened on him, burning with the flame of an emotion which made them
dark and young again.

"So, it's all over," she said, as though to herself.  "They were all
alike, from old Broadbrim, the grandfather, down to this one, and back to
William the Conqueror."

"Like as peas in a pod," exclaimed Soolsby--"all but one, all but one,
and never satisfied with what was in their own garden, but peeking,
peeking beyond the hedge, and climbing and getting a fall.  That's what
they've always been evermore."

His words aroused the Duchess, and the air became a little colder about
her-after all, the division between the classes and the masses must be
kept, and the Eglingtons were no upstarts.  "You will say nothing about
this till I give you leave to speak," she commanded.  "I must tell her
ladyship."

Soolsby drew himself up a little, nettled at her tone.  "It is your
grace's place to tell her ladyship," he responded; "but I've taken ten
years' savings to come to Egypt, and not to do any one harm, but good,
if so be I might."

The Duchess relented at once.  She got to her feet as quickly as she
could, and held out her hand to him.  "You are a good man, and a friend
worth having, I know, and I shall like you to be my friend, Mr. Soolsby,"
she said impulsively.

He took her hand and shook it awkwardly, his lips working.  "Your grace,
I understand.  I've got naught to live for except my friends.  Money's
naught, naught's naught, if there isn't a friend to feel a crunch at his
heart when summat bad happens to you.  I'd take my affydavy that there's
no better friend in the world than your grace."

She smiled at him.  "And so we are friends, aren't we?  And I am to tell
her ladyship, and you are to say 'naught.'

"But to the Egyptian, to him, your grace, it is my place to speak--to
Claridge Pasha, when he comes."  The Duchess looked at him quizzically.
"How does Lord Eglington's death concern Claridge Pasha?" she asked
rather anxiously.  Had there been gossip about Hylda?  Had the public got
a hint of the true story of her flight, in spite of all Windlehurst had
done?  Was Hylda's name smirched, now, when all would be set right?  Had
everything come too late, as it were?

"There's two ways that his lordship's death concerns Claridge Pasha,"
answered Soolsby shrewdly, for though he guessed the truth concerning
Hylda and David, his was not a leaking tongue.  "There's two ways it
touches him.  There'll be a new man in the Foreign Office--Lord Eglington
was always against Claridge Pasha; and there's matters of land betwixt
the two estates--matters of land that's got to be settled now," he
continued, with determined and successful evasion.

The Duchess was deceived.  "But you will not tell Claridge Pasha until I
have told her ladyship and I give you leave?  Promise that," she urged.

"I will not tell him until then," he answered.  "Look, look, your grace,"
he added, suddenly pointing towards the southern horizon, "there he
comes!  Ay, 'tis Our Man, I doubt not--Our Man evermore!"

Miles away there appeared on the horizon a dozen camels being ridden
towards Assouan.

"Our Man evermore," repeated the Duchess, with a trembling smile.  "Yes,
it is surely he.  See, the soldiers are moving.  They're going to ride
out to meet him."  She made a gesture towards the far shore where Kaid's
men were saddling their horses, and to Nahoum's and Kaid's dahabiehs,
where there was a great stir.

"There's one from Hamley will meet them first," Soolsby said, and pointed
to where Hylda, in the desert, was riding towards the camels coming out
of the south.

The Duchess threw up her hands.  "Dear me, dear me," she said in
distress, "if she only knew!"

"There's thousands of women that'd ride out mad to meet him," said
Soolsby carefully; "women that likes to see an Englishman that's done his
duty--ay, women and men, that'd ride hard to welcome him back from the
grave.  Her ladyship's as good a patriot as any," he added, watching the
Duchess out of the corners of his eyes, his face turned to the desert.

The Duchess looked at him quizzically, and was satisfied with her
scrutiny.  "You're a man of sense," she replied brusquely, and gathered
up her skirts.  "Find me a horse or a donkey, and I'll go too," she added
whimsically.  "Patriotism is such a nice sentiment."

For David and Lacey the morning had broken upon a new earth.  Whatever of
toil and tribulation the future held in store, this day marked a step
forward in the work to which David had set his life.  A way had been
cloven through the bloody palisades of barbarism, and though the dark
races might seek to hold back the forces which drain the fens, and build
the bridges, and make the desert blossom as the rose, which give liberty
and preserve life, the good end was sure and near, whatever of rebellion
and disorder and treachery intervened.  This was the larger, graver
issue; but they felt a spring in the blood, and their hearts were
leaping, because of the thought that soon they would clasp hands again
with all from which they had been exiled.

"Say, Saadat, think of it: a bed with four feet, and linen sheets, and
sleeping till any time in the morning, and, If you please, sir,
breakfast's on the table.' Say, it's great, and we're in it!"

David smiled.  "Thee did very well, friend, without such luxuries.  Thee
is not skin and bone."

Lacey mopped his forehead.  "Well, I've put on a layer or two since the
relief.  It's being scared that takes the flesh off me.  I never was
intended for the 'stricken field.'  Poetry and the hearth-stone was my
real vocation--and a bit of silver mining to blow off steam with," he
added with a chuckle.

David laughed and tapped his arm.  "That is an old story now, thy
cowardice.  Thee should be more original.

"It's worth not being original, Saadat, to hear you thee and thou me as
you used to do.  It's like old times--the oldest, first times.  You've
changed a lot, Saadat."

"Not in anything that matters, I hope."

"Not in anything that matters to any one that matters.  To me it's the
same as it ever was, only more so.  It isn't that, for you are you.  But
you've had disappointment, trouble, hard nuts to crack, and all you could
do to escape the rocks being rolled down the Egyptian hill onto you; and
it's left its mark."

"Am I grown so different?"

Lacey's face shone under the look that was turned towards him.  "Say,
Saadat, you're the same old red sandstone; but I missed the thee and
thou.  I sort of hankered after it; it gets me where I'm at home with
myself."

David laughed drily.  "Well, perhaps I've missed something in you.  Thee
never says now--not since thee went south a year ago, 'Well, give my love
to the girls.'  Something has left its mark, friend," he added teasingly;
for his spirits were boyish to-day; he was living in the present.  There
had gone from his eyes and from the lines of his figure the melancholy
which Hylda had remarked when he was in England.

"Well, now, I never noticed," rejoined Lacey.  "That's got me.  Looks as
if I wasn't as friendly as I used to be, doesn't it?  But I am--I am,
Saadat."

"I thought that the widow in Cairo, perhaps--" Lacey chuckled.  "Say,
perhaps it was--cute as she can be, maybe, wouldn't like it, might be
prejudiced."

Suddenly David turned sharply to Lacey.  "Thee spoke of silver mining
just now.  I owe thee something like two hundred thousand pounds, I
think--Egypt and I."

Lacey winked whimsically at himself under the rim of his helmet.  "Are
you drawing back from those concessions, Saadat?" he asked with apparent
ruefulness.

"Drawing back?  No!  But does thee think they are worth--"

Lacey assumed an injured air.  "If a man that's made as much money as me
can't be trusted to look after a business proposition--"

"Oh, well, then!"

"Say, Saadat, I don't want you to think I've taken a mean advantage of
you; and if--"

David hastened to put the matter right.  "No, no; thee must be the
judge!"  He smiled sceptically.  "In any case, thee has done a good deed
in a great way, and it will do thee no harm in the end.  In one way the
investment will pay a long interest, as long as the history of Egypt
runs.  Ah, see, the houses of Assouan, the palms, the river, the masts of
the dahabiehs!"

Lacey quickened his camel's steps, and stretched out a hand to the
inviting distance.  "'My, it's great," he said, and his eyes were
blinking with tears.  Presently he pointed.  "There's a woman riding to
meet us, Saa dat.  Golly, can't she ride!  She means to be in it--to
salute the returning brave."

He did not glance at David.  If he had done so, he would have seen that
David's face had taken on a strange look, just such a look as it wore
that night in the monastery when he saw Hylda in a vision and heard her
say: "Speak, speak to me!"

There had shot into David's mind the conviction that the woman riding
towards them was Hylda.  Hylda, the first to welcome him back, Hylda--
Lady Eglington!  Suddenly his face appeared to tighten and grow thin.
It was all joy and torture at once.  He had fought this fight out with
himself--had he not done so?  Had he not closed his heart to all but duty
and Egypt?  Yet there she was riding out of the old life, out of Hamley,
and England, and all that had happened in Cairo, to meet him.  Nearer and
nearer she came.  He could not see the face, but yet he knew.  He
quickened his camel and drew ahead of Lacey.  Lacey did not understand,
he did not recognise Hylda as yet; but he knew by instinct the Saadat's
wishes, and he motioned the others to ride more slowly, while he and they
watched horsemen coming out from Assouan towards them.

David urged his camel on.  Presently he could distinguish the features of
the woman riding towards him.  It was Hylda.  His presentiment, his
instinct had been right.  His heart beat tumultuously, his hand trembled,
he grew suddenly weak; but he summoned up his will, and ruled himself to
something like composure.  This, then, was his home-coming from the far
miseries and trials and battle-fields--to see her face before all others,
to hear her voice first.  What miracle had brought this thing to pass,
this beautiful, bitter, forbidden thing?  Forbidden!  Whatever the cause
of her coming, she must not see what he felt for her.  He must deal
fairly by her and by Eglington; he must be true to that real self which
had emerged from the fiery trial in the monastery.  Bronzed as he was,
his face showed no paleness; but, as he drew near her, it grew pinched
and wan from the effort at self-control.  He set his lips and rode on,
until he could see her eyes looking into his--eyes full of that which he
had never seen in any eyes in all the world.

What had been her feelings during that ride in the desert?  She had not
meant to go out to meet him.  After she heard that he was coming, her
desire was to get away from all the rest of the world, and be alone with
her thoughts.  He was coming, he was safe, and her work was done.  What
she had set out to do was accomplished--to bring him back, if it was
God's will, out of the jaws of death, for England's sake, for the world's
sake, for his sake, for her own sake.  For her own sake?  Yes, yes, in
spite of all, for her own sake.  Whatever lay before, now, for this one
hour, for this moment of meeting he should be hers.  But meet him, where?
Before all the world, with a smile of conventional welcome on her lips,
with the same hand-clasp that any friend and lover of humanity would give
him?

The desert air blew on her face, keen, sweet, vibrant, thrilling.  What
he had heard that night at the monastery, the humming life of the land of
white fire--the desert, the million looms of all the weavers of the world
weaving, this she heard in the sunlight, with the sand rising like surf
behind her horse's heels.  The misery and the tyranny and the unrequited
love were all behind her, the disillusion and the loss and the undeserved
insult to her womanhood--all, all were sunk away into the unredeemable
past.  Here, in Egypt, where she had first felt the stir of life's
passion and pain and penalty, here, now, she lost herself in a beautiful,
buoyant dream.  She was riding out to meet the one man of all men, hero,
crusader, rescuer--ah, that dreadful night in the Palace, and Foorgat's
face!  But he was coming, who had made her live, to whom she had called,
to whom her soul had spoken in its grief and misery.  Had she ever done
aught to shame the best that was in herself--and had she not been sorely
tempted?  Had she not striven to love Eglington even when the worst was
come, not alone at her own soul's command, but because she knew that this
man would have it so?  Broken by her own sorrow, she had left England,
Eglington--all, to keep her pledge to help him in his hour of need, to
try and save him to the world, if that might be.  So she had come to
Nahoum, who was binding him down on the bed of torture and of death.  And
yet, alas!  not herself had conquered Nahoum, but David, as Nahoum had
said.  She herself had not done this one thing which would have
compensated for all that she had suffered.  This had not been permitted;
but it remained that she had come here to do it, and perhaps he would
understand when he saw her.

Yes, she knew he would understand!  She flung up her head to the sun and
the pulse-stirring air, and, as she did so, she saw his cavalcade
approaching.  She was sure it was he, even when he was far off, by the
same sure instinct that convinced him.  For an instant she hesitated.
She would turn back, and meet him with the crowd.  Then she looked
around.  The desert was deserted by all save herself and himself and
those who were with him.  No.  Her mind was made up.  She would ride
forward.  She would be the first to welcome him back to life and the
world.  He and she would meet alone in the desert.  For one minute they
would be alone, they two, with the world afar, they two, to meet, to
greet--and to part.  Out of all that Fate had to give of sorrow and loss,
this one delectable moment, no matter what came after.

"David!" she cried with beating heart, and rode on, harder and harder.

Now she saw him ride ahead of the others.  Ah, he knew that it was she,
though he could not see her face!  Nearer and nearer.  Now they looked
into each other's eyes.

She saw him stop his camel and make it kneel for the dismounting.  She
stopped her horse also, and slid to the ground, and stood waiting, one
hand upon the horse's neck.  He hastened forward, then stood still, a few
feet away, his eyes on hers, his helmet off, his brown hair, brown as
when she first saw it--peril and hardship had not thinned or greyed it.
For a moment they stood so, for a moment of revealing and understanding,
but speechless; and then, suddenly, and with a smile infinitely touching,
she said, as he had heard her say in the monastery--the very words:

"Speak--speak to me!"

He took her hand in his.  "There is no need--I have said all," he
answered, happiness and trouble at once in his eyes.  Then his face
grew calmer.  "Thee has made it worth while living on," he added.

She was gaining control of herself also.  "I said that I would come
when I was needed," she answered less, tremblingly.

"Thee came alone?" he asked gently.

"From Assouan, yes," she said in a voice still unsteady.  "I was riding
out to be by myself, and then I saw you coming, and I rode on.  I thought
I should like to be the first to say: 'Well done,' and 'God bless you!'"

He drew in a long breath, then looked at her keenly.  "Lord Eglington is
in Egypt also?" he asked.

Her face did not change.  She looked him in the eyes.

"No, Eglington would not come to help you.  I came to Nahoum, as I said
I would."

"Thee has a good memory," he rejoined simply.  "I am a good friend," she
answered, then suddenly her face flushed up, her breast panted, her eyes
shone with a brightness almost intolerable to him, and he said in a low,
shaking voice:

"It is all fighting, all fighting.  We have done our best; and thee has
made all possible."

"David!" she said in a voice scarce above a whisper.

"Thee and me have far to go," he said in a voice not louder than her own,
"but our ways may not be the same."

She understood, and a newer life leaped up in her.  She knew that he
loved her--that was sufficient; the rest would be easier now.  Sacrifice,
all, would be easier.  To part, yes, and for evermore; but to know that
she had been truly loved--who could rob her of that?

"See," she said lightly, "your people are waiting--and there, why, there
is my cousin Lacey.  Tom, oh, Cousin Tom!" she called eagerly.

Lacey rode down on them.  "I swan, but I'm glad," he said, as he dropped
from his horse.  "Cousin Hylda, I'm blest if I don't feel as if I could
sing like Aunt Melissa."

"You may kiss me, Cousin Tom," she said, as she took his hands in hers.

He flushed, was embarrassed, then snatched a kiss from her cheek.  "Say,
I'm in it, ain't I?  And you were in it first, eh, Cousin Hylda?  The
rest are nowhere--there they come from Assouan, Kaid, Nahoum, and the
Nubians.  Look at 'em glisten!"

A hundred of Kaid's Nubians in their glittering armour made three sides
of a quickly moving square, in the centre of which, and a little ahead,
rode Kaid and Nahoum, while behind the square-in parade and gala dress-
trooped hundreds of soldiers and Egyptians and natives.

Swiftly the two cavalcades approached each other, the desert ringing with
the cries of the Bedouins, the Nubians, and the fellaheen.  They met on
an upland of sand, from which the wide valley of the Nile and its wild
cataracts could be seen.  As men meet who parted yesterday, Kaid, Nahoum,
and David met, but Kaid's first quiet words to David had behind them a
world of meaning:

"I also have come back, Saadat, to whom be the bread that never moulds
and the water that never stales!" he said, with a look in his face which
had not been there for many a day.  Superstition had set its mark on him
--on Claridge Pasha's safety depended his own, that was his belief; and
the look of this thin, bronzed face, with its living fire, gave him vital
assurance of length of days.

And David answered: "May thy life be the nursling of Time, Effendina.
I bring the tribute of the rebel lions once more to thy hand.  What was
thine, and was lost, is thine once more.  Peace and salaam!"  Between
Nahoum and David there were no words at first at all.  They shook hands
like Englishmen, looking into each other's eyes, and with pride of what
Nahoum, once, in his duplicity, had called "perfect friendship."

Lacey thought of this now as he looked on; and not without a sense of
irony, he said under his breath, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a
Christian!"

But in Hylda's look, as it met Nahoum's, there was no doubt--what woman
doubts the convert whom she thinks she has helped to make?  Meanwhile,
the Nubians smote their mailed breasts with their swords in honour of
David and Kaid.

Under the gleaming moon, the exquisite temple of Philae perched on its
high rock above the river, the fires on the shore, the masts of the
dahabiehs twinkling with lights, and the barbarous songs floating across
the water, gave the feeling of past centuries to the scene.  From the
splendid boat which Kaid had placed at his disposal David looked out upon
it all, with emotions not yet wholly mastered by the true estimate of
what this day had brought to him.  With a mind unsettled he listened to
the natives in the forepart of the boat and on the shore, beating the
darabukkeh and playing the kemengeh.  Yet it was moving in a mist and on
a flood of greater happiness than he had ever known.

He did not know as yet that Eglington was gone for ever.  He did not know
that the winds of time had already swept away all traces of the house of
ambition which Eglington had sought to build; and that his nimble tongue
and untrustworthy mind would never more delude and charm, and wanton with
truth.  He did not know, but within the past hour Hylda knew; and now out
of the night Soolsby came to tell him.

He was roused from his reverie by Soolsby's voice saying: "Hast nowt to
say to me, Egyptian?"

It startled him, sounded ghostly in the moonlight; for why should he hear
Soolsby's voice on the confines of Egypt?  But Soolsby came nearer, and
stood where the moonlight fell upon him, hat in hand, a rustic modern
figure in this Oriental world.

David sprang to his feet and grasped the old man by the shoulders.
"Soolsby, Soolsby," he said, with a strange plaintive-note in his voice,
yet gladly, too.  "Soolsby, thee is come here to welcome me!  But has
she not come--Miss Claridge, Soolsby?"

He longed for that true heart which had never failed him, the simple soul
whose life had been filled by thought and care of him, and whose every
act had for its background the love of sister for brother--for that was
their relation in every usual meaning--who, too frail and broken to come
to him now, waited for him by the old hearthstone.  And so Soolsby, in
his own way, made him understand; for who knew them both better than this
old man, who had shared in David's destiny since the fatal day when Lord
Eglington had married Mercy Claridge in secret, had set in motion a long
line of tragic happenings?

"Ay, she would have come, she would have come," Soolsby answered, "but
she was not fit for the journey, and there was little time, my lord."

"Why did thee come, Soolsby?  Only to welcome me back?"

"I come to bring you back to England, to your duty there, my lord."

The first time Soolsby had used the words "my lord," David had scarcely
noticed it, but its repetition struck him strangely.

"Here, sometimes they call me Pasha and Saadat, but I am not 'my lord,'"
he said.

"Ay, but you are my lord, Egyptian, as sure as I've kept my word to you
that I'd drink no more, ay, on my sacred honour.  So you are my lord; you
are Lord Eglington, my lord."

David stood rigid and almost unblinking as Soolsby told his tale,
beginning with the story of Eglington's death, and going back all the
years to the day of Mercy Claridge's marriage.

"And him that never was Lord Eglington, your own father's son, is dead
and gone, my lord; and you are come into your rights at last."  This was
the end of the tale.

For a long time David stood looking into the sparkling night before him,
speechless and unmoving, his hands clasped behind him, his head bent
forward, as though in a dream.

How, all in an instant, had life changed for him!  How had Soolsby's tale
of Eglington's death filled him with a pity deeper than he had ever felt-
the futile, bitter, unaccomplished life, the audacious, brilliant genius
quenched, a genius got from the same source as his own resistless energy
and imagination, from the same wild spring.  Gone--all gone, with only
pity to cover him, unloved, unloving, unbemoaned, save by the Quaker girl
whose true spirit he had hurt, save by the wife whom he had cruelly
wronged and tortured; and pity was the thing that moved them both,
unfathomable and almost maternal, in that sense of motherhood which,
in spite of love or passion, is behind both, behind all, in every true
woman's life.

At last David spoke.

"Who knows of all this--of who I am, Soolsby?"

"Lady Eglington and myself, my lord."

"Only she and you?"

"Only us two, Egyptian."

"Then let it be so--for ever."

Soolsby was startled, dumfounded.

"But you will take your title and estates, my lord; you will take the
place which is your own."

"And prove my grandfather wrong?  Had he not enough sorrow?  And change
my life, all to please thee, Soolsby?"

He took the old man's shoulders in his hands again.  "Thee has done thy
duty as few in this world, Soolsby, and given friendship such as few
give.  But thee must be content.  I am David Claridge, and so shall
remain ever."

"Then, since he has no male kin, the title dies, and all that's his will
go to her ladyship," Soolsby rejoined sourly.

"Does thee grudge her ladyship what was his?"

"I grudge her what is yours, my lord--"

Suddenly Soolsby paused, as though a new thought had come to him, and he
nodded to himself in satisfaction.  "Well, since you will have it so, it
will be so, Egyptian; but it is a queer fuddle, all of it; and where's
the way out, tell me that, my lord?"

David spoke impatiently.  "Call me 'my lord' no more.  .  .  .  But I
will go back to England to her that's waiting at the Red Mansion, and you
will remember, Soolsby--"

Slowly the great flotilla of dahabiehs floated with the strong current
down towards Cairo, the great sails swelling to the breeze that blew from
the Libyan Hills.  Along the bank of the Nile thousands of Arabs and
fellaheen crowded to welcome "the Saadat," bringing gifts of dates and
eggs and fowls and dourha and sweetmeats, and linen cloth; and even in
the darkness and in the trouble that was on her, and the harrowing regret
that she had not been with Eglington in his last hour--she little knew
what Eglington had said to Faith in that last hour--Hylda's heart was
soothed by the long, loud tribute paid to David.

As she sat in the evening light, David and Lacey came, and were received
by the Duchess of Snowdon, who could only say to David, as she held his
hand, "Windlehurst sent his regards to you, his loving regards.  He was
sure you would come home--come home.  He wished he were in power for your
sake."

So, for a few moments she talked vaguely, and said at last: "But Lady
Eglington, she will be glad to see you, such old friends as you are,
though not so old as Windlehurst and me--thirty years, over thirty la,
la!"

They turned to go to Hylda, and came face to face with Kate Heaver.

Kate looked at David as one would look who saw a lost friend return from
the dead.  His eyes lighted, he held out his hand to her.

"It is good to see thee here," he said gently.  "And 'tis the cross-roads
once again, sir," she rejoined.

"Thee means thee will marry Jasper?"

"Ay, I will marry Jasper now," she answered.  "It has been a long
waiting."

"It could not be till now," she responded.

David looked at her reflectively, and said: "By devious ways the human
heart comes home.  One can only stand in the door and wait.  He has been
patient."

"I have been patient, too," she answered.

As the Duchess disappeared with David, a swift change came over Lacey.
He spun round on one toe, and, like a boy of ten, careered around the
deck to the tune of a negro song.

"Say, things are all right in there with them two, and it's my turn now,"
he said.  "Cute as she can be, and knows the game!  Twice a widow, and
knows the game!  Waiting, she is down in Cairo, where the orange blossom
blows.  I'm in it; we're all in it--every one of us.  Cousin Hylda's free
now, and I've got no past worth speaking of; and, anyhow, she'll
understand, down there in Cairo.  Cute as she can be--"

Suddenly he swung himself down to the deck below.  "The desert's the
place for me to-night," he said.  Stepping ashore, he turned to where the
Duchess stood on the deck, gazing out into the night.  "Well, give my
love to the girls," he called, waving a hand upwards, as it were to the
wide world, and disappeared into the alluring whiteness.

"I've got to get a key-thought," he muttered to himself, as he walked
swiftly on, till only faint sounds came to him from the riverside.  In
the letter he had written to Hylda, which was the turning-point of all
for her, he had spoken of these "key-thoughts."  With all the
childishness he showed at times, he had wisely felt his way into spheres
where life had depth and meaning.  The desert had justified him to
himself and before the spirits of departed peoples, who wandered over the
sands, until at last they became sand also, and were blown hither and
thither, to make beds for thousands of desert wayfarers, or paths for
camels' feet, or a blinding storm to overwhelm the traveller and the
caravan; Life giving and taking, and absorbing and destroying, and
destroying and absorbing, till the circle of human existence wheel
to the full, and the task of Time be accomplished.

On the gorse-grown common above Hamley, David and Faith, and David's
mother Mercy, had felt the same soul of things stirring--in the green
things of green England, in the arid wastes of the Libyan desert, on the
bosom of the Nile, where Mahommed Hassan now lay in a nugger singing a
song of passion, Nature, with burning voice, murmuring down the unquiet
world its message of the Final Peace through the innumerable years.




GLOSSARY

Aiwa----Yes.
Allah hu Achbar----God is most Great.
Al'mah----Female professional singers, signifying "a learned female."
Ardab----A measure equivalent to five English bushels.

Backsheesh----Tip, douceur.
Balass----Earthen vessel for carrying water.
Bdsha----Pasha.
Bersim----Clover.
Bismillah----In the name of God.
Bowdb----A doorkeeper.

Dahabieh----A Nile houseboat with large lateen sails.
Darabukkeh----A drum made of a skin stretched over an earthenware funnel.
Dourha----Maize.

Effendina----Most noble.
El Azhar----The Arab University at Cairo.

Fedddn----A measure of land representing about an acre.
Fellah----The Egyptian peasant.

Ghiassa----Small boat.

Hakim----Doctor.
Hasheesh----Leaves of hemp.

Inshallah----God willing.

Kdnoon----A musical instrument like a dulcimer.
Kavass----An orderly.
Kemengeh----A cocoanut fiddle.
Khamsin----A hot wind of Egypt and the Soudan.

Kourbash----A whip, often made of rhinoceros hide.

La ilaha illa-llah----There is no deity but God.

Malaish----No matter.
Malboos----Demented.
Mastaba----A bench.
Medjidie----A Turkish Order.
Mooshrabieh----Lattice window.
Moufettish----High Steward.
Mudir----The Governor of a
Mudirieh, or province.
Muezzin----The sheikh of the mosque who calls to prayer.

Narghileh----A Persian pipe.
Nebool----A quarter-staff.

Ramadan----The Mahommedan season of fasting.

Saadat-el-bdsha----Excellency Pasha.
Sdis----Groom.
Sakkia----The Persian water-wheel.
Salaam----Eastern salutation.
Sheikh-el-beled----Head of a village.

Tarboosh----A Turkish turban.

Ulema----Learned men.

Wakf----Mahommedan Court dealing with succession, etc.
Welee----A holy man or saint.

Yashmak----A veil for the lower part of the face.
Yelek----A long vest or smock.






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "WEAVERS":

A cloak of words to cover up the real thought behind
Antipathy of the man in the wrong to the man in the right
Antipathy of the lesser to the greater nature
Begin to see how near good is to evil
But the years go on, and friends have an end
Cherish any alleviating lie
Does any human being know what he can bear of temptation
Friendship means a giving and a getting
He's a barber-shop philosopher
Heaven where wives without number awaited him
Honesty was a thing he greatly desired--in others
How little we can know to-day what we shall feel tomorrow
How many conquests have been made in the name of God
Monotonously intelligent
No virtue in not falling, when you're not tempted
Of course I've hated, or I wouldn't be worth a button
One does the work and another gets paid
Only the supremely wise or the deeply ignorant who never alter
Passion to forget themselves
Political virtue goes unrewarded
She knew what to say and what to leave unsaid
Smiling was part of his equipment
Sometimes the longest way round is the shortest way home
Soul tortured through different degrees of misunderstanding
The vague pain of suffered indifference
There is no habit so powerful as the habit of care of others
There's no credit in not doing what you don't want to do
To-morrow is no man's gift
Tricks played by Fact to discredit the imagination
Triumph of Oriental duplicity over Western civilisation
We want every land to do as we do; and we want to make 'em do it
We must live our dark hours alone
When God permits, shall man despair?
Woman's deepest right and joy and pain in one--to comfort






EMBERS, Complete

By Gilbert Parker



CONTENTS

Volume 1.
EMBERS
ROSLEEN
WILL YOU COME BACK HOME?
MARY CALLAGHAN AND ME
KILDARE
YOU'LL TRAVEL FAR AND WIDE
FARCALLADEN RISE
GIVE ME THE LIGHT HEART
WHERE SHALL WE BETAKE US?
NO MAN'S LAND
AT SEA
ATHENIAN
EYES LIKE THE SEA
UNDER THE CLIFF
OPEN TRY GATE
SUMMER IS COME
O FLOWER OF ALL THE WORLD
WAS IT SOME GOLDEN STAR?
I HEARD THE DESERT CALLING
THE FORGOTTEN WORD
WHAT WILL IT MATTER?
THE COURIER STAR
CONTENTS
CONTENTS
THE WORLD IN MAKING
HEW
O SON OF MAN
AT THE END OF THE WORLD
WAYFARERS
THE RED PATROL
THE YELLOW SWAN
THE HEART OF THE PIONEER
THE NORTH TRAIL
ALONE
THE SCARLET HILLS
THE WOODSMAN LOVER
QUI VIVE
THE LITTLE HOUSE
SPINNING
FLY AWAY, MY HEART
SUZON
MY LITTLE TENDER HEART
THE MEN OF THE NORTH
THE CROWNING
CLOSE UP
W. E. H.
WHEN BLOWS THE WIND


Volume 2.
DOLLY
LIFE'S SWEET WAGES
TO THE VALLEY
THE LILY FLOWER
LOVE IN HER COLD GRAVE LIES
GRANADA, GRANADA
THE NEW APHRODITE
AN ANCIENT PLEDGE
THE TRIBUTE OF KING HATH
THERE IS AN ORCHARD
HEART OF THE WORLD
EPITAPHS
THE BEGGAR
THE MAID
THE FOOL
THE FIGHTER
THE SEA-REAPERS
THE WATCHER
THE WAKING
WHEN ONE FORGETS
ALOES AND MYRRH
IN WASTE PLACES
LAST OF ALL
AFTER
REMEDIAL
THE TWILIGHT OF LOVE
IRREVOCABLE
THE LAST DREAM
WAITING
IN MAYTIME
INSIDE THE BAR
THE CHILDREN
LITTLE GARAINE
TO A LITTLE CHILD
L'EMPEREUR, MORT
PHYLLIS
BAIRNIE


Volume 3.
IN CAMDEN TOWN
JEAN
A MEMORY
IN CAMP AT JUNIPER COVE
JUNIPER COVE TWENTY YEARS AFTER
LISTENING
NEVERTHELESS
ISHMAEL
OVER THE HILLS
THE DELIVERER
THE DESERT ROAD
A SON OF THE NILE
A FAREWELL FROM THE HAREM
AN ARAB LOVE SONG
THE CAMEL-DRIVER TO HIS CAMEL
THE TALL DABOON
THERE IS SORROW ON THE SEA
THE AUSTRALIAN STOCKRIDER
THE BRIDGE OF THE HUNDRED SPANS
NELL LATORE




INTRODUCTION

I had not intended that Embers should ever be given to the public, but
friends whose judgment I respect have urged me to include it in the
subscription edition at least, and with real reluctance I have consented.
It was a pleasure to me to have one piece of work of mine which made no
bid for pence or praise; but if that is a kind of selfishness, perhaps
unnecessary, since no one may wish to read the verses, I will now free
myself from any chance of reproach.  This much I will say to soothe away
my own compunctions, that the book will only make the bid for popularity
or consideration with near a score of others, and not separately, and
that my responsibility is thus modified.  The preface to Embers says all
that need be said about a collection which is, on the whole, merely a
book of youth and memory and impressionism in verse.  At least it was all
spontaneous; it was not made to order on any page of it, and it is the
handful left from very many handfuls destroyed.  Since the first edition
(intended only for my personal friends) was published I have written
"Rosleen," "Where Shall We Betake Us?"  "Granada," "Mary Callaghan and
Me," "The Crowning" (on the Coronation of King Edward VII), the fragment
"Kildare" and "I Heard the Desert Calling"; and I have also included
others like "The Tall Dakoon" and "The Red Patrol," written over twenty
years ago.  "Mary Callaghan and Me" has been set to music by Mr. Max
Muller, and has made many friends, and "The Crowning" was the Coronation
ode of 'The People', which gave a prize, too ample I think, for the best
musical setting of the lines.  Many of the other pieces in 'Embers' have
been set to music by distinguished composers like Sir Edward Elgar, who
has made a song-cycle of several, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Mr. Arthur
Foote, Mrs. Amy Woodforde Finden, Robert Somerville, and others.  The
first to have musical setting was "You'll Travel Far and Wide," to which
in 1895 Mr. Arthur Foote gave fame as "An Irish Folk Song."  Like "O
Flower of All the World," by Mrs. Amy Woodforde Finden, it has had a
world of admirers, and such singers as Mrs. Henschel helped to make Mr.
Foote's music loved by thousands, and conferred something more than an
ephemeral acceptance of the author's words.




     When thou comest to the safe tent of the good comrade,
     abide there till thy going forth with a stedfast mind; and
     if, at the hospitable fire, thou hast learned the secret of a
     heart, thou shalt keep it holy, as the North Wind the
     trouble of the Stars.




                            PROEM

               And the Angel said:
                  "What hast thou for all thy travail--
                  what dost thou bring with thee out
                  of the dust of the world?"

               And the man answered:
                  "Behold, I bring one perfect yesterday!"

               And the Angel questioned:
                  "Hast thou then no to-morrow?
                  Hast thou no hope?"

               And the man replied:
                  "Who am I that I should hope!
                  Out of all my life I have been granted one
                  sheaf of memory."

               And the Angel said:
                  "Is this all!"

               And the man answered:
                  "Of all else was I robbed by the way:
                  but Memory was hidden safely
                  in my heart--the world found it not."






                                ROSLEEN

         "She's the darlin' of the parish, she's the pride of
               Inniskillen;
          'Twould make your heart lep up to see her trippin'
               down the glen;
          There's not a lad of life and fame that wouldn't take
               her shillin'
          And inlist inside her service-did ye hear her laugh-
               in' then?

          Did ye see her with her hand in mine the day that
               Clancy married?
          Ah, darlin', how we footed it-the grass it was so
               green!
          And when the neighbours wandered home, I was the
               guest that tarried,
          An hour plucked from Paradise--come back to me,
               Rosleen!

          Across the seas, beyand the hills, by lovely Inniskillen,
          The rigiment come marchin'--I hear the call once
               more
          Shure, a woman's but a woman--so I took the Ser-
               geant's shillin',
          For the pride o' me was hurted--shall I never see
               her more?

          She turned her face away from me, and black as night
               the land became;
          Her eyes were jewels of the sky, the finest iver seen;
          She left me for another lad, he was a lad of life and
               fame,
          And the heart of me was hurted--but there's none
               that's like Rosleen!"






                      WILL YOU COME BACK HOME?

          Will you come back home, where the young larks are
               singin'?
          The door is open wide, and the bells of Lynn are ringin';
                    There's a little lake I know,
                    And a boat you used to row
          To the shore beyond that's quiet--will you come back
               home?

          Will you come back, darlin'?  Never heed the pain and
               blightin',
          Never trouble that you're wounded, that you bear the
               scars of fightin';
                    Here's the luck o' Heaven to you,
                    Here's the hand of love will brew you
          The cup of peace--ah, darlin', will you come back
               home?






                        MARY CALLAGHAN AND ME

          It was as fine a churchful as you ever clapt an eye on;
            Oh, the bells was ringin' gaily, and the sun was shinin'
               free;
          There was singers, there was clargy--"Bless ye both,"
             says Father Tryon--
               They was weddin' Mary Callaghan and me.

          There was gatherin' of women, there was hush upon the
             stairway,
          There was whisperin' and smilin', but it was no place
             for me;
          A little ship was comin' into harbour through the fair-
             way--
               It belongs to Mary Callaghan and me.

          Shure, the longest day has endin', and the wildest storm
             has fallin'--
          There's a young gossoon in yander, and he sits upon
             my knee;
          There's a churchful for the christenin'--do you hear
             the imp a-callin'?
               He's the pride of Mary Callaghan and me.






                             KILDARE

               He's the man that killed Black Care,
                    He's the pride of all Kildare;
               Shure the devil takes his hat off whin he comes:
                    'Tis the clargy bow before him,
                    'Tis the women they adore him,
               And the Lord Lieutenant orders out the drums--
                    For his hangin', all the drums,
                       All the drums!






                       YOU'LL TRAVEL FAR AND WIDE

          You'll travel far and wide, dear, but you'll come back
               again,
          You'll come back to your father and your mother in
               the glen,
          Although we should be lyin' 'neath the heather grasses
               then--
          You'll be comin' back, my darlin'!

          You'll see the icebergs sailin' along the wintry foam,
          The white hair of the breakers, and the wild swans as
               they roam;
          But you'll not forget the rowan beside your father's
               home
          You'll be comin' back, my darlin'!

          New friends will clasp your hand, dear, new faces on
               you smile;
          You'll bide with them and love them, but you'll long
               for us the while;
          For the word across the water, and the farewell by the
               stile--
          For the true heart's here, my darlin'!

          You'll hear the wild birds singin' beneath a brighter sky,
          The roof-tree of your home, dear, it will be grand and
               high;
          But you'll hunger for the hearthstone where, a child,
               you used to lie--
          You'll be comin' back, my darlin'!

          And when your foot is weary, and when your heart is sore,
          And you come back to the moor that spreads beyand
               your father's door,
          There'll be many an ancient comrade to greet you on
               the shore--
          At your comin' back, my darlin' !

          Ah, the hillock cannot cover, and the grass it cannot hide
          The love that never changeth, whatever wind or tide;
          And though you'll not be seein', we'll be standin' by
               your side--
          You'll be comin' back, my darlin'!

          O, there's no home like the old home, there's no pillow
               like the breast
          You slumbered on in childhood, like a young bird in
               the nest:
          We are livin' still and waitin', and we're hopin' for the
               best--
          Ah, you're comin' back, my darlin'--comin' back!






                         FARCALLADEN RISE

          Oh, it's down the long side of Farcalladen Rise,
          With the knees pressing hard to the saddle, my men;
          With the sparks from the hoofs giving light to the eyes,
          And our hearts beating hard as we rode to the glen!

          And it's back with the ring of the chain and the spur,
          And it's back with the sun on the hill and the moor,
          And it's back is the thought sets my pulses astir,--
          But I'll never go back to Farcalladen more!

          Oh, it's down the long side of Farcalladen Rise,
          And it's swift as an arrow and straight as a spear,
          And it's keen as the frost when the summer-time dies,
          That we rode to the glen, and with never a fear.

          And it's hey for the hedge, and it's hey for the wall,
          And it's over the stream with an echoing cry;
          And there's three fled for ever from old Donegal,
          And there's two that have shown how bold Irishmen die!

          For it's rest when the gallop is over, my men,
          And it's here's to the lads that have ridden their last;
          And it's here's to the lasses we leave in the glen,
          With a smile for the future, a sigh for the past!






                    GIVE ME THE LIGHT HEART

               Give, me the light heart, Heaven above!
                 Give me the hand of a friend,
               Give me one high fine spirit to love,
                 I'll abide my fate to the end:
               I will help where I can, I will cherish my own,
               Nor walk the steep way of the world alone.






                        WHERE SHALL WE BETAKE US?

          "Where shall we betake us when the day's work is over?
               (Ah, red is the rose-bush in the lane.)
          Happy is the maid that knows the footstep of her lover--
               (Sing the song, the Eden song, again.)
          Who shall listen to us when black sorrow comes a-reaping?
               (See the young lark falling from the sky.)
          Happy is the man that has a true heart in his keeping--
             True hearts flourish when the roses die."






                         NO MAN'S LAND

     Oh, we have been a-maying, dear, beyond the city gates,
          The little city set upon a hill;
     And we have seen the jocund smile upon the lips of Fate,
          And we have known the splendours of our will.

     Oh, we have wandered far, my dear, and we have loved apace;
          A little hut we built upon the sand,
     The sun without to lighten it, within, your golden face,--
          O happy dream, O happy No Man's Land!

     The pleasant furniture of spring was set in all the fields,
          And gay and wholesome were the herbs and flowers;
     Our simple cloth of love was spread with all that nature yields,
          And frugal only were the passing hours.

     Oh, we have been a-maying, dear, we've left the world behind,
          We've sung and danced and gossiped as we strayed;
     And when within our little but your fingers draw the blind,
          We'll loiter by the fire that love has made.






                            AT SEA

     Through the round window above, the deep palpable blue,
       The wan bright moon, and the sweet stinging breath of the sea;
     And below, in the shadows, thine eyes like stars,
       And Love brooding low, and the warm white glory of thee.

     Oh, soft was the song in my soul, and soft beyond thought
          were thy lips,
     And thou wert mine own, and Eden reconquered was mine
     And the way that I go is the way of thy feet, and the breath
          that I breathe,
     It hath being from thee and life from the life that is thine!






                                ATHENIAN

               Your voice I knew, its cadences and thrill;
               It stilled the tumult and the overthrow
               When Athens trembled to the people's will;
               I knew it--'twas a thousand years ago.

               I see the fountains, and the gardens where
               You sang the fury from the Satrap's brow;
               I feel the quiver in the raptured air,
               I heard it in the Athenian grove--I hear you now.






                         EYES LIKE THE SEA

          Eyes like the sea, look up, the beacons brighten,
            Home comes the sailor, home across the tide!
          Back drifts the cloud, behold the heavens whiten,
            The port of Love is open, he anchors at thy side.






                           UNDER THE CLIFF
          The sands and the sea, and the white gulls fleeting,
            The mist on the island, the cloud on the hill;
          The song in my heart, and the old hope beating
            Its life 'gainst the bars of thy will.






                             OPEN THY GATE

               Here in the highway without thy garden wall,
                 Here in the babel and the glare,
               Sick for thy haven, O Sweet, to thee I call:
                 Open thy gate unto my prayer--
                 Open thy gate.

               Cool is thy garden-plot, pleasant thy shade,
                 All things commend thee in thy place;
               Dwelling on thy perfectness, O Sweet, I am afraid,
                 But, fearing, long to look upon thy face--
                 Open thy gate.

               Over the ample globe, searching for thee,
                 Thee and thy garden have I come;
               Ended my questing: no more, no more for me,
                 O Sweet, the pilgrim's sandals, call me home--
                 Open thy gate.






                             SUMMER IS COME

               Summer is come; the corn is in the ear,
                 The haze is swimming where the beeches stand;
               Summer is come, though winter months be here--
                 My love is summer passing through the land.

               Summer is come; I hear the skylarks sing,
                 The honeysuckle flaunts it to the bees;
               Summer is come, and 'tis not yet the spring--
                 My love is summer blessing all she sees.

               Summer is come; I see an open door,
                 A sweet hand beckons, and I know
               That, winter or summer, I shall go forth no more--
                 My heart is homing where her summer-roses grow.






                       O FLOWER OF ALL THE WORLD

               O flower of all the world, O flower of all,
               The garden where thou dwellest is so fair,
               Thou art so goodly, and so queenly tall,
               Thy sweetness scatters sweetness everywhere,
                         O flower of all!

               O flower of all the years, O flower of all,
               A day beside thee is a day of days;
               Thy voice is softer than the throstle's call,
               There is not song enough to sing thy praise,
                         O flower of all!

               O flower of all the years, O flower of all,
               I seek thee in thy garden, and I dare
               To love thee; and though my deserts be small,
               Thou art the only flower I would wear,
                         O flower of all!






                          WAS IT SOME GOLDEN STAR?

                         Once in another land,
                           Ages ago,
                         You were a queen, and I,
                           I loved you so:
                         Where was it that we loved--
                           Ah, do you know?

                         Was it some golden star
                           Hot with romance?
                         Was it in Malabar,
                           Italy, France?
                         Did we know Charlemagne,
                           Dido, perchance?

                         But you were a queen, and I
                           Fought for you then:
                         How did you honour me--
                           More than all men!
                         Kissed me upon the lips;
                           Kiss me again.

                         Have you forgotten it,
                           All that we said?
                         I still remember though
                           Ages have fled.
                         Whisper the word of life,--
                           "Love is not dead."






                   I HEARD THE DESERT CALLING

     I heard the desert calling, and my heart stood still--
       There was winter in my world and in my heart;
     A breath came from the mesa, and a message stirred my will,
       And my soul and I arose up to depart.

     I heard the desert calling, and I knew that over there
       In an olive-sheltered garden where the mesquite grows,
     Was a woman of the sunrise with the star-shine in her hair
       And a beauty that the almond-blossom blows.

     In the night-time when the ghost-trees glimmered in the moon,
       Where the mesa by the water-course was spanned,
     Her loveliness enwrapped me like the blessedness of June,
       And all my life was thrilling in her hand.

     I hear the desert calling, and my heart stands still--
       There is summer in my world, and in my heart;
     A breath comes from the mesa, and a will beyond my will
       Binds my footsteps as I rise up to depart.






                           THE FORGOTTEN WORD

               Once in the twilight of the Austrian hills,
               A word came to me, wonderful and good;
               If I had spoken it--that message of the stars--
               Love would have filled thy blood;
               Love would have sent thee pulsing to my arms,
               Laughing with joy, thy heart a nestling bird
               An instant passed--it fled; and now I seek in vain
               For that forgotten word.






                         WHAT WILL IT MATTER?

               What will this matter, dear, when you and I
               Have left our sad world for some fairer sky?
               What will it matter, dear, when, far apart,
               We miss the touch of hand and beat of heart;
               When one's at peace, while unto one is given
               With lonely feet to walk the hills at even?
               What will it matter that one fault more now
               Brings clouds upon one eager mortal brow,
               That one grace less is given to one poor soul,
               When both drink from the last immortal bowl?
               For fault and grace, dear love, when we go hence
               Will find the same Eternal recompense.






                    THE COURIER STAR

               Into a New World wandered I,
               A strong vast realm afar;
               And down the white peaks of its sky,
               Beckoned my courier star.

               It hailed me to mine ancient North,--
               The meadows of the Pole;
               It whistled my gay hunters forth,
               It bugled in my soul.
               On plateaux of the constant snow
               I heard the meteors whir;
               I saw the red wolves nor'ward go
               From my low huts of fir.

               The dun moose ran the deep ravine,
               The musk-ox ranged the plain;
               The hunter's song dripped in between
               In notes of scarlet rain.

               The land was mine: its lonely pride,
               Its distant deep desires;
               And I abode, as hunters bide,
               With joy beside its fires.

               Into a New World wandered I,
               A world austere, sublime;
               And unseen feet came sauntering by;
               A voice with ardent chime
               Rang down the idle lanes of sleep;
               I waked: the night was still;
               I saw my star its sentry keep
               Along a southern hill.

               O flaming star! my courier star!
               My herald, fine and tall!
               You gestured from your opal car,
               I answered to that call.
               I rose; the flumes of snow I trod,
               I trailed to southward then;
               I left behind the camps of God,
               And sought the tents of men.

               And where a princely face looked through
               The curtains of the play
               Of life, O star, you paused; I knew
               The comrade of my day.
               And good the trails that I have trod,
               My courier star before;
               And good the nor'land camps of God:
               And though I lodge no more

               Where stalwart deeds and dreams rejoice,
               And gallant hunters roam,
               Where I can hear your voice, your voice,
               I drive the tent-peg home.






                         THE WORLD IN MAKING

               When God was making the world,
               (Swift was the wind and white was the fire)
               The feet of His people danced the stars;
               There was laughter and swinging bells,
               And clanging iron and breaking breath,
               The hammers of heaven making the hills,
               The vales, on the anvils of God.
               (Wild is the fire and low is the wind)

               When God had finished the world,
               (Bright was the fire and sweet was the wind)
               Up from the valleys came song,
               To answer the morning stars;
               And the hand of man on the anvil rang,
               His breath was big in his breast, his life
               Beat strong 'gainst the walls of the world.
               (Glad is the wind and tall is the fire)






                                HEW

               None shall stand in the way of the lord,
               The Lord of the Earth--of the rivers and trees,
               Of the cattle and fields and vines:
               Hew!
               Here shall I build me my cedar home,
               A city with gates, a road to the sea--
               For I am the lord of the Earth:
               Hew! Hew!
               Hew and hew, and the sap of the tree
               Shall be yours, and your bones shall be strong,
               Shall be yours, and your heart shall rejoice,
               Shall be yours, and the city be yours,
               And the key of its gates be the key
               Of the home where your little ones dwell.
               Hew and be strong!  Hew and rejoice!
               For man is the lord of the Earth,
               And God is the Lord over all.






                            O SON OF MAN

                    "Son of man, stand upon thy feet
                    and I will speak to thee."

          O son of man, behold
          If thou shouldst stumble on the nameless trail,
          The trail that no man rides,
          Lift up thy heart,
          Behold, O son of man, thou hast a helper near!

          O son of man, take heed
          If thou shouldst fall upon the vacant plain,
          The plain that no man loves,
          Reach out thy hand,
          Take heed, O son of man, strength shall be given thee!

          O son of man, rejoice:
          If thou art blinded even at the door,
          The door of the Safe Tent,
          Sing in thy heart,
          Rejoice, O son of man, thy pilot leads thee home!






                       AT THE END OF THE WORLD

                    In the lodge of the Mother of Men,
                    In the land of Desire,
                    Are the embers of fire,
                    Are the ashes of those who return.
                    Who return to the world;
                    Who flame at the breath
                    Of the Mockers of Death.
                    O Sweet, we will voyage again
                    To the camp of Love's fire,
                    Nevermore to return!

                    O love, by the light of thine eyes
                    We will fare over-sea;
                    We will be
                    As the silver-winged herons that rest
                    By the shallows,
                    The shallows of sapphire stone;
                    No more shall we wander alone.
                    As the foam to the shore
                    Is my spirit to thine,
                    And God's serfs as they fly,--
                    The Mockers of Death-
                    They will breathe on the embers of fire
                    We shall live by that breath.
                    Sweet, thy heart to my heart,
                    As we journey afar,
                    No more, nevermore, to return!






                              WAYFARERS

                    War does the fire no longer burn?
                    (I am so lonely)
                    Why does the tent-door swing outward?
                    (I have no home)
                    Oh, let me breathe hard in your face!
                    (I am so lonely)
                    Oh, why do you shut your eyes to me?
                    (I have no home)

                    Let us make friends with the stars;
                    (I am so lonely)
                    Give me your hand, I will hold it;
                    (I have no home)
                    Let us go hunting together:
                    (I am so lonely)
                    We will sleep at God's camp to-night.
                    (I have no home)






                             THE RED PATROL

                    He stands in the porch of the World--
                    (Why should the door be shut?)
                    The grey wolf waits at his heel,
                    (Why is the window barred?)
                    Wild is the trail from the Kimash Hills,
                    The blight has fallen on bush and tree,
                    The choking earth has swallowed the streams,
                    Hungry and cold is the Red Patrol-
                    (Why should the door be shut?)
                    The Scarlet Hunter has come to bide--
                    (Why is the window barred?)

                    He waits at the threshold stone--
                    (Why should the key-hole rust?)
                    The eagle broods at his side,
                    (Why should the blind be drawn?)
                    Long has he watched and far has he called--
                    The lonely sentinel of the North--
                    "Who goes there?" to the wandering soul
                    Heavy of heart is the Red Patrol--
                    (Why should the key-hole rust?)
                    The Scarlet Hunter is sick for home,
                    (Why should the blind be drawn?)

                    Heavy of heart is the Red Patrol--
                    (Why should the key-hole rust?)
                    The Scarlet Hunter is sick for home,
                    (Why should the blind be drawn?)
                     Hungry and cold is the Red Patrol--
                    (Why should the door be shut?)
                    The Scarlet Hunter has come to bide,
                    (Why is the window barred?)






                      THE YELLOW SWAN

               In the flash of the singing dawn,
               At the door of the Great One,
               The joy of his lodge knelt down,
               Knelt down, and her hair in the sun
               Shone like showering dust,
               And her eyes were as eyes of the fawn.
               And she cried to her lord,
               "O my lord, O my life,
               From the desert I come;
               From the hills of the Dawn."
               And he lifted the curtain and said,
               "Hast thou seen It, the Yellow Swan?"

               And she lifted her head, and her eyes
               Were as lights in the dark,
               And her hands folded slow on her breast,
               And her face was as one who has seen
               The gods and the place where they dwell;
               And she said, "Is it meet that I kneel,
               That I kneel as I speak to my lord?"
               And he answered her, "Nay, but to stand,
               And to sit by my side;
               But speak: thou has followed the trail,
               Hast thou found It, the Yellow Swan?"
               And she stood as a queen, and her voice
               Was as one who hath seen the Hills,
               The Hills of the Mighty Men,
               And hath heard them cry in the night,
               Hath heard them call in the dawn,
               Hath seen It, the Yellow Swan.
               And she said, "It is not for my lord";
               And she murmured, "I cannot tell;
               But my lord must go as I went,
               And my lord must come as I came,
               And my lord shall be wise."

               And he cried in his wrath,
               "What is thine, it is mine,
               And thine eyes are my eyes,
               Thou shalt speak of the Yellow Swan."
               But she answered him, "Nay, though I die.
               I have lain in the nest of the Swan,
               I have heard, I have known;
               When thine eyes too have seen,
               When thine ears too have heard,
               Thou shalt do with me then as thou wilt."

               And he lifted his hand to strike,
               And he straightened his spear to slay;
               But a great light struck on his eyes,
               And he heard the rushing of wings,
               And his long spear fell from his hand,
               And a terrible stillness came:
               And when the spell passed from his eyes
               He stood in his doorway alone,
               And gone was the queen of his soul
               And gone was the Yellow Swan.






                       THE HEART OF THE PIONEER

                    My dear love, she waits for me,
                    None other my world is adorning;
                    My true love I come to thee,
                    My dear, the white star of the morning.
                    Eagles, spread out your wings,--
                    Behold where the red dawn is breaking!
                    Hark, 'tis my darling sings,
                    The flowers, the song-birds, awaking--
                    See, where she comes to me,
                    My love, ah, my dear love!






                         THE NORTH TRAIL

     "Oh, where did you get them, the bonny, bonny roses
        That blossom in your cheeks, and the morning in your eyes?"
     "I got them on the North Trail, the road that never closes,
        That widens to the seven gold gates of Paradise."
     "O come, let us camp in the North Trail together,
        With the night-fires lit and the tent-pegs down."






                              ALONE

               O, O, the winter wind, the North wind--
               My snow-bird, where art thou gone?
               O, O the wailing wind, the night wind--
               The cold nest; I am alone.
               O, O my snow-bird!

               O, O, the waving sky, the white sky--
               My snow-bird, thou fliest far;
               O, O the eagle's cry, the wild cry--
               My lost love, my lonely star.
               O, O my snow-bird!






                         THE SCARLET HILLS

               Brothers, we go to the Scarlet Hills--
               (Little gold sun, come out of the dawn.)
               There we will meet in the cedar groves--
               (Shining white dew, come down.)
               There is a bed where you sleep so sound,
               The little good folk of the Hills will guard,
               Till the morning wakes and your love comes home--
               (Fly away, heart, to the Scarlet Hills.)






                            THE WOODSMAN LOVER

               High in a nest of the tam'rac tree,
               Swing under, so free, and swing over;
               Swing under the sun and swing over the world,
               My snow-bird, my gay little lover-
               My gay little lover, don, don! . . . don, don!

               When the winter is done I will come back home,
               To the nest swinging under and over,
               Swinging under and over and waiting for me,
               Your rover, my snow-bird, your lover--
               My lover and rover, don, don! . . . don, don!






                               QUI VIVE

                    Qui vive!
                    Who is it cries in the dawn,
                    Cries when the stars go down?
                    Who is it comes through the mist,
                    The mist that is fine like lawn,
                    The mist like an angel's gown?
                    Who is it comes in the dawn?
                    Qui vive! Qui vive! in the dawn.

                    Qui vive!
                    Who is it passeth us by,
                    Still in the dawn and the mist--
                    Tall seigneur of the dawn,
                    A two-edged sword at his thigh,
                    A shield of gold at his wrist?
                    Who is it hurrieth by?
                    Qui vive! Qui vive! in the dawn.

                    Qui vive!
                    Who saileth into the morn,
                    Out of the wind of the dawn?
                    "Follow, oh, follow me on!"
                    Calleth a distant horn.
                    He is here--he is there--he is gone,
                    Tall seigneur of the dawn!
                    Qui vive! Qui vive! in the dawn.






                        THE LITTLE HOUSE

                               I

               Children, the house is empty,
               The house behind the tall hill;
               Lonely and still is the empty house.
               There is no face in the doorway,
               There is no fire in the chimney--
               Come and gather beside the gate,
               Little Good Folk of the Scarlet Hills.

               Where has the wild dog vanished?
               Where has the swift foot gone?
               Where is the hand that found the good fruit,
               That made a garret of wholesome herbs?
               Where is the voice that awoke the morn,
               The tongue that defied the terrible beasts?
               Come and listen beside the door,
               Little Good Folk of the Scarlet Hills.


                                 II

               Sorrowful is the little house,
               The little house by the winding stream;
               All the laughter has died away
               Out of the little house.
               But down there come from the lofty hills
               Footsteps and eyes agleam,
               Bringing the laughter of yesterday
               Into the little house,
               By the winding stream and the hills.
               Di ron, di ron, di ron-don!


                                 III

               What is there like to the cry of the bird
               That sings in its nest in the lilac tree?
               A voice the sweetest you ever have heard;
               It is there, it is here, ci, ci!
               It is there, it is here, it must roam and roam,
               And wander from shore to shore,
               Till I travel the hills and bring it home,
               And enter and close my door--
               Row along, row along home, ci, ci!

               What is there like to the laughing star,
               Far up from the lilac tree?
               A face that's brighter and finer far;
               It laughs and it shines, ci, ci!
               It laughs and it shines, it must roam and roam,
               And travel from shore to shore,
               Till I get me forth and bring it home,
               And house it within my door--
               Row along, row along home, ci, ci!






                         SPINNING

          Spin, spin, belle Mergaton!
          The moon wheels full, and the tide flows high,
          And your wedding-gown you must put it on
          Ere the night hath no moon in the sky
               Gigoton, Mergaton, spin!

          Spin, spin, belle Mergaton!
          Your gown shall be stitched ere the old moon fade:
          The age of a moon shall your hands spin on,
          Or a wife in her shroud shall be laid--
               Gigoton, Mergaton, spin!

          Spin, spin, belle Mergaton!
          The Little Good Folk the spell they have cast;
          By your work well done while the moon hath shone,
          Ye shall cleave unto joy at last--
               Gigoton, Mergaton, spin!






                    FLY AWAY, MY HEART
          "O traveller, see where the red sparks rise,"
          (Fly away, my heart, fly away)
          But dark is the mist in the traveller's eyes.
          (Fly away, my heart, fly away)
          "O traveller, see far down the gorge,
          The crimson light from my father's forge-"
               (Fly away, my heart, fly away)

          "O traveller, hear how the anvils ring";
          (Fly away, my heart, fly away)
          But the traveller heard, ah, never a thing:
          (Fly away, my heart, fly away)
          "O traveller, loud do the bellows roar,
          And my father waits by the smithy door-"
               (Fly away, my heart, fly away)

          "O traveller, see you thy true love's grace,"
          (Fly away, my heart, fly away)
          And now there is joy in the traveller's face:
          (Fly away, my heart, fly away)
          Oh, wild does he ride through the rain and mire,
          To greet his love by the smithy fire--
               (Fly away, my heart, fly away)






                              SUZON

               O mealman white, give me your daughter,
               Oh, give her to me, your sweet Suzon!
               O mealman dear, you can do no better,
               For I have a chateau at Malmaison.

               Black charcoalman, you shall not have her
               She shall not marry you, my Suzon--
               A bag of meal, and a sack of carbon!
               Non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non

               Go look at your face, my fanfaron,
               For my daughter and you would be night and day.
               Non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non,
               Not for your chateau at Malmaison;
               Non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non,
               You shall not marry her, my Suzon.






                         MY LITTLE TENDER HEART

                         My little tender heart,
                         O gai, vive le roi!
                         My little tender heart,
                         O gai, vive le roi!
                         'Tis for a grand baron,
                         Vive le roi, la reine!
                         'Tis for a grand baron,
                         Vive Napoleon!

                         My mother promised it,
                         O gai, vive le roi!
                         My mother promised it,
                         O gai, vive le roi!
                         To a gentleman of the king,
                         Vive le roi, la reine!
                         To a gentleman of the king,
                         Vive Napoleon!

                         Oh, say, where goes your love?
                         O gai, vive le roi!
                         Oh, say, where goes your love?
                         O gai, vive le roi!
                         He rides on a white horse,
                         Vive le roi, la reine!
                         He wears a silver sword,
                         Vive Napoleon!

                         Oh, grand to the war he goes,
                         O gai, vive le roi!
                         Oh, grand to the war he goes,
                         O gai, vive le roi!
                         Gold and silver he will bring,
                         Vive le roi, la reine!
                         And eke the daughter of a king--
                         Vive Napoleon!






                     THE MEN OF THE NORTH

          They have wrestled their thews with the Arctic bear,
          With tireless moose they've trod;
          They have drained heel-deep of a fighting air,
          And breasted the winds of God.
          They have stretched their beds in the hummocked snow,
          They have set their teeth to the Pole;
          With Death they have gamed it, throw for throw,
          And drunk with him bowl for bowl--
          They are all for thee, O England!

          In their birch canoes they have run cloud-high,
          On the crest of a nor'land storm;
          They have soaked the sea, and have braved the sky,
          And laughed at the Conqueror Worm.
          They reck not beast and they fear no man,
          They have trailed where the panther glides;
          On the edge of a mountain barbican,
          They have tracked where the reindeer hides--
          And these are for thee, O England!

          They have freed your flag where the white Pole-Star
          Hangs out its auroral flame;
          Where the bones of your Franklin's heroes are
          They have honoured your ancient name.
          And, iron in blood and giant in girth,
          They have stood for your title-deed
          Of the infinite North, and your lordly worth,
          And your pride and your ancient greed--
          And for love of thee, O England!






                             THE CROWNING

                    A thousand years of power,
                    A thousand marches done,
                    Lands beyond lands our dower,
                    Flag with no setting sun--
                    Now to the new King's sealing,
                    Come from the farthest seas,
                    Sons of the croft and sheiling,
                    Sons of the moor and leas--

                    Those that went from us, daring
                    The wastes and the wilds and the wood:
                    Hither they come to us, sharing
                    Our glory, the call of the blood;
                    Hither they come to the sealing--
                    They or the seed of them come,
                    Bring the new King the revealing
                    Of continents yesterday dumb.

                    Out on the veldt, in the pineland,
                    Camped by the spring or the hill,
                    Pressing the grapes of the vineland,
                    Grinding the wheat at the mill,
                    Oracles whispered the message
                    Meant for the ear of the King--
                    Joyous and splendid the presage,
                    Lofty the vision they bring!

                    Each for his new land--he made it;
                    Each for the Old Land which gave
                    Treasure, that none should invade it,
                    Blood its high altars to lave;
                    Each for the brotherhood nations,
                    All of the nations for each:
                    Here giving thanks and oblations,
                    One in our blood and our speech,

                    Pledging our love and alliance,
                    Faith upon faith for the King,
                    Making no oath in defiance,
                    Crying, "No challenge we fling,"
                    Yet for the peace of all people,
                    Yet for the good of our own,
                    Here, with our prayers and oblations,
                    Pledge we our lives to the throne!






                              CLOSE UP

          You heard the bugles calling, comrades, brothers,--
          "Close up! Close up!"  You mounted to go forth,
          You answered "We are coming," and you gathered,
          And paraded with your Captains in the North.

          From here you came, from there you came, your voices
          All flashing with your joy as flash the stars,
          You waited, watched, until, the last one riding
          Out of the night, came roll-call after wars.

          Unsling your swords, off with your knapsacks, brothers!
          We'll mess here at headquarters once again;
          Drink and forget the scars; drink and remember
          The joy of fighting and the pride of pain.

          We will forget: the great game rustles by us,
          The furtive world may whistle at the door,
          We'll not go forth; we'll furlough here together--
          Close up! Close up! 'Tis comrades evermore!

          And Captains, our dear Captains, standing steady,
          Aged with battle, but ever young with love,
          Tramping the zones round, high have we hung your virtues,
          Like shields along the wall of life, like armaments above:

          Like shields your love, our Captains, like armaments your
          virtues,
          No rebel lives among us, we are yours;
          The old command still holds us, the old flag is our one flag,
          We answer to a watchword that endures!

          Close up, close up, my brothers!   Lift your glasses,
          Drink to our Captains, pledging ere we roam,
          Far from the good land, the dear familiar faces,
          The love of the old regiment at home!






                             W. E. H.

     "Henley is dead!" Ah, but the sound and the sight of him,
     Buoyant, commanding, and strong, suffering, noble in mind!
     Gone, and no more shall we have any discourse or delight of him,
     Wearing his pain like a song, casting his troubles behind.

     Gallant and fair! Feeling the soul and the ruth of things,
     Probing the wounds of the world, healing he brought and surcease--
     Laughter he gave, beauty to teach us the truth of things,
     Music to march to the fight, ballads for hours of peace.

     Now it is done! Fearless the soul of him strove for us,
     Viking in blood and in soul, baring his face to the rain,
     Facing the storm he fared on, singing for England and love of us,
     On to the last corral where now he lies beaten and slain.

     Beaten and slain! Yes, but England hath heed of him,
     Singer of high degree, master of thought and of word--
     She shall bear witness with tears, of the pride and the
          loss and the need of him;
     We shall measure the years by the voice and the song unheard.






                       WHEN BLOWS THE WIND

               When blows the wind and drives the sleet,
               And all the trees droop down;
               When all the world is sad, 'tis meet
               Good company be known:
               And, in my heart, good company
               Sits by the fire and sings to me.

               When warriors return, and one
               That went returns no more;
               When dusty is the road we run,
               And garners have no store;
               One ingle-nook right warm shall be
               Where my heart hath good company.

               When man shall flee and woman fail,
               And folly mock and hope deceive,
               Let cowards beat the breast and wail,
               I'll homeward hie; I will not grieve:
               I'll curtains draw, I'll there set free
               My heart's beloved boon company.

               When kings shall favour, ladies call
               My service to their side;
               When roses grow upon the wall
               Of life, and love inside;
               I'll get me home with joy to be
               In my heart's own good company!






EMBERS

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.


CONTENTS:

DOLLY
LIFE'S SWEET WAGES
TO THE VALLEY
THE LILY FLOWER
LOVE IN HER COLD GRAVE LIES
GRANADA, GRANADA
THE NEW APHRODITE
AN ANCIENT PLEDGE
THE TRIBUTE OF KING HATH
THERE IS AN ORCHARD
HEART OF THE WORLD
EPITAPHS
THE BEGGAR
THE MAID
THE FOOL
THE FIGHTER
THE SEA-REAPERS
THE WATCHER
THE WAKING
WHEN ONE FORGETS
ALOES AND MYRRH
IN WASTE PLACES
LAST OF ALL
AFTER
REMEDIAL
THE TWILIGHT OF LOVE
IRREVOCABLE
THE LAST DREAM
WAITING
IN MAYTIME
INSIDE THE BAR
THE CHILDREN
LITTLE GARAINE
TO A LITTLE CHILD




                                  DOLLY

                    King Rufus he did hunt the deer,
                    With a hey ho, come and kiss me, Dolly!
                    It was the spring-time of the year--
                    Hey ho, Dolly shut her eyes!
                    King Rufus was a bully boy,
                    He hunted all the day for joy,
                    Sweet Dolly she was ever coy:
                    And who would e'er be wise
                    That looked in Dolly's eyes?

                    King Rufus he did have his day,
                    With a hey ho, come and kiss me, Dolly!
                    So get ye forth where dun deer play--
                    Hey ho, Dolly comes again!
                    The greenwood is the place for me,
                    For that is where the dun deer be,
                    And who would stay at home,
                    That might with Dolly roam?
                    Sing hey ho, come and kiss me, Dolly!






                        LIFE'S SWEET WAGES

               Who would lie down and close his eyes
               While yet the lark sings o'er the dale?
               Who would to Love make no replies,
               Nor drink the nut-brown ale,
               While throbs the pulse, and full's the purse
               And all the world's for sale?

               Though wintry blasts may prove unkind,
               When winter's past we do forget;
               Love's breast in summer-time is kind,
               And all's well while life's with us yet.
               Hey ho, now the lark is mating--
               Life's sweet wages are in waiting!






                           TO THE VALLEY

                    Come hither, oh come hither,
                    There's a bride upon her bed;
                    They have strewn her o'er with roses,
                    There are roses 'neath her head:
                    Life is love and tears and laughter,
                    But the laughter it is dead--
                    Sing the way to the Valley, to the Valley-
                    Hey, but the roses they are red!






                           THE LILY FLOWER
                    Oh, love, it is a lily flower,
                    (Sing, my captain, sing, my lady!)
                    The sword shall cleave it, Life shall leave it--
                    Who shall know the hour?
                    (Sing, my lady, still!)






                    LOVE IN HER COLD GRAVE LIES

                    Love in her cold grave lies,
                    But that is not my love:
                    My love hath constant eyes,
                    My love her life doth prove;
                    That love, the poorer, dies--
                    Ah, that is not my love!

                    Love in her cold grave lies,
                    But she will wake again;
                    With trembling feet will rise,
                    Will call this love in vain,
                    That she doth now despise
                    Ah, love shall wake again!






                          GRANADA, GRANADA

               Granada, Granada, thy gardens are gay,
               And bright are thy stars, the high stars above;
               But as flowers that fade and are grey,
               But as dusk at the end of the day
               Are ye to the light in the eyes of my love--
               In the eyes, in the soul, of my love.

               Granada, Granada, oh, when shall I see
               My love in thy garden, there waiting for me!
               Beloved, beloved, have pity and make
               Not the sun shut its eyes, its hot envious eyes;
               And the world in the darkness of night,
               Be debtor to thee for its light.
               Turn thy face, turn thy face from the skies
               To the love, to the pain in my eyes.

               Granada, Granada, oh, when shall I see
               My love in thy garden, there waiting for me!






                         THE NEW APHRODITE

               What though the gods of the eld be dead,
               Here are the mountains of azure and snow,
               Here are the valleys where loves are wed,
               And lilies in blow.

               Here are the hands that are lucid, sweet,
               Wound at the wrist with an amber beading,
               Folds of the seafoam to cover the feet,
               Mortals misleading.

               Down to the opaline lips of the sea
               Wander the lost ones, fallen but mighty,
               Stretching out hands, crying, "Turn unto me,
               O Aphrodite!"

               See where they lift up their faces and scan,
               Over the wave-heaps, thy coming; despite thee,
               Thou canst not fetter the soul of a man,
               O Aphrodite!

               Nay, but our bodies we bend, and we give
               All that the heart hath, loving, not knowing
               Whether the best is to die or to live,
               Coming or going.

               We shall be taken, but thou shalt live on,
               Swallowed in sea-drifts that never affright thee;
               Smiling, thou'lt lift up thy sweet hands alone,
               Ah, Aphrodite!

               Over thy face is a veil of white sea-mist,
               Only thine eyes shine like stars; bless or blight me,
               I will hold close to the leash at thy wrist,
               O Aphrodite!

               Rosy and proud are the skies of the East,
               Love-dowered moons to enswathe thee, delight thee:
               Thy days and our days--are thine then the least,
               O Aphrodite?

               Thou in the East and I here in the West,
               Under our newer skies purple and pleasant:
               Who shall decide which is better, attest,
               Saga or peasant?

               Thou with Serapis, Osiris, and Isis,
               I with Jehovah, in vapours and shadows;
               Thou with the gods' joy-enhancing devices,
               Sweet-smelling meadows.

               What is there given us?--Food and some raiment,
               Toiling to reach to a Patmian haven,
               Giving up all for uncertain repayment,
               Feeding the raven.

               Striving to peer through the infinite azure,
               Alternate turning to earthward and falling,
               Measuring life with Damastian measure,
               Finite, appalling.

               What does it matter! They passed who with Homer
               Poured out the wine at the feet of their idols:
               Passing, what found they? To-come a misnomer,
               It and their idols?

               Who knows, ah, who knows! Here in this garden,
               Heliotrope, hyacinth, soft suns to light me,
               Leaning out, peering, thou, thou art my warden-
               Thou, Aphrodite!

               Up from the future of all things there come,
               Marching abreast in their stately endeavour,
               Races unborn, to the beat of the drum,
               Of the Forever.

               Resting not, beating down all the old traces,
               Falls the light step of the new-coming nations,
               Burning on altars of our loved graces,
               Their new oblations.

               What shall we know of it, we who have lifted
               Up the dark veil, done sowing and reaping;
               What shall we care if our burdens be shifted,
               Waking or sleeping?

               Sacristan, acolyte, player or preacher,
               Each to his office, but who holds the key?
               Death, only death, thou, the ultimate teacher,
               Will show it to me.

               I am, Thou art, and the strong-speaking Jesus,
               One in the end of an infinite truth?--
               Eyes of a prophet or sphinx may deceive us,
               Bearing us ruth,

               But when the forts and the barriers fall,
               Shall we not find One, the true, the almighty,
               Wisely to speak with the worst of us all,
               O Aphrodite?

               Waiting, I turn from the futile, the human,
               Gone is the life of me, laughing with youth;
               Steals to learn all in the face of a woman,
               Mendicant Truth.







                         AN ANCIENT PLEDGE

          Fair be the garden where their loves may dwell,
          Safe be the highway where their feet may go;
          Rich be the meadows where their hands may toil,
          The fountains many where the good wines flow;
          Full be their harvest bins with corn and oil,
          And quick their hearts all wise delights to know;
          To sorrow may their humour be a foil,
          Tardy their footsteps to the gate Farewell.
          Deep be your cups.  Our hearts the gods make light:
          Drink, that their joy may never know good-night!






                  THE TRIBUTE OF KING HATH

               Oh, bring to me a cup of gold,
               And bring a platter fair,
               And summon forth my Captain old,
               Who keeps the royal stair.

               And fetch a stoup of that rare wine
               That hailed my father's fame;
               And bear some white bread from the shrine
               Built to my mother's name.

               Then, good my gentlemen, bring down
               My robe of soft samite;
               And let the royal horn be blown,
               For we ride far to-night.

               Within the pleasant Vale of Loe
               Beside the Sea of Var,
               The Daughter of our ancient foe
               Dwells where her people are.

               Tribute her fathers paid to mine--
               Young prince to elder crown;
               But for a jest 'twixt bread and wine,
               They struck our banner down.

               And we had foes from Blymar Hills,
               From Gathan and Dagost,
               And pirates from Bagol that spills
               Its refuse on our coast.

               And we were girded South and North;
               And there beyond the Var,
               They drove our goodly fighters forth,
               And dimmed our ancient star.

               Now they have passed us, home for home,
               And matched us town for town;
               Their daughters to our sons now come--
               Our feud it weareth down.

               Between their cups, the hill-men cry,
               "The Lady of the Loe!"
               The sea-kings swing their flags peak-high
               Where'er her galleons go.

               Once when the forge of battle sang
               'Tween Varan and Thogeel;
               And when ten thousand stirrups rang
               'Twixt girth and bloody heel,

               I saw her ride 'mid mirk and fire,
               Unfearing din and death,
               Her eyes upflaming like a pyre,
               Her fearless smile beneath.

               Nor'land 'gainst Southland then she drove,
               A million serfs to free;
               The reeking shuttle lifeward wove,
               Through death from land to sea.

               And perched upon the Hill of Zoom,
               My gentlemen beside,
               I saw the weft shake in the loom,
               The revel blazon wide,

               Until a thousand companies--
               Serf-lords from out Thogeel
               Their broadswords brake across their knees,
               Good captives to her steel.

               And then I sware by name and crown,
               And by the Holy Ghost,
               When Peace should ride with pennon blown,
               From Gathan to Dagost,

               Unto her kingdom I should get,
               And come not back again,
               Until a queen's hand I had set
               Upon my bridle rein.

               Our ships now nestle at Her coast,
               Her corn our garner fills;
               And all is quiet at Dagost,
               And on the Blymar Hills.

               And I will do a deed to bind
               An ancient love once more;
               My gentlemen shall ride behind,
               My Captain on before;

               And we will journey forth to-night
               Towards the Sea of Var,
               Until the vale shall come in sight,
               Where Her great cities are.

               And to the Daughter of that land,
               Which once was kin to mine,
               My Captain, he shall bear in hand
               This sacred bread and wine.

               And he shall show her soft and fair
               This peace-spread sacrament:
               Her banner it shall ride the air
               Upon my Captain's tent.

               And if the wine to lip she raise,
               With morsel of my bread;
               Then as we loved in ancient days,
               These lands of ours shall wed.

               But mine the tribute.  I will bring
               My homage to her door,
               My gentlemen behind their king,
               My Captain on before.

               And we aslant will set our spears,
               Our good swords dipping free;
               And we will ravel back the years
               For love of her and me.

               And I will prove my faith in this
               As never king was proved--
               For kings may fight for what they kiss,
               And die for what they loved!

               But I will bring my court afar,
               My throne to hers shall go;
               And I will reign beside the Var,
               And in the Vale of Loe.

               The younger kingdom, it shall be
               The keeper of my crown;
               And she, my queen, shall reign with me
               Within her own good town.

               And men shall speak me kind, shall tell
               Her graces day and night
               So bring my steed that serves me well,
               My robe of soft samite,

               And bring me here the cup of gold,
               And bring the platter fair,
               And summon me my Captain old,
               That keeps the royal stair.

               For well know I the way I go;
               I follow but my star:
               My home is in the Vale of Loe,
               And by the Sea of Var.






                     THERE IS AN ORCHARD

               There is an orchard beyond the sea,
               And high is the orchard wall;
               And ripe is the fruit in the orchard tree--
               Oh, my love is fair and tall!

               There is an orchard beyond the sea,
               And joy to its haven hies;
               And a white hand opens its gate to me--
               Oh, deep are my true love's eyes!

               There is an orchard beyond the sea,
               Its flowers the brown bee sips;
               But the stateliest flower is all for me--
               Oh, sweet are my true love's lips!

               There is an orchard beyond the sea,
               Where the soft delights do roam;
               To the Great Delight I have bent my knee--
               Oh, good is my true love's home!

               There is an orchard beyond the sea,
               With a nest where the linnets hide;
               Oh, warm is the nest that is built for me-
               In my true love's heart I bide!






                       HEART OF THE WORLD

               Heart of the World give heed,
               Tongues of the World be still!
               The richest grapes of the vine shall bleed
               Till the greeting-cup shall spill;
               The kine shall pause in the pleasant mead,
               The eagle upon the hill--
               Heart of the World give heed!

               Heart of the World break forth,
               Tongues of the World proclaim!
               There cometh a voice from out the North
               And a face of living flame--
               A man's soul crying, Behold what worth
               Was life till her sweet soul came--
               Heart of the World break forth!

               Heart of the World be strong,
               Tongues of the World be wise!
               The White North glows with a morning song
               Or ever the red sun dies;
               For Love is summer and Love is long,
               And the good God 's in his skies--
               Heart of the World be strong!






                           EPITAPHS


          THE BEGGAR

          Poor as a sparrow was I,
          But I was saved like a king;
          I heard the death-bells ring,
          Yet I saw a light in the sky:
          And now to my Father I wing.



          THE MAID

          A little while I saw the world go by--
          A little doorway that I called my own,
          A loaf, a cup of water, and a bed had I,
          A shrine of Jesus, where I knelt alone
          And now, alone, I bid the world good-bye.



          THE FOOL
          I was a fool; nothing had I to know
          Of men, and naught to men had I to give.
          God gave me nothing; now to God I go,
          Now ask for pain, for bread,
          Life for my brain: dead,
          By God's love I shall then begin to live.



          THE FIGHTER
          Blows I have struck, and blows a-many taken,
          Wrestling I've fallen, and I've rose up again;
          Mostly I've stood--
          I've had good bone and blood;
          Others went down though fighting might and main.
          Now Death steps in,
          Death the price of sin:
          The fall it will be his; and though I strive and strain,
          One blow will close my eyes, and I shall never waken.






                         THE SEA-REAPERS

               When the Four Winds, the Wrestlers, strive with the Sun,
               When the Sun is slain in the dark;
               When the stars burn out, and the night cries
               To the blind sea-reapers, and they rise,
               And the water-ways are stark--
               God save us when the reapers reap!
               When the ships sweep in with the tide to the shore,
               And the little white boats return no more;
               When the reapers reap,
               Lord, give Thy sailors sleep,
               If Thou cast us not upon the shore,
               To bless Thee evermore
               To walk in Thy sight as heretofore,
               Though the way of the Lord be steep!
               By Thy grace,
               Show Thy face,
               Lord of the land and the deep!




                           THE WATCHER

          As the wave to the shore, as the dew to the leaf,
          As the breeze to the flower,
          As the scent of a rose to the heart of a child,
          As the rain to the dusty land--
          My heart goeth out unto Thee--unto Thee!
          The night is far spent and the day is at hand.

          As the song of a bird to the call of a star,
          As the sun to the eye,
          As the anvil of man to the hammers of God,
          As the snow to the earth--
          Is my word unto Thy word--to Thy word!
          The night is far spent and the day is at hand






                              THE WAKING

          To be young is to dream, and I dreamed no more;
            I had smothered my heart as the fighter can:
          I toiled, and I looked not behind or before--
            I was stone; but I waked with the heart of a man.

          By the soul at her lips, by the light of her eyes,
            I dreamed a new dream as the sleeper can,
          That the heavenly folly of youth was wise--
            I was stone; but I waked with the heart of a man.

          She came like a song, she will go like a star:
            I shall tread the hills as the hunter can,
          Mine eyes to the hunt, and my soul afar-
            I was stone; but I waked with the heart of a man.






                         WHEN ONE FORGETS

          When one forgets, the old things are as dead things;
          The grey leaves fall, and eyes that saw their May
          Turn from them now, and voices that have said things
          Wherein Life joyed, alas! are still to-day--
                    When one forgets.

          The world was noble, now its sordid casement
          Glows but with garish folly, and the plains
          Of rich achievement lie in mean abasement--
          Ah, Hope is only midwife to our pains!

          When one forgets, but maimed rites come after:
          To mourn, be priest, be sexton, bear the pall,
          Remembrance-robed, the while a distant laughter
          Proclaims Love's ghost--what wonder skies should fall,
                    When one forgets!






                         ALOES AND MYRRH

               Dead, with the dew on your brow,
               Dead, with the may in your face,
               Dead: and here, true to my vow,
               I, who have won in the race,
               Weave you a chaplet of song
               Wet with the spray and the rime
               Blown from your love that was strong--
               Stronger than Time.

               August it was, and the sun
               Streamed through the pines of the west;
               There were two then--there is one;
               Flown is the bird from the nest;
               And it is August again,
               But, from this uttermost sea,
               Rises the mist of my pain--
               You are set free.

               "Tell him I see the tall pines,
               Out through the door as I lie--
               Red where the setting sun shines--
               Waving their hands in good-bye;
               Tell him I hold to my breast,
               Dying, the flowers he gave;
               Glad as I go I shall rest
               Well in my grave."

               This is the message they send,
               Warm with your ultimate breath;
               Saying, "And this is the end;
               She is the bride but of death."
               Is death the worst of all things?
               What but a bursting of bands,
               Then to the First of All Things
               Stretching out hands!

               Under the grass and the snow
               You will sleep well till I come;
               And you will feel me, I know,
               Though you are motionless, dumb.
               I shall speak low overhead--
               You were so eager to hear--
               And even though you are dead,
               You will be near.

               Dead, with the dew on your brow,
               Dead, with the May in your face,
               Dead: and here, true to my vow,
               I, who have won in the race,
               Weave you a chaplet of song
               Wet with the spray and the rime
               Blown from your love that was strong--
               Stronger than Time.






                         IN WASTE PLACES

               The new life is fief to the old life,
               And giveth back pangs at the last;
               The new strife is like to the old strife
               A token and tear of the Past.
               We change, but the changes are only
               New forms of the old forms again,
               We die and some spaces are lonely,
               But men live in lives of new men.

               We hate, and old wrongs lift their faces,
               To fill up the ranks of the new;
               We love, and the early love's graces
               Are signs of the false and the true;
               We clasp the white hands that are given
               To greet us in devious ways,
               But meet the old sins, all unshriven,
               To sadden the burden of days.

               Though we lose the green leaves of the first days,
               Though the vineyards be trampled and red,
               We know, in the gloom of our worst days,
               That the dead are not evermore dead:
               December is only December,
               A space, not the infinite whole;
               Though the hearthstone bear but the one ember,
               There still is the fire of the soul.

               The end comes as came the beginning,
               And shadows fail into the past;
               And the goal, is it not worth the winning,
               If it brings us but home at the last?
               While over the pain of waste places
               We tread, 'tis a blossoming rod
               That drives us to grace from disgraces,
               From the plains to the Gardens of God.






                             LAST OF ALL

               Wave, walls to seaward,
               Storm-clouds to leeward,
               Beaten and blown by the winds of the West,
               Sail we encumbered
               Past isles unnumbered,
               But never to greet the green island of Rest.

               Lips that now tremble,
               Do you dissemble
               When you deny that the human is best?
               Love, the evangel,
               Finds the Archangel--
               Is that a truth when this may be a jest?

               Star-drifts that glimmer
               Dimmer and dimmer,
               What do ye know of my weal or my woe?
               Was I born under
               The sun or the thunder?
               What do I come from, and where do I go?

               Rest, shall it ever
               Come?  Is endeavour
               Still a vain twining and twisting of cords?
               Is faith but treason;
               Reason, unreason,
               But a mechanical weaving of words?

               What is the token,
               Ever unbroken,
               Swept down the spaces of querulous years,--
               Weeping or singing--
               That the Beginning
               Of all things is with us, and sees us, and hears?

               What is the token?
               Bruised and broken,
               Bend I my life to a blossoming rod?
               Shall then the worst things
               Come to the first things,
               Finding the best of all, last of all, God?






                                AFTER

                    Bands broken, cords loosened, and all
                    Set free. Well, I know
                    That I turned my cold face to the wall,
                    Was silent, strove, gasped, then there fell
                    A numbness, a faintness, a spell
                    Of blindness, hung as a pall,
                    On me, falling low,
                    And a far fading sound of a knell.

                    Then a fierce stretching of hands
                    In gloom; and my feet,
                    Treading tremulous over hard sands;
                    A wind that wailed wearily slow,
                    A plashing of waters below,
                    A twilight on bleak lone lands,
                    Spread out; and a sheet
                    Of the moaning sea shallows aflow.

                    Then a steep highway that leads
                    Somewhere, cold, austere;
                    And I follow a shadow that heeds
                    My coming, and points, not in wrath,
                    Out over: we tread the sere path
                    Up to the summit; recedes
                    All gloom; and at last
                    The beauty a flower-land hath.






                              REMEDIAL

                    Well it has come and has gone,
                    I have some pride, you the same;
                    You will scarce put willow on,
                    I will have buried a name.

                    A stone, "Hic Jacet"--no more;
                    Let the world wonder at will;
                    You have the key to the door,
                    I have the cenotaph still.

                    A tear--one tear, is it much,
                    Dropped on a desert of pain?
                    Had you one passionate touch
                    Of Nature there had been rain.

                    Purpose, oh no, there was none!
                    You could not know if you would;
                    You were the innocent one.
                    Malice?   Nay, you were too good.

                    Hearts should not be in your way,
                    You must pass on, and you did;
                    Ah, did I hurt you? you say:
                    Hurt me?  Why, Heaven forbid!

                    Inquisitorial ways
                    Might have hurt, truly, but this,
                    Done in these wise latter days,
                    It was too sudden, I wis.

                    "Painless and pleasing," this is
                    No bad advertisement, true;
                    Painless extinction was his,
                    And it was pleasing-to you.

                    Still, when the surgery's done
                    (That is the technical term),
                    Which has lost most, which has won?
                    Rise now, and truly affirm.

                    You carry still what we call
                    (Poets are dreamy we know)
                    A heart, well, 'tis yours after all,
                    And time hath its wonders, I trow.

                    You may look back with your eyes
                    Turned to the dead of the Past,
                    And find with a sad surprise,
                    That yours is the dead at the last.

                    Seeing afar in the sands,
                    Gardens grown green, at what cost!
                    You may reach upward your hands,
                    Praying for what you have lost.






                    THE TWILIGHT OF LOVE

          Adieu! and the sun goes awearily down,
          The mist creeps up o'er the sleepy town,
          The white sails bend to the shuddering mere,
          And the reapers have reaped, and the night is here.

          Adieu! and the years are a broken song,
          The right grows weak in the strife with wrong,
          The lilies of love have a crimson stain,
          And the old days never will come again.

          Adieu! where the mountains afar are dim
          'Neath the tremulous tread of the seraphim,
          Shall not our querulous hearts prevail,
          That have prayed for the peace of the Holy Grail?

          Adieu! Some time shall the veil between
          The things that are, and that might have been
          Be folded back for our eyes to see,
          And the meaning of all be clear to me.






                            IRREVOCABLE

               What you have done may never be undone
               By day or night,
               What I have seen may never be unseen
               In my sad sight.

               The days swing on, the sun glows and is gone,
               From span to span;
               The tides sweep scornfully the shore, as when
               The tides began.

               What we have known is but a bitter pledge
               Of Ignorance,
               The human tribute to an ageless dream,
               A timeless trance.

               Through what great cycles hath this circumstance
               Swept on and on,
               Known not by thee or me, till it should come,
               A vision wan,

               To our two lives, and yours would seem to me
               The hand that kills,
               Though you have wept to strike, and but have cried,
               "The mad Fate wills!"

               You could not, if you would, give what had been
               Peace, not distress;
               Some warping cords of destiny had held
               You in duress.

               Nay, not the Fates, look higher; is God blind?
               Doth He not well?
               Our eyes see but a little space behind,
               If it befell,

               That they saw but a little space before,
               Shall we then say,
               Unkind is the Eternal, if He knew
               This from alway,

               And called us into being but to give
               To mother Earth
               Two blasted lives, to make the watered land
               A place of dearth?

               The life that feeds upon itself is mad--
               Is it not thus?
               Have I not held but one poor broken reed
               For both of us?

               Keep but your place and simply meet
               The needs of life;
               Mine is the sorrow, mine the prayerless pain:
               The world is rife

               With spectres seen and spectres all unseen
               By human eyes,
               Who stand upon the threshold, at the gates,
               Of Paradise.

               Well do they who have felt the spectres' hands
               Upon their hearts,
               And have not fled, but with firm faith have borne
               Their brothers' parts,

               Upheld the weary head, or fanned the brow
               Of some sick soul,
               Pointed the way for tired pilgrim eyes
               To their far goal.

               So let it be with us: perchance will come
               In after days,
               The benison of happiness for us
               Always, always.






                             THE LAST DREAM

               One more dream in the slow night watches,
                 One more sleep when the world is dumb,
               And his soul leans out to the sweet wild snatches
                 Of song that up from dreamland come.

               Pale, pale face with a golden setting,
                 Deep, deep glow of stedfast eyes;
               Form of one there is no forgetting,
                 Wandering out of Paradise.

               Breath of balm, and a languor falling
                 Out of the gleam of a sunset sky;
               Peace, deep peace and a seraph's calling,
                 Folded hands and a pleading cry.

               One more dream for the patient singer,
                 Weary with songs he loved so well;
               Sleeping now--will the vision bring her?
                 Hark, 'tis the sound of the passing bell!






                             WAITING

                    When shall I see thee again?
                    Weary the years and so long;
                    When shall be buried the wrong,
                    Phantom-like rising between?
                    Seeking for surcease of pain,
                    Pilgrim to Lethe I came;
                    Drank not, for pride was too keen--
                    Stung by the sound of a name.

                    Soft, ardent skies of my youth
                    Come to me over the sea,
                    Come in a vision to me,
                    Come with your shimmer and song;
                    Ye have known all of the truth,
                    Witness to both shall ye bear;
                    Read me the riddle of wrong,
                    Solve me the cords of the snare.

                    Love is not won in a breath,
                    Idle, impassioned and sure;
                    Why should not love then endure,
                    Challenging doubt to the last?
                    True love is true till the death,
                    Though it bear aloes and myrrh;
                    Try me and judge me, O Past,
                    Have I been true unto her?

                    What should I say if we met,
                    Knowing not which should forbear?
                    E'en if I plead would she care?--
                    Sweet is the refuge of scorn.
                    Close by my side, O Regret
                    Long we have watched for the light!
                    Watchman, what of the morn?
                    Well do we know of the night.






                             IN MAYTIME

                    The apple blossoms glisten
                    Within the crowned trees;
                    The meadow grasses listen
                    The din of busy bees;
                    The wayward, woodland singer
                    Carols along the leas,
                    Not loth to be the bringer
                    Of summer fantasies.

                    But you and I who never
                    Meet now but for regret,
                    Forever and forever,
                    Though flower-bonds were set
                    In Maytime, if you wonder
                    That falling leaves are ours,
                    Yours was it cast asunder,
                    Mine are the faded flowers.

                    The fluted wren is sobbing
                    Beneath the mossy eaves;
                    The throstle's chord is throbbing
                    In coronal of leaves;
                    The home of love is lilies,
                    And rose-hearts, flaming red,
                    Red roses and white lilies--
                    Lo, thus the gods were wed!

                    But we weep on, unheeding
                    The earth's joys spread for us;
                    And ever, far receding,
                    Our fair land fades from us:
                    One waited, patient, broken,
                    High-hearted but opprest,
                    One lightly took the token--
                    The mad Fates took the rest.

                    High mountains and low valleys,
                    And shreds of silver seas,
                    The lone brook's sudden sallies,
                    And all the joys of these,--
                    These were, but now the fire
                    Volcanic seeks the sea,
                    And dark wave walls retire
                    Tyrannic seeking me.

                    Spirit of dreams, a vision
                    Well hast thou wrought for us;
                    Fold high the veil Elysian,
                    The past held naught for us;
                    Years, what are they but spaces
                    Set in a day for me?
                    Lo, here are lilied places--
                    My love comes back to me!






                        INSIDE THE BAR

               I knows a town, an' it's a fine town,
               And many a brig goes sailin' to its quay;
               I knows an inn, an' it's a fine inn,
               An' a lass that's fair to see.
               I knows a town, an' it's a fine town;
               I knows an inn, an' it's a fine inn--
               But Oh my lass, an' Oh the gay gown,
               Which I have seen my pretty in!

               I knows a port, an' it's a good port,
               An' many a brig is ridin' easy there;
               I knows a home, an' it's a good home,
               An' a lass that's sweet an' fair.
               I knows a port, an' it's a good port,
               I knows a home, an' it's a good home--
               But Oh the pretty that is my sort,
               What's wearyin' till I come!

               I knows a day, an' it's a fine day,
               The day a sailor man comes back to town;
               I knows a tide, an' it's a good tide,
               The tide that gets you quick to anchors down.
               I knows a day, an' it's a fine day,
               I knows a tide, an' it's a good tide--
               And God help the lubber, I say,
               What's stole the sailor man's bride!






                            THE CHILDREN

               Mark the faces of the children
               Flooded with sweet innocence!
               God's smile on their foreheads glisten
               Ere their heart-strings have grown tense.

               And they know not of the sadness,
               Of the palpitating pain
               Drawn through arid veins of manhood,
               Or the lusts that life disdain.

               Little reek they of the shadows
               Fallen through the steep world's space
               God hath touched them with His chrism
               And their sunlight is His grace.

               And the green grooves of the meadows
               They are fair to look upon;
               And the silver thrush and robin
               Sing most sweetly on and on.

               But the faces of the children-
               They are fairer far than these;
               And the songs they sing are sweeter
               Than the thrushes' in the trees.

               Little hands, our God has given
               All the flower-bloom for you;
               Gather violets in the meadows,
               Trailing your sweet fingers through.

               The swift tears that sometimes glisten
               On their faces dashed with pain
               Weave a rosy bow of promise,
               Like the afterglow of rain.

               The soft, verdant fields of childhood,
               Certes, are the softer for
               The dissolving dew of morning,
               Noon's elate ambassador.

               Looking skyward, do they wonder--
               They, the children palm to palm-
               What is out beyond the azure
               In the infinite of calm?

               Though they murmur soft "Our Father,"
               Angel wings to speed it on
               Past the bright wheels of the Pleiads,
               Have they thought of benison?

               Nay! the undefiled children
               Say it bound by ignorance;
               But the saying is the merit,
               And the loving bans mischance.

               Oh the mountain heights of childhood,
               And the waterfalls of dreams,
               And the sleeping in the shadows
               Of the willows by the streams!

               Toss your gleaming hair, O children,
               Back in waving of the wind!
               Flash the starlight 'heath your eyelids
               From the sunlight of the mind!

               See, we strain you to our bosoms,
               And we kiss your lip and brow;
               Human hearts must have some idols,
               And we shrine you idols now.

               Time, the ruthless idol-breaker,
               Smileless, cold iconoclast,
               Though he rob us of our altars,
               Cannot rob us of the past.

               Dull and dead the gods' bright nectar,
               Disencrowned of its foam;
               Duller, deader far the empty,
               Barren hearthstone of a home.

               Smile out to our age and give us,
               Children, of the dawn's desire;
               We have passed morn's gold and opal,
               We have lost life's early fire.






                           LITTLE GARAINE

          "Where do the stars grow, little Garaine?
          The garden of moons, is it far away?
          The orchard of suns, my little Garaine,
          Will you take us there some day?"

          "If you shut your eyes," quoth little Garaine,
          "I will show you the way to go
          To the orchard of suns and the garden of moons
          And the field where the stars do grow.

          "But you must speak soft," quoth little Garaine,
          "And still must your footsteps be,
          For a great bear prowls in the field of the stars,
          And the moons they have men to see.

          "And the suns have the Children of Signs to guard,
          And they have no pity at all--
          You must not stumble, you must not speak,
          When you come to the orchard wall.

          "The gates are locked," quoth little Garaine,
          "But the way I am going to tell--
          The key of your heart it will open them all:
          And there's where the darlings dwell!"






                          TO A LITTLE CHILD

                               (M. H.)

          When you were born, my dear, when you were born,
            A glorious Voice came singing from the sun,
          An Ariel with roses of the morn,
            And through the vales of Arcady danced one
            All golden as the corn.

          These were the happy couriers of God,
            Bearing your gifts: a magic all your own,
          And Beauty with her tall divining rod;
            While tiny star-smiths, bending to your throne,
            Your feet with summer shod.

          Into my heart, my dear, you flashed your way,
            Your rosy, golden way: a fairy horn
          Proclaimed you dancing light and roundelay;--
            I thank my generous Fates that you were born
            One lofty joyous day.






                          L'EMPEREUR, MORT

                         (M. H., AGED FIVE)

          My dear, I was thy lover,
          A man of spring-time years;
          I sang thee songs, gave gifts and songs most poor,
          But they were signs; and now, for evermore,
          Thou farest forth!  My heart is full of tears,
          My dear, my very dear.

          My dear, I was thy lover,
          I wrote thee on my shield,
          I cried thy name in goodly fealty,
          Thy champion I.  And now, no more for me
          Thy face, thy smile: thou goest far afield,
          My dear, my very dear.

          My dear, I am thy lover:
          Afield thy spirit goes,
          And thou shalt find that Inn of God's delight,
          Where thou wilt wait for us who say good night,
          To thy sweet soul.  The rest--the rest, God knows,
          My dear, my dear!






                           PHYLLIS

          Phyllis, I knew you once when I was young,
          And travelled to your land of Arcady.
          Do you, of all the songs, wild songs, before you flung,
          Remember mine--its buoyant melody,
          Its hope, its pride; do you remember it?
          It was the song that makes the world go round;
          I bought it of a Boy: in scars I paid for it,
          Phyllis, to you who jested at my wound.






                           BAIRNIE

          Did ye see the white cloud in the glint o' the sun?
          That's the brow and the eye o' my bairnie.
          Did ye ken the red bloom at the bend o' the crag?
          That's the rose in the cheek o' my bairnie.
          Did ye hear the gay lilt o' the lark by the burn?
          That's the voice of my bairnie, my dearie.
          Did ye smell the wild scent in the green o' the wood?
          That's the breath o' my ain, o' my bairnie.
          Sae I'll gang awa' hame, to the shine o' the fire,
             To the cot where I lie wi' my bairnie.






EMBERS

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.


CONTENTS

IN CAMDEN TOWN
JEAN
A MEMORY
IN CAMP AT JUNIPER COVE
JUNIPER COVE TWENTY YEARS AFTER
LISTENING
NEVERTHELESS
ISHMAEL
OVER THE HILLS
THE DELIVERER
THE DESERT ROAD
A SON OF THE NILE
A FAREWELL FROM THE HAREM
AN ARAB LOVE SONG
THE CAMEL-DRIVER TO HIS CAMEL
THE TALL DABOON
THERE IS SORROW ON THE SEA
THE AUSTRALIAN STOCBRIDER
THE BRIDGE OF THE HUNDRED SPANS
NELL LATORE





                            IN CAMDEN TOWN

                    How many years of sun and snow
                    Have come to Camden Town,
                    Since through its streets and in its shade,
                    I wandered up and down.

                    Not many more than to you here
                    These verses hapless flung,
                    Yet of the Long Ago they seem
                    To me who am yet young.

                    We strive to measure life by Time,
                    And con the seasons o'er,
                    To find, alas! that days are years,
                    And years for evermore.

                    The joys that thrill, the ill that thralls,
                    Pressed down on heart and brain-
                    These are the only horologues,
                    The Age's loss or gain.

                    And I am old in all of these,
                    And wonder if I know
                    The man begotten of the boy,
                    Who loved that long ago.

                    A lilac bush close to the gate,
                    A locust at the door,
                    A low, wide window flower-filled,
                    With ivy covered o'er.

                    A face--O love of childhood dreams,
                    Lily in form and name--
                    It comes back now in these day-dreams,
                    The same yet not the same.

                    My childhood's friend!   Well gathered are
                    The sheaves of many days,
                    But this one sheaf is garnered in,
                    Bound by my love always.

                    Where have you wandered, child, since when
                    Together merrily,
                    We gathered cups of columbine
                    By lazy Rapanee?

                    The green spears of the flagflower,
                    Down by the old mill-race,
                    Are weapons now for other hands,
                    Who mimic warfare chase.

                    You were so tender, yet so strong,
                    So gentle, yet so free,
                    Your every word, whenever heard,
                    Seemed wondrous wise to me.

                    You marvelled if the dead could hear
                    Our steps, that passed at will
                    Their low green houses in the elm-
                    Crowned churchyard on the hill.

                    And I, whom your sweet childhood's trust,
                    Esteemed as most profound,
                    Thought that they heard, as in a dream,
                    The shadow of a sound.

                    We drew the long, rank grass away
                    From tombstones mossy grown,
                    To read the verses crude and quaint,
                    And make the words our own.

                    One tottering marble, willow-spread,
                    I well remember yet,
                    With only this engraved thereon,
                    "By Joseph to Jeanette."

                    It held us wondering oft, as we
                    Peeped through the pickets old:
                    There was some mystery, we knew,
                    Some history untold.

                    Well, better far those simple words,
                    Where weeping phrase is not,
                    Than burdened tablet, and the rest
                    Forgetting and forgot.

                    And Lily Minden, do you lie
                    In some forgotten grave,
                    Where only strangers' feet pass o'er
                    Your temple's architrave?

                    Or, by some hearthstone, have you learned
                    The worst and best of life,
                    And found sweet greetings in the name
                    Of mother and of wife?

                    I cannot tell: I know you but
                    As bee the clover bloom,
                    That sips content, and straightway builds
                    Its mansion and its tomb.

                    So took I in child-innocence,
                    So build the House of Life,
                    And in low tone to thee alone,
                    As dead or maid or wife,

                    I sing this song, borne all along
                    A space of wasted breath;
                    And build me on from room to room
                    Unto the House of Death,

                    Where portals swing forever in
                    To weary pilgrim guest,
                    And hearts that here were inly dear
                    Shall find a Room of Rest.






                                  JEAN

                    Three times round has the sun gone, Jean,
                    Since on your lips I pressed
                    Mute farewells; if that pain was keen
                    Fair were you in your nest.

                    Smiling, sweetheart, I left you there;
                    You had no word to say;
                    One last touch to your brow and hair,
                    Then I went on my way.

                    Time it was when the leaves were grown
                    Your rose-colour, my queen;
                    Ere the birds to the south had flown,
                    While yet the grass was green.

                    Eyes demure, do you ever yearn,
                    Bird-wise to summer lands?
                    Is it to meet your look I turn,
                    Saying, "She understands,"

                    Saying, "She waits in her quiet place
                    Patient till I shall come,
                    The old sweet grace in her dreaming face
                    That made a Heav'n her home"?

                    No!  She is there 'neath Northern skies,
                    And no word does she send;
                    But near to my heart her image lies,
                    And shall lie there to the end.

                    Come what will I am not bereft
                    Of the memory of that time,
                    When in her hands my heart I left
                    There, in a colder clime.

                    And to my eyes no face is fair,
                    For one face comes between;
                    And if a song has a low sweet air,
                    Through it there whispers, "Jean."

                    Better for me the world would say,
                    If I had broke the charm,
                    Set in the circle she one day
                    Made by her round white arm.

                    Never a king in days of eld
                    Gathered about his throat
                    Such a circlet; no queen e'er held
                    Necklace so clear of mote.

                    It sufficeth the charm was set;
                    And if it chance that one
                    Still remembers, though one forget,
                    Then is the worst thing done--

                    Done, and I still can say "Let be;
                    I have no word of blame;
                    Though her heart is no more for me,
                    Mine shall be still the same."

                    I have my life to live and she--
                    Well, if it be so--so;
                    She may welcome or banish me
                    And if I go, I go.

                    Friend, I pray you repress those tears,
                    Comfort from this derive:
                    I am a score--and more-of years
                    And Jean is only five.






                           A MEMORY

               From buckwheat fields the summer sun
               Drew honeyed breezes over
               The lanes where happy children run
               With bare feet in the clover.

               The schoolhouse stood with pines about
               Upon the hill, and ever
               A creek, where hid the speckled trout,
               Ran past it to the river.

               And rosy faces gathered there,
               With rustic good around them;
               With breath of balm blown everywhere,
               Pure, ere the world had found them.

               Behind sweet purple ambuscades
               Of lilacs, laws were broken;
               And here a desk with knives was frayed,
               There passed forbidden token.

               One slipped a butternut between
               His pearly teeth; a maiden
               Dove-eyed, caressed her cheek; 'twas e'en
               With maple sugar laden--

               A flock that caught at wiles, because
               The shepherd's hand that drove them,
               Reached little toward wise human laws,
               And less to God above them.

               With eyebrows bent and surly look
               He only saw before him,
               The rule, the lesson, and the book,
               Not nature brooding o'er him.

               One day through drone of locusts fell
               The wood-bird's fitful tapping,
               And in his chair at "dinner-spell,"
               The teacher grim sat napping.

               An urchin creeping in beholds
               The tyrant slumber-smitten,
               And in his pocket's ample folds
               He thrusts the school-yard kitten.

               At length the master waked, and clanged
               His bell with anger fitting;
               His sleep had made it double-fanged,
               And crossed like needles knitting.

               Slow to their seats the children file,
               And wait "Prepare for classes,"
               A score of lads across the aisle
               From twice a score of lasses.

               But two within the throng betray
               A mirth suppressed; the sinner,
               And Rafe Ridall, the chief at play,
               At books the easy winner:

               The wildest boy in all the school,
               In mischief first and ever,
               His daily seat the penance-stool,
               Disgraced for weeks together.

               Just sound of bone and strong of heart,
               Staunch friend and noble foeman;
               In life to play the kingly part,
               True both to man and woman.

               Joe's secret now he holds; a deed
               With just enough of danger,
               To win his--ah, what's that?  'Tis freed,
               The pocket-prisoned stranger!

               A moment's riot laughter-filled,
               Then fear, white-visaged, follows;
               And through the silence there is trilled
               The shrill note of the swallows.

               And now a fierce form fronts them all,
               Two fierce eyes search their faces,
               Then flash their fire on Rafe Ridall,
               Whose mirth no peril chases.

               "You did it, sir!"  "Not I!"  "You did!"
               "No!"  "You've one chance for showing
               Who in my coat the kitten hid,
               Or be well thrashed for knowing."

               The master paused, the birch he grasped
               Against his trousers flicking;
               Rafe said, with hands behind him clasped,
               "I'd rather take the licking."

               Full many a year has passed since then,
               The lilacs still are blooming,
               Awaiting childish hands again,
               But they are long in coming.

               Now wandering swallows build their nests
               Where doors and roofs decaying,
               No more shut in the master's zest,
               Nor out the children's playing.

               All, all are gone who gathered there;
               Some toil among the masses,
               Some, overworn with pain and care,
               Wait Death's "Prepare for classes."

               And some--the sighing pines sway on
               Above them, dreamless lying;
               And 'mong them sleeps the master, gone
               His anger and their crying.

               And Rafe Ridall, brave then, brave now,
               Amid the jarring courses
               Of man's misrule, still takes the blow
               For those of weaker forces.






                     IN CAMP AT JUNIPER COVE

               A little brown sparrow came tripping
               Across the green grass at my feet;
               A kingfisher poised, and was peering
               Where current and calm water meet;

               The clouds hung in passionless clusters
               Above the green hills of the south;
               A bobolink fluttered to leeward
               With a twinkle of bells in its mouth.

               Ah, the morning was silver with glory
               As I lay by my tent on the shore;
               And the soft air was drunken with odours,
               And my soul lifted up to adore.

               Is there wonder I took me to dreaming
               Of the gardens of Greece and old Rome,
               Of the fair watered meadows of Ida,
               And the hills where the gods made their home?

               Of the Argonauts sung to by Sirens,
               Of Andromache, Helen of Troy,
               Of Proserpine, Iphigenia,
               And the Fates that build up and destroy?

               Of the phantom isle, green Theresea,
               And the Naiads and Dryads that give
               To the soul of the poet, the dreamer,
               The visions of fancy that live

               In the lives and the language of mortals
               Unconscious, but sure as the sea,
               And that make for great losses repayment
               To wandering singers like me?

               But a little brown sparrow came tripping
               Across the green grass at my feet;
               And a kingfisher poised, and was peering
               Where current and calm water meet;

               And Alice, sweet Alice, my neighbour,
               Stands musing beneath the pine tree;
               And her look says--"I have a lover
               Who sails on the turbulent sea:

               Does he dream as I dream night and daytime
               Of a face that is tender and true;
               Will he come to me e'en as he left me?"
               Yes, Alice, sweet Alice, for you,

               Is the sunlight, and not the drear shadow,
               The gentle and fortunate peace:
               But he who thus revels in rhyming
               Has shadows that never shall cease.






                  JUNIPER COVE TWENTY YEARS AFTER

               The bay gleams softly in the sun,
               The morning widens o'er the world:
               The bluebird's song is just begun,
               And down the skies white clouds are furled.

               The boat lies idly by the shore,
               The shed I built with happy care
               Is fallen; and I see no more
               The white tents in the eager air.

               The goldenrod holds up its plumes
               In the long stretch of meadow grass,
               The briarrose shakes its sweet perfumes,
               In coverts where the sparrows pass.

               Far off, above, the sapphire gleams,
               Far off, below, the sapphire flows,
               And this, my place of morning dreams,
               The bank where my vain visions rose!

               Sweet Alice, he came back again,
               Across the waste of summer sea,
               What time the fields were full of grain,
               But not to thee; but not to thee.

               She comes no more when evening falls,
               To watch the stars wheel up the sky;
               Then love and light were over all;
               Alas! that light and love should die.

               I feel her hand upon my arm,
               I see her eyes shine through the mist;
               Her life was passionate and warm
               As the red jewels at her wrist.

               Hearts do not break, the world has said,
               Though love lie stark and light be flown;
               But still it counts its lost and dead,
               And in the solitudes makes moan.

               We school our lips to make our hearts
               Seem other than in truth they are;
               Before the lights we play our part,
               And paint the flesh to hide the scar.

               Masquers and mummers all, and yet
               The slaves of some dead passion's fires,
               Of hopes the soul can ne'er forget
               Still sobbing in life's trembling wires.

               Fate puts our dear desires in pawn,
               Youth passes, unredeemed they lie;
               The leaves drop from our rose of dawn,
               And storms fall from the mocking sky.

               I shall come back no more; my ship
               Waits for me by the sundering sea;
               A prayer for her is on my lip--
               And the old life is dead to me.






                             LISTENING

I have lain beneath the pine trees just to hear the thrush's calling,
I have waited for the throstle where the harvest fields were brown,
I have caught the lark's sweet trilling from the depths of cloud-land
     falling
And the piping of the linnet through the willow branches blown.

But you have some singing graces, you who sing because you love it,
That are higher than the throstle, or the linnet, or the lark;
And, however far my soul may reach, your song is far above it;
And I falter while I follow as a child does in the dark.

In elder days, when all the world was silent save the beating
Of the tempest-gathered ocean 'gainst the grey volcanic walls,
When the light had met the darkness and the mountains sent their greeting
To each other in sharp flashes as the vivid lightning falls,

Then the high gods said, "In token that we love the earth we fashioned,
We will set the white stars singing, and teach man the art of song":
And there rose up from the valleys sounds of love and life impassioned,
Till men cried, with arms uplifted, "Now from henceforth we are strong!"

Adown the ages there have come the sounds of that first singing,
Lifting up the weary-hearted in the fever of the time;
And I, who wait and wander far, felt all my soul upspringing,
To but touch those ancient forces and the energies sublime,

When I heard you who had heard it--that first song--perhaps in dreaming,
Till it filled you with fine fervour and the hopes of its refrain;
And I knew that God was gracious and had led me in the gleaming
Of a song-shine that is holy and that quiets all my pain.

Though the birds sing in the meadows and fill all the air with sweetness,
They sing only in the present, and they sing because they must;
They are wanton in their pureness, and in all their fine completeness,
They trill out their lives forgotten to the silence of the dust.

But if you should pass to-morrow where your songs could never reach us,
There would still be throbbing through us all the music of your voice;
And your spirit would speak through the chords, as though it would
     beseech us
To remember that the noblest ends have ever noblest choice.






                             NEVERTHELESS

                    In your onward march, O men,
                    White of face, in promise whiter,
                    You unsheathe the sword, and then
                    Blame the wronged as the fighter.

                    Time, ah, Time, rolls onward o'er
                    All these foetid fields of evil,
                    While hard at the nation's core
                    Eat the burning rust and weevil!

                    Nathless, out beyond the stars
                    Reigns the Wiser and the Stronger,
                    Seeing in all strifes and wars
                    Who the wronged, who the wronger.






                              ISHMAEL

                     "No man cared for my soul."

               Blind, Lord, so blind!   I wander far
               From Thee among the haunts of men,
               Most like some lone, faint, flickering star
               Gone from its place, nor knoweth when
               The sun shall give it shining dole
               Lord! no man careth for my soul.

               Blind, Lord, so blind!   In loneliness
               By crowded mart or busy street,
               I fold my hands and feel how less
               Am I to any one I meet,
               Than to Thee one lost billow's roll:
               Lord! no man careth for my soul.

               Blind, Lord, so blind!   And I have knelt
               'Mong myriads in Thy house of prayer;
               And still sad desolation felt,
               Though heavy freighted was the air
               With litanies of love: one ghoul
               Cried, "No man careth for thy soul!"

               Blind, Lord, so blind!   The world is blind;
               It feeds me, fainting, with a stone:
               I cry for bread.    Before, behind,
               Are hurrying feet; yet all alone
               I walk, and no one points the goal
               Lord! no man careth for my soul.

               Blind, Lord, Oh very blind am I!
               If sin of mine sets up the wall
               Between my poor sight and Thy sky,
               O Friend of man, Who cares for all,
               Send sweet peace ere the last bell toll--
               Yea, Lord, Thou carest for my soul!






                          OVER THE HILLS

          Over the hills they are waiting to greet us,
          They who have scanned all the ultimate places,
          Fathomed the world and the things that defeat us--
          Evils and graces.

          They have no thought for the toiling or spinning,
          Striving for bread that is dust in the gaining,
          They have won all that is well worth the winning--
          Past all distaining.

          Now they have done with the pain and the error,
          Nevermore here shall the dark things assail them,
          Void man's devices and dreams have no terror--
          Shall we bewail them?

          They have cast off all the strife and derision,
          They have put on all the joy of our yearning;
          We falter feebly from vision to vision,
          Never discerning.

          Faint light before us, and shadows to grope in,
          Stretching out hands to the starbeams to guide us,
          Finding no place but our life's loves to hope in,
          Doubt to deride us--

          So we climb upward with eyes growing dimmer,
          Looking back only to sigh through our smiling,
          Wondering still if the palpitant glimmer
          Leads past defiling.

          They whom we loved have gone over the mountains,
          Hands beckon to us like wings of the swallow,
          Voices we knew from delectable fountains
          Cry to us, "Follow!"

          Some were so young when they left us, that morning
          Seemed to have flashed and then died into gloaming,
          Leaving us wearier 'neath the world's scorning,
          Blinder in roaming.

          Some, in the time when the manhood is bravest,
          Strongest to bear and the hands to endeavour,
          When all the life is the firmest and gravest,
          Left us for ever.

          Some, when the Springtime had grown to December,
          Said, "It is done: now the last thing befall me;
          I shall sleep well--ah! dear hearts but remember:
          Farewell, they call me!"

          So the tale runs, and the end, who shall fear it?
          Is it not better to sleep than to sorrow?
          Tokens will come from the bourne as we near it--
          Time's peace, to-morrow.






                               THE DELIVERER

          How has the cloud fallen, and the leaf withered on the tree,
          The lemontree, that standeth by the door?
          The melon and the date have gone bitter to the taste,
          The weevil, it has eaten at the core--
          The core of my heart, the mildew findeth it;
          My music, it is but the drip of tears,
          The garner empty standeth, the oven hath no fire,
          Night filleth me with fears.
          O Nile that floweth deeply, hast thou not heard his voice?
          His footsteps hast thou covered with thy flood?
          He was as one who lifteth up the yoke,
          He was as one who taketh off the chain,
          As one who sheltereth from the rain,
          As one who scattereth bread to the pigeons flying.
          His purse was at his side, his mantle was for me,
          For any who passeth were his mantle and his purse,
          And now like a gourd is he withered from our eyes.
          His friendship, it was like a shady wood--
          Whither has he gone?--Who shall speak for us?
          Who shall save us from the kourbash and the stripes?
          Who shall proclaim us in the palace?
          Who shall contend for us in the gate?
          The sakkia turneth no more; the oxen they are gone;
          The young go forth in chains, the old waken in the night,
          They waken and weep, for the wheel turns backward,
          And the dark days are come again upon us--
          Will he return no more?
          His friendship was like a shady wood,
          O Nile that floweth deeply, hast thou not heard his voice?
          Hast thou covered up his footsteps with thy flood?
          The core of my heart, the mildew findeth it!
          When his footsteps were among us there was peace;
          War entered not the village, nor the call of war:
          Now our homes are as those that have no roofs.
          As a nest decayed, as a cave forsaken,
          As a ship that lieth broken on the beach,
          Is the house where we were born.
          Out in the desert did we bury our gold,
          We buried it where no man robbed us, for his arm was strong.
          Now are the jars empty, gold did not avail
          To save our young men, to keep them from the chains.
          God hath swallowed his voice, or the sea hath drowned it,
          Or the Nile hath covered him with its flood;
          Else would he come when our voices call.
          His word was honey in the prince's ear--
          Will he return no more?






                         THE DESERT ROAD

               In the sands I lived in a hut of palm,
               There was never a garden to see;
               There was never a path through the desert calm,
               Nor a way through its storms for me.

               Tenant was I of a lone domain;
               The far pale caravans wound
               To the rim of the sky, and vanished again;
               My call in the waste was drowned.

               The vultures came and hovered and fled;
               And once there stole to my door
               A white gazelle, but its eyes were dread
               With the hurt of the wounds it bore.

               It passed in the dusk with a foot of fear,
               And the white cold mists rolled in;
               And my heart was the heart of a stricken deer,
               Of a soul in the snare of sin.

               My days they withered like rootless things,
               And the sands rolled on, rolled wide;
               Like a pelican I, with broken wings,
               Like a drifting barque on the tide.

               But at last, in the light of a rose-red day,
               In the windless glow of the morn,
               From over the hills and from far away,
               You came-ah, the joy of the morn!

               And wherever your footsteps fell there crept
               A path--it was fair and wide;
               A desert road which no sands have swept,
               Where never a hope has died.

               I followed you forth, and your beauty held
               My heart like an ancient song,
               By that desert road to the blossoming plains
               I came, and the way was long.

               So, I set my course by the light of your eyes;
               I care not what fate may send;
               On the road I tread shine the love-starred skies,
               The road with never an end.






                           A SON OF THE NILE

          Oh, the garden where to-day we, sow and to-morrow we reap;
          Oh, the sakkia turning by the garden walls;
          Oh, the onion-field and the date-tree growing,
          And my hand on the plough--by the blessing of God;
          Strength of my soul, O my brother, all's well!






                   A FAREWELL FROM THE HAREM

          Take thou thy flight, O soul! Thou hast no more
          The gladness of the morning: ah, the perfumed roses
          My love laid on my bosom as I slept!
          How did he wake me with his lips upon mine eyes,
          How did the singers carol, the singers of my soul,
          That nest among the thoughts of my beloved!
          All silent now, the choruses are gone,
          The windows of my soul are closed; no more
          Mine eyes look gladly out to see my lover come.
          There is no more to do, no more to say
          Take flight, my soul, my love returns no more!






                        AN ARAB LOVE SONG

     The bed of my love I will sprinkle with attar of roses,
     The face of my love I will touch with the balm,
     With the balm of the tree from the farthermost wood,
     From the wood without end, in the world without end.
     My love holds the cup to my lips, and I drink of the cup,
     And the attar of roses I sprinkle will soothe like the evening dew,
     And the balm will be healing and sleep, and the cup I will drink,
     I will drink of the cup my love holds to my lips.






                    THE CAMEL-DRIVER TO HIS CAMEL

          Fleet is thy foot: thou shalt rest by the etl tree;
          Water shalt thou drink from the blue-deep well;
          Allah send his gard'ner with the green bersim,
          For thy comfort, fleet one, by the etl tree.
          As the stars fly, have thy footsteps flown--
          Deep is the well, drink, and be still once more;
          Till the pursuing winds, panting, have found thee
          And, defeated, sink still beside thee--
          By the well and the etl tree.






                         THE TALL DAKOON

     The Tall Dakoon, the bridle rein he shook, and called aloud,
     His Arab steed sprang down the mists which wrapped them like a
          shroud;
     But up there rang the clash of steel, the clanking silver chain,
     The war-cry of the Tall Dakoon, the moaning of the slain.

     And long they fought--the Tall Dakoon, the children of the mist,
     But he was swift with lance and shield, and supple of the wrist,
     Yet if he rose, or if he fell, no man hath proof to show--
     And wide the world beyond the mists, and deep the vales below!

     For when a man, because of love, hath wrecked and burned his ships,
     And when a man for hate of love hath curses on his lips,
     Though he should be the peasant born, or be the Tall Dakoon,
     What matters then, of hap, or place, the mist comes none too soon!






                     THERE IS SORROW ON THE SEA

          Our ship is a beautiful lady,
          Friendly and ready and fine;
          She runs her race with the storm in her face,
          Like a sea-bird over the brine.

          In her household work no hand does shirk,--
          No need of belaying-pins,--
          And the captain dear and the engineer,
          They both look after the Twins:

          The Twins that drive her to do her best
          Where the Roaring Forties rage
          From the Fastnet Height to the Liberty Light,
          And the Customs landing-stage.

          Where the crank-shafts pitch in the iron ditch,
          Where the main-shaft swims and glides,
          Where the boilers keep, in the sullen deep,
          A master-hand on the Tides;

          Where the reeking shuttle and booming bar
          Keep time in the hum of the toiling hive,--
          The men of the deep, while the travellers sleep,
          Their steel-clad coursers drive.

          And Davy Jones' locker is full
          Of the labour that moves the world;
          And brave they be who serve the sea
          To keep our flags unfurled:

          The Union Jack and the Stripes and Stars,
          Gallant and free and true,
          In a world-wide trade, and a fame well made,
          And humanity's work to do.

          Now list, ye landsmen, as ye roam,
          To the voice of the men offshore,
          Who've sailed in the old ship Never Return,
          With the great First Commodore.

          They fitted foreign (God keeps the sea),
          They stepped aboard (God breaks the wind).
          And the babe that held by his father's knee,
          He leaves, with his lass, behind.

          And the lad will sail as his father sailed,
          And a lass she will wait again;
          And he'll get his scrip in his father's ship,
          And he'll sail to the Southern Main;

          And he'll sail to the North, and he'll make to the East,
          And he'll overhaul the West;
          And he'll pass outspent as his father went
          From his landbirds in the nest.

          There are hearts that bleed, there are mouths to feed,
          (Now one and all, ye landsmen, list)
          And the rent's to pay on the quarter-day--
          (What ye give will never be missed)

          And you'll never regret, as your whistle you wet,
          In Avenue Number Five,
          That you gave your "quid" to the lonely kid
          And the widow, to keep 'em alive.

          So out with your golden shilling, my lad,
          And your bright bank-note, my dear!
          We are safe to-night near the Liberty Light,
          And the mariner says, What Cheer!






                     THE AUSTRALIAN STOCKRIDER

               I ride to the tramp and shuffle of hoofs
               Away to the wild waste land,
               I can see the sun on the station roofs,
               And a stretch of the shifting sand;
               The forest of horns is a shaking sea,
               Where white waves tumble and pass;
               The cockatoo screams in the myall-tree,
               And the adder-head gleams in the grass.

               The clouds swing out from beyond the hills
               And valance the face of the sky,
               And the Spirit of Winds creeps up and fills
               The plains with a plaintive cry;
               A boundary-rider on lonely beat
               Creeps round the horizon's rim;
               He has little to do, and plenty to eat,
               And the world is a blank to him.

               His friends are his pipe, and dog, and tea,
               His wants, they are soon supplied;
               And his mind, like the weeping myall-tree,
               May droop on his weary ride,
               But he lives his life in his quiet way,
               Forgetting,--perhaps forgot,--
               Till another rider will come some day,
               And he will have ridden, God wot!

               To the Wider Plains with the measureless bounds:
               And I know, if I had my choice,
               I would rather ride in those pleasant grounds,
               Than to sit 'neath the spell of the voice
               Of the sweetest seraph that you could find
               In all the celestial place;
               And I hope that the Father, whose heart is kind,
               When I speak to Him face to face,

               Will give me something to do up there
               Among all the folks that have died,
               That will give me freedom and change of air,
               If it's only to boundary ride:
               For I somehow think, in the Great Stampede,
               When the world crowds up to the Bar,
               The unluckiest mortals will be decreed
               To camp on the luckiest star.






                    THE BRIDGE OF THE HUNDRED SPANS

               It was the time that the Long Divide
               Blooms and glows like an hour-old bride;
               It was the days when the cattle come
               Back from their winter wand'rings home;
               Time when the Kicking Horse shows its teeth,
               Snarls and foams with a demon's breath;
               When the sun with a million levers lifts
               Abodes of snow from the rocky rifts;
               When the line-man's eyes, like the lynx's, scans
               The lofty Bridge of the Hundred Spans.

               Round a curve, down a sharp incline,
               If the red-eyed lantern made no sign,
               Swept the train, and upon the bridge
               That binds a canon from ridge to ridge.
               Never a watchman like old Carew;
               Knew his duty, and did it, too;
               Good at scouting when scouting paid,
               Saved a post from an Indian raid--
               Trapper, miner, and mountain guide,
               Less one arm in a lumber slide;
               Walked the line like a panther's guard,
               Like a maverick penned in a branding-yard.
               "Right as rain," said the engineers,
               "With the old man working his eyes and ears."

               "Safe with Carew on the mountain wall,"
               Was how they put it, in Montreal.
               Right and safe was it East and West
               Till a demon rose on the mountain crest,
               And drove at its shoulders angry spears,
               That it rose from its sleep of a thousand years,
               That its heaving breast broke free the cords
               Of imprisoned snow as with flaming swords;
               And, like a star from its frozen height,
               An avalanche leaped one spring-tide night;
               Leaped with a power not God's or man's
               To smite the Bridge of the Hundred Spans.

               It smote a score of the spans; it slew
               With its icy squadrons old Carew.
               Asleep he lay in his snow-bound grave,
               While the train drew on that he could not save;
               It would drop, doom-deep, through the trap of death,
               From the light above, to the dark beneath;
               And town and village both far and near
               Would mourn the tragedy ended here.

               One more hap in a hapless world,
               One more wreck where the tide is swirled,
               One more heap in a waste of sand,
               One more clasp of a palsied hand,
               One more cry to a soundless Word,
               One more flight of a wingless bird;
               The ceaseless falling, the countless groan,
               The waft of a leaf and the fall of a stone;
               Ever the cry that a Hand will save,
               Ever the end in a fast-closed grave;
               Ever and ever the useless prayer,
               Beating the walls of a mute despair.
               Doom, all doom--nay then, not all doom!
               Rises a hope from the fast-closed tomb.
               Write not "Lost," with its grinding bans,
               On life, or the Bridge of the Hundred Spans.

               See, on the canon's western ridge,
               There stands a girl!  She beholds the bridge
               Smitten and broken; she sees the need
               For a warning swift, and a daring deed.
               See then the act of a simple girl;
               Learn from it, thinker, and priest, and churl.
               See her, the lantern between her teeth,
               Crossing the quivering trap of death.
               Hand over hand on a swaying rail,
               Sharp in her ears and her heart the wail
               Of a hundred lives; and she has no fear
               Save that her prayer be not granted her.
               Cold is the snow on the rail, and chill
               The wind that comes from the frozen hill.
               Her hair blows free and her eyes are full
               Of the look that makes Heaven merciful--
               Merciful, ah! quick, shut your eyes,
               Lest you wish to see how a brave girl dies!
               Dies--not yet; for her firm hands clasped
               The solid bridge, as the breach out-gasped,
               And the rail that had held her downward swept,
               Where old Carew in his snow-grave slept.

               Now up and over the steep incline,
               She speeds with the red light for a sign;
               She hears the cry of the coming train,
               it trembles like lanceheads through her brain;
               And round the curve, with a foot as fleet
               As a sinner's that flees from the Judgment-seat,
               She flies; and the signal swings, and then
               She knows no more; but the enginemen
               Lifted her, bore her, where women brought
               The flush to her cheek, and with kisses caught
               The warm breath back to her pallid lips,
               The life from lives that were near eclipse;
               Blessed her, and praised her, and begged her name
               That all of their kindred should know her fame;
               Should tell how a girl from a cattle-ranche
               That night defeated an avalanche.
               Where is the wonder the engineer
               Of the train she saved, in half a year
               Had wooed her and won her?  And here they are
               For their homeward trip in a parlour car!
               Which goes to show that Old Nature's plans
               Were wrecked with the Bridge of the Hundred Spans.






                            NELL LATORE

               Rebel? . . . I grant you,--my comrades then
               Were called Old Pascal Dubois' Men
               Half-breeds all of us . . . I, a scamp,
               The best long-shot in the Touchwood Camp;
               Muscle and nerve like strings of steel,
               Sound in the game of bit and heel--
               There's your guide-book. . . . But, Jeanne Amray,
               Telegraph-clerk at Sturgeon Bay,
               French and thoroughbred, proud and sweet,
               Sunshine down to her glancing feet,
               Sang one song 'neath the northern moon
               That changed God's world to a tropic noon;
               And Love burned up on its golden floor
               Years of passion for Nell Latore--
               Nell Latore with her tawny hair,
               Glowing eyes and her reckless air;
               Lithe as an alder, straight and tall--
               Pride and sorrow of Rise-and-Fall!
               Indian blood in her veins ran wild,
               And a Saxon father called her child;
               Women feared her, and men soon found
               When they trod on forbidden ground.
               Ride! there's never a cayuse knew
               Saddle slip of her; pistols, too,
               Seemed to learn in her hands a knack
               How to travel a dead-sure track.
               Something in both alike maybe,
               Something kindred in ancestry,
               Some warm touch of an ancient pride
               Drew my feet to her willing side.
               My comrade, she, in the Touchwood Camp,
               To ride, hunt, trail by the fire-fly lamp;
               To track the moose to his moose-yard; pass
               The bustard's doom through the prairie grass;
               To hark at night to the crying loon
               Beat idle wings on the still lagoon;
               To hide from death in the drifting snow,
               To slay the last of the buffalo. . . .
               Ah, well, I speak of the days that were;
               And I swear to you, I was kind to her.
               I lost her.  How are the best friends lost?
               The lightning lines of our souls got crossed--
               Crossed, and could never again be free
               Till Death should call from his midnight sea.

               One spring brought me my wedding day,
               Brought me my bright-eyed Jeanne Amray;
               Brought that night to our cabin door
               My old, lost comrade, Nell Latore.
               Her eyes swam fire, and her cheek was red,
               Her full breast heaved as she darkly said:
               "The coyote hides from the wind and rain,
               The wild horse flies from the hurricane,
               But who can flee from the half-breed's hate,
               That rises soon and that watches late?"
               Then went; and I laughed Jeanne's fears afar,
               But I thought that wench was our evil star.
               Be sure, when a woman's heart gets hard,
               It works up war like a navy yard.

               Half-breed and Indian troubles came--
               The same old story--land and game;
               And Dubois' Men were the first to feel
               The bullet-sting and the clip of steel;
               And last in battle 'gainst thousands sent,
               With Gatling guns for our punishment.
               Every cause has its traitor; then
               How should it fare with Dubois' Men!
               Beaten their cause was, and hunted down,
               Like to a moose in the chase full blown,
               Panting they stood; and a Judas sold
               Their hiding-place for a piece of gold.
               And while scouts searched for us night and day
               Jeanne telegraphed on at Sturgeon Bay.
               Picture her there as she stands alone,
               Cold, in the glow of the afternoon;
               Picture, I ask you, that patient wife,
               Numb with fear for her husband's life,
               When a sharp click-click awakes her brain
               To life, with the needle-points of pain.
               A message it was to Camp Pousette--
               One that the half-breeds think on yet:
               "Dubois' gang are in Rocky Glen,
               Take a hundred and fifty men;
               Go by the next express," it said,
               "Bring them up here, alive or dead!" . . .

               "Go by the next express!" and she,
               Standing there by the silent key,
               Said it over and over again,
               Thinking of one of Dubois' Men
               Thinking in anguish, heart and head,
               Of him, brought up there alive or dead.
               Save him, and perish to save him, yes!
               But three hours more, and that next express
               Would thunder by her, and she, alas!
               Must stand there still and let it pass.
               Duty was duty, and hers was clear;
               God seemed far off, and no friend near.
               But the truest friend and the swiftest horse
               Must ride that ride on a breakneck course;
               And with truest horse and swiftest friend,
               To the fast express was the winning end!
               And as if one pang was needed more,
               There stood in the doorway, Nell Latore--
               Nell Latore, with her mocking face,
               Restless eyes, and her evil grace;
               Quick to read in the wife's sad eyes,
               The deep, strange woe, and the hurt surprise.
               Slow she said, with piercing breath,
               "Rebel fighter dies rebel death!"
               Said, and paused; for she seemed to see
               Far through the other's misery,
               Something that stilled her; triumph fled
               Shamed and fast, as the young wife said--
               "He keeps his faith with an oath he swore,
               For the half-breed's freedom, Nell Latore;
               And, did he lie here, eyes death-dim,
               You, if you spoke but truth of him,
               Truth, truth only, should stand and say,
               'He never wronged me, Jeanne Amray.'"
               Then, for a moment, standing there,
               Hushed and cold as a dead man's prayer,
               Nell Latore, with the woman now,
               Scorching the past from her eyes and brow
               "Trust me," she said, like an angel-call,
               "Tell me his danger, tell me all."

               Quick resolve to a quick-told tale--
               Nell Latore, to the glistening rail
               Fled, and on it a hand-car drew,
               Seized the handles, and backward threw
               One swift, farewell look, and said,
               "You shall have him alive, not dead!"
               Ah, well for her that her arms were strong,
               And cord and nerve like a knotted thong,
               And well for Jeanne in her sharp distress,
               That Nell was racing the fast express
               Her whole life bent to this one deed,
               And, like a soul from its prison freed,
               Rising, dilating, reached across
               Hills of conquest from plains of loss.
               Gorges echoed as she passed by,
               Wild fowl rose with a plaintive cry;
               On she sped; and the white steel rang--
               "Save him--save him for her!" it sang.
               Once, a lad at a worn-out mine
               Strove to warn her with awe-struck sign--
               Turned she neither to left nor right,

               Strained till the Rock Hills came in sight;
               "But two miles more," to herself she said,
               "Then she shall have him alive, not dead!"
               The merciful gods that moment heard
               Her promise, and helped her to keep her word;
               For, when the wheels of the fast express
               Slowed through the gates of that wilderness,
               Round a headland and far away
               Sailed the husband of Jeanne Amray.
               While all that hundred-and-fifty then,
               Hot on the trail of the Dubois Men,
               Knew, as they stood by the pine-girt store,
               The girl that had foiled them--Nell Latore.
               Slow she moved from among them, turned
               Where the sky to the westward burned;
               Gazed for a moment, set her hands
               Over her brow, so! drew the strands
               Loose and rich of her tawny hair,
               Once through her fingers, standing there;
               Then again to the rail she passed.
               One more look to the West she cast,
               And into the East she drew away:
               Backwards and forwards her brown arms play,
               Forwards and backwards, till far and dim,
               She grew one with the night's dun rim;
               Backwards and forwards, and then, was gone
               Into I know not what . . . alone.
               She came not back, she may never come;
               But a young wife lives in a cabin home,
               Who prays each night that, alive or dead,
               Come God's own rest for her lonely head:
               And I--shall I see her then no more,
               My comrade, my old love, Nell Latore?






A LOVER'S DIARY, Complete

By Gilbert Parker



CONTENTS

Volume 1.
THE VISION
ABOVE THE DIN
LOVE'S COURAGE
LOVE'S LANGUAGE
ASPIRATION
THE MEETING
THE NEST
PISGAH
LOVE IS ENOUGH
AT THE PLAY
SO CALM THE WORLD
THE WELCOME
THE SHRINE
THE TORCH
IN ARMOUR
IN THEE MY ART
DENIAL
TESTAMENT
CAPTIVITY
O MYSTIC WINGS
WAS IT THY FACE?
A WOMAN'S HAND
ONE FACE I SEE
MOTHER
WHEN FIRST I SAW THEE
THE FATES LAUGH
AS ONE WHO WAITETH
THE SEALING
THE PLEDGE
LOVE'S TRIBUTARIES
THE CHOICE
RECOGNITION
THE WAY OF DREAMS
THE ACCOLADE
FALLEN IDOLS
TENNYSON
THE ANOINTED


Volume 2.
DREAMS
THE BRIDE
THE WRAITH
SURRENDER
THE CITADEL
MALFEASANCE
ANNUNCIATION
VANISHED DREAMS
INTO THY LAND
DIVIDED
WE MUST LIVE ON
YET LIFE IS SWEET
LOST FOOTSTEPS
THE CLOSED DOOR
THE CHALICE
MIO DESTINO
I HAVE BEHELD
TOO SOON AWAY
THE TREASURE
DAHIN
LOVE'S USURY
THE DECREE
'TIS MORNING NOW
SACRIFICE
SHINE ON
SO, THOU ART GONE
THE THOUSAND THINGS
ONES
THE SEA
THE CHART
REVEALING
OVERCOMING
WHITHER NOW
ARARAT
AS LIGHT LEAPS UP
THE DARKENED WAY
REUNITED
SONG WAS GONE FROM ME
GOOD WAS THE FIGHT
UNCHANGED
ABSOLVO TE
BENEDICTUS
THE MESSAGE
UNAVAILING
YOU SHALL LIVE ON
"VEX NOT THIS GHOST"
THE MEMORY
THE PASSING
ENVOY



INTRODUCTION

'A Lover's Diary' has not the same modest history as 'Embers'.  As far
back as 1894 it was given to the public without any apology or excuse,
but I have been apologising for it ever since, in one way--without avail.
I wished that at least one-fifth of it had not been published; but my
apology was never heard till now as I withdraw from this edition of A
Lover's Diary some twenty-five sonnets representing fully one-fifth of
the original edition.  As it now stands the faint thread of narrative is
more distinct, and redundancy of sentiment and words is modified to some
extent at any rate.  Such material story as there is, apart from the
spiritual history embodied in the sonnets, seems more visible now, and
the reader has a clearer revelation of a young, aspiring, candid mind
shadowed by stern conventions of thought, dogma, and formula, but
breaking loose from the environment which smothered it.  The price it
pays for the revelation is a hopeless love informed by temptation, but
lifted away from ruinous elements by self-renunciation, to end with the
inevitable parting, poignant and permanent, a task of the soul finished
and the toll of the journey of understanding paid.

The six sonnets in italics, beginning with 'The Bride', and ending with
'Annunciation', have nothing to do with the story further than to show
two phases of the youth's mind before it was shaken by speculation,
plunged into the sadness of doubt and apprehension, and before it had
found the love which was to reveal it to itself, transform the character,
and give new impulse and direction to personal force and individual
sense.  These were written when I was twenty and twenty-one years of age,
and the sonnet sequence of 'A Lover's Diary' was begun when I was twenty-
three.  They were continued over seven years in varying quantity.
Sometimes two or three were written in a week, and then no more would be
written for several weeks or maybe months, and it is clearly to be seen
from the text, from the change in style, and above all in the nature of
the thought that between 'The Darkened Way', which ends one epoch, and
'Reunited', which begins another and the last epoch, were intervening
years.

The sonnet which begins the book and particularly that which ends the
book have been very widely quoted, and 'Envoy' has been set to music by
more than one celebrated musician.  Whatever the monotony of a sonnet
sequence (and it is a form which I should not have chosen if I had been
older and wiser) there has been a continuous, if limited, demand for the
little book.  As Edmund Clarence Stedman said in a review, it was a book
which had to be written.  It was an impulse, a vision, and a revealing,
and, in his own words in a letter to me, "It was to be done whether you
willed it or no, and there it is a truthful thing of which you shall be
glad in spite of what you say."

These last words of the great critic were in response to the sudden
repentance and despair I felt after Messrs. Stone and Kimball had
published the book in exquisite form with a beautiful frontispiece by
Will H. Low.  In any case, it is now too late to try and disabuse the
minds of those who care for the little piece of artistry, and since 1894,
when it was published, I have matured sufficiently in life's academy not
to be too unduly sensitive either as to the merit or demerit of my work.
There is, after all, an unlovable kind of vanity in acute self-criticism
--as though it mattered deeply to the world whether one ever wrote
anything; or, having written, as though it mattered to the world enough
to stir it in its course by one vibration.  The world has drunk deep of
wonderful literature, and all that I can do is make a small brew with a
little flavour of my own; but it still could get on very well indeed with
the old staple and matured vintages were I never to write at all.






The King--Whence art thou, sir?

Gilfaron--My Lord, I know not well.
          Indeed, I am a townsman of the world.
          For once my mother told me that she saw
          The Angel of the Cross Roads lead me out,
          And point to every corner of the sky,
          And say, "Thy feet shall follow in the trail
          Of every tribe; and thou shalt pitch thy tent
          Wherever thou shalt see a human face
          Which hath thereon the alphabet of life;
          Yea, thou shalt spell it out e'en as a child:
          And therein wisdom find."

The King--Art thou wise?

Gilfaron--Only according to the Signs.

The King--What signs?

Gilfaron--The first--the language of the Garden, sire,
          When man spoke with the naked searching thought,
          Unlacquered of the world.

The King--Speak so forthwith; come, show us to be wise.

Gilfaron--The Angel of the Cross Roads to me said:
          "And wisdom comes by looking eye to eye,
          Each seeing his own soul as in a glass;
          For ye shall find the Lodges of the Wise,
          The farthest Camp of the Delightful Fires,
          By marching two by two, not one by one."

                         --The King's Daughter.





          THE VISION

          As one would stand who saw a sudden light
          Flood down the world, and so encompass him
          And in that world illumined Seraphim
          Brooded above and gladdened to his sight;

          So stand I in the flame of one great thought,
          That broadens to my soul from where she waits,
          Who, yesterday, drew wide the inner gates
          Of all my being to the hopes I sought.

          Her words come to me like a summer-song,
          Blown from the throat of some sweet nightingale;
          I stand within her light the whole day long,

          And think upon her till the white stars fail:
          I lift my head towards all that makes life wise,
          And see no farther than my lady's eyes.






          ABOVE THE DIN

          Silence sits often on me as I touch
          Her presence; I am like a bird that hears
          A note diviner than it knows, and fears
          To share the larger harmony too much.

          My soul leaps up, as to a sudden sound
          A long-lost traveller, when, by her grace,
          I learn of her life's sweetness face to face,
          And sweep the chords of sympathies profound.

          Her regal nature calmly holds its height
          Above life's din, while moving in its maze.
          Unworthy thoughts would die within her sight,

          And mean deeds creep to darkness from her gaze.
          Yet only in my dreams can I set down
          The word that gives her nobleness a crown.






          LOVE'S COURAGE

          Courage have I to face all bitter things,
          That start out darkly from the rugged path,
          Leading to life's achievement; not God's wrath
          Would sit so heavy when my lady sings.

          I did not know what life meant till I felt
          Her hand clasp mine in compact to the end;
          Till her dear voice said, "See, I am your friend!"
          And at her feet, amazed, my spirit knelt.

          And yet I spoke but hoarsely then my thought,
          I groped amid a thousand forces there;
          Her understanding all my meaning caught,

          It was illumined in her atmosphere.
          She read it line by line, and then there fell
          The curtain on the shrine-and it is well.






          LOVE'S LANGUAGE

          Just now a wave of perfume floated up
          To greet my senses as I broke the seal
          Of her short letter; and I still can feel
          It stir me as a saint the holy cup.

          The missive lies there,--but a few plain words:
          A thought about a song, a note of praise,
          And social duties such as fill the days
          Of women; then a thing that undergirds

          The phrases like a psalm: a line that reads-
          "I wish that you were coming!"  Why, it lies
          Upon my heart like blossoms on the skies,

          Like breath of balm upon the clover meads.
          The perfumed words soothe me into a dream;
          My thoughts float to her on the scented stream.






          ASPIRATION

          None ever climbed to mountain heights of song,
          But felt the touch of some good woman's palm;
          None ever reached God's altitude of calm,
          But heard one voice cry, "Follow!" from the throng.

          I would not place her as an image high
          Above my reach, cold, in some dim recess,
          Where never she should feel a warm caress
          Of this my hand that serves her till I die.

          I would not set her higher than my heart,--
          Though she is nobler than I e'er can be;
          Because she placed me from the crowd apart,

          And with her tenderness she honoured me.
          Because of this, I hold me worthier
          To be her kinsman, while I worship her.






          THE MEETING

          O marvel of our nature, that one life
          Strikes through the thousand lives that fold it round,
          To find another, even as a sound
          Sweeps to a song through elemental strife!

          Through cycles infinite the forces wait,
          Which destiny has set for union here;
          No circumstance can warp them from their sphere;
          They meet sometime; and this is God and Fate.

          And God is Law, and Fate is Law in use,
          And we are acted on by some deep cause,
          Which sanctifies "I will" and "I refuse,"

          When Love speaks--Love, the peaceful end of Laws.
          And I, from many conflicts over-past,
          Find here Love, Law, and God, at last.






          THE NEST

          High as the eagle builds his lonely nest
          Above the sea, above the paths of man,
          And makes the elements his barbican,
          That none may break the mother-eagle's rest;

          So build I far above all human eyes
          My nest of love; Heaven's face alone bends down
          To give it sunlight, starlight; while is blown
          A wind upon it out of Paradise.

          None shall affright, no harm may come to her,
          Whom I have set there in that lofty home:
          Love's eye is sleepless; I could feel the stir

          E'en of God's cohorts, if they chanced to come.
          I am her shield; I would that I might prove
          How dear I hold the lady of my love.






          WHEN thou makest a voyage to the stars, go thou blindfolded;
          and carry not a sword, but the sandals of thy youth.
          --Egyptian Proverb.


          SEEK thou the Angel of the Cross Roads ere thou goest upon a
          journey, and she will give thee wisdom at the Four Corners.
          --Egyptian Proverb.






          PISGAH
          Behold, now, I have touched the highest point
          In my existence.  When I turn my eyes
          Backward to scan my outlived agonies,
          I feel God's finger touch me, to anoint

          With this sweet Present the ungenerous Past,
          With love the wounds that struck stark in my soul;
          With hope life's aching restlessness and dole;
          To show me place to anchor in at last.

          Like to a mother bending o'er the bed
          Where sleeps, death-silent, one that left her side
          Ere he had reached the flow of manhood's tide,

          So stood I by my life whence Life had fled.
          But Life came back at Love's clear trumpet-call,
          And at Love's feet I cast the useless pall.






          LOVE IS ENOUGH

          It is enough that in this burdened time
          The soul sees all its purposes aright.
          The rest--what does it matter? Soon the night
          Will come to whelm us, then the morning chime.

          What does it matter, if but in the way
          One hand clasps ours, one heart believes us true;
          One understands the work we try to do,
          And strives through Love to teach us what to say?

          Between me and the chilly outer air
          Which blows in from the world, there standeth one
          Who draws Love's curtains closely everywhere,

          As God folds down the banners of the sun.
          Warm is my place about me, and above
          Where was the raven, I behold the dove.






          AT THE PLAY

          I felt her fan my shoulder touch to-night.
          Soft act, faint touch, no meaning did it bear
          To any save myself, who felt the air
          Of a new feeling cross my soul's clear sight.

          To me what matter that the players played!
          They grew upon the instant like the toys
          Which dance before the sight of idle boys;
          I could not hear the laughter that they made.

          Swept was I on that breath her hand had drawn,
          Through the dull air, into a mountain-space,
          Where shafts of the bright sun-god interlace,

          Making the promise of a golden dawn.
          And straightway crying, "O my heart, rejoice!"
          It found its music in my lady's voice.






          SO CALM THE WORLD

          Far up the sky the sunset glamour spreads,
          Far off the city lies in golden mist;
          The sea grows calm, the waves the sun has kissed
          Strike white hands softly 'gainst the rocky heads.

          So calm the world, so still the city lies,
          So warm the haze that spreads o'er everything;
          And yet where, there, Peace sits as Lord and King,
          Havoc will reign when next the sun shall rise.

          The wheels pause only for a little space,
          And in the pause they gather strength again.
          'Tis but the veil drawn over Labour's face,

          O'er strife, derision, and the sin of men.
          My heart with a sweet inner joy o'erflows
          To nature's peace, and a kind silence knows.






          THE WELCOME

          But see: my lady comes.  I hear her feet
          Upon the sward; she standeth by my side.
          Just such a face Raphael had deified,
          If in his day they two had chanced to meet.

          And I, tossed by the tide of circumstance,
          Lifting weak hands against a host of swords,
          Paused suddenly to hear her gentle words
          Making powerless the lightnings of mischance.

          I, who was but a maker of poor songs,
          That one might sing behind his prison bars,
          I, who it seemed fate singled out for wrongs--

          She smiled on me as smile the nearest stars.
          From her deep soul I draw my peace, and thus,
          One wreath of rhyme I weave for both of us.






          THE SHRINE

          Were I but as the master souls who move
          In their high place, immortal on the earth,
          My song might be a thing to crown her worth,--
          'Tis but a pathway for the feet of Love.

          But since she walks where I am fain to sing,
          Since she has said, "I listen, O my friend!"
          There is a glory lent the song I send,
          And I am proud, yes, prouder than a king.

          I grow to nobler use beneath her eyes--
          Eyes that smile on me so serenely, will
          They smile a welcome though my best hope dies,

          And greet me at the summit of the hill?
          Will she, for whom my heart has built a shrine,
          Take from me all that makes this world divine?






          THE TORCH

          Art's use what is it but to touch the springs
          Of nature?  But to hold a torch up for
          Humanity in Life's large corridor,
          To guide the feet of peasants and of kings!

          What is it but to carry union through
          Thoughts alien to thoughts kindred, and to merge
          The lines of colour that should not diverge,
          And give the sun a window to shine through!

          What is it but to make the world have heed
          For what its dull eyes else would hardly scan,
          To draw in a stark light a shameless deed,

          And show the fashion of a kingly man!
          To cherish honour, and to smite all shame,
          To lend hearts voices, and give thoughts a name!






          IN ARMOUR,

          But wherein shall Art work?   Shall beauty lead
          It captive, and set kisses on its mouth?
          Shall it be strained unto the breast of youth,
          And in a garden live where grows no weed?

          Shall it, in dalliance with the flaunting world,
          Play but soft airs, sing but sweet-tempered songs?
          Veer lightly from the stress of all great wrongs,
          And lisp of peace 'mid battle-flags unfurled?

          Shall it but pluck the sleeve of wantonness,
          And gently chide the folly of our time?
          But wave its golden wand at sin's duress,

          And say, "Ah me! ah me!" to fallow crime?
          Nay, Art serves Truth, and Truth with Titan blows,
          Strikes fearless at all evil that it knows.






          IN THEE MY ART

          In thee is all my art; from thee I draw
          The substance of my dreams, the waking plan
          Of practised thought; I can no measure scan,
          But thou work'st in me like eternal law.

          If I were rich in goodly title deeds
          Of broad estate, won from posterity;
          If from decaying Time I snatched a see
          Richer than prelates pray for with their beads;

          If some should bring before me frankincense,
          And make a pleasant fire to greet mine eyes;
          If there were given me for recompense

          Gifts fairer than a seraph could devise:
          I would, my sovereign, kneel to thee and say,
          "It all is thine; thou showedst me the way."






          DENIAL

          But is it so that I must never kiss
          Thee on the brow, or smooth thy silken hair?
          Never close down thine eyelids with Love's prayer,
          Or fold my arms about my new-found bliss?

          Must I unto the courses of my age
          Worship afar, lest haply I profane
          The temple that is now my holy fane,
          For which my song is given as a gage?

          Shall I who cry to all, "Come not within
          The bounds where I my lady have enshrined;
          I am her cavalier"; shall I not win

          One dear caress, the rich exchequer find
          Of thy soft cheek?  If thou command, my lips
          Shall find surcease but at thy fingertips.






          TESTAMENT

          Why do I love thee? Shall my answer run:
          Because that thou hast beauty, noble place,
          Because of some sweet glamour in thy face,
          And eyes that shame the clear light of the sun?

          Shall I exclaim upon thy snow-white hands,
          Challenge the world to show a gentler mien,
          Call down the seraphs to attest, the sheen
          Upon thy brow is borrowed from their lands?

          Shall I trace out a map of all thy worth,
          Parcel thy virtues, say, "For this and this
          I learned to love her; here new charms had birth;

          I in this territory caught a bliss"?
          Shall I make inventory of thy grace,
          And crowd the total into common space?






          CAPTIVITY

          Nay, lady, though I love thee, I make pause
          Before thy question, and know naught to say;
          Art cannot teach me to define the way,
          Love led me, nor e'en register Love's cause.

          It can but blazon in this verse of mine
          What love does for me; what from Love it gains;
          What is its quickening; but it refrains
          From divination where thy merits shine.

          Canst thou, indeed, not tell what wrought in thee
          To bring me as a captive to thy feet?
          Canst thou not say, "'Twas this that made decree

          Of conquest; here thy soul with mine did meet?"
          Or is it that both stand amazed before
          The shrine where thou hast blessed and I adore?






          O MYSTIC WINGS

          O mystic wings, upbear me lightly now,
          Beyond life's faithful labour to a seat
          Where I can feel the end of things complete,
          Where no hot breath of ill can scorch the brow.

          O mystic wings of Art, about thee Truth
          Makes atmosphere of purity and power;
          'Tis man's breath kills the spring's soft-petaled flower--

          Ye give a refuge for the heart of youth.

          Ye give a value for all loss in age,
          When feebled eyes search for forgotten springs;
          Ye fan the breeze that turns the moulded page,

          And carry back the soul to ardent things.
          Poor payment can I give, but here engage
          I thee to be Love's airy equipage.






          WAS IT THY FACE?

          Was it thy face I saw when, as a child,
          Night after night I watched one quiet star
          Shine 'tween my curtain and the window-bar
          Until I slept, and made my sleep more mild?

          Was it thy influence outreaching then
          To me, o'er untrod years, o'er varying days,
          To give me courage, as from phase to phase
          Of youth's desires I passed to deeds of men?

          Was it because the star was hid awhile,
          That I in blindness wandered from my path;
          That I wooed Folly with her mumming smile,

          And sought for Lethe in a cup of wrath?
          Another hand touched mine with sadness there,
          And saved me till I saw thy face appear.






          A WOMAN'S HAND

          A woman's hand.  Lo, I am thankful now
          That with its touch I have walked all my days;
          Rising from fateful and forbidden ways,
          To find a woman's hand upon my brow;

          Soft as a pad of rose-leaves, and as pure
          As upraised palms of angels, seen in dreams:
          And soothed by it, to stand as it beseems
          A man who strives to conquer and endure.

          A woman's hand!--there is no better thing
          Of all things human; it is half divine;
          It hath been more to this lame life of mine,

          When faith was weakness, and despair was king.
          Man more than all men, Thou wast glad to bless
          A woman's sacrifice and tenderness.






          ONE FACE I SEE

          One face I see by thine whene'er I hold
          Converse with things that are or things that were;
          Whene'er I seek life's hidden folds to stir,
          And watch the inner to the outer rolled.

          Dost thou not know her, O beloved one?
          Hast thou not felt her sunshine on thy face?
          In me hast thou not learned some signs to trace
          Of that dear soul who calleth me her son?

          Such as I was that in thy countenance
          Found favour, from her it was gathered most.
          To my mad youth her gentle surveillance

          Was like a watch-fire on a rock-bound coast.
          She drew about me motherhood, and thou
          Hast with Love's holy chrism touched my brow.






          MOTHER

          She gave me courage when I weakly said,
          "O see how drifting, derelict, am I!
          The tide runs counter, and the wind is high;
          I see no channel through the rocks ahead.

          My arm is impotent; what worth to trim
          The bending sails!  Look, I shall quaff a cup
          To Fate, while the wild ocean swallows up
          The shipwrecked youth, the man who lives in him."

          She said: "But thou hast valour, dear, too much
          For such as this; thou hast grave embassy,
          Given with thy birth; would'st thou thine honour smutch

          With coward failing?  Dear son, breast the sea."
          Firm-purposed from that hour, through wind and wave,
          I brought my message till thou shelter gave.






          WHEN FIRST I SAW THEE

          When first I saw thee, lady, straightway came
          The thought that somehow, somewhere, destiny,
          Through blinding paths of happiness or blame,
          Would bend my way of life, my soul to thee.

          But then I put it from me: was not I
          A wanderer? To-morrow I should be
          In other lands-beside another sea;
          Nay, you were but a star-gleam in my sky.

          And so I came not in your sight awhile,
          You gave no thought, and I passed not away;
          But like some traveller in a deep defile

          I walked in darkness even through the day:
          Until at last the hands of Circumstance
          Pointed the hour that waked me from my trance.






          THE FATES LAUGH

          I did not will this thing.    I set my face
          Towards duty and my art; I was alone.
          How knew I thou shouldst roll away the stone
          From hopes long buried, by thy tender grace?

          What does it matter that we make resolve?
          The Fates laugh at us as they sit and spin;
          We cannot tell what Good is, or what Sin,
          Or why old faiths in mist of pain dissolve.

          We only can stand watchful in the way,
          Waiting with patient hands on shield and sword,
          Ready to meet disaster in the fray,

          Till Time has struck the letters of one word--
          Word of such high-born worth: triumphant Love,
          Give me thy canopy where'er I rove.






          AS ONE WHO WAITETH

          As one who waiteth for the signet ring
          Of his dear sovereign, that his embassy
          May have clear passport over land and sea,
          And make the subject sacred as his king;

          As waits the warrior for a pontiff's palm,
          Upraised in blessing o'er his high emprise;
          And bows his mailed forehead prayerful-wise,
          Sinking his turbulency in deep calm:

          So waited I for one seal to be set
          Upon my full commission, for a sign
          That should make impotent man's "I forget,"

          And make God's "I remember" more divine:
          Which should command at need the homage of
          The armed squadrons of all loyal love.






          THE SEALING

          But yestermorn my marshalled hopes were held
          Upon the verge of august pilgrimage;
          To-day I am as birds that leave the cage
          To seek green fastnesses they knew of eld;

          To-day I am as one who hides his face
          Within his golden beaver, and whose hand
          Clenches with pride his tried and conquering brand,
          Ay, as a hunter mounted for the chase.

          For, see: upon my lips I carry now
          A touch that speaks reveille to my soul;
          I have a dispensation large enow

          To enfold the world and circumscribe each pole.
          Slow let me speak it: From her lips and brow
          I took the gifts she only could endow.






          THE PLEDGE

          O gifts divine as any ever knew
          The noble spirits of an antique time;
          As any poets fashion in their rhyme,
          Or angels whisper down the shadeless blue!

          The priceless gifts of holy confidence,
          That speak through quivering lips from heart to heart;
          That unto life new energies impart,
          And open up the gates of prescience.

          O dear my love, I unto thee have given
          Pledge that I am thy vassal evermore;
          I stand within the zenith of my Heaven,

          On either hand a starred eternal shore
          I have come nearer to thy greater worth,
          For thou hast raised me from the common earth.






          LOVE'S TRIBUTARIES

          I can say now, "There was the confluence
          Of all Love's tributaries; there the sea
          Of Love spread out towards eternity;
          And there my coarser touched her finer sense.

          Poor though I am in my own sight, I know
          That thou hast winnowed, sweet, what best I am;
          Upon my restlessness thy ample calm
          Hath fallen as on frost-bound earth the snow.

          It hideth the harsh furrows that the wheels
          Of heavy trials made in Life's champaign;
          Upon its pure unfolding sunshine steals,

          And there is promise of the spring again.
          Here make I proclamation of my faith,
          And poise my fealty o'er the head of Death."






          THE CHOICE

          If Death should come to me to-night, and say:
          "I weigh thy destiny; behold, I give
          One little day with this thy love to live,
          Then, my embrace; or, leave her for alway,

          And thou shalt walk a full array of years;
          Upon thee shall the world's large honours fall,
          And praises clamorous shall make for all
          Thy strivings rich amends."  If in my ears

          Thou saidst, "I love thee!" I would straightway cry,
          "A thousand years upon this barren earth
          Is death without her: for that day I die,

          And count my life for it of poorest worth."
          Love's reckoning is too noble to be told
          By Time's slow fingers on its sands of gold.






          RECOGNITION

          As in a foreign land one threads his way
          'Mid alien scenes, knowing no face he meets;
          And, hearing his name spoken, turns and greets
          With wondering joy a friend of other days;

          As in the pause that comes between the sound
          And recognition, all the finer sense
          Is swathed in a melodious eloquence,
          Which makes his name seem in its sweetness drowned

          So stood I, by an atmosphere beguiled
          Of glad surprise, when first thy lips let fall
          The name I lightly carried when a child,

          That I shall rise to at the judgment call.
          The music of thy nature folded round
          Its barrenness a majesty of sound.






          THE WAY OF DREAMS

          Since I rose out of child-oblivion
          I have walked in a world of many dreams,
          And noble souls beside the shining streams
          Of fancy have with beckonings led me on.

          Their faces oft, mayhap, I could not see,
          Only their waving hands and noble forms.
          Sometimes there sprang between quick-gathered storms,
          But always they came back again to me.

          Women with smiling eyes and star-spun hair
          Spake gentle things, bade me look back to view
          The deeds of the great souls who climbed the stair

          Immortal, and for whom God's manna grew:
          Dante, Anacreon, Euripides,
          And all who set rich wine upon the lees.






          THE ACCOLADE

          Men of brave stature came and placed their hands
          Upon my head, and, lifting shining swords,
          Drew through the air signs mightier than words,
          And vanished in the sun upon the sands.

          Glimpses I caught of faces that have come
          Through crowding ages; whisperings of songs;
          And prayers for the redress of human wrongs
          From voices that upon the earth are dumb.

          They were but shadows, but they lent me joy;
          They gave me reverence for all who pace
          The world with hands raised, evil to destroy,

          Who live but for the honour of their race.
          They taught me to strike at no idol raised,
          Worshipped a space, then left to be dispraised.






          FALLEN IDOLS

          Stedfastness, shall we find it, then, at all?
          Is it that as the winds blow north and south,
          So must be praises from the loud world's mouth,
          Which on its heroes in their glory fall?

          Because the voice grows stiller, or the arm
          No longer can beat evils back; because
          The shoulders sink beneath new-rising cause,
          And the fine thought has lost its moving charm;

          Because of these shall puny sages shake
          Their heads, and haste to mock the failing one,
          Who in his strength could make the nations quake;

          Prophet like Daniel, King like Solomon!
          In this full time we have seen mockers run
          About the throne of such as Tennyson.






          TENNYSON

          Who saith thy hand is weak, King Tennyson?
          Who crieth, See, the monarch is grown old,
          His sceptre falls?  Oh, carpers rude and bold,
          You who have fed upon the gracious benison

          Scattered unstinted by him, do you now
          Dispraise the sweet-strung harp, grown tremulous
          'Neath fingers overworn for all of us?
          You cannot tear the laurels from his brow.

          He lives above your idle vaunts and fears,
          Enthroned where all master souls stand up
          In their high place, and fill the golden cup,

          God-blest for kings, with wine of endless years,
          And greet him one with them. O brotherhood
          Of envious dullards, ye are wroth with good.






          THE ANOINTED ONES
          Why, let them rail! God's full anointed ones
          Have heard the world exclaim, "We know you not."
          They who by their souls' travailing have brought
          Us nearer to the wonder of the suns.

          Yet, who can stay the passage of the stars?
          Who can prevail against the thunder-sound?
          The wire that flashes lightning to the ground
          Diverts, but not its potency debars.

          So, men may strike quick stabs at Caesar's worth,--
          They only make his life an endless force,
          'Scaped from its penthouse, flashing through the earth,

          And 'whelming those who railed about his Gorse.
          Men's moods disturb not those born truly great:
          They know their end; they can afford to wait.






A LOVER'S DIARY

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.


CONTENTS:

DREAMS
THE BRIDE
THE WRAITH
SURRENDER
THE CITADEL
MALFEASANCE
ANNUNCIATION
VANISHED DREAMS
INTO THY LAND
DIVIDED
WE MUST LIVE ON
YET LIFE IS SWEET
LOST FOOTSTEPS
THE CLOSED DOOR
THE CHALICE
MIO DESTINO
I HAVE BEHELD
TOO SOON AWAY
THE TREASURE
DAHIN
LOVE'S USURY
THE DECREE
'TIS MORNING NOW
SACRIFICE
SHINE ON
SO, THOU ART GONE
THE THOUSAND THINGS
ONES
THE SEA
THE CHART
REVEALING
OVERCOMING
WHITHER NOW
ARARAT
AS LIGHT LEAPS UP
THE DARKENED WAY
REUNITED
SONG WAS GONE FROM ME
GOOD WAS THE FIGHT
UNCHANGED
ABSOLVO TE
BENEDICTUS
THE MESSAGE
UNAVAILING
YOU SHALL LIVE ON
"VEX NOT THIS GHOST"
THE MEMORY
THE PASSING
ENVOY




          DREAMS

          And so life passed. I lived from year to year
          With shadows, the strong warders of desire;
          I learned through them to seek the golden fire
          That hides itself in Song's bright hemisphere.

          Through them I grew full of imaginings,
          I made strange pictures, conjured images
          From my deep longings; wrote the passages
          Of life inwrought with half-glad wonderings.

          For who can know a majesty of peace,
          That wanders, ever waiting for a voice
          To say to him, "Behold, at last surcease

          Of thy unrest has come, therefore, rejoice"?
          Here set I down some dreams that come again,
          Almost forgotten in my higher gain.






          THE BRIDE

          A ship at sea; a port to anchor in;
          Not far a starry light upon the shore.
          The sheeted lightning, like a golden door,
          Swings to and fro to let earth-angels in.

          Most bravely has she sailed o'er every sea,
          Withstood the storm-rack, spurned the sullen reef;
          Cherished her strength; and held her guerdon fief
          To him who saith, "My ship comes back to me!

          Behold, I sent her forth a stately thing,
          To be my messenger to farthest lands,
          To Fortunate Isles, and where the silver sands

          Girdle a summer sea; that she might bring
          My bride, who wist not that I loved her so--
          This is no bitter day for me, I trow!"






          THE WRAITH

          A ship in port; well-crossed the harbour-bar;
          The hawser swung, the grinding helm at rest;
          Hands clasping hands, and eyes with eager zest
          Seeking the loved, returning from afar.

          And he, the master, holding little reck
          Of all, save but the idol of his soul,
          Seeks not his loving ardour to control.
          Mark how he proudly treads the whitened deck!

          "My bride, my bride, my lone soul's best beloved,
          Come forth, come forth!  Where art thou, Isobel?--
          Pallid, and wan!  Lord, hath it thus befell

          This is but dust; where has the spirit roved?
          O death-cold bride! for this, then, have I strove?
          O phantom ship, O loveless wraith of Love!"





          SURRENDER

          A day of sunshine in a land of snow,
          And a soft-curtained room, where ruddy flakes
          Of fame fall free, in liquid light that slakes
          The soft desire of one cold, paleface: lo,

          Close-pressed sweet lips, and eyes of violet,
          That are filled up as with a sudden fear--
          A storm's prelude upon the expectant mere.
          Yet deep behind what never they forget,

          Who ever see in life's chance or mischance.
          And he who saw, what could he do but say,
          "Fold up the tents; the camp is struck; away!

          Vain victor who rides not in rest his lance!"
          Beside the hearthstone where the flame-flakes fell,
          There lay the cold keys of the citadel.





          THE CITADEL

          A night wind-swept and bound about with blee
          Of Erebus; all light and cheer within;
          White restless hands that falter, then begin
          To weave a music-voiced fantasy.

          And life, and death, and love, and weariness,
          And unrequital, thrid the maze of sound;
          And one voice saith, "Behold, the lost is found!"
          And saith not any more for joyfulness.

          Out of the night there comes a wanderer,
          Who waits upon the threshold, and is still;
          And listens, and bows down his head, until

          His grief-drawn breath startles the heart of her.
          The victor vanquished, at her feet he fell,
          A prisoner in his conquered citadel.






          MALFEASANCE

          Two of one name; they standing where the sun
          Makes shadows in the orchard-bloom of spring;
          She holding in her palm a jewelled ring,
          He speaking on what evil it had done.

          "Raise thy pale face and wondrous eyes to mine;
          Let not thy poor lips quiver in such pain;
          Too young and blindly thou hast drunk the wine
          Crushed from the lees of love.  Be strong again.

          Trail back thy golden hair from thy broad brow,
          And raise thy lily neck like some tall tower,
          That recks not any strife nor any hour,

          So it but holds its height, heeding not how.
          The noblest find their way o'er paths of ire
          To the clear summit of God's full desire."






          ANNUNCIATION

          I think in that far time when Gabriel came
          And gave short speech to Mary sweet and wise,
          That when the faint fear faded from her eyes,
          And they were filled up with a sudden flame

          Of joy bewildering and wonderment;
          With reverence the angel in her palm
          Laid one white lily, dewy with the balm
          Of the Lord's garden; saying: "This is sent

          For thine espousal, thou the undefiled;
          And it shall bloom till all be consummate."
          Lo, then he passed. She, musing where she sate,

          Felt all her being moved in manner wondrous mild;
          Then, laying 'gainst her bosom the white flower,
          She bowed her head, and said, "It is God's dower."






          VANISHED DREAMS

          Dreams, only dreams. They sprang from loneliness
          Of outer life; from innermost desire
          To reach the soul that now in golden fire
          Of cherished song I pray for and caress.

          I wandered through the world with longing gaze,
          To find her who was my hope's parallel,
          That to her I might all my gospel tell
          Of changeless love, and bid her make appraise.

          I knew that some day I should look within
          The ever-deepening distance of her eyes;
          For, in my dreams, from veiled Seraphim

          Came one, as if in answer to my cries:
          And passing near me, pointed down the road
          That led me at the last to thy abode.






          INTO THY LAND

          Into thy land of sunlight I have come,
          And live within thy presence, as a ray
          Of light lives in the brightness of the day;
          And find in thee my heaven and my home.

          Yet what am I that thou shouldst ope the gate
          Of thy most sweet completeness; and should spend
          Rich values of thy life on me thy friend,
          For which I have no worthy duplicate!

          Nay, lady, I no riches have to give;
          I have no name of honour, or the pride
          Of place, to priv'lege me to sit beside

          Thee in thy kingdom, where thy graces live.
          Wilt thou not one day whisper, "You have climbed
          Beyond your merits; pray you, fall behind"?






          Wish thy friend joy of his journey, but pray in secret
          that he have no joy, for then may he return quickly to thee.
                                                   --Egyptian Proverb.






          DIVIDED

          Divided by no act of thine or mine,
          Forever parted by a fatal deed,
          A fatal feud.  Alas! when fathers bleed,
          The children shall fulfil the wild design.

          A Montague hath killed a Capulet,
          A Capulet hath slain a Montague,--
          Twin graves, twin sorrows, and oh, mad to-do
          Of vengeance! oh, dread entail of regret!

          There lie they in their dark, self-chosen graves,
          And from them cries Hate's everlasting ghost,--
          "Blood hath been shed, and Love and ye are slaves,

          Time wrecks, and freedom drifts upon life's coast."
          Yet not for us the relish of that doom
          Which found a throne upon a Juliet's tomb.






          WE MUST LIVE ON

          We must live on; a deeper tragedy:
          To see, to touch, to know, and to desire;
          To feel in every vein the glorious fire
          Of Eden, and to cry, "Oh, to be free!"

          To cry, "Oh, wipe the gloomy stain away,
          Thou who first raised the sword, Who gave the hilt
          Into the hand of man. This blood they spilt--
          Our fathers--oh, blot out the bitter day!

          Erase the hour from out Thy calendar,
          Turn back the hands upon the clock of Time,
          Oh, Artificer of destroying War--

          Their righteous hate who bore us in our crime!"
          "Upon the children!"--'Tis the cold reply
          Of Him who makes to those who must not die.






          YET LIFE IS SWEET

          Yet life is sweet.  Thy soul hath breathed along,
          Thine eyes have cast their glory on the earth,
          Thy foot hath touched it, and thine hour of birth
          Didst give a new pulse to the veins of song.

          Better to stand amid the toppling towers
          Of every valiant hope; a Samson's dream,
          Than the deep indolence of Lethe's stream,
          The loneliness of slow submerging hours.

          Better, oh, better thus to see the wreck,
          And to have rocked to motion of the spheres;
          Better, oh, better to have trod the deck

          Of hope, and sailed the unmanageable years-
          Ay, better to have paid the price, and known,
          Than never felt this tyrannous Alone!






          LOST FOOTSTEPS

          Upon the disc of Love's bright planet fell
          A darkness yestereve, and from your lips
          I heard cold words; then came a swift eclipse
          Of joy at meeting on hope's it-is-well.

          And if I spoke with sadness and with fear;
          If from your gentle coldness I drew back,
          And felt that I had lost the flowery track
          That led to peace in Love's sweet atmosphere:

          It was because a woful dread possessed.
          My aching heart--the dread some evil star
          Had crossed the warm affection in your breast,

          Had bade me stand apart from where you are.
          The world seemed breaking on my life; I heard
          The crash of sorrows in that chiding word.






          THE CLOSED DOOR

          It is not so, and so for evermore,
          That thou and I must live our lives apart;
          I with a patient smother at my heart,
          And thy hand resting on a closed door?

          What couldst thou ever ask me that I should
          Not bend me to achieve thy high behest?
          What cannot men achieve with lance in rest
          Who carry noble valour in their blood?

          And some nobility of high emprise,
          Lady, couldst thou make possible in me;
          If living 'neath the pureness of thy eyes,

          I found the key to inner majesty;
          And reaching outward, heart-strong, from thy hand,
          Set here and there a beacon in the land.






          THE CHALICE

          Not by my power alone, but thou and I
          Together thinking, working, loving on
          Achievement-wards, as all brave souls have gone,
          Perchance should find new star-drifts in the sky

          That curves above humanity, and set
          Some new interpretation on life's page;
          Should serve the strivings of a widening age,
          And fashion wisdom from the social fret.

          Deep did Time's lances go; thou pluck'st them forth,
          And on my sullen woundings laid the balm
          Of thy life's sweetness. Oh, let my love be worth

          The keeping.  My head beneath thy palm,
          Once more I lift Love's chalice to thine eyes:
          Not till thou blessest me will I arise.






          MIO DESTINO

          Here, making count, at every step I see
          Something in her, like to a hidden thought
          Within my life, that long time I had sought,
          But never found till her soul spoke to me.

          And if she said a thousand times, "I did
          Not call thee, thou cam'st seeking; not my voice
          Was it thou heard'st; thy love was not my choice!"
          I should straightway reply, "That of thee hid,

          Even from thyself, lest it should startle thee,
          Hath called me, made me slave and king in one;
          And when the mists of Time shall rise, and we

          Stand forth, it shall be said, Since Time begun
          Ye two were called as one from that high hill,
          Where the creating Master hath His will."






          I HAVE BEHELD

          I have beheld a multitude stand still
          In such deep silence that a sudden pain
          Struck through the heart in sharing the tense strain,
          And all the world seemed bounded by one will.

          But when precipitated on the sea
          Of human feeling was the incident
          That caught their wonder; then the skies were rent
          With quivering sound, with passion's liberty.

          So have I stood before this parting day,
          With chilly fingers pressed upon my breast,
          That my heart burst not fleshen bands away,

          And my sharp cry break through my lady's rest.
          I have shut burning eyelids on the sight
          Of this dread time that scorches my sad night.






          TOO SOON AWAY

          Have I then found thee but to lose thee, friend?
          But touched thee ere thou vanished from my gaze?
          And when my soul is struggling from the maze
          Of many conflicts, must our converse end?

          Across the empty space that now shall spread
          Between us, shall I never go to thee?
          Or thou, beloved, never come to me,
          Save but to whisper prayers above the dead?

          Ah, cruel thought! Shall not Hope's convoy bear
          To thee the reinforcements of my love?
          Shall I not on thy white hand drop a tear

          Of crowned joy, one day, where thou dost move
          In thy place regally; even as now
          I place my farewell token on thy brow?






          THE TREASURE

          And now when from the shore goes out the ship
          Wherein is set the treasure that I hold
          Closer than miser all his hidden gold,
          Dearer than wine Zeus carried to his lip;

          My aching heart cries from its pent-up pain,--
          "O Love, O Life, O more than life to me,
          How can I live without the surety
          Of thy sweet presence till we meet again!"

          So like a wounded deer I came to thee,
          The arrow of mischance piercing my side;
          And through thy sorrow-healing ministry

          I rose with strength, like giants in their pride.
          But now--but now--how shall I stand alone,
          Knowing the light, the hope of me is gone?






          DAHIN

          O brow, so fronted with a stately calm,
          O full completeness of true womanhood,
          O counsel, pleader for all highest good,
          Thou hast upon my sorrow poured thy balm!

          Poor soldier he who did not raise his sword,
          And, touching with his lips the hilt-cross, swear
          In war or peace the livery to wear
          Of one that blessed him with her queenly word.

          Most base crusader, who at night and morn
          Crying Dahin, thought not of her again
          From whose sweet power was his knighthood born,

          For whom he quells the valiant Saracen.
          Shall I not, then, in the tumultuous place
          Of my life's warfare ever seek thy face?






          LOVE'S USURY

          Here count I over all the gentle deeds
          Which thou hast done; here summon I thy words,
          Sweeter to me than sweetest song of birds;
          That came like grace immortal to my needs.

          Love's usury has reckoned such a sum
          Of my indebtedness, that I can make
          No lien large enough to overtake
          Its value--and before it I am dumb!

          Yet, O my gracious, most kind creditor,
          I would not owe to thee one item less
          We cannot give the sun requital for

          Its liberal light; our office is to bless.
          If blessings could be compassed by my prayer,
          High heaven should set star-gems in thy hair.






          THE DECREE

          Last night I saw the warm white Southern moon
          Sail upward through a smoky amber sea;
          Orion stood in silver majesty
          Where the gold-girdled sun takes rest at noon.

          I slept; I dreamed. Against a sunset sky
          I saw thee stand all garmented in white;
          With hand stretched to me, and there in thy sight
          I went to meet thee; but I heard thee cry:

          "We stand apart as sun from shining sun;
          Thou hast thy place; there rolleth far and near
          A sea between; until life's all be done

          Thou canst not come, nor I go to thee, dear."
          Methought I bowed my head to thy decree,
          And donned the mantle of my misery.






          'TIS MORNING NOW

          'Tis morning now, and dreams and fears are gone,
          And sleep has calmed the fever in my veins,
          And I am strong to drink the cup that drains
          The last drop through my lips, and make no moan.

          Strength I have borrowed from the outward show
          Of spiritual puissance thou dost wear.
          Shall I not thy high domination share
          Over the shock of feeling?  Shall I grow

          More fearful than the soldier, when between
          The smoke of hostile cannon lies his way;
          To carry far the colours of his queen,

          While her bright eyes behold him in the fray?
          Here do I smile between the warring hosts
          Of sad farewells; and reek not what it costs.






          SACRIFICE

          And O most noble, and yet once again
          Most noble spirit, if I ever did
          Aught that thy goodness frowns on, be it hid
          Forever, and deep-buried.  Let the rain

          Of coming springs fall on the quiet grave.
          Perchance some violets will grow to tell
          That I, when uttering this last farewell,
          Built up a sacrificial architrave;

          That I, who worship thee, have love so great,
          To live in the horizon thou may'st set;
          To stand but in the shadow of the gate,

          Faithful, when coward promptings cry, "Forget."
          Ah, lady, when I gave my heart to thee,
          It passed into thy lifelong regency.






          SHINE ON

          Shine on, O sun! Sing on, O birds of song!
          And in her light my heart fashions a tune
          Not wholly sad, most like a tender rune
          Sung by some knight in days gone overlong,

          When he with minstrel eyes in Syrian grove
          Looked out towards his England, and then drew
          From a sweet instrument a sound that grew
          From twilight unto morning of his love.

          Go, then, beloved, bearing as you go
          These songs that have more sunlight far than cloud;
          More summer flowers than dead leaves 'neath the snow;

          That tell of hopes from which you raised the shroud.
          My lady, bright benignant star, shine on--

          I lift to thee my low Trisagion!






                HE that hath pleasant dreams is more fortunate
                than one who hath a cup-bearer.
                                            --Egyptian Proverb.






          SO, THOU ART GONE

          So, thou art gone; and I am left to wear
          Thy memory as a golden amulet
          Upon my breast, to sing a chansonnette
          Of winter tones, when summer time is here.

          And yet, my heart arises from the dark,
          Where it fell back in silence when you went
          To seaward, and a sprite malevolent
          Sat laughing in the white sails of thy barque.

          'Twas not moth-wings dashing against the flame,
          Burning in love's areanum; 'twas a cry
          Struck from soul-crossing chords, that, separate, frame

          Life's holy calm, or wasting agony.
          But now between the warring strings there grows
          A space of peace, as 'tween truce-honoured foes.






          THE THOUSAND THINGS

          Here one by one come back the thousand things
          Which made divinely sweet our intercourse;
          Love summons them here straightway to divorce
          The heart from melancholy wanderings.

          "Here laid she her white hand upon my arm;
          To this place came she with slow-gliding grace;
          Here smiled she up serenely in my face;
          And these sweet notes she sang me for a charm."

          I treasure up her words, and say them o'er
          With close-shut eyes; with her again I float
          Upon the Loire; I see the gems she wore,

          The ruby shining at her queenly throat;
          I climb with her again the Pyrenees,
          And hear her laughter ringing through the trees.






          THE SEA

          I in my childhood never saw the sea
          Save in my dreams.  There it was vast and lone,
          Splendid in power, breaking against the stone
          Walls of the world in thunder symphony.

          From it arose mists growing into mists
          Making a cool white curtain for the sun,
          And melting mornward when the day was done,
          A moving sphere where spirits kept their trysts.

          A ceaseless swinging with the swinging earth,
          A never-tiring ebbing to and fro,
          Trenching eternal fastnesses; a girth

          Round mountains in their everlasting snow.
          It was a vast emotion, fibre-drawn
          From all the elements since the first dawn.






          THE CHART

          Then came in further years the virgin sight
          Of the live sea; the sea that marches down,
          With sunny phalanxes and flags of foam,
          To match its puissance with earth's awful might.

          Far off the purple mist drew into mist,
          As thought melts into endless thought, and round
          The rim of the sheer world was heard a sound,
          Floating through palpitating amethyst.

          And through the varying waste of elements
          There passed a sail, which caught the opposing wind,
          Triumphant, as an army in its tents

          Beholds the foe it, conquering, left behind.
          "And Life," I said,--"Life is but like the sea;
          And what shall guide us to our destiny?"






          REVEALING

          The prescience of dreams struck walls away
          From mortal fact, and mortal fact revealed,
          With myriad voices, potencies concealed
          In the dim birth-place of a coming day.

          Even as a blind man's fingers wander o'er
          His harpstrings, led by sound to dreams of sound,
          Till in his soul an eloquence profound
          Rises above the petulance and roar

          Of the great globe: as in a rush of song
          From feathered throats, one, in a mighty wood,
          'Mid sweet interpositions moves along

          The avenues of some predestined good;
          So I, dream-nurtured, standing by the sea,
          Made levy on the wonders that should be.






          OVERCOMING

          And God is good, I said, and Art is good,
          And labour hath its rich reward of sleep;
          And recompense will come for all who keep
          Dishonour's ill contagion from the blood.

          And over us there curves the infinite
          Blue heaven as a shield, and at the end
          We shall find One who loveth to befriend
          E'en those who faint for shame within His sight.

          And down the awful passes of the sky
          There comes the voice that circumvents the gale;
          That makes the avalanche to pass us by,

          And saith, "I overcome" to man's "I fail."
          "And peradventure now," said I, "the zest
          Of all existence waits on His behest."






          WHITHER NOW

          But man's deliverances intervene
          Between the soul's swift speech and God's high will;
          That saith to tempests of the thought, "Be still!"
          And in life's lazaretto maketh clean

          The leprous sense.  Ah, who can find his way
          Among the many altars?   Who can call
          Out perfect peace from any ritual,
          Or shelter find in systems of a day?

          As one sees on some ancient urn, upthrown
          From out a tomb, records that none may read
          With like interpretation, and the stone

          Retains its graven fealty to the dead:
          So, on the great palimpsest men have writ
          Such lines o'ercrossed that none interprets it.






          ARARAT

          What marvel that the soul of youth should cry,
          "Man builds his temples 'tween me and the face
          Of Him whom I would seek; I cannot trace
          His purpose in their shadow, nor descry

          The wisdom absolute?"  What marvel that,
          With yearning impotent, ay, impotent
          Beyond all measure! his full faith was spent,
          And for his soul there rose no Ararat?

          Yet out upon the sun-drawn sensate sea
          Of elemental pain, there came a word
          As if from Him who travelled Galilee,

          As fair as any Zion ever heard.
          The voice of Love spoke; Love, that writes its name
          On Life and Death-and then my lady came.






          AS LIGHT LEAPS UP

          As light leaps up from star to star, so mounts
          Faith from one soul unto another; so
          The lower to the higher; till the flow
          Of knowledge rises from creation's founts;

          Until from human love we come to know
          The august presence of the Love Divine;
          And feel the light unutterable shine
          Upon half-lights that we were wont to show,

          Absorbing them.  'Tis Love that beckons us
          From low desires, from restlessness and sin,
          To heights that else we had not reached; and thus

          We find the Heaven we dared not hope to win.
          How clearer seem designs immortal when
          Our lives are fed on Love's fine regimen






          THE DARKENED WAY

          "It is no matter;"--thus the noble Dane,
          About his heart more ill than one could tell;
          Sad augury, that like a funeral bell
          Against his soul struck solemn notes of pain.

          So 'gainst the deadly smother he could press
          With calm his lofty manhood; interpose
          Purpose divine, and at the last disclose
          For life's great shift a regnant readiness.

          To-day I bought some matches in the street
          From one whose eyes had long since lost their sight.
          Trembling with palsy was he to his feet.

          "Father," I said, "how fare you in the night?"
          "In body ill, but 'tis no matter, friend,
          Strong is my soul to keep me to the end."






          DISTRUST not a woman nor a king--it availeth nothing.
                                                  --Egyptian Proverb.

          WHEN thou journeyest into the shadows, take not sweetmeats
          with thee, but a seed of corn and a bottle of tears and wine;
          that thou mayst have a garden in the land whither thou goeat.
                                                  --Egyptian Proverb.






          REUNITED

          Once more, once more!  That golden eventide!
          Golden within, without all cold and grey,
          Slowly you came forth from the troubled day,
          Singing my heart--you glided to my side;

          You glided in; the same grave, quiet face,
          The same deep look, the never-ending light
          In your proud eyes, eyes shining through the night,
          That night of absence--distance--from your place.

          Calm words, slow touch of hand, but, oh, the cry,
          The long, long cry of passion and of joy
          Within my heart; the star-burst in the sky--

          The world--our world--which time may not destroy!
          Your world and mine, unutterably sweet:
          Dearest, once more, the old song at thy feet.






          SONG WAS GONE FROM ME

          Dearest, once more! This I could tell and tell
          Till life turned drowsy with the ceaseless note;
          Dearest, once more! The words throb in my throat,
          My heart beats to them like a muffled bell.

          Change--Time and Change! O Change and Time, you come
          Not knocking at my door, knowing me gone;
          Here have I dwelt within my heart alone,
          Watching and waiting, while my muse was dumb

          Song was gone from me--sweet, I could not sing,
          Save as men sing upon the lonely hills;
          Under my hand the old chord ceased to ring,

          Hushed by the grinding of the high gods' mills.
          Dearest, once more. Those mad mills had their way--
          Now is mine hour.   To every man his day.






          GOOD WAS THE FIGHT

          How have I toiled, how have I set my face
          Fair to the swords! No man could say I quailed;
          Ne'er did I falter; I dare not to have failed,
          I dare not to have dropped from out the race.

          Good was the fight--good, till a piteous dream
          Crept from some direful covert of despair;
          Showed me your look, that look so true and fair,
          Distant and bleak; for me no more to gleam.

          Then was I driven back upon my soul,
          Then came dark moments; lady, then I drew
          Forth from its place the round unfathomed bowl

          Of sorrow, and from it I quaffed to you;
          Speaking as men speak who have lost
          Their hearts' last prize--and dare not count the cost.






          UNCHANGED

          But you are here unchanged.  You say not so
          In words, but when you placed your hands in mine;
          But when I saw the same old glory shine
          Within your eyes, I read it; and I know.

          And when those hands ran up along my arm,
          And rested on my shoulder for a space,
          A sacred inquisition in your face,
          To read my heart, how could I doubt that charm,

          That truth ineffable!--I set my soul
          In hazard to a farthing, that you kept
          The faith, with pride unspeakable, the whole

          Course of those years in which communion slept.
          Your soul flamed in your look; you read; I knew
          How little worth was I, how heavenly you.






          ABSOLVO TE

          I read your truth. You read--What did you read?
          Did you read all, and, reading all, forgive?
          How I--O little dwarf of conscience sieve
          My soul; bare all before her bare indeed!

          And, looking on the remnant and the waste,
          Can you absolve me,--me, the doubter, one
          Who challenged what God spent His genius on,
          His genius and His pride; so fair, so chaste?

          I am ashamed. . . . And when I told my dreams,
          Shaken and humble,--"Dear, there was no cause,"
          Your words; proud, sorrowful, as it beseems

          Such as thou art. There never was a cause
          Why you should honour me. Ashamed am I.
          And you forgive me, bless me, for reply.






          BENEDICTUS

          You bless me, then you turn away your head--
          "Never again, dear. I have blessed you so,
          My lips upon your lips; between must flow
          The river--Oh the river!"  Thus you said.

          The river--Oh the river, and the sun;
          Stream that we may not cross, sun that is joy:
          Flow as thou must; shine on in full employ--
          Shine through her eyes thou; let the river run.

          O lady, to your liegeman speak.  You say:
          "Dream no more dreams; yourself be as am I"
          Your hands clasped to your face, so shutting out the day.

          An instant, then to me, your low good-bye--
          Good-night, good-bye; and then the social reign,
          The lights, the songs, the flowers--and the pain.






          THE MESSAGE

          "Oh, hush!" you said; "oh, hush!" The twilight hung
          Between us and the world; but in your face,
          Flooding with warm inner light, the sovereign grace
          Of one who rests the brooding trees among--

          Of one who steps down from a lofty throne,
          Seeking that peace the sceptre cannot call;
          And leaving courtier, page, and seneschal,
          Goes down the lane of sycamores alone;

          And, going, listens to the notes that swell
          From golden throats--stories of ardent days,
          And lovers in fair vales; and homing bell:

          And the sweet theme unbearable, she prays
          The song-bird cease! So, on the tale I dare,
          Your "hush!" your wistful "hush!" broke like prayer.






          UNAVAILING

          "Never," you said, "never this side the grave,
          And what shall come hereafter, who may know?
          Whether we e'en shall guess the way we go,
          Passing beneath Death's mystic architrave

          Silence or song, dumb sleep or cheerful hours?"
          O lady, you have questioned, answer too.
          You--you to die--silence and gloom for you:
          Dead song, dead lights, dead graces, and dead flowers?

          It is not so: the foolish trivial end,
          The inconsequent paltry Nothing--gone--gone all;
          The genius of the ageless Something spend

          Itself within this little earthly wall:
          The commonplace conception, that we reap
          Reward of drudge and ploughman--idle sleep!






          YOU SHALL LIVE ON

          You shall live on triumphant, you shall take
          Your place among the peerless, fearless ones;
          And those who loved you here shall tell their sons
          To honour every woman for your sake.

          And those your Peers shall say, "Others are pure,
          Others are noble, others too have vowed,
          And for a vow have suffered; but she bowed
          Her own soul and another's to endure.

          She smote the being more to her than all,--
          Her own soul and the world,--a truth to hold,
          Faith with the dead; and hung a heavy pall

          'Tween her and love and life. The world is old,
          It hath sent here none queenlier.  Of the few,
          The royal few is she, martyred and true."






          "VEX NOT THIS GHOST"

          Upon the rack of this tough world I hear,
          As when Cordelia's glories all dissever-
          "Never--never--never--never--never,--"
          That wild moan of the dispossessed Lear.

          O world, vex not this ghost, yea, let it pass,
          The Spirit of these songs.  The fool hath mocked,
          The fool our woe upon us hath unlocked
          From where the soul holds to our lips the glass,

          To see what breath of life.  O fool, poor fool,
          Well, we have laughed together, you and I.
          O fond insulter, in the healing pool

          Of your deep poignant raillery I lie.
          Let us be grand again, my fool.  The throne
          Is gone; but see, the coronation stone!






          THE MEMORY

          Know you where I, my royal fool, was crowned?
          A rock within the great Egean?  Where
          A strong flood hurrieth on Finistere?
          Where at the Pole our valiant men were drowned?

          Where the soft creamy wash of Indian seas
          Spreads palmward? Where the sunset glides to dawn,
          No night between? Where all the tides are drawn
          To greet their Sun and bathe their Idol's knees?

          Where was I crowned? Dear fool, upon a stone
          That standeth where Earth's arches make but one,
          Where all the banners of her soul were flown,

          And trumpeted the legions of the sun.
          The stone is left: 'tis here against the door
          Of throne and kingdom. . . . Pray you, mock no more.






          THE PASSING

          A time will come when we again shall rail--
          Not yet, not yet.  The flood comes on apace,
          That deep dividing river, and her face
          Grows dimmer as it widens--pale, so pale.

          Have we not railed and laughed these many days,
          Mummers before the lights?  Dear fool, your hand
          Upon your lips--Oh let us once be grand,
          Grand as we were when treading royal ways.

          Lo, there she moves beyond the river.  Gone--
          Gone is the sun-lo, starlight in her eyes.
          See, how she standeth silent and alone--

          Oh, hush! let us not vex her with our cries.
          Proud as of old, unto my throne I go. . . .
          Cordelia's gone...... Hush, draw the curtain--so.






          ENVOY

          When you and I have played the little hour,
          Have seen the tall subaltern Life to Death
          Yield up his sword; and, smiling, draw the breath,
          The first long breath of freedom; when the flower

          Of Recompense has fluttered to our feet,
          As to an actor's; and the curtain down,
          We turn to face each other all alone--
          Alone, we two, who never yet did meet,

          Alone, and absolute, and free: oh, then,
          Oh, then, most dear, how shall be told the tale?
          Clasped hands, pressed lips, and so clasped hands again;

          No words. But as the proud wind fills the sail,
          My love to yours shall reach, then one deep moan
          Of joy; and then our infinite Alone.






THE MONEY MASTER, Complete

By Gilbert Parker




CONTENTS

EPOCH THE FIRST
I.        THE GRAND TOUR OF JEAN JACQUES BARBILLE
II.       THE REST OF THE STORY "TO-MORROW"
III.      "TO-MORROW"

EPOCH THE SECOND
IV.       THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER AND THE CLERK OF THE COURT TELLS A STORY
V.        THE CLERK OF THE COURT ENDS HIS STORY
VI.       JEAN JACQUES HAD HAD A GREAT DAY
VII.      JEAN JACQUES AWAKES FROM SLEEP
VIII.     THE GATE IN THE WALL
IX.       "MOI-JE SUIS PHILOSOPHE"
X.        "QUIEN SABE"--WHO KNOWS!
XI.       THE CLERK OF THE COURT KEEPS A PROMISE
XII.      THE MASTER-CARPENTER HAS A PROBLEM

EPOCH THE THIRD
XIII.     THE MAN FROM OUTSIDE
XIV.      "I DO NOT WANT TO GO"
XV.       BON MARCHE

EPOCH THE FOURTH
XVI.      MISFORTUNES COME NOT SINGLY
XVII.     HIS GREATEST ASSET
XVIII.    JEAN JACQUES HAS AN OFFER
XIX.      SEBASTIAN DOLORES DOES NOT SLEEP
XX.       "AU 'VOIR, M'SIEU' JEAN JACQUES"
XXI.      IF SHE HAD KNOWN IN TIME

EPOCH THE FIFTH
XXII.     BELLS OF MEMORY
XXIII.    JEAN JACQUES HAS WORK TO DO
XXIV.     JEAN JACQUES ENCAMPED.
XXV.      WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE

EPILOGUE




INTRODUCTION

This book is in a place by itself among the novels I have written.  Many
critics said that it was a welcome return to Canada, where I had made my
first success in the field of fiction.  This statement was only meagrely
accurate, because since 'The Right of Way' was published in 1901 I had
written, and given to the public, 'Northern Lights', a book of short
stories, 'You Never Know Your Luck', a short novel, and 'The World for
Sale', though all of these dealt with life in Western Canada, and not
with the life of the French Canadians, in which field I had made my first
firm impression upon the public.  In any case, The Money Master was
favourably received by the press and public both in England and America,
and my friends were justified in thinking, and in saying, that I was at
home in French Canada and gave the impression of mastery of my material.
If mastery of material means a knowledge of the life, and a sympathy with
it, then my friends are justified; for I have always had an intense
sympathy with, and admiration for, French Canadian life.  I think the
French Canadian one of the most individual, original, and distinctive
beings of the modern world.  He has kept his place, with his own customs,
his own Gallic views of life, and his religious habits, with an assiduity
and firmness none too common.  He is essentially a man of the home, of
the soil, and of the stream; he has by nature instinctive philosophy and
temperamental logic.  As a lover of the soil of Canada he is not
surpassed by any of the other citizens of the country, English or
otherwise.

It would almost seem as though the pageantry of past French Canadian
history, and the beauty and vigour of the topographical surroundings of
French Canadian life, had produced an hereditary pride and exaltation--
perhaps an excessive pride and a strenuous exaltation, but, in any case,
there it was, and is.  The French Canadian lives a more secluded life on
the whole than any other citizen of Canada, though the native,
adventurous spirit has sent him to the Eastern States of the American
Union for work in the mills and factories, or up to the farthest reaches
of the St. Lawrence, Ottawa, and their tributaries in the wood and timber
trade.

Domestically he is perhaps the most productive son of the North American
continent.  Families of twenty, or even twenty-five, are not unknown,
and, when a man has had more than one wife, it has even exceeded that.
Life itself is full of camaraderie and good spirit, marked by religious
traits and sacerdotal influence.

The French Canadian is on the whole sober and industrious; but when he
breaks away from sobriety and industry he becomes a vicious element in
the general organism.  Yet his vices are of the surface, and do not
destroy the foundations of his social and domestic scheme.  A French
Canadian pony used to be considered the most virile and lasting stock on
the continent, and it is fair to say that the French Canadians themselves
are genuinely hardy, long-lived, virile, and enduring.

It was among such people that the hero of The Money Master, Jean Jacques
Barbille, lived.  He was the symbol or pattern of their virtues and of
their weaknesses.  By nature a poet, a philosopher, a farmer and an
adventurer, his life was a sacrifice to prepossession and race instinct;
to temperament more powerful than logic or common sense, though he was
almost professionally the exponent of both.

There is no man so simply sincere, or so extraordinarily prejudiced as
the French Canadian.  He is at once modest and vain; he is even lyrical
in his enthusiasms; he is a child in the intrigues and inventions of
life; but he has imagination, he has a heart, he has a love of tradition,
and is the slave of legend.  To him domestic life is the summum bonum of
being.  His four walls are the best thing which the world has to offer,
except the cheerful and sacred communion of the Mass, and his dismissal
from life itself under the blessing of his priest and with the promise of
a good immortality.

Jean Jacques Barbille had the French Canadian life of pageant, pomp, and
place extraordinarily developed.  His love of history and tradition was
abnormal.  A genius, he was, within an inch, a tragedy to the last
button.  Probably the adventurous spirit of his forefathers played a
greater part in his development and in the story of his days than
anything else.  He was wide-eyed, and he had a big soul.  He trained
himself to believe in himself and to follow his own judgment; therefore,
he invited loss upon loss, he made mistake upon mistake, he heaped
financial adventure upon financial adventure, he ran great risks; and it
is possible that his vast belief in himself kept him going when other men
would have dropped by the wayside.  He loved his wife and daughter, and
he lost them both.  He loved his farms, his mills and his manor, and they
disappeared from his control.

It must be remembered that the story of The Money Master really runs for
a generation, and it says something for Jean Jacques Barbille that he
could travel through scenes, many of them depressing, for long years, and
still, in the end, provoke no disparagement, by marrying the woman who
had once out of the goodness of her heart offered him everything--
herself, her home, her honour; and it was to Jean Jacques's credit
that he took neither until the death of his wife made him free; but the
tremendous gift offered him produced a powerful impression upon his mind
and heart.

One of the most distinguished men of the world to-day wrote me in praise
and protest concerning The Money Master.  He declared that the first half
of the book was as good as anything that had been done by anybody, and
then he bemoaned the fact, which he believed, that the author had
sacrificed his two heroines without real cause and because he was tired
of them.  There he was wrong.  In the author's mind the story was planned
exactly as it worked out.  He was never tired; he was resolute.  He was
intent to produce, if possible, a figure which would breed and develop
its own disasters, which would suffer profoundly for its own mistakes;
but which, in the end, would triumph over the disasters of life and time.
It was all deliberate in the main intention and plan.  Any failures that
exist in the book are due to the faults of the author, and to nothing
else.

Some critics have been good enough to call 'The Money Master' a beautiful
book, and there are many who said that it was real, true, and faithful.
Personally I think it is real and true, and as time goes on, and we get
older, that is what seems to matter to those who love life and wish to
see it well harvested.

I do not know what the future of the book may be; what the future of any
work of mine will be; but I can say this, that no one has had the
pleasure in reading my books which I have had in making them.  They have
been ground out of the raw material of the soul.  I have a hope that they
will outlast my brief day, but, in any case, it will not matter.  They
have given me a chance of showing to the world life as I have seen it,
and indirectly, and perhaps indistinctly, my own ideas of that life.
'The Money Master' is a vivid and somewhat emotional part of it.




EPOCH THE FIRST

CHAPTER I

THE GRAND TOUR OF JEAN JACQUES BARBILLE

"Peace and plenty, peace and plenty"--that was the phrase M. Jean Jacques
Barbille, miller and moneymaster, applied to his home-scene, when he was
at the height of his career.  Both winter and summer the place had a look
of content and comfort, even a kind of opulence.  There is nothing like a
grove of pines to give a sense of warmth in winter and an air of coolness
in summer, so does the slightest breeze make the pine-needles swish like
the freshening sea.  But to this scene, where pines made a friendly
background, there were added oak, ash, and hickory trees, though in less
quantity on the side of the river where were Jean Jacques Barbille's
house and mills.  They flourished chiefly on the opposite side of the
Beau Cheval, whose waters flowed so waywardly--now with a rush, now
silently away through long reaches of country.  Here the land was rugged
and bold, while farther on it became gentle and spacious, and was flecked
or striped with farms on which low, white houses with dormer-windows and
big stoops flashed to the passer-by the message of the pioneer, "It is
mine.  I triumph."

At the Manor Cartier, not far from the town of Vilray, where Jean Jacques
was master, and above it and below it, there had been battles and the
ravages of war.  At the time of the Conquest the stubborn habitants,
refusing to accept the yielding of Quebec as the end of French power
in their proud province, had remained in arms and active, and had only
yielded when the musket and the torch had done their work, and smoking
ruins marked the places where homes had been.  They took their fortune
with something of the heroic calm of men to whom an idea was more than
aught else.  Jean Jacques' father, grandfather, and great-great-
grandfather had lived here, no one of them rising far, but none worthless
or unnoticeable.  They all had had "a way of their own," as their
neighbours said, and had been provident on the whole.  Thus it was that
when Jean Jacques' father died, and he came into his own, he found
himself at thirty a man of substance, unmarried, who "could have had the
pick of the province."  This was what the Old Cure said in despair, when
Jean Jacques did the incomprehensible thing, and married l'Espagnole, or
"the Spanische," as the lady was always called in the English of the
habitant.

When she came it was spring-time, and all the world was budding, exuding
joy and hope, with the sun dancing over all.  It was the time between
the sowing and the hay-time, and there was a feeling of alertness in
everything that had life, while even the rocks and solid earth seemed to
stir.  The air was filled with the long happy drone of the mill-stones as
they ground the grain; and from farther away came the soft, stinging cry
of a saw-mill.  Its keen buzzing complaint was harmonious with the
grumble of the mill-stones, as though a supreme maker of music had tuned
it.  So said a master-musician and his friend, a philosopher from Nantes,
who came to St. Saviour's in the summer just before the marriage, and
lodged with Jean Jacques.  Jean Jacques, having spent a year at Laval
University at Quebec, had almost a gift of thought, or thinking; and he
never ceased to ply the visiting philosopher and musician with questions
which he proceeded to answer himself before they could do so; his quaint,
sentimental, meretricious observations on life saddening while they
amused his guests.  They saddened the musician more than the other
because he knew life, while the philosopher only thought it and saw it.

But even the musician would probably have smiled in hope that day when
the young "Spanische" came driving up the river-road from the steamboat-
landing miles away.  She arrived just when the clock struck noon in the
big living-room of the Manor.  As she reached the open doorway and the
wide windows of the house which gaped with shady coolness, she heard the
bell summoning the workers in the mills and on the farm--yes, M. Barbille
was a farmer, too--for the welcome home to "M'sieu' Jean Jacques," as he
was called by everyone.

That the wedding had taken place far down in Gaspe and not in St.
Saviour's was a reproach and almost a scandal; and certainly it was
unpatriotic.  It was bad enough to marry the Spanische, but to marry
outside one's own parish, and so deprive that parish and its young people
of the week's gaiety, which a wedding and the consequent procession and
tour through the parish brings, was little less than treason.  But there
it was; and Jean Jacques was a man who had power to hurt, to hinder, or
to help; for the miller and the baker are nearer to the hearthstone of
every man than any other, and credit is a good thing when the oven is
empty and hard times are abroad.  The wedding in Gaspe had not been
attended by the usual functions, for it had all been hurriedly arranged,
as the romantic circumstances of the wooing required.  Romance indeed it
was; so remarkable that the master-musician might easily have found a
theme for a comedy--or tragedy--and the philosopher would have shaken his
head at the defiance it offered to the logic of things.

Now this is the true narrative, though in the parish of St. Saviour's it
is more highly decorated and has many legends hanging to it like tassels
to a curtain.  Even the Cure of to-day, who ought to know all the truth,
finds it hard to present it in its bare elements; for the history of Jean
Jacques Barbille affected the history of many a man in St. Saviour's; and
all that befel him, whether of good or evil, ran through the parish in a
thousand invisible threads.

                    .......................

What had happened was this.  After the visit of the musician and the
philosopher, Jean Jacques, to sustain his reputation and to increase it,
had decided to visit that Normandy from which his people had come at the
time of Frontenac.  He set forth with much 'eclat' and a little innocent
posturing and ritual, in which a cornet and a violin figured, together
with a farewell oration by the Cure.

In Paris Jean Jacques had found himself bewildered and engulfed.  He had
no idea that life could be so overbearing, and he was inclined to resent
his own insignificance.  However, in Normandy, when he read the names on
the tombstones and saw the records in the baptismal register of other
Jean Jacques Barbilles, who had come and gone generations before, his
self-respect was somewhat restored.  This pleasure was dashed, however,
by the quizzical attitude of the natives of his ancestral parish, who
walked round about inspecting him as though he were a zoological
specimen, and who criticized his accent--he who had been at Laval for one
whole term; who had had special instruction before that time from the Old
Cure and a Jesuit brother; and who had been the friend of musicians and
philosophers!

His cheerful, kindly self-assurance stood the test with difficulty, but
it became a kind of ceremonial with him, whenever he was discomfited, to
read some pages of a little dun-coloured book of philosophy, picked up on
the quay at Quebec just before he sailed, and called, "Meditations in
Philosophy."  He had been warned by the bookseller that the Church had no
love for philosophy; but while at Laval he had met the independent minds
that, at eighteen to twenty-two, frequent academic groves; and he was not
to be put off by the pious bookseller--had he not also had a philosopher
in his house the year before, and was he not going to Nantes to see this
same savant before returning to his beloved St. Saviour's parish.

But Paris and Nantes and Rouen and Havre abashed and discomfited him,
played havoc with his self-esteem, confused his brain, and vexed him by
formality, and, more than all, by their indifference to himself.  He
admired, yet he wished to be admired; he was humble, but he wished all
people and things to be humble with him.  When he halted he wanted the
world to halt; when he entered a cathedral--Notre Dame or any other; or a
great building--the Law Courts at Rouen or any other; he simply wanted
people to say, wanted the cathedral, or at least the cloister, to whisper
to itself, "Here comes Jean Jacques Barbille."

That was all he wanted, and that would have sufficed.  He would not have
had them whisper about his philosophy and his intellect, or the mills and
the ash-factory which he meant to build, the lime-kilns he had started
even before he left, and the general store he intended to open when he
returned to St. Saviour's.  Not even his modesty was recognized; and, in
his grand tour, no one was impressed by all that he was, except once.  An
ancestor, a grandmother of his, had come from the Basque country; and so
down to St. Jean Pied de Port he went; for he came of a race who set
great store by mothers and grandmothers.  At St. Jean Pied de Port he was
more at home.  He was, in a sense, a foreigner among foreigners there,
and the people were not quizzical, since he was an outsider in any case
and not a native returned, as he had been in Normandy.  He learned to
play pelota, the Basque game taken from the Spaniards, and he even
allowed himself a little of that oratory which, as they say, has its
habitat chiefly in Gascony.  And because he had found an audience at
last, he became a liberal host, and spent freely of his dollars, as he
had never done either in Normandy, Paris, or elsewhere.  So freely did he
spend, that when he again embarked at Bordeaux for Quebec, he had only
enough cash left to see him through the remainder of his journey in the
great world.  Yet he left France with his self-respect restored, and he
even waved her a fond adieu, as the creaking Antoine broke heavily into
the waters of the Bay of Biscay, while he cried:

                         "My little ship,
                         It bears me far
                         From lights of home
                         To alien star.
                         O vierge Marie,
                         Pour moi priez Dieu!
                         Adieu, dear land,
                         Provence, adieu."

Then a further wave of sentiment swept over him, and he was vaguely
conscious of a desire to share the pains of parting which he saw in
labour around him--children from parents, lovers from loved.  He could
not imagine the parting from a parent, for both of his were in the bosom
of heaven, having followed his five brothers, all of whom had died in
infancy, to his good fortune, for otherwise his estate would now be only
one-sixth of what it was.  But he could imagine a parting with some sweet
daughter of France, and he added another verse to the thrilling of the
heart of Casimir Delavigne:

                         "Beloved Isaure,
                         Her hand makes sign--
                         No more, no more,
                         To rest in mine.
                         O vierge Marie,
                         Pour moi priez Dieu!
                         Adieu, dear land,
                         Isaure, adieu!"

As he murmured with limpid eye the last words, he saw in the forecastle
not far from him a girl looking at him.  There was unmistakable sadness
in her glance of interest.  In truth she was thinking of just such a man
as Jean Jacques, whom she could never see any more, for he had paid with
his life the penalty of the conspiracy in which her father, standing now
behind her on the leaky Antoine, had been a tool, and an evil tool.  Here
in Jean Jacques was the same ruddy brown face, black restless eye, and
young, silken, brown beard.  Also there was an air of certainty and
universal comprehension, and though assertion and vanity were apparent,
there was no self-consciousness.  The girl's dead and gone conspirator
had not the same honesty of face, the same curve of the ideal in the
broad forehead, the same poetry of rich wavy brown hair, the same
goodness of mind and body so characteristic of Jean Jacques--he was but
Jean Jacques gone wrong at the start; but the girl was of a nature that
could see little difference between things which were alike
superficially, and in the young provincial she only saw one who looked
like the man she had loved.  True, his moustaches did not curl upwards at
the ends as did those of Carvillho Gonzales, and he did not look out of
the corner of his eyes and smoke black cigarettes; but there he was, her
Carvillho with a difference--only such a difference that made him to her
Carvillho II., and not the ghost of Carvillho I.

She was a maiden who might have been as good as need be for all life,
so far as appearances went.  She had a wonderful skin, a smooth, velvety
cheek, where faint red roses came and went, as it might seem at will;
with a deep brown eye; and eh, but she was grandly tall--so Jean Jacques
thought, while he drew himself up to his full five feet, six and a half
with a determined air.  Even at his best, however, Jean Jacques could not
reach within three inches of her height.

Yet he did not regard her as at all overdone because of that.  He thought
her hair very fine, as it waved away from her low forehead in a grace
which reminded him of the pictures of the Empress Eugenie, and of the
sister of that monsieur le duc who had come fishing to St. Saviour's a
few years before.  He thought that if her hair was let down it would
probably reach to her waist, and maybe to her ankles.  She had none of
the plump, mellow softness of the beauties he had seen in the Basque
country.  She was a slim and long limbed Diana, with fine lines and a
bosom of extreme youth, though she must have been twenty-one her last
birthday.  The gown she wore was a dark green well-worn velvet, which
seemed of too good a make and quality for her class; and there was no
decoration about her anywhere, save at the ears, where two drops of gold
hung on little links an inch and a half long.

Jean Jacques Barbille's eyes took it all in with that observation of
which he was so proud and confident, and rested finally on the drops of
gold at her ears.  Instinctively he fingered the heavy gold watch-chain
he had bought in Paris to replace the silver chain with a little crucifix
dangling, which his father and even his great-grandfather had worn before
him.  He had kept the watch, however--the great fat-bellied thing which
had never run down in a hundred years.  It was his mascot.  To lose that
watch would be like losing his share in the promises of the Church.  So
his fingers ran along the new gold-fourteen-carat-chain, to the watch at
the end of it; and he took it out a little ostentatiously, since he saw
that the eyes of the girl were on him.  Involuntarily he wished to
impress her.

He might have saved himself the trouble.  She was impressed.  It was
quite another matter however, whether he would have been pleased to know
that the impression was due to his resemblance to a Spanish conspirator,
whose object was to destroy the Monarchy and the Church, as had been the
object of the middle-aged conspirator--the girl's father--who had the
good fortune to escape from justice.  It is probable that if Jean Jacques
had known these facts, his story would never have been written, and he
would have died in course of time with twenty children and a seat in the
legislature; for, in spite of his ardent devotion to philosophy and its
accompanying rationalism, he was a devout monarchist and a child of the
Church.

Sad enough it was that, as he shifted his glance from the watch, which
ticked loud enough to wake a farmhand in the middle of the day, he found
those Spanish eyes which had been so lost in studying him.  In the glow
and glisten of the evening sun setting on the shores of Bordeaux, and
flashing reflected golden light to the girl's face, he saw that they were
shining with tears, and though looking at him, appeared not to see him.
In that moment the scrutiny of the little man's mind was volatilized, and
the Spanische, as she was ultimately called, began her career in the life
of the money-master of St. Saviour's.

It began by his immediately resenting the fact that she should be
travelling in the forecastle.  His mind imagined misfortune and a lost
home through political troubles, for he quickly came to know that the
girl and her father were Spanish; and to him, Spain was a place of
martyrs and criminals.  Criminals these could not be--one had but to
look at the girl's face; while the face of her worthless father might
have been that of a friend of Philip IV. in the Escorial, so quiet and
oppressed it seemed.  Nobility was written on the placid, apathetic
countenance, except when it was not under observation, and then the look
of Cain took its place.  Jean Jacques, however, was not likely to see
that look; since Sebastian Dolores--that was his name--had observed from
the first how the master-miller was impressed by his daughter, and he was
set to turn it to account.

Not that the father entered into an understanding with the girl.  He knew
her too well for that.  He had a wholesome respect, not to say fear, of
her; for when all else had failed, it was she who had arranged his escape
from Spain, and who almost saved Carvillho Gonzales from being shot.  She
could have saved Gonzales, might have saved him, would have saved him,
had she not been obliged to save her father.  In the circumstances she
could not save both.

Before the week was out Jean Jacques was possessed of as fine a tale of
political persecution as mind could conceive, and, told as it was by
Sebastian Dolores, his daughter did not seek to alter it, for she had
her own purposes, and they were mixed.  These refugees needed a friend,
for they would land in Canada with only a few dollars, and Carmen Dolores
loved her father well enough not to wish to see him again in such
distress as he had endured in Cadiz.  Also, Jean Jacques, the young,
verdant, impressionable French Catholic, was like her Carvillho Gonzales,
and she had loved her Carvillho in her own way very passionately, and--
this much to her credit--quite chastely.  So that she had no compunction
in drawing the young money-master to her side, and keeping him there by
such arts as such a woman possesses.  These are remarkable after their
kind.  They are combined of a frankness as to the emotions, and such
outer concessions to physical sensations, as make a painful combination
against a mere man's caution; even when that caution has a Norman origin.

More than once Jean Jacques was moved to tears, as the Ananias of Cadiz
told his stories of persecution.

So that one day, in sudden generosity, he paid the captain the necessary
sum to transfer the refugees from the forecastle to his own select
portion of the steamer, where he was so conspicuous a figure among a
handful of lower-level merchant folk and others of little mark who were
going to Quebec.  To these latter Jean Jacques was a gift of heaven, for
he knew so much, and seemed to know so much more, and could give them the
information they desired.  His importance lured him to pose as a
seigneur, though he had no claim to the title.  He did not call himself
Seigneur in so many words, but when others referred to him as the
Seigneur, and it came to his ears, he did not correct it; and when he was
addressed as such he did not reprove.

Thus, when he brought the two refugees from the forecastle and assured
his fellow-passengers that they were Spanish folk of good family exiled
by persecution, his generosity was acclaimed, even while all saw he was
enamoured of Carmen.  Once among the first-class passengers, father and
daughter maintained reserve, and though there were a few who saw that
they were not very far removed above peasants, still the dress of the
girl, which was good--she had been a maid in a great nobleman's family
--was evidence in favour of the father's story.  Sebastian Dolores
explained his own workman's dress as having been necessary for his
escape.

Only one person gave Jean Jacques any warning.  This was the captain
of the Antoine.  He was a Basque, he knew the Spanish people well--the
types, the character, the idiosyncrasies; and he was sure that Sebastian
Dolores and his daughter belonged to the lower clerical or higher working
class, and he greatly inclined towards the former.  In that he was right,
because Dolores, and his father before him, had been employed in the
office of a great commercial firm in Cadiz, and had repaid much
consideration by stirring up strife and disloyalty in the establishment.
But before the anarchist subtracted himself from his occupation, he had
appropriated certain sums of money, and these had helped to carry him on,
when he attached himself to the revolutionaries.  It was on his
daughter's savings that he was now travelling, with the only thing he
had saved from the downfall, which was his head.  It was of sufficient
personal value to make him quite cheerful as the Antoine plunged and
shivered on her way to the country where he could have no steady work
as a revolutionist.

With reserve and caution the Basque captain felt it his duty to tell Jean
Jacques of his suspicions, warning him that the Spaniards were the
choicest liars in the world, and were not ashamed of it; but had the same
pride in it as had their greatest rivals, the Arabs and the Egyptians.

His discreet confidences, however, were of no avail; he was not discreet
enough.  If he had challenged the bona fides of Sebastian Dolores only,
he might have been convincing, but he used the word "they" constantly,
and that roused the chivalry of Jean Jacques.  That the comely, careful
Carmen should be party to an imposture was intolerable.  Everything about
her gave it the lie.  Her body was so perfect and complete, so finely
contrived and balanced, so cunningly curved with every line filled in;
her eye was so full of lustre and half-melancholy too; her voice had such
a melodious monotone; her mouth was so ripe and yet so distant in its
luxury, that imposture was out of the question.

Ah, but Jean Jacques was a champion worth while!  He did nothing by
halves.  He was of the breed of men who grow more intense, more
convinced, more thorough, as they talk.  One adjective begets another,
one warm allusion gives birth to a warmer, one flashing impulse evokes a
brighter confidence, till the atmosphere is flaming with conviction.  If
Jean Jacques started with faint doubt regarding anything, and allowed
himself betimes the flush of a declaration of belief, there could be but
one end.  He gathered fire as he moved, impulse expanded into momentum,
and momentum became an Ariel fleeing before the dark.  He would start by
offering a finger to be pricked, and would end by presenting his own head
on a charger.  He was of those who hypnotize themselves, who glow with
self-creation, who flower and bloom without pollen.

His rejection of the captain's confidence even had a dignity.  He took
out his watch which represented so many laborious hours of other
Barbilles, and with a decision in which the strong pulse of chivalry was
beating hard, he said:

"I can never speak well till I have ate.  That is my hobby.  Well, so it
is.  And I like good company.  So that is why I sit beside Senor and
Senorita Dolores at table--the one on the right, the other on the left,
myself between, like this, like that.  It is dinner-time now here, and
my friends--my dear friends of Cadiz--they wait me.  Have you heard the
Senorita sing the song of Spain, m'sieu'?  What it must be with the
guitar, I know not; but with voice alone it is ravishing.  I have learned
it also.  The Senorita has taught me.  It is a song of Aragon.  It is
sung in high places.  It belongs to the nobility.  Ah, then, you have not
heard it--but it is not too late!  The Senorita, the unhappy ma'm'selle,
driven from her ancestral home by persecution, she will sing it to you as
she has sung it to me.  It is your due.  You are the master of the ship.
But, yes, she shall of her kindness and of her grace sing it to you.  You
do not know how it runs?  Well, it is like this--listen and tell me if it
does not speak of things that belong to the old regime, the ancient
noblesse--listen, m'sieu' le captaanne, how it runs:

              "Have you not heard of mad Murcie?
               Granada gay and And'lousie?
               There's where you'll see the joyous rout,
               When patios pour their beauties out;
               Come, children, come, the night gains fast,
               And Time's a jade too fair to last.
               My flower of Spain, my Juanetta,
               Away, away to gay Jota!
               Come forth, my sweet, away, my queen,
               Though daybreak scorns, the night's between.
               The Fete's afoot--ah!  ah!  ah!  ah!
               De la Jota Ar'gonesa.
               Ah!   ah!  ah!  ah!  ah!  ah!  ah! ah!
               De la Jota Ar'gonesa."

Before he had finished, the captain was more than ready to go, for he had
no patience with such credulity, simplicity and sentimentalism.  He was
Basque, and to be Basque is to lack sentiment and feel none, to play ever
for the safe thing, to get without giving, and to mind your own business.
It had only been an excessive sense of duty which had made the captain
move in this, for he liked Jean Jacques as everyone aboard his Antoine
did; and he was convinced that the Spaniards would play the "Seigneur" to
the brink of disaster at least, though it would have been hard to detect
any element of intrigue or coquetry in Carmen Dolores.

That was due partly to the fact that she was still in grief for her
Gonzales, whose heart had been perforated by almost as many bullets as
the arrows of Cupid had perforated it in his short, gay life of adventure
and anarchy; also partly because there was no coquetry needed to interest
Jean Jacques.  If he was interested it was not necessary to interest
anyone else, nor was it expedient to do so, for the biggest fish in the
net on the Antoine was the money-master of St. Saviour's.

Carmen had made up her mind from the first to marry Jean Jacques, and she
deported herself accordingly--with modesty, circumspection and skill.  It
would be the easiest way out of all their difficulties.  Since her heart,
such as it was, fluttered, a mournful ghost, over the Place d'Armes,
where her Gonzales was shot, it might better go to Jean Jacques than
anyone else; for he was a man of parts, of money, and of looks, and she
loved these all; and to her credit she loved his looks better than all
the rest.  She had no real cupidity, and she was not greatly enamoured of
brains.  She had some real philosophy of life learned in a hard school;
and it was infinitely better founded than the smattering of conventional
philosophy got by Jean Jacques from his compendium picked up on the quay
at Quebec.

Yet Jean Jacques' cruiser of life was not wholly unarmed.  From his
Norman forebears he had, beneath all, a shrewdness and an elementary
alertness not submerged by his vain, kind nature.  He was quite a good
business man, and had proved himself so before his father died--very
quick to see a chance, and even quicker to see where the distant,
sharp corners in the road were; though not so quick to see the pitfalls,
for his head was ever in the air.  And here on the Antoine, there crossed
his mind often the vision of Carmen Dolores and himself in the parish of
St. Saviour's, with the daily life of the Beau Cheval revolving about
him.  Flashes of danger warned him now and then, just at the beginning of
the journey, as it were; just before he had found it necessary to become
her champion against the captain and his calumnies; but they were of the
instant only.  But champion as he became, and worshipping as his manner
seemed, it all might easily have been put down to a warm, chivalrous, and
spontaneous nature, which had not been bitted or bridled, and he might
have landed at Quebec without committing himself, were it not for the
fact that he was not to land at Quebec.

That was the fact which controlled his destiny.  He had spent many, many
hours with the Dona Dolores, talking, talking, as he loved to talk, and
only saving himself from the betise of boring her by the fact that his
enthusiasm had in it so fresh a quality, and because he was so like
her Gonzales that she could always endure him.  Besides, quick of
intelligence as she was, she was by nature more material than she looked,
and there was certainly something physically attractive in him--some
curious magnetism.  She had a well of sensuousness which might one day
become sensuality; she had a richness of feeling and a contour in harmony
with it, which might expand into voluptuousness, if given too much sun,
or if untamed by the normal restraints of a happy married life.  There
was an earthquake zone in her being which might shake down the whole
structure of her existence.  She was unsafe, not because she was
deceiving Jean Jacques now as to her origin and as to her feelings for
him; she was unsafe because of the natural strain of the light of love
in her, joined to a passion for comfort and warmth and to a natural self-
indulgence.  She was determined to make Jean Jacques offer himself before
they landed at Quebec.

But they did not land at Quebec.




CHAPTER II

"THE REST OF THE STORY TO-MORROW"

The journey wore on to the coast of Canada.  Gaspe was not far off when,
still held back by the constitutional tendency of the Norman not to close
a bargain till compelled to do so, Jean Jacques sat with Carmen far
forward on the deck, where the groaning Antoine broke the waters into
sullen foam.  There they silently watched the sunset, golden, purple and
splendid--and ominous, as the captain knew.

"Look, the end of life--like that!" said Jean Jacques oratorically with
a wave of the hand towards the prismatic radiance.

"All the way round, the whole circle--no, it would be too much," Carmen
replied sadly.  "Better to go at noon--or soon after.  Then the only
memory of life would be of the gallop.  No crawling into the night for
me, if I can help it.  Mother of Heaven, no!  Let me go at the top of the
flight."

"It is all the same to me," responded Jean Jacques, "I want to know it
all--to gallop, to trot, to walk, to crawl.  Me, I'm a philosopher.  I
wait."

"But I thought you were a Catholic," she replied, with a kindly, lurking
smile, which might easily have hardened into scoffing.

"First and last," he answered firmly.

"A Catholic and a philosopher--together in one?"  She shrugged a shoulder
to incite him to argument, for he was interesting when excited; when
spurting out little geysers of other people's cheap wisdom and
philosophy, poured through the kind distortion of his own intelligence.

He gave a toss of his head.  "Ah, that is my hobby--I reconcile, I unite,
I adapt!  It is all the nature of the mind, the far-look, the all-round
sight of the man.  I have it all.  I see."

He gazed eloquently into the sunset, he swept the horizon with his hand.
"I have the all-round look.  I say the Man of Calvary, He is before all,
the sun; but I say Socrates, Plato, Jean Jacques--that is my name, and it
is not for nothing, that--Jean Jacques Rousseau, Descartes, Locke, they
are stars that go round the sun.  It is the same light, but not the same
sound.  I reconcile.  In me all comes together like the spokes to the hub
of a wheel.  Me--I am a Christian, I am philosophe, also.  In St.
Saviour's, my home in Quebec, if the crops are good, what do men say?
'C'est le bon Dieu--it is the good God,' that is what they say.  If the
crops are bad, what do they say?  'It is the good God'--that is what they
say.  It is the good God that makes crops good or bad, and it is the good
God that makes men say, 'C'est le bon Dieu.' The good God makes the
philosophy.  It is all one."

She appeared to grow agitated, and her voice shook as she spoke.  "Tsh,
it is only a fool that says the good God does it, when the thing that is
done breaks you or that which you love all to pieces.  No, no, no, it is
not religion, it is not philosophy that makes one raise the head when the
heart is bowed down, when everything is snatched away that was all in
all.  That the good God does it is a lie.  Santa Maria, what a lie!"

"Why 'Santa Maria,' then, if it is a lie?" he asked triumphantly.  He
did not observe how her breast was heaving, how her hands were clenched;
for she was really busy with thoughts of her dead Carvillho Gonzales; but
for the moment he could only see the point of an argument.

She made a gesture of despair.  "So--that's it.  Habit in us is so
strong.  It comes through the veins of our mothers to us.  We say that
God is a lie one minute, and then the next minute we say, 'God guard
you!'  Always--always calling to something, for something outside
ourselves.  That is why I said Santa Maria, why I ask her to pray for the
soul of my friend, to pray to the God that breaks me and mine, and sends
us over the seas, beggars without a home."

Now she had him back out of the vanities of his philosophy.  He was up,
inflamed, looking at her with an excitement on which she depended for her
future.  She knew the caution of his nature, she realized how he would
take one step forward and another step back, and maybe get nowhere in the
end, and she wanted him--for a home, for her father's sake, for what he
could do for them both.  She had no compunctions.  She thought herself
too good for him, in a way, for in her day men of place and mark had
taken notice of her; and if it had not been for her Gonzales she would no
doubt have listened to one of them sometime or another.  She knew she had
ability, even though she was indolent, and she thought she could do as
much for him as any other girl.  If she gave him a handsome wife and
handsome children, and made men envious of him, and filled him with good
things, for she could cook more than tortillas-she felt he would have no
right to complain.  She meant him to marry her--and Quebec was very near!

"A beggar in a strange land, without a home, without a friend--oh, my
broken life!" she whispered wistfully to the sunset.

It was not all acting, for the past reached out and swept over her,
throwing waves of its troubles upon the future.  She was that saddest
of human beings, a victim of dual forces which so fought for mastery with
each other that, while the struggle went on, the soul had no firm
foothold anywhere.  That, indeed, was why her Carvillho Gonzales, who
also had been dual in nature, said to himself so often, "I am a devil,"
and nearly as often, "I have the heart of an angel."

"Tell me all about your life, my friend," Jean Jacques said eagerly.  Now
his eyes no longer hurried here and there, but fastened on hers and
stayed thereabouts--ah, her face surely was like pictures he had seen in
the Louvre that day when he had ambled through the aisles of great men's
glories with the feeling that he could not see too much for nothing in an
hour.

"My life?  Ah, m'sieu', has not my father told you of it?" she asked.

He waved a hand in explanation, he cocked his head quizzically.  "Scraps
--like the buttons on a coat here and there--that's all," he answered.
"Born in Andalusia, lived in Cadiz, plenty of money, a beautiful home,"
--Carmen's eyes drooped, and her face flushed slightly--"no brothers or
sisters--visits to Madrid on political business--you at school--then the
going of your mother, and you at home at the head of the house.  So much
on the young shoulders, the kitchen, the parlour, the market, the shop,
society--and so on.  That is the way it was, so he said, except in the
last sad times, when your father, for the sake of Don Carlos and his
rights, near lost his life--ah, I can understand that: to stand by the
thing you have sworn to!  France is a republic, but I would give my life
to put a Napoleon or a Bourbon on the throne.  It is my hobby to stand by
the old ship, not sign on to a new captain every port."

She raised her head and looked at him calmly now.  The flush had gone
from her face, and a light of determination was in her eyes.  To that was
added suddenly a certain tinge of recklessness and abandon in carriage
and manner, as one flings the body loose from the restraints of clothes,
and it expands in a free, careless, defiant joy.

Jean Jacques' recital of her father's tale had confused her for a moment,
it was so true yet so untrue, so full of lies and yet so solid in fact.
"The head of the house--visits to Madrid on political business--the
parlour, the market, society--all that!"  It suggested the picture of the
life of a child of a great house; it made her a lady, and not a superior
servant as she had been; it adorned her with a credit which was not hers;
and for a moment she was ashamed.  Yet from the first she had lent
herself to the general imposture that they had fled from Spain for
political reasons, having lost all and suffered greatly; and it was true
while yet it was a lie.  She had suffered, both her father and herself
had suffered; she had been in danger, in agony, in sorrow, in despair--
it was only untrue that they were of good birth and blood, and had had
position and comfort and much money.  Well, what harm did that do
anybody?  What harm did it do this little brown seigneur from Quebec?
Perhaps he too had made himself out to be more than he was.  Perhaps he
was no seigneur at all, she thought.  When one is in distant seas and in
danger of his life, one will hoist any flag, sail to any port, pay homage
to any king.  So would she.  Anyhow, she was as good as this provincial,
with his ancient silver watch, his plump little hands, and his book of
philosophy.

What did it matter, so all came right in the end!  She would justify
herself, if she had the chance.  She was sick of conspiracy, and danger,
and chicanery--and blood.  She wanted her chance.  She had been badly
shaken in the last days in Spain, and she shrank from more worry and
misery.  She wanted to have a home and not to wander.  And here was a
chance--how good a chance she was not sure; but it was a chance.  She
would not hesitate to make it hers.  After all, self-preservation was the
thing which mattered.  She wanted a bright fire, a good table, a horse,
a cow, and all such simple things.  She wanted a roof over her and a warm
bed at night.  She wanted a warm bed at night--but a warm bed at night
alone.  It was the price she would have to pay for her imposture, that if
she had all these things, she could not be alone in the sleep-time.  She
had not thought of this in the days when she looked forward to a home
with her Gonzales.  To be near him was everything; but that was all dead
and done for; and now--it was at this point that, shrinking, she suddenly
threw off all restraining thoughts.  With abandon of the mind came a
recklessness of body, which gave her, all at once, a voluptuousness more
in keeping with the typical maid of Andalusia.  It got into the eyes and
senses of Jean Jacques, in a way which had nothing to do with the
philosophy of Descartes, or Kant, or Aristotle, or Hegel.

"It was beautiful in much--my childhood," she said in a low voice,
dropping her eyes before his ardent gaze, "as my father said.  My mother
was lovely to see, but not bigger than I was at twelve--so petite, and
yet so perfect in form--like a lark or a canary.  Yes, and she could
sing--anything.  Not like me with a voice which has the note of a drum or
an organ--"

"Of a flute, bright Senorita," interposed Jean Jacques.

"But high, and with the trills in the skies, and all like a laugh with a
tear in it.  When she went to the river to wash--"

She was going to say "wash the clothes," but she stopped in time and said
instead, "wash her spaniel and her pony"--her face was flushed again with
shame, for to lie about one's mother is a sickening thing, and her mother
never had a spaniel or a pony--" the women on the shore wringing their
clothes, used to beg her to sing.  To the hum of the river she would make
the music which they loved--"

"La Manola and such?" interjected Jean Jacques eagerly.  "That's a fine
song as you sing it."

"Not La Manola, but others of a different sort--The Love of Isabella, The
Flight of Bobadil, Saragosse, My Little Banderillero, and so on, and all
so sweet that the women used to cry.  Always, always she was singing till
the time when my father became a rebel.  Then she used to cry too; and
she would sing no more; and when my father was put against a wall to be
shot, and fell in the dust when the rifles rang out, she came at the
moment, and seeing him lying there, she threw up her hands, and fell down
beside him dead--"

"The poor little senora, dead too--"

"Not dead too--that was the pity of it.  You see my father was not dead.
The officer"--she did not say sergeant--"who commanded the firing squad,
he was what is called a compadre of my father--"

"Yes, I understand--a made-brother, sealed with an oath, which binds
closer than a blood-brother.  It is that, is it not?"

"So--like that.  Well, the compadre had put blank cartridges in their
rifles, and my father pretended to fall dead; and the soldiers were
marched away; and my father, with my mother, was carried to his home,
still pretending to be dead.  It had been all arranged except the awful
thing, my mother's death.  Who could foresee that?  She ought to have
been told; but who could guess that she would hear of it all, and come
at the moment like that?  So, that was the way she went, and I was left
alone with my father."  She had told the truth in all, except in
conveying that her mother was not of the lower orders, and that she went
to the river to wash her spaniel and her pony instead of her clothes.

"Your father--did they not arrest him again?  Did they not know?"

She shrugged her shoulders.  That is not the way in Spain.  He was shot,
as the orders were, with his back to the wall by a squad of soldiers with
regulation bullets.  If he chose to come to life again, that was his own
affair.  The Government would take no notice of him after he was dead.
He could bury himself, or he could come alive--it was all the same to
them.  So he came alive again."

"That is a story which would make a man's name if he wrote it down,"
said Jean Jacques eloquently.  "And the poor little senora, but my heart
bleeds for her!  To go like that in such pain, and not to know--If she
had been my wife I think I would have gone after her to tell her it was
all right, and to be with her--"

He paused confused, for that seemed like a reflection on her father's
chivalry, and for a man who had risked his life for his banished king--
what would he have thought if he had been told that Sebastian Dolores was
an anarchist who loathed kings!--it was an insult to suggest that he did
not know the right thing to do, or, knowing, had not done it.

She saw the weakness of his case at once.  "There was his duty to the
living," she said indignantly.

"Ah, forgive me--what a fool I am!" Jean Jacques said repentantly at
once.  "There was his little girl, his beloved child, his Carmen Dolores,
so beautiful, with the voice like a flute, and--"

He drew nearer to her, his hand was outstretched to take hers; his eyes
were full of the passion of the moment; pity was drowning all caution,
all the Norman shrewdness in him, when the Antoine suddenly stopped
almost dead with a sudden jolt and shock, then plunged sideways, jerked,
and trembled.

"We've struck a sunk iceberg--the rest of the story to-morrow, Senorita,"
he cried, as they both sprang to their feet.

"The rest of the story to-morrow," she repeated, angry at the stroke of
fate which had so interrupted the course of her fortune.  She said it
with a voice also charged with fear; for she was by nature a landfarer,
not a sea-farer, though on the rivers of Spain she had lived almost as
much as on land, and she was a good swimmer.

"The rest to-morrow," she repeated, controlling herself.




CHAPTER III

"TO-MORROW"

The rest came to-morrow.  When the Antoine struck the sunken iceberg she
was not more than one hundred and twenty miles from the coast of Gaspe.
She had not struck it full on, or she would have crumpled up, but had
struck and glanced, mounting the berg, and sliding away with a small
gaping wound in her side, broken internally where she had been weakest.
Her condition was one of extreme danger, and the captain was by no means
sure that he could make the land.  If a storm or a heavy sea came on,
they were doomed.

As it was, with all hands at the pumps the water gained on her, and she
moaned and creaked and ached her way into the night with no surety that
she would show a funnel to the light of another day.  Passengers and crew
alike worked, and the few boats were got ready to lower away when the
worst should come to the worst.  Below, with the crew, the little
moneymaster of St. Saviour's worked with an energy which had behind it
some generations of hardy qualities; and all the time he refused to be
downcast.  There was something in his nature or in his philosophy after
all.  He had not much of a voice, but it was lusty and full of good
feeling; and when cursing began, when a sailor even dared to curse his
baptism--the crime of crimes to a Catholic mind--Jean Jacques began to
sing a cheery song with which the habitants make vocal their labours or
their playtimes:

                   "A Saint-Malo, beau port de mer,
                    Trois gros navir's sont arrives,
                    Trois gros navir's sont arrives
                    Charges d'avoin', charges de ble.
                    Charges d'avoin', charges de ble:
                    Trois dam's s'en vont les marchander."

And so on through many verses, with a heartiness that was a good antidote
to melancholy, even though it was no specific for a shipwreck.  It played
its part, however; and when Jean Jacques finished it, he plunged into
that other outburst of the habitant's gay spirits, 'Bal chez Boule':

              "Bal chez Boule, bal chez Boule,
               The vespers o'er, we'll away to that;
               With our hearts so light, and our feet so gay,
               We'll dance to the tune of 'The Cardinal's Hat'
               The better the deed, the better the day
               Bal chez Boule, bal chez Boule!"

And while Jean Jacques worked "like a little French pony," as they say in
Canada of every man with the courage to do hard things in him, he did not
stop to think that the scanty life-belts had all been taken, and that he
was a very poor swimmer indeed: for, as a child, he had been subject to
cramp, and so had made the Beau Cheval River less his friend than would
have been useful now.

He realized it, however, soon after daybreak, when, within a few hundred
yards of the shores of Gaspe, to which the good Basque captain had been
slowly driving the Antoine all night, there came the cry, "All
hands on deck!" and "Lower the boats!" for the Antoine's time had come,
and within a hand-reach of shore almost she found the end of her rickety
life.  Not more than three-fourths of the passengers and crew were got
into the boats.  Jean Jacques was not one of these; but he saw Carmen
Dolores and her father safely bestowed, though in different boats.  To
the girl's appeal to him to come he gave a nod of assent, and said he
would get in at the last moment; but this he did not do, pushing into the
boat instead a crying lad of fifteen, who said he was afraid to die.

So it was that Jean Jacques took to the water side by side with the
Basque captain, when the Antoine groaned and shook, and then grew still,
and presently, with some dignity, dipped her nose into the shallow sea
and went down.

"The rest of the story to-morrow," Jean Jacques had said when the vessel
struck the iceberg the night before; and so it was.

The boat in which Carmen had been placed was swamped not far from shore,
but she managed to lay hold of a piece of drifting wreckage, and began to
fight steadily and easily landward.  Presently she was aware, however, of
a man struggling hard some little distance away to the left of her, and
from the tousled hair shaking in the water she was sure that it was Jean
Jacques.

So it proved to be; and thus it was that, at his last gasp almost, when
he felt he could keep up no longer, the wooden seat to which Carmen clung
came to his hand, and a word of cheer from her drew his head up with what
was almost a laugh.

"To think of this!" he said presently when he was safe, with her
swimming beside him without support, for the wooden seat would not
sustain the weight of two.  "To think that it is you who saves me!" he
again declared eloquently, as they made the shore in comparative ease,
for she was a fine swimmer.

"It is the rest of the story," he said with great cheerfulness and aplomb
as they stood on the shore in the morning sun, shoeless, coatless, but
safe: and she understood.

There was nothing else for him to do.  The usual process of romance had
been reversed.  He had not saved her life, she had saved his.  The least
that he could do was to give her shelter at the Manor Cartier yonder at
St. Saviour's, her and, if need be, her father.  Human gratitude must
have play.  It was so strong in this case that it alone could have
overcome the Norman caution of Jean Jacques, and all his worldly wisdom
(so much in his own eyes).  Added thereto was the thing which had been
greatly stirred in him at the instant the Antoine struck; and now he kept
picturing Carmen in the big living-room and the big bedroom of the house
by the mill, where was the comfortable four-poster which had come from
the mansion of the last Baron of Beaugard down by St. Laurent.

Three days after the shipwreck of the Antoine, and as soon as sufficient
finery could be got in Quebec, it was accomplished, the fate of Jean
Jacques.  How proud he was to open his cheque-book before the young
Spanish maid, and write in cramped, characteristic hand a cheque for a
hundred dollars or so at a time!  A moiety of this money was given to
Sebastian Dolores, who could scarcely believe his good fortune.  A
situation was got for him by the help of a good abbe at Quebec, who was
touched by the tale of the wreck of the Antoine, and by the no less
wonderful tale of the refugees of Spain, who naturally belonged to the
true faith which "feared God and honoured the King."  Sebastian Dolores
was grateful for the post offered him, though he would rather have gone
to St. Saviour's with his daughter, for he had lost the gift of work, and
he desired peace after war.  In other words, he had that fatal trait of
those who strive to make the world better by talk and violence, the vice
of indolence.

But when Jean Jacques and his handsome bride started for St. Saviour's,
the new father-in-law did not despair of following soon.  He would
greatly have enjoyed the festivities which, after all, did follow the
home-coming of Jean Jacques Barbille and his Spanische; for while they
lacked enthusiasm because Carmen was a foreigner, the romance of the
story gave the whole proceedings a spirit and interest which spread into
adjoining parishes: so that people came to mass from forty miles away to
see the pair who had been saved from the sea.

And when the Quebec newspapers found their way into the parish, with a
thrilling account of the last hours of the Antoine; and of Jean Jacques'
chivalrous act in refusing to enter a boat to save himself, though he was
such a bad swimmer and was in danger of cramp; and how he sang Bal chez
Boule while the men worked at the pumps; they permitted the apres noces
of M'sieu' and Madame Jean Jacques Barbille to be as brilliant as could
be, with the help of lively improvisation.  Even speech-making occurred
again in an address of welcome some days later.  This was followed by a
feast of Spanish cakes and meats made by the hands of Carmen Dolores,
"the lady saved from the sea"--as they called her; not knowing that she
had saved herself, and saved Jean Jacques as well.  It was not quite to
Jean Jacques' credit that he did not set this error right, and tell the
world the whole exact truth.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Air of certainty and universal comprehension
Always calling to something, for something outside ourselves
Came of a race who set great store by mothers and grandmothers
Grove of pines to give a sense of warmth in winter
Grow more intense, more convinced, more thorough, as they talk
He admired, yet he wished to be admired
Inclined to resent his own insignificance
Lyrical in his enthusiasms
No man so simply sincere, or so extraordinarily prejudiced
Of those who hypnotize themselves, who glow with self-creation
Spurting out little geysers of other people's cheap wisdom
Untamed by the normal restraints of a happy married life






THE MONEY MASTER

By Gilbert Parker



EPOCH THE SECOND

IV.       THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER AND THE CLERK OF THE COURT TELLS A STORY
V.        THE CLERK OF THE COURT ENDS HIS STORY
VI.       JEAN JACQUES HAD HAD A GREAT DAY
VII.      JEAN JACQUES AWAKES FROM SLEEP
VIII.     THE GATE IN THE WALL
IX.       "MOI-JE SUIS PHILOSOPHE"
X.        "QUIEN SABE"--WHO KNOWS!
XI.       THE CLERK OF THE COURT KEEPS A PROMISE
XII.      THE MASTER-CARPENTER HAS A PROBLEM




CHAPTER IV

THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER AND THE CLERK OF THE COURT TELLS A STORY

It was hard to say which was the more important person in the parish, the
New Cure or M'sieu' Jean Jacques Barbille.  When the Old Cure was alive
Jean Jacques was a lesser light, and he accepted his degree of
illumination with content.  But when Pere Langon was gathered to his
fathers, and thousands had turned away from the graveyard, where he who
had baptised them, confirmed them, blessed them, comforted them, and
firmly led them was laid to rest, they did not turn at once to his
successor with confidence and affection.  The new cure, M. Savry, was
young; the Old Cure had lived to be eighty-five, bearing wherever he went
a lamp of wisdom at which the people lighted their small souls.  The New
Cure could command their obedience, but he could not command their love
and confidence until he had earned them.

So it was that, for a time, Jean Jacques took the place of the Old Cure
in the human side of the life of the district, though in a vastly lesser
degree.  Up to the death of M. Langon, Jean Jacques had done very well
in life, as things go in out-of-the-way places of the world.  His mill,
which ground good flour, brought him increasing pence; his saw-mill more
than paid its way; his farms made a small profit, in spite of a cousin
who worked one on halves, but who had a spendthrift wife; the ash-factory
which his own initiative had started made no money, but the loss was only
small; and he had even made profit out of his lime-kilns, although
Sebastian Dolores, Carmen's father, had at one time mismanaged them--but
of that anon.  Jean Jacques himself managed the business of money-lending
and horse-dealing; and he also was agent for fire insurance and a dealer
in lightning rods.

In the thirteen years since he married he had been able to keep a good
many irons in the fire, and also keep them more or less hot.  Many people
in his and neighbouring parishes were indebted to him, and it was worth
their while to stand well with him.  If he insisted on debts being paid,
he was never exacting or cruel.  If he lent money, he never demanded more
than eight per cent.; and he never pressed his debtors unduly.  His
cheerfulness seldom deserted him, and he was notably kind to the poor.
Not seldom in the winter time a poor man, here and there in the parish,
would find dumped down outside his door in the early morning a half-cord
of wood or a bag of flour.

It could not be said that Jean Jacques did not enjoy his own generosity.
His vanity, however, did not come from an increasing admiration of his
own personal appearance, a weakness which often belongs to middle age;
but from the study of his so-called philosophy, which in time became an
obsession with him.  In vain the occasional college professors, who spent
summer months at St. Saviour's, sought to interest him in science and
history, for his philosophy had large areas of boredom; but science
marched over too jagged a road for his tender intellectual feet; the
wild places where it led dismayed him.  History also meant numberless
dates and facts.  Perhaps he could have managed the dates, for he was
quick at figures, but the facts were like bees in their hive,--he could
scarcely tell one from another by looking at them.

So it was that Jean Jacques kept turning his eyes, as he thought, to the
everlasting meaning of things, to "the laws of Life and the decrees of
Destiny."  He was one of those who had found, as he thought, what he
could do, and was sensible enough to do it.  Let the poor fellows, who
gave themselves to science, trouble their twisted minds with trigonometry
and the formula of some grotesque chemical combination; let the dull
people rub their noses in the ink of Greek and Latin, which was no use
for everyday consumption; let the heads of historians ache with the
warring facts of the lives of nations; it all made for sleep.  But
philosophy--ah, there was a field where a man could always use knowledge
got from books or sorted out of his own experiences!

It happened, therefore, that Jean Jacques, who not too vaguely realized
that there was reputation to be got from being thought a philosopher,
always carried about with him his little compendium from the quay at
Quebec, which he had brought ashore inside his redflannel shirt, with the
antique silver watch, when the Antoine went down.

Thus also it was that when a lawyer in court at Vilray, four miles from
St. Saviour's, asked him one day, when he stepped into the witness-box,
what he was, meaning what was his occupation, his reply was, "Moi-je suis
M'sieu' Jean Jacques, philosophe--(Me--I am M'sieu' Jean Jacques,
philosopher)."

A little later outside the court-house, the Judge who had tried the case
--M. Carcasson--said to the Clerk of the Court:

"A curious, interesting little man, that Monsieur Jean Jacques.  What's
his history?"

"A character, a character, monsieur le juge," was the reply of M. Amand
Fille.  "His family has been here since Frontenac's time.  He is a figure
in the district, with a hand in everything.  He does enough foolish
things to ruin any man, yet swims along--swims along.  He has many kinds
of business--mills, stores, farms, lime-kilns, and all that, and keeps
them all going; and as if he hadn't enough to do, and wasn't risking
enough, he's now organizing a cheese-factory on the co-operative
principle, as in Upper Canada among the English."

"He has a touch of originality, that's sure," was the reply of the Judge.

The Clerk of the Court nodded and sighed.  "Monseigneur Giron of Laval,
the greatest scholar in Quebec, he said to me once that M'sieu' Jean
Jacques missed being a genius by an inch.  But, monsieur le juge, not to
have that inch is worse than to be an ignoramus."

Judge Carcasson nodded.  "Ah, surely!  Your Jean Jacques lacks a balance-
wheel.  He has brains, but not enough.  He has vision, but it is not
steady; he has argument, but it breaks down just where it should be most
cohesive.  He interested me.  I took note of every turn of his mind as he
gave evidence.  He will go on for a time, pulling his strings, doing this
and doing that, and then, all at once, when he has got a train of
complications, his brain will not be big enough to see the way out.  Tell
me, has he a balance-wheel in his home--a sensible wife, perhaps?"

The Clerk of the Court shook his head mournfully and seemed to hesitate.
Then he said, "Comme ci, comme ca--but no, I will speak the truth about
it.  She is a Spaniard--the Spanische she is called by the neighbours.
I will tell you all about that, and you will wonder that he has carried
on as well as he has, with his vanity and his philosophy."

"He'll have need of his philosophy before he's done, or I don't know
human nature; he'll get a bad fall one of these days," responded the
Judge.  "'Moi-je suis M'sieu' Jean Jacques, philosophe'--that is what he
said.  Bumptious little man, and yet--and yet there's something in him.
There's a sense of things which everyone doesn't have--a glimmer of life
beyond his own orbit, a catching at the biggest elements of being,
a hovering on the confines of deep understanding, as it were.  Somehow
I feel almost sorry for him, though he annoyed me while he was in the
witness-box, in spite of myself.  He was as the English say, so 'damn
sure.'"

"So damn sure always," agreed the Clerk of the Court, with a sense of
pleasure that his great man, this wonderful aged little judge, should
have shown himself so human as to use such a phrase.

"But, no doubt, the sureness has been a good servant in his business,"
returned the Judge.  "Confidence in a weak world gets unearned profit
often.  But tell me about his wife--the Spanische.  Tell me the how and
why, and everything.  I'd like to trace our little money-man wise to his
source."

Again M. Fille was sensibly agitated.  "She is handsome, and she has
great, good gifts when she likes to use them," he answered.  "She can do
as much in an hour as most women can do in two; but then she will not
keep at it.  Her life is but fits and starts.  Yet she has a good head
for business, yes, very good.  She can see through things.  Still, there
it is--she will not hold fast from day to day."

"Yes, yes, but where did she come from?  What was the field where she
grew?"

"To be sure, monsieur.  It was like this," responded the other.

Thereupon M. Fille proceeded to tell the history, musical with legend,
of Jean Jacques' Grand Tour, of the wreck of the Antoine, of the marriage
of the "seigneur," the home-coming, and the life that followed, so far as
rumour, observation, and a mind with a gift for narrative, which was not
to be incomplete for lack of imagination, could make it.  It was only
when he offered his own reflections on Carmen Dolores, now Carmen
Barbille, and on women generally, that Judge Carcasson pulled him up.

"So, so, I see.  She has temperament and so on, but she's unsteady,
and regarded by her neighbours not quite as one that belongs.  Bah,
the conceit of every race!  They are all the same.  The English are the
worst--as though the good God was English.  But the child--so beautiful,
you say, and yet more like the father than the mother.  He is not
handsome, that Jean Jacques, but I can understand that the little one
should be like him and yet beautiful too.  I should like to see the
child."

Suddenly the Clerk of the Court stopped and touched the arm of his
distinguished friend and patron.  "That is very easy, monsieur,"
he said eagerly, "for there she is in the red wagon yonder, waiting for
her father.  She adores him, and that makes trouble sometimes.  Then the
mother gets fits, and makes things hard at the Manor Cartier.  It is not
all a bed of roses for our Jean Jacques.  But there it is.  He is very
busy all the time.  Something doing always, never still, except when you
will find him by the road-side, or in a tavern with all the people round
him, talking, jesting, and he himself going into a trance with his book
of philosophy.  It is very strange that everlasting going, going, going,
and yet that love of his book.  I sometimes think it is all pretence, and
that he is all vanity--or almost so.  Heaven forgive me for my want of
charity!"

The little round judge cocked his head astutely.  "But you say he is kind
to the poor, that he does not treat men hardly who are in debt to him,
and that he will take his coat off his back to give to a tramp--is it
so?"

"As so, as so, monsieur."

"Then he is not all vanity, and because of that he will feel the blow
when it comes--alas, so much he will feel it!"

"What blow, monsieur le juge?--but ah, look, monsieur!"  He pointed
eagerly.  "There she is, going to the red wagon--Madame Jean Jacques.
Is she not a figure of a woman?  See the walk of her--is it not
distinguished?  She is half a hand-breadth taller than Jean Jacques.  And
her face, most sure it is a face to see.  If Jean Jacques was not so busy
with his farms and his mills and his kilns and his usury, he would see
what a woman he has got.  It is his good fortune that she has such sense
in business.  When Jean Jacques listens to her, he goes right.  She
herself did not want her father to manage the lime-kilns--the old
Sebastian Dolores.  She was for him staying at Mirimachi, where he kept
the books of the lumber firm.  But no, Jean Jacques said that he could
make her happy by having her father near her, and he would not believe
she meant what she said.  He does not understand her; that is the
trouble.  He knows as much of women or men as I know of--"

"Of the law--hein?" laughed the great man.

"Monsieur--ah, that is your little joke!  I laugh, yes, but I laugh,"
responded the Clerk of the Court a little uncertainly.  "Now once when
she told him that the lime-kilns--"

The Judge, who had retraced his steps down the street of the town--it was
little more than a large village, but because it had a court-house and a
marketplace it was called a town--that he might have a good look at
Madame Jean Jacques and her child before he passed them, suddenly said:

"How is it you know so much about it all, Maitre Fille--as to what she
says and of the inner secrets of the household?  Ah, ha, my little
Lothario, I have caught you--a bachelor too, with time on his hands,
and the right side of seventy as well!  The evidence you have given of a
close knowledge of the household of our Jean Jacques does not have its
basis in hearsay, but in acute personal observation.  Tut-tut!  Fie-fie!
my little gay Clerk of the Court.  Fie!  Fie!"

M. Fille was greatly disconcerted.  He had never been a Lothario.
In forty years he had never had an episode with one of "the other sex,"
but it was not because he was impervious to the softer emotions.  An
intolerable shyness had ever possessed him when in the presence of women,
and even small girl children had frightened him, till he had made friends
with little Zoe Barbille, the daughter of Jean Jacques.  Yet even with
Zoe, who was so simple and companionable and the very soul of childish
confidence, he used to blush and falter till she made him talk.  Then he
became composed, and his tongue was like a running stream, and on that
stream any craft could sail.  On it he became at ease with madame the
Spanische, and he even went so far as to look her full in the eyes on
more than one occasion.

"Answer me--ah, you cannot answer!" teasingly added the Judge, who loved
his Clerk of the Court, and had great amusement out of his discomfiture.
"You are convicted.  At an age when a man should be settling down, you
are gallivanting with the wife of a philosopher."

"Monsieur--monsieur le juge!" protested M. Fille with slowly heightening
colour.  "I am innocent, yes, altogether.  There is nothing, believe me.
It is the child, the little Zoe--but a maid of charm and kindness.  She
brings me cakes and the toffy made by her own hands; and if I go to the
Manor Cartier, as I often do, it is to be polite and neighbourly.  If
Madame says things to me, and if I see what I see, and hear what I hear,
it is no crime; it is no misdemeanour; it is within the law--the perfect
law."

Suddenly the Judge linked his arm within that of the other, for he also
was little, and he was fat and round and ruddy, and even smaller than M.
Fille, who was thin, angular and pale.

"Ah, my little Confucius," he said gently, "have you seen and heard me so
seldom that you do not know me yet, or what I really think?  Of course it
is within the law--the perfect law--to visit at m'sieu' the philosopher's
house and talk at length also to m'sieu' the philosopher's wife; while to
make the position regular by friendship with the philosopher's child is a
wisdom which I can only ascribe to"--his voice was charged with humour
and malicious badinage "to an extended acquaintance with the devices of
human nature, as seen in those episodes of the courts with which you have
been long familiar."

"Oh, monsieur, dear monsieur!" protested the Clerk of the Court, "you
always make me your butt."

"My friend," said the Judge, squeezing his arm, "if I could have you no
other way, I would make you my butler!"

Then they both laughed at the inexpensive joke, and the Clerk of the
Court was in high spirits, for on either side of the street were people
with whom he lived every day, and they could see the doyen of the Bench,
the great Judge Carcasson, who had refused to be knighted, arm in arm
with him.  Aye, and better than all, and more than all, here was Zoe
Barbille drawing her mother's attention to him almost in the embrace of
the magnificent jurist.

The Judge, with his small, round, quizzical eyes which missed nothing,
saw too; and his attention was strangely arrested by the faces of both
the mother and the child.  His first glance at the woman's face made him
flash an inward light on the memory of Jean Jacques' face in the witness-
box, and a look of reflective irony came into his own.  The face of
Carmen Dolores, wife of the philosophic miller and money-master, did not
belong to the world where she was placed--not because she was so unlike
the habitant women, or even the wives of the big farmers, or the sister
of the Cure, or the ladies of the military and commercial exiles who
lived in that portion of the province; but because of an alien something
in her look--a lonely, distant sense of isolation, a something which
might hide a companionship and sympathy of a rare kind, or might be but
the mask of a furtive, soulless nature.  In the child's face was nothing
of this.  It was open as the day, bright with the cheerfulness of her
father's countenance, alive with a humour which that countenance did not
possess.  The contour was like that of Jean Jacques, but with a fineness
and delicacy to its fulness absent from his own; and her eyes were a deep
and lustrous brown, under a forehead which had a boldness of gentle
dignity possessed by neither father nor mother.  Her hair was thick,
brown and very full, like that of her father, and in all respects, save
one, she had an advantage over both her parents.  Her mouth had a
sweetness which might not unfairly be called weakness, though that was
balanced by a chin of commendable strength.

But the Judge's eyes found at once this vulnerable point in her character
as he had found that of her mother.  Delightful the child was, and alert
and companionable, with no remarkable gifts, but with a rare charm and
sympathy.  Her face was the mirror of her mind, and it had no ulterior
thought.  Her mother's face, the Judge had noted, was the foreground of a
landscape which had lonely shadows.  It was a face of some distinction
and suited to surroundings more notable, though the rural life Carmen had
led since the Antoine went down and her fortunes came up, had coarsened
her beauty a very little.

"There's something stirring in the coverts," said the Judge to himself as
he was introduced to the mother and child.  By a hasty gesture Zoe gave a
command to M. Fille to help her down.  With a hand on his shoulder she
dropped to the ground.  Her object was at once apparent.  She made a
pretty old-fashioned curtsey to the Judge, then held out her hand, as
though to reassert her democratic equality.

As the Judge looked at Madame Barbille, he was involuntarily, but none
the less industriously, noting her characteristics; and the sum of his
reflections, after a few moments' talk, was that dangers he had seen
ahead of Jean Jacques, would not be averted by his wife, indeed might
easily have their origin in her.

"I wonder it has gone on as long as it has," he said to himself; though
it seemed unreasonable that his few moments with her, and the story told
him by the Clerk of the Court, should enable him to come to any definite
conclusion.  But at eighty-odd Judge Carcasson was a Solon and a Solomon
in one.  He had seen life from all angles, and he was not prepared to
give any virtue or the possession of any virtue too much rope; while
nothing in life surprised him.

"How would you like to be a judge?" he asked of Zoe, suddenly taking her
hand in his.  A kinship had been at once established between them, so
little has age, position, and intellect to do with the natural
gravitations of human nature.

She did not answer direct, and that pleased him.  "If I were a judge I
should have no jails," she said.  "What would you do with the bad
people?" he asked.

"I would put them alone on a desert island, or out at sea in a little
boat, or out on the prairies without a horse, so that they'd have to work
for their lives."

"Oh, I see!  If M. Fille here set fire to a house, you would drop him on
the prairie far away from everything and everybody and let him 'root hog
or die'?"

"Don't you think it would kill him or cure him?" she asked whimsically.

The Judge laughed, his eyes twinkling.  "That's what they did when the
world was young, dear ma'm'selle.  There was no time to build jails.
Alone on the prairie--a separate prairie for every criminal--that would
take a lot of space; but the idea is all right.  It mightn't provide the
proper degree of punishment, however.  But that is being too particular.
Alone on the prairie for punishment--well, I should like to see it
tried."

He remembered that saying of his long after, while yet he was alive,
and a tale came to him from the prairies which made his eyes turn
more intently towards a land that is far off, where the miserable
miscalculations and mistakes of this world are readjusted.  Now he was
only conscious of a primitive imagination looking out of a young girl's
face, and making a bridge between her understanding and his own.

"What else would you do if you were a judge?" he asked presently.

"I would make my father be a miller," she replied.  "But he is a miller,
I hear."

"But he is so many other things--so many.  If he was only a miller we
should have more of him.  He is at home only a little.  If I get up early
enough in the morning, or if I am let stay up at night late enough, I see
him; but that is not enough--is it, mother?" she added with a sudden
sense that she had gone too far, that she ought not to say this perhaps.

The woman's face had darkened for an instant, and irritation showed in
her eyes, but by an effort of the will she controlled herself.

"Your father knows best what he can do and can't do," she said evenly.

"But you would not let a man judge for himself, would you, ma'm'selle?"
asked the old inquisitor.  "You would judge for the man what was best for
him to do?"

"I would judge for my father," she replied.  "He is too good a man to
judge for himself."

"Well, there's a lot of sense in that, ma'm'selle philosophe," answered
Judge Carcasson.  "You would make the good idle, and make the bad work.
The good you would put in a mill to watch the stones grind, and the bad
you would put on a prairie alone to make the grist for the grinding.
Ma'm'selle, we must be friends--is it not so?"

"Haven't we always been friends?" the young girl asked with the look of
a visionary suddenly springing up in her eyes.

Here was temperament indeed.  She pleased Judge Carcasson greatly.  "But
yes, always, and always, and always," he replied.  Inwardly he said to
himself, "I did not see that at first.  It is her father in her.

"Zoe!" said her mother reprovingly.




CHAPTER V

THE CLERK OF THE COURT ENDS HIS STORY

A moment afterwards the Judge, as he walked down the street still arm in
arm with the Clerk of the Court, said: "That child must have good luck,
or she will not have her share of happiness.  She has depths that are not
deep enough."  Presently he added, "Tell me, my Clerk, the man--Jean
Jacques--he is so much away--has there never been any talk about--about."

"About--monsieur le juge?" asked M. Fille rather stiffly.  "For instance
--about what?"

"For instance, about a man--not Jean Jacques."

The lips of the Clerk of the Court tightened.  "Never at any time--till
now, monsieur le juge."

"Ah--till now!"

The Clerk of the Court blushed.  What he was about to say was difficult,
but he alone of all the world guessed at the tragedy which was hovering
over Jean Jacques' home.  By chance he had seen something on an afternoon
of three days before, and he had fled from it as a child would fly from a
demon.  He was a purist at law, but he was a purist in life also, and not
because the flush of youth had gone and his feet were on the path which
leads into the autumn of a man's days.  The thing he had seen had been
terribly on his mind, and he had felt that his own judgment was not
sufficient for the situation, that he ought to tell someone.

The Cure was the only person who had come to his mind when he became
troubled to the point of actual mental agony.  But the new curb,
M. Savry, was not like the Old Cure, and, besides, was it not stepping
between the woman and her confessional?  Yet he felt that something ought
to be done.  It never occurred to him to speak to Jean Jacques.  That
would have seemed so brutal to the woman.  It came to him to speak to
Carmen, but he knew that he dared not do so.  He could not say to a
woman that which must shame her before him, she who had kept her head
so arrogantly high--not so much to him, however, as to the rest of the
world.  He had not the courage; and yet he had fear lest some awful thing
would at any moment now befall the Manor Cartier.  If it did, he would
feel himself to blame had he done nothing to stay the peril.  So far he
was the only person who could do so, for he was the only person who knew!

The Judge could feel his friend's arm tremble with emotion, and he said:
"Come, now, my Plato, what is it?  A man has come to disturb the peace of
Jean Jacques, our philosophe, eh?"

"That is it, monsieur--a man of a kind."

"Oh, of course, my bambino, of course, a man 'of a kind,' or there would
be no peace disturbed.  You want to tell me, I see.  Proceed then; there
is no reason why you should not.  I am secret.  I have seen much.  I have
no prejudices.  As you will, however; but I can see it would relieve your
mind to tell me.  In truth I felt there was something when I saw you look
at her first, when you spoke to her, when she talked with me.  She is a
fine figure of a woman, and Jean Jacques, as you say, is much away from
home.  In fact he neglects her--is it not so?"

"He means it not, but it is so.  His life is full of--"

"Yes, yes, of stores and ash-factories and debtors and lightning-rods and
lime-kilns, and mortgaged farms, and the price of wheat--but certainly,
I understand it all, my Fille.  She is too much alone, and if she has
travelled by the compass all these thirteen years without losing the
track, it is something to the credit of human nature."

"Ah, monsieur, a vow before the good God--!"  The Judge interrupted
sharply.  "Tut, tut--these vows!  Do you not know that a vow may be a
thing that ruins past redemption?  A vow is sacred.  Well, a poor mortal
in one moment of weakness breaks it.  Then there is a sense of awful
shame of being lost, of never being able to put right the breaking of the
vow, though the rest can be put right by sorrow and repentance!  I would
have no vows.  They haunt like ghosts when they are broken, they torture
like fire then.  Don't talk to me of vows.  It is not vows that keep the
world right, but the prayer of a man's soul from day to day."

The Judge's words sounded almost blasphemous to M. Fille.  A vow not
keep the world right!  Then why the vows of the Church at baptism,
at confirmation, at marriage?  Why the vows of the priests, of the nuns,
of those who had given themselves to eternal service?  Monsieur had
spoken terrible things.  And yet he had said at the last: "It is not vows
that keep the world right, but the prayer of a man's soul from day to
day."  That was not heretical, or atheistic, or blasphemous.  It sounded
logical and true and good.

He was about to say that, to some people, vows were the only way of
keeping them to their duty--and especially women--but the Judge added
gently: "I would not for the world hurt your sensibilities, my little
Clerk, and we are not nearly so far apart as you think at the minute.
Thank God, I keep the faith that is behind all faith--the speech of a
man's soul with God.  .  .  .  But there, if you can, let us hear what
man it is who disturbs the home of the philosopher.  It is not my Fille,
that's sure."

He could not resist teasing, this judge who had a mind of the most rare
uprightness; and he was not always sorry when his teasing hurt; for, to
his mind, men should be lashed into strength, when they drooped over the
tasks of life; and what so sharp a lash as ridicule or satire!

"Proceed, my friend," he urged brusquely, not waiting for the gasp of
pained surprise of the little Clerk to end.  He was glad to see the
figure beside him presently straighten itself, as though to be braced for
a task of difficulty.  Indignation and resentment were good things to
stiffen a man's back.

"It was three days ago," said M. Fille.  "I saw it with my own eyes.
I had come to the Manor Cartier by the road, down the hill--Mont Violet--
behind the house.  I could see into the windows of the house.  There was
no reason why I should not see--there never has been a reason," he added,
as though to justify himself.

"Of course, of course, my friend.  One's eyes are open, and one sees what
one sees, without looking for it.  Proceed."

"As I looked down I saw Madame with a man's arms round her, and his lips
to hers.  It was not Jean Jacques."

"Of course, of course.  Proceed.  What did you do?"

"I stopped.  I fell back--"

"Of course.  Behind a tree?"

"Behind some elderberry bushes."

"Of course.  Elderberry bushes--that's better than a tree.  I am very
fond of elderberry wine when it is new.  Proceed."

The Clerk of the Court shrank.  What did it matter whether or no the
Judge liked elderberry wine, when the world was falling down for Jean
Jacques and his Zoe--and his wife.  But with a sigh he continued: "There
is nothing more.  I stayed there for awhile, and then crept up the hill
again, and came back to my home and locked myself in."

"What had you done that you should lock yourself in?"

"Ah, monsieur, how can I explain such things?  Perhaps I was ashamed that
I had seen things I should not have seen.  I do not blush that I wept for
the child, who is--but you saw her, monsieur le juge."

"Yes, yes, the little Zoe, and the little philosopher.  Proceed."

"What more is there to tell!"

"A trifle perhaps, as you will think," remarked the Judge ironically, but
as one who, finding a crime, must needs find the criminal too.  "I must
ask you to inform the Court who was the too polite friend of Madame."

"Monsieur, pardon me.  I forgot.  It is essential, of course.  You must
know that there is a flume, a great wooden channel--"

"Yes, yes.  I comprehend.  Once I had a case of a flume.  It was fifteen
feet deep and it let in the water of the river to the mill-wheels.  A
flume regulates, concentrates, and controls the water power.  I
comprehend perfectly.  Well?"

"So.  This flume for Jean Jacques' mill was also fifteen feet deep or
more.  It was out of repair, and Jean Jacques called in a master-
carpenter from Laplatte, Masson by name--George Masson--to put the flume
right."

"How long ago was that?"

"A month ago.  But Masson was not here all the time.  It was his workmen
who did the repairs, but he came over to see--to superintend.  At first
he came twice in the week.  Then he came every day."

"Ah, then he came every day!  How do you know that?"

"It was my custom to walk to the mill every day--to watch the work on the
flume.  It was only four miles away across the fields and through the
woods, making a walk of much charm--especially in the autumn, when the
colours of the foliage are so fine, and the air has a touch of
pensiveness, so that one is induced to reflection."

There was the slightest tinge of impatience in the Judge's response.
"Yes, yes, I understand.  You walked to study life and to reflect and to
enjoy your intimacy with nature, but also to see our friend Zoe and her
home.  And I do not wonder.  She has a charm which makes me sad--
for her."

"So I have felt, so I have felt for her, monsieur.  When she is gayest,
and when, as it might seem, I am quite happy, talking to her, or
picnicking, or idling on the river, or helping her with her lessons,
I have sadness, I know not why."

The Judge pressed his friend's arm firmly.  His voice grew more
insistent.  "Now, Maitre Fille, I think I understand the story, but there
are lacunee which you must fill.  You say the thing happened three days
ago--now, when will the work be finished?"

"The work will be finished to-morrow, monsieur.  Only one workman is
left, and he will be quit of his task to-night."

"So the thing--the comedy or tragedy will come to an end to-morrow?"
remarked the Judge seriously.  "How did you find out that the workmen
go tomorrow, maitre?"

"Jean Jacques--he told me yesterday."

"Then it all ends to-morrow," responded the Judge.

The puzzled subordinate stood almost still, and looked at the Judge in
wonder.  Why should it all end to-morrow simply because the work was
finished at the flume?  At last he spoke.

"It is only twelve miles to Laplatte where George Masson lives, and he
has, besides, another contract near here, but three miles from the Manor
Cartier.  Also besides, how can we know what she will do--Jean Jacques'
wife.  How can we tell but that she will perhaps go and leave the beloved
Zoe alone!"

"And leave our little philosopher--miller also alone?" remarked the
Judge quizzically, yet with solemnity.  M. Fille was agitated; he made
a protesting gesture.  "Jean Jacques can find comfort, but the child--ah,
no, it is too terrible!  Someone should speak.  I tried to do it--to
Madame Carmen, to Jean Jacques; but it was no use.  How could I betray
her to him, how could I tell her that I knew her shame!"

The Judge turned brusquely and caught his friend by the shoulders,
fastening him with the eyes which had made many a witness forget to lie.

"If you were an avocat in practice I would ruin your reputation, Fille,"
he said.  "A fool would tell Jean Jacques, or speak to the woman, and
spoil all; for women go mad when they are in danger, and they do the
impossible things.  But did it not occur to you that the one person to
have in a quiet room with the doors shut, with the light of the sun in
his face, with the book of the law open on your desk and the damages to
be got by an injured husband, in a Catholic province with a Catholic
Judge, written down on a piece of paper, to hand over at the right
moment--did it not strike you that that person was your George Masson?"

M. Fille's head dropped before the disdainful eyes of M. Carcasson.  He
who prided himself in keeping the court right on points of procedure, who
was looked upon almost with the respect given the position of the Judge
himself, that he should fail in thinking of the obvious thing was
humiliating, and alas! so disconcerting.

"I am a fool, an imbecile," he responded, in great dejection.

"This much must be said, my imbecile, that every man some time or other
makes just such a fool of his intelligence," was the soft reply.

A thin hand made a gesture of dissent.  "Not you, monsieur.  Never!"

"If it is any comfort to you, know then, my Solon, that I have done so
publicly in my time, while you have only done it privately.  But let us
see.  That Masson must be struck of a heap.  What sort of a man is he to
look at?  Apart from his morals, what class of creature is he?"

"He is a man of strength, of force in his way, monsieur.  He made himself
from an apprentice without a cent, and he has now thirty men at work."

"Then he does not drink or gamble?"

"Neither, monsieur."

"Has he a family?"

"No, monsieur."

"How old is he?"

"Forty or thereabouts, monsieur."

The Judge cogitated for a moment, then said: "Ah, that's bad--unmarried
and forty, and no vices except this.  It gives him few escape-valves.  Is
he good-looking?  What is his appearance?"

"Nor short, nor tall, and square shoulders.  His face like the yellow
brown of a peach, hair that curls close to his head, blue eyes that see
everything, and a big hand that knows what it is doing."

The Judge nodded.  "Ah, you have watched him, maitre.  .  .  .  When?
Since then?"

"No, no, monsieur, not since.  If I had watched him since, I should
perhaps have thought of the right thing to do.  But I did not.  I used to
study him while the work was going on, when he first came, but I have
known him some time from a distance.  If a man makes himself what he is,
you look at him, of course."

"Truly.  His temper--his disposition, what is it?"  M. Fille was very
much alive now.  He replied briskly.  "Like the snap of a whip.  He flies
into anger and flies out.  He has a laugh that makes men say, 'How he
enjoys himself !' and his mind is very quick and sure."

The Judge nodded with satisfaction.  "Well done!  Well done!  I have got
him in my eye.  He will not be so easy to handle; but, if he has brains,
he will see that you have the right end of the stick; and he will kiss
and ride away.  It will not be easy, but the game is in your hands, my
Fille.  In a quiet room, with the book of the law open, and figures of
damages given by a Catholic court and Judge--I think that will do it; and
then the course of true philosophy will not long be interrupted in the
house of Jean Jacques Barbille."

"Monsieur--monsieur le juge, you mean that I shall do this, shall see
George Masson and warn him--me?"

"Who else?  You are a friend of the family.  You are a public officer, to
whom the good name of your parish is dear.  As all are aware, no doubt,
you are the trusted ancient comrade of the daughter of the woman--I speak
legally--Carmen Barbille nee Dolores, a name of charm to the ear.  Who
but you then to do it?"

"There is yourself, monsieur."

"Dismiss me from your mind.  I go to Quebec to-night, as you know, and
there is not time; but even if there were, I should not be the best
person to do this.  I am known to few; you are known to all.  I have no
locus standi.  You have.  No, no, it would not be for me."

Suddenly, in his desperation, the Clerk of the Court sought release for
himself from this solemn and frightening duty.

"Monsieur," he said eagerly, "there is another.  I had forgotten.  It is
Madame Carmen's father, Sebastian Dolores."

"Ah, a father!  Yes, I had forgotten to ask about him; so we are one in
our imbecility, my little Aristotle.  This Sebastian Dolores, where is
he?"

"In the next parish, Beauharnais, keeping books for a lumber-firm.  Ah,
monsieur, that is the way to deal with the matter--through Sebastian
Dolores, her father!"

"What sort is he?"

The other shook his head and did not answer.  "Ah, not of the best?
Drinks?"

M. Fille nodded.

"Has a weak character?"

Again M. Fille nodded.

"Has no good reputation hereabouts?"

The nod was repeated.  "He has never been steady He goes here and there,
but always he comes back to get Jean Jacques' help.  He and his daughter
are not close friends, and yet he likes to be near her.  She can endure
him at least.  He can command her interest.  He is a stranger in a
strange land, and he drifts back to where she is always.  But that is
all."

"Then he is out of the question, and he would be always out of the
question except as a last resort; for sooner or later he would tell his
daughter, and challenge our George Masson too; and that is what you do
not wish, eh?"

"Precisely so," remarked M. Fille, dropping back again into gloom.  "To
be quite honest, monsieur, even though it gives me a task which I abhor,
I do not think that M. Dolores could do what is needed without mistakes
which could not be mended.  At least I can--"  He stopped.

The Judge interposed at once, well pleased with the way things were going
for this "case."  "Assuredly.  You can as can no other, my Solon.  The
secret of success in such things is a good heart, a right mind, a clear
intelligence and some astuteness, and you have it all.  It is your task
and yours only."

The little man's self-respect seemed restored.  He preened himself
somewhat and bowed to the Judge.  "I take your commands, monsieur, to
obey them as heaven gives me power so to do.  Shall it be tomorrow?"

The Judge reflected a moment, then said: "Tonight would be better, but--"

"I can do it better to-morrow morning," interposed M. Fille, "for George
Masson has a meeting here at Vilray with the avocat Prideaux at ten
o'clock to sign a contract, and I can ask him to step into my office on a
little affair of business.  He will not guess, and I shall be armed"--the
Judge frowned--"with the book of the law on such misdemeanours, and the
figures of the damages,"--the Judge smiled--"and I think perhaps I can
frighten him as he has never been frightened before."

A courage and confidence had now taken possession of the Clerk in strange
contrast to his timidity and childlike manner of a few minutes before.
He was now as he appeared in court, clothed with an austere authority
which gave him a vicarious strength and dignity.  The Judge had done his
work well, and he was of those folk in the world who are not content to
do even the smallest thing ill.

Arm in arm they passed into the garden which fronted the vine-covered
house, where Maitre Fille lived alone with his sister, a tiny edition of
himself, who whispered and smiled her way through life.

She smiled and whispered now in welcome to the Judge; and as she did so,
the three saw Jean Jacques, laughing, and cracking his whip, drive past
with his daughter beside him, chirruping to the horses; while, moody and
abstracted, his wife sat silent on the backseat of the red wagon.




CHAPTER VI

JEAN JACQUES HAD HAD A GREAT DAY

Jean Jacques was in great good humour as he drove away to the Manor
Cartier.  The day, which was not yet aged, had been satisfactory from
every point of view.  He had impressed the Court, he had got a chance to
pose in the witness-box; he had been able to repeat in evidence the
numerous businesses in which he was engaged; had referred to his
acquaintance with the Lieutenant-Governor and a Cardinal; to his Grand
Tour (this had been hard to do in the cross-examination to which he was
subjected, but he had done it); and had been able to say at the very
start in reply as to what was his occupation--"Moi je suis M'sieu' Jean
Jacques, philosophe."

Also he had, during the day, collected a debt long since wiped off his
books; he had traded a poor horse for a good cow; he had bought all the
wheat of a Vilray farmer below market-price, because the poor fellow
needed ready money; he had issued an insurance policy; his wife and
daughter had conversed in the public streets with the great judge who was
the doyen of the provincial Bench; and his daughter had been kissed by
the same judge in the presence of at least a dozen people.  He was, in
fact, very proud of his Carmen and his Carmencita, as he called the two
who sat in the red wagon sharing his glory--so proud that he did not
extol them to others; and he was quite sure they were both very proud of
him.  The world saw what his prizes of life were, and there was no need
to praise or brag.  Dignity and pride were both sustained by silence and
a wave of the hand, which in fact said to the world, "Look you, my
masters, they belong to Jean Jacques.  Take heed."

There his domestic scheme practically ended.  He was so busy that he took
his joys by snatches, in moments of suspension of actual life, as it
were.  His real life was in the eddy of his many interests, in the field
of his superficial culture, in the eyes of the world.  The worst of him
was on the surface.  He showed what other men hid, that was all.  Their
vanity was concealed, he wore it in his cap.  They put on a manner as
they put on their clothes, and wore it out in the world, or took it off
in their own homes-behind the door of life; but he was the same vain,
frank, cocksure fellow in his home as in the street.  There was no
difference at all.  He was vain, but he had no conceit; and therefore he
did not deceive, and was not tyrannous or dictatorial; in truth, if you
but estimated him at his own value, he was the least insistent man alive.
Many a debtor knew this; and, by asking Jean Jacques' advice, making an
appeal to his logic, as it were--and it was always worth listening to,
even when wrong or sadly obvious, because of the glow with which he
declared things this or that--found his situation immediately eased.
Many a hard-up countryman, casting about for a five-dollar bill, could
get it of Jean Jacques by telling him what agreeable thing some important
person had said about him; or by writing to a great newspaper in Montreal
a letter, saying that the next candidate for the provincial legislature
should be M. Jean Jacques Barbille, of St. Saviour's.  This never failed
to draw a substantial "bill" from the wad which Jean Jacques always
carried in his pocket-loose, not tied up in a leather roll, as so many
lesser men freighted the burdens of their wealth.

He had changed since the day he left Bordeaux on the Antoine; since he
had first caught the flash of interest in Carmen Dolores' eyes--an
interest roused from his likeness to a conspirator who had been shot for
his country's good.  He was no stouter in body, for he was of the kind
that wear away the flesh by much doing and thinking; but there were
occasional streaks of grey in his bushy hair, and his eye roamed less
than it did once.  In the days when he first brought Carmen home, his eye
was like a bead of brown light on a swivel.  It flickered and flamed; it
saw here, saw there; it twinkled, and it pierced into life's mysteries;
and all the while it was a good eye.  Its whites never showed, as it
were.  As an animal, his eye showed a nature free from vice.  In some
respects he was easy to live with, for he never found fault with what
was given him to eat, or the way the house was managed; and he never
interfered with the "kitchen people," or refused a dollar or ten dollars
to Carmen for finery.  In fact, he was in a sense too lavish, for he used
at one time to bring her home presents of silks and clothes and toilet
things and stockings and hats, which were not in accord with her taste,
and only vexed her.  Indeed, she resented wearing them, and could hardly
bring herself to thank him for them.  At last, however, she induced him
to let her buy what she wanted with the presents of money which he might
give her.

On the whole Carmen fared pretty well, for he would sometimes give her a
handful of bills from his pocket, bidding her take ten dollars, and she
would coolly take twenty, while he shrugged his shoulders and declared
she would be his ruin.  He had never repented of marrying her, in spite
of the fact that she did not always keep house as his mother and
grandmother had kept it; that she was gravely remiss in going to mass;
and that she quarrelled with more than one of her neighbours, who had an
idea that Spain was an inferior country because it was south of France,
just as the habitants regarded the United States as a low and inferior
country because it was south of Quebec.  You went north towards heaven
and south towards hell, in their view; but when they went so far as to
patronize or slander Carmen, she drove her verbal stilettos home without
a button; so that on one occasion there would have been a law-suit for
libel if the Old Cure had not intervened.  To Jean Jacques' credit,
be it said, he took his wife's part on this occasion, though in his
heart he knew that she was in the wrong.

He certainly was not always in the right himself.  If he had been told
that he neglected his wife he would have been justly indignant.  Also, it
never occurred to him that a woman did not always want to talk philosophy
or discuss the price of wheat or the cost of flour-barrels; and that for
a man to be stupidly and foolishly fond was dearer to a woman than
anything else.  How should he know--yet he ought to have done so, if he
really was a philosopher--that a woman would want the cleverest man in
the world to be a boy and play the fool sometimes; that she would rather,
if she was a healthy woman, go to a circus than to a revelation of the
mysteries of the mind from an altar of culture, if her own beloved man
was with her.

Carmen had been left too much alone, as M. Fille had said to Judge
Carcasson.  Her spirits had moments of great dullness, when she was ready
to fling herself into the river--or the arms of the schoolmaster or the
farrier.  When she first came to St. Saviour's, the necessity of adapting
herself to the new conditions, of keeping faith with herself, which she
had planned on the Antoine, and making a good wife to the man who was to
solve all her problems for her, prevailed.  She did not at first miss so
much the life of excitement, of danger, of intrigue, of romance, of
colour and variety, which she had left behind in Spain.  When her child
was born, she became passionately fond of it; her maternal spirit
smothered it.  It gave the needed excitement in the routine of life at
St. Saviour's.

Yet the interest was not permanent.  There came a time when she resented
the fact that Jean Jacques made more of the child than he did of herself.
That was a bad day for all concerned, for dissimulation presently became
necessary, and the home of Jean Jacques was a home of mystery which no
philosophy could interpret.  There had never been but the one child.  She
was not less handsome than when Jean Jacques married her and brought her
home, though the bloom of maiden youthfulness was no longer there; and
she certainly was a cut far above the habitant women or even the others
of a higher social class, in a circle which had an area equal to a
principality in Europe.

The old cure, M. Langon, had had much influence over her, for few could
resist the amazing personal influence which his rare pure soul secured
over the worst.  It was a sad day to her when he went to his long home;
and inwardly she felt a greater loss than she had ever felt, save that
once when her Carvillho Gonzales went the way of the traitor.  Memories
of her past life far behind in Madrid did not grow fainter; indeed, they
grew more distinct as the years went on.  They seemed to vivify, as her
discontent and restlessness grew.

Once, when there had come to St. Saviour's a middle-aged baron from Paris
who had heard the fishing was good at St. Saviour's, and talked to her of
Madrid and Barcelona, of Cordova and Toledo, as one who had seen and
known and (he declared) loved them; who painted for her in splashing
impressionist pictures the life that still eddied in the plazas and
dreamed in the patios, she had been almost carried off her feet with
longing; and she nearly gave that longing an expression which would have
brought a tragedy, while still her Zoe was only eight years old.  But
M. Langon, the wise priest whose eyes saw and whose heart understood,
had intervened in time; and she never knew that the sudden disappearance
of the Baron, who still owed fifty dollars to Jean Jacques, was due to
the practical wisdom of a great soul which had worked out its own destiny
in a little back garden of the world.

When this good priest was alive she felt she had a friend who was as
large of heart as he was just, and who would not scorn the fool according
to his folly, or chastise the erring after his deserts.  In his greatness
of soul Pere Langon had shut his eyes to things that pained him more
than they shocked him, for he had seen life in its most various and
demoralized forms, and indeed had had his own temptations when he lived
in Belgium and France, before he had finally decided to become a priest.
He had protected Carmen with a quiet persistency since her first day in
the parish, and had had a saving influence over her.  Pere Langon
reproved those who criticized her and even slandered her, for it was
evident to all that she would rather have men talk to her than women;
and any summer visitor who came to fish, gave her an attention never
given even to the youngest and brightest in the district; and the eyes
of the habitant lass can be very bright at twenty.  Yet whatever Carmen's
coquetry and her sport with fire had been, her own emotions had never
been really involved till now.

The new cure, M. Savry, would have said they were involved now because
she never came to confession, and indeed, since the Old Cure died, she
had seldom gone to mass.  Yet when, with accumulated reproof on his
tongue, M. Savry did come to the Manor Cartier, he felt the inherent
supremacy of beauty, not the less commanding because it had not the
refinement of the duchess or the margravine.

Once M. Savry ventured to do what the Old Cure would never have done--he
spoke to Jean Jacques concerning Carmen's neglect of mass and confession,
and he received a rebuff which was almost au seigneur; for in Jean
Jacques' eyes he was now the figure in St. Saviour's; and this was an
occasion when he could assert his position as premier of the secular
world outside the walls of the parish church.  He did it in good style
for a man who had had no particular training in the social arts.

This is how he did it and what he said:

"There have been times when I myself have thought it would be a good
thing to have a rest from the duties of a Catholic, m'sieu' le cure," he
remarked to M. Savry, when the latter had ended his criticism.  He said
it with an air of conflict, and with full intent to make his supremacy
complete.

"No Catholic should speak like that," returned the shocked priest.

"No priest should speak to me as you have done," rejoined Jean Jacques.
"What do you know of the reasons for the abstention of madame?  The soul
must enjoy rest as well as the body, and madame has a--mind which can
judge for itself.  I have a body that is always going, and it gets too
little rest, and that keeps my soul in a flutter too.  It must be getting
to mass and getting to confession, and saying aves and doing penance,
it is such a busy little soul of mine; but we are not all alike, and
madame's body goes in a more stately way.  I am like a comet, she is
like the sun steady, steady, round and round, with plenty of sleep and
the comfortable darkness.  Sometimes madame goes hard; so does the sun
in summer-shines, shines, shines like a furnace.  Madame's body goes like
that--at the dairy, in the garden, with the loom, among the fowls,
growing her strawberries, keeping the women at the beating of the flax;
and then again it is all still and idle like the sun on a cloudy day;
and it rests.  So it is with the human soul--I am a philosopher--I think
the soul goes hard the same as the body, churning, churning away in the
heat of the sun; and then it gets quiet and goes to sleep in the cloudy
day, when the body is sick of its bouncing, and it has a rest--the soul
has a rest, which is good for it, m'sieu'.  I have worked it all out so.
Besides, the soul of madame is her own.  I have not made any claim upon
it, and I will not expect you to do more, m'sieu' le cure."

"It is my duty to speak," protested the good priest.  "Her soul is God's,
and I am God's vicar--"

Jean Jacques waved a hand.  "T'sh, you are not the Pope.  You are not
even an abbe.  You were only a deacon a few years ago.  You did not know
how to hold a baby for the christening when you came to St. Saviour's
first.  For the mass, you have some right to speak; it is your duty
perhaps; but the confession, that is another thing; that is the will of
every soul to do or not to do.  What do you know of a woman's soul-well,
perhaps, you know what they have told you; but madame's soul--"

"Madame has never been to confession to me," interjected M. Savry
indignantly.  Jean Jacques chuckled.  He had his New Cure now for sure.

"Confession is for those who have sinned.  Is it that you say one must go
to confession, and in order to go to confession it is needful to sin?"

M. Savry shivered with pious indignation.  He had a sudden desire to rend
this philosophic Catholic--to put him under the thumb-screw for the glory
of the Lord, and to justify the Church; but the little Catholic miller-
magnate gave freely to St. Saviour's; he was popular; he had a position;
he was good to the poor; and every Christmas-time he sent a half-dozen
bags of flour to the presbytery!

All Pere Savry ventured to say in reply was: "Upon your head be it,
M. Jean Jacques.  I have done my duty.  I shall hope to see madame at
mass next Sunday."

Jean Jacques had chuckled over that episode, for he had conquered;
he had shown M. Savry that he was master in his own household and outside
it.  That much his philosophy had done for him.  No other man in the
parish would have dared to speak to the Cure like that.  He had never
scolded Carmen when she had not gone to church.  Besides, there was
Carmen's little daughter always at his side at mass; and Carmen always
insisted on Zoe going with him, and even seemed anxious for them to be
off at the first sound of the bells of St. Saviour's.  Their souls were
busy, hers wanted rest; that was clear.  He was glad he had worked it out
so cleverly to the Cure--and to his own mind.  His philosophy surely had
vindicated itself.

But Jean Jacques was far from thinking of these things as he drove back
from Vilray and from his episode in Court to the Manor Cartier.  He was
indeed just praising himself, his wife, his child, and everything that
belonged to him.  He was planning, planning, as he talked, the new things
to do--the cheese-factory, the purchase of a steam-plough and a steam-
thresher which he could hire out to his neighbours.  Only once during the
drive did he turn round to Carmen, and then it was to ask her if she had
seen her father of late.

"Not for ten months," was her reply.  "Why do you ask?"

"Wouldn't he like to be nearer you and Zoe?  It's twelve miles to
Beauharnais," he replied.

"Are you thinking of offering him another place at the Manor?" she asked
sharply.

"Well, there is the new cheese-factory--not to manage, but to keep the
books!  He's doing them all right for the lumber-firm.  I hear that he--"

"I don't want it.  No good comes from relatives working together.  Look
at the Latouche farm where your cousin makes his mess.  My father is well
enough where he is."

"But you'd like to see him oftener--I was only thinking of that," said
Jean Jacques in a mollifying voice.  It was the kind of thing in which he
showed at once the weakness and the kindness of his nature.  He was in
fact not a philosopher, but a sentimentalist.

"If mother doesn't think it's sensible, why do it, father?" asked Zoe
anxiously, looking up into her father's face.

She had seen the look in her mother's eyes, and also she had no love for
her grandfather.  Her instinct had at one time wavered regarding him; but
she had seen an incident with a vanished female cook, and though she had
not understood, a prejudice had been created in her mind.  She was always
contrasting him with M. Fille, who, to her mind, was what a grandfather
ought to be.

"I won't have him beholden to you," said Carmen, almost passionately.

"He is of my family," said Jean Jacques firmly and chivalrously.  "There
is no question of being beholden."

"Let well enough alone," was the gloomy reply.  With a sigh, Jean Jacques
turned back to the study of the road before him, to gossip with Zoe, and
to keep on planning subconsciously the new things he must do.

Carmen sighed too, or rather she gave a gasp of agitation and annoyance.
Her father?  She had lost whatever illusion once existed regarding him.
For years he had clung to her--to her pocket.  He was given to drinking
in past years, and he still had his sprees.  Like the rest of the world,
she had not in earlier years seen the furtiveness in his handsome face;
but at last, as his natural viciousness became stereotyped, and bad
habits matured and emphasized, she saw beneath his mask of low-class
comeliness.  When at last she had found it necessary to dismiss the best
cook she ever had, because of him, they saw little of each other.  This
was coincident with his failure at the ash-factory, where he mismanaged
and even robbed Jean Jacques right and left; and she had firmly insisted
on Jean Jacques evicting him, on the ground that it was not Sebastian
Dolores' bent to manage a business.

This little episode, as they drove home from Vilray, had an unreasonable
effect upon her.

It was like the touch of a finger which launches a boat balancing in the
ways onto the deep.  It tossed her on a sea of agitation.  She was swept
away on a flood of morbid reflection.

Her husband and her daughter, laughing and talking in the front seat of
the red wagon, seemed quite oblivious of her, and if ever there was a
time when their influence was needed it was now.  George Masson was
coming over late this afternoon to inspect the work he had been doing;
and she was trembling with an agitation which, however, did not show upon
the surface.  She had not seen him for two days--since the day after the
Clerk of the Court had discovered her in the arms of a man who was not
her husband; but he was coming this evening, and he was coming to-morrow
for the last time; for the repair work on the flume of the dam would all
be finished then.

But would the work he had been doing all be finished then?  As she
thought of that incident of three days ago and of its repetition on the
following day, she remembered what he had said to her as she snatched
herself almost violently from his arms, in a sudden access of remorse.
He had said that it had to be, that there was no escape now; and at his
words she had felt every pulse in her body throbbing, every vein
expanding with a hot life which thrilled and tortured her.  Life had been
so meagre and so dull, and the man who had worshipped her on the Antoine
now worshipped himself only, and also Zoe, the child, maybe; or so she
thought; while the man who had once possessed her whole mind and whole
heart, and never her body, back there in Spain, he, Carvillho Gonzales,
would have loved her to the end, in scenes where life had colour and
passion and danger and delightful movement.

She was one of those happy mortals who believe that the dead and gone
lover was perfect, and that in losing him she was losing all that life
had in store; but the bare, hard truth was that her Gonzales could have
been true neither to her nor to any woman in the world for longer than
one lingering year, perhaps one lunar month.  It did not console her--
she did not think of it-that the little man on the seat of the red wagon,
chirruping with their daughter, had been, would always be, true to her.
Of what good was fidelity if he that was faithful desired no longer as
he once did?

A keen observer would have seen in the glowing, unrestful look, in the
hot cheek, in the interlacing fingers, that a contest was going on in the
woman's soul, as she drove homeward with all that was her own in the
world.  The laughter of her husband and child grated painfully on her
ears.  Why should they be mirthful while her life was being swept by a
storm of doubt, temptation, and dark passion?  Why was it?

Yet she smiled at Jean Jacques when he lifted her down from the red wagon
at the door of the Manor Cartier, even though he lifted his daughter down
first.

Did she smile at Jean Jacques because, as they came toward the Manor,
she saw George Masson in the distance by the flume, and in that moment
decided to keep her promise and meet him at a secluded point on the
river-bank at sunset after supper?




CHAPTER VII

JEAN JACQUES AWAKES FROM SLEEP

The pensiveness of a summer evening on the Beau Cheval was like a veil
hung over all the world.  While yet the sun was shining, there was the
tremor of life in the sadness; but when the last glint of amethyst and
gold died away behind Mont Violet, and the melancholy swish of the river
against the osiered banks rose out of the windless dusk, all the region
around Manor Cartier, with its cypresses, its firs, its beeches, and its
elms, became gently triste.  Even the weather-vane on the Manor--the gold
Cock of Beaugard, as it was called--did not move; and the stamping of a
horse in the stable was like the thunderous knock of a traveller from
Beyond.  The white mill and the grey manor stood out with ghostly
vividness in the light of the rising moon.  Yet there were times
innumerable when they looked like cool retreats for those who wanted
rest; when, in the summer solstice, they offered the pleasant peace of
the happy fireside.  How often had Jean Jacques stood off from it all of
a summer night and said to himself: "Look at that, my Jean Jacques.  It
is all yours, Manor and mills and farms and factory--all."

"Growing, growing, fattening, while I drone in my feather bed," he had
as often said, with the delighted observation of the philosopher.  "And
me but a young man yet--but a mere boy," he would add.  "I have piled it
up--I have piled it up, and it keeps on growing, first one thing and then
another."

Could such a man be unhappy?  Finding within himself his satisfaction,
his fountain of appeasement, why should not his days be days of
pleasantness and peace?  So it appeared to him during that summer, just
passed, when he had surveyed the World and his world within the World,
and it seemed to his innocent mind that he himself had made it all.
There he was, not far beyond forty, and eligible to become a member
of Parliament, or even a count of the Holy Roman Empire!  He had thought
of both these honours, but there was so much to occupy him--he never had
a moment to himself, except at night; and then there was planning and
accounting to do, his foremen to see, or some knotty thing to
disentangle.  But when the big clock in the Manor struck ten, and he took
out his great antique silver watch, to see if the two marched to the
second, he would go to the door, look out into the night, say, "All's
well, thank the good God," and would go to bed, very often forgetting to
kiss Carmen, and even forgetting his darling little Zoe.

After all, a mind has to be very big and to have very many tentacles to
hold so many things all at once, and also to remember to do the right
thing at the right moment every time.  He would even forget to ask Carmen
to play on the guitar, which in the first days of their married life was
the recreation of every evening.  Seldom with the later years had he
asked her to sing, because he was so busy; and somehow his ear had not
that keenness of sound once belonging to it.  There was a time when he
himself was wont to sing, when he taught his little Zoe the tunes of the
Chansons Canadiennes; but even that had dropped away, except at rare
intervals, when he would sing Le Petit Roger Bontemps, with Petite Fleur
de Bois, and a dozen others; but most he would sing--indeed there was
never a sing-song in the Manor Cartier but he would burst forth with A la
Claire Fontaine and its haunting refrain:

                   "Il y a longtemps que je t'aime,
                    Jamais je ne t'oublierai."

But this very summer, when he had sung it on the birthday of the little
Zoe, his voice had seemed out of tune.  At first he had thought that
Carmen was playing his accompaniment badly on the guitar, but she had
sharply protested against that, and had appealed to M. Fille, who was
present at the pretty festivity.  He had told the truth, as a Clerk of
the Court should.  He said that Jean Jacques' voice was not as he had so
often heard it; but he would also frankly admit that he did not think
madame played the song as he had heard her play it aforetime, and that
covered indeed twelve years or more--in fact, since the birth of the
renowned Zoe.

M. Fille had wondered much that night of June at the listless manner and
listless playing of Carmen Barbille.  For a woman of such spirit and fire
it would seem as though she must be in ill-health to play like that.  Yet
when he looked at her he saw only the comeliness of a woman whom the life
of the haut habitant had not destroyed or, indeed, dimmed.  Her skin was
smooth, she had no wrinkles, and her neck was a pillar of softly moulded
white flesh, around which a man might well string unset jewels, if he had
them; for the tint and purity of her skin would be a better setting than
platinum or fine gold.  But the Clerk of the Court was really
unsophisticated, or he would have seen that Carmen played the guitar
badly because she was not interested in Jean Jacques' singing.  He would
have known that she had come to that stage in her married life when the
tenure is pitifully insecure.  He would have seen that the crisis was
near.  If he had had any real observation he would have noticed that
Carmen's eyes at once kindled, and that the guitar became a different
thing, when M. Colombin, the young schoolmaster, one of the guests,
caught up the refrain of A la Claire Fontaine, and in a soft tenor voice
sang it with Jean Jacques to the end, and then sang it again with Zoe.
Then Carmen's dark eyes deepened with the gathering light in them, her
body seemed to vibrate and thrill with emotion; and when M. Colombin and
Zoe ceased, with her eyes fixed on the distance, and as though
unconscious of them all, she began to sing a song of Cadiz which she had
not sung since boarding the Antoine at Bordeaux.  Her mind had, suddenly
flown back out of her dark discontent to the days when all life was
before her, and, with her Gonzales, she had moved in an atmosphere of
romance, adventure and passion.

In a second she was transformed from the wife of the brown money-master
to the girl she was when she came to St. Saviour's from the plaza, where
her Carvillho Gonzales was shot, with love behind her and memory blazoned
in the red of martyrdom.  She sang now as she had not sung for some
years.  Her guitar seemed to leap into life, her face shone with the hot
passion of memory, her voice rang with the pain of a disappointed life:

              "Granada, Granada, thy gardens are gay,
               And bright are thy stars, the high stars above;
               But as flowers that fade and are gray,
               But as dusk at the end of the day,
               Are ye to the light in the eyes of my love
               In the eyes, in the soul, of my love.

              "Granada, Granada, oh, when shall I see
               My love in thy gardens, there waiting for me?

              "Beloved, beloved, have pity, and make
               Not the sun shut its eyes, its hot, envious eyes,
               And the world in the darkness of night
               Be debtor to thee for its light.
               Turn thy face, turn thy face from the skies
               To the love, to the pain in my eyes.

              "Granada, Granada, oh, when shall I see
               My love in thy gardens, there waiting for me!"

From that night forward she had been restless and petulant and like one
watching and waiting.  It seemed to her that she must fly from the life
which was choking her.  It was all so petty and so small.  People went
about sneaking into other people's homes like detectives; they turned
yellow and grew scrofulous from too much salt pork, green tea, native
tobacco, and the heat of feather beds.  The making of a rag carpet was an
event, the birth of a baby every year till the woman was forty-five was a
commonplace; but the exit of a youth to a seminary to become a priest, or
the entrance to the novitiate of a young girl, were matters as important
as a battle to Napoleon the Great.

How had she gone through it all so long, she asked herself?  The presence
of Jean Jacques had become almost unbearable when, the day done, he
retired to the feather bed which she loathed, though he would have looked
upon discarding it like the abdication of his social position.  A feather
bed was a sign of social position; it was as much the dais to his honour
as is the woolsack to the Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords.

She was waiting for something.  There was a restless, vagrant spirit
alive in her now.  She had been so long inactive, tied by the leg,
with wings clipped; now her mind roamed into pleasant places of the
imagination where life had freedom, where she could renew the impulses
of youth.  A true philosopher-a man of the world-would have known for
what she was waiting with that vague, disordered expectancy and yearning;
but there was no man of the world to watch and guide her this fateful
summer, when things began to go irretrievably wrong.

Then George Masson came.  He was a man of the world in his way; he saw
and knew better than the philosopher of the Manor Cartier.  He grasped
the situation with the mind of an artist in his own sphere, and with the
knowledge got by experience.  Thus there had been the thing which the
Clerk of the Court saw from Mont Violet behind the Manor; and so it was
that as Jean Jacques helped Carmen down from the red wagon on their
return from Vilray, she gave him a smile which was meant to deceive; for
though given to him it was really given to another man in her mind's eye.
At sunset she gave it again to George Masson on the river-bank, only
warmer and brighter still, with eyes that were burning, with hands that
trembled, and with an agitated bosom more delicately ample than it was on
the day the Antoine was wrecked.

Neither of these two adventurers into a wild world of feeling noticed
that a man was sitting on a little knoll under a tree, not far away from
their meeting-place, busy with pencil and paper.

It was Jean Jacques, who had also come to the river-bank to work out a
business problem which must be settled on the morrow.  He had stolen out
immediately after supper from neighbours who wished to see him, and had
come here by a roundabout way, because he wished to be alone.

George Masson and Carmen were together for a few moments only, but Jean
Jacques heard his wife say, "Yes, to-morrow--for sure," and then he saw
her kiss the master-carpenter--kiss him twice, thrice.  After which they
vanished, she in one direction, and the invader and marauder in another.

If either of these two had seen the face of the man with a pencil
and paper under the spreading beechtree, they would not have been so
impatient for tomorrow, and Carmen would not have said "for sure."

Jean Jacques was awake at last, man as well as philosopher.




CHAPTER VIII

THE GATE IN THE WALL

Jean Jacques was not without originality of a kind, and not without
initiative; but there were also the elements of the very old Adam in him,
and the strain of the obvious.  If he had been a real genius, rather than
a mere lively variation of the commonplace--a chicken that could never
burst its shell, a bird which could not quite break into song--he might
have made his biographer guess hard and futilely, as to what he would do
after having seen his wife's arms around the neck of another man than
himself--a man little more than a manual labourer, while he, Jean Jacques
Barbille, had come of the people of the Old Regime.  As it was, this
magnate of St. Saviour's, who yesterday posed so sympathetically and
effectively in the Court at Vilray as a figure of note, did the quite
obvious thing: he determined to kill the master-carpenter from Laplatte.

There was no genius in that.  When, from under the spreading beech-tree,
Jean Jacques saw his wife footing it back to her house with a light,
wayward step; when he watched the master-carpenter vault over a stone
fence five feet high with a smile of triumph mingled with doubt on his
face, he was too stunned at first to move or speak.  If a sledge-hammer
strikes you on the skull, though your skull is of such a hardness that it
does not break, still the shock numbs activity for awhile, at any rate.
The sledge-hammer had descended on Jean Jacques' head, and also had
struck him between the eyes; and it is in the credit balance of his
ledger of life, that he refrained from useless outcry at the moment.
Such a stroke kills some men, either at once, or by lengthened torture;
others it sends mad, so that they make a clamour which draws the
attention of the astonished and not sympathetic world; but it only
paralysed Jean Jacques.  For a time he sat fascinated by the ferocity
of the event, his eyes following the hurrying wife and the jaunty,
swaggering master-carpenter with a strange, animal-like dismay and
apprehension.  They remained fixed with a kind of blank horror and
distraction on the landscape for some time after both had disappeared.

At last, however, he seemed to recover his senses, and to come back from
the place where he had been struck by the hammer of treachery.  He seemed
to realize again that he was still a part of the common world, not a
human being swung through the universe on his heart-strings by a Gorgon.

The paper and pencil in his hand brought him back from the far Gehenna
where he had been, to the world again--how stony and stormy a world it
was, with the air gone as heavy as lead, with his feet so loaded down
with chains that he could not stir!  He had had great joy of this his
world; he had found it a place where every day were problems to be solved
by an astute mind, problems which gave way before the master-thinker.
There was of course unhappiness in his world.  There was death, there was
accident occasionally--had his own people not gone down under the scythe
of time?  But in going they had left behind in real estate and other
things good compensation for their loss.  There was occasional suffering
and poverty and trouble in his little kingdom; but a cord of wood here, a
barrel of flour there, a side of beef elsewhere, a little debt remitted,
a bag of dried apples, or an Indian blanket--these he gave, and had great
pleasure in giving; and so the world was not a place where men should
hang their heads, but a place where the busy man got more than the worth
of his money.

It had never occurred to him that he was ever translating the world into
terms of himself, that he went on his way saying in effect, "I am coming.
I am Jean Jacques Barbille.  You have heard of me.  You know me.  Wave a
hand to me, duck your head to me, crack the whip or nod when I pass.  I
am M'sieu' Jean Jacques, philosopher."

And all the while he had only been vaguely, not really, conscious of his
wife and child.  He did not know that he had only made of his wife an
incident in his life, in spite of the fact that he thought he loved her;
that he had been proud of her splendid personality; and that, with
passionate chivalry, he had resented any criticism of her.

He thought still, as he did on the Antoine, that Carmen's figure had the
lines of the Venus of Milo, that her head would have been a model either
for a Madonna, or for Joan of Arc, or the famous Isabella of Aragon.
Having visited the Louvre and the Luxembourg all in one day, he felt he
was entitled to make such comparisons, and that in making them he was on
sure ground.  He had loved to kiss Carmen in the neck, it was so full and
soft and round; and when she went about the garden with her dress
shortened, and he saw her ankles, even after he had been married thirteen
years, and she was thirty-four, he still admired, he still thought that
the world was a good place when it produced such a woman.  And even when
she had lashed him with her tongue, as she did sometimes, he still
laughed--after the smart was over--because he liked spirit.  He would
never have a horse that had not some blood, and he had never driven a
sluggard in his life more than once.  But wife and child and world, and
all that therein was, existed largely because they were necessary to Jean
Jacques.

That is the way it had been; and it was as though the firmament had been
rolled up before his eyes, exposing the everlasting mysteries, when he
saw his wife in the arms of the master-carpenter.  It was like some
frightening dream.

The paper and pencil waked him to reality.  He looked towards his house,
he looked the way George Masson had gone, and he knew that what he had
seen was real life and not a dream.  The paper fell from his hand.  He
did not pick it up.  Its fall represented the tumbling walls of life, was
the earthquake which shook his world into chaos.  He ground the sheet
into the gravel with his heel.  There would be no cheese-factory built at
St. Saviour's for many a year to come.  The man of initiative, the man of
the hundred irons would not have the hundred and one, or keep the hundred
hot any more; because he would be so busy with the iron which had entered
into his soul.

When the paper had been made one with the earth, a problem buried for
ever, Jean Jacques pulled himself up to his full height, as though facing
a great thing which he must do.

"Well, of course!" he said firmly.

That was what his honour, Judge Carcasson, had said a few hours before,
when the little Clerk of the Court had remarked an obvious thing about
the case of Jean Jacques.

And Jean Jacques said only the obvious thing when he made up his mind to
do the obvious thing--to kill George Masson, the master-carpenter.

This was evidence that he was no genius.  Anybody could think of killing
a man who had injured him, as the master-carpenter had done Jean Jacques.
It is the solution of the problem of the Patagonian.  It is old as
Rameses.

Yet in his own way Jean Jacques did what he felt he had to do.  The thing
he was going to do was hopelessly obvious, but the doing of it was Jean
Jacques' own; and it was not obvious; and that perhaps was genius after
all.  There are certain inevitable things to do, and for all men to do;
and they have been doing them from the beginning of time; but the way it
is done--is not that genius?  There is no new story in the world; all the
things that happen have happened for untold centuries; but the man who
tells the story in a new way, that is genius, so the great men say.  If,
then, Jean Jacques did the thing he had to do with a turn of his own, he
would justify to some degree the opinion he had formed of himself.

As he walked back to his desecrated home he set himself to think.  How
should it be done?  There was the rifle with which he had killed deer in
the woods beyond the Saguenay and bear beyond the Chicoutimi.  That was
simple--and it was obvious; and it could be done at once.  He could soon
overtake the man who had spoiled the world for him.

Yet he was a Norman, and the Norman thinks before he acts.  He is the
soul of caution; he wants to get the best he can out of his bargain.  He
will throw nothing away that is to his advantage.  There should be other
ways than the gun with which to take a man's life--ways which might give
a Norman a chance to sacrifice only one life; to secure punishment where
it was due, but also escape from punishment for doing the obvious thing.

Poison?  That was too stupid even to think of once.  A pitch-fork and a
dung-heap?  That had its merits; but again there was the risk of more
than one life.

All the way to his house, Jean Jacques, with something of the rage of
passion and the glaze of horror gone from his eyes, and his face not now
so ghastly, still brooded over how, after he had had his say, he was to
put George Masson out of the world.  But it did not come at once.  All
makers of life-stories find their difficulty at times.  Tirelessly they
grope along a wall, day in, day out, and then suddenly a great gate
swings open, as though to the touch of a spring, and the whole way is
clear to the goal.

Jean Jacques went on thinking in a strange, new, intense abstraction.
His restless eyes were steadier than they had ever been; his wife noticed
that as he entered the house after the Revelation.  She noticed also his
paleness and his abstraction.  For an instant she was frightened; but no,
Jean Jacques could not know anything.  Yet--yet he had come from the
direction of the river!

"What is it, Jean Jacques?" she asked.  "Aren't you well?"

He put his hand to his head, but did not look her in the eyes.  His
gesture helped him to avoid that.  "I have a head--la, such a head!
I have been thinking, thinking-it is my hobby.  I have been planning
the cheese-factory, and all at once it comes on-the ache in my head.
I will go to bed.  Yes, I will go at once."  Suddenly he turned at the
door leading to the bedroom.  "The little Zoe--is she well?"

"Of course.  Why should she not be well?  She has gone to the top of the
hill.  Of course, she's well, Jean Jacques."

"Good-good!" he remarked.  Somehow it seemed strange to him that Zoe
should be well.  Was there not a terrible sickness in his house, and had
not that woman, his wife, her mother, brought the infection?  Was he
himself not stricken by it?

Carmen was calm enough again.  "Go to bed, Jean Jacques," she said, "and
I'll bring you a sleeping posset.  I know those headaches.  You had one
when the ash-factory was burned."

He nodded without looking at her, and closed the door behind him.

When she came to the bedroom a half-hour later, his face was turned to
the wall.  She spoke, but he did not answer.  She thought he was asleep.
He was not asleep.  He was only thinking how to do the thing which was
not obvious, which was also safe for himself.  That should be his
triumph, if he could but achieve it.

When she came to bed he did not stir, and he did not answer her when she
spoke.

"The poor Jean Jacques!" he heard her say, and if there had not been
on him the same courage that possessed him the night when the Antoine
was wrecked, he would have sobbed.

He did not stir.  He kept thinking; and all the time her words, "The poor
Jean Jacques!" kept weaving themselves through his vague designs.  Why
had she said that--she who had deceived, betrayed him?  Had he then seen
what he had seen?

She did not sleep for a long time, and when she did it was uneasily.  But
the bed was an immense one, and she was not near him.  There was no sleep
for him--not even for an hour.  Once, in exhaustion, he almost rolled
over into the poppies of unconsciousness; but he came back with a start
and a groan to sentient life again, and kept feeling, feeling along the
wall of purpose for a masterly way to kill.

At dawn it came, suddenly spreading out before him like a picture.  He
saw himself standing at the head of the flume out there by the Mill
Cartier with his hand on the lever.  Below him in the empty flume was the
master-carpenter giving a last inspection to the repairs.  Beyond the
master-carpenter--far beyond--was the great mill-wheel!  Behind himself,
Jean Jacques, was the river held back by the dam; and if the lever was
opened,--the river would sweep through the raised gates down the flume to
the millwheel--with the man.  And then the wheel would turn and turn, and
the man would be in the wheel.

It was not obvious; it was original; and it looked safe for Jean Jacques.
How easily could such an "accident" occur!




CHAPTER IX

"MOI-JE SUIS PHILOSOPHE"

The air was like a mellow wine, and the light on the landscape was full
of wistfulness.  It was a thing so exquisite that a man of sentiment like
Jean Jacques in his younger days would have wept to see.  And the feeling
was as palpable as the seeing; as in the early spring the new life which
is being born in the year, produces a febrile kind of sorrow in the mind.
But the glow of Indian summer, that compromise, that after-thought of
real summer, which brings her back for another good-bye ere she vanishes
for ever--its sadness is of a different kind.  Its longing has a sharper
edge; there stir in it the pangs of discontent; and the mind and body
yearn for solace.  It is a dangerous time, even more dangerous than
spring for those who have passed the days of youth.

It had proved dangerous to Carmen Barbille.  The melancholy of the
gorgeously tinted trees, the flights of the birds to the south, the smell
of the fallow field, the wind with the touch of the coming rains--these
had given to a growing discontent with her monotonous life the desire
born of self-pity.  In spite of all she could do she was turning to the
life she had left behind in Cadiz long ago.

It seemed to her that Jean Jacques had ceased to care for the charms
which once he had so proudly proclaimed.  There was in her the strain of
the religion of Epicurus.  She desired always that her visible corporeal
self should be admired and desired, that men should say, "What a splendid
creature!"  It was in her veins, an undefined philosophy of life; and she
had ever measured the love of Jean Jacques by his caresses.  She had no
other vital standard.  This she could measure, she could grasp it and
say, "Here I have a hold; it is so much harvested."  But if some one had
written her a poem a thousand verses long, she would have said, "Yes, all
very fine, but let me see what it means; let me feel that it is so."

She had an inherent love of luxury and pleasure, which was far more
active in her now than when she married Jean Jacques.  For a Spanish
woman she had matured late; and that was because, in her youth, she had
been active and athletic, unlike most Spanish girls; and the microbes of
a sensuous life, or what might have become a sensual life, had not good
chance to breed.

It all came, however, in the dullness of the winter days and nights, in
the time of deep snows, when they could go abroad but very little.  Then
her body and her mind seemed to long for the indolent sun-spaces of
Spain.  The artificial heat of the big stoves in the rooms with the low
ceilings only irritated her, and she felt herself growing more ample from
lassitude of the flesh.  This particular autumn it seemed to her that she
could not get through another winter without something going wrong,
without a crisis of some sort.  She felt the need of excitement, of
change.  She had the desire for pleasures undefined.

Then George Masson came, and the undefined took form almost at once.
It was no case of the hunter pursuing his prey with all the craft and
subtlety of his trade.  She had answered his look with spontaneity, due
to the fact that she had been surprised into the candour of her feelings
by the appearance of one who had the boldness of a brigand, the health of
a Hercules, and the intelligence of a primitive Jesuit.  He had not
hesitated; he had yielded himself to the sumptuous attraction, and the
fire in his eyes was only the window of the furnace within him.  He had
gone headlong to the conquest, and by sheer force of temperament and
weight of passion he had swept her off her feet.

He had now come to the last day of his duty at the Mill Cartier, when all
he had to do was to inspect the work done, give assurance and guarantee
that it was all right, and receive his cheque from Jean Jacques.  He had
come early, because he had been unable to sleep well, and also he had
much to do before keeping his tryst with Carmen Barbille in the
afternoon.

As he passed the Manor Cartier this fateful morning, he saw her at the
window, and he waved his hat at her with a cheery salutation which she
did not hear.  He knew that she did not hear or see.  "My beauty!" he
said aloud.  "My splendid girl, my charmer of Cadiz!  My wonder of the
Alhambra, my Moorish maid!  My bird of freedom--hand of Charlemagne, your
lips are sweet, yes, sweet as one-and-twenty!"

His lips grew redder at the thought of the kisses he had taken, his
cheek flushed with the thought of those he meant to take; and he laughed
greedily as he lowered himself into the flume by a ladder, just under the
lever that opened the gates, to begin his inspection.

It was not a perfunctory inspection, for he was a good craftsman, and he
had pride in what his workmen did.

"Ah!"

It was a sound of dumbfounded amazement, a hoarse cry of horror which was
not in tune with the beauty of the morning.

"Ah!"

It came from his throat like the groan of a trapped and wounded lion.
George Masson had almost finished his inspection, when he heard a noise
behind him.  He turned and looked back.  There stood Jean Jacques with
his hand on the lever.  The noise he had heard was the fourteen-foot
ladder being dropped, after Jean Jacques had drawn it up softly out of
the flume.

"Ah!  Nom de Dieu!" George Masson exclaimed again in helpless fury and
with horror in his eyes.

By instinct he understood that Carmen's husband knew all.  He realized
what Jean Jacques meant to do.  He knew that the lever locking the mill-
wheel had been opened, and that Jean Jacques had his hand on the lever
which raised the gate of the flume.

By instinct--for there was no time for thought--he did the only thing
which could help him, he made a swift gesture to Jean Jacques, a gesture
that bade him wait.  Time was his only friend in this--one minute, two
minutes, three minutes, anything.  For if the gates were opened, he would
be swept into the millwheel, and there would be the end--the everlasting
end.

"Wait!" he called out after his gesture.  "One second!"

He ran forward till he was about thirty feet from Jean Jacques standing
there above him, with the set face and the dark malicious, half-insane
eyes.  Even in his fear and ghastly anxiety, the subconscious mind of
George Masson was saying, "He looks like the Baron of Beaugard--like the
Baron of Beaugard that killed the man who abused his wife."

It was so.  Great-great-grand-nephew of the Baron of Beaugard as he was,
Jean Jacques looked like the portrait of him which hung in the Manor
Cartier.  "Wait--but wait one minute!" exclaimed George Masson; and now,
all at once, he had grown cool and determined, and his brain was at work
again with an activity and a clearness it had never known.  He had gained
one minute of time, he might be able to gain more.  In any case, no one
could save him except himself.  There was Jean Jacques with his hand on
the lever--one turn and the thing was done for ever.  If a rescuer was
even within one foot of Jean Jacques, the deed could still be done.  It
was so much easier opening than shutting the gates of the flume!

"Why should I wait, devil and rogue?"  The words came from Jean Jacques'
lips with a snarl.  "I am going to kill you.  It will do you no good to
whine--cochon!"

To call a man a pig is the worst insult which could be offered by one man
to another in the parish of St. Saviour's.  To be called a pig as you are
going to die, is an offensive business indeed.

"I know you are going to kill me--that you can kill me, and I can do
nothing," was the master-carpenter's reply.  "There it is--a turn of the
lever, and I am done.  Bien sur, I know how easy!  I do not want to die,
but I will not squeal even if I am a pig.  One can only die once.  And
once is enough .  .  .  No, don't--not yet !  Give me a minute till I
tell you something; then you can open the gates.  You will have a long
time to live--yes, yes, you are the kind that live long.  Well, a minute
or two is not much to ask.  If you want to murder, you will open the
gates at once; but if it is punishment, if you are an executioner, you
will give me time to pray."

Jean Jacques did not soften.  His voice was harsh and grim.  "Well, get
on with your praying, but don't talk.  You are going to die," he added,
his hands gripping the lever tighter.

The master-carpenter had had the true inspiration in his hour of danger.
He had touched his appeal with logic, he had offered an argument.  Jean
Jacques was a logician, a philosopher!  That point made about the
difference between a murder and an execution was a good one.  Beside it
was an acknowledgment, by inference, from his victim, that he was getting
what he deserved.

"Pray quick and have it over, pig of an adulterer!" added Jean Jacques.

The master-carpenter raised a protesting hand.  "There you are
mistaken; but it is no matter.  At the end of to-day I would have been
an adulterer, if you hadn't found out.  I don't complain of the word.
But see, as a philosopher"--Jean Jacques jerked a haughty assent--"as a
philosopher you will want to know how and why it is.  Carmen will never
tell you--a woman never tells the truth about such things, because she
does not know how.  She does not know the truth ever, exactly, about
anything.  It is because she is a woman.  But I would like to tell you
the exact truth; and I can, because I am a man.  For what she did you
are as much to blame as she .  .  .  no, no--not yet!"

Jean Jacques' hand had spasmodically tightened on the lever as though he
would wrench the gates open, and a snarl came from his lips.

"Figure de Christ, but it is true, as true as death!  Listen, M'sieu'
Jean Jacques.  You are going to kill me, but listen so that you will know
how to speak to her afterwards, understanding what I said as I died."

"Get on--quick!" growled Jean Jacques with white wrinkled lips and the
sun in his agonized eyes.  George Masson continued his pleading.  "You
were always a man of mind"--Jean Jacques' fierce agitation visibly
subsided, and a surly sort of vanity crept into his face--"and you
married a girl who cared more for what you did than what you thought--
that is sure, for I know women.  I am not married, and I have had much
to do with many of them.  I will tell you the truth.  I left the West
because of a woman--of two women.  I had a good business, but I could
not keep out of trouble with women.  They made it too easy for me."

"Peacock-pig!" exclaimed Jean Jacques with an ugly sneer.

"Let a man when he is dying tell all the truth, to ease his mind," said
the master-carpenter with a machiavellian pretence and cunning.  "It was
vanity, it was, as you say; it was the peacock in me made me be the
friend of many women and not the husband of one.  I came down here to
Quebec from the Far West to get away from consequences.  It was
expensive.  I had to sacrifice.  Well, here I am in trouble again--my
last trouble, and with the wife of a man that I respect and admire, not
enough to keep my hands off his wife, but still that I admire.  It is my
weakness that I could not be, as a man, honourable to Jean Jacques
Barbille.  And so I pay the price; so I have to go without time to make
my will.  Bless heaven above, I have no wife--"

"If you had a wife you would not be dying now.  You would not then meddle
with the home of Jean Jacques Barbille," sneered Jean Jacques.  The note
was savage yet.

"Ah, for sure, for sure!  It is so.  And if I lived I would marry at
once."

Desperate as his condition was, the master-carpenter could almost have
laughed at the idea of marriage preventing him from following the bent of
his nature.  He was the born lover.  If he had been as high as the Czar,
or as low as the ditcher, he would have been the same; but it would be
madness to admit that to Jean Jacques now.

"But, as you say, let me get on.  My time has come--"

Jean Jacques jerked his head angrily.  "Enough of this.  You keep on
saying 'Wait a little,' but your time has come.  Now take it so, and
don't repeat."

"A man must get used to the idea of dying, or he will die hard," replied
the master-carpenter, for he saw that Jean Jacques' hands were not so
tightly clenched on the lever now; and time was everything.  He had
already been near five minutes, and every minute was a step to a chance
of escape--somehow.

"I said you were to blame," he continued.  "Listen, Jean Jacques
Barbille.  You, a man of mind, married a girl who cared more for a touch
of your hand than a bucketful of your knowledge, which every man in the
province knows is great.  At first you were almost always thinking of her
and what a fine woman she was, and because everyone admired her, you
played the peacock, too.  I am not the only peacock.  You are a good man
--no one ever said anything against your character.  But always, always,
you think most of yourself.  It is everywhere you go as if you say, 'Look
out.  I am coming.  I am Jean Jacques Barbille.

"'Make way for Jean Jacques.  I am from the Manor Cartier.  You have heard
of me.' .  .  .  That is the way you say things in your mind.  But all
the time the people say, 'That is Jean Jacques Barbille, but you should
see his wife.  She is a wonder.  She is at home at the Manor with the
cows and the geese.  Jean Jacques travels alone through the parish to
Quebec, to Three Rivers, to Tadousac, to the great exhibition at
Montreal, but madame, she stays at home.  M'sieu' Jean Jacques is nothing
beside her'--that is what the people say.  They admire you for your
brains, but they would have fallen down before your wife, if you had
given her half a chance."

"Ah, that's bosh--what do you know!" exclaimed Jean Jacques fiercely,
but he was fascinated too by the argument of the man whose life he was
going to take.

"I know the truth, my money-man.  Do you think she'd have looked at me if
you'd been to her what she thought I might be?  No, bien sur!  Did you
take her where she could see the world?  No.  Did you bring her presents?
No.  Did you say, 'Come along, we will make a little journey to see the
world?'  No.  Do you think that a woman can sit and darn your socks, and
tidy your room, and bake you pancakes in the morning while you roast your
toes, and be satisfied with just that, and not long for something
outside?"

Jean Jacques was silent.  He did not move.  He was being hypnotized by a
mind of subtle strength, by the logic of which he was so great a lover.

The master-carpenter pressed his logic home.  "No, she must sit in your
shadow always.  She must wait till you come.  And when you come, it was
'Here am I, your Jean Jacques.  Fall down and worship me.  I am your
husband.'  Did you ever say, 'Heavens, there you are, the woman of all
the world, the rising and the setting sun, the star that shines, the
garden where all the flowers of love grow'?  Did you ever do that?  But
no, there was only one person in the world--there was only you, Jean
Jacques.  You were the only pig in the sty."

It was a bold stroke, but if Jean Jacques could stand that, he could
stand anything.  There was a savage start on the part of Jean Jacques,
and the lever almost moved.

"Stop one second!" cried the master-carpenter, sharply now, for in spite
of the sudden savagery on Jean Jacques' part, he felt he had an
advantage, and now he would play his biggest card.

"You can kill me.  It is there in your hand.  No one can stop you.  But
will that give you anything?  What is my life?  If you take it away, will
you be happier?  It is happiness you want.  Your wife--she will love you,
if you give her a chance.  If you kill me, I will have my revenge in
death, for it is the end of all things for you.  You lose your wife for
ever.  You need not do so.  She would have gone with me, not because of
me, but because I was a man who she thought would treat her like a
friend, like a comrade; who would love her--sacre, what husband could
help make love to such a woman, unless he was in love with himself
instead of her!"

Jean Jacques rocked to and fro over the lever in his agitation, yet he
made no motion to move it.  He was under a spell.

Straight home drove the master-carpenter's reasoning now.  "Kill me, and
you lose her for ever.  Kill me, and she will hate you.  You think she
will not find out?  Then see: as I die I will shriek out so loud that she
can hear me, and she will understand.  She will go mad, and give you over
to the law.  And then--and then!  Did you ever think what will become of
your child, of your Zoe, if you go to the gallows?  That would be your
legacy and your blessing to her--the death of a murderer; and she would
be left alone with the woman that would hate you in death!  Voila--do you
not see?"

Jean Jacques saw.  The terrific logic of the thing smote him.  His wife
hating him, himself on the scaffold, his little Zoe disgraced and
dishonoured all her life; and himself out of it all, unable to help her,
and bringing irremediable trouble on her!  As a chemical clears a muddy
liquid, leaving it pure and atomless, so there seemed to pass over Jean
Jacques' face a thought like a revelation.

He took his hand from the lever.  For a moment he stood like one awakened
out of a sleep.  He put his hands to his eyes, then shook his head as
though to free it of some hateful burden.  An instant later he stooped,
lifted up the ladder beside him, and let it down to the floor of the
flume.

"There, go--for ever," he said.

Then he turned away with bowed head.  He staggered as he stepped down
from the bridge of the flume, where the lever was.  He swayed from side
to side.  Then he raised his head and looked towards his house.  His
child lived there--his Zoe.

"Moi je suis philosophe !" he said brokenly.

After a moment or two, as he stumbled on, he said it again--"Me, I am a
philosopher!"




CHAPTER X

"QUIEN SABE"--WHO KNOWS!

This much must be said for George Masson, that after the terrible
incident at the flume he would have gone straight to the Manor Cartier
to warn Carmen, if it had been possible, though perhaps she already knew.
But there was Jean Jacques on his way back to the Manor, and nothing
remained but to proceed to Laplatte, and give the woman up for ever.  He
had no wish to pull up stakes again and begin life afresh, though he was
only forty, and he had plenty of initiative left.  But if he had to go,
he would want to go alone, as he had done before.  Yes, he would have
liked to tell Carmen that Jean Jacques knew everything; but it was
impossible.  She would have to face the full shock from Jean Jacques'
own battery.  But then again perhaps she knew already.  He hoped she did.

At the very moment that Masson was thinking this, while he went to the
main road where he had left his horse and buggy tied up, Carmen came to
know.

Carmen had not seen her husband that morning until now.  She had waked
late, and when she was dressed and went into the dining-room to look for
him, with an apprehension which was the reflection of the bad dreams of
the night, she found that he had had his breakfast earlier than usual and
had gone to the mill.  She also learned that he had eaten very little,
and that he had sent a man into Vilray for something or other.  Try as
she would to stifle her anxiety, it obtruded itself, and she could eat no
breakfast.  She kept her eyes on the door and the window, watching for
Jean Jacques.

Yet she reproved herself for her stupid concern, for Jean Jacques would
have spoken last night, if he had discovered anything.  He was not the
man to hold his tongue when he had a chance of talking.  He would be sure
to make the most of any opportunity for display of intellectual emotion,
and he would have burst his buttons if he had known.  That was the way
she put it in a vernacular which was not Andalusian.  Such men love a
grievance, because it gives them an opportunity to talk--with a good case
and to some point, not into the air at imaginary things, as she had so
often seen Jean Jacques do.  She knew her Jean Jacques.  That is, she
thought she knew her Jean Jacques after living with him for over thirteen
years; but hers was a very common mistake.  It is not time which gives
revelation, or which turns a character inside out, and exposes a new and
amazing, maybe revolting side to it.  She had never really seen Jean
Jacques, and he had never really seen himself, as he was, but only as
circumstances made him seem to be.  What he had showed of his nature all
these forty odd years was only the ferment of a more or less shallow
life, in spite of its many interests: but here now at last was life, with
the crust broken over a deep well of experience and tragedy.  She knew as
little what he would do in such a case as he himself knew beforehand.  As
the incident of the flume just now showed, he knew little indeed, for he
had done exactly the opposite of what he meant to do.  It was possible
that Carmen would also do exactly the opposite of what she meant to do
in her own crisis.

Her test was to come.  Would she, after all, go off with the master-
carpenter, leaving behind her the pretty, clever, volatile Zoe.  .  .  .
Zoe--ah, where was Zoe?  Carmen became anxious about Zoe, she knew not
why.  Was it the revival of the maternal instinct?

She was told that Zoe had gone off on her pony to take a basket of good
things to a poor old woman down the river three miles away.  She would be
gone all morning.  By so much, fate was favouring her; for the child's
presence would but heighten the emotion of her exit from that place where
her youth had been wasted.  Already the few things she had meant to take
away were secreted in a safe place some distance from the house, beside
the path she meant to take when she left Jean Jacques for ever.  George
Masson wanted her, they were to meet to-day, and she was going--going
somewhere out of this intolerable dullness and discontent.

When she pushed her coffee-cup aside and rose from the table without
eating, she went straight to her looking-glass and surveyed herself with
a searching eye.  Certainly she was young enough (she said to herself) to
draw the eyes of those who cared for youth and beauty.  There was not a
grey hair in the dark brown of her head, there was not a wrinkle--yes,
there were two at the corners of her mouth, which told the story of her
restlessness, of her hunger for the excitement of which she had been
deprived all these years.  To go back to Cadiz?--oh, anywhere, anywhere,
so that her blood could beat faster; so that she could feel the stir of
life which had made her spirit flourish even in the dangers of the far-
off day when Gonzales was by her side.

She looked at her guitar.  She was sorry she could not take that away
with her.  But Jean Jacques would, no doubt, send it after her with his
curse.  She would love to play it once again with the old thrill; with
the thrill she had felt on the night of Zoe's birthday a little while
ago, when she was back again with her lover and the birds in the gardens
of Granada.  She would sing to someone who cared to hear her, and to
someone who would make her care to sing, which was far more important.
She would sing to the master-carpenter.  Though he had not asked her to
go with him--only to meet in a secret place in the hills--she meant to do
so, just as she once meant to marry Jean Jacques, and had done so.  It
was true she would probably not have married Jean Jacques, if it had not
been for the wreck of the Antoine; but the wreck had occurred, and she
had married him, and that was done and over so far as she was concerned.
She had determined to go away with the master-carpenter, and though he
might feel the same hesitation as that which Jean Jacques had shown--she
had read her Norman aright aboard the Antoine--yet, still, George Masson
should take her away.  A catastrophe had thrown Jean Jacques into her
arms; it would not be a catastrophe which would throw the master-
carpenter into her arms.  It would be that they wanted each other.

The mirror gave her a look of dominance--was it her regular features and
her classic head?  Does beauty in itself express authority, just because
it has the transcendent thing in it?  Does the perfect form convey
something of the same thing that physical force--an army in arms, a
battleship--conveys?  In any case it was there, that inherent
masterfulness, though not in its highest form.  She was not an
aristocrat, she was no daughter of kings, no duchess of Castile, no
dona of Segovia; and her beauty belonged to more primary manifestations;
but it was above the lower forms, even if it did not reach to the
highest.  "A handsome even splendid woman of her class" would have been
the judgment of the connoisseur.

As she looked in the glass at her clear skin, at the wonderful throat
showing so soft and palpable and tower-like under the black velvet ribbon
brightened by a paste ornament; as she saw the smooth breadth of brow,
the fulness of the lips, the limpid lustre of the large eyes, the well-
curved ear, so small and so like ivory, it came home to her, as it had
never done before, that she was wasted in this obscure parish of St.
Saviour's.

There was not a more restless soul or body in all the hemisphere than the
soul and body of Carmen Barbille, as she went from this to that on the
morning when Jean Jacques had refrained from killing the soul-disturber,
the master-carpenter, who had with such skill destroyed the walls and
foundations of his home.  Carmen was pointlessly busy as she watched for
the return of Jean Jacques.

At last she saw him coming from the flume of the mill!  She saw that he
stumbled as he walked, and that, every now and then, he lifted his head
with an effort and threw it back, and threw his shoulders back also, as
though to assert his physical manhood.  He wore no hat, his hands were
making involuntary gestures of helplessness.  But presently he seemed to
assert authority over his fumbling body and to come erect.  His hands
clenched at his sides, his head came up stiffly and stayed, and with
quickened footsteps he marched rigidly forward towards the Manor.

Then she guessed at the truth, and as soon as she saw his face she was
sure beyond peradventure that he knew.

His figure darkened the doorway.  Her first thought was to turn and flee,
not because she was frightened of what he would do, but because she did
not wish to hear what he would say.  She shrank from the uprolling of the
curtain of the last thirteen years, from the grim exposure of the
nakedness of their life together.  Her indolent nature in repose wanted
the dust of existence swept into a corner out of sight; yet when she was
roused, and there were no corners into which the dust could be swept,
she could be as bold as any better woman.

She hesitated till it was too late to go, and then as he entered the
house from the staring sunlight and the peace of the morning, she
straightened herself, and a sulky, stubborn look came into her eyes.
He might try to kill her, but she had seen death in many forms far away
in Spain, and she would not be afraid till there was cause.  Imagination
would not take away her courage.  She picked up a half-knitted stocking
which lay upon the table, and standing there, while he came into the
middle of the room, she began to ply the needles.

He stood still.  Her face was bent over her knitting.  She did not look
at him.

"Well, why don't you look at me?" he asked in a voice husky with
passion.

She raised her head and looked straight into his dark, distracted eyes.

"Good morning," she said calmly.

A kind of snarling laugh came to his lips.  "I said good morning to my
wife yesterday, but I will not say it to-day.  What is the use of saying
good morning, when the morning is not good!"

"That's logical, anyhow," she said, her needles going faster now.  She
was getting control of them--and of herself.

"Why isn't the morning good?  Speak.  Why isn't it good, Carmen?"

"Quien sabe--who knows!" she replied with exasperating coolness.

"I know--I know all; and it is enough for a lifetime," he challenged.

"What do you know--what is the 'all'?"  Her voice had lost timbre.  It
was suddenly weak, but from suspense and excitement rather than from
fear.

"I saw you last night with him, by the river.  I saw what you did.  I
heard you say, 'Yes, to-morrow, for sure.'  I saw what you did."

Her eyes were busy with the knitting now.  She did not know what to say.
Then, he had known all since the night before!  He knew it when he
pretended that his head ached--knew it as he lay by her side all night.
He knew it, and said nothing!  But what had he done--what had he done?
She waited for she knew not what.  George Masson was to come and inspect
the flume early that morning.  Had he come?  She had not seen him.  But
the river was flowing through the flume: she could hear the mill-wheel
turning--she could hear the mill-wheel turning!

As she did not speak, with a curious husky shrillness to his voice he
said: "There he was down in the flume, there was I at the lever above,
there was the mill-wheel unlocked.  There it was.  I gripped the lever,
and--"

Her great eyes stared with horror.  The knitting-needles stopped;
a pallor swept across her face.  She felt as she did when she heard the
court-martial sentence Carvillho Gonzales to death.

The mill-wheel sounded louder and louder in her ears.

"You let in the river!" she cried.  "You drove him into the wheel--you
killed him!"

"What else was there to do?" he demanded.  "It had to be done, and it
was the safest way.  It would be an accident.  Such a thing might easily
happen."

"You have murdered him!" she gasped with a wild look.

"To call it murder!" he sneered.  "Surely my wife would not call it
murder."

"Fiend--not to have the courage to fight him!" she flung back at him.
"To crawl like a snake and let loose a river on a man!  In any other
country, he'd have been given a chance."

This was his act in a new light.  He had had only one idea in his mind
when he planned the act, and that was punishment.  What rights had a man
who had stolen what was nearer and dearer than a man's own flesh, and for
which he would have given his own flesh fifty times?  Was it that Carmen
would now have him believe he ought to have fought the man, who had
spoiled his life and ruined a woman's whole existence.

"What chance had I when he robbed me in the dark of what is worth fifty
times my own life to me?" he asked savagely.

"Murderer--murderer!" she cried hoarsely.  "You shall pay for this."

"You will tell--you will give me up?"

Her eyes were on the mill and the river .  .  .  "Where--where is he?
Has he gone down the river?  Did you kill him and let him go--like that!"

She made a flinging gesture, as one would toss a stone.

He stared at her.  He had never seen her face like that--so strained and
haggard.  George Masson was right when he said that she would give him
up; that his life would be in danger, and that his child's life would be
spoiled.

"Murderer!" she repeated.  "And when you go to the gallows, your child's
life--you did not think of that, eh?  To have your revenge on the man who
was no more to blame than I, thinking only of yourself, you killed him;
but you did not think of your child."

Ah, yes, surely George Masson was right!  That was what he had said about
his child, Zoe.  What a good thing it was he had not killed the ravager
of his home!

But suddenly his logic came to his aid.  In terrible misery as he was, he
was almost pleased that he could reason.  "And you would give me over to
the law?  You would send me to the gallows--and spoil your child's life?"
he retorted.

She threw the knitting down and flung her hands up.  "I have no husband.
I have no child.  Take your life.  Take it.  I will go and find his
body," she said, and she moved swiftly towards the door.  "He has gone
down the river--I will find him!"

"He has gone up the river," he exclaimed.  "Up the river, I say!"

She stopped short and looked at him blankly.  Then his meaning became
clear to her.

"You did not kill him?" she asked scarce above a whisper.

"I let him go," he replied.

"You did not fight him--why?"  There was scorn in her tone.

"And if I had killed him that way?" he asked with terrible logic, as he
thought.

"There was little chance of that," she replied scornfully, and steadied
herself against a chair; for, now that the suspense was over, she felt as
though she had been passed between stones which ground the strength out
of her.

A flush of fierce resentment crossed over his face.  "It is not
everything to be big," he rejoined.  "The greatest men in the world have
been small like me, but they have brought the giant things to their
feet."

She waved a hand disdainfully.  "What are you going to do now?" she
asked.

He drew himself up.  He seemed to rearrange the motions of his mind
with a little of the old vanity, which was at once grotesque and piteous.
"I am going to forgive you and to try to put things right," he said.
"I have had my faults.  You were not to blame altogether.  I have left
you too much alone.  I did not understand everything all through.  I had
never studied women.  If I had I should have done the right thing always.
I must begin to study women."  The drawn look was going a little from his
face, the ghastly pain was fading from his eyes; his heart was speaking
for her, while his vain intellect hunted the solution of his problem.

She could scarcely believe her ears.  No Spaniard would ever have acted
as this man was doing.  She had come from a land of No Forgiveness.
Carvillho Gonzales would have killed her, if she had been untrue to him;
and she would have expected it and understood it.

But Jean Jacques was going to forgive her--going to study women, and so
understand her and understand women, as he understood philosophy!  This
was too fantastic for human reason.  She stared at him, unable to say a
word, and the distracted look in her face did not lessen.  Forgiveness
did not solve her problem.

"I am going to take you to Montreal--and then out to Winnipeg, when I've
got the cheese-factory going," he said with a wise look in his face, and
with tenderness even coming into his eyes.  "I know what mistakes I've
made"--had not George Masson the despoiler told him of them?--"and I know
what a scoundrel that fellow is, and what tricks of the tongue he has.
Also he is as sleek to look at as a bull, and so he got a hold on you.
I grasp things now.  Soon we will start away together again as we did at
Gaspe."

He came close to her.  "Carmen!" he said, and made as though he would
embrace her.

"Wait--wait a little.  Give me time to think," she said with dry lips,
her heart beating hard.  Then she added with a flattery which she knew
would tell, "I cannot think quick as you do.  I am slow.  I must have
time.  I want to work it all out.  Wait till to-night," she urged.
"Then we can--"

"Good, we will make it all up to-night," he said, and he patted her
shoulder as one would that of a child.  It had the slight flavour of the
superior and the paternal.

She almost shrank from his touch.  If he had kissed her she would have
felt that she must push him away; and yet she also knew how good a man he
was.




CHAPTER XI

THE CLERK OF THE COURT KEEPS A PROMISE

"Well, what is it, M'sieu' Fille?  What do you want with me?  I've got a
lot to do before sundown, and it isn't far off.  Out with it."

George Masson was in no good humour; from the look on the face of the
little Clerk of the Court he had no idea that he would disclose any good
news.  It was probably some stupid business about "money not being paid
into the Court," which had been left over from cases tried and lost;
and he had had a number of cases that summer.  His head was not so clear
to-day as usual, but he had had little difficulties with M'sieu' Fille
before, and he was sure that there was something wrong now.

"Do you want to make me a present?" he added with humorous impatience,
for though he was not in a good temper, he liked the Clerk of the Court,
who was such a figure at Vilray.

The opening for his purpose did not escape M. Fille.  He had been at a
loss to begin, but here was a natural opportunity for him.

"Well, good advice is not always a present, but I should like mine to be
taken as such, monsieur," he said a little oracularly.

"Oh, advice--to give me advice--that's why you've brought me in here,
when I've so much to do I can't breathe!  Time is money with me, old
'un."

"Mine is advice which may be money in your pocket, monsieur," remarked
the Clerk of the Court with meaning.  "Money saved is money earned."
"How do you mean to save me money--by getting the Judge to give decisions
in my favour?  That would be money in my pocket for sure.  The Court has
been running against my interests this year.  When I think I was never so
right in my life--bang goes the judgment of the Court against me, and
into my pocket goes my hand.  I don't only need to save money, I need to
make it; so if you can help me in that way I'm your man, M'sieu' la
Fillette?"

The little man bristled at the misuse of his name, and he flushed
slightly also; but there was always something engaging in the pleasure-
loving master-carpenter.  He had such an eloquent and warm temperament,
the atmosphere of his personality was so genial, that his impertinence
was insulated.  Certainly the master-carpenter was not unpopular, and
people could not easily resist the grip of his physical influence, while
mentally he was far indeed from being deficient.  He looked as little
like a villain as a man could, and yet--and yet--a nature like that of
George Masson (even the little Clerk could see that) was not capable of
being true beyond the minute in which he took his oath of fidelity.
While the fit of willingness was on him he would be true; yet in reality
there was no truth at all--only self-indulgence unmarked by duty or
honour.

"Give me a judgment for defamation of character.  Give me a thousand
dollars or so for that, m'sieu', and you'll do a good turn to a deserving
fellow-citizen and admirer--one little thousand, that's all, m'sieu'.
Then I'll dance at your wedding and weep at your tomb--so there!"

How easy he made the way for the little Clerk of the Court!  "Defamation
of character"--could there possibly be a better opening for what he had
promised Judge Carcasson he would say!

"Ah, Monsieur Masson," very officially and decorously replied M. Fille,
"but is it defamation of character?  If the thing is true, then what is
the judgment?  It goes against you--so there!"  There was irony in the
last words.

"If what thing is true?" sharply asked the mastercarpenter, catching at
the fringe of the idea in M. Fille's mind.  "What thing?"

"Ah, but it is true, for I saw it!  Yes, alas!  I saw it with my own
eyes.  By accident of course; but there it was--absolute, uncompromising,
deadly and complete."

It was a happy moment for the little Clerk of the Court when he could, in
such an impromptu way, coin a phrase, or a set of adjectives, which would
bear inspection of purists of the language.  He loved to talk, though he
did not talk a great deal, but he made innumerable conversations in his
mind, and that gave him facility when he did speak.  He had made
conversations with George Masson in his mind since yesterday, when he
gave his promise to Judge Carcasson; but none of them was like the real
conversation now taking place.  It was all the impression of the moment,
while the phrases in his mind had been wonderfully logical things which,
from an intellectual standpoint, would have delighted the man whose cause
he was now engaged in defending.

"You saw what, M'sieu' la Fillette?  Out with it, and don't use such big
adjectives.  I'm only a carpenter.  'Absolute, uncompromising, deadly,
complete'--that's a mouthful of grammar, my lords!  Come, my sprig of
jurisprudence, tell us what you saw."  There was an apparent nervousness
in Masson's manner now.  Indeed he showed more agitation than when, a few
hours before, Jean Jacques had stood with his hand on the lever of the
gates of the flume, and the life of the master-carpenter at his feet, to
be kicked into eternity.

"Four days ago at five o'clock in the afternoon"--in a voice formal and
exact, the little Clerk of the Court seemed to be reading from a paper,
since he kept his eyes fixed on the blotter before him, as he did in
Court--"I was coming down the hill behind the Manor Cartier, when my
attention--by accident--was drawn to a scene below me in the Manor.  I
stopped short, of course, and--"

"Diable!  You stopped short 'of course' before what you saw!  Spit it
out--what did you see?"  George Masson had had a trying day, and there
was danger of losing control of himself.  There was a whiteness growing
round the eyes, and eating up the warmth of the cheek; his admirably
smooth brow was contracted into heavy wrinkles, and a foot shifted
uneasily on the floor with a scraping sole.  This drew the attention of
M. Fille, who raised his head reprovingly--he could not get rid of the
feeling that he was in court, and that a case was being tried; and the
severity of a Judge is naught compared with the severity of a Clerk of
the Court, particularly if he is small and unmarried, and has no one to
beat him into manageable humanity.

M. Fille's voice was almost querulous.

"If you will but be patient, monsieur!  I saw a man with a woman in his
arms, and I fear that I must mention the name of the man.  It is not
necessary to give the name of the woman, but I have it written here"--
he tapped the paper--"and there is no mistake in the identity.  The man's
name is George Masson, master-carpenter, of the town of Laplatte in the
province of Quebec."

George Masson was as one hit between the eyes.  He made a motion as
though to ward off a blow.  "Name of Peter, old cock!" he exclaimed
abruptly.  "You saw enough certainly, if you saw that, and you needn't
mention the lady's name, as you say.  The evidence is not merely
circumstantial.  You saw it with your own eyes, and you are an official
of the Court, and have the ear of the Judge, and you look like a saint to
a jury.  Well for sure, I can't prove defamation of character, as you
say.  But what then--what do you want?"

"What I want I hope you may be able to grant without demur, monsieur.
I want you to give your pledge on the Book"--he laid his hand on a
Testament lying on the table--"that you will hold no further
communication with the lady."

"Where do you come inhere?  What's your standing in the business?"
Masson jerked out his words now.  The Clerk of the Court made a reproving
gesture.  "Knowing what I did, what I had seen, it was clear that I must
approach one or other of the parties concerned.  Out of regard for the
lady I could not approach her husband, and so betray her; out of regard
for the husband I could not approach himself and destroy his peace; out
of regard for all concerned I could not approach the lady's father, for
then--"

Masson interrupted with an oath.

"That old reprobate of Cadiz--well no, bagosh!

"And so you whisked me into your office with the talk of urgent business
and--"

"Is not the business urgent, monsieur?"

"Not at all," was the sharp reply of the culprit.

"Monsieur, you shock me.  Do you consider that your conduct is not
criminal?  I have here"--he placed his hand on a book--"the Statutes of
Victoria, and it lays down with wholesome severity the law concerning the
theft of the affection of a wife, with the accompanying penalty, going as
high as twenty thousand dollars."

George Masson gasped.  Here was a new turn of affairs.  But he set his
teeth.

"Twenty thousand dollars--think of that!" he sneered angrily.

"That is what I said, monsieur.  I said I could save you money, and money
saved is money earned.  I am your benefactor, if you will but permit me
to be so, monsieur.  I would save you from the law, and from the damages
which the law gives.  Can you not guess what would be given in a court of
the Catholic province of Quebec, against the violation of a good man's
home?  Do you not see that the business is urgent?"

"Not at all," curtly replied the master-carpenter.  M. Fille bridled up,
and his spare figure seemed to gain courage and dignity.

"If you think I will hold my peace unless you give your sacred pledge,
you are mistaken, monsieur.  I am no meddler, but I have had much
kindness at the hands of Monsieur and Madame Barbille, and I will do what
I can to protect them and their daughter--that good and sweet daughter,
from the machinations, corruptions and malfeasance--"

"Three damn good words for the Court, bagosh!" exclaimed Masson with a
jeer.

"No, with a man devoid of honour, I shall not hesitate, for the Manor
Cartier has been the home of domestic peace, and madame, who came to us a
stranger, deserves well of the people of that ancient abode of chivalry-
the chivalry of France."

"When we are wound up, what a humming we can make!" laughed George
Masson sourly.  "Have you quite finished, m'sieu'?"

"The matter is urgent, you will admit, monsieur?" again demanded M.
Fille with austerity.

"Not at all."

The master-carpenter was defiant and insolent, yet there was a devilish
kind of humour in his tone as in his attitude.

"You will not heed the warning I give?"  The little Clerk pointed to the
open page of the Victorian statutes before him.

"Not at all."

"Then I shall, with profound regret--"

Suddenly George Masson thrust his face forward near that of M. Fille, who
did not draw back.

"You will inform the Court that the prisoner refuses to incriminate
himself, eh?" he interjected.

"No, monsieur, I will inform Monsieur Barbille of what I saw.  I will do
this without delay.  It is the one thing left me to do."

In quite a grand kind of way he stood up and bowed, as though to dismiss
his visitor.

As George Masson did not move, the other went to the door and opened it.
"It is the only thing left to do," he repeated, as he made a gentle
gesture of dismissal.

"Not at all, my legal bombardier.  Not at all, I say.  All you know Jean
Jacques knows, and a good deal more--what he has seen with his own eyes,
and understood with his own mind, without legal help.  So, you see,
you've kept me here talking when there's no need and while my business
waits.  It is urgent, M'sieu' la Fillette--your business is stale.  It
belongs to last session of the Court."  He laughed at his joke.  "M'sieu'
Jean Jacques and I understand each other."  He laughed grimly now.  "We
know each other like a book, and the Clerk of the Court couldn't get in
an adjective that would make the sense of it all clearer."

Slowly M. Fille shut the door, and very slowly he came back.  Almost
blindly, as it might seem, and with a moan, he dropped into his chair.
His eyes fixed themselves on George Masson.

"Ah--that!" he said helplessly.  "That!  The little Zoe--dear God, the
little Zoe, and the poor madame!"  His voice was aching with pain and
repugnance.

"If you were not such an icicle naturally, I'd be thinking your interest
in the child was paternal," said the master-carpenter roughly, for the
virtuous horror of the other's face annoyed him.  He had had a vexing
day.

The Clerk of the Court was on his feet in a second.  "Monsieur, you
dare!" he exclaimed.  "You dare to multiply your crimes in that shameless
way.  Begone!  There are those who can make you respect decency.  I am
not without my friends, and we all stand by each other in our love of
home--of sacred home, monsieur."

There was something right in the master-carpenter at the bottom, with all
his villainy.  It was not alone that he knew there were fifty men in the
Parish of St. Saviour's who would man-handle him for such a suggestion,
and for what he had done at the Manor Cartier, if they were roused; but
he also had a sudden remorse for insulting the man who, after all, had
tried to do him a service.  His amende was instant.

"I take it back with humble apology--all I can hold in both hands,
m'sieu'," he said at once.  "I would not insult you so, much less Madame
Barbille.  If she'd been like what I've hinted at, I wouldn't have gone
her way, for the promiscuous is not for me.  I'll tell you the whole
truth of what happened to-day this morning.  Last night I met her at the
river, and--"Then briefly he told all that had happened to the moment
when Jean Jacques had left him at the flume with the words, "Moi, je suis
philosophe!"  And at the last he said:

"I give you my word--my oath on this"--he laid his hand on the Testament
on the table--"that beyond what you saw, and what Jean Jacques saw, there
has been nothing."  He held up a hand as though taking an oath.

"Name of God, is it not enough what there has been?" whispered the
little Clerk.

"Oh, as you think, and as you say!  It is quite enough for me after to-
day.  I'm a teetotaller, but I'm not so fond of water as to want to take
my eternal bath in it."  He shuddered slightly.  "Bien sur, I've had my
fill of the Manor Cartier for one day, my Clerk of the Court."

"Bien sur, it was enough to set you thinking, monsieur," was the dry
comment of M. Fille, who was now recovering his composure.

At that moment there came a knock at the door, and another followed
quickly; then there entered without waiting for a reply--Carmen Barbille.




CHAPTER XII

THE MASTER-CARPENTER HAS A PROBLEM

The Clerk of the Court came to his feet with a startled "Merci!" and the
master-carpenter fell back with a smothered exclamation.  Both men stared
confusedly at the woman as she shut the door slowly and, as it might
seem, carefully, before she faced them.

"Here I am, George," she said, her face alive with vital adventure.

His face was instantly swept by a storm of feeling for her, his nature
responded to the sound of her voice and the passion of her face.

"Carmen--ah !" he said, and took a step forward, then stopped.  The
hoarse feeling in his voice made her eyes flash gratitude and triumph,
and she waited for him to take her in his arms; but she suddenly
remembered M. Fille.  She turned to him.

"I am sorry to intrude, m'sieu'," she said.  "I beg your pardon.  They
told me at the office of avocat Prideaux that M'sieu' Masson was here.
So I came; but be sure I would not interrupt you if there was not cause."

M. Fille came forward and took her hand respectfully.  "Madame, it is the
first time you have honoured me here.  I am very glad to receive you.
Monsieur and Mademoiselle Zoe, they are with you?  They will also come in
perhaps?"

M. Fille was courteous and kind, yet he felt that a duty was devolving on
him, imposed by his superior officer, Judge Carcasson, and by his own
conscience, and with courage he faced the field of trouble which his
simple question opened up.  George Masson had but now said there had been
nothing more than he himself had seen from the hill behind the Manor; and
he had further said, in effect, that all was ended between Carmen
Barbille and himself; yet here they were together, when they ought to be
a hundred miles apart for many a day.  Besides, there was the look in the
woman's face, and that intense look also in the face of the master-
carpenter!  The Clerk of the Court, from sheer habit of his profession,
watched human faces as other people watch the weather, or the rise or
fall in the price of wheat and potatoes.  He was an archaic little
official, and apparently quite unsophisticated; yet there was hidden
behind his ascetic face a quiet astuteness which would have been a
valuable asset to a worldly-minded and ambitious man.  Besides, affection
sharpens the wits.  Through it the hovering, protecting sense becomes
instinctive, and prescience takes on uncanny certainty.  He had a real
and deep affection for Jean Jacques and his Carmen, and a deeper one
still for the child Zoe; and the danger to the home at the Manor Cartier
now became again as sharp as the knife of the guillotine.  His eyes ran
from the woman to the man, and back again, and then with great courage he
repeated his question:

"Monsieur and mademoiselle, they are well--they are with you, I hope,
madame?"

She looked at him in the eyes without flinching, and on the instant she
was aware that he knew all, and that there had been talk with George
Masson.  She knew the little man to be as good as ever can be, but she
resented the fact that he knew.  It was clear George Masson had told him
--else how could he know; unless, perhaps, all the world knew!

"You know well enough that I have come alone, my friend," she answered.
"It is no place for Zoe; and it is no place for my husband and him
together "she made a motion of the head towards the mastercarpenter.
"Santa Maria, you know it very well indeed!"

The Clerk of the Court bowed, but made no reply.  What was there to say
to a remark like that!  It was clear that the problem must be worked out
alone between these two people, though he was not quite sure what the
problem was.  The man had said the thing was over; but the woman had
come, and the look of both showed that it was not all over.

What would the man do?  What was it the woman wished to do?  The master-
carpenter had said that Jean Jacques had spared him, and meant to forgive
his wife.  No doubt he had done so, for Jean Jacques was a man of
sentiment and chivalry, and there was no proof that there had been
anything more than a few mad caresses between the two misdemeanants; yet
here was the woman with the man for whom she had imperilled her future
and that of her husband and child!

As though Carmen understood what was going on in his mind, she said:
"Since you know everything, you can understand that I want a few words
with M'sieu' George here alone."

"Madame, I beg of you," the Clerk of the Court answered instantly, his
voice trembling a little--"I beg that you will not be alone with him.  As
I believe, your husband is willing to let bygones be bygones, and to
begin to-morrow as though there was no to-day.  In such case you should
not see Monsieur Masson here alone.  It is bad enough to see him here in
the office of the Clerk of the Court, but to see him alone--what would
Monsieur Jean Jacques say?  Also, outside there in the street, if our
neighbours should come to know of the trouble, what would they say?  I
wish not to be tiresome, but as a friend, a true friend of your whole
family, madame--yes, in spite of all, your whole family--I hope you will
realize that I must remain here.  I owe it to a past made happy by
kindness which is to me like life itself.  Monsieur Masson, is it not
so?" he added, turning to the master-carpenter.  More flushed and
agitated than when he had faced Jean Jacques in the flume, the master-
carpenter said: "If she wants a few words-of farewell--alone with me, she
must have it, M'sieu' Fille.  The other room--eh?  Outside there"--he
jerked a finger towards the street--"they won't know that you are not
with us; and as for Jean Jacques, isn't it possible for a Clerk of the
Court to stretch the truth a little?  Isn't the Clerk of the Court a man
as well as a mummy?  I'd do as much for you, little lawyer, any time.  A
word to say farewell, you understand!"  He looked M. Fille squarely in
the eye.

"If I had to answer M. Jean Jacques on such a matter--and so much at
stake--"

Masson interrupted.  "Well, if you like we'll bind your eyes and put wads
in your ears, and you can stay, so that you'll have been in the room all
the time, and yet have heard and seen nothing at all.  How is that,
m'sieu'?  It's all right, isn't it?"

M. Fille stood petrified for a moment at the audacity of the proposition.
For him, the Clerk of the Court, to be blinded and made ridiculous with
wads in his ears-impossible!

"Grace of Heaven, I would prefer to lie!" he answered quickly.  "I will
go into the next room, but I beg that you be brief, monsieur and madame.
You owe it to yourselves and to the situation to be brief, and, if I may
say so, you owe it to me.  I am not a practised Ananias."

"As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, m'sieu'," returned Masson.

"I must beg that you will make your farewells of a minute and no more,"
replied the Clerk of the Court firmly.  He took out his watch.  "It is
six o'clock.  I will come again at three minutes past six.  That is long
enough for any farewell--even on the gallows."

Not daring to look at the face of the woman, he softly disappeared into
the other room, and shut the door without a sound.

"Too good for this world," remarked the master-carpenter when the door
closed tight.  He said it after the disappearing figure and not to
Carmen.  "I don't suppose he ever kissed a real grown-up woman in his
life.  It would have shattered his frail little carcass if, if"--he
turned to his companion--"if you had kissed him, Carmen.  He's made of
tissue-paper,--not tissue--and apple-jelly.  Yes, but a stiff little
backbone, too, or he'd not have faced me down."

Masson talked as though he were trying to gain time.  "He said three
minutes," she returned with a look of death in her face.  As George
Masson had talked with the Clerk of the Court, she had come to see, in so
far as agitation would permit, that he was not the same as when he left
her by the river the evening before.

"There's no time to waste," she continued.  "You spoke of farewells--
twice you spoke, and three times he spoke of farewells between us.
Farewells--farewells--George--!"

With sudden emotion she held out her arms, and her face flushed with
passion and longing.

The tempest which shook her shook him also, and he swayed from side to
side like an animal uncertain if the moment had come to try its strength
with its foe; and in truth the man was fighting with himself.  His
moments with Jean Jacques at the flume had expanded him in a curious kind
of way.  His own arguments while he was fighting for his life had, in a
way, convinced himself.  She was a rare creature, and she was alluring--
more alluring than she had ever been; for a tragic sense had made her
thinner, had refined the boldness of her beauty, had given a wonderful
lustre to her eyes; and suffering has its own attraction to the
degenerate.  But he, George Masson, had had a great shock, and he had
come out of the jaws of death by the skin of his teeth.  It had been the
nearest thing he had ever known; for though once he had had a pistol
pointed at him, there was the chance that it might miss at half-a-dozen
yards, while there was no chance of the lever of the flume going wrong;
and water and a mill-wheel were as absolute as the rope of the gallows.

In a sense he had saved himself by his cleverness, but if Jean Jacques
had not been just the man he was, he could not have saved himself.  It
did not occur to him that Jean Jacques had acted weakly.  He would not
have done what Jean Jacques had done, had Jean Jacques spoiled his home.
He would have sprung the lever; but he was not so mean as to despise Jean
Jacques because he had foregone his revenge.  This master-carpenter had
certain gifts, or he could not have caused so much trouble in the world.
There is a kind of subtlety necessary to allure or delude even the
humblest of women, if she is not naturally bad; and Masson had had
experiences with the humblest, and also with those a little higher up.
This much had to be said for him, that he did not think Jean Jacques
contemptible because he had been merciful, or degraded because he had
chosen to forgive his wife.

The sight of the woman, as she stood with arms outstretched, had made his
pulses pound in his veins, but the heat was suddenly chilled by the wave
of tragedy which had passed over him.  When he had climbed out of the
flume, and opened the lever for the river to rush through, he had felt as
though ice--cold liquid flowed in his veins, not blood; and all day he
had been like that.  He had moved much as one in a dream, and he had felt
for the first time in his life that he was not ready to bluff creation.
He had always faced things down, as long as it could be done; and when it
could not, he had retreated, with the comment that no man was wise who
took gruel when he needn't.  He was now face to face with his greatest
problem.  One thing was clear--they must either part for ever, or go
together, and part no more.  There could be no half measures.  She was
a remarkable woman in her way, with a will of her own, and a kind of
madness in her; and there could be no backing and filling.  They only
had three minutes to talk together alone, and two of them were up.

Her arms were held out to him, but he stood still, and before the fire of
her eyes his own eyes dropped.  "No, not yet!" he exclaimed.  "It's been
a day--heaven and hell, what a day it's been!  He had me like that!"  He
opened and shut his hand with fierce, spasmodic strength.  "And he let me
go--oh, let me go like a fox out of a trap!  I've had enough for one day
--blood of St. Peter, enough, enough!"

The flame of desire in her eyes suddenly turned to fury.  "It is
farewell,  then,  that you wish,"  she said hoarsely.  "It is no more and
farewell then?  You said it to him"--she pointed to the other room--"you
said it to Jean Jacques, and you say it to me--to me that's given you all
I have.  Ah, what a beast you are, George Masson!"

"No, Carmen, you have not given me all.  If you had, there would be no
farewell.  I would stand by you to the end of life, if I had taken all."
He lied, but that does not matter here.

"All--all!" she cried.  "What is all?  Is it but the one thing that the
world says must part husband and wife?  Caramba!  Is that all?  I have
given everything--I have had your arms around me--"

"Yes, the Clerk of the Court saw that," he interrupted.  "He saw from the
hill behind the Manor on Tuesday last."

There was a tap at the door of the other room; it slowly opened, and the
figure of the Clerk appeared.  "Two minutes--just two minutes more, old
trump!" said the master-carpenter, stretching out a hand.  "One minute
will be enough," said Carmen, who was suffering the greatest humiliation
which can come to a woman.

The Clerk looked at them both, and he was content.  He saw that one
minute would certainly be enough.  "Very well, monsieur and madame," he
said, and closed the door again.

Carmen turned fiercely on the man.  "M. Fille saw, did he, from Mont
Violet?  Well, when I came here I did not care who saw.  I only thought
of you--that you wanted me, and that I wanted you.  What the world
thought was nothing, if you were as when we parted last night.  .  .  .
I could not face Jean Jacques' forgiveness.  To stay there, feeling that
I must be always grateful, that I must be humble, that I must pretend,
that I must kiss Jean Jacques, and lie in his arms, and go to mass and to
confession, and--"

"There is the child, there is Zoe--"

"Oh, it is you that preaches now--you that tempted me, that said I was
wasted at the Manor; that the parish did not understand me; that Jean
Jacques did not know a jewel of price when he saw it--little did you
think of Zoe then!"

He made a protesting gesture.  "Maybe so, Carmen, but I think now before
it is too late."

"The child loves her father as she never loved me," she declared.  "She
is twelve years old.  She will soon be old enough to keep house for him,
and then to marry--ah, before there is time to think she will marry!"

"It would be better then for you to wait till she marries before--
before--"

"Before I go away with you!"  She gave a shrill, agonized laugh.  "So
that is the end of it all!  What did you think of my child when you
forced your way into my life, when you made me think of you--ah, quel
bete--what a coward and beast you are!"

"No, I am not all coward, though I may be a beast," he answered.
"I didn't think of your child when I began to talk to you as I did.  I
was out for all I could get.  I was the hunter.  And you were the finest
woman that I'd ever met and talked with; you--"

"Oh, stop lying!" she cried with a face suddenly grown white and cold.

"It isn't lying.  You're the sort of woman to drive men mad.  I went mad,
and I didn't think of your child.  But this morning in the flume I saved
my life by thinking of her, and I saved your life, too, maybe, by
thinking of her; and I owe her something.  I'm going to try to pay back
by letting her keep her mother.  I never felt towards a woman as I've
felt towards you; and that's why I want to make things not so bad for you
as they might be."

In her bitter eagerness she took a step nearer to him.  "As things might
be, if you were the man you were yesterday, willing to throw up
everything for me?"

"Like that--if you put it so," he answered.

She walked slowly up to him, looking as though she would plunge a knife
into his heart.  "I wish Jean Jacques had opened the gates," she said.
"It would have saved the hangman trouble."

Then suddenly, and with a cry, she raised her hand and struck him full in
the face with her fist.  At that instant came a tap at the door of the
other room, and the Clerk of the Court appeared.  He saw the blow, and
drew back with an exclamation.

Carmen turned to him.  "Farewell has been said, M'sieu' Fille," she
remarked in a voice sombre with rage and despair, and she went to the
door leading to the street.

Masson had winced at the blow, but he remained silent.  He knew not what
to say or do.

M. Fille hastily followed Carmen to the door.  "You are going  home,
dear madame?  Permit me  to accompany you," he said gently.  "I have to
do business with Jean Jacques."

A hand upon his chest, she pushed him back.  "Where I go I'm going
alone," she said.  Opening the door she went out, but turning back again
she gave George Masson a look that he never forgot.  Then the door
closed.

"Grace of God, she is not going home!" brokenly murmured the Clerk of
the Court.

With a groan the master-carpenter started forward towards the door, but
M. Fille stepped between, laid a hand on his arm, and stopped him.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Confidence in a weak world gets unearned profit often
Enjoy his own generosity
Had the slight flavour of the superior and the paternal
He had only made of his wife an incident in his life
He was in fact not a philosopher, but a sentimentalist
He was not always sorry when his teasing hurt
Lacks a balance-wheel.  He has brains, but not enough
Man who tells the story in a new way, that is genius
Missed being a genius by an inch
Not content to do even the smallest thing ill
You went north towards heaven and south towards hell






THE MONEY MASTER

By Gilbert Parker



EPOCH THE THIRD

XIII.     THE MAN FROM OUTSIDE
XIV.      "I DO NOT WANT TO GO"
XV.       BON MARCHE




CHAPTER XIII

THE MAN FROM OUTSIDE

                   "Oh, who will walk the wood with me,
                    I fear to walk alone;
                    So young am I, as you may see;
                    No dangers have I known.
                    So young, so small--ah, yes, m'sieu',
                    I'll walk the wood with you!"


In the last note of the song applause came instantaneously, almost
impatiently, as it might seem.  With cries of "Encore!  Encore!" it
lasted some time, while the happy singer looked around with frank
pleasure on the little group encircling her in the Manor Cartier.

"Did you like it so much?" she asked in a general way, and not looking
at any particular person.  A particular person, however, replied, and she
had addressed the question to him, although not looking at him.  He was
the Man from Outside, and he sat near the bright wood-fire; for though it
was almost June the night was cool and he was delicate.

"Ah, but splendid, but splendid--it got into every corner of every one of
us," the Man from Outside responded, speaking his fluent French with a
slight English accent, which had a pleasant piquancy--at least to the
ears of the pretty singer, Mdlle. Zoe Barbille.  He was a man of about
thirty-three, clean-shaven, dark-haired, with an expression of
cleverness; yet with an irresponsible something about him which M. Fille
had reflected upon with concern.  For this slim, eager, talkative, half-
invalid visitor to St. Saviour's had of late shown a marked liking for
the presence and person of Zoe Barbille; and Zoe was as dear to M. Fille
as though she were his own daughter.  He it was who, in sarcasm, had
spoken of this young stranger as "The Man from Outside."

Ever since Zoe's mother had vanished--alone--seven years before from the
Manor Cartier, or rather from his office at Vilray, M. Fille had been as
much like a maiden aunt or a very elder brother to the Spanische's
daughter as a man could be.  Of M. Fille's influence over his daughter
and her love of his companionship, Jean Jacques had no jealousy whatever.
Very often indeed, when he felt incompetent to do for his child all that
he wished--philosophers are often stupid in human affairs--he thought it
was a blessing Zoe had a friend like M. Fille.  Since the terrible day
when he found that his wife had gone from him--not with the master-
carpenter who only made his exit from Laplatte some years afterwards--he
had had no desire to have a woman at the Manor to fill her place, even as
housekeeper.  He had never swerved from that.  He had had a hard row to
hoe, but he had hoed it with a will not affected by domestic accidents or
inconveniences.  The one woman from outside whom he permitted to go and
come at will--and she did not come often, because she and M. Fille agreed
it would be best not to do so--was the sister of the Cure.  To be sure
there was Seraphe Corniche, the old cook, but she was buried in her
kitchen, and Jean Jacques treated her like a man.

When Zoe was confirmed, and had come back from Montreal, having spent two
years in a convent there--the only time she had been away from her father
in seven years--having had her education chiefly from a Catholic
"brother," the situation developed in a new way.  Zoe at once became
as conspicuous in the country-side as her father had been over so many
years.  She was fresh, volatile, without affectation or pride, and had
a temperament responsive to every phase of life's simple interests.
She took the attention of the young men a little bit as her due, but yet
without conceit.  The gallants had come about her like bees, for there
was Jean Jacques' many businesses and his reputation for wealth; and
there was her own charm, concerning which there could be far less doubt
than about Jean Jacques' magnificent solvency.

Zoe had gone heart-whole and with no especial preference for any young
man, until the particular person came, the Man from Outside.

His name was Gerard Fynes, and his business was mumming.  He was a young
lawyer turned actor, and he had lived in Montreal before he went on the
stage.  He was English--that was a misfortune; he was an actor--that was
a greater misfortune, for it suggested vagabondage of morals as well as
of profession; and he was a Protestant, which was the greatest misfortune
of all.  But he was only at St. Saviour's for his convalescence after a
so-called attack of congestion of the lungs; and as he still had a slight
cough and looked none too robust, and as, more than all, he was simple
in his ways, enjoying the life of the parish with greater zest than the
residents, he found popularity.  Undoubtedly he had a taking way with
him.  He was lodging with Louis Charron, a small farmer and kinsman of
Jean Jacques, who sold whisky--"white whisky"--without a license.  It was
a Charron family habit to sell liquor illegally, and Louis pursued the
career with all an amateur's enthusiasm.  He had a sovereign balm for
"colds," composed of camomile flowers, boneset, liquorice, pennyroyal and
gentian root, which he sold to all comers; and it was not unnatural that
a visitor with weak lungs should lodge with him.

Louis and his wife had only good things to say about Gerard Fynes; for
the young man lived their life as though he was born to it.  He ate the
slap-jacks, the buttermilk-pop, the pork and beans, the Indian corn on
the cob, the pea-soup, and the bread baked in the roadside oven, with a
relish which was not all pretence; for indeed he was as primitive as he
was subtle.  He himself could not have told how much of him was true and
how much was make-believe.  But he was certainly lovable, and he was not
bad by nature.  Since coming to St. Saviour's he had been constant to one
attraction, and he had not risked his chances with Zoe by response to the
shy invitations of dark eyes, young and not so young, which met his own
here and there in the parish.

Only M. Fille and Jean Jacques himself had feelings of real antagonism to
him.  Jean Jacques, though not naturally suspicious, had, however, seen
an understanding look pass between his Zoe and this stranger--this
Protestant English stranger from the outer world, to which Jean Jacques
went less frequently since his fruitless search for his vanished Carmen.
The Clerk of the Court saw that Jean Jacques had observed the intimate
glances of the two young people, and their eyes met in understanding.  It
was just before Zoe had sung so charmingly, 'Oh, Who Will Walk the Wood
With Me'.

At first after Carmen's going Jean Jacques had found it hard to endure
singing in his house.  Zoe's trilling was torture to him, though he had
never forbidden her to sing, and she had sung on to her heart's content.
By a subtle instinct, however, and because of the unspoken sorrow in her
own heart, she never sang the songs like 'La Manola'.  Never after the
day Carmen went did Zoe speak of her mother to anyone at all.  It was
worse than death; it was annihilation, so far as speech was concerned.
The world at large only knew that Carmen Barbille had run away, and that
even Sebastian Dolores her father did not know where she was.  The old
man had not heard from her, and he seldom visited at the Manor Cartier or
saw his grand-daughter.  His own career of late years had been marked by
long sojourns in Quebec, Montreal and even New York; yet he always came
back to St. Saviour's when he was penniless, and was there started afresh
by Jean Jacques.  Some said that Carmen had gone back to Spain, but
others discredited that, for, if she had done so, certainly old Sebastian
Dolores would have gone also.  Others continued to insist that she had
gone off with a man; but there was George Masson at Laplatte living
alone, and never going twenty miles away from home, and he was the only
person under suspicion.  Others again averred that since her flight
Carmen had become a loose woman in Montreal; but the New Cure came down
on that with a blow which no one was tempted to invite again.

M. Savry's method of punishing was of a kind to make men shrink.  If
Carmen Barbille had become a loose woman in Montreal, how did any member
of his flock know that it was the case?  What company had he kept in
Montreal that he could say that?  Did he see the woman--or did he hear
about her?  And if he heard, what sort of company was he keeping when he
went to Montreal without his wife to hear such things?  That was final,
and the slanderer was under a cloud for a time, by reason of the anger of
his own wife.  It was about this time that the good priest preached from
the text, "Judge not that ye be not judged," and said that there were
only ten commandments on the tables of stone; but that the ten included
all the commandments which the Church made for every man, and which every
man, knowing his own weakness, must also make for himself.

His flock understood, though they did refrain, every one, from looking
towards the place where Jean Jacques sat with Ma'm'selle--she was always
called that, as though she was a great lady; or else she was called "the
little Ma'm'selle Zoe," even when she had grown almost as tall as her
mother had been.

Though no one looked towards the place where Jean Jacques and his
daughter sat when this sermon was preached, and although Zoe seemed not
to apprehend personal reference in the priest's words, when she reached
home, after talking to her father about casual things all the way, she
flew to her room, and, locking the door, flung herself on her bed and
cried till her body felt as though it had been beaten by rods.  Then
she suddenly got up and, from a drawer, took out two things--an old
photograph of her mother at the time of her marriage, and Carmen's
guitar, which she had made her own on the day after the flight, and had
kept hidden ever since.  She lay on the bed with her cheek pressed to the
guitar, and her eyes hungrily feeding on the face of a woman whose beauty
belonged to spheres other than where she had spent the thirteen years of
her married life.

Zoe had understood more even at the time of the crisis than they thought
she did, child though she was; and as the years had gone on she had
grasped the meaning of it all more clearly perhaps than anyone at all
except her adored friends Judge Carcasson, at whose home she had visited
in Montreal, and M. Fille.

The thing last rumoured about her mother in the parish was that she had
become an actress.  To this Zoe made no protest in her mind.  It was
better than many other possibilities, and she fixed her mind on it, so
saving herself from other agonizing speculations.  In a fixed imagination
lay safety.  In her soul she knew that, no matter what happened, her
mother would never return to the Manor Cartier.

The years had not deepened confidence between father and daughter.  A
shadow hung between them.  They laughed and talked together, were even
boisterous in their fun sometimes, and yet in the eyes of both was the
forbidden thing--the deserted city into which they could not enter.  He
could not speak to the child of the shame of her mother; she could not
speak of that in him which had contributed to that mother's shame--the
neglect which existed to some degree in her own life with him.  This was
chiefly so because his enterprises had grown to such a number and height,
that he seemed ever to be counting them, ever struggling to the height,
while none of his ventures ever reached that state of success when it
"ran itself", although as years passed men called him rich, and he spent
and loaned money so freely that they called him the Money Master, or the
Money Man Wise, in deference to his philosophy.

Zoe was not beautiful, but there was a wondrous charm in her deep brown
eyes and in the expression of her pretty, if irregular, features.
Sometimes her face seemed as small as that of a young child, and alive
with eerie fancies; and always behind her laughter was something which
got into her eyes, giving them a haunting melancholy.  She had no signs
of hysteria, though now and then there came heart-breaking little
outbursts of emotion which had this proof that they were not hysteria--
they were never seen by others.  They were sacred to her own solitude.
While in Montreal she had tasted for the first time the joys of the
theatre, and had then secretly read numbers of plays, which she bought
from an old bookseller, who was wise enough to choose them for her.  She
became possessed of a love for the stage even before Gerard Fynes came
upon the scene.  The beginning of it all was the rumour that her mother
was now an actress; yet the root-cause was far down in a temperament
responsive to all artistic things.

The coming of the Man from Outside acted on the confined elements of her
nature like the shutter of a camera.  It let in a world of light upon
unexplored places, it set free elements of being which had not before
been active.  She had been instantly drawn to Gerard Fynes.  He had the
distance from her own life which provoked interest, and in that distance
was the mother whom perhaps it was her duty to forget, yet for whom she
had a longing which grew greater as the years went on.

Gerard Fynes could talk well, and his vivid pictures of his short play-
acting career absorbed her; and all the time she was vigilant for some
name, for the description of some actress which would seem to be a clue
to the lost spirit of her life.  This clue never came, but before she
gave up hope of it, the man had got nearer to her than any man had ever
done.

After meeting him she awoke to the fact that there was a difference
between men, that it was not the same thing to be young as to be old;
that the reason why she could kiss the old Judge and the little Clerk of
the Court, and not kiss, say, the young manager of the great lumber firm
who came every year for a fortnight's fishing at St. Saviour's, was one
which had an understandable cause and was not a mere matter of individual
taste.  She had been good friends with this young manager, who was only
thirty years of age, and was married, but when he had wanted to kiss her
on saying good-bye one recent summer, she had said, "Oh, no, oh, no, that
would spoil it all!"  Yet when he had asked her why, and what she meant,
she could not tell him.  She did not know; but by the end of the first
week after Gerard Fynes had been brought to the Manor Cartier by Louis
Charron, she knew.

She had then been suddenly awakened from mere girlhood.  Judge Carcasson
saw the difference in her on a half-hour's visit as he passed westward,
and he had said to M. Fille, "Who is the man, my keeper of the treasure?"
The reply had been of such a sort that the Judge was startled:

"Tut, tut," he had exclaimed, "an actor--an actor once a lawyer!  That's
serious.  She's at an age--and with a temperament like hers she'll
believe anything, if once her affections are roused.  She has a flair for
the romantic, for the thing that's out of reach--the bird on the highest
branch, the bird in the sky beyond ours, the song that was lost before
time was, the light that never was on sea or land.  Why, damn it, damn it
all, my Solon, here's the beginning of a case in Court unless we can lay
the fellow by the heels!  How long is he here for?"

When M. Fille had told him that he would stay for another month for
certain, and no doubt much longer, if there seemed a prospect of winning
the heiress of the Manor Cartier, the Judge gave a groan.

"We must get him away, somehow," he said.  "Where does he stay?"

"At the house of Louis Charron," was the reply.  "Louis Charron--isn't
he the fellow that sells whisky without a license?"

"It is so, monsieur."

The Judge moved his head from side to side like a bear in a cage.  "It is
that, is it, my Fille?  By the thumb of the devil, isn't it time then
that Louis Charron was arrested for breaking the law?  Also how do we
know but that the interloping fellow Fynes is an agent for a whisky firm
perhaps?  Couldn't he, then, on suspicion, be arrested with--"

The Clerk of the Court shook his head mournfully.  His Judge was surely
becoming childish in his old age.  He looked again closely at the great
man, and saw a glimmer of moisture in the grey eyes.  It was clear that
Judge Carcasson felt deeply the dangers of the crisis, and that the
futile outburst had merely been the agitated protest of the helpless.

"The man is what he says he is--an actor; and it would be folly to arrest
him.  If our Zoe is really fond of him, it would only make a martyr of
him."

As he made this reply M. Fille looked furtively at the other--out of the
corner of his eye, as it were.  The reply of the Judge was impatient,
almost peevish and rough.  "Did you think I was in earnest, my
punchinello?  Surely I don't look so young as all that.  I am over sixty-
five, and am therefore mentally developed!"

M. Fille was exactly sixty-five years of age, and the blow was a shrewd
one.  He drew himself up with rigid dignity.

"You must feel sorry sometimes for those who suffered when your mind was
undeveloped, monsieur," he answered.  "You were a judge at forty-nine,
and you defended poor prisoners for twenty years before that."

The Judge was conquered, and he was never the man to pretend he was not
beaten when he was.  He admired skill too much for that.  He squeezed M.
Fille's arm and said:

"I've been quick with my tongue myself, but I feel sure now, that it's
through long and close association with my Clerk of the Court."

"Ah, monsieur, you are so difficult to understand!" was the reply.
"I have known you all these years, and yet--"

"And yet you did not know how much of the woman there was in me!  .  .  .
But yes, it is that.  It is that which I fear with our Zoe.  Women break
out--they break out, and then there is the devil to pay.  Look at her
mother.  She broke out.  It was not inevitable.  It was the curse of
opportunity, the wrong thing popping up to drive her mad at the wrong
moment.  Had the wrong thing come at the right time for her, when she was
quite sane, she would be yonder now with our philosopher.  Perhaps she
would not be contented if she were there, but she would be there; and as
time goes on, to be where we were in all things which concern the
affections, that is the great matter."

"Ah, yes, ah, yes," was the bright-eyed reply of that Clerk, "there is no
doubt of that!  My sister and I there, we are fifty years together, never
with the wrong thing at the wrong time, always the thing as it was,
always to be where we were."

The Judge shook his head.  "There is an eternity of difference, Fille,
between the sister and brother and the husband and wife.  The sacredness
of isolation is the thing which holds the brother and sister together.
The familiarity of--but never mind what it is that so often forces
husband and wife apart.  It is there, and it breaks out in rebellion as
it did with the wife of Jean Jacques Barbille.  As she was a strong woman
in her way, it spoiled her life, and his too when it broke out."

M. Fille's face lighted with memory and feeling.  "Ah, a woman of
powerful emotions, monsieur, that is so!  I think I never told you, but
at the last, in my office, when she went, she struck George Masson in the
face.  It was a blow that--but there it was; I have never liked to think
of it.  When I do, I shudder.  She was a woman who might have been in
other circumstances--but there!"

The Judge suddenly stopped in his walk and faced round on his friend.
"Did you ever know, my Solon," he said, "that it was not Jean Jacques who
saved Carmen at the wreck of the Antoine, but it was she who saved him;
and yet she never breathed of it in all the years.  One who was saved
from the Antoine told me of it.  Jean Jacques was going down.  Carmen
gave him her piece of wreckage to hang on to, and swam ashore without
help.  He never gave her the credit.  There was something big in the
woman, but it did not come out right."

M. Fille threw up his hands.  "Grace de Dieu, is it so that she saved
Jean Jacques?  Then he would not be here if it had not been for her?"

"That is the obvious deduction, Maitre Fille," replied the Judge.

The Clerk of the Court seemed moved.  "He did not treat her ill.
I know that he would take her back to-morrow if he could.  He has never
forgotten.  I saw him weeping one day--it was where she used to sing to
the flax-beaters by the Beau Cheval.  I put my hand on his shoulder, and
said, 'I know, I comprehend; but be a philosopher, Jean Jacques.'"

"What did he say?" asked the Judge.

"He drew himself up.  'In my mind, in my soul, I am philosopher always,'
he said, 'but my eyes are the windows of my heart, m'sieu'.  They look
out and see the sorrow of one I loved.  It is for her sorrow that I weep,
not for my own.  I have my child, I have money; the world says to me,
"How goes it, my friend?"  I have a home--a home; but where is she, and
what does the world say to her?'"

The Judge shook his head sadly.  "I used to think I knew life, but I come
to the belief in the end that I know nothing.  Who could have guessed
that he would have spoken like that!"

"He forgave her, monsieur."

The Judge nodded mournfully.  "Yes, yes, but I used to think it is such
men who forgive one day and kill the next.  You never can tell where they
will explode, philosophy or no philosophy."

The Judge was right.  After all the years that had passed since his wife
had left him, Jean Jacques did explode.  It was the night of his birthday
party at which was present the Man from Outside.  It was in the hour when
he first saw what the Clerk of the Court had seen some time before--the
understanding between Zoe and Gerard Fynes.  It had never occurred to him
that there was any danger.  Zoe had been so indifferent to the young men
of St. Saviour's and beyond, had always been so much his friend and the
friend of those much older than himself, like Judge Carcasson and M.
Fille, that he had not yet thought of her electing to go and leave him
alone.

To leave him alone!  To be left alone--it had never become a possibility
to his mind.  It did not break upon him with its full force all at once.
He first got the glimmer of it, then the glimmer grew to a glow, and the
glow to a great red light, in which his brain became drunk, and all his
philosophy was burned up like wood-shavings in a fiery furnace.

"Did you like it so much?"  Zoe had asked when her song was finished, and
the Man from Outside had replied, "Ah, but splendid, splendid!  It got
into every corner of every one of us."

"Into the senses--why not into the heart?  Songs are meant for the
heart," said Zoe.

"Yes, yes, certainly," was the young man's reply, "but it depends upon
the song whether it touches the heart more than the senses.  Won't you
sing that perfect thing, 'La Claire Fontaine'?" he added, with eyes as
bright as passion and the hectic fires of his lung-trouble could make
them.

She nodded and was about to sing, for she loved the song, and it had been
ringing in her head all day; but at that point M. Fille rose, and with
his glass raised high--for at that moment Seraphe Corniche and another
carried round native wine and cider to the company--he said:

"To Monsieur Jean Jacques Barbille, and his fifty years, good health--
bonne sante!  This is his birthday.  To a hundred years for Jean
Jacques!"

Instantly everyone was up with glass raised, and Zoe ran and threw her
arms round her father's neck.  "Kiss me before you drink," she said.

With a touch almost solemn in its tenderness Jean Jacques drew her head
to his shoulder and kissed her hair, then her forehead.  "My blessed one
--my angel," he whispered; but there was a look in his eyes which only M.
Fille had seen there before.  It was the look which had been in his eyes
at the flax-beaters' place by the river.

"Sing--father, you must sing," said Zoe, and motioned to the fiddler.
"Sing It's Fifty Years," she cried eagerly.  They all repeated her
request, and he could but obey.

Jean Jacques' voice was rather rough, but he had some fine resonant notes
in it, and presently, with eyes fastened on the distance, and with free
gesture and much expression, he sang the first verse of the haunting
ballad of the man who had reached his fifty years:

                   "Wherefore these flowers?
                    This fete for me?
                    Ah, no, it is not fifty years,
                    Since in my eyes the light you see
                    First shone upon life's joys and tears!
                    How fast the heedless days have flown
                    Too late to wail the misspent hours,
                    To mourn the vanished friends I've known,
                    To kneel beside love's ruined bowers.
                    Ah, have I then seen fifty years,
                    With all their joys and hopes and fears!"

Through all the verses he ranged, his voice improving with each phrase,
growing more resonant, till at last it rang out with a ragged richness
which went home to the hearts of all.  He was possessed.  All at once he
was conscious that the beginning of the end of things was come for him;
and that now, at fifty, in no sphere had he absolutely "arrived," neither
in home nor fortune, nor--but yes, there was one sphere of success; there
was his fatherhood.  There was his daughter, his wonderful Zoe.  He drew
his eyes from the distance, and saw that her ardent look was not towards
him, but towards one whom she had known but a few weeks.

Suddenly he stopped in the middle of a verse, and broke forward with his
arms outstretched, laughing.  He felt that he must laugh, or he would
cry; and that would be a humiliating thing to do.

"Come, come, my friends, my children, enough of that!" he cried.  "We'll
have no more maundering.  Fifty years--what are fifty years!  Think of
Methuselah!  It's summer in the world still, and it's only spring at St.
Saviour's.  It's the time of the first flowers.  Let's dance--no, no,
never mind the Cure to-night!  He will not mind.  I'll settle it with
him.  We'll dance the gay quadrille."

He caught the hands of the two youngest girls present, and nodded at the
fiddler, who at once began to tune his violin afresh.  One of the joyous
young girls, however, began to plead with him.

"Ah, no, let us dance, but at the last--not yet, M'sieu' Jean Jacques!
There is Zoe's song, we must have that, and then we must have charades.
Here is M'sieu' Fynes--he can make splendid charades for us.  Then the
dance at the last--ah, yes, yes, M'sieu' Jean Jacques!  Let it be like
that.  We all planned it, and though it is your birthday, it's us are
making the fete."

"As you will then, as you will, little ones," Jean Jacques acquiesced
with a half-sigh; but he did not look at his daughter.  Somehow,
suddenly, a strange constraint possessed him where Zoe was concerned.
"Then let us have Zoe's song; let us have 'La Claire Fontaine'," cried
the black-eyed young madcap who held Jean Jacques' arms.

But Zoe interrupted.  "No, no," she protested, "the singing spell is
broken.  We will have the song after the charades--after the charades."

"Good, good--after the charades!" they all cried, for there would be
charades like none which had ever been played before, with a real actor
to help them, to carry them through as they did on the stage.  To them
the stage was compounded of mystery, gaiety and the forbidden.

So, for the next half-hour they were all at the disposal of the Man from
Outside, who worked as though it was a real stage, and they were real
players, and there were great audiences to see them.  It was all quite
wonderful, and it involved certain posings, attitudes, mimicry and
pantomime, for they were really ingenious charades.

So it happened that Zoe's fingers often came in touch with those of the
stage-manager, that his hands touched her shoulders, that his cheek
brushed against her dark hair once, and that she had sensations never
experienced before.  Why was it that she thrilled when she came near to
him, that her whole body throbbed and her heart fluttered when their
shoulders or arms touched?  Her childlike nature, with all its warmth and
vibration of life, had never till now felt the stir of sex in its vital
sense.  All men had in one way been the same to her; but now she realized
that there was a world-wide difference between her Judge Carcasson, her
little Clerk of the Court, and this young man whose eyes drank hers.  She
had often been excited, even wildly agitated, had been like a sprite let
loose in quiet ways; but that was mere spirit.  Here was body and senses
too; here was her whole being alive to a music, which had an aching
sweetness and a harmony coaxing every sense into delight.

"To-morrow evening, by the flume, where the beechtrees are--come--at six.
I want to speak with you.  Will you come?"

Thus whispered the maker of this music of the senses, who directed the
charades, but who was also directing the course of another life than his
own.

"Yes, if I can," was Zoe's whispered reply, and the words shook as she
said them; for she felt that their meeting in the beech-trees by the
flume would be of consequence beyond imagination.

Judge Carcasson had always said that Zoe had judgment beyond her years;
M. Fille had remarked often that she had both prudence and shrewdness as
well as a sympathetic spirit; but M. Fille's little whispering sister,
who could never be tempted away from her home to any house, to whom the
market and the church were like pilgrimages to distant wilds, had said to
her brother:

"Wait, Armand--wait till Zoe is waked, and then prudence and wisdom will
be but accident.  If all goes well, you will see prudence and wisdom; but
if it does not, you will see--ah, but just Zoe!"

The now alert Jean Jacques had seen the whispering of the two, though he
did not know what had been said.  It was, however, something secret, and
if it was secret, then it was--yes, it was love; and love between his
daughter and that waif of the world--the world of the stage--in which men
and women were only grown-up children, and bad grown-up children at that
--it was not to be endured.  One thing was sure, the man should come to
the Manor Cartier no more.  He would see to that to-morrow.  There would
be no faltering or paltering on his part.  His home had been shaken to
its foundations once, and he was determined that it should not fall about
his ears a second time.  An Englishman, an actor, a Protestant, and a
renegade lawyer!  It was not to be endured.

The charade now being played was the best of the evening.  One of the
madcap friends of Zoe was to be a singing-girl.  She was supposed to
carry a tambourine.  When her turn to enter came, with a look of mischief
and a gay dancing step, she ran into the room.  In her hands was a
guitar, not a tambourine.  When Zoe saw the guitar she gave a cry.

"Where did you get that?" she asked in a low, shocked, indignant voice.

"In your room--your bedroom," was the half-frightened answer.  "I saw it
on the dresser, and I took it."

"Come, come, let's get on with the charade," urged the Man from Outside.

On the instant's pause, in which Zoe looked at her lover almost
involuntarily, and without fully understanding what he said, someone else
started forward with a smothered exclamation--of anger, of horror, of
dismay.  It was Jean Jacques.  He was suddenly transformed.

His eyes were darkened by hideous memory, his face alight with passion.
He caught from the girl's hands the guitar--Carmen's forgotten guitar
which he had not seen for seven years--how well he knew it!  With both
hands he broke it across his knee.  The strings, as they snapped, gave a
shrill, wailing cry, like a voice stopped suddenly by death.  Stepping
jerkily to the fireplace he thrust it into the flame.

"Ah, there!" he said savagely.  "There--there!"  When he turned round
slowly again, his face--which he had never sought to control before he
had his great Accident seven years ago--was under his command.
A strange, ironic-almost sardonic-smile was on his lips.

"It's in the play," he said.

"No, it's not in the charade, Monsieur Barbille," said the Man from
Outside fretfully.

"That is the way I read it, m'sieu'," retorted Jean Jacques, and he made
a motion to the fiddler.

"The dance!  The dance!" he exclaimed.

But yet he looked little like a man who wished to dance, save upon a
grave.




CHAPTER XIV

"I DO NOT WANT TO GO"

It is a bad thing to call down a crisis in the night-time.  A "scene" at
midnight is a savage enemy of ultimate understanding, and that Devil,
called Estrangement, laughs as he observes the objects of his attention
in conflict when the midnight candle burns.

He should have been seized with a fit of remorse, however, at the sight
he saw in the Manor Cartier at midnight of the day when Jean Jacques
Barbille had reached his fiftieth year.  There is nothing which, for
pathos and for tragedy, can compare with a struggle between the young
and the old.

The Devil of Estrangement when he sees it, may go away and indulge
himself in sleep; for there will be no sleep for those who, one young and
the other old, break their hearts on each other's anvils, when the lights
are low and it is long till morning.

When Jean Jacques had broken the forgotten guitar which his daughter had
retrieved from her mother's life at the Manor Cartier (all else he had
had packed and stored away in the flour-mill out of sight) and thrown it
in the fire, there had begun a revolt in the girl's heart, founded on a
sense of injustice, but which itself became injustice also; and that is a
dark thing to come between those who love--even as parent and child.

After her first exclamation of dismay and pain, Zoe had regained her
composure, and during the rest of the evening she was full of feverish
gaiety.  Indeed her spirits and playful hospitality made the evening a
success in spite of the skeleton at the feast.  Jean Jacques had also
roused himself, and, when the dance began, he joined in with spirit,
though his face was worn and haggard even when lighted by his smile.  But
though the evening came to the conventional height of hilarity, there was
a note running through it which made even the youngest look at each
other, as though to say, "Now, what's going to happen next!"

Three people at any rate knew that something was going to happen.  They
were Zoe, the Man from Outside and M. Fille.  Zoe had had more than one
revelation that night, and she felt again as she did one day, seven years
before, when, coming home from over the hills, she had stepped into a
house where Horror brooded as palpably as though it sat beside the fire,
or hung above the family table.  She had felt something as soon as she
had entered the door that far-off day, though the house seemed empty.  It
was an emptiness which was filled with a torturing presence or torturing
presenes.  It had stilled her young heart.  What was it?  She had learned
the truth soon enough.  Out of the sunset had come her father with a face
twisted with misery, and as she ran to him, he had caught her by both
shoulders, looked through her eyes to something far beyond, and hoarsely
said: "She is gone--gone from us!  She has run away from home!  Curse her
baptism--curse it, curse it!"

Zoe could never forget these last words she had ever heard her father
speak of Carmen.  They were words which would make any Catholic shudder
to hear.  It was a pity he had used them, for they made her think at last
that her mother had been treated with injustice.  This, in spite of the
fact that in the days, now so far away, when her mother was with them she
had ever been nearer to her father, and that, after first childhood, she
and her mother were not so close as they had been, when she went to sleep
to the humming of a chanson of Cadiz.  Her own latent motherhood,
however, kept stealing up out of the dim distances of childhood's
ignorance and, with modesty and allusiveness, whispering knowledge in
her ear.  So it was that now she looked back pensively to the years she
had spent within sight and sound of her handsome mother, and out of the
hunger of her own spirit she had come to idealize her memory.  It was
good to have a loving father; but he was a man, and he was so busy just
when she wanted--when she wanted she knew not what, but at least to go
and lay her head on a heart that would understand what was her sorrow,
her joy, or her longing.

And now here at last was come Crisis, which showed its thunderous head in
the gay dance, and shook his war-locks in the fire, where her mother's
guitar had shrieked in its last agony.

When all the guests had gone, when the bolts had been shot home, and old
Seraphe Corniche had gone to bed, father and daughter came face to face.

There was a moment's pause, as the two looked at each other, and then Zoe
came up to Jean Jacques to kiss him good-night.  It was her way of facing
the issue.  Instinctively she knew that he would draw back, and that the
struggle would begin.  It might almost seem that she had invited it; for
she had let the Man from Outside hold her hand for far longer than
courtesy required, while her father looked on with fretful eyes--even
with a murmuring which was not a benediction.  Indeed, he had evaded
shaking hands with his hated visitor by suddenly offering him a cigar,
and then in the doorway itself handing a lighted match.

"His eminence, Cardinal Christophe, gave these cigars to me when he
passed through St. Saviour's five years ago," Jean Jacques had remarked
loftily, "and I always smoke one on my birthday.  I am a good Catholic,
and his eminence rested here for a whole day."

He had had a grim pleasure in avoiding the handshake, and in having the
Protestant outsider smoke the Catholic cigar!  In his anger it seemed to
him that he had done something worthy almost of the Vatican, indeed of
the great Cardinal Christophe himself.  Even in his moments of crisis, in
his hours of real tragedy, in the times when he was shaken to the centre,
Jean Jacques fancied himself more than a little.  It was as the master-
carpenter had remarked seven years before, he was always involuntarily
saying, "Here I come--look at me.  I am Jean Jacques Barbille!"

When Zoe reached out a hand to touch his arm, and raised her face as
though to kiss him good-night, Jean Jacques drew back.

"Not yet, Zoe," he said.  "There are some things--What is all this
between you and that man?  .  .  .  I have seen.  You must not forget
who you are--the daughter of Jean Jacques Barbille, of the Manor Cartier,
whose name is known in the whole province, who was asked to stand for the
legislature.  You are Zoe Barbille--Mademoiselle Zoe Barbille.  We do not
put on airs.  We are kind to our neighbours, but I am descended from the
Baron of Beaugard.  I have a place--yes, a place in society; and it is
for you to respect it.  You comprehend?"

Zoe flushed, but there was no hesitation whatever in her reply.  "I am
what I have always been, and it is not my fault that I am the daughter of
M. Jean Jacques Barbille!  I have never done anything which was not good
enough for the Manor Cartier."  She held her head firmly as she said it.

Now Jean Jacques flushed, and he did hesitate in his reply.  He hated
irony in anyone else, though he loved it in himself, when heaven gave him
inspiration thereto.  He was in a state of tension, and was ready to
break out, to be a force let loose--that is the way he would have
expressed it; and he was faced by a new spirit in his daughter which
would surely spring the mine, unless he secured peace by strategy.  He
had sense enough to feel the danger.

He did not see, however, any course for diplomacy here, for she had given
him his cue in her last words.  As a pure logician he was bound to take
it, though it might lead to drama of a kind painful to them both.

"It is not good enough for the Manor Cartier that you go falling in love
with a nobody from nowhere," he responded.

"I am not falling in love," she rejoined.

"What did you mean, then, by looking at him as you did; by whispering
together; by letting him hold your hand when he left, and him looking at
you as though he'd eat you up--without sugar!"

"I said I was not falling in love," she persisted, quietly, but with
characteristic boldness.  "I am in love."

"You are in love with him--with that interloper!  Heaven of heavens, do
you speak the truth?  Answer me, Zoe Barbille."

She bridled.  "Certainly I will answer.  Did you think I would let a man
look at me as he did, that I would look at a man as I looked at him, that
I would let him hold my hand as I did, if I did not love him?  Have you
ever seen me do it before?"

Her voice was even and quiet--as though she had made up her mind on a
course, and meant to carry it through to the end.

"No, I never saw you look at a man like that, and everything is as you
say, but--" his voice suddenly became uneven and higher--pitched and a
little hoarse, "but he is English, he is an actor--only that; and he is a
Protestant."

"Only that?" she asked, for the tone of his voice was such as one would
use in speaking of a toad or vermin, and she could not bear it.  "Is it a
disgrace to be any one of those things?"

"The Barbilles have been here for two hundred years; they have been
French Catholics since the time of"--he was not quite sure--"since the
time of Louis XI.," he added at a venture, and then paused, overcome by
his own rashness.

"Yes, that is a long time," she said, "but what difference does it make?
We are just what we are now, and as if there never had been a Baron of
Beaugard.  What is there against Gerard except that he is an actor, that
he is English, and that he is a Protestant?  Is there anything?"

"Sacre, is it not enough?  An actor, what is that--to pretend to be
someone else and not to be yourself!"

"It would be better for a great many people to be someone else rather
than themselves--for nothing; and he does it for money."

"For money!  What money has he got?  You don't know.  None of us know.
Besides, he's a Protestant, and he's English, and that ends it.  There
never has been an Englishman or a Protestant in the Barbille family, and
it shan't begin at the Manor Cartier."  Jean Jacques' voice was rising in
proportion as he perceived her quiet determination.  Here was something
of the woman who had left him seven years ago--left this comfortable home
of his to go to disgrace and exile, and God only knew what else!  Here in
this very room--yes, here where they now were, father and daughter, stood
husband and wife that morning when he had his hand on the lever prepared
to destroy the man who had invaded his home; who had cast a blight upon
it, which remained after all the years; after he had done all a man could
do to keep the home and the woman too.  The woman had gone; the home
remained with his daughter in it, and now again there was a fight for
home and the woman.  Memory reproduced the picture of the mother standing
just where the daughter now stood, Carmen quiet and well in hand, and
himself all shaken with weakness, and with all power gone out of him--
even the power which rage and a murderous soul give.

But yet this was different.  There was no such shame here as had fallen
on him seven years ago.  But there was a shame after its kind; and if it
were not averted, there was the end of the home, of the prestige, the
pride and the hope of "M'sieu' Jean Jacques, philosophe."

"What shall not begin here at the Manor Cartier?" she asked with burning
cheek.

"The shame--it shall not begin here."

"What shame, father?"

"Of marriage with a Protestant and an actor."

"You will not let me marry him?" she persisted stubbornly.

Her words seemed to shake him all to pieces.  It was as though he was
going through the older tragedy all over again.  It had possessed him
ever since the sight of Carmen's guitar had driven him mad three hours
ago.  He swayed to and fro, even as he did when his hand left the lever
and he let the master-carpenter go free.  It was indeed a philosopher
under torture, a spirit rocking on its anchor.  Just now she had put into
words herself what, even in his fear, he had hoped had no place in her
mind--marriage with the man.  He did not know this daughter of his very
well.  There was that in her which was far beyond his ken.  Thousands of
miles away in Spain it had origin, and the stream of tendency came down
through long generations, by courses unknown to him.

"Marry him--you want to marry him!" he gasped.  "You, my Zoe, want to
marry that tramp of a Protestant!"

Her eyes blazed in anger.  Tramp--the man with the air of a young
Alexander, with a voice like the low notes of the guitar thrown to the
flames!  Tramp!

"If I love him I ought to marry him," she answered with a kind of
calmness, however, though all her body was quivering.  Suddenly she came
close to her father, a great sympathy welled up in her eyes, and her
voice shook.

"I do not want to leave you, father, and I never meant to do so.  I never
thought of it as possible; but now it is different.  I want to stay with
you; but I want to go with him too."

Presently as she seemed to weaken before him, he hardened.  "You can't
have both," he declared with as much sternness as was possible to him,
and with a Norman wilfulness which was not strength.  "You shall not
marry an actor and a Protestant.  You shall not marry a man like that--
never--never--never.  If you do, you will never have a penny of mine,
and I will never--"

"Oh, hush--Mother of Heaven, hush!" she cried.  "You shall not put a
curse on me too."

"What curse?" he burst forth, passion shaking him.  "You cursed my
mother's baptism.  It would be a curse to be told that you would see me
no more, that I should be no more part of this home.  There has been
enough of that curse here.  .  .  .  Ah, why--why--" she added with a
sudden rush of indignation, "why did you destroy the only thing I had
of hers?  It was all that was left--her guitar.  I loved it so."

All at once, with a cry of pain, she turned and ran to the door--entering
on the staircase which led to her room.  In the doorway she turned.

"I can't help it.  I can't help it, father.  I love him--but I love you
too," she cried.  "I don't want to go--oh, I don't want to go!  Why do
you--?" her voice choked; she did not finish the sentence; or if she did,
he could not hear.

Then she opened the door wide, and disappeared into the darkness of the
unlighted stairway, murmuring, "Pity--have pity on me, holy Mother,
Vierge Marie!"  Then the door closed behind her almost with a bang.

After a moment of stupefied inaction Jean Jacques hurried over and threw
open the door she had closed.  "Zoe--little Zoe, come back and say good-
night," he called.  But she did not hear, for, with a burst of crying,
she had hurried into her own room and shut and locked the door.

It was a pity, a measureless pity, as Mary the Mother must have seen,
if she could see mortal life at all, that Zoe did not hear him.  It might
have altered the future.  As it was, the Devil of Estrangement might well
be content with his night's work.




CHAPTER XV

BON MARCHE

Vilray was having its market day, and everyone was either going to or
coming from market, or buying and selling in the little square by the
Court House.  It was the time when the fruits were coming in, when
vegetables were in full yield, when fish from the Beau Cheval were to be
had in plenty--from mud-cats and suckers, pike and perch, to rock-bass,
sturgeon and even maskinonge.  Also it was the time of year when butter
and eggs, chickens and ducks were so cheap that it was a humiliation not
to buy.  There were other things on sale also, not for eating and
drinking, but for wear and household use--from pots and pans to rag-
carpets and table-linen, from woollen yarn to pictures of the Virgin and
little calvaries.

These were side by side with dried apples, bottled fruits, jars of maple
syrup, and cordials of so generous and penetrating a nature that the
currant and elderberry wine by which they were flanked were tipple for
babes beside them.  Indeed, when a man wanted to forget himself quickly
he drank one of these cordials, in preference to the white whisky so
commonly imbibed in the parishes.  But the cordials being expensive, they
were chiefly bought for festive occasions like a wedding, a funeral, a
confirmation, or the going away of some young man or young woman to the
monastery or the convent to forget the world.  Meanwhile, if these
spiritual argonauts drank it, they were likely to forget the world on the
way to their voluntary prisons.  It was very seldom that a man or woman
bought the cordials for ordinary consumption, and when that was done, it
would almost make a parish talk!  Yet cordials of nice brown, of delicate
green, of an enticing yellow colour, were here for sale at Vilray market
on the morning after the painful scene at the Manor Cartier between Zoe
and her father.

The market-place was full--fuller than it had been for many a day.  A
great many people were come in as much to "make fete" as to buy and sell.
It was a saint's day, and the bell of St. Monica's had been ringing away
cheerfully twice that morning.  To it the bell of the Court House had
made reply, for a big case was being tried in the court.  It was a river-
driving and lumber case for which many witnesses had been called; and
there were all kinds of stray people in the place--red-shirted river-
drivers, a black-coated Methodist minister from Chalfonte, clerks from
lumber-firms, and foremen of lumber-yards; and among these was one who
greatly loved such a day as this when he could be free from work, and
celebrate himself!

Other people might celebrate saints dead and gone, and drink to 'La
Patrie', and cry "Vive Napoleon!" or "Vive la Republique!" or "Vive la
Reine!" though this last toast of the Empire was none too common--but he
could only drink with real sincerity to the health of Sebastian Dolores,
which was himself.  Sebastian Dolores was the pure anarchist, the most
complete of monomaniacs.

"Here comes the father of the Spanische," remarked Mere Langlois, who
presided over a heap of household necessities, chiefly dried fruits,
preserves and pickles, as Sebastian Dolores appeared not far away.

"Good-for-nothing villain!  I pity the poor priest that confesses him."

"Who is the Spanische?" asked a young woman from her own stall or stand
very near, as she involuntarily arranged her hair and adjusted her waist-
belt; for the rakish-looking reprobate, with the air of having been
somewhere, was making towards them; and she was young enough to care how
she looked when a man, who took notice, was near.  Her own husband had
been a horse-doctor, farmer, and sportsman of a kind, and she herself was
now a farmer of a kind; and she had only resided in the parish during the
three years since she had been married to, and buried, Palass Poucette.

Old Mere Langlois looked at her companion in merchanting irritably, then
she remembered that Virginie Poucette was a stranger, in a way, and was
therefore deserving of pity, and she said with compassionate patronage:
"Newcomer you--I'd forgotten.  Look you then, the Spanische was the wife
of my third cousin, M'sieu' Jean Jacques, and--"

Virginie Poucette nodded, and the slight frown cleared from her low yet
shapely forehead.  "Yes, yes, of course I know.  I've heard enough.  What
a fool she was, and M'sieu' Jean Jacques so rich and kind and good-
looking!  So this is her father--well, well, well!"

Palass Poucette's widow leaned forward, and looked intently at Sebastian
Dolores, who had stopped near by, and facing a couple of barrels on which
were exposed some bottles of cordial and home-made wine.  He was
addressing himself with cheerful words to the dame that owned the
merchandise.

"I suppose you think it's a pity Jean Jacques can't get a divorce,"
said Mere Langlois, rather spitefully to Virginie, for she had her
sex's aversion to widows who had had their share of mankind, and were
afterwards free to have someone else's share as well.  But suddenly
repenting, for Virginie was a hard-working widow who had behaved very
well for an outsider--having come from Chalfonte beyond the Beau
Chevalshe added: "But if he was a Protestant and could get a divorce,
and you did marry him, you'd make him have more sense than he's got; for
you've a quiet sensible way, and you've worked hard since Palass Poucette
died."

"Where doesn't he show sense, that M'sieu' Jean Jacques?" the younger
woman asked.

"Where?  Why, with his girl--with Ma'm'selle."  "Everybody I ever heard
speaks well of Ma'm'selle Zoe," returned the other warmly, for she had a
very generous mind and a truthful, sentimental heart.  Mere Langlois
sniffed, and put her hands on her hips, for she had a daughter of her
own; also she was a relation of Jean Jacques, and therefore resented in
one way the difference in their social position, while yet she plumed
herself on being kin.

"Then you'll learn something now you never knew before," she said.
"She's been carrying on--there's no other word for it--with an actor
fellow--"

"Yes, yes, I did hear about him--a Protestant and an Englishman."

"Well, then, why do you pretend you don't know--only to hear me talk, is
it?  Take my word, I'd teach cousin Zoe a lesson with all her education
and her two years at the convent.  Wasn't it enough that her mother
should spoil everything for Jean Jacques, and make the Manor Cartier a
place to point the finger at, without her bringing disgrace on the parish
too!  What happened last night--didn't I hear this morning before I had
my breakfast!  Didn't I--"

She then proceeded to describe the scene in which Jean Jacques had thrown
the wrecked guitar of his vanished spouse into the fire.  Before she had
finished, however, something occurred which swept them into another act
of the famous history of Jean Jacques Barbille and his house.

She had arrived at the point where Zoe had cried aloud in pain at her
father's incendiary act, when there was a great stir at the Court House
door which opened on the market-place, and vagrant cheers arose.  These
were presently followed by a more disciplined fusillade; which presently,
in turn, was met by hisses and some raucous cries of resentment.  These
increased as a man appeared on the steps of the Court House, looked round
for a moment in a dazed kind of way, then seeing some friends below who
were swarming towards him, gave a ribald cry, and scrambled down the
steps towards them.

He was the prisoner whose release had suddenly been secured by a piece of
evidence which had come as a thunder-clap on judge and jury.  Immediately
after giving this remarkable evidence the witness--Sebastian Dolores--
had left the court-room.  He was now engaged in buying cordials in the
market-place--in buying and drinking them; for he had pulled the cork out
of a bottle filled with a rich yellow liquid, and had drained half the
bottle at a gulp.  Presently he offered the remainder to a passing
carter, who made a gesture of contempt and passed on, for, to him, white
whisky was the only drink worth while.  Besides, he disliked Sebastian
Dolores.  Then, with a flourish, the Spaniard tendered the bottle to
Madame Langlois and Palass Poucette's widow, at whose corner of
merchandise he had now arrived.

Surely there never was a more benign villain and perjurer in the world
than Sebastian Dolores!  His evidence, given a half-hour before, with
every sign of truthfulness, was false.  The man--Rocque Valescure--for
whom he gave it was no friend of his; but he owned a tavern called "The
Red Eagle," a few miles from the works where the Spaniard was employed;
also Rocque Valescure's wife set a good table, and Sebastian Dolores was
a very liberal feeder; when he was not hungry he was always thirsty.  The
appeasement of hunger and thirst was now become a problem to him, for his
employers at Beauharnais had given him a month's notice because of
certain irregularities which had come to their knowledge.  Like a wise
man Sebastian Dolores had said nothing about this abroad, but had
enlarged his credit in every direction, and had then planned this piece
of friendly perjury for Rocque Valescure, who was now descending the
steps of the Court House to the arms of his friends and amid the
execrations of his foes.  What the alleged crime was does not matter.
It has no vital significance in the history of Jean Jacques Barbille,
though it has its place as a swivel on which the future swung.

Sebastian Dolores had saved Rocque Valescure from at least three years in
jail, and possibly a very heavy fine as well; and this service must have
its due reward.  Something for nothing was not the motto of Sebastian
Dolores; and he confidently looked forward to having a home at "The Red
Eagle" and a banker in its landlord.  He was no longer certain that he
could rely on help from Jean Jacques, to whom he already owed so much.
That was why he wanted to make Rocque Valescure his debtor.  It was not
his way to perjure his soul for nothing.  He had done so in Spain--yet
not for nothing either.  He had saved his head, which was now doing
useful work for himself and for a needy fellow-creature.  No one could
doubt that he had helped a neighbour in great need, and had done it at
some expense to his own nerve and brain.  None but an expert could have
lied as he had done in the witness-box.  Also he had upheld his lies with
a striking narrative of circumstantiality.  He made things fit in "like
mortised blocks" as the Clerk of the Court said to Judge Carcasson, when
they discussed the infamy afterwards with clear conviction that it was
perjury of a shameless kind; for one who would perjure himself to save a
man from jail, would also swear a man into the gallows-rope.  But Judge
Carcasson had not been able to charge the jury in that sense, for there
was no effective evidence to rebut the untruthful attestation of the
Spaniard.  It had to be taken for what it was worth, since the
prosecuting attorney could not shake it; and yet to the Court itself it
was manifestly false witness.

Sebastian Dolores was too wise to throw himself into the arms of his
released tavern-keeper here immediately after the trial, or to allow
Rocque Valescure a like indiscretion and luxury; for there was a strong
law against perjury, and right well Sebastian Dolores knew that old Judge
Carcasson would have little mercy on him, in spite of the fact that he
was the grandfather of Zoe Barbille.  The Judge would probably think that
safe custody for his wayward character would be the kindest thing he
could do for Zoe.  Therefore it was that Sebastian Dolores paid no
attention to the progress of the released landlord of "The Red Eagle,"
though, by a glance out of the corner of his eyes, he made sure that the
footsteps of liberated guilt were marching at a tangent from where he
was--even to the nearest tavern.

It was enough for Dolores that he should watch the result of his good
deed from the isolated area where he now was, in the company of two
virtuous representatives of domesticity.  His time with liberated guilt
would come!  He chuckled to think how he had provided himself with a
refuge against his hour of trouble.  That very day he had left his
employment, meaning to return no more, securing his full wages through
having suddenly become resentful and troublesome, neglectful--and
imperative.  To avoid further unpleasantness the firm had paid him all
his wages; and he had straightway come to Vilray to earn his bed and
board by other means than through a pen, a ledger and a gift for figures.
It would not be a permanent security against the future, but it would
suffice for the moment.  It was a rest-place on the road.  If the worst
came to the worst, there was his grand-daughter and his dear son-in-law
whom he so seldom saw--blood was thicker than water, and he would see to
it that it was not thinned by neglect.

Meanwhile he ogled Palass Poucette's widow with one eye, and talked
softly with his tongue to Mere Langlois, as he importuned Madame to "Sip
the good cordial in the name of charity to all and malice towards none."

"You're a bad man--you, and I want none of your cordials," was Mere
Langlois's response.  "Malice towards none, indeed!  If you and the devil
started business in the same street, you'd make him close up shop in a
year.  I've got your measure, for sure; I have you certain as an arm and
a pair of stirrups."

"I go about doing good--only good," returned the old sinner with a leer
at the young widow, whose fingers he managed to press unseen, as he swung
the little bottle of cordial before the eyes of Mere Langlois.  He was
not wholly surprised when Palass Poucette's widow did not show abrupt
displeasure at his bold familiarity.

A wild thought flashed into his mind.  Might there not be another refuge
here--here in Palass Poucette's widow!  He was sixty-three, it was true,
and she was only thirty-two; but for her to be an old man's darling who
had no doubt been a young man's slave, that would surely have its weight
with her.  Also she owned the farm where she lived; and she was pleasant
pasturage--that was the phrase he used in his own mind, even as his eye
swept from Mere Langlois to hers in swift, hungry inquiry.

He seemed in earnest when he spoke--but that was his way; it had done him
service often.  "I do good whenever it comes my way to do it," he
continued.  "I left my work this morning"--he lied of course--"and hired
a buggy to bring me over here, all at my own cost, to save a fellow-man.
There in the Court House he was sure of prison, with a wife and three
small children weeping in 'The Red Eagle'; and there I come at great
expense and trouble to tell the truth--before all to tell the truth--and
save him and set him free.  Yonder he is in the tavern, the work of my
hands, a gift to the world from an honest man with a good heart and a
sense of justice.  But for me there would be a wife and three children in
the bondage of shame, sorrow, poverty and misery"--his eyes again
ravished the brown eyes of Palass Poucette's widow--"and here again
I drink to my own health and to that of all good people--with charity
to all and malice towards none!"

The little bottle of golden cordial was raised towards Mere Langlois.
The fingers of one hand, however, were again seeking those of the comely
young widow who was half behind him, when he felt them caught
spasmodically away.  Before he had time to turn round he heard a voice,
saying: "I should have thought that 'With malice to all and charity
towards none,' was your motto, Dolores."

He knew that voice well enough.  He had always had a lurking fear that
he would hear it say something devastating to him, from the great chair
where its owner sat and dispensed what justice a jury would permit him to
do.  That devastating something would be agony to one who loved liberty
and freedom--had not that ever been his watchword, liberty and freedom to
do what he pleased in the world and with the world?  Yes, he well knew
Judge Carcasson's voice.  He would have recognized it in the dark--or
under the black cap.  "M'sieu' le juge !" he said, even before he turned
round and saw the faces of the tiny Judge and his Clerk of the Court.
There was a kind of quivering about his mouth, and a startled look in his
eyes as he faced the two.  But there was the widow of Palass Poucette,
and, if he was to pursue and frequent her, something must be done to keep
him decently figured in her eye and mind.

"It cost me three dollars to come here and save a man from jail to-day,
m'sieu' le juge," he added firmly.  The Judge pressed the point of his
cane against the stomach of the hypocrite and perjurer.  "If the Devil
and you meet, he will take off his hat to you, my escaped anarchist"--
Dolores started almost violently now--"for you can teach him much, and
Ananias was the merest aboriginal to you.  But we'll get you--we'll get
you, Dolores.  You saved that guilty fellow by a careful and remarkable
perjury to-day.  In a long experience I have never seen a better
performance--have you, monsieur?" he added to M. Fille.

"But once," was the pointed and deliberate reply.  "Ah, when was that?"
asked Judge Carcasson, interested.

"The year monsieur le juge was ill, and Judge Blaquiere took your place.
It was in Vilray at the Court House here."

"Ah--ah, and who was the phenomenon--the perfect liar?" asked the Judge
with the eagerness of the expert.

"His name was Sebastian Dolores," meditatively replied M. Fille.  "It was
even a finer performance than that of to-day."

The Judge gave a little grunt of surprise.  "Twice, eh?" he asked.
"Yet this was good enough to break any record," he added.  He fastened
the young widow's eyes.  "Madame, you are young, and you have an eye of
intelligence.  Be sure of this: you can protect yourself against almost
anyone except a liar--eh, madame?" he added to Mere Langlois.  "I am
sure your experience of life and your good sense--"

"My good sense would make me think purgatory was hell if I saw him"--
she nodded savagely at Dolores as she said it, for she had seen that last
effort of his to take the fingers of Palass Poucette's widow--"if I saw
him there, m'sieu' le juge."

"We'll have you yet--we'll have you yet, Dolores," said the Judge, as the
Spaniard prepared to move on.  But, as Dolores went, he again caught the
eyes of the young widow.

This made him suddenly bold.  "'Thou shalt not bear false witness against
thy neighbour,'--that is the commandment, is it not, m'sieu' le juge?
You are doing against me what I didn't do in Court to-day.  I saved a man
from your malice."

The crook of the Judge's cane caught the Spaniard's arm, and held him
gently.

"You're possessed of a devil, Dolores," he said, "and I hope I'll never
have to administer justice in your case.  I might be more man than judge.
But you will come to no good end.  You will certainly--"

He got no further, for the attention of all was suddenly arrested by a
wagon driving furiously round the corner of the Court House.  It was a
red wagon.  In it was Jean Jacques Barbille.

His face was white and set; his head was thrust forward, as though
looking at something far ahead of him; the pony stallions he was driving
were white with sweat, and he had an air of tragic helplessness and
panic.

Suddenly a child ran across the roadway in front of the ponies, and the
wild cry of the mother roused Jean Jacques out of his agonized trance.
He sprang to his feet, wrenching the horses backward and aside with
deftness and presence of mind.  The margin of safety was not more than a
foot, but the child was saved.

The philosopher of the Manor Cartier seemed to come out of a dream as men
and women applauded, and cries arose of "Bravo, M'sieu' Jean Jacques!"

At any other time this would have made Jean Jacques nod and smile, or
wave a hand, or exclaim in good fellowship.  Now, however, his eyes were
full of trouble, and the glassiness of the semi-trance leaving them, they
shifted restlessly here and there.  Suddenly they fastened on the little
group of which Judge Carcasson was the centre.  He had stopped his horses
almost beside them.

"Ah!" he said, "ah!" as his eyes rested on the Judge.  "Ah!" he again
exclaimed, as the glance ran from the Judge to Sebastian Dolores.  "Ah,
mercy of God!" he added, in a voice which had both a low note and a high
note-deep misery and shrill protest in one.  Then he seemed to choke, and
words would not come, but he kept looking, looking at Sebastian Dolores,
as though fascinated and tortured by the sight of him.

"What is it, Jean Jacques?" asked the little Clerk of the Court gently,
coming forward and laying a hand on the steaming flank of a spent and
trembling pony.

As though he could not withdraw his gaze from Sebastian Dolores, Jean
Jacques did not look at M. Fil1e; but he thrust out the long whip he
carried towards the father of his vanished Carmen and his Zoe's
grandfather, and with the deliberation of one to whom speaking was like
the laceration of a nerve he said: "Zoe's run away--gone--gone!"

At that moment Louis Charron, his cousin, at whose house Gerard Fynes had
lodged, came down the street galloping his horse.  Seeing the red wagon,
he made for it, and drew rein.

"It's no good, Jean Jacques," he called.  "They're married and gone to
Montreal--married right under our noses by the Protestant minister at
Terrebasse Junction.  I've got the telegram here from the stationmaster
at Terrebasse.  .  .  .  Ah, the villain to steal away like that--only a
child--from her own father!  Here it is--the telegram.  But believe me,
an actor, a Protestant and a foreigner--what a devil's mess!"

He waved the telegram towards Jean Jacques.

"Did he owe you anything, Louis?" asked old Mere Langlois, whose
practical mind was alert to find the material status of things.

"Not a sou.  Well, but he was honest, I'll say that for the rogue and
seducer."

"Seducer--ah, God choke you with your own tongue!" cried Jean Jacques,
turning on Louis Charron with a savage jerk of the whip he held.  "She is
as pure--"

"It is no marriage, of course!" squeaked a voice from the crowd.

"It'll be all right among the English, won't it, monsieur le juge?"
asked the gentle widow of Palass Poucette, whom the scene seemed to rouse
out of her natural shyness.

"Most sure, madame, most sure," answered the Judge.  "It will be all
right among the English, and it is all right among the French so far as
the law is concerned.  As for the Church, that is another matter.  But--
but see," he added addressing Louis Charron, "does the station-master say
what place they took tickets for?"

"Montreal and Winnipeg," was the reply.  "Here it is in the telegram.
Winnipeg--that's as English as London."

"Winnipeg--a thousand miles!" moaned Jean Jacques.

With the finality which the tickets for Winnipeg signified, the shrill
panic emotion seemed to pass from him.  In its mumbling, deadening force
it was like a sentence on a prisoner.

As many eyes were on Sebastian Dolores as on Jean Jacques.  "It's the bad
blood that was in her," said a farmer with a significant gesture towards
Sebastian Dolores.

"A little bad blood let out would be a good thing," remarked a truculent
river-driver, who had given evidence directly contrary to that given by
Sebastian Dolores in the trial just concluded.  There was a savage look
in his eye.

Sebastian Dolores heard, and he was not the man to invite trouble.  He
could do no good where he was, and he turned to leave the market-place;
but in doing so he sought the eye of Virginie Poucette, who, however,
kept her face at an angle from him, as she saw Mere Langlois sharply
watching her.

"Grandfather, mother and daughter, all of a piece!" said a spiteful
woman, as Sebastian Dolores passed her.  The look he gave her was not the
same as that he had given to Palass Poucette's widow.  If it had been
given by a Spanish inquisitor to a heretic, little hope would have
remained in the heretic's heart.  Yet there was a sad patient look on his
face, as though he was a martyr.  He had no wish to be a martyr; but he
had a feeling that for want of other means of expressing their sympathy
with Jean Jacques, these rough people might tar and feather him at least;
though it was only his misfortune that those sprung from his loins had
such adventurous spirits!

Sebastian Dolores was not without a real instinct regarding things.  What
was in his mind was also passing through that of the river-driver and a
few of his friends, and they carefully watched the route he was taking.

Jean Jacques prepared to depart.  He had ever loved to be the centre of a
picture, but here was a time when to be in the centre was torture.  Eyes
of morbid curiosity were looking at the open wounds of his heart-ragged
wounds made by the shrapnel of tragedy and treachery, not the clean
wounds got in a fair fight, easily healed.  For the moment at least the
little egoist was a mere suffering soul--an epitome of shame, misery and
disappointment.  He must straightway flee the place where he was tied to
the stake of public curiosity and scorn.  He drew the reins tighter, and
the horses straightened to depart.  Then it was that old Judge Carcasson
laid a hand on his knee.

"Come, come," he said to the dejected and broken little man, "where is
your philosophy?"

Jean Jacques looked at the Judge, as though with a new-born suspicion
that henceforth the world would laugh at him, and that Judge Carcasson
was setting the fashion; but seeing a pitying moisture in the other's
eyes, he drew himself up, set his jaw, and calling on all the forces at
his command, he said:

"Moi je suis philosophe!"

His voice frayed a little on the last word, but his head was up now.
The Clerk of the Court would have asked to accompany him to the Manor
Cartier, but he was not sure that Jean Jacques would like it.  He had a
feeling that Jean Jacques would wish to have his dark hour alone.  So he
remained silent, and Jean Jacques touched his horses with the whip.
After starting, however, and having been followed for a hundred yards or
so by the pitying murmurs and a few I-told-you-so's and revilings for
having married as he did, Jean Jacques stopped the ponies.  Standing up
in the red wagon he looked round for someone whom, for a moment, he did
not see in the slowly shifting crowd.

Philosophy was all very well, and he had courageously given his
allegiance to it, or a formula of it, a moment before; but there was
something deeper and rarer still in the little man's soul.  His heart
hungered for the two women who had been the joy and pride of his life,
even when he had been lost in the business of the material world.  They
were more to him than he had ever known; they were parts of himself which
had slowly developed, as the features and characteristics of ancestors
gradually emerge and are emphasized in a descendant as his years
increase.  Carmen and Zoe were more a part of himself now than they had
ever been.

They were gone, the living spirits of his home.  Anything that reminded
him of them, despite the pain of the reminder, was dear to him.  Love was
greater than the vengeful desire of injured human nature.  His eyes
wandered over the people, over the market.  At last he saw what he was
looking for.  He called.  A man turned.  Jean Jacques beckoned to him.
He came eagerly, he hurried to the red wagon.

"Come home with me," said Jean Jacques.

The words were addressed to Sebastian Dolores, who said to himself that
this was a refuge surer than "The Red Eagle," or the home of the widow
Poucette.  He climbed in beside Jean Jacques with a sigh of content.

"Ah, but that--but that is the end of our philosopher," said Judge
Carcasson sadly to the Clerk of the Court, as with amazement he saw this
catastrophe.

"Alas!  if I had only asked to go with him, as I wished to do!"
responded M. Fille.  "There, but a minute ago, it was in my mind," he
added with a look of pain.

"You missed your chance, falterer," said the Judge severely.  "If you
have a good thought, act on it--that is the golden rule.  You missed your
chance.  It will never come again.  He has taken the wrong turning, our
unhappy Jean Jacques."

"Monsieur--oh, monsieur, do not shut the door in the face of God like
that!" said the shocked little master of the law.  "Those two together
--it may be only for a moment."

"Ah, no, my little owl, Jean Jacques will wind the boa-constrictor round
his neck like a collar, all for love of those he has lost," answered the
Judge with emotion; and he caught M. Fille's arm in the companionship of
sorrow.

In silence these two watched the red wagon till it was out of sight.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

He hated irony in anyone else
I said I was not falling in love--I am in love
If you have a good thought, act on it
Philosophers are often stupid in human affairs
The beginning of the end of things was come for him






THE MONEY MASTER

By Gilbert Parker



EPOCH THE FOURTH

XVI.      MISFORTUNES COME NOT SINGLY
XVII.     HIS GREATEST ASSET
XVIII.    JEAN JACQUES HAS AN OFFER
XIX.      SEBASTIAN DOLORES DOES NOT SLEEP
XX.       "AU 'VOIR, M'SIEU' JEAN JACQUES"
XXI.      IF SHE HAD KNOWN IN TIME




CHAPTER XVI

MISFORTUNES COME NOT SINGLY

Judge Carcasson was right.  For a year after Zoe's flight Jean Jacques
wrapped Sebastian Dolores round his neck like a collar, and it choked him
like a boaconstrictor.  But not Sebastian Dolores alone did that.  When
things begin to go wrong in the life of a man whose hands have held too
many things, the disorder flutters through all the radii of his affairs,
and presently they rattle away from the hub of his control.

So it was with Jean Jacques.  To take his reprobate father-in-law to his
lonely home would have brought him trouble in any case; but as things
were, the Spaniard became only the last straw which broke his camel's
back.  And what a burden his camel carried--flour-mill, saw-mill, ash-
factory, farms, a general store, lime-kilns, agency for lightning-rods
and insurance, cattle-dealing, the project for the new cheese-factory,
and money-lending!

Money-lending?  It seemed strange that Jean Jacques should be able to
lend money, since he himself had to borrow, and mortgage also, from time
to time.  When things began to go really wrong with him financially, he
mortgaged his farms, his flour-mill, and saw-mill, and then lent money on
other mortgages.  This he did because he had always lent money, and it
was a habit so associated with his prestige, that he tied himself up in
borrowing and lending and counter-mortgaging till, as the saying is, "a
Philadelphia lawyer" could not have unravelled his affairs without having
been born again in the law.  That he was able to manipulate his tangled
affairs, while keeping the confidence of those from whom he borrowed, and
the admiration of those to whom he lent, was evidence of his capacity.
"Genius of a kind" was what his biggest creditor called it later.

After a personal visit to St. Saviour's, this biggest creditor and
financial potentate--M. Mornay--said that if Jean Jacques had been
started right and trained right, he would have been a "general in the
financial field, winning big battles."

M. Mornay chanced to be a friend of Judge Carcasson, and when he visited
Vilray he remembered that the Judge had spoken often of his humble but
learned friend, the Clerk of the Court, and of his sister.  So M. Mornay
made his way from the office of the firm of avocats whom he had
instructed in his affairs with Jean Jacques, to that of M. Fille.  Here
he was soon engaged in comment on the master-miller and philosopher.

"He has had much trouble, and no doubt his affairs have suffered,"
remarked M. Fille cautiously, when the ice had been broken and the Big
Financier had referred casually to the difficulties among which Jean
Jacques was trying to maintain equilibrium; "but he is a man who can do
things too hard for other men."

The Big Financier lighted another cigar and blew away several clouds of
smoke before he said in reply, "Yes, I know he has had family trouble
again, but that is a year ago, and he has had a chance to get another
grip of things."

"He did not sit down and mope," explained M. Fille.  "He was at work the
next day after his daughter's flight just the same as before.  He is a
man of great courage.  Misfortune does not paralyse him."

M. Mornay's speech was of a kind which came in spurts, with pauses of
thought between, and the pause now was longer than usual.

"Paralysis--certainly not," he said at last.  "Physical activity is one
of the manifestations of mental, moral, and even physical shock and
injury.  I've seen a man with a bullet in him run a half-mile--anywhere;
I've seen a man ripped up by a crosscut-saw hold himself together, and
walk--anywhere--till he dropped.  Physical and nervous activity is one of
the forms which shattered force takes.  I expect that your 'M'sieu' Jean
Jacques' has been busier this last year than ever before in his life.
He'd have to be; for a man who has as many irons in the fire as he has,
must keep running from bellows to bellows when misfortune starts to damp
him down."

The Clerk of the Court sighed.  He realized the significance of what his
visitor was saying.  Ever Since Zoe had gone, Jean Jacques had been for
ever on the move, for ever making hay on which the sun did not shine.
Jean Jacques' face these days was lined and changeful.  It looked
unstable and tired--as though disturbing forces were working up to the
surface out of control.  The brown eyes, too, were far more restless than
they had ever been since the Antoine was wrecked, and their owner
returned with Carmen to the Manor Cartier.  But the new restlessness of
the eyes was different from the old.  That was a mobility impelled by an
active, inquisitive soul, trying to observe what was going on in the
world, and to make sure that its possessor was being seen by the world.
This activity was that of a mind essentially concerned to find how many
ways it could see for escape from a maze of things; while his vanity was
taking new forms.  It was always anxious to discover if the world was
trying to know how he was taking the blows of fate and fortune.  He had
been determined that, whatever came, it should not see him paralysed or
broken.

As M. Fille only nodded his head in sorrowful assent, the Big Financier
became more explicit.  He was determined to lose nothing by Jean Jacques,
and he was prepared to take instant action when it was required; but he
was also interested in the man who might have done really powerful things
in the world, had he gone about them in the right way.

"M. Barbille has had some lawsuits this year, is it not so?" he asked.

"Two of importance, monsieur, and one is not yet decided," answered M.
Fille.

"He lost those suits of importance?"

"That is so, monsieur."

"And they cost him six thousand dollars--and over?"  The Big Financier
seemed to be pressing towards a point.

"Something over that amount, monsieur."

"And he may lose the suit now before the Courts?"

"Who can tell, monsieur!" vaguely commented the little learned official.

M. Mornay was not to be evaded.  "Yes, yes, but the case as it stands--
to you who are wise in experience of legal affairs, does it seem at all
a sure thing for him?"

"I wish I could say it was, monsieur," sadly answered the other.

The Big Financier nodded vigorously.  "Exactly.  Nothing is so
unproductive as the law.  It is expensive whether you win or lose, and it
is murderously expensive when you do lose.  You will observe, I know,
that your Jean Jacques is a man who can only be killed once--eh?"

"Monsieur?"  M. Fille really did not grasp this remark.

M. Mornay's voice became precise.  "I will explain.  He has never
created; he has only developed what has been created.  He inherited much
of what he has or has had.  His designs were always affected by the fact
that he had never built from the very bottom.  When he goes to pieces--"

"Monsieur--to pieces!" exclaimed the Clerk of the Court painfully.

"Well, put it another way.  If he is broken financially, he will never
come up again.  Not because of his age--I lost a second fortune at fifty,
and have a third ready to lose at sixty--but because the primary
initiative won't be in him.  He'll say he has lost, and that there's
an end to it all.  His philosophy will come into play--just at the last.
It will help him in one way and harm him in another."

"Ah, then you know about his philosophy, monsieur?" queried M. Fille.
Was Jean Jacques' philosophy, after all, to be a real concrete asset of
his life sooner or later?

The Big Financier smiled, and turned some coins over in his pocket rather
loudly.  Presently he said: "The first time I ever saw him he treated me
to a page of Descartes.  It cost him one per cent.  I always charge a man
for talking sentiment to me in business hours.  I had to listen to him,
and he had to pay me for listening.  I've no doubt his general yearly
expenditure has been increased for the same reason--eh, Maitre Fille?  He
has done it with others--yes?"  M. Fille waved a hand in deprecation, and
his voice had a little acidity as he replied: "Ah, monsieur, what can we
poor provincials do--any of us--in dealing with men like you, philosophy
or no philosophy?  You get us between the upper and the nether mill
stones.  You are cosmopolitan; M. Jean Jacques Barbille is a provincial;
and you, because he has soul enough to forget business for a moment and
to speak of things that matter more than money and business, you grind
him into powder."

M. Mornay shook his head and lighted his cigar again.  "There you are
wrong, Maitre Fille.  It is bad policy to grind to powder, or grind at
all, men out of whom you are making money.  It is better to keep them
from between the upper and nether mill-stones.

"I have done so with your Barbille.  I could give him such trouble as
would bring things crashing down upon him at once, if I wanted to be
merely vicious in getting my own; but that would make it impossible for
me to meet at dinner my friend Judge Carcasson.  So, as long as I can,
I will not press him.  But I tell you that the margin of safety on which
he is moving now is too narrow--scarce a foot-hold.  He has too much
under construction in the business of his life, and if one stone slips
out, down may come the whole pile.  He has stopped building the cheese-
factory--that represents sheer loss.  The ash-factory is to close next
week, the saw-mill is only paying its way, and the flour-mill and the
farms, which have to sustain the call of his many interests, can't stand
the drain.  Also, he has several people heavily indebted to him, and if
they go down--well, it depends on the soundness of the security he holds.
If they listened to him talk philosophy, encouraged him to do it, and
told him they liked it, when the bargain was being made, the chances are
the security is inadequate."

The Clerk of the Court bridled up.  "Monsieur, you are very hard on a man
who for twenty-five years has been a figure and a power in this part of
the province.  You sneer at one who has been a benefactor to the place
where he lives; who has given with the right hand and the left; whose
enterprise has been a source of profit to many; and who has got a savage
reward for the acts of a blameless and generous life.  You know his
troubles, monsieur, and we who have seen him bear them with fortitude and
Christian philosophy, we resent--"

"You need resent nothing, Maitre Fille," interrupted the Big Financier,
not unkindly.  "What I have said has been said to his friend and the
friend of my own great friend, Judge Carcasson; and I am only anxious
that he should be warned by someone whose opinions count with him; whom
he can trust--"

"But, monsieur, alas!" broke in the Clerk of the Court, "that is the
trouble; he does not select those he can trust.  He is too confiding.
He believes those who flatter him, who impose on his good heart.
It has always been so."

"I judge it is so still in the case of Monsieur Dolores, his daughter's
grandfather?" the Big Financier asked quizzically.

"It is so, monsieur," replied M. Fille.  "The loss of his daughter shook
him even more than the flight of his wife; and it is as though he could
not live without that scoundrel near him--a vicious man, who makes
trouble wherever he goes.  He was a cause of loss to M. Barbille years
ago when he managed the ash-factory; he is very dangerous to women--even
now he is a danger to the future of a young widow" (he meant the widow of
Palass Poucette); "and he has caused a scandal by perjury as a witness,
and by the consequences--but I need not speak of that here.  He will do
Jean Jacques great harm in the end, of that I am sure.  The very day
Mademoiselle Zoe left the Manor Cartier to marry the English actor, Jean
Jacques took that Spanish bad-lot to his home; and there he stays, and
the old friends go--the old friends go; and he does not seem to miss
them."

There was something like a sob in M. Fille's voice.  He had loved Zoe
in a way that in a mother would have meant martyrdom, if necessary,
and in a father would have meant sacrifice when needed; and indeed he
had sacrificed both time and money to find Zoe.  He had even gone as far
as Winnipeg on the chance of finding her, making that first big journey
in the world, which was as much to him in all ways as a journey to Bagdad
would mean to most people of M. Mornay's world.  Also he had spent money
since in corresponding with lawyers in the West whom he engaged to search
for her; but Zoe had never been found.  She had never written but one
letter to Jean Jacques since her flight.  This letter said, in effect,
that she would come back when her husband was no longer "a beggar" as her
father had called him, and not till then.  It was written en route to
Winnipeg, at the dictation of Gerard Fynes, who had a romantic view of
life and a mistaken pride, but some courage too--the courage of love.

"He thinks his daughter will come back--yes?" asked M. Mornay.  "Once he
said to me that he was sorry there was no lady to welcome me at the Manor
Cartier, but that he hoped his daughter would yet have the honour.  His
talk is quite spacious and lofty at times, as you know."

"So--that is so, monsieur .  .  .  Mademoiselle Zoe's room is always
ready for her.  At time of Noel he sent cards to all the families of the
parish who had been his friends, as from his daughter and himself; and
when people came to visit at the Manor on New Year's Day, he said to each
and all that his daughter regretted she could not arrive in time from the
West to receive them; but that next year she would certainly have the
pleasure."

"Like the light in the window for the unreturning sailor," somewhat
cynically remarked the Big Financier.  "Did many come to the Manor on
that New Year's Day?"

"But yes, many, monsieur.  Some came from kindness, and some because they
were curious--"

"And Monsieur Dolores?"

The lips of the Clerk of the Court curled, "He went about with a manner
as soft as that of a young cure.  Butter would not melt in his mouth.
Some of the women were sorry for him, until they knew he had given one
of Jean Jacques' best bear-skin rugs to Madame Palass Poucette for a New
Year's gift."

The Big Financier laughed cheerfully.  "It's an old way to popularity--
being generous with other people's money.  That is why I am here.  The
people that spend your Jean Jacques' money will be spending mine too, if
I don't take care."

M. Fille noted the hard look which now settled in M. Mornay's face, and
it disturbed him.  He rose and leaned over the table towards his visitor
anxiously.

"Tell me, if you please, monsieur, is there any real and immediate danger
of the financial collapse of Jean Jacques?"

The other regarded M. Fille with a look of consideration.  He liked this
Clerk of the Court, but he liked Jean Jacques for the matter of that,
and away now from the big financial arena where he usually worked, his
natural instincts had play.  He had come to St. Saviour's with a bigger
thing in his mind than Jean Jacques and his affairs; he had come on the
matter of a railway, and had taken Jean Jacques on the way, as it were.
The scheme for the railway looked very promising to him, and he was in
good humour; so that all he said about Jean Jacques was free from that
general irritation of spirit which has sacrificed many a small man on a
big man's altar.  He saw the agitation he had caused, and he almost
repented of what he had already said; yet he had acted with a view to
getting M. Fille to warn Jean Jacques.

"I repeat what I said," he now replied.  "Monsieur Jean Jacques' affairs
are too nicely balanced.  A little shove one way or another and over goes
the whole caboose.  If anyone here has influence over him, it would be a
kindness to use it.  That case before the Court of Appeal, for instance;
he'd be better advised to settle it, if there is still time.  One or two
of the mortgages he holds ought to be foreclosed, so that he may get out
of them all the law will let him.  He ought to pouch the money that's
owing him; he ought to shave away his insurance, his lightning-rod, and
his horsedealing business; and he ought to sell his farms and his store,
and concentrate on the flour-mill and the saw-mill.  He has had his
warnings generally from my lawyers, but what he wants most is the gentle
hand to lead him; and I should think that yours, M. Fille, is the hand
the Almighty would choose if He was concerned with what happens at St.
Saviour's and wanted an agent."

The Clerk of the Court blushed greatly.  This was a very big man
indeed in the great commercial world, and flattery from him had unusual
significance; but he threw out his hands with a gesture of helplessness,
and said: "Monsieur, if I could be of use I would; but he has ceased to
listen to me; he--"

He got no further, for there was a sharp knock at the street door of the
outer office, and M. Fille hastened to the other room.  After a moment he
came back, a familiar voice following him.

"It is Monsieur Barbille, monsieur," M. Fille said quietly, but with
apprehensive eyes.

"Well--he wants to see me?" asked M. Mornay.  "No, no, monsieur.
It would be better if he did not see you.  He is in some agitation."

"Fille!  Maitre Fille--be quick now," called Jean Jacques' voice from the
other room.

"What did I say, monsieur?" asked the Big Financier.  "The mind that's
received a blow must be moving--moving; the man with the many irons must
be flying from bellows to bellows!"

"Come, come, there's no time to lose," came Jean Jacques' voice again,
and the handle of the door of their room turned.

M. Fille's hand caught the handle.  "Excuse me, Monsieur Barbille,
--a minute please," he persisted almost querulously.  "Be good enough to
keep your manners .  .  .  monsieur!" he added to the Financier, "if you
do not wish to speak with him, there is a door"--he pointed--"which will
let you into the side-street."

"What is his trouble?" asked M. Mornay.

M. Fille hesitated, then said reflectively: "He has lost his case in the
Appeal Court, monsieur; also, his cousin, Auguste Charron, who has been
working the Latouche farm, has flitted, leaving--"

"Leaving Jean Jacques to pay unexpected debts?"

"So, monsieur."

"Then I can be of no use, I fear," remarked M. Mornay dryly.

"Fille!  Fille !" came the voice of Jean Jacques insistently from the
room.

"And so I will say au revoir, Monsieur Fille," continued the Big
Financier.

A moment later the great man was gone, and M. Fille was alone with the
philosopher of the Manor Cartier.

"Well, well, why do you keep me waiting!  Who was it in there--anyone
that's concerned with my affairs?" asked Jean Jacques.

In these days he was sensitive when there was no cause, and he was
credulous where he ought to be suspicious.  The fact that the little man
had held the door against him made him sure that M. Fille had not wished
him to see the departed visitor.

"Come, out with it--who was it making fresh trouble for me?" persisted
Jean Jacques.

"No one making trouble for you, my friend," answered the Clerk of the
Court, "but someone who was trying to do you a good turn."

"He must have been a stranger then," returned Jean Jacques bitterly.
"Who was it?"

M. Fille, after an instant's further hesitation, told him.

"Oh, him--M. Momay !" exclaimed Jean Jacques, with a look of relief, his
face lighting.  "That's a big man with a most capable and far-reaching
mind.  He takes a thing in as the ocean mouths a river.  If I had had
men like that to deal with all my life, what a different ledger I'd be
balancing now!  Descartes, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel--he has
an ear for them all.  That is the intellectual side of him; and in
business"--he threw up a hand--"there he views the landscape from the
mountain-top.  He has vision, strategy, executive.  He is Napoleon and
Anacreon in one.  He is of the builders on the one hand, of the
Illuminati and the Encyclopedistes on the other."

Even the Clerk of the Court, with his circumscribed range of thought and
experience, in that moment saw Jean Jacques as he really was.  Here was a
man whose house of life was beginning to sway from an earthquake; who had
been smitten in several deadly ways, and was about to receive buffetings
beyond aught he had yet experienced, philosophizing on the tight-rope--
Blondin and Plato in one.  Yet sardonically piteous as it was, the
incident had shown Jean Jacques with the germ of something big in him.
He had recognized in M. Mornay, who could level him to the dust tomorrow
financially, a master of the world's affairs, a prospector of life's
fields, who would march fearlessly beyond the farthest frontiers into the
unknown.  Jean Jacques' admiration of the lion who could, and would, slay
him was the best tribute to his own character.

M. Fille's eyes moistened as he realized it; and he knew that nothing he
could say or do would make this man accommodate his actions to the hard
rules of the business of life; he must for ever be applying to them
conceptions of a half-developed mind.

"Quite so, quite so, Jean Jacques," M. Fille responded gently, "but"
--here came a firmer note to his voice, for he had taken to heart the
lesson M. Mornay had taught him, and he was determined to do his duty now
when the opportunity was in his hand--"but you have got to deal with
things as they are; not as they might have been.  If you cannot have the
great men you have to deal with the little men like me.  You have to
prove yourself bigger than the rest of us by doing things better.  A man
doesn't fail only because of others, but also because of himself.  You
were warned that the chances were all against you in the case that's just
been decided, yet you would go on; you were warned that your cousin,
Auguste Charron, was in debt, and that his wife was mad to get away from
the farm and go West, yet you would take no notice.  Now he has gone, and
you have to pay, and your case has gone against you in the Appellate
Court besides.  .  .  .  I will tell you the truth, my friend, even if it
cuts me to the heart.  You have not kept your judgment in hand; you have
gone ahead like a bull at a gate; and you pay the price.  You listen to
those who flatter, and on those who would go through fire and water for
you, you turn your back--on those who would help you in your hour of
trouble, in your dark day."

Jean Jacques drew himself up with a gesture, impatient, masterful and
forbidding.  "I have fought my fight alone in the dark day; I have not
asked for any one's help," he answered.  "I have wept on no man's
shoulder.  I have been mauled by the claws of injury and shame, and I
have not flinched.  I have healed my own wounds, and I wear my scars
without--"

He stopped, for there came a sharp rat-tat-tat at the door which opened
into the street.  Somehow the commonplace, trivial interruption produced
on both a strange, even startling effect.  It suddenly produced in their
minds a feeling of apprehension, as though there was whispered in their
ears, "Something is going to happen--beware!"

Rat-tat-tat!  The two men looked at each other.  The same thought was in
the mind of both.  Jean Jacques clutched at his beard nervously, then
with an effort he controlled himself.  He took off his hat as though he
was about to greet some important person, or to receive sentence in a
court.  Instinctively he felt the little book of philosophy which he
always carried now in his breast-pocket, as a pietist would finger his
beads in moments of fear or anxiety.  The Clerk of the Court passed his
thin hand over his hair, as he was wont to do in court when the Judge
began his charge to the Jury, and then with an action more impulsive than
was usual with him, he held out his hand, and Jean Jacques grasped it.
Something was bringing them together just when it seemed that, in the
storm of Jean Jacques' indignation, they were about to fall apart.
M. Fille's eyes said as plainly as words could do, "Courage, my friend!"

Rat-tat-tat!  Rat-tat-tat!  The knocking was sharp and imperative now.
The Clerk of the Court went quickly forward and threw open the door.

There stepped inside the widow of Palass Poucette.  She had a letter in
her hand.  "M'sieu', pardon, if I intrude," she said to M. Fille; "but I
heard that M'sieu' Jean Jacques was here.  I have news for him."

"News!" repeated Jean Jacques, and he looked like a man who was waiting
for what he feared to hear.  "They told me at the post-office that you
were here.  I got the letter only a quarter of an hour ago, and I thought
I would go at once to the Manor Cartier and tell M'sieu' Jean Jacques
what the letter says.  I wanted to go to the Manor Cartier for something
else as well, but I will speak of that by and by.  It is the letter now."

She pulled off first one glove and then the other, still holding the
letter, as though she was about to perform some ceremony.  "It was a good
thing I found out that M'sieu' Jean Jacques was here.  It saves a four-
mile drive," she remarked.

"The news--ah, nom de Dieu, the slowness of the woman--like a river going
uphill!" exclaimed Jean Jacques, who was finding it hard to still the
trembling of his limbs.

The widow of Palass Poucette flushed, but she had some sense in her head,
and she realized that Jean Jacques was a little unbalanced at the moment.
Indeed, Jean Jacques was not so old that she would have found it
difficult to take a well-defined and warm interest in him, were
circumstances propitious.  She held out the letter to him at once.
"It is from my sister in the West--at Shilah," she explained.  "There is
nothing in it you can't read, and most of it concerns you."  Jean Jacques
took the letter, but he could not bring himself to read it, for Virginie
Poucette's manner was not suggestive of happy tidings.  After an
instant's hesitation he handed the letter to M. Fille, who pressed
his lips with an air of determination, and put on his glasses.

Jean Jacques saw the face of the Clerk of the Court flush and then turn
pale as he read the letter.  "There, be quick!" he said before M. Fille
had turned the first page.

Then the widow of Palass Poucette came to him and, in a simple harmless
way she had, free from coquetry or guile, stood beside him, took his hand
and held it.  He seemed almost unconscious of her act, but his fingers
convulsively tightened on hers; while she reflected that here was one who
needed help sorely; here was a good, warm-hearted man on whom a woman
could empty out affection like rain and get a good harvest.  She really
was as simple as a child, was Virginie Poucette, and even in her
acquaintance with Sebastian Dolores, there had only been working in her
the natural desire of a primitive woman to have a man saying that which
would keep alive in her the things that make her sing as she toils; and
certainly Virginie toiled late and early on her farm.  She really was
concerned for Jean Jacques.  Both wife and daughter had taken flight, and
he was alone and in trouble.  At this moment she felt she would like to
be a sister to him--she was young enough to be his daughter almost.  Her
heart was kind.

"Now!" said Jean Jacques at last, as the Clerk of the Court's eyes
reached the end of the last page.  "Now, speak!  It is--it is my Zoe?"

"It is our Zoe," answered M. Fille.

"Figure de Christ, what do you wait for--she is not dead?" exclaimed
Jean Jacques with a courage which made him set his feet squarely.

The Clerk of the Court shook his head and began.  "She is alive.
Madame Poucette's sister saw her by chance.  Zoe was on her way up the
Saskatchewan River to the Peace River country with her husband.  Her
husband's health was bad.  He had to leave the stage in the United States
where he had gone after Winnipeg.  The doctors said he must live the
open-air life.  He and Zoe were going north, to take a farm somewhere."

"Somewhere!  Somewhere!" murmured Jean Jacques.  The farther away from
Jean Jacques the better--that is what she thinks."

"No, you are wrong, my friend," rejoined M. Fille.  "She said to Madame
Poucette's sister"--he held up the letter--"that when they had proved
they could live without anybody's help they would come back to see you.
Zoe thought that, having taken her life in her own hands, she ought to
justify herself before she asked your forgiveness and a place at your
table.  She felt that you could only love her and be glad of her, if her
man was independent of you.  It is a proud and sensitive soul--but there
it is!"

"It is romance, it is quixotism--ah, heart of God, what quixotism!"
exclaimed Jean Jacques.

"She gets her romance and quixotism from Jean Jacques Barbille," retorted
the Clerk of the Court.  "She does more feeling than thinking--like you."

Jean Jacques' heart was bleeding, but he drew himself up proudly, and
caught his hand away from the warm palm of Poucette's widow.  As his
affairs crumbled his pride grew more insistent.  M. Fille had challenged
his intellect--his intellect!

"My life has been a procession of practical things," he declared
oracularly.  "I have been a man of business who designs.  I am no
dreamer.  I think.  I act.  I suffer.  I have been the victim of romance,
not its interpreter.  Mercy of God, what has broken my life, what but
romance--romance, first with one and then with another!  More feeling
than thinking, Maitre Fille--you say that?  Why the Barbilles have ever
in the past built up life on a basis of thought and action, and I have
added philosophy--the science of thought and act.  Jean Jacques Barbille
has been the man of design and the man of action also.  Don Quixote was a
fool, a dreamer, but Jean Jacques is no Don Quixote.  He is a man who has
done things, but also he is a man who has been broken on the wheel of
life.  He is a man whose heart-strings have been torn--"

He had worked himself up into a fit of eloquence and revolt.  He was
touched by the rod of desperation, which makes the soul protest that it
is right when it knows that it is wrong.

Suddenly, breaking off his speech, he threw up his hands and made for the
door.

"I will fight it out alone!" he declared with rough emotion, and at the
door he turned towards them again.  He looked at them both as though he
would dare them to contradict him.  The restless fire of his eyes seemed
to dart from one to the other.

"That's the way it is," said the widow of Palass Poucette coming quickly
forward to him.  "It's always the way.  We must fight our battles alone,
but we don't have to bear the wounds alone.  In the battle you are alone,
but the hand to heal the wounds may be another's.  You are a philosopher
--well, what I speak is true, isn't it?"

Virginie had said the one thing which could have stayed the tide of Jean
Jacques' pessimism and broken his cloud of gloom.  She appealed to him in
the tune of an old song.  The years and the curses of years had not
dispelled the illusion that he was a philosopher.  He stopped with his
hand on the door.

"That's so, without doubt that's so," he said.  "You have stumbled on a
truth of life, madame."

Suddenly there came into his look something of the yearning and hunger
which the lonely and forsaken feel when they are not on the full tide of
doing.  It was as though he must have companionship, in spite of his
brave announcement that he must fight his fight alone.  He had been
wounded in the battle, and here was one who held out the hand of healing
to him.  Never since his wife had left him the long lonely years ago had
a woman meant anything to him except as one of a race; but in this moment
here a woman had held his hand, and he could feel still the warm palm
which had comforted his own agitated fingers.

Virginie Poucette saw, and she understood what was passing in his mind.
Yet she did not see and understand all by any means; and it is hard to
tell what further show of fire there might have been, but that the Clerk
of the Court was there, saying harshly under his breath, "The huzzy!
The crafty huzzy!"

The Clerk of the Court was wrong.  Virginie was merely sentimental, not
intriguing or deceitful; for Jean Jacques was not a widower--and she was
an honest woman and genuinely tender-hearted.

"I'm coming to the Manor Cartier to-morrow," Virginie continued.  "I have
a rug of yours.  By mistake it was left at my house by M'sieu' Dolores."

"You needn't do that.  I will call at your place tomorrow for it,"
replied Jean Jacques almost eagerly.  "I told M'sieu' Dolores to-day
never to enter my house again.  I didn't know it was your rug.  It was
giving away your property, not his own," she hurriedly explained, and her
face flushed.

"That is the Spanish of it," said Jean Jacques bitterly.  His eyes were
being opened in many directions to-day.

M. Fille was in distress.  Jean Jacques had had a warning about Sebastian
Dolores, but here was another pit into which he might fall, the pit
digged by a widow, who, no doubt, would not hesitate to marry a divorced
Catholic philosopher, if he could get a divorce by hook or by crook.
Jean Jacques had said that he was going to Virginie Poucette's place
the next day.  That was as bad as it could be; yet there was this to the
good, that it was to-morrow and not to-day; and who could tell what might
happen between to-day and to-morrow!

A moment later the three were standing outside the office in the street.
As Jean Jacques climbed into his red wagon, Virginie Poucette's eyes were
attracted to the northern sky where a reddish glow appeared, and she gave
an exclamation of surprise.

"That must be a fire," she said, pointing.

"A bit of pine-land probably," said M. Fille--with anxiety, however, for
the red glow lay in the direction of St. Saviour's where were the Manor
Cartier and Jean Jacques' mills.  Maitre Fille was possessed of a
superstition that all the things which threaten a man's life to wreck it,
operate awhile in their many fields before they converge like an army in
one field to deliver the last attack on their victim.  It would not have
seemed strange to him, if out of the night a voice of the unseen had said
that the glow in the sky came from the Manor Cartier.  This very day
three things had smitten Jean Jacques, and, if three, why not four or
five, or fifty!

With a strange fascination Jean Jacques' eyes were fastened on the glow.
He clucked to his horses, and they started jerkily away.  M. Fille and
the widow Poucette said good-bye to him, but he did not hear, or if he
heard, he did not heed.  His look was set upon the red reflection which
widened in the sky and seemed to grow nearer and nearer.  The horses
quickened their pace.  He touched them with the whip, and they went
faster.  The glow increased as he left Vilray behind.  He gave the horses
the whip again sharply, and they broke into a gallop.  Yet his eyes
scarcely left the sky.  The crimson glow drew him, held him, till his
brain was afire also.  Jean Jacques had a premonition and a conviction
which was even deeper than the imagination of M. Fille.

In Vilray, behind him, the telegraph clerk was in the street shouting to
someone to summon the local fire-brigade to go to St. Saviour's.

"What is it--what is it?" asked M. Fille of the telegraph clerk in
marked agitation.

"It's M'sieu' Jean Jacques' flour-mill," was the reply.

Wagons and buggies and carts began to take the road to the Manor Cartier;
and Maitre Fille went also with the widow of Palass Poucette.




CHAPTER XVII

HIS GREATEST ASSET

Jean Jacques did not go to the house of the widow of Palass Poucette
"next day" as he had proposed: and she did not expect him.  She had seen
his flour-mill burned to the ground on the-evening when they met in the
office of the Clerk of the evening Court, when Jean Jacques had learned
that his Zoe had gone into farther and farther places away from him.
Perhaps Virginie Poucette never had shed as many tears in any whole year
of her life as she did that night, not excepting the year Palass Poucette
died, and left her his farm and seven horses, more or less sound, and a
threshing-machine in good condition.  The woman had a rare heart and
there was that about Jean Jacques which made her want to help him.  She
had no clear idea as to how that could be done, but she had held his hand
at any rate, and he had seemed the better for it.  Virginie had only an
objective view of things; and if she was not material, still she could
best express herself through the medium of the senses.

There were others besides her who shed tears also--those who saw Jean
Jacques' chief asset suddenly disappear in flame and smoke and all his
other assets become thereby liabilities of a kind; and there were many
who would be the poorer in the end because of it.  If Jean Jacques went
down, he probably would not go alone.  Jean Jacques had done a good fire-
insurance business over a course of years, but somehow he had not insured
himself as heavily as he ought to have done; and in any case the fire-
policy for the mill was not in his own hands.  It was in the safe-keeping
of M. Mornay at Montreal, who had warned M. Fille of the crisis in the
money-master's affairs on the very day that the crisis came.

No one ever knew how it was that the mill took fire, but there was one
man who had more than a shrewd suspicion, though there was no occasion
for mentioning it.  This was Sebastian Dolores.  He had not set the mill
afire.  That would have been profitable from no standpoint, and he had no
grudge against Jean Jacques.  Why should he have a grudge?  Jean Jacques'
good fortune, as things were, made his own good fortune; for he ate and
drank and slept and was clothed at his son-in-law's expense.  But he
guessed accurately who had set the mill on fire, and that it was done
accidentally.  He remembered that a man who smoked bad tobacco which had
to be lighted over and over again, threw a burning match down after
applying it to his pipe.  He remembered that there was a heap of flour-
bags near where the man stood when the match was thrown down; and that
some loose strings for tying were also in a pile beside the bags.  So it
was easy for the thing to have happened if the man did not turn round
after he threw the match down, but went swaying on out of the mill, and
over to the Manor Cartier, and up staggering to bed; for he had been
drinking potato-brandy, and he had been brought up on the mild wines of
Spain!  In other words, the man who threw down the lighted match which
did the mischief was Sebastian Dolores himself.

He regretted it quite as much as he had ever regretted anything; and on
the night of the fire there were tears in his large brown eyes which
deceived the New Cure and others; though they did not deceive the widow
of Palass Poucette, who had found him out, and who now had no pleasure at
all in his aged gallantries.  But the regret Dolores experienced would
not prevent him from doing Jean Jacques still greater injury if, and
when, the chance occurred, should it be to his own advantage.

Jean Jacques shed no tears on the night that his beloved flour-mill
became a blackened ruin, and his saw-mill had a narrow escape.  He was
like one in a dream, scarcely realizing that men were saying kind things
to him; that the New Cure held his hand and spoke to him more like a
brother than one whose profession it was to be good to those who
suffered.  In his eyes was the same half-rapt, intense, distant look
which came into them when, at Vilray, he saw that red reflection in the
sky over against St. Saviour's, and urged his horses onward.

The world knew that the burning of the mill was a blow to Jean Jacques,
but it did not know how great and heavy the blow was.  First one and then
another of his friends said he was insured, and that in another six
months the mill-wheel would be turning again.  They said so to Jean
Jacques when he stood with his eyes fixed on the burning fabric, which
nothing could save; but he showed no desire to speak.  He only nodded and
kept on staring at the fire with that curious underglow in his eyes.
Some chemistry of the soul had taken place in him in the hour when he
drove to the Manor Cartier from Vilray, and it produced a strange fire,
which merged into the reflection of the sky above the burning mill.
Later, came things which were strange and eventful in his life, but that
under-glow was for ever afterwards in his eyes.  It was in singular
contrast to the snapping fire which had been theirs all the days of his
life till now--the snapping fire of action, will and design.  It still
was there when they said to him suddenly that the wind had changed, and
that the flame and sparks were now blowing toward the saw-mill.  Even
when he gave orders, and set to work to defend the saw-mill, arranging a
line of men with buckets on its roof, and so saving it, this look
remained.  It was something spiritual and unmaterial, something, maybe,
which had to do with the philosophy he had preached, thought and
practised over long years.  It did not disappear when at last, after
midnight, everyone had gone, and the smouldering ruins of his greatest
asset lay mournful in the wan light of the moon.

Kind and good friends like the Clerk of the Court and the New Cure had
seen him to his bedroom at midnight, leaving him there with a promise
that they would come on the morrow; and he had said goodnight evenly, and
had shut the door upon them with a sort of smile.  But long after they
had gone, when Sebastian Dolores and Seraphe Corniche were asleep, he had
got up again and left the house, to gaze at the spot where the big white
mill with the red roof had been-the mill which had been there in the days
of the Baron of Beaugard, and to which time had only added size and
adornment.  The gold-cock weathervane of the mill, so long the admiration
of people living and dead, and indeed the symbol of himself, as he had
been told, being so full of life and pride, courage and vigour-it lay
among the ruins, a blackened relic of the Barbilles.

He had said in M. Fille's office not many hours before, "I will fight it
all out alone," and here in the tragic quiet of the night he made his
resolve a reality.  In appearance he was not now like the "Seigneur" who
sang to the sailors on the Antoine when she was fighting for the shore of
Gaspe; nevertheless there was that in him which would keep him much the
same man to the end.

Indeed, as he got into bed that fateful night he said aloud: "They shall
see that I am not beaten.  If they give me time up there in Montreal I'll
keep the place till Zoe comes back--till Zoe comes home."

As he lay and tried to sleep, he kept saying over to himself, "Till Zoe
comes home."

He thought that if he could but have Zoe back, it all would not matter so
much.  She would keep looking at him and saying, "There's the man that
never flinched when things went wrong; there's the man that was a friend
to everyone."

At last a thought came to him--the key to the situation as it seemed, the
one thing necessary to meet the financial situation.  He would sell the
biggest farm he owned, which had been to him in its importance like the
flour-mill itself.  He had had an offer for it that very day, and a
bigger offer still a week before.  It was mortgaged to within eight
thousand dollars of what it could be sold for but, if he could gain time,
that eight thousand dollars would build the mill again.  M. Mornay, the
Big Financier, would certainly see that this was his due--to get his
chance to pull things straight.  Yes, he would certainly sell the
Barbille farm to-morrow.  With this thought in his mind he went to sleep
at last, and he did not wake till the sun was high.

It was a sun of the most wonderful brightness and warmth.  Yesterday it
would have made the Manor Cartier and all around it look like Arcady.
But as it shone upon the ruins of the mill, when Jean Jacques went out
into the working world again, it made so gaunt and hideous a picture
that, in spite of himself, a cry of misery came from his lips.

Through all the misfortunes which had come to him the outward semblance
of things had remained, and when he went in and out of the plantation of
the Manor Cartier, there was no physical change in the surroundings,
which betrayed the troubles and disasters fallen upon its overlord.
There it all was just as it had ever been, and seeming to deny that
anything had changed in the lives of those who made the place other than
a dead or deserted world.  When Carmen went, when Zoe fled, when his
cousin Auguste Charron took his flight, when defeats at law abashed him,
the house and mills, and stores and offices, and goodly trees, and well-
kept yards and barns and cattle-sheds all looked the same.  Thus it was
that he had been fortified.  In one sense his miseries had seemed unreal,
because all was the same in the outward scene.  It was as though it all
said to him: "It is a dream that those you love have vanished, that ill-
fortune sits by your fireside.  One night you will go to bed thinking
that wife and child have gone, that your treasury is nearly empty; and in
the morning you will wake up and find your loved ones sitting in their
accustomed places, and your treasury will be full to overflowing as of
old."

So it was while the picture of his home scene remained unbroken and
serene; but the hideous mass of last night's holocaust was now before his
eyes, with little streams of smoke rising from the cindered pile, and
a hundred things with which his eyes had been familiar lay distorted,
excoriated and useless.  He realized with sudden completeness that a
terrible change bad come in his life, that a cyclone had ruined the face
of his created world.

This picture did more to open up Jean Jacques' eyes to his real position
in life than anything he had experienced, than any sorrow he had
suffered.  He had been in torment in the past, but he had refused to see
that he was in Hades.  Now it was as though he had been led through the
streets of Hell by some dark spirit, while in vain he looked round for
his old friends Kant and Hegel, Voltaire and Rousseau and Rochefoucauld,
Plato and Aristotle.

While gazing at the dismal scene, however, and unheeding the idlers who
poked about among the ruins, and watched him as one who was the centre of
a drama, he suddenly caught sight of the gold Cock of Beaugard, which had
stood on the top of the mill, in the very centre of the ruins.

Yes, there it was, the crested golden cock which had typified his own
life, as he went head high, body erect, spurs giving warning, and a
clarion in his throat ready to blare forth at any moment.  There was the
golden Cock of Beaugard in the cinders, the ashes and the dust.  His chin
dropped on his breast, and a cloud like a fog on the coast of Gaspe
settled round him.  Yet even as his head drooped, something else
happened--one of those trivial things which yet may be the pivot of great
things.  A cock crowed--almost in his very ear, it seemed.  He lifted his
head quickly, and a superstitious look flashed into his face.  His eyes
fastened on the burnished head of the Cock among the ruins.  To his
excited imagination it was as though the ancient symbol of the Barbilles
had spoken to him in its own language of good cheer and defiance.  Yes,
there it was, half covered by the ruins, but its head was erect in the
midst of fire and disaster.  Brought low, it was still alert above the
wreckage.  The child, the dreamer, the optimist, the egoist, and the man
alive in Jean Jacques sprang into vigour again.  It was as though the
Cock of Beaugard had really summoned him to action, and the crowing had
not been that of a barnyard bantam not a hundred feet away from him.
Jean Jacques' head went up too.

"Me--I am what I always was, nothing can change me," he exclaimed
defiantly.  "I will sell the Barbille farm and build the mill again."

So it was that by hook or by crook, and because the Big Financier had
more heart than he even acknowledged to his own wife, Jean Jacques did
sell the Barbille farm, and got in cash--in good hard cash-eight thousand
dollars after the mortgage was paid.  M. Mornay was even willing to take
the inadequate indemnity of the insurance policy on the mill, and lose
the rest, in order that Jean Jacques should have the eight thousand
dollars to rebuild.  This he did because Jean Jacques showed such amazing
courage after the burning of the mill, and spread himself out in a
greater activity than his career had yet shown.  He shaved through this
financial crisis, in spite of the blow he had received by the loss of his
lawsuits, the flitting of his cousin, Auguste Charron, and the farm debts
of this same cousin.  It all meant a series of manipulations made
possible by the apparent confidence reposed in him by M. Mornay.

On the day he sold his farm he was by no means out of danger of absolute
insolvency--he was in fact ruined; but he was not yet the victim of those
processes which would make him legally insolvent.  The vultures were
hovering, but they had not yet swooped, and there was the Manor saw-mill
going night and day; for by the strangest good luck Jean Jacques received
an order for M. Mornay's new railway (Judge Carcasson was behind that)
which would keep his saw-mill working twenty-four hours in the day for
six months.

"I like his pluck, but still, ten to one, he loses," remarked M. Mornay
to Judge Carcasson.  "He is an unlucky man, and I agree with Napoleon
that you oughtn't to be partner with an unlucky man."

"Yet you have had to do with Monsieur Jean Jacques," responded the aged
Judge.

M. Mornay nodded indulgently.

"Yes, without risk, up to the burning of the mill.  Now I take my
chances, simply because I'm a fool too, in spite of all the wisdom I see
in history and in life's experiences.  I ought to have closed him up, but
I've let him go on, you see."

"You will not regret it," remarked the Judge.  "He really is worth it."

"But I think I will regret it financially.  I think that this is the last
flare of the ambition and energy of your Jean Jacques.  That often
happens--a man summons up all his reserves for one last effort.  It's
partly pride, partly the undefeated thing in him, partly the gambling
spirit which seizes men when nothing is left but one great spectacular
success or else be blotted out.  That's the case with your philosopher;
and I'm not sure that I won't lose twenty thousand dollars by him yet."

"You've lost more with less justification," retorted the Judge, who, in
his ninetieth year, was still as alive as his friend at sixty.

M. Mornay waved a hand in acknowledgment, and rolled his cigar from
corner to corner of his mouth.  "Oh, I've lost a lot more in my time,
Judge, but with a squint in my eye!  But I'm doing this with no
astigmatism.  I've got the focus."

The aged Judge gave a conciliatory murmur-he had a fine persuasive voice.
"You would never be sorry for what you have done if you had known his
daughter--his Zoe.  It's the thought of her that keeps him going.  He
wants the place to be just as she left it when she comes back."

"Well, well, let's hope it will.  I'm giving him a chance," replied M.
Mornay with his wineglass raised.  "He's got eight thousand dollars in
cash to build his mill again; and I hope he'll keep a tight hand on it
till the mill is up."

Keep a tight hand on it?

That is what Jean Jacques meant to do; but if a man wants to keep a tight
hand on money he should not carry it about in his pocket in cold, hard
cash.  It was a foolish whim of Jean Jacques that he must have the eight
thousand dollars in cash--in hundred-dollar bills--and not in the form of
a cheque; but there was something childlike in him.  When, as he thought,
he had saved himself from complete ruin, he wanted to keep and gloat over
the trophy of victory, and his trophy was the eight thousand dollars got
from the Barbille farm.  He would have to pay out two thousand dollars in
cash to the contractors for the rebuilding of the mill at once,--they
were more than usually cautious--but he would have six thousand left,
which he would put in the bank after he had let people see that he was
well fortified with cash.

The child in him liked the idea of pulling out of his pocket a few
thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills.  He had always carried a good
deal of money loose in his pocket, and now that his resources were so
limited he would still make a gallant show.  After a week or two he would
deposit six thousand dollars in the bank; but he was so eager to begin
building the mill, that he paid over the stipulated two thousand dollars
to the contractors on the very day he received the eight thousand.  A few
days later the remaining six thousand were housed in a cupboard with an
iron door in the wall of his office at the Manor Cartier.

"There, that will keep me in heart and promise," said Jean Jacques as he
turned the key in the lock.




CHAPTER XVIII

JEAN JACQUES HAS AN OFFER

The day after Jean Jacques had got a new lease of life and become his own
banker, he treated himself to one of those interludes of pleasure from
which he had emerged in the past like a hermit from his cave.  He sat on
the hill above his lime-kilns, reading the little hand-book of philosophy
which had played so big a part in his life.  Whatever else had disturbed
his mind and diverted him from his course, nothing had weaned him from
this obsession.  He still interlarded all his conversation with
quotations from brilliant poseurs like Chateaubriand and Rochefoucauld,
and from missionaries of thought like Hume and Hegel.

His real joy, however, was in withdrawing for what might be called a
seance of meditation from the world's business.  Some men make
celebration in wine, sport and adventure; but Jean Jacques made it in
flooding his mind with streams of human thought which often tried to run
uphill, which were frequently choked with weeds, but still were like the
pool of Siloam to his vain mind.  They bathed that vain mind in the
illusion that it could see into the secret springs of experience.

So, on as bright a day as ever the New World offered, Jean Jacques sat
reciting to himself a spectacular bit of logic from one of his idols,
wedged between a piece of Aristotle quartz and Plato marble.  The sound
of it was good in his ears.  He mouthed it as greedily and happily as
though he was not sitting on the edge of a volcano instead of the moss-
grown limestone on a hill above his own manor.

"The course of events in the life of a man, whatever their gravity or
levity, are only to be valued and measured by the value and measure of
his own soul.  Thus, what in its own intrinsic origin and material should
in all outer reason be a tragedy, does not of itself shake the
foundations or make a fissure in the superstructure.  Again--"

Thus his oracle, but Jean Jacques' voice suddenly died down, for, as he
sat there, the face of a woman made a vivid call of recognition.  He
slowly awakened from his self-hypnotism, to hear a woman speaking to him;
to see two dark eyes looking at him from under heavy black brows with
bright, intent friendliness.

"They said at the Manor you had come this way, so I thought I'd not have
my drive for nothing, and here I am.  I wanted to say something to you,
M'sieu' Jean Jacques."

It was the widow of Palass Poucette.  She looked very fresh and friendly
indeed, and she was the very acme of neatness.  If she was not handsome,
she certainly had a true and sweet comeliness of her own, due to the deep
rose-colour of her cheeks, the ivory whiteness round the lustrous brown
eyes, the regular shining teeth which showed so much when she smiled, and
the look half laughing, half sentimental which dominated all.

Before she had finished speaking Jean Jacques was on his feet with his
hat off.  Somehow she seemed to be a part of that abstraction, that
intoxication, in which he had just been drowning his accumulated
anxieties.  Not that Virginie Poucette was logical or philosophical, or
a child of thought, for she was wholly the opposite-practical, sensuous,
emotional, a child of nature and of Eve.  But neither was Jean Jacques a
real child of thought, though he made unconscious pretence of it.  He
also was a child of nature--and Adam.  He thought he had the courage of
his convictions, but it was only the courage of his emotions.  His
philosophy was but the bent or inclination of a mind with a capacity
to feel things rather than to think them.  He had feeling, the first
essential of the philosopher, but there he stayed, an undeveloped
chrysalis.

His look was abstracted still as he took the hand of the widow of Palass
Poucette; but he spoke cheerfully.  "It is a pleasure, madame, to welcome
you among my friends," he said.

He made a little flourish with the book which had so long been his bosom
friend, and added: "But I hope you are in no trouble that you come to me
--so many come to me in their troubles," he continued with an air of
satisfaction.

"Come to you--why, you have enough troubles of your own!" she made
answer.  "It's because you have your own troubles that I'm here."

"Why you are here," he remarked vaguely.

There was something very direct and childlike in Virginie Poucette.  She
could not pretend; she wore her heart on her sleeve.  She travelled a
long distance in a little while.

"I've got no trouble myself," she responded.  "But, yes, I have," she
added.  "I've got one trouble--it's yours.  It's that you've been having
hard times--the flour-mill, your cousin Auguste Charron, the lawsuits,
and all the rest.  They say at Vilray that you have all you can do to
keep out of the Bankruptcy Court, and that--"

Jean Jacques started, flushed, and seemed about to get angry; but she put
things right at once.

"People talk more than they know, but there's always some fire where
there's smoke," she hastened to explain.  "Besides, your father-in-law
babbles more than is good for him or for you.  I thought at first that
M. Dolores was a first-class kind of man, that he had had hard times too,
and I let him come and see me; but I found him out, and that was the end
of it, you may be sure.  If you like him, I don't want to say anything
more, but I'm sure that he's no real friend to you-or to anybody.  If
that man went to confession--but there, that's not what I've come for.
I've come to say to you that I never felt so sorry for anyone in my life
as I do for you.  I cried all night after your beautiful mill was burned
down.  You were coming to see me next day--you remember what you said in
M. Fille's office--but of course you couldn't.  Of course, there was no
reason why you should come to see me really--I've 'only got two hundred
acres and the house.  It's a good house, though--Palass saw to that--and
it's insured; but still I know you'd have come just the same if I'd had
only two acres.  I know.  There's hosts of people you've been good to
here, and they're sorry for you; and I'm sorrier than any, for I'm alone,
and you're alone, too, except for the old Dolores, and he's no good to
either of us--mark my words, no good to you!  I'm sorry for you, M'sieu'
Jean Jacques, and I've come to say that I'm ready to lend you two
thousand dollars, if that's any help.  I could make it more if I had
time; but sometimes money on the spot is worth a lot more than what's
just crawling to you--snailing along while you eat your heart out.  Two
thousand dollars is two thousand dollars--I know what it's worth to me,
though it mayn't be much to you; but I didn't earn it.  It belonged to
a first-class man, and he worked for it, and he died and left it to me.
It's not come easy, go easy with me.  I like to feel I've got two
thousand cash without having to mortgage for it.  But it belonged to
a number-one man, a man of brains--I've got no brains, only some sense
--and I want another good man to use it and make the world easier for
himself."

It was a long speech, and she delivered it in little gasps of oratory
which were brightened by her wonderfully kind smile and the heart--not to
say sentiment--which showed in her face.  The sentiment, however, did not
prejudice Jean Jacques against her, for he was a sentimentalist himself.
His feelings were very quick, and before she had spoken fifty words the
underglow of his eyes was flooded by something which might have been
mistaken for tears.  It was, however, only the moisture of gratitude and
the soul's good feeling.

"Well there, well there," he said when she had finished, "I've never had
anything like this in my life before.  It's the biggest thing in the art
of being a neighbour I've ever seen.  You've only been in the parish
three years, and yet you've shown me a confidence immense, inspiring!
It is as the Greek philosopher said, 'To conceive the human mind aright
is the greatest gift from the gods.'  And to you, who never read a line
of philosophy, without doubt, you have done the thing that is greatest.
It says, 'I teach neighbourliness and life's exchange.'  Madame, your
house ought to be called Neighbourhood House.  It is the epitome of the
spirit, it is the shrine of--"

He was working himself up to a point where he could forget all the things
that trouble humanity, in the inebriation of an idealistic soul which had
a casing of passion, but the passion of the mind and not of the body; for
Jean Jacques had not a sensual drift in his organism.  If there had been
a sensual drift, probably Carmen would still have been the lady of his
manor, and he would still have been a magnate and not a potential
bankrupt; for in her way Carmen had been a kind of balance to his
judgment in the business of life, in spite of her own material and
(at the very last) sensual strain.  It was a godsend to Jean Jacques to
have such an inspiration as Virginie Poucette had given him.  He could
not in these days, somehow, get the fires of his soul lighted, as he was
wont to do in the old times, and he loved talking--how he loved talking
of great things!  He was really going hard, galloping strong, when
Virginie interrupted him, first by an exclamation, then, as insistently
he repeated the words, "It is the epitome of the spirit, the shrine of--"

She put out a hand, interrupting him, and said: "Yes, yes, M'sieu'
Jean Jacques, that's as good as Moliere, I s'pose, or the Archbishop at
Quebec, but are you going to take it, the two thousand dollars?  I made a
long speech, I know, but that was to tell you why I come with the money"
--she drew out a pocketbook--"with the order on my lawyer to hand the
cash over to you.  As a woman I had to explain to you, there being lots
of ideas about what a woman should do and what she shouldn't do; but
there's nothing at all for you to explain, and Mere Langlois and a lot of
others would think I'm vain enough now without your compliments.  I'm a
neighbour if you like, and I offer you a loan.  Will you take it--that's
all?"

He held out his hand in silence and took the paper from her.  Putting his
head a little on one side, he read it.  At first he seemed hardly to get
the formal language clear in his mind; however, or maybe his mind was
still away in that abstraction into which he had whisked it when he began
his reply to her fine offer; but he read it out aloud, first quickly,
then very slowly, and he looked at the signature with a deeply meditative
air.

"Virginie Poucette--that's a good name," he remarked; "and also good for
two thousand dollars!"  He paused to smile contentedly over his own joke.
"And good for a great deal more than that too," he added with a nod.

"Yes, ten times as much as that," she responded quickly, her eyes fixed
on his face.  She scarcely knew herself what she was thinking when she
said it; but most people who read this history will think she was hinting
that her assets might be united with his, and so enable him to wipe out
his liabilities and do a good deal more besides.  Yet, how could that be,
since Carmen Dolores was still his wife if she was alive; and also they
both were Catholics, and Catholics did not recognize divorce!

Truth is, Virginie Poucette's mind did not define her feelings at all
clearly, or express exactly what she wanted.  Her actions said one thing
certainly; but if the question had been put to her, whether she was doing
this thing because of a wish to take the place of Carmen Dolores in Jean
Jacques' life she would have said no at once.  She had not come to that
--yet.  She was simply moved by a sentiment of pity for Jean Jacques, and
as she had no child, or husband, or sister, or brother, or father, or
mother, but only relatives who tried to impose upon her, she needed an
objective for the emotions of her nature, for the overflow of her unused
affection and her unsatisfied maternal spirit.  Here, then, was the most
obvious opportunity--a man in trouble who had not deserved the bitter bad
luck which had come to him.  Even old Mere Langlois in the market-place
at Vilray had admitted that, and had said the same later on in Virginie's
home.

For an instant Jean Jacques was fascinated by the sudden prospect which
opened out before him.  If he asked her, this woman would probably loan
him five thousand dollars--and she had mentioned nothing about security!

"What security do you want?" he asked in a husky voice.

"Security?  I don't understand about that," she replied.  "I'd not offer
you the money if I didn't think you were an honest man, and an honest man
would pay me back.  A dishonest man wouldn't pay me back, security or no
security."

"He'd have to pay you back if the security was right to start with," Jean
Jacques insisted.  "But you don't want security, because you think I'm an
honest man!  Well, for sure you're right.  I am honest.  I never took a
cent that wasn't mine; but that's not everything.  If you lend you ought
to have security.  I've lost a good deal from not having enough security
at the start.  You are willing to lend me money without security--that's
enough to make me feel thirty again, and I'm fifty--I'm fifty," he added,
as though with an attempt to show her that she could not think of him in
any emotional way; though the day when his flour-mill was burned he had
felt the touch of her fingers comforting and thrilling.

"You think Jean Jacques Barbille's word as good as his bond?" he
continued.  "So it is; but I'm going to pull this thing through alone.
That's what I said to you and Maitre Fille at his office.  I meant it too
--help of God, it is the truth!"

He had forgotten that if M. Mornay had not made it easy for him, and had
not refrained from insisting on his pound of flesh, he would now be
insolvent and with no roof over him.  Like many another man Jean Jacques
was the occasional slave of formula, and also the victim of phases of his
own temperament.  In truth he had not realized how big a thing M. Mornay
had done for him.  He had accepted the chance given him as the tribute to
his own courage and enterprise and integrity, and as though it was to the
advantage of his greatest creditor to give him another start; though in
reality it had made no difference to the Big Financier, who knew his man
and, with wide-open eyes, did what he had done.

Virginie was not subtle.  She did not understand, was never satisfied
with allusions, and she had no gift for catching the drift of things.
She could endure no peradventure in her conversation.  She wanted plain
speaking and to be literally sure.

"Are you going to take it?" she asked abruptly.

He could not bear to be checked in his course.  He waved a hand and
smiled at her.  Then his eyes seemed to travel away into the distance,
the look of the dreamer in them; but behind all was that strange, ruddy
underglow of revelation which kept emerging from shadows, retreating and
emerging, yet always there now, in much or in little, since the burning
of the mill.

"I've lent a good deal of money without security in my time," he
reflected, "but the only people who ever paid me back were a deaf and
dumb man and a flyaway--a woman that was tired of selling herself, and
started straight and right with the money I lent her.  She had been the
wife of a man who studied with me at Laval.  She paid me back every
penny, too, year by year for five years.  The rest I lent money to never
paid; but they paid, the dummy and the harlot that was, they paid!  But
they paid for the rest also!  If I had refused these two because of the
others, I'd not be fit to visit at Neighbourhood House where Virginie
Poucette lives."

He looked closely at the order she had given him again, as though to let
it sink in his mind and be registered for ever.  "I'm going to do without
any further use of your two thousand dollars," he continued cheer fully.
"It has done its work.  You've lent it to me, I've used it"--he put the
hand holding it on his breast--"and I'm paying it back to you, but
without interest."  He gave the order to her.

"I don't see what you mean," she said helplessly, and she looked at the
paper, as though it had undergone some change while it was in his hand.

"That you would lend it me is worth ten times two thousand to me,
Virginie Poucette," he explained.  "It gives me, not a kick from behind
--I've not had much else lately--but it holds a light in front of me.
It calls me.  It says, 'March on, Jean Jacques--climb the mountain.'
It summons me to dispose my forces for the campaign which will restore
the Manor Cartier to what it has ever been since the days of the Baron
of Beaugard.  It quickens the blood at my heart.  It restores--"

Virginie would not allow him to go on.  "You won't let me help you?
Suppose I do lose the money--I didn't earn it; it was earned by Palass
Poucette, and he'd understand, if he knew.  I can live without the money,
if I have to, but you would pay it back, I know.  You oughtn't to take
any extra risks.  If your daughter should come back and not find you
here, if she returned to the Manor Cartier, and--"

He made an insistent gesture.  "Hush!  Be still, my friend--as good a
friend as a man could have.  If my Zoe came back I'd like to feel--I'd
like to feel that I had saved things alone; that no woman's money made
me safe.  If Zoe or if--"

He was going to say, "If Carmen came back," for his mind was moving in
past scenes; but he stopped short and looked around helplessly.  Then
presently, as though by an effort, he added with a bravura note in his
voice:

"The world has been full of trouble for a long time, but there have
always been men to say to trouble, 'I am master, I have the mind to get
above it all.'  Well, I am one of them."

There was no note of vanity or bombast in his voice as he said this,
and in his eyes that new underglow deepened and shone.  Perhaps in this
instant he saw more of his future than he would speak of to anyone on
earth.  Perhaps prevision was given him, and it was as the Big Financier
had said to Maitre Fille, that his philosophy was now, at the last, to be
of use to him.  When his wife had betrayed him, and his wife and child
had left him, he had said, "Moi je suis philosophe!" but he was a man of
wealth in those days, and money soothes hurts of that kind in rare
degree.  Would he still say, whatever was yet to come, that he was a
philosopher?

"Well, I've done what I thought would help you, and I can't say more than
that," Virginie remarked with a sigh, and there was despondency in her
eyes.  Her face became flushed, her bosom showed agitation; she looked at
him as she had done in Maitre Fille's office, and a wave of feeling
passed over him now, as it did then, and he remembered, in response to
her look, the thrill of his fingers in her palm.  His face now flushed
also, and he had an impulse to ask her to sit down beside him.  He put it
away from him, however, for the present, at any rate-who could tell what
to-morrow might bring forth!--and then he held out his hand to her.  His
voice shook a little when he spoke; but it cleared, and began to ring,
before he had said a dozen words.

"I'll never forget what you've said and done this morning, Virginie
Poucette," he declared; "and if I break the back of the trouble that's in
my way, and come out cock o' the walk again"--the gold Cock of Beaugard
in the ruins near and the clarion of the bantam of his barnyard were in
his mind and ears--"it'll be partly because of you.  I hug that thought
to me."

"I could do a good deal more than that," she ventured, with a tremulous
voice, and then she took her warm hand from his nervous grasp, and turned
sharply into the path which led back towards the Manor.  She did not turn
around, and she walked quickly away.

There was confusion in her eyes and in her mind.  It would take some time
to make the confusion into order, and she was now hot, now cold, in all
her frame, when at last she climbed into her wagon.

This physical unrest imparted itself to all she did that day.  First her
horses were driven almost at a gallop; then they were held down to a slow
walk; then they were stopped altogether, and she sat in the shade of the
trees on the road to her home, pondering--whispering to herself and
pondering.

As her horses were at a standstill she saw a wagon approaching.
Instantly she touched her pair with the whip, and moved on.  Before the
approaching wagon came alongside, she knew from the grey and the
darkbrown horses who was driving them, and she made a strong effort for
composure.  She succeeded indifferently, but her friend, Mere Langlois,
did not notice this fact as her wagon drew near.  There was excitement in
Mere Langlois' face.

"There's been a shindy at the 'Red Eagle' tavern," she said.  "That
father-in-law of M'sieu' Jean Jacques and Rocque Valescure, the landlord,
they got at each other's throats.  Dolores hit Valescure on the head with
a bottle."

"He didn't kill Valescure, did he?"

"Not that--no.  But Valescure is hurt bad--as bad.  It was six to one and
half a dozen to the other--both no good at all.  But of course they'll
arrest the old man--your great friend!  He'll not give you any more fur-
robes, that's sure.  He got away from the tavern, though, and he's hiding
somewhere.  M'sieu' Jean Jacques can't protect him now; he isn't what he
once was in the parish.  He's done for, and old Dolores will have to go
to trial.  They'll make it hot for him when they catch him.  No more fur-
robes from your Spanish friend, Virginie !  You'll have to look somewhere
else for your beaux, though to be sure there are enough that'd be glad to
get you with that farm of yours, and your thrifty ways, if you keep your
character."

Virginie was quite quiet now.  The asperity and suggestiveness of the
other's speech produced a cooling effect upon her.

"Better hurry, Mere Langlois, or everybody won't hear your story before
sundown.  If your throat gets tired, there's Brown's Bronchial Troches--"
She pointed to an advertisement on the fence near by.  "M. Fille's cook
says they cure a rasping throat."

With that shot, Virginie Poucette whipped up her horses and drove on.
She did not hear what Mere Langlois called after her, for Mere Langlois
had been slow to recover from the unexpected violence dealt by one whom
she had always bullied.

"Poor Jean Jacques!" said Virginie Poucette to herself as her horses ate
up the ground.  "That's another bit of bad luck.  He'll not sleep to-
night.  Ah, the poor Jean Jacques--and all alone--not a hand to hold; no
one to rumple that shaggy head of his or pat him on the back!  His wife
and Ma'm'selle Zoe, they didn't know a good thing when they had it.  No,
he'll not sleep to-night-ah, my dear Jean Jacques!"




CHAPTER XIX

SEBASTIAN DOLORES DOES NOT SLEEP

But Jean Jacques did sleep well that night; though it would have been
better for him if he had not done so.  The contractor's workmen had
arrived in the early afternoon, he had seen the first ton of debris
removed from the ruins of the historic mill, and it was crowned by the
gold Cock of Beaugard, all grimy with the fire, but jaunty as of yore.
The cheerfulness of the workmen, who sang gaily an old chanson of mill-
life as they tugged at the timbers and stones, gave a fillip to the
spirits of Jean Jacques, to whom had come a red-letter day.

Like Mirza on the high hill of Bagdad he had had his philosophic
meditations; his good talk with Virginie Poucette had followed; and the
woman of her lingered in the feeling of his hand all day, as something
kind and homelike and true.  Also in the evening had come M. Fille, who
brought him a message from Judge Carcasson, that he must make the world
sing for himself again.

Contrary to what Mere Langlois had thought, he had not been perturbed by
the parish noise about the savage incident at "The Red Eagle," and the
desperate affair which would cause the arrest of his father-in-law.  He
was at last well inclined to be rid of Sebastian Dolores, who had ceased
to be a comfort to him, and who brought him hateful and not kindly
memories of his lost women, and the happy hours of the past they
represented.

M. Fille had come to the Manor in much alarm, lest the news of the
miserable episode at "The Red Eagle" should bring Jean Jacques down again
to the depths.  He was infinitely relieved, however, to find that the
lord of the Manor Cartier seemed only to be grateful that Sebastian
Dolores did not return, and nodded emphatically when M. Fille remarked
that perhaps it would be just as well if he never did return.

As M. Fille sat with his host at the table in the sunset light, Jean
Jacques seemed quieter and steadier of body and mind than he had been for
a long, long time.  He even drank three glasses of the cordial which Mere
Langlois had left for him, with the idea that it might comfort him when
he got the bad news about Sebastian Dolores; and parting with M. Fille at
the door, he waved a hand and said: "Well, good-night, master of the
laws.  Safe journey!  I'm off to bed, and I'll sleep without rocking,
that's very sure and sweet."

He stood and waved his hand several times to M. Fille--till he was
out of sight indeed; and the Clerk of the Court smiled to himself long
afterwards, recalling Jean Jacques' cheerful face as he had seen it at
their parting in the gathering dusk.  As for Jean Jacques, when he locked
up the house at ten o'clock, with Dolores still absent, he had the air of
a man from whose shoulders great weights had fallen.

"Now I've shut the door on him, it'll stay shut," he said firmly.  "Let
him go back to work.  He's no good here to me, to himself, or to anyone.
And that business of the fur-robe and Virginie Poucette--ah, that!"

He shook his head angrily, then seeing the bottle of cordial still
uncorked on the sideboard, he poured some out and drank it very slowly,
till his eyes were on the ceiling above him and every drop had gone home.
Presently, with the bedroom lamp in his hand, he went upstairs, humming
to himself the chanson the workmen had sung that afternoon as they raised
again the walls of the mill:

                   "Distaff of flax flowing behind her
                    Margatton goes to the mill
                    On the old grey ass she goes,
                    The flour of love it will blind her
                    Ah, the grist the devil will grind her,
                    When Margatton goes to the mill!
                    On the old grey ass she goes,
                    And the old grey ass, he knows!"

He liked the sound of his own voice this night of his Reconstruction
Period--or such it seemed to him; and he thought that no one heard his
singing save himself.  There, however, he was mistaken.  Someone was
hidden in the house--in the big kitchen-bunk which served as a bed or a
seat, as needed.  This someone had stolen in while Jean Jacques and M.
Fille were at supper.  His name was Dolores, and he had a horse just over
the hill near by, to serve him when his work was done, and he could get
away.

The constables of Vilray had twice visited the Manor to arrest him that
day, but they had been led in another direction by a clue which he had
provided; and afterwards in the dusk he had doubled back and hid himself
under Jean Jacques' roof.  He had very important business at the Manor
Cartier.

Jean Jacques' voice ceased one song, and then, after a silence, it took
up another, not so melodious.  Sebastian Dolores had impatiently waited
for this later "musicale" to begin--he had heard it often before; and
when it was at last a regular succession of nasal explosions, he crawled
out and began to do the business which had brought him to the Manor
Cartier.

He did it all alone and with much skill; for when he was an anarchist in
Spain, those long years ago, he had learned how to use tools with expert
understanding.  Of late, Spain had been much in his mind.  He wanted to
go back there.  Nostalgia had possessed him ever since he had come again
to the Manor Cartier after Zoe had left.  He thought much of Spain, and
but little of his daughter.  Memory of her was only poignant, in so far
as it was associated with the days preceding the wreck of the Antoine.
He had had far more than enough of the respectable working life of the
New World; but there never was sufficient money to take him back to
Europe, even were it safe to go.  Of late, however, he felt sure that he
might venture, if he could only get cash for the journey.  He wanted to
drift back to the idleness and adventure and the "easy money" of the old
anarchist days in Cadiz and Madrid.  He was sick for the patio and the
plaza, for the bull-fight, for the siesta in the sun, for the lazy
glamour of the gardens and the red wine of Valladolid, for the redolent
cigarette of the roadside tavern.  This cold iron land had spoiled him,
and he would strive to get himself home again before it was too late.  In
Spain there would always be some woman whom he could cajole; some comrade
whom he could betray; some priest whom he could deceive, whose pocket he
could empty by the recital of his troubles.  But if, peradventure, he
returned to Spain with money to spare in his pocket, how easy indeed it
would all be, and how happy he would find himself amid old surroundings
and old friends!

The way had suddenly opened up to him when Jean Jacques had brought
home in hard cash, and had locked away in the iron-doored cupboard in
the officewall, his last, his cherished, eight thousand dollars.  Six
thousand of that eight were still left, and it was concern for this six
thousand which had brought Dolores to the Manor this night when Jean
Jacques snored so loudly.  The events of the day at "The Red Eagle" had
brought things to a crisis in the affairs of Carmen's father.  It was a
foolish business that at the tavern--so, at any rate, he thought, when
it was all over, and he was awake to the fact that he must fly or go to
jail.  From the time he had, with a bottle of gin, laid Valescure low,
Spain was the word which went ringing through his head, and the way to
Spain was by the Six Thousand Dollar Route, the New World terminal of
which was the cupboard in the wall at the Manor Cartier.

Little cared Sebastian Dolores that the theft of the money would mean
the end of all things for Jean Jacques Barbille-for his own daughter's
husband.  He was thinking of himself, as he had always done.

He worked for two whole hours before he succeeded in quietly forcing open
the iron door in the wall; but it was done at last.  Curiously enough,
Jean Jacques' snoring stopped on the instant that Sebastian Dolores'
fingers clutched the money; but it began cheerfully again when the door
in the wall closed once more.

Five minutes after Dolores had thrust the six thousand dollars into his
pocket, his horse was galloping away over the hills towards the River St.
Lawrence.  If he had luck, he would reach it by the morning.  As it
happened, he had the luck.  Behind him, in the Manor Cartier, the man
who had had no luck and much philosophy, snored on till morning in
unconscious content.

It was a whole day before Jean Jacques discovered his loss.  When he had
finished his lonely supper the next evening, he went to the cupboard in
his office to cheer himself with the sight of the six thousand dollars.
He felt that he must revive his spirits.  They had been drooping all day,
he knew not why.

When he saw the empty pigeon-hole in the cupboard, his sight swam.  It
was some time before it cleared, but, when it did, and he knew beyond
peradventure the crushing, everlasting truth, not a sound escaped him.
His heart stood still.  His face filled with a panic confusion.  He
seemed like one bereft of understanding.




CHAPTER XX

"AU 'VOIR, M'SIEU' JEAN JACQUES"

It is seldom that Justice travels as swiftly as Crime, and it is also
seldom that the luck is more with the law than with the criminal.  It
took the parish of St. Saviour's so long to make up its mind who stole
Jean Jacques' six thousand dollars, that when the hounds got the scent at
last the quarry had reached the water--in other words, Sebastian Dolores
had achieved the St. Lawrence.  The criminal had had near a day's start
before a telegram was sent to the police at Montreal, Quebec, and other
places to look out for the picaroon who had left his mark on the parish
of St. Saviour's.  The telegram would not even then have been sent had it
not been for M. Fille, who, suspecting Sebastian Dolores, still refrained
from instant action.  This he did because he thought Jean Jacques would
not wish his beloved Zoe's grandfather sent to prison.  But when other
people at last declared that it must have been Dolores, M. Fille insisted
on telegrams being sent by the magistrate at Vilray without Jean Jacques'
consent.  He had even urged the magistrate to "rush" the wire, because it
came home to him with stunning force that, if the money was not
recovered, Jean Jacques would be a beggar.  It was better to jail the
father-in-law, than for the little money-master to take to the road a
pauper, or stay on at St. Saviour's as an underling where he had been
overlord.

As for Jean Jacques, in his heart of hearts he knew who had robbed him.
He realized that it was one of the radii of the comedy-tragedy which
began on the Antoine, so many years before; and it had settled in his
mind at last that Sebastian Dolores was but part of the dark machinery
of fate, and that what was now had to be.

For one whole day after the robbery he was like a man paralysed--
dispossessed of active being; but when his creditors began to swarm, when
M. Mornay sent his man of business down to foreclose his mortgages before
others could take action, Jean Jacques waked from his apathy.  He began
an imitation of his old restlessness, and made essay again to pull the
strings of his affairs.  They were, however, so confused that a pull at
one string tangled them all.

When the constables and others came to him, and said that they were on
the trail of the robber, and that the rogue would be caught, he nodded
his head encouragingly; but he was sure in his own mind that the flight
of Dolores would be as successful as that of Carmen and Zoe.

This is the way he put it: "That man--we will just miss finding him,
as I missed Zoe at the railroad junction when she went away, as I missed
catching Carmen at St. Chrisanthine.  When you are at the shore, he will
be on the river; when you are getting into the train, he will be getting
out.  It is the custom of the family.  At Bordeaux, the Spanish
detectives were on the shore gnashing their teeth, when he was a hundred
yards away at sea on the Antoine.  They missed him like that; and we'll
miss him too.  What is the good!  It was not his fault--that was the way
of his bringing up beyond there at Cadiz, where they think more of a
toreador than of John the Baptist.  It was my fault.  I ought to have
banked the money.  I ought not to have kept it to look at like a gamin
with his marbles.  There it was in the wall; and there was Dolores a long
way from home and wanting to get back.  He found the way by a gift of the
tools; and I wish I had the same gift now; for I've got no other gift
that'll earn anything for me."

These were the last dark or pessimistic words spoken at St. Saviour's by
Jean Jacques; and they were said to the Clerk of the Court, who could not
deny the truth of them; but he wrung the hand of Jean Jacques
nevertheless, and would not leave him night or day.  M. Fille was like a
little cruiser protecting a fort when gunboats swarm near, not daring to
attack till their battleship heaves in sight.  The battleship was the
Big Financier, who saw that a wreck was now inevitable, and was only
concerned that there should be a fair distribution of the assets.  That
meant, of course, that he should be served first, and then that those
below the salt should get a share.

Revelation after revelation had been Jean Jacques' lot of late years,
but the final revelation of his own impotence was overwhelming.  When
he began to stir about among his affairs, he was faced by the fact that
the law stood in his way.  He realized with inward horror his shattered
egotism and natural vanity; he saw that he might just as well be in jail;
that he had no freedom; that he could do nothing at all in regard to
anything he owned; that he was, in effect, a prisoner of war where
he had been the general commanding an army.

Yet the old pride intervened, and it was associated with some innate
nobility; for from the hour in which it was known that Sebastian Dolores
had escaped in a steamer bound for France, and could not be overhauled,
and the chances were that he would never have to yield up the six
thousand dollars, Jean Jacques bustled about cheerfully, and as though
he had still great affairs of business to order and regulate.  It was a
make-believe which few treated with scorn.  Even the workmen at the mill
humoured him, as he came several times every day to inspect the work of
rebuilding; and they took his orders, though they did not carry them out.
No one really carried out any of his orders except Seraphe Corniche, who,
weeping from morning till night, protested that there never was so good a
man as M'sieu' Jean Jacques; and she cooked his favourite dishes, giving
him no peace until he had eaten them.

The days, the weeks went on, with Jean Jacques growing thinner and
thinner, but going about with his head up like the gold Cock of Beaugard,
and even crowing now and then, as he had done of yore.  He faced the
inevitable with something of his old smiling volubility; treating nothing
of his disaster as though it really existed; signing off this asset and
that; disposing of this thing and that; stripping himself bare of all the
properties on his life's stage, in such a manner as might have been his
had he been receiving gifts and not yielding up all he owned.  He chatted
as his belongings were, figuratively speaking, being carried away--as
though they were mechanical, formal things to be done as he had done them
every day of a fairly long life; as a clerk would check off the boxes or
parcels carried past him by the porters.  M. Fille could hardly bear to
see him in this mood, and the New Cure hovered round him with a mournful
and harmlessly deceptive kindness.  But the end had to come, and
practically all the parish was present when it came.  That was on the
day when the contents of the Manor were sold at auction by order of the
Court.  One thing Jean Jacques refused absolutely and irrevocably to do
from the first--refused it at last in anger and even with an oath: he
would not go through the Bankruptcy Court.  No persuasion had any effect.
The very suggestion seemed to smirch his honour.  His lawyer pleaded with
him, said he would be able to save something out of the wreck, and that
his creditors would be willing that he should take advantage of the
privileges of that court; but he only said in reply:

"Thank you, thank you altogether, monsieur, but it is impossible--'non
possumus, non possumus, my son,' as the Pope said to Bonaparte.  I owe
and I will pay what I can; and what I can't pay now I will try to pay in
the future, by the cent, by the dollar, till all is paid to the last
copper.  It is the way with the Barbilles.  They have paid their way and
their debts in honour, and it is in the bond with all the Barbilles of
the past that I do as they do.  If I can't do it, then that I have tried
to do it will be endorsed on the foot of the bill."

No one could move him, not even Judge Carcasson, who from his armchair in
Montreal wrote a feeble-handed letter begging him to believe that it was
"well within his rights as a gentleman"--this he put in at the request of
M. Mornay--to take advantage of the privileges of the Bankruptcy Court.
Even then Jean Jacques had only a few moments' hesitation.  What the
Judge said made a deep impression; but he had determined to drink the cup
of his misfortune to the dregs.  He was set upon complete renunciation;
on going forth like a pilgrim from the place of his troubles and sorrows,
taking no gifts, no mercies save those which heaven accorded him.

When the day of the auction came everything went.  Even his best suit
of clothes was sold to a blacksmith, while his fur-coat was bought by a
horse-doctor for fifteen dollars.  Things that had been part of his life
for a generation found their way into hands where he would least have
wished them to go--of those who had been envious of him, who had cheated
or deceived him, of people with whom he had had nothing in common.  The
red wagon and the pair of little longtailed stallions, which he had
driven for six years, were bought by the owner of a rival flour-mill in
the parish of Vilray; but his best sleigh, with its coon-skin robes, was
bought by the widow of Palass Poucette, who bought also the famous
bearskin which Dolores had given her at Jean Jacques' expense, and had
been returned by her to its proper owner.  The silver fruitdish, once (it
was said) the property of the Baron of Beaugard, which each generation of
Barbilles had displayed with as much ceremony as though it was a chalice
given by the Pope, went to Virginie Poucette.  Virginie also bought the
furniture from Zoe's bedroom as it stood, together with the little
upright piano on which she used to play.  The Cure bought Jean Jacques'
writing-desk, and M. Fille purchased his armchair, in which had sat at
least six Barbilles as owners of the Manor.  The beaver-hat which Jean
Jacques wore on state occasions, as his grandfather had done, together
with the bonnet rouge of the habitant, donned by him in his younger days
--they fell to the nod of Mere Langlois, who declared that, as she was a
cousin, she would keep the things in the family.  Mere Langlois would
have bought the fruit-dish also if she could have afforded to bid against
Virginie Poucette; but the latter would have had the dish if it had cost
her two hundred dollars.  The only time she had broken bread in Jean
Jacques' house, she had eaten cake from this fruit-dish; and to her,
as to the parish generally, the dish so beautifully shaped, with its
graceful depth and its fine-chased handles, was symbol of the social
caste of the Barbilles, as the gold Cock of Beaugard was sign of their
civic and commercial glory.

Jean Jacques, who had moved about all day with an almost voluble
affability, seeming not to realize the tragedy going on, or, if he
realized it, rising superior to it, was noticed to stand still suddenly
when the auctioneer put up the fruit-dish for sale.  Then the smile left
his face, and the reddish glow in his eyes, which had been there since
the burning of the mill, fled, and a touch of amazement and confusion
took its place.  All in a moment he was like a fluttered dweller of the
wilds to whom comes some tremor of danger.

His mouth opened as though he would forbid the selling of the heirloom;
but it closed again, because he knew he had no right to withhold it from
the hammer; and he took on a look like that which comes to the eyes of a
child when it faces humiliating denial.  Quickly as it came, however, it
vanished, for he remembered that he could buy the dish himself.  He could
buy it himself and keep it.  .  .  .  Yet what could he do with it?  Even
so, he could keep it.  It could still be his till better days came.

The auctioneer's voice told off the value of the fruitdish--"As an
heirloom, as an antique; as a piece of workmanship impossible of
duplication in these days of no handicraft; as good pure silver, bearing
the head of Louis Quinze--beautiful, marvellous, historic, honourable,"
and Jean Jacques made ready to bid.  Then he remembered he had no money--
he who all his life had been able to take a roll of bills from his pocket
as another man took a packet of letters.  His glance fell in shame, and
the words died on his lips, even as M. Manotel, the auctioneer, was about
to add another five-dollar bid to the price, which already was standing
at forty dollars.

It was at this moment Jean Jacques heard a woman's voice bidding, then
two women's voices.  Looking up he saw that one of the women was Mere
Langlois and the other was Virginie Poucette, who had made the first bid.
For a moment they contended, and then Mere Langlois fell out of the
contest, and Virginie continued it with an ambitious farmer from the next
county, who was about to become a Member of Parliament.  Presently the
owner of a river pleasure-steamer entered into the costly emulation also,
but he soon fell away; and Virginie Poucette stubbornly raised the
bidding by five dollars each time, till the silver symbol of the
Barbilles' pride had reached one hundred dollars.  Then she raised the
price by ten dollars, and her rival, seeing that he was face to face with
a woman who would now bid till her last dollar was at stake, withdrew;
and Virginie was left triumphant with the heirloom.

At the moment when Virginie turned away with the handsome dish from M.
Manotel, and the crowd cheered her gaily, she caught Jean-Jacques' eye,
and she came straight towards him.  She wanted to give the dish to him
then and there; but she knew that this would provide annoying gossip for
many a day, and besides, she thought he would refuse.  More than
that, she had in her mind another alternative which might in the end
secure the heirloom to him, in spite of all.  As she passed him,
she said:

"At least we keep it in the parish.  If you don't have it, well, then..."

She paused, for she did not quite know what to say unless she spoke what
was really in her mind, and she dared not do that.

"But you ought to have an heirloom," she added, leaving unsaid what was
her real thought and hope.  With sudden inspiration, for he saw she was
trying to make it easy for him, he drew the great silver-watch from his
pocket, which the head of the Barbilles had worn for generations, and
said:

"I have the only heirloom I could carry about with me.  It will keep time
for me as long as I'll last.  The Manor clock strikes the time for the
world, and this watch is set by the Manor clock."

"Well said--well and truly said, M'sieu' Jean Jacques," remarked the lean
watchmaker and so-called jeweller of Vilray, who stood near.  "It is a
watch which couldn't miss the stroke of Judgment Day."

It was at that moment, in the sunset hour, when the sale had drawn to a
close, and the people had begun to disperse, that the avocat of Vilray
who represented the Big Financier came to Jean Jacques and said:

"M'sieu', I have to say that there is due to you three hundred and fifty
dollars from the settlement, excluding this sale, which will just do what
was expected of it.  I am instructed to give it to you from the
creditors.  Here it is."

He took out a roll of bills and offered it to Jean Jacques.

"What creditors?" asked Jean Jacques.

"All the creditors," responded the other, and he produced a receipt for
Jean Jacques to sign.  "A formal statement will be sent you, and if there
is any more due to you, it will be added then.  But now--well, there it
is, the creditors think there is no reason for you to wait."

Jean Jacques did not yet take the roll of bills.  "They come from M.
Mornay?" he asked with an air of resistance, for he did not wish to be
under further obligations to the man who would lose most by him.

The lawyer was prepared.  M. Mornay had foreseen the timidity and
sensitiveness of Jean Jacques, had anticipated his mistaken chivalry--for
how could a man decline to take advantage of the Bankruptcy Court unless
he was another Don Quixote!  He had therefore arranged with all the
creditors for them to take responsibility with 'himself, though he
provided the cash which manipulated this settlement.

"No, M'sieu' Jean Jacques," the lawyer replied, this comes from all the
creditors, as the sum due to you from all the transactions, so far as can
be seen as yet.  Further adjustment may be necessary, but this is the
interim settlement."

Jean Jacques was far from being ignorant of business, but so bemused was
his judgment and his intelligence now, that he did not see there was no
balance which could possibly be his, since his liabilities vastly
exceeded his assets.  Yet with a wave of the hand he accepted the roll of
bills, and signed the receipt with an air which said, "These forms must
be observed, I suppose."

What he would have done if the three hundred and fifty dollars had not
been given him, it would be hard to say, for with gentle asperity he had
declined a loan from his friend M. Fille, and he had but one silver
dollar in his pocket, or in the world.  Indeed, Jean Jacques was living
in a dream in these dark days--a dream of renunciation and sacrifice, and
in the spirit of one who gives up all to some great cause.  He was not
yet even face to face with the fulness of his disaster.  Only at moments
had the real significance of it all come to him, and then he had shivered
as before some terror menacing his path.  Also, as M. Mornay had said,
his philosophy was now in his bones and marrow rather than in his words.
It had, after all, tinctured his blood and impregnated his mind.  He had
babbled and been the egotist, and played cock o' the walk; and now at
last his philosophy was giving some foundation for his feet.  Yet at
this auction-sale he looked a distracted, if smiling, whimsical, rather
bustling figure of misfortune, with a tragic air of exile, of isolation
from all by which he was surrounded.  A profound and wayworn loneliness
showed in his figure, in his face, in his eyes.

The crowd thinned in time, and yet very many lingered to see the last of
this drama of lost fortunes.  A few of the riff-raff, who invariably
attend these public scenes, were now rather the worse for drink, from the
indifferent liquor provided by the auctioneer, and they were inclined to
horseplay and coarse chaff.  More than one ribald reference to Jean
Jacques had been checked by his chivalrous fellow-citizens; indeed, M.
Fille had almost laid himself open to a charge of assault in his own
court by raising his stick at a loafer, who made insulting references to
Jean Jacques.  But as the sale drew to a close, an air of rollicking
humour among the younger men would not be suppressed, and it looked as
though Jean Jacques' exit would be attended by the elements of farce and
satire.

In this world, however, things do not happen logically, and Jean Jacques
made his exit in a wholly unexpected manner.  He was going away by the
train which left a new railway junction a few miles off, having gently
yet firmly declined M. Fille's invitation, and also the invitations of
others--including the Cure and Mere Langlois--to spend the night with
them and start off the next day.  He elected to go on to Montreal that
very night, and before the sale was quite finished he prepared to start.
His carpet-bag containing a few clothes and necessaries had been sent on
to the junction, and he meant to walk to the station in the cool of the
evening.

M. Manotel, the auctioneer, hoarse with his heavy day's work, was
announcing that there were only a few more things to sell, and no doubt
they could be had at a bargain, when Jean Jacques began a tour of the
Manor.  There was something inexpressibly mournful in this lonely
pilgrimage of the dismantled mansion.  Yet there was no show of cheap
emotion by Jean Jacques; and a wave of the hand prevented any one from
following him in his dry-eyed progress to say farewell to these haunts of
childhood, manhood, family, and home.  There was a strange numbness in
his mind and body, and he had a feeling that he moved immense and
reflective among material things.  Only tragedy can produce that feeling.
Happiness makes the universe infinite and stupendous, despair makes it
small and even trivial.

It was when he had reached the little office where he had done the
business of his life--a kind of neutral place where he had ever isolated
himself from the domestic scene--that the final sensation, save one, of
his existence at the Manor came to him.  Virginie Poucette had divined
his purpose when he began the tour of the house, and going by a
roundabout way, she had placed herself where she could speak with him
alone before he left the place for ever--if that was to be.  She was not
sure that his exit was really inevitable--not yet.

When Jean Jacques saw Virginie standing beside the table in his office
where he lead worked over so many years, now marked Sold, and waiting to
be taken away by its new owner, he started and drew back, but she held
out her hand and said:

"But one word, M'sieu' Jean Jacques; only one word from a friend--indeed
a friend."

"A friend of friends," he answered, still in abstraction, his eyes having
that burnished light which belonged to the night of the fire; but yet
realizing that she was a sympathetic soul who had offered to lend him
money without security.

"Oh, indeed yes, as good a friend as you can ever have!" she added.

Something had waked the bigger part of her, which had never been awake in
the days of Palass Poucette.  Jean Jacques was much older than she, but
what she felt had nothing to do with age, or place or station.  It had
only to do with understanding, with the call of nature and of a
motherhood crying for expression.  Her heart ached for him.

"Well, good-bye, my friend," he said, and held out his hand.  "I must be
going now."

"Wait," she said, and there was something insistent and yet pleading in
her voice.  "I've got something to say.  You must hear it.  .  .  .  Why
should you go?  There is my farm--it needs to be worked right.  It has
got good chances.  It has water-power and wood and the best flax in the
province--they want to start a flax-mill on it--I've had letters from big
men in Montreal.  Well, why shouldn't you do it instead?  There it is,
the farm, and there am I a woman alone.  I need help.  I've got no head.
I have to work at a sum of figures all night to get it straight.  .  .  .
Ah, m'sieu', it is a need both sides!  You want someone to look after
you; you want a chance again to do things; but you want someone to look
after you, and it is all waiting there on the farm.  Palass Poucette left
behind him seven sound horses, and cows and sheep, and a threshing-
machine and a fanning-mill, and no debts, and two thousand dollars in the
bank.  You will never do anything away from here.  You must stay here,
where--where I can look after you, Jean Jacques."

The light in his eyes flamed up, died down, flamed up again, and
presently it covered all his face, as he grasped what she meant.

"Wonder of God, do you forget?" he asked.  "I am married--married still,
Virginie Poucette.  There is no divorce in the Catholic Church--no, none
at all.  It is for ever and ever."

"I said nothing about marriage," she said bravely, though her face
suffused.

"Hand of Heaven, what do you mean?  You mean to say you would do that for
me in spite of the Cure and--and everybody and everything?"

"You ought to be taken care of," she protested.  "You ought to have your
chance again.  No one here is free to do it all but me.  You are alone.
Your wife that was--maybe she is dead.  I am alone, and I'm not afraid of
what the good God will say.  I will settle with Him myself.  Well, then,
do you think I'd care what--what Mere Langlois or the rest of the world
would say?  .  .  .  I can't bear to think of you going away with
nothing, with nobody, when here is something and somebody--somebody
who would be good to you.  Everybody knows that you've been badly used--
everybody.  I'm young enough to make things bright and warm in your life,
and the place is big enough for two, even if it isn't the Manor Cartier."

"Figure de Christ, do you think I'd let you do it--me?" declared Jean
Jacques, with lips trembling now and his shoulders heaving.  Misfortune
and pain and penalty he could stand, but sacrifice like this and--and
whatever else it was, were too much for him.  They brought him back to
the dusty road and everyday life again; they subtracted him from his big
dream, in which he had been detached from the details of his catastrophe.

"No, no, no," he added.  "You go look another way, Virginie.  Turn your
face to the young spring, not to the dead winter.  To-morrow I'll be gone
to find what I've got to find.  I've finished here, but there's many a
good man waiting for you--men who'll bring you something worth while
besides themselves.  Make no mistake, I've finished.  I've done my term
of life.  I'm only out on ticket-of-leave now--but there, enough, I shall
always want to think of you.  I wish I had something to give you--but
yes, here is something."  He drew from his pocket a silver napkin-ring.
"I've had that since I was five years old.  My uncle Stefan gave it to
me.  I've always used it.  I don't know why I put it in my pocket this
morning, but I did.  Take it.  It's more than money.  It's got something
of Jean Jacques about it.  You've got the Barbille fruit-dish-that is a
thing I'll remember.  I'm glad you've got it, and--"

"I meant we should both eat from it," she said helplessly.

"It would cost too much to eat from it with you, Virginie--"

He stopped short, choked, then his face cleared, and his eyes became
steady.

"Well then, good-bye, Virginie," he said, holding out his hand.

"You don't think I'd say to any other living man what I've said to you?"
she asked.

He nodded understandingly.  "That's the best part of it.  It was for me
of all the world," he answered.  "When I look back, I'll see the light
in your window--the light you lit for the lost one--for Jean Jacques
Barbille."

Suddenly, with eyes that did not see and hands held out before him, he
turned, felt for the door and left the room.

She leaned helplessly against the table.  "The poor Jean Jacques--the
poor Jean Jacques!" she murmured.  "Cure or no Cure, I'd have done it,"
she declared, with a ring to her voice.  "Ah, but Jean Jacques, come with
me!" she added with a hungry and compassionate gesture, speaking into
space.  "I could make life worth while for us both."

A moment later Virginie was outside, watching the last act in the career
of Jean Jacques in the parish of St. Saviour's.

This was what she saw.

The auctioneer was holding up a bird-cage containing a canary-Carmen's
bird-cage, and Zoe's canary which had remained to be a vocal memory of
her in her old home.

"Here," said the rhetorical, inflammable auctioneer, "here is the
choicest lot left to the last.  I put it away in the bakery, meaning to
sell it at noon, when everybody was eating-food for the soul and food for
the body.  I forgot it.  But here it is, worth anything you like to
anybody that loves the beautiful, the good, and the harmonious.  What do
I hear for this lovely saffron singer from the Elysian fields?  What did
the immortal poet of France say of the bird in his garret, in 'L'Oiseau
de Mon Crenier'?  What did he say:

                   'Sing me a song of the bygone hour,
                    A song of the stream and the sun;
                    Sing of my love in her bosky bower,
                    When my heart it was twenty-one.'

"Come now, who will renew his age or regale her youth with the divine
notes of nature's minstrel?  Who will make me an offer for this vestal
virgin of song--the joy of the morning and the benediction of the
evening?  What do I hear?  The best of the wine to the last of the feast!
What do I hear?--five dollars--seven dollars--nine dollars--going at nine
dollars--ten dollars--Well, ladies and gentlemen, the bird can sing--ah,
voila !"

He stopped short for a moment, for as the evening sun swept its veil of
rainbow radiance over the scene, the bird began to sing.  Its little
throat swelled, it chirruped, it trilled, it called, it soared, it lost
itself in a flood of ecstasy.  In the applausive silence, the emotional
recess of the sale, as it were, the man to whom the bird and the song
meant most, pushed his way up to the stand where M. Manotel stood.  When
the people saw who it was, they fell back, for there was that in his face
which needed no interpretation.  It filled them with a kind of awe.

He reached up a brown, eager, affectionate hand--it had always been that
--fat and small, but rather fine and certainly emotional, though not
material or sensual.

"Go on with your bidding," he said.

He was going to buy the thing which had belonged to his daughter, was
beloved by her--the living oracle of the morning, the muezzin of his
mosque of home.  It had been to the girl who had gone as another such a
bird had been to the mother of the girl, the voice that sang, "Praise
God," in the short summer of that bygone happiness of his.  Even this
cage and its homebird were not his; they belonged to the creditors.

"Go on.  I buy--I bid," Jean Jacques said in a voice that rang.  It had
no blur of emotion.  It had resonance.  The hammer that struck the bell
of his voice was the hammer of memory, and if it was plaintive it also
was clear, and it was also vibrant with the silver of lost hopes.

M. Manotel humoured him, while the bird still sang.  "Four dollars--five
dollars: do I hear no more than five dollars?--going once, going twice,
going three times--gone!" he cried, for no one had made a further bid;
and indeed M. Manotel would not have heard another voice than Jean
Jacques' if it had been as loud as the falls of the Saguenay.  He was a
kind of poet in his way, was M. Manotel.  He had been married four times,
and he would be married again if he had the chance; also he wrote verses
for tombstones in the churchyard at St. Saviour's, and couplets for fetes
and weddings.

He handed the cage to Jean Jacques, who put it down on the ground at his
feet, and in an instant had handed up five dollars for one of the idols
of his own altar.  Anyone else than M. Manotel, or perhaps M. Fille or
the New Cure, would have hesitated to take the five dollars, or, if they
had done so, would have handed it back; but they had souls to understand
this Jean Jacques, and they would not deny him his insistent
independence.  And so, in a moment, he was making his way out of the
crowd with the cage in his hand, the bird silent now.

As he went, some one touched his arm and slipped a book into his hand.
It was M. Fille, and the book was his little compendium of philosophy
which his friend had retrieved from his bedroom in the early morning.

"You weren't going to forget it, Jean Jacques?" M. Fille said
reproachfully.  "It is an old friend.  It would not be happy with
any one else."

Jean Jacques looked M. Fille in the eyes.  "Moi--je suis philosophe," he
said without any of the old insistence and pride and egotism, but as one
would make an affirmation or repeat a creed.

"Yes, yes, to be sure, always, as of old," answered M. Fille firmly;
for, from that formula might come strength, when it was most needed,
in a sense other and deeper far than it had been or was now.  "You will
remember that you will always know where to find us--eh?" added the
little Clerk of the Court.

The going of Jean Jacques was inevitable; all persuasion had failed to
induce him to stay--even that of Virginie; and M. Fille now treated it
as though it was the beginning of a new career for Jean Jacques, whatever
that career might be.  It might be he would come back some day, but not
to things as they were, not ever again, nor as the same man.

"You will move on with the world outside there," continued M. Fille,
"but we shall be turning on the same swivel here always; and whenever you
come--there, you understand.  With us it is semper fidelis, always the
same."

Jean Jacques looked at M. Fille again as though to ask him a question,
but presently he shook his head in negation to his thought.

"Well, good-bye," he said cheerfully--"A la bonne heure!"

By that M. Fille knew that Jean Jacques did not wish for company as he
went--not even the company of his old friend who had loved the bright
whimsical emotional Zoe; who had hovered around his life like a
protecting spirit.

"A bi'tot," responded M. Fille, declining upon the homely patois.

But as Jean Jacques walked away with his little book of philosophy in his
pocket, and the bird-cage in his hand, someone sobbed.  M. Fille turned
and saw.  It was Virginie Poucette.  Fortunately for Virginie other women
did the same, not for the same reason, but out of a sympathy which was
part of the scene.

It had been the intention of some friends of Jean Jacques to give him
a cheer when he left, and even his sullen local creditors, now that the
worst had come, were disposed to give him a good send-off; but the
incident of the canary in its cage gave a turn to the feeling of the
crowd which could not be resisted.  They were not a people who could cut
and dry their sentiments; they were all impulse and simplicity, with an
obvious cocksure shrewdness too, like that of Jean Jacques--of the old
Jean Jacques.  He had been the epitome of all their faults and all their
virtues.

No one cheered.  Only one person called, "Au 'voir, M'sieu' Jean
Jacques!" and no one followed him--a curious, assertive, feebly-brisk,
shock-headed figure in the brown velveteen jacket, which he had bought in
Paris on his Grand Tour.

"What a ridiculous little man!" said a woman from Chalfonte over the
water, who had been buying freely all day for her new "Manor," her
husband being a member of the provincial legislature.

The words were no sooner out of her mouth than two women faced her
threateningly.

"For two pins I'd slap your face," said old Mere Langlois, her great
breast heaving.  "Popinjay--you, that ought to be in a cage like his
canary."

But Virginie Poucette also was there in front of the offender, and she
also had come from Chalfonte--was born in that parish; and she knew what
she was facing.

"Better carry a bird-cage and a book than carry swill to swine," she
said; and madame from Chalfonte turned white, for it had been said that
her father was once a swine-herd, and that she had tried her best to
forget it when, with her coarse beauty, she married the well-to-do
farmer who was now in the legislature.

"Hold your tongues, all of you, and look at that," said M. Manotel, who
had joined the agitated group.  He was pointing towards the departing
Jean Jacques, who was now away upon his road.

Jean Jacques had raised the cage on a level with his face, and was
evidently speaking to the bird in the way birds love--that soft kissing
sound to which they reply with song.

Presently there came a chirp or two, and then the bird thrust up its
head, and out came the full blessedness of its song, exultant, home-like,
intimate.

Jean Jacques walked on, the bird singing by his side; and he did not look
back.




CHAPTER XXI

IF SHE HAD KNOWN IN TIME

Nothing stops when we stop for a time, or for all time, except ourselves.
Everything else goes on--not in the same way; but it does go on.  Life
did not stop at St. Saviour's after Jean Jacques made his exit.  Slowly
the ruined mill rose up again, and very slowly indeed the widow of Palass
Poucette recovered her spirits, though she remained a widow in spite of
all appeals; but M. Fille and his sister never were the same after they
lost their friend.  They had great comfort in the dog which Jean Jacques
had given to them, and they roused themselves to a malicious pleasure
when Bobon, as he had been called by Zoe, rushed out at the heels of an
importunate local creditor who had greatly worried Jean Jacques at the
last.  They waited in vain for a letter from Jean Jacques, but none came;
nor did they hear anything from him, or of him, for a long, long time.

Jean Jacques did not mean that they should.  When he went away with his
book of philosophy and his canary he had but one thing in his mind, and
that was to find Zoe and make her understand that he knew he had been in
the wrong.  He had illusions about starting life again, in which he
probably did not believe; but the make-believe was good for him.  Long
before the crash came, in Zoe's name--not his own--he had bought from the
Government three hundred and twenty acres of land out near the Rockies
and had spent five hundred dollars in improvements on it.

There it was in the West, one remaining asset still his own--or rather
Zoe's--but worth little if he or she did not develop it.  As he left St.
Saviour's, however, he kept fixing his mind on that "last domain," as he
called it to himself.  If this was done intentionally, that he might be
saved from distraction and despair, it was well done; if it was a real
illusion--the old self-deception which had been his bane so often in the
past--it still could only do him good at the present.  It prevented him
from noticing the attention he attracted on the railway journey from St.
Saviour's to Montreal, cherishing his canary and his book as he went.

He was not so self-conscious now as in the days when he was surprised
that Paris did not stop to say, "Bless us, here is that fine fellow, Jean
Jacques Barbille of St. Saviour's!"  He could concentrate himself more
now on things that did not concern the impression he was making on the
world.  At present he could only think of Zoe and of her future.

When a patronizing and aggressive commercial traveller in the little
hotel on a side-street where he had taken a room in Montreal said to him,
"Bien, mon vieux" (which is to say, "Well, old cock"), "aren't you a long
way from home?" something of a new dignity came into Jean Jacques'
bearing, very different from the assurance of the old days, and in reply
he said:

"Not so far that I need be careless about my company."  This made the
landlady of the little hotel laugh quite hard, for she did not like the
braggart "drummer" who had treated her with great condescension for a
number of years.  Also Madame Glozel liked Jean Jacques because of his
canary.  She thought there must be some sentimental reason for a man of
fifty or more carrying a bird about with him; and she did not rest until
she had drawn from Jean Jacques that he was taking the bird to his
daughter in the West.  There, however, madame was stayed in her search
for information.  Jean Jacques closed up, and did but smile when she
adroitly set traps for him, and at last asked him outright where his
daughter was.

Why he waited in Montreal it would be hard to say, save that it was a
kind of middle place between the old life and the new, and also because
he must decide what was to be his plan of search.  First the West--first
Winnipeg, but where after that?  He had at last secured information of
where Zoe and Gerard Fynes had stayed while in Montreal; and now he
followed clues which would bring him in touch with folk who knew them.
He came to know one or two people who were with Zoe and Gerard in the
last days they spent in the metropolis, and he turned over and over in
his mind every word said about his girl, as a child turns a sweetmeat in
its mouth.  This made him eager to be off; but on the very day he decided
to start at once for the West, something strange happened.

It was towards the late afternoon of a Saturday, when the streets were
full of people going to and from the shops in a marketing quarter, that
Madame Glozel came to him and said:

"M'sieu', I have an idea, and you will not think it strange, for you have
a kind heart.  There is a woman--look you, it is a sad, sad story hers.
She is ill and dying in a room a little way down the street.  But yes,
I am sure she is dying--of heart disease it is.  She came here first when
the illness took her, but she could not afford to stay.  She went to
those cheaper lodgings down the street.  She used to be on the stage
over in the States, and then she came back here, and there was a man--
married to him or not I do not know, and I will not think.  Well, the
man--the brute--he left her when she got ill--but yes, forsook her
absolutely!  He was a land-agent or something like that, and all very
fine to your face, to promise and to pretend--just make-believe.  When
her sickness got worse, off he went with 'Au revoir, my dear--I will be
back to supper.'  Supper!  If she'd waited for her supper till he came
back, she'd have waited as long as I've done for the fortune the gipsy
promised me forty years ago.  Away he went, the rogue, without a thought
of her, and with another woman.  That's what hurt her most of all.
Straight from her that could hardly drag herself about--ah, yes, and has
been as handsome a woman as ever was!--straight from her he went to a
slut.  She was a slut, m'sieu'--did I not know her?  Did Ma'm'selle Slut
not wait at table in this house and lead the men a dance here night and
day-day and night till I found it out!  Well, off he went with the slut,
and left the lady behind.  .  .  .  You men, you treat women so."

Jean Jacques put out a hand as though to argue with her.  "Sometimes it
is the other way," he retorted.  "Most of us have seen it like that."

"Well, for sure, you're right enough there, m'sieu'," was the response.
"I've got nothing to say to that, except that it's a man that runs away
with a woman, or that gets her to leave her husband when she does go.
There's always a man that says, 'Come along, I'm the better chap for
you.'"

Jean Jacques wearily turned his head away towards the cage where his
canary was beginning to pipe its evening lay.

"It all comes to the same thing in the end," he said pensively; and then
he who had been so quiet since he came to the little hotel--Glozel's,
it was called--began to move about the room excitedly, running his
fingers through his still bushy hair, which, to his credit, was always
as clean as could be, burnished and shiny even at his mid-century period.
He began murmuring to himself, and a frown settled on his fore head.
Mme. Glozel saw that she had perturbed him, and that no doubt she had
roused some memories which made sombre the sunny little room where the
canary sang; where, to ravish the eyes of the pessimist, was a picture of
Louis XVI.  going to heaven in the arms of St. Peter.

When started, however, the good woman could no more "slow down" than her
French pony would stop when its head was turned homewards from market.
So she kept on with the history of the woman down the street.

"Heart disease," she said, nodding with assurance and finality; "and we
know what that is--a start, a shock, a fall, a strain, and pht! off the
poor thing goes.  Yes, heart disease, and sometimes with such awful pain.
But so; and yesterday she told me she had only a hundred dollars left.
'Enough to last me through,' she said to me.  Poor thing, she lifted up
her eyes with a way she has, as if looking for something she couldn't
find, and she says, as simple as though she was asking about the price of
a bed-tick, 'It won't cost more than fifty dollars to bury me, I s'pose?'
Well, that made me squeamish, for the poor dear's plight came home to me
so clear, and she young enough yet to get plenty out of life, if she had
the chance.  So I asked her again about her people--whether I couldn't
send for someone belonging to her.  'There's none that belongs to me,'
she says, 'and there's no one I belong to.'

"I thought very likely she didn't want to tell me about herself; perhaps
because she had done wrong, and her family had not been good to her.  Yet
it was right I should try and get her folks to come, if she had any
folks.  So I said to her, 'Where was your home?'  And now, what do you
think she answered, m'sieu'?'  'Look there,' she said to me, with her big
eyes standing out of her head almost--for that's what comes to her
sometimes when she is in pain, and she looks more handsome then than at
any other time--'Look there,' she said to me, 'it was in heaven, that's
where--my home was; but I didn't know it.  I hadn't been taught to know
the place when I saw it.'

"Well, I felt my skin go goosey, for I saw what was going on in her
mind, and how she was remembering what had happened to her some time,
somewhere; but there wasn't a tear in her eyes, and I never saw her cry-
never once, m'sieu'--well, but as brave as brave.  Her eyes are always
dry--burning.  They're like two furnaces scorching up her face.  So I
never found out her history, and she won't have the priest.  I believe
that's because she wants to die unknown, and doesn't want to confess.
I never saw a woman I was sorrier for, though I think she wasn't married
to the man that left her.  But whatever she was, there's good in her--I
haven't known hundreds of women and had seven sisters for nothing.  Well,
there she is--not a friend near her at the last; for it's coming soon,
the end--no one to speak to her, except the woman she pays to come in and
look after her and nurse her a bit.  Of course there's the landlady too,
Madame Popincourt, a kind enough little cricket of a woman, but with no
sense and no head for business.  And so the poor sick thing has not a
single pleasure in the world.  She can't read, because it makes her head
ache, she says; and she never writes to any one.  One day she tried to
sing a little, but it seemed to hurt her, and she stopped before she had
begun almost.  Yes, m'sieu', there she is without a single pleasure in
the long hours when she doesn't sleep."

"There's my canary--that would cheer her up," eagerly said Jean Jacques,
who, as the story of the chirruping landlady continued, became master of
his agitation, and listened as though to the tale of some life for which
he had concern.  "Yes, take my canary to her, madame.  It picked me up
when I was down.  It'll help her--such a bird it is!  It's the best
singer in the world.  It's got in its throat the music of Malibran and
Jenny Lind and Grisi, and all the stars in heaven that sang together.
Also, to be sure, it doesn't charge anything, but just as long as there's
daylight it sings and sings, as you know."

"M'sieu'--oh, m'sieu', it was what I wanted to ask you, and I didn't
dare!" gushingly declared madame.  "I never heard a bird sing like that
--just as if it knew how much good it was doing, and with all the airs of
a grand seigneur.  It's a prince of birds, that.  If you mean it,
m'sieu', you'll do as good a thing as you have ever done."

"It would have to be much better, or it wouldn't be any use," remarked
Jean Jacques.

The woman made a motion of friendliness with both hands.  "I don't
believe that.  You may be queer, but you've got a kind eye.  It won't be
for long she'll need the canary, and it will cheer her.  There certainly
was never a bird so little tied to one note.  Now this note, now that,
and so amusing.  At times it's as though he was laughing at you."

"That's because, with me for his master, he has had good reason to
laugh," remarked Jean Jacques, who had come at last to take a despondent
view of himself.

"That's bosh," rejoined Mme. Glozel; "I've seen several people odder than
you."

She went over to the cage eagerly, and was about to take it away.
"Excuse me," interposed Jean Jacques, "I will carry the cage to the
house.  Then you will go in with the bird, and I'll wait outside and see
if the little rascal sings."

"This minute?" asked madame.

"For sure, this very minute.  Why should the poor lady wait?  It's a
lonely time of day, this, the evening, when the long night's ahead."

A moment later the two were walking along the street to the door of Mme.
Popincourt's lodgings, and people turned to look at the pair, one
carrying something covered with a white cloth, evidently a savoury dish
of some kind--the other with a cage in which a handsome canary hopped
about, well pleased with the world.

At Mme.  Popincourt's door Mme.  Glozel took the cage and went upstairs.
Jean Jacques, left behind, paced backwards and forwards in front of the
house waiting and looking up, for Mme.  Glozel had said that behind the
front window on the third floor was where the sick woman lived.  He had
not long to wait.  The setting sun shining full on the window had roused
the bird, and he began to pour out a flood of delicious melody which
flowed on and on, causing the people in the street to stay their steps
and look up.  Jean Jacques' face, as he listened, had something very like
a smile.  There was that in the smile belonging to the old pride, which
in days gone by had made him say when he looked at his domains at the
Manor Cartier--his houses, his mills, his store, his buildings and his
lands--"It is all mine.  It all belongs to Jean Jacques Barbille."

Suddenly, however, there came a sharp pause in the singing, and after
that a cry--a faint, startled cry.  Then Mme.  Glozel's head was thrust
out of the window three floors up, and she called to Jean Jacques to come
quickly.  As she bade him come, some strange premonition flashed to Jean
Jacques, and with thumping heart he hastened up the staircase.  Outside a
bedroom door, Mme.  Glozel met him.  She was so excited she could only
whisper.

"Be very quiet," she said.  "There is something strange.  When the bird
sang as it did--you heard it--she sat like one in a trance.  Then her
face took on a look glad and frightened too, and she stared hard at the
cage.  'Bring that cage to me,' she said.  I brought it.  She looked
sharp at it, then she gave a cry and fell back.  As I took the cage away
I saw what she had been looking at--a writing at the bottom of the cage.
It was the name Carmen."

With a stifled cry Jean Jacques pushed her aside and entered the room.
As he did so, the sick woman in the big armchair, so pale yet so splendid
in her death-beauty, raised herself up.  With eyes that Francesca might
have turned to the vision of her fate, she looked at the opening door, as
though to learn if he who came was one she had wished to see through
long, relentless days.

"Jean Jacques--ah, my beautiful Jean Jacques!" she cried out presently in
a voice like a wisp of sound, for she had little breath; and then with a
smile she sank back, too late to hear, but not too late to know, what
Jean Jacques said to her.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Being generous with other people's money
I had to listen to him, and he had to pay me for listening
Law.  It is expensive whether you win or lose
Protest that it is right when it knows that it is wrong






THE MONEY MASTER

By Gilbert Parker



EPOCH THE FIFTH

XXII.     BELLS OF MEMORY
XXIII.    JEAN JACQUES HAS WORK TO DO
XXIV.     JEAN JACQUES ENCAMPED.
XXV.      WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE

EPILOGUE




CHAPTER XXII

BELLS OF MEMORY

However far Jean Jacques went, however long the day since leaving the
Manor Cartier, he could not escape the signals from his past.  He heard
more than once the bells of memory ringing at the touch of the invisible
hand of Destiny which accepts no philosophy save its own.  At Montreal,
for one hallowed instant, he had regained his lost Carmen, but he had
turned from her grave--the only mourners being himself, Mme. Glozel and
Mme. Popincourt, together with a barber who had coiffed her wonderful
hair once a week--with a strange burning at his heart.  That iceberg
which most mourners carry in their breasts was not his, as he walked down
the mountainside from Carmen's grave.  Behind him trotted Mme. Glozel and
Mme. Popincourt, like little magpies, attendants on this eagle of sorrow
whose life-love had been laid to rest, her heart-troubles over.  Passion
or ennui would no more vex her.

She had had a soul, had Carmen Dolores, though she had never known it
till her days closed in on her, and from the dusk she looked out of the
casements of life to such a glowing as Jean Jacques had seen when his
burning mill beatified the evening sky.  She had known passion and vivid
life in the days when she went hand-in-hand with Carvillho Gonzales
through the gardens of Granada; she had known the smothering home-
sickness which does not alone mean being sick for a distant home, but a
sickness of the home that is; and she had known what George Masson gave
her for one thrilling hour, and then--then the man who left her in her
death-year, taking not only the last thread of hope which held her to
life.  This vulture had taken also little things dear to her daily life,
such as the ring Carvillho Gonzales had given her long ago in Cadiz, also
another ring, a gift of Jean Jacques, and things less valuable to her,
such as money, for which she knew surely she would have no long use.

As she lay waiting for the day when she must go from the garish scene,
she unconsciously took stock of life in her own way.  There intruded on
her sight the stages of the theatres where she had played and danced, and
she heard again the music of the paloma and those other Spanish airs
which had made the world dance under her girl's feet long ago.  At first
she kept seeing the faces of thousands looking up at her from the stalls,
down at her from the gallery, over at her from the boxes; and the hot
breath of that excitement smote her face with a drunken odour that sent
her mad.  Then, alas!  somehow, as disease took hold of her, there were
the colder lights, the colder breath from the few who applauded so
little.  And always the man who had left her in her day of direst need;
who had had the last warm fires of her life, the last brief outrush of
her soul, eager as it was for a joy which would prove she had not lost
all when she fled from the Manor Cartier--a joy which would make her
forget!

What she really did feel in this last adventure of passion only made her
remember the more when she was alone now, her life at the Manor Cartier.
She was wont to wake up suddenly in the morning--the very early morning
--with the imagined sound of the gold Cock of Beaugard crowing in her
ears.  Memory, memory, memory--yet never a word, and never a hearsay of
what had happened at the Manor Cartier since she had left it!  Then there
came a time when she longed intensely to see Jean Jacques before she
died, though she could not bring herself to send word to him.  She
dreaded what the answer might be-not Jean Jacques' answer, but the answer
of Life.  Jean Jacques and her child, her Zoe--more his than hers in
years gone by--one or both might be dead!  She dared not write, but she
cherished a desire long denied.  Then one day she saw everything in her
life more clearly than she had ever done.  She found an old book of
French verse, once belonging to Mme. Popincourt's husband, who had been a
professor.  Some lines therein opened up a chamber of her being never
before unlocked.  At first only the feeling of the thing came, then
slowly the spiritual meaning possessed her.  She learnt it by heart and
let it sing to her as she lay half-sleeping and half-waking, half-living
and half-dying:

         "There is a World; men compass it through tears,
          Dare doom for joy of it; it called me o'er the foam;
          I found it down the track of sundering years,
          Beyond the long island where the sea steals home.

         "A land that triumphs over shame and pain,
          Penitence and passion and the parting breath,
          Over the former and the latter rain,
          The birth-morn fire and the frost of death.

         "From its safe shores the white boats ride away,
          Salving the wreckage of the portless ships
          The light desires of the amorous day,
          The wayward, wanton wastage of the lips.

         "Star-mist and music and the pensive moon
          These when I harboured at that perfumed shore;
          And then, how soon!  the radiance of noon,
          And faces of dear children at the door.

         "Land of the Greater Love--men call it this;
          No light-o'-love sets here an ambuscade;
          No tender torture of the secret kiss
          Makes sick the spirit and the soul afraid.

         "Bright bowers and the anthems of the free,
          The lovers absolute--ah, hear the call!
          Beyond the long island and the sheltering sea,
          That World I found which holds my world in thrall.

         "There is a World; men compass it through tears,
          Dare doom for joy of it; it called me o'er the foam;
          I found it down the track of sundering years,
          Beyond the long island where the sea steals home."


At last the inner thought of it got into her heart, and then it was in
reply to Mme. Glozel, who asked her where her home was, she said: "In
Heaven, but I did not know it!"  And thus it was, too, that at the very
last, when Jean Jacques followed the singing bird into her death-chamber,
she cried out, "Ah, my beautiful Jean Jacques!"

And because Jean Jacques knew that, at the last, she had been his, soul
and body, he went down from the mountain-side, the two black magpies
fluttering mournfully and yet hopefully behind him, with more warmth at
his heart than he had known for years.  It never occurred to him that the
two elderly magpies would jointly or severally have given the rest of
their lives and their scant fortunes to have him with them either as
husband, or as one who honourably hires a home at so much a day.

Though Jean Jacques did not know this last fact, when he fared forth
again he left behind his canary with Mme. Glozel; also all Carmen's
clothes, except the dress she died in, he gave to Mme. Popincourt, on
condition that she did not wear them till he had gone.  The dress in
which Carmen died he wrapped up carefully, with her few jewels and her
wedding-ring, and gave the parcel to Mme. Glozel to care for till he
should send for it or come again.

"The bird--take him on my birthday to sing at her grave," he said to Mme.
Glozel just before he went West.  "It is in summer, my birthday, and you
shall hear how he will sing there," he added in a low voice at the very
door.  Then he took out a ten-dollar bill, and would have given it to her
to do this thing for him; but she would have none of his money.  She only
wiped her eyes and deplored his going, and said that if ever he wanted a
home, and she was alive, he would know where to find it.  It sounded and
looked sentimental, yet Jean Jacques was never less sentimental in a very
sentimental life.  This particular morning he was very quiet and grave,
and not in the least agitated; he spoke like one from a friendly, sun-
bright distance to Mme. Glozel, and also to Mme. Popincourt as he passed
her at the door of her house.

Jean Jacques had no elation as he took the Western trail; there was not
much hope in his voice; but there was purpose and there was a little
stream of peace flowing through his being--and also, mark, a stream of
anger tumbling over rough places.  He had read two letters addressed to
Carmen by the man--Hugo Stolphe--who had left her to her fate; and there
was a grim devouring thing in him which would break loose, if ever the
man crossed his path.  He would not go hunting him, but if he passed him
or met him on the way--!  Still he would go hunting--to find his
Carmencita, his little Carmen, his Zoe whom he had unwittingly, God knew!
driven forth into the far world of the millions of acres--a wide, wide
hunting-ground in good sooth.

So he left his beloved province where he no longer had a home, and though
no letters came to him from St. Saviour's, from Vilray or the Manor
Cartier, yet he heard the bells of memory when the Hand Invisible
arrested his footsteps.  One day these bells rang so loud that he would
have heard them were he sunk in the world's deepest well of shame; but,
as it was, he now marched on hills far higher than the passes through the
mountains which his patchwork philosophy had ever provided.

It was in the town of Shilah on the Watloon River that the bells boomed
out--not because he had encountered one he had ever known far down by the
Beau Cheval, or in his glorious province, not because he had found his
Zoe, but because a man, the man--not George Masson, but the other--met
him in the way.

Shilah was a place to which, almost unconsciously, he had deviated his
course, because once Virginie Poucette had read him a letter from there.
That was in the office of the little Clerk of the Court at Vilray.  The
letter was from Virginie's sister at Shilah, and told him that Zoe and
her husband had gone away into farther fields of homelessness.  Thus it
was that Shilah ever seemed to him, as he worked West, a goal in his
quest--not the last goal perhaps, but a goal.

He had been far past it by another route, up, up and out into the more
scattered settlements, and now at last he had come to it again, having
completed a kind of circle.  As he entered it, the past crowded on to him
with a hundred pictures.  Shilah--it was where Virginie Poucette's sister
lived; and Virginie had been a part of the great revelation of his life
at St. Saviour's.

As he was walking by the riverside at Shilah, a woman spoke to him,
touching his arm as she did so.  He was in a deep dream as she spoke,
but there certainly was a look in her face that reminded him of someone
belonging to the old life.  For an instant he could not remember.  For a
moment he did not even realize that he was at Shilah.  His meditation had
almost been a trance, and it took him time to adjust himself to the
knowledge of the conscious mind.  His subconsciousness was very
powerfully alive in these days.  There was not the same ceaselessly
active eye, nor the vibration of the impatient body which belonged to the
money-master and miller of the Manor Cartier.  Yet the eye had more depth
and force, and the body was more powerful and vigorous than it had ever
been.  The long tramping, the everlasting trail on false scents, the
mental battling with troubles past and present, had given a fortitude and
vigour to the body beyond what it had ever known.  In spite of his
homelessness and pilgrim equipment he looked as though he had a home--
far off.  The eyes did not smile; but the lips showed the goodness of
his heart--and its hardness too.  Hardness had never been there in the
old days.  It was, however, the hardness of resentment, and not of
cruelty.  It was not his wife's or his daughter's flight that he
resented, nor yet the loss of all he had, nor the injury done him by
Sebastian Dolores.  No, his resentment was against one he had never seen,
but was now soon to see.  As his mind came back from the far places where
it had been, and his eyes returned to the concrete world, he saw what the
woman recalled to him.  It was--yes, it was Virginie Poucette--the kind
and beautiful Virginie--for her goodness had made him remember her as
beautiful, though indeed she was but comely, like this woman who stayed
him as he walked by the river.

"You are M'sieu' Jean Jacques Barbille?" she said questioningly.

"How did you know?" he asked.  .  .  .  "Is Virginie Poucette here?"

"Ah, you knew me from her?" she asked.

"There was something about her--and you have it also--and the look in the
eyes, and then the lips!" he replied.

Certainly they were quite wonderful, luxurious lips, and so shapely too
--like those of Virginie.

"But how did you know I was Jean Jacques Barbille?" he repeated.

"Well, then it is quite easy," she replied with a laugh almost like a
giggle, for she was quite as simple and primitive as her sister.  "There
is a photographer at Vilray, and Virginie got one of your pictures there,
and sent, it to me.  'He may come your way,' said Virginie to me, 'and if
he does, do not forget that he is my friend.'"

"That she is my friend," corrected Jean Jacques.  "And what a friend--
merci, what a friend!"  Suddenly he caught the woman's arm.  "You once
wrote to your sister about my Zoe, my daughter, that married and ran
away--"

"That ran away and got married," she interrupted.

"Is there any more news--tell me, do you know-?"

But Virginie's sister shook her head.  "Only once since I wrote Virginie
have I heard, and then the two poor children--but how helpless they were,
clinging to each other so!  Well, then, once I heard from Faragay, but
that was much more than a year ago.  Nothing since, and they were going
on--on to Fort Providence to spend the winter--for his health--his
lungs."

"What to do--on what to live?" moaned Jean Jacques.

"His grandmother sent him a thousand dollars, so your Madame Zoe wrote
me."

Jean Jacques raised a hand with a gesture of emotion.  "Ah, the blessed
woman!  May there be no purgatory for her, but Heaven at once and
always!"

"Come home with me--where are your things?" she asked.

"I have only a knapsack," he replied.  "It is not far from here.  But I
cannot stay with you.  I have no claim.  No, I will not, for--"

"As to that, we keep a tavern," she returned.  "You can come the same
as the rest of the world.  The company is mixed, but there it is.  You
needn't eat off the same plate, as they say in Quebec."

Quebec!  He looked at her with the face of one who saw a vision.  How
like Virginie Poucette--the brave, generous Virginie--how like she was!

In silence now he went with her, and seeing his mood she did not talk to
him.  People stared as they walked along, for his dress was curious and
his head was bare, and his hair like the coat of a young lion.  Besides,
this woman was, in her way, as brave and as generous as Virginie
Poucette.  In the very doorway of the tavern by the river a man jostled
them.  He did not apologize.  He only leered.  It made his foreign-
looking, coarsely handsome face detestable.

"Pig!" exclaimed Virginie Poucette's sister.  "That's a man--well, look
out!  There's trouble brewing for him.  If he only knew!  If suspicion
comes out right and it's proved--well, there, he'll jostle the door-jamb
of a jail."

Jean Jacques stared after the man, and somehow every nerve in his body
became angry.  He had all at once a sense of hatred.  He shook the
shoulder against which the man had collided.  He remembered the leer
on the insolent, handsome face.

"I'd like to see him thrown into the river," said Virginie Poucette's
sister.  "We have a nice girl here--come from Ireland--as good as can be.
Well, last night--but there, she oughtn't to have let him speak to her.
'A kiss is nothing,' he said.  Well, if he kissed me I would kill him--if
I didn't vomit myself to death first.  He's a mongrel--a South American
mongrel with nigger blood."

Jean Jacques kept looking after the man.  "Why don't you turn him out?"
he asked sharply.

"He's going away to-morrow anyhow," she replied.  "Besides, the girl,
she's so ashamed--and she doesn't want anyone to know.  'Who'd want to
kiss me after him' she said, and so he stays till to-morrow.  He's not in
the tavern itself, but in the little annex next door-there, where he's
going now.  He's only had his meals here, though the annex belongs to us
as well.  He's alone there on his dung-hill."

She brought Jean Jacques into a room that overlooked the river--which,
indeed, hung on its very brink.  From the steps at its river-door, a
little ferry-boat took people to the other side of the Watloon, and very
near--just a few hand-breadths away--was the annex where was the man who
had jostled Jean Jacques.




CHAPTER XXIII

JEAN JACQUES HAS WORK TO DO

A single lighted lamp, turned low, was suspended from the ceiling of the
raftered room, and through the open doorway which gave on to a little
wooden piazza with a slight railing and small, shaky gate came the swish
of the Watloon River.  No moon was visible, but the stars were radiant
and alive--trembling with life.  There was something soothing, something
endlessly soothing in the sound of the river.  It suggested the ceaseless
movement of life to the final fulness thereof.

So still was the room that it might have seemed to be without life, were
it not for a faint sound of breathing.  The bed, however, was empty, and
no chair was occupied; but on a settle in a corner beside an unused
fireplace sat a man, now with hands clasped between his knees, again with
arms folded across his breast; but with his head always in a listening
attitude.  The whole figure suggested suspense, vigilance and
preparedness.  The man had taken off his boots and stockings, and his
bare feet seemed to grip the floor; also the sleeves of his jacket were
rolled up a little.  It was not a figure you would wish to see in your
room at midnight unasked.  Once or twice he sighed heavily, as he
listened to the river slishing past and looked out to the sparkle of the
skies.  It was as though the infinite had drawn near to the man, or else
that the man had drawn near to the infinite.  Now and again he brought
his fists down on his knees with a savage, though noiseless, force.  The
peace of the river and the night could not contend successfully against a
dark spirit working in him.  When, during his vigil, he shook his shaggy
head and his lips opened on his set teeth, he seemed like one who would
take toll at a gateway of forbidden things.

He started to his feet at last, hearing footsteps outside upon the
stairs.  Then he settled back again, drawing near to the chimney-wall, so
that he should not be easily seen by anyone entering.  Presently there
was the click of a latch, then the door opened and shut, and cigar-smoke
invaded the room.  An instant later a hand went up to the suspended oil-
lamp and twisted the wick into brighter flame.  As it did so, there was a
slight noise, then the click of a lock.  Turning sharply, the man under
the lamp saw at the door the man who had been sitting in the corner.  The
man had a key in his hand.  Exit now could only be had through the door
opening on to the river.

"Who are you?  What the hell do you want here?" asked the fellow under
the lamp, his swarthy face drawn with fear and yet frowning with anger.

"Me--I am Jean Jacques Barbille," said the other in French, putting the
key of the door in his pocket.  The other replied in French, with a
Spanish-English accent.  "Barbille--Carmen's husband!  Well, who would
have thought--!"

He ended with a laugh not pleasant to hear, for it was coarse with
sardonic mirth; yet it had also an unreasonable apprehension; for why
should he fear the husband of the woman who had done that husband such an
injury!

"She treated you pretty bad, didn't she--not much heart, had Carmen!"
he added.

"Sit down.  I want to talk to you," said Jean Jacques, motioning to two
chairs by a table at the side of the room.  This table was in the middle
of the room when the man under the lamp-Hugo Stolphe was his name--had
left it last.  Why had the table been moved?

"Why should I sit down, and what are you doing here?--I want to know
that," Stolphe demanded.  Jean Jacques' hands were opening and shutting.
"Because I want to talk to you.  If you don't sit down, I'll give you no
chance at all.  .  .  .  Sit down!"  Jean Jacques was smaller than
Stolphe, but he was all whipcord and leather; the other was sleek and
soft, but powerful too; and he had one of those savage natures which go
blind with hatred, and which fight like beasts.  He glanced swiftly round
the room.

"There is no weapon here," said Jean Jacques, nodding.  "I have put
everything away--so you could not hurt me if you wanted.  .  .  .  Sit
down!"

To gain time Stolphe sat down, for he had a fear that Jean Jacques was
armed, and might be a madman armed--there were his feet bare on the brown
painted boards.  They looked so strange, so uncanny.  He surely must be a
madman if he wanted to do harm to Hugo Stolphe; for Hugo Stolphe had only
"kept" the woman who had left her husband, not because of himself, but
because of another man altogether--one George Masson.  Had not Carmen
herself told him that before she and he lived together?  What grudge
could Carmen's husband have against Hugo Stolphe?

Jean Jacques sat down also, and, leaning on the table said: "Once I was a
fool and let the other man escape-George Masson it was.  Because of what
he did, my wife left me."

His voice became husky, but he shook his throat, as it were, cleared it,
and went on.  "I won't let you go.  I was going to kill George Masson--I
had him like that!"  He opened and shut his hand with a gesture of fierce
possession.  "But I did not kill him.  I let him go.  He was so clever--
cleverer than you will know how to be.  She said to me--my wife said to
me, when she thought I had killed him, 'Why did you not fight him?  Any
man would have fought him.'  That was her view.  She was right--not to
kill without fighting.  That is why I did not kill you at once when I
knew."

"When you knew what?" Stolphe was staring at the madman.

"When I knew you were you.  First I saw that ring--that ring on your
hand.  It was my wife's.  I gave it to her the first New Year after we
married.  I saw it on your hand when you were drinking at the bar next
door.  Then I asked them your name.  I knew it.  I had read your letters
to my wife--"

"Your wife once on a time!"

Jean Jacques' eyes swam red.  "My wife always and always--and at the last
there in my arms."  Stolphe temporized.  "I never knew you.  She did not
leave you because of me.  She came to me because--because I was there for
her to come to, and you weren't there.  Why do you want to do me any
harm?"  He still must be careful, for undoubtedly the man was mad--his
eyes were too bright.

"You were the death of her," answered Jean Jacques, leaning forward.
"She was most ill-ah, who would not have been sorry for her!  She was
poor.  She had been to you--but to live with a woman day by day, but to
be by her side when the days are done, and then one morning to say, 'Au
revoir till supper' and then go and never come back, and to take money
and rings that belonged to her!  .  .  .  That was her death--that was
the end of Carmen Barbille; and it was your fault."

"You would do me harm and not hurt her!  Look how she treated you--and
others."

Jean Jacques half rose from his seat in sudden rage, but he restrained
himself, and sat down again.  "She had one husband--only one.  It was
Jean Jacques Barbille.  She could only treat one as she treated me--me,
her husband.  But you, what had you to do with that!  You used her--so!"
He made a motion as though to stamp out an insect with his foot.
"Beautiful, a genius, sick and alone--no husband, no child, and you used
her so!  That is why I shall kill you to-night.  We will fight for it."

Yes, but surely the man was mad, and the thing to do was to humour him,
to gain time.  To humour a madman--that is what one always advised,
therefore Stolphe would make the pourparler, as the French say.

"Well, that's all right," he rejoined, "but how is it going to be done?
Have you got a pistol?"  He thought he was very clever, and that he would
now see whether Jean Jacques Barbille was armed.  If he was not armed,
well, then, there would be the chances in his favour; it wasn't easy to
kill with hands alone.

Jean Jacques ignored the question, however.  He waved a hand impatiently,
as though to dismiss it.  "She was beautiful and splendid; she had been a
queen down there in Quebec.  You lied to her, and she was blind at first
--I can see it all.  She believed so easily--but yes, always!  There
she was what she was, and you were what you are, not a Frenchman, not
Catholic, and an American--no, not an American--a South American.  But
no, not quite a South American, for there was the Portuguese nigger in
you--Sit down!"

Jean Jacques was on his feet bending over the enraged mongrel.  He had
spoken the truth, and Carmen's last lover had been stung as though a
serpent's tooth was in his flesh.  Of all things that could be said about
him, that which Jean Jacques said was the worst--that he was not all
white, that he had nigger blood!  Yet it was true; and he realized that
Jean Jacques must have got his information in Shilah itself where he had
been charged with it.  Yet, raging as he was, and ready to take the
Johnny Crapaud--that is the name by which he had always called Carmen's
husband--by the throat, he was not yet sure that Jean Jacques was
unarmed.  He sat still under an anger greater than his own, for there
was in it that fanaticism which only the love or hate of a woman could
breed in a man's mind.

Suddenly Stolphe laughed outright, a crackling, mirthless, ironical
laugh; for it really was absurdity made sublime that this man, who had
been abandoned by his wife, should now want to kill one who had abandoned
her!  This outdid Don Quixote over and over.

"Well, what do you want?" he asked.

"I want you to fight," said Jean Jacques.  "That is the way.  That was
Carmen's view.  You shall have your chance to live, but I shall throw you
in the river, and you can then fight the river.  The current is swift,
the banks are steep and high as a house down below there.  Now, I am
ready.  .  .  .  !"

He had need to be, for Stolphe was quick, kicking the chair from beneath
him, and throwing himself heavily on Jean Jacques.  He had had his day at
that in South America, and as Jean Jacques Barbille had said, the water
was swift and deep, and the banks of the Watloon high and steep!

But Jean Jacques was unconscious of everything save a debt to be
collected for a woman he had loved, a compensation which must be taken in
flesh and blood.  Perhaps at the moment, as Stolphe had said to himself,
he was a little mad, for all his past, all his plundered, squandered,
spoiled life was crying out at him like a hundred ghosts, and he was
fighting with beasts at Ephesus.  An exaltation possessed him.  Not since
the day when his hand was on the lever of the flume with George Masson
below; not since the day he had turned his back for ever on the Manor
Cartier had he been so young and so much his old self-an egotist, with
all the blind confidence of his kind; a dreamer inflamed into action with
all a mad dreamer's wild power.  He was not fifty-two years of age, but
thirty-two at this moment, and all the knowledge got of the wrestling
river-drivers of his boyhood, when he had spent hours by the river
struggling with river-champions, came back to him.  It was a relief to
his sick soul to wrench and strain, and propel and twist and force
onward, step by step, to the door opening on the river, this creature who
had left his Carmen to die alone.

"No, you don't--not yet.  The jail before the river!" called a cool,
sharp, sour voice; and on the edge of the trembling platform overhanging
the river, Hugo Stolphe was dragged back from the plunge downward he was
about to take, with Jean Jacques' hand at his throat.

Stolphe had heard the door of the bedroom forced, but Jean Jacques had
not heard it; he was only conscious of hands dragging him back just at
the moment of Stolphe's deadly peril.

"What is it?" asked Jean Jacques, seeing Stolphe in the hands of two
men, and hearing the snap of steel.  "Wanted for firing a house for
insurance--wanted for falsifying the accounts of a Land Company--wanted
for his own good, Mr. Hugo Stolphe, C.O.D.--collect on delivery!" said
the officer of the law.  "And collected just in time!"

"We didn't mean to take him till to-morrow," the officer added, "but out
on the river one of us saw this gladiator business here in the red-light
zone, and there wasn't any time to lose.  .  .  .  I don't know what your
business with him was," the long-moustached detective said to Jean
Jacques, "but whatever the grudge is, if you don't want to appear in
court in the morning, the walking's good out of town night or day--so
long!"

He hustled his prisoner out.

Jean Jacques did not want to appear in court, and as the walking was
officially good at dawn, he said good-bye to Virginie Poucette's sister
through the crack of a door, and was gone before she could restrain him.

"Well, things happen that way," he said, as he turned back to look at
Shilah before it disappeared from view.

"Ah, the poor, handsome vaurien!" the woman at the tavern kept saying to
her husband all that day; and she could not rest till she had written to
Virginie how Jean Jacques came to Shilah in the evening, and went with
the dawn.




CHAPTER XXIV

JEAN JACQUES ENCAMPED

The Young Doctor of Askatoon had a good heart, and he was exercising it
honourably one winter's day near three years after Jean Jacques had left
St. Saviour's.

"There are many French Canadians working on the railway now, and a good
many habitant farmers live hereabouts, and they have plenty of children
--why not stay here and teach school?  You are a Catholic, of course,
monsieur?"

This is what the Young Doctor said to one who had been under his anxious
care for a few, vivid days.  The little brown-bearded man with the grey-
brown hair nodded in reply, but his gaze was on the billowing waste of
snow, which stretched as far as eye could see to the pine-hills in the
far distance.  He nodded assent, but it was plain to be seen that the
Young Doctor's suggestion was not in tune with his thought.  His nod only
acknowledged the reasonableness of the proposal.  In his eyes, however,
was the wanderlust which had possessed him for three long years, in which
he had been searching for what to him was more than Eldorado, for it was
hope and home.  Hope was all he had left of the assets which had made him
so great a figure--as he once thought--in his native parish of St.
Saviour's.  It was his fixed idea--une idee fixe, as he himself said.
Lands, mills, manor, lime-kilns, factories, store, all were gone, and his
wife Carmen also was gone.  He had buried her with simple magnificence
in Montreal--Mme.  Glozel had said to her neighbours afterwards that the
funeral cost over seventy-five dollars--and had set up a stone to her
memory on which was carved, "Chez nous autrefois, et chez Dieu
maintenant"--which was to say, "Our home once, and God's Home now."

That done, with a sorrow which still had the peace of finality in his
mind, he had turned his face to the West.  His long, long sojourning had
brought him to Shilah where a new chapter of his life was closed, and at
last to Askatoon, where another chapter still closed an epoch in his
life, and gave finality to all.  There he had been taken down with
congestion of the lungs, and, fainting at the door of a drug-store, had
been taken possession of by the Young Doctor, who would not send him to
the hospital.  He would not send him there because he found inside the
waistcoat of this cleanest tramp--if he was a tramp--that he had ever
seen, a book of philosophy, the daguerreotype photo of a beautiful
foreign-looking woman, and some verses in a child's handwriting.  The
book of philosophy was underlined and interlined on every page, and every
margin had comment which showed a mind of the most singular simplicity,
searching wisdom, and hopeless confusion, all in one.

The Young Doctor was a man of decision, and he had whisked the little
brown-grey sufferer to his own home, and tended him there like a brother
till the danger disappeared; and behold he was rewarded for his humanity
by as quaint an experience as he had ever known.  He had not succeeded--
though he tried hard--in getting at the history of his patient's life;
but he did succeed in reading the fascinating story of a mind; for Jean
Jacques, if not so voluble as of yore, had still moments when he seemed
to hypnotize himself, and his thoughts were alive in an atmosphere of
intellectual passion ill in accord with his condition.

Presently the little brown man withdrew his eyes from the window of the
Young Doctor's office and the snowy waste beyond.  They had a curious red
underglow which had first come to them an evening long ago, when they
caught from the sky the reflection of a burning mill.  There was distance
and the far thing in that underglow of his eyes.  It had to do with the
horizon, not with the place where his feet were.  It said, "Out there,
beyond, is what I go to seek, what I must find, what will be home to me."

"Well, I must be getting on," he said in a low voice to the Young Doctor,
ignoring the question which had been asked.

"If you want work, there's work to be had here, as I said," responded the
Young Doctor.  "You are a man of education--"

"How do you know that?" asked Jean Jacques.

"I hear you speak," answered the other, and then Jean Jacques drew
himself up and threw back his head.  He had ever loved appreciation, not
to say flattery, and he had had very little of it lately.

"I was at Laval," he remarked with a flash of pride.  "No degree, but a
year there, and travel abroad--the Grand Tour, and in good style, with
plenty to do it with.  Oh, certainly, no thought for sous, hardly for
francs!  It was gold louis abroad and silver dollars at home--that was
the standard."

"The dollars are much scarcer now, eh?" asked the Young Doctor
quizzically.

"I should think I had just enough to pay you," said the other, bridling
up suddenly; for it seemed to him the Young Doctor had become ironical
and mocking; and though he had been mocked much in his day, there were
times when it was not easy to endure it.

The truth is the Young Doctor was somewhat of an expert in human nature,
and he deeply wanted to know the history of this wandering habitant,
because he had a great compassionate liking for him.  If he could get the
little man excited, he might be able to find out what he wanted.  During
the days in which the wanderer had been in his house, he had been far
from silent, for he joked at his own suffering and kept the housekeeper
laughing at his whimsical remarks; while he won her heart by the
extraordinary cleanliness of his threadbare clothes, and the perfect
order of his scantily-furnished knapsack.  It had the exactness of one
who was set upon a far course and would carry it out on scientific
calculation.  He had been full of mocking quips and sallies at himself,
but from first to last he never talked.  The things he said were nothing
more than surface sounds, as it were--the ejaculations of a mind, not its
language or its meanings.

"He's had some strange history, this queer little man," said the
housekeeper to the Young Doctor; "and I'd like to know what it is.  Why,
we don't even know his name."

"So would I," rejoined the Young Doctor, "and I'll have a good try for
it."

He had had his try more than once, but it had not succeeded.  Perhaps a
little torture would do it, he thought; and so he had made the rather
tactless remark about the scarcity of dollars.  Also his look was
incredulous when Jean Jacques protested that he had enough to pay the
fee.

"When you searched me you forgot to look in the right place," continued
Jean Jacques; and he drew from the lining of the hat he held in his hand
a little bundle of ten-dollar bills.  "Here--take your pay from them," he
said, and held out the roll of bills.  "I suppose it won't be more than
four dollars a day; and there's enough, I think.  I can't pay you for
your kindness to me, and I don't want to.  I'd like to owe you that; and
it's a good thing for a man himself to be owed kindness.  He remembers it
when he gets older.  It helps him to forgive himself more or less for
what he's sorry for in life.  I've enough in this bunch to pay for board
and professional attendance, or else the price has gone up since I had a
doctor before."

He laughed now, and the laugh was half-ironical, half-protesting.  It
seemed to come from the well of a hidden past; and no past that is hidden
has ever been a happy past.

The Young Doctor took the bills, looked at them as though they were
curios, and then returned them with the remark that they were of a kind
and denomination of no use to him.  There was a twinkle in his eye as he
said it.  Then he added:

"I agree with you that it's a good thing for a man to lay up a little
credit of kindness here and there for his old age.  Well, anything I did
for you was meant for kindness and nothing else.  You weren't a bit of
trouble, and it was simply your good constitution and a warm room and a
few fly-blisters that pulled you through.  It wasn't any skill of mine.
Go and thank my housekeeper if you like.  She did it all."

"I did my best to thank her," answered Jean Jacques.  "I said she
reminded me of Virginie Palass Poucette, and I could say nothing better
than that, except one thing; and I'm not saying that to anybody."

The Young Doctor had a thrill.  Here was a very unusual man, with mystery
and tragedy, and yet something above both, in his eyes.

"Who was Virginie Palass Poucette?" he asked.  Jean Jacques threw out a
hand as though to say, "Attend--here is a great thing," and he began,
"Virginie Poucette--ah, there .  .  .  !"

Then he paused, for suddenly there spread out before him that past, now
so far away, in which he had lived--and died.  Strange that when he had
mentioned Virginie's name to the housekeeper he had no such feeling as
possessed him now.  It had been on the surface, and he had used her name
without any deep stir of the waters far down in his soul.  But the Young
Doctor was fingering the doors of his inner life--all at once this
conviction came to him--and the past rushed upon him with all its
disarray and ignominy, its sorrow, joy, elation and loss.  Not since he
had left the scene of his defeat, not since the farewell to his dead
Carmen, that sweet summer day when he had put the lovely, ruined being
away with her words, "Jean Jacques--ah, my beautiful Jean Jacques,"
ringing in his ears, had he ever told anyone his story.  He had had a
feeling that, as Carmen had been restored to him without his crying out,
or vexing others with his sad history, so would Zoe also come back to
him.  Patience and silence was his motto.

Yet how was it that here and now there came an overpowering feeling, that
he must tell this healer of sick bodies the story of an invalid soul?
This man with the piercing dark-blue eyes before him, who looked so
resolute, who had the air of one who could say,

"This is the way to go," because he knew and was sure; he was not to be
denied.

"Who was Virginie Poucette?" repeated the Young Doctor insistently, yet
ever so gently.  "Was she such a prize among women?  What did she do?"

A flood of feeling passed over Jean Jacques' face.  He looked at his hat
and his knapsack lying in a chair, with a desire to seize them and fly
from the inquisitor; then a sense of fatalism came upon him.  As though
he had received an order from within his soul, he said helplessly:

"Well, if it must be, it must."

Then he swept the knapsack and his hat from the chair to the floor, and
sat down.

"I will begin at the beginning," he said with his eyes fixed on those of
the Young Doctor, yet looking beyond him to far-off things.  "I will
start from the time when I used to watch the gold Cock of Beaugard
turning on the mill, when I sat in the doorway of the Manor Cartier in my
pinafore.  I don't know why I tell you, but maybe it was meant I should.
I obey conviction.  While you are able to keep logic and conviction hand
in hand then everything is all right.  I have found that out.  Logic,
philosophy are the props of life, but still you must obey the impulse of
the soul--oh, absolutely!  You must--"

He stopped short.  "But it will seem strange to you," he added after a
moment, in which the Young Doctor gestured to him to proceed, "to hear me
talk like this--a wayfarer--a vagabond you may think.  But in other days
I was in places--"

The Young Doctor interjected with abrupt friendliness that there was no
need to say he had been in high places.  It would still be apparent, if
he were in rags.

"Then, there, I will speak freely," rejoined Jean Jacques, and he took
the cherry-brandy which the other offered him, and drank it off with
gusto.

"Ah, that--that," he said, "is like the cordials Mere Langlois used to
sell at Vilray.  She and Virginie Poucette had a place together on the
market--none better than Mere Langlois except Virginie Poucette, and she
was like a drink of water in the desert.  .  .  .  Well, there, I will
begin.  Now my father was--"

It was lucky there were no calls for the Young Doctor that particular
early morning, else the course of Jean Jacques' life might have been
greatly different from what it became.  He was able to tell his story
from the very first to the last.  Had it been interrupted or unfinished
one name might not have been mentioned.  When Jean Jacques used it, the
Young Doctor sat up and leaned forward eagerly, while a light came into
his face-a light of surprise, of revelation and understanding.

When Jean Jacques came to that portion of his life when manifest tragedy
began--it began of course on the Antoine, but then it was not manifest--
when his Carmen left him after the terrible scene with George Masson, he
paused and said: "I don't know why I tell you this, for it is not easy to
tell; but you saved my life, and you have a right to know what it is you
have saved, no matter how hard it is to put it all before you."

It was at this point that he mentioned Zoe's name--he had hitherto only
spoken of her as "my daughter"; and here it was the Young Doctor showed
startled interest, and repeated the name after Jean Jacques.  "Zoe! Zoe!
--ah!" he said, and became silent again.

Jean Jacques had not noticed the Young Doctor's pregnant interruption, he
was so busy with his own memories of the past; and he brought the tale to
the day when he turned his face to the West to look for Zoe.  Then he
paused.

"And then?" the Young Doctor asked.  "There is more--there is the search
for Zoe ever since."

"What is there to say?" continued Jean Jacques.  "I have searched till
now, and have not found."

"How have you lived?" asked the other.

"Keeping books in shops and factories, collecting accounts for
storekeepers, when they saw they could trust me, working at threshings
and harvests, teaching school here and there.  Once I made fifty dollars
at a railway camp telling French Canadian tales and singing chansons
Canadiennes.  I have been insurance agent, sold lightning-rods, and been
foreman of a gang building a mill--but I could not bear that.  Every time
I looked up I could see the Cock of Beaugard where the roof should be.
And so on, so on, first one thing and then another till now--till I came
to Askatoon and fell down by the drug-store, and you played the good
Samaritan.  So it goes, and I step on from here again, looking--looking."

"Wait till spring," said the Young Doctor.  "What is the good of going on
now!  You can only tramp to the next town, and--"

"And the next," interposed Jean Jacques.  "But so it is my orders."  He
put his hand on his heart, and gathered up his hat and knapsack.

"But you haven't searched here at Askatoon."  "Ah?  .  .  .  Ah-well,
surely that is so," answered Jean Jacques wistfully.  "I had forgotten
that.  Perhaps you can tell me, you who know all.  Have you any news
about my Zoe for me?  Do you know--was she ever here?  Madame Gerard
Fynes would be her name.  My name is Jean Jacques Barbille."

"Madame Zoe was here, but she has gone," quietly answered the Young
Doctor.

Jean Jacques dropped the hat and the knapsack.  His eyes had a glad, yet
staring and frightened look, for the Young Doctor's face was not the
bearer of good tidings.

"Zoe--my Zoe!  You are sure?  .  .  .  When was she here?" he added
huskily.

"A month ago."

"When did she go?"  Jean Jacques' voice was almost a whisper.

"A month ago."

"Where did she go?" asked Jean Jacques, holding himself steady, for he
had a strange dreadful premonition.

"Out of all care at last," answered the Young Doctor, and took a step
towards the little man, who staggered, then recovered himself.

"She--my Zoe is dead!  How?" questioned Jean Jacques in a ghostly sort
of voice, but there was a steadiness and control unlike what he had shown
in other tragic moments.

"It was a blizzard.  She was bringing her husband's body in a sleigh to
the railway here.  He had died of consumption.  She and the driver of the
sleigh went down in the blizzard.  Her body covered the child and saved
it.  The driver was lost also."

"Her child--Zoe's child?" quavered Jean Jacques.  "A little girl--Zoe.
The name was on her clothes.  There were letters.  One to her father--
to you.  Your name is Jean Jacques Barbille, is it not?  I have that
letter to you.  We buried her and her husband in the graveyard yonder."
He pointed.  "Everybody was there--even when they knew it was to be a
Catholic funeral."

"Ah!  she was buried a Catholic?" Jean Jacques' voice was not quite so
blurred now.

"Yes.  Her husband had become Catholic too.  A priest who had met them in
the Peace River Country was here at the time."

At that, with a moan, Jean Jacques collapsed.  He shed no tears, but he
sat with his hands between his knees, whispering his child's name.

The Young Doctor laid a hand on his shoulder gently, but presently went
out, shutting the door after him.  As he left the room, however, he
turned and said, "Courage, Monsieur Jean Jacques!  Courage!"

When the Young Doctor came back a half-hour later he had in his hand the
letters found in Zoe's pocket.  "Monsieur Jean Jacques," he said gently
to the bowed figure still sitting as he left him.

Jean Jacques got up slowly and looked at him as though scarce
understanding where he was.

"The child--the child--where is my Zoe's child?  Where is Zoe's Zoe?"
he asked in agitation.  His whole body seemed to palpitate.  His eyes
were all red fire.




CHAPTER XXV

WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE?

The Young Doctor did not answer Jean Jacques at once.  As he looked at
this wayworn fugitive he knew that another, and perhaps the final crisis
of his life, was come to Jean Jacques Barbille, and the human pity in him
shrank from the possible end to it all.  It was an old-world figure this,
with the face of a peasant troubadour and the carriage of an aboriginal--
or an aristocrat.  Indeed, the ruin, the lonely wandering which had been
Jean Jacques' portion, had given him that dignity which often comes to
those who defy destiny and the blows of angry fate.  Once there had been
in his carriage something jaunty.  This was merely life and energy and a
little vain confidence; now there was the look of courage which awaits
the worst the world can do.  The life which, according to the world's
logic, should have made Jean Jacques a miserable figure, an ill-nourished
vagabond, had given him a physical grace never before possessed by him.
The face, however, showed the ravages which loss and sorrow had made.
It was lined and shadowed with dark reflection, yet the forehead had a
strange smoothness and serenity little in accord with the rest of the
countenance.  It was like the snow-summit of a mountain below which are
the ragged escarpments of trees and rocks, making a look of storm and
warfare.

"Where is she--the child of my Zoe?" Jean Jacques repeated with an
almost angry emphasis; as though the Young Doctor were hiding her from
him.

"She is with the wife of Nolan Doyle, my partner in horse-breeding, not
very far from here.  Norah Doyle was married five years, and she had no
child.  This was a grief to her, even more than to Nolan, who, like
her, came of a stock that was prolific.  It was Nolan who found your
daughter on the prairie--the driver dead, but she just alive when found.
To give her ease of mind, Nolan said he would make the child his own.
When he said that, she smiled and tried to speak, but it was too late,
and she was gone."

In sudden agony Jean Jacques threw up his hands.  "So young and so soon
to be gone!" he exclaimed.  "But a child she was and had scarce tasted
the world.  The mercy of God--what is it!"

"You can't take time as the measure of life," rejoined the Young Doctor
with a compassionate gesture.  "Perhaps she had her share of happiness--
as much as most of us get, maybe, in a longer course."

"Share!  She was worth a hundred years of happiness!" bitterly retorted
Jean Jacques.

"Perhaps she knew her child would have it?" gently remarked the Young
Doctor.

"Ah, that--that !  .  .  .  Do you think that possible, m'sieu'?  Tell
me, do you think that was in her mind--to have loved, and been a mother,
and given her life for the child, and then the bosom of God.  Answer that
to me, m'sieu'?"

There was intense, poignant inquiry in Jean Jacques' face, and a light
seemed to play over it.  The Young Doctor heeded the look and all that
was in the face.  It was his mission to heal, and he knew that to heal
the mind was often more necessary than to heal the body.  Here he would
try to heal the mind, if only in a little.

"That might well have been in her thought," he answered.  "I saw her
face.  It had a wonderful look of peace, and a smile that would reconcile
anyone she loved to her going.  I thought of that when I looked at her.
I recall it now.  It was the smile of understanding."

He had said the only thing which could have comforted Jean Jacques
at that moment.  Perhaps it was meant to be that Zoe's child should
represent to him all that he had lost--home, fortune, place, Carmen and
Zoe.  Perhaps she would be home again for him and all that home should
mean--be the promise of a day when home would again include that fled
from Carmen, and himself, and Carmen's child.  Maybe it was sentiment in
him, maybe it was sentimentality--and maybe it was not.

"Come, m'sieu'," Jean Jacques said impatiently: "let us go to the house
of that M'sieu' Doyle.  But first, mark this: I have in the West here
some land--three hundred and twenty acres.  It may yet be to me a home,
where I shall begin once more with my Zoe's child--with my Zoe of Zoe--
the home-life I lost down by the Beau Cheval.  .  .  .  Let us go at
once."

"Yes, at once," answered the Young Doctor.  Yet his feet were laggard,
for he was not so sure that there would be another home for Jean Jacques
with his grandchild as its star.  He was thinking of Norah, to whom a
waif of the prairie had made home what home should be for herself and
Nolan Doyle.

"Read these letters first," he said, and he put the letters found on Zoe
in Jean Jacques' eager hands.

A half-hour later, at the horse-breeding ranch, the Young Doctor
introduced Jean Jacques to Norah Doyle, and instantly left the house.
He had no wish to hear the interview which must take place between the
two.  Nolan Doyle was not at home, but in the room where they were shown
to Norah was a cradle.  Norah was rocking it with one foot while,
standing by the table, she busied herself with sewing.

The introduction was of the briefest.  "Monsieur Barbille wishes a word
with you, Mrs. Doyle," said the Young Doctor.  "It's a matter that
doesn't need me.  Monsieur has been in my care, as you know.  .  .  .
Well, there, I hope Nolan is all right.  Tell him I'd like to see him
to-morrow about the bay stallion and the roans.  I've had an offer for
them.  Good-bye--good-bye, Mrs. Doyle"--he was at the door--"I hope you
and Monsieur Barbille will decide what's best for the child without
difficulty."

The door opened quickly and shut again, and Jean Jacques was alone with
the woman and the child.  "What's best for the child!"

That was what the Young Doctor had said.  Norah stopped rocking the
cradle and stared at the closed door.  What had this man before her, this
tramp habitant of whom she had heard, of course, to do with little Zoe in
the cradle--her little Zoe who had come just when she was most needed;
who had brought her man and herself close together again after an
estrangement which neither had seemed able to prevent.

"What's best for the child!"  How did the child in the cradle
concern this man?  Then suddenly his name almost shrieked in her brain.
Barbille--that was the name on the letter found on the body of the woman
who died and left Zoe behind--M. Jean Jacques Barbille.

Yes, that was the name.  What was going to happen?  Did the man intend to
try and take Zoe from her?

"What is your name--all of it?" she asked sharply.  She had a very fine
set of teeth, as Jean Jacques saw mechanically; and subconsciously he
said to himself that they seemed cruel, they were so white and regular--
and cruel.  The cruelty was evident to him as she bit in two the thread
for the waistcoat she was mending, and then plied her needle again.  Also
the needle in her fingers might have been intended to sew up his shroud,
so angry did it appear at the moment.  But her teeth had something almost
savage about them.  If he had seen them when she was smiling, he would
have thought them merely beautiful and rare, atoning for her plain face
and flat breast--not so flat as it had been; for since the child had come
into her life, her figure, strangely enough, had rounded out, and lines
never before seen in her contour appeared.

He braced himself for the contest he knew was at hand, and replied to
her.  "My name is Jean Jacques Barbille.  I was of the Manor Cartier, in
St. Saviour's parish, Quebec.  The mother of the child Zoe, there, was
born at the Manor Cartier.  I was her father.  I am the grandfather of
this Zoe."  He motioned towards the cradle.

Then, with an impulse he could not check and did not seek to check--why
should he?  was not the child his own by every right?--he went to the
cradle and looked down at the tiny face on its white pillow.  There
could be no mistake about it; here was the face of his lost Zoe, with
something, too, of Carmen, and also the forehead of the Barbilles.  As
though the child knew, it opened its eyes wide-big, brown eyes like those
of Carmen Dolores.

"Ah, the beautiful, beloved thing!" he exclaimed in a low-voice, ere
Norah stepped between and almost pushed him back.  An outstretched arm in
front of her prevented him from stooping to kiss the child.  "Stand back.
The child must not be waked," she said.  "It must sleep another hour.  It
has its milk at twelve o'clock.  Stand aside.  I won't have my child
disturbed."

"Have my child disturbed"--that was what she had said, and Jean Jacques
realized what he had to overbear.  Here was the thing which must be
fought out at once.

"The child is not yours, but mine," he declared.  "Here is proof--the
letter found on my Zoe when she died--addressed to me.  The doctor knew.
There is no mistake."

He held out the letter for her to see.  "As you can read here, my
daughter was on her way back to the Manor Cartier, to her old home at
St. Saviour's.  She was on her way back when she died.  If she had lived
I should have had them both; but one is left, according to the will of
God.  And so I will take her--this flower of the prairie--and begin life
again."

The face Norah turned on him had that look which is in the face of an
animal, when its young is being forced from it--fierce, hungering,
furtive, vicious.

"The child is mine," she exclaimed--"mine and no other's.  The prairie
gave it to me.  It came to me out of the storm.  'Tis mine-mine only.
I was barren and wantin', and my man was slippin' from me, because there
was only two of us in our home.  I was older than him, and yonder was a
girl with hair like a sheaf of wheat in the sun, and she kept lookin' at
him, and he kept goin' to her.  'Twas a man she wanted, 'twas a child he
wanted, and there they were wantin', and me atin' my heart out with
passion and pride and shame and sorrow.  There was he wantin' a child,
and the girl wantin' a man, and I only wantin' what God should grant all
women that give themselves to a man's arms after the priest has blessed
them.  And whin all was at the worst, and it looked as if he was away
with her--the girl yonder--then two things happened.  A man--he was me
own brother and a millionaire if I do say it--he took her and married
her; and then, too, Heaven's will sent this child's mother to her last
end and the child itself to my Nolan's arms.  To my husband's arms first
it came, you understand; and he give the child to me, as it should be,
and said he, 'We'll make believe it is our own.'  But I said to him,
'There's no make-believe.  'Tis mine.  'Tis mine.  It came to me out of
the storm from the hand of God.' And so it was and is; and all's well
here in the home, praise be to God.  And listen to me: you'll not come
here to take the child away from me.  It can't be done.  I'll not have
it.  Yes, you can let that sink down into you--I'll not have it."

During her passionate and defiant appeal Jean Jacques was restless with
the old unrest of years ago, and his face twitched with emotion; but
before she had finished he had himself in some sort of control.

"You--madame, you are only thinking of yourself in this.  You are only
thinking what you want, what you and your man need.  But it's not to be
looked at that way only, and--"

"Well, then it isn't to be looked at that way only," she interrupted.
"As you say, it isn't Nolan and me alone to be considered.  There's--"

"There's me," he interrupted sharply.  "The child is bone of my bone.
It is bone of all the Barbilles back to the time of Louis XI."--he had
said that long ago to Zoe first, and it was now becoming a fact in his
mind.  "It is linked up in the chain of the history of the Barbilles.
It is one with the generations of noblesse and honour and virtue.
It is--"

"It's one with Abel the son of Adam, if it comes to that, and so am I,"
Norah bitingly interjected, while her eyes flashed fire, and she rocked
the cradle more swiftly than was good for the child's sleep.

Jean Jacques flared up.  "There were sons and daughters of the family of
Adam that had names, but there were plenty others you whistled to as you
would to a four-footer, and they'd come.  The Barbilles had names--always
names of their own back to Adam.  The child is a Barbille--Don't rock the
cradle so fast," he suddenly added with an irritable gesture, breaking
off from his argument.  "Don't you know better than that when a child's
asleep?  Do you want it to wake up and cry?"

She flushed to the roots of her hair, for he had said something for which
she had no reply.  She had undoubtedly disturbed the child.  It stirred
in its sleep, then opened its eyes, and at once began to cry.

"There," said Jean Jacques, "what did I tell you?  Any one that had ever
had children would know better than that."

Norah paid no attention to his mocking words, to the undoubted-truth of
his complaint.  Stooping over, she gently lifted the child up.  With
hungry tenderness she laid it against her breast and pressed its cheek to
her own, murmuring and crooning to it.

"Acushla!  Acushla!  Ah, the pretty bird--mother's sweet--mother's
angel!" she said softly.

She rocked backwards and forwards.  Her eyes, though looking at Jean
Jacques as she crooned and coaxed and made lullaby, apparently did not
see him.  She was as concentrated as though it were a matter of life and
death.  She was like some ancient nurse of a sovereign-child, plainly
dressed, while the dainty white clothes of the babe in her arms--ah,
hadn't she raided the hoard she had begun when first married, in the hope
of a child of her own, to provide this orphan with clothes good enough
for a royal princess!

The flow of the long, white dress of the waif on the dark blue of Norah's
gown, which so matched the deep sapphire of her eyes, caught Jean
Jacques' glance, allured his mind.  It was the symbol of youth and
innocence and home.  Suddenly he had a vision of the day when his own Zoe
had been given to the cradle for the first time, and he had done exactly
what Norah had done--rocked too fast and too hard, and waked his little
one; and Carmen had taken her up in her long white draperies, and had
rocked to and fro, just like this, singing a lullaby.  That lullaby he
had himself sung often afterwards; and now, with his grandchild in
Norah's arms there before him--with this other Zoe--the refrain of it
kept lilting in his brain.  In the pause ensuing, when Norah stooped to
put the pacified child again in its nest, he also stooped over the cradle
and began to hum the words of the lullaby:

         "Sing, little bird, of the whispering leaves,
          Sing a song of the harvest sheaves;
          Sing a song to my Fanchonette,
          Sing a song to my Fanchonette!
          Over her eyes, over her eyes, over her eyes of violet,
          See the web that the weaver weaves,
          The web of sleep that the weaver weaves--
          Weaves, weaves, weaves!
          Over those eyes of violet,
          Over those eyes of my Fanchonette,
          Weaves, weaves, weaves--
          See the web that the weaver weaves!"

For quite two minutes Jean Jacques and Norah Doyle stooped over the
cradle, looking at Zoe's rosy, healthy, pretty face, as though
unconscious of each other, and only conscious of the child.  When Jean
Jacques had finished the long first verse of the chanson, and would have
begun another, Norah made a protesting gesture.

"She's asleep, and there's no more need," she said.  "Wasn't it a good
lullaby, madame?" Jean Jacques asked.

"So, so," she replied, on her defence again.

"It was good enough for her mother," he replied, pointing to the cradle.

"It's French and fanciful," she retorted--"both music and words."

"The child's French--what would you have?" asked Jean Jacques
indignantly.

"The child's father was English, and she's goin' to be English, the
darlin', from now on and on and on.  That's settled.  There's manny an
English and Irish lullaby that'll be sung to her hence and onward; and
there's manny an English song she'll sing when she's got her voice, and
is big enough.  Well, I think she'll sing like a canary."

"Do the birds sing in English?" exclaimed Jean Jacques, with anger in
his face now.  Was there ever any vanity like the vanity of these people
who had made the conquest of Quebec, when sixteen Barbilles lost their
lives, one of them being aide-de-camp to M. Vaudreuil, the governor!

"All the canaries I ever heard sung in English," she returned stubbornly.

"How do Frenchmen understand their singing, then?" irritably questioned
Jean Jacques.

"Well, in translation only," she retorted, and with her sharp white teeth
she again bit the black thread of her needle, tied the end into a little
knot, and began to mend the waistcoat which she had laid down in the
first moments of the interview.

"I want the child," Jean Jacques insisted abruptly.  "I'll wait till she
wakes, and then I'll wrap her up and take her away."

"Didn't you hear me say she was to be brought up English?" asked Norah,
with a slowness which clothed her fiercest impulses.

"Name of God, do you think I'll let you have her!" returned Jean Jacques
with asperity and decision.  "You say you are alone, you and your M'sieu'
Nolan.  Well, I am alone--all alone in the world, and I need her--Mother
of God, I need her more than I ever needed anything in my life!  You have
each other, but I have only myself, and it is not good company.  Besides,
the child is mine, a Barbille of Barbilles, une legitime--a rightful
child of marriage.  But if it was a love-child only it would still be
mine, being my daughter's child.  Look you, it is no such thing.  It is
of those who can claim inheritance back to Louis XI.  She will be to me
the gift of God in return for the robbery of death."

He leaned over the cradle, and his look was like that of one who had
found a treasure in the earth.

Now she struck hard.  Yet very subtly too did she attack him.  "You--you
are thinking of yourself, m'sieu', only of yourself.  Aren't you going to
think of the child at all?  It isn't yourself that counts so much.
You've had your day, or the part of it that matters most.  But her time
is not yet even begun.  It's all--all--before her.  You say you'll take
her away--well, to what?  To what will you take her?  What have you got
to give her?  What--"

"I have the three hundred and twenty acres out there"--he pointed
westward--"and I will make a home and begin again with her."

"Three hundred and twenty acres--'out there'!" she exclaimed in scorn.
"Any one can have a farm here for the askin'.  What is that?  Is it a
home?  What have you got to start a home with?  Do you deny you are no
better than a tramp?  Have you got a hundred dollars in the world?  Have
you got a roof over your head?  Have you got a trade?  You'll take
her where--to what?  Even if you had a home, what then?  You would have
to get someone to look after her--some old crone, a wench maybe, who'd be
as fit to bring up a child as I would be to--" she paused and looked
round in helpless quest for a simile, when, in despair, she caught sight
of Jean Jacques' watch-chain--"as I would be to make a watch!" she
added.

Instinctively Jean Jacques drew out the ancient timepiece he had worn on
the Grand Tour; which had gone down with the Antoine and come up with
himself.  It gave him courage to make the fight for his own.

"The good God would see that--" he began.

"The good God doesn't interfere in bringing up babies," she retorted.
"That's the work for the fathers and mothers, or godfathers and
godmothers."

"You are neither," exclaimed Jean Jacques.  "You have no rights at all."

"I have no rights--eh?  I have no rights!  Look at the child.  Look at
the way she's clothed.  Look at the cradle in which it lies.  It cost
fifteen dollars; and the clothes--what they cost would keep a family half
a year.  I have no rights, is it?--I who stepped in and took the child
without question, without bein' asked, and made it my own, and treated it
as if it was me own.  No, by the love of God, I treated it far, far
better than if it had been me own.  Because a child was denied me, the
hunger of the years made me love the child as a mother would on a desert
island with one child at her knees."

"You can get another-one not your own, as this isn't," argued Jean
Jacques fiercely.

She was not to be forced to answer his arguments directly.  She chose her
own course to convince.  "Nolan loves this child as if it was his," she
declared, her eyes all afire, "but he mightn't love another--men are
queer creatures.  Then where would I be?  and what would the home be but
what it was before--as cold, as cold and bitter!  It was the hand of God
brought the child to the door of two people who had no child and who
prayed for one.  Do you deny it was the hand of God that brought your
daughter here away, that put the child in my arms?  Not its mother,
am I not?  But I love her better than twenty mothers could.  It's the
hunger--the hunger--the hunger in me.  She's made a woman of me.  She has
a home where everything is hers--everything.  To see Nolan play with her,
tossin' her up and down in his arms as if he'd done it all his life--as
natural as natural!  To take her away from that--all the comfort here
where she can have annything she wants!  With my old mother to care for
her, if so be I was away to market or whereabouts--one that brought up
six children, a millionaire among them, praise be to God as my mother
did--to take this delicate little thing away from here, what a sin and
crime 'twould be!  She herself 'd never forgive you for it, if ever she
grew up--though that's not likely, things bein' as they are with you, and
you bein' what you are.  Ah, there--there she is awake and smilin', and
kickin' up her pretty toes this minute!  There she is, the lovely little
Zoe, with eyes like black pearls.  .  .  .  See now--see now which she'll
come to--to you or me, m'sieu'.  There, put out your arms to her, and
I'll put out mine, and see which she'll take.  I'll stand by that--I'll
stand by that.  Let the child decide.  Hold out your arms, and so will I"

With an impassioned word Jean Jacques reached down his arms to the child,
which lay laughing up at them and kicking its pink toes into the air, and
Norah Doyle did the same, murmuring an Irish love-name for a child.  Jean
Jacques was silent, but in his face was the longing of a soul sick for
home, of one who desires the end of a toilsome road.

The laughing child crooned and spluttered and shook its head, as though
it was playing some happy game.  It looked first at Norah, then at Jean
Jacques, then at Norah again, and then, with a little gurgle of pleasure,
stretched out its arms to her and half-raised itself from the pillow.
With a glad cry Norah gathered it to her bosom, and triumph shone in her
face.

"Ah, there, you see!" she said, as she lifted her face from the blossom
at her breast.

"There it is," said Jean Jacques with shaking voice.

"You have nothing to give her--I have everything," she urged.  "My rights
are that I would die for the child--oh, fifty times!  .  .  .  What are
you going to do, m'sieu'?"

Jean Jacques slowly turned and picked up his hat.  He moved with the
dignity of a hero who marches towards a wall to meet the bullets of a
firing-squad.

"You are going?" Norah whispered, and in her eyes was a great relief and
the light of victory.  The golden link binding Nolan and herself was in
her arms, over her heart.

Jean Jacques did not speak a word in reply, though his lips moved.  She
held out the little one to him for a good-bye, but he shook his head.  If
he did that--if he once held her in his arms--he would not be able to
give her up.  Gravely and solemnly, however, he stooped over and kissed
the lips of the child lying against Norah's breast.  As he did so, with a
quick, mothering instinct Norah impulsively kissed his shaggy head, and
her eyes filled with tears.  She smiled too, and Jean Jacques saw how
beautiful her teeth were--cruel no longer.

He moved away slowly.  At the door he turned, and looked back at the two
--a long, lingering look he gave.  Then he faced away from them again.

"Moi je suis philosophe," he said gently, and opened the door and stepped
out and away into the frozen world.




EPILOGUE

Change might lay its hand on the parish of St. Saviour's, and it did so
on the beautiful sentient living thing, as on the thing material and man-
made; but there was no change in the sheltering friendship of Mont Violet
or the flow of the illustrious Beau Cheval.  The autumns also changed not
at all.  They cast their pensive canopies over the home-scene which Jean
Jacques loved so well, before he was exhaled from its bosom.

One autumn when the hillsides were in those colours which none but a
rainbow of the moon ever had, so delicately sad, so tenderly assuring,
a traveller came back to St. Saviour's after a long journey.  He came by
boat to the landing at the Manor Cartier, rather than by train to the
railway-station, from which there was a drive of several miles to Vilray.
At the landing he was met by a woman, as much a miniature of the days of
Orleanist France as himself.  She wore lace mits which covered the hands
but not the fingers, and her gown showed the outline of a meek crinoline.

"Ah, Fille--ah, dear Fille!" said the little fragment of an antique day,
as the Clerk of the Court--rather, he that had been for so many years
Clerk of the Court--stepped from the boat.  "I can scarce believe that
you are here once more.  Have you good news?"

"It was to come back with good news that I went," her brother answered
smiling, his face lighted by an inner exaltation.

"Dear, dear Fille!"  She always called him that now, and not by his
Christian name, as though he was a peer.  She had done so ever since the
Government had made him a magistrate, and Laval University had honoured
him with the degree of doctor of laws.

She was leading him to the pony-carriage in which she had come to meet
him, when he said:

"Do you think you could walk the distance, my dear?  .  .  . It would be
like old times," he added gently.

"I could walk twice as far to-day," she answered, and at once gave
directions for the young coachman to put "His Honour's" bag into the
carriage.  In spite of Fille's reproofs she insisted in calling him that
to the servants.  They had two servants now, thanks to the legacy left
them by the late Judge Carcasson.  Presently M. Fille took her by the
hand.  "Before we start--one look yonder," he murmured, pointing towards
the mill which had once belonged to Jean Jacques, now rebuilt and looking
almost as of old.  "I promised Jean Jacques that I would come and salute
it in his name, before I did aught else, and so now I do salute it."

He waved a hand and made a bow to the gold Cock of Beaugard, the pride of
all the vanished Barbilles.  "Jean Jacques Barbille says that his head is
up like yours, M. le Coq, and he wishes you many, many winds to come," he
recited quite seriously, and as though it was not out of tune with the
modern world.

The gold Cock of Beaugard seemed to understand, for it swung to the left,
and now a little to the right, and then stood still, as if looking at the
little pair of exiles from an ancient world--of which the only vestiges
remaining may be found in old Quebec.

This ceremony over, they walked towards Mont Violet, averting their heads
as they passed the Manor Cartier, in a kind of tribute to its departed
master--as a Stuart Legitimist might pass the big palace at the end of
the Mall in London.  In the wood-path, Fille took his sister's hand.

"I will tell you what you are so trembling to hear," he said.  "There
they are at peace, Jean Jacques and Virginie--that best of best women."

"To think--married to Virginie Poucette--to think of that!"  His sister's
voice fluttered as she spoke.  "But entirely.  There was nothing in the
way--and she meant to have him, the dear soul!  I do not blame her, for
at bottom he is as good a man as lives.  Our Judge called him 'That dear
fool, Jean Jacques, a man of men in his way, after all,' and our Judge
was always right--but yes, nearly always right."

After a moment of contented meditation he resumed.  "Well, when Virginie
sold her place here and went to live with her sister out at Shilah in the
West, she said, 'If Jean Jacques is alive, he will be on the land which
was Zoe's, which he bought for her.  If he is alive--then!' So it was,
and by one of the strange accidents which chance or women like Virginie,
who have plenty of courage in their simpleness, arrange, they met on that
three hundred and sixty acres.  It was like the genius of Jean Jacques to
have done that one right thing which would save him in the end--a thing
which came out of his love for his child--the emotion of an hour.
Indeed, that three hundred and sixty acres was his salvation after he
learned of Zoe's death, and the other little Zoe, his grandchild, was
denied to him--to close his heart against what seemed that last hope, was
it not courage?  And so, and so he has the reward of his own soul--a home
at last once more."

"With Virginie Poucette--Fille, Fille, how things come round!" exclaimed
the little lady in the tiny bonnet with the mauve strings.

"More than Virginie came round," he replied almost oracularly.  "Who,
think you, brought him the news that coal was found on his acres--who but
the husband of Virginie's sister!  Then came Virginie.  On the day Jean
Jacques saw her again, he said to her, 'What you would have given me at
such cost, now let me pay for with the rest of my life.  It is the great
thought which was in your heart that I will pay for with the days left to
me.'"

A flickering smile brightened the sensitive ascetic face, and humour was
in the eyes.  "What do you think Virginie said to that?  Her sister told
me.  Virginie said to that, 'You will have more days left, Jean Jacques,
if you have a better cook.  What do you like best for supper?'  And Jean
Jacques laughed much at that.  Years ago he would have made a speech at
it!"

"Then he is no more a philosopher?"

"Oh always, always, but in his heart, and not with his tongue.  I cried,
and so did he, when we met and when we parted.  I think I am getting old,
for indeed I could not help it: yet there was peace in his eyes--peace."

"His eyes used to rustle so."

"Rustle--that is the word.  Now, that is what, he has learned in life--
the way to peace.  When I left him, it was with Virginie close beside
him, and when I said to him, 'Will you come back to us one day, Jean
Jacques?' he said, 'But no, Fille, my friend; it is too far.  I see it--
it is a million miles away--too great a journey to go with the feet, but
with the soul I will visit it.  The soul is a great traveller.  I see it
always--the clouds and the burnings and the pitfalls gone--out of sight--
in memory as it was when I was a child.  Well, there it is, everything
has changed, except the child-memory.  I have had, and I have had not;
and there it is.  I am not the same man--but yes, in my love just the
same, with all the rest--'  He did not go on, so I said, 'If not the
same, then what are you, Jean Jacques?'"

"Ah, Fille, in the old days he would have said that he was a philosopher"
--said his sister interrupting.  "Yes, yes, one knows--he said it often
enough and had need enough to say it.  Well, said he to me, 'Me, I am a'
--then he stopped, shook his head, and so I could scarcely hear him,
murmured, 'Me--I am a man who has been a long journey with a pack on his
back, and has got home again.'  Then he took Virginie's hand in his."

The old man's fingers touched the corner of his eye as though to find
something there; then continued.  "'Ah, a pedlar!' said I to him, to hear
what he would answer.  'Follies to sell for sous of wisdom,' he answered.
Then he put his arm around Virginie, and she gave him his pipe."

"I wish M. Carcasson knew," the little grey lady remarked.

"But of course he knows," said the Clerk of the Court, with his face
turned to the sunset.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Courage which awaits the worst the world can do
Good thing for a man himself to be owed kindness
I can't pay you for your kindness to me, and I don't want to
No past that is hidden has ever been a happy past
She was not to be forced to answer his arguments directly
That iceberg which most mourners carry in their breasts
The soul is a great traveller
You can't take time as the measure of life






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR "THE MONEY MASTER", COMPLETE:

Air of certainty and universal comprehension
Always calling to something, for something outside ourselves
Being generous with other people's money
Came of a race who set great store by mothers and grandmothers
Confidence in a weak world gets unearned profit often
Courage which awaits the worst the world can do
Enjoy his own generosity
Good thing for a man himself to be owed kindness
Grove of pines to give a sense of warmth in winter
Grow more intense, more convinced, more thorough, as they talk
Had the slight flavour of the superior and the paternal
He had only made of his wife an incident in his life
He was in fact not a philosopher, but a sentimentalist
He was not always sorry when his teasing hurt
He admired, yet he wished to be admired
He hated irony in anyone else
I had to listen to him, and he had to pay me for listening
I can't pay you for your kindness to me, and I don't want to
I said I was not falling in love--I am in love
If you have a good thought, act on it
Inclined to resent his own insignificance
Lacks a balance-wheel.  He has brains, but not enough
Law.  It is expensive whether you win or lose
Lyrical in his enthusiasms
Man who tells the story in a new way, that is genius
Missed being a genius by an inch
No past that is hidden has ever been a happy past
No man so simply sincere, or so extraordinarily prejudiced
Not content to do even the smallest thing ill
Of those who hypnotize themselves, who glow with self-creation
Philosophers are often stupid in human affairs
Protest that it is right when it knows that it is wrong
She was not to be forced to answer his arguments directly
Spurting out little geysers of other people's cheap wisdom
That iceberg which most mourners carry in their breasts
The beginning of the end of things was come for him
The soul is a great traveller
Untamed by the normal restraints of a happy married life
You can't take time as the measure of life
You went north towards heaven and south towards hell






THE WORLD FOR SALE

By Gilbert Parker



CONTENTS:

PRELUDE

BOOK I

I.        "THE DRUSES ARE UP!"
II.       THE WHISPER FROM BEYOND
III.      CONCERNING INGOLBY AND THE TWO TOWNS
IV.       THE COMING OF JETHRO FAWE
V.        "BY THE RIVER STARZKE....IT WAS SO DONE"
VI.       THE UNGUARDED FIRES
VII.      IN WHICH THE PRISONER GOES FREE


BOOK II

VIII.     THE SULTAN
IX.       MATTER AND MIND AND TWO MEN
X.        FOR LUCK
XI.       THE SENTENCE OF THE PATRIN
XII.      "LET THERE BE LIGHT"
XIII.     THE CHAIN OF THE PAST
XIV.      SUCH THINGS MAY NOT BE
XV.       THE WOMAN FROM WIND RIVER
XVI.      THE MAYOR FILLS AN OFFICE
XVII.     THE MONSEIGNEUR AND THE NOMAD
XVIII.    THE BEACONS
XIX.      THE BEEPER OF THE BRIDGE


BOOK III

XX.       TWO LIFE PIECES
XXI.      THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER
XXII.     THE SECRET MAN
XXIII.    THE RETURN OF BELISARIUS
XXIV.     AT LONG LAST
XXV.      MAN PROPOSES
XXVI.     THE SLEEPER
XXVII.    THE WORLD FOR SALE




INTRODUCTION

'The World for Sale' is a tale of the primitive and lonely West and
North, but the primitiveness and loneliness is not like that to be found
in 'Pierre and His People'.  Pierre's wanderings took place in a period
when civilization had made but scant marks upon the broad bosom of the
prairie land, and towns and villages were few and far scattered.  The
Lebanon and Manitou of this story had no existence in the time of Pierre,
except that where Manitou stands there was a Hudson's Bay Company's post
at which Indians, half-breeds, and chance settlers occasionally gathered
for trade and exchange-furs, groceries, clothing, blankets, tobacco, and
other things; and in the long winters the post was as isolated as an
oasis in the Sahara.

That old life was lonely and primitive, but it had its compensating
balance of bright sun, wild animal life, and an air as vivid and virile
as ever stirred the veins of man.  Sometimes the still, bright cold was
broken by a terrific storm, which ravaged, smothered, and entombed the
stray traveller in ravines of death.  That was in winter; but in summer,
what had been called, fifty years ago, an alkali desert was an
everlasting stretch of untilled soil, with unsown crops, and here and
there herds of buffalo, which were stalked by alert Red Indians, half-
breeds, and white pioneer hunters.

The stories in 'Pierre and His People' were true to the life of that
time; the incidents in 'The World for Sale', and the whole narrative, are
true to the life of a very few years ago.  Railways have pierced and
opened up lonely regions of the Sagalae, and there are two thriving towns
where, in the days of Pierre, only stood a Hudson's Bay Company's post
with its store.  Now, as far as eye can see, vast fields of grain greet
the eye, and houses and barns speckle the greenish brown or Tuscan yellow
of the crop-covered lands, while towns like Lebanon and Manitou provide
for the modern settler all the modern conveniences which science has
given to civilized municipalities.  Today the motor-car and the telephone
are as common in such places as they are in a thriving town of the United
Kingdom.  After the first few days of settlement two things always
appear--a school-house and a church.  Probably there is no country in the
world where elementary education commands the devotion and the cash of
the people as in English Canada; that is why the towns of Lebanon and
Manitou had from the first divergent views.  Lebanon was English,
progressive, and brazenly modern; Manitou was slow, reactionary, more or
less indifferent to education, and strenuously Catholic, and was thus
opposed to the militant Protestantism of Lebanon.

It was my idea to picture a situation in the big new West where destiny
is being worked out in the making of a nation and the peopling of the
wastes.  I selected a very modern and unusual type of man as the central
figure of my story.  He was highly educated, well born, and carefully
brought up.  He possessed all the best elements of a young man in a new
country--intelligent self-dependence, skill, daring, vision.  He had an
original turn of mind, and, as men are obliged to do in new countries,
he looked far ahead.  Yet he had to face what pioneers and reformers in
old countries have to face, namely the disturbance of rooted interests.
Certainly rooted interests in towns but a generation old cannot be
extensive or remarkable, but if they are associated with habits and
principles, they may be as deadly as those which test the qualities and
wreck the careers of men in towns as old as London.  The difference,
however, between the old European town and the new Western town is that
differences in the Western town are more likely to take physical form,
as was the case in the life of Ingolby.  In order to accentuate the
primitive and yet highly civilized nature of the life I chose my heroine
from a race and condition more unsettled and more primitive than that of
Lebanon or Manitou at any time.  I chose a heroine from the gipsy race,
and to heighten the picture of the primitive life from which she had come
I made her a convert to the settled life of civilization.  I had known
such a woman, older, but with the same characteristics, the same
struggles, temptations, and suffering the same restriction of her life
and movements by the prejudice in her veins--the prejudice of racial
predilection.

Looking at the story now after its publication, I am inclined to think
that the introduction of the gipsy element was too bold, yet I believe
it was carefully worked out in construction, and was a legitimate,
intellectual enterprise.  The danger of it was that it might detract from
the reality and vividness of the narrative as a picture of Western life.
Most American critics of the book seem not to have been struck by this
doubt which has occurred to me.  They realize perhaps more faithfully
than some of the English critics have done that these mad contrasts are
by no means uncommon in the primitive and virile life of the West and
North.  Just as California in the old days, just as Ballaret in Australia
drew the oddest people from every corner of the world, so Western towns,
with new railways, brought strange conglomerations into the life.  For
instance, a town like Winnipeg has sections which represent the life of
nearly every race of Europe, and towns like Lebanon and Manitou, with
English and French characteristics controlling them mainly, are still as
subject to outside racial influences as to inside racial antagonisms.

I believe The World for Sale shows as plainly as anything can show the
vexed and conglomerate life of a Western town.  It shows how racial
characteristics may clash, disturb, and destroy, and yet how wisdom,
tact, and lucky incident may overcome almost impossible situations.  The
antagonisms between Lebanon and Manitou were unwillingly and unjustly
deepened by the very man who had set out to bring them together, as one
of the ideals of his life, and as one of the factors of his success.
Ingolby, who had everything to gain by careful going, almost wrecked his
own life, and he injured the life of the two towns by impulsive acts.

The descriptions of life in the two towns are true, and the chief
characters in the book are lifted out of the life as one has seen it.
Men like Osterhaut and Jowett, Indians like Tekewani, doctors like
Rockwell, priests like Monseigneur Fabre, ministers like Mr. Tripple, and
ne'er-do-weels like Marchand may be found in many a town of the West and
North.  Naturally the book must lack in something of that magnetic
picturesqueness and atmosphere which belongs to the people in the
Province of Quebec.  Western and Northern life has little of the settled
charm which belongs to the old civilization of the French province.  The
only way to recapture that charm is to place Frenchmen in the West, and
have them act and live--or try to act and live--as they do in old Quebec.

That is what I did with Pierre in my first book of fiction, Pierre and
His People, but with the exception of Monseigneur Fabre there is no
Frenchman in this book who fulfils, or could fulfil, the temperamental
place which I have indicated.  Men like Monseigneur Fabre have lived in
the West, and worked and slaved like him, blest and beloved by all
classes, creeds, and races.  Father Lacombe was one of them.  The part he
played in the life of Western Canada will be written some day by one who
understands how such men, celibate, and dedicated to religious life, may
play a stupendous part in the development of civilization.  Something of
him is to be found in my description of Monseigneur Fabre.




NOTE

This book was begun in 1911 and finished in 1913, a year before war broke
out.  It was published serially in the year 1915 and the beginning of
1916.  It must, therefore, go to the public on the basis of its merits
alone, and as a picture of the peace-life of the great North West.




PRELUDE

Harvest-time was almost come, and the great new land was resting under
coverlets of gold.  From the rise above the town of Lebanon, there
stretched out ungarnered wheat in the ear as far as sight could reach,
and the place itself and the neighbouring town of Manitou on the other
side of the Sagalac River were like islands washed by a topaz sea.

Standing upon the Rise, lost in the prospect, was an old, white-haired
man in the cassock of a priest, with grey beard reaching nearly to the
waist.

For long he surveyed the scene, and his eyes had a rapt look.

At last he spoke aloud:

     "There shall be an heap of corn in the earth, high upon the hills;
     his fruit shall shake like Libanus, and shall be green in the city
     like grass upon the earth."

A smile came to his lips--a rare, benevolent smile.  He had seen this
expanse of teeming life when it was thought to be an alkali desert, fit
only to be invaded by the Blackfeet and the Cree and the Blood Indians on
a foray for food and furs.  Here he had come fifty years before, and had
gone West and North into the mountains in the Summer season, when the
land was tremulous with light and vibrating to the hoofs of herds of
buffalo as they stampeded from the hunters; and also in the Winter time,
when frost was master and blizzard and drift its malignant servants.

Even yet his work was not done.  In the town of Manitou he still said
mass now and then, and heard the sorrows and sins of men and women, and
gave them "ghostly comfort," while priests younger than himself took the
burden of parish-work from his shoulders.

For a lifetime he had laboured among the Indians and the few whites and
squaw-men and half-breeds, with neither settlement nor progress.  Then,
all at once, the railway; and people coming from all the world, and
cities springing up!  Now once more he was living the life of
civilization, exchanging raw flesh of fish and animals and a meal of
tallow or pemmican for the wheaten loaf; the Indian tepee for the warm
house with the mansard roof; the crude mass beneath the trees for the
refinements of a chancel and an altar covered with lace and white linen.

A flock of geese went honking over his head.  His eyes smiled in memory
of the countless times he had watched such flights, had seen thousands
of wild ducks hurrying down a valley, had watched a family of herons
stretching away to some lonely water-home.  And then another sound
greeted his ear.  It was shrill, sharp and insistent.  A great serpent
was stealing out of the East and moving down upon Lebanon.  It gave
out puffs of smoke from its ungainly head.  It shrieked in triumph as
it came.  It was the daily train from the East, arriving at the Sagalac
River.

"These things must be," he said aloud as he looked.  While he lost
himself again in reminiscence, a young man came driving across the
plains, passing beneath where he stood.  The young man's face and figure
suggested power.  In his buggy was a fishing-rod.

His hat was pulled down over his eyes, but he was humming cheerfully to
himself.  When he saw the priest, he raised his hat respectfully, yet
with an air of equality.

"Good day, Monseigneur" (this honour of the Church had come at last to
the aged missionary), he said warmly.  "Good day--good day!"

The priest raised his hat and murmured the name, "Ingolby."  As the
distance grew between them, he said sadly: "These are the men who change
the West, who seize it, and divide it, and make it their own--

     "'I will rejoice, and divide Sichem: and mete out the valley of
     Succoth.'

"Hush!  Hush!" he said to himself in reproach.  "These things must be.
The country must be opened up.  That is why I came--to bring the Truth
before the trader."

Now another traveller came riding out of Lebanon towards him, galloping
his horse up-hill and down.  He also was young, but nothing about him
suggested power, only self-indulgence.  He, too, raised his hat, or
rather swung it from his head in a devil-may-care way, and overdid his
salutation.  He did not speak.  The priest's face was very grave, if not
a little resentful.  His salutation was reserved.

"The tyranny of gold," he murmured, "and without the mind or energy that
created it.  Felix was no name for him.  Ingolby is a builder, perhaps a
jerry-builder; but he builds."

He looked across the prairie towards the young man in the buggy.

"Sure, he is a builder.  He has the Cortez eye.  He sees far off, and
plans big things.  But Felix Marchand there--"

He stopped short.

"Such men must be, perhaps," he added.  Then, after a moment, as he gazed
round again upon the land of promise which he had loved so long, he
murmured as one murmurs a prayer:

     "Thou suferedst men to ride over our heads: we went through fire and
     water, and Thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place."




BOOK I

I.  "THE DRUSES ARE UP!"
II.  THE WHISPER FROM BEYOND
III.  CONCERNING INGOLBY AND THE TWO TOWNS
IV.  THE COMING OF JETHRO FAWE
V.  "BY THE RIVER STARZKE....IT WAS SO DONE"
VI.  THE UNGUARDED FIRES
VII.  IN WHICH THE PRISONER GOES FREE




CHAPTER I

"THE DRUSES ARE UP!"

"Great Scott, look at her!  She's goin' to try and take 'em !" exclaimed
Osterhaut, the Jack-of-all-trades at Lebanon.

"She ain't such a fool as all that.  Why, no one ever done it alone.  Low
water, too, when every rock's got its chance at the canoe.  But, my
gracious, she is goin' to ride 'em!"

Jowett, the horse-dealer, had a sportsman's joy in a daring thing.

"See, old Injun Tekewani's after her!  He's calling at her from the bank.
He knows.  He done it himself years ago when there was rips in the tribe
an' he had to sew up the tears.  He run them Rapids in his canoe--"

"Just as the Druse girl there is doin'--"

"An' he's done what he liked with the Blackfeet ever since."

"But she ain't a chief--what's the use of her doin' it?  She's goin'
straight for them.  She can't turn back now.  She couldn't make the bank
if she wanted to.  She's got to run 'em.  Holy smoke, see her wavin' the
paddle at Tekewani!  Osterhaut, she's the limit, that petticoat--so quiet
and shy and don't-look-at-me, too, with eyes like brown diamonds."

"Oh, get out, Jowett; she's all right!  She'll make this country sit up
some day-by gorry, she'll make Manitou and Lebanon sit up to-day if she
runs the Carillon Rapids safe!"

"She's runnin' 'em all right, son.  She's--by jee, well done, Miss Druse!
Well done, I say--well done!" exclaimed Jowett, dancing about and waving
his arms towards the adventurous girl.

The girl had reached the angry, thrashing waters where the rocks rent and
tore into white ribbons the onrushing current, and her first trial had
come on the instant the spitting, raging panthers of foam struck the bow
of her canoe.  The waters were so low that this course, which she had
made once before with her friend Tekewani the Blackfeet chief, had perils
not met on that desperate journey.  Her canoe struck a rock slantwise,
shuddered and swung round, but by a dexterous stroke she freed the frail
craft.  It righted and plunged forward again into fresh death-traps.

It was these new dangers which had made Tekewani try to warn her from the
shore--he and the dozen braves with him: but it was characteristic of his
race that, after the first warning, when she must play out the game to
the bitter end, he made no further attempt to stop her.  The Indians ran
down the river-bank, however, with eyes intent on her headlong progress,
grunting approval as she plunged safely from danger to danger.

Osterhaut and Jowett became silent, too, and, like the Indians, ran as
fast as they could, over fences, through the trees, stumbling and
occasionally cursing, but watching with fascinated eyes this adventuress
of the North, taking chances which not one coureur-de-bois or river-
driver in a thousand would take, with a five thousand-dollar prize as the
lure.  Why should she do it?

"Women folks are sick darn fools when they git goin'," gasped Osterhaut
as he ran.  "They don't care a split pea what happens when they've got
the pip.  Look at her--my hair's bleachin'."

"She's got the pip all right," stuttered Jowett as he plunged along; "but
she's foreign, and they've all got the pip, foreign men and women both--
but the women go crazy."

"She keeps pretty cool for a crazy loon, that girl.  If I owned her,
I'd--"

Jowett interrupted impatiently.  "You'd do what old man Druse does--you'd
let her be, Osterhaut.  What's the good of havin' your own way with one
that's the apple of your eye, if it turns her agin you?  You want her to
kiss you on the high cheek-bone, but if you go to play the cat-o'-nine-
tails round her, the high cheek-bone gets froze.  Gol blast it, look at
her, son!  What are the wild waves saying?  They're sayin', 'This is a
surprise, Miss Druse.  Not quite ready for ye, Miss Druse.'   My, ain't
she got the luck of the old devil!"

It seemed so.  More than once the canoe half jammed between the rocks,
and the stern lifted up by the force of the wild current, but again the
paddle made swift play, and again the cockle-shell swung clear.  But now
Fleda Druse was no longer on her feet.  She knelt, her strong, slim brown
arms bared to the shoulder, her hair blown about her forehead, her daring
eyes flashing to left and right, memory of her course at work under such
a strain as few can endure without chaos of mind in the end.  A hundred
times since the day she had run these Rapids with Tekewani, she had gone
over the course in her mind, asleep and awake, forcing her brain to see
again every yard of that watery way; because she knew that the day must
come when she would make the journey alone.  Why she would make it she
did not know; she only knew that she would do it some day; and the day
had come.  For long it had been an obsession with her--as though some
spirit whispered in her ear--"Do you hear the bells ringing at Carillon?
Do you hear the river singing towards Carillon?  Do you see the wild
birds flying towards Carillon?  Do you hear the Rapids calling--the
Rapids of Carillon?"

Night and day since she had braved death with Tekewani, giving him a gun,
a meerschaum pipe, and ten pounds of beautiful brown "plug" tobacco as a
token of her gratitude--night and day she had heard this spirit murmuring
in her ear, and always the refrain was, "Down the stream to Carillon!
Shoot the Rapids of Carillon!"

Why?  How should she know?  Wherefore should she know?  This was of the
things beyond the why of the human mind.  Sometimes all our lives, if we
keep our souls young, and see the world as we first saw it with eyes and
heart unsoiled, we hear the murmuring of the Other Self, that Self from
which we separated when we entered this mortal sphere, but which followed
us, invisible yet whispering inspiration to us.  But sometimes we only
hear It, our own soul's oracle, while yet our years are few, and we have
not passed that frontier between innocence and experience, reality and
pretence.  Pretence it is which drives the Other Self away with wailing
on its lips.  Then we hear It cry in the night when, because of the
trouble of life, we cannot sleep; or at the play when we are caught away
from ourselves into another air than ours; when music pours around us
like a soft wind from a garden of pomegranates; or when a child asks a
question which brings us back to the land where everything is so true
that it can be shouted from the tree-tops.

Why was Fleda Druse tempting death in the Carillon Rapids?

She had heard a whisper as she wandered among the pine-trees there at
Manitou, and it said simply the one word, "Now!"  She knew that she must
do it; she had driven her canoe out into the resistless current to ride
the Rapids of Carillon.  Her Other Self had whispered to her.

Yonder, thousands of miles away in Syria, there were the Hills of
Lebanon; and there was one phrase which made every Syrian heart beat
faster, if he were on the march.  It was, "The Druses are up!"  When
that wild tribe took to the saddle to war upon the Caravans and against
authority, from Lebanon to Palmyra, from Jerusalem to Damascus men looked
anxiously about them and rode hard to refuge.

And here also in the Far North where the River Sagalac ran a wild race to
Carillon, leaving behind the new towns of Lebanon and Manitou, "the
Druses were up."

The daughter of Gabriel Druse, the giant, was riding the Rapids of the
Sagalac.  The suspense to her and to those who watched her course--to
Tekewani and his braves, to Osterhaut and Jowett--could not be long.
It was a matter of minutes only, in which every second was a miracle
and might be a catastrophe.

From rock to rock, from wild white water to wild white water she sped,
now tossing to death as it seemed, now shooting on safely to the next
test of skill and courage--on, on, till at last there was only one
passage to make before the canoe would plunge into the smooth water
running with great swiftness till it almost reached Carillon.

Suddenly, as she neared the last dangerous point, round which she must
swing between jagged and unseen barriers of rock, her sight became for an
instant dimmed, as though a cloud passed over her eyes.  She had never
fainted in her life, but it seemed to her now that she was hovering on
unconsciousness.  Commending the will and energy left, she fought the
weakness down.  It was as though she forced a way through tossing,
buffeting shadows; as though she was shaking off from her shoulders
shadowy hands which sought to detain her; as though smothering things
kept choking back her breath, and darkness like clouds of wool gathered
about her face.  She was fighting for her life, and for years it seemed
to be; though indeed it was only seconds before her will reasserted
itself, and light broke again upon her way.  Even on the verge of the
last ambushed passage her senses came back; but they came with a stark
realization of the peril ahead: it looked out of her eyes as a face shows
itself at the window of a burning building.

Memory shook itself free.  It pierced the tumult of waters, found the
ambushed rocks, and guided the lithe brown arms and hands, so that the
swift paddle drove the canoe straight onward, as a fish drives itself
through a flume of dragon's teeth beneath the flood.  The canoe quivered
for an instant at the last cataract, then responding to Memory and Will,
sped through the hidden chasm, tossed by spray and water, and swept into
the swift current of smooth water below.

Fleda Druse had run the Rapids of Carillon.  She could hear the bells
ringing for evening service in the Catholic Church of Carillon, and
bells-soft, booming bells-were ringing in her own brain.  Like muffled
silver these brain-bells were, and she was as one who enters into a deep
forest, and hears far away in the boscage the mystic summons of forest
deities.  Voices from the banks of the river behind called to her--
hilarious, approving, agitated voices of her Indian friends, and of
Osterhaut and Jowett, those wild spectators of her adventure: but they
were not wholly real.  Only those soft, booming bells in her brain were
real.

Shooting the Rapids of Carillon was the bridge by which she passed from
the world she had left to this other.  Her girlhood was ended--wondering,
hovering, unrealizing girlhood.  This adventure was the outward sign, the
rite in the Lodge of Life which passed her from one degree of being to
another.

She was safe; but now as her canoe shot onward to the town of Carillon,
her senses again grew faint.  Again she felt the buffeting mist, again
her face was muffled in smothering folds; again great hands reached out
towards her; again her eyes were drawn into a stupefying darkness; but
now there was no will to fight, no energy to resist.  The paddle lay
inert in her fingers, her head drooped.  She slowly raised her head once,
twice, as though the call of the exhausted will was heard, but suddenly
it fell heavily upon her breast.  For a moment so, and then as the canoe
shot forward on a fresh current, the lithe body sank backwards in the
canoe, and lay face upward to the evening sky.

The canoe sped on, but presently it swung round and lay athwart the
current, dipping and rolling.

From the banks on either side, the Indians of the Manitou Reservation and
the two men from Lebanon called out and hastened on, for they saw that
the girl had collapsed, and they knew only too well that her danger was
not yet past.  The canoe might strike against the piers of the bridge at
Carillon and overturn, or it might be carried to the second cataract
below the town.  They were too far away to save her, but they kept
shouting as they ran.

None responded to their call, but that defiance of the last cataract of
the Rapids of Carillon had been seen by one who, below an eddy on the
Lebanon side of the river, was steadily stringing upon maple-twigs black
bass and long-nosed pike.  As he sat in the shade of the trees, he had
seen the plunge of the canoe into the chasm, and had held his breath in
wonder and admiration.  Even at that distance he knew who it was.  He had
seen Fleda only a few times before, for she was little abroad; but when
he had seen her he had asked himself what such a face and form were doing
in the Far North.  It belonged to Andalusia, to the Carpathians, to
Syrian villages.

"The pluck of the very devil!" he had exclaimed, as Fleda's canoe swept
into the smooth current, free of the dragon's teeth; and as he had
something of the devil in himself, she seemed much nearer to him than the
hundreds of yards of water intervening.  Presently, however, he saw her
droop and sink away out of sight.

For an instant he did not realize what had happened, and then, with angry
self-reproach, he flung the oars into the rowlocks of his skiff and drove
down and athwart the stream with long, powerful strokes.

"That's like a woman!" he said to himself as he bent to the oars, and
now and then turned his head to make sure that the canoe was still safe.
"Do the trick better than a man, and then collapse like a rabbit."

He was Max Ingolby, the financier, contractor, manager of great
interests, disturber of the peace of slow minds, who had come to Lebanon
with the avowed object of amalgamating three railways, of making the
place the swivel of all the trade and interests of the Western North; but
also with the declared intention of uniting Lebanon and Manitou in one
municipality, one centre of commercial and industrial power.

Men said he had bitten off more than he could chew, but he had replied
that his teeth were good, and he would masticate the meal or know the
reason why.  He was only thirty-three, but his will was like nothing the
West had seen as yet.  It was sublime in its confidence, it was free from
conceit, and it knew not the word despair, though once or twice it had
known defeat.

Men cheered him from the shore as his skiff leaped through the water.
"It's that blessed Ingolby," said Jowett, who had tried to "do" the
financier in a horsedeal, and had been done instead, and was now a devout
admirer and adherent of the Master Man.  "I saw him driving down there
this morning from Lebanon.  He's been fishing at Seely's Eddy."

"When Ingolby goes fishing, there's trouble goin' on somewhere and he's
stalkin' it," rejoined Osterhaut.  "But, by gol, he's goin' to do this
trump trick first; he's goin' to overhaul her before she gits to the
bridge.  Look at him swing!  Hell, ain't it pretty!  There you go, old
Ingolby.  You're right on it, even when you're fishing."

On the other-the Manitou-shore Tekewani and his braves were less
talkative, but they were more concerned in the incident than Osterhaut
and Jowett.  They knew little or nothing of Ingolby the hustler, but they
knew more of Fleda Druse and her father than all the people of Lebanon
and Manitou put together.  Fleda had won old Tekewani's heart when she
had asked him to take her down the Rapids, for the days of adventure for
him and his tribe were over.  The adventure shared with this girl had
brought back to the chief the old days when Indian women tanned bearskins
and deerskins day in, day out, and made pemmican of the buffalo-meat;
when the years were filled with hunting and war and migrant journeyings
to fresh game-grounds and pastures new.

Danger faced was the one thing which could restore Tekewani's self-
respect, after he had been checked and rebuked before his tribe by the
Indian Commissioner for being drunk.  Danger faced had restored it, and
Fleda Druse had brought the danger to him as a gift.

If the canoe should crash against the piers of the bridge, if it should
drift to the cataract below, if anything should happen to this white girl
whom he worshipped in his heathen way, nothing could preserve his self-
respect; he would pour ashes on his head and firewater down his throat.

Suddenly he and his braves stood still.  They watched as one would watch
an enemy a hundred times stronger than one's self.  The white man's skiff
was near the derelict canoe; the bridge was near also.  Carillon now
lined the bank of the river with its people.  They ran upon the bridge,
but not so fast as to reach the place where, in the nick of time, Ingolby
got possession of the rolling canoe; where Fleda Druse lay waiting like a
princess to be waked by the kiss of destiny.

Only five hundred yards below the bridge was the second cataract, and she
would never have waked if she had been carried into it.

To Ingolby she was as beautiful as a human being could be as she lay with
white face upturned, the paddle still in her hand.

"Drowning isn't good enough for her," he said, as he fastened her canoe
to his skiff.

"It's been a full day's work," he added; and even in this human crisis he
thought of the fish he had caught, of "the big trouble," he had been
thinking out as Osterhaut had said, as well as of the girl that he was
saving.

"I always have luck when I go fishing," he added presently.  "I can take
her back to Lebanon," he continued with a quickening look.  "She'll be
all right in a jiffy.  I've got room for her in my buggy--and room for
her in any place that belongs to me," he hastened to reflect with a
curious, bashful smile.

"It's like a thing in a book," he murmured, as he neared the waiting
people on the banks of Carillon, and the ringing of the vesper bells came
out to him on the evening air.

"Is she dead?" some one whispered, as eager hands reached out to secure
his skiff to the bank.

"As dead as I am," he answered with a laugh, and drew Fleda's canoe up
alongside his skiff.

He had a strange sensation of new life, as, with delicacy and gentleness,
he lifted her up in his strong arms and stepped ashore.




CHAPTER II

THE WHISPER FROM BEYOND

Ingolby had a will of his own, but it had never been really tried
against a woman's will.  It was, however, tried sorely when Fleda came to
consciousness again in his arms and realized that a man's face was nearer
to hers than any man's had ever been except that of her own father.  Her
eyes opened slowly, and for the instant she did not understand, but when
she did, the blood stole swiftly back to her neck and face and forehead,
and she started in dismay.

"Put me down," she whispered faintly.

"I'm taking you to my buggy," he replied.  "I'll drive you back to
Lebanon."  He spoke as calmly as he could, for there was a strange
fluttering of his nerves, and the crowd was pressing him.

"Put me down at once," she said peremptorily.  She trembled on her feet,
and swayed, and would have fallen but that Ingolby and a woman in black,
who had pushed her way through the crowd with white, anxious face, caught
her.

"Give her air, and stand back!" called the sharp voice of the constable
of Carillon, and he heaved the people back with his powerful shoulders.

A space was cleared round the place where Fleda sat with her head
against the shoulder of the stately woman in black who had come to her
assistance.  A dipper of water was brought, and when she had drunk it
she raised her head slowly and her eyes sought those of Ingolby.

"One cannot pay for such things," she said to him, meeting his look
firmly and steeling herself to thank him.  Though deeply grateful, it was
a trial beyond telling to be obliged to owe the debt of a life to any
one, and in particular to a man of the sort to whom material gifts could
not be given.

"Such things are paid for just by accepting them," he answered quickly,
trying to feel that he had never held her in his arms, as she evidently
desired him to feel.  He had intuition, if not enough of it, for the
regions where the mind of Fleda Druse dwelt.

"I couldn't very well decline, could I?" she rejoined, quick humour
shooting into her eyes.  "I was helpless.  I never fainted before in my
life."

"I am sure you will never faint again," he remarked.  "We only do such
things when we are very young."

She was about to reply, but paused reflectively.  Her half-opened lips
did not frame the words she had been impelled to speak.

Admiration was alive in his eyes.  He had never seen this type of
womanhood before--such energy and grace, so amply yet so lithely framed;
such darkness and fairness in one living composition; such individuality,
yet such intimate simplicity.  Her hair was a very light brown, sweeping
over a broad, low forehead, and lying, as though with a sense of modesty,
on the tips of the ears, veiling them slightly.  The forehead was classic
in its intellectual fulness; but the skin was so fresh, even when pale as
now, and with such an underglow of vitality, that the woman in her, sex
and the possibilities of sex, cast a glamour over the intellect and
temperament showing in every line of her contour.  In contrast to the
light brown of the hair was the very dark brown of the eyes and the still
darker brown of the eyelashes.  The face shone, the eyes burned, and the
piquancy of the contrast between the soft illuminating whiteness of the
skin and the flame in the eyes had fascinated many more than Ingolby.

Her figure was straight yet supple, somewhat fuller than is modern
beauty, with hints of Juno-like stateliness to come; and the curves of
her bust, the long lines of her limbs, were not obscured by her
absolutely plain gown of soft, light-brown linen.  She was tall, but not
too commanding, and, as her hand was raised to fasten back a wisp of
hair, there was the motion of as small a wrist and as tapering a bare arm
as ever made prisoner of a man's neck.

Impulse was written in every feature, in the passionate eagerness of
her body; yet the line from the forehead to the chin, and the firm
shapeliness of the chin itself, gave promise of great strength of will.
From the glory of the crown of hair to the curve of the high instep of a
slim foot it was altogether a personality which hinted at history--at
tragedy, maybe.

"She'll have a history," Madame Bulteel, who now stood beside the girl,
herself a figure out of a picture by Velasquez, had said of her sadly;
for she saw in Fleda's rare qualities, in her strange beauty, happenings
which had nothing to do with the life she was living.  So this duenna of
Gabriel Druse's household, this aristocratic, silent woman was ever on
the watch for some sudden revelation of a being which had not found
itself, and which must find itself through perils and convulsions.

That was why, to-day, she had hesitated to leave Fleda alone and come to
Carillon, to be at the bedside of a dying, friendless woman whom by
chance she had come to know.  In the street she had heard of what was
happening on the river, and had come in time to receive Fleda from the
arms of her rescuer.

"How did you get here?" Fleda asked her.

"How am I always with you when I am needed, truant?" said the other with
a reproachful look.  "Did you fly?  You are so light, so thin, you could
breathe yourself here," rejoined the girl, with a gentle, quizzical
smile.  "But, no," she added, "I remember, you were to be here at
Carillon."

"Are you able to walk now?" asked Madame Bulteel.

"To Manitou--but of course," Fleda answered almost sharply.

After the first few minutes the crowd had fallen back.  They watched her
with respectful admiration from a decent distance.  They had the chivalry
towards woman so characteristic of the West.  There was no vulgarity in
their curiosity, though most of them had never seen her before.  All,
however, had heard of her and her father, the giant greybeard who moved
and lived in an air of mystery, and apparently secret wealth, for more
than once he had given large sums--large in the eyes of folks of moderate
means, when charity was needed; as in the case of the floods the year
before, and in the prairie-fire the year before that, when so many people
were made homeless, and also when fifty men had been injured in one
railway accident.  On these occasions he gave disproportionately to his
mode of life.

Now, when they saw that Fleda was about to move away, they drew just a
little nearer, and presently one of the crowd could contain his
admiration no longer.  He raised a cheer.

"Three cheers for Her," he shouted, and loud hurrahs followed.

"Three cheers for Ingolby," another cried, and the noise was boisterous
but not so general.

"Who shot Carillon Rapids?" another called in the formula of the West.

"She shot the Rapids," was the choral reply.  "Who is she?" came the
antiphon.

"Druse is her name," was the gay response.  "What did she do?"

"She shot Carillon Rapids--shot 'em dead.  Hooray!"

In the middle of the cheering, Osterhaut and Jowett arrived in a wagon
which they had commandeered, and, about the same time, from across the
bridge, came running Tekewani and his braves.

"She done it like a kingfisher," cried Osterhaut.  "Manitou's got the
belt."

Fleda Druse's friendly eyes were given only for one instant to Osterhaut
and his friend.  Her gaze became fixed on Tekewani who, silent, and with
immobile face, stole towards her.  In spite of the civilization which
controlled him, he wore Indian moccasins and deerskin breeches, though
his coat was rather like a shortened workman's blouse.  He did not belong
to the life about him; he was a being apart, the spirit of vanished and
vanishing days.

"Tekewani--ah, Tekewani, you have come," the girl said, and her eyes
smiled at him as they had not smiled at Ingolby or even at the woman in
black beside her.

"How!" the chief replied, and looked at her with searching, worshipping
eyes.

"Don't look at me that way, Tekewani," she said, coming close to him.
"I had to do it, and I did it."

"The teeth of rock everywhere!" he rejoined reproachfully, with a
gesture of awe.

"I remembered all--all.  You were my master, Tekewani."

"But only once with me it was, Summer Song," he persisted.  Summer Song
was his name for her.

"I saw it--saw it, every foot of the way," she insisted.  "I thought
hard, oh, hard as the soul thinks.  And I saw it all."  There was
something singularly akin in the nature of the girl and the Indian.  She
spoke to him as she never spoke to any other.

"Too much seeing, it is death," he answered.  "Men die with too much
seeing.  I have seen them die.  To look hard through deerskin curtains,
to see through the rock, to behold the water beneath the earth, and the
rocks beneath the black waters, it is for man to see if he has a soul,
but the seeing--behold, so those die who should live!"

"I live, Tekewani, though I saw the teeth of rocks beneath the black
water," she urged gently.

"Yet the half-death came--"

"I fainted, but I was not to die--it was not my time."

He shook his head gloomily.  "Once it may be, but the evil spirits tempt
us to death.  It matters not what comes to Tekewani; he is as the leaf
that falls from the stem; but for Summer Song that has far to go, it is
the madness from beyond the Hills of Life."

She took his hand.  "I will not do it again, Tekewani."

"How!" he said, with hand upraised, as one who greets the great in this
world.

"I don't know why I did it," she added meaningly.  "It was selfish.  I
feel that now."

The woman in black pressed her hand timidly.

"It is so for ever with the great," Tekewani answered.  "It comes, also,
from beyond the Hills--the will to do it.  It is the spirit that whispers
over the earth out of the Other Earth.  No one hears it but the great.
The whisper only is for this one here and that one there who is of the
Few.  It whispers, and the whisper must be obeyed.  So it was from the
beginning."

"Yes, you understand, Tekewani," she answered softly.  "I did it because
something whispered from the Other Earth to me."

Her head drooped a little, her eyes had a sudden shadow.

"He will understand," answered the Indian; "your father will understand,"
as though reading her thoughts.  He had clearly read her thought, this
dispossessed, illiterate Indian chieftain.  Yet, was he so illiterate?
Had he not read in books which so few have learned to read?  His life had
been broken on the rock of civilization, but his simple soul had learned
some elemental truths--not many, but the essential ones, without which
there is no philosophy, no understanding.  He knew Fleda Druse was
thinking of her father, wondering if he would understand, half-fearing,
hardly hoping, dreading the moment when she must meet him face to face.
She knew she had been selfish, but would Gabriel Druse understand?  She
raised her eyes in gratitude to the Blackfeet chief.

"I must go home," she said.

She turned to go, but as she did so, a man came swaggering down the
street, broke through the crowd, and made towards her with an arm raised,
a hand waving, and a leer on his face.  He was a thin, rather handsome,
dissolute-looking fellow of middle height and about forty, in dandified
dress.  His glossy black hair fell carelessly over his smooth forehead
from under a soft, wide-awake hat.

"Manitou for ever!" he cried, with a flourish of his hand.  "I salute
the brave.  I escort the brave to the gates of Manitou.  I escort the
brave.  I escort the brave.  Salut!  Salut!  Salut!  Well done, Beauty
Beauty--Beauty--Beauty, well done again!"

He held out his hand to Fleda, but she drew back with disgust.  Felix
Marchand, the son of old Hector Marchand, money-lender and capitalist of
Manitou, had pressed his attentions upon her during the last year since
he had returned from the East, bringing dissoluteness and vulgar pride
with him.  Women had spoiled him, money had corrupted and degraded him.

"Come, beautiful brave, it's Salut!  Salut!  Salut!" he said, bending
towards her familiarly.

Her face flushed with anger.

"Let me pass, monsieur," she said sharply.

"Pride of Manitou--" he apostrophized, but got no farther.

Ingolby caught him by the shoulders, wheeled him round, and then flung
him at the feet of Tekewani and his braves.

At this moment Tekewani's eyes had such a fire as might burn in Wotan's
smithy.  He was ready enough to defy the penalty of the law for
assaulting a white man, but Felix Marchand was in the dust, and that
would do for the moment.

With grim face Ingolby stood over the begrimed figure.  "There's the
river if you want more," he said.  "Tekewani knows where the water's
deepest."  Then he turned and followed Fleda and the woman in black.
Felix Marchand's face was twisted with hate as he got slowly to his feet.

"You'll eat dust before I'm done," he called after Ingolby.  Then, amid
the jeers of the crowd, he went back to the tavern where he had been
carousing.




CHAPTER III

CONCERNING INGOLBY AND THE TWO TOWNS

A word about Max Ingolby.

He was the second son of four sons, with a father who had been a failure;
but with a mother of imagination and great natural strength of brain, yet
whose life had been so harried in bringing up a family on nothing at all,
that there only emerged from her possibilities a great will to do the
impossible things.  From her had come the spirit which would not be
denied.

In his boyhood Max could not have those things which lads prize--fishing-
rods, cricket-bats and sleds, and all such things; but he could take most
prizes at school open to competition; he could win in the running-jump,
the high-jump, and the five hundred yards' race; and he could organize a
picnic, or the sports of the school or town--at no cost to himself.  His
finance in even this limited field had been brilliant.  Other people
paid, and he did the work; and he did it with such ease that the others
intriguing to crowd him out, suffered failure and came to him in the end
to put things right.

He became the village doctor's assistant and dispenser at seventeen and
induced his master to start a drug-store.  He made the drug-store a
success within two years, and meanwhile he studied Latin and Greek
and mathematics in every spare hour he had--getting up at five in the
morning, and doing as much before breakfast as others did in a whole day.
His doctor loved him and helped him; a venerable Archdeacon, an Oxford
graduate, gave him many hours of coaching, and he went to the University
with three scholarships.  These were sufficient to carry him through in
three years, and there was enough profit-sharing from the drug-business
he had founded on terms to shelter his mother and his younger brothers,
while he took honours at the University.

There he organized all that students organize, and was called in at last
by the Bursar of his college to reorganize the commissariat, which he did
with such success that the college saved five thousand dollars a year.
He had genius, the college people said, and after he had taken his degree
with honours in classics and mathematics they offered him a professorship
at two thousand dollars a year.

He laughed ironically, but yet with satisfaction, when the professorship
was offered.  It was all so different from what was in his mind for the
future.  As he looked out of the oriel window in the sweet gothic
building, to the green grass and the maples and elms which made the
college grounds like an old-world park, he had a vision of himself
permanently in these surroundings of refinement growing venerable with
years, seeing pass under his influence thousands of young men directed,
developed and inspired by him.

He had, however, shaken himself free of this modest vision.  He knew that
such a life would act like a narcotic to his real individuality.  He
thirsted for contest, for the control of brain and will; he wanted to
construct; he was filled with the idea of simplifying things, of
economizing strength; he saw how futile was much competition, and how the
big brain could command and control with ease, wasting no force, saving
labour, making the things controlled bigger and better.

So it came that his face was seen no more in the oriel window.  With a
mere handful of dollars, and some debts, he left the world of scholarship
and superior pedagogy, and went where the head offices of railways were.
Railways were the symbol of progress in his mind.  The railhead was the
advance post of civilization.  It was like Cortez and his Conquistadores
overhauling and appropriating the treasures of long generations.  So
where should he go if not to the Railway?

His first act, when he got to his feet inside the offices of the
President of a big railway, was to show the great man how two "outside"
proposed lines could be made one, and then further merged into the
company controlled by the millionaire in whose office he sat.  He got his
chance by his very audacity--the President liked audacity.  In attempting
this merger, however, he had his first failure, but he showed that he
could think for himself, and he was made increasingly responsible.  After
a few years of notable service, he was offered the task of building a
branch line of railway from Lebanon and Manitou north, and northwest, and
on to the Coast; and he had accepted it, at the same time planning to
merge certain outside lines competing with that which he had in hand.
For over four years he worked night and day, steadily advancing towards
his goal, breaking down opposition, manoeuvring, conciliating, fighting.

Most men loved his whimsical turn of mind, even those who were the agents
of the financial clique which had fought him in their efforts to get
control of the commercial, industrial, transport and banking resources of
the junction city of Lebanon.  In the days when vast markets would be
established for Canadian wheat in Shanghai and Tokio, then these two
towns of Manitou and Lebanon on the Sagalac would be like the swivel to
the organization of trade of a continent.

Ingolby had worked with this end in view.  In doing so he had tried to
get what he wanted without trickery; to reach his goal by playing the
game according to the rules, and this policy nonplussed his rivals and
associates.  They expected secret moves, and he laid his cards on the
table.  Sharp, quick, resolute and ruthless he was, however, if he knew
that he was being tricked.  Then he struck, and struck hard.  The war of
business was war and not "gollyfoxing," as he said.  Selfish, stubborn
and self-centred he was in much, but he had great joy in the natural and
sincere, and he had a passionate love of Nature.  To him the flat prairie
was never ugly.  Its very monotony had its own individuality.  The
Sagalac, even when muddy, had its own deep interest, and when it was full
of logs drifting down to the sawmills, for which he had found the money
by interesting capitalists in the East, he sniffed the stinging smell of
the pines with elation.  As the great saws in the mills, for which he had
secured the capital, throwing off the spray of mangled wood, hummed and
buzzed and sang, his mouth twisted in the droll smile it always wore when
he talked with such as Jowett and Osterhaut, whose idiosyncrasies were
like a meal to him; as he described it once to some of the big men from
the East who had been behind his schemes, yet who cavilled at his ways.
He was never diverted from his course by such men, and while he was loyal
to those who had backed him, he vowed that he would be independent of
these wooden souls in the end.  They and the great bankers behind them
were for monopoly; he was for organization and for economic prudence.  So
far they were necessary to all he did; but it was his intention to shake
himself free of all monopoly in good time.  One or two of his colleagues
saw the drift of his policy and would have thrown him over if they could
have replaced him by a man as capable, who would, at the time, consent to
grow rich on their terms.

They could not understand a man who would stand for a half-hour watching
a sunset, or a morning sky dappled with all the colours that shake from a
prism; they were suspicious of a business-mind which could gloat over the
light falling on snow-peaked mountains, while it planned a great bridge
across a gorge in the same hour; of a man who would quote a verse of
poetry while a flock of wild pigeons went whirring down a pine-girt
valley in the shimmer of the sun.

On the occasion when he had quoted a verse of poetry to them, one of them
said to him with a sidelong glance: "You seem to be dead-struck on
Nature, Ingolby."

To that, with a sly quirk of the mouth, and meaning to mystify his
wooden-headed questioner still more, he answered: "Dead-struck?  Dead-
drunk, you mean.  I'm a Nature's dipsomaniac--as you can see," he added
with a sly note of irony.

Then instantly he had drawn the little circle of experts into a
discussion upon technical questions of railway-building and finance,
which made demands upon all their resources and knowledge.  In that
conference he gave especial attention to the snub-souled financier who
had sneered at his love of Nature.  He tied his critic up in knots of
self-assertion and bad logic which presently he deftly, deliberately and
skilfully untied, to the delight of all the group.

"He's got as much in his ten years in the business as we've got out
of half a life-time," said the chief of his admirers.  This was the
President who had first welcomed him into business, and introduced him to
his colleagues in enterprise.

"I shouldn't be surprised if the belt flew off the wheel some day,"
savagely said Ingolby's snub-souled critic, whose enmity was held in
check by the fact that on Ingolby, for the moment, depended the safety
of the hard cash he had invested.

But the qualities which alienated an expert here and there caught the
imagination of the pioneer spirits of Lebanon.  Except those who, for
financial reasons, were opposed to him, and must therefore pit themselves
against him, as the representatives of bigger forces behind them, he was
a leader of whom Lebanon was combatively proud.  At last he came to the
point where his merger was practically accomplished, and a problem
arising out of it had to be solved.  It was a problem which taxed every
quality of an able mind.  The situation had at last become acute, and
Time, the solvent of most complications, had not quite eased the strain.
Indeed, on the day that Fleda Druse had made her journey down the
Carillon Rapids, Time's influence had not availed.  So he had gone
fishing, with millions at stake--to the despair of those who were risking
all on his skill and judgment.

But that was Ingolby.  Thinking was the essence of his business, not
Time.  As fishing was the friend of thinking, therefore he fished in
Seely's Eddy, saw Fleda Druse run the Carillon Rapids, saved her from
drowning, and would have brought her in pride and peace to her own home,
but that she decreed otherwise.




CHAPTER IV

THE COMING OF JETHRO FAWE

Gabriel Druse's house stood on a little knoll on the outskirts of the
town of Manitou, backed by a grove of pines.  Its front windows faced the
Sagalac, and the windows behind looked into cool coverts where in old
days many Indian tribes had camped; where Hudson's Bay Company's men had
pitched their tents to buy the red man's furs.  But the red man no longer
set up his tepee in these secluded groves; the wapiti and red deer had
fled to the north never to return, the snarling wolf had stolen into
regions more barren; the ceremonial of the ancient people no longer made
weird the lonely nights; the medicine-man's incantations, the harvest-
dance, the green-corn-dance, the sun-dance had gone.  The braves, their
women, and their tepees had been shifted to reservations where
Governments solemnly tried to teach them to till the field, and grow
corn, and drive the cart to market; while yet they remembered the herds
of buffalo which had pounded down the prairie like storm-clouds and given
their hides for the tepee; and the swift deer whose skins made the wigwam
luxurious.

Originally Manitou had been the home of Icelanders, Mennonites, and
Doukhobors; settlers from lands where the conditions of earlier centuries
prevailed, who, simple as they were in habits and in life, were
ignorant, primitive, coarse, and none too cleanly.

They had formed an unprogressive polyglot settlement, and the place
assumed a still more primeval character when the Indian Reservation was
formed near by.  When French Canadian settlers arrived, however, the
place became less discordant to the life of a new democracy, though they
did little to make it modern in the sense that Lebanon, across the river,
where Ingolby lived, was modern from the day the first shack was thrown
up.

Manitou showed itself antagonistic to progress; it was old-fashioned, and
primitively agricultural.  It looked with suspicion on the factories
built after Ingolby came and on the mining propositions, which circled
the place with speculation.  Unlike other towns of the West, it was
insanitary and uneducated; it was also given to nepotism and a primitive
kind of jobbery; but, on the whole, it was honest.  It was a settlement
twenty years before Lebanon had a house, though the latter exceeded the
population of Manitou in five years, and became the home of all
adventuring spirits--land agents, company promoters, mining prospectors,
railway men, politicians, saloon keepers, and up to-date dissenting
preachers.  Manitou was, however, full of back-water people, religious
fanatics, little farmers, guides, trappers, old coureurs-de-bois,
Hudson's Bay Company factors and ex-factors, half-breeds; and all the
rest.

The real feud between the two towns began about the time of the arrival
of Gabriel Druse, his daughter, and Madame Bulteel, the woman in black,
and it had grown with great rapidity and increasing intensity.  Manitou
condemned the sacrilegiousness of the Protestants, whose meeting-houses
were used for "socials," "tea-meetings," "strawberry festivals," and
entertainments of many kinds; while comic songs were sung at the table
where the solemn Love Feast was held at the quarterly meetings.  At last
when attempts were made to elect to Parliament an Irish lawyer who added
to his impecuniousness, eloquence, a half-finished University education,
and an Orangeman's prejudices of the best brand of Belfast or Derry,
inter-civic strife took the form of physical violence.  The great bridge
built by Ingolby between the two towns might have been ten thousand yards
long, so deep was the estrangement between the two places.  They had only
one thing in common--a curious compromise--in the person of Nathan
Rockwell, an agnostic doctor, who had arrived in Lebanon with a
reputation for morality somewhat clouded; though, where his patients in
Manitou and Lebanon were concerned, he had been the "pink of propriety."

Rockwell had arrived in Lebanon early in its career, and had remained
unimportant until a railway accident occurred at Manitou and the resident
doctors were driven from the field of battle, one by death, and one by
illness.  Then it was that the silent, smiling, dark-skinned, cool-headed
and cool-handed Rockwell stepped in, and won for himself the gratitude of
all--from Monseigneur Lourde, the beloved Catholic priest, to Tekewani,
the chief.  This accident was followed by an epidemic.

That was at the time, also, when Fleda Druse returned from Winnipeg where
she had been at school for one memorable and terrible six months, pining
for her father, defying rules, and crying the night through for "the open
world," as she called it.  So it was that, to her father's dismay and joy
in one, she had fled from school, leaving all her things behind her; and
had reached home with only the clothes on her back and a few cents in her
pocket.

Instantly on her return she had gone among the stricken people as
fearlessly as Rockwell had done, but chiefly among the women and
children; and it was said that the herbal medicine she administered was
marvellous in its effect--so much so that Rockwell asked for the
prescription, which she declined to give.

Thus it was that the French Canadian mothers with daughters of their own,
bright-eyed brunettes, ready for the man-market, regarded with toleration
the girl who took their children away for picnics down the river or into
the woods, and brought them back safe and sound at the end of the day.
Not that they failed to be shocked sometimes, when, on her wild Indian
pony, Fleda swept through Manitou like a wind and out into the prairie,
riding, as it were, to the end of the world.  Try as they would, these
grateful mothers of Manitou, they could not get as near to Fleda Druse as
their children did, and they were vast distances from her father.

"There, there, look at him," said old Madame Thibadeau to her neighbour
Christine Brisson--"look at him with his great grey-beard, and his eyes
like black fires, and that head of hair like a bundle of burnt flax!  He
comes from the place no man ever saw, that's sure."

"Ah, surelee, men don't grow so tall in any Christian country," announced
Christine Brisson, her head nodding sagely.  "I've seen the pictures in
the books, and there's nobody so tall and that looks like him--not
anywhere since Adam."

"Nom de pipe, sometimes-trulee, sometimes, I look up there at where he
lives, and I think I see a thousand men on horses ride out of the woods
behind his house and down here to gobble us all up.  That's the way I
feel.  It's fancy, but I can't help that."  Dame Thibadeau rested her
hands--on her huge stomach as though the idea had its origin there.

"I've seen a lot of fancies come to pass," gloomily returned her friend.
"It's a funny world.  I don't know what to make of its sometimes."

"And that girl of his, the strangest creature, as proud as a peacock, but
then as kind as kind to the children--of a good heart, surelee.  They say
she has plenty of gold rings and pearls and bracelets, and all like that.
Babette Courton, she saw them when she went to sew.  Why doesn't
Ma'm'selle wear them?"

Christine looked wise and smoothed out her apron as though it was a
parchment.  "With such queer ones, who knows?  But, yes, as you say, she
has a kind heart.  The children, well, they follow her everywhere."

"Not the children only," sagely added the other.  "From Lebanon they
come, the men, and plenty here, too; and there's that Felix Marchand, the
worst of all in Manitou or anywhere."

"I'd look sharp if Felix Marchand followed me," remarked Christine.
"There are more papooses at the Reservation since he come back, and over
in Lebanon--!"  She whispered darkly to her friend, and they nodded
knowingly.

"If he plays pranks in Manitou he'll get his throat cut, for sure.  Even
with Protes'ants and Injuns it's bad enough," remarked Dame Thibadeau,
panting with the thought of it.

"He doesn't even leave the Doukhobors alone.  There's--" Again Christine
whispered, and again that ugly look came to their faces which belongs to
the thought of forbidden things.

"Felix Marchand'll have much money--bad penny as he is," continued
Christine in her normal voice.  "He'll have more money than he can put in
all the trouser legs he has.  Old Hector, his father, has enough for a
gover'ment.  But that M'sieu' Felix will get his throat cut if he follows
Ma'm'selle Druse about too much.  She hates him--I've seen when they met.
Old man Druse'll make trouble.  He don't look as he does for nothing."

"Ah, that's so.  One day, we shall see what we shall see," murmured
Christine, and waved a hand to a friend in the street.

This conversation happened on the evening of the day that Fleda Druse
shot the Carillon Rapids alone.  An hour after the two gossips had had
their say Gabriel Druse paced up and down the veranda of his house,
stopping now and then to view the tumbling, hurrying Sagalac, or to dwell
upon the sunset which crimsoned and bronzed the western sky.  His walk
had an air of impatience; he seemed disturbed of mind and restless of
body.

He gave an impression of great force.  He would have been picked out of a
multitude, not alone because of his remarkable height, but because he had
an air of command and the aloofness which shows a man sufficient unto
himself.

As he stood gazing reflectively into the sunset, a strange, plaintive,
birdlike note pierced the still evening air.  His head lifted quickly,
yet he did not look in the direction of the sound, which came from the
woods behind the house.  He did not stir, and his eyes half-closed, as
though he hesitated what to do.  The call was not that of a bird familiar
to the Western world.  It had a melancholy softness like that of the
bell-bird of the Australian bush.  Yet, in the insistence of the note, it
was, too, a challenge or a summons.

Three times during the past week he had heard it--once as he went by the
market-place of Manitou; once as he returned in the dusk from Tekewani's
Reservation, and once at dawn from the woods behind the house.  His
present restlessness and suppressed agitation had been the result.

It was a call he knew well.  It was like a voice from a dead world.  It
asked, he knew, for an answering call, yet he had not given it.  It was
seven days since he first heard it in the market-place, and in that seven
days he had realized that nothing in this world which has ever been,
really ceases to be.  Presently, the call was repeated.  On the three
former occasions there had been no repetition.  The call had trembled in
the air but once and had died away into unbroken silence.  Now, however,
it rang out with an added poignancy.  It was like a bird calling to its
vanished mate.

With sudden resolution Druse turned.  Leaving the veranda, he walked
slowly behind the house into the woods and stood still under the branches
of a great cedar.  Raising his head, a strange, solemn note came from his
lips; but the voice died away in a sharp broken sound which was more
human than birdlike, which had the shrill insistence of authority.  The
call to him had been almost ventriloquial in its nature.  His lips had
not moved at all.

There was silence for a moment after he had called into the void, as it
were, and then there appeared suddenly from behind a clump of juniper, a
young man of dark face and upright bearing.  He made a slow obeisance
with a gesture suggestive of the Oriental world, yet not like the usual
gesture of the East Indian, the Turk or the Persian; it was composite of
all.

He could not have been more than twenty-five years of age.  He was so
sparely made, and his face being clean-shaven, he looked even younger.
His clothes were the clothes of the Western man; and yet there was a
manner of wearing them, there were touches which were evidence to the
watchful observer that he was of other spheres.  His wide, felt, Western
hat had a droop on one side and a broken treatment of the crown, which of
itself was enough to show him a stranger to the prairie, while his brown
velveteen jacket, held by its two lowest buttons, was reminiscent of an
un-English life.  His eyes alone would have announced him as of some
foreign race, though he was like none of the foreigners who had been the
pioneers of Manitou.  Unlike as he and Gabriel Druse were in height,
build, and movement, still there was something akin in them both.

After a short silence evidently disconcerting to him, "Blessing and hail,
my Ry," he said in a low tone.  He spoke in a strange language and with a
voice rougher than his looks would have suggested.

The old man made a haughty gesture of impatience.  "What do you want with
me, my Romany 'chal'?" he asked sharply.--[A glossary of Romany words
will be found at the end of the book.]

The young man replied hastily.  He seemed to speak by rote.  His manner
was too eager to suit the impressiveness of his words.  "The sheep are
without a shepherd," he said.  "The young men marry among the Gorgios, or
they are lost in the cities and return no more to the tents and the
fields and the road.  There is disorder in all the world among the
Romanys.  The ancient ways are forgotten.  Our people gather and settle
upon the land and live as the Gorgios live.  They forget the way beneath
the trees, they lose their skill in horses.  If the fountain is choked,
how shall the water run?"

A cold sneer came to the face of Gabriel Druse.  "The way beneath the
trees!" he growled.  "The way of the open road is enough.  The way
beneath the trees is the way of the thief, and the skill of the horse is
the skill to cheat."

"There is no other way.  It has been the way of the Romany since the time
of Timur Beg and centuries beyond Timur, so it is told.  One man and all
men must do as the tribe has done since the beginning."

The old man pulled at his beard angrily.  "You do not talk like a Romany,
but like a Gorgio of the schools."

The young man's manner became more confident as he replied.  "Thinking on
what was to come to me, I read in the books as the Gorgio reads.  I sat
in my tent and worked with a pen; I saw in the printed sheets what the
world was doing every day.  This I did because of what was to come."

"And have you read of me in the printed sheets?  Did they tell you where
I was to be found?" Gabriel Druse's eyes were angry, his manner was
authoritative.

The young man stretched out his hands eloquently.  "Hail and blessing, my
Ry, was there need of printed pages to tell me that?  Is not everything
known of the Ry to the Romany people without the written or printed
thing?  How does the wind go?  How does the star sweep across the sky?
Does not the whisper pass as the lightning flashes?  Have you forgotten
all, my Ry?  Is there a Romany camp at Scutari?  Shall it not know what
is the news of the Bailies of Scotland and the Caravans by the Tagus?  It
is known always where my lord is.  All the Romanys everywhere know it,
and many hundreds have come hither from overseas.  They are east, they
are south, they are west."

He made gesture towards these three points of the compass.  A dark frown
came upon the old man's forehead.  "I ordered that none should seek to
follow, that I be left in peace till my pilgrimage was done.  Even as the
first pilgrims of our people in the days of Timur Beg in India, so I have
come forth from among you all till the time be fulfilled."

There was a crafty look in the old man's eyes as he spoke, and ages of
dubious reasoning and purpose showed in their velvet depths.

"No one has sought me but you in all these years," he continued.  "Who
are you that you should come?  I did not call, and there was my command
that none should call to me."

A bolder look grew in the other's face.  His carriage gained in ease.
"There is trouble everywhere--in Italy, in Spain, in France, in England,
in Russia, in mother India"--he made a gesture of salutation and bowed
low--"and our rites and mysteries are like water spilt upon the ground.
If the hand be cut off, how shall the body move?  That is how it is.  You
are vanished, my lord, and the body dies."

The old man plucked his beard again fiercely and his words came with
guttural force.  "That is fool's talk.  In the past I was never
everywhere at once.  When I was in Russia, I was not in Greece; when I
was in England, I was not in Portugal.  I was always 'vanished' from one
place to another, yet the body lived."

"But your word was passed along the roads everywhere, my Ry.  Your tongue
was not still from sunrise to the end of the day.  Your call was heard
always, now here, now there, and the Romanys were one; they held
together."

The old man's face darkened still more and his eyes flashed fire.  "These
are lies you are telling, and they will choke you, my Romany 'chal'.  Am
I deceived, I who have known more liars than any man under the sky?  Am I
to be fooled, who have seen so many fools in their folly?  There is
roguery in you, or I have never seen roguery."

"I am a true Romany, my Ry," the other answered with an air of courage
and a little defiance also.

"You are a rogue and a liar, that is sure.  These wailings are your own.
The Romany goes on his way as he has gone these hundreds of years.  If I
am silent, my people will wait until I speak again; if they see me not
they will wait till I enter their camps once more.  Why are you here?
Speak, rogue and liar."  The wrathful old man, sure in his reading of the
youth, towered above him commandingly.  It almost seemed as though he
would do him bodily harm, so threatening was his attitude, but the young
Romany raised his head, and with a note of triumph said:

"I have come for my own, as it is my right."

"What is your own?"

"What has been yours until now, my Ry."

A grey look stole slowly up the strong face of the exiled leader, for his
mind suddenly read the truth behind the young man's confident words.

"What is mine is always mine," he answered roughly.  "Speak!  What is it
I have that you come for?"

The young man braced himself and put a hand upon his lips.  "I come for
your daughter, my Ry."  The old man suddenly regained his composure, and
authority spoke in his bearing and his words.  "What have you to do with
my daughter?"

"She was married to me when I was seven years of age, as my Ry knows.
I am the son of Lemuel Fawe--Jethro Fawe is my name.  For three thousand
pounds it was so arranged.  On his death-bed three thousand pounds did
my father give to you for this betrothal.  I was but a child, yet I
remembered, and my kinsmen remembered, for it is their honour also.  I am
the son of Lemuel Fawe, the husband of Fleda, daughter of Gabriel Druse,
King and Duke and Earl of all the Romanys; and I come for my own."

Something very like a sigh of relief came from Gabriel Druse's lips, but
the anger in his face did not pass, and a rigid pride made the distance
between them endless.  He looked like a patriarch giving judgment as he
raised his hand and pointed with a menacing finger at Jethro Fawe, his
Romany subject--and, according to the laws of the Romany tribes, his son-
in-law.  It did not matter that the girl--but three years of age when it
happened--had no memory of the day when the chiefs and great people
assembled outside the tent of Lemuel Fawe when he lay dying, and, by the
simple act of stepping over a branch of hazel, the two children were
married: if Romany law and custom were to abide, then the two now were
man and wife.  Did not Lemuel Fawe, the old-time rival of Gabriel Druse
for the kinship of the Romanys, the claimant whose family had been rulers
of the Romanys for generations before the Druses gained ascendancy--did
not Fawe, dying, seek to secure for his son by marriage what he had
failed to get for himself by other means?

All these things had at one time been part of Gabriel Druse's covenant of
life, until one year in England, when Fleda, at twelve years of age, was
taken ill and would have died, but that a great lady descended upon their
camp, took the girl to her own house, and there nursed and tended her,
giving her the best medical aid the world could produce, so that the girl
lived, and with her passionate nature loved the Lady Barrowdale as she
might have loved her own mother, had that mother lived and she had ever
known her.  And when the Lady Barrowdale sickened and died of the same
sickness which had nearly been her own death, the promise she made then
overrode all other covenants made for her.  She had promised the great
lady who had given her own widowed, childless life for her own, that she
would not remain a Gipsy, that she would not marry a Gipsy, but that if
ever she gave herself to any man it would be to a Gorgio, a European, who
travelled oftenest "the open road" leading to his own door.  The years
which had passed since those tragic days in Gloucestershire had seen the
shadows of that dark episode pass, but the pledge had remained; and
Gabriel Druse had kept his word to the dead, because of the vow made to
the woman who had given her life for the life of a Romany lass.

The Romany tribes of all the nations did not know why their Ry had hidden
himself in the New World; they did not know that the girl had for ever
forsworn their race, and would never become head of all the Romanys,
solving the problem of the rival dynasties by linking her life with that
of Jethro Fawe.  But Jethro Fawe had come to claim his own.

Now Gabriel Druse's eyes followed his own menacing finger with sharp
insistence.  In the past such a look had been in his eyes when he had
sentenced men to death.  They had not died by the gallows or the sword or
the bullet, but they had died as commanded, and none had questioned his
decree.  None asked where or how the thing was done when a fire sprang up
in a field, or a quarry, or on a lonely heath or hill-top, and on the
pyre were all the belongings of the condemned, being resolved into dust
as their owner had been made earth again.

"Son of Lemuel Fawe," the old man said, his voice rough with authority,
"but that you are of the Blood, you should die now for this disobedience.
When the time is fulfilled, I will return.  Until then, my daughter and I
are as those who have no people.  Begone!  Nothing that is here belongs
to you.  Begone, and come no more!"

"I have come for my own--for my Romany 'chi', and I will not go without
her.  I am blood of the Blood, and she is mine."

"You have not seen her," said the old man craftily, and fighting hard
against the wrath consuming him, though he liked the young man's spirit.
"She has changed.  She is no longer Romany."

"I have seen her, and her beauty is like the rose and the palm."

"When have you seen her since the day before the tent of Lemuel Fawe now
seventeen years ago?"  There was an uneasy note in the commanding tone.

"I have seen her three times of late, and the last time I saw her was an
hour or so since, when she rode the Rapids of Carillon."

The old man started, his lips parted, but for a moment he did not speak.
At last words came.  "The Rapids--speak.  What have you heard, Jethro,
son of Lemuel?"

"I did not hear, I saw her shoot the Rapids.  I ran to follow.  At
Carillon I saw her arrive.  She was in the arms of a Gorgio of Lebanon--
Ingolby is his name."

A malediction burst from Gabriel Druse's lips, words sharp and terrible
in their intensity.  For the first time since they had met the young man
blanched.  The savage was alive in the giant.

"Speak.  Tell all," Druse said, with hands clenching.

Swiftly the young man told all he had seen, and described how he had run
all the way--four miles--from Carillon, arriving before Fleda and her
Indian escort.

He had hardly finished his tale, shrinking, as he told it, from the
fierceness of his chief, when a voice called from the direction of the
house.

"Father--father," it cried.

A change passed over the old man's face.  It cleared as the face of the
sun clears when a cloud drives past and is gone.  The transformation was
startling.  Without further glance at his companion, he moved swiftly
towards the house.  Once more Fleda's voice called, and before he could
answer they were face to face.

She stood radiant and elate, and seemed not apprehensive of disfavour or
reproach.  Behind her was Tekewani and his braves.

"You have heard?" she asked reading her father's face.

"I have heard.  Have you no heart?" he answered.  "If the Rapids had
drowned you!"

She came close to him and ran her fingers through his beard tenderly.
"I was not born to be drowned," she said softly.

Now that she was a long distance from Ingolby, the fact that a man had
held her in his arms left no shadow on her face.  Ingolby was now only
part of her triumph of the Rapids.  She tossed a hand affectionately
towards Tekewani and his braves.

"How!" said Gabriel Druse, and made a gesture of salutation to the
Indian chief.

"How!" answered Tekewani, and raised his arm high in response.  An
instant afterwards Tekewani and his followers were gone their ways.

Suddenly Fleda's eyes rested on the young Romany who was now standing at
a little distance away.  Apprehension came to her face.  She felt her
heart stand still and her hands grow cold, she knew not why.  But she saw
that the man was a Romany.

Her father turned sharply.  A storm gathered in his face once more, and a
murderous look came into his eyes.

"Who is he?" Fleda asked, scarce above a whisper, and she noted the
insistent, amorous look of the stranger.

"He says he is your husband," answered her father harshly.




CHAPTER V

"BY THE RIVER STARZKE .  .  .  IT WAS SO DONE"

There was absolute silence for a moment.  The two men fixed their gaze
upon the girl.  The fear which had first come to her face passed
suddenly, and a will, new-born and fearless, possessed it.  Yesterday
this will had been only a trembling, undisciplined force, but since then
she had been passed through the tests which her own soul, or Destiny, had
set for her, and she had emerged a woman, confident and understanding, if
tremulous.  In days gone by her adventurous, lonely spirit had driven her
to the prairies, savagely riding her Indian pony through the streets of
Manitou and out on the North Trail, or south through coulees, or westward
into the great woods, looking for what: she never found.

Her spirit was no longer the vague thing driving here and there with
pleasant torture.  It had found freedom and light; what the Romany folk
call its own 'tan', its home, though it be but home of each day's trek.
That wild spirit was now a force which understood itself in a new if
uncompleted way.  It was a sword free from its scabbard.

The adventure of the Carillon Rapids had been a kind of deliverance of an
unborn thing which, desiring the overworld, had found it.  A few hours
ago the face of Ingolby, as she waked to consciousness in his arms, had
taught her something suddenly; and the face of Felix Marchand had taught
her even more.  Something new and strange had happened to her, and her
father's uncouth but piercing mind saw the change in her.  Her quick,
fluttering moods, her careless, undirected energy, her wistful
waywardness, had of late troubled and vexed him, called on capacities in
him which he did not possess; but now he was suddenly aware that she had
emerged from passionate inconsistencies and in some good sense had found
herself.

Like a wind she had swept out of childhood into a woman's world where the
eyes saw things unseen before, a world how many thousand leagues in the
future; and here in a flash, also, she was swept like a wind back again
to a time before there was even conscious childhood--a dim, distant time
when she lived and ate and slept for ever in the field or the vale, in
the quarry, beside the hedge, or on the edge of harvest-fields; when she
was carried in strong arms, or sat in the shelter of a man's breast as a
horse cantered down a glade, under an ardent sky, amid blooms never seen
since then.  She was whisked back into that distant, unreal world by the
figure of a young Romany standing beside a spruce-tree, and by her
father's voice which uttered the startling words: "He says he is your
husband!"

Indignation and a bitter pride looked out of her eyes, as she heard the
preposterous claim--as though she were some wild dweller of the jungle
being called by her savage mate back to the lair she had forsaken.

"Since when were you my husband?" she asked Jethro Fawe composedly.

Her quiet scorn brought a quiver to his spirit; for he was of a people to
whom anger and passion were part of every relationship of life, its
stimulus and its recreation, its expression of the individual.

His eyelids trembled, but he drew himself together.  "Seventeen years ago
by the River Starzke in the Roumelian country, it was so done," he
replied stubbornly.  "You were sealed to me, as my Ry here knows, and as
you will remember, if you fix your mind upon it.  It was beyond the city
of Starzke three leagues, under the brown scarp of the Dragbad Hills.
It was in the morning when the sun was by a quarter of its course.  It
happened before my father's tent, the tent of Lemuel Fawe.  There you and
I were sealed before our Romany folk.  For three thousand pounds which my
father gave to your father, you--"

With a swift gesture she stopped him.  Walking close up to him, she
looked him full in the eyes.  There was a contemptuous pride in her face
which forced him to lower his eyelids sulkily.

He would have understood a torrent of words--to him that would have
regulated the true value of the situation; but this disdainful composure
embarrassed him.  He had come prepared for trouble and difficulty, but he
had rather more determination than most of his class and people, and his
spirit of adventure was high.  Now that he had seen the girl who was his
own according to Romany law, he felt he had been a hundred times
justified in demanding her from her father, according to the pledge and
bond of so many years ago.  He had nothing to lose but his life, and he
had risked that before.  This old man, the head of the Romany folk, had
the bulk of the fortune which had been his own father's and he had the
logic of lucre which is the most convincing of all logic.  Yet with the
girl holding his eyes commandingly, he was conscious that he was asking
more than a Romany lass to share his 'tan', to go wandering from Romany
people to Romany people, king and queen of them all when Gabriel Druse
had passed away.  Fleda Druse would be a queen of queens, but there was
that queenliness in her now which was not Romany--something which was
Gorgio, which was caste, which made a shivering distance between them.

As he had spoken, she saw it all as he described it.  Vaguely, cloudily,
the scene passed before her.  Now and again in the passing years had
filmy impressions floated before her mind of a swift-flowing river and
high crags, and wooded hills and tents and horsemen and shouting, and a
lad that held her hand, and banners waved over their heads, and galloping
and shouting, and then a sudden quiet, and many men and women gathered
about a tent, and a wailing thereafter.  After which, in her faint
remembrance, there seemed to fall a mist, and a space of blankness, and
then a starting up from a bed, and looking out of the doors of a tent,
where many people gathered about a great fire, whose flames licked the
heavens, and seemed to devour a Romany tent standing alone with a Romany
wagon full of its household things.

As Jethro Fawe had spoken, the misty, elusive visions had become living
memories, and she knew that he had spoken the truth, and that these
fleeting things were pictures of her sealing to Jethro Fawe and the death
of Lemuel Fawe, and the burning of all that belonged to him in that last
ritual of Romany farewell to the dead.

She knew now that she had been bargained for like any slave--for three
thousand pounds.  How far away it all seemed, how barbaric and revolting!
Yet here it all was rolling up like a flood to her feet, to bear her away
into a past with its sordidness and vagabondage, however gilded and
graded above the lowest vagabondage.

Here at Manitou she had tasted a free life which was not vagabondage, the
passion of the open road which was not an elaborate and furtive evasion
of the law and a defiance of social ostracism.  Here she and her father
moved in an atmosphere of esteem touched by mystery, but not by
suspicion; here civilization in its most elastic organization and
flexible conventions, had laid its hold upon her, had done in this
expansive, loosely knitted social system what could never have been
accomplished in a great city--in London, Vienna, Rome, or New York.  She
had had here the old free life of the road, so full of the scent of deep
woods--the song of rivers, the carol of birds, the murmuring of trees,
the mysterious and devout whisperings of the night, the happy communings
of stray peoples meeting and passing, the gaiety and gossip of the
market-place, the sound of church bells across a valley, the storms and
wild lightnings and rushing torrents, the cries of frightened beasts, the
wash and rush of rain, the sharp pain of frost, and the agonies of some
lost traveller rescued from the wide inclemency, the soft starlight
after, the balm of the purged air, and "rosy-fingered morn" blinking
blithely at the world.  The old life of the open road she had had here
without anything of its shame, its stigma, and its separateness, its
discordance with the stationary forces of law and organized community.

Wild moments there had been of late years when she longed for the faces
of Romany folk gathered about the fire, while some Romany 'pral' drew all
hearts with the violin or the dulcimer.  When Ambrose or Gilderoy or
Christo responded to the pleadings of some sentimental lass, and sang to
the harpist's strings:

              "Cold blows the wind over my true love,
               Cold blow the drops of rain;
               I never, never had but one sweetheart;
               In the green wood he was slain,"

and to cries of "Again!  'Ay bor'!  again!" the blackeyed lover,
hypnotizing himself into an ecstasy, poured out race and passion and war
with the law, in the true Gipsy rant which is sung from Transylvania to
Yetholm or Carnarvon or Vancouver:

              "Time was I went to my true love,
               Time was she came to me--"

The sharp passion which moved her now as she stood before Jethro Fawe
would not have been so acute yesterday; but to-day--she had lain in a
Gorgio's arms to-day; and though he was nothing to her, he was still a
Gorgio of Gorgios; and this man before her--her husband--was at best but
a man of the hedges and the byre and the clay-pit, the quarry and the
wood; a nomad with no home, nothing that belonged to what she was now a
part of--organized, collective existence, the life of the house-dweller,
not the life of the 'tan', the 'koppa', and the 'vellgouris'--the tent,
the blanket, and the fair.

"I was never bought, and I was never sold," she said to Jethro Fawe at
last "not for three thousand pounds, not in three thousand years.  Look
at me well, and see whether you think it was so, or ever could be so.
Look at me well, Jethro Fawe."

"You are mine--it was so done seventeen years ago," he answered,
defiantly and tenaciously.

"I was three years old, seventeen years ago," she returned quietly, but
her eyes forced his to look at her, when they turned away as though their
light hurt him.

"It is no matter," he rejoined.  "It is the way of our people.  It has
been so, and it will be so while there is a Romany tent standing or
moving on."

In his rage Gabriel Druse could keep silence no longer.

"Rogue, what have you to say of such things?" he growled.  "I am the
head of all.  I pass the word, and things are so and so.  By long and by
last, if I pass the word that you shall sleep the sleep, it will be so,
my Romany 'chal'."

His daughter stretched out her hand to stop further speech from her
father--"Hush!" she said maliciously, "he has come a long way for
naught.  It will be longer going back.  Let him have his say.  It is his
capital.  He has only breath and beauty."

Jethro shrank from the sharp irony of her tongue as he would not have
shrunk before her father's violence.  Biting rejection was in her tones.
He knew dimly that the thing he shrank from belonged to nothing Romany in
her, but to that scornful pride of the Gorgios which had kept the Romany
outside the social pale.

"Only breath and beauty!" she had said, and that she could laugh at his
handsomeness was certain proof that it was not wilfulness which rejected
his claims.  Now there was rage in his heart greater than had been in
that of Gabriel Druse.

"I have come a long way for a good thing," he said with head thrown back,
"and if 'breath and beauty' is all I bring, yet that is because what my
father had in his purse has made my 'Ry' rich"--he flung a hand out
towards Gabriel Druse--"and because I keep to the open road as my father
did, true to my Romany blood.  The wind and the sun and the fatness of
the field have made me what I am, and never in my life had I an ache or
a pain.  You have the breath and the beauty, too, but you have the gold
also; and what you are and what you have is mine by the Romany law, and
it will come to me, by long and by last."

Fleda turned quietly to her father.  "If it is true concerning the three
thousand pounds, give it to him and let him go.  It will buy him what he
would never get by what he is."

The old man flashed a look of anger upon her.  "He came empty, he shall
go empty.  Against my commands, his insolence has brought him here.  And
let him keep his eyes skinned, or he shall have no breath with which to
return.  I am Gabriel Druse, lord over all the Romany people in all the
world from Teheran to San Diego, and across the seas and back again; and
my will shall be done."

He paused, reflecting for a moment, though his fingers opened and shut in
anger.  "This much I will do," he added.  "When I return to my people I
will deal with this matter in the place where Lemuel Fawe died.  By the
place called Starzke, I will come to reckoning, and then and then only."

"When?" asked the young man eagerly.

Gabriel Druse's eyes flashed.  "When I return as I will to return."  Then
suddenly he added: "This much I will say, it shall be before--"

The girl stopped him.  "It shall be when it shall be.  Am I a chattel to
be bartered by any will except my own?  I will have naught to do with any
Romany law.  Not by Starzke shall the matter be dealt with, but here by
the River Sagalac.  This Romany has no claim upon me.  My will is my own;
I myself and no other shall choose my husband, and he will never be a
Romany."

The young man's eyes suddenly took on a dreaming, subtle look, submerging
the sulkiness which had filled him.  Twice he essayed to speak, but
faltered.  At last, with an air, he said:

"For seventeen years I have kept the faith.  I was sealed to you, and
I hold by the sealing.  Wherever you went, it was known to me.  In my
thoughts I followed.  I read the Gorgio books; I made ready for this day.
I saw you as you were that day by Starzke, like the young bird in the
nest; and the thought of it was with me always.  I knew that when I saw
you again the brown eyes would be browner, the words at the lips would be
sweeter--and so it is.  All is as I dreamed for these long years.  I was
ever faithful.  By night and day I saw you as you were when Romany law
made you mine for ever.  I looked forward to the day when I would take
you to my 'tan', and there we two would--"

A flush sprang suddenly to Fleda Druse's face, then slowly faded, leaving
it pale and indignant.  Sharply she interrupted him.

"They should have called you Ananias," she said scornfully.  "My father
has called you a rogue, and now I know you are one.  I have not heard,
but I know--I know that you have had a hundred loves, and been true to
none.  The red scarfs you have given to the Romany and the Gorgio fly-
aways would make a tent for all the Fawes in all the world."

At first he flung up his head in astonishment at her words, then, as she
proceeded, a flush swept across his face and his eyes filled up again
with sullenness.  She had read the real truth concerning him.  He had
gone too far.  He had been convincing while he had said what was true,
but her instinct had suddenly told her what he was.  Her perception had
pierced to the core of his life--a vagabondage, a little more gilded than
was common among his fellows, made possible by his position as the
successor to her father, and by the money of Lemuel Fawe which he had
dissipated.

He had come when all his gold was gone to do the one bold thing which
might at once restore his fortunes.  He had brains, and he knew now that
his adventure was in grave peril.

He laughed in his anger.  "Is only the Gorgio to embrace the Romany lass?
One fondled mine to-day in his arms down there at Carillon.  That's the
way it goes!  The old song tells the end of it:

             "'But the Gorgio lies 'neath the beech-wood tree;
               He'll broach my tan no more;
               And my love she sleeps afar from me,
               But near to the churchyard door.

               'Time was I went to my true love,
               Time was she came to me--'"

He got no farther.  Gabriel Druse was on him, gripping his arms so tight
to his body that his swift motion to draw a weapon was frustrated.  The
old man put out all his strength, a strength which in his younger days
was greater than any two men in any Romany camp, and the "breath and
beauty" of Jethro Fawe grew less and less.  His face became purple and
distorted, his body convulsed, then limp, and presently he lay on the
ground with a knee on his chest and fierce, bony hands at his throat.

"Don't kill him--father, don't!" cried the girl, laying restraining
hands on the old man's shoulders.  He withdrew his hands and released the
body from his knee.  Jethro Fawe lay still.

"Is he dead?" she whispered, awestricken.  "Dead?"  The old man felt the
breast of the unconscious man.  He smiled grimly.  "He is lucky not to be
dead."

"What shall we do?" the girl asked again with a white face.

The old man stooped and lifted the unconscious form in his arms as though
it was that of a child.  "Where are you going?" she asked anxiously, as
he moved away.

"To the hut in the juniper wood," he answered.  She watched till he had
disappeared with his limp burden into the depths of the trees.  Then she
turned and went slowly towards the house.




CHAPTER VI

THE UNGUARDED FIRES

The public knew well that Ingolby had solved his biggest business
problem, because three offices of three railways--one big and two small--
suddenly became merged under his control.  At which there was rejoicing
at Lebanon, followed by dismay and indignation at Manitou, for one of the
smaller merged railways had its offices there, and it was now removed to
Lebanon; while several of the staff, having proved cantankerous, were
promptly retired.  As they were French Canadians, their retirement became
a public matter in Manitou and begot fresh quarrel between the rival
towns.

Ingolby had made a tactical mistake in at once removing the office of the
merged railway from Manitou, and he saw it quickly.  It was not possible
to put the matter right at once, however.

There had already been collision between his own railway-men and the
rivermen from Manitou, whom Felix Marchand had bribed to cause trouble:
two Manitou men had been seriously hurt, and feeling ran high.  Ingolby's
eyes opened wide when he saw Marchand's ugly game.  He loathed the
dissolute fellow, but he realized now that his foe was a factor to be
reckoned with, for Marchand had plenty of money as well as a bad nature.
He saw he was in for a big fight with Manitou, and he had to think it
out.

So this time he went pigeon-shooting.

He got his pigeons, and the slaughter did him good.  As though in keeping
with the situation, he shot on both sides of the Sagalac with great good
luck, and in the late afternoon sent his Indian lad on ahead to Lebanon
with the day's spoil, while he loitered through the woods, a gun slung in
the hollow of his arm.  He had walked many miles, but there was still a
spring to his step and he hummed an air with his shoulders thrown back
and his hat on the back of his head.  He had had his shooting, he had
done his thinking, and he was pleased with himself.  He had shaped his
homeward course so that it would bring him near to Gabriel Druse's house.

He had seen Fleda only twice since the episode at Carillon, and met her
only once, and that was but for a moment at a Fete for the hospital at
Manitou, and with other people present--people who lay in wait for crumbs
of gossip.

Since the running of the Rapids, Fleda had filled a larger place in the
eyes of Manitou and Lebanon.  She had appealed to the Western mind: she
had done a brave physical thing.  Wherever she went she was made
conscious of a new attitude towards herself, a more understanding
feeling.  At the Fete when she and Ingolby met face to face, people had
immediately drawn round them curious and excited.  These could not
understand why the two talked so little, and had such an every-day manner
with each other.  Only old Mother Thibadeau, who had a heart that sees,
caught a look in Fleda's eyes, a warm deepening of colour, a sudden
embarrassment, which she knew how to interpret.

"See now, monseigneur," she said to Monseigneur Lourde, nodding towards
Fleda and Ingolby, "there would be work here soon for you or Father
Bidette if they were not two heretics."

"Is she a heretic, then, madame?" asked the old white-headed priest, his
eyes quizzically following Fleda.

She is not a Catholic, and she must be a heretic, that's certain," was
the reply.

"I'm not so sure," mused the priest.  Smiling, he raised his hat as he
caught Fleda's eyes.  He made as if to go towards her, but something in
her look held him back.  He realized that Fleda did not wish to speak
with him, and that she was even hurrying away from her father, who
lumbered through the crowd as though unconscious of them all.

Presently Monseigneur Lourde saw Fleda leave the Fete and take the road
towards home.  There was a sense of excitement in her motions, and he
also had seen that tremulous, embarrassed look in her eyes.  It puzzled
him.  He did not connect it wholly with Ingolby as Madame Thibadeau had
done.  He had lived so long among primitive people that he was more
accustomed to study faces than find the truth from words, and he had
always been conscious that this girl, educated and even intellectual, was
at heart as primitive as the wildest daughter of the tepees of the North.
There was also in her something of that mystery which belongs to the
universal itinerary--that cosmopolitan something which is the native
human.

"She has far to go," the priest said to himself as he turned to greet
Ingolby with a smile, bright and shy, but gravely reproachful, too.

This happened on the day before the collision between the railway-men and
the river-drivers, and the old priest already knew what trouble was
afoot.

There was little Felix Marchand did which was hidden from him.  He made
his way to Ingolby to warn him.

As Ingolby now walked in the woods towards Gabriel Druse's house, he
recalled one striking phrase used by the aged priest in reference to the
closing of the railway offices.

"When you strike your camp, put out the fires," was the aphorism.

Ingolby stopped humming to himself as the words came to his memory again.
Bending his head in thought for a moment, he stood still, cogitating.

"The dear old fellow was right," he said presently aloud with uplifted
head.  "I struck camp, but I didn't put out the fires.  There's a lot of
that in life."

That is what had happened also to Gabriel Druse and his daughter.
They had struck camp, but had not put out the camp-fires.  That which
had been done by the River Starzke came again in its appointed time.
The untended, unguarded fire may spread devastation and ruin, following
with angry freedom the marching feet of those who builded it.

"Yes, you've got to put out your fires when you quit the bivouac,"
continued Ingolby aloud, as he gazed ahead of him through the opening
greenery, beyond which lay Gabriel Druse's home.  Where he was the woods
were thick, and here and there on either side it was almost impenetrable.
Few people ever came through this wood.  It belonged in greater part to
Gabriel Druse, and in lesser part to the Hudson's Bay Company and the
Government; and as the land was not valuable till it was cleared, and
there was plenty of prairie land to be had, from which neither stick nor
stump must be removed, these woods were very lonely.  Occasionally a
trapper or a sportsman wandered through them, but just here where Ingolby
was none ever loitered.  It was too thick for game, there was no roadway
leading anywhere, but only an overgrown path, used in the old days by
Indians.  It was this path which Ingolby trod with eager steps.

Presently, as he stood still at sight of a ground-hog making for its
hiding-place, he saw a shadow fall across the light breaking through the
trees some distance in front of him.  It was Fleda.  She had not seen
him, and she came hurrying towards where he was with head bent, a
brightly-ribboned hat swinging in her fingers.  She seemed part of the
woods, its wild simplicity, its depth, its colour-already Autumn was
crimsoning the leaves, touching them with amber tints, making the
woodland warm and kind.  She wore a dress of golden brown which matched
her hair, and at her throat was a black velvet ribbon with a brooch of
antique paste which flashed the light like diamonds, but more softly.

Suddenly, as she came on, she stopped and raised her head in a listening
attitude, her eyes opening wide as if listening, too--it was as though
she heard with them as well; alive to catch sounds which evaded capture.
She was like some creature of an ancient wood with its own secret and
immemorial history which the world could never know.  There was that in
her face which did not belong to civilization or to that fighting world
of which Ingolby was so eager a factor.  All the generations of the wood
and road, the combe and the river, the quarry and the secluded boscage
were in her look.  There was that about her which was at once elusive and
primevally real.

She was not of those who would be lost in the dust of futility.  Whatever
she was, she was an independent atom in the mass of the world's breeding.
Perhaps it was consciousness of the dynamic quality in the girl, her
nearness to naked nature, which made Madame Bulteel say that she would
"have a history."

If she got twisted as she came wayfaring, if her mind became possessed of
a false passion or purpose which she thought a true one, then tragedy
would await her.  Yet in this quiet wood so near to the centuries that
were before Adam was, she looked like a spirit of comedy listening till
the Spirit of the Wood should break the silence.

Ingolby felt his blood beat faster.  He had a feeling that he was looking
at a wood-nymph who might flash out of his vision as a mere fantasy of
the mind.  There shot through him the strangest feeling that if she were
his, he would be linked with something alien to the world of which he
was.

Yet, recalling the day at Carillon when her cheek lay on his shoulder and
her warm breast was pressed unresistingly against him, as he lifted her
from his boat, he knew that he would have to make the hardest fight of
his life if he meant not to have more of her than this brief
acquaintance, so touched by sensation and romance.  He was, maybe,
somewhat sensational; his career had, even in its present restricted
compass, been spectacular; but romance, with its reveries and its
moonshinings, its impulses and its blind adventures, had not been any
part of his existence.

Hers were not the first red lips which, voluntarily or involuntarily, had
invited him; nor hers the first eyes which had sparkled to his glances;
and this triumphant Titian head of hers was not the only one he had seen.

When he had taken her hand at the Hospital Fete, her fingers, long and
warm and fine, had folded round his own with a singular confidence, an
involuntary enclosing friendliness; and now as he watched her listening
--did she hear something?--he saw her hand stretch out as though
commanding silence, the "hush!" of an alluring gesture.

This assuredly was not the girl who had run the Carillon Rapids, for that
adventuress was full of a vital force like a man's, and this girl had the
evanishing charm of a dryad.

Suddenly a change passed over her.  She was as one who had listened and
had caught the note of song for which she waited; but her face clouded,
and the rapt look gave way to an immediate distress.  The fantasy of the
wood-nymph underwent translation in Ingolby's mind; she was now like a
mortal, who, having been transformed, at immortal dictate was returning
to mortal state again.

To heighten the illusion, he thought he heard faint singing in the depths
of the wood.  He put his hands to his ears for a moment, and took them
away again to make sure that it was really singing and not his
imagination; and when he saw Fleda's face again, there was fresh evidence
that his senses had not deceived him.  After all, it was not strange that
some one should be singing in that deepest wood beyond.

Now Fleda moved forward towards where he stood, quickening her footsteps
as though remembering something she must do.  He stepped out into the
path and came to meet her.  She heard his footsteps, saw him, and stood
still abruptly.

She did not make a sound, but a hand went to her bosom quickly, as though
to quiet her heart or to steady herself.  He had broken suddenly upon her
intent thoughts, he had startled her as she had been seldom startled, for
all her childhood training had been towards self-possession before
surprise and danger.

"This is not your side of the Sagalac," she said with a half-smile,
regaining composure.

"That is in dispute," he answered gaily.  "I want to belong to both sides
of the Sagalac, I want both sides to belong to each other so that either
side shall not be my side or your side, or--"

"Or Monsieur Felix Marchand's side," she interrupted meaningly.

"Oh, he's on the outside!" snapped the fighter, with a hardening mouth.

She did not reply at once, but put her hat on, and tied the ribbons
loosely under her chin, looking thoughtfully into the distance.

"Is that the Western slang for saying he belongs nowhere?" she asked.

"Nowhere here," he answered with a grim twist to the corner of his mouth,
his eyes half-closing with sulky meaning.  "Won't you sit down?" he
added quickly, in a more sprightly tone, for he saw she was about to move
on.  He motioned towards a log lying beside the path and kicked some
branches out of the way.

After slight hesitation she sat down, burying her shoes in the fallen
leaves.

"You don't like Felix Marchand?" she remarked presently.

"No.  Do you?"

She met his eyes squarely--so squarely that his own rather lost their
courage, and he blinked more quickly than is needed with a healthy eye.
He had been audacious, but he had not surprised the garrison.

"I have no deep reason for liking or disliking him, and you have," she
answered firmly; yet her colour rose slightly, and he thought he had
never seen skin that looked so like velvet-creamy, pink velvet.

"You seemed to think differently at Carillon not long ago," he returned.

"That was an accident," she answered calmly.  "He was drunk, and that is
for forgetting--always."

"Always!  Have you seen many men drunk?" he asked quickly.  He did not
mean to be quizzical, but his voice sounded so, and she detected it.

"Yes, many," she answered with a little ring of defiance in her tone--
"many, often."

"Where?" he queried recklessly.

"In Lebanon," she retorted.  "In Lebanon--your side."

How different she seemed from a few moments ago when she stood listening
like a nymph for the song of the Spirit of the Wood!  Now she was gay,
buoyant, with a chamois-like alertness and a beaming vigour.

"Now I know what 'blind drunk' means," he replied musingly.  "In Manitou
when men get drunk, the people get astigmatism and can't see the
tangledfooted stagger."

"It means that the pines of Manitou are straighter than the cedars of
Lebanon," she remarked.

"And the pines of Manitou have needles," he rejoined, meaning to give her
the victory.

"Is my tongue as sharp as that?" she asked, amusement in her eyes.

"So sharp I can feel the point when I can't see it," he retorted.

"I'm glad of that," she replied with an affectation of conceit.  "Of
course if you live in Lebanon you need surgery to make you feel a point."

"I give in--you have me," he remarked.

"You give in to Manitou?" she asked provokingly.  "Certainly not--only
to you.  I said, 'You have me.'"

"Ah, you give in to that which won't hurt you--"

"Wouldn't you hurt me?" he asked in a softening tone.

"You only play with words," she answered with sudden gravity.  "Hurt you?
I owe you what I can not pay back.  I owe you my life; but as nothing can
be given in exchange for a life, I cannot pay you."

"But like may be given for like," he rejoined in a tone suddenly full of
meaning.

"Again you are playing with words--and with me," she answered brusquely,
and a little light of anger dawned in her eyes.  Did he think that he
could say a thing of that sort to her--when he pleased?  Did he think
that because he had done her a great service, he could say casually what
belonged only to the sacred moments of existence?  She looked at him with
rising indignation, but there suddenly came to her the conviction that he
had not spoken with affronting gallantry, but that for him the moment had
a gravity not to be marred by the place or the circumstance.

"I beg your pardon if I spoke hastily," he answered presently.  "Yet
there's many a true word spoken in jest."

There was a moment's silence.  She realized that he was drawn to her, and
that the attraction was not alone due to his having saved her at
Carillon; that he was not taking advantage of the thing which must ever
be a bond between them, whatever came of life.  When she had seen him at
the Hospital Fete, a feeling had rushed over her that he had got nearer
to her than any man had ever done.  Then--even then, she felt the thing
which all lovers, actual, or in the making, feel--that they must do
something for the being who to them is more than all else and all others.
She was not in love with Ingolby.  How could she be in love with this man
she had seen but a few times--this Gorgio.  Why was it that even as they
talked together now, she felt the real, true distance between them--of
race, of origin, of history, of life, of circumstance?  The hut in the
wood where Gabriel Druse had carried Jethro Fawe was not three hundred
yards away.

She sighed, stirred, and a wild look came in her eyes--a look of
rebellion or of protest.  Presently she recovered herself.  She was a
creature of sudden moods.

"What is it you want to do with Manitou and Lebanon?" she asked after a
pause in which the thoughts of both had travelled far.

"You really wish to know--you don't know?" he asked with sudden
intensity.

She regarded him frankly, smiled, then she laughed outright, showing her
teeth very white and regular and handsome.  The boyish eagerness of his
look, the whimsical twist of his mouth, which always showed when he was
keenly roused--as though everything that really meant anything was part
of a comet-like comedy--had caused her merriment.  All the hidden things
in his face seemed to open out into a swift shrewdness and dry candour
when he was in his mood of "laying all the cards upon the table."

"I don't know," she answered quietly.  "I have heard things, but I should
like to learn the truth from you.  What are your plans?"

Her eyes were burning with inquiry.  She was suddenly brought to the
gateways of a new world.  Plans--what had she or her people to do with
plans!  What Romany ever constructed anything?  What did the building of
a city or a country mean to a Romany 'chal' or a Romany 'chi', they who
lived from field to field, from common to moor, from barn to city wall.
A Romany tent or a Romany camp, with its families, was the whole
territory of their enterprise, designs and patriotism.  They saw the
thousand places where cities could be made, and built their fires on the
sites of them, and camped a day, and were gone, leaving them waiting and
barren as before.  They travelled through the new lands in America from
the fringe of the Arctic to Patagonia, but they raised no roof-tree; they
tilled no acre, opened no market, set up no tabernacle: they had neither
home nor country.

Fleda was the heir of all this, the product of generations of such
vagabondage.  Had the last few years given her the civic sense, the home
sense?  From the influence of the Englishwoman, who had made her forsake
the Romany life, had there come habits of mind in tune with the women of
the Sagalac, who were helping to build so much more than their homes?
Since the incident of the Carillon Rapids she had changed, but what the
change meant was yet in her unopened Book of Revelations.  Yet something
stirred in her which she had never felt before.  She had come of a race
of wayfarers, but the spirit of the builders touched her now.

"What are my plans?"  Ingolby drew along breath of satisfaction.  "Well,
just here where we are will be seen a great thing.  There's the Yukon and
all its gold; there's the Peace River country and all its unploughed
wheat-fields; there's the whole valley of the Sagalac, which alone can
maintain twenty millions of people; there's the East and the British
people overseas who must have bread; there's China and Japan going to
give up rice, and eat the wheaten loaf; there's the U. S. A.  with its
hundred millions of people--it'll be that in a few years--and its
exhausted wheat-fields; and here, right here, is the bread-basket for all
the hungry peoples; and Manitou and Lebanon are the centre of it.  They
will be the distributing centre.  I want to see the base laid right.  I'm
not going to stay here till it all happens, but I want to plan it all so
that it will happen, then I'll go on and do a bigger thing somewhere
else.  These two towns have got to come together; they must play one big
game.  I want to lay the wires for it.  That's why I've got capitalists
to start paper-works, engineering works, a foundry, and a sash-door-and-
blind factory--just the beginning.  That's why I've put two factories on
one side of the river and two on the other."

"Was it really you who started those factories?" she asked
incredulously.

"Of course!  It was part of my plans.  I wasn't foolish enough to build
and run them myself.  I looked for the right people that had the money
and the brains, and I let them sweat--let them sweat it out.  I'm not a
manufacturer; I'm an inventor and a builder.  I built the bridge over the
river; and--"

She nodded.  "Yes, the bridge is good; but they say you are a schemer,"
she added suggestively.

"Certainly.  But if I have schemes which'll do good, I ought to be
supported.  I don't mind what they call me, so long as they don't call me
too late for dinner."

They both laughed.  It was seldom he talked like this, and never had he
talked to such a listener before.  "The merging of the three railways was
a good scheme, and I was the schemer," he continued.  "It might mean
monopoly, but it won't work out that way.  It will simply concentrate
energy and: save elbow-grease.  It will set free capital and capacity for
other things."

"They say there will be fewer men at work, not only in the offices but on
the whole railway system, and they don't like that in Manitou--ah, no,
they don't!" she urged.

"They're right in a sense," he answered.  "But the men will be employed
at other things, which won't represent waste and capital overlapping.
Overlapping capital hits everybody in the end.  But who says all that?
Who raises the cry of 'wolf' in Manitou?"

"A good many people say it now," she answered, "but I think Felix
Marchand said it first.  He is against you, and he is dangerous."

He shrugged a shoulder.  "Oh, if any fool said it, it would be the same!"
he answered.  "That's a fire easily lighted; though it sometimes burns
long and hard."  He frowned, and a fighting look came into his face.

"Then you know all that is working against you in Manitou--working harder
than ever before?"

"I think I do, but I probably don't know all.  Have you any special news
about it?"

"Felix Marchand is spending money among the men.  They are going on
strike on your railways and in the mills."

"What mills--in Manitou?" he asked abruptly.  "In both towns."

He laughed harshly.  "That's a tall order," he said sharply.  "Both
towns--I don't think so, not yet."

"A sympathetic strike is what he calls it," she rejoined.

"Yes, a row over some imagined grievance on the railway, and all the
men in all the factories to strike--that's the new game of the modern
labour agitator!  Marchand has been travelling in France," he added
disdainfully, "but he has brought his goods to the wrong shop.  What do
the priests--what does Monseigneur Lourde say to it all?"

"I am not a Catholic," she replied gravely.  "I've heard, though, that
Monseigneur is trying to stop the trouble.  But--"  She paused.

"Yes--but?" he asked.  "What were you going to say?"

"But there are many roughs in Manitou, and Felix Marchand makes friends
with them.  I don't think the priests will be able to help much in the
end, and if it is to be Manitou against Lebanon, you can't expect a great
deal."

"I never expect more than I get--generally less," he answered grimly;
and he moved the gun about on his knees restlessly, fingering the lock
and the trigger softly.

"I am sure Felix Marchand means you harm," she persisted.

"Personal harm?"

"Yes."

He laughed sarcastically again.  "We are not in Bulgaria or Sicily," he
rejoined, his jaw hardening; "and I can take care of myself.  What makes
you say he means personal harm?  Have you heard anything?"

"No, nothing, but I feel it is so.  That day at the Hospital Fete he
looked at you in a way that told me.  I think such instincts are given
to some people and some races.  You read books--I read people.  I wanted
to warn you, and I do so.  This has been lucky in a way, this meeting.
Please don't treat what I've said lightly.  Your plans are in danger and
you also."  Was the psychic and fortune-telling instinct of the Romany
alive in her and working involuntarily, doing that faithfully which her
people did so faithlessly?  The darkness which comes from intense feeling
had gathered underneath her eyes, and gave them a look of pensiveness not
in keeping with the glow of her perfect health, the velvet of her cheek.

"Would you mind telling me where you got your information?" he asked
presently.

"My father heard here and there, and I, also, and some I got from old
Madame Thibadeau, who is a friend of mine.  I talk with her more than
with any one else in Manitou.  First she taught me how to crochet, but
she teaches me many other things, too."

"I know the old girl by sight.  She is a character.  She would know a
lot, that woman."

He paused, seemed about to speak, hesitated, then after a moment hastily
said: "A minute ago you spoke of having the instinct of your race, or
something like that.  What is your race?  Is it Irish, or--do you mind my
asking?  Your English is perfect, but there is something--something--"

She turned away her head, a flush spreading over her face.  She was
unprepared for the question.  No one had ever asked it directly of her
since they had come to Manitou.  Whatever speculation there had been, she
had never been obliged to tell any one of what race she was.  She spoke
English with no perceptible accent, as she spoke Spanish, Italian,
French, Hungarian and Greek; and there was nothing in her speech marking
her as different from the ordinary Western woman.  Certainly she would
have been considered pure English among the polyglot population of
Manitou.

What must she say?  What was it her duty to say?  She was living the life
of a British woman, she was as much a Gorgio in her daily existence as
this man be side her.  Manitou was as much home--nay, it was a thousand
times more home--than the shifting habitat of the days when they wandered
from the Caspians to John o' Groat's.

For years all traces of the past had been removed as completely as though
the tide had washed over them; for years it had been so, until the
fateful day when she ran the Carillon Rapids.  That day saw her whole
horizon alter; that day saw this man beside her enter on the stage of her
life.  And on that very day, also, came Jethro Fawe out of the Past and
demanded her return.

That had been a day of Destiny.  The old, panting, unrealized,
tempestuous longing was gone.  She was as one who saw danger and faced
it, who had a fight to make and would make it.

What would happen if she told this man that she was a Gipsy--the daughter
of a Gipsy ruler, which was no more than being head of a clan of the
world's transients, the leader of the world's nomads.  Money--her father
had that, at least--much money; got in ways that could not bear the light
at times, yet, as the world counts things, not dishonestly; for more than
one great minister in a notable country in Europe had commissioned him,
more than one ruler and crowned head had used him when "there was trouble
in the Balkans," or the "sick man of Europe" was worse, or the Russian
Bear came prowling.  His service had ever been secret service, when he
lived the life of the caravan and the open highway.  He had no stable
place among the men of all nations, and yet secret rites and mysteries
and a language which was known from Bokhara to Wandsworth, and from
Waikiki to Valparaiso, gave him dignity of a kind, clothed him with
importance.

Yet she wanted to tell this man beside her the whole truth, and see what
he would do.  Would he turn his face away in disgust?  What had she a
right to tell?  She knew well that her father would wish her to keep to
that secrecy which so far had sheltered them--at least until Jethro
Fawe's coming.

At last she turned and looked him in the eyes, the flush gone from her
face.

"I'm not Irish--do I look Irish?" she asked quietly, though her heart
was beating unevenly.

"You look more Irish than anything else, except, maybe, Slav or
Hungarian--or Gipsy," he said admiringly and unwittingly.

"I have Gipsy blood in me," she answered slowly, "but no Irish or
Hungarian blood."

"Gipsy--is that so?" he said spontaneously, as she watched him so
intently that the pulses throbbed at her temples.

A short time ago Fleda might have announced her origin defiantly, now her
courage failed her.  She did not wish him to be prejudiced against her.

"Well, well," he added, "I only just guessed at it, because there's
something unusual and strong in you, not because your eyes are so dark
and your hair so brown."

"Not because of my 'wild beauty'--I thought you were going to say that,"
she added ironically and a little defiantly.  "I got some verses by post
the other day from one of your friends in Lebanon--a stock-rider I think
he was, and they said I had a 'wild beauty' and a 'savage sweetness.'"

He laughed, yet he suddenly saw her sensitive vigilance, and by instinct
he felt that she was watching for some sign of shock or disdain on his
part; yet in truth he cared no more whether she had Gipsy blood in her
than he would have done if she had said she was a daughter of the Czar.

"Men do write that kind of thing," he added cheerfully, "but it's quite
harmless.  There was a disease at college we called adjectivitis.  Your
poet friend had it.  He could have left out the 'wild' and 'savage' and
he'd have been pleasant, and truthful too--no, I apologize."

He had seen her face darken under the compliment, and he hastened to put
it right.

"I loved a Gipsy once," he added whimsically to divert attention from his
mistake, and with so genuine a sympathy in his voice that she was
disarmed.  "I was ten and she was fifty at least.  Oh, a wonderful woman!
I had a boy friend, a fat, happy, little joker he was; his name was
Charley Long.  Well, this woman was his aunt.  When she moved through the
town people looked twice.  She was tall and splendidly made, and her
manner--oh, as if she owned the place.  She did own a lot--she had more
money than any one else thereabouts, anyhow.  It was the tallest kind of
a holiday when Charley and I walked out to the big white house-golly, but
it was white--to visit her!  We didn't eat much the day before we went to
see her; and we didn't eat much the day after, either. She used to feed
us--I wish I could eat like that now! I can see her brown eyes following
us about, full of fire, but soft and kind, too. She had a great temper,
they said, but everybody liked her, and some loved her.  She'd had one
girl, but she died of consumption, got camping out in bad weather.  Aunt
Cynthy--that was what we called her, her name being Cynthia--never got
over her girl's death.  She blamed herself for it.  She had had those
fits of going back to the open-for weeks at a time.  The girl oughtn't to
have been taken to camp out.  She was never strong, and it was the wrong
place and the wrong time of year--all right in August and all wrong in
October.

"Well, always after her girl's death Aunt Cynthy was as I knew her,
being good to us youngsters as no one else ever was, or could be.
Her tea-table was a sight; and the rest of the meals were banquets.
The first time I ever ate hedgehog was at her place. A little while ago,
just before you came, I thought of her.  A hedgehog crossed the path
here, and it brought those days back to me--Charley Long and Aunt Cynthy
and all.  Yes, the first time I ever ate hedgehog; was in Aunt Cynthy's
house.  Hi-yi, as old Tekewani says, but it was good!"

"What is the Romany word for hedgehog?" Fleda asked in a low tone.

"Hotchewitchi," he replied instantly.  "That's right, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is right," she answered, and her eyes had a far-away look, but
there was a kind of trouble at her mouth.

"Do you speak Romany?" she added a little breathlessly.

"No, no. I only picked up words I heard Aunt Cynthy use now and then when
she was in the mood."

"What was the history of Aunt Cynthy?"

"I only know what Charley Long told me.  Aunt Cynthy was the daughter
of a Gipsy--they say the only Gipsy in that part of the country at the
time--who used to buy and sell horses, and travel in a big van as
comfortable as a house.  The old man suddenly died on the farm of
Charley's uncle.  In a month the uncle married the girl.  She brought him
thirty thousand dollars."

Fleda knew that this man who had fired her spirit for the first time had
told his childhood story to show her the view he took of her origin; but
she did not like him less for that, though she seemed to feel a chasm
between them still.  The new things moving in her were like breezes that
stir the trees, not like the wind turning the windmill which grinds the
corn.  She had scarcely yet begun to grind the corn of life.

She did not know where she was going, what she would find, or where the
new trail would lead her.  The Past dogged her footsteps, hung round her
like the folds of a garment.  Even as she rejected it, it asserted its
power, troubled her, angered her, humiliated her, called to her.

She was glad of this meeting with Ingolby.  It had helped her.  She had
set out to do a thing she dreaded, and it was easier now than it would
have been if they had not met.  She had been on her way to the Hut in the
Wood, and now the dread of the visit to Jethro Fawe had diminished.
The last voice she would hear before she entered Jethro Fawe's prison
was that of the man who represented to her, however vaguely, the life
which must be her future--the settled life, the life of Society and not
of the Saracen.

After he had told his boyhood story they sat in silence for a moment or
two, then she rose, and, turning to him, was about to speak.  At that
instant there came distinctly through the wood a faint, trilling sound.
Her face paled a little, and the words died upon her lips.  Ingolby,
having turned his head as though to listen, did not see the change in her
face, and she quickly regained her self-control.

"I heard that sound before," he said, "and I thought from your look you
heard it, too.  It's funny.  It is singing, isn't it?"

"Yes, it's singing," she answered.

"Who is it--some of the heathen from the Reservation?"

"Yes, some of the heathen," she answered.

"Has Tekewani got a lodge about here?"

"He had one here in the old days."

"And his people go to it still-was that where you were going when I broke
in on you?"

"Yes, I was going there.  I am a heathen, also, you know."

"Well, I'll be a heathen, too, if you'll show me how; if you think I'd
pass for one.  I've done a lot of heathen things in my time."

She gave him her hand to say good-bye.  "Mayn't I go with you?" he
asked.

"'I must finish my journey alone,'" she answered slowly, repeating a line
from the first English book she had ever read.

"That's English enough," he responded with a laugh.  "Well, if I mustn't
go with you I mustn't, but my respects to Robinson Crusoe."  He slung the
gun into the hollow of his arm.  "I'd like much to go with you," he
urged.

"Not to-day," she answered firmly.

Again the voice came through the woods, a little louder now.

"It sounds like a call," he remarked.

"It is a call," she answered--"the call of the heathen."

An instant after she had gone on, with a look half-smiling, half-
forbidding, thrown over her shoulder at him.

"I've a notion to follow her," he said eagerly, and he took a step in her
direction.

Suddenly she turned and came back to him.  "Your plans are in danger--
don't forget Felix Marchand," she said, and then turned from him again.

"Oh, I'll not forget," he answered, and waved his cap after her.  "No,
I'll not forget monsieur," he added sharply, and he stepped out with a
light of battle in his eyes.




CHAPTER VII

IN WHICH THE PRISONER GOES FREE

As Fleda wound her way through the deeper wood, remembering the things
which had just been said between herself and Ingolby, the colour came and
went in her face.  To no man had she ever talked so long and intimately,
not even in the far-off days when she lived the Romany life.

Then, as daughter of the head of all the Romanys, she had her place
apart; and the Romany lads had been few who had talked with her even as a
child.  Her father had jealously guarded her until the time when she fell
under the spell and influence of Lady Barrowdale.  Here, by the Sagalac,
she had moved among this polyglot people with an assurance of her own
separateness which was the position of every girl in the West, but
developed in her own case to the nth degree.

Never before had she come so near--not to a man, but to what concerned a
man; and never had a man come so near to her or what concerned her inmost
life.  It was not a question of opportunity or temptation--these always
attend the footsteps of those who would adventure; but for long she had
fenced herself round with restrictions of her own making; and the secrecy
and strangeness of her father's course had made this not only possible,
but in a sense imperative.

The end to that had come.  Gaiety, daring, passion, elation, depression,
were alive in her now, and in a sense had found an outlet in a handful of
days--indeed since the day when Jethro Fawe and Max Ingolby had come into
her life, each in his own way, for good or for evil.  If Ingolby came for
good, then Jethro Fawe came for evil.  She would have revolted at the
suggestion that Jethro Fawe came for good.

Yet, during the last few days, she had been drawn again and again towards
the hut in the wood.  It was as though a power stronger than herself had
ordered her not to wander far from where the Romany claimant of herself
awaited his fate.  As though Jethro knew she was drawn towards him, he
had sung the Gipsy songs which she and Ingolby had heard in the distance.
He might have shouted for relief in the hope of attracting the attention
of some passer-by, and so found release and brought confusion and perhaps
punishment to Gabriel Druse; but that was not possible to him.  First and
last he was a Romany, good or bad; and it was his duty to obey his Ry of
Rys, the only rule which the Romany acknowledged.  "Though he slay me,
yet will I trust him," he would have said, if he had ever heard the
phrase; but in his stubborn way he made the meaning of the phrase the
pivot of his own action.  If he could but see Fleda face to face, he made
no doubt that something would accrue to his advantage.  He would not give
up the hunt without a struggle.

Twice a day Gabriel Druse had placed food and water inside the door of
the hut and locked him fast again, but had not spoken to him save once,
and then but to say that his fate had not yet been determined.  Jethro's
reply had been that he was in no haste, that he could wait for what he
came to get; that it was his own--'ay bor'!  it was his own, and God or
devil could not prevent the thing meant to be from the beginning of the
world.

He did not hear Fleda approach the hut; he was singing to himself a song
he had learned in Montenegro.  There the Romany was held in high regard,
because of the help his own father had given to the Montenegrin people,
fighting for their independence, by admirable weapons of Gipsy
workmanship, setting all the Gipsies in that part of the Balkans
at work to supply them.

This was the song he sang

              "He gave his soul for a thousand days,
               The sun was his in the sky,
               His feet were on the neck of the world
               He loved his Romany chi.

              "He sold his soul for a thousand days,
               By her side to walk, in her arms to lie;
               His soul might burn, but her lips were his,
               And the heart of his Romany chi."

He repeated the last two lines into a rising note of exultation:

              "His soul might burn, but her lips were his,
               And the heart of his Romany chi."

The key suddenly turned in the lock, the door opened on the last words of
the refrain, and, without hesitation, Fleda stepped inside, closing the
door behind her.

"'Mi Duvel', but who would think--ah, did you hear me call then?" he
asked, rising from the plank couch where he had been sitting.  He showed
his teeth in a smile which was meant to be a welcome, but it had an
involuntary malice.

"I heard you singing," she answered composedly, "but I do not come here
because I'm called."

"But I do," he rejoined.  "You called me from over the seas, and I came.
I was in the Balkans; there was trouble--Servia, Montenegro, and Austria
were rattling the fire-irons again, and there was I as my father was
before me.  But I heard you calling, and I came."

"You never heard me call, Jethro Fawe," she returned quietly.  "My
calling of you is as silent as the singing of the stars, where you are
concerned.  And the stars do not sing."

"But the stars do sing, and you call just the same," he responded with a
twist to his moustache, and posing against the wall.  "I've heard the
stars sing.  What's the noise they make in the heart, if it's not
singing?  You don't hear with the ears only.  The heart hears.  It's only
a manner of speaking, this talk about the senses.  One sense can do the
same as all can do and a Romany ought to know how to use one or all.
When your heart called I heard it, and across the seas I came.  And by
long and by last, but I was right in coming."

His impudence at once irritated her and provoked her admiration.  She
knew by instinct how false he was, and how a lie was as common with him
as the truth; but his submission to her father, his indifference to his
imprisonment, forced her interest, even as she was humiliated by the fact
that he was sib to her, bound by ties of clan and blood apart from his
monstrous claim of marriage.  He was indeed such a man as a brainless or
sensual woman could yield to with ease.  He had an insinuating animal
grace, that physical handsomeness which marks so many of the Tziganies
who fill the red coats of a Gipsy musical sextette!  He was not
distinguished, yet there was an intelligence in his face, a daring at
his lips and chin, which, in the discipline and conventions of organized
society, would have made him superior.  Now, with all his sleek
handsomeness, he looked a cross between a splendid peasant and a
chevalier of industry.

She compared him instinctively with Ingolby the Gorgio, as she looked at
him.  What was it made the difference between the two?  It was the world
in a man--personality, knowledge of life, the culture of the thousand
things which make up civilization: it was personality got from life and
power in contest with the ordered world.

Yet was this so after all?  Tekewani was only an Indian brave who lived
on the bounty of a government, and yet he had presence and an air of
command.  Tekewani had been a nomad; he had not been bound to one place,
settled in one city, held subservient to one flag.  But, no, she was
wrong: Tekewani had been the servant and child of a system which was as
fixed and historical as that of Russia or Spain.  He belonged to a people
who had traditions and laws of their own; organized communities moving
here and there, but carrying with them their system, their laws and their
national feeling.

There was the difference.  This Romany was the child of irresponsibility,
the being that fed upon life, that did not feed life; that left one place
in the world to escape into another; that squeezed one day dry, threw it
away, and then went seeking another day to bleed; for ever fleeing from
yesterday, and using to-day only as a camping-ground.  Suddenly, however,
she came to a stop in her reflections.  Her father, Gabriel Druse, was of
the same race as this man, the same unorganized, irresponsible, useless
race, with no weight of civic or social duty upon its shoulders--where
did he stand?  Was he no better than such as Jethro Fawe?  Was he
inferior to such as Ingolby, or even Tekewani?

She realized that in her father's face there was the look of one who had
no place in the ambitious designs of men, who was not a builder, but a
wayfarer.  She had seen the look often of late, and had never read it
until now, when Jethro Fawe stared at her with the boldness of
possession, with the insolence of a soul of lust which had had its
victories.

She read his look, and while one part of her shrank from him as from some
noisome thing, another part of her--to her dismay and anger--understood
him, and did not resent him.  It was the Past dragging at her life.  It
was inherited predisposition, the unregulated passions of her forebears,
the mating of the fields, the generated dominance of the body, which was
not to be commanded into obscurity, but must taunt and tempt her while
her soul sickened.  She put a hand on herself.  She must make this man
realize once and for all that they were as far apart as Adam and
Cagliostro.  "I never called to you," she said at last.  "I did not know
of your existence, and, if I had, then I certainly shouldn't have
called."

"The Gorgios have taken away your mind, or you'd understand," he replied
coolly.  "Your soul calls and those that understand come.  It isn't that
you know who hears or who is coming--till he comes."

"A call to all creation!" she answered disdainfully.  "Do you think you
can impress me by saying things like that?"

"Why not?  It's true.  Wherever you went in all these years the memory of
you kept calling me, my little 'rinkne rakli'--my pretty little girl,
made mine by the River Starzke over in the Roumelian country."

"You heard what my father said--"

"I heard what the Duke Gabriel said--'Mi Duvel', I heard enough what he
said, and I felt enough what he did!"

He laughed, and began to roll a cigarette mechanically, keeping his eyes
fixed on her, however.

"You heard what my father said and what I said, and you will learn that
it is true, if you live long enough," she added meaningly.

A look of startled perception flashed into his eyes.  If I live long
enough, I'll turn you, my mad wife, into my Romany queen and the blessing
of my 'tan'."

"Don't mistake what I mean," she urged.  "I shall never be ruler of the
Romanys.  I shall never hear--"

"You'll hear the bosh played-fiddle, they call it in these heathen
places--at your second wedding with Jethro Fawe," he rejoined insolently,
lighting his cigarette.  "Home you'll come with me soon--'ay bor'!"

"Listen to me," she answered with anger tingling in every nerve and
fibre.  "I come of your race, I was what you are, a child of the hedge
and the wood and the road; but that is all done.  Home, you say!  Home--
in a tent by the roadside or--"

"As your mother lived--where you were bornwell, well, but here's a Romany
lass that's forgot her cradle!"

"I have forgotten nothing.  I have only moved on.  I have only seen that
there is a better road to walk than that where people, always looking
behind lest they be followed, and always looking in front to find refuge,
drop the patrin in the dust or the grass or the bushes for others to
follow after--always going on and on because they dare not go back."

Suddenly he threw his cigarette on the ground, and put his heel upon it
in fury real or assumed.  "Great Heaven and Hell," he exclaimed, "here's
a Romany has sold her blood to the devil!  And this is the daughter of
Gabriel Druse, King and Duke of all the Romanys, him with ancestor King
Panuel, Duke of Little Egypt, who had Sigismund, and Charles the Great,
and all the kings for friends.  By long and by last, but this is a tale
to tell to the Romanys of the world!"  For reply she went to the door and
opened it wide.  "Then go and tell it, Jethro Fawe, to all the world.
Tell them I am the renegade daughter of Gabriel Druse, ruler of them all.
Tell them there is no fault in him, and that he will return to his own
people in his own time, but that I, Fleda Druse, will never return--
never!  Now, get you gone from here."

The sunlight broke through the trees, and fell in a narrow path of light
upon the doorway.  A little grey bird fluttered into the radiance and
came tripping across the threshold; a whippoorwill called in the
ashtrees; and the sweet smell of the thick woodland, of the bracken and
fern, crept into the room.  The balm of a perfect evening of Summer was
upon the face of nature.  The world seemed untroubled and serene; but in
this hidden but two stormy spirits broke the peace to which the place and
the time were all entitled.

After Fleda's scornful words of release and dismissal, Jethro stood for a
moment confounded and dismayed.  He had not reckoned with this.  During
their talk it had come to him how simple it would be to overpower any
check to his exit, how devilishly easy to put the girl at a disadvantage;
but he drove the thought from him.  In the first place, he was by no
means sure that escape was what he wanted--not yet, at any rate; in the
second place, if Gabriel Druse passed the word along the subterranean
wires of the Romany world that Jethro Fawe should vanish, he would not
long cumber the ground.

Yet it was not cowardice or fear of consequences which had held him back;
it was a staggering admiration for this girl who had been given to him in
marriage so many years ago.  He had fared far and wide in his adventures
and amours when he had gold in plenty; and he had swung more than one
Gorgio woman in the wild dance of sentiment, dazzling them by the
splendour of his passion.  The fire gleaming in his dark eyes lighted a
face which would have made memorable a picture by Guido.  He had fared
far and wide, but he had never seen a woman who had seized his
imagination as this girl was doing; who roused in him, not the old hot
desire, but the hungry will to have a 'tan' of his own, and go travelling
down the world with one who alone could satisfy him for all his days.

As he sat in this improvised woodland prison he had had visions of a
hundred glades and valleys through which he had passed in days gone by--
in England, in Spain, in Italy, in Roumania, in Austria, in Australia,
in India--where his camp-fires had burned.  In his visions he had seen
her--Fleda Fawe, not Fleda Druse--laying the cloth and bringing out the
silver cups, or stretching the Turkey rugs upon the ground to make a
couch for two bright-eyed lovers to whom the night was as the day,
radiant and full of joy.  He had shut his eyes and beheld hillsides where
abandoned castles stood, and the fox and the squirrel and the hawk gave
shade and welcome to the dusty pilgrims of the road; or, when the wild
winds blew in winter, gave shelter and wood for the fire, and a sense of
homeliness among the companionable trees.

He had seen himself and this beautiful Romany 'chi' at some village fair,
while the lesser Romany folk told fortunes, or bought and sold horses,
and the lesser still tinkered or worked in gold or brass; he had seen
them both in a great wagon with bright furnishings and brass-girt harness
on their horses, lording it over all, rich, dominant and admired.  In his
visions he had even seen a Romany babe carried in his arms to a Christian
church and there baptized in grandeur as became the child of the head of
the people.  His imagination had also seen his own tombstone in some
Christian churchyard near to the church porch, where he would not be
lonely when he was dead, but could hear the gossip of the people as they
went in and out of church; and on the tombstone some such inscription as
he had seen once at Pforzheim--"To the high-born Lord Johann, Earl of
Little Egypt, to whose soul God be gracious and merciful."

To be sure, it was a strange thing for a Romany to be buried in a Gorgio
churchyard; but it was what had chanced to many great men of the Romanys,
such as the high-born Lord Panuel at Steinbrock, and Peter of Kleinschild
at Mantua--all of whom had great emblazoned monuments in Christian
churches, just to show that in all-levelling death they condescended from
high estate to mingle their ashes with the dust of the Gorgio.

He had sought out his chieftain here in the new world in a spirit of
adventure, cupidity and desire.  He had come like one who betrays, but he
acknowledged to a higher force than his own and to superior rights when
Gabriel Druse's strong arm brought him low; and, waking to life and
consciousness again, he was aware that another force also had levelled
him to the earth.  That force was this woman's spirit which now gave him
his freedom so scornfully; who bade him begone and tell their people
everywhere that she was no longer a Romany, while she would go, no doubt
--a thousand times without doubt unless he prevented it--to the
swaggering Gorgio who had saved her on the Sagalac.

She stood waiting for him to go, as though he could not refuse his
freedom.  As a bone is tossed to a dog, she gave it to him.

"You have no right to set me free," he said coolly now.  "I am not your
prisoner.  You tell me to take that word to the Romany people--that you
leave them for ever.  I will not do it.  You are a Romany, and a Romany
you must stay.  You belong nowhere else.  If you married a Gorgio, you
would still sigh for the camp beneath the stars, for the tambourine and
the dance--"

"And the fortune-telling," she interjected sharply, "and the snail-soup,
and the dirty blanket under the hedge, and the constable on the road
behind, always just behind, watching, waiting, and--"

"The hedge is as clean as the dirty houses where the low-class Gorgios
sleep.  In faith, you are a long way from the River Starzke!" he added.
"But you are my mad wife, and I must wait till you've got sense again."

He sat down on the plank couch, and began to roll a cigarette once more.

"You come fitted out like a Gorgio lass now, and you look like a Gorgio
countess, and you have the manners of an Archduchess; but that's nothing;
it will peel off like a blister when it's pricked.  Underneath is the
Romany.  It's there, and it will show red and angry when we've stripped
off the Gorgio.  It's the way with a woman, always acting, always
imagining herself something else than what she is--if she's a beggar
fancying herself a princess; if she's a princess fancying herself a
flower-girl.  'Mi Duvel', but I know you all!"

Every word he said went home.  She knew that there was truth in what he
said, and that beneath all was the Romany blood; but she meant to conquer
it.  She had made her vow to one in England that she loved, and she would
not change.  Whatever happened, she had finished with Romany life, and to
go back would only mean black tragedy in the end.  A month ago it was a
vow and an inner desire which made her determined; to-day it was the vow
and a man--a Gorgio whom she had but now left in the woods, gazing after
her with the look which a woman so well interprets.

"You mean you won't go free from here?  Because I was a Romany, and wish
you no harm, I have come here to-day to let you go where you will--to go
back to the place where the patrins show where your people travel.  I set
you free, and you say what you think will hurt and shame me.  You have a
cruel soul.  You would torture any woman till she died.  You shall not
torture me.  You are as far from me as the River Starzke.  I could have
let you stay here for my father to deal with, but I have set you free.
I open the door for you, though you are nothing to me, and I am no more
to you than one of the women you have fooled and left to eat the vile
bread of the forsaken.  You have been, you are a wolf--a wolf."

He got to his feet again, and the blood rushed to his face, so that it
seemed almost black.  A torrent of mad words gathered in his throat, but
they choked him, and in the pause his will asserted itself.  He became
cool and deliberate.

"You are right, my girl, I have sucked the orange and thrown the skin
away, and I've picked flowers and cast them by, but that was before the
first day I saw you as you now are.  You were standing by the Sagalac
looking out to the west where the pack-trains were travelling into the
sun over the mountains, and you had your hand on the neck of your pony.
I was not ten feet away from you, behind a juniper-bush.  I looked at
you, and I wished that I had never seen a woman before and could look at
the world as you did then--it was like water from a spring, that look.
You are right in what you say.  By long and by last I had a hard hand,
and when I left what I'd struck down I never looked back.  But I saw you,
and I wished I had never seen a woman before.  You have been here alone
with me with that door shut.  Have I said or done anything that a Gorgio
duke wouldn't do?  Ah, God's love, but you were bold to come!  I married
you by the River Starzke; I looked upon you as my wife; and here you were
alone with me!  I had my rights, and I had been trampled underfoot by
your father--"

"By your Chief."

"'Ay bor', by my Chief!  I had my wrongs, and I had my rights, and you
were mine by Romany law.  It was for me here to claim you--here where a
Romany and his wife were alone together!"

His eyes were fixed searchingly on hers, as though he would read the
effect of his words before he replied, and his voice had a curious, rough
note, as though with difficulty he quelled the tempest within him.
"I have my rights, and you had spat upon me," he said with ferocious
softness.

She did not blench, but looked him steadily in the eyes.

"I knew what would be in your mind," she answered, "but that did not keep
me from coming.  You would not bite the hand that set you free."

"You called me a wolf a minute ago."

"But a wolf would not bite the hand that freed it from the trap.  Yet if
such shame could be, I still would have had no fear, for I should have
shot you as wolves are shot that come too near the fold."

He looked at her piercingly, and the pupils of his eyes narrowed to a
pin-point.  "You would have shot me--you are armed?" he questioned.

"Am I the only woman that has armed herself against you and such as you?
Do you not see?"

"Mi Duvel, but I do see now with a thousand eyes!" he said hoarsely.

His senses were reeling.  Down beneath everything had been the thought
that, as he had prevailed with other women, he could prevail with her;
that she would come to him in the end.  He had felt, but he had declined
to see, the significance of her bearing, of her dress, of her speech, of
her present mode of life, of its comparative luxury, its social
distinction of a kind which lifted her above even the Gorgios by whom she
was surrounded.  A fatuous belief in himself and in his personal powers
had deluded him.  He had told the truth when he said that no woman had
ever appealed to him as she did; that she had blotted out all other women
from the book of his adventurous and dissolute life; and he had dreamed a
dream of conquest of her when Fortune should hand out to him the key of
the situation.  Did not the beautiful Russian countess on the Volga flee
from her liege lord and share his 'tan'?  When he played his fiddle to
the Austrian princess, did she not give him a key to the garden where she
walked of an evening?  And this was a Romany lass, daughter of his
Chieftain, as he was son of a great Romany chief; and what marvel could
there be that she who had been made his child wife, should be conquered
as others had been!

"'Mi Duvel', but I see!" he repeated in a husky fierceness.  "I am your
husband, but you would have killed me if I had taken a kiss from your
lips, sealed to me by all our tribes and by your father and mine."

"My lips are my own, my life is my own, and when I marry, I shall marry a
man of my own choosing, and he will not be a Romany," she replied with a
look of resolution which her beating heart belied.  "I'm not a pedlar's
basket."

"'Kek!  Kek'!  That's plain," he retorted.  "But the 'wolf' is no lamb
either!  I said I would not go till your father set me free, since you
had no right to do so, but a wife should save her husband, and her
husband should set himself free for his wife's sake"--his voice rose in
fierce irony--"and so I will now go free.  But I will not take the word
to the Romany people that you are no more of them.  I am a true Romany.
I disobeyed my 'Ry' in coming here because my wife was here, and I wanted
her.  I am a true Romany husband who will not betray his wife to her
people; but I will have my way, and no Gorgio shall take her to his home.
She belongs to my tent, and I will take her there."

Her gesture of contempt, anger and negation infuriated him.  "If I do not
take you to my 'tan', it will be because I'm dead," he said, and his
white teeth showed fiercely.

"I have set you free.  You had better go," she rejoined quietly.

Suddenly he turned at the doorway.  A look of passion burned in his eyes.
His voice became soft and persuasive.  "I would put the past behind me,
and be true to you, my girl," he said.  "I shall be chief over all the
Romany people when Duke Gabriel dies.  We are sib; give me what is mine.
I am yours--and I hold to my troth.  Come, beloved, let us go together."

A sigh broke from her lips, for she saw that, bad as he was, there was a
moment's truth in his words.  "Go while you can," she said.  "You are
nothing to me."

For an instant he hesitated, then, with a muttered oath, sprang out into
the bracken, and was presently lost among the trees.

For a long time she sat in the doorway, and again and again her eyes
filled with tears.  She felt a cloud of trouble closing in upon her.  At
last there was the sound of footsteps, and a moment later Gabriel Druse
came through the trees towards her.  His eyes were sullen and brooding.

"You have set him free?" he asked.

She nodded.  "It was madness keeping him here," she said.

"It is madness letting him go," he answered morosely.  "He will do harm.
'Ay bor', he will!  I might have known--women are chicken-hearted.  I
ought to have put him out of the way, but I have no heart any more--no
heart; I have the soul of a rabbit."




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Saw how futile was much competition
When you strike your camp, put out the fires






THE WORLD FOR SALE

By Gilbert Parker



BOOK II

VIII.     THE SULTAN
IX.       MATTER AND MIND AND TWO MEN
X.        FOR LUCK
XI.       THE SENTENCE OF THE PATRIN
XII.      "LET THERE BE LIGHT"
XIII.     THE CHAIN OF THE PAST
XIV.      SUCH THINGS MAY NOT BE
XV.       THE WOMAN FROM WIND RIVER
XVI.      THE MAYOR FILLS AN OFFICE
XVII.     THE MONSEIGNEUR AND THE NOMAD
XVIII.    THE BEACONS
XIX.      THE BEEPER OF THE BRIDGE




CHAPTER VIII

THE SULTAN

Ingolby's square head jerked forwards in stern inquiry and his eyes
fastened those of Jowett, the horsedealer.  "Take care what you're
saying, Jowett," he said.  "It's a penitentiary job, if it can be proved.
Are you sure you got it right?"

Jowett had unusual shrewdness, some vanity and a humorous tongue.  He was
a favourite in both towns, and had had the better of both in horse-
dealing a score of times.

That did not make him less popular.  However, it was said he liked low
company, and it was true that though he had "money in the bank," and
owned a corner lot or so, he seemed to care little what his company was.
His most constant companion was Fabian Osterhaut, who was the common
property of both towns, doing a little of everything for a living, from
bill-posting to the solicitation of an insurance agent.

For any casual work connected with public functions Osterhaut was
indispensable, and he would serve as a doctor's assistant and help cut
off a leg, be the majordomo for a Sunday-school picnic, or arrange a
soiree at a meeting-house with equal impartiality.  He had been known to
attend a temperance meeting and a wake in the same evening.  Yet no one
ever questioned his bona fides, and if he had attended mass at Manitou in
the morning, joined a heathen dance in Tekewani's Reserve in the
afternoon, and listened to the oleaginous Rev. Reuben Tripple in the
evening, it would have been taken as a matter of course.

He was at times profane and impecunious, and he had been shifted from
one boarding-house to another till at last, having exhausted credit in
Lebanon, he had found a room in the house of old Madame Thibadeau in
Manitou.  She had taken him in because, in years gone by, he had nursed
her only son through an attack of smallpox on the Siwash River, and
somehow Osterhaut had always paid his bills to her.  He was curiously
exact where she was concerned.  If he had not enough for his week's board
and lodging, he borrowed it, chiefly of Jowett, who used him profitably
at times to pass the word about a horse, or bring news of a possible
deal.

"It's a penitentiary job, Jowett," Ingolby repeated.  "I didn't think
Marchand would be so mad as that."

"Say, it's all straight enough, Chief," answered Jowett, sucking his
unlighted cigar.  "Osterhaut got wind of it--he's staying at old Mother
Thibadeau's, as you know.  He moves round a lot, and he put me on to it.
I took on the job at once.  I got in with the French toughs over at
Manitou, at Barbazon's Tavern, and I gave them gin--we made it a gin
night.  It struck their fancy--gin, all gin!  'Course there's nothing in
gin different from any other spirit; but it fixed their minds, and took
away suspicion.

"I got drunk--oh, yes, of course, blind drunk, didn't I?  Kissed me, half
a dozen of the Quebec boys did--said I was 'bully boy' and 'hell-fellow';
said I was 'bon enfant'; and I said likewise in my best patois.  They
liked that.  I've got a pretty good stock of monkey-French, and I let
it go.  They laughed till they cried at some of my mistakes, but they
weren't no mistakes, not on your life.  It was all done a-purpose.
They said I was the only man from Lebanon they wouldn't have cut up and
boiled, and they was going to have the blood of the Lebanon lot before
they'd done.  I pretended to get mad, and I talked wild.  I said that
Lebanon would get them first, that Lebanon wouldn't wait, but'd have it
out; and I took off my coat and staggered about--blind-fair blind boozy.
I tripped over some fool's foot purposely, just beside a bench against
the wall, and I come down on that bench hard.  They laughed--Lord, how
they laughed!  They didn't mind my givin' 'em fits--all except one or
two.  That was what I expected.  The one or two was mad.  They begun
raging towards me, but there I was asleep on the bench-stony blind,
and then they only spit fire a bit.  Some one threw my coat over me.
I hadn't any cash in the pockets, not much--I knew better than that--and
I snored like a sow.  Then it happened what I thought would happen.  They
talked.  And here it is.  They're going to have a strike in the mills,
and you're to get a toss into the river.  That's to be on Friday.  But
the other thing--well, they all cleared away but two.  They were the two
that wanted to have it out with me.  They stayed behind.  There was I
snoring like a locomotive, but my ears open all right.

"Well, they give the thing away.  One of 'em had just come from Felix
Marchand and he was full of it.  What was it?  Why, the second night of
the strike your new bridge over the river was to be blown up.
Marchand was to give these two toughs three hundred dollars each for
doing it."

"Blown up with what?" Ingolby asked sharply.

"Dynamite."

"Where would they get it?"

"Some left from blasting below the mills."

"All right!  Go on."

"There wasn't much more.  Old Barbazon, the landlord, come in and they
quit talking about it; but they said enough to send 'em to gaol for ten
years."

Ingolby blinked at Jowett reflectively, and his mouth gave a twist that
lent to his face an almost droll look.

"What good would it do if they got ten years--or one year, if the bridge
was blown up?  If they got skinned alive, and if Marchand was handed over
to a barnful of hungry rats to be gnawed to death, it wouldn't help.
I've heard and seen a lot of hellish things, but there's nothing to equal
that.  To blow up the bridge--for what?  To spite Lebanon, and to hurt
me; to knock the spokes out of my wheel.  He's the dregs, is Marchand."

"I guess he's a shyster by nature, that fellow," interposed Jowett.
"He was boilin' hot when he was fifteen.  He spoiled a girl I knew when
he was twenty-two, not fourteen she was--Lil Sarnia; and he got her away
before--well, he got her away East; and she's in a dive in Winnipeg now.
As nice a girl--as nice a little girl she was, and could ride any broncho
that ever bucked.  What she saw in him--but there, she was only a child,
just the mind of a child she had, and didn't understand.  He'd ha' been
tarred and feathered if it'd been known.  But old Mick Sarnia said hush,
for his wife's sake, and so we hushed, and Sarnia's wife doesn't know
even now.  I thought a lot of Lil, as much almost as if she'd been my
own; and lots o' times, when I think of it, I sit up straight, and the
thing freezes me; and I want to get Marchand by the scruff of the neck.
I got a horse, the worst that ever was--so bad I haven't had the heart to
ride him or sell him.  He's so bad he makes me laugh.  There's nothing he
won't do, from biting to bolting.  Well, I'd like to tie Mr. Felix
Marchand, Esquire, to his back, and let him loose on the prairie, and
pray the Lord to save him if he thought fit.  I fancy I know what the
Lord would do.  And Lil Sarnia's only one.  Since he come back from the
States, he's the limit, oh, the damnedest limit.  He's a pest all round-
and now, this!"

Ingolby kept blinking reflectively as Jowett talked.  He was doing two
things at once with a facility quite his own.  He was understanding all
Jowett was saying, but he was also weighing the whole situation.  His
mind was gone fishing, figuratively speaking.  He was essentially a man
of action, but his action was the bullet of his mind; he had to be quiet
physically when he was really thinking.  Then he was as one in a dream
where all physical motion was mechanical, and his body was acting
automatically.  His concentration, and therefore his abstraction, was
phenomenal.  Jowett's reminiscences at a time so critical did not disturb
him--did not, indeed, seem to be irrelevant.  It was as though Felix
Marchand was being passed in review before him in a series of aspects.
He nodded encouragement to Jowett to go on.

"It's because Marchand hates you, Chief.  The bump he got when you
dropped him on the ground that day at Carillon hurts still.  It's a
chronic inflammation.  Closing them railway offices at Manitou, and
dislodging the officials give him his first good chance.  The feud
between the towns is worse now than it's ever been.  Make no mistake.
There's a whole lot of toughs in Manitou.  Then there's religion, and
there's race, and there's a want-to-stand-still and leave-me-alone-
feeling.  They don't want to get on.  They don't want progress.  They
want to throw the slops out of the top windows into the street; they want
their cesspools at the front door; they think that everybody's got to
have smallpox some time or another, and the sooner they have it the
better; they want to be bribed; and they think that if a vote's worth
having it's worth paying for--and yet there's a bridge between these two
towns!  A bridge--why, they're as far apart as the Yukon and Patagonia."

"What'd buy Felix Marchand?" Ingolby asked meditatively.  "What's his
price?"

Jowett shifted with impatience.  "Say, Chief, I don't know what you're
thinking about.  Do you think you could make a deal with Felix Marchand?
Not much.  You've got the cinch on him.  You could send him to quod, and
I'd send him there as quick as lightning.  I'd hang him, if I could, for
what he done to Lil Sarnia.  Years ago when he was a boy he offered me a
gold watch for a mare I had.  The watch looked as right as could be--
solid fourteen-carat, he said it was.  He got my horse, and I got his
watch.  It wasn't any more gold than he was.  It was filled--just plated
with nine-carat gold.  It was worth about ten dollars."

"What was the mare worth?" asked Ingolby, his mouth twisting again with
quizzical meaning.

"That mare--she was all right."

"Yes, but what was the matter with her?"

"Oh, a spavin--she was all right when she got wound up--go like Dexter or
Maud S."

"But if you were buying her what would you have paid for her, Jowett?
Come now, man to man, as they say.  How much did you pay for her?"

"About what she was worth, Chief, within a dollar or two."

"And what was she worth?"

"What I paid for her-ten dollars."

Then the two men looked at each other full in the eyes, and Jowett threw
back his head and laughed outright--laughed loud and hard.  "Well, you
got me, Chief, right under the guard," he observed.

Ingolby did not laugh outright, but there was a bubble of humour in his
eyes.  "What happened to the watch?" he asked.

"I got rid of it."

"In a horse-trade?"

"No, I got a town lot with it."

"In Lebanon?"

"Well, sort of in Lebanon's back-yard."

"What's the lot worth now?"

"About two thousand dollars!"

"Was it your first town lot?"

"The first lot of Mother Earth I ever owned."

"Then you got a vote on it?"

"Yes, my first vote."

"And the vote let you be a town-councillor?"

"It and my good looks."

"Indirectly, therefore, you are a landowner, a citizen, a public servant,
and an instrument of progress because of Felix Marchand.  If you hadn't
had the watch you wouldn't have had that town lot."

"Well, mebbe, not that lot."

Suddenly Ingolby got to his feet and squared himself, and his face became
alight with purpose.  His mind had come back from fishing, and he was
ready now for action.  His plans were formed.  He was in for a fight, and
he had made up his mind how, with the new information to his hand, he
would develop his campaign further.

"You didn't make a fuss about the watch, Jowett.  You might have gone to
Felix Marchand or to his father and proved him a liar, and got even that
way.  You didn't; you got a corner lot with it.  That's what I'm going to
do.  I can have Felix Marchand put in the jug, and make his old father,
Hector Marchand, sick; but I like old Hector Marchand, and I think he's
bred as bad a pup as ever was.  I'm going to try and do with this
business as you did with that watch.  I'm going to try and turn it to
account and profit in the end.  Felix Marchand's profiting by a mistake
of mine--a mistake in policy.  It gives him his springboard; and there's
enough dry grass in both towns to get a big blaze with a very little
match.  I know that things are seething.  The Chief Constable keeps me
posted as to what's going on here, and pretty fairly as to what's going
on in Manitou.  The police in Manitou are straight enough.  That's one
comfort.  I've done Felix Marchand there.  I guess that the Chief
Constable of Manitou and Monseigneur Lourde and old Mother Thibadeau are
about the only people that Marchand can't bribe.  I see I've got to face
a scrimmage before I can get what I want."

"What you want you'll have, I bet," was the admiring response.

"I'm going to have a good try.  I want these two towns to be one.
That'll be good for your town lots, Jowett," he added whimsically.  "If
my policy is carried out, my town lot'll be worth a pocketful of gold-
plated watches or a stud of spavined mares."  He chuckled to himself, and
his fingers reached towards a bell on the table, but he paused.  "When
was it they said the strike would begin?" he asked.

"Friday."

"Did they say what hour?"

"Eleven in the morning."

"Third of a day's work and a whole day's pay," he mused.  "Jowett," he
added, "I want you to have faith.  I'm going to do Marchand, and I'm
going to do him in a way that'll be best in the end.  You can help as
much if not more than anybody--you and Osterhaut.  And if I succeed,
it'll be worth your while."

"I ain't followin' you because it's worth while, but because I want to,
Chief."

"I know; but a man--every man--likes the counters for the game."  He
turned to the table, opened a drawer, and took out a folded paper.  He
looked it through carefully, wrote a name on it, and handed it to Jowett.

"There's a hundred shares in the Northwest Railway, with my regards,
Jowett.  Some of the counters of the game."

Jowett handed it back at once with a shake of the head.  "I don't live in
Manitou," he said.  "I'm almost white, Chief.  I've never made a deal
with you, and don't want to.  I'm your man for the fun of it, and because
I'd give my life to have your head on my shoulders for one year."

"I'd feel better if you'd take the shares, Jowett.  You've helped me,
and I can't let you do it for nothing."

"Then I can't do it at all.  I'm discharged."  Suddenly, however, a
humorous, eager look shot into Jowett's face.  "Will you toss for it?"
he blurted out.  "Certainly, if you like," was the reply.

"Heads I win, tails it's yours?"

"Good."

Ingolby took a silver dollar from his pocket, and tossed.  It came down
tails.  Ingolby had won.

"My corner lot against double the shares?" Jowett asked sharply, his
face flushed with eager pleasure.  He was a born gambler.

"As you like," answered Ingolby with a smile.  Ingolby tossed, and they
stooped over to look at the dollar on the floor.  It had come up heads.
"You win," said Ingolby, and turning to the table, took out another
hundred shares.  In a moment they were handed over.

"You're a wonder, Jowett," he said.  "You risked a lot of money.  Are you
satisfied?"

"You bet, Chief.  I come by these shares honestly now."

He picked up the silver dollar from the floor, and was about to put it in
his pocket.

"Wait--that's my dollar," said Ingolby.

"By gracious, so it is!" said Jowett, and handed it over reluctantly.

Ingolby pocketed it with satisfaction.

Neither dwelt on the humour of the situation.  They were only concerned
for the rules of the game, and both were gamesters in their way.

After a few brief instructions to Jowett, and a message for Osterhaut
concerning a suit of workman's clothes, Ingolby left his offices and
walked down the main street of the town with his normal rapidity,
responding cheerfully to the passers-by, but not encouraging evident
desire for talk with him.  Men half-started forward to him, but he held
them back with a restraining eye.  They knew his ways.  He was responsive
in a brusque, inquisitive, but good-humoured and sometimes very droll
way; but there were times when men said to themselves that he was to be
left alone; and he was so much master of the place that, as Osterhaut and
Jowett frequently remarked, "What he says goes!"  It went even with those
whom he had passed in the race of power.

He had had his struggles to be understood in his first days in Lebanon.
He had fought intrigue and even treachery, had defeated groups which were
the forces at work before he came to Lebanon, and had compelled the
submission of others.  All these had vowed to "get back at him," but when
it became a question of Lebanon against Manitou they swung over to his
side and acknowledged him as leader.  The physical collision between the
rougher elements of the two towns had brought matters to a head, and
nearly every man in Lebanon felt that his honour was at stake, and was
ready "to have it out with Manitou."

As he walked along the main street after his interview with Jowett, his
eyes wandered over the buildings rising everywhere; and his mind reviewed
as in a picture the same thinly inhabited street five years ago when he
first came.  Now farmers' wagons clacked and rumbled through the prairie
dust, small herds of cattle jerked and shuffled their way to the
slaughter-yard, or out to the open prairie, and caravans of settlers with
their effects moved sturdily forward to the trails which led to a new
life beckoning from three points of the compass.  That point which did
not beckon was behind them.  Flaxen-haired Swedes and Norwegians; square-
jawed, round-headed North Germans; square-shouldered, loose-jointed
Russians with heavy contemplative eyes and long hair, looked curiously at
each other and nodded understandingly.  Jostling them all, with a jeer
and an oblique joke here and there, and crude chaff on each other and
everybody, the settler from the United States asserted himself.  He
invariably obtruded himself, with quizzical inquiry, half contempt and
half respect, on the young Englishman, who gazed round with phlegm upon
his fellow adventurers, and made up to the sandy-faced Scot or the
cheerful Irishman with his hat on the back of his head, who showed in the
throng here and there.  This was one of the days when the emigrant and
settlers' trains arrived both from the East and from "the States," and
Front Street in Lebanon had, from early morning, been alive with the
children of hope and adventure.

With hands plunged deep in the capacious pockets of his grey jacket,
Ingolby walked on, seeing everything; yet with his mind occupied
intently, too, on the trouble which must be faced before Lebanon and
Manitou would be the reciprocating engines of his policy.  Coming to a
spot where a great gap of vacant land showed in the street-land which he
had bought for the new offices of his railway combine--he stood and
looked at it abstractedly.  Beyond it, a few blocks away, was the
Sagalac, and beyond the Sagalac was Manitou, and a little way to the
right was the bridge which was the symbol of his policy.  His eyes gazed
almost unconsciously on the people and the horses and wagons coming and
going upon the bridge.  Then they were lifted to the tall chimneys rising
at two or three points on the outskirts of Manitou.

"They don't know a good thing when they get it," he said to himself.
"A strike--why, wages are double what they are in Quebec, where most of
'em come from!  Marchand--"

A hand touched his arm.  "Have you got a minute to spare, kind sir?"
a voice asked.

Ingolby turned and saw Nathan Rockwell, the doctor.  "Ah, Rockwell," he
responded cheerfully, "two minutes and a half, if you like!  What is it?"

The Boss Doctor, as he was familiarly called by every one, to identify
him from the newer importations of medical men, drew from his pocket a
newspaper.

"There's an infernal lie here about me," he replied.  "They say that I--"

He proceeded to explain the misstatement, as Ingolby studied the paper
carefully, for Rockwell was a man worth any amount of friendship.

"It's a lie, of course," Ingolby said firmly as he finished the
paragraph.  "Well?"

"Well, I've got to deal with it."

"You mean you're going to deny it in the papers?"

"Exactly."

"I wouldn't, Rockwell."

"You wouldn't?"

"No.  You never can really overtake a newspaper lie.  Lots of the people
who read the lie don't see the denial.  Your truth doesn't overtake the
lie--it's a scarlet runner."

"I don't see that.  When you're lied about, when a lie like that--"

"You can't overtake it, Boss.  It's no use.  It's sensational, it runs
too fast.  Truth's slow-footed.  When a newspaper tells a lie about you,
don't try to overtake it, tell another."

He blinked with quizzical good-humour.  Rockwell could not resist the
audacity.  "I don't believe you'd do it just the same," he retorted
decisively, and laughing.

"I don't try the overtaking anyhow; I get something spectacular in my own
favour to counteract the newspaper lie."

"In what way?"

"For instance, if they said I couldn't ride a moke at a village
steeplechase, I'd at once publish the fact that, with a jack-knife, I'd
killed two pumas that were after me.  Both things would be lies, but the
one would neutralize the other.  If I said I could ride a moke, nobody
would see it, and if it were seen it wouldn't make any impression; but to
say I killed two mountain-lions with a jack-knife on the edge of a
precipice, with the sun standing still to look at it, is as good as the
original lie and better; and I score.  My reputation increases."

Nathan Rockwell's equilibrium was restored.  "You're certainly a wonder,"
he declared.  "That's why you've succeeded."

"Have I succeeded?"

"Thirty-three-and what you are!"

"What am I?"

"Pretty well master here."

"Rockwell, that'd do me a lot of harm if it was published.  Don't say it
again.  This is a democratic country.  They'd kick at my being called
master of anything, and I'd have to tell a lie to counteract it."

"But it's the truth, and it hasn't to be overtaken."

A grim look came into Ingolby's face.  "I'd like to be master-boss of
life and death, holder of the sword and balances, the Sultan, here just
for one week.  I'd change some things.  I'd gag some people that are
doing terrible harm.  It's a real bad business.  The scratch-your-face
period is over, and we're in the cut-your-throat epoch."

Rockwell nodded assent, opened the paper again, and pointed to a column.
"I expect you haven't seen that.  To my mind, in the present state of
things, it's dynamite."

Ingolby read the column hastily.  It was the report of a sermon delivered
the evening before by the Rev. Reuben Tripple, the evangelical minister
of Lebanon.  It was a paean of the Scriptures accompanied by a crazy
charge that the Roman Church forbade the reading of the Bible.  It had
a tirade also about the Scarlet Woman and Popish idolatry.

Ingolby made a savage gesture.  "The insatiable Christian beast!" he
growled in anger.  "There's no telling what this may do.  You know what
those fellows are over in Manitou.  The place is full of them going to
the woods, besides the toughs at the mills and in the taverns.  They're
not psalm-singing, and they don't keep the Ten Commandments, but they're
savagely fanatical, and--"

"And there's the funeral of an Orangeman tomorrow.  The Orange Lodge
attends in regalia."

Ingolby started and looked at the paper again.  "The sneaking, praying
liar," he said, his jaw setting grimly.  "This thing's a call to riot.
There's an element in Lebanon as well that'd rather fight than eat.  It's
the kind of lie that--"

"That you can't overtake," said the Boss Doctor appositely; "and I don't
know that even you can tell another that'll neutralize it.  Your
prescription won't work here."

An acknowledging smile played at Ingolby's mouth.  "We've got to have a
try.  We've got to draw off the bull with a red rag somehow."

"I don't see how myself.  That Orange funeral will bring a row on to us.
I can just see the toughs at Manitou when they read this stuff, and know
about that funeral."

"It's announced?"

"Yes, here's an invitation in the Budget to Orangemen to attend the
funeral of a brother sometime of the banks of the Boyne!"

"Who's the Master of the Lodge?" asked Ingolby.  Rockwell told him,
urging at the same time that he see the Chief Constable as well, and
Monseigneur Lourde at Manitou.

"That's exactly what I mean to do--with a number of other things.
Between ourselves, Rockwell, I'd have plenty of lint and bandages ready
for emergencies if I were you."

"I'll see to it.  That collision the other day was serious enough, and
it's gradually becoming a vendetta.  Last night one of the Lebanon
champions lost his nose."

"His nose--how?"

"A French river-driver bit a third of it off."

Ingolby made a gesture of disgust.  "And this is the twentieth century!"

They had moved along the street until they reached a barber-shop, from
which proceeded the sound of a violin.  "I'm going in here," Ingolby
said.  "I've got some business with Berry, the barber.  You'll keep me
posted as to anything important?"

"You don't need to say it.  Shall I see the Master of the Orange Lodge or
the Chief Constable for you?"  Ingolby thought for a minute.  "No, I'll
tackle them myself, but you get in touch with Monseigneur Lourde.  He's
grasped the situation, and though he'd like to have Tripple boiled in
oil, he doesn't want broken heads and bloodshed."

"And Tripple?"

"I'll deal with him at once.  I've got a hold on him.  I never wanted to
use it, but I will now without compunction.  I have the means in my
pocket.  They've been there for three days, waiting for the chance."

"It doesn't look like war, does it?" said Rockwell, looking up the
street and out towards the prairie where the day bloomed like a flower.
Blue above--a deep, joyous blue, against which a white cloud rested or
slowly travelled westward; a sky down whose vast cerulean bowl flocks of
wild geese sailed, white and grey and black, while the woods across the
Sagalac were glowing with a hundred colours, giving tender magnificence
to the scene.  The busy eagerness of a pioneer life was still a quiet,
orderly thing, so immense was the theatre for effort and movement.  In
these wide streets, almost as wide as a London square, there was room to
move; nothing seemed huddled, pushing, or inconvenient.  Even the
disorder of building lost its ugly crudity in the space and the sunlight.

"The only time I get frightened in life is when things look like that,"
Ingolby answered.  "I go round with a life-preserver on me when it seems
as if 'all's right with the world.'"

The violin inside the barber-shop kept scraping out its cheap music--a
coon-song of the day.

"Old Berry hasn't much business this morning," remarked Rockwell.
"He's in keeping with this surface peace."

"Old Berry never misses anything.  What we're thinking, he's thinking.
I go fishing when I'm in trouble; Berry plays his fiddle.  He's a
philosopher and a friend."

"You don't make friends as other people do."

"I make friends of all kinds.  I don't know why, but I've always had a
kind of kinship with the roughs, the no-accounts, and the rogues."

"As well as the others--I hope I don't intrude!"

Ingolby laughed.  "You?  Oh, I wish all the others were like you.  It's
the highly respectable members of the community I've always had to
watch."

The fiddle-song came squeaking out upon the sunny atmosphere.
It arrested the attention of a man on the other side of the street--
a stranger in strange Lebanon.  He wore a suit of Western clothes as a
military man wears mufti, if not awkwardly, yet with a manner not wholly
natural--the coat too tight across the chest, too short in the body.
However, the man was handsome and unusual in his leopard way, with his
brown curling hair and well-cared-for moustache.  It was Jethro Fawe.

Attracted by the sound of the violin, he stayed his steps and smiled
scornfully.  Then his look fell on the two figures at the door of the
barber-shop, and his eyes flashed.

Here was the man he wished to see--Max Ingolby, the man who stood between
him and his Romany lass.  Here was a chance of speaking face to face with
the man who was robbing him.  What he should do when they met must be
according to circumstances.  That did not matter.  There was the impulse
storming in his brain, and it drove him across the street as the Boss
Doctor walked away, and Ingolby entered the shop.  All Jethro realized
was that the man who stood in his way, the big, rich, masterful Gorgio
was there.

He entered the shop after Ingolby, and stood for an instant unseen.  The
old negro barber with his curly white head, slave-black face, and large,
shrewd, meditative eyes was standing in a corner with a violin under his
chin, his cheek lovingly resting against it, as he drew his bow through
the last bars of the melody.  He had smiled in welcome as Ingolby
entered, instantly rising from his stool, but continuing to play.  He
would not have stopped in the middle of a tune for an emperor, and he put
Ingolby higher than an emperor.  For one who had been born a slave, and
had still the scars of the overseer's whip on his back, he was very
independent.  He cut everybody's hair as he wanted to cut it, trimmed
each beard as he wished to trim it, regardless of its owner's wishes.
If there was dissent, then his customer need not come again, that was
all.  There were other barbers in the place, but Berry was the master
barber.  To have your head massaged by him was never to be forgotten,
especially if you found your hat too small for your head in the morning.
Also he singed the hair with a skill and care, which had filled many a
thinly covered scalp with luxuriant growth, and his hair-tonic, known as
"Smilax," gave a pleasant odour to every meeting-house or church or
public hall where the people gathered.  Berry was an institution even in
this new Western town.  He kept his place and he forced the white man,
whoever he was, to keep his place.

When he saw Jethro Fawe enter the shop he did not stop playing, but his
eyes searched the newcomer.  Following his glance, Ingolby turned round
and saw the Romany.  His first impression was one of admiration, but
suspicion was quickly added.  He was a good judge of men, and there was
something secluded about the man which repelled him.  Yet he was
interested.  The dark face had a striking racial peculiarity.

The music died away, and old Berry lowered the fiddle from his chin and
gave his attention to the Romany.

"Yeth-'ir?" he said questioningly.

For an instant Jethro was confused.  When he entered the shop he had not
made up his mind what he should do.  It had been mere impulse and the
fever of his brain.  As old Berry spoke, however, his course opened out.

"I heard.  I am a stranger.  My fiddle is not here.  My fingers itch for
the cat-gut.  Eh?"

The look in old Berry's face softened a little.  His instinct had been
against his visitor, and he had been prepared to send him to another
shop-besides, not every day could he talk to the greatest man in the
West.

"If you can play, there it is," he said after a slight pause, and handed
the fiddle over.

It was true that Jethro Fawe loved the fiddle.  He had played it in many
lands.  Twice, in order to get inside the palace of a monarch for a
purpose--once in Berlin and once in London--he had played the second
violin in a Tzigany orchestra.  He turned the fiddle slowly round,
looking at it with mechanical intentness.  Through the passion of emotion
the sure sense of the musician was burning.  His fingers smoothed the
oval brown breast of the instrument with affection.  His eyes found joy
in the colour of the wood, which had all the graded, merging tints of
Autumn leaves.

"It is old--and strange," he said, his eyes going from Berry to Ingolby
and back again with a veiled look, as though he had drawn down blinds
before his inmost thoughts.  "It was not made by a professional."

"It was made in the cotton-field by a slave," observed old Berry sharply,
yet with a content which overrode antipathy to his visitor.

Jethro put the fiddle to his chin, and drew the bow twice or thrice
sweepingly across the strings.  Such a sound had never come from Berry's
violin before.  It was the touch of a born musician who certainly had
skill, but who had infinitely more of musical passion.

"Made by a slave in the cotton-fields!" Jethro said with a veiled look,
and as though he was thinking of something else: "'Dordi', I'd like to
meet a slave like that!"

At the Romany exclamation Ingolby swept the man with a searching look.
He had heard the Romany wife of Ruliff Zaphe use the word many years ago
when he and Charley Long visited the big white house on the hill.  Was
the man a Romany, and, if so, what was he doing here?  Had it anything to
do with Gabriel Druse and his daughter?  But no--what was there strange
in the man being a Romany and playing the fiddle?  Here and there in the
West during the last two years, he had seen what he took to be Romany
faces.  He looked to see the effect of the stranger's remark on old
Berry.

"I was a slave, and I was like that.  My father made that fiddle in the
cotton-fields of Georgia," the aged barber said.

The son of a race which for centuries had never known country or flag or
any habitat, whose freedom was the soul of its existence, if it had a
soul; a freedom defying all the usual laws of social order--the son of
that race looked at the negro barber with something akin to awe.  Here
was a man who had lived a life which was the staring antithesis of his
own, under the whip as a boy, confined to compounds; whose vision was
constricted to the limits of an estate; who was at the will of one man,
to be sold and trafficked with like a barrel of herrings, to be worked at
another's will--and at no price!  This was beyond the understanding of
Jethro Fawe.  But awe has the outward look of respect, and old Berry who
had his own form of vanity, saw that he had had a rare effect on the
fellow, who evidently knew all about fiddles.  Certainly that was a
wonderful sound he had produced from his own cotton-field fiddle.

In the pause Ingolby said to Jethro Fawe, "Play something, won't you?
I've got business here with Mr. Berry, but five minutes of good music
won't matter.  We'd like to hear him play--wouldn't we, Berry?"

The old man nodded assent.  "There's plenty of music in the thing," he
said, "and a lot could come out in five minutes, if the right man played
it."

His words were almost like a challenge, and it reached to Jethro's
innermost nature.  He would show this Gorgio robber what a Romany could
do, and do as easily as the birds sing.  The Gorgio was a money-master,
they said, but he would find that a Romany was a master, too, in his own
way.  He thought of one of the first pieces he had ever heard, a rhapsody
which had grown and grown, since it was first improvised by a Tzigany in
Hungary.  He had once played it to an English lady at the Amphitryon Club
in London, and she had swooned in the arms of her husband's best friend.
He had seen men and women avert their heads when he had played it, daring
not to look into each other's eyes.  He would play it now--a little of
it.  He would play it to her--to the girl who had set him free in the
Sagalac woods, to the ravishing deserter from her people, to the only
woman who had told him the truth in all his life, and who insulated his
magnetism as a ground-wire insulates lightning.  He would summon her here
by his imagination, and tell her to note how his soul had caught the
music of the spheres.  He would surround himself with an atmosphere of
his own.  His rage, his love, and his malignant hate, his tenderness and
his lust should fill the barber's shop with a flood which would drown the
Gorgio raider.  He laughed to himself, almost unconsciously.  Then
suddenly he leaned his cheek to the instrument and drew the bow across
the strings with a savage softness.  The old cottonfield fiddle cried out
with a thrilling, exquisite pain, but muffled, as a hand at the lips
turns agony into a tender moan.  Some one--some spirit--in the fiddle
was calling for its own.

Five minutes later-a five minutes in which people gathered at the
door of the shop, and heads were thrust inside in ravished wonder--the
palpitating Romany lowered the fiddle from his chin, and stood for a
minute looking into space, as though he saw a vision.

He was roused by old Berry's voice.  "Das a fiddle I wouldn't sell for a
t'ousand dollars.  If I could play like dat I wouldn't sell it for ten
t'ousand.  You kin play a fiddle to make it worth a lot--you."

The Romany handed back the instrument.  "It's got something inside it
that makes it better than it is.  It's not a good fiddle, but it has
something--ah, man alive, it has something!"  It was as though he was
talking to himself.

Berry made a quick, eager gesture.  "It's got the cotton-fields and the
slave days in it.  It's got the whip and the stocks in it; it's got the
cry of the old man that'd never see his children ag'in.  That's what the
fiddle's got in it."

Suddenly, in an apparent outburst of anger, he swept down on the front
door and drove the gathering crowd away.

"Dis is a barber-shop," he said with an angry wave of his hand; "it ain't
a circuse."

One man protested.  "I want a shave," he said.  He tried to come inside,
but was driven back.

"I ain't got a razor that'd cut the bristle off your face," the old
barber declared peremptorily; "and, if I had, it wouldn't be busy on you.
I got two customers, and that's all I'm going to take befo' I have my
dinner.  So you git away.  There ain't goin' to be no more music."

The crowd drew off, for none of them cared to offend this autocrat of the
shears and razor.

Ingolby had listened to the music with a sense of being swayed by a wind
which blew from all quarters of the compass at once.  He loved music;
it acted as a clearing-house to his mind; and he played the piano himself
with the enthusiasm of a wilful amateur, who took liberties with every
piece he essayed.  There was something in this fellow's playing which the
great masters, such as Paganini, must have had.  As the music ceased, he
did not speak, but remained leaning against the great red-plush barber's
chair looking reflectively at the Romany.  Berry, however, said to the
still absorbed musician: "Where did you learn to play?"

The Romany started, and a flush crossed his face.  "Everywhere," he
answered sullenly.

"You've got the thing Sarasate had," Ingolby observed.  "I only heard him
play but once--in London years ago: but there's the same something in it.
I bought a fiddle of Sarasate.  I've got it now."

"Here in Lebanon?"  The eyes of the Romany were burning.  An idea had
just come into his brain.  Was it through his fiddling that he was going
to find a way to deal with this Gorgio, who had come between him and his
own?

"Only a week ago it came," Ingolby replied.  "They actually charged me
Customs duty on it.  I'd seen it advertised, and I made an offer and got
it at last."

"You have it here--at your house here?" asked old Berry in surprise.

"It's the only place I've got.  Did you think I'd put it in a museum?
I can't play it, but there it is for any one that can play.  How would
you like to try it?" he added to Jethro in a friendly tone.  "I'd give a
good deal to see it under your chin for an hour.  Anyhow, I'd like to
show it to you.  Will you come?"

It was like him to bring matters to a head so quickly.

The Romany's eyes glistened.  "To play the Sarasate alone to you?" he
asked.

"That's it-at nine o'clock to-night, if you can."

"I will come--yes, I will come," Jethro answered, the lids drooping over
his eyes in which were the shadows of the first murder of the created
world.

"Here is my address, then."  Ingolby wrote something on his visiting-
card.  "My man'll let you in, if you show that.  Well, good-bye."

The Romany took the card, and turned to leave.  He had been dismissed by
the swaggering Gorgio, as though he was a servant, and he had not even
been asked his name, of so little account was he!  He could come and play
on the Sarasate to the masterful Gorgio at the hour which the masterful
Gorgio fixed--think of that!  He could be--a servant to the pleasure of
the man who was stealing from him the wife sealed to him in the Roumelian
country.  But perhaps it was all for the best--yes, he would make it all
for the best!  As he left the shop, however, and passed down the street
his mind remained in the barber-shop.  He saw in imagination the
masterful Gorgio in the red-plush chair, and the negro barber bending
over him, with black fingers holding the Gorgio's chin, and an open razor
in the right hand lightly grasped.  A flash of malicious desire came into
his eyes as the vision shaped itself in his imagination, and he saw
himself, instead of the negro barber, holding the Gorgio chin and looking
down at the Gorgio throat with the razor, not lightly, but firmly grasped
in his right hand.  How was it that more throats were not cut in that
way?  How was it that while the scissors passed through the beard of a
man's face the points did not suddenly slip up and stab the light from
helpless eyes?  How was it that men did not use their chances?  He went
lightly down the street, absorbed in a vision which was not like the
reality; but it was evidence that his visit to Max Ingolby's house was
not the visit of a virtuoso alone, but of an evil spirit.

As the Romany disappeared, Max Ingolby had his hand on the old barber's
shoulder.  "I want one of the wigs you made for that theatrical
performance of the Mounted Police, Berry," he said.  "Never mind what
it's for.  I want it at once--one with the long hair of a French-Canadian
coureur-de-bois.  Have you got one?"

"Suh, I'll send it round-no, I'll bring it round as I come from dinner.
Want the clothes, too?"

"No.  I'm arranging for them with Osterhaut.  I've sent word by Jowett."

"You want me to know what it's for?"

"You can know anything I know--almost, Berry.  You're a friend of the
right sort, and I can trust you."

"Yeth-'ir, I bin some use to you, onct or twict, I guess."

"You'll have a chance to be of use more than ever presently."

"Suh, there's gain' to be a bust-up, but I know who's comin' out on the
top.  That Felix Marchand and his roughs can't down you.  I hear and see
a lot, and there's two or three things I was goin' to put befo' you;
yeth-'ir."

He unloaded his secret information to his friend, and was rewarded by
Ingolby suddenly shaking his hand warmly.

"That's the line," Ingolby said decisively.  "When do you go over to
Manitou again to cut old Hector Marchand's hair?  Soon?"

"To-day is his day--this evening," was the reply.

"Good.  You wanted to know what the wig and the habitant's clothes are
for, Berry--well, for me to wear in Manitou.  In disguise I'm going there
tonight among them all, among the roughs and toughs.  I want to find out
things for myself.  I can speak French as good as most of 'em, and I can
chew tobacco and swear with the best."

"You suhly are a wonder," said the old man admiringly.  "How you fin' the
time I got no idee."

"Everything in its place, Berry, and everything in its time.  I've got a
lot to do to-day, but it's in hand, and I don't have to fuss.  You'll not
forget the wig--you'll bring it round yourself?"

"Suh.  No snoopin' into the parcel then.  But if you go to Manitou
to-night, how can you have that fiddler?"

"He comes at nine o'clock.  I'll go to Manitou later.  Everything in its
own time."

He was about to leave the shop when some one came bustling in.  Berry was
between Ingolby and the door, and for an instant he did not see who it
was.  Presently he heard an unctuous voice: "Ah, good day, good day, Mr.
Berry.  I want to have my hair cut, if you please," it said.

Ingolby smiled.  The luck was with him to-day so far.  The voice belonged
to the Rev. Reuben Tripple, and he would be saved a journey to the manse.
Accidental meetings were better than planned interviews.  Old Berry's
grizzled beard was bristling with repugnance, and he was about to refuse
Mr. Tripple the hospitality of the shears when Ingolby said: "You won't
mind my having a word with Mr. Tripple first, will you, Berry?  May we
use your back parlour?"

A significant look from Ingolby's eyes gave Berry his cue.

"Suh, Mr. Ingolby.  I'm proud."  He opened the door of another room.

Mr. Tripple had not seen Ingolby when he entered, and he recognized him
now with a little shock of surprise.  There was no reason why he should
not care to meet the Master Man, but he always had an uncanny feeling
when his eye met that of Ingolby.  His apprehension had no foundation in
any knowledge, yet he had felt that Ingolby had no love for him, and this
disturbed the egregious vanity of a narrow nature.  His slouching,
corpulent figure made an effort to resist the gesture with which Ingolby
drew him to the door, but his will succumbed, and he shuffled importantly
into the other room.

Ingolby shut the door quietly behind him, and motioned the minister to a
chair beside the table.  Tripple sank down, mechanically smiling, placed
his hat on the floor, and rested his hands on the table.  Ingolby could
not help but notice how coarse the hands were--with fingers suddenly
ending as though they had been cut off, and puffy, yellowish skin that
suggested fat foods, or worse.

Ingolby came to grips at once.  "You preached a sermon last night which
no doubt was meant to do good, but will only do harm," he said abruptly.

The flabby minister flushed, and then made an effort to hold his own.

"I speak as I am moved," he said, puffing out his lips.  "You spoke on
this occasion before you were moved--just a little while before,"
answered Ingolby grimly.  "The speaking was last night, the moving comes
today."

"I don't get your meaning," was the thick rejoinder.  The man had a
feeling that there was some real danger ahead.

"You preached a sermon last night which might bring riot and bloodshed
between these two towns, though you knew the mess that's brewing."

"My conscience is my own.  I am responsible to my Lord for words which I
speak in His name, not to you."

"Your conscience belongs to yourself, but your acts belong to all of us.
If there is trouble at the Orange funeral to-morrow it will be your
fault.  The blame will lie at your door."

"The sword of the Spirit--"

"Oh, you want the sword, do you?  You want the sword, eh?"  Ingolby's jaw
was set now like a millstone.  "Well, you can have it, and have it now.
If you had taken what I said in the right way, I would not have done what
I'm going to do.  I'm going to send you out of Lebanon.  You're a bad and
dangerous element here.  You must go."

"Who are you to tell me I must go?"

The fat hands quivered on the table with anger and emotion, but also with
fear of something.  "You may be a rich man and own railways, but--"

"But I am not rich and I don't own railways.  Lately bad feeling has been
growing on the Sagalac, and only a spark was needed to fire the ricks.
You struck the spark in your sermon last night.  I don't see the end of
it all.  One thing is sure--you're not going to take the funeral service
to-morrow."

The slack red lips of the man of God were gone dry with excitement, the
loose body swayed with the struggle to fight it out.

"I'll take no orders from you," the husky voice protested.  "My
conscience alone will guide me.  I'll speak the truth as I feel it, and
the people will stand by me."

"In that case you WILL take orders from  me.  I'm going to save the town
from what hurts it, if I can.  I've got no legal rights over you, but I
have moral rights, and I mean to enforce them.  You gabble of conscience
and truth, but isn't it a new passion with you--conscience and truth?"

He leaned over the table and fastened the minister's eyes with his own.
"Had you the same love of conscience and truth at Radley?"

A whiteness passed over the flabby face, and the beady eyes took on a
glazed look.  Fight suddenly died out of them.

"You went on a missionary tour on the Ottawa River.  At Radley you toiled
and rested from your toil--and feasted.  The girl had no father or
brother, but her uncle was a railway-man.  He heard where you were, and
he hired with my company to come out here as a foreman.  He came to drop
on you.  The day after he came he had a bad accident.  I went to see him.
He told me all; his nerves were unstrung, you observe.  He meant to ruin
you, as you ruined the girl.  He had proofs enough.  The girl herself is
in Winnipeg.  Well, I know life, and I know man and man's follies and
temptations.  I thought it a pity that a career and a life like yours
should be ruined--"

A groan broke from the twitching lips before him, and a heavy sweat stood
out on the round, rolling forehead.

"If the man spoke, I knew it would be all up with you, for the world is
very hard on men of God who fall.  I've seen men ruined before this,
because of an hour's passion and folly.  I said to myself that you were
only human, and that maybe you had paid heavy in remorse and fear.  Then
there was the honour of the town of Lebanon.  I couldn't let the thing
take its course.  I got the doctor to tell the man that he must go for
special treatment to a hospital in Montreal, and I--well, I bought him
off on his promising to keep his mouth shut.  He was a bit stiff in
terms, because he said the girl needed the money.  The child died,
luckily for you.  Anyhow I bought him off, and he went.  That was a year
ago.  I've got all the proofs in my pocket, even to the three silly
letters you wrote her when your senses were stronger than your judgment.
I was going to see you about them to-day."

He took from his pocket a small packet, and held them before the other's
face.  "Have a good look at your own handwriting, and see if you
recognize it," Ingolby continued.

But the glazed, shocked eyes did not see.  Reuben Tripple had passed the
several stages of horror during Ingolby's merciless arraignment, and he
had nearly collapsed before he heard the end of the matter.  When he knew
that Ingolby had saved him, his strength gave way, and he trembled
violently.  Ingolby looked round and saw a jug of water.  Pouring out a
glassful, he thrust it into the fat, wrinkled fingers.

"Drink and pull yourself together," he said sternly.  The shaken figure
straightened itself, and the water was gulped down.  "I thank you," he
said in a husky voice.

"You see I treated you fairly, and that you've been a fool?"  Ingolby
asked with no lessened determination.

"I have tried to atone, and--"

"No, you haven't had the right spirit to atone.  You were fat with vanity
and self-conceit.  I've watched you."

"In future I will--"

"Well, that rests with yourself, but your health is bad, and you're not
going to take the funeral tomorrow.  You've had a sudden breakdown, and
you're going to get a call from some church in the East--as far East as
Yokohama or Bagdad, I hope; and leave here in a few weeks.  You
understand?  I've thought the thing out, and you've got to go.  You'll do
no good to yourself or others here.  Take my advice, and wherever you go,
walk six miles a day at least, work in a garden, eat half as much as you
do, and be good to your wife.  It's bad enough for any woman to be a
parson's wife, but to be a parson's wife and your wife, too, wants a lot
of fortitude."

The heavy figure lurched to the upright, and steadied itself with a force
which had not yet been apparent.

"I'll do my best--so help me God!" he said and looked Ingolby squarely
in the face for the first time.

"All right, see you keep your word," Ingolby replied, and nodded good-
bye.

The other went to the door, and laid a hand on the knob.

Suddenly Ingolby stopped him, and thrust a little bundle of bills into
his hand.  "There's a hundred dollars for your wife.  It'll pay the
expense of moving," he said.

A look of wonder, revelation and gratitude crept into Tripple's face.  "I
will keep my word, so help me God!" he said again.

"All right, good-bye," responded Ingolby abruptly, and turned away.

A moment afterwards the door closed behind the Rev. Reuben Tripple and
his influence in Lebanon.  "I couldn't shake hands with him," said
Ingolby to himself, "but I'm glad he didn't sniffle.  There's some stuff
in him--if it only has a chance."

"I've done a good piece of business, Berry," he said cheerfully as he
passed through the barber-shop.  "Suh, if you say so," said the barber,
and they left the shop together.




CHAPTER IX

MATTER AND MIND AND TWO MEN

Promptly at nine o'clock Jethro Fawe knocked at Ingolby's door, and was
admitted by the mulatto man-servant Jim Beadle, who was to Ingolby like
his right hand.  It was Jim who took command of his house, "bossed" his
two female servants, arranged his railway tours, superintended his
kitchen--with a view to his own individual tastes; valeted him, kept his
cigars within a certain prescribed limit by a firm actuarial principle
which transferred any surplus to his own use; gave him good advice,
weighed up his friends and his enemies with shrewd sense; and protected
him from bores and cranks, borrowers and "dead-beats."

Jim was accustomed to take a good deal of responsibility, and had more
than once sent people to the right-about who had designs on his master,
even though they came accredited.  On such occasions he did not lie to
protect himself when called to account, but told the truth
pertinaciously.  He was obstinate in his vanity, and carried off his
mistakes with aplomb.  When asked by Ingolby what he called the Governor
General when he took His Excellency over the new railway in Ingolby's
private car, he said, "I called him what everybody called him.  I called
him 'Succelency.'" And "Succelency" for ever after the Governor General
was called in the West.  Jim's phonetic mouthful gave the West a roar of
laughter and a new word to the language.  On another occasion Jim gave
the West a new phrase to its vocabulary which remains to this day.
Having to take the wife of a high personage of the neighbouring Republic
over the line in the private car, he had astounded his master by
presenting a bill for finger-bowls before the journey began.  Ingolby
said to him, "Jim, what the devil is this--finger-bowls in my private
car?  We've never had finger-bowls before, and we've had everybody as was
anybody to travel with us."  Jim's reply was final.  "Say," he replied,
"we got to have 'em.  Soon's I set my eyes on that lady I said: 'She's a
finger-bowl lady.'"

"'Finger-bowl lady' be hanged, Jim, we don't--" Ingolby protested, but
Jim waved him down.

"Say," he said decisively, "she'll ask for them finger-bowls--she'll ask
for 'em, and what'd I do if we hadn't got 'em."

She did ask for them; and henceforth the West said of any woman who put
on airs and wanted what she wasn't born to: "She's a finger-bowl lady."

It was Jim who opened the door to Jethro Fawe, and his first glance was
one of prejudice.  His quick perception saw that the Romany wore clothes
not natural to him.  He felt the artificial element, the quality of
disguise.  He was prepared to turn the visitor away, no matter what he
wanted, but Ingolby's card handed to him by the Romany made him pause.
He had never known his master give a card like that more than once or
twice in the years they had been together.  He fingered the card,
scrutinized it carefully, turned it over, looked heavenward reflectively,
as though the final permission for the visit remained with him, and
finally admitted the visitor.

"Mr. Ingolby ain't in," he said.  "He went out a little while back.  You
got to wait," he added sulkily, as he showed the Romany into Ingolby's
working-room.

As Jim did so, he saw lying on a chair a suit of clothes on top of which
were a wig and false beard and moustache.  Instantly he got between the
visitor and the make-up.  The parcel was closed when he was in the room a
half-hour before.  Ingolby had opened it since, had been called out, and
had forgotten to cover the things up or put them away.

"Sit down," Jim said to the Romany, still covering the disguise.  Then he
raised them in his arms, and passed with them into another room,
muttering angrily to himself.

The Romany had seen, however.  They were the first things on which his
eyes had fallen when he entered the room.  A wig, a false beard, and
workman's clothes!  What were they for?  Were these disguises for the
Master Gorgio?  Was he to wear them?  If so, he--Jethro Fawe--would watch
and follow him wherever he went.  Had these disguises to do with Fleda--
with his Romany lass?

His pulses throbbed; he was in an overwrought mood.  He was ready for any
illusion, susceptible to any vagary of the imagination.

He looked round the room.  So this was the way the swaggering, masterful
Gorgio lived?

Here were pictures and engravings which did not seem to belong to a new
town in a new land, where everything was useful or spectacular.  Here was
a sense of culture and refinement.  Here were finished and unfinished
water-colours done by Ingolby's own hand or bought by him from some hard-
up artist earning his way mile by mile, as it were.  Here were books, not
many, but well-bound and important-looking, covering fields in which
Jethro Fawe had never browsed, into which, indeed, he had never entered.
If he had opened them he would have seen a profusion of marginal notes in
pencil, and slips of paper stuck in the pages to mark important passages.

He turned from them to the welcome array of weapons on the walls-rifles,
shotguns, Indian bows, arrows and spears, daggers, and great sheath-
knives such as are used from the Yukon to Bolivia, and a sabre with a
faded ribbon of silk tied to the handle.  This was all that Max Ingolby
had inherited from his father--that artillery sabre which he had worn in
the Crimea and in the Indian Mutiny.  Jethro's eyes wandered eagerly over
the weapons, and, in imagination, he had each one in his hand.  From the
pained, angry confusion he felt when he looked at the books had emerged a
feeling of fanaticism, of feud and war, in which his spirit regained its
own kind of self-respect.  In looking at the weapons he was as good a man
as any Gorgio.  Brains and books were one thing, but the strong arm, the
quick eye, and the deft lunge home with the sword or dagger were better;
they were of a man's own skill, not the acquired skill of another's
brains which books give.  He straightened his shoulders till he looked
like a modern actor playing the hero in a romantic drama, and with quick
vain motions he stroked and twisted his brown moustache, and ran his
fingers through his curling hair.  In truth he was no coward; and his
conceit would not lessen his courage when the test of it came.

As his eyes brightened from gloom and sullenness to valiant enmity, they
suddenly fell on a table in a corner where lay a black coffin-shaped
thing of wood.  In this case, he knew, was the Sarasate violin.
Sarasate--once he had paid ten lira to hear Sarasate play the fiddle in
Turin, and the memory of it was like the sun on the clouds to him now.
In music such of him as was real found a home.  It fed everything in him
--his passion, his vanity; his vagabond taste, his emotions, his self-
indulgence, his lust.  It was the means whereby he raised himself to
adventure and to pilgrimage, to love and license and loot and spying and
secret service here and there in the east of Europe.  It was the
flagellation of these senses which excited him to do all that man may do
and more.

He was going to play to the masterful Gorgio, and he would play as he had
never played before.  He would pour the soul of his purpose into the
music--to win back or steal back, the lass sealed to him by the Starzke
River.

"Kismet!" he said aloud, and he rose from the chair to go to the violin,
but as he did so the door opened and Ingolby entered.

"Oh, you're here, and longing to get at it," he said pleasantly.

He had seen the look in the eyes of the Romany as he entered, and noted
which way his footsteps were tending.  "Well, we needn't lose any time,
but will you have a drink and a smoke first?" he added.

He threw his hat in a corner, and opened a spirittable where shone a half
dozen cut-glass, tumblers and several well-filled bottles, while boxes of
cigars and cigarettes flanked them.  It was the height of modern luxury
imported from New York, and Jethro eyed it with envious inward comment.
The Gorgio had the world on his key-chain!  Every door would open to him
--that was written on his face--unless Fate stepped in and closed all
doors!

The door of Fleda's heart had already been opened, but he had not yet
made his bed in it, and there was still time to help Fate, if her mystic
finger beckoned.

Jethro nodded in response to Ingolby's invitation to drink.  "But I do
not drink much when I play," he remarked.  "There's enough liquor in the
head when the fiddle's in the hand.  'Dadia', I do not need the spirit to
make the pulses go!"

"As little as you like then, if you'll only play as well as you did this
afternoon," Ingolby said cheerily.  "I will play better," was the reply.

"On Sarasate's violin--well, of course."

"Not only because it is Sarasate's violin, 'Kowadji'!"  "Kowadji!  Oh,
come now, you may be a Gipsy, but that doesn't mean that you're an
Egyptian or an Arab.  Why Arabic--why 'kowadji'?"

The other shrugged his shoulders.  "Who can tell I speak many languages.
I do not like the Mister.  It is ugly in the ear.  Monsieur, signor,
effendi, kowadji, they have some respect in them."

"You wanted to pay me respect, eh?"

"You have Sarasate's violin!"

"I have a lot of things I could do without."

"Could you do without the Sarasate?"

"Long enough to hear you play it, Mr.--what is your name, may I ask?"

"My name is Jethro Fawe."

"Well, Jethro Fawe, my Romany 'chal', you shall show me what a violin can
do."

"You know the Romany lingo?" Jethro asked, as Ingolby went over to the
violin-case.

"A little--just a little."

"When did you learn it?"  There was a sudden savage rage in Jethro's
heart, for he imagined Fleda had taught Ingolby.

"Many a year ago when I could learn anything and remember anything and
forget anything."  Ingolby sighed.  "But that doesn't matter, for I know
only a dozen words or so, and they won't carry me far."

He turned the violin over in his hands.  "This ought to do a bit more
than the cotton-field fiddle," he said dryly.

He snapped the strings, looking at it with the love of the natural
connoisseur.  "Finish your drink and your cigarette.  I can wait," he
added graciously.  "If you like the cigarettes, you must take some away
with you.  You don't drink much, that's clear, therefore you must smoke.
Every man has some vice or other, if it's only hanging on to virtue too
tight."

He laughed eagerly.  Strange that he should have a feeling of greater
companionship for a vagabond like this than for most people he met.  Was
it some temperamental thing in him?  "Dago," as he called the Romany
inwardly, there was still a bond between them.  They understood the glory
of a little instrument like this, and could forget the world in the light
on a great picture.  There was something in the air they breathed which
gave them easier understanding of each other and of the world.

Suddenly with a toss Jethro drained the glass of spirit, though he had
not meant to do so.  He puffed the cigarette an instant longer, then
threw it on the floor, and was about to put his foot on it, when Ingolby
stopped him.

"I'm a slave," he said.  "I've got a master.  It's Jim.  Jim's a hard
master, too.  He'd give me fits if we ground our cigarette ashes into the
carpet."

He threw the refuse into a flower-pot.

"That squares Jim.  Now let's turn the world inside out," he proceeded.
He handed the fiddle over.  "Here's the little thing that'll let you do
the trick.  Isn't it a beauty, Jethro Fawe?"

The Romany took it, his eyes glistening with mingled feelings.  Hatred
was in his soul, and it showed in the sidelong glance as Ingolby turned
to place a chair where he could hear and see comfortably; yet he had the
musician's love of the perfect instrument, and the woods and the streams
and the sounds of night and the whisperings of trees and the ghosts that
walked in lonely places and called across the glens--all were pouring
into his brain memories which made his pulses move far quicker than the
liquor he had drunk could do.

"What do you wish?" he asked as he tuned the fiddle.

Ingolby laughed good-humouredly.  "Something Eastern; something you'd
play for yourself if you were out by the Caspian Sea.  Something that has
life in it."

Jethro continued to tune the fiddle carefully and abstractedly.  His eyes
were half-closed, giving them a sulky look, and his head was averted.  He
made no reply to Ingolby, but his head swayed from side to side in that
sensuous state produced by self-hypnotism, so common among the half-
Eastern races.  By an effort of the will they send through the nerves a
flood of feeling which is half-anaesthetic, half-intoxicant.  Carried
into its fullest expression it drives a man amok or makes of him a
howling dervish, a fanatic, or a Shakir.  In lesser intensity it produces
the musician of the purely sensuous order, or the dancer that performs
prodigies of abandoned grace.  Suddenly the sensuous exaltation had come
upon Jethro Fawe.  It was as though he had discharged into his system
from some cells of his brain a flood which coursed like a stream of soft
fire.

In the pleasurable pain of such a mood he drew his bow across the strings
with a sweeping stroke, and then, for an instant, he ran hither and
thither on the strings testing the quality and finding the range and
capacity of the instrument.  It was a scamper of hieroglyphics which
could only mean anything to a musician.

"Well, what do you think of him?" Ingolby asked as the Romany lowered
the bow.  "Paganini--Joachim--Sarasate--any one, it is good enough," was
the half-abstracted reply.

"It is good enough for you--almost, eh?"

Ingolby meant his question as a compliment, but an evil look shot into
the Romany's face, and the bow twitched in his hand.  He was not Paganini
or Sarasate, but that was no reason why he should be insulted.

Ingolby's quick perception saw, however, what his words had done, and he
hastened to add: "I believe you can get more out of that fiddle than
Sarasate ever could, in your own sort of music anyhow.  I've never heard
any one play half so well the kind of piece you played this afternoon.
I'm glad I didn't make a fool of myself buying the fiddle.  I didn't, did
I?  I gave five thousand dollars for it."

"It's worth anything to the man that loves it," was the Romany's
response.  He was mollified by the praise he had received.

He raised the fiddle slowly to his chin, his eyes wandering round the
room, then projecting themselves into space, from which they only
returned to fix themselves on Ingolby with the veiled look which sees but
does not see--such a look as an oracle, or a death-god, or a soulless
monster of some between-world, half-Pagan god would wear.  Just such a
look as Watts's "Minotaur" wears in the Tate Gallery in London.

In an instant he was away in a world which was as far off from this world
as Jupiter is from Mars.  It was the world of his soul's origin--a place
of beautiful and yet of noisome creations also; of white mountains and
green hills, and yet of tarns in which crawled evil things; a place of
vagrant, hurricanes and tidal-waves and cloud-bursts, of forests alive
with quarrelling!  and affrighted beasts.  It was a place where birds
sang divinely, yet where obscene fowls of prey hovered in the blue or
waited by the dying denizens of the desert or the plain; where dark-eyed
women heard, with sidelong triumph, the whispers of passion; where sweet-
faced children fled in fear from terrors undefined; where harpies and
witch-women and evil souls waited in ambush; or scurried through the
coverts where men brought things to die; or where they fled for futile
refuge from armed foes.  It was a world of unbridled will, this, where
the soul of Jethro Fawe had its origin; and to it his senses fled
involuntarily when he put Sarasate's fiddle to his chin this Autumn
evening.

From that well of the First Things--the first things of his own life, the
fount from which his forebears drew, backwards through the centuries,
Jethro Fawe quickly drank his fill; and then into the violin he poured
his own story--no improvisation, but musical legends and classic
fantasies and folk-breathings and histories of anguished or joyous haters
or lovers of life; treated by the impressionist who made that which had
been in other scenes to other men the thing of the present and for the
men who are.  That which had happened by the Starzke River was now of the
Sagalac River.  The passions and wild love and irresponsible deeds of the
life he had lived in years gone by were here.

It was impossible for Ingolby to resist the spell of the music.  Such
abandonment he had never seen in any musician, such riot of musical
meaning he had never heard.  He was conscious of the savagery and the
bestial soul of vengeance which spoke through the music, and drowned the
joy and radiance and almost ghostly and grotesque frivolity of the
earlier passages; but it had no personal meaning to him, though at times
it seemed when the Romany came near and bent over him with the ecstatic
attack of the music, as though there was a look in the black eyes like
that of a man who kills.  It had, of course, nothing to do with him; it
was the abandonment of a highly emotional nature, he thought.

It was only after he had been playing, practically without ceasing, for
three-quarters of an hour, that there came to Ingolby the true
interpretation of the Romany mutterings through the man's white, wolf-
like teeth.  He did not shrink, however, but kept his head and watched.

Once, as the musician flung his body round in a sweep of passion, Ingolby
saw the black eyes flash to the weapons on the wall with a malign look
which did not belong to the music alone, and he took a swift estimate of
the situation.  Why the man should have any intentions against him, he
could not guess, except that he might be one of the madmen who have a
vendetta against the capitalist.  Or was he a tool of Felix Marchand?  It
did not seem possible, and yet if the man was penniless and an anarchist
maybe, there was the possibility.  Or--the blood rushed to his face--or
it might be that the Gipsy's presence here, this display of devilish
antipathy, as though it were all part of the music, was due, somehow, to
Fleda Druse.

The music swelled to a swirling storm, crashed and flooded the feelings
with a sense of shipwreck and chaos, through which a voice seemed to cry-
the quiver and delicate shrillness of one isolated string--and then fell
a sudden silence, as though the end of all things had come; and on the
silence the trembling and attenuated note which had quivered on the
lonely string, rising, rising, piercing the infinite distance and sinking
into silence again.

In the pause which followed the Romany stood panting, his eyes fixed on
Ingolby with an evil exaltation which made him seem taller and bigger
than he was, but gave him, too, a look of debauchery like that on the
face of a satyr.  Generations of unbridled emotion, of license of the
fields and the covert showed in his unguarded features.

"What did the single cry--the motif--express?" Ingolby asked coolly.
"I know there was catastrophe, the tumblings of avalanches, but the voice
that cried-the soul of a lover, was it?"

The Romany's lips showed an ugly grimace.  "It was the soul of one that
betrayed a lover, going to eternal tortures."

Ingolby laughed carelessly.  "It was a fine bit of work.  Sarasate would
have been proud of his fiddle if he could have heard.  Anyhow he couldn't
have played that.  Is it Gipsy music?"

"It is the music of a 'Gipsy,' as you call it."

"Well, it's worth a year's work to hear," Ingolby replied admiringly, yet
acutely conscious of danger.  "Are you a musician by trade?" he asked.

"I have no trade."  The glowing eyes kept scanning the wall where the
weapons hung, and as though without purpose other than to get a pipe from
the rack on the wall, Ingolby moved to where he could be prepared for any
rush.  It seemed absurd that there should be such a possibility; but the
world was full of strange things.

"What brought you to the West?" he asked as he filled a pipe, his back
almost against the wall.

"I came to get what belonged to me."

Ingolby laughed ironically.  "Most of us are here for that purpose.  We
think the world owes us such a lot."

"I know what is my own."

Ingolby lit his pipe, his eyes reflectively scanning the other.

"Have you got it again out here--your own?"

"Not yet, but I will."

Ingolby took out his watch, and looked at it.  "I haven't found it easy
getting all that belongs to me."

"You have found it easier getting what belongs to some one else," was the
snarling response.

Ingolby's jaw hardened.  What did the fellow mean?  Did he refer to
money, or--was it Fleda Druse?  "See here," he said, "there's no need to
say things like that.  I never took anything that didn't belong to me,
that I didn't win, or earn or pay for--market price or 'founder's
shares'"--he smiled grimly.  "You've given me the best treat I've had in
many a day.  I'd walk fifty miles to hear you play my Sarasate--or even
old Berry's cotton-field fiddle.  I'm as grateful as I can be, and I'd
like to pay you for it; but as you're not a professional, and it's one
gentleman to another as it were, I can only thank you--or maybe help you
to get what's your own, if you're really trying to get it out here.
Meanwhile, have a cigar and a drink."

He was still between the Romany and the wall, and by a movement forward
sought to turn Jethro to the spirit-table.  Probably this manoeuvring was
all nonsense, that he was wholly misreading the man; but he had always
trusted his instincts, and he would not let his reason rule him entirely
in such a situation.  He could also ring the bell for Jim, or call to
him, for while he was in the house Jim was sure to be near by; but he
felt he must deal with the business alone.

The Romany did not move towards the spirit-table, and Ingolby became
increasingly vigilant.

"No, I can't pay you anything, that's clear," he said; "but to get your
own--I've got some influence out here--what can I do?  A stranger is up
against all kinds of things if he isn't a native, and you're not.  Your
home and country's a good way from here, eh?"

Suddenly the Romany faced him.  "Yes.  I come from places far from here.
Where is the Romany's home?  It is everywhere in the world, but it is
everywhere inside his tent.  Because his country is everywhere and
nowhere, his home is more to him than it is to any other.  He is alone
with his wife, and with his own people.  Yes, and by long and by last,
he will make the man pay who spoils his home.  It is all he has.  Good or
bad, it is all he has.  It is his own."

Ingolby had a strange, disturbing premonition that he was about to hear
what would startle him, but he persisted.  "You said you had come here to
get your own--is your home here?"

For a moment the Romany did not answer.  He had worked himself into a
great passion.  He had hypnotized himself, he had acted for a while as
though he was one of life's realities; but suddenly there passed through
his veins the chilling sense of the unreal, that he was only acting a
part, as he had ever done in his life, and that the man before him could,
with a wave of the hand, raise the curtain on all his disguises and
pretences.  It was only for an instant, however, for there swept through
him the feeling that Fleda had roused in him--the first real passion, the
first true love--if what such as he felt can be love--that he had ever
known; and he saw her again as she was in the but in the wood defying
him, ready to defend herself against him.  All his erotic anger and
melodramatic fervour were alive in him once more.

He was again a man with a wrong, a lover dispossessed.  On the instant
his veins filled with passionate blood.  The Roscian strain in him had
its own tragic force and reality.

"My home is where my own is, and you, have taken my own from me, as I
said," he burst out.  "There was all the world for you, but I had only my
music and my wife, and you have taken my wife from me.  'Mi Duvel', you
have taken, but you shall give back again, or there will be only one of
us in the world!  The music I have played for you--that has told you all:
the thing that was music from the beginning of Time, the will of the
First of All.  Fleda Druse, she was mine, she is my wife, and you, the
Gorgio, come between, and she will not return to me."

A sudden savage desire came to Ingolby to strike the man in the face--
this Gipsy vagabond the husband of Fleda Druse!  It was too monstrous.
It was an evil lie, and yet she had said she was a Romany, and had said
it with apparent shame or anxiety.  She had given him no promise, had
pledged no faith, had admitted no love, and yet already in his heart of
hearts he thought upon her as his own.  Ever since the day he had held
her in his arms at the Carillon Rapids her voice had sounded in his ears,
and a warmth was in his heart which had never been there in all his days.
This waif of barbarism even to talk of Fleda Druse as though he was of
the same sphere as herself invited punishment-but to claim her as his
wife!  It was shameless.  An ugly mood came on him, the force that had
made him what he was filled all his senses.  He straightened himself;
contempt of the Ishmael showed at his lips.

"I think you lie, Jethro Fawe," he said quietly, and his eyes were hard
and piercing.  "Gabriel Druse's daughter is not--never was--any wife of
yours.  She never called you husband.  She does not belong to the refuse
of the world."

The Romany made a sudden rush towards the wall where the weapons hung,
but two arms of iron were flung out and caught him, and he was hurled
across the room.  He crashed against a table, swayed, missed a chair
where rested the Sarasate violin, then fell to the floor; but he
staggered to his feet again, all his senses in chaos.

"You almost fell on the fiddle.  If you had hurt it I'd have hurt you,
Mr. Fawe," Ingolby said with a grim smile.  "That fiddle's got too much
in it to waste it."

"Mi Duvel!  Mi Duvel!" gasped the Romany in his fury.

"You can say that as much as you like, but if you play any more of your
monkey tricks here, my Paganini, I will wring your neck," Ingolby
returned, his six feet of solid flesh making a movement of menace.

"And look," he added, "since you are here, and I said what I meant, that
I'd help you to get your own, I'll keep my word.  But don't talk in
damned riddles.  Talk white men's language.  You said that Gabriel
Druse's daughter was your wife.  Explain what you meant, and no
nonsense."

The Romany made a gesture of acquiescence.  "She was made mine according
to Romany law by the River Starzke seventeen years ago.  I was the son of
Lemuel Fawe, rightful King of all the Romanys.  Gabriel Druse seized the
headship, and my father gave him three thousand pounds that we should
marry, she and I, and so bring the headship to the Fawes again when
Gabriel Druse should die; and so it was done by the River Starzke in the
Roumelian country."

Ingolby winced, for the man's words rang true.  A cloud came over his
face, but he said nothing.  Jethro saw the momentary advantage.  "You did
not know?" he asked.  "She did not tell you she was made my wife those
years ago?  She did not tell you she was the daughter of the Romany King?
So it is, you see, she is afraid to tell the truth."

Ingolby's knitted bulk heaved with desire to injure.  "Your wife--you
melodious sinner!  Do you think such tomfoolery has any effect in this
civilized country?  She is about as much your wife as I am your brother.
Don't talk your heathenish rot here.  I said I'd help you to get your
own, because you played the fiddle as few men can play it, and I owe you
a lot for that hour's music; but there's nothing belonging to Gabriel
Druse that belongs to you, and his daughter least of all.  Look out--
don't sit on the fiddle, damn you!"

The Romany had made a motion as if to sit down on the chair where the
fiddle was, but stopped short at Ingolby's warning.  For an instant
Jethro had an inclination to seize the fiddle and break it across his
knees.  It would be an exquisite thing to destroy five thousand dollars'
worth of this man's property at a single wrench and blow.  But the spirit
of the musician asserted itself before the vengeful lover could carry out
his purpose; as Ingolby felt sure it would.  Ingolby had purposely given
the warning about the fiddle, in the belief that it might break the
unwelcome intensity of the scene.  He detested melodrama, and the scene
came precious near to it.  Men had been killed before his eyes more than
once, but there had been no rodomontade even when there had been a woman
in the case.

This Romany lover, however, seemed anxious to make a Sicilian drama out
of his preposterous claim, and it sickened him.  Who was the fellow that
he should appear in the guise of a rival to himself!  It was humiliating
and offensive.  Ingolby had his own kind of pride and vanity, and they
were both hurt now.  He would have been less irritable if this rival had
been as good a man as himself or better.  He was so much a gamester that
he would have said, "Let the best man win," and have taken his chances.

His involuntary strategy triumphed for the moment.  The Romany looked at
the fiddle for an instant with murderous eyes, but the cool, quiet voice
of Ingolby again speaking sprayed his hot virulence.

"You can make a good musician quite often, but a good fiddle is a prize-
packet from the skies," Ingolby said.  "When you get a good musician and
a good fiddle together it's a day for a salute of a hundred guns."

Half-dazed with unregulated emotion, Jethro acted with indecision for a
moment, and the fiddle was safe.  But he had suffered the indignity of
being flung like a bag of bones across the room, and the microbe of
insane revenge was in him.  It was not to be killed by the cold humour of
the man who had worsted him.  He returned to the attack.

"She is mine, and her father knows it is so.  I have waited all these
years, and the hour has come.  I will--"

Ingolby's eyes became hard and merciless again.  "Don't talk your Gipsy
rhetoric.  I've had enough.  No hour has come that makes a woman do what
she doesn't want to do in a free country.  The lady is free to do what
she pleases here within British law, and British law takes no heed of
Romany law or any other law.  You'll do well to go back to your Roumelian
country or whatever it is.  The lady will marry whom she likes."

"She will never marry you," the Romany said huskily and menacingly.

"I have never asked her, but if I do, and she said yes, no one could
prevent it."

"I would prevent it."

"How?"

"She is a Romany: she belongs to the Romany people; I will find a way."

Ingolby had a flash of intuition.

"You know well that if Gabriel Druse passed the word, your life wouldn't
be worth a day's purchase.  The Camorra would not be more certain or more
deadly.  If you do anything to hurt the daughter of Gabriel Druse, you
will pay the full price, and you know it.  The Romanys don't love you
better than their rightful chief."

"I am their rightful chief."

"Maybe, but if they don't say so, too, you might as well be their
rightful slave.  You are a genius in your way.  Take my advice and return
to the trail of the Gipsy.  Or, there's many an orchestra would give you
a good salary as leader.  You've got no standing in this country.  You
can't do anything to hurt me except try to kill me, and I'll take my
chance of that.  You'd better have a drink now and go quietly home to
bed.  Try and understand that this is a British town, and we don't settle
our affairs by jumping from a violin rhapsody to a knife or a gun."  He
jerked his head backwards towards the wall.  "Those things are for
ornament, not for use.  Come, Fawe, have a drink and go home like a good
citizen for one night only."

The Romany hesitated, then shook his head and muttered chaotically.

"Very well," was the decisive reply.  Ingolby pressed a bell, and, in an
instant, Jim Beadle was in the room.  He had evidently been at the
keyhole.  "Jim," he said, "show the gentleman out."

But suddenly he caught up a box of cigars from the table and thrust it
into the Romany's hands.  "They're the best to be got this side of
Havana," he said cheerily.  "They'll help you put more fancy still into
your playing.  Good night.  You never played better than you've done
during the last hour, I'll stake my life on that.  Good night.  Show Mr.
Fawe out, Jim."

The Romany had not time to thrust back the cigars upon his host, and
dazed by the strategy of the thing, by the superior force and mind of the
man who a moment ago he would have killed, he took the box and turned
towards the door, taking his hat dazedly from Jim.

At the door, however, catching sight of the sly grin on the mulatto
servant's face, his rage and understanding returned to him, and he faced
the masterful Gorgio once again.

"By God, I'll have none of it!" he exclaimed roughly and threw the box
of cigars on the floor of the room.  Ingolby was not perturbed.  "Don't
forget there's an east-bound train every day," he said menacingly, and
turned his back as the door closed.

In another minute Jim entered the room.  "Get the clothes and the wig and
things, Jim.  I must be off," he said.

"The toughs don't get going till about this time over at Manitou,"
responded Jim.  Then he told his master about the clothes having been
exposed in the room when the Romany arrived.  "But I don't think he seen
them," Jim added with approval of his own conduct.  "I got 'em out quick
as lightning.  I covered 'em like a blanket."

"All right, Jim; it doesn't matter.  That fellow's got other things to
think of than that."

He was wrong, however.  The Romany was waiting outside in the darkness
not far away--watching and waiting.




CHAPTER X

FOR LUCK

Felix Marchand was in the highest spirits.  His clean-shaven face was
wrinkled with smiles and sneers.  His black hair was flung in waves of
triumph over his heavily-lined forehead; one hand was on his hip with
brave satisfaction, the other with lighted cigarette was tossed upwards
in exultation.

"I've got him.  I've got him--like that!" he said transferring the
cigarette to his mouth, and clenching his right hand as though it could
not be loosed by an earthquake.  "For sure, it's a thing finished as the
solder of a pannikin--like that."

He caught up a tin quart-pot from the bar-counter and showed the soldered
bottom of it.

He was alone in the bar of Barbazon's Hotel except for one person--the
youngest of the officials who had been retired from the offices of the
railways when Ingolby had merged them.  This was a man who had got his
position originally by nepotism, and represented the worst elements of a
national life where the spoils system is rooted in the popular mind.  He
had, however, a little residue of that discipline which, working in a
great industrial organization, begets qualms as to extreme courses.

He looked reflectively at the leaden pot and said in reply: "I'd never
believe in anything where that Ingolby is concerned till I had it in the
palm of my hand.  He's as deep as a well, and when he's quietest it's
good to look out.  He takes a lot of skinning, that badger."

"He's skinned this time all right," was Marchand's reply.  "To-morrow'll
be the biggest day Manitou's had since the Indian lifted his wigwam and
the white man put down his store.  Listen--hear them!  They're coming!"

He raised a hand for silence, and a rumbling, ragged roar of voices could
be heard without.

"The crowd have gone the rounds," he continued.  "They started at
Barbazon's and they're winding up at Barbazon's.  They're drunk enough
to-night to want to do anything, and to-morrow when they've got sore
heads they'll do anything.  They'll make that funeral look like a
squeezed orange; they'll show Lebanon and Master Ingolby that we're to be
bosses of our own show.  The strike'll be on after the funeral, and after
the strike's begun there'll be--eh, bien sur!"

He paused sharply, as though he had gone too far.  "There'll be what?"
whispered the other; but Marchand made no reply, save to make a warning
gesture, for Barbazon, the landlord, had entered behind the bar.

"They're coming back, Barbazon," Marchand said to the landlord, jerking
his head towards the front door.  The noise of the crowd was increasing,
the raucous shouts were so loud that the three had to raise their voices.
"You'll do a land-office business to-night," he declared.

Barbazon had an evil face.  There were rumours that he had been in gaol
in Quebec for robbery, and that after he had served his time he had dug
up the money he had stolen and come West.  He had started the first
saloon at Manitou, and had grown with the place in more senses than one.
He was heavy and thick-set, with huge shoulders, big hands, and beady
eyes that looked out of a stolid face where long hours, greed and vices
other than drink had left their mark.  He never drank spirits, and was
therefore ready to take advantage of those who did drink.  More than one
horse and canoe and cow and ox, and acre of land, in the days when land
was cheap, had come to him across the bar-counter.  He could be bought,
could Barbazon, and he sold more than wine and spirits.  He had a wife
who had left him twice because of his misdemeanours, but had returned and
straightened out his house and affairs once again; and even when she went
off with Lick Baldwin, a cattle-dealer, she was welcomed back without
reproaches by Barbazon, chiefly because he had no morals, and her
abilities were of more value to him than her virtue.  On the whole, Gros
Barbazon was a bad lot.

At Marchand's words Barbazon shrugged his shoulders.  "The more spent
to-night, the less to spend to-morrow," he growled.

"But there's going to be spending for a long time," Marchand answered.
"There's going to be a riot to-morrow, and there's going to be a strike
the next day, and after that there's going to be something else."

"What else?" Barbazon asked, his beady eyes fastened on Marchand's face.

"Something worth while-better than all the rest."  Barbazon's low
forehead seemed to disappear almost, as he drew the grizzled shock of
hair down, by wrinkling his forehead with a heavy frown.

"It's no damn good, m'sieu'," he growled.  "Am I a fool?  They'll spend
money to-night, and tomorrow, and the next day, and when the row is on;
and the more they spend then, the less they'll have to spend by-and-by.
It's no good.  The steady trade for me--all the time.  That is my idee.
And the something else--what?  You think there's something else that'll
be good for me?  Nom de Dieu, there's nothing you're doing, or mean to
do, but'll hurt me and everybody."

"That's your view, is it, Barbazon?" exclaimed Marchand loudly, for the
crowd was now almost at the door.  "You're a nice Frenchman and patriot.
That crowd'll be glad to hear you think they're fools.  Suppose they took
it into their heads to wreck the place?"

Barbazon's muddy face got paler, but his eyes sharpened, and he leaned
over the bar-counter, and said with a snarl: "Go to hell, and say what
you like; and then I'll have something to say about something else,
m'sieu'."

Marchand was about to reply angrily, but he instantly changed his mind,
and before Barbazon could stop him, he sprang over the counter and
disappeared into the office behind the bar.

"I won't steal anything, Barbazon," he said over his shoulder as he
closed the door behind him.

"I'll see to that," Barbazon muttered stolidly, but with malicious eyes.

The front door was flung open now, and the crowd poured into the room,
boisterous, reckless, though some were only sullen, watchful and angry.
These last were mostly men above middle age, and of a fanatical and
racially bitter type.  They were not many, but in one sense they were the
backbone and force of the crowd, probably the less intelligent but the
more tenacious and consistent.  They were black spots of gathering storm
in an electric atmosphere.

All converged upon the bar.  Two assistants rushed the drinks along the
counter with flourishes, while Barbazon took in the cash and sharply
checked the rougher element, who were inclined to treat the bar as a
place for looting.  Most of them, however, had a wholesome fear of
Barbazon, and also most of them wished to stand well with him--credit
was a good thing, even in a saloon.

For a little time the room was packed, then some of the more restless
spirits, their thirst assuaged, sallied forth to taste the lager and old
rye elsewhere, and "raise Cain" in the streets.  When they went, it
became possible to move about more freely in the big bar-room, at the end
of which was a billiard-table.  It was notable, however, that the more
sullen elements stayed.  Some of them were strangers to each other.
Manitou was a distributing point for all radiations of the compass, and
men were thrown together in its streets who only saw one another once or
twice a year-when they went to the woods in the Fall or worked the rivers
in the Summer.  Some were Mennonites, Doukhobors and Finlanders, some
Swedes, Norwegians and Icelanders.  Others again were birds of passage
who would probably never see Manitou in the future, but they were mostly
French, and mostly Catholic, and enemies of the Orange Lodges wherever
they were, east or west or north or south.  They all had a common ground
of unity--half-savage coureurs-de-bois, river-drivers, railway-men,
factory hands, cattlemen, farmers, labourers; they had a gift for
prejudice, and taking sides on something or other was as the breath
of the nostrils to them.

The greater number of the crowd were, however, excitable, good-natured
men, who were by instinct friendly, save when their prejudices were
excited; and their oaths and exclamations were marvels of droll
ingenuity.  Most of them were still too good-humoured with drink to be
dangerous, but all hoped for trouble at the Orange funeral on principle,
and the anticipated strike had elements of "thrill."  They were of a
class, however, who would swing from what was good-humour to deadly anger
in a minute, and turn a wind of mere prejudice into a hurricane of life
and death with the tick of a clock.  They would all probably go to the
Orange funeral to-morrow in a savage spirit.  Some of them were loud in
denunciation of Ingolby and "the Lebanon gang"; they joked coarsely over
the dead Orangeman, but their cheerful violence had not yet the
appearance of reality.

One man suddenly changed all that.  He was a river-driver of stalwart
proportions, with a red handkerchief round his neck, and with loose
corded trousers tucked into his boots.  He had a face of natural ugliness
made almost repulsive by marks of smallpox.  Red, flabby lips and an
overhanging brow made him a figure which men would avoid on a dark night.

"Let's go over to Lebanon to-night and have it out," he said in French.
"That Ingolby--let's go break his windows and give him a dip in the
river.  He's the curse of this city.  Holy, once Manitou was a place to
live in, now it's a place to die in!  The factories, the mills, they're
full of Protes'ants and atheists and shysters; the railway office is gone
to Lebanon.  Ingolby took it there.  Manitou was the best town in
the West; it's no good now.  Who's the cause?  Ingolby's the cause.  Name
of God, if he was here I'd get him by the throat as quick as winkin'."

He opened and shut his fingers with spasmodic malice, and glared round
the room.  "He's going to lock us out if we strike," he added.  "He's
going to take the bread out of our mouths; he's going to put his heel on
Manitou, and grind her down till he makes her knuckle to Lebanon--to a
lot of infidels, Protes'ants, and thieves.  Who's going to stand it?  I
say-bagosh, I say, who's going to stand it!"

"He's a friend of the Monseigneur," ventured a factory-hand, who had a
wife and children to support, and however partisan, was little ready for
that which would stop his supplies.

"Sacre bapteme!  That's part of his game," roared the big river-driver in
reply.  "I'll take the word of Felix Marchand about that.  Look at him!
That Felix Marchand doesn't try to take the bread out of people's mouths.
He gives money here, he gives it there.  He wants the old town to stay as
it is and not be swallowed up."

"Three cheers for Felix Marchand !" cried some one in the throng.  All
cheered loudly save one old man with grizzled hair and beard, who leaned
against the wall half-way down the room smoking a corncob pipe.  He was a
French Canadian in dress and appearance, and he spat on the floor like a
navvy--he had filled his pipe with the strongest tobacco that one man
ever offered to another.  As the crowd cheered for Felix Marchand, he
made his way up towards the bar slowly.  He must have been tall when he
was young; now he was stooped, yet there was still something very sinewy
about him.

"Who's for Lebanon?" cried the big river-driver with an oath.  "Who's
for giving Lebanon hell, and ducking Ingolby in the river?"

"I am--I am--I am--all of us!" shouted the crowd.  "It's no good waiting
for to-morrow.  Let's get the Lebs by the scruff to-night.  Let's break
Ingolby's windows and soak him in the Sagalac.  Allons--allons gai!"

Uproar and broken sentences, threats, oaths, and objurgations sounded
through the room.  There was a sudden movement towards the door, but the
exit of the crowd was stopped by a slow but clear voice speaking in
French.

"Wait a minute, my friends!" it cried.  "Wait a minute.  Let's ask a few
questions first."

"Who's he?" asked a dozen voices.  "What's he going to say?"  The mob
moved again towards the bar.

The big river-driver turned on the grizzled old man beside the bar-
counter with bent shoulders and lazy, drawling speech.

"What've you got to say about it, son?" he asked threateningly.

"Well, to ask a few questions first--that's all," the old man replied.

"You don't belong here, old cock," the other said roughly.

"A good many of us don't belong here," the old man replied quietly.  "It
always is so.  This isn't the first time I've been to Manitou.  You're a
river-driver, and you don't live here either," he continued.

"What've you got to say about it?  I've been coming and going here for
ten years.  I belong--bagosh, what do you want to ask?  Hurry up.  We've
got work to do.  We're going to raise hell in Lebanon."

"And give hell to Ingolby," shouted some one in the crowd.

"Suppose Ingolby isn't there?" questioned the old man.

"Oh, that's one of your questions, is it?" sneered the big river-driver.
"Well, if you knew him as we do, you'd know that it's at night-time he
sits studyin' how he'll cut Lebanon's throat.  He's home, all right.
He's in Lebanon anyhow, and we'll find him."

"Well, but wait a minute--be quiet a bit," said the old man, his eyes
blinking slowly at the big riverdriver.  "I've been 'round a good deal,
and I've had some experience in the world.  Did you ever give that
Ingolby a chance to tell you what his plans were?  Did you ever get close
to him and try to figure what he was driving at?  There's no chance of
getting at the truth if you don't let a man state his case--but no.  If
he can't make you see his case then is the time to jib, not before."

"Oh, get out!" cried a rowdy English road-maker in the crowd.  "We know
all right what Ingolby's after."

"Eh, well, what is he after?" asked the old man looking the other in the
eye.

"What's he after?  Oof-oof-oof, that's what he's after.  He's for his own
pocket, he's for being boss of all the woolly West.  He's after keeping
us poor and making himself rich.  He's after getting the cinch on two
towns and three railways, and doing what he likes with it all; and we're
after not having him do it, you bet.  That's how it is, old hoss."

The other stroked his beard with hands which, somehow, gave little
indication of age, and then, with a sudden jerk forward of his head, he
said: "Oh, it's like that, eh?  Is that what M'sieu' Marchand told you?
That's what he said, is it?"

The big river-driver, eager to maintain his supreme place as leader,
lunged forward a step, and growled a challenge.

"Who said it?  What does it matter if M'sieu' Marchand said it--it's
true.  If I said it, it's true.  All of us in this room say it, and it's
true.  Young Marchand says what Manitou says."

The old man's eyes grew brighter--they were exceedingly sharp for one so
old, and he said quite gently now:

"M. Marchand said it first, and you all say it afterwards--ah, bah!  But
listen to me; I know Max Ingolby that you think is such a villain; I know
him well.  I knew him when he was a little boy and--"

"You was his nurse, I suppose!" cried the Englishman's voice amid a roar
of laughter.

"Taught him his A-B-C-was his dear, kind teacher, eh?" hilariously cried
another.

The old man appeared not to hear.  "I have known him all the years since.
He has only been in the West a few years, but he has lived in the world
exactly thirty-three years.  He never willingly did anybody harm--never.
Since he came West, since he came to the Sagalac, he's brought work to
Lebanon and to Manitou.  There are hundreds more workmen in both the
towns than there were when he came.  It was he made others come with much
money and build the factories and the mills.  Work means money, money
means bread, bread means life--so."

The big river-driver, seeing the effect of the old man's words upon the
crowd, turned to them with an angry gesture and a sneer.

"I s'pose Ingolby has paid this old skeesicks for talking this swash.
We know all right what Ingolby is, and what he's done.  He's made war
between the two towns--there's hell to pay now on both sides of the
Sagalac.  He took away the railway offices from here, and threw men out
of work.  He's done harm to Manitou--he's against Manitou every time."

Murmurs of approval ran through the crowd, though some were silent,
looking curiously at the forceful and confident old man.  Even his bent
shoulders seemed to suggest driving power rather than the weight of
years.  He suddenly stretched out a hand in command as it were.

"Comrades, comrades," he said, "every man makes mistakes.  Even if it was
a mistake for Ingolby to take away the offices from Manitou, he's done a
big thing for both cities by combining the three railways."

"Monopoly," growled a voice from the crowd.  "Not monopoly," the old man
replied with a ring to his voice, which made it younger, fresher.  "Not
monopoly, but better management of the railways, with more wages, more
money to spend on things to eat and drink and wear, more dollars in the
pocket of everybody that works in Manitou and Lebanon.  Ingolby works,
he doesn't loaf."

"Oh, gosh all hell, he's a dynamo," shouted a voice from the crowd.
"He's a dynamo running the whole show-eh!"

The old man seemed to grow shorter, but as he thrust his shoulders
forward, it was like a machine gathering energy and power.

"I'll tell you, friends, what Ingolby is trying to do," he said in a low
voice vibrating with that force which belongs neither to age nor youth,
but is the permanent activity uniting all ages of a man.  "Of course,
Ingolby is ambitious and he wants power.  He tries to do the big things
in the world because there is the big thing to do--for sure.  Without
such men the big things are never done, and other men have less work to
do, and less money and poorer homes.  They discover and construct and
design and invent and organize and give opportunities.  I am a working
man, but I know what Ingolby thinks.  I know what men think who try to do
the big things.  I have tried to do them."

The crowd were absolutely still now, but the big river-driver shook
himself free of the eloquence, which somehow swayed them all, and said:

"You--you look as if you'd tried to do big things, you do, old skeesicks.
I bet you never earned a hundred dollars in your life."  He turned to the
crowd with fierce gestures.  "Let's go to Lebanon and make the place
sing," he roared.  "Let's get Ingolby out to talk for himself, if he
wants to talk.  We know what we want to do, and we're not going to be
bossed.  He's for Lebanon and we're for Manitou.  Lebanon means to boss
us, Lebanon wants to sit on us because we're Catholics, because we're
French, because we're honest."

Again a wave of revolution swept through the crowd.  The big river-driver
represented their natural instincts, their native fanaticism, their
prejudices.  But the old man spoke once more.

"Ingolby wants Lebanon and Manitou to come together, not to fall apart,"
he declared.  "He wants peace.  If he gets rich here he won't get rich
alone.  He's working for both towns.  If he brings money from outside,
that's good for both towns.  If he--"

"Shut your mouth, let Ingolby speak for himself," snarled the big river-
driver.  "Take his dollars out of your pocket and put them on the bar,
the dollars Ingolby gives you to say all this.  Put them dollars of
Ingolby's up for drinks, or we'll give you a jar that'll shake you, old
wart-hog."

At that instant a figure forced itself through the crowd, and broke into
the packed circle which was drawing closer upon the old man.

It was Jethro Fawe.  He flung a hand out towards the old man.

"You want Ingolby--well, that's Ingolby," he shouted.

Like lightning the old man straightened himself, snatched the wig and
beard away from his head and face, and with quiet fearlessness said:

"Yes, I am Ingolby."

For an instant there was absolute silence, in which Ingolby weighed his
chances.  He was among enemies.  He had meant only to move among the
crowd to discover their attitude, to find things out for himself.  He had
succeeded, and his belief that Manitou could be swayed in the right
direction if properly handled, was correct.  Beneath the fanaticism and
the racial spirit was human nature; and until Jethro Fawe had appeared,
he had hoped to prevent violence and the collision at to-morrow's
funeral.

Now the situation was all changed.  It was hard to tell what sharp turn
things might take.  He was about to speak, but suddenly from the crowd
there was spat out at him the words, "Spy!  Sneak!  Spy!"

Instantly the wave of feeling ran against him.  He smiled frankly,
however, with that droll twist of his mouth which had won so many, and
the raillery of his eyes was more friendly than any appeal.

"Spy, if you like, my friends," he said firmly and clearly.  "Moses sent
spies down into the Land of Promise, and they brought back big bunches of
grapes.  Well, I've come down into a land of promise.  I wanted to know
just how you all feel without being told it by some one else.  I knew if
I came here as Max Ingolby I shouldn't hear the whole truth; I wouldn't
see exactly how you see, so I came as one of you, and you must admit, my
French is as good as yours almost."

He laughed and nodded at them.

"There wasn't one of you that knew I wasn't a Frenchman.  That's in my
favour.  If I know the French language as I do, and can talk to you in
French as I've done, do you think I don't understand the French people,
and what you want and how you feel?  I'm one of the few men in the West
that can talk your language.  I learned it when I was a boy, so that I
might know my French fellow-countrymen under the same flag, with the same
King and the same national hope.  As for your religion, God knows, I wish
I was as good a Protestant as lots of you are good Catholics.  And I tell
you this, I'd be glad to have a minister that I could follow and respect
and love as I respect and love Monseigneur Lourde of Manitou.  I want to
bring these two towns together, to make them a sign of what this country
is, and what it can do; to make hundreds like ourselves in Manitou and
Lebanon work together towards health, wealth, comfort and happiness.
Can't you see, my friends, what I'm driving at?  I'm for peace and work
and wealth and power--not power for myself alone, but power that belongs
to all of us.  If I can show I'm a good man at my job, maybe better than
others, then I have a right to ask you to follow me.  If I can't, then
throw me out.  I tell you I'm your friend--Max Ingolby is your friend."

"Spy!  Spy!  Spy!" cried a new voice.

It came from behind the bar.  An instant after, the owner of the voice
leaped up on the counter.  It was Felix Marchand.  He had entered by the
door behind the bar into Barbazon's office.

"When I was in India," Marchand cried, "I found a snake in the bed.  I
killed it before it stung me.  There's a snake in the bed of Manitou--
what are you going to do with it?"

The men swayed, murmured, and shrill shouts of "Marchand!  Marchand!
Marchand !" went up.  The crowd heaved upon Ingolby.  "One minute!" he
called with outstretched arm and commanding voice.  They paused.
Something in him made him master of them even then.

At that moment two men were fiercely fighting their way through the crowd
towards where Ingolby was.  They were Jowett and Osterhaut.  Ingolby saw
them coming.

"Go back--go back!" he called to them.

Suddenly a drunken navvy standing on a table in front of and to the left
of Ingolby seized a horseshoe hanging on the wall, and flung it with an
oath.

It caught Ingolby in the forehead, and he fell to the floor without a
sound.

A minute afterwards the bar was empty, save for Osterhaut, Jowett, old
Barbazon, and his assistants.

Barbazon and Jowett lifted the motionless figure in their arms, and
carried it into a little room.

Then Osterhaut picked up the horseshoe tied with its gay blue ribbons,
now stained with blood, and put it in his pocket.

"For luck," he said.




CHAPTER XI

THE SENTENCE OF THE PATRIN

Fleda waked suddenly, but without motion; just a wide opening of the eyes
upon the darkness, and a swift beating of the heart, but not the movement
of a muscle.  It was as though some inward monitor, some gnome of the
hidden life had whispered of danger to her slumbering spirit.  The waking
was a complete emergence, a vigilant and searching attention.

There was something on her breast weighing it down, yet with a pressure
which was not weight alone, and maybe was not weight at all as weight is
understood.  Instantly there flashed through her mind the primitive
belief that a cat will lie upon the breasts of children and suck their
breath away.  Strange and even absurd as it was, it seemed to her that a
cat was pressing and pressing down upon her breast.  There could be no
mistaking the feline presence.  Now with a sudden energy of the body, she
threw the Thing from her, and heard it drop, with the softness of feline
feet, on the Indian rug upon the floor.

Then she sprang out of bed, and, feeling for the matches, lit a candle on
the small table beside her bed, and moved it round searching for what she
thought to be a cat.  It was not to be seen.  She looked under the bed;
it was not there: under the washstand, under the chest of drawers, under
the improvised dressing-table; and no cat was to be found.  She 173
looked under the chair over which hung her clothes, even behind the
dresses and the Indian deerskin cape hanging on the door.

There was no life of any kind save her own in the room, so far as she
could see.  She laughed nervously, though her heart was still beating
hard.  That it should beat hard was absurd, for what had she to fear--she
who had lived the wild open-air life of many lands, had slept among hills
infested by animals the enemy of man, and who when a little girl had
faced beasts of prey alone.  Yet here in her own safe room on the
Sagalac, with its four walls, but its unlocked doors--for Gabriel Druse
said that he could not bear that last sign of his exile--here in the
fortress of the town-dweller there was a strange trembling of her pulses
in the presence of a mere hallucination or nightmare--the first she had
had ever.  Her dreams in the past had always been happy and without the
black fancies of nightmare.  On the night that Jethro Fawe had first
confronted her father and herself, and he had been carried to the hut in
the Wood, her sleep had been disturbed and restless, but dreamless; in
her sleep on the night of the day of his release, she had been tossed
upon vague clouds of mental unrest; but that was the first really
disordered sleep she had ever known.

Holding the candle above her head, she looked in the mirror on her
dressing-table, and laughed nervously at the shocked look in her eyes,
at the hand pressed upon the bosom whose agitations troubled the delicate
linen at her breast.  The pale light of the candle, the reflection from
the white muslin of her dressing-table and her nightwear, the strange,
deep darkness of her eyes, the ungathered tawny hair falling to her
shoulders, gave an unusual paleness to her face.

"What a ninny I am!" she said aloud as she looked at herself, her tongue
chiding her apprehensive eyes, her laugh contemptuously adding its
comment on her tremulousness.  "It was a real nightmare--a waking
nightmare, that's what it was."

She searched the room once more, however-every corner, under the bed, the
chest of drawers and the dressing-table, before she got into bed again,
her feet icily cold.  And yet again before settling down she looked
round, perplexed and inquiring.  Placing the matches beside the
candlestick, she blew out the light.  Then, half-turning on her side with
her face to the wall, she composed herself to sleep.

Resolutely putting from her mind any sense of the supernatural, she shut
her eyes with confidence of coming sleep.  While she was, however, still
within the borders of wakefulness, and wholly conscious, she felt the
Thing jump from the floor upon her legs, and crouch there with that
deadening pressure which was not weight.  Now with a start of anger she
raised herself, and shot out a determined hand to seize the Thing,
whatever it was.  Her hand grasped nothing, and again she distinctly
heard a soft thud as of something jumping on the floor.  Exasperated, she
drew herself out of bed, lit the candle again, and began another search.
Nothing was to be seen; but she had now the curious sense of an unseen
presence.  She went to the door, opened it, and looked out into the
narrow hall.  Nothing was to be seen there.  Then she closed the door
again, and stood looking at it meditatively for a moment.  It had a lock
and key; yet it had never been locked in the years they had lived on the
Sagalac.  She did not know whether the key would turn in the lock.  After
a moment's hesitation, she shrugged her shoulders and turned the key.  It
rasped, proved stubborn, but at last came home with a click.  Then she
turned to the window.  It was open about three inches at the bottom.  She
closed it tight, and fastened it, then stood for a moment in the middle
of the room looking at both door and window.

She was conscious of a sense of suffocation.  Never in her life had she
slept with door or window or tentflap entirely closed.  Never before had
she been shut in all night behind closed doors and sealed windows.  Now,
as the sense of imprisonment was felt, her body protested; her spirit
resented the funereal embrace of security.  It panted for the freedom
which gives the challenge to danger and the courage to face it.

She went to the window and opened it slightly at the top, and then sought
her bed again; but even as she lay down, something whispered to her mind
that it was folly to lock the door and yet leave the window open, if it
was but an inch.  With an exclamation of self-reproach, and a vague
indignation at something, she got up and closed the window once more.

Again she composed herself to sleep, lying now with her face turned to
the window and the door.  She was still sure that she had been the victim
of a hallucination which, emerging from her sleep, had invaded the
borders of wakefulness, and then had reproduced itself in a waking
illusion--an imitation of its original existence.

Resolved to conquer any superstitious feeling, she invoked sleep, and was
on its borders once more when she was startled more violently than
before.

The Thing had sprung again upon her feet and was crouched there.  Wide
awake, she waited for a moment to make sure that she was not mad, or that
she was not asleep or in a half-dream.  In the pause, she felt the Thing
draw up towards her knees, dragging its body along with tiger-like
closeness, and with that strange pressure which was not weight but power.

With a cry which was no longer doubt, but agonized apprehension, she
threw the Thing from her with a motion of both hands and feet; and, as
she did so, she felt a horrible cold air breathing from a bloodless body,
chill her hand.

In another instant she was on her feet again.  With shaking fingers she
lighted the candle yet once more, after which she lighted a lamp standing
upon the chest of drawers.  The room was almost brilliantly bright now.
With a gesture of incredulity she looked round.  The doors and windows
were sealed tight, and there was nothing to be seen; yet she was more
than ever conscious of a presence grown more manifest.  For a moment she
stood staring straight before her at the place where it seemed to be.
She realized its malice and its hatred, and an intense anger and hatred
took possession of her.  She had always laughed at such things even when
thrilled by wonder and manufactured terrors.  But now there was a sense
of conflict, of evil, of the indefinable things in which so many
believed.

Suddenly she remembered an ancient Sage of her tribe, who, proficient in
mysteries and secret rites gathered from nations as old as Phoenicia and
Egypt and as modern as Switzerland, held the Romanys of the world in awe,
for his fame had travelled where he could not follow.  To Fleda in her
earliest days he had been like one inspired, and as she now stood facing
the intangible Thing, she recalled an exorcism which the Sage had recited
to her, when he had sufficiently startled her senses by tales of the
Between World.  This exorcism was, as he had told her, more powerful than
that which the Christian exorcists used, and the symbol of exorcism was
not unlike the sign of the Cross, to which was added genuflection of
Assyrian origin.

At any other time Fleda would have laughed at the idea of using the
exorcism; but all the ancient superstition of the Romany people latent in
her now broke forth and held her captive.  Standing with candle raised
above her head, her eyes piercing the space before her, she recalled
every word of the exorcism which had caught the drippings from the
fountains of Chaldean, Phoenician, and Egyptian mystery.

Solemnly and slowly the exorcism came from her lips, and at the end her
right hand made the cabalistic sign; then she stood like one transfixed
with her arm extended towards the Thing she could not see.

Presently there passed from her a sense of oppression.  The air seemed to
grow lighter, restored self-possession came; there was a gentle breathing
in the room like that of a sleeping child.  It was a moment before she
realized that the breathing was her own, and she looked round her like
one who had come out of a trance.

"It is gone," she said aloud.  "It is gone."  A great sigh came from her.

Mechanically she put down the candle, smoothed the pillows of her bed,
adjusted the coverings, and prepared to lie down; but, with a sudden
impulse, she turned to the window and the door.

"It is gone," she said again.  With a little laugh of hushed triumph, she
turned and made again the cabalistic sign at the bed, where the Thing had
first assaulted her, and then at that point in the room near the door
where she had felt it crouching.

"Oh, Ewie Gal," she added, speaking to that Romany Sage long since laid
to rest in the Roumelian country, "you did not talk to me for nothing.
You were right--yes, you were right, old Ewie Gal.  It was there,"--she
looked again at the place where the Thing had been--"and your curse drove
it away."

With confidence she went to the door and unlocked it.  Going to the
window she opened it also, but she compromised sufficiently to open it
at the top instead of at the bottom.  Presently she laid her head on her
pillow with a sigh of content.

Once again she composed herself to sleep in the darkness.  But now there
came other invasions, other disturbers of the night.  In her imagination
a man came who had held her in his arms one day on the Sagalac River, who
had looked into her eyes with a masterful but respectful tenderness.  As
she neared the confines of sleep, he was somehow mingled with visions of
things which her childhood had known--moonlit passes in the Bosnian,
Roumelian, and Roumanian hills, green fields by the Danube, with peasant
voices drowsing in song before the lights went out; a gallop after dun
deer far away up the Caspian mountains, over waste places, carpeted with
flowers after a benevolent rain; mornings in Egypt, when the camels
thudded and slid with melancholy ease through the sands of the desert,
while the Arab drivers called shrilly for Allah to curse or bless; a
tender sunset in England seen from the top of a castle when all the
western sky was lightly draped with saffron, gold and mauve and delicate
green and purple.

Now she slept again, with the murmur of the Sagalac in her ears, and
there was a smile at her lips.  If one could have seen her through the
darkness, one would have said that she was like some wild creature of a
virgin world, whom sleep had captured and tamed; for, behind the
refinement which education and the vigilant influence with which Madame
Bulteel had surrounded her, there was in her the spirit of primitive
things: of the open road and the wilderness, of the undisciplined and
vagrant life, however marked by such luxury as the ruler of all the
Romanys could buy and use in pilgrimage.  There was that in her which
would drag at her footsteps in this new life.

For a full hour or more she slept, then there crept through the fantasies
of sleep something that did not belong to sleep--again something from the
wakeful world, strange, alien, troubling.  At first it was only as though
a wind stirred the air of dreams, then it was like the sounds that gather
behind the coming rage of a storm, and again it was as though a night-
prowler plucked at the sleeve of a home-goer.  Presently, with a stir of
fright and a smothered cry, she waked to a sound which was not of the
supernatural or of the mind's illusions, but no less dreadful to her
because of that.  In some cryptic way it was associated with the direful
experience through which she had just passed.

What she heard in the darkness was a voice which sang there by her
window--at it or beneath it--the words of a Romany song.

It was a song of violence, which she had heard but a short time before in
the trees behind her father's house, when a Romany claimed her as his
wife:

                   "Time was I went to my true love,
                    Time was she came to me--"

Only one man would sing that song at her window, or anywhere in this
Western world.  This was no illusion of her overwrought senses.  There,
outside her window, was Jethro Fawe.

She sat up and listened, leaning on one arm, and staring into the half-
darkness beyond the window, the blind of which she had not drawn down.
There was no moon, but the stars were shining brightly, relieving the
intensity of the dark.  Through the whispering of the trees, and hushing
the melancholy of a night-bird's song, came the wild low note of the
Romany epic of vengeance.  It had a thrill of exultation.  Something in
the voice, insistent, vibrating, personal, made every note a thrust of
victory.  In spite of her indignation at the insolent serenade, she
thrilled; for the strain of the Past was in her, and it had been fighting
with her all night, breaking in upon the Present, tugging at the cords of
youth.

The man's daring roused her admiration, even as her anger mounted.  If
her father heard the singing, there could be no doubt that Jethro Fawe's
doom would be sealed.  Gabriel Druse would resent this insolence to the
daughter of the Ry of Rys.  Word would be passed as silently as the
electric spark flies, and one day Jethro Fawe would be found dead, with
no clue to his slayer, and maybe no sign of violence upon him; for while
the Romany people had remedies as old as Buddha, they had poisons as old
as Sekhet.

Suddenly the song ceased, and for a moment there was silence save for the
whispering trees and the night-bird's song.  Fleda rose from her bed, and
was about to put on her dressing-gown, when she was startled by a voice
loudly whispering her name at her window, as it seemed.


"Daughter of the Ry of Rys !" it called.

In anger she started forward to the window, then, realizing that she was
in her nightgown, caught up her red dressing-gown and put it on.  As she
did so she understood why the voice had sounded so near.  Not thirty feet
from her window there was a solitary oak-tree among the pines, in which
was a seat among the branches, and, looking out, she could see a figure
that blackened the starlit duskiness.

"Fleda--daughter of the Ry of Rys," the voice called again.

She gathered her dressing-gown tight about her, and, going to the window,
raised it high and leaned out.

"What do you want?" she asked sharply.

"Wife of Jethro Fawe, I bring you news," the voice said, and she saw a
hat waved with mock courtesy.  In spite of herself, Fleda felt a shiver
of premonition pass through her.  The Thing which had threatened her in
the night seemed to her now like the soul of this dark spirit in the
trees.

Resentment seized her.  "I have news for you, Jethro Fawe," she replied.
"I set you free, and I gave my word that no harm should come to you, if
you went your ways and did not come again.  You have come, and I shall do
nothing now to save you from the Ry's anger.  Go at once, or I will wake
him."

"Will a wife betray her husband?" he asked in soft derision.

Stung by his insolence, "I would not throw a rope to you, if you were
drowning," she declared.  "I am a Gorgio, and the thing that was done by
the Starzke River is nothing to me.  Now, go."

"You have forgotten my news," he said: "It is bad news for the Gorgio
daughter of the Romany Ry."  She was silent in apprehension.  He waited,
but she did not speak.

"The Gorgio of Gorgios of the Sagalac has had a fall," he said.

Her heart beat fast for an instant, and then the presentiment came to her
that the man spoke the truth.  In the presence of the accomplished thing,
she became calm.

"What has happened?" she asked quietly.

"He went prowling in Manitou, and in Barbazon's Tavern they struck him
down."

"Who struck him down?" she asked.  It seemed to her that the night-bird
sang so loud that she could scarcely hear her own voice.

"A drunken Gorgio," he replied.  "The horseshoe is for luck all the world
over, and it brought its luck to Manitou to-night.  It struck down a
young Master Gorgio who in white beard and long grey hair went spying."

She knew in her heart that he spoke the truth.  "He is dead?" she asked
in a voice that had a strange quietness.

"Not yet," he answered.  "There is time to wish him luck."

She heard the ribald laugh with a sense of horror and loathing.  "The
hand that brought him down may have been the hand of a Gorgio, but behind
the hand was Jethro Fawe," she said in a voice grown passionate again.
"Where is he?" she added.

"At his own house.  I watched them take him there.  It is a nice house--
good enough for a Gorgio house-dweller.  I know it well.  Last night I
played his Sarasate fiddle for him there, and I told him all about you
and me, and what happened at Starzke, and then--"

"You told him I was a Romany, that I was married to you?" she asked in a
low voice.

"I told him that, and asked him why he thought you had deceived him, had
held from him the truth.  He was angry and tried to kill me."

"That is a lie," she answered.  "If he had tried to kill you he would
have done so."

Suddenly she realized the situation as it was--that she was standing at
her window in the night, scantily robed, talking to a man in a tree
opposite her window; and that the man had done a thing which belonged to
the wild places which she had left so far behind.

It flashed into her mind--what would Max Ingolby think of such a thing?
She flushed.  The new Gorgio self of her flushed, and yet the old Romany
self, the child of race and heredity had taken no exact account of the
strangeness of this situation.  It had not seemed unnatural.  Even if he
had been in her room itself, she would have felt no tithe of the shame
that she felt now in asking herself what the Master Gorgio would think,
if he knew.  It was not that she had less modesty, that any stir of sex
was in her veins where the Romany chal was concerned; but in the life she
had once lived less delicate cognizance was taken of such things, and
something of it stayed.

"Listen," Jethro said with sudden lowering of the voice, and imparting
into his tones an emotion which was in part an actor's gift, but also in
large degree a passion now eating at his heart, "you are my wife by all
the laws of our people.  Nothing can change it.  I have waited for you,
and I will wait, but you shall be mine in the end.  You see to-night--
'Mi Duvel', you see that fate is with me!  The Gorgio has bewitched you.
He goes down to-night in that tavern there by the hand of a Gorgio, and
the Romany has his revenge.  Fate is always with me, and I will be the
gift of the gods to the woman that takes me.  The luck is mine always.
It will be always with me.  I am poor to-day, I shall be rich to-morrow.
I was rich, and I lost it all; and I was poor, and became rich again.
Ah, yes, there are ways!  Sometimes it is a Government, sometimes a
prince that wants to know, and Jethro Fawe, the Romany, finds it out, and
money fills his pockets.  I am here, poor, because last year when I lost
all, I said, 'It is because my Romany lass is not with me.  I have not
brought her to my tan, but when she comes then the gold will be here as
before, and more when it is wanted.'  So, I came, and I hear the road
calling, and all the camping places over all the world, and I see the
patrins in every lane, and my heart is lifted up.  I am glad.  I rejoice.
My heart burns with love.  I will forget everything, and be true to the
queen of my soul.  Men die, and Gabriel Druse, he will die one day, and
when the time comes, then it would be that you and I would beckon, and
all the world would come to us."

He stretched out a hand to her in the half-darkness.  "I send the blood
of my heart to you," he continued.  "I am a son of kings.  Fleda,
daughter of the Ry of Rys, come to me.  I have been bad, but I can be
good.  I have killed, but I will live at peace.  I have cursed, but I
will speak the word of blessing.  I have trespassed, but I will keep to
my own, if you will come to me."

Suddenly he dropped to the ground, lighting on his feet like an animal
with a soft rebound.  Stretching up his arms, he made soft murmuring of
endearment.

She had listened, fascinated in spite of herself by the fire and meaning
of his words.  She felt that in most part it was true, that it was meant;
and, whatever he was, he was yet a man offering his heart and life,
offering a love that she despised, and yet which was love and passion of
a kind.  It was a passion natural to the people from whom she came, and
to such as Jethro Fawe it was something more than sensual longing and the
aboriginal desire of possession.  She realized it, and was not wholly
revolted by it, even while her mind was fleeing to where the Master
Gorgio lay wounded, it might be unto death; even while she knew that this
man before her, by some means, had laid Ingolby low.  She was all at once
a human being torn by contending forces.

Jethro's drop to the ground broke the sudden trance into which his words
had thrown her.  She shook herself as with an effort of control.  Then
leaning over the window-sill, and, looking down at him, now grown so
distinct that she could see his features, her eyes having become used to
the half-light of the approaching dawn, she said with something almost
like gentleness:

"Once more I say, you must go and come no more.  You are too far off from
me.  You belong to that which is for the ignorant, or the low, the
vicious and the bad.  Behind the free life of the Romany is only the
thing that the beasts of the field have.  I have done with it for ever.
Find a Romany who will marry you.  As for me, I would rather die than do
so, and I should die before it could come to pass.  If you stay here
longer I will call the Ry."

Presently the feeling that he had been responsible for the disaster to
Ingolby came upon her with great force, and as suddenly as she had
softened towards this man she hardened again.

"Go, before there comes to you the death you deserve," she added, and
turned away.

At that moment footsteps sounded near, and almost instantly there emerged
from a pathway which made a short cut to the house, the figure of old
Gabriel Druse.  They had not heard him till he was within a few feet of
where Jethro Fawe stood.  His walking had been muffled in the dust of the
pathway.

The Ry started when he saw Jethro Fawe; then he made a motion as though
he would seize the intruder, who was too dumbfounded to flee; but he
recovered himself, and gazed up at the open window.

"Fleda!" he called.

She came to the window again.

"Has this man come here against your will?" he asked, not as though
seeking information, but confirmation of his own understanding.

"He is not here by my will," she answered.  "He came to sing the Song of
Hate under my window, to tell me that he had--"

"That I had brought the Master Gorgio to the ground," said Jethro, who
now stood with sullen passiveness looking at Gabriel Druse.

"From the Master Gorgio, as you call him, I have just come," returned the
old man.  "When I heard the news, I went to him.  It was you who betrayed
him to the mob, and--"

"Wait, wait," Fleda cried in agitation.  "Is--is he dead?"

"He is alive, but terribly hurt; and he may die," was the reply.

Then the old man turned to the Romany with a great anger and
determination in his face.  He stretched out an arm, making a sign as
cabalistic as that which Fleda had used against her invisible foe in the
bedroom.

"Go, Jethro Fawe of all the Fawes," he said.  "Go, and may no patrins
mark your road!"

Jethro Fawe shrank back, and half raised his arm, as though to fend
himself from a blow.

The patrin is the clue which Gipsies leave behind them on the road they
go, that other Gipsies who travel in it may know they have gone before.
It may be a piece of string, a thread of wool, a twig, or in the dust the
ancient cross of the Romany, which preceded the Christian cross and
belonged to the Assyrian or Phoenician world.  The invocation that no
patrins shall mark the road of a Romany is to make him an outcast, and
for the Ry of Rys to utter the curse is sentence of death upon a Romany,
for thenceforward every hand of his race is against him, free to do him
harm.

It was that which made Jethro Fawe shrink and cower for a moment.  Fleda
raised her hand suddenly in protest to Gabriel Druse.

"No, no, not that," Fleda murmured brokenly to her father, with eyes that
looked the pain and horror she felt.  Though she repudiated the bond by
which the barbarian had dared to call her wife, she heard an inner voice
that said to her: "What was done by the Starzke River was the seal of
blood and race, and this man must be nearer than the stranger, dearer
than the kinsman, forgiven of his crimes like a brother, saved from
shame, danger or death when she who was sealed to him can save him."

She shuddered as she heard the inner voice.  She felt that this Other
Self of her, the inner-seeing soul which had the secret of the far paths,
had spoken truly.  Even as she begged her father to withdraw the
sentence, it flashed into her mind that the grim Thing of the night was
the dark spirit of hatred between Jethro Fawe and the Master Gorgio
seeking embodiment, as though Jethro's evil soul detached itself from his
body to persecute her.

At her appeal, Jethro raised his head.  His courage came back, the old
insolent self-possession took hold of him again.  The sentence which the
Ry had passed was worse than death (and it meant death, too), for it made
him an outcast from his people, and to be outcast was to be thrown into
the abyss.  It was as though a man without race or country was banished
into desolate space.  In a vague way he felt its full significance, and
the shadow of it fell on him.

"No, no, no," Fleda repeated hoarsely, with that new sense of
responsibility where Jethro was concerned.

Jethro's eyes were turned upon her now.  In the starlit night, just
yielding to the dawn, she could faintly see his burning look, could feel,
as it were, his hands reach out to claim her; and she felt that while he
lived she was not wholly free.  She realized that the hand of nomad,
disorderly barbarism was dragging her with a force which was inhuman, or,
maybe, superhuman.

Gabriel Druse could know nothing of the elements fighting in his
daughter's soul; he only knew that her interest in the Master Gorgio was
one he had never seen before, and that she abhorred the Romany who had
brought Ingolby low.  He had shut his eyes to the man's unruliness and
his daughter's intervention to free him; but now he was without pity.  He
had come from Ingolby's bedside, and had been told a thing which shook
his rugged nature to its centre--a thing sad as death itself, which he
must tell his daughter.

To Fleda's appeal he turned a stony face.  There was none of that rage in
his words which had marked the scene when Jethro Fawe first came to claim
what he could not have.  There was something in him now more deadly and
inevitable.  It made him like some figure of mythology, implacable,
fateful.  His great height, his bushy beard and stormy forehead, the eyes
over which shaggy eyebrows hung like the shrubs on a cliff-edge, his face
lined and set like a thing in bronze--all were signs of a power which, in
passion, would be like that of OEdipus: in the moment of justice or doom
would, with unblinking eyes, slay and cast aside as debris is tossed upon
the dust-heap.

As he spoke now his voice was toneless.  His mind was flint, and his
tongue was but the flash of the flint.  He looked at his daughter for a
moment with no light of fatherhood in his face, then turned from her to
Jethro Fawe with slow decision and a gesture of authority.  His eyes
fastened on the face of the son of Lemuel Fawe, as though it was that
old enemy himself.

"I have said what I have said, and there is no more to be spoken.  The
rule of the Ry will be as water for ever after if these things may be
done to him and his.  For generations have the Rys of all the Rys been
like the trees that bend only to the whirlwind; and when they speak there
is no more to be said.  When it ceases to be so, then the Rys will vanish
from the world, and be as stubble of the field ready for the burning.  I
have spoken.  Go!  And no patrins shall lie upon your road."

A look of savage obedience and sullen acquiescence came into Jethro
Fawe's face, and he took off his hat as one who stands in the presence of
his master.  The strain of generations, the tradition of the race without
a country was stronger than the revolt in his soul.  He was young, his
blood was hot and brawling in his veins, he was all carnal, with the
superior intelligence of the trained animal, but custom was stronger than
all.  He knew now that whatever he might do, some time, not far, his doom
would fall upon him suddenly, as a wind shoots up a ravine from the
desert, or a nightbird rises from the dark.

He set his feet stubbornly, and raised his sullen face and fanatical
eyes.  The light of morning was creeping through the starshine, and his
features showed plainly.

"I am your daughter's husband," he said.  "Nothing can change that.  It
was done by the River Starzke, and it was the word of the Ry of Rys.  It
stands for ever.  There is no divorce except death for the Romany."

"The patrins cease to mark the way," returned the old man with a swift
gesture.  "The divorce of death will come."

Jethro's face grew still paler, and he opened his lips to speak, but
paused, seeing Fleda, with a backward look of pity and of horror, draw
back into the darkness of her room.

He made a motion of passion and despair.  His voice was almost shrill
when he spoke.  "Till that divorce comes, the daughter of the Ry of Rys
is mine!" he cried sharply.  "I will not give my wife to a Gorgio thief.
His hands shall not caress her, his eyes shall not feed upon her--"

"His eyes will not feed upon her," interrupted the old man, "So cease
the prattle which can alter nothing.  Begone."

For a moment Jethro Fawe stood like one who did not understand what was
said to him, but suddenly a look of triumph and malice came into his
face, and his eyes lighted with a reckless fire.  He threw back his head,
and laughed with a strange, offensive softness.  Then, waving a hand to
the window from which Fleda had gone, he swung his cap on his head and
plunged into the trees.

A moment afterwards his voice came back exultingly, through the morning
air:

              "But a Gorgio sleeps 'neath the greenwood tree
               He'll broach my tan no more:
               And my love, she sleeps afar from me
               But near to the churchyard door."

As the old man turned heavily towards the house, and opened the outer
door, Fleda met him.

"What did you mean when you said that Ingolby's eyes would not feed upon
me?" she asked in a low tone of fear.

A look of compassion came into the old man's face.  He took her hand.

"Come and I will tell you," he said.




CHAPTER XII

"LET THERE BE LIGHT"

In Ingolby's bedroom, on the night of the business at Barbazon's Tavern,
Dr. Rockwell received a shock.  His face, naturally colourless, was
almost white, and his eyes were moist.  He had what the West called
nerve.  That the crisis through which he had passed was that of a
friend's life did not lessen the poignancy of the experience.  He had a
singularly reserved manner and a rare economy of words; also, he had the
refinement and distinction of one who had, oforetime, moved on the higher
ranges of social life.  He was always simply and comfortably and in a
sense fashionably dressed, yet there was nothing of the dude about him,
and his black satin tie gave him an air of old-worldishness which somehow
compelled an extra amount of respect.  This, in spite of the fact that he
had been known as one who had left the East and come into the wilds
because of a woman not his wife.

It was not, however, strictly true to say that he had come West because
of a woman, for it was on account of three women, who by sudden
coincidence or collusion sprang a situation from which the only relief
was flight.  In that he took refuge, not because he was a coward, but
because it was folly to fight a woman, or three women, and because it was
the only real solution of an ungovernable situation.  At first he had
drifted from one town to another, dissolute and reckless, apparently
unable to settle down, or to forget the unwholesome three.  But one day
there was a terrible railway accident on a construction train, and
Lebanon and Manitou made a call upon his skill, and held him in bondage
to his profession for one whole month.  During this time he performed two
operations which the surgeons who had been sent out by the Railway
Directors at Montreal declared were masterpieces.

When that month was up he was a changed man, and he opened an office in
Lebanon.  Men trusted him despite his past, and women learned that there
was never a moment when his pulses beat unevenly in their presence.
Nathan Rockwell had had his lesson and it was not necessary to learn it
again.  To him, woman, save as a subject of his skill, was a closed book.
He regarded them as he regarded himself, with a kindly cynicism.  He
never forgot that his own trouble could and would have been avoided had
it not been for woman's vanity and consequent cruelty.  The unwholesome
three had shared his moral lapse with wide-open eyes, and were in no
sense victims of his; but, disregarding their responsibility, they had,
from sheer jealousy, wrecked his past, and, to their own surprise, had
wrecked themselves as well.  They were of those who act first and then
think--too late.

Thus it was that both men and women called Rockwell a handsome man, but
thought of him as having only a crater of exhausted fires in place of a
heart.  They came to him with their troubles--even the women of Manitou
who ought to have gone to the priest.

He moved about Lebanon as one who had authority, and desired not to use
it; as one to whom life was like a case in surgery to be treated with
scientific, coolness, with humanity, but not with undue sympathy; yet the
early morning of the day after Ingolby had had his accident at Barbazon's
Hotel found him the slave of an emotion which shook him from head to
foot.  He had saved his friend's life by a most skilful operation, but he
had been shocked beyond control when, an hour after the operation was
over, and consciousness returned to the patient in the brilliantly
lighted room, Ingolby said:

"Why don't you turn on the light?"

It was thus Rockwell knew that the Master Man, the friend of Lebanon and
Manitou, was stone blind.  When Ingolby's voice ceased, a horrified
silence filled the room for a moment.  Even Jim Beadle, his servant,
standing at the foot of the bed, clapped a hand to his mouth to stop a
cry, and the nurse turned as white as the apron she wore.

Dumbfounded as Rockwell was, with instant professional presence of mind
he said:

"No, Ingolby, you must be kept in darkness a while yet."  Then he whipped
out a silk handkerchief from his pocket.  "We will have light," he
continued, "but we must bandage you first to keep out the glare and
prevent pain.  The nerves of the eyes have been injured."

Hastily and tenderly he bound the handkerchief round the sightless eyes.
Having done so, he said to the nurse with unintentional quotation from
the Gospel of St. John, and a sad irony: "Let there be light."

It all gave him time to pull himself together and prepare for the moment
when he must tell Ingolby the truth.  In one sense the sooner it was told
the better, lest Ingolby should suddenly discover it for himself.
Surprise and shock must be avoided.  So now he talked in his low,
soothing voice, telling Ingolby that the operation had put him out of
danger, that the pain now felt came chiefly from the nerves of the eye,
and that quiet and darkness were necessary.  He insisted on Ingolby
keeping silent, and he gave a mild opiate which induced several hours'
sleep.

During this time Rockwell prepared himself for the ordeal which must be
passed as soon as possible; gave all needed directions, and had a
conference with the assistant Chief Constable to whom he confided the
truth.  He suggested plans for preserving order in excited Lebanon, which
was determined to revenge itself on Manitou; and he gave some careful and
specific instructions to Jowett the horse-dealer.  Also, he had conferred
with Gabriel Druse, who had helped bear the injured man to his own home.
He had noted with admiration the strange gentleness of the giant Romany
as he, alone, carried Ingolby in his arms, and laid him on the bed from
which he was to rise with all that he had fought for overthrown, himself
the blind victim of a hard fate.  He had noticed the old man straighten
himself with a spring and stand as though petrified when Ingolby said:
"Why don't you turn on the light?"  As he looked round in that instant of
ghastly silence he had observed almost mechanically that the old man's
lips were murmuring something.  Then the thought of Fleda Druse shot into
Rockwell's mind, and it harassed him during the hours Ingolby slept, and
after the giant Gipsy had taken his departure just before the dawn.

"I'm afraid it will mean more there than anywhere else," he said sadly to
himself.  "There was evidently something between those two; and she isn't
the kind to take it philosophically.  Poor girl!  Poor girl!  It's a
bitter dose, if there was anything in it," he added.

He watched beside the sick-bed till the dawn stared in and his patient
stirred and waked, then he took Ingolby's hand, grown a little cooler,
in both his own.  "How are you feeling, old man?" he asked cheerfully.
"You've had a good sleep-nearly three and a half hours.  Is the pain in
the head less?"

"Better, Sawbones, better," Ingolby replied cheerfully.  "They've
loosened the tie that binds--begad, it did stretch the nerves.  I had
gripes of colic once, but the pain I had in my head was twenty times
worse, till you gave the opiate."

"That's the eyes," said Rockwell.  "I had to lift a bit of bone, and the
eyes saw it and felt it, and cried out-shrieked, you might say.  They've
got a sensitiveness all their own, have the eyes."

"It's odd there aren't more accidents to them," answered Ingolby--"just a
little ball of iridescent pulp with strings tied to the brain."

"And what hurts the head may destroy the eyes sometimes," Rockwell
answered cautiously.  "We know so little of the delicate union between
them, that we can't be sure we can put the eyes right again when, because
of some blow to the head, the ricochet puts the eyes out of commission."

"That's what's the matter with me, then?" asked Ingolby, feeling the
bandage on his eyes feverishly, and stirring in his bed with a sense of
weariness.

"Yes, the ricochet got them, and has put them out of commission," replied
Rockwell, carefully dwelling upon each word, and giving a note of meaning
to his tone.

Ingolby raised himself in bed, but Rockwell gently forced him down again.
"Will my eyes have to be kept bandaged long?  Shall I have to give up
work for any length of time?" Ingolby asked.

"Longer than you'll like," was the enigmatical reply.  "It's the devil's
own business," was the weary answer.  "Every minute's valuable to me now.
I ought to be on deck morning, noon, and night.  There's all the trouble
between the two towns; there's the strike on hand; there's that business
of the Orange funeral, and more than all a thousand times, there's--"
he paused.

He was going to say, "There's that devil Marchand's designs on my
bridge," but he thought better of it and stopped.  It had been his
intention to deal with Marchand directly, to get a settlement of their
differences without resort to the law, to prevent the criminal act
without deepening a feud which might keep the two towns apart for years.
Bad as Marchand was, to prevent his crime was far better than punishing
him for it afterwards.  To have Marchand arrested for conspiracy to
commit a crime was a business which would gravely interfere with his
freedom of motion in the near future, would create complications which
might cripple his own purposes in indirect ways.  That was why he had
declared to Jowett that even Felix Marchand had his price, and that he
would try negotiations first.

But what troubled him now, as he lay with eyes bandaged and a knowledge
that to-morrow was the day fixed for the destruction of the bridge, was
his own incapacity.  It was unlikely that his head or his eyes would be
right by to-morrow, or that Rockwell would allow him to get up.  He felt
in his own mind that the injury he had received was a serious one, and
that the lucky horseshoe had done Maxchand's work for him all too well.
This thought shook him.  Rockwell could see his chest heave with an
excitement gravely injurious to his condition; yet he must be told the
worst, or the shock of discovery by himself that he was blind might give
him brain fever.  Rockwell felt that he must hasten the crisis.

"Rockwell," Ingolby suddenly asked, "is there any chance of my discarding
this and getting out to-morrow?"  He touched the handkerchief round his
eyes.  "It doesn't matter about the head bandages, but the eyes--can't I
slough the wraps to-morrow?  I feel scarcely any pain now."

"Yes, you can get rid of the bandages to-morrow--you can get rid of them
to-day, if you really wish," Rockwell answered, closing in on the last
defence.

"But I don't mind being in the dark to-day if it'll make me fitter for
to-morrow and get me right sooner.  I'm not a fool.  There's too much
carelessness about such things.  People often don't give themselves a
chance to get right by being in too big a hurry.  So, keep me in darkness
to-day, if you want to, old man.  For a hustler I'm not in too big a
hurry, you see.  I'm for holding back to get a bigger jump."

"You can't be in a big hurry, even if you want to, Ingolby," rejoined
Rockwell, gripping the wrist of the sick man, and leaning over him.

Ingolby grew suddenly very still.  It was as though vague fear had seized
him and held him in a vice.  "What is it?  What do you want to say to
me?" he asked in a low, nerveless tone.

"You've been hit hard, Chief.  The ricochet has done you up for some
time.  The head will soon get well, but I'm far from sure about your
eyes.  You've got to have a specialist about them.  You're in the dark,
and as for making you see, so am I.  Your eyes and you are out of
commission for some time, anyhow."

He leaned over hastily, but softly and deftly undid the bandages over the
eyes and took them off.  "It's seven in the morning, and the sun's up,
Chief, but it doesn't do you much good, you see."

The last two words were the purest accident, but it was a strange,
mournful irony, and Rockwell flushed at the thought of it.  He saw
Ingolby's face turn grey, and then become white as death itself.

"I see," came from the bluish-white lips, as the stricken man made call
on all the will and vital strength in him.

For a long minute Rockwell held the cold hand in the grasp of one who
loves and grieves, but even so the physician and surgeon in him were
uppermost, as they should be, in the hour when his friend was standing on
the brink of despair, maybe of catastrophe irremediable.  He did not say
a word yet, however.  In such moments the vocal are dumb and the blind
see.

Ingolby heaved himself in the bed and threw up his arms, wresting them
from Rockwell's grasp.

"My God--oh, my God-blind!" he cried in agony.  Rockwell drew the head
with the sightless eyes to his shoulder.

For a moment he laid one hand on the heart, that, suddenly still, now
went leaping under his fingers.  "Steady," he said firmly.  "Steady.  It
may be only temporary.  Keep your head up to the storm.  We'll have a
specialist, and you must not get mired till then.  Steady, Chief."

"Chief!  Chief!" murmured Ingolby.  "Dear God, what a chief!  I risked
everything, and I've lost everything by my own vanity.  Barbazon's--the
horseshoe--among the wolves, just to show I could do things better than
any one else--as if I had the patent for setting the world right.  And
now--now--"

The thought of the bridge, of Marchand's devilish design, shot into his
mind, and once more he was shaken.  "The bridge!  Blind!  Mother!" he
called in a voice twisted in an agony which only those can feel to whom
life's purposes are even more than life itself.  Then, with a moan, he
became unconscious, and his head rolled over against Rockwell's cheek.
The damp of his brow was as the damp of death as Rockwell's lips touched
it.

"Old boy, old boy!" Rockwell said tenderly, "I wish it had been me
instead.  Life means so much to you--and so little to me.  I've seen too
much, and you've only just begun to see."

Laying him gently down, Rockwell summoned the nurse and Jim Beadle and
spoke to them in low tones.  "He knows now, and it has hit him hard, but
not so hard that he won't stiffen to it.  It might have been worse."

He gave instructions as to the care that should be taken, and replaced
the bandages on the eyes.  It was, however, long before Ingolby was
restored to consciousness, and when it came, Rockwell put to his lips a
cooling drink containing a powerful opiate.  Ingolby drank it without
protest and in silence.  He was like one whose sense of life was
automatic and of an inner rather than an outer understanding.  But when
he lay back on the pillow again, he said slowly:

"I want the Chief Constable to come here to-night at eight o'clock.  It
will be dark then.  He must come.  It is important.  Will you see to it,
Rockwell?"

He thrust out a hand as though to find Rockwell's, and there was a
gratitude and an appeal in the pressure of his fingers which went to
Rockwell's heart.

"All right, Chief.  I'll have him here," Rockwell answered briskly, but
with tears standing in his eyes.  Ingolby had, as it were, been stricken
out of the active, sentient, companionable world into a world where he
was alone, detached, solitary.  His being seemed suspended in an
atmosphere of misery and helplessness.

"Blind!  I am blind!"  That was the phrase which kept beating with the
pulses in Ingolby's veins, that throbbed, and throbbed, and throbbed like
engines in a creaking ship which the storm was shaking and pounding in
the vast seas between the worlds.  Here was the one incomprehensible,
stupefying fact: nothing else mattered.  Every plan he had ever had,
every design which he had made his own by an originality that even his
foes acknowledged, were passing before his brain in swift procession,
shining, magnified, and magnificent, and in that sudden clear-seeing of
his soul he beheld their full value, their exact concrete force and
ultimate effect.  Yet he knew himself detached from them, inactive,
incapable, because he could not see with the eyes of the body.  The great
essential thing to him was that one thing he had lost.  A man might be a
cripple and still direct the great concerns of life and the business of
life.  He might be shorn of limb and scarred of body, but with eye sight
still direct the courses of great schemes, in whatever sphere of life his
purposes were at work.  He might be deaf to every sound and forever dumb,
but seeing enabled him still to carry forward every enterprise.  In
darkness, however, those things were naught, because judgment must depend
on the eyes and senses of others.  The report might be true or false, the
deputy might deceive, and his blind chief might never know the truth
unless some other spectator of his schemes should report it; and the
truth could not surely be checked, save by some one, perhaps, whose life
was joined to his, by one that truly loved him, whose fate was his.

His brain was afire.  By one that truly loved him!  Who was there that
loved him?  Who was there at one with him in all his deep designs, in all
he had done and meant to do?  Neither brother, nor sister, nor friend,
nor any other.  None of his blood was there who could share with him the
constructive work he had set out to do.  There was no friend whose fate
was part of his own.  There was the Boss Doctor: but Rockwell was tied to
his own responsibilities, and he could not give up, of course, would not
give up his life to the schemes of another.  There were a dozen men whom
he had helped to forge ahead by his own schemes, but their destinies were
not linked with his.  Only one whose life was linked with his could be
trusted to be his eyes, to be the true reporter of all he did, had done,
or planned to do.  Only one who loved him.

But even one who loved him could not carry through his incompleted work
against the assaults of his enemies, who were powerful, watchful, astute,
and merciless; who had a greed which set money higher than all else in
the world.  They were of the new order of things in the New World.  The
business of life was to them not a system of barter and exchange, a
giving something of value to get something of value, with a margin of
profit for each, and a sense of human equity behind; it was a cockpit
where one man sought to get what another man had--and get it almost
anyhow.

It was the work of the faro-bank man, whose sleight of hand deceived the
man that carried the gun.

All the old humanity and good-fellowship of the trader, the man who
exchanged, as it was in the olden days of the world and continued in
greater or less degree till the present generation--all that was gone.
It was held in contempt.  It had prevailed when men were open robbers and
filibusters and warriors, giving their lives, if need be, to get what
they wanted, making force their god.  It had triumphed over the violence
and robbery of the open road until the dying years of one century and the
young years of a new century.  Then the day of the trickster came--and
men laughed at the idea of fair exchange and strove to give an illusive
value for a thing of real value--the remorseless sleight of hand which
the law could not reach.  The desire to get profit by honest toiling was
dying down to ashes.

Against such men had Ingolby worked--the tricksters, the manipulators.
At the basis of his schemes was organization and the economy which
concentrated and conserved energy begets, together with its profit.
He had been the enemy of waste, the apostle of frugality and thrift;
and it was that which had enabled him, in his short career, to win the
confidence of the big men behind him in Montreal, to make good every
step of the way.  He had worked for profit out of legitimate product
and industry and enterprise, out of the elimination of waste.  It was his
theory (and his practice) that no bit of old iron, no bolt or screw, no
scrap of paper should be thrown away; that the cinders of the engines
could and should be utilized for that which they would make; and that was
why there was a paper-mill and foundry on the Sagalac at Manitou.  That
was why and how, so far, he had beaten the tricksters.

But while his schemes flashed before his mind, as the opiate suspended
him in the middle heaven between sleep and waking, the tricksters and
manipulators came hurrying after him like marauders that waited for the
moment when they could rush the camp in the watches of the night.  His
disordered imagination saw the ruin and wreck of his work, the seizure of
what was his own--the place of control on his railways, the place of the
Master Man who cared infinitely more to see his designs accomplished than
for the profit they would bring to himself.  Yesterday he had been just
at the top of the hill.  The key in his fingers was turning in the lock
which would make safe the securities of his life and career, when it
snapped, and the world grew dark as the black curtain fell and shut out
the lighted room from the wayfarer in the gloom.  Then, it was, came the
opaque blackness which could be felt, and his voice calling in despair:
"Blind!  I am blind!"

He did not know that he had taken an opiate, that his friend had
mercifully atrophied his rebellious nerves.  These visions he was seeing
were terribly true, but they somehow gave him no physical torture.  It
was as though one saw an operation performed upon one's body with the
nerves stilled and deadened by ether.  Yet he was cruelly conscious of
the disaster which had come to him.  For a time at least.  Then his mind
seemed less acute, the visions came, then without seeing them go, they
went.  And others came in broken patches, shreds, and dreams,
phantasmagoria of the brain, and at last all were mingled and confused;
but as they passed they seemed to burn his sight.  How he longed for a
cool bandage over his eyes, for a soft linen which would shut out the
cumuli of broken hopes and designs, life's goals obliterated!  He had had
enough of the black procession of futile things.

His longing was not denied, for even as he roused himself from the
oblivion coming on him, as though by a last effort to remember his dire
misfortune, maybe his everlasting tragedy, something soothing and soft
like linen dipped in dew was laid upon his forehead.  A cool, delicious
hand covered his eyes caressingly; a voice from spheres so far away that
worlds were the echoing points of the sound, came whispering to him like
a stir of wings in a singing grove.  With a last effort to remain in the
waking world, he raised his head so very little, but fell gently back
again with one sighing word on his lips:

"Fleda!"

It was no illusion.  Fleda had come from her own night of trouble to his
motherless, wifeless home, and would not be denied admittance by the
nurse.  It was Jim Beadle who admitted her.

"He'd be mad if he knew we wouldn't let her come," Jim had said to the
nurse.

It was Fleda who had warned Ingolby of the dangers that surrounded him
--the physical as well as business dangers.  She came now to serve the
blind victim of that Fate which she had seen hovering over him.

The renegade daughter of the Romanys, as Jethro Fawe had called her, was,
for the first time, in the house of her master Gorgio.




CHAPTER XIII

THE CHAIN OF THE PAST

For once in its career, Lebanon was absolutely united.  The blow that had
brought down the Master Man had also struck the town between the eyes,
and there was no one--friend or foe of Ingolby--who did not regard it as
an insult and a challenge.  It was now known that the roughs of Manitou,
led by the big river-driver, were about to start on a raid upon Lebanon
and upon Ingolby at the very moment the horseshoe did its work.  All
night there were groups of men waiting outside Ingolby's house.  They
were of all classes-carters, railway workers, bartenders, lawyers,
engineers, bankers, accountants, merchants, ranchmen, carpenters,
insurance agents, manufacturers, millers, horse-dealers, and so on.

Some prayed for Ingolby's life, others swore viciously; and those who
swore had no contempt for those who prayed, while those who prayed were
tolerant of those who swore.  It was a union of incongruous elements.
Men who had nothing in common were one in the spirit of faction; and all
were determined that the Orangeman, whose funeral was fixed for this
memorable Saturday, should be carried safely to his grave.  Civic pride
had almost become civic fanaticism in Lebanon.  One of the men beaten by
Ingolby in the recent struggle for control of the railways said to the
others shivering in the grey dawn: "They were bound to get him in the
back.  They're dagos, the lot of 'em.  Skunks are skunks, even when you
skin 'em."

When, just before dawn, old Gabriel Druse issued from the house into
which he had carried Ingolby the night before, they questioned him
eagerly.  He had been a figure apart from both Lebanon and Manitou, and
they did not regard him as a dago, particularly as it was more than
whispered that Ingolby "had a lien" on his daughter.  In the grey light,
with his long grizzled beard and iron-grey, shaggy hair, Druse looked
like a mystic figure of the days when the gods moved among men like
mortals.  His great height, vast proportions, and silent ways gave him a
place apart, and added to the superstitious feeling by which he was
surrounded.

"How is he?" they asked whisperingly, as they crowded round him.

"The danger is over," was the slow, heavy reply.  He will live, but he
has bad days to face."

"What was the danger?" they asked.  "Fever--maybe brain fever," he
replied.  "We'll see him through," someone said.

"Well, he cannot see himself through," rejoined the old man solemnly.
The enigmatical words made them feel there was something behind.

"Why can't he see himself through?" asked Osterhaut the universal, who
had just arrived from the City Hall.

"He can't see himself through because he is blind," was the heavy answer.

There was a moment of shock, of hushed surprise, and then a voice burst
forth: "Blind--they've blinded him, boys!  The dagos have killed his
sight.  He's blind, boys!"

A profane and angry muttering ran through the crowd, who were thirsty,
hungry, and weary with watching.

Osterhaut held up the horseshoe which had brought Ingolby down.  "Here it
is, the thing that done it.  It's tied with a blue ribbon-for luck," he
added ironically.  "It's got his blood on it.  I'm keeping it till
Manitou's paid the price of it.  Then I'll give it to Lebanon for keeps."

"That's the thing that did it, but where's the man behind the thing?"
snarled a voice.

Again there was a moment's silence, and then Billy Kyle, the veteran
stage-driver, said: "He's in the jug, but a gaol has doors, and doors'll
open with or without keys.  I'm for opening the door, boys."

"What for?" asked a man who knew the answer, but who wanted the thing
said.

"I spent four years in Arizona, same as Jowett," Billy Kyle answered,
"and I got in the way of thinking as they do there, and acting just as
quick as you think.  I drove stage down in the Verde Valley.  Sometimes
there wasn't time to bring a prisoner all the way to a judge and jury,
and people was busy, and hadn't time to wait for the wagon; so they done
what was right, and there was always a tree that would carry that kind o'
fruit for the sake of humanity.  It's the best way, boys."

"This isn't Arizona or any other lyncher's country," said Halliday, the
lawyer, making his way to the front.  "It isn't the law, and in this
country it's the law that counts.  It's the Gover'ment's right to attend
to that drunken dago that threw the horseshoe, and we've got to let the
Gover'ment do it.  No lynching on my plate, thank you.  If Ingolby could
speak to us, you can bet your boots it's what he'd say."

"What's your opinion, boss?" asked Billy Kyle of Gabriel Druse, who had
stood listening, his chin on his breast, his sombre eyes fixed on them
abstractedly.

At Kyle's question his eyes lighted up with a fire that was struck from a
flint in other spheres, and he answered: "It is for the ruler to take
life, not the subject.  If it is a man that rules, it is for him; if it
is the law that rules, it is for the law.  Here, it is the law.  Then it
is not for the subject, and it is not for you."

"If he was your son?" asked Billy Kyle.

"If he was my son, I should be the ruler, not the law," was the grim,
enigmatic reply, and the old man stalked away from them towards the
bridge.

"I'd bet he'd settle the dago's hash that done to his son what the
Manitou dagos done to Ingolby--and settle it quick," remarked Lick
Farrelly, the tinsmith.

"I bet he's been a ruler or something somewhere," remarked Billy Kyle.

"I bet I'm going home to breakfast," interposed Halliday, the lawyer.
"There's a straight day's work before us, gentlemen," he added, "and we
can't do anything here.  Orangemen, let's hoof it."

Twenty Orangemen stepped out from the crowd.  Halliday was a past master
of their lodge, and they all meant what he meant.  They marched away in
procession--to breakfast and to a meeting of the lodge.  Others straggled
after, but a few waited for the appearance of the doctor.  When the sun
came up and Rockwell, pale and downcast, issued forth, they gathered
round him, and walked with him through the town, questioning, listening
and threatening.

A few still remained behind at Ingolby's house.  They were of the devoted
slaves of Ingolby who would follow him to the gates of Hades and back
again, or not back if need be.

The nigger barber, Berry, was one; another was the Jack-of-all-trades,
Osterhaut, a kind of municipal odd-man, with the well-known red hair, the
face that constantly needed shaving, the blue serge shirt with a scarf
for a collar, the suit of canvas in the summer and of Irish frieze in the
winter; the pair of hands which were always in his own pocket, never in
any one else's; the grey eye, doglike in its mildness, and the long nose
which gave him the name of Snorty.  Of the same devoted class also was
Jowett who, on a higher plane, was as wise and discerning a scout as any
leader ever had.

While old Berry and Osterhaut and all the others were waiting at
Ingolby's house, Jowett was scouting among the Manitou roughs for the
Chief Constable of Lebanon, to find out what was forward.  What he had
found was not reassuring, because Manitou, conscious of being in the
wrong, realized that Lebanon would try to make her understand her wrong-
doing; and that was intolerable.  It was clear to Jowett that, in spite
of all, there would be trouble at the Orange funeral, and that the
threatened strike would take place at the same time in spite of Ingolby's
catastrophe.  Already in the early morning revengeful spirits from
Lebanon had invaded the outer portions of Manitou and had taken
satisfaction out of an equal number of "Dogans," as they called the Roman
Catholic labourers, one of whom was carried to the hospital with an elbow
out of joint and a badly injured back.

With as much information as he needed, Jowett made his way back to
Lebanon, when, at the approach to the bridge, he met Fleda hurrying with
bent head and pale, distressed face in his own direction.  Of all Western
men none had a better appreciation of the sex that takes its toll of
every traveller after his kind than Aaron Jowett.  He had been a real
buck in his day among those of his own class, and though the storm of his
romances had become but a faint stirring of leaves which had tinges of
days that are sear, he still had an eye unmatched for female beauty.  The
sun which makes that northern land a paradise in summer caught the gold-
brown hair of Gabriel Druse's daughter, and made it glint and shine.  It
coquetted with the umber of her eyes and they grew luminous as a jewel;
it struck lightly across the pale russet of her cheek and made it like an
apple that one's lips touch lovingly, when one calls it "too good to
eat."  It made an atmosphere of half-silver and half-gold with a touch of
sunrise crimson for her to walk in, translating her form into melting
lines of grace.

Jowett knew that Druse's daughter was on her way to the man who had
looked once, looked twice, looked thrice into her eyes and had seen there
his own image; and that she had done the same; and that the man, it might
be, would never look into their dark depths again.  He might speak once,
he might speak twice, he might speak thrice, but would it ever be the
same as the look that needed no words?

When he crossed Fleda Druse's pathway she stopped short.  She knew that
Jowett was Ingolby's true friend.  She had seen him often, and he was
intimately associated with that day when she had run the Carillon Rapids
and had lain (for how long she never dared to think) in Ingolby's arms in
the sight of all the world.  First among those who crowded round her at
Carillon that day were Jowett and Osterhaut, who had tried to warn her.

"You are going to him?" she said now with confidence in her eyes, and by
the intimacy of the phrase (as though she could speak of Ingolby only as
him) their own understanding was complete.

"To see how he is and then to do other things," Jowett answered.

There was silence for a moment in which they moved slowly forward, and
then she said: "You were at Barbazon's last night?"

"When that Gipsy son of a dog gave him away!" he assented.  "I never
heard anything like the speech Ingolby made.  He had them in the throat.
The Gipsy would have had nothing out of it, if it hadn't been for the
horseshoe.  But in spite of the giveaway, Ingolby was getting them where
they were soft-fairly drugging them with good news.  You never heard such
dope.  My, he was smooth!  The golden, velvet truth it was, too.  That's
the only kind he has in stock; and they were sort of stupefied and locoed
as they chewed his word-plant.  Cicero must have been a saucy singer of
the dictionary, and Paul the Apostle had a dope of his own you couldn't
buy, but the gay gamut that Ingolby run gives them all the cold good-
bye."

She held herself very still as he spoke.  There was, however, a strange,
lonely look in her eyes.  The man lying asleep in the darkness of body
and mind yonder was not really her lover, for he had said no word direct
of love to her, and she knew him so little, how could she love him?  Yet
there was something between them which had its authority over their
lives, overcoming even that maiden modesty which was in contrast to the
bold, physical thing she had done in running the Carillon Rapids those
centuries ago when she was young and glad-wistfully glad.  So much had
come since that day, she had travelled so far on the highway of Fate,
that she looked back from peak to peak of happening to an almost
invisible horizon.  So much had occurred and she felt so old this
morning; and yet there was in her heart the undefined feeling that she
must keep her radiant Spring of life for the blind Gorgio if he needed
it-if he needed it.  Would he need it, robbed of sight and with his life-
work murdered?

She shuddered as she thought of what it meant to him.  If a man is to
work, he must have eyes to see.  Yet what had she to do with it, after
all?  She had no right to go to him even as she was going.  Yet had she
not the right of common humanity?  This Gorgio was her friend.  Did not
the world know that he had saved her life?

As they came to the Lebanon end of the bridge, Fleda turned to Jowett
and, commenting on his description of the scene at Barbazon, said:
"He is a great man, but he trusts too much and risks too much.  That was
no place for him."

"Big men like him think they can do anything," Jowett replied, a little
ironically, subtly trying to force a confession of her preference for
Ingolby.

He succeeded.  Her eye lighted with indignation.  She herself might
challenge him, but she would not allow another to do so.

"It is not the truth," she rejoined sharply.  "He does not measure
himself against the world so.  He is like--like a child," she added.

"It seems to me all big men are like that," Jowett rejoined; "and he's
the biggest man the West has seen.  He knows about every man's business
as though it was his own.  I can get a margin off most any man in the
West on a horse-trade, but I'd look shy about doing a trade with him.
You can't dope a horse so he won't know.  He's on to it, sees it-sees it
like as if it was in glass.  Sees anything and everything, and--" He
stopped short.  The Master Gorgio could no longer see, and his henchman
flushed like a girl at his "break"; though, as a horse-dealer, he had in
his time listened without shame to wilder, angrier reproaches than most
men living.

She glanced at him, saw his confusion, forgave and understood him.

"It was not the horseshoe, it was not the Gipsy," she returned.  "They
did not set it going.  It would not have happened but for one man."

"Yes, it's Marchand, right enough," answered Jowett, "but we'll get him
yet.  We'll get him with the branding-iron hot."

"That will not put things right if--" she paused, then with a great
effort she added: "Does the doctor think he will get it back and that--"

She stopped suddenly in an agitation he did not care to see and he turned
away his head.

"Doctor doesn't know," he answered.  "There's got to be an expert.  It'll
take time before he gets here, but--" he could not help but say it,
seeing how great her distress was--"but it's going to come back.  I've
seen cases--I saw one down on the Border"--how easily he lied!--"just
like his.  It was blasting that done it--the shock.  But the sight come
back all right, and quick too--like as I've seen a paralizite get up all
at once and walk as though he'd never been locoed.  Why, God Almighty
don't let men like Ingolby be done like that by reptiles same's
Marchand."

"You believe in God Almighty?" she said half-wonderingly, yet with
gratitude in her tone.  "You understand about God?"

"I've seen too many things not to try and deal fair with Him and not try
to cheat Him," he answered.  "I see things lots of times that wasn't ever
born on the prairie or in any house.  I've seen--I've seen enough," he
said abruptly, and stopped.

"What have you seen?" she asked eagerly.  "Was it good or bad?"

"Both," he answered quickly.  "I was stalked once--stalked I was by night
and often in the open day, by some sickly, loathsome thing, that even
made me fight it with my hands--a thing I couldn't see.  I used to fire
buckshot at it, enough to kill an army, till I near went mad.  I was
really and truly getting loony.  Then I took to prayin' to the best woman
I ever knowed.  I never had a mother, but she looked after me--my sister,
Sara, it was.  She brought me up, and then died and left me without
anything to hang on to.  I didn't know all I'd lost till she was gone.
But I guess she knew what I thought of her; for she come back--after I'd
prayed till I couldn't see.  She come back into my room one night when
the cursed 'haunt' was prowling round me, and as plain as I see you, I
saw her.  'Be at peace,' she said, and I spoke to her, and said, 'Sara-
why, Sara' and she smiled, and went away into nothing--like a bit o'
cloud in the sun."

He stopped, and was looking straight before him as though he saw a
vision.

"It went?" she asked breathlessly.

"It went like that--" He made a swift, outward gesture.  "It went and it
never came back; and she didn't either--not ever.  My idee is," he added,
"that there's evil things that mebbe are the ghost-shapes of living men
that want to do us harm; though, mebbe, too, they're the ghost-shapes of
men that's dead, but that can't get on Over There.  So they try to get
back to us here; and they can make life Hell while they're stalking us."

"I am sure you are right," she said.

She was thinking of the loathsome thing which haunted her room last
night.  Was it the embodied second self of Jethro Fawe, doing the evil
that Jethro Fawe, the visible corporeal man, wished to do?  She
shuddered, then bent her head and fixed her mind on Ingolby, whose house
was not far away.  She felt strangely, miserably alone this morning.  She
was in that fluttering state which follows a girl's discovery that she is
a woman, and the feeling dawns that she must complete herself by joining
her own life with the life of another.

She showed no agitation, but her repression gave an almost statuesque
character to her face and figure.  The adventurous nature of her early
life had given her a power to meet shock and danger with coolness, and
though the news of Ingolby's tragedy had seemed to freeze the vital
forces in her, and all the world became blank for a moment, she had
controlled herself and had set forth to go to him, come what might.

As she entered the street where Ingolby lived, she suddenly realized the
difficulty before her.  She might go to him, but by only one right could
she stay and nurse him, and that right she did not possess.  He would,
she knew, understand her, no matter how the world babbled.  Why should
the world babble?  What woman could have designs upon a blind man?  Was
not humanity alone sufficient warrant for staying by his side?  Yet would
he wish it?  Suddenly her heart sank; but again she remembered their last
parting, and once more she was sure he would be glad to have her with
him.

It flashed upon her how different it would have been, if he and she had
been Romanys, and this thing had happened over there in the far lands she
knew so well.  Who would have hinted at shame, if she had taken him to
her father's tan or gone to his tan and tended him as a man might tend a
man?  Humanity would have been the only convention; there would have been
no sex, no false modesty, no babble, no reproach.  If it had been a man
as old as the oldest or as young as Jethro Fawe it would have made no
difference.

As young as Jethro Fawe!  Why was it that now she could never think of
the lost and abandoned Romany life without thinking also of Jethro Fawe?
Why should she hate him, despise him, revolt against him, and yet feel
that, as it were by invisible cords, he drew her back to that which she
had forsworn, to the Past which dragged at her feet?  The Romany was not
dead in her; her real struggle was yet to come; and in a vague but
prophetic way she realized it.  She was not yet one with the settled
western world.

As they came close to Ingolby's house she heard marching footsteps, and
in the near distance she saw fourscore or more men tramping in military
order.  "Who are they?" she asked of Jowett.

"Men that are going to see law and order kept in Lebanon," he answered.




CHAPTER XIV

SUCH THINGS MAY NOT BE

A few hours later Fleda slowly made her way homeward through the woods on
the Manitou side of the Sagalac.  Leaving Ingolby's house, she had seen
men from the ranches and farms and mines beyond Lebanon driving or riding
into the town, as though to a fair or fete-day.  Word of anticipated
troubles had sped through the countryside, and the innate curiosity of
a race who greatly love a row brought in sensation-lovers.  Some were
skimming along in one-horse gigs, a small bag of oats dangling beneath
like the pendulum of a great clock.  Others were in double or triple-
seated light wagons--"democrats" they were called.  Women had a bit of
colour in their hats or at their throats, and the men had on clean white
collars and suits of "store-clothes"--a sign of being on pleasure bent.
Young men and girls on rough but serviceable mounts cantered past,
laughing and joking, and their loud talking grated on the ear of the girl
who had seen a Napoleon in the streets of his Moscow.

Presently there crossed her path a gruesomely ugly hearse, with glass
sides and cheap imitation ostrich plumes drawn by gorged ravens of horses
with egregiously long tails, and driven by an undertaker's assistant,
who, with a natural gaiety of soul, displayed an idiotic solemnity by
dragging down the corners of the mouth.  She turned away in loathing.

Her mind fled to a scene far away in the land of the Volga when she was a
child, where she had seen buried two men, who had fought for their
insulted honour till both had died of their wounds.  She remembered the
white and red sashes and the gay scarfs worn by the women at the burial,
the jackets with great silver buttons worn by the men, and the silver-
mounted pistols and bright steel knives in the garish belts.  She saw
again the bodies of the two gladiators, covered with crimson robes,
carried shoulder-high on a soft bed of interlaced branches to the graves
beneath the trees.  There, covered with flowers and sprigs and
evergreens, ribbons and favours, the kindly earth hid them, cloaked for
their long sleep, while women wept, and men praised the dead, and went
back to the open road again cheerily, as the dead would have them do.

If he had died--the man she had just left behind in that torpid sleep
which opiates bring--his body would have been carried to his last home in
just such a hideous equipage as this hearse.  A shiver of revolt went
through her frame, and her mind went to him as she had seen him lying
between the white sheets of his bed, his hands, as they had lain upon the
coverlet, compact of power and grace, knit and muscular and vital--not
the hand for a violin but the hand for a sword.

As she had laid her hand upon his hot forehead and over his eyes, he had
unconsciously spoken her name.  That had told her more of what really was
between them than she had ever known.  In the presence of the catastrophe
that must endanger, if not destroy the work he had done, the career he
had made, he thought of her, spoke her name.

What could she do to prevent his ruin?  She must do something, else she
had no right to think of him.  As though her thoughts had summoned him,
she came suddenly upon Felix Marchand at a point where her path resolved
itself into two, one leading to Manitou, the other to her own home.

There was a malicious glint in the greenish eyes of the dissolute
demagogue as he saw her.  His hat made a half-circle before it found his
head again.

"You pay early visits, mademoiselle," he said, his teeth showing rat-
like.

"And you late ones?" she asked meaningly.

"Not so late that I can't get up early to see what's going on," he
rejoined in a sour voice.

"Is it that those who beat you have to get up early?" she asked
ironically.

"No one has got up earlier than me lately," he sneered.

"All the days are not begun," she remarked calmly.

"You have picked up quite an education since you left the road and the
tan," he said with the look of one who delivers a smashing blow.

"I am not yet educated enough to know how you get other people to commit
your crimes for you," she retorted.

"Who commits my crimes for me?"  His voice was sharp and even anxious.

"The man who told you I was once a Gipsy--Jethro Fawe."

Her instinct had told her this was so.  But had Jethro told all?  She
thought not.  It would need some catastrophe which threw him off his
balance to make him speak to a Gorgio of the inner things of Romany life;
and child--marriage was one of them.

He scoffed.  "Once a Gipsy always a Gipsy.  Race is race, and you can't
put it off and on like--your stocking."

He was going to say chemise, but race was race, and vestiges of native
French chivalry stayed the gross simile on the lips of the degenerate.
Fleda's eyes, however, took on a dark and brooding look which, more
than anything else, showed the Romany in her.  With a murky flood of
resentment rising in her veins, she strove to fight back the half-savage
instincts of a bygone life.  She felt as though she could willingly
sentence this man to death as her father had done Jethro Fawe that very
morning.  Another thought, however, was working and fighting in her--that
Marchand was better as a friend than an enemy; and that while Ingolby's
fate was in the balance, while yet the Orange funeral had not taken place
and the strikes had not yet come, it might be that he could be won over
to Ingolby.  Her mind was thus involuntarily reproducing Ingolby's
policy, as he had declared it to Jowett and Rockwell.  It was to find
Felix Marchand's price, and to buy off his enmity--not by money, for
Marchand did not need that, but by those other coins of value which are
individual to each man's desires, passions and needs.

"Once a Frenchman isn't always a Frenchman," she replied coolly,
disregarding the coarse insolence of his last utterance.  "You yourself
do not now swear faith to the tricolour or the fleur-de-lis."

He flushed.  She had touched a tender nerve.

"I am a Frenchman always," he rejoined angrily.  "I hate the English.
I spit on the English flag."

"Yes, I've heard you are an anarchist," she rejoined.  "A man with no
country and with a flag that belongs to no country--quelle affaire et
quelle drolerie!"

She laughed.  Taken aback in spite of his anger, he stared at her.  How
good her French accent was!  If she would only speak altogether in that
beloved language, he could smother much malice.  She was beautiful and--
well, who could tell?  Ingolby was wounded and blind, maybe for ever, and
women are always with the top dog--that was his theory.  Perhaps her
apparent dislike of him was only a mood.  Many women that he had
conquered had been just like that.  They had begun by disliking him--from
Lil Sarnia down--and had ended by being his.  This girl would never be
his in the way that the others had been, but--who could tell?--perhaps he
would think enough of her to marry her?  Anyway, it was worth while
making such a beauty care for him.  The other kind of women were easy
enough to get, and it would be a piquant thing to have one irreproachable
affaire.  He had never had one; he was not sure that any girl or woman he
had ever known had ever loved him, and he was certain that he had never
loved any girl or woman.  To be in love would be a new and piquant
experience for him.  He did not know love, but he knew what passion was.
He had ever been the hunter.  This trail might be dangerous, too, but he
would take his chances.  He had seen her dislike of him whenever they had
met in the past, and he had never tried to soften her attitude towards
him.  He had certainly whistled, but she had not come.  Well, he would
whistle again--a different tune.

"You speak French much?" he asked almost eagerly, the insolence gone from
his tone.  "Why didn't I know that?"

"I speak French in Manitou," she replied, "but nearly all the French
speak English there, and so I speak more English than French."

"Yes, that's it," he rejoined almost angrily again.  "The English will
not learn French, will not speak French.  They make us learn English,
and--"

"If you don't like the flag and the country, why don't you leave it?" she
interrupted, hardening, though she had meant to try and win him over to
Ingolby's side.

His eyes blazed.  There was something almost real in the man after all.

"The English can kill us, they can grind us to the dust," he rejoined in
French, "but we will not leave the land which has always been ours.  We
settled it; our fathers gave their lives for it in a thousand places.
The Indians killed them, the rivers and the storms, the plague and the
fire, the sickness and the cold wiped them out.  They were burned alive
at the stake, they were flayed; their bones were broken to pieces by
stones--but they blazed trails with their blood in the wilderness from
New Orleans to Hudson's Bay.  They paid for the land with their lives.
Then the English came and took it, and since that time--one hundred and
fifty years--we have been slaves."

"You do not look like a slave," she answered, "and you have not acted
like a slave.  If you were to do the things in France that you've done
here, you wouldn't be free as you are to-day."

"What have I done?" he asked darkly.

"You were the cause of what happened at Barbazon's last night,"--he
smiled evilly--"you are egging on the roughs to break up the Orange
funeral to-day; and there is all the rest you know so well."

"What is the rest I know so well?"  He looked closely at her, his long,
mongrel eyes half-closing with covert scrutiny.

"Whatever it is, it is all bad and it is all yours."

"Not all," he retorted coolly.  "You forget your Gipsy friend.  He did
his part last night, and he's still free."

They had entered the last little stretch of wood in which her home lay,
and she slackened her footsteps slightly.  She felt that she had been
unwise in challenging him; that she ought to try persistently to win him
over.  It was repugnant to her, still it must be done even yet.  She
mastered herself for Ingolby's sake and changed her tactics.

"As you glory in what you have done, you won't mind being responsible
for all that's happened," she replied in a more friendly tone.

She made an impulsive gesture towards him.

"You have shown what power you have--isn't that enough?" she asked.
"You have made the crowd shout, 'Vive Marchand !' You can make everything
as peaceful as it is now upset.  If you don't do so, there will be much
misery.  If peace must be got by force, then the force of government will
get it in the end.  You have the gift of getting hold of the worst men
here, and you have done it; but won't you now master them again in the
other way?  You have money and brains; why not use them to become a
leader of those who will win at last, no matter what the game may be?"

He came close to her.  She shrank inwardly, but she did not move.  His
greenish eyes were wide open in the fulness of eloquence and desire.

"You have a tongue like none I ever heard," he said impulsively.  "You've
got a mind that thinks, you've got dash and can take risks.  You took
risks that day on the Carillon Rapids.  It was only the day before that
I'd met you by the old ford of the Sagalac, and made up to you.  You
choked me off as though I was a wolf or a devil on the loose.  The next
day when I saw Ingolby hand you out to the crowd from his arms, I got
nasty--I have fits like that sometimes, when I've had a little too much
liquor.  I felt it more because you're the only kind of woman that could
ever get a real hold on me.  It was you made me get the boys rampaging
and set the toughs moving.  As you say, I can get hold of a crowd.  It's
not hard--with money and drink.  You can buy human nature cheap.  Every
man has his price they say--and every woman too--bien sur!  The thing is
to find out what is the price, and then how to buy.  You can't buy
everyone in the same way, even if you use a different price.  You've got
to find out how they want the price--whether it's to be handed over the
counter, so to speak, or to be kept on the window-sill, or left in a
pocket, or dropped in a path, or dug up like a potato, with a funny make-
believe that fools nobody, but just plays to the hypocrite in everyone
everywhere.  I'm saying this to you because you've seen more of the
world, I bet, than one in a million, even though you're so young.  I
don't see why we can't come together.  I'm to be bought.  I don't say
that my price isn't high.  You've got your price, too.  You wouldn't fuss
yourself about things here in Manitou and Lebanon, if there wasn't
something you wanted to get.  Tout ca!  Well, isn't it worth while making
the bargain?  You've got such gift of speech that I'm just as if I'd been
drugged, and all round, face, figure, eyes, hair, foot, and girdle,
you're worth giving up a lot for.  I've seen plenty of your sex, and I've
heard crowds of them talk, but they never had anything for me beyond the
minute.  You've got the real thing.  You're my fancy.  You've been
thinking and dreaming of Ingolby.  He's done.  He's a back number.
There's nothing he's done that isn't on the tumble since last night.
The financial gang that he downed are out already against him.  They'll
have his economic blood.  He made a splash while he was at it, but the
alligator's got him.  It's 'Exit Ingolby,' now."

She made a passionate gesture, and seemed about to speak, but he went on:
"No, don't say anything.  I know how you feel.  You've had your face
turned his way, and you can't look elsewhere all at once.  But Time cures
quick, if you're a good healthy human being.  Ingolby was the kind likely
to draw a girl.  He's a six-footer and over; he spangled a lot, and he
smiled pretty--comme le printemps, and was sharp enough to keep clear of
women that could hurt him.  That was his strongest point after all, for a
little, sly sprat of a woman that's made eyes at you and led you on, till
you sent her a note in a hurry some time with some loose hot words in it,
and she got what she'd wanted, will make you pay a hundred times for the
goods you get.  Ingolby was sharp enough to walk shy, until you came his
way, and then he lost his underpinning.  But last night got him in the
vitals--hit him between the eyes; and his stock's not worth ten cents in
the dollar to-day.  But though the pumas are out, and he's done, and'll
never see his way out of the hole he's in"--he laughed at his grisly
joke"--it's natural to let him down easy.  You've looked his way; he did
you a good turn at the Carillon Rapids, and you'd do one for him if you
could.  I'm the only one can stop the worst from happening.  You want to
pay your debt to him.  Good.  I can help you do it.  I can stop the
strikes on the railways and in the mills.  I can stop the row at the
Orange funeral.  I can stop the run on his bank and the drop in his
stock.  I can fight the gang that's against him--I know how.  I'm the
man that can bring things to pass."

He paused with a sly, mean smile of self-approval and conceit, and his
tongue licked the corners of his mouth in a way that drunkards have in
the early morning when the effect of last night's drinking has worn off.
He spread out his hands with the air of a man who had unpacked his soul,
but the chief characteristic of his manner was egregious belief in
himself.

At first, in her desire to find a way to meet the needs of Ingolby, Fleda
had listened to him with fortitude and even without revolt.  But as he
began to speak of women, and to refer to herself with a look of gloating
which men of his breed cannot hide, her angry pulses beat hard.  She did
not quite know where he was leading, but she was sure he meant to say
something which would vex her beyond bearing.  At one moment she meant to
cut short his narrative, but he prevented her, and when at last he ended,
she was almost choking with agitation.  It had been borne in upon her as
his monologue proceeded, that she would rather die than accept anything
from this man--anything of any kind.  To fight him was the only thing.
Nothing else could prevail in the end.  His was the service of the
unpenitent thief.

"And what is it you want to buy from me?" she asked evenly.

He did not notice, and he could not realize that ominous thing in her
voice and face.  "I want to be friends with you.  I want to see you here
in the woods, to meet you as you met Ingolby.  I want to talk with you,
to hear you talk; to learn things from you I never learned before; to--"

She interrupted him with a swift gesture.  "And then--after that?  What
do you want at the end of it all?  One cannot spend one's time talking
and wandering in the woods and teaching and learning.  After that, what?"

"I have a house in Montreal," he said evasively.  "I don't want to live
there alone."  He laughed.  "It's big enough for two, and at the end it
might be us two, if--"

With sharp anger, yet with coolness and dignity, she broke in on his
words.  "Might be us two!" she exclaimed.  "I have never thought of
making my home in a sewer.  Do you think--but, no, it isn't any use
talking!  You don't know how to deal with man or woman.  You are
perverted."

"I did not mean what you mean; I meant that I should want to marry you,"
he protested.  "You think the worst of me.  Someone has poisoned your
mind against me."

"Everyone has poisoned my mind against you," she returned, "and yourself
most of all.  I know you will try to injure Mr. Ingolby; and I know that
you will try to injure me; but you will not succeed."

She turned and moved away from him quickly, taking the path towards her
own front door.  He called something after her, but she did not or would
not hear.

As she entered the open space in front of the house, she heard footsteps
behind her and turned quickly, not without apprehension.  A woman came
hurrying towards her.  She was pale, agitated, haggard with fatigue.

"May I speak with you?" she asked in French.  "Surely," replied Fleda.




CHAPTER XV

THE WOMAN FROM WIND RIVER

"What is it?" asked Fleda, opening the door of the house.

"I want to speak to you about m'sieu'," replied the sad-faced woman.
She made a motion of her head backwards towards the wood.  "About M'sieu'
Marchand."

Fleda's face hardened; she had had more than enough of "M'sieu'
Marchand."  She was bitterly ashamed that she had, even for a moment,
thought of using diplomacy with him.  But this woman's face was so
forlorn, apart, and lonely, that the old spirit of the Open Road worked
its will.  In far-off days she had never seen a human being turned away
from a Romany tent, or driven from a Romany camp.  She opened the door
and stood aside to admit the wayfarer.

A few moments later, the woman, tidied and freshened, sat at the ample
breakfast which was characteristic of Romany home-life.  The woman's
plate was bountifully supplied by Fleda, and her cup filled more than
once by Madame Bulteel, while old Gabriel Druse bulked friendly over all.
His face now showed none of the passion and sternness which had been
present when he passed the Sentence of the Patrin upon Jethro Fawe;
nothing of the gloom filling his eyes as he left Ingolby's house.  The
gracious, bountiful look of the patriarch, of the head of the clan, was
upon him.

The husband of one wife, the father of one child, yet the Ry of Rys had
still the overlooking, protective sense of one who had the care of great
numbers of people.  His keen eyes foresaw more of the story the woman was
to tell presently than either of the women of his household.  He had seen
many such women as this, and had inflexibly judged between them and those
who had wronged them.

"Where have you come from?" he asked, as the meal drew to a close.

"From Wind River and under Elk Mountain," the woman answered with a look
of relief.  Her face was of those who no longer can bear the soul's
secrets.

There was silence while the breakfast things were cleared away, and the
window was thrown wide to the full morning sun.  It broke through the
branches of pine and cedar and juniper; it made translucent the leaves of
the maples; it shimmered on Fleda's brown hair as she pulled a rose from
the bush at the window, and gave it to the forlorn creature in the grey
"linsey-woolsey" dress and the loose blue flannel jacket, whose skin was
coarsened by outdoor life, but who had something of real beauty in the
intense blue of her eyes.  She had been a very comely figure in her best
days, for her waist was small, her bosom gently and firmly rounded, and
her hands were finer than those of most who live and work much in the
open air.

"You said there was something you wished to tell me," said Fleda, at
last.

The woman gazed slowly round at the three, as though with puzzled appeal.
There was the look of the Outlander in her face; of one who had been
exiled from familiar things and places.  In manner she was like a child.
Her glance wandered over the faces of the two women, then her eyes met
those of the Ry, and stayed there.

"I am old and I have seen many sorrows," said Gabriel Druse, divining
what was in her mind.  "I will try to understand."

"I have known all the bitterness of life," interposed the low, soft voice
of Madame Bulteel.

"All ears are the same here," Fleda added, looking the woman in the eyes.

"I will tell everything," was the instant reply.  Her fingers twined and
untwined in her lap with a nervousness shown by neither face nor body.
Her face was almost apathetic in its despair, but her body had an upright
courage.

She sighed heavily and began.

"My name is Arabella Stone.  I was married from my home over against Wind
River by the Jumping Sandhills.

"My father was a lumberman.  He was always captain of the gang in the
woods, and captain of the river in the summer.  My mother was deaf and
dumb.  It was very lonely at times when my father was away.  I loved a
boy--a good boy, and he was killed breaking horses.  When I was twenty-
one years old my mother died.  It was not good for me to be alone, my
father said, so he must either give up the woods and the river, or he or
I must marry.  Well, I saw he would not marry, for my mother's face was
one a man could not forget."

The old man stirred in his seat.  "I have seen such," he said in his deep
voice.

"So it was I said to myself I would marry," she continued, "though I had
loved the Boy that died under the hoofs of the black stallion.  There
weren't many girls at the Jumping Sandhills, and so there were men, now
one, now another, to say things to me which did not touch my heart; but I
did not laugh, because I understood that they were lonely.  Yet I liked
one of them more than all the others.

"So, for my father's sake, I came nearer to Dennis, and at last it seemed
I could bear to look at him any time of the day or night he came to me.
He was built like a pine-tree, and had a playful tongue, and also he was
a ranchman like the Boy that was gone.  It all came about on the day he
rode in from the range the wild wicked black stallion which all range-
riders had tried for years to capture.  It was like a brother of the
horse which had killed my Boy, only bigger.  When Dennis mastered him and
rode him to my door I made up my mind, and when he whispered to me over
the dipper of buttermilk I gave him, I said, 'Yes.' I was proud of him.
He did things that a woman likes, and said the things a woman loves to
hear, though they be the same thing said over and over again."

Madame Bulteel nodded her head as though in a dream, and the Ry of Rys
sat with his two great hands on the chair-arm and his chin dropped on his
chest.  Fleda's hands were clasped in her lap, and her big eyes never
left the woman's face.

"Before a month was gone I had married him," the, low, tired voice went
on.  "It was a gay wedding; and my father was very happy, for he thought
I had got the desire of a woman's life--a home of her own.  For a time
all went well.  Dennis was gay and careless and wilful, but he was easy
to live with, too, except when he came back from the town where he sold
his horses.  Then he was different, because of the drink, and he was
quarrelsome with me--and cruel, too.

"At last when he came home with the drink upon him, he would sleep on the
floor and not beside me.  This wore upon my heart.  I thought that if I
could only put my hand on his shoulder and whisper in his ear, he would
get better of his bad feeling; but he was sulky, and he would not bear
with me.  Though I never loved him as I loved my Boy, still I tried to be
a good wife to him, and never turned my eyes to any other man."

Suddenly she stopped as though the pain of speaking was too great.
Madame Bulteel murmured something, but the only word that reached the
ears of the others was the Arabic word 'mafish'.  Her pale face was
suffused as she said it.

Two or three times the woman essayed to speak again, but could not.  At
last, however, she overcame her emotion and said: "So it was when M'sieu'
Felix Marchand came up from the Sagalac."

The old man started and muttered harshly, but Fleda had foreseen the
entrance of the dissolute Frenchman into the tale, and gave no sign of
surprise.

"M'sieu' Marchand bought horses," the sad voice trailed on.  "One day he
bought the mining-claims Dennis had been holding till he could develop
them or sell them for good money.  When Dennis went to town again he
brought me back a present of a belt with silver clasps; but yet again
that night he slept upon the floor alone.  So it went on.  M. Marchand,
he goes on to the mountains and comes back; and he buys more horses, and
Dennis takes them to Yargo, and M. Marchand goes with him, but comes back
before Dennis does.  It was then M'sieu' begun to talk to me; to say
things that soothe a woman when she is hurt.  I knew now Dennis did not
want me as when he first married me.  He was that kind of man--quick to
care and quicker to forget.  He was weak, he could not fasten where he
stood.  It pleased him to be gay and friendly with me when he was sober,
but there was nothing behind it--nothing, nothing at all.  At last I
began to cry when I thought of it, for it went on and on, and I was too
much alone.  I looked at myself in the glass, and I saw I was not old or
lean.  I sang in the trees beside the brook, and my voice was even a
little better than in the days when Dennis first came to my father's
house.  I looked to my cooking, and I knew that it was as good as ever.
I thought of my clothes, and how I did my hair, and asked myself if I
was as fresh to see as when Dennis first came to me.  I could see no
difference.  There was a clear pool not far away under the little hills
where the springs came together.  I used to bathe in it every morning and
dry myself in the sun; and my body was like a child's.  That being so,
should my own man turn his head away from me day or night?  What had I
done to be used so, less than two years after I had married!"

She paused and hung her head, weeping gently.  "Shame stings a woman like
nothing else," Madame Bulteel said with a sigh.

"It was so with me," continued Dennis's wife.  "Then at last the thought
came that there was another woman.  And all the time M. Marchand kept
coming and going, at first when Dennis was there, and always with some
good reason for coming--horses, cattle, shooting, or furs bought of the
Indians.  When Dennis was not there, he came at first for an hour or two,
as if by chance, then for a whole day, because he said he knew I was
lonely.  One day, I was sitting by the pool--it was in the evening.
I was crying because of the thought that followed me of another woman
somewhere, who made Dennis turn from me.  Then it was M'sieu' came and
put a hand on my shoulder--he came so quietly that I did not hear him
till he touched me.  He said he knew why I cried, and it saddened his
soul."

"His soul--the jackal!" growled the old man in his beard.

The woman nodded wearily and went on.  "For all of ten days I had been
alone, except for the cattlemen camping a mile away and an old Indian
helper who slept in his tepee within call.  Loneliness makes you weak
when there's something tearing at the heart.  So I let M'sieu' Marchand
talk to me.  At last he told me that there was a woman at Yargo--that
Dennis did not go there for business, but to her.  Everyone knew it
except me, he said.  He told me to ask old Throw Hard, the Indian helper,
if he had spoken the truth.  I was shamed, and angry and crazy, too, I
think, so I went to old Throw Hard and asked him.  He said he could not
tell the truth, and that he would not lie to me.  So I knew it was all
true.

"How do I know what was in my mind?  Is a woman not mad at such a time!
There I was, tossed aside for a flyaway, who was for any man that would
come her way.  Yes, I think I was mad.  The pride in me was hurt--as only
a woman can understand."  She paused and looked at the two women who
listened to her.  Fleda's eyes were on the world beyond the window
of the room.

"Surely we understand," whispered Madame Bulteel.

The woman's courage returned, and she continued: "I could not go to my
father, for he was riding the river scores of miles away.  I was terribly
alone.  It was then that M'sieu' Marchand, who had bribed the woman to
draw Dennis away, begged me to go away with him.  He swore I should marry
him as soon as I could be free of Dennis.  I scarcely knew what I said or
thought; but the place I had loved was hateful to me, so I went away with
him."

A sharp, pained exclamation broke from the lips of Madame Bulteel, but
presently she reached out and laid a hand upon the woman's arm.  "Of
course you went with him," she said.  "You could not stay where you were
and face the return of Dennis.  There was no child to keep you, and the
man that tempted you said he adored you?"

The woman looked gratefully at her.  "That was what he said," she
answered.  "He said he was tired of wandering, and that he wanted a home-
and there was a big house in Montreal."

She stopped suddenly upon an angry, smothered word from Fleda's lips.  A
big house in Montreal!  Fleda's first impulse was to break in upon the
woman's story and tell her father what had happened just now outside
their own house; but she waited.

"Yes, there was a big house in Montreal?" said Fleda, her eyes now
resting sadly upon the woman.

"He said it should be mine.  But that did not count.  To be far away from
all that had been was more than all else.  I was not thinking of the man,
or caring for him, I was flying from my shame.  I did not see then the
shame to which I was going.  I was a fool, and I was mad and bad also.
When I waked--and it was soon--there was quick understanding between us.
The big house in Montreal--that was never meant for me.  He was already
married."

The old man stretched heavily to his feet, leaned both hands on the
table, and looked at the woman with glowering eyes, while Fleda's heart
seemed to stop beating.

"Married!" growled Gabriel Druse, with a blur of passion in his voice.
He knew that Felix Marchand had followed his daughter as though he were a
single man.

Fleda saw what was working in his mind.  Since her father suspected, he
should know all.

"He almost offered me the big house in Montreal this morning," she said
evenly and coldly.

A malediction broke from the old man's lips.

"He almost thought he wanted me to marry him," Fleda added scornfully.

"And what did you say?" Druse asked.

"There could only be one thing to say.  I told him I had never thought of
making my home in a sewer."  A grim smile broke over the old man's face,
and he sat down again.

"Because I saw him with you I wanted to warn you," the woman continued.
"Yesterday, I came to warn him of his danger, and he laughed at me.  From
Madame Thibadeau I heard he had said he would make you sing his song.
When I came to tell you, there he was with you.  But when he left you I
was sure there was no need to speak.  Still I felt I must tell you--
perhaps because you are rich and strong, and will stop him from doing
more harm."

"How do you know we are rich?" asked Druse in a rough tone.

"It is what the world says," was the reply.  "Is there harm in that?  In
any case it was right to tell you all; so that one who had herded with a
woman like me should not be friends with you."

"I have seen worse women than you," murmured the old man.

"What danger did you come to warn M. Marchand about?" asked Fleda.

"To his life," answered the woman.

"Do you want to save his life?" asked the old man.

"Ah, is it not always so?" intervened Madame Bulteel in a low, sad
voice.  "To be wronged like that does not make a woman just."

"I am just," answered the woman.  "He deserves to die, but I want to save
the man that will kill him when they meet."

"Who will kill him?" asked Fleda.  "Dennis--he will kill Marchand if he
can."

The old man leaned forward with puzzled, gloomy interest.  "Why?  Dennis
left you for another.  You say he had grown cold.  Was that not what he
wanted--that you should leave him?"

The woman looked at him with tearful eyes.  "If I had known Dennis
better, I should have waited.  What he did is of the moment only.  A man
may fall and rise again, but it is not so with a woman.  She thinks and
thinks upon the scar that shows where she wounded herself; and she never
forgets, and so her life becomes nothing--nothing."

No one saw that Madame Bulteel held herself rigidly, and was so white
that even the sunlight was gold beside her look.  Yet the strangest,
saddest smile played about her lips; and presently, as the eyes of the
others fastened on the woman and did not leave her, she regained her
usual composure.

The woman kept looking at Gabriel Druse.  "When Dennis found that I had
gone, and knew why--for I left word on a sheet of paper--he went mad like
me.  Trailing to the south, to find M'sieu' Marchand, he had an accident,
and was laid up in a shack for weeks on the Tanguishene River, and they
could not move him.  But at last a ranchman wrote to me, and the letter
found me on the very day I left M'sieu'.  When I got that letter begging
me to go to the Tanguishene River, to nurse Dennis who loved me still, my
heart sank.  I said to myself I could not go; and Dennis and I must be
apart always to the end of time.  But then I thought again.  He was ill,
and his body was as broken as his mind.  Well, since I could do his mind
no good, I would try to help his body.  I could do that much for him.  So
I went.  But the letter to me had been long on the way, and when I got to
the Tanguishene River he was almost well."

She paused and rocked her body to and fro for a moment as though in pain.

"He wanted me to go back to him then.  He said he had never cared for the
woman at Yargo, and that what he felt for me now was different from what
it had ever been.  When he had settled accounts we could go back to the
ranch and be at peace.  I knew what he meant by settling accounts, and it
frightened me.  That is why I am here.  I came to warn the man, Marchand,
for if Dennis kills him, then they will hang Dennis.  Do you not see?
This is a country of law.  I saw that Dennis had the madness in his
brain, and so I left him again in the evening of the day I found him, and
came here--it is a long way.  Yesterday, M'sieu' Marchand laughed at me
when I warned him.  He said he could take care of himself.  But such men
as Dennis stop at nothing; there will be killing, if M'sieu' stays here."

"You will go back to Dennis?" asked Fleda gently.  "Some other woman
will make him happy when he forgets me," was the cheerless, grey reply.

The old man got up and, coming over, laid a hand upon her shoulder.

"Where did you think of going from here?" he asked.

"Anywhere--I don't know," was the reply.

"Is there no work here for her?" he asked, turning to Madame Bulteel.

"Yes, plenty," was the reply.  "And room also?" he asked again.

"Was ever a tent too full, when the lost traveller stumbled into camp in
the old days?" rejoined Fleda.  The woman trembled to her feet, a glad
look in her eyes.  "I ought to go, but I am tired and I will gladly
stay," she said and swayed against the table.

Madame Bulteel and Fleda put their arms round her, steadying her.

"This is not the way to act," said Fleda with a touch of sharp reproof.
Had she not her own trouble to face?

The stricken woman drew herself up and looked Fleda in the eyes.  "I will
find the right way, if I can," she said with courage.

A half-hour later, as the old man sat alone in the room where he had
breakfasted, a rifle-shot rang out in the distance.

"The trouble begins," he said, as he rose and hastened into the hallway.

Another shot rang out.  He caught up his wide felt hat, reached for a
great walking-stick in the corner, and left the house hurriedly.




CHAPTER XVI

THE MAYOR FILLS AN OFFICE

It was a false alarm which had startled Gabriel Druse, but it had
significance.  The Orange funeral was not to take place until eleven
o'clock, and it was only eight o'clock when the Ry left his home.  A
rifle-shot had, however, been fired across the Sagalac from the Manitou
side, and it had been promptly acknowledged from Lebanon.  There was a
short pause, and then came another from the Lebanon side.  It was merely
a warning and a challenge.  The only man who could have controlled the
position was blind and helpless.

As Druse walked rapidly towards the bridge, he met Jowett.  Jowett was
one of the few men in either town for whom the Ry had regard, and the
friendliness had had its origin in Jowett's knowledge of horseflesh.
This was a field in which the Ry was himself a master.  He had ever been
too high-placed among his own people to trade and barter horses except
when, sending a score of Romanys on a hunt for wild ponies on the hills
of Eastern Europe, he had afterwards sold the tamed herd to the highest
bidders in some Balkan town; but he had an infallible eye for a horse.

It was a curious anomaly also that the one man in Lebanon who would not
have been expected to love and pursue horse-flesh was the Reverend Reuben
Tripple to whom Ingolby had given his conge, but who loved a horse as he
loved himself.

He was indeed a greater expert in horses than in souls.  One of the
sights of Lebanon had been the appearance in the field of the "Reverend
Tripple," who owned a great, raw-boned bay mare of lank proportions, the
winner of a certain great trotting-race which had delighted the mockers.

For two years Jowett had eyed Mr. Tripple's rawbone with a piratical eye.

Though it had won only a single great race, that, in Jowett's view, was
its master's fault.  As the Arabs say, however, Allah is with the
patient; and so it was that on the evening of the day in which Ingolby
met disaster, Mr. Tripple informed Jowett that he was willing to sell his
rawbone.

He was mounted on the gawky roadster when he met Gabriel Druse making for
the bridge.  Their greeting was as cordial as hasty.  Anxious as was the
Ry to learn what was going on in the towns, Jowett's mount caught his
eye.  It was but a little time since they had met at Ingolby's house, and
they were both full of the grave events afoot, but here was a horse-deal
of consequence, and the bridle-rein was looseflung.

"Yes, I got it," said Jowett, with a chuckle, interpreting the old man's
look.  "I got it for good--a wonder from Wonderville.  Damned queer-
looking critter, but there, I guess we know what I've got.  Outside like
a crinoline, inside like a pair of ankles of the Lady Jane Plantagenet.
Yes, I got it, Mr. Druse, got it dead-on!"

"How?" asked the Ry, feeling the clean fetlocks with affectionate
approval.

"He's off East, so he says," was the joyous reply; "sudden but sure, and
I dunno why.  Anyway, he's got the door-handle offered, and he's off
without his camel."  He stroked the neck of the bay lovingly.  "How
much?"

Jowett held up his fingers.  The old man lifted his eyebrows quizzically.
"That-h'm!  Does he preach as well as that?" he asked.

Jowett chuckled.  "He knows the horse-country better than the New
Jerusalem, I guess; and I wasn't off my feed, nor hadn't lost my head
neither.  I wanted that dust-hawk, and he knew it; but I got in on him
with the harness and the sulky.  The bridle he got from a Mexican that
come up here a year ago, and went broke and then went dead; and there
being no padre, Tripple did the burying, and he took the bridle as his
fee, I s'pose.  It had twenty dollars' worth of silver on it--look at
these conchs."

He trifled with the big beautiful buttons on the head-stall.  "The
sulky's as good as new, and so's the harness almost; and there's the
nose-bag and the blankets, and a saddle and a monkey-wrench and two
bottles of horse-liniment, and odds and ends.  I only paid that"--and he
held up his fingers again as though it was a sacred rite--"for the lot.
Not bad, I want to say.  Isn't he good for all day, this one?"

The old man nodded, then turned towards the bridge.  "The gun-shots--
what?" he asked, setting forward at a walk which taxed the rawbone's
stride.

"An invite--come to the wedding; that's all.  Only it's a funeral this
time, and, if something good doesn't happen, there'll be more than one
funeral on the Sagalac to-morrow.  I've had my try, but I dunno how it'll
come out.  He's not a man of much dictionary is the Monseenoor."

"The Monseigneur Lourde?  What does he say?"

"He says what we all say, that he is sorry.  'But why have the Orange
funeral while things are as they are?' he says, and he asks for the red
flag not to be shook in the face of the bull."

"That is not the talk of a fool, as most priests are," growled the other.

"Sure.  But it wants a real wind-warbler to make them see it in Lebanon.
They've got the needle.  They'll pray to-day with the taste of blood in
their mouths.  It's gone too far.  Only a miracle can keep things right.
The Mayor has wired for the mounted police--our own battalion of militia
wouldn't serve, and there'd be no use ordering them out--but the Riders
can't get here in time.  The train's due the very time the funeral's to
start, but that train's always late, though they say the ingine-driver is
an Orangeman!  And the funeral will start at the time fixed, or I don't
know the boys that belong to the lodge.  So it's up to We, Us & Co.  to
see the thing through, or go bust.  It don't suit me.  It wouldn't have
been like this, if it hadn't been for what happened to the Chief last
night.  There's no holding the boys in.  One thing's sure, the Gipsy that
give Ingolby away has got to lie low if he hasn't got away, or there'll
be one less of his tribe to eat the juicy hedgehog.  Yes, sir-ee!"

To the last words of Jowett the Ry seemed to pay no attention, though his
lips shut tight and a menacing look came into his eyes.  They were now
upon the bridge, and could see what was forward on both sides of the
Sagalac.  There was unusual bustle and activity in the streets and on the
river-bank of both towns.  It was noticeable also that though the mills
were running in Manitou, there were fewer chimneys smoking, and far more
men in the streets than usual.  Tied up to the Manitou shore were a half-
dozen cribs or rafts of timber which should be floating eastward down the
Sagalac.

"If the Monseenoor can't, or don't, step in, we're bound for a shindy
over a corpse," continued Jowett after a moment.

"Can the Monseigneur cast a spell over them all?" remarked the Ry
ironically, for he had little faith in priests, though he had for this
particular one great respect.

"He's a big man, that preelate," answered Jowett quickly and forcibly.
"He kept the Crees quiet when they was going to rise.  If they'd got up,
there'd have been hundreds of settlers massacreed.  He risked his life to
do that--went right into the camp in face of levelled rifles, and sat
down and begun to talk.  A minute afterwards all the chiefs was
squatting, too.  Then the tussle begun between a man with a soul and a
heathen gang that eat dog, kill their old folks, their cripples and their
deformed children, and run sticks of wood through their bleeding chests,
just to show that they're heathens.  But he won out, this Jesueete friend
o' man.  That's why I'm putting my horses and my land and my pants and my
shirt and the buff that's underneath on the little preelate."

Gabriel Druse's face did not indicate the same confidence.  "It is not an
age of miracles; the priest is not enough," he said sceptically.

By twos, by threes, by tens, men from Manitou came sauntering across the
bridge into Lebanon, until a goodly number were scattered at different
points through the town.  They seemed to distribute themselves by a
preconceived plan, and they were all habitants.  There were no Russians,
Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, or Germans among them.  They were low-browed,
sturdy men, dressed in red or blue serge shirts, some with sashes around
their waists, some with ear-rings in their ears, some in knee-boots, and
some with the heavy spiked boots of the river-driver.  None appeared to
carry any weapon that would shoot, yet in their belts was the sheath-
knife, the invariable equipment of their class.  It would have seemed
more suspicious if they had not carried them.  The railwaymen, miners,
carters, mill-hands, however, appeared to carry nothing save their strong
arms and hairy hands, and some were as hairy as animals.  These
backwoodsmen also could, without weapons, turn a town into a general
hospital.  In battle they fought not only with hands but also with teeth
and hoofs like wild stallions.  Teeth tore off an ear or sliced away a
nose, hands smote like hammers or gouged out eyes, and their nailed boots
were weapons of as savage a kind as could be invented.  They could spring
and strike an opponent with one foot in the chest or in the face, and
spoil the face for many a day, or for ever.  It was a gift of the
backwoods and the lumber-camps, practised in hours of stark monotony when
the devils which haunt places of isolation devoid of family life, where
men herd together like dogs in a kennel, break loose.  There the man that
dips his fingers "friendly-like" in the dish of his neighbour one minute
wants the eye of that neighbour the next not so much in innate or
momentary hatred, as in innate savagery and the primeval sense of combat,
the war which was in the blood of the first man.

The unarmed appearance of these men did not deceive the pioneer folk
of Lebanon.  To them the time had come when the reactionary forces of
Manitou must receive a check.  Even those who thought the funeral
fanatical and provocative were ready to defend it.

The person who liked the whole business least was Rockwell.  He was
subject to the same weariness of the flesh and fatigue of the spirit as
all men; yet it was expected of him that at any hour he should be at the
disposal of suffering humanity--of criminal or idiotic humanity--patient,
devoted, calm, nervestrung, complete.  He was the one person in the
community who was the universal necessity, and yet for whom the community
had no mercy in its troubles or out of them.  There were three doctors in
Lebanon, but none was an institution, none had prestige save Rockwell,
and he often wished that he had less prestige, since he cared nothing for
popularity.

He had made his preparations for possible "accidents" in no happy mood.
Fresh from the bedside of Ingolby, having had no sleep, and with many
sick people on his list, he inwardly damned the foolishness of both
towns.  He even sharply rebuked the Mayor, who urged surgical
preparations upon him, for not sending sooner to the Government for a
force which could preserve order or prevent the procession.

It was while he was doing so that Jowett appeared with Gabriel Druse to
interview the Mayor.

"It's like this," said Jowett.  "In another hour the funeral will start.
There's a lot of Manitou huskies in Lebanon now, and their feet is
loaded, if their guns ain't.  They're comin' by driblets, and by-and-bye,
when they've all distributed themselves, there'll be a marching column of
them from Manitou.  It's all arranged to make trouble and break the law.
It's the first real organized set-to we've had between the towns, and
it'll be nasty.  If the preelate doesn't dope them, there'll be pertikler
hell to pay."

He then gave the story of his visit to Monseigneur Lourde, and the
details of what was going forward in Manitou so far as he had learned.
Also the ubiquitous Osterhaut had not been idle, and his bulletin had
just been handed to Jowett.

"There's one thing ought to be done and has got to be done," Jowett
added, "if the Monseenoor don't pull if off.  The leaders have to be
arrested, and it had better be done by one that, in a way, don't belong
to either Lebanon or Manitou."

The Mayor shook his head.  "I don't see how I can authorize Marchand's
arrest--not till he breaks the law, in any case."

"It's against the law to conspire to break the law," replied Jowett.
"You've been making a lot of special constables.  Make Mr. Gabriel Druse
here a special constable, then if the law's broke, he can have a right to
take a hand in."

The giant Ry had stood apart, watchful and ruminant, but he now stepped
forward, as the Mayor turned to him and stretched out a hand.

"I am for peace," the old man said.  "To keep the peace the law must be
strong."

In spite of the gravity of the situation the Mayor smiled.  "You wouldn't
need much disguise to stand for the law, Mr. Druse," he remarked.  "When
the law is seven feet high, it stands well up."

The Ry did not smile.  "Make me the head of the constables, and I will
keep the peace," he said.  There was a sudden silence.  The proposal had
come so quietly, and it was so startling, that even the calm Rockwell was
taken aback.  But his eye and the eye of the Mayor met, and the look in
both their faces was the same.

"That's bold play," the Mayor said, "but I guess it goes.  Yesterday it
couldn't be done.  To-day it can.  The Chief Constable's down with
smallpox.  Got it from an Injun prisoner days ago.  He's been bad for
three days, but hung on.  Now he's down, and there's no Chief.  I was
going to act myself, but the trouble was, if anything happened to me,
there'd be no head of anything.  It's better to have two strings to your
bow.  It's a go-it's a straight go, Mr. Druse.  Seven foot of Chief
Constable ought to have its weight with the roughnecks."

A look of hopefulness came into his face.  This sage, huge, commanding
figure would have a good moral effect on the rude elements of disorder.

"I'll have you read the Riot Act instead of doing it myself," added the
Mayor.  "It'll be a good introduction for you, and as you live in
Manitou, it'll be a knock-out blow to the toughs.  Sometimes one man is
as good as a hundred.  Come on to the Courthouse with me," he continued
cheerfully.  "We'll fix the whole thing.  All the special constables are
waiting there with the regular police.  An extra foot on a captain's
shoulders is as good as a battery of guns."

"You're sure it's according to Hoyle?" asked Jowett quizzically.

He was so delighted that he felt he must "make the Mayor show off self,"
as he put it afterwards.  He did not miscalculate; the Mayor rose to his
challenge.

"I'm boss of this show," he said, "and I can go it alone if necessary
when the town's in danger and the law's being hustled.  I've had a
meeting of the Council and I've got the sailing-orders I want.  I'm boss
of the place, and Mr. Druse is my--" he stopped, because there was a look
in the eyes of the Ry which demanded consideration--"And Mr. Druse is
lawboss," he added.

The old ineradicable look of command shone in the eyes of Gabriel Druse.
Leadership was written all over him.  Power spoke in every motion.  The
square, unbowed shoulders, the heavily lined face, with the patriarchal
beard, the gnarled hands, the rough-hewn limbs, the eye of bright,
brooding force proclaimed authority.

Indeed in that moment there came into the face of the old Nomad the look
it had not worn for many a day.  The self-exiled ruler had paid a heavy
price for his daughter's vow, though he had never acknowledged it to
himself.  His self-ordained impotency, in a camp that was never moved,
within walls which never rose with the sunset and fell with the morning;
where his feet trod the same roadway day after day; where no man asked
for justice or sought his counsel or fell back on his protection; where
he drank from the same spring and tethered his horse in the same paddock
from morn to morn: all these things had eaten at his heart and bowed his
spirit in spite of himself.

He was not now of the Romany world, and he was not of the Gorgio world;
but here at last was the old thing come back to him in a new way, and his
bones rejoiced.  He would entitle his daughter to her place among the
Gorgios.  Perhaps also it would be given him, in the name of the law, to
deal with a man he hated.

"We've got Mister Marchand now," said Jowett softly to the old chieftain.

The Ry's eyes lighted and his jaw set.  He did not speak, but his hands
clenched, opened and clenched again.  Jowett saw and grinned.

"The Mayor and the law-boss'll win out, I guess," he said to himself.




CHAPTER XVII

THE MONSEIGNEUR AND THE NOMAD

Even more than Dr. Rockwell, Berry, the barber, was the most troubled man
in Lebanon on the day of the Orange funeral.  Berry was a good example of
an unreasoning infatuation.  The accident which had come to his idol,
with the certain fall of his fortunes, hit him so hard, that, for the
first time since he became a barber, his razor nipped the flesh of more
than one who sat in his red-upholstered chair.

In his position, Berry was likely to hear whatever gossip was going.  Who
shall have perfect self-control with a giant bib under the chin, tipped
back on a chair that cannot be regulated, with a face covered by lather,
and two plantation fingers holding the nose?  In these circumstances,
with much diplomacy, Berry corkscrewed his way into confidence, and when
he dipped a white cloth in bay-rum and eau-de-cologne, and laid it over
the face of the victim, with the finality of a satisfied inquisitor, it
was like giving the last smother to human individuality.  An artist after
his kind, he no sooner got what he wanted than he carefully coaxed his
victim away from thoughts of the disclosures into the vague distance of
casual gossip once more.

Gradually and slowly he shepherded his patient back to the realms of
self-respect and individual personality.  The border-line was at the
point where the fingers of his customer fluttered at a collar-button; for
Berry, who realized the power that lies in making a man look ridiculous,
never allowed a customer to be shaved or have his hair cut with a collar
on.  When his customers had corns, off came the boots also, and then
Berry's triumph over the white man was complete.  To call attention to an
exaggerated bunion when the odorous towel lay upon the hidden features of
what once was a "human," was the last act in the drama of the Unmaking of
Man.

Only when the client had felt in his pocket for the price of the flaying,
and laid it, with a ten-cent fee, on the ledge beneath the mirror, where
all the implements of the inquisition and the restoration were assembled,
did he feel manhood restored.  If, however, he tried to keep a vow of
silence in the chair of execution, he paid a heavy price; for Berry had
his own methods of punishment.  A little tighter grasp of the nose; a
little rougher scrape of the razor, and some sharp, stinging liquid
suddenly slapped with a cold palm on the excoriated spot, with the
devilish hypocrisy of healing it; a longer smothering-period under the
towel, when the corners of it were tucked behind the ears and a crease of
it in the mouth-all these soon induced vocal expression again, and Berry
started on his inquisition with gentle certainty.  When at last he dusted
the face with a little fine flour of oatmeal, "to heal the cuticle and
'manoor' the roots," and smelled with content the hands which had
embalmed the hair in verbena-scented oil, a man left his presence
feeling that he was ready for the wrath to come.

Such was Berry when he had under his razor one of Ingolby's business foes
of Manitou, who had of late been in touch with Felix Marchand.  Both were
working for the same end, but with different intentions.  Marchand worked
with that inherent devilishness which sometimes takes possession of low
minds; but the other worked as he would have done against his own
brother, for his own business success; and it was his view that one man
could only succeed by taking the place of another, as though the Age of
Expansion had ceased and the Age of Smother had begun.

From this client while in a state of abject subjection, Berry, whose
heart was hard that day, but whose diplomacy was impeccable, discovered
a thing of moment.  There was to be a procession of strikers from two
factories in Manitou, who would throw down their tools or leave their
machines at a certain moment.  Falling into line these strikers would
march across the bridge between the towns at such time as would bring
them into touch with the line of the Orange funeral--two processions
meeting at right angles.  If neither procession gave way, the Orange
funeral could be broken up, ostensibly not from religious fanaticism,
but from the "unhappy accident" of two straight lines colliding.  It was
a juicy plot; and in a few minutes the Mayor and Gabriel Druse knew of
it from the faithful Berry.

The bell of the meeting-house began to toll as the Orangeman whose death
had caused such commotion was carried to the waiting carriage where he
would ride alone.  Almost simultaneously with the starting of the gaudy
yet sombre Orange cortege, with its yellow scarfs, glaring banners,
charcoal plumes and black clothes, the labour procession approached the
Manitou end of the Sagalac bridge.  The strikers carried only three or
four banners, but they had a band of seven pieces, with a drum and a pair
of cymbals.  With frequent discord, but with much spirit, the Bleaters,
as these musicians were called in Lebanon, inspired the steps of the
Manitou fanatics and toughs.  As they came upon the bridge they were
playing a gross paraphrase of The Marseillaise.

At the head of the Orange procession was a silver-cornet band which the
enterprise of Lebanon had made possible.  Its leader was a ne'er-do-well
young Welshman, who had been dismissed from leadership after leadership
of bands in the East till at last he had drifted into Lebanon.  Here,
strange to say, he had never been drunk but once; and that was the night
before he married the widow of a local publican, who had a nice little
block of stock in one of Ingolby's railways, which yielded her seven per
cent., and who knew how to handle the citizens of the City of Booze.
When she married Tom Straker, her first husband, he drank on an average
twenty whiskies a day.  She got him down to one; and then he died and had
as fine a funeral as a judge.  There were those who said that if Tom's
whiskies hadn't been cut down so--but there it was: Tom was in the bosom
of Abraham, and William Jones, who was never called anything else than
Willy Welsh, had been cut down from his unrecorded bibulations to none at
all; but he smoked twenty-cent cigars at the ex-widow's expense.

To-day Willy Welsh played with heart and courage, "I'm Going Home to
Glory," at the head of the Orange procession; for who that has faced such
a widow as was his for one whole year could fear the onset of faction
fighters!  Besides, as the natives of the South Seas will never eat a
Chinaman, so a Western man will never kill a musician.  Senators,
magistrates, sheriffs, police, gamblers, horse-stealers, bankers, and
broncho-riders all die unnatural deaths at times, but a musician in the
West is immune from all except the hand of Fate.  Not one can be spared.
Even a tough convicted of cheating at cards, or breaking a boom on a
river, has escaped punishment because he played the concertina.

The discord and jangle between the two bands was the first collision of
this fateful day.  While yet there was a space between the two
processions, the bands broke into furious contest.  It was then that,
through the long funeral line, men with hard-set faces came closer up
together, and forty, detaching themselves from the well-kept run of
marching lodgemen, closed up around the horses and the hearse, making a
solid flanking force.  At stated intervals also, outside the lodgemen in
the lines, were special constables, many of whom had been the stage-
drivers, hunters, cattlemen, prospectors, and pioneers of the early days.
Most of them had come of good religious stock-Presbyterians, Baptists,
Methodists, Unitarians; and though they had little piety, and had never
been able to regain the religious customs and habits of their childhood,
they "Stood for the Thing the Old Folks stand for."  They were in a mood
which would tear cotton, as the saying was.  There was not one of them
but expected that broken heads and bloodshed would be the order of the
day, and they were stonily, fearlessly prepared for the worst.

Since the appearance of Gabriel Druse on the scene, the feeling had grown
that the luck would be with them.  When he started at the head of the
cortege, they could scarce forbear to cheer.  Such a champion in
appearance had never been seen in the West, and, the night before,
he had proved his right to the title by shaking a knot of toughs into
spots of disconcerted humanity.

As they approached the crossroads of the bridge, his voice, clear and
sonorous, could be heard commanding the Orange band to cease playing.

When the head of the funeral procession was opposite the bridge--the
band, the hearse, the bodyguard of the hearse--Gabriel Druse stood aside,
and took his place at the point where the lines of the two processions
would intersect.

It was at this moment that the collision came.  There were only about
sixty feet of space between the two processions, when a voice rang out in
a challenge so offensive, that the men of Manitou got their cue for
attack without creating it themselves.  Every Orangeman of the Lodge of
Lebanon afterwards denied that he had raised the cry; and the chances are
that every one spoke the truth.  It was like Felix Marchand to arrange
for just such an episode, and so throw the burden of responsibility on
the Orangemen.

"To hell with the Pope!  To hell with the Pope!" the voice rang out, and
it had hardly ceased before the Manitou procession made a rush forward.
The apparent leader of the Manitou roughs was a blackbearded man of
middle height, who spoke raucously to the crowd behind him.

Suddenly a powerful voice rang out.

"Halt, in the name of the Queen!" it called.  Surprise is the very
essence of successful war.  The roughs of Manitou had not looked for
this.  They had foreseen the appearance of the official Chief Constable
of Lebanon; they had expected his challenge and warning in the
vernacular; but here was something which struck them with consternation
--first, the giant of Manitou in the post of command, looking like some
berserker; and then the formal reading of that stately document in the
name of the Queen.

Far back in the minds of every French habitant present was the old
monarchical sense.  He makes, at worst, a poor anarchist, though he is a
good revolutionist; and the French colonials had never been divorced from
monarchical France.

In the eyes of the most forward of those on the Sagalac bridge, there
was a sudden wonderment and confusion.  To the dramatic French mind,
ceremonial is ever welcome; and for a moment it had them in its grip,
as old Gabriel Druse read out in his ringing voice, the trenchant royal
summons.

It was a strange and dramatic scene--the Orange funeral standing still,
garish yet solemn, with hundreds of men, rough and coarse, quiet and
refined, dissolute and careless, sober and puritanic, broad and tolerant,
sharp and fanatical; the labour procession, polyglot in appearance, but
with Gallic features and looseness of dress predominating; excitable,
brutish, generous, cruel; without intellect, but with an intelligence
which in the lowest was acute, and with temperaments responsive to drama.

As Druse read, his eyes now and then flashed, at first he knew not why,
to the slim, bearded figure of the apparent leader.  At length he caught
the feverish eye of the man, and held it for a moment.  It was familiar,
but it eluded him; he could not place it.

He heard, however, Jowett's voice say to him, scarce above a whisper:

"It's Felix Marchand, boss!"

Jowett also had been puzzled at first by the bearded figure, but it
suddenly flashed upon him that the beard and wig were a disguise, that
Marchand had resorted to Ingolby's device.  It might prove as dangerous
a stratagem with him as it had to Ingolby.

There was a moment's hesitation after Druse had finished reading--as
though the men of Manitou had not quite recovered from their surprise--
then the man with the black beard said something to those nearest him.
There was a start forward, and someone cried, "Down with the Orangemen
--et bas l'Orange!"

Like a well-disciplined battalion the Orangemen rolled up quickly into a
compact mass, showing that they had planned their defence well, and the
moment was black with danger, when, suddenly, Druse strode forward.
Flinging right and left two or three river-drivers, he caught the man
with the black beard, snatched him out from among the oncoming crowd,
and tore off the black beard and wig.  Felix Marchand stood exposed.

A cry of fury rang out from the Orangemen behind, and a dozen men rushed
forward, but Gabriel Druse acted with the instant decision of a real
commander.  Seeing that it would be a mistake to arrest Marchand at that
moment, he raised the struggling figure of the wrecker above his head
and, with Herculean effort, threw him up over the heads of the Frenchmen
in front of him.

So extraordinary was the sight that, as if fascinated, the crowd before
and behind followed the action with staring eyes and tense bodies.  The
faces of all the contending forces were as concentrated for the instant,
as though the sun were falling out of the sky.  It was so great a feat,
one so much in consonance with the spirit of the frontier world, that
gasps of praise broke from both crowds.  As though it were a thunderbolt,
the Manitou roughs standing where Marchand was like to fall, instead of
trying to catch him, broke away from beneath the bundle of falling
humanity, and Marchand fell on the dusty cement of the bridge with a dull
thud, like a bag of bones.

For a moment there was no motion on the part of either procession.
Banners drooped and swayed as the men holding them were lost in the
excitement.

Time had only been gained, however.  There was no reason to think that
the trouble was over, or that the special constables who had gathered
close behind Gabriel Druse would not have to strike heavy blows for the
cause of peace.

The sudden appearance of a new figure in the narrow, open space between
the factions in that momentary paralysis was not a coincidence.  It was
what Jowett had planned for, the factor for peace in which he most
believed.

A small, spare man in a scarlet cassock, white chasuble, and black
biretta, suddenly stole out from the crowd on the Lebanon side of the
bridge, carrying the elements of the Mass.  His face was shining white,
and in the eyes was an almost unearthly fire.  It was the beloved
Monseigneur Lourde.

Raising the elements before him toward his own people on the bridge, he
cried in a high, searching voice:

"I prayed with you, I begged you to preserve the peace.  Last night I
asked you in God's name to give up your disorderly purposes.  I thought
then I had done my whole duty; but the voice of God has spoken to me.
An hour ago I carried the elements to a dying woman here in Lebanon, and
gave her peace.  As I did so the funeral bell rang out, and it came to
me, as though the One above had spoken, that peace would be slain and His
name insulted by all of you--by all of you, Catholic and Protestant.
God's voice bade me come to you from the bed of one who has gone hence
from peace to Peace.  In the name of Christ, peace, I say!  Peace, in the
name of Christ!"

He raised the sacred vessel high above his head, so that his eyes looked
through the walls of his uplifted arms.  "Kneel!" he called in a clear,
ringing voice which yet quavered with age.

There was an instant's hush, and then great numbers of the crowd in front
of him, toughs and wreckers, blasphemers, turbulent ones and evil-livers,
yet Catholics all, with the ancient root of the Great Thing in them, sank
down; and the banners of the labour societies drooped before the symbol
of peace won by sacrifice.

Even the Orangemen bared their heads in the presence of that Popery which
was anathema to them, which they existed to combat, and had been taught
to hate.  Some, no doubt, would rather have fought than have had peace at
the price; but they could not free their minds from the sacred force
which had brought most of the crowd of faction-fighters to their knees.

With a wave of the hand, Gabriel Druse ordered the cortege forward, and
silently the procession with its yellow banners and its sable, drooping
plumes moved on.

Once on its way again, Willy Welsh and his silver-cornet band struck up
the hymn, "Lead, Kindly Light."  It was the one real coincidence of the
day that this moving hymn was written by a cardinal of the Catholic
Church.  It was also an irony that, as the crowd of sullen Frenchmen
turned back to Manitou, the train bearing the Mounted Police, for whom
the Mayor had sent to the capital, steamed noisily in, and redcoats
showed at its windows and on the steps of the cars.

The only casualty that the day saw was the broken arm and badly bruised
body of Felix Marchand, who was gloomily helped back to his home across
the Sagalac.




CHAPTER XVIII

THE BEACONS

There were few lights showing in Lebanon or Manitou; but here and
there along the Sagalac was the fading glimmer of a camp-fire, and in
Tekewani's reservation one light glowed softly like a star.  It came
from a finely-made and chased safety-lantern given to Tekewani by the
Government, as a symbol of honour for having kept the braves quiet when
an Indian and half-breed rising was threatened; and to the powerless
chief it had become a token of his authority, the sign of the Great White
Mother's approval.  By day a spray of eagle's feathers waved over his
tepee, but the gleam of the brass lantern every night was like a sentry
at the doorway of a monarch.

It was a solace to his wounded spirit; it allayed the smart of
subjection; made him feel himself a ruler in retirement, even as Gabriel
Druse was a self-ordained exile.

These two men, representing the primitive nomad life, had been drawn
together in friendship.  So much so, that to Tekewani alone of all the
West, Druse gave his confidence and told his story.  It came in the
springtime, when the blood of the young bucks was simmering and, the
ancient spell was working.  There had preceded them generations of
hunters who had slain their thousands and their tens of thousands of wild
animals and the fowls of the air; had killed their enemies in battle; had
seized the comely women of their foes and made them their own.  No thrill
of the hunter's trail now drew off the overflow of desire.  In the days
of rising sap, there were only the young maidens or wives of their own
tribe to pursue, and it lacked in glory.  Also in the springtime,
Tekewani himself had his own trials, for in his blood the old medicine
stirred.  His face turned towards the prairie North and the mountain West
where yet remained the hunter's quarry; and he longed to be away with
rifle and gun, with his squaw and the papooses trailing after like camp-
followers, to eat the fruits of victory.  But that could not be; he must
remain in the place the Great White Mother had reserved for him; he and
his braves must assemble, and draw their rations at the appointed times
and seasons, and grunt thanks to those who ruled over them.

It was on one of these virginal days, when there was a restless stirring
among the young bucks, who smelled the wide waters, the pines and the
wild shrubs; who heard the cry of the loon on the lonely lake and the
whir of the wild duck's wings, who answered to the phantom cry of ancient
war; it was on such a day that the two chiefs opened their hearts to each
other.

Near to the boscage on a little hill overlooking the great river, Gabriel
Druse had come upon Tekewani seated in the pine-dust, rocking to and fro,
and chanting a low, sorrowful refrain, with eyes fixed on the setting
sun.  And the Ry of Rys understood, with the understanding which only
those have who live close to the earth, and also near to the heavens of
their own gods.  He sat down beside the forlorn chief, and in the silence
their souls spoke to each other.  There swept into the veins of the
Romany ruler something of the immitigable sadness of the Indian chief;
and, with a sudden premonition that he also was come to the sunset of his
life, his big nomad eyes sought the westering rim of the heavens, and his
breast heaved.

In that hour the two men declared themselves to each other, and Gabriel
Druse told Tekewani all that he had hidden from the people of the
Sagalac, and was answered in kind.  It seemed to them that they were as
brothers who were one and who had parted in ages long gone; and having
met were to part and disappear once more, beginning still another trail
in an endless reincarnation.

"Brother," said Tekewani, "it was while there was a bridge of land
between the continents at the North that we met.  Again I see it.  I
forgot it, but again I see.  There was war, and you went upon one path
and I upon another, and we met no more under all the moons till now."

"'Dordi', so it was and at such a time," answered the Ry of Rys.  "And
once more we will follow after the fire-flies which give no light to the
safe places but only lead farther into the night."

Tekewani rocked to and fro again, muttering to himself, but presently he
said:

"We eat from the hands of those who have driven away the buffalo, the
deer, and the beaver; and the young bucks do naught to earn the joy of
women.  They are but as lusting sheep, not as the wild-goat that chases
its mate over the places of death, till it comes upon her at last, and
calls in triumph over her as she kneels at his feet.  So it is.  Like
tame beasts we eat from the hand of the white man, and the white man
leaves his own camp where his own women are, and prowls in our camps,
so that not even our own women are left to us."

It was then that Gabriel Druse learned of the hatred of Tekewani for
Felix Marchand, because of what he had done in the reservation, prowling
at night like a fox or a coyote in the folds.

They parted that hour, believing that the epoch of life in which they
were and the fortunes of time which had been or were to come, were but
turns of a wheel that still went on turning; and that whatever chanced
of good or bad fortune in the one span of being, might be repaired in
the next span, or the next, or the next; so, through their creed of
reincarnation, taking courage to face the failure of the life they now
lived.  Not by logic or the teaching of any school had they reached this
revelation, but through an inner sense.  They were not hopeful and
wondering and timid; they were only sure.  Their philosophy, their
religion, whether heathen or human, was inborn.  They had comfort in it
and in each other.

After that day Gabriel Druse always set a light in his window which
burned all night, answering to the lantern-light at the door of
Tekewani's home--the lights of exile and of an alliance which had
behind it the secret influences of past ages and vanished peoples.

There came a night, however, when the light at the door of Tekewani's
tepee did not burn.  At sunset it was lighted, but long before midnight
it was extinguished.  Looking out from the doorway of his home (it was
the night after the Orange funeral), Gabriel Druse, returned from his new
duties at Lebanon, saw no light in the Indian reservation.  With anxiety,
he set forth in the shine of the moon to visit it.

Arrived at the chief's tepee, he saw that the lantern of honour was gone,
and waking Tekewani, he brought him out to see.  When the old Indian knew
his loss, he gave a harsh cry and stooped, and, gathering a handful of
dust from the ground, sprinkled it on his head.  Then with arms
outstretched he cursed the thief who had robbed him of what had been
to him like a never-fading mirage, an illusion blinding his eyes to the
bitter facts of his condition.

To his mind all the troubles come to Lebanon and Manitou had had one
source; and now the malign spirit had stretched its hand to spoil those
already dispossessed of all but the right to live.  One name was upon the
lips of both men, as they stood in the moonlight by Tekewani's tepee.

"There shall be an end of this," growled the Romany.

"I will have my own," said Tekewani, with malediction on the thief who
had so shamed him.

Black anger was in the heart of Gabriel Druse as he turned again towards
his own home, and he was glad of what he had done to Felix Marchand at
the Orange funeral.





CHAPTER XIX

THE KEEPER OF THE BRIDGE

     "Like the darkness of the grave, which is darkness itself--"

Most of those who break out of the zareba of life, who lay violent hands
upon themselves, do so with a complete reasoning, which in itself is
proof of their insanity.  It may be domestic tragedy, or ill-health,
or crime, or broken faith, or shame, or insomnia, or betrayed trust--
whatever it is, many a one who suffers from such things, tries to end it
all with that deliberation, that strategy, and that cunning which belong
only to the abnormal.

A mind which has known a score or more of sleepless nights acquires an
invincible clearness of its own, seeing an end which is without
peradventure.  It finds a hundred perfect reasons for not going on, every
one of which is in itself sufficient; every one of which knits into the
other ninety and nine with inevitable affinity.

To the mind of Ingolby came a hundred such reasons for breaking out of
life's enclosure, as the effect of the opiate Rockwell had given him wore
off, and he regained consciousness.  As he did so, someone in the room
was telling of that intervention of Gabriel Druse and the Monseigneur at
the Orange funeral, which had saved the situation.  At first he listened
to what was said--it was the nurse talking to Jim Beadle with no sharp
perception of the significance of the story; though it slowly pierced the
lethargy of his senses, and he turned over in the bed to face the
watchers.

"What time is it, Jim?" he asked heavily.  They told him it was sunset.

"Is it quiet in both towns?" he asked after a pause.  They told him that
it was.

"Any telegrams for me?" he asked.

There was an instant's hesitation.  They had had no instructions on this
point, and they hardly knew what to say; but Jim's mind had its own
logic, and the truth seemed best to him now.  He answered that there were
several wires, but that they "didn't amount to nothin'."

"Have they been opened?" Ingolby asked with a frown, half-raising
himself.  It was hard to resign the old masterfulness and self-will.

"I'd like to see anybody open 'em 'thout my pe'mision," answered Jim
imperiously.  "When you's asleep, Chief, I'm awake; and I take care of
you' things, same as ever I done.  There ain't no wires been opened, and
there ain't goin' to be whiles I'm runnin' the show for you."

"Open and read them to me," commanded Ingolby.  Again Ingolby was
conscious of hesitation on Jim's part.  Already the acuteness of the
blind was possessing him, sharpening the senses left unimpaired.
Although Jim moved, presumably, towards the place where the telegrams
lay, Ingolby realized that his own authority was being crossed by that
of the doctor and the nurse.

"You will leave the room for a moment, nurse," he said with a brassy
vibration in the voice--a sign of nervous strain.  With a smothered
protest the nurse left, and Jim stood beside the bed with the telegrams.

"Read them to me, Jim," Ingolby repeated irritably.  "Be quick."

They were not wires which Ingolby should have heard at the time, when his
wound was still inflamed, when he was still on the outer circle of that
artificial sleep which the opiates had secured.  They were from Montreal
and New York, and, resolved from their half-hidden suggestion into bare
elements, they meant that henceforth others would do the work he had
done.  They meant, in effect, that save for the few scores of thousand
dollars he had made, he was now where he was when he came West.

When Jim had finished reading them, Ingolby sank back on the pillows and
said quietly:

"All right, Jim.  Put them in the drawer of the table and I'll answer
them to-morrow.  I want to get a little more sleep, so give me a drink,
and then leave me alone--both nurse and you--till I ring the bell.
There's a bell on the table, isn't there?"

He stretched out a hand towards the table beside the bed, and Jim softly
pushed the bell under his fingers.

"That's right," he added.  "Now, I'm not to be disturbed unless the
doctor comes.  I'm all right, and I want to be alone and quiet.  No one
at all in the room is what I want.  You understand, Jim?"

"My head's just as good to get at what you want as ever it was, and you
goin' have what you want, I guess, while I'm on deck," was Jim's reply.

Jim put a glass of water into his hand.  He drank very slowly, was indeed
only mechanically conscious that he was drinking, for his mind was far
away.

After he had put the glass down, Jim still stood beside the bed, looking
at him.

"Why don't you go, as I tell you, Jim?" Ingolby asked wearily.

"I'm goin'"--Jim tucked the bedclothes in carefully--"I'm goin', but,
boss, I jes' want to say dat dis thing goin' to come out all right bime-
by.  There ain't no doubt 'bout dat.  You goin' see everything, come jes'
like what you want--suh!"

Ingolby did not reply.  He held out his hand, and black fingers shot over
and took it.  A moment later the blind man was alone in the room.

The light of day vanished, and the stars came out.  There was no moon,
but it was one of those nights of the West when millions of stars glimmer
in the blue vault above, and every planet and every star and cluster of
stars are so near that it might almost seem they could be caught by an
expert human hand.  The air was very still, and a mantle of peace was
spread over the tender scene.  The window and the glass doors that gave
from Ingolby's room upon the veranda on the south side of the house, were
open, and the air was warm as in Midsummer.  Now and then the note of a
night-bird broke the stillness, but nothing more.

It was such a night as Ingolby loved; it was such a night as often found
him out in the restful gloom of the trees, thinking and brooding,
planning, revelling in memories of books he had read, and in dreaming of
books he might write-if there were time.  Such a night insulated the dark
moods which possessed him occasionally almost as effectively as fishing
did; and that was saying much.

But the darkest mood of all his days was upon him now.  When Rockwell
came, soon after Jim and the nurse left him, he simulated sleep, for he
had no mind to talk; and the doctor, deceived by his even breathing, had
left, contented.  At last he was wholly alone with his own thoughts, as
he desired.  From the moment Jim had read him the wires, which were the
real revelation of the situation to which he had come, he had been
travelling hard on the road leading to a cul-de-sac, from which there
was no egress save by breaking through the wall.  Never, it might have
seemed, had his mind been clearer, but it was a clearness belonging to
the abnormal.  It was a straight line of thought which, in its intensity,
gathered all other thoughts into its wake, reduced them to the control of
an obsession.  It was borne in on his mind that his day was done, that
nothing could right the disorder which had strewn his path with broken
hopes and shattered ambitions.  No life-work left, no schemes to
accomplish, no construction to achieve, no wealth to gain, no public
good to be won, no home to be his, no woman, his very own, to be his
counsellor and guide in the natural way!

As myriad thoughts drove through his brain on this Indian-summer night,
they all merged into the one obsession that he could no longer stay.  The
irresistible logic of the brain stretched to an abnormal tenuity, and an
intolerable brightness was with him.  He was in the throes of that
intense visualization which comes with insomnia, when one is awake yet
apart from the waking world, where nothing is really real and nothing
normal.  He had a call to go hence, and he must go.  Minute after minute
passed, hours passed, and the fight of the soul to maintain itself
against the disordered mind went on.  All his past seemed but part
of a desert, lonely and barren and strange.

In the previous year he had made a journey to Arizona with Jowett, to see
some railway construction there, and at a ranch he had visited he came
upon some verses which had haunted his mind ever since.  They fastened
upon his senses now.  They were like a lonesome monotone which at length
gave calm to his torturing reflections.  In his darkness the verses kept
repeating themselves:

         "I heard the desert calling, and my heart stood still
          There was Winter in my world and in my heart:
          A breath came from the mesa and a message stirred my will,
          And my soul and I arose up to depart.

          I heard the desert calling; and I knew that over there,
          In an olive-sheltered garden where the mesquite grows,
          Was a woman of the sunrise, with the starshine in her hair,
          And a beauty that the almond-blossom blows.

          In the night-time when the ghost-trees glimmered in the moon,
          Where the mesa by the watercourse was spanned,
          Her loveliness enwrapped me like the blessedness of June,
          And all my life was thrilling in her hand.

          I hear the desert calling, and my heart stands still;
          There is Summer in my world and in my heart;
          A breath comes from the mesa, and a will beyond my will
          Binds my footsteps as I rise up to depart."

This strange, half-mystic song of the mesa and the olive-groves, of the
ghost-trees and the moon, kept playing upon his own heated senses like
the spray from a cooling stream, and at last it quieted him.  The dark
spirit of self-destruction loosened its hold.

His brain had been strained beyond the normal, almost unconsciously his
fingers had fastened on the pistol in the drawer of the table by his bed.
It had been there since the day when he had travelled down from Alaska--
loaded as it had been when he had carried it down the southern trail.
But as his fingers tightened on the little engine of death, from the
words which had been ringing in his brain came the flash of a revelation:

              ".  .  .  And a will beyond my will
               Binds my footsteps as I rise up to depart."

A will beyond his will!  It was as though Fleda's fingers were laid upon
his own; as though she whispered in his ear and her breath swept his
cheek; as though she was there in the room beside him, making the
darkness light, tempering the wind of chastisement to his naked soul.
In the overstrain of his nervous system the illusion was powerful.  He
thought he heard her voice.  The pistol slipped from his fingers, and he
fell back on the pillow with a sigh.  The will beyond his will bound his
footsteps.

Who can tell?  The grim, malign experience of Fleda in her bedroom with
the Thing she thought was from beyond the bounds of her own life; the
voice that spoke to Ingolby, and the breath that swept over his cheek
were, perhaps, as real in a sense as would have been the corporeal
presence of Jethro Fawe in one case and of Fleda Druse in the other.
It may be that in very truth Fleda Druse's spirit with its poignant
solicitude controlled his will as he "rose up to depart."  But if it was
only an illusion, it was not less a miracle.  Some power of suggestion
bound his fleeing footsteps, drew him back from the Brink.

He slept.  Once the nurse came and looked at him and returned to the
other room; and twice Jim stole in silently for a moment and retired
again to his own chamber.  The stars shone in at the doors that opened
out from the quiet room into the night, the watch beside the bed ticked
on, the fox-terrier which always slept on a mat at the foot of the bed
sighed in content, while his master breathed heavily in a sleep full of
dreams that hurried past like phantasmagoria--of a hundred things that
had been in his life, and that had never been; of people he had known,
distorted, ridiculous and tremendous.  There were dreams of fiddlers and
barbers, of crowds writhing in passion in a room where there was a
billiard-table and a lucky horseshoe on the wall.  There were dreams that
tossed and mingled in one whirlpool vision; and then at last came a dream
which was so cruel and clear that it froze his senses.

It was the dream of a great bridge over a swiftflowing river; of his own
bridge over the Sagalacof that bridge being destroyed by men who crept
through the night with dynamite in their hands.

With a hoarse, smothered cry he awoke.  His eyes opened wide.  His heart
was beating like a hammer against his side.  Only the terrier at his feet
heard the muttered agony.  With an instinct all its own, it slipped to
the floor.

It watched its master get out of bed, cross the room and feel for a coat
along the wall--an overcoat which he used as a dressing-gown at times.
Putting it on hastily, with outstretched hands Ingolby felt his way to
the glass doors opening on the veranda.  The dog, as though to let him
know he was there, rubbed against his legs.  Ingolby murmured a soft,
unintelligible word, and, in his bare feet, passed out on to the veranda,
and from there to the garden and towards the gate at the front of the
house.

The nurse heard the gate click lightly, but she was only half-awake, and
as all was quiet in the next room, she composed herself in her chair
again with the vain idea that she was not sleeping.  And Jim the faithful
one, as though under a narcotic of fate, was snoring softly beside the
vacant room.  The streets were still.  No lights burned anywhere so far
as eye could see.  But now and then, in the stillness through which the
river flowed on, murmuring and rhythmic, there rose the distant sounds of
disorderly voices.  Ingolby was in a state which was neither sleep nor
waking, which was in part delirium, in part oblivion to all things in the
world save one--an obsession so complete, that he moved automatically
through the street in which he lived towards that which led to the
bridge.

His terrier, as though realizing exactly what he wished, seemed to guide
him by rubbing against his legs, and even pressing hard against them when
he was in any danger of losing the middle of the road, or swerving
towards a ditch or some obstruction.  Only once did they pass any human
being, and that was when they came upon a camp of road-builders, where a
red light burned, and two men slept in the open by a dying fire.  One of
them raised his head when Ingolby passed, but being more than half-
asleep, and seeing only a man and a dog, thought nothing of it, and
dropped back again upon his rough pillow.  He was a stranger to Lebanon,
and there was little chance of his recognizing Ingolby in the semi-
darkness.

As they neared the river, Ingolby became deeply agitated.  He moved with
his hands outstretched.  Had it not been for his dog he would probably
have walked into the Sagalac; for though he seemed to have an instinct
that was extra-natural, he swayed and staggered in the delirium driving
him on.  There was one dreadful moment when, having swerved from the road
leading on to the bridge, he was within a foot of the river-bank.  One
step farther, and he would have plunged down thirty feet into the stream,
to be swept to the Rapids below.

But for the first time the terrier made a sound.  He gave a whining bark
almost human in its meaning, and threw himself at the legs of his master,
pushing him backwards and over towards the road leading upon the bridge,
as a collie guides sheep.  Presently Ingolby felt the floor of the bridge
under his feet; and now he hastened on, with outstretched arms and head
bent forward, listening intently, the dog trotting beside, with what
knowledge working in him Heaven alone knew.

The roar of the Rapids below was a sonorous accompaniment to Ingolby's
wild thoughts.  One thing only he felt, one thing only heard--the men in
Barbazon's Tavern saying that the bridge should be blown up on the
Saturday night; and this was Saturday night--the night of the day
following that of the Orange funeral.  He had heard the criminal hireling
of Felix Marchand say that it should be done at midnight, and that the
explosive should be laid under that part of the bridge which joined the
Manitou bank of the Sagalac.  As though in very truth he saw with his
eyes, he stopped short not far from the point where the bridge joined the
land, and stood still, listening.

For several minutes he was motionless, intent, as an animal waiting for
its foe.  At last his newly-sensitive ears heard footsteps approaching
and low voices. The footsteps came nearer, the voices, though so low,
became more distinct.  They were now not fifty feet away, but to the
delirious Ingolby they were as near as death had been when his fingers
closed on the pistol in his room.

He took a step forward, and with passionate voice and arms outstretched,
he cried:

    "You shall not do it-by God, you shall not touch my bridge!
     I built it.  You shall not touch it.  Back, you devils-back!"


The terrier barked loudly.

The two men in the semi-darkness in front of him cowered at the sight of
this weird figure holding the bridge they had come to destroy.  His
words, uttered in so strange and unnatural a voice, shook their nerves.
They shrank away from the ghostly form with the outstretched arms.

In the minute's pause following on his words, a giant figure suddenly
appeared behind the dynamiters.  It was the temporary Chief Constable of
Lebanon, returning from his visit to Tekewani.  He had heard Ingolby's
wild words, and he realized the situation.

"Ingolby--steady  there,  Ingolby !" he  called.  "Steady!  Steady!
Gabriel Druse is here.  It's all right."

At the first sound of Druse's voice the two wreckers turned and ran.

As they did so, Ingolby's hands fell to his side, and he staggered
forward.

"Druse--Fleda," he murmured, then swayed, trembled and fell.

With words that stuck in his throat Gabriel Druse stooped and lifted him
up in his arms.  At first he turned towards the bridge, as though to
cross over to Lebanon, but the last word Ingolby had uttered rang
in his ears, and he carried him away into the trees towards his own
house, the faithful terrier following.  "Druse--Fleda !"  They were the
words of one who had suddenly emerged from the obsession of delirium into
sanity, and then had fallen into as sudden unconsciousness.

"Fleda!  Fleda!" called Gabriel Druse outside the door of his house a
quarter of an hour later, and her voice in reply was that of one who knew
that the feet of Fate were at her threshold.




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THE WORLD FOR SALE

By Gilbert Parker



BOOK III

XX.       TWO LIFE PIECES
XXI.      THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER
XXII.     THE SECRET MAN
XXIII.    THE RETURN OF BELISARIUS
XXIV.     AT LONG LAST
XXV.      MAN PROPOSES
XXVI.     THE SLEEPER
XXVII.    THE WORLD FOR SALE




CHAPTER XX

TWO LIFE PIECES

"It's a fine day."

"Yes, it's beautiful."

Fleda wanted to ask how he knew, but hesitated from feelings of delicacy.
Ingolby seemed to understand.  A faint reflection of the old whimsical
smile touched his lips, and his hands swept over the coverlet as though
smoothing out a wrinkled map.

"The blind man gets new senses," he said dreamily.  "I feel things where
I used to see them.  How did I know it was a fine day?  Simple enough.
When the door opened there was only the lightest breath of wind, and the
air was fresh and crisp, and I could smell the sun.  One sense less, more
degree of power to the other senses.  The sun warms the air, gives it a
flavour, and between it and the light frost, which showed that it was dry
outside, I got the smell of a fine Fall day.  Also, I heard the cry of
the wild fowl going South, and they wouldn't have made a sound if it
hadn't been a fine day.  And also, and likewise, and besides, and
howsomever, I heard Jim singing, and that nigger never sings in bad
weather.  Jim's a fair-weather raven, and this morning he was singing
like a 'lav'rock in the glen.'"

Being blind, he could not see that, suddenly, a storm of emotion swept
over her face.

His cheerfulness, his boylike simplicity, his indomitable spirit, which
had survived so much, and must still face so much, his almost childlike
ways, and the naive description of a blind man's perception, waked in her
an almost intolerable yearning.  It was not the yearning of a maid for a
man.  It was the uncontrollable woman in her, the mother-thing, belonging
to the first woman that ever was-protection of the weak, hovering love
for the suffering, the ministering spirit.

Since Ingolby had been brought to the house in the pines, Madame Bulteel
and herself, with Jim, had nursed him through the Valley of the Shadow.
They had nursed him through brain-fever, through agonies which could not
have been borne with consciousness.  The tempest of the mind and the
pains of misfortune went on from hour to hour, from day to day, almost
without ceasing, until at last, a shadow of his former self, but with a
wonderful light on his face which came from something within, he waited
patiently for returning strength, propped up with pillows in the bed
which had been Fleda's own, in the room outside which Jethro Fawe had
sung his heathen serenade.

It was the room of the house which, catching the morning sun, was best
suited for an invalid.  So she had given it to him with an eagerness
behind which was the feeling that somehow it made him more of the inner
circle of her own life; for apart from every other feeling she had, there
was in her a deep spirit of comradeship belonging to far-off times when
her life was that of the open road, the hillside and the vale.  In those
days no man was a stranger; all belonged.

To meet, and greet, and pass was the hourly event, but the meeting and
the greeting had in it the familiarity of a common wandering, the
sympathy of the homeless.  Had Ingolby been less to her than he was,
there would still have been the comradeship which made her the great
creature she was fast becoming.  It was odd that, as Ingolby became
thinner and thinner, and ever more wan, she, in spite of her ceaseless
nursing, appeared to thrive physically.  She had even slightly increased
the fulness of her figure.  The velvet of her cheeks had grown richer,
and her eyes deeper with warm fire.  It was as though she flourished on
giving: as though a hundred nerves of being and feeling had opened up
within her and had expanded her life like some fine flower.

Gazing at Ingolby now there was a great hungering desire in her heart.
She looked at the sightless eyes, and a passionate protest sprang to her
lips which, in spite of herself, broke forth in a sort of moan.

"What is it?" Ingolby asked, with startled face.

"Nothing," she answered, "nothing.  I pricked my finger badly, that's
all."

And, indeed, she had done so, but that would not have brought the moan to
her lips.

"Well, it didn't sound like a pricked finger complaint," he remarked.
"It was the kind of groan I'd give if I had a bad pain inside."

"Ah, but you're a man!" she remarked lightly, though two tears fell down
her cheeks.

With an effort she recovered herself.  "It's time for your tonic," she
added, and she busied herself with giving it to him.  "As soon as you
have taken it, I'm going for a walk, so you must make up your mind to
have some sleep."

"Am I to be left alone?" he asked, with an assumed grievance in his
voice.

"Madame Bulteel will stay with you," she replied.

"Do you need a walk so very badly?" he asked presently.

"I don't suppose I need it, but I want it," she answered.  "My feet and
the earth are very friendly."

"Where do you walk?" he asked.

"Just anywhere," was her reply.  "Sometimes up the river, sometimes down,
sometimes miles away in the woods."

"Do you never take a gun with you?"

"Of course," she answered, nodding, as though he could see.  "I get wild
pigeons and sometimes a wild duck or a prairie-hen."

"That's right," he remarked; "that's right."

"I don't believe in walking just for the sake of walking," she continued.
"It doesn't do you any good, but if you go for something and get it,
that's what puts the mind and the body right."

Suddenly his face grew grave.  "Yes, that's it," he remarked.

"To go for something you want, a long way off.  You don't feel the fag
when you're thinking of the thing at the end; but you've got to have the
thing at the end, to keep making for it, or there's no good going--none
at all.  That's life; that's how it is.  It's no good only walking--
you've got to walk somewhere.  It's no good simply going--you've got to
go somewhere.  You've got to fight for something.  That's why, when they
take the something you fight for away--when they break you and cripple
you, and you can't go anywhere for what you want badly, life isn't worth
living."

An anxious look came into her face.  This was the first time, since
recovering consciousness, that he had referred, even indirectly, to all
that had happened.  She understood him well--ah, terribly well!  It was
the tragedy of the man stopped in his course because of one mistake,
though he had done ten thousand wise things.  The power taken from his
hands, the interrupted life, the dark future, the beginning again, if
ever his sight came back: it was sickening, heartbreaking.

She saw it all in his face, but as if some inward voice had spoken to
him, his face cleared, the swift-moving hands clasped in front of him,
and he said quietly: "But because it's life, there it is.  You have to
take it as it comes."

He stopped a moment, and in the pause she reached out her hand with a
sudden passionate gesture, to touch his shoulder, but she restrained
herself in time.

He seemed to feel what she was doing, and turned his face towards her,
a slight flush coming to his cheeks.  He smiled, and then he said: "How
wonderful you are!  You look--"

He checked himself, then added with a quizzical smile:

"You are looking very well to-day, Miss Fleda Druse, very well indeed.
I like that dark-red dress you're wearing."

An almost frightened look came into her eyes.  It was as though he could
see, for she was wearing a dark-red dress--"wine-coloured," her father
called it, "maroon," Madame Bulteel called it.  Could he then see, after
all?

"How did you know it was dark-red?" she asked, her voice shaking.

"Guessed it!  Guessed it!" he answered almost gleefully.  "Was I right?
Is it dark-red?"

"Yes, dark-red," she answered.  "Was it really a guess?"

"Ah, but the guessiest kind of a guess," he replied.  "But who can tell?
I couldn't see it, but is there any reason why the mind shouldn't see
when the eyes are no longer working?  Come now," he added, "I've a
feeling that I can tell things with my mind just as if I saw them.  I do
see.  I'll guess the time now--with my mind's eye."

Concentration came into his face.  "It's three minutes to twelve
o'clock," he said decisively.

She took up the watch which lay on the table beside the bed.

"Yes, it's just three minutes to twelve," she declared in an awe-struck
voice.  "That's marvellous--how wonderful you are!"

"That's what I said of you a minute ago," he returned.  Then, with a
swift change of voice and manner, he added, "How long is it?"

"You mean, since you came here?" she asked, divining what was in his
mind.

"Exactly.  How long?"

"Six weeks," she answered.  "Six weeks and three days."

"Why don't you add the hour, too," he urged half-plaintively, though he
smiled.

"Well, it was three o'clock in the morning to the minute," she answered.

"Old Father Time ought to make you his chief of staff," he remarked
gaily.  "Now, I want to know," he added, with a visible effort of
determination, "what has happened since three o'clock in the morning,
six weeks and three days ago.  I want you to tell me what has happened
to my concerns--to the railways, and also to the towns.  I don't want you
to hide anything, because, if you do, I'll have Jim in, and Jim, under
proper control, will tell me the whole truth, and perhaps more than the
truth.  That's the way with Jim.  When he gets started he can't stop.
Tell me exactly everything."

Anxiety drove the colour from her cheeks.  She shrank back.

"You must tell me," he urged.  "I'd rather hear it from you than from
Dr. Rockwell, or Jim, or your father.  Your telling wouldn't hurt as much
as anybody else's, if there has to be any hurt.  Don't you understand--
but don't you understand?" he urged.

She nodded to herself in the mirror on the wall opposite.  "I'll try to
understand," she replied presently; "Tell me, then: have they put someone
in my place?"

"I understand so," she replied.

He remained silent for a moment, his face very pale.  "Who is running the
show?" he asked.

She told him.

"Oh, him!" he exclaimed.  "He's dead against my policy.  He'll make a
mess."

"They say he's doing that," she remarked.

He asked her a series of questions which she tried to answer frankly, and
he came to know that the trouble between the two towns, which, after the
Orange funeral and his own disaster had subsided, was up again; that the
railways were in difficulties; that there had been several failures in
the town; that one of the banks--the Regent-had closed its doors; that
Felix Marchand, having recovered from the injury he had received from
Gabriel Druse on the day of the Orange funeral, had gone East for a month
and had returned; that the old trouble was reviving in the mills, and
that Marchand had linked himself with the enemies of the group
controlling the railways hitherto directed by himself.

For a moment after she had answered his questions, there was strong
emotion in his face, and then it cleared.

He reached out a hand towards her.  How eagerly she clasped it!  It was
cold, and hers was so warm and firm and kind.

"True friend o' mine!" he said with feeling.  "How wonderful it is that
somehow it all doesn't seem to matter so much.  I wonder why?  I wonder--
Tell me about yourself, about your life," he added abruptly, as though it
had been a question he had long wished to ask.  In the tone was a quiet
certainty suggesting that she would not hesitate to answer.

"We have both had big breaks in our lives," he went on.  "I know that.
I've lost everything, in a way, by the break in my life, and I've an idea
that you gained everything when the break in yours came.  I didn't
believe the story Jethro Fawe told me, but still I knew there was some
truth in it; something that he twisted to suit himself.  I started life
feeling I could conquer the world like another Alexander or Napoleon.
I don't know that it was all conceit.  It was the wish to do, to see how
far this thing on my shoulders"--he touched his head--"and this great
physical machine"--he touched his breast with a thin hand--"would carry
me.  I don't believe the main idea was vicious.  It was wanting to work
a human brain to its last volt of capacity, and to see what it could do.
I suppose I became selfish as I forged on.  I didn't mean to be, but
concentration upon the things I had to do prevented me from being the
thing I ought to be.  I wanted, as they say, to get there.  I had a lot
of irons in the fire--too many--but they weren't put there deliberately.
One thing led to another, and one thing, as it were, hung upon another,
until they all got to be part of the scheme.  Once they got there, I had
to carry them all on, I couldn't drop any of them; they got to be my
life.  It didn't matter that it all grew bigger and bigger, and the risks
got greater and greater.  I thought I could weather it through, and so I
could have done, if it hadn't been for a mistake and an accident; but the
mistake was mine.  That's where the thing nips--the mistake was mine.
I took too big a risk.  You see, I'd got so used to being lucky, it
seemed as if I couldn't go wrong.  Everything had come my way.  Ever
since I began in that Montreal railway office, after leaving college,
I hadn't a single setback.  I pulled things off.  I made money, and I
plumped it all into my railways and the Regent Bank; and as you said
a minute ago, the Regent Bank has closed down.  That cuts me clean out
of the game.  What was the matter with the bank?  The manager?"

His voice was almost monotonous in its quietness.  It was as though he
told the story of something which had passed beyond chance or change.
As it unfolded to her understanding, she had seated herself near to his
bed.  The door of the room was open, and in view outside on the landing
sat Madame Bulteel reading.  She was not, however, near enough to hear
the conversation.

Ingolby's voice was low, but it sounded as loud as a waterfall in the
ears of the girl, who, in a few weeks, had travelled great distances on
the road called Experience, that other name for life.

"It was the manager?" he repeated.

"Yes, they say so," she answered.  "He speculated with bank money."

"In what?"

"In your railways," she answered hesitatingly.  "Curious--I dreamed
that," Ingolby remarked quietly, and leaned down and stroked the dog
lying at his feet.  It had been with him through all his sickness.
"It must have been part of my delirium, because, now that I've got my
senses back, it's as though someone had told me about it.  Speculated in
my railways, eh?  Chickens come home to roost, don't they?  I suppose I
ought to be excited over it all," he continued.  "I suppose I ought.  But
the fact is, you only have just the one long, big moment of excitement
when great trouble and tragedy come, or else it's all excitement, all the
time, and then you go mad.  That's the test, I think.  When you're struck
by Fate, as a hideous war-machine might strike you, and the whole terror
of loss and ruin bears down on you, you're either swept away in an
excitement that hasn't any end, or you brace yourself, and become
master of the shattering thing."

"You are a master," she interposed.  "You are the Master Man," she
repeated admiringly.

He waved a hand deprecatingly.  "Do you know, when we talked together in
the woods soon after you ran the Rapids--you remember the day--if you had
said that to me then, I'd have cocked my head and thought I was a jim-
dandy, as they say.  A Master Man was what I wanted to be.  But it's a
pretty barren thing to think, or to feel, that you're a Master Man;
because, if you are--if you've had a 'scoop' all the way, as Jowett calls
it, you can be as sure as anything that no one cares a rap farthing what
happens to you.  There are plenty who pretend they care, but it's only
because they're sailing with the wind, and with your even keel.  It's
only the Master Man himself that doesn't know in the least he's that who
gets anything out of it all."

"Aren't you getting anything out of it?" she asked softly.  "Aren't you
--Chief?"

At the familiar word--Jowett always called him Chief--a smile slowly
stole across his face.  "I really believe I am, thanks to you," he said
nodding.

He was going to say, "Thanks to you, Fleda," but he restrained himself.
He had no right to be familiar, to give an intimate turn to things.  His
game was over; his journey of ambition was done.  He saw this girl with
his mind's eye--how much he longed to see her with the eyes of the body
--in all her strange beauty; and he knew that even if she cared for him,
such a sacrifice as linking her life with his was impossible.  Yet her
very presence there was like a garden of bloom to him: a garden full of
the odour of life, of vital things, of sweet energy and happy being.
Somehow, he and she were strangely alike.  He knew it.  From the time
he held her in his arms at Carillon, he knew it.  The great adventurous
spirit which was in him belonged also to her.  That was as sure as light
and darkness.

"No, there's no master man in me, but I think I know what one could be
like," he remarked at last.  He straightened himself against the pillows.
The old look of power came to a face hardly strong enough to bear it.
It was so fine and thin now, and the spirit in him was so prodigious.

"No one cares what happens to the man who always succeeds; no one loves
him," he continued.  "Do you know, in my trouble I've had more out of
nigger Jim's affection than I've ever had in my life.  Then there's
Rockwell, Osterhaut and Jowett, and there's your father.  It was worth
while living to feel the real thing."  His hands went out as though
grasping something good and comforting.  "I don't suppose every man needs
to be struck as hard as I've been to learn what's what, but I've learned
it.  I give you my word of honour, I've learned it."

Her face flushed and her eyes kindled greatly.  "Jim, Rockwell,
Osterhaut, Jowett, and my father!" she exclaimed.  "Of course trouble
wouldn't do anything but make them come closer round you.  Poor people
live so near to misfortune all the time--I mean poor people like Jim,
Osterhaut, and Jowett--that changes of fortune are just natural things to
them.  As for my father, he has had to stretch out his hands so often to
those in trouble--"

"That he carried me home on his shoulders from the bridge six weeks and
three days ago, at three o'clock in the morning," interjected Ingolby
with a quizzical smile.

"Why did you omit Madame Bulteel and myself when you mentioned those who
showed their--friendship?" she asked, hesitating at the last word.
"Haven't we done our part?"

"I was talking of men," he answered.  "One knows what women do.  They may
leave you in the bright days, not in the dark days.  On the majority of
them you couldn't rely in prosperity, but in misfortune you couldn't do
anything else.  They are there with you.  They're made that way.  The
best life can give you in misfortune is a woman.  It's the great
beginning-of-the-world thing in them.  Men can't stand prosperity, but
women can stand misfortune.  Why, if Jim and Osterhaut and Jowett and all
the men of Lebanon and Manitou had deserted me, I shouldn't have been
surprised; but I'd have had to recast my philosophy if Fleda Druse had
turned her bonny brown head away."

It was evident he was making an effort to conquer emotions which were
rising in him; that he was playing on the surface to prevent his deep
feelings from breaking forth.  "Instead of which," he added jubilantly,
"here I am, in the nicest room in the world, in a fine bed with springs
like an antelope's heels."

He laughed, and hunched his back into the mattress.  It was the laugh of
the mocker, but he was mocking himself.  She did not misunderstand.  It
was a nice room, as he said.  He had never seen it with his eyes, but if
he had seen it he would have realized how like herself it was--adorably
fresh, happily coloured, sumptuous and fine.  It had simple curtains,
white sheets, and a warm carpet on the floor; and yet with something,
too, that struck the note of a life outside.  A pennant of many colours
hung where two soft pink curtains joined, and at the window and over the
door was an ancient cross in bronze and gold.  It was not the simple
Christian cross of the modern world, but an ancient one which had become
a symbol of the Romanys, a sign to mark the highways, the guide of the
wayfarers.  The pennant had been on the pole of the Ry's tent in far-off
days in the Roumelian country.  In the girl herself there was that which
corresponded to the gorgeous pennant and the bronze cross.  It was not in
dress or in manner, for there was no sign of garishness, of the unusual
anywhere--in manner she was as well controlled as any woman of fashion,
in dress singularly reserved--but in the depths of the eyes there was
some restless, unsettled thing, some flicker of strange banners akin to
the pennant at the joining of the pink curtains.  There had been
something of the same look in Ingolby's eyes in the past, only with him
it was the sense of great adventure, intrepid enterprise, a touch of
vision and the beckoning thing.  That look was not in his eyes now.
Nothing was there; no life, no soul; only darkness.  But did that look
still inhabit the eyes of the soul?

He answered the question himself.  "I'd start again in a different way if
I could," he said musingly, his face towards the girl.  "It's easy to say
that, but I would.  It isn't only the things you get, it's how you use
them.  It isn't only the things you do, it's why you do them.  But I'll
never have a chance now; I'll never have a chance to try the new way.
I'm done."

Something almost savage leaped into her eyes--a wild, bitter protest, for
it was her tragedy, too, if he was not to regain his sight.  The great
impulse of a nature which had been disciplined into reserve broke forth.

"It isn't so," she said with a tremor in her voice.  All that he--and
she--was in danger of losing came home to her.  "It isn't so.  You shall
get well again.  Your sight will come back.  To-morrow; perhaps to-day,
Hindlip, the great oculist comes from New York.  Mr. Warbeck, the
Montreal man, holds out hopes.  If the New York man says the same,
why despair?  Perhaps in another month you will be on your feet again,
out in the world, fighting, working, mastering, just as you used to do."

A sudden stillness seemed to take possession of him.  His lips parted;
his head was thrust forwards slightly as though he saw something in the
distance.  He spoke scarcely above a whisper.

"I didn't know the New York man was coming.  I didn't know there was any
hope at all," he said with awe in his tones.

"We told you there was," she answered.

"Yes, I know.  But I thought you were all only trying to make it easier
for me, and I heard Warbeck say to Rockwell, when they thought I was
asleep, 'It's ten to one against him.'"

"Did you hear that?" she said sorrowfully.  "I'm so sorry; but Mr.
Warbeck said afterwards--only a week ago--that the chances were even.
That's the truth.  On my soul and honour it's the truth.  He said the
chances were even.  It was he suggested Mr. Hindlip, and Hindlip is
coming now.  He's on the way.  He may be here to-day.  Oh, be sure, be
sure, be sure, it isn't all over.  You said your life was broken.  It
isn't.  You said my life had been broken.  It wasn't.  It was only the
wrench of a great change.  Well, it's only the wrench of a great change
in your life.  You said I gained everything in the great change of my
life.  I did; and the great change in your life won't be lost, it will be
gain, too.  I know it; in my heart I know it."

With sudden impulse she caught his hand in both of hers, and then with
another impulse, which she could not control, she caught his head to her
bosom.  For one instant her arms wrapped him round, and she murmured
something in a language he did not understand--the language of the
Roumelian country.  It was only one swift instant, and then with shocked
exclamation she broke away from him, dropped into a chair, and buried her
face in her hands.

He blindly reached out his hand towards her as if to touch her.  "Mother-
girl, dear mother-girl--that's what you are," he said huskily.  "What a
great, kind heart you've got!"

She did not reply, but sat with face hidden in her hands, rocking
backwards and forwards.  He understood; he tried to help her.  There was
a great joy in his heart, but he dared not give it utterance.

"Please tell me about your life--about that great change in it," he said
at last in a low voice.  "Perhaps it would help me.  Anyhow, I'd like to
know, if you feel you can tell me."

For a moment she was silent.  Then she said to him with an anxious note
in her voice: "What do you know about my life-about the 'great change,'
as you call it?"

He reached out over the coverlet, felt for a sock which he had been
learning to knit and, slowly plying the needles, replied: "I only know
what Jethro Fawe told me, and he was a promiscuous liar."

"I don't think he lied about me," she answered quietly.  "He told you I
was a Gipsy; he told you that I was married to him.  That was true.  I
was a Gipsy.  I was married to him in the Romany way, when I was a child
of three, and I never saw him again until here, the other day, on the
Sagalac."

"You were married to him as much as I am," he interjected scornfully.
"That was a farce.  It was only a promise to pay on the part of your
father.  There was nothing in that.  Jethro Fawe could not claim on
that."

"He has tried to do so," she answered, "and if I were still a Gipsy he
would have the right to do so from his standpoint."

"That sounds silly to me," Ingolby remarked, his fingers moving now more
quickly with the needles.  "No, it isn't silly," she said, her voice
almost as softly monotonous as his had been when he told her of his life
a little while before.  It was as though she was looking into her own
mind and heart and speaking to herself.  "It isn't silly," she repeated.
"I don't think you understand.  Just because a race like the Gipsies have
no country and no home, so they must have things that bind them which
other people don't need in the same way.  Being the vagrants of the
earth, so they must have things that hold them tighter than any written
laws made by King or Parliament.  Unless the Gipsies kept their laws
sacred they couldn't hold together at all.  They're iron and steel, the
Gipsy laws.  They can't be stretched, and they can't be twisted.  They
can only be broken, and then there's no argument about it.  When they are
broken, there's the penalty, and it has to be met."

Ingolby stopped knitting for a moment.  "You don't mean that a penalty
could touch you?" he asked incredulously.

"Not for breaking a law," she answered.  "I'm not a Gipsy any more.
I gave my word about that, and so did my father; and I'll keep it."

"Please tell me about it," he urged.  "Tell me, so that I can understand
everything."

There was a long pause in which Ingolby inspected carefully with his
fingers the work which he was doing, but at last Fleda's voice came to
him, as it seemed out of a great distance, while she began to tell of her
first memories: of her life by the Danube and the Black Sea, and drew
for him a picture, so far as she could recall it, of her marriage with
Jethro, and of the years that followed.  Now and again as she told of
some sordid things, of the challenge of the law in different countries,
of the coarse vagabondage of the Gipsy people in this place or in that,
and some indignity put upon her father, or some humiliating incident, her
voice became low and pained.  It seemed as if she meant that he should
see all she had been in that past, which still must be part of the
present and have its place in the future, however far away all that
belonged to it would be.  She appeared to search her mind to find that
which would prejudice him against her.  While speaking with slow scorn
of the life which she had lived as a Gipsy, yet she tried to make him
understand, too, that, in the days when she belonged to it, it all seemed
natural to her, and that its sordidness, its vagabondage did not produce
repugnance in her mind when she was part of it.  Unwittingly she over-
coloured the picture, and he knew she did.

In spite of herself, however, some aspects of the old life called forth
pictures of happy Nature, of busy animal life of wood and glen and stream
and footpath which was exquisite in its way.  She was in spirit at one
with the multitudinous world of nature among which so many men and women
lived, without seeing or knowing.  It was all undesignedly a part of
herself, and she was one of a population in a universal nation whose
devout citizen she was.  Sometimes, in response to an interjection from
Ingolby, deftly made, she told of some incident which revealed as great a
poetic as dramatic instinct.  As she talked, Ingolby in his imagination
pictured her as a girl of ten or twelve, in a dark-red dress, brown curls
falling in profusion on her shoulders, with a clear, honest, beautiful
eye, and a face that only spoke of a joy of living, in which the small
things were the small things and the great things were the great: the
perfect proportion of sane life in a sane world.

Now and again, carried away by the history of things remembered, she
visualized scenes for him with the ardour of an artist and a lover of
created things.  He realized how powerful a hold the old life still had
upon her.  She understood it, too, for when at last she told of the great
event in England which changed her life, and made her a deserter from
Gipsy life; when she came to the giving of the pledge to a dying woman,
and how she had kept that pledge, and how her father had kept it,
sternly, faithfully, in spite of all it involved, she said to him:

"It may seem strange to you, living as I live now in one spot, with
everything to make life easy, that I should long sometimes for that old
life.  I hate it in my heart of hearts, yet there's something about it
that belongs to me, that's behind me, if that tells you anything.  It's
as though there was some other self in me which reached far, far back
into centuries, that wills me to do this and wills me to do that.  It
sounds mad to you of course, but there have been times when I have had a
wild longing to go back to it all, to what some Gorgio writers call the
pariah world--the Ishmaelites."

More than once Ingolby's heart throbbed heavily against his breast as he
felt the passion of her nature, its extraordinary truthfulness, making it
clear to him by indirect phrases that even Jethro Fawe, whom she
despised, still had a hateful fascination for her.  It was all at
variance to her present self, but it summoned her through the long
avenues of ancestry, predisposition; through the secret communion of
those who, being dead, yet speak.

"It's a great story told in a great way," he said, when she had finished.
"It's the most honest thing I ever heard, but it's not the most truthful
thing I ever heard.  I don't think we can tell the exact truth about
ourselves.  We try to be honest; we are savagely in earnest about it,
and so we exaggerate the bad things we do, and we often show distrust of
the good things we do.  That's not a fair picture.  I believe you've told
me the truth as you see it and feel it, but I don't think it's the real
truth.  In my mind I sometimes see an oriel window in the college where I
spent three years.  I used to work and think for hours in that oriel
window, and in the fights I've been having lately I've looked back and
thought I wanted it again; wanted to be there in the peace of it all,
with the books, and the lectures, and the drone of history, and the
drudgery of examinations; but if I did go back to it, three days'd sicken
me, and if you went back to the Gipsy life three days'd sicken you."

"Yes, I know.  Three hours would sicken me.  But what might not happen in
those three hours!  Can't you understand?"

Suddenly she got to her feet with a passionate exclamation, her
clenched hands went to her temples in an agony of emotion.  "Can't you
understand?" she repeated.  "It's the going back at all for three days,
for three hours, for three minutes that counts.  It might spoil
everything; it might kill my life."

His face flushed, crimsoned, then became pale; his hands ceased moving;
the knitting lay still on his knee.  "Maybe, but you aren't going back
for three minutes, any more than I'm going back to the oriel window for
three seconds," he said.  "We dreamers have a lot of agony in thinking
about the things we're never going to do--just as much agony as in
thinking about the things we've done.  Every one of us dreamers ought to
be insulated.  We ought to wear emotional lightning-rods to carry off the
brain-waves into the ground.

"I've never heard such a wonderful story," he added, after an instant,
with an intense longing to hold out his arms to her, and a still more
intense will to do no such wrong.  A blind man had no right or title to
be a slave-owner, for that was what marriage to him would be.  A wife
would be a victim.  He saw himself, felt himself being gradually
devitalized, with only the placid brain left, considering only the
problem of hourly comfort, and trying to neutralize the penalties of
blindness.  She must not be sacrificed to that, for apart from all else
she had greatness of a kind in her.  He knew far better than he had said
of the storm of emotion in her, and he knew that she had not exaggerated
the temptation which sang in her ears.  Jethro Fawe--the thought of the
man revolted him; and yet there was something about the fellow,
a temperamental power, the glamour and garishness of Nature's gifts,
prostituted though they were, finding expression in a striking
personality, in a body of athletic grace--a man-beauty.

"Have you seen Jethro Fawe lately?" he asked.  "Not since"--she was
going to say not since the morning her father had passed the sentence of
the patrin upon him; but she paused in time.  "Not since everything
happened to you," she added presently.

"He knows the game is up," Ingolby remarked with forced cheerfulness.
"He won't be asking for any more."

"It's time for your milk and brandy," she said suddenly, emotion
subsiding and a look of purpose coming into her face.  She poured out the
liquid, and gave the glass into his hand.  His fingers touched hers.

"Your hands are cold," she said to him.  "Cold hands, warm heart," he
chattered.

A curious, wilful, rebellious look came into her eyes.  "I shouldn't
have thought it in your case," she said, and with sudden resolve turned
towards the door.  "I'll send Madame Bulteel," she added.  "I'm going for
a walk."

She had betrayed herself so much, had shown so recklessly what she felt,
and yet, yet why did he not--she did not know what she wanted him to do.
It was all a great confusion.  Vaguely she realized what had been working
in him, but yet the knowledge was dim indeed.  She was a woman.  In her
heart of hearts she knew that he did care for her, and yet in her heart
of hearts she denied that he cared.

She was suddenly angry with herself, angry with him, the poor blind man,
back from the Valley of the Shadow.  She had not reached the door,
however, when Madame Bulteel entered the room.

"The doctor from New York has come," she said, holding out a note from
Dr. Rockwell.  "He will be here in a couple of hours."

Fleda turned back towards the bed.

"Good luck!" she said.  "You'll see, it will be all right."

"Certainly I'll see if it's all right," he said cheerfully.  "Am I tidy?
Have I used Pears' soap?"  He would have his joke at his own funeral if
possible.

"There are two hours to get you fit to be seen," she rejoined with
raillery, infected by his cheerfulness in spite of herself.  "Madame
Bulteel is very brave.  Nothing is too hard for her!"

An instant later she was gone, with her heart telling her to go back to
him, not to leave him, but yet with a longing stronger still driving her
to the open world, to which she could breathe her trouble in great gasps,
as she sped onward through the woods and by the river.  To love a blind
man was sheer madness, but in her was a superstitious belief that he
would see again.  It prevailed against the doubts and terrors.  It made
her resent his own sense of fatality, his own belief that he would be in
darkness all his days.

In the room where he awaited the verdict of the expert, he kept saying to
himself:

"She would have made everything else look cheap--if it could have been."




CHAPTER XXI

THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER

The last rays of the setting sun touched the gorgeous Autumn woods with
a loving, bright glow, and the day stole pensively away into a purple bed
beyond the sight of the eyes.  From a lonely spot by the river, Fleda
watched the westering gleam until it vanished, her soul alive to the
melancholy beauty of it all.  Not a human being seemed to be within the
restricted circle of her vision.  There were only to be seen the deep
woods, in myriad tints of bronze and red and saffron, and the swift-
flowing river.  Overhead was the Northern sky, so clear, so thrilling,
and the stars were beginning to sparkle in the incredibly swift twilight
which links daytime and nighttime in that Upper Land.  Lonely and
delicately sad it all looked, but there was no feeling of loneliness
among those who lived the life of the Sagalac.  Many a man has stood on a
wide plain of snow, white to the uttermost horizon, or in the yellow-
brown grass of the Summer prairie, empty of all human life so far as eye
could see, and yet has felt no solitude.  It is as though the air itself
is inhabited by a throng of happy comrades whispering in the communion of
the invisible world.

As a child Fleda had often gazed upon just such scenes, lonely and
luminous, but she was only conscious then of a vague and pleasant awe,
a kindly confusion, which, like the din of innumerable bees, lulled
wonder to sleep.  Even as a child, however, something of what it meant
had pierced her awe and wonder.  Once as she crossed a broken, bare
mountain of Roumania she had seen a wild ass perched upon a high summit
gazing, as it were, over the wide valley, where beneath, among the rocks,
other wild asses wandered.  There was something so statue-like in this
immovable wild creature that Fleda had watched it till it was hid from
her view by a jutting rock.  But the thing which made a lasting
impression, drawing her nearer to nature-life than all that had chanced
since she was born, was the fact that on returning, hours after, the wild
ass was still standing upon the summit of the hill, still gazing across
the valley.  Or was it gazing across the valley?  Was there some other
vision commanding its sight?

So a young wife not yet a mother loses herself for hours together in a
vista of unexplored experience.  Fleda had passed on, out of sight of the
wild ass on the hills, but for ever after the memory of it remained with
her and the picture of it sprang to her eye innumerable times.  The
hypnotized wild thing--hypnotized by its own vague instincts, or by
something outside itself-became to her as the Sphinx to the Egyptian, the
everlasting question of existence.

Now, as she watched the day fleeing, and night with swift stealthiness
coming on, that unforgettable picture of the Roumanian hills came to her
again.  The instinct of those far-off days which had been little removed
from the finest animal intelligence had now developed into thought.
Brain and soul strove to grasp what it all meant, and what the revelation
was between Nature and herself.  Nature was so vast; she was so
insignificant; changes in its motionless inorganic life were
imperceptible save through the telescopes of years; but she, like the
wind, the water, and the clouds, was variable, inconstant.  Was there any
real relation between the vast, imperturbable earth, its seas, its
forests, its mountains and its plains, its life of tree and plant and
flower and the men and women dotted on its surface?  Did they belong to
each other, or were mankind only, as it were, vermin infesting the
desirable world?  Did they belong to each other?  It meant so much if
they did belong, and she loved to think they did.  Many a time she kissed
the smooth bole of a maple or whispered to it; or laid her cheek against
a mossy rock and murmured a greeting in the spirit of a companionship as
old as the making of the world.

On the evening of this day of her destiny--carrying the story of her own
fate within its twenty-four hours--she was in a mood of detachment from
life's routine.  As at a great opera, a sensitive spirit loses itself in
visions alien to the music and yet born of it, so she, lost in this
primeval scene before her, saw visions of things to be.

If Ingolby's sight came back!  In her abstraction she saw him with sight
restored and by her side, and even in that joy her mind felt a hovering
sense of invasion, no definite, visible thing, but a presence which made
shadow.  Suddenly oppressed by it, she turned back into the woods from
the river-bank to make for home.  She had explored nearly every portion
of this river-country for miles up and down, but on this evening, lost in
her dreams, she had wandered into less familiar regions.  There was no
chance of her being lost, so long as she kept near to the river, and
indeed by instinct and not by thought or calculation she made her way
about at all times.  Turned homeward, she walked for about a quarter of a
mile, retreading the path by which she had come.  It was growing darker,
and, being in unfamiliar surroundings, she hurried on, though she knew
well what course to take.  Following the bank of the river she would have
increased her walk greatly, as the stream made a curve at a point above
Manitou, and then came back again to its original course; so she cut
across the promontory, taking the most direct line homeward.

Presently, however, she became conscious of other people in the wood
besides herself.  She saw no one, but she heard breaking twigs, the stir
of leaves, the flutter of a partridge which told of human presence.  The
underbrush was considerable, darkness was coming on, and she had a sense
of being surrounded.  It agitated her, but she pulled herself together,
stood still and admonished herself.  She called herself a fool; she asked
herself if she was going to be a coward.  She laughed out loud at her own
apprehension; but a chill stole into her blood when she heard near by--
there was no doubt about it now--mockery of her own laughter.  Then
suddenly, before she could organize her senses, a score of men seemed to
rise up from the ground around her, to burst out from the bushes, to drop
from the trees, and to storm upon her.  She had only time to realize that
they were Romanys, before scarfs were thrown around her head, bound
around her body, and, unconscious, she was carried away into the deep
woods.

When she regained consciousness Fleda found herself in a tent, set in a
kind of prairie amphitheatre valanced by shrubs and trees.  Bright fires
burned here and there, and dark-featured men squatted upon the ground,
cared for their horses, or busied themselves near two large caravans, at
the doors or on the steps of which now and again appeared a woman.

She had waked without moving, had observed the scene without drawing the
attention of a man--a sentry--who sat beside the tent-door.  The tent was
empty save for herself.  There was little in it besides the camp-bed
against the tent wall, upon which she lay, and the cushions supporting
her head.  She had waked carefully, as it were: as though some inward
monitor had warned her of impending danger.  She realized that she had
been kidnapped by Romanys, and that the hand behind the business was that
of Jethro Fawe.  The adventurous and reckless Fawe family had its many
adherents in the Romany world, and Jethro was its head, the hereditary
claimant for its leadership.

Notwithstanding the Ry of Rys' prohibition, there had drawn nearer and
ever nearer to him, from the Romany world he had abandoned, many of his
people, never, however, actually coming within his vision till the
appearance of Jethro Fawe.  Here and there on the prairie, to a point
just beyond Gabriel Druse's horizon, they had come from all parts of the
world; and Jethro, reckless and defiant under the Sentence, and knowing
that the chances against his life were a million to one, had determined
on one bold stroke which, if it failed, would make his fate no worse,
and, if it succeeded, would give him his wife and, maybe, headship over
all the Romany world.  For weeks he had planned, watched and waited,
filling the woods with his adherents, secretly following Fleda day by
day, until, at last, the place, the opportunity, seemed perfect; and here
she lay in a Romany tan once more, with the flickering fires outside in
the night, and the sentry at her doorway.  This watchman was not Jethro
Fawe, but she knew well that Jethro was not far off.

Through the open door of the tent, for some minutes, her eyes studied the
segment of the circle within her vision, and she realized that here was
an organized attempt to force her back into the Romany world.  If she
repudiated the Gorgio life and acknowledged herself a Romany once again,
she knew her safety would be secured; but in truth she had no fear for
her life, for no one would dare to defy the Ry of Rys so far as to kill
his daughter.  But she was in danger of another kind--in deep and
terrible danger; and she knew it well.  As the thought of it took
possession of her, her heart seemed almost to burst.  Not fear, but anger
and emotion possessed her.  All the Romany in her stormed back again from
the past.  It sent her to her feet with a scarcely smothered cry.  She
was not quicker, however, than was the figure at the tent door, which,
with a half-dozen others, sprang up as she appeared.  A hand was raised,
and, as if by magic, groups of Gipsies, some sitting, some standing, some
with the Gipsy fiddle, one or two with flutes, began a Romany chant in a
high, victorious key, and women threw upon the fire powders from which
flamed up many coloured lights.

In a moment the camp was transformed.  From the woods around came
swarthy-faced men, with great gold rings in their ears and bright scarfs
around their necks or waists, some of them handsome, dirty and insolent;
others ugly, watchful, and quiet in manner and face; others still most
friendly and kind in face and manner.  All showed instant respect for
Fleda.  They raised their hands in a gesture of salutation as a Zulu
chief thrusts up a long arm and shouts "Inkoos!" to one whom he honours.
Some, however, made the sweeping Oriental gesture of the right hand, palm
upward, and almost touching the ground--a sign of obedience and infinite
respect.  It had all been well arranged.  Skilfully managed as it was,
however, there was something in it deeper than theatrical display or
dramatic purpose.

It was clear that many of them were deeply moved at being in the presence
of the daughter of the Ry of Rys, who had for so long exiled himself.
Racial, family, clan feeling spoke in voice and gesture, in look and
attitude; but yet there were small groups of younger men whose
salutations were perfunctory, not to say mocking.  These were they who
resented deeply Fleda's defection, and truthfully felt that she had
passed out of their circle for ever; that she despised them, and looked
down on them from another sphere.  They were all about the age of Jethro
Fawe, but were of a less civilized type, and had semi-barbarism written
all over them.  Unlike Jethro they had never known the world of cities.
They repudiated Fleda, because their ambition could not reach to her.
They recognized the touch of fashion and of form, of a worldly education,
of a convention which lifted her away from the tan and the caravan, from
the everlasting itinerary.  They had not had Jethro's experiences in
fashionable hotels of Europe, at midnight parties, at gay suppers, at
garish dances, where Gorgio ladies answered the amorous looks of the
ambitious Romany with the fiddle at his chin.  Because these young
Romanys knew they dare not aspire, they were resentful; but Jethro,
the head of the rival family and the son of the dead claimant to the
headship, had not such compulsory modesty.  He had ranged far and wide,
and his expectations were extensive.  He was nowhere to be seen in the
groups which sang and gestured in the light of the many coloured fires,
though once or twice Fleda's quickened ear detected his voice, exulting,
in the chorus of song.

Presently, as she stood watching, listening, and strangely moved in spite
of herself by the sudden dramatic turn which things had taken, a seat was
brought to her.  It was a handsome stool, looted perhaps from some
chateau in the Old World, and over it was thrown a dark-red cloth which
gave a semblance of dignity to the seat of authority, which it was meant
to be.

Fleda did not refuse the honour.  She had choked back the indignant words
which had rushed to her lips as she left the tent where she had been
lying.  Prudence had bade her await developments.  She could not yet make
up her mind what to do.  It was clear that a bold and deep purpose lay
behind it all, and she could not tell how far-reaching it was, nor what
it represented of rebellion against her father's authority.  That it did
represent rebellion she had no doubt.  She was well enough aware of the
claims of Jethro's dead father to the leadership, abandoned for three
thousand pounds and marriage with herself; and she was also aware that
while her father's mysterious isolation might possibly have developed a
reverence for him, yet active pressure and calumny might well have done
its work.  Also, if the marriage was repudiated, Jethro would be
justified in resuming the family claim to the leadership.

She seated herself upon the scarlet seat with a gesture of thanks, while
the salutations and greetings increased; then she awaited events,
thrilled by the weird and pleasant music, with its touches of Eastern
fantasy.  In spite of herself she was moved, as Romanys, men and women,
ran forward in excitement with arms raised towards her as though they
meant to strike her, then suddenly stopped short, made obeisance, called
a greeting, and ran backwards to their places.

Presently a group of men began a ceremony or ritual, before which the
spectators now and again covered their eyes, or bent their heads low,
or turned their backs, and raised their hands in a sort of ascription.
As the ceremony neared its end, with its strange genuflections, a woman
dressed in white was brought forward, her hands bound behind her, her
hair falling over her shoulders, and after a moment of apparent
denunciation on the part of the head of the ceremony, she was suddenly
thrown to the ground, and the pretence of drawing a knife across her
throat was made.  As Fleda watched it she shuddered, but presently braced
herself, because she knew that this ritual was meant to show what the end
must be of those who, like herself, proved traitor to the traditions of
race.

It was at this point, when fifty knives flashed in the air, with vengeful
exclamations, that Jethro Fawe appeared in the midst of the crowd.  He
was dressed in the well-known clothes which he had worn since the day he
first declared himself at Gabriel Druse's home, and, compared with his
friends around him, he showed to advantage.  There was command in his
bearing, and experience of life had given him primitive distinction.

For a moment he stood looking at Fleda in undisguised admiration, for
she made a remarkable picture.  Animal beauty was hers, too.  There was a
delicate, athletic charm in her body and bearing; but it added to, rather
than took away from, the authority of her presence, so differing from
Jethro.  She had never compared herself with others, and her passionate
intelligence would have rebelled against the supremacy of the body.  She
had no physical vanity, but she had some mental vanity, and it placed
mind so far above matter that her beauty played no part in her
calculations.  At sight of him, Fleda's blood quickened, but in
indignation and in no other sense.  As he came towards her, however,
despising his vanity as she did, she felt how much he was above all those
by whom he was surrounded.  She realized his talent, and it almost made
her forget his cunning and his loathsomeness.  As he came near to her he
made a slight gesture to someone in the crowd, and a chorus of
salutations rose.

Composed and still she waited for him to come quite close to her, and the
look in her face was like that of one who was scarcely conscious of what
was passing around her, whose eyes saw distant things of infinite moment.

A few feet away from her he spoke.

"Daughter of the Ry of Rys, you are among your own people once again,"
he said.  "From everywhere in the world they have come to show their love
for you.  You would not have come to them of your own free will, because
a madness 'got hold of you, and so they came to you.  You cut yourself
off from them and told yourself you had become a Gorgio.  But that was
only your madness; and madness can be cured.  We are the Fawes, the
ancient Fawes, who ruled the Romany people before the Druses came to
power.  We are of the ancient blood, yet we are faithful to the Druse
that rules over us.  His word prevails, although his daughter is mad.
Daughter of the Ry of Rys, you have seen us once again.  We have sung to
you; we have spoken to you; we have told you what is in our hearts; we
have shown you how good is the end of those who are faithful, and how
terrible is the end of the traitor.  Do not forget it.  Speak to us."

Fleda had a fierce desire to spring to her feet and declare to them all
that the sentence of the patrin had been passed upon Jethro Fawe, but she
laid a hand upon herself.  She knew they were unaware that the Sentence
had been passed, else they would not have been with Jethro.  In that case
none would give him food or shelter or the hand of friendship; none dare
show him any kindness; and it was the law that any one against whom he
committed an offence, however small, might take his life.  The Sentence
had been like a cloud upon her mind ever since her father had passed it;
she could not endure the thought of it.  She could not bring herself to
speak of it--to denounce him.  Sooner or later the Sentence would reach
every Romany everywhere, and Jethro would pass into the darkness of
oblivion, not in his own time nor in the time of Fate.  The man was
abhorrent to her, yet his claim was there.  Mad and bad as it was, he
made his claim of her upon ancient rights, and she was still enough a
Romany to see his point of view.

Getting to her feet slowly, she ignored Jethro, looked into the face of
the crowd, and said:

"I am the daughter of the Ry of Rys still, though I am a Romany no
longer.  I made a pledge to be no more a Romany and I will keep it; yet
you and all Romany people are dear to me because through long generations
the Druses have been of you.  You have brought me here against my will.
Do you think the Ry of Rys will forgive that?  In your words you have
been kind to me, but yet you have threatened me.  Do you think that a
Druse has any fear?  Did a Druse ever turn his cheek to be smitten?  You
know what the Druses are.  I am a Druse still.  I will not talk longer,
I have nothing to say to you all except that you must take me back to my
father, and I will see that he forgives you.  Some of you have done this
out of love; some of you have done it out of hate; yet set me free again
upon the path to my home, and I shall forget it, and the Ry of Rys will
forget it."

At that instant there suddenly came forward from the doorway of a tent
on the outskirts of the crowd a stalwart woman, with a strong face and
a self-reliant manner.  She was still young, but her slightly pockmarked
countenance showed the wear and tear of sorrow of some kind.  She had,
indeed, lost her husband and her father in the Montenegrin wars.
Hastening forward to Fleda she reached out a hand.

"Come with me," she said; "come and sleep in my tent to-night.  To-morrow
you shall go back to the Ry of Rys, perhaps.  Come with me."

There was a sudden murmuring in the crowd, which was stilled by a motion
of Jethro Fawe's hand, and a moment afterwards Fleda gave her hand to the
woman.

"I will go with you," Fleda said.  Then she turned to Jethro: "I wish to
speak to you alone, Jethro Fawe," she added.

He laughed triumphantly.  "The wife of Jethro Fawe wishes to speak with
him," he bombastically cried aloud to the assembled people, and he
prepared to follow Fleda.

As Fleda entered the woman's tent a black-eyed girl, with tousled hair
and a bold, sensual face, ran up to Jethro, and in an undertone of evil
suggestion said to him:

"To-night is yours, Jethro.  You can make tomorrow sure."




CHAPTER XXII

THE SECRET MAN

"You are wasting your time."

Fleda said the words with a quiet determination, and yet in the tone was
a slight over-emphasis which was like a call upon reserve forces within
herself.

"Time is nothing to me," was the complete reply, clothed in a tone of
soft irony.  "I'm young enough to waste it.  I've plenty of it in my
knapsack."

"Have you forgotten the Sentence of the Patrin?"  Fleda asked the
question in a voice which showed a sudden access of determination.

"He will have to wipe it out after to-morrow," replied the other with a
gleam of sulky meaning and furtive purpose in his eyes.

"If you mean that I will change my mind to-morrow, and be your wife, and
return to the Gipsy life, it is the thought of a fool.  I asked you to
come here to speak with me because I was sure I could make you see things
as they truly are.  I wanted to explain why I did not tell the Romanys
outside there that the Sentence had been passed on you.  I did not tell
them because I can't forget that your people and my people have been sib
for hundreds of years; that you and I were children together; that we
were sealed to one another when neither of us could have any say about
it.  If I had remained a Gipsy, who can tell--my mind might have
become like yours!  I think there must be something rash and bad in me
somewhere, because I tell you frankly now that a chord in my heart rang
when you made your wild speeches to me there in the hut in the Wood
months ago, even when I hated you, knowing you for what you are."

"That was because there was another man," interjected Jethro.

She inclined her head.  "Yes, it was partly because of another man,"
she replied.  "It is a man who suffers because of you.  When he was alone
among his foes, a hundred to one, you betrayed him.  That itself would
have made me despise you to the end of my life, even if the man had been
nothing at all to me.

"It was a low, cowardly thing to do.  You did it; and if you were my
brother, I would hate you for it; if you were my father, I should leave
your house; if you were my husband, I should kill you.  I asked you to
speak with me now because I thought that if you would go away--far away--
promising never to cross my father's path, or my path, again, I could get
him to withdraw the Sentence.  You have kidnapped me.  Where do you think
you are?  In Mesopotamia?  You can't break the law of this country and
escape as you would there.  They don't take count of Romany custom here.
Not only you, but every one of the Fawes here will be punished if the law
reaches for your throat.  I want you to escape, and I tell you to go now.
Go back to Europe.  I advise you this for your own sake--because you are
a Fawe and of the clan."

The blood mounted to Jethro's forehead, and he made an angry gesture.
"And leave you here for him!  'Mi Duvel!'  I can only die once, and I
would rather die near you than far away," he exclaimed.

His eyes had a sardonic look, there was a savage edge to his tongue, yet
his face was flushed with devouring emotion and he was quivering with
hope.  That which he called love was flooding the field of his feelings,
and the mad thing--the toxic impulse which is deep in the brain of
Eastern races bled into his brain now.  He was reckless, rebellious
against fate, insanely wilful, and what she had said concerning Ingolby
had roused in him the soul of Cain.

She realized it, and she was apprehensive of some desperate act; yet she
had no physical fear of him.  Something seemed to tell her that, no
matter what happened, Ingolby would not wait for her in vain, and that
he would yet see her enter to him again with the love-light in her eyes.

"But listen to me," Jethro said, with an unnatural shining in his eyes,
his voice broken in its passion.  "You think you can come it over me with
your Gorgio talk and the clever things you've learned in the Gorgio
world.  You try to look down on me.  I'm as well born or as ill born as
you.  The only difference between us is the way you dress, the way you
live and use your tongue.  All that belongs to the life of the cities.
Anyone can learn it.  Anyone well born like you and me, with a little
practice, can talk like Gorgio dukes and earls.  I've been among them and
I know.  I've had my friends among them, too.  I've got the hang of it
all.  It's no good to me, and I don't want it.  It's all part of a set
piece.  There's no independence in that life; you live by rule.  Diable!
I know.  I've been in palaces; I've played my fiddle to the women in high
places who can't blush.  It's no good; it brings nothing in the end.
It's all hollow.  Look at our people there."  He swept a hand to the tent
door.

"They're tanned and rough, as all out-door things are rough, but they've
got their share of happiness, and every day has its pleasures.  Listen to
them!" he cried with a gesture of exultation.  "Listen to that!"

The colour slowly left Fleda's face.  Outside in the light of the dying
fires, under the glittering stars, in the shade of the trees, groups of
Romanys were singing the Romany wedding melody, called "The Song of the
Sealing."  It was not like the ringing of wedding bells alone, it sealed
blessing upon the man and the woman.  It was a poem in praise of marriage
passion; it was a paean proclaiming the accomplishment of life.  Crude,
primitive, it thrilled with Eastern feeling; a weird charm was showered
from its notes.

"Listen!" exclaimed Jethro again, a fire burning in his face.  "That's
for you and me.  To them you are my wife, and I am your man.  'Mi Duvel'
--it shall be so!  I know women.  For an hour you will hate me; for a day
you will resent me, and then you will begin to love me.  You will fight
me, but I will conquer.  I know you--I know you--all you women.  But no,
it will not be I that will conquer.  It's my love that will do it.  It's
a den of tigers.  When it breaks loose it will have its way.  Here it is.
Can't you see it in my face?  Can't you hear it in my voice?  Don't you
hear my heart beating?  Every throb says, 'Fleda--Fleda--Fleda, come to
me.'  I have loved you since you were three.  I want you now.  We can be
happy.  Every night we will make a new home.  The world will be ours; the
best that is in it will come to us.  We will tap the trees of happiness
--they're hid from the Gorgio world.  You and I will know where to find
them.  Every land shall be ours; every gift of paradise within our reach
--riches, power, children.  Come back to your own people; be a true
daughter of the Ry of Rys; live with your Romany chal.  You will never be
at home anywhere else.  It's in your bones; it's in your blood; it's
deeper than all.  Here, now, come to me--my wife."

He flung the flap of the tent door across the opening, shutting out the
camp-fires and the people.  "Here--now--come.  Be mine while they sing."

For one swift moment the great passion and eloquence of the man lifted
her off her feet; for one instant the Romany in her triumphed, and a
thrill of passion passed through her, storming her senses, like a mist
shutting out all the rest of the world.  This Romany was right; there was
in her the wild thing--the everlasting strain of race and years breaking
down all the defences which civilized life had built up within her.  Just
for one instant so--and then there flashed before her a face with two
blind eyes.

Like a stream of ether playing upon warm flesh, making it icy cold, so
something of the ineradicable good in her swept like a frozen spray upon
the elements of emotion, and with both hands she made a gesture of
repulsion.

His eyes with their reddish glow burned nearer and nearer to her.  He
bulked over her, driving her back against the couch by the tent wall.
For an instant like that--and then, with clenched hand, she struck him in
the face.

Swift as had been the change in her, so a change like a cyclone swept
over him.  The hysterical passion which had possessed him suddenly
passed, and a dark, sullen determination swept into his eyes and over his
face.  His lips parted in a savage smile.

"Hell, so that's what you've learned in the Gorgio world, is it?" he
asked malevolently.  "Then I'll teach you what they do in the Romany
world; and to-morrow you can put the two together and see what they look
like."

With a Romany expletive, he flung back the curtain of the tent and passed
out into the night.

For a long time Fleda sat stunned and overcome by the side of the
couch, her brain tortured by a thousand thoughts.  She knew there was no
immediate escape from the encampment.  She could only rely upon the hue
and cry which would be raised and the certain hunt which would be made
for her.  But what might not happen before any rescue came?  The ancient
grudge of the Fawes against the Druses had gained power and activity by
the self-imposed exile of Gabriel Druse; and Jethro had worked upon it.
The veiled threats which Jethro had made she did not despise.  He was a
barbarian.  He would kill what he loved; he would have his way with what
he loved, whether or not it was the way of law or custom or right.
Outside, the wedding song still made musical the night.  Women's voices,
shrill, and with falsetto notes, made the trees ring with it; low, bass
voices gave it a kind of solemnity.  The view which the encampment took
of her captivity was clear.  Where was the woman that brought her to the
tent--whose tent it was?  She seemed kind.  Though her face had a hard
look, surely she meant to be friendly.  Or did she only mean to betray
her; to give her a fancied security, and leave her to Jethro--and the
night?  She looked round for some weapon.  There was nothing available
save two brass candlesticks.  Though the door of the tent was closed, she
knew that there were watchers outside; that any break for liberty would
only mean defeat, and yet she was determined to save herself.

As she tried to take the measure of the situation and plan what she would
do, the noise of the music suddenly ceased, and she heard a voice, though
low in tone, give some sort of command.  Then there was a cry, and what
seemed the chaotic noise of a struggle followed; then a voice a little
louder speaking, a voice of someone she remembered, though she could not
place it.  Something vital was happening outside, something punctuated by
sharp, angry exclamations; afterwards a voice speaking soothingly,
firmly, prevailed; and then there was silence.  As she listened there was
a footstep at the door of the tent, a voice called to her softly, and a
hand drew aside the tent curtain.  The woman who had brought her to this
place entered.

"You are all safe now," she said, reaching out both hands to Fleda.  "By
long and by last, but it was a close shave!  He meant to make you his
wife to-night, whether you would or no.  I'm a Fawe, but I'd have none of
that.  I was on my way to your father's house when I met someone--someone
that you know.  He carries your father's voice in his mouth."

She stepped to the tent door and beckoned; and out of the darkness, only
faintly lightened by the dying fires, there entered one whom Fleda had
seen not more than fifty times in her life, and never but twice since she
had ceased to be a Romany.  It was her father's secret agent, Rhodo, the
Roumelian, now grizzled and gaunt, but with the same vitality which had
been his in the days when she was a little child.

Here and there in the world went Rhodo, the voice of the Ry of Rys to do
his bidding, to say his say.  No minister of a Czar was ever more dreaded
or loved.  His words were ever few, but his deeds had been many.  Now, as
he looked at Fleda, his old eyes gleamed, and he showed a double row of
teeth, not one of which was imperfect, though he was seventy years of
age.

"Would you like to come?" he asked.  "Would you like to come home to the
Ry?"

With a cry she flung herself upon him.  "Rhodo!  Rhodo!" she exclaimed,
and now the tears broke forth, and her body shook with sobs.

A few moments later he said to her: "It's fifteen years since you kissed
me last.  I thought you were ashamed of old Rhodo."

She did not answer, but looked at him with eyes streaming, drawing back
from him.  Her embrace was astonishing even to herself, for as a child
Rhodo had been a figure of awe to her, and the feeling had deepened as
the years had gone on, knowing as she did his work throughout the world
for the Ry of Rys.  In his face was secrecy, knowledge, and some tragic
underthing which gave him, apart from his office, a singular loneliness
of figure and manner.  He was so closely knit in form; there was such
concentration in face, bearing and gesture, that the isolation of his
position was greatly deepened.

"No, you never kissed me after you were old enough to like or dislike,"
he said with mournful and ironical reflection.

There crept into his face a kind of yearning such as one might feel who
beheld afar off a promised land, and yet was denied its joys.  Rhodo was
wifeless, childless, and had been so for forty years.  He had had no
intimates among the Romany people.  His life he lived alone.  That the
daughter of the Ry of Rys should kiss him was a thing of which he would
dream when deeds were done and over and the shadows threatened.

"I will kiss you again in another fifteen years," she said half-smiling
through her tears.  "But tell me--tell me what has happened."

"Jethro Fawe has gone," he answered with a sweeping outward gesture.

"Where has he gone?" she asked, apprehension seizing her.

"A journey into the night," responded the old man with scorn and wrath in
his tone, and his lips were set.

"Is he going far?" she asked.

"The road you might think long would be short to him," he answered.

Her hands became cold; her heart seemed to stop beating.

"What road is that?" she asked.  She knew, but she must ask.

"Everybody knows it; everybody goes it some time or another," he answered
darkly.

"What was it you said to all of them outside?"--she made a gesture towards
the doorway.  "There were angry cries, and I heard Jethro Fawe's voice."

"Yes, he was blaspheming," remarked the old man grimly.

"Tell me what it was you said, and tell me what has happened," she
persisted.

The old man hesitated a moment, then said grimly: "I told them they must
go one way and Jethro Fawe another.  I told them the Ry of Rys had said
no patrins should mark the road Jethro Fawe's feet walked.  I had heard
of this gathering here, and I was on my way to bid them begone, for in
following the Ry they have broken his command.  As I came, I met the
woman of this tent who has been your friend.  She is a good woman; she
has suffered.  Her people are gone, but she has a heart for others.  I
met her.  She told me of what that rogue and devil had done and would do.
He is the head of the Fawes, but the Ry of Rys is the head of all the
Romanys of the world.  He has spoken the Word against Jethro, and the
Word shall prevail.  The Word of the Ry when it is given cannot be
withdrawn.  It is like the rock on which the hill rests."

"They did not go with him?" she asked.

"It is not the custom," he answered sardonically.  "That is a path a
Romany walks alone."

Her face was white.  "But he has not come to the end of the path--has
he?" she asked tremulously.  "Who can tell?  This day, or twenty years
from now, or to-morrow, or next moon, he will come to the end of the
path.  No one knows, he least of all.  He will not see the end, because
the road is dark.  I don't think it will be soon," he added, because he
saw how haggard her face had grown.  "No, I don't think it will be soon.
He is a Fawe, at the head of all the Fawes; so perhaps there will be time
for him to think, and no doubt it will not be soon."

"Perhaps it will not be at all.  My father spoke, but he can withdraw his
word," she urged.

Suddenly the old Gipsy's face hardened.  A look of dark resolve and iron
force came into it.

"The Ry will not withdraw.  He has spoken, and it must be.  If he spoke
lightly he is not fit to rule.  Unless the word of the Ry of Rys is good
against breaking, then the Romanys are no more than scattered leaves at
the will of the wind.  It is the word of the Ry that holds our folk
together.  It shall not bless, and it shall not curse in vain."

Pitying the girl's face, however, and realizing that the Gorgio life had
given her a new view of things; angry with her because it was so, but
loving her for herself, he added:

"But the night road may be long, though it is lonely, and if it should be
that the Ry should pass before the end of the road comes to Jethro, then
is Jethro freed, since the Word is gone which binds his feet for the
pitfall."

"He must not die," she insisted.

"Then the Ry of Rys must not live," he rejoined sternly.  With a kindly
gesture, however, he stretched out his hand.  "Come, we shall reach the
house of the Ry before the morning," he added.  "He is not returned from
his journey, and so will not be troubled by having missed you.  There
will be an hour for beauty-sleep before the sun rises," he continued with
the same wide smile with which he greeted her first.  Then he lifted up
the curtain and passed out into the night.

Following him, Fleda saw that the Romanys had broken camp, and only a
small handful remained, among them the woman who had befriended her.
Fleda went up to her:

"I will never forget you," she said.  "Will you wear this for me?" she
added, and she took from her throat a brooch which she had worn ever
since her first days in England, after her great illness there.  The
woman accepted the brooch.  "Lady love," she said, "you've lost your
sleep to-night, but that's a loss you can make good.  If there's a
night's sleep owing you, you can collect the debt some time.  No, a
night's sleep lost in a tent is nothing, if you're the only one in the
tent.  But if you're not alone, and you lose a night's sleep, someone
else may pick it up, and you might never get it again!"

A flush slowly stole over Fleda's face, and a look of horror came into
her eyes.  She read the parable aright.

"Will  you  let me kiss you?" she said to the woman, and now it was the
woman's turn to flush.

"You are the daughter of the Ry of Rys," she said almost shyly, yet
proudly.

"I'm a girl with a debt to pay and can never pay it," Fleda answered,
putting her arms impulsively around the woman's neck and kissing her.
Then she took the brooch from the woman's hand, and pinned it at her
throat.

"Think of Fleda of the Druses sometimes," she said, and she laid a hand
upon the woman's breast.  "Lady love--lady love," said the blunt woman
with the pockmarked face, "you've had the worst fright to-night that
you'll ever have."  She caught Fleda's hand and peered into it.  "Yes,
it's happiness for you now, and on and on," she added exultingly, and
with the fortune-teller's air.  "You've passed the danger place, and
there'll be wealth and a man who's been in danger, too; and there's
children, beautiful children--I see them."

In confusion, Fleda snatched her hand away.  "Good-bye, you fool-woman,"
she said impatiently, yet gently, too.  "You talk such sense and such
nonsense.  Good-bye," she added brusquely, but yet she smiled at the
woman as she turned away.

A moment later she was on her way back to Manitou, but she did not get to
her father's house before the break of day; and in the doorway she met
Madame Bulteel, whose pale, drawn face proclaimed a sleepless night.

"Tell me what has happened?  Tell me what has happened?" she asked in
distress.

Fleda took both her hands.  "Before I answer, tell me what has happened
here," she said breathlessly.  "What news?"

Madame Bulteel's face lighted.  "Good news," she exclaimed eagerly.

"He will see--he will see again?" Fleda asked in great agitation.

"The Montreal doctor said that the chances were even," answered Madame
Bulteel.  "This man from the States says it is a sure thing."

With a murmur Fleda sank into a chair, and a faintness came over her.

"That's not like a Romany," remarked old Rhodo.  "No, it's certainly not
like a Romany," remarked Madame Bulteel meaningly.




CHAPTER XXIII

THE RETURN OF BELISARIUS

Grey days in the prairie country do not come very often, but they are
very depressing when they arrive.  The landscape is not of the luscious
kind; it has no close correspondence with a picture by Corot or
Constable; sunlight is needed to give it the touch of the habitable and
the homelike.  It was, therefore, unfortunate for the spirits of the
Lebanon people that the meeting summoned by local agitators to discuss
with asperity affairs on both sides of the Sagalac should, while starting
with fitful sunlight in the early morning, have developed to a bleak
greyness by three o'clock in the afternoon, the time set for the meeting.

Another strike was imminent in the factories at Manitou and in the
railway-shops at Lebanon, due to the stupidity of the policy of Ingolby's
successor as to the railways and other financial and manufacturing
interests.  If he had planned a campaign of maladroitness he could not
have more happily fulfilled his object.  It was not a good time for
reducing wages, or for quarrelling with the Town Councils of Manitou and
Lebanon concerning assessments and other matters.  November and May
always found Manitou, as though to say, "upset."  In the former month,
men were pouring through the place on their way to the shanties for their
Winter's work, and generally celebrating their coming internment by
"irrigation"; in the latter month, they were returning from their
Winter's imprisonment, thirsty for excitement, and with memories of
Winter quarrels inciting them to "have it out of someone."

And it was in October, when the shantyman was passing through on his way
to the woods--a natural revolutionary, loving trouble as a coyote loves
his hole--that labour discontent was practically whipped into action, and
the Councils of the two towns were stung into bitterness against the new
provocative railway policy.  Things looked dark enough.  The trouble
between the two towns and the change of control and policy of the
railways, due to Ingolby's downfall, had greatly shaken land and building
values in Lebanon, and a black eye, as it were, had been given to the
whole district for the moment.

So serious had the situation been regarded that the Mayor of Lebanon,
with Halliday the lawyer and another notable citizen, all friends of
Ingolby, had "gone East"--as a journey to Montreal, Toronto, or Quebec
was generally called--to confer with and make appeal to the directorate
of the great railways.  They went with some elation and hope, for they
had arguments of an unexpected kind in their possession, carefully hidden
from the rest of the population.  They had returned only the day before
the meeting which was to be held in the square in front of the Town Hall,
to find that a platform had been built at the very steps of the Town Hall
with the assent of the Chief Constable, now recovered from illness and
returned to duty.  To the Deputy Mayor and the Council, the Chief
Constable, on the advice of Gabriel Druse, had said that it was far
better to have the meeting in front of the Town Hall where he could,
on the instant, summon special constables from within if necessary, while
the influence of a well-built platform and the orderly arrangement of a
regular meeting were better than a mob oration from the tops of ash-
barrels.

The signs were ominous.  In a day of sunshine the rebellious and
discontented spirit does not thrive; on a wet day it is apt to take
shelter; on a bleak, grey day men are prone to huddle together in their
anger with consequent stimulation of their passions.

It was a grey enough day at Lebanon, and dark-faced visitors from Manitou
felt the need of Winter clothing as they shiveringly crossed the Sagalac
by Ingolby's bridge.  The air was raw and searching; Nature was sulky.
In the sharp wind the trees shook themselves angrily free of leaves.  The
taverns were greatly frequented, which was not good for Manitou and
Lebanon.  Up to the time of the meeting, however, the expected strike had
not occurred.  This was mainly due to the fact that Felix Marchand, the
evil genius of Manitou, had not been seen in the town or in the district
for over a week.  It was not generally known that he was absent because a
man by the name of Dennis, whose wife he had wronged, was dogging him
with no good intent.  Marchand had treated the woman's warning with
contempt, but at sight of her injured husband he had himself withdrawn
from the scene of his dark enterprises.  His malign influence was
therefore not at work at the moment.

The tactics of the Lebanon Town Council had been careful and wise.  So
that the meeting should not be composed only of the roughest elements,
they privately urged all responsible citizens to attend, and if possible
capture the meeting for law and order and legitimate agitation.  That was
why Osterhaut, the town-crier, went about with a large dinner-bell
announcing the hour of the meeting and admonishing all "good folks" to
attend.  No one had ever seen Osterhaut quite so cheerful--and he had a
bonny cheerfulness on occasion--as on this grisly October day when Nature
was very sour and the spirit of the winds was in a "scratchy" mood.  But
Osterhaut was not more cheerful than Jowett who, in a very undignified
way, described the state of his feelings, on receiving a certain
confidence from Halliday, the lawyer, and Gabriel Druse, by turning a
cart-wheel in the Mayor's office; which certainly was an unusual thing
in a man of fifty years of age.

It was a people's meeting.  No local official was on the platform.
Under the influence of alien elements who, though their co-operation was
directed against the common enemy, were intensely irritating, the meeting
became disorderly.  One or two wise men, however, were able to secure
order long enough to have the resolution passed for forming a Local
Interests Committee whose duty it would be to see that the people were
not sacrificed to a "soulless plutocracy."  While the names of those who
were to form the Committee were being selected, in a storm of disorder
arising from the Manitou section of the crowd, the sky overhead grew
suddenly brighter and the sun came out, bringing an instant change.  It
was as though a hand, which had hypnotized them into anger, restored them
to good-humour once again.

At this moment, to the astonishment of all, there appeared at the back
of the platform between Jowett and Halliday the lawyer, the man with a
tragic history who had been as one buried for weeks past, who had
vanished from their calculations.  It was their old champion, Ingolby.
Slowly a hush came over the vast assembly as, apparently guided by his
friends on the platform, he was given a seat on the right of the
Chairman's table.

A strange sensation, partly pleasure, partly resentment, passed through
the crowd.  Why did Ingolby come to remind them of better days gone--of
his own rashness, of what they had lost through that rashness?  Why had
he come?  They could not say and do all that they wanted with him
present.  It was like having a row in the presence of a corpse.  He had
been a hero to all in Lebanon, but he was not in the picture now.  His
day was done.  It was no place for him.  Yet it was a pleasant omen that
the sun broke clear and shining over the platform as Ingolby took his
seat.  Presently in the silence he half-turned his head, murmured
something to the Chairman, and then got to his feet, stretching out a
hand towards the crowd.

For one moment there was silence, a little awestricken, a little painful,
and then as from one man a great cheer went up.  For a moment they had
thought him inconsiderate to come among them in this crisis, for he was
no longer of their scheme of things, and must be counted out, a beaten,
battered, blind bankrupt.  Yet the sight of him on his feet was too much
for them.  Blind he might be, but there was the personality which had
conquered them in the past brave, adroit, reckless, renowned.  None of
them, or very few of them, had seen him since that night at Barbazon's
Tavern, yet in spite of his tragedy there seemed little change in him.
There was the same quirk at the corner of the mouth, the same humour in
the strong face, not so ruddy now; and strangely enough the eyes were
neither guarded by spectacles, nor were they shrunken, glazed, or
diseased, so far as could be seen.

Stretching out a hand, Ingolby gave a crisp laugh and said: "So there's
been trouble since I've been gone, has there?" The corner of his mouth
quirked, his eyelids drooped in the old quizzical way, and the crowd
laughed in spite of themselves.  What a spirit he had to take it all that
way!

"Got a little deeper in the mire, have you, boys?" he added.  "They tell
me the town's a frost just now, but it seems nice and warm here in the
sun.  Yes, boys, it's nice and warm here among you all--the same good old
crowd that's made the two towns what they are.  The same good old crowd,"
he repeated, "--and up to the same old games!"

At this point he could scarcely proceed for laughter.  "Like true
pioneers," he went on, "not satisfied with what you've got, but wanting
such a lot more--if I might say so in the language of the dictionary, a
deuce of a lot more."

Almost every sentence had been punctuated by cheers.  His personality
dominated them as aforetime with some new accent to it; his voice was
like that of one given up from the dead, yet come back from the wars
alive and loving.  They never knew what a figure he was until now when
they saw and heard him again, and realized that he was one of the few
whom the world calls leaders, because they have in them that immeasurable
sympathy which is understanding of men and matters.  Yet in the old days
there never had been the something that was in his voice now, and in his
face there was a great friendliness, a sense of companionship, a Jonathan
and David something.  He was like a comrade talking to a thousand other
comrades.  There was a new thing in him and they felt it stir them.  They
thought he had been made softer by his blindness; and they were not
wrong.  Even the Manitou section were stilled into sympathy with him.
Many of them had heard his speech in Barbazon's Tavern just before the
horseshoe struck him down, and they heard him now, much simpler in manner
and with that something in his voice and face.  Yet it made them shrink
a little, too, to see his blind eyes looking out straight before him.
It was uncanny.  Their idea was that the eyes were as before, but seeing
nothing-blank to the world.

Presently his hand shot out again.  "The same old crowd!" he said.
"Just the same--after the same old thing, wanting what we all want: these
two places, Manitou and Lebanon, to be boosted till they rule the West
and dominate the North.  It's good to see you all here again"--he spoke
very slowly--"to see you all here together looking for trouble--looking
for trouble.  There you are, Jim Barager; there you are, Bill Riley;
there you are, Mr. William John Thomas McLeary."  The last named was the
butt of every tavern and every street corner.  "There you are, Berry--old
brown Berry, my barber."

At first the crowd did not quite understand, did not realize that he was
actually pointing to the people whom he named, but presently, as Berry
the barber threw up his hands with a falsetto cry of understanding, there
was a simultaneous, wild rush forward to the platform.

"He sees, boys--he sees!" they shouted.

Ingolby's hand shot up above them with a gesture of command.

"Yes, boys, I see--I see you all.  I'm cured.  My sight's come back, and
what's more"--he snatched from his pocket a folded sheet of paper and
held it aloft "what's more, I've got my commission to do the old job
again; to boss the railways, to help the two towns.  The Mayor brought it
back from Montreal yesterday; and together, boys, together, we'll make
Manitou and Lebanon the fulcrum of the West, the swivel by which to swing
prosperity round our centre."

The platform swayed with the wild enthusiasm of the crowd storming it to
shake hands with him, when suddenly a bell rang out across the river,
wildly, clamorously.  A bell only rang like that for a fire.  Those on
the platform could see a horseman galloping across the bridge.

A moment later someone shouted, "It's the Catholic church at Manitou on
fire!"




CHAPTER XXIV

AT LONG LAST

Originally the Catholic church at Manitou had stood quite by itself,
well back from the river, but as the town grew its dignified isolation
was invaded and houses kept creeping nearer and nearer to it.  So that
when it caught fire there was general danger, because the town possessed
only a hand fire-engine.  Since the first settlement of the place there
had been but few fires, and these had had pretty much their own way.
When one broke out the plan was to form a long line of men, who passed
buckets of water between the nearest pump, well, or river, and the
burning building.  It had been useful in incipient fires, but it was
child's play in a serious outburst.  The mournful fact that Manitou had
never equipped itself with a first-class fire-engine or a fire-brigade
was now to play a great part in the future career of the two towns.
Osterhaut put the thing in a nutshell as he slithered up the main street
of Lebanon on his way to the manning of the two fire-engines at the
Lebanon fire-brigade station.

"This thing is going to link up Lebanon and Manitou like a trace-chain,"
he declared with a chuckle.  "Everything's come at the right minute.
Here's Ingolby back on the locomotive, running the good old train of
Progress, and here's Ingolby's fire-brigade, which cost Lebanon twenty
thousand dollars and himself five thousand, going to put out the fires
of hate consuming two loving hamulets.  Out with Ingolby's fire-brigade!
This is the day the doctor ordered!  Hooray!"

Osterhaut had a gift of being able to do two things at one time.  Nothing
prevented him from talking, and though it had probably never been tested,
it is quite certain he could have talked under water.  His words had been
addressed to Jowett, who drew to him on all great occasions like the
drafts of a regiment to the main body.  Jowett was often very critical of
Osterhaut's acts, words and views, but on this occasion they were of one
mind.

"I guess it's Ingolby's day all right," answered Jowett.  "When you say
'Hooray!' Osterhaut, I agree, but you've got better breath'n I have.  I
can't talk like I used to, but I'm going to ride that fire-engine to save
the old Monseenoor's church--or bust."

Both Jowett and Osterhaut belonged to the Lebanon fire-brigade, which
was composed of only a few permanent professionals, helped by capable
amateurs.  The two cronies had their way, and a few moments later,
wearing brass helmets, they were away with the engine and the hose,
leaving the less rapid members of the brigade to follow with the ladders.

"What did the Chief do?" asked Osterhaut.  "Did you see what happened to
him?"

Jowett snorted.  "What do you think Mr. Max Ingolby, Esquire, would do?
He commandeered my sulky and that rawbone I bought from the Reverend
Tripple, and away he went like greased lightning over the bridge.  I
don't know why I drove that trotter to-day, nor why I went on that sulky,
for I couldn't hear good where I was, on the outskirts of the meeting;
but I done it like as if the Lord had told me.  The Chief spotted me soon
as the fire-bell rung.  In a second he bundled me off, straddled the
sulky, and was away 'fore you could say snakes."

"I don't believe he's strong enough for all this.  He ain't got back to
where he was before the war," remarked Osterhaut sagely.

"War--that business at Barbazon's!  You call that war!  It wasn't war,"
declared Jowett spasmodically, grasping the rail of the fire-engine as
the wheel struck a stone and nearly shot them from their seats.  "It
wasn't war.  It was terrible low-down treachery.  That Gipsy gent, Fawe,
pulled the lever, but Marchand built the scaffold."

"Heard anything more about Marchand--where he is?" asked Osterhaut, as
the hoofs of the horses clattered on the bridge.

"Yes, I've heard--there's news," responded Jowett.  "He's been lying
drunk at Gautry's caboose ever since yesterday morning at five o'clock,
when he got off the West-bound train.  Nice sort of guy he is.  What's
the good of being rich, if you can't be decent Some men are born low.
They always find their level, no matter what's done for them, and
Marchand's level is the ditch."

"Gautry's tavern--that joint!" exclaimed Osterhaut with repulsion.

"Well, that ranchman, Dennis What's-his-name, is looking for him, and
Felix can't go home or to the usual places.  I dunno why he comes back at
all till this Dennis feller gits out."

"Doesn't make any bones about it, does he?  Dennis Doane's the name,
ain't it?  Marchand spoiled his wife-run away with her up along the Wind
River, eh?" asked Osterhaut.

Jowett nodded: "Yes, that's it, and Mr. Dennis Doane ain't careful;
that's the trouble.  He's looking for Marchand, and blabbing what he
means to do when he finds him.  That ain't good for Dennis.  If he kills
Marchand, it's murder, and even if the lawyers plead unwritten law, and
he ain't hung, and his wife ain't a widow, you can't have much married
life in gaol.  It don't do you any good to be punished for punishing
someone else.  Jonas George Almighty--look!  Look, Osterhaut!"

Jowett's hand was pointing towards the Catholic church, from a window
of which smoke was rolling.  "There's going to be something to do there.
It ain't a false alarm, Snorty."

"Well, this engine'll do anything you ask it," rejoined Osterhaut.  "When
did you have a fire last, Billy?" he shouted to the driver of the
engine, as the horses' feet caught the dusty road of Manitou.

"Six months," was the reply, "but she's working smooth as music.  She's
as good as anything 'twixt here and the Atlantic."

"It ain't time for Winter fires.  I wonder what set it going," said
Jowett, shaking his head ominously.  "Something wrong with the furnace,
I s'pose," returned Osterhaut.  "Probably trying the first heatup of the
Fall."

Osterhaut was right.  No one had set the church on fire.  The sexton had
lighted the furnace for the first time to test it for the Winter's
working, but had not stayed to see the result.  There was a defect in the
furnace, the place had caught fire, and some of the wooden flooring had
been burnt before the aged Monseigneur Lourde discovered it.  It was he
who had given the alarm and had rescued the silver altar-vessels from the
sacristy.

Manitou offered brute force, physical energy, native athletics, muscle
and brawn; but it was of no avail.  Five hundred men, with five hundred
buckets of water would have had no effect upon the fire at St. Michael's
Church at Manitou; willing hands and loving Christian hearts would have
been helpless to save the building without the scientific aid of the
Lebanon fire-brigade.  Ingolby, on founding the brigade, had equipped it
to the point where it could deal with any ordinary fire.  The work it had
to do at St. Michael's was critical.  If the church could not be saved,
then the wooden houses by which it was surrounded would be swept away,
and the whole town would be ablaze; for though it was Autumn, everything
was dry, and the wind was sufficient to fan and spread the flames.

Lebanon took command of the whole situation, and for the first time in
the history of the two towns men worked together under one control like
brothers.  The red-shirted river-driver from Manitou and the lawyer's
clerk from Lebanon; the Presbyterian minister and a Christian brother of
the Catholic school; a Salvation Army captain and a black-headed Catholic
shantyman; the President of the Order of Good Templars and a switchman
member of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament slaved together on
the hand-engine, to supplement the work of the two splendid engines of
the Lebanon fire-brigade; or else they climbed the roofs of houses, side
by side, to throw on the burning shingles the buckets of water handed up
to them.

For some time it seemed as though the church could not be saved.  The
fire had made good headway with the flooring, and had also made progress
in the chancel and the altar.  Skill and organization, combined with good
luck, conquered, however.  Though a portion of the roof was destroyed and
the chancel gutted, the church was not beyond repair, and a few thousand
dollars would put it right.  There was danger, however, among the smaller
houses surrounding the church, and there men from both towns worked with
great gallantry.  By one of those accidents which make fatality, a small
wooden house some distance away, with a roof as dry as wool, caught fire
from a flying cinder.  As everybody had fled from their own homes and
shops to the church, this fire was not noticed until it had made headway.
Then it was that the cries of Madame Thibadeau, who was confined to her
bed in the house opposite, were heard, and the crowd poured down towards
the burning building.  It was Gautry's "caboose."  Gautry himself had
been among the crowd at the church.

As Gautry came reeling and plunging down the street, someone shouted,
"Is there anyone in the house, Gautry?"

Gautry was speechless with drink.  He threw his hands up in the air with
a gesture of maudlin despair, and shouted something which no one
understood.  The crowd gathered like magic in the wide street before the
house--the one wide street in Manitou--from the roof and upper windows of
which flames were bursting.  Far up the street was heard the noisy
approach of the fire-engine, which now would be able to do little more
than save adjoining buildings.  Gautry, reeling, mumbling and whining,
gestured and wept.

A man shook him roughly by the shoulder.  "Brace up, get steady, you
damned old geezer!  Is there any body in the house?  Do you hear?  Is
there anybody in the house?" he roared.

Madame Thibadeau, who had dragged herself from her bed, was now at the
window of the house opposite.  Seeing Fleda Druse passing beneath, she
called to her.

"Ma'mselle, Felix Marchand is in Gautry's house--drunk!" she cried.
"He'll burn to death--but yes, burn to death."

In agitation Fleda hastened to where the stranger stood shaking old
Gautry.

"There's a man asleep inside the house," she said to the stranger, and
then all at once she realized who he was.  It was Dennis Doane, whose
wife was staying in Gabriel Druse's home: it was the husband of
Marchand's victim.

"A man in there, is there?" exclaimed Dennis.  "Well, he's got to be
saved."  He made a rush for the door.  Men called to him to come back,
that the roof would fall in.  In the smoking doorway he looked back.
"What floor?" he shouted.

From the window opposite, her fat old face lighted by the blazing roof,
Madame Thibadeau called out, "Second floor!  It's the second floor!"

In an instant Dennis was lost in the smoke and flame.

One, two, three minutes passed.  A fire-engine arrived; in a moment the
hose was paid out to the river near by, and as a fireman seized the
nozzle to train the water upon the building the roof fell in with a
crash.  At that instant Dennis stumbled out of the house, blind with
smoke, his clothes aflame, carrying a man in his arms.  A score of hands
caught them, coats smothered Dennis's burning clothes, and the man he had
rescued was carried across the street and laid upon the pavement.

"Great glory, it's Marchand!  It's Felix Marchand!" someone shouted.

"Is he dead?" asked another.

"Dead drunk," was the comment of Osterhaut, who had helped to carry him
across the street.

At that moment Ingolby appeared on the scene.  "What's all this?" he
asked.  Then he recognized Marchand.  "He's been playing with fire
again," he added sarcastically, and there was a look of contempt on his
face.

As he said it, Dennis broke through the crowd and made for Marchand.
Stooping over, he looked into Marchand's face.

"Hell and damnation--you!" he growled.  "I risked my life to save you!"

With a sudden access of rage his hand suddenly went to his hip-pocket,
but another hand was quicker.  It was that of Fleda Druse.

"No--no," she said, her fingers on his wrist.  "You have had your
revenge.  For the rest of his life he will have to bear his punishment
--that you have saved him.  Leave him alone.  It was to be.  It is fate."

Dennis Doane was not a man of great thinking capacity.  If he got a
matter into his head it stayed there till it was dislodged, and
dislodging was a real business with him.

"If you want her to live with you again, you had better let this be as it
is," whispered Fleda, for the crowd were surging round and cheering the
new hero.  "Just escaped the roof falling in," said one.

"Got the strength of two, for a drunk man weighs twice as heavy as a
sober one!" exclaimed another admiringly.

"Marchand's game is up on the Sagalac," declared a third decisively.

The excitement was so great, however, that only a very few of them knew
what they were saying, and fewer still knew that Dennis Doane had risked
his life to save the man he had been stalking for weeks past.  Marchand
had been lying on his face in the smoke-filled room when Dennis broke
into it, and he had been carried down the stairs without his face being
seen at all.

To Dennis it was as though he had been made a fool of by Fate or
Providence, or whatever controlled the destinies of men; as though the
dangerous episode had been arranged to trap him into this situation.

Ingolby drew near and laid a hand upon Dennis's arm.  Fleda's hand was on
the other arm.

"You can't kill a man and save him too," said Ingolby quietly, and
holding the abashed blue eyes of Dennis.  "There were two ways to punish
him; taking away his life at great cost, or giving it him at great cost.
If you'd taken away his life, the cost would probably have been your own
life; in giving him his life you only risked your own; you had a chance
to save it.  You're a bit scorched-hair, eyebrows, moustache, clothes
too, but he'll have brimstone inside him.  Come along.  Your wife would
rather have it this way; and so will you, to-morrow.  Come along."

Dennis suddenly swung round with a gesture of fury.  "He spoiled her-
treated her like dirt!" he cried huskily.

With savage purpose he made a movement towards where Marchand had lain;
but Marchand was gone.  With foresight Ingolby had quickly and quietly
accomplished that while Dennis's back was turned.

"You'd be treating her like a brute if you went to prison for killing
Marchand," urged Ingolby.  "Give her a chance.  She's fretting her heart
out."

"She wants to go back to Elk Mountain with you," pleaded Fleda gently.
"She couldn't do that if the law took hold of you."

"Ain't there to be any punishment for men like him?" demanded Dennis,
stubbornly yet helplessly.  "Why didn't I let him burn!  I'd have been
willing to burn myself to have seen him sizzling.  Ain't men like that to
be punished at all?"

"When he knows who has saved him, he'll sizzle inside for the rest of his
life," remarked Ingolby.  "Don't think he hasn't got a heart.  He's done
wrong and gone wrong; he has belonged to the sewer, but he isn't all bad,
and maybe this is the turning-point.  Drink'll make a man do anything."

"His kind are never sorry for what they do," commented Dennis bitterly.
"They're sorry for what comes from what they do, but not for the doing of
it.  I can't think the thing out.  It makes me sick.  I was hunting for
him to kill him; I was watching this town like a lynx, and I've been and
gone and saved his body from Hell on earth."

"Well, perhaps you've saved his soul from Hell below," said Fleda.  "Ah,
come!  Your face and hands are burned, your hair is scorched--your
clothes need mending.  Arabella is waiting for you.  Come home with
me to Arabella."

With sudden resolve Dennis squared his shoulders.  "All right," he said.
"This thing's too much for me.  I can't get the hang of it.  I've lost my
head."

"No, I won't come, I can't come now," said Ingolby, in response to an
inquiring look from Fleda.

"Not now, but before sundown, please."

As Fleda and Dennis disappeared, Ingolby looked back towards the fire.
"How good it is to see again even a sight like that," he said.  "Nothing
that the eyes see is so horrible as the pictures that come to the mind
when the eyes don't see.  As Dennis said, I can't get the hang of it, but
I'll try--I'll try."

The burning of Gautry's tavern had been conquered, though not before it
was a shell; and the houses on either side had been saved.  Lebanon had
shown itself masterful in organization, but it had also shown that that
which makes enemies is not so deep or great a thing as that which makes
friends.  Jealous, envious, narrow and bitter Manitou had been, but she
now saw Lebanon in a new light.  It was a strange truth that if Lebanon
had saved the whole town of Manitou, it would not have been the same to
the people as the saving of the church.  Beneath everything in Manitou--
beneath its dirt and its drunkenness, its irresponsibility and the signs
of primeval savagery which were part of its life, there was the tradition
of religion, the almost fanatical worship of that which was their master,
first and last, in spite of all--the Church.  Not one of its citizens but
would have turned with horror from the man who cursed his baptism; not
one but would want the last sacrament when his time came.  Lebanon had
saved the Catholic church, the temple of their faith, and in an hour was
accomplished what years had not wrought.

The fire at the church was out.  A few houses had been destroyed, and
hundreds of others had been saved.  The fire-brigade of Lebanon, with its
two engines, had performed prodigies of valour.  The work done, the men
marched back, but with Osterhaut sitting on one fire-engine and Jowett on
the other, through crowds of cheering, roaring workmen, rivermen,
shantymen, and black-eyed habitants.  When Ingolby walked past Barbazon's
Tavern arm in arm with Monseigneur Lourde, to the tiny house where the
good priest lived, the old man's face beaming with gratitude, and with a
piety which was his very life, the jubilant crowd followed them to the
very door.  There the sainted pioneer expressed the feeling of the moment
when he raised his hands in benediction over them and said:

"Peace be unto you and the blessings of peace; and the Lord make his face
to shine upon you and give you peace now and for ever more."




CHAPTER XXV

MAN PROPOSES

Before sunset, as Ingolby had promised, he made his way towards Gabriel
Druse's house.  A month had gone since he had left its hospitality
behind.  What had happened between that time and this day of fate for
Lebanon and Manitou?

It is not a long story, and needs but a brief backward look.  This had
happened:

The New York expert performed the operation upon Ingolby's eyes,
announced it successful, declared that his sight would be restored, and
then vanished with a thousand dollars in his pocket.  For days thereafter
the suspense was almost more than Fleda could bear.  She grew suddenly
thin and a little worn, and her big eyes had that look of yearning which
only comes to those whose sorrow is for another.  Old Gabriel Druse was
emphatic in his encouragement, but his face reflected the trouble in that
of his daughter.  He knew well that if Ingolby remained blind he would
never marry Fleda, though he also knew well that, with her nature, almost
fanatical in its convictions, she would sacrifice herself, if sacrifice
was the name for it.  The New York expert had prophesied and promised,
but who could tell!  There was the chance of failure, and the vanished
eye-surgeon had the thousand dollars in his pocket.

Two people, however, were cheerful; they were Ingolby and Jim.  Jim went
about the place humming a nigger melody to himself, and twice he brought
Berry the barber to play to his Chief on the cottonfield fiddle.  Nigger
Jim, though it was two generations gone which linked him with the wilds
of the Gold Coast, was the slave of fanatical imagination, and in
Ingolby's own mind there was the persistent superstition that all would
be well, because of a dream he had had.  He dreamed he heard his dead
mother's voice in the room, where he lay.  She had called him by name,
and had said: "Look at me, Max," and he had replied, "I cannot see," and
she had said again,

"Look at me, my son!"  Then he thought that he had looked at her, had
seen her face clearly, and it was as the last time they parted, shining
and sweet and good.  She had said to him in days long gone, that if she
could ever speak to him across the Void, she would; and he had the
fullest belief now that she had done so.

So it was that this dreadnought of industry and organization, in dock for
repairs, cheerfully awaited the hour when he would be launched again upon
the tide of work-healthy, healed and whole.  At last there came the day
when, for an instant, the bandages could be removed.  There were present,
Rockwell, Fleda, and Jim--Jim, pale but grinning, at the foot of the bed;
Fleda, with her back against the door and her hands clenched behind her
as though to shut out the invading world.  Never had her heart beat as it
beat now, but her eyes were steady and bright.  There was in them,
however, a kind of pleading look.  She could not see Ingolby's face; did
not want to see it when the bandages were taken off; but at the critical
moment she shut her eyes and her back held the door, as though a thousand
were trying to force an entrance.

The first words after the bandages were removed came from Ingolby.

"Well, Jim, you look all right!" he said.

Swaying as she went, Fleda half-blindly moved towards a chair near by and
sank into it.  She scarcely heard Jim's reply.

"Looking all right yourself, Chief.  You won't see much change in this
here old town."

Ingolby's hand was in Rockwell's.  "It's all right, isn't it?" he asked.

"You can see it is," answered Rockwell with a chuckle in his voice, and
then suddenly he put the bandages round Ingolby's eyes again.  "That's
enough for today," he said.

A moment later the bandages were secured and Rockwell stood back from the
bed.

"In another week you'll see as well as ever you did," Rockwell said.
"I'm proud of you."

"Well, I hope I'll see a little better than ever I did," remarked Ingolby
meaningly.  "I was pretty short-sighted before."

At that instant he heard Fleda's footstep approaching the bed.  His
senses had grown very acute since the advent of his blindness.  He held
out his hand into space.

"What a nice room this is!" he said as her fingers slid into his.  "It's
the nicest room I was ever in.  It's too nice for me.  In a few days I'll
hand the lease over again to its owner, and go back to the pigsty Jim
keeps in Stormont Street."

"Well, there ain't any pigs in that sty now, Chief; but it's all ready,"
said Jim, indignant and sarcastic.

It was a lucky speech.  It broke the spell of emotion which was greatly
straining everybody's endurance.

"That's one in the eye for somebody," remarked Rockwell drily.

"What would you like for lunch?" asked Fleda, letting go Ingolby's hand,
but laying her fingers on his arm for a moment.

What would he like for lunch!  Here was a man back from the Shadows, from
broken hopes and shattered career, from the helplessness and eternal
patience of the blind; here he was on the hard, bright highroad again,
with a procession of restored things coming towards him, with life and
love within his grasp; and the woman to whom it mattered most of all, who
was worth it all, and more than all where he was concerned, said to him
in this moment of revelation, "What would you like for lunch?"

With an air as casually friendly as her own, he put another hand on the
fingers lying on his arm, patted them, and said gaily, "Anything I can
see.  As a drover once said to me, 'I can clean as fur as I can reach.'"

In just such a temper also they had parted when he went back to his
"pigsty" with Jim.  To Gabriel Druse he had said all that one man might
say to another without excess of feeling; to Madame Bulteel he had given
a gold pencil which he had always worn; to Fleda he gave nothing, said
little, but the few words he did say told the story, if not the whole
story.

"It's a nice room," he said, and she had flushed at his words, "and I've
had the best time of my life in it.  I'd like to buy it, but I know it's
not for sale.  Love and money couldn't buy it--isn't that so?"

Then had--come days in his own home, still with bandaged eyes, but with
the bandages removed for increasing hours every day; yet no one at all in
the town knowing the truth except the Mayor, Halliday the lawyer, and one
or two others who kept the faith until Ingolby gave them the word to
speak.  Then had come the Mayor's visit to Montreal, the great meeting,
the fire at Manitou, and now Ingolby on the way to his tryst with Fleda.
They had met twice only since he had left Gabriel Druse's house, and on
the last occasion they had looked each other full in the eyes, and
Ingolby had said to her in the moment they had had alone:

"I'm going to get back, but I can't do it without you."

To this her reply had been, "I hope it's not so bad as that," and she had
looked provokingly in his eyes.  Now she knew beyond peradventure that he
cared for her, and she was almost provoked at herself that when he was in
such danger of losing his sight for ever she had caught his head to her
breast in the passion of the moment.  Many a time when he had been
asleep, with gentle fingers she had caressed his hands, his head, his
face; but that did not count, because he did not know.  He did, however,
know of that moment when her passionate heart broke over him in
tenderness; and she tried to make him think, by things said since,
that it was only pity for his sufferings which made her do it.

Ingolby thought of all these things, but in a spirit of understanding,
as he went to his tryst with her at sunset on the day when Lebanon and
Manitou were reconciled.

                    .........................

He met her walking among the trees, very near the place where they had
had their first long talk, months before, when Jethro Fawe was a prisoner
in the Hut in the Woods.  Then it was warm, singing Summer; now, beneath
the feet the red and brown leaves rustled, the trees were stretching up
gaunt arms to the Winter, the woods were no longer vocal, and the singing
birds had fled, though here and there a black squirrel, not yet gone to
Winter quarters, was busy and increasing his stores.  A hedgehog scuttled
across his path.  He smiled as he remembered telling Fleda that once,
when he was a little boy, he had eaten hedgehog, and she had asked him if
he remembered the Gipsy name for hedgehog--hotchewitchi was the word.
Now, as the shapeless creature made for its hole, it was significant of
the history of his life during the past Summer.  How long it seemed since
that day when love first peeped forth from their hearts like a young face
at the lattice of a sunlit window.  Fleda had warned him of trouble, and
that trouble had come!

In his mind she was a woman like none he had ever known; she could
think greatly, act largely, give tremendously.  As he stood waiting, the
wonderful, ample life of her seemed to come like a wave towards him.  In
his philosophy, intellect alone had never been the governing influence.
Intellect must find its play through the senses, be vitalized by the
elements of physical life, or it could not prevail.  There was not one
sensual strain in him, but with a sensuous mind he loved the vital thing.
He was sure that presently Gabriel Druse would disappear, leaving her
behind with him.  That was what he meant to ask her to-day--to be and
stay with him always.  He knew that the Romanys were gathering in the
prairie.  They had been heard of here and there, and some of them
had been seen along the Sagalac, though he knew nothing of that dramatic
incident in the woods when Fleda was kidnapped and Jethro Fawe vanished
from the scene.

As Fleda came towards him, under the same trees which had shielded her
from the sun months ago--now nearly naked and bare--something in her look
and bearing sharply caught his interest.  He asked himself what it was.
So often a face familiar over half a lifetime perhaps, suddenly at some
new angle, or because, by chance, one has looked at it searchingly, shows
a new expression, a new contour never before observed, giving fresh
significance to the character.  There was that in Ingolby's mind, a depth
of desire, a resolve to stake two lives against the chances of Fate,
which made him look at Fleda now with a revealing intensity.  What was
the new thing in her carriage which captured his eye?  Presently it
flashed upon him--memories of Mexico and the Southern United States;
native women with jars of water upon their heads; the erect, well-
balanced form; the sure, sinuous movement; the step measured, yet free;
the dignity come of carrying the head as though it were a pillar of an
Athenian temple, one of the beautiful Caryatides yonder by the AEgean
Sea.

It smote him as a sudden breath of warm air strikes a face in the night
coolness of the veldt.  His pulses quickened, he flushed with the soft
shock of it.  There she was, refined, civilized, gowned like other women,
with all the manners and details of civilization and social life about
her; yet, in spite of it all, she did not belong; there was about her
still something remote and alien.  It had not to do with appearance
alone, though her eyes were so vivid, and her expression so swift and
varying; it was to be found in the whole presence--something mountain-
like and daring, something Eastern and reserved and secret, something
remote--brooding like a Sphinx, and prophetic like a Sibyl.  But suppose
that in days to come the thing that did not belong, which was of the
East, of the tan, of the River Starzke; suppose that it should--

With a great effort he drove apprehension and the instant's confused
wonder far away, and when, come close to him, she smiled, showing the
perfect white teeth, and her eyes softened to a dreamy regard of him, all
he had ever felt for her in the past months seemed concentrated into this
one moment.  Yet he did not look like a languishing lover; rather like
one inflamed with a great idea or stirred to a great resolve.

For quite a minute they stood gazing as though they would read the whole
truth in each other's eyes.  She was all eager, yet timorous; he was
resolved; yet now, when the great moment had come, as it were, like a
stammerer fearing the sound of his own voice.  There was so much to say
that he could not speak.

She broke the spell.  "I am here.  Can't you see me?" she asked in a
quizzical, playful tone, her lips trembling a little, but with a smile in
her eyes which she vainly tried to veil.

She had said the one thing which above all others could have lifted the
situation to its real significance.  A few weeks ago the eyes now looking
into hers and telling a great story were sealed with night, and the mind
behind was fretted by the thought of a perpetual darkness.  All the
tragedy of the past rushed into his mind now, and gave all that was
between them, or was to be between them, its real meaning.  A beautiful
woman is dear to man simply as woman, and not as the woman; virtue has
slain its thousands, but physical charm has slain its tens of thousands!
Whatever Ingolby's defects, however, infinitely more than the girl's
beauty, more than the palpitating life in her, than red lips and bright
eye, than warm breast and clasping hand, was something beneath all which
would last, or should last, when the hand was palsied and the eye was
dim.

"I am here.  Can't you see me?"

All that he had regained in life in her little upper room rushed upon
him, and with outstretched arms and in a voice choked with feeling, he
said:

"See you!  Dear God--To see you and all the world once more!  It is being
born again to me.  I haven't learned to talk in my new world yet; but I
know three words of the language.  I love you.  Come--I'll be good to
you."

She drew back from him, and her look said that she would read him to the
uttermost word in his life's book, would see the heart of this wonderful
thing; and then with a hungry cry, she flung her arms around his neck and
pressed her wet eyes against his flushed cheek.

A half-hour later, as they wandered back to the house he suddenly
stopped, put his hands on her shoulders, looked earnestly in her eyes,
and said:

"God's good to me.  I hope I'll remember that."

"You won't be so blind as to forget," she answered, and she wound her
fingers in his with a feeling which was more than the simple love of
woman for man.  "I've got much more to remember than you have,"
she added.  Suddenly she put both hands upon his breast.  "You don't
understand; you can't understand, but I tell you that I shall have to
fight hard if I am to be all you want me to be.  I have got a past to
forget; you have a past you want to remember--that's the difference.
I must tell you the truth: it's in my veins, that old life, in spite of
all.  Listen.  I ought to have told you, and I meant to tell you before
this happened, but when I saw you there, and you held out your arms to
me, I forgot everything.  Yet still I must tell you now, though perhaps
you will hate me when you know.  The old life--I hate it, but it calls
me, and I have an impulse to go back to it even though I hate it.
Listen.  I'll tell you what happened the other day.  It's terrible, but
it's true.  I was walking in the woods--"

Thereupon she told him of her being seized and carried to the Gipsy camp,
and of all that happened there to the last detail.  She even had the
courage to tell of all she felt there; but when she had finished, with a
half-frightened look in her eyes, her face pale, and her hands clasped
before her, he did not speak for a minute.  Suddenly, however, he seemed
to tower over her, his two big hands were raised as though they would
strike, and then the palms spread out and enclosed her cheeks lovingly,
and his eyes fastened upon hers.

"I know," he said gently.  "I always understood--everything; but you'll
never have the same fight again, because I'll be with you.  You
understand, Fleda--I'll be with you."

With an exclamation of gratitude she nestled into his arms.

Before the thrill of his embrace had passed from their pulses, they heard
the breaking of twigs under a quick footstep, and Rhodo stood before
them.  "Come," he said to Fleda.  His voice was as solemn and strange as
his manner.  "Come!" he repeated peremptorily.

Fleda sprang to his side.  "Is it my father?  What has happened?" she
cried.

The old man waved her aside, and pointed toward the house.




CHAPTER XXVI

THE SLEEPER

The Ry of Rys sat in his huge armchair, his broad-brimmed hat on his knee
in front of him.  One hand rested on the chair-arm, the other clasped the
hat as though he would put it on, but his head was fallen forward on his
breast.

It was a picture of profound repose, but it was the repose of death.
It was evident that the Ry had prepared to leave the house, had felt a
sudden weakness, and had taken to his chair to recover himself.  As was
evident from the normal way in which his fingers held his hat, and his
hand rested on the chair-arm, death had come as gently as a beam of
light.  With his stick lying on the table beside him, and his hat on his
knee, he was like one who rested a moment before renewing a journey.
There could not have been a pang in his passing.  He had gone as most men
wish to go--in the midst of the business of life, doing the usual things,
and so passing into the sphere of Eternity as one would go from this room
to that.  Only a few days before had he yielded up his temporary position
as chief constable, and had spent almost every hour since in conference
with Rhodo.  What he had planned would never be known to his daughter
now.  It was Rhodo himself who had found his master with head bowed
before the Master of all men.

Before Fleda entered the room she knew what awaited her; a merciful
intuition had blunted the shock to her senses.  Yet when she saw the Ry
on his throne of death a moan broke from her lips like that of one who
sees for the last time someone indelibly dear, and turns to face strange
paths with uncertain feet.  She did not go to the giant figure seated in
the chair.  In what she did there was no panic or hysteria of lacerated
heart and shocked sense; she only sank to her knees in the room a few
feet away from him, and looked at him.

"Father!  Oh, Ry!  Oh, my Ry!" she whispered in agony and admiration,
too, and kept on whispering.

Fleda had whispered to him in such awe, not only because he was her
father, but because he was so much a man among men, a giant, with a
great, lumbering mind, slow to conceive, but moving in a large,
impressive way when once conception came.  To her he had been more than
father; he had been a patriarch, a leader, a viking, capable of the fury
of a Scythian lord, but with the tenderness of a peasant father to his
first child.

"My Ry!  My father!  Oh, my Ry of Rys!" she kept murmuring to herself.

On either side of her, but a few feet behind, stood Rhodo and Ingolby.

Presently in a low, firm voice Rhodo spoke.

"The Ry of Rys is dead, but his daughter must stand upon her feet, and in
his place speak for him.  Is it not well with him?  He sleeps.  Sleep is
better than pain.  Let his daughter speak."

Slowly Fleda arose.  Not so much what Rhodo had said as the meaning in
his voice, aroused her to a situation which she must face.  Rhodo had
said that she must speak for her father.  What did it mean?

"What is it you wish to say to me, Rhodo?" she asked.

"What I have to say is for your ears only," was the low reply.

"I will go," said Ingolby.  "But is it a time for talk?" He made a
motion towards the dead man.  "There are things to be said which can only
be said now, and things to be done which can only be done according to
what is said now," grimly remarked Rhodo.

"I wish you to remain," said Fleda to Ingolby with resolution in her
bearing as she placed herself beside the chair where the dead man sat.
"What is it you want to say to me?" she asked Rhodo again.

"Must a Romany bare his soul before a stranger?" replied Rhodo.  "Must a
man who has been the voice of the Ry of Rys for the long years have no
words face to face with the Ry's daughter now that he is gone?  Must the
secret of the dead be spoken before the robber of the dead--"

It was plain that some great passion was working in the man, that it was
wise and right to humour him, and Ingolby intervened.

"I will not remain," he said to Fleda.  To Rhodo he added: "I am not a
robber of the dead.  That's high-faluting talk.  What I have of his was
given to me by him.  She was for me if I could win her.  He said so.
This is a free country.  I will wait outside," he added to Fleda.

She made a gesture as though she would detain him, but she realized that
the hour of her fate was at hand, and that the old life and the new were
face to face, Rhodo standing for one and she for the other.  When they
were alone, Rhodo's eyes softened, and he came near to her.  "You asked
me what I wished to tell you," he said.  "See then, I want to tell you
that it is for you to take the place of the dead Ry.  Everywhere in the
world where the Romanys wander they will rejoice to hear that a Druse
rules us still.  The word of the Ry of Rys was law; what he wished to be
done was done; what he wished to be undone was undone.  Because of you he
hid himself from his people; because of you I was for ever wandering,
keeping the peace by lies for love of the Ry and for love of you."

His voice shook.  "Since your mother died--and she was kin of mine--you
were to me the soul of the Romany people everywhere.  As a barren woman
loves a child, so I loved you.  I loved you for the sake of your mother.
I gave her to the Ry, who was the better man, that she might be great and
well placed.  So it is I would have you be ruler over us, and I would
serve you as I served your father until I, also, fall asleep."

"It is too late," Fleda answered, and there was great emotion in her
voice now.  "I am no longer a Romany.  I am my father's daughter, but
I have not been a Romany since I was ill in England.  I will not go back;
I shall go with the man I love, to be his wife, here, in the Gorgio
world.  You believed my father when he spoke; well, believe me--I speak
the truth.  It was my father's will that I should be what I am, and do
what I am now doing.  Nothing can alter me."

"If it be that Jethro Fawe is still alive he is free from the Sentence of
the Patrin, and he will become the Ry of Rys," said the old man with
sudden passion.

"It may be so.  I hope it is so.  He is of the blood, and I pray that
Jethro has escaped the sentence which my father passed," answered Fleda.
"By the River Starzke it was ordained that he should succeed my father,
marrying me.  Let him succeed."

The old man raised both hands, and made a gesture as though he would
drive her from his sight.

"My life has been wasted," he said.  "I wish I were also in death beside
him."  He gazed at the dead man with the affection of a clansman for his
chief.

Fleda came up close to him.  "Rhodo!  Rhodo!" she said gently and sadly.
"Think of him and all he was, and not of me.  Suppose I had died in
England--think of it in that way.  Let me be dead to you and to all
Romanys, and then you will think no evil."

The old man drew himself up.  "Let no more be said," he replied.  "Let it
end here.  The Ry of Rys is dead.  His body and all things that are his
belong now to his people.  Say farewell to him," he added, with
authority.

"You will take him away?" Fleda asked.

Rhodo inclined his head.  "When the doctors have testified, we will take
him with us.  Say your farewells," he added, with gesture of command.

A cry of protest rose from Fleda's soul, and yet she knew it was what the
Ry would have wished, that he should be buried by his own people where
they would.

Slowly she drew near to the dead man, and leaned over and kissed his
shaggy head.  She did not seek to look into the sightless eyes; the
illusion of sleep was so great that she wished to keep this picture of
him while she lived; but she touched the cold hand which held the hat
upon the knee and the other that lay upon the chair-arm.  Then, with a
mist before her eyes, she passed from the room.




CHAPTER XXVII

THE WORLD FOR SALE

As though by magic, like the pictures of a dream, out of the horizon,
in caravans, by train, on horseback, the Romany people gathered to the
obsequies of their chief and king.  For months, hundreds of them had not
been very far away.  Unobtrusive, silent, they had waited, watched, till
the Ry of Rys should come back home again.  Home to them was the open
road where Romanys trailed or camped the world over.

A clot of blood in the heart had been the verdict of the doctors; and
Lebanon and Manitou had watched the Ry of Rys carried by his own people
to the open prairie near to Tekewani's reservation.  There, in the hours
between the midnight and the dawn, all Gabriel Druse's personal
belongings--the clothes, the chair in which he sat, the table at which he
ate, the bed in which he slept, were brought forth and made into a pyre,
as was the Romany way.  Nothing personal of his chattels remained behind.
The walking-stick which lay beside him in the moment of his death was the
last thing placed upon the pyre.  Then came the match, and the flames
made ashes of all those things which once he called his own.  Standing
apart, Tekewani and his braves watched the ceremonial of fire with a
sympathy born of primitive custom.  It was all in tune with the
traditions of their race.

As dawn broke, and its rosy light valanced the horizon, a great
procession moved away from the River Sagalac towards the East, to which
all wandering and Oriental peoples turn their eyes.  With it, all that
was mortal of Gabriel Druse went to its hidden burial.  Only to the
Romany people would his last resting-place be known; it would be as
obscure as the grave of him who was laid:

     "By Nebo's lonely mountain, On this side Jordan's wave."

Many people from Manitou and Lebanon watched the long procession pass,
and two remained until the last wagon had disappeared over the crest of
the prairie.  Behind them were the tents of the Indian reservation;
before them was the alert morn and the rising sun; and ever moving on to
the rest his body had earned was the great chief lovingly attended by his
own Romany folk; while his daughter, forbidden to share in the ceremonial
of race, remained with the stranger.

With a face as pale and cold as the western sky, the desolation of this
last parting and a tragic renunciation giving her a deathly beauty, Fleda
stood beside the man who must hereafter be, to her, father, people, and
all else.  Shuddering with the pain of this hour, yet resolved to begin
the new life here and now, as the old life faded before her eyes, she
turned to him, and, with the passing of the last Romany over the crest of
the hill, she said bravely:

"I want to help you do the big things.  They will be yours.  The world is
all for you yet."

Ingolby shook his head.  He had had his Moscow.

His was the true measure of things now; his lesson had been learned;
values were got by new standards; he knew in a real sense the things that
mattered.

"I have you--the world for sale!" he said, with the air of one
discarding a useless thing.




GLOSSARY OF ROMANY WORDS

Bosh----fiddle, noise, music.
Bor----an exclamation (literally, a hedge).

Chal----lad, fellow.
Chi----child, daughter, girl.

Dadia----an exclamation.
Dordi----an exclamation.

Hotchewitchi----hedgehog.

Kek----no, none.
Koppa----blanket.

Mi Duvel----My God.

Patrin----small heaps of grass, or leaves, or twigs, or string, laid at
        cross-roads to indicate the route that must be followed.
Pral----brother or friend.

Rinkne rakli----pretty girl.
Ry----King or ruler.

Tan----tent, camp.

Vellgouris----fair.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Agony in thinking about the things we're never going to do
I don't believe in walking just for the sake of walking
It's no good simply going--you've got to go somewhere
Most honest thing I ever heard, but it's not the most truthful
Women may leave you in the bright days






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "WORLD FOR SALE":

Agony in thinking about the things we're never going to do
I don't believe in walking just for the sake of walking
It's no good simply going--you've got to go somewhere
Most honest thing I ever heard, but it's not the most truthful
Saw how futile was much competition
They think that if a vote's worth having it's worth paying for
When you strike your camp, put out the fires
Women may leave you in the bright days
You never can really overtake a newspaper lie






YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK

[BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER]

By Gilbert Parker




CONTENTS:

Volume 1.
PROEM
I.        "PIONEERS, O PIONEERS"
II.       CLOSING THE DOORS
III.      THE LOGAN TRIAL AND WHAT CAME OF IT
IV.       "STRENGTH SHALL BE GIVEN THEE"
V.        A STORY TO BE TOLD

Volume 2.
VI.       "HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON"
VII.      A WOMAN'S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE
VIII.     ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER
IX.       NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY
X.        "S. O. S."
XI.       IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER

Volume 3.
XII.      AT THE RECEIPT OF CUSTOM
XIII.     KITTY SPEAKS HER MIND AGAIN
XIV.      AWAITING THE VERDICT
XV.       "MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM"
XVI.      "'TWAS FOR YOUR PLEASURE YOU CAME HERE, YOU GO BACK FOR MINE"
XVII.     WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT?
EPILOGUE




INTRODUCTION

This volume contains two novels dealing with the life of prairie people
in the town of Askatoon in the far West. 'The World for Sale' and the
latter portion of 'The Money Master' deal with the same life, and 'The
Money Master' contained some of the characters to be found in 'Wild
Youth'.  'The World for Sale' also was a picture of prairie country with
strife between a modern Anglo-Canadian town and a French-Canadian town in
the West.  These books are of the same people; but 'You Never Know Your
Luck' and 'Wild Youth' have several characters which move prominently
through both.

In the introduction to 'The World for Sale' in this series, I drew a
description of prairie life, and I need not repeat what was said there.
'In You Never Know Your Luck' there is a Proem which describes briefly
the look of the prairie and suggests characteristics of the life of the
people.  The basis of the book has a letter written by a wife to her
husband at a critical time in his career when he had broken his promise
to her.  One or two critics said the situation is impossible, because no
man would carry a letter unopened for a long number of years.  My reply
is: that it is exactly what I myself did.  I have still a letter written
to me which was delivered at my door sixteen years ago.  I have never
read it, and my reason for not reading it was that I realised, as I
think, what its contents were.  I knew that the letter would annoy, and
there it lies.  The writer of the letter who was then my enemy is now my
friend.  The chief character in the book, Crozier, was an Irishman, with
all the Irishman's cleverness, sensitiveness, audacity, and timidity; for
both those latter qualities are characteristic of the Irish race, and as
I am half Irish I can understand why I suppressed a letter and why
Crozier did.  Crozier is the type of man that comes occasionally to the
Dominion of Canada; and Kitty Tynan is the sort of girl that the great
West breeds.  She did an immoral thing in opening the letter that Crozier
had suppressed, but she did it in a good cause--for Crozier's sake; she
made his wife write another letter, and she placed it again in the
envelope for Crozier to open and see.  Whatever lack of morality there
was in her act was balanced by the good end to the story, though it meant
the sacrifice of Kitty's love for Crozier, and the making of his wife
happy once more.

As for 'Wild Youth' I make no apology for it.  It is still fresh in the
minds of the American public, and it is true to the life.  Some critics
frankly called it melodramatic.  I do not object to the term.  I know
nothing more melodramatic than certain of the plots of Shakespeare's
plays.  Thomas Hardy is melodramatic; Joseph Conrad is melodramatic;
Balzac was melodramatic, and so were Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and
Sir Walter Scott.  The charge of melodrama is not one that should
disturb a writer of fiction.  The question is, are the characters
melodramatic.  Will anyone suggest to me the marriage of a girl of
seventeen with a man over sixty is melodramatic.  It may be, but I think
it tragical, and so it was in this case.  As for Orlando Guise, I
describe the man as I knew him, and he is still alive.  Some comments
upon the story suggested that it was impossible for a man to spend the
night on the prairie with a woman whom he loved without causing her to
forget her marriage vows.  It is not sentimental to say that is nonsense.
It is a prurient mind that only sees evil in a situation of the sort.
Why it should be desirable to make a young man and woman commit a
misdemeanor to secure the praise of a critic is beyond imagination.  It
would be easy enough to do.  I did it in The Right of Way.  I did it in
others of my books.  What happens to one man and one woman does not
necessarily happen to another.  There are men who, for love of a woman,
would not take advantage of her insecurity.  There are others who would.
In my books I have made both classes do their will, and both are true to
life.  It does not matter what one book is or is not, but it does matter
that an author writes his book with a sense of the fitting and the true.

Both these books were written to present that side of life in Canada
which is not wintry and forbidding.  There is warmth of summer in both
tales, and thrilling air and the beauty of the wild countryside.  As for
the cold, it is severe in most parts of Canada, but the air is dry, and
the sharpness is not felt as it is in this damper climate of England.
Canadians feel the cold of a March or November day in London far more
than the cold of a day in Winnipeg, with the thermometer many degrees
below zero.  Both these books present the summer side of Canada, which is
as delightful as that of any climate in the world; both show the modern
western life which is greatly changed since the days when Pierre roamed
the very fields where these tales take place.  It should never be
forgotten that British Columbia has a climate like that of England,
where, on the Coast, it is never colder than here, and where there is
rain instead of snow in winter.

There is much humour and good nature in the West, and this also I tried
to bring out in these two books; and Askatoon is as cosmopolitan as
London.  Canada in the West has all races, and it was consistent of me to
give a Chinaman of noble birth a part to play in the tragicomedy.  I have
a great respect for the Chinaman, and he is a good servant and a faithful
friend.  Such a Chinaman as Li Choo I knew in British Columbia, and all I
did was to throw him on the Eastern side of the Rockies, a few miles from
the border of the farthest Western province.  The Chinaman's death was
faithful in its detail, and it was true to his nature.  He had to die,
and with the old pagan philosophy, still practised in China and Japan, he
chose the better way, to his mind.  Princes still destroy themselves in
old Japan, as recent history proves.



YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK

Volume 1.

PROEM
I.        "PIONEERS, O PIONEERS"
II.       CLOSING THE DOORS
III.      THE LOGAN TRIAL AND WHAT CAME OF IT
IV.       "STRENGTH SHALL BE GIVEN THEE"
V.        A STORY TO BE TOLD



PROEM

Have you ever seen it in reaping-time?  A sea of gold it is, with gentle
billows telling of sleep and not of storm, which, like regiments afoot,
salute the reaper and say, "All is fulfilled in the light of the sun and
the way of the earth; let the sharp knife fall."  The countless million
heads are heavy with fruition, and sun glorifies and breeze cradles them
to the hour of harvest.  The air-like the tingle of water from a
mountain-spring in the throat of the worn wayfarer, bringing a sense of
the dust of the world flushed away.

Arcady?  Look closely.  Like islands in the shining yellow sea, are
houses--sometimes in a clump of trees, sometimes only like bare-backed
domesticity or naked industry in the workfield.  Also rising here and
there in the expanse, clouds that wind skyward, spreading out in a
powdery mist.  They look like the rolling smoke of incense, of sacrifice.
Sacrifice it is.  The vast steam-threshers are mightily devouring what
their servants, the monster steam-reapers, have gleaned for them.  Soon,
when September comes, all that waving sea will be still.  What was gold
will still be a rusted gold, but near to the earth-the stubble of the
corn now lying in vast garners by the railway lines, awaiting transport
east and west and south and across the seas.

Not Arcady this, but a land of industry in the grip of industrialists,
whose determination to achieve riches is, in spite of themselves,
chastened by the magnitude and orderly process of nature's travail which
is not pain.  Here Nature hides her internal striving under a smother of
white for many months in every year, when what is now gold in the sun
will be a soft--sometimes, too, a hard-shining coverlet like impacted
wool.  Then, instead of the majestic clouds of incense from the
threshers, will rise blue spiral wreaths of smoke from the lonely home.
There the farmer rests till spring, comforting himself in the thought
that while he waits, far under the snow the wheat is slowly expanding;
and as in April, the white frost flies out of the soil into the sun, it
will push upward and outward, green and vigorous, greeting his eye with
the "What cheer, partner!" of a mate in the scheme of nature.

Not Arcady; and yet many of the joys of Arcady are here--bright, singing
birds, wide adventurous rivers, innumerable streams, the squirrel in the
wood and the bracken, the wildcat stealing through the undergrowth, the
lizard glittering by the stone, the fish leaping in the stream, the
plaint of the whippoorwill, the call of the bluebird, the golden flash of
the oriole, the honk of the wild geese overhead, the whirr of the mallard
from the sedge.  And, more than all, a human voice declaring by its joy
in song that not only God looks upon the world and finds it very good.




CHAPTER I

"PIONEERS, O PIONEERS"

If you had stood on the borders of Askatoon, a prairie town, on the
pathway to the Rockies one late August day not many years ago, you would
have heard a fresh young human voice singing into the morning, as its
possessor looked, from a coat she was brushing, out over the "field of
the cloth of gold," which your eye has already been invited to see.  With
the gift of singing for joy at all, you should be able to sing very
joyously at twenty-two.  This morning singer was just that age; and if
you had looked at the golden carpet of wheat stretching for scores of
miles, before you looked at her, you would have thought her curiously in
tone with the scene.  She was a symphony in gold--nothing less.  Her
hair, her cheeks, her eyes, her skin, her laugh, her voice they were all
gold.  Everything about her was so demonstratively golden that you might
have had a suspicion it was made and not born; as though it was unreal,
and the girl herself a proper subject of suspicion.  The eyelashes were
so long and so black, the eyes were so topaz, the hair was so like such a
cloud of gold as would be found on Joan of Are as seen by a mediaeval
painter, that an air of faint artificiality surrounded what was in every
other way a remarkable effort of nature to give this region, where she
was so very busy, a keynote.

Poseurs have said that nature is garish or exaggerated more often than
not; but it is a libel.  She is aristocratic to the nth degree, and is
never over done; courage she has, but no ostentation.  There was,
however, just a slight touch of over-emphasis in this singing-girl's
presentation--that you were bound to say, if you considered her quite
apart from her place in this nature-scheme.  She was not wholly
aristocratic; she was lacking in that high, social refinement which would
have made her gold not so golden, her black eyelashes not so black.
Being unaristocratic is not always a matter of birth, though it may be a
matter of parentage.

Her parentage was honest and respectable and not exalted.  Her father had
been an engineer, who had lost his life on a new railway of the West.
His widow had received a pension from the company insufficient to
maintain her, and so she kept boarders, the coat of one of whom her
daughter was now brushing as she sang.  The widow herself was the origin
of the girl's slight disqualification for being of that higher circle of
selection which nature arranges long before society makes its judicial
decision.  The father had been a man of high intelligence, which his
daughter to a real degree inherited; but the mother, as kind a soul as
ever lived, was a product of southern English rural life--a little
sumptuous, but wholesome, and for her daughter's sake at least, keeping
herself well and safely within the moral pale in the midst of marked
temptations.  She was forty-five, and it said a good deal for her ample
but proper graces that at forty-five she had numerous admirers.  The girl
was English in appearance, with a touch perhaps of Spanish--why, who can
say?  Was it because of those Spanish hidalgoes wrecked on the Irish
coast long since?  Her mind and her tongue, however, were Irish like her
father's.  You would have liked her, everybody did,--yet you would have
thought that nature had failed in self-confidence for once, she was so
pointedly designed to express the ancient dame's colour-scheme, even to
the delicate auriferous down on her youthful cheek and the purse-proud
look of her faintly retrousse nose; though in fact she never had had a
purse and scarcely needed one.  In any case she had an ample pocket in
her dress.

This fairly full description of her is given not because she is the most
important person in the story, but because the end of the story would
have been entirely different had it not been for her; and because she
herself was one of those who are so much the sport of circumstances or
chance that they express the full meaning of the title of this story.
As a line beneath the title explains, the tale concerns a matrimonial
deserter.  Certainly this girl had never deserted matrimony, though she
had on more than one occasion avoided it; and there had been men mean and
low enough to imagine they might allure her to the conditions of
matrimony without its status.

As with her mother the advertisement of her appearance was wholly
misleading.  A man had once said to her that "she looked too gay to be
good," but in all essentials she was as good as she was gay, and indeed
rather better.  Her mother had not kept boarders for seven years without
getting some useful knowledge of the world, or without imparting useful
knowledge; and there were men who, having paid their bills on demand,
turned from her wiser if not better men.  Because they had pursued the
old but inglorious profession of hunting tame things, Mrs. Tyndall Tynan
had exacted compensation in one way or another--by extras, by occasional
and deliberate omission of table luxuries, and by making them pay for
their own mending, which she herself only did when her boarders behaved
themselves well.  She scored in any contest--in spite of her rather small
brain, large heart, and ardent appearance.  A very clever, shiftless
Irish husband had made her develop shrewdness, and she was so busy
watching and fending her daughter that she did not need to watch and fend
herself to the same extent as she would have done had she been free and
childless and thirty.  The widow Tynan was practical, and she saw none of
those things which made her daughter stand for minutes at a time and look
into the distance over the prairie towards the sunset light or the grey-
blue foothills.  She never sang--she had never sung a note in her life;
but this girl of hers, with a man's coat in her hand, and eyes on the
joyous scene before her, was for ever humming or singing.  She had even
sung in the church choir till she declined to do so any longer, because
strangers stared at her so; which goes to show that she was not so vain
as people of her colouring sometimes are.  It was just as bad, however,
when she sat in the congregation; for then, too, if she sang, people
stared at her.  So it was that she seldom went to church at all; but it
was not because of this that her ideas of right and wrong were quite
individual and not conventional, as the tale of the matrimonial deserter
will show.

This was not church, however, and briskly applying a light whisk-broom to
the coat, she hummed one of the songs her father taught her when he was
in his buoyant or in his sentimental moods, and that was a fair
proportion of the time.  It used to perplex her the thrilling buoyancy
and the creepy melancholy which alternately mastered her father; but as a
child she had become so inured to it that she was not surprised at the
alternate pensive gaiety and the blazing exhilaration of the particular
man whose coat she now dusted long after there remained a speck of dust
upon it.  This was the song she sang:

         "Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
          Hereaway I waited him, hereaway and oft;
          When I sang my song to him, bright his eyes began to shine--
          Hereaway I loved him well, for my heart was soft.

         "Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
          Held my hand, and pressed his cheek warm against my brow,
          Home I saw upon the earth, heaven stood there in the skies--
          'Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?'"

         "Whereaway goes my lad--tell me, has he gone alone?
          Never harsh word did I speak, never hurt I gave;
          Strong he was and beautiful; like a heron he has flown--
          Hereaway, hereaway will I make my grave.

         "When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway,
          Comes to lay his hand in mine, kiss me on the brow,
          I will whisper down the wind, he will weep to hear me say--
          'Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?'"


There was a plaintive quality in the voice of this russet maiden in
perfect keeping with the music and the words; and though her lips smiled,
there was a deep, wistful look in her eyes more in harmony with the
coming autumn than with this gorgeous harvest-time.

For a moment after she had finished singing she stood motionless,
absorbed by the far horizon; then suddenly she gave a little shake
of the body and said in a brisk, playfully chiding way:

"Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!"  There was no one near,
so far as eye could see, so it was clear that the words were addressed
to herself.  She was expressing that wonder which so many people feel
at discovering in themselves long-concealed characteristics, or find
themselves doing things out of their natural orbit, as they think.  If
any one had told Kitty Tynan that she had rare imagination, she would
have wondered what was meant.  If anyone had said to her, "What are you
dreaming about, Kitty?" she would have understood, however, for she had
had fits of dreaming ever since she was a child, and they had increased
during the past few years--since the man came to live with them whose
coat she was brushing.  Perhaps this was only imitation, because the man
had a habit of standing or sitting still and looking into space for
minutes--and on Sundays for hours--at a time; and often she had watched
him as he lay on his back in the long grass, head on a hillock, hat down
over his eyes, while the smoke from his pipe came curling up from beneath
the rim.  Also she had seen him more than once sitting with a letter
before him and gazing at it for many minutes together.  She had also
noted that it was the same letter on each occasion; that it was a closed
letter, and also that it was unstamped.  She knew that, because she had
seen it in his desk--the desk once belonging to her father, a sloping
thing with a green-baize top.  Sometimes he kept it locked, but very
often he did not; and more than once, when he had asked her to get him
something from the desk, not out of meanness, but chiefly because her
moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctilios, she had
examined the envelope curiously.  The envelope bore a woman's
handwriting, and the name on it was not that of the man who owned the
coat--and the letter.  The name on the envelope was Shiel Crozier, but
the name of the man who owned the coat was J. G. Kerry--James Gathorne
Kerry, so he said.

Kitty Tynan had certainly enough imagination to make her cherish a
mystery.  She wondered greatly what it all meant.  Never in anything else
had she been inquisitive or prying where the man was concerned; but she
felt that this letter had the heart of a story, and she had made up fifty
stories which she thought would fit the case of J. G. Kerry, who for over
four years had lived in her mother's house.  He had become part of her
life, perhaps just because he was a man,--and what home is a real home
without a man?--perhaps because he always had a kind, quiet, confidential
word for her, or a word of stimulating cheerfulness; indeed, he showed in
his manner occasionally almost a boisterous hilarity.  He undoubtedly was
what her mother called "a queer dick," but also "a pippin with a perfect
core," which was her way of saying that he was a man to be trusted with
herself and with her daughter; one who would stand loyally by a friend or
a woman.  He had stood by them both when Augustus Burlingame, the lawyer,
who had boarded with them when J. G. Kerry first came, coarsely exceeded
the bounds of liberal friendliness which marked the household, and by
furtive attempts at intimacy began to make life impossible for both
mother and daughter.  Burlingame took it into his head, when he received
notice that his rooms were needed for another boarder, that J. G. Kerry
was the cause of it.  Perhaps this was not without reason, since Kerry
had seen Kitty Tynan angrily unclasping Burlingame's arm from around her
waist, and had used cutting and decisive words to the sensualist
afterwards.

There had taken the place of Augustus Burlingame a land-agent--Jesse
Bulrush--who came and went like a catapult, now in domicile for three
days together, now gone for three weeks; a voluble, gaseous, humorous
fellow, who covered up a well of commercial evasiveness, honesty and
adroitness by a perspiring gaiety natural in its origin and convenient
for harmless deceit.  He was fifty, and no gallant save in words; and,
as a wary bachelor of many years' standing, it was a long time before he
showed a tendency to blandish a good-looking middle-aged nurse named Egan
who also lodged with Mrs. Tynan; though even a plain-faced nurse in
uniform has an advantage over a handsome unprofessional woman.  Jesse
Bulrush and J. G. Kerry were friends--became indeed such confidential
friends to all appearance, though their social origin was evidently so
different, that Kitty Tynan, when she wished to have a pleasant
conversation which gave her a glow for hours afterwards, talked to the
fat man of his lean and aristocratic-looking friend.

"Got his head where it ought to be--on his shoulders; and it ain't for
playing football with," was the frequent remark of Mr. Bulrush concerning
Mr. Kerry.  This always made Kitty Tynan want to sing, she could not have
told why, save that it seemed to her the equivalent of a long history of
the man whose past lay in mists that never lifted, and whom even the
inquisitive Burlingame had been unable to "discover" when he lived in
the same house.  But then Kitty Tynan was as fond of singing as a canary,
and relieved her feelings constantly by this virtuous and becoming means,
with her good contralto voice.  She was indeed a creature of
contradictions; for if ever any one should have had a soprano voice
it was she.  She looked a soprano.

What she was thinking of as she sang with Kerry's coat in her hand it
would be hard to discover by the process of elimination, as the
detectives say when tracking down a criminal.  It is, however, of no
consequence; but it was clear that the song she sang had moved her, for
there was the glint of a tear in her eye as she turned towards the house,
the words of the lyric singing themselves over in her brain:

         "Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
          Held my hand, and pressed his cheek warm against my brow,
          Home I saw upon the hearth, heaven stood there in the skies'
          Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?"'

She knew that no lover had left her; that none was in the habit of laying
his warm cheek against her brow; and perhaps that was why she had said
aloud to herself, "Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!"
Perhaps--and perhaps not.

As she stepped forward towards the door she heard a voice within the
house, and she quickened her footsteps.  The blood in her face, the look
in her eye quickened also.  And now a figure appeared in the doorway--a
figure in shirt-sleeves, which shook a fist at the hurrying girl.

"Villain'!" he said gaily, for he was in one of his absurd, ebullient
moods--after a long talk with Jesse Bulrush.  "Hither with my coat; my
spotless coat in a spotted world,--the unbelievable anomaly--

                  "'For the earth of a dusty to-day
                    Is the dust of an earthy to-morrow.'"

When he talked like this she did not understand him, but she thought it
was clever beyond thinking--a heavenly jumble.  "If it wasn't for me
you'd be carted for rubbish," she replied joyously as she helped him on
with his coat, though he had made a motion to take it from her.

"I heard you singing--what was it?" he asked cheerily, while it could
be seen that his mind was preoccupied.  The song she had sung, floating
through the air, had seemed familiar to him, while he had been greatly
engaged with a big business thing he had been planning for a long time,
with Jesse Bulrush in the background or foreground, as scout or rear-
guard or what you will:

        "'Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
          Hereaway, I waited him, hereaway and oft--'"

she hummed with an exaggerated gaiety in her voice, for the song had
saddened her, she knew not why.  At the words the flaming exhilaration of
the man's face vanished and his eyes took on a poignant, distant look.

"That--oh, that!" he said, and with a little jerk of the head and a
clenching of the hand he moved towards the street.

"Your hat!" she called after him, and ran inside the house.  An instant
later she gave it to him.  Now his face was clear and his eyes smiled
kindly at her.

"'Whereaway, hereaway' is a wonderful song," he said.  "We used to sing
it when I was a boy--and after, and after.  It's an old song--old as the
hills.  Well, thanks, Kitty Tynan.  What a girl you are--to be so kind
to a fellow like--me!"

"Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!"--these were the very words she had
used about herself a little while before.  The song--why did it make Mr.
Kerry take on such a queer look all at once when he heard it?  Kitty
watched him striding down the street into the town.

Now a voice--a rich, quizzical, kindly voice-called out to her:

"Come, come, Miss Tynan, I want to be helped on with my coat," it said.

Inside the house a fat, awkward man was struggling, or pretending to
struggle, into his coat.

"Roll into it, Mr. Rolypoly," she answered cheerily as she entered.

"Of course I'm not the star boarder--nothing for me!" he said in
affected protest.

"A little more to starboard and you'll get it on," she retorted with a
glint of her late father's raillery, and she gave the coat a twitch which
put it right on the ample shoulders.

"Bully! bully!" he cried.  "I'll give you the tip for the Askatoon cup."

"I'm a Christian.  I hate horse-racers and gamblers," she returned
mockingly.

"I'll turn Christian--I want to be loved," he bleated from the doorway.

"Roll on, proud porpoise!" she rejoined, which shows that her
conversation was not quite aristocratic at all times.

"Golly, but she's a gold dollar in a gold bank," remarked Jesse Bulrush
warmly as he lurched into the street.

The girl stood still in the middle of the room looking dreamily down the
way the two men had gone.

The quiet of the late summer day surrounded her.  She heard the dizzy din
of the bees, the sleepy grinding of the grass hoppers, the sough of the
solitary pine at the door, and then behind them all a whizzing, machine-
like sound.  This particular sound went on and on.

She opened the door of the next room.  Her mother sat at a sewing-machine
intent upon some work, the needle eating up a spreading piece of cloth.

"What are you making, mother?" Kitty asked.  "New blinds for Mr. Kerry's
bedroom-he likes this green colour," the widow added with a slight flush,
due to leaning over the sewing-machine, no doubt.

"Everybody does everything for him," remarked the girl almost pettishly.

"That's a nice spirit, I must say!" replied her mother reprovingly, the
machine almost stopping.

"If I said it in a different way it would be all right," the other
returned with a smile, and she repeated the words with a winning soft
inflection, like a born actress.

"Kitty-Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!" declared her mother, and she
bent smiling over the machine, which presently buzzed on its devouring
way.  Three people had said the same thing within a few minutes.  A look
of pleasure stole over the girl's face, and her bosom rose and fell with
a happy sigh.  Somehow it was quite a wonderful day for her.




CHAPTER II

CLOSING THE DOORS

There are many people who, in some subtle psychological way, are very
like their names; as though some one had whispered to "the parents of
this child" the name designed for it from the beginning of time.  So it
was with Shiel Crozier.  Does not the name suggest a man lean and flat,
sinewy, angular and isolated like a figure in one of El Greco's pictures
in the Prado at Madrid?  Does not the name suggest a figure of elongated
humanity with a touch of ancient mysticism and yet also of the
fantastical humour of Don Quixote?

In outward appearance Shiel Crozier, otherwise J. G. Kerry, of Askatoon,
was like his name for the greater part of the time.  Take him in repose,
and he looked a lank ascetic who dreamed of a happy land where
flagellation was a joy and pain a panacea.  In action, however, as when
Kitty Tynan helped him on with his coat, he was a pure improvisation of
nature.  He had a face with a Cromwellian mole, which broke out in
emotion like an April day, with eyes changing from a blue-grey to the
deepest ultramarine that ever delighted the soul and made the reputation
of an Old Master.  Even in the prairie town of Askatoon, where every man
is so busy that he scarcely knows his own children when he meets them,
and almost requires an introduction to his wife when the door closes on
them at bedtime, people took a second look at him when he passed.  Many
who came in much direct contact with him, as Augustus Burlingame the
lawyer had done, tried to draw from him all there was to tell about
himself; which is a friendly custom of the far West.  The native-born
greatly desire to tell about themselves.  They wear their hearts on their
sleeves, and are childlike in the frank recitals of all they were and are
and hope to be.  This covers up also a good deal of business acumen,
shrewdness, and secretiveness which is not so childlike and bland.

In this they are in sharp contrast to those not native-born.  These
come from many places on the earth, and they are seldom garrulously
historical.  Some of them go to the prairie country to forget they ever
lived before, and to begin the world again, having been hurt in life
undeservingly; some go to bury their mistakes or worse in pioneer work
and adventure; some flee from a wrath that would devour them--the law,
society, or a woman.

This much must be said at once for Crozier, that he had no crime to
hide.  It was not because of crime that "He buckles up his talk like the
bellyband on a broncho," as Malachi Deely, the exile from Tralee, said
of him; and Deely was a man of "horse-sense," no doubt because he was a
horse-doctor--"a veterenny surgeon," as his friends called him when they
wished to flatter him.  Deely supplemented this chaste remark about the
broncho with the observation that, "Same as the broncho, you buckle him
tightest when you know the divil is stirring in his underbrush."  And he
added further, "'Tis a woman that's put the mumplaster on his tongue,
Sibley, and I bet you a hundred it's another man's wife."

Like many a speculator, Malachi Deely would have made no profit out of
his bet in the end, for Shiel Crozier had had no trouble with the law,
or with another man's wife, nor yet with any single maid--not yet; though
there was now Kitty Tynan in his path.  Yet he had had trouble.  There
was hint of it in his occasional profound abstraction; but more than all
else in the fact that here he was, a gentleman, having lived his life for
over four years past as a sort of horse-expert, overseer, and stud-
manager for Terry Brennan, the absentee millionaire.  In the opinion of
the West, "big-bugs" did not come down to this kind of occupation unless
they had been roughly handled by fate or fortune.

"Talk?  Watch me now, he talks like a testimonial in a frame," said
Malachi Deely on the day this tale opens, to John Sibley, the gambling
young farmer who, strange to say, did well out of both gambling and
farming.

"Words to him are like nuts to a monkey.  He's an artist, that man is.
Been in the circles where the band plays good and soft, where the music
smells--fairly smells like parfumery," responded Sibley.  "I'd like to
get at the bottom of him.  There's a real good story under his asbestos
vest--something that'd make a man call for the oh-be-joyful, same as I do
now."

After they had seen the world through the bottom of a tumbler Deely
continued the gossip.  "Watch me now, been a friend of dukes in England--
and Ireland, that Mr. James Gathorne Kerry, as any one can see; and there
he is feelin' the hocks of a filly or openin' the jaws of a stud horse,
age-hunting!  Why, you needn't tell me--I've had my mind made up ever
since the day he broke the temper of Terry Brennan's Inniskillen
chestnut, and won the gold cup with her afterwards.  He just sort of
appeared out of the mist of the marnin', there bein' a divil's lot of
excursions and conferences and holy gatherin's in Askatoon that time
back, ostensible for the business which their names denote, like the
Dioceesan Conference and the Pure White Water Society.  That was their
bluff; but they'd come herealong for one good pure white dioceesan thing
before all, and that was to see the dandiest horse-racing which ever
infested the West.  Come--he come like that!"--Deely made a motion like a
swoop of an aeroplane to earth--"and here he is buckin' about like a
rough-neck same as you and me; but yet a gent, a swell, a cream della
cream, that's turned his back on a lady--a lady not his own wife,
that's my sure and sacred belief."

"You certainly have got women on the brain," retorted Sibley.  "I ain't
ever seen such a man as you.  There never was a woman crossing the street
on a muddy day that you didn't sprint to get a look at her ankles.
Behind everything you see a woman.  Horses is your profession, but woman
is your practice."

"There ain't but one thing worth livin' for, and that's a woman,"
remarked Deely.

"Do you tell Mrs. Deely that?" asked Sibley.

"Watch me now, she knows.  What woman is there don't know when her
husband is what he is!  And it's how I know that the trouble with James
Gathorne Kerry is a woman.  I know the signs.  Divils me own, he's got
'em in his face."

"He's got in his face what don't belong here and what you don't know much
about--never having kept company with that sort," rejoined Sibley.

"The way he lives and talks--'No, thank you, I don't care for anny
thing,' says he, when you're standin' at the door of a friendly saloon,
which is established by law to bespeak peace and goodwill towards men,
and you ask him pleasant to step inside.  He don't seem to have a single
vice.  Haven't we tried him?  There was Belle Bingley, all frizzy hair
and a kicker; we put her on to him.  But he give her ten dollars to buy
a hat on condition she behaved like a lady in the future--smilin' at her,
the divil!  And Belle, with temper like dinnemite, took it kneelin' as it
were, and smiled back at him--her!  Drink, women--nothin' seems to have a
hold on him.  What's his vice?  Sure, then, that's what I say, what's his
vice?  He's got to have one; anny man as is a man has to have one vice."

"Bosh!  Look at me," rejoined Sibley.  "Drink women--nit!  Not for me!
I've got no vice.  I don't even smoke."

"No vice?  Begobs, yours has got you like a tire on a wheel!  Vice--what
do you call gamblin'?  It's the biggest vice ever tuk grip of a man.
It's like a fever, and it's got you, John, like the nail on your finger."

"Well, p'r'aps, he's got that vice too.  P'r'aps J. G. Kerry's got that
vice same as me."

"Annyhow, we'll get to know all we want when he goes into the witness
box at the Logan murder trial next week.  That's what I'm waitin' for,
"Deely returned, with a grin of anticipation.  "That drug-eating Gus
Burlingame's got a grudge against him somehow, and when a lawyer's got
a grudge against you it's just as well to look where y' are goin'.
Burlingame don't care what he does to get his way in court.  What set him
against Kerry I ain't sure, but, bedad, I think it's looks.  Burlingame
goes in for lookin' like a picture in a frame--gold seals hangin' beyant
his vestpocket, broad silk cord to his eye-glass, loose flowin' tie, and
long hair-makes him look pretentuous and showy.  But your 'Mr. Kerry,
sir,' he don't have anny tricks to make him look like a doge from Veenis
and all the eyes of the females battin' where'er he goes.  Jealousy, John
Sibley, me boy, is a cruil thing."

"Why is it you ain't jealous of him?  There's plenty of women that watch
you go down-town--you got a name for it, anyway," remarked Sibley
maliciously.

Deely nodded sagely.  "Watch me now, that's right, me boy.  I got a name
for it, but I want the game without the name, and that's why I ain't
puttin' on anny airs--none at all.  I depend on me tongue, not on me
looks, which goes against me.  I like Mr. J. G. Kerry.  I've plenty
dealin's with him, naturally, both of us being in the horse business,
and I say he's right as a minted dollar as he goes now.  Also, and
behold, I'd take my oath he never done annything to blush for.  His
touble's been a woman--wayward woman what stoops to folly!  I give up
tryin' to pump him just as soon as I made up my mind it was a woman.
That shuts a man's mouth like a poor-box.

"Next week's fixed for the Logan killin' case, is it?"

"Monday comin', for sure.  I wouldn't like to be in Mr. Kerry's shoes.
Watch me now, if he gives the, evidence they say he can give--the
prasecution say it--that M'Mahon Gang behind Logan 'll get him sure as
guns, one way or another."

"Some one ought to give Mr. Kerry the tip to get out and not give
evidence," remarked Sibley sagely.  Deely shook his head vigorously.
"Begobs, he's had the tip all right, but he's not goin'.  He's got as
much fear as a canary has whiskers.  He doesn't want to give evidence,
he says, but he wants to see the "law do its work.  Burlingame 'll try to
make it out manslaughter; but there's a widow with children to suffer for
the manslaughter, just as much as though it was murder, and there isn't a
man that doesn't think murder was the game, and the grand joory had that
idea too.

"Between Gus Burlingame and that M'Mahon bunch of horse-thieves, the
stranger in a strange land 'll have to keep his eyes open, I'm thinkin'."

"Divils me darlin', his eyes are open all right," returned Deely.

"Still, I'd like to jog his elbow," Sibley answered reflectively.
"It couldn't do any harm, and it might do good."

Deely nodded good-naturedly.  "If you want to so bad as that, John,
you've got the chance, for he's up at the Sovereign Bank now.  I seen him
leave the Great Overland Railway Bureau ten minutes ago and get away
quick to the bank."

"What's he got on at the bank and the railway?"

"Some big deal, I guess.  I've seen him with Studd Bradley."

"The Great North Trust Company boss?"

"On it, my boy, on it--the other day as thick as thieves.  Studd Bradley
doesn't knit up with an outsider from the old country unless there's
reason for it--good gold-currency reasons."

"A land deal, eh?" ventured Sibley.  "What did I say--speculation,
that's his vice, same as mine!  P'r'aps that's what ruined him.  Cards,
speculation, what's the difference?  And he's got a quiet look, same as
me."

Deely laughed loudly.  "And bursts out same as you!  Quiet one hour like
a mill-pond or a well, and then--swhish, he's blazin'!  He's a volcano in
harness, that spalpeen."

"He's a volcano that doesn't erupt when there's danger," responded
Sibley.  "It's when there's just fun on that his volcano gets loose.
I'll go wait for him at the bank.  I got a fellow-feeling for Mr. Kerry.
I'd like to whisper in his ear that he'd better be lookin' sharp for the
M'Mahon Gang, and that if he's a man of peace he'd best take a holiday
till after next week, or get smallpox or something."

The two friends lounged slowly up the street, and presently parted near
the door of the bank.  As Sibley waited, his attention was drawn to a
window on the opposite side of the street at an angle from themselves.
The light was such that the room was revealed to its farthest corners,
and Sibley noted that three men were evidently carefully watching the
bank, and that one of the men was Studd Bradley, the so-called boss.  The
others were local men of some position commercially and financially in
the town.  Sibley did not give any sign that he noticed the three men,
but he watched carefully from under the rim of his hat.  His imagination,
however, read a story of consequence in the secretive vigilance of the
three, who evidently thought that, standing far back in the room, they
could not be seen.

Presently the door of the bank opened, and Sibley saw Studd Bradley lean
forward eagerly, then draw back and speak hurriedly to his companions,
using a gesture of satisfaction.

"Something damn funny there!"  Sibley said to himself, and stepped
forward to Crozier with a friendly exclamation.  Crozier turned rather
impatiently, for his face was aflame with some exciting reflection.  At
this moment his eyes were the deepest blue that could be imagined--an
almost impossible colour, like that of the Mediterranean when it reflects
the perfect sapphire of the sky.  There was something almost wonderful
in their expression.  A woman once said as she looked at a picture of
Herschel, whose eyes had the unworldly gaze of the great dreamer looking
beyond this sphere, "The stars startled him."  Such a look was in
Crozier's eyes now, as though he was seeing the bright end of a
long road, the desire of his soul.

That, indeed, was what he saw.  After two years of secret negotiation he
had (inspired by information dropped by Jesse Bulrush, his fellow-
boarder) made definite arrangements for a big land-deal in connection
with the route of a new railway and a town-site, which would mean more
to him than any one could know.  If it went through, he would, for an
investment of ten thousand dollars, have a hundred and fifty thousand
dollars; and that would solve an everlasting problem for him.

He had reached a critical point in his enterprise.  All that was wanted
now was ten thousand dollars in cash to enable him to close the great
bargain and make his hundred and fifty thousand.  But to want ten
thousand dollars and to get it in a given space of time, when you have
neither securities, cash, nor real estate, is enough to keep you awake at
night.  Crozier had been so busy with the delicate and difficult
negotiations that he had not deeply concerned himself with the absence of
the necessary ten thousand dollars.  He thought he could get the money at
any time, so good was the proposition; and it was best to defer
raising it to the last moment lest some one learning the secret should
forestall him.  He must first have the stake to be played for before he
moved to get the cash with which to make the throw.  This is not
generally thought a good way, but it was his way, and it had yet to be
tested.

There was no cloud of apprehension, however, in Crozier's eyes as they
met those of Sibley.  He liked Sibley.  At this point it is not necessary
to say why.  The reason will appear in due time.  Sibley's face had
always something of that immobility and gravity which Crozier's face had
part of the time-paler, less intelligent, with dark lines and secret
shadows absent from Crozier's face; but still with some of the El Greco
characteristics which marked so powerfully that of the man who passed as
J. G. Kerry.

"Ah, Sibley," he said, "glad to see you!  Anything I can do for you?"

"It's the other way if there's any doing at all," was the quick response.

"Well, let's walk along together," remarked Crozier a little
abstractedly, for he was thinking hard about his great enterprise.

"We might be seen," said Sibley, with an obvious undermeaning meant to
provoke a question.

Crozier caught the undertone of suggestion.  "Being about to burgle the
bank, it's well not to be seen together--eh?"

"No, I'm not in on that business, Mr. Kerry.  I'm for breaking banks,
not burgling 'em," was the cheerful reply.

They laughed, but Crozier knew that the observant gambling farmer was not
talking at haphazard.  They had met on the highway, as it were, many
times since Crozier had come to Askatoon, and Crozier knew his man.

"Well, what are we going to do, and who will see us if we do it?"
Crozier asked briskly.

"Studd Bradley and his secret-service corps have got their eyes on this
street--and on you," returned Sibley dryly.

Crozier's face sobered and his eyes became less emotional.  "I don't see
them anywhere," he answered, but looking nowhere.

"They're in Gus Burlingame's office.  They had you under observation
while you were in the bank."

"I couldn't run off with the land, could I?" Crozier remarked dryly, yet
suggestively, in his desire to see how much Sibley knew.

"Well, you said it was a bank.  I've no more idea what it is you're
tryin' to run off with than I know what an ace is goin' to do when
there's a joker in the pack," remarked Sibley; "but I thought I'd tell
you that Bradley and his lot are watchin' you gettin' ready to run."
Then he hastily told what he had seen.

Crozier was reassured.  It was natural that Bradley & Co. should take an
interest in his movements.  They would make a pile of money if he pulled
off the deal-far more than he would.  It was not strange that they should
watch his invasion of the bank.  They knew he wanted money, and a bank
was the place to get it.  That was the way he viewed the matter on the
instant.  He replied to Sibley cheerfully.  "A hundred to one is a lot
when you win it," he said enigmatically.

"It depends on how much you have on," was Sibley's quiet reply--"a dollar
or a thousand dollars.

"If you've got a big thing on, and you've got an outsider that you think
is goin' to win and beat the favourite, it's just as well to run no
risks.  Believe me, Mr. Kerry, if you've got anything on that asks for
your attention, it'd be sense and saving if you didn't give evidence at
the Logan Trial next week.  It's pretty well-guessed what you're goin'
to say and what you know, and you take it from me, the M'Mahon mob that's
behind Logan 'll have it in for you.  They're terrors when they get
goin', and if your evidence puts one of that lot away, ther'll be trouble
for you.  I wouldn't do it--honest, I wouldn't.  I've been out West here
a good many years, and I know the place and the people.  It's a good
place, and there's lots of first-class people here, but there's a few
offscourings that hang like wolves on the edge of the sheepfold, ready to
murder and git."

"That was what you wanted to see me about, wasn't it?" Crozier asked
quietly.

"Yes; the other was just a shot on the chance.  I don't like to see men
sneakin' about and watching.  If they do, you can bet there's something
wrong.  But the other thing, the Logan Trial business, is a dead
certainty.  You're only a new-comer, in a kind of way, and you don't need
to have the same responsibility as the rest.  The Law'll get what it
wants whether you chip in or not.  Let it alone.  What's the Law ever
done for you that you should run risks for it?  It's straight talk, Mr.
Kerry.  Have a cancer in the bowels next week or go off to see a dyin'
brother, but don't give evidence at the Logan Trial--don't do it.  I got
a feeling--I'm superstitious--all sportsmen are.  By following my
instincts I've saved myself a whole lot in my time."

"Yes; all men that run chances have their superstitions, and they're not
to be sneered at," replied Crozier thoughtfully.  "If you see black,
don't play white; if you see a chestnut crumpled up, put your money on
the bay even when the chestnut is a favourite.  Of course you're
superstitious, Sibley.  The tan and the green baize are covered with
ghosts that want to help you, if you'll let them."

Sibley's mouth opened in amazement.  Crozier was speaking with the look
of the man who hypnotises himself, who "sees things," who dreams as only
the gambler and the plunger on the turf do dream, not even excepting the
latter-day Irish poets.

"Say, I was right what I said to Deely--I was right," remarked Sibley
almost huskily, for it seemed to him as though he had found a long-lost
brother.  No man except one who had staked all he had again and again
could have looked or spoken like that.

Crozier looked at the other thoughtfully for a moment, then he said:

"I don't know what you said to Deely, but I do know that I'm going to
the Logan Trial in spite of the M'Mahon mob.  I don't feel about it as
you do.  I've got a different feeling, Sibley.  I'll play the game out.
I shall not hedge.  I shall not play for safety.  It's everything on the
favourite this time."

"You'll excuse me, but Gus Burlingame is for the defence, and he's got
his knife into you," returned Sibley.

"Not yet."  Crozier smiled sardonically.

"Well, I apologise, but what I've said, Mr. Kerry, is said as man to man.
You're ridin' game in a tough place, as any man has to do who starts with
only his pants and his head on.  That's the way you begun here, I guess;
and I don't want to see your horse tumble because some one throws a
fence-rail at its legs.  Your class has enemies always in a new country
--jealousy, envy."

The lean, aristocratic, angular Crozier, with a musing look on his long
face, grown ascetic again, as he held out his hand and gripped that of
the other, said warmly: "I'm just as much obliged to you as though I took
your advice, Sibley.  I am not taking it, but I am taking a pledge to
return the compliment to you if ever I get the chance."

"Well, most men get chances of that kind," was the gratified reply of the
gambling farmer, and then Crozier turned quickly and entered the doorway
of the British Bank, the rival of that from which he had turned in brave
disappointment a little while before.

Left alone in the street, Sibley looked back with the instinct of the
hunter.  As he expected, he saw a head thrust out from the window where
Studd Bradley and his friends had been.  There was an hotel opposite the
British Bank.  He entered and waited.  Bradley and one of his companions
presently came in and seated themselves far back in the shadow, where
they could watch the doorway of the bank.

It was quite a half-hour before Shiel Crozier emerged from the bank.  His
face was set and pale.  For an instant he stood as though wondering which
way to go, then he moved up the street the way he had come.

Sibley heard a low, poisonous laugh of triumph rankle through the hotel
office.  He turned round.  Bradley, the over-fed, over-confident, over-
estimated financier, laid a hand on the shoulder of his companion as they
moved towards the door.

"That's another gate shut," he said.  "I guess we can close 'em all with
a little care.  It's working all right.  He's got no chance of raising
the cash," he added, as the two passed the chair where Sibley sat--with
his hat over his eyes, chewing an unlighted cigar.

"I don't know what it is, but it's dirt--and muck at that," John Sibley
remarked as he rose from his chair and followed the two into the street.

Bradley and his friends were trying steadily to close up the avenues of
credit to the man to whom the success of his enterprise meant so much.
To crowd him out would mean an extra hundred and fifty thousand dollars
for themselves.




CHAPTER III

THE LOGAN TRIAL AND WHAT CAME OF IT

What the case was in which Shiel Crozier was to give evidence is not
important; what came from the giving of his testimony is all that
matters; and this story would never have been written if he had not
entered the witness-box.

A court-room at any time seems a little warmer than any other spot to all
except the prisoner; but on a July day it is likely to be a punishment
for both innocent and guilty.  A man had been killed by one of the group
of toughs called locally the M'Mahon Gang, and against the charge of
murder that of manslaughter had been set up in defence; and manslaughter
might mean jail for a year or two or no jail at all.  Any evidence which
justified the charge of murder would mean not jail, but the rope in due
course; for this was not Montana or Idaho, where the law's delays
outlasted even the memory of the crime committed.

The court-room of Askatoon was crowded to suffocation, for the
M'Mahons were detested, and the murdered man had a good reputation in
the district.  Besides, a widow and three children mourned their loss,
and the widow was in court.  Also Crozier's evidence was expected to be
sensational, and to prove the swivel on which the fate of the accused man
would hang.  Among those on the inside it was also known that the clever
but dissipated Augustus Burlingame, the counsel for the prisoner, had a
grudge against Crozier,--no one quite knew why except Kitty Tynan and her
mother, and that cross-examination would be pressed mercilessly when
Crozier entered the witness-box.  As Burlingame came into the court-room
he said to the Young Doctor--he was always spoken of as the Young Doctor
in Askatoon, though he had been there a good many years and he was no
longer as young as he looked--who was also called as a witness, "We'll
know more about Mr. J. G. Kerry when this trial is over than will suit
his book."  It did not occur to Augustus Burlingame that in Crozier, who
knew why he had fled the house of the showy but virtuous Mrs. Tynan, he
might find a witness of a mental and moral calibre with baffling
qualities and some gift of riposte.

Crozier entered the witness-box at a stage when excitement was at fever
height; for the M'Mahon Gang had given evidence which every one believed
to be perjured; and the widow of the slain man was weeping bitterly in
her seat because of noxious falsehoods sworn against her honest husband.

There was certainly someting credible and prepossessing in the look of
Crozier.  He might be this or that, but he carried no evil or vice of
character in his face.  He was in his grave mood this summer afternoon.
There he stood with his long face and the very heavy eyebrows, clean-
shaven, hard-bitten, as though by wind and weather, composed and
forceful, the mole on his chin a kind of challenge to the vertical dimple
in his cheek, his high forehead more benevolent than intellectual, his
brown hair faintly sprinkled with grey and a bit unmanageable, his
fathomless eyes shining.  "No man ought to have such eyes," remarked a
woman present to the Young Doctor, who abstractedly nodded assent, for,
like Malachi Deely and John Sibley, he himself had a theory about
Crozier; and he had a fear of what the savage enmity of the morally
diseased Burlingame might do.  He had made up his mind that so intense a
scrupulousness as Crozier had shown since coming to Askatoon had behind
it not only character, but the rigidity of a set purpose; and that view
was supported by the stern economy of Crozier's daily life, broken only
by sudden bursts of generosity for those in need.

In the box Crozier kept his eye on the crown attorney, who prosecuted,
and on the judge.  He appeared not to see any one in the court-room,
though Kitty Tynan had so placed herself that he must see her if he
looked at the audience at all.  Kitty thought him magnificent as he told
his story with a simple parsimony but a careful choice of words which
made every syllable poignant with effect.  She liked him in his grave
mood even better than when he was aflame with an internal fire of his
own creation, when he was almost wildly vivid with life.

"He's two men," she had often said to herself; and she said it now as she
looked at him in the witness-box, measuring out his words and measuring
off at the same time the span of a murderer's life; for when the crown
attorney said to the judge that he had concluded his examination there
was no one in the room--not even the graceless Burlingame--who did not
think the prisoner guilty.

"That is all," the crown attorney said to Crozier as he sank into his
chair, greatly pleased with one of the best witnesses who had ever been
through his hands--lucid, concentrated, exact, knowing just where
he was going and reaching his goal without meandering.  Crozier was about
to step down when Burlingame rose.

"I wish to ask a few questions," he said.

Crozier bowed and turned, again grasping the rail of the witness-box with
one hand, while with an air of cogitation and suspense he stroked his
chin with the long fingers of the other hand.

"What is your name?" asked Burlingame in a tone a little louder than he
had used hitherto in the trial, indeed even louder than lawyers generally
use when they want to bully a witness.  In this case it was as though he
wished to summon the attention of the court.

For a second Crozier's fingers caught his chin almost spasmodically.  The
real meaning of the question, what lay behind it, flashed to his mind.
He saw in lightning illumination the course Burlingame meant to pursue.
For a moment his heart seemed to stand still, and he turned slightly
pale, but the blue of his eyes took on a new steely look--a look also
of striking watchfulness, as of an animal conscious of its danger, yet
conscious too of its power when at bay.

"What is your name?" Burlingame asked again in a somewhat louder tone,
and turned to look at the jury, as if bidding them note the hesitation of
the witness; though, indeed, the waiting was so slight that none but a
trickster like Burlingame would have taken advantage of it, and only then
when there was much behind.

For a moment longer Crozier remained silent, getting strength, as it
were, and saying to himself, "What does he know?" and then, with a
composed look of inquiry at the judge, who appeared to take no notice,
he said: "I have already, in evidence, given my name to the court."

"Witness, what is your name?" again almost shouted the lawyer, with a
note of indignation in his voice, as though here was a dangerous fellow
committing a misdemeanour in their very presence.  He spread out his
hands to the jury, as though bidding them observe, if they would, this
witness hesitating in answer to a simple, primary question--a witness who
had just sworn a man's life away!

"What is your name?"

"James Gathorne Kerry, as I have already given it to the court," was the
calm reply.

"Where do you live?"

"In Askatoon, as I have already said in evidence; and if it is necessary
to give my domicile, I live at the house of Mrs. Tyndall Tynan, Pearl
Street--as you know so well."

The tone in which he uttered the last few words was such that even the
judge pricked up his ears.

A look of hatred came into the decadent but able lawyer's face.

"Where do you live when you are at home?"

"Mrs. Tynan's house is the only home I have at present."

He was outwitting the pursuer so far, but it only gained him time, as he
knew; and he knew also that no suggestive hint concerning the episode at
Mrs. Tynan's, when Burlingame was asked to leave her house, would be of
any avail now.

"Where were you born?"

"In Ireland."

"What part of Ireland?"

"County Kerry."

"What place--what town or city or village in County Kerry?"

"In neither."

"What house, then--what estate?" Burlingame was more than nettled; and
he sharpened his sword.

"The estate of Castlegarry."

"What was your name in Ireland?"

In the short silence that followed, the quick-drawn breath of many
excited and some agitated people could be heard.  Among the latter were
Mrs. Tynan and her daughter and Malachi Deely; among those who held their
breath in suspence were John Sibley, Studd Bradley the financier, and the
Young Doctor.  The swish of a skirt seemed ridiculously loud in the hush,
and the scratching of the judge's quill pen was noisily irritating.

"My name in Ireland was James Shiel Gathorne Crozier, commonly called
Shiel Crozier," came the even reply from the witness-box.

"James Shiel Gathorne Crozier in Ireland, but James Gathorne Kerry here!"
Burlingame turned to the jury significantly.  "What other name have you
been known by in or out of Ireland?" he added sharply to Crozier.  "No
other name so far as I know."

"No other name so far as you know," repeated the lawyer in a sarcastic
tone intended to impress the court.

"Who was your father?"

"John Gathorne Crozier."

"Any title?"

"He was a baronet."

"What was his business?"

"He had no profession, though he had business, of course."

"Ah, he lived by his wits?"

"No, he was not a lawyer!  I have said he had no profession.  He lived on
his money on his estate."

The judge waved down the laughter at Burlingame's expense.

"In official documents what was his description?" snarled Burlingame.

"'Gentleman' was his designation in official documents."

"You, then, were the son of a gentleman?"  There was a hateful suggestion
in the tone.

"I was."

"A legitimate son?"

Nothing in Crozier's face showed what he felt, except his eyes, and they
had a look in them which might well have made his questioner shrink.  He
turned calmly to the judge.

"Your honour, does this bear upon the case?  Must I answer this legal
libertine?"

At the word libertine, the judge, the whole court, and the audience
started; but it was presently clear the witness meant that the questioner
was abusing his legal privileges, though the people present interpreted
it another way, and quite rightly.

The reply of the judge was in favour of the lawyer.  "I do not quite see
the full significance of the line of defence, but I think I must allow
the question," was the judge's gentle and reluctant reply, for he was
greatly impressed by this witness, by his transparent honesty and
straightforwardness.

"Were you a legitimate son of John Gathorne Crozier and his wife?" asked
Burlingame.

"Yes, a legitimate son," answered Crozier in an even voice.

"Is John Gathorne Crozier still living?"

"I said that gentleman was his designation in official documents.  I
supposed that would convey the fact that he was not living, but I see you
do not quickly grasp a point."

Burlingame was stung by the laughter in the court and ventured a riposte.

"But is once a gentleman always a gentleman an infallible rule?"

"I suppose not; I did not mean to convey that; but once a rogue always a
bad lawyer holds good in every country," was Crozier's comment in a low,
quiet voice which stirred and amused the audience again.

"I must ask counsel to put questions which have some relevance even to
his own line of defence," remarked the judge sternly.  "This is not a
corner grocery."

Burlingame bowed.  He had had a facer, but he had also shown the witness
to have been living under an assumed name.  That was a good start.  He
hoped to add to the discredit.  He had absolutely no knowledge of
Crozier's origin and past; but he was in a position to find it out if
Crozier told the truth on oath, and he was sure he would.

"Where was your domicile in the old country?" Burlingame asked.

"In County Kerry--with a flat in London."

"An estate in County Kerry?"

"A house and two thousand acres."

"Is it your property still?"

"It is not."

"You sold it?"

"No."

"If you did not sell, how is it that you do not own it?"

"It was sold for me--in spite of me."

The judge smiled, the people smiled, the jury smiled.  Truly, though a
life-history was being exposed with incredible slowness--"like pulling
teeth," as the Young Doctor said--it was being touched off with laughter.

"You were in debt?"

"Quite."

"How did you get into debt?"

"By spending more than my income."

If Askatoon had been proud of its legal talent in the past it had now
reason for revising its opinion.  Burlingame was frittering away the
effect of his inquiry by elaboration of details.  What he gained by the
main startling fact he lost in the details by which the witness scored.
He asked another main question.

"Why did you leave Ireland?"

"To make money."

"You couldn't do it there?"

"They were too many for me over there, so I thought I'd come here," slyly
answered Crozier, and with a grave face; at which the solemn scene of a
prisoner being tried for his life was shaken by a broad smiling, which in
some cases became laughter haughtily suppressed by the court attendant.

"Have you made money here?"

"A little--with expectations."

"What was your income in Ireland?"

"It began with three thousand pounds--"

"Fifteen thousand dollars about?"

"About that--about a lawyer's fee for one whisper to a client less than
that.  It began with that and ended with nothing."

"Then you escaped?"

"From creditors, lawyers, and other such?  No, I found you here."

The judge intervened again almost harshly on the laughter of the court,
with the remark that a man was being tried for his life; that ribaldry
was out of place; and that, unless the course pursued by the counsel was
to discredit the reliability of the character of the witness, the
examination was in excess of the privilege of counsel.

"Your honour has rightly apprehended what my purpose is," Burlingame said
deprecatingly.  He then turned to Crozier again, and his voice rose as it
did when he began the examination.  It was as though he was starting all
over again.

"What was it compelled" (he was boldly venturing) "you to leave Ireland
at last?  What was the incident which drove you out from the land where
you were born--from being the owner of two thousand acres"--

"Partly bog," interposed Crozier.

"--From being the owner of two thousand acres to becoming a kind of head-
groom on a ranch?  What was the cause of your flight?"

"Flight!  I came in one of the steamers of the Company for which your
firm are the agents.  Eleven days it took to come from Glasgow to
Quebec."

Again the court rippled, again the attendant intervened.

Burlingame was nonplussed this time, but he gathered himself together.

"What was the process of law which forced you to leave your own land?"

"None at all."

"What were your debts when you left?"

"None at all."

"How much was the last debt you paid?"

"Two thousand five hundred pounds."

"What was its nature?"

"It was a debt of honour--do you understand?"  The subtle challenge of
the voice, the sarcasm, was not lost.  Again there was a struggle on the
part of the audience not to laugh outright, and so be driven from the
court as had been threatened.

The judge interposed again with the remark, not very severe in tone,
that the witness was not in the box to ask questions, but to answer them.
At the same time he must remind counsel that the examination must
discontinue unless something more relevant immediately appeared in the
evidence.

There was silence again for a moment, and even Crozier himself seemed to
steel himself for a question he felt was coming.

"Are you married or single?" asked Burlingame, and he did not need to
raise his voice to summon the interest of the court.

"I was married."

One person in the audience nearly cried out.  It was Kitty Tynan.  She
had never allowed herself to think of that, but even if she had, what
difference could it make whether he was married or single, since he was
out of her star?

"Are you not married now?"

"I do not know."

"You mean you do not know if you have been divorced?"

"No."

"You mean your wife is dead?"

"No."

"What do you mean?  That you do not know whether your wife is living or
dead?"

"Quite so."

"Have you heard from her since you saw her last?"

"I had one letter."

Kitty Tynan thought of the unopened letter in a woman's handwriting in
the green baize desk in her mother's house.

"No more?"

"No more."

"Are we to understand that you do not know whether your wife is living or
dead?"

"I have no information that she is dead."

"Why did you leave her?"

"I have not said that I left her.  Primarily I left Ireland."

"Assuming that she is alive, your wife will not live with you?"

"Ah, what information have you to that effect?"  The judge informed
Crozier that he must not ask questions of counsel.

"Why is she not with you here?"

"As you said, I am only picking up a living here, and even the passage
by your own second-class steamship line is expensive."

The judge suppressed a smile.  He greatly liked the witness.

"Do you deny that you parted from your wife in anger?"

"When I am asked that question I will try to answer it.  Meanwhile, I do
not deny what has not been put before me in the usual way."

Here the judge sternly rebuked the counsel, who ventured upon one last
question.

"Have you any children?"

"None."

"Has your brother, who inherited, any children?"

"None that I know of."

"Are you the heir-presumptive to the baronetcy?"

"I am."

"Yet your wife will not live with you?"

"Call Mrs. Crozier as a witness and see.  Meanwhile, I am not upon my
trial."

He turned to the judge, who promptly called upon Burlingame to conclude
his examination.

Burlingame asked two questions more.

"Why did you change your name when you came here?"

"I wanted to obliterate myself."

"I put it to you, that what you want is to avoid the outraged law of your
own country."

"No--I want to avoid the outrageous lawyers of yours."

Again there was a pause in the proceedings, and on a protest from the
crown attorney the judge put an end to the cross-examination with the
solemn reminder that a man was being tried for his life, and that the
present proceedings were a lamentable reflection on the levity of human
nature--in Askatoon.  Turning with friendly scrutiny to Crozier, he said:

"In the early stage of his examination the witness informed the court
that he had made a heavy loss through a debt of honour immediately before
leaving England.  Will he say in what way he incurred the obligation?
Are we to assume that it was through gambling-card-playing, or other
games of chance?"

"Through backing the wrong horse," was Crozier's instant reply.

"That phrase is often applied to mining or other unreal flights for
fortune," said the judge, with a dry smile.

"This was a real horse on a real flight to the winning-post," added
Crozier, with a quirk at the corner of his mouth.

"Honest contest with man or horse is no crime, but it is tragedy to
stake all on the contest and lose," was the judge's grave and pedagogic
comment.  "We shall now hear from the counsel for defence his reason for
conducting his cross-examination on such unusual lines.  Latitude of this
kind is only permissible if it opens up any weakness in the case against
the prisoner."

The judge thus did Burlingame a good turn as well as Crozier, by creating
an atmosphere of gravity, even of tragedy, in which Burlingame could make
his speech in defence of the prisoner.

Burlingame started hesitatingly, got into his stride, assembled the
points of his defence with the skill of which he really was capable.  He
made a strong appeal for acquittal, but if not acquittal, then a verdict
of manslaughter.  He showed that the only real evidence which could
convict his man of murder was that of the witness Crozier.  If he had
been content to discredit evidence of the witness by an adroit but
guarded misuse of the facts he had brought out regarding Crozier's past,
to emphasise the fact that he was living under an assumed name and that
his bona fides was doubtful, he might have impressed the jury to some
slight degree.  He could not, however, control the malice he felt, and he
was smarting from Crozier's retorts.  He had a vanity easily lacerated,
and he was now too savage to abate the ferocity of his forensic attack.
He sat down, however, with a sure sense of failure.  Every orator knows
when he is beating the air, even when his audience is quiet and
apparently attentive.

The crown attorney was a man of the serenest method and of cold,
unforensic logic.  He had a deadly precision of speech, a very remarkable
memory, and a great power of organising and assembling his facts.  There
was little left of Burlingame's appeal when he sat down.  He declared
that to discredit Crozier's evidence because he chose to use another
name than his own, because he was parted from his wife, because he left
England practically penniless to earn an honest living--no one had shown
it was not--was the last resort of legal desperation.  It was an
indefensible thing to endeavour to create prejudice against a man because
of his own evidence given with great frankness.  Not one single word of
evidence had the defence brought to discredit Crozier, save by Crozier's
own word of mouth; and if Crozier had cared to commit perjury, the
defence could not have proved him guilty of it.  Even if Crozier had not
told the truth as it was, counsel for the defence would have found it
impossible to convict him of falsehood.  But even if Crozier was a
perjurer, justice demanded that his evidence should be weighed as truth
from its own inherent probability and supported by surrounding facts.
In a long experience he had never seen animus against a witness so
recklessly exhibited as by counsel in this case.

The judge was not quite so severe in his summing up, but he did say of
Crozier that his direct replies to Burlingame's questions, intended to
prejudice him in the eyes of the community into which he had come a
stranger, bore undoubted evidence of truth; for if he had chosen to say
what might have saved him from the suspicions, ill or well founded, of
his present fellow-citizens, he might have done so with impunity, save
for the reproach of his own conscience.  On the whole, the judge summed
up powerfully against the prisoner Logan, with the result that the jury
were not out for more than a half-hour.  Their verdict was, guilty of
murder.

In the scene which followed, Crozier dropped his head into his hand and
sat immovable as the judge put on the black cap and delivered sentence.
When the prisoner left the dock, and the crowd began to disperse,
satisfied that justice had been done--save in that small circle where the
M'Mahons were supreme--Crozier rose with other witnesses to leave.  As he
looked ahead of him the first face he saw was that of Kitty Tynan, and
something in it startled him.  Where had he seen that look before?  Yes,
he remembered.  It was when he was twenty-one and had been sent away to
Algiers because he was falling in love with a farmer's daughter.  As he
drove down a lane with his father towards the railway station, those long
years ago, he had seen the girl's face looking at him from the window of
a labourer's cottage at the crossroads; and its stupefied desolation
haunted him for many years, even after the girl had married and gone to
live in Scotland--that place of torment for an Irish soul.

The look in Kitty Tynan's face reminded him of that farmer's lass in his
boyhood's history.  He was to blame then--was he to blame now?  Certainly
not consciously, not by any intended word or act.  Now he met her eyes
and smiled at her, not gaily, not gravely, but with a kind of whimsical
helplessness; for she was the first to remind him that he was leaving the
court-room in a different position (if not a different man) from that in
which he entered it.  He had entered the court-room as James Gathorne
Kerry, and he was leaving it as Shiel Crozier; and somehow James Gathorne
Kerry had always been to himself a different man from Shiel Crozier, with
different views, different feelings, if not different characteristics.

He saw faces turned to him, a few with intense curiosity, fewer
still with a little furtiveness, some with amusement, and many with
unmistakable approval; for one thing was clear, if his own evidence was
correct: he was the son of a baronet, he was heir-presumptive to a
baronetcy, and he had scored off Augustus Burlingame in a way which
delighted a naturally humorous people.  He noted, however, that the nod
which Studd Bradley, the financier, gave him had in it an enigmatic
something which puzzled him.  Surely Bradley could not be prejudiced
against him because of the evidence he had given.  There was nothing
criminal in living under an assumed name, which, anyhow, was his own name
in three-fourths of it, and in the other part was the name of the county
where he was born.

"Divils me own, I told you he was up among the dukes," said Malachi Deely
to John Sibley as they came out.  "And he's from me own county, and I
know the name well enough; an' a damn good name it is.  The bulls of
Castlegarry was famous in the south of Ireland."

"I've a warm spot for him.  I was right, you see.  Backing horses ruined
him," said Sibley in reply; and he looked at Crozier admiringly.

There is the communion of saints, but nearer and dearer is the communion
of sinners; for a common danger is their bond, and that is even more than
a common hope.




CHAPTER IV

"STRENGTH SHALL BE GIVEN THEE"

On the evening of the day of the trial, Mrs. Tynan, having fixed the new
blind to the window of Shiel Crozier's room, which was on the ground-
floor front, was lowering and raising it to see if it worked properly,
when out in the moonlit street she saw a wagon approaching her house
surrounded and followed by obviously excited men.  Once before she had
seen just such a group nearing her door.  That was when her husband was
brought home to die in her arms.  She had a sudden conviction, as,
holding the blind in her hand, she looked out into the night, that again
tragedy was to cross her threshold.  Standing for an instant under the
fascination of terror, she recovered herself with a shiver, and, stepping
down from the chair where she had been fixing the blind, with the
instinct of real woman, she ran to the bed of the room where she was, and
made it ready.  Why did she feel that it was Shiel Crozier's bed which
should be made ready?  Or did she not feel it?  Was it only a dazed,
automatic act, not connected with the person who was to lie in the bed?
Was she then a fatalist?  Were trouble and sorrow so much her portion
that to her mind this tragedy, whatever it was, must touch the man
nearest to her--and certainly Shiel Crozier was far nearer than Jesse
Bulrush.  Quite apart from wealth or position, personality plays a part
more powerful than all else in the eyes of every woman who has a soul
which has substance enough to exist at all.  Such men as Crozier have
compensations for "whate'er they lack."  It never occurred to Mrs. Tynan
to go to Jesse Bulrush's room or the room of middle-aged, comely Nurse
Egan.  She did the instinctive thing, as did the woman who sent a man a
rope as a gift, on the ground that the fortune in his hand said that he
was born not to be drowned.

Mrs. Tynan's instinct was right.  By the time she had put the bed into
shape, got a bowl of water ready, lighted a lamp, and drawn the bed out
from the wall, there was a knocking at the door.  In a moment she had
opened it, and was faced by John Sibley, whose hat was off as though he
were in the presence of death.  This gave her a shock, and her eyes
strove painfully to see the figure which was being borne feet foremost
over her threshold.

"It's Mr. Crozier?" she asked.

"He was shot coming home here--by the M'Mahon mob, I guess," returned
Sibley huskily.

"Is--is he dead?" she asked tremblingly.  "No.  Hurt bad."

"The kindest man--it'd break Kitty's heart--and mine," she added hastily,
for she might be misunderstood; and John Sibley had shown signs of
interest in her daughter.

"Where's the Young Doctor?" she asked, catching sight of Crozier's face
as they laid him on the bed.  "He's done the first aid, and he's off
getting what's needed for the operation.  He'll be here in a minute or
so," said a banker who, a few days before, had refused Crozier credit.

"Gently, gently--don't do it that way," said Mrs. Tynan in sharp reproof
as they began to take off Crozier's clothes.

"Are you going to stay while we do it?" asked a maker of mineral waters,
who whined at the prayer meetings of a soul saved and roared at his
employees like a soul damned.

"Oh, don't be a fool!" was the impatient reply.  "I've a grown-up girl
and I've had a husband.  Don't pull at his vest like that.  Go away.  You
don't know how.  I've had experience--my husband .  .  .  There, wait
till I cut it away with the scissors.  Cover him with the quilt.  Now,
then, catch hold of his trousers under the quilt, and draw them off
slowly.  .  .  .  There you are--and nothing to shock the modesty of a
grown-up woman or any other when a life's at stake.  What does the Young
Doctor say?"

"Hush!  He's coming to," interposed the banker.  It was as though the
quiet that followed the removal of his clothes and the touch of Mrs.
Tynan's hand on his head had called Crozier back from unconsciousness.

The first face he saw was that of the banker.  In spite of the loss of
blood and his pitiable condition, a whimsical expression came to his
eyes.  "Lucky for you you didn't lend me the money," he said feebly.

The banker shook his head.  "I'm not thinking of that, Mr. Crozier.  God
knows, I'm not!"

Crozier caught sight of Mrs. Tynan.  "It's hard on you to have me brought
here," he murmured as she took his hand.

"Not so hard as if they hadn't," she replied.  "That's what a home's for
--not just a place for eating and drinking and sleeping."

"It wasn't part of the bargain," he said weakly.

"It was my part of the bargain."

"Here's Kitty," said the maker of mineral waters, as there was the swish
of a skirt at the door.

"Who are you calling 'Kitty'?" asked the girl indignantly, as they
motioned her back from the bedside.  "There's too many people here," she
added abruptly to her mother.  "We can take care of him"--she nodded
towards the bed.  "We don't want any help except--except from John
Sibley, if he will stay, and you too," she added to the banker.

She had not yet looked at the figure on the bed.  She felt she could not
do so while all these people were in the room.  She needed time to adjust
herself to the situation.  It was as though she was the authority in the
household and took control even of her mother.  Mrs. Tynan understood.
She had a great belief in her daughter and admired her cleverness, and
she was always ready to be ruled by her; it was like being "bossed" by
the man she had lost.

"Yes, you'd all better go," Mrs. Tynan said.  "He wants all the air
he can get, and I can't make things ready with all of you in the room.
Go outdoors for a while, anyway.  It's summer and you'll not take cold!
The Young Doctor has work to do, and my girl and I and these two will
help him plenty."  She motioned towards the banker and the gambling
farmer.

In a moment the room was cleared of all save the four and Crozier, who
knew that upon the coming operation depended his life.  He had been
conscious when the Young Doctor said this was so, and he was thinking, as
he lay there watching these two women out of his nearly closed eyes, that
he would like to be back in Ireland at Castlegarry with the girl he had
married and had left without a good-bye near five years gone.  If he had
to die he would like to die at home; and that could not be.

Kitty had the courage to turn towards him now.  As she caught sight of
his face for the first time--she had so far kept her head turned away--
she became very pale.  Then, suddenly, she gathered herself together.
Going over to the bed, she took the limp hand lying on the coverlet.

"Courage, soldier," she said in the colloquialism her father often used,
and she smiled at Crozier a great-hearted, helpful smile.

"You are a brick of bricks, Kitty Tynan," he whispered, and smiled.

"Here comes the Young Doctor," said Mrs. Tynan as the door opened
unceremoniously.

"Well, I have to make an excursion," Crozier said, "and I mayn't come
back.  If I don't, au revoir, Kitty."

"You are coming back all right," she answered firmly.  "It'll take more
than a horse-thief's bullet to kill you.  You've got to come back.
You're as tough as nails.  And I'll hold your hand all through it--yes,
I will!" she added to the Young Doctor, who had patted her shoulder and
told her to go to another room.

"I'm going to help you, doctor-man, if you please," she said, as he
turned to the box of instruments which his assistant held.

"There's another--one of my colleagues--coming I hope," the Young Doctor
replied.

"That's all right, but I am staying to see Mr. Crozier through.  I said
I'd hold his hand, and I'm going to do it," she added firmly.

"Very well; put on a big apron, and see that you go through with us if
you start.  No nonsense."

"There'll be no nonsense from me," she answered quietly.

"I want the bed in the middle of the room," the Young Doctor said, and
the others gently moved it.




CHAPTER V

A STORY TO BE TOLD

A great surgeon said a few years ago that he was never nervous when
performing an operation, though there was sometimes a moment when every
resource of character, skill, and brain came into play.  That was when,
having diagnosed correctly and operated, a new and unexpected seat of
trouble and peril was exposed, and instant action had to be taken.  The
great man naturally rose to the situation and dealt with it coolly; but
he paid the price afterwards in his sleep when, night after night, he
performed the operation over and over again with the same strain on his
subconscious self.

So it was with Kitty Tynan in her small way.  She had insisted on being
allowed to help at the operation, and the Young Doctor, who had a good
knowledge of life and knew the stuff in her, consented; and so far as the
operation was concerned she justified his faith in her.  When the banker
had to leave the room at the sight of the carnage, she remained, and she
and John Sibley were as cool as the Young Doctor and his fellow-
anatomist, till it was all over, and Shiel Crozier was started again on a
safe journey back to health.  Then a thing, which would have been amusing
if it had not been so deeply human, happened.  She and John Sibley went
out of the house together into the moonlit night, and the reaction seized
them both at the same moment.  She gave a gulp and burst into tears, and
he, though as tall as Crozier, also broke down, and they sat on the stump
of a tree together, her hand in his, and cried like two children.

"Never since I was a little runt--did I--never cried in thirty years--
and here I am-leaking like a pail!"  Thus spoke John Sibley in gasps and
squeezing Kitty's hand all the time unconsciously, but spontaneously, and
as part of what he felt.  He would not, however, have dared to hold her
hand on any other occasion, while always wanting to hold it, and wanting
her also to share his not wholly reputed, though far from precarious,
existence.  He had never got so far as to tell her that; but if she had
understanding she would realise after to-night what he had in his mind.
She, feeling her arm thrill with the magnetism of his very vital palm,
had her turn at explanation.  "I wouldn't have broke down myself--it was
all your fault," she said.  "I saw it--yes--in your face as we left the
house.  I'm so glad it's over safe--no one belonging to him here, and not
knowing if he'd wake up alive or not--I just was swamped."

He took up the misty excuse and explanation.  "I had a feeling for him
from the start; and then that Logan Trial to-day, and the way he talked
out straight, and told the truth to shame the devil--it's what does a man
good!  And going bung over a horserace--that's what got me too, where I
was young and tender.  Swatted that Burlingame every time--one eye, two
eyes all black, teeth out, nose flattened--called him an 'outrageous
lawyer'--my, that last clip was a good one!  You bet he's a sport--
Crozier."

Kitty nodded eagerly while still wiping her red eyes.  "He made the judge
smile--I saw it, not ten minutes before his honour put on the black cap.
You couldn't have believed it, if you hadn't seen it--

"Here, let go my hand," she added, suddenly conscious of the enormity
John Sibley was committing by squeezing it now.

It is perfectly true that she did not quite realise that he had taken
her hand--that he had taken her hand.  She was conscious in a nice,
sympathetic way that her hand had been taken, but it was lost in the
abstraction of her emotion.

"Oh, here, let it go quick!" she added--"and not because mother's
coming, either," she added as the door opened and her mother came out--
not to spy, not to reproach her daughter for sitting with a man in the
moonlight at ten o'clock at night, but--good, practical soul--to bring
them each a cup of beef-tea.

"Here, you two," she said as she hurried to them.  "You need something
after that business in there, and there isn't time to get supper ready.
It's as good for you as supper, anyway.  I don't believe in underfeeding.
Nothing's too good to swallow."

She watched them sip the tea slowly like two schoolchildren.

"And when you've drunk it you must go right to bed, Kitty," she added
presently.  "You've had your own way, and you saw the thing through; but
there's always a reaction, and you'll pay for it.  It wasn't fit work for
a girl of your age; but I'm proud of your nerve, and I'm glad you showed
the Young Doctor what you can do.  You've got your father's brains and my
grit," she added with a sigh of satisfaction.  "Come along--bed now,
Kitty.  If you get too tired you'll have bad dreams."

Perhaps she was too tired.  In any case she had dreams.  Just as the
great surgeon performed his operation over and over in his sleep, so
Kitty Tynan, through long hours that night, and for many nights
afterwards, saw the swift knives, helped to staunch the blood, held the
basin, disinfected the instruments which had made an attack on the man
of men in her eyes, and saw the wound stitched up--the last act of the
business before the Young Doctor turned to her and said, "You'll do
wherever you're put in life, Miss Kitty Tynan.  You're a great girl.
And now get some fresh air and forget all about it."

Forget all about it!  So, the Young Doctor knew what happened after a
terrific experience like that!  In truth, he knew only too well.  Great
surgeons do surgery only and have innumerable operations to give them
skill; but a country physician and surgeon must be a sane being to keep
his nerve when called on to use the knife, and he must have a more than
usual gift for such business.  That is what the Young Doctor had; but he
knew it was not easy to forget those scenes in which man carved the body
of fellow-man, laying bare the very vitals of existence, seeing "the
wheels go round."

It haunted Kitty Tynan in the night-time, and perhaps it was that which
toned down a little the colour of her face--the kind of difference of
colouring there is between natural gold and 14-carat.  But in the daytime
she was quite happy, and though there was haunting, it was Shiel Crozier
who, first helpless, then convalescent, was haunted by her presence.  It
gave him pleasure, but it was a pleasure which brought pain.  He was not
so blind that he had not caught at her romance, in which he was the
central figure--a romance which had not vanished since the day he
declared in the court-room that he was married, or had been married.
Kitty's eyes told their own story, and it made him uneasy and remorseful.
Yet he could not remember when, even for an instant, he had played with
her.  She had always seemed part of a simple family life for which he and
Jesse Bulrush and her mother and the nurse-Nurse Egan-were responsible.
What a blessing Nurse Egan had been!  Otherwise, all the nursing would
have been performed by Kitty and her mother, and it might well have
broken them down, for they were determined to nurse him themselves.

When, however, Nurse Egan came back, two days after the operation was
performed, they included her in the responsibility, as one of the family;
and as she had no other important case on at the time, fortunately she
could give Crozier almost undivided attention.  She had been at first
disposed to keep Kitty out of the sick-chamber, as no place for a girl,
but she soon abandoned that position, for Kitty was not the girl ever to
think of impropriety.  She was primitive and she had rather a before-the-
flood nature, but she had not the faintest vulgar strain in her.  Her
mind was essentially pure; nothing material in her had been awakened.
Her greatest joy was to do the many things for the patient which a nurse
must do--prepare his food, give him drink, adjust his pillows, bathe his
face and hands, take his temperature; and on his part he tried hard to
disguise from her the apprehension he felt, and to avoid any hint by word
or look that he saw anything save the actions of a kind heart.  True, her
views as to what was proper and improper might possibly be on a different
plane from his own.  For instance, he had seen girls of her station in
the West kiss young men freely--men whom they had no thought of marrying;
and that was not the custom of his own class in his home-country.

As he got well slowly, and life opened out before him again, he felt he
had to pursue a new course, and in that course he must take account of
Kitty Tynan, though he could not decide how.  He had a deep confidence in
the Young Doctor, in his judgment and his character; and it was almost
inevitable that he should tell his life-story to the man whose skill had
saved him from death in a strange land, with all undone he wanted to do
ere he returned to a land which was not strange.

The thing happened, as such things do happen, in a quite natural way one
day when he and the Young Doctor were discussing the probable verdict
against the man who had shot him--the trial was to come on soon, and once
again Augustus Burlingame was to be counsel for the defence, and once
again Crozier would have to appear in a witness-box.

"I think you ought to know, Crozier, that, in view of the trial,
Burlingame has written to a firm of lawyers in Kerry to get full
information about your past," the Young Doctor said.

Crozier gave one of those little jerks of the head characteristic of
him and said: "Why, of course; I knew he would do that after I gave my
evidence in the Logan Trial."  He raised himself on his elbow.  "I owe
you a great deal," he added feelingly, "and I can't repay you in cash or
kindness for what you have done; but it is due you to tell you my whole
story, and that is what I propose to do now."

"If you think--"

"I do think; and also I want both Mrs. Tynan and her daughter to hear my
story.  Better, truer friends a man could not have; and I want them to
know the worst and the best there is, if there is any best.  They and you
have trusted me, been too good to me, and what I said at the trial is not
enough.  I want to do what I've never done before.  I want to tell
everything.  It will do me good; and perhaps as I tell it I'll see myself
and everything else in a truer light than I've yet seen it all."

"You are sure you want Mrs. Tynan and her daughter to hear?"

"Absolutely sure."

"They are not in your rank in life, you know."

"They are my friends, and I owe them more than I can say.  There is
nothing they cannot or should not hear.  I can say that at least."

"Shall I ask them to come?"

"Yes.  Give me a swig of water first.  It won't be easy, but--"

He held out his hand, and the Young Doctor grasped it.

Suddenly the latter said: "You are sure you will not be sorry?  That it
is not a mood of the moment due to physical weakness?"

"Quite sure.  I determined on it the day I was shot--and before I was
shot."

"All right."  The Young Doctor disappeared.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Anny man as is a man has to have one vice
Her moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctilios
Law's delays outlasted even the memory of the crime committed
She looked too gay to be good
They had seen the world through the bottom of a tumbler






YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK

[BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER]

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.


VI.       "HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON"
VII.      A WOMAN'S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE
VIII.     ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER
IX.       NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY
X.        "S. O. S."
XI.       IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER




CHAPTER VI

"HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON"

The stillness of a summer's day in Prairie Land has all the
characteristics of music.  That is not so paradoxical as it seems.
The effect of some music is to produce a divine quiescence of the senses,
a suspension of motion and aggressive life; to reduce existence to mere
pulsation.  It was this kind of feeling which pervaded that region of
sentient being when Shiel Crozier told his story.  The sounds that
sprinkled the general stillness were in themselves sleepy notes of the
pervasive music of somnolent nature--the sough of the pine at the door,
the murmur of insect life, the low, thudding beat of the steam-thresher
out of sight hard by, the purring of the cat in the arms of Kitty Tynan
as, with fascinated eyes, she listened to a man tell the tale of a life
as distant from that which she lived as she was from Eve.

She felt more awed than curious as the tale went on; it even seemed to
her she was listening to a theme beyond her sphere, like some shameless
eavesdropper at the curtains of a secret ceremonial.  Once or twice she
looked at her mother and at the Young Doctor, as though to reassure
herself that she was not a vulgar intruder.  It was far more impressive
to her, and to the Young Doctor too, than the scene at the Logan Trial
when a man was sentenced to death.  It was strangely magnetic, this
tale of a man's existence; and the clock which sounded so loud on the
mantelpiece, as it mechanically ticked off the time, seemed only part of
some mysterious machinery of life.  Once a dove swept down upon the
window-sill, and, peering in, filled one of the pauses in the recital
with its deep contralto note, and then fled like a small blue cloud
into the wide and--as it seemed--everlasting peace beyond the doorway.

There was nothing at all between themselves and the far sky-line save
little clumps of trees here and there, little clusters of buildings and
houses--no visible animal life.  Everything conspired to give a dignity
in keeping with the drama of failure being unfolded in the commonplace
home of the widow Tynan.  Yet the home too had its dignity.  The engineer
father had had tastes, and he had insisted on plain, unfigured curtains
and wallpaper and carpets, when carpets were used; and though his wife
had at first protested against the unfigured carpets as more difficult to
keep clean and as showing the dirt too easily, she had come to like the
one-colour scheme, and in that respect her home had an individuality rare
in her surroundings.

That was why Kitty Tynan had always a good background; for what her
bright colouring would have been in the midst of gaudy, cheap chintzes
and "Axminsters," such as abounded in Askatoon, is better left to the
imagination.  It was not, therefore, in sordid, mean, or incongruous
surroundings that Crozier told his tale; as would no doubt have been
arranged by a dramatist, if he had had the making and the setting of the
story; and if it were not a true tale told just as it happened.


Perhaps the tale was the more impressive because of Crozier's deep
baritone voice, capable, as it was, of much modulation, yet, except when.
he was excited, having a slight monotone like the note of a violin with
the mute upon the strings.

This was his tale:

"Well, to begin with, I was born at Castlegarry, in Kerry--you know the
main facts from what I said in court.  As a boy I wasn't so bad a sort.
I had one peculiarity.  I always wanted 'to have something on,' as John
Sibley would say.  No matter what it was, I must have something on it.
And I was very lucky--worse luck!"

They all laughed at the bull.  "I feel at home at once," murmured the
Young Doctor, for he had come from near Enniskillen years agone, and
there is not so much difference between Enniskillen and Kerry when it
comes to Irish bulls.

"Worse luck, it was," continued Crozier, "because it made me confident
of always winning.  It's hard to say how early I began to believe I could
see things that were going to happen.  By the hour I used to shake the
dice on the billiard-table at Castlegarry, trying to see with my eyes
shut the numbers about to come up.  Of course now and then I saw the
right numbers; and it deepened the conviction that if I cultivated the
gift I'd be able to be right nearly every time.  When I went to a horse-
race I used to fasten my mind on the signal, and tried to see beforehand
the number of the winner.  Again sometimes I was very right indeed, and
that deepened my confidence in myself.  I was always at it.  I'd try and
guess--try and see--the number of the hymn which was on the paper in the
vicar's hand before he gave it out, and I would bet with myself on it.
I would bet with myself or with anybody available on any conceivable
thing--the minutes late a train would be; the pints of milk a cow would
give; the people who would be at a hunt breakfast; the babies that would
be christened on a Sunday; the number of eyes in a peck of raw potatoes.
I was out against the universe.  But it wasn't serious at all--just a
boy's mania--till one day my father met me in London when I came down
from Oxford, and took me to Thwaite's Club in St. James's Street.  There
was the thing that finished me.  I was twenty-one, and restless-minded,
and with eyes wide open.

"Well, he took me to Thwaite's where I was to become a member, and
after a little while he left me to go and have a long pow-wow with the
committee--he was a member of it.  He told me to make myself at home,
and I did so as soon as his back was turned.  Almost the first thing with
which I became sociable was a book which, at my first sight of it, had a
fascination for me.  The binding was very old, and the leather was worn,
as you will see the leather of a pocketbook, till it looks and feels like
a nice soap.  That book brought me here."

He paused, and in the silence the Young Doctor pushed a glass of milk and
brandy towards him.  He sipped the contents.  The others were in a state
of tension.  Kitty Tynan's eyes were fixed on him as though hypnotised,
and the Young Doctor was scarcely less interested; while the widow
knitted harder and faster than she had ever done, and she could knit very
fast indeed.

"It was the betting-book of Thwaite's, and it dated back almost to the
time of the conquest of Quebec.  Great men dead and gone long ago--near
a hundred and fifty years ago-had put down their bets in the book, for
Thwaite's was then what it is now, the highest and best sporting club in
the world."

Kitty Tynan's face had a curious look, for there was a club in Askatoon,
and it was said that all the "sports" assembled there.  She had no idea
what Thwaite's Club in St. James's Street would look like; but that did
not matter.  She supposed it must be as big as the Askatoon Court House
at least.

"Bets--bets--bets by men whose names were in every history, and the names
of their sons and grandsons and great-grandsons; and all betting on the
oddest things as well as the most natural things in the world.  Some of
the bets made were as mad as the bets I made myself.  Oh!  ridiculous,
some of them were; and then again bets on things that stirred the world
to the centre, from the loss of America to the beheading of Louis XVI.

"It was strange enough to see the half-dozen lines of a bet by a marquis
whose great-grandson bet on the Franco-German War; that the Government
which imposed the tea-tax in America would be out of power within six
months; or that the French Canadians would join the colonists in what is
now the United States if they revolted.  This would be cheek-by-jowl with
a bet that an heir would be born to one new-married pair before another
pair.  The very last bet made on the day I opened the book was that Queen
Victoria would make Lord Salisbury a duke, that a certain gentleman known
as S. S. could find his own door in St. James's Square, blindfold, from
the club, and that Corsair would win the Derby.

"For two long hours I sat forgetful of everything around me, while I read
that record--to me the most interesting the world could show.  Every line
was part of the history of the country, a part of the history of many
lives, and it was all part of the ritual of the temple of the great god
Chance.  I was fascinated, lost in a land of wonders.  Men came and went,
but silently.  At last there entered a gentleman whose picture I had so
often seen in the papers--a man as well known in the sporting world as
was Chamberlain in the political world.  He was dressed spectacularly,
but his face oozed good-nature, though his eyes were like bright bits of
coal.  He bred horses, he raced this, he backed that, he laid against the
other; he was one of the greatest plungers, one of the biggest figures on
the turf.  He had been a kind of god to me--a god in a grey frock-coat,
with a grey top-hat and field-glasses slung over his shoulder; or in a
hunting-suit of the most picturesque kind--great pockets in a well-
fitting coat, splendid striped waistcoat.  Well, there, I only mention
this because it played so big a part in bringing me to Askatoon.

"He came up to the table where I sat in the room with the beautiful
Adam's fireplace and the ceiling like an architrave of Valhalla, and
said, 'Do you mind--for one minute?' and he reached out a hand for the
book.

"I made way for him, and I suppose admiration showed in my eyes, because
as he hastily wrote--what a generous scrawl it was!--he said to me,
'Haven't we met somewhere before?  I seem to remember your face.

"Great gentleman, I thought, because it was certain he knew he had never
seen me before, and I was overcome by the reflection that he wished to be
civil in that way to me.  'It's my father's face you remember, I should
think,' I answered.  'He is a member here.  I am only a visitor.  I
haven't been elected yet.'  'Ah, we must see to that!' he said with a
smile, and laid a hand on my shoulder as though he'd known me many a
year--and I only twenty-one.  'Who is your father?' he asked.  When I
told him he nodded.  'Yes, yes, I know him--Crozier of Castlegarry; but
I knew his father far better, though he was so much older than me, and
indeed your grandfather also.  Look--in this book is the first bet I ever
made here after my election to the club, and it was made with your
grandfather.  There's no age in the kingdom of sport, dear lad,' he
added, laughing--'neither age nor sex nor position nor place.  It's the
one democratic thing in the modern world.  It's a republic inside this
old monarchy of ours.  Look, here it is, my first bet with your
grandfather--and I'm only sixty now!'  He smoothed the page with his hand
in a manner such as I have seen a dean do with his sermon-paper in a
cathedral puplit.  'Here it is, thirty-six years ago.' He read the bet
aloud.  It was on the Derby, he himself having bet that the Prince of
Wale's horse would win.  'Your grandfather, dear lad,' he repeated, 'but
you'll find no bets of mine with your father.  He didn't inherit that
strain, but your grandfather and your great-grandfather had it--sportsmen
both, afraid of nothing, with big minds, great eyes for seeing, and a
sense for a winner almost uncanny.  Have you got it by any chance?  Yes,
yes, by George and by John, I see you have; you are your grandfather to a
hair!  His portrait is here in the club--in the next room.  Have a look
at it.  He was only forty when it was done, and you're very like him; the
cut of the jib is there.'  He took my hand.  'Good-bye, dear lad,' he
said; 'we'll meet-yes, we'll meet often enough if you are like your
grandfather.  And I'll always like to see you,' he added generously.

"'I always wanted to meet you,' I answered.  'I've cut your pictures out
of the papers to keep them--at Eton and Oxford.'  He laughed in great
good-humour and pride.  'So so, so so, and I am a hero then, with one
follower!  Well, well, dear lad, I don't often go wrong, or anyhow I'm
oftener right than wrong, and you might do worse than follow me--but no,
I don't want that responsibility.  Go on your own--go on your own.'

"A minute more and he was gone with a wave of the hand, and in excitement
I picked up the betting-book.  It almost took my breath away.  He had
staked a thousand pounds that the favourite of the Derby would not win
the race, and that one of three outsiders would.  As I sat overpowered by
the magnitude of the bet the door opened, and he appeared with another
man, not one with whose face I was then familiar, though as a duke and
owner of great possessions, he was familiar to society.  'I've put it
down,' he said.  'Sign it, if it's all in order.' This the duke did,
after apologizing for disturbing me.  He looked at me keenly as he turned
away.  'Not the most elevating literature in the library,' he said,
smiling ironically.  'If you haven't got a taste for it beyond control,
don't cultivate it.'  He nodded kindly, and left; and again, till my
father came and found me, I buried myself in that book of fate--to me.
I found many entries in my grandfather's name, but not one in my father's
name.  I have an idea that when a vice or virtue skips one generation, it
appears with increased violence or persistence in the next, for, passing
over my father into my defenceless breast, the spirit of sport went mad
in me--or almost so.  No miser ever had a more cheerful and happy hour
than I had as I read the betting-book at Thwaites'.

"I became a member of Thwaite's soon after I left Oxford.  As some men go
to the Temple, some to the Stock Exchange, some to Parliament, I went to
Thwaite's.  It was the centre of my interest, and I took chambers in Park
Place, St. James's Street, a few steps away.  Here I met again constantly
the great sportsman who had noticed me so kindly, and I became his
follower, his disciple.  I had started with him on a wave of prejudice in
his favour; because that day when I read in the betting-book what he had
staked against the favourite, I laid all the cash and credit I could get
with his outsiders and against the favourite, and I won five hundred
pounds.  What he won--to my youthful eyes-was fabulous.  There's no use
saying what you think--you kind friends, who've always done something in
life--that I was a good-for-nothing creature to give myself up to the
turf, to horses and jockeys, and the janissaries of sport.  You must
remember that for generations my family had run on a very narrow margin
of succession, there seldom, if ever, being more than two born in any
generation of the family, so that there was always enough for the younger
son or daughter; and to take up a profession was not necessary for
livelihood.  If my mother, who was an intellectual and able woman, had
lived, it's hard to tell what I should have become; for steered aright,
given true ideas of what life should mean to a man, I might have become
ambitious and forged ahead in one direction or another.  But there it
was, she died when I was ten, and there was no one to mould me.  At Eton,
at Oxford-well, they are not preparatory schools to the business of life.
And when at twenty-four I inherited the fortune my mother left me, I had
only one idea: to live the life of a sporting gentleman.  I had a name as
a cricketer--"

"Ah--I remember, Crozier of Lammis !" interjected the Young Doctor
involuntarily.  "I'm a north of Ireland man, but I remember--"

"Yes, Lammis," the sick man went on.  "Castlegarry was my father's place,
but my mother left me Lammis.  When I got control of it, and of the
securities she left, I felt my oats, as they say; and I wasn't long in
making a show of courage, not to say rashness, in following my leader.
He gave me luck for a time, indeed so great that I could even breed
horses of my own.  But the luck went against him at last, and then, of
course, against me; and I began to feel that suction which, as it draws
the cash out of your pocket, the credit out of your bank, seems to draw
also the whole internal economy out of your body--a ghastly, empty,
collapsing thing."

Mrs. Tynan gave a great sigh.  She had once put two hundred dollars in
a mine--on paper--and it ended in a lawsuit; and on the verdict in the
lawsuit depended the two hundred dollars and more.  When she read a fatal
telegram to her saying that all was lost, she had had that empty,
collapsing feeling.

Pausing for a moment, in which he sipped some milk, Crozier then
continued: "At last my leader died, and the see-saw of fortune began for
me; and a good deal of my sound timber was sawed into logs and made into
lumber to build some one else's fortune.  When things were balancing
pretty easily, I married.  It wasn't a sordid business to restore my
fortunes--I'll say that for myself; but it wasn't the thing to do,
for I wasn't secure in my position.  I might go on the rocks; but was
there ever a gambler who didn't believe that he'd pull it off in a big
way next time, and that the turn of the wheel against him was only to
tame his spirit?  Was there ever a gambler or sportsman of my class who
didn't talk about the 'law of chances,' on the basis that if red, as it
were, came up three times, black stood a fair chance of coming up the
fourth time?  A silly enough conclusion; for on the law of chances
there's no reason why red shouldn't come up three hundred times; and so I
found that your run of bad luck may be so long that you cannot have a
chance to recover, and are out of it before the wheel turns in your
favour.  I oughn't to have married."

His voice had changed in tone, his look become most grave, there was
something very like reverence in his face, and deprecating submission in
his eyes.  His fingers fussed with the rug that covered his knees.

"God help the man that's afraid of his own wife!" remarked the Young
Doctor to himself, not erroneously reading the expression of Crozier's
face and the tone of his voice.  "There's nothing so unnerving."

"No, I oughtn't to have done it," Crozier went on.  "But I will say again
it wasn't a sordid marriage, though she had great expectations, but not
immediate; and she was a girl of great character.  She was able and
brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and she knew her own mind,
and was radiantly handsome."

Kitty Tynan almost sniffed.  Through a whole fortnight she had, with a
courage and a right-mindedness quite remarkable, fought her infatuation
for this man, and as she fought she had imagined a hundred times what his
wife was like.  She had pictured to herself a gossamer kind of woman,
delicate, and in contour like one of the fashion-plate figures she saw in
the picture-papers.  She had imagined her with a wide, drooping hat, with
a soft, clinging gown, and a bodice like a great white handkerchief
crossed on her breast, holding a basket of flowers, while a King
Charles spaniel gambolled at her feet.

This was what she had imagined with a kind of awe; but the few words
Crozier had said of her gave the impression of a Juno, commanding,
exacting, bullying, sailing on with this man of men in her wake, who was
afraid of stepping on her train.  Was it strange she should think that?
She was only a simple prairie girl who drew her own comparisons according
to her kind and from what she knew of life.  So she imagined Crozier's
wife to have been a sort of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, who swept up the
dust of the universe with her skirts, and gave no chance at all to the
children of nature like Kitty, who wore skirts scarcely lower than their
ankles.  She almost sniffed, and she became angry, too, that a man like
Crozier, who had faced the offensive Augustus Burlingame in the witness-
box as he did; who took the bullet of the assassin with such courage; who
broke a horse like a Mexican; who could ride like a leech on a filly's
flank, should crumple up at the thought of a woman who, anyhow, couldn't
be taller than Crozier himself was, and hadn't a hand like a piece of
steel and the skin of an antelope.  It was enough to make a cat laugh,
or a woman cry with rage.

"Able and brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and radiantly handsome!"
There the picture was of a high, haughty, and overbearing woman, in
velvet, or brocade, or poplin-yes, something stiff and overbearing, like
grey poplin.  Kitty looked at herself suddenly in the mirror-the half-
length mirror on the opposite wall--and she felt her hands clench and her
bosom beat hard under her pretty and inexpensive calico frock, a thing
for Chloe, not for Juno.

She was very angry with Crozier, for it was absurd, that look of
deprecating homage, that "Hush-she-is-coming" in his eyes.  What a fool a
man was where a woman was concerned!  Here she had been fighting herself
for a fortnight to conquer a useless passion for her man of all the
world, fit to command an array of giants; and she saw him now almost
breathless as he spoke of a great wild-cat of a woman who ought to be by
his side now.  What sort of a woman was she anyhow, who could let him go
into exile as he had done and live apart from her all these years, while
he "slogged away"--that was the Western phrase which came to her mind--to
pull himself level with things again?  Her feet shuffled unevenly on the
floor, and it would have been a joy to shake the in valid there with
the rapt look in his face.  Unable to bear the situation without some
demonstration, she got to her feet and caught up the glass of brandy
and milk with a little exclamation.

"Here," she said, holding the glass to his lips, "here, courage, soldier.
You don't need to be afraid at a six-thousand-mile range."

The Young Doctor started, for she had said what was in his own mind, but
what he would not have said for a thousand dollars.  It was fortunate
that Crozier was scarcely conscious of what she was saying.  His mind was
far away.  Yet, when she took the glass from him again, he touched her
arm.

"Nothing is good enough for your friends, is it?" he said gratefully.

"That wouldn't be an excuse for not getting them the best there was at
hand," she answered with a little laugh, and at least the Young Doctor
read the meaning of her words.

Presently Crozier, with a sigh, continued: "If I had done what my wife
wanted from the start, I shouldn't have been here.  I'd have saved what
was left of a fortune, and I'd have had a home of my own."

"Is she earning her living too?" asked Kitty softly, and Crozier did not
notice the irony under the question.

"She has a home of her own," answered Crozier almost sharply.  "Just
before the worst came to the worst she inherited her fortune--plenty of
it, as I got near the end of mine.  One thing after another had gone.
I was mortgaged up to the eyes.  I knew the money-lenders from Newry to
Jewry and Jewry to Jerusalem.  Then it was I promised her I'd bet no
more--never again: I'd give up the turf; I'd try and start again.  Down
in my soul I knew I couldn't start again--not just then.  But I wanted
to please her.  She was remarkable in her way; she had one of the most
imposing intelligences I have ever known.  So I promised.  I promised
I'd bet no more."

The Young Doctor caught Kitty Tynan's eyes by accident, and there was the
same look of understanding in both.  They both knew that here was the
real tragedy of Crozier's life.  If he had had less reverence for his
wife, less of that obvious prostration of soul, he probably would never
have come to Askatoon.

"I broke my promise," he murmured.  "It was a horse--well, never mind.
I was as sure of Flamingo as that the sun would rise by day and set by
night.  It was a certainty; and it was a certainty.  The horse could win,
it would win; I had it from a sure source.  My judgment was right, too.
I bet heavily on Flamingo, intending it for my last fling, and, to save
what I had left, to get back what I had lost.  I could get big odds on
him.  It was good enough.  From what I knew, it was like picking up a
gold-mine.  And I was right, right as could be.  There was no chance
about it.  It was being out where the rain fell to get wet.  It was just
being present when they called the roll of the good people that God
wished to be kind to.  It meant so much to me.  I couldn't bear to have
nothing and my wife to have all.  I simply couldn't stand--"

Again the Young Doctor met the glance of Kitty Tynan, and there was, once
more, a new and sudden look of comprehension in the eyes of both.  They
began to see light where their man was concerned.

After a moment of struggle to control himself, Crozier proceeded: "It
didn't seem like betting.  Besides, I had planned it, that when I showed
her what I had won, she would shut her eyes to the broken promise, and
I'd make another, and keep it ever after.  I put on all the cash there
was to put on, all I could raise on what was left of my property."

He paused as though to get strength to continue.  Then a look of intense
excitement suddenly possessed him, and there--passed over him a wave of
feeling which transformed him.  The naturally grave mediaeval face became
fired, the eyes blazed, the skin shone, the mouth almost trembled with
agitation.  He was the dreamer, the enthusiast, the fanatic almost, with
that look which the pioneer, the discoverer, the adventurer has when he
sees the end of his quest.

His voice rose, vibrated.  "It was a day to make you thank Heaven the
world was made.  Such days only come once in a while in England, but when
they do come, what price Arcady or Askatoon!  Never had there been so big
a Derby.  Everybody had the fever of the place at its worst.  I was
happy.  I meant to pouch my winnings and go straight to my wife and say,
'Peccavi,' and I should hear her say to me, 'Go and sin no more.'  Yes,
I was happy.  The sky, the green of the fields, the still, home-like,
comforting trees, the mass of glorious colour, the hundreds of horses
that weren't running and the scores that were to run, sleek and long, and
made like shining silk and steel, it all was like heaven on earth to me--
a horse-race heaven on earth.  There you have the state of my mind in
those days, the kind of man I was."

Sitting up, he gazed straight in front of him as though he saw Epsom
Downs before his eyes; as though he was watching the fateful race that
bore him down.  He was terribly, exhaustingly alive.  Something possessed
him, and he possessed his hearers.

"It was just as I said and knew--my horse, Flamingo, stretched away from
the rest at Tattenham Corner and came sailing away home two lengths
ahead.  It was a sight to last a lifetime, and that was what I meant it
to be for me.  The race was all Flamingo's own, and the mob was going
wild, when all of a sudden a woman--the widow of a racing-man gone
suddenly mad--rushed out in front of the horse, snatched at its bridle
with a shrill cry and down she came, and down Flamingo and the jockey
came, a melee of crushed humanity.  And that was how I lost my last two
thousand five hundred pounds, as I said at the Logan Trial."

"Oh!  Oh!" said Kitty Tynan, her face aflame, her eyes like topaz suns,
her hands wringing.  "Oh, that was--oh, poor Flamingo!" she added.

A strange smile shot into Crozier's face, and the dark passion of
reminiscence fled from his eyes.  "Yes, you are right, little friend," he
said.  "That was the real tragedy after all.  There was the horse doing
his best, his most beautiful best, as though he knew so much depended on
him, stretching himself with the last ounce of energy he could summon,
feeling the psalm of success in his heart--yes, he knows, he knows what
he has done, none so well!--and out comes a black, hateful thing against
him, and down he goes, his game over, his course run.  I felt exactly as
you do, and I felt that before everything else when it happened.  Then I
felt for myself afterwards, and I felt it hard, as you can think."

The break went from his voice, but it rang with reflective, remembered
misery.  "I was ruined.  One thing was clear to me.  I would not live on
my wife's money.  I would not eat and drink what her money bought.  No,
I would not live on my wife.  Her brother, a good enough, impulsive lad,
with a tongue of his own and too small to thresh, came to me in London
the night of the race.  He said his sister had been in the country-down
at Epsom--and that she bitterly resented my having broken my promise and
lost all I had.  He said he had never seen her so angry, and he gave me a
letter from her.  On her return to town she had been obliged to go away
at once to see her sister taken suddenly ill.  He added, with an
unfeeling jibe, that he wouldn't like the reading of the letter himself.
If he hadn't been such a chipmunk of a fellow I'd have wrung his neck.
I put the letter her letter-in my pocket, and next day gave my lawyer
full instructions and a power of attorney.  Then I went straight to
Glasgow, took steamer for Canada, and here I am.  That was near five
years ago."

"And the letter from your wife?" asked Kitty Tynan demurely and slyly.

The Young Doctor looked at Crozier, surprised at her temerity, but
Crozier only smiled gently.  "It is in the desk there.  Bring it to me,
please," he said.

In a moment Kitty was beside him with the letter.  He took it, turned it
over, examined it carefully as though seeing it for the first time, and
laid it on his knee.

"I have never opened it," he said.  "There it is, just as it was handed
to me."

"You don't know what is in it?" asked Kitty in a shocked voice.  "Why,
it may be that--"

"Oh, yes, I know what is in it!" he replied.  "Her brother's confidences
were enough.  I didn't want to read it.  I can imagine it all."

"It's pretty cowardly," remarked Kitty.

"No, I think not.  It would only hurt, and the hurting could do no good.
I can hear what it says, and I don't want to see it."

He held the letter up to his ear whimsically.  Then he handed it back to
her, and she replaced it in the desk.

"So, there it is, and there it is," he sighed.  "You have got my story,
and it's bad enough, but you can see it's not what Burlingame suggested."

"Burlingame--but Burlingame's beneath notice," rejoined Kitty.  "Isn't
he, mother?"

Mrs. Tynan nodded.  Then, as though with sudden impulse, Kitty came
forward to Crozier and leaned over him.  The look of a mother was in her
eyes.  Somehow she seemed to herself twenty years older than this man
with the heart of a boy, who was afraid of his own wife.

"It's time for your beef-tea, and when you've had it you must get your
sleep," she said, with a hovering solicitude.

"I'd like to give him a threshing first, if you don't mind," said the
Young Doctor to her.

"Please let a little good advice satisfy you," Crozier remarked ruefully.
"It will seem like old times," he added rather bitterly.

"You are too young to have had 'old times,'" said Kitty with gentle
scorn.  "I'll like you better when you are older," she added.

"Naughty jade," exclaimed the Young Doctor, "you ought to be more
respectful to those older than yourself."

"Oh, grandpapa!" she retorted.




CHAPTER VII

A WOMAN'S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE

The harvest was over.  The grain was cut, the prairie no longer waved
like a golden sea, but the smoke of the incense of sacrifice still rose
in innumerable spirals in the circle of the eye.  The ground appeared
bare and ill-treated, like a sheep first shorn; but yet nothing could
take away from it the look of plenty, even as the fat sides of the shorn
sheep invite the satisfied eye of the expert.  The land now, all stubble,
still looked good for anything.  If bare, it did not seem starved.  It
was naked and unshaven; it was stripped like a boxer for the rubbing-down
after the fight.  Not so refined and suggestive and luxurious as when it
was clothed with the coat of ripe corn in the ear, it still showed the
fibre of its being to no disadvantage.  And overhead the joy of the
prairie grew apace.

September saw the vast prairie spaces around Askatoon shorn and
shrivelled of its glory of ripened grain, but with a new life come into
the air-sweet, stinging, vibrant life, which had the suggestion of nature
recreating her vitality, inflaming herself with Edenic strength, a
battery charging itself, to charge the world in turn with force and
energy.  Morning gave pure elation, as though all created being must
strive; noon was the pulse of existence at the top of its activity;
evening was glamorous; and all the lower sky was spread with those
colours which Titian stole from the joyous horizon that filled his eyes.
There was in that evening light, somehow, just a touch of pensiveness--
the triste delicacy of heliotrope, harbinger of the Indian summer soon to
come, when the air would make all sensitive souls turn to the past and
forget that to-morrow was all in all.

Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other
unduly in this world, and they were not more numerous in Askatoon than
elsewhere.  Not everybody was taking joy of sunrises and losing himself
in the delicate contentment of the sunset.  There were many who took it
all without thought, who absorbed it unconsciously, and got something
from it; though there were many others who got nothing out of it at all,
save the health and comfort brought by a precious climate whose
solicitous friend is the sun.  These heeded it little, even though a
good number of them came from the damp islands lying between the north
Atlantic and the German Ocean.  From Erin and England and the land o'
cakes they came, had a few days of staring bright-eyed happy incredulity
as to the permanency of such conditions, and then settled down to take it
as it was, endless days of sunshine and stirring vivacious air--as though
they had always known it and had it.

There were exceptions, and these had joy in what they saw and felt
according to the measure of their temperament.  Shiel Crozier saw and
felt much of it, and probably the Young Doctor saw more of it than any
one; stray people here and there who take no part in this veracious tale
had it in greater or less degree; fat Jesse Bulrush was so sensitive to
it that he, as he himself said, "almost leaked sentimentality" and Kitty
Tynan possessed it.  She was pulsing with life, as a bird drunken with
the air's sweetness sings itself into an abandonment of motion.

Before Crozier came she had enjoyed existence as existence, wondering
often why it was she wanted to spring up from the ground with the idea
that she could fly, if she chose to try.  Once when she was quite a
little girl she had said to her mother, "I'm going to ile away," and her
mother, puzzled, asked her what she meant.  Her reply was, "It's in the
hymn."  Her mother persisted in asking what hymn; and was told with
something like scorn that it was the hymn she herself had taught her only
child--"I'll away, I'll away to the Promised Land."

Kitty had thought that "I'll away" meant some delicious motion which was
to ile, and she had visions of something between floating and flying as
being that blessed means of transportation.

As the years grew, she still wanted to "ile away" whenever the spirit of
elation seized her, and it had increased greatly since Shiel Crozier
came.  Out of her star as he was, she still felt near to him, and as
though she understood him and he comprehended her.  He had almost at once
become to her an admired mystery, which, however, at first she did not
dare wish to solve.  She had been content to be a kind of handmaiden to a
generous and adored master.  She knew that where he had been she could in
one sense never go, and yet she wanted to be near him just the same.
This was intensified after the Logan Trial and the shooting of the man
who somehow seemed to have made her live in a new way.

As long ago as she could recall she had, in a crude, untutored way, been
fond of the things that nature made beautiful; but now she seemed to see
them in a new light, but not because any one had deliberately taught her.
Indeed, it bored her almost to hear books read as Jesse Bulrush and Nurse
Egan, and even her mother, read them to Crozier after his operation, to
help him pass away the time.  The only time she ever cared to listen--
at school, though quick and clever, she had never cared for the printed
page--was when, by chance, poetry or verses were read or recited.  Then
she would listen eagerly, not attracted by the words, but by the music of
the lines, by the rhyme and rhythm, by the underlying feeling; and she
got something out of it which had in one sense nothing to do with the
verses themselves or with the conception of the poet.

Curiously enough, she most liked to hear Jesse Bulrush read.  He was a
born sentimentalist, and this became by no means subtly apparent to Kitty
during Crozier's illness.  Whenever Nurse Egan was on duty Jesse
contrived to be about, and to make himself useful and ornamental too;
for he was a picturesque figure, with a taste for figured waistcoats and
clean linen--he always washed his own white trousers and waistcoats, and
he had a taste in ties, which he made for himself out of silk bought by
the yard.  He was, in fact, a clean, wholesome man, with a flair for
material things, as he had shown in the land proposal on which Shiel
Crozier's fortunes hung, but with no gift for carrying them out, having
neither constructive ability nor continuity of purpose.  Yet he was an
agreeable, humorous, sentimental soul, who at fifty years of age found
himself "an old bach," as he called himself, in love at last with a
middle-aged nurse with dark brown hair and set figure, keen, intelligent
eyes, and a most cheerful, orderly, and soothing way with her.

Before Shiel Crozier was taken ill their romance began; but it grew in
volume and intensity after the trial and the shooting, when they met by
the bedside of the wounded man.  Jesse had been away so much in different
parts of the country before then that their individual merits never had
had a real chance to make permanent impression.  By accident, however,
his business made it necessary for him to be much in Askatoon at the
moment, and it was a propitious time for the growth of the finer
feelings.

It had given Jesse Bulrush real satisfaction that Kitty Tynan listened to
his reading of poetry--Longfellow, Byron, Tennyson, Whyte Melville, and
Adam Lindsay Gordon chiefly--with such absorbed interest.  His content
was the greater because his lovely nurse--he did think she was lovely,
as Rubens thought his painted ladies beautiful, though their cordial,
ostentatious proportions are not what Raphael regarded as the divine
lines--because his lovely nurse listened to his fat, happy voice rising
and falling, swelling and receding on the waves of verse; though it meant
nothing to her that one who had the gift of pleasant sound was using it
on her behalf.

This was not apparent to her Bulrush, though Crozier and Kitty
understood.  Jesse only saw in the blue-garbed, clear-visaged woman a
mistress of his heart, who had all the virtues and graces and who did not
talk.  That, to him, was the best thing of all.  She was a superb
listener, and he was a prodigious talker--was it not all appropriate?

One day he went searching for Kitty at her favourite retreat, a little
knoll behind and to the left of the house, where a half-dozen trees made
a pleasant resting-place at a fine look-out point.  He found her in her
usual place, with a look almost pensive on her face.  He did not notice
that, for he was excited and elated.

"I want to read you something I've written," he said, and he drew from
his pocket a paper.

"If it's another description of the timber-land you have for sale-please,
not to me," she answered provokingly, for she guessed well what he held
in his hand.  She had seen him writing it.  She had even seen some of the
lines scrawled and re-scrawled on bits of paper, showing careful if not
swift and skillful manufacture.  One of these crumpled-up bits of paper
she had in her pocket now, having recovered it that she might tease him
by quoting the lines at a provoking opportunity.

"It's not that.  It's some verses I've written," he said, with a wave of
his hand.

"All your own?" she asked with an air of assumed innocent interest, and
he did not see the frivolous gleam in her eyes, or notice the touch of
aloes on her tongue.

"Yes.  Yes.  I've always written verses more or less--I write a good many
advertisements in verse," he added cheerfully.  "They are very popular.
Not genius, quite, but there it is, the gift; and it has its uses in
commerce as in affairs of the heart.  But if you'd rather not, if it
makes you tired--"

"Courage, soldier, bear your burden," she said gaily.  "Mount your horse
and get galloping," she added, motioning him to sit.

A moment later he was pouring out his soul through a pleasing voice, from
fat lips, flanked by a high-coloured healthy cheek like a russet apple:

              "Like jewels of the sky they gleam,
               Your eyes of light, your eyes of fire;
               In their dark depths behold the dream
               Of Life's glad hope and Love's desire.

              "Above your quiet brow, endowed
               With Grecian charm to crown your grace,
               Your hair in one soft Titian cloud
               Throws heavenly shadows on your face."

"Well, I've never had verses written to me before," Kitty remarked
demurely, when he had finished and sat looking at her questioningly.
"But 'dark depths'--that isn't the right thing to say of my eyes!  And
Titian cloud of hair--is my hair Titian?  I thought Titian hair was
bronzy-tawny was what Mr. Burlingame called it when he was spouting,"
--her upper lip curled in contempt.

"It isn't you, and you know it," he replied jerkily.  She bridled.
"Do you mean to say that you come and read to me without a word of
explanation, so that I shouldn't misunderstand, verses written for
another?  Am I to be told now that my eyes aren't eyes of light and eyes
of fire, that I haven't got a Grecian brow?  Do you dare to say those
verses don't fit me--except for the Titian hair and heavenly shadows?
And that I've got no right to think they're meant for me?  Is it so, that
a man that's lived in my mother's house for years, eating at the same
table with the family, and having his clothes mended free, with supper to
suit him and no questions asked--is it so, that he reads me poetry, four
lines at a stretch, and a rhyme every other line, and then announces it
isn't for me!"

Her eyes flashed, her bosom palpitated, her hand made passionate
gestures, and she really seemed a young fury let loose.  For a moment he
was deceived by her acting; he did not see the lurking grin in the depths
of her eyes.

Her voice shook with assumed passion.  "Because I didn't show what I felt
all these years, and only exposed my real feelings when you read those
verses to me, do you think any man who was a gentleman wouldn't in the
circumstances say, 'These verses are for you, Kitty Tynan'?  You betrayed
me into showing you what I felt, and then you tell me your verses are for
another girl!"

"Girl! Girl! Girl!" he burst out.  "Nurse is thirty-seven--she told me
so herself, and how could I tell that you--why, it's absurd!  I've only
thought of you always as a baby in long skirts"--she spasmodically drew
her skirts down over her pretty, shapely ankles, while she kept her eyes
covered with one hand--"and you've seen me makin' up to her ever since
Crozier got the bullet.  Ever since he was operated on, I've--"

"Yes, yes, that's right," she interrupted.  "That's manly!  Put the blame
on him--him that couldn't help himself, struck by a horse-thief's bullet
in the dark; him that's no more to blame for your carryings on while
death was prowling about the door there--"

"Carryings on!  Carryings on!" Jesse Bulrush was thoroughly excited and
indignant.  The little devil, to put him in a hole like this!  "Carryings
on!  I've acted like a man all through--never anything else in your
house, and it's a shame that I've got to listen to things that have
never been said of me in all my life.  My mother was a good, true woman,
and she brought me up--"

"Yes, that's it, put it on your mother now, poor woman!  who isn't here
to stretch out her hand and stop you from playing a double game with two
girls so placed they couldn't help themselves--just doing kind acts for a
sick man."  Suddenly she got to her feet.  "I tell you, Jesse Bulrush,
that you're a man--you're a man--"

But she could keep it up no longer.  She burst out laughing, and the
false tears of the actress she dashed from her eyes as she added: "That
you're a man after my own heart.  But you can't have it, even if you are
after it, and you are welcome to the thirty-seven-year-old seraph in
there!"  She tossed a hand towards the house.

By this time he was on his feet too, almost bursting.  "Well, you wicked
little rip--you Ellen Terry at twenty-two, to think you could play it up
like that!  Why, never on the stage was there such--!"

"It's the poetry made me do it.  It inspired me," she gurgled.  "I felt
--why, I felt here"--she pressed her hand to her heart "all the pangs of
unrequited love--oh, go away, go back to the house and read that to her!
She's in the sitting-room, and my mother's away down-town.  Now's your
chance, Claude Melnotte."

She put both hands on his big, panting chest and pushed him backward
towards the house.  "You're good enough for anybody, and if I wasn't so
young and daren't leave mother till I get my wisdom-teeth cut, and till
I'm thirty-seven--oh, oh, oh!"  She laughed till the tears came into her
eyes.  "This is as good as--as a play."

"It's the best acted play I ever saw, from 'Ten Nights in a Bar-room' to
'Struck Oil,'" rejoined Jesse Bulrush, with a face still half ashamed yet
beaming.  "But, tell me, you heartless little woman, are the verses worth
anything?  Do you think she'll like them?"

Kitty grew suddenly serious, and a curious look he could not read
deepened in her eyes.  "Nurse 'll like them--of course she will," she
said gently.  "She'll like them because they are you.  Read them to her
as you read them to me, and she'll only hear your voice, and she'll think
them clever and you a wonderful man, even if you are fifty and weigh a
thousand pounds.  It doesn't matter to a woman what a man's saying or
doing, or whether he's so much cleverer than she is, if she knows that
under everthing he's saying, 'I love you.'  A man isn't that way, but a
woman is.  Now go."  Again she pushed him with a small brown hand.

"Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!" he said admiringly.

"Then be a father to me," she said teasingly.

"I can't marry both your mother and nurse."

"P'r'aps you can't marry either," she replied sarcastically, "and I know
that in any case you'll never be any relative of mine by marriage.  Get
going," she said almost impatiently.

He turned to go, and she said after him, as he rolled away, "I'll let you
hear some of my verses one day when you're more developed and can
understand them."

"I'll bet they beat mine," he called back.

"You'll win your bet," she answered, and stood leaning against a tree
with a curious look emerging and receding in her eyes.  When he had
disappeared, sitting down, she drew from her breast a slip of paper,
unfolded it, and laid it on her knee.  "It is better," she said.  "It's
not good poetry, of course, but it's truer, and it's not done according
to a pattern like his.  Yes, it's real, real, real, and he'll never see
it--never see it now, for I've fought it' all out, and I've won."

Then she slowly read the verses aloud:

"Yes, I've won," she said with determination.  So many of her sex have
said things just as decisively, and while yet the exhilaration of their
decision was inflaming them, have done what they said they would never,
never, never do.  Still there was a look in the fair face which meant a
new force awakened in her character.

For a long time she sat brooding, forgetful of the present and of the
little comedy of elderly lovers going on inside the house.  She was
thinking of the way conventions hold and bind us; of the lack of freedom
in the lives of all, unless they live in wild places beyond the social
pale.  Within the past few weeks she had had visions of such a world
beyond this active and ordered civilisation, where the will and the
conscience of a man or woman was the only law.  She was not lawless in
mind or spirit.  She was only rebelling gainst a situation in which she
was bound hand and foot, and could not follow her honest and exclusive
desire, if she wished to do so.

Here was a man who was married, yet in a real sense who had no wife.
Suppose that man cared for her, what a tragedy it would be for them to be
kept apart!  This man did not love her, and so there was no tragedy for
both.  Still all was not over yet--yes, all was "over and over and over,"
she said to herself as she sprang to her feet with a sharp exclamation of
disgust--with herself.

Her mother was coming hurriedly towards her from the house.  There was a
quickness in her walk suggesting excitement, yet from the look in her
face it was plain that the news she brought was not painful.  "He told me
you were here, and--"

"Who told you I was here?"

"Mr. Bulrush."

"So it's all settled," she said, with a little quirk of her shoulders.

"Yes, he's asked her, and they're going to be married.  It's enough to
make you die laughing to see the two middle-aged doves cooing in there."

"I thought perhaps it would be you.  He said he would like to be a father
to me."

"That would prevent me if nothing else would," answered the widow of
Tyndall Tynan.  "A stepfather to an unmarried girl, both eyeing each
other for a chance to find fault--if you please, no thank you!"

"That means you won't get married till I'm out of the way?" asked Kitty,
with a look which was as much touched with myrrh as with mirth.

"It means I wouldn't get married till you are married, anyway," was the
complacent answer.

"Is there any one special that--"

"Don't talk nonsense.  Since your father died I've only thought of his
child and mine, and I've not looked where I might.  Instead, I've done my
best to prove that two women could live and succeed without a man to earn
for them; though of course without the pension it couldn't have been done
in the style we've done it.  We've got our place!"

There is a dignity attached to a pension which has an influence quite its
own, and in the most primitive communities it has an aristocratic
character which commands general respect.  In Askatoon people gave Mrs.
Tynan a better place socially because of her pension than they would have
done if she had earned double the money which the pension brought her.

"Everybody has called on us," she added with reflective pride.

"Principally since Mr. Crozier came," added Kitty.  "It's funny, isn't
it, how he made people respect him before they knew who he was?"

"He would make Satan stand up and take off his hat, if he paid Hades a
visit," said Mrs. Tynan admiringly.  "Anybody'd do anything for him."

Kitty eyed her mother closely.  There was a strange, far-away, brooding
look in Mrs. Tynan's eyes, and she seemed for a moment lost in thought.

"You're in love with him," said Kitty sharply.

"I was, in a way," answered her mother frankly.  "I was, in a way, a kind
of way, till I knew he was married.  But it didn't mean anything.  I
never thought of it except as a thing that couldn't be."

"Why couldn't it be?" asked Kitty, smothering an agitation rising in her
breast.

"Because I always knew he belonged to where we didn't, and because if he
was going to be in love himself, it would be with some girl like you.
He's young enough for that, and it's natural he should get as his profit
the years of youth that a young woman has yet to live."

"As though it was a choice between you and me, for instance!"

Mrs. Tynan started, but recovered herself.  "Yes.  If there had been any
choosing, he'd not have hesitated a minute.  He'd have taken you, of
course.  But he never gave either of us a thought that way."

"I thought that till--till after he'd told us his story," replied Kitty
boldly.

"What has happened since then?" asked her mother, with sudden
apprehension.

"Nothing has happened since.  I don't understand it, but it's as though
he'd been asleep for a long time and was awake again."

Mrs. Tynan gravely regarded her daughter, and a look of fear came into
her face.  "I knew you kept thinking of him always," she said; "but you
had such sense, and he never showed any feeling for you; and young girls
get over things.  Besides, you always showed you knew he wasn't a
possibility.  But since he told us that day about his being married and
all, has--has he been different towards you?"

"Not a thing, not a word," was the reply; "but--but there's a difference
with him in a way.  I feel it when I go in the room where he is."

"You've got to stop thinking of him," insisted the elder woman
querulously.  "You've got to stop it at once.  It's no good.  It's bad
for you.  You've too much sense to go on caring for a man that--"

"I'm going to get married," said Kitty firmly.  "I've made up my mind.
If you have to think about one person, you should stop thinking about
another; anyhow, you've got to make yourself stop.  So I'm going to
marry--and stop."

"Who are you going to marry, Kitty?  You don't mean to say it's John
Sibley !"

"P'r'aps.  He keeps coming."

"That gambling and racing fellow!"

"He owns a big farm, and it pays, and he has got an interest in a mine,
and--"

"I tell you, you shan't," peevishly interjected Mrs. Tynan.  "You shan't.
He's vicious.  He's--oh, you shan't!  I'd rather--"

"You'd rather I threw myself away--on a married man?" asked Kitty
covertly.

"My God--oh, Kitty!" said the other, breaking down.  "You can't mean it
--oh, you can't mean that you'd--"

"I've got to work out my case in my own way," broke in Kitty calmly.
"I know how I've got to do it.  I have to make my own medicine--and take
it.  You say John Sibley is vicious.  He has only got one vice."

"Isn't it enough?  Gambling--"

"That isn't a vice; it's a sport.  It's the same as Mr. Crozier had.
Mr. Crozier did it with horses only, the other does it with cards and
horses.  The only vice John Sibley's got is me."

"Is you?" asked her mother bewilderedly.

"Well, when you've got an idea you can't control and it makes you its
slave, it's a vice.  I'm John's vice, and I'm thinking of trying to cure
him of it--and cure myself too," Kitty added, folding and unfolding the
paper in her hand.

"Here comes the Young Doctor," said her mother, turning towards the
house.  "I think you don't mean to marry Sibley, but if you do, make him
give up gambling."

"I don't know that I want him to give it up," answered Kitty musingly.

A moment later she was alone with the Young Doctor.




CHAPTER VIII

ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER

"What's this you've been doing?" asked the Young Doctor, with a
quizzical smile.  "We never can tell where you'll break out."

"Kitty Tynan's measles!" she rejoined, swinging her hat by its ribbon.
"Mine isn't a one-sided character, is it?"

"I know one of the sides quite well," returned the Young Doctor.

"Which, please, sir?"

The Young Doctor pretended to look wise.  "The outside.  I read it like a
book.  It fits the life in which it moves like the paper on the wall.
But I'm not sure of the inside.  In fact, I don't think I know that at
all."

"So I couldn't call you in if my character was sick inside, could I?"
she asked obliquely.

"I might have an operation, and see what's wrong with it," he answered
playfully.

Suddenly she shivered.  "I've had enough of operations to last me
awhile," she rejoined.  "I thought I could stand anything, but your
operation on Mr. Crozier taught me a lesson.  I'd never be a doctor's
wife if I had to help him cut up human beings."

"I'll remember that," the Young Doctor replied mockingly.

"But if it would help put things on a right basis, I'd make a bargain
that I wasn't to help do the carving," she rejoined wickedly.  The Young
Doctor always incited her to say daring things.  They understood each
other well.  "So don't let that stand in the way," she added slyly.

"The man who marries you will be glad to get you without the anatomy," he
returned gallantly.

"I wasn't talking of a man; I was talking of a doctor."

He threw up a hand and his eyebrows.  "Isn't a doctor a man?"

"Those I've seen have been mostly fish."

"No feelings--eh?"

She looked him in the eyes, and he felt a kind of shiver go through him.
"Not enough to notice.  I never observed you had any," she replied.  "If
I saw that you had, I'd be so frightened I'd fly.  I've seen pictures of
an excited whale turning a boat full of men over.  No, I couldn't bear to
see you show any feeling."

The dark eyes of the Young Doctor suddenly took on a look which was a
stranger to them.  In his relations with women he was singularly
impersonal, but he was a man, and he was young enough to feel the Adam
stir in him.  The hidden or controlled thing suddenly emerged.  It was
not the look which would be in his eyes if he were speaking to the woman
he wanted to marry.  Kitty saw it, and she did not understand it, for she
had at heart a feeling that she could go to him in any trouble of life
and be sure of healing.  To her he seemed wonderful; but she thought of
him as she would have thought of her father, as a person of authority and
knowledge--that operation showed him a great man, she thought, so
skillful and precise and splendid; and the whole countryside had such
confidence in him.

She regarded him as a being apart; but for a moment, an ominous moment,
he was almost one with that race of men who feed in strange pastures.
She only half saw the reddish glow which came swimming into his eyes, and
she did not realise it, for she did not expect to find it there.  For an
instant, however, he saw with new eyes that primary eloquence of woman
life, the unspent splendour of youth, the warm joy of the material being,
the mystery of maidenhood in all its efflorescence.  It was the emergence
of his own youth again, as why should it not be, since he had never
married and had never dallied!  But in a moment it was gone again--driven
away.

"What a wicked little flirt you are!" he said, with a shake of the head.
"You'll come to a bad end, if you don't change your ways."

"Perform an operation, then, if you think you know what's the matter with
me," she retorted.  "Sometimes in operating for one disease we come on
another, and then there's a lot of thinking to be done."

The look in her face was quizzical, yet there was a strange, elusive
gravity in her eyes, an almost pathetic appealing.  "If you were going to
operate on me, what would it be for?" she asked more flippantly than her
face showed.

"Well, it's obscure, and the symptoms are not usual, but I should strike
for the cancer love," he answered, with a direct look.

She flushed and changed on the instant.  "Is love a cancer?" she asked.
All at once she felt sure that he read her real story, and something very
like anger quickened in her.

"Unrequited love is," he answered deliberately.  "How do you know it is
unrequited?" she asked sharply.

"Well, I don't know it," he answered, dismayed by the look in her face.
"But I certainly hope I'm right.  I do, indeed."

"And if you were right, what would you do--as a surgeon?" she
questioned, with an undertone of meaning.

"I would remove the cause of the disease."

She came close and looked him straight in the eyes.  "You mean that he
should go?  You think that would cure the disease?  Well, you are not
going to interfere.  You are not going to manoeuvre anything to get him
away--I know doctors' tricks.  You'd say he must go away east or west to
the sea for change of air to get well.  That's nonsense, and it isn't
necessary.  You are absolutely wrong in your diagnosis--if that's what
you call it.  He is going to stay here.  You aren't going to drive away
one of our boarders and take the bread out of our mouths.  Anyhow, you're
wrong.  You think because a girl worships a man's ability that she's in
love with him.  I adore your ability, but I'd as soon fall in love with a
lobster--and be boiled with the lobster in a black pot.  Such conceit men
have!"

He was not convinced.  He had a deep-seeing eye, and he saw that she was
boldly trying to divert his belief or suspicion.  He respected her for
it.  He might have said he loved her for it--with a kind of love which
can be spoken of without blushing or giving cause to blush, or reason for
jealousy, anger, or apprehension.

He smiled down into her gold-brown eyes, and he thought what a real woman
she was.  He felt, too, that she would tell him something that would give
him further light if he spoke wisely now.

"I'd like to see some proof that you are right, if I am wrong," he
answered cautiously.

"Well, I'm going to be married," she said, with an air of finality.

He waved a hand deprecatingly.  "Impossible--there's no man worth it.
Who is the undeserving wretch?"

"I'll tell you to-morrow," she replied.  "He doesn't know yet how happy
he's going to be.  What did you come here for?  Why did you want to see
me?" she added.  "You had something you were going to tell me.  Hadn't
you?"

"That's quite right," he replied.  "It's about Crozier.  This is my last
visit to him professionally.  He can go on now without my care.  Yours
will be sufficient for him.  It has been all along the very best care he
could have had.  It did more for him than all the rest, it--"

"You don't mean that," she interrupted, with a flush and a bosom that
leaped under her pretty gown.  "You don't mean that I was of more use
than the nurse--than the future Mrs. Jesse Bulrush?"

"I mean just that," he answered.  "Nearly every sick person, every sick
man, I should say, has his mascot, his ministering angel, as it were.
It's a kind of obsession, and it often means life or death, whether the
mascot can stand the strain of the situation.  I knew an old man--down by
Dingley's Flat it was, and he wanted a boy--his grand-nephew-beside him
always.  He was getting well, but the boy took sick and the old man died
the next day.  The boy had been his medicine.  Sometimes it's a
particular nurse that does the trick; but whoever it is, it's a great
vital fact.  Well, that's the part you played to Mr. Shiel Crozier of
Lammis and Castlegarry aforetime.  He owes you much."

"I am glad of that," she said softly, her eyes on the distance.

"She is in love with him in spite of what she says," remarked the Young
Doctor to himself.  "Well," he continued aloud, "the fact is, Crozier's
almost well in a way, but his mind is in a state, and he is not going to
get wholly right as things are.  Since things came out in court, since he
told us his whole story, he has been different.  It's as though--"

She interrupted him hastily and with suppressed emotion.  "Yes, yes, do
you think I've not noticed that?  He's been asleep in a way for five
years, and now he's awake again.  He is not James Gathorne Kerry now; he
is James Shiel Gathorne Crozier, and--oh, you understand: he's back again
where he was before--before he left her."

The Young Doctor nodded approvingly.  "What a little brazen wonder you
are!  I declare you see more than--"

"Yet you won't have me?" she asked mockingly.  "You're too clever for
me," he rejoined with spirit.  "I'm too conceited.  I must marry a girl
that'd kneel to me and think me as wise as Socrates.  But he's back
again, as you say, and, in my view, his wife ought to be back again
also."

"She ought to be here," was Kitty's swift reply, "though I think mighty
little of her--mighty little, I can tell you.  Stuckup, great tall stork
of a woman, that lords it over a man as though she was a goddess.  Wears
diamonds in the middle of the day, I suppose, and cold-blooded as--as a
fish."

"She ought to have married me, according to your opinion of me.  You said
I was a fish," remarked the Young Doctor, with a laugh.

"The whale and the catfish!"

"Heavens, what spite!" he rejoined.  "Catfish--what do you know about
Mrs. Crozier?  You may be brutally unjust--waspishly unjust, I should
say."

"Do I look like a wasp?" she asked half tearfully.  She was in a strange
mood.

"You look like a golden busy bee," he answered.  But tell me, how did you
come to know enough about her to call her a cat?"

"Because, as you say, I was a busy golden bee," she retorted.

"That information doesn't get me much further," he answered.

"I opened that letter," she replied.

"'That letter'--you mean you opened the letter he showed us which he had
left sealed as it came to him five years ago?" The Young Doctor's face
wore a look of dismay.

"I steamed the envelope open--how else could I have done it!  I steamed
it open, saw what I wanted, and closed it up again."

The Young Doctor's face was pale now.  This was a terrible revelation.
He had a man's view of such conduct.  He almost shrank from her, though
she stood there as inviting and innocent a specimen of girlhood as the
eye could wish to see.  She did not look dishonourable.

"Do you realise what that means?" he asked in a cold, hard tone.

"Oh, come, don't put on that look and don't talk like John the
Evangelist," she retorted.  "I did it, not out of curiosity, and not to
do any one harm, but to do her good--his wife."

"It was dishonourable--wicked and dishonourable."

"If you talk like that, Mr. Piety, I'm off," she rejoined, and she
started away.

"Wait--wait," he said, laying firm fingers on her arm.  "Of course you
did it for a good purpose.  I know.  You cared enough for him for that."

He had said the right thing, and she halted and faced him.  "I cared
enough to do a good deal more than that if necessary.  He has been like a
second father to me, and--"

Suddenly a light of humour shot into the eyes of both.  Sheil Crozier as
a "father" to her was too artificial not to provoke their sense of the
grotesque.

"I wanted to find out his wife's address to write to her and tell her to
come quick," she explained.  "It was when he was at the worst.  And then,
too, I wanted to know the kind of woman she was before I wrote to her.
So--"

"You mean to say you read that letter which he had kept unopened and
unread for five long years?"  The Young Doctor was certainly disturbed
again.

"Every word of it," Kitty answered shamelessly, "and I'm not sorry.  It
was in a good cause.  If he had said, 'Courage, soldier,' and opened it
five years ago, it would have been good for him.  Better to get things
like that over."

"It was that kind of a letter, was it--a catfish letter?"

Kitty laughed a little scornfully.  "Yes, just like that, Mr. Easily
Shocked.  Great, showy, purse-proud creature!"

"And you wrote to her?"

"Yes--a letter that would make her come if anything would.  Talk of tact
--I was as smooth as a billiard-ball.  But she hasn't come."

"The day after the operation I cabled to her," said the Young Doctor.

"Then you steamed the letter open and read it too?" asked Kitty
sarcastically.

"Certainly not.  Ladies first-and last," was the equally sarcastic
answer.  "I cabled to Castlegarry, his father's place, also to Lammis
that he mentioned when he told us his story.  Crozier of Lammis, he was."

"Well, I wrote to the London address in the letter," added Kitty.
"I don't think she'll come.  I asked her to cable me, and she hasn't.  I
wrote such a nice letter, too.  I did it for his sake."

The Young Doctor laid his hands on both her shoulders.  "Kitty Tynan, the
man who gets you will get what he doesn't deserve," he remarked.

"That might mean anything."

"It means that Crozier owes you more than he can guess."

Her eyes shone with a strange, soft glow.  "In spite of opening the
letter?"

The Young Doctor nodded, then added humorously: "That letter you wrote
her--I'm not sure that my cable wouldn't have far more effect than your
letter."

"Certainly not.  You tried to frighten her, but I tried to coax her, to
make her feel ashamed.  I wrote as though I was fifty."

The Young Doctor regarded her dubiously.  "What was the sort of thing you
said to her?"

"For one thing, I said that he had every comfort and attention two
loving women and one fond nurse could give him; but that, of course, his
legitimate wife would naturally be glad to be beside him when he passed
away, and that if she made haste she might be here in time."

The Young Doctor leaned against a tree shaking with laughter.

"What are you smiling at?" Kitty asked ironically.  "Oh, she'll be sure
to come--nothing will keep her away after being coaxed like that!" he
said, when he could get breath.

"Laughing at me as though I was a clown in a circus!" she exclaimed.
"Laughing when, as you say yourself, the man that she--the cat--wrote
that fiendish letter to is in trouble."

"It was a fiendish letter, was it?" he asked, suddenly sobered again.
"No, no, don't tell me," he added, with a protesting gesture.  "I don't
want to hear.  I don't want to know.  I oughtn't to know.  Besides, if
she comes, I don't want to be prejudiced against her.  He is troubled,
poor fellow."

"Of course he is.  There's the big land deal--his syndicate.  He's got a
chance of making a fortune, and he can't do it because--but Jesse Bulrush
told me in confidence, so I can't explain."

"I have an idea, a pretty good idea.  Askatoon is small."

"And mean sometimes."

"Tell me what you know.  Perhaps I can help him," urged the Young Doctor.
"I have helped more than one good man turn a sharp corner here."

She caught his arm.  "You are as good as gold."  "You are--impossible,"
he replied.

They talked of Crozier's land deal and syndicate as they walked slowly
towards the house.  Mrs. Tynan met them at the door, a look of excitement
in her face.  "A telegram for you Kitty," she said.

"For me!" exclaimed Kitty eagerly.  "It's a year since I had one."

She tore open the yellow envelope.  A light shot up in her face.  She
thrust the telegram into the Young Doctor's hands.

"She's coming; his wife's coming.  She's in Quebec now.  It was my
letter--my letter, not your cable, that brought her," Kitty added
triumphantly.




CHAPTER IX

NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY

It was as though Crozier had been told of the coming of his wife, for
when night came, on the day Kitty had received her telegram, he could not
sleep.  He was the sport of a consuming restlessness.  His brain would
not be still.  He could not discharge from it the thoughts of the day and
make it vacuous.  It would not relax.  It seized with intentness on each
thing in turn, which was part of his life at the moment, and gave it an
abnormal significance.  In vain he tried to shake himself free of the
successive obsessions which stormed down the path of the night, dragging
him after them, a slave lashed to the wheels of a chariot of flame.

At last it was the land deal and syndicate on which his future depended,
and the savage fate which seemed about to snatch his fortune away as it
had done so often before; as it had done on the day when Flamingo went
down near the post at the Derby with a madwoman dragging at the bridle.
He had had a sure thing then, and it was whisked away just when it would
have enabled him to pass the crisis of his life.  Wife, home, the old
fascinating, crowded life--they had all vanished because of that vile
trick of destiny; and ever since then he had been wandering in the
wilderness through years that brought no fruit of his labours.  Yet here
was his chance, his great chance, to get back what he had and was in the
old misspent days, with new purposes in life to follow and serve; and it
was all in cruel danger of being swept away when almost within his grasp.

If he could but achieve the big deal, he could return to wife and home,
he could be master in his own house, not a dependent on his wife's
bounty.  That very evening Jesse Bulrush, elated by his own good fortune
in capturing Cupid, had told him as sadly as was possible, while his own
fortunes were, as he thought, soaring, that every avenue of credit seemed
closed; that neither bank nor money-lender, trust nor loan company, would
let him have the ten thousand dollars necessary for him to hold his place
in the syndicate; while each of the other members of the clique had
flatly and cheerfully refused, saying they were busy carrying their own
loads.  Crozier had commanded Jesse not to approach them, but the fat
idealist had an idea that his tongue had a gift of wheedling, and he
believed that he could make them "shell out," as he put it.  He had
failed, and he was obliged to say so, when Crozier, suspecting, brought
him to book.

"They mean to crowd you out--that's their game," Bulrush had said.
"They've closed up all the ways to cash or credit.  They're laying to do
you out of your share.  Unless you put up the cash within the four days
left, they'll put it through without you.  They told me to tell you
that."

And Crozier had not even cursed them.  He said to Jesse Bulrush that it
was an old game to get hold of a patent that made a fortune for a song
while the patentee died in the poor-house.  Yet that four days was time
enough for a live man to do a "flurry of work," and he was fit enough to
walk up their backs yet with hobnailed boots, as they said in Kerry when
a man was out for war.

Over and over again this hovering tragedy drove sleep from his eyes; and
in the spaces between there were a hundred fleeting visions of little and
big things to torture him--remembrances of incidents when debts and
disasters dogged his footsteps; and behind them all, floating among the
elves and gnomes of ill-luck and disappointment, was a woman's face.  It
was not his wife's face, not a face that belonged to the old life, but
one which had been part of his daily existence for over four years.  It
was the first face he saw when he came back from consciousness after the
operation which saved his life--the face of Kitty Tynan.

And ever since the day when he had told the story of his life this face
had kept passing before his eyes with a disturbing persistence.  Kitty
had said to her mother and to the Young Doctor that he had seemed after
he had told his story like one who had awakened; and in a sense it was
startlingly true.  It was as though, while he was living under an assumed
name, the real James Shiel Gathorne Crozier did not exist, or was in the
far background of the doings and sayings of J. G. Kerry.  His wife and
the past had been shadowy in a way, had been as part of a life lived out,
which would return in some distant day, but was not vital to the present.
Much as he had loved his wife, the violent wrench away from her had
seemed almost as complete as death itself; but the resumption of his own
name and the telling if his story had produced a complete psychological
change in him mentally and bodily.  The impersonal feeling which had
marked his relations with the two women of this household, and with all
women, was suddenly gone.  He longed for the arms of a woman round his
neck--it was five years since any woman's arms had been there, since he
had kissed any woman's lips.  Now, in the hour when his fortunes were
again in the fatal balance, when he would be started again for a fair
race with the wife from whom he had been so long parted, another face
came between.

All at once the question Burlingame asked him, as to whether his wife was
living, came to him.  He had never for an instant thought of her as dead,
but now a sharp and terrifying anxiety came to him.  If his wife was
living!  Living?  Her death had never been even a remote possibility to
his mind, though the parting had had the decisiveness of death.  Beneath
all his shrewdness and ability he was at heart a dreamer, a romancist to
whom life was an adventure in a half-real world.

It was impossible to sleep.  He tossed from side to side.  Once he got up
in the dark and drank great draughts of water; once again, as he thought
of Mona, his wife, as she was in the first days of their married life, a
sudden impulse seized him.  He sprang from his bed, lit a candle, went to
the desk where the unopened letter lay, and took it out.  With the
feeling that he must destroy this record, this unread but, as he knew,
ugly record of their differences, and so clear her memory of any cruelty,
of any act of anger, he was about to hold it to the flame of the candle
when he thought he heard a sound behind him as of the door of his room
gently closing.  Laying the letter down, he went to the door and opened
it.  There was no one stirring.  Yet he had a feeling as though some one
was there in the darkness.  His lips framed the words,

"Who is it?  Is any one there?" but he did not utter them.

A kind of awe possessed him.  He was Celtic; he had been fed on the
supernatural when he was a child; he had had strange, indefinable
experiences or hallucinations in the days when he lived at Castlegarry,
and all his life he had been a friend of the mystical.  It is hard to
tell what he thought as he stood there and peered into the darkness of
the other room-the living-room of the house.  He was in a state of
trance, almost, a victim of the night.  But as he closed the door softly
the words of the song that Kitty Tynan had sung to him the day when he
found her brushing his coat came to him and flooded his brain.  The last
two verses of the song kept drowning his sense of the actual, and he was
swayed by the superstition of bygone ancestors:

         "Whereaway goes my lad--tell me, has he gone alone?
          Never harsh word did I speak, never hurt I gave;
          Strong he was and beautiful; like a heron he has flown
          Hereaway, hereaway will I make my grave.

         "When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway,
          Comes to lay his hand in mine, kiss me on the brow,
          I will whisper down the wind, he will weep to hear me say--
          'Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?'"

He went to bed again, but sleep would not come.  The verses of the lament
kept singing in his brain.  He tossed from side to side, he sought to
control himself, but it was of no avail.  Suddenly he remembered the bed
of boughs he had made for himself at the place where Kitty had had her
meeting with the Young Doctor the previous day.  Before he was shot he
used to sleep in the open in the summer-time.  If he could get to sleep
anywhere it would be there.

Hastily dressing himself in flannel shirt and trousers, and dragging a
blanket from the bed, he found his way to the bedroom door, went into the
other room, and felt his way to the front door, which would open into the
night.  All at once he was conscious of another presence in the room, but
the folk-song was still beating in his brain, and he reproved himself for
succumbing to fantasy.  Finding the front door in the dark, he opened it
and stepped outside.  There was no moon, but there were millions of stars
in the blue vault above, and there was enough light for him to make his
way to the place where he had slept "hereaway and oft."

He knew that the bed of boughs would be dry, but the night would be his,
and the good, cool ground, and the soughing of the pines, and the sweet,
infinitesimal and innumerable sounds of the breathing, sleeping earth.
He found the place and threw himself down.  Why, here were green boughs
under him, not the dried remains of what he had placed there!  Kitty--it
was Kitty, dear, gay, joyous, various Kitty, who had done this thing,
thinking that he might want to sleep in the open again after his illness.
Kitty--it was she who had so thoughtfully served him; Kitty, with the
instinct of strong, unselfish womanhood, with the gift of the outdoor
life, with the unpurchasable gift of friendship.  What a girl she was!
How rich she could make the life of a man!

         "Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
          Held my hand, and laid his cheek warm against my brow,
          Home I saw upon the earth, heaven stood there in the skies
          Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?"

How different she was, this child of the West, of Nature, from the woman
he had left behind in England, the sophisticated, well-appointed, well-
controlled girl; too well-controlled even in the first days of married
life; too well-controlled for him who had the rushing impulses of a
Celtic warrior of olden days.  Delicate, refined, perfectly poised, and
Kitty beside her like a sunflower to a sprig of heliotrope!  Mona--Kitty,
the two names, the two who, so far, had touched his life, each in her own
way, as none others had done, they floated before his eyes till sight and
feeling grew dim.  With a last effort he strove to eject Kitty from his
thoughts, for there was the wife he had won in the race of life, and he
must stand by her, play the game, ride honestly, even in exile from her,
run straight, even with that unopened, bitter, upbraiding letter in the--

He fell asleep, and soon and slowly and ever so dimly the opal light of
the prairie dawn crept shyly over the landscape.  With it came stealing
the figure of a girl towards the group of trees where lay the man of
Lammis on the bed of green boughs which she had renewed for him.  She had
followed him from the dark room, where she had waited near him through
the night--near him, to be near him for the last time; alone with him and
the kind, holy night before the morrow came which belonged to the other
woman, who had written to him as she never could have written to any man
in whose arms she ever had lain.  And the pity and the tragedy of it was
that he loved his wife--the catfish wife.  The sharp, pitiless instinct
of love told her that the stirring in his veins which had come of late to
him, which beat higher, even poignantly, when she was near him now, was
only the reflection of what he felt for his wife.  She knew the
unmerciful truth, but it only deepened what she felt for him, yet what
she must put away from herself after to-morrow.  Those verses she wrote
--they were to show that she had conquered herself.  Yet, but a few hours
after, here she was kneeling outside his door at night, here she was
pursuing him to the place where he slept.  The coming of the other woman
--she knew well that she was something to this man of men--had roused in
her all she had felt, had intensified it.

She trembled, but she drew near, accompanied by the heavenly odours of
the freshened herbs and foliage and the cool tenderness of the river
close by.  In her white dress and loosened hair she was like some spirit
of a new-born world finding her way to the place she must call home.  It
was all so dim, so like clouded silver, the trees and the grass and the
bushes and the night.  Noiselessly she stole over the grass and into the
shadows of the trees where he lay.  Again and again she paused.  What
would she do if he was awake and saw her?  She did not know.  The moment
must take care of itself.  She longed to find him sleeping.

It was so.  The hazy light showed his face upward to the skies, his
breast rising and falling in a heavy, luxurious sleep.

She drew nearer and nearer till she was kneeling beside him.  His face
was warm with colour even in the night air, warmer than she had ever seen
it.  One hand lay across his chest and one was thrown back over his head
with the abandon of perfect rest.  All the anxiety and restlessness which
had tortured him had fled, and his manhood showed bold and serene in the
brightening dusk.

A sob almost broke from her as she gazed her fill, then slowly she leaned
over and softly pressed her lips to his--the first time that ever in love
they had been given to any man.  She had the impulse to throw her arms
round him, but she mastered herself.  He stirred, but he did not wake.
His lips moved as she withdrew hers.

"My darling!" he said in the quick, broken way of the dreamer.

She rose swiftly and fled away among the trees towards the house.

What he had said in his sleep--was it in reality the words of
unconsciousness, or was it subconscious knowledge?--they kept ringing
in her ears.

"My darling!" he had said when she kissed him.  There was a light of joy
in her eyes now, though she felt that the words were meant for another.
Yet it was her kiss, her own kiss, which had made him say it.  If--but
with happy eyes she stole to her room.




CHAPTER X

"S. O. S."

At breakfast next morning Kitty did not appear.  Had it been possible she
would have fled into the far prairie and set up a lonely tabernacle
there; for with the day came a reaction from the courage possessing her
the night before and in the opal wakening of the dawn.  When broad
daylight came she felt as though her bones were water and her body a wisp
of straw.  She could not bear to meet Shiel Crozier's eyes, and thus it
was she had an early breakfast on the plea that she had ironing to do.
She was not, however, prepared to see Jesse Bulrush drive up with a buggy
after breakfast and take Crozier away.  When she did see them at the gate
the impulse came to cry out to Crozier; what to say she did not know, but
still to cry out.  The cry on her lips was that which she had seen in the
newspaper the day before, the cry of the shipwrecked seafarers, the
signal of the wireless telegraphy, "S. O. S."--the piteous call, "Save
Our Souls!"  It sprang to her lips, but it got no farther except in an
unconscious whisper.  On the instant she felt so weak and shaken and
lonely that she wanted to lean upon some one stronger than herself; as
she used to lean against her father, while he sat with one arm round her
studying his railway problems.  She had been self-sufficient enough all
her life,--"an independent little bird of freedom," as Crozier had called
her; but she was like a boat tossed on mountainous waves now.

"S. O. S.!-Save Our Souls!"

As though she really had made this poignant call Crozier turned round in
the buggy where he sat with Jesse Bulrush, pale but erect; and, with a
strange instinct, he looked straight to where she was.  When he saw her
his face flushed, he could not have told why.  Was it that there had
passed to him in his sleep the subconscious knowledge of the kiss which
Kitty had given him; and, after all, had he said "My darling" to her and
not to the wife far away across the seas, as he thought?  A strange
feeling, as of secret intimacy, never felt before where Kitty was
concerned, passed through him now, and he was suddenly conscious that
things were not as they had ever been; that the old impersonal
comradeship had vanished.  It disturbed, it almost shocked him.
Whereupon he made a valiant effort to recover the old ground, to get out
of the new atmosphere into the old, cheering air.

"Come and say good-bye, won't you?" he called to her.

"S. O. S.--S. O. S.--S. O. S.!" was the cry in her heart, but she called
back to him from her lips, "I can't.  I'm too busy.  Come back soon,
soldier."

With a wave of the hand he was gone.  "Not a care in the world she has,"
Crozier said to Jesse Bulrush.  "She's the sunniest creature Heaven ever
made."

"Too skittish for me," responded the other with a sidelong look, for he
had caught a note in Crozier's voice which gave him a sudden suspicion.

"You want the kind you can drive with an oatstraw and a chirp--eh, my
friend?"

"Well, I've got what I want," was the reply.  "Neither of us 'll kick
over the traces."

"You are a lucky man," replied Crozier.  "You've got a remarkably big
prize in the lottery.  She is a fine woman, is Nurse Egan, and I owe her
a great deal.  I only hope things turn out so well that I can give her a
good fat wedding-present.  But I shan't be able to do anything that's
close to my heart if I can't get the cash for my share in the syndicate."

"Courage, soldier, as Kitty Tynan says," responded Jesse Bulrush
cheerily.  "You never know your luck.  The cash is waiting for you
somewhere, and it'll turn up, be sure of that."

"I'm not sure of that.  I can see as plain as your nose how Bradley and
his clique have blocked me everywhere from getting credit, and I'd give
five years of my life to beat them in their dirty game.  If I fail to get
it at Aspen Vale I'm done.  But I'll have a try, a good big try.  How far
exactly is it?  I've never gone by this trail."

Bulrush shook his head reprovingly.  "It's too long a journey for you to
take after your knock-out.  You're not fit to travel yet.  I don't like
it a bit.  Lydia said this morning it was a crime against yourself, going
off like this, and--"

"Lydia?--oh yes, pardonnez-moi, m'sieu'!  I did not know her name was
Lydia."

"I didn't either till after we were engaged."  Crozier stared in blank
amazement.  "You didn't know her name till after you were engaged?  What
did you call her before that?"

"Why, I called her Nurse."  answered the fat lover.  "We all called her
that, and it sounded comfortable and homelike and good for every day.
It had a sort of York-shilling confidence, and your life was in her hands
--a first-class you-and-me kind of feeling."

"Why don't you stick to it, then?"

"She doesn't want it.  She says it sounds so old, and that I'd be calling
her 'mother' next."

"And won't you?" asked Crozier slyly.  "Everything in season," beamed
Jesse, and he shone, and was at once happy and composed.  Crozier
relapsed into silence, for he was thinking that the lost years had been
barren of children.  He turned to look at the home they had left.  It was
some distance away now, but he could see Kitty still at the corner of the
house with a small harvest of laundered linen in her hand.

"She made that fresh bed of boughs for me--ah, but I had a good sleep
last night!" he added aloud.  "I feel fit for the fight before me."  He
drew himself up and began to nod here and there to people who greeted
him.

In the house behind them at that moment Kitty was saying to her mother,
"Where is he going, mother?"

"To Aspen Vale," was the reply.  "If you'd been at breakfast you'd have
heard.  He'll be gone two days, perhaps three."

Three days!  She regretted now that she had not said to herself,
"Courage, soldier," and gone to say good-bye to him when he called to
her.  Perhaps she would not see him again till after the other woman--
till after the wife-came.  Then--then the house would be empty; then the
house would be so still.  And then John Sibley would come and--




CHAPTER XI

IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER

Three days passed, but before they ended there came another telegram from
Mrs. Crozier stating the time of her expected arrival at Askatoon.  It
was addressed to Kitty, and Kitty almost savagely tore it up into little
pieces and scattered it to the winds.  She did not even wait to show it
to the Young Doctor; but he had a subtle instinct as to why she did not;
and he was rather more puzzled than usual at what was passing before his
eyes.  In any case, the coming of the wife must alter all the relations
existing in the household of the widow Tynan.  The old, unrestrained,
careless friendship could not continue.  The newcomer would import an
element of caste and class which would freeze mother and daughter to the
bones.  Crozier was the essence of democracy, which in its purest form is
akin to the most aristocratic element and is easily affiliated with it.
He had no fear of Crozier.  Crozier would remain exactly the same; but
would not Crozier be whisked away out of Askatoon to a new fate,
reconciled to being a receiver of his wife's bounty.

"If his wife gets her arms round his neck, and if she wants to get them
there, she will, and once there he'll go with her like a gentleman," said
the Young Doctor sarcastically.  Admiring Crozier as he did, he also had
underneath all his knowledge of life an unreasonable apprehension of
man's weakness where a woman was concerned.  The man who would face a
cannon's mouth would falter before the face of a woman whom he could
crumple with one hand.

The wife arrived before Crozier returned, and the Young Doctor and Kitty
met the train.  The local operator had not divulged to any one the
contents of the telegram to Kitty, and there were no staring spectators
on the platform.  As the great express stole in almost noiselessly, like
a tired serpent, Kitty watched its approach with outward cheerfulness.
She had braced herself to this moment, till she looked the most buoyant,
joyous thing in the world.  It had not come easily.  With desperation she
had fought a fight during these three lonely days, till at last she had
conquered, sleeping each night on Crozier's star-lit bed of boughs and
coming in with the silver-grey light of dawn.  Now she leaned forward
with heart beating fast; but with smiling face and with eyes so bright
that she deceived the Young Doctor.

There was no sign of inward emotion, of hidden troubles, as she leaned
forward to see the great lady step from the train--great in every sense
was this lady in her mind; imposing in stature, a Juno, a tragedy queen,
a Zenobia, a daughter of the gods who would not stoop to conquer.  She
looked in vain, however, for the Mrs. Crozier she had imagined made no
appearance from the train.  She hastened down the platform still with
keen eyes scanning the passengers, who were mostly alighting to stretch
their legs and get a breath of air.

"She's not here," she said at last darkly to the Young Doctor who had
followed her.

Then suddenly she saw emerge from a little group at the steps of a car
a child in a long dress--so it seemed to her, the being was so small and
delicate--and come forward, having hastily said good-bye to her fellow-
passengers.  As the Young Doctor said afterwards, "She wasn't bigger than
a fly," and she certainly was as graceful and pretty and piquante as a
child-woman could be.

Presently, with her alert, rather assertive blue eyes she saw Kitty, and
came forward.  "Miss Tynan?" she asked, with an encompassing look.

Now Kitty was idiomatic in her speech at times, and she occasionally used
slang of the best brand, but she avoided those colloquialisms which were
of the vocabulary of the uneducated.  Indeed, she had had no inclination
to use them, for her father had set her a good example, and she liked to
hear good English spoken.  That was why Crozier's talk had been like
music to her; and she had been keen to distinguish between the rhetorical
method of Augustus Burlingame, who modelled himself on the orators of all
the continents, and was what might be called a synthetic elocutionist.
Kitty was as simple and natural as a girl could be, and as a rule had
herself in perfect command; but she was so stunned by the sight of this
petite person before her that, in reply to Mrs. Crozier's question, she
only said abruptly

"The same!"

Then she came to herself and could have bitten her tongue out for that
plunge into the vernacular of the West; and forthwith a great prejudice
was set up in her mind against Mona Crozier, in whose eyes she caught a
look of quizzical criticism or, as she thought, contemptuous comment.
That for one instant she had been caught unawares and so had put herself
at a disadvantage angered her; but she had been embarrassed and
confounded by this miniature goddess, and her reply was a vague echo of
talk she heard around her every day.  Also she could have choked the
Young Doctor, whom she caught looking at her with wondering humour, as
though he was trying to see "what her game was," as he said to her
afterwards.

It was all due to the fact that from the day of the Logan Trial, and
particularly from the day when Shiel Crozier had told his life-story,
she had always imagined his wife as a stately Amazonian being with the
carriage of a Boadicea.  She had looked for an empress in splendid
garments, and--and here was a humming-bird of a woman, scarcely bigger,
than a child, with the buzzing energy of a bee, but with a queer sort of
manfulness too; with a square, slightly-projecting chin, as Kitty came to
notice afterwards; together with some small lines about the mouth and at
the eyes, which came from trouble endured and suffering undergone.  Kitty
did not notice that, but the Young Doctor took it in with his embracing
glance, as the wife saluted Kitty with her inward comment, which was:

"So this is the chit who wrote to me like a mother!"  But Mona Crozier
did not underestimate Kitty for all that, and she wondered why it was
that Kitty had written as she did.  One thing was quite clear: Kitty had
had good intentions, else why have written at all?

All these thoughts had passed through the mind of each, with a good many
others, while they were shaking hands; and the Young Doctor summoned his
man to carry Mona's hand-luggage to the extra buggy he had brought to the
station.  One of the many other thoughts that were passing through three
active minds was Kitty's unspoken satire:

"Just think; this is the woman he talked of as though she was a moving
mountain which would fall on you and crush you, if you didn't look out!"

No doubt Crozier would have repudiated this description of his talk, but
the fact was he had unconsciously spoken of Mona with a sort of hush in
his voice; for a woman to him was something outside real understanding.
He had a romantic mediaeval view, which translated weakness and beauty
into a miracle, and what psychologists call "an inspired control."

"She's no bigger than--than a wasp," said Kitty to herself, after the
Young Doctor had assured Mrs. Crozier that her husband was almost well
again; that he had recovered more quickly than was expected, and had
gained strength wonderfully after the crisis was passed.

"An elephant can crush you, but a wasp can sting you," was Kitty's
further inward comment, "and that's why he was always nervous when he
spoke of her."  Then, as the Young Doctor had already done, she noticed
the tiny lines about the tiny mouth, and the fine-spun webs about the
bird-bright eyes.

The Young Doctor attributed these lines mostly to anxiety and inward
suffering, but Kitty set them down as the outward signs of an inward
fretfulness and quarrelsomeness, which was rendered all the more
offensive in her eyes by the fact that Mona Crozier was the most,
spotless thing she had ever seen, at the end of a journey--and this, a
journey across a continent.  Orderliness and prim exactness, taste and
fastidiousness, tireless tidiness were seen in every turn, in every fold
of her dress, in the way everything she wore had been put on, in the
decision of every step and gesture.  Kitty noticed all this, and she said
to herself,

"Wound up like a watch, cut like a cameo," and she instinctively felt the
little dainty cameo-brooch at her own throat, the only jewellery she ever
wore, or had ever worn.

"Sensible of her not to bring a maid," commented the Young Doctor
inwardly.  "That would have thrown Kitty into a fit.  Yet how she manages
to look like this after six thousand miles of sea and land going is
beyond me--and Crozier so rather careless in his ways.  Not what you
would call two notes in the same key, she and Crozier," he reflected as
he told her she need not trouble about her luggage, and took charge of
the checks for it.

"My husband--is--is he quite better now?" Mrs. Crozier asked with sharp
anxiety, as the two-seated "rig" started away with the ladies in the back
seat.

"Oh, better, thanks to him," was Kitty's reply, nodding towards the Young
Doctor.

"You have told him I was coming?"

"Wasn't it better to have a talk with you first?" asked Kitty meaningly.

Mrs. Crozier almost nervously twitched the little jet bag she carried,
then she looked Kitty in the eyes.

"You will, of course, have reason for thinking so, if you say it," was
her enigmatical reply.  "And of course you will tell me.  You did not let
him know that you had written to me, or that the doctor had cabled me?"

"Oh, you got his cable?" questioned Kitty with a little ring of triumph
in her voice, meant to reach the ears of the Young Doctor.  It did reach
him, and he replied to the question.

"We thought it better not; chiefly because he had in this country planned
his life with an exclusiveness, and on a principle which did not,
unfortunately, take you into account."

The little lady blushed, or flushed.  "May I ask how you know this to be
so, if it is so?" she asked, and there was the sharpness of the wasp in
her tone, as it seemed to Kitty.

"The Logan Trial--I mentioned it in my letter to you," interposed Kitty.
"He was shot for the evidence he gave at the trial.  Well, at the trial
a great many questions were asked by a lawyer who wanted to hurt him,
and he answered them."

"Why did the lawyer want to hurt him?" Mona Crozier asked quickly.

"Just mean-hearted envy and spite and devilry," was Kitty's answer.
"They were both handsome men, and perhaps that was it."

"I never thought my husband handsome, though he was always distinguished
looking," was the quiet reply.

"Ah, but you haven't seen him at all for so long!" remarked Kitty, a
little spitefully.

"How do you know that?" Mrs. Crozier was nettled, though she did not
show it; but Kitty felt it was so, and was glad.

"He said so at the Logan Trial."

"Was that the kind of question asked at the trial?" the wife quickly
interjected.

"Yes, lots of that kind," returned Kitty.

"What was the object?"

"To make him look not so distinguished--like nothing.  If a man isn't
handsome, but only distinguished"--Kitty's mood was dangerous--"and you
make him look cheap, that's one advantage, and--"

Here the Young Doctor, having observed the rising tide of antagonism in
the tone of the voices behind him, gently interposed, and made it clear
that the purpose was to throw a shadow on the past of her husband in
order to discredit his evidence; to which Mrs. Crozier nodded her
understanding.  She liked the Young Doctor, as who did not who came in
contact with him, except those who had fear of him, and who had an idea
that he could read their minds as he read their bodies.  And even this
girl at her side--Mona Crozier realised that the part she had played was
evidently an unselfish one, though she felt with piercing intuition that
whatever her husband thought of the girl, the girl thought too much of
her husband.  Somehow, all in a moment, it made her sorry for the girl's
sake.  The girl had meant well by her husband in sending for his wife,
that was certain; and she did not look bad.  She was too sedately and
reservedly dressed, in spite of her auriferous face and head and her
burnished tone, to be bad; too fearless in eye, too concentrated to be
the rover in fields where she had no tenure or right.

She turned and looked Kitty squarely in the eyes, and a new, softer look
came into her own, subduing what to Kitty was the challenging alertness
and selfish inquisitiveness.

"You have been very good to Shiel--you two kind people," she said, and
there came a sudden faint mist to her eyes.

That was her lucky moment, and she spoke as she did just in time, for
Kitty was beginning to resent her deeply; to dislike her far more than
was reasonable, and certainly without any justice.

Kitty spoke up quickly.  "Well, you see, he was always kind and good to
other people, and that was why--"

"But that Mr. Burlingame did not like him?"  The wife had a strange
intuition regarding Mr. Burlingame.  She was sure that there was a woman
in the case--the girl beside her?

"That was because Mr. Burlingame was not kind or good to other people,"
was Kitty's sedate response.  There was an undertone of reflection in the
voice which did not escape Mrs. Crozier's senses, and it also caught the
ear of the Young Doctor, to whom there came a sudden revelation of the
reason why Burlingame had left Mrs. Tynan's house.

"Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Crozier enigmatically.  Presently, with suppressed
excitement as she saw the Young Doctor reining in the horses slowly, she
added: "My husband--when have you arranged that I should see him?"

"When he gets back--home," Kitty replied, with an accent on the last
word.

Mrs. Crozier started visibly.  "When he gets back home-back from where?
He is not here?" she asked in a tone of chagrin.  She had come a long
way, and she had pictured this meeting at the end of the journey with a
hundred variations, but never with this one--that she should not see
Shiel at once when the journey was over, if he was alive.  Was it hurt
pride or disappointed love which spoke in her face, in her words?  After
all, it was bad enough that her private life and affairs should be
dragged out in a court of law; that these two kind strangers, whom she
had never seen till a few minutes ago, should be in the inner circle of
knowledge of the life of her husband and herself, without her self-esteem
being hurt like this.  She was very woman, and the look of the thing was
not nice to her eyes, while it must belittle her in theirs.  Had this
girl done it on purpose?  Yet why should she--she who had so appealed to
her to come to him--have sought to humiliate her?

Kitty was not quite sure what she ought to say.  "You see, we expected
him back before this.  He is very exact!"

"Very exact?" asked Mrs. Crozier in astonishment.  This was a new phase
of Shiel Crozier's character.  He must, indeed, have changed since he had
caused her so much anxiety in days gone by.

"Usen't he to be so?" asked Kitty, a little viciously.  "He is so very
exact now," she added.  "He expected to be back home before this"--how
she loved to use that word home--"and so we thought he would be here when
you arrived.  But he has been detained at Aspen Vale.  He had a big
business deal on--"

"A big business deal?  Is he--is he in a large way of business?" Mona
asked almost incredulously.  Shiel Crozier in a large way of business,
in a big business deal?  It did not seem possible.  His had ever been the
game of chance.  Business--business?

"He doesn't talk himself, of course; that wouldn't be like him,"--Kitty
had joy in giving this wife the character of her husband," but they say
that if he succeeds in what he's trying to do now he will make a great
deal of money."

"Then he has not made it yet?" asked Mrs. Crozier.

"He has always been able to pay his board regularly, with enough left for
a pew in church," answered Kitty with dry malice; for she mistook the
light in the other's eyes, and thought it was avarice; and the love
of money had no place in Kitty's make-up.  She herself would never have
been influenced by money where a man was concerned.

"Here's the house," she quickly added; "our home, where Mr. Crozier
lives.  He has the best room, so yours won't be quite so good.  It's
mother's--she's giving it up to you.  With your trunks and things, you'll
want a room to yourself," Kitty added, not at all unconscious that she
was putting a phase of the problem of Crozier and his wife in a very
commonplace way; but she did not look into Mrs. Crozier's face as she
said it.

Mrs. Crozier, however, was fully conscious of the poignancy of the
remark, and once again her face flushed slightly, though she kept outward
composure.

"Mother, mother, are you there?" Kitty called, as she escorted the wife
up the garden walk.

An instant later Mrs. Tynan cheerfully welcomed the disturber of the
peace of the home where Shiel Crozier had been the central figure for so
long.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

And I was very lucky--worse luck!
God help the man that's afraid of his own wife!
Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other





YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK

[BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER]

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.


XII.      AT THE RECEIPT OF CUSTOM
XIII.     KITTY SPEAKS HER MIND AGAIN
XIV.      AWAITING THE VERDICT
XV.       "MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM"
XVI.      "'TWAS FOR YOUR PLEASURE YOU CAME HERE, YOU GO BACK FOR MINE"
XVII.     WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT?
EPILOGUE




CHAPTER XII

AT THE RECEIPT OF CUSTOM

"What are you laughing at, Kitty?  You cackle like a young hen with her
first egg."  So spoke Mrs. Tynan to her daughter, who alternately swung
backwards and forwards in a big rocking-chair, silently gazing into the
distant sky, or sat still and "cackled" as her mother had said.

A person of real observation and astuteness, however, would have noticed
that Kitty's laughter told a story which was not joy and gladness--
neither good humour nor the abandonment of a luxurious nature.
It was tinged with bitterness and had the smart of the nettle.

Her mother's question only made her laugh the more, and at last Mrs.
Tynan stooped over her and said, "I could shake you, Kitty.  You'd make a
snail fidget, and I've got enough to do to keep my senses steady with all
the house-work--and now her in there!"  She tossed a hand behind her
fretfully.

Quick with love for her mother, as she always was, Kitty caught the
other's trembling hand.  "You've always had too much to do, mother;
always been slaving for others.  You've never had time to think whether
you're happy or not, or whether you've got a problem--that's what people
call things, when they're got so much time on their hands that they make
a play of their inside feelings and work it up till it sets them crazy."

Mrs. Tynan's mouth tightened and her brow clouded.  "I've had my problems
too, but I always made quick work of them.  They never had a chance to
overlay me like a mother overlays her baby and kills it."

"Not 'like a mother overlays,' but 'as a mother overlays,'" returned
Kitty with a queer note to her voice.  "That's what they taught me at
school.  The teacher was always picking us up on that kind of thing.
I said a thing worse than that when Mrs. Crozier"--her fingers motioned
towards another room--"came to-day.  I don't know what possessed me.  I
was off my trolley, I suppose, as John Sibley puts it.  Well, when Mrs.
James Shiel Gathorne Crozier said--oh, so sweetly and kindly--'You are
Miss Tynan?' what do you think I replied?  I said to her, 'The same'!"

Rather an acidly satisfied smile came to Mrs. Tynan's lips.  "That was
like the Slatterly girls," she replied.  "Your father would have said it
was the vernacular of the rail-head.  He was a great man for odd words,
but he knew always just what he wanted to say and he said it out.  You've
got his gift.  You always say the right thing, and I don't know why you
made that break with her--of all people."

A meditative look came into Kitty's eyes.  "Mr. Crozier says every one
has an imp that loves to tease us, and trip us up, and make us appear
ridiculous before those we don't want to have any advantage over us."

"I don't want Mrs. Crozier to have any advantage over you and me, I can
tell you that.  Things'll never be the same here again, Kitty dear, and
we've all got on so well; with him so considerate of every one, and a
good friend always, and just one of us, and his sickness making him seem
like our own, and--"

"Oh, hush--will you hush, mother!" interposed Kitty sharply.  "He's
going away with her back to the old country, and we might just as well
think about getting other borders, for I suppose Mr. Bulrush and his
bonny bride will set up a little bulrush tabernacle on the banks of the
Nile"--she nodded in the direction of the river outside--"and they'll
find a little Moses and will treat it as their very own."

"Kitty, how can you!"

Kitty shrugged a shoulder.  "It would be ridiculous for that pair to have
one of their own.  It's only the young mother with a new baby that looks
natural to me."

"Don't talk that way, Kitty," rejoined her mother sharply.  "You aren't
fit to judge of such things."

"I will be before long," said her daughter.  "Anyway, Mrs. Crozier isn't
any better able to talk than I am," she added irrelevantly.  "She never
was a mother."

"Don't blame her," said Mrs. Tynan severely.  "That's God's business.
I'd be sorry for her, so far as that was concerned, if I were you.  It's
not her fault."

"It's an easy way of accounting for good undone," returned Kitty.
"P'r'aps it was God's fault, and p'r'aps if she had loved him more--"

Mrs. Tynan's face flushed with sudden irritation and that fretful look
came to her eyes which accompanies a lack of comprehension.  "Upon my
word, well, upon my word, of all the vixens that ever lived, and you
looking like a yellow pansy and too sweet for daily use!  Such thoughts
in your head!  Who'd have believed that you--!"

Kitty made a mocking face at her mother.  "I'm more than a girl, I'm a
woman, mother, who sees life all around me, from the insect to the
mountain, and I know things without being told.  I always did.  Just life
and living tell me things, and maybe, too, the Irish in me that father
was."

"It's so odd.  You're such a mixture of fun and fancy, at least you
always have been; but there's something new in you these days.  Kitty,
you make me afraid--yes, you make your mother afraid.  After what you
said the other day about Mr. Crozier I've had bad nights, and I get
nervous thinking."

Kitty suddenly got up, put her arm round her mother and kissed her.
"You needn't be afraid of me, mother.  If there'd been any real danger,
I wouldn't have told you.  Mr. Crozier's away, and when he comes back
he'll find his wife here, and there's the end of everything.  If there'd
been danger, it would have been settled the night before he went away.
I kissed him that night as he was sleeping out there under the trees."

Mrs. Tynan sat down weakly and fanned herself with her apron.  "Oh, oh,
oh, dear Lord!" she said.  "I'm not afraid to tell you anything I ever
did, mother," declared Kitty firmly; "though I'm not prepared to tell you
everything I've felt.  I kissed him as he slept.  He didn't wake, he just
lay there sleeping--sleeping."  A strange, distant, dreaming look came
into her eyes.  She smiled like one who saw a happy vision, and an eerie
expression stole into her face.  "I didn't want him to wake," she
continued.  "I asked God not to let him wake.  If he'd waked--oh, I'd
have been ashamed enough till the day I died in one way!  Still he'd have
understood, and he'd have thought no harm.  But it wouldn't have been
fair to him--and there's his wife in there," she added, breaking off into
a different tone.  "They're a long way above us--up among the peaks, and
we're at the foot of the foothills, mother; but he never made us feel
that, did he?  The difference between him and most of the men I've ever
seen!  The difference!"

"There's the Young Doctor," said her mother reproachfully.

"He-him!  He's by himself, with something of every sort in him from the
top to the bottom.  There's been a ditcher in his family, and there may
have been a duke.  But Shiel Crozier--Shiel"--she flushed as she said the
name like that, but a little touch of defiance came into her face too--
"he is all of one kind.  He's not a blend.  And he's married to her in
there!"

"You needn't speak in that tone about her.  She's as fine as can be."

"She's as fine as a bee," retorted Kitty.  Again she laughed that almost
mirthless laugh for which her mother had called her to account a moment
before.  "You asked me a while ago what I was laughing at, mother," she
continued.  "Why, can't you guess?  Mr. Crozier talked of her always as
though she was--well, like the pictures you've seen of Britannia, all
swelling and spreading, with her hand on a shield and her face saying,
'Look at me and be good,' and her eyes saying, 'Son of man, get upon thy
knees!'  Why, I expected to see a sort of great--goodness--gracious
goddess, that kept him frightened to death of her.  Bless you, he never
opened her letter, he was so afraid of her; and he used to breathe once
or twice hard--like that, when he mentioned her!"  She breathed in such
mock awe that her mother laughed with a little kindly malice too.

"Even her letter," Kitty continued remorselessly, "it was as though she
--that little sprite--wrote it with a rod of chastisement, as the Bible
says.  It--"

"What do you know of the inside of that letter?" asked her mother,
staring.

"What the steam of the tea-kettle could let me see," responded Kitty
defiantly; and then, to her shocked mother, she told what she had done,
and what the nature of the letter was.

"I wanted to help him if I could, and I think I'll be able to do it--I've
worked it all out," Kitty added eagerly, with a glint of steel in the
gold of her eyes and a fantastic kind of wisdom in her look.

"Kitty," said her mother severely and anxiously, "it's madness
interfering with other people's affairs--of that kind.  It never was
any use."

"This will be the exception to the rule," returned Kitty.  "There she
is"--again she flicked a hand towards the other room--"after they've been
parted five years.  Well, she came after she read my letter to her, and
after I'd read that unopened letter to him, which made me know how to put
it all to her.  I've got intuition--that's Celtic and mad," she added,
with her chin thrusting out at her mother, to whom the Irish that her
husband had been, which was so deep in her daughter, was ever a mystery
to her, and of which she was more or less afraid.

"I've got a plan, and I believe--I know--it will work," Kitty continued.
"I've been thinking and thinking, and if there's trouble between them; if
he says he isn't going on with her till he's made his fortune; if he
throws that unopened letter in her face, I'll bring in my invention to
deal with the problem, and then you'll see!  But all this fuss for a
little tiny button of a thing like that in there--pshaw!  Mr. Crozier is
worth a real queen with the beauty of one of the Rhine maidens.  How he
used to tell that story of the Rhinegold--do you remember?  Wasn't it
grand?  Well, I am glad now that he's going--yes, whatever trouble there
may be, still he is going.  I feel it in my heart."

She paused, and her eyes took on a sombre tone.  Presently, with a
slight, husky pain in her voice, like the faint echo of a wail, she went
on: "Now that he's going, I'm glad we've had the things he gave us,
things that can't be taken away from us.  What you have enjoyed is yours
for ever and ever.  It's memory; and for one moment or for one day or one
year of those things you loved, there's fifty years, perhaps, for memory.
Don't you remember the verses I cut out of the magazine:

                  "'Time, the ruthless idol-breaker,
                    Smileless, cold iconoclast,
                    Though he rob us of our altars,
                    Cannot rob us of the past.'"

"That's the way your father used to talk," replied her mother.  "There's
a lot of poetry in you, Kitty."  "More than there is in her?" asked
Kitty, again indicating the region where Mrs. Crozier was.

"There's as much poetry in her as there is in--in me.  But she can do
things; that little bit of a babywoman can do things, Kitty.  I know
women, and I tell you that if that woman hadn't a penny, she'd set to
and earn it; and if her husband hadn't a penny, she'd make his home
comfortable just the same somehow, for she's as capable as can be.  She
had her things unpacked, her room in order herself--she didn't want your
help or mine--and herself with a fresh dress on before you could turn
round."

Kitty's eyes softened still more.  "Well, if she'd been poor he would
never have left her, and then they wouldn't have lost five years--think
of it, five years of life with the man you love lost to you!--and there
wouldn't be this tough old knot to untie now."

"She has suffered--that little sparrow has suffered, I tell you, Kitty.
She has a grip on herself like--like--"

"Like Mr. Crozier with a broncho under his hand," interjected Kitty.
"She's too neat, too eternally spick and span for me, mother.  It's as
though the Being that made her said, 'Now I'll try and see if I can
produce a model of a grown-up, full-sized piece of my work.'  Mrs.
Crozier is an exhibition model, and Shiel Crozier's over six feet three,
and loose and free, and like a wapiti in his gait.  If he was a wapiti
he'd carry the finest pair of antlers ever was."

"Kitty, you make me laugh," responded the puzzled woman.  "I declare,
you're the most whimsical creature, and--"

At that moment there came a tapping at the door behind them, and a small,
silvery voice said, "May I come in?" as the door opened and Mrs.
Crozier, very precisely yet prettily dressed, entered.

"Please make yourself at home--no need to rap," answered Mrs. Tynan.
"Out in the West here we live in the open like.  There's no room closed
to you, if you can put up with what there is, though it's not what you're
used to."

"For five months in the year during the past five years I've lived in a
house about half as large as this," was Mrs. Crozier's reply.  "With my
husband away there wasn't the need of much room."

"Well, he only has one room here," responded Mrs. Tynan.  "He never
seemed too crowded in it."

"Where is it?  Might I see it?" asked the small, dark-eyed, dark-haired
wife, with the little touch of nectarine bloom and a little powder also;
and though she spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, there was a look of
wistfulness in her eyes, a gleam of which Kitty caught ere it passed.

"You've been separated, Mrs. Crozier," answered the elder woman, "and
I've no right to let you into his room without his consent.  You've had
no correspondence at all for five years--isn't that so?"

"Did he tell you that?" the regal little lady asked composedly, but with
an underglow of anger in her eyes.

"He told the court that at the Logan Trial," was the reply.

"At the murder trial--he told that?" Mrs. Crozier asked almost
mechanically, her face gone pale and a little haggard.

"He was obliged to answer when that wolf, Gus Burlingame, was after him,"
interposed Kitty with kindness in her tone, for, suddenly, she saw
through the outer walls of the little wife's being into the inner courts.
She saw that Mrs. Crozier loved her husband now, whatever she had done in
the past.  The sight of love does not beget compassion in a loveless
heart, but there was love in Kitty's heart; and it was even greater than
she would have wished any human being to see; and by it she saw with
radium clearness through the veil of the other woman's being.

"Surely he could have avoided answering that," urged Mona Crozier
bitterly.

"Only by telling a lie," Kitty quickly answered, "and I don't believe he
ever told a lie in his life.  Come," she added, "I will show you his
room.  My mother needn't do it, and so she won't be responsible.  You
have your rights as a wife until they're denied you.  You mustn't come,
mother," she said to Mrs. Tynan, and she put a tender hand on her arm.

"This way," she added to the little person in the pale blue, which suited
well her very dark hair, blue eyes, and rose-touched cheeks.




CHAPTER XIII

KITTY SPEAKS HER MIND AGAIN

A moment later they stood inside Shiel Crozier's room.  The first glance
his wife gave took in the walls, the table, the bureau, and the desk
which contained her own unopened letter.  She was looking for a
photograph of herself.

There was none in the room, and an arid look came into her face.  The
glance and its sequel did not escape Kitty's notice.  She knew well--as
who would not?--what Mona Crozier was hoping to see, and she was human
enough to feel a kind of satisfaction in the wife's chagrin and
disappointment; for the unopened letter in the baize-covered desk which
she had read was sufficient warrant for a punishment and penalty due the
little lady, and not the less because it was so long delayed.  Had not
Shiel Crozier had his draught of bitter herbs to drink over the past five
years?

Moreover, Kitty was sure beyond any doubt at all that Shiel Crozier's
wife, when she wrote the letter, did not love her husband, or at least
did not love him in the right or true way.  She loved him only so far as
her then selfish nature permitted her to do; only in so far as the pride
of money which she had, and her husband had not, did not prevent; only in
so far as the nature of a tyrant could love--though the tyranny was pink
and white and sweetly perfumed and had the lure of youth.  In her
primitive way Kitty had intuitively apprehended the main truth, and that
was enough to justify her in contributing to Mona Crozier's punishment.

Kitty's perceptions were true.  At the start, Mona was in nature
proportionate to her size; and when she married she had not loved Crozier
as he had loved her.  Maybe that was why--though he may not have admitted
it to himself--he could not bear to be beholden to her when his ruin
came.  Love makes all things possible, and there is no humiliation in
taking from one who loves and is loved, that uncapitalised and communal
partnership which is not of the earth earthy.  Perhaps that was why,
though Shiel loved her, he had had a bitterness which galled his soul;
why he had a determination to win sufficient wealth to make himself
independent of her.  Down at the bottom of his chivalrous Irish heart
he had learned the truth, that to be dependent on her would beget in her
contempt for him, and he would be only her paid paramour and not her
husband in the true sense.  Quixotic he had been, but under his quixotism
there was at least the shadow of a great tragical fact, and it had made
him a matrimonial deserter.  Whether tragedy or comedy would emerge was
all on the knees of the gods.

"It's a nice room, isn't it?" asked Kitty when there had passed from
Mona Crozier's eyes the glaze or mist--not of tears, but stupefaction--
which had followed her inspection of the walls, the bureau, the table,
and the desk.

"Most comfortable, and so very clean--quite spotless," the wife answered
admiringly, and yet drearily.  It made her feel humiliated that her man
could live this narrow life of one room without despair, with sufficient
resistance to the lure of her hundred and fifty thousand pounds and her
own delicate and charming person.  Here, it would seem, he was content.
One easy-chair, made out of a barrel, a couch, a bed--a very narrow bed,
like a soldier's, a bed for himself alone--a small table, a shelf on the
wall with a dozen books, a little table, a bureau, and an old-fashioned,
sloping-topped, shallow desk covered with green baize, on high legs, so
that like a soldier too he could stand as he wrote (Crozier had made that
high stand for the desk himself).  That was what the room conveyed to
her--the spirit of the soldier, bare, clean, strong, sparse: a workshop
and a chamber of sleep in one, like the tent of an officer on the march.
After the feeling had come to her, to heighten the sensation she espied a
little card hung under the small mirror on the wall.  There was writing
on it, and going nearer, she saw in red pencil the words, "Courage,
soldier!"

These were the words which Kitty was so fond of using, and the girl had
a thrill of triumph now as she saw the woman from whom Crozier had fled
looking at the card.  She herself had come and looked at it many times
since Crozier had gone, for he had only put it there just before he left
on his last expedition to Aspen Vale to carry through his deal.  It had
brought a great joy to Kitty's heart.  It had made her feel that she had
some share in his life; that, in a way, she had helped him on the march,
the vivandiere who carried the water-bag which would give him drink when
parched, battle-worn, or wounded.

Mona Crozier turned away from the card, sadly reflecting that nothing in
the room recalled herself; that she was not here in the very core of his
life in even the smallest way.  Yet this girl, this sunny creature with
the call of youth and passion in her eyes, this Ruth of the wheat-fields,
came and went here as though she was a part of it.  She did this and that
for him, and she was no doubt on such terms of intimacy with him that
they were really part of each other's life in a scheme of domesticity
unlike any boarding-house organization she had ever known.  Here in
everything there was the air, the decorum, and the unartificial comfort
of home.

This was why he could live without his wedded wife and her gold and her
brocade, and the silk and the Persian rugs, and the grand piano and the
carriages and the high silk hat from Piccadilly.  Her husband had had the
luxuries of wealth, and here he was living like a Spartan on his hill--
and alone; though he had a wife whom men had beseiged both before and
after marriage.  A feeling of impotent indignation suddenly took
possession of her.  Here he was with two women, unattached,--one
interesting and good and agreeable and good-looking, and the other almost
a beauty,--who were part of the whole rustic scheme in which he lived.
They made him comfortable, they did the hundred things that a valet or a
fond wife would do; they no doubt hung on every word he uttered--and he
could be interesting beyond most men.  She had realised terribly how
interesting he was after he had fled; when men came about her and talked
to her in many ways, with many variations, but always with the one tune
behind all they said; always making for the one goal, whatever the point
from which they started or however circuitous their route.

As time went on she had hungrily longed to see her husband again, and
other men had no power to interest her; but still she had not sought to
find him.  At first it had been offended pride, injured self-esteem, in
which the value of her own desirable self and of her very desirable
fortune was not lost; then it became the pride of a wife in whom the
spirit of the eternal woman was working; and she would have died rather
than have sought to find him.  Five years--and not a word from him.

Five years--and not a letter from him!  Her eyes involuntarily fell on
the high desk with the greenbaize top.  Of all the letters he had written
at that desk not one had been addressed to her.  Slowly, and with an
unintentional solemnity, she went up to it and laid a hand upon it.  Her
chin only cleared the edge of it-he was a tall man, her husband.

"This is the place of secrets, I suppose?" she said, with a bright smile
and an attempt at gaiety to Kitty, who had watched her with burning eyes;
for she had felt the thrill of the moment.  She was as sensitive to
atmosphere of this sad play of life as nearly and as vitally as the
deserted wife.

"I shouldn't think it a place of secrets," Kitty answered after a moment.
"He seldom locks it, and when he does I know where the key is."

"Indeed?"  Mona Crozier stiffened.  A look of reproach came into her
eyes.  It was as though she was looking down from a great height upon a
poor creature who did not know the first rudiments of personal honour,
the fine elemental customs of life.

Kitty saw and understood, but she did not hasten to reply, or to set
things right.  She met the lofty look unflinchingly, and she had pride
and some little malice too--it would do Mrs. Crozier good, she thought--
in saying, as she looked down on the humming-bird trying to be an eagle:

"I've had to get things for him-papers and so on, and send them on when
he was away, and even when he was at home I've had to act for him; and so
even when it was locked I had to know where the key was.  He asked me to
help him that way."

Mona noted the stress laid upon the word home, and for the first time she
had a suspicion that this girl knew more than even the Logan Trial had
disclosed, and that she was being satirical and suggestive.

"Oh, of course," she returned cheerfully in response to Kitty--"you acted
as a kind of clerk for him!"  There was a note in her voice which she
might better not have used.  If she but knew it, she needed this girl's
friendship very badly.  She ought to have remembered that she would not
have been here in her husband's room had it not been for the letter Kitty
had written--a letter which had made her heart beat so fast when she
received it, that she had sunk helpless to the floor on one of those soft
rugs, representing the soft comfort which wealth can bring.

The reply was like a slap in the face.

"I acted for him in any way at all that he wished me to," Kitty answered,
with quiet boldness and shining, defiant face.

Mona's hand fell away from the green baize desk, and her eyes again lost
their sight for a moment.  Kitty was not savage by nature.  She had been
goaded as much by the thought of the letter Crozier's wife had written to
him in the hour of his ruin as by the presence of the woman in this
house, where things would never be as they had been before.  She had
struck hard, and now she was immediately sorry for it: for this woman was
here in response to her own appeal; and, after all, she might well be
jealous of the fact that Crozier had had close to him for so long and in
such conditions a girl like herself, younger than his own wife, and
prettier--yes, certainly prettier, she admitted to herself.

"He is that kind of a man.  What he asked for, any good woman could give
and not be sorry," Kitty convincingly added when the knife had gone deep
enough.

"Yes, he was that kind of a man," responded the other gently now, and
with a great sigh of relief.  Suddenly she came nearer and touched
Kitty's arm.  "And thank you for saying so," she added.  "He and I have
been so long parted, and you have seen so much more of him than I have of
late years!  You know him better--as he is.  If I said something sharp
just now, please forgive me.  I am--indeed, I am grateful to you and your
mother."

She paused.  It was hard for her to say what she felt she must say, for
she did not know how her husband would receive her--he had done without
her for so long; and she might need this girl and her mother sorely.  The
girl was a friend in the best sense, or she would not have sent for her.
She must remind herself of this continually lest she should take wrong
views.

Kitty nodded, but for a moment she did not reply.  Her hand was on the
baize-covered desk.  All at once, with determination in her eyes, she
said: "You didn't use him right or you'd not have been parted for five
years.  You were rich and he was poor, he is poor now, though he may be
rich any day, and he wouldn't stay with you because he wouldn't take your
money to live on.  If you had been a real wife to him he wouldn't have
seen that he'd be using your money; he'd have taken it as though it was
his own, out of the purse always open and belonging to both, just as
though you were partners.  You must feel--"

"Hush, for pity's sake, hush!" interrupted the other.

"You are going to see him again," Kitty persisted.  "Now, don't you think
it just as well to know what the real truth is?"

"How do you know what is the truth?" asked the trembling little stranger
with a last attempt to hold her position, to conceal from herself the
actual facts.

"The Young Doctor and my mother and I were with him all the time he was
ill after he was shot, and the Trial had only told half the truth.  He
wanted us, his best friends here, to know the whole truth, so he told us
that he left you because he couldn't bear to live on your money.  It was
you made him feel that, though he didn't say so.  All the time he told
his story he spoke of you as though you were some goddess, some great
queen--"

A look of hope, of wonder, of relief came into the tiny creature's eyes.
"He spoke like that of me; he said--?"

"He said what no one else would have said, probably; but that's the way
with people in love--they see what no one else sees, they think what no
one else thinks.  He talked with a sort of hush in his voice about you
till we thought you must be some stately, tall, splendid Helen of Troy
with a soul like an ocean, instead of"--she was going to say something
that would have seemed unkind, and she stopped herself in time--"instead
of a sort of fairy, one of the little folk that never grow up; the same
as my father used to tell me about."

"You think very badly of me, then?" returned the other with a sigh.
Her courage, her pride, her attempt to control the situation had vanished
suddenly, and she became for the moment almost the child she looked.

"We've only just begun.  We're all his friends here, and we'll judge you
and think of you according to what happens between you and him.  You
wrote him that letter!"

She suddenly placed her hand on the desk as the inspiration came to her
to have this matter of the letter out now, and to have Mrs. Crozier know
exactly what the position was, no matter what might be thought of
herself.  She was only thinking of Shiel Crozier and his future now.

"What letter did I write?"  There was real surprise and wonder in her
tone.

"That last letter you wrote to him--the letter in which you gave him fits
for breaking his promise, and talked like a proud, angry angel from the
top of the stairs."

"How do you know of that letter?  He, my husband, told you what was in
that letter; he showed it to you?"  The voice was indignant, low, and
almost rough with anger.

"Yes, your husband showed me the letter--unopened."

"Unopened--I do not understand."  Mona steadied herself against the foot
of the bed and looked in a helpless way at Kitty.  Her composure was
gone, though she was very quiet, and she had that look of a vital
absorption which possesses human beings in crises of their lives.

Suddenly Kitty took from behind a book on the shelf a key, opened the
desk, and drew out the letter which Crozier had kept sealed and unopened
all the years, which he had never read.

"Do you know that?" Kitty asked, and held it out for Mrs. Crozier to
see.

Two dark blue eyes stared confusedly at the letter--at her own
handwriting.  Kitty turned it over.  "You see it is closed as it was when
you sent it to him.  He has never opened it.  He does not know what is in
it."

"He has-kept it--five years--unopened," Mona said in broken phrases
scarce above a whisper.

"He has never opened it, as you see."

"Give--give it to me," the wife said, stepping forward to stay Kitty's
hand as she opened the lid of the desk to replace the letter.

"It's not your letter--no, you shall not," said Kitty firmly as she
jerked aside the hand laid upon her wrist, and threw one arm on the lid,
holding it down as Mrs. Crozier tried to keep it open.  Then with a swift
action of the free hand she locked the desk and put the key in her
pocket.

"If you destroyed this letter he would never believe but that it was
worse than it is; and it is bad enough, Heaven knows, for any woman to
have written to her husband--or to any one else's husband.  You thought
you were the centre of the world when you wrote that letter.  Without a
penny, he would be a great man, with a great future; but you are only a
pretty little woman with a fortune, who has thought a great lot of
herself, and far too much of herself only, when she wrote that letter."

"How do you know what is in it?"  There was agony and challenge at once
in the other's voice.  "Because I read it--oh, don't look so shocked!
I'd do it again.  I knew just how to act when I'd read it.  I steamed it
open and closed it up again.  Then I wrote to you.  I'm not sorry I did
it.  My motive was a good one.  I wanted to help him.  I wanted to
understand everything, so that I'd know best what to do.  Though he's so
far above us in birth and position, he seemed in one way like our own.
That's the way it is in new countries like this.  We don't think of lots
of things that you finer people in the old countries do, and we don't
think evil till it trips us up.  In a new country all are strangers among
the pioneers, and they have to come together.  This town is only twenty
years old, and scarcely anybody knew each other at the start.  We had to
take each other on trust, and we think the best as long as we can.  Mr.
Crozier came to live with us, and soon he was just part of our life--not
a boarder; not some one staying the night who paid you what he owed you
in the morning.  He was a friend you could say your prayers with, or eat
your meals with, or ride a hundred miles with, and just take it as a
matter of course; for he was part of what you were part of, all this out
here--don't you understand?"

"I am trying hard to do so," was the reply in a hushed voice.  Here was a
world, here were people of whom Mona Crozier had never dreamed.  They
were so much of an antique time--far behind the time that her old land
represented; not a new world, but the oldest world of all.  She began to
understand the girl also, and her face took on a comprehending look, as
with eyes like bronze suns Kitty continued:

"So, though it was wrong--wicked--in one way, I read the letter, to do
some good by it, if it could be done.  If I hadn't read it you wouldn't
be here.  Was it worth while?"

At that moment there was a knock at the outer door of the other room, or,
rather, on the lintel of it.  Mona started.  Suppose it was her husband
--that was her thought.

Kitty read the look.  "No, it isn't Mr. Crozier.  It's the Young Doctor.
I know his knock.  Will you come and see him?"

The wife was trembling, she was very pale, her eyes were rather staring,
but she fought to control herself.  It was evident that Kitty expected
her to do so.  It was also quite certain that Kitty meant to settle
things now, in so far as it could be done.

"He knows as much as you do?" asked Mrs. Crozier.

"No, the Young Doctor hasn't read the letter and I haven't told him
what's in it; but he knows that I read it, and what he doesn't know he
guesses.  He is Mr. Crozier's honest, clever friend.  I've got an idea--
an invention to put this thing right.  It's a good one.  You'll see.  But
I want the Young Doctor to know about it.  He never has to think twice.
He knows what to do the very first time."

A moment later they were in the other room, with the Young Doctor smiling
down at "the little spot of a woman," as he called Crozier's wife.




CHAPTER XIV

AWAITING THE VERDICT

"You look quite settled and at home," the Young Doctor remarked, as he
offered Mrs. Crozier a chair.  She took it, for never in her life had she
felt so small physically since coming to the great, new land.  The
islands where she was born were in themselves so miniature that the minds
of their people, however small, were not made to feel insignificant.  But
her mind, which was, after all, vastly larger in proportion than the body
enshrining it, felt suddenly that both were lost in a universe.  Her
impulse was to let go and sink into the helplessness of tears, to be
overwhelmed by an unconquerable loneliness; but the Celtic courage in
her, added to that ancient native pride which prevents one woman from
giving way before another woman towards whom she bears jealousy,
prevented her from showing the weakness she felt.  Instead, it roused
her vanity and made her choose to sit down, so disguising perceptibly the
disparity of height which gave Kitty an advantage over her and made the
Young Doctor like some menacing Polynesian god.

Both these people had an influence and authority in Mona Crozier's life
which now outweighed the advantage wealth gave her.  Her wealth had not
kept her husband beside her when delicate and perfumed tyranny began to
flutter its banners of control over him.  Her fortune had driven him
forth when her beauty and her love ought to have kept him close to her,
whatever fate might bring to their door, or whatever his misfortune or
the catastrophe falling on him.  It was all deeply humiliating, and the
inward dejection made her now feel that her body was the last effort of a
failing creative power.  So she sat down instead of standing up in a vain
effort at retrieval.

The Young Doctor sat down also, but Kitty did not, and in her buoyant
youth and command of the situation she seemed Amazonian to Mona's eyes.
It must be said for Kitty that she remained standing only because a
restlessness had seized her which was not present when she was with Mona
in Crozier's room.  It was now as though something was going to happen
which she must face standing; as though something was coming out of the
unknown and forbidding future and was making itself felt before its time.
Her eyes were almost painfully bright as she moved about the room doing
little things.  Presently she began to lay a cloth and place dishes
silently on the table--long before the proper time, as her mother
reminded her when she entered for a moment and then quickly passed on
into the kitchen, at a warning glance from Kitty, which said that the
Young Doctor and Mona were not to be disturbed.

"Well, Askatoon is a place where one feels at home quickly," added the
Young Doctor, as Mona did not at once respond to his first remark.
"Every one who comes here always feels as though he--or she--owns the
place.  It's the way the place is made.  The trouble with most of us is
that we want to put the feeling into practice and take possession of
'all and sundry.' Isn't that true, Miss Tynan?"

"As true as most things you say," retorted Kitty, as she flicked the
white tablecloth.  "If mother and I hadn't such wonderful good health I
suppose you'd come often enough here to give you real possession.  Do you
know, Mrs. Crozier," she added, with her wistful eyes vainly trying to be
merely mischievous, "he once charged me five dollars for torturing me
like a Red Indian.  I had put my elbow out of joint, and he put it in
again with his knee and both hands, as though it was the wheel of a wagon
and he was trying to put on the tire."

"Well, you were running round soon after," answered the Young Doctor.
"But as for the five dollars, I only took it to keep you quiet.  So long
as you had a grievance you would talk and talk and talk, and you never
were so astonished in your life as when I took that five dollars."

"I've taken care never to dislocate my elbow since."

"No, not your elbow," remarked the Young Doctor meaningly, and turned to
Mona, who had now regained her composure.

"Well,  I shan't call you in to reduce the dislocation--that's the
medical term, isn't it?" persisted Kitty, with fire in her eyes.

"What is the dislocation?" asked Mona, with a subtle, inquiring look but
a manner which conveyed interest.

The Young Doctor smiled.  "It's only her way of saying that my mind is
unhinged and that I ought to be sent to a private hospital for two."

"No--only one," returned Kitty.

"Marriage means common catastrophe, doesn't it?" he asked quizzically.

"Generally it means that one only is permanently injured," replied Kitty,
lifting a tumbler and looking through it at him as though to see if the
glass was properly polished.

Mona was mystified.  At first she thought there had been oblique
references to her husband, but these remarks about marriage would
certainly exclude him.  Yet, would they exclude him?  During the time in
which Shiel's history was not known might there not have been--but no,
it could not have been so, for it was Kitty who had sent the letter which
had brought her to Askatoon.

"Are you to be married--soon?" she asked of Kitty, with a friendly yet
trembling smile, for her agitation was, despite appearances, troubling
every nerve.

"I've thought of it quite lately," responded Kitty calmly, seating
herself now and looking straight into the eyes of the woman, who was
suggesting more truth than she knew.

"May I congratulate you?  Am I justified on such slight acquaintance?
I am sure you have chosen wisely," was the smooth rejoinder.

Kitty did not shrink from looking Mona in the eyes.  "It isn't quite time
for congratulations yet, and I'm not sure I've chosen wisely.  My family
very strongly disapproves.  I can't help that, of course, and I may have
to elope and take the consequences."

"It takes two to elope," interposed the Young Doctor, who thought that
Kitty, in her humorous extravagance, was treading very dangerous ground
indeed.  He was thinking of Crozier and Kitty; but Kitty was thinking of
Crozier, and meaning John Sibley.  Somehow she could not help playing
with this torturing thing in the presence of the wife of the man who was
the real "man in possession" so far as her life was concerned.

"Why, he is waiting on the doorstep," replied Kitty boldly and referring
only to John Sibley.

At that minute there was the crunch of gravel on the pathway and the
sound of a quick footstep.  Kitty and Mona were on their feet at once.
Both recognised the step of Shiel Crozier.  Presently the Young Doctor
recognised it also, but he rose with more deliberation.

At that instant a voice calling from the road arrested Crozier's advance
to the open door of the room where they were.  It was Jesse Bulrush
asking a question.  Crozier paused in his progress, and in the moment's
time it gave, Kitty, with a swift look of inquiry and with a burst of the
real soul in her, caught the hand of Crozier's wife and pressed it
warmly.  Then, with a face flushed and eyes that looked straight ahead of
her, she left the room as the Young Doctor went to the doorway and
stepped outside.  Within ten feet of the door he met Crozier.

"How goes it, patient?" he said, standing in Crozier's way.  Being a man
who thought much and wisely for other people, he wanted to give the wife
time to get herself in control.

"Right enough in your sphere of operations," answered Crozier.

"And not so right in other fields, eh?"

"I've come back after a fruitless hunt.  They've got me, the thieves!"
said Crozier, with a look which gave his long face an almost tragic
austerity.  Then suddenly the look changed, the mediaeval remoteness
passed, and a thought flashed up into his eves which made his expression
alive with humour.

"Isn't it wonderful, that just when a man feels he wants a rope to hang
himself with, the rope isn't to be had?" he exclaimed.  "Before he can
lay his hands on it he wants to hang somebody else, and then he has to
pause whether he will or no.  Did I ever tell you the story of the old
Irishwoman who lived down at Kenmare, in Kerry?  Well, she used to sit at
her doorway and lament the sorrows of the world with a depth of passion
that you'd think never could be assuaged.  'Oh, I fale so bad, I am so
wake--oh, I do fale so bad,' she used to say.  'I wish some wan would
take me by the ear and lade me round to the ould shebeen, and set me
down, and fill a noggen of whusky and make me dhrink it--whether I would
or no!'  Whether I would or no I have to drink the cup of self-denial,"
Crozier continued, "though Bradley and his gang have closed every door
against me here, and I've come back without what I went for at Aspen
Vale, for my men were away.  I've come back without what I went for, but
I must just grin and bear it."  He shrugged his shoulders and gave a
great sigh.

"Perhaps you'll find what you went for here," returned the Young Doctor
meaningly.

"There's a lot here--enough to make a man think life worth while"--inside
the room the wife shrank at the words, for she could hear all--"but just
the same I'm not thinking the thing I went to look for is hereabouts."

"You never know your luck," was the reply.  "'Ask and you shall find,
knock and it shall be opened unto you.'"

The long face blazed up with humour again.  "Do you mean that I haven't
asked you yet?" Crozier remarked, with a quizzical look, which had still
that faint hope against hope which is a painful thing for a good man's
eyes to see.

The Young Doctor laid a hand on Crozier's arm.  "No, I didn't mean that,
patient.  I'm in that state when every penny I have is out to keep me
from getting a fall.  I'm in that Starwhon coal-mine down at Bethbridge,
and it's like a suction-pump.  I couldn't borrow a thousand dollars
myself now.  I can't do it, or I'd stand in with you, Crozier.  No, I
can't help you a bit; but step inside.  There's a room in this house
where you got back your life by the help of a knife.  There's another
room in there where you may get back your fortune by the help of a wife."

Stepping aside he gave the wondering Crozier a slight push forward into
the doorway, then left him and hurried round to the back of the house,
where he hoped he might see Kitty.

The Young Doctor found Kitty pumping water on a pail of potatoes and
stirring them with a broom-handle.

"A most unscientific way of cleaning potatoes," he said, as Kitty did not
look at him.  "If you put them in a trough where the water could run off,
the dirt would go with the water, and you would'nt waste time and
intelligence, and your fingers would be cleaner in the end."

The only reply Kitty made was to flick the broomhead at him.  It had been
dipped in water, and the spray from it slightly spattered his face.

"Will you never grow up?" he exclaimed as he applied a handkerchief to
his ruddy face.

"I'd like you so much better if you were younger--will you never be
young?" she asked.

"It makes a man old before his time to have to meet you day by day and
live near you."

"Why don't you try living with me?" she retorted.  "Ah, then, you meant
me when you said to Mrs. Crozier that you were going to be married?
Wasn't that a bit 'momentary'?  as my mother's cook used to remark.  I
think we haven't 'kept company'--you and I"

"It's true you haven't been a beau of mine, but I'd rather marry you than
be obliged to live with you," was the paradoxical retort.

"You have me this time," he said, trying in vain to solve her reply.

Kitty tossed her head.  "No, I haven't got you this time, thank Heaven,
and I don't want you; but I'd rather marry you than live with you, as I
said.  Isn't it the custom for really nice-minded people to marry to get
rid of each other--for five years, or for ever and ever and ever?"

"What a girl you are, Kitty Tynan !" he said reprovingly.  He saw that
she meant Crozier and his wife.

Kitty ceased her work for an instant and, looking away from him into the
distance, said: "Three people said those same words to me all in one day
a thousand years ago.  It was Mr. Crozier, Jesse Bulrush, and my mother;
and now you've said it a thousand years after; as with your inexpensive
education and slow mind you'd be sure to do."

"I have an idea that Mrs. Crozier said the same to you also this very
day.  Did she--come, did she?"

"She didn't say, 'What a girl you are!' but in her mind she probably did
say, 'What a vixen!"'

The Young Doctor nodded satirically.  "If you continued as you began when
coming from the station, I'm sure she did; and also I'm sure it wasn't
wrong of her to say it."

"I wanted her to say it.  That's why I uttered the too, too utter-things,
as the comic opera says.  What else was there to do?  I had to help cure
her."

"To cure her of what, miss?"

"Of herself, doctor-man."

The Young Doctor's look became graver.  He wondered greatly at this young
girl's sage instinct and penetration.  "Of herself?  Ah, yes, to think
more of some one else than herself!  That is--"

"Yes, that is love," Kitty answered, her head bent over the pail and
stirring the potatoes hard.

"I suppose it is," he answered.

"I know it is," she returned.

"Is that why you are going to be married?" he asked quizzically.

"It will probably cure the man I marry of himself," she retorted.  "Oh,
neither of us know what we are talking about--let's change the subject!"
she added impatiently now, with a change of mood, as she poured the water
off the potatoes.

There was a moment's silence in which they were both thinking of the same
thing.  "I wonder how it's all going inside there?" he remarked.
"I hope all right, but I have my doubts."

"I haven't any doubt at all.  It isn't going right," she answered
ruefully; "but it has to be made go right."

"Whom do you think can do that?"

Kitty looked him frankly and decisively in the face.  Her eyes had the
look of a dreaming pietist for the moment.  The deep-sea soul of her was
awake.  "I can do it if they don't break away altogether at once.  I
helped her more than you think.  I told her I had opened that letter."

He gasped.  "My dear girl--that letter--you told her you had done such a
thing, such--!"

"Don't dear girl me, if you please.  I know what I am doing.  I told her
that and a great deal more.  She won't leave this house the woman she was
yesterday.  She is having a quick cure--a cure while you wait."

"Perhaps he is cured of her," remarked the Young Doctor very gravely.

"No, no, the disease might have got headway, but it didn't," Kitty
returned, her face turned away.  "He became a little better; but he was
never cured.  That's the way with a man.  He can never forget a woman he
has once cared for, and he can go back to her half loving her; but it
isn't the case with a woman.  There's nothing so dead to a woman as a man
when she's cured of him.  The woman is never dead to the man, no matter
what happens."

The Young Doctor regarded her with a strange, new interest and a puzzled
surprise.  "Sappho--Sappho, how did you come to know these things!" he
exclaimed.  "You are only a girl at best, or something of a boy-girl at
worst, and yet you have, or think you have, got into those places which
are reserved for the old-timers in life's scramble.  You talk like an
ancient dame."

Kitty smiled, but her eyes had a slumbering look as if she was half
dreaming.  "That's the mistake most of you make--men and women.  There's
such a thing as instinct, and there's such a thing as keeping your eyes
open."

"What did Mrs. Crozier say when you told her about opening that five-
year-old letter?  Did she hate you?"

Kitty nodded with wistful whimsicality.  "For a minute she was like an
industrious hornet.  Then I made her see she wouldn't have been here at
all if I hadn't opened it.  That made, her come down from the top of her
nest on the church-spire, and she said that, considering my
opportunities, I was not such an aboriginal after all."

"Now, look you, Saphira, prospective wife of Ananias, she didn't say
that, of course.  Still, it doesn't matter, does it?  The point is,
suppose he opens that letter now."

"If he does, he'll probably not go with her.  It was a letter that would
send a man out with a scalping-knife.  Still, if Mr. Crozier had his
land-deal through he might not read the letter as it really is.  His
brain wouldn't then be grasping what his eyes saw."

"He hasn't got his land-deal through.  He told me so just now before he
saw her."

"Then it's ora pro nobis--it's pray for us hard," rejoined Kitty
sorrowfully.  "Poor man from Kerry!"  At that moment Mrs. Tynan came from
the house, her face flushed, her manner slightly agitated.  "John Sibley
is here, Kitty--with two saddle-horses....  He says you promised to ride
with him to-day."

"I probably did," responded Kitty calmly.  "It's a good day for riding
too.  But John will have to wait.  Please tell him to come back at six
o'clock.  There'll be plenty of time for an hour's ride before sundown."

"Are you lame, dear child?" asked her mother ironically.  "Because if
you're not, perhaps you'll be your own messenger.  It's no way to treat a
friend--or whatever you like to call him."

Kitty smiled tenderly at her mother.  "Then would you mind telling him
to come here, mother darling?  I'm giving this doctor-man a prescription.
Ah, please do what I ask you, mother!  It is true about the prescription.
It's not for himself; it's for the foreign people quarantined inside."
She nodded towards the room where Shiel Crozier and his wife were shaping
their fate.

As her mother disappeared with a gesture of impatience and the remark
that she washed her hands of the whole Sibley business, the Young Doctor
said to Kitty, "What is your prescription, Ma'm'selle Saphira?  Suppose
they come out of quarantine with a clean bill of health?"

"If they do that you needn't make up the prescription.  But if Aspen Vale
hasn't given him what he wanted, then Mr. Shiel Crozier will still be an
exile from home and the angel in the house."

"What is the prescription?  Out with your Sibylline leaves!"

"It's in that unopened letter.  When the letter is opened you'll see it
effervesce like a seidlitz powder."

"But suppose I am not here when the letter is opened?"

"You must be here-you must.  You'll stay now, if you please."

"I'm afraid I can't.  I have patients waiting."  Kitty made an impetuous
gesture of command.  "There are two patients here who are at the crisis
of their disease.  You may be wanted to save a life any minute now."

"I thought that with your prescription you were to be the AEsculapius."

"No, I'm only going to save the reputation of AEsculapius by giving him a
prescription got from a quack to give to a goose."

"Come, come, no names.  You are incorrigible.  I believe you'd have your
joke on your death-bed."

"I should if you were there.  I should die laughing," Kitty retorted.

"There will be no death-bed for you, miss.  You'll be translated--no,
that's not right; no one could translate you."

"God might--or a man I loved well enough not to marry him."

There was a note of emotion in her laugh as she uttered the words.  It
did not escape the ear of the Young Doctor, who regarded her fixedly for
a moment before he said: "I'm not sure that even He would be able to
translate you.  You speak your own language, and it's surely original.
I am only just learning its alphabet.  No one else speaks it.  I have a
fear that you'll be terribly lonely as you travel along the trail, Kitty
Tynan."

A light of pleasure came into Kitty's eyes, though her face was a little
drawn.  "You really do think I'm original--that I'm myself and not like
anybody else?" she asked him with a childlike eagerness.

"Almost more than any one I ever met," answered the Young Doctor gently;
for he saw that she had her own great troubles, and he also felt now
fully what this comedy or tragedy inside the house meant to her.  "But
you're terribly lonely--and that's why: because you are the only one of
your kind."

"No, that's why I'm not going to be lonely," she said, nodding towards
the corner of the house where John Sibley appeared.

Suddenly, with a gesture of confidence and almost of affection, she laid
a hand on the Young Doctor's breast.  "I've left the trail, doctor-man.
I'm cutting across the prairie.  Perhaps I shall reach camp and perhaps I
shan't; but anyhow I'll know that I met one good man on the way.  And I
also saw a resthouse that I'd like to have stayed at, but the blinds were
drawn and the door was locked."

There was a strange, eerie look in her face again as her eyes of soft
umber dwelt on his for a moment; then she turned with a gay smile to John
Sibley, who had seen her hand on the Young Doctor's chest without dismay;
for the joy of Kitty was that she hid nothing; and, anyhow, the Young
Doctor had a place of his own; and also, anyhow, Kitty did what she
pleased.  Once when she had visited the Coast the Governor had talked to
her with great gusto and friendliness; and she had even gone so far as to
touch his arm while, chuckling at her whimsically, he listened to a story
she told him of life at the rail-head.  And the Governor had patted her
fingers in quite a fatherly way--or not, as the mind of the observer saw
it; while subsequently his secretary had written verses to her.

"So you've been gambling again--you've broken your promise to me," she
said reprovingly to Sibley, but with that wonderful, wistful laughter in
her eyes.

Sibley looked at her in astonishment.  "Who told you?" he asked.  It had
only happened the night before, and it didn't seem possible she could
know.

He was quite right.  It wasn't possible she could know, and she didn't
know.  She only divined.

"I knew when you made the promise you couldn't keep it; that's why I
forgive you now," she added.  "Knowing what I did about you, I oughtn't
to have let you make it."

The Young Doctor saw in her words a meaning that John Sibley could never
have understood, for it was a part of the story of Crozier's life
reproduced--and with what a different ending!




CHAPTER XV

"MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM"

When Crozier stepped out of the bright sunlight into the shady living-
room of the Tynan home, his eyes were clouded by the memory of his
conference with Studd Bradley and his financial associates, and by the
desolate feeling that the five years since he had left England had
brought him nothing--nothing at all except a new manhood.  But that he
did not count an asset, because he had not himself taken account of this
new capital.  He had never been an introspective man in the philosophic
sense, and he never had thought that he was of much account.  He had
lived long on his luck, and nothing had come of it--"nothing at all, at
all," as he said to himself when he stepped inside the room where,
unknown to him, his wife awaited him.  So abstracted was he, so disturbed
was his gaze (fixed on the inner thing), that he did not see the figure
in blue and white over against the wall, her hand on the big arm-chair
once belonging to Tyndall Tynan, and now used always by Shiel Crozier,
"the white-haired boy of the Tynan sanatorium," as Jesse Bulrush had
called him.

There was a strange timidity, and a fear not so strange, in Mona's eyes
as she saw her husband enter with that quick step which she had so
longingly remembered after he had fled from her; but of which she had
taken less account when he was with her at Lammis long ago-When Crozier
of Lammis was with her long ago.  How tall and shapely he was!  How large
he loomed with the light behind him!  How shadowed his face and how
distant the look in his eyes.

Somehow the room seemed too small for him, and yet he had lived in this
very house for four years and more; he had slept in the next room all
that time; had eaten at this table and sat in this very chair--Mrs. Tynan
had told her that--for this long time, like the master of a household.
With that far-away, brooding look in his face, he seemed in one sense as
distant from her as when she was in London in those dreary, desolate
years with no knowledge of his whereabouts, a widow in every sense save
one; but in her acts--that had to be said for her--a wife always and not
a widow.  She had not turned elsewhere, though there had been temptation
enough to do so.

Crozier advanced to the centre of the room, even to the table laid for
dinner, before he was conscious of some one in the room, of a figure by
the chair.  For a moment he stood still, startled as if he had seen a
vision, and his sight became blurred.  When it cleared, Mona had come a
step nearer to him, and then he saw her clearly.  He caught his breath as
though Life had burst upon him with some staggering revelation.  If she
had been a woman of genius, as in her way Kitty Tynan was, she would have
spoken before he had a chance to do so.  Instead, she wished to see how
he would greet her, to hear what he would say.  She was afraid of him
now.  It was not her gift to do the right thing by perfect instinct;
she had to think things out; and so she did now.  Still it has to be said
for her that she also had a strange, deep sense of apprehension in the
presence of the man whose arms had held her fast, and then let her go
for so bitter a length of time, in which her pride was lacerated and her
heart brought low.  She did not know how she was going to be met now, and
a womanly shyness held her back.  If she had said one word--his name
only--it might have made a world of difference to them both at that
moment; for he was tortured by failure, and now when hope was gone, here
was the woman whom he had left in order to force gifts from fate to bring
himself back to her.

"You--you here!" he exclaimed hoarsely.  He did not open his arms to her
or go a step nearer to her.  His look was that of blank amazement, of
mingled remembrance and stark realisation.  This was a turn of affairs
for which he had made no calculation.  There had ever been the question
of his return to her, but never of her coming to him.  Yet here she was,
debonnaire and fresh and perfectly appointed--and ah, so terribly neat
and spectacularly finessed!  Here she was with all that expert formality
which, in the old days, had been a reproach to his loosely-swung life and
person, to his careless, almost slovenly but well-brushed, cleanly, and
polished ease--not like his wife, as though he had been poured out of a
mould and set up to dry.  He was not tailor-made, and she had ever been
so exact that it was as though she had been crystallised, clothes and
all--a perfect crystal, yet a crystal.  It was this very perfection, so
charming to see, but in a sense so inhuman, which had ever dismayed him.
"What should I be doing in the home of an angel!" he had exclaimed to
himself in the old home at Lammis.

Truth is, he ought never to have had such a feeling, and he would not
have had it, if she had diffused the radiance of love, which would have
made her outer perfectness mere slovenliness beside her inner charm and
magnetism.  Very little of all this passed through Crozier's mind, as
with confused vision he looked at her.  He had borne the ordeal of the
witness-box in the Logan Trial with superb coolness; he had been in
physical danger over and over again, and had kept his head; he had never
been faced by a human being who embarrassed him--except his own wife.
"There is no fear like that of one's own wife," was the saying of an
ancient philosopher, and Crozier had proved it true; not because of
errors committed, but because he was as sensitive as a girl of
sensibility; because he felt that his wife did not understand him, and he
was ever in fear of doing the wrong thing, while eager beyond telling to
please her.  After all, during the past five years, parted from her while
loving her, there had still been a feeling of relief unexplainable to
himself in not having to think whether he was pleasing her or not, or to
reproach himself constantly that he was failing to conform to her
standard.

"How did you come--why?  How did you know?" he asked helplessly, as she
made no motion to come nearer; as she kept looking at him with an
expression in her eyes wholly unfamiliar to him.  Yet it was not wholly
unfamiliar, for it belonged to the days when he courted her, when she
seemed to have got nearer to him than in the more intimate relations of
married life.

"Is--is that all you have to say to me, Shiel?" she asked, with a
swelling note of feeling in her voice; while there was also emerging in
her look an elusive pride which might quickly become sharp indignation.
That her deserter should greet her so after five years of such offence to
a woman's self-respect, as might entitle her to become a rebel against
matrimony, was too cruel to be borne.  This feeling suddenly became alive
in her, in spite of a joy in her heart different from that which she had
ever known; in defiance of the fact that now that they were together once
more, what would she not do to prevent their being driven apart again!

"After abandoning me for five years, is that all you have to say to me,
Shiel?  After I have suffered before the world--"

He threw up his arms with a passionate gesture.  "The world!" he
exclaimed--"the devil take the world!  I've been out of it for five
years, and well out of it.  What do I care for the world!"

She drew herself up in a spirit of defence.  "It isn't what you care for
the world, but I had to live in it--alone, and because I was alone,
eyebrows were lifted.  It has been easy enough for you.  You were where
no one knew you.  You had your freedom"--she advanced to the table, and,
as though unconsciously, he did the same, and they gazed at each other
over the white linen and its furnishings--"and no one was saying that
your wife had left you for this or that, because of her bad conduct or of
yours.  Either way it was not what was fair and just; yet I had to bear
and suffer, not you.  There is no pain like it.  There I was in misery
and--"

A bitter smile came to his lips.  "A woman can endure a good deal when
she has all life's luxuries in her grasp.  Did you ever think, Mona, that
a man must suffer when he goes out into a world where he knows no one,
penniless, with no trade, no profession, nothing except his own helpless
self?  He might have stayed behind among the luxuries that belonged to
another, and eaten from the hand of his wife's charity, but"--(all the
pride and pain of the old situation rose up in him, impelled by the
brooding of the years of separation, heightened by the fact that he was
no nearer to his goal of financial independence of her than he was when
he left London five years before)--"but do you think, no matter what I've
done, broken a pledge or not, been in the wrong a thousand times as much
as I was, that I'd be fed by the hand of one to whom I had given a pledge
and broken it?  Do you think that I'd give her the chance to say, or not
to say, but only think, 'I forgive you; I will give you your food and
clothes and board and bed, but if you are not good in the future, I will
be very, very angry with you'?  Do you think--?"

His face was flaming now.  The pent-up flood of remorse and resentment
and pride and love--the love that tore itself in pieces because it had
not the pride and self-respect which independence as to money gives--
broke forth in him, fresh as he was from a brutal interview with the
financial clique whom he had given the chance to make much money, and who
were now, for a few thousand dollars, trying to cudgel him out of his one
opportunity to regain his place in his lost world.

"I live--I live like this," he continued, with a gesture that embraced
the room where they were, "and I have one room to myself where I have
lived over four years"--he pointed towards it.  "Do you think I would
choose this and all it means--its poverty and its crudeness, its distance
from all I ever had and all my people had, if I could have stood the
other thing--a pauper taking pennies from his own wife?  I had had taste
enough of it while I had a little something left; but when I lost
everything on Flamingo, and I was a beggar, I knew I could not stand the
whole thing.  I could not, would not, go under the poor-law and accept
you, with the lash of a broken pledge in your hand, as my guardian.  So
that's why I left, and that's why I stay here, and that's why I'm going
to stay here, Mona."

He looked at her firmly, though his face had that illumination which the
spirit in his eyes--the Celtic fire drawn through the veins of his
ancestors--gave to all he did and felt; and now as in a dream he saw
little things in her he had never seen before.  He saw that a little
strand of her beautiful dark hair had broken away from its ordered place
and hung prettily against the rosy, fevered skin of her cheek just beside
her ear.  He saw that there were no rings on her fingers save one, and
that was her wedding-ring--and she had always been fond of wearing rings.
He noted, involuntarily, that in her agitation the white tulle at her
bosom had been disturbed into pretty disarray, and that there was neither
brooch nor necklace at her breast or throat.

"If you stay, I am going to stay too," she declared in an almost
passionate voice, and she spoke with deliberation and a look which left
no way open to doubt.  She was now a valiant little figure making a fight
for happiness.

"I can't prevent that," he responded stubbornly.

She made a quick, appealing motion of her hands.  "Would you prevent it?
Aren't you glad to see me?  Don't you love me any more?  You used to love
me.  In spite of all, you used to love me.  Even though you hated my
money, and I hated your gambling--your betting on horses.  You used to
love me--I was sure you did then.  Don't you love me now, Shiel?"

A gloomy look passed over his face.  Memory of other days was admonishing
him.  "What is the good of one loving when the other doesn't?  And,
anyhow, I made up my mind five years ago that I would not live on my
wife.  I haven't done so, and I don't mean to 'do so.  I don't mean to
take a penny of your money.  I should curse it to damnation if I was
living on it.  I'm not, and I don't mean to do so."

"Then I'll stay here and work too, without it," she urged, with a light
in her eyes which they had never known.

He laughed mirthlessly.  "What could you do--you never did a day's work
in your life!"

"You could teach me how, Shiel."

His jaw jerked in a way it had when he was incredulous.  "You used to say
I was only--mark you, only a dreamer and a sportsman.  Well, I'm no
longer a dreamer and a sportsman; I'm a practical man.  I've done with
dreaming and sportsmanship.  I can look at a situation as it is, and--"

"You are dreaming--but yes, you are dreaming still," she interjected.
"And you are a sportsman still, but it is the sport of a dreamer, and a
mad dreamer too.  Shiel, in spite of all my faults in the past, I come to
you, to stay with you, to live on what you earn if you like, if it's only
a loaf of bread a day.  I--I don't care about my money.  I don't care
about the luxuries which money can buy; I can do without them if I have
you.  Am I not to stay, and won't you--won't you kiss me, Shiel?"

She came close to him-came round the table till she stood within a few
feet of him.

There was one trembling instant when he would have taken her hungrily
into his arms, but as if some evil spirit interposed with malign purpose,
there came the sound of feet on the gravel outside, and the figure of a
man darkened the doorway.  It was Augustus Burlingame, whose face as he
saw Mona Crozier took on an ironical smile.

"Yes--what do you want?" inquired Crozier quietly.  "A few words with
Mr. Crozier on business, if he is not too much occupied?"

"What business?"

"I am acting for Messrs.  Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons."

The cloud darkened on Crozier's face.  His lips tightened, his face
hardened.  "I will see you in a moment--wait outside, please," he added,
as Burlingame made as though to step inside.  "Wait at the gate," he
added quietly, but with undisguised contempt.

The moment of moments for Mona and himself had passed.  All the
bitterness of defeat was on him again.  All the humiliation of undeserved
failure to accomplish what had been the dear desire of five years bore
down his spirit now.  Suddenly he had a suspicion that his wife had
received information of his whereabouts from this very man, Burlingame.
Had not the Young Doctor said that Burlingame had written to lawyers in
the old land to get information concerning him?  Was it not more than
likely that he had given his wife the knowledge which had brought her
here?

When Burlingame had disappeared he turned to Mona.  "Who told you I was
here?  Who wrote to you?" he asked darkly.  The light had died away from
his face.  It was ascetic in its lonely gravity now.

"Your doctor cabled to Castlegarry and Miss Tynan wrote to me."

A faint flush spread over Crozier's face.  "How did Miss Tynan know where
to write?"

Mona had told the truth at once because she felt it was the only way.
Now, however, she was in a position where she must either tell him that
Kitty had opened that still sealed letter from herself to him which he
had carried all these years, or else tell him an untruth.  She had no
right to tell him what Kitty had confided to her.  There was no other way
save to lie.

"How should I know?  It was enough for me to get her letter," she
replied.

"At Castlegarry?"

What was there to do?  She must keep faith with Kitty, who had given her
this sight of her husband again.

"Forwarded from Lammis," she said.  "It reached me before the doctor's
cable."

So it was Kitty--Kitty Tynan-who had brought his wife to this new home
from which he had been trying so hard to get back to the old home.
Kitty, the angel of the house.

"You wrote me a letter which drove me from home," he said heavily.

"No--no--no," she protested.  "It was not that.  I know it was not that.
It was my money--it was that which drove you away.  You have just said
so."

"You wrote me a hateful letter," he persisted.  "You didn't want to see
me.  You sent it to me by your sweet, young brother."

Her eyes flashed.  "My letter did not drive you away.  It couldn't have.
You went because you did not love me.  It was that and my money, not the
letter, not the letter."

Somehow she had a curious feeling that the very letter which contained
her bitter and hateful reproaches might save her yet.  The fact that he
had not opened it--well, she must see Kitty again.  Her husband was in a
dark mood.  She must wait.  She knew that her fortunate moment had passed
when the rogue Burlingame appeared.  She must wait for another.

"Shall I go now?  You want to see that man outside.  Shall I go, Shiel?"
She was very pale, very quiet, steady and gentle.

"I must hear what that fellow has to say.  It is business--important,"
he replied.  "It may mean anything--everything, or nothing."

As she left the room he had an impulse to call her back, but he conquered
it.




CHAPTER XVI

"'TWAS FOR YOUR PLEASURE YOU CAME HERE, YOU SHALL GO BACK FOR MINE"

For a moment Crozier stood looking at the closed doorway through which
Mona had gone, with a look of repentant affection in his eyes; but as the
thought of his own helpless insolvency and broken hopes flashed across
his mind, a look of dark and harassed reflection shadowed his face.  He
turned to the front doorway with a savage gesture.  The mutilated dignity
of his manhood, the broken pride of a lifetime, the bitterness in his
heart need not be held in check in dealing with the man who waited to
give him a last thrust of enmity.

He left the house.  Burlingame was seated on the stump of a tree which
had been made into a seat.  "Come to my room if you have business with
me," Crozier said sharply.

As they went, Crozier swung aside from the front door towards the corner
of the house.

"The back way?" asked Burlingame with a sneer.

"The old familiar way to you," was the smarting reply.  "In any case, you
are not welcome in Mrs. Tynan's part of the house.  My room is my own,
however, and I should prefer you within four walls while doing business
with you."

Burlingame's face changed colour slightly, for the tone of Crozier's
voice, the grimness of his manner, suggested an abnormal condition.
Burlingame was not a brave man physically.  He had never lived the
outdoor life, though he had lived so much among outdoor people.
He was that rare thing in a new land, a decadent, a connoisseur in vice,
a lover of opiates and of liquor.  He was young enough yet not to be
incapacitated by it.  His face and hands were white and a little flabby,
and he wore his hair rather long, which, it is said, accounts for the
weakness of some men, on the assumption that long hair wastes the
strength.  But Burlingame quickly remembered the attitude of the lady--
Crozier's wife, he was certain--and of Crozier in the dining-room a few
moments before, and to his suspicious eyes it was not characteristic of
a happy family party.  No doubt this grimness of Crozier was due to
domestic trouble and not wholly to his own presence.  Still, he felt
softly for the tiny pistol he always carried in his big waistcoat pocket,
and it comforted him.

Beyond the corner of the house Crozier paused and took a key from his
pocket.  It opened a side door to his own room, seldom used, since it was
always so pleasant in this happy home to go through the main living-room,
which every one liked so much that, though it was not the dining-room, it
was generally used as such, and though it was not the parlour, it was its
frequent substitute.  Opening the door, Crozier stepped aside to let
Burlingame pass.  It was two years since Burlingame had been in this
room, and then he had entered it without invitation.  His inquisitiveness
had led him to explore it with no good intent when he lived in the house.

Entering now, he gave it quick scrutiny.  It was clear he was looking for
something in particular.  He was, in fact, searching for signs of its
occupancy by another than Shiel Crozier--tokens of a woman's presence.
There was, however, no sign at all of that, though there were signs of
a woman's care and attention in a number of little things--homelike,
solicitous, perhaps affectionate care and attention.  Certainly the
spotless pillows, the pretty curtains, the pincushion, and charmingly
valanced bed and shelves, cheap though the material was, showed a woman's
very friendly care.  When he lived in that house there were no such
little attentions paid to him!  It was his experience that where such
attentions went something else went with them.  A sensualist himself, it
was not conceivable to him that men and women could be under the same
roof without "passages of sympathetic friendship and tokens of affinity."
That was a phrase he had frequently used when pursuing his own sort of
happiness.

His swift scrutiny showed that Crozier's wife had no habitation here, and
that gave him his cue for what the French call "the reconstruction of the
crime."  It certainly was clear that, as he had suggested at the Logan
Trial, there was serious trouble in the Crozier family of two, and the
offender must naturally be the man who had flown, not the woman who had
stayed.  Here was circumstantial evidence.

His suggestive glance, the look in his eyes, did not escape Crozier, who
read it all aright; and a primitive expression of natural antipathy
passed across his mediaeval face, making it almost inquisitorial.

"Will you care to sit?" he said, however, with the courtesy he could
never avoid; and he pointed to a chair beside the little table in the
centre of the room.  As Burlingame sat down he noticed on the table a
crumpled handkerchief.  It had lettering in the corner.  He spread it out
slightly with his fingers, as though abstractedly thinking of what he was
about to say.  The initial in the corner was K.  Kitty had left it on the
table while she was talking to Mrs. Crozier a halfhour before.  Whatever
Burlingame actually thought or believed, he could not now resist picking
up the handkerchief and looking at it with a mocking smile.  It was too
good a chance to waste.  He still hugged to his evil heart the
humiliating remembrance of his expulsion from this house, the share
Crozier had had in it, and the things which Crozier had said to him then.
He had his enemy now between the upper and the nether mill-stones, and he
meant to grind him to the flour of utter abasement.  It was clear that
the arrival of Mrs. Crozier had brought him no relief, for Crozier's face
was not that of a man who had found and opened a casket of good fortune.

"Rather dangerous that, in the bedroom of a family man," he said,
picking up the handkerchief and looking suggestively from the lettering
in the corner to Crozier.  He laid it down again, smiling detestably.

Crozier calmly picked up the handkerchief, saw the lettering, then went
quietly to the door of the room and called Mrs. Tynan's name.  Presently
she appeared.  Crozier beckoned her into the room.  When she entered, he
closed the door behind her.

"Mrs. Tynan," he said, "this fellow found your daughter's handkerchief on
my table, and he has said regarding it, 'Rather dangerous that, in the
bedroom of a family man.'  What would you like me to do with him?"

Mrs. Tynan walked up to Burlingame with the look of a woman of the
Commune and said: "If I had a son I would disown him if he didn't mangle
you till your wife would never know you again, you loathesome thing.
There isn't a man or woman in Askatoon who'd believe your sickening
slanders, for every one knows what you are.  How dare you enter this
house?  If the men of Askatoon had any manhood in them they would tar-
and-feather you.  My girl is as good as any girl that ever lived, and
you know it.  Now go out of here--now!"

Crozier intervened quietly.  "Mrs. Tynan, I asked him in here because it
is my room.  I have some business with him.  When it is over, then he
shall go, and we will fumigate the place.  As for the tar-and-feathers,
you might leave that to me.  I think I can arrange it.

"I'll turn the hose on him as he goes out, if you don't mind," the irate
mother exclaimed as she left the room.

Crozier nodded.  "Well, that would be appropriate, Mrs. Tynan, but it
wouldn't cleanse him.  He is the original leopard whose spots are there
for ever."

By this time Burlingame was on his feet, and a look of craft and fear and
ugly meaning was in his face.  Morally he was a coward, physically he was
a coward, but he had in his pocket a weapon which gave him a feeling
of superiority in the situation; and after a night of extreme self-
indulgence he was in a state of irritation of the nerves which gave
him what the searchers after excuses for ungoverned instincts and acts
call "brain-storms."  He had had sense enough to know that his amorous
escapades would get him into trouble one day, and he had always carried
the little pistol which was now so convenient to his hand.  It gave him a
fictitious courage which he would not have had unarmed against almost any
man--or woman--in Askatoon.

"You get a woman to do your fighting for you," he said hatefully.  "You
have to drag her in.  It was you I meant to challenge, not the poor girl
young enough to be your daughter."  His hand went to his waistcoat
pocket.  Crozier saw and understood.

Suddenly Crozier's eyes blazed.  The abnormal in him--the Celtic strain
always at variance with the normal, an almost ultra-natural attendant of
it awoke like a tempest in the tropics.  His face became transformed,
alive with a passion uncanny in its recklessness and purpose.  It was a
brain-storm indeed, but it had behind it a normal power, a moral force
which was not to be resisted.

"None of your sickly melodrama here.  Take out of your pocket the pistol
you carry and give it to me," Crozier growled.  "You are not to be
trusted.  The habit of thinking you would shoot somebody some time--
somebody you had injured--might become too much for you to-day, and then
I should have to kill you, and for your wife's sake I don't want to do
that.  I always feel sorry for a woman with a husband like you.  You
could never shoot me.  You couldn't be quick enough, but you might try.
Then I should end you, and there'd be another trial; but the lawyer who
defended me would not have to cross-examine any witness about your
character.  It is too well-known, Burlingame.  Out with it--the pistol!"
he added, standing menacingly over the other.

In a kind of stupor, under the storm that was breaking above him,
Burlingame slowly drew out of a capacious waistcoat pocket a tiny but
powerful pistol of the most modern make.

"Put it in my hand," insisted Crozier, his eyes on the other's.

The flabby hand laid the weapon in Crozier's lean and strenuous fingers.
Crozier calmly withdrew the cartridges and then tossed the weapon back on
the table.

"Now we have equality of opportunity," he remarked quietly.  "If you
think you would like to repeat any slander that's slid off your foul
tongue, do it now; and in a moment or two Mrs. Tynan can turn the hose on
the floor of this room."

"I want to get to business," said Burlingame sullenly, as he took from
his pocket a paper.

Crozier nodded.  "I can imagine your haste," he remarked.  "You need all
the fees you can get to pay Belle Bingley's bills."

Burlingame did not wince.  He made no reply to the challenge that he was
the chief supporter of a certain wanton thereabouts.

"The time for your option to take ten thousand dollars' worth of shares
in the syndicate is up," he said; "and I am instructed to inform you that
Messrs.  Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons propose to take over your
unpaid shares and to complete the transaction without you."

"Who informed Messrs.  Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons that I am
not prepared to pay for my shares?" asked Crozier sharply.

"The time is up," surlily replied Burlingame.  "It is assumed you can't
take up your shares, and that you don't want to do so.  The time us up,"
he added emphatically, and he tapped the paper spread before him on the
table.

Crozier's eyes half closed in an access of stubbornness and hatred.
"You are not to assume anything whatever," he declared.  "You are to
accommodate yourself to actual facts.  The time is not up.  It is not up
till midnight, and any action taken before then on any other assumption
will give grounds for damages."

Crozier spoke without passion and with a coldblooded insistence not lost
on Burlingame.  Taking down a calendar from the wall, he laid it beside
the paper on the table before the too eager lawyer.  "Examine the dates,"
he said.  "At twelve o'clock tonight Messrs.  Bradley, Willingden,
Baxter, & Simmons are free to act, if the money is not at the disposal of
the syndicate by then; but till then my option is indefeasible.  Does
that meet the case or not?"

"It meets the case," said Burlingame in a morose voice, rising.
"If you can produce the money before the stroke of midnight, why can't
you produce it now?  What's the use of bluffing!  It can't do any good in
the end.  Your credit--"

"My credit has been stopped by your friends," interrupted Crozier, "but
my resources are current."  "Midnight is not far off," viciously remarked
Burlingame as he made for the door.

Crozier intercepted him.  "One word with you on another business before
you go," he said.  "The tar-and-feathers for which Mrs. Tynan asks will
be yours at any moment I raise my hand in Askatoon.  There are enough
women alone who would do it."

"Talk of that after midnight," sneered Burlingame desperately as the door
was opened for him by Crozier.  "Better not go out by the front gate,"
remarked Crozier scornfully.  "Mrs. Tynan is a woman of her word, and the
hose is handy."

A moment later, with contemptuous satisfaction, he saw Burlingame climb
the picket-fence at the side of the house.

Turning back into the room, he threw up his arms.  "Midnight--midnight--
my God, where am I to get the money!  I must--I must have it .  .  .
It's the only way back."

Sitting down at the table, he dropped his head into his hands and shut
his eyes in utter dejection.  "Mona--by Heaven, no, I'll never take it
from her!" he said once, and clenched his hands at his temples and sat
on and on unmoving.




CHAPTER XVII

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT?

For a full half-hour Crozier sat buried in dark reflection, then he
slowly raised his head, and for a minute looked round dazedly.  His
absorption had been so great that for a moment he was like one who had
awakened upon unfamiliar things.  As when in a dream of the night the
history of years will flash past like a ray of light, so for the bad
half-hour in which Crozier had given himself up to despair, his mind had
travelled through an incongruous series of incidents of his past life,
and had also revealed pictures of solution after solution of his present
troubles.

He had that-gift of visualization which makes life an endless procession
of pictures which allure, or which wear the nature into premature old
age.  The last picture flashing before his eyes, as he sat there alone,
was of himself and his elder brother, Garnett, now master of Castlegarry,
racing ponies to reach the lodge-gates before they closed for the night,
after a day of disobedience and truancy.  He remembered how Garnett had
given him the better pony of the two, so that the younger brother, who
would be more heavily punished if they were locked out, should have the
better chance.  Garnett, if odd in manner and character, had always been
a true sportsman though not a lover of sport.

If--if--why had he never thought of Garnett?  Garnett could help him, and
he would do so.  He would let Garnett stand in with him--take one-third
of his profits from the syndicate.  Yes, he must ask Garnett to see him
through.  Then it was that he lifted his head from his hands, and his
mind awakened out of a dream as real as though he had actually been
asleep.  Garnett--alas!  Garnett was thousands of miles away, and he had
not heard from him for five years.  Still, he knew the master of
Castlegarry was alive, for he had seen him mentioned in a chance number
of The Morning Post lately come to his hands.  What avail!  Garnett was
at Castlegarry, and at midnight his chance of fortune and a new life
would be gone.  Then, penniless, he would have to face Mona again; and
what would come of that he could not see, would not try to see.  There
was an alternative he would not attempt to face until after midnight,
when this crisis in his life would be over.  Beyond midnight was a
darkness which he would not now try to pierce.  As his eyes again became
used to his surroundings, a look of determination, the determination of
the true gambler, came into his face.  The real gambler never throws up
the sponge till all is gone; never gives up till after the last toss of
the last penny of cash or credit; for he has seen such innumerable times
the thing come right and good fortune extend a friendly hand with the
last hazard of all.

Suddenly he remembered--saw--a scene in the gambling rooms at Monte Carlo
on the only visit he had ever paid to the place.  He had played
constantly, and had won more or less each day.  Then his fortune turned
and he lost and lost each day.  At last, one evening, he walked up to a
table and said to the croupier, "When was zero up last?"  The croupier
answered, "Not for an hour."  Forthwith he began to stake on zero and on
nothing else.  For two hours he put his louis at each turn of the wheel
on the Lonely Nought.  For two hours he lost.  Increasing his stake,
which had begun at five francs and had risen at length to five louis, he
still coaxed the sardonic deity.  Finally midnight came, and he was the
only person playing at the table.  All others had gone or had ceased to
play.  These stayed to watch the "mad Inglesi," as a foreigner called
him, knocking his head against the foot stool of an unresponsive god of
chance.  The croupiers watched also with somewhat disdainful, somewhat
pitying interest, this last representative of a class who have an insane
notion that the law of chances is in their favour if they can but stay
the course.  And how often had they seen the stubborn challenger of a
black demon, who would not appear according to the law of chances, leave
the table ruined for ever!

Smiling, Crozier had played on till he had but ten louis left.  Counting
them over with cheerful exactness, he rose up, lit a cigarette, placed
the ten louis on the fatal spot with cynical precision, and with a gay
smile kissed his hand to the refractory Nothing and said, "You've got it
all, Zero-good-night!  Goodnight, Zero!"  Then he had buttoned his coat
and turned away to seek the cool air of the Mediterranean.  He had gone
but a step or two, his head half gaily turned to the table where the
dwindling onlookers stood watching the wheel spin round, when suddenly
the croupier's cry of "Zero!" fell upon his ears.

With cheerful nonchalance he had come back to the table and picked up the
many louis he had won--won by his last throw and with his last available
coin.

As the scene passed before him now he got to his feet and, with that look
of the visionary in his eyes, which those only know who have watched the
born gamester, said, "I'll back my hand till the last throw."  Then it
was, as his eyes gazed in front of him dreamily, he saw the card on his
mirror bearing the words, "Courage, soldier!"

With a deepening flame in his eyes he went over and gazed at it.  At
length he reached out and touched the writing with a caressing finger.

"Kitty--Kitty, how great you are!" he said.  Then as he turned to the
outer door a softness came into his face, stole up into his brilliant
eyes and dimmed them with a tear.  "What a hand to hold in the dark--the
dark of life!" he said aloud.  "Courage, soldier!" he added, as he
opened the door by which he had entered, through which Burlingame had
gone, and strode away towards the town of Askatoon, feeling somehow in
his heart that before midnight his luck would turn.

From the dining-room Kitty had watched him go.  "Courage, soldier!" she
whispered after him, and she laughed; but almost immediately she threw
her head up with a gasping sigh, and when it was lowered again two tears
were stealing down her cheeks.

With an effort she conquered herself, wiped away the tears, and said
aloud, with a whimsical but none the less pitiful self-reproach, "Kitty-
Kitty Tynan, what a fool you are!"

Entering the room Crozier had left, she went to the desk with the green-
baize top, opened it, and took out the fateful letter which Mona Crozier
had written to her husband five years ago.  Putting it into her pocket
she returned to the dining-room.  She stood there for a moment with her
chin in her hands and deep reflection in her eyes, and then, going to the
door of her mother's sitting-room, she opened it and beckoned.  A moment
later Mrs. Crozier and the Young Doctor entered the dining-room and sat
down at a motion from her.  Presently she said:

"Mrs. Crozier, I have here the letter your husband received from you five
years ago in London."

Mrs. Crozier flushed.  She had been masterful by nature and she had had
her way very much in life.  To be dominated in the most intimate things
of her life by this girl was not easy to be borne; but she realised that
Kitty had been a friend indeed, even if not conventional.  In response to
Kitty's remark now she inclined her head.

"Well, you have told us that you and your husband haven't made it up.
That is so, isn't it?" Kitty continued.

"If you wish to put it that way," answered Mona, stiffening a little in
spite of herself.

"P'r'aps I don't put it very well, but it is the stony fact, isn't it,
Mrs. Crozier?"

Mona hesitated a moment, then answered: "He is very upset concerning the
land syndicate, and he has a quixotic idea that he cannot take money from
me to help him carry it through."

"I don't quite know what quixotic means," rejoined Kitty dryly.  "If it
wasn't understood while you lived together that what was one's was the
other's, that it was all in one purse, and that you shut your eyes to
the name on the purse and took as you wanted, I don't see how you could
expect him, after your five years' desertion, to take money from you
now."

"My five years' desertion!" exclaimed Mona.  Surely this girl was more
than reckless in her talk.  Kitty was not to be put down.  "If you don't
mind plain speaking, he was always with you, but you weren't always with
him in those days.  This letter showed that."  She tapped it on her
thumb-nail.  "It was only when he had gone and you saw what you had lost,
that you came back to him--in heart, I mean.  Well, if you didn't go away
with him when he went, and you wouldn't have gone unless he had ordered
you to go--and he wouldn't do that--it's clear you deserted him, since
you did that which drove him from home, and you stayed there instead of
going with him.  I've worked it out, and it is certain you deserted him
five years ago.  Desertion does't mean a sea of water between, it means
an ocean of self-will and love-me-first between.  If you hadn't deserted
him, as this letter shows, he wouldn't have been here.  I expect he told
you so; and if he did, what did you say to him?"

The Young Doctor's eyes were full of decorous mirth and apprehension, for
such logic and such impudence as Kitty's was like none he had ever heard.
Yet it was commanding too.

Kitty caught the look in his eyes and blazed up.  "Isn't what I said
correct?  Isn't it all true and logical?  And if it is, why do you sit
there looking so superior?"

The Young Doctor made a gesture of deprecating apology.  "It's all true,
and it's logical, too, if you stand on your head when you think it.  But
whether it is logical or not, it is your conclusion, and as you've taken
the thing in hand to set it right, it is up to you now.  We can only hold
hard and wait."

With a shrug of her graceful shoulders Kitty turned again to Mrs.
Crozier, who intervened hastily, saying, "I did not have a chance of
saying to him all I wished.  Of course he could not take my money, but
there was his own money!  I was going to tell him about that, but just
then the lawyer, Mr. Burlingame--"

"They all call him 'Gus' Burlingame.  He doesn't get the civility of Mr.
here in Askatoon," interposed Kitty.

Mona made an impatient gesture.  "If you will listen, I want to tell you
about Mr. Crozier's money.  He thinks he has no money, but he has.  He
has a good deal."

She paused, and the Young Doctor and Kitty leaned forward eagerly.
"Well, but go on," said Kitty.  "If he has money he must have it to-day,
and now.  Certainly he doesn't know of it.  He thinks he is broke,--dead
broke,--and there'd be a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for him if he
could put up ten thousand dollars to-night.  If I were you I wouldn't
hide it from him any longer."

Mona got to her feet in anger.  "If you would give me a chance to
explain, I would do so," she said, her lips trembling.  "Unfortunately,
I am in your hands, but please give me credit for some intelligence--and
some heart.  In any case I shall not be bullied."

The Young Doctor almost laughed outright, despite the danger of the
situation.  He was not prepared for Kitty's reply and the impulsive act
that marched with it.  In an instant Kitty had caught Mona Crozier's hand
and pressed it warmly.  "I was only doing what I've seen lawyers do," she
said eagerly.  "I've got something that I want you to do, and I've been
trying to work up to it.  That's all.  I'm not as mean and bad mannered
as you think me.  I really do care what happens to him--to you both," she
hastened to add.

Struggling to keep back her tears, and in a low voice, Mona rejoined: "I
meant to have told him what I'm going to tell you now.  I couldn't say
anything about the money belonging to him till I had told him how it came
to be his."

After a moment' pause she continued: "He told you all about the race
which Flamingo lost, and about that letter."  She pointed to the letter
which Kitty still carried in her hand.  "Well, that letter was written
under the sting of bitter disappointment.  I was vain.  I was young.
I did not understand as I do now.  If you were not such good friends--
of his--I could not tell you this.  It seemed to me that by breaking his
pledge he showed he did not care for me; that he thought he could break a
sacred pledge to me, and it didn't matter.  I thought it was treating me
lightly--to do it so soon after the pledge was given.  I was indignant.
I felt we weren't as we might be, and I felt, too, that I must be at
fault; but I was so proud that I didn't want to admit it, I suppose, when
he did give me a grievance.  It was all so mixed.  I was shocked at his
breaking his pledge, I was so vexed that our marriage hadn't been the
success it might have been, and I think I was a little mad."

"That is not the monopoly of only one of your sex," interposed the Young
Doctor dryly.  "If I were you I wouldn't apologise for it.  You speak to
a sister in like distress."

Kitty's eyes flamed up, but she turned her head, as though some licensed
libertine of speech had had his say, and looked with friendly eyes at
Mona.  "Yes, yes--please go on," she urged.

"When I wrote that letter I had forgotten what I had done the day before
the race.  I had gone into my husband's room to find some things I needed
from the drawer of his dressing-table; and far at the back of a drawer I
found a crumpled-up roll of ten-pound notes.  It was fifty pounds
altogether.  I took the notes--"

She paused a moment, and the room became very still.  Both her listeners
were sure that they were nearing a thing of deep importance.

In a lower voice Mona continued: "I don't know what possessed me, but
perhaps it was that the things he did of which I disapproved most had got
a hold on me in spite of myself.  I said to myself: 'I am going to the
Derby.  I will take the fifty pounds, and I'll put it on a horse for
Shiel.'  He had talked so much to my brother about Flamingo, and I had
seen him go wrong so often, that I had a feeling if I put it on a horse
that Shiel particularly banned, it would probably win.  He had been wrong
nearly every time for two years.  It was his money, and if it won, it
would make him happy; and if it didn't win, well, he didn't know the
money existed--I was sure of that; and, anyhow, I could replace it.  I
put it on a horse he condemned utterly, but of which one or two people
spoke well.  You know what happened to Flamingo.  While at Epsom I heard
from friends that Shiel was present at the race, though he had said he
would not go.  Later I learned that he had lost heavily.  Then I saw him
in the distance paying out money and giving bills to the bookmakers.  It
made me very angry.  I don't think I was quite sane.  Most women are like
that at times."

"As I said," remarked the Young Doctor, his face mirthfully alive.  Here
was a situation indeed.

"So I wrote him that letter," Mona went on.  "I had forgotten all about
the money I put on the outsider which won the race.  As you know, I was
called away to my sick sister that evening, and the money I won with
Shiel's fifty pounds was not paid to me till after Shiel had gone."

"How much was it?" asked Kitty breathlessly.

"Four thousand pounds."

Kitty exclaimed so loudly that she smothered her mouth with a hand.
"Why, he only needs for the syndicate two thousand pounds--ten thousand
dollars," she said excitedly.  "But what's the good of it, if he can't
lay his hand on it by midnight to-night!"

"He can do so," was Mona's quick reply.  "I was going to tell him that,
but the lawyer came, and--"

Kitty sprang up and down in excitement.  "I had a plan.  It might have
worked without this.  It was the only way then.  But this makes it sure
--yes, most beautifully sure.  It shows that the thing to do is to follow
your convictions.  You say you actually have the money, Mrs. Crozier?"

Mona took from her pocket an envelope, and out of it she drew four Bank
of England notes.  "Here it is--here are four one-thousand-pound notes.
I had it paid to me that way five years ago, and here--here it is," she
added, with almost a touch of hysteria in her voice, for the excitement
of it all acted on her like an electric storm.

"Well, we'll get to work at once," declared Kitty, looking at the notes
admiringly, then taking them from Mona and smoothing them out with tender
firmness.  "It's just the luck of the wide world, as my father used to
say.  It actually is.  Now you see," she continued, "it's like this.
That letter you wrote him"--she addressed herself to Mona--"it has to be
changed.  You have got to rewrite it, and you must put into it these four
bank-notes.  Then when you see him again you must have that letter opened
at exactly the right moment, and--oh, I wonder if you will do it exactly
right!" she added dubiously to Mona.  "You don't play your game very
well, and it's just possible that, even now, with all the cards in your
hands, you will throw them away as you did in the past.  I wish that--"

Seeing Mona's agitation changing to choler, the Young Doctor intervened.
He did not know Kitty was purposely stinging Crozier's unhappy little
consort, so that she should be put upon her mettle to do the thing
without bungling.

"You can trust Mrs. Crozier to act carefully; but what exactly do you
mean?  I judge that Mrs. Crozier does not see more distinctly than I do,"
he remarked inquiringly to Kitty, and with admonishment in tone and
emphasis.

"No, I do not understand quite--will you explain?" interposed Mona with
inner resentment at being managed, but feeling that she could not do
without Kitty even if she would.

"As I said," continued Kitty, "I will open that letter, and you will put
in another letter and these bank-notes; and when he repeats what he said
about the way you felt and wrote when he broke his pledge, you can blaze
up and tell him to open the letter.  Then he will be so sorry that he'll
get down on his knees, and you will be happy ever after."

"But it will be a fraud, and dishonest and dishonourable," protested
Mona.

Kitty almost sniffed, but she was too agitated to be scornful.  "Just
leave that to me, please.  It won't make me a bit more dishonourable to
open the letter again--I've opened it once, and I don't feel any the
worse for it.  I have no conscience, and things don't weigh on my mind at
all.  I'm a light-minded person."

Looking closely at her, the Young Doctor got a still further insight into
the mind and soul of this prairie girl, who used a lid of irony to cover
a well of deep feeling.  Things did not weigh on her mind!  He was sure
that pain to the wife of Shiel Crozier would be mortal torture to Kitty
Tynan.

"But I felt exactly what I wrote that Derby Day when he broke his pledge,
and he ought to know me exactly as I was," urged Mona.  "I don't want to
deceive him, to appear a bit better than I am."

"Oh, you'd rather lose him!" said Kitty almost savagely.  "Knowing how
hard it is to keep a man under the best circumstances, you'd willingly
make the circumstances as bad as they can be--is that it?  Besides,
weren't you sorry afterwards that you wrote that letter?"

"Yes, yes, desperately sorry."

"And you wished often that your real self had written on Derby Day and
not the scratch-cat you were then?"

Mona flushed, but answered bravely, "Yes, a thousand times."

"What business had you to show him your cat-self, your unreal, not your
real self on Derby Day five years ago?  Wasn't it your duty to show him
your real self?"

Mona nodded helplessly.  "Yes, I know it was."

"Then isn't it your duty to see that your real self speaks in that letter
now?"

"I want him to know me exactly as I am, and then--"

Kitty made a passionate gesture.  Was ever such an uncomprehending woman
as this diamond-button of a wife?

"And then you would be unhappy ever after instead of being happy ever
after.  What is the good of prejudicing your husband against you by
telling the unnecessary truth.  He is desperate, and besides, he has been
away from you for five years, and we all change somehow--particularly
men, when there are so many women in the world, and very pretty women of
all ages and kinds and colours and tastes, and dazzling, deceitful
hussies too.  It isn't wise for any woman to let her husband or any one
at all see her exactly as she is; and only the silly ones do it.  They
tell what they think is the truth about their own wickedness, and it
isn't the truth at all, because I suppose women don't know how to tell
the exact truth; and they can be just as unfair to themselves as they are
to others.  Besides, haven't you any sense of humour, Mrs. Crozier?  It's
as good as a play, this.  Just think: after five years of desertion, and
trouble without end, and it all put right by a little sleight-of-hand.
Shall I open it?"

She held the letter up.  Mona nodded almost eagerly now, for come of a
subtle, social world far away, she still was no match for the subtlety of
the wilds--or was it the cunning the wild things know?

Kitty left the room, but in a moment afterwards returned with the letter
open.  "The kettle on the hob is the friend of the family," she said
gaily.  "Here it is all ready for what there is to do.  You go and keep
watch for Mr. Crozier," she added to the Young Doctor.  "He won't be gone
long, I should think, and we don't want him bursting in on us before I've
got that letter safe back into his desk.  If he comes, you keep him busy
for a moment.  When we're quite ready I'll come to the front door, and
then you will know it is all right."

"I'm to go while you make up your prescription--all right!" said the
Young Doctor, and with a wave of the hand he left the room.

Instantly Kitty brought a lead pencil and paper.  "Now sit down and write
to him, Mrs. Crozier," she said briskly.  "Use discretion; don't gush;
slap his face a little for breaking his pledge, and afterwards tell him
that you did at the Derby what you had abused him for doing.  Then
explain to him about this four thousand pounds--twenty thousand dollars
--my, what a lot of money, and all got in one day!  Tell him that it was
all won by his own cash.  It's as easy as can be, and it will be a
certainty now."

So saying, she lit a match.  "You--hold this wicked old catfish letter
into the flame, please, Mrs. Crozier, and keep praying all the time, and
please remember that 'our little hands were never made to tear each
other's eyes.'"

Mona's small fingers were trembling as she held the fateful letter into
the flame, and then in silence both watched it burn to a cinder.  A
faint, hopeful smile was on Mona's face now.

"What isn't never was to those that never knew," said Kitty briskly, and
pushed a chair up to the table.  "Now sit down and write, please."

Mona sat down.  Taking up a sheet of notepaper she looked at it
dubiously.

"Oh, what a fool I am!" said Kitty, understanding the look.  "And that's
what every criminal does--he forgets something.  I forgot the notepaper.
Of course you can't use that notepaper.  Of course not.  He'd know it in
a minute.  Besides, the sheet we burned had an engraved address on it.
I never thought of that--good gracious!"

"Wait--wait," said Mona, her face lighting.  "I may have some sheets in
my writing-case.  It's only a chance, but there were some loose sheets in
it when I left home.  I'll go and see."

While she was gone to her bedroom Kitty stood still in the middle of the
room lost in reflection, as completely absorbed as though she was seeing
things thousands of miles away.  In truth, she was seeing things millions
of miles away; she was seeing a Promised Land.  It was a gift of hers, or
a penalty of her life, perhaps, that she could lose herself in reverie at
a moment's notice--a reverie as complete as though she was subtracted
from life's realities.  Now, as she looked out of the door, far over the
prairie to a tiny group of pine-trees in the vanishing distance, lines
she once read floated through her mind:

              "Away and beyond the point of pines,
               In a pleasant land where the glad grapes be,
               Purple and pendent on verdant vines,
               I know that my fate is awaiting me."

What fate was to be hers?  There was no joy in her eyes as she gazed.
Mrs. Crozier was beside the table again before she roused herself from
her trance.

"I've got it--just two sheets, two solitary sheets," said Mona in
triumph.  "How long they have been in my case I don't know.  It is almost
uncanny they should be there just when they're most needed."

"Providential, we should say out here," was Kitty's response.  "Begin,
please.  Be sure you have the right date.  It was--"

Mona had already written the date, and she interrupted Kitty with the
words, "As though I could forget it!"  All at once Kitty put a
restraining hand on her arm.

"Wait--wait, you mustn't write on that paper yet.  Suppose you didn't
write the real wise thing--and only two sheets of paper and so much to
say?"

"How right you always are!" said Mona, and took up one of the blank
sheets which Kitty had just brought her.

Then she began to write.  For a minute she wrote swiftly, nervously, and
had nearly finished a page when Kitty said to her, "I think I had better
see what you have written.  I don't think you are the best judge.  You
see, I have known him better than you for the last five years, and I am
the best judge please, I mean it in the rightest, kindest way," she
added, as she saw Mona shrink.  It was like hurting a child, and she
loved children--so much.  She had always a vision of children at her
knee.

Silently Mrs. Crozier pushed the sheets towards her.  Kitty read the page
with a strange, eager look in her eyes.  "Yes, that's right as far as it
goes," she said.  "It doesn't gush.  It's natural.  It's you as you are
now, not as you were then, of course."

Again Mona bent over the paper and wrote till she had completed a page.
Then Kitty looked over her shoulder and read what had been written.  "No,
no, no, that won't do," she exclaimed.  "That won't do at all.  It isn't
in the way that will accomplish what we want.  You've gone quite, quite
wrong.  I'll do it.  I'll dictate it to you.  I know exactly what to say,
and we mustn't make any mistake.  Write, please--you must."

Mona scratched out what had been written without a word.  "I am waiting,"
she said submissively.

"All right.  Now we go on.  Write.  I'll dictate."  "'And look here,
dearest,'" she began, but Mona stopped her.

"We do not say 'look here' in England.  I would have said 'and see.'"

"'And see-dearest,'" corrected Kitty, with an accent on the last word,
"'while I was mad at you for the moment for breaking your promise--'"

"In England we don't say 'mad' in that connection," Mona again
interrupted.  "We say 'angry' or 'annoyed' or 'vexed.'" There was real
distress in her tone.

"Now I'll tell you what to do," said Kitty cheerfully.  "I'll speak it,
and you write it my way of thinking, and then when we've finished you
will take out of the letter any words that are not pure, noble, classic
English.  I know what you mean, and you are quite right.  Mr. Crozier
never says 'look here' or 'mad,' and he speaks better than any one I ever
heard.  Now, we certainly must get on."

After an instant she began again.

"--While I was angry at you a moment for breaking your promise, I cannot
reproach you for it, because I, too, bet on the Derby, but I bet on a
horse that you had said as much against as you could.  I did it because
you had very bad luck all this year and lost, and also last year, and I
thought--"

For several minutes, with greater deliberation than was usual with her,
Kitty dictated, and at the end of the letter she said, "I am, dearest,
your--"

Here Mona sharply interrupted her.  "If you don't mind I will say that
myself in my own way," she said, flushing.

"Oh, I forgot for the moment that I was speaking for you!" responded
Kitty, with a lurking, undermeaning in her voice.  "I threw myself into
it so.  Do you think I've done the thing right?" she added.

With a direct, honest friendliness Mona looked into Kitty eyes.  "You
have said the exact right thing as to meaning, I am sure, and I can
change an occasional word here and there to make it all conventional
English."

Kitty nodded.  "Don't lose a minute in copying it.  We must get the
letter back in his desk as soon as possible."

As Mona wrote, Kitty sat with the envelope in her hand, alternately
looking at it and into the distance beyond the point of pines.  She was
certain that she had found the solution of the troubles of Shiel and Mona
Crozier, for Crozier would now have his fortune, and the return to his
wife was a matter of course.  Was she altogether sure?  But yes, she was
altogether sure.  She remembered, with a sudden, swift plunge of blood in
her veins, that early dawn when she bent over him as he lay beneath the
tree, and as she kissed him in his sleep he had murmured, "My darling!"
That had not been for her, though it had been her kiss which had stirred
his dreaming soul to say the words.  If they had only been meant for her,
then--oh, then life would be so much easier in the future!  If--if she
could only kiss him again and he would wake and say--

She got to her feet with an involuntary exclamation.  For an instant she
had been lost in a world of her own, a world of the impossible.

"I almost thought I heard a step in the other room," she said in
explanation to Mona.  Going to the door of Crozier's room, she appeared
to listen for a moment, and then she opened it.

"No, it is all right," she said.

In another few minutes Mona had finished the letter.  "Do you wish to
read it again?" she asked Kitty, but not handing it to her.

"No, I leave the words to you.  It was the right meaning I wanted in it,"
she replied.

Suddenly Mona came to her and laid a hand on her arm.  "You are
wonderful--a wonderful, wise, beloved girl," she said, and there were
tears in her eyes.

Kitty gave the tiny fingers a spasmodic clasp, and said: "Quick, we must
get them in!"  She put the banknotes inside the sheets of paper, then
hastily placed both in the envelope and sealed the envelope again.

"It's just a tiny bit damp with the steam yet, but it will be all right
in five minutes.  How soiled the envelope is!" Kitty added.  "Five years
in and out of the desk, in and out of his pocket--but all so nice and
unsoiled and sweet and bonny inside," she added.  "To say nothing of the
bawbees, as Mr. Crozier calls money.  Well, we are ready.  It all depends
on you now, Mrs. Crozier."

"No, not all."

"He used to be afraid of you; now you are afraid of him," said Kitty, as
though stating a commonplace.

There was no more shrewishness left in the little woman to meet this
chastisement.  The forces against her were too many.  Loneliness and the
long struggle to face the world without her man; the determination of
this masterful young woman who had been so long a part of her husband's
life; and, more than all, a new feeling altogether--love, and the
dependence a woman feels, the longing to find rest in strong arms, which
comes with the first revelation of love, had conquered what Kitty had
called her "bossiness."  She was now tremulous before the crisis which
she must presently face.  Pride in her fortune, in her independence, had
died down in her.  She no longer thought of herself as a woman especially
endowed and privileged.  She took her fortune now like a man; for she had
been taught that a man could set her aside just because she had money,
could desert her to be independent of it.  It had been a revelation to
her, and she was chastened of all the termagancy visible and invisible in
her.  She stood now before Kitty of "a humble and a contrite heart," and
made no reply at all to the implied challenge.  Kitty, instantly sorry
for what she had said, let it go at that.  She was only now aware of how
deeply her arrows had gone home.

As they stood silent there was a click at the gate.  Kitty ran into
Crozier's room, thrust the letter into its pigeonhole in the desk, and in
a moment was back again.  In the garden the Young Doctor was holding
Crozier in conversation, but watching the front door.  So soon, however,
as Kitty had shown herself, as she had promised, at the front door and
then vanished, he turned Crozier towards the house again by an adroit
word, and left him at the door-step.

Seeing who was inside the room Crozier hesitated, and his long face, with
paleness added to its asceticism, took on a look which could have given
no hope of happiness to Mona.  It went to her heart as no look of his had
ever gone.  Suddenly she had a revelation of how little she had known of
what he was, or what any man was or could be, or of those springs of
nature lying far below the outer lives which move in orbits of sheltering
convention.  It is because some men and women are so sheltered from the
storms of life by wealth and comfort that these piercing agonies which
strike down to the uttermost depths so seldom reach them.

Shiel half turned away, not sullen, not morose, but with a strange apathy
settled on him.  He had once heard a man say, "I feel as though I wanted
to crawl into a hole and die."  That was the way he felt now, for to be
beaten in the game which you have played like a man yourself and have
been fouled into an unchallenged defeat, without the voice of the umpire,
is a fate which has smothered the soul of better men than Crozier.

Mona's voice stopped him.  "Do not go, Shiel," she urged gently.  "No,
you must not go--I want fair-play from you, if nothing else.  You must
play the game with me.  I want justice.  I have to say some things I had
no chance to say before, and I want to hear some things I have a right to
hear.  Indeed, you must play the game."

He drew himself up.  Not to be a sportsman, not to play the game--to
accuse him of this would have brought him back from the edge of the
grave.

"I'm not fit to-day.  Let it be to-morrow, Mona," was his hesitating
reply; but he did not leave the doorway.

She shook her head and made a swift little childlike gesture towards him.
"We are sure of to-day; we are not sure of to-morrow.  One or the other
of us might not be here to-morrow.  Let us do to-day the thing that
belongs to to-day."

That note struck home, for indeed the black spirit which whispers to men
in their most despairing hours to end it all had whispered to him.

"Let us do to-day the thing that belongs to to-day," she had just said,
and, strange to say, there shot into his mind words that belonged to the
days when he went to church at Castlegarry and thought of a thousand
things other than prayer or praise, but yet heard with the acute ears of
the young, and remembered with the persistent memory of youth.  "For the
night cometh when no man can work," were the words which came to him.  He
shuddered slightly.  Suppose that this indeed was the beginning of the
night!  As she said, he must play the game--play it as Crozier of Lammis
would have played it.

He stepped inside the room.  "Let it be to-day," he said.

"We may be interrupted here," she replied.  Courage came to her.  "Let us
talk in your own room," she added, and going over she opened the door of
it and walked in.  The matured modesty of a lost five years did not cloak
her actions now.  She was a woman fighting for happiness, and she had
been so beaten by the rods of scorn, so smothered by the dust of
humiliation, that there had come to her the courage of those who would
rather die fighting than in the lethargy of despair.

It was like her old self to take the initiative, but she did it now in so
different a way--without masterfulness or assumption.  It was rather like
saying, "I will do what I know you wish me to do; I will lay all reserve
aside for your sake; I will be bold because I love you."

He shut the door behind them and motioned her to a chair.

"No, I will not sit," she said.  "That is too formal.  You ask any
stranger to sit.  I am at home here, Shiel, and I will stand."

"What was it you wanted to say, Mona?" he asked, scarcely looking at
her.

"I should like to think that there was something you wished to hear," she
replied.  "Don't you want to know all that has happened since you left
us--about me, about your brother, about your friends, about Lammis?  I
bought Lammis at the sale you ordered; it is still ours."  She gave
emphasis to "ours."  "You may not want to hear all that has happened to
me since you left, still I must tell you some things that you ought to
know, if we are going to part again.  You treated me badly.  There was no
reason why you should have left and placed me in the position you did."

His head came up sharply and his voice became a little hard.  "I told you
I was penniless, and I would not live on you, and I could do nothing in
England; I had no trade or profession.  If I had said good-bye to you,
you would probably have offered me a ticket to Canada.  As I was a pauper
I preferred to go with what I had out of the wreck--just enough to bring
me here.  But I've earned my own living since."

"Penniless--just enough to bring you out here!"  Her voice had a sound of
honest amazement.  "How can you say such a thing!  You had my letter--you
said you had my letter?"

"Yes, I had your letter," he answered.  "Your thoughtful brother brought
it to me.  You had told him all the dear womanly things you had said or
were going to say to your husband, and he passed them on to me with the
letter."

"Never mind what he said to you, Shiel.  It was what I said that
mattered."  She was getting bolder every minute.  The comedy was playing
into her hands.

"You wrote in your letter the things he said to me," he replied.

Her protest sounded indignantly real.  "I said nothing in the letter I
wrote you that any man would not wish to hear.  Is it so unpleasant for a
man who thinks he is penniless to be told that he has made the year's
income of a cabinet minister?"

"I don't understand," he returned helplessly.

"You talk as though you had never read my letter.

"I never have read your letter," he replied in bewilderment.

Her face had the flush of honest anger.  "You do not dare to tell me you
destroyed my letter without reading it--that you destroyed all that
letter contained simply because you no longer cared for your wife;
because you wanted to be rid of her, wanted to vanish and never see her
any more, and so go and leave no trace of yourself!  You have the
courage here to my face"--the comedy of the situation gained much from
the mock indignation--she no longer had any compunctions--"to say that
you destroyed my letter and what it contained--a small fortune it would
be out here."

"I did not destroy your letter, Mona," was the embarrassed response.

"Then what did you do with it?  Gave it to some one else to read--to some
other woman, perhaps."

He was really shocked and greatly pained.  "Hush!  You shall not say that
kind of thing, Mona.  I've never had anything to do with any woman but my
wife since I married her."

"Then what did you do with the letter?"

"It's there," he said, pointing to the high desk with the green baize
top.

"And you say you have never read it?"

"Never."

She raised her head with dainty haughtiness.  "Then if you have still the
same sense of honour that made you keep faith with the bookmakers--you
didn't run away from them!--read it now, here in my presence.  Read it,
Shiel.  I demand that you read it now.  It is my right.  You are in
honour bound--"

It was the only way.  She dare not give him time to question, to suspect;
she must sweep him along to conviction.  She was by no means sure that
there wasn't a flaw in the scheme somewhere, something that would betray
her; and she could hardly wait till it was over, till he had read the
letter.

In a moment he was again near her with the letter in his hand.

"Yes, that's it--that's the letter," she said, with wondering and
reproachful eyes.  "I remember the little scratchy blot from the pen on
the envelope.  There it is, just as I made it five years ago.  But how
disgracefully soiled the envelope is!  I suppose it has been tossed about
in your saddle-bag, or with your old clothes, and only kept to remind you
day by day that you had a wife you couldn't live with--kept as a warning
never to think of her except to say, 'I hate you, Mona, because you are
rich and heartless, and not bigger than a pinch of snuff.'  That was the
kind way you used to speak of her even when you were first married to
her--contemptuously always in your heart, no matter what you said out
loud.  And the end showed it--the end showed it; you deserted her."

He was so fascinated by the picture she made of passion and incensed
declamation that he did not attempt to open the letter, and he wondered
why there was such a difference between the effect of her temper on him
now and the effect of it those long years ago.  He had no feeling of
uneasiness in her presence now, no sense of irritation.  In spite of her
tirade, he had a feeling that it didn't matter, that she must bluster in
her tiny teacup if she wanted to do so.

"Open the letter at once," she insisted.  "If you don't, I will."  She
made as though to take the letter from him, but with a sudden twist he
tore open the envelope.  The bank-notes fell to the floor as he took out
the sheet inside.  Wondering, he stooped to pick them up.

"Four thousand pounds!" he exclaimed, examining them.  "What does it
mean?"

"Read," she commanded.

He devoured the letter.  His eyes swam; then there rushed into them the
flame which always made them illumine his mediaeval face like the light
from "the burning bush."  He did not question or doubt, because he saw
what he wished to see, which is the way of man.  It all looked perfectly
natural and convincing to him.

"Mona--Mona--heaven above and all the gods of hell and Hellas, what
a fool, what a fool I've been!" he exclaimed.  "Mona--Mona, can you
forgive your idiot husband?  I didn't read this letter because I thought
it was going to slash me on the raw--on the raw flesh of my own
lacerating.  I simply couldn't bear to read what your brother said was
in the letter.  Yet I couldn't destroy it, either.  It was you.  I had
to keep it.  Mona, am I too big a fool to be your husband?"

He held out his arms with a passionate exclamation.  "I asked you to kiss
me yesterday, and you wouldn't," she protested.  "I tried to make you
love me yesterday, and you wouldn't.  When a woman gets a rebuff like
that, when--"

She could not bear it any longer.  With a cry of joy she was in his arms.

After a moment he said, "The best of all was, that you--you vixen, you
bet on that Derby and won, and--"

"With your money, remember, Shiel."

"With my money!" he cried exultingly.  "Yes, that's the best of it--the
next best of it.  It was your betting that was the best of all--the best
thing you ever did since we married, except your coming here."

"It's in time to help you, too--with your own money, isn't it?"

He glanced at his watch.  "Hours--I'm hours to the good.  That crowd--
that gang of thieves--that bunch of highwaymen!  I've got them--got them,
and got a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, too, to start again at
home, at Lammis, Mona, back on the--but no, I'm not sure that I can live
there now after this big life out here."

"I'm not so sure, either," Mona replied, with a light of larger
understanding in her eyes.  "But we'll have to go back and stop the
world talking, and put things in shape before we come here to stay."

"To stay here--do you mean that?" he asked eagerly.

"Somewhere in this big land," she replied softly; "anyhow, to stay here
till I've grown up a little.  I wasn't only small in body in the old
days, I was small in mind, Shiel."

"Anyhow, I've done with betting and racing, Mona.  I've just got time
left--I'm only thirty-nine--to start and really do something with
myself."

"Well, start now, dear man of Lammis.  What is it you have to do before
twelve o'clock to-night?"  "What is it?  Why, I have to pay over two
thousand of this,"--he flourished the banknotes--"and even then I'll
still have two thousand left.  But wait--wait.  There was the original
fifty pounds.  Where is that fifty pounds, little girl alive?  Out with
it.  This is the profit.  Where is the fifty you staked?"  His voice was
gay with raillery.

She could look him in the face now and prevaricate without any shame or
compunction at all.  "That fifty pounds--that!  Why, I used it to buy my
ticket for Canada.  My husband ought to pay my expenses out to him."

He laughed greatly.  All Ireland was rioting in his veins now.  He had no
logic or reasoning left.  "Well, that's the way to get into your old
man's heart, Mona.  To think of that!  I call it tact divine.  Everything
has spun my way at last.  I was right about that Derby, after all.  It
was in my bones that I'd make a pot out of it, but I thought I had lost
it all when Flamingo went down."

"You never know your luck--you used to say that, Shiel."

"I say it again.  Come, we must tell our friends--Kitty, her mother, and
the Young Doctor.  You don't know what good friends they have been to me,
mavourneen."

"Yes, I think I do," said Mona, opening the door to the outer room.

Then Crozier called with a great, cheery voice--what Mona used to call
his tally-ho voice.  Mrs. Tynan appeared, smiling.  She knew at a glance
what had happened.  It was so interesting that she could even forgive
Mona.

"Where's Kitty?" asked Crozier, almost boisterously.

"She has gone for a ride with John Sibley," answered Mrs. Tynan.

"Look, there she is!" said Mona, laying a hand on Crozier's arm, and
pointing with the other out over the prairie.

Crozier looked out towards the northwestern horizon, and in the distance
was a woman riding as hard as her horse could go, with a man galloping
hard after her.  It seemed as though they were riding into the sunset.

"She's riding the horse you won that race with years ago when you first
came here, Mr. Crozier," said Mrs. Tynan.  "John Sibley bought it from
Mr. Brennan."

Mona did not see the look which came into Crozier's face as, with one
hand shading his eyes and the other grasping the banknotes which were to
start him in life again, independent and self-respecting, he watched the
girl riding on and on, ever ahead of the man.

It was at that moment the Young Doctor entered the room, and he
distracted Mona's attention for a moment.  Going forward to him Mona
shook him warmly by the hand.  Then she went up to Mrs. Tynan and kissed
her.

"I would like to kiss your daughter too, Mrs. Tynan," Mona said.  .  .  .
"What are you looking at so hard, Shiel?" she presently added to her
husband.

He did not turn to her.  His eyes were still shaded by his hand.

"That horse goes well yet," he said in a low voice.  "As good as ever--
as good as ever."

"He loves horses so," remarked Mona, as though she could tell Mrs. Tynan
and the Young Doctor anything about Shiel Crozier which they did not
know.

"Kitty rides well, doesn't she?" asked Mrs. Tynan of Crozier.

"What a pair--girl and horse!" Crozier exclaimed.  "Thoroughbred--
absolutely thoroughbred!"

Kitty had ridden away with her heart's secret, her very own, as she
thought: but Shiel Crozier knew--the man that mattered knew.




EPILOGUE

Golden, all golden, save where there was a fringe of trees at a
watercourse; save where a garden, like a spot of emerald, made a button
on the royal garment wrapped across the breast of the prairie.  Above,
making for the trees of the foothills far away, a golden eagle floated,
a prairie-hen sped affrighted from some invisible thing; and in the far
distance a railway train slipped down the plain like a serpent making for
a covert in the first hills of the first world that ever was.

At a casual glance the vast plain seemed uninhabited, yet here and there
were men and horses, tiny in the vastness, but conquering.  Here and
there also--for it was July--a haymaker sharpened his scythe, and the
sound came singing through the air radiant and stirring with life.

Seated in the shade of a clump of trees a girl sat with her chin in her
hands looking out over the prairie, an intense dreaming in her eyes.  Her
horse was tethered near by, but it scarcely made a sound.  It was a horse
which had once won a great race, with an Irish gentleman on his back.
Long time the girl sat absorbed, her golden colour, her brown-gold hair
in harmony with the universal stencil of gold.  With her eyes drowned in
the distance, she presently murmured something to herself, and as she did
so the eyes deepened to a nameless umber tone, deeper than gold, warmer
than brown; such a colour as only can be found in a jewel or in a leaf
the frost has touched.

The frost had touched the soul which gave the colour to the eyes of the
girl.  Yet she seemed all summer, all glow and youth and gladness.  Her
voice was golden, too, and the words which fell from her lips were as
though tuned to the sound of falling water.  The tone of the voice would
last when the gold of all else became faded or tarnished.  It had its
origin in the soul:

         "Whereaway goes my lad?  Tell me, has he gone alone?
          Never harsh word did I speak; never hurt I gave;
          Strong he was and beautiful; like a heron he has flown
          Hereaway, hereaway will I make my grave."

The voice lingered on the words till it trailed away into nothing, like
the vanishing note of a violin which seems still to pulse faintly after
the sound has ceased.

"But he did not go alone, and I have not made my grave," the girl said,
and raised her head at the sound of footsteps.  With an effort she
emerged from the half-trance in which she had been, and smiled at a man
hastening towards her.

"Dear bully, bulbous being--how that word 'bully' would have, made her
cringe!" she said as the man ambled nearer.  He could not go as fast as
his mind urged him.

"I've got news--news, news!" he exclaimed, wading through his own
perspiration to where she sat.  "I can guess what it is," the girl
remarked smilingly, as she reached out a hand to him, but remained
seated.  "It's a real, live baby born to Lydia, wife of Methuselah, the
woman also being of goodly years.  It is, isn't it."

"The fattest, finest, most 'scrumpshus' son of all the ages that ever--"

Kitty laughed happily and very whimsically.  "Like none since Moses was
found among the bulrushes!  Where was this one found, and what do you
intend to call him--Jesse, after his 'pa'?"

"No--nothing so common.  He's to be called Shiel--Shiel Crozier Bulrush,
that's to be his name."

The face of the girl became a shade pensive now.  "Oh!  And do you think
you can guarantee that he will be worth the name?  Do you never think
what his father is?"

"I'm starting him right with that name.  I can do so much, anyway,"
laughed the imperturbable one.  "And Mrs. Bulrush, after her great
effort--how is she?

"Flying--simply flying.  Earth not good enough for her.  Simply flying.
But here--here is more news.  Guess what--it's for you.  I've just come
from the post office, and they said there was an English letter for you,
so I brought it."

He handed it over.  She laid it in her lap and waited as though for him
to go.

"Can't I hear how he is?  He's the best man that ever crossed my path,"
he said.

"It happens to be in his wife's, not his, handwriting--did ever such a
scrap of a woman write so sprawling a hand!" she replied, holding the
letter up.

"But she'll let us know in the letter how Crozier is, won't she?"

Kitty had now recovered herself, and slowly she opened the envelope and
took out the letter.  As she did so something fluttered to the ground.

Jesse Bulrush picked it up.  "That looks nice," he said, and he whistled
in surprise.  "It's a money-draft on a bank."

Kitty, whose eyes were fixed on the big, important handwriting, answered
calmly and without apparently looking, as she took the paper from his
hand: "Yes, it's a wedding present--five hundred dollars to buy what I
like best for my home.  So she says."

"Mrs. Crozier, of course."

"Of course."

"Well, that's magnificent.  What will you do with it?"

Kitty rose and held out her hand.  "Go back to your flying partner, happy
man, and ask her what she would do with five hundred dollars if she had
it."

"She'd buy her lord and master a present with it, of course," he
answered.

"Good-bye, Mr. Rolypoly," she responded, laughing.  "You always could
think of things for other people to do; and have never done anything
yourself until now.  Good-bye, father."

When he was gone and out of sight her face changed.  With sudden anger
she crushed and crumpled up the draft for five hundred in her hand.  "'A
token of affection from both!'" she exclaimed, quoting from the letter.
"One lone leaf of Irish shamrock from him would--"

She stopped.  "But he will send a message of his own," she continued.
"He will--he will.  Even if he doesn't, I'll know that he remembers just
the same.  He does--he does remember."

She drew herself up with an effort, and, as it were, shook herself free
from the memories which dimmed her eyes.

Not far away a man was riding towards the clump of trees where she was.
She saw, and hastened to her horse.

"If I told John all I feel he'd understand.  I believe he always has
understood," she added with a far-off look.

The draft was still crushed in her hand when she mounted the beloved
horse, whose name now was Shiel.

Presently she smoothed out the crumpled paper.  "Yes, I'll take it; I'll
put it by," she murmured.  "John will keep on betting.  He'll be broke
some day and he'll need it, maybe."

A moment later she was riding hard to meet the man who, before the wheat-
harvest came, would call her wife.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

He saw what he wished to see, which is the way of man
Searchers after excuses for ungoverned instincts and acts
Telling the unnecessary truth
What isn't never was to those that never knew






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK":

And I was very lucky--worse luck!
Anny man as is a man has to have one vice
God help the man that's afraid of his own wife!
He saw what he wished to see, which is the way of man
Her moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctilios
Law's delays outlasted even the memory of the crime committed
Searchers after excuses for ungoverned instincts and acts
Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other
She looked too gay to be good
Telling the unnecessary truth
They had seen the world through the bottom of a tumbler
What isn't never was to those that never knew






WILD YOUTH

By Gilbert Parker


Volume 1.
I.        THE MAZARINES TAKE POSSESSION
II.       "MY NAME IS LOUISE"
III.      "I HAVE FOUGHT WITH BEASTS AT EPHESUS"
IV.       TWO SIDES TO A BARGAIN
V.        ORLANDO HAS AN ADVENTURE
VI.       "THINGS MUST HAPPEN"
VII.      "THE ZOOLYOGICAL GARDEN"
VIII.     THE ORIENTAL WAY OF IT
IX.       THE STARS IN THEIR COURSES

Volume 2.
X.        THE MOON WAS NOT ALONE
XI.       LOUISE
XII.      MAN UNNATURAL
XIII.     ORLANDO GIVES A WARNING
XIV.      FILION AND FIONA--ALSO PATSY KERNAGHAN
XV.       OUTWARD BOUND
XVI.      AT THE CROSS TRAILS
XVII.     THE SUPERIOR MAN
XVIII.    YOUTH HAS ITS WAY




WILD YOUTH

CHAPTER I

THE MAZARINES TAKE POSSESSION

From the beginning, Askatoon had had more character and idiosyncrasy than
any other town in the West.  Perhaps that was because many of its
citizens had marked personality, while some were distinctly original--a
few so original as to be almost bizarre.  The general intelligence was
high, and this made the place alert for the new observer.  It slept with
one eye open; it waked with both eyes wide--as wide as the windows of the
world.  The virtue of being bright and clever was a doctrine which had
never been taught in Askatoon; it was as natural as eating and drinking.
Nothing ever really shook the place out of a wholesome control and
composure.  Now and then, however, the flag of distress was hoisted, and
everybody in the place--from Patsy Kernaghan, the casual, at one end of
the scale, and the Young Doctor, so called because he was young-looking
when he first came to the place, who represented Askatoon in the meridian
of its intellect, at the other--had sudden paralysis.  That was the
outstanding feature of Askatoon.  Some places made a noise and flung
things about in times of distress; but Askatoon always stood still and
fumbled with its collar-buttons, as though to get more air.  When it was
poignantly moved, it leaned against the wall of its common sense,
abashed, but vigilant and careful.

That is what it did when Mr. and Mrs. Joel Mazarine arrived at Askatoon
to take possession of Tralee, the ranch which Michael Turley, abandoning
because he had an unavoidable engagement in another world, left to his
next of kin, with a legacy to another kinsman a little farther off.  The
next of kin had proved to be Joel Mazarine, from one of those stern
English counties on the borders of Quebec, where ancient tribal
prejudices and religious hatreds give a necessary relief to hard-driven
human nature.

Michael Turley had lived much to himself on his ranch, but that was
because in his latter days he had developed a secret taste for spirituous
liquors which he had no wish to share with others.  With the assistance
of a bad cook and a constant spleen caused by resentment against the
intervention of his priest, good Father Roche, he finished his career
with great haste and without either becoming a nuisance to his neighbours
or ruining his property.  The property was clear of mortgage or debt when
he set out on his endless journey.

When the prophet-bearded, huge, swarthy-faced Joel Mazarine, with a
beautiful young girl behind him, stepped from the West-bound train and
was greeted by the Mayor, who was one of the executors of Michael
Turley's will, a shiver passed through Askatoon, and for one instant
animation was suspended; for the jungle-looking newcomer, motioning
forward the young girl, said to the Mayor:

"Mayor, this is Mrs. Mazarine.  Shake hands with the Mayor, Mrs.
Mazarine."


Mazarine did not speak very loud, but as an animal senses the truth of a
danger far off with an unshakable certainty, the crowd at the station
seemed to know by instinct what he said.

"Hell--that old whale and her!" growled Jonas Billings, the keeper of
the livery-stable.

At Mazarine's words the Young Doctor, a man of rare gifts, individuality
and authority in the place, who had come to the station to see a patient
off to the mountains by this train, drew in his breath sharply, as though
a spirit of repugnance was in his heart.  This happened during the first
years of the Young Doctor's career at Askatoon, when he was still alive
with human prejudices, although he had a nature well balanced and
singularly just.  The strife between his prejudices and his sense of
justice was what made him always interesting in all the great prairie and
foothill country of which Askatoon was the centre.

He had got his shock, indeed, before Mazarine had introduced his wife to
the Mayor.  Not for nothing had he studied the human mind in its relation
to the human body, and the expression of that mind speaking through the
body.  The instant Joel Mazarine and his wife stepped out of the train,
he knew they were what they were to each other.  That was a real
achievement in knowledge, because Mazarine was certainly sixty-five if he
was a day, and his wife was a slim, willowy slip of a girl, not more than
nineteen years of age, with the most wonderful Irish blue eyes and long
dark lashes.  There was nothing of the wife or woman about her, save
something in the eyes, which seemed to belong to ages past and gone,
something so solemnly wise, yet so painfully confused, that there flashed
into the Young Doctor's mind at first glance of her the vision of a young
bird caught from its thoughtless, sunbright journeyings, its reckless
freedom of winged life, into the captivity of a cage.

She smiled, this child, as she shook hands with the Mayor, and it had the
appeal of one who had learned the value of smiling--as though it answered
many a question and took the place of words and the trials of the tongue.
It was pitifully mechanical.  As the Young Doctor saw, it was the smile
of a captive in a strange uncomprehended world, more a dream than a
reality.

"Mrs. Mazarine, welcome," said the Mayor after an abashed pause.  "We're
proud of this town, but we'll be prouder still, now you've come."

The girl-wife smiled again.  At the same time it was as though she
glanced apprehensively out of the corner of her eye at the old man by her
side, as she said:

"Thank you.  There seems to be plenty of room for us out here, so we
needn't get in each other's way....  I've never been on the prairie
before," she added.

The Young Doctor realized that her reply had meanings which would escape
the understanding of the Mayor, and her apprehensive glance had told him
of the gruesome jealousy of this old man at her side.  The Mayor's polite
words had caused the long, clean-shaven upper lip of the old man with the
look of a debauched prophet, to lengthen surlily; and he noticed that a
wide, flat foot in a big knee-boot, inside trousers too short, tapped the
ground impatiently.

"We must be getting on to Tralee," said a voice that seemed to force its
way through bronchial obstructions.  "Come, Mrs. Mazarine."

He laid a big, flat, tropical hand, which gave the impression of being
splayed, on the girl's shoulder.  The gallant words of the Mayor--a
chivalrous mountain man--had set dark elements working.  As the new
master of Tralee stepped forward, the Young Doctor could not help
noticing how large and hairy were the ears that stood far out from the
devilish head.  It was a huge, steel-twisted, primitive man, who somehow
gave the impression of a gorilla.  The face was repulsive in its
combination of surly smugness, as shown by the long upper lip, by a
repellent darkness round the small, furtive eyes, by a hardness in the
huge, bearded jaw, and by a mouth of primary animalism.

The Mayor caught sight of the Young Doctor, and he stopped the
incongruous pair as they moved to the station doorway, the girl in front,
as though driven.

"Mr. Mazarine, you've got to know the man who counts for more in Askatoon
than anybody else; Doctor, you've got to know Mr. Mazarine," said the
generous Mayor.

Repugnance was in full possession of the Young Doctor, but he was
scientific and he was philosophic, if nothing else.  He shook hands with
Mazarine deliberately.  If he could prevent it, there should be, where he
was concerned, no jealousy, such as Mazarine had shown towards the Mayor,
in connection with this helpless, exquisite creature in the grip of hard
fate.  Shaking hands with the girl with only a friendly politeness in his
glance, he felt a sudden eager, clinging clasp of her fingers.  It was
like lightning, and gone like lightning, as was the look that flashed
between them.  Somehow the girl instinctively felt the nature of the man,
and in spirit flew to him for protection.  No one saw the swift look, and
in it there was nothing which spoke of youth or heart, of the feeling of
man for woman or woman for man; but only the longing for help on the
girl's part, undefined as it was.  On the man's part there was a soul
whose gift and duty were healing.  As the two passed on, the Young Doctor
looked around him at the exclaiming crowd, for few had left the station
when the train rolled out.  Curiosity was an obsession with the people of
Askatoon.

"Well, I never!" said round-faced Mrs. Skinner, with huge hips and gray
curls.  "Did you ever see the like?"

"I call it a shame," declared an indignant young woman, gripping tighter
the hand of her little child, the daughter of a young butcher of twenty-
three years of age.

"Poor lamb!" another motherly voice said.

"She ought to be ashamed of herself--money, I suppose," sneered Ellen
Banner, a sour-faced shopkeeper's daughter, who had taught in Sunday
school for twenty years and was still single.

"Beauty and the beast," remarked the Young Doctor to himself, as he saw
the two drive away, Patsy Kernaghan running beside the wagon, evidently
trying to make friends with the mastodon of Tralee.




CHAPTER II

"MY NAME IS LOUISE"

Askatoon never included the Mazarines in its social scheme.  Certainly
Tralee was some distance from the town, but, apart from that, the new-
comers remained incongruous, alien and alone.  The handsome, inanimate
girl-wife never appeared by herself in the streets of Askatoon, but
always in the company of her morose husband, whose only human association
seemed to be his membership in the Methodist body so prominent in the
town.  Every Sunday morning he tied his pair of bay horses with the
covered buggy to the hitching-post in the church-shed and marched his
wife to the very front seat in the Meeting House, having taken possession
of it on his first visit, as though it had no other claimants.
Subsequently he held it in almost solitary control, because other members
of the congregation, feeling his repugnance to companionship, gave him
the isolation he wished.  As a rule he and his wife left the building
before the last hymn was sung, so avoiding conversation.  Now and again
he stayed to a prayer-meeting and, doing so, invariably "led in prayer,"
to a very limited chorus of "Amens."  For in spite of the position which
Tralee conferred on its owner, there was a natural shrinking from "that
wild boar," as outspoken Sister Skinner called him in the presence of the
puzzled and troubled Minister.

This was always a time of pained confusion for the girl-wife.  She
had never "got religion," and there was something startling to her
undeveloped nature in the thunderous apostrophes, in terms of the oldest
part of the Old Testament, used by her tyrant when he wrestled with the
Lord in prayer.

These were perhaps the only times when her face was the mirror of her
confused, vague and troubled youth.  Captive in a world bounded by a
man's will, she simply did not begin to understand this strange and
overpowering creature who had taken possession of her body, mind and
soul.  She trembled and hesitated before every cave of mystery which her
daily life with him opened darkly to her abashed eyes.  She felt herself
going round and round and round in a circle, not forlorn enough to rebel
or break away, but dazed and wondering and shrinking.  She was like one
robbed of will, made mechanical by a stern conformity to imposed rules of
life and conduct.  There were women in Askatoon who were sorry for her
and made efforts to get near her; but whether it was the Methodist
Minister or his wife, or the most voluble sister of the prayer-meeting,
none got beyond the threshold of Tralee, as it were.

The girl-wife abashed them.  She was as one who automatically spoke as
she was told to speak, did what she was told to do.  Yet she always
smiled at the visitors when they came, or when she saw them and others at
the Meeting House.  It was, however, not a smile for an individual,
whoever that individual might chance to be.  It was only the kindness of
her nature expressing itself.  Talking seemed like the exercise of a
foreign language to her, but her smiling was free and unconstrained, and
it belonged to all, without selection.

The Young Doctor, looking at her one day as she sat in a buggy while her
monster-man was inside the chemist's shop, said to himself:

"Sterilized!  Absolutely, shamefully sterilized!  But suppose she wakes
up suddenly out of that dream between life and death--what will happen?"

He remembered that curious, sudden, delicate catch of his palm on the day
when they first shook hands at the railway-station, and to him it was
like the flutter of life in a thing which seemed dead.  How often he had
noticed it in man and animal on the verge of extinction!  He had not
mistaken that fluttering appeal of her fingers.  He was young enough
to translate it into flattering terms of emotion, but he did not do so.
He was fancy-free himself, and the time would come when he would do a
tremendous thing where a woman was concerned, a woman in something the
same position as this poor girl; but that shaking, thrilling thing was
still far off from him.  For this child he only felt the healer's desire
to heal.

He was one of those men who never force an issue; he never put forward
the hands of the clock.  He felt that sooner or later Louise Mazarine--he
did not yet know her Christian name--would command his help, as so many
had done in that prairie country, and not necessarily for relief of
physical pain or the curing of disease.  He had helped as many men and
women mentally and morally as physically; the spirit of healing was
behind everything he did.  His world recognized it, and that was why he
was never known by his name in all the district--he was only admiringly
called "The Young Doctor."

He had never been to Tralee since the Mazarines had arrived, though he
had passed it often and had sometimes seen Louise in the garden with her
dog, her black cat and her bright canary.  The combination of the cat and
the canary did not seem incongruous where she was concerned; it was as
though something in her passionless self neutralized even the antagonisms
of natural history.  She had made the gloomy black cat and the light-
hearted canary to be friends.  Perhaps that came from an everlasting
patience which her life had bred in her; perhaps it was the powerful gift
of one in touch with the remote, primitive things.

The Young Doctor had also seen her in the paddock with the horses, bare-
headed, lithe and so girlishly slim, with none of the unmistakable if
elusive lines belonging to the maturity which marriage brings.  He had
taken off his hat to her in the distance, but she had never waved a hand
in reply.  She only stood and gazed at him, and her look followed him
long after he passed by.  He knew well that in the gaze was nothing of
the interest which a woman feels in a man; it was the look of one chained
to a rock, who sees a Samaritan in the cheerless distance.

In the daily round of her life she was always busy; not restlessly, but
constantly, and always silently, busy.  She was even more silent than her
laconic half-breed hired woman, Rada.  There was no talk with her
gloating husband which was not monosyllabic.  Her canary sang, but no
music ever broke from her own lips.  She murmured over her lovely yellow
companion; she kissed it, pleaded with it for more song, but the only
music at her own lips was the occasional music of her voice; and it had a
colourless quality which, though gentle, had none of the eloquence and
warmth of youth.

In form and feature she was one made for emotion and demonstration, and
the passionate play of the innocent enterprises of wild youth; but there
was nothing of that in her.  Gray age had drunk her life and had given
her nothing in return--neither companionship nor sympathy nor
understanding; only the hunger of a coarse manhood.  Her obedience to
the supreme will of her jealous jailer gave no ground for scolding or
reproach, and that saved her much.  She was even quietly cheerful, but
it was only the pale reflection of a lost youth which would have been
buoyant and gallant, gay and glad, had it been given the natural thing
in the natural world.

There came a day, however, when the long, unchanging routine, gray with
prison grayness, was broken; when the round of household duties and the
prison discipline were interrupted.  It was as sudden as a storm in the
tropics, as final and as fateful as birth or death.  That day she was
taken suddenly and acutely ill.  It was only a temporary malady, an
agonizing pain which had its origin in a sudden chill.  This chill was
due, as the Young Doctor knew when he came, to a vitality which did not
renew itself, which got nothing from the life to which it was sealed,
which for some reason could not absorb energy from the stinging, vital
life of the prairie world in the June-time.

In her sudden anguish, and in the absence of Joel Mazarine, she sent
for the Young Doctor.  That in itself was courageous, because it was
impossible to tell what view the master of Tralee would take of her
action, ill though she was.  She was not supposed to exercise her will.
If Joel Mazarine had been at home, he would have sent for wheezy,
decrepit old Doctor Gensing, whose practice the Young Doctor had
completely absorbed over a series of years.

But the Young Doctor came.  Rada, the half-breed woman, had undressed
Louise and put her to bed; and he found her white as snow at the end of a
paroxysm of pain, her long eyelashes lying on a cheek as smooth as a
piece of Satsuma ware which has had the loving polish of ten thousand
friendly fingers over innumerable years.  When he came and stood beside
her bed, she put out her hand slowly towards him.  As he took it in his
firm, reassuring grasp, he felt the same fluttering appeal which had
marked their handclasp on the day of their first meeting at the railway-
station.  Looking at the huge bed and the rancher-farmer's coarse clothes
hanging on pegs, the big greased boots against the wall, a sudden savage
feeling of disgust and anger took hold of him; but the spirit of healing
at once emerged, and he concentrated himself upon the duty before him.

For a whole hour he worked with her, and at length subdued the
convulsions of pain which distorted the beautiful face and made the
childlike body writhe.  He had a resentment against the crime which had
been committed.  Marriage had not made her into a woman; it had driven
her back into an arrested youth.  It was as though she ought to have worn
short skirts and her hair in a long braid down her back.  Hers was the
body of a young boy.  When she was free from pain, and the colour had
come back to her cheeks a little, she smiled at him, and was about to put
out her hand as a child might to a brother or a father, when suddenly a
shadow stole into her eyes and crept across her face, and she drew her
clenched hand close to her body.  Still, she tried to smile at him.

His quiet, impersonal, though friendly look soothed her.

"Am I very sick!" she asked.

He shook his head and smiled.  "You'll be all right to-morrow, I hope."

"That's too bad.  I would like to be so sick that I couldn't think of
anything else.  My father used to say that the world was only the size of
four walls to a sick person."

"I can't promise you so small a world," remarked the Young Doctor with a
kind smile, his arm resting on the side of the bed, his chair drawn
alongside.  "You will have to face the whole universe to-morrow, same as
ever."

She looked perplexed, and then said to him: "I used to think it was a
beautiful world, and they try to make me think it is yet; but it isn't."

"Who try to make you?" he asked.

"Oh, my bird Richard, and Nigger the black cat, and Jumbo, the dog," she
replied.

Her eyes closed, then opened strangely wide upon him in an eager, staring
appeal.

"Don't you want to know about me?" she asked.  "I want to tell you--
I want to tell you.  I'm tired of telling it all over to myself."

The Young Doctor did not want to know.  As a doctor he did not want to
know.

"Not now," he said firmly.  "Tell me when I come again."

A look of pain came into her face.  "But who can tell when you'll come
again!" she pleaded.

"When I will things to be, they generally happen," he answered in a
commonplace tone.  "You are my patient now, and I must keep an eye on
you.  So I'll come."

Again, with an almost spasmodical movement towards him, she said:

"I must tell you.  I wanted to tell you the first day I saw you.  You
seemed the same kind of man my father was.  My name's Louise.  It was my
mother made me do it.  There was a mortgage--I was only sixteen.  It's
three years ago.  He said to my mother he'd tear up the mortgage if I
married him.  That's why I'm here with him--Mrs. Mazarine.  But my name's
Louise."

"Yes, yes, I know," the Young Doctor answered soothingly.  "But you must
not talk of it now.  I understand perfectly.  Tell me all about it
another time."

"You don't think I should have--" She paused.

"Of course.  I tell you I understand.  Now you must be quiet.  Drink
this."  He got up and poured some liquid into a glass.

At that moment there was a noise below in the hall.  "That's my husband,"
the girl-wife said, and the old wan captive-look came into her face.

"That's all right," replied the Young Doctor.  "He'll find you better."

At that moment the half-breed woman entered the room.  "He's here," she
said, and came towards the bed.

"That old woman has sense," the Young Doctor murmured to himself.  "She
knows her man."

A minute later Joel Mazarine was in the room, and he saw the half-breed
woman lift his wife's head, while the Young Doctor held a glass to her
lips.

"What's all this?" Mazarine said roughly.  "What?"  He stopped suddenly,
for the Young Doctor faced him sharply.

"She must be left alone," he said firmly and quietly, his eyes fastening
the old man's eyes; and there was that in them which would not be
gainsaid.  "I have just given her medicine.  She has been in great pain.

"We are not needed here now."  He motioned towards the door.  "She must
be left alone."

For an instant it seemed that the old man was going to resist the
dictation; but presently, after a scrutinizing look at the still,
shrinking figure in the bed, he swung round, left the room and descended
the stairs, the Young Doctor following.




CHAPTER III

"I HAVE FOUGHT WITH BEASTS AT EPHESUS"

The old man led the way outside the house, as though to be rid of his
visitor as soon as possible.  This was so obvious that, for an instant,
the Young Doctor was disposed to try conclusions with the old slaver,
and summon him back to the dining-room.  The Mazarine sort of man always
roused fighting, masterful forces in him.  He was never averse to a
contest of wills, and he had had much of it; it was inseparable from his
methods of healing.  He knew that nine people out of ten never gave a
true history of their physical troubles, never told their whole story:
first because they had no gift for reporting, no observation; and also
because the physical ailments of many of them were aggravated or induced
by mental anxieties.  Then it was that he imposed himself; as it were,
fought the deceiver and his deceit, or the ignorant one and his
ignorance; and numbers of people, under his sympathetic, wordless
inquiry, poured their troubles into his ears, as the girl-wife upstairs
had tried to do.

When the old man turned to face him in the sunlight, his boots soiled
with dust and manure, his long upper lip feeling about over the lower lip
and its shaggy growth of beard like some sea-monster feeling for its
prey, the Young Doctor had a sensation of rancour.  His mind flashed to
that upstairs room, where a comely captive creature was lying not an
arm's length from the coats and trousers and shabby waistcoats of this
barbarian.  Somehow that row of tenantless clothes, and the top-boots,
greased with tallow, standing against the wall, were more characteristic
of the situation than the old land-leviathan himself, blinking his beady,
greenish eyes at the Young Doctor.  That blinking was a repulsive
characteristic; it was like serpents gulping live things.

"What's the matter with her?" the old man asked, jerking his head
towards the upper window.

The Young Doctor explained quickly the immediate trouble, and then added:

"But it would not have taken hold of her so if she was not run down.  She
is not in a condition to resist.  When her system exhausts, it does not
refill, as it were."

"What sort of dictionary talk is that?  Run down--here?"  The old man
sniffed the air like an ancient sow.  "Run down--in this life, with the
best of food, warm weather, and more ozone than a sailor gets at sea!
It's an insult to Jehovah, such nonsense."

"Mr. Mazarine," rejoined the Young Doctor with ominous determination in
his eye, "you know a good deal, I should think, about spring wheat and
fall ploughing, about making sows fat, or burning fallow land--that's
your trade, and I shouldn't want to challenge you on it all; or you know
when to give a horse bran-mash, or a heifer salt-petre, but--well, I know
my job in the same way.  They will tell you, about here, that I have a
kind of hobby for keeping people from digging and crawling into their own
graves.  That's my business, and the habit of saving human life, because
you're paid for it, becomes in time a habit of saving human life for its
very own sake.  I warn you--and perhaps it's a matter of some concern to
you--Mrs. Mazarine is in a bad way."

Resentful and incredulous, the old man was about to speak, but the Young
Doctor made an arresting gesture, and added:

"She has very little strength to go on with.  She ought to be plump; her
pulses ought to beat hard; her cheeks ought to be rosy; she should walk
with a spring and be strong and steady as a soldier on the march; but she
is none of these things, can do none of these things.  You've got a
thousand things to do, and you do them because you want to do them.
There is something making new life in you all the time, but Mrs. Mazarine
makes no new life as she goes on.  Every day is taking something out of
her, and there's nothing being renewed.  Sometimes neither good food nor
ozone is enough; and you've got to take care, or you'll lose Mrs.
Mazarine."  He could not induce himself to speak of her as "wife."

For a moment the unwholesome mouth seemed to be chewing unpleasant herbs,
and the beady eyes blinked viciously.

"I'm not swallowin' your meaning," Mazarine said at last.  "I never
studied Greek.  If a woman has a disease, there it is, and you can deal
with it or not; but if she hasn't no disease, then it's chicanyery--
chicanyery.  Doctors talk a lot of gibberish these here days.  What I
want to know is, has my wife got a disease?  I haven't seen any signs.
Is it Bright's, or cancer, or the lungs, or the liver, or the kidneys,
or the heart, or what's its name?"

The Young Doctor had an impulse to flay the heathen, but for the girl-
wife's sake he forbore.

"I don't think it is any of those troubles," he replied smoothly.  "She
needs a thorough examination.  But one thing is clear: she is wasting;
she is losing ground instead of going ahead.  There's a malignant
influence working.  She's standing still, and to stand still in youth
is fatal.  I can imagine you don't want to lose her, eh?"

The Young Doctor's gray-blue eyes endeavoured to hold the blinking beads
under the shaggy eyebrows long enough to get control of a mind which had
the cunning and cruelty of an animal.  He succeeded.

The old man would a thousand times rather his wife lived than died.  In
the first place, to lose her was to sacrifice that which he had paid for
dearly--a mortgage of ten thousand dollars torn up.  Louise Mazarine
represented that to him first-ten thousand dollars.  Secondly, she was
worth it in every way.  He had what hosts of others would be glad to
have--men younger and better looking than himself.  She represented the
triumph of age.  He had lived his life; he had buried two wives; he had
had children; he had made money; and yet here, when other men of his
years were thinking of making wills, and eating porridge, and waiting for
the Dark Policeman to come and arrest them for loitering, he was left a
magnificent piece of property like Tralee; and he had all the sources of
pleasure open to a young man walking the primrose path.  He was living
right up to the last.  Both his wives were gray-headed when they died--it
turned them gray to live with him; both had died before they were fifty;
and here he was the sole owner of a wonderful young head, with hair that
reached to the waist, with lips like cool fruit from an orchard-tree, and
the indescribable charm of youth and loveliness which the young
themselves never really understood.  That was what he used to say to
himself; it was only age could appreciate youth and beauty; youth did not
understand.

Thus the Young Doctor's question roused in him something at once savage
and apprehensive.  Of course he wanted Louise to live.  Why should she
not live?

"Doesn't any husband want his wife to live!" he answered sullenly.
"But I want to know what ails her.  What medicine you going to give her?"

"I don't know," the Young Doctor replied meditatively.  "When she is
quite rid of this attack, I'll examine her again and let you know."

Suddenly there shot into the greenish old eyes a reddish look of rage;
jealousy, horrible, gruesome jealousy, took possession of Joel Mazarine.
This young man to come in and go out of his wife's bedroom, to--Why
weren't there women doctors?  He would get one over from the Coast, or
from Winnipeg, or else there was old Doctor Gensing, in Askatoon--who was
seventy-five at least.  He would call him in and get rid of this
offensive young pill-maker.

"I don't believe there's anything the matter with her," he declared
stubbornly.  "She's been healthy as a woman can be, living this life
here.  What's her disease?  I've asked you.  What is it?"

The other laid a hand on himself, and in the colourless voice of the
expert, said: "Old age--that's her trouble, so far as I can see."

He paused, foreseeing the ferocious look which swept into the repulsive
face, and the clenching of the big hands.  Then in a soothing, reflective
kind of voice he added:

"Senile decay--you know all about that.  Well, now, it happens sometimes
--not often, but it does happen--that a very young person for some cause
or another suffers from senile decay.  Some terrible leakage of youth
occurs.  It has been cured, though, and I've cured one or two cases
myself."

He was almost prevaricating--but in a good cause.  "Mrs. Mazarine's is a
case which can be cured, I think," he continued.  "As you've remarked,
Mr. Mazarine,"--his voice was now persuasive,--"here is fine air, and a
good, comfortable home--"

Suddenly he broke off, and as though in innocent inquiry said: "Now, has
she too much to do?  Has she sufficient help in the house for one so
young?"

"She doesn't do more than's good for her," answered the old man, "and
there's the half-breed hired critter--you've seen her--and Li Choo, a
Chinaman, too.  That ought to be enough," he added scornfully.

The Young Doctor seemed to reflect, and his face became urbane, because
he saw he must proceed warily, if he was to be of service to his new
patient.

"Yes," he said emphatically, "she appears to have help enough.  I must
think over her case and see her again to-morrow."

The old man's look suddenly darkened.  "Ain't she better:"' he asked.

"She's not so much better that there's no danger of her being worse," the
Young Doctor replied decisively.  "I certainly must see her to-morrow."

"Why," the old man remarked, waving his splayed hand up and down in a
gesture of emphasis, "she's never been sick.  She's in and out of this
house all day.  She goes about with her animals like as if she hadn't a
care or an ache or pain in the world.  I've heard of women that fancied
they was sick because they hadn't too much to do, and was too well off,
and was treated too well.  Highsterics, they call it.  Lots of women,
lots and lots of them, would be glad to have such a home as this, and
would stay healthy in it."

The Young Docor felt he had made headway, and he let it go at that.  It
was clear he was to be permitted to come to-morrow.  "Yes, it's a fine
place," he replied convincingly.  "Three thousand acres is a mighty big
place when you've got farm-land as well as cattle-grazing."

"It's nearly all good farm-land," answered the old man with decision.
"I don't believe much in ranching or cattle.  I'm for the plough and
the wheat.  There's more danger from cattle disease than from bad crops.
I'm getting rid of my cattle.  I expect to sell a lot of 'em to-day."
An avaricious smile of satisfaction drew down the corners of his lips.
"I've got a good customer.  He ought to be on the trail now."  He drew
out a huge silver watch.  "Yes, he's due.  The party's a foreigner, I
believe.  He lives over at Slow Down Ranch--got a French name."

"Oh, Giggles!" said the Young Doctor with a quick smile.

The old man shook his head: "No, that ain't the name.  It's Guise-Orlando
Guise is the name."

"Same thing," remarked the Young Doctor.  "They call him Giggles for
short.  You've seen him of course?"

"No, I've been dealing with him so far through a third party.  Why's he
called Giggles?" asked the Master of Tralee.

"Well, you'll know when you see him.  He's not cut according to
everybody's measure.  If you're dealing with him, don't think him a fool
because he chirrups, and don't size him up according to his looks.  He's
a dude.  Some call him The Duke, but mostly he's known as Giggles."

"Fools weary me," grumbled the other.

"Well, as I said, you mustn't begin dealing with him on the basis of his
looks.  Looks don't often tell the truth.  For instance, you're known as
a Christian and a Methodist!"  He looked the old man slowly up and down,
and in anyone else it would have seemed gross insolence, but the urbane
smile at his lips belied the malice of his words.  "Well, you know you
don't look like a Methodist.  You look like,"--innocence showed in his
eye; there was no ulterior purpose in his face, "you look like one of the
bad McMahon lot of claim-jumpers over there in the foothills.  I suppose
that seems so, only because ranchman aren't generally pious.  Well, in
the same way, Giggles doesn't really look like a ranchman; but he's every
bit as good a ranchman as you are a Christian and a Methodist!"

The Young Doctor looked the old man in the face with such a semblance of
honesty that he succeeded in disarming a dangerous suspicion of mockery
--dangerous, if he was to continue family physician at Tralee.  "Ah," he
suddenly remarked, "there comes Orlando now!"  He pointed to a spot about
half a mile away, where a horseman could be seen cantering slowly towards
Tralee.

A moment afterwards, from his buggy, the Young Doctor said: "Mrs.
Mazarine must be left alone until I see her again.  She must not be
disturbed.  The half-breed woman can look after her.  I've told her what
to do.  You'll keep to another room, of course."

"There's a bunk in that room where I could sleep," said the other, with a
note of protest.

"I'm afraid that, in our patient's interest, you must do what I say," the
other insisted, with a friendly smile which caused him a great effort.
"If I make her bloom again, that will suit you, won't it?"

A look of gloating came into the other's eyes: "Let it go at that," he
said.  "Mebbe I'll take her over to the sea before the wheat-harvest."

Out on the Askatoon trail, the Young Doctor ruminated over what he had
seen and heard at Tralee.  "That old geezer will get an awful jolt one
day," he said to himself.  "If that girl should wake!  Her eyes--if
somebody comes along and draws the curtains!  She hasn't the least idea
of where she is or what it all means.  All she knows is that she's a
prisoner in some strange, savage country and doesn't know its language
or anybody at all--as though she'd lost her memory.  Any fellow, young,
handsome and with enough dash and colour to make him romantic could do
it.  .  .  .  Poor little robin in the snow!" he added, and looked back
towards Tralee.

As he did so, the man from Slow Down Ranch cantering towards Tralee
caught his eye.  "Louise-Orlando," he said musingly; then, with a sudden
flick of the reins on his horse's back, he added abruptly, almost
sternly, "By the great horn spoons, no!"

Thus when his prophecy took concrete form, he revolted from it.  A grave
look came into his face.




CHAPTER IV

TWO SIDES TO A BARGAIN

As the Young Doctor had said, Orlando Guise did not look like a real,
simon-pure "cowpuncher."  He had the appearance of being dressed for the
part, like an actor who has never mounted a cayuse, in a Wild West play.
Yet on this particular day,--when the whole prairie country was alive
with light, thrilling with elixir from the bottle of old Eden's vintage,
and as comfortable as a garden where upon a red wall the peach-vines
cling--he seemed far more than usual the close-fitting, soil-touched son
of the prairie.  His wide felt hat, turned up on one side like a
trooper's, was well back on his head; his pinkish brown face was freely
taking the sun, and his clear, light-blue eyes gazed ahead unblinking in
the strong light.  His forehead was unwrinkled--a rare thing in that
prairie country where the dry air corrugates the skin; his light-brown
hair curled loosely on the brow, graduating back to closer, crisper curls
which in their thickness made a kind of furry cap.  It was like the coat
of a French poodle, so glossy and so companionable was it to the head.  A
bright handkerchief of scarlet was tied loosely around his throat, which
was even a little more bare than was the average ranchman's; and his
thick, much-pocketed flannel shirt, worn in place of a waistcoat and
coat, was of a shade of red which contrasted and yet harmonized with the
scarlet of the neckerchief.  He did not wear the sheepskin leggings so
common among the ranchmen of the West, but a pair of yellowish corduory
riding-breeches, with boots that laced from the ankle to the knee.  These
boots had that touch of the theatrical which made him more fantastic than
original in the eyes of his fellow-citizens.

Also he wore a ring with a star-sapphire, which made him incongruous,
showy and foppish, and that was a thing not easy of forgiveness in the
West.  Certainly the West would not have tolerated him as far as it did,
had it not been for three things: the extraordinary good nature which
made him giggle; the fact that on more than one occasion he had given
conclusive evidence that he was brave; and the knowledge that he was at
least well-to-do.  In a kind of vague way people had come to realize that
his giggles belonged to a nature without guile and recklessly frank.

"He beats the band," Jonas Billings, the livery-stable keeper, had said
of him; while Burlingame, the pernicious lawyer of shady character, had
remarked that he had the name of an impostor and the frame of a fop; but
he wasn't sure, as a lawyer, that he'd seen all the papers in the case--
which was tantamount to saying that the Orlando nut needed some cracking.

It was generally agreed that his name was ridiculous, romantic and
unreasonable.  It seemed to challenge public opinion.  Most names in the
West were without any picturesqueness or colour; they were commonplace
and almost geometric in their form, more like numbers to represent people
than things of character in themselves.  There were names semi-scriptural
and semi-foreign in Askatoon, but no name like Orlando Guise had ever
come that way before, and nothing like the man himself had ever ridden
the Askatoon trails.  One thing had to be said, however; he rode the
trail like a broncho-buster, and he sat his horse as though he had been
born in the saddle. --On this particular day, in spite of his garish
"get-up," he seemed to belong to the life in which he was lightheartedly
whistling a solo from one of Meyerbeer's operas.  Meyerbeer was certainly
incongruous to the prairie, but it and the whistling were in keeping with
the man himself.

Over on Slow Down Ranch there lived a curious old lady who wore a bonnet
of Sweet Sixteen of the time of the Crimea, and with a sense of colour
which would wreck the reputation of a kaleidoscope.  She it was who had
taught her son Orlando the tunefulness of Meyerbeer and Balfe and
Offenbach, and the operatic jingles of that type of composer.  Orlando
Guise had come by his outward showiness naturally.  Yet he was not like
his mother, save in this particular.  His mother was flighty and had no
sense, while he, behind the gaiety of his wardrobe and his giggles, had
very much sense of a quite original kind.  Even as he whistled Meyerbeer,
riding towards Tralee, his eyes had a look of one who was trying to see
into things; and his lips, when the whistling ceased, had a cheerful
pucker which seemed to show that he had seen what he wanted.

"Wonder if I'll get a glimpse of the so-called Mrs. Mazarine," he said
aloud.  "Bad enough to marry a back-timer, but to marry Mazarine--they
don't say she's blind, either!  Money--what won't we do for money, Mary?
But if she's as young as they say, she could have waited a bit for the
oof-bird to fly her way.  Lots of men have money as well as looks.
Anyhow, I'm ready to take his cattle off his hands on a fair, square
deal, and if his girl-missis is what they say, I wouldn't mind--"

Having said this, he giggled and giggled again at his unspoken
impertinence.  He knew he had almost said something fatuous, but the
suppressed idea appealed to him, nevertheless; for whatever he did, he
always had a vision of doing something else; and wherever he was, he was
always fancying himself to be somewhere else.  That was the strain of
romance in him which came from his mixed ancestry.  It was the froth
and bubble of a dreamer's legacy, which had made his mother, always
unconsciously theatrical, have a vision of a life on the prairies, with
the white mountains in the distance, where her beloved son would be
master of a vast domain, over which he should ride like one of Cortez'
conquistadores.  Having "money to burn," she had, at a fortunate moment,
bought the ranch which, by accident, had done well from the start, and
bade fair, through the giggling astuteness of her spectacular son, to do
far better still by design.

On the first day of their arrival at Slow Down Ranch, the mother had
presented Orlando with a most magnificent Mexican bridle and head-stall
covered with silver conchs, and a saddle with stirrups inlaid with
silver.  Wherefore, it was no wonder that most people stared and
wondered, while some sneered and some even hated.  On the whole, however,
Orlando Guise was in the way of making a place for himself in the West in
spite of natural drawbacks.

Old Mazarine did not merely sneer as he saw the gay cavalier approach,
he snorted; and he would have blasphemed, if he had not been a professing
Christian.

"Circus rider!" he said to himself.  "Wants taking down some, and he's
come to the right place to get it."

On his part, Orlando Guise showed his dislike of the repellent figure by
a brusque giggle, and further expressed what was in his mind by the one
word "Turk!"

His repugnance, however, was balanced by something possessing the old man
still more disagreeable.  Like a malignant liquid, there crept up through
Joel Mazarine's body to the roots of his hair the ancient virus of Cain.
It was jealous, ravenous, grim: old age hating the rich, robust, panting
youth of the man be fore him.  Was it that being half man, half beast,
he had some animal instinct concerning this young rough-rider before him?
Did he in some vague, prescient way associate this gaudy newcomer with
his girl-wife?  He could not himself have said.  Primitive passions are
corporate of many feelings but of little sight.

As Orlando Guise slid from his horse, Joel Mazarine steadied himself and
said: "Come about the cattle?  Ready to buy and pay cash down?"

Orlando Guise giggled.

"What are you sniggering at?" snorted the old man.

"I thought it was understood that if I liked the bunch I was to pay
cash," Orlando replied.  "I've got a good report of the beasts, but I
want to look them over.  My head cattleman told you what I'd do.  That's
why I smiled.  Funny, too: you don't look like a man who'd talk more than
was wanted."  He giggled again.

"Fool--I'll make you laugh on the other side of your mouth!" the Master
of Tralee said to himself; and then he motioned to where a bunch of a
hundred or so cattle were grazing in a little dip of the country between
them and Askatoon.  "I'll get my buckboard.  It's all hitched up and
ready, and we can get down and see them right now," he said aloud.
"Won't you find it rough going on the buckboard?  Better ride," remarked
Orlando Guise.

"I don't ever notice rough going," grunted the old man.  "Some people
ride horses to show themselves off; I ride a buckboard 'cause it suits
me."

Orlando Guise chirruped.  "Say, we mustn't get scrapping," he said gaily.
"We've got to make a bargain."

In a few moments they were sweeping across the prairie, and sure enough
the buckboard bumped, tumbled and plunged into the holes of the gophers
and coyotes, but the old man sat the seat with the tenacity of a gorilla
clinging to the branch of a tree.

In about three-quarters of an hour the two returned to Tralee, and in
front of the house the final bargaining took place.  There was a
difference of five hundred dollars between them, and the old man fought
stubbornly for it; and though Orlando giggled, it was clear he was no
fool at a bargain, and that he had many resources.  At last he threw
doubt upon the pedigree of a bull.  With a snarl Mazarine strode into the
house.  He had that pedigree, and it was indisputable.  He would show the
young swaggerer that he could not be caught anywhere in this game.

As Joel Mazarine entered the doorway of the house Orlando giggled again,
because he had two or three other useful traps ready, and this was really
like baiting a bull.  Every thrust made this bull more angry; and Orlando
knew that if he became angry enough he could bring things to a head with
a device by which the old man would be forced to yield; for he did not
want to buy, as much as Mazarine wished to sell.

The device, however, was never used, and Orlando ceased giggling
suddenly, for chancing to glance up he saw a face at a window, pale,
exquisite, delicate, with eyes that stared and stared at him as though
he were a creature from some other world.

Such a look he had never seen in anybody's eyes; such a look Louise
Mazarine had never given in her life before.  Something had drawn her out
of her bed in spite of herself--a voice which was not that of old Joel
Mazarine, but a new, fresh, vibrant voice which broke into little spells
of inconsequent laughter.  She loved inconsequent laughter, and never
heard it at Tralee.  She had crept from her bed and to the window, and
before he saw her, she had watched him with a look which slowly became an
awakening: as though curtains had been drawn aside revealing a new,
strange, ecstatic world.

Louise Mazarine had seen something she had never seen before, because a
feeling had been born in her which she had never felt.  She had never
fully known what sex was, or in any real sense what man meant.  This
romantic, picturesque, buoyant figure of youth struck her as the rock was
struck by Moses; and for the first time in all her days she was wholly
alive.  Also, for the first time in his life, Orlando Guise felt a wonder
which in spite of the hereditary romance in him had never touched him
before.  Like Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest, "they changed eyes."

A heavy step was heard coming through the hallway, and at once the
exquisite, staring face at the window vanished-while Orlando Guise turned
his back upon the open doorway and walked a few steps towards the gate in
an effort to recover himself.  When he turned again to meet Mazarine, who
had a paper in his hand, there was a flush on his cheek and a new light
in his eye.  The old man did not notice that, however, for his avaricious
soul was fixed upon the paper in his hand.  He thrust it before Orlando's
eyes.  "What you got to say to that, Mister?" he demanded.

Orlando appeared to examine the paper carefully, and presently he handed
it back and said slowly: "That gives you the extra five hundred.  It's a
bargain."  How suddenly he had capitulated--

"Cash?" asked the old man triumphantly.  How should he know by what
means Orlando had been conquered!

"I've got a cheque in my pocket.  I'll fill it in."  "A cheque ain't
cash," growled the grizzly one.

"You can cash it in an hour.  Come in to Askatoon, and I'll get you the
cash with it now," said Orlando.  "I can't.  A man's coming for a
stallion I want to sell.  Give me a hundred dollars cash now to clinch
the bargain, and I'll meet you at Askatoon to-morrow and get the whole of
it in cash.  I don't deal with banks.  I pay hard money, and I get hard
money.  That's my rule."

"Well, you're in luck, for I've got a hundred dollars," answered Orlando.
"I've just got that, and a dollar besides, in my pocket.  To-morrow you
go to my lawyer, Burlingame, at Askatoon, and you'll get the rest of the
money.  It will be there waiting for you."

"Cash?" pressed the old man.

"Certainly: Government hundred-dollar bills.  Give me a receipt for this
hundred dollars."

"Come inside," said the old man almost cheerfully.  He loved having his
own way.  He was almost insanely self-willed.  It did his dark soul good
to triumph over this "circus rider."

As Joel Mazarine preceded him, Orlando looked up at the window again.
For one instant the beautiful, pale face of the girl-wife appeared, and
then vanished.

At the doorway of the house Orlando Guise stumbled.  That was an unusual
thing to happen to him.  He was too athletic to step carelessly, and yet
he stumbled and giggled.  It was not a fatuous giggle, however.  In it
were all kinds of strange things.




CHAPTER V

ORLANDO HAS AN ADVENTURE

Burlingame had the best practice of any lawyer in Askatoon, although his
character had its shady side.  The prairie standards were not low; but
tolerance is natural where the community is ready-made; where people from
all points of the compass come together with all sorts of things behind
them; where standards have at first no organized sanction.  Financially
Burlingame was honest enough, his defects being associated with those
ancient sources of misconduct, wine and women--and in his case the
morphia habit as well.  It said much for his physique that, in spite of
his indulgences, he not only remained a presentable figure but a lucky
and successful lawyer.

Being something of a philosopher, the Young Doctor looked upon Burlingame
chiefly as one of those inevitable vintages from a vineyard which,
according to the favour or disfavour of Heaven, yields from the same soil
both good and bad.  He had none of that Puritanism which would ruthlessly
root out the vines yielding the bad wine.  To his mind that could only be
done by the axe, the rope or the bullet.  It seemed of little use, and
very unfair, to drive the wolf out of your own garden into that of your
neighbour.  Therefore Burlingame must be endured.

The day after the Young Doctor had paid his professional visit to Tralee,
and Orlando Guise had first seen the girl-wife of, the behemoth, the
Young Doctor visited Burlingame's office.  Burlingame had only recently
returned from England, whither he had gone on important legal business,
which he had agreeably balanced by unguarded adventures in forbidden
paths.  He was in an animated mood.  Three things had just happened which
had given him great pleasure.

In the morning he had gained a verdict of acquittal in the case of one
of the McMahon Gang for manslaughter connected with jumping a claim; and
this meant increased reputation.

He had also got a letter from Orlando Guise, and a cheque for six
thousand dollars, with instructions to pay the amount in cash to Joel
Mazarine; and this meant a chance of meeting Mazarine and perhaps getting
a new client.

Likewise he had received a letter of instructions from a client in
Montreal, a kinsman and legatee of old Michael Turley, the late owner of
Tralee, in connection with a legacy.  This would involve some legal
proceedings with considerable costs, and also contact with Joel Mazarine,
whom he had not yet seen; for Mazarine had come while he was away in
England.

His interest in Mazarine, however, was really an interest in Mrs.
Mazarine, concerning whom he had heard things which stimulated his
imagination.  To him a woman was the supreme interest of existence, apart
from making a necessary living.  He was the primitive and pernicious
hunter.  He had been discreet enough not to question people too closely
where Mazarine's wife was concerned, but there was, however, one gossip
whom Burlingame questioned with some freedom.  This was Patsy Kernaghan.

Before the Young Doctor arrived at his office this particular morning,
Patsy, who had followed him from the Court-house, was put under a light
and skillful cross-examination.  He had been of service to Burlingame
more than once; and he was regarded as a useful man to do odd jobs for
his office, as for other offices in Askatoon.

"Aw, him--that murderin' moloch at Tralee!" exclaimed Patsy when the
button was pressed.  "That Methodys' fella with the face of a pirate!
If there wasn't a better Protistan' than him in the world, the Meeting
Houses'd be used for kindlin'-wood.  Joel, they call him--a dacint
prophet's name misused!

"I h'ard him praying once, as I stood outside the Meetin' House windys.
To hear that holy hyena lift up his voice to the skies!  Shure, I've
never been the same man since, for the voice of him says wan thing, and
the look of him another.  Sez I to meself, Mr. Burlingame, y'r anner, the
minute I first saw him, sez I, 'Askatoon's no safe place for me.' Whin
wan like that gits a footin' in a place, the locks can't be too manny to
shut ye in whin ye want to sleep at night.  That fella's got no pedigree,
and if it wouldn't hurt some dacent woman, maybe, I'd say he was
misbegotten.  But still, I'll tell ye: out there at Tralee there's what'd
have saved Sodom and Gomorrah-aye, that'd have saved Jerusalem, and there
wouldn't ha' been a single moan from Jeremiah.  Out at Tralee there's as
beautiful a little lady as you'd want to see.  Just a girl she is, not
more than nineteen or twenty years of age.  She's got a face that'd make
ye want to lift the chorals an' the antiphones to her every marnin'.
She's got the figure of one that was never to grow up, an' there she is
the wedded wife of that crocodile great-grandfather.

"Aw, I know all about it, Mr. Burlingame, y'r anner.  How do I know?
Didn't Michael Turley tell me before he died what sort o' man his cousin
was?  Didn't he tell me Joel Mazarine married first whin he was eighteen
years of age; an' his daughter was married whin she was seventeen; an'
her son was married whin he was eighteen--an' Joel's a great-grandfather
now.  An' see him out there with her that looks as if the kindergarten
was the place for her."

"Do you go to Tralee often?" asked Burlingame.  "Aw yis.  There's a job
now and then to do.  I'm ridin' an old moke on errands for him whin his
hired folks is busy.  A man must live, and there's that purty lass with
the Irish eyes!  Man alive, but it goes to me heart to luk at her."

"Well, I think I must have a 'luk' at her then," was Burlingame's half
satirical remark.

Not long after Patsy Kernaghan had left Burlingame's office, the Young
Doctor came.  His business was brief, and he was about to leave when
Burlingame said:

"The Mazarines out at Tralee-you know them?  They came while I was away.
Queer old goat, isn't he?"

"His exact place in natural history I'm not able to select," answered the
Young Doctor dryly, "but I know him."

"And his wife--you know her?" asked Burlingame casually.

The other nodded.  "Yes-in a professional way."

"Has she been sick?"

"She is ill now."

"What's the matter?"

"What's the truth about that McMahon claim-jumper who was acquitted this
morning?" asked the Young Doctor with a quizzical eye and an acid note
to his voice.  "You've got your verdict, but you know the real truth,
and you mustn't and won't tell it.  Well?"

Burlingame saw.  "Well, I'll have to ask the old goat myself," he said.
"He's coming here to-day."  He took up Orlando Guise's letter from the
table, glanced at it smilingly, and threw it down again.  "He must be a
queer specimen," Burlingame continued.  "He wouldn't take Orlando Guise's
cheque yesterday.  He says he'll only be paid in hard cash.  He's coming
here this afternoon to get it.  He's a crank, whatever else he is.  They
tell me he doesn't keep a bank account.  If he gets a cheque, he has it
changed into cash.  If he wants to send a cheque away, he buys one for
cash from somebody.  He pays for everything in cash, if he can.
Actually, he hasn't a banking account in the place.  Cash--nothing
but cash!  What do you think of that?"

The Young Doctor nodded: "Cash as a habit is useful.  Every man must have
his hobby, I suppose.  Considering the crimes tried at the court in this
town, Mazarine's got unusual faith in human nature; or else he feels
himself pretty safe at Tralee."

"Thieves?" asked Burlingame satirically.

"Yes, I believe that's still the name, though judging from some of your
talk in the Court-house, it's a word that gives opportunity to take
cover.  I hope your successful client of to-day, and his brothers, are
not familiar with the ways of Mr. Mazarine.  I hope they don't know about
this six thousand dollars in cold cash."

A sneering, sour smile came to Burlingame's lips.  The medical man's dry
allusions touched him on the raw all too often.

"Oh, of course, I told them all about that six thousand dollars!  Of
course!  A lot of people suspect those McMahons of being crooked.  Well,
it has never been proved.  Until it's proved, they're entitled--"
Burlingame paused.

"To the benefit of the doubt, eh?"

"Why not?  I've heard you hold the balance pretty fair 'twixt your
patients and the undertaker."

Quite unmoved, the Young Doctor coolly replied: "In your own happy
phrase--of course!  I get a commission from the undertaker when the
patient's a poor man; when he's a rich man, I keep him alive!  It pays.
The difference between your friends the criminals and me is that probably
nobody will ever be able to catch me out.  But the McMahons, we'll get
them yet,"--a stern, determined look came into his honest eye,--"yes,
we'll get them yet.  They're a nasty fringe on the skirts of Askatoon.

"But there it is as it is," he continued.  "You take their dirty money,
and I don't refuse pay when I'm called in to attend the worst man in the
West, whoever he may be.  Why, Burlingame, as your family physician,
I shouldn't hesitate even to present my account against your estate if,
in a tussle with the devil, he got you out of my hands."

Now a large and friendly smile covered his face.  He liked hard hitting,
but he also liked to take human nature as it was, and not to quarrel.
Burlingame, on his part, had no desire for strife with the Young Doctor.
He would make a very dangerous enemy.  His return smile was a great
effort, however.  Ruefulness and exasperation were behind it.

The Young Doctor had only been gone a few minutes when Joel Mazarine
entered Burlingame's office.  "I've come about that six thousand dollars
Mr. Guise of Slow Down Ranch owes me," the old man said without any
formal salutation.  He was evidently not good-humoured.

At sight of Mazarine, Burlingame at once accepted the general verdict
concerning him.  That, however, would not prejudice him greatly.
Burlingame had no moral sense.  Mazarine's face might revolt him,
but not his character.

"I've got the cash here for you, and I'll have in a witness and hand the
money over at once," he said: "The receipt is ready.  I assume you are
Joel Mazarine," he added, in a weak attempt at being humorous.

"Get on with the business, Mister," said the old man surlily.

In a few moments he had the six thousand dollars in good government
notes in two inner pockets of his shirt.  It made him feel very warm
and comfortable.  His face almost relaxed into a smile when he bade
Burlingame good-day.

Burlingame had said nothing about the letter from the late Michael
Turley's kinsman in Montreal and the question of the legacy.  This was
deliberate on his part.  He wanted an excuse to visit Tralee and see its
mistress with his own eyes.  He had attempted to pluck many flowers in
his day, and had not been unsuccessful.  Out at Tralee was evidently a
rare orchid carefully shielded by the gardener.

As Mazarine left the lawyer's office, he met in the doorway that member
of the McMahon family for whom Burlingame had secured a verdict of
acquittal a couple of hours before.  As was his custom, Mazarine gave
the other a sharp, scrutinizing look, but he saw no one he knew; and he
passed on.  The furtive smile which had betrayed his content at pocketing
the six thousand dollars still lingered at the corners of his mouth.

Though he did not know the legally innocent McMahon whom he had just
passed, McMahon was not so ignorant.  There was no one in all the
countryside whom the McMahons did not know.  It was their habit--or
something else--to be familiar with the history of everybody thereabouts,
although they lived secluded lives at Arrowhead Ranch, which adjoined
that belonging to Orlando Guise.

When Tom McMahon saw Mazarine leave Burlingame's office, his furtive eye
lighted.  Then it was true, what he had heard from the hired girl at Slow
Down Ranch: that old Mazarine was to receive six thousand dollars in cash
from Orlando Guise by the hands of Burlingame!  Only that very morning,
at the moment of his own release from jail, his brother Bill McMahon had
told him of the conversation overheard between Orlando and his mother, by
Milly Gorst, the hired girl.

He turned and watched Mazarine go down the street and enter a barber's
shop.  If Mazarine was going to have his hair cut, he would be in the
barber's shop for some time.  With intense reflection in his eyes,
McMahon entered Burlingame's office.  He had come to settle up accounts
for a clever piece of court-room work on the part of Burlingame.  It was
very well worth paying for liberally.

When he entered the office, Burlingame was not there.  A clerk, however,
informed him that Burlingame would be free within a few moments--and
would he take a chair?  Thereupon, the clerk left the room.  McMahon took
a chair--not the one towards which the clerk pointed him, but one beside
the desk whereon were lying a number of open letters.

The interrogation always in the mind of a natural criminal, prompted
McMahon to take a seat near the open letters.  As soon as the clerk left
the room, a hairy hand reached out for the nearest letter, and a swift
glance took in its contents.

A grimly cheerful, vicious smile lighted up the heavily bearded face.
Placing the letter on the desk again, as soon as it was read, McMahon
almost threw himself over to the chair at some distance from the desk,
which the clerk had first offered him.  There he sat with his elbows on
his knees and his chin in his hands when Burlingame entered the room.

Ten minutes later, with a receipted bill in his pocket, Tom McMahon made
for the barber's shop which Mazarine had entered.  He found it full, but
seated in the red-plush chair, tipped back at a convenient angle, was
Mazarine undergoing the triple operations of shaving his upper lip,
beard-trimming and haircutting.  From that moment and for the rest of all
the long day and evening, Joel Mazarine commanded the unvarying interest
of two members of the McMahon family.

Orlando Guise had had a long day, but one that somehow made him whistle
or sing to himself most of the time.  In a way, half a lifetime had gone
since the day before, when he had first seen what he called to himself
"the captive maid."  He had never been so happy in his life; and yet he
knew that he had not the faintest right to be happy.  The girl who had so
upset his self-control as to make him stumble on her doorstep was the
wife of another man.  It was, of course, silly to call him "another man,"
because he seemed a million miles away from any sphere in which Orlando
lived.  Yet he was another man; and he was also the husband of the girl
who had made Orlando feel for the very first time a strange singing in
his veins.  It actually was as though some wonderful, magnetic thing was
making his veins throb and every nerve tingle and sing.

"It beats me," he said to himself fifty times that day.  He had never
been in love.  He did not know what it was like, except that he had seen
it make men do silly things, just as drink did.  He did not know whether
he was in love or not.  It was absurd that a man should be in love with a
face at a window--a face with the beauty of a ghost rather than of a real
live woman.

Orlando had little evil in his nature; his eyes did not look towards
Tralee as did Burlingame's eyes.  Nothing furtive stirred in Orlando's
intensely blue eyes.  Whatever the feeling was, it was an open thing,
which had neither motive nor purpose behind it--just a thing almost
feminine in its nature.  As yet it was like the involuntary adoration
which girls at a certain period of their lives feel successively for one
hero after another.  What it would become, who could tell?  What would
happen to the young girl adoring the actor, or the hero of the North
Pole, the battle-field or the sea, if the adored one was not far off, but
very near?  Indeed, who could tell?

But as it was, in the upper room where Louise sat all day looking out
over the prairie, and on the prairie where business carried Orlando from
ranch to ranch on this perfect day, no recreant thought or feeling
existed.  Each was a simple soul, as yet unspoiled and in one sense
unsophisticated--the girl, however, with an instinctive caution, such as
an animal possesses in the presence of a foe with which it is in truce;
the man with an astuteness which belonged to a native instinct for
finding a way of doing hard things in the battle of life.

All day Orlando wondered when he should see that face again; all day the
eyes of Louise pleaded for another look at the ranchman with the dress of
a dandy, the laugh of a child, and the face of an Apollo--or so it seemed
to her.  It was the sort of day which ministers to human emotion, which
stirs the sluggish blood, revives the drooping spirit.  There was a
curious, delicate blueness of the sky over which an infinitely more
delicate veil of mist was softly drawn.  At many places on the prairie
the haymakers were loading the great wagons; here and there a fallow
field was burning; yonder a house was building; cattle were being rounded
up; and far off, like moving specks, ranchmen were climbing the hills
where the wild bronchos were, for a day of the toughest, most thrilling
sport which the world knows.

Night fell, and found Orlando making for the trail between what was known
as the Company's Ranch and Tralee.  To reach his own ranch, he had to
cross it at an angle near the Tralee homestead.  It was dark, with no
moon, but the stars were bright.

As he crossed the Tralee trail, he suddenly heard a cry for help.
Between him and where the sound came from was a fire burning.  It was the
camp-fire of some prairie pioneer making for a new settlement in the
North; and beside it was a tent whose owner was absent in Askatoon.

Orlando dug heels into his horse and rode for the point from which the
cry for help had come.  Something was undoubtedly wrong.  The voice was
that of one in real trouble--a hoarse, strangled sort of voice.

As he galloped through the light of the camp-fire, a pistol-shot rang
out, and he felt a sharp, stinging pain in his side.  Still urging his
horse, he cleared the little circle of light and presently saw a man
rapidly mounting a horse, while two others struggled on the ground.

He dashed forward.  As he did so, one of the men on the ground freed
himself, sprang to his feet, mounted his horse, and was away into the
night with his companion.  Orlando slid to the ground beside the figure
which was slowly raising itself from the ground.

"What's the matter?  Are you all right?  Have they hurt you?" he asked,
as he stooped over and caught the shoulders of the victim of the two
fleeing figures.

At that instant there were two more pistol-shots, and a bullet hit the
ground beside Orlando.  Then he saw dimly the face of the man whom he was
helping to his feet.

"Mazarine!  Good Lord-Mazarine!" he said in an anxious voice.  "What
have they done to you?"  "Nothing--I'm all right.  The dogs, the rogues,
the thieves--but they didn't get it!  It was in the pockets of my shirt."
The old man was almost hysterical.  "You just come in time, Mr. Guise.
You frightened 'em off.  They'd have found it, if it hadn't been for
you."

"Found what?" asked Orlando, as he helped the old man towards the camp-
fire, himself in pain, and a dizziness coming over him.

"Found your six thousand dollars that Burlingame paid me to-day," gasped
the old man, spasmodically; "but it's here-it's here!"  He caught at his
breast with devouring greed.

Somehow the agitated joy of the old man revolted Orlando.  He had a
sudden rush of repulsion; but he fought it down.

"Are you all right?" he asked.  "Are you all right?"  Somehow the sound
of his own voice was very weak.  "Yes, I'm all right," Mazarine said, and
he called to his horse near by.

The horse did not stir, and the old man, whose breath came almost
normally now, moved over and caught its bridle.

In a dazed kind of way, and with growing unsteadiness, Orlando walked
towards the camp-fire.  He was leaning against his horse, and opening his
coat and waistcoat to find the wound in his side and staunch it with the
kerchief from his neck, when Mazarine came up.

"What's that on your coat and breeches?  Say, you're all bloody!"
exclaimed Mazarine.  "Why, they shot you!"

"Yes, they got me," was Orlando's husky reply, and he gave a funny little
laugh.  Giggling, people had called it.

"How are we going to get you home?" Mazarine asked.  "You can't ride."

At that moment there was the rumbling jolt of a wagon.  It was the
pioneer-emigrant returning from Askatoon to his camp.

A few minutes later Orlando was lying on some bags in the emigrant's
wagon, while Mazarine rode beside it.  "It's only a few hundred yards to
the house," said the emigrant sympathetically, as he looked down at the
now unconscious figure in the wagon.

"It's four miles to his house," said Mazarine.  "Well, I'm not taking him
four miles to his house or any house," said the emigrant.  "My horse has
had enough to-day, and the sooner the lad's attended to, the better.
He's going to the nearest house, and that's Tralee, as they call it, just
here."

"That's my house," gruffly replied the old man.  "Well, that's where you
want him to go, ain't it?" asked the pioneer sharply.  He could not
understand the owner of Tralee.

"Yes, that's where I want him to go," replied Mazarine slowly.

"Then you ride ahead on the trail, and I'll follow," returned the other
decisively.

"What's the matter?  Who hurt him?" he presently called to Mazarine,
riding in front.

"I'll tell you when we get to Tralee," answered the old man, with his
eyes fixed on two lights in the near distance.  One was in the kitchen,
where a half-breed woman was giving supper to Li Choo, a faithful
Chinaman roustabout; the other was in the room where a young wife sat
with hands clasped, wondering why her husband did not return, yet glad
that he did not.




CHAPTER VI

"THINGS MUST HAPPEN"

Between two sunrises Louise Mazarine had seen her old world pass in a
flash of flame and a new world trembling with a new life spread out
before her; had come to know what her old world really was.  The eyes
with which she looked upon her new world had in them the glimmer not only
of awakened feeling but of awakened understanding.  To this time she had
endured her aged husband as a slave comes to bear the lashes of his
master, with pain which will be renewed and renewed, but pain only, and
not the deeper torture of the soul; for she had never really grasped what
their relations meant.  To her it had all been part of the unavoidable
misery of life.  But on that sunny afternoon when Orlando Guise's voice
first sounded in her ears, and his eyes looked into hers as, pale and
ill, she gazed at him from the window, a revelation came to her of what
the three years of life with Joel Mazarine had really been.  From that
moment until she heard the pioneer's wagon, escorted by her husband,
bringing the unconscious Orlando Guise to her door, she had lived in a
dream which seemed like a year of time to her.

Since the early morning of that very day, when Joel had leaned over her
bed and asked her in his slow, grinding voice how she was, she had lived
more than in all the past nineteen years of her life.  The Young Doctor
had come and gone, amazed at first, but presently with a look of
apprehension in his eyes.  There was not much trace of yesterday's
illness in the alert, eager girl-wife, who twenty-four hours before had
been really nearer to the end of all things than her aged husband.  The
Young Doctor knew all too well what the curious, throbbing light in her
eyes meant.  He knew that the gay and splendid Orlando Guise had made the
sun for this prismatic radiance, and that the story of her life, which
Louise had wished to tell him yesterday, would never now be told--for she
would have no desire to tell it.  The old vague misery, the ancient
veiled torture, was behind her, and she was presently to suffer a new
torture--but also a joy for which men and women have borne unspeakable
things.  No, Louise would never tell him the story of her life, because
now she knew it was a thing which must not be told.  Her mind understood
things it had never known before.  To be wise is to be secret, and she
had learned some wisdom; and the Young Doctor wondered if the greater
wisdom she must learn would be drunk from the cup of folly.  Before he
left her he had said to her with meaning in his voice:

"My dear young madam, your recovery is too rapid.  It is not a cure:
it is a miracle; and miracles are not easily understood.  We must,
therefore, make them understood; and so you will take regularly three
times a day the powerful tonic I will give you."

She was about to interrupt him, but he waved a hand reprovingly and added
with kindly irony:

"Yes, we both know you don't need a tonic out of a bottle; but it's just
as well other people should think that the tonic bringing back the colour
to your cheeks comes out of a bottle and not out of a health resort,
called Slow Down Ranch, about four miles to the north-west of Tralee."

As he said this, he looked straight into the eyes which seemed, as it
were, to shrink into cover from what he was saying.  But when, an instant
afterwards, he took her hand and said good-bye, he knew by the trembling
clasp of her fingers--even more appealing than they had yet been--that
she understood.

So it was a few moments later, outside the house, he had said to Joel
Mazarine that he had given his wife a powerful tonic, and he hoped to see
an almost instant change in her condition; but she must have her room to
herself for a time, according to his instructions of the day before, as
she was nervous and needed solitude, to induce sleep.  He was then about
to start for Askatoon when the old man said:

"I suppose you won't have to come again, as she's going on all right."

To this the Young Doctor had replied firmly: "Yes, I'm coming out to-
morrow.  She's not fit yet to go to Askatoon, and I must see her once
again."

"Oh, keep coming--that's right, keep coming!" answered the miserly old
man, who still was not so miserly that he did not want his young wife
blooming.  "Coming to-morrow, eh!" he added, with something very like a
sneer.

The other had a sudden flash of fury pass through his veins.  The old
Celtic quickness to resent insult swept over him.  The ire of his
forefathers waked in him.  This outrageous old Caliban, to attempt to
sneer at him!  For an instant he was Kilkenny let loose, and then the
cool, trained brain reasserted its mastery, and he replied:

"If there should be a turn for the worse, send for me to-night--not
to-morrow!  "And he looked the old man in the eyes with a steady,
steelly glance which had nothing to do with the words he had just
uttered, but was the challenge of a conquering spirit.

The Young Doctor had acted with an almost uncanny prescience.  It was as
though he had foreseen that Orlando Giuse would be carried upstairs to a
room nearly opposite that of Louise, and laid unconscious on a bed, till
he himself should come again that very night and extract a bullet from
Orlando's side; that he would open Orlando's eyes to consciousness, hear
Orlando say, "Where am I?" and note his startled look when told he was
at Tralee.

Once during this visit, while making Orlando safe and comfortable, with
the help of Li Choo, the Chinaman, and Rada, the half-breed, he had seen
Louise for a moment.  The old man had gone to the stables, and as he came
out of the room where Orlando was, Louise's door opened softly on him.
Dimly, in the half-darkness of her room, in which no light was burning,
he saw her.  She beckoned to him.  Shutting the door of Orlando's bedroom
behind him, he came quickly to her side and said:

"Go to bed at once, young woman.  This will not do."

"I'm not sick now," she urged.  "Say, I really am well again."

"You must not be well again so soon," he replied meaningly.  "I want you
to understand that you must not," he insisted.

There was a pause, which seemed interminable to the Young Doctor, who was
listening for the heavy footstep of Joel Mazarine outside the house; and
then at last in agitation Louise said to him:

"Will he get well?  Rada told me he was shot saving Mr. Mazarine.  Will
he get well?"

"Yes, he will get well, and quickly, if--"

He broke off, for there was the thud of a heavy footstep for which he had
been listening.  Joel Mazarine was returning.

"Won't they let me help nurse him?" she whispered.

The Young Doctor shook his head in negation.  "His mother will be here
to-morrow," he said quickly.  "Be wise, my child."

"You understand?" she whispered wistfully.

"I have no understanding.  Go to bed," he answered sharply.  "Shut the
door at once."

When old Joel Mazarine's footsteps were heard upon the staircase again,
Orlando was lying with half-closed eyes, watching, yet too weak to speak;
and the Young Doctor was giving directions to Rada and Li Choo for the
night-watch in Orlando's room.  When Mazarine entered, the Young Doctor
gave him a casual nod and went on with his directions.  When he had
finished, Rada said in her broken English, with an accent half-Indian,
half-French:

"His mother you send for--yes?  She come queeck.  Some one must take care
him when for me get breakfus and Li Choo do chores."

"We'll send for her in the morning," interrupted Joel Mazarine.

"Perhaps Mrs. Mazarine would be well enough to help a little in the
morning," remarked the Young Doctor in a colourless voice.  He knew when
to be audacious; or, if he did not know, he had an instinct; and he
noticed that the wounded man's eyelids did not even blink when he threw
out the hint concerning Louise, while the eyes of the old man took on a
sullen flame.

"Mrs. Mazarine has to be molly-coddled herself--that's what you've taught
her," he snarled.

"Well, then, send for Mrs. Guise to-night," commanded the Young Doctor.

He thought Joel Mazarine made unnecessary noise as he stamped down the
staircase to send a farmhand to Slow Down Ranch; and he also thought that
Orlando Guise showed discretion of manner and look in a moment of
delicacy and difficulty.  He knew, however, that, as the children say,
"Things must happen."




CHAPTER VII

"THE ZOOLYOGICAL GARDEN"

Patsy Kernaghan regarded Tralee as a kind of Lost Paradise, for the most
part because it had passed from the hands of a son of the Catholic Church
into those of the "prayin' Methodys," as he called them, and also because
he had a "black heart ag'in" Joel Mazarine.

The spark was struck in him with some vigour one day at Tralee.  It was
caused by the flamboyant entrance of Mrs. Guise into the front garden, as
the Young Doctor was getting into his buggy for the return journey to
Askatoon, after attending Orlando, whose enforced visit to Tralee had
already extended over a week.

"Aw, Doctor dear," said Patsy, as Orlando's mother fluttered into the
garden like a gorgeous hen with wings outspread, her clothes a riot of
contradictory colours, all of them insistently bright, "d'ye know what
this place is--this terry firmy on which we stand, that's wan mile wan
way, an' half a mile the other?  Ye don't?  Well, I'll tell ye: it's a
zoolyogical gardin.  Is it like a human bein' she is, the dear ould
wumman there?  Isn't she just some gay ould bird from the forests of the
Equaytor, wherivir it is?  Look at the beautiful little white curls
hanging down her cheek, tied with ribbon-pink ribbon too--an' the bonnet
on her head!  Did ye iver see annything like it outside a zoolyogical
gardin?  Isn't it like the topknot of some fine old parakeet from
Pernambukoko--and oh, Father Rainbow, the maginta dress of her!  Now I
tell you, Doctor dear, I tell you the truth, what I know!  She wears
hoops, she does, the same as y'r grandmother used to.  An' the bit of
rose ribbon round her waist, hanging down behind--now I ask y'r anner, is
it like a wumman at all?  See the face of her, with the little snappin'
eyes an' the yellow beak of a nose, an' the sunset in her cheeks that's
put on wid a painter's brush!  Look at her trippin' about!  Floatin'--
shure, that's what she's doin'!  If you listened hard, you'd hear her
buzzin'.  It's the truth I tell ye.  D'ye follow me?"

The Young Doctor liked talking to Patsy Kernaghan better than to any
other person in Askatoon.  He was always sure to be stimulated by a new
point of view, but he never failed to provoke Kernaghan by scepticism.

"One wild bird from 'Pernambukoko' does not make a zoological garden,
Patsy," he said with an air of dissent.

"Well, that's true for you, Doctor dear," answered Kernaghan, "but this
gardin's got a bunch of specimens for all that.  Listen to me now.  Did
ye ever notice the likeness between the faces of people and of animals
an' things that fly?  You never did?  Well, be thinkin' of it now.  Ivry
man and wumman here at Tralee looks like an animal or a bird in a
zoolyogical gardin.  Shure, there's no likeness between anny two of them;
it's as if they was gathered from ivry corner of the wide wurruld.
There's a Mongolian in the kitchen an' slitherin' about outside, doin'
the things that's part for man and part for wumman.  Li Choo they call
him.  Isn't his the face of a bald-headed baboon?  An' the half-breed
crature--she might ha' come from Patagony.  An' the ould man Mazarine--
part rhinoceros and part Methody, he is.  An' what do ye be thinkin' of
him they call Giggles, that almost guv his life to save the ould
behemoth!  Doesn't he remind you of the zebra, where the wild Hottentots
come from--smart and handsome, but that showy, all stripes and tail and
fetlock!  D'ye unnerstand what I mean, y'r anner?"

"Have you finished calling names, Kernaghan?" asked the Young Doctor in a
low tone.  "Have you really finished your zoological list?"

Kernaghan's eye flashed.  "Aw, Doctor dear," said he, "manny's the time
in County Inniskillen, where you come from, you've seen a wild thing,
bare-footed, springin' from stone to stone on the hillside, wid her hair
flyin' behind like the daughter of a witch or somethin' only half human-
so belongin' to the hills an' the bogs an' the cromlechs was she.  Well,
that's the maid that's mistress of Tralee--belongin' as much to the
Gardin of Eden as to this place here.  There's none of them here that
belongs.  Every wan of them's been caught away from where he ought to be
into this zoolyogical gardin."

"Well, there's one good thing about a zoological garden, Patsy
Kernaghan," said the Young Doctor; "it's generally a safe place for the
birds and animals in it."

"But suppose some wan--suppose, now, the Keeper got drunk and let loose
the popylashin' of the gardin upon each other, d'ye think would it be a
Gardin of Eden?"  Suddenly Patsy's manner changed.  "Aw, I tell you this,
then: I don't like what I see here, an' I like it less an' less ivry
day."

"What don't you like, Patsy?" asked the other quizzically.

"I don't like the way the old fella watches that child he calls his wife.
I don't like the young fella bein' the cause of the old man's watchin'."

"What has happened?  What has he done?" asked the Young Doctor a little
anxiously.

"Divils me own, it isn't what he's done; it's his bein' here.  It's his
bein' what he is.  It doesn't need doin' to bring wild youth together.
Look at her, y'r anner!  A week ago she was like wan that 'd be called to
the Land of Canaan anny minnit.  Wasn't you here tendin' her, as if she
was steppin' intil her grave, an' look at her now!  She's like a rose in
the garden, like a lark's lilt in the air.  What has done it?  The young
man's done it.  You'll be tellin' the ould fella it's the tonic you've
guv her.  Tonic!  How long d'ye think he'll belave it?'

"But she never sees Mr. Guise, does she, Patsy?  Isn't his mother always
with him?  Hasn't Mazarine forbidden his wife to enter the room?"

Kernaghan threw out his hands.  "An' you're the man they say's the
cleverest steppin' between Winnipeg and the Mountains--an'--an'--you talk
to me like that!  Is the ould fella always in the house?  Is he always
upstairs?  I ask you now.  I'll tell you this, y'r anner--"

The Young Doctor interrupted him.  "Don't you suppose that there's
somebody always watching, Patsy--the half-breed, the Chinaman?"

Kernaghan snapped a finger.  "Aw, must I be y'r schoolmaster in the days
of your dotage!  Of course the ould fella has someone to watch, an' I
dunno which it is--the Chinaman or the half-breed wumman.  But I'll tell
you this: they'll take his pay and lie to him about whatever's goin' on
inside the house.  That girl has them both in the palms of her hands.
Let him set what spies he will, she'll do what she wants, if the young
man lets her."

"His mother--" interjected the Young Doctor.  "Her of the plumage--her!
Shure, she's not livin' in this wurruld.  She's only visitin' it.  She's
got no responsibility.  If iver there was a child of a fairy tale, that
wumman's the child.  I belave she'd think her son was doin' right if he
tied the ould fella up to a tree an' stuck him as full of Ingin arrows as
a pin-cushion, an' rode off with the lovely little lady in beyant there.
That's my mind about her.  It isn't on her you can rely.  If ye want the
truth, y'r anner, them two young people have had words together and
plenty of them, whether it's across the hall--her room from his; or in
his room; or through the windy or down the chimney-shure, I don't care!
They've spoke.  There's that between them wants watchin'.  Not that
there's wrong in aither of them--divil a bit!  I've got me own mind about
Mr. Orlando Giggles.  As for her, the purty thing, she doesn't know what
wrong is--that's the worst of it!"

The Young Doctor tapped Kernaghan's head gently with his whip.  "Patsy,"
said he, "you talk a lot.  There's no greater talker between here and
Donegal.  But still I think you know what to say and whom to say it to."

Kernaghan's cap came off.  He ran his fingers through his hair and looked
at the other with a primitive intelligence which showed him to be what
the Young Doctor knew him to be--better than his looks, or his place in
the world, or his reputation.

"Thank you kindly, y'r anner," he said, softly.  "I'm troubled about
things here, I am.  That's why I spoke to ye.  I'm afraid of the old
fella, for his place is not in the pen wid that young thing, an' he'll
break her heart, or kill her, if he gets to know the truth."

"What do you mean by 'the truth,' Patsy?" was the sharp query.

"I mean nothin' at all, save that in there wild youth is spakin' to wild
youth--honest and dacint and true.  But there's manny a tragedy comes out
of that, y'r anner."

"Orlando has been sitting up for two days," said the Young Doctor
meditatively, "and in two days more he can be removed.  Patsy, you are
staying on here.--I know, and I trust you.  The girl and the young man
have both been my patients.  I think as much of both of them as I can
think of any man or woman.  He's straight and--"

"But a girl's mad when the love-song rises in her heart," interjected
Kernaghan.

"Yes, I know, Patsy, but it isn't so bad as you think.  I had a talk with
her to-day.  Perhaps we can get him away to-morrow.  Meanwhile, there
can't much happen."

"Can't much happen, wid that ould wuman in the garden there, an' the
young wife upstairs, an' the fine young fella sittin' alone in his room
achin' for the sound of her voice!  Shure, they're together at this
minnit, p'r'aps."

The Young Doctor tapped Kernaghan again on the head with his whip.
"You're a wild Irishman still," he said, "but I think none the worse of
you for that.  Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.  Keep your
head, Patsy."  And whipping up his horse, he nodded and drove on.

It may be that Kernaghan's instinct was no truer than his own.  It may be
the Young Doctor knew Kernaghan's instinct to be true; and it also may be
that what Kernaghan thought possible, the Young Doctor thought possible;
but he also felt that things must be as they must be.

In any case Kernaghan was right; for while the little flamboyant lady
from Slow Down Ranch was busy in the front garden, Louise Mazarine was
with her wounded guest, with the man who had saved her husband's money
and perhaps his life.  The wounded guest regarded his wound as a blessing
almost.  Perhaps that was why he did not notice that his host had only
been silently grateful.




CHAPTER VIII

THE ORIENTAL WAY OF IT

Orlando Guise's mother was lacking in the caution which mothers generally
have where their men-children are concerned.  If she had had sense, she
would have insisted on removing Orlando to Slow Down Ranch at the
earliest possible moment, even at some risk to his physical well-being.
She ought to have seen that Joel Mazarine was possessed of a jealousy as
unreasoning as that of an animal; she ought to have discouraged Louise's
kindnesses.  If the kindnesses had been only the ordinary acts of a
mistress of a house to a guest who had saved her husband's life--dishes
made by her own hand, strengthening drinks, flowers picked and arranged
by herself--there could have been no cause for nervousness.  Each thing
done by Louise, however, came from a personally and emotionally
solicitous interest.  It was to be seen in the glance of the eye, in the
voice a little unsteady, in girlish over-emphasis, in that shining
something in the face, which, in Ireland, they call the love-light.

So great was Mrs. Guise's vanity, so intense her content in her son, so
proud was she of other people's admiration of him, no matter who they
were, that she welcomed Louise's attentions.  Kernaghan was wrong.
Mazarine had not forbidden Louise to enter Orlando's room.  That was the
contradictory nature of the man.  His innate savagery made him brood
wickedly over her natural housewifery attentions to the man who had
probably saved his own life, and certainly had saved him six thousand
dollars; yet it was as though he must see the worst that might happen,
must even encourage a danger which he dreaded.  When the Methodist
minister from Askatoon came to offer prayer for Orlando, Joel joined in
it with all the unction of a class-leader, while every word of the prayer
trembled in an atmosphere of hatred.  As Patsy Kernaghan said, he himself
watched, and he paid the Chinaman to watch, in the vain belief that money
would secure faithful service.

The Young Doctor had told him that his powerful medicine had brought back
the bloom to his young wife's cheeks and the light to her eyes, but how
much he believed, he could not himself have said.  One thing he did know:
it was that Orlando seemed quite indifferent to everything except his
mother, the state of the crops and the reports on his own cattle.  Also
Orlando had made a good impression when he resented with a funny little
oath and a funnier little giggle, but with some heat in his cheek, Joel's
ostentatious proposal to pay the Young Doctor's bill for attendance.

The offer had been made when Louise was standing in the doorway; but the
old man did not notice that Louise coloured in sympathy with the flush in
Orlando's face.  It was as though a delicate nerve had been touched in
each of them; but it was a nerve that had never been sensitive until they
had met each other for the first time.  Orlando's mother dealt with the
situation in her own way.  She said in a somewhat awkward pause,
following the old man's proposal, that a doctor's bill was a personal
thing, and she would as soon allow some one else to pay it as to pay for her
washing.  At this Orlando giggled again, and ventured the remark that no
doctor could dispense enough medicine in a year to pay her laundry bill
for a month--which pleased the old lady greatly and impelled her to swing
her skirt kittenishly.

It was at this point that Li Choo came knocking at the open door with a
message for Mazarine.  It related to a horse-accident at what was known
as One Mile Spring; and Mazarine, having frowned his wife out of the
doorway, made his way downstairs and prepared for his short journey to
the Spring.  Before he left, however, he called Li Choo aside, and what
he said caused Li Choo to answer: "Me get money, me do job.  Me keep eyes
open.  Me tell you."

From a window Louise had watched the colloquy, and she knew, as well as
though she stood beside them, what was being said.  Li Choo had told the
truth: he had got the cash, and he would do the job.  But not alone from
Joel Mazarine did he get money.  Only two mornings before, Louise, for
all the extra work he had had to do during Orlando's illness and without
thought of bribery, had given him a beautiful gold ten-dollar-piece with
a hole in it.  If the piece had been minus the hole, Li Choo would have
returned it to her, for he would have served her for nothing till the end
of his days, had it been possible.  Because there was a hole in it,
however, and he could put a string through it and wear it round his neck
inside his waistcoat, he took it, blinking his beady eyes at her; and he
said:

"Me watch most petic'ler, mlissy.  Me tell boss Mazaline ev'lytling me
see!"  And he giggled almost as Orlando might have done.

After which Li Choo slip-slopped away to his work behind the kitchen.
When he saw Orlando's mother in the garden and the Young Doctor drive to
Askatoon, and Patsy Kernaghan mount an aged cayuse and ride off, he
clucked with his tongue and then went into the kitchen and prepared a
tray on which he placed several pieces of a fine old set of China, which
had belonged to Mazarine's grandmother and was greatly prized by the old
man.  Then he clucked to the half-breed woman, and she made ready as
sumptuous a tea as ever entered the room of a convalescent.

Like a waiter at a seaside hotel, Li Choo carried the tray above his head
on three fingers to the staircase, and as he mounted to the landing,
called out, "Welly good tea me bling gen'l'man."  This was his way of
warning Orlando Guise, and whoever might be with him, of his coming.

He need not have done so, for though Louise was in Orlando's room, she
was much nearer to the door than she was to Orlando.  She hastened to
place a table near to Orlando, for the tray which Li Choo had brought,
and, as she did so, remarked with a shock at the cherished china upon the
tray.

"Li Choo!  Li Choo!" she gasped, reprovingly, for it was as though the
Ark of the Covenant had been burgled.  But Li Choo, clucking, slip-
slopped out of the room and down the stairs as happy as an Oriental soul
could be.  What was in the far recesses of that soul, where these two
young people were concerned, must remain unrevealed; but Li Choo and the
halfbreed woman in their own language--which was almost without words--
clucked and grunted their understanding.

Left alone again, Louise found herself seated with only the table between
herself and Orlando, pouring him tea and offering him white frosted cake
like that dispensed at weddings; while Orlando chuckled his thanks and
thought what a wonderful thing it was that a bullet in a man's side could
bring the unexpected to pass and the heart's desire of a man within the
touch of his fingers.

Their conversation was like that of two children.  She talked of her bird
Richard, which she had sent to him every morning that it might sing to
him; of her black cat Nigger, which sat on his lap for many an hour of
the day; of the dog Jumbo, which said its prayers for him to get well,
for a piece of sugar-that was a trick Louise had taught it long ago.
Orlando talked of his horses and of his mother--who, he declared, was the
most unselfish person on the whole continent; how she only thought of
him, and spent her money for him, and gave to him, never thinking of
herself at all.

"She has the youngest heart of anyone in the world," said Orlando.

Louise did not even smile at that.  No one with a heart that was not
infantile could dress and talk as Orlando's mother dressed and talked;
and so Louise said softly: "I am sure her heart is a thousand years
younger than mine--or younger than mine was."  And then she blushed, and
Orlando blushed, for he understood what was in her mind--that until they
two had met, she was, as the Young Doctor said, a victim to senile decay.

That was the nearest they had come as yet to saying anything which,
being translated, as it were, through several languages, could mean love-
making.  Their love-making had only been by an inflection of the voice,
by a soft abstraction, by a tuning of their spirits to each other.  They
were indeed like two children; and yet Li Choo was right when, in his
dark soul, he conceived them to be lovers, and thought they would do what
lovers do--hold hands and kiss and whisper, with never an end to a
sentence, never a beginning.

It was not that these things were impossible to them.  It was not that
their beating pulses, and the throbbing in them, was not the ancient
passion which has overturned an empire, or made a little spot of earth
as dear as Heaven above.  It was that these were forbidden things, and
Louise and Orlando accepted that they were forbidden.

How long would this position last?  What would the future bring?
This was only the fluttering approach of two natures, from everlasting
distances.  The girl had been roused out of sleep; from her understanding
the curtains had been flung back so that she might see.  How long would
it last, this simple, unsoiled story of two lives?

Orlando reached out his hand to put his cup back upon the tray.  As her
own hand was extended to take it, her fingers touched his.  Then her face
flushed, and a warm cloud seemed to bedim her eyes.  There flashed into
her mind the deep, overwhelming fact that for three long years a rough,
heavy hand had held her captive by day, by night, in a pitiless
ownership.  She got to her feet suddenly; her breath came quickly, and
she turned towards the door as though she meant to go.

At that instant Li Choo slid softly into the room, caught up the tray,
poised it on his three fingers over his head and said: "Old Mazaline, he
come.  Be queeck!"

They heard the heavy footsteps of Joel Mazarine coming into the hall-way
just below.

The old man, as though moved by some uncanny instinct, had come back from
One Mile Spring by a roundabout trail.  As the Chinaman came out upon the
landing at the top of the stairs, Joel appeared at the bottom, in the
doorway which gave upon the staircase.  Two or three steps down shuffled
the Chinaman; then, as it were by accident, he stumbled and fell, the
tray with the beautiful china crashing down to the feet of Joel Mazarine,
followed by the tumbling, chirruping Li Choo.

Oriental duplicity had made no wrong reckoning.  The old man fell back
into the hall-way from the crashing china and tumbling Oriental, who
plunged out into the hall-way muttering and begging pardon, cursing his
soul in good Chinese and bad English.

Looking down on the wreck, Mazarine saw his treasured porcelain
shattered.  With a growl of rage he stooped and seized Li Choo by the
collar, flung him out of the door, and then with his heavy boot kicked
him once, twice, thrice, a dozen times, anywhere, everywhere!

Li Choo, however, had done his work well.  Joel Mazarine never knew the
reason for the Chinaman's downfall on the stairway, for, in the turmoil,
Louise had slipped away in safety.  His rage had vented itself; but, if
he had seen Li Choo's face an hour after, as he talked to the half-breed
woman in the kitchen, he might have had some qualms for his cruel
assault.  Passion and hatred in the face of an Oriental are not
lovely things to see.




CHAPTER IX

THE STARS IN THEIR COURSES

"It's been a great day--great."

Orlando Guise leaned lazily on the neck of the broncho he was riding,
peering between its ears, over the lonely prairie, to the sunset which
was making beautiful the western sky.  It was as though there was a
golden fire behind vast hills of mauve and pink, purple and saffron; but
the glow was so soft as to suggest a flame which did not burn; which only
shed radiance, colour and an ethereal mist.  All the width of land and
life between was full of peace as far as eye could see.  The plains were
bountiful with golden harvest, and the activities of men were lost among
the corn.  Horses and cattle in the distance were as insects, and in the
great concave sky stars still wan from the intolerant light of their
master, the Sun, looked timidly out to see him burn his way down to the
under-world.

"Great--but it might have been greater!" added Orlando, gazing intently
at the sunset.

Yet, as he spoke, his eyes gazed at something infinitely farther away
than the sunset-even to the goal of his desire.  He was thinking that,
great as the day had been, with all he had done and seen, it lacked a
glimpse of the face he had not seen for a whole month.  The voice, he had
not heard it since it softly cried, "Oh, Orlando!" when the Chinaman
crashed down the staircase with the tray of cherished porcelain, and had
been maltreated by the owner of Tralee.

How many times since then had those words rung in his ears!  Louise had
never called him by name save that once, and then it was the cry of a
soul surprised, the wail of one who felt a heart-break coming on, the
approach of merciless Fate.  It was the companionship of trouble; it was
the bird, pursued by a hawk, calling across the lonely valley to its
mate.  "Oh, Orlando!"  He had waked in the morning with the words in his
ears to make him face the day with hope and cheerfulness.  It had sounded
in his ears at night as he sat on the wide stoop watching the moon and
listening to the night-birds, or vaguely heard his mother babbling things
he did not hear.

It is a memorable moment for a man when he hears for the first time his
"little name," as the French call it, spoken by the woman he loves.  It
is as the sound of a bell in the distance, a familiar note with a new
meaning, revealing new things of life in the panorama of the mind.  By
those two words Orlando knew what was in the mind of Louise.  They were a
prayer for protection and a cry for comradeship.

When Louise first clasped hands with the Young Doctor on her arrival at
Askatoon, the soft appeal of her fingers had made him understand that
loneliness where she lived, and to bear which she sought help.  But the
"Oh, Orlando!" which was wrung from her, almost unknowingly, was the cry
of one who, to loneliness, had added fear and tragedy.  Yet behind the
fear, tragedy and loneliness there was the revelation of a heart.

A courtship is a long or a short ceremonial or convention, a make-
believe, by which people pretend that they slowly come to know and love
each other; but lovers know that each understands the other by one note
or inflection of the voice, by one little act of tenderness.  These, or
one of these, tell the whole story, the everlasting truth by which men
and women learn how good at its worst life is, or speak the lightning-lie
by which the bones of a dead world are exposed to the disillusioned soul.

This had been a great day, because, in it, physical being had joyously
celebrated itself in a wild business of the hills; in air so fresh and
sweet that it almost sparkled to the eye; in a sun that was hot, but did
not punish; at a sport by which the earliest men in the earliest age of
the world made life a rare sensation.  The man who has not chased the
wild pony in the hills with the lasso on his arm, riding, as they say in
the West, "Hell for leather," down the steep hillside, over the rock and
the rough land, balancing on his broncho with the dexterity of a bird or
a baboon, has failed to find one of life's supreme pleasures.

In the foothills, many miles away from Slow Down Ranch and Tralee, there
lived a herd of wild ponies, and it had been the ambition of a dozen
ranchmen and broncho-busters thereabouts to capture one or many.  More
than once Orlando had seen a little gray broncho, with legs like the
wrists of a lady, with a tail like a comet, frisking among the rocks
and the brushwood, or standing alert, moveless and alone upon some
promontory, and he had made up his mind that if, and when, there came a
day of broncho-busting, he would become a hunter of the little gray mare.
When the news came that the ranchmen for miles around were preparing for
the drive of the hills, he determined to take part in it, against the
commands of the Young Doctor, who said that he would run risk in doing
so, for, though his wound was healed, he should still avoid strain and
fatigue.

There is no fatigue like that of broncho-busting.  It is not galloping on
the turf; it is being shaken and tossed in a saddle which the knees can
never grip, on the back of something gone mad--for the maddest, wisest,
carefullest thing on earth is a broncho, which itself was once a wild
pony of the hills, and has been hunted down, thrown by the lasso,
saddled, bridled and heart-broken all in an hour.  When the broncho which
was once a wild pony sets out on the chase after its own, there is
nothing like it in the world; and so Orlando found.

The veteran broncho-busters and ranchmen gave him no vociferous welcome
as he appeared among them.  Had it not been for the reputation which he
already gained for courage, such as he had shown in the recent affair
when he had driven off the men who were robbing Joel Mazarine, and also
for an idea, steadily spreading, that he was masquerading, and that
behind all, was a curly-headed, intrepid, out-door "white man," he would
not have had what he called a great day.

He could not throw the lasso as well as many another, but he could ride
as well as any man that ever rode; and the broncho given him to ride that
day was one sufficiently unreliable in character and sure-footed in
travel to test him to the utmost.  He had endured the test; he had even
got his little gray mare, lassoing her like a veteran.  He had helped to
break her, and had sent her home from the improvised corral by one of his
men.  He had then parted from the others, who had dispersed to their
various ranches with their prizes, and had ridden away on the broncho
with which he had done such a good day's work.  He had had the thrill of
the hunter, riding like any wild Indian through the hills; he had had the
throb of conquest in his veins; but while other men had shouted and
happily blasphemed as they rode and captured, he had only giggled in
excitement.

As he looked now into the sunset, he was thinking of the little gray
mare, with the legs like the wrists of a lady and the soft, bright, wild
eye, which had fought and fought to resist subjection; but which,
overpowered by the stronger will of man, had yielded like a lady, and had
been ridden away to Slow Down Ranch, its bucking over for ever, captive
and subdued.

Orlando was picturing the little gray mare with Louise on its back.  He
had no right to think of Louise; yet there was never an hour in which he
did not think of her.  And Louise had no right to think of Orlando; yet,
sleeping and waking, he was with her.  Their homes were four miles apart,
although, in one sense, they were a million miles apart by law and the
convention which shuts a woman off from the love of men other than her
husband; and yet in thought they were as near together always as though
they had lain in the same cradle and grown up under the same rooftree.

There was something about the gray pony, with the look of a captive in
its eye, a wildness in subjection, like the girl at Tralee--the girl
suddenly come to be woman, with her free soul born into understanding,
yet who was as much a captive as though in prison, and guarded by a
warder with a long beard, a carnivorous head, and boots greased with
tallow.

Since they had parted, the day after Li Choo had averted a domestic
"scene" or tragedy, the search had gone on by the Mounted Police-"the
Riders of the Plains"--for the men who had attempted to rob Mazarine, and
to put Orlando out of action by a bullet.  Suspicion had been directed
against the McMahons, but Joel Mazarine had declared that it was not the
McMahons who had attacked him, although they were masked.  There was
nothing strange in that, because, as the Inspector of the Riders said
"That lot is too fly to do the job themselves; you bet they paid others
to do it."

Orlando had no wish to see the criminals caught or punished.  Somehow,
secretly, he looked upon the assault and his wound as a blessing.  It had
brought him near to his other self, his mate in the scheme of things.
There was something almost pagan and primitive, something near to the
very beginning of things in what these two felt for each other.  It was
as though they really belonged to a world of lovers that "lived before
the god of Love was born."

As Orlando sat watching the sunset, Louise's last words to him, "Oh,
Orlando!" kept ringing in his ears.  He thought of what had happened
that very morning before he started for the hills.  Soon after daybreak,
Li Choo the Chinaman had come slip-slopping to him at Slow Down Ranch,
and had said to him without any preliminaries, or any reason for his
coming:

"I bling Mlissy Mazaline what you like.  She cly.  What you want me do, I
do.  That Mazaline, gloddam!  I gloddam Mazaline!"

Orlando had no desire for intrigue, but Li Choo stood there waiting, and
the devotion the Chinaman had shown made him tear a piece of paper from
his pocket-book and write on it the one word "Always."  He then folded
the paper up until it was no bigger than a waistcoat button, and gave it
to Li Choo.  Also, he offered a five-dollar bill, which Li Choo refused
to take.  When he persisted, the Chinaman opened his loose blue jacket
and showed a ten-dollar gold-piece on a string around his neck.

"Mlissy Mazaline glive me that; it all plenty me," he said.  "You want me
come, I come.  What you say do, I do.  I say gloddam Mazaline!"

That scene came to Orlando's mind now, and it agitated him as the
incident itself had not stirred him when it happened.  The broncho he was
riding, as though the disturbance in Orlando's breast had passed into its
own wilful body, suddenly became restless to be off, and as Orlando gave
no encouragement, showed signs of bucking.

At that moment Orlando saw in the distance, far north of both Tralee and
Slow Down Ranch, a horse, ridden by a woman, galloping on the prairie.
Presently as he watched the headlong gallop, the horse came down and the
rider was thrown.  He watched intently for a moment, and then he saw that
the woman did not move, but lay still beside the fallen horse.

He dug his heels into the broncho's side, and although it had done its
day's work, it reached out upon the trail as though fresh from the
corral.  It bucked malevolently as it went, but it went.

It was apparent that no one else had seen the accident.  Orlando had been
at a point of vantage on a lonely rise about eighty feet above the level
of the prairie.  Where horse and rider lay was a good two miles, but
within seven minutes he had reached the spot.

Flinging the bridle over the broncho's neck, he dismounted.  As he did
so, a cry broke from him.  It was, as it were, an answer to the "Oh,
Orlando!" which had been ringing in his ears.  There, lying upon the
ground beside the horse, with its broken leg caught in a gopher's hole,
was Louise.

Orlando's ruddy face turned white; something seemed to blind him for an
instant, and then he was on his knees beside her, lifting up her head,
feeling her heart.  Presently the colour came back to his face with a
rush.  Her heart was beating; her pulse trembled under his fingers; she
was only unconscious.  But was there other injury?  Was arm or leg
broken?  He called to her.  Then with an exclamation of self-reproach, he
laid her down again on the ground, ran to his broncho; caught the water-
bottle from the saddle, lifted her head, and poured some water between
the white lips.

Presently her eyes opened, and she stared confusedly at Orlando, unable
to realize what had happened.  Then memory came back, and with it her
very life-blood seemed to flow like water through the opening gates of a
flume, with all the weight of the river behind.  As her face flooded, she
shivered with emotion.  She was resting against his knee; her head was
upon his arm; his face was very near; and there was that in his eyes
which told a story that any woman, loving, would be thrilled at seeing.
What restrained him from clasping her to his breast?  What kept her arms
by her side?

The sun was gone, leaving only a glimmer behind; the swift twilight of
the prairie was drawing down.  Warm currents of air were passing like
waves of a sea of breath over the wide plains; the stars were softly
stinging the sky, and a bright moon was asserting itself in the growing
dusk.  Here they were who, without words or acts, had been to each other
what Adam and Eve were in the Garden, without furtiveness, and guiltless
of secret acts which poison Love.  What restrained them was native,
childlike camaraderie, intense, unusual and strange.  The world would
call them romancists, if they believed that this restraint could be.  But
there was something more.  With all their frank childlikeness, there was
also a shyness, a reserve, which would not have been, if either had ever
eaten of the Fruit of Understanding until they met each other for the
first time.

"Are you--are you hurt?" he asked, his voice calmer than his spirit, his
heart beating terribly hard.  "I'm all right," she answered.  "I fell
soft.  You see, I'm very light."

"No bones broken?  Are you sure?" he asked solicitously.

She sat erect, drawing away from his arms and the support of his knee."
Don't you see my legs and arms are all right!  Help me up, please," she
added, and stretched out a hand.

Then, all at once, she saw the horse lying near.  Again she shivered, and
her hand was thrown out in a gesture of pain.

"Oh, see-see!" she cried.  "His leg is broken."  She loved animals far
more than human beings.  There were good reasons for it.  She had fared
hard in life at the hands of men and women, because the only ones with
whom, in her seclusion, she had had to do, had sacrificed her, all save
one-the man beside her.  Animal life had something in it akin to her own
voiceless being.  Her spirit had never been vocal until Orlando came.

"Oh, how wicked I've been!" she cried.  .  .  .  "I couldn't bear it any
longer.  He wouldn't let me ride alone, go anywhere alone.  I had to do
it.  I'd never ridden this horse before.  My own mare wasn't fit.

"See-see.  It's my ankle that ought to be broken, not his."

Orlando got to his feet.  "Look the other way," he said.  "Turn round,
please.  I'll put him out of pain.  He bolted with you, and he'd have
killed you, if he could; but that doesn't matter.  He can't be saved.
Turn round, don't look this way."

She had been commanded to do things all her life, first by her mother,
tyrant-hearted and selfish, and then by her husband, an overlord, with a
savage soul; and she had obeyed always, because she always seemed to be
in the grasp of something against which no pressure could avail.  She was
being commanded now, but there was that in the voice which, while
commanding her, made her long to do as she was bid.  It was an obedience
filled with passion, resigning itself to the will of a force which was
all gentleness, but oh, so compelling!

She buried her face in her hands, and presently Orlando had opened a vein
in the chestnut's neck, and its life-blood slowly ebbed away.

As he turned towards her again, Orlando was startled by a sudden action
on the part of his broncho.  Whether it was the smell of blood which
frightened it, or death itself, which has its own terrors to animal life,
or whether it was as though a naked, shivering animal soul passed by, the
broncho started, shied and presently broke into a trot; then, before
Orlando could reach it, into a gallop, and was away down the prairie in
the direction of Slow Down Ranch.

"That's queer," he said, and he gave a nervous little laugh.  "It's the
worst of luck, and--and we're twelve miles from Tralee," he added slowly.

"It's terrible!" Louise said, her fingers twisting together in an effort
at self-control.  "Don't you see how terrible it is?" she asked, looking
into Orlando's troubled face but cheerful eyes.

"You couldn't walk that distance, of course," he remarked.

She endeavoured to get to her feet, but seemed to give way.  He reached
out his hands.  She took them, and he helped her up.  His face was
anxious.  "Are you sure you're not hurt?" he asked.  "There's nothing
broken," she answered.  "No bones, anyway.  But I don't feel--" She
swayed.  He put an arm around her.

"I don't feel as if I could walk even a mile," she continued.  "It's
shaken me so."

"Or else you're hurt badly inside," he said apprehensively.

"No, no, I'm sure not," she answered.  "It's only the shock."

"Can you walk a little?" he asked.  "This poor horse--let's get away
from it.  There's a good place over there--see!"  He pointed to a little
rise in the ground where were a few stunted trees and some long grass and
shrubs.  "Can you walk?"

"Oh, yes, I'm all right," she answered nervously.  "I don't need your
arm.  I can walk by myself."

"I think not--well, not yet, anyhow," he answered soothingly.  "Please do
as you're told.  I'm keeping my arm around you for the present."

Always in the past she had obeyed, when commanded by her mother or
husband, with an apathy which had smothered her youth.  Now her youth
seemed to drink eagerly a cup of obedience--as though it were the wine of
life itself.  She even longed to obey the voice whispering in her soul
from ever so far away: "Close--close to him!  Home is in his arms."

With all her unconscious revelation of herself, however, there was that
in her which was pure maidenliness.  For, married as she was, she had
never in any real sense been a wife, or truly understood what wifedom
meant, or heard in her heart the call of the cradle.  She had been the
victim of possession, which had meant no more to her than to be, as it
were, subjected daily to the milder tortures of the Inquisition.

Yet she knew and could realize to the full that a power which had her in
control, which possessed her by the rights of the law, prevented her--and
would prevent her by whatever torture was possible--from friendship,
alliance, or whatever it might be, with Orlando.  She knew the law: one
wife to one husband; and the wife to look neither to the right nor to the
left, to the east nor to the west, to the north nor to the south, but to
remain, and be constant in remaining, the helpmeet, the housewife, the
sole property of her husband, no matter what that husband might be--
vinous, vicious, vagrant, vengeful or any other things, good or bad.

"Why don't you look glad when you see me come in?" Joel Mazarine
remarked to her suddenly the day before.  "If you'd had some husbands,
you might have reason for bein' the statue and the dummy you are.  Am I
a drunkard?  Am I a thief?  Am I a nighthawk?  Do I go off lookin' for
other women?  Don't I keep the commandments?  Ain't you got a home here
as good as any in the land?  Didn't I take you out of poverty, and make
you head of all this, with people to wait on you and all the rest of it?"

That was the way he had talked, and somehow she had not seemed able to
bear it; and she had said to him, in unexpected revolt, that her tongue
was her own, and what was in her mind was her own, even if her body
wasn't.

Then, in a fury, he had caught his riding-whip from the wall to lash her
with it, just when Li Choo the Chinaman appeared with a message which he
delivered at the appropriate moment, though he had had it to deliver for
some time.  It was to the effect that the Clerk of the Court in the
neighbouring town of Waterway wished to see him at once on urgent
business.  The message had been left by a rancher in passing.

As Li Choo delivered the word, he managed to put himself between Mazarine
and his wife in such a way as to enrage the old man, who struck the
Chinaman twice savagely across the shoulders with the whip, and then
stamped out of the house, invoking God to punish the rebellious and the
heathen, while Li Choo, shrinking still from the cruel blows, clucked in
his throat.  There was something in the sound which belonged to the abyss
dividing the Eastern from the Western races.

That night Louise had refused to go to bed; but at last, fearing physical
force, had obeyed, and had lain with her face to the wall, close up to
it, letting the cold plaster cool her hot palms, for now she burned with
a fire which was consuming the debris of an old life--the fire of
knowledge, for which she had to pay so heavily.

"You couldn't walk even a little of the way to Tralee, could you?" asked
Orlando, when they had reached a shrub-covered hillock.

"No, I couldn't walk it, I'm so shaken.  I'm terribly weak; I tremble all
over," she added, as she sat down upon a stone.  "But if I don't--if I
don't go back--oh, you know!"

"Yes, I know," answered Orlando.  "He's the sort that would horsewhip a
woman."

"He started to do it yesterday," she answered, "but Li Choo came in time,
and he horsewhipped Li Choo instead."

"I wouldn't myself be horsewhipping Chinamen much," said Orlando.
"They're a queer lot."

Suddenly she got to her feet.  "I won't stand it.  I won't stand it any
longer," she cried.  "That is why to-day, although he told me I mustn't
ride, I took that new chestnut, and saddled it and rode--I didn't care
where I rode.  I didn't care how fast the horse went.  I didn't care what
happened to me.  And here I am, and--But oh, I do care what happens to
me!" she added, her voice breaking.  "I'm--I'm frightened of him--I'm
frightened, in spite of myself.  .  .  .  He doesn't treat me right," she
added.  "And I'm terribly frightened."

She raised her eyes to Orlando's face in the growing dusk--there is no
twilight in that prairie land--and there was that in it which made her
feel that she must not give way any further.  In Orlando's veins was
Southern sap, mixed with Northern blood; in Orlando's eyes was a sudden
look belonging to that which defies the law.

"Don't--don't look like that," she exclaimed.  "Oh, Orlando!"

Once more he heard her speak his name, and it was like salve to a wound.
He put a hand upon himself.  "I'll go to Tralee," he said, "if you don't
mind waiting here alone."

"I can't.  I will not wait alone.  If you go, then I'll go too
somehow....  It's twelve miles.  You couldn't get there till midnight,
and you couldn't get back here with a wagon for another couple of hours
from that.  It would be daylight then.  I can't stay here alone.  I'm
frightened, and I'm cold."

"Wait a minute," said Orlando.

He ran back to the dead horse, unloosed the saddle from its back,
detached from it a rain-coat strapped to the pommel, and brought it to
her.

"This will keep you warm," he said.  "It isn't cold to-night.  You only
feel cold because you're upset and nervous."

"I'm frightened," she answered; "frightened of everything.  Listen!
Don't you hear something stirring--there!"  She peered fearfully into
the dusk behind them.

"Probably," he answered.  "There are lots of prairie dogs and things
about.  The more you listen, the more you hear on the prairie, especially
at night."

There was silence for a moment, and then he added: "My broncho'll steer
straight for Slow Down Ranch, and that'll bring my men.  You can be quite
sure there'll be a search-party out from Tralee, too, at the first streak
of dawn.  You can't make the journey, so the only thing to be done is to
wait here.  That coat will keep you from getting cold, and I'll cut a lot
of long grass and make you a bed here.  Also, the grass is warm, and I'll
cover you with it and with pine branches."

"I can't lie down," she answered.  "No, I can't; I'm afraid.  It's all so
strange, and to-morrow, he--"

"There's nothing to be frightened about," he interrupted.  "Nothing at
all, Louise."

It was the first time he had ever addressed her by name, and it made her
shiver with a new feeling.  It seemed to tell a long, long story without
words.

"You must do what I ask you to do--whatever I ask you to do," he
repeated.  "Will you?"

"Yes, anything you ask me I'll do," she answered, and then added quickly,
"For you won't ask me to do anything I don't want to do.  That's the
difference.  You understand, Orlando."

A few minutes later he had found a suitable place to make a kind of bed
of grass for her, and had prepared it, with his knife, cutting the
branches of small shrubs and grass and the scanty branches of the pine.
When it was finished, he came to her and said:

"It's all ready.  Come and lie down, and I'll cover you up."

She got to her feet slowly, for she was in pain greater than she knew, so
absorbed was her mind in this new life suddenly enveloping her, and then
she said in a low voice: "No, not yet; I can't yet.  I want to sit here.
I've never felt the night like this before.  It's wonderful, and I'm not
nearly so cold now.  I know I oughtn't to be cold at all, in the middle
of summer like this."  She paused, and seemed lost in contemplation of
the sky.  After a moment she added: "I never knew I could feel so far
away from all the world as I do tonight.  But the sky seems so near, and
the moon and the stars so friendly."

"You haven't slept out of doors as I have hundreds of times," he
answered.  "The night and I are brothers; the stars are my little
cousins; and the moon"--he giggled in his boyish way--"is my maiden aunt.
She's so prudish and so kind and friendly, as you say.  She's like an
aunt I had--Aunt Samantha.  She was my father's sister.  I used to love
her to visit my mother.  She always brought me things, and she gave them
to me as if they were on silver dishes--like a ceremony.  She was so
prim, I used to call her Aunt Primrose.  She made me feel as if I could
do anything I liked and break any law I pleased.  But all the time, like
a saint in a stained-glass window, she always seemed to be saying, 'Yes,
you'd like to, but you mustn't.'  She was just like the moon.  I'm well
acquainted with the moon, and--"

"Hush!" Louise interrupted.  "Don't you hear something stirring--there,
behind us?"

He laughed.  "Of course something's always 'stirring behind us' on the
prairie, and things you can't hear at all in the day are almost loud at
night.  There are thousands of sounds that never get to your ears when
the sun is busy, but when Aunt Primrose Moon is saying, 'Hush!  Hush!' to
the naughty children of this world, you can hear a whole new population
at work, cracking away like mad.  Say, ain't I letting myself go to-
night?" he added, giggling again and sitting down beside her.  "I'm
going to give you just half an hour, and at the end of that half-hour
you've got to go to sleep."

"I can't--I can't," she said scarcely above a whisper.  As though in
response to an unspoken thought, he said casually: "I'm going to walk
awhile when you've lain down, and then--" He pointed to a spot about
twenty yards away.  "Do you see the two big stones there?  Well, when
I've finished my walk and my talk with Aunty Primrose"--he laughed up
at the moon--"I'm going to sit down there and snooze till daylight."  He
pointed again: "Right over there beside those two rocks.  That's my bed.
Do you see?"

She did not reply at once, but a long sigh came from her lips.  "You'll
be cold," she said.

"No, it's a hot night," he answered.  "I'm too hot as it is."  And he
loosened his heavy red shirt at the throat.

"If I've got to go to bed in half an hour," she said presently, "tell me
more about your Aunt Samantha, and about yourself, and your home before
you came out here, and what you did when you were a little boy--tell me
everything about yourself."

She was forgetting Tralee for the moment, and the man who raised his hand
against her yesterday, and the life she had lived.  Or was it only that
she had grown young during these last two months, and the young can so
easily forget!

"You want to hear?  You really want to hear?" he asked.  "Say, it won't
be a very interesting story.  Better let me tell you about the broncho-
busting today."

"No, I want to hear about yourself."  She looked intently at him for an
instant, and then her eyes closed and the long lashes touched her cheek.
There was something very wilful in her beauty, and her body too had
delicate, melancholy lines strange in one so young.  She was not
conscious that, in her dreamy abstraction, she was leaning towards him.

It was but an instant, though it seemed to him an interminable time, in
which he fought the fierce desire to clasp her in his arms, and kiss the
lips which, to his ears, said things more wonderful than he had ever
dreamed of in his friendship with the night and the primrose moon.  He
knew, however, that if he did, she would not go back to Tralee to-morrow;
that tomorrow she would defy the leviathan; and that tomorrow he would
not have the courage to say the things he must say to the evil-hearted
master of Tralee, who, he knew, would challenge them with ugly
accusations.  He must be able to look old Mazarine fearlessly in the
face; he would not be the slave of opportunity.  He was going to fight
clean.  She was here beside him in the warm loneliness of the northern
world, and he was full-grown in body and brain, with all the human
emotions alive in him; yet he would fight clean.

Not for a half-hour, but for nearly an hour he told her what she wished
to know, while she listened in a happy dream; and when at last she lay
down, she refused his coverlet of dry grass, saying that she was quite
warm.  She declared that she did not even need the coat he had taken from
the saddle of the dead horse, but he wrapped it around her, and, saying
"Goodnight" almost brusquely, marched away in the light of the dying
moon.

The night wore on.  At first Louise's ears were sensitive to every sound,
and there were stirrings in the hillock by which she slept, but she
comforted herself with the thought that they were the stirrings of
lonely little waifs of nature like herself.  Though she dared not let the
thought take form, yet she feared, too, the sound of human footsteps.  By
and by, however, in the sweet quiet of the night and the somnolent light
of the moon, sleep captured her.  When at last Orlando's footsteps did
crush the dry grass, the sound failed to reach her ears, for it was then
not very far from daylight, and she had slept for several hours.  Sleep
had not touched Orlando's eyes when, sitting down by the stones which
were to mark his resting-place, he waited for Louise to wake.





ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Highsterics, they call it
World was only the size of four walls to a sick person






WILD YOUTH

By Gilbert Parker


Volume 2.


X.        THE MOON WAS NOT ALONE
XI.       LOUISE
XII.      MAN UNNATURAL
XIII.     ORLANDO GIVES A WARNING
XIV.      FILION AND FIONA--ALSO PATSY KERNAGHAN
XV.       OUTWARD BOUND
XVI.      AT THE CROSS TRAILS
XVII.     THE SUPERIOR MAN
XVIII.    YOUTH HAS ITS WAY




CHAPTER X

THE MOON WAS NOT ALONE

Out on the prairie under the light of the stars a man had fought the
first great battle of his life, and had emerged victorious.  There are no
drawn battles in the struggles of the soul.  As Orlando fought, he was
tortured by the thought that none would believe the truth to-morrow when
it was told; and that there would be penalty though there was no crime.

As for Louise, she could have returned, almost blindly defiant, to her
world, hand in hand with Orlando; and yet, when morning came, and her
eyes opened on the prairie at day-break, with life stirring everywhere,
she was glad of the victory--though the shadow of a great trouble to come
was showing in her eyes.

She knew what she had to face at Tralee, and that she had no proof of
her perfect innocence.  It was of little use for them to call upon Heaven
to witness what the night had been; and Joel Mazarine, who distrusted
every man and woman, would distrust her with a sternness which guilt
only could effectively defy!

Orlando's enforced gaiety as he invited her to a breakfast of a couple of
biscuits, left from yesterday's broncho-busting, heartened her; yet both
were conscious of the make-believe.  They realized they were helpless in
the grip of harsh circumstance.  It was almost enough to make them take
advantage of calumny and the traps set for them by Fate, and join hands
for ever.

As they looked into each other's eyes, the same hopeless yet reckless
thought flickered--flickered, and vanished.  Yet as they looked out over
the prairie towards Tralee, to which Louise must presently return, a
rebellious sort of joy possessed them.

                    .........................

The discord of their thoughts was like music beside what had passed at
Tralee.  There nothing relieved the black, sullen rage of Joel Mazarine.
He had returned to the house where his voice had always been able to
summon his slaves, and to know that they would come--Chinaman, half-
breed, wife.  Now he called, and the wife did not come.  On the new
chestnut she had ridden away on the prairie, so the halfbreed woman had
said, as hard as he could go.  He had scanned the prairie till night
came, without seeing a sign of her.

His black imagination instantly conceived the worst that Louise might do.
It was not in him ever to have the decent alternative.  He questioned the
half-breed woman closely; he savagely interrogated the Chinaman; and then
he declared that they lied to him, that they knew more than they said;
and when he was unable to bear it any longer, he mounted his horse and
galloped over to Slow Down Ranch.  As he went, he kept swearing to
himself that Louise had flown thither; and anger made his brain
malignant.  He could scarcely frame his words intelligibly when he
arrived at Slow Down Ranch.

There he was presently convinced that his worst suspicions were true, for
Orlando also had not returned.  He saw it all.  They had agreed to meet;
they had met; they had eloped and were gone!  His beady eyes were those
of serpents watching for the instant to strike, and his words burst over
the head of Orlando's mother like shrapnel.

For once, however, the futile, fantastic mother rose higher than herself,
and declared that her son had never run away from, or with, anything in
his life; that he--Joel Mazarine--had never had anything worth her son's
running away with; and that her son, when he came back, would make him
ask forgiveness as he had never asked it of his God.

Indeed, the gaudy little lady stood in her doorway and chattered her
maledictions after him, as he rode back again towards Tralee muttering
curses which no class leader in the Methodist Church ought even to quote
for pious purposes.

Joel Mazarine had flattered himself that he had everything life could
give--money, property and a garden of youth in which his old age could
loiter and be glad; and that he should be defied suddenly and his garden
made desolate, that the lines of his good fortune should be crossed,
caused him to rage like any heathen.  His monstrous egotism made him like
some infuriated bull in the arena, with the banderillos sticking in his
hot hide.

The two people whom he cursed were in Elysium compared to the place where
he tortured himself.  There are desert birds that silently surround a
rattlesnake, as he sleeps, with little bundles of cactus-heads and their
million needles, so that, when the reptile wakes, it cannot escape
through the palisade of bristling weapons by which it is surrounded; and
in ghoulish anger it strikes its fangs into its own body until it dies.
Just such a helpless rage held Joel Mazarine, and his religion did not
suggest seeking comfort at that Throne of Grace to which he had so
publicly prayed on occasions.

Night held him prowling in his own coverts; morning found him yellow and
mottled, malicious, but now silent.  He somehow felt that he would know
the truth and the whole truth soon.  He ate his pork and beans for
breakfast with the appetite of a ravenous animal.  He put pieces of the
pork chop in his mouth with his fingers; he gulped his coffee; but all
the time he kept his eyes on the open door, as though he expected some
messenger to announce that Providence had stricken his rebellious wife
by sudden death.  It seemed to him that Nature and Jehovah must unite to
avenge him.

After three hours of further waiting he determined to go into Askatoon.
He would have bills printed advertising for Louise as he had done for
stray cattle; he would have notices put in the newspapers proclaiming
that his wife was strayed or stolen and must be put in pound when
discovered.  At the moment he decided thus, he caught sight of a wagon
approaching from the north.  It was near enough for him to see that there
was a woman in it; and the eyes of the half-breed hired woman, possessing
the Indian far-sight, saw that it was Louise, and told her master so.

Ten minutes later Louise stood in front of the Master of Tralee, and the
Master of Tralee filled the doorway.  "What you want here?" he asked of
her with blurred rage in his voice.

"I want to go to my room," Louise answered quietly but firmly.  "Please
stand aside."

Now that Louise was face to face with her foe, a new spirit had suddenly
possessed her; and standing beside his broncho, a hand on its neck,
Orlando almost smiled, for this was Louise with a new nature.  There was
defiance and courage in her face, not the apprehension which had almost
overwhelmed her as they started back to Tralee, having been rescued by
the search-party from Slow Down Ranch.  The night had done something to
Louise which was making itself felt.

"You think you can come back here after what you've done--after where
you've been--the likes of you!" Mazarine snarled unmoving.  "You think
you can!"

Louise turned swiftly to look at Orlando and the three men, one riding
and two in the wagon, as though to call them in evidence of her
innocence; but there came to her eyes a sudden fire of courage, and she
turned again to Mazarine and said:

"I'm your wife by the law--just as much your wife to-day as yesterday.
You treat me before strangers as if I were a criminal.  I'm not going to
be treated that way.  I've got my rights.  Stand back and let me in--
stand back, Joel Mazarine," she said, and she took a step forward, child
though she was, as if she would strike him.  Something had transformed
her.

To Orlando she seemed scarcely real.  The shrinking, colourless child of
a few weeks had suddenly become a woman--and such a woman!

"I'll tell you in my own time where I've been and what I've done," she
continued.  "I want to go upstairs.  Stand out of the doorway."

There was a movement behind her.  A man in the wagon and the one on his
horse seemed to grow angry and threatening.  The ranchman dropped from
his horse.  Only Orlando stood cool, quiet and ominously watchful.
Mazarine did not fail to notice the movement of the two men.

Presently Orlando's voice said slowly and calmly: "Stand back, Mazarine.
Let her go to her room.  This is a free country, and she's free in her
own house.  It's her house until you've proved she's got no right there."
Then he added with sharp insistence and menace: "Stand back--damn you,
Mazarine!"

Orlando did not move as he spoke, but there was a look in his face which
an enemy would not care to see.  Mazarine, in spite of his rage, quailed
before the sharp, menacing voice so little in tune with its reputation
for giggling, and stepping back, he let Louise pass.  Then he plunged
forward out of the doorway.

"That's right.  Come outside," said Orlando scornfully.  "Come out into
the open."  His voice became lower.  There was something deadly in it,
boy as he was.  "Come out, you hypocrite, and listen to what I've got to
say.  Listen to the truth I've got to tell you.  If you don't listen,
I'll horsewhip you, that'd horsewhip a woman, till you can't stand--you
loathsome old dog.  .  .  .  Yes, he took his horsewhip to her
yesterday," he added to the spectators, who muttered angrily, for the
West is chivalrous towards women.

Something near to madness possessed Orlando.  No one had ever seen him
as he was at that moment.  Down through generations had come to him some
iron thing that suddenly revealed itself in him, as something had just
suddenly revealed itself in Louise.

The other three men--two in the wagon and one beside his horse-stared at
him as though they had seen him for the first time.  They were unready
for the passion that possessed him.  Not a muscle of his body appeared to
move; he was as motionless as the trunk of a tree.  But in his eyes and
his voice there was, as one of the ranchers said afterwards, "Hell--and
then some more."

"Listen to me," he said again, and his voice was low and husky now.
"Yesterday I was broncho-busting--"

Thereupon he told the whole story of what had happened since he had seen
Louise thrown from her chestnut on the prairie.  He told how Louise was
too shaken and ill to attempt the journey back to Tralee, and how they
had camped where they were, near the dead horse.

As Orlando talked, the old man was seized by terrible hatred and
jealousy.  "You needn't tell me the rest," he broke in, his hands
savagely opening and shutting.  "I guess I understand everything."

The words had scarcely left his mouth when from the wagon a man said:
"Wait--wait, Mister.  I got something to say."

He sprang to the ground, and ran between Mazarine and Orlando.

"This is where I come in," he said, as Louise's face appeared at an upper
window, and she listened.  "You don't know me.  Well, I know you.
Everybody knows you, and nobody likes you.  I know what happened last
night.  I'm a brother of your fellow Christian Rigby, the druggist, over
there in Askatoon.  He's a Methodist.  I'm not.  I'm only good.  I been a
lot o' things, and nothing in the end.  Well, you hearken to my tale.

"I was tramping with my bundle on my back acrost the prairie to Askatoon
from Waterway.  I'm a sundowner, as they say in Australia.  When the sun
goes down, I down to my bed wherever I be on the prairie.  I was asleep-
I'd been half drunk--when the chestnut threw your wife and broke its leg;
but I was awake when he rode up."  He pointed to Orlando.  "I was awake,
and so I watched.  I knew who she was; I knew who he was."  He pointed to
Orlando again.  "I guessed I'd see something.  I did.

"I watched them two people all night.  There was a moon.  I could see.
I wasn't fifteen feet from her all night, and I jined the others when
they come to rescue.  I guess I got the truth, and I guess if you want
any evidence about me you can get it.  Lots of people know me out here.
I ain't got any house or any home, and I get drunk sometimes, and I ain't
got money to buy meals with, lots of times, but nobody ever knowed me
lie.  That's what ruined me--I been too truthful.  Well, I'm not lying
now, Mister.  I'm telling you the God-help-me truth.  He's a gentleman."
He pointed again to Orlando.  "He's a gentleman from away back in God's
country, wherever that is, and she's the best of the best of the very
best.

"You can bet your greasy old boots and ugly face that you've got a bigger
fortune in that wife of yours than you've any right to.  Say, she's a
queen, Mister, and don't you forget it, and"--he drawled out his words--
"you go inside your house and get down on your knees, same as you do in
the Meeting House, and thank the Lord you love so well for all his
blessings.  As my friend here said a little while back"--he pointed to
Orlando again--"'Damn you, Mazarine!'  Go and hide yourself."

The old man stood for a moment dumbfounded; then, without a word, he
turned and hunched inside the house.

"He raised his horsewhip ag'in' a woman, did he?" said one of Orlando's
ranchmen.  "Ain't that a matter we got to take notice of?"

"Boys," said Orlando as he motioned them to be off, "Mrs. Mazarine can
take care of herself.  You'll forget what's happened, if you want to play
up to her.  If she needs you, she'll be sure to let you know."

A moment afterwards they were all on their way on the road leading to
Slow Down Ranch.

"He didn't giggle much that time," said one of the ranchmen of Orlando,
as they moved on.




CHAPTER XI

LOUISE

The Young Doctor had had a trying day.  Certain of his cases had given
him anxiety; his drives had been long and fatiguing; he had had little
sleep for several nights; and he was what Patsy Kernaghan had called
"brittle"; for when Patsy was in a vexed condition, he used to say, "I'm
so brittle I'll break if you look at me."  As the Young Doctor drew his
chair up to the supper-table and looked at his food with a critical air,
he was very brittle.

For one born in Enniskillen he had an even nature, but its evenness was
more the result of mental control than temperament.  He sighed as he
looked at the marrow bones which, as a rule, gave him joy when their turn
came in the weekly menu; he eyed askance the baked potatoes; and the
salad waiting for his skilled hand only gave him an extra feeling of
fatigue.

Most men in a like state say, "I don't know what's the matter with me,"
and yet many a one has been stimulated out of it, away from it, by the
soft voice and friendly hand of a woman.

There was, however, no woman to distract the overworked Young Doctor by
her freshness, drawn from the reservoir of her vitality; and that was a
pity, because, as Patsy Kernaghan many a time said: "Aw, Doctor dear,
what's the good of a tongue to a wagon if there's only wan horse to draw
it!  Shure, you'll think a lot more of yourself whin you're able to stand
at the head of your own table and say grace for two at least, and
thanksgiving for manny, if it's the will of God."

The Young Doctor did not know why he was so brittle, but the truth is he
was feeding on himself, and that is a poor business.  Every dog knows it
is good to feed on the knuckle of a goat if he hasn't got a beefbone, and
every real man knows--though to know anything at all he must have been
married--that any marriage is better than no marriage at all; because
whether it's happy or unhappy, it makes you concerned for some one
besides yourself, if you have any soul or sense at all.

The Young Doctor was under the delusion that he loved his lonely table
and the making of a simple salad for a simple man, but then he came from
Ireland and had imagination; and that is always a curse when it isn't a
blessing, for there is nothing between the two.  At the end of his
troubled day he almost cursed the salad as it crinkled in the dish just
slightly rubbed with garlic.  He was turning away in apathy from it--from
the bones with the marrow oozing out of the ends, from the bursting baked
potatoes, from the beautiful crusts of brown bread, when he heard the
door-bell ring.  At the sound his face set as though it were mortar.  He
wanted no patients this night; but from the peremptory sound of the bell
he was sure some one had come who needed medicine or the knife, and he
could refuse neither; for was he not at everybody's beck and call, the
Medicine Man whose door was everybody's door!

"Damnation!" he said aloud, and turned towards the door expectantly.

Then he bitted himself to wait; and he did not wait long.  Presently he
heard a voice say, "I must see him," and the door opened wide, and Louise
Mazarine stepped into the room.  Her face was pale and distraught; her
blue eyes, with their long, melancholy lashes, stared at him in appealing
apprehension.  Her lips were almost white; her hands trembled out towards
him.

"I've come--I've come!" she said.  It had the finality of the last
chapter of a book.

The Young Doctor closed the door, ignoring for the instant the hands held
out to him.  After all, he was a very sane Young Doctor, and he had the
faculty of keeping his head, and his heart, and his own counsel.  Also he
knew there was an inquisitive old servant in the hallway.

When the door was closed, he turned round on Louise slowly, and then he
held out his hands to her, for she was shrinking away, as though he had
repulsed her.  He pressed her trembling hands in the way that only
faithful friendship shows, and said:

"Yes, I know you've come, but tell me what you've come for."

"I couldn't bear it any longer," she said brokenly.  "I'm not made of
steel or stone.  It's been terrible.  He doesn't speak to me except to
order me to do this or that.  I haven't done anything wrong, and I won't
be treated so.  I won't!  When he made me kneel down by him in the trail
and tried to make me pray to be forgiven of my sins, I couldn't stand it.
I don't know what my sins are, and I won't be converted if I don't want
to.  I'm not a slave.  I'm of age.  I'm twenty."

There was no sign of fatigue now in the Young Doctor's face.  Something
had called him out of himself, and this human need had done what a wife's
hand might have done, or the welcome of a child.

"No, you're not twenty," he declared, with a friendly smile.  "You aren't
ten.  You are only one.  In fact, I think you're only just born!"

He did not speak as lightly as the words read.  In his voice there was
that compassionate irony with which men shield those for whom they care.
It means protection and defence.  Somehow she seemed to him like a small
bird on its first flight from the nest, or, as Patsy Kernaghan would have
said, "a tame lamb loose in a zoolyogical gardin."

"So because you won't pray and can't bear it any longer, you run away
from him, and come to me!" the other remarked with a sorry smile, pouring
out a glass of wine from a decanter that stood on the table.

"Drink this," he said presently, pushing her down gently into a chair
with one hand and holding the glass to her lips.  "Drink it every drop.
As I said, you've only run away from one master to fall into another
master's hands.  You're a wicked girl.  Drink it--every drop.  .  .  .
That's right."

He took the empty glass from her, put it on the table, and then stood and
looked at her meditatively, fastening her eyes with his own.  More than
her eyes were fastened, however.  Her mind was also under control: but
that was because she believed in him so.

"Yes, you're a wicked girl," he said decisively.

She shuddered and shrank back.  In her eyes was a helpless look, very
different from that which she had given not so many days before when,
with Orlando Guise behind her, she had defied her aged husband in his
doorway, and her defiance had moved him from her path.  Then she had been
inspired by the fact that the man she loved was near her, that she had
been wrongfully accused and was ready to fight.  Afterwards, however,
when she was alone, the sterile presence of Joel Mazarine, his merciless
eyes, his hopeless religious tyranny, had worn upon her as his past
violence had never done.

"Wicked!"  Did this man, then, believe her guilty?  Did he, of all men,
think that the night upon the prairie alone with Orlando had been her
undoing?  Had not the brother of Rigby the chemist borne witness with his
own eyes to her complete innocence?  If the Young Doctor disbelieved,
then indeed she was undone.

"You don't think that of me--of me!" she gasped, her lips all white
again.  She got to her feet excitedly.  "You shall not believe it of me."

"No, I did not say I believed that," the other remarked almost casually.
"But if I did believe it, I don't know that it would make much difference
to me.  Fate, or God Almighty, or whatever it was, had stacked the cards
against you.  When I said it was wicked, I meant you did wrong in rushing
away from your husband and coming to me.  I suppose you have definitely
left your husband--eh?  You've 'left' him, as they say?"

He had an incorrigible sense of humour, as well as an infinite common
sense.  He wanted to break this spell of tense emotion which possessed
her.  So he pursued a new course.

"Don't you think it's rather hard on me?" he continued.  "I'm a lone man
in this house, with only one old woman to protect me, and I'm unmarried.
I've a reputation to lose, and there are lots of mothers and daughters
hereabouts.  Besides, a medical practice is hard to get and not easy to
keep.  What do you mean by making a refuge of me, when there's nothing
for me in it, not even the satisfaction of going into the Divorce Court
with you?  You wicked Mrs. Mazarine!"

"Oh, don't speak like that!" Louise interjected.  "Please don't.  Don't
scold me.  I had to come.  I was going mad."

The Young Doctor had the case well in hand.  He had eased the terrible
tension; he was slowly reducing her to the normal.  It was the only thing
to do.

"What did Mazarine do or say to you that made you run away?  Come now,
didn't you first make up your mind to go to Slow Down Ranch--to Orlando?"

She flushed.  "Yes, but only for a minute.  Then I thought of you,
because I knew you could help me as no one else could.  Everybody
believes in you.  But then Li Choo--"

"Oh, Li Choo!  So Li Choo comes into this, eh?  So he said fly to
Orlando, eh?  Well, that's what he would do.  But why Li Choo--
a Chinaman?  Tell me, what does Li Choo know?"

Quickly she told him the story of the day when Joel Mazarine had almost
surprised her in Orlando's room; how Li Choo had saved the situation by
falling down the staircase with the priceless porcelain, and how Mazarine
had kicked him--"manhandled" him, as they say in the West.

"Chinamen don't like being kicked, especially Chinamen of Li Choo's
station," remarked the Young Doctor meditatively.  "You don't know, of
course, that Li Choo was a prince or a big bug of some sort in his own
country.  Why he left China I don't know, but I do chance to know that
if another Chinky meets Li Choo carrying a basket on his shoulders, or a
package in his hand, he kow-tows, and takes it away from him, and carries
it himself.  .  .  .  No, I don't know why Li Choo is here in Askatoon,
or why he's such a slave to Mrs. Mazarine; but I do know that he's a
different-looking man when a Chinky runs up against him than when he's
choring at Tralee.  A sick Chinaman told me only a week ago that Li Choo
was 'once big high boss Chinaman in Pekin.' .  .  .  And so the mandarin
advised you to fly to Orlando, did he?  I wonder if it's a way they have
in China."

"But I wouldn't go.  I've come to you--Patsy Kernaghan brought me,"
Louise urged.

"Yes, I see you've come to me," remarked the Young Doctor dryly, "and
you've stayed about long enough for me to feel your pulse and diagnose
your case.  And now you're going back with Patsy Kernaghan to your own
home."

She trembled; then she seemed to strengthen herself in defiance.  What a
change it was from the child of a few weeks ago--indeed, of a few moments
ago!  The same passionate determination which seized her when she faced
Mazarine with Orlando, possessed her again.  With her whole being
palpitating, she said: "I will not go back.  I will not go back.  I will
kill myself first."

"That would be a useless sacrifice of yourself and others," the Young
Doctor answered quietly.  Seeing that the new thing in her was not to be
conquered in a moment, he quickly made up his mind what to do.

"See," he continued, "you needn't go back to Tralee to-night, but you're
not going to stay here, dear child.  I'll take you over to Nolan Doyle's
ranch, to Mrs. Doyle.  You'll spend the night there, and we'll think
about to-morrow when to-morrow comes.  You certainly can't stay here.
I'm not going to have it.

"Bless you, you're neither so young nor so old as all that!"

Suddenly he grasped both her arms and looked her in the face.  "My dear
young lady," he said gently, "I'm not your only friend, but I'm a stout
friend--so stout that there isn't a mount can carry us both together.
When you ride, I walk; when I ride, you walk--you understand?  We don't
walk or ride together.  I'm taking care of you.  Your life is too good to
be ruined by rashness.  You're in a 'state,' as my old housekeeper would
say, but you'll be all right presently.  As soon as I've made a salad,
and had a marrowbone, you and I and Patsy Kernaghan are going to Nolan
Doyle's ranch.  .  .  .  My dear, you must do what I say, and if you do,
you'll be happy yet.  I don't see how, quite, but it is so; and
meanwhile, you mustn't make any mistakes.  You must play the game.
And now come and have some supper."

She waved her hand in protest.  "I can't eat," she said.  "Indeed, I
can't."

"Well, you can drink," he answered.  "You shall not leave this house
alive unless you have a pint of milk with a little dash of what Patsy
calls 'oh-be-joyful' in it."

He left the room for a moment, while she sat watching the door as a
prisoner might watch for the return of a friendly jailer.  He had a
curious influence over her.  It was wholly different from that of
Orlando.  Presently he returned.

"It's all right," he said.  "Patsy and you and I will be at Nolan Doyle's
ranch in another hour.  I've sent word to Mrs. Doyle.  I've ordered your
milk-punch too, and now I think I'll make my salad.  You never saw me
make a salad," he added, smiling.  "I've done some successful operations
in my day; I've played about with bones and sinews, proud of my work
sometimes, but the making of a perfect salad is the proud achievement of
a master-mind."  He laughed like a boy.  "'Come hither, come hither, my
little daughter, and do not tremble so,'" he said so cheerfully as to be
almost jeering.

His cheerfulness was not in vain, for a smile stole to her lips, though
it only flickered for an instant and was gone.  For all that, he knew he
had saved the situation, and that another chapter of the life-history of
Orlando and Louise had been ended.  A fresh chapter would begin tomorrow;
but sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof.




CHAPTER XII

MAN UNNATURAL

Mazarine discovered the flight of Louise soon after she had gone.
He had not been five hundred yards from the house since she returned with
Orlando after the night spent upon the prairie, save when he had been
obliged to go in to Askatoon and had taken her with him, dumb and
passive.  She had been a prisoner, tied to the stirrups of her captor;
and he had berated her, had preached at her.  As Louise had said, once on
the way to Askatoon, he had even tried to make her kneel down in the dust
of the trail and plead with Heaven to convict her of sin.

On the evening of Louise's flight, however, he had been forced to go to
a neighbouring ranch, and had commanded Li Choo to keep a strict watch at
the windows of her room to see that she did not attempt escape.  She
could not escape by the door of the room because he had the key in his
pocket.  Li Choo was not a stern jailer, however.  Mazarine had not been
gone three minutes before the Chinaman had touch with Louise.  He did
more; he threw up into the open window of her room a screw-driver, with
which she took the old-fashioned door off its hinges, after half an
hour's work.  Then, leaving a note on the table of the dining-room, to
say that she could not bear it any longer, that she would never come
back, and that she meant to be free, she summoned Patsy Kernaghan and
fled to the Young Doctor.

When Mazarine returned and found her note, he plunged up the stairs to
her bedroom, his pious wrath gurgling in his throat, only to find the
door locked; for Li Choo had promptly restored it to its hinges after
Louise had gone, afterwards dropping from the high window like a cat,
without hurt.

Li Choo, blinking, opaque, immobile, save for his piercing and mysterious
eyes, had no explanation to give.  All he said was, "Me no see all sides
house same time"; so suggesting that, as the room had windows on all
three sides, Louise must have escaped while he made his supposed sentry-
go, slip-slopping round the house.  Mazarine showed what he thought by
spitting in Li Choo's face, and then rushing into the house to get the
raw-hide whip with which he had punished the Chinaman before, and with
which he had threatened his wife.

When he returned a moment afterwards, Li Choo was nowhere to be seen; but
in his place were two other Chinamen who had, as it were, fallen from the
skies, standing where Li Choo had stood, immobile, blinking and passive
like Li Choo, their hands lost in the long sleeves of their coats, their
pigtails so tightly braided as, in seeming, to draw their slanting
eyelids still to greater incline, and to give a look of petrified
intentness to their faces.

Something in their attitude gave Mazarine apprehension.  It was as though
Li Choo had been transformed by some hellish magic into two other
Chinamen.  The rage of his being seemed to stupefy him; he could not
resist the sensation of the unnatural.

"What do you want?  How did you come here?" he asked of the two in a
husky voice.

"We want speak Li Choo.  We come see Li Choo," answered one of the
Chinamen impassively.

"He was here a minute ago," answered Mazarine gruffly.

Then he turned away, going swiftly toward the kitchen, and calling to Li
Choo.  As he went, he was conscious of low, cackling laughter, but when
he turned to look, the two Chinamen stood where he had left them,
blinking and immobile.

The uncanny feeling possessing him increased; the thing was unnatural.
He lurched on, however, looking for Li Choo.  The Chinaman was not to be
found in the kitchen, in the woodshed, in the cellar, in the loft, or in
his own attic room; and the half-breed, Rada, declared she had not seen
him.  He could not be at the stables, for they were too far away to be
reached in the time; and there were no signs of him between the house and
the stables.  When Mazarine returned to the front of the house, the two
Chinamen also had vanished; there were no signs of them anywhere.  Search
did not discover them.

Mingled anger and fear now possessed Mazarine.  He would search no
longer.  No doubt the other two Chinamen had joined Li Choo in his
hiding-place, wherever it was.  Why had the Chinamen come?  What were
they after?  It did not matter for the moment.  What he wanted was
Louise, his bad child-wife, who had broken from her cage and flown from
him.  Where would she go?  Where, but to Slow Down Ranch?  Where, but to
her lover, the circus-rider, the boy with the head of brown curls, with
the ring on his finger and the Cupid mouth!  Where would she go but to
the man with whom she had spent the night on the prairie!

Now he believed altogether that she was guilty, that everybody had
conspired to deceive him, that he was in a net of dark deception.  Even
the two Chinamen, mysteriously coming and going, had laughed at him like
two heathen gods, and had vanished suddenly like heathen gods.

A weakness came over him, and the skin of his face became creased and
clammy like that of a drowned man; his limbs trembled, so desperate was
his passion.  He stumbled into the house and into the dining-room,
where he kept a little black-bound Bible once belonging to his great-
grandfather.  He had thumbed it well in past years, searching it for
passages of violence and denunciation.  Now holy superstition seized him
in the midst of the work of the devil, surrounding him with an almost
medieval instinct.  He seized the ancient book, as it were to deliver its
incantations against everyone destroying his peace, stealing from him
that which he prized beyond all earthly things.

Take this woman away from him, this child-wife from his sixty-five years,
and what was left for him?  She was the garden of spring in which his old
age roamed at ease luxuriously.  She was the fruit of the tree of
pleasure.  She was that which made him young again, renewed in him youth
and the joys of youth.  Take her away, the flower that smelled so sweet
and luscious, the thing that he had held so often to his lips and to his
breast?  Take away what was his, by every holy right, because it was all
according to the law of the land and of the Holy Gospel, and what was
left?  Only old age, the empty house bereft of a fair young mistress,
something to smile at and to curse, if need be, since it was his own by
the laws of God and man.

Take her away, and the two wives that he had buried long years ago, with
their gray heads and lank, sour faces, from which the light of youth had
fled with the first child come to them--their ghosts would seek him out.
They would sit at his table, and taunt him with his vanished Louise,
asking him if he thought she was anything more than one of the trolls
that tempted men aforetime; one of the devil's wenches that lured him
into the secret garden, only at last to leave him scorned and alone.

Where had she gone, his troll, with the face of an angel?  Where had she
gone?  Where would she go, except to her devil's lover at Slow Down Ranch?

He had just started for Slow Down Ranch armed with his greasy, well-
thumbed Bible like a weapon in his pocket, when he heard a voice call
him.  It was full of the devil's laughter.  It was the voice of
Burlingame, the lawyer, on his horse.  Burlingame had had a weary day
and was refreshing himself by a canter on the prairie.

"Where are you going?" asked Burlingame, as he cantered up to Mazarine's
wagon.

"To Slow Down Ranch?"

He saw the look of the drowned man in the face of Mazarine, over whom the
flood of disaster had passed, and he guessed at once the cause of it; for
Burlingame had the philosophy of a Satanic mind, and he knew the things
that happen to human nature.

"So, she's gone again, has she?" he added deliberately, with intent to
put a knife into the old man's feelings and to turn it in the thick of
them.  He wanted to hurt, because Mazarine had only a short time before
dispensed with his services as a lawyer, and had blocked the way to that
intimacy which he had hoped to establish with Tralee and its mistress.
Besides, his pride as a professional man had been hurt, and he had been
deprived of income which now went to his most hated professional rival.
Mazarine's jealous soul had cut him off, on coming to know Burlingame's
dark reputation.  He had not liked the look Burlingame had given Louise
when they met.

"Gone again, has she?" Burlingame repeated sarcastically.  "Well, you
needn't go to Slow Down Ranch to find her.  She isn't there, and you
won't find him there either, for I saw him come by the Lark River Trail
into Askatoon as I left, and a lady was with him.  He booked this morning
for the sleeper of the express going East to-night; so, if I were you,
I'd turn my horse's nose to Askatoon, Mr. Mazarine.  I don't know why I
tell you this, as you're not my client now, but I go about the world
doing good, Mr. Mazarine--only doing good."

There was a look in Burlingame's face which Heaven would not have
accepted as goodness, and there was that in his voice which did not
belong to the Courts of the Lord.  Malice, though veiled, showed in face
and sounded in voice.  Even as he spoke, Joel Mazarine turned his horse's
head towards Askatoon.

"You're sure a woman was with him?  You're sure she was with him?" he
asked in chaos of passion.

"I couldn't see her face; it was too far away," answered Burlingame
suggestively, "but you can form your own conclusions--and the express
is due in thirty minutes!"

He looked at his watch complacently.  "What's the good, Mazarine?  Why
don't you say, 'Go and sin no more?'  Or why don't you divorce her with
the evidence about that night on the prairie?  I could have got you a
verdict and damages.  Yes, I could have got you plenty of damages.  He's
rich.  You took her back and condoned; you condoned, Mazarine, and now
you'll neither have damages nor wife--and the express goes in thirty
minutes!"

"The express won't take Mrs. Mazarine away tonight," the old man said, a
look of jungle fierceness filling his face.

Burlingame laughed unpleasantly.  "Yes, you'll foul your own nest,
Mazarine, and then bring her back to live in it.  I know you.  It isn't
the love of God in your heart, because you'll never forgive her; but
you'll bring her back to the nest you fouled, just because you want her
--'You damned and luxurious mountain goat,' as Shakespeare called your
kind."

With another laugh, which somewhat resembled that of the two strange
vanished Chinamen, Burlingame flicked his horse and cantered away.  A
little time afterwards, however, he turned and looked toward Askatoon,
and he saw the old man whipping his horse into a gallop to reach Askatoon
railway station before the express went East.

"It's true, Mazarine," he said aloud.  "Orlando booked for the sleeper
going East in thirty minutes; but the sleeper was for one only, and that
one was his mother, you old hippopotamus.  .  .  .  But I wonder where
she is--where the divine Louise is?  She hasn't levanted with her
Orlando.  .  .  .  Now, I wonder!" he added.

Then, with a sudden impulse, he dug heels into his horse's sides, and
galloped back towards Askatoon.  He wanted to see what would happen
before the express went East.




CHAPTER XIII

ORLANDO GIVES A WARNING

Askatoon had never lost its interest for Mazarine and his wife since the
day the Mayor had welcomed them at the railway station.  Askatoon was not
a petty town.  Its career had been chequered and interesting, and it had
given haven to a large number of uncommon people.  Unusual happenings had
been its portion ever since it had been the rail-head of the Great
Transcontinental Line, and many enterprising men, instead of moving on
with the railway, when it ceased to be the rail-head, settled there and
gave the place its character.  The town had never been lawless, although
some lawless people had sojourned there.

It was too busy a place to be fussing about little things, or tearing
people's characters to pieces, or gossiping even to the usual degree;
yet in its history it had never gossiped so much as it had done since
the Mazarines had come.

From the first the vast majority of folk had sided with Louise and
denounced Mazarine.  They knew well she had married too young to be self-
seeking or intriguing; and, in any case, no woman in Askatoon or yet in
the West, could have conceived of a girl marrying "the ancient one from
the jungle," as Burlingame had called him.

Burlingame could never have been on the side of the Ten Commandments
himself, even with a sure and certain hope of happiness on earth, and in
Heaven also, guaranteed to him.  Nothing could have condemned Mazarine so
utterly as the coalition between the "holy good people," as Burlingame
called them, and himself; and between the holy good people and himself
were many who in their secret hearts would never have shunned Louise if,
after the night on the prairie with Orlando, release had been found for
her in the Divorce Court.  Jonas Billings had put the matter in a
nutshell when he said:

"It ain't natural, them two, at Tralee.  For marrying her he ought to be
tarred and feathered, and for the way he treats her he ought to be let
loose in the ha'nts of the grizzlies.  What he done to that girl is a
crime ag'in' the law.  If there was any real spunk in the Methodists,
they'd spit him out like pus."

That was exactly what the Methodist body had decided to do on the very
day that Louise had fled from Tralee and the old man pursued her in the
wrong direction.  The Methodist body had determined to discipline
Mazarine, to eject him from their communion, because he had raised a whip
against his wife; because he had maltreated Li Choo; and because he had
used language unbecoming a Christian.  They had decided that Mazarine had
not shown the righteous anger of a Christian man, but of one who had
backslided, and who, in the words of Rigby the chemist, "Must be spewed
out of the mouth of the righteous into the dust of shame."

That was the situation when Joel Mazarine drove furiously into the town
and made for the railway station.  Men like Jonas Billings, who saw him,
and had the scent for sensation, passed the word on downtown, as it is
called, that something "was up" with Mazarine, and the railway station
was the place where what was up could be seen.  Therefore; a quarter of
an hour before the arrival of the express which was to carry Orlando
Guise's mother to her sick sister three hundred miles down the line,
a goodly number of citizens had gathered at the station-far more than
usually watched the entrance or exit of the express.

Mazarine's wagon and steaming horses were tied up outside the station,
and inside on the platform Moses-not-much, as Mazarine had been called by
Jonas Billings, marched up and down, his snaky little eyes blinking at
the doorway of the station reception-room.  People came and some of them
nodded to him derisively.  Some, with more hardihood, asked him if he was
going East; if he was expecting anyone; if he was seeing somebody off.

A good many asked him the last question, because, as the minutes had
passed, Burlingame had arrived.  He had also disclosed his great joke to
those who would carry it far and near, together with the news that Louise
had taken flight.  The last fact, however, was known to several people,
because more than one had seen the Young Doctor and Patsy Kernaghan
taking Louise to Nolan Doyle's ranch.

It was dusk.  The lamps of the station were being lighted five minutes
before the express arrived, and as the lights flared up, Orlando entered
the waiting-room of the station, with a lady on his arm, and presently
showed at the platform doorway, smiling and cheerful.  He did not blench
when Mazarine came towards him.  Mazarine had seen the flutter of a blue
skirt in the waiting-room, and his wife had worn blue that day!

Orlando saw the heavy, offensive figure of Mazarine making for him.  He,
however, appeared to take no notice, though he watched his outrageous
pursuer out of the corner of his eye, as he quietly gave orders to a
porter concerning a little heap of luggage.  When he had finished this,
he turned, as it were casually, to Mazarine.  Then he giggled in the face
of the Master of Tralee.  It was like the matador's waving of the scarlet
cloth in the face of the enraged bull.  Having thus relieved his
feelings, Orlando turned and walked to the door of the reception-room,
but was stopped by the old man rushing at him.  Swinging round, Orlando
almost filled the doorway.

"You devil's spawn," Mazarine almost shouted," get out of that doorway.
I want my wife.  You needn't try to hide her.  You thief!  You lecherous
circus rider!  Stand aside--leper!"

Orlando coolly stretched out his elbows till they touched the sides of
the door, and as the crowd pressed, he said to them mockingly:

"Get back, boys.  Give him air.  Can't you see he's gasping for breath."
Then he giggled again.

The old man looked round at the crowd, but he saw no sympathy--only
aversion and ridicule.  Suddenly he snatched his little black-bound Bible
from his pocket, and held it up.

"What does this Book say?" he thundered.  "It says that a wife shall
cleave unto her husband until death.  For the seducer and the betrayer
death is the portion."

The whistle of the incoming train was heard in the distance.

The old man was desperate.  It was clear he meant to assault Orlando.
"You will only take her away over my dead body," he ground out in his
passion.  "The Lord gave, and only the Lord shall take away."  He
gathered himself together for the attack.

Orlando waved a hand at him as one would at a troublesome child.  At that
instant, his mother stepped up behind him in the reception-room.

"Orlando," she said in her mincing, piping little voice, "Orlando, dear,
the train is coming.  Let me out.  I'm not afraid of that bad man.  I
want to catch my train."

Orlando stepped aside, and his mother passed through, to the
consternation of Mazarine, who fell back.  The old man now realized that
Burlingame had tricked him.  Laughter went up from the crowd.  They had
had a great show at no cost.

"'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again,' Mr. Mazarine!" called
someone from the crowd.

"It's the next train she's going by, old Moses-not-much," shouted a
friend of Jonas Billings.

"She's had enough of you, Joel!" sneered another mocker.

"Wouldn't you like to know where she is, yellow-lugs?" queried a fat
washerwoman.

For an instant Mazarine stood demused, and then, thrusting the Bible into
his pocket, he drew himself up in an effort of pride and defiance.

"Judases!  Jezebels!" he burst out at them all.  Then he lunged through
the doorway of the reception-room; but at the door opening on the street
his courage gave way, and hunched up like one in pain, he ran towards the
hitching-post where he had left his horses and wagon.  They were not
there.  With a groan which was also a malediction, he went up the street
like a wounded elephant, and made his way to the police-station through a
town which had no pity for him.

During the hour he remained in the town, Mazarine searched in vain for
his horses and wagon.  He looked everywhere except the shed behind the
Methodist Church.  It was there the two wags who had played the trick on
him had carefully hitched the horses, and presently they announced in
town that they did it because they knew Mazarine would want to go to the
prayer-meeting to lay his crimes before the Mercy Seat!

It was quite true that it was prayer-meeting night, and as the merciless
wags left the shed, the voice of brother Rigby the chemist was narrating
for the hundredth time the story of his conversion, when, as he said,
"the pains of hell gat hold of him."  Brother Rigby loved to relate the
tortures of the day when he was convicted of sin; but on this night his
ancient story seemed appropriate, as he had dealt with great severity on
the doings of the backslider, Joel Mazarine.

When the two wags returned to the front street of Askatoon, they were
just in time to see the second meeting of Orlando and Mazarine.  Mazarine
had not been able to find his horses at any hotel or livery stable, or in
any street.  It was at the moment, when, in his distraction, he had
decided to walk back to Tralee, that Orlando, driving up the street, saw
him.  Orlando reined in his horses dropped from his buggy and approached
him.

There was a look in Orlando's eyes which was a reflection from a remote
past, from ancestors who had settled their troubles with the first weapon
and the best opportunity to their hands.  "The furrin element in him," as
Jonas Billings called it, had been at full flood ever since he had bade
his mother good-bye.  A storm of anger had been raised in him.  As he
said to himself, he had had enough; he had been filled up to the chin by
the Mazarine business; and his impulsive youth wanted to end it by some
smashing act which would be sensational and decisive.  So it was that
Fate offered the opportunity, as he came up the front street of Askatoon,
and found himself face to face with Mazarine, over against the offices of
Burlingame.

"A word with you, Mr. Mazarine," he said, with the air of a man who wants
to ease his mind of its trouble by action.  "Back there at the station,
I kept my tongue and let you down easy enough, because my mother was
present.  She is old and sensitive, and she doesn't like to see her son
doing the dirty work every man must do some time or other, when there's
street cleaning to be done.  Now, let me tell you this: you've slandered
as good a girl, you've libelled as straight a wife, as the best man in
the world ever had.  You've made a public scandal of your private home.
You've treated the pure thing as if it were the foul thing; and yet, you
want to keep the pure thing that you treat like a foul thing, under your
rawhide whip, because it's young and beautiful and good.  You don't want
to save her soul"--he pointed to the Bible, which the old man had
snatched from his pocket again--"you don't want to save her soul.  You
don't care whether she's happy in this world or the next; what you want
is what you can see of her, for your life in this world only.
You want--"

The old man interrupted him with a savage emotion which Jonas Billings
said made him look like "a satyre."

"I want to save her from the wrath to come," he said.  "This here holy
Book gives me my rights.  It says, 'Thou shalt not steal,' and the
trouble I have comes from you that's stole my wife, that's put her soul
in jeopardy, robbed my home--"

"Robbed your home!" interjected Orlando quietly, but with a voice of
suppressed passion.  "Robbed your home!  Why, the other day you tried
to prevent her entering it.  You wanted to shut her out.  After she had
lived with you all those years, you believed she lied to you when she
told you the truth about that night on the prairie; but her innocence was
proved by one who was there all the time, and for shame's sake you had to
let her in.  But she couldn't stand it.  I don't wonder.  A lark wouldn't
be at home where a vulture roosted."

"And so the lark flies away to the cuckoo," snarled the old man, with
flecks of froth gathering at the corners of his mouth; for the sight of
this handsome, long-limbed youth enraged him.

"Give her back to me.  You know where she is," he persisted.  "You've got
her hid away.  That's why you've sent your mother East--so's she wouldn't
know, though from what I see, I shouldn't think it'd have made much
difference to her."

Exclamations broke from the crowd.  It was the wild West.  It was a
country where, not twenty years before, men did justice upon men without
the assistance of the law; and the West understood that the dark insult
just uttered would in days not far gone have meant death.  The onlookers
exclaimed, and then became silent, because a subtle sense of tragedy
suddenly smothered their voices.  Upon the silence there broke a little
giggling laugh.  It came from lips that were one in paleness with a face
grown stony.

"I ought to kill you," Orlando said quietly after a moment, yet scarcely
above a whisper.  "I ought to kill you, Mazarine, but that would only be
playing your game, for the law would get hold of me, and the girl that
has left you would be sorrowful, for she knows I love her, though I never
told her so.  She'd be sorry to see the law get at me.  She's going to be
mine some day, in the right way.  I'm not going behind your back to say
it; I'm announcing it to all and sundry.  I never did a thing to her that
couldn't have been seen by all the world, and I never said a thing to her
that couldn't be heard by all the world; but I hope she'll never go back
to you.  You've made a sewer for her to live in, not a home.  As I said,
I ought to kill you, but that would play your game, so I won't, not now.
But I tell you this, Mazarine: if I ever meet you again--and I'm sure to
do so--and you don't get off the road I'm travelling on, or the side-walk
I'm walking on, when I meet you or when I pass you, I'll let you have
what'll send you to hell, before you can wink twice.

"As for Louise--as for her: I don't know where she is, but I'll find her.
One thing is sure: if I see her, I'll tell her never to go back to you;
and she won't.  You've drunk at the waters of Canaan for the last time.
For a Christian you're pretty filthy.  Go and wash in the pool of Siloam
and be clean--damn you, Mazarine!"

With that he turned, almost unheeding the hands thrust out to grip his,
the voices murmuring approval.  In a moment he had swung his horses
round.  He did not go beyond ten yards, however, before someone, running
beside his wagon, whispered up to him: "She's out at Nolan Doyle's ranch.
She went with the Young Doctor and Patsy Kernaghan."

Behind, in the street, a young boy came running through the crowd and
shouting: "I know where they are!  I know where they are!"  He stopped
before Mazarine.  "Gimme half a dollar, and I'll tell you where your
horses are.  Gimme half a dollar.  Gimme half a dollar, and I'll tell
you."

An instant later, with the half-dollar in his hand, he said: "They're up
to the shed of the Meetin' House."

"Yes, go along up to the Meetin' House, Mr. Mazarine," said one of the
miscreants who had driven the horses there.  "They're holding a post-
mortem on you at the prayer meetin'.  They say you're dead in trespasses
and sins.  Get along, Joel."

The crowd started to follow him to the shed where his horses were, but
after a moment he turned on them and said:

"Ain't you heerd and seen enough?  Ain't there no law to protect a man?"

A hoe was leaning against a fence.  He saw it, and with sudden fury,
seizing it, swung it round his head as if to throw it into the crowd.  At
that moment a stalwart constable ran forward, raised a hand towards
Mazarine, and then addressed the crowd.

"We've had enough of this," he said.  "I'll lock up any man that goes a
step further towards the Meetin' House.  Where do you think you are?
This is Askatoon, the place of peace and happiness, and we're going to be
happy, if I have to lock up the hull lot of you.  I guess you can go
right on, Mr. Mazarine," he added.  "Go right on and git your wagon."

A moment later Mazarine was walking alone towards the Meeting House; but
no, not alone, for a hundred devils were with him.




CHAPTER XIV

FILION AND FIONA--ALSO PATSY KERNAGHAN

Patsy Kernaghan was in his element in the garden with which Norah Doyle
had decorated the brown bosom of the prairie.  It had verdant shrubs,
green turf, thick fringes of flowers, and one solitary elmtree in the
centre whose branches spread like a cedar of Lebanon.  In the moonlight
Patsy had the telling of a wonderful story to such an audience as he had
never had before in his life, and he had had them from Bundoran to
Limerick, from Limerick to the foothills of the Rockies.

The seance of love and legend had been Patsy's own idea.  At the supper-
table spread by Norah Doyle, in spite of the protests of her visitors--
the Young Doctor, Louise and Patsy--Nolan Doyle, who had a fine gift for
playful talk, had tried to keep the situation free from melodrama.  Yet
Patsy had observed that, in spite of all efforts, Louise's eyes now and
then filled with tears.  Also, he saw that her senses seemed alert for
something outside their little circle.  It was as though she expected
someone to arrive.  She was in that state which is not normal and yet not
abnormal--a kind of trance in which she did ordinary things in a natural
way, yet mechanically, without full consciousness.

There was no one at the table who did not realize what, and for whom,
she was waiting.  To her primitive spirit, now that she was in trouble
because of him, it seemed inevitable that Orlando should come.  One thing
was fixed in her mind: she would never return to Tralee or to the man
whose odious presence made her feel as though she was in a cage with an
animal.

Jonas Billings had called him "The ancient one from the jungle," and that
was how at last he appeared to her.  His arms and breast were thick with
hair; the hair on his face grew almost up to the eyes; the fingers of his
splayed hands were blunt and broad; and his hair was like a nest for
things of the jungle undergrowth.

Since she had been awakened, the memory of his hot breath in her face, of
his clumsy fevered embraces was a torment to her; for always in contrast
there were the fresh clean-shaven cheeks and chin of a young Berserker
with honest, wondering blue eyes, the curly head of a child, and body and
limbs like a young lean stag.

Orlando's touch was never either clammy or fevered.  She could recall
every time that he had touched her: when her fingers and his met on the
afternoon that Li Choo had thrown himself down the staircase with the
priceless porcelain; also the evening of the night spent on the prairie
when, after the accident, her hand had been linked into his arm; also
when he had clasped her fingers at their meeting in the morning.  On each
occasion she had felt a thrill like that of music--persuasive, living
vibrations passing to remote recesses of her being.

No nearer had she ever come to the man she loved, no nearer had he sought
to come.  Once, the evening after the night spent on the prairie, when
old Joel Mazarine had tried to make her pray and ask God's forgiveness,
and he had kissed her with the lips of hungry old age, she had suddenly
sat up in bed, her heart beating hard, every nerve palpitating, because
in imagination she had seen herself in Orlando's arms, with his lips
pressed to hers.

Poor neophyte in life's mysteries, having served as a slave at false
altars of which she did not even know the ritual, it was no wonder that,
after all she had suffered, she could not now bring herself into tune
with the commonplace intercourse of life.  Not that her friends utterly
failed to lure her into it.  She might well have been the victim of
hysterics, but she was only distrait, pensive and gently smiling, with
the smile of a good heart.  Smiling with her had ever taken the place of
conversation.  It was an apology for not speaking when she could not
speak what she felt.

Once during the meal she seemed to start slightly, as though she heard
a familiar sound, and for some minutes afterwards she seemed to be
listening, as it were, for a knock at the door, which did not come.
Immediately after that, Patsy, happy in sitting down to table with "the
quality"--for such they were to him--because he saw that Louise must be
distracted, and because he had seen story-telling, many a time, draw
people away from their troubles even more than music, said:

"Did you remember the day it is, anny of you?  Shure, it's St. Droid's
Day!  Aw, then, don't you know who he was?  You don't!  Well, well,
there's no tellin' how ignorant the wurruld can be.  St. Droid--aw, he
was a good man that brought the two children of Chief Diarmid and Queen
Moira together.  You didn't know about them two?  You niver h'ard of
Chief Diarmid and Queen Moira and their two lovely children?  Well, there
it is, there's no sayin' how ignorant y'are if y'are not Irish.  Aw no,
they wasn't man and wife.  Diarmid was a widower and Moira was a widow.
Diarmid's boy was Filion and Moira's girl was Fiona, an' the troubles of
the two'd make a book for ivry day of the week, an' two for Sunday.  An'
the way that St. Droid brought them two together  Aw, come outside in the
gardin where the moon's to the full, an' it's warm enough for anny man or
woman that's got a warm heart, an' I'll tell you the story of Filion and
Fiona.  You'll not be forgettin' the names of them now, will ye?  And
while I'm tellin' you, all the time you'll be thinkin' of St. Droid, for
it's his day.  It was nothin' till him, St. Droid, that he lived in a
cave, you understan'?  Wasn't his face like the sun comin' up over the
lake at Ballinhoe in the month of June!  Well, it doesn't matter if
you've niver seen Ballinhoe--you understan' what I mean.  Well, then come
out intil the gardin, darlins.  Shure, I'm achin' to tell you the story--
as fine a love-story as iver was told to man and woman."

So it was that Louise with eyes alight-for Patsy had a voice that could
stir imagination in the dullest--so it was that Louise and the others
went out into the moonlit garden, the prairie around them like an endless
waste of sea.  There they placed themselves in a half circle around
Patsy, who sat upon a little bench, with his back to the big spreading
elm-tree, which by some special gift had grown alone over the myriad
years, defying storm and winter's frost, until it seemed to have an
honoured permanence, as stable as the prairie earth itself.

As they seated themselves, there was renewed in Louise the feeling she
had at supper-time, when she had imagined--or had her senses accurately
divined? that Orlando was near, so sure had been the sensation that she
had expected Orlando to enter the room where they sat.  Now it was on her
again, and somehow she felt him there with her.  He was Filion and she
was Fiona.

Since the day she had first seen Orlando, she had awakened to life's
realities.  There had grown in her an alertness and a delicate sense of
things, which, though natural to one born with a soul that cared little
for sordid things, was not common, except in Celtic circles where the
unseen thing is more real than the seen; where gold and precious stones
are only valued in so far as they can purchase freedom, dreams and
desire.

Louise had not been thrilled without cause.  Orlando, the real material
Orlando, had driven out to Nolan Doyle's ranch, but having come, could
not at first bring himself to enter.  Something in him kept saying that
it was not fair to her; kept admonishing him to let things take their
course; that now was not the time to see her; that it might place her in
a false position.  Blameless though she was, she might be blamed by the
world, if he and she, on the night that she fled from Joel Mazarine
should meet, and, above all, meet alone--and what was the good of meeting
at all, if they did not meet alone!  What could two voiceless people say
to each other, people who only spoke with their hearts and souls, when
others were staring at them, watching every act, listening for every
word.  His better sense kept telling him to go back to Slow Down Ranch.

But there she was inside Nolan Doyle's house, and he had come
deliberately to see her.

He stood outside in the garden near the great spreading elm-tree, torn by
a sense of duty and a sense of desire; but the desire was to let her see
by his presence that he would be a tower of strength to her, no matter
what happened.  It was not the desire which had possessed him whom Patsy
Kernaghan had called the keeper of the "zoolyogical" garden.

He had just made up his mind that courage was the right thing: that he
must see her in the presence of others for one minute, whatever the
issue, when she came out with Patsy Kernaghan, the Young Doctor, and
Norah and Nolan Doyle.  None saw him, and, as they seated themselves, he
stepped noiselessly under the spreading branches of the elm-tree.  He
would not speak to them yet; he would wait.  In the shade made by the
drooping branches he could not be seen, yet he could hear and see all.

There was silence for a moment, and then Patsy began the tale of St.
Droid--"whoever he was," as Patsy said to himself; for he was going to
make up out of his head this story of St. Droid and St. Droid's Day, and
Queen Moira, Filion and Fiona.  It was a bold idea, but it gave Patsy the
opportunity of his life.

His description of Black Brian, the rich, ruthless King, to whom Queen
Moira gave her daughter Fiona, despite the girl's bitter sorrow, was a
masterpiece.  It was modelled on Joel Mazarine.  It was the behemoth
transferred to Ireland, to the cromlechs and castles, to the causeways,
the caves, and the stony hillsides; to the bogs and the quicksands and
the Little Men; but it could not be recognized as a portrait, though
everyone felt how wonderful it was that a legend of a thousand years
should be so close to the life of Askatoon.

Patsy had no knowledge of what the mother of Louise was like, but the
likeness between her cruel, material, selfish spirit and Queen Moira, in
the sacrifice of their offspring, provoked the admiration of the Young
Doctor, whose philosophical mind had soon discovered that Patsy was
making up the tale.

That did not matter.  Having got the thing started, Patsy gave reins to
his imagination; and storm, terror, danger, and the capture of Fiona by
Filion, from Black Brian's castle in the hills, was told with primitive
force and passion.  But the most wonderful part of the story described
how a strange dwarfed Little Man came out of the hills in the East,
across the land, to the Western fastness of Black Brian, and there slew
that evil man, because of an ancient feud--slew him in a situation of
great indignity, and left him lying on the sands for the tide to wash him
out to the deep and hungry sea.  Even here Patsy had his inspiration from
real life; and yet he disguised it all so well that no one except the
Young Doctor even imagined what he meant.

Under the tree Orlando listened with strained attention, absorbed and, at
times, almost overcome.  His long sigh of relief was joined to the sighs
of the others when Patsy finished.  The Young Doctor rose to go, and the
others rose also.

"That's a wonderful story, Patsy," said the Young Doctor to him; and he
added quizzically: "You tell it so well because you've told it so often
before, I suppose?"

"Aw, well, that's it, I expect," answered the Irishman coolly.

"I thought so," responded the Young Doctor.  "Now, how many times do you
think you've told that story before, Patsy?"

"About a hundred, I should think; or no--I should think about two hundred
times," answered Patsy shamelessly.

"I thought so," said the Young Doctor, but before turning to go into the
house, he leaned and whispered in his ear: "Patsy, you're the most
beautiful liar that ever come out of Ireland."

"Aw, Doctor dear!" said Patsy softly.

They all moved towards the house, save Louise.  "Please, I want to stay
behind a minute or two," she said, as she held out a hand to the Young
Doctor.  "Don't wait for me.  I want to be alone a little while."  Once
more the Young Doctor felt the trembling appeal of her palm as on the
first day they met, and he gripped her hand warmly.

"It will all come right.  Good-night, my dear," he said cheerfully.
"Have a good sleep on it."

Louise remained in the garden alone, the moon shining on her face lifted
to the sky.  For a moment she stood so, wrapped in the peace of the
night, but her body was almost panting from the thrill of the legend
which Patsy Kernaghan had told.  As he had meant it to do, it gave her
hope; although before her eyes was the picture that Patsy had drawn of
Black Brian with his great sword beside him lying on the sands, waiting
for the hungry sea to claim him.

Presently there stole through the warm air of the night the sound of her
own name.  She did not start.  It seemed to her part of the dream in
which she was.  Her hand went to her heart, however.

Again in Orlando's voice came the word "Louise," a little louder now.
She turned towards the tree, and there beside it stood Orlando.

For an instant there was a sense of unreality, of ghostliness, and then
she gave a little cry of pain and joy.  As she ran towards him, with
sudden impulse, his arms spread out and he caught her to his breast.

His lips swept her hair.  "Louise!  Louise!" he whispered passionately.
For an instant they stood so, and then he gently pressed her away from
him.

"I had to come," he said.  "I want you to know that whatever happens, you
may depend on me.  When you call, I will come.  I must go now.  For your
sake I must not stay.  I had to see you, I had to tell you what I had
never told you."

"You've always told me," she murmured.

He stretched out his hand to clasp hers.  He did not dare to open his
arms again.  The lips which he had never kissed were very near, and ah,
so sweet!  She must not come to him now.

One swift clasp of the hand, and then he vaulted over the fence and was
gone.  A few moments afterwards she heard the rumble of his wagon on the
prairie--he had tied up his horses some distance from the house.

As the Young Doctor drove homeward with Patsy Kernaghan, he also heard
the rumble of the wagon not far in front of him.  Then he began to wonder
why Louise had waited behind in the garden.  He put the thought away from
him, however.  There was no deceit in Louise; he was sure of that.




CHAPTER XV

OUTWARD BOUND

Joel Mazarine did not take the trail to Tralee immediately after he found
his wagon and horses in the shed of the Methodist Meeting House.  As he
drove through the main street of Askatoon again, his lawyer--Burlingame's
rival--waved a hand towards him in greeting.  An idea suddenly possessed
the old man, and he stopped the horses and beckoned.

"Get in and come to your office with me," he said to the lawyer.
"There's some business to do right off."

The unpopularity of a client in no way affects a lawyer.  Indeed, the
most notorious criminal is the greatest legal advertisement, and the
fortunate part of the business is that no lawyer is ever identified with
the morals, crimes or virtues of his client, yet has particular advantage
from his crimes.  So it was that Mazarine's lawyer enjoyed the public
attention given to his drive through the town with Mazarine.  He could
hear this man say, "Hello, what's up!" or another remark that the Law
and the Gospel were out for war.

Just as they were about to enter the office, however, Jonas Billings, who
had a faculty for being everywhere at the interesting moment, said, so as
to be heard by Mazarine and his lawyer, and all others standing near.

"Goin' to leave his property away from his wife!  Makin' a new will--eh?
That's it, stamp on a girl when she's down!  When you can't win the
woman, keep the cash.  Woe is me, Willy, but the wild one rageth!"

Jonas' drawling, nasal, high-pitched sarcasm reached Mazarine's ears and
stung him.  He lurched round, and with beady eyes blinking with malice,
said roughly: "The fool is known by his folly."

"You don't need to label yourself, Mr. Mazarine," retorted Jonas with a
grin.

The crowd laughed in approval.  The loose lower lip of the Master of
Tralee quivered.  The leviathan was being tortured by the little sharks.

Presently the door of the lawyer's office slammed on the street, and
Mazarine proceeded to make a new will, which should leave everything away
from Louise.  After he had slowly dictated the terms of the will, with a
glutinous solemnity he said:

"There; that's what comes of breaking the laws of God and man.  That's
what a woman loses who doesn't do her duty by the man that can give her
everything, and that's give her everything, while she plays the Jezebel."

"I'll complete this for you, and you can sign it now," remarked the
lawyer evasively, not without shrinking; "but it won't stand as it is,
or as you want it to stand, because Mrs. Mazarine has her legal claims in
spite of it!  She's got a wife's dower-rights according to the law.
That's one-third of your property.  It's the law of the land, and you
can't sign it away from her, Mr. Mazarine."

The old man's face darkened still more; his crooked fingers twisted in
his beard.

"I see you forgot that," added the lawyer.  "There's only one way to
dispossess her, and that's to put her through Divorce--if you think you
can.  Of course this document'll stand as far as it goes, and it's
perfectly legal, but it isn't what you intend, and she'd get her one-
third in spite of it."

"I'll come back to-morrow," said the old man, rising to his feet.  "You
make it out, and I'll come back and sign it to-morrow.  I'll make a sure
thing of so much, anyway.  The divorce'll settle the rest.  You have it
ready at noon to-morrow, and you can start divorce proceedings to-morrow
too.  There's plenty of evidence.  She run away from me to go to him.
She stayed with him a whole night on the prairie.  I want the divorce,
and I can get the evidence.  Everybody knows.  This is the Lord's
business, and I mean to see it through.  Shame has come to the house of a
servant of the Lord, and there must be purging.  In the days of David she
would have been stoned to death, and not so far back as that, either."

A moment afterwards he was gone, slamming the door behind him.  His blood
was up-a turgid, angry flood almost bursting his veins.  He now made his
way to the house of the Methodist minister.  There he announced that if
he was disciplined at Quarterly Meeting, as was talked about in the
streets, he would go to law against every class-leader for defamation of
character.

By the time this was done the evening was well advanced.  He did not
leave Askatoon until the moment which coincided with that in which
Orlando left Nolan Doyle's garden and took the trail to Slow Down Ranch.
Orlando would strike the trail from Askatoon to Tralee at a point where
another trail also joined.

Mazarine drove fast through the town, as though eager to put it behind
him, but when he reached the trail on the prairie he slackened his pace,
and drove steadily homewards, lost in the darkest reflections he had ever
known; and that was saying much.  The reins lay loose in his fingers, and
he became so absorbed that he was conscious of nothing save movement.

The heart of Black Brian, the King, of whom Patsy Kernaghan told his
mythical story in Nolan Doyle's garden, had never housed more repulsive
thoughts than were in Mazarine's heart in this unfortunate hour of his
own making.  No single feeling of kindness was in his spirit.  He heard
nothing, was conscious of nothing, save his own grim, fantastic
imaginings.

A jealousy and hatred as terrible as ever possessed a man were on him.
An egregious self-will, a dreadful spirit of unholy old age in him, was
turned hatefully upon the youth long since gone from himself--the youth
which, in its wild, innocent ardours, had brought two young people
together, one of them his own captive for years.

The peace of the prairie, the shining, infant moon, the kindly darkness,
were all at variance with the soul of the man, whose only possession was
what money could buy; and what money had bought in the way of human flesh
and blood, beauty and sweet youth he had not been able to hold.  To his
mind, what was the good of having riches and power, if you could not also
have love, licence and the loot of the conqueror!

He had wrestled with the Lord in prayer; he had been a class-leader
and a lay-preacher; he had exhorted and denounced; he had pleaded and
proscribed; yet never in all his days of professed religion had a heart
for others really moved Joel Mazarine.

He had given now and then of gold and silver, because of the glow of mind
which the upraised hands of admiration brought him, mistaking it for the
real thing; but his life had been barren because it had not emptied
itself for others, at any time, or anywhere.

He had been a professed Christian, not because of Olivet, but because of
Sinai.  It was the stormy authority of the sword of the Lord of Gideon of
the Old Testament which had drawn him into the fold of religion.  It was
some strain of heredity, his upbringing, the life into which he was born,
pious, pedantic and preposterously prayerful, which had made him a
professional Christian, as he was a professional farmer, rancher and
money-maker.  For such a man there never could be peace.

In his own world of wanton inhumanity, oblivious of all except his
torturing thoughts, he did not know that, as he neared the Cross Trails
on his way homewards, something shadowy, stooping, sprang up from the
roadside and slip-slopped after his wagon--slip-slopped--slip-slopped--
catching the thud of the horses' hoofs, and making its footsteps
coincide.

All at once the shadowy figure swung itself up softly and remained for an
instant, half-kneeling, in the body of the wagon.  Then suddenly,
noiselessly, it rose up, leaned over the absorbed Joel Mazarine, and with
long, hooked, steely fingers caught the throat of the Master of Tralee
under the grayish beard.  They clenched there with a power like that of
three men; for this was the kind of grip which, far away in the country
of the Yang-tse-kiang, Li Choo had learned in the days when he had made
youth a thing to be remembered.

No convulsive effort on the part of the victim could loosen that terrible
grip; but the horses, responding to the first jerk of the reins following
the attack, stood still, while a human soul was being wrenched out of the
world behind them.

No word was spoken.  From the moment the fingers clutched his throat Joel
Mazarine could not speak, and Li Choo did his swift work in grim and
ghastly silence.

It did not take long.  When the vain struggles had ceased and the fingers
were loosened, Li Choo's tongue clucked in his mouth, once, twice,
thrice; and that was all.  It was a ghastly sort of mirth, and it had in
it a multitude of things.  Among them was vengeance and wild justice, and
the thing that comes down through innumerable years in the Oriental mind
--that the East is greater than the West; that now and then the East must
prove itself against the West with all the cruelty of the world's prime.

For a moment Li Choo stood and looked at the motionless figure, with the
head fallen on the breast; then he put the reins carefully in the hands
of the dead man, placed the fallen hat on his head, climbed down from the
wagon, patted a horse as he slip-slopped by, and disappeared towards
Tralee into the night, leaving what was left of Joel Mazarine in his
wagon at the crossing of the trails.

As Li Choo stole swiftly away, he met two other figures, silent and
shadowy, and somehow strangely unreal, like his own.  After a moment's
whisperings, they all three turned their faces again towards Tralee.

Once they stopped and listened.  There was the sound of wagons.  One was
coming from the north--that is, from the direction of Tralee; the other
was coming from the south-east-that is, Nolan Doyle's ranch.

Li Choo's tongue clucked in his mouth; then he made an exclamation in
Chinese, at which the others clucked also, and then they moved on again.




CHAPTER XVI

THE CROSS TRAILS

Like Joel Mazarine on his journey from Askatoon, Orlando, on his journey
from Nolan Doyle's ranch, was absorbed, but his reflections were as
different from those of the Master of Tralee as sunrise is from midnight;
indeed, so bright was the light within Orlando's spirit that the very
prairie around him seemed aflame.  The moment with Louise in the garden
lighted by the dim moon, the passing instant of perfect understanding,
the touch of her hair upon his lips, her supple form yielding to his as
he clasped her in his arms, had dropped like a curtain between him and
the fateful episode in the main street of Askatoon.

That wonderful elation of youth on its first excursion into perfumed
meads of Love possessed him.  He had never had flutterings of the heart
for any woman until his eyes met the eyes of Louise at their first
meeting, and a new world had been opened up to him.  He had been as naive
and native a human being with all his apparent foppishness, as had ever
moved among men.  What seemed his vanity had nothing to do with thoughts
of womankind.  It had been a decorative sense come honestly from
picturesque forebears, and indeed from his own mother.

In truth, until the day he had met Louise, or rather until the day of the
broncho-busting, and the fateful night on the prairie, he had never grown
up.  He was wise with the wisdom of a child--sheer instinct, rightness
of mind, real decision of character.  His giggling laugh had been the
undisciplined simplicity of the child, which, when he had reached
manhood, had never been formalized by conventions.  Something indefinite
had marked him until Louise had come, and now he was definite,
determined, alive with a new feeling which made his spirit sing--his
spirit and his lips; for, as he came from Nolan Doyle's ranch to the
Cross Trails, he kept humming to himself, between moments of silence in
which he visualized Louise in a hundred attitudes, as he had seen her.
There had come to him, without the asking even, that which Joel Mazarine,
had he been as rich as any man alive or dead, could not have bought.
That was why he hummed to himself in happiness.

Youth answering to youth had claimed its own; love springing from the
dawn, brave and bright-eyed, had waved its wand towards that good country
called Home.  Never from the first had any thought come into the minds of
either of these two that was not linked with the idea of home.  Nothing
of the jungle had been in their thoughts, though they had been tempted,
and love and the moment's despair had stung them to take revenge in each
other's arms; yet they had kept the narrow path.  There was in their love
something primeval, that belonged to the beginning of the world.

Orlando had almost reached the Cross Trails before he saw Mazarine's
wagon standing in the way.  At first he did not recognize the horses, and
he called to the driver sitting motionless to move aside.  He thought it
to be some drunken ranchman.

Presently, however, coming nearer, he recognized the horses and the man.
Standing up, Orlando was about to call out again in peremptory tones,
when, suddenly, the spirit of death touched his senses, and his heart
stood still for an instant.

As he looked at the motionless figure, he was only subconsciously aware
of the thud of horses' hoofs coming down one of the side-trails.
Springing to the ground, he approached Mazarine's wagon.

The horses neighed; it was a curious, lonely sound.  For a moment he
stood with his hand on the wheel looking at the still figure; then he
reached out and touched Mazarine's knee.

"Hi, there!" he said.

There was no reply.  He mounted the wagon, touched the dead man's
shoulder, and then, with one hand, loosened the waistcoat and felt the
heart.  It was still.  He examined the body.  There was no wound.  He
peered into the face, and saw the distortion there.  "Dead--dead!" he
said in an awed voice.

The husband of Louise was dead.  How he died, in one sense, did not
matter.  Louise's husband was dead; he would torture her no more.  Louise
was free!

Slowly he got down from the wagon, vaguely wondering what to do, so had
the tragedy confused his brain for the moment.  As he did so, he was
conscious of another wagon and horses a few yards away.

"Who goes there?" called the voice of the newcomer.

"A friend," answered Orlando mechanically.  Presently the new-comer
sprang down from his wagon and came over to Orlando.

"What is it, Mr. Guise?" he asked.  "What's the trouble?  .  .  .  Who's
that?" he added, pointing to the dead body.

"It's Mazarine.  He's dead," answered Orlando quietly.

"Oh, good God!" said the other.

He was an insurance agent of the town of Askatoon, who, that very
evening, had heard Orlando threaten the Master of Tralee--that if ever he
passed him or met him, and Mazarine did not get out of the way, it would
be the worse for him.  Well, here in the trail were Orlando and Mazarine
--and Mazarine was dead!

"Good God!" the new-comer repeated.  Scarsdale was his name.

Then Orlando explained.  "It's not what you think," he said.  Then he
told the story--such as there was to tell--of what had happened during
the last few moments.

Scarsdale climbed up into the wagon, struck a light, looked at the body
of Mazarine, at his face, and then lifted up the beard and examined the
neck.  There were finger-marks in the flesh.

"So, that's it," he said.  "Strangled!  He seems to have took it easy,
sittin' there like that," he added as he climbed down.

"I don't understand it," remarked Orlando.  "As you say, it's weird, his
sitting there like that with the reins in his hands.  I don't understand
it!"

"I saw you getting down from the wagon," remarked Scarsdale meaningly.

"Say, do you really believe--?" began Orlando without agitation, but
with a sudden sense of his own false position.

"It ain't a matter of belief," the other declared.  "If there's an
inquest, I've got to tell what I've seen.  You know that, don't you?"

"That's all right," replied Orlando.  "You've got to tell what you've
seen, and so have I.  I guess the truth will out.  Come, let's move him
on to Tralee.  We'll lay him down in the bottom of the wagon, and I'll
lead his horses with a halter.  .  .  .  No," he added, changing his
mind, "you lead my horses, and I'll drive him home."

A moment afterwards, as the procession made its way to Tralee, Scarsdale
said to himself:

"He must have nerves like iron to drive Mazarine home, if he killed him.
Well, he's got them, and still they call him Giggles as if he was a silly
girl!"




CHAPTER XVII

THE SUPERIOR MAN

Students of life have noticed constantly that moral distinctions are not
matters of principle but of certain peremptory rules found on nice
calculations of the social mind.  In the field of crime, responsibility
is most often calculated, not upon the crime itself, but upon how the
thing is done.

In Askatoon, no one would have been greatly shocked if, when Orlando
Guise and Joel Mazarine met at the railway-station or in the main street,
Orlando had killed Mazarine.

Mazarine would have been dead in either case; and he would have been
killed by another hand in either case; but the attitude of the public
would not have been the same in either case.  The public would have
considered the killing of Mazarine before the eyes of the world as
justifiable homicide; its dislike of the man would have induced it to
add the word justifiable.

But that Joel Mazarine should be killed by night without an audience,
secretly--however righteously--shocked the people of Askatoon.

Had they seen the thing done, there would have been sensation, but no
mystery; but night, secrecy, distance, mystery, all begot, not a reaction
in Mazarine's favour, but a protest against the thing being done under
cover, as it were, unhelped by popular observation.  Also, to the
Askatoon mind, that one man should kill another in open quarrel was
courageous, or might be courageous,--but for one man to kill another,
whoever that other was, in a hidden way, was a barbarian business.

It seemed impossible to have any doubt as to who killed the man, though
Orlando had not waited a moment after the body had been brought to
Tralee, but had gone straight to the police, and told what had happened,
so far as he knew it.  He stated the exact facts.

The insurance man, Scarsdale, would not open his mouth until the inquest,
which took place on the afternoon after the crime had been committed.  It
was held at Tralee.  Great crowds surrounded the house, but only a few
found entrance to the inquest room.

Immediately on opening the inquest, Orlando was called to tell his story.
Every eye was fixed upon him intently; every ear was strained as he
described his coming upon the isolated wagon and the dead man with the
reins in his hands.  It is hard to say if all believed his story, but the
Coroner did, and Burlingame, his lawyer, also did.

Burlingame was present, not to defend Orlando, because it was not a
trial, but to watch his interests in the face of staggering
circumstantial evidence.  To Burlingame's mind Orlando was not the man to
kill another by strangling him to death.  It was not in keeping with his
character.  It was too aboriginal.

The Coroner believed the story solely because Orlando's frankness and
straightforwardness filled him with confidence.  Also men of rude sense,
like Jonas Billings, were willing to take bets, five to one, that Orlando
was innocent.

The Young Doctor had not an instant's doubt, but he could not at first
fix his suspicions in a likely quarter.  He had examined the body, and
there were no marks save bruises at the throat.  In his evidence he said
that enormous strength of hands had been necessary to kill so quickly,
for it was clear the attack was so overpowering that there was little
struggle.

The Coroner here interposed a question as to whether it would have been
possible for anyone but a man to commit the crime.  At his words
everybody moved impatiently.  It was certain he was referring to the
absent wife.  The idea of Louise committing such a crime, or being able
to commit it, was ridiculous.  The Coroner presently stated that he had
only asked the question so as to remove this possibility from
consideration.

The Young Doctor immediately said that probably no woman in the
hemisphere could have committed the crime, which needed enormous strength
of hands.

The Coroner looked round the room.  "The widow, Mrs. Mazarine, is not
here?" he said questioningly.

Nolan Doyle interposed.  "Mrs. Mazarine is at my ranch.  She came there
yesterday evening at eight o'clock and remained with my wife and myself
until twelve o'clock.  The murder was committed before twelve o'clock.
Mrs. Mazarine does not even know that her husband is dead.  She is not
well to-day, and we have kept the knowledge from her."

"Is she under medical care?" asked the Coroner.  Nolan Doyle nodded
towards the Young Doctor, who said: "I saw Mrs. Mazarine at the house of
Mr. Doyle last evening between the hours of eight and ten o'clock.  To-
day at noon also I visited her.  She has a slight illness, and is not fit
to take part in these proceedings."

At this point, Scarsdale, who had come upon Orlando and the dead man at
the Cross Trails the night before, told his story.  He did it with
evident reluctance.

He spoke with hesitation, yet firmly and straightforwardly.  He described
how he saw Orlando climb down from the wagon where the dead man was.  He
added, however, that he had seen no struggle of any kind, though he had
seen Orlando close to the corpse.  Questioned by the Coroner, he
described the scenes between Orlando and Mazarine in the main street of
Askatoon and at the railway-station, both of which he had seen.  He
repeated Orlando's threat to Mazarine.

He was pressed as to whether Orlando showed agitation at the Cross
Trails.  He replied that Orlando seemed stunned but not agitated.

He was asked whether Orlando had shown the greater agitation at the Cross
Trails or in the town when he threatened Mazarine.  The answer was that
he showed agitation only in the town.  He was asked to repeat what
Orlando had said to him.  This he did accurately.

He was then asked by counsel whether he had arrived at any conclusion,
when at the Cross Trails or afterwards, as to who committed the crime;
but the Coroner would not permit the question.  The Coroner added that it
was only the duty of the witness to state what he had seen.  Opinions
were not permissible as evidence.  The facts were in possession of the
Court, and the Court could form its own judgment.

It was clear to everyone that the jury must return a verdict of wilful
murder, and it was equally clear that the evidence was sufficient to fix
suspicion upon Orlando, which must lead to his arrest.  Two constables
were in close attendance, and were ready to take charge of the man who,
above all others, or so it was thought, had most reason to wish Mazarine
out of the way.  Indeed, Orlando had resigned himself to the situation,
having realized how all the evidence was against him.

Recalling Orlando, the Coroner asked if it was the case that the death of
Mazarine might be an advantage to him in any way.  Orlando replied that
it might be an advantage to him, but he was not sure.  He added, however,
that if, as the Coroner seemed to suggest, he himself was under
suspicion, it ought to appear to all that to have murdered Mazarine in
the circumstances would have put in jeopardy any possible advantage.
That seemed logical enough, but it was presently pointed out to the
Coroner that the same consideration had existed when Orlando had
threatened Mazarine in the streets of Askatoon.

Presently the Coroner said: "There's a half-breed woman and a Chinaman,
servants of the late Mr. Mazarine.  Have the woman called."

It was at this moment that the Young Doctor and Orlando also were
suddenly seized with a suspicion of their own.  Orlando remembered how
Mazarine had horsewhipped and maltreated Li Choo.  The Young Doctor fixed
his eyes intently on the body, and presently went to it again, raised the
beard and looked at the neck.  Coming back to his place, he nodded to
himself.  He had a clue.  Now he understood about the enormous strength
which had killed Mazarine practically without a struggle.  He had noticed
more than once the sinewy fingers of the Chinaman.  As the inquest went
on, he had again and again looked at the hands and arms of Orlando, and
it had seemed impossible that, strong as he was, his fingers had the
particular strength which could have done this thing.

The Coroner stood waiting for Rada to come, when suddenly the door opened
and a Chinaman entered--one of the two who had appeared so strangely on
the scene the day before.  He advanced to the Coroner with both hands
loosely hanging in the great sleeves of his blue padded coat, his eyes
blinking slowly underneath the brown forehead and the little black
skullcap, and after making salutation with his arms, in curious,
monotonous English with a quaint accent he said:

"Li Choo--Li Choo--he speak.  He have to say.  He send."

Holding up a piece of paper, he handed it to the Coroner and then stood
blinking and immobile.

A few moments afterwards, the Coroner said: "I have received this note
from Li Choo the Chinaman, sometime employed by the deceased Joel
Mazarine.  I will read it to you."  Slowly he read:

"I say gloddam.  That Orlando he not kill Mazaline.  I say gloddam
Mazaline.  That Mazaline he Chlistian.  He says Chlist his brother.
Chlist not save him when Li Choo's fingers had Mazaline's thloat.  That
gloddam Mazaline I kill.  That Mazaline kicked me, hit me with whip;
where he kick, I sick all time.  I not sleep no more since then.  That
Louise, it no good she stay with Mazaline.  Confucius speak like this:
'Young woman go to young man; young bird is for green leaves, not dry
branch.' That Louise good woman; that Orlando hell-fellow good.  I kill
Mazaline--gloddam, with my hands I kill.  You want know all why Li Choo
kill?  You want kill Li Choo?  You come!"

As the Coroner stopped reading, amid gasps of excitement, the Chinaman
who had brought the notewith brown skin polished like a kettle,
expressionless, save for the twinkling mystery of the brown eyesmade
three motions of obeisance up and down with his hands clasped in the
great sleeves, and then said:

"He not come you; you come him.  He gleat man.  He speak all--come.  I
show where."

"Where is he?" asked the Coroner.

The Chinaman did not reply for a moment.  Then he said: "He sacrifice
before you take him.  He gleat man--come."  He slip-slopped towards the
door as though confident he would be followed.

Two minutes afterwards the Coroner, Orlando, the Young Doctor, Nolan
Doyle and the rest stood at the low doorway of what looked like a great
grave.  It was, however, a big root-house used for storing vegetables in
the winter-time.  It had not been used since Mazarine arrived at Tralee.
Into this place, nor far from the house, Li Choo and his two fellow
countrymen had gone the day before, when Mazarine, in his rage, had come
forth with the horsewhip to punish the "Chinky," as Li Choo was
familiarly known on the ranch.

As they arrived at the vault-like place in the ground, which would hold
many tons of roots, another Chinaman came to the doorway.  He was one of
the two who, in their sudden coming and going, had seemed like magic
people to Mazarine the day before.  He made upward and downward motions
of respect with clasped hands in the blue sleeves, and presently, in
perfect English, he said:

"In one minute Li Choo will receive you.  It is the moment of sacrifice.
You wish him to die for the death of Mazarine.  So be it.  It is right
for him to die.  You will hang him; that is your law.  He will not
prevent you.  He has told the truth, but he is making the sacrifice.
When that is done you will enter and take him to prison."

The two constables standing beside the Coroner made a move forward, as
though to show they meant to enforce the law without any palaver.

The Chinaman raised the palms of both hands at them.  "Not yet," he said.
Then he looked at the Coroner.  "You are master.  Will you not prevent
them?"

The Coroner motioned the constables back.  "All right," he said.  "You
seem to speak good English."

"I come from England-from Oxford University," answered the Chinaman with
dignity.  "I have learned English for many years.  I am the son of Duke
Ki.  I came to see my uncle, the brother of Duke Ki.  He is making
sacrifice before you take him."

"Well, I'm blasted," said Jonas Billings from the crowd.  "Chinese dukes,
eh!  What's it all about?"  "Reg'lar hocus-pocus," remarked the vagabond
brother of Rigby the chemist.

At that moment little coloured lights suddenly showed in the darkness of
the root-house, and there was the tinkling of a bell.  Then a voice
seemed calling, but softly, with a long, monotonous, thrilling note.

"Many may not come," said the Chinaman at the door to the Coroner, as he
turned and entered the low doorway.

A minute afterwards the two constables held back the crowd from the
doorway of the root-house, from the threshold of which a few wooden steps
descended to the ground inside.

A strange sight greeted the eyes of those permitted to enter.

The root-house had been transformed.  What had been a semi-underground
place composed of scantlings, branches of trees and mother earth, with a
kind of vaulted roof, had been made into a sort of Chinese temple.  All
round the walls were hung curtains of black and yellow, decorated with
dragons in gold, and above, suspended by cords at the four corners, was a
rug or banner of white ornamented with a great tortoise--the sacred
animal of Chinese religion--with gold eyes and claws.  All round the side
of the room were set coloured lights, shaded and dim.  Coming from the
bright outer sunlight, the place in its shadowed state seemed half-
sepulchral.

When the Coroner, Orlando, the Young Doctor and the others had accustomed
themselves to the dimness, they saw at the end of the chamber--for such,
in effect, it had been made with its trappings and decorations--a figure
seated upon the ground.  Near by the figure, on either hand, there were
standards bearing banners, and the staffs holding the banners were, bound
in white silk, with long streamers hanging down.  Half enclosing the
banners were fanlike screens.  Along the walls also were flags with
toothed edges.  The figure was seated on a mat of fine bamboo in the
midst of this strange scheme of decoration.  Behind him, and drawn
straight across the chamber, was a sheet of fine white cloth, embroidered
with strange designs.  He was clothed in a rich jacket of blue, and a
pair of sandal-like shoes was placed neatly in front of the bamboo mat.
On either side and in front of all, raised a little from the ground, were
bowls or calabashes containing fruit, grain and dried and pickled meats.
It was all orderly, circumspect, weird, and even stately though the place
was small.  Finally, in front of the motionless figure was a tiny brazier
in which was a small fire.

Before the spectators had taken in the whole picture, the Chinaman who
had entered with them came and stood on the right of the space occupied
by the mat, near to the banners and the screens, and under a yellow light
which hung from the vaulted roof.

The figure on the fine bamboo mat was Li Choo, but not the Li Choo which
Tralee and Askatoon had known.  He was seated with legs crossed in
Oriental fashion and with head slightly bowed.  His face was calm and
dignified.  It had an impassiveness which made an interminable distance
between him and those who had till now looked upon him as a poor Chinky,
doing a roustabout's work on a ranch, the handy-man, the Jack-of-all-
trades.  Yet in spite of the menial work which he had done, it was now to
be seen that the despised Li Choo had still lived his own life, removed
by centuries and innumerable leagues from his daily slavery.

As they looked at him, brooding, immobile, strange, he lifted his head,
and the excessive brightness of his black eyes struck with a sense of awe
all who saw.  It was absurd that Li Choo, the hireling, "Yellowphiz," as
he had also been called, should here command a situation with the
authority of one who ruled.

Presently he spoke, not in broken English, but in Chinese.  It was
interpreted by the Chinaman standing on the right by the screens, in well
cadenced, cultured English.

"I have to tell you," said Li Choo--the other's voice repeated the words
after him--"that I am the son of greatness, of a ruler in my own land.
It was by the Yang-tze-kiang, and there were riches and pleasant things
in the days of my youth.  In the hunt, at the tavern, I was first amongst
them all.  I had great strength.  I once killed a bear with my bare
hands.  My hands had fame.

"I had office in the city where my cousin ruled.  He was a bad man, and
was soon forgotten, though his children mourn for him as is the custom.
I killed him.  He gave counsel concerning the city when there was war,
but his counsel was that of a traitor, and the city was lost.  Now
behold, it is written that he who has given counsel about the country or
its capital should perish with it when it comes into peril.  He would not
die--so I killed him; but not before he had heaped upon me baseness and
shame.  So I killed him.

"Yet it is written that when a minister kills his ruler, all who are in
office with him shall without mercy kill him who did the deed.  That is
the law.  It was the word of the Son of Heaven that this should be.  But
those who were in office with me would not kill me, because they approved
of what I did.  Yet they must kill me, since it was the law.  What was
there to do but in the night to flee, so that they who should kill me
might not obey the law?  Had I remained, and they had not obeyed the law,
they also would have been slain."

He paused for a moment and then went on.  "So I fled, and it is many
years since by the Yang-tze-kiang I killed my ruler and saved my friends.
Yet I had not been faithful to the ancient law, and so through the long
years I have done low work among a low people.  This was for atonement,
for long ago by the Yang-tzekiang I should have died, and behold, I have
lived until now.  To save my friends from the pain of killing me I fled
and lived; but at last here at this place I said to myself that I must
die.  So, secretly, I made this cellar into a temple.

"That was a year ago, and I sent to my brother the Duke Ki to speak to
him what was in my mind, so that he might send my kinsmen to me, that
when I came to die, it should be after the manner ordained by the Son of
Heaven; that my body should be clothed according to the ancient rites by
my own people, my mouth filled with rice, and the meats, and grains and
fruits of sacrifice be placed on a mat at the east of my body when I
died; that the curtain should be hung before my corpse; that I should be
laid upon a mat of fine bamboo, and dressed, and prepared for my grave,
and put into a noble coffin as becomes a superior man.  Did not the Son
of Heaven say that we speak of the end of a superior man, but we speak of
the death of a small man?  I was a superior man, but I have lived as a
small man these many days; and now, behold, I am drawing near to my end
as a superior man.

"I wished that nothing should be forgotten; that all should be done when
I, of the house of the Duke Ki, came to my superior end.  So, these my
kinsmen came, these of my family, to be with me at my going, to call my
spirit back from the roof-top with face turned to the north, to leap
before my death-mat, to wail and bare the shoulders and bind the
sackcloth about the head.

"I have served among the low people doing low things, and now I would
die, but in the correct way.  Once to the listeners Confucius said: 'The
great mountain must crumble; the strong beam must break; the wise man
must wither away like a plant.'  So it is.  It is my duty to go to my
end, for the time is far spent, and I should do what my friends must have
done had I stayed in my ancestral city."

Again he paused, and now he rocked his body backwards and forwards for a
moment; then presently he continued: "Yet I would not go without doing
good.  There should be some act among the low people by which I should be
remembered.  So, once again, I killed a man.  He could not withstand the
strength of my fingers--they were like steel upon his throat.  As a young
man my fingers were like those of three men.

"Shall a man treat his wife as she, Louise, was treated?  Shall a man
raise his hand against his wife, and live?  also, was he to live--the low
man--that struck a high man like me with his hands, with the whip, with
his feet, stamping upon me on the ground?  Was that to be, and he live?
Were the young that should have but one nest to be parted, to have only
sorrow, if Joel lived?  So I killed him with my hands" (he slightly
raised his clasped hands, as though to emphasize what he said, but the
gesture was grave and quiet)"--so I killed him, and so I must die.

"It was the duty of my friends to kill me by the Yang-tze-kiang.  It is
your duty, you of the low people, to kill me who has killed a low man;
but my friends by the Yang-tze-kiang were glad that the ruler died, and
you of the low people are glad that Joel is dead.  Yet it is your duty to
kill me.  .  .  .  But it shall not be."

He quickly reached out his hands and drew the burning brazier close to
his feet; then, suddenly, from a sleeve of his robe he took a little box
of the sacred tortoise-shell, pressed his lips to it, opened it, poured
its contents upon the flame, leaned over with his face close to the
brazier and inhaled the little puff of smoke that came from it.

So for a few seconds--and then he raised himself and sat still with eyes
closed and hands clasped in his long sleeves.  Presently his head fell
forward on his breast.

A pungent smell passed through the chamber.  It produced for the moment
dizziness in all present.  Then the sensation cleared away.  The Chinaman
at the right of Li Choo looked steadfastly at him; then, all at once, he
bared his shoulders and quickly bound a piece of sackcloth round his
head.  This done, he raised his voice and cried out with a monotonous
ululation, and at once a second voice cried out in a long wailing call.

Outside Li Choo's kinsman, with his face turned to the north, was calling
his spirit back, though he knew it would not come.

At the first sound of the voice crying outside, the Chinaman beside Li
Choo leaped thrice in front of the brazier, the mat and the moveless
body.

At that moment the Young Doctor came forward.  He who had leaped stood
between him and the body of Li Choo.

"You must not come.  Li Choo, the superior man, is dead," he protested.

"I am a doctor," was the reply.  "If he is dead, the law will not touch
him, and you shall be alone with him, but the law must know that he is
dead.  That is the way that prevails among the 'low people,'" he added
ironically.

The Chinaman stood aside, and the Young Doctor stooped, felt the pulse,
touched the heart and lifted up the head and looked into Li Choo's
sightless eyes.

"He is dead," he said, and he came back again to the Coroner and the
others.  "Let's get out of this," he added.  "He is beyond our reach now.
No need for an inquest here.  He has killed himself."  Then he caught
Orlando's hand in a warm grip.

As they left the chamber, the kinsman of Li Choo was gently laying the
body down upon the bamboo mat.  At the doorway the other son of the Duke
Ki was still monotonously calling back the departed spirit.

The inquest on Joel Mazarine was ended presently, and Nolan Doyle and the
Young Doctor set out to tell Louise that a "low man," once her husband,
had paid a high price for all that he had bought of the fruits of life
out of due season.




CHAPTER XVIII

YOUTH HAS ITS WAY

"Aw, Doctor dear, there's manny that's less use in the wurruld than
Chinamen, and I'd like to see more o' them here-away," remarked Patsy
Kernaghan to the Young Doctor in the springtime of another year.
"Stren'th of mind is all right, but stren'th of fingers is better still."

"You're a bloodthirsty pagan, Patsy," returned the Young Doctor.

"Hell to me sowl, then, didn't Li Choo pull things straight?  I'm not
much of a murd'ring man meself--I haven't the stren'th with me fingers,
but there's manny a time I'd like to do what Li Choo done.  .  .  .
Shure, I don't want to be sp'akin' ill of the dead, but look at it now.
There was ould Mazarine, breakin' the poor child's heart, as fine a fella
as iver trod the wurruld achin' for her, and his life bein' spoilt by the
goin's on at Tralee.  Then in steps the Chinky and with stren'th of mind
and stren'th of fingers puts things right."

"No, no, Patsy, you've got bad logic and worse morals in your head.  As
you say, things were put right, but trouble enough came of it."

"Divils me darlin', Doctor, it was bound to come all right some time.
Shure, wasn't it natural the child should be all crumpled up like and
lose her head for a while?  Wasn't it natural she should fight out agin'
takin' the property the leviathin left her, whin she knew there was
another will he'd spoke on a paper to the lawyer the night he died,
though he hadn't signed it?  And isn't it so that yourself it was talked
her round!"

The Young Doctor waved a hand reprovingly, but Patsy continued:

"Now, lookin' back on it, don't ye think it was clever enough what you
said till her?  'Do justice to yourself and to others, little lady,' sez
you.  'Be just--divide the place up; give two-thirds of it away to the
children of Joel's first two wives and keep one-third, which is yours by
law in anny case.  For why should it be that you should give iverythin'
and get nothin'?  He had the best of you-of your girlhood and your
youth,' sez you.  'Shure y'are entitled to bread and meat, and a roof
over you, as a wife, and as one that got nothin' from your married life
of what ought to be got by honest girls like you, or by anny woman, if it
comes to that,' sez you.  Aw, shure then, I know you said it, because,
didn't she tell it all to Norah Doyle, and didn't Norah tell Nolan, and
me sittin' by and glad enough that the cleverest man betune here and the
other side of the wurruld talked her round!  Aw, how you talk, y'r anner!
Shure, isn't it the wonder that you don't talk the dead back to the
wurruld out of which you help them?  I might ha' been a great man meself"
--he grinned--"if I'd had your eddication, but here I am, a 'low man' as
Li Choo said, takin' me place simple as a babe."

"Patsy, you save my life," remarked the Young Doctor.  "You save my life
daily.  That's why I'm glad you're getting a good home at last."

"At Slow Down Ranch, with her that's to be its queen!  Well, isn't that
like her to be thinkin' of others?  As a rule the rich is so busy lookin'
afther what they've got that they're not worryin' about the poor; but she
thought of me, didn't she?"

The Young Doctor nodded, and Patsy pursued his tale.  "Haven't I see her
day in, day out, at Nolan Doyle's ranch, and don't I understan' why it is
she's not set foot in Tralee since the ould one left it feet foremost,
for his new seven-foot home, housed in a bit of wood-him that had had the
run of the wurruld?  She'll set no foot in Tralee at all anny time, if
she can help it--that's the breed of her.

"Well, it is as it is, and what's goin' to be will plaze every mother's
son in Askatoon.  Giggles they called him!  A bit of a girl they thought
him!  What's he turned out to be, though he's giggling still?  Why, a man
that's got the double cinch on Askatoon.  Even that fella Burlingame had
nothin' to say ag'in' him; and when Burlingame hasn't anny mud to throw,
then you must stop and look hard.  Shure, the blessed Virgin, or the
Almighty himself, couldn't escape the tongue of Augustus Burlingame--not
even you."

The Young Doctor burst out laughing.  "'The Blessed Mary, or the Almighty
himself--not even you!'  Well, Patsy, you're a wonder," he said.

"Aw, you're not goin' to get off by scoffin' at me," remarked Patsy.
"Shure, what did Augustus Burlingame say of you?--well now, what did he
say?"

"Yes, Patsy, what was it?" urged the other.  "Shure, he criticized you.
He called you 'Squills,' and said you'd helped more people intil the
wurruld than out of it."

"You call that criticism.  Patsy?"

"Whichever way you look at it, hasn't it an ugly face?  Is it a kindness
to man to bring him into the wurruld?  That's wan way of lookin' at it.
But suppose he meant the other thing, that not being married, you--"

"Patsy Kernaghan," interjected the Young Doctor sternly, "you're not fit
company.  Take care, or there'll be no Slow Down Ranch for you.  An evil
mind----"

Now it was Patsy's turn to interrupt: "Watch me now, I think that wan of
the most beautiful things I iver saw was them two young people comin'
together.  Five long months it was, afther Mazarine was put away before
she spoke with him.  It was in the gardin at Nolan's ranch, and even then
it wasn't aisy till her.  Not that she didn't want to see him all the
time; not, I'll be bound, that she didn't say, when you and Nolan first
told her the mastodon was dead, 'Thank God, I'm free!'  But, there he
was, flung out of the wurruld without a minute's notice, and with the
black thing in his heart.  Shure you'll be understandin' it a thousand
times better than meself, y'r anner."

He took a pinch of snuff from a little box, offered it to the Young
Doctor and continued his story.

"Well, as I said, whin five months had gone by they met.  By chanct I saw
the meetin'.  Watch me now, I'll tell you how it was.  She was sittin' on
a bench in the gardin, lookin' in front of her and seein' nothin' but
what was in her mind's eye, and who can tell what she would be seein'!
There she sat sweet as a saint, very straight up, the palms of her hands
laid on the bench on either side, as though they was supporfin' her--like
a statue she looked.  I watched her manny a minute, but she niver moved.
Well, there she was, lookin'--lookin' in front o' her, whin round the big
tree in the middle of the gardin he come and stood forninst her.  They
just looked and looked at each other without a word.  Like months it
seemed.  They looked, and looked, as though they was tryin' to read some
story in each other's eyes, and then she give a kind of joyful moan, and
intil his arms she went like a nestlin' bird.

"He raised up her head, and-well, now, y'r anner, I niver saw anything I
liked better.  There niver had been a girl in his life, and there niver
was a man in hers--not one that mattered, till they two took up with each
other, and it's a thing--well, y'r anner, I'd be a proud man if I could
write it down.  It's a story that'd take its place beside the ancient
ones."

The Young Doctor looked at Patsy meditatively.  "Patsy," said he, "the
difference between the north and the south of Ireland is that in the
south they are all poets--" He paused.

"Well, you haven't finished, y 'r anner," said Kernaghan.

"And in the north they think they are," continued the Young Doctor.
"I'd like to see those two as your eyes in front of your mind saw them,
Patsy."

"Aw, well then, you couldn't do it, Doctor dear, for you've niver been in
love.  Shure, there's no heart till ye!" answered the Irishman, and
took another pinch of snuff with a flourish.

                    ........................

Flamingo-like in her bright-coloured, figured gown, with a wild flower in
her hair and her gray curls dancing gently at her temples, a little old
lady trotted up and down the big sitting-room of Slow Down Ranch, talking
volubly and insistently.  One ironically minded would have said she
chirruped, for her words came out in not unmusical, if staccato, notes,
and she shook her shrivelled, ringed fingers reprovingly at a stalwart
young man.

Once or twice, as she seemed to threaten him with what the poet called
"The slow, unmoving finger of scorn," he giggled.  It was evident that he
was at once amused and troubled.  This voice had cherished and chided him
all his life, and he could measure accurately what was behind it.  It was
a wilful voice.  It had the insistance which power gives, and to a woman
--or to most women--power is either money or beauty, since, in the world
as it is, office and authority are denied them.  Beauty was gone from the
face of the ancient dame, but she still had much money, and, on rare
occasions, it gave her a little arrogance.  It did so now as she
admonished her beloved son, who at any time would have renounced fortune,
or hope of fortune, for some wilful idea of his own.  A less sordid
modern did not exist.

He was not very effective in the contest of tongue between his mother and
himself.  As the talk went on he foresaw that he was to be beaten; yet he
persisted, for he loved a joy-wrangle, as he called it, with his mother.
He had argued with her many a time, just to see her in a harmless
passion, and note how the youth of her came back, giving high colour to
the wrinkled face, and how the eyes shone with a brightness which had
been constant in them long ago.  They were now quarrelling over that
ever-fruitful cause of antagonism--the second woman in the life of a man.
Yet, strange to say, the flamingo-like Eugenie Guise, was fighting for
the second woman, not against her.

"I'll say it all again and again and again till you have sense, Orlando,"
she declared.  "Your old mother hasn't lived all these years for nothing.
I'm not thinking of you; I'm thinking of her."  She pointed towards the
door of another room, from which came sounds of laughter--happy laughter
--in which a man's and a woman's voices sounded.  "On the day she comes
into this house--and that's the day after to-morrow--I shall go.  I'll
stand at the door and welcome you, and see you have a good wedding-
breakfast and that it all goes off grand, then I shall vanish."

Orlando made a helpless gesture of the hand.  "Well, mother, as I said,
it will make us both unhappy--Louise as much as me.  You and I have never
been parted except for a few weeks at a time, and I'm sure I don't know
how I could stand it."

"Rather late to think about it," the other returned.  "You can't have two
women spoiling you in one house and being jealous of each other--oh, you
needn't toss your fingers!  Even two women that love each other can't
bear the competition.  Just because I love her and want her to be happy,
off I go to your Aunt Amelia to live with her.  She's poor, and I'll
still have someone to boss as I've bossed you.  I never knew how much I
loved Amelia till she got sick last year when everything terrible was
happening here.  I'm going, Orlando--

               Two birds hopping on one branch
               Would kill the joy of Slow Down Ranch--

"There, I made that up on the moment.  It's true, even if it is poetry."

"It isn't poetry, mother," was the reply, and there was an ironical look
in Orlando's eyes.  "Poetry's the truth of life," he hastened to add
carefully, "and it's not poetry to say that you could be a kill-joy."

The little lady tossed her head.  "Well, you'll never have a chance to
prove it, for I'm taking the express east on the night of your wedding.
That's settled.  Amelia needs me, and I'm going to her.  .  .  .  Your
wedding present will be the ranch and a hundred thousand dollars," she
added.

"You're the sun-dried fruit of Paradise, Mother," Orlando said, taking
her by the arms.

"I heard the Young Doctor call me a bird of Paradise once," she returned.
"People don't know how sharp my ears are.  .  .  .  But I never stored it
up against him.  Taste is born in you, and if people haven't got it in
the cradle, they never have it.  I suppose his mother went around in a
black alpaca and wore her hair like a wardress in a jail.  I'm sorry for
him--that's all."

"Suppose I should get homesick for you and run away from her!" remarked
Orlando slyly.

"Run away with her to me," chirruped Eugenie, with a vain little laugh.

Suddenly her manner changed, and she looked at her son with dreamy
intensity.  "You are so wonderfully young, my dear," she said, "and I am
very old.  I had much happiness with your father while he lived.  He was
such a wise man.  Always he gave in to me in the little things, and I
gave in to him in all the big things.  He almost made me a sensible
woman."

There was a strange wistfulness in her face.  Through all the years, down
beneath everything, there had been the helpless knowledge in her own
small, garish mind that she had little sense; now she realized that she
was given a chance to atone for all her pettiness by doing one great
sensible thing.

Orlando was about to embrace her, but she briskly, turned away.  She
could not endure that.  If he did it, the pent-up motherhood would break
forth, and her courage would take flight.  She was something more than
the "parokeet of Pernambukoko," as Patsy Kernaghan had called her.

She went to the door of the other room.  "I want to talk to the Young
Doctor about Amelia," she said.  "He's clever, and perhaps he could give
her a good prescription.  I'll send Louise to you.  It's nicer courting
in this room where you can see the garden and the grand hills.  You're
going to give Louise the little gray mare you lassooed last year, aren't
you?  I always think of Louise when I look at that gray mare.  You had to
break the pony's heart before she could be what she is--the nicest little
thing that ever was broken by a man's hand; and Louise, she had to have
her heart broken too.  Your father and I were almost of an age--he was
two years older, and we had our youth together.  And you and Louise are
so wonderfully young, too.  Be good to her, son.  She's never been
married.  She was only in prison with that old lizard.  What a horrible
mouth he had!  It's shut now," she added remorselessly.  Opening the door
of the other room, she disappeared.

A moment later, Louise entered upon Orlando.

The vanished months had worked wonders in her.  She was like the young
summer beyond the open windows, alive to her finger-tips, shyly radiant,
with shining eyes, yet in their depths an alluring pensiveness never to
leave them altogether.  Knowledge had come to her; an apprehending soul
was speaking in her face.  The sweetness of her smile, as she looked at
the man before her, was such as could only be distilled from the bitter
herbs of the desert.

"Oh, Orlando!" she said joyously, as she came forward.





ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "WILD YOUTH":

Highsterics, they call it
World was only the size of four walls to a sick person






NO DEFENSE

By Gilbert Parker



CONTENTS

BOOK I.
I.        THE TWO MEET
II.       THE COMING OF A MESSENGER
III.      THE QUARREL
IV.       THE DUEL
V.        THE KILLING OF ERRIS BOYNE
VI.       DYCK IN PRISON
VII.      MOTHER AND DAUGHTER
VIII.     DYCK'S FATHER VISITS HIM
IX.       A LETTER FROM SHEILA

BOOK II
X.        DYCK CALHOUN ENTERS THE WORLD AGAIN
XI.       WHITHER NOW?
XII.      THE HOUR BEFORE THE MUTINY
XIII.     TO THE WEST INDIES
XIV.      IN THE NICK OF TIME
XV.       THE ADMIRAL HAS HIS SAY

BOOK III
XVI.      A LETTER
XVII.     STRANGERS ARRIVE
XVIII.    AT SALEM
XIX.      LORD MALLOW INTERVENES
XX.       OUT OF THE HANDS OF THE PHILISTINES
XXI.      THE CLASH OF RACE
XXII.     SHEILA HAS HER SAY
XXIII.    THE COMING OF NOREEN
XXIV.     WITH THE GOVERNOR
XXV.      THEN WHAT HAPPENED




BOOK I


CHAPTER I

THE TWO MEET

"Well, good-bye, Dyck.  I'll meet you at the sessions, or before that at
the assizes."

It was only the impulsive, cheery, warning exclamation of a wild young
Irish spirit to his friend Dyck Calhoun, but it had behind it the humour
and incongruity of Irish life.

The man, Dyck Calhoun, after whom were sent the daring words about the
sessions and the assizes, was a year or two older than his friend, and,
as Michael Clones, his servant and friend, said, "the worst and best
scamp of them all"--just up to any harmless deviltry.

Influenced by no traditions or customs, under control of no stern records
of society, Calhoun had caused some trouble in his time by the harmless
deeds of a scapegrace, but morally--that is, in all relations of life
affected by the ten commandments--he was above reproach.  Yet he was of
the sort who, in days of agitation, then common in Ireland, might
possibly commit some act which would bring him to the sessions or the
assizes.  There never was in Ireland a cheerier, braver, handsomer
fellow, nor one with such variety of mind and complexity of purpose.

He was the only child of a high-placed gentleman; he spent all the money
that came his way, and occasionally loaded himself with debt, which his
angry father paid.  Yet there never was a gayer heart, a more generous
spirit, nor an easier-tempered man; though, after all, he was only
twenty-five when the words with which the tale opens were said to him.

He had been successful--yet none too successful--at school and Trinity
College, Dublin.  He had taken a pass degree, when he might have captured
the highest honours.  He had interested people of place in the country,
but he never used promptly the interest he excited.  A pretty face, a
fishing or a shooting expedition, a carouse in some secluded tavern, were
parts of his daily life.

At the time the story opens he was a figure of note among those who
spent their time in criticizing the government and damning the Irish
Parliament.  He even became a friend of some young hare-brained rebels of
the time; yet no one suspected him of anything except irresponsibility.
His record was clean; Dublin Castle was not after him.

When his young friend made the remark about the sessions and assizes,
Calhoun was making his way up the rocky hillside to take the homeward
path to his father's place, Playmore.  With the challenge and the
monstrous good-bye, a stone came flying up the hill after him and stopped
almost at his feet.  He made no reply, however, but waved a hand
downhill, and in his heart said:

"Well, maybe he's right.  I'm a damned dangerous fellow, there's no doubt
about that.  Perhaps I'll kill a rebel some day, and then they'll take me
to the sessions and the assizes.  Well, well, there's many a worse fate
than that, so there is."

After a minute he added:

"So there is, dear lad, so there is.  But if I ever kill, I'd like it to
be in open fight on the hills like this--like this, under the bright sun,
in the soft morning, with all the moor and valleys still, and the larks
singing--the larks singing!  Hooray, but it's a fine day, one of the best
that ever was!"

He laughed, and patted his gun gently.

"Not a feather, not a bird killed, not a shot fired; but the looking was
the thing--stalking the things that never turned up, the white heels we
never saw, for I'm not killing larks, God love you!"

He raised his head, looking up into the sky at some larks singing above
him in the heavens.

"Lord love you, little dears," he added aloud.  "I wish I might die with
your singing in my ears, but do you know what makes Ireland what it is?
Look at it now.  Years ago, just when the cotton-mills and the linen-
mills were doing well, they came over with their English legislation, and
made it hard going.  When we begin to get something, over the English
come and take the something away.  What have we done, we Irish people,
that we shouldn't have a chance in our own country?  Lord knows, we
deserve a chance, for it's hard paying the duties these days.  What with
France in revolution and reaching out her hand to Ireland to coax her
into rebellion; what with defeat in America and drink in Scotland; what
with Fox and Pitt at each other's throats, and the lord-lieutenant a
danger to the peace; what with poverty, and the cow and children and
father and mother living all in one room, with the chickens roosting in
the rafters; what with pointing the potato at the dried fish and gulping
it down as if it was fish itself; what with the smell and the dirt and
the poverty of Dublin and Derry, Limerick and Cork--ah, well!"  He threw
his eyes up again.

"Ah, well, my little love, sing on!  You're a blessing among a lot of
curses; but never mind, it's a fine world, and Ireland's the best part of
it.  Heaven knows it--and on this hill, how beautiful it is!"

He was now on the top of a hill where he could look out towards the bog
and in towards the mellow, waving hills.  He could drink in the yellowish
green, with here and there in the distance a little house; and about two
miles away smoke stealing up from the midst of the plantation where
Playmore was--Playmore, his father's house--to be his own one day.

How good it was!  There, within his sight, was the great escarpment of
rock known as the Devil's Ledge, and away to the east was the black spot
in the combe known as the Cave of Mary.  Still farther away, towards the
south, was the great cattle-pasture, where, as he looked, a thousand
cattle roamed.  Here and there in the wide prospect were plantations
where Irish landlords lived, and paid a heavy price for living.  Men did
not pay their rents.  Crops were spoiled, markets were bad, money was
scarce, yet--

"Please God, it will be better next year!"  Michael Clones said, and
there never was a man with a more hopeful heart than Michael Clones.

Dyck Calhoun had a soul of character, originality, and wayward
distinction.  He had all the impulses and enthusiasms of a poet, all the
thirst for excitement of the adventurer, all the latent patriotism of the
true Celt; but his life was undisciplined, and he had not ordered his
spirit into compartments of faith and hope.  He had gifts.  They were
gifts only to be borne by those who had ambitions.

Now, as he looked out upon the scene where nature was showing herself at
her best, some glimmer of a great future came to him.  He did not know
which way his feet were destined to travel in the business of life.  It
was too late to join the navy; but there was still time enough to be a
soldier, or to learn to be a lawyer.

As he gazed upon the scene, his wonderful deep blue eyes, his dark brown
hair thick upon his head, waving and luxuriant like a fine mattress, his
tall, slender, alert figure, his bony, capable hands, which neither sun
nor wind ever browned, his nervous yet interesting mouth, and his long
Roman nose, set in a complexion rich in its pink-and-cream hardness and
health--all this made him a figure good to see.

Suddenly, as he listened to the lark singing overhead, with his face
lifted to the sky, he heard a human voice singing; and presently there
ran up a little declivity to his left a girl--an Irish girl of about
seventeen years of age.

Her hat was hanging on her arm by a green ribbon.  Her head was covered
with the most wonderful brown, waving hair.  She had a broad, low
forehead, Greek in its proportions and lines.  The eyes were bluer even
than his own, and were shaded by lashes of great length, which slightly
modified the firm lines of the face, with its admirable chin, and mouth
somewhat large with a cupid's bow.

In spite of its ardent and luscious look, it was the mouth of one who
knew her own mind and could sustain her own course.  It was open when
Dyck first saw it, because she was singing little bits of wild lyrics of
the hills, little tragedies of Celtic life--just bursts of the Celtic
soul, as it were, cheerful yet sad, buoyant and passionate, eager yet
melancholy.  She was singing in Irish too.  They were the words of songs
taught her by her mother's maid.

She had been tramping over the hills for a couple of hours, virile,
beautiful, and alone.  She wore a gown of dark gold, with little green
ribbons here and there.  The gown was short, and her ankles showed.  In
spite of the strong boots she wore they were alert, delicate, and
shapely, and all her beauty had the slender fullness of a quail.

When she saw Dyck, she stopped suddenly, her mouth slightly open.  She
gave him a sidelong glance of wonder, interest, and speculation.  Then
she threw her head slightly back, and all the curls gathered in a bunch
and shook like bronze flowers.  It was a head of grace and power, of
charm and allurement--of danger.

Dyck was lost in admiration.  He looked at her as one might look at a
beautiful thing in a dream.  He did not speak; he only smiled as he gazed
into her eyes.  She was the first to speak.

"Well, who are you?" she asked with a slightly southern accent in her
voice, delicate and entrancing.  Her head gave a little modest toss, her
fine white teeth caught her lower lip with a little quirk of humour; for
she could see that he was a gentleman, and that she was safe from
anything that might trouble her.

He replied to her question with the words:

"My name?  Why, it's Dyck Calhoun.  That's all."

Her eyes brightened.  "Isn't that enough?" she asked gently.

She knew of his family.  She was only visiting in the district with her
mother, but she had lately heard of old Miles Calhoun and his wayward
boy, Dyck; and here was Dyck, with a humour in his eyes and a touch of
melancholy at his lips.  Somehow her heart went out to him.

Presently he said to her: "And what's your name?"

"I'm only Sheila Llyn, the daughter of my mother, a widow, visiting at
Loyland Towers.  Yes, I'm only Sheila!"

She laughed.

"Well, just be 'only Sheila,"' he answered admiringly, and he held out a
hand to her.  "I wouldn't have you be anything else, though it's none of
my business."

For one swift instant she hesitated; then she laid her hand in his.

"There's no reason why we should not," she said.  "Your father's
respectable."

She looked at him again with a sidelong glance, and with a whimsical,
reserved smile at her lips.

"Yes, he's respectable, I agree, but he's dull," answered Dyck.  "For an
Irishman, he's dull--and he's a tyrant, too.  I suppose I deserve that,
for I'm a handful."

"I think you are, and a big handful too!"

"Which way are you going?" he asked presently.

"And you?"

"Oh, I'm bound for home."  He pointed across the valley.  "Do you see
that smoke coming up from the plantation over there?"

"Yes, I know," she answered.  "I know.  That's Playmore, your father's
place.  Loyland Towers is between here and there.  Which way were you
going there?"

"Round to the left," he said, puzzled, but agreeable.

"Then we must say good-bye, because I go to the right.  That's my nearest
way."

"Well, if that's your nearest way, I'm going with you," he said,
"because--well, because--because--"

"If you won't talk very much!" she rejoined with a little air of
instinctive coquetry.

"I don't want to talk.  I'd like to listen.  Shall we start?"

A half-hour later they suddenly came upon an incident of the road.

It was, alas, no uncommon incident.  An aged peasant, in a sudden fit of
weakness, had stumbled on the road, and, in falling, had struck his head
on a stone and had lost consciousness.  He was an old peasant of the
usual Irish type, coarsely but cleanly dressed.  Lying beside him was a
leather bag, within which were odds and ends of food and some small books
of legend and ritual.  He was a peasant of a superior class, however.

In falling, he had thrown over on his back, and his haggard face was
exposed to the sun and sky.  At sight of him Dyck and Sheila ran forward.
Dyck dropped on one knee and placed a hand on the stricken man's heart.

"He's alive, all right," Dyck said.  "He's a figure in these parts.  His
name's Christopher Dogan."

"Where does he live?"

"Live?  Well, not three hundred yards from here, when he's at home, but
he's generally on the go.  He's what the American Indians would call a
medicine-man."

"He needs his own medicine now."

"He's over eighty, and he must have gone dizzy, stumbled, fallen, and
struck a stone.  There's the mark on his temple.  He's been lying here
unconscious ever since; but his pulse is all right, and we'll soon have
him fit again."

So saying, Dyck whipped out a horn containing spirit, and, while Sheila
lifted the injured head, he bathed the old man's face with the spirit,
then opened the mouth and let some liquor trickle down.

"He's the cleanest peasant I ever saw," remarked Sheila; "and he's coming
to.  Look at him!"

Yes, he was coming to.  There was a slight tremor of the eyelids, and
presently they slowly opened.  They were eyes of remarkable poignancy and
brightness--black, deep-set, direct, full of native intelligence.  For an
instant they stared as if they had no knowledge, then understanding came
to them.

"Oh, it's you, sir," his voice said tremblingly, looking at Dyck.  "And
very kind it is of ye !"  Then he looked at Sheila.  "I don't know ye,"
he said whisperingly, for his voice seemed suddenly to fail.  "I don't
know ye," he repeated, "but you look all right."

"Well, I'm Sheila Llyn," the girl said, taking her hand from the old
man's shoulder.

"I'm Sheila Llyn, and I'm all right in a way, perhaps."

The troubled, piercing eyes glanced from one to the other.

"No relation?"

"No--never met till a half-hour ago," remarked Dyck.

The old man drew himself to a sitting posture, then swayed slightly.  The
hands of the girl and Dyck went out behind his back.  As they touched his
back, their fingers met, and Dyck's covered the girl's.  Their eyes met,
too, and the story told by Dyck in that moment was the beginning of a
lifetime of experience, comedy, and tragedy.

He thought her fingers were wonderfully soft, warm, and full of life; and
she thought that his was the hand of a master-of a master in the field of
human effort.  That is, if she thought at all, for Dyck's warm, powerful
touch almost hypnotized her.

The old peasant understood, however.  He was standing on his feet now.
He was pale and uncertain.  He lifted up his bag, and threw it over his
shoulder.

"Well, I'm not needing you any more, thank God!" he said.

"So Heaven's blessing on ye, and I bid ye good-bye.  You've been kind to
me, and I won't forget either of ye.  If ever I can do ye a good turn,
I'll do it."

"No, we're not going to leave you until you're inside your home," said
Dyck.

The old man looked at Sheila in meditation.  He knew her name and her
history.  Behind the girl's life was a long prospect of mystery.  Llyn
was her mother's maiden name.  Sheila had never known her father.  Never
to her knowledge had she seen him, because when she was yet an infant her
mother had divorced him by Act of Parliament, against the wishes of her
church, and had resumed her maiden name.

Sheila's father's name was Erris Boyne, and he had been debauched,
drunken, and faithless; so at a time of unendurable hurt his wife had
freed herself.  Then, under her maiden name, she had brought up her
daughter without any knowledge of her father; had made her believe
he was dead; had hidden her tragedy with a skilful hand.

Only now, when Sheila was released from a governess, had she moved out of
the little wild area of the County Limerick where she lived; only now had
she come to visit an uncle whose hospitality she had for so many years
denied herself.  Sheila was two years old when her father disappeared,
and fifteen years had gone since then.

One on either side of the old man, they went with him up the hillside for
about three hundred yards, to the door of his house, which was little
more than a cave in a sudden lift of the hill.  He swayed as he walked,
but by the time they reached his cave-house he was alert again.

The house had two windows, one on either side of the unlocked doorway;
and when the old man slowly swung the door open, there was shown an
interior of humble character, but neat and well-ordered.  The floor was
earth, dry and clean.  There was a bed to the right, also wholesome and
dry, with horse-blankets for cover.  At the back, opposite the doorway,
was a fireplace of some size, and in it stood a kettle, a pot, and a few
small pans, together with a covered saucepan.  On either side of the
fireplace was a three-legged stool, and about the middle of the left-hand
wall of the room was a chair which had been made out of a barrel, some of
the staves having been sawn away to make a seat.

Once inside the house, Christopher Dogan laid his bag on the bed and
waved his hands in a formula of welcome.

"Well, I'm honoured," he said, "for no one has set foot inside this place
that I'd rather have here than the two of ye; and it's wonderful to me,
Mr. Calhoun, that ye've never been inside it before, because there's been
times when I've had food and drink in plenty.  I could have made ye
comfortable then and stroked ye all down yer gullet.  As for you, Miss
Llyn, you're as welcome as the shining of the stars of a night when
there's no moon.  I'm glad you're here, though I've nothing to give ye,
not a bite nor sup.  Ah, yes--but yes," he suddenly cried, touching his
head.  "Faith, then, I have!  I have a drap of somethin' that's as good
as annything dhrunk by the ancient kings of Ireland.  It's a wee cordial
that come from the cellars of the Bishop of Dunlany, when I cured his
cook of the evil-stone that was killing her.  Ah, thank God!"

He went into a corner on the left of the fireplace, opened an old jar,
thrust his arm down, and drew out a squat little bottle of cordial.  The
bottle was beautifully made.  It was round and hunched, and of glass,
with an old label from which the writing had faded.

With eyes bright now, Christopher uncorked the bottle and smelled the
contents.  As he did so, a smile crinkled his face.

"Thank the Lord!  There's enough for the two of ye--two fine
tablespoonfuls of the cordial that'd do anny man good, no matter how bad
he was, and turn an angel of a woman into an archangel.  Bless yer Bowl!"

When Christopher turned to lift down two pewter pots, Calhoun reached up
swiftly and took them from the shelf.  He placed them in the hands of the
old man, who drew a clean towel of coarse linen from a small cupboard in
the wall above his head.

She and Dyck held the pots for the old man to pour the cordial into them.
As he said, there was only a good porridge-spoon of liqueur for each.  He
divided it with anxious care.

"There's manny a man," he said, "and manny and manny a lady, too, born in
the purple, that'd be glad of a dhrink of this cordial from the cellar of
the bishop.

"Alpha, beta, gamma, delta is the code, and with the word delta," he
continued, "dhrink every drop of it, as if it was the last thing you were
dhrinking on earth; as if the Lord stooped down to give ye a cup of
blessing from His great flagon of eternal happiness.  Ye've got two kind
hearts, but there's manny a day of throuble will come between ye and the
end; and yet the end'll be right, God love ye!  Now-alpha, beta, gamma,
delta!"

With a merry laugh Dyck Calhoun turned up his cup and drained the liquid
to the last drop.  With a laugh not quite so merry, Sheila raised her mug
and slowly drained the green happiness away.

"Isn't it good--isn't it like the love of God?" asked the old man.
"Ain't I glad I had it for ye?  Why I said I hadn't annything for ye to
dhrink or eat, Lord only knows.  There's nothing to eat, and there's only
this to dhrink, and I hide it away under the bedclothes of time, as one
might say.  Ah, ye know, it's been there for three years, and I'd almost
forgot it.  It was a little angel from heaven whispered it to me whir ye
stepped inside this house.  I dunno why I kep' the stuff.  Manny's the
time I was tempted to dhrink it myself, and manny's the time something
said to me, 'Not yet.'  The Lord be praised, for I've had out of it more
than I deserve!"

He took the mugs from their hands, and for a minute stood like some
ancient priest who had performed a noble ritual.  As Sheila looked at
him, she kept saying to herself:

"He's a spirit; he isn't a man!"

Dyck's eye met that of Sheila, and he saw with the same feeling what was
working in her heart.

"Well, we must be going," he said to Christopher Dogan.  "We must get
homeward, and we've had a good drink--the best I ever tasted.  We're
proud to pay our respects to you in your own house; and goodbye to you
till we meet again."

His hand went out to the shoulder of the peasant and rested there for a
second in friendly feeling.  Then the girl stretched out her hand also.
The old man took the two cups in one hand, and, reaching out the other,
let Sheila's fingers fall upon his own.  He slowly crooked his neck, and
kissed her fingers with that distinction mostly to be found among those
few good people who live on the highest or the lowest social levels, or
in native tents.

"Ah, please God we meet again!  and that I be let to serve you, Miss
Sheila Llyn.  I have no doubt you could do with a little help some time
or another, the same as the rest of us.  For all that's come between us
three, may it be given me, humble and poor, to help ye both that's helped
me so!"

Dyck turned to go, and as he did so a thought came to him.

"If you hadn't food and drink for us, what have you for yourself,
Christopher?" he asked.  "Have you food to eat?"

"Ah, well--well, do ye think I'm no provider?  There was no food cooked
was what I was thinking; but come and let me show you."

He took the cover off a jar standing in a corner.  "Here's good flour,
and there's water, and there's manny a wild shrub and plant on the
hillside to make soup, and what more does a man want?  With the scone
cooked and inside ye, don't ye feel as well as though ye'd had a pound of
beef or a rasher of bacon?  Sure, ye do.  I know where there's clumps of
wild radishes, and with a little salt they're good--the best.  God bless
ye!"

A few moments later, as he stood in his doorway and looked along the
road, he saw two figures, the girl's head hardly higher than the man's
shoulder.  They walked as if they had much to get and were ready for it.

"Well, I dunno," he said to himself.  "I dunno about you, Dyck Calhoun.
You're wild, and ye have too manny mad friends, but you'll come all right
in the end; and that pretty girl--God save her!--she'll come with a smile
into your arms by and by, dear lad.  But ye have far to go and much to do
before that."

His head fell, his eyes stared out into the shining distance.

"I see for ye manny and manny a stroke of bad luck, and manny a wrong
thing said of ye, and she not believing wan of them.  But oh, my God, but
oh!"--his clenched hands went to his eyes.  "I wouldn't like to travel
the path that's before ye--no!"

Down the long road the two young people travelled, gossiping much, both
of them touched by something sad and mysterious, neither knowing why;
both of them happy, too, for somehow they had come nearer together than
years of ordinary life might have made possible.  They thought of the old
man and his hut, and then broke away into talk of their own countryside,
of the war with France, of the growing rebellious spirit in Ireland, of
riots in Dublin town, of trouble at Limerick, Cork, and Sligo.

At the gate of the mansion where Sheila was visiting, Dyck put into her
hands the wild flowers he had picked as they passed, and said:

"Well, it's been a great day.  I've never had a greater.  Let's meet
again, and soon!  I'm almost every day upon the hill with my gun, and
it'd be worth a lot to see you very soon."

"Oh, you'll be forgetting me by to-morrow," the girl said with a little
wistfulness at her lips, for she had a feeling they would not meet on the
morrow.  Suddenly she picked from the bunch of wild flowers he had given
her a little sprig of heather.

"Well, if we don't meet--wear that," she said, and, laughing over her
shoulder, turned and ran into the grounds of Loyland Towers.




CHAPTER II

THE COMING OF A MESSENGER

When Dyck entered the library of Playmore, the first words he heard were
these:

"Howe has downed the French at Brest.  He's smashed the French fleet and
dealt a sharp blow to the revolution.  Hurrah!"

The words were used by Miles Calhoun, Dyck's father, as a greeting to him
on his return from the day's sport.

Now, if there was a man in Ireland who had a narrow view and kept his
toes pointed to the front, it was Miles Calhoun.  His people had lived in
Connemara for hundreds of years; and he himself had only one passion in
life, which was the Protestant passion of prejudice.  He had ever been a
follower of Burke--a passionate follower, one who believed the French
Revolution was a crime against humanity, a danger to the future of
civilization.

He had resisted more vigorously than most men the progress of
revolutionary sentiments in Ireland.  He was aware that his son had far
less rigid opinions than himself; that he even defended Wolfe Tone and
Thomas Emmet against abuse and damnation.  That was why he had delight in
slapping his son in the face, whenever possible, with the hot pennant of
victory for British power.

He was a man of irascible temperament and stern views, given to fits of
exasperation.  He was small of stature, with a round face, eyes that
suddenly went red with feeling, and with none of the handsomeness of his
son, who resembled his mother's family.

The mother herself had been a beautiful and remarkable woman.  Dyck was,
in a sense, a reproduction of her in body and mind, for a more cheerful
and impetuous person never made a household happier or more imperfect
than she made hers.

Her beauty and continual cheerfulness had always been the joy of Dyck's
life, and because his mother had married his father--she was a woman of
sense, with all her lightsome ways--he tried to regard his father with
profound respect.  Since his wife's death, however, Miles Calhoun had
deteriorated; he had become unreasonable.

As the elder Calhoun made his announcement about the battle of Brest and
the English victory, a triumphant smile lighted his flushed face, and
under his heavy grey brows his eyes danced with malicious joy.

"Howe's a wonder!" he said.  "He'll make those mad, red republicans hunt
their holes.  Eh, isn't that your view, Ivy?" he asked of a naval captain
who had evidently brought the news.

Captain Ivy nodded.

"Yes, it's a heavy blow for the French bloodsuckers.  If their ideas
creep through Europe and get hold of England, God only knows what the
end will be!  In their view, to alter everything is the only way to put
things right.  No doubt they'll invent a new way to be born before
they've finished."

"Well, that wouldn't be a bad idea," remarked Dyck.  "The present way has
its demerits."

"Yes, it throws responsibility upon the man, and gives a heap of trouble
to the woman," said Captain Ivy with a laugh; "but they'll change it all,
you'll see."

Dyck poured himself a glass of port, held it up, sniffed the aroma, and
looked through the beautiful red tinge of the wine with a happy and
critical eye.

"Well, the world could be remade in a lot of ways," he declared.  "I
shouldn't mind seeing a bit of a revolution in Ireland--but in England
first," he hastened to add.  "They're a more outcast folk than the
Irish."  His father scoffed.

"Look out, Dyck, or they'll drop you in jail if you talk like that!" he
chided, his red face growing redder, his fingers nervously feeling the
buttons on his picturesque silk waistcoat.  "There's conspiracy in
Ireland, and you never truly know if the man that serves you at your
table, or brings you your horse, or puts a spade into your ground, isn't
a traitor."

At that moment the door opened, and a servant entered the room.  In his
hand he carried a letter which, with marked excitement, he brought to
Miles Calhoun.

"Sure, he's waiting, sir," he said.

"And who's he?" asked his master, turning the letter over, as though to
find out by looking at the seal.

"Oh, a man of consequence, if we're to judge by the way he's clothed."

"Fit company, then?" his master asked, as he opened the heavily sealed
letter.

"Well, I'm not saying that, for there's no company good enough for us,"
answered the higgledy-piggledy butler, with a quirk of the mouth; "but,
as messengers go, I never seen one with more style and point."

"Well, bring him to me," said Miles Calhoun.  "Bring him to me, and I'll
form my own judgment--though I have some confidence in yours."

"You could go further and fare worse, as the Papists say about
purgatory," answered the old man with respectful familiarity.

Captain Ivy and Dyck grinned, but the head of the house seemed none too
pleased at the freedom of the old butler.

"Bring him as he is," said Miles Calhoun.  "Good God!" he added, for he
just realized that the stamp of the seal was that of the Attorney-General
of Ireland.

Then he read the letter and a flush swept over his face, making its red
almost purple.

"Eternal damnation--eternal damnation!" he declared, holding the paper
at arm's length a moment, inspecting it.  He then handed it to Dyck.
"Read that, lad.  Then pack your bag, for we start for Dublin by daylight
or before."

Dyck read the brief document and whistled softly to himself.

"Well, well, you've got to obey orders like that, I suppose," Dyck said.
"They want to question us as to the state of the country here."

"I think we can tell them something.  I wonder if they know how wide your
travel is, how many people you see; and if they know, how did they come
to know?  There's spies all over the place.  How do I know but the man
who's just left this room isn't a spy, isn't the enemy of all of us
here?"

"I'd suspect Michael Clones," remarked Dyck, "just as soon as Mulvaney."

"Michael Clones," said his father, and he turned to Captain Ivy, "Michael
Clones I'd trust as I'd trust His blessed Majesty, George III.  He's a
rare scamp, is Michael Clones!  He's no thicker than a cardboard, but he
draws the pain out of your hurt like a mustard plaster.  A man of better
sense and greater roguery I've never met.  You must see him, Captain Ivy.
He's only about twelve years older than my son, but, like my son, there's
no holding him, there's no control of him that's any good.  He does what
he wants to do in his own way--talks when he wants to talk, fights when
he wants to fight.  He's a man of men, is Michael Clones."

At that moment the door opened and the butler entered, followed by a
tall, thin, Don Quixote sort of figure.

"His excellency," said Mulvaney, with a look slightly malevolent, for the
visitor had refused his name.  Then he turned and left the room.

At Mulvaney's words, an ironical smile crossed the face of the newcomer.
Then he advanced to Miles Calhoun.  Before speaking, however, he glanced
sharply at Captain Ivy, threw an inquisitive look at Dyck, and said:

"I seem to have hurt the feelings of your butler, sir, but that cannot be
helped.  I have come from the Attorney-General.  My name is Leonard
Mallow--I'm the eldest son of Lord Mallow.  I've been doing business in
Limerick, and I bring a message from the Attorney-General to ask you to
attend his office at the earliest moment."

Dyck Calhoun, noting his glance at a bottle of port, poured out a glass
of the good wine and handed it over, saying:

"It'll taste better to you because you've been travelling hard, but it's
good wine anyhow.  It's been in the cellar for forty years, and that's
something in a land like this."

Mallow accepted the glass of port, raised it with a little gesture of
respect, and said:

"Long life to the King, and cursed be his enemies!"  So saying he flung
the wine down his throat--which seemed to gulp it like a well--wiped his
lips with a handkerchief, and turned to Miles Calhoun again.

"Yes, it's good wine," he said; "as good as you'd get in the cellars of
the Viceroy.  I've seen strange things as I came.  I've seen lights on
the hills, and drunken rioters in the roads and behind hedges, and once a
shot was fired at me; but here I am, safe and sound, carrying out my
orders.  What time will you start?" he added.

He took it for granted that the summons did not admit of rejection, and
he was right.  The document contained these words:

     Trouble is brewing; indeed, it is at hand.  Come, please, at once to
     Dublin, and give the Lord-Lieutenant and the Government a report
     upon your district.  We do not hear altogether well of it, but no
     one has the knowledge you possess.  In the name of His Majesty you
     are to present yourself at once at these offices in Dublin, and be
     assured that the Lord-Lieutenant will give you warm welcome through
     me.  Your own loyalty gives much satisfaction here.  I am, sir,
                              Your obedient servant,
                                                  JOHN MCNOWELL.

"You have confidence in the people's loyalty here?" asked Mallow.

"As great as in my own," answered Dyck cheerily.  "Well, you ought to
know what that is.  At the same time, I've heard you're a friend of one
or two dark spirits in the land."

"I hold no friendships that would do hurt to my country," answered Dyck
sharply.

Mallow smiled satirically.  "As we're starting at daylight, I suppose, I
think I'll go to bed, if it may be you can put me up."

"Oh, Lord, yes!  We can put you up, Mr. Mallow," said the old man.
"You shall have as good a bed as you can find outside the Viceregal
Lodge--a fourposter, wide and long.  It's been slept in by many a man of
place and power.  But, Mr. Mallow, you haven't said you've had no dinner,
and you'll not be going to bed in this house without your food.  Did you
shoot anything to-day, Dyck?" he asked his son.

"I didn't bring home a feather.  There were no birds to-day, but there
are the ducks I shot yesterday, and the quail."

"Oh, yes," said his father, "and there's the little roast pig, too.  This
is a day when we celebrate the anniversary of Irish power and life."

"What's that?" asked Mallow.

"That's the battle of the Boyne," answered his host with a little
ostentation.

"Oh, you're one of the Peep-o'-Day Boys, then," remarked Mallow.

"I'm not saying that," answered the old man.  "I'm not an Ulsterman, but
I celebrate the coming of William to the Boyne.  Things were done that
day that'll be remembered when Ireland is whisked away into the Kingdom
of Heaven.  So you'll not go to bed till you've had dinner, Mr. Mallow!
By me soul, I think I smell the little porker now.  Dinner at five, to
bed at eight, up before daylight, and off to Dublin when the light
breaks.  That's the course!"  He turned to Captain Ivy.  "I'm sorry,
captain, but there's naught else to do, and you were going to-morrow at
noon, anyhow, so it won't make much difference to you."

"No difference whatever," replied the sailorman.  "I have to go to
Dublin, too, and from there to Queenstown to join my ship, and from
Queenstown to the coast of France to do some fighting."

"Please God!" remarked Miles Calhoun.  "So be it!" declared Mallow.

"Amen!" said Dyck.

Once again Dyck looked the visitor straight in the eyes, and back in the
horizon of Mallow's life-sky there shone the light of an evil star.

"There's the call to dinner," remarked Miles Calhoun, as a bell began
ringing in the tower outside.  "Come with me, Mr. Mallow, and I'll show
you your room.  You've had your horse put up, I hope?"

"Yes, and my bag brought in."

"Well, come along, then.  There's no time to lose.  I can smell the
porker crawling from the oven."

"You're a master of tempting thoughts," remarked Mallow enthusiastically.

"Sheila--Sheila!" said Dyck Calhoun to himself where he stood.




CHAPTER III

THE QUARREL

The journey to Dublin was made by the Calhouns, their two guests, and
Michael Clones, without incident of note.  Arrived there, Miles Calhoun
gave himself to examination by Government officials and to assisting the
designs of the Peep-o'-Day Boys; and indeed he was present at the
formation of the first Orange Lodge.

His narrow nature, his petty craft and malevolence, were useful in a time
of anxiety for the State.  Yet he had not enough ability to develop his
position by the chances offered him.  He had not a touch of genius; he
had only bursts of Celtic passion, which he had not mind enough to
control.

Indeed, as days, weeks and months went on, his position became less
valuable to himself, and his financial affairs suffered from his own and
his agent's bad management.  In his particular district he was a power;
in Dublin he soon showed the weaker side of his nature.  He had a bad
habit of making foes where he could easily have made friends.  In his
personal habits he was sober, but erratic.

Dyck had not his father's abstention from the luxuries of life.  He
drank, he gamed, he went where temptation was, and fell into it.  He
steadily diminished his powers of resistance to self-indulgence until one
day, at a tavern, he met a man who made a great impression upon him.

This man was brilliant, ebullient, full of humour, character and life,
knowing apparently all the lower world of Dublin, and moving with an
assured step.  It was Erris Boyne, the divorced husband of Mrs. Llyn and
the father of Sheila Llyn; but this fact was not known to Dyck.  There
was also a chance of its not becoming known, because so many years had
passed since Erris Boyne was divorced.

One day Erris Boyne said to Dyck:

"There's a supper to-night at the Breakneck Club.  Come along and have a
skinful.  You'll meet people worth knowing.  They're a damned fine lot of
fellows for you to meet, Calhoun !"

"The Breakneck Club isn't a good name for a first-class institution,"
remarked Dyck, with a pause and a laugh; "but I'll come, if you'll fetch
me."

Erris Boyne, who was eighteen years older than Dyck, laughed, flicked a
little pinch of snuff at his nose with his finger.

"Dear lad, of course I'll come and fetch you," he said.  "There's many a
man has done worse than lead a gay stripling like you into pleasant ways.
Bring along any loose change you have, for it may be a night of nights."

"Oh, they play cards, do they, at the Breakneck Club?" said Dyck, alive
with interest.

"Well, call it what you like, but men must do something when they get
together, and we can't be talking all the time.  So pocket your
shillings."

"Are they all the right sort?" asked Dyck, with a little touch of
malice.  "I mean, are they loyal and true?"

Erris Boyne laid a hand on Dyck's arm.

"Come and find out.  Do you think I'd lead you into bad company?  Of
course Emmet and Wolfe Tone won't be there, nor any of that lot; but
there'll be some men of the right stamp."  He watched Dyck carefully out
of the corner of his eye.  "It's funny," he added, "that in Ireland the
word loyal always means being true to the Union Jack, standing by King
George and his crowd."

"Well, what would you have?" said Dyck.  "For this is a day and age when
being loyal to the King is more than aught else in all the Irish world.
We're never two days alike, we Irish.  There are the United Irishmen and
the Defenders on one side, and the Peepo'-Day Boys, or Orangemen, on the
other--Catholic and Protestant, at each other's throats.  Then there's a
hand thrust in, and up goes the sword, and the rifles, pikes, and
bayonets; and those that were ready to mutilate or kill each other fall
into each other's arms."

Erris Boyne laughed.  "Well, there'll soon be an end to that.  The Irish
Parliament is slipping into disrepute.  It wouldn't surprise me if the
astute English bribe them into a union, to the ruin of Irish
Independence.  Yet maybe, before that comes, the French will have a try
for power here.  And upon my word, if I have to live under foreign rule,
I'd as leave have a French whip over me as an English!"  He came a step
nearer, his voice lowered a little.  "Have you heard the latest news from
France?  They're coming with a good-sized fleet down to the south coast.
Have you heard it?"

"Oh, there's plenty one hears one doesn't believe is gospel," answered
Dyck, his eyes half closing.  "I'm not believing all I hear, as if it was
a prayer-meeting.  Anything may happen here; Ireland's a woman--very
uncertain."

Dyck flicked some dust from his waistcoat, and dropped his eyes, because
he was thinking of two women he had known; one of them an angel now in
company of her sister angels--his mother; the other a girl he had met on
the hills of Connemara, a wonderfully pretty girl of seventeen.  How
should he know that the girl was Erris Boyne's daughter?--although there
were times when some gesture of Boyne, some quick look, some lifting of
the eyebrows, brought back the memory of Sheila Llyn, as it did now.

Since Dyck left his old home he had seen her twice; once at Loyland
Towers, and once at her home in Limerick.  The time he had spent with her
had been very brief, but full of life, interest, and character.  She was
like some piquant child, bold, beautiful, uncertain, caressing in her
manner one instant, and distant at another.

She had said radiant things, had rallied him, had shown him where a
twenty-nine-pound salmon had been caught in a stream, and had fired at
and brought down a pheasant outside the covert at Loyland Towers.
Whether at Loyland Towers, or at her mother's house in Limerick, there
was no touch of forwardness in her, or in anything she said or did.  She
was the most natural being, the freest from affectation, he had ever
known.

As Erris Boyne talked to him, the memory of Sheila flooded his mind,
and on the flood his senses swam like swans.  He had not her careful
composure.  He was just as real, but he had the wilfulness of man.  She
influenced him as no woman had ever yet done; but he saw no happy ending
to the dream.  He was too poor to marry; he had no trade or profession;
his father's affairs were in a bad way.  He could not bring himself to
join the army or the navy; and yet, as an Irishman moved by political
ideals, with views at once critical and yet devoted to the crown, he was
not in a state to settle down.

He did not know that Erris Boyne was set to capture him for the rebel
cause.  How could he know that Boyne was an agent of the most evil forces
in Ireland--an agent of skill and address, prepossessing, with the face
of a Celtic poet and the eye of an assassin?

Boyne's object was to bring about the downfall of Dyck Calhoun--that is,
his downfall as a patriot.  At the Breakneck Club this bad business
began.  Dyck had seen many people, representing the gaiety and deviltry
of life; but it was as though many doubtful people, many reckless ones,
all those with purposes, fads, and fancies, were there.  Here was an
irresponsible member of a Government department; there an officer of His
Majesty's troops; beyond, a profligate bachelor whose reputation for
traitorous diplomacy was known and feared.  Yet everywhere were men known
in the sporting, gaming, or political world, in sea life or land life,
most of whom had a character untouched by criticism.

It was at this club that Dyck again met that tall, ascetic messenger from
the Attorney-General, who had brought the message to Miles Calhoun.  It
was with this man--Leonard Mallow, eldest son of Lord Mallow--that Dyck,
with three others, played cards one afternoon.

The instinctive antipathy which had marked their first introduction was
carried on to this later meeting.  Dyck distrusted Mallow, and allowed
his distrust exercise.  It was unfortunate that Mallow won from him
three-fourths of the money he had brought to the club, and won it with a
smile not easy to forgive.

Dyck had at last secured sudden success in a scheme of his cards when
Mallow asked with a sneer:

"Did you learn that at your home in heaven?"

"Don't they teach it where you live in hell?" was Dyck's reply.

At this Mallow flicked Dyck across the face with his handkerchief.

"That's what they teach where I belong."

"Well, it's easy to learn, and we'll do the sum at any time or place you
please."  After a moment Dyck continued: "I wouldn't make a fuss over it.
Let's finish the game.  There's no good prancing till the sport's ready;
so I'll sit and learn more of what they teach in hell!"

Dyck had been drinking, or he would not have spoken so; and when he was
drunk daring was strong in him.  He hated profoundly this man-so self-
satisfied and satanic.

He kept a perfect coolness, however.  Leonard Mallow should not see that
he was upset.  His wanton wordiness came to his rescue, and until the end
of the game he played with sang-froid, daring, and skill.  He loved
cards; he loved the strife of skill against skill, of trick against
trick, of hand against hand.  He had never fought a duel in his life,
but he had no fear of doing so.

At length, having won back nearly all he had lost, he rose to his feet
and looked round.

"Is there any one here from whom I can ask a favour?"

Several stepped forward.  Dyck nodded.  One of them he knew.  It was Sir
Almeric Foyle.

"Thank you, Sir Almeric," he said; "thank you.  Shall it be swords or
pistols?" he asked his enemy, coolly.

"Swords, if you please," remarked Mallow grimly, for he had a gift with
the sword.

Dyck nodded again.

"As you will.  As you will!"




CHAPTER IV

THE DUEL

It was a morning such as could only be brought into existence by the
Maker of mornings in Ireland.  It was a day such as Dublin placed away
carefully into the pantechnicon of famous archives.

The city of Dublin was not always clean, but in the bright, gorgeous sun
her natural filth was no menace to the eye, no repulse to the senses.
Above the Liffey, even at so early an hour, the heat shimmers like a
silver mist.  The bells of churches were ringing, and the great cathedral
bells boomed in thrilling monotony over the peaceful city.  Here and
there in the shabby yet renowned streets, horsemen moved along; now and
then the costermonger raised his cry of fresh fruit, flowers, and
"distinguished vegetables."

People moved into church doorways on their way to mass or confession--
some bright and rather gorgeous beings, some in deep mourning, shy,
reserved, and obscure.  Here and there, also, in certain streets--where
officials lived or worked--were soldiers afoot; soldiers with carbines
and long bayonets, with tall, slightly peaked hats, smart red coats,
belts crossing their breasts, knee-breeches and leggings, and all with
epaulets shining.  They were in marked contrast to the peasant folk with
the high-peaked soft hat, knee-breeches, rough tail-coat, and stockings,
some with rifles, some with pikes, some with powder-horns slung under
their arms or in the small of the back.

Besides this show of foot-soldiers--that is, regulars and irregulars of
the Cornwallis Regiment, and men of the Defenders and the Peep-o'-Day
Boys--there were little groups of cavalry making their way to the parade-
ground, the castle, the barracks, or the courts.

Beyond these there was the jaunting-car trundling over the rough
cobblestone street, or bumping in and out of dangerous holes.  Whips
cracked, and the loud voices of jarveys shouted blatant humour and Irish
fun at horse and passenger.  Here and there, also, some stately coach,
bedizened with arms of the quality, made its way through the chief
streets, or across the bridges of the Liffey.

Then came the general population, moving cheerfully in the inspiriting
sun; for Irishmen move so much in a moist atmosphere that on a sunshiny
day all tristesse of life seems changed, as in a flash, into high spirits
and much activity.  Not that the country, at its worst, is slow-footed or
depressed; for wit is always at the elbow of want.

Never in all Ireland's years had she a more beautiful day than that
in which Dyck Calhoun and the Hon. Leonard Mallow met to settle their
account in a secluded corner of Phoenix Park.  It was not the usual place
for duels.  The seconds had taken care to keep the locale from the
knowledge of the public; especially as many who had come to know of
the event at the Breakneck Club were eager to be present.

The affair began an hour after sunrise.  Neither Dyck nor Leonard Mallow
slept at home the night before, but in separate taverns near Phoenix
Park.  Mallow came almost jauntily to the obscure spot.  Both men had
sensitiveness, and both entered the grounds with a certain sense of
pleasure.

Dyck moved and spoke like a man charged with some fluid which had
abstracted him from life's monotonous routine.  He had to consider the
chance of never leaving the grounds alive; yet as he entered the place,
where smooth grass between the trees made good footing for the work to be
done, the thrill of the greenery, the sound of the birds, the flick of a
lizard across the path, and the distant gay leap of a young deer, brought
to his senses a gust of joyous feeling.

"I never smelled such air!" he said to one of the seconds.  "I never saw
the sun so beautiful!"  He sniffed the air and turned his face towards
the sun.  "Well, it's a day for Ireland," he added, in response to a
gravely playful remark of Sir Almeric Foyle.  "Ireland never was so
sweet.  Nature's provoking us!"

"Yes, it's a pity," said Sir Almeric.  "But I'm not thinking of bad luck
for you, Calhoun."

Dyck's smile seemed to come from infinite distance.  He was not normal;
he was submerged.  He was in the great, consuming atmosphere of the
bigger world, and the greater life.  He even did not hate Mallow at the
moment.  The thing about to be done was to him a test of manhood.  It was
a call upon the courage of the soul, a challenge of life, strength, and
will.

As Mallow entered the grounds, the thought of Sheila Llyn crossed Dyck's
mind, and the mental sight of her gladdened the eyes of his soul.  For
one brief instant he stood lost in the mind's look; then he stepped
forward, saluted, shook hands with Mallow, and doffed his coat and
waistcoat.

As he did so, he was conscious of a curious coldness, even of dampness,
in the hand which had shaken that of Mallow.  Mallow's hand had a clammy
touch--clammy, but firm and sure.  There was no tremor in the long, thin
fingers nor at the lips--the thin, ascetic lips, as of a secret-service
man--but in his eyes was a dark fire of purpose.  The morning had touched
him, but not as it had thrown over Dyck its mantle of peace.  Mallow also
had enjoyed the smell and feeling of it all, but with this difference--it
had filled him with such material joy that he could not bear the thought
of leaving it.  It gave him strength of will, which would add security to
his arm and wrist.  Yet, as he looked at Dyck, he saw that his work was
cut out for him; for in all his days he had never seen a man so well-
possessed, so surely in hand.

Dyck had learned swordsmanship with as skilled a master as Ireland had
known, and he had shown, in getting knowledge of the weapon, a natural
instinct and a capacity worthy of the highest purpose.  He had handled
the sword since he was six, and his play was better than that of most
men; but this was, in fact, his first real duel.  In the troubled state
of Ireland, with internal discord, challenge, and attack, he had more
than once fought, and with success; but that was in the rough-and-tumble
of life's chances, as it were, with no deliberate plan to fight according
to the rules.  Many times, of course, in the process of his training, he
had fought as men fight in duels, but with this difference--that now he
was permitted to disable or kill his foe.

It was clear that one or the other would not leave this ground--this
verdant, beautiful piece of mother earth--exactly as he entered it.  He
would leave it wounded, incapable, or dead.  Indeed, both might leave it
wounded, and the chances of success were with the older man, Mallow,
whose experience would give him an advantage.

Physically, there was not a vast deal to choose between the two men.
Mallow was lank and tall, nervously self-contained, finely concentrated,
and vigorous.  Dyck was broad of shoulder, well set up, muscular, and
with a steadier eye than that of his foe.  Also, as the combat developed,
it was clear that he had a hand as steady as his eye.  What was more, his
wrist had superb strength and flexibility; it was as enduring and vital
as the forefoot and ankle of a tiger.  As a pair they were certainly
notable, and would give a good account of themselves.

No one of temperament who observed the scene could ever forget it.  The
light was perfect--evenly distributed, clear enough to permit accuracy of
distance in a stroke.  The air was still, gently bracing, and, like most
Irish air, adorably sweet.

The spot chosen for the fight was a sort of avenue between great trees,
whose broad leaves warded off the direct sun, and whose shade had as yet
no black shadows.  The turf was as elastic to the foot as a firm
mattress.  In the trees, birds were singing with liveliness; in the
distance, horned cattle browsed, and a pair of horses stood gazing at
the combatants, startled, no doubt, by this invasion of their pasturage.
From the distance came the faint, mellow booming of church-bells.

The two men fighting had almost the air of gladiators.  Their coats were
off, and the white linen of their shirts looked gracious; while the
upraised left hand of the fighters balancing the sword-thrust and the
weight of the body had an almost singular beauty.  Of the two, Dyck was
the more graceful, the steadier, the quicker in his motions.

Vigilant Dyck was, but not reckless.  He had made the first attack, on
the ground that the aggressor gains by boldness, if that boldness is
joined to skill; and Dyck's skill was of the best.  His heart was warm.
His momentary vision of Sheila Llyn remained with him--not as a vision,
rather as a warmth in his inmost being, something which made him
intensely alert, cheerful, defiant, exactly skilful.

He had need of all his skill, for Mallow was set to win the fight.
He felt instinctively what was working in Dyck's mind.  He had fought a
number of duels, and with a certain trick or art he had given the end to
the lives of several.  He became conscious, however, that Dyck had a
particular stroke in mind, which he himself was preventing by masterful
methods.  It might be one thing or another, but in view of Dyck's
training it would perhaps be the Enniscorthy touch.

Again and again Dyck pressed his antagonist backward, seeking to muddle
his defence and to clear an opening for his own deadly stroke; but the
other man also was a master, and parried successfully.

Presently, with a quick move, Mallow took the offensive, and tried to
unsettle Dyck's poise and disorganize his battle-plan.  For an instant
the tempestuous action, the brilliant, swift play of the sword, the
quivering flippancy of the steel, gave Dyck that which almost
disconcerted him.  Yet he had a grip of himself, and preserved his
defence intact; though once his enemy's steel caught his left shoulder,
making it bleed.  The seconds, however, decided that the thrust was not
serious, and made no attempt to interrupt the combat.

Dyck kept singularly cool.  As Mallow's face grew flushed, his own grew
paler, but it was the paleness of intensity and not of fear.  Each man's
remarkable skill in defence was a good guarantee against disaster due to
carelessness.  Seldom have men fought so long and accomplished so little
in the way of blood-letting.  At length, however, Dyck's tactics changed.
Once again he became aggressive, and he drove his foe to a point where
the skill of both men was tried to the uttermost.  It was clear the time
had come for something definite.  Suddenly Dyck threw himself back with
an agile step, lunged slightly to one side, and then in a gallant foray
got the steel point into the sword-arm of his enemy.  That was the
Enniscorthy stroke, which had been taught him by William Tandy, the
expert swordsman, and had been made famous by Lord Welling, of
Enniscorthy.  It succeeded, and it gave Dyck the victory, for Mallow's
sword dropped from his hand.

A fatigued smile came to Mallow's lips.  He clasped the wounded arm with
his left hand as the surgeon came forward.

"Well, you got it home," he said to Dyck; "and it's deftly done."

"I did my best," answered Dyck.  "Give me your hand, if you will."

With a wry look Mallow, now seated on the old stump of a tree, held out
his left hand.  It was covered with blood.

"I think we'll have to forego that courtesy, Calhoun," he said.  "Look at
the state of my hand!  It's good blood," he added grimly.  "It's damned
good blood, but--but it won't do, you see."

"I'm glad it was no worse," said Dyck, not touching the bloody hand.
"It's a clean thrust, and you'll be better from it soon.  These great
men"--he smiled towards the surgeons--"will soon put you right.  I got my
chance with the stroke, and took it, because I knew if I didn't you'd
have me presently."

"You'll have a great reputation in Dublin town now, and you'll deserve
it," Mallow added adroitly, the great paleness of his features, however,
made ghastly by the hatred in his eyes.

Dyck did not see this look, but he felt a note of malice--a distant note
--in Mallow's voice.  He saw that what Mallow had said was fresh evidence
of the man's arrogant character.  It did not offend him, however, for he
was victor, and could enter the Breakneck Club or Dublin society with a
tranquil eye.

Again Mallow's voice was heard.

"I'd have seen you damned to hell, Calhoun, before I'd have apologized at
the Breakneck Club; but after a fight with one of the best swordsmen in
Ireland I've learned a lot, and I'll apologize now--completely."

The surgeon had bound up the slight wound in Dyck's shoulder, had stopped
the bleeding, and was now helping him on with his coat.  The operation
had not been without pain, but this demonstration from his foe was too
much for him.  It drove the look of pain from his face; it brought a
smile to his lips.  He came a step nearer.

"I'm as obliged to you as if you'd paid for my board and lodging,
Mallow," he said; "and that's saying a good deal in these days.  I'll
never have a bigger fight.  You're a greater swordsman than your
reputation.  I must have provoked you beyond reason," he went on
gallantly.  "I think we'd better forget the whole thing."

"I'm a Loyalist," Mallow replied.  "I'm a Loyalist, and if you're one,
too, what reason should there be for our not being friends?"

A black cloud flooded Calhoun's face.

"If--if I'm a Loyalist, you say!  Have you any doubt of it?
If you have--"

"You wish your sword had gone into my heart instead of my arm, eh?"
interrupted Mallow.  "How easily I am misunderstood!  I meant nothing by
that 'if.'"  He smiled, and the smile had a touch of wickedness.  "I
meant nothing by it-nothing at all.  As we are both Loyalists, we must be
friends.  Good-bye, Calhoun!"

Dyck's face cleared very slowly.  Mallow was maddening, but the look of
the face was not that of a foe.  "Well, let us be friends," Dyck answered
with a cordial smile.  "Good-bye," he added.  "I'm damned sorry we had to
fight at all.  Good-bye!"




CHAPTER V

THE KILLING OF ERRIS BOYNE

"There's many a government has made a mess of things in Ireland," said
Erris Boyne; "but since the day of Cromwell the Accursed this is the
worst.  Is there a man in Ireland that believes in it, or trusts it?
There are men that support it, that are served by it, that fill their
pockets out of it; but by Joseph and by Mary, there's none thinks there
couldn't be a better!  Have a little more marsala, Calhoun?"

With these words, Boyne filled up the long glass out of which Dyck
Calhoun had been drinking--drinking too much.  Shortly before Dyck had
lost all his cash at the card-table.  He had turned from it penniless and
discomfited to see Boyne, smiling, and gay with wine, in front of him.

Boyne took him by the arm.

"Come with me," said he.  "There's no luck for you at the tables to-day.
Let's go where we can forget the world, where we can lift the banner of
freedom and beat the drums of purpose.  Come along, lad!"

Boyne had ceased to have his earlier allurement for Dyck Calhoun, but his
smile was friendly, his manner was hospitable, and he was on the spot.
The time was critical for Dyck--critical and dangerous.  He had lost
money heavily; he had even exhausted his mother's legacy.

Of late he had seen little of his father, and the little he had seen was
not fortunate.  They had quarrelled over Dyck's wayward doings.  Miles
Calhoun had said some hard things to him, and Dyck had replied that he
would cut out his own course, trim his own path, walk his own way.
He had angered his father terribly, and Miles, in a burst of temper,
had disclosed the fact that his own property was in peril.  They had
been, estranged ever since; but the time had come when Dyck must at least
secure the credit of his father's name at his bank to find the means of
living.

It was with this staring him in the face that Erris Boyne's company
seemed to offer at least a recovery of his good spirits.  Dissipated as
Boyne's look was, he had a natural handsomeness which, with good care of
himself personally, well-appointed clothes, a cheerful manner, and witty
talk, made him palatable to careless-living Dublin.

This Dublin knew little of Boyne's present domestic life.  It did not
know that he had injured his second wife as badly as he had wronged his
first--with this difference, however, that his first wife was a lady,
while his second wife, Noreen, was a beautiful, quick-tempered, lovable
eighteen-year-old girl, a graduate of the kitchen and dairy, when he took
her to himself.  He had married her in a mad moment after his first wife
--Mrs. Llyn, as she was now called--had divorced him; and after the first
thrill of married life was over, nothing remained with Boyne except
regret that he had sold his freedom for what he might, perhaps, have had
without marriage.

Then began a process of domestic torture which alienated Noreen from him,
and roused in her the worst passions of human nature.  She came to know
of his infidelities, and they maddened her.  They had no children, and in
the end he had threatened her with desertion.  When she had retorted in
strong words, he slapped her face, and left her with an ugly smile.

The house where they lived was outside Dublin, in a secluded spot, yet
not far from stores and shops.  There was this to be said for Noreen--
that she kept her home spotlessly clean, even with two indifferent
servants.  She had a gift for housewifery, which, at its best, was as
good as anything in the world, and far better than could be found in most
parts of Ireland.

Of visitors they had few, if any, and the young wife was left alone to
brood upon her wrongs.  Erris Boyne had slapped her face on the morning
of the day when he met Dyck Calhoun in the hour of his bad luck.  He did
not see the look in her face as he left the house.

Ruthless as he was, he realized the time had come when by bold effort he
might get young Calhoun wholly into his power.  He began by getting Dyck
into the street.  Then he took him by an indirect route to what was,
reputedly, a tavern of consequence.  There choice spirits met on
occasion, and dark souls, like Boyne, planned adventures.  Outwardly it
was a tavern of the old class, superficially sedate, and called the Harp
and Crown.  None save a very few conspirators knew how great a part it
played in the plan to break the government of Ireland and to ruin
England's position in the land.

The entrance was by two doors--one the ordinary public entrance, the
other at the side of the house, which was on a corner.  This could be
opened by a skeleton key owned by Erris Boyne.

He and Dyck entered, however, by the general entrance, because Boyne had
forgotten his key.  They passed through the bar-parlour, nodding to one
or two habitues, and presently were bestowed in a room, not large, but
well furnished.  It was quiet and alluring on this day when the world
seemed disconcerting.  So pleasantly did the place affect Dyck's spirits
that, as he sat down in the room which had often housed worse men than
himself, he gave a sigh of relief.

They played cards, and Dyck won.  He won five times what he had lost at
the club.  This made him companionable.

"It's a poor business-cards," he said at last.  "It puts one up in the
clouds and down in the ditch all at the same time.  I tell you this,
Boyne--I'm going to stop.  No man ought to play cards who hasn't a
fortune; and my fortune, I'm sorry to say, is only my face!"  He laughed
bitterly.

"And your sword--you've forgotten that, Calhoun.  You've a lot of luck in
your sword."

"Well, I've made no money out of it so far," Dyck retorted cynically.

"Yet you've put men with reputations out of the running, men like
Mallow."

"Oh, that was a bit of luck and a few tricks I've learned.  I can't start
a banking-account on that."

"But you can put yourself in the way of winning what can't be bought."

"No--no English army for me, thank you--if that's what you mean."

"It isn't what I mean.  In the English army a man's a slave.  He can
neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep without being under command.  He has to
do a lot of dirty work without having voice in the policy.  He's a child
of discipline and order."

"And a damned good thing that would be for most of us!" retorted Dyck.
"But I'm not one of the most."

"I know that.  Try a little more of this marsala, Calhoun.  It's the best
in the place, and it's got a lot of good stuff.  I've been coming to the
Harp and Crown for many years, and I've never had a bad drink all that
time.  The old landlord is a genius.  He doesn't put on airs.  He's a
good man, is old Swinton, and there's nothing good in the drink of France
that you can't get here."

"Well, if that's true, how does it happen?" asked Dyck, with a little
flash of interest.  "Why should this little twopenny, one-horse place--
I mean in size and furnishments--have such luck as to get the best there
is in France?  It means a lot of trouble, eh?"

"It means some trouble.  But let me tell you"--he leaned over the table
and laid a hand on Dyck's, which was a little nervous--"let me speak as
an old friend to you, if I may.  Here are the facts.  For many a year,
you know as well as I do, ships have been coming from France to Ireland
with the very best wines and liquors, and taking back the very best wool-
-smuggled, of course.  Well, our little landlord here is the damnedest
rogue of all.  The customs never touch him.  From the coast
the stuff comes up to Dublin without a check, and, as he's a special
favourite, he gets the best to be had in la belle France."

"Why is he such a favourite?" asked Dyck.

Erris Boyne laughed, not loudly, but suggestively.  "When a lady kisses a
man on the lips, of her own free will, and puts her arm around his neck,
is it done, do you think, because it's her duty to do it or die?  No,
it's because she likes the man; because the man is a good friend to her;
because it's money in her pocket.  That's the case with old Swinton.
France kisses him, as it were, because"--he paused, as though debating
what to say--"because France knows he'd rather be under her own
revolutionary government than under the monarchy of England."

His voice had resonance, and, as he said these words, it had insistence.

"Do you know, Calhoun, I think old Swinton is right.  We suffer here
because monarchy, with its cruel hand of iron, mistrusts us, brutalizes
us."

He did not see enlightenment come into the half-drunken eyes of Dyck.  He
only realized that Dyck was very still, and strangely, deeply interested.

"I tell you, Calhoun, we need in Ireland something of the spirit that's
alive in France to-day.  They've cleaned out the kings--Louis's and
Marie's heads have dropped into the basket.  They're sweeping the dirt
out of France; they're cleaning the dark places; they're whitewashing
Versailles and sawdusting the Tuileries; they're purging the aristocratic
guts of France; they're starting for the world a reformation which will
make it clean.  Not America alone, but England, and all Europe, will
become republics."

"England?" asked Dyck in a low, penetrating voice.  "Aye, England,
through Ireland.  Ireland will come first, then Wales, Scotland, and
England.  Dear lad, the great day is come--the greatest the world has
ever known.  France, the spirit of it, is alive.  It will purge and
cleanse the universe!"

The suspicious, alert look passed from Dyck's eyes, but his face had
become flushed.  He reached out and poured himself another glass of wine.

"What you say may be true, Boyne.  It may be true, but I wouldn't put
faith in it--not for one icy minute.  I don't want to see here in Ireland
the horrors and savagery of France.  I don't want to see the guillotine
up on St. Stephen's Green."

Boyne felt that he must march carefully.  He was sure of his game; but
there were difficulties, and he must not throw his chances away.  Dyck
was in a position where, with his inflammable nature, he could be
captured.

"Well, I'll tell you, Calhoun.  I don't know which is worse--Ireland
bloody with shootings and hangings, Ulster up in the north and Cork in
the south, from the Giant's Causeway to Tralee; no two sets of feet
dancing alike, with the bloody hand of England stretching out over the
Irish Parliament like death itself; or France ruling us.  How does the
English government live here?  Only by bribery and purchases.  It buys
its way.  Isn't that true?"

Dyck nodded.  "Yes, it's true in a way," he replied.  "It's so, because
we're what we are.  We've never been properly put in our places.  The
heel on our necks--that's the way to do it."

Boyne looked at the flushed, angry face.  In spite of Dyck's words, he
felt that his medicine was working well.

"Listen to me, Calhoun," he said softly.  "You've got to do something.
You're living an idle life.  You're in debt.  You've ruined your
independent fortune at the tables.  There are but two courses open to
you.  One is to join the British forces--to be a lieutenant, a captain,
a major, a colonel, or a general, in time; to shoot and cut and hang and
quarter, and rule with a heavy rod.  That's one way."

"So you think I'm fit for nothing but the sword, eh?" asked Dyck with
irony.  "You think I've got no brains for anything except the army."

Boyne laughed.  "Have another drink, Calhoun."  He poured out more wine.
"Oh, no, not the army alone; there's the navy--and there's the French
navy!  It's the best navy in the world, the freest and the greatest,
and with Bonaparte going at us, England will have enough to do--too much,
I'm thinking.  So there's a career in the French navy open.  And listen--
before you and I are two months older, the French navy will be in the
harbours of Ireland, and the French army will land here."  He reached out
and grasped Dyck's arm.  "There's no liberty of freedom under the Union
Jack.  What do you think of the tricolour?  It's a great flag, and under
it the world is going to be ruled--England, Spain, Italy, Holland,
Prussia, Austria, and Russia--all of them.  The time is ripe.  You've got
your chance.  Take it on, dear lad, take it on."

Dyck did not raise his head.  He was leaning forward with both arms on
the table, supporting himself firmly; his head was bowed as though with
deep interest in what Boyne said.  And, indeed, his interest was great--
so great that all his manhood, vigour, all his citizenship, were vitally
alive.  Yet he did not lift his head.

"What's that you say about French ships in the harbours of Ireland?" he
said in a tone that showed interest.  "Of course, I know there's been a
lot of talk of a French raid on Ireland, but I didn't know it was to be
so soon."

"Oh, it's near enough!  It's all been arranged," replied Boyne.
"There'll be ships-war-ships, commanded by Hoche.  They'll have orders
to land on the coast, to join the Irish patriots, to take control of
the operations, and then to march on--"

He was going to say "march on Dublin," but he stopped.  He was playing a
daring game.  If he had not been sure of his man, he would not have been
so frank and fearless.

He did not, however, mislead Dyck greatly.  Dyck had been drinking a good
deal, but this knowledge of a French invasion, and a sense of what Boyne
was trying to do, steadied his shaken emotions; held him firmly in the
grip of practical common sense.  He laughed, hiccuped a little, as though
he was very drunk, and said:

"Of course the French would like to come to Ireland; they'd like to seize
it and hold it.  Why, of course they would!  Don't we know all that's
been and gone?  Aren't Irishmen in France grown rich in industry there
after having lost every penny of their property here?  Aren't there
Irishmen there, always conniving to put England at defiance here by
breaking her laws, cheating her officers, seducing her patriots?  Of
course; but what astounds me is that a man of your standing should
believe the French are coming here now to Ireland.  No, no, Boyne; I'm
not taking your word for any of these things.  You're a gossip; you're a
damned, pertinacious, preposterous gossip, and I'll say it as often as
you like."

"So it's proof you want, is it?  Well, then, here it is."

Boyne drew from his pocket a small leather-bound case and took from it a
letter, which he laid on the table in front of Dyck.

Dyck looked at the document, then said:

"Ah, that's what you are, eh?--a captain in the French artillery!  Well,
that'd be a surprise in Ireland if it were told."

"It isn't going to be told unless you tell it, Calhoun, and you're too
much of a sportsman for that.  Besides:

"Why shouldn't you have one of these if you want it--if you want it!"

"What'd be the good of my wanting it?  I could get a commission here in
the army of George III, if I wanted it, but I don't want it; and any man
that offers it to me, I'll hand it back with thanks and be damned to
you!"

"Listen to me, then, Calhoun," remarked Boyne, reaching out a hand to lay
it on Dyck's arm.

Dyck saw the motion, however, and carefully drew back in his chair.  "I'm
not an adventurer," he said; "but if I were, what would there be in it
for me?"

Boyne misunderstood the look on Dyck's face.  He did not grasp the
meaning behind the words, and he said to him:

"Oh, a good salary--as good as that of a general, with a commission and
the spoils of war!  That's the thing in the French army that counts for
so much--spoils of war.  When they're out on a country like this, they
let their officers loose--their officers and men.  Did you ever hear tell
of a French army being pinched for fodder, or going thirsty for drink, or
losing its head for poverty or indigence?"

"No, I never did."

"Well, then, take the advice of an officer of the French army resident
now in Dublin," continued Boyne, laughing, "who has the honour of being
received as the friend of Mr. Dyck Calhoun of Playmore!  Take your hand
in the game that's going on!  For a man as young as you, with brains and
ambition, there's no height he mightn't reach in this country.  Think of
it--Ireland free from English control; Ireland, with all her dreams,
living her own life, fearless, independent, as it was in days of yore.
Why, what's to prevent you, Dyck Calhoun, from being president of the
Irish Republic?  You have brains, looks, skill, and a wonderful tongue.
None but a young man could take on the job, for it will require boldness,
skill, and the recklessness of perfect courage.  Isn't it good enough for
you?"

"What's the way to do it?" asked Dyck, still holding on to his old self
grimly.  "How is it to be done?"  He spoke a little thickly, for, in
spite of himself, the wine was clogging his senses.  It had been
artistically drugged by Boyne.

"Listen to me, Calhoun," continued Boyne.  "I've known you now some time.
We've come in and gone out together.  This day was inevitable.  You were
bound to come to it one way or another.  Man, you have a heart of iron;
you have the courage of Caesar or Alexander; you have the chance of doing
what no Englishman could ever do--Cromwell, or any other.  Well, then,
don't you see the fateful moment has come in Irish life and history?
Strife everywhere!  Alone, what can we do?  Alone, if we try to shake off
the yoke that binds us we shall be shattered, and our last end be worse
than our first.  But with French ships, French officers and soldiers,
French guns and ammunition, with the trained men of the French army to
take control here, what amelioration of our weakness, what confidence and
skill on our side!  Can you doubt what the end will be?  Answer me, man,
don't you see it all?  Isn't it clear to you?  Doesn't such a cause
enlist you?"

With a sudden burst of primitive anger, Dyck got to his feet, staggering
a little, but grasping the fatal meaning of the whole thing.  He looked
Erris Boyne in the eyes.  His own were bloodshot and dissipated, but
there was a look in them of which Boyne might well take heed.

Boyne had not counted on Dyck's refusal; or, if it had occurred to him,
the remedy, an ancient one, was ready to his fingers.  The wine was
drugged.  He had watched the decline of Dyck's fortunes with an eye of
appreciation; he had seen the clouds of poverty and anxiety closing in.
He had known of old Miles Calhoun's financial difficulties.  He had
observed Dyck's wayside loitering with revolutionists, and he had taken
it with too much seriousness.  He knew the condition of Dyck's purse.

He was not prepared for Dyck's indignant outburst.

"I tell you this, Erris Boyne, there's none has ever tried me as you have
done!  What do you think I am--a thing of the dirty street-corner,
something to be swept up and cast into the furnace of treason?  Look you,
after to-day you and I will never break bread or drink wine together.
No--by Heaven, no!  I don't know whether you've told me the truth or not,
but I think you have.  There's this to say--I shall go from this place to
Dublin Castle, and shall tell them there--without mentioning your name--
what you've told about the French raid.  Now, by God, you're a traitor!
You oughtn't to live, and if you'll send your seconds to me I'll try and
do with you as I did with Leonard Mallow.  Only mark me, Erris Boyne,
I'll put my sword into your heart.  You understand--into your filthy
heart!"

At that moment the door of the room opened, and a face looked in for an
instant-the face of old Swinton, the landlord of the Harp and Crown.
Suddenly Boyne's look changed.  He burst into a laugh, and brought his
fists down on the table between them with a bang.

"By Joseph and by Mary, but you're a patriot, Calhoun!  I was trying to
test you.  I was searching to find the innermost soul of you.  The French
fleet, my commission in the French army, and my story about the landlord
are all bosh.  If I meant what I told you, do you think I'd have been so
mad as to tell you so much, damn it?  Have you no sense, man?  I wanted
to find out exactly how you stood-faithful or unfaithful to the crown--
and I've found out.  Sit down, sit down, Calhoun, dear lad.  Take your
hand off your sword.  Remember, these are terrible days.  Everything I
said about Ireland is true.  What I said about France is false.  Sit
down, man, and if you're going to join the king's army--as I hope and
trust you will--then here's something to help you face the time between."
He threw on the table a packet of notes.  "They're good and healthy, and
will buy you what you need.  There's not much.  There's only a hundred
pounds, but I give it to you with all my heart, and you can pay it back
when the king's money comes to you, or when you marry a rich woman."

He said it all with a smile on his face.  It was done so cleverly, with
so much simulated sincerity, that Dyck, in his state of semi-drunkenness,
could not, at the instant, place him in his true light.  Besides, there
was something handsome and virile in Boyne's face--and untrue; but the
untruth Dyck did not at the moment see.

Never in his life had Boyne performed such prodigies of dissimulation.
He was suddenly like a schoolboy disclosing the deeds of some adventurous
knight.  He realized to the full the dangers he had run in disclosing the
truth; for it was the truth that he had told.

So serious was the situation, to his mind, that one thing seemed
inevitable.  Dyck must be kidnapped at once and carried out of Ireland.
It would be simple.  A little more drugged wine, and he would be asleep
and powerless--it had already tugged at him.  With the help of his
confreres in the tavern, Dyck could be carried out, put on a lugger, and
sent away to France.

There was nothing else to do.  Boyne had said truly that the French fleet
meant to come soon.  Dyck must not be able to give the thing away before
it happened.  The chief thing now was to prime him with the drugged wine
till he lost consciousness, and then carry him away to the land of the
guillotine.  Dyck's tempestuous nature, the poetry and imagination of
him, would quickly respond to French culture, to the new orders of the
new day in France.  Meanwhile, he must be soaked in drugged drink.

Already the wine had played havoc with him; already stupefaction was
coming over his senses.  With a good-natured, ribald laugh, Boyne poured
out another glass of marsala and pushed it gently over to Dyck's fingers.

"My gin to your marsala," he said, and he raised his own glass of gin,
looking playfully over the top to Dyck.

With a sudden loosening of all the fibres of his nature, Dyck raised the
glass of marsala to his lips and drained it off almost at a gulp.

"You're a prodigious liar, Boyne," he said.  "I didn't think any one
could lie so completely."

"I'll teach you how, Calhoun.  It's not hard.  I'll teach you how."

He passed a long cigar over the table to Dyck, who, however, did not
light it, but held it in his fingers.  Boyne struck a light and held it
out across the small table.  Dyck leaned forward, but, as he did so, the
wine took possession of his senses.  His head fell forward in sleep, and
the cigar dropped from his fingers.

"Ah, well--ah, well, we must do some business now!" remarked Boyne.  He
leaned over Dyck for a moment.  "Yes, sound asleep," he said, and laughed
scornfully to himself.  "Well, when it's dark we must get him away.
He'll sleep for four or five hours, and by that time he'll be out on the
way to France, and the rest is easy."

He was about to go to the door that led into the business part of the
house, when the door leading into the street opened softly, and a woman
stepped inside.  She had used the key which Boyne had forgotten at his
house.

At first he did not hear her.  Then, when he did turn round, it was too
late.  The knife she carried under her skirt flashed out and into Boyne's
heart.  He collapsed on the floor without a sound, save only a deep sigh.

Stooping over, Noreen drew the knife out with a little gurgling cry--a
smothered exclamation.  Then she opened the door again--the side-door
leading into the street-closed it softly, and was gone.

Two hours afterwards the landlord opened the door.  Erris Boyne lay in
his silence, stark and still.  At the table, with his head sunk in his
arms, sat Dyck Calhoun, snoring stertorously, his drawn sword by his
side.

With a cry the old man knelt on the floor beside the body of Erris Boyne.




CHAPTER VI

DYCK IN PRISON

When Dyck Calhoun waked, he was in the hands of the king's constables,
arrested for the murder of Erris Boyne.  It was hard to protest his
innocence, for the landlord was ready to swear concerning a quarrel he
had seen when he opened the door for a moment.  Dyck, with sudden
caution, only said he would make all clear at the trial.

Dublin and Ireland were shocked and thrilled; England imagined she had
come upon one of the most violent episodes of Irish history.  One journal
protested that it was not possible to believe in Dyck Calhoun's guilt;
that his outward habits were known to all, and were above suspicion,
although he had collogued--though never secretly, so far as the world
knew--with some of the advanced revolutionary spirits.  None of the loyal
papers seemed aware of Erris Boyne's treachery; and while none spoke of
him with approval, all condemned his ugly death.

Driven through the streets of Dublin in a jaunting-car between two of the
king's police, Dyck was a mark for abuse by tongue, but was here and
there cheered by partizans of the ultra-loyal group to which his father
adhered.  The effect of his potations was still upon him, and his mind
was bemused.  He remembered the quarrel, Boyne's explanation, and the
subsequent drinking, but he could recall nothing further.  He was sure
the wine had been drugged, but he realized that Swinton, the landlord,
would have made away with any signs of foul play, as he was himself an
agent of active disloyalty and a friend of Erris Boyne.  Dyck could not
believe he had killed Boyne; yet Boyne had been found with a wound in his
heart, and his own naked sword lying beside him on the table.  The
trouble was he could not absolutely swear innocence of the crime.

The situation was not eased by his stay in jail.  It began with a
revelation terribly repugnant to him.  He had not long been lodged in the
cell when there came a visit from Michael Clones, who stretched out his
hands in an agony of humiliation.

"Ah, you didn't do it--you didn't do it, sir!" he cried.  "I'm sure you
never killed him.  It wasn't your way.  He was for doing you harm if he
could.  An evil man he was, as all the world knows.  But there's one
thing that'll be worse than anything else to you.  You never knew it, and
I never knew it till an hour ago.  Did you know who Erris Boyne was?
Well, I'll tell you.  He was the father of Miss Sheila Llyn.  He was
divorced by Mrs. Llyn many years ago, for having to do with other women.
She took to her maiden name, and he married again.

"Good God!  Good God!"  Dyck Calhoun made a gesture of horror.  "He
Sheila Llyn's father!  Good God!"

Suddenly a passion of remorse roused him out of his semi-stupefaction.

"Michael, Michael!" he said, his voice hoarse, broken.  "Don't say such
a thing!  Are you sure?" Michael nodded.

"I'm sure.  I got it from one that's known Erris Boyne and his first wife
and girl--one that was a servant to them both in past days.  He's been
down to Limerick to see Mrs. Llyn and the beautiful daughter.  I met him
an hour ago, and he told me.  He told me more.  He told me Mrs. Llyn
spoke to him of your friendship with Erris Boyne, and how she meant to
tell you who and what he was.  She said her daughter didn't even know her
father's name.  She had been kept in ignorance."

Dyck seated himself on the rough bed of the cell, and stared at Michael,
his hands between his knees, his eyes perturbed.

"Michael," he said at last, "if it's true--what you've told me--I don't
see my way.  Every step in front of me is black.  To tell the whole truth
is to bring fresh shame upon Mrs. Llyn and her daughter, and not to tell
the whole truth is to take away my one chance of getting out of this
trouble.  I see that!"

"I don't know what you mean, sir, but I'll tell you this--none that knows
you would believe you'd murder Erris Boyne or anny other man."

Dyck wiped the sweat from his forehead.

"I suppose you speak the truth, Michael, but it isn't people who've known
me that'll try me; and I can't tell all."

"Why not, if it'll help you?"

"I can't--of course I can't.  It would be disgrace eternal."

"Why?  Tell me why, sir!"

Dyck looked closely, firmly, at the old servant and friend.  Should he
tell the truth--that Boyne had tried to induce him to sell himself to the
French, to invoke his aid against the English government, to share in
treason?  If he could have told it to anybody, he would have done so to
Michael; but if it was true that in his drunken blindness he had killed
Boyne, he would not seek to escape by proving Boyne a traitor.

He believed Boyne was a servant of the French; but unless the facts came
out in the trial, they should not have sure origin in himself.  He would
not add to his crime in killing the father of the only girl who had ever
touched his heart, the shame of proving that father to be one who should
have been shot as a traitor.

He had courage and daring, but not sufficient to carry him through that
dark chapter.  He would not try to save himself by turning public opinion
against Erris Boyne.  The man had been killed by some one, perhaps--and
the thing ached in his heart--by himself; but that was no reason why the
man's death should not be full punishment for all the wrong he had done.

Dyck had a foolish strain in him, after all.  Romance was his deadly foe;
it made him do a stupid, if chivalrous, thing.  Meanwhile he would warn
the government at once about the projected French naval raid.

"Michael," said Dyck, rising again, "see my father, but you're not to say
I didn't kill Boyne, for, to tell the truth, I don't know.  My head"--
he put his hand to it with a gesture of despair--"my head's a mass of
contradictions.  It seems a thousand years since I entered that tavern!
I can't get myself level with all that's happened.  That Erris Boyne
should be the father of the sweet girl at Limerick shakes me.  Don't you
see what it means?  If I killed him, it spoils everything--everything.
If I didn't kill him, I can only help myself by blackening still more the
life of one who gave being to--"

"Aye, to a young queen!" interrupted Michael.

"God knows, there's none like her in Ireland, or in any other country at
all!"

Suddenly Dyck regained his composure; and it was the composure of one who
had opened the door of hell and had realized that in time--perhaps not
far off--he also would dwell in the infernal place.

"Michael, I have no money, but I'm my father's heir.  My father will not
see me starve in prison, nor want for defence, though my attitude shall
be 'no defence.'  So bring me decent food and some clothes, and send to
me here Will McCormick, the lawyer.  He's as able a man as there is in
Dublin.  Listen, Michael, you're not to speak of Mrs. Llyn and Miss Llyn
as related to Erris Boyne.  What will come of what you and I know and
don't know, Heaven only has knowledge; but I'll see it through.  I've
spoiled as good chances as ever a young man had that wants to make his
way; but drink and cards, Michael, and the flare of this damned life at
the centre--it got hold of me.  It muddled, drowned the best that was in
me.  It's the witch's kitchen, is Dublin.  Ireland's the only place in
the world where they make saints of criminals and pray to them; where
they lose track of time and think they're in eternity; where emotion is
saturnine logic and death is the touchstone of life.  Michael, I don't
see any way to safety.  Those fellows down at the tavern were friends of
Erris Boyne.  They're against me.  They'll hang me if they can!"

"I don't believe they can do it, master.  Dublin and Ireland think more
of you than they did of Erris Boyne.  There's nothing behind you except
the wildness of youth--nothing at all.  If anny one had said to me at
Playmore that you'd do the things you've done with drink and cards since
you come to Dublin,

"I'd have swore they were liars.  Yet when all's said and done, I'd give
my last drop of blood as guarantee you didn't kill Erris Boyne!"

Dyck smiled.  "You've a lot of faith in me, Michael--but I'll tell you
this--I never was so thirsty in my life.  My mouth's like a red-hot iron.
Send me some water.  Give the warder sixpence, if you've got it, and send
me some water.  Then go to Will McCormick, and after that to my father."

Michael shook his head dolefully.

"Mr. McCormick's aisy--oh, aisy enough," he said.  "He'll lep up at the
idea of defendin' you, but I'm not takin' pleasure in goin' to Miles
Calhoun, for he's a hard man these days.  Aw, Mr. Dyck, he's had a lot
of trouble.  Things has been goin' wrong with Playmore.  'Pon honour, I
don't know whether anny of it'll last as long as Miles Calhoun lasts.
There'll be little left for you, Mr. Dyck.  That's what troubles me.  I
tell you it'd break my heart if that place should be lost to your father
and you.  I was born on it.  I'd give the best years of the life that's
left me to make sure the old house could stay in the hands of the
Calhouns.  I say to you that while I live all I am is yours, fair and
foul, good and bad."  He touched his breast with his right hand.  "In
here is the soul of Ireland that leps up for the things that matter.
There's a song--but never mind about a song; this is no place for songs.
It's a prison-house, and you're a prisoner charged--"

"Not charged yet, not charged," interrupted Dyck; "but suspected of and
arrested for a crime.  I'll fight--before God, I'll fight to the last!
Good-bye, Michael; bring me food and clothes, and send me cold water at
once."

When the door closed softly behind Michael Clones, Dyck sat down on the
bed where many a criminal patriot had lain.  He looked round the small
room, bare, unfurnished, severe-terribly severe; he looked at the blank
walls and the barred window, high up; he looked at the floor--it was
discoloured and damp.  He reached out and touched it with his hand.  He
looked at the solitary chair, the basin and pail, and he shuddered.

"How awful--how awful!" he murmured.  "But if it was her father, and if
I killed him"--his head sank low--"if I killed her father!"

"Water, sir."

He looked up.  It was the guard with a tin of water and a dipper.




CHAPTER VII

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

"I don't believe he's guilty, mother."

The girl's fine eyes shone with feeling--with protest, indignation,
anguish.  As she spoke, she thrust her head forward with the vigour of a
passionate counsel.  Sheila Llyn was a champion who would fight to the
last gasp for any cause she loved.

A few moments before, she had found her mother, horror-stricken, gazing
at a newspaper paragraph sent from Dublin.

Sheila at once thought this to be the cause of her mother's agitation,
and she reached out a hand for it.  Her mother hesitated, then handed the
clipping to her.  Fortunately it contained no statement save the bare
facts connected with the killing of Erris Boyne, and no reference to the
earlier life of the dead man.  It said no more than that Dyck Calhoun
must take his trial at the sessions.

It also stated that Dyck, though he pleaded "not guilty," declared
frankly, through Will McCormick, the lawyer, that he had no memory of
aught that happened after he had drunk wine given him by Erris Boyne.  He
said that he and Boyne had quarrelled, but had become reconciled again,
and that the drink was a pledge of their understanding.  From the time he
had taken the drink until he waked in the hands of the king's constables,
he had no memory; but he was sure he had not killed Boyne.  The fact that
there was no blood on his sword was evidence.  Nevertheless, he had been
committed for trial.

Mrs. Llyn was sorely troubled.  She knew of her daughter's interest in
Dyck Calhoun, and of Dyck's regard for Sheila.  She had even looked
forward to marriage, and she wished for Sheila no better fate, because
nearly all she knew of Dyck was to his credit.  She was unaware that his
life in Dublin had been dissipated.

If Dyck was guilty--though she could not believe it--there would be an
end of romance between him and Sheila, and their friendship must be
severed for ever.  Her daughter did not know that Erris Boyne was her
father, and she must not know--in any case not yet; but if Dyck was
condemned, it was almost sure he would be hanged.

She wondered about Boyne's widow, whose name did not appear in the
paragraph she had seen.  She knew that Noreen was beautiful, but that he
had married far beneath him socially.  She had imagined Erris Boyne
living in suburban quiet, not drawing his wife into his social scheme.

That is what had happened.  The woman had lived apart from the daily
experiences of her husband's life in Dublin; and it had deepened her
bitterness against him.  When she had learned that Erris Boyne was no
more faithful to her than he had been to his previous wife, she had gone
mad; and Dyck Calhoun was paying the price of her madness.

Mrs. Llyn did not know this.  She was a woman of distinguished bearing,
though small, with a wan, sad look in her eyes always, but with a
cheerful smile.  She was not poor, but well-to-do, and it was not
necessary to deny herself or her daughter ordinary comforts, and even
many of the luxuries of life.

Her hair was darker than her daughter's, black and wavy, with here and
there streaks of grey.  These, however, only added dignity to a head
beautifully balanced, finely moulded, and, in the language of the day,
most genteelly hung.  She was slender, buoyant in movement yet composed,
and her voice was like her daughter's, clear, gentle, thrilling.

Her mind and heart were given up to Sheila and Sheila's future.  That was
why a knowledge of the tragedy that had come to Dyck Calhoun troubled her
as she had not been troubled since the day she first learned of Erris
Boyne's infidelity to herself.

"Let us go to Dublin, mother," said Sheila with a determined air, after
reading the clipping.

"Why, my dear?"

The woman's eyes, with their long lashes, looked searchingly into her
daughter's face.  She felt, as the years went on, that Sheila had gifts
granted to few.  She realized that the girl had resources which would
make her a governing influence in whatever sphere of life she should be
set.  Quietly, Sheila was taking control of their movements, and indeed
of her own daily life.  The girl had a dominating skill which came in
part from herself, and also to a degree from her father; but her
disposition was not her father's-it was her mother's.

Mrs. Llyn had never known Sheila to lie or twist the truth in all her
days.  No one was more obedient to wise argument; and her mother had a
feeling that now, perhaps, the time had come when they two must have a
struggle for mastery.  There was every reason why they should not go to
Dublin.  There Sheila might discover that Erris Boyne was her father, and
might learn the story of her mother's life.

Sheila had been told by her mother that her father had passed away abroad
when she was a little child.  She had never seen her father's picture,
and her mother had given her the impression that their last days together
had not been happy.  She had always felt that it was better not to
inquire too closely into her father's life.

The years had gone on and then had come the happy visit to Loyland
Towers, where she had met Dyck Calhoun.  Her life at that moment had been
free from troublesome emotions; but since the time she had met Dyck at
the top of the hill, a new set of feelings worked in her.

She was as bonny a lass as ever the old world produced--lithe, with a
body like that of a boy, strong and pleasant of face, with a haunting
beauty in the eyes, a majesty of the neck and chin, and a carriage which
had made Michael Clones call her a queen.

She saw Dyck only as, a happy, wild son of the hilltop.  To her he was a
man of mettle and worth, and irresponsible because he had been given no
responsibility.  He was a country gentleman of Ireland, with all the
interest and peril of the life of a country gentleman.

"Yes, we ought to go to Dublin, mother.  We could help him, perhaps,"
Sheila insisted.

The mother shook her head mournfully.

"My child, we could do him no good at all--none whatever.  Besides, I
can't afford to visit Dublin now.  It's an expensive journey, and the
repairs we've been doing here have run me close."

A look of indignation, almost of scorn, came into the girl's face.

"Well, if I were being tried for my life, as Dyck Calhoun is going to be,
and if I knew that friends of mine were standing off because of a few
pounds, shillings, and pence, I think I'd be a real murderer!"

The mother took her daughter's hand.  She found it cold.

"My dear," she said, clasping it gently, "you never saw him but three
times, and I've never seen him but twice except in the distance; but I
would do anything in my power to help him, if I could, for I like him.
The thing for us to do--"

"Yes, I know--sit here, twist our thumbs, and do nothing!"

"What more could we do if we went to Dublin, except listen to gossip,
read the papers and be jarred every moment?  My dear, our best place is
here.  If the spending of money could be of any use to him, I'd spend it
--indeed I would; but since it can't be of any use, we must stay in our
own home.  Of one thing I'm sure--if Dyck Calhoun killed Erris Boyne,
Boyne deserved it.  Of one thing I'm certain beyond all else--it was no
murder.  Mr. Calhoun wasn't a man to murder any one.  I don't believe"--
her voice became passionate--"he murdered, and I don't believe he will be
hanged."

The girl looked at her mother with surprise.  "Oh, dearest, dearest!"
she said.  "I believe you do care for him.  Is it because he has no
mother, and you have no son."

"It may be so, beloved."

Sheila swept her arms around her mother's neck and drew the fine head to
her breast.

At that moment they heard the clatter of hoofs, and presently they saw a
horse and rider pass the window.

"It's a government messenger, mother," Sheila said.

As Sheila said, it was a government messenger, bearing a packet to Mrs.
Llyn--a letter from her brother in America, whom she had not seen for
many years.

The brother, Bryan Llyn, had gone out there as a young man before the
Revolutionary War.  He had prospered, taking sides against England in the
war, and become a man of importance in the schemes of the new republican
government.  Only occasionally had letters come from him to his sister,
and for nearly eleven years she had not had a single word from him.

When she opened the packet now, she felt it would help to solve--she knew
not how--the trouble between herself and her daughter.  The letter had
been sent to a firm in Dublin with which Bryan Llyn had done business,
with instructions that it should be forwarded to his sister.  It had
reached the hands of a government official, who was a brother of a member
of the firm, and he had used the government messenger, who was going upon
other business to Limerick, to forward it with a friendly covering note,
which ended with the words:

     The recent tragedy you have no doubt seen in the papers must have
     shocked you; but to those who know the inside the end was
     inevitable, though there are many who do not think Calhoun is
     guilty.  I am one of them.  Nevertheless, it will go hard with him,
     as the evidence is strong against him.  He comes from your part of
     the country, and you will be concerned, of course.

Sheila watched her mother reading, and saw that great emotion possessed
her, though the girl could not know the cause.  Presently, however, Mrs.
Llyn, who had read the letter from her brother, made a joyful
exclamation.

"What is it, mother dear?" Sheila asked eagerly.  "Tell me!"

The mother made a passionate gesture of astonishment and joy; then she
leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, with the letter--which was
closely written, in old-fashioned punctiliousness--in her hands.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" she said.  "How strange it all is!  Your Uncle
Bryan is immensely rich.  He has no children and no family; his health is
failing."

She seemed able to get no further.

"Well, what is it, mother?" asked Sheila again.

For an instant Mrs. Llyn hesitated; then she put the letter into Sheila's
hands.

"Read it, my child," she said.  "It's for you as much as for me--indeed,
more for you than for me."  Sheila took the letter.  It ran as follows:

     DEAREST SISTER:

     It is eleven years since I wrote to you, and yet, though it may seem
     strange, there have not been eleven days in all that time in which I
     have not wished you and Sheila were here.  Sheila--why, she is a
     young woman!  She's about the age you were when I left Ireland, and
     you were one of the most beautiful and charming creatures God ever
     gave life to.  The last picture I have of you was a drawing made
     soon after your marriage--sad, bad, unhappy incident.  I have kept
     it by me always.  It warms my heart in winter; it cools my eyes in
     summer.

     My estate is neither North nor South, but farther South than North.
     In a sense it is always summer, but winter on my place would be like
     summer in Norway--just bitingly fresh, happily alert.  I'm writing
     in the summer now.  I look out of the window and see hundreds of
     acres of cotton-fields, with hundreds upon hundreds of negroes at
     work.  I hear the songs they sing, faint echoes of them, even as I
     write.  Yes, my black folk do sing, because they are well treated.

     Not that we haven't our troubles here.  You can't administer
     thousands of acres, control hundreds of slaves, and run an estate
     like a piece of clockwork without creaks in the machinery.  I've
     built it all up out of next to nothing.  I landed in this country
     with my little fortune of two thousand pounds.  This estate is worth
     at least a quarter of a million now.  I've an estate in Jamaica,
     too.  I took it for a debt.  What it'll be worth in another twenty
     years I don't know.  I shan't be here to see.  I'm not the man I was
     physically, and that's one of the reasons why I'm writing to you
     to-day.  I've often wished to write and say what I'm going to say
     now; but I've held back, because I wanted you to finish your girl's
     education before I said it

     What I say is this: I want you and Sheila to come here to me, to
     make my home your home, to take control of my household, and to let
     me see faces I love about me as the shadows enfold me.

     Like your married life, mine was unsuccessful, but not for the same
     reason.  The woman I married did not understand--probably could not
     understand.  She gave me no children.  We are born this way, or
     that.  To understand is pain and joy in one; to misconceive is to
     scatter broken glass for bare feet.  Yet when I laid her away, a few
     years ago, I had terrible pangs of regret, which must come to the
     heart that has striven in vain.  I did my best; I tried to make her
     understand, but she never did.  I used at first to feel angry; then
     I became patient.  But I waked up again, and went smiling along,
     active, vigorous, getting pleasure out of the infinitely small
     things, and happy in perfecting my organization.

     This place, which I have called Moira, is to be yours--or, rather,
     Sheila's.  So, in any case, you will want to come and see the home I
     have made this old colonial mansion, with its Corinthian pillars and
     verandah, high steps, hard-wood floors polished like a pan, every
     room hung in dimity and chintz, and the smell of fruit and flowers
     everywhere.  You will want to see it all, and you'll want to live
     here.

     There's little rain here, so it's not like Ireland, and the green is
     not so green; but the flowers are marvellously bright, and the birds
     sing almost as well as they sing in Ireland, though there's no lark.
     Strange it is, but true, the only things that draw me back to
     Ireland in my soul are you, and Sheila, whom I've never seen, and
     the lark singing as he rises until he becomes a grey-blue speck, and
     then vanishing in the sky.

     Well, you and the lark have sung in my heart these many days, and
     now you must come to me, because I need you.  I have placed to your
     credit in the Bank of Ireland a thousand pounds.  That will be the
     means of bringing you here--you and Sheila--to my door, to Moira.
     Let nothing save death prevent your coming.  As far as Sheila's eye
     can see-north, south, east, and west--the land will be hers when I'm
     gone.  Dearest sister, sell all things that are yours, and come to
     me.  You'll not forget Ireland here.  Whoever has breathed her air
     can never forget the hills and dells, the valleys and bogs, the
     mountains, with their mists of rain, the wild girls, with their bare
     ankles, their red petticoats, and their beautiful, reckless air.
     None who has ever breathed the air of Ireland can breathe in another
     land without memory of the ancient harp of Ireland.  But it is as a
     memory-deep, wonderful, and abiding, yet a memory.  I sometimes
     think I have forgotten, and then I hear coming through this Virginia
     the notes of some old Irish melody, the song of some wayfarer of
     Mayo or Connemara, and I know then that Ireland is persuasive and
     perpetual; but only as a memory, because it speaks in every pulse
     and beats in every nerve.

     Oh, believe me, I speak of what I know!  I have been away from
     Ireland for a long time, and I'm never going back, but I'll bring
     Ireland to me.  Come here, colleen, come to Virginia.  Write to me,
     on the day you get this letter, that you're coming soon.  Let it be
     soon, because I feel the cords binding me to my beloved fields
     growing thinner.  They'll soon crack, but, please God, they won't
     crack before you come here.

     Now with my love to you and Sheila I stretch out my hand to you.
     Take it.  All that it is has worked for is yours; all that it wants
     is you.

                              Your loving brother,

                                                       BRYAN.

As Sheila read, the tears started from her eyes; and at last she could
read no longer, so her mother took the letter and read the rest of it
aloud.  When she had finished, there was silence--a long warm silence;
then, at last, Mrs. Llyn rose to her feet.

"Sheila, when shall we go?"

With frightened eyes Sheila sprang up.

"I said we must go to Dublin!" she murmured.

"Yes, we will go to Dublin, Sheila, but it will be on our way to Uncle
Bryan's home."

Sheila caught her mother's hands.

"Mother," she said, after a moment of hesitation, "I must obey you."

"It is the one way, my child-the one thing to do.  Some one in prison
calls--perhaps; some one far away who loves you, and needs us, calls--
that we know.  Tell me, am I not right?  I ask you, where shall we go?"

"To Virginia, mother."

The girl's head dropped, and her eyes filled with tears.




CHAPTER VIII

DYCK'S FATHER VISITS HIM

In vain Dyck's lawyer, Will McCormick, urged him to deny absolutely
the killing of Erris Boyne.  Dyck would not do so.  He had, however,
immediately on being jailed, written to the government, telling of the
projected invasion of Ireland by the French fleet, and saying that it had
come to him from a sure source.  The government had at once taken action.

Regarding the death of Boyne, the only thing in his favour was that his
own sword-point was free from stain.  His lawyer made the utmost of this,
but to no avail.  The impression in the court was that both men had been
drinking; that they had quarrelled, and that without a duel being fought
Dyck had killed his enemy.

That there had been no duel was clear from the fact that Erris Boyne's
sword was undrawn.  The charge, however, on the instigation of the
Attorney-General, who was grateful for the information about France, had
been changed from murder to manslaughter; though it seemed clear that
Boyne had been ruthlessly killed by a man whom he had befriended.

On one of the days of the trial, Dyck's father, bowed, morose, and
obstinate, came to see him.  That Dyck and Boyne had quarrelled had been
stated in evidence by the landlord, Swinton, and Dyck had admitted it.
Miles Calhoun was bent upon finding what the story of the quarrel was;
for his own lawyer had told him that Dyck's refusal to give the cause of
the dispute would affect the jury adversely, and might bring him
imprisonment for life.  After the formalities of their meeting, Miles
Calhoun said:

"My son, things are black, but they're not so black they can't be
brightened.  If you killed Erris Boyne, he deserved it.  He was a bad
man, as the world knows.  That isn't the point.  Now, there's only one
kind of quarrel that warrants non-disclosure."

"You mean about a woman?" remarked Dyck coldly.

The old man took a pinch of snuff nervously.  "That's what I mean.  Boyne
was older than you, and perhaps you cut him out with a woman."

A wry smile wrinkled the corners of Dyck's mouth.  "You mean his wife?"
he asked with irony.  "Wife--no!" retorted the old man.  "Damn it, no!
He wasn't the man to remain true to his wife."

"So I understand," remarked Dyck; "but I don't know his wife.  I never
saw her, except at the trial, and I was so sorry for her I ceased to be
sorry for my self.  She had a beautiful, strange, isolated face."

"But that wouldn't influence Boyne," was the reply.  "His first wife had
a beautiful and interesting face, but it didn't hold him.  He went
marauding elsewhere, and she divorced him by act of parliament.  I don't
think you knew it, but his first wife was one of your acquaintances--
Mrs. Llyn, whose daughter you saw just before we left Playmore.
He wasn't particular where he made love--a barmaid or a housekeeper,
it was all the same to him."

"I hope the daughter doesn't know that Erris Boyne was her father," said
Dyck.

"There's plenty can tell her, and she'll hear it sooner or later."

Miles Calhoun looked at his son with dejection.

His eyes wandered over the grimly furnished cell.  His nose smelled the
damp of it, and suddenly the whole soul of him burst forth.

"You don't give yourself a chance of escape, Dyck You know what Irish
juries are.  Why don't you tell the truth about the quarrel?  What's the
good of keeping your mouth shut, when there's many that would profit by
your telling it?"

"Who would profit?" asked Dyck.

"Who would profit!" snarled the old man.  "Well, you would profit first,
for it might break the dark chain of circumstantial evidence.  Also, your
father would profit.  I'd be saved shame, perhaps; I'd get relief from
this disgrace.  Oh, man, think of others beside yourself!

"Think of others!" said Dyck, and a queer smile lighted his haggard
face.  "I'd save myself if I honourably could."

"The law must prove you guilty," the old man went on.  "It's not for you
to prove yourself innocent.  They haven't proved you guilty yet."

The old man fumbled with a waistcoat button.  His eyes blinked hard.

"You don't see," he continued, "the one thing that's plain to my eyes,
and it's this--that your only chance of escape is to tell the truth about
the quarrel.  If the truth were told, whatever it is, I believe it would
be to your credit--I'll say that for you.  If it was to your credit,
even if they believe you guilty of killing Erris Boyne, they'd touch you
lightly.  Ah, in the name of the mother you loved, I ask you to tell the
truth about that quarrel!  Give it into the hands of the jury, and let
them decide.  Haven't you got a heart in you?  In the name of God--"

"Don't speak to me like that," interrupted Dyck, with emotion.  "I've
thought of all those things.  I hold my peace because--because I hold my
peace.  To speak would be to hurt some one I love with all my soul."

"And you won't speak to save me--your father--because you don't love me
with all your soul!  Is that it?" asked Miles Calhoun.

"It's different--it's different."

"Ah, it's a woman!"

"Never mind what it is.  I will not tell.  There are things more shameful
than death."

"Yes," snarled the other.  "Rather than save yourself, you bring
dishonour upon him who gave you birth."

Dyck's face was submerged in colour.

"Father," said he, "on my honour I wouldn't hurt you if I could help it,
but I'll not tell the world of the quarrel between that man and myself.
My silence may hurt you, but some one else would be hurt far more if I
told."

"By God, I think you're some mad dreamer slipped out of the ancient fold!
Do you know where you are?  You're in jail.  If you're found guilty,
you'll be sent to prison at least for the years that'll spoil the making
of your life; and you do it because you think you'll spare somebody.
Well, I ask you to spare me.  I don't want the man that's going to
inherit my name, when my time comes, to bring foulness on it.  We've been
a rough race, we Calhouns; we've done mad, bad things, perhaps, but none
has shamed us before the world--none but you."

"I have never shamed you, Miles Calhoun," replied his son sharply.  "As
the ancients said, 'alis volat propriis'--I will fly with my own wings.
Come weal, come woe, come dark, come light, I have fixed my mind, and
nothing shall change it.  You loved my mother better than the rest of the
world.  You would have thought it no shame to have said so to your own
father.  Well, I say it to you--I'll stand by what my conscience and my
soul have dictated to me.  You call me a dreamer.  Let it be so.  I'm
Irish; I'm a Celt.  I've drunk deep of all that Ireland means.  All
that's behind me is my own, back to the shadowy kings of Ireland, who
lost life and gave it because they believed in what they did.  So will I.
If I'm to walk the hills no more on the estate where you are master, let
it be so.  I have no fear; I want no favour.  If it is to be prison, then
it shall be prison.  If it is to be shame, then let it be shame.  These
are days when men must suffer if they make mistakes.  Well, I will
suffer, fearlessly if helplessly, but I will not break the oath which I
have taken.  And so I will not do it--never--never--never!"

He picked up the cloak which the old man had dropped on the floor, and
handed it to him.

"There is no good in staying longer.  I must go into court again
to-morrow.  I have to think how my lawyer shall answer the evidence
given."

"But of one thing have you thought?" asked his father.  "You will not
tell the cause of the quarrel, for the reason that you might hurt
somebody.  If you don't tell the cause, and you are condemned, won't that
hurt somebody even more?"

For a moment Dyck stood silent, absorbed.  His face looked pinched,
his whole appearance shrivelled.  Then, with deliberation, he said:

"This is not a matter of expediency, but of principle. My heart tells
me what to do, and my heart has always been right."

There was silence for a long time.  At last the old man drew the cloak
about his shoulders and turned towards the door.

"Wait a minute, father," said Dyck.  "Don't go like that.  You'd better
not come and see me again.  If I'm condemned, go back to Playmore; if I'm
set free, go back to Playmore.  That's the place for you to be.  You've
got your own troubles there."

"And you--if you're acquitted?"

"If I'm acquitted, I'll take to the high seas--till I'm cured."

A moment later, without further words, Dyck was alone.  He heard the door
clang.

He sat for some time on the edge of his bed, buried in dejection.
Presently, however, the door opened.  "A letter for you, sir," said the
jailer.




CHAPTER IX

A LETTER FROM SHEILA

The light of the cell was dim, but Dyck managed to read the letter
without great difficulty, for the writing was almost as precise as print.
The sight of it caught his heart like a warm hand and pressed it.  This
was the substance of the letter:

     MY DEAR FRIEND:

     I have wanted to visit you in prison, but my mother has forbidden
     it, and so, even if I could be let to enter, I must not disobey her.
     I have not read the papers giving an account of your trial.  I only
     know you are charged with killing a bad man, notorious in Dublin
     life, and that many think he got his just deserts in being killed.

     I saw Christopher Dogan only a week ago, before we came to Dublin.
     His eyes, as he talked of you, shone like the secret hill-fires
     where the peasants make illegal drink.

     "Look you," he said to me, "I care not what a jury decides.  I know
     my man; and I also know that if the fellow Boyne died by his hand,
     it was in fair fight.  I have read Dyck Calhoun's story in the
     stars; and I know what his end will be.  It will be fair, not foul;
     good, not bad; great, not low.  Tell him that from me, miss," was
     what he said.

     I also will not believe that your fate is an evil one, that the law
     will grind you between the millstones of guilt and dishonour; but if
     the law should call you guilty, I still will not believe.  Far away
     I will think of you, and believe in you, dear, masterful, madman
     friend.  Yes, you are a madman, for Michael Clones told me--faith,
     he loves you well!--that you've been living a gay life in Dublin
     since you came here, and that the man you are accused of killing
     was in great part the cause of it.

     I think I never saw my mother so troubled in spirit as she is at
     this time.  Of course, she could not feel as I do about you.  It
     isn't that which makes her sad and haggard; it is that we are
     leaving Ireland behind.

     Yes, she and I are saying good-bye to Ireland.  That's why I think
     she might have let me see you before we went; but since it must not
     be, well, then, it must not.  But we shall meet again.  In my soul
     I know that on the hills somewhere far off, as on the first day we
     met, we shall meet each other once more.  Where are we going?  Oh,
     very far!  We are going to my Uncle Bryan--Bryan Llyn, in Virginia.
     A letter has come from him urging us to make our home with him.  You
     see, my friend--

Then followed the story which Bryan Llyn had told her mother and herself,
and she wrote of her mother's decision to go out to the new, great home
which her uncle had made among the cotton-fields of the South.  When she
had finished that part of the tale, she went on as follows:

     We shall know your fate only through the letters that will follow
     us, but I will not believe in your bad luck.  Listen to me--why
     don't you come to America also?  Oh, think it over!  Don't believe
     the worst will come.  When they release you from prison, innocent
     and acquitted, cross the ocean and set up your tent under the Stars
     and Stripes.  Think of it!  Nearly all those men in America who
     fought under Washington and won were born in these islands.  They
     took with them to that far land the memory and love of these old
     homes.  You and I would have fought for England and with the British
     troops, because we detest revolution.  Here, in Ireland, we have
     seen its evils; and yet if we had fought for the Union Jack beyond
     the mountains of Maine and in the lonely woods, we should, I
     believe, in the end have said that the freedom fought for by the
     American States was well won.

     So keep this matter in your mind, for my mother and I will soon be
     gone.  She would not let me come to you,--I think I have never seen
     her so disturbed as when I asked her, and she forbade me to write to
     you; but I disobey her.  Well, this is a sad business.  I know my
     mother has suffered.  I know her married life was unhappy, and that
     her husband--my father-died many a year ago, leaving a dark trail of
     regret behind him; but, you see, I never knew my father.  That was
     all long ago, and it is a hundred times best forgotten.

     Our ship sails for Virginia in three days, and I must go.  I will
     keep looking back to the prison where lies, charged with an evil
     crime, of which he is not guilty, a young man for whom I shall
     always carry the spirit of good friendship.

     Do not believe all will not go well.  Let us keep the courage of
     our hearts and the faith of our souls--and I hope I always shall!
     I believe in you, and, believing, I say good-bye.  I say farewell in
     the great hope that somehow, somewhere, we shall help each other on
     the way of life.  God be with you!
                                   I am your friend,
                                                  SHEILA LLYN.

     P. S.--I beg you to remember that America is a good place for a
     young man to live in and succeed.

Dyck read the letter with a wonderful slowness.  He realized that by
happy accident--it could be nothing else--Mrs. Llyn had been able to keep
from her daughter the fact that the man who had been killed in the tavern
by the river was her father.  It was clear that the girl was kept much to
herself, read no newspapers, and saw few people, and that those whom she
saw had been careful to hold their peace about her close relationship to
Erris Boyne.  None but the evil-minded would recall the fact to her.

Sheila's ignorance must not be broken by himself.  He had done the right
thing--he had held his peace for the girl's sake, and he would hold it to
the end.  Slowly he folded up the letter, pressed it to his lips, and put
it in the pocket over his heart.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Beginning of a lifetime of experience, comedy, and tragedy
Wit is always at the elbow of want






NO DEFENSE

By Gilbert Parker



BOOK II

X.        DYCK CALHOUN ENTERS THE WORLD AGAIN
XI.       WHITHER NOW?
XII.      THE HOUR BEFORE THE MUTINY
XIII.     TO THE WEST INDIES
XIV.      IN THE NICK OF TIME
XV.       THE ADMIRAL HAS HIS SAY



CHAPTER X

DYCK CALHOUN ENTERS THE WORLD AGAIN

"Is it near the time?" asked Michael Clones of his friend, as they stood
in front of the prison.

His companion, who was seated on a stone, wrapped in dark-green coverings
faded and worn, and looking pinched with cold in the dour November day,
said, without lifting his head:

"Seven minutes, an' he'll be out, God bless him!"  "And save him and
protect him!" said Michael.  "He deserved punishment no more than I did,
and it's broke him.  I've seen the grey gather at his temples, though
he's only been in prison four years.  He was condemned to eight, but
they've let him free, I don't know why.  Perhaps it was because of what
he told the government about the French navy.  I've seen the joy of life
sob itself down to the sour earth.  When I took him the news of his
father's death, and told him the creditors were swallowing what was left
of Playmore, what do you think he did?"

Old Christopher Dogan smiled; his eyes twinkled with a mirth which had
more pain than gaiety.  "God love you, I know what he did.  He flung out
his hands, and said: 'Let it go!  It's nothing to me.'  Michael, have I
said true?"

Michael nodded.

"Almost his very words you've used, and he flung out his hands, as you
said.

"Aye, he'll be changed; but they've kept the clothes he had when he went
to prison, and he'll come out in them, I'm thinking--"

"Ah, no!" interrupted Michael.  "That can't be, for his clothes was
stole.  Only a week ago he sent to me for a suit of my own.  I wouldn't
have him wear my clothes--he a gentleman!  It wasn't fitting.  So I sent
him a suit I bought from a shop, but he wouldn't have it.  He would leave
prison a poor man, as a peasant in peasant's clothes.  So he wrote to me.
Here is the letter."  He drew from his pocket a sheet of paper, and
spread it out.  "See-read it.  Ah, well, never mind," he added, as old
Christopher shook his head.  "Never mind, I'll read it to you!"
Thereupon he read the note, and added: "We'll see him of the Calhouns
risin' high beyant poverty and misfortune some day."

Old Christopher nodded.

"I'm glad Miles Calhoun was buried on the hilltop above Playmore.  He had
his day; he lived his life.  Things went wrong with him, and he paid the
price we all must pay for work ill-done."

"There you're right, Christopher Dogan, and I remember the day the
downfall began.  It was when him that's now Lord Mallow, Governor of
Jamaica, came to summon Miles Calhoun to Dublin.  Things were never the
same after that; but I well remember one talk I had with Miles Calhoun
just before his death.  'Michael,' he said to me, 'my family have had
many ups and downs, and some that bear my name have been in prison before
this, but never for killing a man out of fair fight.'  'One of your name
may be in prison, sir,' said I, 'but not for killing a man out of fair
fight.  If you believe he did, there's no death bad enough for you!'
He was silent for a while; then at last he whispered Mr. Dyck's name, and
said to me: 'Tell him that as a Calhoun I love him, and as his father I
love him ten times more.  For look you, Michael, though we never ran
together, but quarrelled and took our own paths, yet we are both
Calhouns, and my heart is warm to him.  If my son were a thousand
times a criminal, nevertheless I would ache to take him by the hand.'"

"Hush!  Look at the prison gate," said his companion, and stood up.

As the gates of the prison opened, the sun broke through the clouds and
gave a brilliant phase to the scene.  Out of the gates there came slowly,
yet firmly, dressed in peasant clothes, the stalwart but faded figure of
Dyck Calhoun.

Terribly changed he was.  He had entered prison with the flush upon his
cheek, the lilt of young manhood in his eyes, with hair black and hands
slender and handsome.  There was no look of youth in his face now.  It
was the face of a middle-aged man from which the dew of youth had
vanished, into which life's storms had come and gone.  Though the body
was held erect, yet the head was thrust slightly forward, and the heavy
eyebrows were like a pent-house.  The eyes were slightly feverish, and
round the mouth there crept a smile, half-cynical but a little happy.
All freshness was gone from his hands.  One hung at his side, listless,
corded; the other doffed his hat in reply to the salute of his two humble
friends.

As the gates closed behind him he looked gravely at the two men, who were
standing not a foot apart.  There swept slowly into his eyes, enlarging,
brightening them, the glamour of the Celtic soul.  Of all Ireland, or all
who had ever known him, these two were the only ones welcoming him into
the world again!  Michael Clones, with his oval red face, big nose,
steely eye, and steadfast bearing, had in him the soul of great kings.
His hat was set firmly on his head.  His knee-breeches were neat, if
coarse; his stockings were clean.  His feet were well shod, his coat
worn, and he had still the look that belongs to the well-to-do peasant.
He was a figure of courage and endurance.  Dyck's hand went out to him,
and a warm smile crept to his lips.

"Michael--ever--faithful Michael!"

A moisture came to Michael's eyes.  He did not speak as he clasped the
hand Dyck offered him.  Presently Dyck turned to old Christopher with a
kindly laugh.

"Well, old friend!  You, too, come to see the stag set loose again?
You're not many, that's sure."  A grim, hard look came into his face, but
both hands went out and caught the old man's shoulders affectionately.
"This is no day for you to be waiting at prison's gates, Christopher; but
there are two men who believe in me--two in all the world.  It isn't the
killing," he added after a moment's silence--"it isn't the killing that
hurts so.  If it's true that I killed Erris Boyne, what hurts most is the
reason why I killed him."

"One way or another--does it matter now?" asked Christopher gently.

"Is it that you think nothing matters since I've paid the price, sunk
myself in shame, lost my friends, and come out with not a penny left?"
asked Dyck.  "But yes," he added with a smile, wry and twisted, "yes, I
have a little left!"

He drew from his pocket four small pieces of gold, and gazed ironically
at them in his palm.

"Look at them!"  He held out his hand, so that the two men could see the
little coins.  "Those were taken from me when I entered prison.  They've
been in the hands of the head of the jail ever since.  They give them to
me now--all that's left of what I was."

"No, not all, sir," declared Michael.  "There's something left from
Playmore--there's ninety pounds, and it's in my pocket.  It was got from
the sale of your sporting-kit.  There was the boat upon the lake, the
gun, and all kinds of riffraff stuff not sold with Playmore."

Dyck nodded and smiled.  "Good Michael!"

Then he drew himself up stiffly, and blew in and out his breath as if
with the joy of living.  For four hard years he had been denied the free
air of free men.  Even when walking in the prison-yard, on cold or fair
days, when the air was like a knife or when it had the sun of summer in
it, it still had seemed to choke him.

In prison he had read, thought, and worked much.  They had at least done
that for him.  The Attorney-General had given him freedom to work with
his hands, and to slave in the workshop like one whose living depended on
it.  Some philanthropic official had started the idea of a workshop, and
the officials had given the best of the prisoners a chance to learn
trades and make a little money before they went out into the world.  All
that Dyck had earned went to purchase things he needed, and to help his
fellow prisoners or their families.

Where was he now?  The gap between the old life of nonchalance,
frivolity, fantasy, and excitement was as great as that between heaven
and hell.  Here he was, after four years of prison, walking the highway
with two of the humblest creatures of Ireland, and yet, as his soul said,
two of the best.

Stalking along in thought, he suddenly became conscious that Michael and
Christopher had fallen behind.  He turned round.

"Come on.  Come on with me."  But the two shook their heads.

"It's not fitting, you a Calhoun of Playmore!" Christopher answered.

"Well, then, list to me," said Dyck, for he saw the men could not bear
his new democracy.  "I'm hungry.  In four years I haven't had a meal that
came from the right place or went to the right spot.  Is the little
tavern, the Hen and Chickens, on the Liffeyside, still going?  I mean the
place where the seamen and the merchant-ship officers visit."

Michael nodded.

"Well, look you, Michael--get you both there, and order me as good a meal
of fish and chops and baked pudding as can be bought for money.  Aye, and
I'll have a bottle of red French wine, and you two will have what you
like best.  Mark me, we'll sit together there, for we're one of a kind.
I've got to take to a life that fits me, an ex-jailbird, a man that's
been in prison for killing!"

"There's the king's army," said Michael.  "They make good officers in
it."

A strange, half-sore smile came to Dyck's thin lips.

"Michael," said he, "give up these vain illusions.  I was condemned for
killing a man not in fair fight.

"I can't enter the army as an officer, and you should know it.  The king
himself could set me up again; but the distance between him and me is ten
times round the world and back again!"  But then Dyck nodded kindly.  It
was as if suddenly the martyr spirit had lifted him out of rigid, painful
isolation, and he was speaking from a hilltop.  "No, my friends, what is
in my mind now is that I'm hungry.  For four years I've eaten the bread
of prison, and it's soured my mouth and galled my belly.  Go you to that
inn and make ready a good meal."

The two men started to leave, but old Christopher turned and stretched a
hand up and out.

"Son of Ireland, bright and black and black and bright may be the picture
of your life, but I see for you brightness and sweet faces, and music and
song.  It's not Irish music, and it's not Irish song, but the soul of the
thing is Irish.  Grim things await you, but you will conquer where the
eagle sways to the shore, where the white mist flees from the hills,
where heroes meet, where the hand of Moira stirs the blue and the witches
flee from the voice of God.  There is honour coming to you in the world."

Having said his say, with hand outstretched, having thrilled the air with
the voice of one who had the soul of a prophet, the old man turned.  Head
bent forward, he shuffled away with Michael Clones along the stony
street.

Dyck watched them go, his heart beating hard, his spirit overwhelmed.

It was not far to the Castle, yet every footstep had a history.  Now and
again he met people who knew him.  Some bowed a little too profoundly,
some nodded; but not one stopped to speak to him, though a few among them
were people he had known well in days gone by.  Was it the clothes he
wore, or was it that his star had sunk so low that none could keep it
company?  He laughed to himself in scorn, and yet there kept ringing
through his brain all the time the bells of St. Anselm's, which he was
hearing:

              "Oh, God, who is the sinner's friend,
               Make clean my soul once more!"

When he arrived at the Castle walls he stood and looked long at them.

"No, I won't go in.  I won't try to see him," he said at last.  "God, how
strange Ireland is to me!  The soil of it, the trees of it, the grass of
it, are dearer than ever, but--I'll have no more of Ireland.  I'll ask
for nothing.  I'll get to England.  What's Ireland to me?  I must make my
way somewhere.  There's one in there"--he nodded towards the Castle--
"that owes me money at cards.  He should open his pockets to me, and see
me safe on a ship for Australia; but I've had my fill of every one in
Ireland.  There's nothing here for me but shame.  Well, back I'll go to
the Hen and Chickens, to find a good dinner there."

He turned and went back slowly along the streets by which he had come,
looking not to right nor left, thinking only of where he should go and
what he should do outside of Ireland.

At the door of the inn he sniffed the dinner Michael had ordered.

"Man alive!" he said as he entered the place and saw the two men with
their hands against the bright fire.  "There's only one way to live, and
that's the way I'm going to try."

"Well, you'll not try it alone, sir, if you please," said Michael.  "I'll
be with you, if I may."

"And I'll bless you as you go," said Christopher Dogan.




CHAPTER XI

WHITHER NOW?

England was in a state of unrest.  She had, as yet, been none too
successful in the war with France.  From the king's castle to the poorest
slum in Seven Dials there was a temper bordering on despair.  Ministries
came and went; statesmen rose and fell.  The army was indifferently
recruited and badly paid.  England's battles were fought by men of whom
many were only mercenaries, with no stake in England's rise or fall.

In the army and navy there were protests, many and powerful, against
the smallness of the pay, while the cost of living had vastly increased.
In more than one engagement on land England had had setbacks of a serious
kind, and there were those who saw in the blind-eyed naval policy, in
the general disregard of the seamen's position, in the means used for
recruiting, the omens of disaster.  The police courts furnished the navy
with the worst citizens of the country.  Quota men, the output of the
Irish prisons--seditious, conspiring, dangerous--were drafted for the
king's service.

The admiralty pursued its course of seizing men of the mercantile marine,
taking them aboard ships, keeping them away for months from the harbours
of the kingdom, and then, when their ships returned, denying them the
right of visiting their homes.  The press-gangs did not confine their
activities to the men of the mercantile marine.  From the streets after
dusk they caught and brought in, often after ill-treatment, torn from
their wives and sweethearts, knocked on the head for resisting, tradesmen
with businesses, young men studying for the professions, idlers, debtors,
out-of-work men.  The marvel is that the British fleets fought as well as
they did.

Poverty and sorrow, loss and bereavement, were in every street, peeped
mournfully out of every window, lurked at street corners.  From all parts
of the world adventurers came to renew their fortunes in the turmoil of
London, and every street was a kaleidoscope of faces and clothes and
colours, not British, not patriot, not national.

Among these outlanders were Dyck Calhoun and Michael Clones.  They had
left Ireland together in the late autumn, leaving behind them the
stirrings of the coming revolution, and plunging into another revolt
which was to prove the test and trial of English character.

Dyck had left Ireland with ninety pounds in his pocket and many tons'
weight of misery in his heart.  In his bones he felt tragedies on foot in
Ireland which concession and good government could not prevent.  He had
fled from it all.  When he set his face to Holyhead, he felt that he
would never live in Ireland again.  Yet his courage was firm as he made
his way to London, with Michael Clones--faithful, devoted, a friend and
yet a servant, treated like a comrade, yet always with a little
dominance.

The journey to London had been without event, yet as the coach rolled
through country where frost silvered the trees; where, in the early
morning, the grass was shining with dew; where the everlasting green
hedges and the red roofs of villages made a picture which pleased the eye
and stirred the soul, Dyck Calhoun kept wondering what would be his
future.  He had no profession, no trade, no skill except with his sword;
and as he neared London Town--when they left Hendon--he saw the smoke
rising in the early winter morning and the business of life spread out
before him, brave and buoyant.

As from the heights of Hampstead he looked down on the multitudinous area
called London, something throbbed at his heart which seemed like hope;
for what he saw was indeed inspiring.  When at last, in the Edgware Road,
he drew near to living London, he turned to Michael Clones and said:

"Michael, my lad, I think perhaps we'll find a footing here."

So they reached London, and quartered themselves in simple lodgings in
Soho.  Dyck walked the streets, and now and then he paid a visit to the
barracks where soldiers were, to satisfy the thought that perhaps in the
life of the common soldier he might, after all, find his future.  It was,
however, borne in upon him by a chance remark of Michael one day--"I'm
not young enough to be a recruit, and you wouldn't go alone without me,
would you?"--that this way to a livelihood was not open to him.

His faithful companion's remark had fixed Dyck's mind against entering
the army, and then, towards the end of the winter, a fateful thing
happened.  His purse containing what was left of the ninety pounds--two-
fifths of it--disappeared.  It had been stolen, and in all the bitter
days to come, when poverty and misery ground them down, no hint of the
thief, no sign of the robber, was ever revealed.

Then, at last, a day when a letter came from Ireland.  It was from the
firm in which Bryan Llyn of Virginia had been interested, for the letter
had been sent to their care, and Dyck had given them his address in
London on this very chance.  It reached Dyck's hands on the day after
the last penny had been paid out for their lodgings, and they faced the
streets, penniless, foodless--one was going to say friendless.  The
handwriting was that of Sheila Llyn.

At a street corner, by a chemist's shop where a red light burned, Dyck
opened and read the letter.  This is what Sheila had written to him.

     MY DEAR FRIEND:

     The time is near (I understand by a late letter to my mother from an
     official) when you will be freed from prison and will face the world
     again.  I have not written you since your trial, but I have never
     forgotten and never shall.  I have been forbidden to write to you or
     think of you, but I will take my own way about you.  I have known
     all that has happened since we left Ireland, through the letters my
     mother has received.  I know that Playmore has been sold, and I am
     sorry.

     Now that your day of release is near, and you are to be again a free
     man, have you decided about your future?  Is it to be in Ireland?
     No, I think not.  Ireland is no place for a sane and level man to
     fight for honour, fame, and name.  I hear that things are worse
     there in every way than they have been in our lifetime.

     After what has happened in any case, it is not a field that offers
     you a chance.  Listen to me.  Ireland and England are not the only
     places in the world.  My uncle came here to Virginia a poor man.
     He is now immensely rich.  He had little to begin with, but he was
     young like you--indeed, a little older than you--when he first came.
     He invested wisely, worked bravely, and his wealth grew fast.  No
     man needs a fortune to start the business of life in this country.
     He can get plenty of land for almost nothing; he can get credit for
     planting and furnishing his land, and, if he has friends, the credit
     is sure.

     All America is ready for "the likes of you."  Think it over, and
     meanwhile please know there has been placed with the firm in Dublin
     money enough to bring you here with comfort.  You must not refuse
     it.  Take it as a loan, for I know you will not take it as a gift.

     I do not know the story of the killing, even as it was told in
     court.  Well, some one killed the man, but not you, and the truth
     will out in time.  If one should come to me out of the courts of
     heaven, and say that there it was declared you were a rogue, I
     should say heaven was no place for me.  No, of one thing I am sure--
     you never killed an undefended man.  Wayward, wanton, reckless,
     dissipated you may have been, but you were never depraved--never!

     When you are free, lift up your shoulders to all the threats of
     time, then go straight to the old firm where the money is, draw it,
     take ship, and come here.  If you let me know you are coming, I will
     be there to meet you when you step ashore, to give you a firm hand-
     clasp; to tell you that in this land there is a good place for you,
     if you will win it.

     Here there is little crime, though the perils of life are many.
     There is Indian fighting; there are Indian depredations; and not a
     dozen miles from where I sit men have been shot for crimes
     committed.  The woods are full of fighters, and pirates harry the
     coast.  On the wall of the room where I write there are carbines
     that have done service in Indian wars and in the Revolutionary War;
     and here out of the window I can see hundreds of black heads-slaves,
     brought from Africa and the Indies, slaves whose devotion to my
     uncle is very great.  I hear them singing now; over the white-tipped
     cotton-fields there flows the sound of it.

     This plantation has none of the vices that belong to slavery.  Here
     life is complete.  The plantation is one great workshop where trades
     are learned and carried out-shoeing, blacksmithing, building,
     working in wood and metal.

     I am learning here--you see I am quite old, for I am twenty-one now
     --the art of management.  They tell me that when my uncle's day is
     done--I grieve to think it is not far off--I must take the rod of
     control.  I work very, very hard.  I have to learn figures and
     finance; I have to see how all the work is done, so that I shall
     know it is done right.  I have had to discipline the supervisors and
     bookkeepers, inspect and check the output, superintend the packing,
     and arrange for the sale of the crop-yes, I arranged for the sale of
     this year's crop myself.  So I live the practical life, and when I
     say that you could make your home here and win success, I do it with
     some knowledge.

     I beg you take ship for the Virginian coast.  Enter upon the new
     life here with faith and courage.  Have no fear.  Heaven that has
     thus far helped you will guide you to the end.

     I write without my mother's permission, but my uncle knows, and
     though he does not approve, he does not condemn.

     Once more good-bye, my dear friend, and God be with you.

                                        SHEILA LLYN.

     P. S.--I wonder where you will read this letter.  I hope it will
     find you before your release.  Please remember that she who wrote it
     summons you from the darkness where you are to light and freedom
     here.


Slowly Dyck folded up the letter, when he had read it, and put it in his
pocket.  Then he turned with pale face and gaunt look to Michael Clones.

"Michael," said he, "that letter is from a lady.  It comes from her new
home in Virginia."

Michael nodded.

"Aye, aye, sir, I understand you," he said.  "Then she doesn't know the
truth about her father?" Dyck sighed heavily.  "No, Michael, she doesn't
know the truth."

"I don't believe it would make any difference to her if she did know."

"It would make all the difference to me, Michael.  She says she wishes to
help me.  She tells me that money's been sent to the big firm in Dublin-
money to take me across the sea to Virginia."

Michael's face clouded.

"Yes, sir.  To Virginia--and what then?"

"Michael, we haven't a penny in the world, you and I, but if I took one
farthing of that money I should hope you would kill me.  I'm hungry;
we've had nothing to eat since yesterday; but if I could put my hands
upon that money here and now I wouldn't touch it.  Michael, it looks as
if we shall have to take to the trade of the footpad."




CHAPTER XII

THE HOUR BEFORE THE MUTINY

In the days when Dyck Calhoun was on the verge of starvation in London,
evil naval rumours were abroad.  Newspapers reported, one with
apprehension, another with tyrannous comment, mutinous troubles in the
fleet.

At first the only demand at Spithead and the Nore had been for an
increase of pay, which had not been made since the days of Charles II.
Then the sailors' wages were enough for comfortable support; but in 1797
through the rise in the cost of living, and with an advance of thirty per
cent. on slops, their families could barely maintain themselves.  It was
said in the streets, and with truth, that seamen who had fought with
unconquerable gallantry under Howe, Collingwood, Nelson, and the other
big sea-captains, who had borne suffering and wounds, and had been in the
shadow of death--that even these men damned a system which, in its stern
withdrawal of their class for long spaces of time from their own
womenfolk, brought evil results to the forecastle.

The soldier was always in touch with his own social world, and he had
leave sufficient to enable him to break the back of monotony.  He drank,
gambled, and orated; but his indulgences were little compared with the
debauches of able-bodied seamen when, after months of sea-life, they
reached port again.  A ship in port at such a time was not a scene of
evangelical habits.  Women of loose class, flower-girls, fruit-sellers,
and costermongers turned the forecastle into a pleasure-house where the
pleasures were not always secret; where native modesty suffered no
affright, and physical good cheer, with ribald paraphrase, was notable
everywhere.

"How did it happen, Michael?"

As he spoke, Dyck looked round the forecastle of the Ariadne with a
restless and inquisitive expression.  Michael was seated a few feet away,
his head bent forward, his hands clasped around his knees.

"Well, it don't matter one way or 'nother," he replied; "but it was like
this.  The night you got a letter from Virginia we was penniless; so at
last I went with my watch to the pawnbroker's.  You said you'd wait till
I got back, though you knew not where I was goin'.  When I got back, you
were still broodin'.  You were seated on a horse-block by the chemist's
lamp where you had read the letter.  It's not for me to say of what you
were thinkin'; but I could guess.  You'd been struck hard, and there had
come to you a letter from one who meant more to you than all the rest of
the world; and you couldn't answer it because things weren't right.
As I stood lookin' at you, wonderin' what to do, though, I had twelve
shillin's in my pocket from the watch I'd pawned, there came four men,
and I knew from their looks they were recruitin' officers of the navy.
I saw what was in their eyes.  They knew--as why shouldn't they, when
they saw a gentleman like you in peasant clothes?--that luck had been
agin' us.

"What the end would have been I don't know.  It was you that solved the
problem, not them.  You looked at the first man of them hard.  Then you
got to your feet.

"'Michael,' says you quietly, 'I'm goin' to sea.  England's at war, and
there's work to do.  So let's make for a king's ship, and have done with
misery and poverty.'

"Then you waved a hand to the man in command of the recruitin' gang, and
presently stepped up to him and his friends.

"'Sir,' I said to you, 'I'm not going to be pressed into the navy.'

"'There's no pressin', Michael,' you answered.  'We'll be quota men.
We'll do it for cash--for forty pounds each, and no other.  You let them
have you as you are.  But if you don't want to come,' you added, 'it's
all the same to me.'

"Faith, I knew that was only talk.  I knew you wanted me.  Also I knew
the king's navy needed me, for men are hard to get.  So, when they'd paid
us the cash--forty pounds apiece--I stepped in behind you, and here we
are--here we are!  Forty pounds apiece--equal to three years' wages of
an ordinary recruit of the army.  It ain't bad, but we're here for three
years, and no escape from it.  Yes, here we are!"

Dyck laughed.

"Aye, here we're likely to remain, Michael.  There's only this to be
said--we'll be fighting the French soon, and it's easy to die in the
midst of a great fight.  If we don't die, Michael, something else will
turn up, maybe."

"That's true, sir!  They'll make an officer of you, once they see you
fight.  This is no place for you, among the common herd.  It's the dregs
o' the world that comes to the ship's bottom in time of peace or war."

"Well, I'm the dregs of the world, Michael.  I'm the supreme dregs."

Somehow the letter from Virginia had decided Dyck Calhoun's fate for him.
Here he was--at sea, a common sailor in the navy.  He and Michael Clones
had eaten and drunk as sailors do, and they had realized that, as they
ate and drank on the River Thames, they would not eat and drink on the
watery fairway.  They had seen the tank foul with age, from which water
was drawn for men who could not live without it, and the smell of it had
revolted Dyck's senses.  They had seen the kegs of pickled meat, and they
had been told of the evil rations given to the sailors at sea.

The Ariadne had been a flag-ship in her day, the home of an admiral and
his staff.  She carried seventy-four guns, was easily obedient to her
swift sail, and had a reputation for gallantry.  From the first hour on
board, Dyck Calhoun had fitted in; with a discerning eye he had
understood the seamen's needs and the weaknesses of the system.

The months he had spent between his exit from prison and his entrance
into the Ariadne had roughened, though not coarsened, his outward
appearance.  From his first appearance among the seamen he had set
himself to become their leader.  His enlistment was for three years, and
he meant that these three should prove the final success of this naval
enterprise, or the stark period in a calendar of tragedy.

The life of the sailor, with its coarseness and drudgery, its inadequate
pay, its evil-smelling food, its maggoty bread, its beer drawn from casks
that once had held oil or fish, its stinking salt-meat barrels, the
hideous stench of the bilge-water--all this could in one sense be no
worse than his sufferings in jail.  In spite of self-control, jail had
been to him the degradation of his hopes, the humiliation of his manhood.

He had suffered cold, dampness, fever, and indigestion there, and it had
sapped the fresh fibre of life in him.  His days in London had been
cruel.  He had sought work in great commercial concerns, and had almost
been grateful when rejected.  When his money was stolen, there seemed
nothing to do, as he said to Michael Clones, but to become a footpad or a
pirate.  Then the stormy doors of the navy had opened wide to him; and as
many a man is tempted into folly or crime by tempestuous nature, so he,
forlorn, spiritually unkempt, but physically and mentally well-composed,
in a spirit of bravado, flung himself into the bowels of the fleet.

From the moment Dyck arrived on board the Ariadne he was a marked man.
Ferens, a disfranchised solicitor, who knew his story, spread the
unwholesome truth about him among the ship's people, and he received
attentions at once offensive and flattering.  The best-educated of the
ship's hands approached him on the grievances with which the whole navy
was stirring.

Something had put a new spirit into the life of his majesty's ships; it
was, in a sense, the reflection of the French Revolution and Tom Paine's
Age of Reason.  What the Americans had done in establishing a republic,
what France was doing by her revolution, got into the veins and minds of
some men in England, but it got into the veins and minds of the sailor
first; for, however low his origin, he had intercourse not given to the
average landsman.  He visited foreign ports, he came in touch with other
elements than those of British life and character.

Of all the ships in the navy the Ariadne was the best that Dyck Calhoun
could have entered.  Her officers were humane and friendly, yet firm; and
it was quite certain that if mutiny came they would be treated well.  The
agitation on the Ariadne in support of the grievances of the sailors was
so moderate that, from the first, Dyck threw in his lot with it.  Ferens,
the former solicitor, first came to him with a list of proposals, which
only repeated the demands made by the agitators at Spithead.

"You're new among us," said Ferens to Dyck.  "You don't quite know what
we've been doing, I suppose.  Some of us have been in the navy for two
years, and some for ten.  There are men on this ship who could tell
you stories that would make your blood run cold--take my word for it.
There's a lot of things goin' on that oughtn't to be goin' on.  The time
has come for reform.  Have a look at this paper, and tell me what you
think."

Dyck looked at the pockmarked face of Ferens, whose record in the courts
was a bad one, and what he saw did not disgust him.  It was as though
Ferens had stumbled and been badly hit in his fall, but there were no
signs of permanent evil in his countenance.  He was square-headed,
close-cropped, clear-eyed, though his face was yellow where it was not
red, and his tongue was soft in his head.

Dyck read the paper slowly and carefully.  Then he handed it back without
a word.

"Well, what have you got to say?" asked Ferens.  "Nothing?  Don't you
think that's a strong list of grievances and wrongs?"

Dyck nodded.  "Yes, it's pretty strong," he said, and he held up his
hand.  "Number One, wages and cost of living.  I'm sure we're right
there.  Cost of living was down in King Charles's time, and wages were
down accordingly.  Everything's gone up, and wages should go up.  Number
Two, the prize-money scandal.  I'm with you there.  I don't see why an
officer should get two thousand five hundred times as much as a seaman.
There ought to be a difference, but not so much.  Number Three, the food
ought to be better; the water ought to be better.  We can't live on rum,
maggoty bread, and foul water--that's sure.  The rum's all right; it's
powerful natural stuff, but we ought to have meat that doesn't stink,
and bread that isn't alive.  What's more, we ought to have lots of lime-
juice, or there's no protection for us when we're out at sea with the
best meat taken by the officers and the worst left to us; and with foul
water and rotten food, there's no hope or help.  But, if we're going in
for this sort of thing, we ought to do it decently.  We can't slap a
government in the mouth, and we can't kick an admiral without paying
heavy for it in the end.  If it's wholesome petitioning you're up to,
I'm with you; but I'm not if there's to be knuckle-dusting."

Ferens shrugged a shoulder.

"Things are movin', and we've got to take our stand now when the time is
ripe for it, or else lose it for ever.  Over at Spithead they're gettin'
their own way.  The government are goin' to send the Admiralty Board down
here, because our admiral say to them that it won't be safe goin' unless
they do."

"And what are we going to do here?" asked Dyck.  "What's the game of the
fleet at the Nore?"

Ferens replied in a low voice:

"Our men are goin' to send out petitions--to the Admiralty and to the
House of Commons."

"Why don't you try Lord Howe?"

"He's not in command of a fleet now.  Besides, petitions have been sent
him, and he's taken no notice."

"Howe?  No notice--the best admiral we ever had!  I don't believe it,"
declared Dyck savagely.  "Why, the whole navy believes in Howe.  They
haven't forgotten what he did in '94.  He's as near to the seaman as the
seaman is to his mother.  Who sent the petitions to him?"

"They weren't signed by names--they were anonymous."

Dyck laughed.

"Yes, and all written by the same hand, I suppose."  Ferens nodded.

"I think that's so."

"Can you wonder, then, that Lord Howe didn't acknowledge them?  But I'm
still sure he acted promptly.  He's a big enough friend of the sailor to
waste no time before doing his turn."

Ferens shook his head morosely.

"That may be," he said; "but the petitions were sent weeks ago, and
there's no sign from Lord Howe.  He was at Bath for gout.  My idea is he
referred them to the admiral commanding at Portsmouth, and was told that
behind the whole thing is conspiracy--French socialism and English
politics.  I give you my word there's no French agent in the fleet,
and if there were, it wouldn't have any effect.  Our men's grievances
are not new.  They're as old as Cromwell."

Suddenly a light of suspicion flashed into Ferens's face.

"You're with us, aren't you?  You see the wrongs we've suffered, and how
bad it all is!  Yet you haven't been on a voyage with us.  You've only
tasted the life in harbour.  Good God, this life is heaven to what we
have at sea!  We don't mind the fightin'.  We'd rather fight than eat."
An evil grin covered his face for a minute.  "Yes, we'd rather fight than
eat, for the stuff we get to eat is hell's broil, God knows!  Did you
ever think what the life of the sailor is, that swings at the top of a
mast with the frost freezin' his very soul, and because he's slow, owin'
to the cold, gets twenty lashes for not bein' quicker?  Well, I've seen
that, and a bad sight it is.  Did you ever see a man flogged?  It ain't a
pretty sight.  First the back takes the click of the whip like a damned
washboard, and you see the ridges rise and go purple and red, and the man
has his breath knocked clean out of him with every blow.  Nearly every
stroke takes off the skin and draws the blood, and a dozen will make the
back a ditch of murder.  Then the whipper stops, looks at the lashes,
feels them tender like, and out and down it comes again.  When all the
back is ridged and scarred, the flesh, that looked clean and beautiful,
becomes a bloody mass.  Some men get a hundred lashes, and that's torture
and death.

"A man I knew was flogged told me once that the first blow made his flesh
quiver in every nerve from his toe-nails to his finger-nails, and stung
his heart as if a knife had gone through his body.  There was agony in
his lungs, and the time between each stroke was terrible, and yet the
next came too soon.  He choked with the blood from his tongue, lacerated
with his teeth, and from his lungs, and went black in the face.  I saw
his back.  It looked like roasted meat; yet he had only had eighty
strokes.

"The punishments are bad.  Runnin' the gauntlet is one of them.  Each
member of the crew is armed with three tarry rope-yarns, knotted at the
ends.  Then between the master-at-arms with a drawn sword and two
corporals with drawn swords behind, the thief, stripped to the waist, is
placed.  The thing is started by a boatswain's mate givin' him a dozen
lashes.  Then he's slowly marched down the double line of men, who flog
him as he passes, and at the end of the line he receives another dose of
the cat from the boatswain's mate.  The poor devil's body and head are
flayed, and he's sent to hospital and rubbed with brine till he's healed.

"But the most horrible of all is flogging through the fleet.  That's
given for strikin' an officer, or tryin' to escape.  It's a sickenin'
thing.  The victim is lashed by his wrists to a capstan-bar in the ship's
long-boat, and all the ship's boats are lowered also, and each ship in
harbour sends a boat manned by marines to attend.  Then, with the master-
at-arms and the ship's surgeon, the boat is cast off.  The boatswain's
mate begins the floggin', and the boat rows away to the half-minute bell,
the drummer beatin' the rogue's march.  From ship to ship the long-boat
goes, and the punishment of floggin' is repeated.  If he faints, he gets
wine or rum, or is taken back to his ship to recover.  When his back is
healed he goes out to get the rest of his sentence.  Very few ever live
through it, or if they do it's only for a short time.  They'd better have
taken the hangin' that was the alternative.  Even a corpse with its back
bare of flesh to the bone has received the last lashes of a sentence, and
was then buried in the mud of the shore with no religious ceremony.

"Mind you, there's many a man gets fifty lashes that don't deserve them.
There's many men in the fleet that's stirred to anger at ill-treatment,
until now, in these days, the whole lot is ready to see the thing
through--to see the thing through--by heaven and by hell!"

The pockmarked face had taken on an almost ghastly fervour, until it
looked like a distorted cartoon-vindictive, fanatical; but Dyck, on the
edge of the river of tragedy, was not ready to lose himself in the stream
of it.

As he looked round the ship he felt a stir of excitement like nothing he
had ever known, though he had been brought up in a country where men were
by nature revolutionists, and where the sword was as often outside as
inside the scabbard.  There was something terrible in a shipboard
agitation not to be found in a land-rising.  On land there were a
thousand miles of open country, with woods and houses, caves and cliffs,
to which men could flee for hiding; and the danger of rebellion was less
dominant.  At sea, a rebellion was like some beastly struggle in one
room, beyond the walls of which was everlasting nothingness.  The thing
had to be fought out, as it were, man to man within four walls, and God
help the weaker!

"How many ships in the fleet are sworn to this agitation?" Dyck asked
presently.

"Every one.  It's been like a spread of infection; it's entered at every
door, looked out of every window.  All the ships are in it, from the
twenty-six-hundred-tonners to the little five-hundred-and-fifty-tonners.
Besides, there are the Delegates."

He lowered his voice as he used these last words.  "Yes, I know," Dyck
answered, though he did not really know.  "But who is at the head?"

"Why, as bold a man as can be--Richard Parker, an Irishman.  He was once
a junior naval officer, and left the navy and went into business; now he
is a quotaman, and leads the mutiny.  Let me tell you that unless there's
a good round answer to what we demand, the Nore fleet'll have it out with
the government.  He's a man of character, is Richard Parker, and the
fleet'll stand by him."

"How long has he been at it?" asked Dyck.

"Oh, weeks and weeks!  It doesn't all come at once, the grip of the
thing.  It began at Spithead, and it worked right there; and now it's
workin' at the Nore, and it'll work and work until there isn't a ship and
there isn't a man that won't be behind the Delegates.  Look.  Half the
seamen on this ship have tasted the inside of a jail; and the rest come
from the press-gang, and what's left are just the ragged ends of street
corners.  But"--and here the man drew himself up with a flush--"but
there's none of us that wouldn't fight to the last gasp of breath for the
navy that since the days of Elizabeth has sailed at the head of all the
world.  Don't think we mean harm to the fleet.  We mean to do it good.
All we want is that its masters shall remember we're human flesh and
blood; that we're as much entitled to good food and drink on sea as on
land; and that, if we risk our lives and shed our blood, we ought to have
some share in the spoils.  We're a great country and we're a great
people, but, by God, we're not good to our own!  Look at them there."

He turned and waved a hand to the bowels of the ship where sailors traded
with the slop-sellers, or chaffered with women, or sat in groups and
sang, or played rough games which had no vital meaning; while here and
there in groups, with hands gesticulating, some fanatics declared their
principles.  And the principles of every man in the Nore fleet so far
were embraced in the four words--wages, food, drink, prize-money.

Presently Ferens stopped short.  "Listen!" he said.

There was a cry from the ship's side not far away, and then came little
bursts of cheering.

"By Heaven, it's the Delegates comin' here!" he said.  He held up a
warning palm, as though commanding silence, while he listened intently.
"Yes, it's the Delegates.  Now look at that crowd of seamen!"  He swung
his hand towards the bowels of the ship.  Scores of men were springing to
their feet.  Presently there came a great shouting and cheers, and then
four new faces appeared on deck.  They were faces of intelligence, but
one of them had the enlightened look of leadership.

"By Judas, it's our leader, Richard Parker!" declared Ferens.

What Dyck now saw was good evidence of the progress of the agitation.
There were officers of the Ariadne to be seen, but they wisely took no
notice of the breaches of regulation which followed the arrival of the
Delegates.  Dyck saw Ferens speak to Richard Parker after the men had
been in conference with Parker and the Delegates, and then turn towards
himself.  Richard Parker came to him.

"We are fellow countrymen," he said genially.  "I know your history.
We are out to make the navy better--to get the men their rights.  I
understand you are with us?"

Dyck bowed.  "I will do all possible to get reforms in wages and food put
through, sir."

"That's good," said Parker.  "There are some petitions you can draft,
and some letters also to the Admiralty and to the Houses of Lords and
Commons."

"I am at your service," said Dyck.

He saw his chance to secure influence on the Ariadne, and also to do good
to the service.  Besides, he felt he might be able to check the worst
excesses of the agitation, if he got power under Parker.  He was free
from any wish for mutiny, but he was the friend of an agitation which
might end as successfully as the trouble at Spithead.




CHAPTER XIII

TO THE WEST INDIES

A fortnight later the mutiny at the Nore shook and bewildered the British
Isles.  In the public journals and in Parliament it was declared that
this outbreak, like that at Spithead, was due partly to political strife,
but more extensively to agents of revolution from France and Ireland.

The day after Richard Parker visited the Ariadne the fleet had been put
under the control of the seamen's Delegates, who were men of standing in
the ships, and of personal popularity.  Their first act was to declare
that the fleet should not leave port until the men's demands were
satisfied.

The King, Prime Minister, and government had received a shock greater
than that which had come with the announcement of American independence.
The government had armed the forts at Sheerness, had sent troops and guns
to Gravesend and Tilbury, and had declared war upon the rebellious fleet.

At the head of the Delegates, Richard Parker, with an officer's
knowledge, became a kind of bogus admiral, who, in interview with the
real admirals and the representatives of the Admiralty Board, talked like
one who, having power, meant to use it ruthlessly.  The government had
yielded to the Spithead mutineers, giving pardon to all except the
ringleaders, and granting demands for increased wages and better food,
with a promise to consider the question of prize-money; but the Nore
mutineers refused to accept that agreement, and enlarged the Spithead
demands.  Admiral Buckner arrived on board his flag-ship, the Sandwich,
without the deference due to an admiral, and then had to wait three hours
for Parker and the Delegates on the quarter-deck.  At the interview that
followed, while apologizing to the admiral for his discourtesy, Parker
wore his hat as quasi-admiral of the fleet.  The demands of the Delegates
were met by reasoning on the part of Buckner, but without effect: for the
seamen of the Nore believed that what Spithead could get by obstinacy the
Nore could increase by contumacy; and it was their firm will to bring the
Lords of the Admiralty to their knees.

The demands of the Nore Delegates, however, were rejected by the
Admiralty, and with the rejection two regiments of militia came from
Canterbury to reinforce the Sheerness garrison.  The mutineers were
allowed to parade the town, so long as their conduct was decent, as
Admiral Buckner admitted it to be; but Parker declared that the presence
of the militia was an insult to the seamen in the Nore fleet.

Then ensued the beginning of the terror.  When Buckner presented the
Admiralty's refusal to deal with the Delegates, there came quick
response.  The reply of the mutineers was to row into Sheerness harbour
and take away with them eight gunboats lying there, each of which fired a
shot at the fort, as if to announce that the mutineers were now the
avowed enemies of the government.

Thereupon the rebels ordered all their ships together at the Great Nore,
ranging them into two crescents, with the newly acquired gunboats at the
flanks.  The attitude of the authorities gave the violent mutineers their
opportunity.  Buckner's flag was struck from the mainmast-head of the
Sandwich, and the red flag was hoisted in its place.

The Delegates would not accept an official pardon for their mutiny
through Buckner.  They demanded a deputation from the Admiralty, Parker
saying that no accommodation could occur without the appearance of the
Lords of the Admiralty at the Nore.  Then followed threatening
arrangements, and the Delegates decided to blockade the Thames and the
Medway.

It was at this time that Dyck Calhoun--who, by consent of Richard Parker,
had taken control of the Ariadne--took action which was to alter the
course of his own life and that of many others.

Since the beginning of the mutiny he had acted with decision, judgment,
and strength.  He had agreed to the Ariadne joining the mutinous ships,
and he had skilfully constructed petitions to the Admiralty, the House of
Commons, and the King.  His habit of thought, his knowledge of life, made
him a power.  He believed that the main demands of the seamen were just,
and he made a useful organization to enforce them.  It was only when he
saw the mutineers would not accept the terms granted to the Spithead
rebels that a new spirit influenced him.

He had determined to get control of the Ariadne.  His gift as a speaker
had conquered his fellow-sailors, and the fact that he was an ex-convict
gave them confidence that he was no friend of the government.

One of the first things he did, after securing his own pre-eminence on
the ship, was to get the captain and officers safely ashore.  This he did
with skill, and the crew of the ship even cheered them as they left.

None of the regular officers of the Ariadne were left upon her, except
Greenock, the master of the ship, whose rank was below that of
lieutenant, and whose duties were many and varied under the orders of the
captain.  Greenock chose to stay, though Dyck said he could go if he
wished.  Greenock's reply was that it was his duty to stay, if the ship
was going to remain at sea, for no one else could perform his duties or
do his work.

Then, by vote, Dyck became captain of the ship.  He did not, however,
wear a captain's uniform--blue coat, with white cuffs, flat gold buttons;
with lace at the neck, a white-sleeved waistcoat, knee-breeches, white
silk stockings, and a three-cornered black hat edged with gold lace and
ornamented with a cockade; with a black cravat, a straight dress sword,
a powdered cue tied with a black-silk ribbon, and epaulets of heavy gold
stuff completing the equipment.  Dyck, to the end of his career at sea,
wore only the common seaman's uniform.

Dyck would not have accepted the doubtful honour had he not had long
purposes in view.  With Ferens, Michael Clones, and two others whom
Ferens could trust, a plan was arranged which Dyck explained to his
fellow-seamen on the Ariadne.

"We've come to the parting of the ways, brothers," he said.  "We've all
become liable to death for mutiny.  The pardon offered by the King has
been refused, and fresh demands are made.  There, I think, a real wrong
has been done by our people.  The Ariadne is well supplied with food and
water.  It is the only ship with sufficiency.  And why?  Because at the
beginning we got provisions from the shore in time; also we got
permission from Richard Parker to fill our holds from two stopped
merchant-ships.  Well, the rest of the fleet know what our food and drink
fitment is.  They know how safe we are, and to-day orders have come to
yield our provisions to the rest of the fleet.  That is, we, who have
taken time by the forelock, must yield up our good gettings to bad
receivers.  I am not prepared to do it.

"On shore the Admiralty have stopped the supply of provisions to us and
to all the fleet.  Our men have been arrested at Gravesend, Tilbury, and
Sheerness.  The fleet could not sail now if it wished; but one ship can
sail, and it is ours.  The fleet hasn't the food to sail.  On Richard
Parker's ship, the Sandwich, there is food only for a week.  The others
are almost as bad.  We are in danger of being attacked.  Sir Erasmus
Gower, of the Neptune, has a fleet of warships, gunboats, and amateur
armed vessels getting ready to attack us.  The North Sea fleet has come
to help us, but that doesn't save us.  I'll say this--we are loyal men in
this fleet, otherwise our ships would have joined the enemy in the waters
of France or Holland.  They can't go now, in any case.  The men have lost
heart.  Confidence in our cause has declined.  The government sent Lords
of the Admiralty here, and they offered pardon if we accepted the terms
of the Spithead settlement.  We declined the terms.  That was a bad day
for us, and put every one of our heads in a noose.

"For the moment we have a majority in men and ships; but we can't renew
our food or drink, or ammunition.  The end is sure against us.  Our
original agitation was just; our present obduracy is madness.  This ship
is suspected.  It is believed by the rest of the fleet--by ships like the
Invincible--that we're weak-kneed, selfish, and lacking in fidelity to
the cause.  That's not true; but we have either to fight or to run, and
perhaps to do both.

"Make no mistake.  The government are not cowards; the Admiralty are
gentlemen of determination.  If men like Admiral Howe support the
Admiralty--Howe, one of the best friends the seaman ever had--what do you
think the end will be?  Have you heard what happened at Spithead?  The
seamen chivvied Admiral Alan Gardner and his colleagues aboard a ship.
He caught hold of a seaman Delegate by the collar and shook him.  They
closed in on him.  They handled him roughly.  He sprang on the hammock-
nettings, put the noose of the hanging-rope round his neck, and said to
the men who advanced menacingly:

"'If you will return to your duty, you may hang me at the yard-arm!'

"That's the kind of stuff our admirals are made of.  We have no quarrel
with the majority of our officers.  They're straight, they're honest, and
they're true to their game.  Our quarrel is with Parliament and the
Admiralty; our struggle is with the people of the kingdom, who have not
seen to it that our wrongs are put right, that we have food to eat, water
to drink, and money to spend."

He waved a hand, as though to sweep away the criticisms he felt must be
rising against him.

"Don't think because I've spent four years in prison under the sternest
discipline the world offers, and have never been a seaman before, that
I'm not fitted to espouse your cause.  By heaven, I am--I am--I am--
I know the wrongs you've suffered.  I've smelled the water you drink.
I've tasted the rotten meat.  I've seen the honest seaman who has been
for years upon the main--I've seen the scars upon his back got from a
brutal officer who gave him too big a job to do, and flogged him for not
doing it.  I know of men who, fevered with bad food, have fallen, from
the mainmast-head, or have slipped overboard, glad to go, because of the
wrongs they'd suffered.

"I'll tell you what our fate will be, and then I'll put a question to
you.  We must either give up our stock of provisions or run for it.
Parker and the other Delegates proclaim their comradeship; yet they have
hidden from us the king's proclamation and the friendly resolutions of
the London merchants.  I say our only hope is to escape from the Thames.
I know that skill will be needed, but if we escape, what then?  I say if
we escape, because, as we sail out, orders will be given for the other
mutiny ships to attack us.  We shall be fired on; we shall risk our
lives.  You've done that before, however, and will do it again.

"We have to work out our own problem and fight our own fight.  Well,
what I want to know is this--are we to give in to the government, or do
we stand to be hammered by Sir Erasmus Gower?  Remember what that means.
It means that if we fight the government ships, we must either die in
battle, or die with the ropes round our necks.  There is another way.
I'm not inclined to surrender, or to stand by men who have botched our
business for us.  I'm for making for the sea, and, when I get there, I'm
for striking for the West Indies, where there's a British fleet fighting
Britain's enemies, and for joining in and fighting with them.  I'm for
getting out of this river and away from England.  It's a bold plan, but
it's a good one.  I want to know if you're with me.  Remember, there's
danger getting out, and there's danger when and if we get out.  The other
ships may pursue us.  The Portsmouth fleet may nab us.  We may be caught,
and, if we are, we must take the dose prepared for us; but I'm for making
a strong rush, going without fear, and asking no favour.  I won't
surrender here; it's too cowardly.  I want to know, will you come
to the open sea with me?"

There were many shouts of assent from the crowd, though here and there
came a growl of dissent.

"Not all of you are willing to come with me," Dyck continued vigorously.
"Tell me, what is it you expect to get by staying here?  You're famished
when you're not poisoned; you're badly clothed and badly fed; you're kept
together by flogging; you're treated worse than a convict in jail or a
victim in a plague hospital.  You're not paid as well as your
grandfathers were, and you're punished worse.  Here, on the Ariadne,
we're not skulkers.  We don't fear our duty; we are loyal men.  Many of
you, on past voyages, fighting the enemy, lived on burgoo and molasses
only, with rum and foul water to drink.  On the other ships there have
been terrible cruelty and offence.  Surgeons have neglected and ill-
treated sick men and embezzled provisions and drinks intended for the
invalids.  Many a man has died because of the neglect of the ship's
surgeons; many have been kicked about the head and beaten, and haven't
dared to go on the sick list for fear of their officers.  The Victualling
Board gets money to supply us with food and drink according to measure.
They get the money for a full pound and a full gallon, and we get
fourteen ounces of food and seven pints of liquor, or less.  Well, what
do you say, friends, to being our own Victualling Board out in the open
sea, if we can get there?

"We may have to fight when we get out; but I'm for taking the Ariadne
into the great world battle when we can find it.  This I want to ask--
isn't it worth while making a great fight in our own way, and showing
that British seamen can at once be mutineers and patriots?  We have a
pilot who knows the river.  We can go to the West Indian Islands, to the
British fleet there.  It's doom and death to stay here; and it may be
doom and death to go.  If we try to break free, and are fired on, the
Admiralty may approve of us, because we've broken away from the rest.
See now, isn't that the thing to do?  I'm for getting out.  Who's coming
with me?"

Suddenly a burly sailor pushed forward.  He had the head of a viking.
His eyes were strong with enterprise.  He had a hand like a ham, with
long, hairy fingers.

"Captain," said he, "you've put the thing so there can be only one answer
to it.  As for me, I'm sick of the way this mutiny has been bungled from
first to last.  There's been one good thing about it only--we've got
order without cruelty, we've rebelled without ravagement; but we've
missed the way, and we didn't deal with the Admiralty commissioners as
we ought.  So I'm for joining up with the captain here"--he waved a hand
towards Dyck--"and making for open sea.  As sure as God's above, they'll
try to hammer us; but it's the only way."

He held a handkerchief-a dirty, red silk thing.  "See," he continued,
"the wind is right to take us out.  The other ships won't know what we're
going to do until we start.  I'm for getting off.  I'm a pressed man.  I
haven't seen my girl for five years, and they won't let me free in port
to go and see her.  Nothing can be worse than what we have to suffer now,
so let's make a break for it.  That's what I say.  Come, now, lads, three
cheers for Captain Calhoun!"

A half-hour later, on the captain's deck, Dyck gave the order to pass
eastward.  It was sunset when they started, and they had not gone a
thousand yards before some of the mutineering ships opened fire on the
Ariadne.  The breeze was good, however, and she sailed bravely through
the leaden storm.  Once twice--thrice she was hit, but she sped on.  Two
men were killed and several were wounded.  Sails were torn, and the high
bulkheads were broken; but, without firing a shot in reply, the Ariadne
swung clear at last of the hostile ships and reached safe water.

On the edge of the open sea Dyck took stock of the position.  The Ariadne
had been hit several times, and the injury done her was marked.  Before
morning the dead seamen were sunk in watery graves, and the wounded were
started back to health again.  By daylight the Ariadne was well away from
the land.

The first thing Dyck had done, after escaping from the river, was to
study the wants of the Ariadne and make an estimate for the future with
Greenock, the master.  He calculated they had food and water enough to
last for three months, even with liberal provisioning.  Going among the
crew, he realized there was no depression among them; that they seemed to
care little where they were going.  It was, however, quite clear they
wished to fight--to fight the foes of England.

He knew his task was a hard one, and that all efforts at discipline
would have dangers.  He knew, also, that he could have no authority,
save personality and success.  He set himself, therefore, to win the
confidence of Greenock and the crew, and he began discipline at once.
He knew that a reaction must come; that the crew, loose upon their own
trail, would come to regret the absence of official command.  He realized
that many of them would wish to return to the fleet at the Nore, but
while the weather was good he did not fear serious trouble.  The danger
would come in rough weather or on a becalmed sea.

They had passed Beachy Head in the mist.  They had seen no battle-ship,
and had sighted no danger, as they made their way westward through the
Channel.  There had been one moment of anxiety.  That was when they
passed Portsmouth, and had seen in the far distance, to the right of
them, the mastheads of Admiral Gardner's fleet.

It was here that Dyck's orderly, Michael Clones, was useful.  He brought
word of murmuring among the more brutish of the crew, that some of them
wished to join Gardner's fleet.  At this news, Dyck went down among the
men.  It was an unusual thing to do, but it brought matters to an issue.

Among the few dissatisfied sailors was one Nick Swaine, who had been
the cause of more trouble on the Ariadne than any other.  He had a
quarrelsome mind; he had been influenced by the writings of Wolfe Tone,
the Irish rebel.  One of the secrets of Dyck's control of the crew was
the fact that he was a gentleman, and was born in the ruling class, and
this was anathema to Nick Swaine.  His view of democracy was ignorance
controlling ignorance.

By nature he was insolent, but under the system of control pursued by the
officers of the Ariadne, previous to the mutiny, he had not been able to
do much.  The system had bound him down.  He had been the slave of habit,
custom, and daily duty.  His record, therefore, was fairly clean until
two days after the escape from the Thames and the sighting of the
Portsmouth fleet.  Then all his revolutionary spirit ran riot in him.
Besides, the woman to whom he had become attached at the Nore had been
put ashore on the day Dyck gained control.  It roused his enmity now.

When Dyck came down, he had the gunners called to him, admonishing them
that drill must go on steadily, and promising them good work to do.  Then
he turned to the ordinary seamen.

At this moment Nick Swaine strode forward within a dozen feet of Dyck.

"Look there!" he said, and he jerked a finger towards the distant
Portsmouth fleet.  "Look there!  You've passed that."

Dyck shrugged a shoulder.

"I meant to pass it," he said quietly.

"Give orders to make for it," said Nick with a sullen eye.

"I shall not.  And look you, my man, keep a civil tongue to me, who
command this ship, or I'll have you put in irons."

"Have me put in irons!" Swaine cried hotly.  "This isn't Dublin jail.
You can't do what you like here.  Who made you captain of this ship?"

"Those who made me captain will see my orders carried out.  Now, get you
back with the rest, or I'll see if they still hold good."  Dyck waved a
hand.  "Get back when I tell you, Swaine !"

"When you've turned the ship to the Portsmouth fleet I'll get back, and
not till then."

Dyck made a motion of the hand to some boatswains standing by.  Before
they could arrest him, Swaine flung himself towards Dyck with a knife in
his hand.

Dyck's hand was quicker, however.  His pistol flung out, a shot was
fired, and the knife dropped from the battered fingers of Nick Swaine.

"Have his wounds dressed, then put him in irons," Dyck commanded.

From that moment, in good order and in good weather, the Ariadne sped on
her way westward and southward.



CHAPTER XIV

IN THE NICK OF TIME

Perhaps no mutineer in the history of the world ever succeeded, as did
Dyck Calhoun, in holding control over fellow-mutineers on the journey
from the English Channel to the Caribbean Sea.  As a boy, Dyck had been
an expert sailor, had studied the machinery of a man-of-war, and his love
of the sea was innate and deep-seated; but his present success was based
upon more than experience.  Quite apart from the honour of his nature,
prison had deepened in him the hatred of injustice.  In soul he was
bitter; in body he was healthy, powerful, and sane.

Slowly, sternly, yet tactfully, he had broken down the many customs of
ship life injurious to the welfare of the men.  Under his system the
sailors had good coffee for breakfast, instead of a horrible mixture made
of burnt biscuits cooked in foul water.  He gave the men pea-soup and
rice instead of burgoo and the wretched oatmeal mess which was the staple
thing for breakfast.  He saw to it that the meat was no longer a hateful,
repulsive mass, two-thirds bone and gristle, and before it came into the
cook's hands capable of being polished like mahogany.  He threatened the
cook with punishment if he found the meals ill-cooked.

In all the journey to the West Indian seas there had been only three
formal floggings.  His attitude was not that of the commander who
declared:

"I will see the man's backbone, by God!"

He wished to secure discipline without cruelty.  His greatest difficulty,
at the start, was in making lieutenants.  That he overcame by appointing
senior midshipmen before the Ariadne was out of the Channel.  He offered
a lieutenancy to Ferens, who had the courage to decline it.

"Make me purser," remarked Ferens.  "Make me purser, and I'll do the job
justly."

As the purser of the Ariadne had been sent to the sick-bay and was likely
to die (and did die subsequently), Ferens was put into his uniform-three-
cornered cocked hat, white knee-breeches, and white stockings.  The
purser of a man-of-war was generally a friend of the captain, going with
him from ship to ship.

Of the common sailors, on the whole, Dyck had little doubt.  He had
informed them that, whatever happened, they should not be in danger; that
the ship should not join the West Indian fleet unless every man except
himself received amnesty.  If the amnesty was not granted, then one of
two things should happen--the ship must make for a South American port,
or she must fight.  Fighting would not frighten these men.

It was rather among the midshipmen that Dyck looked for trouble.
Sometimes, with only two years' training at Gosport, a youngster became a
midshipman on first going to sea, and he could begin as early as eleven
years of age.  A second-rate ship like the Ariadne carried eighteen
midshipmen; and as six lieutenants were appointed from them, only twelve
remained.  From these twelve, in the dingy after-cockpit, where the
superficial area was not more than twelve square feet; where the air was
foul, and the bilges reeked with a pestilential stench; where the
purser's store-room near gave out the smell of rancid butter and
poisonous cheese; where the musty taint of old ropes came to them, there
was a spirit of danger.

Dyck was right in thinking that in the midshipmen's dismal berth the
first flowers of revolt to his rule would bloom.

Sailors, even as low as the pig-sty men, had some idea of fair play; and
as the weeks that had passed since they left the Thames had given them
better food and drink, and lessened the severity of those above them,
real obedience had come.

It was not strange that the ship ran well, for all the officers under the
new conditions, except Dyck himself, had had previous experience.  The
old lieutenants had gone, but midshipmen, who in any case were trained,
had taken their places.  The rest of the ship's staff were the same,
except the captain; and as Dyck had made a friend of Greenock the master,
a man of glumness, the days were peaceful enough during the voyage to the
Caribbean Sea.

The majority saw that every act of Dyck had proved him just and capable.
He had rigidly insisted on gun practice; he had keyed up the marines to a
better spirit, and churlishness had been promptly punished.  He was, in
effect, what the sailors called a "rogue," or a "taut one"--seldom
smiling, gaunt of face but fearless of eye, and with a body free from
fatigue.

As the weather grew warmer and the days longer, and they drew near to the
coast of Jamaica, a stir of excitement was shown.

"You'd like to know what I'm going to do, Michael, I suppose?" said Dyck
one morning, as he drank his coffee and watched the sun creeping up the
sky.

"Well, in three days we shall know what's to become of us, and I have no
doubt or fear.  This ship's a rebel, but it's returning to duty.  We've
shown them how a ship can be run with good food and drink and fair
dealing, and, please God, we'll have some work to do now that belongs to
a man-of-war!"

"Sir, I know what you mean to do," replied Michael.  "You mean to get all
of us off by giving yourself up."

"Well, some one has to pay for what we've done, Michael."  A dark,
ruthless light came into Dyck's eyes.  "Some one's got to pay."  A grim
smile crossed his face.  "We've done the forbidden thing; we've mutinied
and taken to the open sea.  We were fired on by the other mutiny ships,
and that will help our sailors, but it won't help me.  I'm the leader.
We ought, of course, to have taken refuge with the nearest squadron of
the king's ships.  Well, I've run my luck, and I'll have to pay."

He scratched his chin with a thumb-nail-a permanent physical trait.  "You
see, the government has pardoned all the sailors, and will hang only the
leaders.  I expect Parker is hung already.  Well, I'm the leader on the
Ariadne.  I'm taking this ship straight to his majesty's West Indian
fleet, in thorough discipline, and I'll hand it over well-found, well-
manned, well-officered, on condition that all go free except myself.  I
came aboard a common sailor, a quota man, a prison-bird, penniless.
Well, have I shown that I can run a ship?  Have I learned the game of
control?  During the weeks we've been at sea, bursting along, have I
proved myself?"

Michael smiled.  "What did I say to you the first night on board, sir?
Didn't I say they'd make an officer of you when they found out what
brains you had?  By St. Patrick, you've made yourself captain with the
good-will of all, and your iron hand has held the thing together.  You've
got a great head, too, sir."

Dyck looked at him with a face in which the far future showed.

"Michael, I've been lucky.  I've had good men about me.  God only knows
what would have happened to me if the master hadn't been what he is--a
gentleman who knows his job-aye, a gentleman through and through!  If he
had gone against me, Michael"--he flicked a finger to the sky--"well,
that much for my chances!  I'd have been dropped overboard, or stabbed in
my cabin, as was that famous Captain Pigot, son of an admiral, who had as
much soul as you'd find in a stone-quarry.  When two men had dropped from
the masts, hurrying to get down because of his threat that the last man
should be thrashed--when the two men lay smashed to pieces at his feet,
Pigot said: 'Heave the lubbers overboard.'  That night, Michael, the
seamen rose, crept to his cabin, stabbed him to death, pitched his body
overboard, put his lieutenants to sea in open boats, and then ran away to
South America.  Well, I've escaped that fate, because this was a good
ship, and all the officers knew their business, and did it without
cruelty.  I've been well served.  It was a great thing making the new
lieutenants from the midshipmen.  There never was a better lot on board a
ship."

Michael's face clouded.  "Sir, that's true.  The new lieutenants have
done their work well, but them that's left behind in the midshipmen's
berth--do you think they're content?  No, sir.  The only spot on board
this ship where there lurks an active spirit against you is in the
midshipmen's berth.  Mischief's there, and that's what's brought me to
you now."

Dyck smiled.  "I know that.  I've had my eye on the midshipmen.  I've
never trusted them.  They're a hard lot; but if the rest of the ship is
with me, I'll deal with them promptly.  They're not clever or bold enough
to do their job skilfully.  They've got some old hands down there--
hammock-men, old stagers of the sea that act as servants to them.  What
line do they take?"

Michael laughed softly.

"What I know I've got from two of them, and it is this--the young
gentlemen'll try to get control of the ship."

The cynicism deepened in Dyck's face.

"Get control of the ship, eh?  Well, it'll be a new situation on a king's
ship if midshipmen succeed where the rest dare not try.  Now, mark what
I'm going to do."

He called, and a marine showed himself.

"The captain's compliments to the master, and his presence here at once.
Michael," he continued presently, "what fools they are!  They're scarcely
a baker's dozen, and none of them has skill to lead.  Why, the humblest
sailor would have more sense than to start a revolt, the success of which
depends upon his personal influence, and the failure of which must end in
his own ruin.  Does any one think they're the kind to lead a mutiny
within a mutiny?  Listen to me I'm not cruel, but I'll put an end to this
plot.  We're seven hundred on this ship, and she's a first-class sailer.
I warrant no ship ever swam the seas that looks better going than she
does.  So we've got to see that her, record is kept clean as a mutineer."

At that moment the master appeared.  He saluted.  "Greenock," said Dyck,
"I wonder if you've noticed the wind blowing chilly from the midshipmen's
berth."  A lurking devilish humour shot from Greenock's eyes.

"Aye, I've smelled that wind."

"Greenock, we're near the West Indian Islands.  Before we eat many meals
we'll see land.  We may pass French ships, and we may have to fight.
Well, we've had a good running, master; so I'll tell you what I mean to
do."

He then briefly repeated what he had said to Michael, and added

"Greenock, in this last to-do, I shall be the only man in danger.  The
king's amnesty covers every one except the leaders--that lets you off.
The Delegate of the Ariadne is aboard the Invincible, if he's not been
hanged.  I'm the only one left on the Ariadne.  I've had a good time,
Greenock--thanks to you, chiefly.  I think the men are ready for anything
that'll come; but I also think we should guard against a revolt of the
midshipmen by healthy discipline now.  Therefore I'll instruct the
lieutenants to spread-eagle every midshipman for twelve hours.  There's a
stiff wind; there's a good stout spray, and the wind and spray should
cool their hot souls.  Meanwhile, though without food, they shall have
water as they need it.  If at the end of the twelve hours any still seems
to be difficult, give him another twelve.  Look!"

He stretched out a hand to the porthole on his right.  "Far away in front
are islands.  You cannot see them yet, but those little thickening mists
in the distance mean land.  Those are the islands in front of the
Windward Passage.  I think it would be a good lesson for the young
gentlemen to be spread-eagled against the mists of their future.  It
shall be' done at once; and pass the word why it's done."

An hour later there was laughter in every portion of the ship, for the
least popular members of the whole personnel were being dragooned into
discipline.  The sailors had seen individual midshipmen spread-eagled and
mastheaded, while all save those they could bribe were forbidden to bring
them drink or food; but here was a whole body of junior officers,
punished en masse, as it were, lashed to the rigging and taking the wind
and the spray in their teeth.

Before the day was over, the whole ship was alive with anticipation, for,
in the far distance, could be seen the dark blue and purplish shadows
which told of land; and this brought the minds of all to the end of their
journey, with thoughts of the crisis near.

Word had been passed that all on board were considered safe--all except
the captain who had manoeuvred them to the entrance of the Caribbean Sea.
Had he been of their own origin, they would not have placed so much
credence in the rumour; but coming as he did of an ancient Irish family,
although he had been in jail for killing, the traditional respect for the
word of a gentleman influenced them.  When a man like Ferens, on the one
hand, and the mutineer whose fingers had been mutilated by Dyck in the
Channel, on the other--when these agreed to bend themselves to the rule
of a usurper, some idea of Calhoun's power may be got.

On this day, with the glimmer of land in the far distance, the charges of
all the guns were renewed.  Also word was passed that at any moment the
ship must be cleared for action.  Down in the cockpit the tables were got
ready by the surgeon and the loblolly-boys; the magazines were opened,
and the guards were put on duty.

Orders were issued that none should be allowed to escape active share in
the coming battle; that none should retreat to the orlop deck or the
lower deck; that the boys should carry the cartridge-cases handed to them
from the magazine under the cover of their coats, running hard to the
guns.  The twenty-four-pounders-the largest guns in use at the time-the
eighteen-pounders, and the twelve-pounder guns were all in good order.

The bags of iron balls called grape-shot-the worst of all--varying in
size from sixteen to nine balls in a bag, were prepared.  Then the
canister, which produced ghastly murder, chain-shot to bring down masts
and spars, langrel to fire at masts and rigging, and the dismantling shot
to tear off sails, were all made ready.  The muskets for the marines, the
musketoons, the pistols, the cutlasses, the boarding-pikes, the axes or
tomahawks, the bayonets and sailors' knives, were placed conveniently for
use.  A bevy of men were kept busy cleaning the round shot of rust, and
there was not a man on the ship who did not look with pride at the guns,
in their paint of grey-blue steel, with a scarlet band round the muzzle.

To the right of the Ariadne was the coast of Cuba; to the left was the
coast of Haiti, both invisible to the eye.  Although the knowledge that
they were nearing land had already given the officers and men a feeling
of elation, the feeling was greatly intensified as they came through the
Turk Island Passage, which is a kind of gateway to the Windward Passage
between Cuba and Haiti.  The glory of the sunny, tropical world was upon
the ship and upon the sea; it crept into the blood of every man, and the
sweet summer weather gave confidence to their minds.  It was a day which
only those who know tropical and semitropical seas can understand.  It
had the sense of soaking luxury.

In his cabin, with the ship's chart on the table before him, Dyck Calhoun
studied the course of the Ariadne.  The wind was fair and good, the sea-
birds hovered overhead.  From a distant part of the ship came the sound
of men's voices in song.  They were singing "Spanish Ladies":

         "We hove our ship to when the wind was sou'west, boys,
          We hove our ship to for to strike soundings clear;
          Then we filled our main tops'l and bore right away, boys,
          And right up the Channel our course did we steer.

         "We'll rant and we'll roar like true British sailors,
          We'll range and we'll roam over all the salt seas,
          Until we strike soundings in the Channel of old England
          From Ushant to Scilly 'tis thirty-five leagues."

Dyck raised his head, and a smile came to his lips.

"Yes, you sing of a Channel, my lads, but it's a long way there, as
you'll find.  I hope to God they give us some fighting!  .  .  .  Well,
what is it?" he asked of a marine who appeared in his doorway.

"The master of the ship begs to see you, sir," was the reply.

A moment afterwards Greenock entered.  He asked Dyck several questions
concerning the possible fighting, the disposition of ammunition and all
that, and said at last:

"I think we shall be of use, sir.  The ship's all right now."

"As right as anything human can be.  I've got faith in my star, master."

A light came into the other man's dour face.  "I wish you'd get into
uniform, sir."

"Uniform?  No, Greenock!  No, I use the borrowed power, but not the
borrowed clothes.  I'm a common sailor, and I wear the common sailor's
clothes.  You've earned your uniform, and it suits you.  Stick to it; and
when I've earned a captain's uniform I'll wear it.  I owe you the success
of this voyage so far, and my heart is full of it, up to the brim.  Hark,
what's that?"

"By God, it's guns, sir!  There's fighting on!"

"Fighting!"

Dyck stood for a minute with head thrust forward, eyes fixed upon the
distant mists ahead.  The rumble of the guns came faintly through the
air.  An exultant look came into his face.

"Master, the game's with us--it is fighting!  I know the difference
between the two sets of guns, English and French.  Listen--that quick,
spasmodic firing is French; the steady-as-thunder is English.  Well,
we've got all sail on.  Now, make ready the ship for fighting."

"She's almost ready, sir."

An hour later the light mist had risen, and almost suddenly the Ariadne
seemed to come into the field of battle.  Dyck Calhoun could see the
struggle going on.  The two sets of enemy ships had come to close
quarters, and some were locked in deadly conflict.  Other ships, still
apart, fired at point-blank range, and all the horrors of slaughter were
in full swing.  From the square blue flag at the mizzen top gallant
masthead of one of the British ships engaged, Dyck saw that the admiral's
own craft was in some peril.  The way lay open for the Ariadne to bear
down upon the French ship, engaged with the admiral's smaller ship, and
help to end the struggle successfully for the British cause.

While still too far away for point-blank range, the Ariadne's guns began
upon the French ships distinguishable by their shape and their colours.
Before the first shot was fired, however, Dyck made a tour of the decks
and gave some word of cheer to the men, The Ariadne lost no time in
getting into the thick of the fight.  The seamen were stripped to the
waist, and black silk handkerchiefs were tightly bound round their heads
and over their ears.

What the French thought of the coming of the Ariadne was shown by the
reply they made presently to her firing.  The number of French ships in
action was greater than the British by six, and the Ariadne arrived just
when she could be of greatest service.  The boldness of her seamanship,
and the favour of the wind, gave her an advantage which good fortune
helped to justify.

As she drew in upon the action, she gave herself up to great danger; she
was coming in upon the rear of the French ships, and was subject to
fierce attack.  To the French she seemed like a fugitive warrior
returning to his camp just when he was most needed, as was indeed the
case.  Two of her shots settled one of the enemy's vessels; and before
the others could converge upon her, she had crawled slowly up against the
off side of the French admiral's ship, which was closely engaged with the
Beatitude, the British flagship, on the other side.

The canister, chain-shot, and langrel of the French foe had caused much
injury to the Ariadne, and her canvas was in a sore plight.  Fifty of her
seamen had been killed, and a hundred and fifty were wounded by the time
she reached the starboard side of the Aquitaine.  She would have lost
many more were it not that her onset demoralized the French gunners,
while the cheers of the British sailors aboard the Beatitude gave
confidence to their mutineer comrades.

On his own deck, Dyck watched the progress of the battle with the joy of
a natural fighter.  He had carried the thing to an almost impossible
success.  There had only been this in his favour, that his was an
unexpected entrance--a fact which had been worth another ship at least.
He saw his boarders struggle for the Aquitaine.  He saw them discharge
their pistols, and then resort to the cutlass and the dagger; and the
marines bringing down their victims from the masts of the French flag-
ship.

Presently he heard the savagely buoyant shouts of the Beatitude men, and
he realized that, by his coming, the admiral of the French fleet had been
obliged to yield up his sword, and to signal to his ships--such as could
--to get away.  That half of them succeeded in doing so was because the
British fleet had been heavily handled in the fight, and would have been
defeated had it not been for the arrival of the Ariadne.

Never, perhaps, in the history of the navy had British ships clamped the
enemy as the Aquitaine was clamped by the Beatitude and the Ariadne.
Certain it is that no admiral of the British fleet had ever to perform
two such acts in one day as receiving the submission of a French admiral
and offering thanks to the captain of a British man-of-war whom, while
thanking, he must at once place under arrest as a mutineer.  What might
have chanced further to Dyck's disadvantage can never be known, because
there appeared on the deck of the Beatitude, as its captain under the
rear-admiral, Captain Ivy, who, five years before, had visited Dyck and
his father at Playmore, and had gone with them to Dublin.

The admiral had sent word to the Ariadne for its captain to come to the
Beatitude.  When the captain's gig arrived, and a man in seaman's clothes
essayed to climb the side of the flag-ship, he was at first prevented.
Captain Ivy, however, immediately gave orders for Dyck to be admitted,
but without honours.

On the deck of the Beatitude, Dyck looked into the eyes of Captain Ivy.
He saluted; but the captain held out a friendly hand.

"You're a mutineer, Calhoun, but your ship has given us victory.  I'd
like to shake hands with one that's done so good a stroke for England."

A queer smile played about Calhoun's lips.

"I've brought the Ariadne back to the fleet, Captain Ivy.  The men have
fought as well as men ever did since Britain had a navy.  I've brought
her back to the king's fleet to be pardoned."

"But you must be placed under arrest, Calhoun.  Those are the orders--
that wherever the Ariadne should be found she should be seized, and that
you should be tried by court-martial."

Dyck nodded.  "I understand.  When did you get word?"

"About forty-eight hours ago.  The king's mail came by a fast frigate."

"We took our time, but we came straight from the Channel to find this
fleet.  At the mouth of the Thames we willed to find it, and to fight
with it--and by good luck so we have done."

"Let me take you to the admiral," said Captain Ivy.

He walked beside Dyck to the admiral's cabin.  "You've made a terrible
mess of things, Calhoun, but you've put a lot right to-day," he said at
the entrance to the cabin.  "Tell me one thing honestly before we part
now--did you kill Erris Boyne?" Dyck looked at him long and hard.

"I don't know--on my honour I don't know!  I don't remember--I was drunk
and drugged."

"Calhoun, I don't believe you did; but if you did, you've paid the price
--and the price of mutiny, too."  In the clear blue eyes of Captain Ivy
there was a look of friendliness.  "I notice you don't wear uniform,
Calhoun," he added.  "I mean a captain's uniform."  Dyck smiled.  "I
never have."

The next moment the door of the admiral's cabin was opened.

"Mr. Dyck Calhoun of the Ariadne, sir," said Captain Ivy.




CHAPTER XV

THE ADMIRAL HAS HIS SAY

The admiral's face was naturally vigorous and cheerful, but, as he looked
at Dyck Calhoun, a steely hardness came into it, and gave a cynical twist
to the lips.  He was a short man, and spare, but his bearing had dignity
and every motion significance.

He had had his high moment with the French admiral, had given his
commands to the fleet and had arranged the disposition of the captured
French ships.  He was in good spirits, and the wreckage in the fleet
seemed not to shake his nerve, for he had lost in men far less than the
enemy, and had captured many ships--a good day's work, due finally to the
man in sailor's clothes standing there with Captain Ivy.  The admiral
took in the dress of Calhoun at a glance--the trousers of blue cloth, the
sheath-knife belt, the stockings of white silk, the white shirt with the
horizontal stripes, the loose, unstarched, collar, the fine black silk
handkerchief at the throat, the waistcoat of red kerseymere, the shoes
like dancing-pumps, and the short, round blue jacket, with the flat gold
buttons--a seaman complete.  He smiled broadly; he liked this mutineer
and ex-convict.

"Captain Calhoun, eh!" he remarked mockingly, and bowed satirically.
"Well, you've played a strong game, and you've plunged us into great
difficulty."

Dyck did not lose his opportunity.  "Happily, I've done what I planned to
do when we left the Thames, admiral," he said.  "We came to get the
chance of doing what, by favour of fate, we have accomplished.  Now, sir,
as I'm under arrest, and the ship which I controlled has done good
service, may I beg that the Ariadne's personnel shall have amnesty, and
that I alone be made to pay--if that must be--for the mutiny at the
Nore."

The admiral nodded.  "We know of your breaking away from the mutinous
fleet, and of their firing on you as you passed, and that is in your
favour.  I can also say this: that bringing the ship here was masterly
work, for I understand there were no officers on the Ariadne.  She always
had the reputation of being one of the best-trained ships in the navy,
and she has splendidly upheld that reputation.  How did you manage it,
Mr. Calhoun?"

Dyck briefly told how the lieutenants were made, and how he himself had
been enormously indebted to Greenock, the master of the ship, and all the
subordinate officers.

The admiral smiled sourly.  "I have little power until I get instructions
from the Admiralty, and that will take some time.  Meanwhile, the Ariadne
shall go on as she is, and as if she were--and had been from the first, a
member of my own squadron."

Dyck bowed, explained what reforms he had created in the food and
provisions of the Ariadne, and expressed a hope that nothing should be
altered.  He said the ship had proved herself, chiefly because of his
reforms.

"Besides, she's been badly hammered.  She's got great numbers of wounded
and dead, and for many a day the men will be busy with repairs."

"For a man without naval experience, for a mutineer, an ex-convict and a
usurper, you've done quite well, Mr. Calhoun; but my instructions were,
if I captured your ship, and you fell into my hands, to try you, and hang
you."

At this point Captain Ivy intervened.

"Sir," he said, "the instructions you received were general.  They could
not anticipate the special service which the Ariadne has rendered to the
king's fleet.  I have known Mr. Calhoun; I have visited at his father's
house; I was with him on his journey to Dublin, which was the beginning
of his bad luck.  I would beg of you, sir, to give Mr. Calhoun his parole
on sea and land until word comes from the Admiralty as to what, in the
circumstances, his fate shall be."

"To be kept on the Beatitude on parole!" exclaimed the admiral.

"Land or sea, Captain Ivy said.  I'm as well-born as any man in the
king's fleet," declared Dyck.  "I've as clean a record as any officer in
his majesty's navy, save for the dark fact that I was put in prison for
killing a man; and I will say here, in the secrecy of an admiral's cabin,
that the man I killed--or was supposed to kill--was a traitor.  If I did
kill him, he deserved death by whatever hand it came.  I care not what
you do with me"--his hands clenched, his shoulders drew up, his eyes
blackened with the dark fire of his soul--"whether you put me on parole,
or try me by court-martial, or hang me from the yard-arm.  I've done a
piece of work of which I'm not ashamed.  I've brought a mutinous ship out
of mutiny, sailed her down the seas for many weeks, disciplined her,
drilled her, trained her, fought her; helped to give the admiral of the
West Indian squadron his victory.  I enlisted; I was a quota man.  I
became a common sailor--I and my servant and friend, Michael Clones.  I
shared the feelings of the sailors who mutinied.  I wrote petitions and
appeals for them.  I mutinied with them.  Then at last, having been made
leader of the ship, with the captain and the lieutenants sent safely
ashore, and disagreeing with the policy of the Delegates in not accepting
the terms offered, I brought the ship out, commanding it from the
captain's cabin, and have so continued until to-day.  If I'm put ashore
at Jamaica, I'll keep my parole; if I stay a prisoner here, I'll keep my
parole.  If I've done you service, admiral, be sure of this, it was done
with clear intent.  My object was to save the men who, having mutinied
and fled from Admiralty control, are subject to capital punishment."

"Your thinking came late.  You should have thought before you mutinied,"
was the sharp reply.

"As a common sailor I acted on my conscience, and what we asked for the
Admiralty has granted.  Only by mutiny did the Admiralty yield to our
demands.  What I did I would do again!  We took our risks in the Thames
against the guns that were levelled at us; we've taken our risks down
here against the French to help save your squadron, and we've done it.
The men have done it, because they've been loyal to the flag, and from
first to last set to make the Admiralty and the people know they have
rights which must be cherished.  If all your men were as faithful to the
Crown as are the men on the Ariadne, then they deserve well of the King.
But will you put for me on paper the written word that every man now
aboard the Ariadne shall be held guiltless in the eyes of the admiral of
this fleet; that the present officers shall remain officers, that the
reforms I have made shall become permanent?  For myself, I care not; but
for the men who have fought under me, I want their amnesty.  And I want
Michael Clones to be kept with me, and Greenock, the master, and Ferens,
the purser, to be kept where they are.  Admiral, I think you know my
demands are just.  Over there on the Ariadne are a hundred and fifty
wounded at least, and fifty have been killed.  Let the living not
suffer."

"You want it all on the nail, don't you?"

"I want it at this moment when the men who have fought under me have
helped to win your battle, sir."  There was something so set in Dyck's
voice that the admiral had a sudden revulsion against him, yet, after a
moment of thought, he made a sign to Captain Ivy.  Then he dictated the
terms which Dyck had asked, except as to the reforms he had made, which
was not in his power to do, save for the present.

When the document had been signed by the admiral, Dyck read the contents
aloud.  It embodied nearly all he had asked.

"Now I ask permission for one more thing only, sir--for the new captain
of the Ariadne to go with me to her, and there I will read this paper to
the crew.  I will give a copy of it to the new captain, whoever he may
be."

The admiral stood for a moment in thought.  Then he said:

"Ivy, I transfer you to the Ariadne.  It's better that some one who
understands, as you do, should be in control after Calhoun has gone.
Go with him now, and have your belongings sent to you.  I appoint you
temporary captain of the Ariadne, because I think no one could deal with
the situation there so wisely.  Ivy, every ship in the squadron must
treat the Ariadne respectfully.  Within two days, Mr. Calhoun, you shall
be landed at Jamaica, there to await the Admiralty decree.  I will say
this: that as the sure victory of our fleet has come through you, you
shall not suffer in my report.  Fighting is not an easy trade, and to
fight according to the rules is a very hard trade.  Let me ask you to
conduct yourself as a prisoner of war on parole."






NO DEFENSE

By Gilbert Parker


BOOK III

XVI.      A LETTER
XVII.     STRANGERS ARRIVE
XVIII.    AT SALEM
XIX.      LORD MALLOW INTERVENES
XX.       OUT OF THE HANDS OF THE PHILISTINES
XXI.      THE CLASH OF RACE
XXII.     SHEILA HAS HER SAY
XXIII.    THE COMING OF NOREEN
XXIV.     WITH THE GOVERNOR
XXV.      THEN WHAT HAPPENED



CHAPTER XVI

A LETTER

With a deep sigh, the planter raised his head from the table where he was
writing, and looked out upon the lands he had made his own.  They lay on
the Thomas River, a few hours' horseback travelling from Spanish Town,
the capital, and they had the advantage of a plateau formation, with
mountains in the far distance and ravines everywhere.

It was Christmas Day, and he had done his duty to his slaves and the folk
on his plantation.  He had given presents, had attended a seven o'clock
breakfast of his people, had seen festivities of his negroes, and the
feast given by his manager in Creole style to all who came--planting
attorneys, buccras, overseers, bookkeepers, the subordinates of the local
provost-marshal, small planters, and a few junior officers of the army
and navy.

He had turned away with cynicism from the overladen table, with its
shoulder of stewed wild boar in the centre; with its chocolate, coffee,
tea, spruce-beer, cassava-cakes, pigeon-pies, tongues, round of beef,
barbecued hog, fried conchs, black crab pepper-pod, mountain mullet, and
acid fruits.  It was so unlike what his past had known, so "damnable
luxurious!"  Now his eyes wandered over the space where were the
grandilla, with its blossom like a passion-flower, the black Tahiti plum,
with its bright pink tassel-blossom, and the fine mango trees, loaded
half with fruit and half with bud.  In the distance were the guinea
cornfields of brownish hue, the cotton-fields, the long ranges of negro
houses like thatched cottages, the penguin hedges, with their beautiful
red, blue, and white convolvuluses; the lime, logwood, and breadfruit
trees, the avocado-pear, the feathery bamboo, and the jack-fruit tree;
and between the mountains and his own sugar-estates, negro settlements
and pens.  He heard the flight of parrots chattering, he watched the
floating humming-bird, and at last he fixed his eyes upon the cabbage
tree down in the garden, and he had an instant desire for it.  It was a
natural and human taste--the cabbage from the tree-top boiled for a
simple yet sumptuous meal.

He liked simplicity.  He did not, as so many did in Jamaica, drink claret
or punch at breakfast soon after sunrise.  In a land where all were bon-
vivants, where the lowest tradesmen drank wine after dinner, and rum,
brandy and water, or sangaree in the forenoon, a somewhat lightsome view
of table-virtues might have been expected of the young unmarried planter.
For such was he who, from the windows of his "castle," saw his domain
shimmering in the sun of a hot December day.

It was Dyck Calhoun.

With an impatient air he took up the sheets that he had been reading.
Christmas Day was on his nerves.  The whole town of Kingston, with its
twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants, had but one church.  If he entered
it, even to-day, he would have seen no more than a hundred and fifty to
two hundred people; mostly mulattoes--"bronze ornaments"--and peasants in
shag trousers, jackets of coarse blue cloth, and no waistcoats, with one
or two magistrates, a dozen gentlemen or so, and probably twice that
number of ladies.  It was not an island given over to piety, or to
religious habits.

Not that this troubled Dyck Calhoun; nor, indeed, was he shocked by the
fact that nearly every unmarried white man in the island, and many
married white men, had black mistresses and families born to the black
women, and that the girls had no married future.  They would become the
temporary wives of white men, to whom they were on the whole faithful and
devoted.  It did not even vex him that a wretched mulatto might be
whipped in the market-square for laying his hands upon a white man, and
that if he was a negro-slave he could be shot for the same liberty.

It all belonged to the abnormal conditions of an island where black and
white were in relations impossible in the countries from which the white
man had come.  It did not even startle Dyck that all the planters, and
the people generally in the island, from the chief justice and custos
rotulorum down to the deckswabber, cultivated amplitude of living.

But let Dyck tell his own story.  The papers he held were sheets of a
letter he was writing to one from whom he had heard nothing since the
night he enlisted in the navy, and that was nearly three years before.
This was the letter:

     MY DEAR FRIEND:

     You will see I address you as you have done me in the two letters I
     have had from you in the past.  You will never read this letter, but
     I write it as if you would.  For you must know I may never hope for
     personal intercourse with you.  I was imprisoned for killing your
     father, Erris Boyne, and that separates us like an abysss.  It
     matters little whether I killed him or not; the law says I did, and
     the law has taken its toll of me.  I was in prison for four years,
     and when freed I enlisted in the king's navy, a quota man, with my
     servant-friend, Michael Clones.  That was the beginning of painful
     and wonderful days for me.  I was one of the mutineers of the Nore,
     and--

Here followed a description of the days he had spent on the Ariadne and
before, and of all that happened down to the time when he was arrested by
the admiral in the West Indian Sea.  He told how he was sent over to the
Ariadne with Captain Ivy to read the admiral's letter to the seamen, and
then, by consent of the admiral, to leave again with Michael Clones for
Jamaica, where he was set ashore with twenty pounds in his pocket--and
not on parole, by the admiral's command.  Here the letter shall again
take up the story, and be a narrative of Dyck Calhoun's life from that
time until this Christmas Day.

     What to do was the question.  I knew no one in Jamaica--no one at
     all except the governor, Lord Mallow, and him I had fought with
     swords in Phoenix Park five years before.  I had not known he was
     governor here.  I came to know it when I first saw him riding over
     the unpaved street into Kingston from Spanish Town with his suite,
     ornate with his governorship.  He was a startling figure in scarlet,
     with huge epaulets on his lieutenant-general's uniform, as big a pot
     as ever boiled on any fire-chancellor, head of the government and of
     the army, master of the legislature, judging like one o'clock in the
     court of chancery, controller of the affairs of civil life, and
     maker of a policy of which he alone can judge who knows what
     interests clash in the West Indies.

     English, French, Spanish, and Dutch are all hereabout.  All struggle
     for place above the other in the world of commerce and society,
     though chiefly it is the English versus the French in these days;
     and the policy of the governor is the policy of the country.  He
     never knows whether there will be a French naval descent or whether
     the blacks in his own island will do as the blacks in St. Domingo
     did--massacre the white people in thousands.  Or whether the free
     blacks, the Maroons, who got their freedom by treaty with Governor
     Trelawney, when the British commander changed hats with Cudjoe, the
     Maroon chief, as the sealing of the bargain--whether they will rise
     again, as they before have risen, and bring terror into the white
     settlement; and whether, in that case, all negro-slaves will join
     them, and Jamaica become a land of revolution.

     Of what good, then, will be the laws lately passed regulating the
     control of slaves, securing them rights never given before, even
     forbidding lashes beyond forty-nine!  Of what use, then, the
     punishment of owners who have ill-used the slaves?  The local
     councils who have power to punish never proceed against white men
     with rigour; and to preserve a fair balance between the white man up
     above and the black down below is the responsibility of the fair-
     minded governor.  If, like Mallow, he is not fair-minded, then is
     the lash the heavier, and the governor has burdens greater than
     could easily be borne in lands where the climate is more friendly.

     Lord Mallow did not see me when I passed him in the street, but he
     soon came to know of me from the admiral and Captain Ivy, who told
     him all my story since I was freed from jail.  Then he said I should
     be confined in a narrow space near to Kingston, and should have no
     freedom; but the admiral had his way, and I was given freedom of the
     whole island till word should come from the Admiralty what should be
     done with me.  To the governor's mind it was dangerous allowing me
     freedom, a man convicted of crime, who had been imprisoned, had been
     a mutineer, had stolen one of his majesty's ships, and had fled to
     the Caribbean Sea.  He thought I should well be at the bottom of the
     ocean, where he would soon have put me, I make no doubt, if it had
     not been for the admiral, and Captain Ivy--you do not know him, I
     think--who played a good part to me, when men once close friends
     have deserted me.

     Well, we had, Michael and I, but twenty pounds between us; and if
     there was not plenty of free food in the island, God knows what
     would have become of us!  But there it was, fresh in every field, by
     every wayside, at every doorway.  We could not starve, or die of
     thirst, or faint for lack of sleep, since every bush was a bed in
     spite of the garapatos or wood-ticks, the snore of the tree-toad,
     the hoarse shriek of the macaw, and the shrill gird of the guinea-
     fowl.  Every bed was thus free, and there was land to be got for a
     song, enough to grow what would suffice for two men's daily wants.
     But we did not rest long upon the land--I have it still, land which
     cost me five pounds out of the twenty, and for the rest there was an
     old but on the little place--five acres it was, and good land too,
     where you could grow anything at all.  Heaven knows what we might
     have become in that tiny plantation, for I was sick of life, and the
     mosquitos and flying ants, and the chattering parroquets, the grim
     gallinazo, and the quatre, or native bed--a wooden frame and canvas;
     but one day at Kingston I met a man, one Cassandro Biatt, who had an
     obsession for adventure, and he spoke to me privately.  He said he
     knew me from people's talk, and would I listen to him?  What was
     there to do?  He was a clean-cut rogue, if ever there was one, but
     a rogue of parts, as he proved; and I lent an ear.

     Now, what think you was his story?  Well, but this--that off the
     coast of Haiti, there was a ship which had been sunk with every man
     on board, and with the ship was treasure without counting-jewels
     belonging once to a Spaniard of high place, who was taking them to
     Paris.  His box had been kept in the captain's cabin, and it could
     be found, no doubt, and brought to the surface.  Even if that were
     not possible, there was plenty of gold on the ship, and every piece
     of it was good money.  There had been searching for the ship, but
     none had found it; but he, Cassandro Biatt, had sure knowledge, got
     from an obi-man, of the place where it lay.  It would not be an
     expensive business, but, cheap as it was, he had no means of raising
     cash for the purpose; while I could, no doubt, raise the needed
     money if I set about it.  That was how he put it to me.  Would I do
     it?  It was not with me a case of "no shots left in the locker, no
     copper to tinkle on a tombstone."  I was not down to my last
     macaroni, or quarter-dollar; but I drank some sangaree and set about
     to do it.  I got my courage from a look towards Rodney's statue in
     its temple--Rodney did a great work for Jamaica against Admiral de
     Grasse.

     Why should I tell Biatt the truth about myself?  He knew it.
     Cassandro was an accomplished liar, and a man of merit of his kind.
     This obi-man's story I have never believed; yet how Biatt came to
     know where that treasure-ship was I do not know now.

     Yes, out we went through the harbour of Kingston, beyond the
     splendid defences of Port Royal and the men-of-war there, past the
     Palisadoes and Rock Fort, and away to the place of treasure-trove.
     We found it--that lost galleon; and we found the treasure-box of the
     captain's cabin.  We found gold too; but the treasure-box was the
     chief thing; and we made it ours after many a hard day.  Three
     months it was from the day Biatt first spoke to me to the day when,
     with an expert diver, we brought the box to the surface and opened
     it.

     How I induced one of the big men of Jamaica to be banker and skipper
     for us need not be told; but he is one of whom men have dark
     sayings--chiefly, I take it, because he does bold, incomprehensible
     things.  That business paid him well, for when the rent of the ship
     was met, and the few men on it paid--slaves they were chiefly--he
     pocketed ten thousand pounds, while Biatt and I each pouched forty
     thousand, and Michael two thousand.  Aye, to be sure, Michael was in
     it!  He is in all I do, and is as good as men of ten times his birth
     and history.  Michael will be a rich man one day.  In two years his
     two thousand have grown to four, and he misses no chance.

     But those days when Biatt and I went treasure-ship hunting were not
     without their trials.  If we had failed, then no more could this
     land have been home or resting-place for us.  We should only have
     been sojourners with no name, in debt, in disgrace, a pair of
     braggart adventurers, who had worked a master-man of the island for
     a ship, and money and men, and had lost all except the ship!  Though
     to be sure, the money was not a big thing--a, few hundred pounds;
     but the ship was no flea-bite.  It was a biggish thing, for it could
     be rented to carry sugar--it was, in truth, a sugar-ship of four
     hundred tons--but it never carried so big a cargo of sugar as it did
     on the day when that treasure-box was brought to the surface of the
     sea.

     I'm bound to say this--one of the straightest men I ever met, liar
     withal, was Cassandro Biatt.  He took his jewels and vanished up the
     seas in a flourish.  He would not even have another try at the gold
     in the bowels of the ship.

     "I've got plenty to fill my paunch, and I'll go while I've enough.
     It's the men not going in time that get left in the end"--that's
     what he said.

     And he was right; for other men went after the gold and got some of
     it, and were caught by French and South American pirates and lost
     all they had gained.  Still another group went and brought away ten
     thousand pounds, and lost it in fighting with Spanish buccaneers.
     So Biatt was right, and went away content, while I stayed here--
     because I must--and bought the land and house where I have my great
     sugar-plantation.  It is an enterprise of volume, and all would be
     well if I were normal in mind and body; but I am not.  I have a past
     that stinks to heaven, as Shakespeare says, and I am an outlaw of
     the one land which has all my soul and name and heritage.  Yes, that
     is what they have done to me--made a convict, an outlaw of me.  I
     may live--but not in the British Isles; and if any man kills me, he
     is not liable to the law.

     Men do not treat me badly here, for I have property and money, and
     this is a land where these two things mean more than anywhere else,
     even more than in a republic like that where you live.  Here men
     live according to the law of the knife, fork, and bottle, yet
     nowhere in the world is there deeper national morality or wider
     faith or endurance.  It is a land where the sea is master, where
     naval might is the chief factor, and weighs down all else.

     Here the navies of the great powers meet and settle their disputes,
     and every being in the island knows that life is only worth what a
     hundred-ton brig-of-war permits.  I have seen here in Jamaica the
     off-scourings of the French and Spanish fleets on parole; have seen
     them entering King's House like loyal citizens; have even known of
     French prisoners being used as guards at the entrance of King's
     House, and I have informed the chief justice of dismal facts which
     ought to have moved him.  But what can you expect of a chief justice
     who need not be a lawyer, as this one is not, and has other means of
     earning income which, though not disloyal, are lowering to the
     status of a chief justice?  And not the chief justice alone.  I have
     seen French officers entertained at Government House who were guilty
     of shocking inhumanities and cruelties.  The governor, Lord Mallow,
     is much to blame.  On him lies the responsibility; to him must go
     the discredit.  For myself, I feel his enmity on every hand.  I
     suffer from his suggestions; I am the victim of his dark moods.

     If I want a concession from a local council, his hand is at work
     against me; if I see him in the street, I get a courtesy tossed, as
     you would toss a bone to a dog.  If I appear at the king's ball,
     which is open to all on the island who are respectable, I am treated
     with such disdain by the viceroy of the king that all the island is
     agog.  I went one day to the king's ball the same as the rest of the
     world, and I went purposely in dress contrary to the regulations.
     Here was the announcement of the affair in the Royal Gazette, which
     was reproduced in the Chronicle, the one important newspaper in the
     island:

                                        KING'S HOUSE,
                                        October 27th, 1797.

          KING'S BALL.

          There will be a Ball given by His Honour the Lieutenant-
          Governor, on Tuesday evening, the 6th day of December next,
          in honour of

                         HIS MAJESTY'S BIRTHDAY.

          To prevent confusion, Ladies and Gentlemen are requested to
          order their carriages to come by the Old Court House, and go
          off by the Long Room.

          N.B.--No gentlemen can possibly be admitted in boots, or
          otherwise improperly dressed.


     Well, in a spirit of mutiny--in which I am, in a sense, an expert--
     I went in boots and otherwise "improperly dressed," for I wore my
     hair in a queue, like a peasant.  What is more, I danced with a
     negress in the great quadrille, and thereby offended the governor
     and his lady aunt, who presides at his palace.  It matters naught to
     me.  On my own estate it was popular enough, and that meant more to
     me than this goodwill of Lord Mallow.

     He does not spare me in his recitals to his friends, who carry his
     speech abroad.  His rancour against me is the greater, I know,
     because of the wealth I got in the treasure-ship, to prevent which
     he tried to prohibit my leaving the island, through the withholding
     of a leave-ticket to me.  His argument to the local authorities was
     that I had no rights, that I am a murderer and a mutineer, and
     confined to the island, though not on parole.  He almost succeeded;
     but the man to whom I went, the big rich man intervened,
     successfully--how I know not--and I was let go with my permit-
     ticket.

     What big things hang on small issues!  If my Lord Mallow had
     prevented me leaving the island, I shouldn't now own a great
     plantation and three hundred negroes.  I shouldn't be able to pay
     my creditors in good gold Portuguese half-johannes and Spanish
     doubloons, and be free of Spanish silver, and give no heed to the
     bitt, which, as you perhaps know, is equal to fivepence in British
     money, such as you and I used to spend when you were Queen of
     Ireland and I was your slave.

     Then I worshipped you as few women have been worshipped in all the
     days of the world--oh, cursed spite of life and time that I should
     have been jailed for killing your bad father!  Aye, he was a bad
     man, and he is better in his grave than out of it, but it puts a
     gulf between you and me which nothing will ever bridge--unless it
     should some day be known I did not kill him, and then, no doubt, it
     will be too late.

     On my soul, I don't believe I put my sword into him; but if I did,
     he well deserved it, for he was worse than faithless to your mother,
     he was faithless to his country--he was a traitor!  I did not tell
     that story of his treachery in court--I did not tell it because of
     you.  You did not deserve such infamy, and the truth came not out at
     the trial.  I, in my view, dared not, lest it might injure you, and
     you had suffered enough--nay, more than enough--through him.

     I wonder how you are, and if you have changed--I mean in appearance.
     I am sure you are not married; I should have felt it in my bones,
     if you were.  No, no, my sweet lass, you are not married.  But
     think--it is more than seven long years since we met on the hills
     above Playmore, and you put your hand in mine and said we should be
     friends for all time.  It is near three years since a letter came to
     me from you, and in the time I have made progress.

     I did not go to the United States, as you asked me to do.  Is it not
     plain I could not?  My only course was to avoid you.  You see, your
     mother knows the truth--knows that I was jailed for killing your
     father and her divorced husband.  Therefore, the only way to do was
     as I did.  I could not go where you were.  There should be hid from
     you the fact that Erris Boyne was a traitor.  This is your right, in
     my mind.  Looking back, I feel sure I could have escaped jail if I
     had told what I knew of Erris Boyne; and perhaps it would have been
     better, for I should, no doubt, have been acquitted.  Yet I could
     not have gone to you, for I am not sure I did not kill him.

     So it is best as it is.  We are as we are, and nothing can make all
     different for us.  I am a dissolute planter of Jamaica who has
     snatched from destiny a living and some riches.  I have a bad name
     in the world.  Yet by saving the king's navy from defeat out here I
     did a good turn for my country and the empire.

     So much to the good.  It brought me freedom from the rope and pardon
     for my chief offence.  Then, in company with a rogue, I got wealth
     from the depths of the sea, and here I am in the bottom of my
     luxury, drunken and obscene--yes, obscene, for I permit my overseers
     and my manager to keep black women and have children by them.  That
     I do not do so myself is no virtue on my part, but the virtue of a
     girl whom I knew in Connemara.  I fill myself with drink.  I have a
     bottle of madeira or port every night, and pints of beer or claret.
     I am a creature of low habits, a man sodden with self-indulgence.
     And when I am in drink, no slaver can be more cruel and ruthless.

     Yet I am moderate in eating.  The meals that people devour here
     almost revolt me.  They eat like cormorants and drink like dry
     ground; but at my table I am careful, save with the bottle.  This
     is a land of wonderful fruits, and I eat in quantities pineapple,
     tamarind, papaw, guava, sweet-sop, star-apple, granadilla, hog-plum,
     Spanish-gooseberry, and pindal-nut.  These are native, but there are
     also the orange, lemon, lime, shaddock, melon, fig, pomegranate,
     cinnamon, and mango, brought chiefly from the Spanish lands of South
     America.  The fruit-market here is good, Heaven knows, and I have my
     run of it.  Perhaps that is why my drink does not fatten me greatly.
     Yes, I am thin--thinner even than when you saw me last.  How
     wonderful a day it was!  You remember it, I'm sure.

     We stood on the high hills, you and I, looking to the west.  It was
     a true Irish day.  A little in front of us, in the sky, were great
     clusters of clouds, and beyond them, as far as eye could see, were
     hills so delicately green, so spotted with settlements, so misty and
     full of glamour, and so cheerful with the western light.  And the
     storm broke--do you remember it?  It broke, but not on us.  It fell
     on the middle of the prospect before us, and we saw beyond it the
     bright area of sunny country where men work and prophesy and slave,
     and pray to the ancient gods and acclaim the saints, and die and
     fructify the mould; where such as Christopher Dogan live, and men a
     thousand times lower than he.  Christopher came to the jail the day
     I was released--with Michael Clones he came.  He read me my bill of
     life's health--what was to become of me--the black and the white of
     it, the good and the bad, the fair and the foul.  Even the good
     fortune of the treasure from the sea he foresaw, and much else that
     has not come to me, and, as I think, will never come; for it is too
     full a cup for me so little worthy of it.

     It seems strange to me that I am as near to the United States here
     in Jamaica, or almost as near, as one in London is to one in Dublin;
     and yet one might as well be ten thousand leagues distant for all it
     means to her one loves in the United States.  Yes, dear Sheila, I
     love you, and I would tear out the heart of the world for you.  I
     bathe my whole being in your beauty and your charm.  I hunger for
     you--to stand beside you, to listen to your voice, to dip my prison
     fingers into the pure cauldron of your soul and feel my own soul
     expand.  I wonder why it is that to-day I feel more than I ever felt
     before the rare splendour of your person.

     I have always admired you and loved you, always heard you calling
     me, as if from some sacred corner of a perfect world.  Is it that
     yesterday's dissipation--yes, I was drunk yesternight, drunk in a
     new way.  I was drunk with the thought of you, the longing for you.
     I picked a big handful of roses, and in my mind gave them into your
     hands.  And I thought you smiled and said:

     "Well done, good and faithful servant.  Enter Paradise."  So I
     followed you to your home there in the Virginian country.  It was a
     dream, all except the roses, and those I laid in front of the box
     where I keep your letters and a sketch I made of you when we were
     young and glad--when I was young and glad.  For I am an old man,
     Sheila, in all that makes men old.  My step is quick still, my eye
     is sharp, and my brain beats fast, but my heart is ancient.  I am an
     ancient of days, without hope or pleasure, save what pleasure comes
     in thinking of one whom I worship, yet must ever worship from afar.

     I wonder why I seem to feel you very near to-day!  Perhaps it's
     because 'tis Christmas Day.  I am not a religious man but Christmas
     is a day of memories.

     Is it because of the past in Ireland?  Am I only--God, am I only to
     be what I am for the rest of my days, a planter denied the pleasure
     of home by his own acts!  Am I only a helpless fragment of a world
     of lost things?

     I have no friends--but yes, I have.  I have Michael Clones and
     Captain Ivy, though he's far away-aye, he's a friend of friends, is
     Captain Ivy.  These naval folk have had so much of the world, have
     got the bearings of so many seas, that they lose all littleness, and
     form their own minds.  They are not like the people who knew me in
     Ireland--the governor here is one of them--and who believe the worst
     of me.  The governor--faugh, he was made for bigger and better
     things!  He is one of the best swordsmen in the world, and he is
     out against me here as if I was a man of importance, and not a
     commonplace planter on an obscure river.  I have no social home
     life, and yet I live in what is called a castle.  A Jamaica castle
     has none of the marks of antiquity, chivalry, and distinction which
     castles that you and I know in the old land possess.

     What is my castle like?  Well, it is a squarish building, of
     bungalow type, set on a hill.  It has stories and an attic, with a
     jutting dormer-window in the front of the roof; and above the lowest
     story there is a great verandah, on which the livingrooms and
     bedrooms open.  It is commodious, and yet from a broad standpoint it
     is without style or distinction.  It has none of those Corinthian
     pillars which your homesteads in America have.  Yet there is in it a
     simple elegance.  It has no carpets, but a shining mahogany floor,
     for there are few carpets in this land of heat.  It is a place where
     music and mirth and family voices would be fitting; but there are no
     family voices here, save such as speak with a negro lisp and
     oracularly.

     I can hear music at this moment, and inside my castle.  It comes
     from the irrepressible throats of my cook and my housemaid, who have
     more joy in the language of the plantation than you could have in
     the songs of St. Angelus.  The only person in this castle out of
     spirits is its owner.

     My castle is embowered in a loose grove of palms and acacias,
     pimento shrubs, spendid star-apples, and bully-trees, with wild
     lemon, mahogany, dogwood, Jerusalem-thorn, and the waving plumes of
     bamboo canes.  There is nothing British in it--nothing at all.  It
     stands on brick pillars, is reached by a stair of marble slabs, and
     has a great piazza on the front.  You enter a fine, big hall, dark-
     you will understand that, though it is not so hot in Virginia, for
     the darkness makes for coolness.  From the hall the bedrooms open
     all round.  We are not so barbaric here as you might think, for my
     dining-room, which lies beyond the hall, with jalousies or movable
     blinds, exposed to all the winds, is comfortable, even ornate.
     There you shall see waxlights on the table, and finger-glasses with
     green leaves, and fine linen and napkins, and plenty of silver--even
     silver wine-coolers, and beakers of fame and beauty, and flowers,
     flowers everywhere, and fruit of exquisite charm.  I have to live
     in outward seeming as do my neighbours, even to keeping a black
     footman, gorgeously dressed, with bare legs.

     Here at my window grows a wild aloe, and it is in flower.  Once only
     in fifty years does this aloe flower, and I pick its sweet verdure
     now and offer it to you.  There it lies, beside this letter that I
     am writing.  It is typical of myself, for only once has my heart
     flowered, and it will be only once in fifty years.  The perfume of
     the flower is like an everlasting bud from the last tree of Time.
     See, my Sheila, your drunken, reckless lover pulls this sweet
     offering from his garden and offers it to you.  He has no virtues;
     and yet he would have been a thousand times worse, if you had not
     come into his life.  He had in him the seeds of trouble, the
     sproutings of shame, for even in the first days of his love there in
     Dublin he would not restrain himself.  He drank, he played cards, he
     fought and went with bad company--not women, never that; but he kept
     the company of those through whom he came at last to punishment for
     manslaughter.

     Yet, without you, who can tell what he might have been?  He might
     have fallen so low that not the wealth of ten thousand treasure-
     boxes could give him even the appearance of honesty.  And now he
     offers you what you cannot accept--can never accept--a love as deep
     as the life from which he came; a love that would throttle the world
     for you, that would force the doors of hell to bring you what you
     want.

     What do you want?  I know not.  Perhaps you have inherited the vast
     property to which you were the heir.  If you have, what can you want
     that you have not means to procure?  Ah, I have learned one thing,
     my friend 'one can get nearly everything with money.  It is the
     hidden machinery which makes the world of success go round.  With
     brains, you say?  Yes, money and brains, but without the money
     brains seldom win alone.  Do not I know?  When I was in prison, with
     estate vanished and home gone and my father in his grave, who was
     concerned about me?

     Only the humblest of all God's Irish people; but with them I have
     somehow managed to win back lost ground.  I am a stronger man than I
     was in all that men count of value in the world.  I have an estate
     where I work like any youth who has everything before him.  I have
     nothing before me, yet I shall go on working to the end.  Why?
     Because I have some faculties which are more than bread and butter,
     and I must give them opportunity.

     Yet I am not always sane.  Sometimes I feel I could march out and
     sweep into the sea one of the towns that dot the coast of this
     island.  I have the bloody thirst, as said the great Spanish
     conquistador.  I would like--yes, sometimes I would like to sweep
     to a watery grave one of the towns that are a glory to this island,
     as Savanna la Mar was swept to oblivion in the year 1780 by a
     hurricane.  You can still see the ruins of the town at the bottom of
     the sea--I have sailed over it in what is now the harbour, and there
     beneath, on the deep sands, lost to time and trouble, is the slain
     and tortured town of Savanna la Mar.  Was the Master of the World
     angry that day when, with a besom of wind and a tidal wave, He swept
     the place into the sea?  Or was it some devil's work while the Lord
     of All slept?  As the Spanish say, Quien sabe?

     Then there was that other enormous incident which made a man to be
     swallowed by an earthquake, then belched out again into the sea and
     picked up and restored to life again, and to live for many years.
     Indeed, yes, it is so.  His tombstone may be seen even at this day
     at Green Bay, Kingston.  His name was Lewis Galdy, and he is held in
     high repute in this land.

     I feel sometimes as Beelzebub may feel, and I long to do what
     Beelzebub might do as part of his mission.  Sometimes a madness
     of revolt comes over me, and I long to ravage all the places I see,
     all the people I know--or nearly all.  Why I do not have negroes
     thrashed and mutilated, as some do, I know not.  Over against the
     southern shore in the parish of St. Elizabeth is an estate called
     Salem, owned, it is said, by an American, where the manager does
     such things.  I am told that savageries are found there.  There
     are too many absentee owners of land in this island, and the wrongs
     done by agents who have no personal honour at stake are all too
     plentiful.  If I could, I would have no slavery, would set all the
     blacks free, making full compensation to the owners, and less to the
     absentee owners.

     I look out on a world of summer beauty and of heat.  I see the sheep
     in hundreds on the far hills of pasturage--sheep with short hair,
     small and sweet as any that ever came from the South Downs.  I see
     the natives in their Madras handkerchiefs.  I see upon the road some
     planter in his ketureen--a sort of sedan chair; I see a negro
     funeral, with its strange ceremony and its gumbies of African drums.
     I see yam-fed planters, on their horses, making for the burning,
     sandy streets of the capital.  I see the Scots grass growing five
     and six feet high, food unsurpassed for horses--all the foliage too
     --beautiful tropical trees and shrubs, and here and there a huge
     breeding-farm.  Yet I know that out beyond my sight there is the
     region known as Trelawney, and Trelawney Town, the headquarters of
     the Maroons, the free negroes--they who fled after the Spanish had
     been conquered and the British came, and who were later freed and
     secured by the Trelawney Treaty.  I know that now they are ready to
     rise, that they are working among the slaves; and if they rise the
     danger is great to the white population of the island, who are
     outnumbered ten to one.

     The governor has been warned, but he gives no heed, or treats it all
     lightly, pointing out how few the Maroons are.  He forgets that a
     few determined men can demoralize a whole state, can fight and
     murder and fly to dark coverts in the tropical woods, where they
     cannot be tracked down and destroyed; and, if they have made
     supporters of the slaves, what consequences may not follow!

     What do the Maroons look like?  They are ferocious and isolated,
     they are proud and overbearing, they are horribly cruel, but they
     are potent, and are difficult to reach.  They are not small and
     meagre, but are big, brawny fellows, clothed in wide duck trousers
     and shirts, and they are well-armed--cutlass, powder-horn,
     haversack, sling, shot-gun, and pouch for ball.  They dress as the
     country requires, and they are strong fighters against our soldiers
     who are burdened with heavy muskets, and who defy the climate, with
     their stuffed coats, their weighty caps, and their tight cross-
     belts.  The Maroons are not to be despised.  They have brains, the
     insolence of freedom among natives who are not free, and vast
     cruelty.  They can be mastered and kept in subjection, can be made
     allies, if properly handled; but Lord Mallow goes the wrong way
     about it all.  He permits things that inflame the Maroons.

     One thing is clear to me--only by hounds can these people be
     defeated.  So sure am I upon this point, that I have sent to Cuba
     for sixty hounds, with which, when the trouble comes--and it is not
     far off--we shall be able to hunt the Maroons with the only weapon
     they really fear--the dog's sharp tooth.  It may be the governor may
     intervene on the arrival of the dogs; but I have made friends with
     the provost-marshal-general and some members of the Jamaica
     legislature; also I have a friend in the deputy of the provost-
     marshal-general in my parish of Clarendon here, and I will make a
     good bet that the dogs will be let come into the island, governor
     or no governor.

     When one sets oneself against the Crown one must be sure of one's
     ground, and fear no foe, however great and high.  Well, I have won
     so far, and I shall win in the end.  Mallow should have some respect
     for one that beat him at Phoenix Park with the sword; that beat him
     when he would have me imprisoned here; that beat him in the matter
     of the ship for Haiti, and that will beat him on every hazard he
     sets, unless he stoops to underhand acts, which he will not do.
     That much must be said for him.  He plays his part in no small way,
     and he is more a bigot and a fanatic loyalist than a rogue.
     Suppose--but no, I will not suppose.  I will lay my plans, I will
     keep faith with people here who trust me, and who know that if I am
     stern I am also just, and I will play according to the rules made by
     better men than myself.

But what is this I see?  Michael Clones--in his white jean waistcoat,
white neckcloth and trousers, and blue coat--is coming up the drive in
hot haste, bearing a letter.  He rides too hard.  He has never carried
himself easily in this climate.  He treats it as if it was Ireland.  He
will not protect himself, and, if penalty followed folly, should now be
in his grave.  I like you, Michael.  You are a boon, but--




CHAPTER XVII

STRANGERS ARRIVE

Dyck Calhoun's letter was never ended.  It was only a relic of the years
spent in Jamaica, only a sign of his well-being, though it gave no real
picture of himself.  He did not know how like a tyrant he had become in
some small ways, while in the large things he remained generous, urbane,
and resourceful.  He was in appearance thin, dark-favoured, buoyant in
manner, and stern of face, with splendid eyes.  Had he dwelt on Olympus,
he might have been summoned to judge and chastise the sons of men.

When Michael Clones came to the doorway, Dyck laid down his quill-pen and
eyed the flushed servant in disapproval.

"What is it, Michael?  Wherefore this starkness?  Is some one come from
heaven?"

"Not precisely from heaven, y'r honour, but--"

"But--yes, Michael!  Have done with but-ing, and come to the real
matter."

"Well, sir, they've come from Virginia."

Dyck Calhoun slowly got to his feet, his face paling, his body
stiffening.  From Virginia!  Who should be come from Virginia, save she
to whom he had just been writing?

"Who has come from Virginia?"  He knew, but he wanted it said.

"Sure, you knew a vessel came from America last night.  Well, in her was
one that was called the Queen of Ireland long ago."

"Queen of Ireland--well, what then?"  Dyck's voice was tuneless, his
manner rigid, his eyes burning.  "Well, she--Miss Sheila Llyn and her
mother are going to the Salem Plantation, down by the Essex Valley
Mountain.  It is her plantation now.  It belonged to her uncle, Bryan
Llyn.  He got it in payment of a debt.  He's dead now, and all his lands
and wealth have come to her.  Her mother, Mrs. Llyn, is with her, and
they start to-morrow or the next day for Salem.  There'll be different
doings at Salem henceforward, y'r honour.  She's not the woman to see
slaves treated as the manager at Salem treated 'em."

Dyck Calhoun made an impatient gesture at this last remark.

"Yes, yes, Michael.  Where are they now?"

"They're at Charlotte Bedford's lodgings in Spanish Town.  The governor
waited on them this morning.  The governor sent them flowers and--"

"Flowers--Lord Mallow sent them flowers!  Hell's fiend, man, suppose he
did?"

"There are better flowers here than in any Spanish Town."

"Well, take them, Michael; but if you do, come here again no more while
you live, for I'll have none of you.  Do you think I'm entering the lists
against the king's governor?"

"You've done it before, sir, and there's no harm in doing it again.  One
good turn deserves another.  I've also to tell you, sir, that Lord Mallow
has asked them to stay at King's House."


"Lord Mallow has asked Americans to stay at King's House!"

"But they're Irish, and he knew them in Ireland, y 'r honour."

"Well, he knew me in Ireland, and I'm proscribed!"

"Ah, that's different, as you know.  There's no war on now, and they're
only good American citizens who own land in this dominion of the king; so
why shouldn't he give them courtesy?"

"From whom do you get your information?" asked Dyck Calhoun with an air
of suspicion.

"From Darius Boland, y'r honour," answered Michael, with a smile.  "Who
is Darius Boland, you're askin' in y'r mind?  Well, he's the new manager
come from the Llyn plantations in Virginia; and right good stuff he is,
with a tongue that's as dry as cut-wheat in August.  And there's humour
in him, plenty-aye, plenty.  When did I see him, and how?  Well, I saw
him this mornin', on the quay at Kingston.  He was orderin' the porters
about with an air--oh, bedad, an air!  I saw the name upon the parcels--
Miss Sheila Llyn, of Moira, Virginia, and so I spoke to him.  The rest
was aisy.  He looked me up and down in a flash, like a searchlight
playin' on an enemy ship, and then he smiled.  'Well,' said he, 'who
might you be?  For there's queer folks in Jamaica, I'm told.'  So I said
I was Michael Clones, and at that he doffed his hat and held out a hand.
'Well, here's luck,' said he.  'Luck at the very start!  I've heard of
you from my mistress.  You're servant to Mr. Dyck Calhoun--ain't that
it?'  And I nodded, and he smiled again--a smile that'd cost money
annywhere else than in Jamaica.  He smiled again, and give a slow hitch
to his breeches as though they was fallin' down.  Why, sir, he's the
longest bit of man you ever saw, with a pointed beard, and a nose that's
as long as a midshipman's tongue-dry, lean, and elastic.  He's quick and
slow all at once.  His small eyes twinkle like stars beatin' up against
bad weather, and his skin's the colour of Scots grass in the dead of
summer-yaller, he'd call it if he called it anything, and yaller was what
he called the look of the sky above the hills.  Queer way of talk he has,
that man, as queer as--"

"I understand, Michael.  But what else?  How did you come to talk about
the affairs of Mrs. and Miss Llyn?  He didn't just spit it out, did he?"

"Sure, not so quick and free as spittin', y'r honour; but when he'd
sorted me out, as it were, he said Miss Llyn had come out here to take
charge of Salem; her own estate in Virginia bein' in such good runnin'
order, and her mind bein' active.  Word had come of the trouble with the
manager here, and one of the provost-marshal's deputies had written
accounts of the flogging and ill-treatment of slaves, and that's why
she come--to put things right at Salem!"

"To put things wrong in Jamaica, Michael, that's why she's come.  To
loose the ball of confusion and free the flood of tragedy--that's why
she's come!  Man, Michael, you know her history--who she was and what
happened to her father.  Well, do you think there's no tragedy in her
coming here?  I killed her father, they say, Michael.  I was punished for
it.  I came here to be free of all those things--lifted out and away from
them all.  I longed to forget the past, which is only shame and torture;
and here it is all spread out at my door again like a mat, which I must
see as I go in and out.  Essex Valley--why, it's less than a day's ride
from here, far less than a day's ride!  It can be ridden in four or five
hours at a trot.  Michael, it's all a damnable business.  And here she is
in Jamaica with her Darius Boland!  There was no talk on Boland's part of
their coming here, was there Michael?"

"None at all, sir, but there was that in the man's eye, and that in his
tone, which made me sure he thought Miss Llyn and you would meet."

"That would be strange, wouldn't it, in this immense continent!"  Dyck
remarked cynically.

"She knew I was here before she came?"

"Aye, she knew.  She had seen your name in the papers--English and
Jamaican.  She knew you had regained your life and place, and was a man
of mark here."

"A marked man, you mean, Michael--a man whom the king has had to pardon
of a crime because of an act done that served the State.  I am forbidden
to return to the British Isles or to the land of my birth, forbidden free
traffic as a citizen, hammered out of recognition by the strokes of
enmity.  A man of mark, indeed!  Aye, with the broad arrow on me, with
the shame of prison and mutiny on my name!"

"But if she don't believe?"

"If she don't believe!  Well, she must be told the truth at last.  I
wonder her mother let her come here.  Her mother knew part of the truth.
She hid it all from the girl--and now they are here!  I must see it
through, but it's a wretched fate, Michael."

"Perhaps her mother didn't know you were here, sir."

Dyck laughed grimly.  "Michael, you've a lawyer's mind.  Perhaps you're
right.  The girl may have hid from her mother all newspapers referring to
me.  That may well be; but it's not the way that will bring
understanding."

"I think it's the truth, sir, for Darius Boland spoke naught of the
mother--indeed, he said only what would make me think the girl came with
her own ends in view.  Faith, I'm sure the mother did not know."

"She will know now.  Your Darius Boland will tell her."

"By St. Peter, it doesn't matter who tells her, sir.  The business must
be faced."

"Michael, order my horse, and I will go to Spanish Town.  This matter
must be brought to a head.  The truth must be told.  Order my horse!"
"It is the very heat of the day, sir."

"Then at five o'clock, after dinner, have my horse here."

"Am I to ride with you, sir?"

Dyck nodded.  "Yes, Michael.  There's only one thing to do--face all the
facts with all the evidence, and you are fact and evidence too.  You know
more of the truth than any one else."

Several hours later, when the sun was abating its force a little, after
travelling the burning roads through yams and cocoa, grenadillas and all
kinds of herbs and roots and vagrant trees, Dyck Calhoun and Michael
Clones came into Spanish Town.  Dyck rode the unpaved streets on his
horse with its high demipicque Spanish saddle, with its silver stirrups
and heavy bit, and made his way towards Charlotte Bedford's lodgings.

Dyck looked round upon the town with new eyes.  He saw it like one for
the first time visiting it.  He saw the people passing through the wide
verandahs of the houses, like a vast colonnade, down the street, to be
happily sheltered from the fierce sun.  As he had come down from the
hills he thought he had never seen the houses look more beautiful in
their gardens of wild tamarinds, kennips, cocoa-nuts, pimentos, and
palms, backed by negro huts.  He had seen all sorts of people at the
draw-wells of the houses-British, Spanish, French, South American,
Creoles, and here and there a Maroon, and the everlasting negro who sang
as he worked:

                   "Come along o' me, my buccra brave,
                    You see de shild de Lord he gave:
                    You drink de sangaree,
                    I make de frichassee--"

Here a face peeped out from the glazed sash of the jalousies of the
balconies above--a face that could never be said to be white, though it
had only a tinge of black in its coaxing beauty.  There a workman with
long hair and shag trousers painted the prevailing two-storied house the
prevailing colour, white and green.  There was a young naval officer in
full dress, gold-buckled shoes, white trousers, short jacket with gold
swab on shoulders, dress-sword and smart gait making for supper at King's
House.

A long-legged "son of a gun" of a Yankee had a "clapper-claw," or
handshake, with a planting attorney in a kind of four-posted gig,
canopied in leather and curtained clumsily.  The Yankee laughed at the
heavy straight shafts and the mule that drew the volante, as the gig was
called, and the vehicle creaked and cried as it rolled along over the
road, which was like a dry river-bed.  There a French officer in Hessian
boots, white trousers, blue uniform, and much-embroidered scarlet cuffs
watched with amusement a slave carrying a goglet, or earthen jar, upon
his head like an Egyptian, untouched by the hand, so adding dignity to
carriage.  He was holding a "round-aboutation" with an old hag who was
telling his fortune.

As they passed King's House, they saw troops of the viceroy's guests
issuing from the palace-officers of the king's navy and army, officers
and men of the Jamaica militia, pale-faced, big-eyed men of the Creole
class, mulattoes, quadroons and octoroons, Samboes with their wives in
loose skirts, white stockings, and pinnacle hats.  There also passed, in
the streets, black servants with tin cases on their heads, or carrying
parcels in their arms, and here and there processions of servants, each
with something that belonged to their mistresses, who would presently be
attending the king's ball.

Snatches of song were heard, and voices of men who had had a full meal
and had "taken observations"--as looking through the bottom of a glass of
liquor was called by people with naval spirit--were mixed in careless
carousal.

All this jarred on Dyck Calhoun and gave revolt to his senses.  Yet he
was only half-conscious of the great sensuousness of the scene as he
passed through it.  Now and then some one doffed a hat to him, and very
occasionally some half-drunken citizen tossed at him a remark meant to
wound; but he took no notice, and let things pleasant and provocative
pass down the long ranges of indifference.

All was brought to focus at last, however, by their arrival at Charlotte
Bedford's lodgings, which, like most houses in the town, had a lookout or
belfry fitted with green blinds and a telescope, and had a green-painted
wooden railing round it.

At the very entrance, inside the gate, in the garden, they saw Sheila
Llyn, her mother, and Darius Boland, who seemed to be enduring from the
mother some sharp reprimand, to the amusement of the daughter.  As the
gate closed behind Dyck and Michael, the three from Virginia turned round
and faced them.  As Dyck came forward, Sheila flushed and trembled.  She
was no longer a young girl, but her slim straightness and the soft lines
of her figure, gave her a dignity and charm which made her young
womanhood distinguished--for she was now twenty-five, and had a carriage
of which a princess might have been proud.  Yet it was plain that the
entrance of Dyck at this moment was disturbing.  It was not what she had
foreseen.

She showed no hesitation, however, but came forward to meet her visitor,
while Michael fell back, as also did Darius Boland.  Both these seemed to
realize that the less they saw and heard the better; and they presently
got together in another part of the garden, as Dyck Calhoun came near
enough almost to touch Sheila.

Surely, he thought, she was supreme in appearance and design.  She was
like some rare flower of the field, alert, gentle, strong, intrepid, with
buoyant face, brown hair, blue eyes and cream-like skin.  She was touched
by a rose on each cheek and made womanly by firm and yet generous
breasts, tenderly imprisoned by the white chiffon of her blouse in which
was one bright sprig of the buds of a cherry-tree-a touch of modest
luxuriance on a person sparsely ornamented.  It was not tropical, this
picture of Sheila Llyn; it was a flick of northern life in a summer sky.
It was at once cheerful and apart.  It had no August in it; no oil and
wine.  It was the little twig that grew by a running spring.  It was
fresh, dominant and serene.  It was Connemara on the Amazon!  It was
Sheila herself, whom time had enriched with far more than years and
experience.  It was a personality which would anywhere have taken place
and held it.  It was undefeatable, persistent and permanent; it was the
spirit of Ireland loose in a world that was as far apart from Ireland as
she was from her dead, dishonoured father.

And Dyck?  At first she felt she must fly to him--yes, in spite of the
fact that he had suffered prison for manslaughter.  But a nearer look at
him stopped the impulse at its birth.  Here was the Dyck Calhoun she had
known in days gone by, but not the Dyck she had looked to see; for this
man was like one who had come from a hanging, who had seen his dearest
swinging at the end of a rope.  His face was set in coldness; his hair
was streaked with grey; his forehead had a line in the middle; his manner
was rigid, almost frigid, indeed.  Only in his eyes was there that which
denied all that his face and manner said--a hungry, absorbing, hopeless
look, the look of one who searches for a friend in the denying desert.

Somehow, when he bowed low to her, and looked her in the eyes as no one
in all her life had ever done, she had an almost agonized understanding
of what a man feels who has been imprisoned--that is, never the same
again.  He was an ex-convict, and yet she did not feel repelled by him.
She did not believe he had killed Erris Boyne.  As for the later crime
of mutiny, that did not concern her much.  She was Irish; but, more than
that, she was in sympathy with the mutineers.  She understood why Dyck
Calhoun, enlisting as a common sailor, should take up their cause and run
risk to advance it.  That he had advanced it was known to all the world;
that he had paid the price of his mutiny by saving the king's navy with
a stolen ship had brought him pardon for his theft of a ship and mutiny;
and that he had won wealth was but another proof of the man's power.

"You would not come to America, so I came here, and--"  She paused, her
voice trembling slightly.  "There is much to do at Salem," he added
calmly, and yet with his heart beating, as it had not beaten since the
day he had first met her at Playmore.

"You would not take the money I sent to Dublin for you--the gift of a
believing friend, and you would not come to America!"

"I shall have to tell you why one day," he answered slowly, "but I'll pay
my respects to your mother now."  So saying he went forward and bowed low
to Mrs. Llyn.  Unlike her daughter, Mrs. Llyn did not offer her hand.
She was pale, distraught, troubled--and vexed.  She, however, murmured
his name and bowed.  "You did not expect to see me here in Jamaica," he
said boldly.

"Frankly, I did not, Mr. Calhoun," she said.

"You resent my coming here to see you?  You think it bold, at least."

She looked at him closely and firmly.  "You know why I cannot welcome
you."

"Yet I have paid the account demanded by the law.  And you had no regard
for him.  You divorced him."

Sheila had drawn near, and Dyck made a gesture in her direction.  "She
does not know," he said, "and she should not hear what we say now?"

Mrs. Llyn nodded, and in a low tone told Sheila that she wished to be
alone with Dyck for a little while.  In Dyck's eyes, as he watched Sheila
go, was a thing deeper than he had ever known or shown before.  In her
white gown, and with her light step, Sheila seemed to float away--a
picture graceful, stately, buoyant, "keen and small."  As she was about
to pass beyond a clump of pimento bushes, she turned her head towards the
two, and there was that in her eyes which few ever see and seeing are
afterwards the same.  It was a look of inquiry, or revelation, of emotion
which went to Dyck's heart.

"No, she does not know the truth," Mrs. Llyn said.  "But it has been hard
hiding it from her.  One never knew whether some chance remark, some
allusion in the papers, would tell her you had killed her father."

"Did I kill her father?" asked Dyck helplessly.  "Did I?  I was found
guilty of it, but on my honour, Mrs. Llyn, I do not know, and I do not
think I did.  I have no memory of it.  We quarrelled.  I drew my sword on
him, then he made an explanation and I madly, stupidly drank drugged wine
in reconciliation with him, and then I remember nothing more--nothing at
all."

"What was the cause of your quarrel?"

Dyck looked at her long before answering.  "I hid that from my father
even, and hid it from the world--did not even mention it in court at the
trial.  If I had, perhaps I should not have gone to jail.  If I had,
perhaps I should not be here in Jamaica.  If I had--"  He paused, a flood
of reflection drowning his face, making his eyes shine with black sorrow.

"Well, if you had!  .  .  .  Why did you not?  Wasn't it your duty to
save yourself and save your friends, if you could?  Wasn't that your
plain duty?"

"Yes, and that was why I did not tell what the quarrel was.  If I had,
even had I killed Erris Boyne, the jury would not have convicted me.
Of that I am sure.  It was a loyalist jury."

"Then why did you not?"

"Isn't it strange that now after all these years, when I have settled the
account with judge and jury, with state and law--that now I feel I must
tell you the truth.  Madam, your ex-husband, Erris Boyne, was a traitor.
He was an officer in the French army, and he offered to make me an
officer also and pay me well in French Government money, if I would break
my allegiance and serve the French cause--Ah, don't start!  He knew I was
on my last legs financially.  He knew I had acquaintance with young rebel
leaders like Emmet, and he felt I could be won.  So he made his proposal.
Because of your daughter I held my peace, for she could bear it less than
you.  I did not tell the cause of the quarrel.  If I had, there would
have been for her the double shame.  That was why I held my peace--a
fool, but so it was!"

The woman seemed almost robbed of understanding.  His story overwhelmed
her.  Yet what the man had done was so quixotic, so Celtic, that her
senses were almost paralysed.

"So mad--so mad and bad and wild you were," she said.  "Could you not see
it was your duty to tell all, no matter what the consequences.  The man
was a villain.  But what madness you were guilty of, what cruel madness!
Only you could have done a thing like that.  Erris Boyne deserved death
--I care not who killed him--you or another.  He deserved death, and it
was right he should die.  But that you should kill him, apart from all
else--why, indeed, oh, indeed, it is a tragedy, for you loved my
daughter, and the killing made a gulf between you!  There could be
no marriage in such a case.  She could not bear it, nor could you.  But
please know this, Mr. Calhoun, that she never believed you killed Erris
Boyne.  She has said so again and again.  You are the only man who has
ever touched her mind or her senses, though many have sought her.
Wherever she goes men try to win her, but she has no thought for any.
Her mind goes back to you.  Just when you entered the garden I learned--
and only then-that you were here.  She hid it from me, but Darius Boland
knew, and he had seen your man, Michael Clones, and she had then made him
tell me.  I was incensed.  I was her mother, and yet she had hid the
thing from me.  I thought she came to this island for the sake of Salem,
and I found that she came not for Salem, but for you.  .  .  .  Ah, Mr.
Calhoun, she deserves what you did to save her, but you should not have
done it."

"She deserves all that any better man might do.  Why don't you marry her
to some great man in your Republic?  It would settle my trouble for me
and free her mind from anxiety.  Mrs. Llyn, we are not children, you and
I.  You know life, and so do I, and--"

She interrupted him.  "Be sure of this, Mr. Calhoun, she knows life even
better than either of us.  She is, and has always been, a girl of sense
and judgment.  When she was a child she was my master, even in Ireland.
Yet she was obedient and faithful, and kept her head in all vexed things.
She will have her way, and she will have it as she wants it, and in no
other manner.  She is one of the world's great women.  She is unique.
Child as she is, she still understands all that men do, and does it.
Under her hands the estates in Virginia have developed even more than
under the hands of my brother.  She controls like another Elizabeth.
She has made those estates run like a spool of thread, and she will
do the same here with Salem.  Be sure of that."

"Why does she not marry?  Is there no man she can bear?  She could have
the highest, that's sure."  He spoke with passion and insistence.  If she
were married his trouble would be over.  The worst would have come to
him--like death.  His eyes were only two dark fires in a face that was as
near to tragic pain crystallized as any the world has seen.  Yet there
was in it some big commanding thing, that gave it a ghastly handsomeness
almost; that bathed his look in dignity and power, albeit a reckless
power, a thing that would not be stayed by any blandishments.  He had the
look of a lost angel, one who fell with Belial in the first days of sin.

"There is no man she can bear--except here in Jamaica.  It is no use.
Your governor, Lord Mallow, whom she knew in Ireland, who is distant kin
of mine, he has already made advances here to her, as he did in Ireland
--you did not know that.  Even before we left for Virginia he came to see
us, and brought her books and flowers, and here, on our arrival, he
brought her choicest blooms of his garden.  She is rich, and he would be
glad of an estate that brings in scores of thousands of pounds yearly.
He has asked us to stay at King's House, but we have declined.  We start
for Salem in a few hours.  She wants her hand on the wheel."

"Lord Mallow--he courts her, does he?"  His face grew grimmer.  "Well,
she might do worse, though if she were one of my family I would rather
see her in her grave than wedded to him.  For he is selfish--aye, as few
men are!  He would eat and keep his apple too.  His theory is that life
is but a game, and it must be played with steel.  He would squeeze the
life out of a flower, and give the flower to his dog to eat.  He thinks
first and always of himself.  He would--but there, he would make a good
husband as husbands go for some women, but not for this woman!  It is not
because he is my enemy I say this.  It is because there is only one woman
like your daughter, and that is herself; and I would rather see her
married to a hedger that really loved her than to Lord Mallow, who loves
only one being on earth--himself.  But see, Mrs. Llyn, now that you know
all, now that we three have met again, and this island is small and
tragedy is at our doors, don't you think your daughter should be told the
truth.  It will end everything for me.  But it would be better so.  It is
now only cruelty to hide the truth, harsh to continue a friendship which
will only appal her in the end.  If we had not met again like this, then
silence might have been best; but as she is not cured of her tender
friendship made upon the hills at Playmore, isn't it well to end it all?
Your conscience will be clearer, and so will mine.  We shall have done
the right thing at last.  Why did you not tell her who her father was?
Then why blame me!  You held your peace to save your daughter, as you
thought.  I held my tongue for the same reason; but she is so much a
woman now, that she will understand, as she could not have understood
years ago in Limerick.  In God's name, let us speak.  One of us should
tell her, and I think it should be you.  And see, though I know I did
right in withholding the facts about the quarrel with Erris Boyne, yet I
favour telling her that he was a traitor.  The whole truth now, or
nothing.  That is my view."

He saw how lined and sunken was her face, he noted the weakness of her
carriage, he realized the task he was putting on her, and his heart
relented.  "No, I will do it," he added, with sudden will, "and I will do
it now, if I may."

"Oh, not to-day-not to-day!" she said with a piteous look.  "Let it
not be to-day.  It is our first day here, and we are due at King's House
to-night, even in an hour from now."

"You want her at her glorious best, is that it?"  It seemed too strange
that the pure feminine should show at a time of crisis like this, but
there it was.  It was this woman's way.  But he added presently: "When
she asks you what we have talked about, what will you say?"

"Is it not easy?  I am a mother," she said meaningly.

"And I am an ex-convict, and a mutineer--is that it?"

She inclined her head.  "It should not be difficult to explain.  When you
came I was speaking as I felt, and she will not think it strange if I
give that as my reason."

"But is it wise?  Isn't it better to end it all now?  Suppose Lord Mallow
tells her."

"He did not before.  He is not likely now," was the vexed reply.  "Is it
a thing a gentleman will speak of to a lady?"

"But you do not know Mallow.  If he thought she had seen me to-day, he
would not hesitate.  What would you do if you were Lord Mallow?"

"No, not to-day," she persisted.  "It is all so many years ago.  It can
hurt naught to wait a little longer."

"When and where shall it be?" he asked gloomily.  "At Salem--at Salem.
We shall be settled then--and steady.  There is every reason why you
should consider me.  I have suffered as few women have suffered,
and I do not hate you.  I am only sorry."

Far down at the other end of the garden he saw Sheila.  Her face was in
profile--an exquisite silhouette.  She moved slowly among the pimento
bushes.

"As you wish," he said with a heavy sigh.  The sight of the girl
anguished his soul.




CHAPTER XVIII

AT SALEM

The plantation of Salem was in a region below the Pedro Plains in the
parish of St. Elizabeth, where grow the aloe, and torch-thistle, and
clumps of wood which alter the appearance of the plain from the South
Downs of England, but where thousands of cattle and horses even in those
days were maintained.  The air of the district was dry and elastic, and
it filtered down to the valleys near like that where Salem was with its
clusters of negro huts and offices, its mills and distilleries where
sugar and rum were made.  Salem was situated on the Black River,
accessible by boats and canoes.  The huts of negro slaves were near the
sugar mills, without regard to order, but in clusters of banana, avocado-
pear, limes and oranges, and with the cultivated land round their huts
made an effective picture.

One day every fortnight was allowed the negroes to cultivate their crops,
and give them a chance to manufacture mats for beds, bark-ropes, wicker-
chairs and baskets, earthen jars, pans, and that kind of thing.  The huts
themselves were primitive to a degree, the floor being earth, the roof,
of palm-thatch or the leaves of the cocoa-nut tree, the sides hard-posts
driven in the ground and interlaced with wattle and plaster, and inside
scarcely high enough for its owner to walk upright.  The furniture was
scant--a quatre, or bed, made of a platform of boards, with a mat and a
blanket, some low stools, a small table, an earthen water-jar, and some
smaller ones, a pail and an iron pot, and calabashes which did duty for
plates, dishes and bowls.  In one of the two rooms making the hut, there
were always the ashes of the night-fire, without which negroes could not
sleep in comfort.

These were the huts of the lowest grade of negro-slaves of the fields.
The small merchants and the domestics had larger houses with boarded
floors, some even with linen sheets and mosquito nets, and shelves with
plates and dishes of good ware.  Every negro received a yearly allowance
of Osnaburgh linen, woollen, baize and checks for clothes, and some
planters also gave them hats and handkerchiefs, knives, needles and
thread, and so on.

Every plantation had a surgeon who received a small sum for attendance on
every slave, while special cases of midwifery, inoculation, etc., had a
particular allowance.  The surgeon had to attend to about four hundred to
five hundred negroes, on an income of L150 per annum, and board and
lodging and washing, besides what he made from his practice with the
whites.

Salem was no worse than some other plantations on the island, but it was
far behind such plantations as that owned by Dyck Calhoun, and had been
notorious for the cruelties committed on it.  To such an estate a lady
like Sheila Llyn would be a boon.  She was not on the place a day before
she started reforms which would turn the plantation into a model scheme.
Houses, food, treatment of the negroes, became at once a study to her,
and her experience in Virginia was invaluable.  She had learned there not
to work the slaves too hard in the warm period of the day; and she showed
her interest by having served at her own table the favourite olio the
slaves made of plantains, bananas, yams, calalue, eddoes, cassavi, and
sweet potatoes boiled with salt fish and flavoured with cayenne pepper.
This, with the unripe roasted plantain as bread, was a native relish and
health-giving food.

Ever since the day when she had seen Dyck Calhoun at Spanish Town she had
been disturbed in mind.  Dyck had shown a reserve which she felt was not
wholly due to his having been imprisoned for manslaughter.  In one way he
looked little older.  His physique was as good, or better than when she
first saw him on the hills of Playmore.  It was athletic, strenuous,
elastic.  Yet there was about it the abandonment of despair--at least
of recklessness.  The face was older, the head more powerful, the hair
slightly touched with grey-rather there was one spot in the hair almost
pure white; a strand of winter in the foliage of summer.  It gave a touch
of the bizarre to a distinguished head, it lent an air of the singular to
a personality which had flare and force--an almost devilish force.  That
much was to be said for him, that he had not sought to influence her to
his own advantage.  She was so surrounded in America by men who knew her
wealth and prized her beauty, she was so much a figure in Virginia, that
any reserve with regard to herself was noticeable.  She was enough
feminine to have pleasure in the fact that she was thought desirable
by men; yet it played an insignificant part in her life.

It did not give her conceit.  It was only like a frill on the skirts
of life.  It did not play any part in her character.  Certainly Dyck
Calhoun had not flattered her.  That one to whom she had written, as she
had done, should remove himself so from the place of the deserving
friend, one whom she had not deserted while he was in jail as a criminal
--that he should treat her so, gave every nerve a thrill of protest.
Sometimes she trembled in indignation, and then afterwards gave herself
to the work on the estate or in the household--its reform and its
rearrangement; though the house was like most in Jamaica, had adequate
plate, linen, glass and furniture.  At the lodgings in Spanish Town,
after Dyck Calhoun had left, her mother had briefly said that she had
told Dyck he could not expect the conditions of the Playmore friendship
should be renewed; that, in effect, she had warned him off.  To this
Sheila had said that the killing of a man whose life was bad might be
punishable.  In any case, that was in another land, under abnormal
conditions; and, with lack of logic, she saw no reason why he should be
socially punished in Jamaica for what he had been legally punished for
in Ireland.  As for the mutiny, he had done what any honest man of spirit
would do; also, he had by great bravery and skill brought victory to the
king's fleet in West Indian waters.

Then it was she told her mother how she had always disobeyed her commands
where Dyck was concerned, that she had written to him while he was in
jail; that she had come to Jamaica more to see him than to reform Salem;
that she had the old Celtic spirit of brotherhood, and she would not be
driven from it.  In a sudden burst of anger her mother had charged her
with deceit; but the girl said she had followed her conscience, and she
dismissed it all with a gesture as emphatic as her mother's anger.

That night they had dined with Lord Mallow, and she saw that his
attentions had behind them the deep purpose of marriage.  She had not
been overcome by the splendour of his retinue and table, or by the
magnificence of his guests; though the military commander-in-chief and
the temporary admiral on the station did their utmost to entertain her,
and some of the local big-wigs were pompous.  Lord Mallow had ability and
knew how to use it; and he was never so brilliant as on this afternoon,
for they dined while it was still daylight and hardly evening.  He told
her of the customs of the country, of the people; and slyly and
effectively he satirized some of his grandiloquent guests.  Not unduly,
for one of them, the most renowned in the island, came to him after
dinner as he sat talking to Sheila, and said: "I'm very sorry, your
honour, but good Almighty God, I must go home and cool coppers."  Then he
gave Sheila a hot yet clammy hand, and bade her welcome as a citizen to
the island, "alien but respected, beautiful but capable!"  Sheila had
seen a few of the Creole ladies present at their best-large-eyed, simple,
not to say primitive in speech, and very unaffected in manner.  She had
learned also that the way to the Jamaican heart was by a full table and a
little flattery.

One incident at dinner had impressed her greatly.  Not far away from
her was a young lady, beautiful in face and person, and she had seen a
scorpion suddenly shoot into her sleeve and ruthlessly strike and strike
the arm of the girl, who gave one cry only and then was still.  Sheila
saw the man next to the girl--he was a native officer--secure the
scorpion, and then whip from his pocket a little bag of indigo, dip it in
water, and apply the bag to the wounded arm, immediately easing the
wound.  This had all been done so quickly that it was over before the
table had been upset, almost.

"That is the kind of thing we have here," said Lord Mallow.  "There is a
lady present who has seen in one day a favourite black child bitten by a
congereel, a large centipede in her nursery, a snake crawl from under her
child's pillow, and her son nearly die from a bite of the black spider
with the red spot on its tail.  It is a life that has its trials--and its
compensations."

"I saw a man's head on a pole on my way to King's House.  You have to use
firm methods here," Sheila said in reply.  "It is not all a rose-garden.
You have to apply force."

Lord Mallow smiled grimly.  "C'est la force morale toujours."

"Ah, I should not have thought it was moral force always," was the
ironical reply.

"We have criminals here," declared the governor with aplomb, "and they
need some handling, I assure you.  We have in this island one of the
worst criminals in the British Empire."

"Ah, I thought he was in the United States!" answered the girl sedately.

"You mean General George Washington," remarked the governor.  "No, it is
one who was a friend and fellow-countryman of yours before he took to
killing unarmed men."

"You refer to Mr. Dyck Calhoun, I doubt not, sir?  Well, he is still a
friend of mine, and I saw him today--this afternoon, before I came here.
I understood that the Crown had pardoned his mutiny."

The governor started.  He was plainly annoyed.

"The crime is there just the same," he replied.  "He mutinied, and he
stole a king's ship, and took command of it, and brought it out here."

"And saved you and your island, I understand."

"Ah, he said that, did he?"

"He said nothing at all to me about it.  I have been reading the Jamaica
Cornwall Chronicle the last three years."

"He is ever a source of anxiety to me," declared the governor.

"I knew he was once in Phoenix Park years ago," was the demure yet sharp
reply, "but I thought he was a good citizen here--a good and well-to-do
citizen."

Lord Mallow flushed slightly.  "Phoenix Park--ah, he was a capable fellow
with the sword!  I said so always, and I'd back him now against a
champion; but many a bad man has been a good swordsman."

"So, that's what good swordsmanship does, is it?  I wondered what it was
that did it.  I hear you fight him still--but with a bludgeon, and he
dodges it."

"I do not understand," declared Lord Mallow tartly.  "Ah, wasn't there
some difference over his going for the treasure to Haiti?  Some one told
me, I think, that you were not in favour of his getting his ticket-of-
leave, or whatever it is called, and that the provost-marshal gave it to
him, as he had the right to do."

"You have wide sources of information in this case.  I wonder--"

"No, your honour need not wonder.  I was told that by a gentleman on the
steamer coming here.  He was a native of the island, I think--or perhaps
it was the captain, or the mate, or the boatswain.  I can't recall.  Or
maybe it came to me from my manager, Darius Boland, who hears things
wherever he is, one doesn't know how; but he hears them.  He is to me
what your aide-de-camp is to you," she nodded towards a young man near by
at the table.

"And do you dress your Darius Boland as I dress my aide in scarlet, with
blue facings and golden embroidery, and put a stiff hat with a feather on
his head?"

"But no, he does not need such things.  I am a Republican now.  I am a
citizen of the United States, where men have no need of uniform to tell
the world what they are.  You shall see my Darius Boland--indeed, you
have seen him.  He was there to-day when you gave me the distinction of
your presence."

"That dry, lean, cartridge of a fellow, that pair of pincers with a
face!"

"And a tongue, your honour.  If you did not hear it yet, you will hear
it.  He is to be my manager here.  So he will be under your control--
if I permit him."

"If you permit him, mistress?"

"If I permit him, yes.  You are a power, but you are not stronger than
the laws and rules you make.  For instance, there was the case of Mr.
Dyck Calhoun.  When he came, you were for tying him up in one little
corner of this island--the hottest part, I know, near to Kingston, where
it averages ninety degrees in the shade at any time of the year.  But the
King you represent had not restricted his liberties so, and you being the
King, that is, yourself, were forced to abide by your own regulations.
So it may be the same with Darius Boland.  He may want something, and
you, high up, looking down, will say, "What devilry is here!" and
decline.  He will then turn to your chief-justice or provost-marshal-
general, or a deputy of the provost-marshal, and they will say that
Darius Boland shall have what he wants, because it is the will of the
will you represent."

Almost the last words the governor used to her were these: "Those only
live at peace here who are at peace with me"; and her reply had been:
"But Mr. Dyck Calhoun lives at peace, does he not, your honour?"

To that he had replied: "No man is at peace while he has yet desires."
He paused a minute and then added: "That Erris Boyne killed by Dyck
Calhoun--did you ever see him that you remember?"

"Not that I remember," she replied quickly.  "I never lived in Dublin."

"That may be.  But did you never know his history?"  She shook her head
in negation.  His eyes searched her face carefully, and he was astonished
when he saw no sign of confusion there.  "Good God, she doesn't know.
She's never been told!" he said to himself.  "This is too startling.
I'll speak to the mother."

A little later he turned from the mother with astonishment.  "It's
madness," he remarked to himself.  "She will find out.  Some one will
tell her.  .  .  .  By heaven, I'll tell her first," he hastily said.
"When she knows the truth, Calhoun will have no chance on earth.  Yes,
I'll tell her myself.  But I'll tell no one else," he added; for he felt
that Sheila, once she knew the truth, would resent his having told abroad
the true story of the Erris Boyne affair.

So Sheila and her mother had gone to their lodgings with depression, but
each with a clear purpose in her mind.  Mrs. Llyn was determined to tell
her daughter what she ought to have known long before; and Sheila was
firm to make the one man who had ever interested her understand that he
was losing much that was worth while keeping.

Then had followed the journey to Salem.  Yet all the while for Sheila
one dark thought kept hovering over everything.  Why should life be so
complicated?  Why should this one man who seemed capable and had the
temperament of the Irish hills and vales be the victim of punishment and
shame--why should he shame her?

Suddenly, without her mother's knowledge, she sent Darius Boland through
the hills in the early morning to Enniskillen, Dyck Calhoun's place, with
a letter which said only this: "Is it not time that you came to wish us
well in our new home?  We shall expect you to-morrow."

When Dyck read this note he thought it was written by Sheila, but
inspired by the mother; and he lost no time in making his way down across
the country to Salem, which he reached a few hours after sunrise.  At the
doorway of the house he met Mrs. Llyn.

"Have you told her?" he asked in anxiety.  Astonished at his presence
she could make no reply for a moment.  "I have told her nothing," she
answered.  "I meant to do so this morning.  I meant to do it--I must."

"She sent me a letter asking if it was not time I came to wish you well
in your house, and you and she would expect me to-day."

"I knew naught of her writing you," was the reply--"naught at all.  But
now that you are here, will you not tell her all?"

Dyck smiled grimly.  "Where is she?" he asked.  "I will tell her."

The mother pointed down the garden.  "Yonder by the clump of palms I saw
her a moment ago.  If you go that way you will find her."

In another moment Dyck Calhoun was on his way to the clump of palms, and
before he reached it, the girl came out into the path.  She was dressed
in a black silk skirt with a white bodice and lace, as he had seen her on
her arrival in Kingston, and at her throat was a sprig of the wild pear-
tree.  When she saw him, she gave a slight start, then stood still, and
he came to her.

"I have your letter," he said, "and I came to say what I ought to say
about your living here: you will bring blessings to the place."

She looked at him steadfastly.  "Shall we talk here," she said,
"or inside the house?  There is a little shelter here in the trees"--
pointing to the right--"a shelter built by the late manager.  It has the
covering of a hut, but it is open at two sides.  Will you come?"  As she
went on ahead, he could not fail to notice how slim and trim she was, how
perfectly her figure seemed to fit her gown-as though she had been poured
into it; and yet the folds of her skirt waved and floated like silky
clouds around her!  Under cover of the shelter, she turned and smiled at
him.

"You have seen my mother?"

"I have just come from her," he answered.  "She bade me tell you what
ought to have been told long ago, and you were not, for there seemed no
reason that you should.  You were young and ignorant and happy.  You had
no cares, no sorrows.  The sorrows that had come to your mother belonged
to days when you were scarce out of the cradle.  But you did not know.
You were not aware that your mother had divorced your father for crime
against marital fidelity and great cruelty.  You did not know even who
that father was.  Well, I must tell you.  Your father was a handsome man,
a friend of mine until I knew the truth about him, and then he died--I
killed him, so the court said."

Her face became ghastly pale.  After a moment of anguished bewilderment,
she said: "You mean that Erris Boyne was my father?"

"Yes, I mean that.  They say I killed him.  They say that he was found
with no sword drawn, but that my open sword lay on the table beside me
while I was asleep, and that it had let out his life-blood."

"Why was he killed?" she asked, horror-stricken and with pale lips.

"I do not know, but if I killed him, it was because I revolted from the
proposals he made to me.  I--"  He paused, for the look on her face was
painful to see, and her body was as that of one who had been struck by
lightning.  It had a crumpled, stricken look, and all force seemed to be
driven from it.  It had the look of crushed vitality.  Her face was set
in paleness, her eyes were frightened, her whole person was, as it were,
in ghastly captivity.  His heart smote him, and he pulled himself
together to tell her all.

"Go on," she said.  "I want to hear.  I want--to know all.  I ought to
have known--long ago; but that can't be helped now.  Continue--please."

Her words had come slowly, in gasps almost, and her voice was so frayed
he could scarcely recognize it.  All the pride of her nature seemed
shattered.

"If I killed him," he said presently, "it was because he tried to tempt
me from my allegiance to the Crown to become a servant of France, to--"

He stopped short, for a cry came from her lips which appalled him.

"My God--my God!" she said with bloodless lips, her eyes fastened on his
face, her every look and motion the inflection of despair.  "Go on--tell
all," she added presently with more composure.

Swiftly he described what happened in the little room at the traitor's
tavern, of the momentary reconciliation and the wine that he drank,
drugged wine poured out but not drunk by Erris Boyne, and of his later
unconsciousness.  At last he paused.

"Why did these things not come out at the trial?" she asked in hushed
tones.

He made a helpless gesture.  "I did not speak of them because I thought
of you.  I hid it--I did not want you to know what your father was."

Something like a smile gathered at her pale lips.  "You saved me for the
moment, and condemned yourself for ever," she said in a voice of torture.
"If you had told what he was--if you had told that, the jury would not
have condemned you, they would not have sent you to prison."

"I believe I did the right thing," he said.  "If I killed your father,
prison was my proper punishment.  But I can't remember.  There was no
other clue, no other guide to judgment.  So the law said I killed him,
and--he had evidently not drawn his sword.  It was clear he was killed
defenceless."

"You killed a defenceless man!"  Her voice was sharp with agony.  "That
was mentioned at the trial--but I did not believe it then--in that long
ago."  She trembled to her feet from the bench where she was sitting.
"And I do not believe it now--no, on my soul, I do not."

"But it makes no difference, you see.  I was condemned for killing your
father, and the world knows that Erris Boyne was your father, and here
Lord Mallow, the governor, knows it; and there is no chance of friendship
between you and me.  Since the day he was found dead in the room, there
was no hope for our friendship, for anything at all between us that I had
wished to be there.  You dare not be friends with me--"

Her face suddenly suffused and she held herself upright with an effort.
She was about to say, "I dare, Dyck--I do dare!" but he stopped her with
a reproving gesture.

"No, no, you dare not, and I would not let you if you would.  I am an
ex-convict.  They say I killed your father, and the way to understanding
between us is closed."

She made a protesting gesture.  "Closed!  Closed!--But is it closed?  No,
no, some one else killed him, not you.  You couldn't have done it.  You
would have fought him--fought him as you did Lord Mallow, and in fighting
you might have killed him, but your sword never let out his life when he
was defenceless--never."

A look of intense relief, almost of happiness, came to Dyck's face.
"That is like you, Sheila, but it does not cure the trouble.  You and I
are as far apart as noon and midnight.  The law has said the only thing
that can be said upon it."

She sank down again upon the wooden bench.  "Oh, how mad you were, not to
tell the whole truth long ago!  You would not have been condemned, and
then--"

She paused overcome, and his self-control almost deserted him.  With
strong feeling he burst out: "And then, we might have come together?
No, your mother--your friends, myself, could not have let that be.  See,
Sheila, I will tell you the whole truth now--aye, the whole absolute
truth.  I have loved you since the first day I saw you on the hills when
you and I rescued Christopher Dogan.  Not a day has passed since then
when you were not more to me than any other woman in all the world."

A new light came into her face, the shadows left her eyes, and the pallor
fled from her lips.  "You loved me?" she said in a voice grown soft-
husky still, but soft as the light in a summer heaven.  "You loved me
--and have always loved me since we first met?"

Her look was so appealing, so passionate and so womanly, that he longed
to reach out his arms to her, and say, "Come--come home, Sheila," but the
situation did not permit that, and only his eyes told the story of what
was in his mind.

"I have always loved you, Sheila, and shall do so while I have breath and
life.  I have always given you the best that is in me, tried to do what
was good for us both, since my misfortune--crime, Lord Mallow calls it,
as does the world.  Never a sunrise that does not find you in the
forefront of all the lighted world; never a flower have I seen that does
not seem sweeter--it brings thoughts of you; never a crime that does not
deepen its shame because you are in the world.  In prison, when I used to
mop my floor and clean down the walls; when I swept the dust from the
corners; when I folded up my convict clothes; when I ate the prison food
and sang the prison hymns; when I placed myself beside the bench in the
workshop to make things that would bring cash to my fellow-prisoners in
their need; when I saw a minister of religion or heard the Litany; when I
counted up the days, first that I had spent in jail and then the days I
had still to spend in jail; when I read the books from the prison library
of the land where you had gone, and of the struggle there; when I saw
you, in my mind's eye, in the cotton-fields or on the verandah of your
house in Virginia--I had but one thought, and that was the look in your
face at Playmore and Limerick, the sound of your voice as you came
singing up the hill just before I first met you, the joyous beauty of
your body."

"And at sea?" she whispered with a gesture at once beautiful and
pathetic, for it had the motion of helplessness and hopelessness.  What
she had heard had stirred her soul, and she wanted to hear more--or was
it that she wished to drain the cup now that it was held to her lips?
-drain it to the last drop of feeling.

"At sea," he answered, with his eyes full of intense feeling--"at sea, I
was free at last, doomed as I thought, anguished in spirit, and yet with
a wild hope that out of it would come deliverance.  I expected to lose my
life, and I lived each day as though it would be my last.  I was chief
rogue in a shipful of rogues, chief sinner in a hell of sinners, and yet
I had no remorse and no regret.  I had done all with an honest purpose,
with the good of the sailors in my mind; and so I lived in daily touch
with death, honour, and dishonour.  Yet I never saw a sailor in the
shrouds, or heard the night watch call 'All's well!' in the midst of
night and mutiny, that I did not long for a word from you that would take
away the sting of death.  Those days at sea for ten long weeks were never
free from anxiety, not anxiety for myself, only for the men who had put
me where I was, had given me captain's rank, had--"

Suddenly he stopped, and took from his pocket the letter he was writing
on the very day she landed in Jamaica.  He opened it and studied it for a
moment with a dark look in his face.

"This I wrote even as you were landing in Jamaica, and I knew naught of
your coming.  It was an outbreak of my soul.  It was the truth written
to you and for you, and yet with the feeling that you would never see it.
I was still writing it when Michael Clones came up the drive to tell me
you and your mother were here.  Now, I know not what Christopher Dogan
would say of it, but I say it is amazing that in the hour you were first
come to this land I should be moved to tell you the story of my life
since I left prison; since, on receiving your letter in London, forwarded
from Dublin, I joined the navy.  But here it is with all the truth and
terror in it.--Aye, there was terror, for it gave the soul of my life to
one I never thought to see again; and, if seeing, should be compelled to
do what I have done--tell her the whole truth at once and so have it
over.

"But do not think that in telling it now I repent of my secrecy.
I repent of nothing; I would not alter anything.  What was to be is, and
what is has its place in the book of destiny.  No, I repent nothing, yet
here now I give you this to read while still my story of the days of
which you know is in your ears.  Here it is.  It will tell the whole
story; for when you have read it and do understand, then we part to meet
no more as friends.  You will go back to Virginia, and I will stay here.
You will forgive the unwilling wrong I have done you, but you will make
your place in life without thought of me.  You will marry some one--not
worthy of you, for that could not be; but you will take to yourself some
man from among the men of this world.  You will set him apart from all
other men as yours, and he will be happy, having been blessed beyond
deserving.  You will not regret coming here; but you will desire our
friendship to cease; and what has been to be no more, while the tincture
of life is in your veins.  Sheila, read this thing, for it is the rest of
the story until now."

He handed her the papers, and she took them with an inclination of the
head which said: "Give it to me.  I will read it now while my eyes can
still bear to read it.  I have laid on my heart the nettle of shame, and
while it is still burning there I will read all that you have to teach
me."

"I will go out in the garden while you read it," he said.  "In a half-
hour I will come back, and then we can say good-bye," he added, with pain
in his voice, but firmly.

"No, do not go," she urged.  "Sit here on the bench--at the end of it
here," she said, motioning with her hand.

He shook his head in negation.  "No, I will go and say to your mother
that I have told you, and ease her mind, for I know she herself meant to
tell you."

As he went he looked at her face closely.  It was so young, so pathetic,
so pale, yet so strangely beautiful, and her forehead was serene.  That
was one of her characteristics.  In all her life, her forehead remained
untroubled and unlined.  Only at her mouth and in her eyes did misery or
sorrow show.  He looked into her eyes now, and he was pleased with what
he saw; for they had in them the glow of understanding and the note of
will which said: "You and I are parted, but I believe in you, and I will
not show I am a weak woman by futile horror.  We shall meet no more, but
I shall remember you."

That was what he saw, and it was what he wished to see.  He knew her
character would stand the test of any trial, and it had done so.  Horror
had struck her, but had not overwhelmed her.  She had cried out in her
agony, but she had not been swept out into chaos.  She had no weak
passions and no futilities.  But as he turned away now, it was with the
sharp conviction that he had dealt a blow from which the girl would
recover, but would never be the same again.  She was rich "beyond the
dreams of avarice," but that would not console her.  She had resources
within herself, had what would keep her steady.  Her real power and
force, her real hope, were in her regnant soul which was not to be
cajoled by life's subterfuges.  Her lips opened now, as though she would
say something, but nothing came from them.  She only shook her head
sadly, as if to say: "You understand.  Go, and when you come again, it
will be for us to part in peace--at least in peace."

Out in the garden he found her mother.  After the first agitated
greeting-agitated on her part, he said: "The story has been told, and she
is now reading--"

He told her the story of the manuscript, and added that Sheila had
carried herself with courage.  Presently the woman said to him: "She
never believed you killed Erris Boyne.  Well, it may not help the
situation, but I say too, that I do not believe you did.  I cannot
understand why you did not deny having killed him."

"I could not deny.  In any case, the law punished me for it, and the book
is closed for ever."

"Have you never thought that some one--"

"Yes, I have thought, but who is there?  The crowd at the Dublin hotel
where the thing was done were secret, and they would lie the apron off a
bishop.  No, there is no light, and, to tell the truth, I care not now."

"But if you are not guilty--it is not too late; there is my girl!  If the
real criminal should appear--can you not see?"

The poor woman, distressedly pale, her hair still abundant, her eyes
still bright, her pulses aglow, as they had ever been, made a gesture of
appeal with hands that were worn and thin.  She had charm still, in a way
as great as her daughter's.

"I can see--but, Mrs. Llyn, I have no hope.  I am a man whom some men
fear--"

"Lord Mallow!" she interjected.

"He does not fear me.  Why do you say that?"

"I speak with a woman's intuition.  I don't know what he fears, but he
does fear you.  You are a son of history; you had a duel with him, and
beat him; you have always beaten him, even here where he has been supreme
as governor--from first to last, you have beaten him."

"I hope I shall be even with him at the last--at the very last," was Dyck
Calhoun's reply.  "We were made to be foes.  We were from the first.  I
felt it when I saw him at Playmore.  Nothing has changed since then.  He
will try to destroy me here, but I will see it through.  I will try and
turn his rapier-points.  I will not be the target of his arrows without
making some play against him.  The man is a fool.  I could help him here,
but he will have none of it, and he is running great risks.  He has been
warned that the Maroons are restive, that the black slaves will rise if
the Maroons have any initial success, and he will listen to no advice.
He would not listen to me, but, knowing that, I got the provost-marshal
to approach him, and when he knew my hand was in it, he stiffened.  He
would have naught to do with it, and so no preparations are made.  And up
there"--he turned and pointed--"up there in Trelawney the Maroons are
plotting and planning, and any day an explosion may occur.  If it occurs
no one will be safe, especially if the blacks rise too--I mean the black
slaves.  There will be no safety then for any one."

"For us as well, you mean?"

"For you as well as all others, and you are nearer to Trelawney than most
others.  You are in their path.  So be wise, Mrs. Llyn, and get back to
Virginia as soon as may be.  It is a better place than this."

"My daughter is mistress here," was the sorrowful reply.  "She will have
her own way."

"Your daughter will not care to stay here now," he answered firmly.

"She will do what she thinks her duty in spite of her own feelings, or
yours, or mine.  It is her way, and it has always been her way."

"I will tell her what I fear, and she may change her mind."

"But the governor may want her to stay," answered Mrs. Llyn none too
sagely, but with that in her mind which seemed to justify her.

"Lord Mallow--oh, if you think there is any influence in him to keep
her, that is another question," said Dyck with a grim smile.  "But,
nevertheless, I think you should leave here and go back to Virginia.
It is no safe place for two ladies, in all senses.  Whatever Lord Mallow
thinks or does, this is no place for you.  This place is your daughter's
for her to do what she chooses with it, and I think she ought to sell it.
There would be no trouble in getting a purchaser.  It is a fine
property."

"But the governor might not think as you do; he might not wish it sold."

Mrs. Llyn was playing a bold, indeed a reckless game.  She wanted to show
Dyck there were others who would interest themselves in Sheila even if
he, Dyck, were blotted from the equation; that the girl could look high,
if her mind turned towards marriage.  Also she felt that Dyck should know
the facts before any one else, so that he would not be shocked in the
future, if anything happened.  Yet in her deepest heart she wished him
well.  She liked him as she had never liked any of Sheila's admirers, and
if the problem of Erris Boyne had been solved, she would gladly have seen
him wedded to Sheila.

"What has the governor to do with it!" he declared.  "It is your
daughter's own property, and she is free to hold or to part with it.
There is no Crown consent to ask, no vice-regal approval needed."

Suddenly he became angry, almost excited.  His blood pounded in his
veins.  Was this man, Mallow, to come between his and her fate always,
come into his problem at the most critical moment?  "God in heaven!" he
said in a burst of passion, "is this a land of the British Empire or is
it not?  Why should that man break in on every crisis?  Why should he do
this or that--say yea or nay, give or take away!  He is the king's
representative, but he is bound by laws as rigid as any that bind you or
me.  What has he to do with your daughter or what concerns her?  Is there
not enough trouble in the world without bringing in Lord Mallow?
If he--"

He stopped short, for he saw coming from the summerhouse, Sheila with his
paper in her hand.  She walked slowly and with dignity.  She carried her
head high and firmly, and the skin of her face was shining with light
as she came on.  Dyck noticed how her wide skirts flicked against the
flowers that bordered the path, and how her feet seemed scarcely to touch
the ground as she walked--a spirit, a regnant spirit of summer she
seemed.  But in her face there was no summer, there was only autumn and
winter, only the bright frost of purpose.  As she came, her mother turned
as though to leave Dyck Calhoun.  She called to her to wait, and Mrs.
Llyn stood still, anxious.  As Sheila came near she kept her eyes fixed
on Dyck.  When she reached them, she held out the paper to him.

"It is wonderful," she said quietly, "that which you have written, but it
does not tell all; it does not say that you did not kill my father.  You
are punished for the crime, and we must abide by it, even though you did
not kill Erris Boyne.  It is the law that has done it, and we cannot
abash the law."

"We shall meet no more then!" said Dyck with decision.

Her lips tightened, her face paled.  "There are some things one may not
do, and one of them is to be openly your friend--at present."

He put the letter carefully away in his pocket, his hand shaking, then
flicking an insect from the collar of his coat, he said gently, yet with
an air of warning: "I have been telling Mrs. Llyn about the Maroons up
there"--he pointed towards Trelawney--"and I have advised your going back
to Virginia.  The Maroons may rise at any moment, and no care is being
taken by Lord Mallow to meet the danger.  If they rise, you, here, would
be in their way, and I could not guarantee your safety.  Besides,
Virginia is a better place--a safer place than this," he added with
meaning.

"You wish to frighten me out of Jamaica," she replied with pain in her
voice.  "Well, I will not go till I have put this place in order and
brought discipline and good living here.  I shall stay here in Jamaica
till I have done my task.  There is no reason why we should meet.  This
place is not so large as Ireland or America, but it is large enough to
give assurance we shall not meet.  And if we meet, there is no reason why
we should talk.  As for the Maroons, when the trouble comes, I shall not
be unprepared."  She smiled sadly.  "The governor may not take your
advice, but I shall.  And remember that I come from a land not without
its dangers.  We have Red Indians and black men there, and I can shoot."

He waved a hand abruptly and then made a gesture--such as an ascetic
might make-of reflection, of submission.  "I shall remember every word
you have said, and every note of your voice will be with me in all the
lonely years to come.  Good-bye--but no, let me say this before I go:
I did not know that Erris Boyne was your father until after he was dead.
So, if I killed him, it was in complete ignorance.  I did not know.  But
we have outlived our friendship, and we must put strangeness in its
place.  Good-bye--God protect you!" he added, looking into Sheila's
eyes.

She looked at him with sorrow.  Her lips opened but no words came forth.
He passed on out of the garden, and presently they heard his horse's
hoofs on the sand.

"He is a great gentleman," said Mrs. Llyn.

Her daughter's eyes were dry and fevered.  Her lips were drawn.  "We must
begin the world again," she said brokenly.  Then suddenly she sank upon
the ground.  "My God--oh, my God!" she said.




CHAPTER XIX

LORD MALLOW INTERVENES

Two months went by.  In that time Sheila and Dyck did not meet, though
Dyck saw her more than once in the distance at Kingston.  Yet they had
never met since that wonderful day at Salem, when they had parted, as
it might seem, for ever.  Dyck had had news of her, however, for Darius
Boland had come and gone between the two plantations, and had won Michael
Clones' confidence.  He knew more perhaps than he ever conveyed to Dyck,
who saw him and talked with him, gave him advice as to the customs of
Jamaica, and let him see the details in the management of Enniskillen.

Yet Dyck made no inquiries as to how Mrs. Llyn and Sheila were; first
because he chose not to do so, and also because Darius Boland, at one
time or another, would of his own accord tell what Mrs. Llyn and Sheila
were doing.  One day Boland brought word that the governor had, more than
once, visited Salem with his suite; that he had sat in judgment on a case
in Kingston concerning the estate of Salem, and had given decision in its
favour; and that Mrs. Llyn and Sheila visited him at Spanish Town and
were entertained at King's House at second breakfast and dinner--in
short, that Lord Mallow was making hay in Salem Plantation.  This was no
surprise to Dyck.  He had full intuition of the foray the governor would
make on Sheila, her estate and wealth.

Lord Mallow had acted with discretion, and yet with sufficient passion to
warrant some success.  He was trying to make for himself a future which
might mean the control of a greater colony even.  If he had wealth, that
would be almost a certainty, and he counted Sheila's gold as a guarantee
of power.  He knew well how great effect could be produced at Westminster
and at the Royal Palace by a discreet display of wealth.  He was also
aware that no scandal could be made through an alliance with Sheila, for
she had inherited long after the revolutionary war and with her skirts
free from responsibility.  England certainly would welcome wealth got
through an Irish girl inheriting her American uncle's estates.  So,
steadily and happily, he pressed his suit.  At his dinner-parties he
gave her first place nearly always, and even broke the code controlling
precedence when his secretary could be overruled.  Thus Sheila was given
honour when she did not covet it, and so it was that one day at Salem
when the governor came to court her she was able to help Dyck Calhoun.

"Then you go to Enniskillen?" Lord Mallow said to Darius Boland, as he
entered the plantation, being met by the astute American.

"Sometimes, your honour," was the careful reply.  "I suppose you know
what Mr. Calhoun's career has been, eh?"

"Oh, in a way, your honour.  They tell me he is a good swordsman."

The governor flushed.  "He told you that, did he?"

"No, no, your honour, never.  He told me naught.  He does not boast.
He's as modest as a man from Virginia.  He does not brag at all."

"Who told you, then?"

"Ah, well, I heard it in the town!  They speak of him there.  They all
know that Kingston and Spanish Town, and all the other places, would have
been French by now, if it hadn't been for him.  Oh, they talk a lot about
him in Kingston and thereabouts!"

"What swordsmanship do they speak of that was remarkable?"

"Has your honour forgotten, then?  Sure, seven years is a poor limit for
a good memory."  The blow was a shrewd one, for Darius Boland knew that
Phoenix Park must be a galling memory to his honour.  But Darius did not
care.  He guessed why the governor was coming to Salem, and he could not
shirk having his hand in it.  He had no fear of the results.

"Aye, seven years is a poor limit," he repeated.

The governor showed no feeling.  He had been hit, and he took it as part
of the game.  "Ah, you mean the affair in Phoenix Park?" he said with no
apparent feeling.

Darius tossed his head a little.  "Wasn't it a clever bit of work?
Didn't he get fame there by defeating one of the best swordsmen--in
Ireland?"

Lord Mallow nodded.  "He got fame, which he lost in time," he answered.

"You mean he put the sword that had done such good work against a
champion into a man's bowels, without 'by your leave,' or 'will you draw
and fight'?"

"Something like that," answered the governor sagely.

"Is it true you believed he'd strike a man that wasn't armed, sir?"

The governor winced, but showed nothing.  "He'd been drinking--he is a
heavy drinker.  Do you never drink with him?"

Darius Boland's face took on a strange look.  Here was an intended insult
to Dyck Calhoun.  Right well the governor knew their relative social
positions.  Darius pulled at the hair on his chin reflectively.  "Yes,
I've drunk his liquor, but not as you mean, your honour.  He'd drink with
any man at all: he has no nasty pride.  But he doesn't drink with me."
"Modest enough he is to be a good republican, eh, Boland?"

"Since your honour puts it so, it must stand.  I'll not dispute it, me
being what I am and employed by whom I am."

Darius Boland had a gift of saying the right thing in the right way, and
he had said it now.  The governor was not so dense as to put this man
against him, for women were curious folk.  They often attach importance
to the opinion of a faithful servant and let it weigh against great men.
He had once lost a possible fortune by spurning a little terrier of the
daughter of the Earl of Shallow, and the lesson had sunk deep into his
mind.  He was high-placed, but not so high as to be sure of success where
a woman was concerned, and he had made up his mind to capture Sheila
Llyn, if so be she could be caught flying, or settled, or sleeping.

"Ah, well, he has drunk with worse men than republicans.  Boland.  He was
a common sailor.  He drank what was given him with whom it chanced in the
fo'castle."

Darius sniffed a little, and kept his head.  "But he changed all that,
your honour, and gave sailormen better drink than they ever had, I hear.
In Jamaica he treats his slaves as though they were men and not
Mohicans."

"Well, he'll have less freedom in future, Boland, for word has come from
London that he's to keep to his estate and never leave it."

Darius looked concerned, and his dry face wrinkled still more.  "Ah, and
when was this word come, your honour?"

"But yesterday, Boland, and he'll do well to obey, for I have no choice
but to take him in hand if he goes gallivanting."

"Gallivanting--here, in Jamaica!  Does your honour remember where we
are?"

"Not in a bishop's close, Boland."

"No, not in a bishop's close, nor in an archdeacon's garden.  For of all
places on earth where they defy religion, this is the worst, your honour.
There's as much religion here as you'll find in a last year's bird's-
nest.  Gallivanting--where should he gallivant?"

The governor waved a contemptuous hand.  "It doesn't need ingenuity to
find a place, for some do it on their own estate.  I have seen it."

Darius spoke sharply.  "Your honour, there's naught on Mr. Calhoun's
estate that's got the taint, and he's not the man to go hunting for it.
Drink--well, suppose a gentleman does take his quartern, is it a crime?
I ask your honour, is that a crime in Jamaica?"

"It's no crime, Boland; nevertheless, your Mr. Calhoun will have to take
his fill on his own land from the day I send him the command of the
London Government."

"And what day will that be, your honour?"

To be questioned by one who had been a revolutionary was distasteful to
the governor.  "That day will be when I find the occasion opportune, my
brave Boland," he said sourly.

"Why 'brave,' your honour?"  There was an ominous light in Darius' eye.

"Did you not fight with George Washington against the King of England--
against King George?  And if you did, was that not brave?"

"It was true, your honour," came the firm reply.  "It was the one right
good thing to do, as we proved it by the victory we had.  We did what we
set out to do.  But see, if you will let a poor man speak his mind, if I
were you I'd not impose the command on Mr. Calhoun."

"Why, Boland?"

Darius spoke courageously.  "Your honour, he has many friends in Jamaica,
and they won't stand it.  Besides, he won't stand it.  And if he contests
your honour, the island will be with him."

"Is he popular here as all that?" asked the governor with a shrug of the
shoulders.

"They don't give their faith and confidence to order, your honour,"
answered Darius with a dry inflection.

The burr in the voice did not escape the other's attentive ear.  He swung
a glance sharply at Darius.  "What is the secret of his popularity--how
has it been made?" he asked morosely.

Darius' face took on a caustic look.  "He's only been in the island a
short time, your honour, and I don't know that I'm a good judge, but I'll
say the people here have great respect for bravery and character."

"Character!  Character!" sniffed the governor.  "Where did he get that?"

"Well, I don't know his age, but it's as old as he is--his character.
Say, I'm afraid I'm talking too much, your honour.  We speak our minds
in Virginia; we never count the cost."

The governor waved a deprecating hand.  "You'll find the measure of your
speech in good time, Boland, I've no doubt.  Meanwhile, you've got the
pleasure of hunting it.  Character, you say.  Well, that isn't what the
judge and jury said."

Darius took courage again.  Couldn't Lord Mallow have any decency?

"Judge and jury be damned, your honour," he answered boldly.  "It was an
Irish verdict.  It had no sense.  It was a bit of ballyhack.  He did not
kill an unarmed man.  It isn't his way.  Why, he didn't kill you when he
had you at his mercy in Phoenix Park, now, did he, governor?"

A flush stole up the governor's face from his chin.  Then he turned to
Boland and looked him straight in the eyes.  "That's true.  He had me at
his mercy, and he did not take my life."

"Then, why do you head the cabal against him?  Why do you take joy in
commanding him to stay on his estate?  Is that grateful, your honour?"

The governor winced, but he said: "It's what I am ordered to do, my man.
I'm a servant of the Crown, and the Crown has ordained it."

Again Darius grew stronger in speech.  "But why do you have pleasure in
it?  Is nothing left to your judgment?  Do you say to me that if he keeps
the freedom such as he has enjoyed, you'd punish him?  Must the governor
be as ruthless as his master?  Look, your honour, I wouldn't impose that
command--not till I'd taken his advice about the Maroons anyway.  There's
trouble brewing, and Mr. Calhoun knows it.  He has warned you through the
provost-marshal.  I'd heed his warning, your honour, or it may injure
your reputation as a ruler.  No, I'd see myself in nethermost hell before
I'd meddle with Mr. Calhoun.  He's a dangerous man, when he's moved."

"Boland, you'll succeed as a schoolmaster, when all else fails.  You
teach persistently."

"Your honour is clever enough to know what's what, but I'd like to see
the Maroons dealt with.  This is not my country, but I've got interests
here, or my mistress has, and that's the same to me.  .  .  .  Does your
honour travel often without a suite?"

The governor waved a hand behind him.  "I left them at the last
plantation, and rode on alone.  I felt safe enough till I saw you,
Boland."

He smiled grimly, and a grimmer smile stole to the lean lips of the
manager of Salem.  "Fear is a good thing for forward minds, your honour,"
he said with respect in the tone of his voice and challenge in the words.

"I'll say this, Boland, your mistress has been fortunate in her staff.
You have a ready tongue."

"Oh, I'm readier in other things, your honour, as you'd find on occasion.
But I thank you for the compliment in a land where compliments are few.
For a planter's country it has few who speak as well as they entertain.
I'll say this for the land you govern, the hospitality is rich and rare."

"In what way, Boland?"

"Why, your honour, it is the custom for a man and his whole family to go
on a visit to a neighbour, perhaps twenty or forty miles away, bring
their servants--maybe a dozen or more--and sit down on their neighbour's
hearthstone.  There they eat his food, drink his wine, exhaust his fowl-
yard and debilitate his cook--till all the resources of the place are
played out; then with both hands round his friend's neck the man and his
people will say adieu, and go back to their own accumulated larder and
await the return visit.  The wonder is Jamaica is so rich, for truly the
waste is harmful.  We have the door open in Virginia, but not in that
way.  We welcome, but we don't debauch."

The governor smiled.  "As you haven't old friends here, you should make
your life a success--ah, there is the open door, Boland, and your
mistress standing in it.  But I come without my family, and with no fell
purposes.  I will not debilitate the cook; I will not exhaust the fowl-
yard.  A roasted plantain is good enough for me."

Darius' looks quickened, and he jerked his chin up.  "So, your honour,
so.  But might I ask that you weigh carefully the warning of Mr. Calhoun.
There's trouble at Trelawny.  I have it from good sources, and Mr.
Calhoun has made preparations against the sure risings.  I'd take heed of
what he says.  He knows.  Your honour, it is not my mistress in the
doorway, it is Mrs. Llyn; she is shorter than my mistress."

The governor shaded his brow with his hands.  Then he touched up his
horse.  "Yes, you are right, Boland.  It is Mrs. Llyn.  And look you,
Boland, I'll think over what you've said about the Maroons and Mr.
Calhoun.  He's doing no harm as he is, that's sure.  So why shouldn't he
go on as he is?  That's your argument, isn't it?"

Boland nodded.  "It's part of my argument, not all of it.  Of course he's
doing no harm; he's doing good every day.  He's got a stiff hand for the
shirker and the wanton, but he's a man that knows his mind, and that's a
good thing in Jamaica."

"Does he come here-ever?"

"He has been here only once since our arrival.  There are reasons why he
does not come, as your honour kens, knowing the history of Erris Boyne."

A quarter of an hour later Darius Boland said to Sheila: "He's got an
order from England to keep Mr. Calhoun to his estate and to punish him,
if he infringes the order."

Sheila started.  "He will infringe the order if it's made, Boland.  But
the governor will be unwise to try and impose it.  I will tell him so."

"But, mistress, he should not be told that this news comes from me."

"No, he should not, Boland.  I can tempt him to speak of it, I think.
He hates Mr. Calhoun, and will not need much prompting."

Sheila had changed since she saw Dyck Calhoun last.  Her face was
thinner, but her form was even fuller than it was when she had bade him
good-bye, as it seemed to him for ever, and as it at first seemed to her.
Through anxious days and nights she had fought with the old passion; and
at last it seemed the only way to escape from the torture was by making
all thought of him impossible.  How could this be done?  Well, Lord
Mallow would offer a way.  Lord Mallow was a man of ancient Irish family,
was a governor, had ability, was distinguished-looking in a curious lean
way; and he had a real gift with his tongue.  He stood high in the
opinion of the big folk at Westminster, and had a future.  He had a
winning way with women--a subtle, perniciously attractive way with her
sex, and to herself he had been delicately persuasive.  He had the
ancient gift of picturesqueness without ornamentation.  He had a strong
will and a healthy imagination.  He was a man of mettle and decision.

Of all who had entered her field outside of Dyck Calhoun he was the most
attractive; he was the nearest to the possible husband which she must one
day take.  And if at any day at all, why not now when she needed a man as
she had never done--when she needed to forget?  The sardonic critic might
ask why she did not seek forgetfulness in flight; why she remained in
Jamaica where was what she wished to forget.  There was no valid reason,
save a business one, why she should remain in Jamaica, and she was in a
quandary when she put the question.  There were, however, other reasons
which she used when all else failed to satisfy her exigeant mind.  There
was the question of vessels to Virginia or New York.  They were few and
not good, and in any case they could have no comfortable journey to the
United States for several weeks at least, for, since the revolutionary
war, commerce with the United States was sparse.

Also, there was the question of Salem.  She did not feel she ought to
waste the property which her Uncle Bryan had nurtured with care.  In
justice to his memory, and in fairness to Darius Boland, she felt she
ought to stay--for a time.  It did not occur to her that these reasons
would vanish like mist--that a wilful woman would sweep them into the
basket of forgetfulness, and do what she wished in spite of reason: that
all else would be sacrificed, if the spirit so possessed her.  Truth was
that, far back in her consciousness, there was a vision of better days
and things.  It was as though some angel touched the elbow of her spirit
and said: "Stay on, for things will be better than they seem.  You will
find your destiny here.  Stay on."

So she had stayed.  She was deluding herself to believe that what she was
doing was all for the best; that the clouds were rising; that her fate
had fairer aspects than had seemed possible when Dyck Calhoun told her
the terrible tale of the death of her father, Erris Boyne.  Yet memory
gave a touch of misery and bitterness to all she thought and did.  For
twenty-five years she had lived in ignorance as to her paternity.  It
surely was futile that her mother should have suffered all those years,
with little to cheer her, while her daughter should be radiant in health
and with a mind free from care or sadness.  Yet the bitterest thing of
all was the thought that her father was a traitor, and had died
sacrificing another man.  When Dyck had told her first, she had shivered
with anger and shame--but anger and shame had gone.  Only one thing gave
her any comfort--the man who knew Erris Boyne was a traitor, and could
profit by telling it, held his tongue for her own sake, kept his own
counsel, and went to prison for four years as the price of his silence.
He was now her neighbour and he loved her, and, if the shadow of a grave
was not between them, would offer himself in marriage to her.  This she
knew beyond all doubt.  He had given all a man can give--had saved her
and killed her father--in ignorance had killed her father; in love had
saved herself.  What was to be done?

In a strange spirit Sheila entered the room where the governor sat with
her mother.  She had reached the limit of her powers of suffering.  Soon
after her mother had left the room, the governor said:

"Why do you think I have come here to-day?"

He added to the words a note of sympathy, even of passion in his voice.

"It was to visit my mother and myself, and to see how Salem looks after
our stay on it, was it not?"

"Yes, to see your mother and yourself, but chiefly the latter.  As for
Salem, it looks as though a mastermind had been at work, I see it in
everything.  The slaves are singing.  Listen!"

He held up a finger as though to indicate attention and direction.

                        "One, two, three,
                         All de same;
                         Black, white, brown,
                         All de same;
                         All de same.
                         One, two, three--"

They could hear the words indistinctly.

"What do the words mean?" asked Sheila.  "I don't understand them."

"No more do I, but I think they refer to the march of pestilence or
plague.  Numbers, colour, race, nothing matters, the plague sweeps all
away.  Ah, then, I was right," he added.  "There is the story in other
words.  Listen again."

To clapping of hands in unison, the following words were sung:

                        "New-come buckra,
                         He get sick,
                         He tak fever,
                         He be die;
                         He be die.
                         New-come buckra--"

"Well, it may be a chant of the plague, but it's lacking in poetry," she
remarked.  "Doesn't it seem so to you?"

"No, I certainly shouldn't go so far as that.  Think of how much of a
story is crowded into those few words.  No waste, nothing thrown away.
It's all epic, or that's my view, anyhow," said the governor.  "If you
look out on those who are singing it, you'd see they are resting from
their labours; that they are fighting the ennui which most of us feel
when we rest from our labours.  Let us look at them."

The governor stood up and came to the open French windows that faced the
fields of sugar-cane.  In the near distance were clumps of fruit trees,
of hedges of lime and flowering shrubs, rows of orange trees, mangoes,
red and purple, forbidden-fruit and grapefruit, the large scarlet fruit
of the acqui, the avocado-pear, the feathering bamboo, and the Jack-fruit
tree, with its enormous fruit like pumpkins.  Parrots were chattering in
the acacia and in the Otaheite plum tree, with its bright pink blossoms
like tassels, and flanking the negro huts by the river were bowers of
grenadilla fruit.  Around the negro huts were small individual
plantations kept by the slaves, for which they had one day a fortnight,
besides Sundays, free to work on their own account.  Here and there also
were patches of "ground-fruit," as the underground vegetables were
called, while there passed by on their way to the open road leading to
Kingston wains loaded with sugar-casks, drawn by oxen, and in two cases
by sumpter mules.

"Is there anything finer than that in Virginia?" asked the governor.
"I have never been in Virginia, but I take this to be in some ways like
that state.  Is it?"

"In some ways only.  We have not the same profusion of wild fruits and
trees, but we have our share--and it is not so hot as here.  It is a
better country, though."

"In what way is it better?" the governor asked almost acidly.

"It is better governed."

"What do you mean by that?  Isn't Jamaica well governed?"

"Not so well that it couldn't be improved," was Sheila's reply.

"What improvements would you suggest?" Lord Mallow asked urbanely, for
he was set to play his cards carefully to-day.

"More wisdom in the governor," was the cheerful and bright reply.

"Is he lacking in wisdom?"

"In some ways, yes."

"Will you mind specifying some of the things?"

"I think he is careless."

"Careless--as to what?"

Sheila smiled.  "He is indifferent to good advice.  He has been told of
trouble among the Maroons, that they mean to rise; he has been advised to
make preparations, and he makes none, and he is deceived by a show of
loyalty on the part of the slaves.  Lord Mallow, if the free Maroons
rise, why should not the black slaves rise at the same time?  Why do you
not act?"

"Is everybody whose good opinion is worth having mad?" answered the
governor.  "I have sent my inspectors to Trelawney.  I have had reports
from them.  I have used every care--what would you have me do?"

"Used every care?  Why don't you ensure the Maroons peaceableness by
advancing on them?  Why don't you take them prisoners?  They are enraged
that two of their herdsmen should be whipped by a negro-slave under the
order of one of your captains.  They are angry and disturbed and have
ambushed the roads to Trelawney, so I'm told."

"Did Mr. Calhoun tell you that when he was here?"

"It was not that which Mr. Calhoun told me the only time he came here.
But who Erris Boyne was.  I never knew till, in his honour, he told me,
coming here for that purpose.  I never knew who my father was till he
told me.  My mother had kept it from me all my life."

The governor looked alert.  "And you have not seen him since that day?"

"I have seen him, but I have not spoken to him.  It was in the distance
only."

"I understand your manager, Mr. Boland, sees him."

"My manager does not share my private interests--or troubles.  He is free
to go where he will, to speak to whom he chooses.  He visits Enniskillen,
I suppose--it is a well-managed plantation on Jamaican lines, and its
owner is a man of mark."

Sheila spoke without agitation of any kind; her face was firm and calm,
her manner composed, her voice even.  As she talked, she seemed to be
probing the centre of a flower which she had caught from a basket at the
window, and her whole personality was alight and vivifying, her good
temper and spirit complete.  As he looked at her, he had an overmastering
desire to make her his own--his wife.  She was worth hundreds of
thousands of pounds; she had beauty, ability and authority.  She was the
acme of charm and good bearing.  With her he could climb high on the
ladder of life.  He might be a really great figure in the British world-
if she gave her will to help him, to hold up his hands.  It had never
occurred to him that Dyck Calhoun could be a rival, till he had heard of
Dyck's visit to Sheila and her mother, till he had heard Sheila praise
him at the first dinner he had given to the two ladies on Christmas Day.

On that day it was clear Sheila did not know who her father was; but
stranger things had happened than that she should take up with, and even
marry, a man imprisoned for killing another, even one who had been
condemned as a mutineer, and had won freedom by saving the king's navy.
But now that Sheila knew the truth there could be no danger!  Dyck
Calhoun would be relegated to his proper place in the scheme of things.
Who was there to stand between him and his desire?  What was there to
stay the great event?  He himself was a peer and high-placed, for it
was a time when the West Indian Islands were a centre of the world's
fighting, where men like Rodney had made everlasting fame; where the
currents of world-controversy challenged, met and fought for control.

The West Indies was as much a cock-pit of the fighting powers as ever
Belgium was; and in those islands there was wealth and the power which
wealth buys; the clash of white and black and coloured peoples; the naval
contests on the sea; the horrible massacres and enslavement of free white
peoples, as in St. Domingo and Grenada; the dominating attacks of people
fighting for control--peoples of old empires like France and Spain, and
new empires like that of Britain.  These were a centre of colonial life
as important as had been the life in Virginia and New York and the New
England States and Canada--indeed, more important than Canada in one
sense, for the West Indies brought wealth to the British Isles, and had a
big export trade.  He lost no time in bringing matters to an issue.

He got to his feet and came near to her.  His eyes were inflamed with
passion, his manner was impressive.  He had a distinguished face, become
more distinguished since his assumption of governorship, and authority
had increased his personality.

"A man of mark!" he said.  "You mean a marked man.  Let me tell you I
have an order from the British Government to confine him to his estate;
not to permit him to leave it; and, if he does, to arrest him.  That is
my commanded duty.  You approve, do you not?  Or are you like most women,
soft at heart to bold criminals?"

Sheila did not reply at once.  The news was no news to her, for Darius
Boland had told her; but she thought it well to let the governor think
he had made a new, sensational statement.

"No," she said at last, looking him calmly in the eyes.  "I have no soft
feelings for criminals as criminals, none at all.  And there is every
reason why I should be adamant to this man, Dyck Calhoun.  But, Lord
Mallow, I would go carefully about this, if I were you.  He is a man who
takes no heed of people, high or low, and has no fear of consequences.
Have you thought of the consequences to yourself?  Suppose he resists,
what will you do?"

"If he resists I will attack him with due force."

"You mean you will send your military and police to attack him?"  The
gibe was covered, but it found the governor's breast.  He knew what she
was meaning.

"You would not expect me to do police work, would you?  Is that what your
president does?  What your great George Washington does?  Does he make
the state arrests with his own hand?"

"I have no doubt he would if the circumstances were such as to warrant
it.  He has no small vices, and no false feelings.  He has proved
himself," she answered boldly.

"Well, in that case," responded Lord Mallow irritably, "the event will be
as is due.  The man is condemned by my masters, and he must submit to my
authority.  He is twice a criminal, and--"

"And yet a hero and a good swordsman, and as honest as men are made in a
dishonest world.  Your Admiralty and your government first pardoned the
man, and then gave him freedom on the island which you tried to prevent;
and now they turn round and confine him to his acres.  Is that pardon in
a real sense?  Did you write to the government and say he ought not to be
free to roam, lest he should discover more treasure-chests and buy
another estate?  Was it you?"

The governor shook his head.  "No, not I.  I told the government in
careful and unrhetorical language the incident of his coming here, and
what I did, and my reasons for doing it--that was all."

"And you being governor they took your advice.  See, my lord, if this
thing is done to him it will be to your own discomfiture.  It will hurt
you in the public service."

"Why, to hear you speak, mistress, it would almost seem you had a
fondness for the man who killed your father, who went to jail for it,
and--"

"And became a mutineer," intervened the girl flushing.  "Why not say all?
Why not catalogue his offences?  Fondness for the man who killed my
father, you say!  Yes, I had a deep and sincere fondness for him ever
since I met him at Playmore over seven years ago.  Yes, a fondness which
only his crime makes impossible.  But in all that really matters I am
still his friend.  He did not know he was killing my father, who had no
claims upon me, none at all, except that through him I have life and
being; but it is enough to separate us for ever in the eyes of the world,
and in my eyes.  Not morally, of course, but legally and actually.  He
and I are as far apart as winter and summer; we are parted for ever and
ever and ever."

Now at last she was inflamed.  Every nerve in her was alive.  All she had
ever felt for Dyck Calhoun came rushing to the surface, demanding
recognition, reasserting itself.  As she used the words, "ever and ever
and ever," it was like a Cordelia bidding farewell to Lear, her father,
for ever, for there was that in her voice which said: "It is final
separation, it is the judgment of Jehovah, and I must submit.  It is the
last word."

Lord Mallow saw his opportunity, and did not hesitate.  "No, you are
wrong, wholly wrong," he said.  "I did not bias what I said in my report
--a report I was bound to make--by any covert prejudice against Mr.
Calhoun.  I guarded myself especially"--there he lied, but he was an
incomparable liar--"lest it should be used against him.  It would appear,
however, that the new admiral's report with mine were laid together, and
the government came to its conclusion accordingly.  So I am bound to do
my duty."

"If you--oh, if you did your duty, you would not obey the command of the
government.  Are there not times when to obey is a crime, and is not this
one of them?  Lord Mallow, you would be doing as great a crime as Mr.
Dyck Calhoun ever committed, or could commit, if you put this order into
actual fact.  You are governor here, and your judgment would be accepted
--remember it is an eight weeks' journey to London at the least, and what
might not happen in that time!  Are you not given discretion?"

The governor nodded.  "Yes, I am given discretion, but this is an order."

"An order!" she commented.  "Then if it should not be fulfilled, break
it and take the consequences.  The principle should be--Do what is right,
and have no fear."

"I will think it over," answered the governor.  "What you say has immense
weight with me--more even than I have words to say.  Yes, I will think it
over--I promise you.  You are a genius--you prevail."

Her face softened, a new something came into her manner.  "You do truly
mean it?" she asked with lips that almost trembled.

It seemed to her that to do this thing for Dyck Calhoun was the least
that was possible, and it was perhaps the last thing she might ever be
able to do.  She realized how terrible it would be for him to be shorn of
the liberty he had always had; how dangerous it might be in many ways;
and how the people of the island might become excited by it--and
troublesome.

"Yes, I mean it," answered Lord Mallow.  "I mean it exactly as I say it."

She smiled.  "Well, that should recommend you for promotion," she said
happily.  "I am sure you will decide not to enforce the order, if you
think about it.  You shall be promoted, your honour, to a better place,"
she repeated, half-satirically.

"Shall I then?" he asked with a warm smile and drawing close to her.
"Shall I?  Then it can only be by your recommendation.  Ah, my dear, my
beautiful dear one," he hastened to add, "my life is possible
henceforward only through you.  You have taught me by your life and
person, by your beauty and truth, by your nobility of mind and character
how life should be lived.  I have not always deserved your good opinion
nor that of others.  I have fought duels and killed men; I have aspired
to place; I have connived at appointment; I have been vain, overbearing
and insistent on my rights or privileges; I have played the dictator here
in Jamaica; I have not been satisfied save to get my own way; but you
have altered all that.  Your coming here has given me a new outlook.
Sheila, you have changed me, and you can change me infinitely more.
I who have been a master wish to become your slave.  I want you--beloved,
I want you for my wife."

He reached out as though to take her hand, but she drew back from him.
His thrilling words had touched her, as she had seldom been touched, as
she had never been touched by any one save the man that must never be
hers; she was submerged for the moment in the flood of his eloquence, and
his yielding to her on the point of Dyck's imprisonment gave fresh accent
to his words.  Yet she could not, she dared not yet say yes to his
demand.

"My lord," she said, "oh, you have stirred me!  Yet I dare not reply to
you as you wish.  Life is hard as it is, and you have suddenly made it
harder.  What is more, I do not, I cannot, believe you.  You have loved
many.  Your life has been a covert menace.  Oh, I know what they said of
you in Ireland.  I know not of your life here.  I suppose it is
circumspect now; but in Ireland it was declared you were notorious with
women."

"It is a lie," he answered.  "I was not notorious.  I was no better and
no worse than many another man.  I played, I danced attendance, I said
soft nothings, but I was tied to no woman in all Ireland.  I was
frolicsome and adventurous, but no more.  There is no woman who can
say I used her ill or took from her what I did not--"

"Atone for, Lord Mallow?"

"Atone--no.  What I did not give return for, was what I was going to
say."

The situation was intense.  She was in a place from which there was no
escape except by flight or refusal.  She did not really wish to refuse.
Somehow, there had come upon her the desire to put all thought of Dyck
Calhoun out of her mind by making it impossible for her to think of him;
and marriage was the one sure and complete way--marriage with this man,
was it possible?  He held high position, he was her fellow countryman and
an Irish peer, and she was the daughter of an evil man, who was, above
all else, a traitor to his country, though Lord Mallow did not know that.
The only one she knew possessed of the facts was the man she desired to
save herself from in final way--Dyck Calhoun.  Her heart was for the
moment soft to Lord Mallow, in spite of his hatred of Dyck Calhoun.  The
governor was a man of charm in conversation.  He was born with rare
faculties.  Besides, he had knowledge of humanity and of women.  He knew
how women could be touched.  He had appealed to Sheila more by ability
than by aught else.  His concessions to her were discretion in a way.
They opened the route to her affections, as his place and title could not
do.

"No, no, no, believe me, Sheila, I was a man who had too many temptations
--that was all.  But I did not spoil my life by them, and I am here a
trusted servant of the government.  I am a better governor than your
first words to me would make you seem to think."

Her eyes were shining, her face was troubled, her tongue was silent.  She
knew not what to say.  She felt she could not say yes--yet she wanted to
escape from him.  Her good fortune did not desert her.  Suddenly the door
of the room opened and her mother entered.

"There is a member of your suite here, your honour, asking for you.  It
is of most grave importance.  It is urgent.  What shall I say?"

"Say nothing.  I am coming," said the governor.  "I am coming now."




CHAPTER XX

OUT OF THE HANDS OF THE PHILISTINES

That night the Maroons broke loose upon Jamaica, and began murder and
depredation against which the governor's activities were no check.
Estates were invaded, and men, women and children killed, or carried into
the mountains and held as hostages.  In the middle and western part of
the island the ruinous movements went on without being stayed; planters
and people generally railed at the governor, and said that through his
neglect these dark things were happening.  It was said he had failed to
punish offences by the Maroons, and this had given them confidence,
filling them with defiance.  They had one advantage not possessed by the
government troops and militia--they were masters of every square rod of
land in the middle and west of the island.  Their plan was to raid, to
ambush, to kill and to excite the slaves to rebel.

The first assault and repulse took place not far from Enniskillen, Dyck
Calhoun's plantation, and Michael Clones captured a Maroon who was
slightly wounded.

Michael challenged him thus: "Come now, my blitherin' friend, tell us
your trouble--why are you risin'?  You don't do this without cause--
what's the cause?"

The black man, naked except for a cloth about his loins, and with a small
bag at his hip, slung from a cord over his shoulder, showed his teeth in
a stark grimace.

"You're a newcomer here, massa, or you'd know we're treated bad," he
answered.  "We're robbed and trod on and there's no word kept with us.
We asked the governor for more land and he moved us off.  We warned him
against having one of our head young men flogged by a slave in the
presence of slaves--for we are free men, and he laughs.  So, knowing a
few strong men can bring many weak men to their knees, we rose.  I say
this--there's plenty weak men in Jamaica, men who don't know right when
they see it.  So we rose, massa, and we'll make Jamaica sick before we've
done.  They can't beat us, for we can ambush here, and shoot those that
come after us.  We hide, one behind this rock and one behind that, two or
three together, and we're safe.  But the white soldiers come all together
and beat drums and blow horns, and we know where they are, and so we
catch 'em and kill 'em.  You'll see, we'll capture captains and generals,
and we'll cut their heads off and bury them in their own guts."

He made an ugly grimace, and a loathsome gesture, and Michael Clones felt
the man ought to die.  He half drew his sword, but, thinking better of
it, he took the Maroon to the Castle and locked him up in a slave's hut,
having first bound him and put him in the charge of one he could trust.
But as he put the man away, he said:

"You talk of your people hiding, and men not being able to find you; but
did you never hear of bloodhounds, that can hunt you down, and chew you
up?  Did you never hear of them?"

The man's face wrinkled like a rag, for there is one thing the native
fears more than all else, and that is the tooth of the hound.  But he
gathered courage, and said: "The governor has no hounds.  There ain't
none in Jamaica.  We know dat--all of us know dat--all of us know dat,
massa."

Michael Clones laughed, and it was not pleasant to hear.  "It may be the
governor has no bloodhounds, and would not permit their being brought
into the island, but my master is bringing them in himself--a lot with
their drivers from Cuba, and you Maroons will have all you can do to
hide.  Sure, d'ye think every wan in the island is as foolish as the
governor?  If you do, y'are mistaken, and that's all there is to say."

"The hounds not here--in de island, massa!" declared the Maroon
questioningly.

"They'll be here within the next few hours, and then where will you and
your pals be?  You'll be caught between sharp teeth--nice, red, sharp,
bloody teeth; and you'll make good steak-better than your best olio."

The native gave a moan--it was the lament of one whose crime was come
tete-a-tete with its own punishment.

"That's the game to play," said Michael to himself as he fastened the
door tight.  "The hounds will settle this fool-rebellion quicker than
aught else.  Mr. Calhoun's a wise man, and he ought to be governor here.
Criminal?  As much as the angel Gabriel!  He must put down this
rebellion--no wan else can.  They're stronger, the Maroons, than ever
they've been.  They've planned this with skill, and they'll need a lot of
handlin'.  We're safe enough here, but down there at Salem--well, they
may be caught in the bloody net.  Bedad, that's sure."

A few moments afterwards he met Dyck Calhoun.  "Michael," said Dyck,
"things are safe enough here, but we've prepared!  The overseers,
bookkeepers and drivers are loyal enough.  But there are others not so
safe.  I'm going to Salem-riding as hard as I can, with six of our best
men.  They're not so daft at Salem as we are, Michael.  They won't know
how to act or what to do.  Darius Boland is a good man, but he's only had
Virginian experience, and this is different.  A hundred Maroons are as
good as a thousand white soldiers in the way the Maroons fight.  There
are a thousand of them, and they can lay waste this island, if they get
going.  So I shall stop them.  The hounds are outside the harbour now,
Michael.  The ship Vincent, bringing them, was sighted by a sloop two
days ago, making slowly for Kingston.  She should be here before we've
time to turn round.  Michael, the game is in our hands, if we play it
well.  Do you go down to Kingston and--"

He detailed what Michael was to do on landing the hounds, and laid out
plans for the immediate future.  "They're in danger at Salem, Michael, so
we must help them.  The hounds will settle this whole wretched business."

Michael told him of his prisoner, and what effect the threat about the
hounds had had.  A look of purpose came into Dyck's face.

"A hound is as fair as a gun, and hounds shall be used here in Jamaica.
The governor can't refuse their landing now.  The people would kill him
if he did.  It was I proposed it all."

"Look, sir--who's that?" asked Michael, as they saw a figure riding
under the palms not far away.

It was very early morning, and the light was dim yet, but there was
sufficient to make even far sight easy.  Dyck shaded his forehead with
his hand.

"It's not one of our people, Michael.  It's a stranger."

As the rider came on he was stopped by two of the drivers of the estate.
Dyck and Michael saw him hold up a letter, and a moment later he was on
his way to Dyck, galloping hard.  Arrived, he dropped to the ground, and
saluted Dyck.

"A letter from Salem, sir," he said, and handed it over to Dyck.

Dyck nodded, broke the seal of the letter and read it quickly.  Then he
nodded again and bade the man eat a hearty breakfast and return with him
on one of the Enniskillen horses, as his own would be exhausted.  "We'll
help protect Salem, my man," said Dyck.

The man grinned.  "That's good," he answered.  "They knew naught of the
rising when I left.  But the governor was there yesterday, and he'd
protect us."

"Nonsense, fellow, the governor would go straight to Spanish Town where
he belongs, when there is trouble."

When the man had gone, Dyck turned to his servant.  "Michael," he said,
"the news in the letter came from Darius Boland.  He says the governor
told him he had orders from England to confine me here at Enniskillen,
and he meant to do it.  We'll see how he does it.  If he sends his
marshals, we'll make Gadarene swine of them."

There was a smile at his lips, and it was contemptuous, and the lines of
his forehead told of resolve.  "Michael," he added, "we'll hunt Lord
Mallow with the hounds of our good fortune, for this war is our war.
They can't win it without me, and they shan't.  Without the hounds it may
be a two years' war--with the hounds it can't go beyond a week or so."

"If the hounds get here, sir!  But if they don't?"

Dyck laid his hand upon the sword at his side.  "If they don't get here,
Michael, still the war will be ours, for we understand fighting, and the
governor does not.  Confine me here, will he?  If he does, he'll be a
better man than I have ever known him, Michael.  In a few hours I shall
be at Salem, to do what he could not, and would not, do if he could.  His
love is as deep as water on a roof, no deeper.  He'll think first of
himself, and afterwards of the owner of Salem or any other.  Let me show
you what I mean to do once we've Salem free from danger.  Come and have a
look at my chart."

Some hours later Dyck Calhoun, with his six horsemen, was within a mile
or so of Salem.  They had ridden hard in the heat and were tired, but
there was high spirit in the men, for they were behind a trusted leader
--a man who ate little, but who did not disdain a bottle of Madeira or
a glass of brandy, and who made good every step of the way he went--
watchful, alert, careful, determined.  They cared little what his past
had been.  Jamaica was not a heaven for the good, but it was a haven for
many who had been ill-used elsewhere; where each man, as though he were
really in a new world, was judged by his daily actions and not by any
history of a hidden or an open past.  As they came across country, Dyck
always ahead, they saw how he responded to every sign of life in the
bush, how he moved always with discretion where ambush seemed possible.
They knew how on his own estate he never made mistakes of judgment;
that he held the balance carefully, and that his violences, rare and
tremendous, were not outbursts of an unregulated nature.  "You can't fool
Calhoun," was a common phrase in the language of Enniskillen, and there
were few in the surrounding country who would not have upheld its truth.

Now, to-day, he was almost moodily silent, reserved and watchful.  None
knew the eddies of life which struggled for mastery in him, nor of his
horrible disappointments.  None knew of his love for Sheila.  Yet all
knew that he had killed--or was punished for killing--Erris Boyne.  None
of them had seen Sheila, but all had heard of her, and the governor's
courtship of her, and all wondered why Dyck Calhoun should be doing what
clearly the governor should do.

Somehow, in spite of the criminal record with which Calhoun's life was
stained, they had a respect for him they did not have for Lord Mallow.
Dyck's life in Jamaica was clean; and his progress as a planter had been
free from black spots.  He even kept no mistress, and none had ever known
him to have to do with women, black, brown, or white.  He had never gone
a-Maying, as the saying was, and his only weakness or fault--if it was a
fault--was a fondness for the bottle of good wine which was ever open on
his table, and for tobacco in the smoking-leaf.  To-day he smoked
incessantly and carefully.  He threw no loose ends of burning tobacco
from cigar or pipe into the loose dry leaves and stiff-cut ground.  Yet
they knew the small clouds floating away from his head did not check his
observation.  That was proved beyond peradventure when they were within
sight of the homestead of Salem on an upland well-wooded.  It was in
apparently happy circumstances, for they could see no commotion about the
homestead; they saw men with muskets, evidently keeping guard--yet too
openly keeping guard, and so some said to each other.

Presently Dyck reined his horse.  Each man listened attentively, and eyed
the wood ahead of them, for it was clear Dyck suspected danger there.
For a moment there seemed doubt in Dyck's mind what to do, but presently
he had decided.

"Ride slow for Salem," he said.  "It's Maroons there in the bush.  They
are waiting for night.  They won't attack us now.  They're in ambush--of
that I'm sure.  If they want to capture Salem, they'll not give alarm by
firing on us, so if we ride on they'll think we haven't sensed them.  If
they do attack us, we'll know they are in good numbers, for they'll be
facing us as well as the garrison of Salem.  But keep your muskets ready.
Have a drink," he added, and handed his horn of liquor.  "If they see us
drink, and they will, they'll think we've only stopped to refresh, and
we'll be safe.  In any case, if they attack, fire your muskets at them
and ride like the devil.  Don't dismount and don't try to find them in
the rocks.  They'll catch us that way, as they've caught others.  It's a
poor game fighting hidden men.  I want to get them into the open down
below, and that's where they'll be before we're many hours older."

With this he rode on slightly ahead, and presently put his horse at a
gentle canter which he did not increase as they neared the place where
the black men ambushed.  Every man of the group behaved well.  None
showed nervousness, even when one of the horses, conscious of hidden
Maroons in the wood, gave a snort and made a sharp movement out of the
track, in an attempt to get greater speed.

That was only for an instant, however.  Yet every man's heart beat
faster as they came to the place where the ambush was.  Indeed, Dyck saw
a bush move, and had a glimpse of a black, hideous face which quickly
disappeared.  Dyck's imperturbable coolness kept them steady.  They even
gossiped of idle things loud enough for the hidden Maroons to hear.  No
face showed suspicion or alarm, as they passed, while all felt the
presence of many men in the underbrush.  Only when they had passed the
place, did they realize the fulness of the danger through which they had
gone.  Dyck talked to them presently without turning round, for that
might have roused suspicion, and while they were out of danger now,
there was the future and Dyck's plan which he now unfolded.

"They'll come down into the open before it's dark," he said quietly,
"and when they do that, we'll have 'em.  They've no chance to ambush in
the cane-fields now.  We'll get them in the open, and wipe them out.
Don't look round.  Keep steady, and we'll ride a little more quickly
soon."

A little later they cantered to the front door of the Salem homestead.

The first face they saw there was that of Darius Boland.  It had a look
of trouble.  Dyck explained.  "We thought you might not have heard of the
rise of the Maroons.  We have no ladies at Enniskillen.  We prepared, and
we're safe enough there, as things are.  Your ladies must go at once to
Spanish Town, unless--"

"Unless they stay here!  Well, they would not be unwise, for though the
slaves under the old management might have joined the Maroons, they will
not do so now.  We have got them that far.  But, Mr. Calhoun, the ladies
aren't here.  They rode away into the hills this morning, and they've not
come back.

"I was just sending a search party for them.  I did not know of the rise
of the Maroons."

"In what direction did they go?" asked Dyck with anxiety, though his
tone was even.

Darius Boland pointed.  "They went slightly northwest, and if they go as
I think they meant to do, they would come back the way you came in."

"They were armed?" Dyck asked sharply.

"Yes, they were armed," was the reply.  "Miss Llyn had a small pistol.
She learned to carry one in Virginia, and she has done so ever since we
came here."

"Listen, Boland," said Dyck with anxiety.  "Up there in the hills by
which we came are Maroons hidden, and they will invade this place to-
night.  We were ready to fight them, of course, as we came, but it's a
risky business, and we wanted to get them all if possible.  We couldn't
if we had charged them there, for they were well-ambushed.  My idea was
to let them get into the open between there and here, and catch them as
they came.  It would save our own men, and it would probably do for them.
If Mrs. and Miss Llyn come back that way, they will be in greater danger
than were we, for the Maroons were coming here to capture the ladies and
hold them as hostages; and they would not let them pass.  In any case,
the risk is immense.  The ladies must be got to Spanish Town, for the
Maroons are desperate.  They know we have no ships of the navy here now,
and they rely on their raiding powers and the governor's weakness.  They
have placed their men in every part of the middle and western country,
and they came upon my place last evening and were defeated.  Several were
killed and one taken prisoner.  They can't be marched upon like an army.
Their powers of ambush are too great.  They must be run down by
bloodhounds.  It's the only way."

"Bloodhounds--there are no bloodhounds here!" said Darius Boland.  "And
if there were, wouldn't pious England make a fuss?"

Dyck Calhoun was about to speak sharply, but he caught sarcasm in Darius
Boland's face, and he said: "I have the bloodhounds.  They're outside the
harbour now, and I intend to use them."

"If the governor allows you!" remarked Darius Boland ironically.  "He
does not like you or your bloodhounds.  He has his orders, so he says."

Dyck made an impatient gesture.  "I will not submit to his orders.
I have earned my place in this is land, and he shall not have his way.
The ladies must be brought to Spanish Town, and placed where the
governor's men can protect them."

"The governor's men!  Indeed.  They might as well stay here; we can
surely protect them."

"Perhaps, for you have skill, Boland, and you are cautious, but is it
fair for ladies to stay in this isolated spot with murderers about?  When
the ladies come back, they must be sent at once to Spanish Town.  Can't
you see?"

Darius Boland bowed.  "What you say goes always," he remarked, "but tell
me, sir, who will take the ladies to Spanish Town?"

Dyck Calhoun read the inner meaning of Darius Boland's words.  They did
not put him out of self-control.  It was not a time to dwell on such
things.  It was his primary duty to save the ladies.

"Come, Boland," he said sharply, "I shall start now.  We must find the
ladies.  What sort of a country is it through which they pass?"  He
pointed.

"Bad enough in some ways.  There's an old monastery of the days of the
Spaniards up there"--he pointed or the ruins of one, and it is a pleasant
place to rest.  I doubt not they rested there, if--"

"If they reached it!" remarked Dyck with crisp inflection.  "Yes, they
would rest there--and it would be a good place for ambush by the Maroons,
eh?"

"Good enough from the standpoint of the Maroons," was the reply, the
voice slightly choked.

"Then we must go there.  It's a damnable predicament--no, you must not
come with me!  You must keep command here."

He hastily described the course to be followed by those of his own men
who stayed to defend, and then said: "Our horses are fagged.  If you loan
us four I'll see they are well cared for, and returned in kind or cash.
I'll take three of my men only, and loan you three of the best.  We'll
fill our knapsacks and get away, Boland."

A few moments later, Calhoun and his three men, with a guide added by
Boland, had started away up the road which had been ridden by Mrs. Llyn
and Sheila.  One thing was clear, the Maroons on the hill did not know of
the absence of Sheila and her mother, or they would not be waiting.  He
did not like the long absence of the ladies.  It was ominous at such a
time.

Dyck and his small escort got away by a road unseen from where the
Maroons were, and when well away put their horses to a canter and got
into the hills.  Once in the woods, however, they rode alertly, and
Dyck's eyes were everywhere.  He was quick to see a bush move, to observe
the flick of a branch, to catch the faintest sound of an animal origin.
He was obsessed with anxiety, for he had a dark fear that some ill had
happened to the two.  His blood almost dried in his veins when he thought
of the fate which had followed the capture of ladies in other islands
like Haiti or Grenada.

It did not seem possible that these beautiful women should have fallen
into the outrageous hands of savages.  He knew the girl was armed, and
that before harm might come to her she would end her own life and her
mother's also; but if she was caught from behind, and the opportunity of
suicide should not be hers--what then?

Yet he showed no agitation to his followers.  His eyes were, however,
intensely busy, and every nerve was keen to feel.  Life in the open had
developed in him the physical astuteness of the wild man, and he had all
the gifts that make a supreme open-air fighter.  He sensed things; but
with him it was feeling, and not scent or hearing; his senses were such
perfect listeners.  He had the intense perception of a delicate plant,
those wonderful warnings which only come to those who live close to
nature, who study from feeling the thousand moods and tenses of living
vegetables and animal life.  He was a born hunter, and it was not easy to
surprise him when every nerve was sharp with premonition.  He saw the
marks of the hoofs of Sheila's and her mother's horses in the road,
knowing them by the freshness of the indentations.  An hour, two hours
passed, and they then approached the monasterial ruin of which Boland had
spoken.  Here, suddenly, Dyck dropped to the ground, for he saw
unmistakable signs of fright or flurry in the hoofmarks.

He quickly made examination, and there were signs of women's feet and
also a bare native foot, but no signs of struggle or disturbance.  The
footprints, both native and white, were firmly placed, but the horses'
hoof-prints showed agitation.  Presently the hoofmarks became more
composed again.  Suddenly one of Dyck's supporters exclaimed he had
picked up a small piece of ribbon, evidently dropped to guide those who
might come searching.  Presently another token was found in a loose bit
of buckle from a shoe.  Then, suddenly, upon the middle of the road was a
little pool of blood and signs that a body had lain in the dust.

"She shot a native here," said Dyck to his men coolly.  "There are no
signs of a struggle," remarked the most observant.

"We must go carefully here, for they may have been imprisoned in the
ruin.  You stay here, and I'll go forward," he added, with a hand on his
sword.  "I've an idea they're here.  We have one chance, my lads, and
let's keep our heads.  If anything should happen to me, have a try
yourselves, and see what you can do.  The ladies must be freed, if
they're there.  There's not one of you that won't stand by to the last,
but I want your oath upon it.  By the heads or graves of your mothers,
lads, you'll see it through?  Up with your hands!"

Their hands went up.  "By our mothers' heads or graves!" they said in low
tones.

"Good!" he replied.  "I'll go on ahead.  If you hear a call, or a shot
fired, forward swiftly."

An instant later he plunged into the woods to the right of the road, by
which he would come upon the ruins from the rear.  He held a pistol as he
stole carefully yet quickly forward.  He was anxious there should be no
delay, but he must not be rash.  Without meeting anyone he came near the
ruins.  They showed serene in the shade of the trees.

Then suddenly came from the ruin a Maroon of fierce, yet not cruel
appearance, who laid a hand behind his ear, and looked steadfastly
towards that part of the wood where Dyck was.  It was clear he had heard
something.  Dyck did not know how many Maroons there might be in the
ruins, or near it, and he did not attack.  It was essential he should
know the strength of his foe; and he remained quiet.  Presently the
native turned as though to go back into the ruins, but changed his mind,
and began to tour the stony, ruined building.  Dyck waited, and presently
saw more natives come from the ruins, and after a moment another three.
These last were having an argument of some stress, for they pulled at
each other's arms and even caught at the long cloths of their
headdresses.

"They've got the ladies there," thought Dyck, "but they've done them no
harm yet."  He waited moments longer to see if more natives were coming
out, then said to himself: "I'll make a try for it now.  It won't do to
run the risk of going back to bring my fellows up.  It's a fair risk, but
it's worth taking."

With that he ran softly to the entrance from which he had seen the men
emerge.  Looking in he saw only darkness.  Then suddenly he gave a soft
call, the call of an Irish bird-note which all people in Ireland--in the
west and south of Ireland--know.  If Sheila was alive and in the place
she would answer it, he was sure.  He waited a moment, and there was no
answer.  Then he called again, and in an instant, as though from a great
distance, there came the reply of the same note, clearer and more bell-
like than his own.

"She's there!" he said, and boldly entered the place.  It was dark and
damp, but ahead was a break in the solid monotony of ruined wall, and he
saw a clear stream of light beyond.  He stole ahead, got over the stone
obstructions, and came on to a biggish room which once had been a
refectory.  Looking round it he saw three doors--one evidently led into
the kitchen, one into a pantry, and one into a hall.  It was clear the
women were alone, or some one would have come in answer to his call.  Who
could tell when they would come?  There was no time to be lost.  With an
instinct, which proved correct, he opened the door leading into the old
kitchen, and there, tied, and with pale faces, but in no other sense
disordered, were Sheila and her mother.  He put his fingers to his lips,
then hastily cut them loose from the ropes of bamboo, and helped them to
their feet.

"Can you walk?" he whispered to Mrs. Llyn.  She nodded assent, and
braced herself.  "Then here," he said, "is a pistol.  Come quickly.  We
may have to fight our way out.  Don't be afraid to fire, but take good
aim first.  I have some men in the wood beyond where you shot the
native," he added to Sheila.  "They'll come at once if I call, or a shot
is fired.  Keep your heads, and we shall be all right.  They're a
dangerous crew, but we'll beat them this time.  Come quickly."

Presently they were in the refectory, and a moment after that they were
over the stones, and near the entrance, and then a native appeared,
armed.  Without an instant's hesitation Dyck ran forward, and as he
entered, put his sword into the man's vitals, and he fell, calling out as
he fell.

"The rest will be on us now," said Dyck, "and we must keep going."

Three more natives appeared, and he shot two.

Catching a pistol from Sheila he aimed at the third native and wounded
him, but did not kill him.  The man ran into the wood.  Presently more
Maroons came--a dozen or more, and rushed for the entrance.  They were
met by Dyck's fire, and now also Sheila fired and brought down her man.
Dyck wounded another, and in great skill loaded again, but at that moment
three of the Maroons rushed down into the ruins.

They were astonished to see Dyck there, and more astonished to receive--
first one and then another--his iron in their bowels.  The third man made
a stroke at Dyck with his lance, and only gashed Dyck's left arm.  Then
he turned and fled out into the open, and was met by a half-dozen others.
They all were about to rush the entrance when suddenly four shots behind
them brought three of them down, and the rest fled into the wood
shouting.  In another moment Dyck and the ladies were in the open, and
making for the woods, the women in front, the men behind, loading their
muskets as they ran, and alive to the risks of the moment.

The dresses of the ladies were stained and soiled with dust and damp, but
otherwise they seemed little the worse for the adventure, save that Mrs.
Llyn was shaken, and her face was pale.

"How did you know where we were, and why did you come?" she said, after
they had got under way, having secured the horses which Sheila and her
mother had ridden.

Briefly Dyck explained how as soon as he had dealt with the revolt of the
Maroons at his own place he came straight to Salem.

"I knew you were unused to the ways of the country and to our sort of
native here, and I felt sure you would not refuse to take help--even mine
at a pinch.  But what happened to you?" he added, turning to Sheila.

It was only yesterday Sheila had determined to cut him wholly out of her
life by assenting to marry Lord Mallow.  Yet here he was, and she could
scarcely bear to look into his face.  He was shut off from her by every
fact of human reason.  These were days when the traditions of family life
were more intense than now; when to kill one's own father was not so bad
as to embrace, as it were, him or her who had killed that father.  Sheila
felt if she were normal she ought to feel abhorrence against Dyck; yet
she felt none at all, and his saving them had given a new colour to
their relations.  If he had killed her father, the traitor, he had saved
themselves from death or freed them from a shameful captivity which might
have ended in black disaster.  She kept herself in hand, and did not show
confusion.

"We had not heard of the rising of the Maroons," she said.  "The governor
was at Salem yesterday and a message came from his staff to say would he
come at once.  His staff were not at Salem, but at the next plantation
nearer to Spanish Town.  Lord Mallow went.  If he suspected the real
trouble he said naught, but was gone before you could realize it.  The
hours went by, night came and passed, then my mother and I, this morning,
resolved to ride to the monastery, and then round by the road you
travelled back to Salem."

"There are Maroons now on that hill above your place.  They were in
ambush when we passed, but we took no notice.  It was not wise to invite
trouble.  Some of us would have been killed, but--"

He then told what had been in his mind, and what might be the outcome--
the killing or capture of the whole group, and safety for all at Salem.

When he had finished, she continued her story.  "We rode for an hour
unchallenged, and then came the Maroons.  At first I knew not what to do.
We were surrounded before we could act.  I had my pistol ready, and there
was the chance of escape--the faint chance--if we drove our horses on;
but there was also the danger of being fired at from behind!  So we sat
still on our horses, and I asked them how they dared attack white ladies.
I asked them if they had never thought what vengeance the governor would
take.  They did not understand my words, but they grasped the meaning,
and one of them, the leader, who understood English, was inclined to have
reason.  As it was, we stopped what might have been our murder by saying
it would be wiser to hold us as hostages, and that we were Americans.
That man was killed--by you.  A shot from your pistol brought him down as
he rushed forward to enter the ruins.  But he took care of us as we went
forward, and when I shot one of his followers for laying his hand upon me
in the saddle--he caught me by the leg under my skirt--he would allow no
retaliation.  I knew boldness was the safe part to play.

"But in the end we were bound with ropes as you found us, while they
waited for more of their people to come, those, no doubt, you found
ambushed on the hill.  As we lay, bound as you saw us, the leader said to
us we should be safe if he could have his way, but there were bad
elements among the Maroons, and he could not guarantee it.  Yet he knew
the government would pay for our release, would perhaps give the land for
which they had asked with no avail.  We must, therefore, remain
prisoners.  If we made no efforts to escape, it would be better in the
end.  "Keep your head steady, missy, try no tricks, and all may go well;
but I have bad lot, and they may fly at you."  That was the way he spoke.
It made our blood run cold, for he was one man, with fair mind, and he
had around him men, savage and irresponsible.  Black and ruthless, they
would stop at nothing except the sword at their throats or the teeth in
their flesh."

"The teeth in their flesh!" said Dyck with a grim smile.  "Yes, that is
the only way with them.  Naught can put the fear of God into them except
bloodhounds, and that Lord Mallow will not have.  He has been set against
it until now.  But this business will teach him.  He may change his mind
now, since what he cares for is in danger--his place and his ladies!"

Mrs. Llyn roused herself to say: "No, no, Mr. Calhoun, you must not say
that of him.  His place may be in danger, but not his ladies.  He has no
promise of that.  .  .  .  And see, Mr. Calhoun, I want to say that, in
any case, you have paid your debt, if you owe one to us.  For a life
taken you have given two lives--to me and my girl.  I speak as one who
has a right to say it!  Erris Boyne was naught to me at all, but he was
my daughter's father, and that made everything difficult.  I could make
him cease to be my husband, and I did; but I could not make him cease to
be her father."

"I had no love for Erris Boyne," said Sheila.  Misery was heavy on her.
"None at all, but he was my father."

"See, all's well still at Salem," said Dyck waving a hand as though to
change the talk.  "All's as we left it."

There in the near distance lay Salem, serene.  All tropical life about
seemed throbbing with life and soaking with leisure.

"We were in time," he added.  "The Maroons are still in ambush.  The sun
is beginning to set though, and the trouble may begin.  We shall get
there about sundown--safe, thank God!"

"Safe, thank God--and you," said Sheila's mother.




CHAPTER XXI

THE CLASH OF RACE

In the King's House at Spanish Town the governor was troubled.  All his
plans and prophecies had come to naught.  He had been sure there would be
no rebellion of the Maroons, and he was equally sure that his career
would be made hugely successful by marriage with Sheila Llyn--but the
Maroons had revolted, and the marriage was not settled!

Messages had been coming from the provost-marshal-general of reports from
the counties of Middlesex and Cornwall, that the Maroons were ravaging
everywhere and that bands of slaves had joined them with serious
disasters to the plantation people.  Planters, their wives and children
had been murdered, and in some districts the natives were in full
possession and had destroyed, robbed and ravaged.  He had summoned his
commander of the militia forces, had created special constables, and
armed them, and had sent a ship to the Bahamas to summon a small British
fleet there.  He had also mapped out a campaign against the Maroons,
which had one grave demerit--it was planned on a basis of ordinary
warfare and not with Jamaica conditions in mind.  The provost-marshal
warned him of the futility of these plans, but he had persisted in them.
He had later been shocked, however, by news that the best of his colonels
had been ambushed and killed, and that others had been made prisoners and
treated with barbarity.  From everywhere, except one, had come either
news of defeat or set-back.

One good thing he immediately did: he threw open King's House to the
wounded, and set the surgeons to work, thereby checking bitter criticism
and blocking the movement rising against him.  For it was well known he
had rejected all warnings, had persisted in his view that trust in the
Maroons and fair treatment of themselves and the slaves were all that was
needed.

As he walked in the great salon or hall of audience where the wounded
lay--over seventy feet long and thirty wide, with great height, to which
beds and conveniences had been hastily brought--it seemed to him that he
was saving, if barely saving, his name and career.  Standing beside one
of the Doric pillars which divided the salon from an upper and lower
gallery of communications, he received the Custos of Kingston.  As the
Custos told his news the governor's eyes were running along the line of
busts of ancient and modern philosophers on the gilt brackets between the
Doric pilasters.  They were all in bronze, and his mind had the doleful
imagination of brown slave heroes placed there in honour for services
given to the country.  The doors at the south end of the great salon
opened now and then into the council chambers beyond, and he could see
the surgeons operating on the cases returned from the plantations.

"Your honour," said the Custos, "things have suddenly improved.  The
hounds have come from Cuba and in the charge of ten men--ten men with
sixty hounds.  That is the situation at the moment.  All the people at
Kingston are overjoyed.  They see the end of the revolt."

"The hounds!" exclaimed the governor.  "What hounds?"

"The hounds sent for by Dyck Calhoun--surely your honour remembers!"

Surely his honour did, and recalled also that he forbade the importation
of the hounds; but he could not press that prohibition now.  "The
mutineer and murderer, Dyck Calhoun!" he exclaimed.  "And they have
come!"

"Yes, your honour, and gone with Calhoun's man, Michael Clones, to
Salem."

"To Salem--why Salem?"

"Because Calhoun is there fighting the Maroons in that district.  The
Maroons first captured the ladies of Salem as they rode in the woods.
They were beaten at that game by Calhoun and four men; the ladies then
were freed and taken back to Salem.  Then the storm burst on Salem--
burst, but did not overwhelm.  Calhoun saved the situation there; and
when his hounds arrive at Salem he will range over the whole country.
It is against the ideas of the people of England, but it does our work
in Jamaica as nothing else could.  It was a stroke of genius, the hounds,
your honour!"

Lord Mallow was at once relieved and nonplussed.  No doubt the policy of
the hounds was useful, and it might save his own goose, but it was, in a
sense, un-English to hunt the wild man with hounds.  Yet was it un-
English?  What was the difference between a sword and a good sharp tooth
save that the sword struck and let go and the tooth struck and held on?
It had been said in England that to hunt negroes with hounds was
barbarous and cowardly; but criminals were hunted with bloodhounds
in all civilized countries; and as for cowardice, the man who had sent
for these hounds was as brave as any old crusader!  No, Dyck Calhoun
could not be charged with cowardice, and his policy of the hounds might
save the island and the administration in the end.  They had arrived in
the very hour of Jamaica's and Lord Mallow's greatest peril.  They had
gone on to the man who had been sane enough to send for them.

"Tell me about the landing of the hounds," said Lord Mallow.

"It was last night about dusk that word came from the pilot's station
at Port Royal that the vessel Vincent was making for port, and that she.
came from Cuba.  Presently Michael Clones, the servant of Dyck Calhoun,
came also to say that the Vincent was the ship bringing Calhoun's hounds
from Cuba, and asking permit for delivery.  This he did because he
thought you were opposed to the landing.  In the light of our position
here, we granted the delivery.

"When the vessel came to anchor, the hounds with their drivers were
landed.  The landing was the signal for a great display on the part of
the people and the militia--yes, the militia shared in the applause, your
honour!  They had had a taste of war with the Maroons and the slaves, and
they were well inclined to let the hounds have their chance.  Resolutions
were then passed to approach your honour and ask that full powers be
given to Calhoun to pursue the war without thought of military precedent
or of Calhoun's position.  He has no official place in the public life
here, but he is powerful with the masses.  It is rumoured you have an
order to confine him to his plantation; but to apply it would bring
revolution in Jamaica.  There are great numbers of people who love his
courage, what he did for the King's navy, and for his commercial success
here, and they would resent harsh treatment of him.  They are aware, your
honour, that he and you knew each other in Ireland, and they think you
are hard on him.  People judge not from all the facts, but from what they
see and hear."

During the Custos' narrative, Lord Mallow was perturbed.  He had the
common sense to know that Dyck Calhoun, ex-convict and mutineer as he
was, had personal power in the island, which he as governor had not been
able to get, and Dyck had not abused that power.  He realized that Dyck's
premonition of an outbreak and sending for the hounds was a stroke
of genius.  He recalled with anger Dyck's appearance, in spite of
regulations, in trousers at the King's ball and his dancing with a black
woman, and he also realized that it was a cool insult to himself.  It was
then he had given the home authorities information which would poison
their mind against Dyck, and from that had come the order to confine him
to his plantation.

Yet he felt the time had come when he might use Dyck for his own
purposes.  That Dyck should be at Salem was a bitter dose, but that could
amount to nothing, for Sheila could never marry the man who had killed
her father, however bad and mad her father was.  Yet it gravelled his
soul that Dyck should be doing service for the lady to whom he had
offered his own hand and heart, and from whom he had had no word of
assent.  It angered him against himself that he had not at once sent
soldiers to Salem to protect it.  He wished to set himself right with
Sheila and with the island people, and how to do so was the question.

First, clearly, he must not apply the order to confine Dyck to his
plantation; also he must give Dyck authority to use the hounds in
hunting down the Maroons and slaves who were committing awful crimes.
He forthwith decided to write, asking Dyck to send him outline of his
scheme against the rebels.  That he must do, for the game was with Dyck.

"How long will it take the hounds to get to Salem?" he asked the Custos
presently in his office, with deepset lines in his face and a determined
look in his eyes.  He was an arrogant man, but he was not insane, and he
wished to succeed.  It could only be success if he dragged Jamaica out of
this rebellion with flying colours, and his one possible weapon was the
man whom he detested.

"Why, your honour, as we sent them by wagons and good horses they should
be in Dyck Calhoun's hands this evening.  They should be there by now
almost, for they've been going for hours, and the distance is not great."

The governor nodded, and began to write.  A halfhour later he handed to
the Custos what he had written.

"See what you think of that, Custos," he said.  "Does it, in your mind,
cover the ground as it should?"

The Custos read it all over slowly and carefully, weighing every word.
Presently he handed back the paper.  "Your honour, it is complete and
masterly," he said.  "It puts the crushing of the revolt into the hands
of Mr. Calhoun, and nothing could be wiser.  He has the gifts of a
leader, and he will do the job with no mistake, and in a time of crisis
like this, that is essential.  You have given him the right to order the
militia to obey him, and nothing could be better.  He will organize like
a master.  We haven't forgotten his fight on the Ariadne.  Didn't the
admiral tell the story at the dinner we gave him of how this ex-convict
and mutineer, by sheer genius, broke the power of the French at the
critical moment and saved our fleet, though it was only three-fourths
that of the French?"

"You don't think the French will get us some day?" asked the governor
with a smile.

"I certainly don't since our defences have been improved.  Look at the
sixty big cannon on Fort Augusta!  They'd be knocked to smithereens
before they could get into the quiet waters of the harbour.  Don't forget
the narrows, your honour.  Then there's the Apostle's Battery with its
huge shot, and the guns of Fort Royal would give them a cross-fire that
would make them sick.  Besides, we could stop them within the shoals and
reefs and narrow channels before they got near the inner circle.  It
would only be the hand of God that would get them in, and it doesn't work
for Frenchmen these days, I observe.  No, this place is safe, and King's
House will be the home of British governors for many a century."

"Ah, that's your gallant faith, and no doubt you are right, but go on
with your tale of the hounds," said Lord Mallow.

"Your honour, as the hounds went away with Michael Clones there was
greater applause than I have ever seen in the island except when Rodney
defeated De Grasse.  Imagine a little sloop in the wash of the seas and
the buccaneers piling down on him, and no chance of escape, and then a
great British battleship appearing, and the situation saved--that was how
we were placed here till the hounds arrived.

"Your honour, this morning's--this early morning's exit of the hounds was
like a procession of veterans to Walhalla.  There was the sun breaking
over the tops of the hills, a crimsonish, greyish, opaline touch of soft
sprays or mists breaking away from the onset of the sunrise; and all the
trees with night-lips wet sucking in the sun and drinking up the light
like an overseer at a Christmas breakfast; and you know what that is.
And all the shore, rocky and sandy, rough and smooth, happy and homely,
shimmering in the radiance.  And hundreds of Creoles and coloured folk
beating the ground in agitation, and slaves a-plenty carrying boxes to
the ships that are leaving, and white folk crowding the streets, and
bugles blowing, and the tramp of the militia, and the rattle of carts on
the cobble-stones, and the voices of the officers giving orders, and
turmoil everywhere.

"Then, suddenly, the sharp sound of a long whip and a voice calling, and
there rises out of the landing place the procession--the sixty dogs in
three wagons, their ten drivers with their whips, but keeping order by
the sound of their voices, low, soft, and peculiar, and then the horses
starting into a quick trot which presently would become a canter--and the
hounds were off to Salem!  There could be no fear with the hounds loose
to do the hunting."

"But suppose when they get to Salem their owner is no more."

The Custos laughed.  "Him, your honour--him no more!  Isn't he the man
of whom the black folk say: "Lucky buckra--morning, lucky new-comer!"
If that's his reputation, and the coming of his hounds just when the
island most needed them is good proof of it, do you think he'll be killed
by a lot of dirty Maroons!  Ah, Calhoun's a man with the luck of the
devil, your honour!  He has the pull--as sure as heaven's above he'll
make success.  If you command your staff to have this posted as a
proclamation throughout the island, it will do as much good as a thousand
soldiers.  The military officers will not object, they know how big a man
he is, and they have had enough.  The news is not good from all over the
island, for there are bad planters and bad overseers, and they've
poisoned large fields of men in many quarters of the island, and things
are wrong.

"But this proclamation will put things right.  It will stop the slaves
from revolting; it will squelch the Maroons, and I'm certain sure Calhoun
will have Maroons ready to fight for us, not against us, before this
thing is over.  I tell you, your honour, it means the way out--that's
what it means.  So, if you'll give me your order, keeping a copy of it
for the provost-marshal, I'll see it's delivered to Dyck Calhoun before
morning--perhaps by midnight.  It's not more than a six hours' journey
in the ordinary way."

At that moment an aide-de-camp entered, and with grave face presented to
the governor the last report from the provost-marshal-general.  Then he
watched the governor read the report.

"Ten more killed and twenty wounded!" said the governor.  "It must be
stopped."

He gave the Custos the letter to Dyck Calhoun, and a few moments later
handed the proclamation to his aide-de-camp.

"That will settle the business, your honour," said the aide-de-camp as he
read the proclamation.




CHAPTER XXII

SHEILA HAS HER SAY

"Then, tell me please, what you know of the story," said the governor to
Sheila at King's House one afternoon two weeks later.  "I only get meagre
reports from the general commanding.  But you close to the intimate
source of the events must know all."

Sheila shrank at the suggestion in the governor's voice, but she did not
resent it.  She had purposes which she must carry out, and she steeled
herself.  She wanted to get from Lord Mallow a pledge concerning Dyck
Calhoun, and she must be patient.

"I know nothing direct from Mr. Calhoun, your honour!" she said, "but
only through his servant, Michael Clones, who is a friend of my Darius
Boland, and they have met often since the first outbreak.  You know, of
course, what happened at Port Louise--how the Maroons seized and murdered
the garrison, how families were butchered when they armed first, how
barbarism broke loose and made all men combine to fight the rebels.  Even
before Mr. Calhoun came they had had record of a sack of human ears, cut
from the dead rebel-slaves, when they had been killed by faithful slaves,
and good progress was made.  But the revolters fixed their camps on high
rocks, and by blowing of shells brought many fresh recruits to the
struggle.  It was only when Mr. Calhoun came with his hounds that
anything decisive was done.  For the rebels--Maroons and slaves--were
hid, well entrenched and cautious, and the danger was becoming greater
every day.  On Mr. Calhoun's arrival, he was almost caught in ambush,
being misled, and saved himself only by splendid markmanship.  He was
attacked by six rebels of whom he killed four, and riding his wounded
horse over the other two he escaped.  Then he set the hounds to work and
the rebellion in that district was soon over."

"It was gathering strength with increasing tragedy elsewhere," remarked
the governor.  "Some took refuge in hidden places, and came out only to
steal, rob, and murder--and worse.  In one place, after a noted slave,
well known for his treachery, had been killed--Khoftet was his name--
his head was cut off by slaves friendly to us and his heart roasted and
eaten.  There is but one way to deal with these people.  No gaming or
drinking must be allowed, blowing of shells or beating of drums must be
forbidden, and every free negro or mulatto must wear on his arm a sign--
perhaps a cross in blue or red."

"Slavery is doomed," said Sheila firmly.  "Its end is not far off."

"Well, they still keep slaves in the land of Washington and Alexander
Hamilton.  They are better off here at any rate than in their own
country, where they were like animals among whom they lived.  Here they
are safe from poverty, cared for in sickness, and have no fear of being
handed over to the keepers of carrion, or being the food of the
gallinaso.  They can feed their fill on fricasees of macaca worms and
steal without punishment teal or ring-tailed pigeons and black crabs from
the massa."

"But they are not free.  They are atoms in heaps of dust.  They have no
rights--no liberties."

Sheila was agitated, but she showed no excitement.

She seemed to Lord Mallow like one who had perfect control of herself,
and was not the victim of anticipation.  She seemed, save for her dark
searching eyes, like one who had gone through experience which had
disciplined her to control.  Only her hands were demonstrative--yet
quietly so.  Any one watching her closely would have seen that her hands
were sensitive, expressed even more markedly than her eyes or lips what
were her feelings.  Her tragedy had altered her in one sense.  She was
paler and thinner than ever she had been, but there was enough of her,
and that delicately made, which gave the governor a thrill of desire to
make her his own for the rest of his life or hers.  He had also gone
through much since they had last met, and he had seen his own position in
the balance--uncertain, troubled, insecure.  He realized that he had lost
reputation, which had scarcely been regained by his consent to the use of
the hounds and giving Dyck Calhoun a free hand, as temporary head of the
militia.  He could not put him over the regular troops, but as the
general commanding was, in effect, the slave of Dyck Calhoun, there was
no need for anxiety.

Dyck Calhoun had smashed the rebellion, had quieted the island, had
risen above all the dark disturbances of revolt like a master.  He had
established barracks and forts at many points in the island, and had
stationed troops in them; he had subdued Maroons and slaves by the
hounds.  Yet he had punished only the chief of those who had been in
actual rebellion, and had repressed the violent punishments of the
earlier part of the conflict.  He had forbidden any one to be burned
alive, and had ordered that no one should be executed without his first
judging--with the consent of the governor!--the facts of the case.

Dyck had built up for himself a reputation as no one in all the history
of the island had been able to do.  He commanded by more than official
authority--by personality and achievement.  There was no one in the
island but knew they had been saved by his prudence, foresight and skill.
It was to their minds stupendous and romantic.  Fortunately they showed
no strong feeling against Lord Mallow.  By placing King's House at
disposal as a hospital, and by gifts of food and money to wives and
children of soldiers and civilians, the governor had a little eradicated
his record of neglect.

Lord Mallow had a way with him when he chose to use it.  He was not
without the gift for popularity, and he saw now that he could best attain
it by treating Dyck Calhoun well.  He saw troops come and go, he listened
to grievances, he corrected abuses, he devised a scheme for nursing, he
planned security for the future, he gave permission for buccaneer trading
with the United States, he had by legislative order given the Creoles a
better place in the civic organism.  This was a time for broad policy--
for distribution of cassavi bread, yams and papaws, for big, and maybe
rough, display of power and generosity.  He was not blind to the fact
that he might by discreet courses impress favourably his visitor.  All he
did was affected by that thought.  He could not but think that Sheila
would judge of him by what he did as much as by what he said.

He looked at her now with interest and longing.  He loved to hear her
talk, and she had information which was no doubt truer than most he
received--was closer to the brine, as it were.

"What more can you tell me of Mr. Calhoun and his doings?" he asked
presently.  "He is lucky in having so perfect a narrator of his
histories--yet so unexpected a narrator."

A flush stole slowly up Sheila's face, and gave a glow even to the roots
of her hair.  She could not endure these references to the dark gulf
between her and Dyck Calhoun.

"My lord," she said sharply, "it is not meet that you should say such
things.  Mr. Calhoun was jailed for killing my father--let it be at that.
The last time you saw me you offered me your hand and heart.  Well, do
you know I had almost made up my mind to accept your hand, when the news
of this trouble was brought to you, and you left us--to ourselves and our
dangers!"

The governor started.  "You are as unfriendly as a 'terral garamighty,'
you make me draw my breath thick as the blackamoors, as they say.  I did
what I thought best," he said.  "I did not think you would be in any
danger.  I had not heard of the Maroons being so far south as Salem."

"Yet it is the man who foresees chances that succeeds, as you should know
by now, your honour.  I was greatly touched by the offer you made me--
indeed, yes," she added, seeing the rapt eager look in his face.  "I had
been told what had upset me, that Dyck Calhoun was guilty of killing my
father, and all the world seemed dreadful.  Yes, in the reaction, it was
almost on my tongue to say yes to you, for you are a good talker, you had
skill in much that you did, and with honest advice from a wife might do
much more.  So I was in a mind to say yes.  I had had much to try me,
indeed, so very much.  Ever since I first saw Dyck Calhoun he had been
the one man who had ever influenced me.  He was for ever in my mind even
when he was in prison--oh, what is prison, what is guilt even to a girl
when she loves!  Yes, I loved him.  There it was.  He was ever in my
mind, and I came here to Jamaica--he was here--for what else?  Salem
could have been restored by Darius Boland or others, or I could have sold
it.  I came to Jamaica to find him here--unwomanly, perhaps, you will
say."

"Unusual only with a genius--like you."

"Then you do not speak what is in your mind, your honour.  You say what
you feel is the right thing to say--the slave of circumstances.  I will
be wholly frank with you.  I came here to see Dyck Calhoun, for I knew he
would not come to see me.  Yes, there it was, a real thing in his heart.
If he had been a lesser man than he is, he would have come to America
when he was freed from prison.  But he did not, would not, come.  He knew
he had been found guilty of killing my father, and that for him and me
there could be no marriage--indeed he never asked me to marry him.

"Yet I know he would have done so if he could.  When I came to know
what he was jailed for doing, I felt there was no place for him and me
together in the world.  Yet my heart kept crying out to him, and I felt
there was but one thing left for me to do, and that was to make it
impossible for me to think of him even, or for him to think of me.  Then
you came and offered me your hand.  It was a hand most women might have
been glad to accept from the standpoint of material things.  And you were
Irish like myself, and like the boy I loved.  I was sick of the robberies
of life and time, and I wanted to be out of it all in some secure place.
What place so secure from the sorrow that was eating at my heart as
marriage!  It said no to every stir of feeling that was vexing me, to
every show of love or remembrance.  So I listened to you.  It was not
because you were a governor or a peer--no, not that!  For even in
Virginia I had offers from one higher than yourself--and younger, and a
peer also.  No, it was not material things that influenced me, but your
own intellectual eminence; for you have more brains than most men, as you
know so well."

The governor interrupted her with a gesture.  "No, no, I am not so vain
as you think.  If I were I should have seen at Salem that you meant to
say yes."

"Yet you know well you have gifts, though you have made sad mistakes
here.  Do not think it was your personality, your looks that induced me
to think of you, to listen to you.  When Mr. Calhoun told me the truth,
and gave me a letter he had written to me--"

"A letter--to you?"

There was surprise in the governor's voice--surprise and chagrin, for the
thing had moved him powerfully.  "Yes, a letter to me which he never
meant me to have.  It was a kind of diary of his heart, and it was
written even while I was landing on the island on Christmas Day.  It was
the most terribly truthful thing, opening his whole soul to the girl whom
he had always loved, but from whom he was separated by a thing not the
less tragical because it was merely technical.  He gave it me to read,
and when I read it I saw there was no place for me in the world except
a convent or marriage.  The convent could not be, for I was no Catholic,
and marriage seemed the only thing possible.  That day you came I saw
only one thing to do--one mad, hopeless thing to do."

"Mad and hopeless!" burst out Lord Mallow.  "How so?  Your very reason
shows that it was sane, well founded in the philosophy of the heart."

He was eager to win her yet, and he did not see the end at which she
aimed.  He felt he must tell her all the passion and love he felt.  But
her look gave no encouragement, her eyes were uninviting.

Sheila smiled painfully.  "Yes, mad and hopeless, for be sure of this: we
cannot kill in one day the growth of years.  I could not cure myself of
loving him by marrying you.  There had to be some other cure for that.
I never knew and never loved my father.  But he was my father, and if
Mr. Calhoun killed him, I could not marry him.  But at last I came to
know that your love and affection could not make me forget him--
no, never.  I realize that now.  He and I can never come together,
but I owe him so much--I owe him my life, for he saved it; he must ever
have a place in my heart, be to me more than any one else can be.  I want
you to do something for him."

"What do you wish?"

"I want you to have removed from him the sentence of the British
Government.  I want him to be free to come and go anywhere in the world
--to return to England if he wishes it, to be a free man, and not a
victim Off Outlawry.  I want that, and you ought to give it to him."

"Why?"

Indignation filled her eyes.  "You ask why.  He has saved your
administration and the island from defeat and horrible loss.  He has
prevented most of the slaves from revolting, and he conquered the
Maroons.  The empire is his debtor.  Will you do this for one who has
done so much for you?"

Lord Mallow was disconcerted, but he did not show it.  "I can do no more
than I have done.  I have not confined him to his plantation as the
Government commanded; I cannot go beyond that."

"You can put his case from the standpoint of a patriot."

For a moment the governor hesitated, then he said: "Because you ask me--"

"I want it done for his sake, not for mine," she returned with decision.
"You owe it to yourself to see that it is done.  Gratitude is not dead in
you, is it?"

Lord Mallow flushed.  "You press his case too hard.  You forget what he
is--a mutineer and a murderer, and no one should remember that as you
should."

"He has atoned for both, and you know it well.  Besides, he was not a
murderer.  Even the courts did not say he was.  They only said he was
guilty of manslaughter.  Oh, your honour, be as gallant as your name and
place warrant."

He looked at her for a moment with strange feelings in his heart.  Then
he said: "I will give you an answer in twenty-four hours.  Will that do,
sweet persuader?"

"It might do," she answered, and, strange to say, she had a sure feeling
that he would say yes, in spite of her knowledge that, in his heart of
hearts, he hated Calhoun.

As she left the room, Lord Mallow stood for a moment looking after her.

"She loves the rogue in spite of all!" he said bitterly.  "But she must
come with me.  They are apart as the poles.  Yet I shall do as she wishes
if I am to win her."




CHAPTER XXIII

THE COMING OF NOREEN

The next day came a new element in the situation: a ship arrived from
England.  On it was one who had come to Jamaica to act as governess to
two children of the officer commanding the regular troops in the island.
She had been ill for a week before nearing Kingston, and when the Regent
reached the harbour she was in a bad way.  The ship's doctor was
despondent about her; but he was a second-rate man, and felt that perhaps
an island doctor might give her some hope.  When she was carried ashore
she was at once removed to the home of the general commanding at Spanish
Town, and there a local doctor saw her.

"What is her history?" he asked, after he had seen the haggard face of
the woman.

The ship's doctor did not know; and the general commanding was in the
interior at the head of his troops.  There was no wife in the general's
house, as he was a widower; and his daughters, of twelve and fourteen,
under a faithful old housekeeper, had no knowledge of the woman's life.

When she was taken to the general's house she was in great dejection, and
her face had a look of ennui and despair.  She was thin and worn, and her
eyes only told of the struggle going on between life and death.

"What is her name?" asked the resident doctor.  "Noreen Balfe," was the
reply of the ship's doctor.

"A good old Irish name, though you can see she comes of the lower ranks
of life."

"Married?"

The ship's doctor pointed to her hand which had a wedding-ring.  "Ah,
yes, certainly .  .  .  what hope have you of her?"

"I don't know what to say.  The fever is high.  She isn't trying to live;
she's got some mental trouble, I believe.  But you and I would be of no
use in that kind of thing."

"I don't take to new-fangled ideas of mental cure," said the ship's
doctor.  "Cure the body and the mind will cure itself."

A cold smile stole to the lips of the resident doctor.  Those were days
of little scientific medical skill, and no West Indian doctor had
knowledge enough to control a discussion of the kind.  "But I'd like to
see some one with brains take an interest in her," he remarked.

"I leave her in your hands," was the reply.  "I'm a ship's medico, and
she's now ashore."

"It's a pity," said the resident doctor reflectively, as he watched a
servant doing necessary work at the bedside.  "She hasn't long to go as
she is, yet I've seen such cases recover."

As they left the room together they met Sheila and one of the daughters
of the house.  "I've come to see the sick woman from the ship, if I may,"
Sheila said.  "I've just heard about her, and I'd like to be of use."

The resident doctor looked at her with admiration.  She was the most
conspicuous figure in the island, and her beauty was a fine support to
her wealth and reputation.  It was like her to be kind in this frank way.

"You can be of great use if you will," he said.  "The fever is not
infectious, I'm glad to say.  So you need have no fear of being with her
--on account of others."

"I have no fear," responded Sheila with a friendly smile, "and I will go
to her now--no, if you don't mind, I'd prefer to go alone," she added as
she saw the doctor was coming with her.

The other bowed and nodded approvingly.  "The fewer the better," he said.
"I think you ought to go in alone--quite alone," he said with gentle
firmness, for he saw the girl with Sheila was also going with her.

So it was that Sheila entered alone, and came to the bed and looked at
the woman in the extreme depression of fever.  "Prepare some lime-juice,
please," she said to the servant on the other side of the bed.  "Keep it
always beside the bed--I know what these cases are."

The servant disappeared, and the eyes of the sick woman opened and looked
at Sheila.  There shot into them a look of horror and relief in one, if
such a thing might be.  A sudden energy inspired her, and she drew
herself up in bed, her face gone ghastly.

"You are Sheila Boyne, aren't you?" she asked in a low half-guttural
note.

"I am Sheila Llyn," was the astonished reply.  "It's the same thing,"
came the response.  "You are the daughter of Erris Boyne."

Sheila turned pale.  Who was this woman that knew her and her history?

"What is your name?" she asked--"your real name--what is it?"

"My name is Noreen Balfe; it was Noreen Boyne."  For a moment Sheila
could not get her bearings.  The heavy scent of the flowers coming in at
the window almost suffocated her.  She seemed to lose a grip of herself.
Presently she made an effort at composure.  "Noreen Boyne!  You were then
the second wife of Erris Boyne?"

"I was his second wife.  His first wife was your mother--you are like
your mother!" Noreen said in agitation.

The meaning was clear.  Sheila laid a sharp hand on herself.  "Don't get
excited," she urged with kindly feeling.  "He is dead and gone."

"Yes, he is dead and gone."

For a moment Noreen seemed to fight for mastery of her emotion, and
Sheila said: "Lie still.  It is all over.  He cannot hurt us now."

The other shook her head in protest.  "I came here to forget, and I find
you--his daughter."

"You find more than his daughter; you find his first wife, and you find
the one that killed him."

"The one that killed him!" said the woman greatly troubled.  "How did
you know that?"

"All the world knows it.  He was in prison four years, and since then he
has been a mutineer, a treasure-hunter, a planter, and a saviour of these
islands!"

The sick woman fell back in exhaustion.  At that moment the servant
entered with a pitcher of lime-juice.  Sheila took it from her and
motioned her out of the room; then she held a glass of the liquid to the
stark lips.

"Drink," she said in a low, kind voice, and she poured slowly into the
patient's mouth the cooling draught.  A moment later Noreen raised
herself up again.

"Mr. Dyck Calhoun is here?" she asked.

"He is here, and none to-day holds so high a place in the minds of all
who live here.  He has saved the island."

"All are here that matter," said Noreen.  "And I came to forget!"

"What do you remember?" asked Sheila.  "I remember all--how he died!"

Suddenly Sheila had a desire to shriek aloud.  This woman--did this woman
then see Erris Boyne die?  Was she present when the deed was done?  If
so, why was she not called to give evidence at the trial.  But yes, she
was called to give evidence.  She remembered it now, and the evidence had
been that she was in her own home when the killing took place.

"How did he die?" she asked in a whisper.

"One stroke did it--only one, and he fell like a log."  She made a motion
as of striking, and shuddered, covering her eyes with trembling hands.

"You tell me you saw Dyck Calhoun do this to an undefended man--you tell
me this!"

Sheila's anger was justified in her mind.  That Dyck Calhoun should

"I did not see Dyck Calhoun strike him," gasped the woman.  "I did not
say that.  Dyck Calhoun did not kill Erris Boyne!"

"My God!--oh, my God!" said Sheila with ashen lips, but a great light
breaking in her eyes.  "Dyck Calhoun did not kill Erris Boyne!  Then who
killed him?"

There was a moment's pause, then--"I killed him," said the woman in
agony.  "I killed him."

A terrible repugnance seized Sheila.  After a moment she said in
agitation: "You killed him--you struck him down!  Yet you let an innocent
man go to prison, and be kept there for years, and his father go to his
grave with shame, with estates ruined and home lost--and you were the
guilty one--you--all the time."

"It was part of my madness.  I was a coward and I thought then there were
reasons why I should feel no pity for Dyck Calhoun.  His father injured
mine--oh, badly!  But I was a coward, and I've paid the price."

A kinder feeling now took hold of Sheila.  After all, what this woman had
done gave happiness into her--Sheila's-hands.  It relieved Dyck Calhoun
of shame and disgrace.  A jail-bird he was still, but an innocent jail-
bird.  He had not killed Erris Boyne.  Besides, it wiped out forever the
barrier between them.  All her blind devotion to the man was now
justified.  His name and fame were clear.  Her repugnance of the woman
was as nothing beside her splendid feeling of relief.  It was as though
the gates of hell had been closed and the curtains of heaven drawn for
the eyes to see.  Six years of horrible shame wiped out, and a new world
was before her eyes.

This woman who had killed Erris Boyne must now suffer.  She must bear the
ignominy which had been heaped upon Dyck Calhoun's head.  Yet all at once
there came to her mind a softening feeling.  Erris Boyne had been rightly
killed by a woman he had wronged, for he was a traitor as well as an
adulterer--one who could use no woman well, who broke faith with all
civilized tradition, and reverted to the savage.  Surely the woman's
crime was not a dark one; it was injured innocence smiting depravity,
tyranny and lust.

Suddenly, as she looked at the woman who had done this thing, she, whose
hand had rid the world of a traitor and a beast, fell back on the pillow
in a faint.  With an exclamation Sheila lifted up the head.  If the woman
was dead, then there was no hope for Dyck Calhoun; any story that she--
Sheila--might tell would be of no use.  Yet she was no longer agitated in
her body.  Hands and fingers were steady, and she felt for the heart with
firm fingers.  Yes, the heart was still beating, and the pulse was
slightly drumming.  Thank God, the woman was alive!  She rang a bell and
lifted up the head of the sick woman.

A moment later the servant was in the room.  Sheila gave her orders
quickly, and snatched up a pencil from the table.  Then, on a piece of
paper, she wrote the words: "I, not Dyck Calhoun, killed Erris Boyne."

A few moments later, Noreen's eyes opened, and Sheila spoke to her.
"I have written these words.  Here they are--see them.  Sign them."

She read the words, and put a pencil in the trembling fingers, and, on
the cover of a book Noreen's fingers traced her name slowly but clearly.
Then Sheila thrust the paper in her bosom, and an instant later a nurse,
sent by the resident doctor, entered.

"They cannot hang me or banish me, for my end has come," whispered Noreen
before Sheila left.

In the street of Spanish Town almost the first person Sheila saw was
Dyck Calhoun.  With pale, radiant look she went to him.  He gazed at her
strangely, for there was that in her face he could not understand.  There
was in it all the faith of years, all the truth of womanhood, all the
splendour of discovery, all that which a man can see but once in a human
face and be himself.

"Come with me," she said, and she moved towards King's House.  He obeyed.
For some moments they walked in silence, then all at once under a
magnolia tree she stopped.

"I want you to read what a woman wrote who has just arrived in the island
from England.  She is ill at the house of the general commanding."

Taking from her breast the slip of paper, she handed it to him.  He read
it with eyes and senses that at first could hardly understand.

"God in heaven--oh, merciful God!" he said in great emotion, yet with a
strange physical quiet.

"This woman was his wife," Sheila said.

He handed the paper back.  He conquered his agitation.  The years of
suffering rolled away.  "They'll put her in jail," he said with a strange
regret.  He had a great heart.

"No, I think not," was the reply.  Yet she was touched by his compassion
and thoughtfulness.

"Why?"

"Because she is going to die--and there is no time to lose.  Come, we
will go to Lord Mallow."

"Mallow!"  A look of bitter triumph came into Dyck's face.  "Mallow--at
last!" he said.




CHAPTER XXIV

WITH THE GOVERNOR

Lord Mallow frowned on his secretary.  "Mr. Calhoun to see me!  What's
his business?"

"One can guess, your honour.  He's been fighting for the island."

"Why should he see me?  There is the general commanding."

The secretary did not reply, he knew his chief; and, after a moment, Lord
Mallow said: "Show him in."  When Dyck Calhoun entered the governor gave
him a wintry smile of welcome, but did not offer to shake hands.  "Will
you sit down?" he said, with a slow gesture.

Calhoun made a dissenting motion.  "I prefer to stand, your honour."

This was the first time the two men had met alone since Dyck had arrived
in Jamaica, or since his trial.  Calhoun was dressed in planter's
costume, and the governor was in an officer's uniform.  They were in
striking contrast in face and figure--the governor long, lanky, ascetic
in appearance, very intellectual save for the riotous mouth, and very
spick and span--as though he had just stepped out of Almack's; while
Calhoun was tough and virile, and with the air of a thorough outdoor man.
There was in his face the firm fighting look of one who had done things
and could tackle big affairs--and something more; there was in it quiet
exultation.  Here he was now at last alone with the man who had done him
great harm, and for whom he had done so much; who had sought to wipe him
off the slate of life and being; who had tried to win the girl from whom
he himself had been parted.

In spite of it all--of his life in jail, of his stark mutiny, of the
oppression of the governor, he had not been beaten down, but had
prospered in spite of all.  He had by his will, wisdom and military
skill, saved the island in its hour of peril, saved its governor from
condemnation; and here he was facing the worst enemy of his life with the
cards of success in his hands.

"You have done the island and England great service, Mr. Calhoun," said
the governor at last.

"It is the least I could do for the land where I have made my home, where
I have reaped more than I have sown."

"We know your merit, sir."

A sharp satirical look came into Calhoun's face and his voice rang out
with vigour.  "And because you knew my merit you advised the crown to
confine me to my estate, and you would have had me shot if you could.
I am what I am because there was a juster man than yourself in Jamaica.
Through him I got away and found treasure, and I bought land and have
helped to save this island and your place.  What do I owe you, your
honour?  Nothing that I can see--nothing at all."

"You are a mutineer, and but that you showed your courage would have been
hung at the yard-arm, as many of your comrades in England were."

A cold smile played at Calhoun's lips.  "My luck was as great as my
courage, I know.  I have the luck of Enniscorthy!"

At the last words the governor winced, for it was by that touch Calhoun
had defeated him in the duel long ago.  It galled him that this man whom
he detested could say such things to him with truth.  Yet in his heart of
hearts he had for Calhoun a great respect.  Calhoun's invincible will had
conquered the worst in Mallow's nature, had, in spite of himself, created
a new feeling in him.  There was in Mallow the glimmer of greatness, and
only his supreme selfishness had made him what he was.  He laid a hand on
himself now, though it was not easy to do so.

"It was not the luck of Enniscorthy that sent Erris Boyne to his doom,"
he said, however, with anger in his mind, for Dyck's calm boldness
stirred the worst in him.  He thought he saw in him an exultancy which
could only come from his late experiences in the field.  It was as though
he had come to triumph over the governor.  Mallow said what he had said
with malice.  He looked to see rage in the face of Dyck Calhoun, and was
nonplussed to find that it had only a stern sort of pleasure.  The eyes
of Calhoun met his with no trace of gloom, but with a valour worthy of a
high cause--their clear blue facing his own with a constant penetration.
Their intense sincerity gave him a feeling which did not belong to
authority.  It was not the look of a criminal, whatever the man might be-
-mutineer and murderer.  As for mutineer, all that Calhoun had fought for
had been at last admitted by the British Government, and reforms had been
made that were due to the mutiny at the Nore.  Only the technical crime
had been done by Calhoun, and he had won pardon by his bravery in the
battle at sea.  Yes, he was a man of mark, even though a murderer.

Calhoun spoke slowly.  "Your honour, you have said what you have a right
to say to a man who killed Erris Boyne.  But this man you accuse did not
do it."  The governor smiled, for the assumption was ridiculous.  He
shrugged a shoulder and a sardonic curl came to his lip.

"Who did it then?"

"If you will come to the house of the general commanding you will see."

The governor was in a great quandary.  He gasped.  "The general
commanding--did he kill Erris Boyne, then?"

"Not he, yet the person that did it is in this house.  Listen, your
honour.  I have borne the name of killing Erris Boyne, and I ought to
have killed him, for he was a traitor.  I had proofs of it; but I did not
kill him, and I did not betray him, for he had alive a wife and daughter,
and something was due to them.  He was a traitor, and was in league with
the French.  It does not matter that I tell you now, for his daughter
knows the truth.  I ought to have told it long ago, and if I had I should
not have been imprisoned."

"You were a brave man, but a fool--always a fool," said the governor
sharply.

"Not so great a fool that I can't recover from it," was the calm reply.
"Perhaps it was the best thing that ever happened to me, for now I can
look the world in the face.  It's made a man of me.  It was a woman
killed him," was Calhoun's added comment.  "Will your honour come with me
and see her?"

The governor was thunderstruck.  "Where is she?"

"As I have told you-in the house of the general commanding."

The governor rose abashed.  "Well, I can go there now.  Come."

"Perhaps you would prefer I should not go with you in the street.  The
world knows me as a mutineer, thinks of me as a murderer!  Is it fair to
your honour?"

Something in Calhoun's voice roused the rage of Lord Mallow, but he
controlled it, and said calmly: "Don't talk nonsense, sir; we shall walk
together, if you will."

At the entrance to the house of the general, the man to whom this visit
meant so much stopped and took a piece of paper from his pocket.  "Your
honour, here is the name of the slayer of Erris Boyne.  I give it to you
now to see, so you may not be astonished when you see her."

The governor stared at the paper.  "Boyne's wife, eh?" he said in a
strange mood.  "Boyne's wife--what is she doing here?"

Calhoun told him briefly as he took the paper back, and added: "It was
accident that brought us all together here, your honour, but the hand of
God is in it."

"Is she very ill?"

"She will not live, I think."

"To whom did she tell her story?"

"To Miss Sheila Llyn."

The governor was nettled.

"Oh, to Miss Llyn When did you see her?"

"Just before I came to you."

"What did the woman look like--this Noreen Boyne?"

"I do not know; I have not seen her."

"Then how came you by the paper with her signature?"

"Miss Llyn gave it to me."

Anger filled Lord Mallow's mind.  Sheila--why now the way would be open
to Calhoun to win--to marry her!  It angered him, but he held himself
steadily.

"Where is Miss Llyn?"

"She is here, I think.  She came back when she left me at your door."

"Oh, she left you at my door, did she?  .  .  .  But let me see the woman
that's come so far to put the world right."

A few moments later they stood in the bedroom of Noreen Boyne, they two
and Sheila Llyn, the nurse having been sent out.

Lord Mallow looked down on the haggard, dying woman with no emotion.
Only a sense of duty moved him.

"What is it you wished to say to me?" he asked the patient.

"Who are you?" came the response in a frayed tone.

"I am the governor of the island--Lord Mallow."

"Then I want to tell you that I killed Erris Boyne--with this hand I
killed him."  She raised her skinny hand up, and her eyes became glazed.
"He had used me vilely and I struck him down.  He was a bad man."

"You let an innocent man bear punishment, you struck at one who did you
no harm, and you spoiled his life for him.  You can see that, can't you?"

The woman's eyes sought the face of Dyck Calhoun, and Calhoun said: "No,
you did not spoil my life, Noreen Boyne.  You have made it.  Not that I
should have chosen the way of making it, but there it is, as God's in
heaven, I forgive you."

Noreen's face lost some of its gloom.  "That makes it easier," she said
brokenly.  "I can't atone by any word or act, but I'm sorry.  I've kept
you from being happy, and you were born to be happy.  Your father had
hurt mine, had turned him out of our house for debt, and I tried to pay
it all back.  When they suspected you I held my peace.  I was a coward;
I could not say you were innocent without telling the truth, and that I
could not do then.  But now I'll tell it--I think I'd have told it
whether I was dying or not, though.  Yes, if I'd seen you here I'd have
told it, I'm sure.  I'm not all bad."

Sheila leaned over the bed.  "Never mind about the past.  You can help a
man back to the good opinion of the world now."

"I hurt you too," said Noreen with hopeless pain.  "You were his friend."

"I believed in him always--even when he did not deny the crime," was the
quiet reply.

"There's no good going on with that," said the governor sharply.  "We
must take down her statement in writing, and then--"

"Look, she is sinking!" said Calhoun sharply.  The woman's head had
dropped forward, her chin was on her breast, and her hands became
clenched.

"The doctor at once-bring in the nurse," said Calhoun.  "She's dying."

An instant later, the nurse entered with Sheila, and in a short time the
doctor came.

When later the doctor saw Lord Mallow alone he said: "She can't live more
than two days."

"That's good for her in a way," answered the governor, and in reply to
the doctor's question why, he said: "Because she'd be in prison."

"In prison--has she broken the law?"

"She is now under arrest, though she doesn't know it.

"What was her crime, your honour?"

"She killed a man."

"What man?"

"Him for whom Dyck Calhoun was sent to prison--Erris Boyne."

"Mr. Calhoun was not guilty, then?"

"No.  As soon as the woman is dead, I mean to announce the truth."

"Not till then, your honour?"

"Not till then."

"It's hard on Calhoun."

"Is it?  It's years since he was tried and condemned.  Two days cannot
matter now."

"Perhaps not.  Last night the woman said to me: 'I'm glad I'm going to
die.'" Then he added: "Calhoun will be more popular than ever now."

The governor winced.




CHAPTER XXV

THEN WHAT HAPPENED

An hour after Noreen Boyne had been laid in her grave, there was a
special issue of the principal paper telling all the true facts of the
death of Erris Boyne.  Thus the people of Jamaica came to know that Dyck
Calhoun was innocent of the crime of killing Erris Boyne, and he was made
the object of splashing admiration, and was almost mobbed by admirers in
the street.  It all vexed Lord Mallow; but he steeled himself to
urbanity, and he played his part well.  He was clever enough to see it
would pay him to be outwardly gracious to Calhoun.  So it was he made a
speech in the capital on the return of the general commanding and the
troops from subduing the Maroons, in which he said: "No one in all the
King's dominions had showed greater patriotism and military skill than
their friend Mr. Dyck Calhoun, who had been harshly treated by a mistaken
Government."

A few hours later, in the sweet garden of the house where Sheila and her
mother lodged, Calhoun came upon the girl whose gentle dignity and beauty
seemed to glow.

At first all she said to him was, "Welcome, old friend," and at last she
said, "Now you can come to the United States, Dyck, and make a new life
there."

Presently he said: "I ought to go where you wish me to go, for you came
to me here when I was rejected of men.  I owe you whatever I am that's
worth while, if anything I am is worth while.  Your faith kept me alive
in my darkest days--even when I thought I had wronged you."

"Then you will come to Virginia with me--as my husband, Dyck?"  She
blushed and laughed.  "You see I have to propose to you, for you've never
asked me to marry you.  I'm throwing myself at your head, sir, you
observe!"

He gave an honest smile of adoration.  "I came to-day to ask you to be
my wife--for that reason only.  I could not do it till the governor had
declared my innocence.  The earth is sweeter to-day than it has been
since time began."

He held out his arms, and an instant later the flowers she carried were
crushed to her breast, with her lips given to his.

A little later she drew from her pocket a letter.  "You must read that,"
she said.  "It is from the great Alexander Hamilton--yes, he will be
great, he will play a wondrous part in the life of my new country.
Read it Dyck."

After he had read it, he said: "He was born a British subject here in
these islands, and he goes to help Americans live according to British
principles.  With all my sane fellow-countrymen I am glad the Americans
succeeded.  Do you go to your Virginia, and I will come as soon as I have
put my affairs in order."

"I will not go without you--no, I will not go," she persisted.

"Then we shall be married at once," he declared.  And so it was, and all
the island was en fete, and when Sheila came to Dyck's plantation the
very earth seemed to rejoice.  The slaves went wild with joy, and ate
and drank their fill, and from every field there came the song:

                   "Hold up yo hands,
                    Hold up yo hands,
                    Bress de Lord for de milk and honey!
                    De big bees is a singin',
                    My heart is held up and de bells is a ringin';
                    Hold up yo hands,
                    Hold up yo hands!"

And sweetly solitary the two lived their lives, till one day, three
months later, there came to the plantation the governor and his suite.

When they had dismounted, Lord Mallow said: "I bring you the pay of the
British Government for something of what you have suffered, sir, and what
will give your lady pleasure too, I hope.  I come with a baronetcy given
by the King.  News of it came to me only this morning."

Calhoun smiled.  "Your honour, I can take no title, receive no honour.
I have ended my life under the British flag.  I go to live under the
Stars and Stripes."

The governor was astounded.  "Your lady, sir, do you forget your lady?"

But Sheila answered: "The life of the new world has honours which have
naught to do with titles."

"I sail for Virginia by the first ship that goes," said Calhoun.  "It is
good here, but I shall go to a place where things are better, and where I
shall have work to do.  I must decline the baronetcy, your honour.  I go
to a land where the field of life is larger, where Britain shall remake
herself."

"It will take some time," said the governor tartly.  "They'll be long
apart."

"But they will come together at last--for the world's sake."

There was silence for a moment, and through it came the joy-chant from
the fields:

                   "Hold up yo hands,
                    Hold up yo hands,
                    Bress de Lord for de milk and honey."




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Without the money brains seldom win alone






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "NO DEFENSE":

Beginning of a lifetime of experience, comedy, and tragedy
Wit is always at the elbow of want
Without the money brains seldom win alone






CARNAC'S FOLLY

By Gilbert Parker



CONTENTS:

BOOK I
I.        IN THE DAYS OF CHILDHOOD
II.       ELEVEN YEARS PASS
III.      CARNAC'S RETURN
IV.       THE HOUSE ON THE HILL
V.        CARNAC AS MANAGER
VI.       LUKE TARBOE HAS AN OFFER
VII.      "AT OUR PRICE"
VIII.     JOHN GRIER MAKES ANOTHER OFFER
IX.       THE PUZZLE
X.        DENZIL TELLS HIS STORY
XI.       CARNAC'S TALK WITH HIS MOTHER
XII.      CARNAC SAYS GOOD-BYE

BOOK II
XIII.     CARNAC'S RETURN
XIV.      THE HOUSE OF THE THREE TREES
XV.       CARNAC AND JUNTA
XVI.      JOHN GRIER MAKES A JOURNEY
XVII.     THE READING OF THE WILL

BOOK III
XVIII.    A GREAT DECISION
XIX.      CARNAC BECOMES A CANDIDATE
XX.       JUNIA AND TARBOE HEAR THE NEWS
XXI.      THE SECRET MEETING
XXII.     POINT TO POINT
XXIII.    THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT
XXIV.     THE BLUE PAPER
XXV.      DENZIL TAKES A HAND IN THE GAME
XXVI.     THE CHALLENGE
XXVII.    EXIT
XXVIII.   A WOMAN WRITES A LETTER
XXIX.     CARNAC AND HIS MOTHER
XXX.      TARBOE HAS A DREAM
XXXI.     THIS WAY HOME
XXXII.    'HALVES, PARDNER, HALVES'




BOOK I

CHAPTER I

IN THE DAYS OF CHILDHOOD

"Carnac!  Carnac!  Come and catch me, Carnac!"  It was a day of perfect
summer and hope and happiness in the sweet, wild world behind the near
woods and the far circle of sky and pine and hemlock.  The voice that
called was young and vibrant, and had in it the simple, true soul of
things.  It had the clearness of a bugle-call-ample and full of life and
all life's possibilities.  It laughed; it challenged; it decoyed.

Carnac heard the summons and did his best to catch the girl in the wood
by the tumbling stream, where he had for many an hour emptied out his
wayward heart; where he had seen his father's logs and timbers caught in
jams, hunched up on rocky ledges, held by the prong of a rock, where
man's purpose could, apparently, avail so little.  Then he had watched
the black-bearded river-drivers with their pike-poles and their levers
loose the key-logs of the bunch, and the tumbling citizens of the woods
and streams toss away down the current to the wider waters below.  He was
only a lad of fourteen, and the girl was only eight, but she--Junia--was
as spry and graceful a being as ever woke the echoes of a forest.

He was only fourteen, but already he had visions and dreamed dreams.  His
father--John Grier--was the great lumber-king of Canada, and Junia was
the child of a lawyer who had done little with his life, but had had
great joy of his two daughters, who were dear to him beyond telling.

Carnac was one of Nature's freaks or accidents.  He was physically strong
and daring, but, as a boy, mentally he lacked concentration and decision,
though very clever.  He was led from thing to thing like a ray of errant
light, and he did not put a hand on himself, as old Denzil, the partly
deformed servant of Junia's home, said of him on occasion; and Denzil was
a man of parts.

Denzil was not far from the two when Junia made her appeal and challenge.
He loved the girl exceedingly, and he loved Carnac little less, though in
a different way.  Denzil was French of the French, with habit of mind and
character wholly his own.

Denzil's head was squat upon his shoulders, and his long, handsome body
was also squat, because his legs were as short, proportionately, as his
mind was long.  His face was covered by a well-cared-for beard of dark
brown, streaked with grey; his features were rugged and fine; and his
eyes were like two coals burning under a gnarled headland; for his
forehead, ample and full, had lines which were not lines of age, but of
concentration.  In his motions he was quiet and free, yet always there
was a kind of stealthiness in his movements, which made him seem less
frank than he really was.

For a time, with salient sympathy in his eyes, he watched the two
children playing.  The whisking of their forms among the trees and over
the rocks was fine, gracious, and full of life-life without alarm.  At
length he saw the girl falter slightly, then make a swift deceptive
movement to avoid the boy who pursued her.  The movement did not delude
the boy.  He had quickness of anticipation.  An instant later the girl
was in his arms.

As Denzil gazed, it seemed she was in his arms too long, and a sudden
anxiety took hold of him.  That anxiety was deepened when he saw the boy
kiss the girl on the cheek.  This act seemed to discompose the girl, but
not enough to make drama out of an innocent, yet sensuous thing.  The boy
had meant nothing more than he had shown, and Denzil traced the act to a
native sense of luxury in his nature.  Knowing the boy's father and
mother as he did, it seemed strange that Carnac should have such
demonstration in his character.  Of all the women he knew, Carnac's
mother was the most exact and careful, though now and again he thought
of her as being shrouded, or apart; while the boy's father, the great
lumber-king, cantankerous, passionate, perspicuous, seemed to have but
one passion, and that was his business.

It was strange to Denzil that the lumber-king, short, thin, careless in
his clothes but singularly clean in his person, should have a son so
little like himself, and also so little like his mother.  He, Denzil, was
a Catholic, and he could not understand a man like John Grier who, being
a member of the Episcopal Church, so seldom went to service and so defied
rules of conduct suitable to his place in the world.

As for the girl, to him she was the seventh wonder of the earth.
Wantonly alive, dexterously alert to all that came her way, sportive,
indifferent, joyous, she had all the boy's sprightliness, but none of his
weaknesses.  She was a born tease; she loved bright and beautiful things;
she was a keen judge of human nature, and she had buoyant spirits, which,
however, were counterbalanced by moments of extreme timidity, or, rather,
reserve and shyness.  On a day like this, when everything in life was
singing, she must sing too.  Not a mile away was a hut by the river where
her father had brought his family for the summer's fishing; not a half-
mile away was a tent which Carnac Grier's father had set up as he passed
northward on his tour of inspection.  This particular river, and this
particular part of the river, were trying to the river-man and his clans.
It needed a dam, and the great lumber-king was planning to make one not
three hundred yards from where they were.

The boy and the girl resting idly upon a great warm rock had their own
business to consider.  The boy kept looking at his boots with the brass-
tipped toes.  He hated them.  The girl was quick to understand.  "Why
don't you like your boots?" she asked.

A whimsical, exasperated look came into his face.  "I don't know why they
brass a boy's toes like that, but when I marry I won't wear them--that's
all," he replied.

"Why do you wear them now?" she asked, smiling.

"You don't know my father."

"He's got plenty of money, hasn't he?" she urged.  "Plenty; and that's
what I can't understand about him!  There's a lot of waste in river-
driving, timber-making, out in the shanties and on the river, but he
don't seem to mind that.  He's got fads, though, about how we are to
live, and this is one of them."  He looked at the brass-tipped boots
carefully.  A sudden resolve came into his face.  He turned to the girl
and flushed as he spoke.  "Look here," he added, "this is the last day
I'm going to wear these boots.  He's got to buy me a pair without any
brass clips on them, or I'll kick."

"No, it isn't the last day you're going to wear them, Carnac."

"It is.  I wonder if all boys feel towards their father as I do to mine.
He don't treat me right.  He--"

"Oh, look," interrupted Junia.  "Look-Carnac!"  She pointed in dismay.

Carnac saw a portion of the bank of the river disappear with Denzil.  He
ran over to the bank and looked down.  In another moment he had made his
way to a descending path which led him swiftly to the river's edge.  The
girl remained at the top.  The boy had said to her: "You stay there.
I'll tell you what to do."

"Is-is he killed?" she called with emotion.

"Killed!  No.  He's all right," he called back to her.  "I can see him
move.  Don't be frightened.  He's not in the water.  It was only about a
thirty-foot fall.  You stay there, and I'll tell you what to do," he
added.

A few moments later, the boy called up: "He's all right, but his leg is
broken.  You go to my father's camp--it's near.  People are sure to be
there, and maybe father too.  You bring them along."

In an instant the girl was gone.  The boy, left behind, busied himself in
relieving the deformed broken-legged habitant.  He brought some water in
his straw hat to refresh him.  He removed the rocks and dirt, and dragged
the little man out.

"It was a close call--bien sur," said Denzil, breathing hard.  "I always
said that place wasn't safe, but I went on it myself.  That's the way in
life.  We do what we forbid ourselves to do; we suffer the shames we damn
in others--but yes."

There was a pause, then he added: "That's what you'll do in your life,
M'sieu' Carnac.  That's what you'll do."

"Always?"

"Well, you never can tell--but no."

"But you always can tell," remarked the boy.  "The thing is, do what you
feel you've got to do, and never mind what happens."

"I wish I could walk," remarked the little man, "but this leg of mine is
broke--ah, bah, it is!"

"Yes, you mustn't try to walk.  Be still," answered the boy.  "They'll be
here soon."  Slowly and carefully he took off the boot and sock from the
broken leg, and, with his penknife, opened the seam of the corduroy
trouser.  "I believe I could set that leg myself," he added.

"I think you could--bagosh," answered Denzil heavily.  "They'll bring a
rope to haul me up?"

"Junia has a lot of sense, she won't forget anything."

"And if your father's there, he'll not forget anything," remarked Denzil.

"He'll forget to make me wear these boots tomorrow," said the boy
stubbornly, his chin in his hands, his eyes fixed gloomily on the brass-
headed toes.

There was a long silence.  At last from the stricken Denzil came the
words: "You'll have your own way about the boots."

Carnac murmured, and presently said:

"Lucky you fell where you did.  Otherwise, you'd have been in the water,
and then I couldn't have been of any use."

"I hear them coming--holy, yes!"

Carnac strained his ears.  "Yes, you're right.  I hear them too."

A few moments later, Carnac's father came sliding down the bank, a rope
in his hands, some workmen remaining above.

"What's the matter here?" he asked.  "A fall, eh!  Dang little fool--
now, you are a dang little fool, and you know it, Denzil."

He nodded to his boy, then he raised the wounded man's head and
shoulders, and slipped the noose over until it caught under his arms.

The old lumber-king's movements were swift, sure and exact.  A moment
later he lifted Denzil in his arms, and carried him over to the steep
path up which he was presently dragged.

At the top, Denzil turned to Carnac's father.  "M'sieu', Carnac hates
wearing those brass-toed boots," he said boldly.

The lumber-king looked at his boy acutely.  He blew his nose hard, with a
bandana handkerchief.  Then he nodded towards the boy.

"He can suit himself about that," he said.

With accomplished deftness, with some sacking and two poles, a hasty but
comfortable ambulance was made under the skilful direction of the river-
master.  He had the gift of outdoor life.  He did not speak as he worked,
but kept humming to himself.

"That's all right," he said, as he saw Denzil on the stretcher.  "We'll
get on home now."

"Home?" asked his son.

"Yes, Montreal--to-night," replied his father.  "The leg has to be set."

"Why don't you set it?" asked the boy.

The river-master gazed at him attentively.  "Well, I might, with your
help," he said.  "Come along."




CHAPTER II

ELEVEN YEARS PASS

Eleven years had passed since Denzil's fall, and in that time much
history had been made.  Carnac Grier, true to his nature, had travelled
from incident to incident, from capacity to capacity, apparently without
system, yet actually with the keenest desire to fulfil himself; with an
honesty as inveterate as his looks were good and his character filled
with dark recesses.  In vain had his father endeavoured to induce him to
enter the lumber business; to him it seemed too conventional and fixed.

Yet, in his way, he knew the business well.  By instinct, over the
twenty-five years of his life, he had observed and become familiar with
the main features of the work.  He had once or twice even buried himself
in the shanties of the backwoods, there to inhale and repulse the fetid
air, to endure the untoward, half-savage life, the clean, strong food,
the bitter animosities and the savage friendships.  It was a land where
sunshine travelled, and in the sun the bright, tuneful birds made lively
the responsive world.  Sometimes an eagle swooped down the stream; again
and again, hawks, and flocks of pigeons which frequented the lonely
groves on the river-side, made vocal the world of air; flocks of wild
ducks, or geese, went whirring down the long spaces of water between the
trees on either bank; and some one with a fiddle or a concertina made
musical the evening, while the singing voices of rough habitants rang
through the air.

It was all spirited; it smelt good; it felt good; but it was not for
Carnac.  When he had a revolt against anything in life, the grim storm
scenes of winter in the shanties under the trees and the snow-swept hills
came to his mind's eye.  The summer life of the river, and what is called
"running the river," had for him great charms.  The smell of hundreds of
thousands of logs in the river, the crushed bark, the slimy ooze were all
suggestive of life in the making.  But the savage seclusion of the wild
life in winter repelled his senses.  Besides, the lumber business meant
endless figures and measurements in stuffy offices and he retreated from
it all.

He had an artistic bent.  From a small child he had had it, and it grew
with his years.  He wanted to paint, and he painted; he wanted to sculp
in clay, and he sculped in clay; but all the time he was conscious it was
the things he had seen and the life he had lived which made his painting
and his sculpture worth while.  It was absurd that a man of his great
outdoor capacity should be the slave of a temperamental quality, and yet
it was so.  It was no good for his father to condemn, or his mother to
mourn, he went his own way.

He had seen much of Junia Shale in these years and had grown fond of her,
but she was away much with an aunt in the West, and she was sent to
boarding-school, and they saw each other only at intervals.  She liked
him and showed it, but he was not ready to go farther.  As yet his art
was everything to him, and he did not think of marriage.  He was care-
free.  He had a little money of his own, left by an uncle of his mother,
and he had also an allowance from his mother--none from his father--and
he was satisfied with life.

His brother, Fabian, being the elder, by five years, had gone into his
father's business as a partner, and had remained there.  Fabian had at
last married an elder sister of Junia Shale and settled down in a house
on the hill, and the lumber-king, John Grier, went on building up his
splendid business.

At last, Carnac, feeling he was making small headway with his painting,
determined to go again to New York and Paris.  He had already spent a
year in each place and it had benefited him greatly.  So, with that
sudden decision which marked his life, he started for New York.  It was
immediately after the New Year and the ground was covered with snow.  He
looked out of the window of the train, and there was only the long line
of white country broken by the leafless trees and rail-fences and the
mansard-roofs and low cottages with their stoops, built up with earth to
keep them warm; and the sheds full of cattle; and here and there a
sawmill going hard, and factories pounding away and men in fur coats
driving the small Indian ponies; and the sharp calls of the men with the
sleigh bringing wood, or meat, or vegetables to market.  He was by nature
a queer compound of Radical and Conservative, a victim of vision and
temperament.  He was full of pride, yet fuller of humility of a real
kind.  As he left Montreal he thought of Junia Shale, and he recalled the
day eleven years before when he had worn brass-toed boots, and he had
caught Junia in his arms and kissed her, and Denzil had had his accident.
Denzil had got unreasonably old since then; but Junia remained as she was
the joyous day when boyhood took on the first dreams of manhood.

Life was a queer thing, and he had not yet got his bearings in it.  He
had a desire to reform the world and he wanted to be a great painter or
sculptor, or both; and he entered New York with a new sense developed.
He was keen to see, to do, and to feel.  He wanted to make the world ring
with his name and fame, yet he wanted to do the world good also, if he
could.  It was a curious state of mind for the English boy, who talked
French like a native and loved French literature and the French people,
and was angry with those English-Canadians who were so selfish they would
never learn French.

Arrived in New York he took lodgings near old Washington Square, where
there were a few studios near the Bohemian restaurants and a life as
nearly continental as was possible in a new country.  He got in touch
with a few artists and began to paint, doing little scenes in the Bowery
and of the night-life of New York, and visiting the Hudson River and Long
Island for landscape and seascape sketches.

One day he was going down Broadway, and near Union Square he saved a girl
from being killed by a street-car.  She had slipped and fallen on the
track and a car was coming.  It was impossible for her to get away in
time, and Carnac had sprung to her and got her free.  She staggered to
her feet, and he saw she was beautiful and foreign.  He spoke to her in
French and her eyes lighted, for she was French.  She told him at once
that her name was Luzanne Larue.  He offered to get a cab and take her
home, but she said no, she was fit to walk, so he went with her slowly to
her home in one of the poor streets on the East side.  They talked as
they went, and Carnac saw she was of the lower middle-class, with more
refinement than was common in that class, and more charm.  She was a
fascinating girl with fine black eyes, black hair, a complexion of cream,
and a gift of the tongue.  Carnac could not see that she was very subtle.
She seemed a marvel of guilelessness.  She had a wonderful head and neck,
and as he was planning a picture of an early female martyr, he decided to
ask her to sit to him.

Arrived at her humble home, he was asked to enter, and there he met her
father, Isel Larue, a French monarchist who had been exiled from Paris
for plotting against the Government.  He was handsome with snapping black
eyes, a cruel mouth and a droll and humorous tongue.  He was grateful
to Carnac for saving his daughter's life.  Coffee and cigarettes were
produced, and they chatted and smoked while Carnac took in the
surroundings.  Everything was plain, but spotlessly clean, and he learned
that Larue made his living by doing odd jobs in an electric firm.  He was
just home from his work.  Luzanne was employed every afternoon in a
milliner's shop, but her evenings were free after the housework was done
at nine o'clock.  Carnac in a burst of enthusiasm asked if she would sit
to him as a model in the mornings.  Her father instantly said, of course
she would.

This she did for many days, and sat with her hair down and bared neck, as
handsome and modest as a female martyr should.  Carnac painted her with
skill.  Sometimes he would walk with her to lunch and make her eat
something sustaining, and they talked freely then, though little was said
while he was painting her.  At last one day the painting was finished,
and she looked up at him wistfully when he told her he would not need
another sitting.  Carnac, overcome by her sadness, put his arms round her
and kissed her mouth, her eyes, her neck ravenously.  She made only a
slight show of resistance.  When he stopped she said: "Is that the way
you keep your word to my father?  I am here alone and you embrace me--
is that fair?"

"No, it isn't, and I promise I won't do it again, Luzanne.  I am sorry.
I wanted our friendship to benefit us both, and now I've spoiled it all."

"No, you haven't spoiled it all," said Luzanne with a sigh, and she
buttoned up the neck of her blouse, flushing slightly as she did so.
Her breast heaved and suddenly she burst into tears.  It was evident she
wanted Carnac to comfort her, perhaps to kiss her again, but he did not
do so.  He only stood over her, murmuring penance and asking her to
forget it.

"I can't forget it--I can't.  No man but my father has ever kissed me
before.  It makes me, oh! so miserable!" but she smiled through her
tears.  Suddenly she dried her eyes.  "Once a man tried to kiss me--and
something more.  He was rich and he'd put money into Madame Margot's
millinery business.  He was brilliant, and married, but he had no rules
for his morals--all he wanted was money and pleasures which he bought.
I was attracted by him, but one day he tried to kiss me.  I slapped his
face, and then I hated him.  So, when you kissed me to-day, I thought of
that, and it made me unhappy--but yes."

"You did not slap my face, Luzanne?"

She blushed and hung her head.  "No, I did not; you are not a bad man.
He would have spoiled my life.  He made it clear I could have all the
luxuries money could buy--all except marriage!"  She shrugged her
shoulders.

Carnac was of an impressionable nature, but brought to face the
possibility of marriage with Luzanne, he shrank.  If ever he married it
would be a girl like Junia Shale, beautiful, modest, clever and well
educated.  No, Luzanne could never be for him.  So he forbore doing more
than ask her to forgive him, and he would take her to lunch-the last
lunch of the picture-if she would.  With features in chagrin, she put
on her hat, yet when she turned to him, she was smiling.

He visited her home occasionally, and Luzanne's father had a friend,
Ingot by name, who was sometimes present.  This man made himself almost
unbearable at first; but Luzanne pulled Ingot up acridly, and he
presently behaved well.  Ingot disliked all men in better positions than
himself, and was a revolutionary of the worst sort--a revolutionary and
monarchist.  He was only a monarchist because he loved conspiracy and
hated the Republican rulers who had imprisoned him--"those bombastics,"
he called them.  It was a constitutional quarrel with the world.
However, he became tractable, and then he and Larue formed a plot to make
Carnac marry Luzanne.  It was hatched by Ingot, approved by Larue, and at
length consented to by the girl, for so far as she could love anyone, she
loved Carnac; and she made up her mind that if he married her, no matter
how, she would make him so happy he would forgive all.

About four months after the incident in the studio, a picnic was arranged
for the Hudson River.  Only the four went.  Carnac had just sold a
picture at a good price--his Christian Martyr picture--and he was in high
spirits.  They arrived at the spot arranged for the picnic in time for
lunch, and Luzanne prepared it.  When the lunch was ready, they sat down.
There was much gay talk, compliments to Carnac came from both Larue and
Ingot, and Carnac was excited and buoyant.  He drank much wine and beer,
and told amusing stories of the French-Canadians which delighted them
all.  He had a gift of mimicry and he let himself go.

"You got a pretty fine tongue in your head--but of the best," said Ingot
with a burst of applause.  "You'd make a good actor, a holy good actor.
You got a way with you.  Coquelin, Salvini, Bernhardt!  Voila, you're
just as good!  Bagosh, I'd like to see you on the stage."

"So would I," said Larue.  "I think you could play a house full in no
time and make much cash--I think you could.  Don't you think so,
Luzanne?"

Luzanne laughed.  "He can act very first-class, I'm sure," she said,
and she turned and looked Carnac in the eyes.  She was excited, she was
handsome, she was slim and graceful, and Carnac felt towards her as he
did the day at the studio, as though he'd like to kiss her.  He knew it
was not real, but it was the man in him and the sex in her.

For an hour and a half the lunch went on, all growing gayer, and then at
last Ingot said: "Well, I'm going to have a play now here, and Carnac
Grier shall act, and we all shall act.  We're going to have a wedding
ceremony between M'sieu' Grier and Luzanne--but, hush, why not!" he
added, when Luzanne shook her finger at him, and said she'd do nothing of
the kind, having, however, agreed to it beforehand.  "Why not!  There's
nothing in it.  They'll both be married some day and it will be good
practice for them.  They can learn now how to do it.  It's got to be
done--but yes.  I'll find a Judge in the village.  Come now, hands up,
those that will do it."

With a loud laugh Larue held up his hand, Carnac, who was half-drunk, did
the same, and after a little hesitation Luzanne also.

"Good--a gay little comedy, that's what it is.  I'm off for the Judge,"
and away went Ingot hard afoot, having already engaged a Judge, called
Grimshaw, in the village near to perform the ceremony.  When he had gone,
Larue went off to smoke and Luzanne and Carnac cleared up the lunch-
things and put all away in the baskets.  When it was finished, Carnac and
Luzanne sat down under a tree and talked cheerfully, and Luzanne was
never so effective as she was that day.  They laughed over the mock
ceremony to be performed.

"I'm a Catholic, you know," said Luzanne, "and it isn't legal in my
church with no dispensation to be married to a Protestant like you.  But
as it is, what does it matter!"

"Well, that's true," said Carnac.  "I suppose I ought to be acting the
lover now; I ought to be kissing you, oughtn't I?"

"As an actor, yes, but as a man, better not unless others are present.
Wait till the others come.  Wait for witnesses, so that it can look like
the real thing.

"See, there they come now."  She pointed, and in the near distance Ingot
could be seen approaching with a short, clean-shaven, roly-poly sort of
man who did not look legal, but was a real magistrate.  He came waddling
along in good spirits and rather pompously.  At that moment Larue
appeared.  Presently Ingot presented the Judge to the would--be bride and
bridegroom.  "You wish to be married-you are Mr. Grier?" said Judge
Grimshaw.

"That's me and I'm ready," said Carnac.  "Get on with the show.  What's
the first thing?"

"Well, the regular thing is to sign some forms, stating age, residence,
etc., and here they are all ready.  Brought 'em along with me.  Most
unusual form of ceremony, but it'll do.  It's all right.  Here are the
papers to sign."

Carnac hastily scratched in the needed information, and Luzanne doing the
same, the magistrate pocketed the papers.

"Now we can perform the ceremony," said the Judge.  "Mr. Larue, you go
down there with the young lady and bring her up in form, and Mr. Carnac
Grier waits here."

Larue went away with Luzanne, and presently turned, and she, with her arm
in his, came forward.  Carnac stood waiting with a smile on his face, for
it seemed good acting.  When Luzanne came, her father handed her over,
and the marriage ceremony proceeded.  Presently it concluded, and
Grimshaw, who had had more drink than was good for him, wound up the
ceremony with the words: "And may the Lord have mercy on you!"

Every one laughed, Carnac kissed the bride, and the Judge handed her the
marriage certificate duly signed.  It was now Carnac's duty to pay in the
usual way for the ceremony, and he handed the Judge ten dollars; and
Grimshaw rolled away towards the village, Ingot having also given him
ten.

"That's as good a piece of acting as I've ever seen," said Larue with a
grin.  "It beats Coquelin and Henry Irving."

"I didn't think there was much in it," said Carnac, laughing, "though it
was real enough to cost me ten dollars.  One has to pay for one's fun.
But I got a wife cheap at the price, and I didn't pay for the wedding
ring."

"No, the ring was mine," said Larue.  "I had it a long time.  It was my
engagement ring, and I want it back now."

Luzanne took it off her finger--it was much too large--and gave it to
him.  "It's easy enough to get another," she said in a queer voice.

"You did the thing in style, young man," said Ingot to Carnac with a nod.

"I'll do it better when it's the real thing," said Carnac.  "I've had my
rehearsal now, and it seemed almost real."

"It was almost real," said Ingot, with his head turned away from Carnac,
but he winked at Larue and caught a furtive look from Luzanne's eye.

"I think we'd better have another hour hereabouts, then get back to New
York," said Larue.  "There's a circus in the village--let us go to that."

At the village, they did the circus, called out praise to the clown, gave
the elephant some buns, and at five o'clock started back to New York.
Arrived at New York, they went to a hotel off Broadway for dinner, and
Carnac signed names in the hotel register as "Mr. and Mrs. Carnac Grier."
When he did it, he saw a furtive glance pass from Luzanne's eyes to her
father.  It was disconcerting to him.  Presently the two adjourned to the
sitting-room, and there he saw that the table was only laid for two.
That opened his eyes.  The men had disappeared and he and Luzanne were
alone.  She was sitting on a sofa near the table, showing to good
advantage.  She was composed, while Carnac was embarrassed.
Carnac began to take a grip on himself.

The waiter entered.  "When shall I serve dinner, sir?" he said.

Carnac realized that the dinner had been ordered by the two men, and he
said quietly: "Don't serve it for a half-hour yet--not till I ring,
please.  Make it ready then.  There's no hurry.  It's early."

The waiter bowed and withdrew with a smile, and Carnac turned to Luzanne.
She smiled, got up, came over, laid a hand on his arm, and said: "It's
quiet and nice here, Carnac dear," and she looked up ravishingly in his
face.

"It's too quiet and it's not at all nice," he suddenly replied.  "Your
father and Ingot have gone.  They've left us alone on purpose.  This is a
dirty game and I'm not going to play it any longer.  I've had enough of
it.  I've had my fill.  I'm going now.  Come, let's go together."

She looked a bit smashed and overdone.  "The dinner!" she said in
confusion.

"I'll pay for that.  We won't wait any longer.  Come on at once, please."

She put on her things coolly, and he noticed a savage stealthiness as
she pushed the long pins through her hat and hair.  He left the room.
Outside the hotel, Carnac held out his hand.

"Good night and good-bye, Luzanne," he said huskily.  "You can get home
alone, can't you?"

She laughed a little, then she said: "I guess so.  I've lived in New York
some years.  But you and I are married, Carnac, and you ought to take me
to your home."

There was something devilish in her smile now.  Then the whole truth
burst upon Carnac.  "Married--married!  When did I marry you?  Good God!"
"You married me this afternoon after lunch at Shipton.  I have the
certificate and I mean to hold you to it."

"You mean to hold me to it--a real marriage to-day at Shipton!  You and
your father and Ingot tricked me into this."

"He was a real Judge, and it was a real marriage."

"It is a fraud, and I'll unmask it," Carnac declared in anger.

"It would be difficult to prove.  You signed our names in the hotel
register as Mr. and Mrs. Carnac Grier.  I mean to stick to that name--
Mrs. Carnac Grier.  I'll make you a good wife, Carnac--do believe it.

"I'll believe nothing but the worst of you ever.  I'll fight the thing
out, by God!"

She shook her head and smiled.  "I meant you to marry me, when you saved
my life from the streetcar.  I never saw but one man I wanted to marry,
and you are that man, Carnac.  You wouldn't ask me, so I made you marry
me.  You could go farther and fare worse.  Come, take me home--take me
home, my love.  I want you to love me."

"You little devil!" Carnac declared.  "I'd rather cut my own throat.
I'm going to have a divorce.  I'm going to teach you and the others a
lesson you won't forget."

"There isn't a jury in the United States you could convince after what
you've done.  You've made it impossible.  Go to Judge Grimshaw and see
what he will say.  Go and ask the hotel people and see what they will
say.  You're my husband, and I mean you shall live with me, and I'll love
you better than any woman on earth can love you.  .  .  .  Won't you?"
She held out her hand.

With an angry exclamation, Carnac refused it, and then she suddenly
turned on her heel, slipped round a corner and was gone.

Carnac was dumbfounded.  He did not know what to do.  He went dazedly
home, and slept little that night.  The next day he went out to Shipton
and saw Judge Grimshaw and told him the whole tale.  The Judge shook his
head.

"It's too tall a story.  Why, you went through the ceremony as if it was
the real thing, signed the papers, paid my fee, and kissed the bride.
You could not get a divorce on such evidence.  I'm sorry for you, if you
don't want the girl.  She's very nice, and 'd make a good wife.  What
does she mean to do?"

"I don't know.  She left me in the street and went back to her home.  I
won't live with her."

"I can't help you anyhow.  She has the certificate.  You are validly
married.  If I were you, I'd let the matter stand."

So they parted, and Carnac sullenly went back to his apartments.  The
next day he went to see a lawyer, however.  The lawyer opened his eyes
at the story.  He had never heard anything like it.

"It doesn't sound as if you were sober when you did it.  Were you, sir?
It was a mad prank, anyhow!"

"I had been drinking, but I wasn't drunk.  I'd been telling them stories
and they used them as a means of tempting me to act in the absurd
marriage ceremony.  Like a fool I consented.  Like a fool--but I wasn't
drunk."

"No, but when you were in your right mind and sober you signed your names
as Mr. and Mrs. Carnac Grier in the register of a hotel.  I will try to
win your case for you, but it won't be easy work.  You see the Judge
himself told you the same thing.  But it would be a triumph to expose a
thing of that kind, and I'd like to do it.  It wouldn't be cheap, though.
You'd have to foot the bill.  Are you rich?"

"No, but my people are," said Carnac.  "I could manage the cash, but
suppose I lost!"

"Well, you'd have to support the woman.  She could sue you for cruelty
and desertion, and the damages would be heavy."

Carnac shook his head, paid his fee and left the office.

He did not go near Luzanne.  After a month he went to Paris for eight
months, and then back to Montreal.




CHAPTER III

CARNAC'S RETURN

Arrived in Montreal, there were attempts by Carnac to settle down to
ordinary life of quiet work at his art, but it was not effective, nor had
it been in Paris, though the excitement of working in the great centre
had stimulated him.  He ever kept saying to himself, "Carnac, you are a
married man--a married man, by the tricks of rogues!"  In Paris, he could
more easily obscure it, but in Montreal, a few hundred miles from the
place of his tragedy, pessimism seized him.  He now repented he did not
fight it out at once.  It would have been courageous and perhaps
successful.  But whether successful or not, he would have put himself
right with his own conscience.  That was the chief thing.  He was
straightforward, and back again in Canada, Carnac flung reproaches at
himself.

He knew himself now to be in love with Junia Shale, and because he was
married he could not approach her.  It galled him.  He was not fond of
Fabian, for they had little in common, and he had no intimate friends.
Only his mother was always sympathetic to him, and he loved her.  He saw
much of her, but little of anyone else.  He belonged to no clubs, and
there were few artists in Montreal.  So he lived his own life, and when
he met Junia he cavilled at himself for his madness with Luzanne.  The
curious thing was he had not had a word from her since the day of the
mock marriage.  Perhaps she had decided to abandon the thing!  But that
could do no good, for there was the marriage recorded in the registers of
New York State.

Meanwhile, things were not going well with others.  There befell a day
when matters came to a crisis in the Grier family.  Since Fabian's
marriage with Junia Shale's sister, Sybil, he had become discontented
with his position in his father's firm.  There was little love between
him and his father, and that was chiefly the father's fault.  One day,
the old man stormed at Fabian because of a mistake in the management,
and was foolish enough to say that Fabian had lost his grip since his
marriage.

Fabian, enraged, demanded freedom from the partnership, and offered to
sell his share.  In a fit of anger, the old man offered him what was at
least ten per cent more than the value of Fabian's share.  The sombre
Fabian had the offer transferred to paper at once, and it was signed by
his father--not without compunction, because difficult as Fabian was
he might go further and fare worse.  As for Fabian's dark-haired, brown-
faced, brown-eyed wife, to John Grier's mind, it seemed a good thing to
be rid of her.

When Fabian left the father alone in his office, however, the stark
temper of the old man broke down.  He had had enough.  He muttered to
himself.  Presently he was roused by a little knock at the door.  It was
Junia, brilliant, buoyant, yellow haired, with bright brown eyes,
tingling cheeks, and white laughing teeth that showed against her red
lips.  She held up a finger at him.

"I know what you've done, and it's no good at all.  You can't live
without us, and you mustn't," she said.  The old man glowered still, but
a reflective smile crawled to his lips.  "No, it's finished," he replied.

"It had to come, and it's done.  It can't be changed.  Fabian wouldn't
alter it, and I shan't."

His face was stern and dour.  He tangled his short fingers in the hair on
top of his head.

"I wouldn't say that, if I were you," she responded cheerily.  "Fabian
showed me the sum you offered for his share.  It's ridiculous.  The
business isn't worth it."

"What do you know about the business?" remarked the other.

"Well, whatever it was worth an hour ago, it's worth less now," she
answered with suggestion.  "It's worth much less now," she added.

"What do you mean by that?" he asked sharply, sitting upright, his hands
clasping his knees almost violently, his clean-shaven face showing lines
of trouble.

"I mean he's going to join the enemy," she answered quickly.

"Join the enemy!" broke from the old man's lips with a startled accent.

"Yes, the firm of Belloc."

The old man did not speak, but a curious whiteness stole over his face.
"What makes you say that!" he exclaimed, anger in his eyes.

"Well, Fabian has to put money into something," she answered, "and the
only business he knows is lumber business.  Don't you think it's natural
he should go to Belloc?"

"Did he ever say so?" asked the old man with savage sullenness.  "Tell
me.  Did he ever say so?"

The girl shook back her brave head with a laugh.  "Of course he never
said so, but I know the way he'll go."


The old man shook his head.  "I don't believe it.  He's got no love for
Belloc."

The girl felt like saying, "He's got no love for you," but she refrained.
She knew that Fabian had love for his father, but he had inherited a love
for business, and that would overwhelm all other feelings.  She therefore
said:  "Why don't you get Carnac to come in?  He's got more sense than
Fabian--and he isn't married!"

She spoke boldly, for she knew the character of the man.  She was only
nineteen.  She had always come in and gone out of Grier's house and
office freely and much more since her sister had married Fabian.

A storm gathered between the old man's eyes; his brow knitted.  "Carnac's
got brains enough, but he goes monkeying about with pictures and statues
till he's worth naught in the business of life."

"I don't think you understand him," the girl replied.  "I've been trying
to understand him for twenty-five years," the other said malevolently.
"He might have been a big man.  He might have bossed this business when
I'm gone.  It's in him, but he's a fly-away--he's got no sense.  The
ideas he's got make me sick.  He talks like a damn fool sometimes."

"But if he's a 'damn fool'--is it strange?" She gaily tossed a kiss at
the king of the lumber world.  "The difference between you and him is
this: he doesn't care about the things of this world, and you do; but
he's one of the ablest men in Canada.  If Fabian won't come back, why not
Carnac?"

"We've never hit it off."

Suddenly he stood up, his face flushed, his hands outthrust themselves in
rage, his fingers opened and shut in abandonment of temper.

"Why have I two such sons!" he exclaimed.  "I've not been bad.  I've
squeezed a few; I've struck here and there; I've mauled my enemies, but
I've been good to my own.  Why can't I run square with my own family?"
He was purple to the roots of his hair.

Savagery possessed him.  Life was testing him to the nth degree.  "I've
been a good father, and a good husband!  Why am I treated like this?"

She watched him silently.  Presently, however, the storm seemed to pass.
He appeared to gain control of himself.

"You want me to have in Carnac?" he asked, with a little fleck of foam
at the corners of his mouth.

"If you could have Fabian back," she remarked, "but you can't!  It's been
coming for a long time.  He's got your I.O.U. and he won't return; but
Carnac's got plenty of stuff in him.  He never was afraid of anything or
anybody, and if he took a notion, he could do this business as well as
yourself by and by.  It's all a chance, but if he comes in he'll put
everything else aside."

"Where is he?" the old man asked.  "He's with his mother at your home."

The old man took his hat from the window-sill.  At that moment a clerk
appeared with some papers.  "What have you got there?" asked Grier
sharply.  "The Belloc account for the trouble on the river," answered the
clerk.

"Give it me," Grier said, and he waved the clerk away.  Then he glanced
at the account, and a grim smile passed over his face.  "They can't have
all they want, and they won't get it.  Are you coming with me?" he asked
of the girl, with a set look in his eyes.  "No.  I'm going back to my
sister," she answered.

"If he leaves me--if he joins Belloc!" the old man muttered, and again
his face flushed.

A few moments afterwards the girl watched him till he disappeared up the
hill.

"I don't believe Carnac will do it," she said to herself.  "He's got the
sense, the brains, and the energy; but he won't do it."

She heard a voice behind her, and turned.  It was the deformed but potent
Denzil.  He was greyer now.  His head, a little to one side, seemed sunk
in his square shoulders, but his eyes were bright.

"It's all a bad scrape--that about Fabian Grier," he said.  "You can't
ever tell about such things, how they'll go--but no, bagosh!"




CHAPTER IV

THE HOUSE ON THE HILL

John Grier's house had a porch with Corinthian pillars.  Its elevation
was noble, but it was rather crudely built, and it needed its grove of
maples to make it pleasant to the eye.  It was large but not too ample,
and it had certain rooms with distinct character.

Inside the house, John Grier paused a moment before the door of the
sitting-room where his wife usually sat.  All was silent.  He opened the
door.  A woman rose to meet him.  She was dressed in black.  Her dark
hair, slightly streaked with grey, gave her distinction.  Her eyes had
soft understanding; her lips had a reflective smile.  There was, however,
uneasiness in her face; her fingers slightly trembled on the linen she
was holding.

"You're home early, John," she said in a gentle, reserved voice.

He twisted a shoulder.  "Yes, I'm home early," he snapped.  "Your boy
Fabian has left the business, and I've bought his share."  He named the
sum.  "Ghastly, ain't it?  But he's gone, and there's no more about it.
It's a bad thing to marry a woman that can't play fair."

He noted the excessive paleness of his wife's face; the bright eyes
stared and stared, and the lips trembled.  "Fabian--Fabian gone!" she
said brokenly.

"Yes, and he ain't coming back."

"What's he going to do?" she asked in a bitter voice.

"Join Belloc--fight his own father--try to do me in the race," growled
the old man.

"Who told you that?"  "Junia, she told me."

"What does she know about it?  Who told her that?" asked the woman with
faded lips.

"She always had sense, that child.  I wish she was a man."

He suddenly ground his heel, and there was distemper in face and voice;
his shoulders hunched; his hands were thrust down in his pockets.  He
wheeled on her.  "Where's your other boy?  Where's Carnac?"

The woman pointed to the lawn.  "He's catching a bit of the city from the
hill just beyond the pear-tree."

"Painting, eh?  I heard he was here.  I want to talk to him."

"I don't think it will do any good," was the sad reply.  "He doesn't
think as you do."

"You believe he's a genius," snarled the other.

"You know he is."

"I'll go and find him."

She nodded.  "I wish you luck," she said, but there was no conviction in
her tone.  Truth was, she did not wish him luck in this.  She watched him
leave by the French window and stride across the lawn.  A strange,
troubled expression was in her face.

"They can't pull it off together," she said to herself, and Carnac is too
full of independence.  He wants nothing from anybody.  He needs no one;
he follows no one--except me.  Yes, he follows--he loves me.

She watched her husband till he almost viciously thrust aside the bushes
staying his progress, and broke into the space by the pear-tree where
Carnac sat with palette and brush, gazing at the distant roofs on which
the sun was leaving its last kiss.

Carnac got to his feet with a smile, and with a courage in his eye equal
to that which had ever been in his father's face--in the face of John
Grier.  It was strange that the other's presence troubled him, that even
as a small child, to be in the same room for any length of time vexed
him.  Much of that had passed away.  The independence of the life he
lived, the freedom from resting upon the financial will of the lumber
king had given him light, air and confidence.  He loved his mother.  What
he felt for John Grier was respect and admiration.  He knew he was not
spoken to now with any indolent purpose.

They had seen little of each other of late years.  His mother had given
him the money to go to New York and Paris, which helped out his own
limited income.  He wondered what should bring his father to him now.
There was interested reflection in his eye.  With his habit of
visualization, he saw behind John Grier, as he came on now, the long
procession of logs and timbers which had made his fortune, stretch back
on the broad St. Lawrence, from the Mattawan to the Madawaska, from the
Richelieu to the Marmora.  Yet, what was it John Grier had done?  In a
narrow field he had organized his life perfectly, had developed his
opportunities, had safeguarded his every move.  The smiling inquiry in
his face was answered by the old man saying abruptly:

"Fabian's gone.  He's deserted the ship."

The young man had the wish to say in reply, "At last, eh!" but he
avoided it.

"Where has he gone?"

"I bought him out to-day, and I hear he's going to join Belloc."

"Belloc!  Belloc!  Who told you that?" asked the young man.

"Junia Shale--she told me."

Carnac laughed.  "She knows a lot, but how did she know that?"

"Sheer instinct, and I believe she's right."

"Right--right--to fight you, his own father!" was the inflammable reply.

"Why, that would be a lowdown business!"

"Would it be lower down than your not helping your father, when you can?"

Somehow he yearned over his wayward, fantastic son.  The wilful, splendid
character of the youth overcame the insistence in the other's nature.

"You seem to be getting on all right," remarked Carnac with the faint
brown moustache, the fine, showy teeth, the clean-shaven cheeks, and
auburn hair hanging loosely down.

"You're wrong.  Things aren't doing as well with me as they might.
Belloc and the others make difficult going.  I've got too much to do
myself.  I want help."

"You had it in Fabian," remarked Carnac dryly.  "Well, I've lost it, and
it never was enough.  He hadn't vision, sense and decision."

"And so you come to me, eh?  I always thought you despised me," said
Carnac.

A half-tender, half-repellent expression came into the old man's face.
He spoke bluntly.  "I always thought you had three times the brains of
your brother.  You're not like me, and you're not like your mother;
there's something in you that means vision, and seeing things, and doing
them.  If fifteen thousand dollars a year and a share in the business is
any good to you--"

For an instant there had been pleasure and wonder in the young man's
eyes, but at the sound of the money and the share in the business he
shrank back.

"I don't think so, father.  I'm happy enough.  I've got all I want."

"What the devil are you talking about!" the other burst out.  "You've
got all you want!  You've no home; you've no wife; you've no children;
you've no place.  You paint, and you sculp, and what's the good of it
all?  Have you ever thought of that?  What's there in it for you or
anyone else?  Have you no blood and bones, no sting of life in you?  Look
what I've done.  I started with little, and I've built up a business
that, if it goes all right, will be worth millions.  I say, if it goes
all right, because I've got to carry more than I ought."

Carnac shook his head.  "I couldn't be any help to you.  I'm not a man
of action.  I think, I devise, but I don't act.  I'd be no good in your
business no, honestly, I'd be no good.  I don't think money is the end
of life.  I don't think success is compensation for all you've done and
still must do.  I want to stand out of it.  You've had your life; you've
lived it where you wanted to live it.  I haven't, and I'm trying to find
out where my duty and my labour lies.  It is Art; no doubt.  I don't know
for sure."

"Good God!" broke in the old man.  "You don't know for sure--you're
twenty-five years old, and you don't know where you're going!"

"Yes, I know where I'm going--to Heaven by and by!"  This was his
satirical reply.

"Oh, fasten down; get hold of something that matters.  Now, listen to me.
I want you to do one thing--the thing I ought to do and can't.  I must
stay here now that Fabian's gone.  I want you to go to the Madawaska
River."

"No, I won't go to the Madawaska," replied Carnac after a long pause,
"but"--with sudden resolution--"if it's any good to you, I'll stay here
in the business, and you can go to the Madawaska.  Show me what to do
here; tell me how to do it, and I'll try to help you out for a while--
if it can be done," he added hastily.  "You go, but I'll stay.  Let's
talk it over at supper."

He sighed, and turned and gazed warmly at the sunset on the roofs of the
city; then turned to his father's face, but it was not the same look in
his eyes.




CHAPTER V

CARNAC AS MANAGER

Carnac was installed in the office, and John Grier went to the Madawaska.
Before he left, however, he was with Carnac for near a week, showing the
procedure and the main questions that might arise to be solved.

"It's like this," said Grier in their last talk, "you've got to keep a
stiff hand over the foremen and overseers, and have strict watch of
Belloc & Co.  Perhaps there will be trouble when I've gone, but, if it
does, keep a stiff upper lip, and don't let the gang do you.  You've got
a quick mind and you know how to act sudden.  Act at once, and damn the
consequences!  Remember, John Grier's firm has a reputation, and deal
justly, but firmly, with opposition.  The way it's organized, the
business almost runs itself.  But that's only when the man at the head
keeps his finger on the piston-rod.  You savvy, don't you?"

"I savvy all right.  If the Belloc firm cuts up rusty, I'll think of what
you'd do and try to do it in the same way."

The old man smiled.  He liked the spirit in Carnac.  It was the right
kind for his business.  "I predict this: if you have one fight with the
Belloc lot, you'll hate them too.  Keep the flag flying.  Don't get
rattled.  It's a big job, and it's worth doing in a big way.

"Yes, it's a big job," said Carnac.  "I hope I'll pull it off."

"You'll pull it off, if you bend your mind to it.  But there won't be any
time for your little pictures and statues.  You'll have to deal with the
real men, and they'll lose their glamour.  That's the thing about
business--it's death to sentimentality."

Carnac flushed with indignation.  "So you think Titian and Velasquez and
Goyot and El Greco and Watteau and Van Dyck and Rembrandt and all the
rest were sentimentalists, do you?  The biggest men in the world worship
them.  You aren't just to the greatest intellects.  I suppose Shakespeare
was a sentimentalist!"

The old man laughed and tapped his son on the shoulder.

"Don't get excited, Carnac.  I'd rather you ran my business well, than be
Titian or Rembrandt, whoever they were.  If you do this job well, I'll
think there's a good chance of our working together."

Carnac nodded, but the thought that he could not paint or sculp when he
was on this work vexed him, and he only set his teeth to see it through.
"All right, we'll see," he said, and his father went away.

Then Carnac's time of work and trial began.  He was familiar with the
routine of the business, he had adaptability, he was a quick worker, and
for a fortnight things went swimmingly.  There was elation in doing work
not his regular job, and he knew the eyes of the commercial and river
world were on him.  He did his best and it was an effective best.  Junia
had been in the City of Quebec, but she came back at the end of a
fortnight, and went to his office to get a subscription for a local
charity.  She had a gift in this kind of work.

It was a sunny day in the month of June, and as she entered the office a
new spirit seemed to enter with her.

The place became distinguished.  She stood in the doorway for a moment,
radiant, smiling, half embarrassed, then she said: "Please may I for a
moment, Carnac?"

Carnac was delighted.  "For many moments, Junia."

"I'm not as busy as usual.  I'm glad as glad to see you."

She said with restraint:  "Not for many moments.  I'm here on business.
It's important.  I wanted to get a subscription from John Grier for the
Sailors' Hospital which is in a bad way.  Will you give something for
him?"

Carnac looked at the subscription list.  "I see you've been to Belloc
first and they've given a hundred dollars.  Was that wise-going to them
first?  You know how my father feels about Belloc.  And we're the older
firm."

The girl laughed.  "Oh, that's silly!  Belloc's money is as good as John
Grier's, and it only happened he was asked first because Fabian was
present when I took the list, and it's Fabian's writing on the paper
there."

Carnac nodded.  "That's all right with me, for I'm no foe to Belloc, but
my father wouldn't have liked it.  He wouldn't have given anything in the
circumstances."

"Oh, yes, he would!  He's got sense with all his prejudices.  I'll tell
you what he'd have done: he'd have given a bigger subscription than
Belloc."

Carnac laughed.  "Well, perhaps you're right; it was clever planning it
so."

"I didn't plan it.  It was accident, but I had to consider everything and
I saw how to turn it to account.  So, if you are going to give a
subscription for John Grier you must do as he would do."

Carnac smiled, put the paper on his desk, and took the pen.

"Make it measure the hate John Grier has to the Belloc firm," she said
ironically.

Carnac chuckled and wrote.  "Will that do?"  He handed her the paper.

"One hundred and fifty dollars--oh, quite, quite good!" she said.
"But it's only a half hatred after all.  I'd have made it a whole one."

"You'd have expected John Grier to give two hundred, eh?  But that would
have been too plain.  It looks all right now, and it must go at that."

She smiled.  "Well, it'll go at that.  You're a good business man.  I see
you've given up your painting and sculping to do this!  It will please
your father, but are you satisfied?"

"Satisfied--of course, I'm not; and you know it.  I'm not a money-
grabber.  I'm an artist if I'm anything, and I'm not doing this
permanently.  I'm only helping my father while he's in a hole."

The girl suddenly grew serious.  "You mean you're not going to stick to
the business, and take Fabian's place in it?  He's been for a week with
Belloc and he's never coming back here.  You have the brains for it; and
you could make your father happy and inherit his fortune--all of it."

Carnac flushed indignantly.  "I suppose I could, but it isn't big enough
for me.  I'd rather do one picture that the Luxembourg or the London
National Gallery would buy than own this whole business.  That's the turn
of my mind."

"Yes, but if you didn't sell a picture to the Luxembourg or the National
Gallery.  What then?"

"I'd have a good try for it, that's all.  Do you want me to give up Art
and take to commerce?  Is that your view?"

"I suggested to John Grier the day that Fabian sold his share that you
might take his place; and I still think it a good thing, though, of
course, I like your painting.  But I felt sorry for your father with none
of his own family to help him; and I thought you might stay with him for
your family's sake."

"You thought I'd be a martyr for love of John Grier--and cold cash, did
you?  That isn't the way the blood runs in my veins.  I think John Grier
might get out of the business now, if he's tired, and sell it and let
some one else run it.  John Grier is not in want.  If he were, I'd give
up everything to help him, and I'd not think I was a martyr.  But I've a
right to make my own career.  It's making the career one likes which gets
one in the marrow.  I'd take my chances of success as he did.  He has
enough to live on, he's had success; let him get down and out, if he's
tired."

The girl held herself firmly.  "Remember John Grier has made a great name
for himself--as great in his way as Andrew Carnegie or Pierpont Morgan--
and he's got pride in his name.  He wants his son to carry it on, and in
a way he's right."

"That's good argument," said Carnac, "but if his name isn't strong enough
to carry itself, his son can't carry it for him.  That's the way of life.
How many sons have ever added to their father's fame?  The instances are
very few.  In the modern world, I can only think of the Pitts in England.
There's no one else."

The girl now smiled again.  The best part in her was stirred.  She saw.
Her mind changed.  After a moment she said:  "I think you're altogether
right about it.  Carnac, you have your own career to make, so make it
as it best suits yourself.  I'm sorry I spoke to your father as I did.
I pitied him, and I thought you'd find scope for your talents in the
business.  It's a big game, but I see now it isn't yours, Carnac."

He nodded, smiling.  "That's it; that's it, I hate the whole thing."

She shook hands.  As his hand enclosed her long slim fingers, he felt he
wished never to let them go, they were so thrilling; but he did, for the
thought of Luzanne came to his mind.

"Good-bye, Junia, and don't forget that John Grier's firm is the foe of
the Belloc business," he said satirically.

She laughed, and went down the hill quickly, and as she went Carnac
thought he had never seen so graceful a figure.

"What an evil Fate sent Luzanne my way!" he said.

Two days later there came an ugly incident on the river.  There was a
collision between a gang of John Grier's and Belloc's men and one of
Grier's men was killed.  At the inquest, it was found that the man met
his death by his own fault, having first attacked a Belloc man and
injured him.  The Belloc man showed the injury to the jury, and he was
acquitted.  Carnac watched the case closely, and instructed his lawyer to
contend that the general attack was first made by Belloc's men, which was
true; but the jury decided that this did not affect the individual case,
and that the John Grier man met his death by his own fault.

"A shocking verdict!" he said aloud in the Court when it was given.

"Sir," said the Coroner, "it is the verdict of men who use their judgment
after hearing the evidence, and your remark is offensive and criminal."

"If it is criminal, I apologize," said Carnac.

"You must apologize for its offensiveness, or you will be arrested, sir."

This nettled Carnac.  "I will not apologize for its offensiveness," he
said firmly.

"Constable, arrest this man," said the Coroner, and the constable did so.

"May I be released on bail?" asked Carnac with a smile.

"I am a magistrate.  Yes, you may be released on bail," said the Coroner.

Carnac bowed, and at once a neighbour became security for three thousand
dollars.  Then Carnac bowed again and left the Court with--it was plain--
the goodwill of most people present.

Carnac returned to his office with angry feelings at his heart.  The
Belloc man ought to have been arrested for manslaughter, he thought.  In
any case, he had upheld the honour of John Grier's firm by his protest,
and the newspapers spoke not unfavourably of him in their reports.  They
said he was a man of courage to say what he did, though it was improper,
from a legal standpoint.  But human nature was human nature!

The trial took place in five days, and Carnac was fined twenty-five
cents, which was in effect a verdict of not guilty; and so the newspapers
said.  It was decided that the offence was only legally improper, and it
was natural that Carnac expressed himself strongly.

Junia was present at the trial.  After it was over, she saw Carnac for a
moment.  "I think your firm can just pay the price and exist!" she said.
"It's a terrible sum, and it shows how great a criminal you are!"

"Not a 'thirty-cent' criminal, anyhow," said Carnac.  "It is a moral
victory, and tell Fabian so.  He's a bit huffy because I got into the
trouble, I suppose."

"No, he loathed it all.  He's sorry it occurred."

There was no further talk between them, for a subordinate of Carnac's
came hurriedly to him and said something which Junia did not hear.
Carnac raised his hat to her, and hurried away.

"Well, it's not so easy as painting pictures," she said.  "He gets fussed
over these things."

It was later announced by the manager of the main mill that there was
to be a meeting of workers to agitate for a strike for higher pay.  A
French-Canadian who had worked in the mills of Maine and who was a red-
hot socialist was the cause of it.  He had only been in the mills for
about three months and had spent his spare time inciting well-satisfied
workmen to strike.  His name was Luc Baste--a shock-haired criminal with
a huge chest and a big voice, and a born filibuster.  The meeting was
held and a deputation was appointed to wait on Carnac at his office.
Word was sent to Carnac, and he said he would see them after the work was
done for the day.  So in the evening about seven o'clock the deputation
of six men came, headed by Luc Baste.

"Well, what is it?" Carnac asked calmly.

Luc Baste began, not a statement of facts, but an oration on the rights
of workers, their downtrodden condition and their beggarly wages.  He
said they had not enough to keep body and soul together, and that right
well did their employers know it.  He said there should be an increase of
a half-dollar a day, or there would be a strike.

Carnac dealt with the matter quickly and quietly.  He said Luc Baste had
not been among them a long time and evidently did not know what was the
cost of living in Montreal.  He said the men got good wages, and in any
case it was not for him to settle a thing of such importance.  This was
for the head of the firm, John Grier, when he returned.  The wages had
been raised two years before, and he doubted that John Grier would
consent to a further rise.  All other men on the river seemed satisfied
and he doubted these ought to have a cent more a day.  They were getting
the full value of the work.  He begged all present to think twice before
they brought about catastrophe.  It would be a catastrophe if John
Grier's mills should stop working and Belloc's mills should go on as
before.  It was not like Grier's men to do this sort of thing.

The men seemed impressed, and, presently, after one of them thanking him,
the deputation withdrew, Luc Baste talking excitedly as they went.  The
manager of the main mill, with grave face, said:

"No, Mr. Grier, I don't think they'll be satisfied.  You said all that
could be said, but I think they'll strike after all."

"Well, I hope it won't occur before John Grier gets back," said Carnac.

That night a strike was declared.

Fortunately, only about two-thirds of the men came out, and it could not
be called a complete success.  The Belloc people were delighted, but they
lived in daily fear of a strike in their own yards, for agitators were
busy amongst their workmen.  But the workers waited to see what would
happen to Grier's men.

Carnac declined to reconsider.  The wages were sufficient and the strike
unwarranted!  He kept cool, even good-natured, and with only one-third of
his men at work, he kept things going, and the business went on with
regularity, if with smaller output.  The Press unanimously supported him,
for it was felt the strike had its origin in foreign influence, and as
French Canada had no love for the United States there was journalistic
opposition to the strike.  Carnac had telegraphed to his father when the
strike started, but did not urge him to come back.  He knew that Grier
could do nothing more than he himself was doing, and he dreaded new
influence over the strikers.  Grier happened to be in the backwoods and
did not get word for nearly a week; then he wired asking Carnac what the
present situation was.  Carnac replied he was standing firm, that he
would not yield a cent increase in wages, and that, so far, all was
quiet.

It happened, however, that on the day he wired, the strikers tried to
prevent the non-strikers from going to work and there was a collision.
The police and a local company of volunteers intervened and then the
Press condemned unsparingly the whole affair.  This outbreak did good,
and Luc Baste was arrested for provoking disorder.  No one else was
arrested, and this was a good thing, for, on the whole, even the men
that followed Luc did not trust him.  His arrest cleared the air and
the strike broke.  The next day, all the strikers returned, but Carnac
refused their wages for the time they were on strike, and he had
triumphed.

On that very day John Grier started back to Montreal.  He arrived in
about four days, and when he came, found everything in order.  He went
straight from his home to the mill and there found Carnac in control.

"Had trouble, eh, Carnac?" he asked with a grin, after a moment of
greeting.  Carnac shrugged his shoulders, but said nothing.

"It's the first strike I ever had in my mills, and I hope it will be the
last.  I don't believe in knuckling down to labour tyranny, and I'm glad
you kept your hand steady.  There'll be no more strikes in my mills--I'll
see to that!"

"They've only just begun, and they'll go on, father.  It's the influence
of Canucs who have gone to the factories of Maine.  They get bitten there
with the socialistic craze, and they come back and make trouble.  This
strike was started by Luc Baste, a French-Canadian, who had been in
Maine.  You can't stop these things by saying so.  There was no strike
among Belloc's men!"

"No, but did you have no trouble with Belloc's men?"

Carnac told him of the death of the Grier man after the collision, of his
own arrest and fine of twenty-five cents and of the attitude of the
public and the Press.  The old man was jubilant.  "Say, you did the thing
in style.  It was the only way to do it.  You landed 'em with the protest
fair and easy.  You're going to be a success in the business, I can see
that."

Carnac for a moment looked at his father meditatively.  Then, seeing the
surprise in John Grier's face, he said: "No, I'm not going to be a
success in it, for I'm not going on with it.  I've had enough.  I'm
through."

"You've had enough--you're through--just when you've proved you can do
things as well as I can do them!  You ain't going on!  Great
Jehoshaphat!"

"I mean it; I'm not going on.  I'm going to quit in another month.
I can't stick it.  It galls me.  It ain't my job.  I do it, but it's
artificial, it ain't the real thing.  My heart isn't in it as yours is,
and I'd go mad if I had to do this all my life.  It's full of excitement
at times, it's hard work, it's stimulating when you're fighting, but
other times it's deadly dull and bores me stiff.  I feel as though I were
pulling a train of cars."

Slowly the old man's face reddened with anger.  "It bores you stiff, eh?
It's deadly dull at times!  There's only interest in it when there's a
fight on, eh?  You're right; you're not fit for the job, never was and
never will be while your mind is what it is.  Don't take a month to go,
don't take a week, or a day, go this morning after I've got your report
on what's been done.  It ain't the real thing, eh?  No, it ain't.  It's
no place for you.  Tell me all there is to tell, and get out; I've had
enough too, I've had my fill.  'It bores me stiff'!"

John Grier was in a rage, and he would listen to no explanation.  "Come
now, out with your report."

Carnac was not upset.  He kept cool.  "No need to be so crusty," he said.




CHAPTER VI

LUKE TARBOE HAS AN OFFER

Many a man behind his horses' tails on the countryside has watched the
wild reckless life of the water with wonder and admiration.  He sees a
cluster of logs gather and climb, and still gather and climb, and between
him and that cluster is a rolling waste of timber, round and square.

Suddenly, a being with a red shirt, with loose prairie kind of hat, knee-
boots, having metal clamps, strikes out from the shore, running on the
tops of the moving logs till he reaches the jam.  Then the pike-pole, or
the lever, reaches the heart of the difficulty, and presently the jam
breaks, and the logs go tumbling into the main, while the vicious-looking
berserker of the water runs back to the shore over the logs, safe and
sound.  It is a marvel to the spectator, that men should manipulate the
river so.  To him it is a life apart; not belonging to the life he lives
-a passing show.

It was a stark surprise of the river which makes this story possible.
There was a strike at Bunder's Boom--as it was called--between Bunder and
Grier's men.  Some foreman of Grier's gang had been needlessly offensive.
Bunder had been stupidly resentful.  When Grier's men had tried to force
his hand also, he had resisted.  It chanced that, when an impasse seemed
possible to be broken only by force, a telegram came to John Grier at
Montreal telling him of the difficulty.  He lost no time in making his
way northwards.

But some one else had come upon the scene.  It was Luke Tarboe.  He had
arrived at a moment when the Belloc river crowd had almost wrecked
Bunder's Boom, and when a collision between the two gangs seemed
inevitable.  What he did remained a river legend.  By good temper and
adroitness, he reconciled the leaders of the two gangs; he bought the
freedom of the river by a present to Bunder's daughter; he won Bunder
by four bottles of "Three Star" brandy.  When the police from a town a
hundred miles away arrived at the same time as John Grier, it was
to find the Grier and Belloc gangs peacefully prodding side by side.

When the police had gone, John Grier looked Tarboe up and down.  The
brown face, the clear, strong brown eyes and the brown hatless head rose
up eighteen inches above his own, making a gallant summit to a robust
stalk.

"Well, you've done easier things than that in your time, eh?" John Grier
asked.

Tarboe nodded.  "It was touch and go.  I guess it was the hardest thing I
ever tried since I've been working for you, but it's come off all right,
hasn't it?"  He waved a hand to the workmen on the river, to the tumbling
rushes of logs and timber.  Then he looked far up the stream, with hand
shading his brown eyes to where a crib-or raft-was following the eager
stream of logs.  "It's easy going now," he added, and his face had a look
of pleasure.

"What's your position, and what's your name?" asked John Grier.

"I'm head-foreman of the Skunk Nest's gang--that's this lot, and I got
here--just in time!  I don't believe you could have done it, Mr. Grier.
No master is popular in the real sense with his men.  I think they'd have
turned you down.  So it was lucky I came."

A faint smile hovered at his lips, and his eyes brooded upon the busy
gangs of men.  "Yes, I've had a lot of luck this time.  There's nothing
like keeping your head cool and your belly free from drink."  Now he
laughed broadly.  "By gosh, it's all good!  Do you know, Mr. Grier, I
came out here a wreck eight years ago.  I left Montreal then with a spot
in my lungs, that would kill me, they said.  I've never seen Montreal
since, but I've had a good time out in the woods, in the shanties in the
winters; on the rivers in the summer.  I've only been as far East as this
in eight years."

"What do you do in the winter, then?"

"Shanties-shanties all the time.  In the summer this; in the Fall taking
the men back to the shanties.  Bossing the lot; doing it from love of the
life that's been given back to me.  Yes, this is the life that makes you
take things easy.  You don't get fussed out here.  The job I had took a
bit of doing, but it was done, and I'm lucky to have my boss see the end
of it."

He smiled benignly upon John Grier.  He knew he was valuable to the Grier
organization; he knew that Grier had heard of him under another name.
Now Grier had seen him, and he felt he would like to tell John Grier some
things about the river he ought to know.  He waved a hand declining the
cigar offered him by his great chief.

"Thanks, I don't smoke, and I don't drink, and I don't chew; but I eat
--by gosh, I eat!  Nothing's so good as good food, except good reading."

"Good reading!" exclaimed John Grier.  "Good reading--on the river!"

"Well, it's worked all right, and I read a lot.  I get books from
Montreal, from the old library at the University."

"At what University?" struck in the lumber-king.  "Oh, Laval!  I
wouldn't go to McGill.  I wanted to know French, so I went to Laval.
There I came to know Father Labasse.  He was a great man, Father Labasse.
He helped me.  I was there three years, and then was told I was going to
die.  It was Labasse who gave me this tip.  He said, 'Go into the woods;
put your teeth into the trees; eat the wild herbs, and don't come back
till you feel well.' Well, I haven't gone back, and I'm not going back."

"What do you do with your wages?" asked the lumber-king.

"I bought land.  I've got a farm of four hundred acres twenty miles from
here.  I've got a man on it working it."

"Does it pay?"

"Of course.  Do you suppose I'd keep a farm that didn't pay?"

"Who runs it?"

"A man that broke his leg on the river.  One of Belloc's men.  He knows
all about farming.  He brought his wife and three children up, and there
he is--making money, and making the land good.  I've made him a partner
at last.  When it's good enough by and by, I'll probably go and live
there myself.  Anybody ought to make farming a success, if there's water
and proper wood and such things," he added.

There was silence for a few moments.  Then John Grier looked Tarboe up
and down sharply again, noting the splendid physique, the quizzical,
mirth-provoking eye, and said: "I can give you a better job if you'll
come to Montreal."

Tarboe shook his head.  "Haven't had a sick day for eight years; I'm as
hard as nails; I'm as strong as steel.  I love this wild world of the
woods and fields and--"

"And the shebangs and grog-shops and the dirty, drunken villages?"
interrupted the old man.

"No, they don't count.  I take them in, but they don't count."

"Didn't you have hard times when you first came?" asked John Grier.
"Did you get right with the men from the start?"

"A little bit of care is a good thing in any life.  I told them good
stories, and they liked that.  I used to make the stories up, and they
liked that also.  When I added some swear words they liked them all the
better.  I learned how to do it."

"Yes, I've heard of you, but not as Tarboe."

"You heard of me as Renton, eh?"

"Yes, as Renton.  I wonder I never came across you till to-day."

"I kept out of your way; that was the reason.  When you came north, I got
farther into the backwoods."

"Are you absolutely straight, Tarboe?" asked John Grier eagerly.  "Do
you do these things in the Garden of Eden way, or can you run a bit
crooked when it's worth while?"

"If I'd ever seen it worth while, I'd say so.  I could run a bit crooked
if I was fighting among the big ones, or if we were at war with--Belloc,
eh!"  A cloud came into the eyes of Tarboe.  "If I was fighting Belloc,
and he used a weapon to flay me from behind, I'd never turn my back on
him!"

A grim smile came into Tarboe's face.  His jaw set almost viciously, his
eyes hardened.  "You people don't play your game very well, Mr. Grier.
I've seen a lot that wants changing."

"Why don't you change it, then?"

Tarboe laughed.  "If I was boss like you, I'd change it, but I'm not, and
I stick to my own job."

The old man came close to him, and steadily explored his face and eyes.
"I've never met anybody like you before.  You're the man can do things
and won't do them."

"I didn't say that.  I said what I meant--that good health is better than
everything else in the world, and when you've got it, you should keep it,
if you can.  I'm going to keep mine."

"Well, keep it in Montreal," said John Grier.  "There's a lot doing there
worth while.  Is fighting worth anything to one that's got aught in him?
There's war for the big things.  I believe in war."  He waved a hand.
"What's the difference between the kind of thing you've done to-day, and
doing it with the Belloc gang--with the Folson gang--with the Longville
gang--and all the rest?  It's the same thing.  I was like you when I was
young.  I could do things you've done to-day while I laid the base of
what I've got.  How old are you?"

"I'm thirty--almost thirty-one."

"You'll be just as well in Montreal to-morrow as you are here to-day, and
you'd be twice as clever," said John Grier.  His eyes seemed to pierce
those of the younger man.  "I like you," he continued, suddenly catching
Tarboe's arm.  "You're all right, and you wouldn't run straight simply
because it was the straight thing to do."

Tarboe threw back his head and laughed and nodded.  The old man's eyes
twinkled.  "By gracious, we're well met!  I never was in a bigger hole in
my life.  One of my sons has left me.  I bought him out, and he's joined
my enemy Belloc."

"Yes, I know," remarked Tarboe.

"My other son, he's no good.  He's as strong as a horse--but he's no
good.  He paints, he sculps.  He doesn't care whether I give him money or
not.  He earns his living as he wants to earn it.  When Fabian left me, I
tried Carnac.  I offered to take him in permanently.  He tried it, but he
wouldn't go on.  He got out.  He's twenty-six.  The papers are beginning
to talk about him.  He doesn't care for that, except that it brings in
cash for his statues and pictures.  What's the good of painting and
statuary, if you can't do the big things?"

"So you think the things you do are as big as the things that
Shakespeare, or Tennyson, or Titian, or Van Dyck, or Watt, or Rodin do
--or did?"

"Bigger-much bigger," was the reply.

The younger man smiled.  "Well, that's the way to look at it, I suppose.
Think the thing you do is better than what anybody else does, and you're
well started."

"Come and do it too.  You're the only man I've cottoned to in years.
Come with me, and I'll give you twelve thousand dollars a year; and I'll
take you into my business.--I'll give you the best chance you ever had.
You've found your health; come back and keep it.  Don't you long for the
fight, for your finger at somebody's neck?  That's what I felt when I was
your age, and I did it, and I'm doing it, but I can't do it as I used to.
My veins are leaking somewhere."  A strange, sad, faded look came into
his eyes.  "I don't want my business to be broken by Belloc," he added.
"Come and help me save it."

"By gosh, I will!" said the young man after a moment, with a sudden
thirst in his throat and bite to his teeth.  "By gum, yes, I'll go with
you."




CHAPTER VII

"AT OUR PRICE?"

West of the city of Montreal were the works and the offices of John
Grier.  Here it was that a thing was done without which there might have
been no real story to tell.  It was a night which marked the close of the
financial year of the firm.

Upon John Grier had come Carnac.  He had brought with him a small statue
of a riverman with flannel shirt, scarf about the waist, thick defiant
trousers and well-weaponed boots.  It was a real figure of the river,
buoyant, daring, almost vicious.  The head was bare; there were plain
gold rings in the ears; and the stark, half-malevolent eyes looked out,
as though searching for a jam of logs or some peril of the river.  In the
horny right hand was a defiant pike-pole, its handle thrust forward, its
steel spike stabbing the ground.

At first glance, Carnac saw that John Grier was getting worn and old.
The eyes were not so flashing as they once were; the lips were curled in
a half-cynical mood.  The old look of activity was fading; something
vital had struck soul and body.  He had had a great year.  He had fought
Belloc and his son Fabian successfully; he had laid new plans and
strengthened his position.

Tarboe coming into the business had made all the difference to him.
Tarboe had imagination, skill and decision, he seldom lost his temper; he
kept a strong hand upon himself.  His control of men was marvellous; his
knowledge of finance was instinctive; his capacity for organization was
rare, and he had health unbounded and serene.  It was hard to tell what
were the principles controlling Tarboe--there was always an element of
suspicion in his brown and brilliant eyes.  Yet he loved work.  The wind
of energy seemed to blow through his careless hair.  His hands were like
iron and steel; his lips were quick and friendly, or ruthless, as seemed
needed.  To John Grier's eyes he was the epitome of civilization--the
warrior without a soul.

When Carnac came in now with the statue tucked under his arm, smiling and
self-contained, it seemed as though something had been done by Fate to
flaunt John Grier.

With a nod, Carnac put the statue on the table in front of the old man,
and said: "It's all right, isn't it?  I've lifted that out of the river-
life.  That's one of the best men you ever had, and he's only one of a
thousand.  He doesn't belong anywhere.  He's a rover, an adventurer, a
wanton of the waters.  Look at him.  He's all right, isn't he?"  He asked
this again.

The timber-man waved the statue aside, and looked at the youth with
critical eyes.  "I've just been making up the accounts for the year," he
said.  "It's been the best year I've had in seven.  I've taken the starch
out of Belloc and Fabian.  I've broken the back of their opposition--I've
got it like a twig in iron teeth."

"Yes, Tarboe's been some use, hasn't he?" was the suggestive response.

John Grier's eyes hardened.  "You might have done it.  You had it in you.
The staff of life--courage and daring--were yours, and you wouldn't take
it on.  What's the result?  I've got a man who's worth two of Fabian and
Belloc.  And you"--he held up a piece of paper--"see that," he broke off.
"See that.  It's my record.  That's what I'm worth.  That's what you
might have handled!"  He took a cigar from his pocket, cut off the blunt
end, and continued: "You threw your chance aside."  He tapped the paper
with the point of the cigar.  "That's what Tarboe has helped do.  What
have you got to show?"  He pointed to the statue.  "I won't say it ain't
good.  It's a live man from the river.  But what do I want with that,
when I can have the original man himself!  My boy, the great game of life
is to fight hard, and never to give in.  If you keep your eyes open,
things'll happen that'll bring what you want."

He stood up, striking a match to light his cigar.  It was dusk, and the
light of the match gave a curious, fantastic glimmer to his powerful,
weird, haggard face.  He was like some remnant of a great life, loose in
a careless world.

"I tell you," he said, the smoke leaking from his mouth like a drift of
snow," the only thing worth doing is making the things that matter in the
commerce and politics of the world."

"I didn't know you were a politician," said Carnac.  "Of course I'm a
politician," was the inflammable reply.  "What's commerce without
politics?  It's politics that makes the commerce possible.  There's that
fellow Barouche--Barode Barouche--he's got no money, but he's a Minister,
and he can make you rich or poor by planning legislation at Ottawa
that'll benefit or hamper you.  That's the kind of business that's worth
doing--seeing into the future, fashioning laws that make good men happy
and bad men afraid.  Don't I know!  I'm a master-man in my business;
nothing defeats me.  To me, a forest of wild wood is the future palace of
a Prime Minister.  A great river is a pathway to the palace, and all the
thousands of men that work the river are the adventurers that bring the
booty home--"

"That bring 'the palace to Paris,' eh!"  interrupted Carnac, laughing.

"Paris be damned--that bring the forest to Quebec.  How long did it take
you to make that?" he added with a nod towards the statue.

"Oh, I did it in a day--six hours, I think; and he stood like that for
three hours out of the six.  He was great, but he'd no more sense of
civilization than I have of Heaven."

"You don't need to have a sense of Heaven, you need to have a sense of
Hell.  That prevents you from spoiling your own show.  You're playing
with life's vital things."

"I wonder how much you've got out of it all, father," Carnac remarked
with a smile.  He lit a cigarette.  "You do your job in style.  It's been
a great career, yours.  You've made your big business out of nothing."

"I had something to start with.  Your grandfather had a business worth
not much, but it was a business, and the fundamental thing is to have
machinery to work with when you start life.  I had that.  My father was
narrow, contracted and a blunderer, but he made good in a small way."

"And you in a big way," said Carnac, with admiration and criticism in his
eyes.

He realized that John Grier had summed him up fairly when he said he was
playing with life's vital things.  Somehow, he saw the other had a grip
upon essentials lacking in himself; he had his tooth in the orange, as it
were, and was sucking the juice of good profit from his labours.  Yet he
knew how much trickery and vital evasion and harsh aggression there were
in his father's business life.

As yet he had never seen Tarboe--he had been away in the country the
whole year nearly--but he imagined a man of strength, abilities,
penetration and deep power.  He knew that only a man with savage
instincts could work successfully with John Grier; he knew that Grier
was without mercy in his business, and that his best year's work had been
marked by a mandatory power which only a malevolent policy could produce.
Yet, somehow, he had a feeling that Tarboe had a steadying influence on
John Grier.  The old man was not so uncontrolled as in bygone days.

"I'd like to see Tarboe," Carnac said suddenly.  "He ain't the same as
you," snapped John Grier.  "He's bigger, broader, and buskier."  A
malicious smile crossed over his face.  "He's a bandit--that's what he
is.  He's got a chest like a horse and lungs like the ocean.  When he's
got a thing, he's got it like a nail in a branch of young elm.  He's a
dandy, that fellow."  Suddenly passion came to his eyes.  "You might have
done it, you've got the brains, and the sense, but you ain't got the
ambition.  You keep feeling for a thousand things instead of keeping your
grip on one.  The man that succeeds fastens hard on what he wants to do--
the one big thing, and he does it, thinking of naught else."

"Well, that's good preaching," remarked Carnac coolly.  "But it doesn't
mean that a man should stick to one thing, if he finds out he's been
wrong about it?  We all make mistakes.  Perhaps some day I'll wish I'd
gone with you."

Grimness came into the old man's face.  Something came into his eyes that
was strange and revealing.

"Well, I hope you will.  But you had your chance with me, and you threw
it down like a piece of rotten leather."

"I don't cost you anything," returned Carnac.  "I've paid my own way a
long time--with mother's help."

"And you're twenty-six years old, and what have you got?  Enough to give
you bread from day to day-no more.  I was worth seventy thousand dollars
when I was your age.  I'm worth enough to make a prince rich, and if I'd
been treated right by those I brought into the world I'd be worth twice
as much.  Fabian was good as far as he went, but he was a coward.  You"--
a look of fury entered the dark eyes--"you were no coward, but you didn't
care a damn.  You wanted to paddle about with muck of imagination--" he
pointed to the statue on the table.

"Why, your business has been great because of your imagination," was the
retort.  "You saw things ahead with the artist's eye.  You planned with
the artist's mind; and brought forth what's to your honour and credit--
and the piling up of your bank balance.  The only thing that could have
induced me to work in your business is the looking ahead and planning,
seeing the one thing to be played off against the other, the fighting of
strong men, the politics, all the forces which go to make or break your
business.  Well, I didn't do it, and I'm not sorry.  I have a gift which,
by training and development, will give me a place among the men who do
things, if I have good luck--good luck!"

He dwelt upon these last words with an intensity which dreaded something.
There was retrospection in his eyes.  A cloud seemed to cross his face.

A strong step crunching the path stopped the conversation, and presently
there appeared the figure of Tarboe.  Certainly the new life had not
changed Tarboe, had not altered his sturdy, strenuous nature.  His brown
eyes under the rough thatch of his eyebrow took in the room with
lightning glance, and he nodded respectfully, yet with great
friendliness, at John Grier.  He seemed to have news, and he
glanced with doubt at Carnac.

John Grier understood.  "Go ahead.  What's happened?"

"Nothing that can't wait till I'm introduced to your son," rejoined
Tarboe.

With a friendly look, free from all furtiveness, Carnac reached out a
hand, small, graceful, firm.  As Tarboe grasped it in his own big paw, he
was conscious of a strength in the grip which told him that the physical
capacity of the "painter-fellow," as he afterwards called Carnac, had
points worthy of respect.  On the instant, there was admiration on the
part of each--admiration and dislike.  Carnac liked the new-comer for
his healthy bearing, for the iron hardness of his head, and for the
intelligence of his dark eyes.  He disliked him, however, for something
that made him critical of his father, something covert and devilishly
alert.  Both John Grier and Tarboe were like two old backwoodsmen, eager
to reach their goal, and somewhat indifferent to the paths by which they
travelled to it.

Tarboe, on the other hand, admired the frank, pleasant face of the young
man, which carried still the irresponsibility of youth, but which
conveyed to the watchful eye a brave independence, a fervid, and perhaps
futile, challenge to all the world.  Tarboe understood that this young
man had a frankness dangerous to the business of life, yet which,
properly applied, might bring great results.  He disliked Carnac for his
uncalculating candour; but he realized that, behind all, was something
disturbing to his life.

"It's a woman," Tarboe said to himself, "it's a woman.  He's made a fool
of himself."

Tarboe was right.  He had done what no one else had done--he had pierced
the cloud surrounding Carnac: it was a woman.

"I hear you're pulling things off here," remarked Carnac civilly.  "He
says"--pointing to John Grier--"that you're making the enemy squirm."

Tarboe nodded, and a half-stealthy smile crept across his face.  "I don't
think we've lost anything coming our way," he replied.  "We've had good
luck--"

"And our eyes were open," intervened John Grier.  "You push the brush and
use the chisel, don't you?" asked Tarboe in spite of himself with slight
scorn in his tone.

"I push the chisel and use the brush," answered Carnac, smilingly
correcting him.

"That's a good thing.  Is it yours?" asked Tarboe, nodding and pointing
to the statue of the riverman.  Carnac nodded.  "Yes, I did that one day.
I'd like to do you, if you'd let me."

The young giant waved a brawny hand and laughed.  He looked down at his
knee-boots, with their muddied soles, and then at the statue again on the
table.  "I don't mind you're doing me.  Turn about is fair play.

"I've done you out of your job."  Then he added to the old man: "It's good
news I've got.  I've made the contract with the French firm at our
price."

"At our price!" remarked the other with a grim smile.  "For the lot?"

"Yes, for the lot, and I've made the contracts with the ships to carry
it."

"At our price?" again asked the old man.  Tarboe nodded.  "Just a little
better."

"I wouldn't have believed those two things could have been done in the
time."  Grier rubbed his hands cheerfully.  "That's a good day's work.
It's the best you've done since you've come."

Carnac watched the scene with interest.  No envy moved him, his soul was
free from malice.  Evidently Tarboe was a man of power.  Ruthless he
might be, ruthless and unsparing, but a man of power.

At that instant a clerk entered with a letter in his hand.  "Mrs. Grier
said to give you this," he remarked to Carnac, handing it to him.

Carnac took it and the clerk departed.  The letter had an American
postmark, and the handwriting on the letter brought trouble to his eyes.
He composed himself, however, and tore off the end of the envelope,
taking out the letter.

It was brief.  It contained only a few lines, but as Carnac read them the
colour left his face.  "Good God!" he said to himself.  Then he put the
paper in his pocket, and, with a forced smile and nod to his father and
Tarboe, left the office.

"That's queer.  The letter seemed to get him in the vitals," said John
Grier with surprise.

Tarboe nodded, and said to himself: "It's a woman all right."  He smiled
to himself also.  He had wondered why Carnac and Junia Shale had not come
to an understanding.  The letter which had turned Carnac pale was the
interpretation.

"Say, sit down, Tarboe," said John Grier.  "I want to talk with you."




CHAPTER VIII

JOHN GRIER MAKES ANOTHER OFFER

"I've been keeping my eye on you, Tarboe," John Grier said presently, his
right hand clutching unconsciously the statue which his boy had left with
him.

"I didn't suppose you'd forget me when I was making or breaking you."

"You're a winner, Tarboe.  You've got sense and judgment, and you ain't
afraid to get your own way by any route."

He paused, and gripped the statue closely in his hands.

Tarboe nodded.  In the backwoods he had been without ambition save to be
master of what he was doing and of the men who were part of his world of
responsibility.  Then John Grier had pulled him back into industry and he
had since desired to ascend, to "make good."  Also, he had seen Junia
often, and for her an aspiration had sprung up in him like a fire in a
wild place.

When he first saw her, she was standing in the doorway through which
Carnac had just passed.  The brightness of her face, the wonder of her
eyes, the glow of her cheek, had made his pulses throb as they had never
throbbed before.  He had put the thought of her away from him, but it had
come back constantly until he had found himself looking for her in the
street, and on the hill that led to John Grier's house.

Tarboe realized that the girl was drawn towards Carnac, and that Carnac
was drawn towards the girl, but that some dark depths lay between.  The
letter Carnac had just received seemed to him the plumbline of that
abyss.  Carnac and the girl were suited to each other--that was clear;
and the girl was enticing, provoking and bewildering--that was the
modelling fact.  He had satisfaction that he had displaced Carnac in this
great business, and there was growing in him a desire to take away the
chances of the girl from Carnac also.  With his nature it was inevitable.
Life to him was now a puzzle towards the solution of which he moved with
conquering conviction.

From John Grier's face now, he realized that something was to be said
affecting his whole career.  It would, he was sure, alter his foot-steps
in the future.  He had a profound respect for the little wiry man, with
the firm body and shrivelled face.

Tarboe watched the revealing expression of the old man's face and the
motions of his body.  He noticed that the tight grip of the hand on the
little statue of the riverman had made the fingers pale.  He realized how
absorbed was the lumber-king, who had given him more confidence than he
had given to anyone else in the world.  As near as he could come to
anyone, he had come to John Grier.  There had been differences between
them, but he, Tarboe, fought for his own idea, and, in nine cases out of
ten, had conquered.  John Grier had even treated Tarboe's solutions as
though they were his own.  He had a weird faith in the young giant.  He
saw now Tarboe's eyes fixed on his fingers, and he released his grip.

"That's the thing between him and me, Tarboe," he said, nodding towards
the virile bronze.  "Think of my son doing that when he could do all
this!"  He swept his arm in a great circle which included the horizon
beyond the doors and the windows.  "It beats me, and because it beats me,
and because he defies me, I've made up my mind what to do."

"Don't do anything you'd be sorry for, boss.  He ain't a fool because
he's not what you are."  He nodded towards the statue.  "You think that's
pottering.  I think it's good stuff.  It will last, perhaps, when what
you and I do is forgotten."

There was something big and moving in Tarboe.  He was a contradiction.
A lover of life, he was also reckless in how he got what he wanted.
If it could not be got by the straight means, then it must be by the
crooked, and that was where he and Grier lay down together, as it were.
Yet he had some knowledge that was denied to John Grier.  The soul of the
greater things was in him.

"Give the boy a chance to work out his life in his own way," he said
manfully.  "You gave him a chance to do it in your way, and you were
turned down.  Have faith in him.  He'll probably come out all right in
the end.

"You mean he'll come my way?" asked the old man almost rabidly.  "You
mean he'll do the things I want him to do here, as you've done?"

"I guess so," answered Tarboe, but without conviction in his tone.  "I'm
not sure whether it will be like that or not, but I know you've got a son
as honest as the stars, and the honest man gets his own in the end."

There was silence for some time, then the old man began walking up and
down the room, softly, noiselessly.

"You talk sense," he said.  "I care for that boy, but I care for my
life's work more.  Day in, day out, night in, night out, I've slaved for
it, prayed for it, believed in it, and tried to make my wife and my boys
feel as I do about it, and none of them cares as I care.  Look at Fabian
--over with the enemy, fighting his own father; look at Carnac, out in
the open, taking his own way."  He paused.

"And your wife?" asked Tarboe almost furtively, because it seemed to him
that the old man was most unhappy in that particular field.

"She's been a good wife, but she don't care as I do for success and
money."

"Perhaps you never taught her," remarked Tarboe with silky irony.

"Taught her!  What was there to teach?  She saw me working; she knew the
life I had to live; she was lifted up with me.  I was giving her
everything in me to give."

"You mean money and a big house and servants and comfort," said Tarboe
sardonically.

"Well, ain't that right?" snapped the other.

"Yes, it's all right, but it don't always bring you what you want.  It's
right, but it's wrong too.  Women want more than that, boss.  Women want
to be loved--sky high."

All at once Grier felt himself as far removed from Tarboe as he had ever
been from Carnac, or his wife.  Why was it?  Suddenly Tarboe understood
that between him and John Grier there must always be a flood.  He
realized that there was in Grier some touch of the insane thing;
something apart, remote and terrible.  He was convinced of it, when he
saw Grier suddenly spring up, and pace the room again like a tortured
animal.

"You've got great influence with me," he said.  "I was just going to tell
you something that'd give you pleasure, but what you've said about my boy
coming back has made me change what I was going to do.  I don't need to
say I like you.  We were born in the same nest almost.  We've got the
same ideas."

"Almost," intervened Tarboe.  "Not quite, but almost."

"Well, this is what I've got to say.  You've got youth, courage, and good
sense, and business ability, and what more does a man want in life, I ask
you that?" Tarboe nodded, but made no reply.

"Well, I don't feel as strong as I used to do.  I've been breaking up
this last year, just when we've been knitting the cracks in the building.
What was in my mind is this--to leave you when I die the whole of my
business to keep it a success, and get in the way of Belloc, and pay my
wife so much a year to live on."

"That wouldn't be fair to your wife or your sons."

"As for Carnac, if I left him the business it'd be dead in two years.
Nothing could save it.  He'd spoil it, because he don't care for it.  I
bought Fabian out.  As for my wife, she couldn't run it, and--"

"You could sell it," interrupted Tarboe.

"Sell it!  Sell it!" said Grier wildly.  "Sell it to whom?"

"To Belloc," was the malicious reply.  The demon of anger seized the old
man.

"You say that to me--you--that I should sell to Belloc!  By hell, I'd
rather burn every stick and board and tree I've got--sweep it out of
existence, and die a beggar than sell it to Belloc!"  Froth gathered at
the corners of his mouth, there was tumult in his eyes.  "Belloc!
Knuckle down to him!  Sell out to him!"

"Well, if you got a profit of twenty per cent. above what it's worth it
might be well.  That'd be a triumph, not a defeat."

"I see what you mean," said John Grier, the passion slowly going from his
eyes.  "I see what you mean, but that ain't my way.  I want this business
to live.  I want Grier's business to live long after John Grier has gone.
That's why I was going to say to you that in my will I'm going to leave
you this business, you to pay my wife every year twenty thousand
dollars."  "And your son, Carnac?"

"Not a sou-not a sou--not a sou--nothing--that's what I meant at first.
But I've changed my mind now.  I'm going to leave you the business, if
you'll make a bargain with me.  I want you to run it for three years, and
take for yourself all the profits over the twenty thousand dollars a year
that goes to my wife.  There's a lot of money in it, the way you'd work
it."

"I don't understand about the three years," said Tarboe, with rising
colour.

"No, because I haven't told you, but you'll take it in now.  I'm going to
leave you the business as though you were going to have it for ever, but
I'll make another will dated a week later, in which I leave it to Carnac.
Something you said makes me think he might come right, and it will be
playing fair to him to let him run himself alone, maybe with help from
his mother, for three years.  That's long enough, and perhaps the thought
of what he might have had will work its way with him.  If it don't--well,
it won't; that's all; but I want you to have the business long enough to
baulk Belloc and Fabian the deserter.  I want you for three years to
fight this fight after I'm gone.  In that second secret will, I'll leave
you two hundred thousand dollars.  Are you game for it?  Is it
worthwhile?"

The old man paused, his head bent forward, his eyes alert and searching,
both hands gripping the table.  There was a long silence, in which the
ticking of the clock upon the wall seemed unduly loud and in which the
buzz of cross-cut saws came sounding through the evening air.  Yet Tarboe
did not reply.

"Have you nothing to say?" asked Grier at last.  "Won't you do it--eh?"

"I'm studying the thing out," answered Tarboe quietly.  "I don't quite
see about these two wills.  Why shouldn't the second will be found
first?"

"Because you and I will be the only ones that'll know of it.  That shows
how much I trust you, Tarboe.  I'll put it away where nobody can get it
except you or me."

"But if anything should happen to me?"

"Well, I'd leave a letter with my bank, not to be opened for three years,
or unless you died, and it would say that the will existed, where it was,
and what its terms were."

"That sounds all right," but there was a cloud on Tarboe's face.

"It's a great business," said Grier, seeing Tarboe's doubt.  "It's the
biggest thing a man can do--and I'm breaking up."

The old man had said the right thing--"It's a great business!"  It was
the greatness of the thing that had absorbed Tarboe.  It was the bigness
made him feel life could be worth living, if the huge machinery were
always in his fingers.  Yet he had never expected it, and life was a
problem.  Who could tell?  Perhaps--perhaps, the business would always be
his in spite of the second will!  Perhaps, he would have his chance to
make good.  He got to his feet; he held out his hand.

"I'll do it."

"Ain't it worth any thanks?"

"Not between us," declared Tarboe.

"When are you going to do it?"

"To-night--now."  He drew out some paper and sat down with a pen in his
hand.

"Now," John Grier repeated.




CHAPTER IX

THE PUZZLE

On his way home, with Luzanne's disturbing letter in his pocket, Carnac
met Junia.  She was supremely Anglo-Saxon; fresh, fervid and buoyant with
an actual buoyancy of the early spring.  She had tact and ability,
otherwise she could never have preserved peace between the contending
factions, Belloc and Fabian, old John Grier, the mother and Carnac.  She
was as though she sought for nothing, wished nothing but the life in
which she lived.  Yet her wonderful pliability, her joyful boyishness,
had behind all a delicate anxiety which only showed in flashes now and
then, fully understood by no one except Carnac's mother and old Denzil.
These two having suffered strangely in life had realized that the girl
was always waiting for a curtain to rise which did not rise, for a voice
to speak which gave no sound.

Yet since Carnac's coming back there had appeared a slight change in her,
a bountiful, eager alertness, a sense of wonder and experiment, adding
new interest to her personality.  Carnac was conscious of this increased
vitality, was impressed and even provoked by it.  Somehow he felt--for he
had the telepathic mind--that the girl admired and liked Tarboe.  He did
not stop to question how or why she should like two people so different
as Tarboe and himself.

The faint colour of the crimsoning maples was now in her cheek; the light
of the autumn evening was in her eyes; the soft vitality of September was
in her motions.  She was attractively alive.  Her hair waved back from
her forehead with natural grace; her small feet, with perfect ankles,
made her foothold secure and sedately joyous.  Her brown hand--yet not so
brown after all--held her hat lightly, and was, somehow, like a signal
out of a world in which his hopes were lost for the present.

She was dearer to him than all the rest of the world; and he had in his
hand what kept them apart--a sentence of death, unless he escaped from
the wanton calling him to fulfil duties into which he had been tricked.
Luzanne Larue had a terrible hold over him.  He gripped the letter in his
pocket as a Hopi Indian does the body of a poisonous snake.  The rosy
sunset gave the girl's face a reflected spiritual glamour; it made her,
suddenly, a bewildering figure.  Somehow, she seemed a great distance
from him--as one detached and unfamiliar.

He suddenly felt she knew more than it was possible she should know.
As she flashed an inquiry into his eyes, it was as though she said: "Why
don't you tell me everything, and I will help you?"  Or, was it: "Why
don't you tell me everything and end it all?"  He longed to press her to
his breast, as he had once done in the woods when Denzil had been
injured, but that was not possible.  The thought of that far-off day made
him say to her, rather futilely:

"How is Denzil?  How is Denzil?"

There was swift surprise in her face.  She seemed dumbfounded, and then
she said:

"Denzil!  He's all right, but he does not like your Mr. Tarboe."

"My Mr. Tarboe!  Where do I come in?"

"Well, he's got what you ought to have had," was the reply.  "What you
would have had, weren't you a foolish fellow."

"I still don't understand how he is my Mr. Tarboe."

"Well, he wouldn't have been in your father's life if it weren't for you;
if you had done what your father wished you to do, had--"

"Had sold myself for gold--my freedom, my health, everything to help my
father's business!  I don't see why he should expect that what he's doing
some one else should do--"

"That Belloc would do, that Belloc and Fabian would do," said the girl.

"Yes, that's it--what they two would do.  There's no genius in it,
though my father comes as near being a genius as any man alive.  But
there's a screw loose somewhere.  .  .  .  It wasn't good enough for me.
It didn't give me a chance--in things that are of the mind, the spirit--
my particular gifts, whatever they are.  They would have chafed against
that life."

"In other words, you're a genius, which your father isn't," the girl said
almost sarcastically.

A disturbed look came into Carnac's eyes.  "I'd have liked my father to
be a genius.  Then we'd have hit it off together.  I don't ever feel the
things he does are the things I want to do; or the things he says are
those I'd like to say.  He's a strange man.  He lives alone.  He never
was really near Fabian or me.  We were his sons, but though Fabian is a
little bit like him in appearance, I'm not, and never was.  I always feel
that--"  He paused, and she took up the tale:

"That he wasn't the father you'd have made for yourself, eh!"

"I suppose that's it.  Conceit, ain't it?  Perhaps the facts are, I'm one
of the most useless people that ever wore a coat.  Perhaps the things I
do aren't going to live beyond me."

"It seems as though your father's business is going to live after him,
doesn't it?" the girl asked mockingly.  "Where are you going now?" she
added.

"Well, I'm going to take you home," he said, as he turned and walked by
her side down the hill.

"Denzil will be glad to see you.  He almost thinks I'm a curse."

Carnac smiled.  "All genius is at once a blessing or a curse.  And what
does Denzil think of me?"

"Oh--a blessing and a curse!" she said whimsically.

"I don't honestly think I'm a blessing to anybody in this world.
There's no one belonging to me who believes in me."

"There's Denzil," she said.  "He believes in you."

"He doesn't belong to me; he isn't my family."

"Who are your family?  Is it only those who are bone of your bone and
flesh of your flesh?  Your family is much wider, because you're a genius.
It's worldwide--of all kinds.  Denzil belongs to you, because you helped
to save him years ago; the Catholic Archbishop belongs to you, because
he's got brains and a love of literature and art; Barode Barouche belongs
to you, because he's almost a genius too."

"Barouche is a politician," said Carnac with slight derision.

"That's no reason why he shouldn't be a genius."

"He's a Frenchman."

"Haven't Frenchmen genius?" asked the girl.

Carnac laughed.  "Why, of course.  Barode Barouche--yes, he's a great
one: he can think, he can write, and he can talk; and the talking's the
best that he does--though I've not heard him speak, but I've read his
speeches."

"Doesn't he make good laws at Ottawa?"

"He makes laws at Ottawa--whether they're good or not is another
question.  I shouldn't be a follower of his, if I had my chance though."

"That's because you're not French."

"Oh yes, I'm as French as can be!  I felt at home with the French when I
was in France.  I was all Gallic.  When I'm here I'm more Gallic than
Saxon.

"I don't understand it.  Here am I, with all my blood for generations
Saxon, and yet I feel French.  If I'd been born in the old country, it
would have been in Limerick or Tralee.  I'd have been Celtic there."

"Yet Barode Barouche is a great man.  He gets drunk sometimes, but he's
great.  He gets hold of men like Denzil."

"Denzil has queer tastes."

"Yes--he worships you."

"That's not queer, it's abnormal," said Carnac with gusto.

"Then I'm abnormal," she said with a mocking laugh, and swung her hat on
her fingers like a wheel.  Something stormy and strange swam in Carnac's
eyes.  All his trouble rushed back on him; the hand in his pocket crushed
the venomous letter he had received, but he said:

"No, you don't worship me!"

"Who was it said all true intelligence is the slave of genius?" she
questioned, a little paler than usual, her eye on the last gleam of the
sun.

"I don't know who said it, but if that's why you worship me, I know how
hollow it all is," he declared sullenly, for she was pouring carbolic
acid into a sore.

He wanted to drag the letter from his pocket and hand it her to read; to
tell her the whole distressful story: but he dared not.  He longed for
her, and yet he dared not tell her so.  He half drew the letter from his
pocket, but thrust it back again.  Tell this innocent girl the whole ugly
story?  It could not be done.  There was but one thing to do--to go away,
to put this world of French Canada behind him, and leave her free to
follow her fancy, or some one else's fancy.

Or some one else's fancy?  There was Tarboe.  Tarboe had taken from him
the place in the business which should be his; he had displaced him in
his father's affections .  .  .  and now Junia!

He held out a hand to the girl.  "I must go and see my mother."

His eyes abashed her.  She realized there was trouble in the face of the
man who all her life had been strangely near and dear to her.  With
impulsiveness, she said "You're in trouble, Carnac.  Let me help you."

For one swift instant he almost yielded.  Then he gripped her hand and
said: "No-no-no.  It can't be done--not yet."

"Then let Denzil help you.  Here he is," she remarked, and she glanced
affectionately at the greyish, tousled head of the habitant who was
working in the garden of her father's house.

Carnac was master of himself again.  "Not a bad idea," he said.  "Denzil!
Denzil!" he called.

The little man looked up.  An instant later the figure of the girl
fluttered through the doorway of her home, and Carnac stopped beside
Denzil in the garden.




CHAPTER X

DENZIL TELLS HIS STORY

"You keep going, Denzil," remarked Carnac as he lighted his pipe and came
close to the old servant.

The face of the toiler lighted, the eyes gazed kindly, at Carnac.  "What
else is there to do?  We must go on.  There's no standing still in the
world.  We must go on--surelee."

"Even when it's hard going, eh?" asked Carnac, not to get an answer so
much as to express his own feelings.  "Yes, that's right, m'sieu'; that's
how it is.  We can't stand still even when it's hard going--but, no,
bagosh!"

He realized that around Carnac there was a shadow which took its toll of
light and life.  He had the sound instinct of primitive man.  Strangely
enough in his own eyes was the look in those of Carnac, a past, hovering
on the brink of revelation.  His appearance was that of one who had
suffered; his knotted hands, dark with warm blood, had in them a story of
life's sorrows; his broad shoulders were stooped with the inertia of long
regret; his feet clung to the ground as though there was a great weight
above them.  But a smile shimmered at his mouth, giving to his careworn
face something almost beautiful, lifting the darkness from his powerful,
shaggy forehead.  Many men knew Denzil by sight, few knew him in actual
being.  There was a legend that once he was about to be married, but the
girl had suddenly gone mad and drowned herself in the river.  No one
thought it strange that a month later the eldest son of the Tarboe family
had been found dead in the woods with a gun in his hand and a bullet
through his heart.  No one had ever linked the death of Denzil's loved
one with that of Almeric Tarboe.

It was unusual for a Frenchman to give up his life to an English family,
but that is what he had done, and of late he had watched Junia with new
eager solicitude.  The day she first saw Tarboe had marked an exciting
phase in her life.

Denzil had studied her, and he knew vaguely that a fresh interest,
disturbing, electrifying, had entered into her.  Because it was Tarboe,
the fifteen years younger brother of that Almeric Tarboe who had died a
month after his own girl had left this world, his soul was fighting--
fighting.

As the smoke of Carnac's pipe came curling into the air, Denzil put on
his coat, and laid the hoe and rake on his shoulder.

"Yes, even when it's hard going we still have to march on--name of God,
yes!" he repeated, and he looked at Carnac quizzically.

"Where are you going?  Don't you want to talk to me?"

"I'm going home, m'sieu'.  If you'll come with me I'll give you a drink
of hard cider, the best was ever made."

"I'll come.  Denzil, I've never been in your little house.  That's
strange, when I've known you so many years."

"It's not too late to mend, m'sieu'.  There ain't much in it, but it's
all I need."

Carnac stepped with Denzil towards the little house, just in front of
three pine-trees on the hill, and behind Junia's home.

"I always lock my door--always," said Denzil as he turned a key and
opened the door.

They entered into the cool shade of a living-room.  There was little
furniture, yet against the wall was a kind of bunk, comfortable and
roomy, on which was stretched the skin of a brown bear.  On the wall
above it was a crucifix, and on the opposite wall was the photograph of a
girl, good-looking, refined, with large, imaginative eyes, and a face
that might have been a fortune.

Carnac gazed at it for a moment, absorbed.  "That was your girl, Denzil,
wasn't it?" he asked.

Denzil nodded.  "The best the world ever had, m'sieu'," he replied, "the
very best, but she went queer and drowned herself--ah, but yes!"

"She just went queer, eh!" Carnac said, looking Denzil straight in the
eyes.  "Was there insane blood in her family?"

"She wasn't insane," answered Denzil firmly.  "She'd been bad used--
terrible."

"That didn't come out at the inquest, did it?"

"Not likely.  She wrote it me.  I'm telling you what I've never told
anyone."  He shut the door, as though to make a confessional.  "She wrote
it me, and I wasn't telling anyone-but no.  She'd been away down at
Quebec City, and there a man got hold of her.  Almeric Tarboe it was--the
older brother of Luke Tarboe at John Grier's."  Suddenly the face of the
little man went mad with emotion.  "I--I--" he paused.

Carnac held up his hand.  "No-no-no, don't tell me.  Tarboe--
I understand, the Unwritten Law.  You haven't told me, but I understand.
I remember: he was found in the woods with his gun in his hand-dead.
I read it all by accident long ago; and that was the story, eh!"

"Yes.  She was young, full of imagination.  She loved me, but he was
clever, and he was high up, and she was low down.  He talked her blind,
and then in the woods it was, in the woods where he died, that he--"

Suddenly the little man wrung his fingers like one robbed of reason.
"He was a strongman," he went on, "and she was a girl, weak, but not
wanton .  .  .  and so she died, telling me, loving me--so she died, and
so he died, too, in the woods with his gun in his hand.  Yes, 'twas done
with his own gun--by accident--by accident!  He stumbled, and the gun
went off.  That was the story at the inquest.  No one knew I was there.
I was never seen with him and I've never been sorry.  He got what he
deserved--sacre, yes!"

There was something overwhelming in the face of the little resolute,
powerful man.  His eyes were aflame.  He was telling for the first time
the story of his lifelong agony and shame.

"It had to be done.  She was young, so sweet, so good, aye, she was good-
in her soul she was good, ah, surelee.  That's why she died in the pond.
No one knew.  The inquest did not bring out anything, but that's why he
died; and ever since I've been mourning; life has no rest for me.
I'm not sorry for what I did.  I've told it you because you saved me
years ago when I fell down the bank.  You were only fourteen then,
but I've never forgotten.  And she, that sweet young lady, she--she was
there too; and now when I look at this Tarboe, the brother of that man,
and see her and know what I know--sacre!"  He waved a hand.  "No-no-no,
don't think there's anything except what's in the soul.  That man has
touched ma'm'selle--I don't know why, but he has touched her heart.
Perhaps by his great bulk, his cleverness, his brains, his way of doing
things.  In one sense she's his slave, because she doesn't want to think
of him, and she does.  She wants to think of you--and she does--ah,
bagosh, yes!"

"Yes, I understand," remarked Carnac morosely.  "I understand."

"Then why do you let her be under Tarboe's influence?  Why don't--"

Carnac thrust out a hand that said silence.  "Denzil, I'll never forget
what you've told me about yourself.  Some day you'll have to tell it to
the priest, and then--"

"I'll never tell it till I'm on my death-bed.  Then I'll tell it, sacre
bapteme, yes!"

"You're a bad Catholic, Denzil," remarked Carnae with emotion, but a
smile upon his face.

"I may be a bad Catholic, but the man deserved to die, and he died.
What's the difference, so far's the world's concerned, whether he died by
accident, or died--as he died.  It's me that feels the fury of the
damned, and want my girl back every hour: and she can't come.  But some
day I'll go to M'sieu' Luke Tarboe, and tell him the truth, as I've told
it you--bagosh, yes!"

"I think he'd try and kill you, if you did.  That's the kind of man he
is."

"You think if he knew the truth he'd try and kill me--he!"

Carnac paused.  He did not like to say everything in his mind.  "Do you
think he'd say much and do little?"

"I dunno, I dunno, but I'll tell him the truth and take my chance."
Suddenly he swung round and stretched out appealing hands.  "Haven't you
got any sense, m'sieu'?  Don't you see what you should do?  Ma'm'selle
Junia cares for you.  I know it--I've seen it in her eyes often--often."

With sudden vehemence Carnac caught the wrists of the other.  "It can't
be, Denzil.  I can't tell you why yet.  I'm going away.  If Tarboe wants
her--good--good; I must give her a chance."

Denzil shrank.  "There's something wrong, m'sieu'," he said.  Then his
eyes fastened on Carnac's.  Suddenly, with a strange, shining light in
them, he added "It will all come right for you and her.  I'll live for
that.  If you go away, I'll take good care of her."

"Even if--" Carnac paused.

"Yes, even if he makes love to her.  He'll want to marry her, surelee."

"Well, that's not strange," remarked Carnac.




CHAPTER XI

CARNAC'S TALK WITH HIS MOTHER

Carnac went slowly towards his father's house on the hill.  Fixed, as his
mind was, upon all that had just happened, his eye took fondly from the
gathering dusk pictures which the artist's mind cherishes--the long
roadway, with the maples and pines, the stump fences; behind which lay
the garnered fields, where the plough had made ready the way for the Fall
wheat; the robins twittering in the scattered trees; the cooing of the
wood-pigeon; over all, the sky in its perfect purpling blue, and far down
the horizon the evening-star slowly climbing.  He noted the lizards
slipping through the stones; he saw where the wheel of a wagon had
crushed some wild flower-growth; he heard the far call of a milkmaid to
the cattle; he caught the sweet breath of decaying verdure, and through
all, the fresh, biting air of the new-land autumn, pleasantly stinging
his face.

Something kept saying to his mind: "It's all good.  It's life and light,
and all good."  But his nerves were being tried; his whole nature was
stirred.

He took the letter from his pocket again, and read it in the fading
light.  It was native, naive, brutal, and unconsciously clever--and the
girl who had written it was beautiful.  It had only a few lines.  It
asked him why he had deserted her, his wife.  It said that he would find
American law protected the deluded stranger.  It asked if he had so soon
forgotten the kisses he had given her, and did he not realize they were
married?  He felt that, with her, beneath all, there was more than
malice; there was a passion which would run risks to secure its end.

A few moments later he was in the room where his mother, with her strong,
fine, lonely face, sat sewing by the window.  The door opened squarely on
her, and he saw how refined and sad, yet self-contained, was the woman
who had given him birth.  The look in her eyes warmly welcomed him.  Her
own sorrows made her sensitive to those of others, and as Carnac entered
she saw something was vexing him.

"Dear lad!" she said.

He was beside her now, and he kissed her cheek.  "Best of all the world,"
he said; and he did not see that she shrank a little.

"Are you in trouble?" she asked, and her hand touched his shoulder.

The wrong she had done him long ago vexed her.  It was not possible this
boy could fit in with a life where, in one sense, he did not belong.  It
was not part of her sorrow that he had given himself to painting and
sculpture.  In her soul she believed this might be best for him in the
end.  She had a surreptitious, an almost anguished, joy in the thought
that he and John Grier could not hit it off.  It seemed natural that
both men, ignorant of their own tragedy, believing themselves to be
father and son, should feel for each other the torture of distance,
a misunderstanding, which only she and one other human being understood.

John Grier was not the boy's father.  Carnac was the son of Barode
Barouche.

After a moment he said: "Mother, I know why I've come to you.  It's
because I feel when I'm in trouble, I get helped by being with you."

"How do I help, my boy?" she asked with a sad smile, for he had said
the thing dearest to her heart.

"When I'm with you, I seem to get a hold on myself.  I've always had a
strange feeling about you.  I felt when I was a child that you're two
people; one that lives on some distant, lonely prairie, silent, shadowy
and terribly loving; and the other, a vocal person, affectionate, alert,
good and generous."

He paused, but she only shook her head.  After a moment he continued:
"I know you aren't happy, mother, but maybe you once were--at the start."

She got to her feet, and drew herself up.

"I'm happy in your love, but all the rest--is all the rest.  It isn't
your father's fault wholly.  He was busy; he forgot me.  Dear, dear boy,
never give up your soul to things only, keep it for people."

She was naturally straight and composed; yet as she stood there, she had
a certain lonely splendour like some soft metal burning.  Among her
fellow-citizens she had place and position, but she took no lead; she was
always an isolated attachment of local enterprises.  It was in her own
house where her skill and adaptability had success.  She had brought into
her soul misery and martyrdom, and all martyrs are lonely and apart.

Sharp visions of what she was really flashed through Carnac's mind, and
he said:

"Mother, there must be something wrong with you and me.  You were
naturally a great woman, and sometimes I have a feeling I might be a
great man, but I don't get started for it.  I suppose, you once had an
idea you'd play a big part in the world?"

"Girls have dreams," she answered with moist eyes, "and at times I
thought great things might come to me; but I married and got lost."

"You got lost?" asked Carnac anxiously, for there was a curious note in
her voice.

She tried to change the effect of her words.

"Yes, I lost myself in somebody else's ambitions I lost myself in the
storm."

Carnac laughed.  "Father was always a blizzard, wasn't he?  Now here, now
there, he rushed about making money, humping up his business, and yet why
shouldn't you have ranged beside him.  I don't understand."

"No, that's the bane of life," she replied.  "We don't understand each
other.  I can't understand why you don't marry Junia.  You love her.
You don't understand why I couldn't play as big a part as your father--
I couldn't.  He was always odd--masterful and odd, and I never could do
just as he liked."

There was yearning sadness in her eyes.  "Dear Carnac, John Grier is a
whirlwind, but he's also a still pool in which currents are secretly
twisting, turning.  His imagination, his power is enormous; but he's
Oriental, a barbarian."

"You mean he might have had twenty wives?"

"He might have had twenty, and he'd have been the same to all of them,
because they play no part, except to make his home a place where his body
can live.  That's the kind of thing, when a wife finds it out, that
either kills her slowly, or drives her mad."

"It didn't kill you, mother," remarked Carnac with a little laugh.

"No, it didn't kill me."

"And it didn't drive you mad," he continued.

She looked at him with burning intensity.  "Oh, yes, it did--but I became
sane again."  She gazed out of the window, down the hillside.  "Your
father will soon be home.  Is there anything you want to say before
that?"

Carnac wanted to tell his tragic story, but it was difficult.  He caught
his mother's hand.

"What's the matter, Carnac?  You are in trouble.  I can see it in your
eyes--I feel it.  Is it money?" she asked.  She knew it was not, yet she
could not help but ask.  He shook his head in negation.

"Is it business?"

She knew his answer, yet she must make these steps before she said to
him: "Is it a woman?"

He nodded now.  She caught his eyes and held them with her own.  All the
silence and sorrow, all the remorse and regret of the past twenty-six
years gathered in her face.

"Yes and no," he answered with emotion.  "You've quarrelled with Junia?"

"No," he replied.

"Why don't you marry her?" she urged.  "We all would like it, even your
father."

"I can't."

"Why?"  She leant forward with a slight burning of the cheek.  "Why,
Carnac?"

He had determined to keep his own secret, to hide the thing which had
vexed his life, but a sudden feeling overcame his purpose.  With impulse
he drew out the letter he had received in John Grier's office and handed
it to her.

"Read that, and then I'll tell you all about it--all I can."

With whitening face, she took the letter and read its few lines.  It was
written in French, with savage little flourishes and twists, and the name
signed at the end was "Luzanne."  At last she handed it back, her fingers
trembling.

"Who is Luzanne, and what does it mean?"  What she had read was
startling.

He slowly seated himself beside her.  "I will tell you."

When Carnac had ended his painful story, she said to him: "It's terrible
--oh, terrible.  But there was divorce."

"Yes, but they told me I couldn't get a divorce.  Yet I wish now I'd
tried for it.  I've never heard a word from the girl till I got that
letter.  It isn't strange she hasn't moved in the thing till now.  It was
I that should have acted; and she knew that.  She means business, that's
clear, and it'll be hard to prove I didn't marry her with eyes wide open.
It gets between me and my work and my plans for the future; between--"

"Between you and Junia," she said mournfully.  "Don't you think you ought
to get a divorce for Junia's sake, if nothing else?"

"Yes, of course.  But I'm not sure I could get a divorce--evidence is so
strong against me, and it was a year ago!  If I can see Luzanne again
perhaps I can get her to tear up the marriage-lines--that's what I want.
She isn't all bad.  I must go again to New York; and Junia can wait.  I'm
not much, I know--not worth waiting for, maybe, but I'm in earnest where
Junia's concerned.  I could make a little home for her at once, and a
better one as time went on, if she would marry me."

After a moment of silence, Carnac added: "I'm going to New York.  Don't
you think I ought to go?"

The gaunt, handsome face of the woman darkened, and then she answered:
"Yes."

There was silence again for a moment, deep and painful, and then Carnac
spoke.

"Mother, I don't think father is well.  I see a great change in him.  He
hasn't long to travel, and some day you'll have everything.  He might
make you run the business, with Tarboe as manager."

She shuddered slightly.  "With Tarboe--I never thought of that--with
Tarboe!  .  .  .  Are you going to wait for--your father?  He'll be here
presently."

"No, I'm off.  I'll go down the garden, through the bushes," he said....
"Mother, I've got nearer you to-night than in all the rest of my life."

She kissed him fondly.  "You're going away, but I hope you'll come back
in time."

He knew she meant Junia.

"Yes, I hope I'll come back in time."

A moment later he was gone, out of the sidedoor, through the bushes, and
down the hill, running like a boy.  He had for the first time talked to
his mother about the life of their home; the facts she told him stripped
away the curtain that hid the secret things of life from his eyes.

John Grier almost burst upon his wife.  He opened and shut the door
noisily; he stamped into the dusky room.

"Isn't it time for a light?" he said with a quizzical nod towards her.

The short visit of Carnac had straightened her back.  "I like the
twilight.  I don't light up until it's dark, but if you wish--"

"You like the twilight; you don't light up until it's dark, but if I
wish--ah, that's it!  Have your own way....  I'm the breadwinner; I'm the
breadwinner; I'm the fighter; I'm the man that makes the machine go; but
I don't like the twilight, and I don't like to wait until it's dark
before I light up.  So there it is!"

She said nothing at once, but struck a match, and lit the gas.

"It's easy to give you what you want," she answered after a little.
"I'm used to it now."

There was something animal-like in the thrust forward of his neck, in the
anger that mounted to his eyes.  When she had drawn down the blinds, he
said to her: "Who's been here?"

For an instant she hesitated.  Then she said: "Carnac's been here, but
that has naught to do with what I said.  I've lived with you for over
thirty years, and I haven't spoken my mind often, but I'm speaking it
now."

"Never too late to mend, eh!" he gruffly interposed.  "So Carnac's been
here!  Putting up his independent clack, eh?  He leaves his old father to
struggle as best he may, and doesn't care a damn.  That's your son
Carnac."

How she longed to say to him, "That's not your son Carnac!" but she
could not.  A greyness crossed over her face.

"Is Carnac staying here?"

She shook her head in negation.

"Well, now I'll tell you about Carnac," he said viciously.  "I'm shutting
him out of the business of my life.  You understand?"

"You mean--" She paused.

"He's taken his course, let him stick to it.  I'm taking my course, and
I'll stick to it."

She came close and reached out a faltering hand.  "John, don't do what
you'll be sorry for."

"I never have."

"When Fabian was born, you remember what you said?  You said: 'Life's
worth living now.'"

"Yes, but what did I say when Carnac was born?"

"I didn't hear, John," she answered, her face turning white.

"Well, I said naught."




CHAPTER XII

CARNAC SAYS GOOD-BYE

Fabian Grier's house was in a fashionable quarter of a fashionable
street, the smallest of all built there; but it was happily placed,
rather apart from others, at the very end of the distinguished promenade.
Behind it, a little way up the hill, was a Roman Catholic chapel.

The surroundings of the house were rural for a city habitation.  Behind
it were commendable trees, from one of which a swing was hung.  In a
corner, which seemed to catch the sun, was a bird-cage on a pole, sought
by pigeons and doves.  In another corner was a target for the bow and
arrow-evidence of the vigorous life of the owners of the house.

On the morning after Carnac told his mother he was going away, the doors
of the house were all open.  Midway between breakfast and lunch, the
voices of children sang through the dining-room bright with the morning
sun.  The children were going to the top of the mountain-the two
youngsters who made the life of Fabian and his wife so busy.  Fabian was
a man of little speech.  He was slim and dark and quiet, with a black
moustache and smoothly brushed hair, with a body lithe and composed, yet
with hands broad, strong, stubborn.

As Junia stood by the dining-room table and looked at the alert,
expectant children, she wished she also was going now to the mountain-
top.  But that could not be--not yet.  Carnac had sent a note saying he
wished to see her, and she had replied through Denzil that her morning
would be spent with her sister.  "What is it?" she remarked to herself.
"What is it?  There's nothing wrong.  Yet I feel everything upside down."

Her face turned slowly towards the wide mountain; it caught the light
upon the steeple of the Catholic chapel.  She shuddered slightly, and an
expression came into her shadowed eyes not belonging to her personality,
which was always buoyant.

As she stood absorbed, her mind in a maze of perplexity, a sigh broke
from her lips.  She suddenly had a conviction about Carnac; she felt his
coming might bring a crisis; that what he might say must influence her
whole life.  Carnac--she threw back her head.  Suddenly a sweet,
appealing, intoxicating look crossed her face.  Carnac!  Yes,
there was a man, a man of men.

Tarboe got his effects by the impetuous rush of a personality; Carnac by
something that haunted, that made him more popular absent than present.
Carnac compelled thought.  When he was away she wanted him; when he was
near she liked to quarrel with him.  When they were together, one moment
she wanted to take his hands in her hands, and in the next she wanted to
push him over some great cliff--he was so maddening.  He provoked the
devil in her; yet he made her sing the song of Eden.  What was it?

As she asked the question she heard a firm step on the path.  It was
Carnac.  She turned and stood waiting, leaning against the table,
watching the door through which he presently came.  He was dressed in
grey.  His coat was buttoned.  He carried a soft grey hat, and somehow
his face gave her a feeling that he had come to say good-bye.
It startled her; and yet, though she was tempted to grip her breast,
she did not.  Presently she spoke.

"I think you're a very idle man.  Why aren't you at work?"

"I am at work," Carnac said cheerfully.

"Work is not all paint and canvas of course.  There has to be the
thinking beforehand.  Well, of what are you thinking now?"

"Of the evening train to New York."

His face was turned away from her at the instant, because he did not wish
to see the effect of his words.  He would have seen that apprehension
came to her eyes.  Her mouth opened in quick amazement.  It was all too
startling.  He was going--for how long?

"Why are you going?" she asked, when she had recovered her poise.

"Well, you see I haven't quite learned my painting yet, and I must study
in great Art centres where one isn't turned down by one's own judgment."

"Ananias!" she said at last.  "Ananias!"

"Why do you say I'm a liar?" he asked, flushing a little, though there
was intense inquiry in his eyes.  "Because I think it.  It isn't your
work only that's taking you away."  Suddenly she laughed.  "What a fool
you are, Carnac!  You're not a good actor.  You're not going away for
work's sake only."

"Not for work's sake only--that's true."

"Then why do you go?"

"I'm in a mess, Junia.  I've made some mistakes in my life, and I'm going
to try and put one of them right."

"Is anybody trying to do you harm?" she asked gently.

"Yes, somebody's trying to hurt me."

"Hurt him," she rejoined sharply, and her eyes fastened his.

He was about to say there was no him in the matter, but reason steadied
him, and he said:

"I'll do my best, Junia.  I wish I could tell you, but I can't.  What's
to be done must be done by myself alone."

"Then it ought to be done well."

With an instant's impulse he moved towards her.  She went to the window,
however, and she said: "Here's Fabian.  You'll be glad of that.  You'll
want to say good-bye to him and Sibyl."  She ran from him to the front
door.  "Fabian--Fabian, here's a bad boy who wants to tell you things
he won't tell me."  With these words she went into the garden.

"I don't think he'll tell me," came Fabian's voice.  "Why should he?"

A moment afterwards the two men met.

"Well, what's the trouble, Carnac?" asked Fabian in a somewhat
challenging voice.

"I'm going away."

"Oh--for how long?" Fabian asked quizzically.  "I don't know--a year,
perhaps.  I want to make myself a better artist, and also free myself."

Now his eyes were on Junia in her summer-time recreation, and her voice,
humming a light-opera air, was floating to him through the autumn
morning.

"Has something got you in its grip, then?"

"I'm the victim of a reckless past, like you."  Something provocative was
in his voice and in his words.

"Was my past reckless?" asked Fabian with sullen eyes.

"Never so reckless as mine.  You fought, quarrelled, hit, sold and bought
again, and now you're out against your father, fighting him."

"I had to come out or be crushed."

"I'm not so sure you won't be crushed now you're out.  He plays boldly,
and he knows his game.  One or the other of you must prevail, and I think
it won't be you, Fabian.  John Grier does as much thinking in an hour as
most of us do in a month, and with Tarboe he'll beat you dead.  Tarboe is
young; he's got the vitality of a rhinoceros.  He knows the business from
the bark on the tree.  He's a flyer, is Tarboe, and you might have been
in Tarboe's place and succeeded to the business."

Fabian threw out his arms.  "But no!  Father might live another ten
years--though I don't think so--and I couldn't have stood it.  He was
lapping me in the mud."

"He doesn't lap Tarboe in the mud."

"No, and he wouldn't have lapped you in the mud, because you've got
imagination, and you think wide and long when you want to.  But I'm
middle-class in business.  I've got no genius for the game.  He didn't
see my steady qualities were what was needed.  He wanted me to be like
himself, an eagle, and I was only a robin red-breast."

Suddenly his eyes flashed and his teeth set.  "You couldn't stand him,
wouldn't put up with his tyranny.  You wanted to live your own life, and
you're doing it.  When he bought me out, what was there for me to do but
go into the only business I knew, with the only big man in the business,
besides John Grier.  I've as good blood as he's got in his veins.  I do
business straight.

"He didn't want me to do it straight.  That's one of the reasons we fell
out.  John Grier's a big, ruthless trickster.  I wasn't.  I was for
playing the straight game, and I played it."

"Well, he's got his own way now.  He's got a man who wouldn't blink at
throttling his own brother, if it'd do him any good.  Tarboe is iron and
steel; he's the kind that succeeds.  He likes to rule, and he's going to
get what he wants mostly."

"Is that why you're going away?" asked Fabian.  "Don't you think it'll
be just as well not to go, if Tarboe is going to get all he wants?"

"Does Tarboe come here?"

"He's been here twice."

"Visiting?"

"No.  He came on urgent business.  There was trouble between our two
river-driving camps.  He wanted my help to straighten things out, and he
got it.  He's pretty quick on the move."

"He wanted you to let him settle it?"

"He settled it, and I agreed.  He knows how to handle men; I'll say that
for him.  He can run reckless on the logs like a river-driver; he can
break a jam like an expert.  He's not afraid of man, or log, or devil.
That's his training.  He got that training from John Grier's firm under
another name.  I used to know him by reputation long before he took my
place in the business--my place and yours.  You got loose from the
business only to get tied up in knots of your own tying," he added.
"What it is I don't know, but you say you're in trouble and I believe
you."  Suddenly a sharp look came to his face.  "Is it a woman?"

"It's not a man."

"Well, you ought to know how to handle a woman.  You're popular with
women.  My wife'll never hear a word against you.  I don't know how you
do it.  We're so little alike, it makes me feel sometimes we're not
brothers.  I don't know where you get your temperament from."

"It doesn't matter where I got it, it's mine.  I want to earn my own
living, and I'm doing it."  Admiration came into Fabian's face.  "Yes,"
he said, "and you don't borrow--"

"And don't beg or steal.  Mother has given me money, and I'm spending my
own little legacy, all but five thousand dollars of it."

Fabian came up to his brother slowly.  "If you know what's good for you,
you'll stay where you are.  You're not the only man that ought to be
married.  Tarboe's a strong man, and he'll be father's partner.  He's
handsome in his rough way too, is Tarboe.  He knows what he wants, and
means to have it, and this is a free country.  Our girls, they have their
own way.  Why don't you settle it now?  Why don't you marry Junia, and
take her away with you--if she'll have you?"

"I can't--even if she'll have me."

"Why can't you?"

"I'm afraid of the law."

An uneasy smile hung at Carnac's lips.  He suddenly caught Fabian's
shoulder in a strong grip.  "We've never been close friends, Fabian.
We've always been at sixes and sevens, and yet I feel you'd rather do me
a good turn than a bad one.  Let me ask you this--that you'll not believe
anything bad of me till you've heard what I've got to say.  Will you do
that?"

Fabian nodded.  "Of course.  But if I were you, I wouldn't bet on myself,
Carnac.  Junia's worth running risks for.  She's got more brains than my
wife and me together, and she bosses us; but with you, it's different.
I think you'd boss her.  You're unexpected; you're daring; and you're
reckless."

"Yes, I certainly am reckless."

"Then why aren't you reckless now?  You're going away.  Why, you haven't
even told her you love her.  The other man--is here, and--I've seen him
look at her?  I know by the way she speaks of him how she feels.
Besides, he's a great masterful creature.  Don't be a fool!  Have a try
 .  .  .  Junia--Junia," he called.

The figure in the garden with the flowers turned.  There was a flicker of
understanding in the rare eyes.  The girl held up a bunch of flowers high
like a torch.

"I'm coming, my children," she called, and, with a laugh, she ran forward
through the doorway.

"What is it you want, Fabian?" she asked, conscious that in Carnac's
face was consternation.  "What can I do for you?" she added, with a
slight flush.

"Nothing for me, but for Carnac--" Fabian stretched out a hand.

She laughed brusquely.  "Oh, Carnac!  Carnac!  Well, I've been making him
this bouquet."  She held it out towards him.  "It's a farewell bouquet
for his little journey in the world.  Take it, Carnac, with everybody's
love--with Fabian's love, with Sibyl's love, with my love.  Take it, and
good-bye."

With a laugh she caught up her hat from the table, and a moment later she
was in the street making for the mountain-side up which the children had
gone.

Carnac placed the bouquet upon the table.  Then he turned to his brother.

"What a damn mess you make of things, Fabian!"




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

All genius is at once a blessing or a curse
Do what you feel you've got to do, and never mind what happens
Had got unreasonably old
How many sons have ever added to their father's fame?
Never give up your soul to things only, keep it for people
We do what we forbid ourselves to do
We suffer the shames we damn in others






CARNAC'S FOLLY

By Gilbert Parker



BOOK II

XIII.     CARNAC'S RETURN
XIV.      THE HOUSE OF THE THREE TREES
XV.       CARNAC AND JUNTA
XVI.      JOHN GRIER MAKES A JOURNEY
XVII.     THE READING OF THE WILL




CHAPTER XIII

CARNAC'S RETURN

"Well, what's happened since I've been gone, mother?" asked Carnac.  "Is
nobody we're interested in married, or going to be married?"

It was spring-time eight months after Carnac had vanished from Montreal,
and the sun of late April was melting the snow upon the hills, bringing
out the smell of the sprouting verdure and the exultant song of the
birds.

His mother replied sorrowfully: "Junia's been away since last fall.  Her
aunt in the West was taken ill, and she's been with her ever since.  Tell
me, dearest, is everything all right now?  Are you free to do what you
want?"

He shook his head morosely.  "No, everything's all wrong.  I blundered,
and I'm paying the price."

"You didn't find Luzanne Larue?"

"Yes, I found her, but it was no good.  I said there was divorce, and she
replied I'd done it with my eyes open, and had signed our names in the
book of the hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Carnac Grier and divorce would not be
possible.  Also, I'd let things go for a year, and what jury would give
me relief!  I consulted a lawyer.  He said she had the game in her hands,
and that a case could be put up that would discredit me with jury or
judge, so there it is.  .  .  .  Well, bad as she is, she's fond of me
in her way.  I don't think she's ever gone loose with any man; this is
only a craze, I'm sure.  She wanted me, and she meant to have me."

His mother protested: "No pure, straight, honest girl would--"

Carnac laughed bitterly, and interrupted.  "Don't talk that way, mother.
The girl was brought up among exiles and political criminals in the
purlieu of Montmartre.  What's possible in one place is impossible in
another.  Devil as she is, I want to do her justice."

"Did she wear a wedding-ring?"

"No, but she used my name as her own: I saw it on the paper door-plate.
She said she would wait awhile longer, but if at the end of six months I
didn't do my duty, she'd see the thing through here among my own people."

"Six months--it's overdue now!" She said in agitation.

He nodded helplessly.  "I'm in hell as things are.  There's only this to
be said: She's done naught yet, and she mayn't do aught!"

They were roused by the click of the gate.  "That's your father--that's
John Grier," she said.

They heard the front door open and shut, a footstep in the hall, then the
door opened and John Grier came into the room.

Preoccupation, abstraction, filled his face, as he came forward.  It was
as though he was looking at something distant that both troubled and
pleased him.  When he saw Carnac he stopped, his face flushed.  For an
instant he stood unmoving, and then he held out his hand.

"So you've come back, Carnac.  When did you get here?"

As Carnac released his hand from John Grier's cold clasp, he said: "A
couple of hours ago."

The old man scrutinized him sharply, carefully.  "Getting on--making
money?" he asked.  "Got your hand in the pocket of the world?"

Carnac shook his head.  "I don't care much about the pocket of the world,
but they like my work in London and New York.  I don't get Royal Academy
prices, but I do pretty well."

"Got some pride, eh?"

"I'm always proud when anybody outside Montreal mentions your name!
It makes me feel I have a place in the world."

"Guess you've made your own place," said the other, pleasure coming to
his cheek.  "You've got your own shovel and pick to make wealth."

"I care little about wealth.  All I want is enough to clothe and feed me,
and give me a little home."

"A little home!  Yes, it's time," remarked the other, as he seated
himself in his big chair by the table.  "Why don't you marry?"

The old man's eyes narrowed until there could only be seen a slit of fire
between the lids, and a bitter smile came to his lips.  He had told his
wife a year ago that he had cut Carnac out of all business consideration.
So now, he added:

"Tarboe's taken your place in the business, Carnac.  Look out he doesn't
take your little home too."

"He's had near a year, and he hasn't done it yet."

"Is that through any virtue of yours?"

"Probably not," answered Carnac ironically.  "But I've been away; he's
been here.  He's had everything with him.  Why hasn't he pulled it off
then?"

"He pulls off everything he plans.  He's never fallen over his own feet
since he's been with me, and, if I can help it, he won't have a fall when
I'm gone."

Suddenly he got to his feet; a fit of passion seized him.  "What's Junia
to me--nothing!  I've every reason to dislike her, but she comes and goes
as if the place belonged to her.  She comes to my office; she comes to
this house; she visits Fabian; she tries to boss everybody.  Why don't
you regularize it?  Why don't you marry her, and then we'll know where we
are?  She's got more brains than anybody else in our circle.  She's got
tact and humour.  Her sister's a fool; she's done harm.  Junia's got
sense.  What are you waiting for?  I wouldn't leave her for Tarboe!  Look
here, Carnac, I wanted you to do what Tarboe's doing, and you wouldn't.
You cheeked me--so I took him in.  He's made good every foot of the way.
He's a wonder.  I'm a millionaire.  I'm two times a millionaire, and I
got the money honestly.  I gave one-third of it to Fabian, and he left
us.  I paid him in cash, and now he's fighting me."

Carnac bristled up: "What else could he do?  He might have lived on the
interest of the money, and done nothing.  You trained him for business,
and he's gone on with the business you trained him for.  There are other
lumber firms.  Why don't you quarrel with them?  Why do you drop on
Fabian as if he was dirt?"

"Belloc's a rogue and a liar."

"What difference does that make?  Isn't it a fair fight?  Don't you want
anybody to sit down or stand up till you tell them to?  Is it your view
you shall tyrannize, browbeat, batter, and then that everybody you love,
or pretend to love, shall bow down before you as though you were eternal
law?  I'm glad I didn't.  I'm making my own life.  You gave me a chance
in your business, and I tried it, and declined it.  You gave it to some
one else, and I approved of it.  What more do you want?"

Suddenly a new spirit of defiance awoke in him.  "What I owe you I don't
know, but if you'll make out what you think is due, for what you've done
for me in the way of food and clothes and education, I'll see you get it
all.  Meanwhile, I want to be free to move and do as I will."

John Grier sat down in his chair again, cold, merciless, with a scornful
smile.

"Yes, yes," he said slowly, "you'd have made a great business man if
you'd come with me.  You refused.  I don't understand you--I never did.
There's only one thing that's alike in us, and that's a devilish self-
respect, self-assertion, self-dependence.  There's nothing more to be
said between us--nothing that counts.  Don't get into a passion, Carnac.
It don't become you.  Good-night--good-night."

Suddenly his mother's face produced a great change in Carnac.  Horror,
sorrow, remorse, were all there.  He looked at John Grier; then at his
mother.  The spirit of the bigger thing crept into his heart.  He put his
arm around his mother and kissed her.

"Good-night, mother," he said.  Then he went to his father and held out a
hand.  "You don't mind my speaking what I think?" he continued, with a
smile.  "I've had a lot to try me.  Shake hands with me, father.  We
haven't found the way to walk together yet.  Perhaps it will come; I hope
so."

Again a flash of passion seized John Grier.  He got to his feet.  "I'll
not shake hands with you, not to night.  You can't put the knife in and
turn it round, and then draw it out and put salve on the wound and say
everything's all right.  Everything's all wrong.  My family's been my
curse.  First one, then another, and then all against me,--my whole
family against me!"

He dropped back in his chair sunk in gloomy reflection.

"Well, good-night," said Carnac.  "It will all come right some day."

A moment afterwards he was gone.  His mother sat down in her seat by the
window; his father sat brooding by the table.

Carnac stole down the hillside, his heart burning in him.  It had not
been a successful day.




CHAPTER XIV

THE HOUSE OF THE THREE TREES

During Carnac's absence, Denzil had lain like an animal, watching, as it
were, the doorway out of which Tarboe came and went.  His gloom at last
became fanaticism.  During all the eight months of Carnac's absence he
prowled in the precincts of memory.

While Junia was at home he had been watchfully determined to save her
from Tarboe, if possible.  He had an obsession of wrong-mindedness which
is always attached to crime.  Though Luke Tarboe had done him no wrong,
and was entitled, if he could, to win Junia for himself, to the mind of
Denzil the stain of his brother's past was on Tarboe's life.  He saw
Tarboe and Junia meet; he knew Tarboe put himself in her way, and he was
right in thinking that the girl, with a mind for comedy and coquetry, was
drawn instinctively to danger.

Undoubtedly the massive presence of Tarboe, his animal-like, bull-headed
persistency, the fun at his big mouth and the light in his bold eye had a
kind of charm for her.  It was as though she placed herself within the
danger zone to try her strength, her will; and she had done it without
real loss.  More than once, as she waited in the office for old John
Grier to come, she had a strange, intuitive feeling that Tarboe might
suddenly grip her in his arms.

She flushed at the thought of it; it seemed so absurd.  Yet that very
thought had passed through the mind of the man.  He was by nature a
hunter; he was self-willed and reckless.  No woman had ever moved him in
his life until this girl crossed his path, and he reached out towards her
with the same will to control that he had used in the business of life.
Yet, while this brute force suggested physical control of the girl, it
had its immediate reaction.  She was so fine, so delicate, and yet so
full of summer and the free unfettered life of the New World, so
unimpassioned physically, yet so passionate in mind and temperament,
that he felt he must atone for the wild moment's passion--the passion
of possession, which had made him long to crush her to his breast.  There
was nothing physically repulsive in it; it was the wild, strong life of
conquering man, of which he had due share.  For, as he looked at her
sitting in his office, her perfect health, her slim boyishness, her
exquisite lines and graceful turn of hand, arm and body, or the flower-
like turn of the neck, were the very harmony and poetry of life.  But she
was terribly provoking too; and he realized that she was an unconscious
coquette, that her spirit loved mastery as his did.

Denzil could not know this, however.  It was impossible for him to
analyse the natures of these two people.  He had instinct, but not enough
to judge the whole situation, and so for two months after Carnac
disappeared he had lived a life of torture.  Again and again he had
determined to tell Junia the story of Tarboe's brother, but instinctive
delicacy stopped him.  He could not tell her the terrible story which
had robbed him of all he loved and had made him the avenger of the dead.
A half-dozen times after she came back from John Grier's office, with
slightly heightening colour, and the bright interest in her eyes, and had
gone about the garden fondling the flowers, he had started towards her;
but had stopped short before her natural modesty.  Besides, why should he
tell her?  She had her own life to make, her own row to hoe.  Yet, as the
weeks passed, it seemed he must break upon this dangerous romance; and
then suddenly she went to visit her sick aunt in the Far West.  Denzil
did not know, however, that, in John Grier's office as she had gone over
figures of a society in which she was interested, the big hand of Tarboe
had suddenly closed upon her fingers, and that his head bent down beside
hers for one swift instant, as though he would whisper to her.  Then she
quickly detached herself, yet smiled at him, as she said reprovingly:

"You oughtn't to do that.  You'll spoil our friendship."

She did not wait longer.  As he stretched out his hands to her, his face
had gone pale: she vanished through the doorway, and in forty-eight hours
was gone to her sick aunt.  The autumn had come and the winter and the
spring, and the spring was almost gone when she returned; and, with her
return, Catastrophe lifted its head in the person of Denzil.

Perhaps it was imperative instinct that brought Junia back in an hour
coincident with Carnac's return--perhaps.  In any case, there it was.
They had both returned, as it were, in the self-same hour, each having
endured a phase of emotion not easy to put on paper.

Denzil told her of Carnac's return, and she went to the house where
Carnac's mother lived, and was depressed at what she saw and felt.  Mrs.
Grier's face was not that of one who had good news.  The long arms almost
hurt when they embraced her.  Yet Carnac was a subject of talk between
them--open, clear eyed talk.  The woman did not know what to say, except
to praise her boy, and the girl asked questions cheerfully, unimportantly
as to sound, but with every nerve tingling.  There was, however, so much
of the comedienne in her, so much coquetry, that only one who knew her
well could have seen the things that troubled her behind all.  As though
to punish herself, she began to speak of Tarboe, and Mrs. Grier's face
clouded; she spoke more of Tarboe, and the gloom deepened.  Then, with
the mask of coquetry still upon her she left Carnac's mother abashed,
sorrowful and alone.

Tarboe had called in her absence.  Entering the garden, he saw Denzil at
work.  At the click of the gate Denzil turned, and came forward.

"She ain't home," he said bluntly.  "She's out.  She ain't here.  She's
up at Mr. Grier's house, bien sur."

To Tarboe Denzil's words were offensive.  It was none of Denzil's
business whether he came or went in this house, or what his relations
with Junia were.  Democrat though he was, he did not let democracy
transgress his personal associations.  He knew that the Frenchman was
less likely to say and do the crude thing than the Britisher.

Tarboe knew of the position held by Denzil in the Shale household; and
that long years of service had given him authority.  All this, however,
could not atone for the insolence of Denzil's words, but he had
controlled men too long to act rashly.

"When will Mademoiselle be back?" he asked, putting a hand on himself.

"To-night," answered Denzil, with an antipathetic eye.

"Don't be a damn fool.  Tell me the hour when you think she will be at
home.  Before dinner--within the next sixty minutes?"

"Ma'm'selle is under no orders.  She didn't say when she would be back--
but no!"

"Do you think she'll be back for dinner?" asked Tarboe, smothering his
anger, but get to get his own way.

"I think she'll be back for dinner!" and he drove the spade into the
ground.

"Then I'll sit down and wait."  Tarboe made for the verandah.

Denzil presently trotted after and said:  "I'd like a word with you."

Tarboe turned round.  "Well, what have you got to say?"

"Better be said in my house, not here," replied Denzil.  His face was
pale, but there was fire in his eyes.  There was no danger of violence,
and, if there were, Tarboe could deal with it.  Why should there be
violence?  Why should that semi-insanity in Denzil's eyes disturb him?
The one thing to do was to forge ahead.  He nodded.

"Where are you taking me?" he asked presently, as they passed through
the gate.

"To my little house by the Three Trees.  I've got things I'd like to show
you, and there's some things I'd like to say.  You are a big hulk of a
man, and I'm nobody, but yet I've been close to you and yours in my time
--that's so, for sure."

"You've been close to me and mine in your time, eh?  I didn't know that."

"No, you didn't know it.  Nobody knew it--I've kept it to myself.  Your
family wasn't all first-class--but no."

They soon reached the plain board-house, with the well-laid foundation of
stone, by the big Three Trees.  Inside the little spare, undecorated
room, Tarboe looked round.  It was all quiet and still enough.  It was
like a lodge in the wilderness.  Somehow, the atmosphere of it made him
feel apart and lonely.  Perhaps that was a little due to the timbered
ceiling, to the walls with cedar scantlings showing, to the crude look of
everything-the head of a moose, the skins hanging down the sides of the
walls, the smell of the cedar, and the swift movement of a tame red
squirrel, which ran up the walls and over the floor and along the
chimney-piece, for Denzil avoided the iron stove so common in these new
cold lands, and remained faithful to a huge old-fashioned mantel.

Presently Denzil faced him, having closed the door.  "I said I'd been
near to your family and you didn't believe me.  Sit down, please to, and
I'll tell you my story."

Seating himself with a little curt laugh, Tarboe waved a hand as though
to say: "Go ahead.  I'm ready."

It was difficult for Denzil to begin.  He walked up and down the room,
muttering and shaking his head.  Presently, however, he made the Sign of
the Cross upon himself, and, leaning against the wall, and opposite to
Tarboe, he began the story he had told Carnac.

His description of his dead fiancee had flashes of poetry and
excruciating touches of life:

"She had no mother, and there was lots of things she didn't know because
of that--ah, plenty!  She had to learn, and she brought on her own
tragedy by not knowing that men, even when good to look at, can't be
trusted; that every place, even in the woods and the fields where every
one seems safe to us outdoor people, ain't safe--but no.  So she trusted,
and then one day--"

For the next five minutes the words poured from him in moroseness.  He
drew a picture of the lonely wood, of the believing credulous girl and
the masterful, intellectual, skilful man.  In the midst of it Tarboe
started.  The description of the place and of the man was familiar.  He
had a vision of a fair young girl encompassed by clanger; he saw her in
the man's arms; the man's lips to hers, and--

"Good God--good God!" he said twice, for a glimmer of the truth struck
him.  He knew what his brother had done.  He could conceive the revenge
to his brother's amorous hand.  He listened till the whole tale was told;
till the death of the girl in the pond at home--back in her own little
home.  Then the rest of the story shook him.

"The verdict of the coroner's court was that he was shot by his own hand
--by accident," said Denzil.  "That was the coroner's verdict, but yes!
Well, he was shot by his own gun, but not by his own hand.  There was
some one who loved the girl, took toll.  The world did not know, and does
not know, but you know--you--you, the brother of him that spoiled a
woman's life!  Do you think such a man should live?  She was the sweetest
girl that ever lived, and she loved me!  She told me the truth--and he
died by his own gun--in the woods; but it wasn't accident--it wasn't
accident--but no!  The girl had gone, but behind her was some one that
loved her, and he settled it once for all."

As he had told the story, Denzil's body seemed to contract; his face took
on an insane expression.  It was ghastly pale, but his eyes ware aflame.
His arms stretched out with grim realism as he told of the death of
Almeric Tarboe.

"You've got the whole truth, m'sieu'.  I've told it you at last.  I've
never been sorry for killing him--never--never--never.  Now, what are you
going to do about it--you--his brother--you that come here making love
too?"

As the truth dawned upon Tarboe, his great figure stretched itself.  A
black spirit possessed him.

When Denzil had finished, Tarboe stood up.  There was dementia, cruelty,
stark purpose in his eyes, in every movement.

"What am I going to do?  You killed my brother!  Well, I'm going to kill
you.  God blast your soul--I'm going to kill you!"

He suddenly swooped upon Denzil, his fingers clenched about the thick
throat, insane rage was on him.

At that moment there was a knock at the door, it opened, and Carnac
stepped inside.  He realized the situation and rushed forward.  There was
no time to struggle.

"Let him go," he cried.  "You devil--let him go."  Then with all his
might, he struck Tarboe in the face.  The blow brought understanding back
to Tarboe.  His fingers loosed from the Frenchman's throat, and Carnac
caught Denzil as he fell backwards.

"Good God!" said Carnac.  "Good God, Tarboe!  Wasn't it enough for your
brother to take this man's love without your trying to take his life?"

Carnac's blow brought conviction to Tarboe, whose terrible rage passed
away.  He wiped the blood from his face.

"Is the little devil all right?" he whispered.

Denzil spoke: "Yes.  This is the second time M'sieu' Carnac has saved my
life."

Carnac intervened.  "Tell me, Tarboe, what shall you do, now you know the
truth?"

At last Tarboe thrust out a hand.  "I don't know the truth," he said.

By this Carnac knew that Denzil was safe from the law.




CHAPTER XV

CARNAC AND JUNIA

Tarboe did not see Junia that evening nor for many evenings, but Carnac
and Junia met the next day in her own house.  He came on her as she was
arranging the table for midday dinner.  She had taken up again the
threads of housekeeping, cheering her father, helping the old French-
woman cook--a huge creature who moved like a small mountain, and was a
tyrant in her way to the old cheerful avocat, whose life had been a
struggle for existence, yet whose one daughter had married a rich
lumberman, and whose other daughter could marry wealth, handsomeness
and youth, if she chose.

When Carnac saw Junia she was entering the dining-room with flowers and
fruit, and he recalled the last time they met, when she had thrust the
farewell bouquet of flowers into his hand.  That was in the early autumn,
and this was in late spring, and the light in her face was as glowing as
then.  A remembrance of the scene came to the minds of both, and the girl
gave a little laugh.

"Well, well, Carnac," she said gaily, her cheek flushing, her eyes warm
with colour: "well, I sent you away with flowers.  Did they bring you
luck?"  She looked him steadily in the eyes.

"Yes, they brought me a perfect remembrance--of one who has always been
to me like the balm of Gilead."

"Soothing and stimulating, eh?" she asked, as she put the flowers on the
table and gave him her hand--no, she suddenly gave him both hands with a
rush of old-time friendship, which robbed it of all personal emotion.

For a moment he held her hands.  He felt them tremble in his warm clasp,
the delicate, shivering pulsation of youth, the womanly feeling.  It was
for an instant only, because she withdrew her fingers.  Then she caught
up an apple from the dish she had brought in, and tossed it to him.

"For a good boy," she said.  "You have been a good boy, haven't you?"

"I think so, chiefly by remembering a good girl."

"That's a pretty compliment--meant for me?"

"Yes, meant for you.  I think you understand me better than anyone else."

He noticed her forehead wrinkle slightly, and a faint, incredulous smile
come to her lips.

"I shouldn't think I understand you, Carnac," she said, over her
shoulder, as she arranged dishes on the sideboard.  "I shouldn't think I
know you well.  There's no Book of Revelations of your life except in
your face."

She suddenly turned full on him, and held his eyes.  "Carnac, I think
your face looks honest.  I've always thought so, and yet I think you're
something of a scamp, a rogue and a thief."

There was determination at her lips, through which, though only slightly
apart, her beautiful teeth, so straight, so regular, showed.  "You don't
play fair.  What's the good of having a friend if you don't tell your
friend your troubles?  And you've been in trouble, Carnac, and you're
fighting it through alone.  Is that wise?  You ought to tell some bad
man, or some good woman--if they're both clever--what's vexing you.

"You see the bad clever man would probably think out something that would
have the same effect as the good clever woman.  They never would think
out the same thing, but each 'd think out what would help you."

"But you've just said I'm a bad clever man.  Why shouldn't I work out my
own trouble?"

"Oh, you're bad enough," she answered, "but you're not clever enough."

He smiled grimly.  "I'm not sure though about the woman.  Perhaps I'll
tell the good clever woman some day and let her help me, if she can.
But I'd warn her it won't be easy."

"Then there's another woman in it!"

He did not answer.  He could not let her know the truth, yet he was sure
she would come to know it one way or another.

At that moment she leaned over the table and stretched a hand to arrange
something.  The perfection of her poise, the beauty of her lines, the
charm of her face seized Carnac, and, with an impulse, he ran his arm
around her waist.

"Junia--Junia!" he said in a voice of rash, warm feeling.

She was like a wild bird caught in its flight.  A sudden stillness held
her, and then she turned her head towards him, subdued inquiry in her
eyes.  For a moment only she looked--and then she said:

"Take your arm away, please."

The conviction that he ought not to make any sign of love to her broke
his sudden passion.  He drew back ashamed, yet defiant, rebuked, yet
rebellious.  It was like a challenge to her.  A sarcastic smile crossed
her lips.

"What a creature of impulses you are, Carnac!  When we were children the
day you saved Denzil years ago you flung your arms around me and kissed
me.  I didn't understand anything then, and what's more I don't think you
did.  You were a wilful, hazardous boy, and went your way taking the
flowers in the garden that didn't belong to you.  Yet after all these
years, with an impulse behind which there is nothing--nothing at all,
you repeat that incident."

Suddenly passion seemed to possess her.  "How dare you trifle with things
that mean so much!  Have you learned nothing since I saw you last?  Can
nothing teach you, Carnac?  Can you not learn how to play the big part?
If you weren't grown up, do you know what I would do?  I would slap the
face of an insolent, thoughtless, hopeless boy."  Then her temper seemed
to pass.  She caught up an apple again and thrust it into his hand.  "Go
and eat that, Adam.  Perhaps it'll make you wise like the old Adam.  He
put his faults upon a woman."

"So do I," said Carnac.  "So do I."

"That's what you would do, but you mustn't play that sort of game with a
good woman."  She burst out laughing.  "For a man you're a precious fool!
I don't think I want to see you again.  You don't improve.  You're full
of horrid impulses."  Her indignation came back.  "How dare you put your
arm around me!"

"It was the impulse of my heart.  I can say no more; if I could I would.
There's something I should like to tell you, but I mustn't."  He put the
apple down.

"About the other woman, I suppose," she said coldly, the hot indignation
gone from her lips.

He looked her steadfastly in the eyes.  "If you won't trust me--if you
won't trust me--"

"I've always trusted you," she replied, "but I don't trust you now.
Don't you understand that a good girl hates conduct like yours?"

Suddenly with anger he turned upon her.  "Yes, I understand everything,
but you don't understand.  Why won't you believe that the reason I won't
tell you my trouble is that it's best you shouldn't know?  You're a young
girl; you don't know life; you haven't seen it as I've seen it--in the
sewage, in the ditch, on the road, on the mountain and in the bog.  I
want you to keep faith with your old friend who doesn't care what the
rest of the world thinks, but who wants your confidence.  Trust me--don't
condemn me.  Believe me, I haven't been wanton.  Won't you trust me?"

The spirit of egotism was alive in her.  She knew how much she had denied
herself in the past months.  She did not know whether she loved him, but
injured pride tortured her.  Except in a dance and in sports at a picnic
or recreation-ground no man had ever put his arms around her.  No man
except Carnac, and that he had done it was like a lash upon the raw
skinless flesh.  If she had been asked by the Almighty whether she loved
Carnac, she would have said she did not know.  This was not a matter of
love; but of womanhood, of self-respect, of the pride of one who cannot
ask for herself what she wants in the field of love, who must wait to be
wooed and won.

"You don't think I'm straight," he said in protest.  "You think I'm no
good, that I'm a fraud.  You're wrong.  Believe me, that is the truth."
He came closer up to her.  "Junia, if you'll stand by me, I'm sure I'll
come out right.  I've been caught in a mesh I can't untangle yet, but it
can be untangled, and when it is, you shall know everything, because then
you'll understand.  I can free myself from the tangle, but it could never
be explained--not so the world would believe.  I haven't trifled with
you.  I would believe in you even if I saw, or thought I saw, the signs
of wrong in you.  I would know that at heart you were good.  I put my
faith in you long ago--last year I staked all on your friendship, and I
haven't been deceived."

He smiled at her, his soul in his eyes.  There was truth in his smile,
and she realized it.

After a moment, she put out a hand and pushed him gently from her.  "Go
away, Carnac, please--now," she said softly.

A moment afterwards he was gone.




CHAPTER XVI

JOHN GRIER MAKES A JOURNEY

John Grier's business had beaten all past records.  Tarboe was
everywhere: on the river, in the saw-mills, in the lumber-yards, in the
office.  Health and strength and goodwill were with him, and he had the
confidence of all men in the lumber-world.  It was rumoured that he was a
partner of John Grier, and it was a good thing for him as well as for the
business.  He was no partner, however; he was on a salary with a bonus
percentage of the profits; but that increased his vigour.

There were times when he longed for the backwoods life; when the smell of
the pines and the firs and the juniper got into his nostrils; when he
heard, in imagination, the shouts of the river-men as they chopped down
the trees, sawed the boles into standard lengths, and plunged the big
timbers into the stream, or round the fire at night made call upon the
spirit of recreation.  In imagination, he felt the timbers creaking and
straining under his feet; he smelt the rich soup from the cook's caboose;
he drank basins of tea from well-polished metal; he saw the ugly rows in
the taverns, where men let loose from river duty tried to regain civilian
life by means of liquor and cards; he heard the stern thud of a hard fist
against a piece of wood; he saw twenty men spring upon another twenty
with rage in their faces; he saw hundreds of men arrived in civilization
once again striking for their homes and loved ones, storming with life.
He saw the door flung open, and the knee-booted, corduroyed river-man,
with red sash around his waist and gold rings in his ears, seize the
woman he called wife and swing her to him with a hungry joy; he saw the
children pushed gently here, or roughly, but playfully, tossed in the air
and caught again; but he also saw the rough spirits of the river march
into their homes like tyrants returned, as it were, cursing and banging
their way back to their rightful nests.

Occasionally he would wish to be in it all again, out in the wild woods
and on the river and in the shanty, free and strong and friendly and a
bit ferocious.  All he had known of the backwoods life filled his veins,
tortured him at times.

From the day that both wills were made and signed, no word had been
spoken concerning them between him and John Grier.  He admired certain
characteristics of John Grier; some secret charities, some impulsive
generosity, some signs of public spirit.  The old man was fond of
animals, and had given water-troughs to the town; and his own horses and
the horses he used in the woods were always well fed.  Also, in all his
arrangements for the woods, he was generous.  He believed in feeding his
men well.  It was rough food--beans, potatoes, peas, lentils, pork in
barrels-salted pork; but there was bread of the best, rich soup, pork
well boiled and fried, with good tea, freshly made.  This was the regular
fare, and men throve on it.

One day, however, shortly after Carnac's return home, there came a change
in the scene.  Things had been going badly for a couple of days and the
old man had been seriously overworked.  He had not listened to the
warnings of Tarboe, or to the hints thrown out by his own punished
physique.  He was not a man to take hints.  Everything that vexed his
life roused opposition.  This Tarboe knew, but he also knew that the
business must suffer, if the old man suffered.

When John Grier left the office it was with head bowed and mind
depressed.  Nothing had happened to cause him grave anxiety, yet he had
been below par for several hours.  Why was he working so hard?  Why was
life to him such a concentration?  Why did he seek for more money and to
get more power?  To whom could it go?  Not to Fabian; not to his wife.
To Tarboe--well, there was not enough in that!  This man had only lately
come into his life, and was only near to him in a business sense.  Carnac
was near in every sense that really mattered, and Carnac was out of it
all.

He was not loved, and in his heart of hearts he knew it, but he had had
his own way, and he loved himself.  No one seemed to care for him, not
even his wife.  How many years was it since they had roomed together?
Yet as he went towards his own home now, he recalled the day they were
married, and for the first time had drawn as near to each other as life
could draw.  He had thought her wonderful then, refined, and oh! so rich
in life's gifts.  His love had almost throttled her.  She was warm and
bountiful and full of temperament.  So it went for three years, and then
slowly he drew away from her until at last, returning from the backwoods,
he had gone to another room, and there had stayed.  Very occasionally he
had smothered her with affection, but that had passed, until now, middle-
aged, she seemed to be not a room away from him, but a thousand rooms
away.  He saw it with no reproach to himself.  He forgot it was he who
had left her room, and had set up his own tabernacle, because his hours
differed from hers, and because she tossed in her bed at nights, and that
made him restless too.

Yet, if his love had been the real thing, he would have stayed, because
their lives were so similar, and the rules of domestic life in French
Canada were so fixed.  He had spoiled his own household, destroyed his
own peace, forsaken his own nest, outlived his hope and the possibility
of further hope, except more business success, more to leave behind him.

That was the stern truth.  Had he been a different man the devotion his
wife had shown would have drawn him back to her; had she been a different
woman, unvexed by a horrible remembrance, she would have made his soul
her own and her soul his own once again.  She had not dared to tell him
the truth; afraid more for her boy's sake than for her own.  She had been
glad that Tarboe had helped to replace the broken link with Fabian, that
he had taken the place which Carnac, had he been John Grier's son, ought
to have taken.  She could not blame Carnac, and she could not blame her
husband, but the thing ate into her heart.

John Grier found her sitting by her table in the great living-room,
patient and grave, and yet she smiled at him, and rose as he came into
the room.  His troubled face brought her forward quickly.  She stretched
out a hand appealingly to him.

"What's the matter, John?  Has anything upset you?"

"I'm not upset."

"Yes you are," she urged, "but, yes, you are!  Something has gone wrong."

"Nothing's gone wrong that hasn't been wrong for many a year," he said.

"What's been wrong for many a year?"

"The boys you brought into this world--your sons!" he burst out.  "Why
isn't Carnac working with me?  There must have been something damned bad
in the bringing up of those boys.  I've not, got the love of any of you,
and I know it.  Why should I be thrown over by every one?"

"Every one hasn't thrown you over.  Mr. Tarboe hasn't.  You've been in
great spirits about him.  What's the matter?"

He waved a hand savagely at her, with an almost insane look in his eyes.

"What's he to me!  He's a man of business.  In a business way I like him,
but I want my own flesh and blood by me in my business.  I wanted Carnac,
and he wouldn't come--a few weeks only he came.  I had Fabian, and he
wouldn't stay.  If I'd had a real chance--"

He broke off, with an outward savage protest of his hands, his voice
falling.

"If you'd had your chance, you'd have made your own home happy," she said
sadly.  "That was your first duty, not your business--your home--your
home!  You didn't care about it.  There were times when for months you
forgot me; and then--then--"

Suddenly a dreadful suspicion seized his brain.  His head bent forward,
his shoulders thrust out, he stumbled towards her.

"Then--well, what then!" he gasped.  "Then--you--forgot--"

She realized she had gone too far, saw the storm in his mind.

"No--no--no, I didn't forget you, John.  Never--but--"

She got no farther.  Suddenly his hands stretched out as if to seize her
shoulders, his face became tortured--he swayed.  She caught him.  She
lowered him to the floor, and put a hassock under his head.  Then she
rang the bell--rang it--and rang again.

When help came, all was too late.  John Grier had gone for ever.




CHAPTER XVII

THE READING OF THE WILL

As Tarboe stood in the church alone at the funeral, in a pew behind John
Grier's family, sadness held him.  He had known, as no one else knew,
that the business would pass into his own hands.  He suddenly felt his
task too big for him, and he looked at Carnac now with sympathy.  Carnac
had brains, capacity, could almost take his father's place; he was
tactful, intuitive, alert.  Yet Carnac, at present, was out of the
question.  He knew the stress of spirit which had turned Carnac from
the opportunity lying at his feet.

In spite of himself there ran through his mind another thought.  Near by,
at the left, dressed in mourning also, was Junia.  He had made up his
mind that Junia should be his, and suddenly the usefulness of the
business about to fall into his hands became a weapon in the field of
Love.  He was physically a finer man than Carnac; he had capacity; he had
personality; and he would have money and position--for a time at least.
In that time, why should he not win this girl with the wonderful eyes and
hair, with the frankness and candour of unspoiled girlhood in her face?
Presently he would be in the blare of sensation, in the height of as
dramatic an episode as comes to the lives of men; and in the episode he
saw advantages which should weigh with any girl.

Then had come the reading of the will after the funeral rites were over,
and he, with the family, were gathered in the dining-room of the House on
the Hill.

He was scarcely ready, however, for the prodigious silence following the
announcement read by the lawyer.  He felt as though life was suspended
for many minutes, when it was proclaimed that he, Luke Tarboe, would
inherit the property.  Although he knew of the contents of the will his
heart was thumping like a sledge-hammer.

He looked round the room slowly.  The only embarrassment to be seen was
on the faces of Fabian and his wife.  Mrs. Grier and Carnac showed
nothing.  Carnac did not even move; by neither gesture nor motion of body
did he show aught.  At the close of it all, he came to Tarboe and held
out a hand.

"Good luck to you, Tarboe!" he said.  "You'll make a success, and that's
what he wanted more than anything else.  Good luck to you!" he said
again and turned away.  .  .  .

When John Grier's will was published in the Press consternation filled
the minds of all.  Tarboe had been in the business for under two years,
yet here he was left all the property with uncontracted power.  Mrs. John
Grier was to be paid during her life a yearly stipend of twenty thousand
dollars from the business; she also received a grant of seventy thousand
dollars.  Beyond that, there were a few gifts to hospitals and for the
protection of horses, while to the clergyman of the parish went one
thousand dollars.  It certainly could not be called a popular will, and,
complimentary as the newspapers were to the energy and success of John
Grier, few of them called him public-spirited, or a generous-hearted
citizen.  In his death he paid the price of his egotism.

The most surprised person, however, was Junia Shale.

To her it was shameful that Carnac should be eliminated from all share in
the abundant fortune John Grier had built up.  It seemed fantastic that
the fortune and the business--and the business was the fortune--should be
left to Tarboe.  Had she known the contents of the will before John Grier
was buried, she would not have gone to the funeral.  Egotistic she had
known Grier to be, and she imagined the will to be a sudden result of
anger.  He was dead and buried.  The places that knew him knew him no
more.  All in an hour, as it were, the man Tarboe--that dominant,
resourceful figure--had come into wealth and power.

After Junia read the substance of the will, she went springing up the
mountain-side, as it were to work off her excitement by fatigue.  At the
mountain-top she gazed over the River St. Lawrence with an eye blind to
all except this terrible distortion of life.  Yet through her
obfuscation, there ran admiration for Tarboe.  What a man he was!  He
had captured John Grier as quickly and as securely as a night fisherman
spears a sturgeon in the flare at the bow of the boat.  Tarboe's ability
was as marked as John Grier's mad policy.  It was strange that Tarboe
should have bewildered and bamboozled--if that word could be used--the
old millowner.  It was as curious and thrilling as John Grier's
fanaticism.

Already the pinch of corruption had nipped his flesh; he was useless,
motionless in his narrow house, and yet, unseen but powerful, his
influence went on.  It shamed a wife and son; it blackened the doors
of a home; it penalized a family.

Indeed he had been a bad man, and yet she could not reconcile it all
with a wonderful something in him, a boldness, a sense of humour, an
everlasting energy, an electric power.  She had never seen anyone
vitalize everything round him as John Grier had done.  He threw things
from him like an exasperated giant; he drew things to him like an Angel
of the Covenant.  To him life was less a problem than an experiment, and
this last act, this nameless repudiation of the laws of family life, was
like the sign of a chemist's activity.  As she stood on the mountain-top
her breath suddenly came fast, and she caught her bosom with angry hands.

"Carnac--poor Carnac!" she exclaimed.

What would the world say?  There were those, perhaps, who thought Carnac
almost a ne'er-do-well, but they were of the commercial world where John
Grier had been supreme.

At the same moment, Carnac in the garden of his old home beheld the river
too and the great expanse of country, saw the grey light of evening on
the distant hills, and listened to Fabian who condoled with him.  When
Fabian had gone, Carnac sat down on a bench and thought over the whole
thing.  Carnac had no quarrel with his fate.  When in the old home on the
hill he had heard the will, it had surprised him, but it had not shocked
him.  He had looked to be the discarded heir, and he knew it now without
rebellion.  He had never tried to smooth the path to that financial
security which his father could give.  Yet now that disaster had come,
there was a glimmer of remorse, of revolt, because there was some one
besides himself who might think he had thrown away his chances.  He did
not know that over on the mountain-side, vituperating the memory of the
dead man, Junia was angry only for Carnac's sake.

With the black storm of sudden death roaring in his ears, he had a sense
of freedom, almost of licence.  Nothing that had been his father's was
now his own, or his mother's, except the land and house on which they
were.  All the great business John Grier had built up was gone into the
hands of the usurper, a young, bold, pestilent, powerful, vigorous man.
It seemed suddenly horrible that the timber-yards and the woods and the
offices, and the buildings of John Grier's commercial business were not
under his own direction, or that of his mother, or brother.  They had
ceased to be factors in the equation; they were 'non est' in the
postmortem history of John Grier.  How immense a nerve the old man had to
make such a will, which outraged every convention of social and family
life; which was, in effect, a proclamation that his son Carnac had no
place in John Grier's scheme of things, while John Grier's wife was
rewarded like some faithful old servant.  Yet some newspapers had said he
was a man of goodwill, and had appreciation of talent, adding, however,
the doubtful suggestion that the appreciation stopped short of the
prowess of his son Carnac in the field of Art.  It was evident John
Grier's act was thought by the conventionalist to be a wicked blunder.

As Carnac saw the world where there was not a single material thing that
belonged to him, he had a sudden conviction that his life would run in
other lines than those within which it had been drawn to the present
time.  Looking over this wonderful prospect of the St. Lawrence, he had
an insistent feeling that he ought to remain in the land where he was
born, and give of whatever he was capable to its life.  It was all a
strenuous problem.  For Carnac there was, duly or unduly, fairly or
unfairly, a fate better than that of John Grier.  If he died suddenly,
as his father had died, a handful of people would sorrow with excess of
feeling, and the growing world of his patrons would lament his loss.
No one really grieved for John Grier's departure, except--strange to say
--Tarboe.






CARNAC'S FOLLY

By Gilbert Parker



BOOK III

XVIII.    A GREAT DECISION
XIX.      CARNAC BECOMES A CANDIDATE
XX.       JUNIA AND TARBOE HEAR THE NEWS
XXI.      THE SECRET MEETING
XXII.     POINT TO POINT
XXIII.    THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT
XXIV.     THE BLUE PAPER
XXV.      DENZIL TAKES A HAND IN THE GAME
XXVI.     THE CHALLENGE
XXVII.    EXIT
XXVIII.   A WOMAN WRITES A LETTER
XXIX.     CARNAC AND HIS MOTHER
XXX.      TARBOE HAS A DREAM
XXXI.     THIS WAY HOME
XXXII.    'HALVES, PARDNER, HALVES'




CHAPTER XVIII

A GREAT DECISION

Months went by.  In them Destiny made new drawings.  With his mother,
Carnac went to paint at a place called Charlemont.  Tarboe pursued his
work at the mills successfully; Junia saw nothing of Carnac, but she had
a letter from him, and it might have been written by a man to his friend,
yet with an undercurrent of sadness that troubled her.

She might, perhaps, have yielded to the attentions of Tarboe, had not an
appealing message come from her aunt, and at an hour's notice went West
again on her mission of sick-service.

Politically the Province of Quebec was in turmoil.  The time was drawing
near when the Dominion Government must go to the polls, and in the most
secluded cottage on the St. Lawrence, the virtues and defects of the
administration were vital questions.  Voters knew as much of technical
law-making as the average voter everywhere, but no more, and sometimes
less.  Yet there was in the mind of the French-Canadian an intuition,
which was as valuable as the deeper knowledge of a trained politician.
The two great parties in the Province were led by Frenchmen.  The English
people, however, were chiefly identified with the party opposed to Barode
Barouche, the Secretary of State.

As the agitation began in the late spring, Carnac became suddenly
interested in everything political.

He realized what John Grier had said concerning politics--that, given
other characteristics, the making of laws meant success or failure for
every profession or trade, for every interest in the country.  He had
known a few politicians; though he had never yet met the most dominant
figure in the Province--Barode Barouche, who had a singular fascination
for him.  He seemed a man dominant and plausible, with a right-minded
impulsiveness.  Things John Grier had said about Barouche rang in his
ears.

As the autumn drew near excitement increased.  Political meetings were
being held everywhere.  There was one feature more common in Canada than
in any other country; opposing candidates met on the same platform and
fought their fight out in the hearing of those whom they were wooing.
One day Carnac read in a newspaper that Barode Barouche was to speak at
St. Annabel.  As that was not far from Charlemont he determined to hear
Barouche for the first time.  He had for him a sympathy which, to
himself, seemed a matter of temperament.

"Mother," he said, "wouldn't you like to go and hear Barode Barouche at
St. Annabel?  You know him--I mean personally?"

"Yes, I knew him long ago," was the scarcely vocal reply.

"He's a great, fine man, isn't he?  Wrong-headed, wrong-purposed, but a
big fine fellow."

"If a man is wrong-headed and wrong-purposed, it isn't easy for him to be
fine, is it?"

"That depends.  A man might want to save his country by making some good
law, and be mistaken both as to the result of that law and the right
methods in making it.  I'd like you to be with me when I hear him for the
first time.  I've got a feeling he's one of the biggest men of our day.
Of course he isn't perfect.  A man might want to save another's life, but
he might choose the wrong way to do it, and that's wrongheaded; and
perhaps he oughtn't to save the man's life, and that's wrong-purposed.
There's no crime in either.  Let's go and hear Monsieur Barouche."

He did not see the flush which suddenly filled her face; and, if he had,
he would not have understood.  For her a long twenty-seven years rolled
back to the day when she was a young neglected wife, full of life's
vitalities, out on a junction of the river and the wild woods, with
Barode Barouche's fishing-camp near by.  She shivered now as she thought
of it.  It was all so strange, and heart-breaking.  For long years she
had paid the price of her mistake.  She knew how eloquent Barode Barouche
could be; she knew how his voice had all the ravishment of silver bells
to the unsuspecting.  How well she knew him; how deeply she realized the
darkness of his nature!  Once she had said to him:

"Sometimes I think that for duty's sake you would cling like a leech."

It was true.  For thirty long years he had been in one sense homeless,
his wife having lost her reason three years after they were married.  In
that time he had faithfully visited the place of her confinement every
month of his life, sobered, chastened, at first hopeful, defiant.  At the
bottom of his heart Barode Barouche did not want marital freedom.  He had
loved the mad woman.  He remembered her in the glory of her youth, in the
splendour of her beauty.  The insane asylum did not destroy his memory.

Mrs. Grier remembered too, but in a different way.  Her relations with
him had been one swift, absorbing fever--a mad dream, a moment of rash
impulse, a yielding to the natural feeling which her own husband had
aroused: the husband who now neglected her while Barode Barouche treated
her so well, until a day when under his beguilement a stormy impulse
gave--Carnac.  Then the end came, instant and final; she bolted, barred
and locked the door against Barode and he had made little effort to open
it.  So they had parted, and had never clasped hands or kissed again.  To
him she was a sin of which he never repented.  He had watched the growth
and development of Carnac with a sharp sympathy.  He was not a good man;
but in him were seeds of goodness.  To her he was the lash searing her
flesh, day in day out, year in year out, which kept her sacred to her
home.  For her children's sake she did not tell her husband, and she had
emptied out her heart over Carnac with overwhelming fondness.

"Yes, I'll go, Carnac," she said at last, for it seemed the easier way.
"I haven't been to a political meeting for many years."

"That's right.  I like your being with me."

The meeting was held in what had been a skating-rink and drill-hall.  On
the platform in the centre was the chairman, with Barode Barouche on his
right.  There was some preliminary speech-making from the chairman.  A
resolution was moved supporting Barouche, his party and policy, and there
were little explosions of merriment at strokes of unconscious humour made
by the speakers; and especially by one old farmer who made his jokes on
the spot, and who now tried to embalm Barouche with praise.  He drew
attention to Barouche's leonine head and beard, to his alert eyes and
quizzical face, and said he was as strong in the field of legislation as
he was in body and mind.  Carnac noticed that Barouche listened good-
naturedly, and now and then cocked his head and looked up at the ceiling
as though to find something there.

There was a curious familiarity in the action of the head which struck
Carnac.  He and his mother were seated about five rows back from the
front row on the edge of the aisle.  As the meeting progressed,
Barouche's eyes wandered slowly over the faces of his audience.
Presently he saw Carnac and his mother.  Mrs. Grier was conscious of a
shock upon the mind of Barouche.  She saw his eyes go misty with feeling.
For him the world was suddenly shut out, and he only saw the woods of a
late summer's afternoon, a lonely tent--and a woman.  A flush crept up
his face.  Then he made a spasmodic gesture of the hand, outward, which
again Carnac recognized as familiar.  It was the kind of thing he did
himself.

So absorbed was Barode Barouche that he only mechanically heard the
chairman announce himself, but when he got to his feet his full senses
came back.  The sight of the woman to whom he had been so much, and who
had been so much to him for one short month, magnetized him; the face of
the boy, so like his own as he remembered it thirty years ago, stirred
his veins.  There before him was his own one unacknowledged child--the
only child ever born to him.  His heart throbbed.  Then he began to
speak.  Never in all his life had he spoken as he did this day.  It was
only a rural audience; there was not much intelligence in it; but it had
a character all its own.  It was alive to its own interests, chiefly of
agriculture and the river.  It was composed of both parties, and he could
stimulate his own side, and, perhaps, win the other.

Thus it was that, with the blood pounding through his veins, the inspired
sensualist began his speech.  It was his duty to map out a policy for the
future; to give the people an idea of what his party meant to do; to
guide, to inspire, to inflame.

As Carnac listened he kept framing the words not yet issued, but which
did issue from Barouche's mouth; his quick intelligence correctly
imagined the line Barouche would take; again and again Barouche made
a gesture, or tossed his head, or swung upon his feet to right and left
in harmony with Carnac's own mind.  Carnac would say to himself: "Why,
that's what I'd have done--that's what I'd have said, if I had his
policy."  More than once, in some inspired moment of the speech, he
caught his mother's hand, and he did not notice that her hand trembled.

But as for one of Barouche's chapter of policy Carnac almost sprang to
his feet in protest when Barouche declared it.  To Carnac it seemed fatal
to French Canada, though it was expounded with a taking air; yet as he
himself had said it was "wrong-headed and wrong-purposed."

When the speech had finished to great cheering, Carnac suddenly turned to
his mother:

"He's on the wrong track.  I know the policy to down his.  He's got no
opponent.  I'm going to stand against him at the polls."

She clutched his arm.  "Carnac--Carnac!  You don't know what you're
doing."

"Well, I will pretty quick," he replied stoutly.  "I'm out after him, if
they'll have me."




CHAPTER XIX

CARNAC BECOMES A CANDIDATE

That night Carnac mapped out his course, carefully framed the policy to
offset that of Barode Barouche, and wrote a letter to the Chairman of
the Opposition at Montreal offering to stand, and putting forward an
ingenious policy.  He asked also for an interview; and the interview was
granted by telegram--almost to his surprise.  He was aware, however, of
the discontent among the English members of the Opposition, and of the
wish of the French members to find a good compromise.

He had a hope that his singular position--the notoriety which his
father's death and his own financial disfranchisement had caused--would
be a fine card in his favour.  He was not mistaken.  His letter arrived
at Headquarters when there were difficulties concerning three candidates
who were pressing their claims.  Carnac Grier, the disinherited son of
the great lumber-king, who had fame as an artist, spoke French as though
it were his native tongue, was an element of sensation which, if adroitly
used, could be of great service.  It might even defeat Barode Barouche.
In the first place, Carnac was young, good-looking, personable, and
taking in his manner.  Barouche was old, experienced, with hosts of
enemies and many friends, but with injurious egotism.  An interview was,
therefore, arranged at Headquarters.

On the morning of the day it took place, Carnac's anguished mother went
with him to the little railway station of Charlemont.  She had slept
little the night before; her mind was in an eddy of emotions.  It seemed
dreadful that Carnac should fight his own father, repeating what Fabian
had done in another way.  Yet at the bottom of her heart there was a
secret joy.  Some native revolt in her had joy in the thought that the
son might extort a price for her long sorrow and his unknown disgrace.

As she had listened to Barouche at the meeting, she realized how sincere
yet insincere he was; how gifted and yet how ungracious was his mind.
Her youth was over; long pain and regret had chastened her.  She was as
lonely a creature as ever the world knew; violence was no part of her
equipment; and yet terrible memories made her assent to this new phase of
Carnac's life.  She wondered what Barouche would think.  There was some
ancient touch of war in her which made her rejoice that after long years
the hammer should strike.

Somehow the thing's tremendous possibilities thrilled her.  Carnac had
always been a politician--always.  She remembered how, when he was a boy,
he had argued with John Grier on national matters, laid down the law with
the assurance of an undergraduate, and invented theories impossible of
public acceptance.  Yet in every stand he had taken, there had been
thought, logic and reasoning, wrongly premised, but always based on
principles.  On paper he was generally right; in practice, generally
wrong.  His buoyant devotion to an idea was an inspiration and a tonic.
The curious thing was that, while still this political matter was hanging
fire, he painted with elation.

His mother knew he did not see the thousand little things which made
public life so wearying; that he only realized the big elements of
national policy.  She understood how those big things would inspire the
artist in him.  For, after all, there was the spirit of Art in framing a
great policy which would benefit millions in the present and countless
millions in the future.  So, at the railway station, as they waited for
the train, with an agitation outwardly controlled, she said:

"The men who have fought before, will want to stand, so don't be
surprised if--"

"If they reject me, mother?" interrupted Carnac.  No, I shan't be
surprised, but I feel in my bones that I'm going to fight Barode
Barouche into the last corner of the corral."

"Don't be too sure of that, my son.  Won't the thing that prevents your
marrying Junia be a danger in this, if you go on?"

Sullen tragedy came into his face, his lips set.  The sudden paleness of
his cheek, however, was lost in a smile.

"Yes, I've thought of that; but if it has to come, better it should come
now than later.  If the truth must be told, I'll tell it--yes, I'll tell
it!"

"Be bold, but not reckless, Carnac," his mother urged.

Just then the whistling train approached.  She longed to put a hand out
and hold him back, and yet she ached to let him go.  Yet as Carnac
mounted the steps of the car, a cry went out from her heart: "My son,
stay with me here--don't go."  That was only in her heart, however; with
her lips she said: "Good luck!  God bless you, Carnac!" and then the
train rolled away, leaving her alone in the bright, bountiful morning.

Before the day was done, Headquarters had accepted Carnac, in part, as
the solution of their own difficult problem.  The three applicants for
the post each hated the other; but all, before the day was over, agreed
to Carnac as an effective opponent of Barouche.

One thing seemed clear--Carnac's policy had elements of seduction
appealing to the selfishness of all sections, and he had an eloquence
which would make Barouche uneasy.  That eloquence was shown in a speech
Carnac made in the late evening to the assembled executive.  He spoke for
only a quarter of an hour, but it was long enough to leave upon all who
heard him an impression of power, pertinacity, picturesqueness and
appeal.  He might make mistakes, but he had qualities which would ride
over errors with success.

"I'm not French," he said at last in his speech, "but I used to think
and write in French as though I'd been born in Normandy.  I'm English
by birth and breeding, but I've always gone to French schools and to
a French University, and I know what New France means.  I stand to my
English origin, but I want to see the French develop here as they've
developed in France, alive to all new ideas, dreaming good dreams.
I believe that Frenchmen in Canada can, and should, be an inspiration
to the whole population.  Their great qualities should be the fibre in
the body of public opinion.  I will not pander to the French; I will not
be the slave of the English; I will be free, and I hope I shall be
successful at the polls."

This was a small part of the speech which caused much enthusiasm, and was
the beginning of a movement, powerful, and as time went on, impetuous.

He went to bed with the blood of battle throbbing in his veins.  In the
morning he had a reasonable joy in seeing the headlines of his
candidature in the papers.

At first he was almost appalled, for never since life began had his
personality been so displayed.  It seemed absurd that before he had
struck a blow he should be advertised like a general in the field.
Yet common sense told him that in standing against Barouche, he became
important in the eyes of those affected by Barouche's policy.  He had had
luck, and it was for him to justify that luck.  Could he do it?  His
first thought, however, as his eyes fell on the headlines--he flushed
with elation so that he scarcely saw--was for the thing itself.  Before
him there flashed a face, however, which at once sobered his exaltation.
It was the face of Junia.

"I wonder what she will think," he said to himself, with a little
perplexity.

He knew in his heart of hearts she would not think it incongruous that
he, an artist, should become a politician.  Good laws served to make life
beautiful, good pictures ministered to beauty; good laws helped to tell
the story of human development; good sculpture strengthened the soul;
good laws made life's conveniences greater, enlarged activity, lessened
the friction of things not yet adjusted; good laws taught their framers
how to balance things, how to make new principles apply without
disturbing old rights; good pictures increased the well-balanced harmony
of the mind of the people.  Junia would understand these things.  As he
sat at his breakfast, with the newspaper spread against the teapot and
the milk-pitcher, he felt satisfied he had done the bold and right, if
incomprehensible, thing.

But in another hotel, at another breakfast, another man read of Carnac's
candidature with sickening surprise.  It was Barode Barouche.

So, after twenty-seven long years, this was to be the issue!  His own
son, whom he had never known, was to fight him at the polls!  Somehow,
the day when he had seen Carnac and his mother at the political meeting
had given him new emotions.  His wife, to whom he had been so faithful in
one sense since she had passed into the asylum, had died, and with her
going, a new field of life seemed to open up to him.  She had died
almost on the same day as John Grier.  She had been buried secludedly,
piteously, and he had gone back to his office with the thought that life
had become a preposterous freedom.

So it was that, on the day when he spoke at the political meeting, his
life's tragedy became a hammer beating every nerve into emotion.  He was
like one shipwrecked who strikes out with a swimmer's will to reach his
goal.  All at once, on the platform, as he spoke, when his eyes saw the
faces of Carnac and his mother the catastrophe stunned him like a huge
engine of war.  There had come to him at last a sense of duty where Alma
Grier was concerned.  She was nearly fifty years of age, and he was
fifty-nine; she was a widow with this world's goods; she had been to him
how near and dear! for a brief hour, and then--no more.  He knew the boy
was his son, because he saw his own face, as it had been in his youth,
though his mother's look was also there-transforming, illumining.

He had a pang as he saw the two at the close of his meeting filtering out
into the great retort of the world.  Then it was that he had the impulse
to go to the woman's home, express his sorrow, and in some small sense
wipe out his wrong by offering her marriage.  He had not gone.

He knew of Carnac's success in the world of Art; and how he had alienated
his reputed father by an independence revolting to a slave of convention.
He had even bought, not from Carnac, but from a dealer, two of Carnac's
pictures and a statue of a riverman.  Somehow the years had had their way
with him.  He had at long last realized that material things were not the
great things of life, and that imagination, however productive, should be
guided by uprightness of soul.

One thing was sure, the boy had never been told who his father was.  That
Barouche knew.  He had the useful gift of reading the minds of people in
their faces.  From Carnac's face, from Carnac's mother's face, had come
to him the real story.  He knew that Alma Grier had sinned only once and
with him.  In the first days after that ill-starred month, he had gone to
her, only to be repelled as a woman can repel whose soul has been
shocked, whose self-respect has been shamed.

It had been as though she thrust out arms of infinite length to push him
away, such had been the storm of her remorse, such the revulsion against
herself and him.  So they had fallen apart, and he had seen his boy grow
up independent, original, wilful, capable--a genius.  He read the
newspaper reports of what had happened the day before with senses greatly
alive.

After all, politics was unlike everything else.  It was a profession
recruited from all others.  The making of laws was done by all kinds of
men.  One of the wisest advisers in river-law he had ever known was a
priest; one of the best friends of the legislation of the medical
profession was a woman; one of the bravest Ministers who had ever
quarrelled with and conquered his colleagues had been an insurance agent;
one of the sanest authorities on maritime law had been a man with a
greater pride in his verses than in his practical capacity; and here was
Carnac, who had painted pictures and made statues, plunging into politics
with a policy as ingenious as his own, and as capable of logical
presentation.  This boy, who was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh,
meant to fight him.  He threw back his head and laughed.  His boy, his
son, meant to fight him, did he?  Well, so be it!  He got to his feet,
and walked up and down the room.

"God, what an issue this!" he said.  "It would be terrific, if he won.
To wipe me out of the life where I have flourished--what a triumph for
him!  And he would not know how great the triumph would be.  She has not
told him.  Yet she will urge him on.  Suppose it was she put the idea
into his head!"

Then he threw back his head, shaking the long brown hair, browner than
Carnac's, from his forehead.  "Suppose she did this thing--she who was
all mine for one brief moment!  Suppose she--"

Every nerve tingled; every drop of blood beat hard against his walls of
flesh; his every vicious element sprang into life.

"But no--but no, she would not do it.  She would not teach her son to
destroy his own father.  But something must have told him to come and
listen to me, to challenge me in his own mind, and then--then this
thing!"

He stared at the paper, leaning over the table, as though it were a
document of terror.

"I must go on: I must uphold the policy for which I've got the assent of
the Government."  Suddenly his hands clenched.  "I will beat him.  He
shall not bring me to the dust.  I gave him life, and he shall not take
my life from me.  He's at the beginning; I'm going towards the end.
I wronged his mother--yes, I wronged him too!  I wronged them both, but
he does not know he's wronged.  He'll live his own life;
he has lived it--"

There came a tap at the door.  Presently it opened and a servant came in.
He had in his hand a half-dozen telegrams.

"All about the man that's going to fight you, I expect, m'sieu'," said
the servant as he handed the telegrams.

Barode Barouche did not reply, but nodded a little scornfully.

"A woman has called," continued the servant.  "She wants to see you,
m'sieu'.  It's very important, she says."

Barouche shook his head in negation.  "No, Gaspard."

"It ain't one of the usual kind, I think, m'sieu'," protested Gaspard.
"It's about the election.  It's got something to do with that--" he
pointed to the newspaper propped against the teapot.

"It's about that, is it?  Well, what about that?"  He eyed the servant as
though to see whether the woman had given any information.

"I don't know.  She didn't tell me.  She's got a mind of her own.  She's
even handsome, and she's well-dressed.  All she said was: 'Tell m'sieu' I
want to see him.  It's about the election-about Mr. Grier.'"

Barode Barouche's heart stopped.  Something about Carnac Grier--something
about the election--and a woman!  He kept a hand on himself.  It must not
be seen that he was in any way moved.

"Is she English?"

"She's French, m'sieu'."

"You think I ought to see her, Gaspard?" said Barouche.

"Sure," was the confident reply.  "I guess she's out against whoever's
against you."

"You never saw her before."

"Not to my sense."

"But I haven't finished my breakfast."

"Well, if it's anything important that'll help you, m'sieu'.  It's like
whittling.  If you can do things with your hands while you're talking and
thinking, it's a great help.  You go on eating.  I'll show her up!"

Barouche smiled maliciously.  "Well, show her up, Gaspard."

The servant laughed.  "Perhaps she'll show herself up after I show her
in," he said, and he went out hastily.

Presently the door opened again, and Gaspard stepped inside.

"A lady to see you, m'sieu'," he said.

Barouche rose from the table, but he did not hold out his hand.  The
woman was young, good looking, she seemed intelligent.  There was also
a latent cruelty in her face which only a student of human nature could
have seen quickly.  She was a woman with a grievance--that was sure.
He knew the passionate excitement, fairly well controlled; he saw her
bitterness at a glance.  He motioned her to a chair.

"It's an early call," he said with a smile.  Smiling was one of his
serviceable assets; it was said no man could so palaver the public with
his cheerful goodnature.

"Yes, it's an early call," she replied, "but I wish not to wait till you
go to your office.  I wanted you to know something.  It has to do with
Mr. Carnac Grier."

"Oh, that--eh!"

"It's something you've got to know.  If I give you the sure means to win
your election, it would be worth while--eh?"

The beating of Barouche's heart was hard, but nothing showed in his face.
There he had control.

"I like people who know their own minds," he said, "but I don't believe
anything till I study what I hear.  Is it something to injure Mr. Grier?"

"If a married man went about as a single man and stood up for Parliament
against you, don't you think you could spoil him?"

For a moment Barouche was silent.  Here was an impeachment of his own
son, but this son was out to bring his own father to the ground.  There
were two ways to look at it.  There was the son's point of view, and
there was his own.  If he loved his son he ought to know the thing that
threatened him; if he hated his son he ought to know.  So, after a
moment's study of the face with the fiery eyes and a complexion like
roses touched with frost, he said slowly:

"Well, have I the honour of addressing Carnac Grier's wife?"

Barouche had had many rewards in his life, but the sweetest reward of all
was now his own.  As events proved, he had taken a course which, if he
cared for his son, was for that son's well-being, and if he cared for
himself most, was essential to his own well-being.

Relief crossed the woman's face.  "I'll tell you everything," she said.

Then Luzanne told her story, avoiding the fact that Carnac had been
tricked into the marriage.  At last she said: "Now I've come here to
make him acknowledge me.  He's ruined my life, broken my hopes, and--"

"Broken your hopes!" interrupted Barode Barouche.  "How is that?"

"I might have married some one else.  I could have married some one
else."

"Well, why don't you?  There's the Divorce Court.  What's to prevent it?"

"You ask me that--you a Frenchman and a Roman Catholic!  I'm French.
I was born in Paris."

"When will you let me see your papers?"

"When do you want to see them?"

"To-day-if possible to-day," he answered.  Then he held her eyes.  "To
whom else here have you told this story?"

"No one--no one.  I only came last night, and when I took up the paper
this morning, I saw.  Then I found out where you lived, and here I am,
bien sur.  I'm here under my maiden name, Ma'm'selle Luzanne Larue."

"That's right.  That's right.  Now, until we meet again, don't speak of
this to anyone.  Will you give me your word?"

"Absolutely," she said, and there was revenge and passion in her eyes.
Suddenly a strange expression crept over her face.  She was puzzled.

"There's something of him about you," she said, and her forehead
gathered.  "There's some look!  Well, there it is, but it's something--
I don't know what."

A moment later she was gone.  As the door closed, he stretched his hands
above his head.

"Nom de Dieu, what a situation!" he remarked.




CHAPTER XX

JUNIA AND TARBOE HEAR THE NEWS

To most people Carnac's candidature was a surprise; to some it was a
bewilderment, and to one or two it was a shock.  To the second class
belonged Fabian Grier and his wife; to the third class belonged Luke
Tarboe.  Only one person seemed to understand it--by intuition: Junia.

Somehow, nothing Carnac did changed Junia's views of him, or surprised
her, though he made her indignant often enough.  To her mind, however, in
the big things, his actions always had reasonableness.  She had never
felt his artist-life was to be the only note of his career.  When,
therefore, in the West she read a telegram in a newspaper announcing his
candidature, she guessed the suddenness of his decision.  When she read
it, she spread the paper on the table, smoothed it as though it were a
beautiful piece of linen, then she stretched out her hands in happy
benediction.  Like most of her sex, she loved the thrill of warfare.
There flashed the feeling, however, that it would be finer sport if
Carnac and Tarboe were to be at war, instead of Carnac and Barouche.  It
was curious she never thought of Carnac but the other man came throbbing
into sight--the millionaire, for he was that now.

In one way, this last move of Carnac's had the elements of a master-
stroke.  She knew how strange it would seem to the rest of the world, yet
it did not seem strange to her.  No man she had ever seen had been so at
home in the world of men, and also at home in the secluded field of the
chisel and the brush as Carnac.

She took the newspaper over to her aunt, holding it up.  The big
headlines showed like semaphores on the page.  As the graceful figure of
Junia drew to her aunt--her slim feet, in the brown, well-polished boots,
the long, full neck, and then the chin, Grecian, shapely and firm, the
straight, sensitive nose, the wonderful eyes under the well-cut, broad
forehead, with the brown hair, covering it like a canopy--the old lady
reached out and wound her arms round the lissome figure.  Situated so,
she read the telegram, and then the old arms gripped her tighter.

Presently, the whistle of a train sounded.  The aunt stretched out an
approving finger to the sound.  She realized that the figure round which
her arms hung trembled, for it was the "through" daily train for
Montreal.

"I'm going back at once, aunty," Junia said.

                    ..........................

"Well, I'm jiggered!"

These were Tarboe's words when Carnac's candidature came first to him in
the press.

"He's 'broke' out in a new place," he added.

Tarboe loved the spectacular, and this was indeed spectacular.  Yet he
had not the mental vision of Junia who saw how close, in one intimate
sense, was the relation between the artist life and the political life.
To him it was a gigantic break from a green pasture into a red field of
war.  To her, it was a resolution which, in anyone else's life, would
have seemed abnormal; in Carnac's life it had naturalness.

Tarboe had been for a few months only the reputed owner of the great
business, and he had paid a big price for his headship in the weighty
responsibility, the strain of control; but it had got into his blood,
and he felt life would not be easy without it now.

Besides, there was Junia.  To him she was the one being in the world
worth struggling for; the bird to be caught on the wing, or coaxed into
the nest, or snared into the net; and two of the three things he had
tried without avail.  The third--the snaring?  He would not stop at that,
if it would bring him what he wanted.  How to snare her!  He surveyed
himself in the mirror.

"A great hulking figure like that!" he said in disapproval.  "All bone
and muscle and flesh and physical show!  It wouldn't weigh with her.
She's too fine.  It isn't the animal in a man she likes.  It's what he
can do, and what he is, and where he's going."

Then he thought of Carnac's new outburst, and his veins ran cold.
"She'll like that--but yes, she'll like that: and if he succeeds she'll
think he's great.  Well, she'd be right.  He'll beat Barouche.  He's
young and brave, careless and daring.  Now where am I in this fight?
I belong to Barouche's party and my vote ought to go for him."

For some minutes he sat in profound thought.  What part should he play?
He liked Carnac, he owed him a debt which he could never repay.  Carnac
had saved him from killing Denzil.  If that had happened, he himself
might have gone to the gallows.

He decided.  Sitting down, he wrote Carnac the following letter:

     DEAR CARNAC GRIER,

     I see you're beginning a new work.  You now belong to a party that I
     am opposed to, but that doesn't stop me offering you support.  It's
     not your general policy, but it is you, the son of your father, that
     I mean to work for.  If you want financial help for your campaign--
     or after it is over--come and get it here--ten thousand or more if
     you wish.  Your father, if he knew--and perhaps he does know--would
     be pleased that you, who could not be a man of business in his
     world, are become a man of business in the bigger world of law-
     making.  You may be right or wrong in that policy, but that don't
     weigh with me.  You've taken on as big a job as ever your father
     did.  What's the use of working if you don't try to do the big thing
     that means a lot to people outside yourself!  If you make new good
     laws, if you do something for the world that's wonderful, it's as
     much as your father did, or, if he was alive, could do now.
     Whatever there is here is yours to use.  When you come back here to
     play your part, you'll make it a success--the whole blessed thing.
     I don't wish you were here now, except that it's yours--all of it--
     but I wish you to beat Barode Barouche.

                                   Yours to the knife,

                                                  LUKE TARBOE.


He read the letter through, and coming to the words, "When you come back
here to play your part, you'll make it a success--the whole blessed
thing," he paused, reflecting .  .  .  He wondered what Carnac would
think the words meant, and he felt it was bold, and, maybe, dangerous
play; but it was not more dangerous than facts he had dealt with often
in the last two years.  He would let it stand, that phrase of the hidden
meaning.  He did not post the letter yet.

Four days later he put on his wide-brimmed panama hat and went out into
the street leading to the centre of the city.  There was trouble in the
river reaches between his men and those of Belloc-Grier, and he was
keeping an appointment with Belloc at Fabian Grier's office, where
several such meetings had taken place.

He had not gone far, however, when he saw a sprightly figure in light-
brown linen cutting into his street from a cross-road.  He had not seen
that figure for months-scarcely since John Grier's death, and his heart
thumped in his breast.  It was Junia.  How would she greet him?

A moment later he met her.  Raising his hat, he said: "Back to the
firing-line, Miss Shale!  It'll make a big difference to every one
concerned."

"Are you then concerned?" she asked, with a faint smile.

"One of the most concerned," he answered with a smile not so composed as
her own.  "It's the honour of the name that's at stake."

"You want to ruin Mr. Grier's chances in the fight?"

"I didn't say that.  I said, 'the honour of the name,' and the name of my
firm is 'Grier's Company of Lumbermen.'  So I'm in it with all my might,
and here's a letter--I haven't posted it yet--saying to Carnac Grier
where I stand.  Will you read it?  There's no reason why you shouldn't."
He tore open the envelope and took the letter out.

Junia took it, after hesitation, and read it till she came to the
sentence about Carnac returning to the business.  She looked up,
startled.

"What does that mean?" she asked, pointing to the elusive sentence.

"He might want to come into the business some day, and I'll give him his
chance.  Nothing more than that."

"Nothing more than that!" she said cynically.  "It's bravely said, but
how can he be a partner if he can't buy the shares?"

"That's a matter to be thought out," he answered with a queer twist to
his mouth.

"I see you've offered to help him with cash for the election," she said,
handing back the letter.

"I felt it had to be done.  Politics are expensive they sap the purse.
That's why."

"You never thought of giving him an income which would compensate a
little for what his father failed to do for him?"

There was asperity in her tone.

"He wouldn't take from me what his father didn't give him."  Suddenly an
idea seized him.  "Look here," he said, "you're a friend of the Griers,
why don't you help keep things straight between the two concerns?  You
could do it.  You have the art of getting your own way.  I've noticed
that."

"So you'd like me to persuade Fabian Grier to influence Belloc, because
I'd make things easy for you!" she said briskly.  "Do you forget I've
known Fabian since I was a baby, that my sister is his wife, and that his
interests are near to me?"

He did not knuckle down.  "I think it would be helping Fabian's
interests.  Belloc and Fabian Grier are generally in the wrong, and to
keep them right would be good business-policy.  When I've trouble with
Belloc's firm it's because they act like dogs in the manger.  They seem
to hate me to live."

She laughed--a buoyant, scornful laugh.  "So all the fault is in Belloc
and Fabian, is it?"  She was impressed enormously by his sangfroid and
will to rule the roost.  "I think you're clever, and that you've got
plenty of horse-sense, as they say in the West, but you'll be beaten in
the end.  How does it feel"--she asked it with provoking candour--"to be
the boss of big things?"

"I know I'm always settling troubles my business foes make for me.  I
have to settle one of them now, and I'm glad I've met you, for you can
help me.  I want some new river-rules made.  If Belloc and Grier'll agree
to them, we'll do away with this constant trouble between our gangs."

"And you'd like me to help you?"

He smiled a big riverman's smile down at her, full of good-humour and
audacity.

"If you could make it clear to Fabian that all I'm after is peace on the
river, it'd do a lot of good."

"Well, do you know," she said demurely, "I don't think I'll take a hand
in this game, chiefly because--" she paused.

"Yes: chiefly because--"

"Because you'll get your own way without help.  You get everything you
want," she added with a little savage comment.

A flood of feeling came into his eyes, his head jerked like that of a
bull-moose.  "No, I don't get everything I want.  The thing I want most
in the world doesn't come to me."  His voice grew emotional.  She knew
what he was trying to say, and as the idea was not new she kept
composure.  "I'm not as lucky as you think me," he added.

"You're pretty lucky.  You've done it all as easy as clasping your
fingers.  If I had your luck--!" she paused.

"I don't know about that, but if I could reach out and touch you at any
time, as it were, I think it'd bring me permanent good luck.  You'll find
out one day that my luck is only a bubble the prick of a pin'll destroy.
I don't misunderstand it.  I've been left John Grier's business by Grier
himself, and he's got a son that ought to have it, and maybe will have
it, when the time is ripe."

Suddenly an angry hand flashed out towards him.  "When the time is ripe!
Does that mean, when you've made all you want, you'll give up to Carnac
what isn't yours but his?  Why don't you do it now?"

"Well, because, in the first place, I like my job and he doesn't want it;
in the second place, I promised his father I'd run the business as he
wished it run; and in the third place, Carnac wouldn't know how to use
the income the business brings."

She laughed in a mocking, challenging way.  "Was there ever a man didn't
know how to use an income no matter how big it was!  You're talking
enigmas, and I think we'd better say good-bye.  Your way to the Belloc
offices is down that street."  She pointed.

"And you won't help me?  You won't say a word to Fabian?"

She shrugged a shoulder.  "If I were a man like you, who's so big, so
lucky, and so dominant, I wouldn't ask a woman to help me.  I'd do the
job myself.  I'd keep faith with my reputation.  But there's one nice
thing about you: you're going to help Carnac to beat Barode Barouche.
You've made a gallant offer.  If you'd gone against him, if you'd played
Barouche's game, I--"

The indignation which came to her face suddenly fled, and she said:
"Honestly, I'd never speak to you again, and I always keep my word.
Carnac'll see it through.  He's a man of mark, Mr. Tarboe, and he'll be
Prime Minister of the whole country one day.  I don't think you'll like
it."

"You hit hard, but if I hadn't taken the business, Carnac Grier wouldn't
have got it.  If it hadn't been me, it would have been some one else."

"Well, why don't you live like a rich man and not like a foreman?"

"I've been too busy to change my mode of living.  I only want enough to
eat and drink and wear, and that's not costly."  Suddenly an idea came to
him.  "Now, if that business had been left to you, you'd be building a
stone house somewhere; and you'd have horses and carriages, and lots of
servants, and you'd swing along like a pretty coloured bird in the
springtime, wouldn't you?"

"If I had wealth, I'd make it my servant.  I'd give it its chance; but as
I haven't got it, I live as I do--poor and unknown."

"Not unknown.  See, you could control what belonged to John Grier, if you
would.  I need some one to show me how to spend the money coming from the
business.  What is wealth unless you buy things that give pleasure to
life?  Do you know--"

He got no further.  "I don't know anything you're trying to tell me,
and anyhow this is not the place--" With that she hastened from him up
the street.  Tarboe had a pang, and yet her very last words gave him
hope.  "I may be a bit sharp in business," he said to himself, "but I
certainly am a fool in matters of the heart.  Yet what she said at last
had something in it for me.  Every woman has an idea where a man ought
to make love to her, and this open road certainly ain't the place.  If
Carnac wins this game with Barouche I don't know where I'll be with her-
maybe I'm a fool to help him."  He turned the letter over and over in his
hand.  "No, I'm not.  I ought to do it, and I will."

Then he fell to brooding.  He remembered about the second hidden will.
There came upon him a wild wish to destroy it.  He loved controlling John
Grier's business.  Never had anything absorbed him so.  Life seemed a new
thing.  The idea of disappearing from the place where, with a stroke of
his fingers, he moved five thousand men, or swept a forest into the great
river, or touched a bell which set going a saw-mill with its many cross-
cut saws, or filled a ship to take the pine, cedar, maple, ash or elm
boards to Europe, or to the United States, was terrible to him.  He loved
the smell of the fresh-cut wood.  The odour of the sawdust as he passed
through a mill was sweeter than a million bunches of violets.  Many a
time he had caught up a handful of the damp dust and smelt it, as an
expert gardener would crumble the fallen flowers of a fruittree and sniff
the sweet perfume.  To be master of one of the greatest enterprises of
the New World for three years, and then to disappear!  He felt he could
not do it.

His feelings shook his big frame.  The love of a woman troubled his
spirit.  Suppose the will were declared and the girl was still free,
what would she do?

As he set foot in the office of the firm of Belloc, however, he steeled
himself to composure.

His task well accomplished, he went back to his own office, and spent
the day like a racehorse under the lash, restive, defiant, and reckless.
When night and the shadows came, he sat alone in his office with drawn
blinds, brooding, wondering.




CHAPTER XXI

THE SECRET MEETING

As election affairs progressed, Mrs. Grier kept withdrawn from public
ways.  She did not seek supporters for her son.  As the weeks went on,
the strain became intense.  Her eyes were aflame with excitement, but she
grew thinner, until at last she was like a ghost haunting familiar
scenes.  Once, and once only, did she have touch with Barode Barouche
since the agitation began.  This was how it happened:

Carnac was at Ottawa, and she was alone, in the late evening.  As she sat
sewing, she heard a knock at the front door.  Her heart stood still.  It
was a knock she had not heard for over a quarter of a century, but it had
an unforgettable touch.  She waited a moment, her face pale, her eyes
shining with tortured memory.  She waited for the servant to answer the
knock, but presently she realized that the servant probably had not
heard.  Laying down her work, she passed into the front hall.  There for
an instant she paused, then opened the door.

It was Barode Barouche.  Then the memory of a summer like a terrible
dream shook her.  She trembled.  Some old quiver of the dead days swept
through her.  How distant and how--bad it all was!  For one instant the
old thrill repeated itself and then was gone--for ever.

"What is it you wish here?" she asked.

"Will you not shut the door?" he responded, for her fingers were on the
handle.  "I cannot speak with the night looking in.  Won't you ask me to
your sitting-room?  I'm not a robber or a rogue."

Slowly she closed the door.  Then she turned, and, in the dim light, she
said:

"But you are both a robber and a rogue."

He did not answer until they had entered the sittin-groom.

"I gave you that which is out against me now.  Is he not brilliant,
capable and courageous?"

There was in her face a stern duty.

"It was Fate, monsieur.  When he and I went to your political meeting at
Charlemont it had no purpose.  No blush came to his cheek, because he did
not know who his father is.  No one in the world knows--no one except
myself, that must suffer to the end.  Your speech roused in him the
native public sense, the ancient fire of the people from whom he did not
know he came.  His origin has been his bane from the start.  He did not
know why the man he thought his father seemed almost a stranger to him.
He did not understand, and so they fell apart.  Yet John Grier would have
given more than he had to win the boy to himself.  Do you ever think what
the boy must have suffered?  He does not know.  Only you and I know!"
She paused.

He thrust out a hand as though to stay her speech, but she went on again

"Go away from me.  You have spoiled my life; you have spoiled my boy's
life, and now he fights you.  I give him no help save in one direction.
I give to him something his reputed father withheld from him.  Don't you
think it a strange thing"--her voice was thick with feeling--"that he
never could bear to take money from John Grier, and that, even as a
child, gifts seemed to trouble him.  I think he wanted to give back again
all that John Grier had ever paid out to him or for him; and now, at
last, he fights the man who gave him birth!  I wanted to tell John Grier
all, but I did not because I knew it would spoil his life and my boy's
life.  It was nothing to me whether I lived or died.  But I could not
bear Carnac should know.  He was too noble to have his life spoiled."

Barode Barouche drew himself together.  Here was a deep, significant
problem, a situation that needed more expert handling than he had ever
shown.  As he stood by the table, the dim light throwing haggard
reflections on her face, he had a feeling that she was more than normal.
He saw her greater than he had ever imagined her.  Something in him
revolted at a war between his own son and himself.  Also, he wanted to
tell her of the danger in which Carnac was--how Luzanne had come, and was
hidden away in the outskirts of the city, waiting for the moment when the
man who rejected her should be sacrificed.

Now that Barouche was face to face with Alma Grier, however, he felt the
appalling nature of his task.  In all the years he had taken no chance to
pay tribute to the woman who, in a real sense, had been his mistress of
body and mind for one short term of life, and who once, and once only,
had yielded to him.  They were both advanced in years, and Life and Time
had taken toll.  She was haggard, yet beautiful in a wan way.  He did not
believe the vanished years had placed between them an impassable barrier.

He put his chances to the test at last.

"Yes, I know--I understand.  You remained silent because your nature was
too generous to injure anyone.  Down at the bottom of his heart,
cantankerous, tyrannical as he was, John Grier loved you, and I loved you
also."

She made a protest of her hand.  "Oh, no!  You never knew what love was--
never!  You had passion, you had hunger of the body, but of love you did
not know.  I know you, Barode Barouche.  You have no heart, you have only
sentiment and imagination.  No--no, you could not be true.  You could
never know how."

Suddenly a tempest of fire seemed to burn in his eyes, in his whole
being.  His face flushed: his eyes gleamed; his hands were thrust out
with passion.

"Will you not understand that were I as foul as hell, a woman like you
would make me clean again?  The wild sin of our youth has eaten into the
soul of my life.  You think I have been indifferent to you and to our
boy.  No, never-never!  That I left you both to yourselves was the best
proof I was not neglectful.  I was sorry, with all my soul, that you
should have suffered through me.  In the first reaction, I felt that
nothing could put me right with you or with eternal justice.  So I shrank
away from you.  You thought it was lust satisfied.  I tell you it was
honour shamed.  Good God!  You thought me just the brazen roue, who
seized what came his way, who ate the fruit within his grasp, who lived
to deceive for his own selfish joy.

"Did you think that?  Then, if you did, I do not wonder you should be glad
to see my son fighting me.  It would seem the horrible revenge Destiny
should take."  He took a step nearer to her.  His face flamed, his arms
stretched out.  "I have held you in these arms.  I come with repentance
in my heart, with--"

Her face now was flushed.  She interrupted him.

"I don't believe in you, Barode Barouche.  At least my husband did not go
from his hearthstone looking for what belonged to others.  No--No--no;
however much I suffered, I understood that what he did not feel for me at
least he felt for no one else.  To him, life was his business, and to the
long end business mastered his emotions.  I have no faith in you!  In the
depth of my soul something cries out: 'He is not true.  His life is
false.'  To leave me that was right, but, monsieur, not as you left me.
You pick the fruit and eat it and spit upon the ground the fibre and the
skin.  I am no longer the slave of your false eloquence.  It has nothing
in it for me now, nothing at all--nothing."

"Yet your son--has he naught of me?  If your son has genius, I have the
right to say a part of it came from me.  Why should you say that all
that's good in the boy is yours--that the boy, in all he does and says,
is yours!  No--no.  Your long years of suffering have hardened into
injustice and wrong."

Suddenly he touched her arm.  "There are women as young as you were when
I wronged you, who would be my wife now--young, beautiful, buoyant; but I
come to you because I feel we might still have some years of happiness.
Together, where our boy's fate mattered, we two could help him on his
way.  That is what I feel, my dear."

When he touched her arm she did not move, yet there was in his fingers
something which stirred ulcers long since healed and scarred.  She
stepped back from him.

"Do not touch me.  The past is buried for ever.  There can be no
resurrection.  I know what I should do, and I will do it.  For the rest
of my life, I shall live for my son.  I hope he will defeat you.  I don't
lift a hand to help him except to give him money, not John Grier's money
but my own, always that.  You are fighting what is stronger than
yourself.  One thing is sure, he is nearer to the spirit of your race
than you.  He will win--but yes, he will win!"

Her face suffused with warmth, became alive with a wonderful fire, her
whole being had a simple tragedy.  Once again, and perhaps for the last
time, she had renewed the splendour of her young womanhood.  The vital
warmth of a great idea had given an expression to her face which had long
been absent from it.

He fell back from her.  Then suddenly passion seized him.  The gaunt
beauty of her roused a spirit of contest in him.  The evil thing in him,
which her love for her son had almost conquered, came back upon him.  He
remembered Luzanne, and now with a spirit alive with anger he said to
her:

"No--no--no, he cannot win."  He stretched out a hand.  "I have that
which will keep for me the place in Parliament that has been mine; which
will send him back to the isolation whence he came.  Do you think I don't
know how to win an election?  Why from east to west, from north to south
in this Province of Quebec my name, my fame, have been all-conquering.
Suppose he did defeat me, do you think that would end my political life?
It would end nothing.  I should still go on."

A scornful smile came to her lips.  "So you think your party would find a
seat for you who had been defeated by a young man who never knew what
political life meant till he came to this campaign?  You think they would
find you a seat?  I know you are coming to the end of your game, and when
he defeats you, it will finish everything for you.  You will disappear
from public life, and your day will be done.  Men will point at you as
you pass along the street, and say: 'There goes Barode Barouche.  He was
a great man in his day.  He was defeated by a boy with a painter's brush
in his hand.'  He will take from you your livelihood.  You will go, and
he will stay; he will conquer and grow strong.  Go from me, Barode
Barouche," she cried, thrusting out her hands against him, "go from me.
I love my son with all my soul.  His father has no place in my heart."

There had been upon him the wild passion of revenge.  It had mastered
him before she spoke, and while she spoke, but, as she finished, the
understanding spirit of him conquered.  Instead of telling her of Luzanne
Larue, and of what he would do if he found things going against him,
instead of that he resolved to say naught.  He saw he could not conquer
her.  For a minute after she had ceased speaking, he watched her in
silence, and in his eyes was a remorse which would never leave them.
She was master.

Slowly, and with a sense of defeat, he said to her: "Well, we shall never
meet again like this.  The fight goes on.  I will defeat Carnac.  No, do
not shake your head.  He shall not put me from my place.  For you and me
there is no future--none; yet I want to say to you before we part for
ever now, that you have been deeper in my life than any other woman
since I was born."

He said no more.  Catching up his hat from the chair, and taking his
stick, he left the room.  He opened the front door, stepped out, shut it
behind him and, in a moment, was lost in the night.




CHAPTER XXII

POINT TO POINT

While these things were happening, Carnac was spending all his time in
the constituency.  Every day was busy to the last minute, every hole in
the belt of his equipment was buckled tight.  In spite of his enthusiasm
he was, however, troubled by the fact that Luzanne might appear.  Yet as
time went on he gained confidence.  There were days, however, when he
appeared, mentally, to be watching the street corners.

One day at a public meeting he thought the sensation had come.  He had
just finished his speech in reply to Barode Barouche--eloquent, eager,
masterful.  Youth's aspirations, with a curious sympathy with the French
Canadian people, had idealized his utterances.  When he finished there
had been cheering, but in the quiet instant that followed the cheering,
a habitant got up--a weird, wilful fellow who had a reputation for brag,
yet who would not have hurt an enemy save in wild passion.

"M'sieu' Carnac Grier," he said, "I'd like to put a question to you.
You've been asking for our votes.  We're a family people, we Canucs, and
we like to know where we're going.  Tell me, m'sieu', where's your
woman?"

Having asked the question, he remained standing.  "Where's your woman?"
the habitant had asked.  Carnac's breath came quick and sharp.  There
were many hundreds present, and a good number of them were foes.  Barode
Barouche was on the same platform.

Not only Carnac was stirred by the question, for Barouche, who had
listened to his foe's speech with admiring anxiety, was startled.

"Where's your woman?" was not a phrase to be asked anyhow, or anywhere.
Barouche was glad of the incident.  Ready as he was to meet challenge, he
presently realized that his son had a readiness equally potent.  He was
even pleased to see the glint of a smile at the lips of the slim young
politician, in whom there was more than his own commingling of
temperament, wisdom, wantonness and raillery.

After a moment, Carnac said: "Isn't that a leading question to an
unmarried man?"

Barouche laughed inwardly.  Surely it was the reply he himself would have
made.  Carnac had showed himself a born politician.  The audience
cheered, but the questioner remained standing.  He meant to ask another
question.

"Sit down--sit down, jackass!" shouted some of the more raucous of the
crowd, but the man was stubborn.  He stretched out an arm towards Carnac.

"Bien, look here, my son, you take my advice.  Pursue the primrose path
into the meadows of matrimony."

Again Carnac shrank, but his mind rallied courageously, and he said:
"There are other people who want to ask questions, perhaps."  He turned
to Barode Barouche.  "I don't suggest my opponent has planned this
heckling, but he can see it does no good.  I'm not to be floored by
catch-penny tricks.  I'm going to win.  I run straight.  I haven't been
long enough in politics to learn how to deceive.  Let the accomplished
professionals do that.  They know how."

He waved a hand disdainfully at Barouche.  "Let them put forth all that's
in them, I will remain; let them exert the last ounce of energy, I will
prevail; let them use the thousand devices of elections, I will use no
device, but rely upon my policy.  I want nothing except my chance in
Parliament.  My highest ambition is to make good laws.  I am for the man
who was the first settler on the St. Lawrence and this section of the
continent--his history, his tradition, his honour and fame are in the
history books of the world.  If I should live a hundred years, I should
wish nothing better than the honour of having served the men whose
forefathers served Frontenac, Cartier, La Salle and Maisonneuve, and all
the splendid heroes of that ancient age.  What they have done is for all
men to do.  They have kept the faith.  I am for the habitant, for the
land of his faith and love, first and last and all the time."

He sat down in a tumult of cheering.  Many present remarked that no two
men they had ever heard spoke so much alike, and kept their attacks so
free from personal things.

There had been at this public meeting two intense supporters of Carnac,
who waited for him at the exit from the main doorway.  They were Fabian's
wife and Junia.

Barode Barouche came out of the hall before Carnac.  His quick eye saw
the two ladies, and he raised his broad-brimmed hat like a Stuart
cavalier, and smiled.

"Waiting for your champion, eh?" he asked with cynical friendliness.
"Well, work hard, because that will soften his fall."  He leaned over, as
it were confidentially, to them, while his friends craned their necks to
hear what he said: "If I were you I'd prepare him.  He's beaten as sure
as the sun shines."

Junia was tempted to say what was in her mind, but her sister Sibyl, who
resented Barouche's patronage, said:

"There's an old adage about the slip 'twixt the cup and the lip, Monsieur
Barouche.  He's young, and he's got a better policy than yours."

"And he's unmarried, eh!" Barouche remarked.  "He's unmarried, and I
suppose that matters!"  There was an undercurrent of meaning in his voice
which did not escape Junia.

"And Monsieur Barouche is also unmarried," she remarked.  "So you're even
there."

"Not quite even.  I'm a widower.  The women don't work for me as they
work for him."

"I don't understand," remarked Junia.  "The women can't all marry him."

"There are a lot of things that can't be understood by just blinking the
eyes, but there's romance in the fight of an unmarried man, and women
like romance even if it's some one else's.  There's sensation in it."

Barouche looked to where Carnac was slowly coming down the centre of the
hall.  Women were waving handkerchiefs and throwing kisses towards him.
One little girl was pushed in front of him, and she reached out a hand in
which was a wild rose.

"That's for luck, m'sieu'," she said.

Carnac took the rose, and placed it in his buttonhole; then, stooping
down, he kissed the child's cheek.  Outside the hall, Barode Barouche
winked an eye knowingly.  "He's got it all down to a science.  Look at
him--kissing the young chick.  Nevertheless, he's walking into an abyss."

Carnac was near enough now for the confidence in his face to be seen.
Barouche's eyes suddenly grew resentful.  Sometimes he had a feeling of
deep affection for his young challenger; sometimes there was a storm of
anger in his bosom, a hatred which can be felt only for a member of one's
own family.  Resentment showed in his face now.  This boy was winning
friends on every side.

Something in the two men, some vibration of temperament, struck the same
chord in Junia's life and being.  She had noticed similar gestures,
similar intonations of voice, and, above all else, a little toss of the
head backwards.  She knew they were not related, and so she put the whole
thing down to Carnac's impressionable nature which led its owner into
singular imitations.  It had done so in the field of Art.  He was young
enough to be the imitator without loss to himself.

"I'm doing my best to defeat you," she said to Barouche, reaching out a
hand for good-bye, "and I shall work harder now than ever.  You're so
sure you're going to win that I'd disappoint you, monsieur--only to do
you good."

"Ah, I'm sorry you haven't any real interest in Carnac Grier, if it's
only to do me good!  Well, goodbye--good-bye," he added, raising his hat,
and presently was gone.

As Carnac drew near, Fabian's wife stepped forward.  "Carnac," she said,
"I hope you'll come with us on the river in Fabian's steam-launch.
There's work to do there.  It's pay-day in the lumber-yards on the
Island, so please come.  Will you?"

Carnac laughed.  "Yes, there's no engagement to prevent it."  He thanked
Junia and Sibyl for all they had done for him, and added: "I'd like a
couple of hours among the rivermen.  Where's the boat?"  Fabian's wife
told him, and added: "I've got the roan team here, and you can drive us
down, if you will."

A few moments afterwards, with the cheers of the crowd behind them, they
were being driven by Carnac to the wharf where lay the "Fleur-de-lis."
On board was Fabian.

"Had a good meeting, Carnac?" Fabian asked.

"I should call it first-class.  It was like a storm, at sea-wind from one
direction, then from another, but I think on the whole we had the best of
it.  Don't you think so?" he added to Fabian's wife.

"Oh, much the best," she answered.  "That's so, Junia, isn't it?"

"I wouldn't say so positively," answered Junia.  "I don't understand
Monsieur Barouche.  He talked as if he had something up his sleeve."
Her face became clouded.  "Have you any idea what it is, Carnac?"

Carnac laughingly shook his head.  "That's his way.  He's always
bluffing.  He does it to make believe the game's his, and to destroy my
confidence.  He's a man of mark, but he's having the biggest fight he
ever had--of that I'm sure.  .  .  .  Do you think I'll win?" he asked
Junia presently with a laugh, as they made their way down the river.
"Have I conquest in my eye?"

How seldom did Junia have Carnac to herself in these days!  How kind of
Fabian to lend his yacht for the purpose of canvassing!  But Sibyl had in
her mind a deeper thing--she had become a match-maker.  She and Fabian,
when the boat left the shore, went to one corner of the stern, leaving
Carnac and Junia in the bow.

Three miles below the city was the Island on which many voters were
working in a saw-mill and lumberyard.  It had supporters of Barouche
chiefly in the yards and mills.  Carnac had never visited it, and it was
Junia's view that he should ingratiate himself with the workers, a rough-
and-ready lot.  They were ready to "burst a meeting" or bludgeon a
candidate on occasion.

When Carnac asked his question Junia smiled up at him.  "Yes, I think
you'll win, Carnac.  You have the tide with you."  Presently she added:
"I'm not sure that you've got all the cards, though--I don't know why,
but I have that fear."

"You think that--"

She nodded.  "I think Monsieur Barouche has some cards he hasn't played
yet.  What they are I don't know, but he's confident.  Tell me, Carnac,
is there any card that would defeat you?  Have you committed any crime
against the law--no, I'm sure you haven't, but I want to hear you say
so."  She smiled cheerfully at him.

"He has no card of any crime of mine, and he can't hit me in a mortal
place."

"You have the right policy for this province.  But tell me, is there
anyone who could hurt you, who could spring up in the fight--man or
woman?"

She looked him straight in the eye, and his own did not waver.

"There's no one has a knock-out blow for me--that's sure.  I can weather
any storm."

He paused, however, disconcerted, for the memory of Luzanne came to him,
and his spirit became clouded.  "Except one--except one," he added.

"And you won't tell me who it is?"




CHAPTER XXIII

THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT

"No, I can't tell you--yet," answered Carnac.  "You ought to know; though
you can't put things right."

"Don't forget you are a public man, and what might happen if things went
wrong.  There are those who would gladly roast you on a gridiron for what
you are in politics."

"I never forget it.  I've no crime to repent of, and I'm afraid of
nothing in the last resort.  Look, we're nearing the Island."

"It's your worst place in the constituency, and I'm not sure of your
reception.  Oh, but yes, I am," she added hastily.  "You always win good
feeling.  No one really hates you.  You're on the way to big success."

"I've had some unexpected luck.  I've got Tarboe on my side.  He's a
member of Barouche's party, but he's coming with me."

"Did he tell you so?" she asked with apparent interest.

"I've had a letter from him, and in it he says he is with me 'to the
knife!'  That's good.  Tarboe has a big hold on rivermen, and he may
carry with him some of the opposition.  It was a good letter--if
puzzling."

"How, puzzling?"

"He said in one part of it: 'When you come back here to play your part
you'll make it a success, the whole blessed thing.'  I've no idea what he
meant by that.  I don't think he wants me as a partner, and I'll give him
no chance of it.  I don't want now what I could have had when Fabian
left.  That's all over, Junia."

"He meant something by it; he's a very able man," she replied gravely.
"He's a huge success."

"And women love success more than all else," he remarked a little
cynically.

"You're unjust, Carnac.  Of course, women love success; but they'd not
sell their souls for it--not the real women--and you ought to know it."

"I ought to know it, I suppose," he answered, and he held her eyes
meaningly.  He was about to say something vital, but Fabian and his wife
came.

Fabian said to him: "Don't be surprised if you get a bad reception here,
Carnac.  It's the worst place on the river, and I've no influence over
the men--I don't believe Tarboe could have.  They're a difficult lot.
There's Eugene Grandois, he's as bad as they make 'em.  He's got a grudge
against us because of some act of father, and he may break out any time.
He's a labour leader too, and we must be vigilant."

Carnac nodded.  He made no reply in words.  They were nearing the little
dock, and men were coming to the point where the launch would stop.

"There's Grandois now!" said Fabian with a wry smile, for he had a
real fear of results.  He had, however, no idea how skilfully Carnac
would handle the situation--yet he had heard much of his brother's
adaptability.  He had no psychological sense, and Carnac had big
endowment of it.  Yet Carnac was not demonstrative.  It was his quiet
way that played his game for him.  He never spoke, if being could do what
he wanted.  He had the sense of physical speech with out words.  He was a
bold adventurer, but his methods were those of the subtlest.  If a motion
of the hand was sufficient, then let it go at that.

"You people after our votes never come any other time," sneeringly said
Eugene Grandois, as Carnac and Fabian landed.  "It's only when you want
to use us."

"Would you rather I didn't come at all?" asked Carnac with a friendly
smile.  "You can't have it both ways.  If I came here any other time
you'd want to know why I didn't stay away, and I come now because it's
good you should know if I'm fit to represent you in Parliament."

"There's sense, my bonny boy," said an English-Canadian labourer standing
near.  "What you got to say to that, little skeezicks?" he added
teasingly to Eugene Grandois.

"He ain't got more gifts than his father had, and we all know what he
was--that's so, bagosh!" remarked Grandois viciously.

"Well, what sort of a man was he?" asked Carnac cooly, with a warning
glance at Fabian, who was resentful.  Indeed, Fabian would have struck
the man if his brother had not been present, and then been torn to pieces
himself.

"What sort--don't you know the kind of things he done?  If you don't, I
do, and there's lots of others know, and don't you forget it, mon vieux."

"That's no answer, Monsieur Grandois--none at all.  It tells nothing,"
remarked Carnac cheerily.

"You got left out of his will, m'sieu', you talk as if he was all right
--that's blither."

"My father had a conscience.  He gave me chance to become a partner in
the business, and I wouldn't, and he threw me over--what else was there
to do?  I could have owned the business to-day, if I'd played the game as
he thought it ought to be played.  I didn't, and he left me out--that's
all."

"Makin' your own way, ain't you?" said the English labourer.  "That's
hit you where you're tender, Grandois.  What you got to say to that?"

The intense black eyes of the habitant sparkled wickedly, his jaws set
with passion, and his sturdy frame seemed to fasten to the ground.  His
gnarled hands now shot out fiercely.

"What I got to say!  Only this: John Grier played the devil's part.  He
turned me and my family out into the streets in winter-time, and the law
upheld him, old beast that he was--sacre diable!"

"Beast-devil!  Grandois, those are hard words about a man in his son's
presence, and they're not true.  You think you can say such things
because I'm standing for Parliament.  Beast, devil, eh?  You've got a
free tongue, Grandois; you forgot to say that my father paid the doctor's
bill for your whole family when they were taken down with smallpox; and
he kept them for weeks afterwards.  You forgot to recall that when he
turned you out for being six months behind with your rent and making no
effort to pay up!  Who was the devil and beast then, Grandois?  Who spat
upon his own wife and children then?  You haven't a good memory.  .  .  .
Come, I think your account with my father is squared; and I want you to
vote to put my father's son in Parliament, and to put out Barode
Barouche, who's been there too long.  Come, come, Grandois, isn't it a
bargain?  Your tongue's sharp, but your heart's in the right place--is it
a bargain?"

He held out his hand with applause from the crowd, but Grandois was not
to be softened.  His anger, however, had behind it some sense of caution,
and what Carnac said about the smallpox incident struck him hard.  It was
the first time he had ever been hit between the eyes where John Grier was
concerned.  His prestige with the men was now under a shadow, yet he
dared not deny the truth of the statement.  It could be proved.  His
braggart hatred of John Grier had come home to roost.  Carnac saw that,
and he was glad he had challenged the man.  He believed that in politics,
as in all other departments of life, candour and bold play were best in
the long run.  Yet he would like to see the man in a different humour,
and with joy he heard Junia say to Grandois.

"How is the baby boy, and how is madame, Monsieur Grandois?"

It came at the right moment, for only two days before had Madame Grandois
given her husband the boy for which he had longed.  Junia had come to
know of it through a neighbour and had sent jellies to the sick woman.
As she came forward now, Grandois, taken aback, said:

"Alors, they're all right, ma'm'selle, thank you.  It was you sent the
jellies, eh?"

She nodded with a smile.  "Yes, I sent them, Grandois.  May I come and
see madame and the boy to-morrow?"

The incident had taken a favourable turn.

"It's about even-things between us, Grandois?" asked Carnac, and held
out his hand.  "My father hit you, but you hit him harder by forgetting
about the smallpox and the rent, and also by drinking up the cash that
ought to have paid the rent.  It doesn't matter now that the rent was
never paid, but it does that you recall the smallpox debt.  Can't you say
a word for me, Grandois?  You're a big man here among all the workers.
I'm a better Frenchman than the man I'm trying to turn out.  Just a word
for a good cause.

"They're waiting for you, and your hand on it!  Here's a place for you on
the roost.  Come up."

The "roost" was an upturned tub lying face down on the ground, and in
the passion of the moment, the little man gripped Carnac's hand and stood
on the tub to great cheering; for if there was one thing the French-
Canadians love, it is sensation, and they were having it.  They were
mostly Barouche's men, but they were emotional, and melodrama had stirred
their feelings.

Besides, like the Irish, they had a love of feminine nature, and in all
the river-coves Junia was known by sight at least, and was admired.  She
had the freshness of face and mind which is the heart of success with the
habitants.  With Eugene Grandois on his feet, she heard a speech which
had in it the best spirit of Gallic eloquence, though it was crude.  But
it was forcible and adroit.

"Friends and comrades," said Eugene Grandois, with his hands playing
loosely, "there's been misunderstandings between me and the Grier family,
and I was out against it, but I see things different since M'sieu' Carnac
has spoke--and I'm changing my mind--certainlee.  That throwing out of my
house hit me and my woman and little ones hard, and I've been resentin'
it all these years till now; but I'm weighin' one thing agin another, and
I'm willing to forget my wrongs for this young man's sake.  He's for us
French.  Alors, some of you was out to hurt our friend M'sieu' Carnac
here, and I didn't say no to it; but you'd better keep your weapons for
election day and use them agin Barode Barouche.

"I got a change of heart.  I've laid my plate on the table with a prayer
that I get it filled with good political doctrine, and I've promise that
the food I'm to get is what's best for all of us.  M'sieu' Carnac Grier's
got the right stuff in him, and I'm for him both hands up--both hands way
up high, nom de pipe!"

At that he raised both hands above his head with a loud cheer, and later
Carnac Grier was carried to the launch in the arms of Eugene Grandois'
friends.




CHAPTER XXIV

THE BLUE PAPER

"Who are you, ma'm'selle?"

It was in the house of Eugene Grandois that this question was asked of
Junia.  She had followed the experience on the Island by a visit to
Grandois' house, carrying delicacies for the sick wife.  Denzil had come
with her, and was waiting in the street.

She had almost ended her visit when the outer door opened and Luzanne
Larue entered carrying a dish she placed on the table, eyeing Junia
closely.  First they bowed to each other, and Junia gave a pleasant
smile, but instantly she felt here was a factor in her own life--how,
she could not tell.

To Luzanne, the face of Junia had no familiar feature, and yet she felt
here was one whose life's lines crossed her own.  So it was she presently
said, "Who are you, ma'm'selle?" in a sharp voice.  As Junia did not
reply at once, she put the question in another form: "What is your name,
ma'm'selle?"

"It is Junia Shale," said the other calmly, yet with heart beating hard.
Somehow the question foreshadowed painful things, associated with Carnac.
Her first glance at Luzanne showed the girl was well dressed, that she
had a face of some beauty, that her eyes were full of glamour--black and
bold, and, in a challenging way, beautiful.  It was a face and figure
full of daring.  She was not French-Canadian; yet she was French; that
was clear from her accent.  Yet the voice had an accent of crudity, and
the plump whiteness of the skin and waving fulness of the hair gave the
girl a look of an adventuress.  She was dressed in black with a white
collar which, by contrast, seemed to heighten her unusual nature.

At first Junia shuddered, for Luzanne's presence made her uneasy; yet the
girl must have good qualities, for she had brought comforts to the sick
woman, and indeed, within, madame had spoken of the "dear beautiful
stranger."  That could be no other than this girl.  She became composed.
Yet she had a feeling that between them was a situation needing all her
resources.  About what?  She would soon know, and she gave her name at
last slowly, keeping her eyes on those of Luzanne.

At mention of the name, Luzanne's eyes took on prejudice and moroseness.
The pupils enlarged, the lids half closed, the face grew sour.

"Junia Shale--you are Junia Shale?"  The voice was bitter and resentful.

Junia nodded, and in her smile was understanding and conflict, for she
felt this girl to be her foe.

"We must have a talk--that's sure," Luzanne said with decision.

"Who are you?" asked Junia calmly.  "I am Luzanne Larue."

"That makes me no wiser."

"Hasn't Carnac Grier spoken of me?"

Junia shook her head, and turned her face towards the door of Madame
Grandois' room.  "Had we not better go somewhere else to talk, after
you've seen Madame Grandois and the baby?" she asked with a smile, yet
she felt she was about to face an alarming event.  "Madame Grandois has
spoken pleasantly of you to me," Junia added, for tact was her prompt
faculty.  "If you'd come where we could talk undisturbed--do you see?"

Luzanne made no reply in words, but taking up the dish she went into the
sick-room, and Junia heard her in short friendly speech with Madame
Grandois.  Luzanne appeared again soon and spoke: "Now we can go where
I'm boarding.  It's only three doors away, and we can be safe there.
You'd like to talk with me--ah, yes, surelee!"

Her eyes were combative and repellent, but Junia was not dismayed, and
she said: "What shall we talk about?"

"There's only one thing and one person to talk about, ma'm'selle."

"I still don't know what you mean."

"Aren't you engaged to Carnac Grier?  Don't you think you're going to
marry him?  .  .  .  Don't you like to tell the truth, then?" she added.

Junia raised her eyebrows.  "I'm not engaged to Carnac Grier, and he has
never asked me to marry him--but what business is it of yours,
ma'm'selle?"

"Come and I'll tell you."  Luzanne moved towards the door.  They were
speechless till they reached Luzanne's lodgings.

"This is the house of Monsieur Marmette, an agent of Monsieur Barouche,"
said Junia.  "I know it."

"You'll know it better soon.  The agent of M'sieu' Barouche is a man of
mark about here, and he'll be more marked soon--but yes!"

"You think Monsieur Barouche will be elected, do you?" asked Junia, as
they closed the door.

"I know he will."

"I've been working for Monsieur Grier, and that isn't my opinion."

"I'm working for Barode Barouche, and I know the result."

They were now in Luzanne's small room, and Junia noted that it had all
the characteristics of a habitant dwelling--even to the crucifix at the
head of the bed, and the picture of the French-Canadian Premier of the
Dominion on the wall.  She also saw a rosary on a little hook beside the
bed.

"How do you know?"

"Because I am the wife of Carnac Grier, and I know what will happen to
him.  .  .  .  You turn pale, ma'm'selle, but your colour isn't going to
alter the truth.  I'm Carnac Grier's wife by the laws of New York State."

"Does Monsieur Grier admit he is your husband?"

"He must respect the law by which he married me."

"I don't believe he was ever honestly married to you," declared Junia.
"Has he ever lived with you--for a single day?"

"What difference would that make?  I have the marriage certificate here."
She touched her bosom.

"I'd have thought you were Barode Barouche's wife by the way you act.
Isn't it a wife's duty to help her husband--Shouldn't you be fighting
against Barode Barouche?"

"I mean to be recognized as Carnac Grier's wife--that's why I'm here."

"Have you seen him since you've been here?  Have you told him how you're
working against him?  Have you got the certificate with you?"

"Of course.  I've got my head on like a piece of flesh and blood that
belongs to me--bien sur."

She suddenly drew from her breast a folded piece of blue paper.  "There
it is, signed by Judge Grimshaw that married us, and there's the seal;
and the whole thing can't be set aside.  Look at it, if you like,
petite."

She held it not far from Junia's face, and Junia could see that it was
registration of a marriage of New York State.  She could have snatched
the paper away, but she meant to conquer Luzanne's savage spirit.  "Well,
how do you intend to defeat your husband?"

"I mean to have the people asked from a platform if they've seen the wife
of the candidate, and then a copy of the certificate will be read to all.
What do you think will happen after that?"

"It will have to be done to-night or to-morrow night," remarked Junia.

"Because the election comes the day after to-morrow,--eh

"Because of that.  And who will read the document?"

"Who but the man he's trying to defeat?--tell me that."

"You mean Barode Barouche?"

"Who else?"

"Has he agreed to do it?"

Luzanne nodded.  "On the day--Carnac became a candidate."

"And if Carnac Grier denies it?"

"He won't deny it.  He never has.  He says he was drunk when the thing
was done--mais, oui."

"Is that all he says?"

"No.  He says he didn't know it was a real marriage, and--" Luzanne then
related Carnac's defence, and added: "Do you think anyone would believe
him with the facts as they are?  Remember I'm French and he's English,
and that marriage to a French girl is life and death; and this is a
French province!"

"And yet you are a Catholic and French, and were married by a Protestant
judge."

"That is my own affair, ma'm'selle."

"It is not the thing to say to French-Canadians here.  What do you get
out of it all?  If he is your husband, wouldn't it be better to have him
successful than your defeated victim.  What will be yours if you defeat--"

"Revenge--my rights--the law!" was the sharp rejoinder.

Junia smiled.  "What is there in it all for you?  If the man I married
did not love me, I'd use the law to be free.  What's the good of trying
to destroy a husband who doesn't love you, who never loved you--never."

"You don't know that," retorted Luzanne sharply.

"Yes, I do.  He never loved you.  He never lived with you for a single
day.  That's in the power of a doctor to prove.  If you are virtuous,
then he has taken nothing; if you have given your all, and not to Carnac
Grier, what will his mind be about you?  Is it money?  He has no money
except what he earns.  His father left him nothing--not a dollar.  Why do
you hate him so?  I've known him all my life, and I've never known him
hurt man or animal.  When did he ever misuse you, or hurt you?  Did he
ever treat you badly?  How did you come to know him?  Answer that."

She paused and Luzanne flushed.  The first meeting!  Why, that was the
day Carnac had saved her life, had taken her home safe from danger, and
had begun a friendship with behind it only a desire to help her.  And how
had she repaid the saviour of her life?  By tricking him into a marriage,
and then by threatening him if he did not take her to his home. Truth is,
down beneath her misconduct was a passion for the man which, not
satisfied, became a passion to destroy him and his career.  It was a
characteristic of her blood and breed.  It was a relic of ancient
dishonour, inherited and searching; it was atavism and the incorrigible
thing.  Beneath everything was her desire for the man, and the mood in
which she had fought for him was the twist of a tortured spirit.  She
was not so deliberate as her actions had indicated.  She had been under
the malicious influence of her father and her father's friend.  She was
like one possessed of a spirit that would not be deterred from its
purpose.  Junia saw the impression she had made, and set it down to her
last words.

"Where did you first meet him?  What was the way of it?" she added.

Suddenly Junia came forward and put her hands on Luzanne's shoulders.
"I think you loved Carnac once, and perhaps you love him now, and are
only trying to hurt him out of anger.  If you destroy him, you will
repent of it--so soon!  I don't know what is behind these things you are
doing, but you'll be sorry for it when it is too late.  Yes, I know you
have loved Carnac, for I see all the signs--"

"Do you love him then, ma'm'selle?" asked Luzanne exasperated.  "Do you
love him?"

"He has never asked me, and I have never told him that; and I don't know,
but, if I did, I would move heaven and earth to help him, and if he
didn't love me I'd help him just the same.  And so, I think, should you.
If you ever loved him, then you ought to save him from evil.  Tell me,
did Carnac ever do you a kind act, one that is worth while in your life?"

For a moment Luzanne stood dismayed, then a new expression drove the dark
light from her eyes.  It was as though she had found a new sense.

"He saved my life the day we first met," she said at last under Junia's
hypnotic influence.

"And now you would strike him when he is trying to do the big thing.  You
threaten to declare his marriage, in the face of those who can elect him
to play a great part for his country."

Junia saw the girl was in emotional turmoil, was obsessed by one idea,
and she felt her task had vast difficulty.  That Carnac should have
married the girl was incredible, that he had played an unworthy part
seemed sure; yet it was in keeping with his past temperament.  The girl
was the extreme contrast of himself, with dark--almost piercing-eyes, and
a paleness which was physically constitutional--the joy of the artistic
spirit.  It was the head of a tragedienne or a martyr, and the lean,
rather beautiful body was eloquent of life.

Presently Junia said: "To try to spoil him would be a crime against his
country, and I shall tell him you are here."

"He'll do nothing at all."  The French girl's words were suddenly biting,
malicious and defiant.  The moment's softness she had felt was gone, and
hardness returned.  "If he hasn't moved against me since he married me,
he wouldn't dare do so now."

"Why hasn't he moved?  Because you're a woman, and also he'd believe
you'd repent of your conduct.  But I believe he will act sternly against
you at once.  There is much at stake."

"You want it for your own sake," said Luzanne sharply.  "You think he'd
marry you if I gave him up."

"Perhaps he'd ask me to marry him, if you weren't in the way, but I'd
have my own mind about that, and knowing what you've told me--truth or
lie--I'd weigh it all carefully.  Besides, he's not the only man.
Doesn't that ever strike you?  Why try to hold him by a spurious bond
when there are other men as good-looking, as clever?  Is your world so
bare of men--no, I'm sure it isn't," she added, for she saw anger rising
in the impulsive girl.  "There are many who'd want to marry you, and it's
better to marry some one who loves you than to hold to one who doesn't
love you at all.  Is it hate?  He saved your life--and that's how you
came to know him first, and now you would destroy him!  He's a great man.
He would not bend to his father's will, and so he was left without a sou
of his father's money.  All because he has a conscience, and an
independence worthy of the best that ever lived.  .  .  .  That's the
soul of the man you are trying to hurt.  If you had a real soul, there
wouldn't be even the thought of this crime.  Do you think he wouldn't
loathe you, if you do this ghastly thing?  Would any real man endure it
for an hour?  What do you expect to get but ugly revenge on a man who
never gave anything except friendship?"

"Friendship--friendship-yes, he gave that, but emotion too."

"You think that real men marry women for whom they only have emotion.
You think that he--Carnac Grier--would marry any woman on that basis?
Come, ma'm'selle, the truth!  He didn't know he was being married, and
when you told him it was a real marriage he left you at once.  You and
yours tricked him--the man you'd never have known if he hadn't saved your
life.  You thought that with your beauty--yes, you are beautiful--you'd
conquer him, and that he'd give in, and become a real husband in a real
home.  Come now, isn't that it?"

The other did not reply.  Her face was alive with memories.  The lower
things were flying from it, a spirit of womanhood was living in her--
feebly, but truly, living.  She was now conscious of the insanity of her
pursuit of Carnac.  For a few moments she stood silent, and then she said
with agitation:

"If I give this up"--she took from her breast the blue document--"he'd be
safe in his election, and he'd marry you: is it not so, ma'm'selle?"

"He'd be safe for his election, but he has never asked me to marry him,
and there are others besides him.--She was thinking of Tarboe.  "Tell
me," she added suddenly, "to whom have you told this thing in Montreal?
Did you mean to challenge him yourself?"

"I told it only to M'sieu' Barouche, and he said he would use it at the
right moment--and the right moment has come," she added.  "He asked me
for a copy of it last night, and I said I'd give it to him to-day.  It's
because of him I've been here quiet all these weeks as Ma'm'selle Larue."

"He is worse than you, mademoiselle, for he has known Carnac's family,
and he has no excuse.  If a man can't win his fight fairly, he oughtn't
to be in public life."

After a few dark moments, with a sudden burst of feeling, Luzanne said:
"Well, Carnac won't be out of public life through me!"

She took the blue certificate from her breast and was about to tear it
up, when Junia stopped her.

"Don't do that," Junia said, "don't tear it up yet, give it to me.  I'll
tear it up at the right moment.  Give it to me, my dear."

She held out her hand, and the blue certificate was presently in her
fingers.  She felt a sudden weakness in her knees, for it seemed she held
the career of Carnac Grier, and it moved her as she had never been moved.

With the yielding of the certificate, Luzanne seemed suddenly to lose
self-control.  She sank on the bed beside the wall with a cry of
distress.

"Mon Dieu--oh, Mon Dieu!"  Then she sprang to her feet.  "Give it back,
give it back tome," she cried, with frantic pain.  "It's all I have of
him--it's all I have."

"I won't give it back," declared Junia quietly.  "It's a man's career,
and you must let it go.  It's the right thing to do.  Let it stand,
mademoiselle."

She fully realized the half-insane mind and purpose of the girl, and she
wrapped her arms around the stricken figure.

"See, my dear," she said, "it's no use.  You can't have it back.  Your
soul is too big for that now.  You can be happy in the memory that you
gave Carnac back his freedom."

"But the record stands," said the girl helplessly.  "Tell the truth and
have it removed.  You owe that to the man who saved your life.  Have it
done at once at Shipton."

"What will you do with the certificate?"  She glanced at Junia's bosom
where the paper was hidden.  "I will give it to Carnac, and he can do
what he likes with it."

By now the tears were streaming down the face of Luzanne Larue, and hard
as it was for Junia, she tried to comfort her, for the girl should be got
away at once, and only friendliness could achieve that.  She would see
Denzil--he was near by, waiting.

There would be a train in two hours for New York and the girl must take
it-she must.




CHAPTER XXV

DENZIL TAKES A HAND IN THE GAME

Barode Baruche was excited.  He had sure hope of defeating Carnac with
the help of Luzanne Larue.  The woman had remained hidden since her
coming, and the game was now in his hands.  On the night before the poll
he could declare the thing, not easy to be forgiven by the French-
Canadian public, which has a strong sense of domestic duty.  Carnac Grier
was a Protestant, and that was bad, and if there was added an offence
against domestic morality, he would be beaten at the polls as sure as the
river ran.  He had seen Luzanne several times, and though he did not
believe in her, he knew the marriage certificate was real.  He had no
credence in Carnac's lack of honour, yet it was strange he had not fought
his wife, if his case was a good one.

Day by day he had felt Carnac's power growing, and he feared his triumph
unless some sensation stopped it.  Well, he had at hand the sufficient
sensation.  He would produce both the certificate of marriage and the
French girl who was the legal wife of Carnac Grier.  That Luzanne was
French helped greatly, for it would be used by Carnac's foes as an insult
to French Canada, and his pulses throbbed as he thought of the possible
turmoil in the constituency.

Fortunately the girl was handsome, had ability, and spoke English with a
French accent, and she was powerful for his purposes.  He was out to
prevent his own son from driving himself into private life, and he would
lose no trick in the game, if he could help it.

Sentimental feeling--yes, he had it, but it did not prevent him from
saving his own skin.  Carnac had come out against him, and he must hit as
hard as he could.  It was not as though Carnac had been guilty of a real
crime and was within the peril of the law.  His offence was a personal
one, but it would need impossible defence at the moment of election.
In any case, if Carnac was legally married, he should assume the
responsibilities of married life; and if he had honest reason for not
recognizing the marriage, he should stop the woman from pursuing him.
If the case kept Carnac out of public life and himself in, then justice
would be done; for it was monstrous that a veteran should be driven into
obscurity by a boy.  In making his announcement he would be fighting his
son as though he was a stranger and not of his own blood and bones.  He
had no personal connection with Carnac in the people's minds.

On the afternoon of the day that Junia had had her hour with Luzanne, he
started for the house where Luzanne was lodging.  He could not travel the
streets without being recognized, but it did not matter, for the house
where the girl lodged was that of his sub agent, and he was safe in going
to it.  He did not know, however, that Denzil had been told by Junia to
watch the place and learn what he meant to do.

Denzil had a popular respect of Barode Barouche as a Minister of the
Crown; but he had a far greater love of Carnac.  He remained vigilant
until after Junia and Luzanne had started in a cab for the railway-
station.  They left near three-quarters of an hour before the train was
to start for New York; and for the first quarter of an hour after they
left, Denzil was in apprehension.

Then he saw Barouche enter the street and go to the house of his sub-
agent.  The house stood by itself, with windows open, and Denzil did
not scruple to walk near it, and, if possible, listen.  Marmette, the
subagent, would know of the incident between Junia and Luzanne; and
he feared.  Barouche might start for the station, overtake Luzanne
and prevent her leaving.  He drew close and kept his ears open.

He was fortunate, he heard voices; Marmette was explaining to Barouche
that Junia and Luzanne had gone to the station, as "Ma'm'selle" was bound
for New York.  Marmette had sent word to M. Barouche by messenger, but
the messenger had missed him.  Then he heard Barouche in anger say:

"You fool--why did you let her leave!  It's my bread and butter--and
yours too--that's at stake.  I wanted to use her against Grier.  She was
my final weapon of attack.  How long ago did she leave?"  Marmette told
him.

Denzil saw Barode Barouche leave the house with grim concern and talking
hard to Paul Marmette.  He knew the way they would go, so he fell behind
a tree, and saw them start for the place where they could order a cab.
Then he followed them.  Looking at his watch he saw that, if they got a
cab, they would get to the station before the train started, and he
wondered how he could retard Barouche.  A delay of three minutes would be
enough, for it was a long way, and the distance could only be covered
with good luck in the time.  Yet Denzil had hope, for his faith in Junia
was great, and he felt sure she would do what she planned.  He had to
trot along fast, because Barouche and Marmette were going hard, and he
could not see his way to be of use yet.  He would give his right hand to
help Carnac win against the danger Junia had suggested.  It could not be
aught to Carnac's discredit, or Junia would not have tried to get the
danger out of Montreal; he had seen Luzanne, and she might be deadly, if
she had a good weapon!

Presently, he saw Barouche and his agent stop at the door of a livery-
stable, and were told that no cabs were available.  There were none in
the street, and time was pressing.  Not far away, however, was a street
with a tram-line, and this tram would take Barouche near the station from
which Luzanne would start.  So Barouche made hard for this street and had
reached it when a phaeton came along, and in it was one whom Barouche
knew.  Barouche spoke to the occupant, and presently both men were
admitted to the phaeton just as a tram-car came near.

As the phaeton would make the distance to the station in less time than
the car, this seemed the sensible thing to do, and Denzil's spirits fell.
There remained enough time for Barouche to reach the station before the
New York train started!  He got aboard the tram himself, and watched the
phaeton moving quickly on ahead.  He saw the driver of the phaeton strike
his horse with a whip, and the horse, suddenly breaking into a gallop,
slipped and fell to the ground on the tramtrack.  A moment later the tram
came to a stop behind the fallen horse, and Denzil saw the disturbed face
of Barode Barouche looking for another trap--in any case, it would take
three or four minutes to get the horse up and clear the track for the
tram.  There was no carriage in sight--only a loaded butcher's cart,
a road-cleaner, and a heavily loaded van.  These could be of no use to
Barouche.

In his corner, Denzil saw the play with anxious eyes.

It was presently found that the horse had injured a leg in falling and
could not be got to its feet, but had presently to be dragged from the
tram-lines.  It had all taken near five minutes of the time before the
train went, and, with despair, Barouche mounted the steps of the tram.
He saw Denzil, and shrewdly suspected he was working in the interests of
Carnac.  He came forward to Denzil.

"You're a long way from home, little man," he said in a voice with an
acid note.

"About the same as you from home, m'sieu'," said Denzil.

"I've got business everywhere in this town," remarked Barouche with
sarcasm--"and you haven't, have you?  You're travelling privately, eh?"

"I travel as m'sieu' travels, and on the same business," answered Denzil
with a challenging smile.

The look Barouche gave him then Denzil never forgot.  "I didn't know you
were in politics, mon vieux!  What are you standing for?  When are you
going to the polls--who are you fighting, eh?"

"I'm fighting you, m'sieu', though I ain't in politics, and I'm going to
the polls now," Denzil answered.  Denzil had gained in confidence as he
saw the arrogance of Barode Barouche.  He spoke with more vigour than
usual, and he felt his gorge rising, for here was a man trying to injure
his political foe through a woman; and Denzil resented it.  He did not
know the secret of Luzanne Larue, but he did realize there was conflict
between Junia Shale and Barouche, and between Barouche and Carnac Grier,
and that enlisted his cooperation.  By nature he was respectful; but the
politician now was playing a dirty game, and he himself might fight
without gloves, if needed.  That was why his eyes showed defiance at
Barouche now.  He had said the thing which roused sharp anger in
Barouche.  It told Barouche that Denzil knew where he was going and why.
Anger shook him as he saw Denzil take out his watch.

"The poll closes in three minutes, m'sieu'," Denzil added with a dry
smile, for it was clear Barouche could not reach the station in time,
if the train left promptly.  The swiftest horses could not get him there,
and these were not the days of motor-cars.  Yet it was plain Barouche
meant to stick to it, and he promptly said:

"You haven't the right time, beetle.  The poll closes only when the train
leaves, and your watch doesn't show that, so don't put on airs yet."

"I'll put on airs if I've won, m'sieu'," Denzil answered quietly, for he
saw people in the tram were trying to hear.

Barouche had been recognized, and a murmur of cheering began, followed by
a hum of disapproval, for Barouche had lost many friends since Carnac had
come into the fray.  A few folk tried to engage Barouche in talk, but he
responded casually; yet he smiled the smile which had done so much for
him in public life, and the distance lessened to the station.  The tram
did not go quite to the station, and as it stopped, the two men hurried
to the doors.  As they did so, an engine gave a scream, and presently, as
they reached the inside of the station, they saw passing out at the far
end, the New York train.

"She started five minutes late, but she did start," said Denzil, and
there was malice in his smile.

As he looked at his watch, he saw Junia passing out of a door into the
street, but Barode Barouche did not see her--his eyes were fixed on the
departing train.

For a moment Barouche stood indecisive as to whether he should hire a
locomotive and send some one after the train, and so get in touch with
Luzanne in that way, or send her a telegram to the first station where
the train would stop in its schedule; but presently he gave up both
ideas.  As he turned towards the exit of the station, he saw Denzil, and
he came forward.

"I think you've won, mon petit chien," he said with vindictiveness, "but
my poll comes to-morrow night, and I shall win."

"No game is won till it's all played, m'sieu', and this innings is mine!"

"I am fighting a bigger man than you, wasp," snarled Barouche.

"As big as yourself and bigger, m'sieu'," said Denzil with a smile.

There was that in his tone which made Barouche regard him closely.  He
saw there was no real knowledge of the relationship of Carnac and himself
in Denzil's eyes; but he held out his hand with imitation courtesy, as
though to say good-bye.

"Give me a love-clasp, spider," he said with a kind of sneer.  "I'd like
your love as I travel to triumph."  A light of hatred came into Denzil's
eyes.  "Beetledog--wasp--spider" he had been called by this big man--
well, he should see that the wasp could give as good as it got.  His
big gnarled hand enclosed the hand of Barode Barouche, then he suddenly
closed on it tight.  He closed on it till he felt it crunching in his own
and saw that the face of Barode Barouche was like that of one in a chair
of torture.  He squeezed, till from Barouche's lips came a gasp of agony,
and then he let go.

"You've had my love-clasp, m'sieu'," Denzil said with meaning, "and when
you want it again let me know.  It's what M'sieu' Carnac will do with you
to-morrow night.  Only he'll not let go, as I did, before the blood
comes.  Don't be hard on those under you, m'sieu'.  Remember wasps and
spiders can sting in their own way, and that dogs can bite."

"Little black beast," was the short reply, "I'll strip your hide for
Hell's gridiron in good time."

"Bien, m'sieu', but you'll be in hell waiting, for I'm going to bury you
here where you call better men than yourself dogs and wasps and spiders
and beetles.  And I'll not strip your 'hide,' either.  That's for lower
men than me."

A moment later they parted, Denzil to find Junia, and Barouche to prepare
his speech for the evening.  Barouche pondered.  What should he do--
should he challenge Carnac with his marriage with Luzanne Larue?  His
heart was beating hard.




CHAPTER XXVI

THE CHALLENGE

The day of the election came.  Never had feeling run higher, never had
racial lines been so cut across.  Barode Barouche fought with vigour, but
from the going of Luzanne Larue, there passed from him the confidence he
had felt since the first day of Carnac's candidature.  He had had
temptation to announce to those who heard him the night before the poll
what Luzanne had told; but better wisdom guided him, to his subsequent
content.  He had not played a scurvy trick on his son for his own
personal advantage.  Indeed, when his meetings were all over, he was
thankful for the disappearance of Luzanne.  At heart he was not all bad.
A madness had been on him.  He, therefore, slept heavily from midnight
till morning on the eve of the election, and began the day with the smile
of one who abides the result with courage.

Several times he came upon Carnac in the streets, and they saluted
courteously; yet he saw the confidence of Carnac in his bearing.  Twice
also he came upon Junia and he was startled by the look she gave him.  It
was part of his punishment that Junia was the source of his undoing where
Luzanne was concerned.  Junia knew about Luzanne; but if she condemned
him now, what would she think if she knew that Carnac was his own son!

"A devilish clever girl that," he said to himself.  "If he wins, it'll be
due to her, and if he wins--no, he can't marry her, for he's already
married; but he'll owe it all to her.  If he wins!  .  .  .  No, he shall
not win; I've been in the game too long; I've served too many interests;
I've played too big a part."

It was then he met his agent, who said: "They're making strong play
against us--the strongest since you began politics."

"Strong enough to put us in danger?" inquired Barouche.  "You've been
at the game here for thirty years, and I'd like to know what you think--
quite honestly."

His agent was disturbed.  "I think you're in danger; he has all your
gifts, and he's as clever as Old Nick besides.  He's a man that'll make
things hum, if he gets in."

"If he gets in-you think .  .  . ?"

"He has as good a chance as you, m'sieu'.  Here's a list of doubtful
ones, and you'll see they're of consequence."

"They are indeed," said Barouche, scanning the list.  "I'd no idea these
would be doubtful."

"Luke Tarboe's working like the devil for Carnac.  People believe in him.
Half the men on that list were affected by Tarboe's turning over.  Tarboe
is a master-man; he has fought like hell."

"Nevertheless, I've been too long at it to miss it now," said the rueful
member with a forced smile.  "I must win now, or my game is up."

The agent nodded, but there was no certainty in his eye.  Feeling ran
higher and higher, but there was no indication that Barouche's hopes were
sure of fulfilment.  His face became paler as the day wore on, and his
hands freer with those of his late constituents.  Yet he noticed that
Carnac was still glib with his tongue and freer with his hands.  Carnac
seemed everywhere, on every corner, in every street, at every polling
booth; he laid his trowel against every brick in the wall.  Carnac was
not as confident as he seemed, but he was nearing the end of the trail;
and his feet were free and his head clear.  One good thing had happened.
The girl who could do him great harm was not in evidence, and it was too
late to spoil his chances now, even if she came.  What gave him greatest
hope was the look on Junia's face as he passed her.  It was the sign of
the conqueror--something he could not under stand.  It was knowledge and
victory.

Also, he had a new feeling towards Tarboe, who had given him such
powerful support.  There was, then, in the man the bigger thing, the
light of fairness and reason!  He had had no talk with Tarboe, and he
desired none, but he had seen him at three of his meetings, and he had
evidence of arduous effort on his behalf.  Tarboe had influenced many
people in his favour, men of standing and repute, and the workmen of
the Grier firm had come, or were coming, his way.  He had always been
popular with them, in spite of the strike he had fought, but they voted
independently of their employers; and he was glad to know that most of
them were with him in the fight.

His triumph over Eugene Grandois at the Island had been a good influence,
and he had hopes of capturing the majority of the river people.  Yet,
strange to say, the Church had somewhat reversed its position, and at the
last had swung round to Barouche, quietly, though not from the pulpit,
supporting him.  The old prejudice in favour of a Catholic and a
Frenchman was alive again.

Carnac was keyed to anxiety, but outwardly seemed moving with brilliant
certainty.  He walked on air, and he spoke and acted like one who had the
key of the situation in his fingers, and the button of decision at his
will.  It was folly electioneering on the day of the poll, and yet he saw
a few labour leaders and moved them to greater work for him.  One of
these told him that at the Grier big-mill was one man working to defeat
him by personal attacks.  It had something to do with a so-called secret
marriage, and it would be good to get hold of the man, Roudin, as soon as
possible.

A secret marriage!  So the thing had, after all, been bruited and used-
what was the source of the information?  Who was responsible?  He must go
to the mill at once, and he started for it.  On the way he met Luke
Tarboe.

"There's trouble down at the mill," Tarboe said.  "A fellow called Roudin
has been spreading a story that you're married and repudiate your wife.
It'd be good to fight it now before it gets going.  There's no truth in
it, of course," he added with an opposite look in his eye, for he
remembered the letter Carnac received one day in the office and his own
conclusion then.

"It's a lie, and I'll go and see Roudin at once.  .  .  .  You've been a
good friend to me in the fight, Tarboe, and I'd like a talk when it's all
over."

"That'll be easy enough, Grier.  Don't make any mistake-this is a big
thing you're doing; and if a Protestant Britisher can beat a Catholic
Frenchman in his own habitant seat, it's the clinching of Confederation.
We'll talk it over when you've won."

"You think I'm going to win?" asked Carnac with thumping heart, for the
stark uncertainty seemed to overpower him, though he smiled.

"If the lie doesn't get going too hard, I'm sure you'll pull it off.
There's my hand on it.  I'd go down with you to the mill, but you should
go alone.  You've got your own medicine to give.  Go it alone, Grier.
It's best--and good luck to you!"

A few moments later Carnac was in the yard of the mill, and in one corner
he saw the man he took to be Roudin talking to a group of workmen.  He
hurried over, and heard Roudin declaring that he, Carnac, was secretly
married to a woman whom he repudiated, and was that the kind of man to
have as member of Parliament?  Presently Roudin was interrupted by cheers
from supporters of Carnac, and he saw it was due to Carnac's arrival.
Roudin had courage.  He would not say behind a man's back what he would
not say to his face.

"I was just telling my friends here, m'sieu', that you was married, and
you didn't acknowledge your wife.  Is that so?"

Carnac's first impulse was to say No, but he gained time by challenging.

"Why do you say such things to injure me?  Is that what Monsieur Barouche
tells you to say?"

Roudin shook his head protestingly.

"If Monsieur Barouche does that he oughtn't to hold the seat, he ought to
be sent back to his law offices."

"No, I didn't hear it from M'sieu' Barouche.  I get it from better hands
than his," answered Roudin.

"Better hands than his, eh?  From the lady herself, perhaps?"

"Yes, from the lady herself, m'sieu'."

"Then bring the lady here and let us have it out, monsieur.  It's a lie.
Bring the lady here, if you know her."

Roudin shrugged a shoulder.  "I know what I know, and I don't have to do
what you say--no--no!"

"Then you're not honest.  You do me harm by a story like that.  I
challenge you, and you don't respond.  You say you know the woman, then
produce her--there's no time to be lost.  The poll closes in four hours.
If you make such statements, prove them.  It isn't playing the game--
do you think so, messieurs?" he added to the crowd which had grown in
numbers.  At that moment a man came running from the en trance towards
Carnac.  It was Denzil.

"A letter for you, an important letter," he kept crying as he came
nearer.  He got the letter into Carnac's hands.

"Read it at once, m'sieu'," Denzil said urgently.  Carnac saw the
handwriting was Junia's, and he tore open the letter, which held the blue
certificate of the marriage with Luzanne.  He conquered the sudden
dimness of his eyes, and read the letter.  It said:

     DEAR CARNAC,

     I hear from Mr. Tarboe of the lies being told against you.  Here is
     the proof.  She has gone.  She told it to Barode Barouche, and he
     was to have announced it last night, but I saw her first.  You can
     now deny the story.  The game is yours.  Tell the man Roudin to
     produce the woman--she is now in New York, if the train was not
     lost.  I will tell you all when you are M.P.
                                                       JUNIA.

With a smile, Carnac placed the certificate in his pocket.  How lucky it
was he had denied the marriage and demanded that Roudin produce the
woman!  He was safe now, safe and free.  It was no good any woman
declaring she was married to him if she could not produce the proof
--and the proof was in his pocket and the woman was in New York.

"Come, Monsieur Roudin, tell us about the woman, and bring her to the
polls.  There is yet time, if you're telling the truth.  Who is she?
Where does she live?  What's her name?"

"Mrs. Carnac Grier--that's her name," responded Roudin with a snarl, and
the crowd laughed, for Carnac's boldness gave them a sense of security.

"What was her maiden name?"

"Larue," answered the other sharply.

"What was her Christian name, since you know so much, monsieur?"

He had no fear now, and his question was audacity, but he knew the game
was with him, and he took the risks.  His courage had reward, for Roudin
made no reply.  Carnac turned to the crowd.

"Here's a man tried to ruin my character by telling a story about a woman
whose name he doesn't know.  Is that playing the game after the rules--
I ask you?"

There were cries from the crowd supporting him, and he grew bolder.
"Let the man tell his story and I'll meet it here face to face.  I fear
nothing.  Out with your story, monsieur.  Tell us why you haven't brought
her into the daylight, why she isn't claiming her husband at the polls.
What's the story?  Let's have it now."

The truth was, Roudin dared not tell what he knew.  It was based wholly
on a talk he had partly overheard between Barode Barouche and Luzanne in
the house where she stayed and where he, Roudin, lodged.  It had not been
definite, and he had no proofs.  He was a sensationalist, and he had had
his hour and could say no more, because of Barode Barouche.  He could not
tell the story of his overhearing, for why had not Barouche told the
tale?  With an oath he turned away and disappeared.  As he went he could
hear his friends cheering Carnac.

"Carnac Grier lies, but he wins the game," he said.




CHAPTER XXVII

EXIT

"Grier's in--Carnac's in--Carnac's got the seat!"  This was the cry heard
in the streets at ten-thirty at night when Carnac was found elected by a
majority of one hundred and ten.

Carnac had not been present at the counting of the votes until the last
quarter-hour, and then he was told by his friends of the fluctuations of
the counting--how at one time his defeat seemed assured, since Barode
Barouche was six hundred ahead, and his own friends had almost given up
hope.  One of his foes, however, had no assurance of Carnac's defeat.  He
was too old an agent to believe in returns till all were in, and he knew
of the two incidents by which Carnac had got advantage--at the Island
over Eugene Grandois, and at the Mill over Roudin the very day of
polling; and it was at these points he had hoped to score for Barouche
a majority.  He watched Barouche, and he deplored the triumph in his eye,
for there was no surety of winning; his own was the scientific mind
without emotions or passions.  He did not "enthuse," and he did not
despair; he kept his head.

Presently there were fluctuations in favour of Carnac, and the six
hundred by which Barouche led were steadily swallowed up; he saw that
among the places which gave Carnac a majority were the Island and the
Mill.  He was also nonplussed by Carnac's coolness.  For a man with an
artist's temperament, he was well controlled.  When he came into the
room, he went straight to Barouche and shook hands with him, saying
they'd soon offer congratulations to the winner.  As the meeting took
place the agent did not fail to note how alike in build and manner were
the two men, how similar were their gestures.

When at last the Returning Officer announced the result, the agent dared
not glance at his defeated chief.  Yet he saw him go to Carnac and offer
a hand.

"We've had a straight fight, Grier, and I hope you'll have luck in
Parliament.  This is no place for me.  It's your game, and I'll eat my
sour bread alone."

He motioned to the window with a balcony, beyond which were the shouting
thousands.  Then he smiled at Carnac, and in his heart he was glad he had
not used the facts about Luzanne before the public.  The boy's face was
so glowing that his own youth came back, and a better spirit took
residence in him.  He gave thanks to the Returning Officer, and then,
with his agent, left the building by the back door.  He did not wait for
the announcement of Carnac's triumph, and he knew his work was done for
ever in public life.

Soon he had said his say at the club where his supporters, discomfited,
awaited him.  To demands for a speech, he said he owed to his workers
what he could never repay, and that the long years they had kept him in
Parliament would be the happiest memory of his life.

"We'll soon have you back," shouted a voice from the crowd.

"It's been a good fight," said Barode Barouche.  Somehow the fact he had
not beaten his son by the story of his secret marriage was the sole
comfort he had.  He advised his followers to "play the game" and let the
new member have his triumph without belittlement.

"It's the best fight I've had in thirty years," he said at last, "and
I've been beaten fairly."

In another hour he was driving into the country on his way to visit an
old ex-Cabinet Minister, who had been his friend through all the years
of his Parliamentary life.  It did not matter that the hour was late.
He knew the veteran would be waiting for him, and unprepared for the bad
news he brought.  The night was spent in pain of mind, and the comfort
the ex-Minister gave him, that a seat would be found for him by the
Government, gave him no thrill.  He knew he had enemies in the
Government, that the Prime Minister was the friend of the successful
only, and that there were others, glad of his defeat, who would be
looking for his place.  Also he was sure he had injured the chances
of the Government by the defeat of his policy.

As though Creation was in league against him, a heavy storm broke about
two o'clock, and he went to bed cursed by torturing thoughts.  "Chickens
come home to roost--"  Why did that ancient phrase keep ringing in his
ears when he tried to sleep?  Beaten by his illegitimate son at the
polls, the victim of his own wrong-doing--the sacrifice of penalty!
He knew that his son, inheriting his own political gifts, had done what
could have been done by no one else.  All the years passed since Carnac
was begotten laid their deathly hands upon him, and he knew he could
never recover from this defeat.  How much better it would have been if he
had been struck twenty-seven years ago!

Youth, ambition and resolve would have saved him from the worst then.
Age has its powers, but it has its defects, and he had no hope that his
own defects would be wiped out by luck at the polls.  Spirit was gone out
of him, longing for the future had no place in his mind; in the world of
public work he was dead and buried.  How little he had got from all his
life!  How few friends he had, and how few he was entitled to have!  This
is one of the punishments that selfishness and wrong-doing brings; it
gives no insurance for the hours of defeat and loss.  Well, wealth and
power, the friends so needed in dark days, had not been made, and Barode
Barouche realized he had naught left.  He had been too successful from
the start; he had had all his own way; and he had taken no pains to make
or keep friends.  He well knew there was no man in the Cabinet or among
his colleagues that would stir to help him--he had stirred to help no man
in all the years he had served the public.  It was no good only to serve
the public, for democracy is a weak stick on which to lean.  One must
stand by individuals or there is no defence against the malicious foes
that follow the path of defeat, that ambush the way.  It is the personal
friends made in one's own good days that watch the path and clear away
the ambushers.  It is not big influential friends that are so important
--the little unknown man may be as useful as the big boss in the mill of
life; and if one stops to measure one's friends by their position, the
end is no more sure than if one makes no friends at all.

"There's nothing left for me in life--nothing at all," he said as he
tossed in bed while the thunder roared and the storm beat down the
shrubs.  "How futile life is--'Youth's a dream, middle age a delusion,
old age a mistake!'" he kept repeating to himself in quotation.  "What
does one get out of it?  Nothing--nothing--nothing!  It's all a poor show
at the best, and yet--is it?  Is it all so bad?  Is it all so poor and
gaunt and hopeless?  Isn't there anything in it for the man who gives and
does his best?"

Suddenly there came upon him the conviction that life is only futile to
the futile, that it is only a failure to those who prove themselves
incompetent, selfish and sordid; but to those who live life as it ought
to be lived, there is no such thing as failure, or defeat, or penalty,
or remorse or punishment.  Because the straight man has only good ends to
serve, he has no failures; though he may have disappointments, he has no
defeats; for the true secret of life is to be content with what is
decreed, to earn bread and make store only as conscience directs, and not
to set one's heart on material things.

He got out of bed soon after daylight, dressed, and went to the stable
and hitched his horse to the buggy.  The world was washed clean, that was
sure.  It was muddy under foot, but it was a country where the roads soon
dried, and he would suffer little inconvenience from the storm.  He bade
his host good-bye and drove away intent to reach the city in time for
breakfast.  He found the roads heavy, and the injury of the storm was
everywhere to be seen.  Yet it all did not distract him, for he was
thinking hard of the things that lay ahead of him to do--the heart-
breaking things that his defeat meant to him.

At last he approached a bridge across a stream which had been badly swept
by the storm.  It was one of the covered bridges not uncommon in Canada.
It was not long, as the river was narrow, and he did not see that the
middle pier of the bridge had been badly injured.  Yet as he entered the
bridge, his horse still trotting, he was conscious of a hollow, semi-
thunderous noise which seemed not to belong to the horse's hoofs and the
iron wheels of the carriage.  He raised his eyes to see that the other
end of the bridge was clear, and at that moment he was conscious of an
unsteady motion of the bridge, of a wavering of the roof, and then,
before he had time to do aught, he saw the roof and the sides and the
floor of the bridge collapse and sink slowly down.

With a cry, he sprang from the carriage to retrace his way; but he only
climbed up a ladder that grew every instant steeper; and all at once he
was plunged downwards after his horse and carriage into the stream.  He
could swim, and as he swept down this thought came to him--that he might
be able to get the shore, as he heard the cries of people on the bank.
It was a hope that died at the moment of its birth, however, for he was
struck by a falling timber on the head.

When, an hour later, he was found in an eddy of the river by the shore,
he was dead, and his finders could only compose his limbs decently.  But
in the afternoon, the papers of Montreal had the following head-lines;

DEFEAT AND DEATH OF BARODE BAROUCHE THE END OF A LONG AND GREAT CAREER

As soon as Carnac Grier heard the news, he sent a note to his mother
telling her all he knew.  When she read the letter, she sank to the
floor, overcome.  Her son had triumphed indeed.




CHAPTER XXVIII

A WOMAN WRITES A LETTER

The whole country rang with the defeat and death of Barode Barouche,
and the triumph of the disinherited son of John Grier.  Newspapers drew
differing lessons from the event, but all admitted that Carnac, as a
great fighter, was entitled to success.  The Press were friendly to the
memory of Barode Barouche, and some unduly praised his work, and only a
few disparaged his career.

When news of the tragedy came to Mrs. Grier, she was reading in the
papers of Carnac's victory, and in her mind was an agonizing triumph,
pride in a stern blow struck for punishment.  The event was like none
she could have imagined.

It was at this moment the note came from Carnac telling of Barouche's
death, and it dropped from her hand to the floor.  The horror of it smote
her being, and, like one struck by lightning, she sank to the floor
unconscious.  The thing had hit her where soul and body were closely
knit; and she had realized for the first time how we all must pay to the
last penny for every offence we commit against the laws of life and
nature.  Barode Barouche had paid and she must pay--she also who had
sinned with him must pay.  But had she not paid?

For long she lay unconscious, but at last the servant, unknowing why she
was not called to remove the breakfast things, found her huddled on the
floor, her face like that of death.  The servant felt her heart, saw she
was alive, and worked with her till consciousness came back.

"That's right, ma'am, keep up heart.  I'll send for M'sieu' Carnac at
once, and we'll have you all right pretty quick."

But Mrs. Grier forbade Carnac to be sent for, and presently in her bed,
declined to have the doctor brought.  "It's no use," she said.  "A doctor
can do no good.  I need rest, that's all."

Then she asked for notepaper and pen and ink, and so she was left alone.
She must tell her beloved son why it was there never had been, and never
could be, understanding between John Grier and himself.  She had arrived
at that point where naught was to be gained by further concealment.  So
through long hours she struggled with her problem, and she was glad
Carnac did not come during the vexing day.  He had said when he sent her
word of his victory, that he feared he would not be able to see her the
next day at all, as he had so much to do.  She even declined to see Junia
when she came, sending word that she was in bed, indisposed.

The letter she wrote ran thus:

     MY BELOVED CARNAC,

     Your news of the death of Barode Barouche has shocked me.  You will
     understand when I tell you I have lived a life of agony ever since
     you became a candidate.  This is why: you were fighting the man who
     gave you to the world.

     Let me tell you how.  I loved John Grier when I married him, and
     longed to make my life fit in with his.  But that could not easily
     be, for his life was wedded to his business, and he did not believe
     in women.  To him they were incapable of the real business of life,
     and were only meant to be housekeepers to men who make the world go
     round.  So, unintentionally, he neglected me, and I was young and
     comely then, so the world said, and I was unwise and thoughtless.

     Else, I should not have listened to Barode Barouche, who, one summer
     in camp on the St. Lawrence River near our camp, opened up for me
     new ways of thought, and springs of feeling.  He had the gifts that
     have made you what you are, a figure that all turn twice to see.  He
     had eloquence, he was thoughtful in all the little things which John
     Grier despised.  In the solitude of the camp he wound himself about
     my life, and roused an emotion for him false to duty.  And so one
     day--one single day, for never but the once was I weak, yet that was
     enough, God knows.  .  .  .  He went away because I would not see
     him again; because I would not repeat the offence which gave me
     years of sorrow and remorse.

     After you became a candidate, he came and offered to marry me, tried
     to reopen the old emotion; but I would have none of it.  He was
     convinced he would defeat you, and he wanted to avoid fighting you.
     But when I said, 'Give up the seat to him,' he froze.  Of course,
     his seat belonged to his party and not alone to himself; but that
     was the test I put him to, and the answer he gave was, 'You want me
     to destroy my career in politics!  That is your proposal, is it?'
     He was not honest either in life or conduct.  I don't think he ever
     was sorry for me or for you, until perhaps these last few weeks; but
     I have sorrowed ever since the day you came to me  very day, every
     hour, every minute; and the more because I could not tell John Grier
     the truth.

     Perhaps I ought to have told the truth long ago, and faced the
     consequences.  It might seem now that I would have ruined my home
     life, and yours, and Barode Barouche's, and John Grier's life if I
     had told the truth; but who knows!  There are many outcomes to
     life's tragedies, and none might have been what I fancied.  It is
     little comfort that Barode Barouche has now given all for payment of
     his debt.  It gives no peace of mind.  And it may be you will think
     I ought not to tell you the truth.  I don't know, but I feel you
     will not misunderstand.  I tell you my story, so that you may again
     consider if it is not better to face the world with the truth about
     Luzanne.  We can live but once, and it is to our good if we refuse
     the secret way.  It is right you should know the truth about your
     birth, but it is not right you should declare it to all the world
     now.  That was my duty long ago, and I did not do it.  It is not
     your duty, and you must not do it.  Barode Barouche is gone; John
     Grier has gone; and it would only hurt Fabian and his wife and you
     to tell it now.  You inherit Barode Barouche's gifts, and you have
     his seat, you represent his people--and they are your people too.
     You have French blood in your veins, and you have a chance to carry
     on with honour what he did with skill.  Forgive me, if you can.

                              Your loving

                                             MOTHER.

     P.S.  Do nothing till you see me.




CHAPTER XXIX

CARNAL AND HIS MOTHER

Returning from Barode Barouche's home to his mother's House on the Hill,
Carnac was in a cheerless mood.  With Barouche's death to Carnac it was
as though he himself had put aside for ever the armour of war, for
Barouche was the only man in the world who had ever tempted him to fight,
or whom he had fought.

There was one thing he must do: he must go to Junia, tell her he loved
her, and ask her to be his wife.  She had given him the fatal blue
certificate of his marriage and the marriage could now be ended with
Luzanne's consent, for she would not fight the divorce he must win soon.
He could now tell the truth, if need be, to his constituents, for there
would be time enough to recover his position, if it were endangered,
before the next election came, and Junia would be by his side to help
him!  Junia--would she, after all, marry him now?  He would soon know.
To-night he must spend with his mother, but to-morrow he would see Junia
and learn his fate, and know about Luzanne.  Luzanne had been in
Montreal, had been ready to destroy his chance at the polls, and Junia
had stopped it.  How?  Well, he should soon know.  But now, at first,
for his mother.

When he entered the House on the Hill, he had a sudden shiver.  Somehow,
the room where his mother had sat for so many years, and where he had
last seen his father, John Grier, had a coldness of the tomb.  There was
a letter on the centre table standing against the lamp.  He saw it was in
his mother's handwriting, and addressed to himself.

He tore it open, and began to read.  Presently his cheeks turned pale.
More than once he put it down, for it seemed impossible to go on, but
with courage he took it up again and read on to the end.

"God--God in Heaven!" he broke out when he had finished it.  For a long
time he walked the floor, trembling in body and shaking in spirit.  "Now
I understand everything," he said at last aloud in a husky tone.  "Now I
see what I could not see--ah yes, I see at last!"

For another time of silence and turmoil he paced the floor, then he
stopped short.  "I'm glad they both are dead," he said wearily.  Thinking
of Barode Barouche, he had a great bitterness.  "To treat any woman so--
how glad I am I fought him!  He learned that such vile acts come home at
last."

Then he thought of John Grier.  "I loathed him and loved him always," he
said with terrible remorse in his tone.  "He used my mother badly, and
yet he was himself; he was the soul that he was born, a genius in his own
way, a neglecter of all that makes life beautiful--and yet himself,
always himself.  He never pottered.  He was real--a pirate, a plunderer,
but he was real.  And he cared for me, and would have had me in the
business if he could.  Perhaps John Grier knows the truth now!  .  .  .
I hope he does.  For, if he does, he'll see that I was not to blame for
what I did, that it was Fate behind me.  He was a big man, and if I'd
worked with him, we'd have done big things, bigger than he did, and that
was big enough."

"Do nothing till you see me," his mother had written in a postscript to
her letter, and, with a moroseness at his heart and scorn of Barouche at
his lips, he went slowly up to his mother's room.  At her door he paused.
But the woman was his mother, and it must be faced.  After all, she had
kept faith ever since he was born.  He believed that.  She had been an
honest wife ever since that fatal summer twenty-seven years before.

"She has suffered," he said, and knocked at her door.  An instant later
he was inside the room.  There was only a dim light, but his mother was
sitting up in her bed, a gaunt and yet beautiful, sad-eyed figure of a
woman.  For a moment Carnac paused.  As he stood motionless, the face of
the woman became more drawn and haggard, the eyes more deeply mournful.
Her lips opened as though she would speak, but no sound came, and Carnac
could hardly bear to look at her.  Yet he did look, and all at once there
rushed into his heart the love he had ever felt for her.  After all, he
was her son, and she had not wronged him since his birth.  And he who had
wronged her and himself was dead, his pathway closed for ever to the
deeds of life and time.  As he looked, his eyes filled with tears and his
lips compressed.  At last he came to the bed.  Her letter was in his
hand.

"I have read it, mother."

She made no reply, but his face was good for her eyes to see.  It had no
hatred or repulsion.

"I know everything now," he added.  "I see it all, and I understand all
you have suffered these many years."

"Oh, my son, you forgive your mother?"  She was trembling with emotion.

He leaned over and caught her wonderful head to his shoulder.  "I love
you, mother," he said gently.  "I need you--need you more than I ever
did."

"I have no heart any more, and I fear for you--"

"Why should you fear for me?  You wanted me to beat him, didn't you?"
His face grew hard, his lips became scornful.  "Wasn't it the only way to
make him settle his account?"

"Yes, the only way.  It was not that I fear for you in politics.  I was
sure you would win the election.  It was not that, it was the girl."

"That's all finished.  I am free at last," he said.  He held the blue
certificate before her eyes.

Her face was deadly pale, her eyes expanded, her breath came sharp and
quick.  "How was it don how was it done?  Was she here in Montreal?"

"I don't know how it was done, but she was here, and Junia got this from
her.  I shan't know how till I've seen Junia."

"Junia is the best friend," said the stricken woman gently, "in all the
world; she's--"

"She's so good a friend she must be told the truth," he said firmly.

"Oh, not while I live!  I could not bear that--"

"How could I ask Junia to marry me and not tell her all the truth--
mother, can't you see?"

The woman's face flushed scarlet.  "Ah, yes, I see, my boy--I see."

"Haven't we had enough of secrecy--in your letter you lamented it!  If it
was right for you to be secret all these years, is it not a hundred times
right now for me to tell you the truth.  .  .  .  I have no name--no
name," he added, tragedy in his tone.

"You have my name.  You may say I have no right to it, but it is the only
name I can carry; they both are dead, and I must keep it.  It wrongs no
one living but you, and you have no hatred of me: you think I do not
wrong you--isn't that so?"

His cheek was hot with feeling.  "Yes, that's true," he said.  "You must
still keep your married name."  Then a great melancholy took hold of him,
and he could hardly hide it from her.  She saw how he was moved, and she
tried to comfort him.

"You think Junia will resent it all?  .  .  .  But that isn't what a girl
does when she loves.  You have done no wrong; your hands are clean."

"But I must tell her all.  Tarboe is richer, he has an honest birth, he
is a big man and will be bigger still.  She likes him, she--"

"She will go to you without a penny, my son."

"It will be almost without a penny, if you don't live," he said with a
faint smile.  "I can't paint--for a time anyhow.  I can't earn money for
a time.  I've only my salary as a Member of Parliament and the little
that's left of my legacy; therefore, I must draw on you.  And I don't
seem to mind drawing upon you; I never did."

She smiled with an effort.  "If I can help you, I shall justify living
on."




CHAPTER XXX

TARBOE HAS A DREAM

The day Carnac was elected it was clear to Tarboe that he must win Junia
at once, if he was ever to do so, for Carnac's new honours would play a
great part in influencing her.  In his mind, it was now or never for
himself; he must bring affairs to a crisis.

Junia's father was poor, but the girl had given their home an air of
comfort and an art belonging to larger spheres.  The walls were covered
with brown paper, and on it were a few of her own water-colour drawings,
and a few old engravings of merit.  Chintz was the cover on windows and
easy chairs, and in a corner of the parlour was a chintz-covered lounge
where she read of an evening.  So it was that, with Carnac elected and
Barode Barouche buried, she sat with one of Disraeli's novels in her hand
busy with the future.  She saw for Carnac a safe career, for his two
chief foes were gone--Luzanne Larue and Barode Barouche.  Now she
understood why Carnac had never asked her to be his wife.  She had had no
word with Carnac since his election--only a letter to thank her for the
marriage certificate and to say that after M. Barouche was buried he
would come to her, if he might.  He did say, however, in the letter that
he owed her his election.

"You've done a great, big thing for me, dearest friend, and I am your
ever grateful Carnac"--that was the way he had put it.  Twice she had
gone to visit his mother, and had been told that Mrs. Grier was too ill
to see her--overstrain, the servant had said.  She could not understand
being denied admittance; but it did not matter, for one day Mrs. Grier
should know how she--Junia-had saved her son's career.

So she thought, as she gazed before her into space from the chintz-
covered lounge on the night of the day Barode Barouche was buried.  There
was a smell of roses in the room.  She had gathered many of them that
afternoon.  She caught a bud from a bunch on a table, and fastened it in
the bosom of her dress.  Somehow, as she did it, she had a feeling she
would like to clasp a man's head to her breast where the rose was--one
of those wild thoughts that come to the sanest woman at times.  She was
captured by the excitement in which she had moved during the past month
--far more now than she had been in all the fight itself.

There came a knock at the outer door, and before that of her own room
opened, she recognized the step of the visitor.  So it was Tarboe had
come.  He remembered that day in the street when he met Junia, and was
shown there were times when a woman could not be approached with emotion.
He had waited till the day he knew she was alone, for he had made a
friend of her servant by judicious gifts of money.

"I hope you're glad to see me," he said with an uncertain smile, as he
saw her surprise.

"I hope I am," she replied, and motioned him to a seat.  He chose a high-
backed chair with a wide seat near the lounge.  He made a motion of
humorous dissent to her remark, and sat down.

"Well, we pulled it off somehow, didn't we?" she said.  "Carnac Grier is
M.P."

"And his foe is in his grave," remarked Tarboe dryly.  "Providence pays
debts that ought to be paid.  This election has settled a lot of things,"
she returned with a smile.

"I suppose it has, and I've come here to try and find one of the
settlements."

"Well, find them," she retorted.

"I said one of the settlements only.  I have to be accurate in my life."

"I'm glad to hear of it.  You helped Mr. Grier win his election.  It was
splendid of you.  Think of it, Mr. Tarboe, Carnac Grier is beginning to
get even with his foes."

"I'm not a foe--if that's what you mean.  I've proved it."

She smiled provokingly.  "You've proved only you're not an absolute
devil, that's all.  You've not proved yourself a real man--not yet.  Do
you think it paid your debt to Carnac Grier that you helped get him into
Parliament?"

His face became a little heated.  "I'll prove to you and to the world
that I'm not an absolute devil in the Grier interests.  I didn't steal
the property.  I tried to induce John Grier to leave it to Carnac or his
mother, for if he'd left it to Mrs. Grier it would have come to Carnac.
He did not do it that way, though.  He left it to me.  Was I to blame for
that?"

"Perhaps not, but you could have taken Carnac in, or given up the
property to him--the rightful owner.  You could have done that.
But you were thinking of yourself altogether."

"Not altogether.  In the first place, I am bound to keep my word to John
Grier.  Besides, if Carnac had inherited, the property would have got
into difficulties--there were things only John Grier and I understood,
and Carnac would have been floored."

"Wouldn't you still have been there?"

"Who knows!  Who can tell!  Maybe not!"

"Carnac Grier is a very able man."

"But of the ablest.  He'll be a success in Parliament.  He'll play a big
part; he won't puddle about.  I meant there was a risk in letting Carnac
run the business at the moment, and--"

"And there never was with you!"

"None.  My mind had grasped all John Grier intended, and I have the
business at my fingers' ends.  There was no risk with me.  I've proved
it.  I've added five per cent to the value of the business since John
Grier died.  I can double the value of it in twenty years--and easy at
that."

"If you make up your mind to do it, you will," she said with admiration,
for the man was persuasive, and he was playing a game in which he was a
master.

Her remarks were alive with banter, for Tarboe's humour was a happiness
to her.

"How did I buy your approval?" he questioned alertly.

"By ability to put a bad case in a good light.  You had your case, and
you have made a real success.  If you keep on you may become a Member of
Parliament some day!"

He laughed.  "Your gifts have their own way of stinging.  I don't believe
I could be elected to Parliament.  I haven't the trick of popularity of
that kind."

Many thoughts flashed through Tarboe's mind.  If he married her now, and
the truth was told about the wills and the law gave Carnac his rights,
she might hate him for not having told her when he proposed.  So it was
that in his desire for her life as his own, he now determined there
should be no second will.  In any case, Carnac had enough to live on
through his mother.  Also, he had capacity to support himself.  There was
a touch of ruthlessness in Tarboe.  No one would ever guess what the
second will contained--no one.  The bank would have a letter saying where
the will was to be found, but if it was not there!

He would ask Junia to be his wife now, while she was so friendly.  Her
eyes were shining, her face was alive with feeling, and he was aware that
the best chances of his life had come to win her.  If she was not now in
the hands of Carnac, his chances were good.  Yet there was the tale of
the secret marriage--the letter he saw Carnac receive in John Grier's
office!  The words of the ancient Greek came to him as he looked at her:
"He who will not strike when the hour comes shall wither like a flower,
and his end be that of the chaff of the field."

His face flushed with feeling, his eyes grew bright with longing, his
tongue was loosed to the enterprise.  "Do you dream, and remember your
dreams?" he asked with a thrill in his voice.  "Do you?"

"I don't dream often, but I sometimes remember my dreams."

"I dream much, and one dream I have constantly."

"What is it?" she asked with anticipation.

"It is the capture of a wild bird in a garden--in a cultivated garden
where there are no nests, no coverts for the secret invaders.  I dream
that I pursue the bird from flower-bed to flower-bed, from bush to bush,
along paths and the green-covered walls; and I am not alone in my chase,
for there are others pursuing.  It is a bitter struggle to win the wild
thing.  And why?  Because there is pursuing one of the pursuers another
bird of red plumage.  Do you understand?"

He paused, and saw her face was full of colour and her eyes had a glow.
Every nerve in her was pulsing hard.

"Tell me," she said presently, "whom do you mean by the bird of red
plumage?  Is it a mere figure of speech?  Or has it a real meaning?"

"It has a real meaning."

He rose to his feet, bent over her and spoke hotly.  "Junia, the end of
my waiting has come.  I want you as I never wanted anything in my life.
I must know the truth.  I love you, Junia.  I have loved you from the
first moment I saw you, and nothing is worth while with you not in it.
Let us work together.  It is a big, big game I'm playing."

"Yes, it's a big game you're playing," she said with emotion.  "It is a
big, big game, and, all things considered, you should win it, but I doubt
you will.  I feel there are matters bigger than the game, or than you, or
me, or anyone else.  And I do not believe in your bird of red plumage; I
don't believe it exists.  It may have done so, but it doesn't now."

She also got to her feet, and Tarboe was so near her she could feel his
hot breath on her cheek.

"No, it doesn't exist now," she repeated, "and the pursuer is not
pursued.  You have more imagination than belongs to a mere man of
business--you're an inexperienced poet."

He caught her hand and drew it to his breast.  "The only poetry I know is
the sound of your voice in the wind, the laughter of your lips in the
sun, the delight of your body in the heavenly flowers.  Yes, I've drunk
you in the wild woods; I've trailed you on the river; I've heard you in
the grinding storm--always the same, the soul of all beautiful things.
Junia, you shall not put me away from you.  You shall be mine, and
you and I together shall win our way to great ends.  We will have
opportunity, health, wealth and prosperity.  Isn't it worth while?"

"Yes," she answered after a moment, "but it cannot be with you, my
friend."

She withdrew her fingers and stepped back; she made a gesture of friendly
repulsion.  "You have said all that can be said, you have gifts greater
than you yourself believe; and I have been tempted; but it is no use,
there are deeper things than luxuries and the magazines of merchandise--
much deeper.  No, no, I cannot marry you; if you were as rich as Midas,
as powerful as Caesar, I would not marry you--never, never, never."

"You love another," he said boldly.  "You love Carnac Grier."

"I do not love you--isn't that enough?"

"Almost--almost enough," he said, embarrassed.




CHAPTER XXXI

THIS WAY HOME

All Junia had ever felt of the soul of things was upon her as she
arranged flowers and listened to the church bells ringing.

"They seem to be always ringing," she said to herself, as she lightly
touched the roses.  "It must be a Saint's Day--where's Denzil?  Ah, there
he is in the garden!  I'll ask him."

Truth is, she was deceiving herself.  She wanted to talk with Denzil
about all that had happened of late, and he seemed, somehow, to avoid
her.  Perhaps he feared she had given her promise to Tarboe who had, as
Denzil knew, spent an hour with her the night before.  As this came to
Denzil's brain, he felt a shiver go through him.  Just then he heard
Junia's footsteps, and saw her coming towards him.

"Why are the bells ringing so much, Denzil?  Is it a Saint's Day?" she
asked.

He took off his hat.  "Yes, ma'm'selle, it is a Saint's Day," and he
named it.  "There were lots of neighbours at early Mass, and some have
gone to the Church of St. Anne de Beaupre at Beaupre, them that's got
sickness."

"Yes, Beaupre is as good as Lourdes, I'm sure.  Why didn't you go,
Denzil?"

"Why should I go, ma'm'selle--I ain't sick--ah, bah!"

"I thought you were.  You've been in low spirits ever since our election,
Denzil."

"Nothing strange in that, ma'm'selle.  I've been thinking of him that's
gone."

"You mean Monsieur Barouche, eh?"

"Not of M'sieu' Barouche, but of the father to the man that beat M'sieu'
Barouche."

"Why should you be thinking so much of John Grier these days?"

"Isn't it the right time?  His son that he threw off without a penny has
proved himself as big a man as his father--ah, surelee!  M'sieu' left
behind him a will that gave all he had to a stranger.  His own son was
left without a sou.  There he is now," he added, nodding towards the
street.

Junia saw Carnac making his way towards her house.  "Well, I'll talk with
him," she said, and her face flushed.  She knew she must give account of
her doings with Luzanne Larue.

A few moments later in the house, her hand lay in that of Carnac, and his
eyes met hers.

"It's all come our way, Junia," he remarked gaily, though there was
sadness in his tone.

"It's as you wanted it.  You won."

"Thanks to you, Junia," and he took from his pocket the blue certificate.

"That--oh, that was not easy to get," she said with agitation.  "She had
a bad purpose, that girl."

"She meant to announce it?"

"Yes, through Barode Barouche.  He agreed to that."

Carnac flushed.  "He agreed to that--you know it?"

"Yes.  The day you were made candidate she arrived here; and the next
morning she went to Barode Barouche and told her story.  He bade her
remain secret till the time was ripe, and he was to be the judge of that.
He was waiting for the night before the election.  Then he was going to
strike you and win!"

"She told you that--Luzanne told you that?"

"And much else.  Besides, she told me you had saved her life from the
street-cars; that you had played fair at the start."

"First and last I played fair," he said indignantly.

Her eyes were shining.  "Not from first to last, Carnac.  You ought not
to have painted her, or made much of her and then thrown her over.  She
knew--of course she knew, after a time, that you did not mean to propose
to her, and all the evil in her came out.  Then she willed to have you in
spite of yourself, believing, if you were married, her affection would
win you in the end.  There it was--and you were to blame."

"But why should you defend her, Junia?"

Her tongue became bitter now.  "Just as you would, if it was some one
else and not yourself."

His head was sunk on his breast, his eyes were burning.  "It was a
horrible thing for Barouche to plan."

"Why so horrible?  If you were hiding a marriage for whatever reason, it
should be known to all whose votes you wanted."

"Barouche was the last man on earth to challenge me, for he had a most
terrible secret."

"What was it?"  Her voice had alarm, for she had never seen Carnac so
disturbed.

"He was fighting his own son--and he knew it!"  The words came in broken
accents.

"He was fighting his own son, and he knew it!  You mean to say that!"
Horror was in her voice.

"I mean that the summer before I was born--"

He told her the story as his mother had told it to him.  Then at last he
said:

"And now you know Barode Barouche got what he deserved.  He ruined my
mother's life; he died the easiest death such a man could die.  He has
also spoiled my life."

"Nothing can spoil your life except yourself," she declared firmly, and
she laid a hand upon his arm.  "Who told you all this--and when?"

"My mother in a letter last night.  I had a talk with her afterwards."

"Who else knows?"  "Only you."

"And why did you tell me?"

"Because I want you to know why our ways must for ever lie apart."

"I don't grasp what you mean," she declared in a low voice.

"You don't grasp why, loving you, I didn't ask you to marry me long ago;
but you found out for yourself from the one who was responsible, and
freed me and saved me; and now you know I am an illegitimate son."

"And you want to cut me out of your life for a bad man's crime, not your
own.  .  .  .  Listen, Carnac.  Last night I told Mr. Tarboe I could not
marry him.  He is rich, he has control of a great business, he is a man
of mark.  Why do you suppose I did it, and for over two years have done
the same?--for he has wanted me all that time.  Does not a girl know when
a real man wants her?  And Luke Tarboe is a real man.  He knows what he
wants, and he goes for it, and little could stop him as he travels.  Why
do you suppose I did it?"  Her face flushed, anger lit her eyes.
"Because there was another man; but I've only just discovered he's a
sham, with no real love for me.  It makes me sorry I ever knew him."

"Me--no real love for you!  That's not the truth: it's because I have no
real name to give you--that's why I've spoken as I have.  Never have I
cared for anyone except you, Junia, and I could have killed anyone that
wronged you--"

"Kill yourself then," she flashed.

"Have I wronged you, Junia?"

"If you kept me waiting and prevented me from marrying a man I could have
loved, if I hated you--if you did that, and then at last told me to go my
ways, don't you think it wronging me!  Don't be a fool, Carnac.  You're
not the only man on earth a good girl could love.  I tell you, again and
again I have been moved towards Luke Tarboe, and if he had had
understanding of women, I should now be his wife."

"You tell me what I have always known," he interposed.  "I knew Tarboe
had a hold on your heart.  I'm not so vain as to think I've always been
the one man for you.  I lived long in anxious fear, and--"

"And now you shut the door in my face!  Looked at from any standpoint,
it's ugly."

"I want you to have your due," he answered with face paler.  "You're a
great woman--the very greatest, and should have a husband born in honest
wedlock."

"I'm the best judge of what I want," she declared almost sharply, yet
there was a smile at her lips.  "Why, I suppose if John Grier had left
you his fortune, you'd give it up; you'd say, 'I have no right to it,'
and would give it to my brother-in-law, Fabian."

"I should."

"Yet Fabian had all he deserved from his father.  He has all he should
have, and he tried to beat his father in business.  Carnac, don't be a
bigger fool than there's any need to be.  What is better than that John
Grier's business should be in Tarboe's hands--or in yours?  Remember,
John Grier might have left it all to your mother, and, if he had, you'd
have taken it, if she had left it to you.  You'd have taken it even if
you meant to give it away afterwards.  There are hospitals to build.
There are good and costly things to do for the State."

Suddenly she saw in his eyes a curious soft understanding, and she put
her hand on his shoulder.  "Carnac," she said gently, "great, great
Carnac, won't you love me?"

For an instant he felt he must still put her from him, then he clasped
her to his breast.

"But I really had to throw myself into your arms!" she said later.




CHAPTER XXXII

"HALVES, PARDNER, HALVES"

It was Thanksgiving Day, and all the people of the Province were en fete.
The day was clear, and the air was thrilling with the spirits of the
north country; the vibrant sting of oxygen, the blessed resilience of the
river and the hills.

It was a great day on the St. Lawrence, for men were preparing to go to
the backwoods, to the "shanties," and hosts were busy with the crops,
storing them; while all in trade and industry were cheerful.  There was a
real benedicite in the air.  In every church.  Catholic and Protestant,
hands of devoted workers had made beautiful altar and communion table,
and lectern and pulpit, and in the Methodist chapel and the Presbyterian
kirk, women had made the bare interiors ornate.  The bells of all the
churches were ringing, French and English; and each priest, clergyman and
minister was moving his people in his own way and by his own ritual to
bless God and live.

In the city itself, the Mayor had arranged a festival in the evening, and
there were gathered many people to give thanks.  But those most
conspicuous were the poor, unsophisticated habitants, who were on good
terms with the refreshment provided.  Their enthusiasm was partly due to
the presence of Carnac Grier.  In his speech to the great crowd, among
other things the Mayor said: "It is our happiness that we have here one
whose name is familiar to all in French-Canada--that of the new Member of
Parliament, Monsieur Carnac Grier.  In Monsieur Grier we have a man who
knows his own mind, and it is filled with the interests of the French as
well as the English.  He is young, he has power, and he will use his
youth and power to advance the good of the whole country.  May he live
long!"

Carnac never spoke better in his life than in his brief reply.  When he
had finished, some one touched his arm.  It was Luke Tarboe.

"A good speech, Grier.  Can you give me a few moments?"

"Here?" asked Carnac, smiling.

"Not here, but in the building.  There is a room where we can be alone,
and I have to tell you something of great importance."

"Of great importance?  Well, so have I to tell you, Tarboe."

A few minutes later they were in the Mayor's private parlour, hung with
the portraits of past Governors and Mayors, and carrying over the door
the coat-of-arms of the Province.

Presently Carnac said: "Let me give you my news first, Tarboe: I am to
marry Junia Shale--and soon."

Tarboe nodded.  "I expected that.  She is worth the best the world can
offer."  There was a ring of honesty in his tone.  "All the more reason
why I should tell you what my news is, Carnac.  I'm going to tell you
what oughtn't yet to be told for another two years, but I feel it due
you, for you were badly used, and so I break my word to your father."

Carnac's hand shot out in protest, but Tarboe took no notice.  "I mean to
tell you now in the hour of your political triumph that--"

"That I can draw on you for ten thousand dollars, perhaps?" shot out
Carnac.

"Not for ten thousand, but in two years' time--or to-morrow--for a
hundred and fifty times that if you want it."

Carnac shrugged his shoulders.  "I don't know what you're driving at,
Tarboe.  Two years from now--or to-morrow--I can draw on you for a
hundred and fifty times ten thousand dollars!  What does that mean?  Is
it you're tired of the fortune left you by the biggest man industrially
French-Canada has ever known?"

"I'll tell you the truth--I never had a permanent fortune, and I was
never meant to have the permanent fortune, though I inherited by will.
That was a matter between John Grier and myself.  There was another will
made later, which left the business to some one else."

"I don't see."

"Of course you don't see, and yet you must."  Tarboe then told the story
of the making of the two wills, doing justice to John Grier.

"He never did things like anyone else, and he didn't in dying.  He loved
you, Carnac.  In spite of all he said and did he believed in you.  He
knew you had the real thing in you, if you cared to use it."

"Good God!  Good God!" was all Carnac could at first say.  "And you
agreed to that?"

"What rights had I?  None at all.  I'll come out of it with over a half-
million dollars--isn't that enough for a backwoodsman?  I get the profits
of the working for three years, and two hundred thousand dollars besides.
I ought to be satisfied with that."

"Who knows of the will besides yourself?" asked Carnac sharply.

"No one.  There is a letter to the bank simply saying that another will
exists and where it is, but that's all.

"And you could have destroyed that will in my favour?"

"That's so."  The voice of Tarboe was rough with feeling, his face grew
dark.  "More than once I willed to destroy it.  It seemed at first I
could make better use of the property than you.  The temptation was big,
but I held my own, and now I've no fear of meeting anyone in Heaven or
Hell.  I've told you all.  .  .  .

"Not quite all.  There's one thing more.  The thought of Junia Shale made
me want to burn the second will, and I almost did it; but I'm glad I
didn't."

"If you had, and had married her, you wouldn't have been happy.  You
can't be fooling a wife and be safe."

"I guess I know that--just in time.  .  .  .  I have a bad heart, Carnac.
Your property came to me against my will through your father, but I
wanted the girl you're going to marry, and against my will you won
her.  I fought for her.  I thought there was a chance for me, because of
the rumour you were secretly married--"

"I'll tell you about it, Tarboe, now.  It was an ugly business."  And he
told in a dozen sentences the story of Luzanne and the false marriage.

When he had finished, Tarboe held out his hand.  "It was a close shave,
Carnac."

After a few further remarks, Tarboe said: "I thought there was a chance
for me with Junia Shale, but there never was a real one, for she was
yours from a child.  You won her fairly, Carnac.  If you'll come to the
office to-morrow morning, I'll show you the will."

"You'll show me the will?" asked Carnac with an edge to his tone.

"What do you mean?"  Tarboe did not like the look in the other's eyes.

"I mean, what you have you shall keep, and what John Grier leaves me by
that will, I will not keep."

"You will inherit, and you shall keep."

"And turn you out!" remarked Carnac ironically.  "I needn't be turned
out.  I hoped you'd keep me as manager.  Few could do it as well, and, as
Member of Parliament, you haven't time yourself.  I'll stay as manager at
twenty thousand dollars a year, if you like."

Carnac could not tell him the real reason for declining to inherit, but
that did not matter.  Yet there flashed into his heart a love, which he
had never felt so far in his life, for John Grier.  The old man had
believed he would come out right in the end, and so had left him the
fortune in so odd a way.  How Carnac longed to tell Tarboe the whole
truth about Barode Barouche, and yet dare not!  After a short time of
hesitation and doubt, Carnac said firmly:

"I'll stand by the will, if you'll be my partner and manager, Tarboe.  If
you'll take half the business and manage the whole of it, I'll sell the
half for a dollar to you, and we can run together to the end."

Tarboe's face lighted; there was triumph in his eyes.  It was all better
than he had dared to hope, for he liked the business, and he loathed the
way the world had looked at John Grier's will.

"Halves, pardner, halves!" he said, assenting gladly, and held out his
hand.

They clasped hands warmly.

The door opened and Junia appeared.  She studied their faces anxiously.
When she saw the smiling light in them:

"Oh, you two good men!" she said joyously, and held out a hand to each.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Don't be a bigger fool than there's any need to be
Life is only futile to the futile
Youth's a dream, middle age a delusion, old age a mistake






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "CARNAC'S FOLLY":

All genius is at once a blessing or a curse
Do what you feel you've got to do, and never mind what happens
Don't be a bigger fool than there's any need to be
Had got unreasonably old
How many sons have ever added to their father's fame?
Life is only futile to the futile
Never give up your soul to things only, keep it for people
We suffer the shames we damn in others
We do what we forbid ourselves to do
Youth's a dream, middle age a delusion, old age a mistake





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